text
stringlengths 1
134k
| label
int64 0
1
|
|---|---|
Gaming publisher Ubisoft revealed that sales were down 6% for the 3rd fiscal quarter compared to the previous year while Watch Dogs 2‘s launch wasn’t what they had hoped for. [Ubisoft’s 3rd quarter was as much a mixed bag of victory and defeat. While winter sports sim Steep outperformed its relatively muted expectations, simulator Watch Dogs 2 wasn’t quite as “dynamic” as the company expected with a “soft” launch. Still, it reportedly managed to outperform last year’s shaky Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate launch. While interest in MMO shooter The Division has dwindled since its blockbuster release, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot did report a 152% jump in active players since the game’s big October update. Meanwhile, tactical multiplayer shooter Rainbow Six: Siege is healthier than ever, with over 15 million registered players and the highest daily activity yet in a community that continues to expand. Moreover, back catalog games like the aforementioned The Division and Rainbow Six: Siege are driving profits further than usual. Ubisoft’s continued support of their older titles is paying off, and the lack of a 2016 entry in the Assassin’s Creed franchise seems to have boosted the sales of previous games in the series. Guillemot said that Ubisoft is “successfully pursuing our transformation into a more recurring and more profitable profile” and that “the positive effects of this transformation are remarkable. ” Finally, Ubisoft reported about $213 million for the Assassin’s Creed movie, a “solid first step. ” While it didn’t exactly wow the critics, gamers around the world seem to have enjoyed seeing the titular Assassins struggle against the machinations of Abstergo’s Templars on the big screen. Ubisoft will be releasing the next major entry this year in the Assassin’s Creed franchise and has delayed South Park: The Fractured But Hole into fiscal year 2017, which could help improve their fortunes over last year. Follow Nate Church @Get2Church on Twitter for the latest news in gaming and technology, and snarky opinions on both. | 0 |
Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox Friends,” Breitbart editor at large Peter Schweizer, the author of “Clinton Cash,” detailed how the former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign John Podesta may have violated federal law by failing to disclose stock shares he owned from a company. Schweizer said, “In 2011, John Podesta joins the board of this very small energy company called Joule Energy based out of Massachusetts. About two months after he joins the board of a Russian entity called Rusnano, puts a billion rubles which is about into John Podesta’s company. Now, what is Rusnano? It’s not a private company, Steve. It is a fund directly funded by the Kremlin. In fact, the Russian science minister called Rusnano, Putin’s child. So you have the Russian government investing in one John Podesta’s businesses in 2011, while he is an advisor to Hillary Clinton at the State Department. ” He continued, “So then in 2013, he goes to the White House, to be a special counselor to Barack Obama, and that requires that you, you know, have financial disclosures every year. In his financial disclosure form in 2013, he not only fails to disclose these 75, 000 shares of stock that he has in Joule Energy which is funded in part by the Russian government. He also fails to disclose that he is on one of the three corporate board that this entity has. It’s got this very complex ownership structure. He discloses he is on the company in Massachusetts, that is he on the board of a company in the Netherlands, but he fails to disclose that he is also on the executive order of the holding company. That’s a clear violation of the disclosure rules that needs to be looked at. ” He added, “What makes the Podesta case clear is there was a transfer of money and there was a transfer of a lot of money that stood to make John Podesta a lot of money. That is unique and that’s extremely troubling because at the time that transfer is taking place he is advising Hillary Clinton at the State Department. We know that from the Podesta emails that he is helping her make personnel decisions, speech decisions, policy decisions. He is meeting with her monthly. It’s a transfer of money from a foreign government, at the time, that is he was advising America’s chief diplomat, Hillary Clinton. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 0 |
Jacksonville Clay Target Sports (JCTS) believes education is the key to stopping accidental shootings, so they are teaching kids as young as five gun safety and usage. [JCTS teaches “about 50 children a day how to properly shoot and handle a gun. ” According to First Coast News, Safety Officer Larry Freeman watches over JCTS. He said his dad taught him to use a gun at seven, adding, “He taught me gun safety as a young one and I’ve carried that all through my life. ” Freeman observed: You get rid of the mystique of the gun. That way, now they know what it can do, they’ve seen what it can do and they’ve been taught what it can do. And then they’ll know what to tell their parents if they find one, they won’t be sneaking it off to see how it works and wind up killing somebody. Jacksonville parent Tony Knight agrees with Freeman. He gave his son, Tony Knight Jr. his first gun at age three and says he still stands with Jr. when he shoots, placing his hand on his shoulder to give him support. Knight said he thinks following through — continuing to teach safety and helping them use the gun — is an important part of the learning process. He believes there is no magic age at which someone can begin learning. Rather, a child who can “learn and listen and follow directions” is “ready to be taught the gun. ” Knight’s son said, “People may use them wrong and I think that’s wrong. People should use them for hunting, shooting targets and other stuff, but not harming people. ” He also noted that his father taught him to respect firearms, saying, “It can hurt people, yeah dad taught me it can hurt people. ” Jr. added, “If I see a gun in my house I’m supposed to leave it alone and tell my parents and if they’re not home just leave it alone. ” AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com. | 0 |
For Braulio Jatar, it was the biggest scoop in years: Venezuela’s president was being chased by a crowd screaming of hunger, banging on pots and pans. The photos and video of President Nicolás Maduro soon appeared on Mr. Jatar’s news site, Reporte Confidencial, and spread throughout the nation. The mob cornering Mr. Maduro was a shock in Venezuela — anger in food lines and even riots were a familiar sight, but no one had ever ambushed the president that way. Before he went to bed, Mr. Jatar fired off a series of Twitter messages, some alluding to witness testimony he would soon broadcast on his 9 a. m. radio show. But he never got the chance. He now sits locked in a jail cell, a political prisoner, rights activists say. Venezuela this week took its biggest plunge yet toward the rule of Mr. Maduro as his loyalists on the Supreme Court gutted the country’s legislature, seizing the powers of the only body seen as a counter to the president’s growing authority. But the move was just part of a slide from democracy that has been gaining steady momentum in the country over the past year — seen starkly in prison cells where the ranks of political prisoners are growing. Those cells are filled with opponents of Mr. Maduro, like a former mayor of a wealthy section of Caracas who was sentenced to more than 13 years on charges of inciting violence academics who have spoken out and journalists like Mr. Jatar, whose family says he was simply doing his job when he was detained in September. At least 114 political prisoners are behind bars in Venezuela, according to Penal Forum, a human rights organization that tracks political arrests in the country, a number that rose from 89 a year ago. The group says that since Mr. Maduro took power in 2013, the government has arrested 6, 893 people and jailed 433 for political reasons. “The level of repression has risen to a brutal level,” said Alfredo Romero, who heads the group. “The rise has come from the unpopularity of Maduro. ” The situation has become urgent for Venezuela’s neighbors, 14 of whom wrote a rare joint statement last week calling on Venezuela to release the prisoners as a step toward restoring democratic norms. This week diplomats from the region met at the Organization of American States, a regional diplomacy group, to discuss steps to possibly expel the country from the group because of its political prisoners, among other accusations of violations of the bloc’s democratic charter. President Trump has also weighed in. In February, he posted on Twitter a photograph of himself and other officials in the Oval Office with Lilian Tintori, an opposition activist whose husband, Leopoldo López, was in jail. Mr. Trump wrote that Mr. López, a former mayor of Caracas, should be released immediately. The taking of political prisoners is not new in Venezuela it is the numbers that have grown under Mr. Maduro, human rights groups say. His predecessor, Hugo Chávez, jailed opponents, including a judge who had opposed him. But analysts say Mr. Chávez more often avoided dissent by channeling the country’s oil revenues, at times more than $100 a barrel, into social programs that bolstered his popularity. Mr. Maduro, however, has been faced with falling oil prices and years of economic mismanagement, which have led to shortages of food and basic medicines. Since October, Venezuela’s currency, the bolívar, has been in free fall, with the dollar rising against it by 350 percent at its height, putting food even further out of reach and sinking the president’s popularity. These conditions led to the protests against Mr. Maduro on Margarita Island, where Mr. Jatar, the journalist, was arrested. His publication, Reporte Confidencial, had a long history of chronicling the ups and downs of the island — which is off Venezuela’s eastern coast — beginning as a weekly leaflet in 2006. It later expanded online, where it continued to operate on a shoestring budget and with a small staff. It became known for its investigations, including of improper land use by a judge and one about a state governor linked to a corruption scheme related to subsidized food. “If no one else would publish it, Reporte Confidencial would put it out,” said Yusnelly Villalobos, Mr. Jatar’s assistant. Mr. Jatar’s wife, Silvia Martínez, said he was once threatened by the authorities when he sent reporters to cover antigovernment protests in 2014. The police raided their home and office, leaving with computer equipment. But that was no preparation for what would happen after the protesters’ harassment of Mr. Maduro that night in September. The protest, which was soon known as news spread online by its hashtag, “#cacerolazo,” or the “great pot banging,” was a deep embarrassment for Mr. Maduro. That week the opposition had amassed an estimated one million people in Caracas to protest food shortages and demand his ouster. The president had flown to Margarita Island for what was expected to be a positive reception in an area where he and Mr. Chávez had both won in elections. After inaugurating a public housing complex, Mr. Maduro stopped his motorcade in the town of Villa Rosa, to walk among a crowd of what he thought were . Instead they chased him through the streets. The next morning Mr. Jatar set off to a radio show, which he also ran, where he planned to continue his coverage of the night’s protest. “I turned on the dial to listen to him,” Ms. Martínez said. But he never showed up at the station he had been arrested by Venezuelan intelligence agents. In the next days, 30 more people were arrested in roundups, according to Penal Forum. They were interrogated before being let go, the group said. But Mr. Jatar was not released. He sits in a jail cell in the state of Nueva Esparta on charges involving $25, 000, which the authorities say they found in his car. Ms. Martínez says that the money was planted, and that Mr. Jatar would have never left such a large amount of money where it might have easily been stolen. “We have no idea who ordered his detention,” Ms. Martinez said. José Miguel Vivanco, the director of Human Rights Watch, which has also investigated the case, said his group concluded that the charges were fabricated in an effort to suppress journalists. “Calling for his release is not just about letting another political prisoner out of jail,” he said. “It’s about protecting free speech. ” The government ombudsman did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Jatar or other prisoners. Venezuela’s military and prosecutor’s office also did not respond to a written request for comment. Since Mr. Jatar’s arrest, the government has intensified its focus on arresting those it deems subversive. In early January, Mr. Maduro put Tareck El Aissami, the newly appointed vice president, in charge of what he called the “anticoup squad,” a group aimed at punishing those plotting treason or other crimes against the state. On Jan. 12, Irwing Roca, a political activist, was leaving a meeting with Roniel Farias, a city councilman in Ciudad Bolívar, in the country’s eastern interior. Mr. Roca said that a black car was waiting outside for them, and that intelligence agents ordered them inside after taking their telephones. “At no moment did they say why they had taken us,” Mr. Roca said. Mr. Roca said he was held by the agents for three days without food or water. Mr. Farias was released on March 14, with no explanation. The day before Mr. Roca and Mr. Farias were taken, Gilber Caro, a deputy legislator in the National Assembly for Voluntad Popular, an opposition party, was making his way down a highway outside of Caracas when his car was stopped by Venezuelan intelligence agents, his family said. Yeidi Caro, his sister, first learned of the news when a friend called to mistakenly say he was kidnapped. Mr. Caro initially thought he had been taken by criminals demanding a ransom. Ms. Caro saw the news of his arrest being broadcast. “I turned on the television and I saw that the government had him,” she said. The Venezuelan authorities said that they had found the legislator hiding an assault rifle and money to be used for attacks against the government. Officials broadcast a taped phone call between Mr. Caro and Ms. Tintori — the wife of the political prisoner photographed with Mr. Trump in February — in which they said the two had planned chaotic protests to undermine the government. “He is a person with violent characteristics,” Mr. El Aissami, the vice president, said of Mr. Caro. | 1 |
DAKAR, Senegal — The number of people killed in an accidental military bombing at a Nigerian camp for displaced people has increased to 70, aid groups said on Wednesday, with at least nine of them humanitarian workers. The mistaken attack came after a military plane targeted an area crowded with people fleeing Boko Haram militants. Medical workers were scrambling on Wednesday to assemble equipment to treat dozens of severely injured people who were still awaiting evacuation from the camp in Rann, in northeastern Nigeria. At least 120 people were hurt in the errant strike on Tuesday by the Nigerian Air Force at the camp, which is near the Cameroon border and houses about 20, 000 people. Initial reports put the death toll around 50. Doctors Without Borders, a humanitarian aid group, said three employees of a Cameroonian firm that it hired to provide water and sanitation services in the camp were among the dead. Six local workers for the Nigerian Red Cross were also killed, and 13 others were hurt. injured people were flown to hospitals in Maiduguri, Nigeria, the capital of Borno State. Among them were two young children: a named Yaa Zara with a fractured arm and Kaka Hauwa, 5, whose neck was injured. One of the blasts was so forceful it knocked out two of Kaka’s teeth, the children’s mother, Fati Yasin, 35, said on Tuesday. She said she left her two children at their home in the camp to collect tickets for food distribution when she heard the loud buzz of a fighter jet overhead. “We looked at it in the sky and before we knew it, it had dropped two bombs,” she said. The bomb struck around noon Tuesday, just as aid workers were vaccinating children in the camp for measles and screening them for malnutrition, according to a spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders. In the wake of the bombing, human rights groups were trying to assess how the military could have mistaken such a crowded camp for Boko Haram fighters. A terrorism and counterterrorism researcher for Human Rights Watch circulated on Twitter an aerial view of the encampment dotted with tents and other structures. It is situated near a Nigerian military post. The Nigerian military has been engaged in a fierce battle against Boko Haram, which has ties to the Islamic State, for years. Civilians have often borne the brunt of the war against Boko Haram as soldiers have been accused of rounding up and killing innocent people they suspected of being militants. The military has also been accused of accidentally killing civilians in airstrikes in the past. President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria has declared victory over the militants on several occasions. But the conflict endures, even though military operations have made huge progress killing and arresting hundreds of fighters. On Tuesday, Mr. Buhari said he regretted the error, and Nigerian military officials also expressed remorse, acknowledging they had targeted the wrong spot. The governor of Borno State said friendly fire incidents have occurred in wars throughout history. “It is gratifying that nobody made any effort to hide anything or sweep things under carpet,” Gov. Kashim Shettima said. “War comes with different kinds of very terrible prizes and this is one of such painful prizes. ” The deadly mistake comes as the United States Congress is considering a sale of warplanes to the Nigerian government. Some politicians and humanitarian workers have criticized selling warplanes to a military with a poor record on human rights. Matthew Page, a consultant who until recently was the State Department’s top expert on Nigeria, criticized the use of air power against militants whose main tactic in recent weeks has been sending one or two suicide bombers at a time in attacks on crowded markets or mosques. “Using air power in this late phase of a counterinsurgency is ” Mr. Page said. “The Nigerian government would be wise to use carefully targeted, operations, not aerial bombing campaigns, to mop up what’s left of Boko Haram. ” In Rann, the International Committee of the Red Cross said six people in critical condition were evacuated on Tuesday by helicopter to Maiduguri. About 90 patients remained with 46 still needing to be evacuated, according to the organization. “The conditions for postoperative care are not adequate, so all the patients must be evacuated to Maiduguri as soon as possible,” said Laurent Singa, a surgeon for the Red Cross in Rann. Mausi Segun, the senior Nigeria researcher at Human Rights Watch, called on the government to compensate the victims and their families. “Even if there is no evidence of a willful attack on the camp, which would be a war crime, the camp was bombed indiscriminately, violating international humanitarian law,” she said in a statement. “Victims should not be denied redress merely because the government decided the bombing was accidental. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — The glorious Lincoln Memorial was closed on Inauguration Day, leaving its white marble inhabitant to inspire from a distance. The monument had served as a backdrop for an inaugural concert the night before, and now, in the late morning, construction workers were methodically removing the silvery bars of scaffolding that imprisoned it. Even so, its sole resident could still be seen behind the Doric columns, his gaze trained on the domed Capitol, where a peaceful transfer of power was about to take place. And people still came to be in his presence, some to remind themselves that a country riven by dissent can come together. It has before. No matter that the sky was as gray as the Potomac, or that the cold air felt like a wet sweater. Here they were, from the North and South, East and West, in red Trump hats and blue Hillary jubilant, distressed, feeling a part and apart. They stood in admiration of Lincoln, as workers tore down and cleaned up, including a man collecting debris with a picker, his dog tag laced securely into one of his boots. Ed Rich, he said his name was, while taking a Camel break. years old. A mortgage broker from Annapolis, trying to ride out a slow period. So it’s $12 an hour working for the inauguration, putting up fencing, laying down flooring, snapping up cigarette butts with a metal picker. “I voted for him,” Mr. Rich said of Donald J. Trump, at this point still the . “I think he could make a mess of it, but it could be cleaned up easily. People seem to forget there’s a House and a Senate. ” Mr. Rich tossed his spent cigarette into the box of garbage he was carrying and returned to collecting butts and paper bits, his words nowhere near as eloquent as those of Lincoln, carved into the memorial’s walls, yet in the same vein: the belief — often tested, including on this day — in the country’s democratic system of governance. Generations have come to the Lincoln Memorial to reassure themselves — or to remind the rest of the nation — of this foundational belief. The contralto, Marian Anderson, sang here in 1939, after the Daughters of the American Revolution had barred her from another Washington venue she began with “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty. ” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of course, delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech here in 1963, after Mahalia Jackson called out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin. ” Even Richard M. Nixon, during a dark moment of his presidency (and that is saying something) came here on a very early May morning in 1970, valet in tow he wound up in profoundly strange conversations with some Vietnam War protesters, his disjointed message: Don’t give up on this country. In their footsteps came others on this inaugural morning. Jerry Naradzay, 56, a physician from Henderson, N. C. cycled up to the monument with his son, Sammy, the father’s broad smile explained by his red “Make America Great Again” cap. He noted that the memorial’s stone had come from both the North and the South to convey unity after division. He then said he had goose bumps just thinking of more than two centuries of peaceful transfers of power. Nodding toward the memorial, Dr. Naradzay said, “This monument represents how the country is bigger than one man. ” Standing nearby in full agreement were four Hillary Clinton supporters from Wisconsin’s North Country. They had made plans for this Washington visit in expectation of a different result, but decided to come anyway, in part to participate in the women’s march on Saturday. So: How did they feel? “Hollow,” said Jackie Moore, 33, a member of the Ashland City Council. Several awkward seconds of silence followed. When conversation resumed, another Ashland council member, David Mettille, 32, and his partner, Teege Mettille, 36, recounted how their blue Hillary shirts had spurred some heckling, but they didn’t mind. It was their way of saying: We’re still here. “We will remember this,” David Mettille said. “We will remember how painful today is, so that four years from now — we work to win. ” Then Teege Mettille noted that they had about a left of President Obama, and off the visitors from Ashland went. It was true: Time was winding down, or winding up. From the ceremony in the distance, beyond the reflecting pool’s greenish waters, came the echoes of ministers beseeching God for guidance, the raised voices of the Missouri State University Chorale, the somber tones of imminent transition. All the while, others came to be in Lincoln’s presence. A retired civil engineer from Virginia who said he had voted for Mr. Trump because a relative is a heroin addict, and because the Mexican border is a sieve. A couple from Utah who voted for Mr. Trump because their community depends on natural gas and oil. Mothers and their adult daughters from Texas and New Mexico, so dismayed that Mr. Trump would soon be their president that they kept their backs to the inauguration. Soon the Mormon Tabernacle Choir could be heard singing “America the Beautiful. ” Then came the distinctive voice of the new president, his assertions of a restored American greatness in all things floating through the gray noon and up the four score and seven steps leading from the reflecting pool to the memorial. No longer he was now President Trump. While the pageantry unfolded, Mr. Rich, the debris collector, kept working. A former Marine, he said he spent six months in Iraq with a mortuary affairs unit, collecting bodies and body parts from the front. Sometimes there wasn’t enough for certain identification, he said, “so you’d write, ‘Believed to be. ’” He said he was making plans to succeed again in the mortgage business, in a country whose form of government he trusts. But for now Mr. Rich had what he called his mission, which was to keep the plaza beneath Lincoln’s gaze clean. | 1 |
Director Oliver Stone believes Democrats’ repeated inquiries into alleged connections between President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government is a “path that leads nowhere. ”[In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald to discuss his latest documentary — about Russian President Vladimir Putin — Stone discussed his experience interacting with the Russian leader and what his documentary aims to convey to a Western audience. “It’s not a documentary as much as a question and answer session,” he said. “Mr. Putin is one of the most important leaders in the world and in so far as the United States has declared him an enemy — a great enemy — I think it’s very important we hear what he has to say. ” The documentary will reportedly focus on Putin’s version of events since he became president of Russia in 2000. “It opens up a whole viewpoint that we as Americans haven’t heard,” Stone said. “We went to see him four different times over two years. ” Stone reportedly discussed a number of topics with President Putin, including the case of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. He also noted that the Russian president “talks pretty straight,” and hopes his documentary can help explain Putin’s points of view to a Western audience. When questioned about allegations made by Democrats and the political left that President Trump has direct connections to Russia, Stone replied: “That’s a path that leads nowhere to my mind. ” “That’s an internal war of politics in the US in which the Democratic party has taken a suicide pact or something to blow him up in other words, to completely him and in so doing blow up the US essentially,” he said. “What they’re doing is destroying the trust that exists between people and government. It’s a very dangerous position to make accusations you cannot prove. ” Read the Sydney Morning Herald‘s full interview with Stone here. Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart. com | 0 |
President Trump’s target for economic growth just got a little more distant. The government reported Friday that the economy grew by only 1. 6 percent last year, shy of what experts had estimated and well below the 4 percent rate that Mr. Trump has vowed to deliver — a pledge now cited on the White House website. There are plenty of signs of life in the economy. Consumer spending is healthy, and an index of consumer sentiment just hit a high. Stocks have been surging, and the jobless rate is near what the Federal Reserve considers full employment. But however solid, the recovery under President Barack Obama never reached exuberance. It is the second longest recovery in American history but the first in the postwar era in which growth for a full year did not hit 3 percent. Mr. Trump made that data point a focus of his campaign, citing factories that closed during the recession but never reopened and workers who gave up looking for jobs and dropped out of the labor force. And economists, even if they disagree with his policy prescriptions, acknowledge that many areas have been left behind. While Friday’s report will provide more support for Mr. Trump’s argument, the lackluster pace of economic growth may also complicate the new administration’s plans. Indeed, some of the headwinds in 2016 — like a widening trade deficit and cautious spending by businesses — could persist into 2017 and beyond. In particular, lower exports and higher imports also hurt growth in the fourth quarter, which fell to an annual rate of 1. 9 percent from 3. 5 percent in the prior quarter, the Commerce Department said Friday. In 2016, personal consumption — which accounts for a majority of economic activity — slowed from 2014 and 2015. In addition, the sharp plunge in oil prices over the same period prompted steep cuts in energy production and exploration, contributing to a drop in business investment. All of this underscores why analysts say that Mr. Trump’s growth rate target of 4 percent is audacious at best and fanciful at worst, especially given broader factors like an aging population and the growth rate of 2 percent or so that has prevailed since the recovery began in 2009. “It would defy gravity,” Diane Swonk, a veteran independent economist in Chicago, said. Four percent growth would require big gains in the size of the work force and productivity, but neither is in the offing, Ms. Swonk said, adding, “It’s simple math. ” At the same time, the Federal Reserve has signaled that it is ready to raise interest rates a few times this year, and a faster expansion would only accelerate the Fed’s plan to tighten monetary policy to head off inflation. Whatever the growth trajectory is in 2017, Fed officials will have a tricky time navigating the political and economic currents under Mr. Trump. Not only did he criticize the Fed chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, during the campaign, but his assessment of the current economy is more downbeat than the Fed’s. One week into the Trump administration, there are many other economic wild cards for policy makers and private forecasters to contemplate, including the impact of congressional efforts to reshape the corporate tax code, trade tensions with Mexico and China, and the proposed repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act. Tax cuts could open the way for new spending and investment. But more expensive imports from Mexico could be painful for many consumers, for example, while a trade war with China would hurt American companies like Apple, General Electric and Caterpillar. What is more, although the Commerce Department report focused on the last three full months of Mr. Obama’s second term, anemic economic activity could add to the revenue shortfall the federal government will most likely face from the personal and corporate tax cuts Mr. Trump has discussed. “It’s difficult to see how we would get to 4 percent growth given the current structure of the economy, especially demographics and productivity growth,” said Gus Faucher, deputy chief economist at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh. “That would be true no matter who is the president. ” The retirement of the baby boomers will limit the size of the labor force, he said, while productivity gains from technology are not expected to accelerate from the current level, as they did with the adoption of the internet or mobile phones in the 1990s. Weak growth does strengthen arguments for a federal program to fortify the nation’s infrastructure — an approach Mr. Trump has advocated that could provide an economic stimulus. Since Mr. Trump’s victory in November, many economists have been raising their projected growth rates for the latter half of 2017 and for 2018. That is not necessarily because they feel Mr. Trump’s policies will prove beneficial in the long run. Instead, it is because the tax cuts and infrastructure investments he has called for could bolster the economy in the short term. Mr. Faucher lifted his growth forecast to 2. 4 percent in 2017 and 2. 7 percent in 2018. Previously, he expected output to expand by 2. 25 percent in each year. “Tax cuts and infrastructure spending represent a much more expansionary fiscal policy than we’ve had in some time,” he said. But Mr. Faucher cautioned that increasing the federal deficit, which stood at $587 billion in 2016, by hundreds of billions more in the coming years could increase interest rates, which were already moving higher. Rates, including mortgage rates for home buyers, are already up more than half a percentage point since the election, on expectations of more borrowing and faster growth. But in economics, as in life, everything cuts both ways. The rise in interest rates has also strengthened the dollar relative to other currencies. While that has been good news for American tourists, a stronger currency is bad news for American exporters, with imports becoming cheaper while the price of products abroad rises. The prospect of a stronger dollar also makes it more difficult to achieve another of Mr. Trump’s economic goals: a revival of the American manufacturing sector. Manufacturers are more dependent on foreign sales than many other businesses, but a rising dollar makes their products less competitive overseas. On Friday, the White House announced a manufacturing jobs initiative, naming chief executives like Andrew N. Liveris of Dow Chemical and Elon Musk of Tesla to the as part of the effort, along with labor leaders from the A. F. L. . I. O. The dollar is rising on expectations of faster growth in the United States and because of the jump in domestic interest rates, which make American financial assets like bonds more appealing to global investors than debt in Europe and Asia. “Mr. Trump can’t control the dollar, and that will be a big factor this year,” Mr. Faucher said. “Trade is likely to be a drag on growth. ” | 1 |
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada would like the world to know that he was rather fond of Fidel Castro. Or at least, that is the message that many people took from his unusually warm statement on the death of the Cuban dictator, whom he hailed on Saturday as “a remarkable leader. ” “Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century,” Mr. Trudeau said in the statement, which was issued while he attended a summit meeting in Madagascar. He described Mr. Castro, who ruled as a Communist autocrat for almost 50 years, as “Cuba’s longest serving President. ” “While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante,’” Mr. Trudeau continued. He added that Mr. Castro was “a legendary revolutionary and orator” whose death had brought him “deep sorrow. ” “I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away,” Mr. Trudeau said. (His father, Pierre Trudeau, served as prime minister for over 15 years.) “It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother President Raúl Castro during my recent visit to Cuba. ” Justin Trudeau’s affectionate comments were a radical departure from American reactions to Mr. Castro’s death — the White House diplomatically said it hoped for warmer relations with Cuba, while Donald J. Trump gleefully posted on Twitter, “Fidel Castro is dead!” — and his statement was quickly condemned by political observers in both the United States and Canada. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who is called the Canadian leader’s remarks “shameful and embarrassing. ” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, another said Mr. Trudeau’s statement was “disgraceful” and accused him of “slobbering adulation” of Mr. Castro. In Canada, several members of the opposition Conservative Party condemned Mr. Trudeau’s statement. Kellie Leitch, a lawmaker running for the party’s leadership, criticized the prime minister for his “fawning characterization” of Mr. Castro. Maxime Bernier, another Conservative leadership candidate, called Mr. Trudeau’s praise “repugnant” and rebuked him for suggesting that the Cuban leader’s decades in power had amounted to a form of public service. Mr. Trudeau’s statement also generated a tidal wave of agitated online mockery, the kind of social media blowback to which the telegenic and infinitely prime minister is rarely subjected. In a wink to the moment that brought Mr. Trudeau to national prominence — his televised eulogy for his father in 2000 — jokes about his statement were organized under the hashtag #trudeaueulogies, where critics imagined him waxing poetic about some of history’s great villains. The United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961 and imposed an embargo on the island for decades, but Canada never pursued similar policies. It began formal diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1945 and maintained them throughout the Cold War, when Mr. Trudeau’s father developed a warm relationship with Mr. Castro. Pierre Trudeau was the first leader of a NATO member state to visit communist Cuba in 1976, and Mr. Castro served as an honorary pallbearer at his funeral, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. | 0 |
Originally appeared at Chronicles
Edward Lozansky is president of the American University in Moscow.
Jim Jatras is a former U.S. diplomat and foreign policy adviser to the Senate GOP leadership. He recently published a major study, “ How American Media Serves as a Transmission Belt for Wars of Choice .”
Perhaps one of the most used and abused political expressions in recent years has been that of “American exceptionalism.” Politicians and commentators routinely invoke it as high principle and accuse their opponents of insufficient devotion to it, or contrariwise blame it for all the ills of the world.
For example, in 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin ruffled many Americans’ feathers:
“It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. . . . We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”
Hillary Clinton weighed in on exceptionalism in an August speech before the American Legion, in which she also took a swipe at Donald Trump :
The United States is an exceptional nation. . . . But, in fact, my opponent in this race has said very clearly that he thinks American exceptionalism is insulting to the rest of the world. In fact, when Vladimir Putin, of all people, criticized American exceptionalism, my opponent agreed with him, saying, and I quote, ‘if you’re in Russia, you don’t want to hear that America is exceptional.’ Well maybe you don’t want to hear it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
It needs to be asked, though: when people praise or criticize “American exceptionalism,” are they always talking about the same thing?
America, like any country, has its own distinctive history, culture, and traditions. America’s unique founding principles—consent of the governed, due process, constitutionally limited division of powers, representative government—justly have been an inspiration to the world for over two centuries. Thomas Jefferson wrote of the “palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
This “exceptional” idea was new in human history. Any American worthy of the name justly takes pride in it. This is the genuine American exceptionalism of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, lately championed by Reagan. The fact that we have strayed so far from it, both domestically and internationally, is shameful.
The unique moral revolution to which the Founding Fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor has little connection to the bastard term (usually capitalized as “American Exceptionalism”) that describes post-Cold War U.S. global behavior, by which policymakers in Washington assert both an exclusive “leadership” privilege and unsupportable obligation to undertake open-ended international missions in the name of the “Free World” and the “international community.” This is the counterfeit “Exceptionalism” of a tiny clique of bipartisanapparatchiki—GOP “neoconservatives” and Democrat “liberal interventionists” and their mainstream media mouthpieces —who have little regard for our country’s oldest traditions or the security and welfare of the American people.
This second kind of Exceptionalism means that the rules we demand of other countries don’t apply to us (so much for Jefferson’s appeal in the Declaration of Independence to “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”). Its proponents justify “regime change” in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, maybe in Russia too . They have wasted trillions of Americans’ tax dollars in the process of making us less safe, not more. Now the Obama Administration is willing to risk confronting Moscow and sparking a new world war in a bid to save al-Qaeda in Aleppo. As Trump has noted: “ You're going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton .”
It is this debased and dangerous kind of Exceptionalism that Hillary represents. Closely related is her concept of America’s “indispensability” :
“We are the indispensable nation. People all over the world look to us and follow our lead. . . . When America fails to lead, we leave a vacuum that either causes chaos or other countries or networks rush in to fill the void.”
It’s no coincidence she is preferred by self-regarded indispensable hacks of both parties who have been up to their elbows in every foreign mess since Reagan. Starting next year, they are eager to give us more of the same.
For genuine patriots, the true, uniquely American exceptionalism of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution is our precious inheritance. America’s true exceptionalism is the antithesis of what Hillary and her acolytes intend, as attested by John Quincy Adams : “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
In scouring the world for monsters to destroy Hillary’s perversion of authentic American principles has more in common with Soviet universalism than the vision of the Founders. In pursuing “ benevolent global hegemony ” the supposed indispensables suggest that other countries and peoples are dispensable—or disposable. In the process, Americans’ freedoms have become disposable too. This is, in a word, un-American—a good old expression that needs to make a comeback.
Genuine American exceptionalism and the “America First” policies of Donald Trump don’t mean our withdrawal from the world. U.S. primacy in a multipolar system is something most countries, including Russia and China, would be prepared to accept, however grudgingly. But continuing down the road Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush have blazed for a quarter century promises us just more war, more enemies, and eventual catastrophe. It’s a mistake America cannot afford to make. Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount
If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire | 1 |
Donald J. Trump’s campaign moved on Sunday to squelch reports — set off by the candidate himself — that Gennifer Flowers, the woman whose claims of an affair with Bill Clinton imperiled his 1992 presidential campaign, would be Mr. Trump’s guest on Monday at his first debate with Hillary Clinton. In television interviews on Sunday morning, Mr. Trump’s running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, flatly denied that Ms. Flowers would attend the debate, at Hofstra University on Long Island. And Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said that in threatening on Saturday to invite Ms. Flowers, Mr. Trump had merely been making a point. “He wants to remind people that he’s a great counterpuncher,” Ms. Conway said on ABC’s “This Week. ” The specter of Ms. Flowers’s attendance arose during a skirmish of psychological warfare between the two campaigns and their supporters in the to Monday night’s matchup. Mark Cuban, the voluble billionaire who owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and is supporting Mrs. Clinton, announced on Twitter on Thursday that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign had given him a seat at the debate to watch her “overwhelm” Mr. Trump. For good measure, Mr. Cuban — who once hosted a reality television show called “The Benefactor,” and more recently offered $10 million to the charity of Mr. Trump’s choice if the Republican nominee would let Mr. Cuban interview him for four hours about his “policies and their substance” — suggested the debate would become known as the “Humbling at Hofstra. ” On Saturday, Mr. Trump responded even more provocatively. The Mr. Trump, whose second marriage grew out of an affair during his first one, has repeatedly raised Mr. Clinton’s infidelities as a character attack against Mrs. Clinton. Several of Mr. Trump’s advisers have a long history of calling attention to Mr. Clinton’s scandals. Ms. Flowers herself lent credence to the idea: “Yes I will be there,” she wrote in a text message to The New York Times on Saturday. She did not respond to messages on Sunday. Each campaign receives tickets from the Commission on Presidential Debates to give to supporters at its discretion, and campaigns often engage in mind games when picking guests, as appeared to be the case with Mrs. Clinton’s choice of Mr. Cuban. But inviting Ms. Flowers would be in a different category. In 1992, Mr. Clinton denied Ms. Flowers’s claim of an affair, but years later, when asked in a deposition whether he had engaged in “sexual relations” with Ms. Flowers, he admitted having done so one time, in 1977. Ms. Flowers, in recently broadcast interviews, has accused Mrs. Clinton of being an “enabler” and has said the scandal is a relevant issue in 2016. Inviting Ms. Flowers would be risky for Mr. Trump, because he faces a potentially gender gap with women, who might be troubled by such an aggressive and personal move. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, portrayed Mr. Trump’s Twitter post about Ms. Flowers as yet another example of behavior unbecoming of someone seeking the presidency. “You saw his reaction, which is to do his favorite sport, which is to dive in the sewer and go for a swim,” Mr. Podesta said. But on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Pence, the Indiana governor, sought to put an end to the matter. “Gennifer Flowers will not be attending the debate tomorrow night,” Mr. Pence said. “Donald was using the tweet yesterday really to mock an effort by Hillary Clinton and her campaign to really distract attention from where the people — the American people — are going to be focused tomorrow night, which is on the issues. It’s on the choice that we face. ” | 0 |
Anxiety grows among GOP congressional staffers By Wayne Madsen Posted on October 28, 2016 by Wayne Madsen
With their bosses away campaigning, some for their political lives, a number of Republican staffers in Congress are growing anxious over their future employment. With the Senate now favored to be transferred to Democratic control, GOP staffers for members up for re-election on November 8, as well as Republican staffers assigned to various Senate committees and subcommittees, are shopping around their resumes.
Although more senior staff can always expect to find employment with Washington’s many lobbying firms and policy-wonkish institutes and foundations, that is not necessarily the case with younger staffers who may find their future options being limited to Starbuck’s baristas and Uber drivers.
On the House of Representatives side, Republicans are expected to lose a number of seats in a Democratic wave but GOP control of the House, barring a dramatic shift, is expected to remain in Republican hands. However, staffers for GOP members who are in close races or facing certain defeat are also scurrying around Washington looking for future employment.
In what could be termed poetic justice, many Republican staffers who helped push their bosses’ memes against government “entitlement” programs, including unemployment benefits, may be among the first in line at District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland state unemployment offices come December. Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report . Copyright © 2016 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required) . This entry was posted in Commentary . Bookmark the permalink . | 0 |
The Colombian government and the country’s largest rebel group said Wednesday that they had agreed to a clearing a major hurdle in the effort to end one of the world’s conflicts. In a joint statement, the two sides said that they had overcome some of the most intractable parts of a peace deal, which they have been negotiating in Havana since 2012. In addition to a the rebels — known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC — agreed to lay down their arms. The two sides said they would hold a ceremony in Havana on Thursday to mark the attended by Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, the FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño and other Latin American leaders. Negotiators hope a final peace deal will be reached in the days or weeks to come. “Tomorrow will be a great day,” Mr. Santos said in a statement. “We worked for peace in Colombia, a dream which is now becoming reality. ” On Twitter, the FARC responded: “We made it. The path to peace must continue, because it’s not an illusion now, it’s a promise. ” The agreement sets in motion an end to the region’s oldest conflict. An estimated 220, 000 people have been killed in more than 50 years of fighting between the guerrillas and the government. More than five million people are estimated to have been displaced. The agreement to lay down arms sets the stage for what will be one of the largest demobilization of guerrilla fighters in years. An estimated 7, 000 FARC foot soldiers and commanders would be expected to disarm. Many were kidnapped as children by the guerrillas and know no other life than one with the rebels. Under a related agreement reached last year during the negotiations, FARC soldiers would enter into a “transitional justice” system, with reduced sentences for those who confess to crimes that took place during the conflict. In many cases, the punishments are expected to be limited to community service. Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, will assist in reintegrating hundreds of child soldiers whom the FARC agreed in May to release. Many quarters of Colombia celebrated the steps announced on Wednesday. “This is a transcendent step,” said Alejo Vargas, a political scientist who heads a group that brought war victims to Havana to speak with negotiators during the talks. “Even if it’s not the final deal, we can say without a doubt the process is irreversible now. ” Others lent support, but voiced concerns about how the deal would be enacted. Luis Mendieta, a former chief of Colombia’s National Police who was kidnapped for 12 years by the FARC, said he worried that many guerrillas would join criminal gangs rather than disarm. He also said that while the FARC had agreed to lay down arms, he believed the group was continuing to extort Colombians in the countryside they control. “The FARC must now not just begin a but end all their hostilities,” he said. “The two aren’t the same thing. ” The FARC, whose origins date to the early 1960s, was founded as a group that vowed to defend the country’s peasants from governments in Colombia. But as the years wore on, the group found a potent source of revenue in kidnapping city dwellers. By the 1990s, the FARC had also expanded into the coca trade, earning millions by taxing growers and, according to American and Colombian officials, trafficking cocaine. In 1999, the two governments announced Plan Colombia, an aid package in which the United States poured some $10 billion into Colombia to fight drug traffickers. Many FARC leaders have been killed and the group has suffered from mass desertions in its ranks. It counted 17, 000 members in the early 2000s, a group that is estimated at 7, 000 or fewer today. During the negotiations, the Colombian president, Mr. Santos, said he would hold a referendum on the agreement. A peace plan remains generally popular among most Colombians, with recent polls showing a majority — around 60 percent — saying they would vote for it. Among the harshest critics of the deal is Álvaro Uribe, the former Colombian president whose military crackdown on the FARC many credit with forcing the rebels to the negotiating table. Mr. Uribe has repeatedly said the deal amounts to an amnesty for the FARC and has accused Mr. Santos of being a traitor. Jorge Robledo, a leftist senator from an opposition party, says Mr. Uribe’s position is too extreme. While he believes that challenges remain in reintegrating FARC members into society, the opportunity for a is too important to pass up, he said. “Disarming the FARC won’t resolve all of Colombia’s problems,” he said. “Some violence will disappear, some won’t. And other problems will continue in this country, like poverty, unemployment, an agrarian crisis and corruption. But this doesn’t take away from the immense importance that a has for this country. ” | 1 |
MEXICO CITY — Five people were killed early Monday at a crowded nightclub in the popular Caribbean tourist destination of Playa del Carmen, Mexico, when an armed man who had been denied entry opened fire inside the club, prompting a gun battle and a stampede, officials said. Four of the victims, including three members of the security team that had blocked the gunman’s entry, were hit by bullets, and the fifth victim was trampled in the resulting pandemonium, the authorities said. The shooting occurred at the Blue Parrot nightclub, which was hosting the final night of the BPM Festival, an international electronic music event that draws fans from around the world. The gunman entered the club around 2:30 a. m. but was turned away at the door because he was carrying a weapon, said Miguel Ángel Pech, the state attorney for Quintana Roo State, on the Yucatán Peninsula. The man then opened fire, and as patrons threw themselves to the ground or rushed for the exits, security guards at the club “repelled” the attacker, Mr. Pech said, adding that the guards were apparently armed. The victims included two Canadians, a Colombian, an Italian and a Mexican, and at least 15 other people were injured, including at least three Americans, the authorities said. The gunman has not been captured or identified, but several people were detained soon after the shooting and were being held for questioning, officials said. Mr. Pech, speaking at a news conference on Monday morning, did not suggest why the gunman had tried to enter the club with a weapon, but he said the attack was not an act of terrorism. In an interview with Foro TV later in the day, the state attorney said that investigators had not discounted the possibility that the attack had something to do with a fight between criminal groups or with an extortion racket. Investigators at the scene have recovered 20 casings from three firearms, officials said, though it remained unclear whether some of the bullets had been fired by weapons belonging to the security personnel or, perhaps, to one or more patrons. Humera Hamad, a resident of El Paso, Tex. who was on vacation in Playa del Carmen, said she was in the club when the shooting started. “I couldn’t see anything,” she said in an interview. “I just heard a blast and ran out of there, then started jumping fences. ” She added, “I never looked back. ” Fabian González Camacho, 33, was standing outside the club, near the entrance, and ran for safety after the attack began. “I kept thinking: ‘This is going to be a massacre. They are going to kill us all,’” he said. Survivors sought sanctuary in other nightclubs and stores, he said. “A wave of panic, uncertainty and survival kicked in,” he said. “We were all vulnerable people, having fun, getting drunk, many also doing drugs, and then this happened. ” Videos taken after the shooting and posted online showed clubgoers rushing through the streets of the resort town and crouching beneath tables outside nearby clubs and bars, stricken faces bathed in the glow of neon lights. “We are overcome with grief over this senseless act of violence,” the BPM Festival management said in a statement posted on the company’s Facebook page. The festival is an annual event that draws D. J. s, industry professionals and revelers from around the world to Playa del Carmen, on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán. The shooting could put a dent in the robust tourism industry of the Yucatán, which has generally been less violent than many other places in Mexico, attracting millions of visitors to its white sand beaches and Mayan ruins. | 0 |
LONDON — In a day of intrigue and betrayal, predictions about the next prime minister of Britain were overturned on Thursday as the presumed favorite, Boris Johnson, said he would not run after his ally in the Brexit campaign, Michael Gove, suddenly announced his candidacy. Mr. Gove had once ruled himself out for the job. His Thursday wrecked Mr. Johnson’s prospects and enhanced those of Theresa May, the home secretary, who had backed the Remain campaign but with little enthusiasm. With Mr. Johnson out, the prospect of a race between Ms. May, 59, and Mr. Gove, 48, the justice secretary, also indicated that the next prime minister would not seek to keep Britain in the single market of the European Union if the price was no restriction on immigration from the bloc. The sense that Mr. Johnson, the former London mayor, might try to reach a softer deal with Brussels, and his unwillingness to promise key jobs to Mr. Gove and other leaders of the campaign to exit the European Union, helped doom his candidacy, legislators said. Mr. Gove said Thursday that he had “come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead. ” Ms. May supported staying in the European Union but was a relatively quiet voice in that debate and made no enemies. She is considered a candidate of continuity who is farther to the right than Prime Minister David Cameron, who announced his resignation the day after the vote for to leave the bloc. On Thursday, Ms. May ruled out a second referendum or any effort to rejoin the European Union, emphasizing that there must be better control of immigration. “Brexit means Brexit,” she said. “The campaign was fought, the vote was held, turnout was high and the public gave their verdict,” she said. “There must be no attempts to remain inside the E. U. no attempts to rejoin it through the back door and no second referendum. ” She said that negotiations with Brussels would take years and that they would not start before the end of the year, despite impatience among European leaders. It is notable that the chairman of her campaign is a “Brexit” supporter, Chris Grayling, the leader of the House of Commons. While the bookmakers made Ms. May the new favorite to succeed Mr. Cameron, she is vulnerable to charges that in her years as home secretary, she failed to reduce net immigration to Britain. Also seeking the office are Stephen Crabb, a young Welsh lawmaker who is the work and pensions secretary Andrea Leadsom, the energy minister and Liam Fox, a former defense secretary. The turmoil in the Conservative Party is following a script, with friends betrayed and secret deals, that seems derived from “Game of Thrones,” itself drawn from centuries of English history. Mr. Johnson, in his own speech, included a reference to Brutus in “Julius Caesar,” and spoke of “a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. ” It was not a time to “fight against the tide of history, but to take that tide at the flood and sail on to fortune,” Mr. Johnson said. Mr. Johnson himself played Brutus to Prime Minister Cameron’s Caesar. But he got to be Caesar for only a very short time before Mr. Gove took on the role of Brutus. Mr. Johnson, a betrayer betrayed, seemed more rueful than angry. And he was silent about which candidate he might now support. Mr. Gove, who was a close friend of Mr. Cameron before backing the British exit, appears to have been encouraged to run by Cameron aides who vowed privately to try to block the ascension of Mr. Johnson, regarded as more interested in the game of politics than in the substance. It has been evident in the days since the referendum that Mr. Johnson and Mr. Gove had had no plan for what to do if they won, and that they have disagreements about how to approach the future. Even Thursday morning, Mr. Gove was vague about his aims should he become prime minister. He said his “plan for the United Kingdom, which I hope can provide unity and change” would be unveiled “in the coming days. ” Ms. May, the daughter of a vicar, portrayed herself as a candidate for ordinary voters. “If you’re from an ordinary family, life is just much harder than many people in politics realize,” she said. “You have a job, but you often don’t have job security. ” “Frankly, not everybody in Westminster understands that,” she said, referring to Parliament and the government. If selected by the Conservatives, she would be the second woman to become Britain’s prime minister, after Margaret Thatcher. The five candidates will be winnowed down to two by successive votes by Conservative Party members of Parliament, beginning on July 5. One of those two will then be chosen as the next leader by the 150, 000 or so registered members of the party, with an outcome to be announced on Sept. 9. The opposition Labour Party, too, is in the midst of a leadership struggle. The incumbent, Jeremy Corbyn, overwhelmingly lost a vote among Labour’s members of Parliament, but he has said he will not resign. He faces an expected challenge by Angela Eagle, the former Labour spokeswoman for business. If both Ms. May and Ms. Eagle emerge victorious, women would lead Britain and Scotland. Women would head both main British political parties as well as all three in Scotland and one in Wales. There were auguries on Wednesday when an email to Mr. Gove from his wife, Sarah Vine, a journalist, was leaked. In it, she urged her husband to approach a commitment to Mr. Johnson with skepticism, and to lock down any commitments beforehand, especially on controls over immigration. She encouraged Mr. Gove to have “leverage” in his dealings with Mr. Johnson, claiming that without Mr. Gove’s support, the Conservative Party membership will not have “the necessary reassurance to back Boris” in the leadership vote. In another Shakespearean reference, Ms. Vine has been lampooned on social media as a pushy, plotting Lady Macbeth. Less than two weeks ago, just days before the June 23 referendum, Mr. Gove was adamant that he did not have the desire or the talent to become prime minister. Praising Mr. Cameron “as an exceptional person with exceptional talents,” Mr. Gove told The Daily Telegraph, “I don’t think I have got that exceptional level of ability required for the job. ” Four years ago, Mr. Gove told the BBC, “I could not be prime minister, I’m not equipped to be prime minister, I don’t want to be prime minister. ” But all that was then. Mark Field, a legislator who was planning to back Mr. Johnson, said, “At least it shows that it’s not just the Labour Party that is capable of being a complete shambles. ” | 1 |
fall of the ussr , Valdai , sochi In days when modern Moscow is being accused of pursuing similar ambitions to the USSR, the assembled experts tried to formulate the basic myths about Russia’s Soviet past. Source: Panthermedia / Vostock-photo
The world's leading scholars and analysts from the Valdai Club have analyzed collapse of the Soviet Union and compared the direction of current Russian foreign policy to that of its predecessor at a meeting of the international discussion forum in Sochi on Oct. 24-27.
In days when modern Moscow is being accused of pursuing similar ambitions to the USSR, the assembled experts tried to formulate the basic myths about Russia’s Soviet past and discussed whether the Kremlin is seeking to re-establish. Deliberately dismantled?
"I do not believe that there is an inevitability that in 1991 the Soviet Union had to collapse. There are plenty of reasons why it did not have to occur then," Robert Legvold, Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and director of the Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative, told RBTH, adding that none of the main theories that experts put forward in their search for the causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 explain the phenomenon fully.
Wherever the reasons for the collapse were hidden – in the political and economic system of the USSR or the problem of nationalities that fueled separatist aspirations in some parts of the multinational association – it is still impossible to say with certainty why the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, said Legvold.
13th annual meeting of Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi / Source: Anatoly Strunin / TASS
The failure to completely understand the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union fuels the opinion that the Soviet Union was deliberately dismantled.
"In Russia, too many people believe that the Soviet Union was dismantled, rather than that it broke down on its own," Andrei Tsygankov, a professor at the departments of political science and international relations at San Francisco State University, told RBTH.
The view that the crisis in the Soviet Union was not of a structural nature is confirmed by the fact that in 1988 the economic situation in the USSR improved, Tsygankov said.
"Perhaps it was not a structural, but a cyclical crisis. If the policies had been different, it would have been possible to change the situation," he suggested.
However, an even more interesting question, according to Tsygankov, concerns the extrapolation of the principles of Soviet foreign policy to modern Russia. Few ambitions
"The train has left," said Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, responding to RBTH's question about whether Moscow is looking for the impact on other countries that it had in Soviet times.
It is a mistake to think that any strengthening of Russian influence in the post-Soviet space should necessarily mean the Kremlin's desire to recreate the Soviet Union, he explained.
Legvold agreed, arguing that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s infamous words about the collapse of the USSR being "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" should not be interpreted as his desire to restore the Soviet Union at the earliest opportunity. Putin: Use of 'mythical' Russian military threat a ‘profitable business'
Contemporary Moscow has no ambitions to involve neighboring countries in Cold War-era blocs, believes Legvold. According to the expert, Russia, like any country, wants to have a say in making regional decisions affecting its interests, but this does not mean that Russia is looking for a way to gain full control over its neighbors.
That is why the countries of the Western world should not take Russia as a potential aggressor; Moscow's main task now is to improve the economic and demographic situation in the country, says John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
At the same time, a number of those gathered in Sochi expressed a belief that criticism of Russian integration initiatives is due to the fact that they call into question the faith of the Western countries that there is no alternative to the modern world order.
"The universal system established by the West after 1991 is trying to […] homogenize political space across the globe," said Sakwa. "The development of BRICS and other alternatives is precisely the argument to say that there is now an alternative force, where this unipolar universalism no longer applies."
At the same time, Moscow is not looking for ways to oppose the Western world with an alternative world order deliberately, according to experts, who are convinced that Russia's foreign policy initiatives, including its increasingly close cooperation with China, is due primarily to the U.S. and EU policies toward Moscow.
"Russians tend to react to the Americans […]. It is the Americans pushing the Russians towards the Chinese which, I believe, is not in America’s national interests," said Mearsheimer. | 1 |
STRASBOURG, France — Battered by months of dismal approval ratings and a stubbornly high unemployment rate, President François Hollande of France announced Thursday night that he would not compete in next year’s election. The unprecedented decision opened up and energized France’s presidential race even as it added further turmoil to the country’s unsettled politics. It also injected new uncertainty into the political dynamic of Europe as and populist forces are gaining strength across the Continent, as well as in the United States. Mr. Hollande had kept France in suspense for months over whether he would seek another term, turning his choice into a kind of national guessing game. His surprise decision — he had been expected to run — was the latest in a series of shocks to French and European politics, which have been upended throughout the year by voter discontent with establishment governance, Mr. Hollande’s included. The announcement — issued by the Élysée Palace, the seat of the presidency — was greeted across the political spectrum as a courageous and dignified decision that, as Mr. Hollande himself made clear, was intended to place the interests of the country above his own. “As a Socialist, because that is my life’s commitment, I cannot accept, I cannot come to terms with the dispersion of the left, with its splitting up,” Mr. Hollande said in a somber statement. “Because that would remove all hope of winning in the face of conservatism and, worse yet, of extremism. ” So low had his ratings fallen — Mr. Hollande plumbed historic depths in some surveys, going as low as 4 percent — that many of his own Socialist colleagues had warned publicly that he was headed for certain defeat if he chose to run. More than that, hanging on to the mantle of for the Socialists threatened to bring the party down with him, rendering it all but irrelevant in elections next spring. That prospect had split his own political grouping wide open. He was even forced to submit to a humiliating primary election — also without precedent — to decide who would be the party’s candidate. Several of his former cabinet ministers had already announced they would run against him. Now, with Mr. Hollande out, the Socialists are thought to have improved their chances, even if only slightly. His prime minister, Manuel Valls, is likely to step up as a leading contender in the primary. Mr. Valls is associated with a kind of toughness that analysts and citizens found lacking in Mr. Hollande, and that could help him compete in the general election against candidates from the right. Those now include a former prime minister, François Fillon, who was chosen on Sunday by the Republican Party’s voters, and the National Front’s Marine Le Pen. Both have ridden a wave of nationalist fervor, anger over immigration and worries about Islamist terrorism, and Mr. Valls has sounded similarly themes. At the same time, Mr. Valls could be tainted by his association with Mr. Hollande’s administration, which has been a study in the slow slipping away of authority. For years an unremarkable Socialist functionary who rose slowly through the ranks, waiting for his turn, Mr. Hollande owed his narrow election in 2012 more to disgust with the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, than to any personal appeal he exerted. Still, the French left was delighted that after years in the political wilderness, it finally had an apparent champion in Mr. Hollande. But he never settled on a clear line of policy. First he campaigned as an Socialist, with threats against finance. Once in office, he quickly veered to giving tax breaks to companies. Finally, he tried to push through a overhaul, but largely backed down after huge street protests. Personal scandals did not help. His image as a leader was severely weakened early on when he was photographed on the back of a motorcycle going to a clandestine tryst with an actress. A separation from his partner followed, as well as a book by her. He then dealt himself a final, perhaps fatal, blow by spending hours confiding the inner workings of his presidency to a pair of journalists. Their book of his confessions, published this fall, was greeted with outrage by members of his party, who were baffled that the man who held the country’s highest office would commit such an act of political suicide. It also made clear that he held basic doubts about socialism, enraging what was left of the party’s rank and file. Analysts have long pointed to Mr. Hollande’s ideological fuzziness — dangerous for a politician faced with a French electorate that has historically demanded clarity and authority from its top leader. But it was his failure to make a dent in France’s unemployment rate — much higher than the national figure of 10 percent among youth in some immigrant suburbs, where it approaches 40 percent — that was perhaps the most decisive blow to his presidency. Months ago, Mr. Hollande suggested that he would not run again if he could not bring it down. He made good on that promise Thursday night. “The major commitment I made to you was to lower the unemployment rate,” a melancholy Mr. Hollande said on national television from the Élysée Palace on Thursday night. “And I devoted to that, with my government, all of my energy, took all of the risks. ” “I lowered taxes on companies, because that’s what is needed to create more jobs. I worked to boost hiring, making worker training a top priority,” Mr. Hollande said. “And I took the responsibility to reform the labor market. The results are there — later than I had said that would be, I admit, but they are there. ” Actually, though, unemployment has not budged significantly during Mr. Hollande’s term. Otherwise, his short speech was a dutiful laundry list of the things he said he had accomplished: legalizing marriage, the Paris climate accord, help for schools, reorganizing France’s local governments. It all lacked a defining stamp, as Mr. Hollande himself appeared to recognize. There was a sense of relief in the immediate reactions of his Socialist colleagues. “This was a difficult choice, reflective and serious,” Mr. Valls said. “I want to express to François Hollande my emotion, my respect, my loyalty and my affection,” Mr. Valls added. He did not announce his own candidacy, but he has been suggesting that he might do so soon. The National Front reacted with glee and mockery to Mr. Hollande’s decision, even though it is now likely to face a much tougher Socialist opponent next year. “It was smart, smart of François Hollande,” said Florian Philippot, a top National Front official. “It’s a good thing for France and the French. It says much about the sense of weariness, the deliquescence, of this term. ” | 1 |
EAST RUTHERFORD, N. J. — Lionel Messi had the collar of his shirt pulled up to his nose. With his eyes peeking out just over the fabric, he watched a nightmare unfold. Argentina and Chile had played 120 minutes of ruthless, scoreless soccer on Sunday night at MetLife Stadium. Penalty kicks would be needed to decide the winner of the 45th Copa América. Up stepped Messi, widely regarded as the best player in the world, to take the first shot for Argentina, and he missed, sending the ball sailing over the crossbar and into the crowd. Moments later, he watched as Francisco Silva of Chile buried a shot inside the left post to give his team a shootout win. All of the Argentine players hung their heads near the center circle as the Chileans erupted in celebration. But Messi took a slow, solitary walk across the grass and took a seat on the far end of his team’s bench. He stared at the grass as the Chilean players bobbed up and down in celebration. When he got up again, there were tears in his eyes. The emotions boiled over, and they carried to the locker room. When Messi, 29, he suggested, shockingly, that his national team career was over. “In the locker room, I thought that the national team was finished for me, that it’s not for me,” Messi said. “It’s what I feel right now. It’s a great sadness that it happened to me, that I missed penalty kick that was very important. It’s for the good of everybody. It’s not enough to just get to the final and not win. ” The meeting of Argentina and Chile in the 45th Copa América final was eagerly awaited as an alluring confrontation of two of the finest soccer teams in the world. Yet the game that materialized had all the charm and beauty of a street brawl. Faces puckered in pain and anger. Studded cleats whipped dangerously in the air, aimed at flesh. Bodies collided with other bodies, crumpling and splaying onto the grass. Those in the crowd of 82, 026 — the largest soccer crowd in New Jersey history — who sought a showcase of sophisticated play were instead treated to a stream of crunching tackles, theatrical quarrels, disciplinary cards (eight yellows, two reds). The Chileans, who defeated the Argentines in the same competition last year on Chile’s home soil, will not mind the soreness. Argentina, which has not won a major tournament since 1993, will have a dose of existential despair to accompany the physical pain. Before the tournament, memories of the team’s most recent heartbreaks weighed heavily on Messi’s mind: the Copa América in 2007, in which the Argentines lost a second straight final to their archrival, Brazil the World Cup final in 2014, in which they succumbed to Germany in overtime the Copa América final in 2015, in which they fell to Chile in a penalty shootout. Add 2016, when Chile outlasted them in an unending rumble. “It’s incredible, the fact that we can’t win it,” Messi said. “It’s happened to us again, and by penalty kicks. It’s our third consecutive final. We tried, and it wasn’t for us. ” Messi has played 113 times for Argentina. Last week, with his 55th goal, he became his country’s leading scorer. He has won every award and honor imaginable as an individual and with his club team, Barcelona. But if he does not play another international soccer game, his glittering résumé will have one glaring hole: a championship with Argentina. The game on Sunday had a violent start, establishing a fierce tone, and amid the constellation of superstars on both teams, the referee, Héber Lopes, somehow emerged as the center of attention. The only credible chance of the first half came in the 22nd minute, when Gonzalo Higuaín chipped his shot wide after finding himself one on one with goalkeeper Claudio Bravo. Otherwise, it was a parade of fouls and cards. Marcelo Díaz of Chile picked up a yellow card in the 16th minute for kicking Messi near his midsection. Twelve minutes later, Messi and Díaz collided after Messi had prodded the ball into space on another menacing move, and Lopes ran over holding a second yellow card for Díaz, reducing Chile to 10 men. Two more yellow cards materialized in the 37th minute, after a momentary kerfuffle between Javier Mascherano of Argentina and Arturo Vidal of Chile. Three minutes later, Messi picked up a yellow card for diving. In the 43rd minute, Marcos Rojo of Argentina was issued a straight red card after a slide tackle on Vidal — even though the challenge looked more poorly timed than malicious. On good days, Chile is known for its defense — a system that can make opposing players feel like fish struggling to swim upstream. Argentina at its best can embroider long stretches of passing with the nonchalance of a knitting circle. But reduced to 10 men apiece, the teams resorted to more rudimentary maneuvers. The Argentines had scored 18 goals in their previous five games, but their strategy on Sunday seemed reduced to having Messi try to dribble through the Chilean defense himself. Chile controlled possession, 54 percent to 46, but was severely outshot, . Surrounding the referee, trying to sway him to issue cards to opponents, became a part of the tactical framework of the game. The coaches, Gerardo Martino of Argentina and Juan Antonio Pizzi of Chile, were separated on the sideline at one point. Scoring chances emerged as the game wore on, even as players’ legs grew wobbly, like boxers swaying, seeking a decisive blow, in a bout. The two goalkeepers traded athletic saves in a span of minutes in overtime. Everyone in the stadium — the fans, the players, the referee — seemed exhausted when the game went to penalty kicks. Vidal stepped up first, and his shot was saved by keeper Sergio Romero of Argentina. Then came Messi, who whacked his attempt several yards over the bar. He spent parts of the shootout thereafter on his knees, staring at the ground. Argentina’s fourth shooter, Lucas Biglia, missed, too, setting up Chile’s decisive kick. Messi watched in despair. “There’s not much analysis to go over,” Martino said. “We really had high hopes, and now we’re leaving . ” The sellout crowd — thick with fans of Argentina dressed in light blue and white, speckled throughout with Chile supporters in red — represented one last mass spectacle to cap a month of entertaining games. In recent days, tournament organizers hailed the success of the event, specially scheduled for the 100th anniversary of the tournament and held for the first time outside South America. For the United States, it was a chance to reiterate its capacity to host a future World Cup. The competition drew an average of 46, 119 people per game, more than any other Copa tournament. Sunil Gulati, the president of U. S. Soccer, last week called those figures “World Cup numbers, for an event organized in seven months with 16 teams. ” (The last three World Cups drew averages of 53, 592, 49, 499 and 52, 609 people per game.) The final on Sunday played out under a shadow of scandal, though, with the president of the Argentine Football Association, Luis Segura, and several top soccer officials having been criminally charged in a corruption case in Argentina only three days before the final game. Victor Montagliani, the new president of Concacaf, an organizer of the tournament, said on Sunday that it was something of a miracle that the Copa América had been successfully carried out at all. The tournament figured prominently in the world soccer corruption case announced by the United States Justice Department last year, requiring the associated contracts for media and marketing rights to be torn up. “It was a bit of a Rubik’s Cube to figure it out,” Montagliani said. “This tournament was dead. ” The tournament survived, but it was anguishing for Messi. On Thursday, after the Argentina team plane was delayed, he criticized the federation on his Instagram account, calling it a “disaster. ” He frustration only grew as the weekend went on, through a grueling game against Chile, until he apparently had enough and stepped away from the team altogether. | 1 |
DAMASCUS, Syria — The guns were silent atop Mount Qasioun and the lights on its slopes twinkled over Damascus as President Bashar of Syria welcomed a group of Western visitors into his palace on Monday night, presenting himself as a man firmly in control of his country. He radiated confidence and friendliness as he ushered a group of British and American journalists and policy analysts into an elegant sitting room where he claimed that the social fabric of Syria was stitched together “much better than before” a chaotic civil war began more than five years ago. It was as if half his citizens had not been driven from their homes and nearly half a million had not been killed in the bloody fighting for which he rejected any personal responsibility, blaming instead the United States and Islamist militants. “I’m just a headline — the bad president, the bad guy, who is killing the good guys,” Mr. Assad said. “You know this narrative. The real reason is toppling the government. This government doesn’t fit the criteria of the United States. ” It was a surreal meeting for me after years of writing about a devastating and intractable war that has reduced several of Syria’s grand city centers to rubble and prompted accusations of war crimes. While hundreds of thousands of Syrians are besieged and hungry, here was Mr. Assad, secure in his palace because he has outsourced much of the war to Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah forces whose influence has grown to a degree that makes some of his own supporters uncomfortable. He was on a mission to convince the West that their governments had made a mistake in backing his opponents and that he was secure in his position as the custodian of Syrian sovereignty. Waxing philosophical, he spoke of every Syrian’s right to be “a full citizen, in every meaning of this word,” and likened intolerant versions of religion to a computer operating system that needed to be updated. He promised that a new era of openness and dialogue was underway in Syria and said that he was thinking ahead about how to modernize Syrians’ mentality after a war that he believed his forces were assured of winning. Mr. Assad ruled out political changes until then and declared that he planned to remain president at least until his third term ends in 2021. Even as Mr. Assad and his inner circle tried out this new line of openness about the situation in Syria, they were hardening their stance against compromising with domestic or international opponents. They contended that the United States was actively backing the Islamic State and other extremist militants, and called allegations of war crimes against Syrian officials politically motivated, fabricated or both. Despite “thousands of Syrians killed by the terrorists,” Mr. Assad asserted, “no one is talking about war crimes” by his opponents. In fact, the day before, the United Nations special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, followed by Amnesty International and other international rights groups, condemned the rebel groups’ indiscriminate shelling of sections of Aleppo, attacks that have killed scores of civilians in recent days. But it is Syrian government warplanes that have indiscriminately pounded residential areas daily for years government forces that have imposed starvation sieges and state detention facilities that hold thousands of people — including peaceful protesters, bloggers and other civilians arrested seemingly at random — who languish without trial, often under torture. We asked Mr. Assad about these things, of course. “Let’s suppose that these allegations are correct and this president has killed his own people, and the free world and the West are helping the Syrian people,” Mr. Assad said in English. “After five years and a half, who supported me? How can I be a president and my people don’t support me?” He gave a small giggle and added, “This is not realistic story. ” Indeed, Mr. Assad has managed to hold on not only because of decisive intervention by foreign fighters, but also because of deeper support in some quarters than many thought he had. Mr. Assad said on Monday that while much of his support came from people who may dislike his policies or the Baath Party he heads, they fear that the alternative would be extremist rule or state collapse. “They learned the value of the state,” he said, acknowledging that this support could diminish if the war ends. “That’s what brought them towards us, not because they changed their mind politically. ” Mr. Assad’s remarks came after a conference organized by the British Syrian Society, headed by his Fawaz Akhras, that was billed as part of a new openness and an effort to compete in what has been termed a news media war. I was among several dozen international journalists and analysts who attended the conference as a way to get into the country after more than two years of being unable to obtain a visa. There was no sign that the policy requiring journalists to travel with minders and to go through elaborate hoops to visit specific areas had changed. But Damascus, the capital, appeared less tense than on my last visit, in 2014. New bars are packed in the historic old city. After advances by forces and what the government calls reconciliation deals with besieged suburbs, artillery fire no longer pounds those districts daily, and rebel mortar fire hits the city less frequently. The message from government officials and Assad supporters echoed the president’s: They believe they are winning and they are ready to engage with the West, but on their own terms. “It is up to the West to rethink about their policies,” the Syrian foreign minister, Walid told a group of us on Monday, adding that the government would welcome, though it did not expect, cooperation from the United States. Mr. Moallem said the government would fight to defeat any militants refusing to return to government rule — be they Kurdish groups in the northeast, or the groups and rebels fighting in Aleppo. He dismissed the possibility of any deal that would retain local opposition control in eastern Aleppo, saying that would “reward those murderers. ” Mr. Assad said during our meeting that “until this moment, we still have a dialogue through different channels,” even to the United States. “But that doesn’t mean to give up our sovereignty and transfer Syria into a puppet country,” he added. The confident statements come amid a much more complicated picture. Despite Russian air support and thousands of militia fighters from Iraq and Hezbollah, the government’s push to retake the half of Aleppo is facing stiff resistance and counterattacks. The Syrian pound is worth of its prewar value against the dollar. Millions of Syrian children are unable to attend school. The Islamic State still holds large swaths of Syria. Mr. Assad, in a dark suit and trademark tie, met us at the top of the palace’s sweeping staircase, saying he found it “more cozy” than the official one. There were no security checks. Hanging in the grand entryway was a painting of a distorted, grimacing figure, a signature work by the Syrian artist Sabhan Adam, who draws inspiration for his “human monsters,” his website says, from “the pain, fear and phobia which our society constantly suffers from. ” Mr. Assad joked about his love of technology — “I follow the gadgets on a daily basis” — and noted with pride that 4G mobile phone technology had been introduced in Syria during the war. But he brushed off reports that he loved video games. “The last video game I played was Atari,” he said. “Space Invaders. ” Pressed on how Syria might be restructured or reformed, he said the first change needed was in its mental “operating system,” which he said was based on religion. Ideologies based on “bad interpretation” of Islam had fueled the war, he said, rejecting analysts’ contentions that his government had accelerated the process by building mosques and funneling jihadist fighters to Iraq during the United States occupation. “Islamization means ‘I don’t believe in anyone who doesn’t look like me, behaves like me, thinks like me,’ ” he said. “Secular means freedom of religion. ” He denied the existence of political prisoners and grew steely when asked about people detained for protesting or writing against the government. “If you support the terrorists, it’s not political prisoner,” he added. “You are supporting the killers. ” He said that he had released tens of thousands of prisoners through amnesties to pave the way for “any solution in our society” but that he had the authority to release only those who had been tried and sentenced. Asked about specific detainees whose families have heard nothing of them for years, he demanded proof, saying: “Do you have documents? Did they see them in prison?” Mr. Assad said he was fighting to preserve state institutions and criticized Western intervention. “Good government or bad, it’s not your mission” to change it, he said. | 1 |
A pain management specialist, Dr. Nathaniel Katz, was stunned in 2012 when the Food and Drug Administration rejected a recommendation from an expert panel that had urged mandatory training for doctors who prescribed powerful painkillers like OxyContin. That panel had concluded that the training might help stem the epidemic of overdose deaths involving prescription narcotics, or opioids. At first, Dr. Katz, who had been on the panel, thought that drug makers had pressured the F. D. A. to kill the proposal. Then an agency official told him that another group had fought the recommendation: the American Medical Association, the nation’s largest doctors organization. “I was shocked,” said Dr. Katz, the president of Analgesic Solutions, a company in Natick, Mass. “You go to medical school to help public health and here we have an area where you have 15, 000 people a year dying. ” Now, as the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal and state agencies scramble to find solutions to the vexing opioid problem, the role of doctors is coming back to center stage. The Obama administration recently announced that it supported mandatory training for prescribers of opioids. On Tuesday, a new F. D. A. panel of outside experts will meet to review once again whether such training should be required. The hearing will almost certainly touch off an intense debate inside the medical community and focus attention on medical groups like the A. M. A. which have resisted governmental mandates affecting how doctors practice for both ideological and practical reasons. The panel is expected to make its final recommendation on Wednesday. An F. D. A. spokeswoman said the agency now supported mandatory training. Since 2012, the F. D. A. has required drug companies that produce opioids — drugs like OxyContin, fentanyl and methadone — to underwrite voluntary educational courses on the medications. In a surprise, last week many of those manufacturers came out in support of rules requiring doctors to have specific training or expertise in pain management before getting a license from the Drug Enforcement Administration to prescribe a strong opioid. The approach, which would require congressional action, would ensure that prescribers got “appropriate training in pain management with opioids so their patients can continue to access treatment options,” the group said. Dr. Patrice A. Harris, who is the chairwoman of the A. M. A. ’s Task Force to Reduce Opioid Abuse, said the organization was committed to helping doctors better use opioids. But Dr. Harris added that the A. M. A. continued to oppose mandatory opioid training for doctors because many physicians do not prescribe the drugs. She added that the group also opposed laws that require doctors to check databases before issuing a prescription for a narcotic painkiller. Such laws, which a growing number of states have adopted, are intended to help doctors identify patients who seek prescriptions from multiple physicians and to help doctors avoid prescribing dangerous combinations of drugs. Data shows that when such programs are voluntary, many doctors do not use them. “We know these tools are a great tool in the toolbox,” said Dr. Harris, who is a psychiatrist. “But they are not a panacea. ” Doctors say measures like checking prescription databases take up more time in days already filled with bureaucratic duties, and many express ideological concerns about government’s reach into medicine. And experts say many doctors believe that their practices and their patients are not responsible for the opioid problem. Timothy Condon, a former official at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said he encountered that attitude in 2010 when several federal agencies approached the A. M. A. and medical groups representing specialists to seek their support for mandatory physician training. “The message was, who are you as feds to tell us how to practice medicine, you already regulate us so much,” said Mr. Condon, who is now a research professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He added that when he countered that the scale of the prescriptions that doctors were writing for opioids was central to the overdose problem, the response from the medical group was “silence. ” Mandatory training before prescribing the drugs is not the only area where government officials and medical experts are cautiously circling each other. The Obama administration has asked American medical schools to incorporate new recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about how to treat pain into their curriculums. Along with urging physicians to try nondrug approaches first, the guidelines suggest that opioids be used sparingly. So far, however, only about of the 145 teaching institutions that belong to a major organization, the Association of American Medical Colleges, have agreed to incorporate the C. D. C. guidelines into their programs. Dr. Darrell G. Kirch, the organization’s president, said his group and medical schools were actively working to reduce inappropriate opioid use. But he added that many institutions preferred to develop teaching guidelines based on their own expertise. In addition, Dr. Kirch said that medical school leaders feared that committing to one federal guideline could lead to a situation where lawmakers imposed agendas on physicians that are not in the interest of patient care. Last week, the F. D. A. released data showing the impact of a voluntary approach to educating doctors. The figures showed that only about half of the 80, 000 doctors who the agency had hoped would receive training by March 2015 had completed it. While the agency said the results “make it difficult to draw conclusions regarding the success” of the program, it also raised concerns that requiring training could make it harder for patients to get needed drugs. The F. D. A. will also ask the panel to review whether doctors who prescribe narcotics like Percocet or Vicodin should have access to training. The medical community is not monolithic in its views. Recently, for example, the Massachusetts Medical Society supported legislation in that state imposing a limit on an initial opioid prescription to a supply. Some doctors and dentists give patients 60 or 90 painkillers, enough for a month, giving rise to potential misuse of the drugs or opening a door to addiction. Dr. Katz, the pain expert in Massachusetts, said he understood the resistance of physicians to mandates, including the fear that malpractice lawyers will seek to wield them as weapons. But he has been urging regulators for about 15 years to require doctors to undergo mandatory training. “There is incredible rationalizing that exists,” he said. “There is a problem, and patients and doctors are a part of it. But doctors think it is not me and it is not my patients. ” | 1 |
John Pilger: The Truth Is... There Was No One To Vote For Video - Going Underground
John Pilger tells us what has been revealed by Trump winning the US election. Plus, what does a Donald Trump presidency mean for the Middle East? Posted November 10, 2016 | 0 |
Mosquito Army Released in Zika Fight in Brazil & Colombia "Vaccinating mosquitoes..." Image Credits: flickr, 31031835@N08 .
Scientists are planning to release an army of millions of modified mosquitoes in areas of Brazil and Colombia.
They say the unusual approach is an attempt to provide “revolutionary protection” against mosquito-borne diseases such as Zika and chikungunya.
The mosquitoes are infected with a bug called Wolbachia which reduces their ability to spread viruses to people.
The $18m dollar project is funded by an international team of donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. | 0 |
.@JonahNRO: ”If it’s a contest between James Comey’s credibility and Donald Trump’s credibility,” Comey wins ”10 out of 10 times.” pic. twitter. Sunday on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” while discussing former FBI Director James Comey testifying to Congress next week, Trump critic and National Review senior editor Jonah Goldberg said, “If it’s a contest between James Comey’s credibility and Donald Trump’s credibility,” Comey wins “10 out of 10 times. ” Goldberg said, “I know. But I mean, everything in Washington is sort of a hot mess right now. And I think that, you know, the fact that the Trump White House couldn’t give anybody to come on here and talk about terrorism is a sign of the disarray that they’re in. ” He continued, “Anyway, so their actual attack mode, I think all it does is please the people who are already in Donald Trump’s column. And if it’s a contest between James Comey’s credibility and Donald Trump’s, I think Comey’s brand wins that, you know, 10 out of 10 times. ” Follow Pam Key On Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 0 |
NTEB Ads Privacy Policy The Republican Party Finally Set Free From The Grip Of The Bush Crime Family And Other Phonies To the Bush Crime Family, Colin Powell, William Kristol, and all the other phony Republicans who were exposed, you will not be welcome in the new America under President Donald Trump. You are fakes, frauds, phonies and criminals. Now that you're out, stay out and don't come back. by Geoffrey Grider November 10, 2016 Donald Trump single-handedly took down the entire corrupt wing of the Republican Party
Donald Trump’s run for the presidency over the past year and a half revealed some amazing things, it flushed out the rats that had hijacked the Republican Party like the Bush Crime Family and others. While George W. Bush declared that he and his wife Laura “ would not be voting in this election “, his father George H.W. Bush actually voted for Crooked Hillary Clinton . (If you’d like a cheat sheet of the rest of the Republirats who jumped ship, click here .)
Why did many of the pretend Republicans not vote for Donald Trump? Because they are part of the New World Order elite globalists, and they could not possibly support Trump’s America First agenda. The Bush Crime Family, after 28 years of corrupting the GOP, was finally exposed to the sunlight and what an ugly sight it was. For more information on this topic,please read NTEB’s The Top 5 Conspiracy Theories That Were Proven To Be True Because Donald Trump Ran For President . If you are just hearing about this for the first time, it will be an eye-opener.
The GOP is frequently referred to as the “party of Reagan” , but that’s not really a true statement. It used to be the party of Ronald Reagan after the 1980 revolution , but shortly after Reagan’s term ended it was hijacked by the Bush Crime family. For over twenty years now, the Republican Party has been a festering witches cabal of New World Order elites and Bohemian Grove acolytes. The Bush Crime Family – Three Generations of Treason
The November 1989 edition of SPY magazine featured photos of Bohemian Grove men dancing around dressed up as women . The article included artist renditions of the Moloch idol and discussed how they bus in male prostitutes and how AIDS is a big problem. In July of 2004, a New York Post article reported how a top gay-porn star, Chad Savage, serviced the moguls at the Bohemian Grove. Bigwigs who have attended the two-week retreat include George H.W. Bush , Dick Cheney, Alan Greenspan, Walter Cronkite, Alexander Haig, Jack Kemp, Henry Kissinger , Colin Powell , John Major, William F. Buckley, Justin Dart, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., Caspar Weinberger, Charles Percy, George Schultz, Edward Teller, and former C.I.A. director William Casey. A Brief History Of Molech, the Owl, the Bushes and the Bohemian Grove:
The corrupt liberal media all said in lockstep that Donald Trump will “ destroy the Republican party “, but it was only a half-true statement. All the people who defected when Trump was nominated were people who needed to be expunged from the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and Reagan.
To the Bush Crime Family , Colin Powell , William Kristol , and all the other phony Republicans who were exposed, you will not be welcome in the new America under President Donald Trump. You are fakes, frauds, phonies and criminals.
Now that you’re out, stay out and don’t come back.
Geoffrey Grider NTEB is run by end times author and editor-in-chief Geoffrey Grider. Geoffrey runs a successful web design company, and is a full-time minister of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to running NOW THE END BEGINS, he has a dynamic street preaching outreach and tract ministry team in Saint Augustine, FL. NTEB #TRENDING | 0 |
Jake Turx is a newly minted White House correspondent for a publication that has never before had a seat in the White House press corps: Ami Magazine, an Orthodox Jewish weekly based in Brooklyn. He is a singular presence in the briefing room: a young Hasidic Jew with side curls tucked behind his ears and a skullcap embroidered with his Twitter handle. When President Trump called on him at a news conference on Thursday, saying he was looking for a “friendly reporter,” Mr. Turx was prepared. He had spent an hour crafting a question about a recent surge of with a preamble that he hoped would convey his supportive disposition toward Mr. Trump. But the exchange did not go the way he expected. A few hours later, with the clip replaying on social media and Jewish groups issuing news releases, Mr. Turx, 30, was still reeling. He said in a telephone interview, “Regretfully, today was a day I wish we could have done over. ” His editor, Rabbi Yitzchok Frankfurter, watched aghast from the magazine’s offices as his young correspondent received a from the president: “It was a very disheartening moment for us, to watch him being berated. ” The exchange began with Mr. Turx standing up from his seat and gesturing slightly toward his fellow reporters: “Despite what some of my colleagues may have been reporting, I haven’t seen anybody in my community accuse either yourself or anyone on your staff of being . We understand that you have Jewish grandchildren. You are their zayde,” which is Yiddish for “grandfather” and often a word of great affection. At that Mr. Trump nodded slightly, and said, “thank you. ” “However,” Mr. Turx continued, “what we are concerned about and what we haven’t really heard being addressed is an uptick in and how the government is planning to take care of it. There’s been a report out that 48 bomb threats have been made against Jewish centers all across the country in the last couple of weeks. There are people committing acts or threatening to — — ” At that, Mr. Trump interrupted, saying it was “not a fair question. ” “Sit down,” the president commanded. “I understand the rest of your question. ” As Mr. Turx took his seat, Mr. Trump said, “So here’s the story, folks. No. 1, I am the least person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life. No. 2, racism, the least racist person. ” Mr. Turx tried to interject, realizing how the encounter had turned. He said he had wanted to clarify that he in no way meant to accuse Mr. Trump of but instead intended to ask what his administration could do to stop the incidents. But Mr. Trump would not let him speak again, saying, “Quiet, quiet, quiet. ” As Mr. Turx shook his head with an incredulous look on his face, Mr. Trump accused him of having lied that his question would be straight and simple. Mr. Trump said, “I find it repulsive. I hate even the question because people that know me. … ” He went on to say that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, during his visit to the United States on Wednesday, had vouched for Mr. Trump as a good friend of Israel and the Jewish people and no . Mr. Trump concluded that Mr. Turx should have relied on Mr. Netanyahu’s endorsement, “instead of having to get up and ask a very insulting question like that. ” “Just shows you about the press, but that’s the way the press is,” Mr. Trump said. At the news conference, Mr. Turx was referring to a rash of incidents that have shaken many American Jews since Mr. Trump was elected. On three separate days in January, Jewish synagogues, community centers and schools across the country received what seemed to be a coordinated wave of telephone bomb threats that led to evacuations and F. B. I. investigations. Other Jewish institutions have seen an uptick in vandalism and graffiti in the last few months. It was the second time in two days that Mr. Trump was asked to denounce and offer American Jews a dose of reassurance. In his joint news conference with Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Trump responded to a question about by breezily recounting the size of his Electoral College victory and then reminding the reporters that his daughter, Ivanka, his Jared Kushner, and their three children — Mr. Trump’s grandchildren — are all Jewish. The League issued a statement on Thursday that said, “It is why President Trump prefers to shout down a reporter or brush this off as a political distraction. ” David Harris, chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, said, “Respectfully, Mr. President, please use your bully pulpit not to bully reporters asking questions potentially affecting millions of fellow Americans, but rather to help solve a problem that, for many, is real and menacing. ” Surveys show that Mr. Trump was not the choice of the majority of American Jews, who tend to vote for Democrats and came out in force for Hillary Clinton. Many Jews have been critical of Mr. Trump for not more forcefully denouncing and racists like David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan who endorsed Mr. Trump during the campaign. Many Jewish leaders are also wary of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s White House strategist, because of the close affinity between Breitbart News, which he once ran, and the white supremacists in the movement known as the . On Friday, the leaders of Reform Judaism, which includes more than a third of American Jews and is the largest stream of American Judaism, announced that they opposed the confirmation of David M. Friedman as ambassador to Israel. The leaders said in a statement that Mr. Friedman, who has supported Israeli settlements in the West Bank, was unqualified, intemperate and held “extreme views” on Israel that will endanger “both American and Israeli security. ” Mr. Trump was popular among many Orthodox Jews. They were reassured to see the Orthodox Jews in his family and attracted to his hawkish line on Israel, his support of vouchers for religious schools and his promise to ban Muslim immigrants from entering the country. Rechy Frankfurter and her husband, Rabbi Frankfurter, founded Ami Magazine more than six years ago to serve a conservative Jewish audience. It circulates in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia and is one of several news publications serving the community. Ami Magazine comes out weekly and has three sister publications: one for women, one for teens and a cooking magazine called Whisk. The magazine interviewed Mr. Trump before he declared he was running for president and did so again during the campaign. “We didn’t do a political endorsement of him, but I really wanted the president to be elected, and I do want him to succeed,” said Rabbi Frankfurter, the editor in chief. Mrs. Frankfurter, the magazine’s senior editor, said it was clear that Mr. Trump was not an and that Mr. Trump “must have misheard the question” from the magazine’s reporter. “The president is very sensitive to such an accusation, and we find the fact that he’s sensitive to it reassuring,” she said, because it means he understands how awful it is to be thought of as an . Rabbi Frankfurter, whose parents survived the Holocaust, said, “Perhaps the president should speak out more vigorously than he has. He’s got a bully pulpit, and he should use it for good reasons. ” After the news conference, Mr. Turx, a pen name, said that he had had conversations on Thursday evening with White House staff members and that he and members of the Orthodox Jewish community were “extremely confident” that the White House would give “the proper help, guidance and collaboration” on . | 1 |
Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” during the roundtable segment, Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons said President Donald Trump’s cabinet picks are “starting to make it seem a little bit also like America first is really white America first. ” Simmons said, “The thing that is so concerning to me is that the president is undermining all the American institutions. He’s going after the press he’s going after the judiciary, things we’re talking about. It’s starting to make it seem a little bit also like America first is really white America first. Because if you look at what he’s doing, he’s going after immigrants. Even in the administration — the reason we know who Colin Powell and Condi Rice are is because Republican presidents appointed them to significant jobs. ” “This president doesn’t have Latinos, in unusual jobs in his cabinet,” Simmons continued. “This is something that I think we all have to worry about. The United States of America has been moving in a direction for about 30 or 40 years, where everybody gets to participate. We have been teaching our children that. You see Democrats, progressives, but also independents on the streets because this president is moving us away from that direction. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 0 |
WASHINGTON — After waging an assault on the Republican establishment, Donald J. Trump changed course on Tuesday and enlisted the party’s high priests of foreign policy to help him win the confirmation of Rex W. Tillerson as secretary of state. Several former Republican secretaries of defense and state sought to dismiss bipartisan concerns about Mr. Tillerson, the Exxon Mobil chief executive, over his relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. At the center of the debate are questions about Mr. Tillerson’s vocal opposition to American sanctions imposed on Russia as he pursued oil and gas deals in that country. Their mobilization showed how much Mr. Tillerson’s nomination is already a Congressional proxy fight over Mr. Trump’s embrace of Russia and Mr. Putin. Democrats issued blunt denunciations of the idea that a energy executive could adequately represent the national interests of the United States. So did several leading Republicans, whose party orthodoxy has been for decades. “I have serious concerns about his nomination,” said Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. Senator Ben Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, declared himself “deeply troubled” by Mr. Tillerson’s opposition to sanctions imposed by the United States on Russia after its intervention in Ukraine in 2014. Democrats and liberal activists also expressed deep concern about the fate of human rights and climate change under a State Department led by Mr. Tillerson, a veteran of the country’s largest oil company. At the other end of the political spectrum, social conservatives condemned him for playing a role in reversing the Boy Scouts’ longstanding policy of excluding gay people, an issue that became a cultural flashpoint for the religious right. And when he faces lawmakers during hearings before the Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Tillerson will almost certainly be grilled about his finances, his tax returns and his personal investments — questions that Mr. Trump managed to largely avoid answering about himself during his presidential campaign. “Rex Tillerson’s philosophy on international religious freedom, Middle East instability, foreign assistance and relations with countries like Russia and China must be closely examined before confirmation,” Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, said on Tuesday in a statement on Facebook. Mr. Trump’s effort to counter those concerns began early Tuesday morning, almost immediately after his Twitter message making the nomination official: “I have chosen one of the truly great business leaders of the world, Rex Tillerson, Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, to be Secretary of State,” he posted at 6:43 a. m. A series of statements followed from former Vice President Dick Cheney and former secretaries of state James A. Baker III and Condoleezza Rice, among others. In an interview, Robert M. Gates, who served as secretary of defense under President Obama and President George W. Bush, strongly endorsed Mr. Tillerson, a longtime friend, calling him someone who “knows the world like the back of his hand. ” Mr. Gates, whose consulting firm has represented Exxon Mobil, said that senators concerned about Mr. Tillerson’s relationship with Mr. Putin are basing their criticism “on a superficial watching” of video clips of the Exxon executive receiving the Russian Order of Friendship in 2013 with Mr. Putin. Mr. Gates said he recommended Mr. Tillerson to the because he is someone with decades of experience negotiating with foreign leaders. “I think it’s a mistake to confuse having a friendly relationship based on business with sympathy or friendship,” said Mr. Gates, who acknowledged in an earlier statement that Exxon has been a client. “I think Rex is a realist, and I think he will absolutely put America’s interests first in any negotiation. ” During the 2016 primary campaign, Mr. Trump often railed against a Republican establishment that he accused of trying to prevent him from becoming president. On Tuesday, his transition staff proudly released statements of support for Mr. Tillerson that included some of his fiercest critics, including Jeb Bush, the former Republican governor of Florida who fought a losing battle for the party’s presidential nomination. Mr. Gates had written one of the most scathing statements, writing in a Wall Street Journal article in September that “a temperamental, and lip, uninformed is too great a risk for America. ” Mr. Trump’s willingness to embrace the very establishment that he once scorned is partly a reflection of the difficulty that Mr. Tillerson faces in his confirmation battle. Over the past several days, Republican and Democratic lawmakers warned that Mr. Tillerson would face intense scrutiny about his relationship with Russia and with Mr. Putin. Mr. Tillerson has been publicly skeptical about Russian sanctions, which have halted some of Exxon’s biggest projects in Russia, including an agreement with the state oil company to explore and pump underground resources in Siberia that could be worth tens of billions of dollars. Democrats seized on Mr. Tillerson’s background as the leader of an oil company to raise doubts about his commitment to environmental issues. A native of Wichita Falls, Tex. who speaks with a strong Texan twang, Mr. Tillerson, 64, runs a company with operations in about 50 countries, and has cut deals to expand businesses in Venezuela, Qatar, Kurdistan and elsewhere. “He and other company executives led Exxon Mobil in funding outside groups to create an illusion of scientific uncertainty around the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change,” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, said in a statement. Ms. Tanden, who has been a longtime confidante of Hillary Clinton, added, “This misinformation campaign directly narrowed the world’s window of opportunity to cut emissions and avert the catastrophic effects of climate change. ” Amnesty International said in a statement that “Rex Tillerson’s nomination is deeply troubling and could undermine human rights in the U. S. and abroad. ” A former national president for the Boy Scouts, Mr. Tillerson was involved in opening the Scouts up to gay scouts and leaders. Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, wrote on his organization’s website that Mr. Tillerson “caved to the pressure of the far left, irreparably splitting the Scouts and destroying a proud and honorable American tradition. ” Mr. Perkins also cited Exxon’s financial donations to Planned Parenthood, calling them “upsetting at best. ” Mr. Trump appeared unfazed by the potential roadblocks to Mr. Tillerson’s confirmation. In his statement making official his decision to nominate Mr. Tillerson, the lavished praise on the Exxon executive for his business acumen and knowledge of the world. “His tenacity, broad experience and deep understanding of geopolitics make him an excellent choice for secretary of state,” Mr. Trump said. “Rex knows how to manage a global enterprise, which is crucial to running a successful State Department, and his relationships with leaders all over the world are second to none. ” Mr. Tillerson said in the statement that he shared Mr. Trump’s vision for “restoring the credibility of the United States’ foreign relations,” and he vowed to “focus on strengthening our alliances, pursuing shared national interests and enhancing the strength, security and sovereignty of the United States. ” Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, who was a finalist to become Mr. Trump’s secretary of state and will oversee confirmation hearings as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, issued an enthusiastic statement. “Mr. Tillerson is a very impressive individual and has an extraordinary working knowledge of the world,” Mr. Corker said. “I congratulate him on his nomination and look forward to meeting with him and chairing his confirmation hearing. ” | 1 |
On the eve of the 100 days in office milestone, President Donald Trump claims he is both a nationalist and a globalist — despite campaign promises that his presidency would reject globalism and put America first. [“Hey, I’m a nationalist and a globalist,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. “I’m both. ” “And I’m the only one who makes the decision, believe me,” Trump said. But Trump also said that he would terminate NAFTA “if we’re unable to make a deal, but hopefully we won’t have to do that. ” Trump’s remarks come as debate swirls around his presidential campaign promise to end the North America Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA in contrast to his recent assertion that he will “negotiate” a revision of the treaty that has guided U. S. trade policy with Mexico and Canada since 1994. The Journal reported that Trump received almost calls from Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Following those conversations Trump said, “They’re serious about it and I will negotiate rather than terminate. ” “Meanwhile, Sonny Perdue — the agriculture secretary who took office two days earlier — and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross met with Mr. Trump and showed him a map indicating the states where jobs would be lost if the pact collapsed, according to a person familiar with the matter,” the Journal reported, noting that many of the states on the map supported Trump in the 2016 presidential election. “Those conversations, along with a flood of calls to the White House from business executives, helped steer Mr. Trump away from an idea that some of his own advisers feared was a rash and unnecessary threat to two trading partners who fully expected to renegotiate the agreement anyway,” the Journal reported. “I expect the administration to closely consult with Congress before such major decisions are made,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch ( ) chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees trade. “Withdrawing from NAFTA would have significant effects on the America economy. ” Following Trump’s election in November, Chriss Street penned a commentary for Breitbart News focused on how Trump’s “America First” message would strike a blow to “world socialism. ” “The election of Donald Trump now represents an existential threat to World Socialism across the planet,” Street wrote. “Socialists know that when President Reagan went rogue with his muscular capitalist policies, communism quickly imploded. Trump has already torn up the Partnership, which would have internationalized the law covering $28 trillion in trade and investment, about 40 percent of global GDP. “Trump seems determined to destroy “Socialist Globalization” with the same capitalist tax cuts and regulatory relief that President Reagan used to destroy communism,” Street wrote. In an interview with conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham last month, former presidential candidate and conservative commentator Pat Buchanan said abandoning his populist economic message would be “fatal” for Trump’s presidency. | 0 |
Politics By Amy Moreno November 10, 2016
Last night’s win for Donald Trump was one of the record books.
President-elect Trump delivered one of the greatest political upsets of all time to win the White House from a career criminal and save America.
While liberals are crying and looking for safe spaces, patriots all over America celebrate the fact that America is no longer under the politically correct stranglehold of the past eight years.
Clint Eastwood thanked America for doing their duty. Thank you America, I don’t have long left to live but now I know the last few years will be great, I can’t thank you enough #PresidentTrump
— Clint Eastwood (@EastwoodUSA) November 9, 2016 Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Presidency and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. | 0 |
Wednesday on CBS’s “The Late Show,” host Stephen Colbert mocked MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow for her lengthy tease a night earlier that led up to the release of President Donald Trump’s 2005 tax forms. “I hold in my hand something very significant,” Colbert said. “It is a joke — a joke that we have confirmed has been heard by Donald Trump. We believe this is the first time any joke dealing with Donald Trump has been released. ” Follow Breitbart. tv on Twitter @BreitbartVideo | 0 |
House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Devin Nunes announced Wednesday that members of President Donald Trump’s transition team, including the were “incidentally” surveilled by the intelligence community, additional names of the transition team were “unmasked,” and that the information was not obtained in relation to Russia. [Nunes recalled his recent confirmation that information on members of the Trump transition team had been incidentally collected by the intelligence community on numerous occasions. “Details about U. S. persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value, were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting. ” “Third, I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition team members were unmasked,” said Nunes. When later asked by reporters if the President was also included in the incidental collection of information, Nunes replied, “Yes. ” In response to another reporter, Nunes said “it’s possible” that Trump’s personal communication was collected. Rep. Nunes later went on to say of “dozens” of reports he has seen thus far, “I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show that the and his team were, I guess, at least monitored and disseminated out in intelligence in what appears to be … intelligence reporting channels. ” He added that he is, however, awaiting further information. The representative’s fourth point was emphatic, “ … none of this surveillance was related to Russia or the investigation of Russian activities or of the Trump team. ” He made clear that the House Intelligence Committee will investigate surveillance of Trump associates and subsequent dissemination of information gathered. He stated that the goal is to determine: Who was aware of it, Why it was not disclosed to Congress, Who requested and authorized the additional unmasking, Whether anyone directed the intelligence community to focus on Trump associates, Whether any laws, regulations, or procedures were violated, Nunes said that he believes the collection was done legally, but questions remain as to unmasking and the dissemination list of information collected during the transition during the months of November, December, and January. Rep. Nunes characterized the information that was collected as “A lot of it appears like it was … it was essentially a lot of information on the and his transition team and what they were doing. ” He said he has asked the Directors of FBI, NSA, and CIA to “expeditiously comply” with his March 15 letter and provide a full account of such surveillance activities. Nunes called the NSA very, very helpful. He expects additional information to come on Friday. Rep. Nunes said he has not seen any information that has anything to do with Russia or the Russian investigation. He said that while he expects more information and did not make an absolute determination on how the information was collected, “It was not criminal, it was normal, foreign surveillance is what it looked like to me, but let’s wait until we get all the information. ” “This appears to be all legally collected foreign intelligence under FISA, where there was incidental collection that then ended up in reporting channels and that was widely disseminated,” said Nunes. Rep. Nunes said he was surprised and alarmed by the discovery of this information, “because we went through this about a year and a half ago as it related to members of Congress … ” Nunes stated that he would travel to the White House in the afternoon to share the new information he has with President Trump. Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana | 0 |
Report Copyright Violation Planet nine might be pulling our solar system out of alignment Astronomers have speculated for years that there could be a large planet in the outer reaches of our solar system, but no such object has ever been directly observed. However, the harder we look, the more plausible the existence of “planet nine” becomes. Astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech have added another piece of evidence to the debate. Their observations indicate that planet nine could be causing a “wobble” in the solar system. | 0 |
Washington D.C. Insider Says Obama Might Disclose UFO Truth Before January 2017 Nov 18, 2016 6 0
Steven Basset is the only registered UFO disclosure lobbyist in Washington D.C. and just yesterday, he made a public announcement that is very timely indeed. Steven runs the Paradigm Research Group , which lobbies for the official political announcement disclosing the truth about the UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon that the U.S. government has been covering up for decades. Steven Basset has pushed for disclosure for over 20 years in Washington D.C.
In a press release from November 17th, 2016, Basset said the Paradigm Research Group was contacted by a source within the military/intelligence community and that the basis of the message was that the “persons who are directly involved in the management of the extraterrestrial issues want Disclosure to take place under President Obama and are ready to work with the Secretary of Defense if approached.”
Basset goes on to explain that the Paradigm Research Group has publicly stated before that the Clinton team has had an agenda to disclose to the world the existence of extraterrestrial beings if she became president. Since she lost the presidential race, that is no longer an option, but instead, may force the issue to happen quicker and while Barack Obama is still president:
“The Clintons now have a choice to make of historic proportions. Should they immediately take interviews with top journalists and discuss in greater detail what they know about the ET issue and what transpired during the Rockefeller Initiative from 1993-1996 , the resulting media storm will force the Pentagon and the White House to reach the necessary understanding allowing Barack Obama to be the Disclosure president. Or should they remain silent and allow the truth embargo to continue on into the next administration.” When will the truth be announced?
While the amount of information and steps needed for the Secretary of Defense to brief the White House is immense, Steven says the pressure is building quickly for Obama to be the one to make the historic announcement:
In order for the Secretary of Defense to approach the White House regarding Disclosure, he must reach down into the military/intelligence complex for the needed information to proceed. Although the managers of the ET issues are constrained by the highest level of classification, Paradigm Research Group is convinced they are ready to provide that information because there is a growing internal consensus Disclosure must take place under President Obama.
This process is time sensitive. Disclosure would need to happen early enough for the nation [and world] to absorb such extraordinary information and settle down prior to the inauguration. There would also be time to prepare various government agencies for the engagement of the media and the public going forward. Then the new president would be stepping into a relatively stable and organized post-Disclosure status.
With this in mind, Paradigm Research Group would assert Disclosure after January 6th, 2017 would not be a responsible option. The means the Clintons have a choice to make and a few weeks to reach a decision.”
While some may still be skeptics of the notion that there are other beings in our universe, we must keep in mind the number of insiders who have revealed what they know as well as the positions they’ve held to acquire such knowledge. As we reported earlier today , full UFO disclosure is inevitable. With former NASA astronauts, physicists, scientists, engineers and high ranking military personnel blowing the whistle for several decades now, we see that the world is getting closer to learning the truth.
With respect to this announcement from Paradigm Research Group just yesterday, we must keep a couple things in mind. First, in the grand scheme of the disclosure process, it is not crucially important if this announcement takes place under Obama before Trump’s inauguration in late January of 2017. If such an announcement is not made before then, we mustn’t believe the push for disclosure is or has been a failure. We must keep in mind the bigger picture and specifically the words from the press release, “there is a growing internal consensus Disclosure must take place…” That is what is important. It’s the fact that there is such momentum and pressure building within the political and military/intelligence community for this announcement to be made public.
What are your thoughts about this latest announcement? Will Obama be the disclosing president? Or will Trump? Or will some other world leader make the announcement? When do you think it will happen?
Lance Schuttler graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in Health Science and does health coaching through his website Orgonlight Health . You can follow the Orgonlight Health facebook page or visit the website for more information and other inspiring articles. | 1 |
President Obama is known for his humor, but his interview with Samantha Bee is downright hilarious.
During his final days in office, Obama has been making rounds on talk shows. When he sat down with the host of Full Frontal this week, the result was simply priceless.
Bee took a few shots at him for his age, asking if he would consider an appearance on Antique Roadshow and pointing out the white in his hair. Obama reminded her that he was still president, after all, but Bee was hell bent on making this an interview to remember.
She finally asked Obama if he would “mess” with Donald Trump once he was done serving as Commander in Chief.
“After you leave office, have you thought of just whispering in Donald Trump’s ear, ‘You were right, I wasn’t born here,’ just to, like, mess with him?” Bee asked.
“I think it’s fair to say that I will be organizing my post-presidency where I’m not close enough to him to whisper into his ear,” Obama shot back.
They did discuss some important issues, such as young voters and the struggles that Hillary Clinton may face as the first woman to serve as President of the United States. But the playful back and forth between President Obama and Bee is too funny to miss. It also reminds us just why it is that we are going to miss this man so much when he is gone.
Watch the interview, here :
Featured image via video screen capture Share this Article! | 0 |
Editor’s Note: Is it any wonder that Hillary Clinton is being hit from all sides? The tens of thousands of leaked emails, the re-opening of the FBI investigation, and overwhelming support by military officers for Donald Trump suggest that those working for the military, law enforcement and the intelligence community will do whatever they can to keep Hillary Clinton from becoming their new boss.
Former United States Department of State official Dr. Steve Pieczenik is a psychiatrist who has over 20 years experience in resolving international crises for four U.S. administrations.
Pieczenik was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, and James Baker. His expertise includes foreign policy, international crisis management, and psychological warfare. He served the presidential administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the capacity of deputy assistant secretary.
He has come forward with a series of videos that expose the Clintons, explains that they co-opted many central facets of our government including the White House, the judiciary, the CIA, and the FBI. and claims that the corrupt couple belongs to a high-level pedophile ring.
Pieczenik explains that it was not the Russians who provided information to WikiLeaks – US intelligence offered the data to Julian Assange. This counter-coup is working against Hillary Clinton and her campaign.
Here, Pieczenik discusses the Clintons’ connections to Anthony Weiner , Jeffrey Esptein’s Lolita Express, and more.
In this video, Pieczenik reveals the details regarding Democratic Party ‘Fixer,” Jeff Rovin.
Dr. Pieczenik tells us “the second American revolution” is happening.
I hope he’s correct, because we certainly need it.
Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). | 0 |
Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, discussed with Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Alex Marlow the serious nature of current and future budget issues facing the nation. [“We are on track if we do nothing over the next ten years — doing nothing, passing no laws — we will borrow nine trillion dollars,” said MacGuineas on Tuesday’s show. She also pointed out that as of now, Trump’s current plans based upon his campaign rhetoric would add another five trillion dollars to the deficit. “Our debt is already at record levels,” she added. “It’s about percent of GDP, and we will borrow another nine trillion dollars because of automatic spending growth. ” MacGuineas said, “Not many people notice, but the single part of the budget is interest on the debt. ” “If we do nothing, at some point, we’ll have a debt crisis,” she added, discussing the ramifications at length. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. | 0 |
(AP) MOSCOW — Russia reacted to U. S. military strikes on its ally Syria Friday by cutting a hotline intended to prevent midair incidents, a response that demonstrates Moscow’s readiness to defy Washington and could even put the two nuclear superpowers on a course toward military confrontation. [President Vladimir Putin signaled he was ready to risk a clash with the U. S. and abandon hopes for mending ties with the U. S. under President Donald Trump, rather than accept the humiliation of standing by while his ally is bombed. Russia’s decision to suspend the hotline established after the launch of the Russian air campaign in Syria in September 2015 effectively means that Russian and U. S. planes could fly dangerously close to each other during combat missions, raising the risk of inadvertent or deliberate clashes in the crowded skies over Syria. By freezing the information channel between the two potent militaries, Russia is signaling to Washington that it will tolerate no further strikes on Syrian government facilities. Syria has aging aircraft and air defense missile systems, while Russia has deployed dozens of its cutting edge warplanes and air defense batteries at its base in Syria’s coastal province of Latakia. It also has a strategically important naval outpost in the Syrian port of Tartus, which is protected by air defense assets. Further upping the ante, the Russian Defense Ministry said it will now help strengthen Syrian air defenses. U. S. officials accused Russia of failing to ensure Syrian President Bashar Assad’s commitment to a 2013 deal for the destruction of Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal. The U. S. says that arsenal was tapped for a chemical attack that killed dozens of civilians in the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province. Trump cited the chemical attack as justification for the missile strike on a Syrian air base. But the Kremlin insists Assad’s government wasn’t responsible for the attack, saying civilians in Khan Sheikhoun were exposed to toxic agents from a rebel arsenal that was hit by Syrian warplanes. “President Putin believes that the U. S. strikes on Syria represent an aggression against a sovereign state in violation of international law under a pretext,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a statement. “Washington’s move deals a significant blow to . S. relations, which are already in deplorable shape. ” Until the attack on the Syrian air base, the U. S. had avoided striking Assad’s forces for fear of provoking a clash with the Russian military. The action comes ahead of U. S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s trip to Moscow next week. The Kremlin initially had been encouraged by Trump’s goal of repairing ties with Moscow, which plunged to War lows under President Barack Obama, but hopes for a thaw have withered amid the congressional investigation of possible links between Trump campaign officials and Russia. The U. S. missile strike could make it all but impossible to improve relations. “Some people here thought that it would be easy to deal with Trump,” Yelena Suponina, a Mideast expert, said in televised remarks. “No, it will be very difficult. He’s not only ready to make tough decisions, he is unpredictable. ” Mikhail Yemelyanov, a senior member of the lower house of parliament, warned that the U. S. action raised the threat of a direct clash between Russia and the U. S. “Consequences could be grave, up to military confrontation and exchange of blows, nothing can be excluded,” he said, according to the Interfax news agency. Tillerson said Russia had “failed in its responsibility” to deliver on a 2013 deal it helped broker to destroy Syria’s chemical arsenal. “So either Russia has been complicit, or Russia has been simply incompetent on its ability to deliver,” he said. By ordering the strike, Trump threatened the military assets of Assad, who has enjoyed Russia’s support throughout the conflict. Russia’s military has helped turn the war in Assad’s favor and Moscow has used its U. N. Security Council veto to protect Damascus from censure. Russia also has important military facilities in Syria that could be put at risk if Assad is removed from power, a goal of Western powers that had recently been put on the back burner because of the focus on fighting Islamic State extremists in Syria and Iraq. Peskov said the U. S. gave Russia advance notice about the strike. He added that Moscow believes it makes no sense to maintain the hotline. Asked if the decision to freeze the information exchange could raise the risk of midair incidents, Peskov said it was the U. S. attack that increased such danger. Peskov wouldn’t say if Russia could use its military assets to protect Syrian facilities from future U. S. strikes. Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Russia will quickly “strengthen the Syrian air defense system and increase its efficiency in order to protect Syria’s most sensitive infrastructure facilities. ” | 1 |
BUCHAREST, Romania — In a surprise move, Romania’s largest political party nominated a woman from the country’s Tatar minority for prime minister on Wednesday. If she wins approval from the president and Parliament, she will be both the first Muslim and the first woman to hold the post. The Social Democratic Party scored a resounding victory in the Dec. 11 general election, winning more than 45 percent of the vote. Together with its smaller ally, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, it holds a majority of the seats in Parliament. Ordinarily, the leader of the largest party is designated by the country’s president to become prime minister. But the Social Democrats’ leader, Liviu Dragnea, would have been a problematic choice: He was convicted of electoral fraud and given a suspended sentence in April. President Klaus Iohannis has said that the country’s next prime minister should be untainted by criminal convictions or continuing investigations. So the Social Democrats turned instead to Sevil Shhaideh, 52, a relatively figure who served as minister of regional development for six months in the last Social government. “It’s a surprising choice,” said Sergiu Miscoiu, a professor of political science at University in Cluj. “People were expecting somebody controlled by Dragnea, but from the party’s upper levels, not a relative newcomer. ” “Picking Shhaideh suggests that Dragnea will control the government without taking direct responsibility,” Professor Miscoiu added. “She is not stained in a direct way, so Iohannis has no official reason to reject her. ” Professor Miscoiu said the choice might have also been intended to counter accusations of orthodoxism and nationalism during the campaign. Referring to the Social Democratic Party, he said: “P. S. D. are saying implicitly with this nomination: ‘You accused us of being nationalist and orthodoxist — look what we do, don’t you like it?’ ” The nomination of Ms. Shhaideh took many observers by surprise. “We have seen many names put forward in the last days, but her name was not among them,” said Paul Ivan, a senior policy analyst at the European Policy Center in Brussels and a former Romanian diplomat. Ms. Shhaideh is thought of as more of a manager than a politician, Mr. Ivan said. “She is seen as a technocrat,” he said. “She’s an economist who has worked in local and regional administration for many years. ” Ms. Shhaideh has spent most of her career in Constanta, a port on the Black Sea, and not in Bucharest, the capital. But she is seen as close to Mr. Dragnea. She was secretary of state in the Development Ministry when Mr. Dragnea was its minister, succeeding him when he stepped down in 2015. He attended her wedding to a Syrian businessman. Ms. Shhaideh and her husband own three properties in Syria, according to a declaration of financial interests from July 2015. Muslim women have very rarely served as heads of state or government in Europe. The few previous examples were in countries with Muslim majorities: Tansu Ciller was prime minister of Turkey in the 1990s, and Atifete Jahjaga was president of Kosovo from 2011 to 2016. By contrast, more than 80 percent of Romanians are Orthodox Christians, while fewer than 1 percent are Muslims. “There will clearly be part of the electorate that won’t like it,” Mr. Ivan said of the party’s choice of Ms. Shhaideh. “They also won’t like that the two most powerful political positions in Romania will be taken by those from ethnic and religious minorities. ” (Mr. Iohannis, the president, is Protestant and of German ancestry.) Even so, Mr. Ivan said he did not think Ms. Shhaideh’s faith would make her seem alien to fellow Romanians. “Generally, Romania’s Muslim community, the Turks and Tatars, the Islam they practice is a very moderate one,” he said. “They have lived more than 100 years in a country, they’ve been through a socialist regime. If you look at Shhaideh, her head isn’t covered. ” There appeared to be little chance that the appointment of Ms. Shhaideh would soften Romania’s position on migrant quotas. Romania was one of the European Union member countries that initially opposed the setting of mandatory quotas for the relocation of migrants, many of whom are from the Middle East or northern Africa. “Ironically, the fact that she is a Muslim will prevent her from being too bold on areas like refugees, simply because it is so easy to demonize and say, ‘Of course you say that, you’re a Muslim,’ ” said Radu Magdin, brand ambassador of Smartlink Communications, a political consulting group. “Her team will advise her not to get involved in issues where things can become personal. ” Now that Ms. Shhaideh has been nominated, the next step is for the president to formally designate her as the next prime minister that could happen this week. She would then need to be confirmed in office by a vote of confidence in Parliament. | 1 |
The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) reported on Monday that the number of confirmed measles cases in the outbreak that began in April has increased to 69. [For the first time, MDH is confirming that the outbreak has spread beyond the Somali community in Minnesota to white and Hispanic residents of the state. of the 69 cases of measles are in Somali Minnesotans, seven are and three are MDH reported. Though the number of cases continues to grow, the cases have not spread beyond four counties: Three cases are in adults, 66 are in children (ages years). of the 69 cases have been “confirmed to be unvaccinated. ” Of the remaining four cases, “1 had 1 dose of MMR [and] 3 had 2 doses of MMR. ” Since 1997, the number of measles cases diagnosed in Minnesota has exceeded double digits only once, in 2011, when 26 cases were diagnosed. The current measles outbreak is the largest in the state since 1990, when a total of 460 cases of measles were confirmed. Experts say the outbreak is likely to continue to spread. MDH officials have said the initial infection that sparked the current measles outbreak was due to a foreign traveler. “Measles is a rare disease in Minnesota and in the U. S. however, measles is still common in other parts of the world. Most measles cases occurring in Minnesota result from someone traveling to or from countries where measles is common, and who are infectious with measles after arriving in Minnesota,” the MDH website states. As part of its public information program to promote vaccinations, MDH offers a Think Measles “[l]etter size poster with a reminder to get vaccinated for measles before international travel,” that is available in nine languages, including English, Amharic, Hmong, Khmer, Oromo, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. The outbreak began in the Somali community, which has seen vaccination rates plummet over the past decade. MDH officials blame that drop in vaccination rates on who have spread the medically discredited claim that vaccinations are tied to autism to the Somali community in Minnesota. . Paul is home to the largest Somali community in the United States, estimated to be about 70, 000 in total. “Since FY 2002, 100, 246 Somali refugees have resettled in the United States, according to the State Department’s interactive website,” Breitbart News reported in December. In Olmsted County, which is about 70 miles southeast of Le Sueur County, “a public forum has been scheduled for Monday evening in Rochester to discuss Minnesota’s worst measles outbreak since 1990,” the Post Bulletin reported: The Somali Health Advisory Committee has organized the forum in hopes of addressing the Somali community’s increasing resistance to the MMR vaccine because of fears of its links to autism, a claim that has been debunked repeatedly by the science community. Abdirashid Shire, director of Rochester’s Health and Research Institute for Somali Americans, and Nasra Giama, a nursing professor at the University of Minnesota Rochester and a Mayo Clinic researcher, will lead the discussion. Representatives from Mayo Clinic, Olmsted Medical Center, Olmsted County Public Health and Minnesota Department of Health are expected to attend and participate in the discussion. “The primary goal is to talk about childhood health issues, specifically about trying to dispel the myth about the link between MMR and autism and the importance of vaccines,” Dawn Beck, associate director of the Olmsted County Public Health, told the Post Bulletin: Despite ongoing efforts from MDH and other health agencies in recent years, Minnesota’s Somali community has seen its vaccination rate plunge from nearly 90 percent to the . In Olmsted County, Somalis have an MMR vaccination rate of 75 percent, according to 2016 data. Despite good news locally, Olmsted County’s recent Community Health Needs Assessment identified immunizations as one of its top five priorities in 2017. Minnesota state officials now believe the current measles outbreak, combined with increased rates of tuberculosis and syphilis, has become a significant public health problem in the state. Minnesota Health Commissioner Ed Ehlinger said earlier this month: In recent months, state and local public health officials have had to respond to a series of infectious disease outbreaks including resistant tuberculosis, hundreds of new cases of syphilis, and now, the largest measles outbreak the state has faced in nearly 30 years. These outbreaks come on the heels of extensive public health efforts in 2016 for the Zika virus response and in for Ebola preparedness. With state and local response costs for the first half of 2017 approaching $3 million just for measles, tuberculosis and syphilis, I respectfully request that the legislature create a public health response contingency fund of $5 million to ensure sufficient resources are available for immediate, actions to protect Minnesotans from infectious disease outbreaks and other unanticipated public health threats. “Governor Dayton has given me his support for this proposal and we will advocate for its inclusion in any final legislative budget agreement,” Ehlinger noted. | 1 |
BERLIN (AFP) — German local authorities on Thursday blocked rallies by Turkish ministers aimed at promoting a referendum that would expand President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s powers, citing capacity problems. [The Union of European Turkish Democrats had been due to hold one rally later Thursday in the western town of Gaggenau, with Turkey’s Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag as the guest speaker. But Gaggenau authorities withdrew an earlier agreement for the group to rent a hall for the event, saying it did not have the capacity to host so many people. “Because the event is now known across the region, the city expects a large number of visitors. However, the Bad Rotenfels hall, parking lots and access road are insufficient to meet that demand,” the town’s authorities said in a statement. “Due to these reasons, the hall rental agreement with the UETD has been revoked,” it added. Separately, Cologne city authorities said they would no longer allow the UETD to use a hall on Sunday, when Turkish Economy Minister Nihat Zeybekci is expected to make a rally speech. “The event can and will not happen there,” a spokeswoman for Cologne city authorities told AFP. It was unclear if Zeybekci would be able to find an alternative site. The UETD had earlier reserved a room in the city hall of the district for a “theatre event” said the spokeswoman. But on Wednesday, the group said it would now host an “information event”. The city said however that it would no longer make the site available to the group, citing difficulties in guaranteeing security at such short notice. Turkish politicians including Prime Minister Binali Yildirim have sparked controversy over their visits to Germany to hold political rallies. Germany is home to about three million people of Turkish origin, the legacy of a massive “guest worker” programme in the 1960s and 70s and the biggest population of Turks in the world outside of Turkey. And Erdogan’s government is keen to harness their votes for the April 16 referendum, which would discard the post of prime minister for the first time in Turkey’s history. Critics say the new presidential system will cement rule in the country. relations have been strained by a series of disputes since the failed coup that aimed to oust Erdogan last July. The latest issue dogging ties is Ankara’s provisional detention of a German journalist on charges. Deniz Yucel, 43, a correspondent of the German newspaper Die Welt, has been held since February 18 in connection with news reports on an attack by hackers against the email account of Turkey’s energy minister. Berlin’s sharp criticism of Ankara’s massive crackdown after the failed putsch has also irked Turkey. | 0 |
The “Day Without Immigrants” turned out to be a day without many protestors or any political impact, but with many Mexican flags, angry slogans, and a muted response by amnesty advocates. [The Thursday turnout in most cities was few hundred protestors, despite some employers shutting their workplaces. But organizers did get a turnout of several thousand people in North Carolina and Chicago. NBC described the national turnout as merely “thousands,” despite an estimated population of roughly 11 million illegals. WATCH: Thousands take part in #DayWithoutImmigrants protests across the US on Thursday. https: . pic. twitter. — NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) February 16, 2017, In recognition of the low numbers, the response from immigration politicians and activists was muted. Douglas Rivlin, Director of Communication for Democratic Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez, tweeted nothing about the marches. Neither did the National Immigration Forum. Linda Sarsour, Muslim organizer of the Women’s March, simply tweeted “solidarity. ” Although the event was a political dud, the organizers will likely use it as a basis for larger, future protests. The organizers claimed they represent roughly 31 million immigrants and roughly 11 million illegal aliens. If the organizers turned out 30, 000 protestors, that represented 0. 27 percent of the illegal population, and 0. 097 percent of the immigrant population, most of which was at work in in school during the scattered protests. Even though employers shut their workplaces, many of the missing illegals were likely hard at work in their second or third jobs. While there are panoramic photos of the two largest demonstrations in Chicago and Charlotte, N. C. photographs from the small demonstrations tend to be ground level and also close up. which allows the photographers to hide the small scale of a group from viewers. Activists are blocking major intersection in #DC at U St NW and 14th St NW for #DayWithoutImmigrants pic. twitter. — The Task Force (@TheTaskForce) February 16, 2017, Just 250 people, at most, turned out in Reading, Pennsylvania. Largest immigrant march in history of Reading Pa. 250 strong. #nobansnowallsnoraids #freedaniel working people not ”coastal elites” pic. twitter. — Make the Road PA (@MakeTheRoadPa) February 16, 2017, Long Island also has a large immigrant population, and a major problem with gangs, but the demonstration was very small. Long Island stands with immigrants! #UnDiaSinInmigrantes #DayWithoutImmigrants #freedaniel #HeretoStay pic. twitter. — Angel Reyes Rivas (@Areyesrivas) February 16, 2017, A small turnout in Minnesota, whose population includes tens of thousands of Somalis. Native American group performs in front of Minnesota capitol as part of ’Day Without Immigrants’ protest in St. Paul https: . pic. twitter. — ABC News (@ABC) February 17, 2017, The growing population in Tennesee provided a small contingent. Unthinkable that people are protesting about illegal immigrants breaking the law encouraging others to do the same. #DayWithoutImmigrants pic. twitter. — Tennessee (@TEN_GOP) February 16, 2017, The turnout in Texas was very small, in a state with a huge population of immigrants and illegal aliens. #DayWithoutImmigrants #atx nearly at the capitol, group began marching at 11 pic. twitter. — Nicole Rosales (@NicoleRose_KVUE) February 16, 2017, There was a turnout in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A of the protest in Grand Rapids today. #DayWithoutImmigrants #StopTrump #Resist! pic. twitter. — SeriouslyUS? (@USseriously) February 17, 2017, Here are two images of the Washington event. The biggest turnouts were in Chicago and Charlotte, where city officials estimated the turnout at 8, 000. 1000s took the streets of Chicago, Charlotte, Detroit more protesting ICE Trump’s racist immigration polices | #DayWithoutimmigrants pic. twitter. — agitator in chief (@soit_goes) February 16, 2017, Some demonstrators waved the flag of their home countries, underlining their identity as foreigners from countries whose primary exports include cheap labor for U. S. employers. In Chicago, one set of protestors listened to speeches under the flags of Mexican, Ecuadorean, and El Salvador. #UnDiaSinInmigrantes Chicago🌹✊🏽🙌🏽 YOU GUYS MUST WATCH! !! pic. twitter. — Johanna (@johannaortiz_) February 17, 2017, immigration reformers noted the failure of the protests. The problem with a general strike is that if it doesn’t actually work, it exposes its organizers as paper tigers. #daywithoutimmigrants, — (((Mark Krikorian))) (@MarkSKrikorian) February 17, 2017, | 1 |
WASHINGTON — Who is Guccifer 2. 0, the Romanian “lone hacker” responsible for copying thousands of emails and other files from the Democratic National Committee — a real person, or a front created by Russian intelligence officials? Technology specialists have been debating that question since June 15, when CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee, announced that sophisticated hacker groups with Russian links were responsible for breaching the committee’s computer servers. Within hours of the announcement, someone using the moniker Guccifer 2. 0 started a blog to mock that finding, posting several of the stolen documents and claiming sole credit. But the publication by WikiLeaks of an archive of the committee’s internal emails — and the uproar they caused on the eve of the Democratic National Convention — have focused wider attention on who, or what, is operating behind that name. While WikiLeaks has not said how it obtained the emails, Guccifer 2. 0 claimed in a blog post last month to have sent them to WikiLeaks. Cybersecurity specialists have pointed to an array of forensic and technical evidence suggesting that Guccifer 2. 0 might not be a Romanian as claimed. That evidence included metadata hidden in the early documents indicating that they were edited on a computer with Russian language settings. American intelligence officials believe that Guccifer 2. 0 is a front for the G. R. U. Russia’s military intelligence service, according to federal officials briefed on the investigation. In blog posts, Twitter messages, and electronic chats with journalists, Guccifer 2. 0 has insisted such skeptics are wrong. Against that backdrop, Guccifer 2. 0’s words are taking on heightened interest. They may be clues to a person’s decision to intervene in the American election, or they may be a case study of a Russian information campaign — the work of different intelligence officials, crowded around a keyboard. “Just because the Wizard of Oz says he’s a wizard doesn’t actually mean he is,” said Peter Singer, a security strategist at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute. The original “Guccifer” (pronounced ) is a real person: Marcel Lazar Lehel, a Romanian hacker who used the pseudonym Guccifer to hack various accounts belonging to American celebrities and government officials, including members of the Bush family, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and Sidney Blumenthal, an informal adviser to Hillary Clinton. Mr. Lehel was arrested in Romania in 2014 for hacking the email accounts of several Romanian officials. In April, he was extradited to the United States to face hacking charges and pleaded guilty in May before a federal judge in Alexandria, Va. While awaiting sentencing, Mr. Lehel claimed to have hacked Mrs. Clinton’s private email server, but federal officials have found no evidence to support his claim. Mr. Lehel is known for his fixation on what conspiracy theorists call the Illuminati, a shadowy group that they believe controls the world. The first Guccifer 2. 0 blog post, and messages Guccifer 2. 0 sent along with packages of files that same day to the websites Gawker and The Smoking Gun, also denounced the Illuminati. Other oddities also arose. Technical specialists, scouring metadata on documents posted to Guccifer 2. 0’s blog, found some that were last marked by a person with a user name in Cyrillic that appeared to be a nod to Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, best known for establishing the early Soviet secret police forces. On June 21, Motherboard, an online technology magazine, posted a Twitter chat log of an interview with Guccifer 2. 0, in which the person using that account claimed to be Romanian and denied working with the Russian government. Pressed on why Russian language markings showed up in the metadata of the documents he had sent out, Guccifer 2. 0 claimed that was just a “watermark. ” “I don’t like Russians and their foreign policy. I hate being attributed to Russia,” Guccifer 2. 0 wrote. During the interview, Motherboard switched from using English to Romanian and to Russian. Guccifer 2. 0 claimed not to speak Russian and abruptly cut off the interview. Motherboard later reported findings of linguistics specialists who said that his Romanian answers did not seem like those of a native speaker, and that the syntax of several of his English lines echoed Russian sentence constructions. And a linguistic analysis provided to The New York Times by Shlomo Argamon, a chief scientist at Taia Global, a cybersecurity firm that has questioned cyberattack attribution claims in the past, also concluded that Guccifer 2 is Russian. Mr. Argamon, who is a professor of computer science and the director of the master of data science program at the Illinois Institute of Technology, found seven oddities in the hacker’s English text, five of which pointed clearly to Russian as the speaker’s native tongue. “The linguistic evidence consistently points towards the writer being either a native Russian speaker,” Mr. Argamon said. “It is possible that the writer is a Romanian speaker who has studied Russian. However, the writer denied knowing any Russian, and so the most reasonable conclusion is that he is a Russian native speaker rather than a Romanian native speaker. ” On June 30, Guccifer 2. 0 posted additional documents from the Democratic National Committee’s servers on the WordPress blog. The post again denied Russian links, and spoke admiringly of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence analyst who leaked archives of surveillance documents and Chelsea Manning, the Army private who sent a huge trove of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks in 2010. That post accused Mrs. Clinton of being “bought and sold,” in contrast to Mr. Trump, who it said “has earned his money himself. And at least he is sincere in what he says. ” But the post still expressed opposition to Mr. Trump’s ideas “about closing borders and deportation policy. ” Of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the post said, “He never had a chance to win the nomination as the Democratic Party itself stood against him!” The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress, reported on July 13 that Guccifer 2. 0 had reached out to it and had provided documents about Democratic campaign donors and lobbyists. It quoted Guccifer 2. 0 as saying in an electronic chat, “The press [is] gradually forget[ing] about me, [W]ikileaks is playing for time and [I] have some more docs. ” The next day, Guccifer 2. 0 posted those documents on the blog. That was the last blog posting. The Guccifer 2. 0 Twitter account posted a few more messages. The most recent one, on July 22, expressed excitement that WikiLeaks had posted the archive of nearly 20, 000 Democratic committee emails that “I’d given them! !!” Since then, that account has fallen silent, too. No messages were posted even as the Democratic Party chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, resigned and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager accused the Russian government of providing the leaked emails to WikiLeaks to help Mr. Trump. | 1 |
In these trying times, Jackie Mason is the Voice of Reason. [In this week’s exclusive clip for Breitbart News, Jackie questions why lawmakers can’t seem to get the three things Americans want most — health care, tax reform and the continuing resolution — passed once and for all. “I could see where it’s impossible to climb two mountains at the same time, or drive two cars at the same time, or dance with two elephants at the same time,” Jackie says. “But you can’t pass three resolutions at the same time? How long does it take?” “Let’s assume somebody said it was a fundraiser, are you coming? Yes or no? Would you be able to answer them? What if they told you there’s two fundraisers, or four fundraisers?” Jackie challenges. “Would you say you have no time to do all of them? You would have time to do ten thousand of them. But as soon as a vote is involved, which takes a second, you have no time. ” Jackie also wonders about the qualifications needed to become a congressman. “If you want to become a barber, you know there’s a state test to become a barber? In other words, in this country, they protect you from a bad haircut, but if you want to run the country, they’ll take any schmuck in the world,” he says. “Even a plumber has to take a state test,” he adds. “Why do you think the toilets in this country are working perfectly, but the government is full of … you know what I’m talking about. ” Sadly, Jackie says things will never change because lawmakers make the same amount of money whether the country is running or not. And despite all the fear of a government shutdown, Jackie thinks it could actually be a good thing. Check out the video above to see why. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 0 |
This year, the political conventions pulled off an amazing feat: They rebooted a familiar figure, someone who spent years in the public eye going through shifts, and who emerged from the quadrennial partisan ritual reintroduced and reinvigorated. I’m referring, of course, to Stephen Colbert. When “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” began on CBS in September 2015, it came with enormous expectations and risks. Mr. Colbert was following in David Letterman’s footsteps as well as his own, having created a satirical performance piece for the ages on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report. ” His move to a late night show might have been a reinvention of the form it might have been a bust. Instead, for most of the year, it just … was. There was the occasional newsworthy interview, like his emotional September talk with Vice President Joe Biden, grieving the recent loss of his son. There were a few experiments, like letting the director Spike Jonze shoot a video in which Mr. Colbert shared an existential moment with Grover from “Sesame Street. ” Night by night, “Late Show” was fine but inessential. Even as a flabbergasting election unfolded, you were less likely to think, “What is Stephen Colbert going to say about this?” than “I wonder what Stephen Colbert would have said about this. ” Then, for the two weeks of the conventions, “Late Show” aired live, and it came back to life. Mr. Colbert brought his old buffoonish conservative commentator character back, bearing a Captain America shield, with guest appearances by his old compadre Jon Stewart. He brought out Laura Benanti to spoof Melania Trump’s plagiarism scandal. He ambushed the stages of both conventions in character as the “Hunger Games” host Caesar Flickerman. The combination of live TV and politics was like a comedy speedball that “Late Show” injected straight into its heart. Where had CBS been keeping this guy? And how can we keep him on the air? Obviously, only so much of this special is reproducible . Mr. Colbert isn’t likely to start doing a live show every night, nor to band together with Mr. Stewart to the old Comedy Central lineup on CBS. But the convention weeks showed off strengths that “Late Show” can and should keep playing to. The most important: Don’t waste Mr. Colbert’s time and ours on topics and guests he’s not engaged in. When he’s had to host stars plugging movies or read off questions to the 2016 Super Bowl’s most valuable player, Von Miller (in his live special after the big game) it felt like the job was defining Mr. Colbert instead of him defining the job. For the last two weeks, Mr. Colbert was focused almost entirely on the most important thing going on in the country and the culture, and his interest and energy showed. That doesn’t necessarily mean doing nothing but politics. Mr. Colbert is not that boring. His interview with Mr. Biden had political overtones — the vice president was still considering a presidential run. But what made it great was how Mr. Colbert drew on his humanity and Catholic faith to dive deep to the stuff that mattered. He can pull off celebrity interviews, too, when there’s a real shared interest, as when he and Key recently geeked out on their love of improv. Speaking of which: Mr. Colbert’s revival of his Comedy Central character and his zany turn as Flickerman reminded us that he’s TV’s best performance artist not currently running for president. “Late Show” might want to let him try on more characters. It could also cultivate a stable of other performers — Mr. Colbert also worked well as ringmaster and hype man for Mr. Stewart and Ms. Benanti. But letting Mr. Colbert be Mr. Colbert will definitely mean politics, and these days, that’s inevitably going to mean alienating viewers. After the Orlando, Fla. terrorist shooting in June, Mr. Colbert took apart Donald J. Trump’s response by diagraming a word cloud of the candidate’s insinuations — “Obama,” “something going on,” “radical Islam” — and the connecting lines formed a swastika. It was savage and hilarious and guaranteed to turn off a sizable chunk of the electorate. Mr. Colbert has tried to spread his fire around. When the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, decried big money in politics at the Democratic convention, he snarked that her outcry “resounded throughout every corner of the Wells Fargo Arena, from the CNN Grill to the Comcast Xfinity Live complex!” But clearly nothing fires his satirical synapses right now like Mr. Trump. That’s the guy CBS hired, though. He couldn’t be a Johnny Carson or Jay Leno, amiably poking at the nonpartisan foibles of both sides for a audience, even if that were still possible today. And it isn’t. That sort of comedy was a product of a less polarized political era, one with less niche programming and more swing voters, with liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, with some consensus on the basic functions of government. comedy doesn’t work when the road no longer has a middle wide enough to ride a bicycle down. That’s why, where past “Tonight” hosts made light fun of politics, today Jimmy Fallon is most effective when he avoids politics altogether. He’s good at it, and the ratings are great. It’s a familiar coping mechanism for people burned out by apocalyptic news and vitriolic social media feeds: Please, let’s just not talk about it for an hour. But the cerebral Mr. Colbert is not a kind of guy that is his bug and his feature. I don’t pretend to know whether his show’s drift was driven by CBS, Mr. Colbert’s artistic desire to grow and move on, or both. His convention shows suggested, though, a way to change without renouncing his past works — just as Mr. Letterman eventually found a distinctive voice on his “Late Show” while hanging on to signature features like the list. On Wednesday night of the second week, Mr. Colbert announced some bad news: Because of an complaint, he could never use the original “Stephen Colbert” character, or his commentary segment “The Wørd,” again. Instead, he was bringing on “Stephen Colbert,” the original character’s “identical twin cousin,” and introducing a new commentary feature, “The Werd. ” “I cannot reasonably argue,” Mr. Colbert deadpanned, “that I own my face or my name. ” But in so doing, he very much did own it: He is who he is. And there’s no reason for his show to fight it. | 1 |
Good morning. Welcome to California Today, a morning update on the stories that matter to Californians (and anyone else interested in the state). Tell us about the issues that matter to you — and what you’d like to see: CAtoday@nytimes. com. Want to receive California Today by email? Sign up. As we take a closer look at the 17 voter initiatives on the ballot this November, one of the less prominent measures with a lot of money at stake is Proposition 51. Though it will likely get overshadowed by flashier topics like marijuana and the death penalty, a yes vote would allow the state to issue $9 billion in bonds for school construction projects. Backers have raised more than $9 million to fight for its passage, according to The Sacramento Bee’s Data Tracker. Most of the proceeds from Proposition 51 would go toward upgrading the state’s buildings, with another $2 billion set aside for community colleges. Those bankrolling the effort are mostly construction groups that have a profit motive to see it pass. Supporters say the measure comes at a time of dire need. It’s been 10 years since the last statewide school bond measure and many of California’s roughly 10, 000 public schools are outdated and crumbling. A couple weeks ago, for example, a school in Daly City canceled classes after its aging sewer system backed up into the bathrooms. Dozens of school districts, state lawmakers and business groups have endorsed Proposition 51. Last week, the editorial board of The San Francisco Chronicle did too, calling it “a statewide commitment to the success of local schools. ” While many opponents acknowledge a need to upgrade infrastructure, they say Proposition 51 is the wrong way to go about it. In February, Gov. Jerry Brown called it a “developers’ $9 billion bond” that would deepen school inequity. The funding process favors schools that apply for projects early, meaning affluent districts with more seasoned administrators could muscle out poorer ones. “It’s a blunderbuss effort that promotes sprawl and squanders money that would be far better spent in communities,” Mr. Brown said. Critics argue that local districts are more than capable of issuing bonds of their own for schools and housing developers should shoulder more of the costs. The editorial boards of The Mercury News in San Jose and The San Diego have opposed the initiative. The bond would cost Californians roughly $8. 6 billion in interest by the time it is paid off in 35 years. They would pay that bill through taxes, reductions in services or both. Californians tend to approve bonds for school upgrades, and a poll conducted in April suggested that they were likely to favor a statewide measure in November. If opponents hope to turn that tide, they have work to do. Want to go deeper? Dive into analyses by the Legislative Analyst’s Office and the League of Women Voters of California. What are the issues with the schools in your area? Tell us at: CAtoday@nytimes. com. Your response may be featured in an future newsletter. • Kamala who? Many voters remain undecided or unaware of the candidates in the United States Senate race. [KQED] • How a congressional race in Santa Barbara became one of the most expensive in the country. [Los Angeles Times] • Economists may not like it, but rent control is spreading to the Bay Area’s suburbs. [San Francisco Chronicle] • Elon Musk said Tesla is readying improvements to its Autopilot technology that might have prevented a fatal accident in May. [The New York Times] • Apple is helping revive Nintendo’s great franchise with Super Mario Run, coming exclusively to iOS. [The New York Times] • Kim Chambers set off on a record bid to swim 93 miles to Tiburon from Sacramento. In the end, she couldn’t do it. [The New York Times] • Recovery on Cobb Mountain: Nearly a year after the Valley Fire, a family struggles to reclaim their lives. [Sacramento Bee] • Alexis Arquette, a transgender actress born into a famous Hollywood family, has died at 47. [Los Angeles Times] • A deadly fungus has moved inexorably across the Sierra Nevada, leaving thousands of frogs dead. [KPCC Radio] • Separating financial reality from the romantic vision of being a vineyard owner is not easy. [The New York Times] • A San Francisco Opera staging of “Dream of the Red Chamber” hopes to succeed where similar efforts have struggled. [The New York Times] • On Monday, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter will visit one of the department’s outposts in Silicon Valley. On Tuesday, he’ll meet with artificial intelligence researchers. • Beyoncé is to perform twice in California, at Dodger Stadium on Wednesday, and Levi’s Stadium on Saturday. Our critic called an earlier stop on the tour “a display of a female power. ” • The Monterey Jazz Festival starts Friday. Among the stars: Wayne Shorter, Pat Metheny and Branford Marsalis. • The 68th Primetime Emmy Awards will be held Sunday. HBO’s “Game of Thrones” led the nominations with 23, followed by “The People v. O. J. Simpson” and “Fargo. ” Research centers at U. C. Davis are interrogating some of the planet’s most pressing problems. There are the Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Center for Poverty Research … the Coffee Center. U. C. Davis recently announced what it said would be the world’s first university research hub focused on studies of coffee. Plans for the center grew out of the popularity of the undergraduate course called Design of Coffee. Introduced in 2013, it now has the highest enrollment — more than 1, 500 students a year — of any elective course at Davis, surpassing favorites like Introduction to Human Sexuality. The Coffee Center is being financed with a $250, 000 gift from Peet’s Coffee, the chain. William Ristenpart, the director of the center, said researchers would explore “everything you do after you pick the cherry, through the washing, drying, roasting, brewing and tasting. ” U. C. Davis also offers courses in winemaking and beer brewing. Asked what beverage the university might turn its attention to next, Professor Ristenpart said a colleague was soliciting funding for a distillation center. “So, I suppose craft cocktails could be next,” he said. California Today goes live at 6 a. m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes. com. The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. Follow him on Twitter. California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U. C. Berkeley. | 1 |
Barack Obama has kept a relatively low profile since leaving office last month, and he largely avoided the spotlight on Friday night — at least as much as a former president can when he is attending a Broadway show. Shortly after the lights went down at the American Airlines Theater on West 42nd Street, there was a blur, and the brief shining of a flashlight. Three people quickly took their seats several rows back from the stage: Mr. Obama his eldest daughter, Malia and Valerie Jarrett, who was a senior adviser to the president. A woman sitting nearby let out a small yelp, but most of the audience at the revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Price’’ did not realize they were watching a Broadway show with someone who was, until recently, the most powerful person in the world. The play, starring Mark Ruffalo, Danny DeVito, Jessica Hecht and Tony Shalhoub, centers on two estranged brothers and their quest to reconnect. “Well, I actually didn’t know he was sitting in the row,” said Laralyn Mowers, 37, who lives in Astoria, Queens. She was sitting five seats to the right of Mr. Obama and did not realize he was there until a friend told her at intermission. “I had a really bad day and it all just changed. ” Ms. Mowers said she was actually irritated when the trio first came in. “Who is so rude to come in after the show starts with the flashlights and everything?” she said. Mr. Obama wore glasses during the show. At one point during the second act, he and his daughter sat in identical poses: right hands pressed to their chins while intently observing the drama before them. Just before intermission, again in darkness, Mr. Obama, his daughter and Ms. Jarrett were whisked backstage to greet the cast and to take pictures with the crew. Once more, most of the crowd was oblivious to his presence. After the play ended, the Obamas and Ms. Jarrett joined the crowd in a standing ovation for the cast, the most visible they had been all night. Minutes later, they were gone. The audience members who managed to see the former president were heard expressing surprise that he had been there. The Obamas have mostly kept out of sight since President Trump’s inauguration. After leaving office, Mr. Obama and Michelle Obama went to the British Virgin Islands at the invitation of Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group. Mr. Branson challenged him to a kitesurfing contest. Mr. Obama won. Photos of a smiling Mr. Obama kitesurfing and wearing his baseball cap backward set off a flurry of jokes on the internet and on late night comedy shows. A common thread: Was he ever coming back? Mrs. Obama was spotted by the Daily Mail leaving a SoulCycle class in Washington this week. And on Thursday night, the former president was spotted leaving a restaurant with Malia in New York City’s Little Italy. The Obamas have shown a fondness for Broadway. In 2009, Mr. Obama whisked Mrs. Obama away from Washington for a Saturday dinner and a theater date, taking in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. ” Five years later, the Obamas attended a performance of “A Raisin in the Sun,” starring Denzel Washington. Mr. Obama took both of his daughters to see a matinee performance of “Hamilton” in 2015. Last March, instead of leaving Washington, he brought “Hamilton” cast members to the White House to perform and to conduct a workshop with high school students. In November, Mr. Obama appeared at a for Democrats that featured a special performance of the hit musical. Of course, Mr. Obama is not alone among politicians who attend Broadway shows. Hillary Clinton has been spotted at four Broadway shows since her defeat in November, and was greeted with adulation. In an episode that garnered much attention, Mike Pence, then the vice was treated by a cast member to a brief statement about inclusion after seeing “Hamilton” in November. Mr. Trump, who helped finance a Broadway play in his 20s, and has said he is a fan of the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, was not pleased. During Friday’s performance of “The Price,” a line from Mr. DeVito’s character, a furniture dealer, about the federal government being unreliable drew the biggest laugh of the night. Mr. Obama sat . “He said that he was happy that it was while he was not in office,” Mr. Ruffalo said during an interview after the show. | 1 |
Prison Labor is Slavery by Another Name Prison Labor is Slavery by Another Name By 0 151
Right now there’s a national movement mobilizing to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage of $15 an hour. But imagine if instead of earning even that much, you could only earn a few cents an hour.
If that sounds like something from the developing world, think again. The reality is our prisons are perpetuating slave labor .
Every day, incarcerated people work long hours for barely any money. Meanwhile, prisons charge inmates for everything from telephone calls, to extra food and convenience items, to occupying a bed.
In an official statement announcing the start of the historically largest nationwide prison strike, the IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee wrote: “In one voice, rising from the cells of long term solitary confinement, echoed in the dormitories and cell blocks from Virginia to Oregon, we prisoners across the United States vow to finally end slavery in 2016.”
The prison system profits from mass incarceration. Prisons have numerous incentives to fill beds — including the cheap labor prisoners provide — and very little incentive to treat prisoners like human beings. (Photo: Shutterstock)
Current minimum wage laws don’t apply to people in prison, nor do labor rights regulations. So prisoners experiencing grueling hours or cruel treatment don’t have any recourse to file complaints or seek restitution.
On the contrary, clear human rights violations – including chain gangs — go unchecked all the time.
And the prison system targets an already incredibly vulnerable population. Most inmates aren’t just low-income — they’re the poorest of the poor. In 2014, prior to their incarceration, inmates generally made over 40 percent less than their peers.
Much of the prison population only wound up in the system in the first place because of policies that criminalize race, poverty, and mental health.
Some are there because they couldn’t afford to post bail after facing minimal charges. Others end up back in the system because of stigma and policies that make it difficult to find a job as an ex-convict.
Others still are locked up for being homeless and sleeping on the street, or stealing food. Many with mental illnesses end up cycling between the emergency room and a jail cell.
But even those with steady work, once inside prison, can’t continue to earn a decent living. On just a few pennies an hour, prisoners can’t support themselves or their families, or earn enough to survive once they reenter society.
People who spend years or even decades behind bars lose years worth of wages and have few resources for food or rent post-incarceration. It’s easy to see how prisons trap people in a cycle of poverty that helps ensure that even if released, they’re likely to end up back in prison.
The majority of these prisoners are people of color who’ve been disproportionately targeted for imprisonment — from racial profiling to the failed war on drugs that targeted black communities starting in the 1980s.
And it’s not just the wages that are reminiscent of slavery.
One in ten prisoners is subject to physical and sexual abuse by guards and fellow inmates, according to the first National Former Prisoners Survey .
There’s no real infrastructure to address the physical and mental consequences that come with this abuse. Meanwhile, prison wardens, correction officers, and prison administrators are rarely held accountable for their actions.
Some of these injustices have inspired the Department of Justice to end federal contracts with private prisons, but that’s not enough.
The Eighth Amendment states that cruel and unusual punishment is illegal in this country. Yet, today people are slaving away in prison factories, under working conditions that first prompted the rise of the labor movement.
Prisoners are human beings who deserve the same human rights and dignity as the rest of us.
We must end the practice of prison labor. It’s slavery by another name, and we have a clear obligation to ensure that slavery is completely eradicated in the United States. | 1 |
The State of Michigan has agreed to spend $87 million in a proposed settlement to replace thousands of lead pipes throughout Flint over the next three years, the latest effort by state and city officials to fix the contaminated water system. The state may use a combination of federal and state funds for the project, which, if approved, would settle a lawsuit brought last year by a coalition of Flint residents and national groups. The suit blamed city and state officials for failing to protect residents from drinking water for more than a year. A federal judge is expected to review the agreement during a hearing in Detroit on Tuesday. The proposed deal also calls for the state to provide free bottled water and to conduct extensive testing of Flint’s tap water for lead in the coming months. By January 2020, the agreement says, the city will have replaced pipes in and around thousands of homes — perhaps 18, 000 of them — speeding up a project that began last year to replace corroded lead pipes. Pipes made of lead or galvanized steel are expected to be replaced with copper. “This proposed agreement is a win for the people of Flint,” said Dimple Chaudhary, a lawyer for the National Resources Defense Council. “It provides a comprehensive framework to address lead contamination in Flint’s tap water. The agreement is a significant step forward for the Flint community, covering a number of critical issues related to water safety. ” The lawsuit was filed against Michigan and Flint officials in January 2016 by a group including the Natural Resources Defense Council the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan Concerned Pastors for Social Action and Melissa Mays, a Flint resident. The group asserted that the state and the city were in violation of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. Ari Adler, a spokesman for Gov. Rick Snyder, said he could not comment because the agreement was still under mediation. Under the terms of the deal, residents are entitled to lead testing of their water four times a year. Residents who are homebound may receive deliveries of bottled water, and nine distribution centers will offer free bottled water, filters and replacement cartridges for filters. Teams dispatched by the city will inspect water filters on faucets, ensure that they are installed correctly and explain proper use to residents, a step to further educate people in Flint about lead contamination. In April 2014, Flint officials switched the city’s water source from Detroit’s water system to the Flint River, and residents immediately began to report health problems, water discoloration and foul smells from their faucets. It took more than a year before state officials publicly acknowledged the problem. Experts said that water from the Flint River had corroded the pipes and caused lead to leach into the water. Jacob D. Abernethy, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, collaborated with Flint officials on a study last year that analyzed the water system and the undertaking to replace lead pipes in homes. He said that finishing the replacement in three years seemed possible with enough money and resources. The pipe replacement in Flint did not begin as quickly as officials had initially hoped. “It’s been a slow project for a lot of reasons,” Mr. Abernethy said. “There’s a lot of hurdles in the way: The City Council has to approve the locations. Every time you want to go to a home, you have to get approval from the homeowner. Contractors encounter problems they didn’t expect to find. ” But after months of construction, he said, officials in Flint “have figured out how to make this thing go fast. ” | 0 |
SALINAS, Calif. — As Americans gather around Thanksgiving tables, chances are that the healthier parts of their menus — the tossed salads, broccoli casseroles or steaming bowls of roasted brussels sprouts — were grown here in the Salinas Valley. A long strip of deep and fertile soil pinched by sharply rising mountains, the valley has more than doubled its output of produce in recent decades and now grows well over half of America’s leaf lettuce. Yet one place the valley’s bounty of antioxidants does not often appear is on the tables of the migrant workers who harvest it. Public health officials here describe a crisis of poverty and malnutrition among the tens of thousands of farmworkers and their families who tend to the fields of lettuce, broccoli, celery, cauliflower and spinach, among many other crops, in an area called the salad bowl of the nation. More than a third of the children in the Salinas City Elementary School District are homeless overall diabetes rates are rising and projected to soar and 85 percent of farmworkers in the valley are overweight or obese, partly because unhealthy food is less costly, said Marc B. Schenker, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies the health of farmworkers. “The people who grow our food can’t afford to eat it, and they are sicker because of it,” said Joel Diringer, a public health specialist and advocate for farmworkers. “It’s an incredible irony that those who work in the fields all day long don’t have access to the fresh produce that they harvest. ” For decades, the fields of the Salinas Valley have been a revolving door of migrants, from the Okies of John Steinbeck’s writings to the Latin American immigrants who tend the fields today. percent of farmworkers in California are foreign born, primarily from Mexico, according to the United States Department of Labor. While the valley’s vegetables are reaching an number of American households, public health officials say there are no signs of improvement in the living conditions and diets of farmworkers. The popularity of sugary drinks and cultural preferences for filling but foods like tacos and tamales contribute to the obesity of farmworkers and their families, public health officials say. Because an estimated half of agricultural workers in the Salinas Valley are in the country illegally, many do not have health insurance and go without treatment until symptoms become acute. The combination of high rents and low incomes — wages typically fall in the range of $10 to $15 an hour — leaves farmworkers with minimal and often inadequate money for food and is a contributor to the housing crisis in Salinas. Homelessness has risen so steadily in recent years that the Salinas City Elementary School District now has a liaison for students without permanent housing. Cheryl Camany, the school district’s homeless liaison, listed the types of dwellings where some farmworkers slept: “Tents, encampments, abandoned buildings,” she said. “They could be living in a toolshed, a chicken coop. ” Poverty and neglect among farmworkers is by no means new. Steinbeck, the valley’s most famous native son, wrote in the 1930s about the “curious attitude toward a group that makes our agriculture successful. ” “The migrants are needed, and they are hated,” he wrote, a sentiment that residents here feel has been revived with the election of Donald J. Trump as president and his promises to deport undocumented workers. At a diabetes and nutrition awareness class held at a nursery school in King City, overweight women from farmworker families were given a barrage of statistics on the dangers of poor diets, especially those excessive in sugar. “Two in five Americans will develop diabetes,” Lisa Rico, the instructor, told the class in Spanish. “But for us it’s one in two. ” The class was run by the Natividad Medical Foundation, a nonprofit that is part of Natividad Medical Center, a large hospital in Salinas. Ms. Rico read to the class the findings of a survey of 1, 200 young people in Monterey County, which includes Salinas: 72 percent of children under 10 years old and 83 percent of teenagers said they drank at least one soda a day adolescents drank 4. 5 times as many sugary drinks as water. A study published in March by the U. C. L. A. Center for Health Policy Research reported that 57 percent of residents in Monterey County had diabetes or prediabetes, just slightly above the California average of 55 percent. But Dr. Dana Kent, the medical director for health promotion and education at the Natividad Medical Foundation, said estimates among farmworkers might be low, especially among those who are undocumented and fearful to obtain medical services. “We get a sense that there are a lot of people out there who are undiagnosed,” Dr. Kent said. On a recent afternoon, workers from Mexico and El Salvador harvested heads of iceberg lettuce in a field in Gonzales, a city in the heart of the Salinas Valley. The workers moved so quickly — slicing, trimming the outer leaves and putting the heads of lettuce into plastic bags — that they looked like actors in a film played at an accelerated speed. Angelica Beltran, the supervisor, said her workers typically ate six to eight tacos while at work and had two or three sodas during their shift. “No one drinks diet soda,” she said. “It doesn’t taste good. ” Despite the frenetic pace of the work, farmworkers suffer from what Melissa Kendrick, the head of the Food Bank for Monterey County, calls the “obesity paradox of the poor. ” “They are fat, yes, but they are malnourished because all they are eating is garbage,” she said. The consumption of cheap, starchy food has been a major contributor to the epidemic of obesity across America. But the rates among farmworkers here are significantly higher: 85 percent are overweight or obese compared with 69 percent nationally. Some farmworkers in the Salinas Valley sleep next to the vegetables they cannot afford to buy. In a row of dusty, apartments straddled by railway tracks and vast fields of broccoli, Maria Hernandez, 60, pays $520 a month for two tiny rooms, each about 18 feet across. Her extended family are Mexican immigrants who have spent their lives farming and picking strawberries, celery and other crops. She became aware of the need to eat healthily when both her mother and her sister were diagnosed with diabetes. “Although we are surrounded by it, we don’t eat it because it’s expensive,” said Antonia Tejada, Ms. Hernandez’s daughter, who works the night shift at McDonald’s. “We will buy a big bag of beans instead of a little thing of broccoli for $2 that won’t feed even one person. ” Only an hour south of Silicon Valley, the Salinas Valley is a rural setting with urban prices. Israel de Jesus, who works as an interpreter at the Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, crowded into a home that rented for $1, 600 a month when he was doing farm work. “There’s no way to save money because of the bills and the rent,” Mr. de Jesus said. “But you have to save money so you can make it through the winter. ” Even when vegetables and other healthy foods are available or affordable, farmworkers sometimes opt for the satisfaction of comfort food. Brigita Gonzalez rises every day at 3:30 a. m. to prepare food for her husband, who leaves for the fields an hour later. When she made him a salad once to accompany his tacos, he returned in the evening with the salad unfinished. Ms. Gonzalez says her husband was needled by for eating a salad: “Everybody was like, ‘What are you eating? ’” Ms. Kendrick of the food bank said demand was strong for healthy foods, cultural preferences notwithstanding. The food bank gives out about five million meals a year and is raising money to build a large food warehouse on a plot. Ms. Kendrick, who previously worked in Silicon Valley, said she was motivated by the idea that malnutrition and hunger were fixable in a country with so much wealth. “I’ve spent time in India, the Middle East, Southeast Asia — third world countries where poverty is everywhere,” she said. “It’s shocking when it’s in your home state. ” | 1 |
T. J. Oshie dominating in a thrilling United States shootout victory over Russia. Sidney Crosby scoring an overtime goal on home ice to lift Canada to the gold medal over the United States. Henrik Lundqvist stretching across the goal line with seconds remaining to secure gold for Sweden. Some of the more memorable moments in Olympic hockey history have involved N. H. L. players, but new ones will probably have to be forged without them next winter in South Korea. Citing a majority of owners’ overwhelming opposition to disrupting the regular season, the N. H. L. announced Monday that it would not participate in the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, depriving the Games of the world’s best players in a showcase sport. Players in the N. H. L. have participated in every Olympics since 1998, and many have expressed interest in playing at next winter’s Games. Lundqvist, the Rangers’ stellar goaltender, said on Twitter that the league’s decision wasted “a huge opportunity to market the game at the biggest stage” and that he was disappointed “for all the players that can’t be part of the most special adventure in sports. ” The Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin has said he plans to represent Russia at the Pyeongchang Games no matter what the N. H. L. might decide, raising the possibility that the next battle for the owners might be with individual players who do not want to obey the league. The National Hockey League Players’ Association said in a statement that players were “extraordinarily disappointed and adamantly disagree” with the league’s decision. “N. H. L. players are patriotic and they do not take this lightly,” the association said. “A decent respect for the opinions of the players matters. This is the N. H. L. ’s decision, and its alone. It is very unfortunate for the game, the players and millions of loyal hockey fans. ” N. H. L. owners and officials do not like the idea of shutting down the league for a few weeks. They have argued that they deserve a portion of the revenue that the International Olympic Committee receives from the tournament, and they do not like the injury risk. Several stars, among them Islanders center John Tavares and Red Wings center Henrik Zetterberg, sustained injuries at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. “The league isn’t ” N. H. L. Commissioner Gary Bettman told Chicago business leaders last month. “We’ve been to five of them. The problem is the clubs are to the season. To disappear for almost three weeks in February when there’s no football, no baseball, there’s only basketball and us. To do it where there’s no programming for the NHL Network, for NHL. com, for all of our social media platforms — we just disappear. ” The United States Olympic Committee responded to the decision with a statement posted on its website: “We’re disappointed that the N. H. L. has decided not to participate and feel for the players who were looking forward to the Games. That said, we’re confident U. S. A. Hockey will build the team to compete and win in Pyeongchang. ” Bettman has been hinting at a potential Olympic absence for about a year, telling reporters before Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals last May that “our teams are not interested in paying for the privilege” of participating. The N. H. L. endorsed another global event, the World Cup of Hockey, held in Canada in September. The competition ended two weeks before the season, and coupled with mandated breaks for each team, it created a compressed schedule comparable to that of an Olympic year. Players and coaches have complained that the schedule has led to fatigue and poor play. The N. B. A. is the only other one of the four major North American sports leagues that sends its players to the Olympics, but basketball is contested at the Summer Games, during the league’s . When baseball was a medal sport, from 1992 to 2008, Major League Baseball would not permit its players to compete for similar reasons as the N. H. L. ’s: a lengthy interruption of an inflexible schedule that would cost owners and the players’ association about three weeks’ worth of revenue. Minor leaguers and college players competed instead, as could be the case with the hockey teams for the United States and Canada in Pyeongchang. “We knew it was a very real possibility for many months and certainly respect the decision of the N. H. L. ,” Dave Ogrean, executive director of U. S. A. Hockey, said in a statement. “The good news is that because of our efforts over the course of many years, our player pool is as deep as it has ever been, and we fully expect to field a team that will play for a medal. ” The president of the International Ice Hockey Federation, René Fasel, said recently that the federation needed the N. H. L. ’s decision on 2018 by the end of April. Though the N. H. L. ’s statement on Monday ended with “We now consider the matter officially closed,” it remains to be seen whether the decision is, in fact, final. Negotiations for the 2014 Sochi Olympics stalled four years ago, but an agreement was reached on July 19, 2013, less than seven months before the opening ceremony. Furthermore, although the N. H. L. said in its statement that the I. O. C. had let it be known that the league’s participation in the 2022 Beijing Games was contingent on its presence in Pyeongchang, the league is striving to make inroads in China. Refusing to send its players there could ruin an opportunity to tap a new market. Last week, Bettman traveled to China to announce that the Vancouver Canucks and the Los Angeles Kings would play two exhibition games there in September, in Shanghai and Beijing, where the Kontinental Hockey League of Russia recently installed a team. In its statement, the N. H. L. said it had been open to hearing from the I. O. C. the I. I. H. F. and the players’ association on ways to make Olympic participation more attractive to the team owners. “A number of months have now passed, and no meaningful dialogue has materialized,” the N. H. L. said. The I. O. C. which had previously paid travel and insurance expenses for N. H. L. players, had said it would not do so for the 2018 Games. The I. I. H. F. stepped in to cover those costs instead, but that concession did not satisfy the league. | 1 |
Leeks
Vegetables that do not like to be disturbed include many of the root vegetable varieties such as Carrots, Beets, Turnips, and Parsnips. Many of the root vegetables are cold-hearty and can withstand colder temperatures, and therefore be directly planted in the ground as soon as temperatures are above 39 F for the season. Several vegetables that are a bit trickier include corn, beans, and peas. These vegetables have a much more sensitive root system and do well when they are directly planted into the ground once the season has come, after the last frost when temperatures begin to warm and sunlight increases.
When your seedlings have matured enough and the temperature outside is warming, it is time to start thinking about getting your vegetables outside and into the garden. This typically happens after the last frost, when the outdoor temperature is above 59 F. If nighttime temperatures drop a lot lower than this, wait another week or two.
Cold weather can rot seedlings and shock them, even killing tender crops. Once you are confident that temperatures and weather outside is optimal, begin to harden your seedlings and prep them for transplanting.
To do this, place your seedlings outside in a shaded area with filtered light and slowly, over the course of a week, expose them to more and more sunlight. Seedlings grown indoors are usually quite fragile and soft, and need time to harden before being planted outside in the ground.
Once your seedlings have been planted in the ground, ensure that they are watered immediately. Some may droop or wilt as a result of being transplanted, but most will rebound after they have had time to adjust to their move. Be sure not to over water new transplants because they will be unable to use all the moisture around them and soon rot.
Starting seedlings inside will give you a fun activity to do indoors and your garden will thank you in spring!
Ariana Marisol is a contributing staff writer for REALfarmacy.com. She is an avid nature enthusiast, gardener, photographer, writer, hiker, dreamer, and lover of all things sustainable, wild, and free. Ariana strives to bring people closer to their true source, Mother Nature. She graduated The Evergreen State College with an undergraduate degree focusing on Sustainable Design and Environmental Science. Follow her adventures on Instagram. | 0 |
MINNEAPOLIS — Emma Blom grew up in the Scandinavian heartland of rural Minnesota, reliably attending her small town’s Lutheran church. She spent each childhood summer in vacation Bible school and played the piano for Sunday worship services. “Borning Cry” was her grandmother’s favorite hymn. Catholics were a scattered minority on the Minnesota prairie, Jews even rarer. As for Muslims, Ms. Blom had never met one. “I knew the women wore stuff on their head,” she recalled. “I didn’t even know it was called a hijab. ” Then, as a sophomore at Augsburg College here in 2014, Ms. Blom felt her faith wavering. She had been shaken by her grandmother’s death, and drew no solace from her church’s rituals. One of her classes scrutinized the Bible for sexism and misogyny. Was she a Christian anymore? Was she even a believer? She didn’t dare to ask any of her Lutheran friends, for fear of being judged and found wanting. Still struggling this fall, Ms. Blom turned to perhaps the most unexpected counselor and confessor of all: Augsburg’s Muslim chaplain, Fardosa Hassan. And from Ms. Hassan, 26, a Somali refugee who had never seen snow until arriving in Minnesota as a entering fifth grade, Ms. Blom heard words that sustained her. Doubt was the necessary companion of belief, Ms. Hassan assured her, not its irreversible solvent. Divine texts can be interpreted by human hands and in modern ways. One devout person’s truth is not necessarily another’s. Two months after the conversation, Ms. Blom is attending church again, feeling more settled in her soul. In this encounter across chasms of difference, Ms. Hassan embodied the vital role that dozens of Muslim chaplains like her are playing at colleges and universities throughout the nation. These chaplains serve as doors that open two ways — welcoming and integrating Muslim students who fear hostility at a time of rising Islamophobia, and normalizing Islam to students who have absorbed a narrative of it as an oppressive and violent religion. “My role is to help students negotiate this multifaith, diverse environment,” said Ms. Hassan. “I’m going to give them a tool for when they go out of this institution, so they know how to be respectful of others. A lot of times, people are afraid even to ask the questions of people who are different. So I say, begin with friendship. Start by saying hello. ” Across the United States, nearly 40 Muslim chaplains serve private universities, according to Abdullah Antepli, the chaplain at Duke University and a leader in the national association of Muslim chaplains, which also includes those serving in hospitals, the military, prisons and various community settings. (For reasons of church and state separation, public universities cannot pay for clergy of any kind, although a Muslim chaplain at the University of Michigan is supported by private donations.) Virtually all these chaplains have been hired since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In their polarizing aftermath, the chaplains both chose and were compelled to become cultural and religious interlocutors. For each one of those chaplains provided a face, if not the face, of the “ummah,” or global community of Islam. “If you have a Muslim among the Jews and Christians and Buddhists and humanists, you get better integrated into the life of the school,” said Heidi Hadsell, the president of Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, which has a program to train Muslim chaplains. “They act as advocates for Muslim students, but also a bridge to other communities. And that’s critically important. It’s a way of people on campus knowing a Muslim. ” There is probably no college that stands more astride the religious divide than Augsburg. It is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and has traditionally attracted the vast majority of its students from white Protestant denominations. Yet its campus directly abuts the neighborhood that is the epicenter of Minnesota’s population of 31, 500 Somali Muslims. Perhaps nowhere else in the United States does a hockey rink sit so close to a halal meat market. With the growth of Minnesota’s Somali population over the past the most common national news from the area has concerned the dozens of young men who joined the Islamic State or the Shabab militant group — or were apprehended trying. In September, a Somali man shouting “Allahu akbar” stabbed 10 people at a shopping mall in St. Cloud, 65 miles from Minneapolis, heightening fears of homegrown terrorism. Such explosive events, though, obscure the less dramatic assimilation of Somali immigrants here. One serves on the Minneapolis City Council. Another won a seat in the state legislature on Election Day. As of 2006, Somalis in Minnesota owned 600 businesses and had $164 million in buying power, according to a report by the American Immigration Council, and those numbers have certainly increased in the subsequent decade. So when Paul C. Pribbenow became president of Augsburg in 2006, he looked to the Somali community for prospective students. Having written his doctoral dissertation about Hull House, Jane Addams’s landmark settlement house in Chicago, Dr. Pribbenow conceived of Augsburg as the “ equivalent. ” As he recently put it: “What does a settlement house do? It listens to neighbors and learns how to be a neighbor. ” With a student body of about 2, 500, Augsburg’s Muslim enrollment increased to 101 in 2016 from 11 in 2007. Ms. Hassan, in the graduating class of 2012, was one of those students. Her family fled Somalia’s civil war in 1991 and lived in Ethiopia and Kenya for several years before she came to Minneapolis in the care of her grandmother. Equipped with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and international relations, Ms. Hassan went to work for an interfaith group in St. Paul. Augsburg, meanwhile, got a harrowing reminder of its lingering gaps in meeting the needs of Muslim students when one was shot and killed near campus in 2008. The college pastor, the Rev. Sonja Hagander, realized to her shame that there was no Muslim religious figure on campus to help students grieve. As a Lutheran, she felt almost an impostor in the role. So when Augsburg created a position of Muslim student program associate, Ms. Hassan applied and was hired in August 2015. In the role, she addresses classes, organizes service projects, leads field trips to local mosques and started a service for Friday Prayers, known as jummah, on campus. She also makes sure there are plenty of Doritos when members of the Muslim Student Association turn up for their meetings. For Ms. Hassan, such efforts are necessarily . If a Christian student like Ms. Blom represented one vector of her outreach, then Mohamud Mohamed typifies the other. The son of Somali refugees, he memorized the Quran by age 13 and began teaching in a weekend madrasa a year later. His default position before he went to college was to assume that the most rigorous version of Islam was the most genuine. At Augsburg, Ms. Hassan utilized Mr. Mohamed’s religious training to have him, rather than an outside imam, lead Friday Prayer. She also nudged him to move the sermons away from fire and brimstone and toward issues of social justice, such as the Black Lives Matter movement. As a result, the prayer service has begun to attract some Christian and atheist students for its political message. And in at least one small way on one campus, Islam itself has been demystified and defanged. “They feel like there’s no more mystery about it,” Mr. Mohamed, 19, said of students. “It’s not some secret ritual. It’s a way for us to be ambassadors for Muslims. ” | 1 |
2142 Views November 16, 2016 35 Comments Guest Posts The Saker
by Iman Safi
The major political parties of Western democracies; the Conservatives on one hand and the Liberal Progressives on the other hand, irrespective what specific names they give themselves, are by-and-large based on the “traditional” so-called right versus left divide.
This divide has taken many shapes and forms, and of course a huge array of names and descriptions, and this is why to pinpoint the doctrinal difference between them, it is perhaps best go back to the basic difference of conservatism versus liberalism; the desire to maintain as opposed to the desire to change.
This is basically why political preference was grossly gravitated to by the norms of human nature. Thus, the privileged were attracted to conservatism whilst the underprivileged were lured by the need for change.
In this rapid time of change, change at all levels, those sharp dividing lines have been merging at times and splitting at others. In their denial to this paradigm shift, the major parties in the West have lost what originally defined them; and when their constituents tell them that they do not see any difference between them any longer, instead of listening to them, they shun them and tell them that they are wrong.
It is of little wonder therefore that new kids are coming on the block; new kids who can strike in the weakest spot of the underbelly of the major parties, and they strike when the eyes of the major parties are either closed, or at best, in denial.
Enter the Greens.
As both major parties move closer towards the center, or at least as they are perceived to do so, gaps are created at the extremes of the conservative-progressive divide. Even if the major parties are not indeed either moving closer or towards the center, the fact that they are perceived to do so by voters is enough reason to send votes swaying in any direction as perceived.
The Greens were quick enough and smart enough to capitalize on one of the perceived vacuum corners and jumped into the left progressive former nook. Fairly quickly they came to embody what the traditional progressive left side of politics used to uphold and defend, and was supposed to continue to do so. Thus, in a rather short period of time, just 2-3 decades in fact, the Greens vote now accounts to nearly 10% in most Western democracies, and it is on the rise.
On the other extreme, the protagonists of the extreme right, had to wait a bit longer for a more opportune moment. The wave of refugees and ensuing terrorism that the short-sighted politics and the wars that both major parties created gave them the golden goose they had been waiting for.
Ironically however, in most Western nations, many major new concerns, including the concern about refugees, come from both the very privileged and the very underprivileged combined. The two diametrically-opposite socio-economic dipoles found quite a bit of common ground that united them. Thus, and perhaps for the first time in history, the desire to change did not come exclusively from the bottom. The days of the French Revolution seem to have gone. The days of hungry people taking to the streets demanding bread are long forgotten.
This created the foundation of the Trump’s “Conservative Revolution”. Whilst this term sounds oxymoronic, it describes the status quo of the paradigm shift that major parties in all Western nations are seemingly and conveniently choosing to ignore to their own peril. The “Conservative Revolution” is a new social phenomenon, originating from both extreme of the socio-economic divide crashing the center and the rot that traditional politics has festered around the mid-point shades of grey.
The muddled up and muddied new scenario is something that traditional conservative and progressive parties are not used to. In their tradition of assuming that power is exclusive for either one of them for the taking, they have built a high and huge wall of arrogance that they do not seem to want to surmount.
For some reason, they seem to believe that their self-perceived oppositeness is as real and as permanent as black and white. It is time that they realize that they are both seen as, with the risk of repetition, slightly different shades of grey and that there is a new clearer brand of black and white emerging. For some mysterious reason they believe that their presence is etched in stone that they will always be here, and that even when in opposition, it is only a question of time before they get re-elected and voted in.
It is time that they wake up, and get a reality check.
In Trump’s “Conservative Revolution”, not even the American Republican Party (ie the GOP) had fully endorsed him, and ultimately, for better or for worse, his win was his own; not the GOP’s. Above all, Trump used primarily his own funds, and in more ways than one, he owes nothing to none, none at all but his loyal inner circle and, of course, his voters nationwide.
So apart from Trump and his close inner circle, who are those who believe that they are the winners in the USA? Obviously and sadly, the ultra-right including the KKK and the like, and this is the main cause of fear and concern among the ranks of the truly educated liberal-minded Americans, and for good reasons. They simply do not know what to expect next.
It is no wonder therefore that the rest of the Western World is at loss trying to deal with the Trump win tsunami.
Right here in Australia, even the staunch ultra-right Australian former PM John Howard, a prime mover and shaker who was instrumental in pursuing Bush to invade Iraq, is at loss and in total despair facing Trump’s win. Traditionally after a GOP win, this man should now be rejoicing. After all, he was the one who said eight years ago that Al-Qaeda would be happy to see Obama win. But thus far, Trump does not give the impression that he is the regular conservative warmonger that Howard likes to see in the Oval Office. Quite the contrary in fact.
The world is changing and changing fast. The biggest paradigm shift after the end of WWII was the breakup of the USSR and the establishment of the so-called “New World Order” in which the USA was the sole superpower.
The “New World Order” is coming to an end. In fact, it already did when Russia unilaterally decided to send its Sukhois to bomb ISIS in Syria.
The economic strife that the USA is suffering from, its shrinking global influence and needless and expensive wars that it had been engaged with almost continuously since the end of WWII has reached a tipping point that President-elect Trump is savvy enough to acknowledge, and forward enough to openly and overtly decide that he wants to deal with in a fiscally-pragmatic and conciliatory manner.
Unless Trump does an Obama and changes course soon after his inauguration, a new era in foreign American policy, an era that is primarily America-centric rather than hegemonic will set the course of global events in a new direction.
Other nations, and specifically the two major parties of Western democracies will have very few choices. They will either have to acknowledge and accept this change, find a way in which they can redefine themselves in order to be able to find a nook for themselves within it, or simply stick to their waning guns and allow to fall to 3 rd and 4 th ranks in power and allow the Greens and new ultra-right to become the two new de-facto major parties. The ball is in their courts, but not for a long time.
The longer they take to redefine themselves, and the longer they continue to bury their heads in the sand, the Greens will continue to chew away votes from the progressive parties and the ultra-right will do the same from the conservative parties. As a matter of fact, in this particular unprecedented situation, the major parties can lose votes in any direction, but mostly towards the one seen closer to them.
Unless the major parties wake up, and they are the devil the West knows, the West will soon find itself under the control of either the far right or the far left; the devils that no one really knows, let alone, wants to know.
To be explicit and specific, in Australia this will mean that unless the ruling Liberal-National Coalition on one hand and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) on the other hand reach a new bi-partisan foreign policy agreement that will endeavour to sever the unconditional and rather outdated loyalty to the America tag, a tag that the USA itself is possibly no longer interested in keeping, then in the not too distant future when Australians go to the polling booths, they will eventually have to choose between either the Greens or the infamous xenophobic Pauline Hanson One Nation Party.
Not surprisingly, the ruling Australian conservative government is at a total loss because it is now facing the prospect of having to contend with the love-child of the “Conservative Revolution”, an American President that they have not seen the likes of before, someone they cannot place in any position on the right to left track; definitely not in any position they are familiar with. Prime Minister Turnbull had no option but to congratulate the President-elect in a rather morbid manner that, when looked at in between the lines, one would argue that Turnbull might as well have said that Australia will accept the decision of the American people even if they vote in a moron and a thug.
On the other hand, former opposition ALP leaders, two of whom are former Prime Ministers Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd have genuinely welcomed the change. Another former ALP leader who never reached the top job, Mark Latham, was excited to see that this change may mean that the USA will no longer be the world police. But Keating put it very strongly when he urged Australia to act like a grown-up nation and sever the unconditional loyalty to the America tag ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=share&v=paPrAG6IY_8&app=desktop ).
I have not been scanning who has been saying what, but I would not be surprised if what Paul Keating had to say was quite unique and not matched with any post US-election statements coming from any Western leader or former leader.
Once the fears resulting from Trump’s pre-election statements about women, Hispanics, Muslims etc… are dissipated, if they get dissipated, and if he remains true to his word on international policy, Western leaders of the conservative and progressive parties that rule in alternation will have to redefine and realign themselves, otherwise they may either get squeezed into oblivion or swept away by their own home-grown “Conservative Revolutions”.
Will Trump keep his promises on international matters?
Will Australia take Keating’s advice and lead the West into a new era of how to deal and cooperate with the new USA if indeed a new USA is on the rise?
Very pertinently, will Trump realize that he cannot unite people if he is going to adopt social policies based on segregation? This sounds like expecting him to keep certain election promises and denounce others; and expectation that he keeps the election promises on international affairs and revoking those on social justice issues, a big dose of wishful thinking, but will his stand on the social issues that are causing concern within and outside America take a back step?
We can all hope, because as the world stands at the edge of the cliff of a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers, something that most Westerners seem to be totally oblivious to, a very precarious position that the Obama/Clinton legacy has put the world into, humanity needs miracles to be saved, and when we need miracles, all we have left is prayer and all the hope we can afford to have.
As a die-hard leftie, I hope that the traditional left wakes up and takes the lead in adopting its own rebirth; a doctrinal renaissance that will see the world from a vantage point of working towards partnership and conflict resolution, because right now, the bi-partisan agreements between the two major parties of any Western Democracy, Australia included, is nothing short of being a disgraceful bi-partisanship of war. The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95 | 1 |
Trump Says He Will Sign Very First Bill to Repeal Obamacare
“This is ready-made advertising for Republican candidates to use nationwide,” stated Republican strategist Ron Bonjean. “If you’re a Republican candidate, it would be malpractice not to talk about it, highlight it or advertise on it.”
To be sure, Trump has been hitting the issue hard over the past several days, mentioning the rate hikes at four separate rally appearances in a 24-hour period this week.
“ Repealing Obamacare and stopping Hillary’s healthcare takeover is one of the single most important reasons that we must win on Nov. 8,” Trump told rally-goers Tuesday afternoon in Sanford, Florida. Advertisement - story continues below
Other Republicans have been quick to jump on the issue as well, including vulnerable incumbent GOP senators like Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Roy Blunt of Missouri.
Should these Republican senators and others maintain a focus on Obamacare during the final two weeks, they stand a good chance of fending off the Democrat effort to wrench control of the Senate away from the GOP.
The same applies to Trump, should he refrain from media distractions and continue harping on the failures of Obama and his health care law, particularly in hard-hit swing states like Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, to name just a few.
And he will have Obama to thank personally for paving the way to a Trump presidency through his horribly flawed Obamacare law. Advertisement - story continues below | 0 |
Japanese troops deploy to South Sudan risking first overseas conflict since World War 2 The move risks pulling the troops into conflict for the first time in more than seven decades By Michael Krieger - 11.21.2016 @1:18 PM EST
The re-miliarization of Japan has been on my radar and caused me much concern in recent years. I’ve covered the topic on several occasions, with the most recent example published over the summer in the post, Japanese Government Shifts Further Toward Authoritarianism and Militarism . Here are the first few paragraphs: One of the most discomforting aspects of Neil Howe and William Strauss’ seminal work on generational cycles, The Fourth Turning (1997), is the fact that as far as American history is concerned, they all climax and end with massive wars. To be more specific, the first “fourth turning” in American history culminated with the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the second culminated with the Civil War (1861-1865), while the third ended with the bloodiest war in world history, World War II (1939-1945). The number of years between the end of the Revolutionary War and the start of the Civil War was 78 years, and the number of years between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War II was 74 years (76 years if you use America’s entry into the war as your starting date). Therefore, if Howe & Strauss’ theory holds any water, and I think it does, we’re due for a major conflict somewhere around 75 years from the end of World War II. That brings us to 2020. The more I look around, the more signs appear everywhere that the world is headed into another major conflict. From an unnecessary resurgence of a Cold War with Russia, to increased tensions in the South China Sea and complete chaos and destruction in the Middle East, the world is a gigantic tinderbox. All it will take to transform these already existing conflict zones into a major conflagration is another severe global economic downturn, something I fully expect to happen within the next 1-2 years. Frighteningly, this puts on a perfect collision course with the 2020 area.
Although I felt World War 3 was a virtual lock under Hillary Clinton, the election of Trump does not negate historical cycles or current geopolitical trends, and the world continues to move in a very dangerous direction.
While the below snippet from a Reuters article published today may not seem like a big deal, it’s just a small part of a much larger trend.
Via Reuters : A contingent of Japanese troops landed in South Sudan on Monday, an official said – a mission that critics say could see them embroiled in their country’s first overseas fighting since World War Two. The soldiers will join U.N. peacekeepers and help build infrastructure in the landlocked and impoverished country torn apart by years of civil war. But, under new powers granted by their government last year, they will be allowed to respond to urgent calls for help from U.N. staff and aid workers. There are also plans to let them guard U.N. bases, which have been attacked during the fighting. The deployment of 350 soldiers is in line with Japanese security legislation to expand the military’s role overseas. Critics in Japan have said the move risks pulling the troops into conflict for the first time in more than seven decades.
All it would take is a sharp global economic downturn to push world “leaders” towards overseas conflict in order to distract from problems at home. The risk is very real. | 0 |
COLORADO SPRINGS — The Colorado Springs Fire Department said that Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, had to be rescued from an elevator that was stuck between the first and second floors of a resort. In a statement released on Saturday, the department said that it was called at 1:30 p. m. on Friday to rescue about 10 people, including Mr. Trump, who were trapped inside the elevator at The Mining Exchange, a Wyndham Grand Hotel and Spa resort. The department said the firefighters opened the top elevator hatch and lowered a ladder into the elevator. Mr. Trump and the others used the ladder to climb out of the elevator to the second floor. The department said no injuries were reported. The Trump campaign confirmed that the incident occurred but did not provide details. During a rally on Friday at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Mr. Trump criticized the city’s fire marshal for limiting the number of people allowed to attend his speech at the building where the event was held. Fire Marshal Brett Lacey told the Colorado Springs Gazette that he had already agreed to allow a 10 percent increase in seating at the venue. | 0 |
The man who scaled Trump Tower last week told investigators he did so for “the publicity,” which he hoped would earn him a meeting with Donald J. Trump, Manhattan prosecutors said in court on Wednesday. Prosecutors said the man, Stephen Rogata, 19, made the statement after he was detained for the Aug. 10 stunt. It turned into an international spectacle, streamed over social media and broadcast by television news. Mr. Rogata appeared in Criminal Court through a video link to Bellevue Hospital Center, where he has been under psychiatric care since the episode. Wearing a pale blue hospital outfit, his brown hair covering most of his face, Mr. Rogata sat quietly as prosecutors read the charges, including reckless endangerment and criminal trespassing. Judge Kevin McGrath set bail at $10, 000 cash or $5, 000 bond. Prosecutors said Mr. Rogata, who lives in Virginia, walked into the Midtown tower’s atrium, sneaked into a area and began his climb of the building’s exterior on the fifth floor. Mr. Rogata had been scaling the building for nearly three hours when he was grabbed by officers who had removed a window on the 21st floor. The climb, which was watched by millions of viewers on television and online, as well as hundreds of people from the streets below, was the latest chapter for Trump Tower, since Mr. Trump began his presidential campaign there last summer. On Wednesday, Pierre Griffith, an assistant district attorney, said that Mr. Rogata told investigators he had wanted to give Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, “secret information” that “has to do with when he’s president, how he’s going to govern. ” Prosecutors said Mr. Rogata told investigators that he had hoped to make it to the top of the building but also knew he would quite likely be arrested. Mr. Rogata, prosecutors said, waited for his parents to leave home before driving to New York City, where he arrived on Aug. 9. He bought climbing equipment online in the weeks before the stunt and practiced on a building in Virginia, Mr. Griffith said. Mr. Griffith asked the judge for a $20, 000 bail, saying several items fell out of Mr. Rogata’s backpack as he climbed, including a laptop computer. “This defendant’s crime endangered not only himself and people beneath him,” but also emergency responders, he said. But Judge McGrath lowered the amount after being petitioned by Mr. Rogata’s lawyer, Tara Collins of the Legal Aid Society. Ms. Collins said Mr. Rogata had been receiving psychiatric treatment at Bellevue. She described him as a good student — a member of the debate and the cross country teams in high school — who volunteered for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. He works at a plant nursery, she said. She described Mr. Rogata’s father as a “ ” officer in the Navy with a specialty in flight navigation, and said both of his parents had visited him at the hospital. Mr. Rogata, she said, “did something that was profoundly stupid with hopes of meeting someone who he will never get to meet. ” | 0 |
RIO DE JANEIRO — Several referees and judges have been removed from the Olympic boxing competition after officials reviewed their decisions, fueling suspicion of dubious results in some matches at the Rio Games. A spokesman for the federation that governs the boxing tournament said Wednesday that the names of the referees and judges who were dismissed, and the matches that were tainted, would not be released because he did not want to “besmirch their families. ” The international federation, known as AIBA, said in a statement that the committee that reviews officiating had assessed all 239 bouts at the Rio Games through Tuesday and had “determined that less than a handful of the decisions were not at the level expected. ” The federation statement also said that “the concerned referees and judges will no longer officiate at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. ” The move came a day after Michael Conlan, an Irish bantamweight, accused the federation of corruption and suggested that Russian boxing officials had bribed judges. Conlan’s accusations came in an tirade after he lost his quarterfinal to Vladimir Nikitin of Russia. Nikitin won a unanimous decision, but the public response to the verdict suggested that many observers believed Conlan should have won. The judges’ decision in the fight was not the first at the Rio Games to draw scrutiny. On Monday, the crowd jeered when another Russian fighter, Evgeny Tishchenko, was awarded a unanimous decision over Vassiliy Levit of Kazakhstan, who appeared to have won the bout handily. Two of the three judges who scored Conlan’s bout — Jones Kennedy Silva do Rosario of Brazil and Udeni Talik Bandara Kiridena of Sri Lanka — returned to officiate on Wednesday. All three judges had scored the fight in favor of Nikitin. The judges of the fight, the heavyweight gold medal match, were also unanimous in their decision. Only one of them, however, made a repeat appearance. Armando Carbonell Alvarado of Colombia judged two fights Wednesday, while Michael Gallagher of Ireland and Kheira Sidi Yakoub of Algeria judged none. The boxing federation did not say how many decisions it deemed insufficient, and it did not specify what was wrong with those decisions. None of the decisions will be overturned, AIBA said. Coaches at the boxing venue Wednesday said that the scoring system left a lot of room for interpretation and that the judges, although well trained, were not infallible. They also expressed relief that the issue of inadequate judging was being addressed, although they dismissed the accusations of corruption. “I’m glad some action was taken,” said Billy Walsh, a coach of the United States team. “Anybody can make a mistake, but it’s happened too often. ” Kay Koroma, who also coaches the Americans, said, “I don’t think it’s corruption it’s just bad decision making. ” AIBA invited people with evidence about bribing judges to step forward. “With regard to corruption, we would like to strongly restate that unless tangible proof is put forward, not rumors, we will continue to use any means, including legal or disciplinary actions, to protect our sport” and the referees and judges “whose integrity is constantly put into question,” the federation’s statement said. The federation chooses from 36 judges and referees at the Rio Games. AIBA picks five judges to work each bout and prohibits judges from a fighter’s country, or from a country in conflict with a fighter’s country, from working a bout. After each fight, a computer program randomly determines which three of the five judges’ scorecards will be counted. The other two scorecards are thrown out. Still, questions about judging will continue. “If they really prove that there was some kind of corruption, it is really very sad, but for now there’s no proof of anything, only rumors,” said Mateus Alves, a Brazilian coach. | 0 |
Share on Facebook Research presented by Professor Nigel Bundred at the European Breast Cancer Conference in Amsterdam revealed that they had tested the effectiveness of a pair of drugs known as Herceptin (a.k.a trastuzumab) and Lapatinib. The two drugs are commonly used in breast cancer treatment already, but this is the first time they had been combined together and used before surgery and chemotherapy. What they found was they were able to eliminate some types of breast cancer in just 11 days. Funded by Cancer Research UK, they aimed to use these drugs to combat a protein called HER2 (human epidermal growth factor receptor 2) which affects the growth and division of cancer cells . It's also more likely to return than other cancer types. What also makes this treatment so appealing is the fact that it eliminates the need for chemotherapy and surgery. The temporary side effects like hair loss, vomiting and fatigue are also avoided, making treatment less impactful on the body. Chemo is not entirely effective, nor is it the right choice for a lot of patients, so any alternatives are welcomed. Study Results 257 women with HER2 positive breast cancer were selected for the study, with half being put on the drug combo and the other half were the control group. What they found was that of those on the drug, 11% had no cancer cells remaining within two weeks and 17% of cases featured dramatically shrunken tumors . Compared to the control group who were only given Herceptin, they were found to have 0% with no trace of cancer cells and only 3% showed a drop in tumor size. Clearly, the two drugs combined have a major effect on breast cancer cells as opposed to being used on their own. The problem currently, however, is that Herceptin's licensing makes it only available for use alongside chemotherapy and not alone. The results of this study may help to change that though. Although there's still a lot of work to be done, hopefully, this is a major step in the fight against one of the world's deadliest diseases. With medical advancements improving every year, it's entirely possible this could happen sooner than we think! | 0 |
A PPP poll of Florida found:
Candidates who have been vocal in their support for gun violence prevention perform well in Florida. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump by four points (48/44), and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Patrick Murphy is tied with Republican incumbent Sen. Marco Rubio, 46/46. By an almost two to-one margin, 51/26, Florida voters would be more likely to vote for a candidate for U.S. Senate who supports strengthening gun laws, suggesting ample room for growth for gun safety candidates before the election next month.
The poll was conducted by PPP the Americans for Responsible Solutions PAC, and it illustrates the dilemma that the Florida Senate race has created for Democrats. Democratic leadership is divided on spending more money on expensive Florida media, but there are polls that suggest that Sen. Marco Rubio’s Democratic challenger, Rep. Patrick Murphy, has a chance of winning the seat.
If Rep. Murphy can beat Sen. Rubio, the defeat would likely put an end to Rubio’s national political career or at least force the Florida Republican to put the brakes on his plan to run for president in 2020, and instead focus on a run for governor.
Democrats have a real chance to send Marco Rubio to the unemployment line. Rubio has been a disinterested Senator, who just like Ted Cruz, seems only interest in his Senate seat as a platform from which to launch his presidential ambitions. Rubio has provided poor service to his constituents , and doesn’t deserve to return to the US Senate.
Sen. Rubio has refused to commit to serving his full Senate term, which should tell voters all they need to know about his commitment to them.
Democrats have a chance to solidify their potential Senate majority by sending Marco Rubio home. With cash to spend and less than two weeks left in the campaign, they’d be foolish not to take it.
Marco Rubio Inches Closer To Unemployment As Poll Shows Florida Senate Race Tie added by Jason Easley on Fri, Oct 28th, 2016 | 0 |
BOSTON (AP) — Black students at Harvard University are organizing a graduation ceremony of their own this year to recognize the achievements of black students and faculty members some say have been overlooked. [advertisement | 0 |
■ Prime Minister Matteo Renzi offered his resignation on Monday, as promised. But Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, said in a statement that he had asked Mr. Renzi to delay stepping down until Parliament passes a budget for 2017. ■ Mr. Renzi had said he would resign after voters rejected changes to the Constitution that he supported in what amounted to a referendum on the prime minister’s government. ■ The decision to hold a referendum is another example of why political scientists say such votes are often “messy and dangerous. ” ■ The results represented another victory for movements in Europe. “Times have changed,” said Beppe Grillo, the leader of the populist Five Star Movement. As promised, Mr. Renzi submitted his resignation to Mr. Mattarella on Monday evening at the Quirinale Palace, the president’s official residence, but the president asked Mr. Renzi to defer his resignation to see through the approval of his government’s budget. “Given the need to complete the parliamentary process to approve the budget law,” Mr. Mattarella asked Mr. Renzi to postpone stepping down until the budget, now being discussed in the Senate, had been passed, according to the statement from the president’s office. An official from the office said the budget was expected to be passed this week. Mr. Mattarella’s request was not unusual: His predecessor, Giorgio Napolitano, had “frozen” the resignations of two prime ministers so that pending laws could be passed. Before his meeting with the president, Mr. Renzi briefly conferred with his cabinet at the Chigi Palace, the prime minister’s residence in Rome, where the night before Mr. Renzi announced in an emotional news conference, “the experience of my government ends here. ” Once Mr. Renzi’s resignation eventually takes effect, Mr. Mattarella will work with Italian political leaders to discuss what comes next. — ELISABETTA POVOLEDO and JASON HOROWITZ Italy greeted the news of Mr. Renzi’s symbolic defeat with uncertainty on Monday. A headline in the daily La Repubblica declaring, “The No Triumphs, Renzi Quits,” echoing the sentiment in most newspapers. Commentators acknowledged Mr. Renzi’s dignified reaction to what mostly seemed a vote against his tenure, and they called for responsibility from political forces. “Now the reality is the risk of a return to the swamps and to instability,” Mario Calabresi, editor in chief of La Repubblica, wrote in a editorial on Monday. “A scenario that Italy really doesn’t need. ” Once Mr. Renzi’s resignation is official and he steps down, Mr. Mattarella would then hold talks with the political parties trying to form a caretaker government or call early elections. According to the Italian news media, one candidate who could lead a temporary government is Economy Minister Pier Carlo Padoan, a technocrat. The speaker of the Senate, Pietro Grasso, a longtime magistrate, is also a possibility. Although most opposition parties are pushing for quick elections, opponents of Mr. Renzi in his Democratic Party are more inclined to take their time. — GAIA PIANIGIANI Beppe Grillo, the leader of the Five Star Movement who campaigned against the proposed constitutional changes and against Mr. Renzi, declared on Monday that “times have changed. ” How much so may depend on Mr. Grillo’s ability to parlay his latest success into a full sweep of the political establishment he has thumbed his nose at for years. Mr. Grillo, a former comedian, said that Italians should waste no time pressing for a new electoral law and for the dismantling of the old order. “You should vote as soon as possible,” he said in a blog post on Monday to rally his supporters against the usual jockeying by parties for power in a caretaker government. “The parties will do anything to drag their feet,” he said. The Five Star Movement won a quarter of the vote in 2013 national elections. Mr. Grillo said then that cooperating with traditional parties in any sort of alliance would be akin to capitulation. “The existing political class must be expelled immediately,” he said in an interview at that time with The New York Times. — JEFFREY MARCUS A breakdown of returns shows that opposition to the constitutional changes was widespread, though more pronounced in the south. Only three regions backed the changes: the historically leftist areas of Tuscany and in central Italy, and Adige in the far north. In the economically struggling Sicily and Sardinia, which voted against the changes, the divide between the camps was as large as 44 percentage points. The pattern was similar in areas with high unemployment and social problems. “The country isn’t growing, and voters blamed their personal condition on the government,” said Stefano Folli, a commentator for La Repubblica. The results also reflected a generational divide. According to a survey reported by the news channel Sky TG24, young voters rejected the proposed changes, while more than half of those over 55 supported them. — GAIA PIANIGIANI In analyzing the results, Italian pundits did not always agree, except on one point: the severe consequences for Mr. Renzi. “Does Renzi represent the country from a political, cultural point of view? Yesterday’s vote is a clear rejection of Renzi’s economic policies and of how he envisioned the country,” the political commentator Mario Sechi said. Mr. Renzi “doesn’t represent the zeitgeist of the nation, which did not follow him,” he added. For Mr. Sechi, the Five Star Movement is the clear victor, even if the “no” campaign brought together divergent political forces. Sergio Fabbrini, director of the Luiss School of Government in Rome, said the outcome was less clear. Rejection of the constitutional changes was actually a reaction to Mr. Renzi’s “reformist program that in some way threatened a big part of the social political equilibrium,” he said. The nearly 60 percent of the population that voted against him is “highly divided, with nothing in common, and no leader,” Mr. Fabbrini said. What joins them is a conservative, outlook. “Within that, you have the most extreme left and right. ” The person to watch in the short term is Mr. Mattarella, the president. “This is the first real test of the president of the Republic, who has kept mostly in the background,” said Antonio Polito, deputy director of the daily Corriere della Sera. — ELISABETTA POVOLEDO The euro recovered from early losses, and European stocks edged up. It was a muted reaction, in part because a vote against the constitutional changes had been expected, giving investors time to adjust their portfolios. Also, political instability in Rome is not unusual. But analysts said Italy was not in the clear, and there is potential for market turmoil in the case of government paralysis and of delays to plans to fix Italy’s ailing banks. The euro first fell as much as 1. 5 percent against the dollar in Asian trading after the vote, but recovered by the morning in Europe, and it even gained ground compared with last week. Major European stock markets were all slightly higher. — JACK EWING The vote results and Mr. Renzi’s decision to step down drew a jubilant response from other populist leaders in Europe. “Italians have disavowed the E. U. and Renzi,” Marine Le Pen, the head of the National Front in France, wrote on Twitter. “We need to listen to this thirst for nations’ freedom and for protection!” With polls predicting that Ms. Le Pen will reach the 2017 presidential election runoff, she has sought to build an platform calling for a “Frexit” and a “People’s Spring. ” The vote in Britain to withdraw from the European Union, known as Brexit, and Donald J. Trump’s recent victory in the United States have put wind in her sails. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who recently refused to attend his trial, used Twitter to congratulate “Italia + Matteo Salvini,” a reference to the leader of the Northern League. — BENOÎT MORENNE Writing in Italy’s leading economic newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, the columnist Guido Gentili said that after the referendum, Italy needed to show through actions and legislation that it “is not impermeable to reform. ” The image of Italy as a nation that “bobs more or less happily in stagnant water between the third largest public debt in the world and a banking system in a deep coma” must be “vigorously contested,” he wrote. Vincenzo Boccia, the president of Italy’s main business lobby, Confindustria, said the referendum results highlighted the need to tackle pressing economic issues like “debt, deficit and growth. ” “Growth is the only way to eliminate inequalities and poverty,” he said in a statement issued Monday morning. Italian companies have been making “crucial efforts” to compete in international markets, he added, and need the government to back them up. — ELISABETTA POVOLEDO The populist victory in Italy was hailed by many leaders across Eastern Europe, where similar sentiments are on the rise, but their reaction was tempered by widespread concern that the results would accelerate the fraying of the European Union, upon which the region has come to depend. Poland, the largest economy in the region, seemed torn between praising a victory by populists who share its governing party views and worrying about vulnerability to Russia. “This would be a major blow not just for the E. U. but for the eurozone,” Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski said in an interview with Polish state radio. “What will the future bring?” Tomas Sedlacek, chief macroeconomic strategist in Prague for the lender CSOB, tied the Italian defeat directly to Mr. Trump’s victory and predicted a dire future. “Democracy, and the future of the euro in Europe, is truly walking on the edge of a knife,” he said. In Slovakia, where sentiment is widespread, many residents say that embracing the currency led to higher prices for everyday goods. “We can expect a referendum about leaving the eurozone,” predicted Richard Zulik, leader of Slovakia’s liberal Freedom and Solidarity party. — RICK LYMAN Finance ministers from the 19 countries that use the euro expressed relief that the economic reaction to the Italian referendum was muted. Yet the vote could still roil the European Union: It threatens to embolden opponents of the single currency, which could destabilize the Italian economy and foment turmoil in the banking sector. Helping to stoke that concern is Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Italy’s oldest lender, which faces questions about whether it has sufficient capital. Asked whether a planned capital increase for the bank would now be delayed, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the president of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, emphasized that Italy first needed to select a new leader. Even as Brussels scrambled to stave off negative financial consequences, ministers from fiscally hawkish countries like Germany and the Netherlands will not want to be seen by their own electorates as being overly permissive toward Italy. — JAMES KANTER | 1 |
From actor Chris Evans (Captain America) to director Joss Whedon, the Marvel Comics franchise is committing harikari in the most unbecoming of ways: through unapologetic, partisan bashing of a democratically elected president they can’t stand. [Evans has expressed deep contempt for what he considers to be in the ignorant masses of Americans that voted Donald Trump into the White House. These are, however, the very masses that make up the core viewership of Marvel’s superhero movies. “People were just so desperate to hear someone say that someone is to blame,” Evans said in a recent interview with Esquire magazine. “They were just so happy to hear that someone was angry, hear someone say that Washington sucks. ” “I feel rage,” he said. “I feel fury. It’s unbelievable. ” “They just want something new without actually understanding,” he continued. “I mean, guys like Steve Bannon — Steve Bannon! — this man has no place in politics. ” Evans’ trolling of Trump on Twitter seems more an obsession than a pastime, and the actor seems to blame the President for all of the country’s woes. They did not die because of you. They died because of a hateful, ignorant, pathetic, EMBOLDENED piece of trash. https: . — Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) May 29, 2017, Unacceptable. This man disgusts me. If you dont think Trump has played a role in this unapologetic wave of ignorance and hate, you are WRONG https: . — Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) May 15, 2017, This administration LOVES to distract. This will only make it harder for women to stay healthy. Government $ can’t be spent on abortions! https: . — Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) April 14, 2017, Of course, no one expects Hollywood actors to be intellectually sophisticated, but to have them try to infect Americans with their own ignorant bigotry is really a bridge too far. In large part, the bizarre rants the Marvel folks carry out on Twitter and elsewhere are abortion driven. Spitting in the face of their conservative fan base that is overwhelmingly Whedon and Evans, along with other Marvel stars such as Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow) and Mark Ruffalo (Hulk) fawn over Planned Parenthood while painting abortion foes as backward and unenlightened. “As most of you know, Planned Parenthood has been under attack for many years now for another service they thankfully offer, providing a safe place for legal abortions,” Johansson said during a Variety luncheon last year. “A woman’s right to choose what to do with her body shouldn’t just be a woman’s rights issue. It’s the year 2016, and this is a human rights issue. ” Whedon recently went so far as to produce a short video panegyric to Planned Parenthood, calling America’s largest abortion provider a “beacon of hope” for the nation, while imagining how horrible life would be without Planned Parenthood to eliminate the unintended consequences of sexual libertinism. Why actors and filmmakers feel an irresistible urge to allow partisan politics to get in the way of their craft is a mystery, but whatever their motives such unrestraint often has consequences. It’s only a matter of time before Marvel’s fan base calls them out for their hypocrisy. are not what patriots pay to see. Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome | 0 |
The restaurant’s ratings are as good as it gets: three stars from Michelin and four from The New York Times. But for all the success of Eleven Madison Park, its owners, Will Guidara and the chef Daniel Humm, are about to start a major overhaul. They plan to close the Manhattan restaurant on June 9 to renovate the kitchen and the dining room, and to ship the operation and staff to a more casual, temporary setting in the Hamptons. If all goes well, they expect to reopen in with a new look and a revised menu with some new dishes. “It’s time for a change,” Mr. Humm said. “We’ve been at the restaurant for 11 years, and it’s been open for 20 years. We’re still using Danny Meyer’s brasserie. ” Mr. Humm was referring to the restaurant’s original owner, who sold it to them in 2011. Back then, they considered closing and renovating but held back because they thought it was more important to establish their footing. So they made only small changes over time to their stately dining room, with its Art Deco geometry and soaring casement windows overlooking Madison Square Park. The kitchen is also nearly 20 years old its renovation will require closing the restaurant. Mr. Humm has already ordered a Molteni stove from France, a of cookery with a comparable price tag. But he does not plan to outfit his kitchen with lots of electronic gear. “We cook in a pretty traditional way,” he said. The partners are entrusting the redesign, which has not been completed, to Brad Cloepfil, who has offices in New York and Portland, Ore. and whose only restaurant work has been in Portland. He designed the Museum of Arts and Design, at Columbus Circle, and the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis. Mr. Cloepfil knows Eleven Madison Park well and has been a regular customer. “I’m thrilled to be doing this,” he said. “It’s a great, elemental, historic room that needs preserving and updating. ” The partners want to open up the entrance, which is now partitioned from the dining room, and rearrange seating to give the whole room a more symmetrical, central focus. There will be rugs on the terrazzo floors and more color everywhere: grays, blues, greens and golds. “I’m not making a design statement,” Mr. Cloepfil said. “If people are startled, I will have failed. ” The most significant change will be in the bar area, which will be enlarged somewhat and given a more distinct identity. The partners decided that during the renovation this summer, they would need to find a way to keep the staff working. “We thought about what New Yorkers did in summer — they go to the Hamptons,” Mr. Guidara said. Once the restaurant closes, they will move into a big white farmhouse on Pantigo Road in East Hampton. For decades, it was the Spring Close restaurant in the past few years it has been Moby’s, for fish. They’re calling their EMP Summer House it will open in late June with an indoor restaurant, a dining room under a tent with picnic tables for dinners like lobster boils, and another outdoor area. The equipment they will no longer need in Manhattan will outfit the kitchen. Reservations for indoor seating will be taken online starting on May 1. Only cards from American Express, Mr. Humm and Mr. Guidara’s partner in this project, will be accepted. In before Eleven Madison Park closes, the partners will replace its current menu with an $295 tasting menu recalling favorites over the years. Dishes will include sea urchin cappuccino, carrot tartare, foie gras with maple syrup, poached chicken with black truffles, and the dessert called Milk and Honey. When the restaurant reopens, Mr. Humm plans to offer multicourse tasting menus that are similar to the present format, perhaps with more choices. (The particular dishes have not been determined.) In recent years, the number of courses has gradually been reduced, and the number of choices increased. “We’ll be starting over in many ways,” Mr. Guidara said. “And we’ll finally be making the restaurant truly our own. ” | 1 |
Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” during a very contentious interview, President Donald Trump aide Kellyanne Conway told host Chuck Todd, “We’re going to have to rethink our relationship here,” if he continued to ask why press secretary Sean Spicer told a “falsehood,” about Trump’s inaugural crowd size. Todd asked, “I’m curious why president trump chose yesterday to send out his press secretary to essentially litigate a provable falsehood when it comes to a small and petty thing like inaugural crowd size. my question to you is why do that.? After her answer Todd again said, “You did not answer the question. Why did the president send out his press secretary who is not just the spokesperson for Donald Trump, he is also the spokesperson for all of America at times. He speaks for all of the country at times, why put him out there for the very first time in front of that podium to utter a provable falsehood? It’s a small thing, but the first time he confronts the public it’s a falsehood. ” Conway said “Chuck, if we’re going to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms, I think we are going to have to rethink our relationship here. I want a great open relationship with our press. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 0 |
Some details of the Orlando nightclub massacre are known to the minute: The first reports of gunfire came at 2:02 a. m. The gunman made a 911 call at 2:35 a. m. in which he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. By 5:15 a. m. as hostages fled to safety, he lay dead or mortally wounded in a scene of unimaginable carnage. Many questions persist about those three hours at the Pulse nightclub, and about how law enforcement handled the crisis on June 12. Orlando police officials have been peppered with queries from the public, survivors and the news media about whether they should have confronted the gunman sooner and whether any of the victims were shot by the police. The city’s police chief, John Mina, and other officials have repeatedly defended the delay in storming a bathroom where the gunman had taken hostages, and have deflected questions about whose bullets did what damage. On Monday, Chief Mina answered in a way that left open the possibility that some of the 49 people killed and 53 wounded were, in fact, hit by police gunfire. “That’s part of the investigation, but here’s what I will tell you: Those killings are on the suspect,” he said. The chief spoke at a news conference with local and federal law enforcement officials outside the club to release a partial transcript of the gunman’s conversations with the police during the siege, and to fill a few gaps in the official account of what took place. But the news conference seemed intended just as much to reject criticism of the police. “I think there was this misconception that we didn’t do anything for three hours, and that’s absolutely not true,” the chief said. He said the police had used the time to rescue patrons, get the lay of the building, put resources into place, determine where people were hiding and talk to the gunman. Federal law enforcement officials at Monday’s news conference offered vigorous praise of local agencies and their personnel. “They should not be ” said A. Lee Bentley III, the United States attorney for the Middle District of Florida. “Lives were saved because of their heroic work. ” The killer, Omar Mateen, spoke with the authorities four times for a total of 29 minutes while holding hostages in a bathroom where victims lay bleeding. The transcript released by the F. B. I. covered only the first, brief call and fragments of the last call the substance of his statements was made public last week but not the precise language. In the first call, to 911 at 2:35 a. m. which lasted less than a minute, Mr. Mateen, 29, took responsibility for the shootings “in the name of God the merciful,” and declared allegiance to the Islamic State and its leader, Abu Bakr . He demanded that the United States halt its bombing in Syria and Iraq. He talked with a police negotiator at 2:48 for nine minutes, at 3:03 for 16 minutes and at 3:24 for three minutes. In the last call, he claimed — falsely, it turned out — to have explosives. “There is some vehicle outside that has some bombs, just to let you know,” he said. “You people are gonna get it, and I’m gonna ignite it if they try to do anything stupid. ” He said he had a vest of the kind “used in France,” an apparent reference to explosive vests used by Islamic State attackers in Paris in November. “While the killer made these murderous statements, he did so in a chilling, calm and deliberate manner,” said Ronald Hopper, an assistant special agent in charge of the F. B. I. ’s office in Tampa, Fla. The F. B. I. at first released a transcript redacted to avoid mentioning the Islamic State and Mr. Baghdadi by name, which officials described as an effort not to play into the group’s propaganda. That drew ridicule in the news media and from some Republicans, led by Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who suggested the Obama administration was playing down the attacker’s radical Islamist motivation. Hours later, the F. B. I. released what it said was an unedited transcript of the first 911 call, with the names. The material released does not include any mention of a hatred of gays, which the bureau has been investigating as a possible motive. Federal officials declined to release transcripts of all the calls, or of 911 calls made by people trapped inside Pulse, or audio recordings of any of them. The first calls about a shooting came at 2:02 a. m. according to a timeline released by the F. B. I. The timeline did not say whether Mr. Mateen exchanged gunfire with an officer working security, as some officials have said. At 2:04, more officers arrived, and at 2:08, officers from multiple agencies entered the club, and they and Mr. Mateen opened fire. “That engagement and that initial entry caused him to stop shooting, retreat, and barricade himself into a bathroom,” Chief Mina said. Officials did not say how many officers fired in that gun battle, or how many rounds. The Orange County medical examiner, Dr. Joshua D. Stephany, said in an interview that autopsies of victims had not made any determination about who fired the fatal shots. In an interview, the SWAT commander, Mark Canty, said he doubted any fatalities resulted from police bullets. Members of his team, he said, “are trained to kind of identify the targets. ” But it is not clear whether any officers in that gunfight were from the SWAT team, and it is clear that some were not. The full team was not called to the scene until 2:18. From the time Mr. Mateen retreated to the bathroom, Chief Mina said, “There was no shooting in that period until the commencement of the operation. ” Survivors who were in that bathroom have said Mr. Mateen had sprayed it with gunfire, killing and injuring several people, but their accounts did not make clear whether that happened before or after the firefight with the police. Former hostages agreed that a long period without shooting followed, though some have said Mr. Mateen shot a few more people at the end of the siege, after officers began to storm the building. Officials here have insisted that the police followed protocol in not trying to force a showdown that could have claimed more lives. In fact, Mayor Buddy Dyer said the department’s practices called for officers to retreat 1, 000 feet once there was a threat of explosives, but they did not. Chief Mina said that throughout the standoff, officers went into the club, putting themselves in danger to rescue people. Some survivors have told stories to that effect Angel Colon, tearfully told of being unable to walk after having been shot several times, and expressed gratitude to an officer who pulled him to safety. But others who escaped with their lives have not been so complimentary. Norman Casiano said that after hiding and then making his way toward the club entrance, “I poked my head out, and the police actually shot at me. ” “I started crying and yelling, ‘I’m a victim, I’m a victim, please, I’m hurt, I’m injured, I’ve been shot twice,’ ” he said. Jeannette McCoy, 37, who escaped early on, was furious at the caution of the police, yelling at them to end the matter. “I wanted this guy dead,” she said, but “they gave him so much time. ” At 4:21 a. m. officers pulled an out of a wall, creating an escape route for people hiding in one room of the club. Eight minutes later, according to the F. B. I. timeline, some people who been inside had told the police that the gunman had said he was going to put explosive vests on four hostages within 15 minutes. That prompted the decision to storm the club, officials have said. While the gunman and his hostages were in one bathroom, officials decided to breach the building’s outer wall at another bathroom nearby, to free people trapped there, and make a path in. A team from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office placed explosives on the wall. Those were detonated at 5:02 a. m. but did not break all the way through, so officers used an armored vehicle to punch through the wall. But officials have said their aim was off, and they had to try multiple times to find the right spot for a hole. At 5:14 a. m. there were gunshots, as officers traded fire with Mr. Mateen. At 5:15, word came across the radio: the suspect was down. The F. B. I. said it had collected more than 600 pieces of evidence and conducted more than 500 interviews. One of those interviewed, Mohammad Malik, said that Mr. Mateen, a longtime friend, told him two years ago that he had listened to recordings of Anwar the radical cleric who was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. Mr. Malik told a reporter that he told the F. B. I. at the time, and the bureau investigated but did not bring charges. The F. B. I. has said it looked into Mr. Mateen in 2014. Investigators continue to believe that Mr. Mateen acted on his own, inspired by extremist groups but not directly in contact with them. They are still looking into what his wife knew, to determine whether she should face charges. Agent Hopper appealed for the public’s patience with a case so complex that agents were still combing the crime scene. “This investigation is one week and one day old,” he said, “and it may last months, and even years. ” | 1 |
“In the Trumpian sense of the term, she’s the ultimate ‘nasty woman.’ An inspiration. Volcanic. When I start to write about her, I always feel, . ” The volcano referred to is Emily Dickinson, as described by the contemporary poet Susan Howe in the catalog for an exhibition, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson,” opening on Friday at the Morgan Library Museum. The show is one of the largest gatherings ever of prime Dickinson relics, and it comes with an aura the size of a city block. It instantly turns the Morgan into a pilgrimage site, a literary Lourdes, a place to come in contact with one aspect of American culture that truly can claim greatness, which we sure can use in an political moment. The show has a mission: To give audiences a fresh take on Dickinson. Gone is the Puritan nun, and that infantilized charmer, the Belle of Amherst. At the Morgan we get a different Dickinson, a person among people: a member of a household, a a citizen. She was born in 1830 to rural gentry in Western Massachusetts, and one of the earliest items in the show gives an impression of modest Yankee privilege. It’s a portrait of Dickinson at around age 10 with her older brother, Austin, and young sister, Lavinia, done by a local artist, Otis Allen. It’s sort of a big deal to have it here: This is the first time it has left Houghton Library at Harvard since it arrived there in 1950. And the Morgan displays it well, against wallpaper that replicates the original, only recently uncovered, in Emily’s Amherst bedroom. In a sweet coincidence, the roses on the paper echo the flower the holds in her portrait. As the daughter of a — her father, Edward, was elected to the United States Congress in 1853 — and a lifelong consumer of newspapers and periodicals, Dickinson had a good sense of what was happening in the world. She went to grammar school, and was a bookworm, but had friends and a poised, dry sense of humor, as some teasing early letters to her brother suggests. In 1847, she spent a year as a boarding student at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, her one stint in higher education. And from that time came what many devotees will consider the exhibition’s star attraction: the daguerreotype of the Dickinson with her pale skin and eyes. It’s another rare visitant — it last left home at Amherst College in 1986 — and it’s almost a shock to see how small it is: like a holy card or a talisman. Dickinson said that she liked Mount Holyoke, but I don’t know. It had its stresses. Part of the curriculum was religious, with students expected to make a profession of faith before graduating. The school informally divided potential candidates into three categories: those who would readily comply those who would need some persuasion and “” to whom they paid special attention. Dickinson, who had developed an allergy to orthodoxy, was a and proud. It’s important, in presenting a revisionist view of her, especially a normalizing one, to note that from the start, resistance was her natural mode, and one that grew increasingly pronounced, and eventually acute. The end of her schooling signaled the start of a new phase of her life. She was again at home and beginning to work in a serious way on poetry, which required concentration and a degree of isolation: a commitment, the willingness, I guess you could say, to make a vow. I think it wasn’t easy. The 1850s were a period of personal tumult. Her school friends had dispersed. Several had married. Among them was Susan Gilbert, with whom she had forged a tight emotional and intellectual bond, and whom she relied on as a first reader and editor of her poetry. In 1856, Gilbert — there’s a picture of her here — married Austin and lived with him in the house next door to the family homestead. By 1858, Dickinson had accumulated enough poems to begin collecting them in handwritten, booklets known as fascicles. And from around this time comes what is thought to be another portrait, a daguerreotype that surfaced in 2012 and is on public view at the Morgan. It’s a portrait of two seated women, the one on the left tentatively identified as Dickinson the other one as her friend, and possible romantic partner, Kate Scott Turner. In the show, it’s placed side by side with the earlier, authenticated photograph. The Dickinsons in each, with their candid, unguarded gaze, share a clear, if inconclusive, resemblance. And her pose in the dual portrait is extremely moving. Far from being the timid, removed figure of myth, she looks directly at the camera and reaches, in a to touch the back of her friend. Much of Dickinson’s poetry from this time has an experimental, incendiary flair images of combat and violence occur. It’s as if she were experiencing the Civil War before it happened. And when it did happen, her production soared. Oddly, in the midst of the conflict, war was rarely her active theme. But like Walt Whitman, who began working as the equivalent of a psychiatric nurse in a military hospital in Washington, Dickinson seems to have been caught up in the atmosphere that gripped the nation, a mood probably not entirely different from the one found in a divided America now. Whitman was permanently shaped by the war and its waste. Whether Dickinson was, I don’t know. But when it was over, her life changed. She began to withdraw. Communication was through writing: letters as intricately composed as puzzles, notes as brief as tweets, poems sent out like gifts. The primary relics from this time forward are her manuscripts of poems. Nearly 1, 800 survive 24 examples are in the show, organized by Mike Kelly, head of archives and special collections at Amherst College, and Carolyn Vega, assistant curator in the Morgan’s department of literary and historical manuscripts. The manuscripts come with questions of legibility. Dickinson’s penmanship grew eccentric over time, as did her compositional methods. Transcribing her work has become a complex science, particularly in the matter of rendering the alternative phrases and words she included in drafts. It was as if she were deliberately creating poems that demanded reader participation, poems that could be endlessly rewritten. And maybe as her conviction grew that she would always be her own best audience, she turned poems into art objects, sculptures and pictures: A draft of a poem that begins “The way hope builds his house” is composed on a bit of paper — an envelope flap? — shaped like a house. In the show’s catalog, aptly titled “The Networked Recluse: The Connected World of Emily Dickinson,” the art historian Marta Werner analyzes the visual nature of the manuscripts. Yet what matters most in Dickinson is the element most easily passed over in an exhibition: words. And they warn us, whenever we focus on them, against trying to normalize Dickinson, against trying to make her acceptable and explicable. She was an outsider, and as such a disrupter. Was she a feminist? Not in the modern sense, though an idea of female power as a protean force was central to her thinking, as it was to the writers she loved: Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Central, too, was her disdain for the false power of churches, fathers, governments, God, ego. Even her most poems, like the one for which the show is named, slice away at that power: This little anthem to outsider solidarity, delivered with a lift, is both cute and furious, a joke and a call to arms. Some of its references translate neatly into the present of ethical bogs, Pepe the Frog, a new . Its paranoia is of the moment, too, for many with a grain of Otherness in their makeup. Dickinson did, as a woman who said no to a culture that wanted her to be a wife, a mother, a social creature on its terms, when she had other plans. And to pursue them she assumed the guise of a Nobody: invisible, independent, ignoring the knock on the door. The fringe for her was a position of strength, not deprivation. This truth should not be lost in the rebranding campaigns periodically conducted on her behalf. Nor should it be forgotten that defending difference took a lifelong fight, one which she was willing and able — supremely able — to wage. That’s a revolutionary talking. And her voice carries, subaudibly explosive, through this show. | 1 |
New NASA Footage Films UFO Flying Past page: 1 link Here the video shows a very odd craft zooming past. It looks to be very direct on its movement and shows no sign of being as NASA love to use ''debris'' flying by. It is on its own and on its own path. Be nice to see what others think about this footage I have no idea whether this is coming from NASA hardware or not. It states on the video also 2016, I presume this is new. It would seem we are being visited all the time, by our visitors. Star people, ET's. edit on 27-10-2016 by BlackProject because: (no reason given) | 0 |
Washington Free Beacon October 26, 2016
Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, a chief architect of Obamacare, described the recent announcement of rising health care premiums under the Affordable Care Act as “not a big increase.”
Emmanuel served as a special health care policy adviser to the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House at the beginning of President Obama’s first term.
Emmanuel spoke with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle on Tuesday and was asked about a recent government report that stated health care premiums were slated to rise by 25 percent next year in the 39 states served by the federal online exchanges.
Ruhle started by asking Emmanuel, “Why should Americans have faith in the Affordable Care Act?” This article was posted: Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 7:36 am Share this article | 0 |
QUALIFIED! Joe Biden explains reason Hillary set up private email & server (Hint: This doesn’t help her) Posted at 9:30 am on October 28, 2016 by Doug P. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
Joe Biden, VP and possible future secretary of state , is trying to help Hillary out of a huge jam: Interviewed by @jdickerson for @FaceTheNation , @VP says @HillaryClinton didnt understand "the gravity" of setting up own e-mail system. pic.twitter.com/abIZ1f0kvO
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) October 28, 2016
Didn’t understand the gravity? Nice try, Joe: Ummm… Not helpful Joe. Not helpful IN THE EXTREME. https://t.co/gpiIsLL0qg
— 0☀️Annie (@bloodless_coup) October 28, 2016 So to quote Dave Chapelle: “I’m sorry officer I … didn’t know I couldn’t do that." https://t.co/a1mLeOv0KL
— Ben Howe (@BenHowe) October 28, 2016 "I'm sorry officer. I didn't understand the gravity of robbing that bank. My b. Won't happen again. I promise. I think." https://t.co/H61mYqtgyo
The truth is that when it comes to understanding gravity, Hillary Clinton rivals Sir Isaac Newton: @BenHowe What she did understand was the gravity of FOI. | 0 |
Russophobia: War Party Propaganda
The worlds most reactionary regime, the head-chopping, terror-sponsoring Saudi Arabian kleptocracy, was awarded the chair of the UN Human Rights Council, while Russia has been kicked out. The travesty was engineered by the Superpower of Lies to punish Moscow for resisting the U.S.-led war of sectarian massacre and regime change in Syria. The War Party is on the march, to the cheers of corporate media and Hillary hasnt even been elected yet.
By Margaret Kimberley All attempts to stop the fighting were rejected by the U.S. and NATO and sealed the fate of the Syrian people.
November 06, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " BAR " - Did Russia invade Iraq and kill one million people? Does Russia have a greater percentage of its population behind bars than any other country in the world? Did Russia occupy Haiti after kidnapping its president? Are Russian police allowed to shoot children to death without fear of repercussion? Is Russia entering its 20th year of a terror war against the people of Somalia? All of these crimes take place in or at the direction of the United States. Yet the full force of propaganda and influence on world opinion is directed against Russia, which whatever its shortcomings cannot hold a candle to America in violating human rights.
The dangers presented by a Hillary Clinton presidency cannot be overstated. She and the war party have been steadily working towards a goal that defies logic and risks all life on earth. Regime change is once again their modus operandi and they hope to make it a reality against Russia.
Nearly every claim of Russian evil doing is a lie, a ruse meant to put Americans in a fighting mood and lose their fear of nuclear conflagration. It isnt clear if Clinton and the rest of the would-be warriors actually realize they are risking mushroom clouds. Perhaps they believe that Vladimir Putin will be easily pushed around when all evidence points to the contrary.
The unproven allegations of interference in the presidential election and casting blame on Russia as the sole cause of suffering in Syria are meant to desensitize the public. It is an age old ploy which makes war not just acceptable but deemed a necessity. The usual suspects are helping out eagerly. The corporate media, led by newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post , are front and center in pushing tales of Russian villainy. Human Rights Watch and other organizations who care nothing about abuses committed by the United States and its allies are also playing their usual role of choosing the next regime change victim.
Russia lost its seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council in part because of American pressure and public relations assistance from the human rights industrial complex. The UNHRC is now chaired by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that funds the jihadist terrorist groups who caused 500,000 Syrian deaths. The Saudis are causing dislocation, death and starvation in Yemen, too, but they are American allies, so there is little opposition to their misdeeds.
The openly bigoted Donald Trump has been the perfect foil for Hillary Clinton. That is why she and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership preferred him as their rival. He made the case for the discredited lesser evilism argument and his sensible statements about avoiding enmity with Russia made him even more useful.
The United States and its allies are the cause of Syrias destruction. Their effort to overthrow president Assad created a humanitarian disaster complete with ISIS and al Nusra fighters who love to chop off heads for entertainment. Far from being the cause of the catastrophe Russia left its ally to fight alone for four years. They even made overtures to negotiate Assads fate with the United States. All attempts to stop the fighting were rejected by the U.S. and NATO and sealed the fate of the Syrian people. The people of east Aleppo are being shelled by American allies but one wouldnt know that by reading what passes for journalism in newspapers and on television. The American role in the slaughter is barely mentioned or is excused as an effort to protect the civilian population. The bloodshed was made in the U.S. and could end if this government wanted it to.
The anti-Russian propaganda effort has worked to perfection. NATO is massing troops on Russias borders in a clear provocation yet Putin is labeled the bad guy. He is said to be menacing the countries that join in threatening his nation. The United States makes phony claims of Russian war crimes despite having blood on its hands. The latest Human Rights Watch canards about prosecuting Assad come straight from the White House and State Department and have nothing to do with concern for Syrians living in their fifth year of hell.
There is no lesser evil between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. She is fully supported by the war party in her desire for a more muscular foreign policy. That bizarre term means death and starvation for millions more people if Clinton wins in a landslide. She must be denied a victory of that magnitude and any opportunity to claim a mandate. Peace loving people must give their votes to the Green Party ticket of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. They are alone in rejecting the premise of an imperialist country and its endless wars.
The United States is the most dangerous country in the world. If it has a reckless and war loving president the threat becomes existential. That is the prospect we face with a Hillary Clinton presidency. If the role of villain is cast on the world stage she is the star of the show.
Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
Russia kills civilians, US promotes democracy Washingtons mantra for domestic consumption | 1 |
Monica Crowley, who was selected just weeks ago to serve in a post on Donald J. Trump’s National Security Council, has decided against taking the position after allegations that she plagiarized key passages in a 2012 book. Ms. Crowley, whose name was briefly floated as a candidate for White House press secretary, has been dogged by accusations of plagiarism in recent weeks, beginning with the discovery by CNN that she copied several passages in a book she published with HarperCollins. A later report in Politico unearthed similar issues in her doctoral dissertation. “After much reflection, I have decided to remain in New York to pursue other opportunities and will not be taking a position in the incoming administration,” Ms. Crowley said in a statement to The Washington Times. “I greatly appreciate being asked to be part of Trump’s team, and I will continue to enthusiastically support him and his agenda for American renewal,” she said. She did not address the allegations of plagiarism. Ms. Crowley is the second official announced by the transition team to decide not to go to the White House, following Jason Miller, who was to be the communications director. One person close to the transition said that Ms. Crowley’s role would have involved overseeing certain speeches, something that would have been difficult after the plagiarism claims. HarperCollins has withdrawn the digital edition of Ms. Crowley’s book “What the (Bleep) Just Happened?” Published by Broadside Books, a conservative imprint at HarperCollins, it is a critical look at Barack Obama’s presidency. It sold out 20, 000 copies in hardcover, Publishers Marketplace said. Mr. Trump’s transition team had labeled the plagiarism reports “a politically motivated attack” and defended Ms. Crowley’s ability to serve. “Monica’s exceptional insight and thoughtful work on how to turn this country around is exactly why she will be serving in the administration,” transition officials said in a statement to CNN. “HarperCollins — one of the largest and most respected publishers in the world — published her book, which has become a national best seller,” the statement said. “Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country. ” Most publishers do not check for plagiarism, fabrication or factual inaccuracies. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — When Secretary of State John Kerry took the floor at the United Nations on Wednesday to deliver a searing denunciation of the airstrike on an aid convoy headed for the Syrian city of Aleppo President Obama was crosstown, at his Manhattan hotel, preparing for a day of diplomacy that included Africa, Israel and Colombia — but, conspicuously, not Syria. It was typical of the arm’ approach the president has taken toward the Syria conflict on the world stage in recent weeks. At a summit meeting in China this month, he studiously avoided negotiating a with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, leaving the diplomacy to Mr. Kerry and his Russian counterpart. At the United Nations, he scarcely mentioned Syria in a farewell address to the General Assembly. Mr. Obama’s public distancing, White House officials insist, does not reflect a lack of concern. On the contrary, they say the president is desperate for Mr. Kerry to negotiate a viable agreement with Russia that would halt the relentless bombing of civilians in Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria — if only because he does not see a viable Plan B to stop the carnage. But as Mr. Obama’s presidency enters its final months, the negotiations with Russia have become a threadbare exercise, leaving a president who has long avoided military entanglement with Syria backing a policy that he himself believes is destined to fail. This week, his frustration boiled over publicly. The situation in Syria “haunts me constantly,” the president said in an interview with the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, published Thursday in Vanity Fair. In a mix of candor and defensiveness, Mr. Obama said he had himself more on Syria than any other issue during his presidency. He repeated his rejection of critics who said he should have armed the moderate rebels much earlier in the conflict or carried through on his threat to take military action against the government of President Bashar after he fired poison gas at civilians in 2013. But he conceded that there might have been a failure of imagination in his response to the conflict. “I do ask myself, ‘Was there something that we hadn’t thought of? ’” the president told Ms. Goodwin. “‘Was there some move that is beyond what was being presented to me that maybe a Churchill could have seen, or an Eisenhower might have figured out? ’” While Mr. Obama has supported Mr. Kerry’s diplomacy — even over the objections of the Pentagon — he does not want to be drawn into it. When Mr. Kerry met with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, at a Group of 20 meeting in Hangzhou, China, on Sept. 4, the two fell just short of a agreement over what officials said were minor details. American officials suspected the Russians were stalling so the deal could be sealed in a meeting the following day between Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin. After 90 minutes, a Mr. Obama emerged to say, “Given the gaps of trust that exist, that’s a tough negotiation, and we haven’t yet closed the gaps in a way where we think it would actually work. ” He instructed Mr. Kerry to keep talking to Mr. Lavrov, and the two came to terms five days later in Geneva. Mr. Obama, his aides said, was determined not to give Mr. Putin a platform to declare Russia was working hand in hand with the United States in Syria, particularly since he did not believe the Russians would abide by the terms of the agreement. “The president wasn’t prepared to offer the Russians what they wanted most — a symbolic show of U. S. cooperation — until the Russians delivered on their end of the bargain,” said the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest. “That’s why the bargain is structured the way it is. And it’s rooted in our skepticism that they would deliver. ” “The president doesn’t want U. S. credibility to be sullied by Russia’s dishonesty and willingness to sacrifice principle in the name of convenience,” Mr. Earnest added. Mr. Obama’s skepticism appeared warranted when the aid convoy was hit by a warplane that American officials believe was Russian. White House officials reacted harshly. Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, said, “The question is whether or not we just walk away from the table completely at this point, or whether or not we do some more diplomacy and consultation to determine whether or not there is some path forward. ” Again, though, Mr. Obama left it to Mr. Kerry to reproach Mr. Lavrov at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council. To the extent he mentioned Syria during the General Assembly, it was in humanitarian terms. At a meeting with other world leaders on the refugee crisis, Mr. Obama read a letter by a boy from Scarsdale, N. Y. who wrote to him to offer a home to Omran Daqneesh, the Syrian boy from Aleppo who was photographed, dazed and bloodied, after being rescued from an airstrike. The White House recorded the boy reading the letter aloud, and the video went viral on social media. Mr. Obama’s struggles with Syria are most palpable when he tries to sum up his legacy. In his speech to the General Assembly, for example, the president cited his diplomatic overtures to Cuba and Myanmar, as well as the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord, which he said exemplified the power of global collaboration. But when he referred to Syria, Mr. Obama spoke of constraints rather than possibilities. “If we are honest, we understand that no external power is going to be able to force different religious communities or ethnic communities to coexist for long,” he said, referring to Syria’s sectarian rifts. “I do believe we have to be honest about the nature of these conflicts. ” Mr. Obama made no direct reference to the negotiations with the Russians, saying only, “In a place like Syria, where there’s no ultimate military victory to be won, we’re going to have to pursue the hard work of diplomacy that aims to stop the violence, and deliver aid to those in need. ” Several former administration officials said they understood why Mr. Obama was keeping his distance from the issue. “Frankly, I doubt Obama engaging on the diplomatic side would help much,” said Robert S. Ford, a former American ambassador to Damascus who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “Like Kerry, Obama wouldn’t have much leverage with the Putin unless Obama was also putting into play in the Syria war new elements of material — not verbal — pressure against the alliance. ” Dennis B. Ross, a former coordinator of Middle East policy at the National Security Council, said Mr. Obama’s dilemma went back to the earliest days of his response to the Syria conflict, when he viewed it as a sectarian quagmire similar to that in neighboring Iraq. As the war ground on and the opposition became more Islamist, Mr. Obama’s options narrowed. Now, Mr. Ross said, the president has little incentive to say anything. “He knows that anything he says either requires him to do something if it is tough — and he won’t — or makes him look weak and ineffective on an issue that will plague his legacy,” he said. | 1 |
(Before It's News) 43 here, 109 there and pretty soon 443 employees are dismissed Bank has to file ‘WARN notices’ with New York state agency The first “plant layoff” notice came in February: 43 people would lose their jobs.
The second arrived six weeks later, increasing the cuts to 109 workers. Then a third, in April, for 146 more. And a fourth, in June: 98. Three more notices followed, including 20 dismissals announced last week.
The “plant” in question — Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Like all big companies in New York State, the firm is required to file a “WARN notice” with state authorities when it plans to shed large numbers of employees as part of a plant closing, or “mass layoffs” involving 250 or more. Employers also must inform the state of smaller reductions under certain circumstances, and Goldman Sachs cited a “plant layoff” in each case. Last week’s notice brings this year’s job-cut tally to 443.With the run of notices, seven since the start of the year, the bank has signaled its intention to dismiss hundreds of employees in New York without placing a single, headline-grabbing number on the overall reduction, already its largest since 2008. The company’s approach differs from competitors, including Morgan Stanley, who have shown a preference for larger, one-time cuts.
Big Number
“When there’s a big number, people right away get that something is happening at that firm — it’s a negative,” said Jeanne Branthover, a partner at New York-based executive-search firm DHR International. “This is more, ‘We’re having layoffs and we don’t want to explain it.’ It’s more under the radar screen.”
The 20 people in the latest reduction were notified either this month or last, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing staffing decisions. The terminations will take place between Nov. 7 and Jan. 5, according to the notice posted on the state Labor Department’s website. The workers aren’t represented by a union.
Gena Palumbo, a managing director and the bank’s global head of employment law, is the sole Goldman Sachs contact listed on each of this year’s WARN notices. In 2008, the firm dismissed 900 people in New York in two different sets of cuts as the financial crisis raged. A spokesman for the bank declined to comment.
Goldman Sachs set aside $9.2 billion for compensation and benefits this year through September, 13 percent less than the first nine months of last year. Total employees, including consultants and part-time workers, fell 5.4 percent to 34,900.
While Goldman prefers a scalpel, its rival Morgan Stanley wielded an ax. That firm took steps to shrink in the fourth quarter, cutting 1,200 employees, including about 25 percent of the fixed-income trading staff, or about 470 traders and salesmen. When asked about how Morgan Stanley decided to make the changes, trading chief Ted Pick said he favored a bold move.
“We took the view of taking tough medicine,” Pick, 47, said in February.
Slower Approach
Goldman Sachs’s slower approach may reflect a desire to avoid cutting too much if trading or dealmaking comes roaring back. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein has spoken about staying nimble to respond to revenue opportunities when they arise.
It also may reflect an outlook that got cloudier as the year progressed. In January, a person familiar with the firm’s thinking said Goldman Sachs was mulling cuts to more than 5 percent of its fixed-income staff. By March, that would expand to more than 5 percent but less than 10 percent. And by May, 10 percent.
The job cuts continued after first-quarter revenue was the worst for the start of a year in Blankfein’s decade-long tenure. While trading business bounced back in the second and third quarters, total trading revenue for the first nine months declined 11 percent from last year.
The WARN notices don’t capture firings outside New York and they don’t include voluntary retirements. More than a half-dozen partners have left Goldman Sachs this year, according to internal memos obtained by Bloomberg.
“Everything Goldman does is scrutinized,” Branthover said. “This may be a signal or a sign that there are changes being made internally, or there are businesses and areas that are not performing satisfactorily. I would keep an eye on it.” | 1 |
War on the Streets of Paris: Armed Migrants Fight Running Battles in the French Capital Nick Gutteridge, Express, November 2, 2016
A migrant turf war erupted into violence on the streets of one of Paris’ trendiest neighbourhoods early this morning as asylum seekers beat each other to a pulp with wooden clubs.
The area around Stalingrad Metro station was turned into a refugee battleground as rival gangs of migrants set upon each other in shocking scenes of violence.
Asylum seekers wearing hooded tops wielded makeshift clubs fashioned from lengths of wood which they used to bludgeon each other as horrified pedestrians looked on.
The blood-curdling brawl erupted just yards from the Stalingrad Metro station, where a squalid migrant camp has popped up following the demolition of the Jungle.
It was not immediately clear what sparked the early morning fight, but rival gangs of people smugglers have previously been involved in violent brawls in Calais.
And despite the horrific brawl, a pro-migrant rally is apparently being organised to take place at the camp at 6pm tonight.
The once peaceful neighbourhood, in Paris’ 10th Arrondissement, used to be a popular area with tourists, boasting a lively nightlife scene bustling with restaurants and bars.
But worried residents have revealed how it has become a no go zone in recent weeks following the establishment of the refugee camp, which has brought squalor and violence.
Thousands of migrants–mostly from Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan, and Eritrea–have pitched tents under the Metro station after the demolition of the Jungle hampered their attempts to reach Britain.
French police have tried and failed on many occasions to clear the squalid squat, but asylum seekers simply keep on returning and reestablishing it.
There are now nore than 2,500 migrants pitching up in the makeshift camp, with locals saying the eyesore is ruining their businesses and making life a “living hell”.
Residents in the once popular district say that the squatters are now becoming increasingly violent and dangerous, with increased reports of muggings.
Faisal, a shopkeeper, told the French daily Le Figaro that Stalingrad locals are living in fear, threatening the future of his business.
He said: “The stench of urine, faeces, and rubbish has made Stalingrad an insalubrious place to live. The place is dead – no-one wants to come here anymore. People are afraid to go out and lock themselves in.
“I’m making less than €60 (£53) a day. A few more weeks like this and I’ll go bust!
“French people have been kind to them. I know they’re desperate, but the least they can do is respect the law and try and integrate into French society.”
Jeanne, another Stalingrad resident, told Le Figaro the migrants had become increasingly violent towards locals.
She said: “Brazen migrants are snatching jewellery and handbags off passers-by–they’re even stealing bread. I’ve seen them beat people up too.”
Police have raided the camp some 30 times in the past year, and on Monday French president François Hollande vowed to close the camp for good.
But within 24 hours of a police operation to move migrants on tents had sprung up again, showing the uphill battle authorities in the French capital face to shut down such illegal encampments.
Furious locals have demanded that the camp be closed once and for all, describing how they have heard “blood-curdling noises” coming from it in the middle of the night.
Marie, who lives right next to the makeshift camp, told Le Figaro: “Life here has become unbearable. More than 2,500 squatters were evacuated in September, and now, less than two months later, they’re back. And now that the ‘Jungle’ camp has been closed, things are about to get even worse.”
Another local, Monique, said that she was at “a loss for words” and “utterly distraught” over the situation.
She said: “The streets are littered with rubbish and faeces. We can hear blood-curdling screams coming from the camp in the middle of the night. | 0 |
Bias bashers NYU Prof on CIA's Media Control and Drive for War with Russia (Video)
Prof. Mark Crispin Miller discussed the ways in which the mainstream media distorts the public's view of reality Offguardian
Mark Crispin Miller is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. His research interests include modern propaganda, history and tactics of advertising, American film, and media ownership. Mark Crispin Miller is the author of Boxed In: The Culture of TV; Seeing Through Movies, ed.; Mad Scientists: The Secret History of Modern Propaganda; Spectacle: Operation Desert Storm and the Triumph of Illusion; and The Bush Dyslexicon. His newest book is Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney’s New World Order.
Here he talks about US government propaganda, the corporate media, the CIA and the Russian “Putin” threat. He also discusses the recent attempt by the corporate media to get him fired using a NYU graduate student working for Rupert Murdock-owned VICE. Finally, he “looks at the role of the CIA and the US government in their organized effort to demonize Putin and Russia and create a US population hysteria similar to the 1950s. This interview was done during the Project Censored 40th anniversary at Sonoma State University on October 22, 2016 by Pacifica KPFA WorkWeek host Steve Zeltzer.” | 0 |
SUNDARBANS NATIONAL PARK, Bangladesh Two hundred years ago, the first cholera pandemic emerged from these mangrove swamps. It began in 1817, after the British East India Company sent thousands of workers deep into the remote Sundarbans, part of the Ganges River Delta, to log the jungles and plant rice. These brackish waters are the cradle of Vibrio cholerae, a bacterium that clings to human intestines and emits a toxin so virulent that the body will pour all of its fluids into the gut to flush it out. Water loss turns victims ashen their eyes sink into their sockets, and their blood turns black and congeals in their capillaries. Robbed of electrolytes, their hearts lose their beat. Victims die of shock and organ failure, sometimes in as little as six hours after the first abdominal rumblings. Cholera probably had festered here for eons. Since that first escape, it has circled the world in seven pandemic cycles that have killed tens of millions. Artists of the 19th century often depicted it as a skeleton with a scythe and victims heaped at its feet. It stalked revelers at a masked ball in Heinrich Heine’s “Cholera in Paris” and kills the protagonist in Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice. ” Outbreaks forced London, New York and other cities to create vast public water systems, transforming civic life. Today cholera garners panicky headlines when it strikes unexpectedly in places like Ethiopia or Haiti. But it is a continuing threat in nearly 70 countries, where more than one billion people are at risk. Now, thanks largely to efforts that began in cholera’s birthplace, a way to finally conquer the plague is in sight. A treatment protocol so effective that it saves 99. 9 percent of all victims was pioneered here. The World Health Organization estimates that it has saved about 50 million lives in the past four decades. Just as important, after 35 years of work, researchers in Bangladesh and elsewhere have developed an effective cholera vaccine. It has been accepted by the W. H. O. and stockpiled for epidemics like the one that struck Haiti in 2010. Soon, there may be enough to begin routine vaccination in countries where the disease has a permanent foothold. Merely creating that stockpile — even of a few million doses — profoundly improved the way the world fought cholera, Dr. Margaret Chan, secretary general of the W. H. O. said last year. Ready access to the vaccine has made countries less tempted to cover up outbreaks to protect tourism, she said. That has sped up emergency responses and attracted more vaccine makers, lowering costs. “More cholera vaccines have been deployed over the last two years than in the previous 15 years combined,” Dr. Chan said. The treatment advances relied heavily on research and testing done at the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, known as the ICDDR, B, in Dhaka. Although Dhaka may not be the first place one might look to find a public health revolution, the center is famous among experts in gut diseases. While its upper levels are quiet and scholarly, the center’s ground floor is the world’s largest diarrhea hospital. Its vast wards treat 220, 000 patients a year, almost all of whom recover within 36 hours. Doctors there save hundreds of lives a day. The ICDDR, B was originally the Cholera Research Laboratory, founded in 1960 by the United States as part of that era’s “soft diplomacy. ” Research hospitals were built in friendly countries both to save lives locally and to act as sentinels for diseases that might threaten America. The wards, which in the rainy season extend into tents in the parking lot, contain long rows of “cholera cots. ” On each iron or wood frame is a plastic sheet with a hole in the middle. A bucket beneath the hole catches diarrhea, while another beside the cot fills with vomit. An IV pole completes the setup. Defying expectations, the ward smells only of the antiseptic that the floors are constantly mopped with. Patients with severe watery diarrhea arrive around the clock, many of them carried in — limp, dehydrated and barely conscious — by friends or family. A nurse sees each one immediately, and those close to death get an IV line inserted within 30 seconds. It contains a blend of glucose, electrolytes and water. Cholera spurs the intestines to violently flush themselves, but it does not actually damage the gut cells. If the fluid is replaced and the bacteria flushed out or killed by antibiotics, the patient is usually fine. Within hours, patients start to revive. As soon as they can swallow, they get an antibiotic and start drinking a rehydration solution. Most walk out within a day. The techniques perfected here are so effective that the ICDDR, B has sent training teams to 17 cholera outbreaks in the past decade. Usually, the only patients who stay long in the hospital are infants so malnourished that another bout of diarrhea would kill them. They live for up to a month in a separate ward with their mothers, who are taught how to cook nutritious porridges from the cheapest lentils, squash, onions, greens and oil. Only about 20 percent of the patients at the center have cholera. The rest usually have rotavirus, salmonella or E. coli. The same therapy saves them all, but the cholera cases are more urgent because these patients plummet so precipitously toward death. “I thought I was dying,” Mohammed Mubarak, a gaunt printing press worker, said one afternoon from his cot. His roommates had carried him in at 7 that morning, unconscious and with no detectable pulse. Now, after six liters of intravenous solution, he was still weak but able to sit up and drink the rehydration solution and eat bits of bread and banana. “His stool is changing from to green, so he is recovering,” said Momtaz Begum, the ward nurse who monitors the buckets and makes sure patients take in as much liquid as they lose. Mr. Mubarak had first fallen ill at about 2 a. m. a few hours after he drank tap water with his dinner. “Usually I drink safe water, filtered water,” he explained. “But I drank the city water last night. I think that is what did this. ” Cholera, born in the swamps, arrived long ago in Dhaka. The city is home to more that 15 million, and a third of the population lives in slums. In some places, water pipes made of rubbery plastic are pierced by illegal connections that suck in sewage from the gutters they traverse and carry pathogens down the line to new victims, like Mr. Mubarak. Vibrio cholerae travels from person to person via fecal matter. In 1854, the epidemiologist John Snow famously traced cases to a single well dug near a cesspit in which a mother had washed the diaper of a baby who died of cholera and nd convinced officials to remove the well’s pump handle. Because cholera is a constant threat to hundreds of millions of people lacking safe drinking water in China, India, Nigeria and many other countries, scientists have long sought a more powerful weapon: a cheap, effective vaccine. Now they have one. Injected cholera vaccines were first invented in the 1800s and were long required for entry into some countries. But many scientists suspected they did not work, and in the 1970s studies overseen by the ICDDR, B confirmed that. In the 1980s, a Swedish scientist, Dr. Jan Holmgren, invented an oral vaccine that worked an impressive 85 percent of the time. But it was expensive to make and had to be drunk with a large glass of buffer solution to protect it from stomach acid. Transporting tanks of buffer was impractical. Making matters worse, it was fizzy, and poor Bangladeshi children who had never tasted soft drinks would spit it out as soon as it tickled their noses. In 1986, a Vietnamese scientist, Dr. Dang Duc Trach, asked for the formula, believing he could make a bufferless version. Dr. Holmgren and Dr. John D. Clemens, an American vaccine expert who at the time was a research scientist for the ICDDR, B, obliged. “This isn’t an elegant vaccine — it’s just a bunch of killed cells, technology that’s been around since Louis Pasteur,” said Dr. Clemens, who is now the ICDDR, B’s executive director. He and Dr. Holmgren lost touch with Dr. Dang, largely because of Vietnam’s isolation in those days. But seven years later, Dr. Dang notified them that he had made a new version of the vaccine. He had tested it on 70, 000 residents of Hue, in central Vietnam, and had found it to be 60 percent effective. Although his was not as effective as Dr. Holmgren’s, it cost only 25 cents a dose. If enough people in an area can be made immune through vaccination, outbreaks often stop spontaneously. In 1997, Vietnam became the first — and thus far, only — country to provide cholera vaccine to its citizens routinely, not just in emergencies. Cases dropped sharply, according to a 2014 study, and in 2003 cholera vanished from Hue, where the campaign focused most heavily. But Dr. Dang had not conducted a classic clinical trial, and Vietnam’s vaccine factory did not meet W. H. O. standards, so no United Nations agency was allowed to buy his vaccine. Because no pharmaceutical company had an incentive to pay for trials or factories, his invention languished in “the valley of death” — the expensive gap between a product that works in a lab and a version safe for millions. In 1999, Dr. Clemens approached what is now the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation, which was just getting organized. “They were literally operating out of a basement then,” he said. “I got a letter from Bill Gates Sr. It was very relaxed, sort of, ‘Here’s $40 million. Would you mind sending me a report once in a while?’ “But without that,” Dr. Clemens continued, “this wouldn’t have seen the light of day. ” With that money, Dr. Clemens reformulated Dr. Dang’s vaccine, conducted a successful clinical trial in Calcutta and found an Indian company, Shantha Biotechnics, that could make it to W. H. O. standards. Rolled out in 2009 under the name Shanchol, it came in a vial about the size of a chess rook, needed no buffer and cost less than $2 a dose. Even so, there was little interest, even from the W. H. O. The vaccine lacked the publicity campaign that pharmaceutical companies throw behind commercial products, and “cholera ward care” was saving many lives — when it could be organized. The new vaccine was not used in a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe in 2009, or initially in Haiti’s explosive outbreak in 2010. The “valley of death” lengthened: Without customers, Shantha could not afford to build a bigger factory. The impasse was broken only when Dr. Paul Farmer, a founder of Partners in Health, which has worked in central Haiti since 1987, began publicly berating the W. H. O. for not moving faster. The agency approved Shanchol in 2011, and since then, the vaccine has slowly gained acceptance. In 2013, an emergency stockpile was started, and the GAVI Alliance committed $115 million to raise it to six million doses. The vaccine is now used in Haiti, and has been deployed in outbreaks in Iraq, South Sudan and elsewhere. A second version, Euvichol, from South Korea, was approved in 2015. And later this year, Bangladesh — where it all began — hopes to begin wiping out its persistent cholera. A local company has begun making a domestic version of the vaccine, called Vaxchol. Dr. Firdausi Qadri, a leading ICDDR, B researcher, estimated last year that success there would require almost 200 million doses. The world finally has a vaccine that, with routine administration, could end one of history’s great scourges. But what will happen is still hazy. With 1. 4 billion people at risk, the potential cost of vaccination in countries is enormous. And the disease tends to move, surging and vanishing among the many causes of diarrhea. Even Bill Gates, who paid for much of the research, has asked: “We actually have a cholera vaccine, but where should it be used?” Looking back on his long struggle to prove the vaccine’s value, and then to win acceptance, Dr. Clemens offered an explanation that blended wistfulness and cynicism. “We’re probably not bad scientists,” he said, “but we were lousy advocates. “If this disease had been in American kids, there would have been trials as fast as the Salk polio vaccine. ” | 1 |
The REAL REASON Hillary Was Not Prosecuted For Her Email Scandal Will Infuriate You Oct 28, 2016 Previous post
Oh, Governor Terry McAuliffe… The smelly, Democratic cat of politics that just keeps returning to our doorstep.
Just this summer he restored voting rights to thousands of felons with the hopes of garnering more votes for Clinton (I’m surprised his legislation wasn’t entitled, “Felons for Felons!”).
Now we’ve found out that he and his money are likely part of the reason why Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted for her e-mail scandal.
In a story line that would make the writers of House of Cards salivate, Governor McAuliffe donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaign of the Deputy FBI Director’s wife.
Yes, you read that right.
According to Zero Hedge :
The latest allegation of potential impropriety and conflict of interest involving the Democratic Party and the FBI, which over the summer famously cleared Hillary Clinton of any criminal wrongdoing as relates to her personal email server, comes not from a Podesta email or a Wikileaks disclosure, but the WSJ which overnight reported that the political organization of Virginia Govenor Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use .
Campaign finance records show Mr. McAuliffe’s political-action committee donated $467,500 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of Dr. Jill
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK | 0 |
NC Trump Supporter Hangs Clinton In Effigy At Rally, Says She Deserves Prison (VIDEO) By Andrew Bradford on October 27, 2016 Subscribe
Donald Trump held a rally Wednesday night in the crucial battleground state of North Carolina, and as he spoke, one of his supporters held up a Hillary Clinton doll with a noose around its neck.
The woman who hung the Democratic nominee in effigy said her name was Ginger Glover. Glover said she decided to hang the “Lyin’ Hillary” doll to show that Clinton should be “incarcerated, at the very least.”
So does Glover wish harm on the former Secretary of State? She insisted she didn’t: “It’s just for effect.”
One is left wondering why, if Glover thinks Clinton should be imprisoned, she didn’t dress the doll in an orange jumpsuit or prison stripes. Perhaps she’s simply not bright enough to have thought of doing so.
In recent weeks, various disturbing and violent displays have shown up at Trump rallies: Earlier this week at a rally in Virginia Beach, Trump supporters took a model of Clinton’s head and mounted it on a stake.
Also, at that same rally, reporters saw a poster which depicted a bull’s-eye superimposed over Clinton’s face.
It should also be noted that a frequent chant heard at Trump rallies is the oft-repeated “Lock her up” refrain which was a feature of the GOP convention in Cleveland. Yet the Trump campaign always denies that their supporters are are the least bit violent or seeking confrontations with those who disagree with them.
Actions speak louder than words, and clearly the Trumpkins are a hate-filled basket of deplorables.
Featured Image Via NBC News Screengrab About Andrew Bradford
Andrew Bradford is a single father who lives in Atlanta. A member of the Christian Left, he has worked in the fields of academia, journalism, and political consulting. His passions are art, music, food, and literature. He believes in equal rights and justice for all. To see what else he likes to write about, check out his blog at Deepleftfield.info. Connect | 0 |
KABUL, Afghanistan — A double bombing by the Taliban near the Afghan Parliament office compound in Kabul on Tuesday killed dozens of people during the rush hour, officials said. The assault in the Afghan capital was the deadliest of several attacks on Tuesday, including an explosion at a government guesthouse in the southern province of Kandahar that wounded the provincial governor and the visiting ambassador of the United Arab Emirates. Wahidullah Majrooh, a spokesman for the Afghan Health Ministry, said 80 injured people and 30 bodies were taken to Kabul hospitals. Many officials feared that the number of casualties would rise. The Taliban issued a statement claiming responsibility for the Parliament bombings. One witness who was inside the compound said the attack started when a suicide bomber detonated explosives nearby. Then, as security forces gathered in the area a few minutes later, a car bomb detonated on the busy road that passes in front of the compound, the witness said. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters. An Afghan lawmaker, Kamal Safi, said meetings were underway in the compound when the attack took place, including one about the national budget. “The explosions took place exactly at the time when government employees were going home, so it was a rush hour,” Mr. Safi said. “More than a thousand people are working there, so I know the number of casualties are very high. ” An officer named Mirwais who was among those providing security for the Parliament building said most of the casualties came from a public bus that was passing by the compound when the car bomb exploded. “It was 4 p. m. and the workers were leaving — they either had private cars or were walking out to the main road for public transport,” Mr. Mirwais said. “The second attack happened on the main road by the gate, and that caused a lot of casualties. ” Violent attacks in Afghanistan have not subsided this year despite the harsh winter, with Taliban assaults reported on a daily basis across several provinces in the north and the south. The deteriorating situation in the south, in particular, prompted the dispatch of about 200 NATO military advisers to Farah Province. And in Helmand Province, where American and British troops struggled for years to loosen the Taliban’s grip at the height of the war, 300 United States Marines will return to help hold the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, against the insurgents. The attacks in Kabul came hours after a Taliban bomber targeted a meeting of militia commanders in Lashkar Gah, killing seven to 11 people, according to various Afghan officials. The target of that attack revealed the chaotic reality of the province that has been slipping from the hands of the Afghan government: The bombing hit the house of Hajji Khudaidad, a Taliban commander who had recently switched sides to lead a clandestine government force, essentially a duplicate Taliban, to infiltrate insurgency lines, Afghan officials said. Col. Gulai Khan, the security chief of the province, said a meeting was underway at Mr. Khudaidad’s house in the city’s Second Precinct when the attack happened. “The suicide bomber parked his vehicle laden with explosive nearby the house and walked to the house, where he shot the watchman who was on duty, and later he blew up his explosives inside,” Colonel Khan said. He said that seven people were killed and three were wounded, and that a bomb squad was trying to clear the vehicle. Other accounts suggested the attacker might have thrown grenades inside and managed to flee before he was tracked down by the police. Abdul Karim Attal, head of the Helmand provincial council, however, put the number of dead at 11. Among the wounded, officials said, were Mr. Khudaidad and Mullah Ibrahim, a senior commander of a Taliban breakaway faction that is believed to have close ties with the government. Many officials in Helmand said the effort to create the militia was being led by Abdul Jabar Qahraman, President Ashraf Ghani’s special envoy to the province, who used similar militia tactics in the 1980s on behalf of the collapsing communist government at the time. Mr. Qahraman, in an interview, admitted that he was behind creating such a “secret force” but denied that the group targeted today was part of it. It amounts to a desperate attempt to break some of the Taliban’s momentum — the insurgents largely control six districts of the province, the government controls two, and another six are contested, according to Bashir Ahmad Shakir, the head of the security committee at the Helmand provincial council. Details about the attack at the governor’s guesthouse in Kandahar remained scant. Officials said the governor, Humayoon Azizi, was meeting with the visiting ambassador of United Arab Emirates for an evening reception when explosions went off. Gen. Abdul Raziq, the police chief of Kandahar Province, said bombs had been placed in couches in the governor’s house. “Eleven people have been killed and around 12 have been injured, including the governor and the U. A. E. ambassador, but their conditions are not ” General Raziq said. “The bodies of the dead are badly burned and beyond recognition. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats concede they have little leverage to stop Donald J. Trump’s cabinet nominees. But that will not discourage them from trying to make life as uncomfortable as possible for many of his choices, with the hope of forcing their Republican colleagues and Mr. Trump to squirm along the way. With nominees like Representative Tom Price, a proponent of fundamental changes to Medicare, to be health secretary, and Steven Mnuchin, a Goldman Sachs trader turned hedge fund manager, as Treasury secretary, Democrats hope to use the confirmation hearings to highlight the wide river of incongruities between Mr. Trump’s campaign promises and much of the team he is assembling. The goal: to fuel a narrative that the incoming president, and the Republicans who support him, cannot be trusted. “ Trump promised that he was going to clean up the swamp,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the incoming Democratic leader, “and a whole lot of his nominees have had their career in the swamp. ” One by one, Mr. Schumer said, Democrats will use the confirmation process to highlight positions held by nominees that are either inconsistent with Mr. Trump’s campaign promises or raise the sorts of ethical questions that Democrats tried in vain to hang around Mr. Trump’s neck during the campaign, like refusing to release his tax returns. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, who serves on committees that are likely to have contentious hearings, can be counted on to work over many nominees. “We should know what direction this administration is headed in,” Mr. Schumer said. “They didn’t win the election by saying they were going to hire people who want to cut Social Security and Medicare. I will also be looking for any ethical transgressions. ” For starters, Democrats announced this past week that they would push for a rule requiring all nominees to provide Congress with their tax returns, a move made to suggest that some of Mr. Trump’s selections may share and tax issues with the incoming president. Democrats have themselves to blame for their weakened position in challenging a nominee. In 2013, the Senate voted largely along party lines to remove the threshold on and Court judicial nominees. Mr. Trump’s nominees will now need the support of only 51 senators to be confirmed Republicans are expected to hold 52 seats next year. “At the end of the day, we were the ones who changed it to 51,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, who voted for the measure. “I think it’s important to remember how righteous we were. ” It is highly unusual for Congress, even in an era of divided government, to outright filibuster cabinet nominees. Republicans have shown broad support for Mr. Trump’s choices so far, even those lawmakers who have been otherwise critical of him. In one telling move, Senator Susan Collins gave a fast nod to Mr. Trump’s choice of attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who came under immediate fire by Democrats for his positions on civil rights issues and his immigration stance that made him an early Trump ally. In short, Republicans say, bring it on. “Responsible Democrats responded to the election by saying they heard the message of the American people and pledged to work with the incoming administration and Republicans in Congress to move America forward,” said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader. She added, “We hope responsible Democrats won’t be bullied by the radical left to turn the confirmation process into some political side show. ” But Democratic lawmakers can make the process afflictive. Mr. Price is expected to receive a particularly hot grilling. As a congressman from Georgia, Mr. Price has been the chief architect of a plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act and has long desired to transform Medicare into a voucherlike program for future participants. Mr. Sessions is likely to undergo tough questioning about accusations of racially insensitive comments from the 1980s that doomed his nomination to be a federal judge and his tentative embrace of Mr. Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigration. That effort seems most likely to backfire because Mr. Sessions has served in the Senate for more than a decade and has a complex record on civil rights back home in Alabama, and his Republican colleagues will likely be quick to defend him. “Our friend,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, referring to Mr. Sessions, “is undoubtedly qualified and prepared for this role as attorney general because of the long career he spent protecting and defending our Constitution and the rule of law. ” Betsy DeVos, the Michigan billionaire Mr. Trump chose to lead the Department of Education, will also be questioned by Democrats for her unwavering support of charter schools, many of which have fared poorly in her state, and tax issues concerning her summer home. “There are a lot of pointed questions I plan to ask,” said Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the Medicare program and already requires tax returns from nominees. “These nomination hearings are extremely important in that they are going to provide a key opportunity to lay out the concerns we have. ” Democrats hope that moderate Republicans, especially those up for in two years, will face an uncomfortable vote on someone like Mr. Price, given the popularity of the Medicare program. “Are Republicans going to want to vote for a guy who wants to raise the Medicare eligibility age?” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. “I don’t think it’s a done deal. ” (It probably is a done deal.) But most Democrats seem more interested in pointing out that Mr. Trump’s nominees largely stand out of step with his campaign promises to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists, former bankers and Washington insiders. Mr. Mnuchin is a veteran of Goldman Sachs, and the billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, the choice for commerce secretary, signed a letter in support of the Partnership trade deal, which Mr. Trump has ridiculed as disastrous. Democrats plan to use the nomination process to underscore the dichotomy. “He’s filling it with bigger swamp creatures,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, who is pressing for nominees to be required to disclose tax returns. And for whatever bumps Mr. Price or Mr. Sessions might face, other nominees will probably breeze through confirmation. Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina, whom Mr. Trump has chosen to be his ambassador to the United Nations, and Elaine L. Chao, a former labor secretary whom he has nominated for secretary of transportation, have encountered little opposition. Mr. McConnell is especially excited for Ms. Chao, his wife. “I think it was an outstanding choice,” he said. | 1 |
CANNON BALL, N. D. — The prairie is seething. Work crews are plugging ahead on the Dakota Access oil pipeline, inching closer and closer to a river crossing that activists view as a critical juncture in their monthslong fight against a $3. 7 billion project that they say will threaten water supplies and that Native Americans say violates their right to sacred land. Last week, clashes erupted between lines of law enforcement officers and protesters. The air was filled with pepper spray and black smoke from burning tires. The authorities arrested 142 people during what local sheriffs denounced as a riot and protesters said was a peaceful demonstration. For months now, Mekasi Horinek and Deputy Jon Moll have lived these demonstrations, day in and day out. But they fall on opposite sides of the front lines, reflecting a community that is as divided as, well, oil and water. Mekasi Horinek, activist Mr. Horinek sees the pipeline protest from the rolling prairies, his arms locked with his fellow Native American activists to sing and pray. He sees tribe members standing up to years of racist slights and treaties. He sees prayer circles, pipe ceremonies and a unifying fight for clean water. He is the son of Ponca Tribe activists from Oklahoma who took him to rallies when he was a baby. Mr. Horinek, 43, remembers riding on his father’s and uncle’s shoulders as they marched with Cesar Chavez in the California ’ protests. “I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t being taught to stand up for human rights, native rights,” he says. He came to North Dakota for a cause. Here is how he describes that cause now: “What I said to the police officers when I was sitting down in a prayer circle, I asked them, ‘Don’t you drink water, too? ’” he says. “Don’t your children drink water? We’re here to protect the water. This isn’t just a native issue. We’re here protecting the water, not only for our families and our children, but for your families and your children. For every ranch and every farm along the Missouri River. ” Law enforcement officials have accused the protesters of rioting and attacking pipeline contractors, and they have arrested more than 400. But Mr. Horinek says the protesters — water protectors, they call themselves — are not the bad guys. He tells a story: Last week, he and 49 other demonstrators decided to link arms and sit together by the overturned earth where the Dakota Access pipeline is slated to go. They were on what the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe considers sacred ancestral land, but from a legal perspective, it is owned by the pipeline company. So sheriff’s officers arrested them for trespassing. Mr. Horinek says he and the others, including his mother, were and driven to the county seat, Mandan. He says he had bruises from being tied up so tightly, and from being thrown to the ground and pinned during his arrest. His mother and some of the older people were stiff and sore for days. Officials wrote numbers on their arms — his was 4838, he says — and held them overnight in cages in a parking garage, men and women separated by a plastic tarp. They spent the night singing and praying. “No matter what they do to us, they’re not going to strip our dignity, our honor,” Mr. Horinek says. “These are things we hold in our DNA, and we’ll never lose. ” The next morning, he bailed himself out of jail with money he had been keeping in his wallet in case he was arrested, and headed back to the camp. Jon Moll, sheriff’s deputy Deputy Moll sees the pipeline protest through a windshield, his patrol car slipping along North Dakota’s gravel county roads. He sees protesters occupying federal land and trespassing on private ranches. He sees tense confrontations, lost days off and threats to his fellow officers. He is the son of a Lutheran pastor, who moved the family from Ottertail, Minn. to Philadelphia. Mr. Moll, 38, remembers learning about the diversity of this country as the only white child in his class. “I’m the son of farmers, and we worked hard for everything we have,” he says. He came to Morton County, N. D. for work. Here is how he describes that work now: “Sometimes, the job sucks, but you do your job. It’s definitely been a strain. Every time we’ve been out, we’ve seen weapons. People screaming down this road at 100 miles per hour. Trespassing and squatting on federal property. If I wanted to build a house there, I’d have U. S. marshals knocking on my door, saying, ‘No, you can’t do that. ’” Activists have accused law enforcement of needlessly roughing up and demonstrators, and of responding to their and marches with militarized force. But Mr. Moll says the deputies are not the bad guys. He tells a story: Earlier this fall, about 70 demonstrators rallied at one of the ranches being bisected by the pipeline. Ranchers have grown angry and impatient with the protests and regularly come up to Deputy Moll when he gases up his car to ask him when it will all just be over. He says he sees the Standing Rock Sioux as neighbors and respects them, but he has a harsher view of what he sees as protesters from outside North Dakota. “Folks are terrified,” he says. On this day, officials decided to move in and arrest the protesters for trespassing. As they did, some in the crowd started to yell, “Bring out your horses!” to their fellow activists who had parked their trailers in a field of winter wheat. From his patrol car, Mr. Moll says, he saw one of the horses charge directly at a line of officers, and he hit the gas and raced over to cut off the horse as another officer raised a shotgun loaded with beanbag rounds at the rider. “You run a animal at a person, that’s a deadly threat,” Mr. Moll said. “They were willing to use the threat of the horse against us, all the while screaming, ‘We’re peaceful protesters. ’” He has been working around the protests almost every day since, and expects to be on straight through to Thanksgiving. | 1 |
Three police officers were shot dead, and three others were wounded, in Baton Rouge, La. on Sunday morning. The gunman was killed, the authorities said. The area where the shooting took place has been the scene of protests in the weeks since the police shooting of Alton B. Sterling on July 5. • Around 8:40 a. m. on Sunday, the police in Baton Rouge responded to a report of a man with a gun dressed in black walking near the Hammond Aire Plaza shopping center on Airline Highway. The confrontation lasted less than 10 minutes, officials said. • The slain officers were identified as Montrell L. Jackson, 32, and Matthew Gerald, 41, of the Baton Rouge Police Department and Brad Garafola, 45, an East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s deputy. • The hospitalized officers are Nicholas Tullier, 41, a sheriff’s deputy who was in critical condition on Monday Bruce Simmons, 51, a sheriff’s deputy who underwent surgery for wounds that were not and an unidentified Baton Rouge police officer, 41, who also had injuries that were not . • The gunman was identified by the authorities as Gavin Long of Kansas City, Mo. Mr. Long, an was a former Marine who had served from 2005 to 2010, and he had been deployed to Iraq in 2008, according to military records. He had received a national defense service medal and a reward for good conduct. • Mr. Long is believed to have been the only gunman, the police in Baton Rouge said at a news conference, despite earlier reports of two others being at large. On Monday, the state police said Mr. Long had set out to ambush the officers. • A video on a site registered under the name of the gunman, Gavin Long, urges a bloody response to police killings of black men. • President Obama called for restraint at a time of extraordinary tension. “This has happened far too often,” he said at the White House on Sunday afternoon. “We don’t need inflammatory rhetoric. We don’t need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or advance an agenda. We need to temper our words and open our hearts, all of us. ” | 0 |
JERUSALEM — While Israelis here are celebrating the country’s Independence Day today, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) passed a resolution disavowing Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and ignoring Jewish ties to the religion’s holiest sites. [In no particular order, here are five outrages within the text of the nonbinding UNESCO resolution, which was submitted by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, and Sudan and passed in a UNESCO vote: 1 — The resolution designates Judaism’s second holiest site, the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, and Judaism’s third holiest site, Rachel’s Tomb, as “an integral part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory. ” 2 — The resolution claims it is “safeguarding” the “cultural heritage of Palestine,” despite the fact that no such country exists. Palestine previously referred to territories that encompass present day Israel and Jordan. It was utilized in the 1917 Balfour Declaration to call for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. ” In the case of the resolution, UNESCO clearly intended “Palestine” to connote a Palestinian state within Israel even though there is no such state. 3 — The text refers to eastern sections of Jerusalem as an entity called “East Jerusalem” in a clear attempt to lobby for the division of Jerusalem. The full clause states: Affirming that nothing in the current decision, which aims, inter alia, at the safeguarding of the cultural heritage of Palestine and the distinctive character of East Jerusalem, shall in any way affect the relevant Security Council and United Nations resolutions and decisions on the legal status of Palestine and Jerusalem, including United Nations Security Council resolution 2334 (2016). In reality, Jerusalem is one city there is no city called East Jerusalem. The term is largely utilized to claim that Israel is occupying “East Jerusalem,” and that the city section should become part of a future Palestinian state. Jews maintained a historic presence in Jerusalem, including in the eastern sections, until they were forced to leave the Old City en masse in 1948. Jordan illegally occupied and annexed the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem from 1948 until Israel captured the lands in a defensive war in 1967. The 1967 Six Day War was launched after Arab countries used the territories to stage attacks against the Jewish state. In 1988, Jordan officially renounced its claims to the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem and unilaterally recognized terrorist Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. ” 4 — The resolution refers to Israel as an “occupying power” in its own capital, Jerusalem. It claims all fundamental Israeli territorial actions in Jerusalem are “null and void. ” The text states: Reminding that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, the occupying Power, which have altered or purport to alter the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and in particular the “basic law” on Jerusalem, are null and void and must be rescinded forthwith. In actuality, the Palestinians never had a state in either the West Bank or eastern Jerusalem and they are not legally recognized as the authorities in those areas for Israel to be occupying the land from. The UNESCO resolution further ignores that the Temple Mount and Western Wall — the holiest sites in Judaism — are located in eastern Jerusalem, which is steeped in Jewish history. 5 — The resolution forbids Israel to carry out “excavations, tunneling, works and projects in East Jerusalem, particularly in and around the Old City of Jerusalem. ” The sponsoring countries seem to fear that excavations in these areas routinely uncover archaeological evidence further tying Jews to Jerusalem. For example, discoveries at the City of David, an archeological site just outside the Temple Mount, have unearthed the core of ancient Jerusalem, including Hezekiah’s Tunnel, evidence of the Gihon Spring, Jewish Temple artifacts, Temple purifying pools and more. Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. ” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook. | 1 |
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has finished, turkey has been consumed and football has been watched. Time for a trip to the movies. Here is a look at five films that Times editors recommend after that last piece of pumpkin pie. If You Want a Family Film for Younger Kids Disney’s latest animated offering tells the story of an adventurous teenager (Auli’i Cravalho) in search of the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson). The visuals are lush and the songs (some written by the “Hamilton” creator Miranda) are lively, with plenty to hold the whole family’s attention. If it’s sold out: With crowds expected for “Moana,” you may need a second choice. Consider “Trolls,” another animated movie that has been in theaters a bit longer. If You Want a Family Film for Older Kids Harry Potter himself may not be back, but the wizarding world is at the center of this new film written by J. K. Rowling. The setting is 1926 New York and Eddie Redmayne plays Newt Scamander, a wizard with a suitcase full of unruly creatures. Kids who grew up on the Harry Potter series should feel at home here. The Times critic Manohla Dargis found the titular beasts a highlight, writing, “With the strange caws and showy displays, these beasties provide a lot of the movie’s easygoing pleasures. ” If it’s sold out: Consider “Doctor Strange,” Marvel’s latest “giddily enjoyable” adventure film that has been a big draw at the box office, but should be a little easier to get into now that it has been out a few weeks longer. If You Want to Get Away From Family Done playing nice around the dinner table and seeking a break from the family this holiday? Try this irreverent sequel to the irreverent comedy that became a hit in 2003. Billy Bob Thornton is back as the boozing, womanizing title character. (Did you know he wasn’t the first or even second choice for the role? Find out more in this oral history of the first film.) If You Want to Get Serious After the Holiday For the kind of film that will offer substance as well as a ray of hope, try the drama “Arrival. ” Amy Adams plays a linguist who figures out a way to communicate with alien visitors. It has sleek visual effects and a twisty narrative. In her review, Manohla Dargis praised the lead performance, writing, “By turns inviting and opaque, Ms. Adams turns softness and quiet into heroic qualities, keeping her voice low, modulated, and using stillness to draw you near. ” If You Want to Keep It Light After Thanksgiving Turkey Stuffed from the meal and in search of a movie that will go down easy? Try the comedy “Almost Christmas. ” The ensemble film focuses on an Alabama family gathering for the holiday, with comic turns from Danny Glover, Gabrielle Union, Omar Epps, J. B. Smoove and a wisecracking Mo’Nique, whom the critic Glenn Kenny called “simply magnificent” in his Times review. | 0 |
GOOGLE PLANNED MASSIVE AI INTEGRATED SOCIAL NETWORK SPY TOOL FOR HILLARY CAMPAIGN IN 2014 Source: Higgins News Network
A newly released Podesta email reveals that Google CEO Eric Schmidt contacted the Hillary campaign in 2014 to begin their partnership in sponsoring Clinton’s campaign run for President in 2016.
The revelations come from a memo in the email sent to Cherry Mills which was then forwarded Robby Mook, John Podesta, and David Plouffe.
Schmidt’s memo outlines an overall campaign strategy for Hillary, Schmidt’s vision for a massive cloud-based AI integrate software program and also reveals that Google colluded with the Obama administration in the 2012 election.
The memo goes on to layout plans to construct a massive cloud-based database, along with programs that leveraged machine learning (aka Artificial Intelligence) that would be used to first to track users online to create a partial digital voter ids.
Those partial digital ids contain a collection of attributes about the users online behavior which Schmidt explains will all eventually be tied to a real voter id file by leveraging machine learning.
Schmidt details the procurement of a development team and the use of outline money to create software that will be connected to users smart phones on 2016 that would allow volunteers the ability to access any and all voter data.
Schmidt also outlines ideas for the using the integrated tool to monitor social media and news stories to help promote positive articles and target the source of “rumors” and negative articles.
Given Google’s massive collection of personal user data combined with previous revelations that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg and Facebook COO were colluding with Hillary raises series concerns above user privacy, media manipulation and host of other problems.
That combined with the fact that just about every other Silicon Valley company and executive is behind the Hillary Campaign makes this a chilling memo that should be getting much more attention than it is.
Presented in full:
Secondary verification by google.com DKIM key
Fwd: 2016 thoughts
Date: Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 1:56 PMSubject: 2016 thoughts
Cheryl, I have put together my thoughts on the campaign ideas and I havescheduled some meetings in the next few weeks for veterans of the campaign to tell me how to make these ideas better. This is simply a draft but dolet me know if this is a helpful process for you all. Thanks !! Eric
Notes for a 2016 Democratic CampaignEric Schmidt
Here are some comments and observations based on what we saw in the 2012campaign. If we get started soon, we will be in a very strong position toexecute well for 2016.
1. Size, Structure and Timing
Lets assume a total budget of about $1.5Billion, with more than 5000 paidemployees and million(s) of volunteers. The entire startup ceasesoperation four days after November 8, 2016 . The structure includes aChairman or Chairwoman who is the external face of the campaign and aPresident who is the executive in charge of objectives, measurements,systems and building and managing the organization.
Every day matters as our end date does not change. An official campaignright after midterm elections and a preparatory team assembled now is best.
2. Location
The campaign headquarters will have about a thousand people, mostly youngand hardworking and enthusiastic. Its important to have a very largehiring pool (such as Chicago or NYC) from which to choose enthusiastic,smart and low paid permanent employees. DC is a poor choice as its full ofdistractions and interruptions. Moving the location from DC elsewhereguarantees visitors have taken the time to travel and to help.
The key is a large population of talented people who are dying to work foryou. Any outer borough of NYC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston are all goodexamples of a large, blue state city to base in.
Employees will relocate to participate in the campaign, and will find lowcost temporary housing or live with campaign supporters on a donated basis.This worked well in Chicago and can work elsewhere.
The computers will be in the cloud and most likely on Amazon Web services(AWS) . All the campaign needs are portable computers, tablets and smartphones along with credit card reader s.
3. The pieces of a Campaign
a) The Field
Its important to have strong field leadership, with autonomy andempowerment. Operations talent needs to build the offices, set up thesystems, hire the people, and administer what is about 5000 people.Initial modeling will show heavy hiring in the key battleground states.There is plenty of time to set these functions up and build the humansystems. T he field is about organizing people, voter contact, and get outthe vote programs.
For organizing tools, build a simple way to link people and activities as aworkflow and let the field manage the system, all cloud based. Build asimple organizing tool with a functioning back-end. Avoid deep integrationas the benefits are not worth it. Build on the cloud. Organizing isreally about sharing and linking people, and this tool would measure andtrack all of it.
There are many other crucial early investments needed in the field:determining the precise list of battleground states, doing early polling toconfirm initial biases, and maintaining and extending voter protectionprograms at the state level.
b) The Voter
Key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates allthat is known about them. In 2016 smart phones will be used to identify,meet, and update profiles on the voter. A dynamic volunteer can easilyspeak with a voter and, with their email or other digital handle, get thevoter videos and other answers to areas they care about (“the benefits ofACA to you” etc.)
The scenario includes a volunteer on a walk list, encountering a potentialvoter, updating the records real time and deepening contact with the voterand the information we have to offer.
c) Digital
A large group of campaign employees will use digital marketing methods toconnect to voters, to offer information, to use social networks to spreadgood news, and to raise money. Partners like Blue State Digital will domuch of the fund raising. A key point is to convert BSD and other partnersto pure cloud service offerings to handle the expected crush and load.
d) Media (paid), (earned) and (social), and polling
New tools should be developed to measure reach and impact of paid, earnedand social media. The impact of press coverage should be measurable inreach and impact, and TV effectiveness measured by attention and othersurveys.
Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors , andmodel how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us aboutthe origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme .Connect polling into this in some way.
Find a way to do polling online and not on phones.
e) Analytics and data science and modeling, polling and resourceoptimization tools
For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote.Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributesof the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn outand why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches workwell. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the mostimportant factors for turnout, and preference.
It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcomingdatabases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurementpurposes.
The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set ofvendors.
f) Core engineering, voter database and contact with voters online
The database of voters (NGP Van) is a fine starting point for voter recordsand i s maintained by the vendor (and needs to be converted to the cloud ).The code developed for 2012 (Narwahl etc. ) is unlikely to be used, andreplaced by a model where the vendor data is kept in the Van database andintermediate databases are arranged with additional information for a voter.
Quite a bit of software is to be developed to match digital identities withthe actual voter file with high confidence . The key unit of the campaignis a “voter”, and each and every record is viewable and updatable byvolunteers in search of more accurate information .
In the case w here we can’t identify the specific human , we can still have a partial digital voter id , for a person or “probable-person” with attributesthat we can identify and use to targe t. As they respond we can eventuallymatch to a registered voter in the main file. This digital key iseventually matched to a real person .
The Rules
Its important that all the player in the campaign work at cost and there beno special interests in the financing structure . This means that allvendors work at cost and there is a separate auditing function to ensure noone is profiting unfairly from the campaign. All investments and conflictsof interest would have to be publicly disclosed. The rules of the auditshould include caps on individual salaries and no investor profits from thecampaign function. (For example, this rule would apply to me.)
The KEY things
a) early b uild of an integrated development team and recognition that thisis an entire system that has to be managed as suchb) decisions to exclusively use cloud solutions for scalability, and choiceof vendors and any software from 2012 that will be reused.c) the role of the smart phone in the hands of a volunteer. The smartphone manages the process, updates the database, informs the citizen, andallows fundraising and recruitment of volunteers (on android and iphone).d) early and continued focus of qualifying fundraising dollars to build thefield, and build all the tools. Outside money will be plentiful andperfect for TV use. A smart media mix tool tells all we need to know aboutmedia placement, TV versus other media and digital media . | 1 |
SIX years after dropping an average of 129 pounds on the TV program “The Biggest Loser,” a new study reports, the participants were burning about 500 fewer calories a day than other people their age and size. This helps explain why they had regained 70 percent of their lost weight since the show’s finale. The diet industry reacted defensively, arguing that the participants had lost weight too fast or ate the wrong kinds of food — that diets do work, if you pick the right one. But this study is just the latest example of research showing that in the long run dieting is rarely effective, doesn’t reliably improve health and does more harm than good. There is a better way to eat. The root of the problem is not willpower but neuroscience. Metabolic suppression is one of several powerful tools that the brain uses to keep the body within a certain weight range, called the set point. The range, which varies from person to person, is determined by genes and life experience. When dieters’ weight drops below it, they not only burn fewer calories but also produce more hormones and find eating more rewarding. The brain’s system considers your set point to be the correct weight for you, whether or not your doctor agrees. If someone starts at 120 pounds and drops to 80, her brain rightfully declares a starvation state of emergency, using every method available to get that weight back up to normal. The same thing happens to someone who starts at 300 pounds and diets down to 200, as the “Biggest Loser” participants discovered. This coordinated brain response is a major reason that dieters find weight loss so hard to achieve and maintain. For example, men with severe obesity have only one chance in 1, 290 of reaching the normal weight range within a year severely obese women have one chance in 677. A vast majority of those who beat the odds are likely to end up gaining the weight back over the next five years. In private, even the diet industry agrees that weight loss is rarely sustained. A report for members of the industry stated: “In 2002, 231 million Europeans attempted some form of diet. Of these only 1 percent will achieve permanent weight loss. ” The specific “Biggest Loser” diet plan is probably not to blame. A previous study found similar metabolic suppression in people who had lost weight and kept it off for up to six years. Whether weight is lost slowly or quickly has no effect on later regain. Likewise — despite endless debate about the relative value of different approaches — in comparisons, diet plans that provide the same calories through different types of food lead to similar weight loss and regain. As a neuroscientist, I’ve read hundreds of studies on the brain’s ability to fight weight loss. I also know about it from experience. For three decades, starting at age 13, I lost and regained the same 10 or 15 pounds almost every year. On my most serious diet, in my late 20s, I got down to 125 pounds, 30 pounds below my normal weight. I wanted (unwisely) to lose more, but I got stuck. After several months of eating fewer than 800 calories a day and spending an hour at the gym every morning, I hadn’t lost another ounce. When I gave up on losing and switched my goal to maintaining that weight, I started gaining instead. I was lucky to end up back at my starting weight instead of above it. After about five years, 41 percent of dieters gain back more weight than they lost. studies show dieters are more likely than to become obese over the next one to 15 years. That’s true in men and women, across ethnic groups, from childhood through middle age. The effect is strongest in those who started in the normal weight range, a group that includes almost half of the female dieters in the United States. Some experts argue that instead of dieting leading to weight gain, the relationship goes in the other direction: People who are genetically prone to gain weight are more likely to diet. To test this idea, in a 2012 study, researchers followed over 4, 000 twins aged 16 to 25. Dieters were more likely to gain weight than their identical twins, suggesting that dieting does indeed increase weight gain even after accounting for genetic background. The difference in weight gain was even larger between fraternal twins, so dieters may also have a higher genetic tendency to gain. The study found that a single diet increased the odds of becoming overweight by a factor of two in men and three in women. Women who had gone on two or more diets during the study were five times as likely to become overweight. The causal relationship between diets and weight gain can also be tested by studying people with an external motivation to lose weight. Boxers and wrestlers who diet to qualify for their weight classes presumably have no particular genetic predisposition toward obesity. Yet a 2006 study found that elite athletes who competed for Finland in such sports were three times more likely to be obese by age 60 than their peers who competed in other sports. To test this idea rigorously, researchers could randomly assign people to worry about their weight, but that is hard to do. One program took the opposite approach, though, helping teenage girls who were unhappy with their bodies to become less concerned about their weight. In a randomized trial, the eBody Project, an online program to fight eating disorders by reducing girls’ desire to be thin, led to less dieting and also prevented future weight gain. Girls who participated in the program saw their weight remain stable over the next two years, while their peers without the intervention gained a few pounds. WHY would dieting lead to weight gain? First, dieting is stressful. Calorie restriction produces stress hormones, which act on fat cells to increase the amount of abdominal fat. Such fat is associated with medical problems like diabetes and heart disease, regardless of overall weight. Second, weight anxiety and dieting predict later binge eating, as well as weight gain. Girls who labeled themselves as dieters in early adolescence were three times more likely to become overweight over the next four years. Another study found that adolescent girls who dieted frequently were 12 times more likely than to binge two years later. My repeated dieting eventually caught up with me, as this research would predict. When I was in graduate school and under a lot of stress, I started binge eating. I would finish a carton of ice cream or a box of saltines with butter, usually at 3 a. m. The urge to keep eating was intense, even after I had made myself sick. Fortunately, when the stress eased, I was able to stop. At the time, I felt terrible about being out of control, but now I know that binge eating is a common mammalian response to starvation. Much of what we understand about weight regulation comes from studies of rodents, whose eating habits resemble ours. Mice and rats enjoy the same wide range of foods that we do. When tasty food is plentiful, individual rodents gain different amounts of weight, and the genes that influence weight in people have similar effects in mice. Under stress, rodents eat more sweet and fatty foods. Like us, both laboratory and wild rodents have become fatter over the past few decades. In the laboratory, rodents learn to binge when deprivation alternates with tasty food — a situation familiar to many dieters. Rats develop binge eating after several weeks consisting of five days of food restriction followed by two days of free access to Oreos. Four days later, a brief stressor leads them to eat almost twice as many Oreos as animals that received the stressor but did not have their diets restricted. A small taste of Oreos can induce deprived animals to binge on regular chow, if nothing else is available. Repeated food deprivation changes dopamine and other neurotransmitters in the brain that govern how animals respond to rewards, which increases their motivation to seek out and eat food. This may explain why the animals binge, especially as these brain changes can last long after the diet is over. In people, dieting also reduces the influence of the brain’s system by teaching us to rely on rules rather than hunger to control eating. People who eat this way become more vulnerable to external cues telling them what to eat. In the modern environment, many of those cues were invented by marketers to make us eat more, like advertising, supersizing and the buffet. Studies show that dieters are more likely to eat for emotional reasons or simply because food is available. When dieters who have long ignored their hunger finally exhaust their willpower, they tend to overeat for all these reasons, leading to weight gain. Even people who understand the difficulty of weight loss often turn to dieting because they are worried about health problems associated with obesity like heart disease and diabetes. But our culture’s view of obesity as uniquely deadly is mistaken. Low fitness, smoking, high blood pressure, low income and loneliness are all better predictors of early death than obesity. Exercise is especially important: Data from a 2009 study showed that low fitness is responsible for 16 percent to 17 percent of deaths in the United States, while obesity accounts for only 2 percent to 3 percent, once fitness is factored out. Exercise reduces abdominal fat and improves health, even without weight loss. This suggests that overweight people should focus more on exercising than on calorie restriction. In addition, the evidence that dieting improves people’s health is surprisingly poor. Part of the problem is that no one knows how to get more than a small fraction of people to sustain weight loss for years. The few studies that overcame that hurdle are not encouraging. In a 2013 study of obese and overweight people with diabetes, on average the dieters maintained a 6 percent weight loss for over nine years, but the dieters had a similar number of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease during that time as the control group. Earlier this year, researchers found that intentional weight loss had no effect on mortality in overweight diabetics followed for 19 years. Diets often do improve cholesterol, blood sugar and other health markers in the short term, but these gains may result from changes in behavior like exercising and eating more vegetables. Obese people who exercise, eat enough vegetables and don’t smoke are no more likely to die young than people with the same habits. A 2013 (which combines the results of multiple studies) found that health improvements in dieters have no relationship to the amount of weight they lose. If dieting doesn’t work, what should we do instead? I recommend mindful eating — paying attention to signals of hunger and fullness, without judgment, to relearn how to eat only as much as the brain’s system commands. Relative to chronic dieters, people who eat when they’re hungry and stop when they’re full are less likely to become overweight, maintain more stable weights over time and spend less time thinking about food. Mindful eating also helps people with eating disorders like binge eating learn to eat normally. Depending on the individual’s set point, mindful eating may reduce weight or it may not. Either way, it’s a powerful tool to maintain weight stability, without deprivation. I finally gave up dieting six years ago, and I’m much happier. I redirected the energy I used to spend on dieting to establishing daily habits of exercise and meditation. I also enjoy food more while worrying about it less, now that it no longer comes with a side order of shame. | 1 |
November 1, 2016 Pope Francis Commemorates 500th Anniversary Of Protestant Reformation
Pope Francis is in Sweden to kick off the commemoration of 500 years since the Protestant Reformation. The reformation started in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the church door to denounce what he saw as abuses by the Catholic Church.
Email (will not be published) (required) Website Sow a seed to help the Jewish people Follow Endtime Copyright © 2016 All Rights Reserved Endtime Ministries | End of the Age | Irvin Baxter Endtime Ministries, Inc. PO Box 940729 Plano, TX 75094 Toll Free: 1.800.363.8463 DON'T JUST READ THE NEWS... understand it from a biblical perspective. Your Information will never be shared with any third party. Get a 2-year subscription, normally $29, now just $20.15. ONLY 500 deals are still available. Offer available while supplies last or it expires on December 31, 2015. close We are a small non-profit that runs a high-traffic website, a daily TV and radio program, a bi-monthly magazine, the prophecy college in Jerusalem, and more. Although we only have 35 team members, we are able to serve tens of millions of people each month; and have costs like other world-wide organizations. We have very few third-party ads and we don’t receive government funding. We survive on the goodness of God, product sales, and donations from our wonderful partners. Dear Readers, X close We have experienced tremendous growth in our web presence over the last five years. In fact, in 2010 we averaged 228,000 pageviews per month. Last year we averaged just over 2,000,000 pageviews per month. That’s an increase of 777% in five years! However, our servers and software are outdated, which causes downtime on occasion for many of you and additional work hours and finances to maintain for us at Endtime. Updating our servers and software as well as maintaining service for a year will cost us $42,000. If each person reading this gave at least $10, our bill to provide FREE broadcasting and resources to the world via our website would be covered for over a year! Learn more - Click Here ► Dear Readers, | 0 |
Sonntag, 20. November 2016 Sonntagsfrage: Was sagen Sie dazu, dass Angela Merkel wohl noch einmal antreten will? Am Sonntagabend wird Angela Merkel vor die Presse treten und eine bisher unbekannte Erklä- ... na gut, eigentlich weiß jeder in Deutschland, was die ewige Kanzlerin zu verkünden hat. Haben Sie sich schon auf Merkel 2017 eingestellt? In dieser Woche will der Merkillon (unterstützt durch Yawn Control ) von Ihnen wissen: Und hier noch die unglaublich spannenden Ergebnisse der letzten Sonntagsfrage (Stimmen gesamt: 84.695): Was sagen Sie dazu, dass Donald Trump tatsächlich gewonnen hat? (Top-3-Antworten) 3. Glück für George W. Bush, der sich schon fast damit abgefunden hat, als schlechtester US-Präsident aller Zeiten in die Geschichte einzugehen. - 17,45% (14.781 Stimmen) 2. Seltsam. Und das, obwohl die Demokraten mit Hillary Clinton eine Kandidatin aufgestellt haben, die all das verkörperte, was die Amerikaner an der Politik hassen. - 17,6% (14.907 Stimmen) 1. Und was macht der Mann als erste Amtshandlung? Nimmt einer schwarzen Familie das Haus weg. Un-mög-lich! - 25,6% (21.686 Stimmen) Foto: Shutterstock | 0 |
After a long night and a hard election, Donald J. Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States. In the early hours of November 9, 2016, Hillary Clinton conceded the election.
Both candidates helped usher in a new political era; she is the first woman to get this far in a presidential election successfully. Whereas, Trump is the first person to be elected to the highest office in the U.S. who never served in the military and never served in a political capacity.
When the night culminated with Trump winning well over the required 270 electoral votes, the election was called. The reality star now holds a new title, President Elect Donald J. Trump.
His presidency will begin with Republicans holding the majority in both chambers of Congress. President-Elect Trump will be nominating a new Supreme Court Justice to fill the seat vacated when Antonin Scalia died in February.
Surprising Night at the Polls On November 8, the polls began to close at 6:00 p.m. ET on the east coast. Whereas on the west coast, the polls closed 11:00 p.m. There were early projections, which made hearts race. The numbers bounced back and forth in many key swing states. That is until eastern state’s tallies began to roll in, then the numbers evened out.
Polling Site Glitches Many polling sites experienced technical issues. Trump attempted early in the day to sue Nevada because the polls in Clark County remained open for an hour and a half on Nov. 7. The judge stated there was no fraud since the state’s law indicates if a person is in line before the polling site closes, they must be allowed to cast their ballot.
In Durham County, N.C., there was a delay beginning the votes, so the Democratic Party sought to have the time extended to make up for time lost. This was granted, and the polls remained open for 30 of the 45 minutes requested.
Donald Trump Needs to Reunite the Country Commentators on CNN Politics agree that the campaign tore through the fabric that makes America great. During the campaigning, citizens became polarized into two drastically divisive and hateful camps.
How is President Elect Trump going to heal the wounds he inflicted on Clinton’s supporters, the Muslim community, Latino citizens, and every other group?
During Trump’s campaign, he threatened to have Clinton arrested when he won, build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, close the mosques, and restart stop and search policies. He said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act, and lower the tax ceiling for the richest Americans.
His supporters are thrilled, and Clinton’s voters are stunned. There are fear and confusion in the air.
Hillary Clinton Concedes Clinton sent out her campaign manager to tell her supporters that it was late and the final tallies were not going to happen soon. She asked them to go home and get some rest. The announcement was made that Clinton would speak in the morning.
Within an hour, Trump told his supporters that she had called him and conceded. The President-Elect proffered a simple acceptance. He stated that his was not a campaign but a movement for change.
By Cathy Milne
Sources:
CNN Politics: 2016 Election Results
MSNBC: Live 2016 Election Coverage
NBC News: Breaking News Alerts
Image Courtesy of Gage Skidmore’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License #CMJournalist , Hillary Clinton , President Elect , spot , Trump , VP Elect | 0 |
Brilliant! | 0 |
Over the past year, I’ve tried to clear up a lot of the misconceptions on food and drink: about salt, artificial sweeteners, among others, even water. Now let me take on alcohol: wine, beer and cocktails. Although I have written about the dangerous effects of alcohol abuse and misuse, that doesn’t mean it’s always bad. A part of many complex and delicious adult beverages, alcohol is linked to a number of health benefits in medical studies. That doesn’t mean the studies provide only good news, either, or that the evidence in its favor is a slam dunk. You won’t be surprised to hear that, once again, my watchword — moderation — applies. Research into how alcohol consumption affects health has been going on for a long time. A 1990 prospective cohort study included results of more than 275, 000 men followed since 1959. Compared with those who never drank alcohol, those who consumed one to two drinks a day had a significantly reduced mortality rate from both coronary heart disease and “all causes. ” Those who consumed three or more drinks a day still had a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease, but had a higher mortality rate over all. A 2004 study came to similar conclusions. It followed about 6, 600 men and 8, 000 women for five years and found that compared with those who drank about one drink a day on average, those who didn’t drink at all and those who drank more than two drinks a day had higher rates of death. Results like these have been consistent across a number of studies in different populations. Even studies published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research agree that moderate drinking seems to be associated with a decreased risk of death over all. However, alcohol seems to have different effects on different diseases. Almost all of the major benefits of drinking are seen in cardiovascular illnesses. In fact, with men, even consumption of a surprisingly large amount can seem protective. When it comes to cancer, the picture isn’t as rosy. For instance, a 2007 study involving the Women’s Health Study cohort found that increased alcohol consumption was associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. More broadly, a 2014 systematic review of epidemiologic and experimental studies looking at alcohol and breast cancer found that the overall consensus is that each additional drink per day increases the relative risk (comparing the risk in two groups) of breast cancer by a statistically significant, but small, 2 percent — although not the absolute risk. A of colorectal cancer and alcohol found that heavy drinkers, but not light or moderate drinkers, were at increased risk of the disease. No relationship is seen with respect to bladder cancer or ovarian cancer. A study that included all cancers found that light drinking was protective moderate drinking had no effect and heavy drinking was detrimental. Moderate alcohol consumption has been found to be associated with other benefits, though. A cohort of about 6, 000 people followed in Britain found that those who consumed alcohol at least once a week had significantly better cognitive function in middle age than those who did not drink at all. This protective effect on cognition was seen in people who drank up to 30 drinks a week. A 2004 systematic review found that moderate drinking was associated with up to 56 percent lower rates of diabetes compared with nondrinkers. Heavy drinkers, though, had an increased incidence of diabetes. This is where savvy readers should be asking: What about randomized controlled trials? After all, epidemiologic evidence and associations only go so far they cannot get us to causation. Recently, in Annals of Internal Medicine, such a trial was published. Patients with Type 2 diabetes were randomized to drink 150 milliliters of water, white wine or red wine with dinner for two years. The beverages were provided to patients free of charge. They were all placed on a Mediterranean diet with no calorie restrictions. Researchers found that those who drank the wine, most notably red wine, had a reduction in cardiometabolic risk factors, or those for heart disease, diabetes or stroke. This was especially true in patients who had certain genotypes. Further, no one had any significant adverse effects from being randomized to drink the alcohol. In another analysis of that randomized control trial published this year, the most interesting finding was about blood pressure. In this study, some people saw a reduction in systolic blood pressure. Again, the alcohol was not associated with significant adverse effects. This contradicts the findings from systematic reviews of epidemiologic studies that show alcohol intake may be associated with a small but significant increase in blood pressure. Adding further complications was a trial looking at red wine consumption that found it had no effect, positive or negative, on blood pressure in patients with atherosclerosis. A different analysis of that study found that it did result in improved cholesterol levels, even though many patients were already being treated with statins. A 2011 examined 63 controlled trials of wine, beer and spirits, and found that all of those beverages increased levels of HDL cholesterol (the good cholesterol). There was even a with more alcohol consumed having more of an effect. Synthesizing all this, there seems to be a sizable amount of evidence that moderate alcohol consumption is associated with decreased rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and death. It also seems to be associated with increased rates, perhaps to a lesser extent, of some cancers, especially breast cancer, as well as some other diseases or conditions. The gains from improved cardiovascular disease deaths seem to outweigh all of the losses in other diseases combined. The most recent report of the U. S. D. A. Scientific Advisory Panel agrees with that assessment. But alcohol isn’t harmless. Many people with certain diseases or disorders, and women who are pregnant, need to avoid it. Others who can’t keep their consumption to acceptable levels need to abstain. Alcohol is very harmful when abused, so much so that it’s difficult for me to tell people to start drinking for their health. That’s rarely the conclusion of any studies about alcohol, no matter how positive the results. Nor is it the advice any doctors I know give. However, the evidence does seem to say that moderate consumption is safe, and that it may even be healthy for many people. If you’re enjoying some drinks this holiday season, it’s nice to know that they may be doing more than just bringing you cheer. | 1 |
Global Unrest Cycle Elects Evangelical Mayor for Rio October 31, 2016 Global Unrest Cycle Elects Evangelical Mayor for Rio
An evangelical bishop was elected mayor of Rio de Janeiro on Sunday in a second round of municipal voting that cemented a rout of the leftist party and allies who dominated Brazil's presidency and major cities for over a decade. Marcelo Crivella, a controversial conservative who is a senator, bishop and nephew of the founder of an evangelical megachurch, defeated a progressive former schoolteacher to runBrazil's second biggest city by a margin of nearly 20 percentage points. The 59-year-old pastor weathered an uproar over past criticism of homosexuality and Catholicism, the dominant religion in Latin America's largest country, by distancing himself from those comments and vowing to govern for Rio's residents, not the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, the influential congregation from which he hails. In a victory speech to supporters in a working-class Rio neighborhood, he promised to "take care of people," echoing campaign vows to improve deficient public services, from health to transport to sanitation, that complicate day-to-day life for the blue-collar voters who supported his candidacy. Crivella's victory, partly fueled by the growing influence of evangelical voters, fortifies a rightward shift in Brazil following the 13-year reign of the leftist Workers Party, which presided over a long economic boom before cratering during the recession and an historic corruption scandal.
(BRAZIL) - The elections, which toppled many incumbents in a first round of voting earlier this month, are also a broader renunciation of the status quo, with voters frustrated by a second year of recession and the giant kickback scandal that has led to the arrest dozens of political and corporate chieftains.
"It's an important election to change the old way of doing things," said Rafael Mello, a civil servant who voted Sunday morning in Rio.
In the first round of voting, just weeks after lawmakers impeached former President Dilma Rousseff because of budget irregularities by her Workers Party government, two-term Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes, a one-time Rousseff ally, failed to secure a place in the runoff for his hand-picked successor candidate.
LISTEN MORE: TRUNEWS HOST RICK WILES SPEAKS ABOUT THE 500 YEAR CYLE
In São Paulo, Brazil's biggest city and the cradle of the Workers Party, voters ousted Mayor Fernando Haddad, once considered one of the party's rising stars. The Workers Party held onto only one of the state capitals it had previously occupied.
EYEING 2018 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Sunday's voting will also influence how some key players at the national level could fare ahead of the 2018 presidential elections.
In Belo Horizonte, capital of the rich southeastern state of Minas Gerais, a loss by a candidate from the centrist Brazilian Social Democratic Party is expected to help resolve an ongoing power struggle within the PSDB, as the party is known.
The PSDB, which had been the chief opposition to the Workers Party and is increasingly well positioned to retake the presidency after four consecutive defeats, won São Paulo and other important cities in the first round of municipal elections.
The victory by wealthy businessman João Doria in São Paulo fortified Geraldo Alckmin, the governor of that state and a possible presidential candidate, who pushed for Doria despite opposition from other PSDB leaders.
The loss in Belo Horizonte, to a smaller centrist party, is considered a defeat for Aecio Neves, another PSDB leader who was the party's candidate against Rousseff in 2014. Neves, a senator and former governor of Minas Gerais, failed to win the state in that election and gave his imprimatur to this year's losing mayoral candidate.
Crivella, the Rio victor, belongs to the Brazilian Republican Party, a relatively new conservative party.
His leftist rival, Marcelo Freixo, represented the Socialism and Liberty Party, which broke away from the Workers Party over a decade ago to focus on human rights, education and social issues.
Though Freixo garnered energetic support from celebrities, artists, intellectuals and prosperous Rio leftists, their ballots were easily outnumbered by a populist vote in less affluent parts of the city, traditionally skeptical of progressive platforms. Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news
We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories | 1 |
The Modern History of ‘Rigged’ US Elections October 27, 2016
Special Report: Donald Trump claims the U.S. presidential election is “rigged,” drawing condemnation from the political/media establishment which accuses him of undermining faith in American democracy. But neither side understands the real problem, says Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The United States is so committed to the notion that its electoral process is the world’s “gold standard” that there has been a bipartisan determination to maintain the fiction even when evidence is overwhelming that a U.S. presidential election has been manipulated or stolen. The “wise men” of the system simply insist otherwise.
We have seen this behavior when there are serious questions of vote tampering (as in Election 1960) or when a challenger apparently exploits a foreign crisis to create an advantage over the incumbent (as in Elections 1968 and 1980) or when the citizens’ judgment is overturned by judges (as in Election 2000). Presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan photographed together in the Oval Office in 1991. (Cropped from a White House photo that also included Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.)
Strangely, in such cases, it is not only the party that benefited which refuses to accept the evidence of wrongdoing, but the losing party and the establishment news media as well. Protecting the perceived integrity of the U.S. democratic process is paramount. Americans must continue to believe in the integrity of the system even when that integrity has been violated.
The harsh truth is that pursuit of power often trumps the principle of an informed electorate choosing the nation’s leaders, but that truth simply cannot be recognized.
Of course, historically, American democracy was far from perfect, excluding millions of people, including African-American slaves and women. The compromises needed to enact the Constitution in 1787 also led to distasteful distortions, such as counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation (although obviously slaves couldn’t vote).
That unsavory deal enabled Thomas Jefferson to defeat John Adams in the pivotal national election of 1800. In effect, the votes of Southern slave owners like Jefferson counted substantially more than the votes of Northern non-slave owners.
Even after the Civil War when the Constitution was amended to give black men voting rights, the reality for black voting, especially in the South, was quite different from the new constitutional mandate. Whites in former Confederate states concocted subterfuges to keep blacks away from the polls to ensure continued white supremacy for almost a century.
Women did not gain suffrage until 1920 with the passage of another constitutional amendment, and it took federal legislation in 1965 to clear away legal obstacles that Southern states had created to deny the franchise to blacks.
Indeed, the alleged voter fraud in Election 1960, concentrated largely in Texas, a former Confederate state and home to John Kennedy’s vice presidential running mate, Lyndon Johnson, could be viewed as an outgrowth of the South’s heritage of rigging elections in favor of Democrats, the post-Civil War party of white Southerners.
However, by pushing through civil rights for blacks in the 1960s, Kennedy and Johnson earned the enmity of many white Southerners who switched their allegiance to the Republican Party via Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy of coded racial messaging. Nixon also harbored resentments over what he viewed as his unjust defeat in the election of 1960.
Nixon’s ‘Treason’
So, by 1968, the Democrats’ once solid South was splintering, but Nixon, who was again the Republican presidential nominee, didn’t want to leave his chances of winning what looked to be another close election to chance. Nixon feared that — with the Vietnam War raging and the Democratic Party deeply divided — President Johnson could give the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a decisive boost by reaching a last-minute peace deal with North Vietnam. President Richard Nixon with his then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in 1972.
The documentary and testimonial evidence is now clear that to avert a peace deal, Nixon’s campaign went behind Johnson’s back to persuade South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu to torpedo Johnson’s Paris peace talks by refusing to attend. Nixon’s emissaries assured Thieu that a President Nixon would continue the war and guarantee a better outcome for South Vietnam.
Though Johnson had strong evidence of what he privately called Nixon’s “treason” — from FBI wiretaps in the days before the 1968 election — he and his top advisers chose to stay silent. In a Nov. 4, 1968 conference call , Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford – three pillars of the Establishment – expressed that consensus, with Clifford explaining the thinking:
“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” Clifford said. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”
Clifford’s words expressed the recurring thinking whenever evidence emerged casting the integrity of America’s electoral system in doubt, especially at the presidential level. The American people were not to know what kind of dirty deeds could affect that process.
To this day, the major U.S. news media will not directly address the issue of Nixon’s treachery in 1968, despite the wealth of evidence proving this historical reality now available from declassified records at the Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas. In a puckish recognition of this ignored history, the library’s archivists call the file on Nixon’s sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks their “X-file.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ LBJ’s ‘X-File’ on Nixon’s ‘Treason. ’”]
The evidence also strongly suggests that Nixon’s paranoia about a missing White House file detailing his “treason” – top secret documents that Johnson had entrusted to Rostow at the end of LBJ’s presidency – led to Nixon’s creation of the “plumbers,” a team of burglars whose first assignment was to locate those purloined papers. The existence of the “plumbers” became public in June 1972 when they were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate in Washington. National Security Adviser Walt Rostow shows President Lyndon Johnson a model of a battle near Khe Sanh in Vietnam. (U.S. Archive Photo)
Although the Watergate scandal remains the archetypal case of election-year dirty tricks, the major U.S. news media never acknowledge the link between Watergate and Nixon’s far more egregious dirty trick four years earlier, sinking Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks while 500,000 American soldiers were in the war zone. In part because of Nixon’s sabotage — and his promise to Thieu of a more favorable outcome — the war continued for four more bloody years before being settled along the lines that were available to Johnson in 1968. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ The Heinous Crime Behind Watergate .”]
In effect, Watergate gets walled off as some anomaly that is explained by Nixon’s strange personality. However, even though Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, he and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who also had a hand in the Paris peace talk caper, reappear as secondary players in the next well-documented case of obstructing a sitting president’s foreign policy to get an edge in the 1980 campaign.
Reagan’s ‘October Surprise’ Caper
In that case, President Jimmy Carter was seeking reelection and trying to negotiate release of 52 American hostages then held in revolutionary Iran. Ronald Reagan’s campaign feared that Carter might pull off an “October Surprise” by bringing home the hostages just before the election. So, this historical mystery has been: Did Reagan’s team take action to block Carter’s October Surprise? President Ronald Reagan, delivering his Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 1981, as the 52 U.S. hostages in Iran are simultaneously released.
The testimonial and documentary evidence that Reagan’s team did engage in a secret operation to prevent Carter’s October Surprise is now almost as overwhelming as the proof of the 1968 affair regarding Nixon’s Paris peace talk maneuver.
That evidence indicates that Reagan’s campaign director William Casey organized a clandestine effort to prevent the hostages’ release before Election Day, after apparently consulting with Nixon and Kissinger and aided by former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, who was Reagan’s vice presidential running mate.
By early November 1980, the public’s obsession with Iran’s humiliation of the United States and Carter’s inability to free the hostages helped turn a narrow race into a Reagan landslide. When the hostages were finally let go immediately after Reagan’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981, his supporters cited the timing to claim that the Iranians had finally relented out of fear of Reagan.
Bolstered by his image as a tough guy, Reagan enacted much of his right-wing agenda, including passing massive tax cuts benefiting the wealthy, weakening unions and creating the circumstances for the rapid erosion of the Great American Middle Class.
Behind the scenes, the Reagan administration signed off on secret arms shipments to Iran, mostly through Israel, what a variety of witnesses described as the payoff for Iran’s cooperation in getting Reagan elected and then giving him the extra benefit of timing the hostage release to immediately follow his inauguration. Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush with CIA Director William Casey at the White House on Feb. 11, 1981. (Photo credit: Reagan Library)
In summer 1981, when Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Nicholas Veliotes learned about the arms shipments to Iran, he checked on their origins and said, later in a PBS interview:
“It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment. … [This operation] seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration. And I understand some contacts were made at that time.”
Those early covert arms shipments to Iran evolved into a later secret set of arms deals that surfaced in fall 1986 as the Iran-Contra Affair, with some of the profits getting recycled back to Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan Contra rebels fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist government.
While many facts of the Iran-Contra scandal were revealed by congressional and special-prosecutor investigations in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the origins of the Reagan-Iran relationship was always kept hazy. The Republicans were determined to stop any revelations about the 1980 contacts, but the Democrats were almost as reluctant to go there.
A half-hearted congressional inquiry was launched in 1991 and depended heavily on then-President George H.W. Bush to collect the evidence and arrange interviews for the investigation. In other words, Bush, who was then seeking reelection and who was a chief suspect in the secret dealings with Iran, was entrusted with proving his own guilt.
Tired of the Story
By the early 1990s, the mainstream U.S. news media was also tired of the complex Iran-Contra scandal and wanted to move on. As a correspondent at Newsweek, I had battled senior editors over their disinterest in getting to the bottom of the scandal before I left the magazine in 1990. I then received an assignment from PBS Frontline to look into the 1980 “October Surprise” question, which led to a documentary on the subject in April 1991. PBS Frontline’s: The Election Held Hostage, co-written by Robert Parry and Robert Ross.
However, by fall 1991, just as Congress was agreeing to open an investigation, my ex-bosses at Newsweek, along with The New Republic, then an elite neoconservative publication interested in protecting Israel’s exposure on those early arms deals, went on the attack. They published matching cover stories deeming the 1980 “October Surprise” case a hoax, but their articles were both based on a misreading of documents recording Casey’s attendance at a conference in London in July 1980, which he seemed to have used as a cover for a side trip to Madrid to meet with senior Iranians regarding the hostages.
Although the bogus Newsweek/New Republic “London alibi” would eventually be debunked, it created a hostile climate for the investigation. With Bush angrily denying everything and the congressional Republicans determined to protect the President’s flanks, the Democrats mostly just went through the motions of an investigation.
Meanwhile, Bush’s State Department and White House counsel’s office saw their jobs as discrediting the investigation, deep-sixing incriminating documents, and helping a key witness dodge a congressional subpoena.
Years later, I discovered a document at the Bush presidential library in College Station, Texas, confirming that Casey had taken a mysterious trip to Madrid in 1980. The U.S. Embassy’s confirmation of Casey’s trip was passed along by State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson to Associate White House Counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. in early November 1991, just as the congressional inquiry was taking shape.
Williamson said that among the State Department “material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown,” Beach noted in a “ memorandum for record ” dated Nov. 4, 1991.
Two days later, on Nov. 6, Beach’s boss, White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, convened an inter-agency strategy session and explained the need to contain the congressional investigation into the October Surprise case. The explicit goal was to ensure the scandal would not hurt President Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992. C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel under President George H.W. Bush.
At the meeting, Gray laid out how to thwart the October Surprise inquiry, which was seen as a dangerous expansion of the Iran-Contra investigation. The prospect that the two sets of allegations would merge into a single narrative represented a grave threat to George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign. As assistant White House counsel Ronald vonLembke, put it , the White House goal in 1991 was to “kill/spike this story.”
Gray explained the stakes at the White House strategy session. “Whatever form they ultimately take, the House and Senate ‘October Surprise’ investigations, like Iran-Contra, will involve interagency concerns and be of special interest to the President ,” Gray declared, according to minutes . [Emphasis in original.]
Among “touchstones” cited by Gray were “No Surprises to the White House, and Maintain Ability to Respond to Leaks in Real Time. This is Partisan.” White House “talking points” on the October Surprise investigation urged restricting the inquiry to 1979-80 and imposing strict time limits for issuing any findings.
Timid Democrats
But Bush’s White House really had little to fear because whatever evidence that the congressional investigation received – and a great deal arrived in December 1992 and January 1993 – there was no stomach for actually proving that the 1980 Reagan campaign had conspired with Iranian radicals to extend the captivity of 52 Americans in order to ensure Reagan’s election victory. Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana.
That would have undermined the faith of the American people in their democratic process – and that, as Clark Clifford said in the 1968 context, would not be “good for the country.”
In 2014 when I sent a copy of Beach’s memo regarding Casey’s trip to Madrid to former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, who had chaired the October Surprise inquiry in 1991-93, he told me that it had shaken his confidence in the task force’s dismissive conclusions about the October Surprise issue.
“The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he [Casey] did make the trip” to Madrid, Hamilton told me. “Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.”
Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation.
“If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said, adding that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests. But that trust was at the heart of the inquiry’s failure. With the money and power of the American presidency at stake, the idea that George H.W. Bush and his team would help an investigation that might implicate him in an act close to treason was naïve in the extreme.
Arguably, Hamilton’s timid investigation was worse than no investigation at all because it gave Bush’s team the opportunity to search out incriminating documents and make them disappear. Then, Hamilton’s investigative conclusion reinforced the “group think” dismissing this serious manipulation of democracy as a “conspiracy theory” when it was anything but. In the years since, Hamilton hasn’t done anything to change the public impression that the Reagan campaign was innocent.
Still, among the few people who have followed this case, the October Surprise cover-up would slowly crumble with admissions by officials involved in the investigation that its exculpatory conclusions were rushed , that crucial evidence had been hidden or ignored , and that some alibis for key Republicans didn’t make any sense .
But the dismissive “group think” remains undisturbed as far as the major U.S. media and mainstream historians are concerned. [For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative or Trick or Treason: The 1980 October Surprise Mystery or Consortiumnews.com’s “ Second Thoughts on October Surprise. ”]
Past as Prologue
Lee Hamilton’s decision to “clear” Reagan and Bush of the 1980 October Surprise suspicions in 1992 was not simply a case of miswriting history. The findings had clear implications for the future as well, since the public impression about George H.W. Bush’s rectitude was an important factor in the support given to his oldest son, George W. Bush, in 2000. President George W. Bush is introduced by his brother Florida Gov. Jeb Bush before delivering remarks at Sun City Center, Florida, on May 9, 2006. (White House photo by Eric Draper)
Indeed, if the full truth had been told about the father’s role in the October Surprise and Iran-Contra cases, it’s hard to imagine that his son would have received the Republican nomination, let alone made a serious run for the White House. And, if that history were known, there might have been a stronger determination on the part of Democrats to resist another Bush “stolen election” in 2000.
Regarding Election 2000, the evidence is now clear that Vice President Al Gore not only won the national popular vote but received more votes that were legal under Florida law than did George W. Bush. But Bush relied first on the help of officials working for his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, and then on five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to thwart a full recount and to award him Florida’s electoral votes and thus the presidency.
The reality of Gore’s rightful victory should have finally become clear in November 2001 when a group of news organizations finished their own examination of Florida’s disputed ballots and released their tabulations showing that Gore would have won if all ballots considered legal under Florida law were counted.
However, between the disputed election and the release of those numbers, the 9/11 attacks had occurred, so The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other leading outlets did not want the American people to know that the wrong person was in the White House. Surely, telling the American people that fact amid the 9/11 crisis would not be “good for the country.”
So, senior editors at all the top new organizations decided to mislead the public by framing their stories in a deceptive way to obscure the most newsworthy discovery – that the so-called “over-votes” in which voters both checked and wrote in their choices’ names broke heavily for Gore and would have put him over the top regardless of which kinds of chads were considered for the “under-votes” that hadn’t registered on antiquated voting machines. “Over-votes” would be counted under Florida law which bases its standards on “clear intent of the voter.”
However, instead of leading with Gore’s rightful victory, the news organizations concocted hypotheticals around partial recounts that still would have given Florida narrowly to Bush. They either left out or buried the obvious lede that a historic injustice had occurred. Former Vice President Al Gore. (Photo credit: algore.com)
On Nov. 12, 2001, the day that the news organizations ran those stories, I examined the actual data and quickly detected the evidence of Gore’s victory. In a story that day, I suggested that senior news executives were exercising a misguided sense of patriotism. They had hid the reality for “the good of the country,” much as Johnson’s team had done in 1968 regarding Nixon’s sabotage of the Paris peace talks and Hamilton’s inquiry had done regarding the 1980 “October Surprise” case.
Within a couple of hours of my posting the article at Consortiumnews.com, I received an irate phone call from The New York Times media writer Felicity Barringer, who accused me of impugning the journalistic integrity of then-Times executive editor Howell Raines. I got the impression that Barringer had been on the look-out for some deviant story that didn’t accept the Bush-won conventional wisdom.
However, this violation of objective and professional journalism – bending the slant of a story to achieve a preferred outcome rather than simply giving the readers the most interesting angle – was not simply about some historical event that had occurred a year earlier. It was about the future.
By misleading Americans into thinking that Bush was the rightful winner of Election 2000 – even if the media’s motivation was to maintain national unity following the 9/11 attacks – the major news outlets gave Bush greater latitude to respond to the crisis, including the diversionary invasion of Iraq under false pretenses. The Bush-won headlines of November 2001 also enhanced the chances of his reelection in 2004. [For the details of how a full Florida recount would have given Gore the White House, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ Gore’s Victory ,” “ So Bush Did Steal the White House ,” and “ Bush v. Gore’s Dark American Decade. ”]
A Phalanx of Misguided Consensus
Looking back on these examples of candidates manipulating democracy, there appears to be one common element: after the “stolen” elections, the media and political establishments quickly line up, shoulder to shoulder, to assure the American people that nothing improper has happened. Graceful “losers” are patted on the back for not complaining that the voters’ will had been ignored or twisted. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Al Gore is praised for graciously accepting the extraordinary ruling by Republican partisans on the Supreme Court, who stopped the counting of ballots in Florida on the grounds, as Justice Antonin Scalia said, that a count that showed Gore winning (when the Court’s majority was already planning to award the White House to Bush) would undermine Bush’s “legitimacy.”
Similarly, Rep. Hamilton is regarded as a modern “wise man,” in part, because he conducted investigations that never pushed very hard for the truth but rather reached conclusions that were acceptable to the powers-that-be, that didn’t ruffle too many feathers.
But the cumulative effect of all these half-truths, cover-ups and lies – uttered for “the good of the country” – is to corrode the faith of many well-informed Americans about the legitimacy of the entire process. It is the classic parable of the boy who cried wolf too many times, or in this case, assured the townspeople that there never was a wolf and that they should ignore the fact that the livestock had mysteriously disappeared leaving behind only a trail of blood into the forest.
So, when Donald Trump shows up in 2016 insisting that the electoral system is rigged against him, many Americans choose to believe his demagogy. But Trump isn’t pressing for the full truth about the elections of 1968 or 1980 or 2000. He actually praises Republicans implicated in those cases and vows to appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Trump’s complaints about “rigged” elections are more in line with the white Southerners during Jim Crow, suggesting that black and brown people are cheating at the polls and need to have white poll monitors to make sure they don’t succeed at “stealing” the election from white people.
There is a racist undertone to Trump’s version of a “rigged” democracy but he is not entirely wrong about the flaws in the process. He’s just not honest about what those flaws are.
The hard truth is that the U.S. political process is not democracy’s “gold standard”; it is and has been a severely flawed system that is not made better by a failure to honestly address the unpleasant realities and to impose accountability on politicians who cheat the voters.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ). | 1 |
Several Hollywood celebrities came to Stephen Colbert’s defense this week after the Late Show host sparked a social media firestorm when he made what some critics called a homophobic and vitriolic joke about President Donald Trump during a broadcast. [“The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c*ck holster,” Colbert said during his monologue on Monday night’s Late Show, during which he also called the president a “ ” and a “ . ” The joke elicited laughs from Colbert’s studio audience but the real reaction came later on social media, as thousands of viewers demanded that CBS penalize the host for what they said was an attack on the president, and the hashtag #FireColbert became a trending topic on Twitter. Still, some celebrities leapt to the host’s defense, including Star Trek actor George Takei, comedian Patton Oswalt, and actress Rosie O’Donnell. “Now the little right wing mushrooms want to #FireColbert because he made fun of the Troll King. Waaaa! It’ll go as well as #BoycottHamilton,” Takei wrote on Twitter Wednesday, appearing to refer to the social media outrage that enveloped the Broadway show Hamilton when the cast lectured Vice President Mike Pence from the stage during a performance in November. Now the little right wing mushrooms want to #FireColbert because he made fun of the Troll King. Waaaa! It’ll go as well as #BoycottHamilton. — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) May 3, 2017, Meanwhile, Oswalt tweeted that he wished he had thought of the “hilarious” phrase before Colbert did, while O’Donnell used the hashtag “#GiveColbertARaise. ” #CancelColbert for coming up with the hilarious phrase ”cock holster” before I did. — Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 3, 2017, cause he is slaying it nightly #giveCOLBERTaRAISE https: . — ROSIE (@Rosie) May 3, 2017, Actor Mark Ruffalo also appeared to lend his support to the embattled host by several messages Wednesday, including one that urged fellow users to make “#GiveColbertARaise” a trending topic. The supportive messages from celebrities come as both Colbert and CBS have remained silent on the controversy and social media campaign. Neither the host nor the network had issued a public statement as of Wednesday evening, and representatives for CBS did not immediately return Breitbart News’ request for comment. On Wednesday, CBS announced that the May 9 episode of The Late Show would reunite the stars of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, on which Colbert got his start. Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Rob Corddry and Ed Helms are set as guests for the episode. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 0 |
Friday caps a wildly busy week, especially out of Washington. There was Donald Trump’s news conference. There was the dossier on Trump and Russia. And then there were the confirmation hearings for the ’s cabinet nominations. One of the nominees, Jeff Sessions for attorney general, was described in a Times profile leading up to the hearings as having Christian values. “Mr. Sessions,” the profile said, “offers an uncompromising brand of conservatism that combines Christian and values with strains of populism and a willingness to say the unpopular, or even offensive. ” That description drew fire from several readers. The public editor’s take: I contacted the writers, Sharon LaFraniere and Matt Apuzzo, to ask about their intent. Both wanted to assure readers that they were not trying to use Christian values as a for any specific policies. They also said they weren’t trying to assert whether he lives a good Christian life, only that he is a devout Methodist who views his religion a guiding factor. Seems reasonable. I do appreciate, however, that the phrase used in this way could be seen as equating Sessions’ views to those of all Christians. It implies a universality to “Christian values” in a way that might offend Christians who don’t share them. Also in the news this week was that unsubstantiated Trump dossier. We, of course, received a number of emails on the topic, and this office has been looking into it. Here’s one common reader complaint. The public editor’s take: It sounds as if you came upon a rare link here to the BuzzFeed article. I’m told that Times staffers were given clear instructions not to link to it, but it appears one article briefly did so. Given how much of a point The Times made about the dossier being unsubstantiated, it would have been having it both ways to refuse to publish the documents but then link to BuzzFeed. Another reader pointed out that while The Times emphasized that the claims in the dossier were unsubstantiated, it did not go to such lengths in covering Hillary Clinton’s scandals during the presidential election. This week Trump also decided to give his Jared Kushner, a place in his government as a senior White House adviser. The Times covered the decision thoroughly, giving readers a better view into the man’s background. But some readers took issue with his religion being noted often, including in a story noting that Trump and his advisers, a group that included Kushner, had met on a Saturday even though Kushner typically observes the Sabbath strictly. The public editor’s take: The Times guidelines say such references to religion should be used when relevant to the news. In this case, Trump often cites Kushner’s relationships with Israel and his Jewish faith as reasons he would be effective in dealing with Middle East issues. As to Kushner meeting on the Sabbath, the senior editor for standards, Greg Brock, notes that The Times offered similar explanations when Senator Joseph I. Lieberman was running for president. Brock also said, “I can see why a reporter or editor might have included the reference to Kushner’s religion because it is the type of question another reader might very well ask: Why is Kushner attending meetings and not observing the Sabbath? I don’t know that the reference was necessary, but mentioning it seems legitimate. ” The public editor’s take: I agree with Brock. When relevant yes, but that’s not a license to do it without context. Another reader flagged what he thought was a conflict between the business and news side. Kinsey Wilson, executive vice president for product and technology, gave a good explanation of how this happens that applies to advertising generally: Another reader pointed out that The Times accidentally quoted a spoof account in its story on London transportation strikes — and is still using the quote. A rare and refreshing reader note came in last week. The reader wrote in simply to thank Times journalists. We hope you all enjoy the long weekend. | 1 |
The people voted for a military coup, says Theresa May 03-11-16 THE UK has already voted for the overthrow by force of Parliament, the House of Lords and the judiciary, the prime minister has asserted. Speaking from the head of a fleet of tanks driving down the Mall, May said that she has a mandate to shell the House of Commons, send Lords into exile and imprison all judges indefinitely without trial. May said: “In the last vote Britain will ever have, and the only one that counts, I was chosen as the country’s president-for-life with extraordinary and unlimited powers. “Any attempt to claim otherwise, for example by supporting one of the opposition parties made illegal by decree this morning, is an act of revolution.” She added: “Also, I always had this moustache. Can’t be a proper dictator without a moustache.”
Save | 0 |
30 Views Share: Pre-commentary by Dr. David Duke. An article in the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper has claimed that “Jewish charities” give more money to Israel than they do to education, and that this figure is of the order of $26 billion. As Professor Kevin McDonald points out in this article below, this figure is actually not even the real total—it is considerably more. As he points out, this figure does not include what is collected at synagogues—and then given to Israel—each month, because synagogues, schools and seminaries are not required to file tax returns. This is of real importance for everyone who wishes to understand how the Jewish lobby in America works, and how it uses American money—and taxpayers—to keep the racist Jews-only state of Israel in business. The immense wealth of the Jewish lobby is not the product of “Jewish ingenuity”—it is the product of active discrimination in favor of Jews by other Jews—in the educational system, the economy and in the media. Forward Study of the Jewish Charity Industry By Professor Kevin MacDonald. The $26 billion dollar figure in the title refers to the net assets of the network of explicitly Jewish charitable organizations, which puts it in the same league as a major corporation. Annual revenue is around $12-14 billion. Assuming an American Jewish population of around 6.4 million, this implies assets per capita of over $4000 and per capita annual giving of around half that. Based on an older survey indicating 2.3 persons per Jewish household, annual giving per household would be around $4600. These numbers are certainly not earth shaking, but, when broken down to particular categories, they indicate that Jewish activist organizations are indeed well funded, especially when compared to the financial resources of organizations that oppose Jewish interests (probably well under $1 million for organizations explicitly dedicated to advancing the interests of White Americans). For example, 6% of the $3.7 billion in annual donations for “functional charities” is allocated for “General Advocacy” ($222,000,000 annually), and 38% goes to Israel-related causes ($1.4 billion annually). Advocacy presumably includes the ADL which reported revenue of over $53 million in 2012—enough to fund over $31 million in employee salaries (including Abe Foxman at $688,188 ) and 28 regional offices. That’s a lot of power in opposition to European interests given the virtual non-existence of organizations explicitly dedicated to furthering European identification and interests. These numbers for donations to Jewish charity are underestimates because the IRS doesn’t require synagogues to file tax returns, and the same goes for schools and seminaries. As a result, “the $12 billion to $14 billion in annual revenue, the Forward’s best estimate based on tax filings, is probably billions of dollars short of the network’s actual size.” The other way in which such a report fails to get at the scope of financial support for Jewish ethnic activism is that it does not include organizations that are not explicitly Jewish but are supported by Jews for ethnic reasons. As Norman Podhoretz notes, Jews are the financial engine of the left, but of course the vast majority of charity for leftist causes would not appear in the Forward article because they are not explicitly Jewish organizations. A good example is the SPLC which is largely Jewish-funded but would not be considered a Jewish communal organization. (In 2012 the SPLC reported revenue of over $37 million and salaries of over $16 million.) Or consider the neocon infrastructure, such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies: All of the identifiable donors are Jews, including a host of well-known Jewish activists like Edgar M. Bronfman ($1,050,000) and Michael Steinhardt ($850,000) who co-founded the Birthright Israel program that brings Jewish young people to Israel for a dose of Jewish patriotism. The same goes for the Republicans and Democrats, where Jewish funding promotes Israel and the liberal/left values of the Jewish community (likely at least 60% of Democrat funding, and at least 40% of Republican). For example, Haim Saban has donated millions to the Democrats, and right now “Republicans who are considering a run for president are courting Sheldon Adelson [who donated more than $100 million to Republicans in the last presidential election cycle] as a preliminary to everything else they must do to prove their worthiness, like kissing babies in Iowa or formulating a position on jobs.” And anyone with a half a brain knows that Adelson’s support begins and ends with what the candidate will do for Israel. Ditto for David Gelfand’s donation of more than $100 million to the Sierra Club on condition that it adopt a view on immigration in sync with the views of the organized Jewish community. (My gloss, but it’s hard to believe that his donation did not reflect the typical Jewish commitment to displacement-level immigration). In other words, a lot of the most destructive Jewish funding is not included in these figures. And even though the donations to the explicitly Jewish organizations covered by the article are only the tip of the iceberg, there is no suggestion that the Jewish community is highly mobilized at this time, as indicated by the per capita data. A crisis in Israel would lead to a huge upsurge of Jewish funding, as it did during the 1967 and 1973 wars — as would any indication that European Americans are beginning to develop a sense of racial identity and beginning to assert their interests by developing explicitly European organizations which have the wherewithal to make a difference. | 1 |
Email Print Sean Hannity said on his radio show Friday that he doesn’t believe reports from ‘The New York Times’ that the FBI’s latest investigation into the Clinton Foundation is related to Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner. Instead, Hannity suspects that the FBI is protecting itself because they know that WikiLeaks is about to drop proof that Hillary Clinton should have been indicted in July.
SEAN HANNITY: If you believe The New York Times, they have a new story that just broke. “New emails in Clinton case came from Anthony Weiner’s electronic devices. Federal law enforcement officials said Friday that new emails uncovered in closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server discovered after the FBI seized electronic devices belonging to Huma Abedin, and aide to Mrs. Clinton, and her husband Anthony Weiner. The FBI told Congress that uncovered new emails.”
Let me tell you how. I am going to say something that I know is true. This story is total bull. I don’t believe this for a minute. “Hannity, it’s The New York Times.” I have no doubt the New York Times got on-the-record leaks that this is related to Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin’s emails. I have no doubt — maybe Huma didn’t take a sledgehammer to her devices the way Hillary Clinton did. But this is not what resulted in the reopening of this case. No way, shape, manner, or form. They know Julian Assange — there’s too much in WikiLeaks that is coming, that has tipped them off that they’re dead. That they’re about to be exposed. And that is, more than anything else, this is about preservation now.
Because James Comey, and and now we get back to… this this sky Andrew McCabe who was the FBI deputy director supervising the investigation of Clinton not long after Terry McAuliffe through a PAC gave $675,000 dollars to Jo McCabe, the wife of the chief the FBI deputy Director looking into the investigation into Clinton for a long shot bid, and that $675,000 came from Hillary, who went out there and raise money for the Super PACs that McAuliffe coudl give it to her.
The wife of the guy doing the key investigation here. Now if that doesn’t impress you, I don’t know what does..
Now let’s go back to Trey Gowdy grilling James Comey. What did he say?
Secretary Clinton said she never sent or received classified information over a private email server, is that true? “Comey: Our investigation found there was classified information sent.”
Stop right there. Comey is admitting a crime is committed. That raises the question why did Comey then make a determination on his own not to send this to or grand jury or special prosecutor or anybody else? In other words, the statute requires, she doesn’t even have to be negligent. I’m sorry the statute requires negligence or gross negligence, yet Hillary was knowingly, purposefully, and WikiLeaks proves this, in her decisions and actions setting up a server under her control.
Here’s the question Comey has to ask: Why did you give all these people immunity?Why did you destroy evidence in the case as part of a proffered deal, why in under any circumstances do you close this case down when the evidence was overwhelming and incontrovertible and had sent numerous other people to jail for a far lesser offenses? That’s called a two-tiered Justice system, that’s a problem…
Hillary knowingly and purposely hurt decisions and actions set up a server under her exclusive control and possession in order to control (violate the law) in ordered to control information that was available to the American public and Congress regarding actions as Secretary of State.
Furthermore, she took those government-owned communications into our own personal possession after leaving her position, knowingly and willingly attempted to destroy them, by the way that’s obstruction of justice, violation of the law, penalty of which a minor offenses you never get a government position for the rest of your life. And was so nefarious in her actions, could never be known used as evidence…
This gets more curious day by day. Now there were reports out today that FBI agents were reportedly close to revolting over the treatment of Clinton, they’re so disgusted, and every FBI special agent I know … nobody has a good answer because they don’t understand why organizes pretty deep
New emails tied to discovered– I don’t believe the New York Times, and I think the the FBI did this because they know what is coming. That’s my take. Stay connected by subscribing to our news letter. Click on the button. | 1 |
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange appeared on the Ecuadorian embassy balcony Friday afternoon after Sweden announced they were dropping the investigation into alleged rapes. [Calling today’s development an “important victory” Mr Assange, 45, who has been claiming political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy since 2012 to escape extradition to the United States where he faces accusations of espionage, slammed the “terrible injustice” that led to his incarceration, and the European Union for creating the situation that allowed it to develop. Speaking to journalists from the balcony, Mr Assange said: “Seven years without charge, while my children grew up without me. That is not something I can forgive, it is not something I can forget. “The inevitable enquiry into what has occurred in this moment of terrible injustice is something that I hope will be just about me and this situation. Because the reality is, detention and extradition without charge has become a feature of the European Union. A feature that has been exploited, yes, in my case, for political reasons, but in other cases has subjected many people to terrible injustice”. Criticising the developing practice of detention without trial and the arrest warrant, to which the United Kingdom is no longer party, Mr Assange continued: “In Sweden, indefinite detention is policy. There is no time limited someone can be detained without charge. “This is now how we expect a civilised state to behave. Similarly, extradition without charge is not something we expect from the rule of law in the United Kingdom. It is a measure that was introduced as part of the European Union system to turn the EU into a federation”. Acknowledging that he still faces arrest by the UK for breaking bail and failing to surrender himself to court while in the embassy, he continued: “The UK has said it will arrest me regardless. “The United States, CIA director Pompeo and the US attorney general have said I and other Wikileaks staff have no rights, no first amendment rights, and our arrest is a priority. That’s not acceptable … My legal staff have contacted the UK authorities and we have to engage in a dialogue about what is the best way forward. “To some extent, the UK has been exploited by the processes from the European Union where it agreed to extradite people without charge. A forced position the UK has been put into and the first part of that is over”. Mr Assange said despite the threats against him the work of Wikileaks would continue, and the pace of leaks published targeting the United States’ CIA organisation would intensify. He also hailed the release of “Chelsea Manning” a U. S. Army soldier and intelligence analyst who was incarcerated at a military prison for leaking cables to Wikileaks. Assange called the release a “very important victory” remarking “we and others have managed to have him released 28 years early from his sentence”. | 0 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.