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Goldman Sachs estimates that almost one million foreign contract workers are now employed in jobs throughout the United States, even though many media outlets routinely say the federal government approves only 85, 000 visas per year. [Goldman’s February estimate of the huge population also ignores multiple other visa programs which invite foreign graduates to work in the United States. These other temporary work visas are used to employ an additional 470, 000 foreign college graduates in the United States, according to a study released on March 7 by the Economic Policy Institute. The EPI study, titled “Temporary foreign workers by the numbers,” says U. S. companies employ roughly 470, 000 foreign professionals via the O, L, J, OPT, and TN visas. The EPI study estimates that the population at a much lower level of only 460, 000 employees, partly because EPI says many workers quickly get permanent green cards, which converts them into legal residents, not contract workers. If Goldman’s estimate of almost one million is combined with the EPI’s estimate of various other skilled visa programs, then the government data shows that U. S. companies employ roughly 1. 4 million temporary workers in the United States. The imported workers are not immigrants, citizens, legal residents or green card holders, but are supposed to return home after several years. Companies have used them to fill enough outsourced jobs to fully employ nearly all Americans who graduated from college with skilled degrees in 2015 and 2016. This population of temporary workers has pushed many established U. S. workers out of jobs, partly because none of the visa programs require that Americans be hired before foreigners. “I’m working at one of the Home Depot [hardware store] … there’s a lot of people in my position,” said Les, a former New York City technology worker for Disney, Pearson publishing, and other U. S. companies. He was pushed out of the business when companies outsourced their U. S. workplaces to Indian companies, many of which need U. workers to link their U. S. clients to outsourcing offices in India. Les has a teenager to raise, and would return to the sector if he got a job offer, he said. “That’s what I know — it is not like I could go back to school to become a dentist or lawyer or a teacher,” he told Breitbart News. The two new reports also that U. S. companies also employ roughly 185, 000 foreign temporary workers, plus roughly 200, 000 foreign temporary workers. The EPI report also says the population of agricultural is roughly 75, 000, or just seven percent of at least 930, 000 university trained resident in the United States. Campaign Promises, The huge U. S. population of foreign contract workers — ranging from 1. 4 million up to 1. 8 million — is a problem for President Donald Trump, who repeatedly promised to reform the program during his 2016 campaign. “I will end forever the use of the as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program,” said a Trump statement in 2016. “No exceptions. ” In his inauguration speech, Trump declared his national economic policy is: “Buy American, Hire American. ” So far, Trump has not revamped the program, although his deputies have temporarily ended a approval process supported by business groups. That change was adopted amid intense lobbying by companies — including Google, Microsoft, Facebook — to preserve the annual inflow of cheap workers. On April 3, the Department of Labor will start distributing another 85, 000 visas to companies, as required by law. Statements from White House officials suggest that a reform of the program will be linked to a larger plan to comprehensively reform the nation’s immigration system into Trump’s proposed immigration system. Business groups will likely oppose Trump’s immigration reform unless they can negotiate a promise for additional contract workers. In 2013, Democratic politicians supported this negotiated demand by business groups, because the business groups promised to pressure GOP politicians to create “a path to citizenship” for the resident population of at least 11 million illegal aliens. Trump would be reluctant to endorse any increase in contract workers because polls show that voters — especially his voters — want Americans to get jobs before companies can import more contract workers. For more than 20 years, have been slashed by the large population of 8 million working illegal immigrants, and by the legal immigration of roughly 800, 000 immigrants each year. Americans now face a growing economic threat from the inflow of contract workers. No matter their skills, American workers face a huge disadvantage because the have a much greater incentive to work long hours at low wages. The distorting incentive is the federal government’s willingness to offer a deferred bonus of citizenship to foreign workers who stay in their temp jobs for six to 10 years. This deferred compensation package is worth many millions of dollars to contract workers, partly because the citizenship benefit can be duplicated for their spouses, children, parents, siblings, and descendants. Those benefits of citizenship are vast — they include all of the rights enunciated in the U. S. Constitution, plus the right to live in a society largely free of petty corruption, clannishness or tribalism, of class, caste, racial or regional discrimination, plus full access to the efficient economy, the free education system, the massive federal welfare system and the national banking system, plus the physical security ensured by gun rights, neighbors, efficient police and military services. But companies cannot offer American this subsidy instead of wages because the Americans already are citizens. If they want to hire an American instead of a foreign contract worker, companies have to pay Americans their full, unsubsidized marketplace value. So the hidden federal subsidy of skews hiring practices in favor of foreign workers, much to the disadvantage of the 800, 000 young Americans who graduate with skilled degrees each year. Federal data shows that relatively few American graduates even get jobs in the sectors which they studied — at great cost — in university. The U. S. Census Bureau reported in July that 2014 that: 74 percent of those who have a bachelor’s degree in science, technology, engineering and math — commonly referred to as STEM — are not employed in STEM occupations … According to new statistics from the 2012 American Community Survey, engineering and computer, math and statistics majors had the largest share of graduates going into a STEM field with about half employed in a STEM occupation. Science majors had fewer of their graduates employed in STEM. Roughly 660, 000 foreign workers are employed throughout the U. S. software business, says the Goldman report. Many are employed in writing software, but many foreigners are hired as cheap managers, business experts, financial analysts, and salesmen by American and companies. An additional 340, 000 contract workers are employed throughout the nation as doctors, therapists and pharmacists, professors, engineers and financial planners, managers and designers, soccer coaches and economics teachers, government scientists and university lab technicians, architects, lawyers and even journalists, according to job descriptions found at MyVisaJobs. com. Amid this widespread use of contract workers, the salaries of young American professionals have stalled since the bubble imploded. In the last five years, they’ve grown by roughly one percent a year — after deducting inflation — according to a January 2017 report titled “National Compensation Forecast,” by the Economic Research Institute. During the same period, salaries, increased company profits, and sales have pushed the Dow Jones Index of stocks up by 60 percent. If the programs were sharply reduced, Americans companies would be forced to compete for the limited pool of Americans by offering higher salaries. The resulting “tight labor market” for Americans graduates would push up average salaries, give underemployed graduates an escape from jobs (such as at Starbucks) boost recruitment of older professionals, spur technology investment, and also greatly increase the opportunities for American teenagers, dropouts and the unemployed to study for college degrees. Even minor reforms of the program — such as rules — would boost salaries by 10 percent for the many U. S. employees of outsourcing companies, says the Goldman Sachs report. The Population, The lack of public data about the number of resident is “absurd,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “This is a basic piece of information that the public should know, and the problem is not even that the government has the numbers and isn’t releasing them — rather the government doesn’t know the number itself,” he said. The establishment media tend to ignore the issue of numbers or just to highlight the annual inflow of instead of describing the full resident population. Calculating the total numbers is difficult. The program is managed collectively by the departments of Labor, State, and Homeland Security. Each agency collects data on different aspects of the program, including the number of requests for work visas, the number of visas that are approved, and the arrival or departure of contract workers. Also, the regulatory details of the program are complex. The basic regulations say each visa lasts for three years — and can be automatically extended for another three years. In theory, that would limit the population to a maximum of six times the annual apparent cap of 85, 000, or a total of 510, 000. But, the program has many loopholes which are used by immigration lawyers to bring in an extra 20, 000 extra workers per year, to lengthen the stay of many by several years and to get work permits for some spouses of workers. Goldman Sachs’ February study, titled “The Visa Debate: A Global FAQ for Investors,” tried to count these extra workers and extra years, saying: “We estimate that 900k to 1mn individuals are working under visas in the US today, based on the assumption that most existing visas are renewed for a second term, and that about of qualified visa holders eventually apply for a green card (based on average wait times and green card quotas for countries affected) … figures would be slightly higher when including spouses of visa holders (which could be as many as 500k people based on prevailing marriage rates of roughly 50% across countries). That number is much larger that a 2011 estimate by the Center for Immigration Studies, which estimated the population of to be roughly 650, 000. Additional Visa Programs, Both the EPI and the Goldman studies ignore different parts of the massive contract labor force in the United States. The Goldman report understates the total number of contract workers in the United States by downplaying several additional visa programs that are similar to the program. In contrast, the EPI report shows that these additional visa programs keep an extra population of roughly 450, 000 skilled workers in the United States. For example, the EPI study says the J visa delivers roughly 56, 000 professionals, the Optional Practical Training program employs almost 140, 000 graduates, the visas supply another 50, 000 professionals, and the L visas allow 350, 000 or foreign company employees to work in the United States. The Goldman report also shows — but does not count — the annual inflow of workers via the L, B and O visa programs. The 2015 inflow of these contract workers is 180, 000, said the report. A calculation suggests these visa programs are used by a resident population of 200, 000 residing in the United States. But the Goldman report also does not mention the J visas or the Optional Practical Training visas, which together deliver almost 200, 000 foreign college graduates to work in the United States, according to EPI. The EPI study ignores the fact that President Barack Obama allowed the spouses of workers to get jobs. The Goldman report says that roughly 500, 000 spouses of workers are now allowed to get jobs in the United States. The Goldman report does not say how many of the spouses are working in skilled jobs, but if that number is only of the resident spouses, then the number of foreign contract workers would climb by up to 100, 000 people. If Goldman’s estimate of almost one million is combined with the EPI’s estimate of other skilled visa programs, the data shows that U. S. companies employ roughly 1. 4 million foreign contract workers in the United States. That’s enough jobs to fully employ nearly all Americans who graduated from college with skilled degrees in 2015 and 2016. Even if the EPIs lower estimate for the population is correct, then the extra visas programs show the number of contract workers in the United States up to roughly 940, 000. Goldman’s estimate of almost one million is much higher than the EPI estimate because Goldman estimates many are waiting for green cards instead of returning home. Green Cards, Roughly of workers apply for green cards, says Goldman. The pipeline for green cards is very backed up because only a maximum of 140, 000 green cards are awarded to foreign employees and their family members each year. This pipeline ensures that many stay in the United States longer than six years by getting or renewals as they wait to get green cards. In contrast, the EPI report reduces its estimate of the resident population by concluding that 140, 000 visa workers quickly got permanent green cards in 2011, 2012 and 2013, so reducing the number of contract workers in the program. Both reports acknowledge that many contract workers get green cards and remain in the United States. But neither report counts the number of former contract workers who have won green cards, and who are free to compete against American graduates for jobs. That number is difficult to count because the federal government distributes 140, 000 green cards to company employees each year, but those cards must be shared with family members, including spouses and children. The green card numbers add up. For example, if 40, 000 skilled workers get Green Cards each year for the next decade, that delivers another 400, 000 skilled workers into the U. S. labor market to compete against Americans. If of those 400, 000 future green card workers are they will be enough to grab 54 percent of the extra 488, 500 new technology jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects will be added to the economy over the next decade. In 2016, Breitbart surveyed the data for three Midwestern states, and concluded up to 75, 000 foreign college grads have gotten green cards since 1990. Like many other companies and universities, Goldman hires thousands of workers for jobs sought by young American business graduates and tries to get green cards for hundreds of its employees. The company numbers are shown by this chart found at MyVisasJobs. com, which relies on government data to track the marketplace. The annual inflow of skilled workers with green cards would be far higher if the 2013 “Gang of Eight immigration bill had passed. That bill allowed universities to get green cards for an unlimited number of foreign customers who paid for a Masters Degree at a U. S. university. Thea plan died in 2014 when GOP House Speaker John Boehner recognized the high level of public opposition to the amnesty and bill. Universities and The Goldman report does not mention the supply of visas granted to universities and affiliates of major companies. can hire as many workers as they wish each year, and now employ roughly 85, 000 workers as professors, doctors, researchers, and designers. That 85, 000 estimate is only for contract workers holding the renewable visas, and it excludes workers who are in the process of getting green cards. The Goldman report says of holders try for green cards, so pushing up the universities’ likely employment of up to roughly 130, 000 foreign contract workers. That overall university population is likely included in Goldman’s estimate of almost one million resident . Other Contract Workers, The EPI estimate says the resident population of contract workers is roughly 95, 000 workers plus roughly 90, 000 unskilled “Summer Work Travel” workers, many of whom work jobs at vacation resorts. The EPI data also suggests that 200, 000 unskilled contract workers live in the United States. Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart. com, | 1 |
Rep. Roger Williams ( ) has become the ninth of a bill that would terminate the U. S. Department of Education. [“I have said from day one that the federal government should focus on three things: defend our borders, maintain our infrastructure, collect our taxes — and then get out of the way,” Williams tells Breitbart News. “A long history of Washington bureaucrats inserting their failed policies into our children’s classrooms has resulted in a and often failing educational system. ” Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie (R) introduced the bill, H. R. 899, in February. The measure consists of only one sentence: “The Department of Education Shall Terminate on December 31, 2018. ” Let’s return control of education and educational spending to parents, teachers, school boards, where it belongs: https: . — Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) February 21, 2017, In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Massie said his bill is getting significant attention and that it could easily get support from both sides of the political aisle. “I think right now is a wonderful opportunity for us to get some people on the left side of the aisle in favor of reducing big government,” he said, continuing: Because, oftentimes, they’ve been proponents of a centralized government that’s not just powerful, but which has placed all of its power in the executive branch. And for the last four years — I have been arguing — number one, we need to devolve that power back to the states, but number two, to the extent it exists at the federal level, it needs to go back to Congress instead of sitting in the White House. And, now, I think the liberals are more receptive to that argument. And, if nothing else, they’re certainly apathetic about the Department of Education right now. “I do seem to remember that Trump was in favor of this,” Massie added. “I’m going to pursue the bill here in Congress with the assumption that if we can get it to them, they would sign it. In the meantime, a lot of congressmen are hearing from their constituents in support of this bill. ” Williams echoes the assertion that local control of education benefits all children. “It is long past time for big government Democrats to realize that local jurisdictions know what’s best for our youth and that a quality education is the right of all children, not just the Washington elite,” Williams says. Williams joins Rep. Justin Amash ( ) Rep. Andy Biggs ( ) Rep. Jason Chaffetz ( ) Rep. Matt Gaetz ( ) Rep. Jody Hice ( ) Rep. Walter Jones ( ) Rep. Raul Labrador ( ) and Rep. Ralph Abraham ( ) as of the legislation. | 1 |
posted by Eddie We are in the generation of social and medical cannabis evolution. Not only are the numbers of cannabis advocates increasing, but creative innovators around the globe are developing new ideas left and right. There are now more ways than ever to get your medicinal or social intake of marijuana. If you thought you’ve seen it all, though, think again. The world’s first-ever cannabis inhaler is starting to roll out and goes by the name of Vapen Clear , and there’s nothing else like it out there! So What is the Vapen Clear? Well it looks exactly like your typical inhaler. It performs in the the same way too, but without the albuterol. The Vapen Clear releases the psychoactive compound THC. It packs a powerful 10mg expenditure per puff, which equals to 100 total puffs per cartridge but can be toned down to meet your needs. Whereas normal vaporizer pens heat the contents, the Vapen Clear doesn’t heat the THC. Rather, it uses a propellant to blast the medicine directly inside your lungs. Not only is the Vapen Clear the first of its kind, but it also comes in three different designs based on your favorite strain. For example, the “Daytime” inhaler comes with THC from a sativa strain, because a sativa produces energy. In like manner, there is the “Nighttime” inhaler that comes with an indica strain to provide a more mellow and chill effect. Then there’s the “Afternoon” inhaler, which provides a steady buzz from a hybrid of the two. The Benefits The smell of cannabis can mask all others. While many cannabis consumption methods leave a strong odor behind, the Vapen Clear has virtually no smell whatsoever. Again, the product doesn’t heat the oil, unlike other vaporizers.Discreetness is obviously another benefit. When people see an inhaler, they think asthma, not cannabis. Therefore, the chances of someone accusing you of medicating are slim. Size is another factor, and we’re pleased to tell you that it doesn’t disappoint. In fact, it’s so small that you can carry it with you wherever you go. Whether you slide it into your pocket or drop it into your purse, it’s easy to take. Not to mention, you don’t have to worry about lugging batteries and lighters along with it. So if you are a cannabis connoisseur who stays on-the-go, this product is perfect for you. Where Can You Find It? The Vapen Clear inhaler is currently only available in Arizona at select specialist centers. However, if you want one but cannot get it just yet, not to worry. Soon, Vapen products will be available in California, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. | 0 |
Will it be representative government or thugocracy? Exclusive: Erik Rush envisions Clinton using high court 'as a bludgeon' against liberty Published: 43 mins ago About | | Archive Erik Rush is a columnist and author of sociopolitical fare. His latest book is "Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal - America's Racial Obsession." In 2007, he was the first to give national attention to the story of Sen. Barack Obama's ties to militant Chicago preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright, initiating a media feeding frenzy. Erik has appeared on Fox News' "Hannity and Colmes," CNN, and is a veteran of numerous radio appearances. Print
“ I feel strongly that the Supreme Court needs to stand on the side of the American people, not on the side of the powerful corporations and the wealthy. For me, that means that we need a Supreme Court that will stand up on behalf of women’s rights, on behalf of the rights of the LGBT community, that will stand up and say no to Citizens United, a decision that has undermined the election system in our country because of the way it permits dark, unaccountable money to come into our electoral system. ”
– Hillary Clinton
The first salvo from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (or rather, her answer to the first question posed by Fox News’ Chris Wallace to her and Donald Trump at the third presidential debate) was as chilling as it was an exemplar of hypocrisy.
Those on the left are quite fond of leveling the accusation against conservatives of employing “dog whistle politics,” rhetoric that allegedly contains hidden or esoteric derogatory messaging which targets a specific subgroup within the opposition. Ms. Clinton’s response to Wallace’s question (where they wanted to see the Supreme Court take the country, and their views on how the Constitution ought to be interpreted) however, was representative of this tactic.
While women’s rights and those of the LGBT community may seem to be a curious focus for the high court (since objectively, women wouldn’t appear to be particularly oppressed given that one has been nominated to run for president, and the LGBT community accounts for less than 5 percent of the American population), Clinton’s answer revealed the focus she believes the court should have once she becomes empress.
“Women’s rights” is of course “dog whistle” for unfettered abortion, even late-term abortion, which is essentially infanticide via dismemberment. “LGBT rights” is “dog whistle” for disenfranchising the majority of Americans who hold traditional values, primarily Christians. Leveraging a vocal minority of homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender individuals whom the left has whipped into a froth against Christians is the methodology that was employed to negate the political power of Christians in Europe and Canada. A direct assault via legislation in this area would not work in the U.S. (at least not at present); however, judicial rulings could effectively bring about the same result.
Let us leave aside for a moment the fact that judicial activism is unethical and skirts the Constitution and that Clinton’s overall objectives are manifestly evil. Hillary Clinton’s stated priorities for the Supreme Court are a clear indicator of her desire to use the court as a bludgeon against the Constitution and individual liberties, rather than allowing it to perform its designated function. The hypocrisy attendant to Clinton citing the rights of women and homosexuals when she is beholden via financial contributions to nations that institutionally persecute and murder members of these groups remains plain for all to see, despite being conveniently ignored by the press.
Clinton’s reference to “powerful corporations and the wealthy” and the malign influence of that sinister conservative organization, Citizens United, was of course another exercise in blatant hypocrisy. Clinton is quite wealthy, and corrupt or otherwise compromised powerful corporations have been instrumental in bringing about the designs of American socialists. Even if Citizens United were a vehicle for “dark, unaccountable money,” the scope of its influence would pale next to the subversive designs of the Muslim Brotherhood, with which Bill and Hillary Clinton have been partnered for decades, or the myriad tentacles of organizations funded by George Soros, the former Nazi collaborator dedicated to advancing oligarchical collectivism in America, someone with whom the Clintons also have a long association.
One need not attempt to decipher the thinly veiled intent behind Clinton’s debate rhetoric to discern what a Hillary Clinton presidency might look like. Her actions to date – and particularly those in the pursuit of seeking that office – should suffice quite nicely. Despite the craven complicity of the establishment press (mainstream media), there is ample evidence for even the most indolent news consumer to reach the conclusion that she and the Democratic leviathan supporting her, and which facilitated Barack Obama’s rise to power, are fundamentally malignant.
In recent days, we’ve become aware of all manner of unethical conspiracies and outright criminality that’s been brought to bear in getting Clinton elected, from Democratic officials tampering with the outcome of the illegal email server investigation, to the oversampling of key demographics in polling in order to enhance the public perception of Clinton’s popularity, to the recent revelation of criminally prosecutable actions on the part of the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the White House.
The bottom line here is that Hillary Clinton represents a class of people who transcend even the loathed archetypal modern politician in their rapaciousness and amorality. What all Americans – not just voters, and not just Republicans – need to realize is that leaders at the highest levels in the Republican Party are every bit as culpable as the gutter operatives of the Democratic Party who pay miscreants to dress up as ducks, instigate fistfights at opposition rallies and, yes, even vote for their candidates.
The burning question is this: In the end, are we to be governed by the will of the people, or are we going to continue pretending that we have a representative government, when we are in effect being ruled by abject thugs operating behind a faux veneer of government?
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A combat veteran with PTSD wasn’t allowed to fly with her service dog. So she sued. ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Fundraising Benefited From Loophole In Federal Anti-Corruption Rule By VNN on October 31, 2016 ‘Particularly Vulnerable To Pay To Play Practices’
by David Sirota AND Andrew Perez (MAPLIGHT) AND Avi Asher-Schapiro
Despite an anti-corruption rule that was designed to reduce the financial industry’s political power, top officials from the investment firm BlackRock hosted Hillary Clinton at campaign fundraisers earlier this year. The cash — which poured in through a loophole in the law — came in as BlackRock’s federal contracts to manage billions of dollars of retiree assets will be up for renewal during the next president’s term.
In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission looked to stop campaign donations to public officials from financial firms seeking to convince those officials to hire them to manage public employees’ retirement assets. The agency enacted a pay-to-play rule that applied such a restriction to state and local officials. The rule, however, was structured in a way that effectively exempted federal agencies from its restrictions — and it was created even though a major federal agency had just been plagued by an investment-related influence-peddling scandal.
In practice, the gap in the rule allows BlackRock executives to raise big money for presidential candidates who — if they win — will appoint the officials that run the federal Thrift Savings Plan, which awards contracts to manage retirement assets for nearly 5 million current and former federal employees.
The loophole also allows Wall Street executives to give cash to presidential candidates, even as those executives’ firms get deals to manage — and earn fees from — investments for the federal government’s separate pension insurance agency, which is run by presidential appointees.
In all, the loophole in the SEC rule effectively leaves nearly a half-trillion dollars of retirement assets unprotected by the nation’s major anti-corruption measure. Clinton’s presidential campaign has raised more than $1 million from financial firms that are contracted to manage those assets.
Two SEC spokespeople, Ryan White and Judith Burns, declined to answer questions from International Business Times and MapLight about the pay-to-play rule carveout for federal agencies.
‘Particularly Vulnerable To Pay To Play Practices’
This report is part of an IBT/MapLight series examining the extent to which corporate interests are able to circumvent federal and state anti-corruption rules designed to restrict the influence of money on public policy.
When the SEC passed its rule to restrict Wall Street campaign contributions, the agency said the measure was necessary because publicly administered retirement programs “are particularly vulnerable to pay to play practices” which can end up “leading to inferior management, diminished returns or greater losses” for retirees. A study released last month validated that concern: Researchers at Stanford, Rice and Erasmus universities found that retirement systems whose overseers “have received relatively more contributions from the financial industry have lower returns.”
Federal regulators ended up prohibiting investment firms from earning fees from “a government entity” — that is, a retirement system — if firm executives donate to a public official who has power to influence the retirement system’s investment decisions. The rule, though, narrowly defined “government entity”: It says the term means only an agency at the state or local level, not the federal government.
“There’s no clear carve-out for federal plans, but the definition itself also does not insinuate that they are covered,” Benjamin Keane, an attorney at the law firm Dentons, told IBT/MapLight.
Through legislation, congressional lawmakers could close the loophole by passing a pay-to-play law that defined “government entity” to encompass the federal government. Without that, the loophole will remain.
‘Wouldn’t Appear To Put Such Firms At Risk’
The result: Pay-to-play restrictions do not apply to the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) — a $458 billion behemoth that is the single largest retirement system in America.
BlackRock officials delivered over $100,000 to President Barack Obama’s campaigns, and Obama’s appointees to the TSP’s board have awarded BlackRock contracts to manage $251 billion on behalf of millions of federal workers. Those contracts were awarded by the Obama administration between 2012 and 2015.
Now, with those deals coming up for renewal, BlackRock employees are helping raise big money for Clinton, Obama’s potential successor.
BlackRock official Matt Mallow and his wife are listed on Clinton’s website as “Hillblazers” who have raised or donated at least $100,000 for the Democratic candidate’s 2016 campaign. Mallow hosted a fundraiser for Clinton this past February. Cheryl Mills, a longtime Clinton adviser, also hosted a fundraiser for her and serves on BlackRock’s board of directors. Clinton’s campaign has received roughly $100,000 directly from employees of BlackRock.
If Clinton wins the election, the agency her appointees run will decide the fate of BlackRock’s TSP contracts — and there is nothing in the SEC pay-to-play rule to stop those appointees from rewarding Clinton’s donors.
“Since the Thrift Savings Plan is solely a creature of the federal government,” Keane told IBT/MapLight, “contributions to the president or presidential candidates by covered executives of investment advisors to the TSP wouldn’t appear to put such firms at risk.”
A TSP spokesperson, Kim Weaver, confirmed to IBT/MapLight that “the SEC has no jurisdiction” over the board that governs the retirement system.
While TSP management contracts involve relatively low fees, the deals are coveted. The TSP does not publish an itemized list of the exact fees it pays to outside money managers, but documents reviewed by IBT show that the TSP pays about $106 million in annual expenses for the specific funds that BlackRock manages.
BlackRock likely earns additional revenues through securities lending, in which it can lend out portfolio assets to other firms for a fee. BlackRock can also use TSP’s holdings to exert influence with major corporations.
Weaver said the agency “uses a competitive RFP [request for proposal] process when selecting fund managers. The vendor is selected purely on the basis of best value and the selection is done on a fiduciary basis.” She said the agency’s presidentially appointed board members “do not serve as selecting officials on any [agency] procurement.”
Federal law says the board sets “policies for the investment and management” of the TSP, and agency press releases note that the board selected BlackRock for the four investment contracts the firm won.
‘Serious Questions About The Integrity Of The Process’
The TSP is not the only source of investment business at the federal level: There is also the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation , which insures the pensions of 44 million Americans and pays out benefits if private pension systems collapse. PBGC officials currently oversee roughly $88 billion of investments.
The PBGC ( Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation ) invests money with 23 financial firms, according to a PBGC spokesperson. Employees at twelve of those firms — including J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock — have collectively given Clinton’s presidential campaign more than $1.2 million. Goldman Sachs also paid Clinton $675,000 for speeches after she completed her tenure as Secretary of State. Those same firms donated over $870,000 to Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.
The PBGC declined to disclose any information on how much in annual fees the agency pays the Wall Street firms, but there are clues about how much at least some of those firms might be making off the system. The agency’s most recent financial report says roughly 1.7 percent of its assets are in “private equity, private debt, and private real estate.” That translates to roughly $1.5 billion of such investments. Assuming industry standard fees of up to 2 percent, that one small slice of PBGC investments alone could generate up to $30 million of annual management fees for financial firms — on top of any additional fees levied on investment returns.
Asked if it is appropriate for the agency to award contracts to firms whose executives make contributions to presidential campaigns, agency spokesman Marc Hopkins told IBT/MapLight: “PBGC follows federal procurement laws and regulations.”
The SEC’s decision to shield the federal government from the pay-to-play rule is striking, given that the PBGC was engulfed in an influence-peddling scandal at the beginning of President Obama’s term.
In January 2009, Charles E.F. Millard resigned as head of the PBGC amid accusations he inappropriately communicated with firms who were courting lucrative PBGC contracts. A whistleblower told the agency’s inspector general that Millard had been communicating with Wall Street firms seeking business from the PBGC, and that Millard refused to cut ties even after he was warned of potential ethical violations.
The investigation found that BlackRock and Goldman Sachs assigned employees to win over Millard. BlackRock even tasked a former high school classmate of Millard’s to keep in touch.
Goldman provided Millard with advice about how to persuade his colleagues to invest more PBGC funds in alternative investments, and the PBGC soon picked BlackRock and Goldman to manage nearly $1.6 billion in PBGC assets.
The inspector general said at the time that the “improper actions raise serious questions about the integrity of the process by which the winners” of federal investment contracts were selected. The IG noted that after Millard resigned, a Goldman executive worked to help him find a Wall Street job. Millard — who was not criminally charged — worked as a managing director and head of pension relations at Citigroup until earlier this year.
A few months after the IG report was released, President Obama appointed a private equity executive to take over the agency — just as that executive’s New York firm was facing questions about whether it used political influence to secure public pension deals. A year later, the SEC passed its pay to play rule — including the language that made sure the rule did not apply to the PBGC and other federal agencies.
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Posted on October 28, 2016 by Charles Hugh Smith
Central banks are obsessed with boosting inflation, but the “why inflation is good” arguments make no sense for households being ravaged by inflation. The basic argument is that inflation makes it easier for debtors to service their debts.
But this is only true if income rises along with costs. If income stays flat while costs rise, households lose ground–debt remains a burden as the purchasing power of income plummets.
Central banks and the mainstream media make two fatal errors when discussing inflation.
1. They assume an inflation rate that lumps all costs/prices into one number is meaningful. But the “headline” consumer price index (CPI) is meaningless for two reasons:
A. The “headline” CPI is easily manipulated by underweighting sectors with double-digit cost increases such as higher education, rent and healthcare, and by gaming hedonics and other adjustments.
B. Households and enterprises that are exposed to sectors with double-digit cost increases experience inflation at rates that are far higher than those households and enterprises that have little to no exposure to soaring rents, healthcare premiums and college tuition.
2. They lump all inflation-adjusted household income into one “headline number” of median household income. This is a meaningless number because it combines the top 5% of households that are experiencing strong income gains in the “recovery” with the 95% of households experiencing stagnant or declining purchasing power.
In other words, there is not one inflation rate or median household income, there are completely different classes of inflation and income. Americans in the top 5% with little exposure to the soaring big-ticket expenses of rent, healthcare and higher education are doing great, as their income/purchasing power is rising while their household budget is protected from 25% increases in rent, healthcare premiums, etc.
Households with stagnant incomes that are fully exposed to the ravages of soaring big-ticket expenses are experiencing catastrophic losses of purchasing power (i.e. inflation) on the order of 8% to 12% declines annually.
Take a look at these charts:
A better measure of how households are doing is to compare GDP (gross domestic product) and wages: if GDP is rising but household incomes aren’t keeping pace with GDP, then households are doing worse–which is exactly what’s happened in the “recovery”:
The share of GDP devoted to wages is another basic measure of household well-being: the wage/salary share of the economy has been declining for 45 years:
Meanwhile, the top 5% is riding high: notice how the spending of the top 5% has pulled away from the stagnant spending of the bottom 95% during the “recovery”:
Any household paying soaring healthcare premiums and co-pays is being crushed:
Ditto for households experiencing double-digit rent increases:
Rising inflation crushes the purchasing power of the bottom 95% whose incomes are not rising along with double-digit cost increases in big-ticket expenses. Central banks seeking to boost inflation are waging financial war on the bottom 95% of households. | 0 |
REDMOND, Wash. — Just off a remote stretch of road here, near wineries, horse stables and farms, Amazon is secretly growing something, but it’s not what Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, calls the “tiny seeds” that could become the company’s next big businesses. No, Amazon is growing actual plants, more than 3, 000 species of them spread around a greenhouse a ’s drive from Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle. There are carnivorous pitcher plants, exotic philodendrons and orchids from Ecuador that resemble the menacing flora from “Little Shop of Horrors. ” “Cinnamon, wax candy and baby powder,” said Ron Gagliardo, the Amazon horticulturist who oversees the greenhouse, when asked to describe the mysterious scent of the orchid, called Anguloa virginalis. Amazon pioneered internet shopping, electronic book reading and cloud computing. Now, as it enters adulthood, it is applying some of that inventiveness to its new home. The company is constructing a collection of and buildings in downtown Seattle that will be arrayed around three striking transparent, conjoined structures that Amazon calls spheres. They will act as greenhouses, the kind of flashy architecture that Amazon shunned for the first 22 years of its life. “We wanted it to be iconic, a structure that would be similar to another icon in the city, like the Space Needle, for newcomers to Seattle,” said John Schoettler, director of Amazon’s global real estate and facilities. “It would be a found treasure in the downtown neighborhood. ” The real point of the spheres is how Amazon wants to use the nature on the inside to inspire employees. When they open in early 2018, the spheres will be packed with a plant collection worthy of conservatories, allowing Amazon employees to amble through tree canopies three stories off the ground, meet with colleagues in rooms with walls made from vines and eat kale Caesar salads next to an indoor creek. Since Amazon decided about a decade ago to stay in downtown Seattle, the company said, it has invested over $4 billion in the construction and development of offices in the city, though it won’t disclose the budget for the spheres. The spheres will be accessible to Amazon employees only, but the company may eventually allow public tours. “The whole idea was to get people to think more creatively, maybe come up with a new idea they wouldn’t have if they were just in their office,” said Dale Alberda, the lead architect on the project at NBBJ, a firm that has also worked on building projects for Samsung, Google and the Chinese internet company Tencent. Tech companies have been eager to test ways to make workplaces more conducive to creativity. Some turn their offices into playgrounds, with beanbag chairs, ball pits and tables. The more refined alternative now catching on is to make nature the star of the show. Apple, for example, has hired an arborist, Dave Muffly, to oversee the planting of about 8, 000 trees on its new campus in Cupertino, Calif. which will surround a new building where Apple employees will work. The mostly native trees are intended to restore the natural landscape that once blanketed Silicon Valley. What makes Amazon’s project unusual is its location — in the heart of a city, rather than on a sprawling suburban campus of the sort favored by most other big tech companies. Amazon, the largest private employer in Seattle, has more than 20, 000 employees spread out in more than 30 buildings in the city. Its current construction plans will give it the space to more than double its local head count. Mr. Bezos has said that Amazon is staying put in a city because the kinds of employees it wants are attracted to an urban environment. But the concrete and steel canyons around Amazon’s new downtown properties do not have a lot of greenery. That is where the spheres and Mr. Gagliardo, whom Amazon hired to fill them with plants, enter the picture. Margaret O’Mara, an associate professor of history at the University of Washington, sees the spheres as a kind of Walden Pond under glass. “It’s a retreat, a cathedral away from the hubbub of the city,” she said. There was plenty of noise inside the spheres on a recent tour, as workers welded steel, pounded bolts into place and sawed concrete inside the structure. The glass panels that make up the carapace of the spheres were being lowered onto steel supports in shapes. Wearing a hard hat, Mr. Gagliardo dodged power cords and scaffolding, surveying an enormous mass of concrete where a living wall — fabric pockets filled with plants — will eventually be installed. He pointed to where a glass roof panel will be removed and a fig tree will be lifted by crane into one of the spheres, one of 40 to 50 trees that will be installed. “Being able to walk through here, I’m starting to see where things are going to go,” he said. The spheres will have meeting areas called treehouses, and suspension bridges high off the ground that will be just wobbly enough to quicken the pulses of employees who walk over them. “Amazon said, ‘Make this fun,’” said Mr. Alberda, the architect. Amazon’s architects had to make the spheres welcoming for both plants and people, a space with the abundance of a conservatory but without the stickiness that will fog MacBook screens and make people sweat. During the day, Amazon will keep the spheres at 72 degrees and 60 percent humidity, while at night the temperature will average 55 degrees and the humidity 85 percent, which Mr. Gagliardo said would be optimal for the cloud forest plant specimens it has collected. A growing body of academic research points to the benefits of giving employees access to nature. About a decade ago, Ihab Elzeyadi, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Oregon, conducted a study in which workers who were provided with a view of nature experienced a 20 percent reduction in sick leave from their employer, though it was not clear why that happened. Dr. Elzeyadi said he was intrigued by Amazon’s sphere project, but not convinced it would be as effective as letting workers gaze at plants from their desks. ”You’re making a big investment and betting on two big hypotheses,” he said. “Will they leave work and go there and, having that kind of maybe once a week, will it really impact their stress levels?” Any respite from stress could be particularly helpful for a company that has a reputation for a sometimes punishing work environment. Until plants start moving into the spheres next spring, Mr. Gagliardo, 50, dotes on them in their temporary home in the huge greenhouse Amazon has been leasing for the last couple of years. He will continue to tend to the plants for Amazon after they are planted in the spheres. He stops by a welwitschia, a Namibian plant with two leaves, proclaiming it the “ugliest plant in the world” and delivering the line with such enthusiasm that it sounds like a compliment. With misters pumping water into the air, he swells with excitement discussing his current love affair with a group of begonias from Southeast Asia. “Next week I’ll be more excited about a different group,” he said. Many of the species Amazon is growing here are endangered or extinct in the wild, acquired from botanical gardens, universities and private growers around the world. Mr. Gagliardo, who previously worked at the Atlanta Botanical Garden and in amphibian conservation, said opportunities to build a plant collection like Amazon’s did not come along often. “I’m a plant curator by heart,” he said. “So different plant families, amassing a collection of plants, is totally what I geek out on and go crazy about. ” | 1 |
As experts and politicians debate the merits of President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting refugee flows from nations, few have addressed the many warnings prior to Trump’s assumption of the presidency that Islamic State terrorist have long planned to infiltrate Western nations disguised as refugees. [Trump’s executive order, which many in the left have falsely described as a “Muslim ban,” temporarily halts the entry of individuals from seven nations listed in the Terrorist Prevention Act of 2015: Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Iran, Iraq, and Yemen. The government is set to restore entry of refugees from these nations contingent upon establishing an orderly and competent screening process to prevent terrorists from posing as refugees and entering the United States. In this sense, the executive order addresses a concern former CIA director John Brennan presented before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in June 2016, shortly after the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub orchestrated by an Islamic State sympathizer. “ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West,” Brennan said, using an alternate acronym for the Islamic State. “And the group is probably exploring a variety of means for infiltrating operatives into the West, including refugee flows, smuggling routes, and legitimate methods of travel. ” He noted that ISIS has also expanded its propaganda efforts to “inspire attacks by sympathizers who have no direct links to the group. ” These remarks came months after Brennan had warned against “hermetically seal[ing] our borders,” a statement he made at a forum in November 2015. Even before the Pulse massacre, Brennan nonetheless suggested U. S. officials should be “wary” of who enters the country. Brennan was not the first to warn that Islamic State terrorists may pose as refugees to enter the United States. The same month Brennan suggested the U. S. should decline to “hermetically seal our borders,” Senator John McCain said in an interview he had reason to believe that Islamic State terrorists could pose as Syrian refugees to enter the United States. “I am sure that Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, has already told some of these young men, go into the refugee flow and call us when you get to Berlin, New York, Paris, wherever it is,” he told New York radio host John Catsimatidis. “So we are going have to be very, very careful about what individuals we allow to come into this country as a result of this terrible tragedy. ” Senator McCain has since accused Trump of fueling “ISIS propaganda” by responding to the threat of Islamic State terrorists posing as Mideast refugees. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul also suggested in 2015 that intelligence he had been privy to suggested the Islamic State was seeking to infiltrate the West through refugee flows. “ISIS members in Syria have attempted to exploit [the refugee program] to get into the United States,” he told an audience at National Defense University. “The U. S. government has information to indicate that individuals tied to terrorist groups in Syria have already attempted to gain access to our country through the U. S. refugee program. ” The State Department has also indicated the U. S. is struggling with a concerted effort by Islamic State terrorists to enter the United States from Syria. “I wouldn’t debate the fact that there’s the potential for ISIS terrorists to try to insert themselves,” State Department Spokesperson Rear Admiral John Kirby said in September, adding that he believed those who have entered the United States have “all been extremely and very stridently vetted. ” The plan has succeeded in Europe. The Islamic State terrorist responsible for the New Year’s Eve massacre in Istanbul’s Reina nightclub, for example, entered Turkey through Syria with his wife and child, despite being an Uzbek national. Nearly a year before that attack, another Islamic State suicide bomber succeeded in killing 25 people in Istanbul, entering Turkey as a Syrian refugee. In Western Europe, four Islamic State terrorists cleared Syrian refugee vetting in October 2015, with two of them successfully attacking Paris. At least one refugee with ties to the Islamic State has been arrested in the United States: Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan, an Iraqi refugee who pled guilty to “providing material support and swearing allegiance to ISIS” in a Texas court. | 1 |
(Reuters) — A speeding car crashed into pedestrians on a sidewalk in New York City’s busy Times Square on Thursday, killing one person and injuring at least 12, and police said the incident did not appear to be an act of terrorism, witnesses, police and news media said. [A Reuters witness said one person was covered with a bloodstained blanket after the collision, which occurred around noon ET (1600 GMT) at the Midtown Manhattan tourist venue. Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them visitors from around the world, pass daily through the bustling commercial area, the heart of the Broadway theater district. The vehicle was a red Honda sedan and CBS New York Television said the driver had been removed. Television footage showed police officers restraining a man in a dark and placing him in a police car. Read the rest of the story at Reuters. | 1 |
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A week after the Government of India announced its new Regional Connectivity Plan for the Aviation industry called the UDAN scheme, a group of techies in Bangalore have now written to the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) demanding that it too start air transport services.
In an exclusive to The Unreal Times , Nikhil Chaudhary, one of the techies behind this ingenious proposal told us, “You know the traffic situation. By the time we cross Silk Board, the Prime Minister goes to some foreign nation, signs an agreement, posts a selfie and comes back to India. By the time we cross Marathahalli, Talgo has completed its trials of a train from Delhi to Mumbai. This was getting too much for us. Now, with UDAN, we can actually get stuck less in traffic. The government has proposed a maximum of Rs. 2500 per hour for a flight. Given that it takes us more than an hour to cross Silk Board or Marathahalli, this seems like a good move. The only problem is that the Minister says anyone with hawai chappal can now fly, but our dress code doesn’t permit hawai chappal .”
When contacted, an official of the BMTC confirmed that they had received the demand. He said, “This will require a lot of work. First we sign the papers, send to the MD, she signs it and then it goes to the minister, he signs and then it goes to the dustbin. It will take us time to process it after that.”
Meanwhile, on hearing this, Uber and Ola excitedly announced new plans for air-based taxis.
An Ola official confirmed this. Speaking to our correspondent, he said, “We have run Ola Boats in Chennai during the floods, we were planning Ola Tanks to navigate Delhi’s garbage mountains, why not go for a Helicopter? We can take off anywhere, land anywhere. We’ll charge per kilometre, per minute and of course, take-off and landing charges will be applicable. We’ll also bring back Ola Café and name it Ola Sky Café for our riders. We will run special services just to cross Silk Board and Marathahalli.
When contacted, Uber too, said that they were serious about launching such services. “We have been investing a lot into driverless cars, but have concluded that cars will get involved in accidents in no time in India, so we decided to focus only on air-based taxis. While we are still researching on it abroad, in India we will take it forward with immediate effect,” said an Uber official. “We have earlier given our Customers Helicopter rides, now we’ll give them plane rides in Bangalore city itself.” When we asked him where they’d be able to find a runway for the plane to take off from, he smiled and said, “We’ll just have to take a leaf from Nitin Gadkari’s book and use Ring Road as a runway.” | 0 |
Mexican authorities are using the deportation of a woman in Arizona as a platform to promote their consular services pointing to a “new reality” with “severe applications of migration control. ” [U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested and deported Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, who had a standing deportation order. The woman was arrested late last week when she went to the ICE office for her yearly . In their statement, Mexico’s Foreign Relations Ministry did not mention that Garcia de Rayos, while had been convicted in 2009 on the felony charge of impersonation for having used someone else’s identifying information to work illegally in the country. According to various news articles, the woman was originally arrested in 2008 during a workplace raid. In 2013, federal authorities issued a removal order and the woman was granted supervised release until authorities were able to deport her. While everyday Mexico receives hundreds of deported individuals and the case of Garcia Rayos is considered common, the Mexican government issued a statement on Garcia Rayos’ case claiming that the case showed a “new reality” in the United States. The Mexican government is further advising any migrants in the U. S. to get close to the 50 consular offices in the country, as they foresee further toughening of immigration enforcement. The Mexican government further state that they expect possible violations of constitutional rights or other violations in those immigration measures. Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. | 1 |
(Before It's News)
openminds.tv
This UFO spotted over Whitby coastline left photographer ‘freaked out’ – Gazette Live Reports of strange lights in East Valley – 3TV Phoenix The Untold Story of How John Podesta Answered My Question About UFOs – Mother Jones A night of UFO hunting reveals nothing unexplained, but plenty to ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ about – WCPO A new theory about life in our solar system – Blasting News | 0 |
Email
Just when it looked like Hillary Clinton was poised to win the 2016 election , the FBI has thrown a gamechanger into the mix. On Friday, FBI Director James Comey announced that his agency has discovered new emails related to Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information that they had not previously seen. According to the Associated Press , the newly discovered emails “did not come from her private server”, but instead were found when the FBI started going through electronic devices that belonged to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her husband Anthony Weiner. The FBI has been looking into messages of a sexual nature that Weiner had exchanged with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina, and that is why they originally seized those electronic devices. According to the Washington Post , the “emails were found on a computer used jointly by both Weiner and his wife, top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, according to a person with knowledge of the inquiry”, and according to some reports there may be “potentially thousands” of emails on the computer that the FBI did not have access to previously. Even though there are less than two weeks to go until election day, this scandal has the potential to possibly force Clinton out of the race, and if that happens could Barack Obama delay or suspend the election until a replacement candidate can be found?
Let’s take this one step at a time. On Friday, financial markets tanked when reports of these new Clinton emails hit the wires. The following comes from CNN …
After recommending earlier this year that the Department of Justice not press charges against the former secretary of state, Comey said in a letter to eight congressional committee chairmen that investigators are examining newly discovered emails that “appear to be pertinent” to the email probe.
“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote the chairmen. “I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.”
At this point, we do not know what is contained in these emails. But without a doubt Huma Abedin is Hillary Clinton’s closest confidant, and I have always felt that she was Clinton’s Achilles heel. Journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) is fully convinced that the FBI would have never made this move unless something significant had already been discovered …
We don’t know what this means yet except that it’s a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation. So that’s where we are…
Is it a certainty that we won’t learn before the election? I’m not sure it’s a certainty we won’t learn before the election.
One thing is, it’s possible that Hillary Clinton might want to on her own initiative talk to the FBI and find out what she can, and if she chooses to let the American people know what she thinks or knows is going on. People need to hear from her…
If the FBI has indeed found something explosive, would they actually charge her with a crime right before the election?
It is possible, but we also have to remember that government agencies (including the FBI) tend to move very, very slowly. If there are thousands of emails, it is going to take quite a while to sift through them all. And of course Barack Obama has lots of ways that he could influence, delay or even shut down the investigation.
So those that are counting on this to be the miracle that Donald Trump needs should not count their chickens before they hatch.
But if Hillary Clinton were to be forced out of the race by this FBI investigation, the Democrats would have to decide on a new candidate, and that would take time. The following is from a U.S. News & World Report article that examined what would happen if one of the candidates was forced out of the race for some reason…
If Clinton were to fall off the ticket, Democratic National Committee members would gather to vote on a replacement. DNC members acted as superdelegates during this year’s primary and overwhelmingly backed Clinton over boat-rocking socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
DNC spokesman Mark Paustenbach says there currently are 445 committee members – a number that changes over time and is guided by the group’s bylaws, which give membership to specific officeholders and party leaders and hold 200 spots for selection by states, along with an optional 75 slots DNC members can choose to fill.
But the party rules for replacing a presidential nominee merely specify that a majority of members must be present at a special meeting called by the committee chairman. The meeting would follow procedures set by the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee and proxy voting would not be allowed.
It would be extremely challenging to get a majority of the members of the Democratic National Committee together on such short notice. If Clinton were to drop out next week, it would be almost impossible for this to happen before election day.
In such a scenario, Barack Obama may attempt to invoke his emergency powers . Since the election would not be “fair” until the Democrats have a new candidate, he could try to delay or suspend the election. There would be a lot of controversy as to whether this is legal or not, but Barack Obama has not let the U.S. Constitution stop him in the past.
Meanwhile, new poll numbers show that the Trump campaign was already gaining momentum even before this story about the new emails broke. According to a brand new ABC News/Washington Post survey, Donald Trump is now only trailing Hillary Clinton by 4 points after trailing her by as much as 12 points last weekend.
And CNBC is reporting on a highly advanced artificial intelligence system that accurately predicted the outcomes of the presidential primaries and which is now indicating that Trump will be the winner in November…
An artificial intelligence system that correctly predicted the last three U.S. presidential elections puts Republican nominee Donald Trump ahead of Democrat rival Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House.
MogIA was developed by Sanjiv Rai, founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai. It takes in 20 million data points from public platforms including Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the U.S. and then analyzes the information to create predictions.
The AI system was created in 2004, so it has been getting smarter all the time. It had already correctly predicted the results of the Democratic and Republican Primaries.
Without Hillary at the top of the ticket, the odds of a Trump victory would go way, way up.
So if Hillary is forced out of the race by this investigation, Barack Obama and the Democrats will want to delay or suspend the election for as long as possible if they can.
At this point there is probably not a high probability that such a scenario will play out, but in this crazy election year we have already seen that just about anything can happen.
Take a look at the future of America: The Beginning of the End and then prepare | 0 |
A series of major earthquakes have plagued Italy (Rome) in recent days. Could we be witnessing the start of the end of the world?
Could we be living through the times described in many religious prophecies and texts?
You decide!
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Source: Is the ‘Big One’ About to Hit Rome? Series of Tremors and Volcano’s Reawakening Prompt Fears of Major Quake Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
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Read the Open Letter By Former Federal Prosecutors Criticizing James Comey Posted on Oct 31, 2016 FBI Director James Comey. ( Flickr / CC 2.0 )
Editor’s note: This open letter was published on Hillary Clinton’s website Sunday night in response to FBI Director James Comey’s recent announcement regarding the agency’s email review . See the full list of signatories on her website here .
Sunday, as reported by the Associated Press , a group of nearly 100 former federal prosecutors and high-ranking [Department of Justice] officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations, including former [Attorney General] Eric Holder and former Deputy AG Larry Thompson, issued the following joint letter expressing serious concerns over FBI Director Comey’s departure from long-standing department protocols:
As former federal prosecutors and high-ranking officials of the U.S. Department of Justice, we know that the impartiality and nonpartisanship of the United States justice system makes it exceptional throughout the world. To maintain fairness and neutrality, federal law enforcement officials must exercise discipline whenever they make public statements in connection with an ongoing investigation. Often, evidence uncovered during the course of an investigative inquiry is incomplete, misleading or even incorrect, and releasing such information before all of the facts are known and tested in a court of law can unfairly prejudice individuals and undermine the public’s faith in the integrity of our legal process.
For this reason, Justice Department officials are instructed to refrain from commenting publicly on the existence, let alone the substance, of pending investigative matters, except in exceptional circumstances and with explicit approval from the Department of Justice officials responsible for ultimate supervision of the matter. They are also instructed to exercise heightened restraint near the time of a primary or general election because, as official guidance from the Department instructs, public comment on a pending investigative matter may affect the electoral process and create the appearance of political interference in the fair administration of justice.
It is out of our respect for such settled tenets of the United States Department of Justice that we are moved to express our concern with the recent letter issued by FBI Director James Comey to eight Congressional Committees. Many of us have worked with Director Comey; all of us respect him. But his unprecedented decision to publicly comment on evidence in what may be an ongoing inquiry just eleven days before a presidential election leaves us both astonished and perplexed. We cannot recall a prior instance where a senior Justice Department official—Republican or Democrat—has, on the eve of a major election, issued a public statement where the mere disclosure of information may impact the election’s outcome, yet the official acknowledges the information to be examined may not be significant or new.
Director Comey’s letter is inconsistent with prevailing Department policy, and it breaks with longstanding practices followed by officials of both parties during past elections. Moreover, setting aside whether Director Comey’s original statements in July were warranted, by failing to responsibly supplement the public record with any substantive, explanatory information, his letter begs the question that further commentary was necessary. For example, the letter provides no details regarding the content, source or recipient of the material; whether the newly-discovered evidence contains any classified or confidential information; whether the information duplicates material previously reviewed by the FBI; or even “whether or not [the] material may be significant.”
Perhaps most troubling to us is the precedent set by this departure from the Department’s widely-respected, non-partisan traditions. The admonitions that warn officials against making public statements during election periods have helped to maintain the independence and integrity of both the Department’s important work and public confidence in the hardworking men and women who conduct themselves in a nonpartisan manner.
We believe that adherence to longstanding Justice Department guidelines is the best practice when considering public statements on investigative matters. We do not question Director Comey’s motives. However, the fact remains that the Director’s disclosure has invited considerable, uninformed public speculation about the significance of newly-discovered material just days before a national election. For this reason, we believe the American people deserve all the facts, and fairness dictates releasing information that provides a full and complete picture regarding the material at issue. | 0 |
American novelists have long complained about the ability of real life to outstrip fiction. In his landmark 1961 essay “Writing American Fiction,” Philip Roth observed that “actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist. ” The figure Roth cites is Charles Van Doren, of scandal fame but place Mr. Van Doren next to Donald J. Trump, and you can measure the change in the nature of credibility over the past . Mr. Van Doren was disgraced when it was revealed that he had been given the answers to the questions on the game show “” a contest that television viewers believed was real, not staged. Today an entire flourishing genre of television goes by the name “reality,” yet no one who watches it thinks it is genuinely real — that is, unplanned and unedited. Artificiality is what makes reality television enjoyable, even though these same shows, if advertised as fiction, would appear banal, repetitive and undramatic. Reality is the ingredient that turns a bad fiction into an enthralling one. This dynamic is part of the novel’s origins. The earliest English novels, from “Moll Flanders” (1722) to “Clarissa” (1748) were published anonymously, with titles that implied they were true stories. It took generations to establish the conventions of fiction sufficiently to allow readers to take pleasure in novels that were explicitly untrue. The suspension of disbelief that fiction involves is a late stage in the evolution of taste, and it may prove to have been a temporary one. The rise of the memoir over the past few decades doesn’t mean that readers are ready to abandon the techniques of fiction but, like readers three centuries ago, they want the freedom of fiction along with consequentiality of fact. The author David Shields diagnosed this desire in his 2010 manifesto “Reality Hunger”: “I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself as a novel. ” Many fiction writers share this intuition, though they respond to it in different ways. One way is to make the novel by turning its imitation of reality into an exaggeration, a mirror. Has our reality since felt apocalyptic? Then imagine Manhattan being destroyed by zombies (Colson Whitehead’s “Zone One”) or a flood (Nathaniel Rich’s “Odds Against Tomorrow”) or civil war and foreign bankers (Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story”). Because we know such things “could never happen,” they mark the story as fiction because we know similar things have happened and will happen, they become truthful fictions. An alternative approach is to make fiction as close to fact as possible, by reducing its scope to the one subject on which each writer is an unchallengeable authority: himself or herself. Ben Lerner’s “10:04,” Tao Lin’s “Taipei” and Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?” all seek to convince us that we are reading about the writer’s actual life. These writers are engaged in a sophisticated project, in which the line between truth and fiction becomes harder and harder to make out. But this game has a : Label a book “fiction,” and all is forgiven. A fiction can never be accused of being a lie. The problem is that, more and more, people seem to want to be lied to. This is the flip side of “reality hunger,” since a lie, like a fake memoir, is a fiction that does not admit its fictionality. That is why the lie is so seductive: It allows the liar and his audience to cooperate in changing the nature of reality itself, in a way that can appear almost magical. “Magical thinking” is used as an insult, but it is perhaps the most primal kind of thinking there is. The problem for modern people is that we can no longer perform this magic naively, with an undoubting faith in the reality of our inventions. We lie to ourselves now with a bad conscience. When the memoir is exposed as not having “really” happened, we want our money back. Fiction was one solution to this quandary, allowing us to suspend disbelief in the way that Coleridge said was essential for literature. But the postmodern solution is even more powerful: It is the simple shamelessness that allows us to recognize a lie as a lie but still treat it as if it were a reality. Reality shows are a trivial example of this technique, but when it comes to politics the same process can have deadly results. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was published, like “Moll Flanders,” with no name on the title page it, too, claimed to be a true account of real events — in this case, a meeting at which Jews plotted to take over the world and destroy civilization. Perhaps some of its readers, when it first appeared around 1903 and even today, sincerely believed that this was a real document. But the “Protocols” is even more powerful when endorsed by people who know it is false, because such an act turns fact itself into an irrelevance. People who can turn a lie into a truth have the power to shape reality they are poets of the real. And the audience that gives them its willing suspension of disbelief is a in this uncanny transformation, just as novel readers conspire in their enchantment. The bond between demagogues and their audience is cemented by their exhilarating consciousness of shared culpability. The problem with our “ ” politics is that a large share of the population has moved beyond true and false. They thrill precisely to the falsehood of a statement, because it shows that the speaker has the power to reshape reality in line with their own fantasies of beleaguerment. To call novelists liars is naïve, because it mistakes their intention they never wanted to be believed in the first place. The same is true of demagogues. From its beginning, the novel has tested the distinction between truth, fiction and lie now the collapse of those distinctions has given us the age of Trump. We are entering a period in which the very idea of literature may come to seem a luxury, a distraction from political struggle. But the opposite is true: No matter how irrelevant hardheaded people may believe it to be, literature continually proves itself a sensitive instrument, a leading indicator of changes that will manifest themselves in society and culture. Today as always, the imagination is our best guide to what reality has in store. | 1 |
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sunday in an interview on New York AM 970 radio show “The Cats Roundtable” that it was very clear that former FBI Director James Comey hated President Donald Trump after he made it known he leaked memos. He also urged Congress to act to abolish the independent counsel established by the Department of Justice to investigate alleged ties between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and Russia. Gingrich told host John Catsimatidis, “The more amazing thing I thought that Comey did that I think is going to have a lot of repercussions is Comey admitted publicly, in fact, boasted about it, that he had deliberately leaked … in order to set up the pressure to get a special, independent counsel. And I think that is an astonishing statement. ” “[I]t’s very clear that Comey hates Trump,” he continued. “I think Congress should now intervene and should abolish the independent counsel because Comey makes so clear that it’s the poison fruit of a deliberate manipulation by the FBI director leaking to the New York Times to deliberately set up this particular situation. I think it is very sick. ” Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 1 |
Christians Martyred by ISIS: 1,131 In addition, at least 125 Christian churches had been attacked or destroyed by ISIS Michael W. Chapman | CNS News - October 27, 2016 Comments
A report submitted to the State Department earlier this year documented that between 2003 and June 9, 2014, at least 1,131 Christians – identified by name and place of death – had been murdered by the radical Muslims that comprise the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
In addition, at least 125 Christian churches had been attacked or destroyed by ISIS.
The report, Genocide Against Christians in the Middle East , was submitted to Secretary of State John Kerry on March 9, 2016 by the Knights of Columbus and the humanitarian group In Defense of Christians. Eight days later, March 17, Kerry officially declared that ISIS’s ongoing actions against Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities constituted genocide.
Britain, the European Parliament, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Iraqi and Kurdish governments have also declared ISIS’s actions genocide. | 0 |
Home / News / BREAKING: ILLEGAL ALIEN CAUSES $61 MILLION IN DAMAGE, HAS BEEN DEPORTED 5 TIMES…TRUMP IS PISSED! BREAKING: ILLEGAL ALIEN CAUSES $61 MILLION IN DAMAGE, HAS BEEN DEPORTED 5 TIMES…TRUMP IS PISSED! fisher 2 hours ago News , USA , World Comments Off on BREAKING: ILLEGAL ALIEN CAUSES $61 MILLION IN DAMAGE, HAS BEEN DEPORTED 5 TIMES…TRUMP IS PISSED! BREAKING: ILLEGAL ALIEN CAUSES $61 MILLION IN DAMAGE, HAS BEEN DEPORTED 5 TIMES… TRUMP IS PISSED!
Angel Gilberto Garcia-Avalos is an illegal alien living in America who has been reported FIVE TIMES.
He recently caused $61 million in damage after setting fire to a National Forest in California.
This is the reason Donald Trump will win on November 8th.
People are fed-up with these illegal criminals!
From Washington Times:
Angel Gilberto Garcia-Avalos had been deported five times in just the past four years, yet each time he has managed to sneak from Mexico back into the U.S., where he ended up in more mischief: driving without a license, attempted burglary and felony weapons charges.
In August, he graduated to full-fledged mayhem, sparking a fire in the Sequoia National Forest that has already cost the government $61 million and left some of the country’s most beautiful landscape scarred for years to come.
Garcia, who pleaded guilty last month and faces 13 months in prison, had only recently been released from the Kern County Jail. He likely would have been deported again, but local authorities were unable to report him to immigration authorities because of California’s new sanctuary city law, which prohibited the sheriff from communicating with federal agents.
Thanks a lot, sanctuary cities!
When Trump wins, these cities that protect illegals from the feds will not receive funding.
Liberal policies harm us all. This is proof.
Who’s going to wind up paying for this mess? | 0 |
SITTWE, Myanmar — Satellite images show villages burned to the ground. Human rights groups relay allegations of rape and the slaughter of children. Thousands of refugees have fled across the border to Bangladesh, while aid workers have been prevented from reaching the afflicted. As the Myanmar Army unleashes a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against the Rohingya in the north, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s leader, has remained nearly silent, putting her status as an exemplar of democratic values and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate in a different light. Human rights advocates accuse her of condoning a military campaign designed to drive the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in this nation, off their land in Rakhine State and out of the country. The United Nations human rights agency has said the abuses may amount to crimes against humanity. Now, nearly two months after the campaign began, it remains unclear what Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s plan is. She has chosen not to visit the area, close to the border with Bangladesh, which has been sealed under a military directive designed to keep out foreign aid workers and journalists. And though she has created an advisory commission headed by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, to look into reconciliation in Rakhine State, she has largely defended the military’s behavior. “Show me a country without human rights issues,” she said at an Oct. 12 news conference. “Every country has human rights abuses. I am taking seriously allegations of human rights violations in this country. ” A few weeks later during a visit to Tokyo, she said, “We have been very careful not to blame anyone until we have complete evidence about who has been responsible. ” The Obama administration had hoped that once Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi came to power, the plight of the Rohingya would improve. Instead, their living conditions have deteriorated, American officials say. Near the town of Sittwe, south of where the military campaign is being carried out, more than 100, 000 Rohingya live in internment camps, after their properties were demolished in communal violence in 2012. The army began its campaign this fall, after it said armed men killed nine police officers on Oct. 9. But instead of retaliating against what is believed to be a small group of poorly armed Rohingya men, it has uprooted tens of thousands of impoverished civilians, most of whom lead a existence as rice farmers and petty traders. The use of helicopter gunships and the “wholesale burning of villages” amounted to “gross violations of human rights,” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an early supporter of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi. Experts say the army’s excessive methods are adapted from British counterinsurgency tactics from the colonial era, known as the “four cuts. ” The military has honed those practices during decades of fighting ethnic groups in other parts of Myanmar, said U Aung Thu Nyein, director of the Institute for Strategy and Policy in Myanmar. Those tactics include denying armed groups access to intelligence, finance, recruits and food by pushing civilian populations away from where they usually live. About 10, 000 Rohingya have struggled across the border into Bangladesh since the operation began, many of them weak after evading Bangladeshi patrols that have officially closed the border, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees said. The refugees were fleeing security forces who were “killing men, shooting them, slaughtering children, raping women, burning and looting houses, forcing these people to cross the river” into Bangladesh, John McKissick, the head of the agency’s office in the Bangladeshi outpost, Cox’s Bazaar, told the BBC last week. The ultimate goal was “the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority in Myanmar,” Mr. McKissick said. “Descriptions coming out of there are consistent with decades of abuse by the military against the Karen, Chin and Shan ethnic people,” said Tyler Giannini, a professor at Harvard Law School and a of its International Human Rights Clinic. “That’s why it is beholden on the government to investigate what’s going on against the Rohingya and hold those responsible accountable. ” As the civilian leader of the government, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi now shares power with the military. The army controls three vital cabinet posts: defense, home affairs and border affairs. These are the ministries running the operation in Rakhine State. Most of the information she receives on the Rohingya is from military leaders, and they have convinced her that the Rohingya in Rakhine are terrorists, analysts in Myanmar say. Her government advisers are mostly former military officers, or veteran civil servants with firm beliefs about the superiority of Buddhist values over all others, they say. A spokesman for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi said she was “standing” with the military. “She knows everything,” said U Zaw Htay, the spokesman. “The military has been briefing her on every important issue. ” Further, there is little pushback against the military from the Myanmar news media or other possible quarters of criticism, said Kelley Currie, a senior fellow at the Project 2049 Institute, a private group that promotes international security in Washington, and who regularly visits Myanmar. “‘Progressive’ elements have either gone silent or joined in and rhetoric based on information that is to the military,” she said. Fiona MacGregor, a reporter who wrote about alleged rapes of Rohingya women by the military for The Myanmar Times, a privately run newspaper, said she was fired after her article appeared. So far, the government has declined requests to appoint an independent inquiry into the military’s abuses. Instead, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is depending on the advisory commission, which does not include any Rohingya members. Mr. Annan is scheduled to visit Sittwe on Friday. Mr. Giannini said there is enough evidence to warrant an independent commission similar to one conducted in the Darfur region of Sudan under the auspices of the United Nations in 2004. That inquiry found the Sudanese military had committed war crimes and referred the matter to the International Criminal Court. Satellite images reviewed by Human Rights Watch captured over four days in November showed that entire villages in Rakhine State had been razed and more than 1, 250 buildings were destroyed by fire, said Matthew Smith, chief executive of Fortify Rights, a group that specializes in the Rohingya. “We’ve steadily received allegations of mass rape of Rohingya women and girls by army soldiers,” Mr. Smith said. “With a gun to his head, one man was reportedly forced to watch as soldiers raped his daughter. ” About 30, 000 men, women and children are in “desperate need” of food, shelter and medical care, said Vivian Tan, a spokeswoman for the United Nations high commissioner for refugees. About 160, 000 vulnerable people have been cut off from health care, school feedings and maternal care, she said. Most of the aid workers who should be tending to the displaced have been forced to leave the area and have been refused travel permits to return, Mr. Smith said. The office of the state counselor, which Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi presides over, is in charge of travel permits for the Rakhine region. Of 26 workers distributing aid before Oct. 9, only six were still there, he said. Like many who admired Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s steadfastness during 15 years of house arrest under the former junta, Mr. Giannini, the Harvard Law professor, said he was baffled by her failure to speak out. “She says she is a politician,” he noted. “You can have politics and you can have protection of the civilian population at the same time. ” | 1 |
Friday on ABC’s “The View,” senior for Breitbart News Joel Pollak took on Joy Behar over claims Breitbart News is a white supremacist and site. Partial transcript as follows: BEHAR: Breitbart — the website has been described as a platform for the or some say white supremacists. How would you describe it? POLLAK: Breitbart News is a conservative website and we have a very diverse group of editors and writers. I’m the orthodox Jewish former senior . So not exactly an accurate description. We call that fake news, a fake news description. But we are — BEHAR: What’s fake news, what I said? POLLAK: Yes. BILA: That it is white supremacists. BEHAR: No no no. That is not fake news. POLLAK: It’s absolutely — BEHAR: How do you explain this headline, ‘Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,’ You’re Jewish. POLLAK: It was written by David Horowitz, who is one of the most prominent Jewish conservatives. He was criticizing Bill Kristol for not being Jewish enough, so it was the opposite of what people described. And we have more than a dozen Jewish people working at Breitbart including the CEO, COO. We have Black writers, Hispanic, Asian, whatever, gay, whatever you can imagine. BEHAR: What do you think is the rise of about in this country? POLLAK: I’m really glad the media finally woke up to this phenomena. It started quite a long time ago, long before Donald Trump ran for president, particularly in California where I live, on college campuses, there’s been a rising tide of linked to far criticism of Israel. It’s very tough to be a Jewish student on some of these campuses nowadays. BEHAR: Mostly, it seems to me that there’s a flurry of them since Trump is in. POLLAK: I think the media just woke up and noticed that this is a problem. BEHAR Really? POLLAK: And I think that I feel very proud that Donald Trump not only is one of the most presidents that we’ve ever had, but his daughter Ivanka tonight will light the Sabbath candles just like my wife will, and bring in the Sabbath. To me, that is something extraordinary in America history. BEHAR: But you know that phrase, one of my best friends is Jewish, it’s meaningless really. You can still be an and have Jewish relatives. POLLAK: I agree with you. When people say my friends are Jewish, it doesn’t cut it. HOSTIN: Or I have a black friend. POLLAK: But when your are Jewish, you have a little more credibility. HOSTIN: Let me ask you about Steve Bannon. Whoopi calls him President Bannon. He’s the White House chief strategist, former executive chair of Breitbart, people have called him everything from a Nazi to a racist. He’s made bigoted statements. They’ve called him a white supremacist sympathizer. What’s your response? How do you work for someone who has that reputation? POLLAK: None of that is true. That’s more fake news and even people who — HOSTIN: So everyone is lying? POLLAK: Yes. Steve is a fantastic guy. I worked with him for six years and he can be very tough in an argument. We used to argue all the time over any kind of policy issues. Jedediah will back me up here. You bring data and facts to the table — BILA: A very tough guy. POLLAK: Absolutely a person. HOSTIN: So we can’t believe when he makes these bigoted statements, is he just being provocative? POLLAK: What statements are you talking about? HOSTIN: There’s a laundry list. I can get you a card. BEHAR: Here’s a headline from Breitbart. ‘Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.’ Do I look crazy to you? POLLAK: You see how you’ve shifted the goal post now. So, it’s gone from Steve Bannon says things to, “Oh, there was a headline. ” Steve Bannon has not said bigoted things. BEHAR: But he’s behind these though. What are you talking about? BILA: I submitted content a long time ago to Breitbart and I know Steve and I’ve often argued that you can disagree with him, and it’s tough to disagree with him because he’s a strong headed guy, but I don’t believe him to be an or racist. He’s tough though, so if you go into battle you better be prepared. I have a question about Steve, which is that Steve is from what I know of him, he is kind of a boss. He does like to take control. He does like to be kind of in charge, and I see a lot of what’s coming out from the Trump campaign now. A lot of the focus seems to be about going against the media establishment. That is Steve’s main focal point. Is it safe to assume that Steve is kind of running the show? POLLAK: Well, I don’t think Donald Trump takes orders from anybody, so I think Donald Trump is very much in charge. I think that Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus do get along. Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
PITTSBURGH — The Miami Dolphins won the coin toss Sunday and kicked off to the Pittsburgh Steelers, a decision that in retrospect seemed a tad misguided. But then it was not as if electing to receive would have been a wiser choice. A more prudent, if somewhat unorthodox, strategy would have been doing something else entirely with the football. Hiding it, for example. Maybe beneath the Dolphins’ parkas. Because without the ball, the Steelers’ offense could not score. And if the Steelers’ offense could not score, then the Dolphins might actually have stood a chance of winning Sunday’s playoff game at Heinz Field instead of absorbing a comprehensive demolition. The defeat, which reaffirmed Pittsburgh as a formidable A. F. C. contender, held less suspense than a romantic comedy. All of 2 minutes 45 seconds elapsed before Pittsburgh scored on an exquisite (50 yards) by Antonio Brown. That preceded another exquisite by Brown (62 yards) which preceded a scoring rush by Le’Veon Bell, who accounted for all 78 yards on that drive (excluding a penalty) all on runs, 10 in a row. It was as if the Steelers kept giving him the ball because they had grown bored of demoralizing Miami through the air. Finishing with 167 yards, Bell set the team postseason record in his playoff debut. He missed the playoffs two seasons ago with a hyperextended knee. Last year, a torn knee ligament sidelined him. The Steelers have been eagerly waiting for their redoubtable trio of Bell, Brown and quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who completed his first 11 passes for 188 yards, to play in the postseason together. They combined for all four touchdowns, scored across the first seven series (one was a before halftime) in a performance that showcased Pittsburgh at the apex of its intimidating might. “We can attack in different ways,” Bell said. All of them are devastating. Especially those that involve Brown, who turned two short passes into long touchdowns, and Bell. Not since Barry Sanders, perhaps, has the N. F. L. seen a running back as destructively patient as Bell. He takes the handoff. Then he waits. “I’m standing back there and I’m watching, and I’m like, ‘Uh, are you going to go any time here? ’” Roethlisberger said of Bell. The length of Bell’s pause varies from play to play, but it allows him to survey the field, set up his blockers and find creases. Accelerating through, he leaves defenders in his wake, then drags them through it. “He’s a man for all situations or circumstances,” Coach Mike Tomlin said. When Miami’s defensive coordinator, Vance Joseph, was asked last week how he prioritized containing Brown, Bell and Roethlisberger, he chose Bell first. “If you can’t contain Bell, you can’t contain A. B. ,” Joseph said, using Brown’s nickname. The Dolphins, overwhelmed by the challenge, did neither. The burden of preparing for the Steelers now belongs to the Kansas City Chiefs, who will host Pittsburgh on Sunday afternoon in a rematch of a Week 4 game. The Steelers won by 29 points that night, but there is folly in perceiving past as prologue. The Dolphins’ resurfacing in the postseason after an absence elicited much joy not only in South Florida, but also in western Pennsylvania, where the Steelers seethed all week, eager to avenge an October rout. That win ignited Miami’s recovery from a start and foretold the steamrollering that running back Jay Ajayi, who rushed for 204 yards that day, would administer to defensive game plans. Even thinking about that defeat angered the Steelers’ defensive coordinator, Keith Butler, who said it “really challenges your manhood. ” The Steelers pride themselves on playing a physical style. Shoved around that day, they vowed to inflict pain Sunday. “We just wanted to get out there and be as physical and as violent as we could be,” safety Mike Mitchell said. “Like I said, our was to tee off on them. It wasn’t to wrap up and make tackles. ” Ajayi exceeded 200 yards twice more during the regular season. He never came close Sunday, smothered by Pittsburgh’s front. He finished with 33 yards on 16 carries. “We always can get better, but we was cooking today,” defensive end Stephon Tuitt said. “It was fun to cook. ” The essence of Mitchell’s proclamation — “The goal was to tee off on them I can’t say that enough” — permeated the rest of the defense, which nearly turned Miami’s suboptimal quarterback situation even more dire midway through the second quarter. Starting a fourth consecutive week in place of the injured Ryan Tannehill (knee) Matt Moore left the pocket and, after releasing a pass, encountered linebacker Bud Dupree. He did not hit Moore so much as nearly dislodge Moore’s head from his body. “You just see a sack,” said Dupree, who had not yet seen a replay. Moore crumpled to the field and lay there as a skirmish that began near the Miami sideline expanded closer to midfield. It seemed to take less time for Moore to be examined for a concussion, and other injuries, than he spent on the ground. He missed one play. “I got checked out, I felt fine,” Moore said. “It was more of my jaw than anything else. I felt good. I came back in, and I was fine. ” On that drive, the Dolphins kicked a field goal to draw to within . But on their next two series, on either side of halftime, Moore was losing the ball — and, soon enough, the game for the Dolphins. Pittsburgh, which has won eight straight, has not lost since Nov. 13, when Dallas pilfered a late victory that earned the wrath of Roethlisberger, who demanded afterward that the Steelers play with more discipline and accountability. Those elements returned, and so did the A. F. C. North crown, borrowed for a year by Cincinnati. The Steelers reached this stage of the playoffs last season before losing at Denver. They did not have Bell, or even Brown, who sat with a concussion. Now they have both. And Roethlisberger, who said he would play next week despite an injured ankle encased afterward in a walking boot. And a healthy offensive line. And a snarling defense. But still. “I’m not excited about this,” guard Ramon Foster said after the win. Why? “It’s bigger than this week,” he added, referring to the coming game against the Chiefs. | 1 |
celebrities may be staying away from Donald J. Trump’s inauguration on Friday, but a large number of religious leaders will take part in the ceremony, reading Scripture and offering prayers for his administration. Six religious leaders — including a rabbi, a cardinal, and a diverse group of Protestant preachers — will participate, more than for any previous president, said Jim Bendat, an author and historian of inaugural ceremonies. Each will have 60 to 90 seconds to offer a reading or lead a prayer. “Some inaugurations have had just one, others have had two or three covering different religions, but this is a record,” Mr. Bendat said. Here are those who are scheduled to participate: Cardinal Dolan has been the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York since 2009. His participation in the inauguration has been controversial in part because he has criticized Mr. Trump. In a 2015 piece for The Daily News, he described the as the manifestation of “the ugly phenomenon called nativism” that shaped American politics in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He said voters should “take seriously the Bible’s teaching that we are to welcome the stranger. ” Last week on his radio show, the cardinal said he was “honored” to be invited to take part in the inauguration and said he would have done the same thing had Hillary Clinton won the election. “It’s not the person, it’s the office, right?” he said. “I pray with prisoners. That doesn’t mean I approve of what they’ve done. ” Mr. Rodriguez is the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, an organization that says it represents roughly 100 million Hispanic evangelicals in the United States and Latin America. In a statement, he said that he saw participating in the inauguration as “not just a patriotic honor” but “as a sacred duty. ” Mr. Rodriguez has walked a tightrope in the past, defending Mr. Trump against accusations of racism (he called them “hyperbole from the liberal media”) but also speaking up for undocumented immigrants, many of whom attend evangelical churches. “The vast majority are not rapists or murderers,” he said in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. “They’re actually Christians, committed to biblical orthodoxy or very staunch conservative Catholics. How about that? So they’re not rapists or murderers and we have to find a way of finding a solution. If we’re not going to deport them, how are we going to integrate them?” Pastor White is a Florida televangelist who is controversial in evangelical circles for her promotion of prosperity gospel, which states that true believers will be blessed not just with eternal salvation but also with health and wealth on Earth. She is also the pastor of a church in Apopka, Fla. Prosperity gospel is a theological world that has seen some abuse from the misuse of financial donations given to speed the arrival of God’s blessings. The practices of Ms. White and other televangelists were investigated by the Senate Finance Committee in 2007, but no wrongdoing was found. On her website, Pastor White sells a range of spiritual products like books and DVDs and also exhorts followers to make a “first fruits” donation to her ministry, a gift she says is ”mandated by God. ” “Your sacrificial offering will be a seed for blessings for the remainder of the year,” Pastor White wrote. “According to Ezekiel 44, when you present your First Fruits offering, it will cause a blessing to rest upon your house!” Rabbi Hier is the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization named after the Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor. Critics have called for him to drop out of the inauguration, citing Mr. Trump’s support among white nationalist groups, but the rabbi said participating in the ceremony was a “ ” for him. “There are 364 days a year for politics, for the two sides to pile on each other. Three hundred days of that is enough,” he said. “Once every four years, the president of United States deserves a pass from both sides from political bickering otherwise, we weaken our democracy. ” Rabbi Hier will be the first Jewish religious leader to take part in an inaugural ceremony since 1985, he said, a fact that weighed in his decision to attend. “If a rabbi turned this down and said no?” he said, “It would be a tremendous backlash. Many people would say ‘look at how ungrateful the Jewish community is. ’” Mr. Graham is the son of Billy Graham, a pioneering televangelist and longtime spiritual adviser to American presidents from both parties. He has continued much of his father’s work. He is president and chief executive of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and has been a vocal Trump supporter. The day after the election, Mr. Graham wrote on Facebook that Mr. Trump had won because “God’s hand intervened Tuesday night to stop the godless, atheistic progressive agenda from taking control of our country. ” He continued: Bishop Jackson runs Great Faith Ministries International and Impact Television Network, which describes itself as the only Christian network founded and operated by . Bishop Jackson hosted Mr. Trump at his Detroit church and interviewed him on his network last September, a decision which drew criticism from other spiritual leaders because of the ’s comments about minorities. In the interview, the bishop asked Mr. Trump how he planned to heal the country’s racial divide if he won the presidency. Mr. Trump attributed that polarization to a lack of “spirit” and poverty and promised to create jobs. Bishop Jackson defended his visit with Mr. Trump to The Detroit Free Press in August. “It’s not about being a Judas to my people,” he said. “This is not an endorsement. This is engagement, for him to tell us what he wants to do. ” | 1 |
Multiple NY Police Departments Under Investigation for Hosting Gay Sex Parties With Underage Boys Multiple NY Police Departments Under Investigation for Hosting Gay Sex Parties With Underage Boys Matt Agorist November 3, 2016 1 Comment
Schenectady, NY — A police officer’s suspension over an investigation into writing fraudulent checks has prompted a multi-agency investigation into alleged gay sex parties for police officers. While sex parties alone are not criminal, a source close to the investigation said the parties were attended by young boys who were not of legal age to drink or consent to having sex with adults.
Sgt. Jonathan E. Moore, 35, of the Schenectady police department, has been suspended after he and his boyfriend, Anthony Aubin, 27, were caught at trying to use a fraudulent check to purchase a $92,000 Jaguar. Aubin was arrested on felony charges for attempting to use the check.
However, according to a report in the Times Union, the arrest of Aubin, who has a lengthy criminal record and was recently on parole, has triggered a much broader, multi-agency police investigation into allegations that gay officers may have hosted or taken part in sex parties — called “breeding parties” — that allegedly were attended by teenagers who were not of legal age to drink alcohol or consent to having sex with adults.
Aside from the Schenectady police department investigation, the probe has spread to the Albany police department as well. As the Times reports, other departments may also become involved in the broader investigation, according to a person briefed on the matter but not authorized to comment publicly.
“I’m not really in a position to say anything about it at this point,” Albany police Chief Brendan Cox said Tuesday. “There is a case we are looking into but we are not in a position to even gauge whether or not there is any truth to what has been alleged.”
Moore also admitted to using the state-run criminal database for personal reasons to check the background of his boyfriend.
According to the report, Moore told police that he knew Aubin had a lengthy criminal record but had no idea the checks were fakes. The $92,000 check was purported to be from a Miami law office and the $15,000 check was from a fictitious company on Washington Avenue in Albany, reported the Times.
Moore told investigators that Aubin moved in with him several months ago and the couple was planning to make a lot of money because they had signed contracts with a Connecticut company called Bear Films to make gay porn movies.
In a statement on Wednesday, Schenectady police Chief Eric Clifford said Moore’s involvement in the pornography industry may have violated departmental policies, but he did not mention whether or not the officer will face charges.
Clifford said it’s “not appropriate to have him out on the street working for us.”
After Aubin was locked up, he apparently began rolling over on all his other connections in police departments. His allegations have sparked investigations into other officers who may have had unlawful sex with teenage boys.
Police officers having sex with underage victims is, unfortunately, a fairly common practice. Police sexual misconduct is so common that more than 1,000 officers have had their licenses revoked in just the last six years for it — nearly half of them involve underage victims.
According to the report , around 1,000 policemen across the US had their licenses revoked and lost their jobs over the last six years on account of numerous sexual offenses that included rape and possession of child pornography.
The probe involved examining records from 41 states to see how many police officers’ licenses were revoked in 2009-2014 and for which offenses. Police desertification data was not provided by nine states and the District of Columbia. The investigation included examining the records of state and local police, sheriff’s deputies, prison guards and school resource officers. However, no federal officers were included in the investigation, meaning that number is likely higher. Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter and now on Steemit Share | 0 |
The National Institutes of Health announced on Thursday that it was planning to lift its ban on funding some research that injects human stem cells into animal embryos. The N. I. H. announced its proposal in a blog post by Carrie Wolinetz, the associate director for science policy, and in the Federal Register. The purpose is to try to grow human tissues or organs in animals to better understand human diseases and develop therapies to treat them. Researchers have long been putting human cells into animals — like pieces of human tumors in mice to test drugs that might destroy the tumors — but stem cell research is fundamentally different. The stem cells are put into developing embryos where they can become any cells, like those in organs, blood and bone. If the funding ban is lifted, it could help patients by, for example, encouraging research in which a pig grows a human kidney for a transplant. But the very idea of a mix can be chilling, and will not meet with universal acceptance. In particular, when human cells injected into an animal embryo develop in part of that animal’s brain, difficult questions arise, said Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell researcher at the University of California, Davis. “There’s no clear dividing line because we lack an understanding of at what point humanization of an animal brain could lead to more humanlike thought or consciousness,” he said. The N. I. H. ’s plan will most likely go into effect in the fall — perhaps with some modifications — after a comment period that is now open to the public and researchers. The N. I. H. which would be a major source of federal funds for this type of work, imposed the moratorium in September to consider concerns about the research. The studies were just beginning, and the N. I. H. did not have any projects underway involving chimeras, a term derived from mythological creatures that were part goat, lion and snake. But Renate Myles, a spokeswoman, said, “We watch the state of the science and knew that this was where the science was heading. ” For scientists, the moratorium was “a little jarring,” said Dr. George Q. Daley, a Harvard professor and the director of the stem cell transplantation program at Boston Children’s Hospital. Two months later, the N. I. H. convened a workshop to hear from researchers and experts in animal welfare. Two types of experiments that are being considered for funding would still have to undergo a review by an N. I. H. advisory committee. The first involves the addition of human stem cells to the embryos of animals before the embryos reach a stage when organs are starting to develop. Because nonhuman primates like monkeys and chimpanzees are so genetically close to people, researchers working with such primates would have to wait until an embryo was further developed before adding human stem cells, according to the proposal. The second type of study introduces stem cells into embryos of animals other than rodents where the cells could get into and modify the animals’ brains. Of particular concern is creating chimeras with human cells in the brain. The N. I. H. would continue its ban on funding any research that could result in an animal with human sperm or eggs that would then be bred. All of the N. I. H. ’s proposals, though, apply only to the work that is financed with taxpayer money. Research supported by private donors or companies would not be affected. Dr. Daley described some of the work researchers had been doing in this area. First, they wanted to know if they had isolated new types of stem cells — ones that could turn into any type of tissue or organ. Accomplishing that involves putting the new cells into an embryo and seeing if they turn into the placenta, as well as every cell type in the adult animal. In other experiments, they wanted to look at human stem cells that developed into very specific tissues. For example, one team of researchers found that if they put rat stem cells into the embryo of a mouse that was missing genes needed to make a pancreas, they ended up with a mouse that had a rat pancreas. Now, Dr. Daley said, the hope is to do the same sort of experiments with pigs missing genes for organs like a kidney or a liver and see if human stem cells can be used to grow human organs in the animals for transplants. “It’s science fiction today, but there has been enough progress in rat to mouse and even in pigs that it is at least theoretically possible,” Dr. Daley said. Another team studied the use of human stem cells in mice embryos in the hope of eventually understanding human psychiatric disorders. Dr. Wolinetz of the N. I. H. said during a teleconference that she expected “some learning” about what would happen with chimeras that had human cells in their brains. “There is a lot we don’t understand about the brain,” she said, “which is one reason the possibility of these animal models is really exciting. ” The work is disturbing to many. But does the unease reflect the novelty of the ideas, like concerns that surfaced with the advent of heart transplants, which were first met with revulsion and then embraced by the public? Or is this work of a different ilk? Jeffrey P. Kahn, the director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, points to two looming ethical issues. One is to decide if there is a fundamental difference between adding DNA from one species into another — the technology used to produce genetically modified foods — and putting human cells into an animal. Many people can accept genetically modified organisms, but would a chimera eventually become acceptable? After all, Dr. Kahn said, in both cases, you could say “it’s just DNA. ” Where to draw the human boundary is another issue. If it is O. K. to put human cells into an animal, why does it seem clearly wrong to put animal cells into a human? As more and more human cells are added to an animal, at what point is the result different from adding more and more animal cells to a human embryo? “What are we doing when we are mixing the traits of two species?” Dr. Kahn asked. “What makes us human? Is it having 51 percent human cells?” Those questions, he added, “are part of what make people react to this issue. ” | 1 |
¿Qué hacer si tu pareja se muda a tu piso? CONSEJOS vivienda
Tu pareja y tú habéis decidido dar un paso importante en vuestra relación: vivir juntos. Dentro de poco, se mudará a tu piso y comenzaréis a compartir ese espacio que, hasta ahora, era sólo para ti. Pero ¿está preparada tu casa? Te ofrecemos unos consejos con los que acondicionar tu hogar para convertirlo en vuestro nidito de amor.
1. Camas separadas : Llegará un momento en vuestra relación en que os agobiaréis durmiendo juntos. Los ronquidos, el calor corporal o las posturas que adopta tu pareja al dormir harán que acabéis optando por pernoctar en camas separadas. ¿Por qué no adelantarse a ese momento y hacerlo desde el principio? Os aportará comodidad y evitará que dentro de 30 años tengáis que pasar por el incómodo momento de confesar que preferís dormir solos.
2. Esconde a tus padres : Nunca llegaste a reconocer que, a tus cerca de cuarenta años, sigues viviendo con ellos y sólo ibais a tu casa cuando no estaban. Ahora ya es demasiado tarde para confesarlo. La única opción que te queda es colocar una trampilla en el suelo y meter allí a tus progenitores. Recuerda darles de comer y ofrecerles cada día un cuenco con agua: si tu pareja los descubre, que al menos en su primer encuentro estén con vida.
3. Inventario de tus pertenencias : Haz un inventario detallado y minucioso de todas y cada una de tus pertenencias. Que tu pareja sea el amor de tu vida no significa que no tenga tendencias cleptómanas. No te lo tomes como un símbolo de falta de confianza (o sí) sino como una manera de evitar que tus objetos más preciados acaben en Wallapop o en el mercadillo de los domingos. Este consejo está especialmente recomendado para aquellas personas cuyas parejas se llamen Vladimir Livitchenko o “La Rulas”.
4. Fotos ficticias de amigos y familiares : En realidad, sólo te quedan tus padres, tu tía Adela y dos amigos del colegio, pero si pones un corcho lleno de fotos de desconocidos y dices que son tu familia y amigos, siempre tendrás una coartada para irte de casa cuando no te apetezca estar con tu pareja. Un “Cariño, me ha llamado mi prima Sole para echar un café” o un “Hoy salgo de cañas con los del barrio” siempre sonarán mejor que un “Me voy al parque tres horas porque no te aguanto más”.
5. Tener un bebé por casa : Tener un bebé en casa y presentárselo a tu pareja como el hijo que nunca le confesaste que tenías será la prueba definitiva para saber si realmente te quiere. Si no sale corriendo nada más ver al niño, o te propone dejarlo a las puertas de un convento, es que merece la pena. No hace falta que el hijo sea tuyo, siempre puedes pedírselo prestado unos meses a otra pareja de amigos o alquilárselo por dos euros la hora. Es el precio del amor.
6. Habitación del pánico : Un espacio seguro en el que resguardarse cuando tu pareja está desquiciada y no atiende a razones. Puede valer el cuarto de la plancha, pero asegúrate de que está equipado con latas de conservas para más de dos meses. Hay enfados que no se pasan en una tarde.
7. Amante en el armario : “Si no tengo amante”, estarás pensando. No te preocupes, en España hay muchos actores en paro que por un bocadillo al día estarán encantados de hacerse pasar por uno. La idea es tenerlo siempre en el armario, escondido detrás de los abrigos, y si en algún momento te hartas de tu pareja, se lo enseñas y finges que llevas engañándole con esa persona varios meses. En el 89% de los casos conllevará a la ruptura inmediata con tu pareja. En el otro 11% el asunto suele derivar en una propuesta para realizar un trío.
8. Falsifica el contrato de alquiler : ¿Por qué vas a hacer que tu pareja te pague sólo 350 euros cuando puedes hacer que te pague 700? Falsifica el contrato e infla el precio. ¿No dice siempre que haría cualquier cosa por ti? Ahora es el momento de que lo demuestre.
9. Compra la Filmoteca Nacional : El cénit de toda relación llega cuando la actividad de la pareja se reduce a ver películas juntos, repanchingados en el sillón. La idea puede parecer arriesgada, pero ni Netflix ni Movistar Plus te ofrecerán los 36.000 títulos de la Filmoteca Nacional. Y haznos caso, los vais a ver todos, quizá en sólo un domingo.
10. Alquila un piso en el edificio de enfrente y contrata un francotirador : Es muy violento tener que decirle a tu pareja que no te gusta que traiga visitas a casa. Por eso, siempre es más sencillo alquilar un piso frente al tuyo y contratar un francotirador que pase allí las 24 horas apuntando hacia vuestra ventana. Si tu pareja trae al piso a alguien que no te cae bien, sólo tendrás que hacer una señal para que abra fuego. | 0 |
Uber has lost a battle in the British High Court which has ruled that all private hire taxi companies must have their drivers pass an English language test to be allowed to operate in London. [High Court Judge John Mitting shut down Uber’s appeal of Transport for London’s (TfL) new English requirements that were proposed last year, arguing that “TfL are entitled to require private hire drivers to demonstrate English language compliance. ” TfL argued that to better serve Londoners, private hire drivers who originated from speaking countries would have to hold a English qualification. The issue for Uber resulted not from drivers having to learn to speak English, but the fact that to pass the test, their drivers would also have to show skills in reading and writing. Uber argued that this requirement was too welcoming the opportunity to go before a judge on the issue in September of last year. Tom Elvidge, the general manager for Uber London at the time, argued that “TfL’s plans threaten[ed] the livelihoods of thousands of drivers in London, while also stifling tech companies for Uber. ” However, the decision was not all bad for Uber. TfL had also proposed that a dedicated call center for passengers had to be set up, along with drivers taking out more insurance than was necessary. These measures were struck down by the judge. Elvidge noted these wins for the company, but stressed that the decision was overall negative: While we are glad the court agreed with us on the other measures TfL tried to impose this is a deeply disappointing outcome for tens of thousands of drivers who will lose their livelihoods because they cannot pass an essay writing test. We’ve always supported spoken English skills, but writing an essay has nothing to do with communicating with passengers or getting them safely from A to B. Transport for London’s own estimates show that their plans will put more than 33, 000 existing private hire drivers out of business. That’s why we intend to appeal this unfair and disproportionate new rule. Jack Hadfield is a student at the University of Warwick and a regular contributor to Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @ToryBastard or on Gab @JH. | 1 |
Posted on November 2, 2016 by DavidSwanson
If you’re a fan of the Netflix show Black Mirror , go watch the episode called “Men Against Fire” before reading this. It’s the one about war.
In this 60-minute science fiction show, soldiers have been (somehow) programed so that when they look at certain people they see them as freaky monsters with pointed teeth and bizarre faces. These people look frightening and non-human. They are thought of as objects, not as people at all. In reality they are themselves terrified, unarmed, ordinary looking people. And they have a tool with which to protect themselves, a stick with a green light. It doesn’t kill or injure. The stick deprograms a soldier so that when he looks at someone he sees them as they really are without the monstrous distortion.
Of course a deprogramed soldier is of no use to the military. In “Men Against Fire” the military offers a deprogramed soldier two choices. He can re-experience on an endless loop a recent reality in which he murdered helpless human beings, but this time experience it while seeing them as human beings instead of as “roaches” (what the military calls the intended victims made to appear monstrous), or he can be reprogramed and get back to the untroubled work of extermination.
While this story is more fiction than science, some reality breaks into the Netflix drama. During World War I, we’re told accurately, a commander beat troops with a stick to get them to shoot at enemies. Troops we’re also routinely drugged for the same purpose. During World War II, we’re told, also on the basis of actual studies, only 15% to 20% of U.S. troops fired at opposing troops. In other words, 80% to 85% of the Greatest Heroes of the Greatest War Ever were actually a drain on the killing campaign, whereas the conscientious objector featured in the new Mel Gibson movie or, for that matter, the guy who stayed home and grew vegetables contributed more to the effort.
Killing and facing killing are extremely difficult. They require the closest human reality to programing. They require conditioning. They require muscle memory. They require thoughtless reflex. The U.S. military had so mastered this programing by the time of the war on Vietnam that as many as 85% of troops actually fired at enemies — though some of them also fired at their own commanders. The real trouble came when they didn’t remember these acts of murder as the extermination of “roaches” but as the reality of what they were. And veterans remembered their acts of murder on an endless loop with no option to be re-programed out of it. And they killed themselves in greater numbers than the Vietnamese had killed them.
The U.S. military has advanced not an inch in the matter of reconciling its killers to what they have done. Here’s an account just published of what that means for veterans and those they know and love. You can easily find another such account every day online. The top killer of members of the U.S. military is suicide. The top killer of the people who live in “liberated” nations during their liberations is members of the U.S. military. This is not coincidental. Veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (only a disorder from the perspective of those who’d like to suppress healthy inhibitions), moral injury (what a veteran friend calls “a fancy word for guilt and regret”), and neurocognitive disorder/brain injury. Often the same individual suffers all three of these types of harm, and often they are hard to distinguish from each other or to fully diagnose prior to autopsy. But the one that eats your soul, the one solved only by science fiction, is moral injury.
Of course science fiction only works when it overlaps with nonfiction. U.S. troops conditioned to kick in doors in Iraq or Syria and view every person inside as a non-human threat don’t use the term “roaches,” preferring “hadjis” or “camel jockeys” or “terrorists” or “combatants” or “military aged males” or “Muslims.” Removing the killers physically to a drone piloting booth can create psychic “distance” aided by reference to victims as “bugsplat” and other terms in the same vein as “roaches.” But this approach to producing conscience-free killers has been a spectacular failure. Watch the real suffering of the real drone killers in the current movie National Bird . There’s no fiction there, but the very same horror of the roach-killing soldier re-experiencing what he’s done.
Such failures and shortcomings for the military are never complete failures of course. Many kill, and kill ever more willingly. What becomes of them afterward is not the military’s problem. It couldn’t possibly care less. So, awareness of what becomes of those who kill won’t stop the killing. What we need is the real life equivalent of a little stick with a green light on it, a magic tool for deprograming members of every military on earth, every potential recruit, every investor in weapons dealing, every profiteer, every willing tax payer, every apathetic observer, every heartless politician, every thoughtless propagandist. What can we use?
I think the closest equivalents to the stick with the green light are passports and telephones. Give every American a passport automatically and free. Make the right to travel inviolable, including for felons. Make the duty to travel and to speak multiple languages part of every education. And give every family in every nation on the Pentagon’s potential enemies list a phone with a camera and internet access. Ask them to tell us their stories, including the stories of their encounters with the rarest of species: the newly appearing Unarmed American. This entry was posted in General . Bookmark the permalink . | 0 |
President Donald Trump will play golf with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe next week, near his Club in Palm Beach, Florida. [Trump insists that Abe is his partner during the round. So as usual, the 45th president plans on winning. “We’re going to have a round of golf, which is a great thing,” Golf Digest reported. “That’s the one thing about golf — you get to know somebody better on a golf course than you will over lunch. ” Trump has a ways to go to catch up to Barack Obama, who played over 300 rounds during his presidency. Nevertheless, Trump claims to have won many club championships over the years before his decision to dive into the political arena. Historically, golf plays a significant role for many of the nation’s presidents. Dwight Eisenhower played some 800 rounds as the 34th President of the United States. Woodrow Wilson reportedly played 1200 rounds when he was president from 1913 to 1921. The new will get a chance to air out a gift Abe presented to Trump after he won the election in November. Japan’s chief executive bestowed a Honma Beres driver to the New York billionaire. The club retails for a whopping $3, 755. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump indicated he would be looking for Abe and his country to help the United States in covering the cost of providing security and safety around the world. This idea disturbed many of Trump’s critics, as they accused him of encouraging nuclear arms proliferation in the “Land of the Rising Sun. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — House Republicans unveiled on Monday their plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, scrapping the mandate for most Americans to have health insurance in favor of a new system of tax credits to induce people to buy insurance on the open market. The bill sets the stage for a bitter debate over the possible dismantling of the most significant health care law in a . In its place would be a health law that would be far more oriented to the free market and would make changes to a vast part of the American economy. The House Republican bill would roll back the expansion of Medicaid that has provided coverage to more than 10 million people in 31 states, reducing federal payments for many new beneficiaries. It also would effectively scrap the unpopular requirement that people have insurance and eliminate tax penalties for those who go without. The requirement for larger employers to offer coverage to their employees would also be eliminated. People who let their insurance coverage lapse, however, would face a significant penalty. Insurers could increase their premiums by 30 percent, and in that sense, Republicans would replace a penalty for not having insurance with a new penalty for allowing insurance to lapse. House Republican leaders said they would keep three popular provisions in the Affordable Care Act: the prohibition on denying coverage to people with conditions, the ban on lifetime coverage caps and the rule allowing young people to remain on their parents’ health plans until age 26. Republicans hope to undo other major parts of President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement, including tax credits that help millions of Americans buy insurance, taxes on people with high incomes and the penalty for people who do not have health coverage. Medicaid recipients’ entitlement to health care would be replaced by a allotment to the states. And people with medical conditions would face new uncertainties in a more deregulated insurance market. The bill would also cut off federal funds to Planned Parenthood clinics through Medicaid and other government programs for one year. “Obamacare is a sinking ship, and the legislation introduced today will rescue people from the mistakes of the past,” said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader. Democrats denounced the effort as a cruel attempt to strip Americans of their health care. “Republicans will force tens of millions of families to pay more for worse coverage — and push millions of Americans off of health coverage entirely,” said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader. Two House committees — Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce — plan to take up the legislation on Wednesday. House Republicans hope the committees will approve the measure this week, clearing the way for the full House to act on it before a spring break scheduled to begin on April 7. The outlook in the Senate is less clear. Democrats want to preserve the Affordable Care Act, and a handful of Republican senators expressed serious concerns about the House plan as it was being developed. Under the House Republican plan, the tax credits provided under the Affordable Care Act would be replaced with credits that would rise with age as older people generally require more health care. In a late change, the plan reduces the tax credits for individuals with annual incomes over $75, 000 and married couples with incomes over $150, 000. Republicans did not offer any estimate of how much their plan would cost, or how many people would gain or lose insurance. The two House committees plan to vote on the legislation without having estimates of its cost from the Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper on Capitol Hill. But they did get the support from President Trump that they badly need to win House passage. “Obamacare has proven to be a disaster with fewer options, inferior care and skyrocketing costs that are crushing small business and families across America,” said the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer. “Today marks an important step toward restoring health care choices and affordability back to the American people. ” The release of the legislation is a step toward fulfilling a campaign pledge — repeal and replace — that has animated Republicans since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010. But it is far from certain Republican lawmakers will be able to get on the same page and repeal the health measure. On Monday, four Republican senators — Rob Portman of Ohio, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — signed a letter saying a House draft that they had reviewed did not adequately protect people in states like theirs that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Three conservative Republicans in the Senate — Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas — had already expressed reservations about the House’s approach. In the House, Republican leaders will have to contend with conservative members who have already been vocal about their misgivings about the legislation being drawn up. “Obamacare 2. 0,” Representative Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, posted on Twitter on Monday. Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, also offered a warning on Monday, joining with Mr. Paul to urge that Republican leaders pursue a “clean repeal” of the health care law. “Conservatives don’t want new taxes, new entitlements and an ‘ObamaCare Lite’ bill,” they wrote on the website of Fox News. “If leadership insists on replacing ObamaCare with no repeal will pass. ” The move to strip Planned Parenthood of funding and the plan’s provisions to reverse tax increases on the taxpayers will also expose Republicans in more moderate districts to Democratic attacks. The bill would provide each state with a fixed allotment of federal money for each person on Medicaid, the program for more than 70 million people. The federal government would pay different amounts for different categories of beneficiaries, including children, older Americans and people with disabilities. The bill would also repeal subsidies that the government provides under the Affordable Care Act to help people pay deductibles and other costs for insurance purchased through the public marketplaces. Eliminating these subsidies would cause turmoil in insurance markets, insurers and consumer advocates say. However, the House Republicans would provide states with $100 billion over nine years, which states could use to help people pay for health care and insurance. The tax credits proposed by House Republicans would start at $2, 000 a year for a person under 30 and would rise to a maximum of $4, 000 for a person 60 or older. A family could receive up to $14, 000 in credits. Even with those credits, Democrats say, many people would find insurance unaffordable. But Republicans would allow insurers to sell a leaner, less expensive package of benefits and would allow people to use the tax credits for insurance policies covering only catastrophic costs. While Republicans have argued over how to proceed, Mr. Trump has expressed only vague goals for how to repeal the Affordable Care Act and improve the nation’s health care system. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers and their aides are waiting to see whether he uses his platform, Twitter account and all, to press reluctant Republicans to get behind the House plan. The new version of the House Republican bill makes several changes to earlier drafts of the legislation. It drops a proposal to require employees with health insurance to pay income and payroll taxes on some of the value of that coverage. In addition, it would delay a provision of the Affordable Care Act that imposed an excise tax on insurance plans provided by employers to workers. Congress had already delayed this “Cadillac tax” — despised by employers and labor unions alike — by two years, to 2020. The new legislation would suspend the tax from 2020 through 2024. House Republicans would offer tax credits to help people buy insurance if they did not have coverage available from an employer or a government program. Under earlier versions of the bill, the tax credits increased with a person’s age, but would not have been tied to income. Backbench Republicans said the government should not be providing financial assistance to people with high incomes. Accordingly, under the new version of the bill, the tax credits would be reduced and eventually phased out. | 1 |
Some people may have recently heard of the many benefits of choosing a Paleo diet and may be wondering what this regime entails. Is this a new fad diet that is heavy on promises and low on results, or is it something that deserves to be thoroughly looked into? Today we are going to address some of the best aspects of a Paleo Diet as well as cover some of the foods that are to avoided.
Best Aspects of the Paleo Diet: Fish: To begin with, this diet is a good choice for those who savor seafood. This dietary regimen allows for the consumption of these foods. According to Dr. Cordain’s work, salmon, halibut, and more types of seafood are even encouraged. This can offer the benefits of healthy Omega 3 fatty acids.
However, there are many medical researchers, such as Dr. Helen Caldicott, that strongly suggest people avoid seafood and the consumption of seaweed dishes, from the Pacific Ocean, due to the ongoing Fukushima disaster. This is a problem that should also be known by those who enjoy cheeses and mushrooms since they both tend to absorb harmful amounts of radiation.
Meats: Grass produced meats are permitted. The Paleo Diet suggests meats are best in moderation. The same applies to other sources of protein, such as seeds, nuts, and eggs.
Many people find this variety of choices is what makes the Paleo Diet superior to many other weight-loss options. This is because a majority of the most common food cravings can be halted with the correct use of these permitted foods. While other healthy diets and eating options tend to revolve around a combination of prudent choices and a strong willpower to succeed, the Paleo Diet is viewed, by many, as one of the least restrictive weight-loss and management options. The variety of foods permitted makes it far easier to stick to an eating regimen, which can lead to positive results in both health and appearance.
Foods to Avoid: There are certain foods that are to be avoided on the Paleo Diet. These food choices include certain grains, refined sugar, dairy, and perhaps the hardest of all, for some, salt. There are some salt substitutes that are healthier and that taste the same as salt, therefore, this hurdle can easily be overcome. One such substitute is called, “No Salt,” which many proclaim tastes so much like regular salt, it is indistinguishable. Perhaps the most quirky thing, due to the makeup of the peanut, is that while nuts are allowed on the diet, peanuts are not allowed.
Before choosing any diet, it is a good idea to consult a doctor first, with that in mind, the Paleo Diet is certainly a health choice that should be considered and is worth researching. This is particularly true regarding those that have experimented with a variety of diets, in the past. There are people who may have given up on their weight-loss journey, due to the experience of food cravings that were unable to be met. This is the leading cause of diet failure in America today and the Paleo Diet is becoming quite popular due to the elimination of this hurdle.
By Samuel Di Gangi
Edited by Jeanette Smith
Sources:
The Paleo Diet: what to eat on the paleo diet
Independent Australia: educating Australians about Fukushima’s implications Dr. Helen Caldicott
Educating Australia
Image Courtesy of Adam Plotrowski’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License diet , paleo , weight-loss | 0 |
Dr. Jim Willie: ‘The Western central bank franchise system is totally broken, totally insolvent, and totally corrupt’… Bloomberg: ‘If debt continues to increase at twice the rate of GDP, financial engineering can only smooth things over for so long.’ by IWB · October 27, 2016 Tweet Schaeuble says monetary policy has reached its limits There is a growing international consensus that monetary policy has reached the limits of its possibilities, German Finance Wolfgang Schaeuble told a group of government officials in Berlin on Tuesday.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-schaeuble-liquidity-idUSKCN12P2EN China Gets Desperate About Debt
With its debts surging and growth sluggish, China has hit on a new strategy to revitalize its ailing economy. It’s the same as the old strategy. Only this time, it won’t work.
Earlier this month, China’s State Council released guidelines for a new swap program, in which companies can exchange troubled debt with banks in return for equity. The government hopes this will give the firms a chance to restructure on favorable terms, and avoid the prospect of “zombie companies” propped up indefinitely by state-owned lenders.
Optimists point to a similar program that China executed, with some success, a little more than a decade ago. But they’re overlooking the primary reason that the previous swap seemed to work — which doesn’t portend success this time around.
In the late 1990s, responding to a similar bout of excessive borrowing, China’s government created state-owned asset-management companies to help banks clean up their balance sheets. Firms such as China Cinda Asset Management Co. and China Huarong Asset Management Co. grew out of this program. These “bad banks” purchased a wide variety of assets and held them for extended periods with minimal return, thus helping the banks to continue lending.
The extent to which this solved any problems, as opposed to papering them over, is debatable. But even the limited success of that program won’t be repeated this time around.
…
In this light, China doesn’t need a new debt-for-equity swap program. It needs to cut credit growth. If debt continues to increase at twice the rate of GDP, financial engineering can only smooth things over for so long. The government also needs to recapitalize the banking system. That will be expensive: By most estimates, it will cost upward of $500 billion . But if banks simply shuffle bad debt between themselves, as is happening so far, there will be no net change to the health of the system.
Unfortunately for China, there’s no cheap or easy way out of this problem. Someday, the debt always comes due.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-26/china-gets-desperate-about-debt
Europe could be on eve of banking Armageddon which will dwarf Credit Crunch, says expert
GERMANY, Italy, Switzerland, Britain and France are facing the catastrophic consequences of ‘over leveraging’ as Europe’s biggest banks prepare to release their latest results over the next two days.
And analysts say the potential for a cataclysmic failure could spread like a wild-fire hitting the continent and beyond as the true extent of deep troubles in the international banking sector are revealed.
The IMF and German governments have refused to step in to prop-up struggling banks but risk analysts are warning Deutsche Bank, RBS, Lloyds, Unicredit, Intesa SanPaolo, and BMPS could all need a state bail out.
And it’s going to be a wake up call for the whole of Europe say experts who fear the reports are not going to be good for anyone.
With alarming simliarities to the 2008 global financial crash, the latest results could spell disaster not only for the wealthy bankers paid to operate the system but for ordinary savers.
New York based David Hendler of Viola Risk Advisors says the next two days could have serious ramifications for the entire globe.
He said: “Like autumn leaves falling from the mighty oaks, the incredible yellows, oranges, and reds, will turn and rot into the ugly browns and black detritus, leading to smelly and then crumbled leaves.
Dr. Jim Willie Writes:
The Western central bank franchise system is totally broken, totally insolvent, and totally corrupt. It invites the Gold Standard return. The entire financial system is built upon a debt-based monetary system. The debt saturation process has run its full course. The central bank heads have been covering the sovereign debt for the last five years, having rendered their balance sheets as ruined. Debt is at obscene levels, like $19.7 trillion for the USGovt. No debt limits are in place anymore, a signal that most likely it has already defaulted. A hidden game is underway, with control lost to the creditors, even as they attempt to salvage their debt holdings. The major central banks continue to manage badly the great game, where money is fake phony and a farce. A titanic battle is underway, where the Eastern nations are discarding their USTreasury Bonds, and doing so in tremendous volume while they set up the many platforms and pieces to the Gold Standard. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve did not raise its benchmark interest rate in June because officials worried that economic growth might be flagging, according to an official account published on Wednesday. And that was before Britain upset financial markets by voting to leave the European Union. The June meeting, and the fallout from the Brexit vote, continued what has become a familiar pattern: The Fed entered the year predicting stronger growth and a gradual return to higher interest rates. It has beat a slow retreat from both predictions as the data has disappointed its expectations. “This is not an economy that is running hot,” Daniel Tarullo, a Fed governor who advocated patience, said on Wednesday. He added that it would take time to assess the impact of Britain’s exit from the European Union on the American economy. Financial markets are now betting heavily that the Fed will not raise rates again before 2017. The yield on the benchmark Treasury bond has fallen below 1. 4 percent, the lowest level in history. Fed officials insisted in the weeks before the June meeting that they were thinking seriously about raising rates for the first time since December. The meeting account, released after a standard delay, said the weak pace of reported job growth in May effectively ended that debate. “Almost all participants judged that the surprisingly weak May employment report increased their uncertainty about the outlook for the labor market,” the account said. The vote to do nothing at the June meeting was unanimous — a first for the Fed since January — but differences persisted over how long the Fed should wait. Some officials continued to argue for raising rates soon, while others saw little reason for urgency. Those in favor of moving argued that unemployment and inflation were close to levels the Fed regarded as healthy, and waiting could cause the economy to overheat. In their view, the minutes said, “taking another step in removing monetary accommodation should not be delayed too long. ” Stanley Fischer, the Fed’s vice chairman, said last week on the business cable news network CNBC that there was still reason for optimism about the economic outlook. “First of all, the U. S. economy since the very bad data we got in May on employment has done pretty well,” he said. “Most of the incoming data looked good. ” Others, however, were inclined to leave rates near zero for some time. These officials, the account said, “underscored they would need to accumulate sufficient evidence to increase their confidence that economic growth was strong enough to withstand a possible downward shock to demand. ” James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, announced after the June meeting that he now expected that the Fed should keep rates near the current low level through 2018. Rob Martin, an economist at Barclays, said the debate would be decided by job growth in the coming months. The government will release its June employment report on Friday. “If employment growth picks up this summer, members will become more optimistic over the outlook for activity,” Mr. Martin wrote on Wednesday, after the release of the meeting minutes. “Likewise, if employment growth disappoints over the summer, even the most hawkish member will begin to revise its outlook lower and no member would push hard for a September rate hike. ” Since the financial crisis, inflation has consistently failed to reach the 2 percent annual pace the Fed regards as healthy. Inflation expectations have declined sharply. And, as inflation sags in other developed nations, some economists warn that central banks are not doing enough. But the Fed remains officially sanguine. The account said most officials expected faster inflation in coming years. The global economy also remains a concern. The June minutes said that officials saw signs of improvement — but that was before the British vote. There is general agreement that Britain’s exit from the European Union will drag on growth, but the magnitude remains unclear. In the short term, that is another reason for the Fed to delay any rate increases. “We are still evaluating it,” Mr. Fischer said on Friday. “My guess is that it will be less important for the U. S. than the countries directly involved — almost just logically so. We will wait and see. ” | 1 |
SPECTRE Is Real: Federal Shadow Government # www.youtube.com 225
The shadow government has fully come into the light. The Rothschild central banking system has been defined as the 'octopus' aka devilfish that "feeds on nothing but gold."
Today we go one step further and unveil the dark spiritual entity behind the shadow government. This entity is encoded within the Papal regalia of Vatican City which controls all countries under the law of the seas (Maritime Law) discretely.
This video exposes the HEAD of the shadow government. For the COMPLETE breakdown of the Papal Regalia please visit theJonathankleck via YouTube. Tags | 0 |
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said on Friday that despite Russian attempts to undermine the presidential election, it has concluded that the results “accurately reflect the will of the American people. ” The statement came as liberal opponents of Donald J. Trump, some citing fears of vote hacking, are seeking recounts in three states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — where his margin of victory was extremely thin. A drive by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, for recounts in those states had brought in more than $5 million by midday on Friday, her campaign said, and had increased its goal to $7 million. She filed for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday, about an hour before the deadline. In its statement, the administration said, “The Kremlin probably expected that publicity surrounding the disclosures that followed the Russian compromises of emails from U. S. persons and institutions, including from U. S. political organizations, would raise questions about the integrity of the election process that could have undermined the legitimacy of the . ” That was a reference to the breach of the Democratic National Committee’s email system, and the leak of emails from figures like John D. Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. “Nevertheless, we stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people,” it added. Supporters of Mrs. Clinton have enthusiastically backed the notion of challenging the results in the three states as a effort to reverse Mr. Trump’s clear majority in the Electoral College. They have seized on suggestions by some computer scientists that the states, which were crucial to Mr. Trump’s victory, need to manually review paper ballots to ensure the election was not hacked. The campaign, uniting around the hashtag #AuditTheVote, has picked up momentum among activists still mourning Mr. Trump’s victory. But the pleas for recounts have gained no support from the Clinton campaign, which has concluded that it is highly unlikely to change the outcome. In Michigan, Ms. Stein must wait for a Monday meeting of the state’s Board of Canvassers to certify the results of the Nov. 8 balloting before filing for a recount. In Pennsylvania, where paper ballots are used only in some areas, election officials said that the deadline to petition for a recount had passed, but that a candidate could challenge the result in court before a Monday deadline. The recount efforts have generated pushback by experts who said it would be enormously difficult to hack voting machines on a large scale. The administration, in its statement, confirmed reports from the Department of Homeland Security and intelligence officials that they did not see “any increased level of malicious cyberactivity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day. ” The administration said it remained “confident in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that was borne out. ” It added: “As a result, we believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective. ” However, intelligence officials are still investigating the impact of a broader Russian “information warfare” campaign, in which fake news about Mrs. Clinton, and about United relations, appeared intended to influence voters. Many of those false reports originated from RT News and Sputnik, two Russian sites. Those reports were widely circulated on social media, independent studies, including one set for release soon, have shown, sometimes in an organized fashion by groups that appear to have had common ownership. Individuals, conservative hosts and activists recirculated them, often not knowing, or apparently not caring, about the accuracy of the reports. A study published just before the election on War on the Rocks, written by Andrew Weisburd, Clinton Watts and J. M. Berger, documented efforts by “trolls” to attack the reputations of those who challenged Russia’s activities in Syria, and to spread rumors about Mrs. Clinton’s health. The study said that an effort to track 7, 000 social media accounts over two and a half years indicated that support for Mr. Trump “isn’t the end of Russia’s social media and hacking campaign in America, but merely the beginning. ” But the misinformation effort is far from . Many people who spread false news have no connections to any foreign power, including a man in Austin, Tex. who posted a Twitter message saying that paid protesters were being bused to an demonstration there. Though the report quickly went viral, the buses, it turned out, were there for a corporate conference. Other examples, including one studied by a group called Propaganda or Not and first cited by The Washington Post, appear to have more concrete connections to Russia. In late August, stories suggesting that Mrs. Clinton might have Parkinson’s disease were circulated on trupundit. com, which often runs material. It clearly twisted an email sent by one of Mrs. Clinton’s top aides about a drug called Provigil that is used to treat sleepiness. It has also been prescribed to patients with sleepiness as a side effect from several different ailments, the email added, including “Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis. ” That single reference was enough to create a fake story suggesting that Mrs. Clinton was being treated for Parkinson’s. The allegation was quickly shot down by several news organizations. It made little difference: Propaganda or Not, made up of former national security, intelligence and other professionals, and some workers at Google and other technology firms, concluded that it was reproduced tens of thousands of times, sometimes by botnets, and viewed millions of times. But it is not known whether that news was circulated under Russian government direction, or simply by Russian sympathizers, or Mrs. Clinton’s opponents. The barrage of online efforts to influence the election this year has prompted broader concerns that similar attempts, directed by the Kremlin or its surrogates, could now be focused on elections next year in Germany and France. The goal, intelligence officials and outside experts fear, is to undermine the cohesiveness of the Western alliance, particularly NATO members, by calling into question the validity of democratic elections. “We simply don’t know what the effects of the ‘fake news’ and other disinformation was,” said Jason Healey, an expert on cyberconflict at Columbia University. “If they were able to influence in favor of Trump by one or two percentage points in some places, they will be encouraged to try again for the French and the Germans. ” The efforts have also prompted debate inside Facebook and other social media firms about their responsibility to filter out false news. But doing so is a complex task, akin to editing a news operation, and it comes with complex political calculations: Once social media firms begin editing here to American standards, they will be under pressure from authoritarian regimes to do the same to their standards. In its statement, the administration focused chiefly on the threat of Russian manipulation of the vote on Election Day, not on the proliferation of propaganda and fake news. Ms. Stein, of the Green Party, acknowledged on Thursday in an interview with the PBS “NewsHour” that it was unlikely that recounts could change the results. Still, she said that “this was an election in which we saw hacking all over the place,” and that “at the same time, we have a voting system which has been proven to basically be wide open to hackers. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — The human cargo was loaded on ships at a bustling wharf in the nation’s capital, destined for the plantations of the Deep South. Some slaves pleaded for rosaries as they were rounded up, praying for deliverance. But on this day, in the fall of 1838, no one was spared: not the baby and her mother, not the field hands, not the shoemaker and not Cornelius Hawkins, who was about 13 years old when he was forced onboard. Their panic and desperation would be mostly forgotten for more than a century. But this was no ordinary slave sale. The enslaved had belonged to the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests. And they were sold, along with scores of others, to help secure the future of the premier Catholic institution of higher learning at the time, known today as Georgetown University. Now, with racial protests roiling college campuses, an unusual collection of Georgetown professors, students, alumni and genealogists is trying to find out what happened to those 272 men, women and children. And they are confronting a particularly wrenching question: What, if anything, is owed to the descendants of slaves who were sold to help ensure the college’s survival? More than a dozen universities — including Brown, Columbia, Harvard and the University of Virginia — have publicly recognized their ties to slavery and the slave trade. But the 1838 slave sale organized by the Jesuits, who founded and ran Georgetown, stands out for its sheer size, historians say. At Georgetown, slavery and scholarship were inextricably linked. The college relied on Jesuit plantations in Maryland to help finance its operations, university officials say. (Slaves were often donated by prosperous parishioners.) And the 1838 sale — worth about $3. 3 million in today’s dollars — was organized by two of Georgetown’s early presidents, both Jesuit priests. Some of that money helped to pay off the debts of the struggling college. “The university itself owes its existence to this history,” said Adam Rothman, a historian at Georgetown and a member of a university working group that is studying ways for the institution to acknowledge and try to make amends for its tangled roots in slavery. Although the working group was established in August, it was student demonstrations at Georgetown in the fall that helped to galvanize alumni and gave new urgency to the administration’s efforts. The students organized a protest and a using the hashtag #GU272 for the slaves who were sold. In November, the university agreed to remove the names of the Rev. Thomas F. Mulledy and the Rev. William McSherry, the college presidents involved in the sale, from two campus buildings. An alumnus, following the protest from afar, wondered if more needed to be done. That alumnus, Richard J. Cellini, the chief executive of a technology company and a practicing Catholic, was troubled that neither the Jesuits nor university officials had tried to trace the lives of the enslaved or compensate their progeny. Mr. Cellini is an unlikely racial crusader. A white man, he admitted that he had never spent much time thinking about slavery or history. But he said he could not stop thinking about the slaves, whose names had been in Georgetown’s archives for decades. “This is not a disembodied group of people, who are nameless and faceless,” said Mr. Cellini, 52, whose company, Briefcase Analytics, is based in Cambridge, Mass. “These are real people with real names and real descendants. ” Within two weeks, Mr. Cellini had set up a nonprofit, the Georgetown Memory Project, hired eight genealogists and raised more than $10, 000 from fellow alumni to finance their research. Dr. Rothman, the Georgetown historian, heard about Mr. Cellini’s efforts and let him know that he and several of his students were also tracing the slaves. Soon, the two men and their teams were working on parallel tracks. What has emerged from their research, and that of other scholars, is a glimpse of an insular world dominated by priests who required their slaves to attend Mass for the sake of their salvation, but also whipped and sold some of them. The records describe runaways, harsh plantation conditions and the anguish voiced by some Jesuits over their participation in a system of forced servitude. “A microcosm of the whole history of American slavery,” Dr. Rothman said. The enslaved were grandmothers and grandfathers, carpenters and blacksmiths, pregnant women and anxious fathers, children and infants, who were fearful, bewildered and despairing as they saw their families and communities ripped apart by the sale of 1838. The researchers have used archival records to follow their footsteps, from the Jesuit plantations in Maryland, to the docks of New Orleans, to three plantations west and south of Baton Rouge, La. The hope was to eventually identify the slaves’ descendants. By the end of December, one of Mr. Cellini’s genealogists felt confident that she had found a strong test case: the family of the boy, Cornelius Hawkins. There are no surviving images of Cornelius, no letters or journals that offer a look into his last hours on a Jesuit plantation in Maryland. He was not yet five feet tall when he sailed onboard the Katharine Jackson, one of several vessels that carried the slaves to the port of New Orleans. An inspector scrutinized the cargo on Dec. 6, 1838. “Examined and found correct,” he wrote of Cornelius and the 129 other people he found on the ship. The notation betrayed no hint of the turmoil on board. But priests at the Jesuit plantations recounted the panic and fear they witnessed when the slaves departed. Some children were sold without their parents, records show, and slaves were “dragged off by force to the ship,” the Rev. Thomas Lilly reported. Others, including two of Cornelius’s uncles, ran away before they could be captured. But few were lucky enough to escape. The Rev. Peter Havermans wrote of an elderly woman who fell to her knees, begging to know what she had done to deserve such a fate, according to Robert Emmett Curran, a retired Georgetown historian who described eyewitness accounts of the sale in his research. Cornelius’s extended family was split, with his aunt Nelly and her daughters shipped to one plantation, and his uncle James and his wife and children sent to another, records show. At the time, the Catholic Church did not view slaveholding as immoral, said the Rev. Thomas R. Murphy, a historian at Seattle University who has written a book about the Jesuits and slavery. The Jesuits had sold off individual slaves before. As early as the 1780s, Dr. Rothman found, they openly discussed the need to cull their stock of human beings. But the decision to sell virtually all of their enslaved in the 1830s left some priests deeply troubled. They worried that new owners might not allow the slaves to practice their Catholic faith. They also knew that life on plantations in the Deep South was notoriously brutal, and feared that families might end up being separated and resold. “It would be better to suffer financial disaster than suffer the loss of our souls with the sale of the slaves,” wrote the Rev. Jan Roothaan, who headed the Jesuits’ international organization from Rome and was initially reluctant to authorize the sale. But he was persuaded to reconsider by several prominent Jesuits, including Father Mulledy, then the influential president of Georgetown who had overseen its expansion, and Father McSherry, who was in charge of the Jesuits’ Maryland mission. (The two men would swap positions by 1838.) Mismanaged and inefficient, the Maryland plantations no longer offered a reliable source of income for Georgetown College, which had been founded in 1789. It would not survive, Father Mulledy feared, without an influx of cash. So in June 1838, he negotiated a deal with Henry Johnson, a member of the House of Representatives, and Jesse Batey, a landowner in Louisiana, to sell Cornelius and the others. Father Mulledy promised his superiors that the slaves would continue to practice their religion. Families would not be separated. And the money raised by the sale would not be used to pay off debt or for operating expenses. None of those conditions were met, university officials said. Father Mulledy took most of the down payment he received from the sale — about $500, 000 in today’s dollars — and used it to help pay off the debts that Georgetown had incurred under his leadership. In the uproar that followed, he was called to Rome and reassigned. The next year, Pope Gregory XVI explicitly barred Catholics from engaging in “this traffic in Blacks … no matter what pretext or excuse. ” But the pope’s order, which did not explicitly address slave ownership or private sales like the one organized by the Jesuits, offered scant comfort to Cornelius and the other slaves. By the 1840s, word was trickling back to Washington that the slaves’ new owners had broken their promises. Some slaves suffered at the hands of a cruel overseer. Roughly of the Jesuits’ former slaves — including Cornelius and his family — had been shipped to two plantations so distant from churches that “they never see a Catholic priest,” the Rev. James Van de Velde, a Jesuit who visited Louisiana, wrote in a letter in 1848. Father Van de Velde begged Jesuit leaders to send money for the construction of a church that would “provide for the salvation of those poor people, who are now utterly neglected. ” He addressed his concerns to Father Mulledy, who three years earlier had returned to his post as president of Georgetown. There is no indication that he received any response. are often a fleeting presence in the documents of the 1800s. Enslaved, marginalized and forced into illiteracy by laws that prohibited them from learning to read and write, many seem like ghosts who pass through this world without leaving a trace. After the sale, Cornelius vanishes from the public record until 1851 when his trail finally picks back up on a cotton plantation near Maringouin, La. His owner, Mr. Batey, had died, and Cornelius appeared on the plantation’s inventory, which included 27 mules and horses, 32 hogs, two ox carts and scores of other slaves. He was valued at $900. (“Valuable Plantation and Negroes for Sale,” read one newspaper advertisement in 1852.) The plantation would be sold again and again and again, records show, but Cornelius’s family remained intact. In 1870, he appeared in the census for the first time. He was about 48 then, a father, a husband, a farm laborer and, finally, a free man. He might have disappeared from view again for a time, save for something few could have counted on: his deep, abiding faith. It was his Catholicism, born on the Jesuit plantations of his childhood, that would provide researchers with a road map to his descendants. Cornelius had originally been shipped to a plantation so far from a church that he had married in a civil ceremony. But six years after he appeared in the census, and about three decades after the birth of his first child, he renewed his wedding vows with the blessing of a priest. His children and grandchildren also embraced the Catholic church. So Judy Riffel, one of the genealogists hired by Mr. Cellini, began following a chain of weddings and births, baptisms and burials. The church records helped lead to a woman in Baton Rouge named Maxine Crump. Ms. Crump, a retired television news anchor, was driving to Maringouin, her hometown, in early February when her cellphone rang. Mr. Cellini was on the line. She listened, stunned, as he told her about her Cornelius Hawkins, who had labored on a plantation just a few miles from where she grew up. She found out about the Jesuits and Georgetown and the sea voyage to Louisiana. And she learned that Cornelius had worked the soil of a estate that straddled the Bayou Maringouin. All of this was new to Ms. Crump, except for the name Cornelius — or Neely, as Cornelius was known. The name had been passed down from generation to generation in her family. Her had the name, as did one of her cousins. Now, for the first time, Ms. Crump understood its origins. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God. ” Ms. Crump is a familiar figure in Baton Rouge. She was the city’s first black woman television anchor. She runs a nonprofit, Dialogue on Race Louisiana, that offers educational programs on institutional racism and ways to combat it. She prides herself on being unflappable. But the revelations about her lineage — and the church she grew up in — have unleashed a swirl of emotions. She is outraged that the church’s leaders sanctioned the buying and selling of slaves, and that Georgetown profited from the sale of her ancestors. She feels great sadness as she envisions Cornelius as a young boy, torn from everything he knew. Mr. Cellini, whose genealogists have already traced more than 200 of the slaves from Maryland to Louisiana, believes there may be thousands of living descendants. He has contacted a few, including Patricia president of the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society in Spokane, who is helping to track the Jesuit slaves with her group. (Ms. discovered her connection through an earlier effort by the university to publish records online about the Jesuit plantations.) Meanwhile, Georgetown’s working group has been weighing whether the university should apologize for profiting from slave labor, create a memorial to those enslaved and provide scholarships for their descendants, among other possibilities, said Dr. Rothman, the historian. “It’s hard to know what could possibly reconcile a history like this,” he said. “What can you do to make amends?” Ms. Crump, 69, has been asking herself that question, too. She does not put much stock in what she describes as “casual institutional apologies. ” But she would like to see a scholarship program that would bring the slaves’ descendants to Georgetown as students. And she would like to see Cornelius’s name, and those of his parents and children, inscribed on a memorial on campus. Her ancestors, once amorphous and invisible, are finally taking shape in her mind. There is joy in that, she said, exhilaration even. “Now they are real to me,” she said, “more real every day. ” She still wants to know more about Cornelius’s beginnings, and about his life as a free man. But when Ms. Riffel, the genealogist, told her where she thought he was buried, Ms. Crump knew exactly where to go. The two women drove on the narrow roads that line the green, rippling sugar cane fields in Iberville Parish. There was no need for a map. They were heading to the only Catholic cemetery in Maringouin. They found the last physical marker of Cornelius’s journey at the Immaculate Heart of Mary cemetery, where Ms. Crump’s father, grandmother and are also buried. The worn gravestone had toppled, but the wording was plain: “Neely Hawkins Died April 16, 1902. ” | 1 |
New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick sat down for an interview that aired Thursday with CNBC’s Suzy Welch and finally shared his thoughts on “ ” in a game of word association. Welch asked Belichick for the word he associates with “” and the coach responded “ridiculous. ” The NFL suspended Belichick’s quarterback Tom Brady for four games in 2016 over the suspicion of deflated footballs from the 2015 AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts. Welch also asked Belichick for his thoughts on winning. “The goal,” he replied. “There’s no medals for trying. This isn’t like eighth grade where everybody gets a trophy. We’re in a professional sport and it’s competitive to win. That’s what we do. ” Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 1 |
Beach and spa vacations are typically associated with relaxation while urban getaways tend to be all go, go, go, but that doesn’t always have to be the case, according to Michael Bonsor, the hotel manager of Rosewood London. “You can absolutely head to a city for a relaxing vacation,” he said. Here, Mr. Bonsor shares his tips on how to have a trip in a busy city setting: SET THE MOOD BEFOREHAND Use the journey to your destination as an opportunity to get into vacation mode: If you’re flying, use a pair of headphones and order a glass of Champagne or another drink you enjoy when you get on board. And watch movies or listen to music on your iPad or on the airline’s entertainment system. If you’re driving, plan to hit the road when it isn’t rush hour, so you don’t spend hours sitting in traffic have a playlist on hand with your favorite songs and carry indulgent snacks such as a bar of good chocolate. The idea, Mr. Bonsor said, is to start unwinding before your vacation starts. PICK A MANAGEABLE CITY Large cities like New York City, Paris and Tokyo usually don’t lend themselves to relaxation because visitors are often overwhelmed by the number of attractions and can tire themselves out trying to take them all in. Smaller cities such as Vancouver, British Columbia San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Washington, while still appealing, are more manageable. “You might want to hit a site or two, but there’s not that feeling of sensory overload that comes with larger urban settings,” Mr. Bonsor said. HOTEL LOCATION MATTERS Maximize your getaway by staying in a neighborhood you want to explore — you will probably be able to get around by walking or biking and won’t waste time commuting to other parts of town. If you like shopping, choose a property in the city’s main shopping district. If art is of interest, go for a hotel near art museums or galleries. BOOK A SPA TREATMENT UPON ARRIVAL There is nothing like a massage or a spa treatment to help you and set the tone for a relaxing getaway. In advance of your trip, make an appointment for the day you arrive at your hotel’s spa or one nearby. And if there are particular techniques that the destination is known for, ask for these so you get a greater sense of place. PLAN FOR RELAXATION Give yourself plenty of unscheduled time to decompress by napping or reading by the hotel pool, at cafes, lingering at wine bars and wandering through the streets soaking up the surroundings. Of course, you should hit tourist sites, but plan to visit them early in the day when they tend to be less crowded. | 1 |
There was a invocation of “ economics” a repeated, awkward pronunciation of China some audible sniffling and a vehement complaint of a broken microphone a plea to call Sean Hannity and a gleeful shoulder shimmy. Yes, to kick off its 42nd season, “Saturday Night Live,” the NBC sketch comedy institution, opened with a parody of the first presidential debate, pitting Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton against Alec Baldwin as Donald J. Trump, and Michael Che as the baffled, deadpan moderator, Lester Holt. This eagerly awaited sketch, which opened the show on Saturday (and which NBC had been promoting during the week as if it were a championship prize fight) mixed some of the zingers and gaffes from Monday’s debate with the show’s own satirical takes on the political showdown. Ms. McKinnon played Mrs. Clinton as a politician still struggling to make personal connections, warning that Mr. Trump’s policies would harm “laborers like my own human father, who made, I guess, drapes, or printed drapes or sold drapes, something with drapes — he was relatable and I am also relatable. ” Meanwhile, Mr. Baldwin gave a preening, impersonation of Mr. Trump, who in one volatile tirade said of Mrs. Clinton: “She’s the one with the bad temperament. She’s always screaming. She’s constantly lying. Her hair is crazy. Her face is completely orange, except around the eyes where it’s white. ” The lampooning of the presidential debate has become a quadrennial tradition at “S. N. L. ” It’s an institution that has yielded such enduring moments as when, in 1988, Jon Lovitz (in the guise of Michael Dukakis) contemplated Dana Carvey (as the elder George Bush) and groused, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy” in 1992, when Mr. Carvey simultaneously played Mr. Bush and his challenger Ross Perot (the latter performance had been recorded ahead of time) and in 2000, when Will Ferrell (as George W. Bush) summarized the best argument for his candidacy in a single word, “strategery. ” This year, anticipation for the debate parody seemed to run especially high, following the on Monday between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton at Hofstra University, which drew an estimated 84 million viewers, according to Nielsen. “S. N. L. ” is riding the momentum of Ms. McKinnon’s recent Emmy Award victory for her work on the show, and, for an added boost of adrenaline, brought in Mr. Baldwin, a frequent guest host, to play Mr. Trump this season. (Recently, the role had been played by Darrell Hammond, a veteran “S. N. L. ” cast member who is now its announcer, and Taran Killam, who left the show before the start of this season.) “Saturday Night Live” is also facing the question of whether it can have any satirical bite on Mr. Trump, who was a controversial choice to host the program in November 2015. NBC, the longtime home of Mr. Trump’s reality shows “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice,” said it was ending its business ties with him in June 2015, citing the “derogatory statements” in his announcement as a presidential candidate, in which he described Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “murderers. ” Nonetheless, Mr. Trump has continued to appear on NBC entertainment programs including “S. N. L. ” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” whose host was roundly criticized for conducting a chummy interview with Mr. Trump in September. In Saturday’s season premiere, “S. N. L. ” seemed to play it down the middle, balancing each joke about Mr. Trump with a zinger about Mrs. Clinton. As the Colin Jost remarked at the start of the “Weekend Update” segment, “The first presidential debate is over, and it’s official: We have to choose between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. ” Mr. Che, on “Weekend Update,” joked that watching the debate was like “watching a divorced couple fight for custody of a kid that hates them both. ” He also compared the debate to the divorce of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, “but if Brad Pitt only wanted to keep the white kids. ” Other sketches included a political edition of the game show “Family Feud,” in which members of the Trump family (and Vladimir V. Putin) competed against Mrs. Clinton’s allies, including Bernie Sanders (played by the frequent “S. N. L. ” guest star Larry David). | 1 |
Black Box Voting, founded in 2003, performs nonpartisan investigative reporting on elections in an attempt to stop vote rigging.
You may be wondering what the term “black box” means. A “black box” system is non-transparent; its functions are hidden from the public. Elections, of course, should not be black box systems.
Here is a link to a free copy of the book, Black Box Voting HERE .
Author Bev Harris became known for groundbreaking work on electronic voting machines, which can remove transparency of the vote count.
With voting machines, all political power can be converted to the hands of a few anonymous subcontractors:
Source
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November 21, 2016 How White Helmets Videos Are Made
The video below was originally uploaded on November 18 in the channel of the RFSMediaOffice (Revolutionary Forces of Syria Media Office), a propaganda organization supporting various groups fighting the Syrian state.
It depicts the "Making of" a scene where people in White Helmets outfit "rescue" a man. For some 20 seconds the two "rescuers" and the "victim" are motionless waiting for the command to start a hectic "rescue operation" and, when that starts, adds on the usual background sound of screaming people.
The embed is a copy I made from the original and posted on my account to make sure that it is preserved.
I do not know why the RFS Media Office would upload this. To show that the White Helmets and their videos are fake? Did they not pay their dues? Or was the channel hacked and the upload done by someone else?
The original title "Edge of death | #MannequinChallenge" points to some social media nonsense which The Telegraph describes as: A viral video craze, it involves people imitating mannequins and freezing for the camera while music plays in the background.
So is this a fake? Or a fake of the fakes the original White Helmets videos are ( this one for example)?
Anyway - have fun with it while I keep nursing my not so fake influenza (no video). 21, 2016 at 01:40 PM | Permalink | 0 |
ERBIL, Iraq — At least 80 people, many of them Shiite pilgrims on their way home to Iran, were killed on Thursday when an Islamic State suicide bomber detonated a truck filled with explosives at a roadside service station in southern Iraq, local officials said. The devastating attack came two days after Prime Minister Haider applauded the security forces for protecting the millions of Shiites who have flowed through southern Iraq in recent days for what many consider the world’s largest religious pilgrimage, larger even than the hajj in Saudi Arabia. In years past, the annual rite known as Arbaeen, a commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a revered Shiite figure, was a frequent target of Sunni extremist groups like the Islamic State and its predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq. Until the bombing on Thursday, for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility in a statement, the event had been carried out safely. That was seen as a success for Mr. Abadi and the military, and was hailed as a sign that the government could keep pushing a major offensive against the Islamic State in Mosul, while protecting pilgrims in the south. Thursday’s bombing, in Hilla, a city south of Baghdad, shattered that illusion. The Islamic State clearly remains a potent force, both on the battlefields of Mosul, where fighters are putting up a last stand against Iraq’s elite counterterrorism forces in eastern neighborhoods, and in its ability to carry out more traditional guerrilla attacks. For nearly six weeks, tens of thousands of Iraqi security force members have been fighting in northern Iraq to retake Mosul, the country’s city and the last stronghold of the Islamic State in Iraq. Government forces have found themselves bogged down, fighting house to house in dense urban neighborhoods, and many civilians have been killed. A victory in Mosul could represent the end of the Islamic State’s control of territory in Iraq. But the bombing Thursday was a stark reminder that the group will most likely revert to its roots as a guerrilla insurgency and continue to carry out terrorist attacks across the country. The bombing was the deadliest in Iraq since an truck blew up near a shopping mall in Baghdad in July, killing at least 300 people in the worst terrorist attack in the capital since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. That attack alarmed American officials, who worry that efforts to help the Iraqis defeat the Islamic State in Mosul will be squandered if civilians around the country are terrorized by suicide bombings. In recent months, the United States has rushed intelligence advisers and new drones to Iraq to counter car bomb attacks in Baghdad and the south. Before Thursday’s bombing, there had been a noticeable decline in the numbers of attacks. Falah the head of the provincial security committee in Babil Province, where the bombing occurred, said that at least 80 people had been killed and that dozens more had been wounded. Mr. Khafaji said early reports suggested that the bomber had followed a bus of Iranian pilgrims and then detonated his explosives in a crowded parking lot at a gas complex, setting fire to a number of vehicles and fuel tanks. Another local official, Dr. Nowras Abdulrazak, the head of Babil’s health directorate, said on Thursday that his casualty toll was 75 people dead and 25 wounded. That number was likely to rise, he said. Most of the victims were Iranians, officials said, but it was unclear in the immediate aftermath of the attack exactly how many. Iranian state television, however, reported that a majority of the victims were Afghan citizens living in Iran. Iran is the region’s Shiite power, and millions of its citizens annually flock to Iraq, which is also majority Shiite, to visit important religious sites in the cities of Karbala and Najaf. The Islamic State said in a statement released after the attack that one of its fighters, an Iraqi man, had carried out the suicide bombing. The group vowed to spread the “flames” of the battles underway in Mosul to the south, according to a translation released by the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist statements. The Islamic State considers Shiites apostates, and it has long carried out a campaign of sectarian killings in Iraq. In its statement, it called Shiites “miscreants” and said, “What awaits them in the immediate future, Allah permitting, is more sorrowful and bitter. ” One of the people hurt in the bombing, Toma Muhan, 31, said on Thursday that just before the explosion, he parked his car at the service station. He was walking away when he was knocked to the ground. “I felt a strong blast at my back and then severe pain in my leg,” he said from a hospital bed, where he was being treated for shrapnel wounds and burns to his neck and legs. “I remember hearing loud screaming, and then I passed out and woke up later at the hospital. ” A local police officer, Col. Thamir Jhazala, said that the restaurant and gas station had opened recently, and that security was not good. He cited what he said was a lack of surveillance cameras. Numan who works at the station, said that Thursday was a day off for him, but that he had been nearby when the explosion occurred and rushed to the scene. “I heard the sound of a big explosion and saw the blaze rising up to the sky, followed by smoke,” he said. When he got to the scene, Mr. Jibouri said, he saw charred and unrecognizable victims, but he did recognize one: a man who works with him named Mohammed, who was severely burned. He rushed his colleague to the hospital, where he was being treated. | 1 |
In the Wall Street dogfight between two billionaire investors, William A. Ackman won a moral victory but Carl C. Icahn won the war over the future of Herbalife, the nutritional supplements company. On Friday, federal regulators imposed stiff sanctions on Herbalife for deceiving buyers and sellers of its products but stopped short of shutting down the company. Mr. Ackman had wagered big on Herbalife’s demise, while Mr. Icahn had been betting on its ultimate survival. In a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, Herbalife will pay $200 million in consumer relief, hire an outside monitor and make substantial changes to its business practices in the United States that could affect its bottom line, but the company will continue to operate. For nearly four years, Mr. Ackman argued loudly and often that Herbalife was a pyramid scheme that took advantage of customers — at one point staking $1 billion on a decline in Herbalife’s shares in a characteristically brash move to prove his point. He gave numerous public presentations using hundreds of slides and videos to make his case that Herbalife was predatory. He even invoked members of Congress to pressure regulators to take action against the company. In response, Mr. Icahn invested in Herbalife, placing an even bigger bet that it would weather the regulatory scrutiny. Other big Wall Street investors including Daniel S. Loeb and George Soros also piled on against Mr. Ackman. But Mr. Icahn seemed to particularly relish going with Mr. Ackman, famously calling the hedge fund manager a “crybaby in the schoolyard” when the two men squared off with each other during a live CNBC broadcast in January 2013. To win his bet, Mr. Ackman needed regulators at the F. T. C. to either shut down Herbalife or take some action that would cause shares of Herbalife to crash. Mr. Ackman, founder of the $12 billion Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund, had said on a number of occasions he expected shares of Herbalife to go to zero. He even appeared in a documentary earlier this year about the tussle, called “Betting on Zero. ” Instead, shares of Herbalife shot up more than 10 percent on Friday on the news of the settlement and most recently were trading at $65 a share. “This settlement will require Herbalife to fundamentally restructure its business so that participants are rewarded for what they sell, not how many people they recruit,” Edith Ramirez, the F. T. C. chairwoman, said in a news release announcing the settlement and the filing of a complaint in federal court seeking a permanent injunction and other relief against the company. In a conference call with reporters, Ms. Ramirez said Herbalife had been “deceiving hundreds of thousands of hopeful people” with the belief they could get rich. But she would not say whether or not the company was a pyramid scheme as Mr. Ackman has claimed. The commission’s “focus wasn’t on a particular label,” Ms. Ramirez added. The complaint filed on Friday by the F. T. C. against Herbalife in federal court in Los Angeles does call into question some of the company’s longstanding distribution practices and ways it generates revenue by relying on customers to sell products to friends and relatives. The complaint says, “the overwhelming majority of Herbalife distributors who pursue the business opportunity make little or no money and a substantial percentage lose money. ” The agreement with the F. T. C. will require Herbalife to overhaul its system for compensating its customers and recording sales of its supplement drinks and other food products. Over time, the structural changes mandated by the F. T. C. in the settlement and civil complaint could have a impact on Herbalife’s profitability. The settlement with the F. T. C. “does not change our business model and will set new standards for the industry,” a spokesman for Herbalife said in a statement. “We agreed to the terms and to pay $200 million because we simply wanted to move forward with our mission. ” The company also took a swipe at Mr. Ackman in its statement, saying it had been “under attack by an intransigent hellbent on a misinformation campaign designed to destroy our company. ” Mr. Ackman was noticeably after the announcement of the settlement. His firm released a statement in which it insisted that Herbalife’s business model would fail once the company instituted the structural changes required by the settlement. “We expect that once Herbalife’s business restructuring is fully implemented, these fundamental structural changes will cause the pyramid to collapse,” the statement said. Mr. Ackman’s contention that Herbalife is an unlawful pyramid scheme has focused on the company’s sales practices. Herbalife relies on independent resellers who are rewarded for recruiting new members, and Mr. Ackman argued that these recruitment efforts were more lucrative than the sale of its products. In the near term, the settlement will be bad news for investors in Mr. Ackman’s hedge fund who have lost money investing in his fund over the last year and a half. While Mr. Ackman has restructured the bet against Herbalife — known as a short — reducing it by more than 60 percent, he still has exposure. And he has spent more than $50 million on research and legal fees for his campaign against the company So far this year, Mr. Ackman’s Herbalife bet has lost him 11 percent, according to his most recent investor update. His Pershing Square Holdings fund is down 19. 1 percent. In a separate note to investors on Friday, Pershing Square said Herbalife was trying “to spin the settlement remarkably as somehow an endorsement of their business model” and that over the long haul the outcome would be “materially positive for our short position. ” Herbalife said on Friday that it would let Mr. Icahn increase his ownership stake to as much as 35 percent from the 18 percent of the company’s outstanding shares he currently holds. The move could set the stage for Mr. Icahn and others to take Herbalife private, an action that would make it difficult to determine the economic impact of the changes in business practices on Herbalife’s bottom line. In a statement, Mr. Icahn said he would ”consider a range of strategic opportunities, including potential involving competitors, as well as other strategic transactions. ” Mr. Icahn also wasted no time in gloating over his victory. “Unlike many of those that ‘shorted’ Herbalife, we did not rely on one or two research papers prepared by nonexperts,” he said in his statement Friday morning. “While Bill Ackman and I are on friendly terms, we have agreed to disagree (vehemently) on this subject,” Mr. Icahn said, adding that the F. T. C. ’s settlement “vindicates our research and conviction. ” It was almost two years ago to the day that Mr. Icahn and Mr. Ackman hugged and made up publicly on stage at an investor conference in Manhattan. “It’s not about winning,” Mr. Ackman said at that conference on July 16, 2014. But, he added, “I would love to get Carl out of this stock. ” After Friday’s settlement that possibility looks less likely than ever. | 1 |
Политика
Ни у кого не обнаруживается столько друзей, сколько у свежеиспечённого президента после оглашения результатов выборов – разве что у бедняка после выигрыша в лотерею нескольких миллионов долларов. Внезапно оказалось, что практически все российские звезды – добрые знакомые Дональда Трампа. А чтобы никому не пришло в голову усомниться, многие поспешили предъявить, так сказать, вещественные доказательства: совместные фотографии с 45-м президентом США, правда, сделанные ещё тогда, когда он о президентстве и не задумывался.
Фото с Трампом уже продемонстрировали Филипп Киркоров, Ани Лорак, Кэти Топурия, Игорь Николаев, Оксана Фёдорова, Эмин, а Владимир Винокур разместил в Инстаграме снимки и с Трампом, и с Путиным, да ещё подписал их “Мы победили!”, заставляя задуматься: а всё ли мы знаем о большой политике и роли в ней Винокура?
Некоторые представительницы российского шоу-бизнеса отметились в жанре короткого рассказа на тему: “Дональд Трамп в моей жизни”. Тина Канделаки поведала миру, что её дочь получила не самое распространённое в России имя Мелания в честь супруги Трампа, которую она лично не знала, но зато видела по телевизору в качестве ведущей конкурса красоты. Не упустила шанс напомнить о своих достижениях и Елена Кулецкая, больше всего известная как бывшая невеста Димы Билана. Оказывается, она брала у Трампа интервью и довела миллиардера до такой степени откровенности, что он заговорил о той части своего тела, которую люди его уровня редко показывают публично – о ногах.
Даже те персонажи, которые Трампа в глаза не видели, сумели вписаться в актуальный, так сказать, тренд. Таисия Повалий разместила своё фото в казино, да не в каком-нибудь, а в принадлежащем Трампу: остальное предлагается дофантазировать читателям. Но всех переплюнул стриптизёр и муж Наташи Королевой Сергей Глушко, более известный как Тарзан: он поместил в “Инстаграм” своё фото в белом махровом халате, украшенном логотипом одного из отелей свежеизбранного президента США. Дескать, лично не знаком – но хоть так причастен.
При виде этого парада тщеславия невольно вспоминается персонаж, который после рукопожатия знаменитости неделю не моет руку. Вот только в роли такого восторженного простака выступили сами звезды. Поскольку наивные люди в шоу-бизнесе не выживают, то, похоже, демонстрация дружеских чувств призвана подкрепить радужные планы: авось победитель на праздничный концерт пригласит или новое интервью даст. Если вспомнит, конечно. А не вспомнит – так лишний пиар ещё никому не повредил. | 0 |
22 Views November 21, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News
Look at the stunning levels of extreme action in gold, silver, U.S. dollar and the stock market post-election.
Below you can see the commercial short interest in the gold market. The commercials have been decreasing their short position as the price of gold has declined.
Below you can see the sentiment in the gold market, which has reached levels showing extreme pessimism. IMPORTANT: To find out which company Doug Casey, Rick Rule and Sprott Asset Management are pounding the table on that already has a staggering 18.1 million ounces of gold that just added another massive deposit and is quickly being recognized as one of the greatest gold opportunities in the world – CLICK HERE OR BELOW: Sponsored
The chart below shows extreme pessimism in the silver market as well.
You can also see that large amounts of money have been flowing out SLV, the silver ETF.
You can also see that the U.S. dollar has now reached levels showing extreme optimism (see chart below).
Public Becoming More Bullish On Stocks For those who are interested in the stock market, check out the bullish sentiment chart below that shows the public becoming more bullish on stocks as markets hit new highs.
The bottom line is that post-election market moves have been extreme and may be getting close to a reversal in stocks, the dollar as well as gold and silver. It would also appear that the endless talk about the commercial short positions in both metals coupled with the bullish advance coming on the heels of a brutal 5-year cyclical bear market is keeping a healthy level of “fear” in the early stages of the newest leg of the bullish advance. So it will be very interesting to see how gold and silver trade from current levels in the days and weeks ahead.
T o listen to the extraordinarily powerful audio interview where Dr. Leeb urged investors to stay strong ahead of what he predicted “is going to be the greatest bull market of anybody’s lifetime that’s alive today ” CLICK HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW.
***ALSO JUST RELEASED: This Is The Real Reason Why The Public Is Broke And The Middle Class Is Being Destroyed CLCK HERE.
© 2015 by King World News®. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the articles is permitted and encouraged. About author | 0 |
A jury at Canterbury Crown Court has delivered guilty verdicts for all four men on trial for a lost girl who had gone into a takeaway in Ramsgate to ask for help. [Tamin Rahmani, 37, of Ramsgate (above right) Shershah Muslimyar, 20, of Canterbury, Rafiullah Hamidy, 24, of no fixed abode (above left) and Hamid Mohamadi, 18, from Wye were found guilty of three counts of rape, reports KentLive. The jury returned their verdicts on Friday the 26th of May on all three charges against all four men. Verdicts were unanimous on all charges apart from two against the owner of the 555 Pizza takeaway, Rahmani, who received a guilty verdict on the two charges with a majority of 11:1. The court had heard that in the early hours of Sunday the 18th of September 2016, the girl, who had just turned 16, went into the takeaway to ask for help. Owner Rahmani, and the other rapists who worked at 555 Pizza, instead led her to Hamidy’s “filthy” room above where she was pushed onto a “grubby mattress” whilst the men physically restrained her and stood by the door “so she knew there was no escape”. The teen was then “passed around like an entertainment device” by the “laughing” men. “Every single orifice had been penetrated by the group of men, while others watched, laughed and joined in themselves,” prosecutor Simon Taylor told the court. Mr. Taylor told the court the four men tried to plot and lie their way out of the evidence held against them. All the four of the Afghans‘ DNA was found at the scene of the rape in Hamidy’s room. Hamidy, an Afghan asylum seeker, claimed the sex with the girl was consensual before he fled to France and Italy after his immigration hearing was cancelled. He was later extradited to the UK. The youngest rapist, Mohamadi, could be named by the media as it was found he was not 16, as he had claimed, but is believed to be 18. Senior investigating officer Detective Inspector Richard Vickery said: “The victim in this case was a vulnerable teenage girl who was taken advantage of and subjected to some of the most horrendous crimes imaginable. “It was late at night, she was lost and she asked a group of men for directions. Instead they saw an opportunity to fulfil their depraved sexual desires and betrayed the trust she placed in them in the worst possible way. “Rape is an abhorrent crime and the victim has suffered a great deal of emotional harm from the ordeal she was forced to endure. She has displayed tremendous courage in reliving what happened to her, and I would like to personally thank her for having the strength to help bring her offenders to justice. “They clearly pose a significant danger to women and children and are fully deserving of the lengthy prison sentences they will surely now serve. ” A date for sentencing has not yet been confirmed but is not expected to be before July 17. | 1 |
CHEHALIS, Wash. — At this small factory south of Seattle, employees make one of the most specialized products in the aerospace industry: the rubber mats that Boeing workers stand on while assembling jets. As long as there are jets and Boeing, business would seem to be steady. But even here workers are bracing for bumps and economic uncertainty over the gritty details of where aviation parts get made and who makes them. President Trump has talked about border tariffs and new trade deals that many people in aerospace fear could raise the cost of American airplanes bought by foreign airlines or governments. And if Boeing’s sales or profits suffer, its supply chain — more than 13, 000 companies across the United States, and more than 1. 5 million jobs — would most likely feel the pain, too. At SmartCells, 50 employees and a few dozen temporary workers stamp out cushion pads on heavy machines. Executives work in a red building everyone calls the barn, and first names are the rule. Washington feels far away, but it is on just about everybody’s radar. “Let’s hit it with a and see how it reacts, then get a plan,” said Bob Bishop, the chief operations officer at SmartCells, describing Mr. Trump’s style. “That doesn’t always work. ” The anxiety, said Mr. Bishop, 46, a former deputy county sheriff who voted for Mr. Trump, centers not so much on politics as economics, specifically the intense competition with the French airplane maker Airbus, which competes toe to toe with Boeing for jet orders in countries around the world in a delicate game of narrow cost differences and giant contracts. Mr. Trump has said he would seek a 45 percent tariff on imports from China, for example, to protect American jobs, and a 20 percent tariff on goods from Mexico. If business costs for Boeing go up as a result, the company — the nation’s single largest exporter by dollar volume — probably would not be able to raise prices on its airplanes to make up the difference, because then it would lose customers to Airbus. For workers and suppliers, the fallout could be brutal. “So what does it mean? It means they may cut jobs,” said Kevin Michaels, the managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory, a specialized market analysis company in Ann Arbor, Mich. “It’s a very complex field. ” And one that is already changing. Boeing’s commercial airplane division cut 8 percent of its work force, or over 6, 000 jobs, in the United States last year. Some companies in the supply chain, partly because of pressure by Boeing, have shrunk or merged. Since his election, Mr. Trump has tried to pit American aviation companies against one another over the costs of new fighter jets, and has harshly criticized Boeing’s high price tag for a new Air Force One presidential plane. Boeing, founded in Seattle in 1916, employs about 140, 000 people in the United States, about half of them in Washington State. “We’ve got such a huge network here — anything that curtails exports hurts the entire supply chain,” said John Thornquist, the director of the aerospace office at the Washington State Department of Commerce. “We’re very vulnerable. ” Companies that sell to Boeing, or sell to other companies that build Boeing components, said that even predicting a trade war was risky, with so many variables — politics, economics, multiple countries — all in play. A modern commercial jetliner can have up to six million components that must be engineered and tested to safety standards, even before assembly starts. “We’re trying to do our best due diligence to put together an assessment, but at this time, the best we can do is just monitor day by day,” said Maurizio Miozza, the vice president for development and strategic planning at Umbra Cuscinetti, an Italian company that makes precision parts for Boeing and that has about 100 employees north of Seattle. But, he added, “the picture is not rosy. ” “You prepare yourself for the worst and hope for the best,” he said. Other aerospace companies were hesitant to discuss their worries because it might draw unwanted attention — from competitors, the White House or foreign governments. It is not a good time, several said, to take chances. Boeing declined an interview request for this article, but said in an email statement that talks with the Trump administration were continuing. “The administration has made it clear that they are growth, including in exports and manufacturing jobs,” the company said. “We are engaged with the administration in direct and productive discussion. ” In any small business, optimism and practicality are lifeblood forces, and SmartCells’ president, Bryce L. Betteridge, a chemical engineer, says he believes the company’s future is bright. A mix of polymers and wafflelike molds creates the upward bounce of a SmartCells mat, which reduces fatigue for a standing person and can also prevent injuries in falls, he said. The company has already diversified. Amazon warehouse workers and Costco checkout clerks — both employed by companies that started out in the Seattle area — stand on SmartCells mats. And Mr. Betteridge mentioned other new markets and ideas with enthusiasm: rifle stocks, nursing home floors, playgrounds. No idea for a better cushion seems beyond reach. But he said the company’s strategy for the future was shifting on the assumption that international trade under Mr. Trump would become more difficult. For one thing, he said, he has now discarded any thought of expanding the company into China, Mexico or anywhere else where SmartCells’ products could be made and brought into the United States for sale. “That benefit is going to go away, I anticipate,” Mr. Betteridge said. And it is simply too expensive to export heavy, relatively products like cushion mats to other countries from Washington, he said. That means the company’s growth in foreign markets, when or if it happens, will probably come through licensing the technology to manufacturers abroad, which will then hire local workers. Sales and marketing positions might be added here in Chehalis, Mr. Betteridge said, but no added manufacturing jobs would be needed. But a pressure to “buy American” coming from the White House could also be a powerful force, he and other industry leaders said, if companies like Boeing ultimately shift a greater proportion of their airplane component purchases to suppliers in the United States. Currently, Boeing spends about 80 percent of its $40 billion annual budget in the United States, and exports about 75 percent of its products. “Some of the suppliers in Puget Sound might actually be rooting for this, because in the long run it could benefit them,” Mr. Michaels, the industry analyst, said. Kurt Mullins, 56, a former lumber millworker who has been at SmartCells for about a year and a half, often installs floor cushioning systems at Boeing, where he hears the worries of workers there, too. “I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Mr. Mullins said. | 1 |
LONDON — The world did not end. No recession unfolded. Nine months after Britain voted to leave the European Union, disregarding warnings of grim economic consequences, a nation famous for calmly carrying on has seemingly gone about its business. As Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday officially initiated Britain’s exit from Europe — Brexit, in everyday talk — the lack of disaster was touted by those steering the departure as a sign of little trouble ahead. “There were predictions about what would happen to the economy if the United Kingdom voted to leave,” Ms. May told Parliament on Wednesday. “Those predictions have not proved to be correct. We see a strong economy. ” But the reassuring talk did not reckon with one significant detail: Nothing has actually happened yet. Mrs. May has only set in motion the complex, politically fraught divorce proceedings through which Britain must settle its affairs with the 27 jilted members of the European Union. The outcome will almost certainly be costly: Britain has placed in jeopardy its trading relationship with Europe, its largest customer for exports, while imperiling London’s status as banker to the planet. The markets essentially shrugged. The move was as expected as the next Super Bowl. The pound dipped a tad. So did shares on London’s stock market. The immediate impact of Mrs. May’s action was to start negotiations on future dealings across the English Channel. Those talks have a deadline. If no deal is struck before then, Britain and Europe would plunge into a state of chaotic uncertainty. Trade would revert to the rules of the World Trade Organization, making Britain’s exports to Europe vulnerable to tariffs and other barriers to commerce, including health and safety rules. London’s bankers would be effectively severed from Europe, with many transactions for clients based on the Continent rendered illegal. Until now, such issues were wrapped in layers of hypotheticals, with the details left for some indeterminate day when Britain’s government would make it real. That day has come. Though the financial industry has been preparing to move jobs to other financial capitals in anticipation of a messy Brexit, other industries have waited for clarity. Now, they will feel pressure to act — shifting some lines of business to European capitals, perhaps shelving British expansions. Global banking giants like Citigroup, HSBC and JPMorgan Chase may soon carry out plans to shift thousands of jobs to financial centers in the European Union. Goldman Sachs recently confirmed that it is moving hundreds of jobs out of London while expanding offices in Frankfurt and Paris. Vodafone, the telecommunications giant, said after the referendum that it might shift its headquarters from London. “The fact of setting this clock ticking is significant, because two years for many businesses is enough time for them to adapt, but short enough that they have to start making decisions really quickly,” said Nicolas Véron, an economist and senior fellow at Bruegel, a research institution in Brussels. “You will start to see very observable, concrete consequences of Brexit very soon. ” Britain has exploited its inclusion in Europe’s vast single market to make itself a dominant hub for multinational companies as various as aviation, pharmaceuticals and finance. They have set up factories, marketing teams and trading floors in Britain while selling to clients from Ireland to Greece, as if this swath of geography — home to some 500 million people — were one country. So much for all that. European leaders have consistently reaffirmed that remaining in the single market requires that Britain accept the free movement of people. That collides with a primary aim of many Brexit supporters — restricting immigration. After months of pretending that a finesse could be found, Mrs. May in January declared her government’s choice: enter immigration limits, goodbye single market. Long before this political reckoning with reality, executives at global banks were already mulling which jobs to move from London to other cities in the European Union — Dublin, Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam, Luxembourg. “People will have to move,” said William Wright, founder and managing director of New Financial, a research institution in London. “There’s no other option. ” Predicting how many jobs will move has become a thriving cottage industry. Oliver Wyman, the global consultancy, concluded that if, as now seems likely, transactions in London for European clients are sharply curtailed, as many as 35, 000 British jobs could disappear with as much as 20 billion pounds ($24. 8 billion) in revenue. After the Brexit vote, Mrs. May met with Nissan’s chief executive to offer assurances that her government would do what was necessary to keep auto manufacturing competitive. Nissan said it would continue to make sport utility vehicles in Sunderland, a city in northern England. Brexit supporters called the outcome a template for how a pragmatic British government would prevent businesses from abandoning its shores — with tax cuts, friendly regulation and deal making. But if Britain promised anything meaningful to Nissan, it probably violated World Trade Organization rules. Nissan has since said it continues to assess the uncertain economics of Britain. Ford and BMW are reassessing their British factories, too. For now, Britain has managed to avoid the most frightening economic forecasts. Before the referendum last June, the British Treasury predicted that a vote to exit could shrink the economy by as much 6 percent annually for the first two years. The economy expanded by 1. 8 percent last year. British consumers continued to spend. British factories continued to churn out cars, medical devices and aircraft parts, many of them destined for Europe. This month, Toyota announced plans to sink an additional £240 million (about $297 million) into a factory in Derbyshire, though it qualified that it required reliable access to Europe. Snap, the parent company of social media darling Snapchat that raised $3. 4 billion in an initial public offering, recently picked London as its international headquarters. But consumer spending has been increasingly paid for by debt. The British pound has surrendered 17 percent of its value against the dollar since the referendum, raising the cost of imported goods. Investment is flagging. A weaker pound helps exports, making British goods cheaper on world markets. But exports have also been aided by the very thing Britain is trying to ditch — inclusion in Europe. Proponents of Brexit tend to dismiss Europe as a land leading only in the numbers of unemployed men who are moving in with their parents. Britain’s next era is supposed to be centered on trade with faster growing, innovative nations like the United States. Britain and Europe must negotiate a trade deal that will prevent a rupture to commerce. During the campaign, Brexit supporters argued that Europe would ultimately make it happen because its most powerful member, Germany, now sends a parade of BMWs, Audis and Volkswagens to Britain. But trade negotiations are vulnerable to the manipulations of politically protected industries. This one seems particularly prone to acrimony. European leaders confront existential threats to their union, with political parties across the Continent hostile to its powers. Many are intent on using Britain to illustrate what they contend happens when a member leaves — nothing good. “It’s common sense,” said Mr. Véron, an economist. “You don’t allow someone who leaves the club to have better terms than someone who’s in the club, or otherwise the club doesn’t mean anything. ” Even if European leaders seek middle ground, any one of the member nations could hijack the proceedings with their demands while the clock ticks away. Last year, a single province of Belgium nearly scuppered a trade deal negotiated between all of Europe and Canada in seeking favor for its dairy farmers. In a bid to stake out a stronger negotiating position, Mrs. May has threatened to walk away if Europe does not extend good terms. “No deal for Britain is better than a bad deal,” she said in January. Whatever the comparative rankings of unfortunate events, Britain’s leaving Europe sans deal would be bad, as economists and people running businesses have said. It is often said that businesses fear uncertainty more than anything. Mrs. May just eliminated some of that. But she replaced it with an apparent certainty that presents its own troubles: Britain really is departing the largest consumer market on earth. | 1 |
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Nuclear weapons present the greatest public health and existential threat to our survival every moment of every day. Yet the United States and world nuclear nations stand in breach of the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty which commits these nations to work in good faith to end the arms race and to achieve nuclear disarmament. Forty eight years later the efforts of the nuclear nations toward this goal is not evident and the state of the world is equally as dangerous as it was during the height of the Cold War and arguably more dangerous with current scientific evidence on the catastrophic effects of even limited regional nuclear war.
This year’s presidential campaign has once again done little to focus on the dangers of nuclear weapons focusing more on who has the temperament to have their finger on the button with absolutely no indication of any understanding of the consequences to all of humanity by the use of these weapons even on a very small scale. In addition to tensions between Russia and the U.S. in Ukraine and Syria, there is a real danger of nuclear war in South Asia which could kill more than 2 billion people from the use of just 100 Hiroshima size weapons.
The rest of the world is finally standing up to this threat to their survival and that of the planet. They are taking matters into their own hands and refusing to be held hostage by the nuclear nations. They will no longer be bullied into sitting back and waiting for the nuclear states to make good on empty promises.
At the United Nations this past week, 123 nations voted to commence negotiations next year on a new treaty to prohibit the possession of nuclear weapons. Despite President Obama’s own words in his 2009 pledge to seek the security of a world free of nuclear weapons, the US voted “no” and led the opposition to this treaty.
Rather than meet our obligations under international law, the US has proposed by stark contrast to begin a new nuclear arms race spending $1 trillion dollars over the next 30 years to modernize and rebuild every aspect our nuclear weapons programs. A ‘jobs’ program to end humanity. Each of the nuclear nations is expected to do the same in rebuilding their weapons programs continuing the arms race for generations to come.
The myth of deterrence is the guise for this effort when in fact deterrence is the principle driver of the arms race. For every additional weapon my adversary has, I need two and so on and so on to our global arsenals of 15,500 weapons.
Fed up with this inaction and doublespeak, the non-nuclear nations of the world have joined the ongoing efforts of the world’s NGO, health and religious communities in demanding an end to the madness. Led by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a global partnership of 440 partners in 98 countries, the International Red Cross, the world’s health associations representing more than 17 million health professionals worldwide along with religious communities including the Catholic Church and World Council of Churches they are calling for a treaty to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.
The effort to ban nuclear weapons has several parallels to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines led by Jody Williams, recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. This effort was dismissed and called utopian by most governments and militaries of the world when it was launched by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in 1992 only to succeed in 1997 through partnerships, public imagination and political pressure resulting in the ultimate political will. The nuclear ban movement has been vigorously fought by the nuclear nations trying desperately to hold onto their weapons and pressuring members of their alliances to hold the line.
Unfortunately these weapons and control systems are imperfect. During the Cold War there were many instances where the world came perilously close to nuclear war . It is a matter of sheer luck that this scenario did not come to pass by design or accident. Our luck will not hold out forever. Luck is not a security policy. From a medical and public health stance based on our current evidence-based understanding of what nuclear weapons can actually do, any argument for continued possession of these weapons by anyone in untenable and defies logic. There is absolutely no reasonable or adequate medical response to nuclear war.
As with any public health threat from Zika, to Ebola, Polio, HIV, prevention is the goal. The global threat from nuclear weapons is no different. The only way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons is to ban and eliminate them. Our future depends upon this.
President Kennedy speaking on nuclear weapons before the U.N. Security Council in September 1961 said, “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us”. Our children’s children will look back and rightly ask why we the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons remained on the wrong side of history when it came to abolishing nuclear weapons.
Robert Dodge is a family physician practicing full time in Ventura, California. He serves on the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles serving as a Peace and Security Ambassador and at the national level where he sits on the security committee. He also serves on the board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions . He writes for PeaceVoice . | 0 |
Two administrators at Harvard University have been accused of embezzling $110, 000 of funding earmarked for disabled students, allegedly spending the money on cell phones, computers, and even sex toys. [School administrators Meg DeMarco and Darris Saylors both quit their jobs after being confronted by police over the missing funds, The Daily Mail reported. Saylors, who worked in the Dean of Students’ office, allegedly bought tablets, computers, phones, and electronic sex toys, reports say. For her part, DeMarco, who was the Harvard Law School’s Director of Student Affairs until 2013, was confronted about the theft at her new job at Babson College. DeMarco, 33, admitted to “making mistakes” in the job. “I never intended to harm the university. I’m very sorry and will do everything in my power to rectify the situation,” she told CBS affiliate WBZ TV. Officials accuse DeMarco of using a school mobile card reader to transfer money into her personal account and then altering records to cover her tracks. She also bought a large amount of electronic items, investigators said. Police subpoenaed Apple Corp. and discovered items had been shipped to DeMarco’s home. Harvard announced a change in procedure after the reports. “As a result of this matter, the Law School implemented additional layers of controls governing the use of its credit accounts and purchasing protocols,” the school said in a statement. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 1 |
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
– From Major General Smedley Butler’s War is a Rackett
Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich has just penned an extremely powerful warning about the warmongers in Washington D.C. Who funds them, what their motives are, and why it is imperative for the American people to stop them.
The piece was published at The Nation and is titled: Why Is the Foreign Policy Establishment Spoiling for More War? Look at Their Donors .
Read it and share it with everyone you know.
W ashington, DC, may be the only place in the world where people openly flaunt their pseudo-intellectuality by banding together, declaring themselves “think tanks,” and raising money from external interests, including foreign governments, to compile reports that advance policies inimical to the real-life concerns of the American people.
As a former member of the House of Representatives, I remember 16 years of congressional hearings where pedigreed experts came to advocate wars in testimony based on circular, rococo thinking devoid of depth, reality, and truth. I remember other hearings where the Pentagon was unable to reconcile over $1 trillion in accounts, lost track of $12 billion in cash sent to Iraq, and rigged a missile-defense test so that an interceptor could easily home in on a target. War is first and foremost a profitable racket.
How else to explain that in the past 15 years this city’s so called bipartisan foreign policy elite has promoted wars in Iraq and Libya, and interventions in Syria and Yemen, which have opened Pandora’s box to a trusting world, to the tune of trillions of dollars, a windfall for military contractors. DC’s think “tanks” should rightly be included in the taxonomy of armored war vehicles and not as gathering places for refugees from academia.
According to the front page of this past Friday’s Washington Post, the bipartisan foreign-policy elite recommends the next president show less restraint than President Obama. Acting at the urging of “liberal” hawks brandishing humanitarian intervention, read war, the Obama administration attacked Libya along with allied powers working through NATO.
Indeed, I warned about this in last week’s piece: U.S. Foreign Policy ‘Elite’ Eagerly Await an Expansion of Overseas Wars Under Hillary Clinton .
The think tankers fell in line with the Iraq invasion. Not being in the tank, I did my own analysis of the call for war in October of 2002, based on readily accessible information, and easily concluded that there was no justification for war. I distributed it widely in Congress and led 125 Democrats in voting against the Iraq war resolution. There was no money to be made from a conclusion that war was uncalled for, so, against millions protesting in the United States and worldwide, our government launched into an abyss, with a lot of armchair generals waving combat pennants. The marching band and chowder society of DC think tanks learned nothing from the Iraq and Libya experience.
The only winners were arms dealers, oil companies, and jihadists. Immediately after the fall of Libya, the black flag of Al Qaeda was raised over a municipal building in Benghazi, Gadhafi’s murder was soon to follow, with Secretary Clinton quipping with a laugh, “We came, we saw, he died.” President Obama apparently learned from this misadventure, but not the Washington policy establishment, which is spoiling for more war.
The self-identified liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) is now calling for Syria to be bombed, and estimates America’s current military adventures will be tidied up by 2025, a tardy twist on “mission accomplished.” CAP, according to a report in The Nation, has received funding from war contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who make the bombers that CAP wants to rain hellfire on Syria.
The Brookings Institute has taken tens of millions from foreign governments , notably Qatar, a key player in the military campaign to oust Assad. Retired four-star Marine general John Allen is now a Brookings senior fellow . Charles Lister is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute , which has received funding from Saudi Arabia , the major financial force providing billions in arms to upend Assad and install a Sunni caliphate stretching across Iraq and Syria. Foreign-government money is driving our foreign policy.
As the drumbeat for an expanded war gets louder, Allen and Lister jointly signed an op-ed in the Sunday Washington Post, calling for an attack on Syria. The Brookings Institute, in a report to Congress , admitted it received $250,000 from the US Central Command, Centcom, where General Allen shared leadership duties with General David Petraeus. Pentagon money to think tanks that endorse war? This is academic integrity, DC-style.
And why is Central Command, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of transportation, and the US Department of Health and Human Services giving money to Brookings?
Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who famously told Colin Powell , “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it,” predictably says of this current moment , “We do think there needs to be more American action.” A former Bush administration top adviser is also calling for the United States to launch a cruise missile attack on Syria.
The American people are fed up with war, but a concerted effort is being made through fearmongering, propaganda, and lies to prepare our country for a dangerous confrontation, with Russia in Syria.
The demonization of Russia is a calculated plan to resurrect a raison d’être for stone-cold warriors trying to escape from the dustbin of history by evoking the specter of Russian world domination.
It’s infectious. Earlier this year the BBC broadcast a fictional show that contemplated WWIII, beginning with a Russian invasion of Latvia (where 26 percent of the population is ethnic Russian and 34 percent of Latvians speak Russian at home).
The imaginary WWIII scenario conjures Russia’s targeting London for a nuclear strike. No wonder that by the summer of 2016 a poll showed two-thirds of UK citizens approved the new British PM’s launching a nuclear strike in retaliation. So much for learning the lessons detailed in the Chilcot report.
As this year’s presidential election comes to a conclusion, the Washington ideologues are regurgitating the same bipartisan consensus that has kept America at war since 9/11 and made the world a decidedly more dangerous place.
The DC think tanks provide cover for the political establishment, a political safety net, with a fictive analytical framework providing a moral rationale for intervention, capitol casuistry. I’m fed up with the DC policy elite who cash in on war while presenting themselves as experts, at the cost of other people’s lives, our national fortune, and the sacred honor of our country.
Any report advocating war that comes from any alleged think tank ought to be accompanied by a list of the think tank’s sponsors and donors and a statement of the lobbying connections of the report’s authors.
It is our patriotic duty to expose why the DC foreign-policy establishment and its sponsors have not learned from their failures and instead are repeating them, with the acquiescence of the political class and sleepwalkers with press passes.
It is also time for a new peace movement in America, one that includes progressives and libertarians alike, both in and out of Congress, to organize on campuses, in cities, and towns across America, to serve as an effective counterbalance to the Demuplican war party, its think tanks, and its media cheerleaders. The work begins now, not after the Inauguration. We must not accept war as inevitable, and those leaders who would lead us in that direction, whether in Congress or the White House, must face visible opposition.
Thank you Mr. Kucinich, I couldn’t agree more. | 0 |
LIKE FROM A MOVIE, MIKE PENCE DID SOMETHING AMAZING AT A TRUMP RALLY TODAY! by IWB · October 27, 2016
Danny Gold for Liberty Writers reports, Mike Pence is honest, patriotic, and faithful. But he just took his love for the people to a whole new level. I don’t recall ever seeing a politician do this. Read more: | 0 |
Why Every Man Must Take Control Of His Finances How to profit off of the collapse Image Credits: flickr, 68751915@N05 .
The world that we live in is nothing like the world that our parents lived in. Back in the pre-globalization era, of roughly 1940-1990, it was completely feasible to expect a corporation to pay your salary and help ease you into retirement.
Back in this “golden era,” corporations actually looked out for their employees. Through various financial means, such as the Roth 401k or a conventional pension, employers could expect to be getting a reliable deposit bi-monthly in order to help them sustain their standard of living all throughout their retirement years.
It also used to be that a college degree was something to aspire to; something that guaranteed you a well-paying job, that would allow you to support a family of four with just a single college graduate’s income. This is obviously no longer the case.
Now, in 2016, the rate of unemployment for college graduates is officially 7%, but we all know the games that the economists play. | 0 |
She seemed like the model tenant. A nurse who was living at the Y. W. C. A. in Harlem, she had come to rent a at the Wilshire Apartments in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. She filled out what the rental agent remembers as a “beautiful application. ” She did not even want to look at the unit. There was just one hitch: Maxine Brown was black. Stanley Leibowitz, the rental agent, talked to his boss, Fred C. Trump. “I asked him what to do and he says, ‘Take the application and put it in a drawer and leave it there,’” Mr. Leibowitz, now 88, recalled in an interview. It was late 1963 — just months before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act — and the tall, mustachioed Fred Trump was approaching the apex of his building career. He was about to complete the jewel in the crown of his housing empire: seven towers, called Trump Village, spread across nearly 40 acres in Coney Island. He was also grooming his heir. His son Donald, 17, would soon enroll at Fordham University in the Bronx, living at his parents’ home in Queens and spending much of his free time touring construction sites in his father’s Cadillac, driven by a black chauffeur. “His father was his idol,” Mr. Leibowitz recalled. “Anytime he would come into the building, Donald would be by his side. ” Over the next decade, as Donald J. Trump assumed an increasingly prominent role in the business, the company’s practice of turning away potential black tenants was painstakingly documented by activists and organizations that viewed equal housing as the next frontier in the civil rights struggle. The Justice Department undertook its own investigation and, in 1973, sued Trump Management for discriminating against blacks. Both Fred Trump, the company’s chairman, and Donald Trump, its president, were named as defendants. It was news, and for Donald, amounted to his debut in the public eye. “Absolutely ridiculous,” he was quoted as saying of the government’s allegations. Looking back, Mr. Trump’s response to the lawsuit can be seen as presaging his handling of subsequent challenges, in business and in politics. Rather than quietly trying to settle — as another New York developer had done a couple of years earlier — he turned the lawsuit into a protracted battle, complete with angry denials, character assassination, charges that the government was trying to force him to rent to “welfare recipients” and a $100 million countersuit accusing the Justice Department of defamation. When it was over, Mr. Trump declared victory, emphasizing that the consent decree he ultimately signed did not include an admission of guilt. But an investigation by The New York Times — drawing on files from the New York City Commission on Human Rights, internal Justice Department records, court documents and interviews with tenants, civil rights activists and prosecutors — uncovered a long history of racial bias at his family’s properties, in New York and beyond. That history has taken on fresh relevance with Mr. Trump arguing that black voters should support him over Hillary Clinton, whom he has called a bigot. While there is no evidence that Mr. Trump personally set the rental policies at his father’s properties, he was on hand while they were in place, working out of a cubicle in Trump Management’s Brooklyn offices as early as the summer of 1968. Then and now, Mr. Trump has steadfastly denied any awareness of any discrimination at Trump properties. While Mr. Trump declined to be interviewed for this article, his general counsel, Alan Garten, said in a statement that there was “no merit to the allegations. ” And there has been no suggestion of racial bias toward prospective residents in the luxury housing that Mr. Trump focused on as his career took off in Manhattan in the 1980s. In the past, Mr. Trump has treated the case as a footnote in the narrative of his career. In his memoir “The Art of the Deal,” he dispensed with it in five paragraphs. And while stumping in Ohio, he even singled out his work at one of his father’s properties in Cincinnati, omitting that, at the time, the development was the subject of a separate discrimination lawsuit — one that included claims of racial slurs uttered by a manager whom Mr. Trump had personally praised. As eager as he was to leave behind the precincts of New York City where Fred Trump had made his fortune, Donald Trump often speaks admiringly of him, recalling what he learned at his father’s side when the Trump name was synonymous with utilitarian housing, not yet with luxury, celebrity, or a polarizing brand of politics. “My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy,” he said last year. Fred Trump got into the housing business when he was in his early 20s, building a home for a neighbor in Queens. During World War II, he constructed housing for shipyard workers and Navy personnel in Norfolk, Va. After the war, he returned to New York, setting his sights on bigger, more ambitious projects, realized with the help of federal government loans. His establishment as one of the city’s biggest developers was hardly free of controversy: The Senate Banking Committee subpoenaed him in 1954 during an investigation into profiteering off federal housing loans. Under oath, he acknowledged that he had wildly overstated the costs of a development to obtain a larger mortgage from the government. In 1966, as the investigative journalist Wayne Barrett detailed in “Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth,” a New York legislative committee accused Fred Trump of using state money earmarked for housing to build a shopping center instead. One lawmaker called Mr. Trump “greedy and grasping. ” By this point, the Trump organization’s business practices were beginning to come under scrutiny from civil rights groups that had received complaints from prospective tenants. People like Maxine Brown. Mr. Leibowitz, the rental agent at the Wilshire, remembered Ms. Brown repeatedly inquiring about the apartment. “Finally, she realized what it was all about,” he said. Ms. Brown’s first instinct was to let the matter go she was happy enough at the Y. W. C. A. “I had a big room and two meals a day for five dollars a week,” she said in an interview. But a friend, Mae Wiggins, who had also been denied an apartment at the Wilshire, told her that she ought to have her own place, with a private bathroom and a kitchen. She encouraged Ms. Brown to file a complaint with the New York City Commission on Human Rights, as she was doing. “We knew there was prejudice in renting,” Ms. Wiggins recalled. “It was rampant in New York. It made me feel really bad, and I wanted to do something to right the wrong. ” Mr. Leibowitz was called to testify at the commission’s hearing on Ms. Brown’s case. Asked to estimate how many blacks lived in Mr. Trump’s various properties, he remembered replying: “To the best of my knowledge, none. ” After the hearing, Ms. Brown was offered an apartment in the Wilshire, and in the spring of 1964, she moved in. For 10 years, she said, she was the only in the building. Complaints about the Trump organization’s rental policies continued to mount: By 1967, state investigators found that out of some 3, 700 apartments in Trump Village, seven were occupied by families. Like Ms. Brown, the few minorities who did live in buildings often had to force their way in. A black woman named Agnes Bunn recalled hearing in early 1970 about a vacant Trump apartment in another part of Queens, from a white friend who lived in the building. But when she went by, she was told there were no vacancies. “The super came out and stood there until I left the property,” Ms. Bunn said. Ms. Bunn testified about the experience at a meeting with the New York City Commission on Human Rights in 1970. According to a summary, recovered from the New York City Municipal Archives, she told a Trump lawyer that it was known that no “colored” people were wanted as tenants in the building. The lawyer concluded that the episode was “all a misunderstanding. ” Ms. Bunn and her husband, a Manhattan accountant, soon became the building’s first black tenants. Unlike the public schools, the housing market could not be desegregated simply by court order. Even after passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited racial discrimination in housing, developments in white neighborhoods continued to rebuff blacks. For years, it fell largely to local civil rights groups to highlight the problem by sending white “testers” into apartment complexes after blacks had been turned away. “Everything was sort of whispers and innuendo and you wanted to try to bring it out into the open,” recalled Phyllis Kirschenbaum, who volunteered for Operation Open City, a housing rights advocacy organization. “I’d walk in with my freckles and red hair and Jewish name and get an apartment immediately. ” The complaints of discrimination were not limited to New York. In 1969, a young black couple, Haywood and Rennell Cash, sued after being denied a home in Cincinnati at one of the first projects in which Donald Trump, fresh out of college, played an active role. Mr. Cash was repeatedly rejected by the Trumps’ rental agent, according to court records and notes kept by Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Cincinnati, which sent in white testers posing as a young couple while Mr. Cash waited in the car. After the agent, Irving Wolper, offered the testers an apartment, they brought in Mr. Cash. Mr. Wolper grew furious, shoving them out of the office and calling the young female tester, Maggie Durham, a “” according to court records. “To this day I have not forgotten the fury in his voice and in his face,” Ms. Durham recalled recently, adding that she also remembered him calling her a “traitor to the race. ” The Cashes were ultimately offered an apartment. At a campaign stop in Ohio recently, Mr. Trump shared warm memories of his time in Cincinnati, calling it one of the early successes of his career. And in “The Art of the Deal,” he praised Mr. Wolper, without using his surname, calling him a “fabulous man” and “an amazing manager. ” “Irving was a classic,” Mr. Trump wrote. The young Mr. Trump also spent time in Norfolk, helping manage the housing complexes his father built there in the 1940s. Similar complaints of discrimination surfaced at those properties beginning in the and were documented by Ellis James, an equal housing activist. “The managers on site were usually not very sophisticated,” Mr. James, now 78, recalled. “Some were dedicated segregationists, but most of them were more concerned with following the policies they were directed to keep. ” Donald Trump said he had first heard about the lawsuit, which was filed in the fall of 1973, on his car radio. The government had charged him, his father and their company, Trump Management Inc. with violating the Fair Housing Act. Another major New York developer, the LeFrak Organization, had been hit with a similar suit a few years earlier. Its founder, Samuel LeFrak, had appeared at a news conference alongside the United States attorney, trumpeting a consent agreement to prohibit discrimination in his buildings by saying it would “make open housing in our cities a reality. ” The LeFrak company even offered the equivalent of one month’s rent to help 50 black families move into predominantly white buildings. Donald Trump took a different approach. He retained Senator Joseph McCarthy’s counsel, Roy Cohn, to defend him. Mr. Trump soon called his own news conference — to announce his countersuit against the government. The government’s lawyers took as their starting point the years of research conducted by civil rights groups at Trump properties. “We did our own investigation and enlarged the case,” said Elyse Goldweber, who as a young assistant United States attorney worked on the lawsuit, U. S. A. v. Trump. A former Trump superintendent named Thomas Miranda testified that multiple Trump Management employees had instructed him to attach a separate piece of paper with a big letter “C” on it — for “colored” — to any application filed by a black . The Trumps went on the offensive, filing a charge against one of the prosecutors, accusing her of turning the investigation into a “ interrogation. ” The Trumps derided the lawsuit as a pressure tactic to get them to sign a consent decree like the one agreed to by Mr. LeFrak. The judge dismissed both the countersuit and the charge. After nearly two years of legal wrangling, the Trumps gave up and signed a consent decree. As is customary, it did not include an admission of guilt. But it did include pages of stipulations intended to ensure the desegregation of Trump properties. Equal housing activists celebrated the agreement as more robust than the one signed by Mr. LeFrak. It required that Trump Management provide the New York Urban League with a weekly list of all its vacancies. This did not stop Mr. Trump from declaring victory. “In the end the government couldn’t prove its case, and we ended up making a minor settlement without admitting any guilt,” he wrote in “The Art of the Deal. ” Only this was not quite the end. A few years later, the government accused the Trumps of violating the consent decree. “We believe that an underlying pattern of discrimination continues to exist in the Trump Management organization,” a Justice Department lawyer wrote to Mr. Cohn in 1978. Once again, the government marshaled numerous examples of blacks being denied Trump apartments. But this time, it also identified a pattern of racial steering. While more black families were now renting in buildings, the government said, many had been confined to a small number of complexes. And tenants in some of these buildings had complained about the conditions, from falling plaster to rusty light fixtures to bloodstained floors. The Trumps effectively wore the government down. The original consent decree expired before the Justice Department had accumulated enough evidence to press its new case. The issue was becoming academic, anyway. New York’s white population was shrinking. Shifting demographics would soon make it impractical to turn away black tenants. By the spring of 1982, when the case was officially closed, Donald Trump’s prized project, Trump Tower, was just months from completion. The rebranding of the Trump name was well underway. As for Ms. Brown, she still lives in the same apartment in the Wilshire. Over the years, she has watched the building’s complexion begin to change — along with some of her neighbors’ attitudes toward her. During the 1990s, one man who used to step off the elevator whenever she stepped on suddenly started greeting her warmly. On a recent afternoon, she reminisced about the unlikely role she played in breaking the color barrier of the Trump real estate empire. “I just wanted a decent place to live,” she said. | 1 |
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BACKGROUND: The superiority of Lactated Ringer’s solution (LR) or normal saline (NS) in fluid resuscitation in a variety of medical and surgical scenarios remains the most hotly debated irrelevant topic in modern medicine. For this reason and because advancement in our academic medicine careers requires us to have a certain number of publications, we have designed this study to finally determine which of the two is the ULTIMATE FLUID!
METHODS: The medical and surgical departments at Miskatonic Medical Center in Maine were made to compete in a no-holds-barred water balloon battle. The teams were randomized to either NS or LR-filled water balloons. Participants were blinded as to which fluid they were using and the data analysis teams were blinded as well. Finally, everyone involved was physically blindfolded by two different blindfolds, thus creating the first ever QUADRUPLE -BLIND clinical study.
Nephrologists were excluded from participating, because they can unfailingly identify and manipulate all fluids with their psychic powers.
RESULTS: The surgical department pulled into an early lead thanks in no small part to the orthopedics team. Led by Dr. Brock Hammersley and assisted by a platoon of Stryker reps who refilled water balloons and acted as spotters, the ortho team’s throws were powerful enough to send the medical department’s participants to the ER with broken bones .
Dr. Hammersley almost won the day for the surgical department by turfing all the new admissions straight back to medicine. However, in a surprise twist, the medicine department pulled out their ace in the hole: legendary hospitalist and goalkeeper Tim Howard . Howard, who has managed to keep his hospitalist team admission-free for two straight years, was able to easily deflect every admission.
Despite Dr. Howard’s assistance, the surgical team captured more flags, scored more touchdowns, shot more hoops, and generally looked cooler doing it all. Nevertheless, medicine ultimately won on points after the medical student on the Heme/Onc service managed to quote the JNC 9 Water Balloon Battle guidelines as pertaining to left-handed African-American male patients with preeclampsia on a night when five virgins are sacrificed to the blood moon.
CONCLUSION: Lactated Ringer’s solution (ironically randomized to medicine) is the ULTIMATE FLUID! Further work needs to be done so we can continue getting NIH funding. 2K Shares | 0 |
Home » Headlines » World News » Oathkeeper Chapter 8
A peaceful valley in the mountains of Colorado becomes a battleground pitting the federal government against a rural sheriff’s department. Sheriff Bear Ellison finds himself increasingly isolated as he is forced to decide between risking his life protecting a local hero, or reneging on his oath and handing him over to federal prosecutors…
Chapter 8
Cold winds poured down off the mountains and swirled in the valley, heralding the end of Indian summer. Billowing cumulonimbus clouds boiled upwards into the stratosphere, dwarfing the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks to the west. The aspen on the northern slopes had lost the last of their leaves and the cottonwoods and willows that clustered in the arroyos and flood plains had turned yellow. The elk had made their way down off the high meadows, and the mule deer were more common, grazing along the shoulders of the highway, sizing up their prospects of safe crossing.
Sheriff Ellison drove his patrols with a heavy heart. Nguyet had made her decision. She was leaving for Atlanta, and he would soon be alone. He wished his term was over so that he could jettison his responsibilities and join her and his new granddaughter. The visit with Acevedo had cured him of any lingering political aspirations. Despite the DEA’s wishes, he never did give a press conference on the accidental shooting.
What would be the point? he thought. Acevedo was right in one sense. The sheriff would have been held responsible for the shooting, regardless of how he framed it for the public.
Ellison conceded that he would not be able to reign in the feds. He knew that the populace had most likely also realized this by now, and this painted him in a pastel hue of weakness. He noticed that people in general had become less social and cordial towards him since the botched raid. “Good morning, Sheriff. How are things?” was replaced with a cursory “Howdy” or a perfunctory nod, followed by averted eyes. This, along with his wife’s looming departure, filled him with a feeling of isolation. The DEA raids would continue, despite his protest. Nguyet had begged him to resign, but he just couldn’t. Not at such a chaotic time in his career.
Ellison’s hope was that the county might turn against the DEA occupation. Monte Turcot was a hero, after all, and the shooting of him and his wife was a lightning rod. He hoped that the citizens were beginning to question the value of the DEA’s mission, but without effective leadership and organization, they would be helpless to foment any real resistance.
Ellison knew Acevedo was disappointed that he did not do the requested damage control on the DEA’s behalf. He learned of this through a phone call with the governor’s office, whom the DEA had contacted to voice their displeasure. They had called him demanding an explanation.
“There’s nothing for my department to communicate,” Ellison had explained over the phone. “We were not involved in that operation… We have asked DA Chalmers to launch a grand jury investigation… We expect their decision any day… I’ve ordered Special Agent Acevedo to suspend operations… No, he has not complied… I respectfully disagree with your assessment… I will take the governor’s position under advisement…”
The DEA continued according to their plan. It didn’t matter to them what the sheriff or a constituency of “rancheros and hippy flameouts” thought of their operation. Their mission was ordained by the president. Provincial resistance was futile. Those who stood athwart them would be ignored or swept aside. Acevedo and his agents conducted three more raids after the Turcot shooting, adding to their tally of minor victories in the War on Drugs at a taxpayer cost of over $100,000 per arrest. Thankfully, no one else was shot.
One afternoon, while on patrol, Ellison received a text on his cell phone. He glanced at it quickly, then turned off the road to change direction. An email from DA Chalmers came moments later.
“Re: Turcot Shooting,” it read. “GJ has decided not to pursue.”
Ellison stepped on the gas. He turned west onto County Road 306 and north just after the golf course, taking Gun Club Road for two miles and over Michigan Ditch where it ended at the intersection of a dirt road running east and west. Ellison turned west, his cruiser’s tires throwing up rocks and a plume of dust as he accelerated up the road that led into the hills and evergreen forest. Ten minutes from when he had received the email, he was pulling into Monte Turcot’s driveway. He shut off his cruiser, looked at his watch, took a deep breath, then got out and walked up to the door. As he raised his hand to knock, the recognizable pop of gunfire echoed through the trees. Instinctively, Ellison reached down towards his holster. Another shot rang out, then another, and another, in deliberate succession. The sounds were coming from behind Turcot’s trailer, where it abutted the woods.
Cautiously, the sheriff made his way around the trailer, ready to draw if necessary. As he stepped out from behind it, the source of the shooting finally came into view. It was Monte Turcot himself, now bearded and thin, firing rounds into a tree trunk with a small pistol. His back was turned to the sheriff, and a half empty bottle of Jim Beam sat clasped in his other hand.
“Don’t shoot me, Monte. I’m right behind you,” Ellison called.
Monte staggered a few steps back and lowered his gun.
“Listen, I came out here to talk to you.”
Without even acknowledging the sheriff’s presence, Monte took a swig from the bottle, his pistol now dangling in his hand like a toy gun at his side. Ellison kept his hand close to his holster and made a quick glance about, looking for cover in the event that Monte had in fact lost his marbles and was mulling over the idea of suicide by cop.
“Can we talk?” asked Ellison.
Monte stared into the woods, wobbling, his back still turned to the sheriff. After another swig, he lowered his bottle, holding it so loosely that Ellison wondered if it might slip out and crash on the rocks at his feet.
“Monte?”
Monte didn’t move.
“Okay, Monte,” Ellison explained slowly. “I’m going to go back to my car and check my messages and call in. That’ll take me about five minutes or so. Then I’ll be on my way. If you want, you can come over and talk. Or call me later. Does that sound okay with you?”
Monte didn’t respond, swaying in the autumn air. A gust of wind blew pine cones off the trees, which landed with a thunk on his trailer’s metal roof. Ellison backed away behind the trailer and walked back to his cruiser. Inside, he radioed a quick status report to dispatch and then checked his messages. Nguyet was wondering when he would be home for dinner. His son had emailed pictures of his granddaughter. A reporter from the Gazette wanted to talk about his reelection campaign. Someone had sent a note about a roadkill carcass on the highway north of town.
Something moved in the corner of his eye. Ellison glanced up and was startled to find the ragged Monte Turcot framed in his windshield. He looked pale, his hair was matted, and his filthy sweatshirt was stained with blood. Ellison looked at his hands. Monte was no longer wielding the pistol, but he still clung to the bottle. From the looks of it, he’d had a few more drinks since the sheriff had arrived.
Relieved but still cautious, Ellison rolled down the passenger window. “Get in, Monte.”
Monte stared back, his blank expression evoking that of a zombie’s. Ellison clipped his cell phone into its mount on the dash, then reached over and opened the passenger door. Monte slowly shuffled towards it and got in.
“How are you holding up, Monte?” Ellison asked.
“Still here,” he answered in a raspy tone.
“This is a terrible thing you’re going through. I wish there was something I could do to help.”
“Thanks,” murmured Monte.
“What’s that blood from, on your shirt there?”
“Tore my hands up chopping wood.”
“Did you cut yourself?”
“No.” Monte set his bottle down on the floorboard and presented the palms of his hands to the sheriff. They were covered in blisters, some of which had burst. The tender layer of skin beneath had torn open.
“You should take care of that,” Ellison warned him. “It could get infected.”
“Yeah…you’re probably right.”
“Looks like you did a lot of chopping.”
“Four cords,” Monte stated quietly.
“How long did that take you?”
“I split it all yesterday.”
“That ought to be plenty to get you through winter in that trailer of yours.”
Monte stared out the passenger window. The mountains appeared through a break in the ponderosa that lined his drive, their peaks sheathed in the purest of white.
“It certainly is beautiful out here this time of year,” the sheriff observed.
“I think I might just walk myself up into those mountains and never come back down,” Monte answered in a quiet, resigned sigh. “You ever think about doing something like that, Sheriff?”
“I think about that a lot, Monte. Maybe not exactly like you describe it, but there are a lot of days – too many days – when I think about dropping everything and going away, going away for a while.”
“I ain’t talking about for a while . I’m talking about for good.”
“You wouldn’t be planning on bringing that gun along with you, would you?” asked Ellison.
“You know, I don’t really plan anything, anymore.” Monte looked down at his ravaged hands. “The future changes day by day. Sometimes I think about going back to active duty again, volunteering for all the action. I thought for sure that was going to be my future yesterday. But then today, I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Today, I think I’ve seen enough killing for one lifetime. I don’t want any part of that no more. Right now, I wish I’d never joined in the first place.” He shrugged. “But then again, who knows? Tomorrow, I’ll probably wish I never came home.”
“It’s got to be tough, dealing with everything you’ve been through,” Ellison answered. “It’s too much for one man.”
“Yeah.” Monte nodded slowly. “I’m ashamed of the things that I thought about doing yesterday.”
“What sort of things?”
“I’m worried about you, Monte.”
“What do you know about anything, Sheriff?”
“You’re right. I don’t know much about what you’re going through. I just worry.”
“Don’t.”
“Monte,” Ellison said, wary of the direction he was about to take the conversation, “I came out here to check up on you. It doesn’t look like you’re doing well. I don’t think you’re out of line or anything, all things considered. I just think you’re out here all alone, and that it’s not good for you. Is there any way I could talk you into staying with some family for a while? You’ve got a sister, don’t you? Maybe she could come out and stay with you, or you could go visit her.”
“She lives in Connecticut. She’s got four kids.”
“What about your parents?”
“They’re old, worn down, worn out. I’d be a burden on them. I don’t want to deal with them right now, anyway.”
“Monte…I wouldn’t feel right about just leaving you out here without knowing you’re going to get some help. Everyone needs help, sometimes. There isn’t any shame in that.”
Monte turned from the window and looked at Ellison. “So what happened with the grand jury? That’s really why you came out here, isn’t it? To tell me about that?”
Ellison felt relieved that Monte had broached the subject first. He hadn’t been able to figure out a way to get there gracefully by himself.
“They concluded that, under applicable law, no criminal charges will be filed against the DEA agent that shot you and your wife. I’m sorry.” He watched as Monte’s eyes dimmed in helpless frustration. “For the record, that’s the DA’s language, not mine. I think it’s wrong.”
“I can’t say that I’m surprised,” Monte replied. He picked his bottle off the floorboards and opened the door. “I think I’m going to go back inside and lay down for a while.”
“Okay, Monte. I’ll stay out here for a few minutes, if you don’t mind.”
“Don’t worry, Sheriff. I’ll be all right,” answered Monte. “I just need to get some rest. These hands are hurting real bad, and I’m pretty drunk.” He stumbled out of the cruiser and staggered slowly back into his trailer, letting the door slam shut behind him.
Sheriff Ellison waited outside with his window down, listening for a gunshot for over an hour. | 0 |
On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “New Day,” CNN Senior Media Correspondent and “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter stated that he thinks leaks coming from the Trump White House are “partly to do with career government officials, who are concerned about Trump. Partly, it does have to do with some former Obama administration officials, who have their own agendas, and partly, it’s a cry for help from Trump aides … people are motivated to leak in order to alert the public to a problem. ” Stelter said, “Leaks are coming from many different places, for many different reasons. That’s been true during the transition, and now especially true, that Trump is in office. Every administration, every government has leaks, but this is of a whole other level. We’re seeing something so much more extreme. ” He added, “I think it has partly to do with career government officials, who are concerned about Trump. Partly, it does have to do with some former Obama administration officials, who have their own agendas, and partly, it’s a cry for help from Trump aides, from people inside the Trump White House, who may feel they’re loyal to him, but believe he needs help, that he’s not getting the right support. Oftentimes, people are motivated to leak in order to alert the public to a problem. ” Stelter further stated that government officials could be breaking the law by sharing information, and some could be felonies. Stelter also pointed out that there were leak investigations during the Obama administration. ( RCP Video) Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions, facing a storm of criticism over newly disclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States, recused himself on Thursday from any investigation into charges that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election. His announcement, delivered at a terse news conference, came after a day of developments in a murky affair that has shadowed President Trump, jeopardized his closest aides and intensified pressure for a full inquiry into Moscow’s attempts to influence the election as well as the policies of the new administration. Many top Democrats demanded Mr. Sessions’s resignation, and a growing number of Republicans declared that he should not take part in any investigation into the case, given his own still largely unexplained role in it. But Mr. Trump stoutly defended Mr. Sessions, one of his few early champions on Capitol Hill. “He could have stated his response more accurately, but it was clearly not intentional,” he said in a statement, which accused Democrats of engaging in “a total witch hunt. ” Mr. Sessions insisted there was nothing nefarious about his two meetings with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, even though he did not disclose them to the Senate during his confirmation hearing and they occurred during the heat of the race between Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, and Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Sessions was advising on national security. In his account on Thursday of the more substantive meeting, which took place in his Senate office on Sept. 8, Mr. Sessions described Mr. Kislyak as one of a parade of envoys who seek out lawmakers like him to glean information about American policies and promote the agendas of their governments. “Somehow, the subject of Ukraine came up,” Mr. Sessions said, recalling that the meeting grew testy after the ambassador defended Russia’s conduct toward its neighbor and heaped blame on everybody else. “I thought he was pretty much of an ambassador,” Mr. Sessions said, noting that he declined a lunch invitation from Mr. Kislyak. Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself was one of his first public acts as attorney general. He said he made the decision after consulting with Justice Department officials, and he denied misleading Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, when he said in his confirmation hearing that he had not met with Russian officials about the Trump campaign. “In retrospect,” Mr. Sessions told reporters, “I should have slowed down and said, ‘But I did meet one Russian official a couple of times, and that would be the ambassador.’ ” The latest disclosures — and the Trump administration’s contradictory accounts of them — have deepened the questions about Russia’s role in the election and its aftermath. The affair has fueled calls for congressional and independent investigations, and toppled another close Trump aide, Michael T. Flynn, who resigned as national security adviser last month after admitting he had misled the administration over his contacts with Mr. Kislyak. On Thursday, the White House confirmed that Mr. Flynn had his own previously undisclosed meeting with the ambassador in December to “establish a line of communication” between the incoming administration and the Russian government. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s and now a senior adviser, also participated in the meeting at Trump Tower. The extent and frequency of the contacts remain unclear. But news of the meeting added to the emerging picture of how the relationship between Mr. Trump’s team and Moscow evolved to include some of Mr. Trump’s most trusted advisers. Two other Trump campaign advisers also reportedly spoke with Mr. Kislyak last year at an event on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention. Carter Page, a businessman and early Trump foreign policy adviser, told MSNBC on Thursday, “I’m not going to deny that I talked to him,” but said in an earlier statement that he would not comment about the event, which was off the record. Additionally, J. D. Gordon, a retired naval officer who advised Mr. Trump on national security, told USA Today that he had had an “informal conversation” with Mr. Kislyak, and played down its importance. Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself exposed a rift between the White House and the Justice Department, not only over whether he should do so — Mr. Trump said he did not think Mr. Sessions needed to — but over the president’s public statements. A Justice Department official confessed puzzlement about why the White House regularly asserted that no one from the Trump campaign had any contact with the Russian government. With Mr. Sessions’s recusal, any Justice Department investigation would be overseen by the deputy attorney general. Dana J. Boente is currently serving in an acting capacity from his role as the chief federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Virginia. A Senate hearing is scheduled for Tuesday for the nomination of Rod J. Rosenstein as deputy attorney general he would oversee the issue if he is confirmed, and his hearing is now likely to be dominated by questions about the Russia issue. It is not clear if the Justice Department is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, although the F. B. I. is known to have examined possible contacts between Russia and Trump advisers. The House Intelligence Committee has also opened an inquiry into whether Russia tried to influence the election. Mr. Trump said that he “wasn’t aware” that Mr. Sessions had spoken to the ambassador, but that he believed that the attorney general had testified truthfully during his confirmation hearing. “I think he probably did,” Mr. Trump told reporters, while touring the Gerald R. Ford, the newest American aircraft carrier, in Newport News, Va. Asked whether Mr. Sessions should recuse himself from the investigations, the president said, “I don’t think so. ” Within Mr. Trump’s inner circle, Mr. Flynn appears to have been the primary interlocutor with the Russian envoy. The two were in contact during the campaign and the transition, Mr. Kislyak and current and former American officials have said. But Mr. Sessions served as the chairman of Mr. Trump’s national security committee — a post Democrats said would have made him a much figure for officials from many foreign countries. There is nothing unusual about meetings between presidential campaigns and foreign diplomats. Mr. Kislyak was one of several envoys at the Republican National Convention, where his first meeting with Mr. Sessions, according to the attorney general, was a brief encounter after a panel organized by the Heritage Foundation. Ambassadors also attended the Democratic convention, though it was not clear whether Mr. Kislyak was among them. “Active embassies here consider it as their assignment to stretch out feelers to presidential hopefuls,” said Peter Wittig, the German ambassador, who met most of the Republican candidates, though not Mr. Trump. “I don’t consider it as something unusual or problematic. ” The trouble in Mr. Sessions’s case is that his meeting came as the nation’s intelligence agencies were concluding that Russia had tried to destabilize the election and help Mr. Trump. Mr. Sessions’s initial lack of disclosure of the meetings with Mr. Kislyak fed suspicions that it was more than diplomacy. The disclosure, first reported by The Washington Post, contradicted forceful and repeated denials from the White House that anyone from the Trump campaign had discussions with the Russians. “I have nothing to do with Russia,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference on Feb. 20. “To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does. ” Asked at the news conference on Thursday whether he and the ambassador had discussed Mr. Trump or the election, Mr. Sessions said, “I don’t recall. ” Ambassadors are “pretty gossipy,” he said, and “this was in campaign season, but I don’t recall any specific political discussions. ” Mr. Sessions noted that he was joined by two retired Army colonels on his staff, as well as perhaps a younger staff member. He said they opened with small talk about Mr. Sessions’s visit to Russia with a church group in 1991. “He said he was not a believer himself, but he was glad to have church people come there,” Mr. Sessions recalled. That meeting came during the waning months of the campaign. But the meeting two months later of Mr. Kushner, Mr. Flynn and Mr. Kislyak came at an arguably more crucial time, with Mr. Trump as the and the Obama White House preparing to impose sanctions on Russia and publicly make its case that Moscow had interfered with the election. What is becoming clear is that the incoming Trump administration was simultaneously striking a conciliatory pose toward Moscow in a series of meetings and calls involving Mr. Kislyak. “They generally discussed the relationship, and it made sense to establish a line of communication,” said Hope Hicks, a White House spokeswoman. “Jared has had meetings with many other foreign countries and representatives — as many as two dozen other foreign countries’ leaders and representatives. ” The Trump Tower meeting lasted 20 minutes, and Mr. Kushner has not met since with Mr. Kislyak, Ms. Hicks said. At Mr. Sessions’s confirmation hearing, Mr. Franken asked him about a CNN report that after the election, intelligence briefers had told President Barack Obama and Mr. Trump that Russian operatives claimed to have compromising information about Mr. Trump. Mr. Franken also noted that the report indicated that surrogates for Mr. Trump and intermediaries for the Russian government continued to exchange information during the campaign. He asked Mr. Sessions what he would do if that report proved true. Mr. Sessions replied that he was “not aware of any of those activities. ” He added, “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I didn’t have — did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it. ” On Thursday, Mr. Sessions said he did not view Mr. Kislyak’s visit as tied to his campaign role, but he acknowledged, “I can’t speak for what the Russian ambassador may have had in his mind. ” | 1 |
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NASA’s space cameras have accidentally filmed another unidentified flying object (UFO) travelling out of earth’s atmosphere. The question is why did the space agency not turn off the live feed or try to cover up, as it usually does with UFOs and aliens?
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A disk-shaped UFO appears in the video giving support to the theory that extraterrestrial beings and their crafts are continuously visiting earth. Scroll Down For Video Below
Ever since the footage was uploaded to YouTube, it generated great controversy both among those who support the idea that it might be an extraterrestrial object, as among those who are completely skeptical of the subject, and as a joke suggest that “UFO’s that are planning on entering our air space should be registered and pay taxes.”
The truth is that on many occasions only fragments of videos in which these mystery objects are visible are released. However, the fact that NASA interrupts its live feed transmissions is what arouses more suspicion among those who are eager to find new evidence of the existence of alien life, UFO’s and how we are all part of a massive conspiracy.
One user wrote on YouTube: “The question isn’t “is this an alien spacecraft?”, but actually “Why NASA didn’t cut or blur this video as they always do with other strange sights?” According to many people, in today’s era, it isn’t a question anymore whether or not UFO’s are real.
In fact, if we look back into the past we will see numerous fascinating statements made by former astronauts, military officials and scientists about Alien life and the existence of UFOs.
Here are only a few:
“Intelligent beings from other star systems have been and are visiting our planet Earth. They are variously referred to as Visitors, Others, Star People, Et’s, etc…They are visiting Earth now; this is not a matter of conjecture or wistful thinking.” – Theodor C. Loder III, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences, University of New Hampshire.
We cannot address the UFO phenomena without mentioning Dr. Edgar Mitchel, one of the best-known Apollo astronauts and the sixth man to walk on the moon; a retired Captain in the US Navy, aeronautical engineer and founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) who had much to say about Alien life:
“I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real…Yes, there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered. We are not alone in the universe; they have been coming here for a long time.”
Franklin Story Musgrave, an American Physician, retired NASA astronaut who worked on the design and development of the Skylab Program and the only astronaut to have flown missions on all five Space Shuttles had very interesting things to say about life elsewhere in the cosmos:
“Statistically it’s a certainty there are hugely advanced civilizations, intelligence, life forms out there. I believe they’re so advanced that they’re even doing interstellar travel. I believe it’s possible that they even came here. It’s logical to presume the universe must have other life in it and by virtue of association that we could be visited at some point.” | 0 |
link a reply to: carewemust "Vomiting black liquid" caught my eye. I know bleeding internally can cause black vomit, sometimes it looks like coffee grounds. But something in the HeatStreet article that Fox news linked too also caught my eye: Max was buried in Canterbury cemetery after his mother arranged to have his body flown home a week after his death. A post-mortem examination was carried out by a pathologist in east Kent, but Vanessa says that more than two months later she still does not know the result, or whether there will be an inquest. She added: “Apparently, he had not suffered any obvious physical injuries but he could have been slowly poisoned, which is why the results of toxicology tests from his post-mortem are so important. [bolding by me] Activated charcoal -- which is black and readily available to anyone -- is used to treat poisoning, and could cause black vomit also. Could Spiers have suspected he was being poisoned and tried to self-treat with activated charcoal? I can't find much more about the black vomit... as in if someone was with him before/during/after he vomited the black liquid... or if it was found at the same time as he was found dead. | 0 |
Trump rape accuser skips press conference, citing threats ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board NATO and Turkey: Time to admit reality By GPD on November 4, 2016 By DAVID ROMANO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created after World War Two to unite democratic states or Western Europe and North America against Soviet expansionism. The alliance admitted Turkey in 1952, two years after the country transitioned into a democratic electoral system of government.
Today, in contrast, neither the Soviet Union nor a democratic Turkey exist. Going on with the charade of NATO may, under the circumstances, do more harm than good. Russia today remains much smaller and less powerful than the Soviet empire was, and bilateral arrangements with countries looking for protection against their eastern neighbor should suffice. From the Russian point of view, a large alliance apparently arrayed against it, working hard to encircle Russia, provokes understandable concerns. The West should consider asking Russia what it would concede in return for the dissolution of the alliance.
In the case of Turkey, the country’s NATO membership also increasingly makes a mockery of the alliance’s charter and places significant liabilities on the shoulders of other members. Perusing the NATO charter, one finds statements such as:
The Parties to this…are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law…..The Parties will contribute toward the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations by strengthening their free institutions, by bringing about a better understanding of the principles upon which these institutions are founded, and by promoting conditions of stability and well-being.
Although Turkey’s military coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980 briefly interrupted democracy there, the military made good on its promises to quickly return power to elected civilian control. Today, in contrast, it seems increasingly clear that President Erdogan will never relinquish power. His purges and complete subversion of democratic institutions and individual liberties may take decades to repair, if ever.
This process began well before the failed July 15 coup in Turkey, but that event provided a pretext for taking the purges in Turkey to new heights. Under new “emergency rule” legislation, some 200,000 civil servants have been dismissed with scant evidence of wrongdoing. Around 2000 academics lost their posts, including just about every university dean – replacements for which will all be appointed directly by Mr. Erdogan. Many of the academics dismissed were only guilty of signing a petition for peace between the government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Mr. Erdogan’s government also shut down some 170 media outlets, including a Kurdish children’s broadcaster. Remaining media, including Turkey most venerable newspaper ( Cumhuriyet ) have seen their editors and journalists arrested and imprisoned. People now face arrest and imprisonment without charge for up to 30 days, and the state can now record conversations between those arrested and their lawyers (when they finally get so see one), with the recordings then provided to prosecutors. According to Human Rights Watch, torture has also now returned to Turkish prisons, where 27 elected mayors from mostly Kurdish cities like Diyarbakir now reside. Judges and prosecutors doing anything even mildly displeasing to the ruling party have been summarily dismissed or arrested themselves, only to be replaced with more pliant sycophants (laws were also changed to allow the ruling party to appoint even High Court judges). Hundreds of generals and officers are behind bars, to the point that the Turkish air force can only operate a portion of its fighter planes.
Your columnist could go on, of course, but the point seems clear enough – “freedom, democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law” have withered in Turkey. What’s more, Ankara’s actions and foreign policy threaten NATO. This became abundantly clear when Turkey shot down a Russian fighter plane last year, threatening to drag the alliance into a war it did not want. Although Turkey has since reconciled with Russia, Ankara threatens or even appears poised to go to war with a number actors helping other NATO countries – Iraq, the Democratic Union Party of Syria (PYD), and even Greece, a NATO member itself (Mr. Erdogan recently fumed that the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne made a mistake in giving Greece islands off Turkey’s Aegean coast). During the July 15 attempted coup, Ankara cut off electricity to U.S. forces at Incirlik air base (where they guard nuclear weapons, among other things). Mr. Erdogan and his government suggested that the United States either condoned the coup or even had a role in it.
Combined with Ankara’s support for a number of Islamist groups in the region, including some fairly hard-core Jihadi outfits in Syria, these developments ring a lot of alarm bells in Brussels and Washington. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, the Republican chair of a House subcommittee on emerging threats, expressed such concerns a few weeks ago when he stated that “Ten years ago Turkey was a solid NATO ally and a staunch opponent of radical Islam and a friend of the United States, and today that’s all in question… Erdogan is purging pro-Western people throughout his country who are in positions of influence. He himself has become more aggressive in his Islamic beliefs, and there’s reason for us to be seriously concerned.”
The NATO charter lacks any provisions for expelling members, however, and such a public break is probably not in any member’s interest. The better approach would be to disband NATO and put something new together. American policy makers will protest that Washington can’t afford to lose Turkey. This ignores the fact that they have already lost the Turks to Mr. Erdogan and his ilk – they just haven’t officially left yet.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
Related Posts: No Related Posts The GPD 50 Reads Filed under Politics | 0 |
WATCH: CNN Hack Humiliates Self, Tells Viewers U.S. Reps Are Term-Limited Already (They’re Not)
That breakdown in communication in Washington is exactly what has fueled the rise of Trump . People are sick and tired of nothing getting done, at least nothing good, so they want a new leader who can actually accomplish great things.
“I think that we have decided that rather than confront the disagreement and differences of opinion, we’ll just simply annihilate the person who disagrees with us,” Thomas said.
Unfortunately he is exactly right. Both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of preferring to demonize their opponents rather than engaging in meaningful discussion.
This sort of polarization doesn’t help America. All it does is increase the frustration the American people have with Congress when they see nothing happening for years.
Trump has a history of making compromises and hammering out complex deals in the business world. Unlike Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton, Trump has a history of making things work.
If Trump can bring about some real change in Washington, he can finally turn this country around.
Share this on Facebook and Twitter and let us know if you think electing Trump will be enough to fix what is broken in our capitol. | 0 |
Multan a un ultrasur por lanzar a un jugador del Barça al campo durante el partido Madrid-Legia EL PARTIDO SE CONSIDERABA DE ALTO RIESGO PARA LOS JUGADORES DEL BARCELONA Real Madrid
Un jugador barcelonista golpeó a varios jugadores durante el encuentro de la Champions que tuvo lugar ayer entre el Real Madrid y el Legia Varsovia después de ser arrojado desde la grada por un hincha madridista.
El portero del Legia, muy molesto, intentó devolver el jugador a las gradas de una patada y se encaró con los Ultrasur, que ya preparaban a otro jugador para echarlo al campo y entorpecer el encuentro. En esta ocasión pretendían prenderlo con un mechero antes de lanzarlo al césped.
Las autoridades han vuelto a pedir a los aficionados que dejen de lanzar cosas al campo como botellas, monedas y jugadores del Barcelona. El dispositivo de seguridad no puedo hacer nada por evitar que algunos hinchas introdujeran a jugadores barcelonistas a la grada, pues los llevaban camuflados dentro de bocadillos de gran tamaño.
El partido pudo ser reanudado cuando el árbitro apartó a un rincón del césped al jugador barcelonista. | 0 |
Belgian historian David Engels claims a civil war will erupt in the next 30 years as he draws parallels between Europe and the fall of the Roman Republic. [“In 20 to 30 years Europe will have become an authoritarian or imperial state, after a phase resembling civil war and decay,” said Mr. Engels who is a historian at the Free University of Brussels. Engels has been predicting Europe would go down the path of authoritarianism since 2011, but the ongoing migrant crisis has added weight to his prior warnings, Kronen Zeitung reports. “I expect a civil war, which will force a fundamental social and political reformation in Europe, whether we like it or not, following the example of the decaying Roman Republic in the first century BC,” he said. Convinced the fate of the European Union is heading toward its equivalent of Julius Caesar’s, the man perhaps most famous during the Roman civil wars who fought against his rival Pompey the Great, the historian said the parallels are “so massive, so obvious, and that has been the case for decades”. According to Engels, the factors that brought down the Roman Republic are present in Europe today. He listed many factors like family decay, individualism, the decline of traditional culture, globalisation, fundamentalism, and rampant crime. Significantly, he noted the split between an oligarch class, the Roman Senators or the current financial and political elite, and the rise of a populist movement that demanded to give the people a voice. In Europe, those populist voices take the shape of politicians like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France, and others who the academic compared to populist Roman Senator Publius Clodius Pulcher. While the migrant crisis plays a part in his vision, Engels said it is not the only factor. “The present population movements are only one of the many symptoms of our present spirit, characterised by a strange mixture of cosmopolitanism, calculus, materialism, and bad conscience,” he said. “I’m afraid of that, but it would be cowardly to close my eyes just because you do not want to see reality,” he said noting that he wasn’t in favour of civil war or authoritarianism. The civil war, which he says cannot be avoided, will likely not look like a traditional military conflict, he said, because European societies are not militarised. Rather, he said the civil war will look like the situation in Sweden where over 50 areas have formed or Brussels where suburbs like Molenbeek were able to hide Paris terrorist Salah Abdeslam from police for months. French academic and Islamic expert Gilles Kepel made a similar prediction last year saying that the rise of radical Islam among young Muslims in Europe could take the continent into a civil conflict. | 1 |
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Tyler Durden – Perhaps the most beneficial outcome resulting from last night’s loss of the Clinton Clan, whose “charitable” donations from generous donors such as Saudi Arabia to the Clinton Foundation just ended, is that with Hillary not in charge, the probability of World War III has been taken off the table.
This was confirmed early this morning, When Russian President Vladimir Putin – whose relations with the US and Barack Obama have deteriorated to Cold War levels – congratulated Donald Trump for his election victory on Wednesday, and said he expected relations between the Kremlin and Washington to improve.
The Kremlin announced that Putin had sent a telegram to Trump on Wednesday morning expressing “ his hope they can work together toward the end of the crisis in Russian-American relations, as well address the pressing issues of the international agenda and the search for effective responses to global security challenges .”
Additionally, speaking at the presentation ceremony of foreign ambassadors’ letters of credentials in Moscow, President Putin said that Russia is ready and looks forward to restoring bilateral relations with the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, commenting on the news of Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.
“We heard Trump’s campaign rhetoric while still a candidate for the US presidency, which was focused on restoring the relations between Russia and the United States.”
He added that “we understand and are aware that it will be a difficult path in the light of the degradation in which, unfortunately, the relationship between Russia and the US are at the moment.”
Speaking about the degraded state of relations between the countries, the Russian president once again stressed that “it is not our fault that Russia-US relations are as you see them.”
Other Russian politicians joined in.
Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin has also expressed hope that Trump’s victory in the presidential election will help pave the way for a more constructive dialogue between Moscow and Washington.
“The current US-Russian relations cannot be called friendly. Hopefully, with the new US president a more constructive dialogue will be possible between our countries,” he said. “The Russian Parliament will welcome and support any steps in this direction,” Volodin added on Wednesday.
Commenting on Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia will judge the new US administration by its actions and take appropriate steps in response. “We are ready to work with any US leader elected by the US people,” the minister said on Wednesday.
“I can’t say that all the previous US leaders were always predictable. This is life, this is politics. I have heard many words but we will judge by actions.”
Sergey Zheleznyak, member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in parliament, hailed Trump’s “deserved victory” in a statement on the party’s website.
“Despite all the intrigues and provocations that the current U.S. government put in front of Trump, people supported his intention to address the serious problems that have accumulated in America, and to move from confrontation to cooperation with Russia and the world, ” Zheleznyak said. “I hope that between now and [his] entry into office as the new president of the United States there will be no tragic events and the new U.S. administration will have enough political will and wisdom for civilized solutions to existing problems.”
Russia’s second biggest party the Communist Party also issued a statement Wednesday morning, expressing hope for more cooperation and calling Trump’s win “astounding” and against the “elite clans” in the United States. The party leader was more lukewarm on the news, noting that U.S. imperialism was unlikely to change.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the right-wing nationalist leader of the Liberal Democratic Party who has previously been nicknamed the Russian Donald Trump, called Clinton a “mindless old woman” and praised U.S. voters for “coming to their senses” after eight years of President Barack Obama, whom he referred to as “the Afro-American.” SF Source Zerohedge | 0 |
Maggie Haberman, a New York Times political correspondent, has devoted her journalistic career to two irresistible subjects: politics and New York City. At age 7, her first byline appeared in The Daily News it has now been published in all three New York dailies. A native of the Upper West Side who lives in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, she has covered 10 election cycles, from mayoral contests to presidential campaigns, including the 2016 race, which turns to New York on Tuesday for its primary. Join us for live primary updates. There have been pickles and pizzas, jeering crowds and pushy and dashes out to Coney Island for hot dogs alongside scruffy, bearded rock stars. Campaigns in New York feel at times like a movable feast, with candidates gorging on local specialties as they move along city sidewalks, shaking hands and trying to avoid dripping grease on their shirts. And this presidential race, which once seemed so distant, has taken on a distinctly New York character in the prelude to Tuesday’s primary, and not just in its greasy diet. The campaign has captivated New Yorkers, drawing tens of thousands out of their homes from the South Bronx to Staten Island, to take in what this city relishes: a big show. “Do women like Trump?” Donald J. Trump asked two female fans wearing “Make America Great Again” ball caps on Sunday, as he posed for a picture with them on Staten Island. Mr. Trump, who is heavily favored here in Tuesday’s primary, was holding one of his few official campaign events in the city. And the two Trump fans, who said they could not reveal their names because it would imperil their jobs, were ready for the occasion. Mr. Trump smiled as he stood for the snapshot with them, quietly murmuring that the giddy women and another man who pushed himself into the photograph needed to pipe down a bit. No matter, they were very happy to have met the leading Republican candidate. “He let us know that he loves us, too,” one of the women gushed. Mr. Trump was greeted like a hometown hero on Staten Island. Outside the Hilton Garden Inn, where he was to give a speech, the line to get in snaked for over 50 yards in the parking lot. About 1, 000 people made it inside. Mr. Trump seemed thrilled to be in the borough, if a little fuzzy on its charms. Asked by a reporter to identify his favorite local pizza place, he responded that there are “a lot” of them. He had worked on Staten Island as a youngster for four summers, he told the assembled press corps — although, ever the salesman, he increased it to “probably five” summers by the time he spoke to the Staten Island crowd in the next room. His lowly job? Collecting coins from laundry machines at one of his father’s buildings. Watching Mr. Trump take the stage in that ballroom, with people standing on chairs to hear him, was a reminder of why he is doing so well in the Republican primary. The borough is an enclave of voters, police officers and firefighters. And, setting aside his gilded towers and airplane Mr. Trump talks and sounds more like his fans than the city’s last Republican mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. I once watched Mr. Bloomberg draw cringes from a Staten Island crowd when he joked that he was the only politician present not to have a vowel at the end of his name. The battle for Brooklyn between Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is intense, and Mrs. Clinton is counting on her deep support in the borough’s neighborhoods to offset Mr. Sanders’s popularity among white liberals. At a block party in the section on Sunday, she was praised by Representative James E. Clyburn, a leader who traveled from his home state, South Carolina, for the occasion. There has not been an election in his lifetime, Mr. Clyburn told the crowd of about 200 people waiting in the hot sun, “that’s going to be more consequential than this one. ” Finally, Mrs. Clinton arrived and climbed the steps up to the bed of a red pickup truck that was being used as a stage. “Hello Brooklyn in the house, and on the street!” Mrs. Clinton called out to the crowd. The former secretary of state is comfortably ahead in the polls here, and she seems to be enjoying hopscotching around the state she represented for eight years in the Senate. But for all the warmhearted reminiscences, Mrs. Clinton has something to fear from Mr. Sanders on Tuesday. Around the time she visited thousands gathered for a rally for Mr. Sanders in Prospect Park, the pristine patch of green wedged between Crown Heights and upscale Park Slope. The actor Danny DeVito led the cheerful crowd in chants of “Bernie! Bernie!” and someone handed out copies of a fake newspaper with a banner headline reading “A Vote for Hillary Clinton Is a Vote for Donald Trump. ” The Sanders campaign said the crowd reached 28, 300, a record for its rallies. If you live here and have yet to see a candidate, you still have time. While the Republicans hold events on Monday in Maryland, Western New York and upstate (Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio will visit Schenectady, the city most likely to be misspelled by reporters) the Democrats are around. Mr. Sanders will hold a rally at Hunters Point South Park in Queens on Monday evening, for which doors open at 5 p. m. And Mrs. Clinton will address one of her core constituencies — women — at the New York Hilton Midtown. Doors open at noon. | 1 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. A decision made by General Motors years ago to save a few dollars per airbag may have led to the widespread use of the faulty Takata technology that has been blamed in the deaths of 14 people and become the subject of the auto industry’s largest recall. A Times investigation revealed that the automaker switched its supplier to Takata despite signs that ammonium nitrate, a compound used in its devices, was unsafe. Takata continues to manufacture airbags with the compound — and automakers continue to buy them. ______ 2. Hillary Clinton’s speech on Thursday found an unusual audience cheering it on: the “ ” crowd that she denounced in her remarks. Though Donald J. Trump has publicly kept his distance from the her attack on him for fanning the flames of racism embraced by the community was celebrated by its leaders, who did their best to capitalize on the moment. And in Youngstown, Ohio, above, — a Midwestern stronghold — residents are wrestling with whether a Manhattan billionaire can revitalize a struggling Rust Belt town. ______ 3. One of our most read stories examines the ultraconservative strain of Islam known as Wahhabism that is taught in Saudi Arabia, and its effect on Muslim communities around the world. The wealthy nation has spent lavishly on religious outreach for half a century, spreading a view of Islam that many believe has helped to fuel global extremism. Yet Saudi leaders seek good relations with the West and see jihadist violence as a menace. “I’d be careful about blaming the Saudis,” said a former U. S. ambassador to Syria and Algeria. ______ 4. France’s highest administrative court has overturned a town’s ban on burkinis, the swimwear used by some Muslim women. The ruling applies only to above, a seaside resort of about 14, 000, but means that bans enacted by other municipalities — there are at least 30 of them — could be similarly struck down if challenged in court. ______ 5. The U. S. Open begins Monday in New York, and much attention will be focused on whether the era of the Big Four in the men’s game is over. Roger Federer won’t be playing, Rafael Nadal is often coping with injuries and Novak Djokovic lost at Wimbledon. That leaves Andy Murray as the last of the establishment vanguard. One of our contributors lists some picks to keep an eye on in both the men’s and women’s fields. ______ 6. It’s likely that the Federal Reserve will raise its benchmark interest rate in the coming months, Janet L. Yellen, above, the Fed chairwoman, said during an annual policy conference. Gains in the job market and the economic outlook have strengthened the case for a rate increase, she said, but analysts think an increase won’t happen before December. ______ 7. America’s new pharmaceutical villain is defending herself and her company from scrutiny over a sharp price increase on the lifesaving EpiPen. “I am running a business. I am a business. I am not hiding from that,” said Heather Bresch, whose total compensation at Mylan has gone from about $2. 5 million to nearly $19 million during the same time the EpiPen’s price has risen fourfold. But Ms. Bresch moved quickly to reduce the cost to patients after a public furor over the price increase, though the list price remains at about $600. ______ 8. Frank Ocean’s album release last weekend is delighting fans but also highlighting the tension between artists, record companies and streaming services. Mr. Ocean, above, apparently was able to cut his record company out of the profits for one of the year’s albums by releasing “Blonde” a day after fulfilling his contractual agreement to the company with a separate “visual album. ” And Kanye West also made waves in the music world with the opening night of his “Saint Pablo” tour, performing the entire show on Thursday from floating platforms instead of a formal stage. ______ 9. Like others before them, they moved to the United States from Italy and made a life for themselves in New York City. And now, many appear to be moving to the suburbs. But these residents are different: They are lizards. A biologist is studying the Italian wall lizard, above, to learn how it’s adapted to a colder and more crowded environment. They appear to be following conventional routes out of the city: the train tracks. ______ Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a. m. Sundays. Want to look back? Here’s last night’s briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
NBC News launched the latest in a series of failed attempts to link Dr. Sebastian Gorka — the philosemitic, deputy foreign policy adviser to President Donald Trump — to the on Saturday. [As with all such previous attempts, NBC found nothing to prove any extremist ideas or views on the part of Dr. Gorka. And as with all such previous slanders, NBC relied on fraud — this time, in the form of the phony “Anne Frank Center. ” The full name of the bogus front organization is the “Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect” — an ironic title, given that it is a Democratic Party attack machine that shows no respect for anyone else whatsover. The “civil rights activist” who leads it, Steven Goldstein, is an LGBT activist who has beclowned himself on cable news over the past few months in his efforts to tarnish President Trump as the second coming of Adolf Hitler. Breitbart Jerusalem editor Aaron Klein exposed Goldstein and his organization in February. Goldstein is no Holocaust expert: he is merely an ardent Hillary Clinton supporter who found a ready audience for his political schtick among a gullible press corps eager for ammunition in their war against the White House. He has no qualms about exploiting the name and memory of Anne Frank for his purely partisan purposes. It is Holocaust desecration, if not outright denial. Among many embarrassing moments for Goldstein and the Anne Frank Center, none was worse than last month’s revelation that the barrage of antisemitic bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers had been carried out by a black liberal journalist and a Jewish teenager in Israel. Rather than apologize for vomiting forth false accusations of hatred against the White House, Goldstein, reacting to the news, still managed to blame the Trump administration. And yet it is the Anne Frank Center to which NBC News, lacking any other proof for its baseless claims, turned for help in condemning Gorka. Goldstein’s operation did not disappoint: “How many ducks in the Trump White House must walk, talk and quack before our country wakes up and sees the greater problem?” the Center said in a statement to NBC. Never mind that all such accusations are entirely without merit: Goldstein Co. repeat the lies. The rest of the NBC News report was devoted to collecting statements from Hungarian villagers who claim to recall Gorka’s father’s membership in, and Gorka’s sympathy for, a version of the Vitezi Rend order that was anticommunist and had nothing to do with the Second World War organization of the same name. NBC News was forced to admit that after sending investigative journalists halfway around the world, it was “unable to confirm” Gorka’s membership. Cue the Anne Frank Center, there to add its emotive name and bilious innuendo to the heap of false accusations. Yet as Bruce Abramson and Jeff Ballabon noted at the Jerusalem Post last month, the Gorka family protected Jews during the Second World War. Gorka senior went on to fight Soviet communism — which, notably, suppressed the Jewish faith and encouraged fanaticism. For that, he was awarded, in exile, the Vitezi Rend medal his son wore in tribute. Dr. Gorka, a former Breitbart News editor, worked for this company for years — under the management of Jews, alongside many Jewish colleagues, and with favorable views toward the Jewish community and the Jewish state. It is clear that liberal media outlets like NBC and fronts like the bogus “Anne Frank Center” are just attacking him as a way to undermine Trump. Their partisanship is obvious they could, at least, make the fraud a little less obvious. Joel B. Pollak is Senior at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak. | 1 |
Santiago Calatrava diseña una lápida gigantesca, blanca y con pinchos para Rita Barberá LA POLÍTICA MANTENDRÁ SU PUESTO EN EL SENADO Valencia
Sólo unas horas después de anunciarse la muerte de Rita Barberá, el arquitecto valenciano Santiago Calatrava ha informado de que ha diseñado una lápida de proporciones gigantescas, blanca y con pinchos para la que fuera alcaldesa de Valencia. “Son unas pirámides a la valenciana, con pinchos y que se caen, un gran monumento”, ha explicado el arquitecto por teléfono.
La lápida está situada sobre un pequeño edificio horizontal y se compone de una enorme pared adornada con tubos de aluminio pintados en blanco, de 100 metros de altura por 250 de longitud, a cinco metros del suelo y con movimiento oscilante. “Dispone de diversos pasillos interiores, con trampas y cámaras para enterrar pruebas de la trama Gürtel”, ha explicado Calatrava sin detallar los planos ni los costes.
“En algún momento se derrumbará, por lo que se convertirá en un homenaje aún más sentido”, ha insistido. El arquitecto espera que el monumento funerario se financie ilegalmente “porque es lo que ella habría querido”.
“Rita Barberá murió haciendo lo que más le gustaba, evadir la justicia, porque siempre fue una persona coherente con sus principios y con los de este partido”, ha declarado Mariano Rajoy.
Aunque se lleve adelante la construcción de la lápida de 100 metros de altura, la política valenciana no será enterrada para evitar malversación de fondos, “que es algo a lo que ella se opondría”, sino que mantendrá su puesto en el Senado indefinidamente. | 0 |
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WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Charles Ortel is a veteran Wall Street investment analyst who has carried out major studies into the operation of the Clinton Foundation and its legal status, and runs a blog monitoring its activities. Ortel was the whistleblower that blew the lid off the General Electric financial discrepancies in 2008. “The Clinton Foundation has been a gigantic slush fund,” Ortel said. “People can donate relatively small sums to the Clinton regime and get gigantic concessions worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars back.”
During the four years that Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into the Clinton Foundation from governments around the world, many of which then enjoyed favored treatment from the US State Department, Ortel noted. “To the world at large, the Clintons are open for business,” he stated.
The US corporate media always refused to subject the Clinton Foundation to any kind of serious or skeptical coverage, in part because of fear of alienating the Clintons, Ortel explained.
“This is such a big story that the US press is not doing its job. What we have in ‘Clinton Incorporated,’ is Tammany Hall on steroids,” he said.
Tammany Hall was the corrupt Democratic political organization that ran New York City for most of a century after the 1861-65 Civil War. “If you are in the US press, you have got to have access to the president of the United States and the federal government… I have little confidence that the US media would do the work necessary in investigating the workings of the Clinton Foundation as our media is in thrall to the Clintons,” Ortel added.
Ortel maintained that the operations of the Clinton Foundation and the actions of Hillary Clinton as Obama’s first secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 needed to be understood as part of a long-term master plan to regain and exercise political power by the Clinton family. “The Clintons put together a long-term plan decades ago. They were already planning when Bill Clinton stepped down at the end of his second term that Hillary would run for president and eventually Chelsea will too,” he said.
Ortel welcomed the decision of FBI Director James Comey to reopen the federal probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of private server for official business while secretary of state, and said the manner in which it had been done suggested the federal investigators believed they would find important revelations.
“To reopen an investigation is a massive decision so there must be a massive set of reasons for doing so. If it were a small matter, they would have waited until after the presidential election. It is also significant that this decision was announced publicly,” Ortel noted. An FBI investigation proceeds very carefully and methodically, and is thorough and sweeping. Therefore, Comey’s decision to reopen the emails probe was a very serious decision, Ortel pointed out. “To then reopen an investigation 11 days before a presidential election involving a major candidate and their family is virtually unprecedented,” he said. | 0 |
LISTEN: GOP Insider Reveals Truth About Who’s REALLY Behind Republican Civil War
“And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest,” Clinton said. “He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name.”
Clinton wanted women to think she was standing up for this beauty queen — and all other women — by bringing this to voters’ attention. The truth was that the former secretary of state had known about the issue since at least Dec. 2015 but said nothing about it until the timing suited her own interests.
In fact, a 157-page opposition research file was emailed to Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta by her campaign’s research director Tony Carrk.
Along with information about Trump, the file contained research files on Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, two of Trump’s main rivals in the GOP primaries.
Podesta’s emails were among those hacked by WikiLeaks, and more than 25,000 of them have been released so far by the group.
We cannot allow Clinton to convince people that she is the candidate for women’s issues, or even looking out for women’s — or anyone else’s — best interests.
The fact is that she cares about one thing — winning, at all costs. | 0 |
BREAKING: Smoking Gun! Shock “Clean Up” Order White House Gave When Hillary Emails Broke
That action left Rovin feeling particularly guilty. He told host Sean Hannity that he finally got to apologize to Lewinsky in person after a coincidence made them neighbors.
Rovin also said that Hillary Clinton had an affair with longtime ally and lawyer Vince Foster that lasted for years. Foster was found dead in what police said was a suicide, but speculation has always been that he was murdered.
Part of Rovin’s “fixer” responsibilities included helping scrub Foster’s office after his death. He also said he was ordered to distract the media while Team Clinton rummaged through Foster’s office.
Foster also said he hired Jerry Parks, an Arkansas investigator, to spy on Bill because Hillary was worried about Bill’s exploits with so many “sluts” and how that could hurt their political careers.
Two months after Foster was found dead, Parks was found shot nine times at a stoplight in his SUV in Little Rock, Arkansas. Rovin said Parks had to die because he knew everything.
Rovin also said he was told to keep stories quiet in one of two ways: “by trading access to the Clintons for ‘positive’ interviews or by paying the reporters.”
Rovin also told Hannity that the “endless attention” to the alleged indiscretions of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump was what forced him to go public now. | 0 |
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Get ready for the most heartwarming story you’ll read all day.
If you met Paul Langdon or Ayesha Qamar on the street, you might think they have nothing in common. Paul is a retired firefighter, Ayesha is a law student. Paul has lived in the same suburb of Columbus for his entire life, Ayesha immigrated to Ohio from Pakistan when she was a teen. Paul is a devout Christian, Ayesha is Muslim. But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that they share a common bond: Both Paul and Ayesha have ‘Trump’ painted on their garages!
Beautiful! Take a look at the side-by-side pictures above to see just how similar these two really are.
When Donald Trump announced his campaign last summer, Paul knew he wanted to show his support by painting a large sign of the candidate’s name on his garage door. But Paul probably never would have guessed that one year later, just a few towns over from him, Ayesha’s own garage would be painted with literally the exact same word! Paul and Ayesha may be from totally different walks of life, but when it comes to the name currently painted on their garages, these two have more in common than they ever could have imagined.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether their skin is white or brown. It doesn’t matter whether they worship God or Allah. And it doesn’t matter whether the word ‘Trump’ has been carefully lettered or hastily scrawled across the garage in brusque spray paint. All that matters is the commonality they share in having the word ‘Trump’ painted on their homes for the entire neighborhood to see.
Amazing! It just goes to show, you should never judge a book by its cover.
At a time when our country feels so divided, stories like this one give us hope for humanity. On the surface, Paul and Ayesha couldn’t be more different, but the messages painted or spray-painted across their garages are one in the same. What an amazing reminder that we’re not so different after all! | 0 |
If you want to know the likely result of next month’s French presidential election run off, just look at how the markets responded. The euro and the French markets both jumped dramatically. [And this has nothing to do with the underlying strength of the sclerotic, unionised, statist, overtaxed, unproductive French economy or, indeed, with the future of the doomed euro. It was simply a case of the status quo breathing a sigh of relief that it was going to be business as usual, after all: Emmanuel Macron, the de facto Establishment candidate is now pretty much a for the French presidency his rival, Marine Le Pen doesn’t stand a prayer — of that the Establishment will make sure. But Brexit. But Donald Trump … Nope: I’m afraid those arguments just don’t wash in this case. Yes, it’s true the world is in the throes of a revolution in which the globalist elite is gradually being overthrown by populist, nationalist rebels. But it won’t happen yet in France — a country whose political system has more in common with Putin’s Russia or Erdoğan’s Turkey or some African hellhole with a than it does with liberal democracies. That is, Emmanuel Macron is going to win this presidency because it was decided long ago by France’s Establishment that he was the option of the candidates available. The fact that he is a hollow man — a slippery, with a winning smile and nice suits — who will do almost nothing seriously to address France’s massive social and economic problems is a help, not a hindrance. Emmanuel Macron is the French Establishment’s Manchurian Candidate. He attended one of France’s most elite schools where he was trained in Civil Service, graduating in 2004. His biography states that in 2007, he served as deputy rapporteur for the Commission to improve French growth headed by Jacques Attali, Macron was 29. But the Commission wasn’t formed until 2008. Obviously he is a bit ‘math challenged’. The Commission report was heavily criticized for its proposal to ‘relaunch immigration’ and ‘open borders’ … Attali was ridiculed and called a ‘globalist’. Sound like anyone we know? Macron left the Commission, which was shelved September 2010, to work for Rothschilds Cie Banque where he became an overnight millionaire while working the Nestle acquisition of Pfizer’s nutritional outlet, which closed in 2012. Nestle is a client of Rothschilds. Macron had no experience in acquisitions and mergers whatsoever … What does one do when one makes millions overnight? Apparently one quits. He then left Rothschilds to work for Hollande as deputy secretary general of Elysee, and eventually Minister of Economy, Industry and Digital Data in 2014 where he served 18 months before running for Presidency. I’d call that a pretty fast paced runup with little to no political experience or business savvy. Indeed. Reports that Macron is a breath of fresh air who will transform French politics could hardly be further from the truth. Macron is an énarque — liberal elite the living embodiment of the French Deep State. So how has this apparently isolated and underfunded individual managed all this in such a short time? It is clear that Macron has powerful supporters behind the scenes, and a clue may lie in the fact that some years ago he was identified as a member of ‘les Gracques’ — a discreet pressure group loosely staffed by influential chief executives and civil service mandarins. They are socialists who long ago gave up on the Socialist party. Many are fellow ‘énarques’ (graduates of ENA) and every step of Macron’s career could have been directed by them. Spotted as a brilliant and charming student, Macron could first have been launched into the prestigious state Finance Inspectorate, then switched into Rothschild to gain business experience (and wealthy support) and then placed like a time bomb in Hollande’s outer office, where he ticked away until he could be moved into the heart of the Valls government. Last August he finally exploded into action at the perfect moment to cause maximum damage to Hollande, Valls and the entire Socialist presidential election campaign. Macron’s rise bears all the hallmarks of a classic ENA undercover operation, a fundamental part of the énarques’ and one in which the country’s leading bureaucrats are cynically trained. Like Obama, he got where is because the System arranged it that way. Consider, for example, how ruthlessly the best of the Presidential candidates — the Thatcherite François Fillon — was destroyed by an unwholesome alliance of the government Deep State and the judiciary. Days after winning the Republican party primary, François Fillon, once Macron’s most dangerous potential opponent, was put under investigation for having put his wife and children on the payroll of the state, with little evidence that they did much if any work. The evidence against Fillon appears to have come directly from a secretive cell within the Finance Ministry, a Cabinet Noir, with access to the tax returns of both Fillon and his Welsh wife, Penelope. These documents found their way to the investigating magistrates, who pounced. Only the naive can imagine that the magistrates are unmotivated by their political sympathies, especially after it was revealed that their union had compiled an enemies list of right wing politicians targeted for prosecution, and had even posted their pictures on the wall of their Paris headquarters. While many French — and pretty much all the global commentariat — appear to have made up their minds that they have just dodged a bullet because they are not, after all, going to end up with a Presidency in the hands of the “far right” they really have very little to celebrate. All France has done is to guarantee the election of a caretaker president — Continuation Hollande — who will ensure that France’s ongoing decline will continue unabated. Its industries will stagnate its social unrest will intensify ever greater numbers of its citizenry will be murdered in homegrown terrorist attacks its economy will tank the country that was once arguably the most civilised and beautiful and sophisticated in all the world will descend ever deeper into chaos, ugliness, and despair. Salut, President Macron. Adieu, la France. | 1 |
A candidate under FBI investigation? Check.
A candidate who may have let top secret/classified emails land on the laptop of disgraced former Democrat Congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop? Check.
A Republican campaign willing to wrap it all up in a brutal final weekend TV ad for battleground states? Check.
This is gonna leave a mark.
| 0 |
In the Roethle household in Leawood, Kan. the children woke up on Wednesday to a family celebration. Donald J. Trump was the new president. But the excitement came with an admonition “to be a good winner” and not to gloat about his win at school. “Kindness is the No. 1 thing in our house,” said Alana Roethle, 37, a mother of four children ranging in age from 4 to 9. “We were talking about this in the morning, that we love everybody, even if they don’t share our political views, even if they don’t love Jesus. ” The morning was different for Amber Karamat, 47, of Anaheim, Calif. Her son was devastated by the news. “Will Trump still let me be an American?” he asked his mom, who cried as she recounted the story. “I feel helpless. I said, ‘No one can take that away from you, sweetie. You were born an American. ’” Perhaps more than any other election in recent memory, the Trump versus Clinton campaign was a family affair. Girls donned “The Future is Female” and canvassed neighborhoods with their mothers to support Hillary. Parents supporting Trump imagined a better economic future for their children, and talked to them about gun rights and safe borders. Often, the election news cycle forced parents to navigate tricky topics like bullying, profanity and sexual harassment. A Clinton ad reminded us “Our children are watching. ” And now, in the days after the election, parents on both sides of the vote struggle to put the bitter election fight into perspective and find teachable moments in the sometimes unpleasant aftermath. Amber Deyle, 37, of Emmons, Minn. and her husband, Dan, watched the election results roll in with their two sons, ages 6 and 10. “We were really excited,” she said, noting gun rights as a critical issue. “Hunting is important to our family. Not only were we raised on it, but it helps us teach our children where food comes from. ” But she and her husband had some hard conversations with their boys about Mr. Trump, she added, “because of some of the things he had said about women and minorities and things like that. But at the same time, we also had to explain to our children what Benghazi was. ” Daniel Roberts, a father of two daughters in Montclair, N. J. and a Clinton supporter, took his younger daughter, 10, to vote with him. Mr. Roberts, a high school football coach and a patient navigator at a hospital, is black and his wife is white, and their daughters are biracial. After the results came in, his younger daughter was upset that a woman didn’t win and worried about the racist sentiments she’d been hearing. “My wife and I talked about it a lot and told her to keep aiming high, and reach for the stars. ” His older daughter, 14, was not so easily comforted. “My daughter wants to be a doctor. She’s a smart girl, and she knows it’s a tough field. She understands that she’s already starting one step behind as a woman. ” Mr. Roberts said he’d never seen her so dejected. “Seeing her mood after the election, the dad in me came out and I felt for her. It almost made me cry. ” Parents on both sides of the election say the result has triggered conversations at home that are equally focused on civics and history as well as values and acceptance. Carrie Chavis, a mother in Austin, Tex. voted for Mrs. Clinton, but most of her neighborhood voted for Mr. Trump. Her sons expressed disbelief when Ms. Chavis told them that Mr. Trump had won the election. Her oldest son was taunted at school when classmates learned he supported Mrs. Clinton. But even though Ms. Chavis is sad about the result, she used the moment to remind her sons about the value of democracy. “I told them that we are so lucky that we get to vote for who we want as president, and we should be so thankful,” she said. In Pelham, N. Y. Cherie Corso, a Trump supporter, had similar conversations with her daughter, Julia, who helped her volunteer for the Trump campaign and cried with happiness when he won. But she also struggled at school, where most of the other students supported Mrs. Clinton. “She’s been getting backlash,” Ms. Corso said. “My advice to her is, ‘He’s the winner, O. K.? He won, the people have spoken, you don’t have to defend Donald Trump, you don’t have to say anything. ’” Julia said most Trump supporters at her school don’t admit it. “Everybody whispers,” she said. “If I say something about how he’s not that bad, people yell at me. I don’t blame them because it’s something they feel passionately about. ” Jason Benedict, 46, a registered Republican and the father of a boy in elementary school in Scotch Plains, N. J. voted for a candidate. He reminded his son “to be kind to his friends who may be upset by this decision. ” “No matter who the president is, what’s really important is that he try his hardest every day to be nice to people, be helpful, and that everyone is entitled to their own life and opinions,” he said. Valerie Kummer, 32, a Republican from Watford City, N. D. watched her children leave for school on Tuesday morning chanting “Trump” because they were excited to cast their ballots in the school’s mock election. Ms. Kummer said she reminded them throughout the campaign “about loving other people and loving differences. ” For the first time in his life, Ben Goldstein, 39, a rabbi and father of three young children in Los Angeles, voted for a Democrat for president. The first thing his daughter asked him when she woke up on Wednesday was, who won the election? “I told her that Donald Trump won and explained that we live in an amazing country where people disagree and get to decide who is president. I told her that I hope he does such a great job that I end up voting for him in four years,” he said. His daughter seemed to accept that explanation, but Rabbi Goldstein is concerned about the damage the divisive campaign has already done. “Instead of vilifying him and all his followers, we can take this opportunity to look in the mirror and see how we contributed to the rhetoric of the past few years. How do we treat those with whom we disagree? What do we do with their arguments?” he said. In some families, children disagreed with their parents’ choice for president. Elise Breth, a mother of two in Orlando, Fla. is a Trump supporter, as is her son. But her daughter supported Mrs. Clinton. She “thought Hillary hung the moon because she’s female, and that’s who her friends at school were supporting,” Ms. Breth said. “Even though I support most of Trump’s policies, I am proud of my daughter for recognizing that a strong, independent woman can be anything she wants to be. ” | 1 |
Home › BIG BROTHER | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY › GOOGLE/AMAZON TO “ECHO” EVERYTHING & EVERYONE IN YOUR HOME TO NSA GOOGLE/AMAZON TO “ECHO” EVERYTHING & EVERYONE IN YOUR HOME TO NSA 10 SHARES [10/27/16] Google Home (GH) is always listening to everything that goes on inside your home. It’s like paying the NSA, sorry I meant Google, $129.00 to bug your home. Click here & here to find out about Google’s close relationship with the NSA.
GH does more than listen to music, it can control your lights, thermostats, radios, TV’s, smart refrigerators, smart plugs and more. GH has partnered with Nest, Phillips, IFTTT and Samsung who also makes the ‘ family hub refrigerator ‘.
Google Assistant’s new surveillance feature called “My Day,” gives you morning updates, weather, commute times and a summary of your schedule (assuming you opt in).
At least GH doesn’t have SEVEN microphones like Amazon’s Echo .
Just how invasive is GH? ‘Always on’ devices are always listening
Below, is an excerpt taken from Google’s Privacy & Terms:
Voice Search (Google Assistant) uses pattern recognition to transcribe spoken words to written text. For each voice query made to Voice Search, we store the language, the country, the utterance and our system’s guess of what was said.
A Computerworld article warns everyone about the dangers of ‘always on’ devices. | 0 |
GLP Forum (godlike productions) « on: Today at 10:28:07 AM » Has anyone on here kept track much on the forum: godlike productions or GLP forum? It is not easy trying to get past the trolls but it seems to stay up with current news so I usually go there to see what the recent news was. I was posting there with a link and when I tried to post it, I was immediately banned. Anyone else go there at all on this forum? Does anyone on here know anything about this forum like who controls it? Lee51 | 0 |
By D. Buxman October 31, 2016
Speculator is, quite simply, the best novel that I have read in the past three years and deserves better than a 5-star rating. It is a nuanced adventure that will offer the reader unique insights into topics as diverse as geology, capitalism, colonialism, junior gold mining investment and anarcho-capitalism. This wonderful book presents a freedom-based political/economic philosophy that is every bit as compelling and profound as that of Ayn Rand, at a much faster pace and without the laborious monologs.
I was lucky enough to purchase an advance copy of this book in July, and I pre-ordered the Kindle version so that I could make it a permanent part of my digital library, accessible to my college-aged kids for whom it is now required reading. Technical elements such as dialogue and character development are superb, and I can’t wait to see how the heroes and villains develop in the planned sequels. Over two months after my first reading, I am still thinking about the themes that resonate throughout this book. I recommend it without reservation. Few novels have the potential to be life-changing vehicles, but this is one of them. | 0 |
Ruling Alters Legal Landscape in NY Shaken-baby Cases Rene Bailey and her attorney Adele Bernhard. Photo courtesy Democrat and Chronicle
Democrat and Chronicle
Excerpts:
For the first time, a New York appellate court has ruled that evidence once used to convict people in shaken-baby cases may no longer be scientifically valid.
The ruling, which came in the case of René Bailey, a Greece woman convicted of causing the death of a child in 2001, has implications for a number of other people in state prisons for shaken-baby offenses. In this area alone, several dozen people have been convicted of murder or assault in such cases.
The appeals court decision, released Thursday, changes the legal landscape in New York for alleged shaken baby cases, said Brian Shiffrin, a local appellate lawyer who was not involved in the case.
“It makes it both easier for defense attorneys to argue the science and it puts the burden back on prosecutors to show there is evidence to support the theory of shaken baby syndrome,” said Shiffrin, who has handled appeals of shaken-baby convictions.
Bailey, who ran a home day-care center, was charged with second-degree murder after a 2½-year-old girl in her care died after suffering a head injury. Prosecutors accused Bailey of causing the child’s death by shaking or throwing her, and called medical experts who testified that the injury could only have been caused by the care-giver’s abuse. Bailey, now 56, had been in state prison about nine years when a volunteer lawyer offered to take up her case. The lawyer, Adele Bernhard, was director of a law clinic for indigent defendants at Pace University in Westchester County.
Read the Full Article at Democrat and Chronicle MedicalKidnap.com.
More stories on the changing legal tide of Shaken Baby Syndrome: | 0 |
Sudanese President Omar indicated through his state media on Friday that he would not attend this weekend’s Islamic Summit in Saudi Arabia, at which U. S. President Donald Trump will be a guest of honor. Trump is scheduled to deliver a major address on American relations with the Muslim world at the summit. [The Associated Press quotes Sudanese reports that Minister of State Taha will be sent to the summit in Riyadh instead. “President Omar has apologized to King Salman of Saudi Arabia for being unable to attend the Riyadh summit,” said a statement from Bashir’s office. Undefined “personal reasons” were given as the reason for his absence. The New York Times notes that Saudi Arabia’s invitation to Bashir “outraged human rights advocates, who called it a breach of longstanding United States policy. ” The policy in question calls for ostracizing accused war criminals with outstanding arrest warrants, of which Bashir boasts two, dating back to 2009 and 2010. The International Criminal Court describes him as a “suspect still at large. ” The list of charges is impressive: Five counts of crimes against humanity murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, and rape two counts of war crimes intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking part in hostilities, and pillaging three counts of genocide: by killing, by causing serious bodily or mental harm, and by deliberately inflicting on each target group conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction, allegedly committed at least between 2003 and 2008 in Darfur, Sudan. According to the United Nations, up to 300, 000 people have been killed in the Darfur genocide, and another 2. 3 million displaced into refugee camps. The U. S. State Department said it was opposed to “invitations, facilitation or support for travel by any person subject to outstanding International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants, including President Bashir. ” Bashir usually encounters little difficulty when he wishes to travel, despite the war crimes charges against him. The International Criminal Court has filed complaints against several nations, including South Africa and Uganda, for refusing to arrest him when he traveled to their jurisdictions. This week, Bashir’s government confidently stated he would attend the Saudi summit and “participate actively,” with a particular emphasis on lifting U. S. sanctions against Sudan. “On his agenda for the summit will be the removal of sanctions finally which were imposed by the US on Sudan. Also on the top of the agenda is to how to combat and how to fight terrorism. What we know is that President Bashir and President Trump will be in the same conference hall, but we don’t know whether he will meet President Trump,” Rabie Abdul Atti, a senior member of the ruling Sudanese party said on Wednesday. CNN notes that prior to President Trump’s inauguration, the Obama administration played up Sudanese opposition to the Islamic State, and was working to ease some sanctions against Sudan as a reward for humanitarian progress in Darfur. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — At the State Department, the normally pulsating hub of executive offices is hushed and virtually empty. At the Pentagon, military missions in some of the world’s most troubled places are being run by a defense secretary who has none of his top team in place. And at departments like Treasury, Commerce and Health and Human Services, many senior posts remain vacant even as the agencies have been handed enormous tasks like remaking the nation’s health insurance system. From the moment he was sworn in, President Trump faced a personnel crisis, starting virtually from scratch in lining up senior leaders for his administration. Seven weeks into the job, he is still hobbled by the slow start, months behind where experts in both parties, even some inside his administration, say he should be. The lag has left critical power centers in his government devoid of leadership as he struggles to advance policy priorities on issues like health care, taxes, trade and environmental regulation. Many federal agencies and offices are in states of suspended animation, their career civil servants answering to temporary bosses whose influence and staying power are unclear, and who are sometimes awaiting policy direction from appointees whose arrival may be weeks or months away. “There’s no question this is the slowest transition in decades,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former State Department official who served under presidents of both parties and has been involved in transitions since 1988. “It is a very, very big mistake. The world continues — it doesn’t respect transitions. ” Mr. Trump has insisted that the barren ranks of his government are not a shortcoming but the vanguard of a plan to cut the size of the federal bureaucracy. “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint, because they’re unnecessary to have,” Mr. Trump told Fox News last month. “I say, ‘What do all these people do?’ You don’t need all those jobs. ” But the president has not proposed any plan for trimming crucial senior positions, and a White House spokeswoman, Lindsay E. Walters, said he eventually planned to fill them. Mr. Trump’s personnel problems are rooted in a dysfunctional transition effort that left him without a pool of who had been screened for security and financial problems and were ready to be named on Day 1. In the weeks since, the problem has been compounded by roadblocks of his own making: a loyalty test that in some cases has eliminated qualified candidates, a lobbying ban that has discouraged some of the most potential appointees, and a general sense of upheaval at the White House that has repelled many others. Officials involved in and briefed on the situation described it on the condition of anonymity, unwilling to be quoted disparaging Mr. Trump or his administration. But the numbers paint an unmistakable picture. While Mr. Trump has won confirmation of 18 members of his cabinet, he has not nominated anyone for more than 500 other vital posts and has fallen behind his predecessors in filling the important and positions that carry out most of the government’s crucial daily functions. As of Sunday, he had sent to the Senate 36 nominations for critical positions, just over half of the 70 sent by President Barack Obama, who was also criticized for early delays, at the same point in 2009, according to figures compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition at the Partnership for Public Service. In the vast majority of cases, Mr. Trump’s administration has not even begun the lengthy screening process — which can take several weeks to as long as two months — that nominees must complete before their confirmations can be considered by the Senate. According to data obtained by The New York Times, the Office of Government Ethics, the independent agency that conducts financial reviews of every presidential nominee, had received only 63 disclosure reports for prospective Trump administration nominees as of March 5, less than a third of the 228 that Mr. Obama’s team had submitted by that date in 2009. At the State Department, both jobs remain unfilled, along with the posts of six under secretaries and 22 assistant secretaries. At the Treasury Department, Mr. Trump has yet to name a deputy secretary, general counsel or chief financial officer, or any of the three under secretaries and nine assistant secretaries. At the Department of Homeland Security, one of three agencies for which the president has nominated a deputy, he has yet to name any of the four under secretaries, three assistant secretaries or other crucial players like a chief of Citizenship and Immigration Services or a commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. Ms. Walters, the White House spokeswoman, denied any substantial delay in staffing the government, saying that “there is no holdup. ” But she added that the administration was now screening a large pool of prospective nominees — a senior White House official put the number at about 130 — whom it would soon name for crucial positions. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to detail internal deliberations, said that since Inauguration Day, the White House had set a pace for filling positions that rivaled the rate of previous administrations, and was now moving as quickly as the meticulous personnel process would allow. Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign was a compact operation, so he did not have the potentially thousands of political aides that other new presidents have rewarded with plum jobs, the official added. The staffing delays appear to reflect Mr. Trump’s lack of experience in government and his deep suspicion of anyone with such a background — two significant factors in his flawed transition. Another challenge has been the president’s attempt to apply to the sprawling federal bureaucracy the same mode of leadership he has used for decades in his business, where he placed exclusive trust in a small, insular team. “The approach that the president took as a businessman and a candidate is simply not scalable to the challenge of filling out the rest of the government leadership,” said Max Stier, the president of the Center for Presidential Transition. If agencies lack leaders who understand their operations and policies and have the president’s trust, said Carlos M. Gutierrez, who served as commerce secretary under President George W. Bush, “it just makes the whole function of the executive branch less effective. ” “It is a big problem, because either the agency is not well represented or isn’t represented at all,” Mr. Gutierrez said. Outside the government, he added, foreign diplomats, businesspeople and others “don’t know who to call or who to talk to. ” The lag could also undercut Mr. Trump’s global influence. When trade ministers of Pacific Rim nations, including China, meet this week in Chile, the United States will be represented by its ambassador to Chile, Carol Z. Perez, a career diplomat, because no trade official has been confirmed. At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is overseeing missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen without his own leadership team. Some nominees, including the billionaire Vincent Viola, Mr. Trump’s choice for Army secretary, had to withdraw because background checks — which would normally have been completed weeks earlier — revealed insurmountable problems, like financial entanglements. That has left Mr. Mattis to rely on holdovers like Robert O. Work, the deputy defense secretary under Mr. Obama, and senior civil servants. “He is really missing three to four levels of his leadership team,” said Michèle Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy under Mr. Obama, who said she removed herself from consideration to be Mr. Mattis’s deputy because she did not agree with the new administration’s values and policy direction. “The White House personnel system has really put an emphasis on loyalty to Trump, and they have ruled out anyone who said anything bad about him. ” Steven T. Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, identified potential nominees for senior posts early on, including Jim Donovan, a Goldman Sachs executive, whom he wants to be his deputy. But one official close to the process said the White House had hesitated over the political risk of bringing another alumnus of the investment bank into an administration that has styled itself a champion of Americans. A nomination probably remains weeks away, according to another person familiar with the situation. As of Sunday, the list of Treasury officials on the department’s website was empty, save for the words, “This page is temporarily unavailable. ” At the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, the administrator, was confirmed by the Senate last month, and he has hired a chief of staff and a few others. But the White House has yet to nominate anyone to fill another dozen key jobs requiring Senate confirmation, like the assistant administrators who oversee clean air and water regulation. Those offices sit empty even as Mr. Trump says he wants the E. P. A. to start rolling back several major regulations, including a rule on water pollution. “It will be impossible for them to carry out that agenda unless they can get people in place,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, an assistant E. P. A. administrator under Mr. Bush. Adding to Mr. Trump’s challenge is an approach to personnel that at times appears haphazard he abruptly asked 46 United States attorneys to submit their resignations on Friday and immediately clean out their desks, leaving himself the task of appointing replacements around the country. Analysts say Mr. Trump’s approach also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the government works. “They can think of this lack of appointments as being a lean government, but this isn’t like running a small business,” said Terry Sullivan, the executive director of the White House Transition Project, a nonpartisan organization that tracks the pace of appointments. “The federal government is quantum times larger than the largest American corporation. It puts Exxon Mobil in the shade. It is a reflection of naïveté about how big the U. S. government is. ” The personnel crisis has become something of a prophecy, discouraging some experienced policy specialists from joining Mr. Trump’s government. Rodney L. Whitlock, a health policy consultant and former longtime aide to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said the lobbying ban was a deterrent from pursuing a position with the administration. “If I stayed in for three years, and then I stepped out, when could I lobby?” Mr. Whitlock said. “I would be 60. I’ve got to put kids through college, and I’m not the only one. ” Beyond that, he said, “a perception of chaos, right or wrong, makes people uncomfortable. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — President Obama pledged on Wednesday to lift all remaining sanctions against Myanmar, seeking to reward the country’s recent moves toward democracy after decades of brutal military rule. The White House issued the announcement during a visit by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s leader, whose victory in democratic elections last year was viewed by the Obama administration as a triumph in the president’s strategy of engaging with countries the United States had long shunned. “In part because of the progress that we’ve seen over the last several months,” Mr. Obama said in the Oval Office, as he sat beside Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, “the United States is now prepared to lift sanctions that we have imposed on Burma for quite some time. “It is the right thing to do in order to ensure that the people of Burma see rewards from a new way of doing business and a new government,” the president said. “Congratulations on the progress that has been made,” he told Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest as a political prisoner when Mr. Obama was elected president. “It is not complete, and I think Daw Suu is the first one to indicate that a lot of work remains to be done, but it’s on the right track. ” But the move was quickly criticized by leaders of some human rights groups, who said they worried that eliminating sanctions was premature given the slow pace of change in Myanmar, also known as Burma, where the military still controls a large portion of parliamentary seats and important government ministries. “If the issue was growing Burma’s economy, there are plenty of other ways to do that without pulling off all of these important restrictions, which have given Suu Kyi leverage over the military, with whom she still has battles ahead,” said John Sifton, the deputy Washington director of Human Rights Watch. “If the issue is leverage, the decision today makes almost no sense: Obama and Suu Kyi just took important tools out of their collective tool kit for dealing with the Burmese military, and threw them into the garbage. ” It remained unclear exactly when the remaining sanctions would be lifted they apply to trade in jade and precious stones, and to doing business with some of Myanmar’s military officials or their affiliates. Restrictions imposed by Congress, including sanctions related to North Korea and those governing arms sales and military cooperation, will remain unless lawmakers vote to lift them. Mr. Obama had moved in May to ease a broad array of sanctions that barred American citizens and companies from doing business with Myanmar, loosening restrictions on banks and entities. But, at that time, he left in place an official government finding of a state of emergency for Myanmar, which calls the country an “extraordinary threat. ” Earlier on Wednesday, Mr. Obama sent Congress official notice that he was restoring trade benefits to Myanmar that were revoked in 1989 because of concerns over worker rights, allowing it to qualify for a program that allows poor countries to export thousands of products to the United States. The decision to go a step further, and scrap the sanctions entirely, reflects Mr. Obama’s belief in using diplomacy paired with sanctions relief to prod former foreign adversaries toward greater openness. That principle was at the heart of Mr. Obama’s agreement last year with Iran to relax sanctions in exchange for restraints on the country’s nuclear program, and has been the driving force behind the opening of a dialogue with Cuba. Since taking power six months ago, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has moved to heal ethnic conflicts that have long plagued Myanmar. She invited a team led by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, to begin investigating the plight of the Rohingya, a group of about a million Muslims living in dire conditions in western Myanmar. Yet Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi had declined to use the term “Rohingya” to describe the persecuted Muslim population that has lived in Myanmar for generations, angering rights activists who had hoped she would reverse discriminatory policies that have marginalized the Rohingya and prompted many to flee. And crucial political changes have yet to be made, like amending Myanmar’s Constitution to remove the military’s control over 25 percent of parliamentary seats, its ability to dissolve Parliament in times of national emergency and its control over the nation’s security, defense and border ministries. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi said she was grateful to the United States for enacting sanctions that pressured Myanmar to restore human rights, but added that the time had come for the restrictions to be lifted. She also said she was eager to draw foreign visitors and investment to her country. Saying her first priority was “national reconciliation and peace,” Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi also conceded that she had to do more to shift the government toward civilian rule. “We have a Constitution that is not very democratic, because it gives the military a special place in politics,” she said. Obama administration officials have argued that freeing Myanmar from economic sanctions need not wait until the country liberalizes entirely, and that doing so will improve the chances that democracy will take hold there. It is also an important legacy issue for Mr. Obama, who said during a visit there in 2012 that it was time to open the United States’ relationship with Myanmar, despite the fact that it was not yet a “perfect democracy. ” On Wednesday, the White House insisted that Mr. Obama had not been swayed by a concern for his legacy to remove the sanctions before Myanmar had demonstrated more progress on its transition to democracy. “The president was quite interested in making as much progress as we can to support the Burmese people and the Burmese government in pursuing democratic reforms, but the decision to lift the national emergency was driven by the progress they made in Burma — not by the election calendar in the United States,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. | 1 |
RIO DE JANEIRO — A thousand metaphysical miles from the Olympic zone, a couple of activists and I entered the Favela do Mandela, a ramshackle collection of buildings. We walked a narrow road ringed by young men, which led to a narrower one, which led to a alleyway. We found the home of Marie Auxiliadora. With blond hair brushed back, she was a diminutive eruption of joy. She apologized for her modest home, scrubbed and packed with crucifixes and plastic flowers and pastel curtains. She wore a sun dress and pink . Although morning gunfire had earlier forced her to hide in her bedroom, she insisted hers had been a good life. She noted she had four beautiful adult children, thank God. On her television, we watched demonstrators protest the presence of the Olympic torch on the day before the Olympics started. She pursed her lips and put her hands over her chest. “I am so upset,” she said. Her eyes turned . “I have not gotten my retirement check for a month. Our hospitals and schools are broken. Shooting every day, and they spend all of our money on this Olympics. “The rich play, and we die. ” Seen from the northern and western precincts of Rio de Janeiro, which sprawl inland from the green Tijuca forest and the coastal mountain spine, the Olympics inhabit a foreign and wealthy world. In two days of wandering through favelas and neighborhoods, I found Olympic excitement an often extinguished fire. Graffiti and signs draped across walls by labor activists document the Games’ huge cost to a wounded city. Olympic torchbearers jogged into several neighborhoods and left sprinting, chased by angry residents. Outrage is not difficult to understand. Billionaire developers and media magnates have made a fortune off the Olympics bribe and corruption investigations arising from these Games are a growth industry, with construction companies and hundreds of congressional deputies potentially in the dock. An extremely expensive subway was built to run the length of this city’s south coast from Copacabana to the Olympic site. A forest of towers to house athletes rose on publicly owned land afterward, the developer will turn these into luxury housing. On the route from the international airport to the south shore, Olympic organizers put up colorful walls so that visitors could not see the favelas. The International Olympic Committee’s chieftain, Thomas Bach, proclaimed the Rio Games a grand success last week. I wondered at the quality of his eyes. To write of pain is to take nothing from the Brazilians, who are gracious hosts and exuberant fans, crowding the waterfront of Copacabana for beach volleyball. Grand athletic achievement is inspiring, and these athletes, the world’s greatest, deserve applause. But the practiced I. O. C. shakedown of cities, the demands that local officials compete to construct obscenely expensive stadiums and news media centers and to guarantee that tourist zones have been swept of the desperate, has rarely looked more problematic. Rio is all but bankrupt. Teachers have gone months without pay. Retirees are months behind on pension checks. University professors gather to mop floors and empty overflowing garbage cans. I talked to a hospital administrator in a northern neighborhood who asked that I not use his name for fear he might lose his job. Officials had instructed him, he said, to reserve beds in overcrowded wards and to put aside medicines, such as blood pressure pills, for Olympic tourists. His hospital received a new ambulance to serve the Olympics. I traveled this day in the company of Anderson Franca, a sturdy, bearded activist, writer and researcher, and his wife, Suelen Masiero. Anderson sees a bill of lading for decades of neglect come due. “In a way, the Olympics are to be congratulated,” he says. “The contradictions of this city are emerging faster and more dramatically. ” Later, we will put the question of the Olympics to Geovane Prince, a muscular, tattooed photographer in the Mandela favela. He has created a thriving studio and travels about the city. He shakes his head before I get the question out. “All the corruption, the suffering, there is too much pain,” he says. “We protest. To keep building giant arenas in the wealthy zone? We are sick of investing in this. ” Violence is a caldron still boiling and cannot be separated from this Olympic antipathy. In advance of the 2014 World Cup and now the Olympics, the police and the military pushed at the point of semiautomatic rifles and armored cars into hundreds of favelas in brutal pacification campaigns. Homicides dropped significantly but spiked again this year. New York City recorded 350 murders in 2015. Rio de Janeiro, a state with roughly double the population of New York City, recorded 461 murders in April 2016 alone. The police were responsible for of all murders in Rio last year, according to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. At 8:30 a. m. last week, we traveled toward the Complexo do Alemão favela, which sprawls across four hills. We stopped at a traffic light. . I tilted my head it sounded like firecrackers, except not really. The driver in the car next to ours rolled his eyes. The paramilitaries and drug gangs, he said through his open window, shoot early this morning. “You see that hill?” Franca, the activist and my guide this day, said as he pointed toward a green mountain ridge. Tumbledown homes climbed its slopes azure skies rose above. Those were the Mercy Hills. “They found a mass grave with dozens of bodies. No names. ” I talked later to a woman who owned a modest grocery store on another hillside in this favela. She cradled her baby granddaughter. “No one can even get together to watch a game,” she said. “The occupation is too dangerous. ” Hers was an often repeated observation. Residents want peace, but they harbor no particular rooting interest in the army or the drug gangs or the paramilitaries composed of retired cops: All armies are lethal. We scrambled up a hardscrabble path to the new police precinct that commands the hill like a medieval castle keep. Inside, three police officers in body armor nodded warily. They pointed to one, two, three bullet holes in the glass windows of the precinct, each the size of a ball the police attack, and the gangs counterattack. The precinct wall is dominated by a painting of a knight kneeling and holding his sword, accompanied by these words: “You may die, but if you don’t fight, you’re already dead. ” The precinct commander walked in, a semiautomatic rifle strapped to his chest. “You should not stay here — go back to the Olympics,” he said. “Shooting is anytime. ” Officials cut several bus lines that run north to south during the Olympics, in hope of keeping gangs from invading the tourist zones of Copacabana and Ipanema and the central business district. Many tens of thousands of Cariocas, as natives of Rio are known, spend two and a half to three hours commuting to distant jobs, journeys made far more arduous during the Games. Anderson’s mother lives in a favela. She is in her ninth decade and has never visited the white sand beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema. The city’s public safety director talks about the disaster that could await when the Olympics end and soldiers withdraw from the tourist zones. The next day, I talked with Carla Maria Avesani, a young professor at the Rio de Janeiro state university. She has a Ph. D. and runs a nutrition institute at the University of Rio de Janeiro. She serves on the board of a prestigious journal and writes for an international audience of academics. She studies how changes in diet help poor patients on dialysis and those with heart problems. It was her dream to work at a public university with a mission. Now she and her fellow professors pool their Brazilian reais to buy computers and paper towels, and to fix doors. They try to figure out what to do about the broken elevator. Their university is broke, its pockets turned out. She lives in an neighborhood, with good restaurants and that Mediterranean climate. The evening atmosphere, with young couples hand in hand, calls to mind Rome, except with enormous rock faces nearby and an ocean lapping at your feet. She watched the opening ceremony, all the brilliant choreographies, and read her friends’ proud posts on Facebook. She could not join them. “It was a beautiful party we Brazilians do wonderful parties,” Avesani said. “But to see the amount of money spent for stupid stadiums, I don’t want to celebrate when the state is broke and hospitals are closing and the poor are dying by the thousands. ” She paused. “It’s nice to see so many foreigners, and I want you to be happy. I want to be happy. ” She sighed. “I would be happiest now if the world sees how we are living. I feel absolutely offended by these Olympics. ” | 1 |
Sales have skyrocketed for famed journalist David Halberstam’s book The Best and the Brightest after it was reported that President Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon is reading it and encouraging White House staffers to do the same. [What’s more, Julia Halberstam, David Halberstam’s daughter, is donating the royalties from the books sold in 2017 to investigative journalism ProPublica. “Julia Halberstam told us she was moved to do this by reaction to a story in the New York Times reporting that White House assistant Stephen Bannon was reading the book during the presidential transition and recommending it to colleagues,” the New York group reports. News of Bannon’s interest in The Best and the Brightest broke after New York Times sports reporter Marc Tracy spotted Trump’s top adviser holding the 1972 book at Atlanta Georgia’s International Airport. “Mr. Bannon was carrying a book, and when an incoming president’s guru is reading a book, you should find out what it is,” Tracy wrote in a Times article titled, “Steve Bannon’s Book Club. ” “I walked by and peeked. It was The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s 1972 history of the strategic errors and human foibles that birthed the disastrous American involvement in the Vietnam War. ” ProPublica, says “we agree with Bannon that the book is ‘great for seeing how little mistakes early on’ in an administration ‘can lead to big ones later. ’” “If you have not read The Best and the Brightest, or have not read it recently, we join Steve Bannon in urging you to do so. ProPublica will benefit, to be sure, but we believe anyone seeking to be an informed citizen will as well. ” Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson | 1 |
The rambling voice on the telephone was disguised and garbled, and warned of a slaughter of Jews. The voice spoke of a bomb loaded with shrapnel and of an imminent “blood bath. ” Moments later, the caller hung up. The threat to a Jewish community center turned out to be a hoax. The warning was one of at least 100 that Jewish community centers and schools have reported since the beginning of the year, a menacing pattern that has upended daily life for people in 33 states and prompted a federal investigation that has come under increasing scrutiny from lawmakers, security specialists and Jewish leaders. Combined with the recent vandalism at Jewish cemeteries in Missouri and Pennsylvania, the calls have stoked fears that a virulent has increasingly taken hold in the early days of the Trump administration. At the beginning of an address to Congress on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump said the episodes, along with last week’s attack on two Indian immigrants in Kansas, “remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms. ” In a meeting with state attorneys general earlier Tuesday, Mr. Trump suggested that the threats and destruction might be a politically coordinated effort to “make people look bad,” according to the attorneys general of Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia. “First, he said the acts were reprehensible,” said Attorney General Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a Democrat who asked Mr. Trump about the episodes during a session at the White House. “Second, he said: ‘And you’ve got to be careful it could be the reverse. This could be the reverse, trying to make people look bad. ’” Jewish leaders denounced Mr. Trump’s comments to the attorneys general, and some urged the federal government to accelerate its investigation of the threatening calls, the latest of which came on Monday. “The person or persons doing this have broken the law, and it’s the responsibility of our system to investigate it and apprehend the individual or individuals responsible,” said David Posner, the director of strategic performance for the JCC Association of North America. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been leading an inquiry since January, and a federal law enforcement official, who was not authorized to discuss a continuing investigation, said that a single person may be making the threats using an internet calling service. Independent analysts, including extremism researchers and retired law enforcement officials, share that theory and said that, so far, they have seen no evidence of an organized effort. Though some people had suspected that the calls were recorded and automated, there was evidence to the contrary. In Milwaukee, for instance, a switchboard operator asked questions and received responses from the caller, said Mark Shapiro, the president of the Harry and Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center. Mr. Posner said an F. B. I. official had emphasized that the investigation was a priority for the bureau, involving experts in behavioral analysis, civil rights and hate groups. “Agents and analysts across the country are working to identify and stop those responsible,” Stephen Richardson, the bureau’s assistant director for the criminal investigative division, said. “We will work to make sure that people of all races and religions feel safe in their communities and in their places of worship. ” According to Mr. Posner’s group, more than 80 community centers and day schools in the United States and Canada have been threatened, some repeatedly. The calls have come in five rounds, most recently on Monday, when there were 31 threats. Many of the calls have prompted evacuations and bomb sweeps, forcing schoolchildren from classrooms and employees to push cribs full of infants into parking lots. Retirees have been rushed from swimming pools, and offices and streets shut down. The threats are frequent and alarming, community center leaders said. “My initial reaction was, ‘This is our turn,’” said Karen Kolodny, the executive director of the JCC of in Scarsdale, N. Y. where officials responded to a bomb threat on Monday. “My reaction was not complete shock. We thought it was going to happen at some point. ” F. B. I. data shows that most hate crimes are linked to race, ethnicity or ancestry. In 2015, the most recent year for which federal data has been released, the authorities recorded 664 episodes they classified as . Analysts said they believed that commentary online before last year’s presidential election had gradually escalated into more sinister behavior toward the Jewish institutions, which have long prepared for threats and often employ private security. “You started out with the hostile tweets,” said Mitchell D. Silber, who was director of intelligence analysis for the New York Police Department. “You moved to the bomb threats against JCCs and other institutions, and now you have a physical manifestation at the cemeteries with the gravestones knocked over. ” Although the F. B. I. is investigating damage to headstones at a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia, the episode there, as well as a similar one near St. Louis, is not believed to have been the work of anyone behind the bomb threats. The bureau’s inquiry into the bomb threats is likely complicated by the reality that criminals have embraced new technology, said Ronald T. Hosko, one of Mr. Richardson’s predecessors as an assistant F. B. I. director. “This is unlikely to be little twisted Johnny calling from his parents’ house,” Mr. Hosko said. Instead, Mr. Hosko suggested, the caller could be relying on libraries, restaurants or other public places with internet access, sites that might be equipped with surveillance cameras that the F. B. I. could use to help identify someone who frequented those places at the dates and times of the calls. Each new threat, Mr. Hosko said, increased the odds of an arrest. “Every one of those contacts presents another opportunity,” he said. “It’s another dot in the pattern analysis. ” As the threats have poured in, from Albuquerque to Nashville to Providence, there have been rising worries over whether people might stay away from the centers, which also serve people of other religious backgrounds. Some have fretted that the intense public attention might be encouraging whoever is behind the calls. “Given that this is happening wave after wave, there are concerns for people’s families, and people are concerned about whether they should still send their kids to JCCs,” said Oren Segal, the director of the League’s Center on Extremism. “When communities start like this, it is incredibly alarming and disruptive and serves the purpose of whoever is carrying out these threats. ” But Jewish institution leaders, in interviews and in conversations with one another, have expressed more frustration than fear. “By attacking the JCC, they’re really attacking what is best about America: the diversity, the pluralism, the inclusion that one faith community can be as welcoming to other faith communities and demonstrate that through deeds on the ground,” Mr. Posner said. “That’s something we will never surrender. ” | 1 |
Behind the headlines - conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more. Real news and perspectives that you won't find in the mainstream media. Browse: Home / How Spirits are Connected to Your Health – Swedenborg and Life Essential Reading Did New York Orchestrate The Asian Tsunami? By wmw_admin on October 17, 2008
With Afghanistan and Iraq already lost, the Wall Street bankers were all desperately looking for other ways to control our world, when suddenly and very conveniently, the Sumatran Trench exploded. Trick or Treat? Joe Vialls investigates 9/11 Masterminds – Explosive Connections By wmw_admin on October 7, 2011
This brilliant video investigation reveals more incriminating evidence on those behind 9/11. Includes stunning revelation on Bush cousin Jim Pierce’s role. Highly recomended Before and after the “Holocaust”: Jewish population numbers in 1933 and 1948 By wmw_admin on November 30, 2013
During the time Hitler was supposed to have killed six million Jews — between 1933 and 1948 — the world’s Jewish population actually increased from 15,315,000 to 15,753,000 Admiral Richard B. Byrd’s, Diary Feb. Mar. 1947 By wmw_admin on December 30, 2007
Fact or fantasy? Admiral Richard B. Byrd’s account of his flight over the North Pole and discovery of a “land beyond the poles” is legend. For those still unfamiliar with it we present his classic account and leave you to decide Evidence: Syria Gas Attack Work of U.S. Allies By wmw_admin on August 28, 2013
Clear and conclusive evidence that ‘Syrian rebels’ were behind the chemical weapons attack — not the Syrian Army — using toxins supplied by Saudi Arabia. Includes videos Six Million Jews 1915-1938 By wmw_admin on March 4, 2013
Years before Hitler and WWII the iconic figure of six million Jews was being widely promulgated. Here are a few examples Horrifying US Secret Weaponry Unleashed in Baghdad By wmw_admin on September 1, 2003
DU was bad enough, but reports filtering out of Baghdad suggest US forces used a new type of weapon to capture the city. This is the real story behind the fall of Baghdad and it truly is the stuff of nightmares The true inside facts about the 7/7 London bombings By wmw_admin on January 21, 2008
What this website has long suspected has been confirmed. James Casbolt, himself a former MI6 operative, gets the inside story from a disaffected member of British Intelligence on who was really behind the 7/7 bombings and why | 0 |
WATCH: Gingrich Accuses Megyn Kelly Of Being “Fascinated With Sex”
Sent by the Democrat candidate’s top aide Huma Abedin five months before Podesta asked about Clinton’s head, this email read as follows: “She’s going to stick to notes a little closer this am, still not perfect in her head.”
As with Podesta’s email, Abedin’s may have been referring to a simple headache, or she could have meant that Clinton couldn’t get the text of her message “in her head.” Again, however, the evidence suggested otherwise. Advertisement - story continues below
Critics have quite reasonably questioned Clinton’s health during this election season because of her persistent coughing fits and haggard look. Moreover, she was observed nearly collapsing to the ground during a Sept. 11 memorial event in New York City.
Specifically, a video recorded from the event showed her propped up on a barrier, trying to remain upright as her security phalanx prepared to help her into her van.
As Clinton began walking toward the van, however, she began stumbling. Her campaign later first blamed this behavior on dehydration but subsequently attributed it to pneumonia .
Combined, both the email revelations and the Democrat candidate’s behavior have led many critics to speculate on her health, with some going so far as to claim that she suffers from Parkinson’s disease or a similar ailment. Advertisement - story continues below | 0 |
Video: ‘Build The Wall!’: Meet Israel’s Trump Supporters MEE went to Israel to find out why some Israelis support the Republican nominee.
With just hours to go before America elects its 45th President, MEE goes to Israel – a key foreign policy battleground – to find out why some Israelis are raving about the right-wing candidate Donald Trump: | 0 |
WATCH: BlackLivesMatter Cop Hater Slaps Police Horse Then GETS MAJOR PAYBACK From Horse…. Oct 28, 2016 Previous post
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For most critical thinking individuals, common sense usually dictates staying clear of bigger objects that could pose a threat, especially within the animal kingdom. However for the “blissfully young and ignorant”, that innate and inborn instinct at times needs a little reinforcement, and no doubt getting kicked by a police horse hopefully did the trick.
The incident took place during the Queen’s University homecoming in Kingston, Ontario, when a young blond woman ran up behind a police horse mounted by police officer and smacked the horse on its rear, and of course the horse immediately responded as it was trained to do, and kicked the woman to the ground, face first.
The 40-second video captures the woman wearing a dark shirt with a red stripe appearing in front of the brief video clip running towards the horse, and the whispered commentary coming from the operator seems to indicate that this was all a part of a silly prank, and the young blond was actually the dupe or more likely the dope, take your pick.
According to authorities 3-people were arrested and charged with assaulting a police horse during the homecoming celebrations, however the condition of the woman wasn’t immediately known, other
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RIO DE JANEIRO — Argentine fans were irrepressible, bouncing up and down and back and forth across the stands, waving flags, imploring their compatriots to jump along, and singing that anyone who did not join the fun was Brazilian. The Brazilians yelled right back, heralding the career goal tally of Pelé, their soccer hero, and crowing about their five World Cup trophies. They made sure, of course, to insult Diego Maradona, Argentina’s own World Cup legend. It was, in many ways, a typical sardonic showdown between fans of the two South American rivals — except it was happening on Wednesday night at a basketball game between Argentina and the United States. After the Americans had scuffled through the final three games of the pool stage, Coach Mike Krzyzewski suggested that the presence in the quarterfinal round of the Argentine fans — who had been making so much noise the last two weeks — might invigorate his players. Whether it helped or not, the Americans looked lively amid the noise, sauntering to a win that left the Brazilian fans — their sports allies for a night — singing in joy. As the seconds ticked off the clock in the blowout, Brazilian fans yelled out “Olé!” to usher the Argentines out of Carioca Arena 1. “We didn’t understand what was going on,” said Paul George, who had 17 points and 8 rebounds and galvanized his team with his defensive effort. “We didn’t know if they were against each other or if they were cheering with each other. ” The Americans will face Spain — which steamrollered France, — on Friday in the semifinals. “We enjoyed it,” George said. “That’s new to us. We enjoyed being in this atmosphere. ” The Americans, many of them still relatively new to international basketball, had found the vibe at their earlier games a bit odd. The stands at the Olympic arena sit far back from the sidelines. Nonpartisan crowds at certain games did not seem compelled to make much noise. “It’s almost like a golf tournament,” DeMarcus Cousins said this week, gently tapping the fingers on his right hand against the palm of his left. “It’s different. ” The Americans are used to the atmosphere of the N. B. A. with the familiar tableau of the league’s arenas. Sound technicians make sure to quash any threat of silence with thunderous music. Courtside seats creep up along the sidelines, eliminating personal space between players and fans. “You can’t hear as much trash talking as usual,” DeAndre Jordan said about the fans in Rio. On Wednesday, Argentine fans arrived early to spread their jollity inside and around the arena. They belted out the country’s national anthem in full voice. They were eager to scream, and it helped that their team got off to a fast start, jumping out to a lead in the first quarter. Whenever the United States fans started a chant — “ !” or “ !” — they were drowned in a torrent of whistles and jeers from the Argentine fans. The local Brazilians, who consider Argentina their big sports rival, did some jeering of their own on the Americans’ behalf. “I’m a huge fan of soccer,” Jordan said. “The fans are engaged in the game. They have chants and cheers and the wave going. It’s cool. ” The decibel level dropped for a spell, though, as the Americans charged back, producing a scoring run at one point. Halfway through the second quarter, Kyrie Irving displayed his exceptional skills, stringing together a dizzying sequence of crossovers on Nicolas Laprovittola to create an opening to the rim. Amid the momentary quiet, the Americans made their own fun. In the second quarter, when Kevin Durant (27 points) disassembled Andres Nocioni with a crossover — before scoring on a fadeaway combination — the reserves on the American bench popped off their seats and pirouetted with delight. Despite the loss, Argentine fans’ spirits were high. Asked at halftime about the atmosphere, Gerardo Genzano, a fan from Argentina, said, “Argentina has taken over Rio. ” Asked who would win, he changed the subject. “We need more beer,” he said. Durant, who averaged 16. 8 points in the first five games, was unstoppable. He shot 9 for 13 from the field, including 7 for 9 from range, and added seven rebounds and six assists before sitting for most of the fourth quarter. Durant described the knockout game as a Game 7 and praised his teammates for raising their intensity level. He complimented the outward national pride of the Argentine fans. He said he had heard chants of “ !” rising above the din. “It gave me chills,” he said. | 1 |
Home / Be The Change / BREAKING: No-Fly Zone Declared as Militarized Police Prep for Assault on ‘Front-Line Camp’ at Standing Rock BREAKING: No-Fly Zone Declared as Militarized Police Prep for Assault on ‘Front-Line Camp’ at Standing Rock Jay Syrmopoulos October 27, 2016 Leave a comment
Cannon Ball, ND – Pipeline opponents attempting to protect their water supply from the Dakota Access oil pipeline (DAPL), as well as prevent the continued destruction of burial grounds and cultural sites, are anticipating a confrontation with police today. This news come after “water protectors” refused law enforcement requests to vacate reoccupied land in the pipeline’s path, owned by Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners.
Last week, native activists took the bold action of declaring eminent domain over their traditional territory and set up a new camp “Front-Line” camp directly in the pipeline’s path. Pipeline opponents say they have simply reclaimed the land under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, clearly noting the Sioux never ceded that territory. The new encampment lies across Highway 1806, where pipeline security guards armed with guard dogs and pepper spray attacked protestors attempting to stop the bulldozing of cultural sites and burial grounds on September 3.
The impending crisis comes after nearly 200 water protectors set up the new camp on land that Energy Transfer Partners last month purchased from a local rancher in an effort to bolster strategic and tactical control of areas surrounding construction of the controversial pipeline.
According to the AP , however, the Native Americans claim the land is theirs by way of an “1851 treaty and they won’t leave until the pipeline is stopped.” “We never ceded this land,” said protester Joye Braun.
This latest flashpoint in the ongoing conflict is north of the larger and more permanent encampments, which have been constructed on federally owned land where over 200 Native American tribes have gathered to oppose the pipeline’s construction.
On Wednesday, a heavily militarized law enforcement presence began mobilizing heavy equipment, including Humvees, armored personnel carriers, buses and demanded the protestors leave the occupied area.
In an ominous sign, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has restricted flights , and banned the use of drones within a radius of about 4 ½ miles of Cannon Ball. The FAA declared that only aircraft affiliated with the North Dakota Tactical Operation Center are allowed within the restricted airspace. The flight restriction went into effect Wednesday and will last until November 5.
Indian Country Today reports :
What began with prayers and a single tipi alongside Highway 1806 quickly grew to more than a dozen tipis surrounded by tents, buses, cars and hundreds of water protectors. Some are calling it the “1851 Treaty Camp” to acknowledge their Treaty rights.
Across the road is the encroaching pipeline and a heavily militarized police force with armored vehicles, helicopters, planes, ATVs and busloads of officers. Tensions are growing as unarmed citizens worry that police will use unnecessarily harsh tactics.
In recent weeks, nearly 300 unarmed water protectors who were arrested have been subjected to pepper spray, strip-searches, delayed bail, exaggerated charges and physical violence, according to interviews with several who were taken into custody. The ACLU and National Lawyers Guild recently sent attorneys to Standing Rock to help the Red Owl Collective, a team of volunteer lawyers headed by attorney Bruce Ellison, who are representing many of those arrested.
The massive law enforcement contingent, consisting of sheriff’s deputies and officers from numerous other states and counties, as well as National Guard, began staging near the encampment — with scores of Armored Personnel Carriers, buses and Humvees poised at the ready.
“At some point the rule of law has to be enforced,” Cass County Sheriff Paul Laney said Wednesday. “We could go down there at any time. We’re trying not to.”
Dakota Access LLC, the pipeline developer released a statement encouraging trespassers to “vacate the land immediately” or be “removed from the land.”
“Alternatively and in coordination with local law enforcement and county/state officials, all trespassers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and removed from the land,” the company said. “Lawless behavior will not be tolerated.”
Just days ago, sheriff’s officials had said earlier they didn’t have the resources to immediately remove activists from the private land, about 50 miles south of Bismarck. Subsequently, law enforcement officials put out a call for reinforcements, with hundreds of officers from out of state responding.
On Wednesday, actor and environmental activist Mark Ruffalo and civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson went to the new camp to speak and pray with the water protectors. Ruffalo had arrived the night before to speak on an anti-DAPL panel with Native activists at the Prairie Knights Casino and Hotel, according to Indian Country Today.
After touring the camp Jackson spoke to the crowd, reminding people that nonviolence is key to winning the battle for justice.
“With promises broken, land stolen, and sacred lands desecrated, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is standing up for their right to clean water. They have lost land for settlers to farm, more land for gold in the Black Hills, and then again even more land for the damn (sic) that was built for flood control and hydro power,” Jackson said.
When will the taking stop? When will we start treating the first peoples of these lands with the respect and honor they deserve?
The rerouting of the pipeline away from Bismarck to its current route is “the ripest case of environmental racism I’ve seen in a long time,” Jackson said. “Bismarck residents don’t want their water threatened, so why is it okay for North Dakota to react with guns and tanks when Native Americans ask for the same right?”
The pipeline was originally scheduled to run north of Bismarck until local residents expressed displeasure with the plan, with the DAPL ultimately being rerouted to its current trajectory near the Oceti Sakowin Standing Rock Reservation.
With an impending militarized police raid of the camp, Mekasi Camp-Horinek, one of the camp coordinators, told officers the protesters planned to stand their ground, saying “Do what you’ve got to do,” according to the Bismarck Tribune
“I don’t have a crystal ball to know when it will happen, but we know it will happen,” said Mekasi Camp-Horinek, a member of the Ponca tribe in Oklahoma. “We’re going to hold this ground.”
Water protectors could be heard chanting, “Stand in peace against the beast.”
“I’m here to die if I have to. I don’t want to die but I will,” said Didi Banerji, who lives in Toronto but is originally from the Spirit Lake Sioux reservation in North Dakota.
The protesters are simply trying to keep law enforcement from preventing their efforts to stop the pipeline said David Red Bear Jr., 30, from the South Dakota side of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
“If we don’t stop them here, they’re going to cut us off closer to the pipeline. We can’t let that happen,” Red Bear said. “We’re not trying to force anybody’s hand. We’re just trying to stand up for what we believe in.”
The reality is that the citizens of North Dakota are funding a protection force, in the form of police, for a multi-billion dollar corporate entity. North Dakota’s Emergency Commission previously approved $6 million in emergency funding for law enforcement costs related to the protest — with almost all of those funds having been used already. The Department of Emergency Services plans to ask for more, spokeswoman Cecily Fong said.
Do North Dakotans want their tax money spent on police acting as paid enforcers for Wall Street and big oil interests?
While law enforcement claims they are just doing their job and enforcing the law, in reality, they are acting as enforcers for an unjust corporate oligarchy that consistently puts money over people. The financial elite are the ones who the police are truly protecting and serving — not the American people.
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“Everyone to your life rafts!” “Every man and woman for themselves!” “This ship is going down!” That is just a snippet of what we imagine to be the conversations happening all around the nation within the offices of DNC members. The DNC and Hillary are certainly no strangers to scandal at this point. These days, news reporters can barely keep up with crimes of the Democrats. The party is reaching new lows, practically pushing each other out of the way to commit fraud and lie to the voters. Meanwhile, continuing to try and only show the world what the Republicans are supposedly doing wrong. They would like Americans to believe that only the Republicans are guilty. There are many problems with this, beginning with all of the evidence available. Just a few days ago, the story broke that Democrats were returning contribution money. Returning money? Why on earth would they do that? It may have something to do with the fact that the tens of thousands of dollars from the personal injury lawyers of the Thornton Law Firm was money the partners received in illegal reimbursements. Campaign finance rules prohibit companies like Thornton from giving more than $2,700 to any singular candidate. Straw donor practices easily allow the firms to get around the rule. We wouldn’t want laws to get in the way of lawyers and money. In Boston, it was uncovered that the law firm gave their partners bonuses the same day they donated to the campaigns–in the same amounts. Dirty money given to dirty politicians from dirty lawyers. Perfect headline for Democrats. High profile Senators and candidates have rushed to “donate” the money they received to the Department of Treasury. This is a common method of “dumping” tainted money from a campaign. The Democrats involved in this scandal include: Florida Rep. Patrick Murphy Former Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto Pennsylvania Senate hopeful Katie McGinty New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan Former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold These candidates all have something very important in common: they are fighting for swing-state seats in Senate races. If wrongdoing stopped there, it would be more than enough to disqualify these people when you go to cast your vote. It did not; it went much further. Already these unethical donations made the small Thornton firm, which boasts just ten partners, one of the country’s largest dollar for dollar political donors. It turns out this is not the first time that this particular law firm helped out Democrats. The Boston Globe revealed that “between 2010 and 2014, three of the firm’s partners gave $1.6M to mostly Democratic candidates. During that same period of time, those same three partners received $1.4M in bonuses from the law firm, in what appears to be reimbursement for their hefty donations.” As this story broke, it encouraged other people to come forward and admit their involvement. Viveca Novak, who reported the story for the Center for Responsive Politics, told FOXBusiness.com:
This may not be an isolated case and is likely not the only one of employees being reimbursed for contributions to candidates. We’ve received emails since the story was published that employees at other companies were pressured to make donations and were told they’d be reimbursed. We always thought it was a much bigger problem, but it is hard to flush out. So here we are with Democrats promptly abandoning ship and handing the money over to the Treasury. Not all of the Democrats, though. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, and best friend to Hillary Clinton, is standing strong and defending her actions. She says she will not return the money until it is proven to be illegal. This is the same Senator who has spent her career sitting on the high horse of condemning hidden money in politics. Elizabeth Warren’s hypocrisy aside, this is a very serious situation. Lawyers representing public interest from The Campaign Legal Center have filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. This is certainly just the beginning of uncovering the truth of the Democrats’ campaign practices. The problem we are currently faced with is that the election is 5 days away. Judith Ingram of the Federal Election Commission told reporters that there is a lengthy process to review these complaints for merit and next steps. A complete investigation is exactly what we want and need. It will hopefully continue until they have discovered the whole truth. The election though, is next week. We don’t have time. The Democrats in battleground states have been using filthy money to fund their campaigns. There is absolutely no way to know that this money hasn’t swayed the election in their favor. Voters in these states need to be aware. They must know the truth before they walk into the voting booth. Information in this election is crucial because the Democrats have done such a good job at muddying the waters around the real issues. There is no telling how deep this goes. As of today, we absolutely have enough information to know a few very important facts: The Democratic party as a whole, cannot be trusted to tell the truth . The money that their campaigns use is not all from legal contributions . The only way to send them a clear message that we will not condone their actions: vote Republican. We need Donald Trump now more than ever. Corruption in politics has gotten so bad that many people don’t even bat an eye when we see shocking revelations like this one. On November 8th, we have the opportunity to drain the swamp and root out all of this corruption. We have been given an opportunity, we should take advantage of it!
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HIGHLANDS, N. Y. — The veteran’s mind had been slipping away for years. With no relatives or close friends in his life, few people noticed when he was no longer a regular on the streets of this town in Orange County. Inside the motel room where the man, David McLellan, ended up, he slept in squalor, crowded by piles of furniture, old TVs and a lawn mower. He spent his days outside his door, sitting in a faded armchair, its torn fabric stained from his own urine. Neighbors would see him walking around the parking lot late at night, naked and confused, looking for cigarette butts on the ground. For Mr. McLellan, life at the U. S. Academy Motel, about 50 miles north of New York City, was a lonely blur, marked by what the police say was emotional abuse and neglect. When a detective asked him how long he had lived there, Mr. McLellan said he thought it had been four days. Mr. McLellan had been living there for about six years, exploited for much of that time by another man, Perry Coniglio, living at the motel, the police said. Mr. Coniglio posed as Mr. McLellan’s caretaker, withheld food and stole thousands of dollars of his monthly Social Security and pension benefits, said Joseph Cornetta, the detective in charge of criminal investigations for the Highlands Police Department. Mr. Coniglio, 43, was arrested on July 19 on preliminary charges of unlawful imprisonment, grand larceny, endangering the welfare of a vulnerable person, criminal possession of a weapon, menacing and possession of narcotics. He has pleaded not guilty. “The abuse was staggering,” Detective Cornetta said. “Perry Coniglio exercised custody and control over this individual for one purpose: financial exploitation. Keep the cash cow going. ” But how Mr. McLellan ended up languishing in such peril is largely shrouded in official secrecy. Motel records show a case worker from the Orange County Adult Protective Services agency dropped off Mr. McLellan in 2010, and the police say their records indicate the agency was aware of Mr. McLellan’s situation as recently as 2012. But the agency, citing the man’s privacy, said it could not confirm that it had had any role in the man’s care, and it would not say whether anyone from the agency had checked on Mr. McLellan in the years before the police uncovered the alleged exploitation. Monica Mahaffey, a spokeswoman for the State Office of Children and Family Services, which oversees local adult protective agencies, said privacy rules precluded the state from disclosing whether it was investigating the county’s handling of Mr. McLellan’s needs. It is not uncommon for older people like Mr. McLellan to slip through the cracks and become vulnerable to fraud and abuse from caretakers, experts say. According to a 2011 study, 141 out of 1, 000 older New York State residents have experienced an event since turning age 60, but only a small portion of these cases are brought to the attention of local authorities. In 2010, the police in the village of Highland Falls received a call from a local bank employee who suspected that a man was posing as Mr. McLellan’s relative. The police referred the bank employee to the county’s Adult Protective Services agency, the police chief, Kenneth Scott, said. In April 2012, the department received a complaint that Mr. Coniglio had thrown a burning piece of paper into Mr. McLellan’s window. When officers responded to the call, Mr. McLellan told them the situation was a misunderstanding, Chief Scott said. About two weeks later, Adult Protective Services requested that the police perform a welfare check on Mr. McLellan. Officers found “nothing to report,” the chief said. It was a drug investigation by the police from the Town of Highlands, a neighboring jurisdiction, that eventually led investigators to Mr. McLellan. (The town’s police station is just steps from the motel, but the motel sits just across the border, and the town police never received any reports related to Mr. McLellan while he was living at the motel, Detective Cornetta said.) But according to people who live at the motel, the troubles were no secret to those in earshot. For years, they had heard constant screaming between the two men. “You felt that something was just not right,” said Carmine Bloise, who lived two doors down from Mr. McLellan and Mr. Coniglio for about two years. But fearing he would be kicked out for attracting the attention of law enforcement, Mr. Bloise said he did not report the suspicious relationship to the police. About a month ago, though, one resident of the motel decided to speak up. Natasha Blanc, a former home health aide whose room was opposite Mr. McLellan’s, reported the relationship to the police. Detective Cornetta said he encouraged her to record videos of the interactions between Mr. Coniglio and Mr. McLellan. “He was like a lost little kid,” Ms. Blanc said of Mr. McLellan. “He can’t speak up for himself, so someone has to do it for him. ” One video in particular persuaded the detective to make an arrest. In the video, Mr. Coniglio is seen charging into Mr. McLellan’s room with a long wooden stick, cursing at him and seemingly threatening him. Mr. Coniglio is heard screaming at the older man to grab his bowl to be filled with his meal — “like a prisoner,” Detective Cornetta said. Since his arrest, Mr. Coniglio has been held in the Orange County Jail. On the day of the arrest, the authorities escorted Mr. McLellan out of his room, sending him to a hospital for treatment and placing him under the care of Adult Protective Services. A walk through Mr. McLellan’s room revealed flashes of his isolated time in the motel: a filthy, molding bathroom trash a table covered in cigarette ash — but there also were snippets of his identity, like a wooden bracelet with Catholic images of the Virgin Mary. The man’s former neighbors in Fort Montgomery, less than two miles south of the motel, recalled Mr. McLellan’s life before his mind succumbed to dementia. Mr. McLellan, originally from New Jersey, is believed to have served in the Navy during the Korean War, Detective Cornetta said. For many years he worked in the Ford assembly plant in Mahwah, N. J. until it closed in 1980, his former neighbor, David Tonneson, said. Mr. McLellan then became a registered nurse and moved to a trailer on a hill on Hemlock Street in Fort Montgomery, where he lived for decades, neighbors said. Many in town knew him for the six goats he kept on his property, said Mr. Tonneson, a volunteer firefighter and retired contractor in the neighborhood. “Everybody knows who the goat man was,” he said. Mr. McLellan served as a caretaker for his mother, who lived with him for a number of years until her death, said Cathy McCutchen, who used to live next door. But after Mr. McLellan’s retirement and his mother’s death, something changed. He stopped being able to take care of himself, and his house started falling apart. He would spend nights in the barn with his goats because he had no heat in his house, Mr. Tonneson said. More than six years ago, local officials condemned his house and his animals. Mr. McLellan spent about two months staying in the homes of parishioners of his church in Fort Montgomery and of its former pastor, the Rev. Jack Arlotta, now at St. Stephen the First Martyr Parish in Warwick, N. Y. Shortly after, Father Arlotta said, Mr. McLellan “sort of disappeared. ” At the motel where he ended up, the owner, Iftihar Malik, would take him to the bank to collect his benefits, Detective Cornetta said. Then, Mr. Coniglio moved into the motel and began working as Mr. Malik’s maintenance worker. He moved into the only motel room with a full kitchen, next door to Mr. McLellan’s room. In an interview, Mr. Malik said he did not know anything about the alleged financial exploitation or abuse and believed Mr. Coniglio was taking care of Mr. McLellan. Mr. Malik said the criminal investigation was an “exaggeration. ” “Tell me, who is washing the clothes?” Mr. Malik said. “Who is cutting the hair?” Mr. Coniglio’s lawyer, Brad White, said, “There’s certainly more to the story. ” Mr. Coniglio’s aunt, Phyllis Coniglio, said she felt her nephew was trying to help the veteran but was battling his own mental health problems and was not competent enough to be the man’s caretaker. “I think he just got stuck with it,” Ms. Coniglio said. “This man Dave was just shuffled off to somebody. ” The police are still investigating others who might have contributed to, or covered up, Mr. McLellan’s abuse, Detective Cornetta said. “For whatever reason, nothing was ever done,” the detective said. “This is a veteran who got left behind. ” | 1 |
What is the “Scientific method”? [Saturday’s March for Science calls for “robustly funded” science and “political leaders and policy makers to enact evidence based policies in the public interest. ” But is this just an attempt to dress up the marchers’ political beliefs as science? And what do they mean by science? Fortunately for those who care, there is a remarkable level of agreement in the writings of scientific pioneers such as Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Benjamin Franklin on the nature of the scientific method. That agreement is also reflected in the definition provided by the Oxford English Dictionary. We have expanded on the established definition and identified eight necessary criteria for a work to be considered useful science. The criteria include objectivity and full disclosure. We expect that most scientists would agree with these criteria as obviously true and important. The pioneers of science charted the way by describing how to comply with the criteria. To be objective, according to Newton, the study should compare all reasonable hypotheses by using a fair and balanced experimental design. We have summarized the eight criteria on a checklist (available at guidelinesforscience. com). You can easily refer to it to assess whether something you are looking at is a work of science. By using the checklist, you do not have to depend on an authority to tell you “this is what the science says. ” Knowing and agreeing with the criteria in the checklist does not help. To be useful, the checklist must be used. The checklist is concerned only with the scientific method, so one does not need to be an expert in the field or topic to use it. In fact, experts may have difficulty rating the scientific compliance of works in their own field. They are likely to be biased against findings that challenge conventional wisdom. We found that the ratings of raters who did not use the checklist were unreliable. Their ratings differed substantially from those derived using the checklist. When faculty and students raters used the checklist, their ratings were remarkably consistent. The checklist is available at guidelinesforscience. com. The checklist is badly needed. One cannot rely on the fact that a purported discovery was published in a scientific publication. When we used the checklist to rate papers published in leading scientific journals, we found less than one percent of them to be compliant with the scientific method. We suggest that you try out the checklist at the March for Science rallies. Show your respect for the scientific method and, as Newton emphasized, be willing to consider alternatives. Be fair in evaluating alternative hypotheses. You have to ask yourself the question, “Can I imagine any evidence that would prove my favored hypothesis is wrong?” If you can’t, you are not approaching the subject with an open mind. You also fail Newton’s criteria for understanding science. Speakers should comply with science. Listeners should be respectful and request of the speakers, “Please show us that you have complied with science. ” It’s not enough for them to say that they have followed the scientific method. Progress in all fields relies on the scientific method. Science is a process. Voting has no place in science. Scientific laws always eventually prevail over the political laws created by our elected officials. The March for Science should not simply be another way for us to express our opinions. It should not be an effort to pressure scientists and voters to agree with us. The scientific method is the best way we have of engaging in factual disputes. J. Scott Armstrong (jscottarmstrong@upenn. edu ) is a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Kesten C. Green (kesten. green@unisa. edu. au) teaches managerial economics in the University of South Australia Business School. | 1 |
Hillary HQ Gets Massive Surprise Outside Right After FBI Announcement Posted on October 30, 2016 by Amanda Shea in Politics Share This Hillary Clinton
Hours after the FBI announced that they are reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, the liberals holed up at the Democratic headquarters in Ohio opened their door to a massive surprise outside that they weren’t expecting. Now, they’re getting the police involved as they fear this is the start to much more unwanted attention from Donald Trump supporters.
While Trump headquarters in various states have become targets of violence from angry Hillary supporters who don’t know how to handle themselves, when the tables are turned, the response is much different. “What reasonable person thinks this is OK????” party chair Bethe Goldenfield complained in a post in the Greater Cincinnati Politics facebook group with the hashtag #TrumpLovesHate. “I won’t be responding to anyone who thinks this is acceptable behavior. It is ILLEGAL!” she said of what she’s taking as a terror attack on their party, but apparently didn’t seem to think the same when Trump’s party office was firebombed a few states away.
Sending a very fitting message about what people think not only of Hillary but of the Democratic Party, an unknown individual unloaded a massive mound of manure in the parking lot. Obviously, this person was just giving back a small portion of what Dems have been feeding Americans for years and is symbolic of what comes out of Hillary’s mouth, which is why the FBI is now re-investigating her. However, Goldenfield doesn’t see the humor in it since it wasn’t a molotov cocktail at a Republican office. Manure pile left outside the Democratic Headquarters in Lebanon, Ohio
According to Cincinnati.com , Goldenfield was alerted to the manure pile by the police in Lebanon who called her at about 7:45 on Saturday morning, which she took full advantage of by urging a widespread investigation to nab the person responsible. “Hopefully the perps will be held accountable for their actions,” she said, repeating her inaccurate #TrumpLovesHate hashtag.
The local GOP office came under some speculation of involvement, but not only did they announce that they had nothing to do with this, they offered to help clean it up — something that Democrats didn’t offer in Indiana and North Carolina when both offices suffered actual destructive damage, unlike this case of a nonviolent attack that didn’t damage property. | 0 |
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“I heard someone once say that we’re only as sick as our secrets,” Carrie Fisher wrote in her 2008 memoir “Wishful Drinking. ” Ms. Fisher didn’t, it seems, harbor many secrets. A prolific writer and chronic oversharer, she published several heavily autobiographical novels, including the best seller “Postcards From the Edge,” which drew on her struggles with drug abuse and mental illness, and three memoirs that recounted her experiences growing up in the shadow of Hollywood royalty, her affair with Harrison Ford while shooting the “Star Wars” films, and her battle with bipolar disorder. One of her final creative acts was publishing her memoir “The Princess Diarist,” which came out last month. Ms. Fisher’s literary legacy seemed to offer some solace to fans mourning her death this week, at age 60. “The Princess Diarist,” which drew on the diaries Ms. Fisher wrote when she was a actress on the cusp of fame for playing Princess Leia, rose to the top of Amazon’s list, and was listed as temporarily out of stock on Thursday. Blue Rider Press, which published the book, plans to reprint 65, 000 copies, in addition to the 173, 000 copies already in circulation. “Postcards From the Edge” and “Wishful Drinking” also rose to the top 10 on Amazon and were out of stock. Simon Schuster, which published those books, is reprinting another 20, 000 copies of “Wishful Drinking” and 17, 500 copies of “Postcards From the Edge. ” Over all, Simon Schuster has sold some 500, 000 copies of Ms. Fisher’s books. Readers also turned to “Unsinkable,” a 2013 memoir published by Ms. Fisher’s mother, the actress Debbie Reynolds, who died at age 84 on Wednesday, one day after her daughter. (“Unsinkable” rose to No. 395 on Amazon on Thursday, from 24, 172.) Following Ms. Fisher’s death on Tuesday, some novelists praised her prose as being as blunt, funny and honest — much like Ms. Fisher. “Fisher’s legacy includes her written words — cutting, clever, observant, and unbowed,” the science fiction writer John Scalzi wrote in The Los Angeles Times. | 1 |
One midnight near semester’s end on the skirts of Harvard Yard, music thumped and laughs rang out from a colonnaded, mansion, the sort usually seen in Hollywood fantasies about fraternal campus life. But it was the scene outside that suggested something other than a frat party. This was the headquarters of the Fly, an exclusive men’s fellowship known here as a final club. At its side door stood a man in tuxedo, checking names against a list of the lucky invited. Eager young women in queued up. Except one. A lone girl sat on the front steps, bathed by yellow light spilling from windows in which the silhouettes of revelers held pool cues and beer bottles. She was hunched over, legs flopped on either side, face in hands. She had managed to get in but was “kicked out,” she wailed into a phone pressed against her ear. Her cheeks were reddened, streaked with mascara. Now, she sobbed, “they won’t let me in!” A group of young men stood in the doorway, hands shoved in pockets, chatting. Every so often they cast an awkward glance at the young woman. The Fly is one of six remaining final clubs. They are, if not the hub, the apex of social life at Harvard — upscale surrogates for those classic centers of college merriment, sororities and fraternities. On any given weekend, a string of young women spools out onto Mount Auburn Street in front of one or another of the club porticos. And while there might be legitimate reasons to exclude them, from intoxication to overcrowding, the crying woman on the stairs underscored the power the final clubs have over the student psyche. Entree can feel like belonging, rejection like a scarlet F. Some students describe final clubs as nothing more than fun outlets on a campus with few options for unsupervised play. To those who join they offer a group of friends and a refuge from the high pressure of the Harvard course load. After graduation, members enjoy access to an extensive alumni network. But to many students on the outside, the clubs are laden with a legacy of snobbishness. As the writer Kenneth Auchincloss referred to them in a 1958 dispatch in The Harvard Crimson: Final clubs are gathering places of the “St. Grottlesex crop,” an amalgamation of the names of several elite East Coast boarding schools, who “look to the Clubs as centers for privacy and ‘’ cut off from the hectic University by their locked front doors, their aura of secrecy, and a generally shared feeling of superiority. ” Today, that description is perpetuated by unwritten codes on who may pass through their doors and who may join. The elaborate courtship of the desirable can begin with an engraved invitation slipped under a dorm room door to “punch” — a selection process that continues with a series of outings and culminates in a dinner feting the few who make it through. To many students, the clubs remain potent symbols of privilege, anachronistic and out of place on an increasingly diverse campus. These clashing perceptions have roiled the community over the past year, with the administration falling squarely into the camp that final clubs and all they represent, wittingly or not, do not belong at Harvard. It is a stance that has resulted in periodic action by the university — and counterpunches by the clubs. But this year’s iteration of the battle, led by Rakesh Khurana, dean of the college, carries a particularly big stick: Starting with the class of 2021, members will be barred from leadership roles in clubs and athletics and from receiving recommendations from the dean for top scholarships like the Rhodes and Fulbright. And the conversation has been expanded to include all clubs unaffiliated with the university, including five final clubs, four sororities and five fraternities. The decision stands to have ramifications beyond Cambridge, Mass. by ratifying a movement that is taking hold across the country: to make student social life more inclusive. “The discriminatory membership policies of these organizations have led to the perpetuation of spaces that are rife with power imbalances,” Dr. Khurana wrote in a letter to Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, in May. “The most entrenched of these spaces send an unambiguous message that they are the exclusive preserves of men. In their recruitment practices and through their extensive resources and access to networks of power, these organizations propagate exclusionary values that undermine those of the larger Harvard College community. ” In an interview a few days after graduation, Dr. Khurana softened his rhetoric. “It’s not our intention to make the students feel persecuted,” he said. “I want to just say to our students: The issue is not our students. I think they are people of immense character and integrity. We are trying to create the conditions to allow our students to become the kind of people they say they want to become in their admissions essays. ” The push to end, or at least reform, final clubs is also informed by the urgent discussion nationwide of sexual assault on campus. A 2015 survey of several universities by the Association of American Universities found that by the time they were seniors, 47 percent of Harvard women who had participated in final club activities had experienced unwanted sexual touch, compared with 31 percent schoolwide. Some clubs have complained that the university has not presented them with any documented cases of sexual assaults on their premises. But a subsequent analysis of the data by the university’s Task Force on the Prevention of Sexual Assault linked the solution to the final club question. The clubs perpetuate misogynistic attitudes, according to the task force report, particularly through “parties at which the only nonmembers in attendance were women selected mainly by virtue of their physical appearance” and party themes and invitations that have “reinforced a sense of sexual entitlement. ” Richard T. Porteus, class of ’78 and president of the Fly’s graduate body, is one of the few final club members to publicly challenge the college. “If Harvard really were to become serious about preventing sexual assault rather than using it as a way to push an ideological stance,” he told me, “they’d drill down to find out exactly what is occurring rather than trying to throw a moral pall over any man or women who belongs to these clubs. ” To charges that the men cast themselves in the role of patriarchal gatekeeper, Mr. Porteus made a pragmatic argument: The clubhouses have limited capacity, and protects members and guests, particularly women. And the doorkeeper, a staff member and parent of a college student, can assess the sobriety of guests, entering and departing. In a stab at the dean, he concluded: “What is more patriarchal than an older male authority figure deciding for young women where and how they should spend their personal time when ?” The clubs have adamantly defied demands to become coeducational not for exclusivity’s sake, Mr. Porteus said, but out of a belief that what a space offers is of deep value. “Whether you’re a man or a woman or you identify in any other way, you’re curious to learn from others of the gender you identify with,” he said. “That is why entities exist, from Wellesley College to the Boy Scouts of America. ” “It is not,” he said, “a rejection of anyone. ” • Walking into the Fly, it’s easy to sense the power and lineage of the men who came before: the lingering aroma of smoke that must have taken decades to accumulate, the large wooden table in the library, where students have studied for at least a hundred years in this, their final social club before graduation (having already passed through a freshman club and a waiting club). Up the stairwell is a gallery of memories — photos of famous members like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and members killed in war — leading to the trophy room. This is a space clearly created by young men for young men. Animal busts decorate the walls. There are large speakers for music. Billiard tables have been topped with glass, good for table tennis and beer pong. Each club is known for a particular personality: The Fly is Park Avenue, the Phoenix S. K. sporty, the Fox artsy, the Owl fratty. By most accounts, athletes have an edge in selection, as does wealth. Legacy matters. Illustrious alumni include T. S. Eliot (the Fox) and John F. Kennedy (the Spee) whose brother Ted quit the Owl in 2006 under fire for belonging to such an exclusionary group. “Each is unique in its policy and procedures,” said Mr. Porteus, a charter school founder. “The clubs do not act in concert, seldom and sporadically share information, and in many respects are rivals. Dean Khurana is describing all clubs as though they were the same. ” The Porcellian, for example, does not throw parties or even allow nonmembers inside its clubhouse. Founded in 1791, it is the oldest and most prestigious club, counting among members Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theodore Roosevelt and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the Olympic rowing twins of social network fame. It’s been said that F. D. R. saw being overlooked by “the Porc” as a painful lifelong failing. An alumnus, or graduate member, agreed to talk about the lasting meaning the Porc has for its members. He described how quaint bonding activities, like dinners in which members perform club songs and tell stories from its history, forged lasting friendships. Lunch is taken together almost every day in the club. After graduation, dinners are held monthly, worldwide, allowing alumni to retain those friendships. Because of the club’s policy of secrecy, which harks back hundreds of years, the member would speak only on condition he not be named — and in a conversation monitored by a public relations representative who periodically told him he was saying too much and to stop talking. History is venerated, and he was eager to tell how it is passed down through the many artworks and objets d’art housed in its clubhouse, including thousands of renderings of boars, its emblem. Alexander Calder, a rare exception to the nonvisitor policy, was so taken with the place, the story goes, that he gifted a sculpture depicting two mating boars it was once lent to the Whitney Museum of American Art for a retrospective. Far from fraternity hazing, Porc initiation rites include memorizing and reciting each item’s provenance and meaning in pop quizzes. The Porcellian is considering becoming coed, the member said. “Even though it’s the oldest club, it’s not blindly and foolishly wedded to a certain way of being,” he said. “The club, in order to stay relevant for its members, needs to continue to evolve. ” What it is rejecting is being forced by outside parties to do so — and instantly. And it has pushed back. Last spring, the Porcellian commissioned a report of its own contesting the sexual assault statistics produced by the Association of American Universities. If the administration continues with its sanctions, he said, the club will pursue a lawsuit, citing rights to freedom of assembly. The Fly is also considering litigation. If the groups were to bend and turn coed, whatever it is they do behind their stately doors and Corinthian columns could continue. Last year, a few relented: The Spee and Fox admitted women, though in response to alumni backlash the Fox’s were provisional members. Contrary to the patrician conception of the club, the graduate member said, the current new class, though under a dozen, as is typical, is diverse, including several students of color as well as foreign students. Yet the clubs are stymied by both their image problem and closelipped policies. He understood that conundrum: “We recognize that as an club, and particularly as the oldest club, even if you take the time to learn about our traditions, our quirky weird traditions, we are just not a sympathetic figure and never will be in the public eye. ” • Harvard has had a complicated history with women, and has long grappled with gender discrimination. Founded as a men’s college, it began to integrate women slowly in the 1970s via a quasi merger with its sister school, Radcliffe College, but the two were not fully combined until as late as 1999. As the college itself made strides toward gender parity, it fired a salvo at the final clubs to push them in the same direction: In 1984, it severed ties after they refused to admit women. But instead of breaking down barriers, more organizations emerged. In the early ’90s, the first final clubs and sororities arose. “We had often found ourselves on the steps of a final club trying to get into a party and being chosen or not chosen by these men, who own this real estate,” Eugenia B. Schraa Huh, a founder of the Sablière Society, told me. “There was this feeling of us being powerless on the social scene. We absolutely founded the club to help correct a power imbalance at Harvard. ” But parity has remained elusive. The women’s clubs have their own level of exclusivity, and their social role is limited because many of them do not have dedicated spaces (some partner with men’s clubs for parties, or dinners — at the Fly, for example, with wine served from its cellar). The rub with the new rules is that they apply to all clubs. Shortly after the announcement of sanctions, a protest called Hear Her Harvard coalesced about eliminating the women’s “safe spaces. ” An estimated 250 participants marched from Massachusetts Hall, past the bronze statue of John Harvard, and through Harvard Yard to decry the inclusion of groups in the new rules, but the conversation swelled to encompass the everyday experience of being a woman at Harvard. Caroline Tervo, a member of the Pleiades Society (a women’s club named for the “seven sisters” star cluster) addressed the crowd before the march: “Gender discrimination happens every day. It happens in the classroom, when men are called on more often in the workplace, when men are paid more and on the weekend, when women are targeted and shamed for their sexuality. On a campus and in a society that is still so male dominated, female spaces are necessary sources of empowerment. ” On the day sanctions were announced, women in huddled in urgent discussion around campus. On Facebook, fraternity and sorority members changed their profile pictures to their organization’s insignia in solidarity. Many want final clubs to change but believe that by including other groups the university painted with too broad a brush. “There is a lot of value in targeting some of the exclusionary aspects of the final clubs, and making sure we are working toward the same goals collectively,” said Rebecca Ramos, a rising senior and president of the Delta Gamma chapter, one of the Greek organizations that took root here in the early ’90s. But, she told me, “The administration has tried to target the entire single organization scene in one fell swoop, as opposed to targeting certain organizations that don’t align with the values expressed by the mission of Harvard College. ” She said that sisters of her sorority, which is open to all women, including transgender women, act as guardians of one another’s mental health, watching for signs of emotional distress and coming to their aid to share coping mechanisms or just hugs. “We’ve been emotional support throughout many difficult times for our sisters,” she said. “People are really concerned about losing that on campus. Harvard can be a really difficult place to be. ” It is a place where social pressure is palpable. Several dozen students refused to discuss final clubs on the record. One, rushing across campus in a seersucker suit on his way to a Kentucky party, summed up the sentiment of many when he said that if you have an opinion that might offend someone, keep it to yourself. Even detractors feared being dropped from a final club’s party rolls. Some worried they would be blacklisted from certain professions after graduation if a powerful club alumnus got wind of any criticism. Several students were afraid they would not be able to get a job in academia, or of getting bad grades, if they criticized Harvard. Ana Andrade, a freshman folded into a chair in the center of Harvard Yard between final exams, felt emboldened enough to comment on the clubs’ social impact. Particularly galling for her are the mechanics of a final club party, where women, dressed to impress, show up hoping to be picked from the crowd and invited in. “It’s all about the patriarchy,” she said. “It’s perpetuated right there. ” The process, she noted, has an Ivy League twist: Women are not measured merely by the yardstick of physical beauty. A “Harvard 10,” she explained, is a mix of intellect, social status and academic je ne sais quoi. Yet the idea that men determine women’s worth, she said, made her too uncomfortable to participate. Amir Khan, a student at a local community college, has borne uneasy witness to young men as the gatekeepers of Harvard social life. He drives a cab at night, and regularly picks up profoundly inebriated women from outside final clubs. “You give them power and they think that everyone has to kneel down to them,” Mr. Khan said of the club members. “Even with girls, that’s how they look at it. They get to pick it’s their choice. You let these kids grow up like this and they’ll have this mentality for the rest of their lives. ” In an annual survey of seniors conducted by the university, a majority continually say they view the clubs unfavorably, even though just a small fraction of the student body belongs to one. A similar, less comprehensive survey by The Harvard Crimson reflects that breakdown. The clubs have their defenders. In a letter to Dean Khurana, and made public in The Crimson, Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, praised the efforts to rein in behavior at a few “noxious” clubs but condemned the new measures: “The good you may achieve will in the long run be eclipsed by the bad: a College culture of fear and anxiety about nonconformity. ” The precedent of excluding members from leadership roles because of their stance is “breaking dangerous new ground,” he wrote. “By the same logic,” he pointed out, “in another year or by another dean, members of the Chilton Club, of the D. A. R. or of a political party advocating Muslim exclusion might also be considered deficient relative to Harvard’s standards of nondiscrimination. ” Robert Shibley, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an organization that defends freedom of speech on college campuses, likened the sanctions to a blacklist. “It is solely up to arbitrary judgment of the authorities as to who is no longer savory enough,” he told me. “In the ’50s that would have been the Communist Party. Once you start using that as a reason to disqualify, there is no principled place to stop. ” “When you don’t have an equal opportunity for people of different points of views to participate in what’s supposed to be a marketplace of ideas,” Mr. Shibley said, “you’re impoverishing that education. ” On Mount Auburn Street, defense of the clubs is more visceral. It was a spring night at the Phoenix S. K. Club, and young women were swiftly waved in, known so well they exchanged kisses with the doorkeeper. Inside, they danced under crystal chandeliers beside art depicting Revolutionary War soldiers. As students swayed to a live band, a young man picked up a microphone. “Everybody say hi to Dean Khurana, he’s in the back!” he yelled. The name drew curses from the dance floor. • Harvard is but the most prestigious wave in an ocean of unrest on college campuses regarding extracurricular groups. With fraternities caught up in allegations of sexual misconduct across the country, the movement to abolish them has gained momentum. In 2014, Wesleyan University ruled that its small group of residential fraternities must integrate women. Greek organizations have been banned altogether from Amherst College. Middlebury College has replaced them with “social houses. ” Studies underscore the connection between binge drinking, assault and Greek life. A 2007 study by John D. Foubert, a professor of higher education at Oklahoma State University, found that members of frats have three times the likelihood of committing rape as nonmembers. But whether abolishing male organizations improves the environment for women remains to be seen. “There are lots of questions we don’t have research about,” Dr. Foubert said. Good metrics are hard to come by: A rise in sexual assault complaints can be a good sign — “the women trust the institution more,” he said — and “kids can drink alcohol in any setting undetected. ” Some experts worry that bad behavior would just move underground. At Trinity College, a push to force organizations to go coed was abandoned last year, after the president, Joanne announced that the move appeared unlikely to foster the inclusion and equality that was hoped for. “In fact, communitywide dialogue concerning this issue has been divisive and counterproductive,” she wrote in a statement. A spokeswoman confirmed that the houses failed to attract the opposite sex, and alumni donors with Greek life ties had pulled back. Despite the turmoil, nothing seismic happened when the Fox went coed, according to one member interviewed outside the clubhouse. (He would not give his full name because the club forbids members to speak to the news media.) “People were worried that, ‘Oh, we can’t act the same way, we can’t act up,’’u2009” he said. “But I don’t see it changing. I think it’s a cool experience with having a different perspective in the club. ” Some fear what their commitment to such clubs will mean for their future. Mitchell York briefly questioned his hope to punch this year when, as a sophomore, he’ll be eligible. But the promise of lifelong friends outweighed any hesitation. It even trumped the specter of reprisal, and any anxiety of being associated with a club at the cross hairs of a conversation about sexual assault. That’s because the solution, Mr. York believes, lies in the club members themselves. “I know that I would never have an issue with what the final clubs are accused of,” he said. “People who are joining, and people who are in them currently, have to take on the responsibility to make sure that these things don’t happen. ” | 1 |
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