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WASHINGTON — In the summer of 2015, armed American drones over eastern Syria stalked Junaid Hussain, an influential hacker and recruiter for the Islamic State. For weeks, Mr. Hussain was careful to keep his young stepson by his side, and the drones held their fire. But late one night, Mr. Hussain left an internet cafe alone, and minutes later a Hellfire missile killed him as he walked between two buildings in Raqqa, Syria, the Islamic State’s de facto capital. Mr. Hussain, a from Birmingham, England, was a leader of a band of computer specialists who had given a megaphone to Islamic State propaganda and exhorted online followers to carry out attacks in the West. One by one, American and allied forces have killed the most important of roughly a dozen members of the cell, which the F. B. I. calls “the Legion,” as part of a secretive campaign that has largely silenced a powerful voice that led to a surge of counterterrorism activity across the United States in 2015 as young men and women came under the influence of its propaganda. American military, intelligence and law enforcement officials acknowledge that the Islamic State still retains a sophisticated social media arm that could still inspire attacks like those in San Bernardino, Calif. and in Orlando, Fla. and remains a potent foe suspected of maintaining clandestine cells in Europe. But they point to the coordinated effort against the Legion as evidence of the success the United States has had in reducing the Islamic State’s ability to direct, enable or inspire attacks against the West. Initially the threat posed by the Legion was primarily seen as a problem for law enforcement officials. But as the threat worsened last year, and the F. B. I. stepped up the monitoring of terrorism suspects around the country, the bureau pressed the military to focus on the group, according to current and former American officials. While American and British forces conducted a series of drone strikes on members of the group, the F. B. I. sifted through thousands of the Legion’s followers on social media to figure out who had actually been inspired to take action. In the last two years, it has arrested nearly 100 people in cases involving the terrorist group. Several of the arrests were of people who had direct contact with the Legion. Many of the others involved were “folks who first came on our radar because we became aware of them” through their connections with Hussain and Reyaad Khan, also a British citizen, who was another leader of the group, according to Andrew McCabe, deputy director of the F. B. I. Mr. Hussain wore a number of hats, including that of a hacker. He was linked to the release of personal information on more than 1, 300 American military and government employees. In March 2015, his group posted the names and addresses of service members with instructions: “Kill them in their own lands, behead them in their own homes, stab them to death as they walk their streets thinking they are safe. ” More important were Mr. Hussain’s efforts as an online recruiter. According to court records, Mr. Hussain communicated with at least four men in four states, imploring them to initiate attacks or help spread the Islamic State’s message. Mr. Hussain was behind a plot to behead Pamela Geller, the author of a conservative blog. In early 2015, Mr. Hussain began communicating with Usaamah Abdullah Rahim, 26, and gave him instructions to kill Ms. Geller. Mr. Rahim abruptly abandoned the plan and decided instead to kill a police officer in the Boston area. The bureau was monitoring him, and Mr. Rahim was shot and killed in June 2015 after he confronted an F. B. I. surveillance team with a knife. The F. B. I. also arrested two of Mr. Rahim’s associates, whom prosecutors say were involved in the plot. Mr. Hussain’s associates were also busy. Another Briton, named Raphael Hostey, was in touch with Mohammed Hamzah Khan, 19, of Bolingbrook, Ill. Mr. Khan tried to travel to Syria with his two younger siblings before he was arrested by the F. B. I. In another plot that the F. B. I. disrupted, Mr. Hussain instructed an Ohio college student named Munir Abdulkader to kidnap a member of the military and record his killing on video. Mr. Hussain then asked Mr. Abdulkader to attack a police station in the Cincinnati area. As Mr. Abdulkader prepared for the suicide operation, he told Mr. Hussain about his prowess on the shooting range. Mr. Hussain responded: “Next time ul be shooting kuffar in their face and stomach. ” Kuffar is a derogatory term for . Mr. Abdulkader, 22, who was born in Eritrea, was arrested and pleaded guilty in July to material support for terrorism and plotting to kill a member of the military and police officers. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. And last year, the F. B. I. arrested a North Carolina man, Justin Nolan Sullivan, then 19, and charged him with trying to provide material support to the Islamic State. Federal prosecutors say he planned to target a public venue in a mass shooting. The authorities said that Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Hussain had discussed making a video of the attack for use as propaganda. When Mr. Sullivan’s parents voiced concerns about their son buying a silencer, he approached an undercover F. B. I. employee about killing them. Mr. Sullivan, who described Mr. Hussain as part of the Islamic State “cyberteam,” was also charged with fatally shooting his neighbor in the head. A senior American law enforcement official described the spring and summer of 2015 as a “nightmare” for the F. B. I. A spike in terrorism activity left the F. B. I. reeling. The strain was so great, said the F. B. I. director, James B. Comey, that the bureau was struggling to keep pace with the threat, forcing it to move criminal officers to surveillance squads. But then, carrying out one strike after the next, American and British forces set out to destroy the Legion. Mr. Hostey was reported killed in May. Several months later, Reyaad Khan was killed in a drone strike. An Australian, Neil Prakash, was targeted in a strike around the same time. A senior American official said that Mr. Prakash was wounded but survived. In the last few weeks, however, a Middle Eastern government arrested Mr. Prakash, another senior American military official said. Mr. Hussain died in August 2015. His wife, Sally Jones, a former punk rock musician from southeastern England, who went with him to Raqqa, is believed to be alive. Shawn Parson, who was Trinidadian and in Mr. Hussain’s circle, was also killed. American officials say they have been surprised that the Islamic State has failed to replace Mr. Hussain and the other members of the Legion with hackers of comparable ability. But the F. B. I. is still grappling with Mr. Hussain’s legacy. “We are still dealing with the repercussions of that development and that recruitment of that network to this day,” said Mr. McCabe, the F. B. I. official. | 1 |
November 09, 2016 First Thoughts On The Not-Hillary Election Results
So I just woke up and found that the world has changed. World War III was called off. Trump won, Clinton conceded. His victory speech is fair and integrating.
My "not Hillary" prediction for the election was right. That is, I believe, how Trump won. No so much by gaining genuine votes but by taking them from the crappiest candidate the Democrats could send into the race. This was not a "white vote". Trump did better with black (+5) and latino (+2) voters than Romney. Racism does not explain that. Clinton promised more wars. Those who would have to fight them on the ground rejected that position.
The people voted against corruption, against international warmongering, against attacks of the culture of their life and against Zionist and Arab manipulation. In short - they voted against Hillary.
The media with their outright and widespread manipulation and one sided reporting against Trump and for Clinton lost too. People did not believe the partisan crap that fact-checked Trump on every minor issue but hardly reported on the huge, huge scandals and corruption Wikileaks revealed about the Clintons. Fact-checkers ain't a good weapon in a culture war. The polls, but the one of the LA Times, turned out to be systematic manipulation.
The leading politicians in Europe will crap their pants. Nearly all but Putin bet heavily on Clinton. The European media were also strongly pro Clinton, even more so than in the U.S. There was zero reporting about Trump's real political positions and support. Only tiny bits about Clinton's corruption were revealed on the back pages. They always believe what the NYT writes is the essence of U.S. thinking. It is far from it. No one but a few east-coast party goers and the NYT cares about some 16 year old girl, who thinks she is "transsexual" and wants to use a men's public toilet. The average people think that such craziness deserves zero attention if not a hefty kick in the ass. Pro-migration and other political correctness movements in Europe will have a difficult stand now. They can no longer work against the instincts of the people by pointing to the soothing, fake words of an Obama or Clinton.
The Democratic party failed. The outright corruption of the party heads, who pushed Sanders out to move Clinton in by manipulating the primaries, blocked the natural development that went on at the base. They even wanted Trump as a candidate because they though Clinton could easily beat him. They were totally detached from real life. I am sure that post-mortem analysis will show that many, many potential pro-democratic voters were just disgusted and stayed at home or voted for a third party. The establishment of the Republican party were no better. They failed their voters just as much by shunning Trump and working for Clinton. All the neo-cons that flocked to Clinton will now scramble to get back to Trump. They will have little chance.
But the election also created huge new dangers. People around Trump, including his vice-president, are not sane realist but fairly extreme ideologues. Trump himself isn't. He is, in my estimate, fairly pragmatic. The Republicans also won the Senate and House. There is a danger that extreme policies will be implemented with huge and terrible long-term consequences. But remember that Obama had the same chance in his first two years of his Presidency. He never used it. From a progressive view he blew it.
Winning back the House and Senate in two years is a must for anyone with some middle-of-the-road thinking.
I believe that this result is good for Syria and the non-Jihadi and non-Zonist Middle East. Al-Qaeda in Syria will have a sad. Their main supporters leave the stage. The result is likely good for Europe including for Russia. It is bad for economic equality in the United States.
I for one feel mightily eased. The U.S. voters knocked over a chessboard that brought war and misery to many people. We do not know how the new game will look but I think there is a fair chance now that it, in total, will be somewhat less devastating for the global good. Posted by b on November 9, 2016 at 03:03 AM | Permalink | 0 |
A former Univision host stands accused of raping a girl multiple times last year. [Victor Hugo 35, was charged in Arkansas on May 15 for allegedly raping a girl multiple times in 2016, 5NEWS reported. Police issued an arrest warrant for on May 25 and have so far been unable to locate him. A relative of the victim, Barbara Gutierrez, said this entire ordeal had been the most difficult thing she has ever experienced because of the pain and suffering of the little girl. “Because I have to absorb … I have to absorb what she’s going through and take it in myself,” Gutierrez said. “It’s been the most difficult challenge I’ve ever faced. ” Gutierrez said the local community has reached out and shown a tremendous amount of support but that she wants all efforts focused on finding . “We must bring awareness and we must stand up to these people who want to hurt kids and we must stop it,” Gutierrez said. “It cannot go on anymore. ” According to 5NEWS, Pinnacle Media President Gregory Fess said in a statement on May 27 that left the company earlier this year. “Pinnacle Media does not take any responsibility for personal actions of former employees,” Fess said. Univision has had a rough go in recent months after staking out editorial positions against President Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. In November 2016, Breitbart News reported that Univision was planning on laying off up to 250 employees after recording a $30. 5 million loss in revenues during the third quarter. WikiLeaks previously revealed that Univision’s owner counseled failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in her strategy with the Latino community during her 2016 campaign. Ryan Saavedra is a contributor for Breitbart Texas and can be found on Twitter at @RealSaavedra. | 1 |
During the Thursday edition of “The Dan Patrick Show” on NBC Sports, retiring ESPN broadcaster Brent Musburger blasted former ESPN host and now GQ host Keith Olbermann over calling for President Donald Trump to resign. Musburger said Olbermann, who used to work alongside Dan Patrick, should get back to sports, where people actually “enjoy him. ” “When did Keith Olbermann become this progressive that’s out there leading the banner?” Musburger asked. “I think I was looking for Musburger on Google last night and I’d had enough Irish whiskey that I hit the O button and I looked at Olbermann and he’s calling for the president to resign. What’s going on with my guy? I mean, come on. He’s a baseball guy. I want to know how many games the Cubs are going to win next year and he’s out there calling for Mr. Trump to resign. When did this happen?” “He should get off that soapbox of his and get back to where we enjoy him. I love to listen to him talk baseball,” he added later. Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 1 |
Good morning. (Want to get California Today by email? Sign up.) Something stinks in Huntington Beach. Going back decades, residents along the coastline between Long Beach and Newport Beach have reported a powerful stench that wafts into the region every so often and lingers for an hour or longer. Depending on who is asked, it happens as frequently as multiple times a month or a handful of times a year. But it is unmistakable, residents say — bad enough to make heads throb and stomachs queasy. (Officials said there have been no known serious illnesses linked to the odor.) “It’s more than a smell,” said Ellery A. Deaton, a City Council member in Seal Beach. “It’s noxious. When it happens I need to run around and close my windows. ” The odor is commonly described as “” but its origin remains a stubborn mystery. Over the years, City Council, fire department and air quality officials have tried unsuccessfully to get to the bottom of it. As a result, a number of theories have flourished. Gina a schools official who lives in Huntington Beach, said she believes it’s natural gas. That’s despite assurances from the Southern California Gas Company, which has investigated complaints and ruled out the possibility of a leak. Ms. talked about the area’s layout of gas lines, the trajectory of the smell’s spread and her sense in the odor of a hint of mercaptan — a natural gas additive. ”The smell that I smell,” she said, “is the natural gas smell. ” Other residents wonder about offshore oil platforms, or perhaps the shipping vessels arriving into the nearby ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. “My theory, which is based mainly on the process of elimination, is that it is oil tankers off the coast releasing pressure,” Ms. Deaton said. Arley M. Baker, a spokesman for the Port of Los Angeles, was skeptical of that idea. The ships abide by fairly strict clean air rules. What’s more, Mr. Baker said, “I can’t think of a function on a ship that would discharge a foul smell. ” Sam Atwood, a spokesman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, said the agency had investigated complaints multiple times, but has been unable to establish a cause. “Odors can be very difficult to track down,” he said. For the moment, the mystery seems bound to linger. Capt. Chris Coates of the Costa Mesa Fire Department said emergency dispatch has been getting calls about the smell for more than a decade. He is as perplexed as anyone, he said. “That’s the mystique to the whole thing,” he said. “Nobody knows. ” • The Department of Justice opened a civil rights inquiry into the Orange County district attorney’s office. [The New York Times] • A House ethics panel is investigating possible violations by Representative Duncan D. Hunter, a Republican whose district includes most of San Diego County. [San Diego ] • A man was fatally shot by a Bakersfield police officer who thought he had a gun. He was actually carrying a crucifix. [The New York Times] • An Orange County jury found a convicted sex offender guilty of kidnapping and killing four women. [Orange County Register] • In a step to lower greenhouse gas emissions, California passed regulations for energy use in computers. [The New York Times] • A tale of two droughts in California: Wetter in the north, still bone dry in the south. [Los Angeles Times] • How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing. [The New York Times] • San Francisco supports immigrants — “just not into our neighborhoods. ” [Opinion | San Francisco Chronicle] • The city of Pacifica said it would demolish an apartment complex perched on a rapidly eroding oceanside cliff. [San Francisco Chronicle] • A Los art collective has gathered thousands of copies of “Jerry Maguire” on VHS for an exhibit next month. [The New York Times] • Girl at the White Horse, the name of a bar opening this month in East Hollywood, has a series of cozy and intimate nooks in which to hang out. [The New York Times] The National Park Service said Thursday that a female mountain lion had been killed trying to cross Highway 118 in Los Angeles. The mountain lion known as left behind three offspring. Without their mother, they were unlikely to have the hunting skills to survive, wildlife officials said. “It’s your worst nightmare in that kind of scenario,” said Tanya Diamond, a wildlife ecologist. was the 13th known mountain lion to be killed in and around the Santa Monica Mountains since 2002, when the park service began studying animals there. Untold others have been hit across the state. Ecologists say roadkill accidents are made more likely as the animal’s habitat is increasingly squeezed by urban sprawl. From February 2015 to February 2016, roughly 6, 000 vehicle accidents in California involved wildlife, according to one study. The collisions have added urgency to efforts in California to create wildlife corridors across highways that allow mountain lions, deer, foxes and other animals to cross safely between habitats in search of sustenance and mating opportunities. Caltrans has been working with wildlife advocates to advance a number of projects. One of most ambitious involves a proposed wildlife bridge in Los Angeles County that would allow animals to cross the formidable 101 freeway between the Simi Hills and the Santa Monica Mountains. At an estimated cost of more than $30 million, the Liberty Canyon wildlife corridor would be the nation’s largest such crossing, advocates say. In Northern California, another project involves digging two tunnels beneath Highway 17 in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where researchers say hundreds of animals have been hit in the last eight years. Ms. Diamond, whose group Pathways for Wildlife has provided research on the Highway 17 project, said state officials were increasingly getting behind such efforts. “It’s a great time because I think now a lot of these ideas are coming to fruition,” she said. California Today goes live at 6 a. m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes. com. The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. Follow him on Twitter. California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U. C. Berkeley. | 1 |
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Calling all geniuses!
General Mills is having an open casting call for top-rank positions, and they’re looking for the best and brightest minds they can get. On the back of select cereal boxes is a brain-busting puzzle that, if solved, could net you a high-ranking job at the prestigious Fortune 500 company.
Think you’ve got what it takes? Take a look below at the puzzle currently in circulation and see if you can demonstrate the cryptographic savvy to put you on General Mills’ radar.
What initially appears to be a wall of random letters is actually a fiendishly complex cipher designed to weed out everyone except the most highly intelligent individuals. According to General Mills, somewhere in that mess of characters are words written in plain English.
Successful code breakers are encouraged to post their results on social media and tag General Mills so that recruiters can contact them with additional instructions. What happens after that is unknown, with internet anecdotes suggesting everything from applicants being hired on the spot to another battery of tests that narrow down the field of elite candidates even further.
If you figure it out, let us know! | 0 |
AZUSA, Calif. — A gunman with a rifle was found dead inside a home in a suburb of Los Angeles on Tuesday after shooting at police officers who responded to a report of gunfire and found one person fatally shot and two others critically injured, the authorities said. It was not clear if the gunman — a man whose identity was not immediately known — died of a gunshot wound or had been shot by the police, Lt. John Corina of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said at a news conference. “We’re in the process of trying to figure out why this happened and who this person is and what exactly made him snap,” he said. The victim who was fatally shot was a man, but no details were immediately available about him. The two other victims, women ages 65 and 59, were in “really critical” condition, Lieutenant Corina said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen to them,” he said. The episode, which unfolded around 2 p. m. in Azusa, a city about 25 miles east of Los Angeles, took several confusing and conflicting turns as the authorities tried to sort out what happened and to whom. The acting chief of the Azusa Police Department, Steve Hunt, had said at a news conference earlier on Tuesday that the person who did the shooting was a woman armed with a rifle and that the dead victim was also a woman. Asked about the inconsistencies with earlier accounts, Lieutenant Corina said, “With something like this there are a lot of rumors flying around and a lot of misinformation going out. ” He added that “so far we have found no evidence” of an accomplice in the shooting but emphasized that the police were searching for anyone else who might be injured, dead or hiding. The shooting unfolded as five Azusa police officers and one from nearby Irwindale responded to a report of gunfire on Fourth Street. Chief Hunt said that officers found “multiple victims” and that as they were tending to them, the officers came under fire. They had to be extracted by armored vehicles. All of the officers who were pinned down by gunfire were “accounted for, safe and rescued,” the department said on Twitter. The gunman went back into a home and was barricaded there until tactical units entered the house and found him dead. Lieutenant Corina said that the police were obtaining a search warrant to look through the house. The victim who was fatally shot was lying in a doorway outside the home. What set off the shooting remained a mystery. “We’re still trying to figure it out ourselves,” Lieutenant Corina said. After the shooting, two schools were locked down and two polling sites — at Memorial Park and Dalton Elementary — were closed, with Memorial Park shut for the rest of the day. “Voters should avoid the area and, if necessary, cast a ballot at an alternate polling location,” Dean Logan, the Los Angeles County and county clerk, said on Twitter. The police said the shooting did not appear to have any connection to the polling sites or Election Day. Alfonso Mendez, 42, who lives in the neighborhood, said he saw two vehicles crash at the intersection of North Angeleno Avenue and Third Street. “A big van and a white car were in an accident,” Mr. Mendez said. He said an occupant “ran out of the car and started shooting at the cops. ” Chief Hunt said there was no pursuit by the police leading up to the shooting. The lieutenant said it was not clear how — or if the crash — was related to the shooting. | 1 |
The United States shipped hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons to Saudi Arabia just weeks prior to the Saudi-led coalition’s funeral bombing in Sanaa, Yemen, according to a new analysis of U.S. government data conducted by Shadowproof.
The October 8 bombing killed 140 and wounded over 500. It was widely condemned by human rights groups and exposed U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen to greater scrutiny.
In response to a query from Shadowproof about the funeral strike, State Department spokesperson Frankie Sturm replied, “ We have regularly expressed our concerns to the Saudi-led coalition, and urged them – as we have urged all sides, including the Houthis – to take all feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians and civilian objects and return to a cessation of hostilities .”
Despite the US government’s purported desire for a “cessation of hostilities” and “concerns” for civilians, Shadowproof’s analysis shows that large quantities of U.S. weapons continue to flow to the Saudi government, impeding a sustained ceasefire and enabling civilian carnage.
In July and August, the U.S. shipped Saudi $8.8 million in bombs, $47.3 million in parts for bombs, 313 guided missiles worth $26 million, one military helicopter worth $15.7 million, and 334 armored fighting vehicles and 19 armored vehicles, which together are worth over $197 million.
From April to July, when peace talks were active, the U.S. shipped $50 million in armored vehicles and $82 million in parts for bombs. Talks broke down in July and were followed by a major increase in coalition air assaults in Yemen.
Following the attack on a funeral, the U.S. government announced it was “ reviewing ” its support for the Saudi coalition; however, as of October 10 , there were no changes to U.S. military support for coalition operations.
A UN-brokered ceasefire implemented in April ushered in a major reduction in fighting. Yet, U.S. weapons shipments continued.
In fact, over the course of President Barack Obama’s administration, it has approved a staggering $115 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia—including a $1.29 billion sale in November 2015, which included over 19,000 bombs and a $1.15 billion sale of tank components, ammunition, and other weapons.
The U.S. government has also provided logistical and intelligence support that has facilitated the Saudi coalition’s carnage.
Given Saudi’s dependence on the U.S. government for military support, it is difficult to overstate the degree of influence the U.S possesses over the Saudi government. For example, Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution said in April, “If the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told King Salman that this war has to end, it would end tomorrow.”
Kristine Beckerle, who researches Yemen for Human Rights Watch, told Shadowproof, “The Saudi-led coalition’s air campaign in Yemen has been devastating for civilians, hitting marketplaces, factories, homes and hospitals. There is no question US weapons have been used in some of these unlawful attacks, including one of the most deadly. The US should be suspending arms sales to Saudi, until it not only curbs unlawful strikes but also credibly investigates those that have already occurred.”
A survey conducted by the Yemen Data Project found that, from the beginning of the Saudi coalition’s air campaign in Yemen in March 2015, through August of 2016, more than one-third of the coalition’s 8,600 strikes hit non-military targets.
“The coalition is responsible for twice as many civilian casualties as all other forces put together, virtually all as a result of air strikes,” UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said back in March.
Nasser Arrabyee, a journalist in Sanaa, told Shadowproof, “In the first weeks of the war the battle for Sanna was over, all the military sites were destroyed, yet the coalition strikes continue on a daily basis, often hitting civilians.”
The U.S. government continues to insist the Saudi coalition isn’t intentionally targeting civilians, but Colette Gadenne, who heads Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF) Yemen mission told Shadowproof, “We’ve seen airstrikes hit civilian locations so often. For example, there was a strike on a crowded marketplace in Harad at 8 pm on July 4. It took place after people broke their Ramadan fast. And we only know about the strikes we see directly.”
Three MSF hospitals, one MSF mobile clinic, and an MSF ambulance were attacked by coalition forces.
After the funeral attack, images appeared on social media allegedly showing fragments of a U.S-supplied tail fin for a JDAM guidance kit for a U.S-made Mark 82 500 lb. bomb.
Ali Al-Ahmed, an expert on Saudi Arabia at the Institute for Gulf Affairs and himself a Saudi, told Shadowproof the Saudis indeed target civilians.
“They couldn’t defeat [the Houthis] on the battlefield so they’re killing women and children, bombing schools, to get that result,” Ahmed explained.
Back in 2010, U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning disclosed a State Department cable from the same year that showed the U.S. government provided “imagery” of the Yemen border to the Saudi government, despite evidence Saudi aircraft were attacking civilians when attacking Houthis in northern Yemen. Assistant Minister of Defense and Aviation Prince Khaled bin Sultan appealed to a U.S. ambassador to give them a Predator drone to help limit civilian casualties.
Another cable from 2009 that was also disclosed by Manning shows the U.S. government approved military assistance for Saudi Arabia or Yemen if aid was not used against Houthis. Since then, the U.S. government has allowed the Saudi Kingdom to pull them into an open-ended war.
With regard to al Qaida, Ahmed noted, “Hundreds of Saudi jets and their allies bombing Yemeni forces have avoided bombing…positions in Yemen of al Qaida.”
“The Saudi air force is really becoming the air force for al-Qaida,” Ahmed said. “The Saudi bombings have helped mostly one group: al-Qaida.”
Ahmed also stressed the bombings fuel “anti-Americanism.” Prior to the war, the Yemeni government cooperated closely with the U.S. in counterterrorism matters.
In a letter to President Obama, 36 members of congress urged him to block the $1.15 billion arms deal announced in August. The letter stated, “Amnesty International has documented at least 33 unlawful airstrikes by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition across Yemen that appear to have deliberately targeted civilians and civilians facilities, such as hospitals, schools, markets, and places of worship. These attacks may amount to war crimes.”
According to a recent report by Reuters, the coalition has hit sites the U.S. government put on a “do not strike” list. The U.S. designated these locations as being vital infrastructure for delivery of food aid and for post-war reconstruction.
The Saudi coalition declared as a target the entire Saada Governorate (measuring 4,000 square miles), which borders Saudi Arabia. It also reportedly used incendiary weapons, white phosphorous, as well as cluster weapons, which are banned by most countries.
Both of these weapons were supplied by the U.S.
The war’s effect on civilians in Yemen is enormous. “The jets overhead scare the children. There is no place people can go to be safe, even hospitals are hit in strikes. The population is traumatized,” Gadenne said.
More than 10,000 civilians have been killed since the Saudi-led coalition began, including more than 1,000 children. More than 80 percent of the population now requires some form of humanitarian assistance for survival.
Beatriz Ochoa from Save the Children told Shadowproof, “The number of children that are severely malnourished has doubled to 370,000 since the beginning of the coalition bombing. 1.6 million women and children under 5 are suffering from acute malnutrition with over 14 million, or roughly half of Yemen’s population, are considered food insecure.”
The coalition imposed a blockade, which has resulted in shortages of medicine and food, as well as price spikes and hoarding of goods.
Recently, there was a reported cholera outbreak, which may exacerbate the already dangerous health crisis.
Another serious concern is unexploded ordnance. “A 16-year-old girl was collecting firewood in Sadaa, and there had been an air strike in the area 3 months prior. An unexploded ordnance went off and she lost a leg,” Gadenne recalled.
Ms. Gadenne said MSF has seen victims from unexploded ordnance all over the country. Research from Amnesty International found thousands of unexploded munitions in northern Yemen, following a 10-day tour of the region earlier this year.
The dire humanitarian crisis resulting from the war has given rise to a great deal of anger in Yemen, according to Arrabyee. “Yemenis see the war as an American war, as the coalition couldn’t carry out the strikes in Yemen without U.S. support. There is a big campaign saying Americans are the ones killing the Yemenis people.”
William Hartung from the Center for International Policy told Shadowproof the U.S. is directly involved in Yemen, even if it’s not the one dropping the bombs.
“Without U.S. support there’s no way Saudi coalition could wage the war at this level,” Hartung said. “The large weapons deals and mid-flight refueling provided by the U.S. play an important role in Saudi’s ability to conduct strikes in Yemen.”
The post U.S. Behind Huge Weapons Shipments To Saudi Arabia Prior to Yemen Funeral Attack appeared first on Shadowproof .
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The father of a man who was brutally shot and killed says President Donald Trump is “not wasting any time” on his promises to end illegal immigration into the U. S.[During an interview with FOX Business Network, Dan Golvach said Trump is the first elected official to sincerely look into the illegal immigration crisis that has plagued the country for decades. “It appears to me [Trump] is not wasting any time,” Golvach told FOX’s Liz MacDonald. “I just have to say I think that he is sincere. ” Golvach is a member of the Remembrance Project, a group for parents of children who have lost their kids to illegal immigrants. “He has treated us like family,” Golvach said. “He knows a lot of us in the Remembrance Project and a lot of the families by name and he has done a lot of things on his own dime for us. ” Golvach lost his son, Spencer, when the young man was stopped at a and shot by an illegal immigrant who had already been deported four previous times and had spent five years in prison. Trump, most recently, will also be publishing a list of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in sanctuary cities every week in order to “inform the public regarding the public safety threats associated with sanctuary jurisdictions,” according to the Executive Order. John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 1 |
BALTIMORE — A year after Tiffany Bennett moved into a red brick house at 524 Loudon Avenue here, she received alarming news. Two children, both younger than 6, for whom Ms. Bennett was guardian, were found to have dangerous levels of lead in their blood. Lead paint throughout the nearly home had poisoned them. Who was responsible for the dangerous conditions in the home? Baltimore health officials say it was an investment company that entered into a lease with the unemployed Ms. Bennett to take the home in 2014 “as is” — chipping, peeling lead paint and all. Ms. Bennett, 46, and the children moved out, but they should never have been in the house at all. City officials had declared the house “unfit for human habitation” in 2013. Throughout the country, tens of thousands of rundown homes have been scooped up by investment companies that have offered financing or deals largely to poor people. Many of these homes were foreclosed on during the housing crisis. These investors, however, often put no money toward renovation, or for fixing lead paint problems. The buyers and renters are forced to make all repairs. When there are serious problems with the homes, victims can be required to sign confidentiality agreements to keep them quiet in a settlement after they have been compensated, as happened in Ms. Bennett’s case. As a result, housing contracts have aggravated a persistent problem of lead poisoning among young children in this country. About 535, 000 children a year nationwide test positive for lead in their blood, which can cause brain damage and other developmental delays. Problems with water in Flint, Mich. put the issue on the map. Yet exposure to lead paint in aging and poorly maintained homes remains the biggest source of poisoning. It is not known how many homes nationwide are in contracts, and not every state requires that such contracts be recorded. Still, health officials say they are increasingly seeing a connection between homes that are in contracts and cases. “Unfortunately they have this contract which removes the actual owner of the home from the liabilities of fixing the home and requires these people who have no money to fix their own home,” said Dr. Jennifer Lowry, chief of toxicology in the pediatrics unit of Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City. Dr. Lowry said she had seen an increase in patients with lead poisoning who live in homes bought through a contract on both the Missouri and Kansas sides of the city. “What I care about is this kid who has elevated blood levels and yet I can’t get anybody to fix the home,” she said. Ms. Bennett entered into a contract with Vision Property Management of Columbia, S. C. one of the biggest players in this market. Vision failed to register the property with Baltimore housing officials after buying it in 2014 from Fannie Mae, the mortgage finance firm. It then ignored the city’s previous building code violation, according to public records reviewed by The New York Times. The details of Ms. Bennett’s situation were pieced together through interviews with public officials, court records and documents provided through public records requests to various city and state agencies. Some of the documents were redacted to protect the privacy of the children. In many cases, families who had been affected by lead poisoning declined to comment when reached, citing concerns about reprisals. Baltimore has fined Vision more than $11, 300 for failing to register 43 homes in the city, a requirement that applies to all landlords. State lead investigators visited at least two other Vision homes earlier this year but could not physically enter and inspect them. A representative for Vision said that the company “does not comment on the specific details of matters pertaining to tenants or properties” and that noted the matter with Ms. Bennett had been resolved. Vision, which was featured in a article in The Times, manages more than 6, 000 homes across the country through nearly two dozen limited liability companies. When it came to fixing the lead issues in Ms. Bennett’s home, Vision did not respond to the city’s request in late 2015. The company has argued its contracts put all responsibility for repairs on its tenants. In most cities and states, landlords are required to keep the properties they rent in habitable condition. Some legal experts say contracts like those used by Vision may violate that requirement and could be unenforceable in housing court. Baltimore, as a matter of law, requires landlords to ensure that a home is fit for human habitation, and building officials said that includes landlords. But homes that are leased in deals can fall through the cracks because the city has so many abandoned and rundown homes. Jason Hessler, deputy assistant commissioner for Baltimore Housing, said, “The house was in violation at the time it was sold by Fannie Mae to Vision and was supposed to be unoccupied until approved by the building department. ” But he added that unless it was obvious that someone had moved into a house without the department’s permission, building inspectors might not know. For many poor families who want to own a house and cannot get a mortgage, nontraditional housing transactions like Ms. Bennett’s have become their only option. Some do not understand what they are signing. Dr. Lowry says that many of the families she works with do not speak English and thought they were buying a house outright. She was one of several housing officials and doctors who discussed the problems caused by deals at a recent conference on childhood lead poisoning in Washington. deals, which include contracts for deed and leases, are loaded with risk. They lack basic consumer protections, and residents can be easily evicted since the title to a home is not transferred until the final payment is made. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has begun to investigate whether some companies are taking advantage of consumers. State regulators in Wisconsin, New Mexico and New York have begun their own inquiries, while officials in Minnesota and Missouri have issued consumer alerts. Poor families that buy or rent one of these rundown homes often find themselves with another problem: Because they do not technically own their house, they are ineligible for any state or local grants to help defray the cost of removing lead paint. Kendra Harrell, 23, moved into a Vision home in Baltimore with her mother in 2014 on a contract. Ms. Harrell, who has two young children, estimated that she had paid more than $1, 000 to repair the home, which still has a leaking roof. “Pretty much everything is on me,” said Ms. Harrell, who works as a cashier at a local Home Depot. Now she worries about the chipping paint on the banister in the home, which was built in 1915, adding that her son had tested positive for lead while living in another house. “I figured maybe I could try to get someone out to break off the paint and paint over it,” she added. In New York State, some grants provided to residents in rural communities to eliminate “critical health and safety threats” from homes, including lead paint, specifically exclude anyone buying a home with a contract for deed. A program in Columbus, Ohio, is open only to property owners — again shutting out people buying homes through a contract for deed or a signing a lease. Katarina Karac, an assistant city attorney for Columbus, recently helped one woman who bought a home with a contract for deed get the seller to apply for a lead paint removal grant. Ms. Karac said the woman, who has three young children, had applied at least twice to the program and was rejected because she did not legally own the home. “She was lucky enough the property owner was willing to work with her,” she said. “I can’t imagine someone in her position ordering a lead test, and if lead is found, asserting a claim against the owner. ” In Michigan last month, a special task force set up by the governor after the water crisis in Flint recommended a lead inspection, the results of which property owners must disclose to buyers and renters. The proposal stipulated that the requirement could not be “waived in the event of a sale through land contract. ” In Ms. Bennett’s case, Baltimore’s health department sued a limited liability company tied to Vision in December 2015 for failing to promptly comply with an order to eliminate the lead paint condition in the home. Many of Vision’s homes were bought cheaply from Fannie Mae and had been empty for years. Vision bought the house at 524 Loudon Avenue from Fannie for about $5, 000. Ms. Bennett, who paid a monthly rent of $440, sued Vision after learning the children were poisoned by lead. She declined to talk about her situation, citing a confidentiality provision in the settlement of her lawsuit. She left the house in November 2015 as part of a settlement with Vision. Lead poisoning has been particularly acute in Baltimore because of its aging housing stock. The city has about 40, 000 abandoned homes on some streets the vacant, rundown homes outnumber the occupied ones. Maryland’s environmental agency says some 1, 100 children age 6 or younger tested positive for elevated lead levels in the city of Baltimore in 2015. “This is something that everyone has an obligation to fix — certainly the landlord has an obligation as well,” said Dr. Leana Wen, Baltimore’s health commissioner. And the company has violated rules in other cities. In 2012, legal aid lawyers in Minnesota sued Vision on behalf of a couple with four children and two grandchildren, contending the company knowingly sold them, through a contract for deed, a home in Minneapolis that the city determined had a “severe” lead paint problem. Conditions in the home, which Vision bought from Fannie Mae, were so bad that the city posted a “do not occupy” warning notice on the house. But the couple, Charles and Leona Rush, claimed they did not see any warning sign when they bought the house. In court papers, Vision disputed the Rushes’ claim. The company’s lawyers argued that “unless plaintiffs closed their eyes as they entered the property, they saw the bright green lead hazard sign. ” The lawsuit ended with a confidential settlement. Ruth Ann Norton, who heads the Green Healthy Homes Initiative, a nonprofit that promotes national policies to combat childhood lead poisoning, says the federal government can do more to make sure homes with lead paint problems are not dumped onto the market. Fannie Mae sold some 900, 000 foreclosed homes after the crisis. Peter Bakel, a Fannie spokesman, said, “Fannie Mae has policies in place designed to ensure compliance with applicable laws regarding lead paint disclosures and remediation. ” Ms. Norton’s group is proposing that government housing agencies be required to eliminate dangerous lead conditions in vacant and foreclosed homes before putting them on the market. “We should not allow houses to go on the market that will poison children,” said Ms. Norton, whose organization provided assistance to Ms. Bennett. Vision has since washed its hands of the Loudon Avenue home. The company settled with Baltimore health officials by paying a $10, 000 fine in October and sold the house last summer. The house is being renovated, but a sign posted in the dirt yard advertised the house as “FOR RENT! !!” | 1 |
The Islamic State group is determined to move closer to Israel’s borders, Palestinian jihadist and IS supporter Abu Baker Almaqdesi told Breitbart Jerusalem in an interview. [Addressing a recent attack against a monastery in Sinai in which an Egyptian police officer was killed, Almaqdesi said, “It’s clear that the goal of the brothers is to close in on all sides in the direction of occupied Palestine and fight the Jews with the intent of expelling them from Islamic lands. ” Almaqdesi refers to the entire state of Israel as “occupied Palestine. ” According to Almaqdesi, despite IS’s fronts in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Afghanistan, “our guiding compass is still the liberation of Jerusalem. The Jews have benefited from the abandonment of Islam’s holy places they did so because of the estrangement of Muslims from their faith. ” Almaqdesi also addressed the attempts of the Islamic State group to continue firing rockets from Sinai and the Gaza Strip toward Israel. “We will continue firing at the Jews and we will continue in our attempts to commit attacks with the goal of harming Jews and their government in Palestine and in all the holy places. ” According to Almaqdesi, “The war in Sinai, the consolidation in the Gaza Strip, the attempt to gain a serious hold in Jordan and of course the war in Syria, will end with the control of the Caliphate and Sharia, and will end with the liberation of the Mosque and Palestine. “Syria is important and central and its place in Allah’s Sharia is central, but (Jerusalem) is also central … and I know that it’s high on the agenda of the brothers leading the (Islamic) State. We won’t let the Jews continue defiling the Mosque. We won’t continue to let the Jews prevent Muslims from praying at . ” Contrary to Almaqdesi’s claims, Muslims are not barred from praying on the Al Aqsa Mosque with the exception of limited periods during any high security threats when Israel temporarily may restrict Muslim male youths from the site. In general, Muslims have hour access to the Temple Mount and mosques on the site. In contrast, Israeli police, working with the Islamic custodians of the Mount, bar Jews from praying on the site at any time. Jews are only allowed to visit during select hours in the morning and cannot bring holy objects to the Mount, Judaism’s holiest site. Meanwhile, Almaqdesi continued, “The Jews know that we present a challenge and the largest threat for them and so they try to use infidel Arab and Muslim leaders — even Hamas has joined the war against Islam — but they aren’t fighting against a few thousand Mujahedeen, they are fighting Allah and Allah cannot be defeated, even if the Americans and Russians or even the entire world stand behind them. ” This isn’t the first threat to Israel’s borders. Speaking on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” in March 2016, Abu a Gaza Salafist jihadist allied with Islamic State ideology, claimed it was only a matter of time before the Islamic State’s branch in the Egyptian Sinai carries out a “big operation” in the Israeli resort town of Eilat and other parts of southern Israel. Ansari has since been arrested by Hamas and is currently in prison in Gaza. Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. ” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook. | 1 |
After the bullet shells get counted, the blood dries and the votive candles burn out, people peer down from windows and see crime scenes gone cold: a band of yellow police tape blowing in the breeze. The South Bronx, just across the Harlem River from Manhattan and once shorthand for urban dysfunction, still suffers violence at levels long ago slashed in many other parts of New York City. And yet the city’s efforts to fight it remain splintered, underfunded and burdened by scandal. In the 40th Precinct, at the southern tip of the Bronx, as in other poor, minority neighborhoods across the country, people long hounded for infractions are crying out for more protection against grievous injury or death. By September, four of every five shootings in the precinct this year were unsolved. Out of the city’s 77 precincts, the 40th has the highest murder rate but the fewest detectives per violent crime, reflecting disparities in staffing that hit hardest in some neighborhoods outside Manhattan, according to a New York Times analysis of Police Department data. Investigators in the precinct are saddled with twice the number of cases the department recommends, even as their bosses are called to Police Headquarters to answer for the sharpest crime rise in the city this year. And across the Bronx, investigative resources are squeezed. It has the highest rate of the city’s five boroughs but the thinnest detective staffing. Nine of the 14 precinct detective squads for violent crime in the city are there. The borough’s robbery squad is smaller than Manhattan’s, even though the Bronx has had 1, 300 more cases this year. And its homicide squad has one detective for every four murders, compared with one detective for roughly every two murders in Upper Manhattan and more than one detective per murder in Lower Manhattan. In lobbies and family apartments, outside methadone clinics and art studios, people take note of the inequity. They hear police commanders explain that they lack the resources to place a floodlight on a dangerous block or to post officers at a corner. They watch witnesses cower behind doors, more fearful of a gunman’s crew than confident in the Police Department’s ability to protect them. So though people see a lot, they rarely testify. And in the South Bronx, as in so many predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods like it in the United States, the contract between the police and the community is in tatters. Some people have stories of crime reports that were ignored, or 911 calls that went unanswered for hours. Others tell of a 911 call for help ending in the caller’s arrest, or of a minor charge leading to 12 hours in a fetid holding cell. This is the paradox of policing in the 40th Precinct. Its neighborhoods have historically been prime targets for aggressive tactics, like that are designed to ward off disorder. But precinct detectives there have less time than anywhere else in the city to answer for the blood spilled in violent crimes. Gola White, who was beside her daughter when she was shot and killed in a playground this summer, four years after her son was gunned down in the same housing project, ticked off the public safety resources that she said were scant in Bronx neighborhoods like hers: security cameras, lights, locks, investigating police officers. “Here, we have nothing,” she said. When it comes to “ families,” she said, the authorities “don’t really care as much. That’s how I feel. ” The Times has been documenting the murders logged this year in the 40th Precinct, one of a handful of neighborhoods where deadly violence remains a problem in an era of crime in New York City. The homicides — 14 in the precinct this year, up from nine in 2015 — strain detectives, and when they go unsolved, as half of them have this year, some look to take the law into their own hands. From hundreds of conversations with grieving relatives and friends, witnesses and police officers, the social forces that flare into murder in a place like the 40th Precinct become clearer: merciless gang codes, mental illness, drugs and long memories of feuds that simmered out of officers’ view. The reasons some murders will never be solved also emerge: paralyzing fear of retribution, victims carrying secrets to their graves and relentless casework that forces detectives to move on in hopes that a break will come later. Frustrations build on all sides. Detectives’ phones rarely ring with tips, and officers grow embittered with witnesses who will not cooperate. In the meantime, a victim’s friends conduct their own investigations, and talk of grabbing a stash gun from a wheel well or a mother’s apartment when they find their suspect. In the chasm between the police and the community, gangs and gun violence flourish. Parents try to protect their families from drug crews’ threats, and officers work to overcome the residue of years of mistrust and understaffing in communities where they still go racing from one 911 call to the next. The streets around St. Mary’s Park were the scene of two fatal shootings logged in the 40th Precinct this year. Both are unsolved. James Fernandez heard talk of the murders through the door of his apartment on East 146th Street in a the Betances Houses. He lived at the end of a long hallway strewn with hypodermic needles, empty dope bags and discarded Hennessy bottles. A young men who spoke of being in a subset of the Bloods gang had made it their drug market, slinging marijuana and cocaine to regulars, flashing firearms and blowing smoke into the Fernandez apartment. When Mr. Fernandez, 40, asked the young men to move, they answered by busting up his car. This kind of crime, an anachronism in much of New York, still rattles the 40th Precinct, even though murders there have fallen to 14 this year from 83 in 1991. It has more major felony crimes per resident than any other residential district in the city. It is also one of the poorest communities in the country, and many young men find their way into underground markets. Mr. Fernandez was not one to shrink from the threats. When he was growing up on the Lower East Side, he rode his bicycle around to the customers of the drug dealers he worked for and collected payments in a backpack. After leaving that life, he got a tech maintenance job and, three years ago, moved into the Betances Houses with his wife and daughter, now 11. He had two choices to get help with the drug crew: call the police for help and risk being labeled a snitch, or call his old Lower East Side bosses for muscle and risk violence. He chose the police. Again and again, he walked into a local substation, Police Service Area 7, and asked for protection. His daughter was using an inhaler to relieve coughs from the marijuana smoke. Mr. Fernandez and his wife got terrible headaches. “There’s a lot of killers here, and we are going to kill you,” a sergeant’s police report quoted a telling Mr. Fernandez in August 2015. A second report filed the same day said a warned him, “I’m going to shoot through your window. ” Mr. Fernandez told the police both the teenagers’ names, which appear in the reports, and then went home. He said one of their friends had seen him walk into the substation, and they tried to intimidate him out of filing another report. Three days later, the same propped his bike on their door, “then said if I was to open the door and say something, they would body slam me,” Mr. Fernandez’s wife, Maria Fernandez, wrote on slips of paper she used to document the hallway ruckus and the inadequate police response. The boys made comments about how easy a target she was and about how they would have to “slap” her if she opened the door while they made a drug sale, and they threatened to beat the Fernandez family because “they are the ones snitching,” her notes say. But another complaint at the substation, 10 days after the first, brought no relief. A week later, feeling desperate, Ms. Fernandez tried calling: first to the substation, at 8:50 p. m. when one of the boys blew weed smoke at her door and made a threat to attack her, and then to 911 at 10:36 p. m. The police never came, she wrote in her notes. She tried the 40th Precinct station house next, but officers at the desk left her standing in the public waiting area for a she said, making her fear being seen again. Officers put her in worse danger some months later, she said, when they came to her door and announced in front of the teenagers that they were there on a complaint about drug activity. Mr. Fernandez started doing the work that he said the police had failed to do. He wired a camera into his peephole to record the drugs and guns. The footage hark back to the New York of the 1980s, still very much present to some of the precinct’s residents. Around 6:30 each morning, Sgt. Michael J. LoPuzzo walks through the tall wooden doors of the 40th Precinct station house. The cases that land on his metal desk — dead bodies with no known cause, strip club brawls, shooting victims hobbling into the hospital themselves — bring resistance at every turn, reminding him of an earlier era in the city’s campaign. “I haven’t got one single phone call that’s putting me in the right direction here,” said Sergeant LoPuzzo, the head of the precinct’s detective squad, one day this summer as he worked on an answer to an email inquiry from a murder victim’s aunt about why the killer had not been caught. “And people just don’t understand that. ” Often it is detectives who most feel the effects of people turning on the police. Witnesses shout them away from their doors just so neighbors know they refuse to talk. Of the 184 people who were shot and wounded in the Bronx through early September, more than a third — 66 victims — refused to cooperate. Over the same period in the 40th Precinct, squad detectives closed three of 17 nonfatal shootings, and 72 of 343 robbery cases. Part of the resistance stems from preventive policing tactics, like that were a hallmark of the style under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly. Near the height of the strategy, in 2012, the 40th Precinct had the stops in the city, the stops in which officers used force and the most frisks. Of 18, 276 stops that year, 15, 521 were of people who had done nothing criminal. The precinct was also one of the areas that the department flooded with its newest officers. At roll calls, they were pressured to generate numbers: write tickets and make arrests. They had no choice but to give a summons to a young man playing in a park after dark, even if the officers had done the same growing up in the same neighborhood. “I need to bring something in today to justify my existence,” Officer Argenis Rosado, who joined the precinct in 2010, said in an interview at the station house. “So now you’re in a small area, and day after day you’re hammering the same community. Of course that community’s eventually going to turn on you. ” The pressure warped the way officers and residents saw each other. Rookies had to ignore why someone might be drinking outside or sitting on a stoop. “Some of the cops that came out at that time probably viewed the community differently, too,” said Hector Espada, a veteran of the precinct. “Not because they wanted to, but because they had to. Because some way or somehow, you can’t give someone a $115 summons and feel like you guys could still have a civil conversation after that. ” Morale wilted in the aged station house on Alexander Avenue, in Mott Haven. Officers felt pressure to downgrade crime complaints to make them appear less serious. Several said in interviews that they had overlooked crime reports from immigrants because they were seen as unlikely to complain, and watched supervisors badger victims into repeating their stories in hopes that they would drop their complaints. The practice of downgrading complaints resulted in the disciplining of 19 officers in the precinct last year, one in a string of scandals that has left officers there feeling overscrutinized for problems that also existed elsewhere. Four commanders in the precinct were sent packing in five years, one of them after officers were found to be “ticket fixing,” or forgiving parking tickets for friends, and another after he was recorded giving guidance on whom to stop and frisk: black boys and men, ages 14 to 21. Some officers fled to other commands. Others became reluctant to take assignments in proactive policing units, like that put them in situations on the street. “Whenever I walked through the doors of the precinct, to me, it seemed like a black cloud,” said Russell Lewis, a of the 40th. “It was like a heaviness. When you walked in, all you wanted to do was do your 8 hours 35 minutes and go home, because you didn’t want to get caught up in anything. ” The precinct covers only about two square miles, but the more than a dozen housing projects there mean that it overflows with people. Methadone clinics draw addicts from around the city. lofts on the southern edge of the precinct presage a wave of gentrification. Even as the Police Department has hired 1, 300 more officers for neighborhood policing and counterterrorism, officers in the 40th Precinct said they could still rush to 25 911 calls during a shift — a number unchanged from what the new police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, said he was handling in a similar South Bronx precinct 15 years ago. Several dozen calls at a time can be waiting for a response. Residents know that if you want the police for a domestic problem, it helps to hint that there is a weapon. Last year, the precinct drew the number of civilian complaints for officer misconduct in the city, and the most lawsuits stemming from police actions. The precinct is trying to improve morale under a new commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Brian Hennessy. A cadre of what the department calls neighborhood coordination officers has been on patrol since last January, part of a citywide effort under Mr. O’Neill and Mayor Bill de Blasio to bring back the beat cop, unencumbered by chasing every last 911 call, who can listen to people’s concerns and help with investigations. The precinct has made among the most gun arrests in the city, and officers said they now had more discretion to resolve encounters without a summons or an arrest. At one corner near a school, on Courtlandt Avenue and East 151st Street, that has long spawned complaints about gunfire and fights, Inspector Hennessy and some of his officers painted over graffiti and swept up drug paraphernalia this summer. People said it was the first answer to their complaints in years. But the inspector acknowledged that the residue of policing lingers. “That perception really sticks,” he said. The workload in the 40th Precinct is startling and reveals a gap in how detective squads are equipped to answer violent crime in Manhattan compared with the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Three of the precinct’s 16 detectives are carrying more than 400 cases each this year, and many others have loads in the high 300s, even though the department advises 150 in violent precincts. When they are assigned a homicide, they typically have four days to investigate before dealing with other cases. Quieter precincts can give detectives a month with little distraction to investigate a murder. Detectives in the 40th Precinct have each handled an average of 79 violent felonies this year through — murders, rapes, felony assaults and robberies. By contrast, a detective in the precinct on the southern end of Staten Island carries nine such cases a detective in the precinct patrolling Union Square and Gramercy Park handles 16 and a detective in the precinct for most of Washington Heights handles 32, the citywide median. Last year, the 40th was the for violent crime, with 65 cases per detective. In the Bronx as a whole, a precinct detective has carried an average of 58 violent felonies this year, compared with 27 in Manhattan, 37 in Brooklyn, 38 in Queens and 25 on Staten Island. Rape cases and robbery patterns are later sent to more specialized units, but precinct detectives do extensive initial work to interview victims, write reports and process evidence. Precincts in much of Manhattan, which are whiter and wealthier than the South Bronx, often have more property felonies, like stolen laptops or credit cards, and the police say those can be complex. But even accounting for those crimes, the 40th Precinct has some of the heaviest caseloads of overall crime per detective in the city. Michael Palladino, the head of the Detectives’ Endowment Association and a former Bronx officer, said staffing disparities affected the department’s efforts to build trust in communities like the South Bronx. Witnesses make a calculation, he said: “If I cooperate with the detectives, there’s so much work, there’s so few of them there, they won’t even get the chance to protect me, or they’ll be there too late when the retaliation comes. ” Sergeant LoPuzzo, who turned down a more prestigious post to stay in the 40th Precinct, said that his squad worked tirelessly to handle cases with the people he had, and that while every squad wanted more detectives, staffing needs for counterterrorism units and task forces had created new deployment challenges across the department. “We fight with the army we have, not the army we wish we had,” he said. Details of how the Police Department assigns its 36, 000 officers are closely held and constantly in flux, and the public has minimal information on how personnel are allocated. Presented with The Times’s analysis of confidential staffing data, the department’s chief of detectives, Robert K. Boyce, vowed to send more detectives to the 40th Precinct and said the department would reassess its deployment more broadly in troubled precincts. He said a recent decision to bring gang, narcotics and vice detectives under his command made it easier to shift personnel. Chief Boyce said the burdens on detectives went beyond felony crimes to include and cases. And he noted the support that precinct squads got from centralized units focusing on robberies, gangs or grand larcenies, for example. Major crime keeps pounding the 40th Precinct, at rates that in 2015 were only a tenth of a percent lower than in 2001, even as citywide crime dropped by more than a third over the same period. But the precinct’s detective squad shrank by about eight investigators during those years, according to staffing data obtained from the City Council through a Freedom of Information Law request. The squad covering Union Square and Gramercy Park, where crime dropped by a third over that period, grew by about 11 investigators. (The 40th Precinct was given an additional detective and four investigators this summer, when it was already missing three detectives for illness or other reasons.) Retired detectives are skeptical that community relations alone can drive down crime in the city’s last “” the busiest precincts. Rather, they say, the Police Department should be dedicating more resources to providing the same sort of robust investigative response that seems standard in Manhattan. “Any crime in Manhattan has to be solved,” said Howard Landesberg, who was a 40th Precinct detective in the late 1980s. “The outer boroughs are, like, forgotten. ” Retired detectives said that understaffing made it harder to solve crimes in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, where the higher prevalence of gang and drug killings already saddled investigators with cases in which people were not inclined to cooperate. Through detectives had closed 67 percent of homicides in Manhattan and 76 percent of those in Staten Island this year, compared with 54 percent of those in the Bronx, 42 percent of those in Queens and 31 percent of those in Brooklyn. Of last year’s homicides, detectives cleared 71 percent in Manhattan, 63 percent in the Bronx, 62 percent in Queens, 57 percent in Staten Island and 31 percent in Brooklyn. “It’s the culture of the Police Department that they worry about Manhattan,” said Joseph L. Giacalone, a former sergeant in the Bronx Cold Case Squad, in part “because that’s where the money is. ” He added: “When de Blasio came in, he talked about the tale of two cities. And then he’s done the complete opposite of what he said. It’s just business as usual. ” The Bronx’s struggles extend into prosecutions. In each of the last five years, prosecutors in the Bronx have declined to prosecute violent felony cases more than anywhere else in the city. And the rate of conviction in the Bronx is routinely the lowest in the city as well, but has ticked up this year to surpass Brooklyn’s rate through November as Bronx prosecutors work to streamline cases. Some cases have become even more difficult to win because of the problem in the 40th Precinct, which has allowed defense lawyers to attack the credibility of officers who were implicated, said Patrice O’Shaughnessy, a spokeswoman for the Bronx District Attorney’s office. The district attorney, Darcel D. Clark, elected in 2015, said in a statement, “I was a judge here in the Bronx, and I heard from jurors that they can’t be impartial because they don’t trust the police. ” Against that tide of mistrust, Sergeant LoPuzzo’s detectives work 36 hours straight on some fresh cases. They buy Chinese takeout with their own money for a murder suspect. They carry surveillance videos home in hopes that their personal computers may enhance them better than a squad computer. They buy an urn for a homeless mother who has her murdered son’s ashes in a box. In the months after a killing, they can seem like the only people in this glittering city who are paying attention to the 40th Precinct’s homicide victims. Newly fatherless children go back to school without a therapist’s help. Victims’ families wander confused through a courthouse and nearly miss an appearance. Newspapers largely ignore killings of people with criminal pasts, pushing them down the priority lists of the chiefs at Police Headquarters. In a stuffy squad room, the detectives of the 40th Precinct grapple with an inheritance of government neglect. They meet mothers who believe their sons might never have been murdered had a city guidance counselor listened to pleas to help them stay enrolled, or had a city housing worker fixed the locks or lights on a building. And the detectives work alongside a vicious system on the streets for punishing police cooperators. Young men scan court paperwork in prison, looking for the names of people who turned on them. One murder victim in the precinct this year was cast out of his crew after he avoided being arrested with them in a gang takedown some believed he was cooperating. A longtime 40th Precinct detective, Jeff Meenagh, said a witness in a homicide case was going to testify until he went back to his neighborhood and was told that anyone who testified would “get what you deserve. ” The allies Sergeant LoPuzzo makes are friendly only for so long. He helped clear a woman’s son of a robbery charge by locating surveillance video that proved he was not the robber. The mother started calling with tips under a code name — about a gun under a car, for example. But she always refused to testify. And she cut ties this year after Sergeant LoPuzzo arrested her son in the stabbing of two people and her in a shooting. New York City owns East 146th Street and the buildings on each side. But James Fernandez, in the Betances Houses, said the reality on the ground was different: The drug boss ran the block. By October, Mr. Fernandez was increasingly afraid — and fed up. Mr. Fernandez and his wife went so far as to give officers keys to the building door, so they could get in whenever they wanted, showed them the videos and offered them access to his camera so they could see what was happening in the hallway. A couple of officers said they needed a supervisor’s permission to do more. Others answered that the young men were only making threats. Officers occasionally stopped outside their building, causing the young men to scatter, but did not come inside, Mr. Fernandez said. The menacing worsened. Mr. Fernandez’s daughter was harassed as she arrived home from school. She grew more and more distressed, and her parents had her start seeing a therapist. Mr. Fernandez made several complaints at the office of the borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr. and visited a victim’s advocate in the district attorney’s office. On Oct. 20, 2015, he sent an online note to the police commissioner’s office. “We went to all proper channels for help,” the note said. “Both precincts failed us, except 2 officers who helped us, but their hands are tied. No one else to turn to. I have months of video of multiple crimes taking place and we are in extreme danger. ” “40th and PSA 7 won’t do anything,” he wrote, referring to the local substation. “Please we need to speak to some one with authority. ” The local substation commander, Deputy Inspector Jerry O’Sullivan, and the Bronx narcotics unit were alerted to the complaints. But Mr. Fernandez said he never heard from them. So he relied on his own street instincts to protect his family. He made pleas to a man he thought was employing the dealers in the hallway. The activity quieted briefly, but it returned after the young men rented a room in a woman’s apartment upstairs. Mr. Fernandez approached a different man who he learned was the boss of the operation. The man agreed to ask the dealers to calm down. He even hired a drug customer to sweep the hallway, Mr. Fernandez said. But two weeks later, the dealing and the harassment resumed. So he went to his old Lower East Side bosses, who hired men to trail his wife and daughter on their way out of the building and make sure they made it safely to school. At other times they sat outside the Betances Houses. He also bought two bulletproof vests, for about $700 each. He could not find one small enough for his daughter. “I have no faith in the City of New York, I have no faith in the police, I have no faith in the politicians,” Mr. Fernandez said. “The only thing I know for sure: God, if we’re in a situation again, I will be left to defend my family. ” Paying such close attention to what was happening in the hallway, Mr. Fernandez said he learned some details about two recent homicides that the 40th Precinct was investigating. But because his calls for help were going nowhere, he said he decided not to put himself in greater risk by talking: He would not tell the police what he had learned. “I’m bending over backward, and nobody’s not even doing anything,” he said. “Why am I going to help you, if you ain’t going to help me?” By last January, a new neighborhood coordination officer was working with residents of the Betances Houses, and ended up with the most arrests in his housing command, Inspector O’Sullivan said. Chief Boyce said that the silos in which gang and narcotics detectives used to work made responding to complaints more difficult, but that the recent restructuring would remove those obstacles. “No one should live like Mr. Fernandez lived, with people dealing drugs outside of his apartment,” he said. Mr. Fernandez’s complaints did not spur any arrests, but two men from the hallway were caught separately this year in shootings. One of them, whom Mr. Fernandez named in a police report, was charged this summer with hitting an officer with a metal folding chair and firing three gunshots into a crowd, court papers say. He is being held on Rikers Island on an attempted murder charge. That was too late for Mr. Fernandez. By May, he had moved his family away. | 1 |
The Director of the FBI Reopens the Hillary Case
Paul Craig Roberts
Word has reached me from Washington that the FBI has reopened the Hillary case of her violation of US National Security protocols, not because of the content of the new email releases, but because voter support for Trump seems to be overwhelming, while Hillary has cancelled appearances due to inability to muster a crowd. The popular vote leaves the FBI far out on the limb for its corrupt clearance of Hillary. The agency now has to redeem itself.
I myself do not know what precisely to think. Having been at the top of the Washington hierarchy for a quarter century, I have seen many mistaken judgments. At one time I had subpoena power over the CIA and was able to inform President Reagan that the CIA had misled him. He took note and proceeded with his policy of ending the Cold War with the Soviets. On other issues I have been mistaken, because I assumed that there was more integrity in government than actually exists.
However, FBI director Comey did not need to reopen the case against Hillary simply because some new incriminating emails appeared. Having dismissed the other incriminating evidence, these emails could have passed unremarked.
The problem for the FBI, which once was a trusted American institution, but no longer is, is that there is no longer any doubt that Donald Trump will win the popular vote for president of the United States. His appearances are so heavily attended that thousands are turned away by local fire/occupancy regulations. In contrast, Hillary has curtailed her appearances, because she doesn’t draw more than 30 or 40 people.
Americans are sick to death of the corrupt Clintons and the corrupt American media. The Clintons are so completely bought-and-paid-for by the Oligarchy that they were able to outspend Hollywood on their daughter’s wedding, dropping $3,000,000 on the event.
Nevertheless, I don’t underestimate the power of the Oligarchy. As Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury I experienced the Oligarchy’s power. If I had not been backed by the President of the United States, I would have been destroyed.
Indeed, the Oligarchy is still trying to destroy me.
Possibly Trump, as his enemies allerge, is just another fake, like Obama who misled the electorate. However, Trump attacks the Oligarchy so strongly that it is hard to believe that Trump isn’t real. Trump is asking for a bullet like John F. Kennedy, like Robert Kennedy, like Martin Luther King, like George Wallace.
In Amerika, dissidents are exterminated.
Trump is up against voting machines over which he has no control. If there are no INDEPENDENT exit polls, Trump can easily be robbed of the election, as the Texas early voting scandal indicates, with the electronic machines assigning Trump votes to Hillary. The “glitch” doesn’t assign any Hillary votes to Trump.
My expectation is that, unless Trump’s popular vote is so overwhelming, the electoral collage vote will be stolen. Because of the absence of any valid reporting by the presstitutes, I don’t know what impact the orchestrated election of Hillary would have on the electorate. Possibly, Americans will break out of The Matrix and take to the streets.
I beleve that Hillary in the Oval Office would convince the Russians and the Chinese that their national survival requires a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the crazed, insane government of the United States, the complete narcisstic state that in the words of Hillary and Obama is “the exceptional, indispensible country,” empowered by History to impose its will on the world. This crazed American agenda is not something that Russia and China will accept.
Here is Donald Trump speaking to Americans in words Americans have been waiting to hear:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8prvxjW2wM
Notice that Trump doesn’t need teleprompters.
I do not agree with Trump on many issues, but the American people do. For me and for the world, the importance of Trump is the prospect of peace with Russia. Nuclear war makes every other problem irrelevant.
If Hillary is installed by the Oligarchy—this is a word used by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter who said that the US is no longer a functioning democracy but is ruled by an Oligarchy—war with Russia and China will be upon us.
After 15 years the Taliban and ISIS still run wild in the Middle East despite the efforts of the American “superpower.” Unable to defeat a few lightly armied Taiban after 15 years, what prospects does the enfeebled US have of winning a conflict with Russia and China?
None whatsoever.
The United States has had an entire generation of people born into a war for which the purpose is inexplicable. Why these wars? Why this endless slaughter of women and children and endless columns of refugees overwhelming all of Europe desperately striving to escape Washington’s wars of world hegemony. Why do not the total dumbshits in Washington hear when the President of Russia says that “Russia can no longer tolerate the state of affairs that Washington has created in the world.”
The unjustified arrogance of Washington, a washed up Third World State, is likely to destroy life on earth. No greater danger to life exists than Washington. We have to hope that Trump can clean out the Augean Stables.
I
The post The Director of the FBI Reopens the Hillary Case — Paul Craig Roberts appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org . | 0 |
November 3, 2016 Pope Francis Warns Nations Not to Take in More Refugees Than They Can Assimilate
In an unusually nuanced discourse, Pope Francis has seemed to walk back earlier statements encouraging European nations to open their doors to migrants and refugees, suggesting that harboring unassimilated migrants can lead to a dangerous “ghettoization.” During the short papal press conference on the return flight from Sweden to Rome Tuesday, the Pope expressed his belief that people’s hearts should be open to migrants and refugees, but that political authorities need to exercise prudence so as not to allow more migrants into the country than can be reasonably assimilated.
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— Susan? (@GaetaSusan) October 27, 2016 WikiLeaks: Former State Dept. Official Coordinated with Team Clinton on Uranium One Scandal Pushback One month before former State Department official Jose Fernandez defended then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to sign off on the transfer of 20 percent of U.S. uranium to Russia, Fernandez told John Podesta that he was eager to “do all I can to support Secretary Clinton,” according to purported emails uncovered by WikiLeaks. On March 30, 2015 — weeks before the explosive book Clinton Cash was released, and nearly a month before the New York Times published a 4,000 word story detailing the Uranium One transaction that multiple donors to the Clinton Foundation made millions from — Jose Fernandez wrote an email to Podesta in hopes that the pair could meet.
On April 17, Fernandez writes to Podesta, again, thanking him for their meeting and said, “I would like to do all I can to support Secretary Clinton, and would welcome your advice and help in steering me to the right persons in the campaign.”
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/10/26/wikileaks-former-state-dept-official-coordinated-with-team-clinton-on-uranium-one-scandal-pushback/ If The Media Investigated Hillary Like They Did Watergate, We Wouldn’t Need WikiLeaks Today, mainstream publications have become willing accomplices in suppressing the same type of information they worked so tenaciously to expose all those years ago.
It has now been more than four decades since the Washington Post and New York Times led the charge to bring down Richard Nixon and his administration’s massive web of corruption and political subterfuge schemes. They did so by aggressively and tirelessly seeking out the truth, and reporting back to the American people clearly and comprehensively.
Today, both publications have become willing accomplices in suppressing the same type of information they worked so tenaciously to expose all those years ago. By openly and unapologetically acting as institutional surrogates for the Clinton campaign, these same institutions, and nearly every other mainstream media outlet in America, have gone hands-off in exposing what may very well turn out to be the most explosive and damaging corruption scandal in American politics since “Tricky Dick” was reelected back in ’72.
Not by coincidence, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have stepped in to fill the void. And boy, are the “truth seekers” mad about that! My, How Times Have Changed
On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested for breaking and entering the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, both reporters for the Washington Post at the time, unflinchingly pursued the complete truth behind the break-in. Little did they know that summer how vast was the network of lies and corruption their investigation would eventually uncover.
The editors at the Post initially put the story on the back burner, while the Nixon administration deftly stonewalled the reporters’ probes. By September, though, the Post and New York Times were fully on board with the investigation, and the administration had gone into full cover-up mode. Even though the FBI had confirmed that the administration had conducted a political sabotage conspiracy, it was not enough to keep Nixon from being reelected in a landslide in November. But the die was cast. The American press made it clear this story would not end until all the facts were in and Nixon and his henchmen were fully exposed.
Fast-forward to 2016. We are now two weeks away from the general election, and once again a potentially devastating story appears to be developing, related to a web of corruption and deceit that could eventually rival the Watergate scandal. Just like 1972, the Post and the Times are fully engaged. Except this time, the “two lions of journalism” have little interest in covering the avalanche of revelations pouring forth against the Clinton campaign. Instead, both publications are working around the clock to bring the Democratic nominee to power. That’s not all. Nearly every other mainstream media outlet in the country has jumped on the bandwagon.
It would be incorrect to think that until now the mainstream media has been a relatively objective source for news. This has been going on for a long time. Few could argue that back in the ’70s, editors Ben Bradlee at the Post and Abe Rosenthal at the Times were not absolutely salivating at the chance to bring Nixon down. But they achieved this objective in relentless pursuit of the facts, not the willing suppression of the same.
One would think, given the self-inflicted meltdown the Donald Trump camp finds itself in right now, the media might at least feign some level of balanced reporting, but they’ve made it very clear they’re not taking any chances. They’re going to keep digging dirt on Trump, and they’re going to continue to minimize, to the best of their ability, a story that may well have historic and damaging implications, both for the nation as a whole and our entire political system moving forward.
Although this may prove to be a very successful political tactic for this year’s presidential election, it is likely to forever damage the reputation of mainstream American journalism, and it most certainly will continue to encourage the American public to look elsewhere for the unvarnished truth. President Obama's brother calls for @POTUS to pardon Assange https://t.co/BjtaY2wrJ1
Assange & Kenya, background: https://t.co/BQ8EqCXTqD | 0 |
— Alfredo Romero (@alfredoromero) October 26, 2016
According to Romero, more than 20 people were injured in the state of Merida, while five were injured in Zulia.
Earlier on Wednesday, opposition leader Henrique Capriles initiated a large-scale peaceful protest across the country to defend the nation’s right to a referendum on Maduro's recall . According to media reports, police in some Venezuelan cities started to use tear gas against the opposition protesters. ... | 0 |
Celebrating the Death of the TPP Trade Deal November 20, 2016
Exclusive: It’s been a rough year for neo-liberalism and its orthodoxy about global “free trade,” now including the political defeat of President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, writes Chelsea Gilmour.
By Chelsea Gilmour
In all practical senses, U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership is over, at least for now. The Washington Post reported that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says Congress will not seek to ratify the trade deal during the lame-duck session, essentially the last hope of the Obama Administration to pass the deal. People celebrated the defeat of the TPP at a rally on November 17, 2016. (Photo by Chelsea Gilmour)
House Speaker Paul Ryan said the GOP does not have enough votes to pass TPP in the House, with soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, confirming the deal will not be approved.
How did this historic defeat happen? One answer is people-power built around widespread anger over the damage that earlier trade deals, such as NAFTA, have done to America’s manufacturing base and the decent-paying jobs that went with it.
The TPP deal was viewed as one more corporate give-away and another sell-out of the working class, a disdain shared by many on both the Left and Right. That, in turn, inspired a strong bipartisan, grassroots opposition that delayed passage of the deal, carrying the issue into 2016 and the presidential election. Timing sealed the deal’s fate, TPP became political anathema to any politician who tried to touch it.
The pushback against the Trans-Pacific Partnership came from many directions, mainly because of the intersectional nature of the deal itself. The TPP would have affected everything from environmental regulations to internet privacy to pharmaceutical prices to workers’ ability to organize themselves.
Celebrating a Victory
At a rally organized by the labor union National Nurses United (NNU) on Nov. 17 in Washington, D.C., various unions, progressive groups and Congressional Democrats came together to celebrate TPP’s apparent defeat and to emphasize the importance of continuing the grassroots momentum under the incoming Trump administration.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and former Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner spoke at the event, along with leaders of various unions and organizations, such as AFL-CIO Vice President Tefere Gebre. The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), the Communication Workers of America (CWA), and United Steelworkers (USW) were some of the unions in attendance to support the defeat of the deal and to celebrate their role in helping halt the deal in Congress.
Fernando Losada, the Collective Bargaining Director of National Nurses United who organized the rally, said “The movement against TPP was a movement of movements, if you will — a movement for healthcare justice, movement for environmental justice, movement for workers rights, etc. All these things were under threat under TPP and now those same movements are under threat [from the Trump administration], so we have to be vigilant, not only about the trade agreements but all the issues.” Members of National Nurses United, which organized the anti-TPP event on November 17, 2016, hold signs supporting Bernie Sanders and Medicare for All. (Photo by Chelsea Gilmour)
The rally was originally organized to galvanize opposition to the TPP but the trade deal’s political demise transformed the event into more of a celebration. Because of Trump’s victory in the Nov. 8 election, the rally shifted emphasis somewhat to concerns about the actions of a Trump administration.
For instance, a main theme of the rally was Medicare for All, single-payer healthcare for all American citizens, but there was also fear that the Republican-controlled Congress would take aim at Medicare itself, the health insurance program for the elderly.
Losada explained: “Medicare itself — Medicare for the limited numbers that it’s available to now — is completely vulnerable and exposed to existential attack by the Republican administration. Paul Ryan, in particular, stated he wants to privatize it.”
Next Steps for Progressives
There were also signs of a shared Left-Right hostility toward policies pushed by the Establishment that harm common citizens, the TPP trade deal being only one, though the rally focused on what progressives should do in the future.
“It’s really about all the political Establishment that would think about undermining our past achievements, our rights, and our aspirations for the future as a movement,” Losado said. “We’ve got to organize people’s power here, there’s just no alternative to it. We can only organize our way out of this one.
“We think that this coming period is going to really rally people, we’re already seeing that. We’re going to see a rise in militancy, a rise in vigilance and maybe this is what the movement needs to finally get us over the hump. The alternative, of a neoliberal regime in power, ultimately may have not helped the final outcome, so we’ll see. We’ll remain hopeful. All we can do is fight.”
Former Ohio Sen. Turner, a Bernie Sanders supporter during Campaign 2016, MC’d the event and asked attendees — particularly progressives — to be wary against tactics of division and hate in their organizing efforts, tactics which were used extensively by the Trump team. She said the “promise lies in the problem” and referenced the popular Democratic slogan, “Love Trumps Hate.”
Bernie Sanders called on Democrats to reflect on their own shortcomings and to formulate a new direction moving forward. He endorsed Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, to become the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee. (Photo by Chelsea Gilmour)
Addressing the likely policies of the incoming Trump administration, Sanders said, “Donald Trump is not going to stand up to the Establishment — We are going to stand up to the Establishment.”
He stressed the need for individuals of all political stripes to get involved in movement-building in their own communities: “If there’s any message I have today it is not ‘Bernie,’ it is ‘All of Us Together.’ …
“As previous speakers have told you and what I believe: if you look at history, the lesson that you learn is that when ordinary people stand up by the millions, when they don’t let demagogues divide us up … when we stand together and keep our eyes on the prize, when we focus on economic justice, when we focus on social justice, racial justice, environmental justice, when we stand together, Donald Trump and nobody — nobody — is going to stop us. Let us go forward together.” | 0 |
White House Press secretary Sean Spicer angrily confronted a CNN reporter following a story reporting that the administration pressured the FBI to publicly “knock down” stories in the media. [The gaggle, which took place Friday morning, was described as a “background briefing” by the White House. It included the White House press pool and was expanded to include a CNN reporter as well as reporters from ABC, NBC, Fox Business and Fox News. CBS was in the pool. Spicer went on the record to confront CNN in front of their colleagues in the White House during the briefing that occurred in his office. CNN reporter Joe John (whose byline did not appear on contested story) was told by Spicer that their network was wrong to suggest that the White House put “pressure” on the FBI to publicly challenge the reports on ties. Some of the details of Spicer’s comments about the story were included in the White House press pool, but a White House aide that was present in the room detailed the confrontation. “I know it’s a CNN issue you guys have — but at least get it straight,” an enraged Spicer said to John. The White House maintains that FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe approached White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to discuss the misleading story in The New York Times, that he described as “bulls**t. ” That meeting occurred on February 15, after the New York Times published the story. Priebus asked McCabe if they would correct the record, which cited sources claiming the existence of an FBI investigation into “repeated contacts” between Trump aides and Russian intelligence. The CNN report claims that this meeting violated “procedures that limit communications with the FBI on pending investigations. ” All of this was directly pointed out to CNN reporter Joe John during the press gaggle. Spicer repeatedly emphasized that the meeting was about a story in a newspaper, not the ongoing investigation. The real story, according to White House officials, was that according to the FBI, the New York Times got their initial story wrong. CNN’s reporter was told by Spicer that their network had “buried the lead. ” Spicer reportedly said he was “disgusted” with the way CNN handled the story, calling it “disgraceful. ” Later, Friday afternoon, the White House hosted a gaggle for the press pool in Sean Spicer’s office, and included reporters from One America News, Breitbart News, The Washington Times, and The Washington Examiner. CNN was not included in the second gaggle, which prompted a protest that they were being “shut out” by Spicer. “This is an unacceptable development by the Trump White House. Apparently this is how they retaliate when you report facts that don’t like,” a statement from the CNN public relations department read. “We’ll keep reporting regardless. ” Similar exclusions of press outlets took place under the Obama administration, which restricted some press meetings to liberal outlets as reported by The New York Times. | 1 |
Al Gore has issued a devastating riposte to President Trump’s Executive Order on Energy: he has unleashed the trailer for An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power. [Unlike its creaky predecessor — basically an extended powerpoint lecture featuring crap animations of drowning polar bears and a fat, sweating, failed presidential candidate in a suit clambering up onto a hydraulic elevator to make some tendentious, whiney point about a graph — this sequel uses shock, awe and spectacular footage to bludgeon its audience into submission. A maelstrom of brown, boiling floodwaters, calving glaciers, burning mountainsides and lashing tornadoes, Gore’s production team have pulled out the stops to create a propaganda movie so lavishly convincing it makes Triumph Of The Will look like Snakes On A Plane. At the heart of the movie is Gore himself — whose caring, nurturing, sensitivity as he travels the world’s weather disaster zones to marvel at the damage done by man’s selfishness, greed and (TM) is contrasted with the smirking evil of the movie’s Donald J. Trump. Trump, of course, represents the “Power” to whom the heroic Gore figure is speaking “Truth. ” What is clear, though, even from the trailer, is that among the things left behind on the cutting room floor are science, integrity, and credibility. There is, for example, absolutely no evidence that carbon dioxide has produced an increase in extreme weather events. In fact tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, bitter winters and extreme precipitation have all either remained much the same or reduced since “global warming” began. So what Gore is doing here, in other words, is misleading his audience with weather horror porn of extreme events which have nothing at all to do with climate change. As for the prominently featured wind turbines and solar arrays — these are a blatant attempt to push the expensive, environmentally damaging, inefficient renewables to which green shysters like Gore are ideologically committed but which will make no difference to climate change. Their sole purpose is to enrich, at taxpayers’ expense, a few of the troughers, and other charlatans who are leeching off the back of this disgusting $1. 5 trillion per annum scam. Follow the money: this is the real reason Gore has made this movie. And it’s the reason there has been such squealing objection to President Trump’s (actually quite disappointingly modest) attempts to take on the Climate Industrial Complex. Still, you can tell Trump is headed in the right direction from the kind of people who are attacking him. Historians in the near future will mark today, March 28, 2017, as the day the extinction of human life on earth began, thanks 2 Donald Trump, — Michael Moore (@MMFlint) March 28, 2017, Trump admin has put American people’s health our planet’s future on the back burner, lining the pockets of big oil special interests. — Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) March 28, 2017, This will kill 120k . Donald Trump is about to undo Obama’s legacy on climate change https: . # via @HuffPostPol, — Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) March 28, 2017, These are the kind of rising sea levels we can all enjoy: the ones caused by the sweet, salty deluge of liberal tears. | 1 |
FBI Director may be sacked for intrusion into elections 08.11.2016 James Comey, Director of the FBI, can be sacked in the nearest future because of a thoughtless step - 'intrusion into elections'. As the British Daily Mail reported with a reference to a source in the White House, it was Obama's adviser Valerie Jarrett who convinced him of necessity to undertake such a step. Head of the FBI alienated both Democrats and Republicans. Thus, the Congress will support the leaving president in this issue. Obama has already discussed with Jarrett all the possible legal and political consequences of such decision. At the same time, other sources assert that Comey himself is ready to resign, not waiting for Obama's decision. In the FBI they believe that the Director has prejudiced reputation of the bureau and lost his weight among employees . Reopening of investigation against the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton 'for no apparent reason ' and further closure of the case without consulting with experts have concerned law-enforcement as well as prosecutors. Pravda.Ru | 0 |
With Donald J. Trump about to take control of the White House, it would seem a dark time for the renewable energy industry. After all, Mr. Trump has mocked the science of global warming as a Chinese hoax, threatened to kill a global deal on climate change and promised to restore the coal industry to its former glory. So consider what happened in the middle of December, after investors had had a month to absorb the implications of Mr. Trump’s victory. The federal government opened bidding on a tract of the ocean floor off New York State as a potential site for a huge wind farm. Up, up and away soared the offers — interest from the bidders was so fevered that the auction went through 33 rounds and spilled over to a second day. In the end, the winning bidder offered the federal Treasury $42 million, more than twice what the government got in August for oil leases — oil leases — in the Gulf of Mexico. Who won the bid? None other than Statoil, the Norwegian oil company, which is in the midst of a major campaign to turn itself into a big player in renewable energy. We do not know for sure that the New York wind farm will get built, but we do know this: The energy transition is real, and Mr. Trump is not going to stop it. On a global scale, more than half the investment in new electricity generation is going into renewable energy. That is more than $300 billion a year, a sign of how powerful the momentum has become. Wind power is booming in the United States, with the industry adding manufacturing jobs in the reddest states. When Mr. Trump’s appointees examine the facts, they will learn that technician is projected to be the occupation in America over the next decade. The election of Mr. Trump left climate activists and environmental groups in despair. They had pinned their hopes on a Hillary Clinton victory and a continuation of President Obama’s strong push to tackle global warming. Now, of course, everything is in flux. In the worst case, with a sufficiently pliant Congress, Mr. Trump could roll back a decade of progress on climate change. Barring some miraculous conversion on Mr. Trump’s part, his election cannot be interpreted as anything but bad news for the climate agenda. Yet despair might be an overreaction. For starters, when Mr. Trump gets to the White House, he will find that the federal government actually has relatively little control over American energy policy, and particularly over electricity generation. The coal industry has been ravaged in part by cheap natural gas, which is abundant because of technological changes in the way it is produced, and there is no lever in the Oval Office that Mr. Trump can pull to reverse that. The intrinsically weak federal role was a source of frustration for Mr. Obama and his aides, but now it will work to the benefit of environmental advocates. They have already persuaded more than half the states to adopt mandates on renewable energy. Efforts to roll those back have largely failed, with the latest development coming only last week, when Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, a Republican, vetoed a rollback bill. The federal government does offer important subsidies for renewable energy, and they will surely become a target in the new Congress. But those subsidies are already scheduled to fall drastically over five years, in a deal cut a year ago that gave the oil industry some favors and that passed Congress with many Republican votes. If Mr. Trump pushes for an early end to the subsidies, he will find that renewable energy has friends in the Republican Party. Topping that list is Charles E. Grassley, the senior senator from Iowa. That state — in presidential politics, let us remember — will soon be getting 40 percent of its electricity from wind power. “Senator Grassley has been and continues to be an extraordinary leader and champion for the wind industry,” said Tom Kiernan, the head of the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group. When I spoke with him last week, Mr. Kiernan did not sound like a man gnashing his teeth about the impending Trump era. By his group’s calculations, $80 billion of wind industry investment is in the pipeline for the United States over the next few years. “We are creating jobs throughout America, jobs, and we think Trump will want that to continue,” he said. If Mr. Trump really wanted to roll back the clock, he could try to get Congress to override all the state mandates, a gross violation of the supposed conservative commitment to federalism. But it would be a titanic fight, some Republican senators would defect on principle, and Mr. Trump would almost certainly lose. So if the damage Mr. Trump can do domestically is limited by circumstance, what about the international effort against global warming? That is the prospect that has David G. Victor most worried. Dr. Victor, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, is one of the closest observers of global climate politics. While the nations of the world agreed a year ago to a landmark deal to tackle global warming, that consensus is fragile, he pointed out. The Paris Agreement is really an outline more promise than reality. Mr. Trump has vowed to withdraw. Right now, other countries are saying they will go forward even if he does so, but it is not hard to imagine the thing unraveling. As part of the negotiations, the Obama administration promised billions of dollars from American taxpayers to help poor countries adjust to the devastation of global warming. “That’s a big part of the glue that held the Paris deal together,” Dr. Victor pointed out. Mr. Trump is considered likely to abandon that pledge. Perhaps the biggest threat to the climate agenda posed by the incoming administration is not anything that Mr. Trump might do, but rather what he will not do. While the energy transition is real, it is still in its earliest stages. Iowa may soon get 40 percent of its power from wind, but for the United States as a whole, the figure is closer to 5 percent. The transition is simply not happening fast enough. The pledges countries made in Paris, even if kept, are not ambitious enough. To meet the climate goals embodied in the Paris Agreement, the world needed an American president who would have pushed hard to accelerate the energy transition. You can debate whether Mrs. Clinton would have been that president, but it is certainly clear that Mr. Trump will not be. So as Washington goes into reverse gear on climate policy, seas will keep rising and heat waves will get worse. Later this month, global monitoring agencies are expected to report that 2016 was the hottest year in the historical record, beating out 2015, which beat out 2014. If nothing else, the next four years may be a fascinating test of just how far politics can become divorced from physical reality. | 1 |
Hollyjood strikes again ! Quoting: Buck Bundy 73107416 They werent far off. DH3 came out in 1995. 43 was GWB. 44th was Obumbletard. #44 was supposed to be Hitlary, but they knew Obumbletard would cause even more damage so they let him go first. Quoting: Anonymous Coward 73154155 Thats true the more i think more about it = I think they meant because hillary was actually in charge when bill was president - which would make her the 43 rd kinda i guess ? Moulin | 0 |
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Wednesday on 800 WVHU radio’s “The Tom Roten Morning Show,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said polls showing Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton with a lead over Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump were “designed to suppress turnout.”
Paul said “You know, I think sometimes polling is done to dampen election turnout. So when Trump says the thing’s rigged, I’m not sure exactly what he means and I’m not sure I always agree with him. But I do think that when we say over and over someone can’t win, that is a form of rigging in the sense that it is designed to suppress turnout.”
He added, “The polls are put out, you know to make it either look closer than it is or to make it look like Democrats have a better chance. And I think it’s done by design to try to dampen turnout.” | 0 |
FAYETTEVILLE, N. C. — Donald J. Trump formally introduced Gen. James N. Mattis as his choice for defense secretary Tuesday night, appearing side by side with him during a “thank you” rally in this heavily military community, home to the Army Special Operations Command and the 82nd Airborne Division. To a roar in the Crown Coliseum, Mr. Trump called General Mattis “one of the most effective generals that we’ve had in many, many decades” and the living embodiment of the Marine Corps motto, “semper fidelis. ” He vowed that with General Mattis, nicknamed Mad Dog, leading the Pentagon, America would rebuild its military. “Mad Dog plays no games, right?” Mr. Trump asked the cheering crowd. The rally was the second of several large events that Mr. Trump is holding before his inauguration next month. In Cincinnati last week, he reprised the brash and biting tone of his presidential campaign and boasted about his victory over Hillary Clinton. But for North Carolinians hoping to see that performance again, Mr. Trump was more restrained. He followed the teleprompter, recapping the agenda he intends to pursue in office, including repealing the Affordable Care Act, stopping illegal immigration, renegotiating trade deals and bringing jobs back to the country from overseas. He barely lashed out at the news media, as he usually does, but he did brag about winning North Carolina, a state that political pundits had repeatedly predicted would support Mrs. Clinton. The location of the rally — a stadium not far from Fort Bragg, a vast military base housing more than 50, 000 personnel — gave Mr. Trump an opportunity to emphasize his support for the armed forces and to lavish praise upon General Mattis, whom he has compared favorably to Gen. George S. Patton, the famed World War II officer. For the first 15 minutes of his address, Mr. Trump outlined his approach to foreign policy, saying he would “engage the use of military forces when it’s in the vital national security interests of the United States. ” He promised to make the military stronger than it has ever been, but said that under his leadership, the country would “stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about. ” “This destructive cycle of intervention and chaos must finally come to an end,” he said. The offered few details about how his approach would play out, though he said he would quickly move to eliminate the automatic military spending cuts that Congress and President Obama reluctantly embraced several years ago to control spending and reduce the deficit. He also suggested that the United States would seek to strengthen alliances around the world that help prevent conflicts. “Any nation that shares these goals will be our partner in this mission,” he said. The crowd cheered Mr. Trump when he vowed to improve health care for the nation’s veterans. “It will be the duty of my administration to make sure we protect those who protect us,” he said. Even before he takes office, Mr. Trump, who said once during the campaign that he knew more than the nation’s generals, is seizing the opportunity to assume the mantle of commander in chief. On Saturday, he is planning to attend the annual football game, a tradition often observed by the sitting occupant of the White House. A spokesman said Mr. Trump, like the presidents before him, would sit in the stands on both sides during the game, which is the annual pinnacle of a fierce rivalry. Mr. Trump began the rally by inviting General Mattis onto the stage, where the general expressed gratitude for the chance to serve again and said he hoped Congress would give him the waiver he needs to be the Pentagon’s civilian leader. He retired from the Marines in 2013, and federal law requires a waiting period between active duty and serving as defense secretary. “You’ll get that waiver, right?” Mr. Trump said when he came back to the microphone. “If you didn’t get that waiver, there will be such a lot of angry people. ” Republicans in Congress moved on Tuesday to use a stopgap spending bill to pave the way for General Mattis to receive the waiver. The spending measure, which was unveiled Tuesday night and must be approved by Friday to avoid a government shutdown, contains language that would speed up the consideration of legislation granting the waiver early next year. On the same day that Mr. Trump focused on the military in North Carolina, Mr. Obama traveled to Tampa, Fla. where he thanked service members at MacDill Air Force Base and delivered a speech on his administration’s approach to counterterrorism. For Mr. Trump, the visit to Fayetteville was a triumphant return to a state that was critical to his election victory and that the Clinton campaign had thought it could win. While he did not spend much time Tuesday night reliving his win, Mr. Trump could hardly resist going off script to get a few cheers. “We won Ohio. We won Iowa by a massive number, 10 points,” he said. “Then we went down and we won Florida. ‘We have breaking news: Donald Trump wins Florida. Donald Trump wins North Carolina. ’” That brought a roar from the crowd, and Mr. Trump added: “We won so many states. We won 30 states, 32 states. We won so much, and we just kept winning. ” The is scheduled to keep traveling in the days ahead. He will hold a rally in Des Moines on Thursday and will go to Grand Rapids, Mich. on Friday. More rallies are possible in the coming weeks, officials said. Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign is paying for the rallies, according to a spokesman for the transition. Campaign experts said that was allowed, and that candidates often used campaign funds to pay for events that took place between the election and inauguration. | 1 |
in: Government , Special Interests (image credit: AP) Having closed his earlier investigation into Hillary’s use of her private email server for classified State Department documents without bringing charges, dismissing indictable evidence, it’s hard imagining a shift of agency policy now. So what’s going on? Is FBI Director Comey trying to save face, even at this late stage, having tarnished the reputation of the agency and himself. The fullness of time will show what he has in mind. He faces intense political pressure from key Democrat senators, demanding immediate answers about why he’s reopening his investigation days before November’s election, an unprecedented act. Senators Patrick Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, Thomas Carper and Ben Cardin wrote Comey, saying: “(N)o later than Monday, 31 October 2016, we request you provide us with more detailed information about the investigative steps being taken, the number of emails involved, and what is being done to determine how many of the emails are duplicative of those already reviewed by the FBI.” They want Attorney General Loretta Lynch explaining her involvement in Comey’s action, if any. The Hillary campaign called for “public answers” to clarify what new information the FBI discovered. After saying that revisiting his decision last July would be unlikely, Comey opted for an October surprise – the likes of which Washington hasn’t seen since the tumultuous end of Nixon’s tenure. Paul Craig Roberts said he’s gotten word “that the FBI has reopened the Hillary case of her violation of US National Security protocols, not because of the content of the new email releases, but because voter support for Trump seems to be overwhelming, while Hillary has cancelled appearances due to inability to muster a crowd. The popular vote leaves the FBI far out on the limb for its corrupt clearance of Hillary. The agency now has to redeem itself.” How remains to be seen. Like Roberts, I’m puzzled. Washington power brokers chose Hillary to succeed Obama. Enormous resources, energy, corporate pollsters consistently showing her ahead, and one-sided scoundrel media support have gone into assuring it. Have things changed days before November 8? Are power brokers abandoning Hillary this late in the game? The last 48 hours have been breathtaking – the stuff Hollywood thrillers are made of. Will Hillary supporters blame Russia for Comey’s action? One Democrat congressman suggested it. Will Comey be accused of being a Kremlin agent? However things unfold in the campaign’s final days, Trump got a significant boost – whether enough for a “master of suspense” Alfred Hitchcock ending remains to be seen. My view, right or wrong, remains the same. After going all-out for Hillary throughout months of campaigning, it’s hard believing power brokers decided otherwise this late in the game – unheard of in US electoral politics. At the same time, this political season has been unlike any I remember since the 1940s. Nothing ahead will surprise me. Submit your review | 0 |
This is how the muzzling starts: not with a boot on your neck, but with the fear of one that runs so deep that you muzzle yourself. Maybe it’s the story you decide against doing because it’s liable to provoke a president to put the power of his office behind his attempt to destroy your reputation by falsely calling your journalism “fake. ” Maybe it’s the line you hold back from your script or your article because it could trigger a federal leak investigation into you and your sources (so, yeah, jail). Or, maybe it’s the commentary you spike because you’re a publicly supported news channel and you worry it will cost your station its federal financing. In that last case, your fear would be existential — a matter of your very survival — and your motivation to could prove overwhelming. We no longer have to imagine it. We got a example last week in San Antonio, where a PBS station sat atop the slippery slope toward censorship and then promptly started down it. It’s a single television station in a single state in a very big country. And the right thing ultimately happened. But only after a very wrong thing happened. The editorial misfire bears retelling because it showed the most likely way that the new administration’s attempts to shut down the free press could succeed, just as it shows how those attempts can be stopped. The story began with a Jan. 24 speech that Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, gave on the House floor regarding what he described as the unfair way the national media was covering President Trump. He said for instance that the media ignored highs in consumer confidence, which of course it did not. And he ended with an admonition for his constituents: “Better to get your news directly from the president. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth. ” His remarks caught the notice, and the ire, of a longtime San journalist and commentator, Rick Casey, who hosts a weekly public affairs program “Texas Week” on KLRN. He ends each week’s show with his own commentary, which also runs in The San Antonio . Mr. Casey has been able to work for “40 years as a professional smart ass,” he told me, because “I’m not really a bomb thrower — I’ve watched politicians for so many years that I know how to be strong about something without being unfriendly. ” But Mr. Smith’s comments bothered him enough that he wrote up a stemwinder of a closing commentary. “Smith’s proposal is quite innovative for America,” it went. “We’ve never really tried getting all our news from our top elected official. It has been tried elsewhere, however. North Korea comes to mind. ” All set to go, the commentary was mentioned in a Facebook promotion for the show, which in turn caught the eye of Mr. Smith’s office, which called the station to inquire about the segment. Forty minutes before the show aired, the station’s president and chief executive, Arthur Rojas Emerson, left a message for Mr. Casey saying he was pulling the commentary and replacing it with an older one. Mr. Casey told me he missed the call, but saw what happened with his own eyes. At a meeting the next Monday, Mr. Casey said, Mr. Emerson expressed concern “that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was under attack and that this would add to it. ” The Corporation for Public Broadcasting provides financing for public stations, including KLRN, and Mr. Trump’s election has heightened fears that its financing will be cut. It also happens that Mr. Emerson had left journalism for several years to run his own advertising firm and that Mr. Smith had at one point been a client. Mr. Casey says he asked Mr. Emerson if he’d be willing to come on the program and discuss it all, but Mr. Emerson declined. And that seemed to be that. But as we’re learning this year, journalism has a safety net in the people who appreciate it, and the people who work in it. First, when Mr. Casey’s commentary ran as planned in The San Antonio astute readers noticed it was different than the previous night’s televised commentary. The story of what happened began traveling around San Antonio journalism circles, making its way to the columnist Gilbert Garcia, who shared the details last Friday. Another titan of Texas journalism, Evan Smith, who The Texas Tribune and regularly appears on Mr. Casey’s program, noticed Mr. Garcia’s column while he was in Washington. “I had a hot coffee in my hand and I came very close to dropping it,” Mr. Smith told me. “Holding people accountable in public life is so fundamentally important that this idea that somehow we’re going to stop doing that because we’re worried about what the government’s going to do to us, I so unbelievably reject that. ” As it happened, Evan Smith was in Washington for a meeting of the PBS national board, on which he sits, and “I certainly got into the board room and talked to people in the system. ” He also called Mr. Emerson, and told him “I didn’t see why The Tribune or I should continue to be associated with this show or this station. ” By late last week, Mr. Emerson had agreed to let Mr. Casey’s original segment run this Friday, as long as it included a new “commentary” label that will run with his opinion segments. When I caught up with Mr. Emerson this week he acknowledged making “a mistake” that should not tarnish a career spent mostly in broadcast news, starting in a $1. job as a cameraman. “I had to make a decision in what was about 20 minutes,” he said. He acknowledged that “clearly we always worry about funding for public television,” but said that wasn’t the “principal reason” for his decision to hold back the commentary. “We have to protect the neutrality of the station — somebody could have looked at it as slander,” he said. The “commentary” label, he said, would take care of it. Mr. Casey is satisfied with the result. But he acknowledged that it was a close call and that he was uniquely qualified to push back in a way others might not be. “I’m lucky to be in the position of being 70 years old, and not in the position of being 45,” he said, meaning that job security was not the same issue. “There’s no level of heroism here. ” In a week in which Congress is calling for a leak investigation into stories in The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN that led to Michael T. Flynn’s forced resignation as national security adviser, heroism is what’s called for. Hopefully there’s enough of it to go around. | 1 |
OXON HILL, Md. — Calling Sen. Ted Cruz ( ) “one of the leading constitutionalists” in America, conservative giant Mark Levin engaged the prominent Texan senator at CPAC on Thursday in a conversation covering the Constitution, immigration, and the Second Amendment. Many are wondering if Cruz might be President Trump’s next pick for the Supreme Court. [“Let me ask you about the courts,” Levin said early through the interview, asking Cruz about the recent decision from the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit against Trump’s executive order restricting foreigners from seven nations from entering the United States. “You look at judicial activism,” Cruz began, unloading on the San appeals court. “They don’t even cite the controlling federal law!” he exclaimed, noting that Congress in 8 U. S. C. § 1182( f) explicitly delegated to the president the power to do precisely what Trump did in issuing Executive Order 13, 769. Cruz also tackled the Second Amendment, blasting a decision this week from the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which held that firearms useful in military conflicts are not protected by the Second Amendment. “It is nuts!” the senator declared. “If we were living back in 1789, your musket would be really useful for military conflict,” yet muskets are clearly protected as part of the right to bear arms. He explained that the Second Amendment is “about protecting your home, and your family, and your life,” and that any firearms that could achieve that purpose could also be used in a military setting. But, he continued, this appeals court — which is now dominated by liberal judges — have excluded all such firearms from constitutional protection. “So apparently the Second Amendment protects ” Cruz added sarcastically, saying that if someone breaks into your home, the owner can make sure the intruder is clean while he’s robbing the house. Later the conversation shifted to Jeff Sessions becoming the nation’s top law enforcement officer as attorney general. “Let me just say that again: ‘Attorney General Jeff Sessions,’” Cruz said, to the laughter and applause of the crowd. “I just like to make Chuck Schumer twitch,” he quipped. “The Democrats right now are living in an alternative universe,” he went on, discussing Democratic reactions to Sessions and various other presidential appointments. He pointed out that Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. Focusing again on the former Alabama senator, Cruz kept the applause coming with, “Let me, on behalf of CPAC, thank Harry Reid … Harry Reid, that you for Attorney General Jeff Sessions,” singling out other Cabinet officials for praise as well. Cruz also promised that, one way or the other, Senate Republicans would also get Judge Neil Gorsuch confirmed to the Supreme Court. After Gorsuch is confirmed, there’s already buzz about who conservatives want to see as the next nominee to the High Court. Experts expect two more vacancies, likely for Justices Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, during Trump’s current presidential term. When talking with top conservative leaders at CPAC, two names keep popping up, neither of whom is a judge. One is former U. S. Solicitor General Paul Clement. The other is Sen. Ted Cruz. Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski. | 1 |
President Donald Trump met with Republican senators for lunch at the White House to discuss progress on the bill to replace Obamacare, using the occasion to highlight the failures of former President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare plan and the obstruction of Democrats. [“Obamacare has been broken, and it’s been a broken promise,” Trump said to the press, pointing to the “lies” by Democrats that Americans could keep their doctor and their plan and would experience lower premiums. He cited the Obamacare’s leading to skyrocketing premiums in multiple states, many over 100 percent increases. Trump did not go into detail about what the Senate Republican bill would include, but he said it would be “phenomenal” and “generous, kind, with heart. ” The Democrats, Trump said, were “obstructionists,” whom he said would never support Republican efforts to fix health care. “Even their new motto — ‘Resist’ — I guess it’s a pretty accurate motto. Every time I see it, I say, ‘That’s right. That does represent the Democrats,’” he said. The president said he had “great respect” for the Senate Republicans who attended the lunch: Senator Rob Portman ( )Senator John Thune ( )Senator Pat Toomey ( )Senator Mike Lee ( )Senator Ted Cruz ( )Senator Lamar Alexander ( )Senator John Barrasso ( )Senator Cory Gardner ( )Senator Tom Cotton ( )Senator Lisa Murkowski ( )Senator Susan Collins ( )Senator Joni Ernst ( )Senator Orrin Hatch ( ) “I’ve gotten to know and love some of them and know and like others,” he said as the senators laughed. When asked about the timing of the Republican Senate healthcare bill, Trump replied, “As soon as we can do it. ” The president is expected to meet with families experiencing the failed promises of Obamacare during a trip to Wisconsin Tuesday. | 1 |
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Natural Blaze
As the floodwaters receded from Nichols, South Carolina and the surrounding areas, many residents made the emotional journey home to assess what little they had left, a good portion of those people discovering that they had absolutely nothing. Having spent the last several weeks in a shelter operated out of the National Guard Armory in neighboring Mullins (some of those at the shelter are from Mullins also), the shelter residents have been anxious to return home or, at the very least, to return to a home at all.
After the cleanup has begun and the issue morphed into getting the victims out the shelters, many people thought that the cavalry finally arrived when FEMA announced it was coming to town to “assess” the damages and the need of the community for aid. Unfortunately for those who don’t fully understand the nature of such organizations, FEMA has been anything but a cavalry.
In fact, despite an annual budget of nearly $14 billion a year , FEMA has done virtually nothing other than “assess” damages. The agency did not come with water, sandbags, food, blankets or anything else necessary for flood victims. All it brought was an expensive van and lots of paperwork.
So what does FEMA actually do besides assess? And why on earth would it need $14 billion to assess anything? The answer? Besides creating the blueprint to use a natural disaster, military conflict, economic collapse, and social unrest as justification to set up domestic internment camps alongside the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA acts as a facilitator for loans and “loan assistance” to victims who have lost their homes and their livelihood. Instead of providing “trailers” (preferably free of toxic chemicals) to victims, FEMA is instead focused on providing “low interest” loans through the Small Business Administration .
While no one is arguing that loan assistance program is the problem, many would rightly wonder why, if this is all FEMA will do in an actual emergency, is there an annual budget of $14 billion?
For many people, FEMA is just another in a long line of useless and overrated organizations reaping the benefits of the disaster relief industrial complex. The Red Cross, for instance, is notorious for sucking up large sums of money and disappearing, leaving only a fragile house or two behind them to prove that they did, technically speaking, build homes for disaster victims . In Mullins, for instance, where the organization ran the shelter for the Hurricane Matthews victims, the Red Cross was seen as a hindrance as much as it was a help. While the organization’s help in running the shelter was appreciated, it was reported by an overwhelming numbers of people in the Mullins area who attempted to bring food and supplies to the victims that the Red Cross rudely refused their assistance. In fact any and all hot food brought by members of the community was actually turned away. Likewise, supplies donated by citizens and people of the surrounding areas were taken in but not actually distributed, instead being shipped to other locations. The Red Cross, in Mullins, actively prevented the community from coming to aid their friends and neighbors.
Predictably, after the media cameras were gone and the words “Hurricane Matthew” fell from the headlines, the Red Cross decided to close the last remaining shelter, which was still housing over 80 people at the time. The shelter victims were given only a matter of a few days prior knowledge that they were about to be homeless in the traditional manner, i.e., that they would soon be sleeping on the street. Oh, and they were directed to FEMA to apply for their low interest loans.
As is typical with the Red Cross and many organizations like it, when the glory of being the “selfless” disaster relief organization faded, so did its interest in the people it was allegedly there to assist.
As WPDE TV 15 reported ,
After Hurricane Matthew, the Red Cross opened 95 shelters statewide and 24 in our area. Now, there is only one left open, the National Guard Armory in Mullins.
As of Monday night, this shelter still has more than 70 people staying there. However, they plan on closing it Thursday at 3 p.m.
All the people staying at the shelter were evacuated from Nichols after the Little Pee Dee River and Lumber River flooded the town.
“We don’t have a home to go to. That’s what I’m telling Red Cross. What are you all going to do with us when you close Thursday? We have a shelter full of people that they don’t have a home,” said Margaret Tart, who’s staying at the shelter and lived in Nichols. She continued. “How can you close a shelter and put us out?”
After outcry from citizens in Mullins and the subsequent negative attention in the local press, however, the Red Cross reversed its decision to close the shelters. WPDE reported the next day ,
About 70 people were still staying there as of Monday night and all had been evacuated from Nichols after the Little Pee Dee River and Lumber River flooded the town.
Shelter officials were planning to close it as of 3 p.m. on Thursday, but Palm said that decision has changed.
“We reached an accommodation with our partners and they decided…that they could keep the shelter open as long as was needed there,” he said.
The disaster response from the Red Cross and FEMA should serve as a lesson not only to Marion County citizens but to every single American. When disaster strikes, you cannot depend on multi-million dollar “relief” organizations nor can you depend upon FEMA or any other government agency. While we argue that FEMA should be redirected to act as what it was allegedly created to be-a crisis management organization that provides material and logistical support to relief, rescue, and rebuilding operations.
In the meantime and, unfortunately, in the real world, communities must accept the fact that they are on their own when it comes to disasters. Stronger connections within the community must be built and maintained and the people of both rural and urban areas must begin to make plans and preparations to act for themselves and their neighbors when outside agencies and organizations are not there for them.
But back to that giant FEMA budget . . . . | 0 |
“I know maybe the president is watching. ” So said Brian Kilmeade, of “Fox and Friends,” on Thursday morning’s show. It was no mere boast, since President Trump has publicly stated his affection for the show and for Fox News, the channel on which it airs. If Mr. Trump was indeed tuning in, he was far from alone. Fox News has been the most watched cable news network for 15 years, but depending on the hour, the news narrative it presents to its large and loyal conservative audience can sharply diverge from what consumers of other media outlets may be seeing. We watched Fox News from 6 a. m. until midnight on Thursday to see how its coverage varied from that of its rivals on a day when cable news was dominated by the health care debate in Congress, the terrorist attack in London and the investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election. One notable way Fox News stood apart from its competition, as it has been known to do for years, was in the stories it chose to highlight and the tone — in some of its opinion shows, unapologetically supportive of Mr. Trump and his agenda — with which it covered them. There was extensive coverage of the health care vote, for example, but there was also considerable time given to topics, like a rape case in Maryland, that viewers would not have heard about if they had turned to CNN or MSNBC. The rape case, which involved an undocumented immigrant and went virtually uncovered on most networks, received almost hourly updates on Fox, and at times was used as proof that Mr. Trump’s calls for tighter borders and a crackdown on immigration were justified. During coverage of the London terrorist attack, in a break from the rather muted coverage on CNN, “Fox and Friends” veered into discussing the faith of the “Muslim mayor” of London. A morning news show noted that most British police officers did not carry guns (a fact that a guest labeled “lunacy”) and considered how the attack represented the broader terrorist threat. And while other networks were devoting time to the apology made by Representative Devin Nunes of California, the Republican chairman of the House committee investigating Russian interference in the election, for not sharing information about intelligence with the committee’s top Democrat before giving it to Mr. Trump, Fox was touting a report about “potential” evidence that Mr. Trump’s team may indeed have been surveilled by the Obama administration. It was presented as vindication of Mr. Trump’s earlier assertions that his phones had been wiretapped. Still, while people who do not watch Fox News may think it presents a uniform voice from morning to night, the network’s content varies plenty. It offers a heavy dose of opinionated fare — “Fox and Friends” and its entire lineup — and has something closer to a more traditional news format for much of the afternoon. And just like any cable news network, when news breaks, it can find itself scrambling. With all that in mind, if you weren’t watching Fox News on Thursday, this is how the news played out through its distinctive lens. _________ It promised to be an eventful day in Washington, with the debate over the health care bill providing the twists, turns and negotiations that cable news channels love. But when “Fox and Friends” began at 6 a. m. the Ainsley Earhardt was holding up the gruesome front page of The New York Post. “Anguish, terror strikes in the shadow of Big Ben,” she said, reading the paper’s headline, as the camera zoomed in on a photograph of a bloodied victim. “It’s like she’s looking at us,” added Mr. Kilmeade of the cover photo. The crew of “Fox and Friends” spent a large chunk of the morning focusing on the London terrorist attack, and updates on the situation kept coming through the morning on the shows “America’s Newsroom” and “Happening Now. ” Many of these updates came with an underlying message: that the world can be a dark and often dangerous place, and that it is under the threat of “radical Islamic terror,” as was said with emphasis on “Fox and Friends. ” (That phrase is one that Mr. Trump proudly and frequently uses.) The message of fear would resonate throughout the day, in the London coverage and later in segments on the Maryland rape case. “Police say the attacker was but many say this attack highlights the importance of properly vetting immigrants and refugees,” said Ed Henry, a substitute host on “America’s Newsroom. ” Mr. Henry later said to a panel of guests, “It seems to me that it’s harder and harder for Democrats to say that the travel ban doesn’t make sense. ” On “Happening Now,” an interview with Danny Coulson, a former deputy assistant director at the F. B. I. centered on the “lunacy” of not equipping police officers with guns, words that echoed Mr. Trump’s comments about security guards after the nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla. Mr. Kilmeade repeatedly turned his focus to London’s “Muslim mayor,” Sadiq Khan, calling on him to discuss the difference between his faith and that of the attacker. “Fox and Friends” also spent time on comments that Mr. Khan made in 2016 about how terrorism preparedness was “part and parcel” of living in a big city. After the attack this week, Donald Trump Jr. wrote a Twitter post about Mr. Khan’s comments and was roundly criticized for taking them out of context. “Fox and Friends” did not note that. _________ As the day progressed, more time was given to covering the health care bill. The 6 p. m. and 11 p. m. editions of the news show “Special Report,” hosted by Bret Baier, along with “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Hannity,” spent significant portions of their broadcasts discussing the bill and its fate. But with the bill in trouble, there were several conspicuous stretches when health care, seemingly the top news story of the day, disappeared from the Fox News airwaves. The vote on the bill, which had been scheduled for Thursday, was postponed around 3:30 p. m. Still, it took Tucker Carlson, whose show comes on at 9 p. m. 45 minutes to address it. On Fox News’s 7 p. m. show, “The First 100 Days,” which is supposed to focus on, well, the president’s first 100 days, the bill barely registered 10 minutes of airtime. The panel of the 5 p. m. show “The Five” discussed the bill and the vote in the program’s first 10 minutes before moving on to topics like surveillance, the London attack and a segment on Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York. (One panelist, Kimberly Guilfoyle, complained that “all the garbage isn’t collected” in her neighborhood.) Mr. Carlson’s attention was on immigration, and his guest, Ann Coulter, opined that Mr. Trump should focus on immigration and a border wall. It wasn’t the first time the wall was mentioned. “America’s Newsroom,” Fox’s midmorning show, devoted an entire segment to the wall Mr. Trump says will be built along the Mexican border. The coverage featured graphics, talk about how companies would bid for the chance to build the wall and a discussion about potential requirements for the structure, like “withstand assault,” “unclimbable” and “aesthetically pleasing on the U. S. side. ” _________ “Since other networks are determined to ignore it, we open tonight with more coverage of the horrific alleged rape in Rockville, Maryland,” Mr. Carlson said at the start of his show. All week, Fox News had been covering a story of a Maryland girl who said she had been raped by two of her high school classmates, one of whom is an undocumented immigrant. The way the story was discussed throughout the day on the network was not unlike a Trump campaign speech: criticism of the mainstream media, accusing it of having a liberal agenda that prioritizes identity politics over safety proclamations that sanctuary cities and states are rife with danger from illegal immigration mentions of Kathryn Steinle, the woman killed by an undocumented immigrant in San Francisco in 2015 who was often invoked on the campaign trail by Mr. Trump, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and other conservatives and descriptions of a border so porous that there are “waves of unaccompanied children coming across. ” The Maryland case was a topic on Fox News from the morning to almost midnight. The coverage was also laced with critical comments aimed at other networks for not giving the case enough attention. “In my mind, they’re telling our little girls that this little girl’s life doesn’t matter as much as these illegal immigrants’ lives matter because they don’t want to spread a negative story,” Ms. Earhardt, referring to other news outlets, said on “Fox and Friends. ” (Howard Kurtz, the network’s media analyst, said that Fox’s shows had dedicated more than 53 minutes of attention to the case — and that rival morning shows and evening newscasts had virtually ignored it.) The “Fox and Friends” Steve Doocy introduced a segment on the case by saying: “Where’s the mainstream media’s outrage? Hmm, we couldn’t find it. ” On “The Five,” the panelist Greg Gutfeld said the case wasn’t being covered sufficiently because it didn’t fit the media’s “liberal feminist narrative. ” Ms. Guilfoyle deemed it a “shameful blackout. ” A guest on “America’s Newsroom,” Ed Martin, bluntly stated that “they’re raping and killing our people, and that’s what Trump won on. ” _________ Even as Fox latched on to stories on Thursday that were not being emphasized on other networks, its afternoon hours hewed closer to traditional news coverage. For instance, Fox showed all 50 minutes of Sean Spicer’s White House press briefing, just as CNN and MSNBC did. And when Fox’s 3 p. m. anchor, Shepard Smith, came on, skepticism of the president ramped up. Mr. Smith has an evenhanded reputation that sets him somewhat apart from his colleagues in the minds of some, but the unpopularity of the health care bill was mentioned throughout the afternoon. During Fox’s 2 p. m. hour, a National Journal editor, Josh Kraushaar, said that Mr. Trump’s brand would be “undermined somewhat” if he could not get the votes for the bill. On Neil Cavuto’s 4 p. m. slot, after the vote had been postponed, The Post’s Daniel Halper said that Mr. Trump’s low approval ratings gave him “a lot less leeway” with members of the House. Mr. Smith called Mr. Trump’s claim that he had been wiretapped by the Obama administration “unfounded. ” He even asked a guest, “Is there a longtime danger from this that maybe his followers don’t understand or haven’t thought about?” While Mr. Smith was on the air, the House decided to delay its vote on the health care bill until Friday, prompting Mr. Smith to say, “For this to go down in flames, according to analysts on both sides of the political aisle, would be very bad for this White House. ” _________ The ability of different Fox News programs to lurch between news and opinion was demonstrated clearly when it came to Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California. On “Special Report,” Mr. Baier said that Mr. Hunter was under investigation by the Justice Department for misspending campaign funds. Less than two hours later, Mr. Hunter, along with Representative Chris Collins, Republican of New York, appeared live on “The O’Reilly Factor” to discuss the health care bill. Mr. Hunter argued that the bill would “save America. ” Eric Bolling, who was filling in for the host, Bill O’Reilly, did not raise the investigation with the congressman. _________ While the London attack, the Maryland rape case and critiques of the media moved to the fore during certain stretches, an implicit defense of Mr. Trump was also a consistent theme. Mr. Cavuto dinged the media for being too harsh on Mr. Trump. “If you want to be liked by the media, you better be like the media, which means these days you better not like Donald Trump,” Mr. Cavuto said, noting that the president had boycotted his show. He added of the media, “I’m not saying it’s time to get over Trump — I’m saying it’s time to get over yourselves. ” And even though Mr. Trump’s first push for major legislation was in peril by the end of Thursday night, the mantra from numerous Fox hosts and analysts was: Don’t blame him. Mr. Hannity started his 10 p. m. show by denouncing Republicans in the House, saying they were “ill prepared for this moment to lead, and now they failed the president. ” The Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs appeared on the show and specifically called out Speaker Paul D. Ryan for proving “he’s not a leader. ” (That sentiment was not particular to Fox. Lawrence O’Donnell opened his 10 p. m. show on MSNBC by saying that Mr. Ryan had “failed his first big test as speaker. ”) Earlier in the day, Mr. Bolling — who appeared on “The Five” before filling in on “The O’Reilly Factor” — said of the bill’s troubles, “Make no mistake, this is on Paul Ryan, not Donald Trump. ” Ms. Guilfoyle echoed that, saying, “It certainly won’t be because of a lack of effort from President Trump. ” Earlier, on “America’s Newsroom,” Mr. Henry was quick to draw a comparison with Mr. Trump’s predecessor. “The criticism of Barack Obama, for so long, he wouldn’t get his hands dirty, didn’t like dealing with Congress — this president is getting his hands dirty,” Mr. Henry said. While some other networks were at the center of controversy last year for hiring some people with very close ties to Mr. Trump, Fox News remains the home for his defenders. A list of the guests who appeared on the network on Thursday includes Mr. Spicer, Jerry Falwell Jr. the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and the British politician Nigel Farage. Mr. Huckabee and Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business Network both said they would be perfectly pleased if Mr. Trump turned to tax cuts and moved past health care. As Mr. Trump weathered the fallout from his claim that he was wiretapped by Mr. Obama, numerous guests discussed recent unverified reports that some members of Mr. Trump’s team were surveilled by the Obama administration. Mr. Farage appeared on “Fox and Friends” to heap praise on the president after the reports, made public by Mr. Nunes. “For Donald Trump to use a term like ‘somewhat vindicated’ is mastery of understatement, isn’t it?” Mr. Farage said. “I should think he’s pleased that he has been proved to be right. ” Mr. Kilmeade later said that this was not the first time the president had been vindicated after making a comment that others criticized. “Sweden, same thing,” Mr. Kilmeade said, referring to Mr. Trump’s comment that immigrants were causing crime in Sweden, something even Mr. Trump himself later clarified. “What’s going on with Sweden? Nothing’s going on with Sweden?” Mr. Kilmeade said. “A week later, there are riots and people are talking about what’s actually going on in some of those ghetto areas. So those are areas on which he spoke out, and he ended up being proven right here. ” Throughout the afternoon, a countdown clock previewing Mr. Carlson’s show made a promise: “Trump Team Surveillance EXPOSED. ” Nothing of the sort came up on the 9 p. m. show for the first 30 minutes, but Mr. Carlson, along with Mr. Hannity and other hosts, mentioned a report by the Fox correspondent James Rosen that a potential “smoking gun” could be coming. As the night wore down, and in the aftermath of the delayed health care vote, Mr. Hannity turned his attention fully to this latest topic. He even went so far as to ask a guest on his show whether this could “make Watergate look like kindergarten. ” To find that out, you would have to tune in again. | 1 |
Except, of course, other US weaponry.
Where did ISIS get such a fine anti-tank weapon? | 0 |
You’ve probably been cleaning your hands all wrong. They must be filthy. Scientists have found that a common technique for applying hand sanitizer, one that is even recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is inferior to an alternative method with twice as many steps. The C. D. C. way: Step One: Apply the sanitizer to one palm. Step Two: Rub both palms together. Step Three: Rub product over your hands until dry. In a study published in the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, scientists in Scotland found that an alternative technique, recommended by the World Health Organization, was significantly more effective in reducing the median bacteria count on participants’ hands. It was also more . The C. D. C. method takes 35 seconds on average to complete the alternative, 42. 5 seconds. You may notice that while the instructions include applying the sanitizer and allowing your hands to dry, the technique ignores both actions. (The diagramed W. H. O. method actually contains 11 intensive steps. The study only counted Steps 2 through 7.) Here’s how you do it the (much more laborious) W. H. O. way: Step One: Rub palms together. Step Two: Rub each palm front to back over the back of the other hand, interlacing fingers. Step Three: Twist palms with fingers interlaced, and rub between fingers. Step Four: Interlock your fingers, (thumbs should be on opposite sides) and twist again, this time, backs of fingers against palms. Step Five: Clasp your left thumb in your right hand and move thumb in circular motion — then switch thumbs. Step Six: (Still with us?) Press your right fingers together and rub them in a circular motion on your left palm, then switch. You’re done! Jacqui Reilly of the Glasgow Caledonian University, the lead author of the study, which focused on workers, stressed that the way the steps were counted emphasized the precision of the superior W. H. O. technique. “The difference between them is that the W. H. O. guidance gives you six maneuvers to do, instead of just saying, ‘Apply it all over your hands,’ ” she said. Hand hygiene, she added, remained “the single most important intervention that you can do to prevent health infection but also to protect yourself and your family from infections and viruses. ” Certain antibacterial soaps may do more harm than good, experts say. Some have come under scrutiny for using chemicals like triclosan. The Food and Drug Administration has recommended using hand sanitizers that contain at least 60 percent alcohol if soap and water is unavailable. Dr. Reilly said that while her study focused only on hand sanitizer, the technique applied equally well to hand washing with soap and water. O. K. so maybe you have been persuaded but are reluctant to memorize and do all those new steps? You’re not alone. According to the study, even the professionals who participated had trouble with all the steps. Nearly a third of them were unable to complete the entire process despite “having instructions on the technique in front of them and having their technique observed. ” | 1 |
In the rough countryside of northern Morocco the writer and horticulturist Umberto Pasti has created Rohuna, his garden, which is nothing less than autobiography writ from earth and flora. I FIRST CAME HERE, to this patch of dusty land 40 miles south of Tangier, 18 years ago. Tired after a long walk, I fell asleep under a fig tree and had a strange dream, full of words whose relation to one another I didn’t understand: mouth, nasturtium, exedra, unicorn. At the time, I didn’t know that the jinn, the local spirits, possess those who fall asleep under trees in the middle of nowhere. What I did know was that I was going to build a garden here. I told my Moroccan friend who was traveling with me that I wanted to buy the land. There were 20 or so owners to negotiate with, but after about 100 meetings with the adouls, Muslim notaries, the deal was done. In the meantime, I’d already set myself up in a shack made out of reeds and palm leaves, built with help from Rachid, the child who had popped out from behind a bramble one day, a huge smile on his face. Today, he is Rohuna’s head gardener. Objectively, it wasn’t an ideal place for a garden. Sure, a few trees grew in the dusty, scorching heat — three figs, a small cluster of pomegranates and a eucalyptus — and the view, of the sleepy, stony ground, of the ocean, was biblical, the solitude exciting. But, unfortunately, you could only get there either by scrambling along a difficult path or on the back of a mule. The chalky soil was in many places, in fact, sand or lifeless clay. The temperature could climb to almost 122 degrees and the rocks were home to scorpions and vipers, including the rare, magnificent Vipera latastei, whose bite is lethal. What’s more, the peasants who lived in the village nearby were stubborn and suspicious, and many had never seen a European. My father had died not too long before, leaving me some money. I used all of it making up for the roadblocks that destiny had placed in my path as a gardener. By the time my Cleopatra syndrome reached its height, I had hired 600 workers: There were three houses to build, a track to lay down miles of stone, walls to erect. And in the meantime we had to transport hundreds of tons of good topsoil so that everything would turn out as I had dreamed. My vision for the garden, I am still convinced, is for how it has always been — but always when? In what dimension did a sliver of Moroccan countryside coincide with something out of the background of a Renaissance painting, populated by centaurs, basilisks, hippogriffs? THESE WERE TIRING YEARS, but there were also many moments of joy: the morning on which the pump we’d attached to the third probe yielded a rivulet when coming back from Tangier, I saw the Iris planifolia that, months before, we’d transplanted by the thousands from the construction site of a tourist dock, all in bloom. In the beginning, I was very strict with myself. Other than fruit trees, I only planted greenery threatened by the urbanization that has disfigured northern Morocco, snatching them from the jaws of excavators and bulldozers: gigantic olive trees, holly oaks, strawberry bushes, viburnum shrubs and fig trees. Then I let myself go, but only in the ornamental terraces around the houses, where I liberally planted the species that I’d seen in the gardens in the country’s north: Damask roses, Madonna lilies, Canna indica, Iris germanica and Iris pallida (Dalmation irises) Dietes iridioides (fortnight lilies) tithonia, hollyhocks, carnations and geraniums. These terraces, of which there are roughly 20, are each themed. There’s the Englishman’s Garden, with its lilies and fuchsias the Italian’s Garden, planted with olives, myrtle and lilies of the Nile, and the Egyptian Garden, because when I sit there I feel as if I’m in Luxor. I surprised my partner and guardian angel with Stephan’s Terrace, which I named after him. We now drink gin and tonics there on summer nights. And Bando’s Gardens take their name from one of the gardeners the meandering bloodlines of his family, one of the oldest in the village, leave me as awestruck as those of the Guermantes family do the narrator of “In Search of Lost Time. ” In these gardens, it’s my men who decide what to plant among the mulberries, the apricots and the pears, delighting me with their audacity: orange Streptosolen jamesonii (marmalade bushes) next to Tecoma garrocha alongside horseshoe pelargoniums as red as the idea of red itself, purple African daisies and Tagetes lemmonii (Lemmon’s marigold) those perfumed clouds of gold. BUT THIS GARDENER’S heart truly resides beyond the path that leads to the village, on the margins of the forest of fig trees that yields, as in a fable, to the wooden bridge built for me by my friend Najim. Here wild plants grow — roughly 300 native species — from the magisterial Quercus ilex, the evergreen oak, to the minuscule Acis tingitana, and all the rock roses, euphorbia, helianthemum and thyme that made northern Morocco a paradise. Wild bulbs are our forte: There are 17 species of iris (six native) 12 narcissus varietals, five kinds of ornithogalum ( ) and tulips, romulea, merendera, dipcadi, fritillaries, gladioli, grape hyacinths, crocuses, meadow saffrons and garlics. And I’m not talking about small clusters. Such boundless Phoenician horizons demand courage. For winter picnics, straw mats and rugs are spread out among the thousands of Iris tingitana (Moroccan irises) — in their honor we drink mint tea and break bread. To live in this Arcadia is a great privilege. Here, the lives of people are intertwined with the lives of plants and of the animals, and the rhythms of nature itself. This is the Morocco that I love more than anything else in the world, the noble and rustic Morocco for which I live. I am grateful to the men who work with me — and to the jinn that possesses me still. | 1 |
Samstag, 5. November 2016 Asterix-Comics wegen Verherrlichung von Doping aus dem Handel genommen Berlin (Archiv) - Ist das das Aus für die unbeugsamen Gallier? Wie der Ehapa-Verlag am Mittwoch mitteilte, werden alle Bände der beliebten Asterix-Reihe von Autor René Goscinny und Zeichner Albert Uderzo umgehend aus dem Handel genommen. Damit reagiert der Verlag auf eine Untersuchung der Nationalen Anti-Doping Agentur Deutschland (NADA), die jahrelanges flächendeckendes Doping bei den beliebten Comicfiguren nachweisen konnte. Bereits Ende letzter Woche hatte die NADA entsprechende Ergebnisse veröffentlicht. Demnach konnten die Kontrolleure die Verwendung einer euphemistisch als "Zaubertrank" bezeichneten Substanz in allen Heften nachweisen. Mit Hilfe des berüchtigten Doping-Arztes Miraculix aka "Der Druide" sollen somit sämtliche der Schlachten- und Prügelergebnisse der Gallier gegen römische Patrouillen, Feldlager und Legionen ganz offenkundig und ungeniert manipuliert worden sein. Unsportlich. Von einem fairen Wettkampf keine Spur. "Wir befürchten, dass durch die Verherrlichung des Dopingmittels als Zaubertrank ohne Nebenwirkungen die Hemmschwelle für den Konsum leistungssteigernder Substanzen sinkt", heißt es in einer Erklärung der Agentur. Gerade jüngere Leser seien gefährdet. Besonders erschütternd: Ein Charakter soll gar als Kind in das Dopingmittel gefallen sein und seitdem über übermenschliche Kräfte verfügen. Beim Ehapa-Verlag gibt man sich derweil zerknirscht und lässt die Zukunft der beliebten Comics offen. Zwar sei ein "cleaner" Neustart der Reihe in Planung, so ein Sprecher des Verlages. Doch ob der neue Band "Asterix und die Zerstörung des kleinen Dorfs durch selbstverständlich haushoch überlegene Römer" am Ende tatsächlich den Weg in deutsche Buchhandlungen finde, sei noch nicht sicher. dan, khi; Idee: khi; Fotos: Ehapa-Verlag; Hinweis: Erstmals erschienen am 31.7.14 Artikel teilen: | 0 |
Actress Rachel Bloom has teamed up with “Science Guy” Bill Nye to debut an LGBT sex anthem on the new Netflix series Bill Nye Saves the World. [During an episode of the show — which debuted on the streaming service this week — Nye introduces Bloom’s performance as “very special” and a “cool little segment. ” Bloom, perhaps best known for her role in the sitcom Crazy proceeds to give a performance of a song titled “My Sex Junk,” which includes lyrics like: “This world of ours is so full of choice. But must I choose between only John or Joyce? Are my options only hard or moist? My vagina has its own voice. ” Other lines in the performance, which features Nye behind a DJ booth and a man ripping his trousers off, include: “Versatile love may have some butt stuff. It’s evolution, ain’t nothing new. There’s nothing taboo about a sex stew. ” “That’s exactly the right message, Rachel, nice job,” Nye says as Bloom finishes her performance. The video was quickly excoriated by viewers, with the YouTube version receiving more than 10, 000 “dislikes” compared with just 170 “likes. ” Twitter users also blasted the video, with some claiming that Nye’s perspective on gender is not backed by science. *curled up in a therapist chair, shivering arhythmically, scratching my inner elbow* alright so it all began with this video, ”my sex junk”, — C✪RBYNISTA (@fuckmuir) April 24, 2017, Well @BillNye shot his credibility when he decided there’s no science to gender. Oh, and that was SAD. #mysexjunk, — Wrongthink Radio (@wrongthinkradio) April 24, 2017, I’ve seen some stuff in my life, but nothing as bad as ”My Sex Junk”. #RachelBloom, — Hazel (@RoseHazel12) April 24, 2017, Reviewing the rest of Nye’s show, which is intended to inform viewers about science, Maddie Stone of Gizmodo describes it as “a small amount of information packaged to promote a understanding of a complex science issue, slanted to the POV of an unabashedly political science comedian. ” She adds that Nye spends the majority of the show just “yelling at his audience. ” Earlier this week, Nye told MSNBC that he wanted to remind the Trump administration that “science is political,” arguing that the Constitution grants Congress the power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts. ” However, Nye’s understanding of the Constitutional passage has since been shown to be incorrect. You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart. com | 1 |
The president of a conservative group in Spain has vowed to fight on after a judge impounded a bus that was due to tour the country protesting transgender ideology. [Ignacio Arsuaga, president of Hazte Oír, accused the judge of “kidnapping” his bus, which had a slogan on the side saying: “Boys have penises, girls have vaginas. Don’t be fooled. ” The bus generated outrage among left wingers after its first day on the streets of Madrid on Monday, resulting in the city council banning it from their roads. Judge José Juan Escalonilla then backed the decision, with Madrid prosecutors now considering whether to investigate it for hate crime. They say that failure to do so could risk “disturbing the peace and creating a feeling of insecurity or fear among people due to their identity or sexual orientation, and specifically among minors who could be affected by the message. ” However, Mr. Asuaga said his group had the freedom to protest “sexual indoctrination” in schools, adding that the slogan on the side of the bus is based on a “fact of biology”. “We are going to appeal this unjust decision and file a criminal case against the Madrid mayor,” he said. La Gaceta reports the group now plans to cover the bus with a tarpaulin containing different messages in order to circumvent the ban and continue travelling Friday. They may also charter a second vehicle with the same message. The group created the campaign in response to posters put up in cities across the north of Spain depicting naked children with genitalia of the opposite sex. The posters, created by transgender advocacy group Chrysallis, declared: “There are girls with penises and boys with vaginas. It’s as simple as that. ” They were funded by an anonymous American donor who gave €28, 000 (£24, 000) to help the group spread its message. | 1 |
PARIS — On chilly winter mornings, most Parisians hurry by the square that is home to the beautiful medieval Tour St. Jacques. Only occasionally do they pause, perhaps hearing a light rustle on the fallen leaves or glimpsing something scampering among the dark green foliage. A bird? A cat? A puppy? No. A rat. No. Three rats. No. Look closer: Ten or 12 rats with lustrous coats are shuffling among the dried autumn leaves. Paris is facing its worst rat crisis in decades. Nine parks and green spaces have been closed either partly or entirely. Some, like the Champs de Mars, home to the Eiffel Tower, are being “ ” in sections. “I haven’t seen this sort of situation in 39 years,” said Gilles Demodice, a manager in Paris’s animal pest control department, who has spent much of his adult life working for the city. Some places cannot be completely closed, like the Boulevard which runs through a neighborhood with little green space and is beloved by mothers with strollers as well as joggers — but also, it seems, by packs of rats. Rat invasion is an old problem in Paris — and a new one — and it is hard to get a grip on. In 2014, the city promised a 100 percent “ . ” In the 19th century, rats terrified and disgusted Parisians who knew that five centuries earlier, the creatures had brought the bubonic plague across the Mediterranean. The plague ravaged the city, as it did much of Europe, killing an estimated 100, 000 Parisians, between a third and half the population at the time. It recurred periodically for four more centuries. Not surprisingly, the experience left Paris with a aversion to rodents. Today, no one talks about a 100 percent Paris. But why is the problem worse now than in the past? “We don’t know exactly why,” Mr. Demodice said. “I think it might be because there is an overpopulation underground because the usual habitat for this animal are the sewers, underground, not above ground. ” “Our work is to push them back down,” he said. But why are they proliferating? Could it be everybody’s favorite scapegoat — the European Union and its faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats? Yes, it could. New regulations from Brussels, the European Union’s headquarters, have forced countries to change how they use rat poison, said Dr. Michaux, a veterinarian and head of the Urban Animals Scientific and Technical Institute in Paris. The old way of poisoning rodents involved a sort of deadly snack service in which park employees put lethal pellets directly into the burrows where the rats lived or sprinkled a poison powder along the underground byways used by the rats. The poison would cling to the rat’s fur “and then when the rat cleaned itself, licked itself, it absorbed the powder and was automatically poisoned,” Dr. Michaux said. Either method meant the rat was likely to come in direct contact with the deadly substance. Typically, the rat died two or three days later. The poison is an anticoagulant that eventually causes dehydration, internal bleeding and death. However, the old method could easily contaminate the water supply, and the poison could be ingested by domestic animals or human beings, with the greatest risk being to children and pregnant women, Dr. Michaux said. Now the European Union requires that the poison be secured in small black plastic boxes, known as bait stations, and the rats have to actively seek it out. The United States has similar restrictions. In Paris, however, the rats can easily find a meal much of the year within a stone’s throw of their burrows — at least around the Tour St. Jacques. And they appear to prefer a baguette with butter and ham, a piece of apple and an unfinished container of pasta, prosciutto and peas. Three park workers tasked with checking the poison boxes scattered every 25 feet among the shrubbery at the Tour St. Jacques did not find even one breached by a rat last Friday. Patrick Lambin, 43, a city worker in the Square St. Jacques, gleefully seized a dead rat with a pincerlike implement used for picking up trash on Friday morning and swung it around. “That’s the fourth one I’ve gotten,” he said. Over how many days? He shrugged, “Since we began. ” That was between two and three weeks ago. While it is possible the other rats running around the little square may be dying slowly from the poison, it seems at least as likely that they are propagating faster than they are dying. The rat’s rapid reproduction rate is a reason that the creatures are likely to have the upper hand in the competition for survival. “Rats are capable of breeding every three weeks,” said Dr. Michaux, the veterinarian. “Sexual maturity by the children is reached between six and nine weeks, and so very quickly the second generation also starts reproducing, then the third generation and so on,” he said. Taking into account that a rat mother produces on average four to five offspring in each litter, the numbers rise exponentially. While the poison could be a risk to human beings, so are the rats — potentially, although no one is suggesting that the bubonic plague is likely to return. The species of rat responsible for the black death, as the plague was called, Rattus rattus, a black rat that first arrived in Europe probably about A. D. 500, is not the rat now turning up in Paris parks. The rat causing alarm in the French capital is the Rattus norvegicus, a relative newcomer to Europe, which arrived about 150 to 200 years ago from Asia. Although it is not easy to get sick from having a passing contact with these rats, they do carry diseases like salmonella or leptospirosis, more commonly known as swamp fever. Dirt, disease, degeneracy, the poor rat is much despised. The celebrated French satirist and printmaker Honoré Daumier depicted a rat that looked similar to those today that run around the Tour St. Jacques. Mr. Daumier, however, shows them running over dead bodies. The French writer Victor Hugo had one of his main characters in “Les Misérables” terrify small children by telling them that the rats that lived in an abandoned statue of an elephant in the Place de la Bastille “were so big they could eat cats. ” But today’s Parisian rat is also, if not man’s best friend, at least a familiar and constant denizen of city life: Where there are men, there are rats, said Mr. Demodice, the pest control manager. Listening to Mr. Demodice, who has spent much of life observing rats, it is almost possible to feel affection for them. “A rat is a very intelligent and athletic animal,” he said. “Rats play a very useful role for us because what they eat we do not need to dispose of, so it’s very economical for us, and when rats are underground they also clean the pipes with their fur when they run through them. “So we need to keep them. They’re sort of our friends, but they need to stay below. That’s all we ask: that they stay below. ” | 1 |
By Amanda Froelich It should be evident if you’re following news concerning the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota that tension continues to escalate between... | 0 |
President Donald Trump made a dramatic display of executive power at the Environmental Protection Agency, as he signed an executive order to begin ratcheting back the EPA regulations. [“My administration is putting an end to the war on coal,” Trump said in a speech prior to signing the executive order. Trump was joined by Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, and Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. “Our nation can’t run on pixie dust and hope,” Zinke said during his speech. “The last eight years showed that. ” Vice President Mike Pence was also present for the event. “President Trump digs coal,” Pence said as he introduced Trump. “The war on coal is over. ” Several coal miners were also present at the event, and at one point Trump left the podium in the middle of his speech to shake all of their hands. “We’re with you 100%,” he said, recalling his campaign promise to put them back to work. Trump said that his executive order was focused on giving power back to the states and back to the people to restore American energy jobs. “We’re going to have safety, we’re going to have clean water, we’re going to have clean air, but so many are unnecessary and so many are job killing, we’re getting rid of the bad ones,” he said. Despite his focus on coal miners, Trump also praised EPA employees. “You’re doing important work to protect our health and public resources, so important,” he said. Trump also recognized Sen. Shelley Moore Capito ( ) who joined the event. After signing the executive order, Trump reached back with one of the signature pens and gave it to the miners. “Only a miner, c’mon fellas you split it up,” he said, as the crowd laughed. After signing executive order at the EPA, Trump double taps the desk pic. twitter. — Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) March 28, 2017, | 1 |
Op-Ed by Paul A. Philips Ever wondered how Big Pharma has managed to tightly control so many aspects of conventional medicine’s healthcare system, even to the point of imposing limitations on our... | 0 |
Anthony D. Weiner confirmed on Thursday that the New York City Administration for Children’s Services has opened an investigation into his treatment of his son, Jordan. The inquiry comes after Mr. Weiner was embarrassed yet again this week by revelations that he had sent sexually charged messages over social media to a woman he had never met. One message showed his son in a photograph that also included Mr. Weiner’s crotch. Though The New York Post reported on Wednesday that the child welfare agency had begun looking into the matter, citing anonymous sources, Mr. Weiner told The New York Times the same day that he had not yet been contacted. On Thursday, however, he said that the agency had left a letter about the investigation at his mother’s house. It was unclear why the agency had sent a letter to his mother’s residence, rather than to him directly. He, too, seemed mystified: “Crazy if you ask me,” he said, adding that he had called the agency to learn more. To prompt an investigation, a person who has direct knowledge of the allegations of mistreatment must report any concerns to the Statewide Central Register, a state hotline if the state believes that an inquiry is warranted, it directs the city agency to investigate. By law, the agency must investigate all reports it receives from the state. Mr. Weiner, a Democrat, once served in Congress and ran for mayor. His political career was destroyed by two previous scandals involving lewd online messages, and he is now separated from his wife and Jordan’s mother, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton. Ms. Abedin announced the separation on Monday. | 1 |
Despite fears that dementia rates were going to explode as the population grows older and fatter, and has more diabetes and high blood pressure, a large nationally representative survey has found the reverse. Dementia is actually on the wane. And when people do get dementia, they get it at older and older ages. Previous studies found the same trend but involved much smaller and less diverse populations like the mostly white population of Framingham, Mass. and residents of a few areas in England and Wales. The new study found that the dementia rate in Americans 65 and older fell by 24 percent over 12 years, to 8. 8 percent in 2012 from 11. 6 percent in 2000. That trend is “statistically significant and impressive,” said Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania who was not associated with the study. In 2000, people received a diagnosis of dementia at an average age of 80. 7 in 2012, the average age was 82. 4. “The dementia rate is not immutable,” said Dr. Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging. “It can change. ” And that “is very good news,” said John Haaga, director of the institute’s division of behavioral and social research. It means, he said, that “roughly a million and a half people aged 65 and older who do not have dementia now would have had it if the rate in 2000 had been in place. ” Keith Fargo, director of scientific programs and outreach at the Alzheimer’s Association, said the group had been encouraged by some of the previous research showing a decline but had also been “a little bit nervous” about drawing conclusions because the populations in the earlier studies were so homogeneous. Now, he said of the new data, “here is a nationally representative study. It’s wonderful news. ” An estimated four million to five million Americans currently have dementia. It remains the most expensive disease in America — a study funded by the National Institute on Aging estimated that in 2010 it cost up to $215 billion a year to care for dementia patients, surpassing heart disease ($102 billion) and cancer ($77 billion). The study, published online Monday by the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, included 21, 000 Americans 65 and older across all races, education and income levels, who participate in the Health and Retirement Study, which regularly surveys people and follows them as they age. The National Institute on Aging funded the work but was not involved with the data collection, analysis or interpretation. To assess dementia, participants were asked, among other things, to recall 10 nouns immediately and after a delay, to serially subtract seven from 100, and to count backward from 20. The test was based on extensive research indicating it was a good measure of memory and thinking skills. Participants also were asked about their education levels, income and health. In a way, the dementia decline might seem unexpected. It occurred despite an increase in diabetes — the diabetes prevalence among older Americans surged to 21 percent in 2012 from 9 percent in 1990. It began to fall only very recently. And, the study found, diabetes increased the risk of dementia by 39 percent. More older people today also have cardiovascular risk factors — high levels of blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol — which increase the risk of dementia. But more are taking medications for those conditions, so perhaps better control of those risk factors played a role in the decline. The findings about obesity were especially puzzling. Compared with people of normal weight, overweight people and obese people had a 30 percent lower risk of dementia, the study found. Underweight people had a risk 2. 5 times as great. Yet the obesity picture is muddled because other studies have found that obesity in middle age increases dementia risk in old age. Then there is the education question. On average, older Americans in 2012 had one more year of schooling than older Americans in 2000. And years of education were associated with decreased dementia risk in this study, as in many others. It is still not clear exactly why education would reduce the risk of dementia. There is the cognitive reserve hypothesis: that education changes developing brains in a good way, making them more resistant to dementia, and that people with more education have brains that are better able to compensate for dementia damage. But education also is linked to more wealth. People with more education often live in environments that differ from those of people who have less schooling, and they tend to have better health over all. They also are less likely to smoke. As for black Americans, the dementia risk was higher, but some possible reasons — less education, less wealth, more cardiovascular risk factors — did not fully explain the difference. One possibility is that they received a poorer quality of education, so each year of it offered less protection from dementia, said the study’s lead author, Dr. Kenneth Langa. In the end, much of what is happening with dementia rates defies explanation, said Dr. Langa, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who also works in the Veterans Affairs health care system there. Dr. Denis Evans, a professor of medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, urged caution in accepting the conclusion that dementia rates were declining and, if they are, in accepting the possible explanations. Although he had nothing but praise for the abilities of the researchers, he noted that such studies were extremely difficult to do. Deciding if a respondent is demented can easily be inadvertently skewed, he said. “It’s very complex,” Dr. Evans said. But the decline is consistent with what seems to be a trend, despite researchers’ failure to find any effective way for individuals to protect themselves from Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia. Dr. Langa estimates that compared with the rate in the early 1990s, there has been a 25 to 30 percent decrease in dementia rates among older Americans. As for the future, that is hard to predict, Dr. Langa said. Even with the lower prevalence of dementia, there will be many more older people in the United States over the next few decades, especially people age 85 and older, who are at highest risk. For that reason, the total number of people with dementia should rise, although not as much as had been estimated. And there are forces acting against the continuation of the decline in dementia rates. More people reaching age 65 and above in the next few decades will have been obese in middle age, possibly increasing their risk of dementia. In addition, the trend toward more years of schooling seems to have leveled off, so the education effect might not be as much of a factor. But researchers remain optimistic. The study found associations, Dr. Hodes noted. “Now the real challenge,” he said, “is to see if we can generate evidence of what causes what. ” | 1 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. Disturbing footage emerged of the fatal encounter between a black man and police officers in Charlotte, N. C. Recorded on a cellphone by the wife of the man, Keith Scott, the video shows the officers ignoring her as she tells them from a distance that her husband is unarmed, has a traumatic brain injury and just took his medicine. As she pleads with the officers not to shoot, the sound of gunfire can be heard. “He better live,” she says repeatedly, turning the camera to his body on the ground. Then: “Did you all call the police? I mean, did you all call an ambulance?” _____ 2. Stock prices dipped on Wall Street. Some investors dropped Yahoo, driving down its share price a day after the company revealed the 2014 breach of a staggering 500 million user accounts, an episode that may affect Verizon’s deal to acquire the company. Facebook’s stock was down, too, after it acknowledged a measuring error led to inflated figures on video consumption, while Twitter shares shot up — way up — on reports that the company was in talks to be bought. _____ 3. President Obama vetoed a bill that would allow families of Sept. 11 victims to sue the Saudi government for any role in the attacks. But Congress, which passed the bill in both houses with bipartisan support, is likely to override the veto, which would be a first during Mr. Obama’s presidency. Mr. Obama will speak at the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture on Saturday. _____ 4. Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump are preparing for their first debate, each looking to take advantage of the other’s vulnerabilities on Monday night. In our campaign podcast, The Mr. Trump’s ghostwriter for “The Art of the Deal” shares his observations on both candidates’ weak spots. As of Sunday, there will be a new platform for following the race: We the People, a Snapchat Discover channel from one of the founders of Politico. _____ 5. Mr. Trump won the surprise endorsement of a former bitter rival: Ted Cruz. And in another sign of Republican acquiescence, if not unity, House Speaker Paul Ryan, who once made it a point to counter Mr. Trump’s more controversial statements, generally deflects questions about the candidate now. Here’s our voter registration guide. _____ 6. In theaters this weekend: “The Magnificent Seven,” a remake of a remake. Our critic says its main redeeming feature is Denzel Washington, “a great star, which means that he has that ineluctable what’ for selling the goods no matter what their date. ” And our TV experts recommend Season 3 of “Transparent” (Amazon) and, for those who want to relive the distinctive humor of Garry Shandling, “The Larry Sanders Show” (HBO Now). _____ 7. In San Francisco, the new Millennium apartment tower has taken on a pronounced lean, forcing city officials to reassess how buildings are vetted. An exemplar of the city’s construction spree, the tower is the subject of a suit on behalf of the unnerved residents, some of whom paid more than $2 million for a apartment. _____ 8. Violence in Syria suddenly escalated. Government forces and their Russian allies launched aerial assaults on areas of the northern city of Aleppo and threatened a ground invasion. Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to revive a at the United Nations appeared to collapse. President Obama has said the situation in Syria “haunts me constantly,” but his calculations of the realities, including the difficulty of trusting deals with Russia, have stopped him from greater intervention. _____ 9. One of our stories today is by a novelist whose defense of fiction as a vehicle for empathy was met with outrage by those who understood her interest in writing about people different from herself to be excusing cultural appropriation. The novelist, Lionel Shriver (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”) said she worried that the stance popular among the young could end up damaging progressive politics. “There are many people who see these frenzies about cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, and safe spaces as overtly crazy,” she writes. “The shrill tyranny of the left helps to push them toward Donald Trump. ” _____ 10. Finally, need a break? You need venture no farther than your armchair to go to the ends of the earth through the eyes of six adventuresome photographers. “It’s the region where Lucy, the famous hominin, was found it was the start of humanity, and it feels like it,” one of them wrote about his visit to the area pictured above, the Danakil Desert in Ethiopia. Have a great weekend. _____ Martin Tsai contributed reporting. _____ 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 |
posted by Eddie Female fungal infections have become quite common in recent times. Treating them is difficult, but luckily, we have a few natural solutions which will help you treat them from the comfort of your own home. Tea Rosemary tea is particularly effective against the symptoms of fungal infections. The tea can also be used for daily intimate care. To treat yeast infections, drink 1-4 cups of rosemary tea a day, and in cases of fungal infections, you should drink blueberry juice a couple of times a day. You can also eat fresh blueberries or take cranberry extract for the same problem. Oils Some essential oils have powerful antifungal properties that can relieve infections. You can soak a tampon in tea tree oil and insert it into your vagina to treat vaginal infections. Leave the tampon in for a couple of hours and repeat the process twice a day for best results. Oregano oil provides a similar effect, and can be applied topically diluted with olive oil. Taking two capsules of oregano oil extract every day and you will defeat the infection in just a week or two. Garlic Garlic is great against yeast infections. We recommend applying a garlic paste on the affected area, or consuming a mixture made of garlic, oil, vitamin E capsules and coconut oil. Vinegar Pour a cup of apple cider vinegar in a tub of hot water, then soak in it for 20 minutes to relieve fungal and yeast infections. Marigold Marigold has great antifungal and anti-inflammatory properties. Take a couple of marigold leaves, then mash them and apply the paste on the affected area to get rid of the infection. The treatment should be avoided during pregnancy. source: | 0 |
PITTSBURGH — There would be no magic for Henrik Lundqvist and the Rangers this year. After four consecutive postseasons in which they often played their best when their backs were against the wall, the Rangers’ season ended with a thud Saturday. The rookie Bryan Rust had two goals and an assist as the Pittsburgh Penguins wrapped up their Eastern Conference quarterfinal series against the Rangers with a victory in Game 5. Pittsburgh won the series, four games to one, after losing to the Rangers by the same series margin in the first round last year. “We just got beat,” Rangers defenseman Marc Staal said. “We got beat by the better team. They were better than us. All series. ” The Rangers entered Saturday’s game hoping for a repeat performance of their 2014 series against the Penguins, in which they came back from a deficit to beat Pittsburgh in seven games. Having won 15 of the past 19 games in which they faced elimination, the Rangers had reason to have confidence that they could do so again. After all, Lundqvist had a 1. 50 goals against average in those games. But these Rangers are not the same Rangers who reached the conference finals three times from 2012 to 2015. And this Lundqvist is not the same Lundqvist. He failed to finish a game for the third time in five outings this series, which began with his being knocked out of Game 1 after he was hit near the eye by a teammate’s stick. The Penguins bombarded Lundqvist for 10 goals during his final four periods. His backup, Antti Raanta, played the third period Saturday after having played the final minutes in Game 4 on Thursday. Lundqvist allowed four goals on 12 shots in what proved his final period of the season. “The second period, it was a feeling of embarrassment to give up that many goals,” Lundqvist said. “But also a sense of hopelessness. ” He allowed only eight goals in the entire series against Pittsburgh last season. And before Thursday’s loss in Game 4, he had given up just 16 goals to the Penguins during his previous 11 playoff appearances against them, winning eight of those games. But then Lundqvist gave up 10 goals in 64 minutes 55 seconds — the equivalent of a 9. 23 goals against average. “There’s been a lot of big opportunities right in front in this series, and you need strong goaltending,” Lundqvist said. “You need a goalie that’s going to make a lot of big extra saves. And I wasn’t able to come up with that. ” While Lundqvist was not sharp in Game 5 — four of the goals came on shots that were unscreened but well placed — the breakdowns by the remade defensive corps in front of him did not help. Coach Alain Vigneault pulled out all the stops. He brought back the veteran Dan Girardi, who had been out since Game 1 because of a “whole body” injury. Vigneault also dressed seven defensemen, turning to Raphael Diaz, who had not played in an N. H. L. game all season. (Dan Boyle, 39, was a healthy scratch in what was most likely his final game he said in the fall that he planned to retire after the season.) Diaz and Girardi rewarded those decisions as each assisted on a goal. A Girardi shot 62 seconds into the game was deflected in by Rick Nash. Chris Kreider got a piece of a similar shot by Diaz from the point during a power play in the third period for the Rangers’ first goal in the series with a advantage. Dominic Moore had made the score just past the midway point of the first period, the puck going into the net after ricocheting off several Penguins. But the Rangers’ final lead of the series lasted only 64 seconds, until a Phil Kessel slap shot from the right circle smacked off the shaft of Lundqvist’s stick and into the far top corner of the net. That made Pittsburgh 8 for 20 on the power play in the series. Then came the onslaught in the second period, and the Rangers were finished. The Rangers, who lost in the first round of the playoffs for the first time since 2011, had won eight playoff series over the previous four years, including 2014, when they advanced to the finals. “The way they play the game, that’s what we used to do to teams,” Rangers forward Derick Brassard said, noting that Penguins Coach Mike Sullivan had been an assistant with the Rangers from 2009 to 2013. “And they did it to us now. ” With many in the Rangers’ core aging, some will wonder if this is the end of an era. Nine Rangers who played in this series are 30 or older two more will turn 30 before the start of next season. Lundqvist posted the worst goals against average of his career and tied for his worst save percentage since the season. Nash, who missed 20 games with a leg injury, had his fewest goals in a season. Girardi had an uneven season. Eric Staal and Keith Yandle, trade acquisitions during the past 14 months, are pending unrestricted free agents. After the game, Vigneault said it was too early to give a evaluation of where his team would go from here. “Like any organization, we’re going to go through all the steps, from coaches to management,” he said. He added, “Everybody wanted to end this way differently than it did. ” | 1 |
DETROIT — Just before the holidays, on a dark street a few blocks from downtown, a group of public officials crowded onto a makeshift stage before a shivering crowd, flipped a big switch — and the last of this city’s 65, 000 new streetlights blazed on. For years, urban decline here was encapsulated in headlines about Detroit’s lights going out. Nowadays, tales of the city’s slow recovery tend to focus on plucky hipsters from Los Angeles or Brooklyn colonizing abandoned spaces, opening pickle companies or tilling little urban agriculture plots. Glossy magazines acclaim Detroit as the next Berlin never mind that Germany’s reunified capital has always floated on a bed of cushy federal subsidies. Let’s hope that if anyone writes a history of Detroit’s rejuvenation, a chapter is devoted to the lights returning. Like picking up the trash, fixing potholes and responding to emergencies, these efforts signal that no matter where you live in Detroit, you are no longer forgotten — that government here can finally keep its basic promises. The city, postbankruptcy, is led by Mike Duggan, a strong mayor. Its most solid indicator of progress may come this year, with the release of census figures, Mr. Duggan told me. After generations of white and black flight, there’s hope the numbers will reveal, for the first time in decades, the population holding steady or even rising. So far, much news about growth has focused on downtown, where Dan Gilbert, the billionaire owner of Quicken Loans, is a vocal booster, and on Midtown, home to businesses like the luxury brand Shinola. A light rail under construction will soon link the two neighborhoods, doubling down on their redevelopment. All that said, Detroit is a large city with limited resources. It sprawls across 139 square miles (two and a half times the size of Miami) a preponderance of which remain blighted and empty, with few prospects for prosperity. I made a pilgrimage to Sister Pie, a cozy corner bakery opened a few years ago by a gifted Brooklyn transplant in the troubled West Village area, where more new shops and restaurants have lately settled. West Village is being advertised as another pocket of resurgence. You sometimes even hear the G word — gentrification — bandied around. But drive a block or so from Sister Pie and you’ll still find street after street of houses. This is where the new lights come in. They’re spread all across town. The project cost $185 million, paid by the city and the state. The Public Lighting Authority of Detroit, backed by the mayor, received a critical assist from the Obama administration: Energy Department experts advised local officials to swap out the old, costly, sodium lamps, which vandals had been stripping bare for copper wire. They recommended LED technology. Investments by the Obama administration in lighting have reduced costs, making LEDs feasible for a city like Detroit. Three years ago, nearly half the 88, 000 streetlights in the city were out of commission. The more potent LED lights allow the authority to replace those 88, 000 old fixtures with 65, 000 new ones, strong enough for you to read one of those glossy magazines after dark. The whole thing came in under budget and on time. When was the last time anyone could say that about a major infrastructure project in Detroit? “An example of how good government should work,” as Lorna L. Thomas, chairwoman of the lighting authority, put it at the ceremony. It’s also an example of how one smart decision can have ripple effects. Some residents here grumbled about fewer lights. That said, the stronger new ones turn out to save Detroit nearly $3 million in electric bills. They use aluminum wiring, which nobody wants to strip, discouraging crime. The technology even cuts carbon emissions by more than 40, 000 tons a year — equivalent to “taking 11, 000 cars off of your streets,” Shaun Donovan, Mr. Obama’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, pointed out at the lighting event, as well as “putting more money in the city’s pockets to do more good things. ” Good things like investing in development beyond the core. I met with the city’s new planning and housing chiefs, who outlined a bold agenda to target dense areas, like the one around Livernois Avenue, between Seven Mile Road and Eight Mile Road, the city’s former luxury fashion district. Homegrown entrepreneurs like Rufus Bartell, catering to a young, more population, are reviving the avenue. Mr. Bartell and his family have opened nearly a dozen businesses along Livernois, including Kuzzo’s Chicken Waffles, where he and I convened one recent morning over breakfast. The place was mobbed, as usual. Businesses like Kuzzo’s pretty much had to shut down by dinnertime during the winter when the lights were out, Mr. Bartell told me. “People didn’t want to go out to eat or shop after the sun went down,” he said. He gestured out the window toward a shop across the street. “I own a store that sells furs and leather goods, with a customer base that skews older. Foot traffic almost fell to zero after dark. Since the lights came on, it’s up 15 percent across this neighborhood. ” Back at Sister Pie, I talked with Shannon Smith, 26, another Detroit native, who said he had grown up in Cody Rouge, an area on the northwest side of the city where getting to and from the bus stop as a teenager was a nightmare when streetlights failed. He and other schoolchildren all across town waited in the dark for buses that often didn’t arrive on schedule. “I was especially vulnerable whenever it snowed, because the city didn’t clear the sidewalks,” Mr. Smith recalled. City officials told me that since 2014, using federal Department of Transportation funding, Detroit has added 80 buses, hired dozens of drivers and increased ridership by approximately 100, 000 trips a week. Buses are critical to bringing together the areas of newly targeted development. It’s one of the cruel (many here say racist) burdens of life in Detroit that automobile insurance rates for city residents are through the roof many can’t afford a car. Like the streetlights, buses restore the fabric of the streets and a base line of normalcy. I made one last stop, at Louisiana Creole Gumbo, a restaurant near downtown. Joe Spencer has owned Louisiana Creole since the early 1980s. It catered to neighborhood workers before drug dealers moved in and the lights went out. Now the lights are on, Mr. Spencer said, and diners are returning at night. But more important, he said, the lights demonstrate that City Hall followed through on a promise: “Residents stopped trusting government, and without trust people won’t want to settle here or start a business. The mayor said he’d turn the lights back on. He did. ” Among ripple effects, trust may be the most invaluable. As I said, one smart design move. | 1 |
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ISIS has declared war on Palestine, threatening genocide against the Palestinian people, following the murder of Hamas’ senior commander Saber Siam on Sunday. ISIS militants said that Siam was killed due to the fact he was “a partner in a declared war against religion and against Muslims, working for the heretical government in Gaza”. Americans.org report: The attack was conducted by ISIS-affiliated Salafist rebels who have also warned local residents to stay away from Hamas offices and buildings as it plans to carry out more attacks. The conflict between Hamas and ISIS in Gaza started when Palestinian forces demolished a makeshift mosque used by Ansar al-Bayt al-Maqdis in early May. Ansar al-Bayt al-Maqdis is an Egyptian Islamist group that has pledged allegiance to ISIS and has been recruiting Palestinians for the Islamic State. After demolishing the Almtahabin mosque, Hamas then arrested seven men, including a local Salafist Sheikh Yasser Abu Houli. ISIS claims it will kill Palestinians “one by one” and that it knows the names and addresses of all the officers working for the Palestinian Intelligence agency. | 0 |
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(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. The world lost another revered musician: Prince died at his home in Minnesota. He was 57. No cause of death has been given, but his publicist said last week that he was “fighting the flu” after reports that his plane made an emergency landing because of a health scare. His death comes just months after David Bowie, also lauded across the musical spectrum, died at age 69. _____ 2. The most important decision Republican voters make in Pennsylvania next week may not be choosing a candidate, but choosing delegates. The unusual way the state selects them means the 54 unbound delegates sent to the national convention could well end up casting decisive votes for a nominee who is not Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the divisive Republican nomination fight is forcing the party to scale back its spending. _____ 3. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders is under intense pressure to win the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday. A loss for the senator would mean watching Hillary Clinton — who has burned through tens of millions of dollars — add to her already sizable delegate lead and potentially hamper his efforts. If Mrs. Clinton secures the nomination, her embrace of military engagements abroad will most likely set her apart from any Republican rival. _____ 4. President Obama’s trip to Saudi Arabia wrapped up after a series of sessions about regional security with the leaders of six Persian Gulf nations. He’s headed to London, where he’ll offer birthday wishes to Queen Elizabeth II (she is 90 today). Also happening Friday: World leaders will sign the landmark Paris agreement to tackle climate change, although experts say the plan doesn’t go far enough. _____ 5. The owners of nearly 500, 000 diesel Volkswagen cars in the United States that are outfitted with illegal emissions software will be able to sell the cars back to the company or get them fixed, under an agreement reached today. They’ll get additional compensation, too, but how much hasn’t been determined. Other details of the settlement, including what the automaker will pay in fines, are also still to be negotiated. _____ 6. There are in the television world: ESPN fired the analyst Curt Schilling, above, over offensive remarks he made on social media, and at ABC, Kelly Ripa has been absent from the show “Live With Kelly and Michael” since being told at the last minute that her Michael Strahan, would move to “Good Morning America. ” For Mr. Schilling, comments about transgender people this week were just the latest to have led to controversy. _____ 7. Uber can keep categorizing drivers in California and Massachusetts as independent contractors. The landmark agreement, reached through a settlement in a pair of lawsuits, is a significant victory for the service, which agreed to pay as much as $100 million to about 385, 000 drivers. _____ 8. An already flooded Houston got even more rain, but forecasters are hopeful that the skies will stay dry for a couple of days after the latest storm system moves out. At least eight deaths have been blamed on the weather, which has dumped more than a foot of rain on the city and surrounding counties since Sunday. _____ 9. In Vancouver, 110 addicts have prescriptions to receive three daily doses of heroin — injected by a nurse, in a clinic. It’s the only medical facility in North America permitted to prescribe the drug’s active ingredient, and its supporters say it has helped addicts repair their fractured lives. But in the United States, proposals for similar programs have been criticized over concerns that they would encourage more drug use. _____ 10. Meet the island fox. It is small and adorable, and nearly every member of the species is literally identical. The animals, smaller than a house cat, live on islands off the coast of Southern California. Scientists are trying to figure out how their lack of genetic variation hasn’t seriously threatened their survival. _____ 11. Finally, here’s our wine critic’s list of 20 bottles that cost less than $20. Happy spring! Don’t fret if you can’t find these particular ones: Our critic says the greatest opportunity to find values is in the range of $15 to $25. 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 |
By wmw_admin on November 6, 2016 Thomas Erdbrink — New York Times Nov 5, 2016 In the past, Iranians looking to mock the United States would burn cardboard effigies of Uncle Sam or Lady Liberty. But in recent months, as the U.S. presidential election took a series of bizarre turns, Iranians seeking to make fun of the “Great Satan” ditched the arts and crafts and simply switched on their TV sets. Iran’s state television, a bastion of ideologues, for once interrupted its regular programing of the “murders and crimes committed” by the United States, and instead aired all three debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — live. In a country that tightly controls information about the United States and depictions of Western democracy generally, the decision to air the debates was unprecedented. The election is an opportunity for Iranian hard-liners rather than a threat, insiders said. “We only need to sit back and let these candidates show themselves how idiotic they are,” said Hamidreza Taraghi, a conservative analyst and a regular guest on state television. “The best way for us to prove that the U.S. government is corrupt and hideous is by showing these people live on our TV.” Live, yes, but some parts — especially those criticizing Iran — were not fully translated. After each debate, experts would discuss and agree that the U.S., especially in its current state, “cannot do a damn thing.” Iran’s political establishment has been thoroughly enjoying the campaign. Not because the ruling clerics favor either candidate, but because, they say, the tenor of the debates shows the “catastrophe” that U.S. democracy has become. On Tuesday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called the U.S. election “a spectacle for exposing their crimes and debacles.” Khamenei seized on the campaign’s tawdriest details: accusations of infidelity and sexual assault. “The remarks made by these two U.S. presidential candidates over the last few weeks on immoral issues — which are, for the most part, not baseless accusations — are enough to disgrace America,” he said during a speech commemorating the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. His supporters responded enthusiastically by shouting, “Death to America.” Trump, the Republican nominee, was not mentioned by name, but the ayatollah seemed to praise his outspokenness, saying: “People pay more attention to him.” The candidate, he said, is tapping into genuine American dissatisfaction. “Because the people look at what he says and see it is true,” Khamenei said. “They see it in the facts of their lives.” Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has been officially anti-American. Many ordinary Iranians have milder feelings for the U.S., where more than 2 million of their relatives live. Iran’s leaders, however, are entangled in a constant battle for power and influence with the United States, which was long the strongest power in the Middle East. The U.S. withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan have emboldened Iran. Leaders felt comfortable enough to cut a nuclear deal with the U.S. and expand Iranian influence in the region, local analysts said. “America is no longer a superpower in the region. It’s weak in the Middle East. They are now only one of the players,” said Jalal Barzegar, a reformist journalist. “It’s now just a country.” For Iranians uninterested in watching the debates, Iran’s state television had another option. In recent weeks it has been airing Netflix’s “House of Cards,” called “House of Straw” here because playing cards is considered un-Islamic. Kevin Spacey’s portrayal as the conniving politician Frank Underwood is the perfect embodiment of the “inhumane face” of U.S. politics, state television officials have said. Apparently, Khamenei has also been watching. In his recent speech, he quoted a line uttered by Spacey in the series. “‘Shake with your right hand, but hold a rock in your left one,’ as they say themselves,” Khamenei said. “This is the kind of people they are.” | 0 |
OTTAWA — Rapidly changing winds brought Alberta’s huge wildfire to the perimeter of two of the oldest and largest of Canada’s oil sands complexes on Tuesday, posing a new threat to an industry that just a day earlier had been preparing to resume operations. And hopes that residents of the city of Fort McMurray, or at least those whose houses were not destroyed, might soon be able to return similarly waned. While the huge firestorm’s new path largely bypassed the city on Monday night and early Tuesday, two explosions added an additional 10 houses to the tally of destruction. An estimated 2, 400 buildings have been destroyed, officials said. As the raging blaze, now more than a week old, turned north, skirting the western edge of Fort McMurray on Monday afternoon and evening, a series of small camps holding about 600 oil sands workers were evacuated. By Tuesday, according to Rachel Notley, the premier of Alberta, about 6, 000 workers had been moved to the north while an additional 2, 000 fled south. Thousands of the northern escapees then made their way back south to Edmonton, the nearest major city to Fort McMurray, by air on Tuesday. The workers had mainly come from the big mines and processing facilities owned by the companies Suncor and Syncrude. Over the past week, workers had been gradually traveling north from Edmonton and elsewhere to restart those operations. Some of them had just returned only to quickly find themselves again boarding an evacuation bus. By midday on Tuesday, the provincial government said that just eight employees remained at Suncor and 78 at Syncrude. In normal times, up to 7, 400 people work at Syncrude, producing up to 350, 000 barrels of oil a day. Most of the holdouts are members of the two companies’ fire brigades. Chad Morrison, the head of Alberta’s wildfire service, said that the fire was now close to the Syncrude and Suncor oil sands plants. As it made its way there overnight on Monday, the flames devoured a work camp that had been evacuated hours earlier. But Mr. Morrison added that “we feel there’s good resilience with the industrial sites. ” In addition to having and fire brigades of their own, a wide band of gravel surrounds the oil sands operations as a fire break. Both companies have been extending the size of those barriers since the outbreak of the wildfire. If the fire nevertheless finds a way to enter the open pit mines where gigantic excavators scoop up tar like bitumen and place it in similarly oversize dump trucks, Mr. Morrison said that the province’s experience during a 2011 fire suggested that the bitumen is unlikely to ignite. The plants where the bitumen is separated from sand and then converted into a synthetic crude oil present a potentially greater fire risk. Yet they are located well away from the fire and the forests. While firefighting efforts have been concentrated on preserving the undamaged parts of Fort McMurray, reopening the oil sands plants, which generally lie to the north, has also been a priority. In an analysis written just before the latest setback, the Conference Board of Canada estimated that 14 days of shutdown would mean a loss of production valued at 985 million Canadian dollars, about $762 million. Royalties from the oil sands are also an important part of the provincial budget. Some oil sands operations, like those of Shell Canada, are well north and were not affected on Tuesday. There were no estimates late Tuesday afternoon about when the workers might be able to give restarting the operations a second try. On Monday, smoke was clearly as big a problem as the fire. Video made by evacuating workers showed that the atmosphere had turned a dull red. Normally, Alberta’s poorest air quality ranking is 10, with 1 being the cleanest. Ms. Notley said that the rating hit 38 on Monday and was still at 13 on Tuesday. The cause of the two explosions remained under investigation, Ms. Notley said. After a round of setbacks, Ms. Notley’s one bit of good news was not unalloyed. “The more that’s burned around the edge of Fort McMurray,” she told a news conference, “the safer it becomes. ” | 1 |
More than five months after a mysterious substance exploded in Central Park, blowing off the lower part of a man’s left leg, many questions about the episode persist. Law enforcement officials continue to believe the blast may have been the result of an amateur’s experiment with homemade explosives. But they have yet to determine why the explosive was in the park or to identify a suspect or make an arrest. On Friday, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is investigating the explosion along with the New York Police Department, said it would offer a $12, 500 reward for information that led to a suspect, bringing the total amount of reward money being offered by law enforcement agencies in connection with the blast to $25, 000. The authorities also asked for anyone to come forward who might have taken photographs or videos near the explosion site, around the entrance to the park at 60th Street and Fifth Avenue, in the days before the blast. The announcement came as investigators continued to struggle to solve the mystery behind the July 3 explosion. Connor Golden, who was visiting New York City from Virginia, was climbing down from a rock formation with two friends when a bag he stepped on exploded around 11 a. m. Occurring in such a heavily used section of the city on a holiday weekend, the accident rattled people in the area. The sense of unease was compounded by news media reports, which proved untrue, that the police had shut down the entire park. Soon after the explosion, officials suggested they believed it was a fireworks experiment gone awry. But no motive or explanation has yet been established. The police have said they do not believe the explosive was placed as a booby trap. Mr. Golden’s family has criticized those characterizations. “We’ve consistently been maintaining that the public has been lulled in the false sense of complacency by early statements by officials,” Kevin Golden, Mr. Golden’s father, said in a telephone interview from Virginia on Friday. The younger Mr. Golden has returned to the University of Miami, where he is a sophomore. He now has a prosthetic leg. His family has been raising money to help defray the medical expenses they incurred because of the injury. Kevin Golden said the family has kept in touch with investigators in New York and that he had been lobbying officials to describe the explosion with more gravity. The announcement that the reward would double, he said, was “at least partially the result of that pressing. ” “We applaud the additional exposure and think it’s a step in the right direction,” he said. “We think that the people in the New York City area should be concerned about the potential causes of that explosion and should come forward with any information. ” | 1 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good morning. Here’s what you need to know: • Sessions offered attorney general post. Donald J. Trump has chosen Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama for the cabinet position. While Mr. Sessions, a close adviser to Mr. Trump, is well liked in the Senate, his record as a federal prosecutor in the 1980s may become an issue for Democrats and civil rights groups. Also today, Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas was picked to run the C. I. A. He’s a former Army officer who gained prominence during the hearings into the 2012 attack on an American compound in Benghazi, Libya. The news follows a report from a top official who says Mr. Trump has asked Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn to be his national security adviser. General Flynn has helped shape the ’s view that the U. S. is at “world war” with Islamist militants. • More transition news. Mr. Trump is scheduled to meet this weekend with someone who once called him a “phony”: Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee. The meeting comes as Mr. Trump’s Jared Kushner, seeks a way to join the administration without violating laws. • What does “America First” mean? The slogan used by Mr. Trump to describe his philosophy on governing is being put to the test. We look at the challenges the faces on Iran, North Korea and Syria and in Europe. Separately, Mr. Trump said on Twitter Thursday night that he helped save a Ford plant from leaving for Mexico. The company, though, never planned to move the factory. Meanwhile, President Obama is meeting with European leaders today in Berlin and will then head to Peru for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting. • A tale of two nations. Our reporters and photographers spent the past week gauging the feelings of Americans. “They returned with a portrait of a country at odds with itself,” our magazine editor says. Our graphics team took a different approach: They created two maps that represent the divide between Republicans and Democrats. • Finding hope after hate. You may have read this week about a recent wave of reports of attacks. But the violence has been countered by acts of public support and solidarity, as in the case of an Iraqi family in Maryland after they found a threat taped to their door. • Potential agricultural breakthrough. Scientists announced a discovery that could increase the world’s food supply. Using genetic engineering to tinker with photosynthesis, they were able to boost a plant’s productivity as much as 20 percent. One scientist said gains of 50 percent were possible. • Social media’s role in U. S. politics, and the fake news sometimes used to sway voters, is now in the spotlight, but other nations have been dealing with the problem for years. Chatbots releasing false information on Twitter were used to disrupt political discussions in the U. S. a new study found. • In memoriam: Ruth Baron Ziff, 92, a sociologist and trailblazer in the advertising world of the 1950s. Her work influenced the famous “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin” toilet paper commercials. • Worried about what you can’t control? Our personal finance columnist offers ways to cope with anxieties over the economy and politics. • U. S. stocks were up on Thursday. Here’s a snapshot of global markets. • Chasing pirates on the Amazon. Piracy is a growing menace in South America. Join a police force on a patrol in Brazil. • New at the movies. We review “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” a footnote to the films based on J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. “This time out the wizard isn’t a boy on the verge of manhood but a man idling in boyhood,” our critic writes. Navigating the teenage years is at the heart of “The Edge of Seventeen. ” The comedy, our critic says, “can hold its own” with movies like “Clueless” that have raised the bar for teenage films. • A lost world is found. Archaeologists hit the jackpot this fall in the Black Sea. The discovery of a sunken medieval ship led to finding dozens more shipwrecks off Bulgaria’s coast. “We can expect some real contributions to our understanding of ancient trade routes,” one researcher said. • The American Thanksgiving. The country will celebrate one of its most cherished holidays next week. Fifteen families showed us the dishes they make that speak most eloquently about their traditions. Their stories, our food editor writes, tell “the story of who we are. ” • Recipe of the day. Make tonight a taco night. Try versions with fish or pork. Over the weekend, brush up on how to cook brussels sprouts. Brazil is celebrating an important holiday on Sunday, though it’s one that may be unfamiliar outside the country: Black Consciousness Day. Slavery existed in Brazil until 1888, making it the last country in the Americas to abolish the practice. More than five million slaves were sent to Brazil through the Atlantic trade, compared with about 300, 000 in mainland North America, according to one of the most thoroughly researched academic estimates. Today the nation has more residents of African heritage than any other country outside Africa. The population has historically been underrepresented in government, but a rise in citizens identifying as black or mixed race is helping to chip away at economic and educational inequalities. Black Consciousness Day was established in 2003, featuring the “Freedom Walk” — parades around the country meant to show the size of the black population. The date, Nov. 20, was set for the anniversary of the death of Zumbi dos Palmares, one of the great black heroes of the Americas. He led a small kingdom founded by runaway slaves. He was killed by the Portuguese in 1695, after they overran his republic. But the power of his story has only grown as the country embraces its African roots. A researcher with the Museum in São Paulo sees more progress ahead: “We Brazilian blacks are finally learning to be black. ” _____ Photographs may appear out of order for some readers. Viewing this version of the briefing should help. Your Morning Briefing is published weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern and updated on the web all morning. What would you like to see here? Contact us at briefing@nytimes. com. You can sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — As Republicans try to move past the furor that Donald J. Trump provoked with his attack on a judge, party leaders are finding themselves in the unpleasant position of asking yet again just how far is too far — and what, if anything, they can do to keep Mr. Trump in check. Some lawmakers, senior members of the Republican National Committee and delegates to the party’s convention next month in Cleveland acknowledged in interviews this week that another disruptive crisis would force the party to begin seriously looking at ways to deny Mr. Trump the nomination. So far, discussions of a renewed drive have taken place only among the factions of the party that are openly opposed to Mr. Trump, and they have failed to gain much support. But Mr. Trump’s suggestion that Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel’s Mexican heritage should disqualify him from hearing a lawsuit against Trump University has reawakened talk of hatching a convention coup — a complicated and nearly impossible measure of last resort that has no precedent in modern Republican politics. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and one of Mr. Trump’s most unapologetic backers on Capitol Hill, suggested this week that Mr. Trump had “a crucial or period” to smooth out his rougher edges or put his nomination in jeopardy. Stopping Mr. Trump at this point could prove additionally difficult, however, because he has quietly filled the most important convention committees — those that will determine the rules and platform — with delegates loyal to him. Initially seen as not having a strong delegate whip operation, Mr. Trump can now count on about half the seats on the platform and rules committees, according to Republicans who have been tracking delegate selection. This is a major turnaround from two months ago, when Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign was sweeping the delegate contests. Conflicting impulses are at play. Republicans have been reluctant to openly encourage a challenge to Mr. Trump at the convention for fear of hopelessly splitting the party. But they are not discouraging the idea, either, as their patience with Mr. Trump’s erratic and offensive behavior wears thin. A Republican National Committee spokesman declined to comment Thursday on calls to push Mr. Trump aside. The most prominent voice to call for Mr. Trump’s ouster since his attack on Judge Curiel has been that of Hugh Hewitt, a host who is respected in conservative circles but has no role in the nomination process. On his show Wednesday, Mr. Hewitt advocated opening the convention to let the delegates decide the nominee because ignoring Mr. Trump’s flaws, he said, was like “ignoring Stage IV cancer. ” But the more resigned responses from party leaders like Paul D. Ryan, the speaker of the House, and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, signaled what many more Republicans have concluded: For better or worse, they are stuck with Mr. Trump. “I think it would tear the party apart if we started changing rules,” said John Whitbeck, the chairman of the Virginia Republican Party and a delegate to the convention. “Our voters have spoken,” he added. Mr. Whitbeck said that he had spoken with aides to Mr. Trump on Wednesday and that they seemed unfazed. “They do not believe that this is something that’s going to have an impact on the race,” he said. “And if they’re correct, we’ll just have to wait until the next controversial thing he says. And there will be other things. This guy just doesn’t care. ” The talk of forcing Mr. Trump from the ticket presumes something many Republicans are so far not willing to concede: That he is a lost cause whose tendencies will make it impossible for him to beat Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee. Party leaders — most notably Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Mr. Ryan, the House speaker — have seemed eager to forgive Mr. Trump and move on. Several Republicans said this week that a statement Mr. Trump issued Tuesday afternoon, in which he attempted to explain his remarks about the judge, did buy him some good will. Mr. Preibus, for one, praised Mr. Trump late Tuesday, saying his speech that night amid the uproar over the judge was “exactly the right approach and perfectly delivered. ” Republican leaders are also unwilling to be seen as nullifying the results of a nominating process in which Mr. Trump received more than 13 million votes, a record for a Republican primary contender. But their reasons may have more to do with simple realism than with lofty principles: For much of the last year, Republican elites have proved incapable of reeling Mr. Trump in, let alone of blocking his path. Once Mr. Trump became the presumptive nominee last month, party officials more or less fell in line. Even Mr. Ryan came around, announcing last week that he would support Mr. Trump — just as Mr. Trump, it turned out, was unloading on Judge Curiel. One other obstacle confronts the “Never Trump” crowd: No candidate of any stature has stepped forward to challenge Mr. Trump at the convention. “Until somebody gets courage, it doesn’t matter,” said Curly Haugland, a member of the convention Rules Committee from North Dakota who has argued that delegates should vote their consciences in Cleveland — a position that puts him at odds with the leadership of the Republican National Committee. Without a candidate, Mr. Haugland added, all talk of a contested convention is meaningless. “In order to have a contested convention,” he said, “we need to have contestants. ” | 1 |
If you're a DemocRAT you lie. It's what you do. Too bad switching to Geiko can't save us from all their lies. | 0 |
BERLIN — A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for, the old maritime saying goes. A German sailing couple, seized and held for ransom eight years ago by Somali pirates, apparently lived by that rule. A German yachting website reported Monday that the couple appeared to have been abducted again, this time while cruising a dangerous area of the Philippines, by militants of Abu Sayyaf, an insurgent group known for kidnapping and ransoming foreigners. The woman was said to have been killed. The couple, Jürgen Kantner, 70, and his partner, Sabine Merz, have been sailing the oceans for many years aboard their the Rockall. They were held for 52 days in Somalia in 2008 before their captors freed them, reportedly after a ransom had been paid. The Philippine media on Monday reported that a German couple had been attacked while sailing in an area of the southern Philippines under the control of Abu Sayyaf. The woman was shot and the man abducted, the reports said. The Philippine Daily Inquirer quoted a spokesman for Abu Sayyaf as saying via telephone that the woman had fired upon them. “Our men shot back and killed her,” he said. The newspaper said that the spokesman had made a man come to the phone and that he had identified himself as Jürgen Kantner. The account quoted him as saying: “Pirates took our boat and they took us. ” In Berlin, the foreign ministry said it was working with Philippine authorities to clarify the situation. “As always in such cases, I would like to be very ” said the ministry spokesman, Martin Schäfer. He stressed that there was no confirmation of the reported killing or the abduction. Uwe Janssen, editor in chief of the German yachting website, Yacht. de, noted the lack of official confirmation but wrote that a photograph released by the Philippine military authorities “is clear: the attacked vessel indeed belongs to Jürgen Kantner. ” The sailboat in the photo is marked Rockall, the same name that was on the vessel captured by the Somalis eight years ago. Mr. Janssen said, “Everything suggests that the two victims” were Mr. Kantner and Ms. Merz. In May 2009, Agence reported that Mr. Kantner had returned to Somalia after the couple’s abduction and release, and quoted him as vowing to get the Rockall seaworthy once more and to set off for Asia. “Why should I return to Germany, where I have nobody?” he was quoted as saying. “After 32 years on my boat, I have lost all contact with them. ” He acknowledged “that it is a little bit like suicide,” and said he prayed that he would not get captured a second time. In a lengthy interview with the German magazine Yacht after the 2008 abduction, Mr. Kantner and Ms. Merz said they had been captured then while sailing close to the coast of Yemen, and that they had no warning of special danger. They dismissed suggestions that they had courted danger, citing cases of vessels robbed in calmer regions, like the Canary Islands or Corsica. | 1 |
Leave a reply Charles Hugh Smith – Correspondent Bart D. (Australia) captured the entire global economy in three words: The Landfill Economy. Stuff is manufactured, energy is consumed shipping it somewhere, consumers buy it and shortly thereafter it ends up as garbage in the landfill. This is of course the definition of “economic growth”: waste, inefficiency, environmental destruction–none of these matter. Only two things matter: maximize “growth” by any means necessary, and maximize profits by any means necessary. The Landfill Economy now encompasses the entire planet. The swirling gyre of plastic trash the size of Texas between Hawaii and California: it’s just one modest example of the planetary trash dump that “growth” and profit generate as byproducts/blowback. The planet’s oceans are one giant trash dump. Everything from plastic water bottles to abandoned fishing nets to radiation to containers that fell off ships is floating around even the most distant corners of the seas. Seabirds nesting in remote islands die of starvation as their guts fill with plastic bits of “permanent growth.” Globalization has turned the planet’s land masses and rivers into trash dumps.Want to make a quick profit along a tropical sea coast? Dig some big holes near the coast, dump in baby prawns, food and chemicals to suppress algae blooms and diseases and then harvest the prawns to ship to the insatiable markets of the developed world. Once the prawn farms are poisoned wastelands, move on and despoil another coastline elsewhere. Globalization has greased the slippery slope from factory to landfill by enabling the global distribution of defective parts. Whether they are pirated, designed to fail or just the result of slipshod quality control, the flood of defective parts guarantee that the entire assembly they are installed in–stoves, vacuum cleaners, transmissions, electronics, you name it–will soon fail and be shipped directly to the landfill, as repairing stuff is far costlier than buying a new replacement. QE/ZIRP Is Crushing the Global Supply Chain, Product Quality and Profits (October 17, 2016) The Keynesian Cargo Cults that rule global economics love The Landfill Economy because it means more “growth”. Never mind the poisoned seas, rivers and land, or the immense waste of energy, commodities and labor that result from the global manufacture and distribution of shoddy products: if it adds to “growth,” it’s all good in the warped view of the Keynesian Cargo Cults. We got your “growth” right here. People are also tossed on the trash heap with careless abandon. The health of workers is a cost that reduces profits, so it’s ignored unless it can be turned into a profit center via state funding for managing preventable diseases, i.e. sickcare. A worker sickened by industrial waste or lifestyle illnesses who becomes a profit center is a wonderful source of “growth” and profits. A worker who can’t generate a corporation or state a profit is dumped on the trash heap as a matter of routine. A worker who can’t generate somebody a profit or “growth” by taking on more debt to spend spend spend is worthless. If a robot or software can do the same work, then it is self-destructive for an enterprise to pay a human worker: if profits fall, Wall Street will crucify the enterprise and competitors will eat it alive. This “maximizing growth and profits is the highest good” mode of production is insane. It doesn’t have to rule the world. As I outline in my book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology & Creating Jobs for All , other more efficient, sustainable and humane modes of production are within reach if we escape from the global grip of the destructive “growth by any means” cult. Charles Smith is a Contributing Writer for Shift Frequency SF Source Of Two Minds Nov. 2016 Share this: | 0 |
Great article ! | 0 |
JACKSON, Miss. — Thousands of miles away from home, in a solidly Republican state, a British populist politician came here on Wednesday to deliver “a message of hope and a message of optimism. ” “You have a fantastic opportunity here,” said Nigel Farage, the outgoing U. K. Independence Party leader in Britain who is credited with leading the Brexit movement months ago. “You can go out, you can beat the pollsters, you can beat the commentators, you can beat Washington, and you’ll do it by doing what we did for Brexit in Britain. ” In a campaign that has staked its reputation on “America First,” the presence of a foreign politician was as unexpected as a Republican presidential candidate campaigning in a deeply conservative state with 11 weeks left in the election, yet Mr. Farage delivered a rousing speech in support of Donald J. Trump, keeping in line with the candidate’s populist message and offering supporters a vision and an example that they can win. He repeatedly referred to how the Brexit vote represented an upstart victory for the “little people,” how his political effort turned out “people who have never voted in their lives” and how “anything is possible if enough decent people are prepared to stand up to the establishment. ” His remarks offered a salve of optimism as Mr. Trump finds himself behind in many national and swing state polls. Mr. Farage pointed out that the Brexit vote had “beat the pollsters” and that it could be done again. For Mr. Trump, who stood just to the side of the lectern as Mr. Farage spoke, repeatedly nodding, smiling and applauding, the Brexit vote presented a parallel for his campaign. “I was very supportive of their right to do it and take control of their own future like exactly what we’re going to be voting for on Nov. 8,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “November is our chance to redeclare American independence. ” Initially, Mr. Farage expressed reticence in directly addressing the politics of the election, noting that he himself had criticized President Obama’s speech in Britain before the Brexit vote. “Having criticized and condemned his behavior, I could not possibly tell you how to vote in this election, but … ” he said as he let his voice trail off and the crowd whoop itself into a frenzy. Moments later, he reversed course. “If I was an American citizen, I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton if you paid me,” he said, and urged the crowd to “get your walking boots on” and “get out there campaigning. ” For the rest of the rally, Mr. Trump ran through most of his standard stump speech, repeatedly harping on the immigration plan of Mrs. Clinton and accusing her of playing identity politics and delivering his harshest criticism of the candidate’s relationship with minority voters. “Hillary Clinton is a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future,” Mr. Trump told the crowd. Mr. Trump and Mr. Farage appeared at a dinner before the rally, where Mr. Trump had said he was brilliant for championing Brexit and remind the crowd that he predicted the victory, according to an attendee at the dinner. Mr. Farage’s presence seemed to offer Mr. Trump living proof of his clairvoyance, as Mr. Trump constantly says in his speeches that he is “very good at predicting. ” There was the occasional moment at the rally, however, when the declared parallels between the Brexit vote and the Trump campaign seemed to be lost on the crowd. At one point, Mr. Farage ratcheted his voice up with the gusto normally reserved for an applause line. “The big coward,” he shouted, referring to Minister David Cameron, and attacking him for inviting a “foreign visitor” to London. More silence from the crowd. “Yes, we were visited by one Barack Obama,” he said. The boos rained down. | 1 |
HANOI, Vietnam — President Obama arrived in the steamy capital of Vietnam ahead of schedule on Sunday night to begin three days of meetings in hopes of luring yet another Southeast Asian country away from China’s tight embrace. He was greeted on the tarmac by a young woman in a long yellow dress who handed him a bouquet of flowers. Several Vietnamese officials shook the president’s hand before he climbed into his limousine for a quick trip to his hotel after nearly 24 hours of travel. Quiet clusters of people on the dark streets watched his motorcade pass. Except for the small groups, the streets seemed to have been completely cleared. Since Air Force One had been scheduled to land after midnight, or about three hours later, the official arrival ceremony with high officials in attendance was postponed until Monday morning. Maybe then Mr. Obama will see the kind of emotional outpouring that greeted President Bill Clinton in 2000, when he became the first United States president to visit the country since the Vietnam War. But it is possible that relations between the two countries have reached a stage that the arrival of an American head of state no longer seems so unusual. Mr. Obama will meet with the country’s newly installed prime minister and president on Monday, then get together with the country’s real power — Nguyen Phu Trong, the general secretary of the Communist Party. Mr. Obama’s visit is an important step in a complex dance that Vietnam has carried on with China for centuries. Most of Vietnam’s illustrious historical figures made their reputations by battling Chinese invaders. The population here is deeply nationalistic and sentiment is visceral. The American War, as it is known here, is mostly forgotten, particularly since half of the population is under 30. Vietnam relies on China for trade, investment and even the water that feeds the vast Mekong Delta, so the leadership knows it can poke the dragon only so much. Indeed, Vietnam had mostly sought to appease China since a brief and bloody war between the countries in 1979, and had shrugged off a series of provocations as China sought in recent years to assert its dominance over the South China Sea, which extends the length of Vietnam’s coast. But in 2014, China placed a giant drilling rig to explore for oil and gas right off the Vietnamese coast, and Mr. Trong could not even get his telephone calls to Beijing returned. The confrontation touched off angry protests in Vietnam that led to the deaths of two Chinese and the destruction of Taiwanese and South Korean factories. Since then, Vietnam has stepped up its contacts with the United States. Neither the United States nor Vietnam is ready for a formal alliance, but Vietnam may grant American warships access to its ports, and Washington seems certain at least to widen exceptions to its longtime arms embargo and may end it altogether. Human rights remain a barrier to closer ties. thugs routinely attack dissidents, and recent protests over a toxic spill that killed vast numbers of fish led to beatings and arrests by the police. While the country does have elections — polling places were packed Sunday for a parliamentary election — candidates must be approved by the Communist Party. Mr. Obama plans to meet with some dissidents and civil society leaders on Tuesday before making a speech. Brad Adams, the Asia director at Human Rights Watch, suggested that the president “should start by calling for the right of all people to stand for election, voice critical views of government, associate with others and freely choose candidates. ” American help in reforming Vietnam’s economy is also high on the agenda for leaders of both countries. While Vietnam has grown robustly — the transformation of this city’s airport and skyline over the past two decades is astonishing — the country remains saddled with a bloated state sector that dominates telecommunications and other crucial parts of the economy, and reliance on manufacturing that will be increasingly difficult to sustain as the country prospers. Widespread corruption undermines economic growth government officials with modest salaries can be seen touring the countryside in expensive European automobiles. There are keen hopes here that the Partnership, a trade agreement with the United States and 10 other countries, will provide a huge boost. The World Bank estimated that Vietnam would gain the most from the agreement, adding 10 percent to its economic growth by 2030 through increased sales from its textiles and apparel industries. Vietnam is the only developing country in the pact, and it had to make major concessions on issues like allowing independent labor unions and ensuring environmental compliance. “Vietnam has agreed to allow independent unions that can control their own finances, elect their own leaders, conduct strikes, affiliate as they wish, get assistance from outside labor organizations,” the United States trade representative, Michael Froman, said in a briefing. There is some debate about whether the promised changes are transformational or just cosmetic, but the government took a risk in promising to make them and is now dismayed to see that the pact has little chance of passing Congress anytime soon. Still, innovation incubators, technology and a focus on small and companies are now all the rage among development agencies and government officials. Mr. Obama intends to address attendees at an entrepreneurship event on Tuesday afternoon in Ho Chi Minh City. | 1 |
James Bond wouldn’t make the grade in modern MI6, says Britain’s top... James Bond wouldn’t make the grade in modern MI6, says Britain’s top spy By 0 41
Fictional super-spy James Bond’s lack of a moral compass would quickly rule him out of the intelligence services today, the head of MI6 said in a rare public statement.
In a question-and-answer session for the Black History Month website, spy chief Alex Younger said 007’s lack of an ethical core would have seen him rejected from training.
“ We know that if we undermine British values, even in the name of defending them, then we have failed. Our staff are not from another planet ,” Younger said.
“ They are ordinary men and women operating in the face of complex moral, ethical and physical challenges, often in the most forbidding environments on Earth .”
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“ In contrast to James Bond, MI6 officers are not for taking moral shortcuts. In fact, a strong ethical core is one of the first qualities we look for in our staff, ” he added.
Younger insisted that Bond’s erratic individualism would certainly have rendered him unable to “get through our recruitment process.”
“ Whilst we share his qualities of patriotism, energy and tenacity, an intelligence officer in the real MI6 has a high degree of emotional intelligence, values teamwork and always has respect for the law… unlike Mr. Bond, ” Younger said.
Some, however, would contest claims that MI6 is a bastion of ethical conduct, not least during the UK’s heavy involvement in kidnap and torture in the post-9/11 world.
A Libyan kidnapped and delivered to the Libyan regime for torture recently questioned the commitment to morality of a previous MI6 head.
In July, Abdul Hakim Belhaj said former MI6 chief Mark Allen was mistaken if he thinks a recent article he wrote for a Christian magazine means his “account is settled with God.”
In 2004, Abdul Hakim Belhaj was kidnapped in Hong Kong with British complicity, along with his pregnant wife, and rendered back to his native Libya. He was then held and tortured by the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi for six years.
A note faxed from Allen to the Libyan authorities told the regime’s spy chief Moussa Koussa: “ I congratulate you on the safe arrival of… the air cargo. ”
On August 4, a day before the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided it would not press charges against Allen, the ex-spook published a piece in the Catholic Herald on “ Christian ” approaches to terrorism.
Belhaj’s response, which had been offered to the Herald, was published on the website of the Reprieve human rights charity.
“ His words on the power of faith to see us through bloodshed are too rich to swallow, ” the torture victim wrote in reference to the now infamous ‘ air cargo ’ fax.
Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license. | 0 |
Battles for Senate Lead to ‘Precipitous Rise’ in Cloaked Money Spending Deirdre Fulton / Common Dreams Hey, big spender: The battle for one of Pennsylvania’s seats in the Senate pits Republican incumbent Pat Toomey (pictured) against Democratic opponent Katie McGinty in a race edging close to the record for total spending on a campaign for Congress. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr / CC-BY-SA)
“We have truly crossed a new Rubicon,” one campaign finance expert says in response to new data showing record levels of outside spending pouring into high-stakes Senate races this election cycle.
According to an analysis released Tuesday by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, outside groups—free from contribution limits and sometimes able to conceal their donors from the public—are outspending both political parties and candidates “in the battle for control of the U.S. Senate.”
In fact, of the $557 million spent so far in 10 key Senate contests, the Brennan Center says such groups are responsible for $282 million, or 51 percent. Further, in each of the four most expensive contests—Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—candidates account for 37 percent or less of total spending.
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“This may be a new high for non-party outside spending, although direct comparisons to past cycles are hindered by a lack of available data,” the report states .
Brennan Center
The analysis takes into account “shadow party groups—super PACs and nonprofits run by former top staff of party committees or party leaders and able to mimic party spending strategy—as nonparty outside groups,” the Brennan Center explains. “This is because these groups, despite being controlled to some degree by the parties, take unlimited contributions and sometimes hide their donors. That the parties are increasingly outsourcing their finances to unregulated shadow parties severely weakens the campaign finance system’s protections against corruption and undue influence.”
Among the report’s other notable findings:
● GOP winning outside money battle: Nearly 60 percent of the money spent so far in top Senate races supports GOP candidates, a reversal from 2014. Dark money spending, from groups that conceal their donors, favors GOP candidates six to one.
● Dark money spending is highly concentrated: Just three groups, One Nation, with ties to Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell; the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity; and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, account for 67 percent of all dark money spending.
“The precipitous rise of outside groups is problematic for a few reasons,” said study author Ian Vandewalker, counsel in the Brennan Center’s democracy program.
“Unlike the parties and candidates, they are free to accept donations of unlimited size and can conceal their funders from the public,” he continued. “So the bigger a role they play in an election, the more political power is concentrated in the hands of a few million-dollar funders and professional political operatives, with a consequent loss in power for the millions of Americans who can’t afford jumbo donations. While this problem was created in part by 2010’s Citizens United decision , the 2016 data shows we have truly crossed a new Rubicon.”
To snatch back some of that power, the Brennan Center calls for the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse its damaging decision in Citizens United; for stronger rules against coordination between candidates and outside groups; for improved disclosure and transparency laws; and “most fundamentally” for a public campaign financing system to “provide an alternative to the incentives to chase bigger and bigger checks that currently drive political spending, allowing candidates to fund competitive campaigns without relying on the wealthiest donors.”
Two such public financing systems are on statewide ballots this November. TAGS: | 0 |
8 Ways To Forge Strength Through Challenges 8 Ways To Forge Strength Through Challenges
Corey is an aspiring iconoclast. He believes that the key to life is for men to honour their primal nature.
Learn more about his views at theprimalmale.com You can also follow him on Twitter . November 14, 2016 Mind
We, modern men, need to constantly improve ourselves in a hostile world like ours that tries to debase us. While the lesser “men” embrace weakness and degeneracy, we must embrace strength and discipline. While whiners complain about how unfair the world is and how it’s better to just disengage, we must engage the world with greater willpower and defeat our enemies. Towards this end, I propose that we become both resilient and antifragile in every way possible.
The following are ways you can turn a seemingly negative circumstances into strengths. 1. Stress
Although stress has been maligned as the plague of the modern world that wrecks our mental and physical health, the way you perceive it makes a profound difference on how it affects you. New studies have shown that those who see stress as being toxic suffered damaging health effects while who saw it as being helpful were able to turn it into a source of energy to push them through their challenges.
So, next time you feel stressed from whatever trouble you may be facing, remember that it is your friend. You must reframe the sensation and believe that it’s your body trying to help you. By changing how you processes stress, you can use it to succeed in life. 2. Obstacles Your response to obstacles reveal the kind of man you really are.
Whatever obstacles you may face in your endeavors, you have two choices: become frustrated and discouraged by it, or see it as an opportunity to grow stronger. Like stress, it’s the weaker man’s inclination to view an obstacle as a confirmation of his own helplessness, but you must do better and face up to whatever gets in your way. Use every occasion to grow stronger from your obstacles and if you aren’t facing enough of them in your life, you need to get out and start doing more things.
How you deal with obstacle will show your true nature as a man for the world to see. So, don’t pussy out or moan about what you must overcome; instead, be determined to rise above it. Your honor is at stake. 3. Failures
Failures are inevitable in life. Although you should always try your best to succeed, you shouldn’t be afraid to fail either. Just as with obstacles, view every instance of failure as an opportunity to learn and adapt. It’s not failure itself that is bad, but not learning from it or giving up so easily. Remember: winners don’t quit; they try to do better. 4. Rejection
Rejection is a specific kind of failure that is often the most painful of them all. It’s especially difficult because it’s often unclear whether it was actually your fault or not. I would say that it’s best to assume full responsibility for all the rejections you face and see what area you can improve to better increase your chance next time. As long as you’re willing to learn and as long as you’re willing to try again, you will grow. Master rejections and you’ll be placing yourself far above other men. 5. Physical Discomfort This is why Russians are so tough.
It’s well known that the human body is designed to be anti-fragile. Your bones get thicker with every blow and your skin gets tougher with every scrap. Pain and discomfort of all sorts also become more bearable the more you expose yourself to them. The more harshness you endure, the stronger you become over time. But inversely, the more comfortable you are, the softer you turn and the weaker you get.
One simple method you can implement to become more healthy and energized is to start taking cold showers. The benefits of doing it are many, including: stronger immune system, enhanced mood and energy, better circulation, boost in testosterone level, and so on. If you are having trouble getting started, start by doing just 30 seconds at the end of your usual warm shower and go from there. You want to train yourself until you can comfortably stand under the coldest water for at least five minutes. 6. Fear
You can’t really turn fear itself into a positive, but the process of conquering your fears can have a transformative effect on your life. Some of the proudest, most exciting, and memorable moments of my life were when I defied fears by doing a presentation in front of hundreds of people (I had a terrible stage-fright), going rock climbing (I have a terrible fear of heights), and traveling for the first time by myself to a foreign country.
One thing you can do to completely turn your life around is to do what this man did and make a list of all the fears that you wish to defeat. Write them down in an order from the least fearful to the most and start knocking them down one by one. It’s impossible not to become a better man once you conquer them all. 7. Anger
Like fear, anger is not something you can transform into a positive trait (I’ve heard of people “transmutating” their anger to re-channel the energy into other activities, but I’ve never had it work that way). However, it is a good focal point to master your mind to become more stoic. It can also serve as your area of focus if you practice meditation.
No matter how unpleasant, your anger will teach you a lot about yourself and only if you allow it. It will reveal your weaknesses, insecurities, and any other areas of your life in need of improvement. As one of the most base and primal of human emotions, you shouldn’t just shirk it as something that is unneeded; instead, make it your friend. 8. Negativity And Pessimism
For the longest time, I felt guilty about being “so negative” because I was constantly told by everyone else that it was a bad thing. Smile, they said; think positively, they said; your life will improve, they said. I was constantly berated for not being part of the North American positivity cult. It’s no wonder why people there tend to say that they’re doing “great” even when they’re feeling like shit (a habit I have yet to fix).
But in contrary to the long held belief that positive thinking and attitude gives you a better life, studies have shown just the opposite: Forced positivity can actually harm you . For some people (like me) positive thinking backfires and makes things worse. Also, bad-tempered people who are pessimists have been shown to enjoy more successful marriages, be healthier, live longer, be better at negotiating, and more successful overall in life. So, if you’re a natural grouch like me, it’s time to embrace who you are and tell the fake-ass, positivity people to shove it. Conclusion
The road to self-improvement is an ugly and a bumpy one. I honestly can’t say that I enjoy it. But no matter what, I know that it is a necessary part of being a man. I can’t imagine myself not trying to be better in spite of all the difficulties. I refuse to live a life of complacency. Some people mock and insult our efforts , but know that their opinions don’t matter. Lesser men have no say on what it means to live. So, fight on and prosper, for this is your one and only life. | 0 |
JewTube Shuts Down Bill Clinton’s Black Son Danny Williams
Andrew Anglin Daily Stormer October 27, 2016
The filthy Christ-killing Jews who run YouTube have shut down the account of Bill Clinton’s Black son Danney Williams AKA America’s Favorite Clinton AKA The Greatest Clinton Generation AKA The Good Clinton AKA D’Jamal Clinton AKA My Favorite Black Guy.
Seriously.
WND :
YouTube on Wednesday suspended the account of Danney Williams, the 30-year-old man who has claimed since the 1990s to be the black son of former President Bill Clinton.
YouTube, citing ârepeated or severe violations of our Terms of Use and/or Community Guidelines,â declared the account âcannot be restored.â
The YouTube decision blocked the nine-minute feature âBANISHED â The Untold Story of Danney Williams,â which had received 1.2 million views since Williams posted it last week. Produced by filmmaker Joel Gilbert, it drew nearly 100,000 views per day and more than 1,000 viewer comments, with the overwhelming majority expressing support for Williams and outrage at the Clintons for not being willing to allow a DNA test to determine paternity.
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âMy YouTube account has been deleted, but the same video appears in 50 other places on YouTube alone,â Williams said on his Facebook page after being notified of YouTubeâs decision. â[YouTube] canât handle the truth! Please share #BillClintonSon.â
Twitter also continues to allow Williams to post the âBanishedâ video on Danney Williamsâ page, but the Twitter link to YouTube displays the message: âThis video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated. Sorry about that.â
This young lad has bravely come out and confronted his evil father who won’t even give him any money. The media has attacked him as a Trump plant.
Danney has been raising kids since he was 16. He needs money. His kids need money. But old grandpa Bill the rapist won’t give a cent.
The least Bill could do is dip into his quarter-billion dollar fortune and buy these Black grandkids some friggin bikes. I mean come on.
Here’s the video.
I highly recommend this video. It is a fantastic voyage with great music.
Make sure to download it and reupload it for when this copy gets shoah’d.
Alex Jones also interviewed him recently and his Vegas press conference was spectacular.
Danney Clinton should be running for President. At least he’s a good person. He raises his own kids and takes them to church.
When Trump is in control and Bill and Hillary are in prison, Danney should be given control of the Clinton Foundation. And least then his kids can get bikes.
Follow Danney on Twitter and support him. | 0 |
PARIS — As heads of state go, this one appears to be quite expensive. The investigative and satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné reported on Wednesday that President François Hollande’s personal hairdresser has been paid 9, 895 euros — over $10, 000 — per month since Mr. Hollande was elected in 2012, about the same amount as a government minister’s salary. The report is especially jarring for Mr. Hollande, 61, a Socialist who campaigned on the promise that he would be a “normal” and exemplary president but who has seen his private life spill into the open on several occasions. It would be hard for Mr. Hollande to be less popular. His approval ratings, while receiving a bump from the Euro 2016 soccer tournament, have been persistently low. He has been forced to agree to a primary among parties, including his own Socialists, to settle on a candidate for president next year — a first for a sitting president. Mr. Hollande has not managed to deliver on his promise to significantly lower unemployment, especially among young people. His government has faced months of street protests over an unpopular bill to loosen France’s rigid labor laws. And he faces a potential challenge from his economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, who has hinted that he may run for president next year. The new controversy — the hashtag #CoiffeurGate, “coiffeur” being French for hairdresser, was a trending topic on Twitter on Wednesday — could contribute to the image as a president who is out of touch. Mr. Hollande is certainly not the first politician to encounter problems with hairdressing. In 1993, two of Los Angeles International Airport’s runways were shut for nearly an hour so that President Bill Clinton’s Beverly Hills hairstylist could come aboard Air Force One to give him a haircut. In 2007, John Edwards, a former senator, had to reimburse his presidential campaign $800 to cover the cost of two haircuts. The Republican nominee Sarah Palin spent tens of thousands of dollars on hair and makeup in the homestretch of her 2008 campaign. In France, opposition and parties were, unsurprisingly, critical of Mr. Hollande, and while reactions in his own party were more muted, some struck a harsher tone. “That’s a lot of money for a hairdresser, and for the French in general,” Thierry Mandon, the junior minister for higher education and research, told the LCP news channel. “For many people in France that really, really, really is a lot of money. ” Still, the revelations have yet to morph into a political scandal in France, where the financial excesses or abuses of politicians are sometimes met with a shrug. On Twitter, French observers expressed a mixture of amusement and outrage. “When my 2, 600 euros of income tax represent one week of the hairdresser’s salary #CoiffeurGate #shameful,” one user wrote. “#CoiffeurGate — ah, now I finally understand the expression ‘budgetary cuts,’” mused another. Some photoshopped royal wigs, mullets or toupées onto the French president’s sparsely adorned head. The hairdresser, identified by Le Canard Enchaîné only as Olivier B. was first mentioned in a book by two French journalists published in April that aimed to give a look at the Élysée Palace, the presidential residence. The book identified the hairdresser as Olivier Benhamou, and said that his monthly salary was 8, 000 euros. When the tabloid magazine Closer wrote an article using that information, Mr. Benhamou sued them that case is pending. The work contract Mr. Benhamou signed with the Élysée Palace was recently introduced as evidence in a French court as part of that case, and was obtained by Le Canard Enchaîné, which used it as the basis of its report. The contract was signed by Mr. Hollande’s former chief of staff. It is unclear whether Mr. Hollande knew how much the hairdresser is paid. On Wednesday evening, Valérie Trierweiler, Mr. Hollande’s former companion, wrote on Twitter: “Let’s be fair: F. Hollande was not aware of the hairdresser’s salary. I can attest to his anger when he learned about it later. ” The Élysée Palace confirmed the report, telling Le Canard Enchaîné that Mr. Benhamou started his days very early and that “he redoes the president’s hair every morning and as much as needed, for each public statement. ” A 2015 report by the Cour des Comptes, the French organization that conducts financial audits of the state and other public institutions, found that personnel spending at the Élysée Palace in 2014 — 68. 2 million euros, out of the palace’s overall budget of 100 million euros — had fallen by 1. 6 percent from the previous year and that staff numbers had been cut. | 1 |
IMAM KHOMEINI AIRPORT, Iran — When the United States wrestling team arrived at 3 a. m. on Saturday at an airport hotel outside Iran’s capital, Tehran, staff members ordered out for pizza. “We were all over the lobby, eating out of the boxes,” said Rich Bender, the executive director of Team USA. The wrestlers had just flown in from the western Iranian city of Kermanshah, where the team lost the Freestyle Wrestling World Cup to Iran, in a series of thrilling matches. At a time of increasing tension between the countries, how were the athletes received and what did they think about Iran? Kyle Snyder, an Olympic gold medalist, said his mother had been a bit worried when he told her he would travel to Iran. But he said the team was welcomed with nothing but friendliness. “They gave us roses at the airport, brought our bags, everyone wanted to take selfies with us,” Mr. Snyder said. “This was the best tournament I have ever participated in, even better than the Olympics in Rio. ” Later on Saturday, during a sightseeing trip, the wrestling team took to the landmark Milad Tower in Tehran, and excited Iranians took pictures of the team. Jordan Burroughs, an Olympic champion, said he has more fans in Iran’s capital “than from any other city. ” For a time, it had seemed the American wrestlers would be forced to stay home. After President Trump announced that Iran would be included in a travel ban, the country decided it would reciprocate by barring the team. But the Iranian authorities changed their minds after seeing numerous protests in the United States against the ban. Mr. Burroughs said that he was disappointed when he heard of the issues with the travel ban. “I don’t necessarily agree with all decisions by my government, and clearly not with this one,” he said of the order barring travel by Iranians and citizens of six other predominantly Muslim countries to the United States. “I have never been affected by terror, but here in Iran, I have never felt any ill will toward me — the opposite actually. ” Iranian fans cheered the American wrestlers during matches against competitors from Azerbaijan, Russia and Georgia. “They were just screaming Jordan, Jordan, all the time,” said Bill Zadick, the team’s head coach, about Mr. Burroughs. “Jordan has defeated some of their heroes in key matches in the past, so they look up to him. ” Mr. Bender has accompanied the team on four trips to Iran. “We never had issues, as I recall,” he said. American wrestlers did not make their first trip back to Iran after the 1979 revolution until 1998. But since then, they have visited the country more than a dozen times. Wrestling can be a highly emotional sport, Mr. Bender said, but the athletes realize they are viewed as ambassadors of their country. “This is a highly competitive, mano a mano sport,” Mr. Bender said. “Sometimes people get poked in the eye. People can get angry. So we stress that here it is extra important to keep your posture, shake hands. Luckily, all the guys understand they represent the U. S. on and off the mat. ” Iran’s wrestling federation sent a former wrestler to the hotel to protect the team members in case someone might not be a fan. But there, as during the event in Kermanshah, all of the Iranians they met were all smiles. It was hard to believe, someone said, that Iran is . “Is it true there is a mural in the city center that says ‘death to America’?” Mr. Bender wanted to know. “Because I haven’t noticed any of that. ” | 1 |
By Amanda Froelich The rock legend’s latest song, Indian Givers, is about the pipeline and seeks to raise awareness about the Native water protectors in North Dakota. Since Donald Trump won the... | 0 |
About the EU and NATO . (Thanks to Daniel McAdams) 12:29 pm on October 28, 2016 | 0 |
It has been 1,700 years since Emperor Constantine built the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where the tomb of Jesus was revealed. The emperor believed Joseph of Arimathea placed the body of Jesus inside the church, according to CBN News.
Workmen, under the watchful eye of The National Geographic, have gently removed the marble slab that laid on top of the tomb. This heavy piece of marble has laid on the tomb of Jesus since 1555 A.D. Fredrik Hiebert, a National Geographic archeologist-in-residence, said he was profoundly astonished by the find.
The Tomb of Jesus Hours of examination of the tomb of Jesus led the team of researchers to announce their revelations. Hiebert says, they are not 100 percent sure, but it appears the location of the tomb has not shifted. He also said that scientists and historians have wondered this for decades.
The tomb of Jesus revealed a layer of fill material. After hours of labor, workers exposed an entirely different marble slab with a cross carved into it. Workers also found, in the tomb of Jesus, three crosses and some iron nails. After high anticipation, of those watching, they finally uncovered what they believe is the original limestone burial bed of Christ .
Christian tradition states that the body of Jesus Christ laid on a shelf, or burial bed, carved into the side of a limestone cave. This happened after the Romans crucified him, around 30-33 A.D. According to Christian faith, Jesus was resurrected after his death. As the story goes, a woman who went to anoint Jesus’ body, three days after he was buried, said there were no remains in the tomb.
In the Gospel of John, 19:38-42, it is written that Joseph of Arimathea, a disciple of Jesus, asked Pilate if he could take the body of Jesus away. He was given permission and took Jesus’ body.
Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes. He brought about 100 pounds of them. They both took the body of Jesus and bound him in linen covered in spices; this was a custom of the Jews. A garden grew in the place where he was crucified. The tomb sat in the garden no one had yet laid in. This is where John and Nicodemus placed the body of Jesus Christ.
Restoring the Tomb
Scientists from the National Technical University of Athens are trying to repair a structure that protects the tomb of Jesus called Edicule. This is from the Latin word, aedicule that means little house . The last dated work to the structure was between 1808-10.
In the 19th-century, Edicule suffered structural integrity, from an earthquake, in 1927. The building was shored up, in 1947, by the British authorities. Lack of financial resources and difficulties had put a stop to the repairs.
Antonia Moropoulou, the leader of the restoration project, said they will have to remove the marble and stone slabs. She went on to say they will also inject grout into them. This process will homogenize the complex structure.
People working on the project say that it is more than just a job. Vasyleyos Zafeylys, a Greek civil engineer, says he is a Christian Orthodox. He also said, he has worked on projects like this, but this is a special one. He believes he cannot go to another project that will be bigger and better than this one. Moropoulou said, it is a collaborative effort, but everyone near the archeological find feels the value of the holy tomb giving the resurrection message.
The churches’ communities agreed to restore the church, in March of 2016. Completion of Edicule is scheduled for spring of 2017. The $4 million-plus project has major backers such as royal benefactors from King Abdullah II of Jordan. Mica Ertegun gifted $1.3 million to the World Monument Fund in support of the endeavor.
By Tracy Blake
Edited by Jeanette Smith
Sources:
CBN News: What Researchers Found in the Tomb of Jesus
Live Science: Original Bedrock of Jesus’ Tomb Revealed in New Images
National Geographic: Exclusive: Christ’s Burial Place Exposed for First Time in Centuries
Image Courtesy of Seetheholyland.net’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
Inline Image Courtesy of Ft Lawrence, Lew O.P.’s Flickr Page – Creative Common License spot , Tomb of Jesus | 0 |
2016 presidential campaign by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Democrats used to value things like global peace and justice in the workplace. But, for decades they have given their votes to warmongers and job-exporters. This week, they are mourning the defeat of a politician they once would have despised. In January, lots of Black Democrats will cry over the exit of a president who “won by making himself palatable to white people while also taking advantage of undeserved black pride.” Freedom Rider: Obama’s Hollow Legacy by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
“The sight of Barack and Michelle hosting a state dinner was enough to make black hearts swoon.”
Obama’s legacy is in tatters, and that is good news. Donald Trump’s victory was not just a win over Hillary Clinton, but against Democratic Party policies that silenced the rank and file. For years Democrats became convinced that the only means of keeping Republicans at bay was to go along with their party leadership without complaint. If they wanted to expand trade deals that stole workers’ jobs, so be it. The people who marched against the invasion of Iraq folded their tents when Democrats became the party of endless war. When Obama promoted austerity and “grand bargains” with Republicans not a word was uttered. Even Black Lives Matter refused to point out that the Obama Justice Department left killer cops unpunished.
Barack Obama is nothing if not consistent. While Democrats take to the streets in protest against president elect Trump, Obama declares that the man he once called unfit is not an ideologue, but a “pragmatist.” No one should be surprised about the conciliatory tone. Obama never had a problem with Republicans. They may have obstructed him, but he was always happy to assist them because he wasn’t really opposed to their policies.
The most obvious example of Obama’s lack of substance was his relationship with black Americans. His disdain and contempt for the people who loved him the most was clear to anyone who paid attention. Jokes about “cousin Pookie” and parents serving fried chicken for breakfast should have been seen as the racist screeds they clearly were. But the desire to see a black face in a prominent place endures to our detriment.
“The people who marched against the invasion of Iraq folded their tents when Democrats became the party of endless war.”
Obama won by making himself palatable to white people while also taking advantage of undeserved black pride. Hillary Clinton would be the president elect if the new voters who emerged in 2008 had remained committed to the Democratic Party. But their loyalty was to the imagery of Barack Obama as president. Their joy was confined to seeing him meet the queen of England alongside his first lady or disembarking from Air Force One with his signature swagger. The sight of Barack and Michelle hosting a state dinner was enough to make black hearts swoon. Policy initiatives need not intrude upon the love fest.
The end result of this unrequited and superficial love was six million fewer votes cast for Hillary Clinton in 2016 than for Obama in 2012. The apocryphal cousin Pookie stayed home and no one should be surprised. There is no secret to keeping voters engaged. They are engaged if their needs are met. Deliver for voters and they deliver in the voting booth.
Even the unpopular and shady Hillary Clinton could have won Michigan if the people of Flint had received the federal help they needed so badly. Not only did the Obama environmental protection agency allow the beleaguered city to be given contaminated water, but he showed up for a photo opportunity and did nothing else as residents suffered. He drank a glass of water, posed for the cameras and returned to Washington. The people of Flint are still living under conditions Americans think of as being “Third World.”
“Democratic voters must ask themselves why they said nothing when their party promoted trade deals that were against their interests.”
The response to Trump’s victory should mean more than protesting policies the Democrats now have little ability to fight. This moment presents an opportunity for much needed introspection and mea culpas. Millions of people did more than just accept Democratic Party policy. They supported actions they would have rejected if carried out by a Republican or a white Democrat. They supported Muammar Gaddafi when Republicans were president but averted their eyes to his murder when committed by a Democrat. They even voted for the person who bragged about the killing. Democratic voters must ask themselves why they said nothing when their party promoted trade deals that were against their interests. Ultimately that acquiescence led to defeat at Trump’s hands.
The Obama team’s propaganda skills were legendary but the day of reckoning revealed the emptiness of what they produced. The corporate media acted like scribes under White House direction and declared that Russia was an enemy state and its president a 21 st century Hitler. Now it is Donald Trump, the self-promoting reality television star, who declares his willingness to talk to his Russian counterpart. It is the sort of behavior that Democrats once valued.
Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton began the tradition of getting Democrats to support what they didn’t like. Obama perfected the art, which ultimately led to the debacle. He will certainly not be the last to tempt the party faithful but in 2016 Democrats sold their souls and ended up with nothing. Defeat creates the most hollow feelings of all. Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com. | 0 |
Another couple of options, Maybe the White Hats now having massive backing from the Americans if they steal the election, step in and remove the Cabal. All they would have to do is take over the MSM and let the public know that will be restoring the Organic Constitution and and ask for the support and backing of the people in making this transition.
Another option, If they steal the election from Trump thru fraud, can you imagine if Trump and all his supporters who have donated money to the Trump campaign filled a massive Trillion Dollar Class Action Law suit against the people who are enabling the voting fraud?
His donors would be more than happy to donate to the cause and cost of the law suit. He could raise 100 million overnight from all the injured parties.
Trump and people who donated money would certainly have standing.
If you could find an honest judge and get a jury trial and win, it could take down the entire fraud system. | 0 |
Pentagon officials said on Friday that next week will mark the first attempt to shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile in flight, closely simulating a North Korean attack on the United States. [The Associated Press notes that missile intercept technology has a “spotty track record,” having succeeded in just 9 of 17 attempts since 1999. Previous tests have involved missiles, not an intercontinental ballistic missile. ICBMs pass through space en route to their targets. The difficulty of keeping the warhead intact upon reentry to Earth’s atmosphere is one of the hurdles North Korean scientists have not yet been able to overcome. “The most recent test, in June 2014, was a success, but that followed three straight failures,” the AP recalls. The system, known as Midcourse Defense (GMD) has been notoriously compared to “hitting a bullet with a bullet. ” More precisely, it involves hitting a rocket with a rocket that launches another rocket. “An interceptor is to be launched from an underground silo at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and soar toward the target, which will be fired from a test range on Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific. If all goes as planned, the ‘kill vehicle’ will slam into the target’s mock warhead high over the Pacific Ocean,” the AP writes. Officials said the test target would be moving much faster than targets from previous intercept tests, to better simulate the challenge of hitting an inbound ICBM. However, the target is not meant to precisely simulate any specific model of North Korean missile. Although Reuters quotes recent remarks from U. S. intelligence officials that indicate “mounting concern about Pyongyang’s advancing missile and nuclear weapons programs,” it notes that next week’s intercept test was “planned well in advance and was not in reaction to any specific event. ” The U. S. has a total of 36 interceptor missiles ready to fire, and plans to build 8 more during the coming year, but no such defensive weapon has ever been used in actual combat conditions. Skeptics say even those sporadic test successes involved simulated targets that were much less challenging than an actual enemy missile would be. | 1 |
Good morning. Here’s what you need to know: • President Obama commuted most of the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence analyst convicted of an enormous 2010 leak to WikiLeaks that revealed U. S. military and diplomatic activities around the world. She will be free in five months. The decision will likely come up at Mr. Obama’s final news conference today, along with other legacy issues, like the fight to preserve the Affordable Care Act. A report found that repealing major provisions of Obamacare would cost 18 million people medical insurance in the first year, a number that could increase to 32 million in 10 years. _____ • President Xi Jinping of China continues a visit to Switzerland, with stops at the U. N. in Geneva and the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne. Mr. Xi, who made a forceful argument for free trade, international integration and climate responsibility at the World Economic Forum on Tuesday, appears to be positioning China as a global leader in sharp contrast to the incoming U. S. president, Donald J. Trump. _____ • “Rigged. ” Mr. Trump hit back at a poll that put his favorability rating at 40 percent, compared with President Obama’s 79 percent before inauguration and George W. Bush’s 62 percent. Senate hearings for Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks continue on a packed schedule. And officials are putting the final touches on days of celebrations for his inauguration on Friday, which will also be surrounded by protests. Security costs could top $100 million. _____ • Australia’s transport minister did not rule out future underwater searches for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, but said that investigators were certain the jet is not on the seabed in the area that searchers had scoured for nearly three years. The decision, while expected, drew criticism from families of the 239 people who were on board _____ • Jay Y. Lee, the Samsung vice chairman, is expected to attend a hearing and then be held in detention — possibly overnight — to await the decision of a judge in Seoul on whether he should be arrested. Mr. Lee has denied accusations that he paid more than $36 million in bribes to organizations linked to Choi the unofficial adviser at the center of the corruption scandal that engulfed President Park . • British American Tobacco is buying all of Reynolds American that it did not already own. The $49 billion deal, if approved by shareholders and regulators, will reshape the global tobacco industry. • General Motors became the latest company to highlight initiatives following Mr. Trump’s pressure to bolster U. S. manufacturing, announcing a $1 billion investment in American factories. • the maker of aircraft engines and turbines, agreed to pay $817 million to resolve corruption inquiries by Britain, the U. S. and Brazil, including accusations of wrongdoing in Indonesia and China. • The New York Times released a review of its newsroom and a blueprint for the future created by a team of seven of its journalists. • U. S. stocks were lower. Here’s a snapshot of global markets. • Prime Minister Theresa May charted a “clean break” for Britain from the European Union and stressed her country’s determination to regain control of migration. [The New York Times] • A Nigerian fighter jet that meant to strike Boko Haram militants bombed a refugee camp. Doctors Without Borders counted more than 50 dead and 200 injured. [The New York Times] • The widow of the gunman who killed 49 people at an Orlando, Fla. nightclub last year was charged under antiterrorism laws. “She knew he was going to conduct the attack,” a federal prosecutor asserted. [The New York Times] • NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are expected to announce that 2016 set the record for the hottest year globally. [Climate Central] • The head of Air India was quoted as saying that the carrier planned to set aside seats to allow more protection for women traveling alone. [The Economist] • Cambodia canceled military exercises with the U. S. for two years, a decision announced weeks after its exercises with China. [The Cambodia Daily] • Bhutan has struggled to persuade other nations to adopt its Gross National Happiness index as a measure of social ills. [The New York Times] • Fifty years ago this month, Vo Thi Mo led three commando squads against a U. S. Army battalion in the Vietnam War. Here is her story of resilience and survival. [The New York Times] • Maybe don’t skip your workout this morning — it just might help your brain grow stronger. • Here is a guide to help you teach young people about philanthropy and offer them the tools to give. • Recipe of the day: For a simple side dish, try braised greens spiced with red pepper flakes. • India’s democracy includes 287 million illiterate people, so party symbols matter. This week, a feud over the image of a bicycle that had split a powerful political dynasty was resolved. • Each spring, poplar trees planted by the millions under Mao blanket Chinese cities with cottonlike balls of fluff. In Beijing, the government hopes to eliminate the fuzz forever. • And we introduce The Long View, in which the historian Jon Meacham looks at books that speak to historical and cultural moments. This first installment looks at the chaotic U. S. of the 1930s. The Oval Office is often used as shorthand for the U. S. presidency, but did you know that fewer than half of the presidents have worked there? During President Theodore Roosevelt’s term ( ) the West Wing was added to hold the executive branch’s growing staff. He had a office in the addition (now called the Roosevelt Room). Earlier leaders worked in the residence, mostly in what is known as the Lincoln Bedroom. Roosevelt’s successor, William H. Taft, had the Oval Office built and was its first occupant. The design wasn’t novel. George Washington had rooms in Philadelphia in 1791, allowing him to greet guests circled around him. The pomp mimics an English court tradition called the levée. There was a White House precursor, too. The Blue Room is rounded and used for diplomatic receptions. In the family quarters, there’s a Yellow Oval Room. On Christmas Eve in 1929, the Oval Office was badly damaged in a fire. President Franklin Roosevelt renovated it, moving it closer to the residence. The “commute” is under a minute. Presidents can redecorate, but there are limits. One is that the presidential seal must remain on the ceiling. And there’s an other tradition: the outgoing president leaves a letter on the desk for his successor. Adeel Hassan contributed reporting. _____ Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings. What would you like to see here? Contact us at asiabriefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
A leading US senator: US Supporting War in Syria
A leading US senator said the war in Syria would have been over by now if the US had put an end to its intervention when Russia entered the war-ravaged country.
“If the United States had just stayed out of it at that point, the war would be over by now; people would be rebuilding, refugees would be returning back to Syria, but the United States rushed anti-Tank missiles, and we used these so-called moderate rebels as a conduit to supply al-Nusra Front (also known as Fatah al-Sham Front), which is al-Qaeda in Syria,” republican member of the Virginia State in US Senate, Richard Hayden Black said in an exclusive interview with Press TV.
“If we were not supporting the war in Syria, I believe that the Syrians, combined with their allied forces from Iran, Lebanon and Russia… would move very steadily and restore the borders of Syria.”
The senate member, who visited Syria in April, refused to distinguish between militants and terrorists fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad, saying, the two are “thoroughly integrated.”
“They really are one and the same, they’re part of the same army,” he said, citing a US defense intelligence agency’s investigation in 2013, which showed Washington’s ties with the terror group.
The outspoken state senator referred to plans by the CIA to transfer arms from Libya to Turkey and from there to Syria to supply the militants, noting that the move “evolved into an indiscriminate program of supplying all militant groups, including specifically ISIL and al-Qaeda.”
“We do it indirectly because it’s unlawful to do it directly,” he said, adding that the US keeps “extremely violent organizations… off the terrorist watch list because these are the agents that take our weapons and then distribute them to ISIL and al-Qaeda.”
In response to a question on why Iran and Russia are portrayed as the “bad guys,” while they are the ones really fighting terrorism there, as put recently by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, Black said the Republican candidate has a “clear understanding of what’s happening over there.”
“Sometimes, his rhetoric has to match the political mood of the moment… but I know a number of his advisers and they believe that our determination to topple the government in Syria is suicidal, that it threatens not only the entire Middle East but literally the entire world.”
He further warned that the US itself could be “threatened,” arguing that, “if Syria falls, it will be dominated by some al-Qaeda-related organization; Lebanon will fall; Jordan will fall and the entire area will be destabilized.”
The Vietnam war veteran also elaborated on his personal definition of the Middle East “axis of evil,” naming Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and “particularly” Turkey over their support for terrorism.
“Probably, three quarters of the rebels are not Syrian at all, they are mercenaries recruited by Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia,” he asserted, describing the three countries as “the primary force behind the terrorist movement.”
“Turkey has invaded Iraq and Syria with heavy military forces. Turkey has really become a rogue nation,” he added, referring to a 1923 treaty that set the border between Turkey and Greece, saying that was even being questioned by President Rececp Tayyip Erdogan.
“And now you see this emerging threat against Western Europe by Turkey,” he noted, further adding that Erdogan “has made it clear that he looks to resurrection of the Ottoman Empire.”
“He has become more and more aggressive; he’s crushed the military, the free press; every powerful institution of the Turkish government has come under his iron fist and he’s now a total dictator. He’s a man who has said that he wants the constitution amended so that he will have power similar to those of Adolf Hilter… This is our great ally; we’re allied with a man who would be Hitler.”
He also blasted Washington’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, “where women are not allowed to walk out in the front yard to pick up the newspaper without a man’s permission; they can’t drive a car!”
“Somehow, this is part of the liberalization that we seek to impose on the Middle East,” he said ironically, calling it “bizarre.”
He also praised the resistance against the Saudi aggression by the people of Yemen, saying, “God bless them! The Yemenis are giving the Saudis a bloody nose,” despite being a “tiny little, poor nation.”
“I think the world recognizes that Saudi Arabia has just embarked in massive war crimes in Yemen,” he said, voicing regret over the US support for the monarchy.
“We don’t pay too much attention to them while engaged in war crimes because they’re our good allies,” he said, concluding that Washington is on a “suicidal course of action.”
“Saudi money pays the very top politicians in many Western nations. And they really have co-opted the American military into acting as mercenaries for Wahhabism.”Black referred to the Western media’s portrayal of Iran as a supporter of terrorism, saying, “The fact of the matter is that if you really look at global terrorism, it all emanates from Saudi Arabia.”
He exemplified various terrorists attack, including the 9/11, the Boston bombing, and the Brussels attacks, noting that they are all a “reflection of the Wahhabi philosophy.” | 0 |
Irak verbietet den Alkohol Voltaire Netzwerk | 26. Oktober 2016 français Español italiano عربي Das irakische Parlament hat in aller Heimlichkeit am 22. Oktober 2016 eine Änderung zu seinem Gemeindegesetz verabschiedet, die den Verkauf, die Einfuhr und die Herstellung von Alkohol untersagt.
Das Alkoholverbot wurde angenommen, um am Vorabend der Befreiung des von Daesch besetzten Mossul die Islamisten zufrieden zu stellen.
Das Gesetz führt Bußgelder von 8.000 bis 20.000 Dollar für den festgestellten Verstoß ein.
Da die Christen des Irak (die den Wein benutzen, um ihre Messe zu feiern) das Gesetz als diskriminierend betrachten, haben sie beschlossen, vor einem Bundesgericht gegen den Gesetzestext zu klagen.
Übersetzung
Sabine | 0 |
DETROIT — The race by automakers and technology firms to develop cars has been fueled by the belief that computers can operate a vehicle more safely than human drivers. But that view is now in question after the revelation on Thursday that the driver of a Tesla Model S electric sedan was killed in an accident when the car was in mode. Federal regulators, who are in the early stages of setting guidelines for autonomous vehicles, have opened a formal investigation into the incident, which occurred on May 7 in Williston, Fla. In a statement, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said preliminary reports indicated that the crash occurred when a made a left turn in front of the Tesla, and the car failed to apply the brakes. It is the first known fatal accident involving a vehicle being driven by itself by means of sophisticated computer software, sensors, cameras and radar. The safety agency did not identify the Tesla driver who was killed. But the Florida Highway Patrol identified him as Joshua Brown, 40, of Canton, Ohio. He was a Navy veteran who owned a technology consulting firm. In a news release, Tesla on Thursday described him as a man “who spent his life focused on innovation and the promise of technology and who believed strongly in Tesla’s mission. ” Mr. Brown posted videos of himself riding in autopilot mode. “The car’s doing it all itself,’’ he said in one, smiling as he took his hands from the steering wheel. In another, he praised the system for saving his car from an accident. The death is a blow to Tesla at a time when the company is pushing to expand its product lineup from expensive electric vehicles to more mainstream models. The company on Thursday declined to say whether the technology or the driver or either were at fault in the accident. In its news release it said, “Neither autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied. ” The crash also casts doubt on whether autonomous vehicles in general can consistently make driving decisions on the highway. And other companies are increasing investments in technology. Google, for example, recently announced plans to adapt 100 Chrysler minivans for autonomous driving. Earlier this year, G. M. acquired the software firm Cruise Automation to accelerate its own applications. Even as the companies conduct many tests on autonomous vehicles at both private facilities and on public highways, there is skepticism that the technology has progressed far enough for the government to approve cars that totally drive themselves. The traffic safety agency said it was working with the Florida Highway Patrol in the inquiry into Mr. Brown’s fatal accident. The agency cautioned that the opening of an investigation did not mean it thought there was a defect in the vehicle being examined. The federal traffic safety agency is nearing the release of a new set of guidelines and regulations regarding the testing of vehicles on public roads. They are expected to be released in July. At a recent technology conference in Novi, Mich. the agency’s leader, Mark Rosekind, said cars should at least be twice as safe as human drivers to result in a significant reduction in roadway deaths. “We need to start with two times better,’’ Mr. Rosekind said. “We need to set a higher bar if we expect safety to actually be a benefit here. ” Karl Brauer, an analyst with the auto research firm Kelley Blue Book, said the accident served as a signal that the technology might not be as advanced and ready for the market as some proponents have suggested. “This is a bit of a call,” Mr. Brauer said. “People who were maybe too aggressive in taking the position that we’re almost there, this technology is going to be in the market very soon, maybe need to reassess that. ” Tesla said in its news release that it had informed the traffic safety agency about the accident “immediately after it occurred. ” But the company reported it publicly only on Thursday, after learning that the agency had begun to investigate. Mr. Brown had spent 11 years in the Navy and then founded a technology consulting company, Nexu Innovations, according to a May obituary of Mr. Brown in The Greensburg Tribune Review in Westmoreland County, Pa. where he had formerly lived. The Nexu Innovations website, describing Mr. Brown as founder and owner, said that in the Navy he had been on active duty as a “master explosive ordnance disposal technician,” including a stint with the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, which is commonly known as SEAL Team 6. Ricky Hammer, a retired Navy master chief who worked with Mr. Brown at the development group, said Mr. Brown had strong computer skills and “was the equivalent of an electrical engineer even though he didn’t have the degree. ” In Iraq in 2006, he said, Mr. Brown played a crucial role in preparing captured explosive projectiles for shipment to the United States to support efforts to improve the armor on military vehicles. “He did it by being very aggressive,” Mr. Hammer said, noting that Mr. Brown helped to collect the projectiles after raids on shops and would them to determine their contents. In the past, Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive, has praised the company’s feature, introduced in the Model S last fall, as “probably better than a person right now. ” But in its statement on Thursday, the company cautioned that it was still only a test feature and noted that its use ‘‘requires explicit acknowledgment that the system is new technology. ’’ It noted that when a driver activated the system, an acknowledgment box popped up, explaining that the autopilot mode “is an assist feature that requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times. ” | 1 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. Donald Trump railed at reporters for his promises and revealing delays in donations he promised military veterans in January. “The press should be ashamed of themselves,” he said. “You make me look very bad. ” He also defended Trump University against testimony that was revealed as part of a lawsuit filed by dissatisfied former students. “I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme,” said one sales manager at the school. _____ 2. The battle for California heated up a week ahead of the primary. Gov. Jerry Brown endorsed Hillary Clinton, but also spoke highly of Bernie Sanders. “He has driven home the message that the top 1 percent has unfairly captured way too much of America’s wealth, leaving the majority of people far behind,” Mr. Brown said in an open letter. Above, Mr. Sanders campaigned in Northern California. _____ 3. The sniffer dogs U. S. airports rely on to detect even the most minute trace of explosives face new challenges as bombmakers shift to using household chemicals, like the compound TATP. “So we’re now asking dogs not just to find a needle in a haystack,” one expert said. “Now we’re also saying to the dog, ‘We need you to find any sharp object in the haystack.’ ” _____ 4. “It is practically a reinvented game these Splash Brothers are playing. ” That’s our sports columnist, saluting Stephen Curry, above, and Klay Thompson for pushing the Golden State Warriors into the N. B. A. finals with 13 on Monday night. (Game 1 of the title rematch with the Cleveland Cavaliers: Thursday, 9 p. m. Eastern, at Golden State, ABC) _____ 5. The party that took power in Poland in November is reviving efforts to extradite the filmmaker Roman Polanski to the U. S. the country’s close ally. The justice minister said he would appeal a court ruling that said turning over Mr. Polanski, 82, would be an “obviously unlawful” deprivation of liberty. He fled the U. S. decades ago, after pleading guilty to having sex with an underage girl. _____ 6. militias, elite Iraqi Army counterterrorism forces and Sunni policemen are all taking part in the operation to drive Islamic State fighters out of the city of Falluja. An estimated 50, 000 civilians are believed trapped with little food or medicine. _____ 7. The Cincinnati police said they were investigating how a managed to get into a gorilla enclosure at the city’s zoo over the weekend. Zoo workers fatally shot the gorilla after it dragged the boy around the pen, prompting complaints by animal rights activists and petitions blaming the boy’s mother. The police declined to identify the family. _____ 8. Our story for days: a novelist’s essay on marriage. The bad news: Because we’re lonely, or mix love up with destructive tendencies, or think we can make happiness permanent, many of us marry the wrong people, he writes. The good: There really isn’t a perfect person to meet all of our needs anyway, so learn to tolerate differences. “Compatibility,” he concludes, “is an achievement of love it must not be its precondition. ” _____ 9. Federal data show that the number of homeless people over 50 has risen by about 20 percent since 2007, passing 300, 000 to make up some 31 percent of the nation’s total. Some people have been on the streets for a generation. “Skid Row is sad,” said a homeless woman. “It is as sad as you can imagine. You literally have to live here to see how sad it is. ” _____ 10. Finally, can civil tensions be worked out in street theater? The spectacular Patum festival that wrapped up in Catalonia, Spain, dates to medieval times, but its evocation of the struggle between good and evil colorfully reflects the clashes between between right and left, church and state, the Spanish government in Madrid and Catalan secessionists. _____ 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. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
Email
Former Illinois congressman and conservative radio host Joe Walsh appeared to invite armed insurrection when he tweeted that he was "grabbing his musket" if Hillary Clinton defeats Donald Trump in the presidential election.
"On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump," Walsh tweeted. "On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket."
"@WalshFreedom what exactly does that mean?" CNN's Jake Tapper tweeted in reply.
"@jaketapper It means protesting," Walsh tweeted. "Participating in acts of civil disobedience. Doing what it takes to get our country back."
Walsh's rhetoric comes as Americans are already nervous about what will happen on and after Election Day. Trump's insistence that the election is "rigged," and his statement at the last debate that he would keep America "in suspense" about whether or not he will accept the results, have left some in fear that violence could flare up if his supporters refuse to accept the outcome.
More than half of Americans expressed concern about violence on election day according to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll released Wednesday.
Walsh dismissed another Twitter user's concern that his call to arms could draw the attention of the Secret Service saying, "They understand that a musket hasn't been used in battle in almost 200 years."
"I'm serious," Walsh tweeted later. "I don't think a musket would do much good these days, but it's time for civil disobedience on the right."
Walsh repeated his defense that he was only speaking of civil disobedience to NBC's Chicago affiliate. "We're talking about a musket," Walsh said, according to NBC 5 Chicago. "I could've said grab your slingshot and let's go. Metaphorically, I meant grab your muskets, if Trump loses, man, we're going to do what we have to do. We're going to protest and boycott and practice civil disobedience. We may start a third party."
This wasn't the first time Walsh, who served one term before being defeated by Rep. Tammy Duckworth in 2012, drew criticism for an incendiary tweet. In July he got national attention for telling President Obama to "watch out" after five police officers were killed by a shooter in Dallas.
"3 Dallas Cops killed, 7 wounded," Walsh tweeted in a post that has since been deleted. "This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you." | 0 |
This week, a documentary called “Wilders” premiered at DocFest, a film festival for documentaries in the British town of Sheffield. [The documentary is made by American film director Stephen Robert Morse. Although he does not agree with my political views, he at least tried to bring a balanced story, which is more than I can say of many Dutch journalists. I allowed Morse and his team to follow me around for a few months. The documentary shows how, due to Islamic death threats, I have to live under police protection, am being driven around in armoured cars, am obliged to wear a bulletproof vest whenever I have to speak in public, etc. Some live in almost similar situations, such as Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and his Swedish colleague Lars Vilks, British author Salman Rushie, Danish historian Lars Hedegaard, and others. In that sense, this documentary is also a tribute to them. What we all have in common is that we are on Islam’s death list. But what always strikes me is that I am the only elected politician on the list. All politicians competing in elections claim to be standing for office with the goal of serving the people. But serving the people begins with telling them the truth. The truth about Islam is not a pleasant one. How wonderful would it be if Islam were what most of our politicians claim it to be: a religion of peace. Wonderful, but naïve, for the truth is that almost all terrorist acts committed in the world today are committed in the name of Islam. Many politicians do not tell the truth about Islam. Some find it much easier to parrot the dogmas of the left. Others are afraid of having to live like me and Westergaard, Vilks, Rushdie, Hedegaard and others. But I do not consider that a valid excuse. is forced to be a politician, but if you do choose to do so, allowing yourself to be silenced by the threat of violence, means that you allow the violent side to win. And that is something no democratic politician should ever do. Over the past decades, the threat of terrorism in the West has steadily grown. This growth has everything to do with the growth of Islam in our democratic societies. Politicians who refuse to see this reality are not just fooling themselves but also endangering the citizens. That is why today everyone is on the death list of Islam. We are all at risk now. And this is totally unacceptable. People have the right to live safely in their own towns and cities. That, too, is a basic human right. In my opinion, it overrides the rights of the followers of Islam in our society to live according to their religion. The West should not grant Islam the freedom to abolish the freedoms of the West. There are already plenty Islamic nations in the world, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, where Sharia is the law of the land. Why don’t those who want to introduce Sharia in our land just move there? Sooner or later, even those politicians who still prefer to look away from the problems will be forced to face them. Meanwhile, however, we are losing precious time. And the present governing elite is entirely to blame for that. The more Islam it allows into our country, the less free we will become. In my country, the Netherlands, we are currently in the process of forming a government coalition. Although my party, the Party for Freedom (PVV) has become the second largest party in parliament, the Liberal Party (VVD) of the outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, which managed to remain the largest party despite suffering heavy losses in the 15 March 2017 elections, refuses to form a government with the PVV. So does the third party, the (CDA) of Sybrand Buma. This has resulted in political gridlock, making it virtually impossible to form a majority government. Earlier this week, both Mark Rutte and Sybrand Buma wrote a letter explaining why they refuse to cooperate with the PVV. They do so, they write, because they consider the PVV to be “radical. ” It is not the PVV, however, which is radical it is Islam. Let us stop the cowardice. Let us reject political correctness. As General Patton said: “The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. ” I will keep doing my duty. Probably again as leader of the opposition. And I will keep speaking out, whatever the price may be. I will fight the Islamization of my country and defend its freedom. Without compromise and with determination, conviction and strength. Always. Geert Wilders MP is leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV) in The Netherlands. | 1 |
Putin calls for observing military safety measures to avoid incidents October 28, 2016 TASS vladimir putin , dmitry peskov Russian President Vladimir Putin. Source: Kremlin.ru
Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for strictly obeying set safety measures to avoid dangerous incidents involving military aircraft and ships, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Oct. 28.
"Unconditionally, the president does not support fanning any tensions," Peskov stated. "He urges strict observance of the existing regulations in international law, which define cooperation in the context of avoiding dangerous incidents - both in the skies and at sea."
Along with this, Peskov neither confirmed, nor denied media reports that at one of the meetings, Putin had allegedly harshly responded to an incident when Russian jets flew close to a U.S. warship.
"Closed-door meetings are held so that opinions could be exchanged there freely," the spokesman emphasized. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — In the rhetorical battle over Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, senators in both parties have been selectively arguing the facts on the jurist and overstating the Senate’s procedural history. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, promised on Sunday that Judge Gorsuch would be confirmed this week, even if it required changing longstanding Senate practice to require only a simple majority vote. Here is an assessment of claims from Democratic and Republican lawmakers. THIS IS MISLEADING To reasonably claim a standard, filibusters would have to be a factor. It takes only a majority, 51 votes, to confirm a nominee. Two current Supreme Court justices, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas, did not receive 60 confirmation votes. But under current Senate rules, ending debate or a filibuster over a Supreme Court nominee — called a cloture vote — requires a majority. Eight Democrats would need to vote for cloture to end debate over Judge Gorsuch and bring his nomination to a straight vote. The Senate has moved to invoke cloture only four times in history for Supreme Court nominations, most recently for Justice Alito’s confirmation in 2006, when it voted to end debate. Factoring in cloture votes to end filibusters, Mr. Schumer is right that the most successful nominees have met the bar at some point. Justice Thomas is the one exception since 1949. According to the Congressional Research Service, Democrats chose not to filibuster him: “In 1991, five days of debate on the Thomas nomination concluded with a confirmation vote. The 48 opposition votes would have been more than enough to defeat a cloture motion if one had been filed. ” In three other cases, they chose not to filibuster, but the nominees failed the vote. Why does this matter? In 2013, the Senate majority leader at the time, Harry Reid, “went nuclear” and reduced the cloture threshold for all other judicial and executive nominees to a simple majority. Mr. McConnell has signaled willingness to change the debate rules for Supreme Court nominees as well, and he rejected the idea of a standard. “It’s a shot across the bow, so to speak,” said Joshua Huder of the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. “You’re seeing hardball tactics in the Senate accompanied by hardball language dressed up as procedural nuance. This is about as intense as a showdown in the Senate gets. ” THIS IS MISLEADING Last year, Republicans repeatedly justified their decision not to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick B. Garland, by citing tradition. But a Supreme Court vacancy during the “last, final months” has happened only one other time in modern history. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Associate Justice Abe Fortas to replace Earl Warren as chief justice. The Senate did consider Justice Fortas for the position. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was also confirmed during President Ronald Reagan’s last year in office, though he was nominated the year before. Looking further back, seven nominations in the 19th century were made by a “lame duck” president between the election and inauguration of his successor. THIS NEEDS CONTEXT The debate over Justice Fortas in 1968 also serves as an example of a successful filibuster, as noted on the Senate’s website. During hearings, Justice Fortas’s ties to the president, judicial philosophy and outside activities lost him support, and the Senate failed to invoke cloture by a roll call vote. Nine Democrats and three Republicans did not vote. His nomination was then withdrawn. The filibuster was technically bipartisan, with 19 Democrats voting against cloture. But 15 of them were Southern Democrats, who were part of the conservative coalition and “who stood apart from the regular Democratic Party and would be Republicans today,” said Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution. Filibusters are not always a factor in unsuccessful nominations. President Ronald Reagan’s pick, Judge Robert Bork, was outright rejected, as were two of President Richard M. Nixon’s selections. “In modern practice, nominees more often withdraw if it looks like their confirmation is in jeopardy,” Mr. Huder said. “That’s what happened with Harriet Miers, Bush II’s nominee. ” THIS IS MISLEADING Judge Gorsuch had long exchanges with Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, about the school desegregation case during his hearings. While he never simply stated that he agreed with the decision, Judge Gorsuch offered praise several times: ■ “It is one of the shining moments in constitutional history in the United States Supreme Court. ” ■ “It’s a great and important decision. ” ■ “It was a seminal decision that got the original understanding of the 14th Amendment right and corrected one of the most deeply erroneous interpretations of law in Supreme Court history, Plessy v. Ferguson, which is a dark, dark stain on our court’s history. ” | 1 |
Thursday night, Democrats did what party people do in Brooklyn. They rented out a big space on the waterfront and held a rave. Along with a few rants. The CNN debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders was not, substantively, much different from their previous showdowns. But man, was it louder. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders, heading into Tuesday’s New York primary, went at each other hard, sniping, snapping and jockeying for attention like starving customers trying to order the pastrami at Katz’s. It was a Midtown traffic jam of a debate. The charges were sharp — she questioned his command of facts, he condemned her “racist” use of the term “ ” in defense of a 1990s crime bill but the hectoring was sharper. At one point, Wolf Blitzer, one of the moderators, broke in to scold the pair: “If you’re both screaming at each other, the viewers won’t be able to hear either of you. ” Did the candidates realize they had microphones? Any undecided New York voters didn’t need cable to tune in they could probably just open a window. But credit where it’s due: The true cause of political junkies’ lingering headache Friday morning was the audience. Good lord, that audience. It sounded like someone told it the primary was going to be decided by . From the audience members made themselves a factor, or an obstacle. The crowd cheered, booed, kibitzed. Someone shouted “Free Palestine!” during an answer on Israel. Mr. Sanders’s section broke into “Bernie! Bernie!” repeatedly, like concert fans calling for an encore. In fairness, we’ve heard competitive hooting at plenty of Republican debates this cycle. And while Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders were especially feisty Thursday, no one defended the proportions of any of their body parts. It would be reasonable if their campaigns had concluded that, if you want to be heard in 2016, you had better bring your own amplifier. Indeed, if this campaign’s debates in both parties have made one persuasive argument, it is this: We should ban debate audiences. They’re tent revivals of the converted, full of staffers and supporters whose huzzahs and boos may be heartfelt but are meaningless all the same. A debate audience’s only real purpose is as a prop. It reflects the candidates like a vanity mirror, howling at the applause lines and hissing at uncomfortable arguments, cueing us how to feel. For the networks, it pumps up the excitement and drama that keep viewers coming back. Debate audiences are the laugh tracks of politics. In the middle of the din, Mr. Blitzer, CNN’s Dana Bash and Errol Louis of the NY1 news channel did a good job following up and pointing out when candidates evaded answering. By this stage in the campaign, though, most of those questions and answers are familiar. Early on, Mr. Blitzer brought up Mr. Sanders’s attacks on Mrs. Clinton’s qualifications later, Ms. Bash raised Mrs. Clinton’s questioning of Mr. Sanders’s bona fides as a Democrat. In between, it was sparring over banks, guns, the Middle East, once more and with feeling. It’s not as though there are no other topics to cover. Late in the debate (and during the debate from her Twitter account) Mrs. Clinton chided the panel for not asking “one question about a woman’s right to make her own decisions about reproductive health care. ” (Scoring points off the moderators is another tactic we’re more used to seeing at Republican debates.) Much had been made in advance of the location: not just New York City but Brooklyn, where Mr. Sanders was born and where the former New York senator Mrs. Clinton has campaign headquarters. In the end, though, the most New York thing about the debate was the noise. It was set on the same red, white and blue, stage that you could have dropped in Atlanta or Indianapolis or Sacramento. There is only one place now: Debateland. We have been living there since last summer, and it feels as if we will never get out. But we will: If the blaring of the candidates and their rooting sections said anything, it was that we’re approaching the finish of the primary and they know it. Did this debate move the needle? Absolutely. It moved the needle all the way into the red. | 1 |
Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race Posted on Oct 29, 2016
By Julia Angwin and Terry Parris Jr. / ProPublica David Sleight / ProPublica
Imagine if, during the Jim Crow era, a newspaper offered advertisers the option of placing ads only in copies that went to white readers.
That’s basically what Facebook is doing nowadays.
The ubiquitous social network not only allows advertisers to target users by their interests or background, it also gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls “Ethnic Affinities.” Ads that exclude people based on race, gender and other sensitive factors are prohibited by federal law in housing and employment.
Here is a screenshot of an ad we purchased in Facebook’s housing categories via the company’s advertising portal :
Advertisement Square, Site wide
The ad we purchased was targeted to Facebook members who were house hunting and excluded anyone with an “affinity” for African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people. ( Here’s the ad itself .)
When we showed Facebook’s racial exclusion options to a prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman , he gasped and said, “This is horrifying. This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.”
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 makes it illegal “to make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.” Violators can face tens of thousands of dollars in fines .
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 also prohibits the “printing or publication of notices or advertisements indicating prohibited preference, limitation, specification or discrimination” in employment recruitment.
Facebook’s business model is based on allowing advertisers to target specific groups — or, apparently to exclude specific groups — using huge reams of personal data the company has collected about its users. Facebook’s microtargeting is particularly helpful for advertisers looking to reach niche audiences, such as swing-state voters concerned about climate change. ProPublica recently offered a tool allowing users to see how Facebook is categorizing them . We found nearly 50,000 unique categories in which Facebook places its users.
Facebook says its policies prohibit advertisers from using the targeting options for discrimination, harassment, disparagement or predatory advertising practices.
“We take a strong stand against advertisers misusing our platform: Our policies prohibit using our targeting options to discriminate, and they require compliance with the law,” said Steve Satterfield, privacy and public policy manager at Facebook. “We take prompt enforcement action when we determine that ads violate our policies.”
Satterfield said it’s important for advertisers to have the ability to both include and exclude groups as they test how their marketing performs. For instance, he said, an advertiser “might run one campaign in English that excludes the Hispanic affinity group to see how well the campaign performs against running that ad campaign in Spanish. This is a common practice in the industry.”
He said Facebook began offering the “Ethnic Affinity” categories within the past two years as part of a “multicultural advertising” effort.
Satterfield added that the “Ethnic Affinity” is not the same as race — which Facebook does not ask its members about. Facebook assigns members an “Ethnic Affinity” based on pages and posts they have liked or engaged with on Facebook.
When we asked why “Ethnic Affinity” was included in the “Demographics” category of its ad-targeting tool if it’s not a representation of demographics, Facebook responded that it plans to move “Ethnic Affinity” to another section.
Facebook declined to answer questions about why our housing-categories ad excluding minority groups was approved 15 minutes after we placed the order.
By comparison, consider the advertising controls that the New York Times has put in place to prevent discriminatory housing ads. After the newspaper was successfully sued under the Fair Housing Act in 1989, it agreed to review ads for potentially discriminatory content before accepting them for publication.
Steph Jespersen, the Times’ director of advertising acceptability, said that the company’s staff runs automated programs to make sure that ads that contain discriminatory phrases such as “whites only” and “no kids” are rejected.
The Times’ automated program also highlights ads that contain potentially discriminatory code words such as “near churches” or “close to a country club.” Humans then review those ads before they can be approved.
Jespersen said the Times also rejects housing ads that contain photographs of too many white people. The people in the ads must represent the diversity of the population of New York, and if they don’t, he says he will call up the advertiser and ask them to submit an ad with a more diverse lineup of models.
But, Jespersen said, these days most advertisers know not to submit discriminatory ads: “I haven’t seen an ad with ‘whites only’ for a long time.”
Clarification, Oct. 28, 2016: We’ve updated the story to explain more clearly that the ad we bought was not for housing itself — it was placed in Facebook’s housing categories.
Julia Angwin is a senior reporter at ProPublica. From 2000 to 2013, she was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she led a privacy investigative team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2011 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2010.
Terry is ProPublica’s community editor. Prior to joining ProPublica, he led digital production and engagement at WDET 101.9 FM, NPR’s affiliate in Detroit. TAGS: | 0 |
November 2015 Ads THE WIKILEAKS LIST: At Least 65 Mainstrea Media Reporters Were Meeting with and/or Coordinating Offline with Top Hillary Advisors
A few of the “journalists” meeting offline with Hillary advisers
Thanks to Wikileaks we now know that at least 65 mainstream reporters were working closely with the Clinton campaign this election year. They were invited to top elitist dinners with Hillary Campaign Chairman John Podesta or Chief Campaign strategist Joel Benenson.
NO FOX NEWS REPORTERS MADE THE LIST!
These 65 mainstream reporters CAN NEVER BE TRUSTED:
As previously reported — At least 38 top national reporters attended a different dinner at John Podesta’s house in April 2015.
The Clinton campaign sent out invites to New York reporters in April 2015 on their off-the-record meeting on how to sell Hillary Clinton to the public
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK | 0 |
The California Department of Water Resources issued a sudden evacuation order shortly before 5 p. m. Sunday for residents near the Oroville Dam in northern California, warning that the dam’s emergency spillway would fail in the next 60 minutes. [The Oroville Dam is the highest in the nation. An emergency alert issued on Facebook stated: EMERGENCY EVACUATION ORDER ISSUED: Officials are anticipating a failure of the Auxiliary Spillway at Oroville Dam within the next 60 minutes. Residents of Oroville should evacuate in a northward direction, toward Chico. Other cities should follow the orders of their local law enforcement. The emergency spillway, which is unpaved, was activated on Saturday morning to relieve the flow down the dam’s normal spillway, where a major hole appeared in recent days and began to widen. The height of the lake, once drained by drought and now swollen by recent rains and snow melt, had reached 901 feet above sea level when the emergency spillway was opened. Aux spillway at Oroville Dam expected to fail within hour. Oroville under mandatory evacuations, could have downstream effects in Sacramento pic. twitter. — Sacramento Fire (@SacFirePIO) February 13, 2017, As Breitbart News reported in continuing coverage of the crisis, officials initially assured the public that evacuations would not be necessary, because the damage to the normal spillway appeared limited. They repeated those assurances on Saturday as the emergency spillway was used for the first time since the dam’s construction in 1968. Now, however, local ABC News affiliate KRCR reports that state officials warn the emergency spillway could suffer a structural failure. It is not clear whether that would lead to a structural failure of the dam itself, which would be a major ecological and economic disaster. #Evacuation area for #OrovilleDam #spillway. Immediate evac from the low levels of #Oroville downstream areas ordered. pic. twitter. — bbdd333 (@bbdd333) February 13, 2017, The Sacramento Bee quoted California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesperson Mike Smith: “What they’re expecting is as much as 30 vertical feet of the top of the spillway could fail and could fail within one to two hours. We don’t know how much water that means, but we do know that’s potentially 30 feet of depth of Lake Oroville. ” Authorities said Sunday afternoon that they had increased the flow down the normal spillway to 100, 000 cubic feet per second, despite the damage, to relieve pressure on the emergency spillway. The Feather River flows south into the Sacramento River. Flooding could potentially affect the Sacramento River and surrounding areas. Update: A flash flood warning has been issued for significant parts of Butte County. The Butte County Sheriff has issued a warning: “This is NOT a drill. ” Immediate Evacuation Order — Officials: Oroville Dam In California Expected To Fail Any Moment … https: . pic. twitter. — #MAGADayVarela (@dayvarelat) February 13, 2017, Update (6:53 p. m. PDT): Officials speaking at a press conference indicated that releases from the normal spillway had reduced some of the erosion to the emergency spillway and lowered the level of the lake. They were optimistic that the expected failure of the emergency spillway might be averted. They explained that they had evacuated the region out of an abundance of caution. Update (8:30 p. m. PST): Officials are moving construction equipment into position in preparation for a daring operation to plug the hole in the emergency spillway by using rocks, which are to be dropped from helicopters. Meanwhile, there are unconfirmed reports of looting in the town of Oroville (later denied by law enforcement see 11:30 p. m. update). Houses getting looted in my neighborhood. My sons best friend home got broken in to. My house is houses down #OrovilleDam #OrovilleSpillway, — Jen — Jmona (@JmonaReviews) February 13, 2017, Update (8:36 p. m. PST): The Butte County Sheriff announces that county jails are being evacuated to other prison facilities shelters are being opened for displaced residents and Butte College facilities and buses will be shut down on Monday. A statement on Facebook indicates the situation at the dam is precarious: “The next several hours will be crucial in determining whether the concrete structure at the head of the auxiliary spillway remains intact and prevents larger, uncontrolled flows. ” Update (8:48 PST): Mark Finan of local NBC affiliate KCRA reports that the level of the lake has dropped to near 100% capacity — just over 901 feet above sea level — such that flow has effectively ended over the emergency spillway. At 8pm, Lake Oroville was at 901. 02′. Flow is now ending over the emergency spillway, — Mark Finan (@kcraFinan) February 13, 2017, That does not mean the danger is past, but it should slow the erosion of the spillway — for now. Update (11:30 PST): A press conference revealed that water had stopped flowing over the emergency spillway. Authorities plan to keep flow through the main spillway at about 100, 000 cubic feet per second, with a goal of lowering the level of the lake by 50 feet, which will help the lake absorb additional runoff from anticipated storms later in the week. Law enforcement said that there was no looting or violence in Oroville or neighboring towns, and that the rumor of looting had been started thanks to a coincidental within Oroville at the time that the crisis began. Authorities said they hoped for drier weather, as well as cooler weather (to keep snow from melting on the mountains). The maximum flow rate of the main spillway was 150, 000 cubic feet per second current inflows were 40, 000 cubic feet per second. They planned to evaluate the damage to both the main and emergency spillways at first light Monday morning. Meanwhile, evacuation orders would remain in place for nearly 200, 000 people in the area below the dam. 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 |
Email Print You know Hillary Clinton is getting desperate when she begins resorting to cheap tricks like this one… As you already know, yesterday the FBI announced that they will be reopening the Clinton email investigation following the discovery of new emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop that Hillary thought she had deleted. Well, as a last ditch effort to try and save her career, President Obama stepped in last minute and Ordered Attorney General Loretta Lynch to tell Comey to back off and not release the information to the public! You see, technically Loretta Lynch is in charge of the FBI by being attorney general. She approached Comey directly when she learned about the information and ordered him to stand down, saying he was violating Department of Justice policy. According to her, it would “interfere with the election.” James Comey, however, was apparently sick and tired of being bossed around. He stared back at her and declared that he had a duty to Congress and the American people to let them know what is REALLY going on. Comey said, “I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.” So thank you, FBI Director Comey, for finally growing a pair and standing up to the Hillary Clinton and Obama machine. Now the American people know the TRUTH about Hillary Clinton, and that will end her reign of terror. If you want to show Comey your support, then share this out so everyone can see that the man is a hero just in case Obama uses some dirty trick to try and sabotage him too… Join us on Facebook to Stop The Takeover. Click on the button to subscribe. | 0 |
Eric ZUESSE | 05.11.2016 | OPINION The FBI Can’t Actually Investigate a Candidate Such as Hillary Clinton The power above the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the US Attorney General, and, above that person, the US President. That’s whom the FBI actually serves — not the US public. This is the reason why the FBI is having such internal tensions and dissensions over the investigation of Hillary Clinton: Not only is she the current President’s ardently preferred and designated successor — and overwhelmingly supported also by America’s aristocracy and endorsed by the aristocracy’s press — but the top leadership of the FBI have terms-in-office that (unlike, for example, the term of the US Attorney General) do not end with the installation of the next President; and these people will therefore be serving, quite possibly, the very same person whom they are now ‘investigating’. This is the reason why James Comey, the FBI’s Director, let Clinton totally off the hook on July 5th, when he declined to present the case to a grand jury: he and the rest of the FBI’s top management violated three basic principles of trying white-collar-crime cases when a prosecutor is serious about wanting to prosecute and obtain a conviction against a person — he (and they) wanted to keep their jobs, not be fighting their boss and their likely future boss. If America were an authentic democracy, there would be a way for the FBI to serve the public even when the US President doesn’t want it to. According to the only scientific study that has ever been done of the matter, the US federal government is a dictatorship not a democracy. This was reluctantly reported by the researchers, whose own careers are dependent upon the aristocracy which they were finding actually controls that government. They found that the US, at the federal level, is not a democracy but an «oligarchy», by which the researchers were referring to an «economic elite», America’s billionaires and centi-millionaires who control America’s international corporations and the ‘charities’ (such as think tanks) that are dependent upon them — including many that directly affect US politics, such as the think tanks or other way-stations for former US government employees to become hired by private firms. The authors of the only empirical scientific research-study that has been done of whether the United States is a democracy , or instead a dictatorship, excluded the very term «aristocracy» (or «collective dictatorship» such as an «economic elite» is if that «elite» actually is in control of the given nation’s government) from their article. They did this so as for the meaning not to be clear to the US public. In any country in the modern world where an aristocracy exists, aristocrats nowadays try to hide their power, not (like in former eras) display their power by crowns and other public symbols of ‘the nobility’. The closest the study’s authors came to using that term, «aristocracy», was their only sentence that employed the pejorative term for an aristocracy, «oligarchy». That obscure lone sentence was: «Jeffrey Winters has posited a comparative theory of ‘Oligarchy,' in which the wealthiest citizens — even in a 'civil oligarchy' like the United States — dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth and income protection.11" Their 11th footnote made clear that they were referring here to the book Oligarchy , by Jeffrey A. Winters, which stated the ‘theory’ that this article had actually just confirmed in the American case. Their article mentioned the book — and the «oligarchy» — only in this one footnote, so that the authors of the article (whose own careers are dependent upon America’s ‘oligarchs’) won't be able to be accused by oligarchs (or in any way thought by their own financial benefactors — America’s aristocrats) to have called the US an «oligarchy» (a collective dictatorship by the few super-rich and their agents). To apply either term — «aristocracy» or «oligarchy» — to one’s own country, is now viewed as negative, an insult to the country’s controlling elite. Neither scholars nor scholarly publishers wish to insult the people who ultimately are their top funders. This article was written in the standard unnecessarily obscurantist style of social ‘scientists’ who want to be comprehensible only to their peers and not to the general public. Doing it this way is safer for them, because it makes extremely unlikely that their own benefactors would retaliate, against them or else against the institutions that hire them, by withdrawing their continued financial and promotional support (such as by no longer having them invited onto CNN as an «expert»). (This type of fear prevents theory in the social ‘sciences’ from being strictly based upon the given field’s empirical findings: it’s not authentically scientific. The physical sciences are far less corrupt, far more scientific. The biological sciences are in-between.) One particular reason why the authors never called the people who control the US government an «aristocracy», is that everyone knows that the Founders of the US were opposed to, and were engaged in overthrowing, the existing aristocracy, which happened to be British, and that they even banned forever in the US the use of aristocratic titles, such as «Lord» or «Sir.» Consequently, within the US, the only term that the aristocrats consider acceptable to refer to aristocrats, is «oligarchs», which always refers only to aristocrats in foreign countries, and so is considered safe by the aristocrats’ writers (including scholars and political pundits) to use. Everyone knows: in accord with the clear intention of America’s Founders , the US should eliminate from its citizenry any aristocrat (any self-enclosed and legally immune group that holds power over the government), but Americans naturally accept the existence of «oligarchs» in other countries (and «good-riddance to them there»), typically the ones in countries US foreign policy opposes and often overthrows by means of coup or outright military invasion (any form of conquest, such as in 2003 Iraq, or 2011 Libya). It’s fine to refer to other countries’ aristocracies as ‘oligarchies’, because any such foreign aristocracy can therefore be declared to be bad and ‘deserving’ of overthrow. Thus, any aristocracy that is opposed to America’s aristocracy (especially one that’s opposed to being controlled by the US aristocracy), and which wants to be controlling instead their own independent nation, can acceptably be overthrown by coup (such as Ukraine 2014 was) or invasion (such as Libya 2011 was). Thus, calling a foreign aristocracy an «oligarchy» is supportive of, not opposed to, the US aristocracy — and, so, «oligarchy» is the term the authors used (on that one occasion, and they never used the prohibited term «aristocracy»). Nonetheless, despite the cultural ban on describing the US as an «aristocracy», the authors were — as obscurely as they were able — proving that the US is an aristocracy, no authentic democracy at all. Or, again, as they said it in their least-obscurantist phrasing of it: « Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis, even though our findings probably understate the political influence of elites. Our measure of the preferences of wealthy or elite Americans — though useful, and the best we could generate for a large set of policy cases — is probably less consistent with the relevant preferences than are our measures of the views of ordinary citizens or the alignments of engaged interest groups. Yet we found substantial estimated effects even when using this imperfect measure. The real-world impact of elites upon public policy may be still greater». ‘Greater’ than what? They didn’t say. That’s because what they were saying (as obscurely as possible) is that it’s probably ‘greater’ than is shown in the data that was publicly available to them, and upon which data their clear finding is that the US is an aristocracy, no democracy at all. Or, as they also put it: "Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis.» But, actually, «Economic Elite Domination theories» (virtually all of which come down to positing an aristocracy that consists of the billionaires — and centi-millionaires — and their corporations, and their think tanks, and their lobbyists, etc.) did phenomenally well, in their findings, not just ‘rather well’— they simply can’t safely say this. Saying it is samizdat, in the US dictatorship. They were allowed to prove it, but not to say it. So, that’s what they did. They didn’t want to «upset the applecart» from which they themselves are feeding. The simplest (but no less accurate) way of stating their finding is: the US, at least during the period the researchers probed, which was 1981-2002, was an aristocracy, no democracy at all. The US, in other words, was (even prior to the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which is making the aristocracy even more concentrated among even fewer people) a country of men (and women — that’s to say, of individuals ) not of laws; it’s a dictatorship, in short; it is not a country «of laws, not of men» . America’s Founders have finally lost. The country has been taken over by an aristocracy. And one of those «men» now, is actually Hillary Clinton, even though she is no longer officially holding governmental power. They know she soon might be. That’s why, the FBI cannot really, and seriously, investigate her. It’s not for legal reasons at all. It’s because of whom she is. In fact, purely on the basis of US laws, she clearly ought to be in prison . Any honest lawyer, inside or outside the FBI, has long known this, because the actual case against her is ‘slam-dunk’ , even though the FBI has refused to investigate it and has limited its ‘investigation’ only to peripheral ‘national security’ issues. (The #2 person at FBI, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, right below Director James Comey, specified this limitation to his ‘investigators’. They simply weren’t allowed to investigate her, except on the hardest-to-prove crimes that she probably but not definitely did also do. The slam-dunks were just off-limits to them. McCabe’s wife’s political campaign had received $675,000 from the PAC of Terry McAuliffe , a close friend of the Clintons, who chaired Hillary’s 2008 Presidential campaign. And, even on the harder-to-prove matters, which FBI Director Comey declined on July 5th to pursue, they stood a strong chance of winning, if only Comey hadn’t prevented their moving forward to try — but those issues are tangential to the basic case against her, anyway.) There are at least six federal criminal laws which accurately and unquestionably describe even what Ms. Clinton has now publicly admitted having done by her privatized email system, and intent isn’t even mentioned in most of them nor necessary in order for her to be convicted — the actions themselves convict her, and the only relevance that intent might have, regarding any of these laws, would be in determining how long her prison sentence would be. I have already presented the texts of these six laws (and you can see the sentences for each one, right there), and any reader can easily recognize that each one of them describes, unambiguously without any doubt, what she now admits having done . Most of these crimes don’t require any intent in order to convict (and the ones that do require intent are only «knowingly … conceals», or else «with the intent to impair the object’s … use in an official proceeding», both of which «intents» would be easy to prove on the basis of what has already been made public — but others of these laws don’t require even that); and none of them requires any classified information to have been involved, at all. It’s just not an issue in these laws. Thus, conviction under them is far easier. If a prosecutor is really seeking to convict someone, he’ll be aiming to get indictments on the easiest-to-prove charges, first. That also presents for the prosecutor the strongest position in the event of an eventual plea-bargain. As Alan Dershowitz said , commenting on one famous prosecution: «They also wanted a slam-dunk case. They wanted the strongest possible case.» Comey simply didn’t; he wanted the hardest-to-convict case. His presentation was a brazen hoax. That’s all. That’s the real scandal, and nobody (other than I) has been writing about it as what it is — a hoax. But what it shows is that maybe the only way that Clinton will be able to avoid going to prison is by her going to the White House. Either she gets a term in the White House, or else she gets a (much longer) term in prison — or else our government is so thoroughly corrupt that she remains free as a private citizen and still above the law, even though not serving as a federal official. Even if she is convicted only on these six slam-dunk statutes (and on none other, including not on the ones that Comey was referring to when he said on July 5 th that, «Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case»), she could be sentenced to a maximum of 73 years in prison (73 = 5 + 5 + 20 + 20 + 3 + 10 + 10). Adding on others she might also have committed (such as the ones that Comey was referring to, all of which pertain only to the handling of classified information), would mean that her term in prison might be lengthier still, but what’s important in the email case isn’t that; it’s to convict her on, essentially, theft and/or destruction of US government documents by means of transferring them into her private email and/or smashing hard drives. No one, not even a US federal official, can legally do that, and those six laws are specifically against it. Motive is important in Ms. Clinton’s email case, because motive tells us why she was trying to hide from historians and from the public her operations as the US Secretary of State: was it because she didn’t want them to know that she was selling to the Sauds and her other friends the US State Department’s policies in return for their million-dollar-plus donations to the Clinton Foundation , and maybe even selling to them (and/or their cronies) US government contracts, or why? However, those are questions regarding other crimes that she might have been perpetrating while in public office, not the crimes of her privatized email operation itself ; and those other crimes (whatever they might have been) would have been explored only after an indictment on the slam-dunks, and for further possible prosecutions, if President Obama’s people were serious about investigating her. They weren’t. Clearly, this is selective ‘justice’. That’s the type of ‘justice’ an aristocracy imposes. Why, then, did Comey finally switch to re-open the Clinton case? It wasn’t merely the discovery of some of her previously unknown emails on the computer of Anthony Wiener, husband to Hillary’s closest aide Huma Abedin. As Politico on October 28th reported , «Another former Justice official said Comey's letter [announcing the re-opening of Hillary’s case] could be part of an effort on his part to quiet internal FBI critics who viewed him as burying the Clinton probe for political reasons. ‘He’s come under a lot of criticism from his own people for how he’s handled this. He’s trying to gain back some of their respect,’ former Justice Department spokeswoman Emily Pierce said. ‘His ability to do what he does largely depends on the respect within his own ranks.’» Joachim Hagopian at Global Research headlined on October 30th, «The Real Reasons Why FBI Director James Comey Reopened the Hillary Email Investigation» , and reported: «Former federal attorney for the District of Columbia Joe diGenova spelled it all out in a WMAL radio interview last Friday just hours after the news was released that Comey had sent a letter informing Congress that the case is being reopened. DiGenova said that with an open revolt brewing inside the FBI, Comey was forced to go public on Friday with reopening the investigation. … Finally, diGenova dropped one more bombshell in Friday’s interview. An inside source has revealed to him that the laptops belonging to key Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, both wrongly granted immunity , were not destroyed after all as previously reported, but have been secretly kept intact by investigating FBI agents refusing to destroy incriminating evidence as part of the in-house whitewash». In other words: Comey was between a rock (the resignation-letters piling up on his desk from subordinates who felt that no person should be above the law) and a hard place (his ability to stay on at the FBI and not have a scandal against himself bleed out to the public from down below). The US wasn’t yet that kind of dictatorship — one which could withstand such a public disclosure. In order for it to become one, the aristocracy’s control would have needed to be even stronger than it yet is. Also on the 30 th , Ed Klein in Britain’s Daily Mail bannered : EXCLUSIVE: Resignation letters piling up from disaffected FBI agents, his wife urging him to admit he was wrong: Why Director Comey jumped at the chance to reopen Hillary investigation James Comey revived the investigation of Clinton's email server as he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents, sources say The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim [Comey] announced last July that he wouldn't recommend an indictment against Hillary He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. So, does this now mean that, finally, the FBI will bring before a grand jury the evidence that Hillary Clinton blatantly violated those six federal criminal laws against stealing and/or trying to destroy federal documents? There has never — at least since 1981 — been so severe a test of the extent to which this nation is (as those researches found it to have unquestionably been between 1981 and 2002) an «oligarchy». However, a serious criminal prosecution of Ms. Clinton would potentially start an unwinding of this dictatorship. The present writer will make no prediction. However, obviously, the results of the election on November 8th will certainly have an enormous impact upon the outcome. Since I think that anyone but a complete fool can recognize this much, I’m confident enough to assert it — a conditional about the future. | 0 |
November 8, 2016 Kurdish forces enter town near Mosul as Iraqi troops find mass grave
Iraqi Kurdish fighters have exchanged heavy fire with militants as they entered a town held by Islamic State east of Mosul, while troops advancing south of the city discovered a mass grave containing an estimated 100 or so decapitated bodies.
The offensive to reclaim the town of Bashiqa is part of the broader push to drive Isis out of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, relieving those living under its brutal occupation, which has included mass killings.
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Here is what eight years of President Obama’s “post-racial” reign have wrought.
The weekend before Election Day, Hillary Clinton grinned from ear to ear at a Cleveland rally while reciting a verse from Jay-Z’s remix of Young Jeezy’s “My President is Black.” As the rapper and his Black Lives Matter-promoting wife, Beyonce, beamed on stage nearby, pandersuit-clad Clinton twanged with a stilted accent:
“Remember, Jay memorably said: ‘Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk, and Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could run, and Barack Obama ran so all the children could fly.'”
This would be comical if not for the noxious cynicism of it all. Clinton may not remember (if she was ever aware in the first place), but the original version of “My President is Black” is a brazen middle finger to nonblack America. Just a few lines after the verse Hillary quoted, the song taunts:
Hello Miss America, hey pretty lady
Red, white, and blue flag, wave for me baby
Never thought I’d say this s—, baby I’m good
You can keep your p—, I don’t want no more Bush
No more war, no more Iraq
No more white lies, the President is black
So the poster granny for liberal white privilege, groveling for black votes, kissed the rings of celebrity Obama BFFs Jay-Z and Beyonce by parroting an inflammatory anthem laced with profanities and radical racialized gloating.
Could there have been a more perfect beclownment to cap Clinton’s phony-baloney “Stronger Together” campaign?
After denigrating millions of Trump supporters as “deplorable” and “irredeemable” earlier this year, Clinton then unctuously confessed on election eve: “I regret deeply how angry the tone of the campaign became.”
Note the classic textbook employment of the passive voice to evade personal responsibility.
The good news is that after being blasted as haters by Clinton’s hate-filled minions, after being slapped down as racial “cowards” by Clintonite holdover Eric Holder, after being lambasted as “xenophobes” and “nativists” by immigration expansionists in both parties, after enduring a string of faked hate crimes blamed on conservatives, after ceaseless accusations of “Islamophobia” in the wake of jihad attacks on American soil, after baseless accusations of “homophobia” for protesting the government’s gay wedding cake coercion, and after mourning a growing list of police officers ambushed and targeted by violent thugs seeking racial vengeance, an undeniable movement of citizens in the 2016 election cycle decided to push back.
When all is said and done, one of the most important cultural accomplishments of Donald Trump’s bid will be the platform he created for Americans of all colors, ethnicities, political affiliations, and socioeconomic backgrounds to defy soul-draining identity politics.
Beltway chin-pullers expediently focused on Trump’s white and conservative supporters who are rightly sick and tired of social justice double standards. But they ignored the increasingly vocal constituency of hyphen-free, label-rejecting American People Against Political Correctness who don’t fit old narratives and boxes.
And the same “Never Trump” pundits and establishment political strategists who gabbed endlessly about the need for “minority outreach” after 2012 were flummoxed by the blacks, gays, Latinos, women and Democrats who rallied behind the GOP candidate.
The most important speech of the 2016 election cycle wasn’t delivered by one of the presidential candidates. It came from iconoclastic Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel who best explained the historically significant backlash against the intolerant tolerance mob and phony diversity-mongers.
“Louder voices have sent a message that they do not intend to tolerate the views of one half of the country,” he observed at the National Press Club last week. He recounted how the gay magazine The Advocate, which had once praised him as a “gay innovator,” declared he was “not a gay man” anymore because of his libertarian, limited-government politics.
“The lie behind the buzzword of diversity could not be made more clear,” Thiel noted. “If you don’t conform, then you don’t count as diverse, no matter what your personal background.”
Trump’s eclectic coalition was bound by that common thread: disaffected individuals tired of being told they don’t count and discounted because their views do not properly “match” their gender, chromosomes, skin color or ethnicity. That is exactly why the more they and their nominee were demonized, the stronger their support grew.
“No matter what happens in this election,” Thiel concluded last week, “what Trump represents isn’t crazy and it’s not going away.”
He’s right. I too often take for granted my own personal awakening about the entrenched tribalism of identity politics at a crazy liberal arts college in the early 1990s. The liberation from collectivist ideology is profound and lasting. Witnessing so many outspoken newcomers arrive at this enlightenment, however circuitous the route, has been the most encouraging and underappreciated phenomenon of the 2016 campaign.
Michelle Malkin is a senior editor at Conservative Review. For more articles and videos from Michelle, visit ConservativeReview.com. Her email address is [email protected].
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Getty - Tim Sloan IJR Opinion is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR.
A Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton presidency is rather mind-boggling to many of us. At last check, there are over 300 million people in the United States, and we can't find anyone better than HRC and 'The Donald'?
Sadly, we are watching the American presidential election devolve into a competition between the DNC and the GOP as to who can put forward the most corrupt, asinine, power hungry candidate possible. Although the race to the bottom is a voting conundrum for both sides, the extreme left has posited a unique argument that can help social conservatives when it comes to personal principles and the voting booth.
In a world where biological sex is gleefully separated from gender identification, shouldn’t it be acceptable that one might separate selecting a candidate from voting for him or her? Put another way: if having male genitalia doesn't necessarily make you male, then selecting someone for president doesn’t necessarily mean that you voted for that person. Right?
This type of disconnected reality is only fair if everyone can play the game. Wow - this is an existential moment! I feel better already. To quote The Kinks : “Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls. It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world…”
Thank you, transgender community, for helping me work through this “mixed up, muddled up” election. Although I will select Donald Trump for President of the United States, I will not be voting for him.
That’s right. I’m voting for three reasons and three reasons only:
I’m voting to curtail the Clintons' power.
I’m voting to curtail the Clintons' power.
I’m voting to curtail the Clintons' power.
There you have it: three solid reasons for selecting Donald Trump without voting for him. It’s time to be pragmatic. It’s time to select a candidate who will create the greatest amount of disturbance within the system albeit with the least amount of power.
Who might that be? Let’s see: “ eeny, meeny, miny, moe , H-R-C has got to go! ” Really, people - how long are we going to elect the same old political hacks who have consolidated their power for decades?
It is amazing that in a “free” country we’ve allowed the Clintons to run the DNC (and thus a fair portion of Washington, D.C.) for nearly 30 years! They have manipulated the system for their personal gain to the tune of $110 million! They are willing to sell our country to the nation or company that will pay the highest speaking fee . They lie, cheat, and steal their way to the top.
Is this not problematic? Power - and the lack of - is the most important thing for the next president, yet the media isn’t discussing it.
Here’s the most substantial difference between Donald Trump and HRC. If elected, Donald Trump would have a fraction of the power of HRC. For crying out loud: 2/3 of the GOP is already against him . Do you hear any major resistance rising up against HRC by DNC insiders? No. Progressives should wake up to the fact that if they vote for HRC, then they prove that their Occupy Wall Street, stick-it-to-the-man gig is a complete sham.
Indeed, if progressives vote for HRC, then they’re either quintessential hypocrites who couldn’t care less about the American people or they’re complete idiots being played like a drum by the powers that be in the DNC.
Make no mistake about it. I’ll select Trump’s name for president, but I’m not voting for him. Rather, I’m voting to limit the power of the presidency; I’m voting to stop HRC’s quest to become the first Queen of America by wielding the power of her husband’s former kingship.
Wake up, America! We fought a revolution to prevent such a consolidation of power. I would like to think Americans are smart enough to stop the Clintons from gaining even more of it.
Proverbs 15:27 - “He who is greedy for gain troubles his own house.” | 0 |
SYDNEY, Australia — New Zealand’s prime minister, John Key, surprised the country on Monday by announcing he would resign next week, citing a desire to spend more time with his family. Mr. Key, 55, has been in office since November 2008 and led the conservative National Party to election victories in 2011 and 2014. The next election is scheduled for next year, and Mr. Key had been seen as the likely favorite. Though many people were asking why, answers were elusive. “I think he decided he was simply done with politics particularly when this year his friend David Cameron in the U. K. decided to step down as prime minister and another friend of his, Barack Obama, will next year leave office,” said Stephen Levine, a professor of political science at Victoria University of Wellington. Mr. Key, a former Merrill Lynch executive, said Monday that he had never wanted to be a career politician and did not know what he would do next. “Throughout these years I have given everything I could to this job that I cherish, and this country that I love,” he said in a statement. “All of this has come at quite some sacrifice for the people who are dearest to me — my family. ” Shelley Mackey, a spokeswoman for Mr. Key, said the prime minister had decided to leave office for personal reasons. Mr. Key said that he would resign on Dec. 12 and that his party would choose a new leader and prime minister that same day. Mr. Key said he would support whomever the party chose but that he would vote for Bill English, his deputy prime minister and finance minister, if Mr. English put his name forward. “The expectation is that Bill English will be the new leader of New Zealand,” Professor Levine said. Mr. English, 55, declined to comment. Mr. English was involved in Mr. Key’s initiative to partly privatize utilities and, like the prime minister, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Partnership, the multilateral trade deal that has been put in doubt with Donald J. Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States. Mr. Key was prime minister during the 2011 earthquake in the city of Christchurch that killed 185 people. During his tenure, Mr. Key pushed for New Zealand to adopt a new flag, saying the old one symbolized a bygone colonial era. But voters chose to keep the old flag in a nationwide referendum. Mr. Key successfully negotiated the first visit of a United States warship to New Zealand in 30 years. The Sampson, a guided missile destroyer, arrived at the port of Auckland last month as part of the 75th anniversary celebrations of the Royal New Zealand Navy. New Zealand’s Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act of 1987 declared that the country’s sea, air and land space were zones. But Mr. Key successfully negotiated the visit of the Sampson without generating internal political controversy or compromising American policy that neither confirms nor denies its vessels are carrying nuclear weapons, Professor Levine said. | 1 |
Hillary Thugs IDENTIFIED, Homeless Woman Protecting Trump Star Gets Justice Posted on November 1, 2016 by Rebecca Diserio in News Share This
In a sad story that went viral, thugs beat up a homeless black woman who was defending Donald Trump’s star on Hollywood Boulevard. Now, those thugs have been identified. Shockingly, these Hillary Clinton thugs are nothing but bullies who beat up anyone supporting Trump, even the elderly and disabled, but the good news is, the homeless black woman is getting much-deserved justice. A black homeless woman was beaten up by Hillary thugs for protecting Donald Trump’s “star”& supporting him in this election.
After an idiot took a jackhammer to Donald Trump’s Hollywood “Star of Fame,” one brave black homeless woman decided to protect it from further damage. That brought out the Hillary bullies, but there was one problem. None of them could be identified because kept the best video evidence from getting out.
Now, Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars has obtained a clear copy of what happened, and we now have enough evidence to identify the attackers. In the video, Watson does an excellent job of identifying two of the Hillary bullies. One he calls “ Trigglypuff ,” an obese woman who may identify as a man, is wanted for felony assault by Los Angeles police, and another man, who ironically is wearing a cross necklace, taunted the homeless woman, saying, “Didn’t I tell you about five minutes ago that no I would not defend you because you spewed hate and you got hate, you got exactly what you were dishing out.” “Trigglypuff” (the name given to social justice warriors who get triggered) is caught on video, wanted by police for felony assault. The thug who yelled, “Didn’t I tell you,” is caught on video and also wanted by Los Angeles police for aiding and abetting a felony assault.
The California homeless woman sat on the star with a sign that read, “20 Million Illegals and Americans Sleep in the Streets In Tents, Vote For Trump.” That was the “hate” she was spewing, and here is the backward logic the Hillary bullies are selling, as Watson sarcastically points out , “Didn’t I tell you if you disagree if you dare disagree with our retarded political opinions you get physically attacked by a sack of sh*t [Trigglypuff] and by the way it’s your fault for spewing hate.”
Another thug can be heard saying not to call an ambulance as they continue to laugh at the victim, but there is a silver lining. This latest video gives the police all they need to formally identify “Trigglypuff,” who is wanted for felony assault and those other thugs who aided and abetted the felony crime of beating this homeless woman.
This incident has gotten so much attention, and the police are very motivated to do everything they can to track down these Hillary bullies. It’s just a matter of time, and they will be positively identified. In the meantime, Trump dispatched one of his representatives to Los Angeles to find the homeless woman to give her “something.” I’m sure Trump was moved by this woman’s plight, and what he is offering will help her in the dire situation she finds herself in.
This story was not on any mainstream media networks, but imagine if the homeless woman was a Hillary supporter and Trump supporters beat her up. We all know it would be reported on 24/7 on CNN and MSNBC with panels of experts discussing Trump and his supporters who commit acts of violence.
As Watson concludes in his video, the only thugs acting out after this election will be the paid Hillary bullies who time after time have shown up at Trump events and used violence against peaceful citizens. Luckily, their sick reign of shame and violence is coming to an end as Hillary is falling apart and Trump will be elected our next president. | 0 |
HAMAM Iraq — One week after Iraqi forces began their push into western Mosul, American firepower is playing an essential role in softening the opposition from the Islamic State. The thunderous booms from howitzers near Hamam a town along the Tigris River, are just part of the American military’s contribution to keeping the Iraqi offensive moving forward. Capt. Geoffrey Ross, who commands the unit of artillery here, said his soldiers had been a lot busier than he had anticipated. “It’s considerably more than we thought we were going to shoot when we left Fort Hood,” he said on Saturday, as one of his howitzers hurled another round toward Mosul, 15 miles to the northwest. At Qayyarah Airfield West, a sprawling Iraq base 40 miles south of Mosul, a United States Army task force fires Himars rockets at targets. Apache attack helicopters, equipped with Hellfire missiles, stand ready to carry out their missions from the base’s airfield. Not to mention the punishing airstrikes by American and allied warplanes and drones. A flurry of attacks were carried out by the coalition in and around Mosul on Saturday, some involving the dropping of multiple bombs. That firepower, the decision to position American advisers closer to the fighting, and the determined efforts of the Iraqi forces themselves have yielded some notable gains. Iraq’s federal police have fully secured the Mosul airport, while Iraq’s elite counterterrorism service seized a nearby military base last week. That ground has been taken at a cost. Four Iraqis were killed in action and 53 wounded on Friday, according to an American official who requested anonymity to discuss the statistics, which have yet to be officially published. That is a small fraction of the approximately 500 dead and 3, 000 wounded that Iraqi forces suffered in their push to secure the eastern half of the city during an earlier, offensive. But the toughest part of the battle — the combat in the narrow streets of the old part of western Mosul — still lies ahead. The Islamic State’s military tactics have also added to the challenge. With the encouragement of the Americans, the Iraqi strategy has been to mount an attack on multiple axes to present the militants with more problems than they can handle. But the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has responded at times by concentrating its firepower on what it believes to be the Iraqis’ main line of attack. In ISIS’ version of combined arms warfare, it has sent drones equipped with bombs even as it lobbed mortars and deployed suicide car bombers, whom the militants use as a primitive but often effective way to deliver munitions. Iraqi troops have been spooked by the ISIS drones, which sometimes hover in swarms of three to five. Neither the American nor the Iraqi military has an easy remedy. Trying to jam the drones might interfere with the Iraqis’ own communications, and it is not always easy to shoot them out of the sky. So the United States military has used its firepower to try to mitigate the drone problem, just as it targeted ISIS’ car bomb factories, mortar teams and command posts. On Saturday, the command announced that it had struck a “staging area” for launching drones and a cache of the weapons. Qayyarah West, which was once known as Saddam Airbase and is called by American soldiers, is a pivotal base for the Mosul offensive. Runways at the air base, captured from the Islamic State in July, have been repaired by American combat engineers, which makes it an important logistics hub and a useful platform for projecting power. First Lt. Mary Floyd, a officer who was raised in South Carolina, has been focused on doing exactly that. The commander of a platoon that fires Himars rockets, she helped flatten a building the American military says Islamic State militants were using as a command post shortly before the Iraqis began their offensive to take western Mosul. Over the past week, she said, her platoon launched rockets toward Mosul 10 to 20 times. Military officers have a name for the two platoons that fire Himars that are deployed at the base: Task Force Thor. Firing rockets into a densely populated city is a tricky proposition. But the rockets’ satellite guidance, perpendicular angle of attack and the fact that they can accommodate a relatively small warhead have led the military to turn to it during previous urban fights, including the 2006 battle for Ramadi and the 2007 struggle for the control of Haifa Street in Baghdad. The United States is not the only nation supporting the Iraqis by firing artillery. French artillery has been active as well. Hamam was taken by Iraqi forces in November, and a mass grave of ISIS victims was later uncovered near an agricultural college there. Now, United States Army crews live and even sleep inside their Paladin artillery units, waiting for orders to fire. Captain Ross declined to say precisely how many rounds his soldiers had fired. But he said they were ready to shoot day and night and could “range the entire city. ” | 1 |
MIAMI — After returning from a honeymoon in the Dominican Republic, Jamie asked to be tested for the Zika virus. Ms. 28, a publicist in Rochester, N. Y. wants to get pregnant, but not before she knows her body is Zika free. But she and other parents are quickly learning that getting a Zika test isn’t easy. As worries about the spread of the virus in the United States continue to mount, public health department labs in Florida and New York City are running at or close to capacity, while private commercial labs have won emergency approval to run Zika tests and have ramped up their testing capacity. But that doesn’t mean that just anybody can get a test. Even people like Ms. who have compelling reasons to be tested for a virus known to cause devastating brain defects in the fetus, can’t walk into a local health department and get tested on demand. That’s because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued strict guidelines about who should be tested, giving priority to pregnant women with possible exposure to Zika and people with symptoms. Already public health officials in Florida say they face a backlog of tests for pregnant women, some of whom may be waiting to make decisions about whether to have abortions if they test positive. But the C. D. C. ’s testing policy largely ignores a sizable subgroup of women and men also at risk — those who are trying to conceive but fear they have been exposed to Zika. The C. D. C. recommends women contemplating pregnancy avoid travel to areas where Zika transmission is occurring and, if they have traveled, says they should wait at least eight weeks before trying to conceive. But it does not recommend testing. Guidance for men is inconsistent. Although the virus can persist in sperm for months after exposure, the C. D. C. recommends that men who may have been exposed to the virus have protected sex for at least eight weeks after potential exposure unless they have symptoms. The World Health Organization just changed its recommendation to six months of protected sex for men and women. Neither group recommends testing. The restrictions are aimed at preventing an onslaught of requests for Zika tests that could clog the system and prevent public health officials from identifying new cases quickly. They also shape medical practice and influence insurance coverage, making doctors reluctant to order tests and insurers unwilling to cover the costs — between $229 and $800 on the private market — if patients don’t fit the C. D. C. ’s testing criteria. In the case of Ms. and her husband, her obstetrician and primary care doctors declined to refer her for testing because she didn’t meet the criteria. “If I have to wait a year, I will, because you want a healthy baby,” said Ms. who booked her trip to the Dominican Republic almost a year ago, long before Zika had emerged as a threat. She and her husband already have a son and want to conceive now so the children are close in age. “If I could conceive sooner rather than later, that would be good for our family,” she said. Public health experts say the restrictions are necessary to ensure that people most at risk have access to testing. “We aren’t interested in stimulating the testing of simply anxious people,” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious diseases specialist and the head of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “We want health care providers to provide the appropriate counseling and to be selective in the use of this test, as they are in the use of any other test. ” Laboratories and public health agencies say they are inundated with requests for tests, but declined to provide specifics. Julie Kliegl, the president of Laboratories, a commercial lab in Lee’s Summit, Mo. said the demand for Zika testing had doubled between July and August. Clarissa Bradstock, the chief executive of Any Lab Test Now, a franchise company with headquarters in Alpharetta, Ga. said its central call center had been getting dozens of calls a day from people asking about Zika testing. The lab briefly offered testing, in defiance of C. D. C. guidelines, but last week stopped the practice after one of the company’s testing partners raised concerns. “We’re just trying to respond to customers’ demands,” she said. “We don’t want to add to the hype, but we’re getting many people who want to conceive or are concerned about themselves or their partners being infected. ” One problem with private testing, health officials say, is that most commercial labs can’t offer all the tests needed to determine conclusively if a person has been exposed to the virus. Testing for Zika is surprisingly complex, and may require three tests to be sure of a result. One type is called a polymerase chain reaction, or P. C. R. designed to detect the active virus in blood and urine. The test is similar to those used for more common viruses like West Nile and influenza. But the P. C. R. test is reliable only if it’s used within a week or two of exposure. Since most people don’t have symptoms for Zika, many can’t pinpoint the date of exposure. While a positive P. C. R. test shows definitively that a person has Zika, a negative test does not mean a person is Zika free. If a P. C. R. test is negative, the next step is to test the blood sample for Zika antibodies. Antibody tests are not widely available and can also produce equivocal results. A negative antibody test means a person wasn’t exposed to Zika. But a positive result requires a third test to be sure the detected antibodies aren’t other viruses, such as dengue or chikungunya, both of which cause flulike symptoms and are present in Latin and South American countries. The third type, the plaque reduction neutralization test, or P. R. N. T. determines conclusively if a person was exposed to Zika. But the test is now done only by the C. D. C. and a limited number of local health department labs. For men, the story is even more complicated. Infected men can carry Zika in their semen for up to six months, but there is no approved test for screening semen. “Unfortunately, telling someone ‘you do not have Zika and never had Zika’ can be challenging. There are limitations to the best available tests,” said Dr. Jay K. Varma, the deputy commissioner for disease control at New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “There are situations in which we have to tell people, ‘We don’t know for sure whether or not you’ve been infected. We can’t conclusively say you were infected, and we can’t conclusively say you weren’t infected.’ That’s the limitation of the technology. ” For Elizabeth 33, of Los Angeles, the lack of reliable testing for women who want to conceive has been disappointing. Ms. had her dream wedding in May on a beach in Puerto Rico, an active zone of Zika transmission, and didn’t realize the impact it would have on her path to pregnancy. A cancer survivor, she consulted a fertility specialist after returning home to Los Angeles to talk about getting pregnant. “My doctor just said, ‘No, you can’t. No, you have to wait,’” Ms. said. “It was kind of heartbreaking. ” Some medical groups are pushing back against the C. D. C. guidelines. On Thursday, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, a membership organization that represents fertility experts, recommended that men and women who may have been exposed to Zika consider being tested and embark on fertility treatments only if tests are negative. But while the new guidelines incorporate the option of testing, Dr. Kristin Bendikson, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, said, “If you aren’t sure, your best option is to wait two months. ” | 1 |
0 comments Our Constitution REQUIRES us to defend from ALL enemies, foreign and DOMESTIC and that is the message Trevor Loudon puts forth in “ The Enemies Within ”
“ The Enemies Within ” exposes the anti-American, Socialist, Communist and Jihadist sympathies of leading figures in the Democratic Party including Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.
Loudon uncovers the shocking Communist connections of many of our elected servants, which explains well why they do not act like servants…and instead like masters.
Trevor Loudon has lived through the horrors of handing the reigns over to communist sympathizers in New Zealand. What is happening in the United States scares him.
He points out that 100 Congressmen and 20 Senators could not qualify to obtain a basic security clearance to clean the toilets at any military base in the nation. Neither could Barack Obama. He discusses how many elected officials have close ties to Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela and even Iran and North Korea.
We have some serious problems in the United Stated and as the Apostle Paul told Timothy, they will wax worse and worse if we do not wake up!
“ The Enemies Within ” is designed to show American voters exactly how modern communism works and how it impacts on your life, every single day. Just how do the communists win big on things like Obamacare and immigration “reform,” which go completely against the wishes of the American people?” This has been a “deliberately engineered attack” on the United States!
Watch the trailer :
Order your copy now at EnemiesWithinMovie.com
“The Enemies Within” zooms in on the best-kept secret of modern politics. Almost no one is aware of the fact that fewer than 20,000 U.S. communists, socialists and extreme “progressives” are able to influence the politicians and even write the laws that control the lives of over 300 million Americans.
This movie is a must have for your library! Order the movie today and share with your friends. How we stop the madness is by shedding the light on the insanity! | 0 |
VALERIE VALDEZ, now 60, was separated from her husband, Ted, and living in a converted garage apartment in Santa Cruz, Calif. when he died of a heart attack in 2014. She faced a sudden loss of income and wondered how she was going to support herself. She owned a home in Noe Valley, an upscale San Francisco neighborhood, occupied by a tenant renting month to month. She gave the tenant notice and moved back into the house, which she had cleaned and repainted. She invited the friend of a friend as a paying guest for $60 a night, placed a listing on Airbnb and received two additional bookings right away. “This is going to work,” she remembers telling herself. “I’m going to be O. K. ” Ms. Valdez now lists the home (she occupies one bedroom) on Airbnb, as well as Vacation Home Rentals, HomeAway and VRBO. The three bedrooms each list for $105 to $155 a night on Airbnb. On other sites she lists the entire house. Last year, she said, she hosted about 400 guests from 100 cities. Owning a cozy in an idyllic location has long been a common dream of many employees. But it’s hard work. Many baby boomers, though, are finding another way to become de facto innkeepers. “It’s an ingenious way of making money off this asset that you otherwise can’t monetize,” said Richard W. Johnson, director of retirement planning at the Urban Institute in Washington. Airbnb, in a 2015 study, identified people over 60 as the cohort of its hosts, increasing by 102 percent that year, compared to its overall growth rate in the United States of 85 percent. Worldwide, the company estimates that about 260, 000 of its roughly two million listings are offered by hosts 60 and older. Of those, 64 percent are women. (The company doesn’t track marital status.) Other home rental companies also have older hosts, they say, but don’t break down statistics by age or gender. There is even a specifically aimed at older people. Some 1, 500 individuals pay a $75 annual fee to belong to the Evergreen BB Club, which advertises homestays for people over 50. Members are expected to be hosts as well as paying guests, contributing $20 a night to cover the cost of breakfast and incidentals. While some may have concerns about lost privacy or living with strangers, those who have taken the plunge say their experiences are largely worthwhile. Divorced in 2012, Jacque Schultz, 66, heard about Airbnb at a party and looked at the furnished but unused downstairs of her duplex, which has a separate entrance, as a potential profit center. “It was more house than I needed,” she said of the property, which is in Nashville. She added a luggage rack. Her guests have included European tourists, performers who come to the area for a gig and recent college graduates on job searches. During winter months, she visits family in Florida. Ms. Schultz says that the unit, which rents for $110 a night, is booked about 15 to 20 days a month. Airbnb says the average senior host receives about $6, 000 a year for about 60 days of work. The company charges hosts a 3 percent booking fee, as does Vacation Home Rentals. Fees at other companies vary. Having strangers nearby doesn’t faze her. “I’ve not had a single negative experience,” she said. She turned away one persistent guest who wanted to circumvent the registration process. She relies on Airbnb’s screening to weed out undesirable guests. “A potential host or guest is disqualified if he or she appears on state or national sex offender registries, terrorism designations or if they have been convicted of a violent crime, serious sexual offense and prostitution or drug offenses,” Nick Shapiro, an Airbnb spokesman, wrote in an email. The company said its hosts can require guests to provide a government ID, like a driver’s license or passport. And they created a program called Verified ID for guests, which connects this offline identification to their Airbnb profile. The company says adding publicly available reviews and feedback also helps create an atmosphere of trust. Experts say hosting provides some nonmonetary benefits as well. It “allows you to stay in your home longer, adds a level of social engagement and provides some level of daily purpose,” said Ken Smith, director of mobility at the Stanford Center on Longevity. Opening your home to guests can mean almost always being on, as Elle La Forge, 65, found out when she began renting out the ground floor of her townhouse in the St. George neighborhood of Staten Island, a short walk to the ferry to Manhattan. She invested $5, 000, painted and installed a new floor, and added appliances, glasses, dishes and a microwave. For a private space that sleeps up to three, she charges $80 a night for one person and $10 a night for each additional person. “It does tie you down,” Ms. La Forge said. “I have my phone with me all the time. ” One guest, she recalled, phoned after departure for a lesson in paying tolls on the New Jersey Turnpike. But her solicitousness, and the general enjoyment she takes in helping point her guests to tourist attractions and other options, pays off. She is almost fully booked through September, she said. Airbnb said women over 60 are consistently the in the company’s star system. Edward LeMay, 73, a retired accounting professor, is another popular host. He has augmented his pension and retirement income by renting out rooms in his rowhouse in the South End of Boston. The extra income has provided him with the means to take piano and voice lessons, and travel to Israel and Turkey with the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus. In comments online, guests praise his warm welcome and engaging conversation. Still, his hospitality has limits. For two couples looking to stay together during the crowded Boston Marathon event, he agreed to give up his own room. But then he received a belated complaint letter from one of them about some minor repairs that were going on at the time. He did not need to reimburse the guests, but it still left a sour taste that they hadn’t recognized that he had gone out of his way to help them. “Even if someone is very nice, they aren’t necessarily going to be a good guest,” he said. Others prefer the reciprocity of Evergreen BB Club. Nancy Kennedy, 78, a weaver from Eureka, Calif. drives to shows to display her handmade rugs and stays with club members en route. “It’s a way to cut costs and make new friends,” she said. She discussed “politics and life” with one host. At another destination, the host told her where to find the key and left food in the refrigerator. Ms. Valdez has told friends and relatives about her experiences and encouraged them to join Airbnb as well. She has entertained German, French and Chinese tourists simultaneously. “It makes me feel like I am traveling around the world,” she said. | 1 |
KIEV IN PANIC: Tymoshenko declares Third Maidan, emergency govt committee prepares martial law November 14, 2016 - Fort Russ News - RusVesna - translated by J. Arnoldski - Ukrainian law enforcement and security agencies are preparing for possible protest actions in the country. A headquarters for responding to a surge of protest activities has been established at the base of the National Security and Defense Committee of Ukraine. This has been confirmed by Ukrainian journalists close to the headquarter’s structures. Among the planned measures is a crackdown on protest actions and the introduction of martial law in Kiev if the situation deteriorates to armed confrontation. The headquarters is headed by the national security committee’s secretary, Alexander Turchynov. According to insider sources, the special structure also includes Defense Minister Arsen Avakov, General Prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko, Chief of General Staff Viktor Muzhenko, SBU and intelligence representatives, and also people’s deputy Sergey Pashinsky. The first meeting of the headquarters took place on Sunday at the presidential administration. Several resolutions were adopted. The police have been ordered not to allow vehicles transporting protesters into the capital. Kiev authorities and law enforcement have been ordered to by all means prevent equipment and tents from being set up on the Maidan. The municipality is supposed to seek a court ban on holding mass actions in the center of the capital in order to enact this. MP’s from the coalition factions in parliament (the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and People’s Front) have been suggested to organize private security detachments out of athletes and staff to help security forces disperse actions if necessary. Intelligence services and the SBU have been tasked with investigating evidence of a “Russian trace” in the planned protests. They have also been instructed to look into shutting down TV channels and blocking internet sites. If all of these measures do not have the desired effect and protests are held on a large scale with the blockade of administrative buildings, then security forces could receive the order to disperse protests and arrest their leaders. Detachments of the National Guard, Armed Forces, and SBU special forces have been proposed to carry out such operations. At the headquarters meeting, the National Security and Defense Committee of Ukraine was instructed to prepare draft legislation on the imposition of martial law and a curfew in Kiev, sources have reported. The most likely pretext for protests will be the so-called “shock bills”, according to which as of October new prices are to be introduced for heating. Earlier, the Cabinet of Ministers raised them by 75-90%. Now, heating a two-bedroom apartment costs approximately 1,500 hryvnia, while the average salary is in the range of only 5,000 hryvnia. Earlier, authorities also raised the prices for electricity, gas, and cold water. Videos taken by locals have captured columns of military vehicles moving in the direction of Kiev. **** Novorossiya - translated by J. Arnoldski - Yulia Tymoshenko has urged Ukrainians to take to the streets on November 15th for an indefinite protest action in the center of Kiev. She stated this on Monday, November 14th, during a speech in the Verkhovna Rada. According to Tymoshenko, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and the National Bank have become a bastion of corruption and the head of state has appointed his business partners to key positions in the country. “Today only the people can restore justice and put the government in its place. Tomorrow morning, citizens, including pensioners, will go out for an indefinite protest against the devaluation of the hryvnia, the increase in utility costs, and for returning their bank deposits,” she announced. Tymoshenko also added that the government is calling protesters “the hand of the Kremlin”, while in fact “people are just fed up.” “Officials hide behind the war, but they themselves are corrupting and robbing the country. Either the people will unite or the government will simply destroy the Ukrainian nation and Ukrainian state,” she emphasized. Information that Tymoshenko was preparing a new Maidan appeared as early as late September. It was reported that public organizations with links to her had purchased from 300 to 500 tents for use in mass actions. Tymoshenko recently stated that even Western Ukraine is starting to think positively about the country’s former president, Viktor Yanukovych. “If they think so in Galicia, then you can only imagine what thoughts people from other regions are having," she warned. Follow us on Facebook! | 0 |
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“Premiums will go up sharply next year under President Barack Obama’s health care law, and many consumers will be down to just one insurer, the administration confirmed Monday.” The Associated Press explains at this link . Arizona will see the biggest spike (a whopping 116 percent), while Oklahoma will see a spike of 69 percent and Tennessee, Minnesota and Alabama will see spikes around 60 percent. The national average will be about 25%, the Obama administration says.
Mary Katharine Ham recently wrote a column titled “ My Defective Obamacare Health Insurance Product Just Blew Up . Last year, her insurance plan’s cost went up “by almost 60 percent.” The plan had been purchased on the Affordable Care Act “marketplace.” This year, things got much worse:
My premium is going up 96 percent. Ninety-six percent . My monthly payment, which was the amount of a decent car payment, is now the size of a moderate mortgage. The president refers to these for thousands of citizens as “a few bugs” when to us it feels like a flameout.
For this astronomical payment, I get a plan with an astronomical deductible that my healthy family of three will likely never hit except in the most catastrophic of circumstances.
Before Obamacare, she, like many other people , had a better plan at a lower price:
During the run-up to Obamacare, President Obama referred to these plans as “junk” plans, but my family and I received perfectly good care and service through them. We were responsible, healthy citizens consuming a small amount of health care, paying out of pocket for most of it, and making sure we weren’t deadbeats should something catastrophic come to pass. Our health insurance was a rational and responsible purchase.
But thanks to Obamacare, that plan no longer exists, even though Obama got Congress to approve Obamacare by falsely claiming that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” (A claim that even biased left-leaning fact-checker PolitiFact later called the “ lie of the year .”)
As Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute noted in the Chicago Tribune,
Obamacare inflation impacts everyone. August saw the biggest monthly gain in prices for medicine, doctor appointments and health insurance since 1984. . .The average employer-sponsored family policy now costs more than $18,000 a year.
That means family coverage costs $4,400 more today than before the health law passed in 2010. So much for President Barack Obama’s promise families would save $2,500 a year.
Further, the Government Accountability Office found the Obamacare website is a magnet for fraud. The office created 14 fictitious enrollees who were approved for $60,000 in health insurance subsidies.
Turner argues that an expansion of Obamacare recently proposed by Hillary Clinton would “double down” on its failures, replicating on a much larger scale the flaws of the “health insurance cooperatives concocted by Obamacare. The co-op program cost taxpayers $2.4 billion, but 17 of the 23 state co-ops have failed.”
Obamacare has already reduced employment in most states by between 1.5% and 3%, according to Georgetown University’s Tomas Wind. The “healthcare law will slow economic growth over the next decade, costing the nation about 2.3 million jobs and contributing to a $1 trillion increase in projected deficits, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released” in 2014 . | 0 |
Climate change is never going to announce itself by name. But this is what we should expect it to look like. That’s what many scientists, analysts and activists are saying after heavy rains in southern Louisiana have killed at least 11 people and forced tens of thousands of residents from their homes, in the latest in a series of extreme floods that have occurred in the United States over the last two years. That increase in heavy rainfall and the resultant flooding “is consistent with what we expect to see in the future if you look at climate models,” said David Easterling, a director at the National Centers for Environmental Information, which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Not just in the U. S. but in many other parts of the world as well. ” The flooding in Louisiana is the eighth event since May of last year in which the amount of rainfall in an area in a specified window of time matches or exceeds the NOAA predictions for an amount of precipitation that will occur once every five hundred years, or has a 0. 2 percent chance of occurring in any given year. Louisiana joins five other states, most of them in the South, that have experienced deadly flooding in the last 15 months, including Oklahoma, Texas, South Carolina and West Virginia. In the last three months alone, floods in Maryland, West Virginia and Louisiana have combined to kill dozens of people and damage tens of thousands of homes and vehicles. The National Weather Service reports that parts of Louisiana have received as much as 31 inches of rain in the last week, a number Dr. Easterling called “pretty staggering,” and one that exceeds an amount of precipitation that his center predicts will occur once every thousand years in the area. Dr. Easterling said that those sorts of estimates were predicated on the idea that the climate was stable, a principle that has become outdated. The third National Climate Assessment, released in 2014 by the United States Global Change Research Program, showed that “the amount of rain falling in very heavy precipitation events” had been significantly above average since 1991. However, the research did not identify the South as one of the areas of greatest concern the increase was found to be greatest in the Northeast, Midwest and Upper Great Plains regions of the United States. Some climate researchers warned Tuesday that it was too early to explain why so much of the country has faced sudden flooding. “It’s really hard to attribute things like this without a larger body of evidence,” said Barry D. Keim, the Louisiana state climatologist. “And, of course, the question keeps coming up: How large does that body of evidence have to get?” But others said that the situation was quite clear. “This is exactly what scientists have been predicting,” said the climate activist Bill McKibben. “The basic physics are simple: Warm air holds more water vapor, something that is turning out to be one of the most important facts of the 21st century. ” “And while Louisiana was flooding, there were also huge flood events underway in Moscow (biggest rains in 129 years of ) the Sudan, Manila, and probably plenty of other places,” he added. For the last four years, the American Meteorological Society has attempted to explain how climate change has influenced individual extreme weather events. However, that type of analysis, known as event attribution, is not yet available for the flooding in Louisiana. Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit, who focuses on climate change’s effect on water resources, said that state and local governments would have to change their approaches to keeping citizens safe from flooding. “If you look across all our natural disaster policies, they’re predicated on the wrong assumption that our flood risk in the future looks identical to our flood risk in the past,” he said. He said that initiatives like the National Flood Insurance Program, which focuses on helping people rebuild in areas that have been flooded, were increasingly “untenable,” given sea level rise. A report released earlier this month by the real estate sales company Zillow predicted that almost 1. 9 million homes, worth a combined $882 billion, would be lost to the rising sea levels — and the flooding likely to follow — that climate scientists expect to see by the year 2100. “When Zillow starts warning about sea level rise, it may be time to start worrying about sea level rise,” Mr. Moore said. | 1 |
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