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WASHINGTON — President Trump turned the power of the White House against the news media on Friday, escalating his attacks on journalists as “the enemy of the people” and berating members of his own F. B. I. as “leakers” who he said were putting the nation at risk. In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Trump criticized as “fake news” organizations that publish anonymously sourced reports that reflect poorly on him. And in a series of Twitter posts, he assailed the F. B. I. as a dangerously porous agency, condemning unauthorized revelations of classified information from within its ranks and calling for an immediate hunt for leakers. Hours after the speech, as if to demonstrate Mr. Trump’s determination to punish reporters whose coverage he dislikes, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, barred journalists from The New York Times and several other news organizations from attending his daily briefing, a highly unusual breach of relations between the White House and its press corps. Mr. Trump’s barrage against the news media continued well into Friday night. “FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn’t tell the truth,” he wrote on Twitter shortly after 10 p. m. singling out The Times and CNN. “A great danger to our country. ” The moves underscored the degree to which Mr. Trump and members of his inner circle are eager to use the prerogatives of the presidency to undercut those who scrutinize him, dismissing negative stories as lies and confining press access at the White House to a few chosen news organizations considered friendly. The Trump White House has also vowed new efforts to punish leakers. Mr. Trump’s attacks on the press came as the White House pushed back on a report by CNN on Thursday night that a White House official had asked the F. B. I. to rebut a New York Times article last week detailing contacts between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russian intelligence officials. The report asserted that a senior White House official had called top leaders at the F. B. I. to request that they contact reporters to dispute the Times’s account. “The fake news doesn’t tell the truth,” Mr. Trump said to the delight of the conservatives packed into the main ballroom at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center just south of Washington. “It doesn’t represent the people, it doesn’t and never will represent the people, and we’re going to do something about it. ” In the West Wing less than three hours later, the consequences were becoming clear. Mr. Spicer told a handpicked group of reporters in a briefing in his spacious office that the White House would relentlessly counter coverage it considered inaccurate. “We’re going to aggressively push back,” he said, according to a recording of the session provided by a reporter who was allowed to attend. “We’re just not going to sit back and let, you know, false narratives, false stories, inaccurate facts get out there. ” Reporters from The Times, BuzzFeed News, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, the BBC and The Huffington Post were among those shut out of the briefing. Aides to Mr. Spicer admitted only reporters from a group of news organizations that, the White House said, had been previously confirmed. Those organizations included Breitbart News, the One America News Network and The Washington Times, all with conservative leanings. Journalists from ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Fox News also attended. Reporters from The Associated Press and Time magazine, who were set to be allowed in, chose not to attend the briefing in protest of the White House’s actions. The Washington Post did not send a reporter to the session. “Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement. “We strongly protest the exclusion of The New York Times and the other news organizations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest. ” Marty Baron, the Post’s editor, called Mr. Spicer’s decision to exclude some news organizations from a scheduled briefing “appalling. ” “This is an undemocratic path that the administration is traveling,” Mr. Baron said. “There is nothing to be gained from the White House restricting the public’s access to information. ” The White House played down the drama surrounding Friday’s briefing. “We invited the pool, so everyone was represented,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy White House press secretary, said in an email Friday afternoon, referring to the small group of reporters on hand at the White House each day to follow the president and send reports to the broader press corps. “We decided to add a couple of additional people beyond the pool. Nothing more than that. ” The White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents the press corps, also protested the decision. But Jeff Mason, the organization’s president, pointed out that the White House had provided briefings and accepted questions from a variety of news outlets since Mr. Trump took office. “We’re not happy with how things went today,” Mr. Mason said in an interview. “But it’s important to keep in mind the context of how things have gone up until now. ” He added: “I don’t think that people should rush to judgment to suggest that this is the start of a big crackdown on media access. ” Still, the Committee to Protect Journalists, which typically advocates press rights in countries with despotic regimes, issued an alarmed statement on Friday about Mr. Trump’s escalating language. “It is not the job of political leaders to determine how journalists should conduct their work, and sets a terrible example for the rest of the world,” said the group’s executive director, Joel Simon. “The U. S. should be promoting press freedom and access to information. ” Mr. Trump, in his attack on the news media at the conservative gathering, complained at length about the use of anonymous sources in news stories, charging that some reporters were fabricating unnamed sources to level unfair charges against him. “They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name,” Mr. Trump said. “Let their name be put out there. ” At another point, he said, “A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people because they have no sources — they just make it up. ” He added that his “enemy of the people” label applied only to “dishonest” reporters and editors. Those comments came shortly after his own aides had held a briefing for the White House press pool on the condition of anonymity to deny CNN’s story suggesting there had been improper contact between the White House and the F. B. I. regarding the Times article on Russian contacts. Later, in the briefing from which the Times was excluded, Mr. Spicer said that it was top F. B. I. officials — first Andrew G. McCabe, the deputy director, and later James B. Comey, the director — who approached Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, the day after the article appeared to say that it was false. Mr. Priebus then asked the two F. B. I. officials what they could do to rebut it publicly. They apologized and said they were unable to issue a statement or otherwise comment on the matter, Mr. Spicer said. “They came to us and said the story is not true. We said, ‘Great, could you tell people that? ’” Mr. Spicer said, describing the discussions between Mr. Priebus and F. B. I. officials. The F. B. I. on Friday declined to provide its account of those conversations. On Thursday night an F. B. I. official said that the White House had asked last week for the bureau’s help disputing the article, and that senior F. B. I. officials had rejected the request, citing the investigation into Russian efforts to affect the election. The article reported that current and former American officials said that phone records and intercepted calls showed that members of Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election. The intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. Last week the White House declined to comment on the Times article and referred reporters back to Mr. Spicer’s previous assertions that Mr. Trump’s campaign had no contact with the Russian government. Mr. Baquet said on Friday that The Times “had numerous sources confirming this story. ” “Attacking it does not make it less true,” Mr. Baquet added. Mr. Spicer’s Friday session, known as a gaggle, was scheduled as an event, less formal than his usual briefings that are carried live on cable news. But past administrations have not selected outlets that can attend such sessions. Representatives of the barred news organizations made clear that they believed the White House’s actions were punitive. “Apparently this is how they retaliate when you report facts they don’t like,” CNN said in a statement. Tensions always emerge between an administration and the reporters who cover it, and it is not unusual for a White House to single out groups of journalists for special briefings outside of the daily session. The Obama White House was harshly criticized by members of the press corps after it tried to exclude Fox News from interviews with top administration officials. But press relations in the Trump White House have taken on a tinderbox dynamic, with journalists and press aides highly suspicious of each other’s motives. “The grass is dry on both sides,” said Ari Fleischer, who was press secretary to George W. Bush, “so it only takes a very small match to light it on fire. ” | 1 |
Home People To All Undecided Voters, View This: To All Undecided Voters, View This: Oct 29th, 2016 0 Comment
Hillary Clinton: A Career Criminal
EVERY voter in America should watch this video, especially those women who want Hillary because she’s a woman. Disclaimer: All information, data and material contained, presented, or provided on EyeOpening.info is for educational purposes only. It is not to be construed or intended as providing medical or legal advice. Decisions you make about your family's healthcare are important and should be made in consultation with a competent medical professional. We are not physicians and do not claim to be. Any views expressed here-in are not necessarily those held by EyeOpening.info | 0 |
Dear Mr. President- How Many Jobs Will Building a Wall Create? Part 1 By Lee Adler. If you have ever wondered what’s the best business to be in for wages and growth, there’s no contest. It’s doctors’ offices. This includes not just the doctors, but the office staff, including nurses, medical secretaries, medical assistants, and receptionists. That little tidbit came out of a deep look I took at BLS data on job growth, current wages, and the growth of real wages during the economic “recovery” since 2009 until last month. | 0 |
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The Angels – We know so many of you feel as if you have been disappointed in this lifetime. Some of you feel you have disappointed yourselves. Many of you feel disappointed by others. Even more feel disappointed by life. Take heart! Each one of you, in every breath, has opportunity for change! Each one of you has the ability to release yourselves and others from the bondage of expectations, and to dance with life, exactly as you are, and exactly as life is.
We hear you now! “I expect to be treated kindly! I expect myself to do my best. I expect others to be honest! I expect my children to listen to me” and on the list goes. You may have these expectations dear ones, but what happens when you do not live up them? What happens when others do not? While it is fine to have expectations, you already know that life and others do not always act as you expect. You do not always live up to your own expectations. What then?
Far better to say, “I expect to be treated kindly but if I am not I will discern what to do next.” “I expect to do my best, but when I do not, I will choose to learn.” “I expect others to be honest with me but when they betray my trust, I will walk away or let them know kindly what it takes to earn it once again.” “I expect my children to listen to me, but if they don’t, I will lovingly guide them in their lessons here upon the earth.”
Expect the best of yourself and others dear ones, if you wish, but when you or they do not live up to these expectations, be flexible. Dance with the present moment, as you are, as life is, because in that reality you are no longer resisting life. You are no longer chained to your expectations in the past. You are open to guidance in the moment, dealing with reality of life in front of you.
In this fashion, you free yourself to find the most loving course of action based on how you are, how life is, and how others are being… right here and right now, in the present moment. SF Source Visions of Heaven | 0 |
pages into the journal found in Dylann S. Roof’s car — after the assertions of black inferiority, the lamentations over white powerlessness, the longing for a race war — comes an incongruous declaration. “I want state that I am morally opposed to psychology,” wrote the young white supremacist who would murder nine black worshipers at Emanuel A. M. E. Church in Charleston, S. C. in June 2015. “It is a Jewish invention, and does nothing but invent diseases and tell people they have problems when they dont. ” Mr. Roof, who plans to represent himself when the penalty phase of his federal capital trial begins on Tuesday, apparently is devoted enough to that proposition (or delusion, as some maintain) to stake his life on it. Although a defense based on his psychological capacity might be his best opportunity to avoid execution, he seems steadfastly committed to preventing any public examination of his mental state or background. “I will not be calling mental health experts or presenting mental health evidence,” he wrote to Judge Richard M. Gergel of Federal District Court on Dec. 16, a day after a jury took only two hours to find him guilty of 33 counts, including hate crimes resulting in death, obstruction of religion and firearms violations. At a hearing on Wednesday, Mr. Roof told the judge that he planned to make an opening statement but not call witnesses or present evidence on his behalf. The testimony presented by prosecutors during the guilt phase of Mr. Roof’s trial detailed with gruesome precision how he had plotted and executed the massacre during a Wednesday night Bible study in the church’s fellowship hall. It was less satisfying in revealing why he had done it. With his choice to sideline his legal team and represent himself, the second phase — when the same jury of nine whites and three blacks will decide whether to sentence him to death or to life in prison — may prove little different. Death penalty experts said it was exceedingly rare for capital defendants to represent themselves after allowing lawyers to handle the initial part of a case. Mr. Roof, who also faces a death penalty trial in state court, has not publicly explained his reasoning. But legal filings strongly suggest a split with his defenders about whether to argue that his rampage resulted from mental illness. Mr. Roof’s lead lawyer, David I. Bruck, tried repeatedly to plant that notion during the guilt phase, knowing it might be his only chance. Because evidence of mitigating factors is supposed to be reserved for the penalty phase, Judge Gergel allowed him little leeway. In his closing argument, while acknowledging Mr. Roof’s guilt, Mr. Bruck managed to tell the jury that Mr. Roof subscribed to “the mad idea that he can make things better by massacring the most virtuous, kind and gentle people he could ever have found. ” Mr. Bruck seeded his speech with words like “abnormal,” “irrationality,” “senselessness,” “delusional,” “obsession” and “perseveration,” a psychiatric term referring to the uncontrollable repetition of a particular response. Mr. Bruck, one of the country’s most experienced death penalty litigators, portrayed his client as a loner whose most meaningful relationship seemed to be with his cat who staged hundreds of photographs of himself with no sign of friends whose racial hatred was ignited by internet searches and not personal experience who could not pinpoint during his confession to the F. B. I. how many he had killed, how long he had spent at the church or even what month it was who had no escape plan and left suicide notes to his parents. “There was something in him that made him feel that he had to do it,” Mr. Bruck said, “and that is as much as he knows. ” After receiving the results of a psychiatric examination in November, Judge Gergel found Mr. Roof competent to stand trial — meaning that he was capable of understanding the proceedings and assisting in his defense. At Mr. Bruck’s request, the judge scheduled a second competency hearing for Monday, but he signaled last week that he saw no reason to delay the penalty phase. The judge has repeatedly warned Mr. Roof against representing himself, including immediately after the verdicts, when he called it “a bad decision” and urged him to “fully appreciate the implications. ” The warnings have had no discernible effect on Mr. Roof, who has until Tuesday to reverse his decision to relegate his lawyers to standby counsel. That status allows Mr. Bruck and his team to offer guidance, but not to question witnesses or make objections. Prosecutors plan a procession of grief, perhaps calling dozens of members of victims’ families to testify about the impact of the killings. The prosecutors are also likely to the considerable evidence of Mr. Roof’s premeditation and clearly articulated racial intent. Death penalty experts said the absence of mental health evidence to mitigate those aggravating factors could be decisive. “If the jury views Roof as evil and having made a knowing, intelligent choice to kill these innocent, churchgoing people in order to foment racial hatred, they are much more likely to impose the death penalty than if they believe him to be a young and severely mentally ill person who acted under delusional racist beliefs,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a research group. It would take only one holdout on the jury, which consists of 10 women and two men, to spare Mr. Roof from lethal injection. Judge Gergel has ruled that the jurors can be told that prosecutors had rejected Mr. Roof’s offer, through Mr. Bruck, to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. Many in Charleston were relieved by Mr. Roof’s conviction in light of the mistrial that had been declared 10 days earlier in the state murder prosecution of Michael T. Slager, the white North Charleston policeman whose fatal shooting of a black motorist in 2015 was captured on video. Even those who oppose the death penalty on moral grounds, like the Rev. Joseph A. Darby, a presiding elder for the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, said it would seem bewildering for Mr. Roof to escape capital punishment. “That could very well be the end of the death penalty in America, because if there was ever justification for killing anybody, this is the case,” Mr. Darby said. There is no consensus among members of the victims’ families about Mr. Roof’s fate. When the Justice Department elected in May to seek the death penalty, it acted against the wishes of many and of the two women he had spared. Five relatives offered Mr. Roof a measure of forgiveness at a remarkable bond hearing two days after the shootings. But by law, those who testify now are prohibited from telling the jury what penalty they think he should receive. “It’s going to be extremely emotional, powerful testimony,” said John H. Blume, a death penalty expert who teaches at Cornell Law School, “and that emotion could implicitly and misleadingly indicate to the jury that some of these people want the death penalty when it’s not the case. ” If Mr. Roof is sentenced to death, it will be the first time a jury has done so in a prosecution involving the federal hate crimes law, according to experts on capital cases. That statute, which was broadened in 2009, does not carry a potential death sentence, but Mr. Roof was also convicted of other crimes that do. A death sentence most likely would give way to a yearslong series of appeals (in which Mr. Roof could not represent himself). Among the issues could be the composition of the jury, given that Mr. Roof acted rather passively as his own lawyer when it was selected the withholding of evidence on mental health and other mitigating factors and Mr. Roof’s competence to stand trial and to represent himself. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in Indiana v. Edwards that trial judges could insist on legal representation for defendants who are “competent enough to stand trial but who suffer from severe mental illness to the point where they are not competent to conduct trial proceedings by themselves. ” Mr. Bruck and his team have argued in court filings that Mr. Roof, a dropout, “has no right to represent himself in a capital trial, and even less so at the penalty phase. ” But in the 41 years since the Supreme Court recognized a Sixth Amendment right of for criminal defendants, in Faretta v. California, the court has never specifically narrowed that holding for death penalty trials, despite their complexity. Some death penalty opponents hope that Mr. Roof’s defiance will prompt the appellate courts to adopt a more rigorous standard for capital defendants. “Whether or not they’re legally insane, there’s certainly something mentally wrong with them,” said Peter D. Greenspun, a lawyer who was ousted by a defendant, John A. Muhammad, for part of a capital murder trial for the 2002 sniper attacks in the Washington area. He added, “To have a person like that make this kind of decision, it really calls into question, from a philosophical point of view, whether that person is in a position to understand their civil liberties. ” Mr. Muhammad, who ultimately reinstated Mr. Greenspun, was sentenced to death in 2003 and executed six years later. “It’s something that Roof will likely regret,” Mr. Greenspun predicted of his choice to represent himself. “At some point down the road, he’s going to say, ‘What did I do?’ And there’s no going back. ” | 1 |
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At the current rate of progress, it could take nearly a century before the gender pay gap is closed in Britain. So the government is trying to speed up the process. Putting pressure on employers to tackle the nation’s gender pay gap, new rules taking effect on Thursday will require large companies to publish the average salaries of the men and the women they employ. The regulation affects companies with 250 or more employees. The figures must reveal information like salary differences between men and women, differences in average bonuses and the proportion of men and women who received those bonuses. The rules give the companies until April 2018 to report the information to the government and publish it on their websites and on a government website. “Helping women to reach their full potential isn’t only the right thing to do, it makes good economic sense and is good for British business,” Justine Greening, the minister for women and equalities, said in a statement. Under British law, men and women should receive equal pay for the same job, but there is still a gap between average wages when it comes to gender. The gender pay gap in Britain was 18. 1 percent in 2016, dropping from 27. 5 percent in 1997, according to the Office for National Statistics. The gap exists in large part because there are fewer women in senior roles and the women often do the jobs where pay is lower, said Jon Terry, a partner at the accounting firm PwC who advises financial clients on hiring and pay. According to research by PwC, it would take 95 years to close the gender pay gap in countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, of which Britain is a member. Women’s pay has become a more prominent topic in countries like Iceland and France, where women have walked out of their jobs at the hour they generally stopped being paid equally for their work. In the United States, decades after President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, women earned 79 cents for every dollar men earned in 2014, according to the Census Bureau. Social scientist say one way to effect change is to publish everyone’s pay. Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Washington University, found that salary transparency raised wages, in part because “even being cognizant of gender pay disparity” can change norms. In New York, the City Council tackled the issue on Wednesday by voting to prohibit employers from asking job seekers about previous salaries to help “break the cycle of gender pay inequity by reducing the likelihood that a person will be prejudiced by prior salary levels. ” In Britain, many hope the regulations will prompt companies to examine why the gender pay gap exists. “It puts such a spotlight on the issue,” Mr. Terry said. “It’s easier to see whether an organization is taking this seriously. ” Sam Smethers, the chief executive of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for women’s rights and equality, said the new regulation, passed by the British government in February, was the most significant legal change since the Equal Pay Act of 1970. “It’s the first time we require employers to look at their pay and report on that, so that is significant change,” Ms. Smethers said. There are doubts about how effective the regulation will be. “There is no penalty for noncompliance,” Ms. Smethers noted. “Not requiring an action is a real weakness. It’s not just about the numbers it’s about engaging with the problem you’ve got. ” Some companies say the numbers do not matter in the big scheme of things. Over a quarter of senior personnel interviewed for a survey in March by the consulting firm NGA Human Resources said the gender gap was not an issue for businesses. And about 10 percent of the people interviewed said a plan was not necessary to address gender pay gap challenges in their organizations. Even if these companies do not have a gender pay gap, it was surprising that they did not have a plan in place, said Geoff Pearce, a managing consultant at NGA. “Businesses need to look at what the implications are,” he said. “If it creates an issue, that can affect their ability to recruit and retain talent, and studies have shown that the more diverse a work force is, the more productive it is. ” Still, the British regulation was likely to speed up change, Mr. Terry of PwC said companies that do not grasp the value of reporting the salary information may be persuaded to take it seriously if their reputations are at stake and they are named and shamed. “The gender pay reporting really smacks them in the face,” he said. “If they have a pay gap of 18 percent, they will get a lot of negative press. ” | 1 |
43 Views November 08, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News
On election day, today John Embry told King World News that the greatest wealth transfer in history nears as the ‘Deep State’ is now pulling out all the stops.
‘Deep State’ Desperation John Embry: “Eric, mercifully election day in the U.S. has finally arrived to put an end to the ugly spectacle which has been billed as the presidential campaign. The capper came on Monday, when in response to the FBI ending its investigation of Hillary Clintons email transgressions, the Dow magically rallied back to 18,200, a level which had been defended for months by the powers that be… Continue reading the John Embry interview below… Advertisement To hear what billionaire Eric Sprott & Rick Rule are doing with their own money and which $7 billion company John Embry & Dr. Marc Faber oversee click on the logo:
John Embry continues: “ Simultaneously gold and silver were viciously attacked, while virtually every other asset category, including oil and copper, which incidentally have terrible fundamentals, rose in price. This represents business as usual as the ‘Deep State’ pulls out all stops to have their candidate Hillary Clinton elected.
I suspect that in the fullness of time Monday will be seen as one of the most ridiculous days in market history, irrespective of who wins the election. The sad fact is that the U.S. problems now run so deep that no president has any ability at this stage to address the situation and bring back the good old days of sustainable growth and containable inflation. I believe that we are going to see rising inflation in conjunction with a steadily weakening economy as the staggering debt load takes its inevitable toll.
I laughed when I saw the headlines in the New York Times and the London Financial Times in the wake of last week’s lousy jobs numbers, which incidentally would have been a whole lot worse if they weren’t so heavily doctored. The New York Times headline screamed, ‘Unemployment Hits 2008 Low, Wages Increase.’ The FT stated, ‘Wage Data Underlines Solid Jobs Market As Poll Nears.’ These newspapers are now so compromised that they shouldn’t be referred to as newspapers, but rather government propaganda machines. The old Soviet Pravda operation would be green with envy. In reality, U.S. federal government tax withholdings are now falling, giving a much better indication of the true state of the U.S. economy.
The sharp fall in gold and silver on Monday provided yet another excellent buying opportunity. But irrespective of who is the next U.S. president, both metals will be heading sharply higher as financial reality overtakes the present pre-election fantasy. I would echo James Turk’s excellent advice on KWN yesterday when he said, ‘Own assets.’ I believe he is dead right, and as I’ve said many times, before this saga is over we are going to witness the greatest wealth transfer in history and one best be on the right side of that transaction.”
As The World Awaits The U.S. Election Outcome, Buckle Up For Some Rough Times | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Emboldened by weeks of protests across the country, congressional Democrats are digging in as Republicans try to swiftly remake a government shaped by the Obama administration. Tensions over President Trump’s early efforts to deliver on a long menu of campaign promises have spilled into the halls of Congress, turning debates into a proxy battle over a combative president. With the Senate already hinting it could work through the weekend, expect another busy week at the Capitol. Let us get you up to speed. ■ Vice President Mike Pence could well be needed to break a tie in the Senate over the nomination of Betsy DeVos as education secretary. ■ Mr. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, could be confirmed by the end of the week. ■ Republicans in Congress will also vote to roll back regulations. Mr. Pence may be summoned to the Capitol early this week to cast the 51st vote to confirm Ms. DeVos as education secretary over vociferous, now bipartisan objections. The Senate could vote on her nomination as late as Tuesday. Congressional trivia buffs, take note: It would be the first time that the vice president has been forced to cast a tiebreaking vote on a cabinet nomination, said Betty K. Koed, the Senate historian. Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska thrust Ms. DeVos’s nomination into question last week when they became the first two Republicans to declare their opposition. Should the Democratic caucus vote as a bloc, their votes would set up a tie that Mr. Pence would have to settle in his capacity as president of the Senate. The Capitol has been flooded with thousands of constituent calls and messages, many of them urging senators to vote against Ms. DeVos. Still, it looks unlikely that any more Republicans will defect, and that would be enough to confirm her. Once the Senate deals with the DeVos nomination, it will move on to the nomination of Mr. Sessions to be attorney general. First comes a procedural vote that sets the timer for up to 30 hours of debate before the final vote. That means Mr. Sessions’s confirmation vote should come later this week, at which point the Senate will start the process over with the nomination of Representative Tom Price of Georgia to be secretary of health and human services, followed by a vote on the nomination of Steven T. Mnuchin to be Treasury secretary. Of course, just because Democrats may not have the votes to block Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees does not mean they will go quietly. Having stacked up as many parliamentary roadblocks as they could find last week, Democrats are expected to take advantage of the mandatory debate time, probably to air their concerns about Mr. Trump’s picks as well as grievances against their Republican counterparts, who they believe have stymied a thorough examination of some nominees. That could be bad news for senators with plans on Saturday: Republican leaders may keep the Senate in session over the weekend to get the job done. After dusting off the Congressional Review Act last week, the House will use that momentum to continue rolling back recently finalized regulations. On Tuesday, the House is scheduled to vote to toss out three rules: an Interior Department rule intended to increase transparency and public input on the use of public lands an Education Department rule that spells out provisions of a recent education law regarding accountability and another Education Department rule that sets the parameters for gathering and sharing data on teacher training programs. The Senate began taking up these regulations between nomination votes last week, and it is likely to continue this week, voting after the House to roll back each rule one by one before it is sent to the president. Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, the federal appeals court judge nominated by Mr. Trump for the Supreme Court, will continue his courtesy meetings with senators. Judge Gorsuch is expected to meet on Monday with Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, after having sat down last week with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Ms. Feinstein has expressed reservations about Judge Gorsuch, as has Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, who said Mr. Trump’s propensity for flouting “the rule of law” demanded “an independent jurist. ” Two weeks after congressional Republicans and Senate Democrats ducked out for their policy retreats, the House Democratic caucus will slip away on Wednesday for its summit meeting in Baltimore. While Republicans spent part of their retreat debating — and occasionally fretting — about how to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, Democrats seem likely to strategize their response. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, has seized every recent opportunity to condemn Republican plans to get rid of the health care law, as Democrats continue to transmit a simple message across the aisle about the nation’s health care system: If you break it, you buy it. | 1 |
BANGALORE, India — The factory floor is going full throttle when the new girls walk in. Everywhere is the thrumming of sewing machines, the hum of fans, the faint burning smell of steam irons. On narrow tables that run between the machines, Marks Spencer miniskirts are thrust forward by fistfuls. The tailors, absorbed in the task of finishing 100 pieces per hour, for once turn their heads to look. The new girls smell of the village. They have sprinklings of pimples. They woke well before dawn to prepare themselves for their first day of work, leaning over one another’s faces in silence to shape the edges of each eyebrow with a razor blade. Their braids bounce to their hips, tight and glossy, as if woven by a surgeon. On their ankles are silver chains hung with bells, so when they walk in a group, they jingle. But it is impossible to hear this sound over the racket on the factory floor. The tailors glance up for only a moment, long enough to take in an experiment. The new workers — teenagers, most of them — have been recruited from remote villages to help factories like this one meet the global demand for cheap garments. But there is also social engineering going on. A government program has drawn the trainees from the vast population of rural Indian women who spend their lives doing chores. In 2012, the last time the government surveyed its citizens about their occupation, an astonishing 205 million women between the ages of 15 and 60 responded “attending to domestic duties. ” Economists, with increasing urgency, say India will not fulfill its potential if it cannot put them to work in the economy. They say that if female employment were brought on par with male employment in India, the nation’s gross domestic product would expand by as much as 27 percent. Experiments like the one in Bangalore run against deep currents in India, whose guiding voice, Mohandas K. Gandhi, envisioned a socialist future built on the economy of the village. They also collide spectacularly with an old way of life, in which girls are kept in seclusion until they can be transferred to another family through arranged marriage. Bangalore is the first city the 37 trainee tailors have seen. They are dazzled by the different kinds of light. Picking their way through the alleys around the factory, a column of virgins from the countryside, they stare up at an apartment building that towers over the neighborhood and wish their mothers could see it. Among them are two sisters, Prabhati and Shashi Das. They have come from a village at the end of a road, a place so conservative that the single time they went to a movie theater, their male cousins and uncles created a human chain around them, their big hands linked, to protect them from any contact with outside men. They are, as far as they know, the first unmarried women who have ever migrated from the village to work. Neighbors in the village are waiting to see what happens. The nasty ones say, with obvious relish, it will end badly. They whisper about migrant workers whose eyes were removed by organ traders while they slept. They say Prabhati and Shashi will be “used this way and that. ” Still, they go. Prabhati, at 21, is stubborn and able, and Shashi, two years her junior, pretty and fizzing with suppressed laughter. The two sisters hook pinkies when they walk down the lane that leads to the factory. “All the flirts and ruffians in the whole world must have been born on this lane,” Shashi grumbles, but she is laughing. Attention is like water to her. The sisters are waiting, too, to see what will happen to them. They are both at the age when they could be summoned at any moment to be displayed to a family of strangers as a potential . And each of them wants something else, something impossible. It is late May, the first day of their factory summer — of love letters folded into squares and dropped onto work stations of fevers sweated out on the floor of a bare hostel room of supervisors shouting in a language they do not understand, a couple of words — “work” and “faster” — gradually becoming clear of capitalism, of men and of a bit of freedom. It all started in March, in the drippy jungle of rural Odisha, when two distant relatives happened to meet on the roadside. One of the men had found employment as a “mobilizer” for Gram Tarang, a agency contracted by India’s government to recruit and train workers. He mentioned that Gram Tarang was offering a cash incentive — roughly 450 rupees, or about $6. 75, a head — to mobilizers who identified young women willing to enroll in a training program for garment factory jobs. The second man, Hemant Das, perked up, sensing the approach of a change of career. Hemant had an underfed look and teeth rimmed with tobacco stains. Among the first college graduates from his family, he had tried his hand at laying bricks, tutoring schoolchildren, programming computers, setting up wedding tents and waiting tables before finally falling back on the only job widely available to men here, working as a field hand for 200 rupees a day. Hemant was from a village called Ishwarpur, and as it happened, idle young women were something Ishwarpur had in great quantity. That they could be monetized came as good news. On its economic merits alone, Hemant figured, the government scheme would prove tempting: After two months of training, their daughters would be placed in a factory in the industrial center of Bangalore, where they would earn the legal minimum wage, 7, 187 rupees per month, or about $108, which is more than most of their fathers make. Six months after arriving in Bangalore, they would be free to return home if they wished. Hemant set out the next day with a fistful of pamphlets and an uncharacteristically sunny disposition. But as he made his rounds of local families — 30 of them, at least — they shook their heads. No. “Letting go of female children is dishonorable, in itself,” explained Pramanand Das, who presides over an informal family council. Minati Das, the mother of a got to the point quicker. “Not everyone wants a who is a working woman,” she said. “They think she has lost her chastity. ” The village had its own plan for these young women. Upon reaching adulthood, they would be transferred to the guardianship of another family, along with a huge dowry that serves as an incentive to treat them well. The transfer is final. Once married, the new bride cannot return to visit her parents without permission, which is given sparingly, so that the bonds to her old home will weaken. She must show her submission to the new family: She is not allowed to speak the names of her because it is seen as too familiar, and in some places she is not allowed to use words that begin with the same letters as her ’ names, requiring the invention of a large parallel vocabulary. Each morning, before she is allowed to eat, the must wash the feet of her husband’s parents and then drink the water she has used to wash them. Hemant would have been completely out of luck if he had not thought to try Karuna Das, who had two daughters of marriageable age. Karuna was a sinewy day laborer, and he had roamed far from the village in his younger days to work in iron foundries in Chennai and Hyderabad. The gossip was that Karuna agreed to enroll his eldest daughters because he was unable to scrape together 100, 000 rupees for dowries. That was undoubtedly the case. It was also true that Karuna did not care much what other people said. He had never behaved like a poor man. When word spread that he had agreed to send Prabhati and Shashi, the village elders convened emergency meetings to determine whether this violated “purdah,” or separation between the sexes, and whether this would damage the marriage prospects of their own daughters. Women stopped by to tease the girl’s mother, Radha Rani, who wept inconsolably. It turned out that Karuna had not been asking for permission. He instructed his daughters to pack four or five changes of clothes. Go see what the world is like, he told them. “They were reluctant to go anywhere because they were a bit scared,” he said. “I told them being scared is O. K. O. K. you’re scared. Now you have to move on. ” Prabhati has never seen a train, much less ridden in one, and on the journey to Bangalore the earth seems to heave under her. As miles of paddy fields slide by, she vomits. Thatch roofs are replaced by peaked roofs, and she vomits. When they reach south India, rain begins to hit the window in fat spatters. It had come as news to Prabhati that the training program involved traveling 900 miles. But some intention had hardened within her. She wanted to prove the neighbors wrong. She did not care about her marriage prospects because, after examining the marriages that surrounded her in Ishwarpur, she decided she did not want to marry at all. “I will go to Bangalore,” she told her parents. “If I come back, then you can get me married. If I don’t come back, you can’t get me married. ” Shashi sits beside her retching sister and strokes her back. She had not wanted to come. Happy enough with a future as a housewife, she had focused her energy on making mischief. Among friends, she introduced herself as “45 kilograms of hotness. ” Out of the corner of her mouth came a stream of dirty jokes, and she made the other girls dissolve in helpless laughter by comparing breast sizes to vegetables (including, mournfully, a kernel of corn). Working on an assembly line was not Shashi’s idea of fun. But Prabhati plunged forward, and, as usual, Shashi cruised along in her wake. The sisters, lugging a bag of clothes, sit with 35 other girls from Odisha who are making the same journey. They have all dressed in baggy uniforms, with ID cards swinging from their necks. Their parents had made attempts to keep them from leaving, which had to be repelled with sustained tantrums. A girl called Baby, who is 18 and bespectacled, said that she had secured her mother’s permission only by refusing to eat for two days. “They wanted me to come home,” she says. “I’m not going home. ” The Gram Tarang instructors had taught them an anthem about and they sing it on their journey to Bangalore, again and again, for comfort. We will stay a month and train ourselvesThis job is the story of our livesThe job is as important as prayerWe won’t fear, and we will go ahead. The sun has not yet risen when they arrive at the hostel that will be their new home for the next six months: 137 women in 15 unfurnished rooms, every inch covered with girlish flotsam, underwear and bras drying on the window grates, sentimental verses penciled on the walls. Prabhati and Shashi’s room is being painted, so on the first night 25 of them crowd into two rooms, so tight that one of their roommates stretches out on the kitchen counter. “I thought there would be beds,” murmurs one, and the chaperone from Gram Tarang looks exasperated. “They complain, ‘You could have given us this, you could have given us that,’” he says. “We sweetly explain that it is not possible. They don’t have the bed system in Bangalore. ” But the girls are too keyed up to sleep. Climbing onto the roof, they can see the sun rising over a landscape of other roofs, where, in all directions, migrants seek a breath of quiet. There they can gaze up at the 22nd story of an apartment building, where residents come out to hang their laundry on balconies. It is the most amazing thing they have ever seen: big people looking tiny. “I want to see what I haven’t seen,” murmurs one of the girls, sleepily. “I want to see what I don’t even know exists. ” Baby says something about her eventual return to India, and when someone corrects her, she looks up sharply. “Bangalore is in India?” she asks. For the first few weeks, everything is new. Stepping out of the hostel, the trainees are surrounded by men: Men on balconies, men on scooters, men lounging in doorways, staring. The road is plastered with signs saying “tailors wanted,” and one girl gives a yelp of alarm, mistaking them for wanted posters. On the day of a Hindu festival, Prabhati peers down from the roof at a troupe of transgender dancers, smiling and twitching suggestively as men press in around them. When one bends down so that an onlooker can stick a folded bill in her cleavage, Prabhati is so shocked that she has an impulse to reach for a stone and throw it. “If this happened in the village,” she says, “you would all be dead. ” In rural Odisha they like to say that “a girl’s shyness is her jewelry. ” But here, there is no space for the newcomers unless they make space for themselves. To cross the street — a throbbing road coursing with auto rickshaws, clattering cargo trucks, scooters carrying whole families — requires stepping in front of the vehicles, if necessary stopping them with their bodies. The girls waver, and then they plunge. Much of what they learned in the village must be unlearned here. One evening when Baby begins preparing dinner, several of her roommates protest. She is menstruating, and caste tradition dictates that menstruating women must live in isolation, sleeping alone and taking care not to step into the kitchen, lest they contaminate the food and water. So two of the younger roommates cook, emerging an hour later with a glutinous, inedible glop. At this point, Baby is irritated. Menstruating women are allowed to work in the factory, aren’t they? She walks into the kitchen, and the scent of spices and onions fills the room. After a brief discussion, they agree that the menstruation rules will be void for as long as they are living in Bangalore. Then they stuff themselves with food and fall into a deep sleep. When they are introduced to a factory supervisor and dive to touch her feet, a traditional gesture of respect toward elders, the supervisor jumps back as if she has been stuck with a hot poker. She then assumes a slight crouch, as if preparing to defend herself from further reverence. Back in their bedrooms, the girls laugh hysterically at this. From childhood, they have been told that it is disrespectful for a girl to laugh out loud in the presence of elders. In the event of irrepressible laughter, girls must cover their mouths with anything at hand: the corner of a dupatta, a hand, a washcloth. This lesson, too, flies out the window. In the hostel they laugh like tractors. They laugh so loud they spit their water out. “I’m giving you 25 seconds to thread this needle,” the supervisor says in Hindi. The recruits, whose native language is Oriya, barely understand. tailors bend their heads, trying to guide frayed threads through a maze of eight loops. At the K. Mohan Company Exports Private Limited, the girls have entered a world of machines: massive industrial extractors, laser cutters, a protocol that kicks in when a needle tip breaks off. And yet, incredibly, garments worn in the West are still made by humans — nearly all of them women, working exhausting hours, with few legal protections and little chance of advancement, for some of the lowest wages in the global supply chain. As the trainees practice sewing straight lines on pieces of scrap fabric, supervisors pace the aisle, hoping to spot one with machinelike dexterity and speed. One of them slows, and then stops, beside a girl called Cuddles, the daughter of a truck driver. The supervisor blinks, looks again. This is — there is no other word for it — talent. She has covered the fabric with seams as straight as the lines on ruled notebook paper. Cuddles is among the first in the group to be integrated into an assembly line, bent over, eyes straining. Her task is to stitch together three small tags for the Marks Spencer stretch corduroy skirt: one that identifies the brand, one that gives washing instructions and one the size, a scrap so tiny that it is nearly impossible to hold straight between finger and thumb. If she allows a tag to slip to the floor, or fly away in the gusts from the ceiling fan, her salary will be docked. She will be under pressure to complete this task 100 times per hour for eight hours, with one break for lunch, for a base daily wage of around $2. A man with a loft of dyed black hair steps out of his office to greet the group. This is N. Manjunath, the assistant general manager for human resources at the factory. He is recruiting rural workers through the government program because he is desperate: are no longer interested in factory jobs like these, with their low pay and punishing conditions, and attrition rates are high. Migrant women are more docile. This is what Manjunath is hoping. Prabhati, Shashi and the other recruits take seats in a canteen, and sit with their hands folded in their laps. They are to work every day but Sunday. They can collect their pension in 40 years. Should they die on the job, state health insurance will cover funeral costs. They are drowsy. The numbers fly by them in flocks. When a response is expected, they chorus “Yes, miss,” or “Yes, sir,” as they would to a schoolmaster. Any questions? “Can we work on Sundays?” Manjunath thinks of himself as a kind man. But the complications of employing village girls have strained his last nerve: the weepy petitions for leave to return to the village for essential functions, like a father having a hemorrhoid removed the domestic squabbles, which on one occasion ended in the consumption of toilet cleaner and the “love cases,” in which a tailor, upon forming a romantic attachment in the factory, is summarily ordered home. Lately, when the girls come to him with complaints, he listens skeptically, with a sardonic smile. He assesses this latest batch of recruits, the second from Odisha, as “lackadaisical. ” He believes they have come here for an adventure, and will gravitate back to the village as soon as their parents tell them to come home. He is right to worry. After six months on the job, when the government incentives are paid out, around half the trainees brought in by Gram Tarang return to their villages. Only 40 percent stay longer than a year. It comes down to this: If the village has a plan for the girls, so does the factory. Leading them through the rows of machines, Manjunath wags his finger. “Don’t get married too soon,” he warns them. Within two weeks of their arrival, one of the sisters’ roommates has eloped straight from the factory gates, not even stopping by the hostel to pick up her clothes. Those who remain spill their secrets to one another. Tanushree Behera sleeps entangled with a girl she calls her wife. Jayasmita Behera is divorced, having left her husband less than two weeks after the wedding. “If I had stayed,” she says, “my life would have been destroyed. ” The rest spend their evenings in quiet conversation with boyfriends, whose existence is unknown to their parents. They examine each other’s palms for creases that indicate they will be among the small number of Indians — as low as 5 percent, according to one survey — who marry for love. At the factory, they stitch their boyfriends’ names on scrap fabric. Male tailors stroll by as they work, dropping love letters folded into fat wads, and the girls read them aloud, to comic effect, at the hostel. “My dear, my lever,” someone writes to Shashi in broken English. “I have tied you up in my heart. ” Sitting on the floor, they compare notes on evasive maneuvers they use to avoid being shown to prospective like Roadrunner slipping away from Wile E. Coyote. Shradhanjali Mallick, the beauty among them, says she used to have success with bouts of hysterical crying, but that moving to Bangalore has been more effective. “How can they marry me off if I am not physically present?” she asks innocently, and Prabhati laughs. “Let them hold a wedding of and ” she says. “Because that’s the only kind of wedding they will be able to pull off. ” This is not something Prabhati can laugh about at home. Her views on marriage were set in stone several years back, when a young wife in her village was set on fire in a domestic dispute. Prabhati has been arguing for years that she should be allowed to remain single, that her parents should proceed to fixing a marriage for Shashi, who is pretty and will get better offers. “I will become a nun,” she says. But her parents flick away her comment, casually, as if it were a fly. So she thinks of escape. This is a subject she cannot discuss with her sister. Three years ago, Prabhati came across a mobile phone that a secret boyfriend gave Shashi as a way of keeping in touch, rigged, as if for espionage, with no audible sound or light, to be switched on at times when they have agreed to speak. Prabhati snatched the phone away and informed her father. Shashi screamed at her father that day — don’t break that phone! — but she never saw it again. For months, she could not look him in the eye. The sisters were never as close again. When it comes to the future, Prabhati and Shashi keep their own counsel. By the first week of June, the new girls are praying for Sunday to arrive. Their joints hurt. Their backs hurt. They come home from the factory with fingers punctured by needles or sliced by industrial clippers. Sitting still for eight hours is strange and new, and at times, the boredom is maddening. They sing to their machines. They pull hairs out of their chins. Baby amuses herself by giving herself little scratches on the wrist. They are locked into the hostel except for “out passes” on alternate Sundays, which are granted by the factory human resources staff. A Gram Tarang “life skills” instructor makes the rounds inside the hostel, selling them jars of an Herbalife energy drink, which she tells them will help them keep up with the pace of work in the factory. It does give them energy — it includes caffeine and maltodextrin — but it also gives them diarrhea and eats up their remaining cash. This is no small problem, because they are running out of money for food. They count the days until June 10, when they will be paid for their first two weeks of work. Prabhati and Shashi, who had left home with 5, 000 rupees, or about $75, find themselves with 100 rupees between them. “If there’s no salary today, it’s going to be a problem,” Prabhati says. On June 10, they are not paid. Three more days pass, and they still are not paid. Outside the factory window the sky has turned black and the air is churning a curtain of monsoon rain is about to sweep in. About 15 girls walk into Manjunath’s office, hearts pounding, to demand their pay. He looks up from his desk, annoyed. The usual genial expression has vanished from his face. He explains that he cannot solve their problem: The company has opened bank accounts for them, but the bank has not delivered their A. T. M. cards. Anyway, he dismisses the suggestion that the girls are running out of money. And who, he wonders, has given them the idea that they can make demands? He surveys the group in search of its leader. “My clear understanding is that if you have a basket of fruits and only one is not good, it will spoil the other fruit,” he explains. “You have to take one out. ” When Jayasmita steps forward to say they have not eaten since yesterday, he swivels his head in her direction. He does not speak Oriya. “What did she say?” he asks a caseworker. The girls are promised an advance for rice and are ordered to leave his office. They shuffle out. They had been planning to stop working unless they were paid immediately, but their strike has lasted less than five minutes. Jayasmita slumps against a wall, and vows never to try anything like that again. “When you come to a new city,” she says, “you have to learn to care for yourself, and not bother with others. ” The money for the first two weeks’ work comes through three or four days later — after withholdings for pension, health insurance, lodging, food and kitchen furnishings, a grand total of 1, 874 rupees, or roughly $28. This sum must last them for the next month. In the hostel room where Prabhati and Shashi stay, the amount of the paycheck is not relevant. They have never earned money before, only asked their fathers for it. A wave of happiness washes over all of them. They do not feel like girls, they say: They feel like boys. They transfer credit — 30 rupees, 50 rupees — to the cellphones of their mothers, brothers, and boyfriends, as if they were distributing sweets to celebrate some windfall. Unable to wait, they call their families from cubbyhole A. T. M.s to share the news. This is not always welcome. Cuddles transfers a balance of 50 rupees to her father’s phone, but he considers it shameful to accept money from a daughter. He calls her, angrily, to say, “Never do that again. ” Cuddles doesn’t care she has never been so happy. Prabhati and Shashi are among the last to receive their A. T. M. cards. They find a bank machine in between Krishna Jewelers Pawnbrokers and Blooming Buds India Playschool. Leaving the A. T. M. Prabhati feels joy, but she is not the type of person who shows it. She scans the street, looking for some way to celebrate, and finally asks a man if she can borrow his bicycle for a moment. She climbs on top of it and pedals as hard as she can, her braid flying behind her. Then, taking note of his look of worry, she swings the bicycle around and returns it to its owner. Shashi dances down the stairs and most of the way home. The money sends a wild thrill through her, so that she wishes she could through the next month, and the month after that, and after that. So that life is a long string of paydays. The two sisters make a pact: They will stay in Bangalore at least a year. They spend much of their paychecks on nose rings for each other, tiny specks of gold. They place them on each other in front of their roommates, beaming, their faces so close together that they could be kissing. Then Prabhati lies down on her stomach, full length, cheek to the cool linoleum. She is not feeling well. It is strange that one of the first girls to falter is Prabhati, who was the most resolute about staying in Bangalore. She has contracted a fever that comes and goes for two weeks. She stops eating and then stops talking her eyes are so hollow that you could place a handful of rice in them. Shashi stays home, combing her sister’s hair and forcing her to bathe. But then she must return to work, and Prabhati is left shivering on the floor. “In city life,” Prabhati says, “even if you are dead, people will just get dressed and go to the factory without being bothered. ” Minati Mahji, who has lived in the hostel for six years, observes them wearily. Of 130 women who arrived at the same time, only she and her four roommates have stuck it out. She tried switching to another factory, but it was no better, and she wound up back in the hostel. Her pay has crept up to 9, 800 rupees, or $146 per month. She has seen wave after wave of young women arrive from the countryside, freshly hatched, and she knows how it usually ends — with the girl’s disappearance into that old world as a . “Whatever they are planning, it doesn’t happen like that,” she says. Even through her fever, Prabhati knows she wants to stay. She tries to keep her illness from her family, handing her crisp new bills to a doctor who seems to give all his injections in the buttocks. It is Shashi who tells their father that her sister is sick. Her father calls the Gram Tarang training center, demanding that Prabhati be sent home, and the training center calls the factory. On the day she is to board a train to return to Ishwarpur, Prabhati stands at the edge of the roof, tears streaming down her face, and watches her younger sister walk down the lane toward the factory. The mood in the hostel sags. “The day she left, she told me: ‘I told you I would stay a year. And I couldn’t even stay for two months,’ ” Jayasmita recounts. Minati doubts Prabhati will return. The family, having violated custom once by letting the daughters go, is not likely to do it twice. “People mean to come back,” Minati says. “But they don’t come back. ” On the assembly line, someone covers Prabhati’s sewing machine with plastic sheeting. Three weeks later, two burly men come to push it to an area marked “idle machines. ” Just like that, Prabhati is back in her mother’s thatch hut, feeding kindling into a clay oven. Coming home is like falling into cotton. Rice is sprouting up through great reflective planes of water, so vivid it hurts your eyes to look at it. The neighbors stop by, seeking an outcome to the family’s experiment. “So, are your daughters back from their jobs?” asks one, in a voice thick with . Prabhati’s mother, Radha Rani, takes her to a country witch, who traces shapes around her head with a broom and declares that someone has cast an evil eye on her. He blows on her, a holy wind. Outside there is the smell of things growing. Prabhati sleeps as if she is under a spell. When she calls her sister, hoping to arrange for her return to Bangalore, Shashi sounds far away. It turns out factory life agrees with Shashi. She has been absorbed into an assembly line expected to produce 100 pairs of khaki chinos an hour. In the morning she takes her seat among hillocks of pants, and spends the next eight and a half hours in a punctuated by the shouting of supervisors and a break for lunch. A whiteboard lists the target. They are always behind. Behind her in the assembly line, a potbellied man in his late 30s peppers her with the gustatory queries that pass for small talk in south India. Have you eaten today? Are you hungry? Do you want to eat more? She swivels in her chair to ask him, “Would you like me to shove these pants down your throat?” Shashi finds it interesting that she, the in the family, is the one becoming a city person. She examines her face in the mirror for signs that she is becoming paler. She tells the family that Prabhati should not return, and that she cannot send money home this month. Instead, Shashi arranges for a meeting with Sunil, a boy from a neighboring village whom she wants to marry. Six years ago, when Sunil first asked Shashi to meet him in person, she was escorted by a female cousin and was too shy to look at Sunil’s face. When he sat on the chair, she would go to the bed. When he went to the bed, she would go to the chair. Finally he told her to stop and listen. She sat still. Whatever it was he said to her, it made her feel that he was her own. “I love him, you know?” she says. “I do not know whether he is good or bad. ” Since that day three years ago when Prabhati discovered the cellphone Sunil had given her, Shashi has been proceeding cautiously with a plan to persuade her parents to agree to her choice for a husband. She and Sunil have chosen names, Situ and Sukhi, for a girl and boy. “If I work for a long time,” she says, “and I really insist on it, there is a chance. ” Now that her sister is gone, it is no longer necessary for Shashi to keep this a secret. It is a blessed relief, like taking off a shoe that is cutting into a tender part of your foot. On the August day when her third paycheck comes in, Shashi doesn’t tell anyone what she has planned. Leaving the hostel means breaking curfew, but she persuades her friends to go with her. The small group threads its way along the darkening street, past rotting cauliflower and coconut shells. The girls are headed to a bright shop where smartphones are displayed in glass cases. The shopkeeper is about 25, his shirt unbuttoned to reveal a glint of gold chain. He has seen many girls like these, provincials, fishing out coins at the vegetable market. He does not hide his disdain. But when Shashi announces that she wants to buy a Lava A59 smartphone, he is suddenly wide awake, respectful. Shashi’s face is a mask of concentration as she repeatedly counts the bills and arranges them into a fan to show the shopkeeper. The girls around her are hushed. The amount is more than half her month’s pay. It is the weightiest decision she has ever made. When they step back onto the street, something flickers across Shashi’s face — triumph — and she pumps her fist. Back at the hostel, she drops her new purchase into the hands of her roommates, who immediately go through it, looking for WhatsApp, which they discovered the week before. Sunil will be calling soon. He has been badgering Shashi to make this purchase so she can send pictures over the internet. She disappears into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. She is gone a long time. She lies for a moment on the floor, staring at the ceiling. Then she dials a number in the village. “Elder sister,” she says. “I got my phone!” September has arrived, and every day there is a new reason Prabhati cannot return to Bangalore. Her mother has stomach cramps. Her younger siblings’ tuition bills are due. No adult male is available to accompany her on the train journey. Prabhati mentally reviews the cost of the ticket: 1, 350 rupees for the train, 300 more for the auto rickshaw from Majestic Station. She jokes, a little nervously, that she should steal the money. A voice in her head tells her that if she doesn’t go now, she never will. And yet that voice is becoming fainter. She can feel the village’s drowsy peace overtaking her. Her mother says, in an offhand way, that it is time to start finding a groom. This is not how it was supposed to go. Shashi ensconced in the city, and Prabhati stuck in Ishwarpur. “Before, I was at home, and I didn’t know anything, and it was O. K.,” she says, dully. “Now I know something, and it’s not O. K. ” Back in Bangalore, the factory girls’ fathers have begun to call. They expect them to come home on leave in December, after the factory stint is up. Jayasmita’s father says a marriage proposal has come from a man in Cattuck. “I tell them I’m not going anywhere,” she says. “The moment I heard talk about marriage, I hung up. ” Shradhanjali says she will return, and plans to wriggle out of yet another proposal. “If possible, I’ll fight it off,” she says, but sounds uncertain. “You know where you’ll find her in a year?” Jayasmita says, teasingly. “At her . ” The factory girls seem less afraid every month. Shashi sees her boyfriend, Sunil, as planned. He takes the overnight train in from Kerala, where he has migrated for work. They meet at a nearby gas station and walk in a park for most of the day, holding hands. At 4 p. m. he returns to the train station and boards another overnight train back to Kerala. She uses Facebook and WhatsApp to communicate with him, as if the internet were two tin cans attached by a piece of twine. Every time they get into a fight, she uninstalls the apps. Her smartphone has become an appendage. She presses it to her ear while she is walking down the lane, striding over rats flattened into the pavement. Waking in the night, she rolls over and checks it for new messages. A group of her friends are toying with the idea of leaving the hostel, seeking work at another factory. She is amazed at how far she has come. On an outing last Sunday, she arranged to meet a male cousin, another migrant worker, and a group of them strolled together at the edge of a highway overpass, breathing in the exhaust from 12 lanes of traffic. They don’t have money to step into a restaurant, so they sit on a pipe on the ground outside a Toyota dealership, in the bright sunshine, comparing phones. That’s another thing: Shashi and her friends are not the new girls anymore. The new girls are arriving from Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand. Their braids are tight and glossy. Dropping their bags in their rooms, they climb up to the roof to gaze at the building, which is the most amazing thing they have ever seen. Their eyes widen at the girls from Odisha, in their jeans and . The girls from Odisha regard them with friendly condescension. They invite them into their rooms, as if they’ve been here forever. | 1 |
Electric Floors Could Generate Renewable Energy From Walking Posted on Oct 29, 2016 Chuck Coker / CC BY-ND 2.0
LONDON—US scientists have found a new way to generate energy at home: the tribo-electric floor. Tread on it and it will convert the kinetic energy of a footstep into a current of electricity . And it’s made from the waste wood pulp that already serves as cheap flooring throughout the world. Xudong Wang , an engineer and materials scientist, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues report in the journal Nano Energy that they have taken cellulose fibres from forest waste material and chemically treated them in a way that creates an electric charge when they come into contact with untreated wood pulp fibres. The result: a patented, tribo-electric nanogenerator floor covering that can harness the energy of any footfall, and turn it into electric current that could light up a room or charge a battery. So far, it exists only as a laboratory prototype. It promises, the scientists say, to be cheap and durable. And it exploits a waste material available wherever there is a forest industry. “Our initial test in our lab shows that it works for millions of cycles without any problem,” Professor Wang said. “We haven’t converted those numbers into years of life for a floor yet, but I think with appropriate design it can definitely outlast the floor itself.” Long wait The gap between any laboratory experiment and a commercial success is huge, and many promising products never make it, or take years of further experiment. But this study is yet another example of the extraordinary explosion of ingenuity prompted by the need to generate energy in ways that sidestep the greenhouse gas emissions that have been driving dangerous climate change. Engineers, nanotechnologists and chemists have tested ways to make windows and even solar panels by making timber optically transparent . They have looked more closely at the tree’s relationship with the sun and fashioned a bionic leaf that can exploit sunlight 10 times more effectively to create biomass that could be turned into a liquid fuel. They have dreamed up an electric car battery that can renew itself with atmospheric carbon dioxide , and a bacterial fuel cell that generates electricity from waste water. Energy conserved And they have even devised the ultimate in power dressing – a fabric that as it rustles could charge a cellphone. Such research starts from the laws of thermodynamics, which dictate that energy must always be conserved. The energy involved in a plate of food, a footstep, the sprouting of a seedling or the turning of a turbine is still energy: there could be a way to recycle it rather than let it dissipate as heat into the atmosphere. What Professor Wang and his team have done is exploit the same property that creates static electricity in clothing: the tribo-electric effect which turns vibration into charge. The ground beneath the foot is a source of potential energy: the challenge is to find a way to plug into it. In theory, a busy motorway could become a renewable power source. Professor Wang and his team have already tested a nanogenerator that recovers energy from rolling tyres . Then they turned to the surface under the wheels. “We’ve been working a lot on harvesting energy from human activities. One way is to build something to put on people and another way is to build something that has constant access to people” “Roadside energy harvesting requires thinking about places where there is abundant energy we could be harvesting,” said Professor Wang. “We’ve been working a lot on harvesting energy from human activities. One way is to build something to put on people and another way is to build something that has constant access to people. The ground is the most used place.” The team have tested a fabric less than 1mm thick made of tiny chemically treated and untreated wood pulp fibres: in contact, electrons move from one to the other. This electronic transfer creates a charge imbalance that must be righted. But as the electrons return, they pass through an external circuit and deliver energy. In theory, the electric floor technology could be incorporated into all kinds of flooring. In theory, extra layers of the fabric could deliver even more power. The next step is to demonstrate the concept by putting a sheet of it down in a high-profile spot in the university campus. “This development shows great promises in creating large-scale and environmentally sustainable tribo-electric board for flooring, packaging and supporting infrastructures,” the authors write.
Tim Radford, a founding editor of Climate News Network, worked for The Guardian for 32 years, for most of that time as science editor. He has been covering climate change since 1988.
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posted by Eddie The emails released by WikiLeaks were leaked by brave members of the US intelligence community in an effort to expose Hillary Clinton’s corruption and stop her being elected, according to State Department insider Steve Pieczenik . The Clintons have initiated a “ silent coup ” in their bid for power, Pieczenik claims, explaining that the White House, judiciary, CIA, FBI, Loretta Lynch and James Comey have all been “ co-opted ” through political cronyism. But Piecezenik, a State Department veteran who has served in seven administrations, claims there is mutiny within the intelligence community and a “ counter-coup ” is in operation. “ In order to stop this coup we in the intelligence community have informally got together and with their permission I am starting to announce that we have initiated a counter-coup through Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. “
Pieczenik was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and James Baker, and served the administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as deputy assistant secretary. He is a legitimate insider with connections in all departments and agencies. FBI Mutiny His claims might explain the unprecedented and mysterious actions by the FBI on Tuesday. The FBI Vault silently and unexpectedly made documents relating to the investigation into Hillary Clinton available to the public – documents that were not due to be declassified until 2041. We can finally stop blaming Russians. Pieczenik states clearly that US intelligence – brave men and women in the FBI, CIA and wider intelligence community – submitted the emails to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in order to thwart “ the second American revolution .” This counter-coup is working against Hillary Clinton and her campaign. Their goal is a peaceful transition of power away from the corrupt Clintons. “ Something had to be done to save the republic ,” he explains. source: | 0 |
Woman working hard on winter body 08-11-16 A WOMAN who ate a doughnut in the middle of the night is making her body an appropriate shape for the season. Emma Bradford is aiming for the perfect ‘winter body’ in time for the colder weather by eating a shit-ton of fatty things and getting nice and chubby. Bradford said: “It stands to reason that if you’re meant to have slim body for the summer, then you need to have a warm layer of blubber for when it’s chilly. “It has meant changing the way I eat, but I’ve made a handy menu planner that tells me when to replace lettuce with a sausage or quinoa with two packets of Space Raiders. “My aim is to outgrow my clothes by Christmas and realise my dream of wearing a slanket to the office party.”
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.@SenJohnMcCain on U. S airstrikes in Syria: “The president of the United States last night showed strength. ” pic. twitter. Friday on Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” Sen. John McCain ( ) praised President Donald Trump for the missile strike on Syria in response to that country’s alleged use of chemical weapons. McCain said, “I would not expect more strikes, but I would hope that we would reinvigorate our support for the Free Syrian Army, the establishment of a zone, and move forward. This is important, and it is an important signal, but it is the beginning of a departure from the failed policies of the last eight years, and you’re not going to repair that overnight. ” “The other point that I would like to make really quick is that the President showed me that he has trust in what I believe is the strongest national security team assembled,” he continued. “I was not sure, frankly, whether he listened to them or listened to others. I think it is very clear that he values their advice and counsel, and this action is a result of the collective wisdom of some of the wisest people I have known. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
London's first underground farm produces herbs Thu Oct 27, 2016 6:44PM News Bulletin Growing Underground’s list of produce is long and includes pea shoots, rocket, wasabi mustard, red basil and red amaranth, pink stem radish, garlic chives, fennel and coriander.
London’s first underground farm has begun working in a big disused bunker which used to belong to the underground transport system.
The crops produced in the subterranean farm are being used in dishes of London's famous restaurants. The products are all micro herbs which are allowed to grow to first leaf before harvesting, usually when they're about 25 days old.
Experts say the farm is similar to a conventional greenhouse except that it is always using artificial light.Meanwhile, strict hygiene rules aim to restrict any transfer of soil or waste from above ground to the growing areas below are being implemented. | 0 |
Joe Biden unaware he’s first in line for Hillary’s old job, so no one spoil the surprise Posted at 12:33 am on October 28, 2016 by Brett T. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
Even though a quick scan of social media suggests the country is so over old white men, Joe Biden, the fifth hottest vice president ever , holds a special place in the hearts of all Americans. Good news, then, for everyone who was sad to see him go: Politico reported Thursday night that Hillary Clinton was considering asking Biden to take over her old gig at the State Department. "They are spending a lot of time figuring out the best way to try to persuade him to do it if she wins" https://t.co/387Su8UptM
— POLITICO (@politico) October 28, 2016
Politico, citing an unnamed source within Camp Clinton, noted that “neither Clinton, nor her aides have yet told Biden,” so it would be appreciated if everyone could keep this under wraps until she determines the best way to approach him with the offer. BREAKING: Clinton wants Joe Biden as secretary of state: report https://t.co/FGgS5anww6 pic.twitter.com/xfZsoT5hbq
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) October 28, 2016
It seems the reality of a Secretary of State Biden is a ways off at best, but the report provides a nice distraction from all the noise surrounding Clinton in the wake of those daily WikiLeaks dumps. Who couldn’t use a nice distraction, Hillary most of all? @politico bs. won't happen.
— Yaqub Osman (@yaqub_osman) October 28, 2016 @politico That sounds like BS. Why would you go from VP to SOS? I think somebody's running their mouth for nothing.
— Ari Keys (@arionkeys) October 28, 2016 @dcexaminer Total nonsense. The story is nothing more than a scheme to get voters to believe the election is already over.
— Don Fredrick (@Colony14) October 28, 2016 Biden won't be Secretary of State. But throwing his name around will amp up enthusiasm among Hillary supporters to make sure they vote.
— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) October 28, 2016 @politico how much of this article did @johnpodesta and team write? #wikileaks pic.twitter.com/Qv6X1NB6GX
— The Haberdasher (@thatjer) October 28, 2016 @politico sounds like a "leak" to distract
— Kyler Hess (@KylerKHess) October 28, 2016
But the anonymous source said they were totally considering thinking about asking Biden to consider thinking about it. @politico He would bring the whip out! pic.twitter.com/Vs9Gt0BeFr
— Sasi Patkunan (@SPatkunan) October 28, 2016 @dcexaminer @JoeBiden will take Putin behind the gym and rough him up till he gives back our uranium that @HillaryClinton helped Putin get
— Dustin Bissette (@bissghetti) October 28, 2016
Beware, enemies of freedom worldwide: if Hillary’s elected, Secretary of State Biden’s gonna put y’all back in chains! @politico Uncle Joe will protect us all pic.twitter.com/qDHTfwba65
— KGB AGENT♢DEPLORABLE (@aj_slown) October 28, 2016 @dcexaminer Can’t we get rid of this guy? | 0 |
The public can attend two events on Thursday to honor Donald Trump ahead of Inauguration Day on Friday, Jan. 20. [Thursday’s events will take place at the Lincoln Memorial, according to a press release from the Presidential Inaugural Committee. The two public events are titled: “Voices of the People” and “Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration. ” According to the press release, the Voices of the People event includes: “the DC Fire Department Emerald Society Pipes and Drums, King’s Academy Honor Choir, the Republican Hindu Coalition, Montgomery Area High School Marching Band, Marlana Van Hoose, Maury NJROTC Color Guard, Pride of Madawaska, Webelos Troop 177, Northern Middle School Honors Choir, American Tap Company, South Park and District Pipe Band, Everett High School Viking Marching Band, TwirlTasTix Baton Twirling, and Celtic United Pipes and Drums. ” The Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration will happen following the Voices of the People event. Trump will deliver remarks. According to the press release, other special guests include: “Toby Keith, Jon Voight, Jennifer Holliday, The Piano Guys, Lee Greenwood, RaviDrums, 3 Doors Down, and The Frontmen of Country (featuring Tim Rushlow, former lead singer of “Little Texas” Larry Stewart of “Restless Heart” and Richie McDonald of “Lonestar”). ” “ Trump has made it clear that this inaugural is of, by, and for the American people. The 58th Inaugural will celebrate American history and heritage, while setting the course to a brighter and bolder future for all Americans,” stated the Committee’s Chairman Tom Barrack. “Above all, it will serve as tribute to one of our greatest attributes, the peaceful transition of partisan power. ” “As Abraham Lincoln said, ‘when an election is over, it is altogether fitting a free people that until the next election they should be one people,’” Barrack added. “We will be one people working together, leading together, and making America great again, together. ” On Thursday morning, Trump will also attend a ceremony at Arlington Cemetery. The “Deploraball” will take place Thursday night, along with several other inauguration balls. Friday, Inauguration Day, will begin with Trump’s ceremony at the U. S. Capitol beginning at 11:30 a. m. According to the Washington Post, security will open at 6:30 a. m. There will be an inaugural parade on Pennsylvania Avenue following the ceremony. Three official inaugural balls will be held on Friday night. One will be at the National Building Museum, another at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, and there will be an Armed Services Ball. The following morning, on Saturday, there will be a National Prayer Service at Washington National Cathedral. | 1 |
The migration Sweden Democrats have scored their highest ever numbers in the first polls released since the Stockholm terror attack last week which killed four people. [The Sweden Democrats are now officially the largest political party in Sweden after polling 27. 2 per cent in a survey conducted by Sentio. The result marks a new record for the migration party who have seen a surge of support since the start of the migrant crisis, Nyheteridag reports. Political scientist Ljunggren said he doubted the terror attack last Friday had a significant impact on the polling, saying it was unlikely that a large change in support would happen so quickly. The biggest losers in the poll were the Centre Party who lost 2. 3 per cent, taking them below 10 per cent. The biggest rivals of the Sweden Democrats, the ruling Social Democrats, were down slightly less than a percentage point to 23. 3 per cent. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, who heads the Social Democrats, recently said the previous open borders policy toward migrants would end after the terror attack, a policy advocated by the Sweden Democrats many months prior. The raw data from the polling shows there may be even more support for the party than the numbers show. According to Sentio, who surveyed 1, 001 people between April, 29. 6 per cent of respondents said they would vote for the Sweden Democrats if there were an election held today. The leader of the Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Åkesson, spoke out about the attack Tuesday, commenting on the fact the attacker was a failed asylum seeker. “It is a massive scandal if it is so. We have seen how the number of internal border controls has fallen very sharply since the debate on the internal border raged a few years ago,” he said. Åkesson later wrote an opinion piece for newspaper Expressen demanding political consequences for the attack. Åkesson has been the leader of the Sweden Democrats since 2005 when he became the youngest leader in the party’s history at only 25. Mr. Åkesson has also been a fierce proponent of both Brexit and U. S. President Donald J. Trump. In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Åkesson wrote how Trump had been correct about the problems of mass migration in Sweden. “Mr Trump did not exaggerate Sweden’s current problems. If anything, he understated them,” he wrote. The Sweden Democrats have received significant pushback from Swedish media, but also international media like the BBC who wrongfully labelled them a “ ” party in November 2015. The party dismissed the allegations from the BBC telling Breitbart London: “The media is desperately trying to blame us for arsons in an effort to even further try to put the lid on the immigration debate. ” Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson@breitbart. com | 1 |
A 23 kiloton tower shot called BADGER, fired on April 18, 1953 at the Nevada Test Site, as part of the Operation Upshot-Knothole nuclear test series. | 0 |
This post was originally published on this site
HELSINKI, Nov. 1 (Xinhua)– Both Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and his Latvian counterpart on Tuesday underlined the importance of continuing dialogue with Russia , particularly amid tense security situation in the Baltic region.
Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis paid an official visit to Finland on Tuesday. Security in the Baltic region was one of the key issues discussed during his meeting with Niinisto.
“We are facing now in the Baltic Sea area increased tensions, and that is not good for anybody,” Niinisto said at a press conference after the meeting.
He said NATO’s presence in the Baltics and Poland is important to ensure the security of the area.
Vejonis said open dialogue with Russia is essential to increase transparency and predictability, as well as to avoid misunderstanding.
In addition, Vejonis underlined the significance to strengthen cooperation with NATO and the European Union , as well as the other Baltic and Nordic countries.
Vejonis was the third Baltic president visiting Finland within a month, following the presidents of Lithuania and Estonia. Related | 0 |
There are a ton of tards who will continue to laugh until their tongues are consumed while still inside their mouths. | 0 |
0 комментариев 10 поделились
По словам президента, постоянно штампуются мифы о "пресловутой российской военной угрозе".
"Действительно, это прибыльное занятие, можно новые военные бюджеты выбивать в своих собственных странах, нагибать союзников под интересы одной сверхдержавы, расширить НАТО, приблизить инфраструктуру альянса, боевые подразделения, технику к нашим границам", — отметил российский лидер.
Президент России назвал НАТО пережившей свой век структурой, созданной во времена холодной войны. Никакой адаптации альянса к новым условиям не происходит, несмотря на постоянные разговоры об этом, подчеркнул Путин.
Он также отметил, что ОБСЕ постоянно пытаются превратить в инструмент обслуживания чьих-то внешнеполитических интересов, несмотря на то, что это важный механизм обеспечения европейской и трансатлантической безопасности. И в результате этот механизм работает "вхолостую", считает президент России.
Путин подчеркнул, что Россия не стремиться к глобальному доминированию и экспансии.
"Стран, которые как Россия могут опереться на тысячелетнюю историю, в мире немало, и мы научились ценить свою идентичность, свободу, независимость. При этом мы не стремимся ни к глобальному доминированию, ни к экспансии, ни к конфронтации с кем бы то ни было", — сказал глава государства.
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WASHINGTON — It seemed like a chummy reunion between friends. Chris Wallace, the Fox News anchor, was chatting amiably in his studio here on Sunday with Paul J. Manafort, Donald J. Trump’s new campaign chief, reminiscing about Ronald Reagan as the seconds ticked down to airtime. Then the cameras switched on. Mr. Wallace’s tone sharpened as he pressed Mr. Manafort about his lobbying work for a Filipino dictator and his description of Mr. Trump as playing a “part. ” One halting answer was dismissed with a sly Wallace riposte: “Forgive me, it does seem a little bit like spin. ” By the time Mr. Manafort removed his microphone, tweets were swirling about his uneven performance. Mr. Wallace, who compares interviews to shot a glance at his producer: success. As Fox News grapples with how to cover Mr. Trump — who has tested the network’s influence and battled its anchors, even as he stokes its ratings — Mr. Wallace has stood out as Fox’s moderate, occasionally contrarian voice, irritating Mr. Trump with tough questions and, on occasion, tweaking his opinionated colleagues, too. When Mr. Trump pledged in an interview to act more presidential, Mr. Wallace parried: “When are you going to start?” Then there was the time he ticked off Roger Ailes, Fox’s powerful chairman, after chastising the hosts of the network’s morning show, “Fox and Friends,” for their carping coverage of Senator Barack Obama in 2008. “They were very unhappy,” Mr. Wallace recalled. “I had called them out on the air. ” He added: “There’s a phrase that we all talk about, which is, ‘You do not fire inside the tent.’ That’s the ultimate transgression in Roger Ailes’s mind. ” Over eggs and tea here on Sunday, Mr. Wallace, whose “Fox News Sunday” is experiencing its highest ratings since starting 20 years ago this week, did not hesitate to take his industry and even his network to task, saying that Mr. Trump has been granted too much exposure on cable news. “If we put Donald Trump on for a rally now, and it’s going to spike our audience, it’s pretty hard if you’re a news executive to say no,” he said. “Did everybody do it too much? Yes. ” Mr. Wallace singled out CNN as a notable offender. Would he include Fox in that group? “Absolutely,” he replied. And asked if Fox’s commentators, who often support the Republican nominee in presidential years, would rally around a Trump candidacy, Mr. Wallace laughed. “That’ll test it, won’t it?” he said. “I don’t know. It’ll be interesting to see. ” Mr. Wallace, 68, is a registered Democrat — in order to vote in local Washington elections, he explains — and he spent decades as a correspondent on NBC and ABC before joining Fox in 2003. The move to Fox prompted him to review what he calls his “unexamined assumptions” about traditional network news. “If there’s a story on marriage, it’s like this is a celebration of a new civil right,” Mr. Wallace said. “I’m not saying I disagree with that. What I’m saying is there are two sides to the story, and I don’t think, generally speaking, the broadcast networks will portray both sides evenly. ” Wry and punchy Mr. Wallace has long had a rebellious streak. Bill Clinton accused him in an interview of having a “little smirk on your face” Newt Gingrich goaded a crowd into mocking him at a 2011 debate President Obama’s refusal to appear on his show prompted Mr. Wallace to describe his administration as “crybabies. ” (Mr. Obama ended his drought this month, in an interview that lured millions of viewers.) In the Fox studio in Washington on Sunday, Mr. Wallace could not resist making mischief. After grilling Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Mr. Wallace reassured her during a commercial break that the segment had gone fine. “It was clear you think Donald Trump sucks,” Mr. Wallace said, earning a laugh from Ms. Schultz. Last summer, Mr. Trump lashed out at Mr. Wallace for asking about his bankruptcies during the first Republican debate. “The son is only a tiny fraction of Mike, believe me,” Mr. Trump said afterward. That would be Mr. Wallace’s father, Mike Wallace, the famous correspondent whose legacy has been a complicated backdrop to his son’s career. For years, the men were not close Chris Wallace still considers his stepfather, Bill Leonard, a former president of CBS News, as “more of a father than my father was. ” Mike Wallace once stole an interview, with the comedian Chris Rock, away from his son the two did not speak for several months. Chris Wallace said there was a time when Mr. Trump’s remark might have bothered him, adding: “It doesn’t anymore. ” “At some point, I realized, I was never going to be Mike Wallace, but neither was anybody else,” he said. He and his father, who died in 2012, bonded later in life Mr. Wallace has also borrowed bits of his father’s interviewing style, prefacing tough questions with a polite “Forgive me,” and occasionally placing a deferential arm across his chest. “He’s a dignified, smart, fairly quiet guy, who came up under a legend,” Mr. Ailes said in an interview. “He’s now pretty much achieved what his old man did. ” So what does Mr. Ailes make of Mr. Wallace’s contention that news networks, including Fox, have Mr. Trump? “Did he get too much coverage? Yes,” Mr. Ailes said, after a pause. “On the other hand, it’s not just cable news, but all news. ” “The broadcast networks are just as guilty,” Mr. Ailes added, noting that Mr. Trump, in addition to being the Republican has been more accessible to the news media than his opponents. “When you go try to drag another candidate to talk about another serious issue that day, he’s not available,” Mr. Ailes said. Andrew Heyward, a former president of CBS News, praised Mr. Wallace for his tough interviews and for refusing to allow Mr. Trump to phone in to his Sunday show, an accommodation made by some other networks. He noted that Mr. Wallace’s journalistic reputation provided another benefit to Fox. “Part of the brilliance of Ailes is he has a few people like that he can point to, and say, ‘What do you mean we are the official spokesman of the Republican Party? That’s ridiculous,’” Mr. Heyward said. “He’s his own man,” Mr. Heyward said of Mr. Wallace. “And that works for Roger, too. ” (Mr. Ailes said in response: “It’s amusing to me to hear that one person I picked has made this all work. ’’) Over lunch, Mr. Wallace said that some of Mr. Trump’s behavior had taken politics “to new depths, and I think it’s sad. ” “I understand the need to entertain, but I think it would suit him, and serve democracy, if it was conducted on a higher plane,” he said. That hasn’t stopped Mr. Wallace from displaying a “Make America Great Again” cap, signed by Mr. Trump, among the mementos in his office. (Also on display: his father’s old Rolodex.) “It’s a great hat,” he said, urging a reporter to try it on. His brow arched, he said he likes to wear it while visiting one of his daughters, “a raving liberal,” in New York. Why? “I knew it would really tick her off. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON, D. C. — On Thursday, Sen. Lindsey Graham ( ) said that if Democrats tried to filibuster Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court, he would vote for the “constitutional option” to permanently end filibusters of nominees to the nation’s highest court. [For the first time in American history, in 2003 Sen. Chuck Schumer ( ) persuaded Senate Democrats to use the upper chamber’s rule on legislation to block a final vote on judicial nominations, at that time blocking several of George W. Bush’s nominees to the federal appeals courts. Republicans then considered the constitutional option — also called the “nuclear option” — to restore the practice of always allowing votes on judges, by ruling that filibusters apply to legislation, but not to nominations. A decade ago, Graham became part of the “Gang of 14,” which negotiated allowing most of the stalled nominees to get a final confirmation vote in exchange for not abolishing the filibuster in the future. Then in 2014, it was Sen. Harry Reid ( ) who led Democrats in going nuclear over presidential nominations to the executive branch and every federal court except the Supreme Court. Republicans said the only reason Reid did not include the High Court at the time is that there were no vacancies at the time. With Schumer taking things to a new level and vowing to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee, Graham ended months of commentators’ speculation by telling Mike Gallagher’s radio show: If my Democratic colleagues choose to filibuster this guy, then they will be telling me that they don’t accept the election results — 306 Electoral [College] votes — that they’re trying to delegitimize President Trump. And that’s not right, and we would have to change the rules to have the Supreme Court like everyone else. There are 52 Republicans in the Senate. It would therefore take eight Democrats to reach 60 to invoke cloture on Gorsuch, or for all but two of the Republicans to hang together on the procedural question to clarify that the constitutional option applies to all presidential nominations, including those to the Supreme Court. Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski. | 1 |
LeBron James has decided not to play for the United States at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, according to his agent, Rich Paul. “I could use the rest,” James told Cleveland. com, which first reported James’s decision. Other athletes, including Rory McIlroy, have cited concerns about the Zika virus as a factor in their decisions not to attend the Olympics this summer. But the virus did not play a role in James’s decision, Paul said. James, 31, helped the Cleveland Cavaliers defeat the Golden State Warriors in Game 7 of the N. B. A. finals to notch their first title. He informed U. S. A. Basketball of his decision the day after joining his teammates for a celebratory parade in Cleveland. It was a sixth consecutive trip to the finals — which extend two months beyond the end of the regular season — for James, who had played in the previous three Olympics. James was named the Most Valuable Player of the finals and led all players in points (29. 7) rebounds (11. 3) assists (8. 9) blocks (2. 3) and steals (2. 6) per game. James won a gold medal with the American team at the 2012 London Olympics a month after winning his first N. B. A. title with the Miami Heat. But he is now four years older and has considerably more mileage on his legs. | 1 |
WASHINGTON, DC — Political Islam, focused on establishing an unfree society ruled by strict sharia law, is “fundamentally incompatible” with the U. S. Constitution and the overall “foundation of the American way of life,” declared Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an expert at the Hoover Institution think tank, during a Senate panel hearing. [Meanwhile, Michael Leiter, the former director of the U. S. National Counterterrorism Center, argued that sharia law is compatible with the American Constitution. “Muslim’s honoring of Sharia is not inherently in tangent with living in constitutional democracies anymore than it would be for Christians or Jews who also seek to honor their religious traditions while still complying with civil authority,” testified Leiter. The Ali — an honor violence victim, a strong advocate against female genital mutilation (FGM) and author — strongly disagreed. During a hearing on Islamic ideology and terror held by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Wednesday, Ali testified alongside the former U. S. official who served under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “My central argument is that political Islam implies a constitutional order fundamentally incompatible with the US Constitution and with the ‘constitution of liberty’ that is the foundation of the American way of life,” proclaimed Ali in her written testimony. She later stressed, “Let it be said explicitly: the Islamists’ program is fundamentally incompatible with the US Constitution, religious tolerance, the equality of men and women, the tolerance of different sexual orientations, the ban on cruel and unusual punishment and other fundamental human rights. ” Ali explained that intimidation and advancing the goal of imposing Islamic law (sharia) on society are fundamental tenets of political Islam. She noted that “Islamism” is the ideology that drives political Islam and “dawa” provides the means by which it is spread, adding: The term “dawa” refers to activities carried out by Islamists to win adherents and enlist them in a campaign to impose sharia law on all societies. Dawa is not the Islamic equivalent of religious proselytizing, although it is often disguised as such by blending humanitarian activities with subversive political activities … The ultimate goal of dawa is to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with strict sharia. Islamists rely on both violent and nonviolent means to achieve their objectives. The strategy used by the United States to combat violent Islamic extremism has “failed” because it has solely focused on acts of violence while ignoring the ideology that drives jihadists and Islamists, argued Ali. She told lawmakers, “The dominant strategy from through the present, focusing only on Islamist violence, has failed. In focusing only on acts of violence, we have ignored the ideology that justifies, promotes, celebrates, and encourages violence, and the methods of dawa used to spread that ideology. ” In order to reverse its failure, the United States has to fight “a war of ideas against political Islam (or “Islamism”) as an ideology and against those who spread that ideology,” advised Ali. President Donald Trump advocating for an ideological campaign against “radical Islam” is “refreshing and heartening,” testified Ali, adding, “This deserves to be called a paradigm shift. ” She noted that Trump’s position marks a departure from his predecessors. Ali pointed out that Islam is on the rise across the world and jihadist groups have proliferated despite the U. S. spending at least $3. 6 trillion on combat and reconstruction costs in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and sacrificing more than 5, 000 American service members and the tens of thousands of wounded U. S. troops. “According to one estimate, 10−15 percent of the world’s Muslims are Islamists. Out of well over 1. 6 billion, or 23 percent of the globe’s population, that implies more than 160 million individuals,” mentioned Ali. “Based on survey data on attitudes toward sharia in Muslim countries, total support for Islamist activities in the world is likely significantly higher than that estimate. ” | 1 |
The criticism itself will neither surprise nor sting Pep Guardiola. He made that perfectly clear months ago, on the day he was presented as Manchester City manager. “I know when it is not going well, you are not going to help us,” he told the assembled news media that day. Guardiola has spent his entire coaching career at clubs where crisis and defeat are synonyms. The pressure cookers of Barcelona and Bayern Munich soon remove any thin skin. “When we play badly, you have to say, ‘Oh, this team played badly,’” he said. Over the last 15 games, Guardiola has heard that more than he would have liked. Manchester City has won just four times since the start of October. Against Leicester City on Saturday, Guardiola’s side allowed three goals inside 20 minutes. His team is now 7 points behind Chelsea, the Premier League’s leader. In recent weeks, Manchester City has played poorly more often than not. Guardiola has not especially enjoyed hearing it, of course. His news conferences have become awkwardly staccato, most of his answers preceded by a brief, pointed glare at his inquisitor. He would have expected nothing less, however. “I know this is business,” he said back in July. At times, however, it has not felt like business. In defeat, or even the absence of victory, Guardiola — more than any of his peers — is reproached not just for his professional decisions, his tactics and team selection, but for his personal flaws, too, as if the number of games City loses is directly proportional to the number of character failings its manager possesses. After the defeat at Leicester, for example, Peter Schmeichel, the former Manchester United goalkeeper, declared that Guardiola’s refusal to adapt his tactics to try to combat the reigning Premier League champions marked him as a “very arrogant man. ” “That is a man saying: ‘I know best. My way of playing football is the best,’” Schmeichel added. That is not the only accusation that has been leveled at Guardiola during City’s stutter over the last 10 weeks: Intransigence has been featured, as has a supposed tendency to overcomplicate matters, and a perfectionist’s restlessness. For his part, Guardiola admitted after leaving Bayern that he is “arrogant,” though not to the point that he thought he could change German soccer. All of this illustrates just how acidic, how charged, the subject of Guardiola has become. This is not just another of those quibbles and squabbles that sustain the soap opera of the Premier League over the course of a long season it runs deeper than that. There are few subjects — perhaps José Mourinho apart — more contentious, more keenly felt than the issue of whether Guardiola deserves the lofty reputation that precedes him. That is because, at root, the debate is not actually about Guardiola at all. It is about English soccer’s sense of self. Almost every week since Guardiola arrived, in those news media briefings he finds such a chore, one question has recurred. Now, he is almost waiting for it. He knows, at some point, he will be asked whether the Premier League is the strongest in the world. His answer is not always the same. In the middle of October, he chided the lazy assumption that soccer in Spain and Germany was lacking in intensity. “You have not been there, so you do not know how intense it is,” he said. A couple of weeks later, he seemed to have changed his tune. “Guys, you have to be so proud,” he said, his tone studiously flat. “The Premier League is so difficult. ” His reaction to the question is now more consistent. He smiles, fleetingly, when he hears it: It is so familiar that it has almost become comforting. He is also, it is fair to say, just a little bit amused by the fixation it is, after all, curious that a league so bombastic in its should appear to be so desperate for validation. There is, however, a reason for it. Guardiola, in English eyes, is the epitome of Continental sophistication. He has enjoyed unparalleled, almost unbroken, success in the two domestic competitions that might be considered the Premier League’s superiors, in Spain and Germany. He is also — from what he wears to how he thinks — resolutely other. He eschews both the traditional options for Premier League managers on the sideline — tracksuit to convey dynamism, business suit to project authority — in favor, usually, of a turtleneck, skinny jeans and sneakers. On the surface, so below: Many of Guardiola’s principles border on heretical in England. He does not mind that his goalkeeper, Claudio Bravo, is not a wonderful stopper of shots or a fearsome collector of crosses, because Guardiola believes it is more important that he plays a role in starting attacks. “I’m sorry, but until my last day as a coach, I will try to play from my goalkeeper,” he said after a draw with Everton in the middle of this difficult run. Nor does he have much time for England’s obsession with the physical. “I am not a coach for the tackles, so I do not train them,” he said after the defeat at Leicester. In a league and in a country that treasures its reputation for blood and thunder, where, as Xabi Alonso once observed, a tackle can be applauded almost as loudly as a goal, such an dismissal is unthinkable. It is that otherness that makes Guardiola’s presence in England so fascinating, of course it is also, however, what makes him the subject of such heightened emotions. In part it is because his endorsement is a considerable prize in a public relations battle if Guardiola, of all people, can be won over by the idea that England’s top division is the most demanding of all, then it would prove beyond doubt that there is substance behind the spin. But it is more than that. If Guardiola struggles — or if he fails outright — at Manchester City, then the myth of English exceptionalism is vindicated. The Premier League can continue to regard itself as a world apart. He will have failed the Rainy Night in Stoke test, the idea that greatness accrued elsewhere in Europe can only ever come with an asterisk until it has been proved when faced with the unique array of challenges on offer in England. If he succeeds, though, then all of that falls away. He has made it plain that he does not intend to compromise his beliefs for his new surroundings. “I won 21 titles in seven years: three titles per year playing in this way,” he said earlier this season. “I’m sorry, guys. I’m not going to change. ” This, in essence, is a battle of ideas. Guardiola, in many ways, represents a new way of thinking. Should he thrive, it would not just represent the triumph of his philosophy, but also the failure of so many of the tenets that are central to England’s identity. That is where the vitriol comes from that is why it has become personal. It is not about Guardiola it is about us. | 1 |
It was the Friday before Labor Day, and Alicia Keys, the pop star, was on the “Today” show performing for the program’s summer concert series — she’s about to release a new album, and she wrote the theme song for “Queen of Katwe,” out next week. There was a lot to talk about. But instead, Ms. Keys spent most of her time talking about makeup (and not wearing it) with the anchors Tamron Hall, Billy Bush and Al Roker, who were doggedly wiping the pancake off their faces. “You’re all crazy,” said Ms. Keys, swabbing Ms. Hall’s cheeks. “This isn’t even what it’s about!” “It” is #nomakeup — a meme, a movement, a cri de coeur — that has been roiling social media for months. If you missed the kerfuffle, it started in May, when Ms. Keys wrote an essay for Lenny, Lena Dunham’s online magazine, about the insecurities she felt being a woman in the public eye, and the roles (and makeup) she put on over the years to armor herself. She wrote about the anxiety she endured if she left her house unadorned: “What if someone wanted a picture? What if someone posted it?” And then, when she went without makeup or styling for an album portrait, she felt liberated, and the act became a metaphor. “I hope to God it’s a revolution,” she wrote. In the months that followed, Ms. Keys was seemingly everywhere — always without makeup, always beautiful — performing at the Democratic National Convention, on “The Voice” and the MTV Video Music Awards, at the Tom Ford show during New York Fashion Week. That’s a nice story, right? Inspiring and kind of sweet? Feh. “ 2016,” as The New York Post and others called it, has grown only weirder and louder, as Twitter was at first ignited with Alicia Keys supporters, and then flooded with a backlash against her. And then with the backlash to the backlash. #Nomakeup was empowering and brave. No, it was annoying, incendiary and invasive. Ms. Keys’s (mostly female) detractors howled at her disingenuousness (surely she had spent thousands on skin care?) and her deceit (surely she was wearing tinted moisturizer?) some slammed her for not looking pretty enough (though they used coarser words than those). Late last month, Swizz Beatz, Ms. Keys’s husband, took to Instagram with a video defending his wife: “This is deep,” he said, clearly incredulous. “Somebody’s sitting home mad, because somebody didn’t wear makeup on their face?” Don’t be surprised that this is news, said Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the feminist activist and author. “It’s all so familiar,” she said. “Alicia Keys could be taking a page from the orthodoxy of the women’s movement 40 years ago. I’d never heard of her before this brouhaha, but now I’ll follow her anywhere. What she’s doing is . She’s not just talking about the tyranny of makeup. She’s talking about female authenticity. She’s challenging the culture’s relentless standards of feminine conformity and the beauty industry’s incessant product hype. ” (Ms. Pogrebin said that while she was reading Ms. Keys’s essay, an ad popped up for some kind of skin cream.) Why is it, wondered Linda Wells, founding editor of Allure magazine, that fashion is considered and makeup is ? Or something more pernicious? Ms. Wells recalled “The Beauty Myth,” Naomi Wolf’s 1991 book in which she argued that contemporary ideals of beauty, proposed in large part by a cosmetics industry, were enslaving women and holding them in thrall to all manner of restrictive practices, from makeup to surgery to eating disorders. “I get the argument, but I don’t agree with it,” Ms. Wells said. “To me, we’re not all passive victims. Make your choice, like Alicia Keys. Decide what makes you feel confident and enjoy it. ” Furthermore, Ms. Wells said, Ms. Keys’s gesture is coming at a particular moment, when the internet is flooded with YouTube videos on how to best present yourself … on the internet. “It’s tutorials about contouring and highlighting, except now it’s called strobing, and there’s something else called baking, which is basically a thick coat of powder,” Ms. Wells said. “It’s a very extreme look — we haven’t had highlighting since the ’80s. It’s this sort of extreme grooming geared for the selfie culture, and then someone like Alicia Keys comes out and says, ‘I’m not going to do it,’ and people are losing their minds. ” Whose makeup is it anyway? In the late 1980s, Andrea Robinson, then the president of Ultima II, recalled the response of her male bosses at Revlon when she proposed an extension of her brand called the Nakeds, makeup designed for women who didn’t want to look as if they were wearing any. As Ms. Robinson remembered: “They said: ‘Why would a woman want to wear mud on her face? Makeup is about fantasy, it’s about color.’ What they didn’t say was that it was about their fantasy, their sense of color. The idea that women would want to look like themselves, and wear makeup for themselves, was crazy to them. ” Once introduced, the Nakeds broke all sorts of sales records, she said, and sold out over and over again. Hundreds of women wrote her in gratitude, Ms. Robinson said, including Jean Harris, who wrote her from prison: “She thought we had the right idea, that women should not overpaint themselves, and use their simple beauty. ” For the record, cosmetics executives aren’t worried that #nomakeup will have women hurling their lipsticks into the Dumpster. “It’s a makeup moment,” said Jane Hertzmark Hudis, group president of the Estée Lauder Companies, adding that her industry is experiencing “explosive growth,” with “prestige” makeup sales up 13 percent last year, according to the NPD Group (sales driven in large part by concealers, as it happens). Sales of all beauty products reached $16 billion in this country in 2015. Nude colors are consistent best sellers, Ms. Hudis said. Just ask Bobbi Brown, the makeup artist turned cosmetics mogul who built a company, as Ms. Robinson did, around nude makeup, and whose corporate manifesto right now is #bewhoyouare. “It takes a lot of guts to face HDTV without makeup,” Ms. Brown said of Ms. Keys. “But I get it. It’s all fine. Choose who you want to be. Personally, I like to have a little concealer. But obviously it’s more than about makeup. I don’t think people understand how difficult it is for women like Alicia Keys to worry about the way you look every second. It is the ugly internet we live in. Let’s be nice to people, and not be so judgey. ” There is a sense you just can’t win. When Kim Novak appeared on the Academy Awards in 2014, there was much snark regarding her clearly augmented face. Laura Lippman, the crime novelist who was then 55, was appalled: Who were these internet trolls who would weigh in so viciously on an ’s appearance? In solidarity with Ms. Novak, she posted a selfie of her face “as is” and invited others to do the same. It was a different sort of #nomakeup moment. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, is how I felt,” she said. The response, she said, was overwhelming: thousands of “as is” photos from all sorts of people, including one man, she said, who photographed himself on a hospital gurney the day he had a minor heart attack. It’s just complicated, said Sheila Bridges, the interior designer. Given an alopecia diagnosis years ago, she decided to shave her head rather than contend with wigs or weaves, a private act that has subjected her to constant, uninvited public commentary. Also, people have been moved to pat her head. “Historically, beauty has been our currency as women,” Ms. Bridges said, “and when you do something that is inconsistent with societal norms, people get upset. It reminds me of when Gabby Douglas won her gold medals at the London Olympics. ” It was 2012, and the was taking home two gold medals for her performances, but much of the conversation around that historic event — Ms. Douglas was the first woman to earn the Olympic title — was about how her hair was pulled into a ponytail and secured with clips. “There was a tremendous backlash,” Ms. Bridges recalled, “and all these terrible tweets, and what was so disturbing for me was that the majority seemed to come from other black women. I’m like: ‘Are you kidding? She’s one of the world’s best athletes, and we’re talking about her hair? ’” Gail O’Neill, a journalist and former model, said that for some, Ms. Keys has become a Rorschach test, and the disapprobation for the singer’s personal choice comes from women who are measuring themselves against it. “When women start applying makeup as preteenagers,” she said, “by adulthood, that mindless habit can result in a mask we don’t even know we’re wearing until someone like Alicia decides to remove hers in public. ” People who do things outside the herd scare people who are in the herd, said Anne Kreamer, a journalist who stopped coloring her hair at 49, and wrote about her experience in her 2007 book, “Going Gray: What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity and Everything Else That Matters. ” “It was the women who were the most critical,” Ms. Kreamer recalled, as if by doing without herself, she was taking something away from them. In her book, Ms. Kreamer noted that in the 1950s, fewer than 10 percent of women dyed their hair, as compared with 40 to 75 percent in the she also surveyed some 400 women, of which 15 percent said they’d had some sort of plastic surgery. As she wrote, darkly, “Extrapolate the trend line, double the available technologies, and imagine the choices and pressures our may face. ” In 1983, Ms. Pogrebin wrote an article called “The Power of Beauty” for Ms. the magazine she helped found. She was galvanized to do so when a friend had a chin augmentation, and then blossomed, emotionally, as a result. What’s the proper feminist response, Ms. Pogrebin asked herself, to such an extreme renovation: to offer congratulations, or wincing disapproval? If a feature distracts people from what they feel is their true selves, how can you argue with their alteration of that feature? But then again, as Ms. Pogrebin pointed out, whose notion of attractiveness motivated the change? “We can argue about what is attractive, but not that we wish to attract,” she wrote. The solution to not making ourselves crazy, she suggested, is to propose a broader definition of beauty, one that celebrates its impact but reduces its tyranny. Meanwhile, the churn about women’s looks continues. Last week, after Hillary Clinton’s performance on NBC, Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, took to Twitter to chastise the former secretary of state … for not smiling. | 1 |
Bill Clinton on Pedophile Island — Human Slavery & Sex Trafficking in the Elite's World Journalist Benn Swann exposes pedophilia in the highest government circles. In the following video... http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/bill-clinton-on-pedophile-island-human.html Journalist Benn Swann exposes pedophilia in the highest government circles. In the following video, billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, his relationship with Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew and other famous names and their connection to a high-level sex scandal is exposed by Conchita and Cristina Sarnoff. The video (below) also looks at slavery and human sex trafficking in the modern world — and more. Lawyers for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein touted his close relationship with Bill Clinton and also claimed in a 2007 letter to the Florida State Attorney’s office, that he helped start the Clinton’s family foundation. ( Source ) American Patriot reports: Jeffrey Epstein, the “billionaire pedophile” who was accused of keeping under aged girls as sex slaves on his private island, was long known to be friendly with former President Bill Clinton. The extent of that relationship, however, has never been made clear. But new records indicate the former leader of the free world was much cozier with Epstein than originally known. All aboard the ‘Lolita Express’: Flight logs reveal the many trips Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz took on pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet with anonymous women Flight logs for Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane dubbed the ‘Lolita Express’ were published for the first time on Thursday They show that former President Bill Clinton boarded the plane with women believed to have been involved in creating underage sex slave ring Alleged victim Virginia Roberts says she was recruited as a slave when she was 15, and that she was forced to have sex with both Prince Andrew and Harvard law profession Alan Dershowitz The latter, she says, molested her mid-flight on the private jet Both the Duke of York and Dershowitz have fiercely denied their involvement in the ring. Records obtained by Fox News show that Clinton “was a much more frequent flyer on a registered sex offender’s infamous jet than previously reported, with flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the ‘Lolita Express’– even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail for at least five of the flights.” Original reports had Clinton on Epstein’s personal 727 only 11 times, however the flight logs obtained by Fox have him flying more than twice that amount. Fox News reports: “Bill Clinton… associated with a man like Jeffrey Epstein, who everyone in New York, certainly within his inner circles, knew was a pedophile,” said Conchita Sarnoff, of the Washington, D.C. based non-profit Alliance to Rescue Victims of Trafficking, and author of a book on the Epstein case called “TrafficKing.”“Why would a former president associate with a man like that?” (…) Official flight logs filed with the Federal Aviation Administration show Clinton traveled on some of the trips with as many as 10 U.S. Secret Service agents. However, on a five-leg Asia trip between May 22 and May 25, 2002, not a single Secret Service agent is listed. The U.S. Secret Service has declined to answer multiple Freedom of Information Act requests filed by FoxNews.com seeking information on these trips. Clinton would have been required to file a form to dismiss the agent detail, a former Secret Service agent told FoxNews.com. Virginia Roberts pictured with Prince Andrew, the Duke of York: Claims: Virginia Roberts says she was recruited to work as a sex slave for Epstein when she was just 15, and has named Dershowitz and Prince Andrew as two of the men she was forced to have sex with. Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue.
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Armchair venture capitalists will soon have a new place to hunt for intriguing : Indiegogo, the popular crowdfunding site for developers of creative ventures like movies, games and gadgets. Starting on Tuesday, the site will give entrepreneurs the option of offering backers an equity stake in their projects and creations. Indiegogo is the first major crowdfunding site to use a new securities rule that took effect six months ago, allowing ordinary investors to risk up to a few thousands dollars a year backing private companies. Previously, only accredited investors — wealthy people with an annual income of more than $200, 000 or a net worth of at least $1 million — were allowed to put money into such risky ventures. That created a schism: Companies like Pebble, a smartwatch maker, and Oculus, a virtual reality headset developer, raised millions on crowdfunding sites from eager early customers and used that surge to prove that buyers wanted their fledgling products. But when those companies subsequently raised money from investors, crowdfunding backers were shut out. When Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion, venture capitalists and rich angel investors reaped the rewards. “In a lot of ways, this levels the playing field,” said David Mandelbrot, Indiegogo’s chief executive. “This was one of the few areas of the law where citizens were treated differently based on the amount of wealth that they have. ” Securities law had long prohibited regular investors from gambling on private companies because they can be risky investments that are likely to go bad. Half of American small businesses with employees shut down within five years, and those that survive often take many years to turn a profit. Things have not been looking so hot for Pebble, for example, which recently laid off a quarter of its staff. Still, some entrepreneurs are eager to test out the new market. ArtCraft Entertainment, a video game developer in Austin, is considering an Indiegogo campaign to find investors for Crowfall, a game it plans to release next year. Crowfall already took in nearly $1. 8 million from a Kickstarter campaign last year. For that, the company offered traditional crowdfunding perks like early access to the game’s beta tests and a thank you in Crowfall’s credits. Some 33, 000 backers have kicked in money for Crowfall’s development, and ArtCraft — which has also raised money from traditional investors — likes the idea of offering them a stake in the game’s financial outcome, said J. Todd Coleman, the company’s creative director. The company considered an offering in May, when equity crowdfunding became legal, but backed off because of concerns about whether it could draw interest, Mr. Coleman said. Selling stakes to small investors is a strictly regulated process, and all offerings must be run through portals registered with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Indiegogo is partnering with MicroVentures, a registered portal that will handle the investment logistics. Around 20 portals have become certified and started courting investors, but interest has been scant. Only 55 companies have run successful equity crowdfunding campaigns, raising a total of $12. 4 million, according to statistics compiled by the investment portal Wefunder. Indiegogo could shake up the field by bringing investment opportunities to a much wider audience. Some eight million people have backed projects on the site, raising more than $1 billion. “When Indiegogo called us, that flipped the equation,” Mr. Coleman said. “It changed the math from ‘this isn’t something we feel comfortable risking,’ to ‘let’s try it!’ We have some very, very passionate fans, and we think it would be cool to let them have the opportunity to invest. ” Most crowdfunding investors gamble tiny sums. About a third of the investments made on Wefunder so far are for $100, the site’s minimum, and 76 percent are for $500 or less, according to Nick Tommarello, Wefunder’s chief executive. Unlike shares in public companies, which can be easily sold if an investor wants out, stock in private ventures is largely illiquid. Investors who snap up a stake in a they spot on Indiegogo are most likely stuck with it for many years. And the process is more complex and expensive than traditional crowdfunding. It costs nothing to start a regular campaign on Indiegogo. The site takes a 5 percent cut of the funds raised. The people who donate typically get an early version product in question, plus various trinkets or karmic rewards. But for equity campaigns, creators will need to spend about $7, 000 on compliance and regulatory costs, Indiegogo estimates, before a campaign is permitted to go live. The site will then take a cash fee of 7 percent on any funds raised, plus an additional 2 percent in stock. Investors will pay a $7 processing fee or 2 percent of their investment, whichever is higher. The and most active site for crowdfunding projects, Kickstarter, says it is not interested in the equity market. “The purpose of creativity is not to become an investment vehicle,” said Justin Kazmark, a Kickstarter spokesman. “When creative projects escape the need to generate profit, the result is a more vibrant and diverse culture. We’re more focused on a richer culture than richer investors. ” | 1 |
When Simone Manuel touched the wall of the pool in the women’s freestyle race Thursday at the Rio Olympics, she turned around, her eyes searching for the clock. The moment she registered her win is now a reaction for the history books. Manuel, a swimmer from Sugar Land, Tex. became the first woman to win an individual event in Olympic swimming. She also set an Olympic record, along with Penny Oleksiak of Canada: They tied for the win, clocking in at 52. 70 seconds. (Manuel also helped the American women’s team win silver in the freestyle relay.) The swimming world has known about Manuel, a N. C. A. A. swimming champion, for years, but her status as a newly minted gold medalist rocketed her to wider popularity overnight. Here’s a closer look at a swimmer who just made history. Manuel’s supporters have high hopes that she could affect diversity in the sport, encouraging more minorities to join. She addressed the issue after her win on Thursday: “I definitely think it raises some awareness and will get them inspired,” Manuel told reporters. “I mean, the gold medal wasn’t just for me it was for people that came before me and inspired me to stay in the sport. “For people who believe that they can’t do it, I hope I’m an inspiration to others to get out there and try swimming. You might be pretty good at it. ” Miriam Lynch of Diversity in Aquatics, a nonprofit organization focused on curbing high numbers of drowning deaths among said Manuel’s victory could help reverse what she called a cultural fear of swimming in that group. The phenomenon has been traced to slavery and to Jim Crow laws, which segregated swimming pools. The hope is to encourage more young people to become lifeguards, coaches and swimmers. “When you see that the lifeguard is from the community, you think, ‘I can be a lifeguard I can be a coach,’ ” Ms. Lynch said. “Now, with Simone, it’s, ‘I can be an Olympian.’ ” Chuck Wielgus, the executive director of USA Swimming, said in an interview on Friday that Manuel’s achievements, compounded by the success of black gold medalists like Cullen Jones, who came before her, might spur a bump in minority memberships. Michael Phelps did something similar when he first started swimming: When Phelps made the Olympic team in 2000, membership in USA Swimming was about 37 percent male today, male membership of the organization is around 44 percent. “I think we’ll see it now with Cullen and Simone,” Mr. Wielgus said. “The benefits of it will be seen 10 years from now. ” membership grew by 55 percent from 2004 to 2015, he said. But that still amounts to only about 1 percent of USA Swimming. Manuel comes from a family of athletes — her two older brothers and her father played college basketball — but after her victory, she spoke to reporters about the pressure of being a black athlete in a sport that has historically lacked diversity. “It is something I’ve definitely struggled with a lot,” Manuel said. “Coming into the race, I tried to take weight of the black community off my shoulders. It’s something I carry with me. I want to be an inspiration, but I would like there to be a day when it is not ‘Simone the black swimmer.’ ” The network drew sharp criticism on social media from fans who said it should have prioritized Manuel’s medal ceremony as it happened instead of broadcasting the women’s gymnastics event. The sports site Deadspin linked to a BBC video, which has since been taken down, so that people could watch Manuel’s historic moment. A few people caught the footage and posted it to Twitter. Before Manuel won a gold medal, Lia Neal, who is of Chinese and African descent, made headlines in 2012 for winning a bronze medal in the freestyle relay at the London Games. They follow in the wake of Maritza Correia, a Puerto swimmer of Guyanese descent who was the first black woman to join the United States Olympic team, and was on the freestyle relay group that won silver in Athens in 2004. Both freestyle sprinters, Manuel and Neal are friends and rivals, and they’re teammates at Stanford University. Greg Meehan, the university’s lead swimming coach, told ESPN last year that Manuel’s arrival to the team took some pressure off Neal, who is a year older. “She has a huge spotlight on her, and she’s managed it well,” Meehan said of Manuel. “And it’s given Lia some freedom to do what she needs to do. ” In the fall, Stanford will add even more Olympic firepower when Katie Ledecky, the team’s most dominant female swimmer, comes aboard. The tennis powerhouse Serena Williams, who has four gold medals of her own, shared a photo on Instagram that praised Manuel and another famous Simone — that would be Simone Biles, who is widely regarded as the best gymnast in the world. Biles is a friend of Manuel’s and, of course, a fellow Texan. | 1 |
MSM Caught Preparing Hillary Victory Results Prior to Election 11/03/2016
In today’s video, Christopher Greene of AMTV reports the Mainstream media caught preparing Hillary Clinton election results prior to November 8. Juror explanation for Ammon Bundy verdict 11/03/2016 OREGONLIVE Juror 4 has so far provided the only public explanation of the behind-the-scenes discussions that led to t ... Doug Casey: A Civil War Could Be in the Cards After the Election 11/03/2016 LEW ROCKWELL (Source: The 2nd American Civil War by Richard Hubal, via MN Artists) Nick Giambruno: The US preside ... Putin grants Steven Seagal Russian citizenship 11/03/2016 DAILY MAIL President Vladimir Putin signed off Thursday on a decree granting Russian citizenship to American action her ... AMTV Archives | 0 |
How To Talk To Your Child About The Election Results Close Vol 52 Issue 44 · Politics · Parenting · Kids · Election 2016 Here’s some advice for talking to your child about the shocking outcome of the 2016 presidential election:
Children often understand more than we think, so start off by asking them if they have any idea what the fuck is happening.
Put their mind at ease by confirming that the results of this election aren’t the end of the world in any strictly literal sense.
Don’t be afraid to openly share your wine with them.
Avoid touching on any topic that might be distressing to a young child, such as the electoral college.
Reassure them that no matter what, the adults in their life will always feel obligated to tell them everything’s going to be all right.
Explain that testosterone is a naturally occurring steroid hormone that makes a person more aggressive and reactive.
Remind them that one day when they’re older, they’ll understand all of this a lot better and will get to decide for themselves whether or not they should forgive us.
Acquaint your daughter with the word “motherfucker” to equip her for what lies ahead.
If they have additional questions, direct them to your Twitter feed. Share This Story: WATCH VIDEO FROM THE ONION Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter
Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines | 0 |
How did American intelligence officials come to brief President Obama, Donald J. Trump and lawmakers about supposed Russian plans to blackmail Mr. Trump? There are far more questions than answers. But here is a look at the story so far. ■ In September 2015, a Washington political research firm, Fusion GPS, paid by a wealthy Republican donor who did not like Mr. Trump, began to compile “opposition research” on him — standard practice in politics. ■ Last June, after evidence of Russian hacking of Democratic targets surfaced, Fusion GPS hired a retired British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, to investigate Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia. ■ After it became clear that Mr. Trump would be the Republican nominee, Democratic clients who supported Hillary Clinton began to pay Fusion GPS for this same opposition research. ■ Mr. Steele, who had long experience in Russia and a network of connections there, compiled dozens of reports detailing what he heard from his contacts. The memos he wrote, mostly one to three pages long, are dated from June to December. ■ The memos contain unsubstantiated claims that Russian officials tried to obtain influence over Mr. Trump by preparing to blackmail him with sex tapes and bribe him with business deals. They also claim that the Trump campaign met with Russian operatives to discuss the Russians’ hacking and leaking of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee and from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta. ■ Fusion GPS and Mr. Steele shared the memos first with their clients, and later with the F. B. I. and multiple journalists at The New York Times and elsewhere. The memos, totaling about 35 pages, also reached a number of members of Congress. ■ Last week, when the F. B. I. C. I. A. and National Security Agency gave a classified report on the Russian hacking, leaking and efforts to influence the presidential election to Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump and congressional leaders, they attached a summary of the unverified allegations in the memos. ■ Whether any of the claims in the memos are true. American intelligence agencies have not confirmed them, and Mr. Trump has said they are a complete fabrication. In addition, one specific allegation — that Mr. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen met with a Russian official in Prague in August or September — has been denied by both Mr. Cohen, who says he has never been to Prague, and the Russian, Oleg Solodukhin. ■ Who concocted the information in the memos, if it is entirely false or partly so, and with what purpose. If all the information in the dossier is false, it is a very sophisticated fabrication. ■ What exactly prompted American intelligence officials to pass on a summary of the unvetted claims to Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump and Congress. Officials have said they felt the should be aware of the memos, which had circulated widely in Washington. But putting the summary in a report that went to multiple people in Congress and the executive branch made it very likely that it would be leaked. The F. B. I. has been investigating the claims in the memos, and Democrats are demanding a thorough inquiry into the reports that Trump representatives met with Russian officials during the campaign. But as of Jan. 20, Mr. Trump will be in charge of the bureau and the other intelligence agencies, and he may not approve such an investigation. Because the 35 pages of memos prepared as opposition research on Mr. Trump contain detailed claims that neither the intelligence agencies nor The Times has been able to verify, Times editors decided to briefly summarize the claims and not publish the document. The Times did report before the election that the F. B. I. was investigating claims about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia — an article that resulted from an extensive reporting effort. The Democratic National Committee and Podesta emails were public, their authenticity was not in doubt, and they contained newsworthy information. That is a question the director, James B. Comey, may eventually have to answer. His two public statements about the bureau’s investigation of the Clinton emails broke with long F. B. I. tradition. Many reporters from multiple news organizations tried to verify the claims in the memos but were unsuccessful. CNN broke the news that a summary of the memos had been attached to the classified report by the F. B. I. C. I. A. and National Security Agency on the Russian hacking and leaking, and that it had been given to Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump and congressional leaders last week. That level of official attention prompted news organizations to decide to inform the public about the memos. | 1 |
Dumptrump and hillary m | 0 |
Hungary negotiates its migration problem with the EU, not with Russia Nations such as Hungary are using the migration issue to challenge the power and competences of the EU in the name of national sovereignty. At the same time, the refugee wave has become a geopolitical dilemma between Russia and the EU Nations such as Hungary are using the migration issue to challenge the power and competences of the EU in the name of national sovereignty. At the same time, the refugee wave has become a geopolitical dilemma between Russia and the EU.
A Syrian refugee looks at Hungarian riot police from the Serbian side of the fence built by Hungarian authorities at the border between Serbia and Hungary, in Horgos, Serbia. Photo: AP
The referendum in Hungary on the migration issue in early October, combined with the death of a policeman at the door of a Russia-friendly far right anti-migration activist at the end of the same month, have once again highlighted the importance of the migration issue for Hungary. There are two distinct aspects of this issue – Hungary’s relationship with Brussels and with Russia – and it is clear that there is quite a disconnect between the two.
Hungarians went to the polls on Oct. 2 to give their opinion on a referendum question that each political side interpreted in its own way. The turnout remained well below the necessary 50 percent of all valid votes, although 98 percent of voters – more than three million people – said they wanted the Hungarian parliament to have a decisive say about any future quota-based redistribution of asylum-seekers inside the EU.
The referendum and its campaign had two separate goals. First, the ruling Fidesz party had to test the loyalty of their political camp, thus they tried to redefine classical political fault lines and checked on the unity of the opposition. Secondly, Prime Minister Viktor Orban used this occasion to bring forward his arguments about reshaping the competences of the European Union, especially the European Commission itself.
The referendum question has been thoroughly debated ever since it was published, as it reflects both of the above goals. The question asks: "Do you want the European Union to be able to order the mandatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without parliament’s consent?"
Of course, political and civil groups were enabled by the ambiguous wording of the question to focus on significantly different interpretations. Neither the Constitutional Court nor the National Election Committee declared the question invalid, despite the fact that it raised concerns among experts. The constitutional rules within most member states declare that no national referendum should be held on issues already regulated by international treaties.
As a way of getting around this fact, the government later claimed that the referendum did not concern the decisions of mandatory quotas already decided at the level of the European Council - it would only concern future possible decisions.
Debating the competency of the EU Clearly, the European Council is required to give the final word in any such case of quota-based distribution of resettlement or relocation among EU member states, in any case where Hungary has a way to raise its own voice or to build a blocking coalition. The Hungarian government decided to go against the quota system after the Council’s decisions of last autumn. Slovakia and Hungary went to the European Court in Luxembourg to dispute the legality of the measure. ;
This was the final point where the Hungarian government turned the migration crisis into a sovereignty question. It had started in the official government rhetoric already after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo , but the referendum question undoubtedly raised the stakes of the debate. It is not anymore about whether migrants or refugees should be welcomed or not, the opinion of the government focuses on the competence of the European institutions ;- whether they can, in theory, enforce population-related decisions on member states.
The Hungarian position is openly on the side that the quota system violates the sovereignty of member states and unnecessarily forces a non-solution instead of paying attention to securing the external borders of the Schengen area. This has been the argument already since last summer, when hundreds of thousands of refugees crossed the country and the Balkan route towards Germany.
First, the borders must be secured, because if member states start the redistribution mechanism, the political pressure for a sustainable solution at the border protection level would dissipate and Hungary would be left with an ever-growing influx of uncontrolled immigration.
The EU-Turkey deal seriously decreased the number of asylum-seekers arriving in the Balkans, though the Mediterranean route remains open and Italy is under growing pressure again. Hungarians have not seen masses of migrants since last September when the government sealed the southern Hungarian borders with a razor-wire fence. Despite this measure, the government continued to communicate a permanent threat of uncontrolled migrants throughout the campaign.
Recommended: " Why migration represents a new existential threat for Europe " The momentum of vox populi in the EU member states While Pew Research and other polls do not put the Hungarian electorate among the friendliest towards foreigners from other cultures, it is still a member of the community of European values. Hungarians came up with a very positive response through civil society last summer during the crisis at the Eastern Train Station in Budapest, where medical and social services as well as food was provided by NGOs, volunteers and churches to the tens of thousands stranded asylum-seekers. Not one single organized attack was carried out against the people on the road, while in Germany, safe homes and groups have been attacked in the hundreds.
Hungarians are, of course, not resistant to strong government messages that resonate, but the invalid referendum gave proof that the will of the government is not enough in itself to completely reshape the perception of the electorate. While xenophobia has risen to a new high in the population, it is still not the general attitude of the average voter. Hungarians live in their own reality, facing economic hurdles and challenges, caring about how to make a living in a country where the average salary is about half of the minimum wage in France.
The government campaign focused largely on classic media platforms: billboards, public and pro-government television and radio channels, leaflets in the mailbox. It was significantly weaker on social media, where youngsters remain a relatively disaffected group.
The number of invalid votes – those who put their paper in the ballot box but did not pick any of the choices – together with the more than 50,000 voters who actually decided to take home the ballot instead of casting it at all, hit a record. Altogether, well over 250,000 voters sent the message that they did not want to reply to such a question.
The referendum must be dealt with at the European level The Hungarian referendum enters into the long-running history of the Budapest-Brussel battle that the second Orbán-government (2010-2014) started right around the country’s European Council presidency in 2011. The referendum’s signature motto was “Let’s Tell Brussels” what Hungarians want, implying that EU bureaucrats (technocrats) are not representing the interests of nation states.
This argumentation to adopt Brussels as a scapegoat is not unknown in other capitals of Europe either. Actually, the truly diverse community of the 27 member states have their national sensitivities elsewhere. For Central Europeans, demography and population policy (i.e. migration) is a pivotal question, especially for their nation-state minded governments.
For Ireland, their sovereignty over Irish tax policy is a cornerstone issue, in which they do not wish to have the support of the EU institutions against Apple. The German constitutional court in Karlsruhe has declared itself against EU legislation in some instances over the last few decades.
So the legal battleground among member states and EU institutions is an old one, which is an organic part of the history of European integration. Popular referenda are another thing entirely. Greece tried to acquire some weight by its last vote on credit conditions, with only limited results. Referenda on the European Constitution in France and the Netherlands were also serious failures.
Also read: " Is Europe coming apart at the seams? " Quickly shifting geopolitical background This migration topic has been turned into the most successful glue among the Visegrad states. Anti-migrant messages have been strong in Slovakia, bringing a sharp election victory and a colorful coalition for Robert Fico and in the Czech Republic, especially by the pro-Russian president, Milos Zeman. Finally, the new right-wing government of Poland also claimed sovereignty over migration, though often in a less harsh voice, as a rule of law procedure has been opened in Brussels investigating the situation in post-election Warsaw.
This coalition seems to be broken up by the Slovakian presidency of the Council, where Bratislava had to take the position of honest broker. Prague also approached Berlin on several questions and the government took a step back on this question.
After the EU summit in Bratislava in September, the European context for quota-based solutions shifted anyway. Powerful member states also put the accent on the protection of external borders and the cooperation on the front against terrorism. Besides Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, it seems that others have taken the redistribution issue off the political agenda, or at least it is not the cornerstone of current council sessions.
Russian factor The shift in the European political discourse about migration is an important one: It is less and less framed as a social issue and has been turned into a security question. As soon as it is considered to touch upon the national security of EU member states, the Russian involvement in Syria and other active measures influencing the movement of asylum-seekers might become more critical for European military and other law enforcement actors. This could drive to new tensions if the sides are not taking into account the new context of communication.
In late October, a Hungarian special law enforcement agency knocked on the door of a well-known far-right figure, István Győrkös. In the ensuing exchange of gunfire, he killed a policeman. This brought forth his organization, the Hungarian National Front (MNA), which set up the Hidfő webpage, which eventually turned into a notorious pro-Russian news portal. Investigative reports in the Hungarian media started to describe the MNA as a rather old platform for Russian influence over the Hungarian far-right and neo-Nazi scene.
Ever since the migration crisis hit Europe, a network of relatively new, otherwise often pro-Russian news pages started to exploit the anti-migrant or xenophobic feelings of Hungarians and other populations of EU member states. The migration crisis turned into one of the most visible gap between new and old member states: certainly, it is not a fruitful debate but a bitter division.
Many European observers consider the destabilization of the European alliance and the Euro-Atlantic alliance to be a strategic Russian interest. Migration and the amplification of this issue within society by the media, together with the presence of Russian support for several European far-right movements, create a dangerous mix for the EU. In this game, Hungary must play along with its EU and NATO partners, rather than with Russia. It has much more to lose outside of the Western frameworks.
In the long term, the Kremlin will also face the dilemmas of migration policy. The Russian government adopted a comprehensive new policy on migration in 2012, though the country is a target destination overwhelmingly among the citizens of the former Soviet states. An ageing population, a growing work force gap and extremely long land borders suggest that difficult years could be ahead for the Kremlin as well.
Hence in the long term, the EU and Russia will not necessarily be conflicting on migration regulation. Nevertheless, currently the attempt to win the support of Turkey is apparent. Both the EU and Russia want Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to support their own respective interests in handling the crisis in Syria and in the Middle East.
As long as the Syrian conundrum is not resolved together with Washington and other regional actors, conflicting interests are encoded in the EU-Russia relationship regarding migration. ;The German secret service BND also reported about alleged active measures of Russia around the Greek-Macedonian border to further escalate the situation. [The BND is Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst – Editor’s note]
This shows that Moscow is not truly seeking cooperation with Europe on the migration crisis, but so far tries to exploit it for its other strategic interests and to create another bargaining chip for future negotiations.
The opinion of the author may not necessarily reflect the position of Russia Direct or its staff. | 0 |
The founder of the Republican Hindu Coalition, Shalabh Kumar, spoke with me on Sunday evening’s Breitbart News radio show on Sirius XM Patriot 125 about his new book Ab Ki Baar Trump Sarkar! in which details how he, alongside various Trump campaign operatives, helped flip “one million plus” Democratic votes in favour of President Trump in 2016. [Kumar, a wealthy and successful businessman based in Chicago, took the opportunity to dispel media and myths about former Breitbart News Executive Chairman and now Chief White House Strategist Stephen K. Bannon. Speaking to Breitbart News, he said: “[He is a] totally different creature [to his portrayal in the media],” said Kumar. “When I first met him, this narrative was there. And the first time I met him at the end of July last year, he welcomed me, he showed me his great innovative mind, he recognised the potential of the vote, and he was participant every which way. “He was so nice, he was just unbelievably nice … [he’s] just an absolutely great guy,” added Kumar. The book, written by political operative James Kahrs details Mr. Kumar’s journey from setting up the Republican Hindu Coalition, having himself become convinced of the party and its conservative values through personal conversations with President Ronald Reagan. Mr. Kumar says he threw his weight behind Mr. Trump after meeting him on several occasions during the Presidential campaign, hosting dozens of town hall events, putting himself forth as a Trump surrogate on television channels around the world, and indeed producing a video aimed at Hindu Americans which he says had 1. 2 billion impressions around the world, including amongst the 4. 2 million Hindu Americans living in the United States. “In the past, they’ve only voted 16 per cent for Republicans … 84 per cent have voted for Democrats … They should all be voting … 90 per cent should be voting for Republican conservatives, but they needed to be touched”. In the book, Kahrs writes: People who know Bannon know that he is a gregarious and courtly man, despite all the scary stories written about him or even his portrayal on NBC’s Saturday Night Live as the grim reaper. True to himself, Bannon was the first to greet Kumar when he arrived. “He is not the racist animal that is depicted in the media at all,” Kumar thought to himself. “In fact, he was so kind and hospitable. He took me around to the offices and introduced me to the members of the staff. He really made me feel like I was a welcome member of the team. ” The book recalls stories of how Kumar met with candidate Donald Trump, even at one point getting the now President to utter the Hindi words “Ab Ki Baar Trump Sarkar!” for a campaign video. LISTEN: | 1 |
As early as last Saturday, a Newsweek special edition depicting Hillary Clinton as the new President of the United States began circulating to media outlets and bookstores. The questionable cover was... | 0 |
The owner of the Dallas Cowboys Jerry Jones will receive an ethical violation warning for providing game tickets, airfare, and hotel reservations to over 100 police officers. [Jones argued in front of a North Little Rock, Arkansas, city council commission that his gift, valued at approximately $300, 000, was a tribute to his home town’s police officers. Jones said that the gifts were not payment for ordinary work performed by police, but to “send a positive message of the work police do outside of their normal jobs,” reported ArkansasMatters. com. Arkansas state law does not allow public servants to receive gifts of over $100. Internet blogger Russ Racop exposed the first time violation and has come under fire for his criticism of the goodwill extended to the men and women in blue. As it turns out, Racop has been outed with having his own set of issues with the court system, reported the Arkansas Times. Former Attorney General Dustin McDaniel is offering free legal services to any of the officers who received the gift. However, according to the Times, Little Rock has no intention of treating the gifts as taxable income. Fortunately for Jones, a first violation of the law is considered a minor offense, subject only to a warning. Next time Jerry can just send his money to Black Lives Matters, where he will avoid admonition and probably relieve a hardy round of applause. | 1 |
Home / Badge Abuse / Breaking: Emergency Call to Action at Standing Rock as Police Violently Attack Prayer Ceremony Breaking: Emergency Call to Action at Standing Rock as Police Violently Attack Prayer Ceremony Jay Syrmopoulos November 2, 2016 11 Comments
Cannon Ball, ND – Law enforcement responded violently to water protectors attempting build a wooden footbridge across a creek linking the main Native encampment and the Dakota Access Pipeline construction area for a prayer ceremony. The police responded with a vicious assault on the peaceful water protectors. Breaking: hundreds of #NoDAPL water protectors attempting to cross foot bridges built over Cannonball river to reach DAPL construction area
The Guardian reports :
The US army corps of engineers has ordered North Dakota police to arrest Native American protesters and destroy a bridge that activists built over a creek at the center of the increasingly tense Dakota Access pipeline demonstrations.
The Morton County sheriff’s office announced on Wednesday that police were in a “standoff with protesters on the banks of the Cantapeta Creek” while activists said they were engaged in a peaceful water ceremony.
The situation raised concerns that there could be more mass arrests and violent clashes with police.
The tense situation erupted into state sponsored violence as law enforcement began spraying water protectors attempting to cross the creek with pepper spray, with reports of a water protector being shot in the back by a non-lethal round.
The situation on the ground is tense and many there feel that this conflict is coming to a head with these latest police actions.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has given the county orders to remove the makeshift bridge and arrest any protesters who cross the Cantapeta Creek for criminal trespass, according to Morton County spokeswoman Donnell Preskey.
“Protesters involved in this activity are violating numerous federal and state laws,” Pesky said.
According to a report by Forum News Service :
The Corps owns a sliver of land on the north side of the creek, Preskey said. Citing free speech rights, the Corps has been allowing hundreds and sometimes thousands of Native Americans and other pipeline protesters to camp on Corps land south of the creek along the nearby Cannonball River since Aug. 10 Variety of officers have been regularly spraying water protectors with pepper spray; more await in boats nearby. pic.twitter.com/y5ep8PczqK
— Unicorn Riot (@UR_Ninja) November 2, 2016
The water protectors were attempting to build a bridge to gain access to a pipeline construction area near Cannonball Ranch. Access to that area was cut off last week, after the militarized police crackdown on the “Treaty Camp” that saw more than 140 water arrested. Barrier of logs and rope has been constructed, placed the water by #NoDAPL water protectors. More officers arriving, lining up on the shore. pic.twitter.com/LY4TbioL6z
— Unicorn Riot (@UR_Ninja) November 2, 2016
We will keep you updated to this intense breaking situation. Please share this story to get the word out about what is happening on the ground at Standing Rock! Share Google + AlPennG
TIME WE THE PEOPLE TAKE UP ARMS AND START SHOOTING BACK!! TIME THESE CRIMINAL COPS BE TREATED LIKE WHAT THEY ARE TERRORISTS PERIOD!!!! SORRY BUT THAT SEEMS TO BE THE ONLY THING OUR GOVERNMENT UNDERSTANDS https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8f2d1d284997f291ece8ef19beb5ed9363cbd1115c9edc352271f40a95ccc3aa.jpg Ian Purcell
Government is treason against the Great Spirit of GOD. Razedbywolvs
The Government does regulate the corporations. This is what you wanted. Phil Freeman
Power is never conceded willingly. john smith
the last time i heard the drums like that they were used a psychological warfare in ukraine to get people to fight while snipers shot both sides… Phil Freeman | 0 |
NTEB Ads Privacy Policy SHAMEFUL: Weather Channel Using Children In New Video To Promote Climate Change Hoax The Weather Channel released a climate change video featuring young children attempting to convince their parents of the seriousness of the issue. The video, entitled ‘When Kids are Talking Climate – Maybe it’s Time to Listen!’ was released on November 1, 2016. by Geoffrey Grider November 3, 2016 There are lots of people who don’t agree with man-made climate change. Weather Channel founder John Coleman is one of those people.
“Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.” Job 38:3,4 (KJV)
Listen to what he thinks of his former channel’s use of indoctrinating children to promote Climate Change propaganda:
“Right or wrong, using children to promote a point of view borders on immoral. Even knowing that climate change is not happening, it is far beneath my values to use children to promote this truth,” Coleman told Climate Depot. “I know without a doubt that there is no significant threat to the future climate of Earth from the industrialized civilization we have created and the drastic climate changes predicted by the Al Gore clan and the UN’s IPCC are not occurring and are based on an invalid theory. But I will not stoop to the use children to promote my position.” Weather Channel using children to promote Climate Change hoax:
The Weather Channel released a climate change video featuring young children attempting to convince their parents of the seriousness of the issue. The video, entitled ‘When Kids are Talking Climate – Maybe it’s Time to Listen!’ was released on November 1, 2016.
Kids : ‘Dear Mom and Dad: ‘The science is clear’ | 0 |
AURORA, Colo. — It took 11 days of calling lawyers, beseeching immigration officials and trying to book plane tickets, but on Tuesday, Osman Nasreldin got the love of his life back. His fiancée, Sahar Fadul, had been detained late last month after arriving at Dulles International Airport from her parents’ home in Sudan and put on a plane back to Africa, the visa it had taken a year for her to acquire stamped “CANCELLED” in purple ink. They were reunited on a mild afternoon in Colorado, joining a flood of other travelers taking advantage of the temporary suspension of President Trump’s immigration order restricting the entry of refugees and arrivals from seven largely Muslim countries in the Middle East and Africa. Other couples across the world were still in limbo. “What does it mean if you live in heaven and don’t have the person you love?” asked Mr. Nasreldin, a dental hygienist in Aurora. For couples of different nationalities trying to navigate America’s immigration system, the president’s executive order and the legal upheaval it created have thrown relationships and marriages into turmoil. Americans with Syrian and Sudanese partners outside the United States are staying up past midnight to buy plane tickets and plan harried reunions while enforcement of the order is still suspended. Legal challenges aside, couples of mixed Iranian and American backgrounds are rethinking their plans to build lives together in a country where one partner no longer feels welcome. Engagement parties abroad have been scrapped, a wedding dress returned. Mr. Nasreldin and Ms. Fadul were among those racing to reunite, hoping to bind themselves together no matter the outcome of federal court cases challenging the legality of Mr. Trump’s temporary ban. Many of the couples touched by the executive order are accustomed to living apart. They had met online, on business trips or on return visits to countries that one or both had left years ago. What changed, they said, was their certainty they would make it through the immigrant vetting process and one day live together in the United States. “It’s all up in the air,” said Guy R. Croteau, a psychotherapist in Boston who met his fiancé, an Iranian, through Facebook and became engaged after a few whirlwind visits in Istanbul and Malaysia. His fiancé — Mr. Croteau publicly refers to him as “M” because he is concerned about M’s safety as a gay man living in Iran — received a fiancé visa that is valid until July, one of 30, 000 to 40, 000 such visas granted each year. But the couple are unsure whether the visa will still be valid after the administration’s immigration hold passes. They are waiting it out apart. “We don’t know,” Mr. Croteau said. “Will there be additional vetting? We don’t know. ” In the meantime, couples are trying to bridge the divide digitally. Olivia Cross chats by video with her husband, Yahya Abedi, an Iranian, as she walks between classes at the University of Michigan. Mr. Abedi has taped photos of the couple’s wedding to the wall of his apartment in Bandar Abbas so Ms. Cross, an American citizen, can see them when she calls. After meeting online, they married last February in Tbilisi, Georgia, and had been threading their way through the visa process when Mr. Trump signed the order. Iran retaliated, saying it would bar American citizens from traveling there. And there went the couple’s plans for a reunion in Iran this May. “I just feel like whatever I do, however I try to pivot, it’s all blocked,” Ms. Cross said. “We just want to be able to live our life together. ” When Michelle Brady chats by video with her husband, a aid worker recovering in Poland after heart surgery, their son, Jad, recognizes his father’s pixelated face on the screen. When they disconnect, Jad tries to find his father in the computer. “He’s crying and upset that his dad is not there,” said Ms. Brady, who is now unsure when her husband can join them at their home in the Washington area. Even those who aren’t separated say the order has scrambled their plans for weddings and engagements. Relatives from Iran or Syria aren’t sure whether they will be able to attend summer weddings in the United States. Couples with immigrant parents say they are hesitant about traveling to their familial homelands to celebrate. Dr. Arash Afshinnik, who leads a neurointensive care unit in Fresno, was married three weeks ago in California and planned to fly to Iran with his wife, Sandra Shahinpour, for a second ceremony with her family. He has been in the United States since he was 3 months old, but she spent part of her 20s in Iran and is close to friends and cousins who had wanted to celebrate. “We’ve scrapped the plans,” Dr. Afshinnik, 40, said. His wife returned the dress she had bought for the ceremony. “While everything’s getting sorted out, what hasn’t changed is the uncertainty. Why even dip your toe in the pool? It just seems too hot. ” For much of their courtship, Jehan Mouhsen and Khaled Almilaji lived apart. She studied medicine in Montenegro. Dr. Almilaji, 35, a Syrian physician well known among workers, was in Turkey, saving lives, he said, by supporting doctors in the Syrian conflict zone. He is a romantic who sent Dr. Mouhsen, 26, “buckets of roses” and surprised her with visits to Montenegro. They married in July, and in August they settled in Rhode Island, where Dr. Almilaji had received a scholarship for a master’s degree in public health at Brown University, studying on a student visa. He was excited to be sharpening skills to help rebuild his country. She was excited because it seemed their days apart were over. Now Dr. Almilaji is stranded in Gaziantep, Turkey, near the Syrian border, after what was supposed to be a visit to take care of personal and professional affairs. His original return visa was not honored. He went to the American Consulate in Istanbul on Jan. 20 to get a new visa to return, and has not heard back. Dr. Mouhsen fled the loneliness of their apartment in Providence to stay with friends in New York City, where she is studying for her medical board exams and wrestling with morning sickness. She is pregnant. “He tells me to eat fruits and vegetables, take care of me and the baby,” she said. Although Dr. Mouhsen has Montenegrin roots, they both grew up in Aleppo, Syria, and plan to return someday. In 2013, Dr. Almilaji’s early detection system found that polio was making a comeback in Syria, and he coordinated a campaign the next year that vaccinated more than a million Syrian children. Though his work was supported by powerful organizations like the United States Agency for International Development, Unicef, the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, there is little they can do to help him now. Early in the civil war, Dr. Almilaji was arrested, tortured and jailed for six months by the regime. But he says he feels even more powerless now that his wife is suffering from an abrupt separation caused by the action of the United States government. “I’ve been arrested, and I’ve been tortured and everything,” he said in a phone conversation from Turkey. “But my wife, she doesn’t have to suffer this. ” | 1 |
RT October 27, 2016
Local authorities in Calais claim that the ‘Jungle’ refugee camp has been successfully evacuated, but according to an RT crew at the site, a number of refugees and migrants apparently remain at the half-demolished camp.
Unlike the previous days and nights, the demolition of the site on Wednesday for the most part passed off peacefully.
“This is the end of the ‘Jungle,'” Calais regional prefect Fabienne Buccio reported. “Mission accomplished.”
The statement may be as premature as the one made in the same words by then US President George W Bush after the Iraq invasion in 2003. RT’s crew on the ground reports that dozens of people remain at the camp.
“Soon after that statement was made we went inside and saw that there was either a massive blunder in terms of their public relations line or a lie. The camp was far from being evacuated and closed,” RT’s Harry Fear reported from the scene.
On Thursday, Buccio warned that refugees arriving at the ‘Jungle’ camp in the future would not be offered resettlement, unlike those evacuated in recent days.
“It is not Calais’ role to receive all the migrants of Europe. We do not want to create a vacuum. We have asked [those newly arrived] migrants to disperse,” she said.
Earlier in the day, about 100 migrants were seen filing past police officers overseeing the camp demolition, Reuters reports. 6:43 | 0 |
— Dave Kinchen on FOX (@DKinchenFOX29) October 27, 2016
Holding your ground on a debate stage can be difficult, but it’s even tougher if you weren’t invited to participate in the first place: Debate crasher! Green Party candidate dragged off stage of debate she wasn't invited to pic.twitter.com/d93eVYQhZu
Better luck next time :
Margaret Flowers, a physician who has sought recognition from debate organizers for months, stood briefly between Democratic nominee Chris Van Hollen and Republican Kathy Szeliga in a University of Baltimore auditorium as her supporters applauded. | 0 |
I'm sure everything is above board | 0 |
The Pentagon cannot account for $6.5 trillion dollars according to a new Department of Defense Inspector General’s report– raising alarm bells not just because of the obvious lack of accountability and oversight, but because the last time the Pentagon ‘lost’ an enormous sum of money, 9/11 happened.
Via UsualRoutine
Donald Rumsfeld was due to testify about a missing $2.3 trillion before Congress on September 13 2001, however the case was put on hold after the events of September 11.
Scroll Down For Video Below The paper trail was destroyed when one side of the Pentagon was blown up, and the $2.3 trillion dollar case was brushed under the rubble. The new case of the missing trillions, and the combustible political climate in the U.S. in 2016, has left many commentators fearing that “something big is about to happen again.”
Everyone knows by now that the US military has the largest budget on the planet. It’s so large in fact, that it could pay for China’s military budget 3 times over. Which has to make you wonder, where does all of that money go? You may think that question has an obvious answer, since we are aware of most of the military’s weapon systems, personnel numbers, and equipment.
In reality, we don’t know. And when I say we, I mean even our own government doesn’t really know. In response to Congressional demands that the Pentagon provide a comprehensive audit of their finances for the first time, a Department of Defense Inspector General’s report was published last week. It revealed that the Pentagon could not provide documentation pertaining to $6.5 trillion in transactions.
On top of that, the report showed that the Pentagon “did not document or support why the Defense Departmental Reporting System . . . removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million records during Q3 FY 2015. As a result, the data used to prepare the FY 2015 AGF third quarter and year-end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail.” Sounds like the Pentagon is deliberately hiding some of their expenses, doesn’t it?
Which wouldn’t come as a surprise, since the Pentagon has been ignoring a federal law passed 20 years ago, which mandates regular audits for all government agencies. In that time, they’ve never once provided a good explanation for where their our money is spent. Is this money being burned up in fraud and waste, or are they spending it on clandestine activities that would outrage the American people? Since they never get in trouble for ignoring our auditing laws, we’ll probably never know.
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SAN FRANCISCO — The University of California, Berkeley, announced Friday that Claude Steele, the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost for the past two years, resigned his administrative positions for personal reasons. Mr. Steele’s abrupt departure comes at a time of turmoil for the university, as he and other top administrators have been criticized for their handling of a widening sexual harassment scandal. Dan Mogulof, a spokesman for the university, said an interim successor for Mr. Steele would be named in the coming days. In a statement released by the university, Mr. Steele said his wife faced “quite significant” health problems and that he needed to spend more time with her. The university’s chancellor, Nicholas B. Dirks, praised Mr. Steele for his “lasting impact” on the university, citing his work in dealing with the university’s finances and and “improving the campus climate” with regard to racial diversity. Mr. Steele will remain at Berkeley in a faculty position, joining the psychology department next year, according to the announcement. The statement did not mention the sexual harassment scandal, which has grown in magnitude in recent weeks. Mr. Steele has been criticized for his handling of claims of sexual harassment made against the dean of the law school, Sujit Choudhry. A report by the university found that Mr. Choudhry had repeatedly hugged and kissed his executive assistant, behavior that an investigator concluded was “unwelcome and objectively sexual in nature. ” Mr. Steele allowed Mr. Choudhry to stay on as the dean, but ordered a cut in his salary and required that he undergo counseling and write a letter of apology to his assistant, who was told to look for work elsewhere at the university. Alumni and students expressed outrage at the terms of the punishment, which became public in March when Mr. Choudhry’s assistant, Tyann Sorrell, filed a civil suit. Prominent alumni of the law school called the punishment “feeble. ” Court papers filed with the lawsuit say that when Ms. Sorrell questioned why university officials had not taken stronger action against Mr. Choudhry, Mr. Steele told her that he had decided against termination because it “would ruin the dean’s career, that is, destroy his future chances for higher appointment. ” Mr. Choudhry has since resigned. The university this month released hundreds of pages of investigative reports showing violations of the university’s sexual harassment policies by 19 university employees. Most of the cases had not previously been made public. In addition to these cases, the university is investigating 16 cases involving sexual harassment and nine involving sexual violence. | 1 |
JERUSALEM — The Israeli military said on Tuesday that Syrian forces had fired two missiles after Israeli aircraft targeted artillery positions in the Syrian Golan Heights overnight, but it categorically denied a claim by the Syrians that they had shot down an Israeli warplane and a drone. It was not immediately clear whether the Syrian antiaircraft fire early Tuesday, a rare response to an Israeli air incursion, was intended to hit the Israeli planes or to serve as a warning. Syria’s state news agency, SANA, cited the country’s General Command of the Army and Armed Forces as saying that defense forces responded to an attack by “the Israeli enemy’s air force” on a military position in the southern province of Quneitra around 1 a. m. Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said the Syrians “didn’t shoot anything down. ” Suggesting that the missile fire had not come close to hitting the Israeli aircraft, he added that they were “in no danger” and that “at no point was the safety of the aircraft compromised. ” Israeli Army Radio said that the missile fire had been inaccurate and had occurred long after the Israeli attack. The altercation came soon after a fragile went into effect on Monday in Syria, part of an international effort to reduce the violence there after more than five years of civil war. However, insurgents fighting government forces in the Quneitra area of the section of the Golan Heights have declared a new offensive. The Israeli military said its attack on Syrian artillery positions had come in response to what appeared to be spillover from that fighting, after a projectile landed on the side of the Golan Heights for the fourth time in a week. Three more projectiles landed on the Israeli side later on Tuesday, without causing injury, and Israeli aircraft retaliated again, targeting more Syrian government artillery positions, the Israeli military said. Colonel Lerner said it was not always clear whether the rounds that had hit territory had been the result of an intentional attack or of errant fire. Israel has repeatedly declared its neutrality in the struggle between President Bashar of Syria and rebel forces, but it has been carrying out a covert campaign to prevent the transfer of sophisticated weapons from Syria to Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shiite organization that is aiding Mr. Assad. Other strikes attributed to Israel, which fought a monthlong war against Hezbollah in 2006, have targeted forces associated with the militant group across the line in the Golan Heights. As the civil war in Syria has spilled over into the part of the Golan Heights, whether intentionally or not, Israel has openly acknowledged strikes against Syrian government positions in recent years. Israel says it holds Syria responsible for the fire in its part of the Golan Heights. The attacks in response by Israel, as well as its more covert campaign, have generally passed without retaliation from a Syrian government beleaguered by the civil war. Israeli strikes in the Quneitra area in recent weeks have fueled the suspicions of Syrian government supporters that Israel is aiding insurgents — including those linked to Al Qaeda — near the frontier. SANA reported that the Israeli attack on Tuesday “came in support of the armed terrorist groups and in a desperate attempt to raise the deteriorating morale of their members due to the heavy losses they have suffered in Quneitra. ” While maintaining that its policy is one of noninterference in the Syrian war, Israel has been extending medical help and other humanitarian aid to what it describes as the more moderate rebels across the border. | 1 |
American Olympians are considering boycotting a world championship event scheduled to be held in Sochi, Russia, in February, a move that would represent the most provocative gesture yet by athletes dissatisfied with how sports officials have responded to the continuing Russian doping scandal. American athletes who compete in bobsled and skeleton have circulated memos laying out reasons to avoid participating in the world championships in Sochi, the site of the last Winter Olympics and of elaborate, cheating. The athletes have cited concerns about doping control, personal safety and information security. The correspondence, some of which was obtained by The New York Times, indicates that the athletes have the support of the United States Olympic Committee. That organization has not taken a strong public stand on Russia’s systemic doping as it seeks to curry favor with global sports leaders in a bid to hold the 2024 Summer Games in Los Angeles. “This has been passed down the line from the very highest level of sport, and now it’s fallen into the lap of athletes,” said Kyle Tress, an American skeleton racer. “There’s tremendous support to skip this event, and I think it’s the right decision. ” The United States Olympic Committee initially declined to comment. On Sunday, after this article was published online, a spokesman wrote that the organization supported athletes’ rights to choose when and where to compete. “The U. S. O. C. does not, and will not, support blanket boycotts of any events,” the spokesman added. “Any decisions our athletes make will be supported independently from our bid for the 2024 Summer Games, which is independent and unrelated to these events. ” In recent days, Mr. Tress and other members of his sport’s athlete advisory committee voted unanimously to recommend that if the competition was not relocated, American athletes should boycott the 2017 world championships. That event is key in determining rankings ahead of the following year’s Winter Olympics, to be held in Pyeongchang, South Korea. In May, a longtime chief of Russia’s antidoping laboratory, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, told The New York Times of a cheating operation coordinated by the Russian government at the Sochi Olympics in 2014. Top Russian athletes doped during the competition, he said, and had their urine replaced with clean urine for drug testing. An investigation commissioned by the World Agency verified the account, with its report released in July, and results of another investigation due this week are expected to address which athletes benefited from the cheating. “The fact that nothing has been done about the Sochi scandal and the fact that we’re still going to race there — it doesn’t make us feel secure, or that they’re taking the situation seriously,” said Katie Uhlaender, an American skeleton racer. At the Sochi Games, Ms. Uhlaender placed fourth, finishing 0. 04 of a second behind the bronze medal winner, Elena Nikitina of Russia. Ms. Nikitina’s urine sample was among those with which Dr. Rodchenkov said he had tampered, leaving Ms. Uhlaender wondering if she deserved a medal. This year, numerous Olympic medals have been stripped from Russian athletes for doping offenses at the Games in London in 2012 and in Beijing in 2008 — but not at Sochi. Athletes who are advocating a Sochi boycott hope that the World Agency’s publication of a final investigative report on Friday will prompt a stronger response from the International Olympic Committee and the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, the sport’s international governing body. Athletes are lobbying for the championships to be moved to a site outside Russia and for officials to revisit the standings of the 2014 Games as warranted. (The I. O. C. has appointed a disciplinary commission focused on Sochi, but it has not taken action ahead of the inquiry report expected this week.) “Perhaps after the report comes out, they’ll listen,” Mr. Tress said. “There’s politics and money and sponsors involved, but this is an opportunity to come out in favor of clean sport. And they’ve missed that opportunity. ” In July, after WADA published an initial report detailing cheating in Sochi, the I. O. C. provided guidance to sports organizations planning to host events in Russia. “Because of the detailed references to the manipulation of samples during the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014,” the committee wrote in a news release, “the I. O. C. asks all International Olympic Winter Sports Federations to freeze their preparations for major events in Russia, such as world championships, World Cups or other major international competitions under their responsibility, and to actively look for alternative organizers. ” Nonetheless, plans for February’s championships have moved forward. The I. O. C. has not publicly clarified its guidelines, and the matter is expected to be discussed at the Olympic committee’s executive board meetings in Switzerland this week. The International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation did not respond to emails requesting comment. “Sochi is in Russia, and it’s the place where the cheating happened,” Ms. Uhlaender said. “I’m confused at how the I. O. C. said what it said, and we’re still holding our world championships there. ” Such confusion has transcended nationalities. “It’s not just the U. S. athletes,” said Travis T. Tygart, chief executive of the United States Agency. “Athletes around the world are concerned about this, and it’s a last resort,” he added, referring to the consideration of boycotting competitions. Lizzy Yarnold of Britain, who won a gold medal in skeleton at the Sochi Games, said in October that she was considering skipping the event in Sochi in February. Those traveling to Russia have concerns extending beyond drug testing, too, after recent Russian cyberattacks on WADA and Usada, and the theft of athletes’ private medical information, raised issues. As groups of athletes organize, they are increasingly forcing national governing bodies to support their cause — an uncomfortable position for United States sports officials, who need the votes of global Olympic officials to win the right to host the 2024 Games. The race to hold that competition has narrowed to three bidders, with Los Angeles and Paris considered ahead of Budapest. It was unclear how drug testing at the Sochi competition would be handled. WADA has decertified Russia’s national antidoping agency, making the country ineligible to hold an Olympic competition. That ineligibility, some antidoping officials said, should carry over to other international sporting events. “So long as Russia is noncompliant, they should not have events there,” said Thorhild Widvey, a politician from Norway who sits on WADA’s executive committee. Craig Reedie, WADA’s president, who is also a longtime I. O. C. member and has been criticized for seeming to run the regulatory agency more as politician than policeman, expressed eagerness last month for Russia to return to good standing. He invoked the country’s willingness to host major international competitions — something fewer and fewer countries are vying for. Mr. Tress said, “There hasn’t been a sufficient response from people in leadership positions, and there’s a lot of frustration. ” | 1 |
23 GOLD , KWN King World News
On the heels of a wild week, today the man who has become legendary for his predictions on QE, historic moves in currencies, and major global events, spoke with King World News about a shocker and what is really happening in the gold market.
A Historic Shocker Egon von Greyerz: “ There is a total misunderstanding of the role of gold and why it is so critical to own physical gold. Gold should not be bought or sold based on rumors or events. This week gold moved for totally the wrong reasons.
The whole Western world had forecast a Clinton victory. The Western media, which does no analysis but only reports what they are fed, spent no time trying to understand what the mood of the people was. It was exactly the same with Brexit. The elite in London, New York and the big metropolitan areas have totally different objectives than ordinary people…
Continue reading the Egon von Greyerz interview below…
In a King World News interview I spoke with the man who predicted the Swiss National Bank would experience staggering losses and that the Fed would also experience massive losses that will destabilize the global financial system! His company is the only one in the world offering a precious metals investment service outside the banking system, with direct ownership and full control by the investor. He has also become legendary for his predictions on QE, historic moves in currencies, and major global events. To find out what he and his company can do to help answer that age old question for you CLICK HERE. Sponsored
Egon von Greyerz continues: “ The change in trend in public reaction which we are seeing now is not just a temporary phenomenon. Ordinary people are tired of a small elite of bankers, industrialists and politicians helping themselves to unlimited power and wealth whilst normal people are getting poorer, with lower incomes and more debt.
And it is the masses which ultimately are responsible for repaying debt, which is increasing exponentially in most countries. They will of course not repay the debt because they can’t. Instead, they will suffer immeasurably when the global debt of roughly $250 trillion implodes, leading to a severe depression. The gap between the rich and the poor in the West is wider than ever. In the US, the top 0.1% have 22% of total wealth. And top professionals in the US have had an increase in real pay of 51% since 1973, whilst the average worker has seen a reduction of 4.6%. This a very dangerous trend and when the economic downturn comes, it is likely to lead to violent protests and social unrest.
The Trump win was totally unexpected in the US as well as in other countries. Most politicians in Europe and around the world have ridiculed Trump and assumed that he would never be elected. They all certainly must eat humble pie now.
Coming back to gold, we saw the most incredible volatility during last week. As the Trump victory became clear, gold went from $1,270 to $1,335 in under 4 hours. Then massive selling of gold futures pushed the price down to $1,270 where it started before election. On Friday last week it was pushed down further to $1,225, which is $110 from the euphoric election peak. Initially, heavy paper speculative buying of gold took place around the world but very little serious physical buying. Some gold experts predicted that gold would go up by at least $100 if Trump won. Well, it did go up $65 but then declined over $100 from there. A dealer in London ran out of physical stock due to panic retail buying. But when the stock markets turned around from down 4-5% to up, the paper longs in gold were liquidated and speculative funds flowed into stock markets instead. Two years of gold production was traded after the election – all in the paper market. Andrew Maguire’s excellent interview on KWN explains in detail how it happened.
Despite Plunge, Is A Major Short Squeeze In Gold About To Unfold? As usual, when gold is dumped in the futures market there is little selling of physical. Thus, the paper price of gold is totally false and in no way reflects what is happening in the physical market. It is likely that commercial gold buyers, who are already long, will add to positions at these suppressed levels. The paper market has maximum 1 oz of physical for every 100 oz of paper gold. When the commercials add to positions at these artificially low levels, there is likely to be a major short squeeze.
I agree with Maguire that gold is bottoming at these levels and could rally strongly from here. Our proprietary cycle indicators confirm this.
Gold investors should totally ignore these short-term moves as well as any news or events that temporarily move gold. Sadly, many investors buy gold when it goes up and sell it when it goes down. This behavior shows a total ignorance of the role of gold and why it is so important to hold physical gold. Because gold is not an investment and should definitely not be seen as a speculative commodity. But futures traders and the bullion banks have no interest in gold for wealth protection purposes. For them it is just a commodity traded in the paper market with no intention of ever taking delivery.
When gold moves strongly based on events, the move is seldom sustained. Those moves are mostly speculative and in the paper market. Sustained moves in gold are due to the debasement of paper money and nothing else. Since the creation of the Fed in 1913, all major currencies have declined 97- 99% against gold. The US has not had a real budget surplus since 1960, so the trend is very clear and unlikely to be reversed any time soon. Since 1971, when Nixon abolished the gold backing of the dollar, US debt has grown by an average of 9% per year. This means that on average US federal debt has doubled every eight years. And Obama is no exception. He duly complied with the trend of exponential debt increases and doubled US debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. It took the US over 200 years to go from zero debt to $10 trillion and Obama managed to double it in just 8 short years. What an achievement!
Neither Clinton nor Trump had any intention of breaking the trend of massive debt expansion. Trump’s proposed tax reductions and major infrastructure investments will add over $5 trillion to the debt. But with this expansive policy, there is absolutely no reason why debt in the next four years will grow by less than the 9% annual average. This would take the US debt to at least $28 trillion by 2021.
But it is likely to get a lot worse. Rising interest rates, higher unemployment, stress in the debt markets and major problems in the global financial system are likely to lead to substantially higher debt as well as massive money printing.
Long term US interest rates turned up earlier this year with 10 year Treasury yield up 50% from 1.4% to 2.1%. The 35 year rate cycle has now turned and rates are likely to go back to at least the 16% we saw in 1980 but probably a lot higher as the biggest bond bubble in history bursts. Due to the massive size of this bubble on a global scale, the increase in rates could happen very quickly. This will not just affect debt markets and the ability of governments to pay the interest but also the derivatives market.
The $1.5 quadrillion of global derivatives are extremely sensitive to interest rate increases and that market will not survive much higher interest rates.
And if we look around the world, the risks are unprecedented. Japan is totally bankrupt, China has a major debt problem and the European banking system is unlikely to survive in its present form. Also, what started with Brexit is likely to continue in many European countries. Just like in the US, many Europeans are tired of an elite in Brussels ruling over 500 million people with little understanding of the resentment that this unaccountable and unelected elite is causing. The Italian election is next in December and then we have France and Germany in 2017. The breakup of the EU and the end of the Euro is just a matter of time and it could happen a lot faster than anyone expects.
A Difficult Road For Trump With all these problems around the world, Trump will have major difficulties reversing the trend of debts, deficits and no real growth of the US economy. Global trade is already declining and is likely to deteriorate substantially in the next few years. With both global and US problems of unparalleled proportions, it is not the best time to become president of the biggest and most indebted economy in the world. Clearly, Trump is determined to succeed but running an insolvent economy in a virtually bankrupt world will be a lot harder than building a property empire.
As the world enters a period with risk exponentially greater than in 2006, the reasons for holding physical gold as insurance and wealth protection are more compelling than ever. The continued debasement of the currencies will guarantee a higher gold price. In addition, the failure of the paper gold market could happen at any time. When this happens there will be no physical gold available at any price until there is equilibrium in the physical market. At what price that will take place is impossible to forecast but it is certain to be multiples of the current price. ” For those who are interested in hearing more about the gold market and the Trump shocker, KWN has just released one of legendary Art Cashin’s greatest audio interviews ever discussing the gold market at length, including the recent takedown in gold, what to surprises to expect in key markets as Trump becomes president, and what impact massive public works projects will have on the United States, inflation, gold, bonds, and much more. and you can listen to this extraordinary interview by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW.
***KWN has now released the extraordinary KWN audio interview with whistleblower Andrew Maguire, where he discusses the gold and silver smash, at what price the large sovereign wholesale bids are located, and much more, and you can listen to it by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW.
***ALSO JUST RELEASED: The World Is About To Witness A Breathtaking Once In A Century Event CLICK HERE.
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A bill that would regulate the traditional use of loudspeakers for the Muslim call to prayer passed its first legislative hurdle in Israel’s Parliament on Wednesday, provoking frustration and anger among some Arab lawmakers. One version of the bill would prohibit places of worship from using loudspeakers between 11 p. m. and 7 a. m. while another would ban any broadcast over such speakers regardless of the time of day if it is deemed “unreasonably loud,” the BBC reported. The first daily prayer is traditionally performed before sunrise. Both versions passed with slim majorities, but a final draft requires further approval from Parliament before becoming law. Opponents describe the legislation as an attack on religious freedom that targets the five daily calls to prayer. Supporters describe it as something closer to a noise ordinance. “Israel is committed to freedom for all religions, but is also responsible for protecting citizens from noise,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in November, when his ministers approved an earlier version of the proposal and sent it to the Parliament. Zouheir Bahloul, a member of Parliament belonging to the Zionist Union, disagreed, calling the bill “dangerous” in a translated interview with i24, an Israeli television station. “We’re talking about small politicians who are trying to persecute the Arab minority in the country,” he said. “It’s a stain on the forehead of Israeli society and the state of Israel. In the book of laws, this law is the blackest. ” Some Arab lawmakers ripped up copies of the legislation during a debate. One, Ayman Odeh, the leader of an alliance of Arab parties known as the Joint List, was thrown out of the chamber after doing so, according to the BBC. When the ban was proposed in November, it was denounced by Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. “The call to prayer is a symbol of Islam,” Adel Elfar, the imam of a mosque in Lod, a city of Arabs and Jews in Israel, said at the time. “This is something that’s existed for 1, 426 years. ” | 1 |
PORTLAND, Ore. — The 911 caller had reported a man with a samurai sword, lunging at people on the waterfront. It was evening, and when the police arrived, they saw the man pacing the beach and called to him. He responded by throwing a rock at the embankment where they stood. They shouted to him from a sheriff’s boat he threw another rock. They told him to drop the sword he said he would kill them. He started to leave the beach, and after warning him, they shot him in the leg with a beanbag gun. He turned back, still carrying the blade. In another city — or in Portland itself not that long ago — the next step would almost certainly have been a direct confrontation and, had the man not put down the weapon, the use of lethal force. But the Portland Police Bureau, prodded in part by the 2012 findings of a Justice Department investigation, has spent years putting in place an intensive training program and protocols for how officers deal with people with mental illness. At a time when police behavior is under intense scrutiny — a series of fatal shootings by police officers have focused national attention on issues of race and mental illness — Portland’s approach has served as a model for other law enforcement agencies around the country. And on that Sunday last summer, the police here chose a different course. At 2:30 a. m. after spending hours trying to engage the man, the officers decided to “disengage,” and they withdrew, leaving the man on the beach. A search at daylight found no signs of him. People with mental illnesses are overrepresented among civilians involved in police shootings: percent or more of people fatally shot by the police have had a mental disorder, according to various analyses. In Chicago, for example, police officers killed a mentally ill man, Quintonio LeGrier, in December after the police said he had come at them with a baseball bat. In Denver, Paul Castaway, 35, who had a history of mental illness, was fatally shot by the police last year after they said he moved “dangerously close” to them, holding a knife to his own throat. Similar encounters have occurred in Albuquerque, Dallas, Indianapolis and other cities. In response to public outcry, many police departments have, like Portland, turned to more training for their officers, in many cases adopting some version of a model pioneered in Memphis almost three decades ago and known as crisis intervention team training, or C. I. T. Studies have found that the training can alter the way officers view people with mental illness. And the approach, which teaches officers ways to defuse potentially violent encounters before force becomes necessary, is useful for officers facing any volatile situation, even if a mental health crisis is not involved, law enforcement experts say. Whether the training leads to less use of force by officers, however, is still an open question: The findings of studies have been mixed, although one study to be published later this year suggests that Portland’s program, which is based on C. I. T. is having an effect. And training alone is not enough, experts say. For the approach to be effective, it needs the full backing of a police department’s leadership, continual checks on its effectiveness, and collaboration with the mental health community. “The training is great, but it’s not magic,” said Laura Usher, coordinator of crisis intervention team training for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “The thing that actually transforms the way the system works is when everyone gets together. ” The decision by the Portland police to leave the man on the beach was controversial within the department. Some officers argued that more should have been done: What if the man had injured or killed someone? Others countered that it was late and that the secluded area was deserted. The man had committed no crime. And a confrontation could easily have ended with him or the officers being harmed. But the discussion itself, some officers said, was a sign of change. “Ten years ago, we would have been more proactive in dealing with him at the start,” said Officer Brad Yakots, a specialist in mental health issues who was called to the scene. “It’s a new way of looking at it. ” As in other cities, change in Portland began with a fatal encounter: On Sept. 17, 2006, James Chasse Jr. 42, a singer in a local band who had schizophrenia, died after a confrontation with police officers. Mr. Chasse’s death outraged the public. The Police Bureau, in response, revised policies and required all its officers to complete 40 hours of crisis intervention training. But after more troubling instances involving the mentally ill, a Justice Department investigation concluded in 2012 that the Police Bureau had shown “a pattern or practice of unnecessary or unreasonable force during interactions with people who have or are perceived to have mental illness. ” This time, the Police Bureau’s leadership responded far more aggressively. In addition to the mandatory training for the entire force, a group of about 100 patrol officers signed up for 40 extra hours of instruction to handle more complex calls involving mental illness or drug and alcohol addiction. Teams of officers were paired with mental health clinicians to follow up on cases. New protocols were put in place. And the police connected with housing and mental health organizations to help further. “It’s really about a culture shift,” said Lt. Tashia Hager, who heads the unit that coordinates the department’s mental health response. She noted that in cases like that of the man with the sword, “there’s a potential negative outcome regardless of the decision we make. ” In the past, she said, officers were taught, “If you do this, I’m going to do that. ” Now they are encouraged to question whether “that” is really necessary. Officers need to be educated about mental illness, many criminal justice experts say, because cutbacks in financing for mental health services have put them on the front lines of dealing with many people who have psychiatric disorders. Jails around the country have filled with mentally ill inmates who, unable to obtain treatment in the community, are arrested time and again for minor offenses like disorderly conduct and petty theft. Police officers have been forced to play dual roles as law enforcers and psychiatric social workers. “We are working in the backdrop of a fractured mental health system that has gotten worse and worse,” said Portland’s police chief, Lawrence O’Dea III. Yet many police officers know little about mental disorders, and what they do know is often shaped by stigma. Bizarre behavior is often interpreted as a prelude to violence. And routine police actions aimed at control — placing a hand on a person’s shoulder, for example — can backfire with someone with a severe mental illness. “Instead of being calming, it can trigger them to either pull away or resist,” said Matthew Epperson, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Chicago. The officers, in turn, can misinterpret such responses as resistance or an attempt to flee, he added. In the crisis training, officers learn about psychiatric medications, various scenarios, and have opportunities to interact with people who have a mental illness when they are not in crisis. The officers are told, among other things, to use distance and time to try to defuse potentially violent encounters. About 2, 700 law enforcement agencies around the country use some form of the approach, said Ms. Usher, of the mental illness alliance, and that number is growing as more departments have come under pressure to change police behavior. In January, responding to a series of shootings across the country, a group of leaders urged departments to adopt higher standards for the use of force than those set down by the Supreme Court, and to adopt methods to defuse volatile situations and avoid violence. Some departments require crisis training for all their officers. But Maj. Sam Cochran, who coordinated the first crisis intervention program in Memphis and now consults with other departments, said he believed the training worked best when departments trained a smaller group of volunteers who then took the lead on police calls involving mental health issues. “There’s all kinds of specialization in law enforcement,” Major Cochran said. “We’ve got bomb technicians, narcotics, robbery. I want all the officers present at a scene to understand that this C. I. T. officer is the leader. That represents clarity, and responsibility brings about a level of accountability. ” In a draft report released this month, outside monitors concluded that the Police Bureau in Portland still had more to do, including keeping better track of how many police contacts involved mental health issues. But the bureau, the monitors said, had made “substantial progress” in improving the way they dealt with the mentally ill. And the study of the Portland police that is to be published later this year found that the use of force by officers had decreased by 65. 4 percent from 2008 to 2014, as measured in quarterly reports. The researchers attributed the drop in large part to increased training and oversight in recent years, although the study did not specifically look at interactions with the mentally ill. Police shootings, the researchers found, had also dropped, averaging three a year from 2007 to 2014, compared with eight a year from 2002 to 2005. And allegations of excessive force by citizens declined by 74. 2 percent from 2004 to 2014, a decrease that Tim Prenzler, an adjunct professor of criminology at Griffith University in Australia and the lead author of the study, called “a remarkable achievement. ” The research will appear in Journal of Criminological Research, Policy and Practice. Officer Yakots, who has been on the force for nine years, said he thought that the department’s efforts to shift course had been largely successful. But he added: “Do things fall through the cracks? Yeah, it’s not perfect. A lot of times we have limited resources. ” It was a Monday night in late February when he and his partner, Officer Michael Hastings, were making the rounds of makeshift homeless camps and downtown street corners, listening for radio calls that might require their presence. An adolescent girl was on an overpass, threatening to jump. A college student had called his mother in another city and told her he was going to kill himself. A woman was standing outside a mental health treatment center demanding to be taken to the hospital because, she said, “I am suicidal and homicidal. ” Officer Hastings said that before the department changed its approach, the attitude was “enforce, enforce, enforce, arrest, arrest, arrest. ” But taking people to an emergency room or putting them in jail did nothing. “These people, they’re out within four hours most of the time,” he said. At least in Portland, Officer Hastings said, most police officers had accepted that part of their job was now dealing with mental illness and helping to find solutions. “We’ve realized that it is what it is,” he said, “and we’re the ones that are going to be responding to that. ” | 1 |
A New York real estate company owned by the family of President Trump’s has been negotiating to sell a $400 million stake in its Fifth Avenue flagship skyscraper to a Chinese insurance company with ties to leading families of the Communist Party. The Chinese company, Anbang Insurance Group, would pay to get a piece of Manhattan real estate and would commit to spending billions more to completely transform the tower into a chic condominium and retail citadel. If signed, the potential agreement would create a financial marriage of two politically powerful families in the world’s two biggest economies, but it would also present the possibility of glaring conflicts of interest. The Kushner family, owners of the tower, would reap a financial windfall courtesy of a Chinese company, even as Jared Kushner, a senior adviser to Mr. Trump as well as his helps oversee American foreign policy. News of the negotiations surfaced as President Trump and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, were preparing for their first meeting, to be held next month. Jared Kushner has emerged as a moderating voice in China policy among Mr. Trump’s inner circle, and he has been heavily involved in planning for the visit. Asked about a deal at a news conference on Tuesday, the White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, referred questions back to the Kushner Companies. “Jared went through extraordinary lengths” to comply with rules, he said. A spokesman for Anbang said in a statement that there was no agreement and that “there is no investment from Anbang for this deal. ” In his presentation to prospective investors, Charles Kushner, the leader of the family company and Jared’s father, has said that once renovated, the property would be worth more than $7 billion, according to a real estate broker and two investors who have heard the pitch and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they want to do further business with the companies. That would make it the most valuable property in Manhattan. The chairman of Anbang, Wu Xiaohui, who wined and dined Jared Kushner at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in November, serving $ Château Lafite Rothschild, married the granddaughter of Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who transformed China’s economy. Mr. Wu also counts the son of a top army marshal as a longtime business partner. The Waldorf Astoria is one of a string of trophy properties that Anbang has bought in the United States in recent years, spending billions of dollars for it and a collection of luxury properties that the company acquired last year from the Blackstone Group. But the company’s murky shareholding structure has caused federal regulators to put the brakes on other planned acquisitions. Anbang, a huge Chinese conglomerate with almost $300 billion in assets, is owned by 39 companies, many of them shell companies that, when traced, lead to empty offices or government registration bureaus, according to Chinese government records. At least 35 of the companies, which collectively control more than 92 percent of Anbang, trace all or part of their ownership to relatives of Mr. Wu, to Deng’s granddaughter or to Chen Xiaolu, the marshal’s son, though the three no longer show up as owners in company records, The New York Times reported in September. Should an agreement be reached, going into business with the family of the of the American president would buy Mr. Wu an immense amount of credibility within China because he is seen as having influence at the apex of power in the United States, said Minxin Pei, a professor of political science at Claremont McKenna College in California, who focuses on Chinese politics and corruption. “He is purchasing political prestige, and that is a priceless asset for somebody like him,” Mr. Pei said by telephone. A deal, however, could face scrutiny by the American and Chinese governments before it is completed. The Chinese government has been eager to stanch the flow of overseas investments as the economy slows. A White House press officer said that “these negotiations will not affect the Trump administration’s policies or approach with China in any way. ” Details of the negotiations with Anbang were first reported by Bloomberg on Monday. Talks were underway between Anbang and the Kushners, including Jared, as early as last year, and were first reported by The Times in January. The deal would value the office tower at $2. 8 billion, a high value for a building that has never been considered a New York trophy. Anbang would eventually take a controlling stake in the property and obtain a $4 billion construction loan, Bloomberg said, for a makeover of the tower, which would have luxury apartments at the top, a multifloor retail mall at the base, and a hotel in the middle. The proposed development comes at an odd time in New York. For years, foreign investors have poured billions of dollars into New York apartments, hotels, office buildings and developments based on a perception that this is one of the most stable markets in a tumultuous world. But luxury hotel rates in New York have started to fall, and developers who rushed to build supertowers with $100 million penthouses have seen a drastic slowdown in sales. A similar plan to convert the Sony office building at 550 Madison Avenue into a condominium, hotel and mall was abandoned last year because of the slowdown in the luxury residential market. The Kushner family declined to discuss details of the deal. “Kushner Companies is in active discussions around 666 Fifth,” a spokesman said in a brief statement Monday, “and nothing has been finalized. ” A spokeswoman for Kushner Companies had said previously that Jared Kushner recused himself in November, not long after Mr. Trump’s election, to avoid conflicts of interest. Mr. Kushner has also since stepped away from the business of the company and placed some of his assets in a trust. Hope Hicks, a White House spokeswoman, said on Monday that Mr. Kushner had sold his interest in 666 Fifth Avenue to a trust in which neither he, nor his wife, Ivanka Trump, nor their children are beneficiaries at a price “based on appraisals. ” The amount paid has not been revealed. Ms. Hicks, in an email, also said that Mr. Kushner “has not communicated with anyone regarding this matter since the president took office. ” The Kushners bought 666 Fifth for $1. 8 billion on Jared’s birthday in January 2007, as part of a plan to reposition the family company as a major Manhattan developer. Until then, the Kushners were based in New Jersey, where they owned a huge portfolio of suburban garden apartments and donated heavily to the Democratic Party. But the deal at 666 Fifth came with a big price, $1, 200 per square foot. As the family struggled to make its mortgage payments amid the recession, it slowly sold segments to Vornado Realty Trust, which owns 49. 5 percent of the building’s office space and a slice of the retail, and others. They would have to be bought out for the deal to close. A spokesman for Vornado declined to comment. The proposed deal would be a form of political risk insurance for Mr. Wu, said Mr. Pei, the political science professor. China is in the middle of a widespread crackdown on corruption, and billionaires are not immune. In January, one of the country’s richest financiers was apparently abducted from an apartment in Hong Kong’s Four Seasons hotel and whisked across the border into Chinese custody. By doing business with the Kushners, Mr. Wu may buy himself safety. “Now he has extra protection, because Chinese authorities who want to come after him will now have to think twice about the political fallout,” said Mr. Pei, who wrote “China’s Crony Capitalism. ” “For him, it is a brilliant move. ” | 1 |
Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Donald Trump’s incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus said the CNN and Buzzfeed stories about unverified reports that Russia had damaging information on Trump were “total phony baloney garbage. ” Priebus said, “Well, I mean, the BuzzFeed memo is total complete garbage is what it is. And I, look BuzzFeed themselves said it was garbage. The New York Times wouldn’t even print the document because it was unverifiable. This is what this is. There are tens of thousands of retired agents all over the world. You’ve got some agent somewhere maybe in the UK that hangs a shingle and says pay me a rate I’m going to do opposition research. He does a memo or she does a memo. This thing circulates for months. It’s unsubstantiated and viola it shows up! I talked to Michael Cohen. One of the basis’ of this entire report is that a guy named Michael Cohen who works for the Trump organization went to Prague and had a meeting with Russian agents. He’d never been to Prague in his life. I don’t know what it says about the report. In fact the coach of USC Baseball in Southern California said, wait a second. He wasn’t in Prague he was with me in Southern California with his son. ” He added, “All I can tell you is the BuzzFeed memo, the salacious details in that memo, all of those things are total phony baloney garbage. It never happened. It isn’t true. And what created the BuzzFeed article and I think most of what CNN’s been talking about, I’m not watching it is based on this document for this opposition research guy that is based on nothing. That is not true. ” ( RCP Video) Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
A great “might have been” for the universe, or at least for the people who study it, disappeared Friday. Last December, two teams of physicists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider reported that they might have seen traces of what could be a new fundamental constituent of nature, an elementary particle that is not part of the Standard Model that has ruled particle physics for the last . A bump on a graph signaling excess pairs of gamma rays was most likely a statistical fluke, they said. But physicists have been holding their breath ever since. If real, the new particle would have opened a crack between the known and the unknown, affording a glimpse of quantum secrets undreamed of even by Einstein. Answers to questions like why there is matter but not antimatter in the universe, or the identity of the mysterious dark matter that provides the gravitational glue in the cosmos. In the few months after the announcement, 500 papers were written trying to interpret the meaning of the putative particle. On Friday, physicists from the same two CERN teams reported that under the onslaught of more data, the possibility of a particle had melted away. “We don’t see anything,” said Tiziano Camporesi of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and a spokesman for one of the detector teams known as C. M. S. on the eve of the announcement. “In fact, there is even a small deficit exactly at that point. ” His statement was echoed by a member of the competing team, known as Atlas. James Beacham, of Ohio State University, said, “As it stands now, the bumplet has gone into a flatline. ” “This is the success of science, this is what science does,” he added. Dr. Camporesi said, “It’s disappointing because so much hype has been made about it. ” But, he added, noting that the experimenters had always cautioned that the bump was most likely a fluke, “we have always been very cool about it. ” The new results were presented in Chicago at the International Conference of High Energy Physics, ICHEP for short, by Bruno Lenzi of CERN for the Atlas team, and Chiara Rovelli for their competitors named for their own detector called C. M. S. short for Compact Muon Solenoid. The presentations were part of an outpouring of dozens of papers from the two teams on the results so far this year from the collider, all of them in general agreement with the Standard Model. The main news is that the collider, which had a rocky start, exploding back in 2008, is now running “swimmingly” in CERN’s words, producing up to a billion collisions a second. “We’re just at the beginning of the journey,” said Fabiola Gianotti, CERN’s in a statement. But perhaps nature has not gotten the memo. The has further deepened an already deep mystery about the famous Higgs boson, which explains why other particles have mass, and whose discovery resulted in showers of champagne and Nobel Prizes four years ago. The Higgs, one of the heaviest elementary particles known, weighs about 125 billion electron volts, in the units of mass and energy favored by particle physicists — about as much as an entire iodine atom. That, however, is way too light by a factor of trillions according to standard quantum calculations, physicists say, unless there is some new phenomenon, some new physics, exerting its influence on the universe and keeping the Higgs mass from zooming to cataclysmic scales. That would mean new particles. “We have seen the Higgs, we expect to see something else,” said Lisa Randall, a Harvard particle theorist who was not part of the CERN experiments. Hence the excitement over the December bump. Its mass, about 750 billion electron volts, was in the range where something should happen. “It would have been great if it was there,” Dr. Randall said. “It is the sort of thing they should be looking for if we want to understand the Higgs. ” For a long time, the phenomenon physicists have thought would appear to save the day is a conjecture known as supersymmetry, which comes with the prediction of a whole new set of elementary particles, known as wimps, for weakly interacting massive particles, one of which could comprise the dark matter that is at the heart of cosmologists’ dreams. But so far, wimps haven’t shown up either in the collider or in underground experiments designed to detect wimps floating through space. Neither has evidence for an alternative idea that the universe has more than three dimensions of space. The Large Hadron Collider is expected to run for another 20 years. So, these could still be exciting times. The CERN collider was built at a cost of some $10 billion, to speed protons around an underground track at more than 99 percent of the speed of light, and smash them together with a combined energy of 14 trillion electron volts, in search of new particles and forces of nature. The more energy they can pour into these collisions, microscopic samples of primordial fire, by virtue of Einstein’s equivalence of mass and energy, the more massive particles can come out of them. During its first two years of running the collider, hampered by electrical problems, ran at only half power but still managed to find the Higgs boson. Since last spring, after a shutdown, CERN physicists have been running their collider at nearly its full energy, 13 trillion electron volts, or 13 TeV. “The potential for discovery is the biggest we’ve had since it first turned on,” said Kyle Cranmer of New York University, a member of the Atlas team. Whether this is enough to break through to new physics — if in fact there is new physics to be found — depends on who is talking. “It might be we don’t have the firepower,” Dr. Randall said, suggesting that physicists might eventually have to build a more powerful machine, “If we didn’t see it at 8 TeV, it’s not a shocker if it is not at 13. ” Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, said, “Energy is the great tool of discovery, so going from 8 TeV to 13 TeV is a really big deal. Keep your fingers crossed. ” Dr. Camporesi said it was too soon to tell. So far physicists have only had time to pluck the fruit from their new machine, and more subtle, difficult analyses would take time. “I would consider us lucky if we discovered new phenomena or a new state of matter in two or three years,” he said, adding, “It would mean nature has been kind to us, but nature might be more subtle. ” Dave Charlton of the University of Birmingham, the Atlas spokesman, said, “We don’t know what nature has in store for us. ” Modern particle physics, in particular, is a counting game in which a small deviation from calculated expectations building up in the course of millions or billions of individual events — a bump on a graph — can rewrite the laws of nature. Last December’s bump first manifested as an excess of pairs of gamma rays produced in the collisions. They could have been produced in pairs by the radioactive decay of a new particle. This was exciting because the Higgs boson itself had first showed up as pairs of gamma rays, except this new particle was six times more massive than the Higgs and — unlike the Higgs — was not expected. But as Dr. Cranmer noted at the time, there was a chance this was a fluke — far from the . odds of mere chance, known as that is considered the gold standard for a discovery. But the fact that both teams saw something was enticing. Theoretical papers started flowing immediately, suggesting, among other things, that the new particle might be a cousin of the Higgs — good for supersymmetry — or a graviton, the conjectured quantum carrier of gravity. “Had the bump been real, it would have without a doubt been the most important discovery in particle physics in the past half century,” said Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist at Arizona State University. “Which is why the odds were that it probably wasn’t. ” In three months of this year, Dr. Beacham said, his team had collected more than a quadrillion proton collisions, four times as much data as in all of 2015. As experimentalists, Dr. Beacham and his colleagues had to ignore the theory papers about what it all might mean. “We can’t be chasing ambulances,” he said. “Let the data do the talking. In this case it turned into this flat line. ” Maria Spiropulu of the California Institute of Technology and a member of the C. M. S. team, said, “So there is no gloom and doom in my opinion that this is gone. As we have said multiple times, it could have been anything, including nothing. ” | 1 |
CLEVELAND — Donald J. Trump’s coronation as the Republican nominee for president Tuesday night was a signal accomplishment not only for the candidate, but also for the man who commands the most important control room in American politics: the Fox News chairman Roger Ailes. Mr. Trump’s convention has been a triumph for Mr. Ailes’s brand of and “politically incorrect” politics — with speakers, themes, rhetoric and, ultimately, a nominee who is far more at home on the set of Fox News than in the establishment halls of Congress, the Republican National Committee or The Weekly Standard. It is, in a way, the most Fox convention in the network’s history. But just as party delegates were nominating Mr. Trump at their convention here, Mr. Ailes’s career at the network was unraveling, with news that he was negotiating the details of his departure with his bosses at 21st Century Fox. A copy of what was purported to be a proposed set of settlement terms even leaked into public view, fittingly, on the Drudge Report. In 20 years at the helm of his news network, Mr. Ailes helped lead the movement he is so closely associated with to a sociopolitical promised land, in a year in which Fox News had some of its highest ratings ever. But just as Mr. Ailes reached the peak of the mountain, he hit the end of his own path, at least at Fox News. His future has been in doubt since a former Fox News anchor, Gretchen Carlson, filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against him two weeks ago. Fox News’s political power, and therefore that of Mr. Ailes, is often overstated: They are not kingmakers. But they often dictate the terms and themes of the Republican debate, often by relentlessly driving home — day after day, night after night — the sort of narratives that have dominated the convention stage: “All lives matter,” Hillary Clinton’s alleged failings in the murderous attack in Benghazi, the need for a big wall on the border with Mexico or the tactics of the activist Saul Alinsky. Throughout his career as both a top national political strategist and a television executive, Mr. Ailes has exhibited an unmatched ability to tap into the resentments and insecurities of white Americans who acutely feel the effects of a changing country. Those are the people Mr. Trump has so successfully courted this year, and Mr. Ailes has an uncanny sense of how to reach them through television. Part of it goes back to Mr. Ailes’s Ohio roots as a son of factory foreman, a boy who dug ditches as a teenager but then went on to work his way up from the bottom in broadcasting. He got his big break in television as the executive producer of “The Mike Douglas Show. ” His political career started there, when Richard Nixon appeared as one of Mr. Douglas’s guests. The two hit it off as Mr. Ailes urged Mr. Nixon to embrace television as the ultimate way to move the masses, and he went on to become Mr. Nixon’s media guru. He went on to serve several of the nation’s most consequential Republican politicians, including Ronald Reagan and George Bush, for whom Mr. Ailes sharpened the devastating attack against his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, as soft on crime. It was impossible to walk around this convention without bumping into a former Ailes client. One of them, Rudolph W. Giuliani, even provided one of the bigger moments of the first night of the convention, delivering a “colorblind” message about race and policing in the Black Lives Matter era, the same kind of message that has frequently been aired in Fox News programs. “The conservative movement deserves to give Roger Ailes a lot of credit for the work that he did in helping candidates and founding Fox News and giving conservatives a voice in this country,” said another of his clients roaming the convention hall, Gov. Terry Branstad of Iowa. But Mr. Ailes has always made it clear he wants his legacy to be what he built at Fox News, though one former political adversary, the former Obama adviser David Axelrod, said he brought the same skills to both. “Roger Ailes created a network that speaks to Americans he had targeted effectively for decades as a Republican media consultant,” Mr. Axelrod said on Tuesday night. He called Mr. Ailes “brilliant” and “visionary. ” But he also said, “The rise of Fox News has corresponded with an era of rising polarization in our politics. ” Mr. Ailes brilliantly packaged his network as “Fair and balanced,” an antidote for what he described as a liberally biased mediasphere. But it also became a catchphrase for a brand of journalism that at times — especially during Fox’s opinion lineup in prime time — formed an ideological cocoon for a version of the news that was at odds with the mainstream reports it sought to discredit. Though the network has a distinct stable of personalities — and many journalists who are respected throughout the field — it was truly an extension of Mr. Ailes’s own political mind, which is why there are so many questions about what the network might look like without him. It was Mr. Ailes who, after the Sept. 11 attacks, directed his network to break with classic journalistic detachment to get fully behind the war efforts of the George W. Bush White House, which jarred the rest of his industry. During the Bush years, Fox News was a staunch defender of presidential power, and most of its hosts spoke out against a “liberal media” that, in their view, was unfairly questioning its president. “’We are not United States,” Mr. Ailes told me in 2001. “We just do not assume that America’s wrong first. ” Then came the Obama years. Mr. Ailes’s network provided the soundtrack and sometimes the script for the Tea Party rebellion and whatever we decide will come after — at times questioning Mr. Obama’s motives, his associations, and, certainly, his exercise of presidential power, which some of the network’s hosts often described in totalitarian terms. Mr. Obama often flashed frustration with the network, telling my colleague John Harwood in one typical refrain, “I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration. ” The political nimbleness of Mr. Ailes’s network — which became No. 1 over CNN about 14 years ago and never looked back — is matched by one politician in particular, Mr. Trump, with whom Mr. Ailes, like so many other of the New networks, has had a long relationship. It was an intriguing subplot this year when Mr. Ailes emerged as the only major television executive who was willing to take on Mr. Trump directly, in defense of Megyn Kelly, whom Mr. Trump repeatedly attacked, often in misogynistic terms. That defense included a statement in which the network accused Mr. Trump of having a “sick obsession” with the star and sent the signal that the network had the ratings stature, and confidence, to jeopardize its access to Mr. Trump, who had proved to be a great ratings draw. But in recent months, the network emerged as the television home of choice for Mr. Trump, who appears there more than anywhere else. That swing has created tensions within the network, between the more traditional conservative and establishment Republican thinkers, and its New populists. Mr. Ailes is clearly more aligned with the latter and, for that matter, Mr. Trump, who will give his formal acceptance speech Thursday night. If the settlement agreement between Mr. Ailes and 21st Century Fox that leaked on Drudge on Tuesday is finalized, Mr. Ailes could step down from the Fox chairmanship the next day. | 1 |
White House press secretary Sean Spicer called out the media for repeatedly trying to undermine and demoralize President Donald Trump and his supporters. [“He’s gone out there and defied the odds over and over and over again, and he keeps getting told what he can’t do by this narrative that’s out there,” Spicer said. “And he exceeds it every single time. ” Spicer made his remarks during a question and answer session with CNN’s Jim Acosta during the White House Press briefing. During the briefing, Spicer listed all of the speculative predictions that the media made during Trump’s campaign, the transition, and the inauguration that turned out to be wrong. “I think over and over again there’s this constant attempt to undermine his credibility and the movement that he represents,” Spicer said. “And it’s frustrating for not just him, but I think so many of us that are trying to work to get this message out. ” Throughout his time in Washington, Spicer said, the media had never been as negative as they were toward Trump, calling it “demoralizing. ” “I’ve never seen it like this, Jim,” he told Acosta, adding later that the “default narrative is always negative and it’s demoralizing. ” Despite accusations that Spicer misled the media, he said that he would never intentionally lie to them. “There are certain things that we may not fully understand when we come out,” he said. “But our intention’s never to lie to you. ” Big Government, Big Journalism | 1 |
Donate Deconstructing an Example of Establishment Media Reportage: the Boston Globe Publishes Not-So Subtle Hit Piece on Sanders and Warren Couched in establishment lingo and perspective, relying upon shallow but credible-seeming misinformation, the Boston Globe reveals itself to be no ally of the people or the revolution. Sanders and Warren By Liam Miller / filmsforaction.org
Why, at such an uncertain time, would the Boston Globe’s Michael Levenson ([email protected]) and Annie Linskey ([email protected]) sow disinformation and discord? That might seem like an exaggerated statement. But it only requires a slightly critical eye to see they tip their hand quite clearly: They serve the establishment's interests.
The piece, inoccuously titled Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders duo will lead liberals in the Senate , begins with the wholly unsubstantiated statement, “Bernie Sanders did not like to open the phone lines to political critics when he hosted his Friday radio show on WDEV…” It is an assertion that rings true in a general way; who likes to open communication with detractors? From the gate, this characterization paints Bernie as someone who doesn’t like to listen to people who disagree with him; but anyone who has observed him knows this characterization isn't on point.
To see this, simply watch Bernie’s regular, Friday Brunch with Bernie appearances on Thom Hartmann’s radio show. The phones were open to any and all, throughout the country. Bernie is always patient, respectful, and compassionate. If this were the only point upon which the authors were off-base, one could excuse it. This is far from the only example, however.
Their next paragraph is thick with establishment perspective, as they discuss Warren and Sanders’ potential ability to “tap into the populist anger Trump channeled”. Here, the first and only means of understanding why people would listen to Warren and Sanders is anger; not the reasonableness of their positions, the compassion of their views, or their integrity and honesty. This argument is straight out of the establishment media’s playbook against Sanders from the primary; in speaking only of his supporters’ anger, they blurred the distinction between Sanders and Trump. This was convenient when establishment water-bearers in the media were attacking Sanders on Clinton’s behalf, and ultimately successful in handing her the primary (with disastrous consequences). But their utter lack of understanding, exemplified by this limited, tone deaf perspective is the real problem. It’s not that people are angry (although some are); it’s that they feel, quite distinctly and strongly, that they can trust Sanders and Warren to both understand and advocate for their perspectives. When understood in this way, this piece’s failure is not just an oversight; it is a deliberate marginalization, that lays groundwork for future dismissal.
A few paragraphs later, they say “Their [Warren and Sanders’] history is more fraught and their future more uncertain than their ideological alliances might suggest”, before going on to quoting Charles Chamberlain of Democracy for America’s view that they would be leading the party and the movement. Then they continue: “Still, tensions may lie ahead,” before going on to claim that Warren is more of an insider while Sanders (“an independent and self-professed socialist”) is more of an outsider. Setting aside the obvious dog-whistle “socialist”, when Sanders in fact terms himself a “democratic-socialist”, the presumption of friction between them is simple unsupported speculative gossip. Oh, sorry – it’s supported by a University political scientist, who is cited as saying there “can really be only one custodian of the heart of the Democratic base,” and so Warren and Sanders interests must collide. This of course presumes that either of them covets such a role; in fact, as we saw throughout the primary by Sanders’ repeatedly demurring on his own individual importance, and Warren’s consistent, ongoing rebuff of any and all attempts to get her to evince even the slightest aspiration to power. Simply put, the authors don’t understand Warren and Sanders, because they (like so many in the media) can only comprehend those in political life as, at heart, self-interested sociopaths. They must hunger for power; and so they must, eventually, be at odds.
The piece goes on to discuss Sanders and Warren’s ongoing conversations on his radio show, and their tendency to agree; then, in a seemingly pointless non-sequitur, makes an isolated quote of the station owner, who says he “can’t say” that it was “wonderful radio”. This point, entirely irrelevant to the purported point at hand (that Warren and Sanders would lead the Democratic party in the Senate), reflects poorly on them both; and is, indeed, a most indicative morsel of information. With it, we see that the authors are not sympathetic to Warren or Sanders. And, in the tradition established by the New York Times with their documented bias against Sanders (Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone’s account of this is a chilling), subtly malign under the guise of reportage. They write in support of the political establishment; and with that understanding, their intent is revealed.
The authors’ most egregious assertion is that “Warren refused Sanders’ repeated entreaties to endorse his run for the presidency.” This is a plausible-seeming, but entirely unsubstantiated bit of gossip. It’s true, Sanders’ supporters longed for Warren to endorse him, and many of them doubtless pled on his behalf; but there is absolutely nothing to support the claim that Sanders himself made such entreaties. This version of events does, however, play neatly into the narrative of friction that the authors want to present.
I could be criticized for making too much of such seeming small details; but in fact, the point I am making here is that ‘reporters’ such as these two are not reporting about events, or even real people; they are reporting about the establishment’s views, seemingly congratulating each other on the subtlety of their understanding, while whole-heartedly missing the point and ignoring reality. Everything they say is in line with the same, lazy narrative espoused by establishment media througout the election. They don’t, and don't want to understand Warren or Sanders; they don’t comprehend why anyone would prefer them to Clinton; and the piece reveals their ongoing failure to self-reflect, to see how their own narrowness of perspective – which only reinforces itself, and those who agree with it – created the media echo-chamber that ultimately facilitated the rise of Trump.
Not that we need it further confirmation of the intent to discredit, but the authors of this not-so-subtle hit piece gave the last word on Warren and Sanders to former Republican Senator Jud Gregg of New Hampshire: “They’re carrying the mantle of socialism, and it’s on the rise in the Democratic Party”. More red-baiting (which establishment Democrats employed against Sanders throughout the primary); no mention of the absolutely dominant support Warren and Sanders’ positions enjoy among the American people (Juan Cole wrote an eye-popping piece about this in May of last year). So what, in fact, did the authors have in mind? It’s hard to say specifically, but their establishment bias, in style and intent, is clear. Maybe at this point it’s just habit. Or maybe they’re still trying to pretend that they’ve been right all along, and that we still ought to listen to them.
To which I say: President Trump.
Nowhere in the piece do they substantiate their own title: that Warren and Sanders would lead in the Senate. They quote a leader of Democracy for America, who makes the case that they’d be leading “the movement”; but they quote literally no one else in the Senate, and there is no mention of what specific form their leadership of the Senate might take. The title is pure, trojan clickbait; dangled to entice folks interested in Sanders and Warren (especially those who, rightly disenchanted with the establishement, might be investigating Warren and Sanders for the first time). Any who are informing themselves about Warren and Sanders for the first time would, based on this piece, start off with the view that they are extreme, petty, and their history is fraught with squabbling. No leaders to be found here; best to continue to trust the political establishment, and those who (like the authors) are here to tell you all about it.
We need to hold such examples of failed journalism up to scrutiny; those of us who have followed the election closely know this kind of smear piece, in support of establishment ideals and efforts, put us in this position. They don’t serve the public good; they don’t report accurately on events; and they certainly will be of no help in stopping the oligarchs’ agenda. You can’t stop the oligarchy if you are carrying water for its creatures, and making baseless attacks upon those who oppose it – however sublte, or couched in orthodoxy. In fact, mindless allegiance to that orthodoxy is the heart of the problem.
We can’t afford it any more. There must be no place for such blind, pro-establishment partisanship, in governance or reportage. Any news source that misrepresents information to serve the establishment must be revealed and rebuked.
There’s just no more time.
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CHARLESTON, S. C. — They sat on the same courtroom bench, but worlds apart — the parents of Walter L. Scott, a black man shot to death in 2015, and Michael T. Slager, the white police officer who killed him as he fled after a traffic stop. And the arguments they heard from lawyers were just as disparate as they pleaded with jurors to settle a bitterly divisive case in their favor: for the government, a rare conviction of a police officer, and for the defense, an acquittal of an officer seen on tape shooting a fleeing man. “Our whole criminal justice system rides on the back of law enforcement,” Scarlett A. Wilson, the chief prosecutor for Charleston County, told the jury of 11 white people and a black man. “They have to be held accountable when they mess up. It is very, very rare, but it does happen. ” But Mr. Slager’s lawyer, Andrew J. Savage III, pressed jurors to resist “a false narrative” — that the officer malevolently opened fire toward Mr. Scott’s back on April 4, 2015, when he fled a traffic stop for a broken taillight — and to find that Mr. Slager had acted in . “This shooting didn’t happen in a vacuum,” Mr. Savage said. “Mr. Scott did not get shot because he had a broken taillight. Mr. Scott was shot because of what he did on April 4. ” Jurors, who began their deliberations on Wednesday evening, must reach a unanimous decision, and they have three options if they are to avoid a mistrial: a conviction for murder, a conviction for voluntary manslaughter or an acquittal. The difference between murder and manslaughter — charges with vastly different potential penalties in this state — revolves around whether someone had “malice” toward the person who was killed. Under South Carolina law, a conviction for murder carries a prison term of 30 years to life the penalty for manslaughter is between two and 30 years in prison. Mr. Slager has also been charged in Federal District Court with violating Mr. Scott’s civil rights. Like the federal case, the state’s case, tried over four grueling weeks in a courtroom here, turns on a matter of minutes on the Saturday before Easter last year, when Mr. Slager stopped Mr. Scott for an equipment violation. It was a stop, virtually everyone agrees, that began normally. But Mr. Scott soon decided to flee on foot — his family and prosecutors believe he did so because of outstanding child support obligations — and Mr. Slager chased him. The men became involved in a fight, and, according to Mr. Slager, who testified on Tuesday, Mr. Scott took control of the officer’s Taser, leaving him in “total fear. ” Near the end of their physical struggle, a switched on his cellphone’s camera and began to record a video of the moments that soon rocketed into the national consciousness: when Mr. Slager fired eight shots and Mr. Scott, wounded, collapsed to the ground. Mr. Scott was at least 17 feet from Mr. Slager, and running away, when the officer began to shoot. Mr. Savage, during a presentation when he argued that Mr. Slager had been maligned by the news media, failed by his department and victimized by a shoddy investigation, said Mr. Scott had left Mr. Slager with little choice after he “made decisions to attack a police officer. ” “Should he have assumed that an unarmed man would have attacked a police officer?” Mr. Savage said of Mr. Slager, who he complained had been made a “poster boy” of alleged police misconduct because of controversial killings in other parts of the country. Ms. Wilson unambiguously and furiously denied that other cases had affected the prosecution here, and she told jurors that there could not “let your decision be based on things going on elsewhere. ” Rather, she contended, investigators had at first sided with Mr. Slager. “They bought everything he said hook, line and sinker,” she said. “They believed him until they didn’t, until they knew better. ” Winding down a criminal case that has drawn enormous attention here, Ms. Wilson accused Mr. Savage of relying on a defense strategy she said was intended to confuse jurors and shift blame for Mr. Scott’s death. The defense’s approach, she argued, could be summarized simply: “Look at everything else — everybody else — but don’t look at that video. ” She said that Mr. Slager, who is now 35, had embellished the nature of his confrontation with Mr. Scott, who was 50. She characterized one of Mr. Slager’s wounds, cited by his lawyers as evidence of a struggle, as “a glorified paper cut,” and she hailed the role that video had played in the case. “Thank goodness we have a camera,” she said, “because it’s not just memory that matters. ” Eventually, as Ms. Wilson neared the end of her argument, she played the video of the shooting again. As the eight shots echoed the courtroom one last time, Mr. Scott’s parents, still in their seats, embraced, looking away from the killing. | 1 |
One of the latest symbols of the overinflated luxury housing market is a pink mansion perched above the Mediterranean on the French Riviera. The property, built and owned by the fashion magnate Pierre Cardin, is composed of giant terra cotta orbs arranged in a sprawling hive. The home’s name befits its price. “Le Palais Bulles,” or “the Bubble Palace,” is being offered for sale at approximately $450 million. The listing is part of a global pileup of homes listed for $100 million or more. A record 27 properties with prices are officially for sale, according to Christie’s International Real Estate. That is up from 19 last year and about a dozen in 2014. If you add in “whisper listings” that are offered privately, brokers say the actual number of listings worldwide could easily top 40 or 50. “It’s a bumper crop,” said Dan Conn, chief executive of Christie’s International Real Estate. “It’s just a new world in terms of what people are building and offering for sale. ” The rise in real estate listings comes just as sales of luxury real estate have cooled. Many say the sudden surge in hyperprice homes — often built and sold by speculative investors — is the ultimate bubble signal. “When you have a record number of homes for sale at a price point of $100 million or more, that tells you these homes aren’t selling,” said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel Inc. a real estate appraisal and research firm. “It’s not as deep a market as some might hope. ” Last year, only two homes in the world sold for over $100 million, according to Christie’s. One was a house in Hong Kong purchased for $193 million by Jack Ma, the chief of Alibaba. The other was a townhouse in London that sold for $132 million. This year, a ranch in Texas went on the market for $700 million and a home in Dallas listed for $100 million. Both sold, but the actual sale prices have not been disclosed. The last time a sudden pop in $100 listings occurred was in 2007 and 2008, just before the housing crash. In 2008, at least four homes in the world listed for nine figures. Only one ended up selling for close to that. A mansion in Palm Beach owned by Donald Trump and listed for $100 million sold for $95 million. (Mr. Trump says it sold for $100 million.) A mansion in Surrey, England, called Updown Court, was listed for $138 million, but sold in 2011 for about $50 million. A log mansion planned for the Yellowstone Club in Montana, with a promised price of $155 million, was never built, and the land sold for $10 million. Of course, anyone can slap a $100 million price tag on a home to get attention. Yet actual sales of homes are rare, even in good times. Between 2011 and 2016, only 15 homes in the world have sold for $100 million or more, according to Christies, and five of those were in 2014. “The era of aspirational pricing is over, and I’m not sure it ever really worked,” Mr. Miller said. “These prices get headlines, but the properties just don’t sell. ” Brokers promoting the listings say their properties are masterpieces — like Picassos or Modiglianis — that rarely come on the market. They add that the more than 1, 800 billionaires in the world see property as a safer store of wealth than stocks or art. Mr. Conn estimates that of the 27 listings, a third will sell for under $100 million, a third will sell for around $100 million and a third for far more. “I don’t think it’s a sign of a bubble,” Mr. Conn said. “It’s a sign of growing wealth in the world and the quality of some of the new construction. ” Yet the market for megamansions and penthouses has cooled significantly in the last year. Prices for homes in the top 5 percent of the real estate market fell 1. 1 percent in the first quarter of 2016, according to Redfin. Prices for the rest of the housing market increased 4. 7 percent. Brokers say the very top of the market — consisting of and homes — is faring the worst as slowing economies overseas and volatile stock markets have spooked buyers. The supply of homes for the rich exploded as builders aimed at the high end after the financial crisis. Of the 10 most expensive listings in the world, seven are in the United States and four of these are in Los Angeles. The most expensive listing in the world is the $500 million compound being built in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles by Nile Niami, a film producer and speculative builder. The property will have a main house, a garage and a “ casino. ” In nearby Holmby Hills, a more modest mansion, built by the investor and developer Gala Asher, came on the market in April for $150 million. The ultramodern house, on the prestigious Carolwood Drive, has a master suite and a club level with bar, dance floor, wine room, lap pool, theater complex, beauty parlor and massage rooms. The property also includes several guesthouses and staff housing. The broker, Ginger Glass, said the price of the property was justified. “Buyers today want new construction,” she said. “And there isn’t anything that’s new like this in such a great location. ” Still more homes are on the way. Real estate agents and developers say a home under construction in Bel Air is likely to have more than 50, 000 square feet of living space, with finishes rivaling a superyacht’s. The price will be too, at around $300 million. Among the home’s amenities: the world’s largest safe. | 1 |
Republican nominee Donald Trump has been strategically placing certain people behind his him at rallies to create a false illusion about the diversity of his supporters. You may have noticed a man holding a “BLACKS FOR TRUMP” sign behind the racist rabble-rouser at his events, with a website URL “GODS2.com” underneath it. If you’ve wondered just what kind of black Americans could bring themselves to support Trump or if this election could get any weirder, well, hold on to your seat.
The man holding the sign is “Michael the Black Man,” also known as Maurice Woodside or Michael Symonette. LittleGreenFootballs did some research and discovered that Michael isn’t your ordinary concerned citizen. He’s a former member of a murderous cult , Yahweh ben Yahweh, led by preacher Hulon Mitchell Jr.
Michael, along with 15 other Yahweh followers, was charged for allegedly conspiring in two murders; his brother, who was also in the cult, told jurors that Michael had helped beat one man who was later killed and stuck a sharpened stick into another man’s eyeball. But jurors found Michael (and six other Yahweh followers) innocent. They sent Mitchell away for 20 years in the federal pen.
Michael later reinvented himself as a radio host and an anti-gay, anti-Obama preacher and soon found himself in the spotlight at Republican events, whose organizers were delighted to have found another person of color to attack Obama without being obviously racist. His website, GODS2.com, is filled with the delusional, vaguely anti-Semitic rantings of a madman, homages to Yahweh, and assertions that .
This may not mean much in the long run, but it’s worth pointing out just how outrageous the hypocrisy of the Trump campaign is. Trump attacked Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton when the father of the Orlando nightclub shooter appeared in the stands behind her at a rally out of chance, accusing her of associating with the father of a deranged murderer – but this man is actually being planted behind Trump because of his skin color. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — American lawmakers have for years been assailing companies for dodging taxes with overseas maneuvers. But now that the European Union has done something about it by trying to wrest billions of dollars from Apple, those officials have offered a response viewed by many as rife with hypocrisy: collective outrage. Tax avoidance has become a lightning rod as the presidential campaign has taken on a strong populist cast, and leading Republicans and Democrats in Congress have demanded that companies be forced to pay their fair share. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump have vowed to crack down on deals that allow companies to relocate their headquarters overseas to lower their tax bills, and the Treasury Department has made limiting international loopholes a priority. Despite all that, Apple — a company long accused of being overly creative at avoiding taxes — now has the federal government standing up for it after the European Union’s executive commission ordered Ireland on Tuesday to collect $14. 5 billion in taxes from the company. And for at least some American politicians, the anger stems from a simple calculation: The tax money that the European Union extracts from Apple should be going to the United States Treasury, not that they have figured out how to make that happen. “It’s remarkable to think that the administration has been flying over to Brussels on taxpayers’ dollars to lobby the European Union against collecting taxes owed in Europe when they’re not collecting the taxes owed here,” said Clark Gascoigne, deputy director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition. “It’s terribly ironic. ” Most lawmakers and business groups do not see it that way. They defended Apple by arguing that the European Union was overstepping its authority and reinterpreting international tax law to unfairly penalize the company. Some called it a new brand of protectionism. The Treasury Department said the ruling was “deeply troubling. ” The Business Roundtable, a lobbying organization for America’s largest companies, called the move a “reckless and dramatic overreach” and an “act of aggression” against a company and a sovereign government. In Congress, lawmakers in both parties have urged the Treasury Department to be tougher on European officials as they aggressively investigate what they call undue tax benefits given by member nations to leading American companies. Members of the Senate Finance Committee sent a letter in May to Jacob J. Lew, the Treasury secretary, urging him to consider retaliation that would include doubling taxes on companies and individuals in Europe. The European Commission “is using a theory to make tax law, is doing it in a way that is retroactive and that overrides national tax law authority, in our view,” Mr. Lew said Wednesday at a Brookings Institution event previewing this weekend’s meeting in China of the Group of 20 largest industrial economies. He pushed back against the idea that Treasury is condoning tax evasion, saying legislation that prevents companies from parking income overseas to avoid being taxed in the United States “will see action probably not in my tenure but early in the next administration. ” The European Commission’s ruling has even managed to forge a rare moment of agreement between the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, and Senator Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat who is likely to become the next leader of his party in the Senate. “This decision is awful,” Mr. Ryan said in a statement. “Slamming a company with a giant tax bill — years after the fact — sends exactly the wrong message to job creators on both sides of the Atlantic. ” Mr. Schumer said in an interview that he and Mr. Ryan had been discussing possibilities for a corporate tax overhaul for next year. He said he was optimistic about the prospect of requiring corporate money to return to the United States at a lower tax rate, with some of the proceeds being used to fund a large investment in infrastructure. The action taken by the European Union, he said, should be an impetus to get moving on such legislation. “The European Union is going to grab this money, instead of the U. S.,” Mr. Schumer said. “It’s a big signpost here for us. Let’s get moving. ” He added: “We’re trying to protect our U. S. tax base. That money sitting over there should be here in the U. S. not in Ireland and not in the E. U. ” The bipartisan “consensus” that the corporate tax rate should be cut in exchange for loopholes closures emerged in President Obama’s first term, yet Congress has not formally drafted a bill, much less voted on one. Tax experts said that without a deep cut in the tax rate, companies like Apple would be better off paying back taxes in Europe than repatriating their overseas cash. “This is not taking 13 billion euros out of the U. S. Treasury’s pocket and U. S. taxpayers’ pocket and putting it into Europe,” said Jeffery M. Kadet, a tax lecturer at the University of Washington School of Law. “They wouldn’t be bringing this money back to the U. S. anyway. ” Reuven S. who directs the international taxation program at the University of Michigan Law School, said that the European Union had a strong case for collecting the taxes from Apple and that if the situation were reversed, Americans would be clamoring to collect taxes from a foreign company. “Just because it happens to be an American company, to say that the European Union should not take action, I think, is the height of hypocrisy,” Mr. said. While most lawmakers condemned the treatment of Apple, one prominent former senator said he was pleased to see Europe take action. Carl M. Levin, Democrat of Michigan, who was chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations when it examined Apple’s use of tax havens in 2013, said the European Commission should fill the vacuum left by lackadaisical tax enforcement in the United States. “The royalties Apple collects for its overseas sales of products designed and developed in the U. S. should be taxed in the U. S.,” Mr. Levin said. “But Apple has avoided the billions of dollars of taxes it owes the U. S. by transferring its intellectual property to itself in Ireland. ” Blaming Apple and the Internal Revenue Service, he added, “When Apple used those tax avoidance schemes, it is understandable that Europe would try to go after them. ” It remains to be seen if corporate tax reform will be a priority for the next administration, but the language used by both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump on the campaign trail suggests that it is a strong possibility. Mrs. Clinton has released a formal proposal to prevent corporate inversions and to reward companies that keep their operations in the United States. Mr. Trump, who has called for a boycott of Apple products, has threatened to punish companies that relocate to other countries by imposing taxes on products they sell in the United States. The news that a corporate giant might have evaded billions of dollars in taxes could become another populist rallying cry. “There’s a reason Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders did so well in the campaign this year,” Mr. Gascoigne, of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, said. “People are fed up with the kinds of deals that are happening at the large multinational companies at the expense of the American people. ” | 1 |
Thu, 27 Oct 2016 09:10 UTC A new large study presented at the American Neurological Association Annual Meeting has found a strong connection between cholesterol-lowering medications and Parkinson's disease. Contradicting previous claims that statins are protective against PD. In recent years there has been a considerable effort to try to find new applications for statins. Reports have tried to link statins with positive results on a wide range of conditions, such as: Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Cancer, Multiple Sclerosis and Depression. These claims have been somewhat surprising considering that the brain and nervous system have the highest requirements for cholesterol and low cholesterol levels are associated with cognition problems, increased suicide, and an increased risk for some types of cancer . Many people have suspected that the data is being carefully cherry picked in an attempt to show a false benefit and expand the use of statins into other areas. In the new study, researchers analysed data from the MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters database - including information on 30,343,035 persons aged 40 to 65 years. The use of cholesterol-lowering drugs was associated with a significantly higher prevalence of Parkinson's disease. This is not the first time that we have seen an absence of the predicted benefits of statins in real life data. For example, a large study in 2011 collected data from 289 of 290 municipalities in Sweden and found that the predicted benefits of statins had not materialised, despite a dramatic increase in statin use. An important finding of this new study is that all of the cholesterol lowering drugs included were associated with an increased risk of PD. Suggesting that the harms of the drugs could be directly related to the cholesterol-lowering effect. This adds to the mountain of data that now exists to show that having a low level of cholesterol is worse than having a high level. Sources Nilsson, S et al. No connection between the level of exposition to statins in the population and the incidence/ mortality of acute myocardial infarction: An ecological study based on Sweden's municipalities. Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine 2011, 10:6 Comment: It doesn't come as a surprise: | 0 |
Getty - Chip Somodevilla The Wildfire 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.
In case you missed the political advertisement for Obamacare, it was touted as the “Affordable Care Act.”
Here are Democrats hyping the program, which the Obamacare architect described as a pathway to single-payer :
Not too long ago, another fan of single-payer healthcare was Donald Trump. But don't take our word for it, look no further than the unofficial Trump campaign arm Breitbart.com for evidence . As Trump said in September 2015:
Scott Pelley: Universal health care.
Donald Trump: I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.
In 1999, Trump was perfectly clear , as reported by Newsmax:
“I said I’m conservative, generally speaking, I’m conservative, and even very conservative,” Trump told King in response to a question about a “patients' bill of rights,” reports BuzzFeed.
“But I’m quite liberal and getting much more liberal on healthcare and other things. I really say: What’s the purpose of a country if you’re not going to have defensive and healthcare?” he told King. "If you can’t take care of your sick in the country, forget it, it’s all over. I mean, it’s no good.
“So I’m very liberal when it comes to healthcare. I believe in universal healthcare. I believe in whatever it takes to make people well and better.”
After Obamacare passed, Trump sat down for an interview on HLN. This is what he had to say, as noted by The Washington Examiner:
“Number one, as a human being, I like to see people — it's inconceivable that, you know, people are sick, like you get sick, or I get sick, or the kids get sick, and you bring 'em to a doctor, inconceivable that, you know, 31 or 33 million people can't do that,” Trump told host Joy Behar. “So on one level, I think something had to be done.”
Trump continued, saying the law is “really going to cost a lot of money in terms of competitiveness with this country” and said it would cost a friend's company “over $200 million a year.”
Here is what Trump recently tweeted: Obamacare is a disaster - as I've been saying from the beginning. Time to repeal & replace! #ObamacareFail pic.twitter.com/5CvoMbVceT — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 25, 2016
Did Trump say it was a “disaster from the beginning,” or “on one level, I think something had to be done”?
Perhaps, we turn to another tweet he had, drawing on the popular hashtag #ObamaCareInThreeWords: REPEAL AND REPLACE!!! #ObamaCareInThreeWords — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 25, 2016
It turns out that Donald Trump is a fan of “repeal and replace,” but his political track record before he ran for president as a Republican shows that what he means by that is “single-payer”—the goal of the Obamacare architect all along.
When it comes to Trump's solution for Obamacare—making it more competitive for insurance companies—this runs antithetical to the goal of single-payer, which is the government (i.e. taxpayers) paying for everyone.
One can draw their own conclusions about what Trump actually means right now, because no one can be one hundred percent sure. Yet for a man who styled himself as an outsider and not at all like a “politician,” his statements on Obamacare show himself very much to be similar to one. | 0 |
Exclusive: Dem Senator’s Private Email Hacked DCLeaks obtains emails of Colorado Democratic Senator Andy Kerr Mikael Thalen - October 27, 2016 Comments
Infowars has exclusively learned that the email account of Colorado Democratic Senator Andy Kerr has been hacked.
The emails, shown to Infowars by the website DCLeaks, include hundreds of discussions from March 2015 to July 2016 – with one email concerning 2015 marijuana legislation oddly claiming to be from December of 2000.
Taken from Kerr’s Gmail account, the emails, which are currently password protected, mostly surround requests and comments by Kerr’s constituents on a wide range of political topics.
Speaking with Infowars, David Pourshoushtari, communications director for the Colorado State Senate Democrats, said Kerr was unaware of the hack but that the senator declined to provide an official statement until the situation could be assessed.
While the exact reasoning behind the hack is currently unknown, Kerr may have been targeted as part of the same hacking campaign that compromised the emails of other political figures including Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta.
It is also unclear whether Kerr, like Podesta, fell victim to a phishing attack that would have resulted in the senator putting his email password into a fake Google login page.
Earlier this month the former Chief of Protocol of the United States, Capricia Marshall, who was one of Clinton’s insiders at the State Department, similarly had her emails appear on DCLeaks.
The website also made headlines in August after publishing hundreds of documents connected to billionaire donor George Soros.
According to the U.S. government and many in the cybersecurity community , Russian state hackers are responsible for the recent spate of election season hacks. DCLeaks has similarly been accused of being a publishing front for the Russian government. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles | 0 |
The body of an activist from St. Louis who led protests about the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. in 2014 was found with a gunshot wound in the charred remains of a vehicle on Tuesday morning, according to the police and news accounts. The activist, Darren Seals, 29, was found inside the vehicle on Diamond Drive in Riverview in St. Louis County around 1:50 a. m. the St. Louis County Police Department said in a statement. The vehicle had been on fire and he was found after the flames were extinguished. The police said Mr. Seals had lived at an address on Millburn Drive in St. Louis, about 12 miles from where his body was found. The case is being investigated as a homicide by the department’s Bureau of Crimes Against Persons. The motive for the killing was unknown. The police identified Mr. Seals as Daren Seals, although other records listed the spelling of his first name as Darren, The St. Louis reported. On his Twitter account, Mr. Seals described himself as a businessman, revolutionary, activist and “Unapologetically BLACK, Afrikan in AmeriKKKa, Fighter, Leader. ” He helped lead protests after Mr. Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed on Aug. 9, 2014, by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis. The shooting prompted protests that roiled the area for weeks. On Nov. 24, 2014, the St. Louis County prosecutor announced that a grand jury had decided not to indict Mr. Wilson. That announcement set off another wave of protests. In an interview with MTV. com, Mr. Seals described the night the grand jury announcement was made. He said he was with Mr. Brown’s mother and some friends outside the Ferguson Police Department. He said the decision not to indict the officer was “the ultimate slap in the face. ” “And for Mike Brown’s mother to be right there in my arms crying — she literally cried in my arms — it was like I felt her soul crying,” he said. “It’s a different type of crying. I’ve seen people crying, but she was really hurt. And it hurt me. It hurt all of us. ” Mr. Seals led protests with the group Hands Up United, which was organizing a campaign called Polls Ova Police, which sought to use this year’s elections to challenge police policies. “The broken systems and policies that police enforce must be challenged,” the project said on its website. “We will not vote in favor of any candidate partnering with those who are not fighting for Black life. Polls Ova Police is the war cry of this generation. ” On Twitter, supporters paid tribute to Mr. Seals on Tuesday: | 1 |
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — In the state capital these days, anybody who is anybody is either being investigated or being questioned about someone who is. The chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court has been hit with ethics charges for defying federal courts on marriage, and could be removed from his seat. The governor, caught on tape engaging in salacious banter, apparently with his powerful chief adviser, is facing criminal investigations and calls for impeachment. That the governor’s racy phone calls became public at all is because of what may be the most significant and sweeping crisis of the lot: the impending trial of the Alabama House speaker, Michael G. Hubbard, described by friends and foes as the most powerful man in state politics. Of the trifecta of calamities plaguing Alabama’s branches of government, it is Mr. Hubbard’s felony corruption trial starting this week that may rattle the state the most. The potential witness list, reflecting Mr. Hubbard’s approach to politics, is a lineup of the state’s power elite, including bank executives, construction magnates, legislators, lobbyists, former Gov. Bob Riley and, promising a day of testimony, the current governor, Robert Bentley. Mr. Hubbard and Mr. Bentley have vigorously denied wrongdoing, and Chief Justice Roy S. Moore, who was removed from the same position in 2003 for refusing to move a monument of the Ten Commandments from the state judicial building, insists that the ethics charges he is facing are without merit. “Start with Lord Acton and the famous axiom that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” said Wayne Flynt, a retired professor of history at Auburn University. “Alabama has had a seamless transition from Democratic rule and synonymous corruption to Republican rule and synonymous corruption. ” Power in Alabama is centralized by design. The state Constitution requires legislatively approved amendments for matters as trivial as local traffic laws, resulting in what has been described as the longest constitution in the world. Consolidating things further, Alabama has nearly always been a state. For more than a century, that party was the Democrats and major political decisions were hashed out among the party’s leaders and its major donors. “When I first moved here, an older lawyer friend told me there were 4, 000 people in Alabama and four million extras,” said David Mowery, a political consultant in Montgomery. Republicans railed against the Democratic leadership as a network, and few did so more vehemently than Mr. Hubbard, an executive in the broadcasting and media business. Denouncing “corruption, crime and cronyism at the highest levels of state government,” Mr. Hubbard created a sophisticated — some have said legally questionable — machine to win control of the State House in 2010. Chairman of both the State Republican Party and the House caucus, he conscripted candidates — bank employees, foresters, waste haulers — and determined where campaign money should be spent. In November 2010, the Republicans not only took over the State House for the first time in 136 years, they won a supermajority, winning every court race on the ballot and every statewide office. Mr. Bentley, a dermatologist and legislator, was elected governor. Mr. Hubbard was unanimously elected speaker of the House, where his first priority was to pass an ethics law described as among the strongest in the country. Four years later, Mr. Hubbard was indicted on a charge of violating that ethics law, accused of using his positions as speaker and party chairman to solicit work and investments for his own financial interest by steering campaign work to his business interests and pushing bills that helped his consulting clients. That his moneymaking plans were running into the ethics law he helped pass is something he is shown lamenting in private emails released by prosecutors. “Who proposed those things? !” he wrote, apparently jokingly, to Mr. Riley, the former governor. “What were we thinking?” He would eventually argue in court that the ethics law was unconstitutional. Still, Mr. Hubbard remains the speaker and enjoys steadfast support in the House. This is in part because Democrats and their backers have been almost completely frozen out of state politics. But Mr. Flynt and others say there is more to it than the lack of competition. The speed and scale of the Republican takeover brought into power a class of politicians inexperienced with total control, some with no political experience at all. There was little infrastructure in the party beyond what Mr. Hubbard and his allies put together at one point, he suggested the creation of a “shadow party,” something that would be effectively achieved by way of political action committees. “Hubbard’s problems permeated the whole Legislature,” said Arthur Payne, a former Republican state representative. “The majority felt like they owed their allegiance to him rather than the people of Alabama. ” Mr. Hubbard’s partisans say it is not the speaker who has had Alabama under his sway, but the deputy state attorney general who is prosecuting him: Matt Hart, a hulking man with a background in military intelligence and a reputation for a bludgeoning approach. Even some critics of Mr. Hubbard have denounced Mr. Hart’s tactics, though almost no one wants to do so publicly. “He knows bullying,” said Sonny Reagan, a former deputy attorney general. “Matt Hart approaches his cases like the U. S. military approaches ISIS. ” Mr. Reagan serves as a good example of the breadth of disarray in Montgomery, which has spread even to the watchdogs. A dispute with Mr. Hart over office space blew up into formal complaints about his methods and motivations in the Hubbard case this led ultimately to the resignation of Mr. Reagan, a former adviser in the Riley administration, who was accused of trying to sabotage the prosecution. Such disorders have been a regular feature of the year and a half leading to Mr. Hubbard’s trial. The latest was in February, when a political operative in Montgomery asserted that Mr. Hart had been leaking apparent grand jury details to create a “whisper campaign” against Mr. Hubbard. Mr. Hart, who referred to the operative as a “ confidential informant,” produced an affidavit from Spencer Collier, the former head of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, saying that agents had looked into the accusations of grand jury leaks and found no basis for an investigation. But the governor, according to Mr. Collier, had not approved of this affidavit. When Mr. Collier provided it to prosecutors anyway, Mr. Bentley ordered him to take a leave of absence and soon after fired him, citing “possible misuse of state dollars. ” Mr. Collier then came forward with a public announcement: Mr. Bentley had been having an affair with Rebekah Caldwell Mason, his principal adviser. And with that, the state immediately had not one, but two blockbuster scandals. Jury selection in Mr. Hubbard’s trial begins Monday. Impeachment proceedings against Mr. Bentley have gone slowly, though scrutiny is intensifying of nonprofits and businesses connected with Ms. Mason, a powerful figure in the administration. Federal investigators have been conducting interviews around Montgomery, and Mr. Bentley has acknowledged that the attorney general’s office is also at work. The attorney general might also prosecute Judge Moore at his ethics hearing, further winding an already tortuous vortex. Mr. Bentley could be called on to replace Judge Moore, who could preside over the impeachment of Mr. Bentley, which could be recommended by the House under Mr. Hubbard, who if found guilty, could eventually have an appeal before Judge Moore’s court. Allen Farley, a Republican state representative, is skeptical that much will change in Montgomery, saying that special interests have always been the power behind both parties. But there is a chance, he believes, that over the next few weeks all of it will blow up. “When the prosecution starts,” said Mr. Farley, “there could be a meltdown of enormous proportions in Alabama politics. ” | 1 |
HONG KONG — Almost three years after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared with 239 people on board, officials said on Tuesday that they had called off the underwater search for the plane, ensuring that one of the great aviation mysteries will remain unsolved for the foreseeable future. The decision, which had been expected, indefinitely suspends an intensive search in the southern Indian Ocean for remnants of the plane, a Boeing 777. The underwater search turned up no traces of the aircraft, although pieces of debris were found as far away as Tanzania. Flight 370 disappeared on the way from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, to Beijing on March 8, 2014, prompting the largest and costliest search in aviation history. Investigators determined that the plane veered off course and flew south for several hours, for reasons that remain unknown. “Today the last search vessel has left the underwater search area,” the governments of Australia, China and Malaysia, the three countries that oversaw the search, said in a joint statement on Tuesday. “Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has not been located in the underwater search area in the southern Indian Ocean,” a zone of more than 46, 000 square miles. “Despite every effort using the best science available, technology, as well as modeling and advice from highly skilled professionals who are the best in their field, unfortunately, the search has not been able to locate the aircraft,” the statement said. “Accordingly, the underwater search for MH370 has been suspended. ” At a news conference in Sydney on Wednesday, Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said, “We grieve with the families of the victims and we share their deep disappointment that the plane has not been found. ” “There has been a massive search. It is an unprecedented search,” Mr. Turnbull added. “It has been conducted with the best advice over the areas that were identified as the most likely to find the location of the airplane. ” The decision drew sharp rebukes from relatives of the missing. “It is incomprehensible that they would give up right now,” a sobbing Grace Nathan, 28, whose mother, Anne Daisy, was on the flight, said in a telephone interview from Kuala Lumpur. “I can’t imagine living the rest of my life accepting that people just disappeared into thin air. ” Investigators have several theories about what happened. They believe that the plane ran out of fuel, and one theory holds that the pilots tried to make an emergency landing at sea. It has also been suggested that one or both pilots lost control of the aircraft, that one was a rogue pilot, or that the plane was hijacked. What investigators do know from radar and satellite communications data is that the plane made several turns, then flew south for five hours. That information led them to concentrate the search along a arc from which the plane most likely sent its last signal. The first phase of the search, lasting 52 days, was conducted from the air, covering 1. 7 million square miles and involving 334 search flights. Australia, China and Malaysia have said since July that the search would end if the plane were not found. China is involved because 153 of the passengers on the plane were Chinese. In December, investigators said they may have been looking too far south and recommended expanding the search zone. But the Australian government said that without more credible evidence on a specific location, the search, which cost a total of $150 million, would be called off this month. “We remain hopeful that new information will come to light and that at some point in the future the aircraft will be located,” the statement on Tuesday said. About 20 pieces of debris believed to be from the missing jet have been recovered, including a wing part, known as a flaperon, that was found on Réunion Island, east of Madagascar, in July 2015. That location, combined with analysis of ocean currents, supported the theory that the plane had crashed in the southern Indian Ocean. The end of the search appeared to dash the last hopes of victims’ relatives. “There have been so many similar incidents and people were always able to find something,” said Liu Jiani, whose grandparents, Chinese citizens, were on the plane. “Why has nothing been found?” | 1 |
Venezuela is currently in an economic collapse . Food shortages have driven the now 83% of Venezuelans that live in cities to grow their own produce as a means of survival. Socialist President Nicolás Maduro’s calls for “food sovereignty,” meaning that he wants urban people to start small farms and raise chickens in their homes in order to feed themselves, but his policies have only caused economic depravity, resulting in starvation and homelessness throughout the country. To add insult to injury, many believe these urban “ victory gardens ” will fail due to the lack of gardening skills urban dwellers possess.
Learn about the 7 Laws of Gardening Too Little Too Late? Venezuelans think Maduro’s strategy is a sorry excuse for a solution to solve the country’s dire food shortages and crippling inflation. Critics of Venezuelan economic policies have taken to social media to accuse government officials of downplaying the impoverished situation across the country.
#ThisIsVenezuela Urban farming in #Venezuela . Thanks to @NicolasMaduro . Image via @OvarioV pic.twitter.com/d2n6quZOt9
— Michael Welling (@WellingMichael) July 16, 2016
An increasingly common sight in Caracas, a picture posted to Twitter shows a man and dog sifting through trash for food with the caption “Urban Farming in Venezuela. Thanks to @Nicolas Maduro.” Many people think that Maduro is not fixing the problem but ignoring it altogether.
Another tweet shows a picture of a woman shopping inside a Venezuelan grocery store with the caption “#ThisIsVenezuela”, and the shelves are nearly empty.
#ThisIsVenezuela #TalkingDoesntWork #MoreAction #Venezuela #NadieSeRindeCarajo #Democracia #SacaLaBasura #MaduroPaFuera pic.twitter.com/vb9FP1oRz6
— Mariana Gordon (@MarianaGordon_) November 2, 2016
Others are enthusiastic about the plan. “If all communities began to cultivate, it would help to combat the high cost of living and food shortages,” said Luisana Galvis, 69, in a Reuters report . “If we sell and cultivate in our own home, nobody can take that away from us, and nobody is going to sell it to us. And so, we reduce the cost of living.”
In 3 months time, only 273 tons of food have been grown, and this falls far short of the 3,500 ton annual goal of Venezuelans to feed their country. Some seeds that the Venezuelans are most likely growing are those that are easy to cultivate .
‘An Impending Humanitarian Crisis’ This past week, lawmakers in Venezuela declared a “food emergency” after reports of widespread shortages in milk, meat, bread and produce.
Maduro blames an “economic war”, but many Venezuelans are condemning Maduro’s socialist economic policies for causing the inflation and subsequent market instability.
Phil Gunson , a member of the International Crisis Group based in Caracas, warns of an impending humanitarian crisis.
“At least one in 10 people is eating two meals a day or less. There isn’t starvation. We are not talking about famine,” says Gunson. “But we are talking about malnutrition, particularly in the case of children.”
With crime on the streets of Caracas at an all-time high, some are happy to be starting an indoor garden for the sake of staying away from thieves and violent crime. For Iraima Pacheco de Leandro, 54, a government opponent who was once kidnapped and held for ransom, farming is a great way to circumvent the chaos, but it may not be a long-term solution for Venezuela’s economic crisis. Her terrace is filled with vegetables as a measure of self-suffiiciency, but she still thinks that “agriculture should not be a solution,” and the real problem lies in government policy and the inflated markets they created.
This information has been made available by Ready Nutrition
Originally published November 4th, 2016 How Would You Survive Hyperinflation in Venezuela? Stockpiling of Food Banned in Venezuela Venezuela: A Prepper’s Nightmare Come to Life Bartering to Eat: How People on the Streets of Venezuela are This Is What a Real-Life Economic Collapse Looks Like | 0 |
On Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily, Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney told SiriusXM host Alex Marlow he was deeply concerned about the “Obama holdovers” that are “almost entirely populating” the Trump administration at senior levels. [Gaffney expressed dismay at the combination of these holdovers, globalists President Trump has brought into the White House, plus “a group of establishment Republicans in leadership positions, particularly on the Hill, who align pretty much with those liberal Democrats. ” “It’s a formula for this president to be foiled at every turn, even if he’s still committed to and pursuing assiduously his agenda,” Gaffney warned. “If he starts trimming sails, or worse yet throwing ballast out of the balloon all of the things that brought him into office, it will never appease this assorted group of adversaries. I think it will simply reinforce their conviction that if they hang tough, and they hang together, they will be able to keep the swamp full of toxic waste and prevent him from draining it, let alone moving the country forward as he promised to do in the 2016 election. ” He suggested the ideas which propelled Trump to victory in 2016 are the glue that holds his unusual coalition of voters together across partisan lines, and also help to explain “why Breitbart connects so well with so many people. ” “It isn’t just on the right,” he noted. “I think it’s that Trump base, which as you know better than anybody, Alex, wound up being an awful lot of Democrats who were sick to the teeth of what their party has become: an party. ” “I would argue that the thing that brings us together, that brought Donald Trump to the White House as much as anything, was common sense. I think that’s what you serve up in very substantial doses on Breitbart Radio, and it’s a privilege to be able to contribute to that,” said Gaffney. Asked to grade President Trump’s first 100 Days from a national security perspective, Gaffney said “there are some points that are encouraging. ” “I’m very happy with a lot of his rhetoric, notably about restoring American policy to the practice of peace through strength, which my old boss Ronald Reagan of course espoused. I like the fact that he has set his sights on rebuilding our military, ensuring that our military deterrent is once again ‘top of the pack,’ as he put it, that we have a missile defense for example. I think some of the uses of power that he has conducted have also helped give credibility to those rhetorical statements,” he elaborated. “That’s on the plus side, Alex. On the negative side, I have to say I am very troubled that he is not pursuing what he promised — as I think he must — in regards to one particularly dangerous aspect of the national security picture, and of course that’s the phenomenon he’s called ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ I call it sharia supremacism, but whatever term you prefer, it is very much with us,” he continued. “The thing that is most alarming to me, which causes my grade to be considerably lower than it might otherwise be — maybe a C, ? — is the appointment of people to his national security team who do not get the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorism. In fact, some of them refuse even to call it that, which is evidence of a disconnect with this president that I think is not only a problem, but it’s undermining his effectiveness in a very critical space,” he said. Gaffney agreed with Marlow that the specter of “climate change” obsession still hangs over the national security apparatus, describing it as “a priority for Ivanka Trump and apparently for Jared Kushner, who are playing outsize roles in all aspects of the administration’s it seems. ” “There is no question that many of the people that are either holdovers from the previous administration, or that have been brought in by this new administration, have not simply paid lip service to the Obama agenda on national security — whether it’s calling radical Islamic supremacism what they used as a euphemism, ‘violent extremism,’ which really in a way meant that they could justify being as worried about returning veterans and Tea Party activists and constitutionalists as they were about Islamists — on the one hand, and then on the other there’s this idea that really the problem that we are confronting is actually climate change, not live human beings seeking our destruction. I think this is, again, completely at odds with common sense and the national security interests of the United States,” he warned. Marlow asked if the Trump administration is “holding Iran accountable for their pursuit of nuclear weapons adequately at this point. ” “This is a classic example of what we’ve just been talking about in the abstract,” Gaffney replied. “You had Obama holdovers who were deeply involved in bringing this disastrous deal — the president was absolutely right, it is arguably the worst deal ever negotiated, in fact it isn’t even a deal, nobody signed this thing — but it was brought to him by people who are still staffing his administration. One of them, I believe, was instrumental in getting the State Department last week to certify that the Iranians are complying with this deal. ” “First of all, that’s not true,” he objected. “Second of all, even if they were, it would still mean they could be beavering away at a nuclear weapon, and they are. ” “The president was furious, I’m told, when he discovered the State Department had done this,” Gaffney revealed. “It shouldn’t come as a surprise, given who’s staffing most of it below Rex Tillerson’s level. But he’s directed, apparently, Rex Tillerson to muster out the next day, Wednesday of last week, and deliver personally a statement essentially denouncing the Iranians both for the nuclear deal and for terrorism, and much much more — properly so. ” “There is a certain incoherence, I think it’s fair to say, that emerged in part because people who lack common sense are still helping to guide his policy, and he’s obliged to try to correct it. This is no way to run a government,” he declared. “I hope he will clean house at long last, both with respect to this odious deal, but also more generally, and bring in people who supported him in the campaign, who get national security the way I think he does — certainly the way he ran on, his platform of peace through strength. By so doing, I think we have a shot at turning this thing around. If we don’t get those changes, though, the grade is going to be a lot worse in the second hundred days, that’s for sure,” he said. Gaffney said he hoped legislators briefed by the White House on North Korea would seize the opportunity to “hear what I think is the single most ominous threat from North Korea, bar none. ” “It’s not gotten a lot of attention. Jim Woolsey, the former director of Central Intelligence under Bill Clinton, Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, among others have been warning for a long time that what the North Koreans have almost certainly done — and if they haven’t, they could at any moment — is place aboard one of their two satellites now in orbit, or future ones, a small nuclear weapon that is optimized to create something called electromagnetic pulse,” he said. “If a weapon like that were detonated over the United States — and those satellites overfly it all the time — it would be the end of our electric grid, and our nation,” he predicted. “That threat must be neutralized, Alex. I believe, I hope that’s what the administration is going to talk to them about on the Hill today and in the White House complex. Also, we need to protect the electric grid against these sorts of threats. ” Gaffney expressed gratitude to Breitbart News for “the emphasis it has placed on doing just that. ” He expected the congressional briefings on North Korea to include information about “their ballistic missile program, and about their nuclear weapons testing, and about their belligerent statements, and perhaps about the pathology of this lunatic who runs the country, and those sorts of things. ” “That’s all old news,” he noted. “I don’t know that if that’s all that is described, it will be that useful an exercise. But if, as I pray, these legislators will be told about the sorts of threats that I’ve just described, it will I hope really concentrate the minds and support what the president’s trying to do to bring the North Koreans to heel. ” Gaffney added that if China is “enabling the North Korean threat” instead of helping us contain it, “we’re going to have to do it ourselves. ” “It would start, in my judgment, with neutralizing those satellites now overhead, and ensuring there aren’t new ones put up there that could have this kind of threat aboard them,” he advised. He noted China certainly could be helpful if it wanted to. “They could make all the difference in the world. If they say it’s over for Kim it’s over. But I see no evidence that they intend to do that,” he said. Gaffney pointed out that the missile canisters displayed by North Korea in recent military parades “looked an awful lot like Chinese canisters, and they were aboard that were provided by the Chinese. ” “Those are tangible signs that the Chinese think a more dangerous North Korea — one that worries us, worries us to the point where we might give them concessions, or at least give concessions to North Korea to prop up this client state of theirs — this is a practice, this is a policy that is being deliberately pursued by the Chinese, and has been for years,” he charged. “I don’t think they are on our side. Could they be? Yes. I don’t see evidence of them doing it just yet,” Gaffney said. “I think that the Chinese are pursuing a strategy which has, at its core, displacing the United States as a global power, certainly in their region of the world, but I think it’s really worldwide. ” “I think that having strong and dangerous clients like North Korea, and frankly building bases around the world, and fortifying new islands they’re creating in the South China Sea, and massing their military for future global operations are all signs that is where they’re headed. I think their policy toward North Korea is part of that larger strategic design,” he judged. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. | 1 |
LONDON — Britain’s political crisis was set aside, at least temporarily, on Friday as leaders made their way to France to attend commemorations for the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. Still, contenders to replace Prime Minister David Cameron are beginning to firm up the groundwork for their campaigns, with Michael Gove making a speech a day after throwing his hat in the ring. Here’s your daily “Brexit” briefing. • Michael Gove, whose surprise entrance into the race for Conservative Party leader (and prime minister) helped knock Boris Johnson out of the contest, said on Friday that while he lacked charisma, he could deliver change. Challengers to Mr. Gove, including former Defense Secretary Liam Fox, have also been making their cases. Ken Clarke, a former chancellor of the Exchequer, said Mr. Gove should stand aside. Read our rundown of the contenders to be Britain’s next leader. • Mr. Cameron and the Labour Party’s embattled leader, Jeremy Corbyn, attended commemorations for the Battle of the Somme. Members of the royal family will be there as well. Smaller ceremonies are taking place across the country. • George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, met with business leaders in Manchester. And John McDonnell, the Labour Party’s shadow chancellor, spoke to a business audience in London. • Mr. Gove’s candidacy turned the race on its head. Several British newspapers have accounts of how that happened. The BBC’s political editor runs through conspiracy theories about Thursday’s events. The Daily Mail has thrown its weight behind the oddsmakers’ favorite, Home Secretary Theresa May. • Mr. Johnson, once the favorite, said on Thursday he would not run a Conservative stalwart says he has “ripped the party apart. ” My colleague Sarah Lyall writes that Mr. Johnson was done in by his own hubris and lack of preparation. A piece in our section likens the former London mayor to someone who would “order a lavish meal and the best wine on the menu and then walk out. ” • Whither London? It’s been only a week since the referendum, and already European cities are jockeying to lure away businesses. My colleague James B. Stewart ranks the alternatives. • Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister, argues that Britain is “in peril” and pleads for the Conservatives to conduct their leadership election with “genuine patriotic regard. ” • Slovakia takes over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union today. Why is that interesting? It will hand off to Malta, which in July 2017 was supposed to hand off to . .. Britain. People on the Continent aren’t happy, and there are reports that Britain wants to hand off the presidency anyway. • Mr. Osborne abandoned a pledge to return to a budget surplus by 2020. He and his party have long argued that austerity was necessary in order to restore health to Britain’s public finances. • The pound fell sharply against the dollar when Mark J. Carney, the governor of Britain’s central bank, said on Thursday that the bank may need to cut interest rates, but the currency recovered somewhat. British and Continental European stocks were headed for a fourth straight day of gains. Jeff Sommer writes that past crises give clues that markets will recover their losses after the announcement of the referendum result. • Standard Poor’s lowered its rating on European Union debt, citing the uncertainty after the British referendum results. There will be more Brexit news to come. Keep checking back for updates. | 1 |
Saakashvili reveals age-long friendship with Trump 10.11.2016 Mikheil Saakashvili reported that he had known Donald Trump for many years, was a friend of him and called to be careful. As he wrote on his Facebook, 'I've known him for over 20 years, we are friends. I predicted this cautiously. It's a strong personality with unpredictable policy. We should be more careful and organized than ever'.Donald Trump has won the US presidential elections. Mikheil Saakashvili was a president himself in Georgia. And resigned as a Governor of the Odessa region the other day. It should be recollected that the Ukrainian authorities tried to help the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton at these elections. In summer the Ukrainian Anti-Corruption Bureau opened investigation against ex-chairman of Trump's presidential campaign Paul Manafort who had allegedly got some millions dollars from former ruling Party of Regions. Petro Poroshenko in his turn hoped that whoever came to power in the US after elections, Kiev would still get support.Poroshenko's Administration also sent a request for a meeting with Trump at the UN General Assembly during Poroshenko's being in New York. However, Trump's representatives ignored the request. Pravda.Ru | 0 |
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At the United Nations this past week, 123 nations voted to commence negotiations next year on a new treaty to prohibit the possession of nuclear weapons. Despite President Obama’s own words in his 2009 pledge to seek the security of a world free of nuclear weapons, the U.S. voted “no” and led the opposition to this treaty.
Rather than meet our obligations under international law, the U.S has proposed by stark contrast to begin a new nuclear arms race spending $1 trillion over the next 30 years to “upgrade” every aspect our nuclear weapons programs. A jobs program to end humanity. Each of the nuclear nations is expected to do the same in rebuilding their weapons programs continuing the arms race for generations to come—or until planetary thermonuclear murder, whichever comes first.
The myth of deterrence is the guise for this effort when in fact deterrence is the principle driver of the arms race. For every additional weapon my adversary has, I need two and so on and so on to our global arsenals of 15,500 weapons.
Fed up with this inaction and doublespeak, the non-nuclear nations of the world have joined the ongoing efforts of the world’s NGO, health and religious communities in demanding an end to the madness. Led by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)—a global partnership of 440 partners in 98 countries—along with the International Red Cross, the world’s health associations representing more than 17 million health professionals worldwide, the Catholic Church and World Council of Churches, are all calling for a treaty to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.
The effort to ban nuclear weapons has several parallels to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines led by Jody Williams, recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. This effort was dismissed and called utopian by most governments and militaries of the world when it was launched by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in 1992; then it succeeded in 1997 through partnerships, public imagination and political pressure resulting in the ultimate political will. The nuclear ban movement has been vigorously fought against by the nuclear nations arrogantly persisting in possessing those horrific weapons and pressuring members of their alliances to hold the line.
Nuclear weapons present the greatest public health and existential threat to our survival every moment of every day. Yet the United States and world nuclear nations stand in breach of the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which commits these nations to work in good faith to end the arms race and to achieve nuclear disarmament. Forty- eight years later the efforts of the nuclear nations toward this goal are not evident and the state of the world is as dangerous as it was during the height of the Cold War.
This year’s presidential campaign has once again done little to focus on the dangers of nuclear weapons, looking instead at who has the temperament to have their finger on the button with absolutely no indication of any understanding of the consequences to all of humanity by the use of these weapons even on a very small scale. In addition to tensions between Russia and the U.S. in Ukraine and Syria, there is a real danger of nuclear war in South Asia, which could kill more than two billion people from the use of “just” 100 Hiroshima-size weapons.
Some of rest of the world is finally standing up to this threat to their survival and that of the planet. They are taking matters into their own hands and refusing to be held hostage by the nuclear nations. They will no longer be bullied into sitting back and waiting for the nuclear states to make good on empty promises.
Unfortunately these weapons and control systems are imperfect. During the Cold War there were many instances where the world came perilously close to nuclear war. It is a matter of sheer luck that this scenario did not come to pass by design or accident. Our luck will not hold out forever. Luck is not a security policy. From a medical and public health stance, our current evidence-based understanding of what nuclear weapons can actually do means any argument for continued possession of these weapons by anyone in untenable and defies logic. There is absolutely no reasonable or adequate medical response to nuclear war.
As with any public health threat from Zika, to Ebola, Polio, HIV, prevention is the goal. The global threat from nuclear weapons is no different. The only way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons is to ban and eliminate them. Our future depends upon this.
President Kennedy speaking on nuclear weapons before the U.N. Security Council in September 1961 said, “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.” Our children’s children will look back and rightly ask why we–the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons–remained on the wrong side of history when it came to abolishing nuclear weapons. | 0 |
West Shamelessly Whitewashing Terrorist Counterattack on Aleppo
They're just your friendly neighborhood head-choppers being victimized by Russia Originally appeared at New Eastern Outlook
Militants led by designated terrorist organisation, Jabhat Al Nusra, now obliquely referred to by the Western media as “Jabhat Fateh al-Sham,” has spearheaded another attempt to disrupt security operations against militants trapped in Syria’s norther city of Aleppo.
Despite what is clearly a terrorist assault employing indiscriminate artillery fire provided by Grad rocket systems on an urban center and the use of suicide bombings employing vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIED), Western media organisations are attempting to depict the assault as a “rebel counter-attack” meant to “break” what it is depicting as a “siege” by Syria’s own military forces.
Reuters in their article, “ Syrian rebels launch Aleppo counter-attack to break siege ,” would claim:
It is particularly interesting to see Reuters attempt to depict the assault as a “rebel” operation, despite being unable to name a single “rebel” group, and admitting the leading role designated foreign terrorist organisation Jabhat Al Nusra is playing as well as the use of clearly terrorist tactics being employed.
Reuters continues by admitting much further down in its article that:
Fateh al-Sham played a big part in a rebel attack in July that managed to break the government siege on eastern Aleppo for several weeks before it was reimposed.
Abu Youssef al-Mouhajir, an official from the powerful Ahrar al-Sham Islamist group, said the extent of cooperation between the different rebel factions was unusual, and that the largest axis of attack was on the western edge of the city.
Reuters is all but admitting that even the so-called “rebels” it attempts to credit the assault with are operating not under the banner of the “Free Syrian Army,” but ultimately under the banner of Jabhat Al Nusra, quite literally Al Qaeda in Syria.
Reuters concedes that this “complicates” US foreign policy in Syria, claiming that heavier weapons cannot be passed on to “rebels” in fear that they would immediately fall into the hands of terrorist groups “rebels” are clearly operating under. Reuters, however, never explains why any weapons at all would be provided to “rebel” groups so clearly and transparently in league with Jabhat Al Nusra in the first place.
Finally, Reuters claims:
Grad rockets were launched at Aleppo’s Nairab air base before the assault began said Zakaria Malahiji, head of the political office of the Aleppo-based Fastaqim rebel group, adding that it was going to be “a big battle”.
The Observatory also said that Grad surface-to-surface rockets had struck locations around the Hmeimim air base, near Latakia.
Grad rockets are an effective weapon in combat on open terrain. In the confined urban environment of Aleppo, they are an indiscriminate weapon the West, its media and its human rights advocates have little trouble pointing out their use constitutes a war crime, but only when used by forces of nations the West seeks to undermine and ultimately overthrow. No mention of their indiscriminate, inappropriate nature when used in urban environments is made when used by forces backed by Western interests.
Also, Reuters’ inadvertently mentions the “rebel” group Fastaqim in the closing paragraphs of its report, a faction operating under the Aleppo-based Fatah Halab (Aleppo Conquest) coalition. It was revealed by the West’s own rights advocacy group, Amnesty International, in a post titled, “ Syria: armed opposition group committing war crimes in Aleppo – new evidence ,” that:
The Aleppo Conquest armed groups may have used chemical weapons, as well as ‘hell cannon’ gas canister munitions.
Armed groups surrounding the predominantly Kurdish Sheikh Maqsoud district of Aleppo city have repeatedly carried out indiscriminate attacks – possibly including with chemical weapons – that have struck civilian homes, markets and mosques, killing and injuring civilians, and have displayed a shameful disregard for human life, said Amnesty International today.
Indeed, even groups described as “rebels” by the Western media, are guilty of serial offences that clearly make them terrorists, not “rebels.” The fact that this information is omitted from Reuters’ reports and the nature of these groups’ relationship with Al Qaeda affiliates made as intentionally nebulous as possible, reveals a common theme that has run through Western coverage of the Syrian conflict since it began; a concerted effort to conceal the true terroristic nature of so-called “rebels” in a bid to legitimize the illegitimate, and defend the indefensible. | 0 |
After an extraordinarily contentious election, crucial elements of the rules that determine how Americans vote will be under assault from conservatives and facing legal challenges heading toward the Supreme Court as Donald J. Trump prepares to become president. Mr. Trump’s claims of a “rigged” election — made before he won — and his false declaration after his victory that “millions of people” had voted illegally for Hillary Clinton made headlines. They also amplified longstanding Republican claims that rampant voter fraud justified a welter of state laws making it more difficult to register and vote. Democrats say the laws are not about combating fraud but about suppressing the vote of minorities and other constituencies. Mr. Trump will have enormous power to shape future policy on voting. “The last time we had a national government that was as hostile to the protection of minority voting rights as we may have with this president was probably near the end of the first Reconstruction” after the Civil War, said Pamela S. Karlan, a Stanford University law professor, who was a deputy assistant attorney general under President Obama until 2015. “There are still strong Republican protectors and champions of voting rights,” she said. “But they don’t seem to have the whip hand in their own party. ” Such concerns could prove overstated. Beyond warnings of fraud, Mr. Trump has offered little specific about his views on voting rights. Four Trump transition officials did not reply to emailed requests for comment. One conservative scholar of election law, Hans A. von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, called the worries “way overboard. ” “The emphasis may be a little different,” he said. “But this idea that when Republicans come in, they’re suddenly going to stop enforcing the Voting Rights Act and other laws — the evidence doesn’t bear it out. ” Mr. Trump will take office at a pivotal moment in a battle over the rules governing voting and elections, one in which advocates seemed to be gaining an upper hand. Several potentially decisive federal court rulings on voting rules and redistricting, most favoring advocates, now appear bound for a Supreme Court whose ideological balance is in Mr. Trump’s hands. Enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a linchpin of some of those cases, will fall to a Justice Department whose likely attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, is viewed with deep suspicion by civil rights advocates. One Trump adviser, Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, is among the most aggressive national crusaders for voting restrictions. Entering a meeting with Mr. Trump last week, Mr. Kobach was photographed carrying a sheaf of policy recommendations. The visible text proposed to “Draft Amendments to the National Voter” — an apparent reference to the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, the “motor voter” law that has come under sharp attack from Republicans. The law prohibits states from purging voters from the rolls for technical reasons like moving within a district, and imposes a waiting period and other requirements to remove voters. Conservatives say the requirements keep ineligible voters on the rolls and promote fraud. Democrats say the law prevents partisan purges of poor and minority voters. Mr. Kobach, who once suggested that Mr. Obama was plotting to replace American voters with legalized immigrants, is the leading advocate of requiring everyone to present proof of citizenship when registering to vote instead of swearing an oath. Critics say the poor are far less likely to have those documents, and the costs of obtaining them essentially amount to a poll tax, which has long been unconstitutional. But some actions that advocates call regressive actually would improve election integrity and efficiency, Mr. von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation said. Requiring citizenship documents, he argued, would reduce fraud. And he said that Mr. Obama’s Justice Department has failed to enforce the part of the law that requires election officials to cull voter lists of people who have died or moved. A Justice Department under Mr. Trump is likely to press on both those fronts, he said. In general, he noted, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department has filed far fewer lawsuits to enforce the Voting Rights Act than the department under President George W. Bush, where Mr. von Spakovsky worked on civil rights cases. “They’ve been sitting on their rumps for eight years,” he said. Others say the department’s Civil Rights Division in the Bush era was sometimes a hostile environment — an inspector general’s report noted that one leader compared lawyers to mold spores — and that lawsuits, while fewer in number, have had national rather than local impacts. Mr. Trump’s greatest influence over election policy may lie in the Supreme Court, where he has pledged to nominate a reliable conservative to the seat vacated by Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February. At least two major voting lawsuits against the Texas and North Carolina state governments seem likely to be appealed to the court. In both, federal courts of appeals this summer voided or modified Republican laws requiring voters to produce photo IDs, saying they disproportionately reduced minorities’ turnout. The court has upheld photo ID requirements before. But the new cases marshal far more evidence of their outsize effect on minority voters. The North Carolina ruling concluded that the state intentionally imposed restrictive rules “with almost surgical precision” to suppress voters. Whether the Supreme Court will agree is an open question. Many legal experts say the eight justices appear evenly split over whether the Texas and North Carolina laws violate the Voting Rights Act or the Constitution. Should the cases be heard after a Trump nominee is approved, legal analysts agree, the chance that the laws will be reinstated will markedly increase. “If it is someone whose stance is like Justice Scalia, you should expect a reversal” of the appeals courts, said Ellen D. Katz, a former Justice Department lawyer and a law professor at the University of Michigan. “Every signal they’ve given us to date is that they would overturn the decisions. ” Yet some analysts are less certain. In recent cases, for example, courts have broadly agreed that ID laws must be written so that people who cannot reasonably obtain required identification cards still get an opportunity to vote. “Courts are going to insist on a safety net” for voters without proper IDs, said Edward B. Foley, a professor and director of the Election Law Project at Ohio State University’s law school. “Even conservative appeals judges are buying into that. ” The Supreme Court also seems certain to address a second important question: whether majority parties in state and local governments can gerrymander political maps during redistricting, redrawing boundaries in ways that solidify their hold on power. Gerrymandering to dilute minority voters’ power has long been illegal. But while justices have said partisan gerrymandering is wrong, they have never decided whether they can outlaw it. Three partisan gerrymandering cases are moving toward hearings in a Supreme Court that some experts say could be poised to rein in the tactic, even with a Trump appointee. Other policy questions remain unanswered, Professor Katz and others said, including whether the Justice Department will pursue voting rights lawsuits that the Obama administration started or joined. Nor is it clear how vigorously it will enforce Voting Rights Act clauses that remain. The 2013 ruling ended the department’s power to oversee voting and election rules in jurisdictions with histories of racial bias. Advocacy groups and pro bono lawyers have assumed some of those watchdog duties. But whether the agency will enforce remaining clauses of the law by bringing or joining lawsuits like those in the Texas and North Carolina cases is unknown. “The consequences here will be in what they don’t do as well as what they affirmatively do,” Professor Katz said. Should enforcement taper off, she said, “it’s not clear that the private bar can step up and do all the things the Justice Department has been doing. ” Still, officials at organizations said they hoped to build a bipartisan consensus on issues like automatic voter registration and restoring voting rights to where some Republicans support reforms. Beyond that, they said, they will regroup and decide what causes are most important. One leading organization, Common Cause, will renew efforts to block any resurgence of state or federal laws making registration or voting more difficult. “There’s a concern at the federal level that there could be the introduction of laws to make photo IDs a national requirement, or to require documentary proof of citizenship at registration,” said Allegra Chapman, the group’s director of voting and elections. It is a sharp turnabout from the scenario most expected would unfold under a Clinton presidency. “What’s the phrase? ‘These are the times that try men’s souls,’” said Lloyd Leonard, director for advocacy at the League of Women Voters in Washington. “We’ll be playing defense in a number of areas. ” | 1 |
3709 Views November 15, 2016 25 Comments SITREPs Scott
First, I wish to congratulate the president elect of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump. I can only imagine what this gentleman has gone through in this election cycle and this does not address the vitriol poured on his wife and children during the media attack, and that is exactly what it was and is, a concerted and ongoing news media and blog attack on Mr. Trump and his entire family.
With Mr. Trump’s stunning, in view of The Media and the current power structure in USA, victory in the election the taps were opened to maximum output and the vitriol and attacks intensified dramatically. In the words of one commenter I know, with Mr. Trump’s election ‘the light was suddenly turned on in a dirty kitchen and the cockroaches scattered in all directions’. In my opinion that is a pretty good analogy for the cockroaches infesting the government in USA and EU et al are screaming bloody murder and calling Mr. Trump every name in the book and whining about the end of the world as they knew it. That, my friends, is an even better analogy, ‘the end of the world as they knew it’.
I’ve been on this rock for a long time. I grew up and was educated in a different time that seems eons from today. I left home the moment I turned eighteen, after all I knew far more about the world and life than that foolish old man who raised me, who kept me fed well and warm in winter and who had no qualms about knocking the puppy snot out of my when I deserved it which was not infrequent. We did not lock our doors when we left home for Church, for shopping and other errands and in fact we did not have a key for the back door. No one in the eighteen years I lived in that farmhouse ever bothered anything. We left the tractors in the fields at day’s end, all of us riding back to the barn on one tractor. No one bothered the machines, no one stole diesel or gas from any of them. Life in USA was different then and that life is well remembered by many Americans.
In the ensuing time since those, in retrospect, peaceful and bucolic years things in US have changed a bit. I was gone for most of those years, returning off and on as was possible. Through the late sixties and through the seventies I was gone enough to see some slight changes whenever I returned but nothing to worry about. The turmoil in DC and the presidency seemed to have no great affect on the lives of most of the populace and the economy was humming along nicely.
The era of the 80’s ushered in the twelve years of Republican dominance in the White House. I was in the same situation, gone most of the time but back just enough to not be worried about the culture and economy of my country, USA. This changed in the nineties and as I began to spend more time ‘home’ I began to see worrying changes in the general populace along the east and west coasts.
The defining occurrence of that era was the (not so) sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, this same Soviet Union that had instituted the Pax Rossiya in all of eastern Europe after the second war which was in essence simply a continuance of the first war, The War to End All Wars. This Pax Rossiya was in many instances brutal especially in the beginning, as the populaces were cleansed of their propensity of joining every foray in to Russia since Napoleon’s time, in the second war sending tens of thousands of willing volunteers to fight The Godless Russians. However, the Soviet Union did give Europe the longest stretch of unbroken peace in European history, from 1945 (technically) through 1990. Yes yes, there were troubles in eastern Germany in the early ’50’s, Hungary in the mid ’50’s and Poland was from time to time a concern but in essence peace reigned regardless of the two armed forces facing each other at the borders, both armed to the teeth with the western forces strongly backed by the US Army and the eastern forces heavily backed and reinforced by the Soviet Army.
Through all those years I believed, I believed in the truth and righteousness of what I was taught at home and school and Church, that America was the shining light, the end all and be all of peace, prosperity and democracy, that the Soviet Union and her people were a massive and deadly threat to everything we believed in and would attack us and conquer us if given half a chance.
But a crack had appeared in that belief in the late 80’s. I began to understand through interaction with these supposedly Godless Communists that some of these people were exactly like me, patriotic and believing in their cause and their country and not a one of them that I met, in peaceful actions or sometimes not so peaceful actions, ever mentioned conquering Europe or destroying America. In actual fact I found them to be as religious as I was and am, they had no ingrained hatred of USA and many of them admired America and Americans as opposed to everything I was taught about these strange people who spoke an incomprehensible language and many of whom took the trouble to learn what was to them an equally incomprehensible language, English.
The crack widened as the wars started again in Europe after the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The breakup of Yugoslavia was the beginning of these wars and they are ongoing. When Hillary Diane Rodham assumed the de facto presidency in 1993 a new agenda was evident both in USA and American interaction with The World.
At the same time American culture and economy, which had slowly begun to decline in the late eighties and early nineties, accelerated that decline and a new phrase, Politically Correct, began to be heard more and more often. I noticed in my increasing returns to US that the things I and my friends used to laugh and joke about were suddenly not allowed. I found that I was supposed to watch what I say and how I spoke, in essence I was supposed to be ‘Politically Correct’ in my speech and actions, that square was round and nothing was black and white, everything was gray. People that I had known for years, the tradesmen and skilled workers who did so well before, were now worried and watching their small businesses and trades decline at ever increasing speed. Ever increasing Government oversight and regulations began to strangle their businesses and trades, backed up with the constant threat of Government action against them if they did not do as told. Do as told? Since when is Washington my/our nanny?
During her term as president Hillary Diane Rodham put her stamp on Department of State, that entity that to a great extent promulgated US foreign policy. She packed that bureaucracy with her minions and laid the base for power for when she was no longer president. She was appointed Secretary of State in 2009, having spent the previous eight or so years as a senator from New York and working mightily to further infest DoS with her minions. And the wars started. All along the south coast of the Mediterranean Sea starting with the deposing and murder of Qaddafi she worked her magic, attacking Libya, attempting to destroy Egypt, destroying Syria and instrumenting the ongoing mess in Ukraine.
Ukraine. Herein is the problem concerning me and mine. The coup d’etat in Kiev in February of 2014 was planned and executed by Hillary Diane Rodham. The actual prosecution of that coup d’etat was by the sitting US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, with a great deal of the groundwork performed by the previous ambassador, John Teft (who then was appointed ambassador to Russia where he attempted, and failed, in a plan for ‘regime change’ in Russia).
Ukraine in and of itself meant and means nothing to Hillary Diane Rodham although I have no doubts she is quite happy to have taken a shot at Russia as a consequence of the coup. The prize for all the turmoil and blood in Kiev was Krimean Peninsula and the crown jewel, Sevastopol. When the citizens of The Autonomous Republic of Krimea and the Federal City of Sevastopol said ‘oh hell no’ to the coup installed Kiev government after some pretty serious threats from same, armed up and closed both the peninsula and City, Clinton’s screams could be heard on Mars. When dual referendums were held in Krimea and Sevastopol as to the future of both entities and the vote was a unanimous decision to ‘leave’ Ukraine her screams were heard light years from our little galaxy. It is my understanding that she was apoplectic when both The Autonomous Republic of Krimea and the Federal City of Sevastopol asked to be and were accepted back in to Russia after the referendums, thereby negating Krushchov’s illegal ‘gift’ of Krimea and Sevastopol to administration of the Ukraine SSR.
Her dreams of taking Krimea and Sevastopol, if successful, would have put a massive US Navy base in Sevastopol and turned all of Krimea in to an armed camp with enough missiles to negate a significant portion of Russia’s nuclear deterrent and to put a fair sized portion of Russia in point blank range of US armed forces. All of the sanctions piled on Russia since late March of 2014 are because President V V Putin of Russia, and Krimea and Sevastopol, did not do as she expected and demanded and refused to listen to her. As an aside it’s not too many decades in the past when such an open attack via ‘sanctions’ on a country would have brought a note delivered by the Ambassador of same with a declaration of war.
Now we are two years and nine months after the coup in Kiev. The ongoing war, read attempted regime change, in Syria is coming to a head and with Russia invited in to help the legally elected head of Syria the tide is turning to Dr. Assad’s and the Syrian populace’s favor. Any and all actions by the US Military and soldiers therein are illegal and constitute numerous felonies for each and every one of them, private to general, and every politician who has or had anything to do with that effort. I won’t even mention Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Ukraine, Kosovo and Bosnia and the hundreds of thousands of deaths involved.
Mr. Trump with his election victory has inherited a seething cauldron of a mess that will make the labors of Hercules seem but a flower pot weeding task in comparison. I have no doubts that he is well aware of the mess he is stepping in to as I have no doubts he will clean at least some of this mess, hence the cockroaches running for cover. Four years will surely not be enough and possibly eight years will not suffice either, but I sincerely wish him the best in his efforts. As for EU, I used to think that Merkel, Golland, Blair et al were in total subservience to US due to secrets Langley knows of them. I no longer think that, I think that all of them were and are more than willing accomplices in the continuous efforts to undermine and destroy Russia, in essence ‘once and for all’. They have failed and their careers are now over as is Hillary Diane Rodham’s career. She will be relegated to the trash heap of history along with the rest of them.
As for me, the facade collapsed long ago. I am well aware of what did happen and what is happening now. I am American and loyal to my America, the America of the times I grew up in, the time when I was proud of America. I have no doubts that with time America will return to what she was and should be and I will be proud of America again. However, I am happy where I live now. We don’t lock our doors when we leave for Church or errands and such. I can and have left our car outside the walls unlocked and no one touched it. This is a Navy town and we are proud of our sailors, and the soldiers and Marines based here. They are in uniform in public always and everywhere. Do you see that in US or Europe today? And the silence here at night and dawn is deafening. That is what is known as ‘peace and calm’.
I think the defining moment of my life here, in Russia, was two years ago. I had been to US, not because I wanted to go but because I had to go to take care of some loose ends and it was during that trip that I met Saker face to face. On my return the young Starshi Lutanant in Border Control looked at my US passport and then at my brand new blue Russian Residency passport. He went through every page of the Russian passport and examined my propeeska stamp with a looking glass to make sure it was real and wet stamped. He then smiled, handed both documents back to me and said “Welcome home, (my rank). Enjoy your flight to Sevastopol.” Would that I was welcomed that same way in America when I arrived. I wasn’t.
Thank you for your time,
Auslander
Author Never The Last One https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZGCY8KK
An Incident On Simonka https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01ERKH3IU | 0 |
Meanwhile Hillary Clinton is at home sleeping
Steve Watson Prison Planet.com October 27, 2016
GOP nominee Donald Trump took time out of a relentless campaign schedule Wednesday to spend around an hour opening a new hotel, prompting one CNN reporter to accuse Trump of “taking time out of swing states.” Meanwhile Hillary Clinton is again nowhere to be seen.
CNN’s Dana Bash suggested that Trump should be more concerned with campaigning in swing states, yet Trump had three campaign stops scheduled for the same day. Dana Bash: Is your DC hotel opening free advertising?Donald Trump: “No, not at all” https://t.co/6OZtrfIwim https://t.co/9HHqooom8r
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) October 26, 2016
“So to people who say you’re taking time out of swing states to go do this, you say?” Bash asked.
“I say the following: You have been covering me for the last — long time. I did yesterday eight stops and three major speeches, and I’ve been doing this for weeks straight,” Trump responded.
“For you to ask me that question is actually very insulting because Hillary Clinton does one stop and then she goes home and sleeps. And yet you’ll ask me that question. I think that’s a very rude question, to be honest with you.” Trump exclaimed.
Trump added that the opening of the hotel also served to prove a point that he can get things built under budget and ahead of schedule, suggesting that the country needs to be able to follow suit.
While CNN has continuously run defense for Hillary Clinton amid a myriad of scandals, and even rigged its own polls to suggest she won the debates, the network has been forced to admit that Hillary is running an extremely light campaign schedule.
Last month, for example, Hillary went six days without an event except for a short speech she gave in Orlando, Florida.
And in August, Hillary took seven of the first 14 days of the month off and even went four days without a single campaign appearance.
“Her speeches are so short – they don’t last long, they’re like 10 minutes and ‘let’s get out of here,’” Donald Trump said about her schedule. “Go back home and go to sleep.” This article was posted: Thursday, October 27, 2016 at 8:12 am Share this article | 0 |
OAKLAND, Calif. — The Golden State Warriors were practicing Sunday when they learned that one of their most important pieces would be absent from Game 5 of the N. B. A. finals on Monday. Coach Steve Kerr approached Draymond Green, the team’s forward, and told him that he had been suspended. “He’s disappointed,” Kerr said. The N. B. A. announced Sunday that the league had retroactively assessed Green with a foul for striking the Cleveland Cavaliers’ LeBron James in the groin in the fourth quarter of the Warriors’ Game 4 victory on Friday, triggering an automatic suspension, per league rules. A foul is less severe than a which results in an automatic ejection. However, four flagrant foul “points” in the postseason (two points for a one point for a ) result in a suspension. Green, who has had trouble keeping his appendages to himself in recent weeks, already had three. It was a seismic decision by the N. B. A. with the Warriors heading into Game 5 at Oracle Arena with a lead in the series and an opportunity to clinch their second straight championship. Green’s value to the team is difficult to overstate. In the finals, Green is averaging 14. 8 points, 9. 3 rebounds and 5. 8 assists while playing more than 38 minutes a game. Without him, the Warriors will need to find solutions by committee. Green did not address the news media. “We know it’s going to kill him not being there,” shooting guard Klay Thompson said. “But we’re going to go out there and do it as a team and win for him. ” The Warriors sounded edgy about the situation. Andrew Bogut, the team’s starting center, said he had no doubt that the Cavaliers had lobbied for Green’s suspension. Bogut also described the N. B. A. ’s disciplinary system as one without “rhyme or reason” and compared it to the league’s draft lottery process. “Pull out a ball and make a decision,” Bogut said. “They made a decision, which was an interesting one. ” On Friday, after James pushed Green to the court late in the fourth quarter and tried to step over him, Green retaliated by swiping at James and making contact with his groin. After the game, James said he was “not cool” with some things that Green had said to him. Green, in turn, took offense to the way James had stepped over him. On Sunday, Kiki Vandeweghe, the N. B. A. ’s executive vice president for basketball operations, said in a statement that while Green’s actions in Green 4 did not merit a suspension as a “ act,” he was deserving of a flagrant foul. It was an accumulation of offenses that resulted in the suspension. The series — already physical — has reached a heightened state. After Sunday’s practice, Thompson basically accused James of being a crybaby. “I guess his feelings just got hurt,” Thompson said, adding: “Guys talk trash in this league all the time. I’m just kind of shocked some guys take it so personal. I mean, it’s a man’s league, and I’ve heard a lot of bad things on that court. But at the end of the day, it stays on the court. ” When James was informed of Thompson’s comments, he asked a reporter to repeat them. Then he laughed. “Oh, my goodness,” James said. “It’s so hard to take the high road. I’ve been doing it for 13 years. It’s so hard to continue to do it, and I’m going to do it again. ” Green has always had a tendency to treat games like acts. Consider his blowup inside the Warriors’ locker room at halftime of a game against the Oklahoma City Thunder in February. His volatility can fuel his play and that of his teammates (the Warriors wound up winning that game against Oklahoma City) but he also risks becoming a distraction. “We thrive off of Draymond’s competitiveness and his edge,” Kerr said, “and it’s been very important for us this year. And maybe that same quality has led him to this point — just his competitiveness and his passion. And that’s all part of it. ” Bogut said that Green had to play with emotion, otherwise he would not be nearly as effective. So the Warriors accept the pros while bracing for any potential cons. Against Portland in the conference semifinals, Green was borderline obsessed with psychological games. After guaranteeing one win, he declared that the Trail Blazers’ playoff chances were dead before the series was over. His fondness for the dramatic arts bled onto the court, where he swung his arms in reaction to a call and made inadvertent contact with the official Ken Mauer, who had to seek treatment for a cut to his hand. Green’s fire worked out against the Trail Blazers because he produced, averaging 22. 2 points, 11. 2 rebounds and 7. 4 assists over the course of the series as the Warriors advanced. Against the Thunder in the conference finals, Green kicked Steven Adams in the groin in Game 3, drawing a foul, and tripped Enes Kanter in Game 4. (The league did not penalize Green for the latter offense, and perhaps he was fortunate.) But all the outside noise appeared to affect him. In Games 3 and 4 against the Thunder, Green scored a total of 12 points while shooting 2 of 16 from the field. Now, with the Warriors on the cusp of a championship, they will need to find a way to cope with his absence. “We know we have the personnel and the depth to come out and get a win, and that’s all that really matters,” Stephen Curry said. “It honestly doesn’t matter what we think about what he did or didn’t do. The situation is what it is, and we’ve got to win. ” | 1 |
French populist and Front National leader Marine Le Pen spoke out against claims the European Union has eyed France and Britain’s nuclear arsenals with a view to take them over for the common use of EU nations. [While the plans have been considered by fringe Europhile diehards for decades as a means to force European military unity, the idea of taking over the nuclear weapons already possessed by EU member states for the common good have never been taken seriously. However, a flurry of articles in recent weeks discussing the plans and a resurgence of interest has caused concern — prompting presidential candidate Marine Le Pen to speak out against the idea. According to the claims, these fringe European defence theorists are speaking up for the plans in the wake of the election of President Donald J. Trump, as European leaders look for defence alternatives should they fail to maintain their NATO commitments, and therefore jeopardise their relationship with the U. S. While Britain’s withdrawal from the EU would preclude the independent nuclear deterrent being by Brussels, the approximately 300 French warheads will for now remain within the political reach of the Union. Speaking at a campaign event on Saturday, Le Pen slammed the present diminished state of French defence, and called any attempts by the EU to seize elements of member state’s defence apparatus “totalitarian”. She said: France, throughout her history, has rarely been so disarmed. Of course, we still have — but for how long? — our nuclear deterrent. I hear voices who talk in favour of a gloomy project which would lead to sharing our nuclear deterrent on a European scale. This would be madness and a crime against France, her safety, her power and her independence. For decades now, we have denounced the totalitarian drift of the European Union. It is therefore out of the question to enable this supranational techno structure to gain access to any kind of military capacity! This would mean an intolerable threat to the fundamental freedom of the people of Europe. Marine Le Pen has hit out repeatedly at the EU in recent weeks, most recently saying she would work with Britain, Poland, and Hungary to “dismantle” the continental power bloc. The FN leader said in the future “each country is free and sovereign to defend their own interests”. Follow Oliver Lane on Facebook, Twitter: Follow @Oliver_Lane or : olane[at]breitbart. <! [CDATA[ ! function( d,s, id){var js, fjs=d. getElementsByTagName( s)[0],p= ^ | 1 |
Given the sheer tonnage of books already devoted to the Nazis and Hitler, you might assume that everything interesting, terrible and bizarre is already known about one of history’s most notorious regimes and its genocidal leader. Then along comes Norman Ohler, a novelist from Berlin, who rummages through military archives and emerges with this startling fact: The Third Reich was on drugs. All sorts of drugs, actually, and in stupefying quantities, as Mr. Ohler documents in “Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany,” a best seller in Germany and Britain that will be published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April. He was in New York City last week and sat for an interview before giving a lecture to a salon in a loft in the East Village, near Cooper Union. “This is actually my old neighborhood,” he said, sipping grape juice on a sofa. “I lived around here when I wrote my first novel, a detective story. ” Mr. Ohler fell back on his interest in sleuthing during the five years it took to research and write “Blitzed. ” Through interviews and documents that hadn’t been carefully studied before, he unearthed new details about how soldiers of the Wehrmacht were regularly supplied with methamphetamine of a quality that would give Walter White, of “Breaking Bad,” pangs of envy. Millions of doses, packaged as pills, were gobbled up in battles throughout the war, part of an officially sanctioned campaign against fatigue. As surely as hangover follows high, this pharmacological stratagem worked for a while — it was crucial to the turbocharged 1940 invasion and defeat of France — and then did not, most notably when the Nazis were mired in the Soviet Union. But the most vivid portrait of abuse and withdrawal in “Blitzed” is that of Hitler, who for years was regularly injected by his personal physician with powerful opiates, like Eukodal, a brand of oxycodone once praised by William S. Burroughs as “truly awful. ” For a few undoubtedly euphoric months, Hitler was also getting swabs of cocaine, a sedation and stimulation combo that Mr. Ohler likens to a “classic speedball. ” “There are all these stories of party leaders coming to complain about their cities,” Mr. Ohler said, “and Hitler just says: ‘We’re going to win. These losses make us stronger.’ And the leaders would say: ‘He knows something we don’t know. He probably has a miracle weapon.’ He didn’t have a miracle weapon. He had a miracle drug, to make everyone think he had a miracle weapon. ” Lanky and angular, Mr. Ohler quietly conveys the mordant humor that occasionally surfaces in his book, which has a chapter titled “High Hitler. ” “Blitzed,” he explained, was born when a Berlin friend who is a D. J. and a fan of substances asked, “Did you know that the Nazis took loads of drugs?” While growing up in Munich, the friend had heard about wartime meth use from former soldiers. Aside from a documentary on the subject, Mr. Ohler found little information online. So he contacted an academic in the documentary, who provided invaluable leads about how to search military archives, which weren’t indexed for “drug” searches. Initially, the findings were intended as material for a fourth novel, but his publisher told him the story was too weird for fiction. Just tell it straight, he was advised. History can be a treacherous discipline for neophytes, but some professionals have given the exhaustively researched and carefully footnoted “Blitzed” high marks. The renowned Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw called it “a serious piece of scholarship. ” And though elements of this tale have been told, the extent of narcotic consumption by Nazi soldiers and Hitler has surprised even those who have spent decades researching this era. How is that possible? “It’s one of the old problems of specialization,” said Antony Beevor, the author of several highly regarded books about World War II. “No historian knows a lot about drugs. When an outsider comes in with an open mind and different interests, the results can be fantastic and very illuminating. ” Mr. Ohler’s fascination with drugs comes from colorful personal experience. In his 20s, while visiting New York, he took acid and hallucinated a race riot on Second Avenue. Did he ever trip again? “Yeah,” he said. “Blitzed” begins with Germany’s success in the 19th century as the world’s inventors, manufacturers and exporters of drugs, ranging from the benign (aspirin) to the infamous (heroin). One of those drugs was meth, which was initially marketed over the counter to the German public as an upper that beat back everything from depression to hay fever. Red, white and blue tubes of pills, sold under the trade name Pervitin, caught the attention of a doctor at the Academy of Military Medicine in Berlin, who would oversee the logistics of ferrying millions of pills to troops. soldiers would sprint tirelessly through the Ardennes at the onset of war, an adrenalized performance that left Winston Churchill “dumbfounded,” as he wrote in his memoirs. A German general would later gloat that his men had stayed awake for 17 straight days. “I think that’s an exaggeration,” Mr. Ohler said, “but meth was crucial to that campaign. ” The other focus of “Blitzed” is a man long considered one of the era’s farcical bit players: Theodor Morell, the portly, overweening physician who had won Hitler’s confidence in 1936 by curing the stomach pain that had afflicted the Führer for years. An opportunist and a maestro with a syringe, Dr. Morell responded to the incessant demands of Patient A, as he calls Hitler in his notes, with an escalating regimen of injected vitamins, hormones and steroids, which included extracts from the hearts and livers of animals. (While Hitler’s diet was vegetarian, his veins told a different story.) Starting in the summer of 1943, the cocktail included generous quantities of opiates. By 1944, the doctor had trouble finding veins to shoot. Then, as the Allies bombed the factories that produced Germany’s drugs, he had trouble finding opiates. “Historians have tried to explain Hitler’s tremors that started in 1945 by saying that he suffered from Parkinson’s,” Mr. Ohler said. “I wouldn’t rule it out, but there’s no proof of it. I think Hitler was suffering from cold turkey. ” Mr. Ohler believes that Hitler’s drug consumption prolonged the war, by enabling his delusions. But “Blitzed” does not aspire to recast our understanding of National Socialism, or Hitler’s psyche, fundamentally, so much as to add particulars that make other portraits seem incomplete. For Mr. Ohler, writing the book was cathartic. He grew up with a palpable sense of the horrors of Naziism, learning an unflinching account of the war at school in what was then West Germany. The history was made all the more appalling and personal by his maternal grandfather, a former Nazi Party member who lamented the demise of Hitler whenever something about life in a democracy got on his nerves. Then there was the legacy of his paternal grandfather, who fought for the Nazis in the Soviet Union. “I always wondered why my father never showed any emotions toward me,” he said. “It’s because his father never showed any emotions toward him. The German people coming out of the war were emotionally so disturbed. I had always been in that story. Now, I have written myself out of that story. I have freed myself by writing this book. It was a liberating experience. It was a good five years. ” | 1 |
Dispatches from STEPHEN LENDMAN A s the moment of truth approaches, America’s two leading broadsheets, the NYT and WaPo, continue relentlessly bashing Trump, shamelessly supporting a woman belonging in prison, not high office. A same day article discussed The Times’ latest anti-Trump broadside. WaPo featured two editorials hammering him, following so many others earlier, disgracefully accusing him of everything imaginable, while practically elevating Hillary to sainthood by comparison. “Will Republicans respect democracy,” WaPo editors asked? How can anyone knowledgeable about how America is run respect what’s nonexistent, not earlier or now? “The big question after Tuesday’s election…will be whether the nation’s leaders act to preserve our republic – or hasten a descent toward a banana republic,” said WaPo editors. They failed to explain US governance resembles the way a crime family operates – a godfather (or godmother) atop the hierarchy, serving privileged interests exclusively. .. The “first priority (for the nation’s leadership) must be preserving and restoring the country’s democratic institutions…” WaPo editors claimed. How can it when none exist? America is a rogue state, run by its lunatic fringe, neocon extremists, waging endless wars of aggression, punishing ordinary people with neoliberal harshness, enforcing police state viciousness on resisters, a hair’s breadth from instituting full-blown tyranny – likely coming with Hillary in charge. .. WaPo editors are terrified about how multiple investigations of her wrongdoing might turn out – heading toward possibly indicting and impeaching her, ludicrously claiming: .. “There is no substantiated charge against Ms. Clinton that would warrant impeachment, or even talk of impeachment. Despite suggestions otherwise, there is also no imminent indictment against the Democratic nominee, or any available evidence suggesting that indictment is a realistic possibility… Instead, what the nation has seen over the closing days of this campaign is a party preparing to (mis)use extraordinary congressional powers for despicable political ends.”
Fact: Volumes of evidence show Hillary guilty of war crimes, orchestrating coups, other international and constitutional law violations, racketeering, perjury, obstruction of justice, fraud, influence-selling pay-for-play, and jeopardizing national security by using her private server for classified State Department documents – enough to lock anyone up for life.
Separately, WaPo editors said “Trump’s election would be a major threat to the economy” – a way over-the-top unjustifiable claim, saying: .. His “election would be a major new source of instability here and abroad…Suddenly, a man with a deep-seated hostility to, and incomprehension of, markets would be at the helm of the world’s preeminent market economy.” A billionaire business tycoon with no comprehension of markets? No one could become super-rich without a keen understanding of how they work – so what irks WaPo editors? .. They support jobs-killing trade deals like NAFTA and TPP. Trump’s justifiable opposition riles them. They’re angry because he’s right accusing the (Wall-Street controlled) Fed of keeping interest rates near zero for political reasons, along with government agencies fudging economic data like GDP, monthly jobs numbers and inflation, among others – to make economic conditions look rosier than reality. .. Trump “failed to level with the public about the challenges before us, to provide a plausible sense of how he would improve things – or to demonstrate much of anything except the risks of entrusting him with management of an $18 trillion economy,” WaPo editors claimed. Agree or disagree with him, he presented a clearer agenda than Hillary – time and again proving she’s a serial liar, dishonest, untrustworthy, ruthless and dangerous. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • CONTINUE THE DEBATE ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE. CLICK HERE . ABOUT THE AUTHOR STEPHEN LENDMAN lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected] . His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” ( http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html ) Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com . =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN. SIGN UP AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. | 0 |
The Trump jobs boom continues, with computer giant IBM announcing that it is set to hire 2, 000 veterans of the U. S. Military after a meeting with President Donald J. Trump. [IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, who serves on Trump’s business advisory board, is to announce the new plans on Friday. The company intends to open 20 new schools in the U. S. and will retrain and certify the veterans over a period, Axios reported. Many of the veterans will be trained in the use of IBM’s software programs used by law enforcement, cybersecurity, and national security agencies. IBM joins a growing list of companies announcing major expansion in the age of Trump. The list includes 45, 000 jobs announced by Exxon Mobil, 10, 000 new jobs at Kroger, 10, 000 jobs at Walmart, another 10, 000 jobs to be offered by U. S. Steel, and 50, 000 by SoftBank Telecommunications, among many others. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 1 |
By Peter Dockrill
Last year was a huge turning point for clean power, with renewable energy surpassing coal to become the largest source of power capacity in the world for the first time, according to a new report.
And not only have renewables now overtaken coal, but the rate of their adoption keeps getting faster. In another first, growth in renewables outstripped all other forms of new power generation in 2015, with clean energy accounting for more than half of the world’s new electricity capacity added last year.
The new figures, released in a market report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) this week, mean that energy forecasts from only a year ago now need to be revised – with renewables growth between 2015 and 2021 predicted to be 13 percent greater than estimated last year.
That revised estimate should see renewables be responsible for 28 percent of electricity generation by 2021 – last year, it accounted for 23 percent , so each year, renewables take over about 1 percent of the electricity market.
That 2021 prediction might only be a little over a quarter of the world’s total electricity in five years’ time, but it amounts to a massive 7,600 terawatt hours – equivalent to the total combined electricity generation of the US and the European Union (EU) today.
And in that five-year timespan, renewables are expected to absorb 60 percent of all power capacity growth, which basically means the IEA doesn’t see the record-setting gains shown in the past year slowing down any time soon.
“We are witnessing a transformation of global power markets led by renewables and, as is the case with other fields, the centre of gravity for renewable growth is moving to emerging markets,” said IEA executive director Fatih Birol .
In those emerging markets, the rate of renewables adoption is almost unimaginably fast. In China, two new wind turbines were installed every hour in 2015, meaning the nation had built almost 20,000 new turbines by the end of the year.
That flurry of investment saw China soak up about half of all new wind power additions, and approximately 40 percent of global renewable capacity increases in total.
Wind power led the growth in renewables, adding 66 gigawatt (GW) of capacity in 2015, followed by solar , which represented 49 GW.
And just in case you think that means solar’s been slacking off, bear this in mind: that additional 49 GW of capacity amounts to about 500,000 new solar panels being installed around the world every day last year.
So obviously there’s a lot to celebrate in these new figures, which the IEA puts down to stronger renewables policies – chiefly in the US, China, India, and Mexico – plus falling prices thanks to stronger competition in the marketplace, and better technology .
But the researchers also say we need to make sure the momentum keeps up.
Many countries around the world still aren’t getting behind renewables strongly enough, and even in nations that have thrown their support behind clean power – such as China – their increase in renewables capacity still doesn’t meet their ever-higher electricity demands.
Whereas in the US, EU, and Japan, additional renewables capacity is expected to outpace electricity demand over the next five years.
The report also shows that the renewables landscape has changed, with industrialised countries – that once led the charge on clean power – losing ground to emerging nations like China and India. By 2021, these two nations alone are predicted to account for almost half of global renewable capacity additions.
“If you think of running a marathon, Europe started with a big advance, more than half of the marathon they are leading by far,” Birol told Adam Vaughan at The Guardian . “They are now getting a bit tired, and some others are overtaking Europe slowly but surely.”
Even with the massive gains we’re making, though, the researchers warn that uptake still isn’t happening fast enough for the world to meet the ambitious commitments made at the 2015 UN Paris climate deal , designed to keep rises in global temperature under 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
In other words, we’ve come a long way on renewables, but there’s still a long way to go .
“I am pleased to see that last year was one of records for renewables and that our projections for growth over the next five years are more optimistic,” Birol said in a statement .
“However, even these higher expectations remain modest compared with the huge untapped potential of renewables.
The Medium-Term Renewable Energy Market Report 2016 is available online.
Source: Science Alert
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Tweet Widget by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
So-called “fake news” has Obama shook up – probably because he and other presidents want to keep their monopoly on false narratives. “The ruling class, which Obama so faithfully serves, has lost control of the social and political narrative, without which it cannot ‘protect’ its wealth, privilege and power. It is a crisis of legitimacy, rooted in the crisis of capitalism, itself.” Obama’s Musings on False Narratives and Fake Stories by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“ People no longer believe the fake “news” and bogus narratives issued by the ruling class and its corporate and military misinformation specialists.”
President Obama traveled to Berlin last week to browbeat Europeans on why they should continue to play junior partners in Washington’s quest for full spectrum global domination, but kept returning to his post-election obsession: the existential threat posed by “fake news” on social media. It was as if the realization had just dawned on the lame duck president, that his own powers to create “facts” and manufacture “news” out of thin air would soon be gone. Without the Clintons in the White House to continue the neoliberal project, history might conclude that the First Black President’s only enduring legacy was...that he was the first Black president.
It’s a question of who gets to decide what’s “fake” or not. Obama fears that what he calls “fake” news begets fake history, which begets the fall of western civilization as the rulers would like people to imagine it. Fake news is a grave danger “in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and its packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television,” according to Obama . “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect,” he told the Germans.
It was a magic kind of moment. The legendarily cool and collected Obama had just let out the secret: the ruling class, which he so faithfully serves, has lost control of the social and political narrative, without which it cannot “protect” its wealth, privilege and power.
“ When the people come to believe that the president’s narrative is a bunch of ‘propaganda,’ then future Obamas will no longer be able to protect the Lords of Capital from the pitchforkers.”
Was the world’s most powerful individual (until January 20) in despair over Facebook’s failure to erase three or four fictitious, yet ultimately inconsequential, stories from its pages? Of course not. Obama’s problem -- and capitalism’s crisis-- is that people no longer believe the fake “news” and bogus narratives issued by the ruling class and its corporate and military misinformation specialists. “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, and particularly in an age of social media when so many people are getting their information in sound bites and off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” said Obama.
This is the man that told the nation’s assembled bankers, a year after the Greet Meltdown of 2008, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." When the people come to believe that the president and the corporate media’s narrative -- that the system can be fixed with a little tinkering -- is a bunch of “propaganda,” rather than “serious argument,” then future Obamas will no longer be able to protect the Lords of Capital from the pitchforkers.
Losing control of the narrative is what happened after Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, when Black youth stopped listening to Obama’s fictitious sermon that racism is not endemic in America, a fake history that candidate Obama had successfully dispensed in his “A More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia, in 2008.
Obama’s targeted handful of phony social media articles generally favored Donald Trump. But the
biggest “fake news” of the recent campaign, promulgated by virtually the entirety of the ruling class ensconced in Hillary Clinton’s Supersized Tent, was that the Russians were scheming to despoil and disrupt the U.S. elections -- crimes Americans commit all by themselves every cycle through massive voter purges and other racist conspiracies. To Clinton and Obama’s horror, this McCarthyite deluge of fake anti-Russian news failed to sway the very “Middle Americans” that were thought to be the most belligerent, warlike constituency of all.
“The root of the crisis lies in the inability of late stage capitalism to offer anything that will stem the steady decline in the mass of people’s living standards and economic security.”
The Big Tent -- Wall Street, the national security establishment, and their media – have lost all credibility with the public, and Obama was still shaken by the realization when he traveled to Berlin. Donald Trump and his crowd’s credibility – their ability to weave a believable narrative – was nonexistent from the start among half the country, and will shrink even more over time.
The root of the crisis of credibility, which is really a systemic crisis of legitimacy, lies in the inability of late stage capitalism to offer anything that will stem the steady decline in the mass of people’s living standards and economic security. So deep is the decay, every amelioration of public pain would require the dismantling of capitalist structures of power, which is unacceptable to the rulers.
On the most basic level, the U.S. does not have universal health care because capital has entrenched itself in all aspects of health care delivery. The rulers cannot provide affordable housing because Wall Street has financialized the nation’s land and dwellings. Good jobs at living wages are impossible, as long as corporations are empowered to maintain their carefully crafted international supply chain for manufactured goods – the foundation of corporate globalization. Black America cannot break free of the Mass Black Incarceration State until Black people eject the police, as presently constituted, from their communities, which will also require ejecting the corporate collaborators of the Black Misleadership Class from positions of power. There can be no peace -- and no peace “dividend” for Americans – while predatory corporations and cartels dictate U.S. foreign policy. The cycle of decline and repression will continue until corporate power is broken and the banks are nationalized.
The rulers offer nothing, because the system is no longer capable of providing relief to the working and “superfluous” classes (that means most Black folks). They can only spin tales of fantasy and distraction – fake stories and phony narratives.
American “Exceptionalism” is “Manifest Destiny” with Native American genocide and Black slavery blotted out. It is the falsest narrative of all, tailored for imperial conquest and an “end of history” — meaning, the end of everyone’s narrative except the imperialist. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected] . | 0 |
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In American political terminology, “lame duck” refers to a politician whose term is drawing to a close. That of course describes President Barack Obama, who will turn over the keys to the White House to President-elect Donald Trump on January 20, 2017. Several past presidents have used the time between the presidential election and the inauguration of their successors to issue controversial executive orders, make “midnight appointments,” and grant controversial pardons.
After President John Adams lost to Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800, he used this time to make a multitude of political appointments, including filling the post of chief of justice of the Supreme Court with John Marshall. Adams left office in 1801, but Marshall remained on the court until 1835. (This is a dramatic illustration of the importance placed on Supreme Court appointments during the just-past presidential campaign.) The Republican-controlled Senate has already made clear that Obama will not be allowed to make a repeat of that history-changing nomination, opting to not even hold hearings on Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, offered as a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
But Obama still holds the reins of executive power until Trump takes the oath of office, and there are many more radical moves he could make in an effort to extend his influence beyond the end of his term of office.
One area of concern, based on his previous actions, includes his pushing the envelope on the role of the executive branch in the enforcement of federal regulations. For example, Obama has pressured public schools across America to open their showers and restrooms to transgender students. Under this policy, the Obama Department of Education used Title IX statutes to argue that refusal to allow, for example, a male student to walk into a shower with female students, if that student claims to self-identify as a girl, is an act of discrimination not allowed under federal law. And if these schools refuse to follow Obama’s policy, they are threatened with the loss of federal funds. Of course, the federal statutes refer to discrimination on the basis of sex, and no one can seriously contend that those statutes were enacted decades ago with transgender students in mind.
And that was before the 2016 presidential election, when such a policy could hurt Democratic congressional candidates, or even the presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. What will Obama do if he no longer has any such concern? Will he take even bolder action in the time he has left?
Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy with the American Action Forum, has said that five major rule changes in areas such as renewable fuels and methane are still awaiting action by Obama. With Trump unlikely to advance the radical environmental agenda of Obama, there may well be some move by the outgoing president in this area before the inauguration in January.
Obama has regularly demonstrated a disregard for the doctrine of separation of powers. Under this important doctrine, the Constitution explicitly gives to Congress all legislative power enumerated in the Constitution. Yet faced with a Congress that has refused to pass legislation favored by Obama in areas such as immigration, he has not hesitated to use “executive orders” to implement this agenda anyway.
Considering that restricting out-of-control immigration was a major campaign theme of Trump, will Obama issue yet another executive order in this area, believing nothing will happen to change it for the next four years?
“I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” Obama said back in 2014. “And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward."
Some of Obama’s previous executive orders have been challenged in court and sometimes blocked by federal judges on the grounds that he exceeded his powers. Yet he has not backed off in using executive orders to, in effect, make law. He has declared, “One of the things that I’m going to be talking to my Cabinet about is how do we use all the tools available to use, not just legislation , in order to advance a mission that I think unifies all Americans.” (Emphasis added.)
Surely Obama does not believe using executive orders to circumvent Congress and the Constitution is somehow “unifying.”
Other presidents have certainly issued executive orders, going all the way back to George Washington. But this misses the point. Executive orders are a legitimate exercise of presidential power — if they are directed to members of the executive branch, to implement an act of Congress, or in some cases, concerning court decisions. Contrary to Obama’s assertions, however, they are not a constitutional method of making law, as the Constitution clearly states that all that power belongs to Congress. All does not leave any such legislative power to the president.
One subject that could be of more immediate concern during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal negotiated by Obama, but with which Congress has yet to take action. With President Trump an ardent opponent of the deal, it will most likely be withdrawn from congressional consideration after January 20 of next year. Knowing that, Obama may make a major effort to push the pact through in the lame-duck session. One might remember that President Bill Clinton did the same thing with NAFTA during his term as president. And since far too many Republican members of Congress, and even leaders such as House Speaker Paul Ryan favor the TPP, opponents of this globalist trade deal cannot let down their guard.
Finally, it is traditional for presidents to grant pardons in their last days in office, and even up to their very last day. These actions of executive clemency are certainly constitutional, as part of the checks-and-balances concept of the Constitution — powers granted to the president to correct alleged injustices that may have occurred in the federal courts. But some pardons over the years have certainly raised eyebrows.
With Hillary Clinton remaining under a cloud of potential prosecution by a future Justice Department, some have even speculated that Obama may give her a pardon on his way out the door. Also, one Republican lobbyist, Michael McKenna, noted, “I do think a pardon for Huma and Weiner might happen.” McKenna was referring to Clinton’s top confidante, Huma Abedin, and her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. It appears that Abedin and Weiner may have violated federal laws in their handling of sensitive State Department documents. The discovery of a trove of these e-mails on the laptop of Weiner precipitated the issuance of a statement by FBI Director James Comey that he had reopened the investigation into Clinton.
It is not the first time that Comey has given a Clinton a clean bill of legal health.
Comey also played a role in a controversial pardon issued by Bill Clinton years ago. Marc Rich was a fugitive who fled the country during his prosecution (ironically, by then-federal attorney Rudi Guiliani), and traveled to Switzerland to avoid imprisonment. He owed $48 million in taxes and was charged with 51 counts of tax fraud. Rich was also wanted for trading illegally with Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, where he purchased around $200 million worth of oil during the time 53 Americans were held hostage in Teheran. He also made illegal deals with Gadhafi in Libya, Kim Il Sung in North Korea, and other communist dictatorships, including the Soviet Union and Cuba.
He fled to Switzerland in 1983, but outgoing President Bill Clinton pardoned him on his last day in office, on January 20, 2001. Even Clinton supporters were repulsed by the pardon, with the New York Times calling it “a shocking abuse of presidential power,” and former President Jimmy Carter declaring it “disgraceful.” Even Democrat Congressman Barney Frank said, “It was a real betrayal of Bill Clinton of all who had been strongly supportive of him to do something this unjustified. It was contemptuous.”
James Comey was later appointed to investigate the circumstances surrounding this pardon, but claimed he found no illegality on Clinton’s part. This investigation occurred as a result of Rich’s wife donating over $200,000 to the Democratic Party in 2000. She later gave $450,000 to the Clinton Library Foundation, and $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign.
With this kind of sordid history of a past president, coupled with Obama’s own track record of disregarding constitutional restrictions, it's no surprise that many are holding their breaths to see just what our outgoing president might do during his last few weeks at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment
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WASHINGTON, D. C. — Justice Neil Gorsuch is only halfway through his first sitting on the Supreme Court, yet is already having an impact that will be felt for years to come. [Justice Neil Gorsuch had an active first day on the Supreme Court on Monday, weighing in heavily on both of the Court’s morning cases and injecting some humor into two dry legal subjects. Before the High Court turned to its normal business, Chief Justice John Roberts took a moment to welcome Gorsuch “as the 101st associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States,” and on behalf of all the members of the Court, wished him a long and successful career in what Roberts referred to as their “common calling. ” Gorsuch responded in kind, thanking the chief justice and all the other justices for the warm welcome he had received over the past week. In Perry v. Merit Systems Protection Board, when a lawyer was walking the Court through a badly worded federal statute on how federal employees file appeals in their employment system, when the lawyer tried to persuade the justices that he was “not asking this Court to break any new ground,” Gorsuch replied, “No, just to continue to make it up. ” At another point in the case when the lawyer tried to assure Gorsuch by saying, “I think I am maybe emphatically agreeing with you,” Gorsuch quipped, “I hope so! ,” evoking laughter throughout the courtroom. On a more serious note, on Wednesday Gorsuch sat in on the biggest case of the year, Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, considering whether state constitutional provisions that forbid churches from participating in state funding grant programs violate the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution. Currently pending before the Court right now is a petition to review a case from Colorado, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which a baker was sanctioned by the state for not baking a cake for a wedding. Word on that petition could come as early as next Monday. Next Wednesday on the Court’s last oral argument day for its 2016 term, Gorsuch will sit in on oral arguments in Maslenjak v. U. S. a case in which an immigrant was stripped of her U. S. citizenship when she made a false statement in a criminal proceeding that, while false, was also immaterial to the case. It’s a busy two weeks for the Supreme Court’s newest member. Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski. | 1 |
Senate Republicans used the “constitutional option” to change longstanding cloture rules around 12:30pm Thursday, clearing the way for Judge Neil Gorsuch to receive a vote of the full Senate on his confirmation to the Supreme Court. [Republicans resorted to the vote after weeks of wrangling over Gorsuch’s nomination in which Senate Democrats threatened the first partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee in American history. After the Democrats assembled the votes needed to prevent the end of debate under current rules, the constitutional option allowing cloture on a simple majority became the only remaining path to placing Gorsuch on the Court. Mike Pence, who would have been needed to break a tie should any two Republicans have voted to maintain the cloture rule, was not present for the vote, indicating Republican confidence their entire caucus would agree to the change. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ( ) moved for a point of order after his first attempt to invoke cloture failed with only 55 votes. From the podium, he cited the need to “restore Senate norms” in light of the Democrats’ “unprecedented partisan filibuster” of a Supreme Court nominee. McConnell invoked the precedent of Senate Democrats’ own change to same simple majority cloture rule for all presidential nominees but those to the Supreme Court in 2013 in calling for an override of the Senate chair’s determination sixty votes were needed for cloture. That appeal passed on a vote. Thursday’s historic move harmonized Senate rules, removing the possibility of minority filibusters of Supreme Court nominees. Given the reluctance, in the past, for either party to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee with majority support, the constitutional option restored, as a practical matter, traditional Senate custom in this area. A successful cloture vote quickly followed the rule change. The vote began a thirty hour countdown to a vote of the full Senate. Judge Gorsuch is, therefore, slated for the final vote on his confirmation no later than seven o’clock Friday evening. All 52 Republicans and three Democrats are expected to vote for his confirmation, allowing him to replace Antonin Scalia as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. | 1 |
When Tony Schwartz was writing Donald J. Trump’s first book, “The Art of the Deal,” in the late 1980s, he was startled by his client’s short attention span. During their first interview, Mr. Trump endured just a few minutes of Mr. Schwartz’s questions before leaping up from his chair and declaring the entire exercise a waste of his time. “He couldn’t tolerate doing interviews,” he tells me. “He just couldn’t stay focused for more than a few minutes at a time. And think about this, Michael, it was when he was talking about himself, which is his favorite subject. ” In the latest episode of The Mr. Schwartz explains why he is sharing his intimate knowledge of how Mr. Trump thinks and behaves with aides to Hillary Clinton to help her prepare for Monday night’s highly anticipated presidential debate. He’s worried about a habit he noticed during Ms. Clinton’s performance at a national security forum hosted by NBC News a week ago: “What I would hope is that she doesn’t go the same route she did with Matt Lauer when he started coming at her relentlessly, which was to revert to her knowledge, to revert to her ability to produce a hundred facts in a short period of time,” he says. “Because this debate is going to turn not a bit on the issues. It’s going to turn on emotion, it’s going to turn on which candidate makes all of us feel safer and which candidate makes us feel less safe. And the one who wins that contest wins the debate — and probably wins the election. ” Mr. Schwartz offered his help to the Clinton campaign as part of his long (and possibly futile) effort to make up for the guilt he feels about setting Mr. Trump on a path to fame by ghostwriting his book. “I don’t think I can ever even the score I don’t think I can ever set it totally straight,” he says. All he can do now, he says, is “say the truth that I know in the service of trying to help save the country and the world from a guy who is exceptionally dangerous. ” In the episode, we explore the profoundly contrasting style of preparation and showmanship that Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton bring to the debate with my colleagues, Frank Bruni, an opinion columnist, and Amy Chozick, a reporter who has covered Mrs. Clinton for the last two years. “I think of Trump as a toddler sitting in a high chair,” Mr. Bruni says. “And his advisers are saying ‘Donald, you must get through the meal without throwing your spaghetti on the wall.’ So the question is, will they successfully persuade him not to throw his spaghetti on the wall before the debate ends?” From a desktop or laptop, you can listen by pressing play on the button above. Or if you’re on a mobile device, the instructions below will help you find and subscribe to the series. On your iPhone or iPad: 1. Open your podcast app. It’s a app called “Podcasts” with a purple icon. (This link may help.) 2. Search for the series. Tap on the “search” magnifying glass icon at the bottom of the screen, type in “The ” and select it from the list of results. 3. Subscribe. Once on the series page, tap on the “subscribe” button to have new episodes sent to your phone free. You may want to adjust your notifications to be alerted when a new episode arrives. 4. Or just sample. If you would rather listen to an episode or two before deciding to subscribe, tap on the episode title from the list on the series page. If you have an internet connection, you’ll be able to stream the episode. On your Android phone or tablet: 1. Open your podcast app. It’s a app called “Play Music” with an icon. (This link may help.) 2. Search for the series. Click on the magnifying glass icon at the top of the screen, search for the name of the series and select it from the list of results. You may have to scroll down to find the “Podcasts” search results. 3. Subscribe. Once on the series page, click on the word “subscribe” to have new episodes sent to your phone free. 4. Or just sample. If you would rather listen to an episode or two before deciding to subscribe, click on the episode title from the list on the series page. If you have an internet connection, you’ll be able to stream the episode. | 1 |
PHILADELPHIA — Democrats marked a decisive turn in their campaign against Donald J. Trump this week, moving to recast the 2016 race not as a conventional battle between left and right but as a national emergency that requires voters of all stripes to band together against a singularly menacing candidate. Abandoning their standard critique against conservative Republicans, allies of Hillary Clinton argued that Mr. Trump was not merely another champion of ideas, deserving of rejection for his views on the environment or health care. Instead, in an onslaught of astonishing ferocity led by President Obama, they used their convention to portray Mr. Trump as a dangerously unstable figure and a friend of foreign despots like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Some Democrats suggested Mr. Trump might have authoritarian impulses of his own: Prominent in Mrs. Clinton’s acceptance speech Thursday night was a pointed reminder that the American system was designed to prevent the rise of a dictator. In effect, Mrs. Clinton and Democratic Party leaders signaled that they would seek to fight the general election, to some extent, in nonpartisan terms — as a clash between the broad mainstream of American voters and a candidate they argue would put the nation in jeopardy. David Boaz, the executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said Democrats had picked up on an unsettling theme in Mr. Trump’s campaign. He said the attacks this week on Mr. Trump as an autocrat had the potential to resonate outside the Democratic base. “I really don’t think that’s too over the top,” Mr. Boaz said. “We have one candidate who’s not even pretending — he is promising to be a ruler. ” Mrs. Clinton herself stopped short of denouncing Mr. Trump as an authoritarian. But in her convention speech — and on the campaign trail in recent days — she described his political worldview as being in profound tension with traditional American values. That somewhat gentler argument, strategists close to Mrs. Clinton said, will be central to her campaign in the general election. She has rebuked Mr. Trump repeatedly for depicting the United States as a nation in decline and declaring, “I alone can fix it. ” That sentiment, Mrs. Clinton said, is inconsistent with democracy. Mrs. Clinton returned to that theme on Thursday, and said Mr. Trump’s proclamation should “set off alarm bells for all of us. ” “Remember,” she said, “our founders fought a revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a nation where one person had all the power. ” Mr. Trump and his campaign have batted away suggestions that he holds antidemocratic views. Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, said on Thursday that the Democrats’ new attempts to label Mr. Trump a signaled desperation and were an effort to counter his rousing convention speech last week in Cleveland. In that address, Mr. Trump offered himself to the country as a “ candidate” and a champion of working people in a nation under siege. Democrats, Mr. Manafort said, were trying to attack Mr. Trump to skirt responsibility for the conditions he is now campaigning against. But the attacks Democrats leveled in Philadelphia may not be so easily dismissed: Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Mr. Trump was so unprepared and so divisive that he would put American lives at risk. In an electric Wednesday night speech, Mr. Obama lumped Mr. Trump’s candidacy with violent ideologies that have spawned attacks on America. “Anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end,” Mr. Obama said. Americans, the president said, do not “look to be ruled. ” Democrats recruited respected figures from outside the party to amplify their appeal: Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor, who is a political independent, warned sternly that must rally with Mrs. Clinton to stop a “dangerous demagogue. ” John Allen, a retired Marine general, thundered into an arena dotted with American flags that voters faced a choice between Mrs. Clinton and “a dark place of discord and fear. ” There is no recent precedent in American politics for such unrelenting and direct attacks on a presidential nominee’s commitment to the basic institutions of democracy. Alvin S. Felzenberg, a historian and conservative columnist, said the latest point of comparison for this week’s Democratic barrage might be the 1940 election, in which Republicans savaged Franklin D. Roosevelt for defying tradition to pursue a third term as president. Even that, Mr. Felzenberg said, was “not with this tenacity and not at the conventions per se. ” But Mr. Trump has stirred concerns throughout the 2016 race, on the left and right, with a political approach and a set of policy prescriptions that plainly defy the norms of American politics. He has campaigned on pledges to bar Muslims from entering the United States and to torture people suspected of terrorism. (Mr. Trump has recently suggested barring people from the United States based on their country of origin, though he has not ruled out a religious test.) In Philadelphia on Thursday night, Khizr Khan, whose son, a Muslim and a United States Army captain, was killed fighting in Iraq, stirred the convention crowd as he denounced Mr. Trump’s proposal, calling it an offense against the Constitution. “Donald Trump, you’re asking Americans to trust you with their future,” Mr. Khan said. “Let me ask you, have you even read the United States Constitution?” Mr. Trump has routinely praised autocratic foreign leaders for what he characterizes as their steely leadership abilities. He has hailed Saddam Hussein, the executed Iraqi leader, for his skill at maintaining power, and said of Kim the North Korean leader, “You have to give him credit” for consolidating authority. This week, amid reports that hackers had breached the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Trump said he considered Mr. Putin a superior leader to Mr. Obama. Mr. Trump also said on Wednesday that he hoped Russia would hack and release emails that Mrs. Clinton deleted from her time as secretary of state. He said later that the remark was intended as sarcasm. Mr. Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman, indicated that Mr. Trump would not back away from presenting himself as a rescuer for a nation in peril. “The reason Donald Trump’s speech at the convention worked was because he was saying what people are feeling and thinking,” Mr. Manafort said in an email. Mr. Trump’s emphasis on national strength, he said, is meant to hammer home that “weak leadership” from Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton “is what caused the instability in the world that exists today. ” And Trump aides have argued that his defiant claim — “I alone can fix it” — has been distorted by Democrats. Mr. Trump, they say, aimed to present himself as the only available candidate who can turn the country around. But Democrats intend to keep up their assault on Mr. Trump’s worldview and fitness for office: Clinton surrogates will crisscross the country with the message that he is a singular threat, and a “super PAC” plans to beam the message into living rooms. Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director for Mrs. Clinton, said the campaign would hammer the message that Mr. Trump is “not a normal Republican. ” “He has an incredibly disturbing theory that at its core rejects the American values of both and the value of community,” Ms. Palmieri said. Geoff Garin, a pollster for Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC, said the race had entered a new phase. A defining goal for the group now, he said, was to ensure that voters “reckon with what it would mean to have a dangerous demagogue like Trump as president. ” Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, the chairman of the Democratic Governors’ Association, said Mr. Trump’s candidacy echoed the rise of fascism in Europe before World War II. “Maybe this is an American version of that: Divide and conquer, marginalize as many as you can,” Mr. Malloy said just outside the conventional hall. The Republican presidential nominee, Mr. Malloy said, should be cast as a “uniquely bad” force in American politics. “Whether he has evil purposes in mind,” Mr. Malloy said, “he is a dangerous man. ” | 1 |
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Leaked audio from 2006, when Hillary Clinton was running for Senate in New York, proves that she has absolutely NO apprehensions about rigging elections.
During an editorial meeting with a small Jewish newspaper in Brooklyn, various topics were discussed, including the then-recent election in Palestine.
Here’s what Hillary had to say about it:
“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” | 0 |
Donald Trump: Minnesota Has ‘Suffered Enough’ Accepting Refugees Tessa Berenson, TIME, November 6, 2016
In a pitch to suspend the nation’s Syrian refugee program , Donald Trump said Minnesotans have “suffered enough” from accepting Somali immigrants into their state.
“Here in Minnesota you have seen firsthand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state, without your knowledge, without your support or approval,” Trump said at a Minneapolis rally Sunday afternoon.
He said his administration would suspend the Syrian refugee program and not resettle refugees anywhere in the United States without support from the communities, while Hillary Clinton’s “plan will import generations of terrorism, extremism and radicalism into your schools and throughout your communities.”
{snip} | 0 |
geoengineeringwatch.org
We are all swimming in a sea of microwave transmissions that are decimating the climate system and are extremely harmful to all life forms. What you don't know can hurt you. Many are now finally beginning to look up and take notice of the ongoing atmospheric aerosol spraying that is occurring in skies all over the globe. Incredibly anomalous cloud shapes and forms which can only be considered engineered have been photographed from satellite. Extremely powerful microwave transmissions are a major aspect of the climate engineering assault that often goes unnoticed by many, even within the ranks of the anti-climate engineering movement. Radio frequency transmissions are utilized by the climate engineers to manipulate the aircraft sprayed heavy metal and chemical particulates. Like sound waves, microwave transmissions ripple through the atmosphere, leaving their telltale signature on the geoengineering aerosol laced cloud cover. Radio frequency transmissions emanating from the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, captured on satellite imagery. French Southern and Antarctic Lands Palm Springs, California. Photo credit: Ron Morgan Port Washington, New York. Photo credit: GeoengineeringWatch.org Palm Springs, California. Photo credit: Ron Morgan Morongo Valley, California. Photo credit: Ron Morgan Palm Springs, California. Photo credit: Ron Morgan Morongo Valley, California. Photo credit: Ron Morgan Morongo Valley, California. Photo credit: Ron Morgan Cantabria, Spain. Photo credit: Alberto Ibañez Morongo Valley, California. Photo credit: Ron Morgan Morongo Valley, California. Photo credit: Ron Morgan Honolulu, Hawaii. Photo credit: Irmina Bernal | 0 |
Part 1 BABYLON "SUN WORSHIP" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDHZaMeIwRs | 0 |
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that courts must make an exception to the usual rule that jury deliberations are secret when evidence emerges that those discussions were marred by racial or ethnic bias. “Racial bias implicates unique historical, constitutional and institutional concerns,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in the decision. The case arose from statements made during jury deliberations in a 2010 sexual assault trial. “I think he did it because he’s Mexican, and Mexican men take whatever they want,” a juror said of the defendant, according to sworn statements from other jurors submitted by defense lawyers after the trial was over. The juror, identified in court papers as H. C. was a former law enforcement officer. After the trial was over, two other jurors submitted sworn statements describing what he had said during deliberations. “He said that where he used to patrol, nine times out of 10 Mexican men were guilty of being aggressive toward women and young girls,” one juror recalled. Those statements, Justice Kennedy wrote, warranted an investigation by the trial judge into deliberations that are ordinarily secret. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the majority opinion. In dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that the majority opinion was a well intentioned but intrusion into jurors’ privacy. “This is a startling development,” Justice Alito wrote, “and although the court tries to limit the degree of intrusion, it is doubtful that there are principled grounds for preventing the expansion of today’s holding. ” Justice Kennedy wrote that the usual tools to root out biased jurors — questioning during jury selection and reports from jurors before they render a verdict — are less effective when race is at issue. Pointed questions about racism may exacerbate tensions, he wrote. And jurors may be reluctant, he added, to accuse one another of insensitivity. “Not every offhand comment indicating racial bias or hostility will justify” an investigation into jurors’ deliberations, Justice Kennedy wrote. “For the inquiry to proceed, there must be a showing that one or more jurors made statements exhibiting overt racial bias that cast serious doubt on the fairness and impartiality of the jury’s deliberations and resulting verdict. ” In dissent, Justice Alito countered that it would be difficult to limit the sweep of the ruling. He added that the court’s constitutional analysis was flawed. “The real thrust of the majority opinion is that the Constitution is less tolerant of racial bias than other forms of juror misconduct, but it is hard to square this argument with the nature of the Sixth Amendment right on which petitioner’s argument and the court’s holding are based,” he wrote. “What the Sixth Amendment protects is the right to an ‘impartial jury.’ Nothing in the text or history of the amendment or in the inherent nature of the jury trial right suggests that the extent of the protection provided by the amendment depends on the nature of a jury’s partiality or bias. ” In earlier cases, the Supreme Court has said that even egregious misconduct in the jury room cannot be used to challenge a conviction if it would require jurors to testify about what was said there. Until Monday, though, the court had never confronted whether racial or ethnic prejudice requires an exception to the general rule. In 1987, in Tanner v. United States, the Supreme Court let stand convictions in a mail fraud case in Florida even though the jury had treated the trial as “one big party” fueled by “rampant drug and alcohol abuse,” as one juror described it. During recesses, jurors drank pitchers of beer and liters of wine, and they used marijuana and cocaine. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, said there were good reasons to ignore “irresponsible or improper juror behavior” if it was based on jurors’ accounts of what had gone on in the jury room. challenges based on jurors’ testimony, she wrote, would make it less likely that jurors would speak candidly during deliberations. Allowing such challenges would encourage lawyers to harass former jurors, she said, and undermine the finality of verdicts. In 2014, in Warger v. Shauers, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that jurors may not testify about what went on during deliberations, even to expose dishonesty during jury selection. But Justice Sotomayor, writing for the court, suggested that cases involving racial bias might require a different result. “There may be cases of juror bias so extreme that, almost by definition, the jury trial right has been abridged,” she wrote. “If and when such a case arises, the court can consider whether the usual safeguards are or are not sufficient to protect the integrity of the process. ” Monday’s decision addressed the question the court had deferred in 2014. Miguel Angel Peña Rodriguez, who maintains that he is innocent, was convicted of harassing and trying to grope two teenage sisters in a racetrack bathroom. A defense witness testified that Mr. Peña Rodriguez was elsewhere at the time of the assault. H. C. the juror said to have made the biased statements, was not persuaded by that testimony, according to a fellow juror. “He said he did not think the alibi witness was credible because, among other things, he was ‘an illegal,’” the fellow juror said. The jury deadlocked on the most serious charge, a felony, but convicted Mr. Peña Rodriguez of three misdemeanors. He was sentenced to two years’ probation. In Monday’s decision in Peña Rodriguez v. Colorado, No. Justice Kennedy said the justice system must root out racial bias. “The progress that has already been made,” he wrote, “underlies the court’s insistence that blatant racial prejudice is antithetical to the functioning of the jury system and must be confronted in egregious cases. ” Justice Alito responded that the majority’s motives were admirable but misguided, citing the 1987 decision. “The court’s decision is ” he wrote. “It seeks to remedy a flaw in the jury trial system, but as this court said some years ago, it is questionable whether our system of trial by jury can endure this attempt to perfect it. ” | 1 |
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Как пишет журналист Боян Билбияпетак, читатели сотни раз высмеивали аргументы дипломата о "Крыме и исторической правде". Но Александрович готов ввести санкции. Против кого? Против всех, кто осмелился посетить "украинский Крым" или, не дай бог, самопровозглашенный Донбасс и не спросил у посла разрешения?
Под удар Украины итак попали шестеро граждан Сербии , включая народных депутатов, против которых будут введены экономические санкции. Как пишет обозреватель, но и это "Александровичу стало мало, он желает стать инквизитором, на костре которого будут гореть и сербские журналисты".
Так в редакцию газеты поступило сообщение Александровича, в котором он желает, чтобы "правительство Украины открыло уголовное дело против журналиста Бояна Билбия, который побывал в Крыму в обход законов Украины".
Журналист издания пишет, что не понимает, чем он "нарушил законы державы, которая годами не контролирует огромную часть своей территорию". Однако ему совершенно ясно другое. "Киев, через своего посла, хочет запугиваниями повлиять на свободу информации, слова и передвижения. Украинское правительство и его посол прикрываются "европейскими ценностями", но они должны знать, что подавление свободы СМИ и угрозы журналистам отдаляют их от стандартов европейской цивилизации".
Боян Билбияпетак пишет, что в демократических странах журналисты имеют право передвигаться свободно, путешествовать по миру и делать репортажи и интервью со всеми, даже если речь идет о приверженцах противоборствующих сторон, диктаторах или других темах интересных общественности. И Крым, который "европейский Киев" два года назад отрезал от электроэнергии и воды, является чрезвычайно интересной темой для сербской публики.
Журналист напоминает, что читатели "Политики" ясно дали понять послу Украины, что они думают о его санкциях и угрозах. Билбияпетак не удивился бы, если украинское посольство задумает наказать даже правительство Сербии за то, что оно не приводит на допросы граждан, желающих посетить Крым.
Автор считает, что посол Украины просто пускает пыль в глаза. Билбияпетак задается вопросом, почему Александрович говорит "Косово — это Сербия, Крым — это Украина", а Украина, в отличие от России и многих других друзей Сербии, не голосовала против принятия Косово в ЮНЕСКО?
"Да, я, может, сам добровольно предстал бы перед судом в Киеве. Но, господин Алексанрович, вы должны лично за мной прийти", — подытоживает Боян Билбияпетак.
Напомним, ранее президент Сербии Томислав Николич заявил, что страна не введет санкции по отношению к России , даже если этого требует общая внешняя политика ЕС. Об этом президент республики сообщил на встрече с вице-президентом США Джозефом Байденом.
"Мы не можем ввести санкции России, если это подразумевает приведение в согласие (сербской — ред.) внешней политики с ЕС. Мы связаны с Россией и связаны с США, в которых живет многочисленная сербская община", — цитирует пресс-служба главу государства.
Николич также отметил, что несмотря на то, что "нет лучшей опции для граждан Сербии, чем путь в Евросоюз", он не готов подписать с самопровозглашенной республикой Косово документ, который имел бы межгосударственный характер. В свою очередь, по данным пресс-службы, Байден подчеркнул, что "США не ожидают, что Сербия сделает выбор между ними и Россией" и поддерживают ее на пути евроинтеграции.
Друзья не предают: Сербия не откажется от России из-за ЕС Поделиться: | 0 |
On Saturday, Alex Honnold, one of the world’s most climbers, scaled the side of Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan in just under four hours using his bare hands and a bag of chalk on Saturday. [“So stoked to realize a life dream today,’ Honnold, 31, wrote on Facebook after he completed the steep vertical climb, which some have described in the past as a suicide mission. Honnold, who has been climbing since he was 11, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he has dreamt about conquering El Capitan free style for eight years. “The hardest part was 2, 300 feet off the ground,” Honnold reportedly said. Others have not dared conquer El Capitan without ropes or safety backups. The feat Honnold accomplished was so bold that Alpinist magazine wrote on its Facebook page, “This is indisputably the greatest free solo of all time. Congratulations, Alex!” While likely his most dangerous, this is not Honnold’s first risky climb. According to the Chronicle, in 2008, he climbed the Moonlight Buttress in Utah’s Zion National Park, and the northwest face of Yosemite’s Half Dome, without rope. Just one moment of distraction could have cost him his life. In 2015, two men reached the peak of El Capitan after climbing the face of the granite Dawn Wall for 17 days using only safety ropes and their hands and feet. This March, a mountain climber fell off a mountain in Colorado, but survived. He was discovered by a jogger after he was reported missing for several days. Adelle Nazarian is a politics and national security reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter. This post has been updated. | 1 |
WILLIAMSON, W. Va. — If a single moment captured coal country’s despair this year, it was when Bo Copley, a mine maintenance planner, fought tears as he asked Hillary Clinton how, having dismissed coal’s future in language that came back to haunt her, she could “come in here and tell us you’re going to be our friend. ” That was in May. Mr. Copley, 39 and a registered Republican, was “very uncomfortable” with Donald J. Trump then, he said. But over time, in a paradox of the Bible Belt, Mr. Copley, a deeply religious father of three, put his faith in a Manhattan real estate mogul as a savior for coal country — and America. “God has used unjust people to do his will,” Mr. Copley said, explaining his vote. Now coal country is reckoning with an inconvenient truth: Experts say Mr. Trump’s expansive campaign promise to “put our miners back to work” will be very difficult to keep. Yet as he prepares to move into the Oval Office, Appalachians are eyeing Washington with a feeling they have not had in years: hope. The American market for coal is shrinking, industry analysts agree. Utility companies have drastically reduced their reliance on coal, in part because of President Obama’s aggressive regulations to cut emissions from power plants, but also because natural gas is cheaper. Nationally, about 300 power plants have closed since 2008, according to the National Mining Association, a trade group. Many of those plants — including one in nearby Louisa, Ky. where a giant cooling tower was recently demolished after the plant converted from coal to natural gas — are not coming back. Politicians and economists agree that what Appalachia really needs is a diversified economy, a goal that has eluded Mr. Obama and state and local politicians. But in this land of staggering beauty and economic pain, Trump backers said over and over again that while coal might never be what it once was, the businessman they helped send to the White House could indeed put them back to work — if not in mining, then in some other industry. “I don’t think he can ever fulfill all the promises he made even in four or eight years,” Danny Maynard, 59, said after Bible study at the Chattaroy Missionary Baptist Church. Mr. Maynard lost his job at a coal company last year. “But I think we’re headed in the right direction,” he said. “He wants to make America great again. ” Mr. Trump pummeled Mrs. Clinton in coal country. Here in West Virginia, he won every county and took 69 percent of the vote, a landslide also fueled by his promise to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices who would roll back abortion rights. As Mr. Copley put it, “Coal is secondary to me. ” It is difficult for outsiders to fathom how deeply faith and work are intertwined here, or the economic and psychological depression that sets in when an entire region loses the only livelihood many of its people have ever known. Coal has always been boom and bust its decline began long before Mr. Obama took office. But in West Virginia alone, 12, 000 coal industry jobs have been lost during his tenure. At the Huddle House on Route 119, Kayla Burger, 32, a waitress, has worked three jobs since her husband lost his they take home less than a quarter of the roughly $100, 000 he used to earn. She took an offer for miners’ wives to train as phlebotomists, but with so many miners out of work, the phlebotomy market was flooded. She also substitute teaches and cooks at the school. They have given up cellphones and sold their boat one car has been repossessed the only reason they still have their house, she said, is that they saw layoffs coming and saved money. Her husband, who cares for the children, has experienced depression. “He doesn’t feel like a man,” Ms. Burger said. Her father was a miner, too he and her mother drive now. In Williamson — population roughly 3, 100, down from 4, 300 two decades ago — everyone has a story. The city used to market itself as “the heart of the coal fields,” but it now wraps its tourism pitches around the trails that run through the nearby mountains. (“We’re the coal fields,” said Natalie Taylor, the executive director of the Tug Valley Chamber of Commerce.) Williamson’s downtown, on the border with eastern Kentucky, sits between the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River and the Norfolk Southern Railroad tracks. At the newly opened pulmonary clinic here for patients with black lung disease, Patricia Sigmon, a respiratory therapist, has been caught in the . With coal paying less in severance tax to the state, there is less funding for schools. Her husband, a school bus driver in nearby Boone County, was forced to take a $4, 000 cut in pay. Larry Gannon, 61, retired early from his job as a coal processing plant foreman so that a younger man could keep his. Mr. Copley’s wife, Lauren, has a photography business, which is how they make do. They used to have “Cadillac” health coverage now they have Medicaid. So when scientists, and Democrats like Al Gore, warn that Mr. Trump will endanger the planet, people hear that as something off in the future feeding your family is here and now. Many say Mother Nature will have her way. “When I was growing up, they said we were in an ice age,” said Kyle Lovern, the managing editor of The Williamson Daily News. He voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 and Mr. Trump this year. Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in West Virginia, where anger at politicians has been building for years. Mr. Copley remembers the Democrats who held power here — men like Senator Robert C. Byrd, who died in 2010 and whose name is on buildings and roads built with the tax dollars he brought home — and wonders why they did not see the coal bust coming and work to diversify the economy. “We’re a forgotten people,” Ms. Taylor said, explaining why it did not take much for Mr. Trump to win coal country’s trust. “He mentions West Virginia, he mentions the coal workers, and that was pretty much all he had to do to seal this deal. ” Now that the deal has been sealed, Mr. Trump has put a climate change contrarian and friend of the coal industry in charge of his Environmental Protection Agency transition team. Environmentalists are horrified, but Bill Raney, the president of the West Virginia Coal Association, a trade group, is thrilled. “Just a positive attitude in the White House is enormously important,” he said. While American utilities are shunning coal, Mr. Raney says, some mines are shipping coal overseas. He sees promise in clean coal technology and says that “some plants can get back on line” if Mr. Trump dismantles Mr. Obama’s Clean Power Plan. But that will take time. The plan is tied up in litigation the Supreme Court was expected to hear the case next year. Mr. Copley, and many others, are waiting — and contemplating a divided nation. Mr. Copley is now a here. Yahoo News declared that he had helped shape the race and invited his family to its studios in New York on election night. The family had never been to the city. Mr. Copley did not like having to explain to his children why protesters were shouting profanities in Times Square, and he later felt put off by the cast of “Hamilton” reading a statement he deemed “rude” to Mike Pence, the vice . At home, though, Mr. Copley sees nuance. His children’s drama teacher, Dusty Smith, 36, who has purple and blue streaks in her hair, said she had voted for Mr. Trump because he seemed “very humble” on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. ” At the Thanksgiving play Ms. Smith directed, an teenager delivered a homage to racial harmony. Watching it, Mr. Copley worried that his black friends would think he was racist because of his vote. People have asked Mr. Copley if he will run for public office if God leads him to, he said, he will. As for Mr. Trump, he will give the time: “He’s got four years. ” | 1 |
PARIS — When the Islamic State was about to be driven out of the ancient city of Palmyra in March, Yves Ubelmann got a call from Syria’s director of antiquities to come over in a hurry. An architect by training, Mr. Ubelmann, 36, had worked in Syria before the country was engulfed by war. But now there was special urgency for the kind of work his youthful team of architects, mathematicians and designers did from their cramped offices in Paris: producing digital copies of threatened historical sites. Palmyra, parts of it already destroyed by the Islamists who deemed these monuments idolatrous, was still rigged with explosives. So he and Houmam Saad, his Syrian colleague, spent four days flying a drone with a robot camera over the crumbled arches and temples. “Drones with four or six rotors can hover really close and register structural details, every crack and hole, and we can take very precise measurements,” said Mr. Ubelmann, who founded the company Iconem. “This is the stuff architects and archaeologists need. ” They need it in a new push for virtual preservation that scientists, archaeologists and others, like Mr. Ubelmann, are compiling on a large scale. The records could be used to create computer models that would show how monuments and endangered historical sites might one day be restored, repaired or reconstructed. Of special interest today are ancient sites in Syria, and also Iraq, that have suffered from war, looting and the Islamic State. “Palmyra was very difficult,” Mr. Ubelmann said. “The terrorists were uploading videos with them blowing up monuments and smashing statues to manipulate public opinion,” he said. “We felt the best response was to magnify the pictures of these places and show their splendor and their importance to the culture. It became a war of images. ” The latest front in that war is in the exhibition halls of the Grand Palais in Paris, where, through Jan. 9, many of the 40, 000 images he and his team took at Palmyra have become the basis for displays. Called “Eternal Sites: From Bamiyan to Palmyra,” the show aims to draw attention to the rising threats to global heritage. To underscore the exhibition’s political importance, it was opened several weeks ago by President François Hollande of France, who described it as “an act of resistance” against terror and intolerance. Showing the beauty of the Middle Eastern heritage, he said, “is the best answer to the Islamist propaganda of hate, destruction and death. ” Martinez, the director of the Louvre and the lead curator of the show, said the sites had been chosen because “all are under threat from pillaging, neglect or destruction and are not accessible to the public. ” He said it aimed to mobilize public opinion “in the face of the devastation of unique heritage. ” Besides images from Palmyra, the multimedia show projects enormous photographs and videos, immersing visitors in different eras, including the ancient Iraqi city of Khorsabad around 700 B. C. an mosque in Damascus and a medieval Christian citadel. Mr. Ubelmann dismissed any criticism of collaboration with the government of the Syrian president, Bashar . “We were working pro bono, not for any government, but to help the archaeologists,” he said. They shared their work with the Syrian archaeologists, he said, adding, “We also train our colleagues so they can later do this on their own. ” What is paramount is memory and potential restoration. In the last year, his team has flown drones over some 20 historic sites in Syria. Recently, it moved into zones in Iraq, close to the front line in the fight against the Islamic State. The team is now analyzing the war’s effects on the remains of once thriving cities dating back some 3, 000 years, including Nineveh, Khorsabad and the thrashed temple and palace of Nimrud, where the government drove out the jihadists in November. In 2015, Islamists sent out videos showing militants using sledgehammers to break reliefs of human figures and mythical winged bulls as part of their campaign. “Nimrud was probably the most splendid of the Assyrian cities,” Layla Abdulkarim, a Syrian architect, said as she analyzed aerial photographs. Using drones in archaeological work is not entirely new, specialists say, but at a recent gathering in Paris researchers from Europe and the Middle East said they were now having to practice “war archaeology,” that is, collecting reliable data from areas. The images from the drones in war zones had proved immensely valuable. But these were barely scratching the surface. Before the war, close to 150 archaeological projects were underway, just in Syria, researchers said. Experts from many countries are trying to assess the damage in Syria’s old cities but also in the area where the Islamic State held sway that is straddling Iraq and Syria, the region that is seen as central to human history and often called the birthplace of modern economics and writing. There is an outcry for data about the havoc wreaked in Yemen by Saudi bombing. “People are exchanging satellite images and data on blogs and other research platforms, but we have no real assessment yet because so many ancient sites are not accessible,” said Pascal Butterlin, a professor of archaeology at the Sorbonne in Paris. Time is of the essence, even in the case of ruins, Mr. Butterlin said. He has led expeditions for more than 20 years to Mari, near Syria’s border with Iraq. Before fleeing, the guards at Mari reported that looters had come from Iraq, he said. “We need to know what places need to be stabilized and how looters have altered the sites,” he said. “Important evidence, like clandestine pits, can disappear very quickly through sandstorms and erosion. ” Cheikhmous Ali, a Syrian archaeologist based in France, who founded the international group the Association for the Protection of Syrian Archaeology, said reports of organized pillaging continued. A first wave of looting began in 2012, Mr. Ali said, and looting has accelerated since 2014 with the arrival of the Islamic State. While jihadists were more motivated to destroy the artifacts, they had also allowed looters to operate in exchange for money. Mr. Ali said he kept an ever changing tally of museums bombed, objects carted off, safes stolen. The exhibition in Paris, which is drawing large crowds, coincides with “History Begins in Mesopotamia,” a show at the Louvre’s regional museum in Lens. Both exhibitions highlight the French government’s active concern about cultural damage in Syria, which was briefly controlled by France in the first half of the 20th century. Mr. Hollande has taken a strong interest, condemning the deliberate destruction of patrimony by all sides as “war crimes. ” This past month, France offered $30 million toward a proposed $100 million fund to protect sites as fighting abates, provide emergency storage for artifacts and eventually rehabilitate monuments. At the “Eternal Sites” opening at the Grand Palais, Mr. Hollande stressed that France was taking in more Syrian refugees trying to protect monuments of great historical and cultural importance did not mean ignoring the suffering of the population. “Should we be concerned about the patrimony?” he asked. “What is more important, saving lives or saving stones? In reality, these two are inseparable. ” | 1 |
Documentaries hold a power unique to any other type of film. They have the remarkable capacity to shift our understanding of the vast and complex world in which we live, most of the time presenting us with powerfully relevant information, a previously unknown perspective, and hopefully, a new choice to make a difference. The following list of documentaries showcases films that may inspire a new outlook on the world we live in. There were so many to choose from that compiling this list proved challenging, however, each one of these films stands as prudent commentaries offering valuable insight into the wonders and workings of the world at large. Enjoy! 1) Hungry For Change “Hungry For Change exposes shocking secrets the diet, weight loss and food industry don’t want you to know about; deceptive strategies designed to keep you coming back for more. Find ut what’s keeping you from having the body and health you deserve and how to escape the diet trap forever.” 2) Fed Up “Everything we’ve been told about food and exercise for the past 30 years is dead wrong. FED UP is the film the food industry doesn’t want you to see. From Katie Couric, Laurie David (Oscar winning producer of AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH) and director Stephanie Soechtig, FED UP will change the way you eat forever.” 3) Tiny “TINY is a documentary about home, and how we find it. The film follows one couple’s attempt to build a “tiny house” from scratch, and profiles other families who have downsized their lives into homes smaller than the average parking space. Through homes stripped down to their essentials, the film raises questions about good design, the nature of home, and the changing American Dream.” 4) Cosmos ”‘Family Guy’ creator Seth MacFarlane, in a departure from the type of material he is best known for, pays homage to Carl Sagan’s award-winning and iconic ‘Cosmos’ with this docu-series. Through stories of humankind’s quest for knowledge, viewers travel across the universe. Scientific concepts are presented clearly, with both skepticism and wonder, to impart their full impact. Renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts, and Sagan’s original creative collaborator, Ann Druyan, serves as an executive producer.” 5) Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead “100 pounds overweight, loaded up on steroids and suffering from a debilitating autoimmune disease, Joe Cross is at the end of his rope and the end of his hope. In the mirror he saw a 310lb man whose gut was bigger than a beach ball and a path laid out before him that wouldn’t end well— with one foot already in the grave, the other wasn’t far behind. FAT, SICK & NEARLY DEAD is an inspiring film that chronicles Joe’s personal mission to regain his health.” 6. Forks Over Knives “Forks Over Knives examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods. The major storyline in the film traces the personal journeys of a pair of pioneering yet under-appreciated researchers, Dr. T. Colin Campbell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn.” 7) Cowspiracy “Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret is a groundbreaking feature-length environmental documentary following intrepid filmmaker Kip Andersen as he uncovers the most destructive industry facing the planet today – and investigates why the world’s leading environmental organizations are too afraid to talk about it.” 8) In Plane Sight “911: In Plane Site: Director’s Cut is a 2004 documentary which promotes 9/11 conspiracy theories. Photographs and video footage from the September 11 attacks are presented and the documentary claims that the public was not given all of the facts surrounding the terrorist attack.” 9) Pump “This is the movie that will change your attitude about fuel forever. PUMP is an inspiring, eye-opening documentary that tells the story of America’s addiction to oil, from Standard Oil’s illegal tactics to the monopoly oil companies enjoy today. The film explains clearly and simply how we can end this monopoly — and finally win choice at the pump.” 10) The Human Experiment “The Human Experiment lifts the veil on the shocking reality that thousands of untested chemicals are in our everyday products, our homes and inside of us. Simultaneously, the prevalence of many diseases continues to rise. From Oscar® winner Sean Penn and Emmy® winning journalists Dana Nachman and Don Hardy, The Human Experiment tells the personal stories of people who believe their lives have been affected by chemicals and takes viewers to the front lines as activists go head-to-head with the powerful and well-funded chemical industry. These activists bring to light a corrupt system that’s been hidden from consumers… until now.” Have you seen any movies on Netflix lately that you feel deserve to be on this list? Please mention them in the comments section below! Much Love Documentaries hold a power unique to any other type of film. They have the remarkable capacity to shift our understanding of the vast and complex world in which we live, most of the time presenting us with powerfully relevant information, a previously unknown perspective, and hopefully, a new choice to make a difference. The following list of documentaries showcases films that may inspire a new outlook on the world we live in. There were so many to choose from that compiling this list proved challenging, however, each one of these films stands as prudent commentaries offering valuable insight into the wonders and workings of the world at large. Enjoy! 11) Life: The BBC Mini-Series A vast majority of people live their lives exiled from the wonders of nature and the myriad of living creatures that inhabit our incredibly diverse biosphere. Not to worry, however, as this wonder is magnificently captured in the 2009 BBC mini-series, Life. Shot in crystal clear high-definition and narrated by the world’s most beloved narrator himself, David Attenborough, the series chronicles some of the most unusual, if not downright bizarre, behaviors that living organisms h ave devised to keep their species alive. The massive project took 4 years to shoot and put together, taking brave camera crews across every continent and habitat imaginable. Get your popcorn ready and prepare for your mind to be blown. 12) The Zeitgeist Trilogy Commonly pegged as the films that ignited a global awakening, the Zeitgeist Trilogy quickly opened a public discourse into the largest “conspiracies” to brace the modern day world. Narrated by the enigmatic filmmaker and social activist, Peter Joseph, the film audaciously exposes the high-ordered corruption in all aspects of finance, religion, and politics today, inspiring the masses to open their eyes to the the inner workings of the global tyranny ruling our world. The series leaves the viewer with a whetted appetite for more, making this documentary film series a can of worms only for the brave and ready. 13) The Square By now, we have undoubtedly heard about the horrendous ongoing conflict in Egypt through the mainstream lens, but rarely have we gotten the chance to see an inside perspective from the men, women and children who are actually experiencing the carnage and chaos. The 2013 documentary, The Square, does just this. Audiences get a compelling inside look at the cascading series of revolutions and counter-revolutions that have shaken Egypt since the beginning of 2011, shattering routine bias commonly imposed by the mainstream media. We see the humanness of the Egyptian conflict like never before, a frightening reality that reminds us of the possibilities any country could experience in the face of governmental defiance. 14) I Am Known for his clever knack for ridiculous humour, filmmaker Tom Shadyac’s resume of films include blockbuster hits like The Nutty Professor, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and Bruce Almighty . But after a 2007 biking accident left him with a series of insistent headaches and a painful sensitivity to light, Tom was forced to spend a 6-month period bed-ridden, in complete darkness. Once Tom recovered, he found himself with a new perspective and a slew of burning questions about life. This prompted his journey into the realm of documentary film-making, spawning the film I Am. The film asks two central questions: “ What’s Wrong With the World?” and “ What Can We Do About it?”, picking the brains of a cast of intriguing and insightful public figures. The themes explored in I Am make important food for thought for everyone. 15) Samsara Samsara also made a previous list of life changing films we wrote about, seen here , due to its success in capturing the unfathomable reaches of humanity’s spirituality and the human experience. Neither a traditional documentary nor a travelogue, Samsara takes the form of a nonverbal, visionary inspired guided meditation. From the mundane to the extraordinary, prepare for a journey around the world like nothing you’ve seen before. 16) Earthlings Coming in at number 5 is a film that changed my life only 20 minutes in. Earthlings is one of those films you cannot walk away from unaffected, exposing a reality so often swept under the rug by most. Some of the largest industries in our world today operate from the exploitation and slaughter of billions of animals annually, and this film exposes these gruesome and oft-ignored facets of society. The film does well at showing how all living beings on this planet are ‘earthlings,’ and that somewhere along the way we’ve severed our connection to animals to a sadistic degree. If you are ready, watch this film and prepare for a massive wake-up call. 17) Life In A Day Life In A Day takes the number 3 spot for a few reasons. The first reason is due to it’s incredibly original concept – an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to YouTube, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, July 24, 2010. The second reason is due to the sheer magnitude and global perspective it provides the audience with. The film leaves you with a feeling of connectedness, having seen the diversity and rawness of humanity and the windows into different lives, capturing moments humourous and sad, ordinary and momentous. 18) Revolution Revolution is an urgent call to action over the looming ecological collapse. It presents the idea that all of our actions are interconnected and that environmental degradation, species loss, ocean acidification, pollution, and scarcity of food and water are limiting, even reducing, the Earth’s ability to support humans. What is particularly important about this film is the director’s passion to get this message across to our youth, the ones who will be left to deal with the mess of previous generation’s decisions. Revolution is a film that should no doubt be mandatory for high school and university students to watch, whence the future policy makers emerge, to hopefully one day make a difference. 19) Planet Earth What other documentary would you expect to take the top spot on our list other than BBC`s Planet Earth ? The series is probably the most breath-taking visualization of our planet ever conceptualized. Comprised of eleven episodes, each features a global overview of a different biome or habitat on Earth captured in stunning high-definition. Planet Earth comes in at number one for the sole reason that it gives us a truly epic perspective on the world we live in, and reminds us of how freaking awesome and sacred our planet truly is.
The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle.
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"If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group." - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune | 0 |
Has Donald J. Trump become a Christian? That is the suggestion of James C. Dobson, one of America’s leading evangelicals, who said Mr. Trump had recently come “to accept a relationship with Christ” and was now “a baby Christian. ” Dr. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and one of the country’s most prominent social conservatives, gave his account at a meeting Mr. Trump had in New York on Tuesday with hundreds of Christian conservatives. In an interview recorded at the event by a Pennsylvania pastor, the Rev. Michael Anthony, Dr. Dobson said he knew the person who had led Mr. Trump to Christ, though he did not name him. “I don’t know when it was, but it has not been long,” Dr. Dobson said. “I believe he really made a commitment, but he’s a baby Christian. ” Mr. Anthony posted the interview to his blog on Friday. Dr. Dobson could not be reached on Saturday, and Hope Hicks, the Trump campaign spokeswoman, did not respond Saturday to a request for details. Mr. Trump stumbled at times last year when speaking about faith. At one point he said that he had never asked for God’s forgiveness. And after repeating on the campaign trail that the Bible was his favorite book, ahead of his own “Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump declined to name a favorite verse. “The Bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics,” he told Bloomberg Television. Mr. Trump, a Presbyterian, questioned the faith of Hillary Clinton, a Methodist, at a meeting with a smaller group of evangelical leaders on Tuesday, saying, “We don’t know anything about Hillary in terms of religion. ” During the New York meeting, Mr. Trump made no mention of being born again. It is a possibility certain to cause chortles in some corners, but it could also open doors in others for the presumptive Republican nominee for president. For evangelicals, “accepting Christ” is at the heart of becoming a genuine Christian, and refers to acknowledging sin and declaring the need for Jesus Christ as savior. “The expectation evangelicals have is of a radical change, a turn from the life of sin to following Christ,” said Kedron Bardwell, a political science professor at Simpson College in Iowa, who is the son of an evangelical pastor. With new believers, this is often done in prayer with another Christian, which may have been what Dr. Dobson was referring to when he said that he knew the person who had “led him to Christ. ” Mr. Trump won a majority of evangelical voters in the Republican primaries, though some prominent conservative Christian leaders kept their distance. Dr. Dobson endorsed Senator Ted Cruz. Since Mr. Trump clinched the nomination in May, some of those leaders have rallied to him, including Ralph Reed. In his interview, Dr. Dobson conceded that Mr. Trump did not exactly fit the typical mold of an evangelical. “He used the word ‘hell’ four or five times,” he said. “He doesn’t know our language. ” He added that Mr. Trump “refers a lot to religion and not much to faith and belief. ” For evangelicals, the heart of Christianity is a dependence on God. They often contrast this with what they characterize as merely “religion,” which they view as more rules and . Dr. Dobson joked that Christians should take it easy on Mr. Trump for what some might perceive as . “You got to cut him some slack,” Dr. Dobson said. “He didn’t grow up like we did. ” Mr. Anthony referred to the conversion of Saul, a zealous Pharisee, who later became the Apostle Paul: “He didn’t know the language either. ” Dr. Dobson agreed. “I think there’s hope for him,” Dr. Dobson said. “And I think there’s hope for us. ” | 1 |
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