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Major cities need to import yet more immigrant residents to replace the Americans fleeing from those cities’ crowded, and expensive districts, according to a Bloomberg article. [The government imports 1 million new legal immigrants per year, even as 4 million young Americans turn 18, but according to Bloomberg: Immigration to the U. S. has failed to make up for the number of residents leaving New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — the nation’s top three metropolitan areas. Chicago — beset by crime, economic and budgetary woes and high taxes — is the net exodus leader among 100 metro areas tracked by Bloomberg using Census Bureau data for the year through July 1, 2016. An average 245 local residents left the Windy City each day compared with the arrival of 71 foreigners. Census doesn’t inquire about a person’s citizenship status … For the nation’s third metropolitan area, foreign immigration “is the only offset we’ve got and it would be tragic to lose,” said Diane Swonk, chief executive and founder of DS Economics in Chicago. Rising government taxes, rental and housing prices in the cities help push ambitious young Americans towards southern cities, such as Dallas, Austin, Tampa, Orlando, Atlanta, and Charlotte. Some other coastal cities are also gaining population from arriving Americans, principally Seattle and Portland. But immigration is so high in Miami that it is pushing out Americans, just like in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Young people are leaving the crowded cities, in part, because elite jobs and large immigrant populations combine to push up property prices and taxes, while also holding down the salaries and wages needed to start families. “In the New York metropolitan area, Manhattan prospers while old factory towns such as Paterson, New Jersey, and Waterbury, Connecticut, languish … While Los Angeles gained more than 54, 000 international migrants, it lost more than 87, 000 people due to domestic migration,” said Bloomberg. That is bad news for conservatives in those states because GOP candidates tend to sweep districts with where voters can afford to set up homes. Those trends were reflected in the 2016 election, where Trump won 26 of 27 states. As more Americans migrate southwards, they are likely to bring more voters to their new districts, which help offset the huge immigrant inflow of residents. Read the article here. Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart. com, | 1 |
This season’s special congressional elections are being heralded as a test of whether newly energized Democrats will fare better with an unpopular Republican president. So far, the Democrats are passing the test. On Tuesday, Republicans won an unexpectedly close race in Kansas’ Fourth Congressional District. The Republican Ron Estes won by seven points over James Thompson, even though President Trump won the district by 27 points in November. No Democrat holds a House seat as Republican as this one, so it’s startling that the seat was even competitive. In general, it’s a mistake to read too much into a single special election. They are more prone to odd results. That’s because there’s less time for recruitment, or even opposition research. There isn’t a national campaign going on at the same time. The turnout is often low and variable. But the Kansas result is not a great sign for the Republicans, and it’s hard to dismiss. Ultimately, special elections are still elections. They reflect the national political environment in nearly the same way as regularly scheduled contests. There just happen to be a few more outlying results. In theory, if you had enough special elections you could make a pretty good inference about the national political environment. There aren’t usually enough of them in a cycle to make such a conclusion, though. Instead, every special election provides a small and imperfect bit of information about the overall national picture. The small and imperfect lesson of Tuesday’s special election in Kansas is that the Republicans might be in quite a bit of trouble. Mr. Estes’s victory is extremely poor for this district, whether under politically neutral circumstances or an environment deeply unfavorable to the president’s party. Even with Mr. Trump’s approval rating around 40 percent, Mr. Estes should still have been considered a favorite in the district. There are extenuating circumstances, as there often are. The Kansas Republican Party is deeply unpopular under the leadership of the governor, Sam Brownback, and Mr. Estes is the state treasurer in Mr. Brownback’s administration. Details like this always make it hard to pinpoint expectations for a single congressional election — especially in races without an incumbent. Nonetheless, it is a stretch to argue that the entirety of the difference between Mr. Estes’s result and what you would expect under politically neutral circumstances can be attributed to his connection to Mr. Brownback. The case to dismiss the Kansas result will be better if Republicans fare well in coming special elections. But Democrats have already been doing well in state legislative special elections, in part because of strong turnout. The Democrats also look to be competitive in a May congressional election in Montana, and will most likely outperform Hillary Clinton’s share of the vote there. Win or lose, the Democrats are competitive in the special election in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District (the election is next Tuesday, with a possible runoff in June). Republican struggles are to be expected the party has full control of government and its president is unpopular. These are the circumstances that often end in a wave election, like the ones that swept Democrats into power in 2006 and out of the House in 2010. We might well be heading for another. At a minimum, the Kansas result is fully consistent with that possibility. | 1 |
Region: Southern Asia The fight against terrorism is increasingly a key issue for all countries, and it is quite natural that it has drawn the attention of the participants of the 8th BRICS summit. However, India has a particular interest in focusing attention on it after terrorists from the radical group “Jaish-e-Mohammed” (“Army of Mohammed”) committed attacks on the Indian infantry battalion garrison near the town of Uri, 10 km from the Line of Control in Kashmir on September 18th. India held Pakistan responsible for the deaths of 18 Indian soldiers, and claimed that it supports these terrorists. On Twitter, Rajnath Singh, the Home Minister, described the attack as a cross-border invasion of militants trained and armed by Pakistan, and called it a “terrorist state.” Speaking at the 71st session of the UN General Assembly, the representative of India raised the issue of Pakistan’s support for cross-border terrorism, which has both a regional and global impact. India responded to the terrorist attack with surgical strikes on their bases in the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir, which destroyed seven militant hideouts and killed more than 35 extremists. Despite protests from Pakistan, the world community has not condemned India’s actions. Relations between the two countries have entered a new round of confrontation that has also involved the BRICS countries. The problem of terrorism brought up by Narendra Modi at the summit (which was condemned by Pakistan) turned out not to have such a simple solution as it affects the interests of other members of the organization, especially Russia and China. At the opening of the meeting, N. Modi said: “In our region, terrorism poses a grave threat to peace, security and development. Tragically the mothership of terrorism is a country in India’s neighbourhood. Terror modules around the world are linked to this mothership. BRICS must speak in one voice against this threat.” Earlier at the G20 meeting on September 5th, N. Modi called for the isolation and punishment of those who sponsor or support terrorism. Thus, when discussing the issue of terrorism, the BRICS countries de facto had to answer the question of who they support more: India or Pakistan in their struggle for leadership in South Asia. In spite of the Russia-Pakistan joint military exercises carried out shortly before the summit, N. Modi decided not only not to focus attention on this issue but put every effort into winning the support of Russia, which he called “old friend” (in Russian), and expressed his appreciation for the unequivocal condemnation of the terrorist attack on an army garrison in Uri. In the Joint Statement issued following the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to the Republic of India on October 15, 2016, the parties stressed the need to avoid the emergence of ‘safe havens’ for terrorists. Although the wording is rather vague and does not point directly to Pakistan as a ‘safe haven’ for terrorists, India was satisfied with it. While answering the journalists’ questions about military ties between Russia and Pakistan, the Deputy Foreign Minister of India Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said that Russia would not do anything that could harm India’s interests. There is full understanding between Russia and India. At the summit, this was actually proved by the strengthening of the military-technical and economic cooperation between the two countries. As for China, its position regarding the involvement of Pakistan in the terrorist attack to India, was announced even earlier, when it blocked the Indian proposal to include Masood Azhar, the leader of the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad, into the list of international terrorists, declared illegal by the UN. India considers him responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in the country including the attack of December 13, 2001 on the Parliament and of January 2, 2016 on the Pathankot Air Force Station. The issue, of course, is not about Masood Azhar. As it was officially announced, “China opposes all forms of terrorism. Double standards in combating terrorism should be abandoned. However, it is also unacceptable to use the fight against terrorism as a pretext for political purposes.” China is governed by purely pragmatic economic and political considerations underlying its rapprochement with Pakistan. Politically, China wants to use Pakistan as a geopolitical player, able to resist the growing influence of India in South Asia, and as a link with the Islamic world. Expansion of military cooperation between India and the United States also causes concern among the Chinese leadership as it could adversely affect China’s plans in the Indian Ocean. In addition to the geopolitical rivalry between China and India, the fact that India provides protection to the Dalai Lama is a further irritant to their relations. Pakistan is also of economic interest to China in terms of the realisation of its ambitious initiative, “One Belt, One Road”. Although N. Modi tried to persuade Xi Jinping that India and China, as ‘victims of terrorism’, should not conduct different approaches to counter it; the Chinese leader acknowledged the growing threat of terrorism and condemned all its forms in his 10-minute speech at the summit, however he limited himself to stating the need to strengthen dialogue on security and partnership in the region. China’s position on Masood Azhar remained unchanged. India’s attempts to politicise the issue of terrorism at the BRICS summit in order to isolate Pakistan politically as a country “which provides havens for terrorists and arms them” failed. The leaders of the five countries reasonably remained neutral and demonstrated political foresight, in order not to aggravate the situation in South Asia which may be used by the terrorists to enhance their activities. Natalya Rogozhina, Ph.D. in Political Science, senior research fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, the Russian Academy of Sciences, exclusively for the online magazine “ New Eastern Outlook. “
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В докладе, опубликованном в журнале Science Advances, ученые рассказали о создании трехмерного чипа, в котором для хранения памяти используются азото-замещенные вакансии — один из дефектов кристаллической решетки, возникающий при удалении атома углерода и его замене на атом азота.
Именно это открывает широкие возможности для манипулирования спинами атомов азота, что учеными использовалось для записи информации при помощи лазера. Таким образом удалось обойти затруднение, связанное с ограничением плотности записываемой информации, налагаемым объемом дисковых носителей формата DVD и Blu-Ray.
По словам американских физиков, плотность размещаемой информации на прототипе оказалась в сотни тысяч раз выше, чем на Blu-Ray. Также данные на чипе, как утверждают ученые, можно перезаписывать неограниченное число раз.
Ранее Pravda. Ru писала, что Министерство обороны РФ и инновационный центр "Сколково" проявили интерес к проекту аспиранта Ижевского госуниверситета Михаила Шаронова. Молодой ученый представил проект создания инновационного носителя информации на основе нейронных сетей, который он назвал " нейро-флешкой" .
Носитель можно использовать как традиционную карту памяти, которая имеет при этом расширенные возможности. Предполагается, что изделие может быть использовано как носитель информации устройств с искусственным интеллектом.
На созданием "Нейро-флешки" помимо Шаронова работает команда из восьми разработчиков на базе кафедры вычислительной техники Ижевского госуниверситета имени Калашникова.
26-летнему аспиранту было предложено стать резидентом инновационной территории. В свою очередь Минобороны РФ также проявило интерес к новой разработке, предложив Шаронову разработать техзадание с параметрами и местами возможного использования "нейро-флешки".
Читайте последние новости Pravda.Ru на сегодня Флешка будущего с ноготок | 0 |
There were so many instant internet spoofs making fun of Kellyanne Conway’s “Bowling Green Massacre” that it’s hard to pick a favorite. Gun to my head, I’d say mine was the Twitter meme that showed a brass plaque dedicated to the names of the poor souls left for dead on Bowling Green’s grassy killing field. It was blank. That’s because there was no massacre there. No one died. No one even stubbed a toe. But there’s a good chance you know that by now: that the supposed terrorist attack in Bowling Green, Ky. that Ms. Conway, a top presidential adviser, invoked on MSNBC last week to justify President Trump’s contentious travel ban never happened. (And, no, the reason you had never heard of it was not because the Dishonest Media ignored the alleged carnage at the time of its as Ms. Conway alleged.) The very fact that you probably know all this means that the “Bowling Green Massacre” may go down in the record of the Trump presidency as the first break in the “fake news” clouds that have cast such gloom over our fair and once (relatively) true republic. The same internet that enabled false stories to run unchecked through news feeds during the election year dispatched new white blood cells that attacked Ms. Conway’s “alternate facts” with “true facts” (a redundant term that I guess we’re stuck with for now). Their most effective attack was traditional reporting, in many cases from news organizations that have doubled down on joined by newfangled memes that accentuate the truth. The Massacre That Wasn’t showed that while Facebook, Google and Twitter take steps to combat nefarious hoaxes, they are already playing host to an organic correction movement led by ordinary users who are crowdsourcing reality. It’s early. Vigilance, and continuing improvements throughout the news business, remain necessary. But the tale of the “massacre” could be the start of something new. Ms. Conway’s mention of the supposed attack — she was trying to justify Mr. Trump’s order that closed the border to citizens from seven predominately Muslim countries — slipped past the MSNBC host interviewing her, Chris Matthews. The corrective story broke the way stories have broken since God invented newspapers: A guy walked into a bar. In this case, the guy was Joe Sonka, a staff writer for the Insider Louisville website. He was having a beer at a bar called the Backdoor when “someone texted me that Conway said something insane,” Mr. Sonka told me. As a reporter — and onetime liberal blogger — in Kentucky for several years, Mr. Sonka knew what Ms. Conway seemed to be referring to when he went home to check it out. In 2011, the federal authorities arrested two Iraqi refugees who were later given prison sentences — one for life and one for 40 years — for plotting to send money and weapons to Al Qaeda in Iraq from their new homes in Bowling Green. The episode led to a slowdown in Iraqi immigration as the Obama administration reworked vetting procedures. The authorities never charged the men — one of whose fingerprints turned up on a roadside bomb in Iraq — with planning an attack on American soil. So at 9:34 p. m. on Thursday, Mr. Sonka wrote on Twitter: “@KellyannePolls says that 2 Iraqi refugees ‘were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre.’ (There was no such massacre. )” It made like a Trump tweet and roared through the broader news media sphere. “That tweet got 2. 4 million impressions,” Mr. Sonka said. “Pretty crazy. ” There was fast by Vox, The Washington Post, CNN and Fox News (among many others) on conservative websites including Newsmax and Breitbart and, finally, in multiple references on “Saturday Night Live” — the ultimate sign that something has truly broken through. In the end, social media and journalistic scrutiny aligned with comedy to right a wrong pretty definitively. That it happened so organically showed that false “facts” might not always be the stubborn things so many people fear they are becoming. To understand how deep those fears go, just look at how “1984,” by George Orwell, has climbed up the lists nearly 70 years after its debut. A “1984” stage adaptation is even heading to Broadway. (How about a Hamiltonesque musical: “2 and 2 make 5? Don’t give me that jive! ”) As the New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani put it recently, Orwell’s classic seems “all too familiar,” capturing “a world in which the government insists that reality is not ‘something objective, external, existing in its own right. ’” Mr. Trump renews those fears every time he taps out social media messages like one he posted on Facebook on Thursday complimenting an article about a “ ” travel ban Kuwait was imposing on five nearby countries. As it happens, this was untrue, as even Sputnik International, the Russian news service that helped promote the story, acknowledged. Then there are the regular Trump Tweets calling CNN or The Times “fake news. ” The Bowling Green episode made such a splash because it played directly into concerns that the Trump administration would use untrue assertions to rally support for its agenda while denigrating as “dishonest” all the valid reporting pointing out the falsehoods. But even before the Bowling Green story fell apart so spectacularly, there were signs that what had worked well during the presidential campaign last year might not succeed when it comes to the work of government. All the accusations of “fake news” and “dishonest media” couldn’t erase images of crying relatives stranded at airports — or the reporting on the legal questions surrounding Mr. Trump’s immigration order that led a judge to temporarily suspend it. No one in the administration could disappear the readouts from the president’s tense call with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia leaked to The Washington Post. Nor could they reverse the effects of the reporting, some of it in The Times, about the potential business conflicts of his Army secretary nominee, Vincent Viola, who withdrew his name Friday night because of them. Ditto for the blowback over the whole Bowling Green yarn. Ms. Conway went on to admit her error, first on Twitter (where else?) and later in an interview with Howard Kurtz of Fox News, saying it was overblown because “I misspoke one word. ” (By that, she meant, apparently, that she should have said “Bowling Green terrorists” rather than “Bowling Green massacre. ”) And Ms. Conway was right when she wrote that “honest mistakes abound. ” After all, The Washington Post admitted over the weekend that several details in a column about internal White House strife over the president’s executive order on immigration were in dispute. A few days before that, of Detroit walked back a report about a woman who died in Iraq supposedly after Mr. Trump’s new policy blocked her entry to the United States. Yet by the end of the weekend, it was Ms. Conway’s credibility that was receiving the most scrutiny (which she described as unfair and coming from “a lot of the haters” in her interview with Mr. Kurtz). Some, like the New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, were calling upon the television networks to stop booking her. And CNN declined to have her as a guest on Sunday — in part because the Trump administration offered her in lieu of Vice President Mike Pence, but also because of what the network told me were “serious questions about her credibility. ” It would be a positive development if Ms. Conway embraced the idea that the term “honest mistakes” can apply to reporters, too, as it would be if everybody — including journalists — doubly committed to getting the facts right, without hysteria or misfires. Too optimistic? Well, if you had asked me a few days ago what I was planning to write about, I wouldn’t have said it would involve praising Twitter for keeping the national debate — and fun. Eventually, the Bowling Green memes led to mock street memorials with signs like “Never Remember. ” They had made it IRL, or “In Real Life,” which, the new administration is learning, has a way of sneaking up on you. | 1 |
Why Time Magazine’s Joe Klein Is So Wrong About Hillary Clinton Rebutting the absurd claims of my namesake. November 4, 2016 Joseph Klein
Time Magazine’s Joe Klein has just penned an article entitled “Why Hillary Clinton Is the Only Choice to Keep America Great.” I feel duty bound to respond to at least the most absurd of the comments made by namesake and author of Primary Colors, the novel based on about Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign in 1992.
The other Joe Klein laments that Hillary has been so “severely damaged in the course of the 30-year battering she’s received at the hands of extremists and the media.” Sorry, but Hillary’s wounds are self-inflicted. Her lies, greed and corruption go back decades and have now reached a crescendo with the dual scandals of her use of a private server for State Department business while she was Secretary of State and of the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation.
“There is one part of Trump that is indisputably real: his ego,” the other Joe Klein wrote, as if Hillary were the epitome of humility and grace.
“Those who would put Clinton’s failings in the same league as Trump’s depravities are delusional,” declared Klein. I agree with his statement, but for precisely the opposite reason that he advances. Trump did not abuse a public office for personal gain. He did not “hand pick” (Hillary’s word) an ambassador to serve in one of the most dangerous countries in the world and then never respond to his multiple requests for enhanced security, let alone pick up the phone and contact Ambassador Chris Stevens directly. "The government was not able to save four lives, to keep four lives safe. How can you keep a country safe?" asked Stevens’ former fiancé in a rhetorical question that Hillary would be unable to answer. Trump did not lie to the families of those slain in Benghazi, as Hillary did. Trump did not put national security at risk by using a private server for government e-mails in order to evade the Freedom of Information Act, as Hillary did.
In short, anyone who thinks that Hillary’s proven record of recklessness, mendacity, and indifference is not more troubling by several orders of magnitude than Trump’s “depravities” is “delusional.”
The other Joe Klein complains that Trump deals in “stereotypes” - “the blacks,” “the Hispanics,” “the Muslims,” “the women” and, yes, even “the veterans.” Yet much of Hillary’s pitch is gender-based. Elect her because she is a woman. And she attacks millions of people who support her opponent with vile epithets – “deplorable,” “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “xenophobic,” “Islamaphobic,” and – for good measure - “irredeemable.”
The other Joe Klein charges that Trump is “about all that has gone wrong in our society, and nothing of what has gone right.” To paraphrase Bill Clinton, that would depend on what your definitions of “wrong” and “right” are. Is Hillary Clinton really right when she parrots Black Lives Matter’s stereotypical attacks on what she herself has characterized as white “privilege” and “systemic racism” in this country? Is she right when she leaps to conclusions about police “brutality” aimed against African-Americans before the evidence in specific cases is carefully examined? I don’t think so.
Hillary also represents the political correctness and anti-religious bigotry of the secular left elite that many Americans believe are what truly have gone wrong in our society. At the Women in the World Summit last year, for example, Hillary said that in order to fully secure the reproductive rights of women, “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” Hillary demeaned the sincerely held religious belief in the sanctity of life held by millions of Americans, reminiscent of President Obama’s contemptuous ‘clinging to religion’ quote back in 2008.
Hillary’s key supporters and top aides have targeted the Catholic Church in particular for their notion of progressive reform. “There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church,” wrote Sandy Newman, president of Voices for Progress, in an e-mail to Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. In response, Podesta picked up on the “spring” theme. He wrote, “We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up.”
When Time Magazine’s Joe Klein talks about what is right or wrong in American society, he should get out of his Washington D.C. bubble more often and actually speak with the American people about their day-to-day concerns. Even if Hillary Clinton ends up winning the election, the country will remain divided and she will have no mandate whatsoever to advance her progressive agenda. | 0 |
Election rigging and dirty tricks against Trump and Brexit — Slattery and Collett November 8, 2016 at 12:13 pm
Election rigging and dirty tricks against Trump and Brexit — Slattery and Collett
Dr. Patrick Slattery and Mark Collett talk about the myriad of ways that the establishment tried to rig the outcome of both the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election, how the British high court is now allowing for the government to overturn the will of the voters, and what the American (((establishment))) could block the inauguration of Donald Trump even if he is announced the winner of the November 8 election. Also, they discuss what still needs to be done to win back control over our societies. | 0 |
This election proved the power of the Internet, and of the people who used their voices to the fullest.
But now, they will pay for it.
Will it mean the end of free speech?
Clearly, the deep state was not defeated overnight, but a loose network of hackers, researchers, alternative media outlets and long-term constituents of the “vast rightwing conspiracy” did manage to overpower the establishment’s choice of Hillary for president – and managed to embarrass the mainstream media while they were at it.
Even if they won’t get everything they wanted under President-elect Trump, they proved that a number of leading websites, and quite a few underground blogs, aren’t just promoting fringe views, but have become influential and often damning, even to the most high profile players. The Internet, and in particular, the alternative media, counterbalanced the mainstream effectively in 2016, and defeated their narrative.
And now, those who control the corporate-dominated flow of information want to end that competition.
As SHTF just reported :
What this year’s Presidential election has proven is that alternative media is a force to be reckoned with, and the establishment is scared shitless.
But they won’t let it happen again.
[…] Today’s actions by Google and Facebook provide further evidence that the establishment media and Deep State politicians are preparing a digital lock down on any and all information that has not been approved by an as of yet unknown Truth Panel.
A Facebook spokesman said it will explicitly ban sites that traffic in fake news from using the Facebook Audience Network… Google said it plans to prevent Google ads from being placed “on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information [as well as] sites that distribute false news.”
Though this effort may be subtle, there is every reason to think it will be brutal for free speech. It could prove to be the last laugh for Hillary Clinton, who blames her media opponents, Wikileaks hackers and even the failure of her own friends and presstitutes in the media for destroying her campaign with piles of Clinton family dirt.
Major outlets are now circulating a list of websites that have been deemed to be “fake news” and worthy of censorship that was compiled by… you guessed it… a random community college assistant professor trolling websites they’d like to have removed because they disagree with it.
As The Daily Sheeple reported , these sites comprise of many of the biggest alternative news sites on the Internet:
Like clockwork, floating around on the Internet now is a list of these “fake” sites authored by Melissa Zimdars, assistant professor of Media and Communications at Merrimack College.
She has deemed all of these sites as “false, misleading, clickbait-y, and/or satirical ‘news’ sources”.
Just to name a few examples, The Daily Sheeple, The Free Thought Project, Infowars, Breitbart, Lew Rockwell, Before Its News , Intellihub and even CoastToCoastAM.com were flagged as “fake news” sites that should be blocked, removed and/or censored.
As many online account holders know, there are many subtle ways of suppressing or blocking accounts, including demonitization that takes away an author’s incentive. That is what Google is attempting right now by denying ad sense revenue to sites they disapprove of, while they are still the masters of quietly de-listing sites in the algorithm so that fewer people will find their links – and those being targeted may never know what happened.
Meanwhile, the State Department just refused to recognized reporters from RT at a press conference. Spokesman John Kirby got testy over a question about Syria hospital bombings and retorted: “I’m not going to put Russia Today on the same level with the rest of you who are representing independent media outlets.”
A major blowback is underway by the corporate, establishment media in retribution for their embarrassing failure in stage-managing a cakewalk election for Hillary Clinton. CNN’s parent company Time Warner (recently bought out by AT&T) was in the top ten of Hillary’s donor list , along with most of the largest Wall Street banks, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Inc. and Microsoft. It is no surprise to see many of these players acting in accordance to de-list dissenters.
Considering that Donald Trump has also teamed up with Facebook board member Peter Thiel to sue critical journalists , and have proposed new legislation to make defamation laws stronger, his administration may not prove much better, despite the strong backing for his campaign by the “alt right.”
Will these next few years be the most difficult yet for online free speech? There certainly seems to be a lot of pressure coming down from above.
Read more:
Digital Lock Down: Google and Facebook Take Aim At ‘Fake News’ Websites: “The Establishment Is Scared Sh*tless”
List of “Fake” News Sites for Google to Target Released; Every Alt Site You Know (Including The Daily Sheeple) Is On It
Make No Mistake: “Everyone Who Is Warning About Clinton Is A Target and They Are Marked”
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The second video (bottom one ) proves what Trump is sayng is true , corruption with the Clinton gang is rife , he could use this in his arguments . http://www.opb.org/news/series/burns-oregon-standoff-bundy-militia-news-updates/ammon-bundy-verdict-oregon-standoff-malheur-court/ And lets not forget there were 15 undercover FBI infrmants doing the provications = set up . | 0 |
Friday 11 November 2016 by Tom Moore Mayans admit to four-year margin of error
A Mayan spokesperson has this morning confirmed that their calendar has been subject to a small margin of error for the last several thousand years.
The Mayan calendar was thought to conclude on 31st December 2012 leaving many to fear a global cataclysmic event had been predicted.
But a spokesperson has confirmed this morning that Mayans have been aware of their miscalculation for centuries.
They told us, “We all got together a few hundred years ago when we realised our mistake. We decided it was best not to say anything as we’d already had loads printed and they seemed to be selling quite well. The logistics would have been a nightmare”.
The Mayans claim they had known about the impending apocalypse since the end of the 17th Century but didn’t know exactly what form it would take.
They added, “We had our eye on Nigel Farage for a number of months but it looks like we were looking in the wrong place.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently | 0 |
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HOUSTON, TX – Chambers County election officials have switched to emergency paper ballots after technical glitches with the electronic voting machines during early voting. Chambers County Clerk, Heather Hawthorne said electronic voting will be temporarily suspended until her office completes a software update. Reportedly, there was an error in the programming of Election Systems and Software, Inc. electronic voting machines. “The Straight Party vote for both the Republicans and Democrats did not automatically select one race on each ballot.” Hawthorne said she anticipates all technical difficulties to be addressed by the end of Tuesday. But until the issue is fully corrected, emergency paper ballots will be used. See the official press release below: | 0 |
JERUSALEM — Israel’s debate over Jewish settlement in the West Bank reignited on Sunday with a fierce exchange between the government and a human rights organization that touched on broader arguments over definitions of patriotism and the very character of the country. The latest of accusations began after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced late Saturday that he would push for legislation to bar Israelis from volunteering for national service with B’Tselem, an organization that focuses on allegations of human rights violations against Palestinians in territories. On Friday, Hagai the executive director of B’Tselem, addressed a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council devoted to a discussion titled “The Settlements as the Obstacle to Peace and the Solution,” referring to the internationally endorsed goal of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The session was initiated by the Palestinians and requested by five countries, including Egypt, a regional ally with which Israel signed a peace treaty in the late 1970s. Most of the world considers Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, territories that were conquered from Jordan in the 1967 war, to be a violation of international law. The Palestinians demand those areas as the heart of a future independent state, and continued Israeli building there has been a constant source of tension between Israel and the United States. Mr. Netanyahu’s pronouncement was largely symbolic: Only three volunteers from a program for exempted from compulsory military service on ideological, religious, health or other grounds have applied to perform national service at B’Tselem in the last seven years. Amit Gilutz, a spokesman for B’Tselem, said no other volunteers were in the pipeline. He described Mr. Netanyahu’s ban as “spin” and “a distraction from the actual issues. ” Yet it underscores the rawness of the political divide in Israel over the fate of the territories it seized nearly 50 years ago, the work of nongovernmental organizations that oppose the occupation, and the wedge that Jewish settlement there drives between Israel and the rest of the world. “Anything short of decisive international action will achieve nothing but ushering in the second half of the first century of the occupation,” Mr. told the Security Council. Living under Israeli military rule in the West Bank, he said, “mostly means invisible, bureaucratic, daily violence. ” Israel officially considers the West Bank disputed, not occupied, and it annexed East Jerusalem in a move that was never internationally recognized. Mr. Netanyahu denounced B’Tselem and Americans for Peace Now, a sister organization of the leftist Israeli Peace Now group, on Facebook. He said they had “joined the chorus of besmirching Israel” and had repeated “the mendacious claim that ‘the occupation and settlements’ are the cause” of the conflict. He added, “The truth is that the Palestinians have been attacking Israel for 50 years, since before a single settlement existed. ” He described B’Tselem and similar organizations as “ephemeral and delusional. ” Jerbi, the director of Israel’s National Civilian Service authority, told Israel Radio that B’Tselem had “crossed a red line” by addressing the Security Council meeting and had carried out “an act of betrayal. ” Zehava Galon, a former executive director of B’Tselem who now leads the Meretz party, which sits in opposition to Israel’s government, wrote on Twitter on Sunday that Israel “has needed to have the discussion about the settlements and the occupation for a very long time, because of the price the Palestinians pay but also because of the price paid by Israelis. ” Responding to what it called Mr. Netanyahu’s “slander,” B’Tselem said in a statement, “We insist on saying loud and clear: The occupation is not Israel, and resisting it is not . ” Mr. Gilutz, B’Tselem’s spokesman, said that just as his organization did not take a position on the nature of the solution of the conflict, it was also not specifying what kind of international action should be taken. Saeb Erekat, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said in a recent statement that “the international community, including the United States, must completely and unequivocally boycott Israeli settlements. ” The Israeli government has long questioned the patriotism of groups that oppose its policies in the West Bank, and in July, the Knesset approved legislation requiring nongovernmental organizations that receive more than half of their financing from foreign governments to disclose that information in their publications, advertising and meetings with public officials. The NGO law, which supporters said was intended to increase transparency, applies mainly to leftist groups critical of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians, since rightist groups mostly receive private funding from abroad. The latest quarrel over B’Tselem arose after the Obama administration condemned the Israeli government in uncommonly harsh terms for approving plans to create a new Jewish settlement, three weeks after Israel signed a lucrative military aid package with the United States. The new housing was meant to accommodate settlers who are supposed to be evacuated against their will from the illegal settlement outpost of Amona by Dec. 25, by an order of Israel’s Supreme Court. After years of delays and legal wrangling, the pending struggle over Amona has put Mr. Netanyahu’s government in a bind, and it has decided to petition the Supreme Court to put off the evacuation for an additional six months. | 1 |
Published on Oct 27, 2016 by Jeff Quitney The Big Picture TV Series playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
more at http://quickfound.net
‘The 30th Infantry Division –“Old Hickory” as this combat infantry division was affectionately called by military people both in and out of it. This National Guard Division is shown in North Carolina and Tennessee, and in combat. It rightfully earned its name as “the Work Horse of the Western Front.” Colonel Quinn appears and explains the clothing, equipment and food available to the combat infantryman.’
“The Big Picture” episode TV-211
Public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30th_In… )
The 30th Infantry Division was a unit of the Army National Guard in World War I and World War II. It was nicknamed the “Old Hickory” division, in honor of President Andrew Jackson. The Germans nicknamed this division “Roosevelt’s SS.”. The 30th Infantry Division was regarded by SLA Marshall as the number one infantry division in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), involved in 282 days of intense combat over a period from June 1944 through April 1945…
The 30th Infantry Division arrived in England, 22 February 1944, and trained until June. It landed at Omaha Beach, Normandy, 11 June 1944, secured the Vire-et-Taute Canal, crossed the Vire River, 7 July, and, beginning on 25 July spearheaded the Saint-Lô break-through of Operation Cobra.
During Operation Cobra, on both 24 and 25 July, the 30th encountered a devastating friendly fire incident. As part of the effort to break out of the Normandy hedgerows, U.S. Army Air Force bombers from England were sent to carpet bomb a one by three mile corridor of the German defenses opposite the American line. However, Air Force planners, in complete disregard or lack of understanding of their role in supporting the ground attack, loaded the heavy B-24 Liberator and B-17 Flying Fortress bombers with 500-pound bombs, destroying roads and bridges and complicating movement through the corridor, instead of lighter 100-pound bombs intended as antipersonnel devices against German defenders. Air planners switched the approach of attack by 90 degrees without informing ground commanders, thus a landmark road to guide the bombers to the bombing zone was miscommunicated as the point to begin the bombing run. Start point confusion was further compounded by red smoke signals that suddenly blew in the wrong direction, and bombs began falling on the heads of the U.S. soldiers. There were over 100 friendly fire casualties over the two days, including Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, commander of Army Ground Forces.
The 30th relieved the 1st Infantry Division near Mortain on 6 August. The German drive to Avranches began shortly after. The 30th clashed with the elite 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, and fierce fighting in place with all available personnel broke out. The 30th frustrated enemy plans and broke the spearhead of the enemy assault in a violent struggle from 7–12 August. After the liberation of Paris, the division drove east through Belgium, crossing the Meuse River at Visé and Liège on 10 September. Elements of the division entered the Netherlands on 12 September, and Maastricht fell the next day. Moving into Germany and taking up positions along the Wurm River, the 30th launched its attack on the heavily defended city of Aachen on 2 October 1944, and succeeded in contacting the 1st Division on 16 October, resulting in the encirclement and takeover of Aachen…
After a rest period, the 30th eliminated an enemy salient northeast of Aachen on 16 November, pushed through Alsdorf to the Inde River on 28 November, and then moved to rest areas. On 17 December the division rushed south to the Malmedy-Stavelot area to help block the powerful enemy drive in the Battle of the Bulge… Share this: | 0 |
by Lambert Strether
Lambert here: Apparently, then, Neoliberal U plans to build “trust-based relations” and offer “personalised attention” by gutting tenured faculty, shifting the teaching load to contingent faculty, redistributing salaries to administrators, and socking money into fancy facilities. Let me know how that works out.
By Philip Oreopoulos, Professor of Economics and Public Policy, University of Toronto, and Uros Petronijevic, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, York University. Originally published at VoxEU .
Questions over the value of a university education are underscored by negative student experiences. Personalised coaching is a promising, but costly, tool to improve student experiences and performance. This column presents the results from an experiment comparing coaching with lower cost ‘nudge’ interventions. While coaching led to a significant increase in average course grades, online and text message interventions had no effect. The benefits of coaching appear to derive from the trust-based nature of relationships and personalised attention.
Policymakers and academics share growing concerns about stagnating college completion rates and negative student experiences. Recent figures suggest that only 56% of students who pursue a bachelors’ degree complete it within six years (Symonds et al. 2011), and it is increasingly unclear whether students who attain degrees acquire meaningful new skills along the way (Arum and Roska 2011). Students enter college underprepared, with those who procrastinate, do not study enough, or have superficial attitudes about success performing particularly poorly (Beattie et al 2016).
Personalised Coaching to Improve Outcomes
A promising tool for improving students’ college outcomes and experiences is personalised coaching. At both the high school and college levels, an emerging recent literature demonstrates the benefits of helping students foster motivation, effort, good study habits, and time-management skills through structured tutoring and coaching. Cook et al. (2014) find that cognitive behavioural therapy and tutoring generate large improvements in maths scores and high school graduation rates for troubled youth in Chicago, while Oreopoulos et al. (forthcoming) show that coaching, tutoring, and group activities lead to large increases in high school graduation and college enrolment among youth in a Toronto public housing project. At the college level, Scrivener and Weiss (2013) find that the Accelerated Study in Associates Program – a bundle of coaching, tutoring, and student success workshops – in CUNY community colleges nearly doubled graduation rates and Bettinger and Baker (2014) show that telephone coaching by Inside Track professionals boosts two-year college retention by 15% across several higher-education institutions.
While structured, one-on-one support can have large effects on student outcomes, it is often costly to implement and difficult to scale up to the student population at large (Bloom 1984). Noting this challenge, we set out to build on recent advances in social-psychology and behavioural economics, investigating whether technology – specifically, online exercises, and text and email messaging – can be used to generate comparable benefits to one-on-one coaching interventions but at lower costs among first-year university students (Oreopoulos and Petronijevic 2016).
Several recent studies in social-psychology find that short, appropriately timed interventions can have lasting effects on student outcomes (Yeager and Walton 2011, Cohen and Garcia 2014, Walton 2014). Relatively large improvements on academic performance have been documented from interventions that help students define their long-run goals or purpose for learning (Morisano et al. 2010, Yeager et al. 2014), teach the ‘growth mindset’ idea that intelligence is malleable (Yeager et al. 2016), and help students keep negative events in perspective by self-affirming their values (Cohen and Sherman 2014). In contrast to these one-time interventions, other studies in education and behavioural economics attempt to maintain constant, low-touch contact with students or their parents at a low cost by using technology to provide consistent reminders aimed at improving outcomes. Providing text, email, and phone call updates to parents about their students’ progress in school has been shown to boost both parental engagement and student performance (Kraft and Dougherty 2013, Bergman 2016, Kraft and Rogers 2014, Mayer et al. 2015), while direct text-message communication with college and university students has been used in attempts to increase financial aid renewal (Castleman and Page 2014) and improve academic outcomes (Castleman and Meyer 2016).
Can Lower-Cost Alternatives to One-On-One Coaching Be Effective?
We examine whether benefits comparable to those obtained from one-on-one coaching can be achieved at lower cost by either of two specific interventions (Oreopoulos and Petronijevic 2016). We examine a one-time online intervention designed to affirm students’ goals and purpose for attending university, and a full-year text and email messaging campaign that provides weekly reminders of academic advice and motivation to students. We work with a sample of more than 4,000 undergraduate students who are enrolled in introductory economics courses at a large representative college in Canada, randomly assigning students to one of three treatment groups or a control group. The treatment groups consist of: A one-time, online exercise completed during the first two weeks of class in the autumn; The online intervention plus text and email messaging throughout the full academic year; and The online intervention plus one-on-one coaching in which students are assigned to upper-year undergraduate students who act as coaches.
Students in the control group are given a personality test measuring the Big Five personality traits.
Figure 1 summarises our main results on course grades. Overall, we find large positive effects from the coaching programme, amounting to approximately a 4.92 percentage-point increase in average course grades; we also find that coached students experience a 0.35 standard-deviation increase in GPA. In contrast, we find no effects on academic outcomes from either the online exercise or the text messaging campaign, even after investigating potentially heterogeneous treatment effects across several student characteristics, including gender, age, incoming high school average, international-student status, and whether students live on residence.
Figure 1 . Main effects of interventions
Our results suggest that the benefits of personal coaching are not easily replicated by low-cost interventions using technology. Many successful coaching programmes involve regular student-coach interaction facilitated either by mandatory meetings between coaches and students or proactive coaches regularly initiating contact (Scrivener and Weiss 2013, Bettinger and Baker 2014, Cook et al. 2014, Oreopoulos et al. forthcoming). Our coaches initiated contact and built trust with students over time, in person and through text messaging. Through a series of gentle, open-ended questions, the coaches could understand the problems students were facing and provide clear advice, ending most conversations with students being able to take at least one specific action to help solve their current problems.
Our text messaging campaign offered weekly academic advice, resource information, and motivation, but did not initiate communication with individual students about specific issues (e.g. help with writing or an upcoming mid-term). The text-messaging team often invited students to reply to messages and share their concerns but was unable to do this with the same efficacy as a coach, nor were we able to establish the same rapport with students. Our inability to reach out to all students and softly guide the conversation likely prevented us from learning the important details of their specific problems. Although we provided answers and advice to the questions we received, we did not have as much information on the students’ backgrounds as our coaches did, and thus could not tailor our responses to each student’s specific circumstances.
Our coaches were also able to build trust with students by fulfilling a support role. Figure 2 provides an example of how the coaching service was more effective than the text messaging campaign in this respect. The text messages attempted to nudge students in the right direction, rather than provide tailored support. The left panel of Figure 2 shows three consecutive text messages, in which we provide a tip on stress management, an inspirational quote, and a time-management tip around the exam period. As in this example, it was often the case that students would not respond to such messages. In contrast, the student-coach interaction in the right panel shows our coaches offering more of a supportive role rather than trying to simply nudge the student in a specific direction. The coach starts by asking an open-ended question, to which the student responds, and the coach then guides the conversation forward. In this example, the coach assures the student that they will be available to help with a pending deadline and shows a genuine interest in the events in the student’s life.
Figure 2 . Distinguishing the text-messaging campaign and the coaching programme
Coaches also kept records of their evolving conversations with students and could check in to ask how previously discussed issues were being resolved. Although we kept a record of all text message conversations, a lack of resources prevented us from conducting regular check-ups to see how previous events had unfolded, which likely kept us from helping students effectively with their problem and from establishing the trust required for students to share additional problems.
Concluding Remarks
In sum, the two key features that distinguish the coaching service from the texting campaign are that coaches proactively initiated discussion with students about their problems and could establish relationships based on trust in which students felt comfortable to openly discuss their issues. Future work attempting to improve academic outcomes in higher education by using technology to maintain constant contact with students may need to acknowledge that simply nudging students in the right direction is not enough. A more personalised approach is likely required, in which coaches or mentors initially guide students through a series of gentle conversations and subsequently show a proactive interest in students’ lives. These conversations need not necessarily occur during face-to-face meetings, but the available evidence suggests that they should occur frequently and be initiated by the coaches. While such an intervention is likely to be costlier than the text messaging campaign in our study, it is also likely to be more effective but still less costly than the personalised coaching treatment. | 0 |
November 11, 2016 Top EU Official Disputes That Trump Could Upend Iran Nuclear Deal
Asked Thursday about President-elect Donald Trump’s threats to tear up the Iran nuclear deal once in office, the European Union official tasked to oversee its implementation said it was not a bilateral agreement but a multilateral one, enshrined in a U.N. Security Council resolution.
E.U. foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini’s words reinforced those of Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, who said on Iranian television Wednesday that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was “not concluded with one country or government but was approved by a resolution of the U.N. Security Council, and there is no possibility that it can be changed by a single government.”
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HOLLAND, Mich. — While much of the American political class has been consumed with recriminations over the wrenching loss of manufacturing jobs, Chuck Reid has been quietly adding them. His company, First Class Seating, makes recliner seats for movie theaters here at a factory on the shores of Lake Michigan. Since he bought the business three years ago, its work force has grown to 40 from 15. But those jobs will be in jeopardy if Donald J. Trump follows through on his combative promises to punish countries he deems guilty of unfair trade. Mr. Trump secured the White House in part by vowing to bring manufacturing jobs back to American shores. The has fixed on China as a symbol of nefarious trade practices while threatening to slap 45 percent punitive tariffs on Chinese imports. But many existing American manufacturing jobs depend heavily on access to a broad array of goods drawn from a global supply chain — fabrics, chemicals, electronics and other parts. Many of them come from China. At Mr. Reid’s factory, imports account for roughly of the cost of making a recliner chair. In short, Mr. Trump’s signature trade promise, one ostensibly aimed at protecting American jobs, may well deliver the reverse: It risks making successful American manufacturers more vulnerable by raising their costs. It would unleash havoc on the global supply chain, prompting some multinationals to leave the United States and shift manufacturing to countries where they can be assured of buying components at the lowest prices. “If you do this tomorrow, you would have a lot of disruption,” said Susan Helper, an economist at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “The stuff that China now makes and the way they make it, it’s not trivial to replicate that. ” Mr. Reid takes pride in using American products. His designers here in Michigan dreamed up his sleek recliner. Local hands construct the frames using steel, then affix molded foam from a factory in nearby Grand Rapids. They staple upholstery to hunks of wood harvested by timber operations in Wisconsin. They do all this inside a former heating and cooling equipment factory that shut down a decade ago when the work shifted to Mexico. But the fabric for Mr. Reid’s seats arrives from China. So do the electronics in the “magic box” that enables moviegoers to control the recliner. Ditto, the plastic cup holders and the bolts and screws that hold the parts together. The motor is the work of a German company that makes it in Hungary, almost certainly using electronics from China. Mr. Reid estimates that a 45 percent tariff on Chinese wares would raise the costs of making a recliner here by 20 percent. Tariffs would give his factory an edge against American competitors that import even more from China. But his company would be vulnerable to competitors in Mexico, Colombia and Australia. They would be free to draw on China’s supply chain and sell their wares into the American market unhindered. “Our chair would be priced out of the market,” Mr. Reid said. “If it impacts our sales, that puts jobs at risk. ” Trade experts dismiss Mr. Trump’s threat of tariffs as campaign bluster that will soon give way to pragmatic concerns about growth and employment. Between 1998 and 2006, the imported share of components folded into American manufacturing rose to 34 percent from 24 percent, according to one widely cited study. International law also limits the scope of what the Trump administration can do. Under the rules of the World Trade Organization, the United States cannot apply tariffs. It must develop cases industry by industry, proving that China is damaging American rivals through unfair practices. Talk of tariffs is “pure theater,” said Marc L. Busch, an expert on international trade policy at Georgetown University in Washington. “It’s impossible to do. It violates the rule of law. ” But Mr. Trump has suggested taking the extraordinary step of abandoning the W. T. O. to gain authority to dictate terms. His successful of Carrier, the company, which agreed to keep 1, 000 jobs at a plant in Indiana rather than move them to Mexico, attests to his priorities in delivering on his trade promises. The people advising Mr. Trump on trade have records of advocating a pugnacious response to what they portray as Chinese predations. There is Dan DiMicco, the former chief executive of the American steel giant Nucor, who has long advocated punitive tariffs on Chinese goods. There is Peter Navarro, a senior policy adviser and of a book titled “Death by China: Confronting the Dragon — A Global Call to Action. ” In an email on Friday, Mr. Navarro, the Trump transition team’s economic adviser, said that imposing steep tariffs on China was an essential step to begin to address the American trade deficit with China, which reached $365 billion last year. He blamed Chinese trade practices for “destroying entire industries, hollowing out entire communities” and “putting millions out of work. ” But Mr. Navarro also cast the threat of tariffs as an opening gambit in a refashioning of trade positions. “Tariffs are not an end game but merely one of several negotiating tools to bring our trade back into balance,” he said, adding that Mr. Trump’s administration would do so “in a measured way. ” Mr. Navarro’s Greg Autry, a professor at the University of Southern California, said he assumed the Trump camp was dead serious about its threats to impose tariffs on China. The goal is to force manufacturers to come back to the United States as a condition of selling into the American market. A trade war between the world’s two largest economies would cost American jobs in the immediate term, Mr. Autry said, but eventually millions of new ones would be created as the United States again hummed with factory work. “We moved our supply chain to Asia in about two decades,” he said. “You certainly can do it in the U. S. a whole lot faster. It’s going to take a few years, but it’s going to be a much better America. ” Even if factory work does return to the United States, though, that is unlikely to translate into many paychecks. As automation spreads, robots are primed to secure most of the jobs. At Mr. Reid’s factory, talk of a bountiful future through trade barriers resonates as dangerous nonsense. Mr. Reid has a business to run in the here and now. His customers are waiting for product. He must be able to tap the supply chain. “You can’t just turn your ship around and bring that stuff back,” he said. In threatening tariffs, Mr. Trump is wielding a blunt instrument whose impacts are increasingly easy to evade by sophisticated businesses with operations across multiple borders. The geography of global trade is perpetually being redrawn. In China, factory owners, casting a wary eye on Mr. Trump, are accelerating their exploration of alternative locales with workers across Southeast Asia and even as far away as Africa. In Vietnam, entrepreneurs are preparing for a potential surge of incoming investment from China should Mr. Trump take action. In Europe, factories that sell manufacturing equipment to China are watching to see if Mr. Trump will unleash trade hostilities that will damage global growth. “Money and goods will always find their way, regardless of what barriers you put up,” said Ernesto Maurer, chairman of SSM, a Swiss maker of textile machinery that operates a factory in China. “You just make it more difficult and more expensive. ” In the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, Jiang Jiacheng exudes confidence that China will continue to serve as the factory floor for the world — with tariffs or otherwise. His company, the Guangzhou Shuqee Digital Tech Company, makes movie chairs, exporting about 20 percent of its wares to the United States. It is an exemplar both of China’s manufacturing prowess and of the conditions that make it a competitive threat. Mr. Jiang pays his factory workers $290 a month. They work six days a week. Lax environmental rules allow him to dispose of pollutants cheaply. The total cost of making one of his products, a movie chair, runs $72. He sells it for $116 to wholesalers who export to the United States. Back in September, Mr. Jiang gathered with other Chinese movie chair manufacturers to discuss the alarming statements coming from Mr. Trump. The consensus view was not to worry. “Once he takes up the post, he will certainly return things to the normal state,” Mr. Jiang said. Still, he has a backup plan. Even before President Trump entered the lexicon, Mr. Jiang was exploring a transfer of some of his work to places like Vietnam. His company would not be the first to make the journey. A dozen years ago, the United States Commerce Department accused China of dumping wooden bedroom furniture at below cost. It imposed protective tariffs. For Lawrence M. D. Yen, who had a furniture factory in southern China, that was the impetus to move to Vietnam. Labor costs were cheaper. Today, Mr. Yen’s company, Woodworth Wooden Industries, operates a factory in Cu Chi, on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, a district best known for the elaborate tunnels used by Vietcong guerrillas in their battles against American forces. This former hive of combat is now the workplace for 5, 000 people making sofa beds, recliner chairs and bedroom furniture. of the products are destined for the United States, including Las Vegas casino resorts like Mandalay Bay and the MGM Grand. Woodworth’s plant churns out more than 10, 000 sofas each month. This year, the company opened a second Vietnam factory. Arithmetic gives Mr. Yen confidence that Mr. Trump’s talk will be muted by the realities of the marketplace. Brands that deliver goods to American retailers have leaned heavily on Asian suppliers to secure low prices. In pledging to bring manufacturing back, Mr. Trump is effectively pitting the interests of a relatively small group of people — those who work in factories — against hundreds of millions of consumers. “The retail industry now employs an awful lot more people than apparel industries ever did,” said Pietra Rivoli, a trade expert at Georgetown. Seven years ago, the Obama administration accused China of unfairly subsidizing tires. It imposed tariffs reaching 35 percent. A subsequent analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan think tank, calculated the effect: Some 1, 200 American jobs were preserved, but American consumers paid $1. 1 billion extra for tires. That prompted households to cut spending at retailers, resulting in more than 2, 500 net jobs lost. The TAL Group claims to make one of every six dress shirts sold in the United States. It produces finished goods for Brooks Brothers, Banana Republic and J. Crew, operating 11 factories worldwide. If Mr. Trump places tariffs on China, the company will accelerate its shift to Vietnam, said TAL’s chief executive, Roger Lee. If that trade is disrupted, the work would flow to other countries like Bangladesh, India and Indonesia. Mr. Lee can envision no situation in which the physically taxing, monotonous work of making garments will go to the United States. “Where are you going to find the work force in the U. S. that is willing to work at factories?” Mr. Lee said. Horgen, a Swiss village on the shores of Lake Zurich, seems far removed from the gritty industrial zones of Asia. With its gingerbread homes and mountain views, it looks more like a resort. But Horgen is home to SSM, a company that has become an important supplier to Asia. Its machines turn polyester and other synthetic fibers into threads. If the rise of textiles in Asia has been a gold rush, this Swiss company has been among those cashing in by making the picks and shovels. Workers at the factory earn roughly 6, 000 Swiss francs ($5, 940) a month — some 10 times what SSM pays its workers at its Chinese factory. It makes its most sophisticated components in Switzerland and at another plant in Italy. It uses China for machines. The company sells virtually all of its products abroad, chiefly in Asia. It buys metal parts from the Czech Republic and Poland, electronic components from Malaysia, and electric motors from an American company that makes them at a factory in India. Another American company supplies software. “There is not a single machine that we have that we are able to build with materials from one country,” said Mr. Maurer, the SSM chairman. If the United States were to impose trade barriers on China, that might slow Chinese demand for textile machinery. That would potentially reduce Swiss purchases of American goods and services. But Mr. Maurer struggles to see how this would create any jobs in the United States. The American textile industry is small and increasingly dominated by robots. The rest of the world holds billions of hands willing to work cheaply. “Someone else will pick up the business,” Mr. Maurer said. “These markets are very fast. ” But the textile and apparel trades are relatively simple businesses. If the cost of making trousers becomes less appealing in China, a room full of sewing machines in Cambodia can quickly be filled with seamstresses. Industries involving precision machinery are not so easily reassembled somewhere else. An abrupt change to the economics would devastate factories that could not quickly line up alternative suppliers. American automakers are especially dependent on the global supply chain. Between 2000 and 2011, the percentage of imported components that went into exported vehicles grew to 35 percent, from 24 percent, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. At EBW Electronics in Holland, Mich. workers in lab coats tend boxy soldering machines as they make circuitry for LED lights that go into cars. It buys tiny parts and slots them into circuit boards, which are sold to major automakers. Some 80 percent of the components are imported from China. Even that number fails to capture the degree to which the company — and its 240 workers — depend on unfettered trade. Pat LeBlanc, the chairman, pointed to a nib of metal on a circuit board. The silicon was extracted at a plant in Minnesota, then processed into a thin wafer at another factory in Massachusetts. The wafer was shipped to China for testing, cut into pieces at another Chinese factory, and then delivered to the Philippines for a chemical process. Then it went back to China to be put onto a reel that can be inserted into soldering machines here in Michigan. “It literally is a global supply chain,” Mr. LeBlanc said. Mr. Reid, the owner of the theater seating company, could not imagine having to buy everything from American suppliers. Buying upholstery domestically would raise his fabric costs as much as 40 percent. “All the componentry, all the cords, it all comes from China,” he said. “I don’t know that you could ever get all of that made in the United States. Some of these industries have just been abandoned. ” He wandered into the paint shop, where a worker was spraying chair backs. He picked up a can of paint and read the label: “Made in the U. S. A. with Global Materials. ” | 1 |
PART 1 YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Numbered balls of chance rattle and rise two nights a week down at the cavernous community hall of Sts. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It’s called a good bingo when your number comes up. But that last Saturday before Christmas offered no good bingos. The night was reserved for a boxing event billed as Season’s Beatings, which had prompted a newspaper deliveryman named Anthony Taylor to pull up in his clattering Dodge Caravan. years old, 5 feet tall, 115 pounds, about to turn pro. A fist of nerves, he walked down the stairwell to the finished basement, a space used for church dances and wedding banquets, but now an open locker room. Chandeliers glittered above the fighters trying to warm up and calm down, while the crowds upstairs cheered on the amateurs, including a who would knock out his opponent. Taylor had longed for this moment. All those years of being picked on because of his size, all those street fights, all that anger needing redirection toward something constructive — all down to this. He had his hair in ropy dreadlocks and his shorts, for $300, pulled high on his hardened torso. Portable curtains in the basement separated the hometown favorites from the the A’s from the B’s. Someone smart about boxing could walk in cold and tell which side was which. The local fighters are usually a notch above, in better shape, expected to win. But Taylor’s trainer, Jack Loew, heard this hammering sound, a whap, whap, from the curtain’s other side. He peeked and saw a sinewy teenager in shorts pounding the outstretched mitts of his trainer with uncommon discipline. . “We got a fighter,” Loew said to somebody. Taylor was on his own side of the divide, warming up, when the curtain briefly parted to reveal his opponent. They made eye contact. “Nothing like anger,” Taylor recalled. “Both nervous. Just looking at each other. ” The curtain closed. A Life of Taking Punches and Unleashing His Own “Five foot even. ” That’s how Anthony Taylor describes his height. Not a higher or lower. Five foot even. When you’re 9 inches shorter than the average man, abuse will find you. But Taylor was determined from an early age to prove his true stature the only way he knew. “Street fighting,” he says. His mother, an factory worker, and his father, a handyman, split up before he was in kindergarten, so he bounced around a little. Moving from the small Ohio city of Warren to Youngstown, then down to Jackson, Tenn. he learned that broken families were tough on children, and that bullies were ubiquitous. “I was always the smallest guy in the neighborhood, so I had a lot of people picking on me,” Taylor said. “I really didn’t go around looking for trouble. It just seemed to find me because I was so small. ” “And I had a bad attitude,” he added. One day the manager of a gym in Jackson saw this small angry kid giving as good as he got, and invited him to do something with those quick hands and quicker rage. The kid began to learn. “Somebody hit you, hit you really hard, and you want to do something back,” Taylor said. “But when you think about it, you can’t fight when you’re angry. Boxing is a thinking game. ” Taylor followed the amateur circuit — Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Nevada — earning a reputation as a boxer who kept on coming. At a fight one night in Little Rock, his trainer called out, “Go get him, Tiger. ” The nickname stuck. He tried a semester of community college, but higher education wasn’t for him, at least not yet. Sometimes the classes would run over time, and he’d be late to the gym. College could wait, he figured boxing could not. He had his career goals. “To be at the top of the ladder,” he said. “Number one. Champion. ” Missing his family back north, Taylor returned to Ohio. He lives with his fiancée, Tiera Glover, their daughter and her two sons in Warren, in a worn house with green plastic furniture planted under the porch’s sagging roof. They cover the $600 monthly rent by delivering 250 copies of The Tribune Chronicle, a Warren newspaper, every morning. And every afternoon, except on days when he can’t afford the gas, Taylor drives his knocking Dodge Caravan, with its car seat and little girl toys, the 20 miles to Youngstown — to Jack Loew’s South Side Boxing Club, his sanctuary, where boxing gloves hang from nails like holiday ornaments. The club stands out along a stretch of Market Street. Some years ago, its owner, Jack Loew, hired a resident of a nearby halfway house for convicts to paint the exterior red and black. The artist also painted a pair of boxing gloves, enveloped in a wreath of stars that can convey dreamlike glory or a concussive haze. Loew is 56, and as squat and solid as his building. He boxed as an amateur before focusing on a college football career that ended after several knee operations. He became a Teamster, lost the warehouse job he thought would last to retirement, worked construction and started his own company. He also opened this club in 1989, as if in homage to what his hometown had once been. Youngstown was a pugnacious steel city of 167, 000 when Loew was born, with boxing clubs anchored in many neighborhoods. This is where his childhood friend Ray Mancini — Boom Boom — learned how to become a world lightweight champion. A later, Youngstown is down to a population of 65, 000, a hemorrhaging of 100, 000 people caused by closings, a failure to diversify and the absence, so far, of a sustainable second act. Lost in the exodus were some signature parts of the Youngstown culture, including many boxing clubs. But Loew took a shot. He opened his gym on Southern Boulevard, moved to an ancient brick building on Erie Street, then settled here, on the city’s tough south side. No problems so far, save for that time someone removed a massive tractor tire from the gym and rolled it like a determined Sisyphus up and down the hilly neighborhood — only to return the tire the next day. His excuse was simple: Just wanted to see if I could do it, Coach. Two decades ago, a scrappy kid from the south side’s Slovak neighborhood came to Loew’s gym looking to learn how to box. This kid, Kelly Pavlik, went on to become the Ghost, an electrifying, dominant boxer with a drinking problem. He abruptly quit in 2013, saying he feared the medical impact of his chosen career. “Kelly picked my door to come through,” said Loew, who is called Coach Jack by his boxers. “We were always crowded, but when we won middleweight champion of the world. … ” No need to finish the sentence: Pavlik’s success was good for Jack Loew’s South Side Boxing Club. It attracted a lot of locals looking to make their mark, including a superflyweight named Anthony Taylor. “A Joe Frazier,” Loew said. This is boxing code for saying that Taylor keeps coming at you, takes a punch to give a punch, and has fists that hit like anvils. Taylor couldn’t remain an amateur forever. Loew needed to find him a professional opponent, maybe for the Season’s Beatings event that he had set up for the week before Christmas at the Ukrainian hall. But flyweights and bantamweights — who weigh less than half the reigning heavyweight champion, Tyson Fury — are hard to come by in this part of the country. A couple of weeks before Christmas, though, a trainer from Detroit who was bringing in two amateurs for the boxing night offered a solution. He said that he could supply a flyweight who, like Taylor, was itching to turn pro. Two Partners Engaging in a Dangerous Dance The ding of a bell in a church hall transformed two slight young men into professional fighters, hired to withstand blows to body and head while trying to pound each other out of consciousness. Their pay for the fight: $300 for Taylor and $500 for his opponent, since he was coming in from 200 miles away. Moments earlier they had stood with heads bowed, their coaches massaging their backs as the referee went over final details. Then they had tapped gloves, a gesture conveying solidarity between strangers, known to each other only through a stolen glance across that parted curtain. Anthony Taylor danced the cautionary dance with his partner, head bobbing, looking for a moment to strike. He prided himself on his patience. But when the opponent tested with a tentative, catlike thrust, Taylor responded with a wild swing that punched only air, betraying his overeagerness. Then came a scrum, left right left right. Violent contact made. The crowd aahed in approval. More than 700 people had turned out. Loew, the promoter as well as Taylor’s trainer, had charged $20 for general admission and $50 for ringside, while also managing to sell more than two dozen corporate tables. But after covering expenses that included the referee, the hall and ring rentals, and the hotel rooms for boxers, Loew would take in just $382 for his eight weeks of work. At least his choice of location and timing — a Ukrainian church hall in late December — ensured a festive touch to the boxing event. A decorated Christmas tree sparkled in the corner. A Ukrainian flag hung over the water fountain. A Christmas wreath and bright lights hung beside signs that said, “Valid Bingo Is Ball Called — Not Off Monitor” and “Early Bird Winner Take All. ” Instead of calls of “ ” and “” though, there arose the grunts of boxers, the whacks of leather against flesh, the cries and sighs of spectators in thrall. Some of the loudest shouts came from Taylor’s friends and family members. “Come on, Ant’! You got this!” Taylor crouched as he stalked, making his frame even smaller before springing like a . He connected with a left that sent his opponent back, and kept on coming. He ducked under a swing, came over the top and delivered another left that knocked the fighter in red and white down into the ropes. As Taylor retreated to his corner, fans were shouting: “He’s done, he’s done! Stop the fight!” Seconds later, Taylor struck again. “His guard came down, and I hit him with a straight left hand,” he recalled. A second knockdown, although this time his opponent got up quickly, adjusting his trunks as if the fall had been nothing more than a wardrobe malfunction. Then Taylor found himself reeling backward, almost comically, after taking a hard left to the head. He responded with a punch that he thought connected for a delayed knockdown others saw more of a phantom punch and stumble. Still, Loew recalled, “If the ref had stopped the fight, I don’t think anyone would have complained. ” The bell clanged. Taylor slumped to his corner, exhausted from all that he had expended trying to end the fight. He drank some water and listened to encouraging words from Loew, who struggled to be heard over the music pounding out of the sound system. Then, again, came the bell’s beckoning. Taylor found his opponent waiting for him at the center of the ring, as if awakened by the knockdowns of the previous round. Soon there came a left that bounced Taylor off the ring’s ropes. “Anthony!” someone pleaded. But Taylor could not yet find the wind or strength. “I threw out a lot of gas in the first round by me trying to finish him off,” he said later. “You’re trying to hurry up and get done with the fight. And that’s where the turnaround was in the second round. ” “Knock him out,” someone in Taylor’s corner shouted. Then: “Get him! Get him!” And: “Let’s go, Tiger!” And: “Put him down, Ant’!” Taylor took quick rights to the jaw, another hard right that rocked him, then a left and a right. Gloved fists pounded his many tattoos: the “R. I. P. ” on his right shoulder that honors a brother shot to death (“Wrong place, wrong time,” he says) the on his left shoulder that reminds him he’s a jewel in the rough the dice and playing cards adorning his chest, along with the inscription: “Life A Gamble. ” Tension and Triumph, Confusion and Dread The bell. Another squirt of water. More of Coach Jack’s encouragement, only now sounding urgent. The passing blur of a young woman holding aloft a placard announcing Round 3. The bell. And there was Taylor’s opponent again, at the center of the ring, waiting. Taylor connected with a roundhouse left, but his opponent returned with a insult to the chin. Taylor seemed almost disengaged, as if exhaustion had displaced his purpose. “Let’s go, little man!” someone called out. But Taylor’s coach was more concrete. “Breathe, breathe!” Loew was shouting. “You gotta push it, Anthony!” Taylor did revive, holding his own until the bell. He was convinced the round was a tossup, but his coach knew otherwise. “Anthony was gassed in the third round, and took an ” Loew said. Now it was the fourth and last round, the final three minutes, and there again was his opponent, waiting. Taylor knew this was it — “an thing,” he called it. His dreadlocks swayed as he danced and dodged, as he punched and received punches. It went this way, a study in mundane violence, for most of the first two minutes. Toe to toe. But then Taylor suddenly had his opponent near the ropes. He threw a right that either glanced off the boxer or missed him entirely. The opponent fell backward to all but sit on the apron. Trying to capitalize, Taylor threw a left. But the opponent ducked to his right and stumbled forward, head sweeping briefly against Taylor’s chest, arms outstretched, looking for something to hold on to, as if the blue mat had been pulled from beneath him. He looped his left arm around Taylor’s torso as he fell onto his right knee, his lower body gone limp, his black gloves down in sudden vulnerability. The referee waved his arms. Fight over! He bent down to help the opponent, who reached up with his right hand. Halfway to his feet, the boxer wobbled and fell back down. The sudden uncertainty disrupted the order in the ring. The opponent’s coach had slipped through the ropes and was now trying to help his fighter, who struggled again to rise, only to sway and fall back against his coach’s shins. My knee, he was saying. My knee. Loew was also in the ring, yelling to Bernie Profato, the director of the Ohio Athletic Commission, sitting at ringside, that the round hadn’t ended, and you can’t have people coming into the ring, and that was a knockdown. … “Your kid’s gotta hit him for a knockdown,” Profato called back. Mere noise. The fight was over. The opponent lay on his back as some people hovered over him, including the ringside doctor — a dermatologist — now slipping on a pair of surgical gloves. Taylor, meanwhile, knew only that he had won. He raised an arm and took a few courtly bows. But a shadow of dread was settling over this decorated bingo hall masquerading as a boxing arena. A fallen man was not rising, not rising, still not rising. His eyes were closed. Medics were climbing into the ring. “You knew,” Loew said. “You knew right then and there. ” You knew right then and there. The loser, this kid from Michigan named Hamzah Aljahmi, now was unconscious. And the winner, Anthony Taylor, now was sobbing. PART 2 DEARBORN, Mich. — The amateur boxer slept. Huddled in the passenger seat of his family’s sport utility vehicle, he rocked in slumber as his father drove out of Dearborn, then south and east around Lake Erie, verses from the Quran intoning softly from the speakers. Now and then the boxer would rouse long enough for a snatch of small talk. But soon his eyes would close again, and he would sleep through the December blur of Rust Belt towns and fields, right to the edge of the Ohio city where he was to fight his first professional fight. Youngstown. This was Hamzah Aljahmi, 19, the oldest child and best friend of the man behind the wheel, Ali Aljahmi. The permit dangling from the rearview mirror hinted of the father’s worries, but no matter how bad things got, he knew that he could always confide in this beautiful beside him, sleeping now to the rhythms. How could he deny his son’s passionate dream to box his way to fame and fortune? To become the pride of Dearborn? Of Yemeni people everywhere? This was Hamzah’s destiny: to make his professional debut at a Christmastime boxing event called Season’s Beatings. Hamzah’s father had followed a different path. Born in Yemen, he had immigrated to Brooklyn, left high school without graduating — joked around too much, he says — and begun a life of manual labor. Store work. Factory work. Lifting and moving. He gravitated to Dearborn, the world headquarters of the Ford Motor Company, where of the nearly 100, 000 residents are : Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, Palestinian, Yemeni. Here are the Henry Ford museum and the Arab American National Museum, plants that make the truck and restaurants that make fahsa, a seasoned lamb stew that is shared with others and scooped with torn pieces of flatbread. Now Ali Aljahmi was the married father of five, disabled by a injury and living in a neighborhood, a block from a massive factory. But he was an Aljahmi, a member of a fiercely proud extended Yemeni family with deep roots in two cultures. The Aljahmis, the Eljahmis, the Algahmis, the Aljahims — all there for him, and he for them. Above all, he was there for Hamzah, his elder son, the boxer. Years earlier, when the family was living in Detroit, three kids ganged up on skinny young Hamzah Aljahmi. The boy held his own in the mismatch, prompting an onlooker to give grudging respect: Your son is one tough character. Sensing a purpose in life, Hamzah began training with one of his idols, Brian Mihtar, a prominent middleweight boxer known as Brian the Lion, who compiled a record, with 10 knockouts, before suspending his career in 2010. He took a liking to this fledgling boxer, who showed both talent and heart. “Like a brother,” Mihtar said. When Mihtar closed his gym, Aljahmi and his father searched the Detroit area for someone who could make the boy someday. They eventually chose Mohamed Hamood, or Coach Mo, a muscular former Marine with a shaved head who builds houses to support his family and his boxing fix. The amateur’s determination and focus impressed Hamood. The boy had phenomenal hand speed, an ability to slip punches, and surprising pop for a flyweight. But his tendency to fight with his chin up often left him dangerously exposed it was almost as if he were daring to be hit. Still, Hamood said, “a very hard worker — very hard. ” Hamzah Aljahmi fought more than a score of amateur matches, winning most and learning from all. Turning pro became his obsession, his father said: “All the time, his mind go to the boxing. ” He admired the ferocious boxers of Yemeni blood. Sadam Ali, the tough welterweight from Brooklyn. Mohamed Adam, the young superfeatherweight from Dearborn. His former coach, the Lion, Brian Mihtar. And, of course, Prince Naseem, whose image even served for a while as the wallpaper on Aljahmi’s smartphone. True, the young man had other interests. He attended prayer services. Doted on his mother and younger siblings. Abided high school, barely. Kept girls at a safe but friendly distance. Worked at a Tim Horton’s doughnut shop and then at the American Coney Island restaurant, serving hot dogs smothered in chili and onions. But it was boxing that defined him. He craved cranberry juice, shunned bread and spent most of his spare time in Hamood’s gym, in Dearborn Heights, working out, sparring with heavier partners, itching to fight for a living. “He was bugging me to go pro when he was 17,” Hamood, 55, recalled. “And I’d say, ‘Let’s take our time.’ ” Some friends and relatives approached the inherent violence of Aljahmi’s passion delicately, occasionally suggesting that he give up the ring. Others accepted that he knew who he was, and admired him for it. He talked of becoming champion and parlaying his fame in a way that would help others in need — in Yemen and beyond. Remember when he helped to collect clothes for Syrian refugees? And somehow persuaded his father to donate his three favorite coats? Remember that saying he used to repeat? “You laugh at me because I’m different I laugh at you because you’re all the same. ” Mohammad Yacoubi, 19, a classmate of Aljahmi’s and one of his closest friends, shrugged in mock surrender while trying to explain the young man’s charms. He had no enemies, he was respectful to his mother and father, he loved his siblings, and he was loyal to his friends. “Just a special kid,” Yacoubi said. Opportunity came in early December, when Coach Mo Hamood struck a deal to have Aljahmi fight in Youngstown against another amateur who was also turning pro. “He was ready,” Hamood said of his young flyweight. Aljahmi girded for the day. After telling his father that a door had opened, he posted a photograph on Instagram of his application for a Michigan boxing license, along with a note sharing the date of his debut fight — “DECEMBER 19th” — and asking people to come support him. “Alhamdulillah. ” Praise be to God. Making Final Preparations and Planning to Celebrate As the S. U. V. approached the outskirts of Youngstown, some three hours after leaving Dearborn, Hamzah Aljahmi stirred into consciousness. Looking around, he said that it was his turn to drive. His father laughed but surrendered the wheel. Father and son headed to the prefight at a government building in downtown Youngstown. The younger Aljahmi’s manner impressed the director of the Ohio Athletic Commission, a retired police officer and former referee named Bernie Profato — so much so that Profato told him, win or lose, “You’ll be welcome back in Ohio anytime. ” After the Aljahmi joined his coach and the two amateurs from Dearborn, including an with a preternatural punching ability, for some at a Carrabba’s Italian restaurant, not far from their rooms at the Red Roof Inn. Aljahmi had pasta with cream sauce. Before the night was over, the eager boxer posted one last photograph of himself on Instagram. Big smile. Throwing a right fist at the camera. “Ready for 2mrw fight night everyone keep me in ur prayers inshallah,” he wrote. If Allah wills it. The next morning, Aljahmi and his father ate breakfast at an IHOP — eggs and turkey sausage for more weight gain — then returned to the hotel for a short rest and the long wait. Since the next day would be the father’s 51st birthday, the two Aljahmis talked about getting a cake. “Win and we’ll celebrate twice,” the father promised. With the time drawing near, they drove with Coach Mo and his two young amateurs to the community hall of Sts. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church, on Youngstown’s west side. Joining them were four friends who had driven from Dearborn in a cramped Toyota. Down in the hall’s chandeliered basement, where curtains separated boxers from the opponents they were about to meet, young Aljahmi chatted away as his coach prepared him for his debut. While Aljahmi sat with his arms propped on a white towel draped over a chair back, Coach Mo wrapped his boxer’s hands in protective gauze, carefully, almost clinically. He then slipped gloves over those hands and tied the strings. Finally, to cut down on the rudeness of leather against skin, he applied petroleum jelly with his fingertips to the unlined brow, the fresh cheeks, and the chin too often left exposed in the rashness of youth. There was one last detail. With his first professional fight just moments away, Aljahmi still had no nickname. But if his opponent — a short fighter he had seen when the curtain between them suddenly opened — was calling himself the Tiger, then how about something just as feral? How about the Lion? Agreed. A protective entourage — his father, his coach, a few friends — escorted Aljahmi up the basement steps and into the auditorium, a bingo hall set up for a boxing event. Now here he was, for the night’s first professional fight, a in the superflyweight division. In shorts with matching red shoes, the dynamo from Dearborn. The pride of the community. His father’s best friend. Hamzah “the Lion” Aljahmi. A Sudden Shift in Mood After the Opening Bell Before the first bell, Aljahmi had told Coach Mo that this was his time. I’m ready, Coach, he had said. Let’s get this thing going. Now it was going, but not well. Aljahmi’s opponent was quick, active, and crouched so small that he made for a difficult target. The sight of their Hamzah being pummeled startled his friends, who had been harboring a more abstract understanding of what it meant to box professionally. Then down Aljahmi went, tagged by a powerful left. His opponent had capitalized on the weakness that Coach Mo had been working on: the “boxing ” he called it, of leaving the chin exposed. “It felt like a movie when he went down,” Aljahmi’s friend Mohammad Yacoubi said. “He had gone into that ring like a superhero. ” A few seconds later, Aljahmi went down a second time, forcing Coach Mo to make quick assessments. His young boxer was more “wobbly” after the first knockdown, the coach later said, after taking a punch that was “right on the button. ” But the second one? “He had a little wobble,” he said. “But he can go. ” Aljahmi did bounce up quickly. He adjusted his trunks — as if recalibrating body and mind — and went back to work. Becoming more aggressive, he delivered a hard left that had his opponent backpedaling. Then, while trying to avoid a swing that seemed to hit more air than flesh, Aljahmi fell against the ropes. He might have simply tripped, but it was not an impressive way to end the first round. Two knockdowns and one stumble. He returned to his corner charged with energy. What did I do wrong, Coach? “Hamzah, your chin is way up in the air,” Hamood recalled saying. “And your right hand is down. ” Aljahmi went out to own the second round, exploiting his opponent’s fatigue and blocking out the shouts of a Youngstown crowd eager to see this fall. When the bell rang, he all but ran back to his corner after leaving his weary opponent on the ropes. “Great job,” Coach Mo told Aljahmi. “Let’s keep doing what you’re doing. Use your jab. No need to wrestle with him. ” Aljahmi looked at his clutch of friends in the seats, smiled, nodded his head — and returned to the ring to follow his coach’s instructions exactly. Round 3 repeated Round 2. Although his opponent tagged him quickly with a left from nowhere, Aljahmi answered with a hard right to the chin. “There he goes!” Yacoubi, Aljahmi’s friend, shouted. Soon another Aljahmi right found purchase. “There you go! There you go! He’s tired! He’s tired! Hamzah, he’s tired!” This was true. Aljahmi’s opponent was still recovering from having fought so aggressively in the first round. His own coach was shouting for him to push through it — which he did, briefly, during a flurry. The bell rang just as Aljahmi uncorked one more punch. A little late, it seemed, but clearly accidental. He tapped his opponent’s chest in apology. Coach Mo gave Aljahmi water and applied more petroleum jelly, that translucent touch of protection, to his eyebrows, cheeks and nose. “We need this round,” the coach said, as if to make clear to his boxer the tossup closeness of the fight. I got you, Coach. Aljahmi then leaned over, found his father in the crowd, and shook his right glove in a gesture that seemed to say now is the time. Now. He was so jacked up on adrenaline that he hurried to the center of the ring well before the bell. The referee had to nudge him back a step or two, while his coach called after him that he was the toughest kid he knew. “Go get him,” Coach Mo commanded. The two superflyweights gave it their all, each determined not to lose his professional debut, as the crowd urged them on. “Give him one, Hamzah!” Aljahmi’s friends shouted. “There you go! More! More!” “Get him, get him, get him!” “Hamzah, get him! Hamzah, he’s done! He’s done!” “Keep going!” Then — a punch to their friend’s head. “Oooh!” Aljahmi, who had been dominating, was suddenly backed into a corner by his flailing opponent. “Get out of the corner!” a friend yelled. “Get out of the corner!” Too late. Their superhero was squat against the apron, dodging swings, lurching forward, grasping to hold on to something unseen, then falling, drooping, legs not cooperating, arms down. The referee stopped the fight, causing confusion about what had just happened. He tried to help Aljahmi to his feet, but the boxer could not find the strength. Panicking, Coach Mo rushed into the ring. “Good job, Hamzah!” he said, mistakenly thinking the bell had rung. “Get up. You won the fight!” I can’t. My knee. I twisted my knee. He leaned back, or maybe fell back, onto Coach Mo’s shins. Aljahmi’s father and friends had just been shouting that his opponent was “done” now they were mute. A moment ago their Hamzah had been controlling the fight now he was propped against his coach’s legs like a rag doll. A dermatologist serving as the ringside doctor slipped under the ropes and donned surgical gloves. The Lion lay flat on the mat. Then, Coach Mo said, “Hamzah closed his eyes. ” PART 3 YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — The fearless young boxer feared what he would see, feared how he would be received. He lingered at the threshold of the surgical intensive care unit, unable to take those few short steps to the bedside of his comatose opponent. The boxer, Anthony Taylor, known for his ferocity, froze under the unforgiving lights of crisis care at St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital, where a chorus of beeping monitors and exhaling respirators sang of lives at the precipice. He did not want to be here. That is, he wanted to be here, and his coach told him that he should be here, but he was frightened. In his gloveless hands he carried the shield of a bouquet, bright yellow flowers that were like dandelions, only nicer. A nurse asked if he needed help. Soon, a relative of the patient he had come to see invited him into a crowded room. There, in a small bed, with a white bandage wrapped around his head and a blue air tube running from his mouth, was the man Taylor had recently danced and fought with: Hamzah Aljahmi, 19, his eyes still closed. Taylor handed the flowers to someone and sat in a chair near the foot of the bed, stunned. To think that less than 72 hours earlier, he and this person had each been paid a few hundred dollars to fight their first professional fight, a in the hall of a Ukrainian church. To think how they had stared into each other’s eyes while engaged in a most violent form of intimacy. It could be Anthony Taylor in that bed, not Hamzah Aljahmi. Now Anthony would be spending the holidays with his family, while Hamzah. … The visitor began to cry. Ali Aljahmi, a first cousin, was moved, even impressed, by the sight of this distraught stranger paying his respects. For you to step into this room of anger and grief, Aljahmi thought to himself. For you to come to be with us. Takes a lot of strength. The cousin led Taylor into the hall to offer comforting perspective. Whatever was happening in that hospital room was Allah’s will, he said, and do not doubt that you helped Hamzah to realize his dream of becoming a professional boxer. One more thing, Aljahmi said. “You have become family with me forever for this kind of gesture. ” Taylor returned to the room and, for the next hour, talked with the father, an uncle and a few cousins of the man laid out before them, the black of his eyebrows enhanced by an enveloping whiteness of bandages and blankets. “They told me they wanted me to keep going,” Taylor recalled. “That he would want me to keep going, and that I have to honor him and keep him alive by continuing to box. ” The father, also named Ali Aljahmi, would only vaguely remember Taylor’s visit, so were his waves of grief. He had been at the fight. He had seen his beloved son, a determined fighter, crumple to the blue mat. Not in direct response to any punch, it seemed, but almost as an afterthought. The elder Aljahmi had been here in this chilling, antiseptic environment ever since, save for when nurses would gently tell him it was time to leave for the night. He’d return to a hotel whose name he would not remember and try to avoid the many anxious telephone calls from family members and friends back in their hometown of Dearborn. How is Hamzah? How is Hamzah? How is Hamzah? The father did not want to answer. If he did respond, it was to tell a version of the truth: “Hamzah is sleeping. ” Finally, the father telephoned a nephew in Dearborn with the same name as his: Ali Aljahmi, Hamzah’s cousin. I need you to bring Hamzah’s mother here to Youngstown, Ali. She needs to see him. The nephew understood what his uncle was not saying. He did as he was told. He packed Hamzah’s mother, Jamilah Aljahmi, and other relatives into a borrowed Chevy Cruze and began to drive, listening to them cry because Hamzah had been injured, but knowing that worse news awaited them in Youngstown. The mother saw her child wrapped in white, as if already prepared for the coffin. She held his feet, felt warmth, and in her profound grief exclaimed that he was alive! All this was too much for her health, it was decided. A relative drove Hamzah’s mother and the other women back to Dearborn. To wait for what was to be. But the father clung to hope as his son had clung to the ropes. He arose one morning in that strange hotel feeling as though all would be well. These efficient people in lab coats and nursing outfits would find some equivalent of smelling salts, and his son’s eyes would open. Finally, though, the father let go. Shedding his stoicism, he collapsed onto his son’s chest and begged between sobs that Hamzah rise and come with him to IHOP for another restorative meal. Please, Hamzah, he implored. Do not leave your best friend like this. The shaken cousin, Ali Aljahmi, sought out the neurosurgeon and asked to be told straight, so that the family could prepare. “He said in 30 years he hadn’t seen a brain so damaged,” he remembered. “He told me : Start making arrangements. ” By this point, Anthony Taylor the boxer had said his hospital goodbyes and driven his dented Dodge Caravan the 20 miles back to the weathered white house he rented with his fiancée. Exhausted by it all, he fell asleep, only to awake an hour later to a text message aglow on his phone. Hamzah Aljahmi was dead. A Tribute to a Man Who ‘Was Everything’ After the autopsy, a Youngstown funeral home arranged to return Hamzah Aljahmi to Michigan, retracing his interstate journey past the deadened brown of a Rust Belt December, to a funeral home in Detroit, close to the Dearborn line. A handful of relatives and friends, all men, prepared the young body for burial. They prayed as they tended to their somber task, while verses of the Quran emanated from a loudspeaker. The dead young man was laid upon a table. Fingernails and toenails were clipped. The body was meticulously cleansed and gently rubbed with a scented oil that made the skin glisten — “The smell was very beautiful,” the cousin Ali Aljahmi said. Then it was wrapped in three sheets of white cloth. The boxer was placed in a coffin made of fiberboard and cardboard, in keeping with an adherence to simplicity. A pleasant perfume was sprinkled over the burial cloth. Late the next morning, a dark blue Dodge Caravan hearse carried the body the seven miles to the American Moslem Society mosque, a building topped with a turquoise dome. Hundreds were already gathering in the parking lot. Family members shelved their shoes and carried the modest coffin up the stairs, past the small brown donation boxes and into a area reserved for women, at the far back of the cavernous hall. The sounds of weeping escaped the divide. The coffin, draped in a cloth, was then moved to one side of the long rectangular hall, where mourners paid their respects to many, many relatives: the extended Aljahmi tribe. The father, Ali Aljahmi, sat in the first chair, and in the second, at the family’s insistence, was Mohamed Hamood — Coach Mo — Hamzah’s trainer. The mourning paused for the afternoon prayer. Long rows of men and boys, including many not before seen at the mosque, stood shoulder to shoulder on the carpet with patterns pointing toward Mecca. They spilled into the downstairs space and out into the parking lot. After the afternoon prayer, relatives carried the coffin to the front of the room. The imam led a short funeral service that included prayers for forgiveness, for Hamzah Aljahmi, for all of humankind, and for mercy upon the family. Allahu akbar. God is great. It was time for burial. The shoeless pallbearers descended the stairs to meet the December cold and the jostle of thousands. They walked with purpose across the lot, some slipping into shoes as they went, carving a path through a human crush that was affecting traffic along Vernor Highway. Many vied to touch the coffin, while others competed for an honored turn as a pallbearer. But why so many mourners for a man? People explain that Hamzah Aljahmi “died in action” that he represented the Yemeni embrace of boxing that he made friends with Arabs and black, white, male, female that he embodied an infectious liveliness. “He was everything, to be honest with you,” Ibrahim Aljahim, a cousin and community leader, said. Another cousin, Fayez Algahmi, a former honorary consul of Yemen, agreed. “The way he died, and the thing he died for, touched everyone,” Algahmi said. The funeral procession turned right onto Riverside Drive, along which the rusty fence of Woodmere Cemetery disappears into the distance. Now and then the undulations in the cemetery’s brown grass revealed the tops of tombstones. Chanting prayers as they walked, the mourners turned left at a gate to enter the cemetery, many of them forming a protective bubble around the raised coffin. The occasional cold breeze ruffled its drape of cloth. Near the grave site, relatives opened the coffin one more time, so that the father and a few others could say their final goodbyes. “I gave him a bunch of kisses on the forehead,” his first cousin Ali Aljahmi recalled. In keeping with Islamic ritual, the body was turned on its right side to face Mecca, and some dirt was placed beside it. The coffin was closed, and lowered into its concrete rectangular case. Then mourner after mourner threw dirt three times into the hole, signifying the beginning and end of things. God is great, they whispered. To God we belong, and to him we shall return. The communal grieving did not end at the grave. For weeks afterward, streams of people came to the Aljahmi family’s simple home to offer condolences and distraction. Among them were many young people seeking some token or relic of their friend the boxer, Hamzah the Lion. A . A jacket. A shoe. A ribbon. A trophy. Of course, of course, the brokenhearted father would say. “I don’t close the door,” he explained. A Fighter Finds Comfort in Someone Who Understands On the tough south side of Youngstown, in the squat refuge called Jack Loew’s South Side Boxing Club, the boxing life continues for Anthony Taylor. He and other champions punch bags and skip rope, spar with partners and obey the sign that says “no weapon of any kind” — other than fists. Taylor had taken some time off after the Hamzah Aljahmi fight to get his body and mind straight. His right hand had been damaged, among other parts. True, the first time Taylor returned to the ring to spar, he froze for a moment. (“I was waiting on him, and he hit me, and hit me again,” he says. “And I was like, O. K. ”) But now the Tiger is back, shorn of his dreadlocks and preparing for his second professional fight, which is scheduled to be at the same venue, Sts. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He’ll be taking his chances, once again, in a bingo hall. “I can’t walk in there thinking about what happened,” Taylor says, as if trying to convince himself. “You can’t change what’s happened in the past. I wish I could. ” As Taylor works out, his coach, Jack Loew, sits in his back office, the walls covered with boxing memorabilia, a broken speed bag on his desk. He was the promoter behind that fatal boxing event, and he has wept over Aljahmi’s death. “You don’t think about stuff like that,” Loew says, voice cracking. “A frigging club show with for four rounds. ” A few loose ends from that night remain to be tied. For one thing, the Mahoning County coroner has yet to release the results of his autopsy (although the weakness in Aljahmi’s right leg that night could be suggestive of a left hemispheric brain bleed). This is why Bernie Profato, the Ohio Athletic Commission’s director, has not formally closed the case, although he says his own inquiry found no lapses of protocol by the commission he oversees. Profato is also haunted by the memory of this polite young man, such a model of respect at the . But the inherent dangers are made plain in the contracts signed by boxers, including these two pros, Taylor and Aljahmi. “You’re entering a sport where you could be seriously hurt or injured,” Profato says. “They know that. That’s just the nature of the sport. ” A childhood friend of Loew’s comes through the boxing club’s door: Ray Mancini, the onetime lightweight world champion, known in Youngstown and far beyond as Boom Boom. Unfairly, he is also known for one fight: Kim, Las Vegas, 1982. Mancini connected with two hard rights to Kim’s head at the start of the 14th round, sending the tenacious South Korean challenger to the canvas and prompting the referee to declare a technical knockout. Incurring a brain bleed known as a subdural hematoma, Kim lapsed into a coma and died four days later. He was 27. Mancini was 21. It took years, but Mancini worked his way through the depression and that followed. Even though he eventually forgave himself and made peace with the tragedy, he says, others have shown less grace over the years. “Hey, Boom Boom,” he mimics. “Hey, man, let me ask you something. What’s it like to kill somebody in the ring? I mean, what’s it like to see someone go down and never get up?” Mancini is 54 now, and fit, with various business and entertainment interests. He has come to his friend’s club this evening to counsel the young boxer with whom he shares a sorrowful bond. He wants to talk about forgiveness, and loudmouths, and giving up the game if there is even the slightest hesitation in the ring. Loew heads for the door in search of his boxer Taylor, saying, “I don’t even know where this kid is at. ” Soon Anthony Taylor, fresh from the stutter of speed bags and the whack of skipped rope, is in the quiet, sitting shyly across from the Boom Boom Mancini like a confessor before a priest. “Really sad for you, man,” Mancini begins. “I never met you before, but. … ” | 1 |
Twelve people, six of them police officers, were injured after a molotov cocktail exploded in a Paris restaurant. [Three people were airlifted to a hospital after suffering severe burns from the fire that started in Aubervilliers, a commune located in the northern part of Paris, around 8:30 p. m. Sunday, the Daily Mail reported. Six police officers suffered minor burns as they tried to evacuate the building. News. com. au reported that the staff stopped an attempted robbery when the suspected robber threw the bomb at the restaurant. Police have not released a motive for the crime and did not say if it was an attack. Fifty firefighters arrived on the scene with 15 trucks to fight the fire. “The restaurant is part of a building,” an emergency services source said. “Everything is being done to contain the blaze, and search for other victims. ” The incident took place the day of France’s parliamentary elections. France has spent 14 months under a state of emergency as a result of several terrorist attacks that ISIS and have claimed responsibility for, France 24 reported. French President Emmanuel Macron, however, wants to end the state of emergency soon in favor of making some state of emergency powers, such as property searches without a warrant, part of common law. Police have not yet identified who is responsible for the attack and do not believe it is linked to terrorism. | 1 |
Trump victory: A new political awakening 09.11.2016 Donald Trump's historic Challenge victory over Hillary Clinton's Establishment saw another law being written in the modern geopolitical rule book in a world where globalization has marginalized millions, for whom "change" can only mean something better. Trump translates as businesslike pragmatism... Donald Trump won a brilliant victory over Hillary Clinton for one clear reason: because he adoped a businesslike and pragmatic approach, directing his message at his target, dealing the cards throughout the game and delivering what people wanted to hear. The target Around a quarter of the electorate in the United States of America live on under one thousand USD per month; a substantial slice of the electorate is one paycheck away from the street. Globalization has meant little for these people, other than fewer jobs, as factories relocate abroad to the Philippines and as Filipinos come home to work for less and to drive down wages. Donald Trump understood the discourse of America's blue-collar workers and on election day, they turned out en masse . The opinion polls Print version Font Size However, the Trump vote was also an anti-establishment one and this was the magical hidden number of voters who eluded the election pundits and opinion poll makers. Those who regard the Establishment as having failed them participate neither in re-electing the Establishment, nor in participating in any of its mechanisms, including opinion polls, so these cannot take into account a growing percentage of the population and this by far exceeds the three per cent margin of error the pundits work with. Today, the opinion polls have become meaningless. Dealing the cards Throughout the campaign, Donald Trump appealed as the dealer even on polemical issues. The Mexican Wall had Hillary supporters crying blue murder and had the Mexican President jumping up and down as the world media buzzed. But Trump dealt the card. Ditto women's rights, immigration, Moslems, terrorists in America's communities and all other sexy soundbites from start to finish. Trump was out there, sometimes visiting five States a day while Hillary Clinton became famous for her prolonged absences. Delivering what people wanted to hear Clinton, as the Establishment candidate, could only offer more of the same (how can you speak about "change" when you have been part of the system for three decades and how much change did Obama deliver?) Trump, as the Challenger, played his role to perfection, attacking the system, promising much more in terms of jobs, working conditions and prosperity. Foreign policy Again, Trump has been making the sounds of a businessman and a pragmatist in relation to foreign policy. A businessman likes a level playing field, a businessman likes to set and know and play by the rules, clear rules, a businessman has values, a businessman respects his partners and tries to get along with them. This, if the Trump presidency is not hijacked by a cabal of lobbies, if Trump himself is not neutered, or worse, will dictate a businesslike and fresh start for the international community. Conclusion Hillary Clinton's embodiment of the Establishment, as an insider, saw her regarded as being out of touch in the corridors of power. The allegations surrounding the way the Clinton Foundation was perceived as a mechanism to facilitate favors in return for donations did nothing to further her cause and the arrogance with which she and the Democrats conducted policy, such as the interference in Ukraine, such as her giggling fit when told that terrorists had murdered Gaddafi, such as the continuation of the policy of siding with terrorists in Syria, served her political epitaph in this election and placed a heavy tombstone on her career. In a word, Hillary "almost" Clinton. For Trump, with both Houses in his favor, the cards are stacked for him to start dealing. I repeat, if the lobbies do not neuter him, or worse, he may be the best dealer the USA has had for many decades. And time will tell. Donald Trump may be out of the box but he is not out of his mind. Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey | 0 |
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Bill Still – Good evening, I’m still reporting on an ongoing counter-coup being run by patriotic members of 17 U.S. intelligence agencies to stop the Clinton Crime syndicate from proceeding with the rigging of the coming election.
According to a 4 minute video, done by Dr. Steve Pieczenik, a Harvard and MIT-educated psychiatrist who has written 26 New York Times Best Sellers, the Clinton coup has been put down by an intelligence community counter-coup, effective at noon today.
Dr. Pieczenik has great contacts in the American intelligence community. He put the following video up on his YouTube channel at noon today and says that the channel was down twenty minutes later.
Currently, that channel is up, so perhaps our channel will not be harmed.
I believe what you are about to see is true because of the nature of the recent WikiLeaks revelations. To me, hackers could not have done this. To me, white hats at NSA had to have been involved.
Having spent my adult life working around the community, I knew that folks who were at most of these agencies – exempting DHS and CIA – are American patriots who would not allow this nation to be destroyed by the Clinton Crime Syndicate.
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This may well be the reason President Obama yesterday had his press secretary praise the work of Jim Comey, head of the FBI, at the very moment that Hillary Clinton was speaking in Florida deriding Comey. Let us all pray that Comey has actually turned away from being subservient to Obama and the Clintons and has now joined forces with the vast majority of the American military/intelligence community and Obama has decided – for his own preservation – to not fight them. I’m still reporting from Washington; good evening.
Bill Still is a former newspaper editor and publisher. He has written for USA Today, The Saturday Evening Post, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, OMNI magazine, and has also produced the syndicated radio program, Health News. He has written 22 books and two documentary videos and is the host of his wildly popular daily YouTube Channel the “Still Report”, the quintessential report on the economy and Washington. Share this: | 0 |
Organizers of the Fyre Festival — a promised “luxury” music festival in the Bahamas that left guests who paid tens of thousands of dollars scrambling immediately to find flights home — have been hit with a $100 million lawsuit alleging the whole enterprise was a “ scam” from the beginning. [Attorney Mark Geragos filed the $100 million proposed lawsuit in California Sunday on behalf of client and festival attendee Daniel Jung, Billboard reports. The claim alleges that Fyre organizers — namely, the rapper Ja Rule and entrepreneur Billy McFarland — attempted to “fleece attendees for hundreds of millions of dollars by inducing them to fly to a remote island without food, shelter or water — and without regard to what might happen to them after that. ” Ticket buyers — some of whom spent up to a reported $200, 000 on the most luxurious festival accommodations — arrived at the Island of Exumas on Thursday to find a festival site in disarray, with unfinished infrastructure and stages, disaster relief tents in place of luxury villas, and “gourmet” bread and cheese sandwiches in a cafeteria organizers had promised would be staffed by a celebrity chef. The festival — which had been heavily promoted for months by models and influential social media personalities including Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Hailey Baldwin — had been billed as a unique “cultural experience,” with planned performances from and the rappers Tyga and Desiigner, and opulent ticket packages offering the ability to charter a yacht. The festival’s official video promised the island was once owned by legendary drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. But guests who made it to the island reported seeing wet, soggy tents, a lack of security and food, and even stray animals roaming the campgrounds. After organizers cancelled the event Friday, attendees struggled to schedule return flights home as the Island of Exumas’ tiny airport was overrun with travelers. In the lawsuit, Geragos alleges that the festival was “more like The Hunger Games or Lord of the Flies than Coachella,” according to Billboard. The suit alleges fraud, breach of contract and negligent misrepresentation, with Geragos charging that the island was not “private,” as had been advertised, and had never been owned by Escobar. The lawsuit also claims that Rule and McFarland knew the festival would be a catastrophe and warned promoters not to attend. “They called all the names and the modeling agencies and told them not to come,” a source told the New York Post‘s Page Six over the weekend. “They were just like, ‘Oh, come next weekend when all the kinks have been worked out.’ This was before the chaos even started. ” Organizers issued a statement to Billboard claiming “full responsibility” for the festival, but promised full refunds and VIP accommodations to next year’s event, which they said would take place at a “United States beach venue. ” “We apologize for any inconvenience the past has caused and we look forward to making a considerable donation to the Bahamas Red Cross Society as part of our initiatives,” the organizers wrote. “We need to make this right. And once we make this right, then we will put on the dream festival we sought to have since the inception of Fyre. ” Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
AL SHIHR, Yemen — When fighters from Al Qaeda seized control of a stretch of southern Yemen in 2015, they looted millions of dollars from the central bank, spreading such fear that other banks shut down. But during the year Al Qaeda reigned, Al Omgy Brothers Money Exchange kept running its business here in the coastal town of Al Shihr. It held accounts for the national oil company, disbursed salaries for the Yemeni government and earned the praise of local officials for providing needed services during a tough time. And if members of Al Qaeda wanted to open accounts, too, well, the company could not really say no, according to Muhammad who runs the money exchange with his brother, Said. The United States was not impressed. This month, the United States Treasury Department designated the brothers and their company as having provided “financial services to or in support of” Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is widely considered to be the terrorist group’s most dangerous branch. Any of their assets subject to United States jurisdiction are blocked, and Americans are generally prohibited from having transactions with them. During an interview in his office here, Mr. Omgy acknowledged that his company had provided financial services to Al Qaeda. “We had no other option but to comply with them,” he said. “They were the rulers of the city. ” But he denied the Treasury Department’s charge that he was a Qaeda member, describing his ties to the group as a business relationship that had ended. “They withdrew their money before they left the city,” he said. The case of the Omgy brothers is a small but telling account of the chaos that has engulfed Yemen, the southernmost country on the Arabian Peninsula and the Arab world’s poorest state. Since 2011, when protests erupted against the previous president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, much of the state has collapsed, and armed tribes and militias have taken control of significant territory. In 2014, rebels from the north known as the Houthis stormed the capital, Sana, forcing the government into exile and dividing the country. The Houthis now control the northwest, including the capital, where they have struggled to exert authority over what remains of the government. Much of the south and east are held by forces backed by Persian Gulf nations and are nominally loyal to the exiled president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. So much upheaval has often left struggling Yemenis to deal with whichever armed group has most recently taken control. And so it was in April 2015, when Qaeda fighters seized territory along Yemen’s southern coast — and turned to the Omgy brothers for their banking needs. Mr. Omgy was so upset by the charge against him that he invited an employee of The New York Times to his office in Al Shihr to tell his side of the story. His headquarters bore testament to the business’s success, with green marble floors, comfortable sofas and central — a luxury in a country where millions struggle to find enough food, much less power to charge their phones. Three new Lexus sport utility vehicles were parked outside. The brothers opened their first money exchange in 1990 and now have 95 offices across Yemen that work like banks, holding accounts and performing inexpensive money transfers, Mr. Omgy said. “I received the news from social media and news sites,” Mr. Omgy said of the Americans’ designation of him as a Qaeda member. “I have never financed Qaeda activities nor joined the organization. ” He did, however, acknowledge doing the group’s banking. After the militants seized the area, the brothers closed their offices, he said, but reopened because none of the banks would. The local branch of Yemen’s national oil company maintained an account, as did the civilian council that helped run local affairs. Even the government relied on the company to get salaries to its employees, according to Yemeni officials. The United States said in its designation that a Qaeda official in charge of taxation had held an account with Al Omgy from which he sent money to militants around Yemen. It also said that early this year Al Qaeda ordered the oil company to transfer more than $1 million to Al Omgy “to support terrorist activities. ” Mr. Omgy said he had been forced to give the militants accounts. “We opened the accounts when they threatened us,” he said. Then, to pay their taxes, the oil company and local businessmen would ask Al Omgy to transfer money from their accounts to those of Al Qaeda. He denied that the company had paid Al Qaeda a 10 percent commission on all transactions, as the United States also charged, but said that individual Qaeda members could have transferred money through the company. “We have branches everywhere,” he said. “We could not reject their orders. ” He dismissed the rest of the United States’ charges, that he had smuggled arms for Al Qaeda and that his brother had raised funds for the Iraqi insurgency. “I have neither political nor religious affiliations,” he said. Staying open had been the only way the company could provide services for others, he said, including the Yemeni government, which the United States considers an ally against Al Qaeda. “The government asked us to turn to Al Omgy,” said Saeed Bahmran, who works for the Education Ministry in Al Mukalla, a nearby city also seized by Al Qaeda. “Al Omgy has branches everywhere, and we can get our salaries at anytime, even at midnight. ” Mohammed Sharem, the director of the local branch of the national oil company during Al Qaeda’s control, said, “Our relationship with Al Omgy is strong and it is an excellent company. ” He said gas stations deposited their profits directly into the oil company’s account with Al Omgy, and kept doing so after Yemeni forces pushed Al Qaeda out in April 2016. After the designation, the governor of Hadramawt Province blasted the decision in a statement, saying the Omgy brothers had “stood with the sons of the province during the hardest and most complicated times. ” Mr. Omgy is unsure how the designation, which the Americans made in cooperation with the United Arab Emirates, will affect his business, as he has no assets in either country. But he is looking for ways to challenge a decision that he says has tarnished his name. Its effects may have already hit others. A soldier with the local force supported by the United Arab Emirates in southern Yemen said that so many of his colleagues used to get their salaries through Al Omgy that the company would deliver the cash to their base to prevent backups at its branches. But last month, their pay did not come. “This is the first time they haven’t paid our salaries,” said the soldier, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being associated with a company associated with Al Qaeda. | 1 |
Os Estados Unidos vão reformar-se, ou dilacerar-se? Thierry Meyssan Ao observar a campanha eleitoral presidencial norte-americana, Thierry Meyssan analisa a ressurgência de um velho e grande conflito civilizacional. Hillary Clinton acaba de declarar que esta eleição não versava sobre programas, mas sobre a questão de saber «Quem são os Americanos?». Não é baseados em questões políticas que os tenores republicanos acabam de retirar o seu apoio ao seu candidato, Donald Trump, mas antes a propósito do seu comportamento pessoal. Segundo o nosso autor, até à data presente, os Norte-americanos eram emigrantes vindos de horizontes diferentes e aceitando submeter-se à ideologia de uma comunidade especial. É este modelo que está em vias de se desfazer, com o risco de estilhaçar o próprio país.
Rede Voltaire | Damasco (Síria) | 26 de Outubro de 2016 français Español italiano русский English Deutsch ελληνικά Türkçe عربي No decurso do ano de campanha eleitoral norte-americana que estamos a acabar de atravessar, a retórica mudou profundamente e uma clivagem inesperada surgiu entre os dois campos. Se, à partida, os candidatos falavam de assuntos basicamente políticos (tais como a repartição de riqueza ou a segurança nacional), agora eles tratam principalmente de sexo e dinheiro.
Foi este discurso, e não as questões políticas, o que fez explodir o Partido Republicano –-cujos principais líderes retiraram o apoio ao seu candidato–- e que reformula o tabuleiro político, fazendo ressurgir uma clivagem civilizacional muito velha. De um lado, a senhora Clinton pretende ser politicamente correcta, enquanto do outro «O Donald» fez voar em estilhaços a hipocrisia da antiga «primeira Dama».
De um lado, Hillary Clinton promove a igualdade homens/mulheres, muito embora ela jamais tenha hesitado em atacar e emporcalhar as mulheres que revelavam ter-se deitado com o seu marido; que se apresenta não pelas suas qualidades pessoais, mas enquanto esposa de um anterior presidente, e que ela acusa Donald Trump de misoginia porque ele não esconde o seu gosto pela espécie feminina. Do outro lado, Donald Trump denuncia a privatização do Estado, e a extorsão de personalidades estrangeiras pela Fundação Clinton, sempre que queriam obter acesso ao Departamento de Estado; a criação do ObamaCare, não no interesse dos cidadãos mas para benefício dos Seguros médicos; e vai até ao ponto de pôr em causa a idoneidade do sistema eleitoral.
Estou perfeitamente ciente que a maneira como Donald Trump se exprime encoraja de facto o racismo, mas não acho de todo que isto esteja no centro do debate eleitoral apesar do martelar que os média(mídia) pró-Clinton fazem a propósito.
Não é indiferente que, aquando do escândalo Lewinsky, o presidente Bill Clinton tenha apresentado as suas desculpas à Nação e tenha reunido Pastores para rezar pela sua salvação. Enquanto ao ser posto em causa por factos parecidos, numa gravação áudio, Donald Trump se tenha contentado a apresentar as suas desculpas às pessoas atingidas, sem fazer apelo a membros do clero.
A clivagem actual retoma a revolta de valores dos Católicos, de Ortodoxos, e de Luteranos, contra os dos Calvinistas, representados nos Estados Unidos principalmente pelos Presbiterianos, Baptistas e os Metodistas.
Mesmo se os dois candidatos foram educados na tradição puritana (Clinton como Metodista e Trump como Presbiteriano), H.Clinton retornou à religião pela morte do seu pai e participa hoje em dia no grupo de oração dos chefes do estado-maior das forças armadas, The Family («A Família»- ndT), enquanto Trump segue uma espiritualidade mais interiorizada e não frequenta habitualmente os templos.
É claro, ninguém fica fechado nos padrões em que foi criado. Mas, quando se age sem reflexão, podemos reproduzi-los de forma inconsciente. A questão do ambiente religioso de cada um pode portanto ser importante.
Para entender o que está em jogo, é preciso voltar à Inglaterra do século XVII. Oliver Cromwell derruba, com um golpe de Estado militar, o rei Carlos Iº. Ele pretendeu instaurar uma República, purificar a alma do país, e assim fez decapitar o antigo soberano. Criou um regime sectário inspirado nas ideias de Calvino, massacrou os Irlandeses papistas em massa, e impôs um modo de vida puritano. Concebeu também o sionismo: ele chamou à atenção para os judeus em Inglaterra e foi o primeiro chefe de Estado, no mundo, a reivindicar a criação de um Estado judeu na Palestina. Este episódio sangrento é conhecido com o nome de «Primeira Guerra civil britânica».
Após a restauração da monarquia, os Puritanos de Cromwell fugiram da Inglaterra. Eles instalaram-se nos Países Baixos, de onde alguns de entre eles partiram a bordo do Mayflower para as Américas (os chamados “Pais Peregrinos"), enquanto outros fundaram a comunidade Afrikaner na África Austral. Aquando da guerra de independência dos Estados Unidos, no século XVIII, reviu-se o confronto dos Calvinistas contra a Monarquia britânica, de tal modo que nos manuais actuais de História Britânica, designam-na como a «Segunda Guerra civil».
No século XIX, a Guerra de Secessão opôs os Estados do Sul (sobretudo habitados por colonos católicos) aos do Norte (principalmente habitados por colonos protestantes). A História dos vencedores apresenta este confronto como uma luta pela Liberdade face à Escravatura, o que é pura propaganda (os Estados do Sul aboliram a escravatura durante a guerra, quando fecharam uma aliança com a monarquia britânica). Com efeito, regressa-se ao enfrentamento dos Puritanos contra o Trono inglês, razão pela qual certos historiadores falam aqui de uma «Terceira Guerra civil britânica».
Durante o século XX, este enfrentamento interno da civilização britânica parecia ultrapassado, fora o ressurgimento dos Puritanos ao Reino Unido com «os cristãos não-conformistas» do primeiro-ministro David Lloyd George. Estes últimos dividiram a Irlanda e dedicaram-se a criar o «Lar nacional judaico» na Palestina.
Seja como fôr, um dos conselheiros de Richard Nixon, Kevin Phillips, consagrou uma volumosa tese a estas guerras civis, constatando que nenhum dos problemas estava resolvido e anunciou uma quarta volta [ 1 ].
Os adeptos das Igrejas calvinistas, que desde há 40 anos votavam maciçamente pelos Republicanos, apoiam agora os Democratas.
Eu não duvido que H. Clinton será a próxima Presidente dos Estados Unidos, ou que se Trump fosse eleito, ele seria rapidamente eliminado. Mas, em alguns meses, assiste-se a uma ampla redistribuição eleitoral sobre o fundo de uma evolução demográfica irreversível. As Igrejas vindas dos Puritanos não somam mais que um quarto da população e basculam para o campo Democrata. O seu modelo aparece como um acidente histórico. Ele já desapareceu na África do Sul e não poderá sobreviver ainda por muito mais tempo, nem nos Estados Unidos, nem em Israel.
Para além da eleição presidencial, a sociedade dos EUA deve evoluir rapidamente ou irá dilacerar-se novamente. Num país onde o juventude rejeita maciçamente a influência dos pregadores puritanos, não é mais possível mover a questão da igualdade. Os puritanos idealizam uma sociedade onde os homens são todos iguais, mas não equivalentes. Lorde Cromwell queria uma República para o Ingleses, mas só depois de ter massacrado os papistas Irlandeses. É assim que actualmente nos Estados Unidos, todos os cidadãos são iguais perante a lei mas, em nome dos mesmos textos, os tribunais condenam sistematicamente negros enquanto encontram circunstâncias atenuantes no caso de brancos tendo cometido crimes ou delitos equivalentes. E, na maioria dos Estados, uma condenação penal, mesmo por um excesso de velocidade, basta para retirar o direito de voto. Por conseguinte, brancos e negros são iguais, mas em alguns Estados, a maioria dos negros tem legalmente sido privada do seu direito de voto. O paradigma deste pensamento, em política externa, é a «solução de dois Estados» na Palestina: iguais, mas acima de tudo não equivalentes.
Foi o pensamento puritano que orientou as administrações do Pastor Carter, de Reagan, de Bush (o Sr. e o Jr. são dois descendentes directos dos “Pais Peregrinos”), de Clinton e de Obama a apoiar o wahabismo, em contradição com os ideais propagados pelo seu país, e hoje em dia a apoiar o Daesh(E.I.).
No passado, os “Pais Peregrinos” fundaram comunidades em Plymouth e Boston, que foram mitificadas na memória colectiva americana. Contudo os historiadores são rigorosos. Eles afirmavam construir o «Novo Israel» e escolheram a «Lei de Moisés». Eles não colocaram a Cruz nos seus templos, mas, sim as Tábuas da Lei. Muito embora cristãos, atribuíam mais importância às Escrituras Judaicas que aos Evangelhos. Eles obrigaram as suas mulheres a tapar a cabeça com véu e restabeleceram os castigos corporais.
Thierry Meyssan Tradução
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Home › POLITICS › IS THIS WHY COMEY BROKE: A STACK OF RESIGNATION LETTERS FROM FURIOUS FBI AGENTS IS THIS WHY COMEY BROKE: A STACK OF RESIGNATION LETTERS FROM FURIOUS FBI AGENTS 0 SHARES
[10/31/16] Conspiracy theories have swirled in recent days as to why FBI Director James Comey reopened Hillary’s email investigation after just closing it back in July concluding that, although Hillary had demonstrated gross negligence in her establishment of a private email server, that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against her. Democrats, after lavishing Comey with praise for months on concluding his investigation in an “impartial” way, have since lashed out at him for seeking to influence the 2016 election cycle with Hillary herself describing his recent actions as “deeply troubling”. Republicans, on the other hand, have praised Comey’s recent efforts as an attempt to correct a corrupt investigation that seemingly ignored critical evidence while granting numerous immunity agreements to Clinton staffers.
According to the Daily Mail , and a source close to James Comey, the decision, at least in part, came after he “could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI” who “felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.”
James Comey’s decision to revive the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server and her handling of classified material came after he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI , including some of his top deputies, according to a source close to the embattled FBI director.
‘The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn’t recommend an indictment against Hillary,’ said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass every week.
‘Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,’ said the source. ‘They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.’
According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice.
He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom.
‘The people he trusts the most have been the angriest at him,’ the source continued. ‘And that includes his wife, Pat. She kept urging him to admit that he had been wrong when he refused to press charges against the former secretary of state.
Though we’re sure there are many facets behind Comey’s decision making process, we can all be quite certain, at this point, that he’s not motivated by a desire to make friends having now alienated just about everyone in Washington, both in law enforcement and in both political parties. In fact, after Tim Kaine just last week praised Comey as a “wonderful” career public servant with the “highest standards of integrity” …. Post navigation | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has long been one of the high priests of the Washington establishment, staying quiet in this year’s raucous presidential campaign while tending to his reputation as a thoughtful officer and diplomat. But a hack of Mr. Powell’s email this week has ripped away the diplomatic jargon and political niceties to reveal his unvarnished disdain of Donald J. Trump as a “national disgrace,” his personal peeves with Hillary Clinton and his lingering, but still very raw, anger with the Republican colleagues with whom he so often clashed a decade ago. There has been an expectation that Mr. Powell, who waited until the final weeks to endorse Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, would do the same for Mrs. Clinton this year. But in one 2014 email released online, Mr. Powell lamented that while he respected Mrs. Clinton, he would “rather not have to vote for her,” describing the Democratic presidential nominee as having “a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational. ” The emails make clear that if Mr. Powell endorses Mrs. Clinton, he will be motivated by intense feelings about Mr. Trump, whom he also called an “international pariah. ” In the email messages, which an aide to Mr. Powell confirmed were authentic, the retired general who served as President George W. Bush’s top diplomat also accuses Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, of having embraced what Mr. Powell called a “racist” movement when he aggressively questioned the validity of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate and his legitimacy to serve as the country’s top elected official. But the emails, many of which were sent in recent weeks, also reveal Mr. Powell’s disapproval of Mrs. Clinton’s handling of her email scandal and expose his sometimes unflattering observations of the Democratic presidential nominee and her husband. In a series of exchanges, Mr. Powell lamented efforts by Mrs. Clinton’s “minions” to drag him into the controversy surrounding her use of a private email server by claiming he had advised her on the issue. “H. R. C. could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me into it,” Mr. Powell wrote late last month, referring to Mrs. Clinton by her initials. “I told her staff three times not to try that gambit. I had to throw a at a Hamptons party to get their attention. She keeps tripping into these ‘character’ minefields. ” In the 2014 email, Mr. Powell, though offering no independent knowledge, alluded in graphic language to coverage in The New York Post suggesting that Bill Clinton had continued to cheat on his wife. The emails, some of which were first reported by BuzzFeed News, also show Mr. Powell venting about some members of Mr. Bush’s administration. In one reference to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, he accuses “the idiot Rummy” of being disloyal to both President Bushes. In another email, Mr. Powell calls Dick Cheney, the former vice president, and his daughter Liz Cheney “idiots and a spent force peddling a book that ain’t going nowhere. ” Mr. Powell appeared to be angry that NBC proposed that he appear on “Meet the Press” with Mr. Cheney and his daughter, who were promoting a book they wrote together. In the email, Mr. Powell said the network agreed to invite the Cheneys at a later date. Mr. Powell’s emails appeared on a website called DCLeaks. com, which had previously posted documents that the site had obtained after hacks into the accounts of prominent Democrats and some Republicans, including Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, the former commander of NATO forces in Europe, and George Soros, a wealthy backer of liberal causes. It is unclear who operates DCLeaks. com. Peggy Cifrino, an aide to Mr. Powell, responded Wednesday morning to an inquiry about the emails: “We are confirming that General Powell has been hacked and that they are his emails. We have no further comment at this time. ” Mr. Powell did not respond to an email sent directly to his personal account. In several emails, Mr. Powell suggested that speaking out against Mr. Trump would only add to the attention the Republican nominee was getting from the news media. Responding to a reporter asking for comment, Mr. Powell wrote last month that Mr. Trump is “his own best enemy” and added: “I will speak out when I feel it appropriate and not after every idiot thing he says. ” But the emails make clear that Mr. Powell, who also served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has no intention of supporting Mr. Trump. In one with a former aide, Mr. Powell insisted that Mr. Trump should not be elected president. “No need to debate it with you now, but Trump is a national disgrace and an international pariah,” Mr. Powell wrote in June, noting the criticism of Mr. Trump by several prominent conservatives. “He is in the process of destroying himself, no need for Dems to attack him. ” Mr. Powell also made clear in a series of exchanges how much he was offended by Mr. Trump’s attacks on the issue of Mr. Obama’s birth. “Yup, the whole birther movement was racist,” Mr. Powell wrote. “That’s what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn’t keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim. As I have said before, ‘What if he was?’ Muslims are born as Americans everyday. ” Mr. Powell dismissed as completely ineffective Mr. Trump’s recent attempts to reach out to black voters, saying that the Republican nominee “takes us for idiots. ” Mr. Powell said that nothing Mr. Trump could say to black voters would improve his standing, in part because of the things he said about Mr. Obama. “He can never overcome what he tried to do to Obama with his search for the birth certificate hoping to force Obama out of the presidency,” Mr. Powell wrote, saying to his aide, “You don’t fall for his false sincerity, I hope. ” In the emails, Mr. Powell blamed the news media for helping fuel Mr. Trump’s candidacy. In December 2015, he turned down a request from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to discuss Mr. Trump. “It is time to start ignoring him. You guys are playing his game, you are his oxygen,” Mr. Powell responded. In August 2015, Mr. Powell predicted that Mr. Trump would “take it to the convention” in part because news networks were chasing ratings. “He appeals to the worst angels of the G. O. P. nature and poor white folks,” Mr. Powell said in the email.’ ”In that email, Mr. Powell in part defended Mrs. Clinton’s actions in the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.” ’In December 2015, he told Condoleezza Rice, his successor at the State Department, that the Republican political attacks on Benghazi were “a stupid witch hunt” and wrote that “basic fault falls on a courageous ambassador who thought Libyans now love me and I am O. K. in this very vulnerable place. ” He added that “blame also rests on his leaders and supporters back here,” including Mrs. Clinton. A few months later, in a discussion about Mrs. Clinton’s email scandal, Mr. Powell lamented that “everything H. R. C. touches she kind of screws up with hubris. ” He then related a story about “the gig I lost at a university” when the institution said it could no longer afford his speaking fees after paying Mrs. Clinton. “I should send her a bill. ” | 1 |
April, known as the month of deluges, is certainly flooding New York’s theater landscape. There are 14 — count ’em 14 — shows opening on Broadway, with more forms of entertainment cropping up like wild crocuses all over the rest of the city. Audience members can submerge themselves in everything from the brassy manipulations of a little old matchmaker named Dolly (embodied by a little old diva named Bette) to the more recessive mysteries of humanity according to American theater’s patron saint of the inarticulate, Annie Baker. “Hello, Dolly!” Jerry Herman’s whinnying war horse from 1964 returns after a absence from Broadway, in a feverishly awaited production directed by Jerry Zaks and featuring David Hyde Pierce as the curmudgeonly tycoon Horace Vandergelder. The show also includes a staircase made for one really grand entrance, a slew of singing waiters and, in their midst (in the title role) she whom the patrons of louche bathhouses in the 1970s hailed as the Divine Miss M. If you don’t know that’s Bette Midler, don’t bother joining the queue for cancellations. Tickets: hellodollyonbroadway. com “Oslo” You probably already know the outcome of this intricately wrought drama about the Middle East peace talks of 1993. (Spoiler: they’re still fighting.) But that doesn’t keep J. T. Rogers’s portrait of the backdoor diplomacy that led to the Oslo Accords from being a nail biter, or from inspiring hope. Vividly directed by Bartlett Sher, and starring Jefferson Mays and Jennifer Ehle as a pair of married diplomats, this tale moves from downstairs (where it opened last summer at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater) to upstairs (at the more commodious Vivian Beaumont) just in time to become a for the Tony Awards. Tickets: lct. “The Antipodes” Nobody’s saying what this latest offering from Signature Theater is about, exactly. But the fact that it was written by Annie Baker, the hugely influential Pulitzer author of “The Flick,” automatically makes it a for students of contemporary American drama — and for those of us who just like to hear Ms. Baker’s fumbling characters talk about nothing and everything. The director, auspiciously, is Lila Neugebauer, whose energizing production of Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves,” a study of a girls’ soccer team, was a knockout. Tickets: signaturetheatre. org “Groundhog Day” Andy Karl is not playing the mammal of the title. But his performance in this musical adaptation of the 1993 movie seems guaranteed to confirm his status as an star. Mr. Karl (who took a lickin’ but kept on tickin’ on Broadway as “Rocky” in 2014) portrays a cynical news reporter, and when I saw the show at the Old Vic in London last year, he was dazzling (and original) enough to make me forget what’ Bill Murray, who created the part on film. Danny Rubin adapted his original screenplay and Tim Minchin, the man who gave us the blissfully naughty score of “Matilda the Musical,” wrote the music. Matthew Warchus, another talented “Matilda” alumnus, directs. Tickets: groundhogdaymusical. com “Six Degrees of Separation” John Guare’s masterwork, about a world in which is an passkey, is one of the best plays ever written about New York society and its more liberal denizens. It returns to Broadway 26 years after it didn’t win (but should have) the Tony Award for best play, with a cast that includes Allison Janney (back onstage after many years of being winningly waspish on television) and John Benjamin Hickey. They portray a sophisticated but husband and wife Corey Hawkins (“24: Legacy,” “Straight Outta Compton”) is the seductive young man who (another spoiler) is probably not Sidney Poitier’s son. Tickets: sixdegreesbroadway. com | 1 |
Good morning. Here’s what you need to know: • A recount effort in the United States presidential election that began in Wisconsin may extend this week to two more states narrowly lost by Hillary Clinton. Donald J. Trump dismissed the effort as a “scam” and unleashed a daylong storm of Twitter posts, including asserting without evidence that his shortfall in the popular vote was because of “millions of people” voting illegally. The Twitter outburst also came as Mr. Trump is laboring to fill crucial positions in his cabinet. An adviser assailed Mitt Romney, one the top candidates for secretary of state, as having gone “out of his way to hurt” the in the primaries. _____ • Mr. Trump’s business dealings around the globe are raising widespread concerns over conflicts of interest. One example is a postelection telephone call with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, in which the praised his business associate in the Trump Towers in Istanbul, above. In Scotland, Mr. Trump built a wall on the border of his golf course, blocking the sea view of local residents, and then sent them the bill. _____ • François Fillon, a conservative government veteran who called for economic sacrifice, major changes in the workplace and a crackdown on immigration and Islam, won a runoff to represent France’s Republican Party in April’s presidential contest. The outcome paved the way for a likely with the country’s party. _____ • The Cuban government is rolling out plans for a period of “Duelo Nacional,” or national pain, after the death of Fidel Castro, 90. The country, which defied the United States for nearly half a century before hostilities eased, remains firmly in the grip of his brother, Raúl Castro. The capital, Havana, has been quiet, but Cuban exiles celebrated in Miami. Mr. Castro’s ashes will be interred on Sunday. _____ • In Tbilisi, Georgia, a apartment shared by a computer science student and his younger brother is an unlikely offshore outpost of America’s fake news industry. “I did not write to make Trump win,” the student said. “I just wanted to get viewers and make some money. ” _____ • Swiss voters rejected a proposal to phase out nuclear power by 2029. • American retailers have geared up for Cyber Monday, the last day of deals in what has become an annual shopping weekend. Sales rose 18 percent over last year, to $5. 3 billion. Visits to stores dipped. • The European Court of Justice will hear arguments on Tuesday that will most likely determine how Uber can operate across the European Union. • Our business columnist tracked the fortune of J. K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author. He estimates Ms. Rowling’s net worth at $1. 2 billion, noting that she pays taxes and gives generously to charity. • A thinks it may have found the secret to growing truffles. • Here’s a snapshot of global markets. • In Montenegro, a detained mercenary is slowly spilling his guts on a purported plot orchestrated by two Russians to kill the prime minister and install a new government hostile to NATO. [The New York Times] • Viktor F. Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine, said that he regretted not ordering troops to disperse the mass protests that forced him into exile in Russia. [The New York Times] • The U. K. Independence Party is expected to announce its new leader today. [The Financial Times] • The Vatican is seeking a grand compromise with China’s Communist leaders to heal a rift that has divided generations of Chinese Catholics. [The New York Times] • A Moroccan state broadcaster instructed women on ways to hide signs of domestic violence with makeup. [The Guardian] • U. S. officials say they will close a protest camp that has drawn thousands of Native Americans opposed to an oil pipeline in North Dakota. [The New York Times] • “I see the anger I was raised with rocking the nation. ” A young American who renounced white nationalism considers the wave of white rage that aligned behind Donald J. Trump as he ascended to the White House. [The New York Times] • A weekslong chess battle between Sergey Karjakin of Russia and the defending world champion, Magnus Carlsen of Norway, could end today. Simmering Cold War tensions have given the match weightier geopolitical overtones. A Russian spokesman said that President Vladimir V. Putin receives constant updates. • Anger rooms let customers smash objects to release their rage. Sessions are meant to be therapeutic, but mental health professionals question the efficacy of rampaging in a faux cubicle. • Nico Rosberg, driving for Mercedes, became the second son of a Formula One world champion to win the title himself. • “Hero of the Empire,” an account of Winston Churchill’s time in South Africa, and “Iza’s Ballad,” a meditative Hungarian novel, are among our 100 Notable Books of 2016. Here’s the full list. • And just look at these trees in Lapland, Finland’s northernmost region. They are so coated in frosty rime that they could be mistaken for towers of shaving foam. That banana you might be having for breakfast is probably a Cavendish, the most widely available variety of one of the world’s most popular fruits. But a deadly fungus is on the march, and the Cavendish’s lack of genetic diversity is raising fears of a possible “bananapocalypse. ” The killer, a strain of Panama disease called Tropical Race 4, has spread to China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan and the Northern Territory of Australia, and has recently been found in Africa and the Middle East. With its yellow peel and seedless fruit, the Cavendish makes up 95 percent of bananas sold worldwide, according to the U. N. Food and Agriculture Organization. The previous dominant variety, the Gros Michel, was devastated by another form of the fungus in the 1950s. Growers turned to the Cavendish, whose strength lies more in disease resistance than flavor. (One expert said it “had been considered something close to junk. ”) The Cavendish is thought to have arrived in England in the 1800s from Mauritius, taking its name from the family in whose greenhouse it was cultivated. Missionaries eventually carried it to the Pacific islands. One scientist sees a silver lining in newly urgent efforts to save the seeds from wild bananas. “Race 4 is a threat,” he says, “but it’s also an opportunity to start growing more diversity. ” Remy Tumin contributed reporting. _____ Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings. What would you like to see here? Contact us at europebriefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
Posted on October 30, 2016 by Sean Adl-Tabatabai in News , World // 0 Comments
Erdogan’s dream of reinstating Turkey’s death penalty is set to become reality after a new bill looks set to pass in Parliament.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan will make good on his promise of cleansing Turkey of “traitor citizens” and “political dissidents”– by sending them to their deaths. Recommended
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced plans to bring back the death penalty in Turkey following last months failed coup. (2 hours ago)
Yahoo News reports:
Addressing crowds in Ankara on Saturday, Erdogan said he would ratify such a bill once it passed despite any objections it might spark in the West.
Erdogan made the comments in response to public chants calling for the death penalty, which Turkey abolished in 2004 as part of its bid to join the European Union.
Erdogan said:
“Soon, our government will bring (the bill) to Parliament…It’s what the people say that matters, not what the West thinks.” Recommended
Turkish President Recep Taiyp Erdogan has been warned not to use the failed coup in Turkey as a “blank cheque” to bypass democratic principles. (2 hours ago)
The government has blamed the coup on the followers of U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen.
The cleric denies involvement. | 0 |
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AA Gabriel – When you pray to remove all obstacles, you are expressing your desire for full communion with God. You are asking for all that is in the way of your connection with the Divine Presence to be removed, so that you can consciously feel your alignment with love.
God is your partner in life. Prayer is the key to remind you of this partnership. Prayer is a deep and powerful action bringing you into the right frame of mind so your life will work for you in happier ways. Prayer is a tool for opening your heart. It brings love into every situation. Love is the greatest healing energy that exists in the world, so it serves you well to bring love into your life in a conscious way through prayer.
True communion with Spirit is a state of enlightenment. It is fully loving, courageous, free, and filled with joy. It is the happy state of knowing that the Divine Presence is always there to turn to so you never feel alone.
When you achieve the conscious awareness of your oneness with God, you will look at life from a state of joy, not fear. You will feel a sense of peace within you. In this state of Divine communion, your true freedom exists.
Pray with your heart, open your mind and be willing for miraculous changes to take place in your life. You were meant to be happy and at peace. You deserve all that is good. Know that you are a beloved child of the Source of all Light.
It is possible to live in love and full communion with God. The Angels are assisting you to make this deep connection at all times. You can call upon their grace to make joy your ever-present reality.
To have more harmony within yourself today, remember this simple suggestion from Archangel Gabriel: Pray to remove all obstacles to the Source of Divine Light. SF Source ShantaGabriel.com | 0 |
Is butter, along with other sources of saturated fats, back on the table, as many have recently claimed? It is. Just not in the quantities the meat, dairy and industries might have you ingest. Unless you have a medical condition that dictates otherwise, there’s no reason to cut anything — not butter, ice cream or Porterhouse steak — completely from your diet as long as you mainly eat foods (vegetables, fruits and whole grains) lean animal protein and fish and don’t go overboard on foods rich in saturated fats that can cause harm in excess. That’s the conclusion of the best available evidence I’ve reviewed for maximizing the health of body and brain and enjoying a long life. The unending controversies about a wholesome diet provide much fodder for this column. An extensively researched book by the science writer Nina Teicholz (“The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet”) published in 2014, has raised serious questions about the evidence that nearly 40 years ago prompted the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs to recommend that Americans follow a diet low in saturated fats and cholesterol to curb what was then a runaway epidemic of heart and other cardiovascular diseases. Those recommendations spawned an outpouring of and processed foods that replaced the maligned fats with carbohydrates, primarily sugars and refined starches, which the body treats like sugar. A result: Heart attacks and coronary deaths are way down (thanks largely to the decline in smoking and use of medications along with dietary changes) but obesity and Type 2 diabetes have soared. So what should we do? Cut back on carbs and go back to eating lots of meats and dairy products? Not if you value your health. The task now is to appreciate the effects that different nutrients have on the body and adopt a rational and enjoyable diet that takes both health benefits and risks into account. Upon reviewing the newest reports, Dr. Boris Hansel, a French who specializes in obesity management, wrote in a Medscape commentary: “Butter is one of the foods with the highest saturated fat content, and consuming it on a regular basis promotes an increase in blood cholesterol levels. ” But, he added, “It should be considered a pleasure food for those who are fond of it, provided that it is consumed in moderate amounts and not consumed in addition to other foods that are high in saturated fatty acids. ” At the same time, a lot more attention should be paid to the overconsumption of simple and refined carbohydrates — the sugary drinks, desserts, pastries and snacks, as well as white bread, white rice and potatoes — that promote obesity and now threaten to reverse the decline in cardiovascular disease. “Not all fats and not all carbohydrates are created equal,” Dr. Frank Hu, the senior author of a recent report on saturated fats, told me. “The types of fats and carbohydrates are more important than the quantity. ” Dr. Hu is a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and a member of the nation’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee that last year recommended a diet lower in red and processed meat, which have been linked to heart disease and cancer. “Saturated fat is still bad for heart disease risk,” Dr. Hu told the Nutrition Action Healthletter, published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a public advocacy group. “Evidence from studies on thousands of people shows that if you replace saturated fat with unsaturated fat, you reduce your risk of heart disease. If you replace saturated fat with refined carbs, you don’t reduce your risk. ” Studies that seem to exonerate saturated fats often fail to compare their effects with the appropriate nutrients, Dr. Hu said in an interview. Furthermore, claims that, heart risk aside, diets low in saturated fats do not prevent premature death have now been refuted by a huge observational study published online in July in JAMA Internal Medicine. With Dr. Dong D. Wang in Dr. Hu’s department as first author, this study of 83, 349 female nurses followed for 32 years and 42, 884 male health professionals followed for 26 years found that both total death rates and deaths from specific diseases like heart disease, respiratory disease, cancer and dementia were reduced among those consuming the least amount of saturated and trans fats, replacing them with polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats. Simply substituting 5 percent of calories from saturated fats with the equivalent amount of polyunsaturated fats reduced total deaths by 27 percent, and replacing saturates with monounsaturates (from foods like olive and canola oil, nuts and avocados) reduced deaths by 13 percent. fatty acids from fish also “modestly” lowered total mortality, the researchers found. However, when saturated fats were consumed in place of carbohydrates, there was no significant drop in cardiovascular death rates and slightly higher death rates from cancer. Dr. Wang and colleagues wrote that this finding was not surprising “because the major sources of carbohydrates in a typical Western diet are highly processed foods with large amounts of refined starch and sugar” that can raise the risk of cardiovascular disease independent of saturated fats. For the various diseases with death rates linked to diets high in saturated fats, chronic inflammation is believed to be a main underlying cause. Chronic inflammation promotes atherosclerosis, leading to arteries and setting the stage for heart attacks and strokes. The same process affects arteries in the brain and can result in vascular dementia, a common cause of memory loss. On the other hand, a diet rich in olive oil and nuts but relatively low in saturated fats not only protects the heart but also has been shown to improve cognitive function and may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a report from Barcelona last year. Diets rich in red meat and processed meats have repeatedly been linked to an increased risk of developing colon cancer. And an ongoing study of young nurses under the auspices of the Harvard School of Public Health is exploring evidence that higher intakes of saturated fats (as well as too many simple carbohydrates) can raise the risk of premenopausal breast cancer. All saturated fats are not alike, which is good news for chocolate lovers. Stearic acid, the saturated fat in dark chocolate, does not raise unhealthy cholesterol. And there’s room for an occasional indulgence — if you eat healthfully most of the time. | 1 |
Evidence Emerges That ‘Clinton Cash’ May Have Played a Role in the FBI’s Investigation of Hillary Clinton Posted on Tweet Home » Headlines » World News » Evidence Emerges That ‘Clinton Cash’ May Have Played a Role in the FBI’s Investigation of Hillary Clinton
While most people are rightly focused on FBI head James Comey, there’s another person who needs to be investigated far more closely. That person is deputy director of the FBI. Andrew McCabe.
Submitted by Michael Krieger :
A theme I’ve been focused on for the past several weeks, relates to the growing anger from within the ranks of current and former FBI agents over the agency’s questionable and shady investigation into the email practices of Hillary Clinton. For example, in last week’s post, Internal Anger at the FBI Over Clinton Investigation Continues to Grow , I noted:
“This is a textbook case where a grand jury should have convened but was not. That is appalling,” an FBI special agent who has worked public corruption and criminal cases said of the decision. “We talk about it in the office and don’t know how Comey can keep going.”
DiGenova told WMAL radio’s Drive at Five last week, “People are starting to talk. They’re calling their former friends outside the bureau asking for help. We were asked to day to provide legal representation to people inside the bureau and agreed to do so and to former agents who want to come forward and talk. Comey thought this was going to go away.”
He explained, “It’s not. People inside the bureau are furious. They are embarrassed. They feel like they are being led by a hack but more than that that they think he’s a crook. They think he’s fundamentally dishonest. They have no confidence in him. The bureau inside right now is a mess.”
He added, “The most important thing of all is that the agents have decided that they are going to talk.”
While most people are rightly focused on FBI head James Comey, there’s another person who needs to be investigated far more closely due to his ties to cash from long-time Clinton ally and Virginia Governor, Terry McAuliffe. That person is deputy director of the FBI. Andrew McCabe.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
The political organization of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use.
Campaign finance records show Mr. McAuliffe’s political-action committee donated $467,500 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, who is married to Andrew McCabe, now the deputy director of the FBI.
The Virginia Democratic Party, over which Mr. McAuliffe exerts considerable control, donated an additional $207,788 worth of support to Dr. McCabe’s campaign in the form of mailers, according to the records. That adds up to slightly more than $675,000 to her candidacy from entities either directly under Mr. McAuliffe’s control or strongly influenced by him. The figure represents more than a third of all the campaign funds Dr. McCabe raised in the effort.
The FBI said in a statement that during his wife’s campaign Mr. McCabe “played no role, attended no events, and did not participate in fundraising or support of any kind. Months after the completion of her campaign, then-Associate Deputy Director McCabe was promoted to Deputy, where, in that position, he assumed for the first time, an oversight role in the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails.”
FBI officials said that after that meeting with the governor in Richmond on March 7, Mr. McCabe sought ethics advice from the bureau and followed it, avoiding involvement with public corruption cases in Virginia, and avoiding any campaign activity or events.
Mr. McCabe’s supervision of the Clinton email case in 2016 wasn’t seen as a conflict or an ethics issue because his wife’s campaign was over by then and Mr. McAuliffe wasn’t part of the email probe, officials said.
Mr. McAuliffe has been a central figure in the Clintons’ political careers for decades. In the 1990s, he was Bill Clinton’s chief fundraiser and he remains one of the couple’s closest allies and public boosters. Mrs. Clinton appeared with him in northern Virginia in 2015 as he sought to increase the number of Democrats in the state legislature.
Indeed, McAuliffe is also the guy who made it clear over the summer that Hillary Clinton’s “private position” on the TPP was to support it. This was discussed in July’s post: Nobody Knows Who’s Paying for the Privately Funded Democratic National Convention .
Dr. McCabe announced her candidacy in March 2015, the same month it was revealed that Mrs. Clinton had used a private server as secretary of state to send and receive government emails, a disclosure that prompted the FBI investigation.
At the time the investigation was launched in July 2015, Mr. McCabe was running the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office, which provided personnel and resources to the Clinton email probe.
At the end of July 2015, Mr. McCabe was promoted to FBI headquarters and assumed the No. 3 position at the agency. In February 2016, he became FBI Director James Comey’s second-in-command.
As deputy director, Mr. McCabe was part of the executive leadership team overseeing the Clinton email investigation, though FBI officials say any final decisions on that probe were made by Mr. Comey, who served as a high-ranking Justice Department official in the administration of George W. Bush.
Mr. McAuliffe has been under investigation for months by the FBI’s Washington field office, a probe that includes an examination of donations made on behalf of a Chinese businessman, according to people familiar with the matter. His lawyers have denied any wrongdoing and said the investigation is seeking to determine if Mr. McAuliffe may have violated a law requiring people to register as agents of a foreign entity.
Just further evidence that the U.S. has been transformed into little more than a glorified Banana Republic. This entry was posted in World News and tagged Clinton Cash , Hillary Clinton , Liberty Blitzkrieg , Michael Krieger . Bookmark the permalink . Post navigation | 0 |
Mittwoch, 23. November 2016 Lufthansa ersetzt streikende Piloten kurzfristig durch umgeschulte Busfahrer Frankfurt (dpo) - Gute Nachrichten für Flugreisende! Offenbar fällt trotz des Pilotenstreiks kein einziger Flug aus. Möglich wurde dies, weil die bestreikte Fluglinie Lufthansa nach eigenen Angaben kurzerhand 1172 Busfahrer in einem fünfstündigen Lehrgang zu Piloten umgeschult hat. Die Pilotenvereinigung Cockpit zeigt sich empört. Bei der Lufthansa dagegen sieht man die Entscheidung als notwendigen Schritt. "Unsere Piloten halten sich offenbar für unersetzbar", erklärt der Vorstandsvorsitzende Carsten Spohr. "Das sind sie aber nicht. Busfahrer machen die gleiche Arbeit für deutlich weniger Lohn – und das ganz ohne dieses arrogante Pilotengehabe." Die eingesetzten Busfahrer, die bereits gestern in einem kurzen Crashkurs Start und Landung, das Verhalten bei Gewitter sowie den typischen beruhigenden Piloten-Singsang beigebracht bekommen haben, geben sich jedenfalls bescheiden. Über den Wolken: Grabowski mit über 400 Passagieren auf dem Weg nach Boston "Airbus, Linienbus… Das ist doch alles das Gleiche, nur dass man eben fliegt statt zu fahren", erklärt etwa Aushilfspilot Harry Grabowski und lehnt sich zufrieden zurück, nachdem er mit seinem 9.13-Uhr-Direktflug Frankfurt-Boston gerade die Reiseflughöhe über dem Atlantik erreicht hat. Die Umstellung auf einen Airbus 380-841 fiel dem 44-Jährigen, der sich nach zwölf Jahren Berufserfahrung als Busfahrer nun als Streikbrecher bei der Lufthansa etwas dazuverdient, nicht besonders schwer. "Weniger Stopps auf der Strecke, keine Jugendlichen mit lauter Handymusik mehr und weniger Omas, die sich mit mir unterhalten wollen – ich habe eine wunderbare Zeit hier. Und diese Stewardessen, da träumen wir bei der Stadtbuslinie 34 von." Hier nickt Grabowskis Co-Busfahrer zustimmend. Sollte sich das Konzept bewähren, steht für die Lufthansa die Frage im Raum, ob man auch grundsätzlich weiterhin auf Piloten setzen will. Immerhin verlangen die Busfahrer nur rund 2400 Euro brutto und damit einen Bruchteil eines Pilotengehalts. ssi, dan; Idee: mle; Foto oben: Cray of CatPRO / Shutterstock.com , Foto rechts: von Wedelstaedt , GNU 1.2 ; Hinweis: Erstmals erschienen am 4.12.14 Artikel teilen: | 0 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. We all knew it was coming, but now it’s official: The “Brexit” has begun. Prime Minister Theresa May invoked Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, putting Britain on track to leave the European Union in 2019 and upending the order established after World War II. Here’s what comes next in the country’s march into the unknown. The bloc loses its economy, and hard questions abound about whether the pivot toward nationalism and marks the start of a more volatile global era. _____ 2. The United States and China appear likely to switch roles on environmental issues, thanks to President Trump’s executive order aimed at undoing the Obama administration’s climate change policies. China, despite its own dire air pollution, seems ready to push the U. S. to adhere to the 2015 Paris Agreement, which Mr. Trump has signaled he has no intention of doing. Today on The Daily podcast, we discuss Mr. Trump’s efforts to roll back environmental rules. _____ 3. Leaders of the Senate investigation into Mr. Trump’s possible ties to Russia sought to distance themselves from the flagging House inquiry — and present a unified political front. The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee pledged to interview key players and press intelligence agencies to provide information. “This investigation’s scope will go wherever the intelligence leads,” said Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, above with Senator Mark Warner of Virginia. _____ 4. Ivanka Trump is becoming an official, though unpaid, federal employee. The move, which she says subjects her to federal rules, is meant to answer concerns over the ethics implications of her earlier unofficial role in her father’s administration. The implications for her business are not immediately clear. Ms. Trump’s title will be special assistant to the president. Her husband, Jared Kushner, has the title of senior adviser. _____ 5. “An outrageous abuse of power. ” That was the judge who sentenced two figures in the “Bridgegate” case, when lanes to the George Washington Bridge were closed to jam traffic in a New Jersey town whose mayor had refused to endorse Gov. Chris Christie for . Bridget Anne Kelly, a former Christie aide, above, is to serve 18 months, and Bill Baroni, a former Christie ally at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is to serve two years. _____ 6. The Fox News host Bill O’Reilly apologized to Representative Maxine Waters of California. He had called her hair “a James Brown wig. ” But right after the mea culpa, he went on the attack, accusing her of demagogy for criticizing Mr. Trump. Ms. Waters declined to spar. “I’m not going to be put down, I’m not going to go anywhere,” she said on MSNBC. “I’m going to stay on the issues. ” _____ 7. We compiled tips on how to protect your privacy online, like using a VPN. They may come in handy, given Congress’s decision to dismantle rules that, had they been allowed to go into effect this year, would have required internet providers to get permission before collecting and selling customers’ online information, including browsing activities. But our tech writer points out that you didn’t have much online privacy to begin with. _____ 8. “It was never my intention to go against the president of the United States,” said Mohamed Iye, a American citizen whose wife and daughters were stranded abroad when the Trump administration’s travel ban took effect. “I was just following the law and doing everything the way it’s in the books. And it came to this. ” Like more than 50 others, he has filed a lawsuit against Mr. Trump over the ban on travelers from predominantly Muslim countries. (The second version of the ban is currently held up by rulings from federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland.) _____ 9. The supplies in many school nurses’ offices include EpiPens for allergic reactions, inhalers for asthma — and now naloxone, an antidote for opioid overdoses. As communities across the country face a deadly toll from heroin and pills, educators are increasingly worried. “Some people worry that this says, ‘Oh, there are drugs in the schools,’” said one school official. “No, there are drugs everywhere. ” _____ 10. Bob Dylan will accept his Nobel Prize for literature in Stockholm after all. On his terms. Mr. Dylan greeted news of the prize last fall with silence and skipped the December ceremony, citing commitments. He’s to receive the award this weekend in Stockholm, where he’s playing two concerts. Members of the Academy “will show up at one” and then hand over his medal privately, an academy spokesman wrote. “All according to Dylan’s wishes. ” _____ 11. Finally, the cast of “The Daily Show” proposed a new strategy to save Meals on Wheels: deliver sandwiches via rocket launcher. And The Times’s chief TV critic investigated the existential doubt caused by surreal shows, like FX’s “Legion,” before its season finale airs tonight. Have a great night. _____ Photographs may appear out of order for some readers. Viewing this version of the briefing should help. Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a. m. Sundays. Want to look back? Here’s last night’s briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
Standing at an intersection in Shuafat Refugee Camp, in East Jerusalem, I watched as a boy, sunk down behind the steering wheel of a sedan, zoomed through an intersection with his arm out the driver’ window, signaling like a Nascar driver pulling in for a pit stop. I was amazed. He looked about 12. “No one cares here,” my host, Baha Nababta, said, laughing at my astonishment. “Anyone can do anything they want. ” As Baha and I walked around Shuafat this spring, teenagers fell in behind us, forming a kind of retinue. Among them were cool kids who looked like cool kids the world over, tuned in to that teenage frequency, a dog whistle with global reach. I noticed that white was a popular color. White slouchy, pegged jeans, white polo shirts, white . Maybe white has extra status in a place where many roads are unpaved and turn to mud, where garbage is everywhere, literally, and where water shortages make it exceedingly difficult to keep people and clothing clean. So few nonresidents enter Shuafat that my appearance there seemed to be a highly unusual event, met with warm greetings verging on hysteria, crowds of kids following along. “Hello, America!” they called excitedly. I was a novelty, but also, I was with Baha Nababta, a Palestinian community organizer beloved by the kids of Shuafat. Those who followed us wanted not just my attention but his. Baha had a rare kind of charisma. charisma, you might call it. He was a natural leader of boys. Every kid we passed knew him and either waved or stopped to speak to him. Baha founded a community center so that older children would have a place to hang out, because there is no open space in Shuafat Refugee Camp, no park, not a single playground, nowhere for kids to go, not even a street, really, where they can play, because there are no sidewalks, most of the narrow roads barely fitting the cars that ramble down them. Youngers kids tapped me on the arms and wanted to show me the mural they painted with Baha. The road they helped to pave with Baha, who supervised its completion. The plants they planted with Baha along a narrow strip. Baha, Baha, Baha. It was like that with the adults too. They all wanted his attention. His phone was blowing up in his pocket as we walked. He finally answered. There was a dispute between a man whose baby died at a clinic and the doctor who treated the baby. The man whose baby died tried to burn the doctor alive, and now the doctor was in critical condition, in a hospital in Jerusalem. Throughout the two days I spent with Baha, I heard more stories like this that he was asked to help resolve. People relied on him. He had a vision for the Shuafat camp, where he was born and raised, that went beyond what could be imagined from within the very limited confines of the place. In an area of apartment buildings clustered around a mosque with spindly, futuristic minarets, a pudgy boy of 10 or 11 called over to us. “My dad is trying to reach you,” he said to Baha. Baha told me that the buildings in that part of the camp had no water and that everyone was contacting him about it. He had not been answering his phone, he confessed, because he didn’t have any good news yet for the residents. I got the impression Baha was something like an informal mayor, on whom people depended to resolve disputes, build roads, put together volunteer committees and try to make Shuafat safe for children. The building next to us was 12 stories. Next to it was another building. apartments in the camp are built so close together that if a fire should happen, the results would be devastating. There would be no way to put it out. The buildings were all built of stone blocks that featured, between blocks, wooden wedges that stuck out intermittently, as if the builders had never returned to fill the gaps with mortar. I gazed up at a towering facade, with its strange wooden wedges, which made the building look like a model of a structure, except that it was occupied. The pudgy boy turned to me as I craned my neck. “This building is stupidly built,” he said. “It’s junk. ” “Do you live here?” I asked him, and he said yes. Shuafat Refugee Camp is inside Jerusalem proper, according to the municipal boundaries that Israel declared after the Six Day War in 1967. (Though the entire walled area is frequently referred to as the Shuafat Refugee Camp, the actual camp, run by the United Nation’s relief agency for Palestinian refugees, is only a small portion. Adjacent to the camp are three neighborhoods that are the responsibility of the city of Jerusalem.) The Palestinian Authority has no jurisdiction there: The camp is, according to Israeli law, inside Israel, and the people who live there are Jerusalem residents, but they are refugees in their own city. Residents pay taxes to Israel, but the camp is barely serviced. There is very little legally supplied water, a scarcely functioning sewage system, essentially no garbage pickup, no road building, no mail service (the streets don’t even have names, much less addresses) virtually no infrastructure of any kind. There is no adequate school system. Israeli emergency fire and medical services do not enter the camp. The Israeli police enter only to make arrests they provide no security for camp residents. There is chaotic land registration. While no one knows how many people really live in the Shuafat camp and its three surrounding neighborhoods, which is roughly one square kilometer, it’s estimated that the population is around 80, 000. They live surrounded by a concrete wall, a wall interspersed by guard towers and trapdoors that swing open when Israeli forces raid the camp, with reinforcements in the hundreds, or even, as in December 2015, over a thousand troops. Effectively, there are no laws in the Shuafat Refugee Camp, despite its geographical location inside Jerusalem. The Shuafat camp’s original citizens were moved from the Old City, where they sought asylum in 1948 during the War, to the camp’s boundaries starting in 1965, when the camp was under the control of the Jordanian government, with more arriving, in need of asylum, during and after the war in 1967. Now, 50 years after Israel’s 1967 boundaries were drawn, even Israeli security experts don’t quite know why the Shuafat Refugee Camp was placed inside the Jerusalem municipal boundaries. The population was much smaller then and surrounded by beautiful green, open forestland, which stretched to the land on which the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev was later built. (The forestland is still there, visible beyond the separation wall, but inaccessible to camp residents, on account of the wall.) Perhaps the Israelis were hoping the camp’s residents could be relocated, because they numbered only a few thousand. Instead, the population of the camp exploded in the following decades into the tens of thousands. In 1980, Israel passed a law declaring Jerusalem the “complete and united” capital of Israel. In 2004, Israel began erecting the concrete wall around the camp, cutting inside Israel’s own declared boundaries, as if to stanch and cauterize the camp from “united” Jerusalem. If buildings are not typically conjured by the term “refugee camp,” neither is an indoor shopping mall, but there is one in the Shuafat camp: two floors and a third that was under construction, an escalator up and down and a store called Fendi, which sells inexpensive women’s clothes. The mall owner greeted us with exuberance and pulled Baha aside to ask for advice of some kind. A teenager who worked at a mall parlor, a hipster in a hoodie and eyeglass frames without lenses, did a beatbox for me and Moriel a writer and organizer who had walked me into the camp in order to make introductions between me and Baha and to serve as my Arabic interpreter. Moriel and the teenager from the shop took turns. Moriel’s own beatbox was good but not quite up to the Shuafat Refugee Camp beatbox standard. We met an accountant named Fahed, who had just opened his shop in the mall to prepare taxes for residents. He was stunned to hear English being spoken and eager to use his own. The tax forms are in Hebrew, he explained, so most people in the camp must hire a bilingual accountant to complete them. Before the separation wall was constructed, the mall was bulldozed twice by the Israeli authorities, but the owner rebuilt both times. Since the wall has gone up, the Israelis have not tried to demolish any large buildings in Shuafat, though they have destroyed individual homes. Armed Palestinian gangsters could take away someone’s land or apartment at any moment. A fire or earthquake would be catastrophic. There are multiple risks to buying property in the Shuafat camp, but the cost of an apartment there can be less than a tenth of what an apartment would cost on the other side of the separation wall, in East Jerusalem. And living in Shuafat is a way to try to hold onto Jerusalem residency status. Jerusalem residents have a coveted blue ID card, meaning they can enter Israel in order to work and support their families, unlike Palestinians with green, or West Bank ID cards, who need many supporting documents in order to enter Israel — to work or for any other reason, and who also must pass through military checkpoints like Qalandiya, which can require waiting in hourslong lines. Jerusalem residency is, quite simply, a lifeline to employment, a matter of survival. There are also in the camp. Since the wall went up, it became a sanctuary, a haven. I met people from Gaza, who cannot leave the square kilometer of the camp or they risk arrest, because it is illegal for Gazans to enter Israel or the occupied West Bank except with Israeli permission, which is almost never granted. I met a family of Brazilian Palestinians with passports who also cannot leave the camp, because they do not have West Bank green IDs nor Jerusalem blue IDs. Shuafat camp is often depicted in the international media as the most dangerous place in Jerusalem, a crucible of crime, jihad and trash fires. On the day that I arrived, garbage was indeed smoldering in great heaps just inside the checkpoint entrance, against the concrete separation wall, flames jumping thinly in the strong morning sun. I had been to countries that burn their trash it is a smell you get used to. My main concern, over the weekend I spent in the camp, was not getting my foot run over by a car. If you are seriously hurt in the camp, there isn’t much help. Ill or injured people are carried through the checkpoint, on foot or by car, and put in ambulances on the other side of the wall. According to residents of the camp, several people have unnecessarily died in this manner. As we walked, I began to understand how to face the traffic without flinching, to expect that drivers are experienced at navigating such incredible human density. I asked Baha if people were ever run over by cars, assuming he would say no. “Yes, all the time,” he said. “A child was just killed this way,” he added. I hugged the walls of the apartment buildings as we strolled. Later that evening, I watched as a tiny boy riding a grown man’s bicycle was bumped by a car. He crashed in the road. I ran to help him. He was crying, holding out his abraded hands. I remembered how painful it is to scrape your palms, how many nerve endings there are in an open hand. A Palestinian man told the little boy he was O. K. and ruffled his hair. When I asked Baha if garbage was burned by the separation wall because it was safer — a way to contain a fire, like a giant fireplace — he shook his head. “It’s, aah, symbolic. ” In other words, garbage is burned by the wall because the wall is Israeli. Drugs are sold along the wall by the Israeli checkpoint, not for symbolic reasons. The camp organizers, like Baha, cannot effectively control the drug trade in a zone patrolled by the Israeli police and monitored by security cameras. Dealers are safe there from the means of popular justice exacted inside the camp. The most heavily militarized area of the camp is perhaps its most lawless. The popular drug the dealers sell is called Mr. Nice Guy, which is sometimes categorized as a “synthetic cannabinoid” — a meaningless nomenclature. It is highly toxic, and its effects are nothing like cannabis. It can bring on psychosis. It damages brains and ruins lives. Baha told me that Mr. Nice Guy is popular with kids as young as 8. Empty packets of it sifted around at our feet as we crossed the large parking lot where buses pick up 6, 000 children daily and transport them through the checkpoint for school, because the camp has only one public school, for elementary students. Every afternoon, children stream back into camp, passing the dealers and users who cluster near the checkpoint. I didn’t see the dealers, but I doubt Baha would have pointed them out. What I mostly noticed were children working, being industrious, trying to find productive ways to live in a miserable environment and to survive. Across from Baha’s house, a group of kids run a carwash. We waved to them from Baha’s roof. Baha introduced me to a group of teenage boys who own their own service. He took me to a barber shop, where kids in flawless outfits with fades were hanging out, listening to music, while a boy of about 13 gave a haircut to a boy of about 5. A young teenager in a pristine white polo shirt and delicate gold neck chain flexed his baby potato of a biceps and announced his family name: “Alqam!” The children in the barbershop were all Alqam. They ran the shop. They were ecstatic to see Baha. We were all ecstatic. The language barrier between me and the boys only thickened our collective joy, as my interpreter Moriel was whisked into a barber chair for a playfully coerced beard trim, on the house. The boys and I shouldered up for selfies, put on our sunglasses and posed. Whenever men shook my hand after Baha introduced me, I sensed — especially after Moriel left that afternoon — that men and boys would not get so physically close to a Palestinian woman who was a stranger. But I was an American woman, and I was with Baha, which made me something like an honorary man. Later I told myself and everyone else how wonderful it was in the Shuafat camp. How safe I felt. How positive Baha was. All of that still feels true to me. But I also insisted, to myself and everyone else, that Baha never expressed any fears for his own safety. In looking at my notes, I see now that my insistence on this point was sheer will. A fiction. It’s right there in the notes. He said he was nervous. He said he’d been threatened. Also in my notes, this: Baha says, two types 1. Those who want to help make a better life 2. Those who want to destroy everything And in parentheses: (Arms trade. Drugs trade. Construction profits. No oversight wanted.) “I wanted you to meet the boys because they are nice people,” Baha said, after we left the barbershop. “But they do all carry guns. ” It was only after I returned home to the United States that I learned, in the banal and cowardly way, with a few taps on my computer, that two Alqam boys, cousins who were 12 and 14, had been accused of stabbing, with a knife and scissors, an Israeli security guard on a tram in East Jerusalem. I still don’t know whether they were related to the boys in the barber shop. Several of the young assailants in what has been called the Knives Intifada have been from the Shuafat camp, which has also been the site of huge and violent protests in which Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces. In 2015, three children from the Shuafat Refugee Camp lost eyes from sponge bullets shot by Israeli forces. The other thing I suppressed, besides Baha’s admissions of fear, was his desire for police. I didn’t write that down. It wasn’t part of my hero narrative, because the police are not part of my hero narrative. “Even if they have to bring them from India,” he said several times, “we need police here. We cannot handle the disputes on our own. People take revenge. They murder. ” A Middle East correspondent I met in the West Bank, hearing that I was going to spend the weekend in the Shuafat camp, asked me if I “planned to visit Shit Lake” while there. Apparently that was his single image of the place. I assumed he was referring to a sewage dump, but Baha never mentioned it, and after seeing Baha’s pleasure in showing me the community center, the roads his committee had built, the mall, which was the only open gathering space, all things that, for him, were hopeful, I wasn’t going to ask him for Shit Lake. That correspondent had never stepped foot in the camp. I hadn’t expected to either, until I was invited on an extensive tour of the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and was asked to choose a subject to write about, for a book to be published next year. With no previous experience in the region, and little knowledge, I gravitated instinctually to Shuafat camp. From my own time there, the sustaining image is shimmering white. The kids, dressed in white. The buildings, a baked tone of dusty, white. The minarets, all white. And there was the 1972 Volkswagen Beetle in gleaming white, meticulously restored. It was on the shop floor of a garage run by Baha’s friend Adel. A enthusiast and owner myself, I wanted to talk to Adel about the car. He showed me his garage, his compressor, his lift. Like the escalator in the mall, these were things you would never expect to find in a place without services. We sat, and Adel made coffee. He and Baha told me about the troubles with the drug Mr. Nice Guy. They said every family has an addict among its children and sometimes among the older people as well. A third of the population is strung out on it, they said. It makes people crazy, Adel and Baha agreed. Is there a link, I asked, between Mr. Nice Guy and the kids who decide, essentially, to end it all by running at an Israeli soldier with a knife? They each concurred that there was. Two years earlier, Baha said, by way of contrast, there was a man from the Shuafat camp who did a deadly car ramming. The Israelis came and blew up his house. He was older, Baha said, and out of work and he decided that he was finally ready to lose everything. With the kids, Baha said, it’s different. It’s an act of impulsive courage. The drug helps enormously with that. Adel kept making reference to his daughter, who is physically disabled and cannot attend school. I asked to meet her or Adel asked if I wanted to meet her. Either way we ended up in Adel’s large apartment, and his daughter Mira was wheeled out to the living room. Mira was burned over most of her body and is missing part of one arm and a kneecap. Her face and scalp are disfigured. A school bus filled with children from the Shuafat camp were on a trip to Ramallah when their bus collided with a truck on wet roads. The bus overturned and burst into flames. Five children and a teacher burned to death. Dozens were injured. Emergency services were delayed by confusion over who had jurisdiction. As a result, Mira and other children had to be taken in the cars of bystanders to the closest hospital. The accident took place between the Adam settlement and Qalandiya checkpoints, in what is called Area C of the West Bank, which is entirely under Israeli control. The likelihood of something like this occurring was well known. Later, a report from Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights group, established that the tragedy resulted from the multiple challenges of living beyond the separation barrier. Roads were substandard. There were too many children on the bus, the children had no access to education in their own communities and there was no oversight. “When the accident happened, we didn’t know how to cope with it,” Baha told me. Someone got up on a loading dock in the camp and called out the names of the dead. Afterward, Baha and Adel cried all the time. They felt that the lives of Shuafat’s children were disposable. They decided to start their own volunteer emergency team, through WhatsApp, and it has 80 members, who are trained in first aid and in special skills they are ready to employ at a moment’s notice. They are saving up to purchase their own Shuafat camp ambulance, whose volunteer drivers will be trained medical professionals, like Baha’s wife, Hiba, who is a nurse. Baha, I noticed, seemed more optimistic about their emergency team, and about the future, than Adel did. At one point, Adel, who has a shattered and frantic but loving, warm energy, turned to me and said, “We are orphans here. ” Mira, who had been transferred from her wheelchair to the couch, sat and fidgeted. She understood no English but was forced to quietly pretend she was listening. I kept smiling at her, and she smiled back. I was desperate to give her something, to promise something. It’s very difficult to see a child who has suffered so tremendously. It’s basically unbearable. I should give her the ring I was wearing, I thought. But then I saw that it would never fit her fingers, which were very swollen and large, despite her young age her development, after the fire, was thwarted because her bones could not properly grow. I’ll give her my earrings, was my next idea, and then I realized that her ears had been burned off in the fire. I felt obscene. I sat and smiled as if my oversize teeth could beam a protective fiction over this poor child, blind us both to the truth, that no shallow gesture or petty generosity would make any lasting difference, and that her life was going to be difficult. The travel agency in the Shuafat mall is called Hope. There is a toy store in the mall called the Happy Child. The children I met were all Baha’s kids, part of his group, on his team, drafting off his energy, which was relentlessly upbeat. I have to recreate, with all the precision I can manage, to remember what I am able to about Baha. I see Baha in his pink polo shirt, tall and handsome, but with a soft belly that somehow reinforces his integrity, makes him imperfectly, perfectly human. Baha singing “Bella Ciao” in Italian, a language he learned at 19, on the trip that changed his life, working with Vento di Terra, a and human rights group based in Italy. Later, I sent a video of Baha singing to various Italian friends, leftists who were thrilled that a guy in a Palestinian refugee camp knew the words to “Bella Ciao. ” Baha’s friends and relatives all hugging me and me, the women bringing out boxes that contained their wedding dresses, insisting I try on each dress, whose colors and designs specified where they were from: one in black with white stitching, from Ramallah. Cream with red, Jerusalem. In each case we took a photo, laughing, me in each dress, with the woman it belonged to on my arm. Everyone imploring me to come back, and to bring Remy, my and I was sure that I would come back, and bring Remy, because I had fallen in love with these people. And in the background of the hugs and kisses, in almost every home where we spent time, the TV playing the Islamic channel, Palestine a relentless montage of blood, smoke, fire and fighters with . The constant hospitality. Coffee, tea, mint lemonade, ice water, all the drinks I politely accepted. Drank and then sloshed along, past faded posters of jihadist martyrs. Come back. Bring Remy. I will, I told them, and I meant it. Late at night, Baha and Hiba decided to show me their digital wedding photo book. It was midnight, their two young daughters asleep on couches around us. Hiba propped an iPad on a table — she was four months pregnant, expecting her third child, a boy — and we looked at every last image, hundreds of images, of her and Baha in highly curated poses and stiff wedding clothes, her tiara, her beautiful face neutralized by heavy makeup but the makeup is part of the ritual, and the ritual is part of the glory. The two of them in a lush park in West Jerusalem. Every picture we looked at was, for them watching me see the images, a new delight: There were more and more and more. For me, they all started to run together, it was now 1 in the morning, I was exhausted, but I made myself regard each photograph as something unique, a vital integer in the stream of these people’s refusal to be reduced. I slept in what they called their Arabic room, on low cushions, a barred window above me issuing a cool breeze. I listened to roosters crow and the semiautomatic weapons being fired at a nearby wedding celebration, and eventually I drifted into the calmest, heaviest sleep I’d had in months. The next day, Baha had meetings to attend to try to solve the water problem. I spoke to Hiba about their kids. She asked me at what age Remy started his piano lessons. “I want music lessons for the girls,” she said. “I think it’s very good for their development. ” As she said it, more fire erupted from the roof of a nearby building. “I want them to know the feel, the smells, of a different environment. To be able to imagine other lives. ” When I think of Hiba Nababta wanting what I want for my child, her rightful desire that her kids should have an equal chance, everything feels hopeless and more obscene, even, than my wanting to give earrings to a child without ears. I went with Hiba that morning to her mother’s house, where she and Hiba’s sisters were preparing an exquisite meal of stuffed grape leaves and stuffed squashes, the grape leaves and vegetables grown on her mother’s patio. We were all women, eating together in relaxed company. A came downstairs to join us, sleepy, beautiful, with long red nails and hair dyed honey blond, in her pajamas and slippers. She said that she was leaving for New Jersey with her husband, Hiba’s brother, and their new baby. Relatives had arranged for them to immigrate. She would learn English and go to school. When it was time to say goodbye, a younger sister was appointed to walk me to the checkpoint. Halfway there, I assured her I could walk alone, and we said goodbye. On the main road, shopkeepers came out to wave and smile. Everyone seemed to know who I was: the American who had come to meet with Baha. At the checkpoint, the Palestinian boy in front of me was detained. I was next, and the soldiers were shocked to see an American, as they would have been shocked to see any . There was much consternation in the reinforced station. My passport went from hand to hand. The commander approached the scratched window. “You’re a Jew, right?” he blurted into the microphone. For the context in which he asked, for its reasoning, I said no. But in fact, I’m ethnically on my father’s side, although I was not raised with any religious or even a cultural connection to Judaism. My mother is a white Protestant from Tennessee. I might have said, “Yes, partly,” but I found the question unanswerable, on account of its conflation of Zionism and Jewish identity. My Odessan was a clothing merchant on Orchard Street. My grandfather worked in his shop as a boy. That is classically Jewish, but my sense of self, of what it might mean to inherit some trace of that lineage, was not the kind of patrimony the soldier was asking after. I was eventually waved along. The day I left Shuafat camp was April 17. Fifteen days later, on May 2, Baha Nababta was murdered in the camp. An unknown person approached on a motorcycle as Baha worked with roughly a hundred fellow camp residents to pave a road. In front of this very large crowd of people, working together, the person on the motorcycle shot at Baha 10 times and fled. Seven bullets hit him. It is now December. Baha’s wife, Hiba, has given birth to their son. His father is gone. His mother is widowed. But a baby — a baby can thrive no matter. A baby won’t even know, until it is told, that someone is missing. | 1 |
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There are things that we tend not to agree with when it comes to Putin. However, I think when you see the point he is trying to make here, this is common ground we can all meet on and agree with one another on.
His reason for being upset with the government is clear. They allowed a sexual predator free for reasons that are so asinine that one could think the defendant himself made the ruling.
It’s sickening..
The Russian president rarely comments on the internal affairs of European countries, and even less on specific court cases. However, Mr. Putin refused to stay silent this week as he slammed the Austrian justice system over a case in which the infamous “sexual emergency” migrant rapist was alleged to have been acquitted by an Austrian court who will seek a retrial on the case, reports OE24.
According to Mr. Putin, the court’s decision was the result of a “dissolution of traditional national values”. He added: “In a European country a child is raped by a migrant. The court acquitted him for two reasons: he speaks the language poorly and he did not understand that the boy, yes it was a boy, didn’t want this.”
Putin called the resulting court ruling inconceivable and said that a nation that refuses to defend its children has no future. “This is the result of the dissolution of traditional national values and a sense of guilt towards migrants,” he said.
Breitbart London reported on the attack, which occurred late last year, in which the Iraqi asylum seeker brutally raped a ten-year-old boy in a swimming pool in the Austrian capital of Vienna.
The boy was so brutally assaulted that he had to be hospitalised for his injuries and the migrant, when asked why he committed the crime, claimed it had been a “sexual emergency”. The phrase became notorious on social media as many used it to highlight the clear social problems many of the new migrants presented to European societies.
According to Austria’s chief justice, the migrant had not, in fact, been acquitted of the charges, but rather the trial was expected to be re-run on the basis that the boy now suffers post-traumatic stress disorder. This new charge could allow prosecutors to put the Iraqi behind bars for up to 15 years.
Putin says when a country refuses to protect its’ children, it becomes a country with no future. What do you think about that, would you agree? Related Items | 0 |
Editor’s note: We’re resurfacing this 2013 magazine article to remind you that tirelessly helping others could be the key to hyperefficiency. Just after noon on a Wednesday in November, Adam Grant wrapped up a lecture at the Wharton School and headed toward his office, a speed walk away. Several students trailed him, as often happens at conferences, Grant attracts something more like a swarm. Grant chatted calmly with them but kept up the pace. He knew there would be more students waiting outside his office, and he said, more than once, “I really don’t like to keep students waiting. ” Grant, 31, is the and professor at Wharton. He is also one of the most prolific academics in his field, organizational psychology, the study of workplace dynamics. Grant took three years to get his Ph. D. and in the seven years since, he has published more papers in his field’s journals than colleagues who have won awards. His influence extends beyond academia. He regularly advises companies about how to get the most out of their employees and how to help their employees get the most out of their jobs. It is Grant whom Google calls when “we are thinking about big problems we are trying to solve,” says Prasad Setty, who heads Google’s people analytics group. Plenty of people have made piles of money by promising the secrets to getting things done or working a week or figuring out what color your parachute is or how to be a brilliant manager. But in an academic field that is preoccupied with the study of efficiency and productivity, Grant would seem to be the most efficient and productive. When we arrived at Grant’s office on the Philadelphia campus, five students were waiting outside. The first was a student trying to decide between Teach for America and a job at Google. Grant walked her through some other possibilities, testing her theories about potential outcomes. Although she was aware of the crowd, she seemed to be in no hurry to leave, in part because Grant was so clearly engaged. A second student came in. Then a third. Someone dropped off a bottle of wine to say thank you another asked for a contact (Grant pledges to introduce his students to anyone he knows or has met, and they shop his LinkedIn profile for just that purpose). For every one of them, Grant seemed to have not only relevant but also scientifically tested, advice: Studies show you shouldn’t move for location, since what you do is more important than where you do it. Studies show that people who take jobs with too rosy a picture get dissatisfied and quit. If you truly can’t make a decision, consider delegating it to someone who knows you well and cares about you. Is there anything else I can help you with? How else can I help? He was like some kind of . Grant might not seem so different from any number of accessible and devoted professors on any number of campuses, and yet when you witness over time the sheer volume of Grant’s commitments, and the way in which he is able to follow through on all of them, you start to sense that something profoundly different is at work. Helpfulness is Grant’s credo. He is the colleague who is always nominating another for an award or taking the time to offer a thoughtful critique or writing a lengthy letter of recommendation for a student — something he does approximately 100 times a year. His largess extends to people he doesn’t even know. A student at Warwick Business School in England recently wrote to express his admiration and to ask Grant how he manages to publish so often, and in such journals. Grant did not think, upon reading that I cannot possibly answer in full every such query and still publish so often, and in such journals. Instead, Grant, who often returns home after a day of teaching to an of 200 responded, “I’m happy to set up a phone call if you want to discuss!” He attached handouts and slides from the presentation on productivity he gave to the Academy of Management annual conference a few years earlier. For Grant, helping is not the enemy of productivity, a diversion from the actual work at hand it is the mother lode, the motivator that spurs increased productivity and creativity. In some sense, he has built a career in professional motivation by trying to unpack the puzzle of his own success. He has always helped he has always been productive. How, he has wondered for most of his professional life, does the interplay of those two factors work for everyone else? Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want to keep doing it. Traditionally the thinking has been that employers should appeal to workers’ more obvious forms of : financial incentives, yes, but also work that is inherently interesting or offers the possibility for career advancement. Grant’s research, which has generated broad interest in the study of relationships at work and will be published for the first time for a popular audience in his new book, “Give and Take,” starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others focusing on the contribution of our work to other people’s lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves. “Give and Take” incorporates scores of studies and personal case histories that suggest the benefits of an attitude of extreme giving at work. Many of the examples — the selfless C. E. O. ’s, the consultants who mentor ceaselessly — are inspiring and humbling, even if they are a bit intimidating in their natural expansiveness. These generous professionals look at the world the way Grant does: an filled with requests is not a task to be dispensed with perfunctorily (or worse, avoided) it’s an opportunity to help people, and therefore it’s an opportunity to feel good about yourself and your work. “I never get much done when I frame the 300 as ‘answering ’ ” Grant told me. “I have to look at it as, How is this task going to benefit the recipient?” Where other people see hassle, he sees bargains, a little work for a lot of gain, including his own. The message sounds terrific: Feel good about your work, and get more of it done, and bask in the appreciation of all the people you help along the way. Nice guys can finish first! (Now there’s research to prove it.) But I couldn’t help wondering, as I watched Grant race through his marathon day (even one of his mentors admitted, “He can be exhausting”) about the cost of all this . If you are devoted to being available to everyone, all the time, how do you relax? How can you access the kind of creativity that comes from not being on task every waking moment? How do you make time for the more important relationships in your life? As Grant’s office hours came to an end four and a half hours later, he patiently continued offering help until he finally had to close the door and tell a student to try him by phone he would squeeze him in on his commute or by . But he would not say no. The study of job design in the and century focused on how to improve the drudge work of manufacturing: Grant is credited with reviving the field, shifting the thinking toward the more modern conditions of a service and knowledge economy. He first realized that his ideas about giving at work might actually yield quantifiable results when he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and he proposed a study set in a university call center. Call centers, even on college campuses, are notoriously unsatisfying places to work. The job is repetitive and can be emotionally taxing, as callers absorb verbal abuse while also facing rejection (the rejection rate at that call center was about 93 percent). The manager, Howard Heevner, did not have a lot of faith that Grant would be able to motivate his . He had already tried, in a previous job at a call center, the usual incentives — cash prizes, competitive games — and was generally unimpressed with the results. But Grant had a different idea. When he was an undergraduate at Harvard, he took a job selling advertisements for the travel guide series “Let’s Go,” but he was terrible at it. “I was a pushover,” he says in “Give and Take,” “losing revenues for the company and sacrificing my own commission. ” Then he met another undergraduate whose job at “Let’s Go” was helping her pay her way through college. Suddenly the impact of his role became clear to him: without advertising revenues, the company could not make money, which in turn meant it couldn’t provide jobs to students who needed them. With that in mind, he was willing to make a harder sell, to take a tougher line on negotiations. “When I was representing the interests of students, I was willing to fight to protect them,” he writes. It would not be a psychology book if every anecdote did not have a dramatic ending: Grant eventually sold the largest advertising package in company history and less than a year later, at 19, was promoted to director of advertising sales, overseeing a budget of $1 million. As a psychology major, Grant always hoped to do a study on the “Let’s Go” staff, in which the books’ editors and writers would meet with or read letters by people whose travels had been enhanced by their work. Would knowing how the books benefited others inspire them to work harder? Now, at the call center, Grant proposed a simple, experiment: given that one of the center’s primary purposes was funding scholarships, Grant brought in a student who had benefited from that . The callers took a break as the young man told them how much the scholarship had changed his life and how excited he now was to work as a teacher with Teach for America. The results were surprising even to Grant. A month after the testimonial, the workers were spending 142 percent more time on the phone and bringing in 171 percent more revenue, even though they were using the same script. In a subsequent study, the revenues soared by more than 400 percent. Even simply showing the callers letters from grateful recipients was found to increase their draws. When Grant went back and talked to the callers about their improvement, many actively discounted the possibility that the brief encounter with a scholarship student helped. “Several of them were stunned,” Grant said. “Their response was, ‘Yeah, I knew I was more effective, but that was because I had more practice,’ or, ‘That was because I had a better alumni pool in that period — I got lucky.’ ” Eventually, having replicated the test five times, Grant was confident that he had eliminated other explanations. It was almost as if the good feelings had bypassed the callers’ conscious cognitive processes and gone straight to a more subconscious source of motivation. They were more driven to succeed, even if they could not pinpoint the trigger for that drive. The study quickly raised Grant’s profile in his field, partly because it relied on hard data: dollars, as opposed to manager assessments or . “I don’t know the last time there was a study in our field that had such striking results,” says Stuart Bunderson, a professor of organizational behavior at Washington University. “In terms of an intervention that has practical significance and moves the needle on employee behavior — you don’t see them that often. ” The intervention was also a manager’s dream: fast and practically free. Over the years, Grant has followed up that study with other experiments testing his theories about prosocial motivation — the desire to help others, independent of easily foreseeable payback. In one study, Grant put up two different signs at stations in a hospital. One reminded doctors and nurses, “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases” another read, “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases. ” Grant measured the amount of soap used at each station. Doctors and nurses at the station where the sign referred to their patients used 45 percent more soap or hand sanitizer. These studies, two of Grant’s best known, focus on typically worthy beneficiaries: needy students and vulnerable patients. But some of his other research makes the case that prosocial behavior is as applicable in corporate America as it is in a hospital or a university. “Think of it this way,” he said. “In corporate America, people do sometimes feel that the work they do isn’t meaningful. And contributing to can be a substitute for that. ” Take, for example, Grant’s study of workers at Borders who contributed to an fund managed by the staff, with Borders matching donated funds. The money was set aside for employees in need — someone facing a pregnancy that would put a strain on their finances, for example, or the funeral of a loved one. Interestingly, Grant found that it was not the beneficiaries who showed the most significant increase in their commitment to Borders it was the donors, even those who gave just a few dollars a week. Through interviews and questionnaires, Grant determined that “as a result of gratitude to the company for the opportunity to affirm a valued aspect of their identities, they developed stronger affective commitment to the company. ” The study is uplifting and troubling at the same time: even Grant acknowledges the possibility of corporations playing off their employees’ generous impulses, as a sop to compensate for other failings — poor pay or demeaning work. (After all, if the employees at Borders had better benefits and pay, they might not have needed the emergency fund.) Jerry Davis, a management professor who taught Grant at the University of Michigan and is generally a fan of his former student’s work, couldn’t help making a pointed critique about its inherent limits when they were on a panel together: “So you think those workers at the Apple factory in China would stop committing suicide if only we showed them someone who was incredibly happy with their iPhone?” Grant’s answer to these questions is academic: he tries to understand how these mechanisms function but does not necessarily advocate implementation. “I am also skeptical about the motivations of corporations,” he said. “My concern is ultimately for the success and of people in organizations. To the extent that individual and group accomplishments and quality of work life contribute to profits, I’m happy, but that’s not my primary goal. ” For all his general interest in psychology, Grant doesn’t seem interested in digging too deeply into the origins of his own psyche. About his desire to help, he says simply: “My mother has what she calls the gene. Maybe I just inherited it. ” He grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, raised by a lawyer, his father, and a teacher, his mother. He was an upbeat boy, though socially awkward and burdened by numerous food allergies and strong aversions — to haircuts, to bluejeans, to chocolate. He felt things deeply those aversions were matched by equally consuming passions. An aspiring basketball player, he would not allow himself to go inside until he made 23 consecutive free throws, even if it meant missing dinner. (That he never made the team is the one failure that still pains him.) On weekends, he played video games for so many consecutive hours — 10 was not unusual — that his mother called the local paper to complain about what the paper called, in the subsequent article, “The Dark Side of Nintendo. ” Grant started significantly losing his hair in his 20s, as if his head were trying to keep pace with his overall precociousness. Now almost entirely bald, he has a striking, monklike look. Though he comes across as charming and agreeable, there are still traces of the awkward boy he says he once was, a hint of discomfort in the smile he gives a student he runs into unexpectedly, a longstanding dread of parties (“unless they like psychology or magic tricks, in which case I’d come alive,” he said). He is aware of his own introverted tendencies, and some of his research involves the strengths of introverts at work. For the most part, Grant has more than compensated for the shyness he felt growing up. Once phobic about speaking in public, he forced himself to lecture as much as he could as a graduate student, handing out feedback forms so he could methodically learn from his weaknesses. He developed strategies for socializing comfortably, even though, he said, “I feel uncomfortable when I’m in a situation and I don’t know what people want or expect of me. ” Giving, he eventually realized, was a reliable way of mediating social interactions. On the day I followed Grant as he hurried to his office hours at Wharton, I read something on his face that registered as more than just busyness he seemed anxious. I wondered whether Grant was driven by the desire to help or a deep fear of disappointing someone. “That is one astute observation!” Grant said when I asked him about that by . (With Grant, every observation is an astute one.) Grant often starts his research with observations about himself — “” they call it in the field — and he had conducted a study trying to determine which of those two impulses was more motivating. The answer turned out to be a combination of the two. “Givers motivate themselves to avoid complacency by focusing on the benefits to others if they succeed and worrying about disappointing them if they fail,” Grant wrote. One of Grant’s roommates, he went on, once joked that he had a productive form of O. C. D. “He noticed that when I was anxious about something, I had a habit of throwing myself into tasks in which I felt responsible to others,” he said. “A few days later, my mentor, Brian Little, sent me an article by Ian McGregor, one of his doctoral students, who studied ‘compensatory conviction’: anxiety in one domain motivates people to dive into passionate pursuit in another. It was one of those crystallizing moments that triggered a ‘Yes, I want to be a psychologist!’ reaction — I was fascinated by how closely his theory and findings mapped onto my own experience. ” It’s not hard to imagine a interpretation of Adam Grant: that his generosity might have its roots in some kind of need — maybe a need he feels, even more than the rest of us, to be liked. Or perhaps that he is channeling his extreme ambition into a form of achievement. Productive and happy, Grant could even be seen as a paradigm of Freud’s definition of mental health: aggression sublimated into work. But he has never put much stock in psychoanalysis — if the work is not he’s skeptical. “I think a lot of it is baggage that goes back to Freud, and Freud would always say that whatever is going on with you can be traced back to something that happened early in childhood with your mother,” he told me, by phone, as he was driving to work one day. “You can either accept that or be in denial. You can’t win!” He would rather simply understand himself as someone who gets a lot out of giving, then harness that feeling, study it and see how the mechanisms involved can inspire others to succeed. One night Grant forwarded me a grateful from a student whose life, the student said, changed because of some advice Grant gave her. I commented that most people would be thrilled to receive one note like that in a lifetime. “I get several dozen a week,” Grant said. He agreed to send some my way. That evening, at around 8:30, the started coming — Thank you for our conversation the other day and for your genius. . . . I couldn’t have done this without you. . . . I cannot thank you enough for your time and insight. . . . I’m thrilled. And I have you to thank. . . . After the first 10, I was impressed when they kept arriving, I was surprised. On and on, until almost 11, my kept pinging when I awoke the next morning, I saw that he had forwarded me 41 from the preceding week, each one of them numbered for my convenience. Was this compulsive behavior? “Not really,” Grant said. “I would see it as and focused. ” He said the question had generated a new research idea for him: “How Prosocial Behavior Can Mitigate O. C. D. Tendencies. ” Grant’s book, incorporating several decades of research on reciprocity, divides the world into three categories: givers, matchers and takers. Givers give without expectation of immediate gain they never seem too busy to help, share credit actively and mentor generously. Matchers go through life with a master chit list in mind, giving when they can see how they will get something of equal value back and to people who they think can help them. And takers seek to come out ahead in every exchange they manage up and are defensive about their turf. Most people surveyed fall into the matcher category — but givers, Grant says, are overrepresented at both ends of the spectrum of success: they are the doormats who go nowhere or burn out, and they are the stars whose giving motivates them or distinguishes them as leaders. Much of Grant’s book sets out to establish the difference between the givers who are exploited and those who end up as models of achievement. The most successful givers, Grant explains, are those who rate high in concern for others but also in . And they are strategic in their giving — they give to other givers and matchers, so that their work has the maximum desired effect they are cautious about giving to takers they give in ways that reinforce their social ties and they consolidate their giving into chunks, so that the impact is intense enough to be gratifying. (Grant incorporates his field’s findings into his own life with methodical rigor: one reason he meets with students four and a half hours in one day rather than spreading it out over the week is that a study found that consolidating giving yields more happiness.) The studies are elaborate, the findings nuanced — but it is easy to walk away from the book forgetting the cautionary tales about people who give too much and remembering only the wash of stories about boundless generosity resulting in surprising rewards: a computer programmer who built a Web site at no cost for music fans (one of whom turns out to be an influential figure in Silicon Valley) a financial adviser who travels to take on a client thought to be impoverished (only to find that person sitting on a significant fortune) the writers who start out working free on a project for a friend (and somehow end up among the most successful in Hollywood). I had assumed that Grant, and the other examples of extreme givers in his book, were simply superhuman in one way or another — not only in the acute empathy that makes giving so rewarding for them but also in their unusual focus and stamina and speed, traits that allow them to bend time and squeeze in more generosity than the rest of us. Grant, clearly, has some advantages beyond his propensity to help: more than one of his colleagues told me, for example, that when they cannot find the citation for a particular paper, they simply Grant directly, who is more reliable than Google and almost as fast (his childhood friends called him Mr. Facts). But Grant believes that in terms of giving, we all have the same muscle it’s just that he and the other givers in his book have exercised it more. In “Give and Take,” he cites a study that found that most people lose physical strength after enduring a test of will, like resisting cookies when they are hungry. Typically, the study’s subjects could squeeze a handgrip for only 25 seconds after an exercise in willpower. But one group distinguished itself, squeezing the grip for 35 seconds after the test of will. They were people who were on the giving end of the scale. “By consistently overriding their selfish impulses in order to help others, they had strengthened their psychological muscles, to the point where using willpower for painful tasks was no longer exhausting,” writes Grant of the study, conducted by researchers at Northwestern University. It seems too simple to assume that Grant just happens to be capable of great discipline across all facets of his life all those exercises in will, he would argue, feed each other, with one making the others possible. I like to think I am a typically helpful person, but after reading Grant’s book, I found myself experimenting with being more proactive about it. I started ending by encouraging people to let me know if I could help them in one way or another. I put more effort into answering random entreaties from students trying to place articles. I encouraged contacts seeking work or connections to see me as a resource. And I did notice that simply avoiding the mental lag of deciding whether to help or not was helpful. At a minimum, Grant’s example presents a rule: Unless the person on the other end is a proven taker, just do it — collaborate, offer up, grant the favor. The first time I exchanged those I usually felt good after the second exchange on a given topic, I thought perhaps I had done my duty. But I noticed that every offer of help I initiated or granted engendered four or five at the end of which I sometimes felt surly and behind on my work — and then guilty for feeling that way. Worse, those exchanges often even ended with the person on the other end wanting to meet for coffee. Coffee! Now I struggled to find a way to say, gracefully, that there was no way I could meet for coffee — not this week or next or the week after that, because there are only so many hours in the day, and if I do not get home in time to make dinner, my children will dine on Pirate’s Booty and Smarties, which would not make me feel helpful or productive or good. Children. It must be said that in the middle of a national debate about flexible hours and telecommuting, there is precious little in Grant’s book about work and family balance. The division of labor in Grant’s own marriage is very traditional his wife, who has a degree in psychiatric nursing, does not work outside the home, devoting her time to the care of their two young daughters and their home. Grant would be an extraordinary giver under any circumstances but it can only help that he doesn’t have to worry about running to the grocery store or renewing the car registration. “Sometimes I tell him, ‘Adam — just say no,’ ” his wife, Allison, told me, referring to the hundreds of requests he gets every day. “But he can’t say no. That’s what he is. That’s his way. ” Grant is devoted to his family — he has dinner most nights at home and takes his daughter to a preschool activity on many afternoons. But he also works at least one full day on the weekend, as well as six evenings a week, often well past 11. Once, when Grant was asked to give a talk on productivity, he confessed to a mentor that for all his research, he was still not sure what he did that was any different from anyone else. It wasn’t exactly a mystery, his mentor told him: He worked more. “I made a commitment to talk about that more,” Grant said. He did not mean to suggest that everyone should work on weekends he wanted them to be aware that they were making a choice, maybe even one they felt good about. “The way I see it, I have several different roles,” he told me: teacher, scholar, adviser, friend, to name a few. “I’d be concerned if any of those roles took more of my time than my family. ” Grant, of course, has conducted a study investigating whether giving behaviors at work translate into happiness at home. He found that people who felt they had contributed to others’ at work did not always feel great at the end of the workday but they usually did by bedtime, especially if they had reflected about their contribution in the intervening hours. It turns out that bringing your work home with you can be beneficial after all — if you’re thinking about it the right way. A skeptic might read Grant’s book and conclude that extreme givers are just matchers who are in it, maybe even subconsciously, for the long run. Eventually, in ways that are predictable and unpredictable, the bounty returns to them. Grant’s giving instincts might be reflexive, but they do clearly contribute to his success. “The entire world feels like it owes him a favor — including me,” says Justin Berg, a doctoral candidate who studies creativity at Wharton and who has collaborated with Grant. “People rush at the opportunity to work with him. ” And one round of giving enables another: when Grant calls on a work contact and asks her to meet with an undergraduate seeking work, chances are that contact is more than happy to enable Grant’s favor, because she has already been the beneficiary of more than one from him herself. The path to success is filled with people helping to clear the way. From the point of creativity, Grant’s undiscriminating helpfulness also reaps professional benefits, Berg says. “The best ideas occur to people who are touching multiple worlds and domains. And in our field, he’s at the nexus of a lot of them. ” Because one study found that old friends and connections can be even more valuable as resources than current ones — because they intersect with different worlds and therefore have more fresh ideas — Grant has a tickler built into his calendar reminding him, once a month, to get in touch with a contact he likes but with whom he has temporarily lost touch. And he is highly efficient about his giving: he virtually never says no to the favor, something that will help someone out — an introduction, a quick suggestion — but cost him very little, relative to impact. We were sitting in Grant’s office one afternoon talking about efficiency, when he said: “The truth is, I don’t care how many articles I publish or how many words I write. Productivity is an imperfect way of indexing how much I’m contributing, how I’m using my limited time to make the most difference. ” It wasn’t until I was transcribing the conversation a few days later that I realized that when he referred to his limited time, he wasn’t just talking about a busy schedule there was a more existential tug in the phrase. I brought it up with him by phone. “It’s the kind of thing I almost never talk about,” Grant said. “But my responsibility is to be open. ” Mortality, he said, was the one subject that gave him something like panic attacks. He had always felt that way, since he was a brainy, sensitive kid playing basketball in his driveway, staring at the sun, suddenly terrified of what would happen when it burned out. That was why he first wanted to be a scientist — before he realized biology bored him and he would never reinvent physics — so he could help figure out how to extend life, or at least design the spacecrafts that he is sure, even now, will take us to safer planets if this one runs dry. Mortality, he said, is “something I can’t fix. I can’t do anything with or about it. ” He can’t let himself think about it too much he has lost days at a time to his anxiety, “to the point that it’s the equivalent of extreme physical pain. ” It struck Grant as odd that no one had ever tried to figure how the awareness of death motivates people’s behavior at work, and in 2009, he published a paper trying to understand the link between mortality and productivity: “The Hot and Cool of Death Awareness at Work: Mortality Cues, Aging and and Prosocial Motivations. ” The study walks the reader through the fascinating field of death awareness, which measures how people respond to reminders of death, like a news clip about a deadly car crash. When and how, he asked, does the prospect of death become relevant to employees at work? Grant argued that when people’s reactions to reminders of death are “hot” — anxious and panicked — those workers tend to withdraw. But when they are “cool” — more reflective, as in response to chronic reminders, the kinds, for example, firefighters face — those workers would be more likely to “reflect on the meaning of life and their potential contributions. ” Grant wrote the paper, in part, to try to sort out his own hot and cool feelings on the subject. Contemplating the meaning of life doesn’t make him want to relax and work less. “I always go back to William James,” he said. “ ‘The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.’ A big part of it is being remembered. ” Besides, relaxing stresses him out. “For me, in my moments of idleness, I experience the most existential anxiety, so I like that every moment is scheduled, even when it’s having on my calendar that I’m going to watch a television show with my wife. It means my brain is engaged in other things, and it’s not going to be a terrifying evening. ” Grant would be the first to say that he is not purely altruistic — that pure altruism, giving without regard for one’s perhaps does not even exist. When he writes those 100 student recommendations, he says, he gets the satisfaction of helping them succeed. But there are other happy byproducts of that work as well: he might end up the beneficiary of those students’ good will later on and possibly inspire them to try to do right by those who will eventually ask them for help. He will also have kept himself busy enough that he won’t have much time to spend agonizing over what happens when he can’t give anymore. As he left the office after one of our meetings, Grant headed for his car, carrying another gift of gratitude: a twiggy box filled with organic jellies and dried fruit from the Environmental Defense Fund, to which he had recently spoken about how to motivate their . On the way to the garage, Grant told me the story of a time that someone asked quite a lot from him. “So I got an out of the blue from a recent Ph. D. who wanted career advice,” Grant said. “And I spoke to him for a while on the phone — twice. But then, after that, he asks me if I could give him comments on his dissertation, and he sends me this thing that was like 300 pages long. It was one of those moments — yikes!” Grant did not know this academic and was not an expert on the subject. This, I thought, was the last straw, an occasion when Grant not only said no but also perhaps found the request itself galling. Surely he did not shun his family, his students, his ultimate Frisbee game, his research and his list of requests for the hours that it would have taken him to analyze a dissertation. Even Adam Grant must say no sometimes. Grant said that he rarely feels resentful of such requests. “It’s on me if I want to say no,” he said. “I own my guilt. ” He did decide that in this case, the time it would take to read the paper would be excessive — and that indulging the impulse to read it all would be tantamount, in the logic of Grant’s thinking, to letting himself down, flouting his own rules of efficient giving. “So I just skimmed it for the most important parts,” he said, and gave general feedback on those points. The author then reworked the paper completely and sent it back to Grant to read again. Grant, of course, complied. “And guess what?” Grant said, breaking out in a smile. “The paper was great!” | 1 |
For now, at least, Hillary Clinton has a 76 percent chance of defeating Donald Trump to become president of the United States. A victory by Mr. Trump remains quite possible: Mrs. Clinton’s chance of losing is about the same probability that an N. B. A. player will miss a free throw. This electoral probability, the first forecast by the Upshot’s presidential prediction model, is based on the voting history of each state and on roughly 300 state and national polls of the race conducted since . Our model suggests Mrs. Clinton is a strong favorite in 14 states and the District of Columbia, enough to give her 186 of the 270 electoral votes she needs to win the White House. Add to this eight more states that polls currently show are leaning Democratic — including Minnesota, Michigan and Pennsylvania — and Mrs. Clinton would have 275 electoral votes and the presidency. But, with 16 weeks remaining in the campaign, a lot can change. Using the same model, we would have said that Bill Clinton had less than a 20 percent chance to win the presidency with roughly four months to go in 1992. It was only after Ross Perot left the race and the Democrats rallied around Mr. Clinton after the Democratic convention that his polls improved. And they improved sharply. One month later, he was an 84 percent favorite. This kind of polling volatility should be expected, particularly with party conventions at hand. It is one reason that Mrs. Clinton’s probability of victory is not higher. Current polling averages suggest a victory in the national popular vote for Mrs. Clinton, if nothing changes. But we expect changes between now and Election Day. The Upshot is not the only news organization trying to forecast election results. We believe each model provides useful glimpses of possible futures, so we are compiling forecasts from a variety of them into one table. Viewed side by side, the differences among the models become clearer. Arizona, for example, is rated as a tossup by FiveThirtyEight, while our model has not yet seen enough polling evidence to revise its assessment of Arizona’s recent history as a state. Similarly, while the betting markets rate New Mexico as almost a sure thing in the Democratic column, our model is not as certain, giving Mr. Trump a 21 percent chance to upset Mrs. Clinton there. We’ll update our forecast every day until Election Day. Check here to see our predictions and that of others, and to play around with the possible paths that could lead Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump to victory. Below is more about how we built our model. Our model is slow to move. This is by design. Our model starts with a weighted average of polls in each state, giving polls conducted more recently and polls with a larger sample size a greater weight in the average. At this point in the election cycle, it uses a longer time window to calculate these averages. This steadiness means it is more stable and less inclined to chase after the most recent poll. But it also means it is slower to react to developing trends, such as recent polling that may indicate a tightening race. This can be a feature or a bug, depending on your perspective. Preconvention polls are informative, but history suggests that it is a mistake to place too much emphasis on a week’s worth of polling. Let’s say you want to forecast the average margin of national polls for the next month. Would you rather take the average of the polls from the previous two weeks or average every poll from the previous two months? More often than not, you’d be better off taking the average of the longer period. This informs the approach taken by our model. That said, we expect the simulations in our model to converge rapidly over the next month or two, as the conventions end and polling becomes more predictive of the final outcome. Distributions are more interesting than averages. Our estimate for Mrs. Clinton’s lead over Mr. Trump nationally is 3. 7 points our friends at FiveThirtyEight have a slightly smaller estimate of 3. 4 points, but our overall probabilities of winning differ by 12 percentage points. This is a small difference, but a notable one. We believe one source of the difference is in the ways we believe states will (or won’t) swing together, and how much they’ll shift. This is illustrated best by seeing our electoral distributions side by side: The FiveThirtyEight histogram is wider and flatter than ours. It assigns a greater chance that something highly unusual will happen, while ours thinks that the course of this election will look pretty much like the ones that have come before it. For example, we think there is only about a 1 percent chance that Mrs. Clinton will get fewer than 160 electoral votes. The FiveThirtyEight model assigns that prospect an 8 percent chance. Fundamentals say it’s a good year for Mr. Trump, but we don’t rely much on fundamentals. Although our model uses how states voted in previous presidential elections as a starting point, it is almost entirely a model. In contrast, some other models of presidential elections use fundamentals to arrive at their forecasts, like the state of the economy and the number of years the Democrats have been in power. These fundamentals models will generally be more favorable to Mr. Trump history suggests that this should be a more election cycle. For example, the FiveThirtyEight “ ” model has been more favorable to Mr. Trump than the “ ” model. Our model is well calibrated. One of the differences between a model and a simpler polling average is that the model knows how wrong it has been in the past. So when we say that we think Mrs. Clinton has a 14 percent chance of winning North Dakota, we mean that, judging from how the polling averages have moved in previous election cycles, candidates in Mrs. Clinton’s position have won in one in seven similar situations in past elections. Of course, there is no guarantee that this election will turn out the way that elections have in the past, a flaw that is common to any forecasting model. These numbers are our best guesses using the information we have. Expect shifts. This has been a long election cycle, but the ride will probably get even more wild. Our forecast will move again, here’s where you can find it. | 1 |
We Are Change
The debut album by Cahill vs. Kalma is an extremely ambitious, experimental and emotionally powerful album recorded in NYC between 2013 thru 2016. The album has a wide array of musical styles including pop, hard rock, gypsy jazz, new wave & more. The concept album’s story focuses on dualism found in nature and the world, life vs. death, robots vs. humans, analog vs. digital, acoustic vs. electric, Cahill vs. Kalma.
Cahill vs. Kalma now available on CD , iTunes , Google Play , Amazon and more.
Purchase a physical CD using your credit card or PayPal:
Cahill vs. Kalma Produced by Dave Cahill & Brian Herman Engineered, Mixed & Mastered by Brian Herman Dave Cahill vocals, guitar, bass, synth & noise Brian Herman guitar, drums, bass, synth & noise Alex Radus backing vocals on tracks 1, 2, 6 & 8 Andy Janowiak drums on tracks 3, 5, 6, 8, & 10 Dallas Vietty accordion on track 3 Music written by Dave Cahill & Brian Herman Lyrics written by Dave Cahill Album artwork by Dennis Gatz Recorded sporadically between 2013 to 2016 SMT Studios NYC & Treefort Recording in Brooklyn ©2016 Dave Cahill & Brian Herman The post Cahill vs. Kalma Debut Album Out Now! appeared first on We Are Change .
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Breitbart News is the #45th most trafficked website in the United Sates, according to rankings from Amazon’s analytics company, Alexa. com. [With over two billion pageviews generated in 2016 and 45 million unique monthly visitors, Breitbart News has now surpassed Fox News (#47) Huffington Post (#50) Washington Post (#53) and Buzzfeed (#64) in traffic. “The numbers speak for themselves,” said Breitbart News President and CEO Larry Solov. “Our 2017 global expansion strategy is hands down the most aggressive growth initiative in the history of the company. We’re making major capital investments to execute a series of new offerings — one of which Breitbart will announce this week. ” One driver of the company’s explosive traffic trajectory has been its dominance across social media. Breitbart has the number one political Facebook and Twitter pages in the world, according to analytics giant NewsWhip. Yet unlike many competitors, says Breitbart News Alex Marlow, the company’s primary traffic is not disproportionately beholden to social media it comes from destination traffic. “Establishment media — the same folks who laughed off Donald Trump — are mystified by what makes Breitbart the powerhouse we’ve become,” said Marlow. “We’ve built an authentic, community where people come to hang out to join in the conversation that’s taking place 24 hours a day. ” Marlow added: “It’s a beautiful, loud, intensely savvy 45 community where we read reporting devoid of establishment spin and then discuss, debate, and share what it all means with the world. ” When Breitbart relaunched its website in 2012, the publisher generated roughly 12 million pageviews a month. Today, Breitbart receives more pageviews in a single month than it previously did in an entire year. That trend is likely to continue globally. With bureaus in London, Jerusalem, Washington, California, and Texas, Breitbart is in the process of establishing news bureaus in France and Germany. | 1 |
LOS ANGELES — It all started with Uncle Tony. In summer 1989, Tony Hassan opened a Detroit agency to book strippers for local bachelor blowouts. By the time his shy nephew, Myles Hass, finished high school two decades later, the little company, Erotic Image (“give the gift that unwraps itself”) was a scorching success — so much so that Mr. Hass hatched a spinoff plan. Nude dudes. Mr. Hass spotted bachelorette parties as a growing market for male strippers. (Credit “Sex and the City. ”) And he started to fantasize: What about creating a male revue? Competing with the Chippendales or the Thunder From Down Under was too much to dream. But he could probably book Michigan clubs. Detroit. Grand Rapids. Maybe even Kalamazoo. “Something quality, with real showmanship,” Mr. Hass told me over drinks at the W Hollywood hotel recently. “Not a traveling group of man whores. ” His publicist, seated beside him, shifted uncomfortably, but Mr. Hass, 28, has nothing to be embarrassed about. Last year, his touring revue, Magic Men Live, sold roughly $5 million worth of tickets at 148 shows in North America. Mr. Hass, who will introduce a Magic Men on Tuesday in Rapid City, S. D. thinks attendance could double in the coming years. Now that is a business with legs. “I can’t believe it, either, to be honest with you,” said Mr. Hass, who moved to Los Angeles from Detroit a few months ago. “When we started out, we were literally driving our own cars, four guys to a vehicle, sleeping on each other in uncomfortable positions. ” He added: “I started this company while living with my parents. From my childhood bedroom. Now women arrive by the thousands. It’s like, ‘Here we go, boys! ’” As it turns out, and I did some serious investigating here, this corner of show business is booming. Interest has been fueled by the “Magic Mike” male stripper movies — no relation to Magic Men — and the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books, films and products, which have prompted women in more conservative areas (and audiences are 99 percent women, Mr. Hass said) to more openly enjoy watching guys gyrate onstage. The Chippendales are not only still grinding away in Las Vegas (“ goodness,” the website promises). Their global tours also attract a growing audience roughly two million people (again, mostly women) went to see a Chippendales show last year, according to Michael Caprio, a spokesman. Competitors include Thunder From Down Under and . The creation of Black Magic Live, a new multiracial revue, was chronicled on a Lifetime reality show in January that starred Vivica A. Fox. (She was pilloried for claiming gay men are not a target audience — “hell no,” she said — leading to a public mea culpa.) And another mainstream star, Channing Tatum, is joining the fray. His male revue, Magic Mike Live, took up residency at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas late last month. Mr. Tatum, a force behind the “Magic Mike” movies, served as one of the revue’s directors. A publicist for Magic Mike Live declined interview requests, so it’s difficult to know how serious of a production it is. The Las Vegas said it included “acrobatic aerialism on harnesses. ” (Sorry, ladies — and gents! — Mr. Tatum will not disrobe in it. But he does know how: He once made a living in a Florida revue called Male Encounter.) You may think that the young upstart of Magic Men would be sweating Magic Mike’s arrival. After all, Mr. Hass — even in his state — is just a guy from Detroit, while Mr. Tatum has all the resources of a major celebrity. Mr. Hass also openly trades on the “Magic Mike” films, billing his Magic Men revue as “the first stage production to bring the phenomenon of ‘Magic Mike,’ ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and others to life with a experience. ” Among the Magic Men merchandise that Mr. Hass sells is a $25 shirt with the words “Alright, alright, alriiiight,” a phrase associated with Matthew McConaughey, who starred in “Magic Mike,” which was released in 2012 and took in $167 million, spawning a 2015 sequel. But Mr. Hass does not seem worried. “They will do their thing, and we will do ours,” he said. “I don’t see us as competing. We tour. They stay in Vegas. ” His new Magic Men show, he added, “has nothing to do with those movies except for us paying our respects to them. ” Mr. Hass declined to say how “Magic Mike” would be incorporated into his revamped show. “He wants to be able to surprise the fans,” his publicist, Andy Keown, wrote in an email. Despite different packaging and a few unique niches — the Chippendales also sing, for instance — these shows are fairly interchangeable. A striptease is a striptease. Just switch out the abs, put on some dance music and add fake fog. “Everyone who is doing this now is just copying what we originated,” Mr. Caprio said. (For the record, he added, the Chippendales have brand cachet that others lack, pointing to the casting of Chippendales dancers in the Syfy channel’s “Sharknado 4. ” I told him I had missed that one. Mr. Caprio sent me to Google with these instructions: “Search for Chippendales and crotch fight. ”) Mr. Hass, who arrived for our interview wearing a leather jacket and a backward baseball hat, has a boyish charm and manscaped eyebrows. He performs in Magic Men as the M. C. warming up the crowd and introducing dancers who go by names like Cowboy Christian and Boy Toy Troy. He employs 25 people, including 10 dancers, and tours with two sleeper buses and an to carry sound and lighting equipment. Part of his success appears to come from a savvy use of geography: Magic Men mostly visits smaller cities, bringing a style of entertainment not often seen in spots like Bismarck, N. D. and Owensboro, Ky. Troupe members regularly interact with fans on Snapchat and Instagram. Magic Men has 1. 1 million followers on Facebook Chippendales has about 803, 300. “One of my friends was following them on Snapchat, and she kind of got me hooked,” Johnelle Allen, 28, told me by phone from her home in Albuquerque. Ms. Allen, a single mother, has been to five Magic Men shows over the last year, posting about her experiences online and trading messages with the dancers on Snapchat. “You wouldn’t think they would be but they are,” she said. “They make us feel like we’re all friends. ” Ms. Allen said she enjoyed the escape that Magic Men performances provided from her everyday life. Watching the men strip down to “the smallest boxer briefs you have ever seen in your life” is less titillating than funny, she said. At one of the last performances she saw, a dancer started his routine wearing a furry, Elmo costume. Putting a “Sesame Street” character into a sexually charged setting, she said, made the audience really hoot and howl. But wait. Five performances over the past year? “They have multiple stops in one area, so we also went to see them in Amarillo and El Paso,” she said. “It’s like a boy band. ” Except without as many clothes. | 1 |
The SPLC’s Libelous New Report on 'Anti-Muslim Extremists' Equating counter-jihadists with jihadists. Robert Spencer
The objective of this libelous new report from the hard-Left money-making and incitement machine the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is made plain within it: “Before you book a spokesperson from an anti-Muslim extremist group or quote them in a story, research their background — detailed in this in-depth guide to 15 of the most visible anti-Muslim activists— and consider the consequences of giving them a platform.”
They wish to silence those who speak honestly about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, blaming us for a supposed rise in “Islamophobia.” If they really want to stamp out suspicion of Islam, of course, they will move against not us, but the likes of Omar Mateen, Syed Rizwan Farook, Tashfeen Malik, Nidal Malik Hasan, Mohammed Abdulazeez, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and the myriad other Muslims who commit violence in the name of Islam and justify it by reference to Islamic teachings.
The SPLC doesn’t do that because its objective is not really to stop “Islamophobia” at all, but to create the illusion of a powerful and moneyed network of “Islamophobes,” who can only be stopped if you write a check to the SPLC. That’s what this is really all about.
In constructing this illusory edifice, the SPLC labels me and fourteen others “anti-Muslim extremists.” We are, of course, no more “anti-Muslim” than foes of the Nazis were anti-German, but note the word “extremists.” That’s the mainstream media and Obama administration’s term of choice for jihad terrorists. In what way are we “extremists”? Has anyone on the SPLC’s hit list (and given the SPLC’s track record of inciting violence against its targets, that is exactly what it is) ever blown anything or anyone up? Beheaded anyone? Boasted of our imminent conquest of any territory and the massacre of or enslavement of its people? No, all we have done is speak critically about jihad terror and Sharia oppression. The SPLC is trying to further the libel that we are the other side of the coin, the non-Muslim bin Ladens and Awlakis. Until we commit any terror attacks or conspire with others to do so, however, the SPLC’s libel is only that: a libel.
It’s also passingly ironic that the SPLC list includes several people who are doubtless horrified to be in this company, as they have endeavored for years to distinguish their message from that of those whom they themselves would smear as “Islamophobes.” But their temporizing and pandering didn’t work: they ended up on the Index of Prohibited Thinkers anyway, as will, ultimately, anyone who dares to note that Islam just might have something to do with the acts of murder committed in its name and in accord with its teachings.
The “report” as a whole stands as an example of the Left’s strange tendency to present true statements as if they were self-evidently false, without bothering to explain why. Apparently the SPLC knows its supporters and is aware that it doesn’t need to bother with troublesome things like, you know, facts.
The SPLC’s hit list recurrently excoriates people for making true statements that it apparently regards as self-evidently false. For example, it says that Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch “accuses immigrant-run stores of illegally trafficking in food stamps.” This is a case that Corcoran makes with evidence – evidence that the SPLC doesn’t bother to try disproving. It says that Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism “has claimed that the Obama administration ‘extensively collaborates’ with the Muslim Brotherhood.” That he actually has done so doesn’t seem to bother them. As Andrew C. McCarthy has noted , “Barack Obama has spent his presidency cultivating Islamists, particularly from the international Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates in the United States.” The SPLC also hits Emerison for having “asserted that Europe is riddled with ‘no-go zones.’” Regarding “no-go zones,” here are some news articles from just the past few weeks:
Germany: Police “sick” of citizens’ no-go zone fears
The SPLC excoriates Brigitte Gabriel of ACT for America for saying that any “practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Koran to be the word of Allah … who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day — this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen of the United States.” Yet it says nothing, of course, about the many teachings of the Qur’an that contradict American Constitutional principles: the denial of the freedom of speech, the death penalty for apostasy, the devaluation of women, and more. How to reconcile these teachings with U.S. citizenship, the SPLC did not bother to explain.
The SPLC quotes David Horowitz saying: “There are only a couple of degrees of separation between anybody on the left and the terrorists — and that includes people in the Democratic Party, even those who are anti-terrorist.” Here again, no refutation is offered – yet the Left’s dalliance with Palestinian jihad groups and overall anti-Americanism make it impossible to dismiss Horowitz’s assertion.
Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, we’re told, “is gripped by paranoid fantasies about Muslims destroying the West from within.” The SPLC doesn’t bother to mention the Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America , the captured Muslim Brotherhood internal document that explained that Brotherhood members “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
In attacking Pamela Geller of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, the SPLC descended to outright fabrications. Notes Geller : “Their claim that I insist that Obama is the ‘love child’ of Malcolm X is patently untrue. The SPLC also states that I ‘have spoken to a neo-fascist group in Germany,’ when in fact I have never even been to Germany.” It characterizes former FBI agent John Guandolo’s claim that CIA director John Brennan was a convert to Islam as an “outlandish accusation,” when in fact “a U.S. asset assigned overseas with Brennan in Saudi Arabia when he was station chief confirmed years ago their firsthand account that Brennan was indeed the target of a Saudi intelligence influence operation that led to his conversion. Brennan has also stated publicly that he visited Mecca, which is impossible for a non-Muslim to do unless he is a special guest of the Saudi King.”
Even more strangely, the SPLC targets Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman who grew up as a Muslim in Somalia, suffered genital mutilated at the hands of Muslims, is under death threats from Muslims, and lives in exile from her homeland because of Muslims. Instead of trying to discredit her, the SPLC should be honoring her for her stand for human rights against Sharia oppression. But the SPLC has other priorities.
Of me, the SPLC concedes that I am a “real intellectual” but complains that I am “entirely self-taught in the study of Islam.” An odd objection. One cannot be both “self-taught” and a “real intellectual”? In any case, it’s false: I am indeed mostly self-taught in the study of Islam, and make no secret of or apologies for it; every day’s headlines proves me correct. Nonetheless, the fact is that I did first read the Qur’an and began studying Islam in earnest while at the University of North Carolina. My claims, says the SPLC, are “provably false,” but then only offers a number of them that are demonstrably true, without any attempt to refute them.
It even says that I have “referred to Barack Obama as ‘the first Muslim president.’” This one epitomizes the dishonesty of the SPLC. The quote comes from an article I wrote in 2007 discussing how Obama was not a Muslim, stating that his obvious affinity for Islam and the Muslim world could make him into “our first Muslim president” the way Bill Clinton was called “our first black president.” After eight years of Obama, I’d say I was proven correct in rather spectacular fashion.
The SPLC, finally, hits me for having “even suggested that the media may be getting money to depict Muslims in a positive light.”
The facts are once again deeply unfortunate for the SPLC: George Soros funded a report on “Islamophobia” on Twitter and gave $200,000 to the Center for American Progress for a defamatory report on alleged “Islamophobes.” He also spent $600,000 for favorable coverage of the Muslim migrant inundation, bought favorable coverage of the Iran deal , and bought “Islamophobia” propaganda after the San Bernardino jihad massacre.
But what need does the SPLC have of facts? It knows its readers won’t check up on the veracity of its claims, but will accept them at face value, since the SPLC is of the camp of the saints, the enlightened and tolerant Left. Those who are outside that camp clearly have no rights that the SPLC feels bound to respect. | 0 |
“The Girl on the Train” is a preposterous movie but not an unenjoyable one. If that sounds like faint praise, well, it is and it isn’t. There’s always something to be said for an entertainment that sustains its nuttiness all the way to its twisty finish. This one may not make much sense, but — like a demented old film noir or a Shonda Rhimes show at its crazed best — “Girl” doesn’t falter in its absurdity or commitment to its own seriousness. It never winks. You may laugh (as the audience I saw it with did, on and off) but there’s genuine pleasure in that mirth. It’s based on the 2015 book by the British author Paula Hawkins that vaulted to the top of the list with a mix of unreliable narration, suspicious characters, ugly emotions, freewheeling gender stereotypes and a slowly kinking mystery that becomes as perilous as the labyrinth at the Overlook Hotel. With a troika of dubious female narrators, the book isn’t an obvious choice for the big screen, partly because of its rotating voices. One problem is how to get into those separate heads, which the director Tate Taylor has tried to solve with and by piling on creating a proximity approaching the dermatological. Its loomingest head belongs to the Emily Blunt, who plays Rachel, the story’s hub. She was once married to Tom (Justin Theroux, trying out his smile) who’s now married to Anna (Rebecca Ferguson) with whom he has a baby. A hard drinker, Rachel chugs booze like water and weeps like a broken faucet. She’s a sloshy mess, or so we’re meant to believe from her alternating lightly or heavily smeared eyeliner, which functions as a kind of mood . She’s a masochist: She stares out of a window at the house where she lived with Tom, and where he now lives with Anna and their child. Rachel is also a fantasist: She ogles another couple, dreaming about their lives. Put another way, Rachel is a for us, the viewer, the voyeur who peers into other lives. Specifically, she’s a proxy for the consumer of a certain kind of glorious romantic fiction, in which beautiful women suffer magnificently. Hollywood used to excel at these kinds of stories, movies in which, say, Bette Davis or Ingrid Bergman suffered, endured and suffered some more before their teary, triumph. Those types of movies aren’t all that common in American cinema these days, partly because women and their stories aren’t. The sobs and drama nonetheless did keep flowing, first in daytime soap operas and later in nighttime soaps. Rachel is a clever surrogate, especially because she doesn’t really appear that far gone. She may drink way too much, but, well, she looks like the lovely, spunky and very appealing Ms. Blunt, just with chapped lips, splotchy skin and raccoon eyes. Like almost every star in a mainstream vehicle who plays a problematic character, Ms. Blunt — her persona, filmography, likability, relatability — serves as a kind of assurance from the filmmakers to the viewers not to worry, that things will turn out all right. Her stardom is our light at the end of the dark tunnel, a flickering promise, which is one thing that hasn’t changed much since the days of female martyrdom. You need a tough woman for that sort of job, and Ms. Blunt, who moves easily out of crinolines and into combat gear, holds this material together with fierce, unwavering conviction. Rachel’s fantasy duo turn out to be Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans) a married couple who tend to pose or rut whenever Rachel’s train conveniently passes by. Megan also likes to stand on her balcony, playing peekaboo with her robe and flashing her undies and tummy. Or at least that’s how Rachel sees Megan. That’s also how we see Megan, an outlook that’s meant to change as the points of view shift, diverge and unite. As always, much depends on who’s telling the story. Mr. Taylor doesn’t so much juggle the movie’s various parts — including a fragmented timeline, a device that here is nothing but empty mannerism — as lob them at the screen. (Erin Cressida Wilson wrote the script.) When Megan disappears, Rachel turns detective, if one mildly hindered by her drinking and narratively convenient habit of blacking out, which means that she doesn’t always know what’s happened in her own life. Rachel goes through a crucible of agony, braving abuse, infertility, betrayal and ravages of the body and the mind. But she looks. And she learns, including about other women. That’s the moral of this story, the appealing, gleaming jewel in the trash. “The Girl on the Train” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for extremely bad adult behavior. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. | 1 |
U. S. Border Patrol agents assigned to the Nogales Station arrested a Mexican national who the country after being deported just last month. [The agents from the Tucson Sector arrested Rene a previously deported criminal alien. A records check carried out by the agents revealed has an extensive criminal history and prior deportations. His most recent deportation occurred just weeks ago. His criminal history dates back to 1990 according to information obtained by Breitbart Texas from U. S. Customs and Border Protection officials. In one of the cases, a court convicted for raping a child. The court sentenced him to only 26 months in prison. Upon the conclusion of his prison sentence, he received two years of probation. That conviction occurred in 1994. Court records obtained by Breitbart Texas show that agents arrested the Mexican citizen near Nogales, Arizona, on March 7. On February 9, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Enforcement Removal Operations agents deported through the El Paso Port of Entry, court records stated. now faces new criminal charges of illegal after removal as a sex offender. This is a felony charge. Breitbart Texas extensively reported on previously deported sex offenders who are arrested by Border Patrol agents after illegally returning to the U. S after being deported. In February, Breitbart Texas reported that agents in the El Centro Sector, Southern California, arrested their fifth previously deported sex offender since the new fiscal year began in October. Following the arrests of two previously deported sex offenders in Southern California in early February, El Centro Sector Assistant Chief Patrol Agent David S. Kim said, “These two arrests highlight the importance of knowing who is coming into the United States. The two sex offenders our Border Patrol Agents arrested took advantage of and preyed on minors. Our agents shield our communities and our country from threats like this every day. ” Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook. | 1 |
Share This A Trump supporter was arrested after polling officials spotted what he was wearing at an early voting station in Bulverde, Texas.
As the election draws near, liberals are attempting to stifle any votes for Hillary Clinton’s increasingly popular opponent, Donald Trump, hoping their felonious candidate can pull off a win. However, what a Trump supporter was recently arrested for wearing shows just how desperate leftists really are to stop the conservative vote.
When Brett Mauthe woke up last Monday morning, he was eager to get his ballot in early and secure a vote for Trump while the Republican nominee’s approval rate continues to rise. The 55-year-old Texan got dressed, put on his favorite hat, and headed out the door. Unfortunately, he didn’t realize that it was his choice of clothing that would not only prohibit him from voting but also land him inside a jail cell.
KSAT 12 reports that Bulverde polling officials confronted Mauthe when they spotted him wearing a pro-Trump hat and a t-shirt that read “Basket of Deplorables,” a sarcastic reference to Hillary’s crude remarks about conservative voters. Apparently unaware that he wasn’t allowed to sport campaign gear inside the polling station, Mauthe removed his hat but refused to turn his shirt inside out. It was then that the officials called the police and had him arrested.
Mauthe was placed in cuffs and charged with electioneering and loitering as local police threw the book at the confused man. Like Mauthe, voters at the same polling place were shocked that wearing such clothing is not only prohibited at the polls but can result in a misdemeanor charge . Brett Mauthe, 55, was charged with electioneering and loitering for wearing a “Basket of Deplorables” t-shirt mocking Hillary Clinton’s crude reference to conservatives.
“I don’t feel like you should be preaching to anybody, but I do feel like you should be able to wear a shirt if you want and if it has the candidate,” Georgina Pereida said after casting her vote Wednesday morning. “I’m kind of shocked because I think that’s part of the freedoms that we’re voting for. “
While Mauthe is wholly responsible for not following the rules, although he may not have understood the severity of his violation, we’re betting that career politicians are keen on the election rules. Proving that the liberal elites are above the rules, Hillary herself was caught breaking the same law as Mauthe but with a very different outcome. This year, Hillary was caught campaigning in front of a North Carolina polling station and Bill was busted thanking Hillary voters over a loudspeaker within 20 feet of a Massachusetts polling station. Unlike Mauthe, neither of the Clintons were arrested.
Mad World News reported that Hillary was captured on video campaigning in front of Raleigh’s Chavis Center, a polling place in North Carolina. The female candidate walked straight up to early voters, greeting them and snapping selfies as if she was at one of her own rallies. Of course, the scheming doesn’t end there.
In March of this year, Bill was busted thanking “those of you who are supporting Hillary Clinton” with a loudspeaker while within 20 feet of a Massachusetts polling station. His massive police detail also blocked civilians from entering the precinct to vote. The Daily Kos reports that even though electioneering, which is Mauthe’s crime, is only a misdemeanor, interfering with voting rights is a felony, which is exactly what Bill did. As expected, Mauthe was arrested and charged for his crimes, but Bill was fawned over and even abetted by police officers.
Although Mauthe definitely broke the law when he refused to remove his shirt, his real crime is that he wasn’t a Hillary supporter. If he had been a liberal celebrity or the husband of a Democratic politician, he would’ve been allowed to block voters and openly campaign for his choice right there in the station.
The bias is clear â not only are the electronic polling machines switching votes for the left, influential Democrats are potentially changing views right there in the polling stations. It’s undeniable that, regardless of the results, the American people don’t stand a chance at a fair election. | 0 |
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The Iraqi Army has entered Mosul for the first time in over two years at the start of a battle which is likely to end in a decisive defeat for Isis . The significance of the fight for Mosul will be all the greater for Isis because its self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi , is believed to be still inside the city, a senior Kurdish official has told The Independent .
Fuad Hussein, chief of staff to Kurdish President Massoud Barzani, said in an exclusive interview that his government had information from multiple sources that “Baghdadi is there and, if he is killed, it will mean the collapse of the whole [Isis] system.” Isis would have to choose a new caliph in the middle of a battle, but no successor would have the authority and prestige of Baghdadi, the leader who surprised the world by establishing the caliphate after capturing Mosul in June 2014.
Baghdadi has kept himself concealed for the last eight or nine months according to Mr Hussein, who added that the caliph had become very dependent on Isis commanders from Mosul and Tal Afar, a city just to the west of Mosul. Other senior and better known figures in Isis, particularly those from Syria and other countries, have been killed since their initial triumphs in the summer of 2014 when they took over much of northern Iraq and eastern Syria.
The presence of Baghdadi in Mosul may complicate and prolong the battle for Mosul as his surviving adherents fight to the death to defend him. Mr Hussein said that “it is obvious that they will lose, but not how long this will take to happen.” He said that Kurdish Peshmerga forces had been impressed by the extraordinary number of tunnels that Isis had dug in order to provide hiding places in the villages around Mosul.
Iraqi Special Forces advanced into Mosul, which once had a population of two million, on Tuesday seizing the state television on the east bank of the Tigris River that divides the city in half. Mr Hussein said that the speed of the fall of Mosul would depend on many factors especially whether or not Isis “is going to destroy the five bridges over the river.”
Iraqi army units backed by US-led air strikes have been attacking across the Nineveh Plain to the east of Mosul, capturing empty towns and villages from which the inhabitants have almost entirely fled. Where Christians and other minorities have tried to return to their old homes in towns like Bartella and Qaraqosh, they have found them looted and often burned by retreating Isis fighters.
Iraqi troops entered Gogjali, a district inside Mosul’s city limits, and later the borders of the more built-up Karama district, according to Major General Sami al-Aridi of the Iraqi special forces. Under an agreement reached before the offensive began on 17 October, Kurdish Peshmerga and Shia-militia paramilitaries known as the Hashd al-Shaabi, will not join the attack into Mosul, which is a largely Sunni Arab city.
As night fell, a sandstorm blew up cutting visibility to only 100 yards making air support for Iraqi forces more difficult and bringing the fighting to an end. “Daesh (Isis) is fighting back and have set up concrete blast walls to block off the Karama neighbourhood and [stop] our troops’ advance,” General Aridi said. He added later that the troops had taken the nearby state television building, the only one in Nineveh province, but there had been heavy fighting when they tried to move further into built-up areas. They are still some six miles from the city centre.
The anti-Isis offensive is dependent on US-led air strikes and the presence of US special forces. “I assure you that the Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga do not move one millimetre forward without American permission and coordination,” said one Kurdish observer. He did not think that the battle for Mosul would necessarily go on a long time. But it is increasingly difficult for the 3,000 to 5,000 Isis fighters in Mosul and the 1,500 to 2,500 on the outskirts to escape, even if they wanted to. The Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga encircle the city to the north, east and west and the Hashd are moving in from the west, cutting the last routes to Syria.
US spokesman Colonel John Dorrian said that the US-led airpowers had noticed that Isis forces could no longer move in large numbers. “And when we see them come together where there are significant numbers we will strike them and kill them,” he said during a televised press conference. Some 1,792 Iraqis of whom 1,120 were civilians were killed in October according to the UN, though the total probably does not include Isis fighters.
Eyewitnesses inside Mosul, where Isis is reported to have killed 40 Iraqi prisoners at the weekend and thrown their bodies into the Tigris, say there are few fighters to be seen in the streets. “There are mostly just teenagers with guns,” said one Mosul resident reached by telephone. Part of the city is shrouded in smoke because of air strikes and artillery fire, but also because Isis fighters are lighting fires to produce a smokescreen which will make observation from the air more difficult.
It has been reported that Isis commanders were divided on whether or not it was better for them to make a last stand in Mosul or withdraw, after inflicting the maximum number of casualties on its enemies, and revert to guerrilla warfare. Last month 100 Isis fighters staged a spectacular raid on the Kurdish-held oil city of Kirkuk. An advantage for Isis in fighting in Mosul is that it would be more difficult for the US and its allies to carry out air strikes because there may be up to 1.5 million civilians still in the city. Isis has been preventing them leaving though the number is increasing as the anti-Isis forces move forward and it becomes clear that they intend to assault the city.
Isis has never been popular in Mosul according to local residents who detest its extreme violence, religious bigotry and subjugation of women. But it found more support in Sunni Arab villages around the city and among the Sunni Turkman of the nearby city of Tal Afar, who have always been notorious for their religious extremism and hatred for Shia and Kurds. Some observers believe that Isis might want to fight here against the Shia paramilitaries of the Hashd, because the US-led air coalition has not been providing air cover for the Hashd on the grounds that they are sectarian and under Iranian influence.
The fighting is so far on the eastern side of Mosul that traditionally had a Kurdish and Christian population while, if Isis has local support, it will be in the overwhelmingly Sunni Arab west of the city. Life here is said to be still relatively normal with markets open and people in the streets. In addition to the indigenous population of Mosul, there are believed to be several hundred thousand Sunni Arabs, many of them Isis supporters, who fled there from Iraqi provinces such as Anbar, Diyala and Salahudin where Isis has already been defeated. (Reprinted from The Independent by permission of author or representative) | 0 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. Primaries in six states played out even as the presidential nominations seemed to be set. Hillary Clinton had already hit the delegate threshold to secure the Democratic nomination, but cemented her standing with a wins in New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota. Bernie Sanders vowed to fight on, hoping a win in California might prompt superdelegates to defect to him. ______ 2. Donald Trump said his comments about a Hispanic judge — suggesting he would not be able to handle a case against the Trump University fairly because of his heritage — had been misconstrued. Mr. Trump spoke after Speaker Paul Ryan, above, called Mr. Trump’s criticism “the textbook definition of a racist comment” and “absolutely unacceptable. ” ______ 3. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, goaded by concern over a possible Trump presidency, showcased an unusually cooperative approach on his second visit to the White House in two years. He took crucial steps toward ratifying the Paris climate accord and finishing the purchase of nuclear reactors, with a military deal to come. “Modi wants to get as much as he can out of Obama’s last months in office,” an analyst said. ______ 4. More than 350, 000 people have signed a petition for the recall of a California judge who sentenced this Stanford University student, Brock Turner, to only six months in jail after he was convicted of sexual assault. The victim’s cry for justice, published after the sentencing, has been viewed more than 8. 5 million times. ______ 5. Muhammad Ali died just as a foundation devoted to the photographer Gordon Parks was preparing to exhibit some of his images of the boxer. The new show features previously unseen photos of Ali taken on assignment for Life magazine between 1966 and 1970. Above, Ali praying before a bout in London. ______ 6. J. K. Rowling pleaded with fans to keep the plot twists in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” secret. The play, which begins at the point where her series ends, opened in previews in London. No spoilers here: “Ron still provides comic relief,” our reporter says, “Hermione remains cerebral and slightly bossy and Harry tries as hard as he can but doesn’t quite live up to his own expectations. ” ______ 7. In a rare victory against prison abuses, five New York City correction officers were convicted of all charges in the beating of a Rikers Island inmate in 2012. The inmate testified that he was punched, kicked and stomped, and spat up blood for months. Several more accused officers are to hear their verdict on Friday. “Regrettably, some people think of prisoners as less than human,” said a lawyer. ______ 8. The Syrian president, Bashar swore to retake “every inch” of territory lost in six years of civil war. His defiant address offered no hope that he would back a revival of talks to find a political solution. Meanwhile, U. N. officials said the Syrian authorities had delayed approval for desperately needed food aid for civilians trapped in a area near the capital. ______ 9. Finally, the cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who suffers from a form of Lou Gehrig’s disease, made a significant addition to his groundbreaking work on black holes. Working with two colleagues, he found that the essential properties of whatever falls into these cosmic pits may, after all, survive. Or, as he put it recently, black holes “are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. ” ______ Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a. m. Sundays. Want to look back? Here’s last night’s briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
WASHINGTON, D. C. — A block in Washington, D. C. was temporarily shut down by law enforcement and a bomb squad dispatched after an apparent backpack was found on a busy street corner. The ordeal lasted over an hour as a man in a bomb suit and another in a vest and helmet took measures to inspect the potential threat. The street was eventually reopened and the item in concern was apparently deemed safe. | 1 |
Ang Lee’s new film, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” contains sights perhaps never so vividly rendered in a movie. When bullet casings fly from a machine gun, each one is clearly visible rather than appearing in a blur. When Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn) a soldier on leave from Iraq, tears up at the national anthem or experiences battle flashbacks during the smoke bombs of a Destiny’s Child performance, the emotions in his eyes register with uncommon clarity. On the other hand, when Steve Martin mugs as the owner of a pro football team, his face contains a level of detail normally preferred by dermatologists. These are the of working at a high frame rate, the speed at which a film is shot and, in some cases, projected. The rate has a strong effect on an image’s sharpness. Mr. Lee shot “Billy Lynn” at 120 frames per second, far faster than 24, the standard for about 90 years. Few theaters are presenting it at that rate, so most viewers are out of luck — or perhaps better off, depending on your views on frame rates. For some directors, like Peter Jackson — who shot “The Hobbit” at 48 frames per second, to largely negative reaction — and James Cameron, higher frame rates are the future of movies, an opportunity to correct the motion blur that afflicts action sequences shot at the standard rate. Introducing “Billy Lynn” at the New York Film Festival last month, Mr. Lee, who won a directing Oscar for his work with digital cinema on “Life of Pi,” expressed trepidation about reaction to what he called “kind of an experimental movie” and asked the audience to keep an open mind. He had reason to worry. David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter offered a typical reaction. The film, he wrote in his review, had the “somewhat distancing sharpness of many outsize TVs. ” High frame rates aren’t new they’re used in video games and on television. And that’s the problem: Viewers, accustomed to the softer texture of movies, see the extreme sharpness of cinema and feel intuitively that they’ve stumbled into a theatrical broadcast or a football game. “If you start increasing the frame rate of the movie, whether it’s 48 or 60 or 120, it can tend to start looking like a television show,” said Douglas Trumbull, a director and special effects expert who has been a pioneer in high frame rates. In the 1970s, he developed the Showscan process, which ran at 60 frames per second. Still, he said, there is no need for that association: “I can guarantee you that we can make a movie that does not look like television. ” The 24 rate, at which most movies, even digitally projected ones, are shown, was always something of an accident. At the dawn of sound, when the rate was standardized, going more slowly would have muddied the audio and going faster would have exceeded the sensitivity of existing film stocks, said Dean Goodhill, one of the editors of “The Fugitive” and an inventor of MaxiVision48, a process from the late 1990s that never got beyond a demonstration clip. There were other experiments with frame rates in the celluloid era. The process of the 1950s ran at 30 frames per second. Cinerama used three simultaneous projectors and ran at 26 frames per second. In both cases, the higher rates were needed to accommodate outsize screens that made flicker and blur more visible. Tim J. Smith, an academic who studies visual cognition at Birkbeck, University of London, said there is no scientific reason 24 frames per second should be more appealing to viewers. “What we’re coming into the cinema with is the same audiovisual sensory system we have before we go into the cinema,” he said. In theory, he said, the move to a higher frame rate should “lead to more natural, more effortless processing by the viewer’s visual system. ” Acculturation may be the main reason moviegoers find the sharpness . “It’s interesting that people are sensitive to it,” Mr. Smith said. “They’re seeing a crispness to the image, which is unfamiliar in the cinema context. Their main frame of reference seems to be TV or video, and kind of implied by that association is ‘cheapness’ or ‘documentary’ or ‘immediacy.’ Is it good to have that? It’s hard to know. ” But the film historian David Bordwell said that high frame rates have only as a solution to a problem that is specific to digital cinema, particularly murky digital which grows less murky when frames are added. He noted that at least on a screen, there was never any of the dreaded stammer in the panning shots of Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Ophüls or Jean Renoir. “People who doubt it should see the films (on film, not video) to check,” he wrote by email. For Mr. Trumbull, who demonstrated rates for Mr. Lee but did not take part in the production of “Billy Lynn,” the increased film speed of his Showscan process was a natural outgrowth of the move toward bigger screens and bigger spectacles in the 1950s and 1960s, but a faster rate was never taken up as the industry moved toward multiplexes and tiny auditoriums. He was effusive about Mr. Lee and his willingness to experiment — a “wonderful, brave and courageous effort,” he said. But after watching the movie at the New York Film Festival, he wasn’t pleased. “I was really upset when I was at the premiere of ‘Billy Lynn’ that it was in a very narrow, theater,” he said. He felt that it was projected with too much illumination, that it needed dark time between frames. (We don’t perceive them as such, but movies are successions of still images — and on most projectors, each flash is interspersed with moments of darkness.) “Billy Lynn” has almost no darkness. In response, Ben Gervais, the film’s technical supervisor, said, “We found that there was no real advantage in terms of the way that the movie felt” with added dark time. Mr. Trumbull also said that it was crucial to present the film on a screen that filled a wider frame of vision, like Imax, to show the benefits of rates and to keep cinematic texture. “We shouldn’t draw conclusions about high frame rates as a result of ‘Billy Lynn’ being incorrectly presented,” he said. “It would be really tragic. ” Mr. Trumbull has a competing rate format, Magi, which is different from Showscan. But he said Magi has solved what he sees as the problems of “Billy Lynn. ” It may also be necessary, he added, for filmmakers to alter their approaches to suit the format. He recalled his own experience working on the visual effects of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” for which the camera motion was slowed so that the visuals would look smooth on a giant screen. “That’s what kind of led to the style of the movie,” he said. Like Mr. Trumbull, Mr. Goodhill said that it was possible to retain the cinematic texture while gaining the clarity of the higher frame rate. MaxiVision48 — lavishly praised in 1999 by Roger Ebert, among others — looked “both new and traditional at the same time,” he recalled. But he emphasized that he doesn’t necessarily regard that texture as the right one. “That’s up for the individual artist to decide. ” | 1 |
Notes Evidence of Use Northeast of Mosul by
With Iraqi forces continuing to near the city of Mosul in a protracted military offensive, there are more than a few concerns about potential war crimes against the massive civilian population in the ISIS-held city. Today, Amnesty International’s concern centers on white phosphorus .
White phosphorus is legally used both for smoke screens and for illumination in war zones, its use is often heavily criticized for the risk of civilian casualties in the intense temperature the chemical burns at. Its use in areas where civilians are present is considered a war crime.
This is particularly true around Mosul, a huge city in which some 1.5 million people are believed to still reside. Amnesty noted it has photographic evidence of the use of the chemical to the northeast of Mosul, and warned against any further use in areas where civilians are present or may be present in the near future.
US forces have been documented using white phosphorus recently in Iraq, though they insist they’ve only done so in ways consistent with their interpretation of international law. The US, of course, insists everything they do in Iraq is legal, but in the case of such a densely populated area, this could be a big problem. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Brooklyn came to the aid of scores of refugees and others who were trapped at airports across the United States on Saturday after an executive order signed by President Trump, which sought to keep many foreigners from entering the country, led to chaotic scenes across the globe. The judge’s ruling blocked part of the president’s actions, preventing the government from deporting some arrivals who found themselves ensnared by the presidential order. But it stopped short of letting them into the country or issuing a broader ruling on the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s actions. The legal case played out on Saturday amid global turmoil, as the executive order signed by the president slammed shut the borders of the United States for an Iranian scientist headed to a lab in Massachusetts, a Syrian refugee family headed to a new life in Ohio and countless others across the world. The president’s order, enacted with the stroke of a pen at 4:42 p. m. Friday, suspended entry of all refugees to the United States for 120 days, barred Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocked entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The Department of Homeland Security said that the order also barred green card holders from those countries from the United States. In a briefing for reporters, White House officials said that green card holders from the seven affected countries who are outside the United States would need a waiver to return. Mr. Trump — in office just a week — found himself accused of constitutional and legal overreach by two Iraqi immigrants, defended by the American Civil Liberties Union. Meanwhile, large crowds of protesters turned out at airports around the country to denounce Mr. Trump’s ban on the entry of refugees and people from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Lawyers who sued the government to block the White House order said the judge’s decision could affect an estimated 100 to 200 people who were detained upon arrival at American airports. Judge Ann M. Donnelly of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, ruled just before 9 p. m. that implementing Mr. Trump’s order by sending the travelers home could cause them “irreparable harm. ” She said the government was “enjoined and restrained from, in any manner and by any means, removing individuals” who had arrived in the United States with valid visas or refugee status. The ruling does not appear to force the administration to let in people otherwise blocked by Mr. Trump’s order who have not yet traveled to the United States. The judge’s ruling came swiftly after lawyers for the A. C. L. U. testified in her courtroom that one of the people detained at an airport was being put on a plane to be deported back to Syria at that very moment. A government lawyer, Gisela A. Westwater, who spoke to the court by phone from Washington, said she simply did not know. Hundreds of people waited outside of the courthouse chanting, “Set them free!” as lawyers made their case. When the crowd learned that Judge Donnelly had ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, a rousing cheer went up in the crowd. Minutes after the judge’s ruling in New York City, another judge, Leonie M. Brinkema of Federal District Court in Virginia, issued a temporary restraining order for a week to block the removal of any green card holders being detained at Dulles International Airport. In a statement released early Sunday morning, the Department of Homeland Security said it would continue to enforce all of the president’s executive orders, even while complying with judicial decisions. “Prohibited travel will remain prohibited,” the department said in a statement, adding that the directive was “a first step towards control over America’s borders and national security. ” Around the nation, security personnel at major international airports had new rules to follow, though the application of the order appeared chaotic and uneven. Humanitarian organizations delivered the bad news to overseas families that had overcome the bureaucratic hurdles previously in place and were set to travel. And refugees already on flights when the order was signed on Friday found themselves detained upon arrival. “We’ve gotten reports of people being detained all over the country,” said Becca Heller, the director of the International Refugee Assistance Project. “They’re literally pouring in by the minute. ” Earlier in the day, at the White House, Mr. Trump shrugged off the sense of anxiety and disarray, suggesting that there had been an orderly rollout. “It’s not a Muslim ban, but we were totally prepared,” he said. “It’s working out very nicely. You see it at the airports, you see it all over. ” But to many, the government hardly seemed prepared for the upheaval that Mr. Trump’s actions put into motion. There were numerous reports of students attending American universities who were blocked from returning to the United States from visits abroad. One student said in a Twitter post that he would be unable to study at Yale. Another who attends the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was refused permission to board a plane. A Sudanese graduate student at Stanford University was blocked for hours from entering the country. Human rights groups reported that legal permanent residents of the United States who hold green cards were being stopped in foreign airports as they sought to return from funerals, vacations or study abroad. There was widespread condemnation of the order, from religious leaders, business executives, academics, political leaders and others. Mr. Trump’s supporters offered praise, calling it a necessary step on behalf of the nation’s security. Homeland Security officials said on Saturday night that 109 people who were already in transit to the United States when the order was signed were denied access 173 were stopped before boarding planes heading to America. people who were stopped were eventually given waivers to enter the United States, officials said. Legal residents who have a green card and are currently in the United States should meet with a consular officer before leaving the country, a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told reporters. Officials did not clarify the criteria that would qualify someone for a waiver, other than that it would be granted “in the national interest. ” But the administration appeared to be implementing the order chaotically, with agencies and officials around the globe interpreting it in different ways. The Stanford student, Nisrin Omer, a legal permanent resident, said she was held at Kennedy International Airport in New York for about five hours but was eventually allowed to leave the airport. Others who were detained appeared to be still in custody or sent back to their home countries. White House aides claimed on Saturday that there had been consultations with State Department and homeland security officials about carrying out the order. “Everyone who needed to know was informed,” one aide said. But that assertion was denied by multiple officials with knowledge of the interactions, including two officials at the State Department. Leaders of Customs and Border Protection and of Citizenship and Immigration Services — the two agencies most directly affected by the order — were on a telephone briefing on the new policy even as Mr. Trump signed it on Friday, two officials said. The A. C. L. U.’s legal case began with two Iraqis detained at Kennedy Airport, the named plaintiffs in the case. One was en route to reunite with his wife and son in Texas. The other had served alongside Americans in Iraq for a decade. Shortly after noon on Saturday, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, an interpreter who worked for more than a decade on behalf of the United States government in Iraq, was released. After nearly 19 hours of detention, Mr. Darweesh began to cry as he spoke to reporters, putting his hands behind his back and miming handcuffs. “What I do for this country? They put the cuffs on,” Mr. Darweesh said. “You know how many soldiers I touch by this hand?” The other man the lawyers are representing, Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, who was en route to Houston, was released Saturday night. Before the two men were released, one of the lawyers, Mark Doss, a supervising attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project, asked an official, “Who is the person we need to talk to?” “Call Mr. Trump,” said the official, who declined to identify himself. While the judge’s ruling means that none of the detainees will be sent back immediately, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case expressed concern that all those at the airports would now be put in detention, pending a resolution of the case. The White House said the restrictions would protect “the United States from foreign nationals entering from countries compromised by terrorism” and allow the administration time to put in place “a more rigorous vetting process. ” But critics condemned Mr. Trump over the collateral damage on people who had no sinister intentions in trying to come to the United States. Peaceful protests began forming Saturday afternoon at Kennedy Airport, where nine travelers had been detained upon arrival at Terminal 7 and two others at Terminal 4, an airport official said. Similar scenes were playing out at other airports across the nation. An official message to all American diplomatic posts around the world provided instructions about how to treat people from the countries affected: “Effective immediately, halt interviewing and cease issuance and printing” of visas to the United States. Internationally, confusion turned to panic as travelers found themselves unable to board flights bound for the United States. In Dubai and Istanbul, airport and immigration officials turned passengers away at boarding gates and, in at least one case, ejected a family from a flight it had boarded. Seyed Soheil Saeedi Saravi, a promising young Iranian scientist, had been scheduled to travel in the coming days to Boston, where he had been awarded a fellowship to study cardiovascular medicine at Harvard, according to Thomas Michel, the professor who was to supervise the research fellowship. But Professor Michel said the visas for the student and his wife had been indefinitely suspended. “This outstanding young scientist has enormous potential to make contributions that will improve our understanding of heart disease, and he has already been thoroughly vetted,” Professor Michel wrote to The New York Times. A Syrian family of six who have been living in a Turkish refugee camp since fleeing their home in 2014 had been scheduled to arrive on Tuesday in Cleveland. Instead, the family’s trip has been called off. “Everyone is just so heartbroken, so angry, so sad,” said Danielle Drake, the community manager for US Together, an agency that resettles refugees. A Christian family of six from Syria said in an email to Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania, that they were being detained on Saturday morning at Philadelphia International Airport despite having legal paperwork, green cards and visas that had been approved. In the case of the two Iraqis held at Kennedy Airport, the legal filings by his lawyers say that Mr. Darweesh was granted a special immigrant visa on Jan. 20, the same day Mr. Trump was sworn in as president. A husband and father of three, Mr. Darweesh arrived at Kennedy Airport with his family. Mr. Darweesh’s wife and children made it through passport control and customs, but agents of Customs and Border Protection detained him. In Istanbul, during a stopover on Saturday, passengers reported that security officers had entered a plane after everyone had boarded and ordered a young Iranian woman and her family to leave the aircraft. Iranian green card holders who live in the United States were blindsided by the decree while on vacation in Iran, finding themselves in a legal limbo and unsure whether they would be able to return to America. “How do I get back home now?” said Daria Zeynalia, a green card holder who was visiting family in Iran. He had rented a house and leased a car, and would be eligible for citizenship in November. “What about my job? If I can’t go back soon, I’ll lose everything. ” | 1 |
TEL AVIV — The U. S. Russia and Israel are said to have reached a consensus on the threat posed by forces in Syria, the Kuwati daily newspaper reported Saturday. [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived at an understanding with Washington and Moscow that forces, including Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, constitute an “existential threat” to the Jewish state. The three countries agreed that forces would need their movements in Syria restricted, eventually leading to their expulsion from the country. The report cited unnamed U. S. officials saying that Israel was conducting military strikes in Syria, including airstrikes on weapons convoys, in order to curb the threat. At the same time, Russia is reported to be withdrawing its forces in areas of southern Syria, leaving the Assad regime to take over. Israel is hoping that pressure exerted by Washington and Moscow will help weaken military entities to the point where they can be removed entirely from Syria. However, Tehran’s grip over Damascus means that this will be no easy task, a U. S. official told the paper. Israel has long harbored concerns over Iran’s presence in Syria, and the Jewish state has made it clear that it will not allow for proxies of the Islamic Republic to remain a permanent fixture in its northern neighbor. Netanyahu has vowed to continue strikes against Iran’s affiliates, like Hezbollah, who threaten Israel. Lebanese newspaper reported over the weekend that the Assad regime in Syria sent messages to Israel via Russia threatening that any further strikes by the Israeli military within Syria’s borders will be met with Scud missiles capable of carrying half a ton of explosives being fired deep into the Jewish state. Syria added that strikes on its military would result in Scuds being launched at IDF bases, while strikes in civilian areas would be met with counterstrikes on the northern coastal city of Haifa and petrochemical plants in the region, the report claimed. | 1 |
LOS ANGELES — Marvel Entertainment hates to be called a machine — the studio thinks that term sells its filmmakers short — but a machine it truly is: With the arrival of “Doctor Strange” over the weekend, Marvel has delivered an uninterrupted string of 13 critical and commercial hits in only eight years. No film company, not even Pixar, can claim a track record like that. “Doctor Strange,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch as one of Marvel’s lesser comic book heroes, collected an estimated $85 million at theaters in the United States and Canada, according to comScore, which compiles box office data. The movie, which received strong reviews, cost at least $275 million to make and market worldwide. Disney said that “Doctor Strange” took in an additional $240. 4 million overseas Imax results in China were especially robust. With ticket sales of about $45. 6 million, “Trolls” took second place at the domestic box office it was produced by DreamWorks Animation at a cost of $125 million and distributed by 20th Century Fox. Turnout for “Trolls,” based on a line of Danish toys and featuring songs by Justin Timberlake, was on par with efforts like “The Croods” and “How to Train Your Dragon,” both of which spawned sequels. Third place went to Mel Gibson’s “Hacksaw Ridge” (Lionsgate) which arrived to about $14. 8 million in ticket sales, a solid total for a movie from a director with a lot of personal baggage that relied heavily on marketing. It was independently financed for about $40 million and played mostly to older moviegoers Lionsgate said that 68 percent of the weekend audience was over the age of 35. Perhaps most notably, Mr. Gibson — assisted by savvy Lionsgate and Rogers Cowan publicists — has himself as a player in Hollywood after a decade when his offscreen behavior made him a movie industry pariah. “Hacksaw Ridge” received mostly positive reviews and has been generating awards buzz. | 1 |
Yemen UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash (Photo by Reuters)
The United Arab Emirates, a key Saudi ally in its deadly aggression against Yemen, has welcomed a new United Nations peace proposal to end the Yemen conflict.
"The UAE supports the efforts of UN [Special] Envoy [for Yemen] Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed knowing that the mission of a mediator is always tough," Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash said on his Twitter account on Thursday.
The remarks came two days after the UN envoy submitted the plan to Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement and its allies.
According to informed sources, the roadmap urges agreement on naming a new vice president after the withdrawal of Houthis from the capital Sana’a and other cities and their handover of arms to a third party.
The initiative further calls on former Yemeni president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, to transfer power to the vice president who would appoint a new premier to form a government. United Nations Special Envoy for Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, speaks to reporters at Sana’a airport following his visit to the Yemeni capital on October 25, 2016. (Photo by Reuters)
“The roadmap represents a political solution for the Yemeni crisis,” Gargash said, adding, “UN efforts represent a chance to bring Yemenis back to the political track. Other alternatives are gloomy.”
The Hadi administration, however, said that it had not received any roadmap for a political settlement.
Peace talks, which were held between Yemen’s opposing parties in Kuwait, ended in deadlock in August.
Earlier this week, Ahmed made a visit to Sana’a, where he held meetings with Yemen’s warring sides and called for a return to a cessation of hostilities to allow aid deliveries.
The Riyadh regime resumed its deadly airstrikes on Yemen on Sunday hours after a three-day truce in the conflict-ridden country expired.
Yemen has seen almost daily military attacks by Saudi Arabia since late March 2015, with the UN putting the toll from the aggression at more than 10,000.
The offensive was launched to crush the Houthi Ansarullah movement and its allies and reinstate the former Yemeni government.
The Houthi Ansarullah fighters took state matters in their own hands after the resignation and escape of Hadi, which threw Yemen into a state of uncertainty and threatened a total security breakdown in the country, where an al-Qaeda affiliate is present. Loading ... | 0 |
Posted by David Risselada
Much to the surprise of the American electorate, both on the right and left, the FBI is reopening it’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal . Whether this will amount to anything meaningful, or it is simply a distraction is any body’s guess. Many are speculating that this could be the issue which would cause President Obama to cancel the elections . In my recent article “Corrupting One’s Self is the Ultimate Morality in the Pursuit of Utopia,” I discussed the possibility that the blatant corruption is deliberately being thrust in our face to create the necessary attitude for social change. This idea of course, is based on the writings of Alinsky and other “social engineers” skilled in the arts of propaganda and psychological manipulation. Looking at it from this perspective, cancelled elections are a possibility. The truth is, with Hillary Clinton you never know what to expect because she is operating from an “ends justify the means mentality,” and she is willing to do anything to see her dreams of a collectivized America move forward.
According to Elizabeth Harrington from the Washington Free Beacon, the Clinton campaign began conducting focus groups to determine which approach Hillary should take concerning her run for the presidency. Hillary is diehard ideologue whose beliefs are right in line with Communists dictators like Stalin and Mao. She believes that ordinary people have no idea how to best conduct their personal business and the state should be involved in every aspect of our lives. The goal of these focus groups was to determine the attitudes of the electorate in order to mold her message and her personality into something they would vote for. Many people would attempt to ridicule and discredit anyone associating Hillary Clinton with communists because she comes across as compassionate and caring, always blaming everything on a vast, right wing conspiracy.
This has always been the modus operandi of the communist movement and it explains why so many young people have no idea about the atrocities committed under the regimes of communist rulers. Today’s millennials are well aware of the holocaust and the millions of Jews murdered by Adolph Hitler. They may not however, know that Hitler murdered more than Jews. He started by eliminating the sick and disabled, then he murdered Christians, homosexuals and anyone else essentially, that didn’t go along with his national socialism. The belief is that fascism is an extreme right wing world view. This explains the hostility towards today’s conservative movement. They have been branded as fascists, when in fact, the truth is the exact opposite. On the true political scale, national socialism or fascism is to the right of communism, which represents complete state control, but it is still way left of center. A true, extreme right wing world view would be complete absence of government control over anything. With this being said, and understanding that the horrors of communism have all been forgotten simply because they are no longer being taught, the communists have been very successful in deceiving people because like Hillary Clinton, they pretend to be something they are not.
Millions of young people in America, due to left wing indoctrination in our universities , are falling for the communist propaganda under the guise that communism is a more fair, compassionate system of economics. Left wing professors, refusing to acknowledge the failures of communism because they believe the right leader has not come along to implement it the right way, have failed to teach these young minds that the pursuit of total equality has led to the death of 100,000,000 people under communist controlled governments. Communists, believing not in God but in evolution and science, believe that man can be trained into submission and a refusal to accept communist ideals is in fact, a sign of mental deficiency. Therefore, it is justifiable to eliminate them. To understand this read “Brainwashing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics.” Communists also hide this belief by claiming their pursuit of equality is motivated by a pursuit of social and economic justice when in fact, it is motivated by a pure desire to control every aspect of human being.
The Black Book of Communism references the historical debate over the evil natures of both Communism and Nazism. Adolf Hitler, despite his cruelty was open about what his intentions were. He set out to create a perfect race that understood its role was to serve the state and nothing else. This isn’t any different than the goals of communism truthfully, only insofar as communists seek to accomplish this on a global scale, (using the economic class issue as opposed to race) while national socialism focuses on achieving such a goal for the country itself. The communists on the other hand, as mentioned above, pretended to be compassionate about the poor and oppressed when in reality- they use these groups to organize for power while hiding behind the guise of compassion and the struggle to achieve social justice, while in reality-they are systematically imprisoning and murdering all that don’t go along with their agenda. This, according to the Black Book of Communism, makes the communist ideology, if you could really assign degrees of evil, more evil than Nazism because of its deceptive nature.
We all know Hillary Clinton is a liar, and she wrote her college thesis on Saul Alinsky but do we know anything else about her? Given the fact that she conducted focus groups to help mold her campaign message it is obvious she is hiding something. Over the past several weeks we have seen references to leaked emails which show she has an obvious disdain for the average American and the common beliefs in liberty that most of us share. She has referred to many of us as “irredeemable deplorables” in an effort to brand us as the uncompassionate ones while pretending to care about the poor and so called oppressed. In fact, this is the whole strategy of the Democrat party because as we all know, they have taken a hard turn left and do not represent the views of most Americans. They will however, pretend to in order to get in office. What are her intentions if she were to assume office? Are the massive dehumanization campaigns where conservatives are labeled as fascists and whites as automatic racists a first step to a repeat of history where millions were slaughtered because they were deemed as undesirable by their own government? Looking at the deceptive nature of Hillary Clinton and the violent nature of the left, it sure seems like a distinct possibility.
The number of deaths under communist regimes from the Black Book of Communism Soviet Union- Vladimr Lenin and Joseph Stalin-20 million deaths China-Mao- 65 million deaths Vietnam- Ho Chi Mihn- 1 million deaths North Korea- 2 million deaths Cambodia- Pol Pot- 2 million deaths Eastern Europe- 1 million deaths Latin America- 150,000 deaths Africa- 1.7 million deaths Afghanistan (under soviet control) 1.5 million deaths
These are not deaths represented by wartime or revolutions, but by outright murder committed by evil men intent on creating perfect societies based on social justice and equality. I guess the question remains. Is man capable of bringing about a perfect society?
Courtesy of Freedom Outpost
David Risselada is a freelance writer and researcher. David served in the United States Marine Corps from 1995-1999 and the US Army from 2001-2006. In addition to contributing to FreedomOutpost.com, he writes at Radical Conservative . Follow David on Twitter .
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Lady Gaga rocked a futuristic Nazi uniform at a Hillary rally in North Carolina yesterday, throwing her weight behind the Clinton camp’s assault on the First and Second Amendments.
Via YourNewsWire
Heil Hitlary!
However there was widespread backlash against her outfit on social media. “The pop star spoke out to give the Democrat a boost, but her outfit raised some eyebrows. POP icon Lady Gaga has been slammed for her bizarre outfit while speaking at a Hillary Clinton rally, as social media users likened it to a Nazi uniform.
The singer addressed supporters of the Democratic presidential candidate in North Carolina ahead of today’s election, urging them to get out and vote while also calling for reconciliation between Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s supporters.
Speaking of her admiration for Clinton, the 30-year-old told the crowd: “No matter how absurd and mean [Trump] became, she smiled bravely and she continued on.”She added that Hillary Clinton is “made of steel” and said: “If we are true, true Americans, then we must go from viewing his followers as our adversaries to viewing them as our allies.” HEIL #HITLLARY !
– @LadyGaga 's #Nazi Salute at #Hillary Rally. #HeilHitllary #HeilHillary pic.twitter.com/ZmliQPadb1
— Deplorable Dmitry (@DmitryTamoikin) November 8, 2016
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Home › POLICE STATE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | US NEWS › DETROIT AIRPORT USING NEW HIGH-TECH SYSTEM: TAKES FINGERPRINTS, IRIS SCAN, HIGH-RES PHOTO OF FACE DETROIT AIRPORT USING NEW HIGH-TECH SYSTEM: TAKES FINGERPRINTS, IRIS SCAN, HIGH-RES PHOTO OF FACE 0 SHARES
[10/27/16] Metro Detroit Airport now has a new way to allow people to move seamlessly through airport security .
It’s called CLEAR and it’s now in operation at the airport’s McNamara Terminal. Certified as a “qualified anti-terrorism technology” by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, CLEAR has been used more than five million times to move travelers quickly through airport security lines at 16 other airports.
“They validate their identity using a knowledge-based quiz, they use a government identification that’s validated using technology, and then we link it to their bio-metrics — we take 10 fingerprints with a digital reader, we take a scan of their iris, and we take a high-res photo of their face,” said CLEAR spokesperson David Cohen.
Cohen said the initial sign-up process takes about five minutes and after that, getting through security lines should be a breeze. He said there are special lines for CLEAR customers that can be a great time-saver for travelers, who will still have to pass through X-Rays and body scans. Post navigation | 0 |
CBS News reports: LAS VEGAS — Vice President Mike Pence assured the Republican Jewish Coalition that he and President Donald Trump will work tirelessly on foreign and domestic issues important to the group, such as enacting policies at home and supporting Israel abroad. [“If the world knows nothing else, the world will know this: America stands with Israel,” Pence told the group Friday night. The Republican administration is “assessing” whether to move the U. S. Embassy to Jerusalem, he said, and has put Iran “on notice. ” Pence’s words served as evidence of the fruits of years of the politically active group’s labors. Its annual conference at billionaire donor Sheldon Adelson’s casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip has become a de facto campaign stop for Republican presidential candidates over the past few years. The RJC also drew the entire GOP presidential field to its December 2015 forum in Washington. Read more here. | 1 |
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, his presidential campaign behind him, looked to advance the movement he built during the Democratic primary race, with the public unveiling on Wednesday of a political organization focused on addressing economic inequality and taking on special interests. But while the establishment of the new group, Our Revolution, had been eagerly awaited by many of his most ardent supporters, it has been met with criticism and controversy over its financing and management. A principal concern among backers of Mr. Sanders, whose condemnation of the campaign finance system was a pillar of his presidential bid, is that the group can draw from the pool of “dark money” that Mr. Sanders condemned for lacking transparency. The announcement of the group, which was live streamed on Wednesday night, also came as a majority of its staff resigned after the appointment last Monday of Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders’s former campaign manager, to lead the organization. Several people familiar with the organization said eight core staff members had stepped down. The group’s entire organizing department quit this week, along with people working in digital and data positions. After the resignations, Mr. Sanders spoke to some who had quit and asked them to reconsider, but the staff members refused. At the heart of the issue, according to several people who left, was deep distrust of and frustration with Mr. Weaver, whom they accused of wasting money on television advertising during Mr. Sanders’s campaign mismanaging campaign funds by failing to hire staff members or effectively target voters and creating a hostile work environment by threatening to criticize staff members if they quit. Claire Sandberg, who was the organizing director at Our Revolution and had worked on Mr. Sanders’s campaign, said she and others were also concerned about the group’s tax status — as a 501( c)(4) organization it can collect large donations from anonymous sources — and that a focus by Mr. Weaver on television advertising meant that it would fail to reach many of the young voters who powered Mr. Sanders’s campaign and are best reached online. “I left and others left because we were alarmed that Jeff would mismanage this organization as he mismanaged the campaign,” she said, expressing concern that Mr. Weaver would “betray its core purpose by accepting money from billionaires and not remaining and plowing that billionaire cash into TV instead of investing it in building a genuine movement. ” Kenneth Pennington, who was the digital director of Our Revolution, declined to go into detail about his reasons for leaving but confirmed that he was no longer with the organization. The staff members who quit also said that they feared that the 501( c)(4) designation meant that the group would not be able to work directly with Mr. Sanders or the people that he had encouraged to run for office because such organizations are not allowed to coordinate directly with candidates. Mr. Weaver did not respond to requests for comment. In an email sent to Sanders supporters on Tuesday night encouraging them to participate, Mr. Weaver said that the new group would work together to “empower a wave of progressive candidates this November and win the major upcoming fights for the values we share. ” Mr. Sanders has been using his vast list of supporters to raise money for local lawmakers like Chris Pearson, a state representative in Vermont. He is also supporting Tim Canova, a liberal Democrat who is trying to unseat Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, whom Mr. Sanders accused of favoring Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the primary race. In his announcement, Mr. Sanders sounded nostalgic about his presidential campaign as he repeatedly said his candidacy had changed the Democratic Party and pulled Hillary Clinton toward his progressive ideas. “We changed the conversation regarding the possibilities of our country. That is what we changed,” he said. “We redefined what the vision and the future of our country should be, and that is no small thing. ” Mr. Sanders also said Our Revolution would focus on seven specific initiatives across the country, including a California proposition aimed at lowering the cost of prescription drugs and a Colorado initiative aimed at creating a health care system. But Mr. Sanders also made it clear that he did not plan to run the organization himself, saying, “As a United States senator, I will not be directing or controlling Our Revolution. ” Mr. Sanders praised Mr. Weaver as someone who had worked with him for 30 years and who has “very, very good qualifications. ” Mr. Sanders added that Shannon Jackson, his former assistant, would be the executive director of Our Revolution. “I expect big things from them and all of you who join with them to carry the political revolution forward,” Mr. Sanders said. The creation of the group comes as Mr. Sanders faces lingering disappointment from some of his supporters for his endorsement of Mrs. Clinton and questions about his finances that have arisen since he left the race. During the primary race, Mr. Sanders repeatedly delayed releasing his financial disclosure information, and ultimately never did. This month, he spent nearly $600, 000 on a vacation home in Vermont near Lake Champlain. Paul S. Ryan, a campaign finance expert at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit political finance group, said that it was unusual for a federal lawmaker to set up such a organization and that Mr. Sanders should have had to follow Federal Election Commission donation limits and disclosure requirements. “There are definitely some red flags with respect to the formation of this group,” Mr. Ryan said. “We’re in a murky area. ” | 1 |
Tesla, ‘World’s Safest Car,’ Explodes Like a Bomb By DailyBellStaff - November 05, 2016
Fiery Tesla Crash Sends Flaming Batteries Shooting Like Projectiles, Killing Two In World’s Safest Car … When a Tesla Model S collided with a tree in downtown Indianapolis Thursday, an inferno erupted. The crash, which killed the driver and her one passenger, sent battery cells “firing off almost like projectiles around rescuers,” fire department officials told local NBC affiliate WTHR. “It hit that tree and it bounced around and all of a sudden it just exploded,” Al Finnell, an eyewitness, told the station. -IBD
The world’s safest car just blew up like a bomb but that message seems to be getting lost amidst the larger coverage about Tesla.
For years and years, Tesla has never made a nickel despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars. But the company is beloved by the predictable monetary elites that seek more and more control over the rest of us.
Founder Elon Musk offers that potential control. Every day, he works as hard as he can to ensure that sooner or later government will take away your ability to drive where you want when you want.
Here at DB, we’ve written several articles about Tesla ( here and here , most recently). We don’t like the car and much more than that, we don’t like the implications behind it.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, is fairly clear about his goals. He wants to create an electric, self-driving car. And he has Tesla fans throughout the US and the world.
Extend the logic and you come the inevitable conclusion that larger entities will have to support Tesla’s vision. These entities will surely be linked to some sort of government control.
Don’t pay your ticket? Have a confrontation of some sort outside of the home? Or simply fall afoul of one of a plethora of rules and regulations that increasingly hem-in behavior … and you will pay the consequences in terms of your driving life.
You will get up in the morning and your car won’t start because someone has flagged your behavior. If you do manage to get your car started, it won’t go anywhere because its driving mechanisms have been disabled.
You’ll have to go to court. You’ll have to pay a fine. Then you’ll be able to drive again. Or maybe not. Think driving is a “privilege”? Just wait.
We could extend this logic beyond government. It’s perfectly possible that large private entities could have relationships with government that generate similar consequences.
Why Musk has managed to attract fans for his cars given the inevitable results of his technology is a mystery to us. His ability to continue to fund his endless automotive depredations are a mystery as well.
It is most probable that his access to funds has a lot to do with the maturation of his technology and the increasing governmental control it offers.
We live in a time when technology is being celebrated as an enabler of freedom but it the kinds of technology that Musk is perfecting has little to do with freedom. No doubt it could, but not in the current climate.
There are other issues as well. Musk is running a vast corporation with other people’s money. But if you look elsewhere you will see other titanic entities are throwing their resources behind the development of technology, especially robots.
It would be one thing if these technological innovations were being developed by entrepreneurs. But one of the biggest developer of robot technology – deadly technology at that – is the Pentagon.
Since we’ve already seen movies about deadly robots, we’re not shocked by the idea of what the Pentagon is doing. But that doesn’t make it much better.
How many people wake up in the morning and decide they’re going to build a robot that will kill people automatically?
But that’s what is going on. This technology is being developed by huge corporations with virtually unlimited funds. These corporations wouldn’t exist without monopoly central banking and a variety of rules and regulations to support them and ensure they have little or no competition.
The world today is technocratic and fascist. It is run by gigantic corporations that would not exist without laws and judicial decisions that guarantee their viability no matter how incompetently they operate.
These corporations work hand-in-glove with governments around the world. Both the corporations and governments are run secretly by the same banking cabal that runs central banking via the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland.
In other words, the technological progress that we are supposed to celebrate is actually being organized for nefarious purposes. It wouldn’t exist in the form it does without vast entities that have turned their energies toward perfecting technology that is intended to create additional control, not freedom.
A normal entrepreneurial society in which individuals and groups applied technology with an eye toward marketplace acceptance might end up with completely different kinds of technology.
Many people might reject self-driving cars and killer robots – at least without proper safeguards.
But we don’t have normal societies in the world, for the most part. Instead we have people like Elon Musk who builds “the world’s safest car,” albeit one that explodes like a bomb at high impact.
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The impact knocked the wheels off of the car before the batteries caught fire and exploded. Speckman died at the scene while her passenger, 44-year-old Kevin McCarthy, died at the hospital.
What else do we learn? “’Lithium-ion battery cell fires are tough to put out,’ Indiana Fire Trucks Battalion Chief Kevin Jones said.”
The Tesla Model S is “known” for being fabulously safe. As the article informs us, it achieved the highest National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rating of any car ever tested.
Conclusion: Except when it explodes. | 0 |
Wednesday 9 November 2016 By Jojo Britain hopeful that Trump presidency and falling dollar will lead to more affordable Marmite
Post-Brexit Britain has been given hope for the future after was a revealed that a falling dollar could lead to more affordable Marmite.
With global economies still reeling from the news that Donald Trump will become the leader of the free world, the first silver linings have appeared for the people of Britain.
A spokesperson for Marmite products told us, “Many of the global commodities in our value chain are traded in dollars, so cheaper dollars means cheaper ingredients, which means cheaper marmite.”
“And I bet when you woke up and saw the news this morning you thought today was going to downhill fast, right? How wrong you were.”
Voter Simon Williams told us, “I genuinely believed Brexit was a terrible decision, one that would cripple our spending power and decimate the weekly shop of ordinary British consumers.
“I honestly thought that the only way to make things better was to cancel that terrible decision.
“It turns out all we really needed was for America to make a worse one.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently | 0 |
THE BIG UPSET: Democrats Go Into Shock As Donald Trump Pulls Even With Crooked Hillary In Michigan Trump and Clinton both received 44 percent support from respondents in a poll conducted Nov. 3 in Michigan. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson received 4 percent support, while Green party nominee Jill Stein received 3 percent. One percent of the respondents said that they were supporting someone else, and five percent said they were still undecided. Republican nominee Donald Trump is tied with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in Michigan, according to a Strategic National Poll.
The Michigan statewide poll revealed Trump is now dead even with Clinton , in a state that has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988.
Trump and Clinton both received 44 percent support from respondents in a poll conducted Nov. 3, which was obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson received 4 percent support, while Green party nominee Jill Stein received 3 percent. One percent of the respondents said that they were supporting someone else, and five percent said they were still undecided.
The survey , conducted by Strategic National , a Republican leaning consulting firm based in Michigan, contacted 573 likely voters in the State of Michigan on Nov. 3. The survey reported that 39 percent of the respondents were affiliated with the Democratic Party, 34 percent affiliated with the GOP, 21 percent affiliated with an independent or third party, and 5 percent said they were “unsure” of their party affiliation. Donald Trump MASSIVE Rally in Warren, Michigan:
Clinton is scheduled to make an appearance in Detroit Friday afternoon. Clinton will attempt to inject enthusiasm into reliable Democratic Party voters that came out for President Barack Obama in full force both in 2008 and 2012. Trump appeared at two rallies in the state Monday, and his children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka stumped around the state this week.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz appeared at a campaign rally with vice presidential candidate Mike Pence Thursday in Portage, Mich. on the state’s west side — an area where Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich performed well in the GOP primary.
Both candidates have made “ six-figure ” advertising purchases in the state in the last days before the election. Clinton’s campaign dumped $2.5 million in Michigan in two days alone, according to tabloid news outlet TMZ . Laura Ingraham on Why Trump Can Pull Off an Election Upset Over Clinton on Tuesday:
Clinton enjoyed as much as a 13-point advantage over Trump in Michigan just two weeks ago. The Democratic nominee has not made Michigan a regular campaign stop while Trump has focused on the state and other rust belt states as a potential path to victory.
While Michigan hasn’t voted for a Republican candidate for president since President George H. W. Bush in 1988, the state is home to vast swaths of conservative-leaning precincts and a well-established state party apparatus. Michigan’s governor and both legislative chambers are controlled by Republicans and the state’s congressional delegation is made up of nine Republicans and five Democrats.
Democrats have been able to win presidential elections by “running up the score” in its urban areas and population bases, something Clinton hoped would keep the state safely in her corner without diverting resources and time from other battleground states.
“Trump is over performing in key segments of the electorate especially in rural areas and Macomb County while Clinton is failing to get the numbers she needs out of the city of Detroit,” John Yob, CEO of Strategic National, who conducted the poll, reported.
Out of the poll’s respondents , 75 percent were contacted by landline, while 25 percent were contacted over cellular phone. The poll was conducted through landlines, using Interactive Voice Response and the margin of error for the poll is 4.09 percent. source
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Hadi Would Be Figurehead to Placate Saudis by Jason Ditz, October 27, 2016 Share This
Heavily backed by Saudi Arabia, former Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s ambition to return as the ruler of Yemen appears to be waning, with a new UN peace plan proposal making the rounds that would sideline him more or less entirely.
Hadi’s position has been contentious from the start. “Elected” in 2012 in a UN-mandated vote in which no opposition was allowed, Hadi was supposed to serve two years in office leading to a new constitution and free elections. The constitution never happened, and Hadi extended his reign unilaterally in 2014. He resigned in January 2015 when his anti-Houthi military offensive turned sour and he lost the capital.
The Saudis, primarily opposed to the Houthis because they’re Shi’ites, insists to this day that Hadi remains the rightful ruler, and in March 2015 attacked Yemen, vowing to reinstall him. While the Houthis have expressed openness to a unity government that ends the conflict, they’ve also opposed it involving Hadi or his vice president Ali Mushin Ahmar, who they say were too corrupt to work with in a transitional government.
The UN plan seems largely to agree, as it would require Ahmar to resign outright, and would allow Hadi to remain only as a figurehead with no real power, instead seeking to stack the government with people both sides are likely to accept.
The decision to leave Hadi in at all appears to be designed to placate the Saudis, who vowed to reinstall him through their war, and would be able to claim that they succeeded under this deal, even if it ultimately means Hadi doesn’t get any power. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz | 0 |
Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, was previously financially aided by the George MoveOn. org to win his Congressional seat. [Schiff was also awarded the Toll Fellowship, which is sponsored by the Council of State Governments, a nonprofit that monitors federal government activities and is heavily financed by Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The Open Society and groups have additionally supported a number of Schiff’s legislative efforts. Schiff has been helping to lead the Democrats’ unsubstantiated charges of alleged collusion between President Donald Trump and Moscow. Last month, Schiff delivered the opening statements at a Congressional hearing where he laid out the case for alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. This reporter previously documented serious problems with Schiff’s charges, which include wild conspiracy theories and heavy reliance on a questionable source. In largely forgotten history, Schiff’s 2000 Congressional campaign against Republican incumbent Jim Rogan was openly aided by MoveOn. org. On January 1, 2000, the Wall Street Journal reported on the radical group’s fundraising efforts for Schiff. The Congressional seat was particularly important since Rogan had gained fame after he was selected to be one of thirteen House Managers in the 1998 impeachment case of Bill Clinton. Rogan was supportive of Clinton’s impeachment and became a hero in the Republican Party. The Journal reported: If MoveOn were to achieve its ambitious goals, it just might have a big impact on this year’s struggle to control Congress, especially the House. Republicans hold only a slim majority there, and the outcome will “likely be determined in no more than three dozen congressional districts,” says Thomas Mann, director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. And of course, most congressional impeachment proponents were Republicans. One of the most prominent among them, House impeachment manager James Rogan of California, faces a challenge this year from Democratic State Senator Adam Schiff, for whom MoveOn to date has raised $106, 000, Mr. Boyd says. CNN reported on the MoveOn. org money for Schiff’s 2000 campaign: “By 2000, MoveOn. org was raising $2 million for Democratic candidates, including more than $100, 000 to help California’s Adam Schiff beat Congressman James Rogan, one of the House managers during Clinton’s impeachment trial. ” MoveOn. org also sponsored a January 2010 rally in favor of health care reform outside Schiff’s office in Pasadena, California. Schiff’s 2000 campaign bio, meanwhile, relates that he was “awarded the prestigious Toll Fellowship, sponsored by The Council of State Governments. ” The bio continues: Nominated and endorsed by his peers in the Legislature, Schiff was selected from many outstanding applicants across the nation by a committee of state elected and appointed officials as one of the most promising new leaders of state government. In 1998, the California League of High Schools named Schiff Legislator of the Year. Schiff later said that the Toll Fellowship “helped me identify my own leadership strengths, work more effectively with my colleagues and strengthen my relationship with the media. ” The Council of State Governments, which sponsors the Toll Fellowship, is heavily financed by Soros. The Open Society provided the group with $320, 000 in 2003 $1 million in 2004 and another $100, 000 that year alone. In 2009, Schiff introduced the Criminal Justice Reinvestment Act. The bill was described by the Justice Center at the Council of State Governments — which gave Schiff the Toll Fellowship award — as providing “grants to state and local governments to design and advance strategies to reduce corrections spending and increase public safety. ” A press release from the Council of State Governments said that Schiff’s bill “builds on the justice reinvestment work done by the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center in Texas, Kansas, Vermont, Rhode Island and seven other states. ” The Justice Center’s justice reinvestment initiative was itself directly supported by Soros’s Open Society, the press release documents. In 2014, the Open Society released a statement publicly supporting legislation by Schiff “requiring the president to provide an annual public report on the total number of persons killed or injured in drone strikes. ” The Open Society further signed a joint statement with other leftwing groups, including organizations financed by Soros, supporting Schiff’s Targeted Lethal Force Transparency Act. Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. ” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook. With research by Brenda J. Elliott. | 1 |
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IN the clearest indication yet that US/Russian relations may be at an all-time low post-Cold War, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is staunchly refusing to open a Snapchat he received from his US counterpart Barack Obama.
“If Putin opens it, it’s a poor political play. It shows he’s curious, interested in what Obama has to say. By not opening it, he’s telling Obama and the world that he has something better to do with his time,” explained app and politics expert Morgan Wilde.
A number of Snapchat users have become heavily invested in the ongoing brinkmanship between the two superpowers who are locked in a series of countermeasures in Syria, which have left lives of innocent civilians in the balance and with rumours persisting that Putin hasn’t looked at any Western leaders’ Snapchat stories in weeks, the outlook is bleak.
“Oh, shit, I didn’t realise it was all this serious,” said one Snapchat user, who had finally begun to understand the full extent of the deterioration of the diplomatic relationship.
“It’s one thing to be squabbling over Aleppo, and accusations of war crimes, but it really hits home when it’s played out on my favourite app,” added Snapchat user Ciaran Bergin.
However, some political commentators have urged people not to read too much into the exchange.
“Look, who knows what the Snap contained, it could have just been Obama with a dog face, his way of reaching out to Putin and saying ‘God, it’s lonely at the top, isn’t it? Now, how funny do I look with dog ears and a big tongue?’ Let’s not panic about this,” shared commentator Henrietta Norris.
There is some hope in Russia circles that Putin was simply taking a day off the app as he’s sick of seeing the same 4 or 5 people send Snapchats all day long. | 0 |
Uber will refund passengers who used their service near London Bridge during the terrorist attack on Saturday night. [The company will be offering the refund as an apology after fares surged during and following the attack, charging passengers a high price due to the demand of those trying to escape. “Our hearts go out to everybody affected by yet another horrific attack on our city,” wrote Uber in a statement following the attack. “We’d like to thank all the drivers who helped tens of thousands of Londoners get home safely last night. ” “As soon as we heard about the incident we immediately suspended dynamic pricing all around the area of the attacks — and shortly afterwards across the whole of central London — just as we did following the attacks in Manchester and Westminster,” they continued, adding, “We are also ensuring all rides from around the affected area were free of charge. ” The company also announced their efforts to get any footage from Uber drivers during the attack to the Metropolitan Police. If users have not already received a refund, they are encouraged by Uber to contact customer services. According to the BBC, “Uber offered free rides to customers in Manchester after the attack at the Manchester Arena on 22 May. ” The company also announced their intention to donate the fares received from taking passengers to and from the #OneLoveManchester concert on Sunday to charity. Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 1 |
What Trump Did For A Disabled Child Is Stunning Oct 28, 2016 Previous post A video has resurfaced that is reported to be from 2000, when a little girl named Megan appeared on the Maury Povich show with her mother, and a New York business man named Donald Trump took notice.
Megan was 10 years old and was born with Brittle Bone Disease. Only 32 inches tall and unable to walk, Megan didn’t know any other children like herself. Her mother, Debbie, wrote in to Maury’s show, who found another child named Tiffany with the same disease and introduced the two as guests on a show segment called “I May Look Different But I Have New Friends.”
Some time later, Megan was invited back onto the show again – and a new surprise was in store for her. Maury told Megan someone else had seen the original show and taken a special interest in her – a very famous person. Maury played a special video message from the famous person – Donald Trump.
Trump told her, “Hi Megan, My name’s Donald. You probably don’t know me, but I was watching Maury’s show the other day, and I must tell you, you really hit me right here (in the heart.) I think you are so beautiful, both inside and out, I had a little something, a little gift that I gave to Maury, who’s a friend of mine… and I hope you and your mother have a good time with it. And you’re very special, and you just keep it up and keep up that attitude. So good luck, and you stay in touch.”
Maury told Megan that Donald Trump “has his name on more buildings in New York City than any
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Getty - Chip Somodevilla
Two of Hillary Clinton’s top advisers, including her campaign chairman, agreed in a leaked email exchange that the Democratic nominee's “instincts can be terrible.”
Clinton adviser Neera Tanden, president of the far-left Center for American Progress, wrote to John Podesta on Sept. 6, 2015, to check in.
“How are you feeling about things?” she wrote.
Biden will get in
We are still way more likely than not to win nomination
We've taken on a lot of water that won't be easy to pump out of the boat.
Most of that has to do with terrible decisions made pre-campaign, but a lot has to do with her instincts.
She's nervous so prepping more and performing better.
Got to do something to pump up excitement but not certain how to do that.
Tanden agreed about Clinton’s “instincts” in her response:
You know I'm not a sycophant to you by any means. But the thing that makes me most confident she will prevail is that you are there.
Almost no one knows better me that her instincts can be terrible.
She does have to give time to allow new things to take hold. Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta and adviser Neera Tanden agree on Hillary: "...her instincts can be terrible" pic.twitter.com/spAihHm9IP — Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) October 26, 2016
Trump used the email during the Las Vegas presidential debate, claiming even Clinton's own campaign chairman thinks her instincts are terrible, causing Podesta to push back and express his “love” for Clinton in a statement to The Daily Mail:
“No, I think, you know, I love Hillary Clinton and I think if any fair reading of what I've said about her or what I think about her indicates that I think she is someone who's a tremendous leader who's gotten tremendous results for kids, for families, for people throughout her public service.” Image Credit: Rick Wilking-Pool/Getty Images
In another awkward email exchange , Podesta and Tanden wondered in shock why Clinton's team didn't disclose information about her private email server long before her presidential campaign to avoid the distraction.
“Why didn't they get this stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy,” Tanden wrote to Podesta.
“Unbelievable,” Podesta replied.
Then Tanden answered her own question: “[I] guess I know the answer. [T]hey wanted to get away with it.” | 0 |
Defiant and determined to transform the Democratic Party, Senator Bernie Sanders is opening a phase of his presidential campaign aimed at inflicting a heavy blow on Hillary Clinton in California and amassing enough leverage to advance his agenda at the convention in July — or even wrest the nomination from her. Advisers to Mr. Sanders said on Wednesday that he was newly resolved to remain in the race, seeing an aggressive campaign as his only chance to pressure Democrats into making fundamental changes to how presidential primaries and debates are held in the future. They said he also held out hope of capitalizing on any late stumbles by Mrs. Clinton or any damage to her candidacy, whether by scandal or by the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump. After sounding subdued if not downbeat about the race for weeks, Mr. Sanders resumed a combative posture against Mrs. Clinton, demanding on Wednesday that she debate him before the June 7 primary in California and highlighting anew what he asserted were her weaknesses against Mr. Trump. Mr. Sanders, his advisers said, has been buoyed by a stream of polls showing him beating Mr. Trump by larger margins than Mrs. Clinton in some battleground states, and by his belief that an upset victory in California could have a psychological impact on convention delegates who already have doubts about Mrs. Clinton. But his newly resolute attitude is also the cumulative result of months of anger at the national Democratic Party over a debate schedule that his campaign said favored Mrs. Clinton a arrangement between the party and the Clinton campaign the appointment of fierce Clinton partisans as leaders of important convention committees and the party’s rebuke of Mr. Sanders on Tuesday for not clearly condemning a melee at the Nevada Democratic convention on Saturday. While Mr. Sanders says he does not want Mr. Trump to win in November, his advisers and allies say he is willing to do some harm to Mrs. Clinton in the shorter term if it means he can capture a majority of the 475 pledged delegates at stake in California and arrive at the Philadelphia convention with maximum political power. Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders, said the campaign did not think its attacks would help Mr. Trump in the long run, but added that the senator’s team was “not thinking about” the possibility that they could help derail Mrs. Clinton from becoming the first woman elected president. “The only thing that matters is what happens between now and June 14,” Mr. Devine said, referring to the final Democratic primary, in the District of Columbia. “We have to put the blinders on and focus on the best case to make in the upcoming states. If we do that, we can be in a strong position to make the best closing argument before the convention. If not, everyone will know in and we’ll have to take a hard look at where things stand. ” The prospect of a Democratic fight is deeply troubling to party leaders who are eager for Mrs. Clinton and House and Senate candidates to turn to attacking Mr. Trump without being diverted by Democratic strife. Mr. Sanders has won nearly 10 million votes, compared to Mrs. Clinton’s 13 million, and Democratic leaders say she needs time to begin courting the young voters, liberals and other Sanders supporters who view her as an ally of corporate and interests. But Mr. Sanders has sharpened his language of late, saying Tuesday night that the party faced a choice to remain “dependent on campaign contributions and be a party with limited participation and limited energy” or “welcome into the party people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change. ” Mr. Sanders’s instincts have been encouraged by his campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, who has been blistering against the Clinton camp and the party establishment. On Wednesday, he took to CNN to accuse Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the Democratic national chairwoman, of “throwing shade on the Sanders campaign from the very beginning. ” For weeks, some current and former Sanders campaign workers have privately acknowledged feeling disheartened about Mr. Weaver’s determination to go after the Democratic National Committee, fearing a pitched battle with the party they hope to support in the general election. The intraparty fighting has affected morale, they say, and raised concerns that Mr. Weaver, a longtime Sanders aide who more recently ran a comic book store, was not devoted to achieving Democratic unity. Several described the campaign’s message as having devolved into a with perceived conspiracies on the part of Mrs. Clinton’s allies. Democratic leaders said they wanted to do everything possible to avoid having tensions send the Philadelphia convention into the sort of chaos they had expected to mar the Republican convention. So far, though, Mr. Sanders has not indicated that he would ask his delegates to support Mrs. Clinton, as she did in 2008 for Barack Obama. “I’m hopeful that the two candidates will come together, and soon, which could blunt the possibility of real trouble at our convention,” said Edward G. Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania and a Clinton supporter who is chairman of the Philadelphia host committee for the convention. “But you look at what happened in Nevada, and you worry. ” The melee there, at which Sanders supporters revolted and threatened the state Democratic chairwoman in a fight over delegates, intensified concerns among Clinton allies. Senator Barbara Boxer of California, who attended the convention, said she spoke with Mr. Sanders late Tuesday and said he was “distressed” by the Nevada episode. “He will be judged as whether or not he has leadership qualities by the way he handles this,” she said. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who is close to Mr. Sanders, spoke with Mr. Sanders on Friday about not letting the state convention devolve into a messy fight. They spoke again on Tuesday afternoon, and Mr. Reid complained that a staff member who had attended feared for her safety. But Mr. Sanders’s subsequent statement condemning the violence, which mostly dwelled on how dismissively he felt the party was treating him, did little to soothe Mr. Reid’s unease. “Bernie and I have known each other for a long time, and I believe he is better than this,” Mr. Reid said Wednesday. But some Sanders supporters said that Democrats were ignoring an undercurrent of anger among those who fear that Mrs. Clinton, if elected, would lack the courage to challenge her friends and political contributors. “We want to have progressive values and socialism on the convention’s agenda, rather than slip back into centrist Democratic thinking if she gets elected,” said Tick Segerblom, a state senator in Nevada and a Sanders supporter. “I think there could be some chaos at the convention — at least outside, with a lot of anarchists, socialists, young people. ” Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has largely taken Mr. Sanders’s latest broadsides in stride. In soliciting donations Wednesday, it said that the battle against Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump was “one of the toughest parts of our campaign so far. ” A Clinton campaign spokesman declined to comment about Mr. Sanders’s debate proposal in California. Privately, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said Mr. Sanders could win California but emphasized their confidence that Mrs. Clinton would still win the nomination. She now has a total of 2, 293 pledged delegates and superdelegates she needs 90 more to win the nomination, although superdelegates can shift their support up to the convention. Mr. Sanders has 1, 533 pledged delegates and superdelegates. Mr. Sanders is now running slightly behind Mrs. Clinton in California in public polls. Ben Tulchin, Mr. Sanders’s pollster, pointed to signs of rising voter registration in California among young people and independents — two core Sanders constituencies — as evidence that he could win the state. But Hispanic registration is also rising, which could benefit Mrs. Clinton. With Mr. Sanders expected to campaign aggressively over the next three weeks, his supporters in the state said they were focused on winning the primary, not on November. “If you want to talk about historic, let’s talk about the record turnout numbers at his rallies,” said Mayor Bao Nguyen of Garden Grove, Calif. a Sanders supporter. “Senator Sanders isn’t obliged to help Secretary Clinton if she wins. That’s a decision his team can make if they face that choice. ” Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, Mr. Sanders’s lone endorser in the Senate, said that the party’s divisions would only deepen if Mr. Sanders was driven from the race now. “You can’t say to them, ‘Hey we don’t want to hear your views,’ and shut the door on them,” Mr. Merkley said, “and then a month later open the door and say, ‘Hey, can you come in and help us out?’ | 1 |
Mittwoch, 23. November 2016 Mann bucht Maas und Nahles für 10.000 Euro, damit sie beim Dachdecken helfen Bremen (dpo) - "Das ist wahrscheinlich das teuerste Dach hier in der Wohngegend, aber das ist es mir wert", erklärt Günther Neukamm. Der 43-Jährige hat sich bei der SPD-Agentur Network Media für insgesamt 10.000 Euro sowohl Bundesjustizminister Heiko Maas als auch Arbeitsministerin Andrea Nahles als Gehilfen zum Dachdecken angemietet. Als er zum ersten Mal hörte, dass man SPD-Minister gegen Geld buchen kann , sei ihm sofort sein Dach eingefallen, so Neukamm. "Der Hausbau hat mich rund 200.000 Euro gekostet. Da kommt's auf die 10.000 nicht mehr an. Eigentlich kosten die einzeln 6000, aber ich habe Mengenrabatt bekommen, weil ich zwei genommen habe." Über die dachdeckerischen Fähigkeiten der beiden Politiker macht sich Neukamm keine Illusionen: "Mir ist schon klar, dass die in der Richtung nix drauf haben", erklärt der Bremer Restaurantbesitzer. "Aber ich dachte mir, die sollen wenigstens einmal im Leben auch was Anständiges machen. Mensch, Andrea! Das seh ich doch von hier unten, dass da ein abgeschliffener Ziegel hinmuss! Du bist doch Arbeitsministerin! Dann arbeite auch mal ordentlich!" Nach neun Stunden harter Knochenarbeit verabschiedet Neukamm die beiden völlig erschöpften Minister. Er findet, dass sich die Aktion gelohnt hat: "Ich hab mich fast totgelacht, als der Maas einmal fast vom Dach gefallen ist und mich gewundert, wie viele Ziegel die Nahles wuchten kann." Soeben wurde bekannt, dass die SPD das mittlerweile in Verruf geratene Programm mit sofortiger Wirkung einstellt . Neukamm bedauert das: "Eigentlich wollte ich mir mal diesen Oppermann nach Hause holen. Diesmal sogar wirklich für ein Gespräch. Ich schlaf doch abends immer so schlecht ein." ssi, dan; Foto [M]: Shutterstock Artikel teilen: | 0 |
House Speaker Paul Ryan pushed back against hysterical Democrats who insist Attorney General Jeff Sessions had improper meetings with a Russian diplomat during President Donald Trump’s political campaign. [“I think Democrats are lighting their hair on fire to get you to cover this story,” Ryan said, pointing to House and Senate Democrats calling for Sessions to resign. The Washington Post reported that Sessions did not reveal two meetings with a Russian ambassador during his confirmation hearings, even though he testified that he did not have contact with the Russians about the campaign. Ryan said there was zero evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to interfere in the election. “We have seen no evidence from any of these ongoing investigations that anybody in the Trump campaign or the Trump team was involved in any of this,” he said during a press conference. Ryan added that there still wasn’t evidence than any American colluded with the Russians to sway the election to Trump, and he added that members of congress frequently communicate with ambassadors of other countries. “Honestly, we meet with ambassadors all the time,” he said. “I don’t even remember which — all the ones I met with and took pictures with. ” | 1 |
Attorney General Jeff Sessions joined syndicated Boston radio host Howie Carr on his broadcast Thursday, laying out the new path his Department of Justice is charting in the Trump era. [New measures to crack down at the border were of particular focus in light of Sessions’s sweeping announcements in Nogales, Arizona Tuesday. Talk also turned to Sessions’ efforts to rebuild a Justice Department still largely staffed with holdover appointees and career civil service employees, most of whom worked under the previous administration. Sessions’ continued crusade against “sanctuary cities” made up the final portion of their conversation. “I’ve been excited about progress at the border … March was the lowest level of illegal entrants to the country in 17 years. It was 72% below the last month of the Obama Administration,” Sessions relayed to Carr. Building on his statements on Fox News’s Hannity, he added: I thought if we had clear leadership by the President, by our officers, and tell people please don’t come illegally, if you want to come to America wait your turn. If we do that we’d see a decline, and so far it’s exceeded my expectation. Carr expressed his disbelief at the controversy that has arisen over Sessions’ directives. “You’re enforcing the law! There’s nothing new here. You’re just taking the federal criminal code and enforcing it,” he said. Sessions was equally incredulous: It is just beyond my comprehension how we drifted so far away from the common sense notion that sovereign nations have borders and those borders should be honored … Any country that has common sense, and almost all do, has laws that if you commit a crime while you’re in the country, lawfully or unlawfully, you are to be deported. Carr moved conversation to the pace of confirmations and appointments in the Sessions DOJ. Slowed by Democratic political maneuvering like the protracted Senate battle over Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, Sessions’ efforts to assemble a team of his choosing around him has been painfully slow. Only his choices for the number two and three spots at DOJ, Deputy Attorney General and Associate Attorney General have been received a hearing and been passed for a vote of the full Senate by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Only one other DOJ nomination has been officially taken up by the Committee, Antitrust Assistant AG nominee Makan Delrahim. Sessions told Carr that he expects his Deputy pick, Rod Rosenstein of Maryland, and his nominee for Associate AG, Rachel Brand of Iowa, to be confirmed soon, but expressed dismay over the whole process: It does appear, however, that we are further behind than normal with appointments. It looks like it will be two weeks before I get the first of my fifteen or so Senate confirmed deputies approved. Can you imagine that? The first. And he may be the first one in the entire government that’s been confirmed as a deputy … it’s not good. Carr pressed Sessions on “Obama holdovers” throughout his department, especially those in the Civil Rights Division who implemented Assistant Attorney General Vanity Gupta’s response to the Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore riots that has drawn considerable criticism on the political right. “Are you trying to weed out these people?” he asked. Sessions acknowledged that career employees have always and will continue to make up of the majority of the Justice Department, but had a stern message to those who might resist the new direction at DOJ. “The President, the Attorney General set the policy, and I expect those policies to be followed. If people can’t comply with the policies of this administration, they should look elsewhere. ” The Attorney General was hopeful at the prospects for the career he oversees. “We’re getting pretty good cooperation,” he said, citing the example of career prosecutor and acting U. S. Attorney for the District of Rhode Island Stephen Dambruch, who did not shy away from revealing the immigration status of those caught in a heroin roundup Thursday. Carr finally turned attention to a cornerstone of Sessions’ nascent tenure at DOJ: “sanctuary” jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal authorities on immigration enforcement. “We going to, um, urge, these people involved in sanctuary cities,” was Sessions’s suggestive reply. “The law says if somebody commits a crime in Boston or New Hampshire, they’re to be deported if they’re here unlawfully … why cities would block that and keep criminals in their cities is beyond me. ” | 1 |
Email
Hillary Clinton may not be completely in the clear on her use of a private, unsecured e-mail server used to send and receive classified information during her time as secretary of state. FBI Director James Comey announced on Friday — in a letter to high-ranking members of Congress — that the FBI is reopening the investigation on the basis of new information.
The letter was addressed to Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chairman, Select Committee on Intelligence; Senator Charles “Chuck” Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman, Committee on the Judiciary; Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman, Committee on Appropriations and Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and related Agencies; Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs; Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; Representative Robert “Bob” Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman, Committee on the Judiciary; Representative John Culberson (R-Texas), chairman, Committee on Appropriations and Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and related Agencies; and Representative Jayson Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Comey — who declined to recommend an indictment against Clinton after the conclusion of the previous investigation in July — wrote to the chairmen of these committees to say that “in connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” of Clinton. Due to this new information, Comey wrote that he believes “it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony” regarding the investigation into whether Clinton knowingly broke the law.
Comey did not say what the “unrelated case” is or how it is connected to Clinton’s e-mails. He did say that he had been briefed about the newly discovered e-mails on Thursday and wrote, “I agree that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” CNN’s Evan Perez reported that law enforcement sources say the new e-mails are not from to WikiLeaks and are not about the Clinton Foundation.
In response to the letter, Representative Bob Goodlatte released a statement which said: The FBI’s decision to reopen its investigation into Secretary Clinton reinforces what the House Judiciary Committee has been saying for months: the more we learn about Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server, the clearer it becomes that she and her associates committed wrongdoing and jeopardized national security. Now that the FBI has reopened the matter, it must conduct the investigation with impartiality and thoroughness. The American people deserve no less and no one should be above the law.
Jason Chaffetz tweeted about the letter, saying, “FBI Dir just informed me, "The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation." Case reopened.”
The Clinton campaign claimed not to have had any previous knowledge of this most recent development. A Clinton aide reportedly told CNN, “We’re learning about this just like you all are.” That sounds strangely similar to President Obama’s claim that he learned about Clinton’s private e-mail server from news reports — a claim the White House later had to walk back.
Caught off guard, Clinton’s running mate, Tim Kaine, was asked about the reopened investigation while campaigning in Tallahassee, Florida. The only response he offered to reporters was, “Got to read a little more, got to read a little more.”
Donald Trump — who told Clinton in the second presidential debate that if he is elected, he will have her investigated and that the conclusion is “you’d be in jail.” — seized the opportunity to make a statement before giving a prepared speech in Manchester, New Hampshire. He told the audience, “They are reopening the case into her criminal and illegal conduct that threatens the security of the United States,” adding, “We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.”
Comey was careful in his letter to say that “the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant,” adding that “I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work.” This new phase of the investigation may — in keeping with a Clinton family tradition — continue past the election, and — if Clinton is elected — result in impeachment proceedings against her.
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GOSHEN, N. Y. — The judge in the case of a woman accused of killing her fiancé during a kayak outing will allow jurors to watch virtually all of an police interrogation video in which the defendant, Angelika Graswald, makes a series of incriminating statements. Ms. Graswald has been awaiting trial here in the Orange County jail for 19 months. Since the summer, County Court Judge Robert H. Freehill has postponed several pretrial conferences. But on Friday, he scheduled the start of jury selection for Feb. 14. The decision was a blow to the defense since Ms. Graswald’s lawyer had vigorously sought to keep the police interrogation and other statements out of evidence. Neither side is allowed to discuss the case. Ms. Graswald was charged with murder in April 2015, nearly two weeks after her fiancé, Vincent Viafore, 46, drowned when his kayak capsized. The couple, who shared an apartment in Poughkeepsie, N. Y. had gone kayaking together on the Hudson River, paddling in the cold, choppy water to Bannerman Island. Prosecutors say Ms. Graswald, 36, a native of Latvia, intentionally caused the kayak of Mr. Viafore, who was not wearing a life jacket, to overturn. They say she was unhappy in the relationship and stood to gain $250, 000 in life insurance from two polices that listed her as the beneficiary. Along with allowing jurors to see the interrogation, Judge Freehill ruled that the district attorney’s office could tell them about statements Ms. Graswald made the day before her arrest, when she spoke to police investigators on Bannerman Island. She had gone there to lay a wreath. According to prosecutors, she told one of the investigators during a walk that she had removed the drain plug from Mr. Viafore’s kayak, as well as a ring from his paddle. During the lengthy interrogation that followed in the police barracks, Ms. Graswald stopped short of confessing to the murder. But she complained about Mr. Viafore’s interest in pornography and group sex, and described her ambivalence as he was drowning. “I’m like ripping in two halves,” she said then. “You know, angels and demons. The demon side, it’s not a good side, and that side was telling me this is gonna happen. Just let it. But the good side was, ‘Save him, save him, save him. You’re strong. ’” Ms. Graswald’s lawyer, Richard A. Portale, insists that the police coerced her into making the statements by wearing her down over hours. At the end of the questioning, she had blurted out, “I wanted him dead and now he’s gone and I’m fine with it. ” Judge Freehill decided to keep one part of the interrogation from jurors: a brief conversation Ms. Graswald had in Russian with someone toward the end of the 11 hours. “Because a finding cannot be made that the statements were voluntary during the conversation in Russian, these statements and those that follow cannot be used by the People at trial,” he wrote. On the day of the kayaking trip in April 2015, the water had turned rough as the couple was returning to shore from Bannerman Island. The river was cold enough to cause hypothermia, according to the National Center for Cold Water Safety. This past June, a pretrial hearing determined how investigators had obtained their evidence. In the case against Ms. Graswald, the allegations hinge largely on her statements to investigators. Another issue that arose during the June hearing was whether Ms. Graswald had understood the meaning of the Miranda warning, which alerts suspects to their right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present. A State Police investigator in the case, Donald DeQuarto, testified at an earlier hearing that he had read Ms. Graswald her Miranda rights after they had spoken for over three hours at a police barracks, and that she had understood them. But Mr. Portale argued otherwise, pointing to her question — “Who’s Miranda?” — a few hours after they had been read. Mr. Viafore’s body was found in the Hudson River in May 2015. A medical examiner said the cause of death was drowning and the manner of death a homicide, citing “kayak drain plug intentionally removed by other. ” Legal experts questioned that citation, however, saying the medical examiner’s office overstepped its bounds in focusing on the drain plug when its mandate was to examine the body. | 1 |
Morning Sickness May Protect Mother and Child VN:F [1.9.22_1171] Close Transcript Transcript: Morning Sickness May Protect Mother and Child
Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.
“Since the beginning of time, pregnant women have been [known] to suffer…nausea and vomiting [during pregnancy].”“The term ‘morning sickness’ is [actually] misleading,” since women can feel sick all day long. And sometimes, it can get so serious women have to be hospitalized.
Researchers at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital found that saturated fat seemed to be a primary dietary risk factor for severe sickness. Five times the odds for each 15 grams’ intake of saturated fat, like a quarter-pound cheeseburger’s worth. The reason saturated fat intake may be such a strong risk factor could be through its effect on estrogen, as “[s]aturated fat has been shown to increase circulating levels of estrogen.”
Why would we evolve to have such a negative reaction to saturated fat? Why would we evolve to get sick at all? “Pregnancy sickness is a universal phenomenon, [with nausea and vomiting] affecting 70 to 85% of all pregnant women.” If you include food aversions in the definition, then the incidence is more like 100%. “Because pregnancy sickness is such a common phenomenon, one must question why this is so. Is there a purpose for such a potentially devastating condition?” Well, in the past, pregnancy sickness was dismissed as all just in women’s heads, but “recent…studies have reconsidered pregnancy sickness as an embryo-protective mechanism, an evolutionary adaptation to protect the [baby].”
Protect the baby from what? Maybe from meat. “Meat is the principal source of pathogens for humans. Meat is also the most common type of food avoided by pregnant women.” So, the development of an aversion to meat during pregnancy could be protective, as “meat may have toxins that are mutagenic, carcinogenic, and teratogenic”—meaning birth defect-causing. Tainted meat may also be contaminated by pathogens, and “[p]regnancy is a time of relative immunosuppression.” Normally, we can fend off most meat pathogens; however, by design, pregnant women are immunosuppressed to not reject the developing embryo, since half the baby—from the father’s side—is foreign.
So, maybe morning sickness evolved as a way to get us to stay away from meat during this vulnerable time. This would be consistent with a “profound overrepresentation” of taboos against meat eating during pregnancy in sample societies around the world.
If this theory is true, then we should be able to make five predictions. If nausea and vomiting in pregnancy is there to be protective, then women who have it should have better pregnancy outcomes. And, indeed, women who experience nausea and vomiting are significantly less likely to miscarry, or suffer a stillbirth.
Prediction #2 would be that the triggering foods contain things that can be particularly harmful to the baby. And, indeed, “[o]f all food types, animal protein (including meat, poultry, eggs, and seafood…) is the most dangerous. Meat is the source of a wide range of pathogens that pose a grave threat to pregnant women and [their developing babies].”
Nausea and vomiting in pregnancy should also coincide with when the embryo is most vulnerable. That’s between like, you know, weeks 5 and 15, when all the critical organ structures are being formed—which is right when nausea and vomiting is peaking, which is right when pregnant women find meats, fish, poultry, and eggs most aversive.
And, finally, if this theory is true, one would expect a lower frequency of morning sickness among plant-based populations. And, yes, the few societies where you don’t see such morning sickness problems are the ones that tend to have only plants as dietary staples, rather than meat. Please consider volunteering to help out on the site. Close Sources Video Sources Doctor's Note
If you do suffer from morning sickness, what can you do? See Natural Treatments for Morning Sickness .
What other effects can diet have on a healthy pregnancy? See, for example : Maternal Diet May Affect Stress Responses in Children
If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here . To post comments or questions into our discussion board, first log into Disqus with your NutritionFacts.org account or with one of the accepted social media logins. Click on Login to choose a login method. Click here for help. Julie
So nice to have a video without pop-ins!! :) In early pregnancy my food aversion wasn’t to meat (which I didn’t eat anyway). However I did have a major aversion to peanut butter–couldn’t even take a whiff of the stuff! Maybe protection from aflatoxin? Secondary aversion was to oatmeal which had been my go-to breakfast for years. Didn’t touch either throughout pregnancy. WFPBRunner
Something that is also curious is I had morning sickness the minute I got up but was fine for the rest of the day. If meat was the culprit wouldn’t I have been sick when the food was still in my stomach? What good would vomiting up nothing do? Julie
Yeah, doesn’t make much sense, does it? I’ve never really thought there’s much rhyme or reason to the idiosyncrasies of pregnancy like morning sickness, food aversions and cravings.. Many of them don’t make much sense, although it would be interesting if they did. WFPBRunner
Hormones Nick Presidente
I wonder if our evolution is the culprit on things like this. Where we might have evolved the morning sickness as a reponse to toxins, when toxins were almost entirely from our diet. Today we wear make up, and touch chemicals among other things, who knows, maybe make up makes us throw up? It’d be interesting to see a more detailed breakdown of that. Foroogh – NF Moderator
Yes, I think this is very interesting topic for further research. The bodies response to toxin to protect the fetus that his or her immune systems is not developed yet. Yes, our bodies are very complex system and we learn a lot from it. plant_this_thought
Our bodies are equipped to tell us so many things, when we stop to listen. Tom Goff
Symptoms often aren’t just messages. They are the body’s first line defences against infection and injury. Coughing expels noxious organisms, fevers kill pathogens etc etc. Suppressing symptoms may actually be counterproductive in some circumstances. plant_this_thought
Disease, then, is not the body misbehaving, but working as designed. Darryl
This paper offers a similar hypothesis that the reason saturated fat intake induces inflammation (in the nonpregnant as well) is that it’s an adaptive response to gut pathogens that meat promotes.
Embyronic implantation “ resembles an open wound that requires a strong inflammatory response ” where the uterine lining is broken and endometrial tissue invaded, and this enhanced immune response is partly responsible for morning sickness. Terry
We had 4 children and my wife got morning sickness with each one. I am not a doc and of course can’t give medical advise. But we used B-6 and the morning sickness was gone. With all 4 children. Others tried my suggestion and it worked for them too. B-6 is supposed to work for sea sickness too. Darryl
They used 25 mg every 8 h for 3 d. nc54
Eat a banana every 8 hours. Good source of B6. Joyce
At the time I became pregnant with my son, my diet consisted mainly of vegetables with very occasional meals of chicken or fish. I did not experience morning sickness. However, as the pregnancy progressed, i began to crave red meat. Since I had not had any for more than 15 years, it was difficult to contemplate following through on this need. Eventually, the craving became so powerful, I purchased and ate an entire steak. I was surprised that the need persisted for the remainder of the pregnancy. Once my son was born, I reverted to a predominantly vegetarian diet. But clearly my usual diet was lacking in something required for the pregnangy lemonhead
Same thing happened to me re: red meat. I did get morning sickness in my first trimester, though. Julie
Same thing happened to a friend of mine. She normally hated red meat, but while pregnant she craved it like crazy! Bobbi
I just love the pop-in images and the picture videos! what a nice way to change things up- thank you Nutritionfacts.
This video is so interesting to me since I vomited for almost 7 months of my pregnancy and thus never had another child after my wonderfu Sebastian. I know this rationale is fact for me. It was always fried smells of any time and I literally lived on peanut butter and toast while fearing my son would then be allergic to peanuts after my high consumption, but he is 24 now and no signs of it. Our bodies are so wise! Bobbi
Sorry, meant to write, “smells of frying or cooking meat” that made me have to literally walk quickly past restaurants and decline dinner invitations. I think the reason it turned on early in the morning and stayed all day and night for me was because that is when it needed to alert me; when I was awake. Foroogh – NF Moderator
http://www.babycenter.com/morning-sickness?page=2 Maria
uhg… baby center is full of pop info that aims to please everyone and anyone- not a great scientific resource….. Maria
Oh my goodness- I love Dr. Gregor and my plant based diet but I get really upset at stuff like this… 6 weeks to the day (after eating pounds of asparagus and beans) I got debilitating nausea with my second pregnancy (that PS was quelled for awhile when I ate a high calorie/ high fat meal like…. meat. Which I wouldn’t touch until I was pregnant.) For all of you watching please don’t go around promising women they will not have morning sickness if they are plant based because it’s simply not true. I think it has more to do with changes in hormones (this is all from experience totally non scientific…). I am super sensitive to changes in hormones to the point where I get extremely nauseous at milk let down when I’m nursing (even after intercourse- which is a similar hormone “rush” if I’m not mistaken). I have searched all over for information about this but I feel like all of it is anecdotal. My biggest aversions during pregnancy were to rice, oatmeal, and whole beans (smashed was fine haha)- and it sounds stupid but I hated drinking water. I simply couldn’t eat enough calories to support myself because of the nausea.
I didn’t try ginger or B6 but I just want to fix the cause of the nausea not put a bandaid on it….
As a side note I totally avoided heartburn because of the PB Diet. It was amazing!!! Had it horrible with my first but not with my second! Oil, meat, and anything processed (even a little) gave me horrible heartburn- greens and fruit rock! nire81
I’ve had three pregnancies with severe morning sickness. The first pregnancy I was a vegetarian (for over a decade) and I threw up so much I lost weight for 7 months. The second pregnancy I was still a vegetarian and was also very sick, but threw up a little less. My third pregnancy I was vegan (for two years) and I couldn’t stand up without needing to puke, and I had issues with dehydration. I was having blood work done yearly because of my Hashimoto’s, and my nutrient levels were fine. All three times the sickness lasted the entire pregnancy and went away right after delivery. Maybe meat is one cause of morning sickness, but based on my experience I think there must be other causes as well. NutritionistMia
I am 17 weeks pregnant with twins. I have suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) throughout my pregnancy and have been hospitalized due to dehydration before. I also am a primarily plant-based eater. While I think this theory could hold some merit since so many pregnant women experience aversions to meat and poultry, it really doesn’t begin to explain the range of nausea triggers for those of us with HG. For example, a simple car ride or a whiff of certain vegetables (especially ones that I used to love!) can induce excessive vomiting, and neither of these examples appear harmful for the fetuses. My point is I think this theory is a bit oversimplified and dismissive of a condition that is much more complex and mysterious than this video would suggest. Maria
YES! I think pregnant women are just so widely misunderstood. It’s not JUST what you eat (maybe a factor)- maybe it’s even stress! I wonder if those other countries that are more plant based also see pregnancy as a normal part of life (not a disease like in the US) and have families who support the pregnant women (not have demanding work days and isolation from families as a normal part of the culture- not to mention a a negative view of pregnancy and children) NutritionistMia
Agreed. Really limiting stress has been key for me, in addition to medication and monitoring by my medical team. Also in developing countries (even plant based societies in Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia), women can and do die of HG due to dehydration and inability to access health services. Removing meat from one’s diet is not a cure for severe morning sickness, the same way that meat is not the cause of morning sickness. It is much more complicated than that! Foroogh – NF Moderator
Hi, I think this is great video and we can learn a lot from it and it is a subject for further research as I can understand from reading the comments different pregnancy has different issues associated with morning sickness. Vege-tater
Interesting irony…though I never liked meat and liver gagged me, when I was pregnant I craved it nearly raw! Can make me gag now just thinking about it! I had wicked morning sickness early on and barely could hold anything down, but by the craving stage it was history. The following pregnancy was uneventful. Odd. DashnMe
Ok, this one is way off for me. I was ill enough to be hospitalized with my first pregnancy. I was kept in for 2weeks on I’ve fluids no food the entire time and when I was released, I couldn’t eat enough hamburgers to satisfy me…and I had been a vegetarian for the previous 5 or more years!! The smell of coffee or even the smell of boiling water made me ill, the taste of water, eating lettuce made me violently ill…I hated how my taste buds changed but there it is. With my second child, I was no lo get a vegetarian but felt just as sick but managed to stay out of the hospital. And for me, it was a 24/7 illness not just morning.
Lol, humans didn’t evolve. Keri Hanson
Two pregnancies, two healthy sons, no morning sickness. I was vegan prior to my first, ate some chicken and fish at my Midwife’s advice during my first pregnancy, and are no meat my second. Jen
Hello Dr. Greger – I don’t mean to be nit-picky, but its quite unclear to me (and I would guess others as well by the nature of the comments we are seeing) whether you are speaking about this subject as a hypothesis or a theory. A couple of times you stated “If this theory is true . . . “.
As a scientist, you know that a “theory” is generally regarded as accepted fact due to a plethora of information sufficient to fully support it. A “hypothesis” is still questioned as fact and is still in the “accepting information as to its validity” stage. So I’m a little unclear as to how you are representing this set of information: as hypothesis or as theory? I think it has added to some confusion in the discussions below.
My sense of it is that this is a hypothesis at this point but you are using the word “theory” loosely as many of us do. I wouldn’t make a point of it except that this is a fact-based site and we are seeing lots of diverse perspectives and some confusion. So I’m wondering if you could clarify for us. Love your work however! broccoli
This is bogus info from Dr Greger under the disguise to be against meat eaters. Morning sickness has to do with hormone imbalance in pregnant women but has nothing to do with vomiting to expel meat “poisons” from the body as a “protective mechanism”. And the saturated fat theory is even more laughable.
Even vegan pregnant women have morning sickness. | 0 |
The Washington Post is drumming up hysteria over an American labor shortage if the foreign guest worker visa is limited by the Trump Administration, despite no evidence indicating a crunch. [In a piece chronicling a worker in the U. S. on an visa, the Post pleads for the expansion of the program, with language already in a omnibus spending bill that would do the same. The visa brings more than 66, 000 foreign nationals to the U. S. for nonagricultural jobs each year. The visa impacts the and poor most in the hospitality industry, entertainment venues, retail, and restaurants. More than half a million jobs in the U. S. have been filled by visa workers in the last five years. The open borders lobby and The Washington Post piece drums on about a labor shortage if any changes are made to the visa: The country’s $25 billion dollar horse racing industry relies on a majority Hispanic immigrant workforce. Many, like Julio, are in the United States on visas, but others are here illegally, working at racetracks and barns throughout the country. But this year, fear and uncertainty have swept through the industry as the Trump administration has cracked down on immigration, increasing raids and deportations of undocumented immigrants and limiting visa programs. The policies could have a significant impact on the racing industry, and many employed in it. Without enough visas, horse trainers would face a labor shortage, which could force them to either hire more immigrants illegally or slow down their operations. Under an expansion of the visa currently included in the omnibus spending bill, the number of foreign workers entering the U. S. could increase by 20, 000. The lengthy, complicated process of the visa, which is often riddled with fraud and abuse, is good business for immigration lawyers, as The Washington Post piece gleefully notes. Claims of labor shortage are regularly pushed by the mainstream media, the open borders lobby and big business interests whose profit margins can rise from insourcing jobs. In a recent report by Breitbart Texas, American unemployment rolls and stagnant, often decreased, wages for workers in the U. S. indicate there is no such labor shortage, according to experts. “Despite such claims from industry groups — other than employer anecdotes — no credible data or labor market metrics have been presented by groups or organizations — let alone by disinterested academics — proving the existence of labor shortages in occupations that could justify a large expansion of the program,” the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) wrote in a recent analysis report. There are 1. 37 million “missing workers” in the American labor force between the ages of 45 and . These individuals are not included in the monthly unemployment rate, but if they were, the unemployment rate would be 5. 3 percent, according to EPI. John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 1 |
A ten-person federal jury has found that Rolling Stone journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely defamed University of Virginia dean Nicole Eramo with actual malice over a fraudulent college rape story. Rolling Stone and its parent company Wenner Media were also found to have defamed Eramo, who is seeking $7.5 million in damages, but to a lesser extent than the writer herself. Rubin Erdely’s piece conveyed that Eramo was indifferent and even callous towards the accuser, Jackie Coakley , in addition to discouraging her from reporting the “crime.” And so continues coverage of the rape hoax of the decade.
The controversy, which began with the publication of Rubin Erdely’s story in 2014, centered on a now debunked fraternity gang rape alleged by fabulist Coakley . Well before this week’s court decision, Rubin Erdely admitted to not bothering to contact the male UVA students accused of the act. These young men, via their Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, are suing separately for $25 million , a surprisingly low figure which makes Eramo’s claim look comparatively astronomical.
Sabrina Rubin Erdely, far left, arrives for court. Pictured on the right is the Deputy Managing Editor of Rolling Stone, Sean Woods, instrumental in the bogus story’s publication and who defended it later.
Because of Coakley’s limited financial position, and the respect even outed sexual assault frauds are given, Eramo is legally pursuing only Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone , and Wenner Media for the $7.5 million. Nevertheless, Eramo’s attempts to portray herself as a victim are troubling. She was, after all, UVA’s go-to college administrator for handling “sexual violence” cases, a euphemism for the organizer of what are basically kangaroo courts.
Aside from Eramo, UVA President Teresa Sullivan’s actions were appalling. Giving basic credence to Jackie’s allegations, Sullivan suspended all Greek Life activities at the University of Virginia as publicity about the accusations grew. This only increased the suffering of the falsely maligned fraternity members, plus gave ammunition to the “rape culture” activists who ridiculously represent every young male on campus as a potential sexual abuser of women.
The true victims are the falsely accused young men, not Nicole Eramo Nicole Eramo is a “victim” of the same system she helps to prop up and defend: “rape culture.”
Nicole Eramo may have been defamed, but she was also intricately involved in a UVA system that does not afford young men even the most basic procedural rights. Whilst we should be happy that she did not rush into supporting Jackie Coakley’s lies to the extent of trying to eschew police involvement, we are still not dealing with either an admirable or upstanding individual.
After extensive research, I am yet to find instances of Eramo challenging the shameful treatment of college students accused of sexual assault, whether in specific instances or more broadly. She is neither a defender of these young men nor some kind of principled whistleblower. The only “positive” thing that can be generally said of her is that she is somewhat less prone to typical knee-jerk SJW reactions, i.e. she did try to get Jackie to talk to the police.
Again, Jackie Coakley has escaped any punishment Stupid does not even begin to describe the man who decided to marry rape hoaxer Jackie Coakley. Thanks to Chuck Johnson and www.gotnews.com for their work in outing Coakley as a fabulist and sociopath.
Jackie Coakley is the sociopathic architect of this whole mess. Notwithstanding that Rubin Erdely and others would have gleefully found another poster girl from somewhere else in America, the degree of malice and calculation in Coakley’s actions is the worst I have seen. Even the very terrible Crystal Mangum , the black stripper who is now serving a long sentence for homicide (not false rape allegations), made her bogus accusations of racism and being gang raped much more opportunistically, after Duke lacrosse players declined her services as a stripper. Coakley’s misdeeds, however, inhabit a world of their own.
Because women like Jackie Coakley, obsessed as they are with fantasy worlds and self-victimization, have next to no money to go after in defamation suits, they need to be charged and prosecuted for crimes such as public mischief. It obviously would be better if they were charged with making a false rape claim, yet Coakley had enough self-preserving foresight to avoid talking to the police. Consequently, the system usually gives next to no remedies for discouraging outright lies about rape. To boot, The Washington Post may have savaged Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone , but it still refuses to publish Jackie Coakley’s full name, despite all the evidence completely disproving the rape accusations.
If Nicole Eramo gets $7.5 million, the accused male UVA students deserve $7.5+ billion Attention-seeker Emily Renda. She used Jackie Coakley’s lies to promote an agenda, not seek redress for a “victim.”
Determination of damages in the Nicole Eramo case is yet to take place and the $7.5 million claim may just have been posturing by her legal team, a high watermark figure designed to secure a smaller but nonetheless very tidy sum. At a minimum, the accused UVA students deserve 100 times more than whatever Eramo gets. Of course, Wenner Media’s coffers are nowhere near that big, but the principle remains. Compared to the mauled reputations of the witch-hunted fraternity members, Eramo suffered a slight pinprick from a broken system she has otherwise staked her career on supporting and expanding.
Other villains in this saga also need to be held to account. Chief among them is Emily Renda , a sociology major at UVA who is now completing a law degree at UC Berkeley. A “rape culture” extremist, she acted as the conduit between Coakley and Rubin Erdely. As Chuck Johnson and Got News have already demonstrated, Renda’s own “rape survivor” story has changed . Biased “journalists” such as Anna Merlan , formerly of Jezebel , additionally promoted the UVA hoax and were greatly upset when the gang rape was found not to have taken place. So many supporting actors created this mess.
Let’s hope that the heavy legal blows against Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone , and, obliquely, Jackie Coakley’s lies continue with the UVA fraternity defamation suit. Only significant financial and legal hardship, not the pangs of conscience, will stop SJWs and their enablers from attempting to ruin the lives of innocent men.
Read More: Why Hasn’t Jackie Coakley Been Punished For Starting The Biggest Rape Hoax Of The Decade?
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Obama not ruling out Clinton pardon Will Clinton go free after White House pardon? By Shepard Ambellas - November 9, 2016 WASHINGTON D.C. ( INTELLIHUB ) — The pardoning of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is not out of the question, sources say.
This comes after heaping mounds of evidence of criminal wrongdoing have been publicly released via the Wikileaks platform over the past weeks leading up to Election Night.
Hillary Clinton and her foundation are under active federal investigation at this time, but as of yet no charges have been made after the Director of the FBI James Comey has cleared Hillary twice publicly. Shepard Ambellas is an opinion journalist, filmmaker , radio talk show host and the founder and editor-in-chief of Intellihub News & Politics. Established in 2013, Intellihub.com is ranked in the upper 1% traffic tier on the World Wide Web. Read more from Shep’s World . Get the Podcast . Follow Shep on Facebook and Twitter . Featured Image: WhiteHouse.gov/Pete Souza | 0 |
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The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine are assigned by Congress to provide policy guidance to the government. The group describes itself as “advisers to the nation. ” The advice often comes through written reports from scientific committees organized by the group. One of those committees, though, is facing questions about how its members were selected. The concerns focus on a panel studying biotechnology, a booming area of business, including in the food industry, and one of the most contentious scientific issues in Washington. Critics say that several committee members have financial ties to biotech businesses that could color the panel’s report, expected to be published soon, potentially giving short shrift to health and environmental worries. By the academies’ own account, two of the scientists already violate the group’s extensive policy. In addition, an employee at the academies who helped pick the scientists to serve on the panel was pursuing a different job while he put together his recommendations for the group. Three of the 13 people he recommended — all of whom were eventually selected for the panel — were board members at his new employer, a new biotechnology nonprofit. The criticism adds to the heated debate about how federal regulators are handling the fast development of biotechnology. The National Academies play an outsize role in the debate because of their stature in the academic community and connections to the federal government. A separate study the organization did on genetic engineering in agriculture, published in May, also came under intense criticism from environmentalists. The National Academies have defended the panel that produced the May report, as well as the current panel on biotechnology, saying that the type of expertise needed to staff them is limited and thus some conflict must be tolerated. But people with ties to the academies say any perceived conflicts of interest may undermine some of the group’s authority. “There’s often a lot riding on what the academies say, and so their ability to act with objectivity and independence defines any value they have,” said Dr. Harvey Fineberg, a former leader of what is now the medical division of the National Academies. The most recent committee convened to study biotechnology was formed this year at the behest of the White House. The group was asked to predict what new technologies might arise over the next 15 years and advise the government on how to oversee them. The regulation for the industry was last updated in 1992, years before the first approval of genetically engineered seeds, which are now widely used by farmers. Like the 200 or so other reports published by the National Academies each year, the biotechnology report is undergoing peer review, the process regularly used by academic journals. The report could have broad implications for the industry. Big food companies like and Archer Daniels Midland, for instance, have invested in synthetic biology, a term used for the more sophisticated genetic engineering now coming into use that was the panel’s area of study. Food companies are exploring its use in creating flavorings and sweeteners. When the National Academies announced the committee this year, they disclosed that two of the group’s 13 scientists had ties to the biotech industry that violated the organization’s policy. Such disclosures are rare for the academies, said William Kearney, a spokesman for the organization, but scientists with conflicts are sometimes allowed to work on a committee when the academies think the scientist has a specialty or knowledge that cannot be found elsewhere. Mr. Kearney would not, however, provide data on how frequently the academies have to disclose such conflicts, saying only that they are “rare. ” The two scientists with conflicts are Dr. Steven Evans, a scientist at Dow AgroSciences, a major biotechnology company, and Jeffrey Wolt, a professor at Iowa State University, who the academies said has investments in a company that could benefit from the study’s results. The academies noted their conflicts when the panel members were announced. Dr. Evans and Professor Wolt referred questions about their role to Mr. Kearney. Mr. Kearney said the disclosed conflicts of interest were discovered during the usual vetting of panel members by the academies. The academies kept the scientists on the panel, he said, because they could not find anyone with the same expertise. But more than three dozen environmental and health advocates argue that the National Academies also allowed several other scientists with potential financial conflicts onto the panel without any disclosures. “Several members of this committee stand to benefit directly or indirectly from the rules and regulations their recommendations will help shape,” said Tim Schwab, a food researcher at Food Water Watch, an advocacy group leading the group of critics. “Nor does the committee include anyone who might advocate a more judicious approach to regulating the industry. ” The group made note of Farren Isaacs, an assistant professor at Yale. Professor Isaacs is a founder of enEvolv, a that engineers tiny organisms “to produce chemicals. ” DuPont, which has major investments in biotech, has funded Dr. Isaacs’s research, and he holds two patents that could be used in synthetic biology. Professor Isaacs referred questions to Mr. Kearney. Mr. Kearney said all conflicts that violate the academies’ policy had been disclosed when the panel was announced. Professor Isaacs, he said, did not have a conflict that required disclosure because his company’s technologies are not now being used in biotech. “The term ‘conflict of interest’ applies only to current interests, not prospective ones,” Mr. Kearney said. He said the same about similar questions raised about other members of the committee by the group of critics. (One panel member resigned: Richard Johnson, a former partner at Arnold Porter, a law firm that counts many biotech companies as clients. Mr. Kearney attributed the decision to scheduling conflicts.) The job of finding the scientists to fill the 13 open spots on the biotech committee largely fell to Douglas Friedman, the “responsible staff officer,” or study director. Such employees help the academies identify scientists to serve on a study’s panel, set the agenda for their meetings and oversee the production of the final report, among other tasks. But while Mr. Friedman, who has degrees in chemistry and chemical biology, was putting together his recommendations, he was also applying for a leadership job in the biotech world. In January, Mr. Friedman widely distributed an email seeking nominations for the panel. The email was one of many digital records about Mr. Friedman and the panel that were discovered by Food Water Watch. The group found the records, including the emails and spreadsheets, through Google searches of the panel’s members and shared them with The New York Times, which repeated the search and also found the documents. The records have since been removed from the websites where they had been cached. One recipient of the email was the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering and advancing synthetic biology research. According to the digital records discovered online, Mr. Friedman was firmly on the nonprofit’s radar as a possible leader by the time he began his search for members for the National Academies panel. Ginni Ursin, a Monsanto executive on the nonprofit’s board, commented on a spreadsheet dated December 2015 that Mr. Friedman was the “top candidate by a decent margin. ” The 13 scientists Mr. Friedman recommended to his superiors at the National Academies — including three members of the nonprofit’s board — were all ultimately approved, he said. The panel was appointed in April, and in July, Mr. Friedman started as the new executive director of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium. In a phone interview, he said that he pursued the new job while helping to put the panel together but did not see any reason to tell the academies about the job search. He said he was only one of many layers in the process of appointing members to the biotech panel. And he said it was a coincidence that so many committee members also have roles at the nonprofit. “It’s a relatively small community of people involved in the biotech space,” he said. But Mr. Kearney of the National Academies said Mr. Friedman should not have played the role he did in the selection of the committee in the midst of a job search he did not disclose. The National Academies, he said, are reviewing the selection process, including the oversight of the staff members who oversee it. “No staff member,” he said, “should be participating in the appointment of a committee with members who are also on the board of an organization with which he or she is negotiating employment. ” | 1 |
No one has passed for more yardage or more touchdowns in a Dallas Cowboys uniform than Tony Romo. Not Troy Aikman, Roger Staubach, Danny White or Don Meredith. But Romo has apparently completed his last pass for the team. After losing his starting job last season, he is retiring as a player to become the lead football analyst for CBS Sports, replacing Phil Simms. CBS announced the hiring on Tuesday and said that Romo would join the man Jim Nantz and the sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson on the lead announcing team. “We know Tony will quickly develop into a terrific analyst,” the news release said. On Tuesday afternoon, Romo posted on Twitter a photograph of himself in a CBS blazer with the message, “I guess it’s time to start dressing up. ” CBS’s announcement acknowledged Simms, who has been its lead N. F. L. analyst for 20 years. “We are discussing with Phil his future role with CBS Sports,” it said. Romo played for the Cowboys for 13 seasons and compiled a record as a starter, but, unlike Aikman and Staubach, he never won a Super Bowl. In fact, he was never on a team that produced a decent playoff run, going in his career. As a result, he will probably always sit just below the top quarterbacks in the Cowboys pantheon. But playoff failures are not the reason the Cowboys cut him. They had plenty of other reasons. Chief among them was the emergence of Dak Prescott, the rookie who stepped in last season when Romo was injured and put up huge numbers for the Cowboys. Romo will be 37 at the start of next season, and he has struggled to stay on the field of late, managing only four games in 2015 and only four passes in 2016. After missing the first 10 weeks of last season with a back injury, he returned, but Prescott had been so impressive that Romo did not get his job back. Nonetheless, there were some suitors who had hoped to get something out of Romo’s twilight years. Romo was a Pro Bowl selection and could have provided veteran leadership to a young team or been the final piece of the puzzle for a team close to the top prize. Most of the speculation recently centered on the Broncos and the Texans. Denver, which struggled with Trevor Siemian last season, and Houston, whose signing of Brock Osweiler was a bust, will now have to look elsewhere. Still, Romo has been good enough recently enough that some wondered if he would return, if the offer was right. Starting quarterbacks get injured, and teams have been known to have midseason quarterback crises. Veteran players are also known to have second thoughts about retirement — ask Brett Favre. Romo has certainly been the most player in this linked with a dozen or more teams at one time or another. The Browns, the Redskins, the Chiefs, the Jets and the 49ers were all linked with him. It seemed likely that there would be a job for him somewhere. Instead, he retires ranked 21st in career passing touchdowns, with 248, sandwiched between the standouts Drew Bledsoe and Boomer Esiason. But like them, he will be remembered for never winning a Super Bowl as a starter. Romo played college football at Eastern Illinois. In a year in which quarterbacks Carson Palmer, Byron Leftwich, Kyle Boller and Rex Grossman were all taken in the first round of the draft, Romo was bypassed by every team through all seven rounds in 2003. The Cowboys signed him to a contract, and he sat on the bench for three years behind Quincy Carter, Vinny Testaverde and Drew Bledsoe before finally taking over as starter in 2006. His elevation led to a reversal of fortune for the Cowboys. They had made the playoffs just once in the previous six seasons. Under Romo, they made it in three of four years, including in and seasons. But they won just one playoff game. After a fallow period, Romo had a last hurrah in 2014, making the Pro Bowl and leading the Cowboys to a record. But the team tripped up in the playoffs again, losing to the Packers in the divisional round. | 1 |
President Donald Trump has instructed the State Department to slash its $10 billion budget for funding United Nations programs by as much as 50 percent, Foreign Policy is reporting. [The article said the move is “signaling an unprecedented retreat by [the] administration from international operations that keep the peace, provide vaccines for children, monitor rogue nuclear weapons programs, and promote peace talks from Syria to Yemen. ” FP used three unnamed sources for its report, which also called Trump’s directive “draconian measures” taken ahead of the planned release on Thursday of his 2018 federal budget proposal. The budget “is expected to include cuts of up to 37 percent for spending on the State Department, the U. S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other foreign assistance programs, including the U. N. in next year’s budget,” according to the report, which went on: It remains unclear whether the full extent of the steeper U. N. cuts will be reflected in the 2018 budget, which will be prepared by the White House Office of Management and Budget, or whether, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has proposed, the cuts would be phased in over the coming three years. One official close to the Trump administration said Tillerson has been given flexibility to decide how the cuts would be distributed. Richard Gowan, a U. N. expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told FP these budget cuts would create “chaos. ” The U. N. refugee agency (UNHCR) for example, received nearly 40 percent of its budget from the United States in 2016. Cutting the U. S. contribution would “leave a gaping hole that other big donors would struggle to fill,” according to Gowan. The FP cites Trump’s intention to cut diplomacy and foreign assistance programs will help him increase the funding for the U. S. military by $54 billion, a “shift” from the Obama administration’s approach to the federal budget. “State Department officials, for instance, were told that they should try to identify up to $1 billion in cuts in the U. N. peacekeeping budget, according to one source,” FP reported. “The United States provides about $2. 5 billion per year to fund peacekeepers. ” Nikki Haley, the U. S. ambassador to the United Nations, cautioned against “ cuts” during her Senate confirmation hearing but is said to be reviewing the U. N.’s 16 peacekeeping missions for possible cuts. The United States pays over 22 percent of the U. N.’s $2. 5 billion yearly administrative budget, including money “to battle climate change. ” FP reported that “U. N. diplomats and foreign dignitaries say they expect the United States to seek to eliminate funding for some agencies unpopular with conservatives — including the U. N. Population Fund, which receives about $35 million a year from the United States for family planning programs, and the U. N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. ” Also, “the U. N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which provides aid to Palestinian refugees, has long been the target of Israeli and congressional criticism on the grounds that it has a bias. According to the FP report: But one diplomat said UNRWA might be spared because it relieves Israel of the obligation to care for some Palestinians and because Israel sees the program as ultimately promoting stability. The United States has broad discretion to cut voluntary funds to humanitarian agencies, including the World Food Programme and UNICEF. But those programs are popular among Democrats and Republicans, and any move to slash funding could undermine Washington’s case for leading those agencies. In the early days of his administration, Trump reinstated the “Mexico City Policy,” a policy first instituted by President Ronald Reagan and continued by Republican presidents since. The policy prohibits funding international NGOs and other entities that provide or promote abortion around the globe. “Anticipating cuts to family planning programs, Dutch Development Minister Lilianne Ploumen recently established a fund to solicit contributions to institutions that have faced a cutoff of U. S. assistance because they perform abortions,” FP reported. FP also reported that if the U. S. “fails to honor its funding commitments to the U. N.’s regular budget, which is obligatory, it could lose its voting rights in the General Assembly. ” | 1 |
The parents of Kathryn Steinle have received the to sue the federal government over Kathryn’s July 2o15 death she was killed by an illegal alien holding a gun issued to a federal agent. [U. S. Magistrate Joseph Spero said Steinle’s parents can sue but stressed that the suit may be dismissed if there is no evidence that the illegal alien — Juan Francisco — stole the gun from a federal agent. The gun in question came from the car of a federal agent — a car from which the gun was stolen. On August 28, 2015, Breitbart News previously reported that the . 40 caliber round that killed Steinle was fired from a Sig Sauer handgun that had been stolen from a Bureau of Land Management agent. However, it appears the case will turn on whether stole the gun himself. On July 7, 2015, told he shot Steinle, but he said it was an accident. He said he found the gun “lying on the ground wrapped in a ” and that it “went off by accident when he picked it up. ” But the San Francisco Chronicle reports that Spero said the Steinle family “can sue the federal government for negligence because a ranger allegedly left the gun used in the shooting in his unlocked car. ” He added, “Leaving a gun loaded makes (its) capability for harm readily accessible in the same way as leaving the key in the ignition of a vehicle. ” Spero dismissed Steinle’s parent’s suit against the City of San Francisco, even as he gave the for the suit against the federal government. He “rejected [her parent’s] claims that the city was legally responsible for releasing without contacting the federal government and that federal immigration officials, who had known the city was holding him, had a duty to pick him up and deport him. ” AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com. | 1 |
The Washington Post reports that James T. Hodgkinson, the suspect in the Alexandria shooting that wounded Rep. Steve Scalise ( ) and three others at a Republican baseball practice Wednesday morning campaigned for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential election. [The Post and other outlets have identified the suspect as James T. Hodgkinson, a man from Belleville, IL who reportedly owns a home inspections business. The Post‘s Robert Costa interviewed a man who says that he and Hodgkinson campaigned for Sanders in Iowa: Charles Orear, 50, a restaurant manager from St. Louis, said in an interview Wednesday that he became friendly with James T. Hodgkinson, whom law enforcement officials identified as the shooter, during their work in Iowa on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Orear said Hodgkinson was a passionate progressive and showed no signs of violence or malice toward others. CNN also reported that law enforcement authorities are searching through the suspect’s social media postings, which included “ rhetoric. ” JUST IN: Virginia shooter’s social media includes postings https: . https: . — CNN (@CNN) June 14, 2017, Rep. Ron DeSantis ( ) told MSNBC late Wednesday morning that the profile photo on the suspect’s alleged Twitter account matched the man he saw in the parking lot outside the baseball game, and who asked him whether those playing were Republicans or Democrats. There are two Facebook accounts reported for the suspect. Hodgkinson’s apparent cited, by the Smoking Gun website, has biographical details that match the description of the suspect, and is devoted to Sanders. The profile photo touts “democratic socialism,” and the cover photo is an image of a smiling Sen. Sanders. One of the Facebook posts at that page also links to a Change. org petition calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump for treason. The owner of the page added above the link: “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump Co. ” A second Facebook account, confirmed by the local Belleville in Hodgkinson’s former hometown, includes similar content. A Twitter account — whose profile also matches the description of the suspect — only had a handful of tweets and 86 followers as of this writing, one of which replied to a tweet by Sanders: @SenSanders I don’t see the need for the word Sorry. This shit sould have stopped when it started, years ago. — James Hodgkinson (@JTHInspections) April 6, 2014, Hodgkinson had reportedly moved to Alexandria recently. Authorities have not yet confirmed a motive for the shooting. Sen. Sanders issued a statement Wednesday morning: “Our prayers go out for a full recovery of Rep. Scalise, the congressional aides and police officers who were injured. We’ve got to stop the violence. ” Update: Sanders made an additional statement from the floor of the Senate, acknowledging that the shooter was a former campaign volunteer, and declaring that he was “sickened by this despicable act. ” Sanders aides won’t let reporters question him, hand out statement he will deliver on the floor pic. twitter. — Burgess Everett (@burgessev) June 14, 2017, Joel B. Pollak is Senior at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak. This post has been updated. | 1 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. Minnesota’s governor called for a federal investigation into the police shooting of a black man, Philando Castile, during a traffic stop. Mr. Castile’s girlfriend, above, streamed the aftermath live on Facebook, immersing viewers in the grisly scene, below. It has been replayed more than four million times. With a composure periodically fractured by wailing, she described an officer shooting at least four times after Mr. Castile began complying with a request to produce his registration — and alerted the officer that he had a licensed gun. An emotional President Obama said “all Americans should be troubled” by the shootings caught on video this week in Minnesota and Louisiana. _____ 2. A House panel questioned the F. B. I. director, James Comey, for nearly four hours about the bureau’s decision not to recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton. Under strong Republican pressure, Mr. Comey reiterated that while Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal email network as secretary of state showed “great carelessness,” it did not meet the bar for criminality. But he also said a series of her statements were untrue. Those included her assertions that none of the emails were marked classified and that she had turned over all emails. _____ 3. Donald Trump held a series of meetings with congressional Republicans that turned rocky. A spokesman for Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska said the meeting had not persuaded him to endorse Mr. Trump, calling the election “a Dumpster fire. ” Mr. Trump also raised a new wave of anxiety about his motives and temperament, hedging when asked about speculation that he might win the presidency but decline to serve. “I’ll let you know how I feel about it after it happens,” he told our reporter. _____ 4. Democrats are seeking to leverage Mr. Trump’s unpopularity among broad sectors of voters in other November elections. They plan to spend $1 million on ads painting the Republican Party as one with Mr. Trump. And several Democrats said Bernie Sanders would endorse Mrs. Clinton next week. _____ 5. Good news for the : Researchers found that riding an electric bike — one that supplements rather than replaces the rider’s effort — can still provide a workout comparable to brisk walking or an easy jog. And the 20 subjects reported that their rides were “a blast,” the study’s lead author said. _____ 6. Germany took a significant step on women’s rights. German lawmakers unanimously passed a law that makes it easier to prosecute violence against women. It defines rape as a violation of a woman’s will, affirming that “no means no. ” The measure includes a provision for abuses in crowds, which was added after reports of widespread sexual assault in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Above, a protest over those assaults in January. _____ 7. One of our stories today is an essay by a former hedge fund trader on the damage done by pervasive, sexist “bro talk” in the financial world. comments about women’s bodies and sexual appeal, he writes, produce “a force field of disrespect and exclusion that makes it incredibly difficult for women to ascend the Wall Street ladder. ” _____ 8. Opening this weekend: “The Secret Life of Pets,” an animated, frolic voiced by the likes of Louis C. K. Hannibal Buress, Jenny Slate, Kevin Hart and Ellie Kemper. Our reviewer writes, “While this movie never achieves — and does not really aim for — the emotional richness or visual inventiveness of the better Pixar features, or the sly social consciousness of ‘Zootopia,’ it has a playful absurdity and a winning, friendly spirit. ” _____ 9. “The lake was our mother and our father. Without this lake, where do we go?” Our special report on the evaporation of Bolivia’s lake, Poopó, tracks the plight of indigenous people robbed of their way of life by climate change. The lake, after suffering decades of water diversions and El Niño droughts, basically disappeared in December, making climate refugees of those who once lived by its waters. _____ 10. President Obama left for Poland, where he will attend his final NATO summit meeting. The agenda promises to be crammed, given the need to address Russia’s provocative policies in Eastern Europe, the Continent’s migrant crisis, fears of more terrorism and, not least, the disruption of Britain’s vote to exit the European Union. _____ Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a. m. Sundays. Want to look back? Here’s last night’s briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
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Donald Trump’s campaign has ended fundraising events meant to support the Republican Party’s get-out-the-vote efforts in next month’s elections.
Aides to the Republican nominee told Fox News that Trump Victory, the joint fundraising committee for the GOP and the campaign, held its most recent fundraiser on Oct. 19 and no more such events were scheduled.
The move, which was first reported by The Washington Post, cuts off a key money source for Republicans hoping to keep hold of both houses of Congress.
“We’ve kind of wound down,” Trump national finance chairman Steven Mnuchin told the Post. “But the online fundraising continues to be strong.”
By contrast, the Post reported that Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign has scheduled 41 fundraising events between now and Nov. 4. The former secretary of state was scheduled to make her last personal fundraising appearance Tuesday in Miami.
Mnuchin told the paper that the real estate mogul was focusing on making his final pitch to the voters at a campaign events rather than raising money in the final two weeks of the race.
“We have minimized his fundraising schedule over the last month to emphasize his focus on political [events],” Mnuchin said of the candidate. “Unlike Hillary, who has been fundraising and not out and about, he has constantly been out and about.”
According to the Post, the Republican National Committee had collected $40 million through Trump Victory as of Sept. 30.
RNC spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said the organization “[continues] to fundraise for the entire GOP ticket.”
Meanwhile, Politico reported Tuesday that the Senate Leadership Fund, a Super PAC with ties to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was putting $25 million into seven Senate races deemed crucial in determining the balance of power on Capitol hill. | 0 |
FBI Wiretapped Corruption Suspect Discussing Clinton Deals November 3, 2016 Daniel Greenfield
If you're wondering why Team Hillary panicked and unleashed hell on the FBI, this may be another ingredient in the stew. The Wall Street Journal article is clearly trying to spin things to the left and damage the credibility of the FBI, but it's an interesting data point .
The FBI had secretly recorded conversations of a suspect in a public-corruption case talking about alleged deals the Clintons made, these people said. The agents listening to the recordings couldn’t tell from the conversations if what the suspect was describing was accurate, but it was, they thought, worth checking out.
Prosecutors thought the talk was hearsay and a weak basis to warrant aggressive tactics, like presenting evidence to a grand jury, because the person who was secretly recorded wasn’t inside the Clinton Foundation.
FBI investigators grew increasingly frustrated with resistance from the corruption prosecutors, and some executives at the bureau itself, to keep pursuing the case.
As prosecutors rebuffed their requests to proceed more overtly, those Justice Department officials became more annoyed that the investigators didn’t seem to understand or care about the instructions issued by their own bosses and prosecutors to act discreetly.
In short, FBI people had material for a case that the government didn't want brought because Team Obama were Hillary backers and the senior leadership in the DOJ saw their careers linked to the rise of Hillary. And so a stand down order was handed down.
Following the February meeting, officials at Justice Department headquarters sent a message to all the offices involved to “stand down,’’ a person familiar with the matter said.
This is what happens when the DOJ has been so thoroughly corrupted from the top down.
Meanwhile there's little doubt, considering what we already know, that the DOJ people had been updating Hillary's people on the FBI investigation. Should those emails come out, they will be some of the most damning of all. And so Hillary's people panicked and decided to pull the trigger. | 0 |
Associated Press
Excerpts:
A St. Louis jury on Thursday awarded a California woman more than $70 million in her lawsuit alleging that years of using Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder caused her cancer, the latest case raising concerns about the health ramifications of extended talcum powder use.
The jury ruling ended the trial that began Sept. 26 in the case brought by Deborah Giannecchini of Modesto. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2012. The suit accused Johnson & Johnson of “negligent conduct” in making and marketing its baby powder.
“We are pleased the jury did the right thing. They once again reaffirmed the need for Johnson & Johnson to warn the public of the ovarian cancer risk associated with its product,” Jim Onder, an attorney for the plaintiff, told The Associated Press. | 0 |
This recap discusses events in detail from the first two episodes of Netflix’s “The Crown. ” As we saw from the success of “Downton Abbey,” the reassuring rigidities of the British class system can do wonders for angsty Americans. If you’re grossed out by the utter charmlessness and moral squalor of a year’s worth of debased political a perfect antidote is “The Crown,” Netflix’s compulsively watchable dramatization of the life of Queen Elizabeth II, served up on a silver platter by dramatist Peter Morgan (“The Queen”) and the director and producer Stephen Daldry (“The Audience”). Instead of sitting with an ice pack on your head and listening to John King yakking on CNN about red and blue paths to victory, revel in John Lithgow’s droll old war horse, Winston Churchill, as he makes his imperial progress up the aisle at Westminster Abbey. Notice how augustly the patriotic hero takes his seat in a pew next to his sanely amused, wife, Clemmie, at the wedding of the young Princess Elizabeth to Lt. Philip Mountbatten of the Royal Navy, formerly the Prince of Greece and Denmark and newly the Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich of Greenwich. Instead of ranting about the leaking and the belching and defaming of email leaks and social media, experience the private courage — the crushing, unexpressed pain — of the King George VI, played with quiet depth and range by Jared Harris (best known as the tormented Lane Pryce in “Mad Men”). Shudder as he begins to realize that his cough is a death sentence hidden from him by his own doctors and struggles with what that will mean for the British constitution and his own beloved family. The marvel of both Mr. Harris’s performance and Mr. Morgan’s versatile script is how much unspoken emotion is communicated to the audience. One of the most memorable scenes from the opening episodes is the king’s private conversation on a excursion at Sandringham, the royals’ Norfolk estate, with his young Prince Philip. Without ever hinting that his own health is failing, the king tries to explain to Philip in the gathering mist the burden of duty that awaits him now that he is married to the young woman who will be queen. “She is the job,” he tells a quizzical Philip with the intensity of impending death. “Loving her. Protecting her. ” And her — Her Royal Highness — is the most refreshing moral counterpoint of all. Claire Foy’s young Elizabeth is luminously ordinary. In the first two episodes, Mr. Daldry achieves something unusual: He tells the story of Elizabeth II through the prism of being unprepared. Her character is formed by being forced to rise to an occasion. We see hints of her grounded certainties in her instant attraction to Philip. She wants this dazzlingly alpha young naval officer, who mocks the pomp of royal ceremony while always knowing how to observe it. No amount of family disapproval deters her. When the king, knowing he is too sick to undertake a monthslong commonwealth tour, asks her if she, a young mother of two, will take his place, she unhesitatingly agrees, despite Philip’s resistance to abandoning his own promising naval career. And what about the children? “They’re too young to notice,” she says firmly, a line that signifies her first acceptance of a lifetime’s distancing between her own desires and the needs of her country, along with the collateral damage that will inevitably follow. (I think of the famously poignant moment when the Prince Charles greeted his mother after a absence on a royal tour in 1953, not with a hug but a grave, extended handshake.) As Philip, Matt Smith (an erstwhile Doctor of “Doctor Who”) has great chemistry with Ms. Foy’s Elizabeth. He has just the right combination of rippling impatience and dangerous, masculine for a consort whose loyalty is laced with a sometimes heedless power to cause her pain. The real triumph of the first two episodes of “The Crown” is the unerring emotional focus of Mr. Daldry, the director. He finds the heart in every scene and takes us into the interior world of people so famous and so familiar they have drained into stereotypes and gesture. He makes us care so much I winced every time the king dragged deeply on one of the lethal cigarettes to which he was addicted. In short, he discovers the royal family’s humanity. Anyone who has seen Mr. Daldry’s theatrical tour de force “Billy Elliot” or his flying fleet of Mary Poppinses at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics might expect the visual audacity he brings to his stage productions. And “The Crown” has plenty of that, from the jarring opening image of a toilet bowl flushing blood from the king’s diseased lungs to the soaring, saturated scenes in Westminster Abbey as the packed congregation sings “I Vow to Thee My Country” over a thundering organ. (Netflix’s budget is, as they say, all up on the screen.) But Sam Spiegel once told me that the biggest challenge in making “Lawrence of Arabia” was “to not let the sand overwhelm the movie. ” Mr. Daldry could have let pageantry overwhelm “The Crown,” or allowed it to slide into costume drama. He avoids the sentimental clichés. When the young queen, far away with Philip in Kenya on the royal tour at the idyllic wildlife retreat Treetops, is brought the news that the king has died, Mr. Daldry does not give us her reaction. We see her as her aides would — at a distance, held in Philip’s embrace on the lawn. Nor do we see the grief of the dead king’s wife, suddenly the queen mother. Instead Mr. Daldry shows a household suddenly in motion as the news sweeps through Sandringham — first the shock, then the running, running through the corridors, the queen mother still in her nightdress, everyone running toward the death chamber except the queen’s younger sister, Princess Margaret, who stands in a stricken eddy of silence, her grief : not only for the loss of her father, the king, but for fear she will also have to say goodbye to his closest aide, the married group captain Peter Townsend, with whom she has fallen hopelessly in love. It’s fair to say that, so far at least, “The Crown” is not a work of political or social history. It’s family history, and it’s a love story — more precisely, a series of overlapping love stories: between a father and a daughter, between a princess headed for greatness and her dashing prince, between another princess headed for heartbreak and her forbidden swain, and between a royal household and an adoring public. It shows us that public as the royals see it — again distantly, from palace balconies or through the windows of limousines and planes and luxuriously outfitted steam trains rushing through the peaceful beauty of the British countryside. Beyond the manicured gardens and immaculate driveways that surround the royals, and as invisible to us as it was to them, is a postwar Britain of drab, streets and pale, exhausted Londoners clutching their ration books. If all goes as intended, these two enthralling episodes will be the opening chapters of an epic that promises to occupy viewers into the 2020s. “The Crown” has already been approved for two seasons of 10 episodes each. The plan is for each season to cover a decade in the life of the queen and her realm, with casts that change as the central characters age. My hope is that the show’s canvas will open up and out into the world as Elizabeth’s emerging composure and moral clarity are tested by family and country into the 1960s and beyond, right through what is now the seventh decade of an extraordinary and still vibrant reign. | 1 |
Beyoncé has canceled her scheduled headlining appearance at the Coachella music festival this year after her doctor advised her to maintain a less strenuous schedule while she is pregnant with twins. [In a statement, festival organizer Goldenvoice said the singer would not be able to perform in Indio on April 15 and April 22 as planned, but would instead headline Coachella in 2018. “Following the advice of her doctors to keep a less rigorous schedule in the coming months, Beyoncé has made the decision to forgo performing at the 2017 Coachella Valley Music Arts Festival,” the organizer said in a statement. “However, Goldenvoice and Parkwood are pleased to confirm that she will be a headliner at the 2018 festival. Thank you for your understanding. Stay tuned for more information. ” Coachella organizers had hoped that Beyoncé’s performance at the Grammy Awards this month was a sign that she would be able to take the stage at the Southern California festival in April. The singer’s fans took to social media Thursday afternoon to express their disappointment, with many saying they would request refunds from the festival or else sell their tickets to interested buyers. I literally only bought a Coachella ticket for Beyoncé. This is stupid. Who wants my ticket?! — Amanda Castillo (@ACastillo121) February 23, 2017, I was only gonna go to @coachella for @Beyonce so guess I’m not going anymore🙃 — R O G Ξ L I O (@ItzMe_Roger) February 23, 2017, If Beyoncé getting pregnant not preforming at Coachella (I got my tix in May) isn’t the epitome of my luck this past year then idk what is, — Megan (@meganelizax) February 23, 2017, Makes sense why so many people are selling their Coachella tickets now … — ♔ shana (@lalashana) February 23, 2017, Coachella will still go on as planned over two weekends in April. The festival’s other headliners include Kendrick Lamar and Radiohead, while other artists set to perform include Bon Iver, Lorde, Future, Justice, The xx and DJ Khaled. The festival did not immediately announce a replacement headliner. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
2K Games won a case about its right to store and distribute the biometric data it collects from face scans in its games. [When you use your console’s camera to scan your face into one of 2K’s sports titles to create custom players with your likeness, that information is uploaded and stored on 2K Games’ servers. According to the terms of service you almost certainly didn’t read, that means you’ve granted 2K permission to make your face visible to others. Two players took exception and sued 2K over NBA 2K15 and 2K16 in October 2015. They argued that 2K’s practices violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act and that the publisher had not obtained explicit informed consent before storing the 3D renditions of their heads. A judge, however, has decided that there was not enough proof of “sufficient injury” to the plaintiffs, stating: At best, more extensive notice and consent could have dissuaded the plaintiffs from using the MyPlayer feature, meaning that would have never collected the plaintiffs’ biometrics. But the plaintiffs have failed to establish that their use of the MyPlayer feature resulted in any imminent risk that the data protection goal of the BIPA would be frustrated. Consequently, more extensive notice and consent could not have altered the standing equation because there has been no material risk of harm to a concrete BIPA interest that more extensive notice and consent would have avoided. The dismissal of this case may set precedent on the rights of corporations on things as sensitive as a digital image of your physical likeness. As the technology to gather precision biometrics advances, that could become a very real privacy concern. Follow Nate Church @Get2Church on Twitter for the latest news in gaming and technology, and snarky opinions on both. | 1 |
You are here: Home / US / Project Veritas Reveals Who Was REALLY Behind Romney’s 47% Video Project Veritas Reveals Who Was REALLY Behind Romney’s 47% Video October 28, 2016 Pinterest
Once again, the lengths to which the Democrats have to go to win elections was evidenced by a Project Veritas video released Wednesday night on Fox News’“The O’Reilly Factor.” In the video, we found out that the “bartender” who obtained video of former Gov. Mitt Romney’s infamous “47%” comments during his 2012 presidential campaign may have actually been part of a coordinated effort by Democrat operatives to tank Romney’s campaign — despite the truth of his comments.
Scott Foval, who was fired from his post at Americans United for Change after Project Veritas began releasing their videos, revealed that there may have been more behind the “47%” video than just a bartender at the fundraiser taking footage on his own, with no direction from anyone else.
Twitchy reported :
In Wednesday’s video release, Foval explains that the bartender who caught Romney’s devastating “47 percent” remarks on video during a fundraiser was part of a coordinated operation to sneak a video recording device into the event. That video eventually was passed along to David Corn of Mother Jones, who won a George Polk Award for his efforts.
The story at the time, of course, was that bartender Scott Prouty brought a camera along in hopes of perhaps getting a photo with Romney — which somehow involved setting down the camera and hitting the record button. Progressives hailed Prouty as a hero for coming forward with the video.
Yeah, not according to Foval.
“Bob [Creamer] got a hold of our guys who did the original insertions back in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns against Bush where they were inserting people and interrupting his fundraisers and rallies,” he told an undercover Project Veritas journalist. “And then, I don’t know if you remember, well from, they are the ones who negotiated to get that lawyer in in Florida who recorded the 47 percent video.”
“Wait, I thought that was a bartender,” the undercover PVA reporter responded.
“It was actually a lawyer at the event,” Foval said and added: “The lawyer took his phone and had the bartender walk around with it and set it up.”
Foval continued, “It was a whole coordinated operation to get the phone in because they had taken away all the cell phones from all the staff and so what they did was they set it up in the room.”
When Foval was asked about who the lawyer was, he claimed he didn’t know. “I have no idea who it is but they, the people who do the operations, they have a team of about 25 folks that this is what they do.”
Of course, Foval is walking back his comments, and Corn has claimed that it isn’t true. Then again, that’s what liberals always do when they’re caught — deflect, lie, pretend it didn’t happen, etc. etc. James O'Keefe's New Story About the 47-Percent Video Is Totally False. https://t.co/uFnbTTqOLk | 0 |
Jesus hurry back. . To much suffering..thk u. Julian Assage. | 0 |
AUSTIN, Texas — Texas is set to get its first immigrant detention center under the Trump administration after a private prison company announced that it won a contract with ICE. [The GEO group announced in a press release on Thursday that it has been awarded a contract by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for the construction and operation of a detention facility located in Conroe, Texas, which is just north of Houston. Under the $110 contract with ICE, GEO is expected to, “design, finance, build, and operate the Facility. ” GEO has a long history of partnering with ICE spanning well over two decades. “We are very appreciative of the continued confidence placed in our company by U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” said George C. Zoley, GEO’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. The GEO group has a total of 23 facilities in the state of Texas which includes correctional centers, detention centers, residential reentries, and youth services. According to GEO’s website, ICE is a client at four of the facilities in Texas. The largest of the facilities that ICE has a contract for, the South Texas Detention Complex, is in Pearsall, Texas, which can house 1, 904 detainees. The other facilities are the Rio Grande Detention Center, located in Laredo with a capacity 1, 900 Joe Corley Detention Facility, located in Conroe with a capacity 1, 517 and Ector County Correctional Center, located in Odessa with a capacity 235. Ryan Saavedra is a contributor for Breitbart Texas and can be found on Twitter at @RealSaavedra. | 1 |
SEATTLE — Last Sunday in Palm Springs, Calif. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, climbed into the cockpit of a robot and began flailing his arms as though warming up for a workout, causing the robot’s enormous appendages to mimic his movements. “Why do I feel so much like Sigourney Weaver?” Mr. Bezos said, referring to the actress who wore a mechanical suit in a climactic battle in the 1986 movie “Aliens. ” The intimate audience of entrepreneurs and academics, attending an Amazon conference on robotics and artificial intelligence, chuckled. Later, Mr. Bezos posted a photo on Twitter of himself in the suit with a more menacing air, the robot’s arms raised as if about to deliver a bear hug. For years, retailers have been haunted by the thought of Amazon using its technological prowess to squeeze them into powder. That battle has mostly played out on Amazon’s home turf, the world of online shopping. Now the fight is coming directly to retailers on actual streets around the globe, where Amazon is slowly building a fleet of physical stores. And while most of the attention has been focused on Amazon’s grocery store dreams, the company has a more ambitious collection of experiments underway. If those experiments work — and there is no guarantee of that — they could have a profound influence on how other stores operate. Over time, they could also introduce new forms of automation, putting traditional retail jobs in jeopardy. At the same time, locating those stores close to customers’ homes could also help Amazon further its ambitions of delivering internet orders within hours. The company is exploring the idea of creating stores to sell furniture and home appliances, like refrigerators — the kinds of products that shoppers are reluctant to buy over the internet sight unseen, said one of several people with knowledge of the discussions who, in conversations with The New York Times, spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans were confidential. The stores would serve as showcases where people could view the items in person, with orders being delivered to their homes. These would not be your average Home Depots: Amazon has considered using forms of augmented or virtual reality to allow people to see how couches, stoves and credenzas will look in their homes, the person briefed on the discussions said. Amazon is also kicking around an concept similar to Apple’s retail emporiums, according to two of the people familiar with the discussions. These shops would have a heavy emphasis on Amazon devices and services such as the company’s Echo smart home speaker and Prime Video streaming service. And in groceries — a giant category in which Amazon has struggled — the company has opened a convenience store that does not need cashiers, and it is close to opening two stores where drivers can quickly pick up groceries without leaving their cars, all in Seattle. It has explored another grocery store concept that could serve customers and act as a hub for home deliveries. Overseas, Amazon is quietly targeting India for new grocery stores. It is a vast market, and one still largely dominated by traditional street bazaars where shoppers must wander from stall to stall haggling over prices and deliberating over unrefrigerated meat sitting in the dusty open air. Amazon’s internal code name for its India grocery ambitions: Project Everest. Last week, Amazon opened its fifth physical book store in Chicago, and it has five more announced locations under construction. It is possible that some of the store ideas will never see the light of day. Groups within Amazon are often encouraged to come up with zany initiatives (this is the company that popularized the idea of drone deliveries). Many ideas are chucked after deeper scrutiny by executives. Amazon declined to talk about any stores it has not announced publicly. “We are always thinking about new ways to serve customers, but thinking is different than planning,” said Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman. Since the late ’90s, pundits have asked when Amazon — the company Mr. Bezos founded on the premise that people would rather shop from the comfort of their screens — would finally start building stores. But Amazon executives saw plenty of opportunities in online retail and new ways to reach people, from creating digital devices like Kindle to building up the Prime membership service for getting faster deliveries and other benefits. In 2012, Mr. Bezos told the television interviewer Charlie Rose that shoppers were already well served by existing retailers and that Amazon had no interest in a effort. “We want to do something uniquely Amazon,” he said. “If we can find that idea, and we haven’t found it yet, but if we can find that idea, we would love to open physical stores. ” Despite Amazon’s internet retailing success, over time it has become clear that there is a lot of shopping that people prefer to do in person. The most glaring example is groceries — the mother of all shopping categories, with about $770 billion for the supermarkets represented by the Food Marketing Institute, a nonprofit group that includes the majority of such stores in the United States. After pouring resources into an online grocery service, AmazonFresh, for almost a decade, the company has made only modest progress. According to people familiar with the workings of the company’s grocery business, it has struggled to operate it profitably, leading to a slow rollout of the service in new locations. One big desire many customers have is that they want to see fresh fruits, vegetables and meat in person before buying them. The relatively high cost of home delivery — Amazon charges $15 a month for its Fresh service, on top of a $99 annual Prime membership — is another barrier. Online grocery delivery accounts for only about 3 percent of the market in the United States, though it is closer to 10 percent in Britain, said Randy Burt, a partner in the food and beverage practice of A. T. Kearney, a strategy and management consulting firm. Mr. Burt said Amazon’s growing interest in stores mirrored the conclusion that other online merchants with physical stores — the apparel seller Bonobos and the eyewear seller Warby Parker — had come to. “I think they are recognizing, for certain things you can’t digitize and replicate online all the experience one has in a store,” Mr. Burt said. “The ability to create experiences is going to be critical for them to continue to get share. ” Joe Thompson, a former general manager in Amazon’s retail business, sees physical retail as key to Mr. Bezos’s outsize ambitions for the company. ”I can’t help but feel that, in Bezos’s mind, he wants to be the first valuation company,” said Mr. Thompson, who is now an executive at BuildDirect, an online home improvement store. To do that, he said, Amazon would have to “crack” a couple of “completely underpenetrated markets online. ” Amazon’s current market value is bobbing around $400 billion. In the coming weeks, Amazon is expected to open its first two grocery pickup stores, in Seattle’s Ballard and SoDo neighborhoods, which will allow customers to order food online and schedule brief windows for picking them up in person. Recently, as cars ripped by, workers hung a sign on the exterior of one of the stores — to be called AmazonFresh Pickup, according to city permit documents obtained by GeekWire — before quickly covering it up. A growing number of established grocery retailers are experimenting with this “click and collect” approach to shopping, including Walmart, Kroger and others. According to one person briefed on Amazon’s plans, the company has been developing technology for automatically detecting when a customer pulls into the parking lot so orders can be brought to them more quickly. A few miles away from its other Seattle stores, on the ground floor of one of its many office towers in the city, the company is testing Amazon Go, a convenience store concept stocked with beverages, sandwiches and prepared meals, which are put together by chefs in a kitchen that is visible from the street. The retail industry has been captivated by Amazon Go’s technology since the company unveiled the store late last year. The store uses a combination of sensors and artificial intelligence to automatically detect the food items shoppers remove from shelves, so they can leave the store without visiting a cashier — the way customers do when they bolt from an Uber. “Amazon is wonderful at frictionless commerce,” said Timothy Laseter, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. There have been glitches with the technology that Amazon engineers continue to work on, according to a person familiar with the operations. For now, only Amazon employees are allowed to use the store. Amazon previously said it would open Amazon Go to the public in early 2017. If Amazon is successful at automating the checkout process, the implications for employment could be because other retailers would probably do everything possible to copy it. More than 3. 4 million people are employed as cashiers in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Amazon Go technologies like artificial intelligence are “Latin for ‘fire cashiers,’” said Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. “I’ve probably been in 30 boardrooms of retailers in the past year,” Mr. Galloway said. “I would say the No. 1 topic of conversation is Amazon. ” For months, reports have circulated that Amazon was considering a concept for a larger grocery store that would combine shopping formats like traditional purchases, and home delivery. One of those articles, a February piece by The New York Post, described a futuristic Amazon grocery store staffed by robots, requiring only three human workers. That was too much, apparently, for Mr. Bezos, who became uncharacteristically feisty on Twitter, attacking the article by saying The Post’s sources had “mixed up their meds. ” But a group within Amazon has explored another larger grocery store format, according to both a person familiar with the concept and to internal Amazon documents reviewed by The New York Times. The store could stock fresh produce, meats and other items in a public area of the store, while keeping frozen foods, cereals and other items traditionally found in the center of a grocery store behind a wall, in what would be a kind of small Amazon warehouse. Workers behind the wall, not robots, could quickly package orders for customers. The idea resembles a concept laid out in a paper, “A Beautiful Way to Save Woolworths,” written by the retail industry consultant Brittain Ladd, who was later hired by Amazon. The status of that project at Amazon is unclear: One person said it never advanced far and was effectively dead, and another disputed that characterization. While Mr. Bezos was known for coining the motto “Get Big Fast” in the early days of Amazon, the company’s plans in physical retail could be better described as “Get Big Slow. ” Some reports have said Amazon has discussed building up to 2, 000 grocery stores. But that figure was floated mainly as a hypothetical to consider the impact on Amazon’s supply chain, not as a goal that was under serious consideration, a person familiar with the discussions said. In addition to the two soon to open in Seattle, as many as five more AmazonFresh Pickup locations could open by next year, and the company hopes to expand Amazon Go to Britain and several cities in the United States in the same time frame, this person said. India could represent another big market for Amazon in physical retail. The company, which has vowed to spend billions of dollars on its efforts in the world’s populous country, recently sought approval from the Indian government to open online and physical food stores in the country, The Economic Times reported in February. According to a person familiar with Amazon’s India grocery efforts, the company hopes to open its first Indian grocery store in Bangalore. In a statement, Amazon said the company was excited by the Indian government’s efforts to encourage foreign investment in a “stronger food supply chain. ” “We have sought an approval to invest and partner with the government in achieving this vision,” Amazon said. For Mr. Galloway at N. Y. U. the slow pace of Amazon’s rollout of stores is a sign that it has not figured out physical retail yet, and that has surprised him. Five years ago, he believed Amazon would have hundreds of stores by this time. “What appears to be clear is they haven’t yet zeroed in on a format they’re willing to massively scale,” he said. “This is a company that the moment it figures out something that works, it puts nuclear energy behind it. ” | 1 |
An open letter to the Hollywood Elite and the rest of America:[My Dear friends and colleagues, I have recently been pondering President Trump’s executive action with regard to our nation having extreme vetting and our immigration policy finally being enforced. It has pained me deeply to see such a violent reaction to something that, to my mind, makes absolute common sense. Let me begin by saying that I am from a family of immigrants that came to this country for a better life. They came to the US “legally,” assimilated, integrated, and learned English to the best of their ability, and demanded we speak it. As we all know, we live in a time in which there are forces who wish to destroy our way of life. There are thousands of illegal immigrant criminals in the United States whose country of origin will not take them back. These criminals are free on the streets of America. We have recently heard from a plethora of Hollywood stars on this issue — Meryl Streep, Robert DeNiro, Ashley Judd, Madonna, major agencies, musicians, singers and even the indomitable Shia LaBeouf. After much prayer on this issue, I must now stand in solidarity with all of my Hollywood elite brethren. They are right! The rest of you are wrong! It is now in this spirit that I make an appeal to all in Hollywood and the media for us to use the Oscars to take a stand for the entire world to see and hear. It is time for Hollywood to lead the way. I propose that Meryl Steep, Chelsea Handler, Richard Gere, Robert DeNiro, Christoph Waltz and others lead an Oscar first: let’s do away with the rules, barriers, and tickets to the Oscars and such as the swanky Vanity Fair party or the Weinsteins’ affair. I ask all migrants, all illegal immigrant criminals and all refugees to converge on Hollywood to come to the Oscars and all the even those held at the mansions or the Chateau Marmont or anywhere else. After all, we in the Hollywood community want to show all Islamic extremists that we have love in our hearts — and what better way to do that than by inviting them along on our most important night? It’s time the walls and electronic security gates come down. There are roughly 3, 600 seats to the Oscars we should have at least 2, 500 seats reserved for illegal aliens, refugees and migrants, or maybe even more. For those celebrities skipping the ceremony, each should invite at least 100 illegal aliens, refugees or migrants to come to their home to watch the Oscars with them. The Academy and the Vanity Fair people should also get the 150 criminals who have recently been deported from Los Angeles and bring them to the show as honored guests. I find it curious that when President Obama did the same exact thing — and more — in terms of enforcing the law on illegal immigration, the Hollywood elite were silent. Why were they silent then, but are so vocal now when President Trump is doing basically the same thing? Is Hollywood racist? Why — when Christians are being slaughtered in Syria, Iraq, and other places in the Middle East — is Hollywood silent? Of course, the people that wish death upon Christians, Jews, gay people and the West are greeted with open arms by the elite in Hollywood — so why can’t they come to our Oscar parties? Additionally, I am now pleased to announce that Hollywood and the recording industry no longer require the protection of the Men in Blue at any of their events! We do not need a country of laws only a country of illegal immigrants, refugees and migrants. How dare we ignore the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … ” So now, we ask you all: please come to the Oscars on February 26th at the Dolby Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. We welcome you to our homes with open arms and love in our hearts. Together, let us celebrate the Progressive left and its policies, which have helped make blue collar America Tired, Hungry, and Poor. And the Oscar goes to … With love in my heart, Robert Davi | 1 |
What do they want, you ask?
More.
All they ever want is more.
And they’re not going to stop until we stop them.
Physically.
NBC NY :
The inbound upper level of the George Washington Bridge was closed by an immigrant rights protest on Wednesday morning, snarling traffic on one of the region’s most important crossings at the height of rush hour.
Delays at the bridge for traffic heading into New York from New Jersey were up to nearly 90 minutes; traffic cameras showed bumper-to-bumper traffic barely inching along.
The protesters apparently chained themselves across the roadway to block traffic, unfurling large banners in an attempt to spread their message. One banner appeared to read “Resist, Organized, Act Up!”
Drivers were clashing with the protesters in an effort to get the bridge open, according to witnesses. Police quickly detained the small group and traffic began moving again about 15 minutes.
The Port Authority said 10 people who were blocking the eastbound lanes were arrested. No injuries were reported. The agency said it is investigating. | 0 |
Op-Ed by Laraine C. Abbey The political story of our time is less about Hillary or Trump than what many believe is the destruction of... | 0 |
Sergey I. Kislyak, the longtime Russian ambassador to the United States, hosted a dazzling dinner in his mansion four blocks north of the White House to toast Michael A. McFaul just weeks before he took up his post as the American envoy to Russia. It was, Mr. McFaul recalled, an “ extraordinary dinner,” including five courses of Russian fusion cuisine for 50 seated guests who shared one main characteristic: They were government officials intimately involved in formulating Russia policy for the Obama administration, including senior figures from the Defense and State Departments. “I admired the fact that he was trying to reach deep into our government to cultivate relations with all kinds of people,” Mr. McFaul said of the dinner in late 2011. “I was impressed by the way he went about that kind of socializing, the way he went about entertaining, but always with a political objective. ” Mr. Kislyak’s networking success has landed him at the center of a sprawling controversy and made him the most prominent, if politically radioactive, ambassador in Washington. Two advisers to President Trump have run into trouble for not being more candid about contacts with Mr. Kislyak: Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as national security adviser, and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who admitted two previously undisclosed conversations. Mr. Kislyak also met during the transition with Mr. Trump’s and adviser, Jared Kushner. A career diplomat raised in the Soviet era, Mr. Kislyak, 66, (pronounced ) may seem an unlikely protagonist in such a drama. He has interacted with American officials for decades and been a fixture on the Washington scene for the past nine years, jowly and cordial with an easy smile and fluent if accented English, yet a pugnacity in advocating Russia’s assertive policies. Invited to think tanks to discuss arms control, he would invariably offer an unapologetic defense of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and assail Americans for what he portrayed as their hypocrisy — then afterward approach a debating partner to suggest dinner. “Not all of us, myself included, initially appreciated his very tough, style,” said Dimitri K. Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest and an advocate of closer relations, who hosted a dinner at his home for Mr. Kislyak after his arrival in Washington and regularly invited him to events at his center. “But we gradually came to develop a grudging respect for him as someone who was really representing the positions of his country. ” Mr. Simes introduced Mr. Kislyak to Mr. Trump in a receiving line last April at a foreign policy speech hosted by his center at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Mr. Kislyak was one of four ambassadors who sat in the front row for Mr. Trump’s speech at the invitation of the center. Mr. Simes noted that Mr. Sessions, then a senator from Alabama, was there, but he did not notice whether he and the ambassador spoke at that time. The Russian Embassy did not respond to an email on Thursday, but Mr. Kislyak defended engagements with American officials last November, when he was asked during a speech at Stanford University about allegations of Russian meddling in the elections. Mr. Kislyak echoed his government’s line that it was not involved in hacking. He said it was natural for diplomats to attend events such as political conventions and foreign policy speeches by candidates. “It is normal diplomatic work that we have been doing: It is our job to understand, to know people, both on the side of the Republicans and Democrats,” he said. “I personally have been working in the United States for so long that I know almost everybody. ” Even some critics of Russian policy said it was hardly surprising that Mr. Kislyak would meet people around Mr. Trump. “That was part of his job,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine who is now at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t see anything nefarious in that per se, and I don’t think it was out of the box for Senator Sessions to talk with Kislyak. ” An expert on arms control negotiations with a degree from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, Mr. Kislyak first served in the Washington embassy from 1985 to 1989 during the late Soviet period. He became the first Russian representative to NATO and was ambassador to Belgium from 1998 to 2003. He returned to Moscow, where he spent five years as a deputy foreign minister. He was appointed ambassador to Washington in 2008. “He is a brilliant, highly professional diplomat — affable, pleasant, unbelievably good at arms control and relations for decades,” said Sergei A. Karaganov, a periodic Kremlin adviser on foreign policy. Some Russian foreign policy experts compared him to Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington from 1962 to 1986 and a political player in both capitals. Until recently, at least, Mr. Kislyak played a more discreet, quiet role in Washington and was even less visible in Moscow. “I would describe him as Russia’s top authority on the United States,” said Vladimir Frolov, a foreign policy analyst. The questions about contacts between Mr. Trump’s circle and Russian officials have revealed what both sides presumably knew, that American intelligence agencies closely track Mr. Kislyak’s movements and tap his phone calls. Russian officials on Thursday expressed anger that their ambassador’s actions were being questioned and that some news reports suggested he might be an intelligence operative. Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, delivered an extended diatribe during her weekly briefing against what she called the low professional standards of the American news media. “I will reveal a military secret to you: Diplomats work, and their work consists of carrying out contacts in the country where they are present,” she said. “This is on record everywhere. If they do not carry out these contacts, do not participate in negotiations, then they are not diplomats. ” Until Vladimir V. Putin returned to the Russian presidency in 2012 and tensions between Washington and Moscow rose again, Mr. Kislyak was a popular host, especially for weekend events at the estate at Pioneer Point in Maryland, which the Obama administration ordered closed last December over the hacking allegations. He invited the Americans who negotiated the New Start nuclear arms treaty and their families to a party at the estate. Russian security guards took the children of his guests tubing on the ambassador’s boat. During the treaty negotiations, Mr. McFaul remembered, Mr. Kislyak frequently telephoned the secretary of defense or others involved, thwarting the American desire to limit his channels of communication. “He was actively pushing to try to find fissures and disagreements among us,” Mr. McFaul said. “He is very smart, very experienced, always well prepared,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of state who negotiated three Iran sanctions resolutions at the United Nations with Mr. Kislyak. “But he could be cynical, obstreperous and inflexible, and had a Soviet mentality. He was very aggressive toward the United States. ” Some of that aggression was on display at the Stanford event last fall, which was moderated by Mr. McFaul. Saying that he had been sent to Washington to improve relations, Mr. Kislyak named areas of possible cooperation, but then went through a long list of grievances, accusing the United States of meddling around the globe. When an audience member asked about Russian mistakes, he demurred. He said the most serious problem with the United States is that it believes it is exceptional. “The difference between your exceptionalism and ours is that we are not trying to impose on you ours, but you do not hesitate to impose on us yours,” he said. “That is something we do not appreciate. ” He has told associates that he will leave Washington soon, likely to be replaced by a general. His name recently surfaced at the United Nations as a candidate for a new post responsible for counterterrorism, diplomats there said. Vitaly I. Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, died last month and that post remains vacant. For Mr. Kislyak, Washington is no longer the place it once was. It has become lonely, and he has told associates that he is surprised how people who once sought his company were now trying to stay away. | 1 |
Email
The second presidential debate flew off the rails on Sunday night when Donald Trump invoked accusations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton and suggested that Hillary Clinton could "be in jail" if he's elected in November, threatening to appoint a special prosecutor to look into her private email server.
ABC's Martha Raddatz, one of the debate moderators, asked Trump whether his behavior exposed in the shocking 2005 video released Friday, in which he bragged about groping and kissing women without permission, was consistent with his current behavior.
"As I told you, that was locker-room talk," Trump said. "I am not proud of it. I am a person who has great respect for people, for my family, for people of this country, and I'm not proud of it."
Trump then said if you "look at the history of politics in this country, no one had been so abusive of women" as former President Bill Clinton, the husband of the Democratic nominee, whom Trump suggested intimidated those women.
Three women who had previously accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct held a press conference with Trump earlier Sunday, and each was seated in the front row at the debate.
"Mine were words — his were actions," Trump said.
"So, don't tell me about words," he continued. "I am absolutely, I apologize for those words. But it is things that people say. Bill Clinton. He was impeached. He was no longer allowed to practice law. He had to pay an $850,000 fine to one of the women, Paula Jones, who is here tonight. That when Hillary brings up a point like that, brings up words I say 11 years ago, I think it's disgraceful. And I think she should be ashamed of herself, if you want to know the truth."
Donald Trump: "If I win, I'm going to instruct my attorney general" to investigate Clinton https://t.co/raPU4ICkl6 https://t.co/IWGVUleEtr
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) October 10, 2016The former secretary of state responded by saying that "so much of what he just said is not right" but that he was doing it because of his floundering campaign.
"I am reminded of what my friend Michelle Obama advised us all," she said. "When they go low, you go high."
"And, look, if this were just about one video, maybe what he's saying tonight would be understandable," she said. "But everyone can come to their own conclusions about whether or not the man in the video or the man on the stage respects women. But he never apologizes to anyone for anything."
She mentioned that Trump had not apologized to the Khans, a couple who lost a son, a Muslim US soldier, during the Iraq War. Trump engaged in a lengthy back-and-forth with the Khans after they appeared at the Democratic National Convention in July.
Clinton also said Trump had not apologized to a reporter whose disability he mocked in front of a camera, a federal judge who Trump said couldn't do his job fairly because he was of Mexican descent, and President Barack Obama, whose birthplace Trump tried to discredit in a multiyear campaign.
"He owes the president an apology, he needs to apologize to our country, and he needs to take responsibility," she said.
Trump responded by repeating the false claim that the Clinton campaign started the rumors casting doubt on Obama's birthplace in 2008. He added that she owed an apology for the "33,000 emails you deleted."
"If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation," Trump said. "Because there have never been so many lies, so much deception. And we're going to have a special prosecutor."
Clinton said everything Trump said was "absolutely false" but she was "not surprised."
"Oh really?" Trump interjected.
Clinton then mentioned the difficulty in fact-checking Trump, to which he capped off the exchange by saying "you'd be in jail" during his potential administration. | 0 |
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