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North Korea’s foreign ministry warned Monday that its government is prepared to go to war with the United States, following remarks from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in which he said the Trump administration was prepared for a military engagement with the communist dictatorship should they strike U. S. allies. [“The U. S. should face up to the situation of the world with its eyes wide open. The DPRK has the will and capability to fully respond to any war the U. S. would like to ignite,” the Korean Central News Agency quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying, according to the South Korean newswire service Yonhap. “If the . S. thought that they would frighten the DPRK, they would soon know that their method would not work on the latter,” the spokesman continued. “The world will soon witness what eventful significance the great victory won by the DPRK in the recent ground jet test of engine will carry. ” Addressing Secretary Tillerson directly, the spokesman said he was “repeating what Obama touted much sanctions [sic] until he left the White House. What matters is that neither Obama nor Tillerson knows the reason why the DPRK had to have access to nuclear weapons and why it is dynamically bolstering up the nuclear force. ” The North Korean official appeared to be responding to Tillerson’s statements in South Korea on Friday where he told reporters that the Trump administration would not back down in protecting its allies in Seoul and Tokyo. “The policy of strategic patience has ended. We are exploring a new range of diplomatic, security and economic measures. All options are on the table,” Tillerson said, clarifying to one reporter that these options did include a military last resort. Tillerson also repeated on multiple stops during his Asia trip that he hoped to see North Korea’s closest ally, China, take steps to ensure that Pyongyang abides by United Nations sanctions. In China, Tillerson emphasized issues on which the two nations agreed, though reports suggest that he privately urged Beijing to cut economic ties with North Korea. Pyongyang appears to have received the message. In addition to the foreign ministry’s response, the Rodong Sinmun, a state propaganda newspaper, published a column Monday arguing that North Korea needs nuclear weapons because the United States will invade it if it does not threaten a nuclear attack. “Our army and people will continuously bolster up our nuclear deterrent for down the road under the conditions that U. S. government officials adamantly stick to their hostile policy toward us,” the column read. In addition to public statements, North Korea tested a new rocket engine model on Sunday at the orders of dictator Kim . The Rodong reported that Kim applauded the test as a success: He noted that the success made in the current test marked a great event of historic significance as it declared a new birth of the rocket industry which has radically turned into a industry both in name and in reality by completely doing away with dogmatism, conservatism and formalism left in the field of rocket industry and the dependence on the technology of other countries. Kim said of the test, “the whole world will soon witness what eventful significance the great victory won today carries. ” The rocket engine, experts presume, is meant to fuel the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). North Korea has been developing nuclear technology in the hopes of creating a nuclear weapon with enough reach to successfully strike U. S. soil. Reuters corroborated the claims in North Korean media that the rocket engine test was an advance in the nation’s weapons technology, citing the South Korean defense ministry. | 1 |
Creepers of the web, rejoice! Now you can find someone’s social media account just by taking their picture. [Jack Kenyon, founder of smartphone app Facezam, says that it “could be the end of our anonymous societies. ” Kenyon outlines the function of the app with alarming clarity: “Users will be able to identify anyone within a matter of seconds, which means privacy will no longer exist in public society. ” Facezam uses Facebook’s user information database to match the picture you snap with the person’s social media information. It claims a less than turnaround on most queries. In testing, its facial recognition has maintained about 70% accuracy. If you do not want to participate, you are unfortunately out of luck. Being one of the almost 2 billion Facebook users means that you are already part of the developer database that Facezam uses for identification. And Facebook already uses facial recognition to suggest who should be tagged in your photos, so the proverbial prize is right there for the taking. The app is set to launch on March 21, but Facebook itself may stand in the way. The social network says that Facezam “violates [their] terms” and that they are “reaching out to the developer to ensure they bring their app into compliance. ” Kenyon, however, disagrees. He says that his company has “looked into this,” and they remain “confident the app won’t be violating Facebook’s terms. ” Furthermore, he claims the ramifications of the app could have “a mix of positives and negatives” and that it could even help to reduce crime. Right now, the only way to reduce Facezam’s effectiveness is to obscure your face in pictures. If you are prone to wearing sunglasses, or have hair that falls across your face, you may be fortunate enough to reduce the chances of being identified by a stranger’s phone to about 55%. **UPDATE** Facezam has been revealed as a hoax, with their website stating, “This was a publicity stunt by Zacozo Creative, a Viral Marketing Agency. ” 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 / How This Syrian Refugee Supports 4 Wives, 22 Children is NUTS How This Syrian Refugee Supports 4 Wives, 22 Children is NUTS October 27, 2016
Here’s a preview of Hillary’s America should she be elected president: in Germany, a Syrian refugee has four wives and 22 children that German citizens reportedly support via more £320,000 per year worth of benefits.
The U.K. Express reported :
The migrant, known only as Ghazia A, fled Syria last year along with his family.
He has since resettled in Germany with his four wives and 22 of his children. One of his daughters has since moved to Saudi Arabia where she has married.
The family could be receiving more than £320,000 a year in benefits according to a financial manager on the Employers’ Association website.
There is no official confirmation on this figure.
Under Islamic tradition, the 49-year-old can have up to four wives – as long as he can support them financially.
Don’t forget everyone, all cultures are equal so you have to respect a culture that says it’s okay to have four wives and 22 children that the rest of society supports.
Since Germany doesn’t legally recognize polygamy — being a civilized country and all (not for long) — they couldn’t all live together and get benefits. But don’t worry, Ghazia found a way to be compliant with the law and get German taxpayers on the hook for his lifestyle. Isn’t multiculturalism just swell?
How it works is that Ghazia chose a “main wife,” and now the other three and their children get government benefits to support them.
Ghazia, his main wife, and their five children live in Montabaur, which is located in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. His other wives and children are spread around up to 31 miles away.
Back in Syria, Ghazia worked in a garage and car hire service, but ever since he settled in Germany and received government benefits for his family, he just can’t seem to find the time to work anymore.
He claimed that he wants to work, but because of his religion he has to make sure he spends enough time with each family. Ghazia told German newspaper Bild: “In our religion it is my duty to visit every family and to be with them.”
Sergei Jaufmann, a neighbor of Ghazia, said according to the Express: “The children play football in the street. The mother I often see, when [she] comes from shopping.”
According to the Express, a social media user noted that “the Syrian with 4 women and 23 children is now being sold to us as a new normality.”
Yes it is. This is a prime example of how globalists are actively working to tear down the western world. Refugees and immigrants aren’t expected to assimilate to the culture; the culture is expected to adapt to them. And not only that, you get to pay for it.
Sorry, all cultures aren’t equal and people from around the world that are clamoring to get into the west — aside from the terrorists that we’re supposed to pretend aren’t abusing immigrant/refugee streams — know that full well, which is why they want to come here and take advantage of what western culture built. | 0 |
Taming the corporate media beast Yandex Email Account Proves DNC Hacker Was NOT Russian
Or, who in Russian intelligence doesn’t dpeak Russian? Originally appeared at Medium.com
On March 22, 2016 William “Billy” Rhinehart, a regional field director at the Democratic National Committee, received an email from Google warning him that someone tried to access his account and that he should immediately change his password. He complied.
Unfortunately for Mr. Rhinehart, it wasn’t Google who sent him that email. He, along with many others, were a victim of Threat Group 4127 — the SecureWorks designation for Fancy Bear (CrowdStrike), APT28 (FireEye), and Sofacy (Kaspersky Lab). Secureworks assesses that TG 4127 “is operating from the Russian Federation and is gathering intelligence on behalf of the Russian government.”
Thanks to a bizarre twist involving Guccifer 2.0’s solicitation of a journalist at The Smoking Gun (TSG) to write about the DCLeaks emails in exchange for giving TSG an early look at some of the stolen documents, TSG was able to obtain the original spear phishing email directly from Billy Rhinehart and shared it with ThreatConnect, who posted this screenshot of the email’s headers and identified the actual sender of the email:[email protected]. 1-ibuqqojl1spagetqb9oumq.png
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
Yandex is the Google of Russia. Like Google, Yandex is a search engine, and, like Gmail, Yandex‘s users can open a free email account.
When you visit Yandex.ru and create a new email account, the email assigned to you has the .ru domain. However, [email protected] has a .com domain. There’s only one reason why something like that would happen, but first, here’s what a Russian user would see when he creates a Yandex email account on RUNET (the Russian Internet).
Step One: Pretend that you‘re in Russia
Secureworks says that you work on behalf of the Russian government. CrowdStrike says that you’re an employee of the Russian government. And everyone else believes that you’re Russian so for this little experiment to work, you need to be on the Russian Internet.
Assuming that you aren’t already in Russia, you’ll need to connect to a Russian proxy server. I have an account with PrivateVPN and used vpn-ru1.privatevpn.com for my test.
Once you’re connected, run a test to make sure that you’re on RUNET by visiting http://www.ip2location.com/ . It will show you your IP address and geolocation.
Step Two: Go to Yandex.ru
Type Yandex.ru into your browser’s address bar. You should see it resolve to https://yandex.ru/ . | 0 |
Previous The Elite Have Hung Hillary Out to Dry? This Is a Short-Lived Victory by the People
Even the mainstream media polls indicate that Clinton is losing. Clinton has been abandoned by Obama and CNN in the last 24 hours.
What’s behind the slide in the polls? Why are the powers that be still attempting to inundate us with fake polling results based upon shoddy science.
The move away from Hillary by the elite is stunning? IF you think the elite are giving up, think again. This country has never been in a more precarious position.
A breakdown of the events follows in this video. I certainly hope you have your basic supplies in order. | 0 |
By wmw_admin on November 1, 2016 News Brief — Oct 31, 2016 Frankfurt central station. Click to enlarge On Sunday a knife wielding attacker stabbed four people in Frankfurt’s Hauptwache train station. At this stage the motive for the stabbings is still unknown and the assailant is still on the run. Frankfurt Police confirmed all four victims were still in hospital. However, the police have yet to issue any description of the attacker or any eyewitness accounts of the attacks. All of which prompts this writer to wonder why? Normally following such incidents police release an impression of the attacker based on victims description. But this time German police have released no such information, not even a photofit of the alleged attacker. Although it is still unclear who was responsible or what their motive was, the attacks follow a spate of similar attacks carried out by migrants and asylum seekers in Germany. In addition to a wave of sexual assaults that accompanied the migrant influx, more overtly politically motivated attacks have also been carried out. All of which have called into question Angela Merkel’s open-door immigration policy. A week of violence that rocked Germany began in mid July when Pakistani teenager Riaz Khan Ahmadzai, 17, posing as an Afghan refugee, hacked at passengers on a train in Wurzburg with an axe, wounding five. He was shot dead by police. Four days later mentally disturbed German-Iranian teenager Ali Sonboly shot nine dead during a rampage through a Munich shopping centre before taking his own life. Although the authorities said that there was no terrorist motive for the attack and that Sonboly had acted in response to bullying, that didn’t stop many Germans from arriving at their own conclusions. Two days later a Syrian refugee, 21, hacked a pregnant woman to death in Reutlingen and on the same night a 27year-old Syrian refugee injured 12 people when he detonated a rucksack packed with metal shards and screws in Ansbach. The bomber was also killed by the blast. However, in a message left on his mobile phone he claimed that the attack had been carried out on behalf of ISIS as an act of revenge against Germans . More deaths had been narrowly averted after the bomber was turned away by security guards at a music festival and instead detonated his rucksack bomb outside a nearby wine bar. Earlier this month the town of Chemitz went into lockdown after police raided the flat of Syrian refugee Jaber Albakr, who is alleged to have been plotting a terror attack on a German airport. All of which leaves us wondering: why no photofit or eyewitness description from the Frankfurt attack? In fact since the attack occurred on Sunday and the attacker went on the run there have been no further updates. Nothing. Almost as if a news blackout were being imposed. Ed | 0 |
The Washington Post has published a “blind item” White House report — where not only its sources but the subject of the article is anonymous. [Using “people familiar with the matter” as sources, the Post’s Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky report that the investigation into the Trump campaign and its connections to Russia “has identified a current White House official as a significant person of interest, showing that the probe is reaching the highest levels of government. ” The person is a senior White House adviser “close to the president,” but the unnamed sources would not identify that official, the Post reported. “The sources emphasized that investigators remain keenly interested in people who previously wielded influence in the Trump campaign and administration but are no longer part of it, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort,” the Post reported. However, the story says, “people familiar with the investigation said the intensifying effort does not mean criminal charges are near, or that any such charges will result. ” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer emphasized the lack of evidence of collusion in a statement responding to the Post’s story. “As the President has stated before — a thorough investigation will confirm that there was no collusion between the campaign and any foreign entity,” the statement said. The Post published this story as President Donald Trump is on his way to Saudi Arabia on the first leg of multiple state visits, his first trip abroad since he took office. Earlier this week, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to serve as special counsel and lead the investigation going forward. | 1 |
November 4, 2016 - Fort Russ News - RIA Novosti - translated by J. Arnoldski -
The US should get rid of the illusion that there is the possibility of “taming” terrorists, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated.
“Terrorism is like a snake: you turn your back on it and it bites you. Don’t play with it,” she said in an interview to China Radio International.
Zakharova remarked that Western and regional countries have invested a lot of forces and means in terrorist groupings.
“But these are terrorists, and they shouldn’t be flirted with,” Zakharova added.
In the diplomat’s opinion, the actions of the American side, which is not allowing Jebat Al-Nusra to be destroyed, “are a clear manifestation of the fact that they are protecting it.”
Zakharova also noted that this is not the first time that Russia is clashing with such an approach by the US.
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“Drama. ” “ . ” “Thriller. ” “ . ” If you’re searching for a movie to watch on a streaming site, and you filter by genre, those are among the words you’ll see right away. Pretty straightforward, yes. Intrepid or surprising, not in the least. The Fandor experience is quite different. Based in San Francisco, Fandor combines breathtaking eclecticism with an platform that’s an exemplary example of the digitization of culture. Search for a film in the “ ” genre, and you’ll get 18 pages with 18 choices on each, but there are even more options: The top of the page has links to 10 other very specific subgenres, including “Martial Arts,” “Sword and Sandal,” “Wilderness” and “Treasure Hunting. ” You can also refine your search by checking off from a list of about 30 countries, or toggle between film durations (shortest to longest) and years of release (oldest to most recent). Going down the Fandor rabbit hole is the most fun I’ve had with a streaming website in a while. While “Documentary” isn’t the first place I look when exploring movies on streaming sites, one recent afternoon two of the many documentaries the service offers jumped out at me. The first was “Komeda: A Soundtrack for a Life. ” This 2010 short feature directed by Claudia tells the life story of Krzysztof Komeda, the Polish jazz musician and film score composer whose life came to a freakishly tragic end not too long after he went to Hollywood to work on his friend Roman Polanski’s first American film, “Rosemary’s Baby. ” The next documentary was Mark Rappaport’s “Debra Paget, for Example,” from 2015, a study of the onetime 20th Century Fox contract bombshell best known for her work with Elvis Presley and Fritz Lang. Not all of the documentaries are so but this is a site that rewards buffs capable of appreciating the tendrils of its library and how it’s organized. Returning to “” the selection under that rubric reflects a wide and arguably generous interpretation of the category. There’s the searing 1980 military saga “Breaker Morant” and the 2001 cult item “Ichi the Killer. ” There’s John Ford’s seminal “Stagecoach” Ted V. Mikels’s evergreen, “Ten Violent Women” and “The Wild Geese,” a ’70s mercenary (in every sense of the term) action picture in which Richard Harris and Richard Burton phone it in while Roger Moore does his usual level best. According to Gail Gendler, the head of programming at Fandor, the site’s goal is to maintain access to 6, 000 titles (more or less) at any given time, even as titles come and go. “We want to present a canon for film fanatics and millennial movie lovers,” Ms. Gendler said in a phone interview. She was quick to point out that the site, which started in 2011, functions as a vital bridge between cult and mainstream. “We have the first film by Damien Chazelle and the first film by Barry Jenkins,” she said, citing two filmmakers who had good showings at this year’s Academy Awards. (Those are “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench” by Mr. Chazelle, the “La La Land” director, and “My Josephine” by Mr. Jenkins, the “Moonlight” director both are well worth checking out.) “We have early work by Kelly Reichardt, one of the most vital indie filmmakers in the United States. ” Speaking to Ms. Gendler about the site’s remarkable menus, I mentioned that while looking through Fandor’s L. G. B. T. Q. page, I found “Out 1,” French director Jacques Rivette’s experimental drama from 1971, a picture that I never considered as thematically L. G. B. T. Q. But thinking about how one of that film’s characters, a street hustler played by Juliet Berto, struggles with identity questions throughout her story line, it occurred to me that perhaps I had been looking at the film narrowly. “We’re always having interesting arguments internally about genre and tagging systems. ” she said. “Does one category contain too many films or not enough films is one aspect of the discussion. But often times where we place a given film offers an opportunity for conversation with the film community of both subscribers and nonsubscribers who look at the editorial and social part of the site, or on the Facebook page. We want to make the experience not just about viewing, but connecting with other film lovers. ” To that end, the editorial side of the site, Keyframe, has a great asset in the correspondent David Hudson, who deftly aggregates film news, connecting readers to outside material while maintaining a reliable and witty voice and displaying a sensibility. Keyframe itself offers a lot of video essays, with topics recently ranging from a profile of the silent film pioneer Alice to a primer on the “chopped and screwed” genre of featured on the soundtrack of “Moonlight. ” Also contributing to what Ms. Gendler calls a “once you get there, it’s hard to leave” aim, the site features monthly “Spotlights,” which gather library films under occasionally timely topics. February, for instance, featured 2017 Oscar nominees, with work by Mr. Jenkins Mr. Chazelle and Maren Ade, whose “Toni Erdmann” was a nominee for best foreign language film. Sometimes the topics are just topics, as in last month’s “Twenty Something,” with titles from Bertrand Blier’s corrosive “Going Places” ( a young and hunky Gérard Depardieu in 1974) to Sean Baker’s “Starlet” (2012) about an aimless young woman in the fringes of California’s porn industry (a very fringy place to be). This month, a nod to the Tribeca Film Festival comes in the form of a “New York films” spotlight. The company is expanding into the funding and production of original documentary shorts — one of which, “Gut Hack,” is having a premiere as a New York Times on Monday, April 10 — and anticipating more good things from a deal with Amazon, offering the service at a slightly reduced rate for Amazon Video subscribers. (Fandor’s monthly fee is $10.) “That’s wonderful for us,” Ms Gendler said. “Any platform wants more growth. And we’re hungry to build our subscription base. ” I’d say the site deserves that. | 1 |
President Barack Obama interrupted the White House press briefing Tuesday to praise Press Secretary Josh Earnest for his years of service. [Obama said Earnest had an “all American” look and a face “made for television,” and the outgoing president lauded Earnest’s “smarts” and his “maturity. ” The president pointed out that Earnest had “never disappointed” during his time in the White House. “He was tough and he didn’t always give you guys everything you wanted, but he was always prepared. He was always courteous,” Obama said. Obama didn’t mention previous press secretaries Robert Gibbs or Jay Carney, but appeared to spend more time praising Earnest’s character. “This guy ranks as high as just about anybody that I’ve worked with,” Obama said. “He is not only a great press secretary but more importantly, he is a really, really good man, and I’m really, really proud of him. ” | 1 |
Friday on ABC’s “The View,” former and executive producer of the upcoming VH1 series “Daytime Divas” Star Jones said of reports that President Donald Trump’s son Barron Trump was upset when he saw the controversial photo of comedian Kathy Griffin holding up a bloody mask of his father, “There is a lot to have been embarrassed about if that was your father. ” While Jones was clear she felt the photo was “inappropriate,” she also declared,”Our president cracks me up when he says his son was upset. ” Jones said, “It’s tough, you know when you cross the line, and you used to always say, Joy, funny is funny, but then there are some things that just are not funny. And if the joke doesn’t land, the joke doesn’t land. I think that was really the problem. ” Jones continued, “I can’t stand Trump, but that has nothing to do with it. But I don’t want to see the president of the United States with a bloody head. Under any circumstance no matter who he is. I think it’s inappropriate. There you go. ” But she said, “Our president though cracks me up when he says his son was upset. He has to remember — I wonder how upset he was when he heard his father referred to the kinds of assaults that he would do on women or did they not talk about that?” Joy Behar, interjected, “Or making fun of handicapped people. ” Jones agreed, “Yes exactly. ” Behar continued, “Or a make fun of a Gold Star family. I mean he was horrible. ” Jones added, “There is a lot to have been embarrassed about if that was your father. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
Joint Way Forward Deal Does Not Lead to Peace or Progress for Afghans Nazifa Alizada Afghans protest in Stockholm against the Joint Way Forward deal with signs that read: “Do not sell us for money.” (Shahmama and Salsal National Association (SANSA))
I was born in Ghazni province of Afghanistan but have no memories of my birthplace. When I was 3, the Taliban took over and forced me and my family to flee the country. I was too little to realize any of this. I still have a blurred image of an old orange bus, a loaf of bread, and rugged, dusty mountains.
As I grew older, my mother explained that the bus belonged to my father, and we did not attempt to migrate to Iran at first. The Soviet invasion and the Afghan civil war taught people of my village how to protect themselves when crises get heated. The men would move their women and children to the dark, moist undergrounds immediately and make them stay there until the situation calmed down. We were not lucky enough to fit in the underground this time. We passed two days in a mountain—the blurred mountain, in my mind—and hopelessly moved toward Iran.
My Afghan identity took my precious childhood from me. In Iran, I refrained from playing with other kids since they would mock my Afghan accent. I preferred to stay home to avoid hearing “Afghani kesafat,” or “Afghani Ashghal,” literally meaning “the garbage Afghan,” on the street.
When I turned 7, schools refused to let me attend because I was an undocumented Afghan migrant. I enrolled in a school run by refugees for refugees and did my primary schooling there. But the school lacked human and capital resources to offer classes beyond seventh grade, and an undocumented Afghan refugee could not get any further education. Constant insults, seclusion and deprivation of the right to a quality education were the gifts Iran provided me in my childhood.
In 2001, upon the fall of the Taliban regime, my family and I returned to Afghanistan. At first glance, Kabul resembled anything but a city. Crumbled walls, broken glass, burned buildings, dusty roads and bullet shells on the streets all were evidence of the war. We did not expect a war-weary city to be any better. Yet one thing lured us into returning: safety and the hope for a better future. The Joint Way Forward deal between the European Union and Afghanistan misses this crucial point.
In early October, the Afghan government and the EU signed this bilateral deal, which facilitates deportation of thousands of Afghan asylum seekers. In return, the EU promised to continue its generous aid package to Afghanistan. The deal promises job creation for returnees, emphasizes reintegration and resettlement programs, and ensures the safe return of vulnerable groups, in particular unaccompanied minors and women.
None of these factors are enough to prevent hundreds of thousands of Afghans from taking the perilous journey toward Europe without a guarantee of security. After the fall of the Taliban, thousands of Afghan families returned to the war-torn country despite being aware of the existing limited opportunities.
Peace, hope for the future and stability were the factors which drove Afghans back to their homeland for the first time since 2001. The irony is that the lack of these very notions in 2015 made thousands of others abandon the country. With more than 11,000 civilian casualties, 2015 is the worst year in terms of security since the fall of the Taliban.
The Joint Way Forward is based on the illusion that Afghanistan is safe. Kunduz, one of the country’s major cities, fell into the hands of the Taliban for the second time this year. The war forced hundreds to flee the city, while hundreds of others remained defenseless and stuck.
In Badghis, a northwestern province, at least 60 police officers surrendered to the Taliban with their guns and resources. Three districts of Farah, a western province, already are ruled by insurgents. The Taliban rules many districts of Helmand province, and active war goes on in the city every so often.
Nengarhar, Paktia, Paktika, Ghazni, and most other provinces are no better. Even the shortest highways—such as the Kabul-Ghazni, or Kabul-Wardak, routes—are controlled by the Taliban. Unknown numbers of people are being kidnapped or killed based on ethnic and religious reasons, or for having ties with foreign or government officials, on a regular basis.
At least three bombs have exploded in different areas of Kabul since the deal was signed. By considering Afghanistan safe, despite the ongoing turmoil, the EU flinches from its humanitarian responsibility.
Afghans have fled uncertainty, insecurity and the abusive policies of their government with the hopes of establishing a better life for themselves in Europe. They never imagined they would risk their entire lives to be sold back to the government they just escaped. More than a mere failure of security in Afghanistan, the EU-Afghan deal is a failure of humanity.
Most EU countries warn their citizens against travelling to Afghanistan and mark it unsafe on their Foreign Affairs website. If it is not safe for EU citizens to spend a few days in Afghanistan, how is it safe for Afghans to live their whole lives there? Such deals reinforce double standards and spotlight how differently people’s lives are valued in today’s world.
Europe’s decision to deport Afghans is hasty, unconstructive and shortsighted. People’s lives are being endangered for a second time. Statistics show that a great number of previous deportees already have attempted to return to Europe through Balkan routes. Many others lack social support to stay in Afghanistan after migrating to Europe from Pakistan or Iran.
The deal is also unproductive for Europe, since it could lead to a repeat of the 2015 refugee crisis.
The current bilateral EU-Afghan deal will be a colossal failure unless the EU forces the Afghan government to prioritize security. Dealing with corruption and regaining people’s trust is the next big move to push people back to their homeland.
The developed world should not use aid as a negotiating tool to pressurize poorer nations.
People’s lives are not political capital.
Nazifa Alizada of Afghanistan is a graduate of the Asian University for Women. She currently works with the National Secretariat for Gender Research at Gothenburg University in Sweden. TAGS: | 0 |
Tuesday 1 November 2016 by Pete Redfern Microsoft Outlook to introduce ‘Hillary’ button to delete emails ‘en masse’
Microsoft has today announced that the next version of their popular email software will include a function that quickly and irretrievably deletes every email on the computer.
Head of product development Simon Williams announced, “With the FBI investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails, we have recognised the need for a quick one-click button that will instantly remove all emails from your PC.
“This will be useful if you suddenly find yourself under investigation by the FBI. Or if you’ve had a bit of a flirty email exchange with that girl from accounts who you felt you had a bit of chemistry with, but then you took it a bit too far that one time and now suddenly realise you are in grave danger of being dismissed for sexual harassment.
“You know, everyday sort of situations.”
The new Microsoft Office suite is due to be released next year, and Outlook is reportedly not the only software with a Clinton inspired update.
“We’ve tweaked Internet Explorer a little too,” continued Mr Williams.
“For those users who routinely forget to use InPrivate Browsing, we will be adding a ‘Bill’ button which with one click will simultaneously close your browsing window and delete all of your search history and cookies.
“This will protect you from your wife ever knowing that you googled ‘What is Monica Lewinsky up to these days’.
“Or in the case of a regular user it will prevent your spouse finding out whatever niche, depraved pornography you are into when she unexpectedly returns from a work social an hour early and catches you mid self-pleasure.
“Again, just normal, everyday situations our customers find themselves in.”
The button will be adjacent to the Minimize, Maximize and Close icons on the top toolbar, thereby saving the user a frantic search of the menus while pathetically attempting to conceal their erection as their significant other approaches.
Industry experts are expecting sales to be high. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently | 0 |
So much for choice. In many parts of the country, Obamacare customers will be down to one insurer when they go to sign up for coverage next year on the public exchanges. A central tenet of the federal health law was to offer a range of affordable health plans through competition among private insurers. But a wave of insurer failures and the recent decision by several of the largest companies, including Aetna, to exit markets are leaving large portions of the country with functional monopolies for next year. According to an analysis done for The Upshot by the McKinsey Center for U. S. Health System Reform, 17 percent of Americans eligible for an Affordable Care Act plan may have only one insurer to choose next year. The analysis shows that there are five entire states currently set to have one insurer, although our map also includes two more states because the plans for more carriers are not final. By comparison, only 2 percent of eligible customers last year had only one choice. A similar analysis by Avalere Health, another consulting firm, also highlighted the increase in areas with only one insurance carrier. The market is still in some flux. Final contracts between insurers and the federal government won’t be signed until late September. That means it is still possible that additional insurers will choose to enter new markets between now and then, and the competitive picture could improve. It is also possible that some carriers will decide to exit. It was just this week that Aetna surprised regulators and others with the news that it was leaving most of the markets where it offered policies on the exchange, leaving it in just four states. The Obama administration says it is too early to evaluate competition in the Obamacare markets for 2017. Marjorie Connolly, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said: “A number of steps remain before the full picture of marketplace competition and prices are known. Regardless, we remain confident that the majority of marketplace consumers will have multiple choices and will be able to select a plan for less than $75 per month when Open Enrollment begins Nov. 1. ” Many places in the country still have robust choice and competition, including many large population centers like Denver, Los Angeles, New York and Miami. But large areas have limited choice, like the five states that now have only one issuer: Alabama, Alaska, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wyoming. (Our map also shows Kansas and North Carolina with only one, but the picture may change for parts of those states, because additional insurers have said they plan to enter.) Large sections of other states may also be down to one carrier, including Florida, Utah and Missouri. It also appears that there is one county in Arizona, Pinal County, between Phoenix and Tucson, where no carriers are set to offer health plans in the marketplace. While the dwindling competition may not be fatal, “it isn’t ideal,” conceded Larry Levitt, a senior executive at the Kaiser Family Foundation. People shopping for plans in the exchanges will be left with fewer insurer choices but also, probably, fewer choices of doctors and hospitals because the companies that remain will most likely offer sharply narrow networks. Evidence from the first years of the marketplace suggests that consumers benefit from more plan choices. According to a study from researchers at the Urban Institute, more competitive markets tended to have lower premiums. “It’s important to have competition in the exchange markets, both to have consumer choice and to keep premiums competitive,” said Caroline Pearson, a senior vice president at Avalere Health. But it is unclear whether competitive markets are causing lower premiums, or whether the kinds of places attractive to insurance carriers — those with many healthy customers and a broad range of doctors and hospitals — may simply be easier places to offer insurance. A rule in the health law limits how much of their premiums insurers can keep for overhead and profits, which may hinder a monopoly insurer’s ability to overcharge, even in the absence of competition. The exodus has left some states in flux, with regulators and remaining insurers trying to stabilize the market. In North Carolina, the exit of the UnitedHealth Group and Aetna has left BlueCross Blue Shield of North Carolina to serve the exchange. The plan says it lost $405 million in 2014 and 2015 on the exchanges, and its chief executive, Brad Wilson, is concerned about the market. The insurer has sought sharply higher premiums for next year. “Consistently losing money on these plans ultimately puts all of our customers and our business at risk,” he said. Insurers say the current rush to the exits underscores their contention that changes need to be made to the law. The decline in participation “echoes our calls for Congress and the administration to move forward with solutions that will improve the stability of the market and provide the affordable coverage options that consumers need,” said Clare Krusing, a spokeswoman for the America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group. The McKinsey analysis is based on detailed information about the number of carriers in regions of the country known as ratings areas. In 17 states, as well as Washington, D. C. analysts had full information about carriers intending to sell insurance next year. For the rest of the country, the analysts used complete data from 2016, then updated the information whenever an insurer announced publicly that it was leaving an entire state. Our map does not show places where insurers have exited only portions of those states, and so may show more carriers in some areas than there will be. Nor does it take account of carriers’ promises to enter portions of states that have not yet published filings for 2017. The Affordable Care Act has changed a lot about the individual insurance market — opening it to people even if they had previous illnesses, guaranteeing a standard package of covered services and providing subsidies to help Americans buy their own plans. But when it comes to competition and choice, the markets may look very much the way they did before the enactment of the law, with regions and even whole states dominated by a single insurance company, typically a Blue Cross plan. The Blue Cross plans traditionally played the role of the insurer of last resort, said Timothy Jost, an emeritus law professor at Washington and Lee who has closely followed the progress of the law. “They will be the last people to leave the marketplace,” he said. | 1 |
The photo taken on October 4, 2016, shows destruction in the village of Amatrice that was rattled by an earthquake on August 24. (Photo by AFP)
An earthquake measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale has hit central Italy, including the capital Rome.
Italy's national geophysics institute said the quake struck at a depth of nine kilometers in the Macerata area of the central region of Marche on Wednesday.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) confirmed the magnitude, saying the epicenter was seven kilometers south-southwest of Visso village in Macerata.
There was no information immediately available about potential casualties or damage caused by the quake, which was felt in the towns of Pescara, Ancone and L'Aquila, which was jolted by a 6.3-magnitude quake in 2009 that killed over 300 people.
Wednesday’s quake rattled windows and doors in the capital of Rome.
The quake comes about two months after nearly 300 people were killed as a strong earthquake hit central Italy.
On August 24, a powerful earthquake measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale hit Italy, and almost flattened scores of towns and villages in the central parts. The quake was followed by a series of aftershocks, the strongest of which measured 4.2, rattling the already hit areas. Loading ... | 0 |
Weak. Why not just own that your whole "hey, weather is not climate!" comment is completely worthless because all climate scientists know that? So does everyone who follows this issue. | 0 |
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In the following interview with the X22Report Spotlight report, Dr. Jim Willie unleashes with both guns blazing on a subject I’ve been warning about for about for over two years now, which is the loss the U.S. Dollar’s status as the World’s Global Reserve Currency.
For the simple fact that no one under the age of 70 has never known a planet earth where the U.S. Dollar has not been the World’s Reserve Currency, most Americans in particular have no idea what it will mean when we lose that status.
The subject is not one that is taught in schools until well into the graduate school level in most cases, so unless a person has done independent research on the subject, the average American cannot comprehend how painful it will be for individual American families not IF, but WHEN the inevitable finally happens.
Losing the World Reserve Currency status is a process, just like losing the world’s faith in the U.S. was a process. Both are processes that have been well underway for the better part of the last two decades, especially this past decade. Roughly ten years ago, 75% of global trade was denominated in U.S. Dollars, and that makes sense. After all, we’ve been the Reserve Currency.
Over the last ten years, that figure has dropped to roughly 35% of all global trade which is now settled in U.S. Dollars, because countries are rushing to distance themselves from the U.S. for many of the reasons Dr. Willie outlines in another interview from earlier today titled, Dr. Jim Willie: Unprecedented Bond Dumping Means U.S. Dollar Collapse Ahead .
The bottom line is this: The U.S. has grossly abused its privilege of being the World Reserve Currency, largely because we've adopted the practice of monetizing our debt by printing money out of thin air. Giving that process a fancy name like Quantitative Easing, doesn't change the reality of what it is. We print money out of thin air, and rip-off every country we've borrowed from when we pay them back with Dollars worth less than the ones we borrowed.
Now, the world has lost all faith in the only thing that backs the U.S. Dollar in the first place: The Full Faith and Credit of the United States Government. In the interview, Dr. Willie gives a BLISTERING account of what to expect. He begins the first 30 seconds of the interview by explaining how once the U.S. Dollar is finished being phased out, a process that as I’ve said is well underway, he expects the Dollar to experience a massive currency devaluation of 30% almost instantly.
After the initial devaluation of 30%, Dr. Willie expects there to be another another 30% devaluation six to eight months down the road, followed by a long series of 20% devaluations over the next several years, until we reach a point in about 4-5 years when our currency is completely devalued, and worth about 10% of what it is today.
For a country with a trade deficit of over $500 BILLION, and as a country that imports over 50% of our food… that means conditions Americans once considered to be unthinkable here in the United States, will soon become ordinary. Let that sink in for a moment. The unthinkable will become ordinary. The time to prepare is now. Brace yourself for a very intense interview… one of Dr. Willie’s most intense ever!
DO NOT MISS THE SECOND VIDEO BELOW WITH CANADIAN BILLIONAIRE NED GOODMAN, AS HE LECTURES ON THE COMING COLLAPSE OF THE U.S. DOLLAR!
As individual Americans or as families, in the past when we’ve heard news from pundits or politicians talking about issues like trade deficits, bad trade deals, or the federal debt, many times what we hear goes in one ear and out the other, because many of us cannot SEE or FEEL how those reports affect our families on a daily basis, or in our every day lives.
The loss of the Reserve Currency is not something that might happen. It’s not something that could happen. It’s an eventually that there’s no chance of avoiding. That ship set sail far too long ago to fix the damage already done, and what lies ahead. It’s not an event where a vote is taken, and we’ll lose the status over night thanks to anything done by a U.N. vote, or by our own politicians in Washington. What's done is done, now it just has to play out.
As explained, it’s a process, and it’s well underway. I could not be more serious when I say that conditions Americans once considered to be unthinkable in the United States, will soon become ordinary. If you’re fortunate enough to still be working, and you have an income, do not squander your opportunity to protect your family. Begin preparing. There is a reason Peter Schiff has said: The Collapse of the Dollar Will Be the Single Biggest Event In All of Human History .
How The Coming Dollar Collapse Will Leave Americans Destitute
An increasing number of financial experts are saying the United States dollar is no longer a reliable and dependable currency – and that its downfall is inevitable. There are even some experts who think the dollar is so unstable that the Chinese Yuan will soon become the world’s reserve currency, or currency of choice.
“Our addictions to debt and cheap money have finally caused our major international creditors to call for an end to dollar hegemony and to push for a ‘de-Americanized’ world,” investment advisor and financial strategist Micheal Pento wrote in an op-ed piece for CNBC .
Others agree.
“In my view the dollar is about to become dethroned as the world’s defacto currency basically,” Canadian billionaire investor Ned Goodman said. “We’re headed to a period of stagflation , maybe serious inflation , and the United States will be losing the privilege of being able to print at its will the global reserve currency.”
Goodman believes the US already is in another recession. The unemployment numbers are understated and the “real” unemployment number likely is closer to 15 percent, he said.
Over half of 200 international institutional investors surveyed by the Economist think that the Yuan will eventually replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The reserve currency is the money most commonly accepted for international trade.
Why Reserve Currencies Matter
Having money with a reserve currency status enables a nation to dominate and control the world’s financial markets, as their currency is used for international trade and transactions. The US has the ability to maintain a $17 trillion national debt largely because the dollar is the reserve currency.
A nation with a reserve currency can simply print money to pay its debts.
In past centuries nations such as Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Portugal lost their status as super powers in part when their money lost reserve currency status. Reserve currencies collapse because people no longer trust or believe in the governments that issue them.
Goodman says that the US dollar became the reserve currency in the 1970s because Saudi Arabia agreed to only accept only the dollar as payment for oil. Goodman noted that at least one major producer, Russia, is now accepting Yuan in payment for oil.
Goodman was referring to a deal that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin made last May. Under the terms of deal, Russian companies can borrow money directly from China in exchange for oil.
The US dollar once was backed by gold and silver, Goodman said, but now is “backed by nothing.”
Australia Starts Using Yuan
One of America’s oldest and closest allies may have taken the first step to ending the dollar’s reign as the reserve currency. CNBC reported that the Yuan will now be traded in Australia’s financial markets. Among other things that will let Chinese customers pay Australian firms in Yuan. China is the biggest market for Australia’s exports such as iron and coal.
Story continues below video
The Australian government has endorsed the deal because China is Australia’s biggest trading partner. Arthur Sinodinos, Australia’s Assistant Treasurer (treasury secretary) even went on CNBC’s Asia Squawk Box show to endorse the deal.
“It’s a big vote of confidence by both countries in the future of the relationship,” Sinodinos said. Not even recent economic problems in China seemed to dampen Sinodinos’ enthusiasm for the arrangement.
“There’s no doubt that the Chinese authorities are having to manage issues in the financial sector to make sure that growth is sustained, but they’ve shown great skill at that in the past they were very adept at the fallout from the global financial crisis,” Sinodinos said. In other words, Sinokinos believes the Chinese are doing a very good job of managing their economy and their currency is reliable.
How will the Dethroning of the Dollar Affect You?
Observers disagree widely on how the end of the dollar’s reign as reserve currency would affect the US economy and average Americans. Retired neurosurgeon and pundit Dr. Ben Carson thinks it would turn the US into a third world nation and lead to unrest that would lead to martial law, as Off The Grid News recently reported.
Goodman believes there will soon be a massive sell off of US dollars that will lead to inflation. He also suggested a way for people to protect their assets.
“The Chinese have three and a half trillion US dollars and they’re spending these dollars as quickly as they can, and it will not be long before the rest of the world and the US will be thinking likewise. I do.” Goodman said.
In the 1930s, everyone wanted US dollars, he said, but today they’re trying to get rid of them. He thinks that many investors are trying to spend all of their dollars to buy hard assets in order to avoid losing money invested in dollars.
That means average people might be able to protect themselves by investing in hard assets such as gold, real estate or silver, Goodman said.
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I visited Mosul on the day it fell to Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and a small detachment of US Special Forces on 11 April 2003. As we drove into the city, we passed lines of pick-up trucks piled high with loot returning to the Kurdish-controlled enclave in northern Iraq. US soldiers at a checkpoint, over which waved the Stars and Stripes, were shooting at a man in the distance who kept bobbing up from behind a wall and waving the Iraqi flag .
If there had ever been any sympathy between liberators and liberated in Mosul, it was disappearing fast. Inside the city, every government building, including the university, was being systematically looted by Kurds and Arabs alike. I saw one man who had stolen an enormous and very ugly red and gold sofa from the governor’s office dragging it slowly down the street. He would push one end of the sofa a few feet forward and then go to the other end and repeat the same process. The mosques were soon calling on the Sunni Arab majority to build barricades to defend their neighbourhoods from marauders.
We parked our vehicle near a medieval quarter of ancient stone buildings while we went to see a Christian ecclesiastic. When we got back, we found that our driver was very frightened and wanted to get out of Mosul as fast as possible. He explained that soon after we left a crowd had gathered, recognised our number plates as Kurdish and debated lynching him and setting fire to his car before being restrained by a local religious leader moments before they took action.
The oil city of Kirkuk was captured at about the same time by the Peshmerga, despite having promised the Americans and Turks that they would do no such thing. Again, there was looting everywhere and I saw two Peshmerga stand in the middle of the road to stop an enormous yellow bulldozer that was being driven off. Instead of slowing down, the driver put his foot on the accelerator so the Peshmerga had to jump aside to avoid being crushed.
Inside the newly established Peshmerga headquarters, I ran into Pavel Talabani, whose father Jalal Talabani headed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the political party whose militia now held the city. He stressed the temporary nature of the Kurdish occupation of the city. “We came to control the situation,” he said. “We expect to withdraw some of our men in 45 minutes.”
Some Peshmerga, but not all: 13 years later the Kurds still hold Kirkuk, whose population is Kurdish, Arab and Turkoman, and to which the Kurds claim an historic right saying they have only reversed anti-Kurdish ethnic cleansing by Saddam Hussein.
By now the rest of the world has forgotten that there was a time when the Kurds did not hold the city. The Kurdish leaders had understood that the US-led invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein had created conditions of unprecedented political fluidity and it was an ideal moment to create facts on the map, which would become permanent whatever the protestations of other players.
The current multi-pronged offensive aimed at taking Mosul is producing a similar situation as different countries, parties and communities vie to fill the vacuum they expect to be created by the fall of Isis, just as in 2003 the vacuum was the result of the fall of Saddam Hussein.
The different segments of the anti-Isis forces potentially involved in seizing Mosul – the Iraqi army, Kurds, Shia and Sunni paramilitaries, Turks – may be temporary allies, but they are also rivals. They all have their own very different and conflicting agendas. Presiding over this ramshackle and disputatious alliance is the US, which is orchestrating the Mosul offensive and without whose air power and Special Forces there would be no attack.
The Shia-dominated Iraqi government needs to take and hold Mosul, Iraq’s main Sunni Arab city, if it is to be convincing as the national government of Iraq. To achieve this, Baghdad’s rule must be acceptable to the Sunni majority in the city in a way that was not true when Isis took it in 2014. It needs to establish its rule while it still has full military and political support from the US.
The Kurds, for their part, want to solidify their control of the so-called “disputed territories” claimed by both the central government and the Kurdish regional authorities. The Kurds opportunistically used the defeat of the Iraqi Army in northern Iraq by Isis two years ago to take these territories inhabited by both Kurds and Arabs, thereby expanding by 40 per cent the area of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). They know that once Isis is defeated, the Kurds will no longer get international and, above all, American backing to hold this expanded version of the KRG.
These problems have only begun to surface because Mosul is still a long way from being besieged or even encircled.
The Shia militia forces are surprisingly calm about being excluded from a military role in the siege. They may calculate that the Iraqi army, if it gets sucked into street fighting, will not be able to take Mosul on its own and will have to look to them for support. The Shia paramilitaries are making up for their lack of participation in the battle for Mosul by sending reinforcements – some 5,000 men, according to reports – to join the Syrian Army in the siege of East Aleppo.
Turkey wants to be a player and, as a great Sunni power, the defender of the Sunnis of Mosul. To this end, it has soldiers based at Bashiqa, north east of Mosul, and claims to be taking part in the attack. But so far at least, Turkish ambitions and rhetoric in Iraq and Syria have exceeded its performance. Both interventions may be designed to impress a domestic audience which is deluged with exaggerated accounts of Turkish achievements in the government-controlled Turkish media.
These participants in the struggle for Mosul may be dividing the tiger’s skin before the tiger is properly dead. Isis showed that it still has sharp claws when it responded to the assault on Mosul with raids on Kirkuk and Rutbah on the main Iraq-Jordan road. It is fighting hard to slow down the anti-Isis advance towards Mosul with a mix of suicide bombers, IEDs, booby-traps, snipers and mortar teams. But it is unclear if it will make a last stand in Mosul where, at the end of the day, it must go down to defeat in the face of superior numbers backed by the massive firepower of the US-led air forces.
The likelihood is that Isis will fight for Mosul, the site of its first great victory, in order to prolong the battle, cause casualties and to let divisions emerge among its enemies. But its strategy over the last 12 months has been not to stage heroic but doomed last stands in any of the cities it has lost in Iraq and Syria.
At Ramadi, Fallujah, Sinjar, Palmyra and Manbij it has staged a fighting withdrawal at the last moment. The same may now happen in Mosul. (Reprinted from The Independent | 0 |
By wmw_admin on April 16, 2011 Zion’s Big Lie
“ The First Holocaust ” by Don Heddesheimer is a critical work documenting the continuous Jewish attempts at floating out Holocaust propaganda before, during and after World War One , often invoking the magical “6,000,000” figure and using the term “Holocaust”. Of course, these clever propagandists have since accomplished their goal of establishing the outrageous myth of the Jewish Holocaust™ in the public consciousness following the end of WW2. In large part due to fictional Hollywood movies like “Shindler’s List” from that lying venomous worm, Steven Spielberg. Read The First Holocaust online here .
Why the number “Six Million”?
As documented in the book The First Holocaust , the Zionists have continuously and hysterically attempted to claim that six million Jews were dead, dying or in grave danger in Europe and Russia since the late 1800’s. Any time there was turmoil in Europe, albeit turmoil often instigated by Jews in the first place, prominent Zionist figures and Jewish-controlled media organizations world wide continuously whipped up a frenzy with phony sob stories to get people to feel sorry for Europe’s Jews and donate money to Jewish charities. It turns out that this mythical six million figure, long since discredited even by mainstream Holohoax historians, comes from a Jewish-Talmudic religious myth that says “ye shall return minus six million” or “you shall return to the land of Israel with six million less”, and of course WW2 birthed the modern state of Israel which was established in 1948. Israeli Jews often excuse their systematic genocide of Palestinians and theft of Palestinian lands by bringing up the so-called Holocaust™ of WW2, which any serious researcher and critical thinker knows by now is a fraud of collosal proportions. The Zionists have so much influence that they turned a delusional Jewish religious prophecy into “historical fact”.
From History & Scriptural Origins of the Six Million Number ;
[Quote 1] Jewish prophecies in the Torah require that 6 million Jews must “vanish” before the state of Israel can be formed. “You shall return minus 6 million.” That’s why Tom Segev, an Israeli historian, declared that the “6 million” is an attempt to transform the Holocaust story into state religion. Those six million, according to prophecy, had to disappear in “burning ovens”, which the judicial version of the Holocaust now authenticates. As a matter of fact, Robert B. Goldmann writes: “. . . without the Holocaust, there would be no Jewish State.” A simple consequence: Given six million Jews gassed at Auschwitz who ended up in the “burning ovens” (the Greek word holocaust means burned offerings), therefore, the prophecies have now been “fulfilled” and Israel can become a “legitimate state”. –Unknown [ Quote 2] Regarding the ‘six million’ number you should know the following: In the Hebrew text of the Torah prophesies, one can read “you shall return”. In the text the letter “V” or “VAU” is absent, as Hebrew does not have any numbers; the letter V stands for the number 6. Ben Weintraub, a religious scientist, learned from rabbis that the meaning of the missing letter means the number is ‘6 million’. The prophesy then reads: You will return, but with 6 million less. See Ben Weintraub: “The Holocaust Dogma of Judaism”, Cosmo Publishing, Washington 1995, page 3. The missing 6 million must be so before the Jews can return to the Promised Land. Jahweh sees this as a cleaning of the souls of the sinful people. The Jews must, on the return to the Promised Land, be clean — the cleaning shall be done in burning stokes. –A Correspondent
A few examples for your consideration;
1900- Jewish leader lets slip the Zionist Holohoax scheme
JUNE 11, 1900 – NEW YORK TIMES – page 7 – Rabbi Wise’s Address“There are 6,000,000 living, bleeding, suffering arguments in favor of Zionism.” 1906-
1911-
Max Nordau , co-founder of the World Zionist Organization together with Theodore Herzl, warns of the “annihilation of six million people” at the Zionist congress in Basle, Switzerland. This was 22 years before Hitler came to power and 3 years before WW1 started.
1919-
Shortly after WW1 Jews claim Holocaust of “six million Jews”. It doesn’t fly too far, nobody buys it. Click to read full article.
1921- White Russian patriots gain ground on the Jewish Bolshevik usurpers of their nation. In a vein attempt to disguise their heavy involvement in murderous Bolshevism, Jews reel out the “six million” myth once again.
1938-
This is only a small portion of tracts available that point to there being far more to the “Holocaust” than is apparent. These along with many other examples can be found at Zion’s Big Lie: The “Six Million” Myth | 0 |
SAN FRANCISCO — Social media companies are under increasing scrutiny for the amount of hate speech that thrives on their platforms, especially since the presidential election. Now, Twitter has unveiled several new measures to curb the online abuse, though the changes are unlikely to be enough to quiet the company’s critics. On Tuesday, Twitter said it was making it easier for its users to hide content they do not wish to see on the service and to report abusive posts, even when those messages are directed at other users. The company has given its support teams training to better identify mistreatment on Twitter. “There’s a fine line between free expression and abuse, and this launch is another step on the path toward getting rid of abuse,” said Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president of trust and security. “We’ve been launching new products to address this, and the cadence of product releases is picking up. We have a lot planned on this path. ” Online harassment and hate speech have long festered on Twitter, but the incidents appeared to rise during the presidential campaign. Exchanges between supporters of Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton grew personal and acrimonious. Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters also relied on a series of images — some and others quietly coded as racist — to circulate hate speech on Twitter. Since Mr. Trump’s victory last week, Twitter has been filled with reports of racist and derogatory taunts against minorities. Many users have expressed fear and concern about the escalation of such behavior. When asked about harassment of minorities, Mr. Trump told “60 Minutes” that his supporters should “stop it. ” Twitter has not had a comprehensive response for dealing with hate speech, largely because the company did not want to limit freedom of expression on the service. But over time, Twitter has rolled out measures to tackle the problem. It has let people mute the accounts of other users, effectively making their content disappear from view. Last year, it issued an explicit prohibition against hateful conduct. The company is now taking more action. It is letting people more specifically block out what they do not want to see on the service, including muting words, phrases and even entire conversations. Twitter is also making it easier for people to report abusive behavior, even if they are only bystanders to the abuse, and for the company to evaluate those reports. And it has overhauled its approach to training support teams, holding special sessions on cultural and historical context for hateful conduct. “Someone looking at user complaints in Asia may not recognize something happening in the E. U. or the U. S. as hateful,” Ms. Harvey said. “We need to make sure there is a universal familiarity with the most common trends and themes we’re seeing that are abusive, but may not seem so at first glance. ” Critics said that while the steps are positive, they will not eliminate hate speech. Twitter’s changes “don’t stop the problem of posting abusive content,” said Mark S. Luckie, a former Twitter manager who now runs a digest of the topics trending among Twitter’s users called Today in #BlackTwitter. “People will find a way to abuse others online, but these changes may put users at ease and curb the perception of abuse on Twitter. ” Part of the reason abuse has thrived on Twitter is because the company allows anonymity, Mr. Luckie said. “But unlike other sites with anonymity, Twitter lets users broadcast to the world — so their abuse has a huge potential impact,” he said. “If you fight with a celebrity and the celebrity fights back, then you have potentially reached a global audience with your abuse. ” Ms. Harvey acknowledged that Twitter has not always moved fast enough to clamp down on abusive behavior. She said that the problem would probably never be entirely solved, but that the company was doing more to identify repeat offenders who create new accounts when Twitter shuts them down or who incite users to gang up on others. “When I hear that Twitter only cares about this now, that we’re only going through the motions, I understand where that perception comes from,” Ms. Harvey said. “But this is important to us because people are experiencing these abusive things, and we need to make sure they know what options they have and that we’re taking action to make things better. ” | 1 |
What Exactly Are Poll Watchers? Here’s The Cliff Notes Version (VIDEO) By Natalie Dailey on October 29, 2016 Subscribe
For months, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has been whining that the election is rigged against him.
He urges people to go to the polls and look out for voter fraud. Watching for fraud is not illegal by itself. If you actually try to force someone to vote a certain way, that is illegal. Sending out false information about the election is also illegal in Ohio. In most states, intimidating voters like that is illegal. According to 18 U.S. Code § 594 : “Whoever intimidates, threatens, coerces, or attempts to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of such other person to vote or to vote as he may choose.”
The states are allowed to regulate election procedures, so the rules vary widely. Some states allow poll watchers to help out by simply being in the room. They watch for any specific suspicious behavior. What Are Poll Watchers?
For example, in Florida, each candidate is allowed to have one poll watcher at each polling place. They have to be approved by the state beforehand.
The poll watcher’s job is to make sure that the votes are counted correctly and to make sure there aren’t any weird voting schemes going on.
Also in Florida, the poll watchers are allowed to challenge someone’s identity if they find a problem with the person’s identification or if the voter doesn’t show up on local voter rolls. If the issue isn’t resolved on-site, then the person can fill out a “provisional” ballot.
This ballot won’t get counted until the problem with the voter’s identity is cleared up, and only if the vote numbers are close enough for provisional ballots to make a difference. Unfortunately, they often don’t get counted at all and if they do, not until after the vote would’ve been useful. Who Are The Poll Workers?
The poll workers are usually a combination of state employees, temporary contractors, or volunteers. They are trained to answer your questions, and they handle disputes with the poll watchers.
You are allowed to ask who poll workers are and who they represent. If you have a problem while voting, you’ll report it to the poll workers.
Poll watchers and poll workers are not allowed to intimidate voters or suppress voting based on race, gender, national origin, or religion. They also can’t question you, and they can’t film you without your approval.
Stay safe on election day, November 8!
Donald Trump has gotten himself in some hot water for calling for poll watchers:
Featured image via YouTube screenshot . About Natalie Dailey
Hi, I'm from Huntsville, AL. I'm a Liberal living in the Bible Belt, which can be quite challenging at times. I'm passionate about many issues including mental health, women's rights, gay rights, and many others. Check out my blog abravealabamaatheist.com. Check out my other blog weneedtotalkaboutmentalhealth.com Connect | 0 |
While former aides to President Obama and members of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign predictably panned President Donald Trump for firing James Comey as FBI director, it was only a few months ago that Clinton’s campaign repeatedly alleged wrongdoing by Comey over his investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. [And last October, Obama’s former attorney general, Eric Holder, signed his name to a letter circulated by Clinton’s campaign strongly criticizing Comey’s decision to publicize aspects of the FBI investigation, alleging Comey’s moves were inconsistent with FBI protocol. In late October, less than two weeks before the presidential election, Comey informed key members of Congress that the FBI was reviewing additional emails that may have been relevant to the Clinton probe. This after emails were reportedly discovered on the personal devices of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. At the time, Clinton’s campaign circulated the letter, signed by Holder as well as nearly 100 former federal prosecutors and Department of Justice officials. The letter stated: “Many of us have worked with Director Comey all of us respect him. But his unprecedented decision to publicly comment on evidence in what may be an ongoing inquiry just eleven days before a presidential election leaves us both astonished and perplexed. ” ABC News reported on the letter: The authors of the letter said they were “moved” to speak out publicly because Comey’s action violated “settled” DOJ tenets. Justice Department officials are instructed to refrain from commenting publicly on pending investigations except in “exceptional circumstances,” as well as to “exercise heightened restraint near the time of a primary or general election,” said the letter. “We cannot recall a prior instance where a senior Justice Department official — Republican or Democrat — has, on the eve of a major election, issued a public statement where the mere disclosure of information may impact the election’s outcome, yet the official acknowledges the information to be examined may not be significant or new,” they wrote. The nearly 100 former DOJ officials who signed on to the letter wrote that Comey’s letter to Congress was inconsistent with prevailing department policy and that it broke with longstanding practices followed during past elections. “Perhaps most troubling to us is the precedent set by this departure from the Department’s traditions,” they wrote. After Comey renewed the email probe in late October, Clinton herself called the FBI chief’s actions “deeply troubling. ” “It is pretty strange,” she said. “It’s pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information, right before an election. In fact, it’s not just strange it’s unprecedented and it’s deeply troubling. ” Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, said Comey had “not been forthcoming with the facts. ” However, now that Trump has fired Comey, with administration officials citing Comey’s handling of the Clinton email investigation, former Obama aides and Clinton officials claim to be dismayed. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein clarified the firing in a letter, writing, “I cannot defend the director’s handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton’s emails. ” Yet Sen. Tim Kaine, Clinton’s running mate, claimed the firing was about the Russia investigation. “Trump firing Comey shows how frightened the Admin is over Russia investigation,” Kaine tweeted in response to the news. “Comey firing part of a growing pattern by White House to the truth. ” Trump firing Comey shows how frightened the Admin is over Russia investigation, — Senator Tim Kaine (@timkaine) May 9, 2017, Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, released the following statement: I was as frustrated, concerned and disappointed as anyone with Director Comey’s handling of the email investigation, but President Trump just fired the man investigating how Russia meddled in our election and whether members of his campaign were involved, an investigation President Trump called a “charade” only 24 hours ago. It’s equally concerning that our attorney general, who lied about his own meetings with the Russians, approved Director Comey’s firing. Clinton’s press secretary, Brian Fallon, tweeted, “I’m not shedding any tears for Comey personally — he hurt the FBI’s reputation — but I do worry whether we ever get to the bottom of Russia now. ” Former aides to Obama also claimed Trump fired Comey over the Russia investigation. “This should not be sugarcoated. Firing Comey is up there in terms of the scariest things Trump has done,” former Obama White House Communications Director Jen Psaki wrote on Twitter. Former Obama National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes expressed concern: “This is not normal. This is not healthy for a democracy. The fixed 10 year term for an FBI Director exists to prevent … this,” he wrote. “This justification several months into this Administration is just completely and insultingly unbelievable. ” 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 Joshua Klein. | 1 |
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WASHINGTON — For two days in January, all seemed right in the Republican Party. Gathered in Philadelphia for their annual congressional retreat, less than a week after President Trump’s inauguration, lawmakers exulted in the possibilities of total government control, grinning through forums about an aggressive agenda that began with honoring a central campaign promise: repealing the Affordable Care Act. Adult beverages flowed. Members were given socks. And the president showered praise on his most important partner, the man with the pen, the man who would find the votes. “Speaker Paul Ryan — very, very special,” Mr. Trump said. “He is writing his heart out, right? And we’re actually going to sign the stuff that you’re writing. ” “Now,” the president said, “it’s going to happen. ” It is not going to happen. At least not this time. Less than 18 months after being elected speaker, Mr. Ryan has emerged from the defeat of the health care bill badly damaged, retaining a grip on the job but left to confront the realities of his failure — imperiling the partnership that was supposed to sustain a new era of conservative government under unified Republican rule. So far, to the surprise of some close to Mr. Trump, the president has remained upbeat on Mr. Ryan, a frequent punching bag during the 2016 campaign and an ideological mismatch whose instincts informed the molding and selling of the health bill far more than the president’s own. But after a humiliating defeat, which many Trump advisers are eager to pin on the speaker, Mr. Ryan is now tasked with defending not just his leadership abilities but his very brand of conservatism in a party fitfully searching for a coherent policy identity that can deliver tangible victories. In this first fight, Mr. Ryan’s more orthodox vision was only halfheartedly by Mr. Trump, who has few fixed political beliefs, in service of a bill the president never well understood, even as he laid on the superlatives in praising it. Now, Mr. Ryan must tug a ruptured conference toward future agenda items, like overhauling the tax code, made all the more difficult by this initial failure. “Oh, I’m sure he’ll get blamed,” Representative Billy Long, Republican of Missouri and a vocal Trump supporter, said of the speaker as he left the Capitol on Friday, making clear he did not believe this would be fair. “He’ll get blamed for everything. ” The episode not only demonstrated an inability to honor a longstanding pledge that powered Republicans through a string of election cycles. It was also a remarkable setback for Mr. Ryan as the body’s principal in his first major test as the speaker under a Republican president. In January, he coasted to with almost unanimous party support, prompting allies to gloat that he had tamed the House Freedom Caucus far more deftly than his predecessor, John A. Boehner. By Friday, his bill had at once alienated those archconservatives and more moderate members who abandoned the legislation as Mr. Ryan and Mr. Trump began caving to demands of the far right, to little effect. “We were a opposition party, where being against things was easy to do,” Mr. Ryan said at a sheepish news conference shortly after the bill was pulled, adding with uncharacteristic candor that Republicans were not yet prepared to be a “governing party. ” “We will get there,” Mr. Ryan said, “but we weren’t there today. ” His job will not get easier. With disparate coalitions in his conference, outside groups like the political arm of the Heritage Foundation pushing lawmakers to pursue conservative purity, and a president whom some members have appeared more willing to buck recently, there are few establishment forces helping Mr. Ryan keep the peace. “There is a lot more safety in opposition than there used to be,” said Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader who was ousted by a more conservative challenger, citing pressure from the outside groups. At the same time, several Trump allies have suggested that Mr. Ryan has still failed to grasp fully the lessons of the president’s election and its rejection of traditional political dogma. The most ominous signals have proliferated on sites like Breitbart, often the online id of Mr. Trump’s orbit. Its lead headlines on Saturday morning included: “Polls: GOP Legislators Dodged 2018 Headache When Leaders Dropped Ryancare” and “Speaker Ryan Crippled? Replacement Chatter Erupts on Hill. ” But as the bill circled the congressional drain, Republicans appeared broadly supportive of Mr. Ryan, grateful for his steady hand and policy fluency and mindful of the risks he took last year as Mr. Trump’s campaign nemesis, giving members cover during a tumultuous election cycle. Most suggested there was nothing he could have done differently to secure the necessary votes. “If he can’t deliver them, they can’t be delivered,” said Representative Chris Collins of New York, a close Trump ally. “I’m certainly not blaming Paul Ryan in the least. ” Others grew more wistful, recalling that Mr. Ryan had to be coaxed into seizing the speaker’s gavel in the first place. “He didn’t ask to do it,” said Representative Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota. “We wanted a speaker who could articulate our principles, who could go on everybody’s radio shows and everybody’s TV shows, and go district to district in many cases, selling and articulating our philosophy, as well as sometimes pretty nerdy legislative stuff. He was tireless in that effort. ” A handful of Republicans took veiled swipes at the House leadership as the bill flailed. Representative Justin Amash of Michigan wrote Friday night on Twitter that the House was “supposed to be a deliberative body where outcomes are discovered, not dictated. ” “Compromise consensus cannot be centrally planned,” said Mr. Amash, a member of the Freedom Caucus. But the chief wild card, as ever, is Mr. Trump. In his private conversations, the president has remained supportive of Mr. Ryan, declining to join in his advisers’ frustrations over how the bill was handled in the House. One adviser described him as still “smitten” with Mr. Ryan. “I want to thank Paul Ryan. He worked very, very hard,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “I will tell you that. He worked very, very hard. ” Mr. Trump’s praise for Mr. Ryan seemed to owe, at least in part, to the fact that the speaker had repeatedly kept him informed throughout the negotiations. Mr. Ryan was also exceedingly deferential to the president, casting him for days as the consummate closer and a winner of the highest order. “The president gave his all in this effort,” he said on Friday. “He’s really been fantastic. ” Dynamics could shift quickly. Several of Mr. Trump’s advisers have for days been casting blame on Mr. Ryan, who is close with the president’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus. Mr. Trump is also known to grow angrier over time, particularly if faced with public embarrassment. On Friday, Mr. Ryan was quick to adopt Mr. Trump’s favored rationale during the health fight, arguing that Republicans had been doing Democrats a grand favor by dismantling President Barack Obama’s health law in the first place and that Democrats would eventually suffer the consequences. “I’m sure they may be pleased right now,” Mr. Ryan said, but when they see “how bad” things get, “I don’t think they’re going to like that, either. ” Mr. Ryan spoke from the same room where, just two weeks earlier, he delivered a slide show presentation live on cable, holding the attention of the political world — clicker in hand, sleeves peeled above his forearms — with a meditation on insurance premiums and Medicaid spending. For all the outward displays of collaboration, the exhibition demonstrated the gulfs, both philosophical and stylistic, that divided Mr. Ryan from the Trump White House. The administration had sought a different visual as the bill debuted to a critical panning: arranging competing stacks of paper in the White House briefing room, meant to demonstrate the relative simplicity of the Republican proposal compared with the thicker Affordable Care Act. “This is government,” Sean Spicer, the press secretary, said at the time, gesturing first to the Democrats’ bill, then the new one. “This is not. ” | 1 |
MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte said Friday that he would like to kill millions of drug addicts in the Philippines, defying international criticism of his country’s bloody war on narcotics and escalating his brutal rhetoric with a reference to the Holocaust. “Hitler massacred three million Jews,” Mr. Duterte said after returning to the Philippines from a trip to Vietnam, understating the toll cited by historians, which is six million. “Now there is three million, there’s three million drug addicts. There are. I’d be happy to slaughter them. ” Killing that number of drug users would “finish the problem of my country and save the next generation from perdition,” he said. Since Mr. Duterte took office in June promising a grisly campaign against crime and drugs, the Philippines has seen a surge in killings of drug suspects. Philippine officials have counted about 3, 000 deaths during the crackdown, about a third at the hands of the police. The police spokesman Dionardo Carlos said on Friday that the police had been overstating the number killed by the police. He said that the correct number was 1, 120, not about 1, 500, which the police had given earlier. He did not explain why the number had been revised. The police have also said that 1, 500 nonpolice killings are under investigation and that hundreds of these also are believed to be . Responding to expressions of alarm about the killings from the European Union and other international bodies, Mr. Duterte said Friday that the European Union’s advisers on the issue were “ . ” He criticized European officials for finding fault with his government while not doing enough to help migrants fleeing Middle Eastern countries. “You allow them to rot, and then you’re worried about the death of about 1, 000, 2, 000, 3, 000?” he said. Mr. Duterte complained that his foreign critics had depicted him as “a cousin of Hitler” and said that they were wrong to criticize him now that he was the country’s president. Doing so put all Filipinos “to shame,” he said. The president’s latest provocative remarks came days after he cast doubt on the Philippines’ longstanding military ties with the United States, announcing in Vietnam that the countries’ coming joint military exercises would be their last. Officials in his government later said that all military agreements with the United States were still in effect and that they were awaiting “clarification and guidance” from Mr. Duterte. While in Vietnam, Mr. Duterte also said he had received information that “the C. I. A. is planning to kill me. ” Officials in his government and at the United States Embassy in Manila declined to comment on that statement. A spokeswoman for the embassy, Molly Koscina, said Friday that the United States would continue to work with the Philippines to “uphold our shared democratic values. ” She said the relationship was built on “shared sacrifices for democracy and human rights, and strong and societal ties, and obviously we’d like to see that continue. ” | 1 |
When Indira Islas was in third grade at Centennial Arts Academy, a public elementary school in Gainesville, Ga. she decided it was time to get serious. It was 2006, and she was in the lowest reading group in her class. She had been in that group since arriving two years earlier, speaking no English, in Gainesville, a city of 38, 000 just northeast of Atlanta’s booming outer suburbs. But being at the bottom went against everything she believed about herself. “I wanted to be with the smart kids,” she recalls. Starting the year before, in second grade, she read every volume of the “Magic Tree House” books in her library, a series about two ordinary siblings who climb into their backyard treehouse and to Pompeii, the Wild West, the ice age, feudal Japan and beyond. “I absolutely loved them,” she says. “It was like going on adventures all over the world. ” It was also the opposite of her own life. Indira left Mexico for the United States at age 6 with her parents and two younger sisters. Her mother cleaned houses when she wasn’t caring for the children — there would eventually be seven of them — and her father worked in construction, and there was no money for lessons or soccer clubs, let alone traveling. “I’d hear about trips and experiences of my white friends, and I remember thinking: I’ll never go to the beach or Disney World for spring break,” Indira says. Her parents told her that education was all that mattered, and she had to spend all her free time inside, reading and writing. “I tell my children this country is a blessing to all the people living here,” her mother told me. “If you have the opportunity to be good, it’s very important to take it. ” Indira took this advice to heart. By the time she was in fifth grade, her reading skills had improved so much that she tested into the top reading group. By middle school, she consistently got A’s, which qualified her for a celebratory school trip every time report cards came out. “They rewarded us by taking us skating or bowling,” she says. “I felt like I was so smart, just getting the chance to go out for the whole school day with friends. That’s when I said: ‘I can make it. ’’u2009” Indira began to throw herself into everything. At recess, she played soccer and basketball, competing so fiercely that everyone took notice. Boys usually picked other boys for their teams, and white kids tended to favor other white kids. But everyone started picking Indira. In middle school, she was on the track team, running races. Her coach was stunned by her determination. In meets, even when she won her event, she scolded herself unless she broke her previous record. After practices ended, she would keep running. “I wanted to think,” she says. “I’d stay after practice and run and run and run. ” Indira remembers understanding vaguely that it wasn’t just poverty that set her and her family apart. Her parents had been doctors in Mexico. She admired pictures in their dresser drawer of the two of them in their 20s standing together, tall and proud in their white coats — before they all fled the violence of drug gangs who were then taking over their home state, Guerrero. When she asked her parents why they were no longer doctors, they explained it was because they were not American citizens. It didn’t make sense to Indira. Why would her father have shed that beautiful crisp white coat for the fraying pants and shirts he now wore? Soon after Indira turned 13, in 2011, she was riding home from track practice with her mother when another car sideswiped the family’s Ford Expedition. The other driver, who was at fault, insisted on calling the police, according to Indira and a lawyer who assisted the family. Indira pleaded not to involve the police, explaining that her mother did not have a driver’s license because she was not an American citizen. (In Georgia and most other states, undocumented immigrants cannot obtain driver’s licenses.) But the driver said she needed a police report to get insurance to cover the damage to her car. A police officer arrived and asked for Indira’s mother’s license. When she said she did not have one — a state crime — she was told to get out of the car. Indira got out, too. She remembers two of her younger siblings sleeping in the back, one in a booster seat, one in a car seat. Two elders from the church they attended arrived to ask for mercy. She has seven children, they told the officer. He responded that he was simply enforcing the law. Indira’s mother turned to her and began to cry. “Indira, I don’t know what is going to happen,” she said. “They’re going to take me. ” Indira remembers remaining strangely calm. “When she was being handcuffed, I said: ‘Mom, everything is going to be O. K.’’u2009” Indira’s mother was held in Gainesville’s Hall County jail for three days, but that wasn’t the most frightening part for the family. Hall is one of four counties in Georgia that have a formal agreement to report arrests of undocumented immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security, which means that infractions as minor as a bulb above a license plate can spiral into deportation proceedings. Indira’s mother says that her charge of driving without a license ultimately led to a referral to immigration court and a deportation order instructing her to leave the country within 30 days. She stayed, slipping into the shadows. Every day since, Indira says, she and her siblings have feared that their mother would be deported. It would take only one more traffic stop. “That woke me up,” Indira says. “Until then, I thought the world was happy. ” In fact, she now realized, it was only American citizens who seemed truly happy. “It must feel pretty good, I guess, to not have to worry about whether your family could be taken away any day. ” Indira has wanted to be a doctor for almost as long as she can remember. When she was 10, her family was shopping for groceries at Sam’s Club, and she spotted a large book about human anatomy. She became so excited about it that her parents bought it for her birthday, even though it was well above her reading level — and their price range. She began working her way through it, mesmerized, and when she got stuck, her mother would explain whatever had stumped her. She was determined to go to college and medical school and fulfill her parents’ interrupted dream. In her junior year, Indira began researching college options. She would be a strong applicant. She was consistently at or near the top of her class she was on the track and soccer teams she volunteered over 1, 000 hours a year at the local hospital, a record in the history of the program and she led her school’s chapter of the Hispanic Organization Promoting Education (HOPE) which encouraged Latino students — who made up just over half the district’s population — to stay in school and graduate. She was distressed to discover that Georgia barred undocumented immigrants from attending its top public universities and charged them tuition at all others — triple the rate for citizen residents. She then turned to researching financial aid and learned that Congress barred her from accessing federal Pell grants, loans, scholarships and jobs — the most common forms of assistance for students. At first, she greeted this as just another set of obstacles to surmount, but as time went on, she began to despair. She would retreat to the classroom of her science teacher, Teresa Leach, who had become her mentor, in need of encouragement. “There were a couple of times when I just cried to her because I was tired,” she said. “I questioned myself if it was all worth the effort. ” All the while, Indira told me, she held onto her religious conviction that God had a plan, and that she must respect it. At a college fair attended by representatives of numerous Georgia colleges, she asked admissions officers what kind of help was available for undocumented students. No one had any to offer her. She switched her focus to private colleges and was admitted to Atlanta’s Agnes Scott, which she says awarded her $20, 000 annually in financial aid, less than half of what she needed. She researched private scholarships and found two for undocumented students, but she was selected for neither. She was awarded seven small scholarships, which totaled $10, 000, enough to go to a nearby public commuter college for only one semester at the tuition rate. Last May, Indira attended her graduation ceremony at Gainesville High School, but she had nowhere to go next. In every picture from that day, she wears a wide smile, but she was in pain inside, particularly when she caught a glimpse of her mother in the crowd, looking distraught. Unable to bring herself to celebrate with friends, she went home to be with her family. Days later, a friend told her about a philanthropic organization called TheDream. US, which was offering undocumented students full scholarships to Delaware State University or Eastern Connecticut State University. The application was demanding, and only 76 students would be chosen. She poured herself into the essays, spending hours composing them alongside an English teacher, Cindy Lloyd. She applied to Delaware State, a historically black college in Dover, five hours closer to home than Eastern Connecticut. In late June, she received an email from TheDream. US. “I saw ‘Congratulations,’’u2009” she remembers, “and I read no more. ” In late August, Indira made the drive with her parents from Gainesville to Delaware State in unusual silence. She was thinking hard about each of her six younger siblings, wondering how they would fare without her. Over breakfast at a Cracker Barrel in South Carolina, when her mother pressed her about how she was feeling, she talked only of her concerns about not being at home to help everyone. When she arrived on campus — a flat expanse of grassy courtyards and buildings amid strip malls, auto dealers and chain restaurants just beyond Dover’s historic capital area — she found 33 other “opportunity scholars,” just as worried and hopeful as she was. All of them were assigned to a dorm about a quarter of a mile from the D. S. U. campus, a former Sheraton hotel acquired a few years earlier by the university as part of an expansion. They bonded instantly, traveling as a posse from classes to the library to the cafeteria, often ending up together late at night in the dorm lobby or in a lounge that had been a large hotel suite on the second floor. In their first month on campus, the opportunity scholars were invited to a welcoming ceremony in the school’s Martin Luther King Jr. Student Center with Gov. Jack Markell the Democratic senator Tom Carper Donald Graham, a founder of TheDream. US and D. S. U. ’s president, Harry Williams. “This is not just an opportunity for you it is an opportunity for the state of Delaware,” Markell told them. “It is sad to see your own home state reject such talent and potential. ” He pronounced himself “thrilled that you’re here. ” It was the first time many of the students could recall being welcomed anywhere. “We felt rejection our whole lives from our own states,” Indira said. “We were here only three weeks, and we already met the governor and the senator. It felt like saying ‘Haha!’ to Georgia. ” Of the 34 opportunity scholars enrolled at D. S. U. 28 are from Mexico and one each is from Ecuador, El Salvador, Peru, Gabon, Gambia and Trinidad and Tobago. Their families are a composite portrait of the economic forces that have drawn undocumented immigrants to the nation’s small towns and metropolitan heartland. Their parents work in poultry plants, on factory lines, in warehouses, on construction sites, in restaurants they clean and paint houses and schools, tend gardens. “They make everything look perfect for the tourists,” Yulma Lopez, who left Mexico at age 3, said of her parents’ work for a landscaping company in Charleston, S. C. Almost all their parents work illegally, but many pay income taxes, having obtained federal numbers. And some, including Indira’s father, have secured temporary federal permission to work and drive lawfully. While most of the students are 18 or 19, typical for college freshmen, some have worked for years in hopes of one day saving enough for college. Olivia Bekale, who is 27 and grew up in Baton Rouge, arrived in Louisiana from Gabon as a child. She graduated from high school in 2008 with a 3. 9 G. P. A. from the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts, a prestigious boarding school for top achievers. Unable to afford college, she cycled from one position to the next — server at the Melting Pot, a fondue restaurant retail sales consultant for Sprint agent for Marriott pharmacy tech for Walgreens. Olivia, who had wanted to be a doctor since an aunt died of AIDS when she was 5, had been out of high school for eight years when she learned of the opportunity scholarship she applied immediately. All but one of the students were enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, also known as DACA. Created in 2012 by an executive action, DACA allowed teenagers and young adults who came to the United States illegally as children with their parents to register with the government and in turn receive a renewable protection against deportation, along with work permits and Social Security numbers. Most of the students, like Indira, signed up at age 15, as soon as they were eligible. With DACA, Indira, who is now 18, was able to get a driver’s license and a job at a Publix supermarket when she was in high school, working 20 hours a week as a cashier and bagger. Being able to work and drive legally, free of the fears her mother faced, and fitting in with her classmates, Indira says, was “living the American dream. ” With her income from Publix, she even was able to get braces for her teeth. The starting point for all of their dreams was education, and the quest for it has been central to the experience of undocumented young people since long before Indira and her classmates were born. In the late 1970s, when undocumented immigrants had yet to move in large numbers beyond border states, Texas passed a law authorizing local school districts to ban them from public schools or charge them tuition. In a landmark decision in Plyler v. Doe in 1982, a narrowly divided Supreme Court struck down the law, finding that undocumented children had a constitutional right to free public education. The opinion blamed a dysfunctional immigration system for creating the crisis by failing to keep out undocumented immigrants or provide them a path to citizenship. “Already disadvantaged as a result of poverty, lack of ability and undeniable racial prejudices, these children, without an education, will become permanently locked into the lowest socioeconomic class,” Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority, quoting the opinion. The case also introduced the argument that undocumented children were legally blameless, unlike their parents: “The classification at issue deprives a group of children of the opportunity for education afforded all other children simply because they have been assigned a legal status due to a violation of law by their parents,” Justice Lewis Powell wrote in a concurring opinion. Undocumented children poured into the nation’s schools over the next generation, and as they reached college age, they coalesced into a movement, advocating access to higher education as well as full citizenship. In 2001, they began calling themselves Dreamers, now an estimated 2. 1 million young immigrants who have grown up as Americans in almost every way except for their passports. The name came from the Dream Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) introduced in Congress in 2001 by Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, and Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, and for which activists fought for over a decade. The measure, which would have put undocumented children on a path to citizenship, never passed, but the vast network of Dreamers became a compelling political force. In 2001, hundreds of them turned out to testify in Texas in favor of legislation to allow undocumented residents to pay college tuition if they graduated from Texas high schools and lived in the state for three years. “Something magical happened when those kids told their stories,” says the former Texas state representative Rick Noriega, a Democrat who sponsored the bill. “It was a humanizing of a very real issue dealing with children’s dreams and hopes. Every heart on that committee was touched, Republicans and Democrats. ” The legislation passed both houses almost unanimously and was signed by Rick Perry, then governor of Texas and now President Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary. Texas became the first state, followed quickly by California, to allow Dreamers to pay tuition. Today, 21 states charge Dreamers the same tuition as legal residents, including six carried by Trump — Florida, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah and Texas. In many of those states, however, the issue has turned politically treacherous. In Texas, efforts to repeal the tuition law come closer to passing every year, and Noriega says there is no chance the original measure would pass today. The leading national opponents of tuition for Dreamers include the Republican senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s choice for attorney general, and the secretary of state of Kansas, Kris Kobach, a Republican who was a leader of Trump’s transition team on immigration. Each argues that students who are in the United States illegally should not get a public benefit in any state that is denied to a citizen from another state. In other words, if Dreamers pay tuition in Texas, citizen students next door in Arkansas and Oklahoma — or Massachusetts, for that matter — should have the same right. “How much sense does that make, to have people here illegally, and they have more benefits than those who are here legally?” Sessions asked in a Senate floor statement. Kobach used the same argument to bring lawsuits against tuition for Dreamers in Kansas and California. Judges found no legal basis for the claims and dismissed the cases. The larger debate over how to treat an estimated 11 million immigrants who came here illegally has been at a stalemate for decades, with advocates seeking a “path to citizenship” for families who have been in the country for years and opponents denouncing “amnesty” for people who broke the law to enter the country. Amid hardening resistance in Congress to immigration reform, Dreamers brought pressure on Obama — including and hunger strikes at his 2012 campaign offices — to use his executive power to create DACA. The program, announced on June 15, 2012, the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Plyler decision, proved transformative for Dreamers. They have entered college, taken jobs, received driver’s licenses, bought cars. They now fly on planes, passing effortlessly through airport security. They still lack legal immigration status, but no longer are they exactly undocumented. “DACAmented,” many have called themselves. Even in states where they pay tuition, Dreamers still struggle to afford college because they are disproportionately and have no access to federal financial aid. Fewer than 10 percent of Dreamers who graduate from high school enroll in college. At a time when college graduates earn 70 percent more than those without degrees, these numbers conjure the 1982 warning by the Supreme Court that undocumented children could become a permanent underclass. In response, a handful of philanthropies have adopted the cause of sending students with DACA status to college. The biggest of these, TheDream. US, has raised $90 million to eventually finance 4, 000 students at public colleges, with significant contributions from Donald Graham, former publisher and chief executive of The Washington Post, and his family Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Bill and Melinda Gates the executive William Ackman and Michael Bloomberg, among others. (I was a reporter at The Washington Post from 1980 to 2008.) In 2014, TheDream. US began offering Dreamers full scholarships in states that charge them tuition. Last year, in partnership with Delaware and Connecticut, the organization created the program for students from the other 29 states, financed by $41 million in philanthropy from Graham and his family and two anonymous donors. The governors of Delaware and Connecticut agreed to charge roughly tuition rates for the 34 scholars at Delaware State and the 42 at Eastern Connecticut State — a total of $80, 000 per student for tuition, room and board for four years. In an effort to political opposition, Graham says, the philanthropy works only with schools, like Delaware State and Eastern Connecticut State, that have excess capacity, so that undocumented students are not displacing citizens. And private donors pay all expenses, so that no state dollars are spent. Still, when The Delaware State News ran an article in September about the D. S. U. opportunity scholars, the online comments complained that undocumented immigrants, not citizens, were benefiting. “Trump isn’t perfect, but I will vote for him because he puts Americans FIRST,” wrote a reader named John Huff of Magnolia, Del. “There are plenty of kids who are citizens who have the same dream and should come first. ” And as news of the scholarship spread on the Delaware campus this fall, a number of students told Dreamers that they resented that their own families had to go into debt for a portion of their education costs while the DACA students got full scholarships. By then, Trump had mobilized anger in large swaths of the country, having kicked off his campaign criticizing Mexican immigrants — “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” — and vowing to build a wall on the border to keep them out. In stump speeches, he promised to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants and, in his first 100 days in office, to terminate DACA, labeling it “illegal amnesty. ” Both vows became instant applause lines. Indira declared her major in biological sciences at the beginning of the semester and started a demanding curriculum with six classes, including biology and chemistry, both requiring labs. Her parents had insisted she not take a job, in order to devote herself to education, freeing up four hours a night that she had spent working in high school. With that extra time, she found the academic challenges manageable. Much harder was living apart from her family for the first time in her life. Her mother texted her daily. “Good morning, hija,” she wrote one recent morning, using the Spanish word for daughter. “May God bless you today in school. Please be kind to everyone. ” That night, over FaceTime, Indira talked with two of her younger sisters, who like her were born in Mexico and are undocumented. One, a junior in high school, is already on a quest for college scholarships. She and Indira came up with potential essay ideas and discussed her résumé. Then Indira helped the other, a freshman who is the smartest of all the family’s children, Indira says, with physics homework. On weekends, she FaceTimes with her four youngest siblings — a sixth grader, a fourth grader, a third grader and a first grader — all of whom were born in Georgia and are citizens. Separation from family, from home, even from Mexican food made most of the opportunity scholars profoundly lonely. Estephany Martinez, a petite major with long black hair, couldn’t stop thinking about her sisters in the first weeks. “Whenever we came home from school, all four sisters would sit in the living room and do our homework and talk and watch TV,” she recalled wistfully of her life in Winder, Ga. In Delaware, “I didn’t have anybody that cared for me. I didn’t have anyone to come home to. ” In early September, she summoned all the scholars to a gathering in the dorm’s lounge. “All right, you guys, we’re going to be here for each other,” she said. “That part of our lives — being undocumented — is critical to who we are. We have to share our stories. ” Everyone crowded in, sitting on the sofa, spilling onto the floor, sitting shoulder to shoulder on counters that once were part of a kitchenette, sprawling into one another’s space. Carlos Gonzales of Manteo, N. C. a lanky and cheerful marketing major whose mother is a restaurant cook, broke down crying when he recalled the violence that drove his family from Mexico City. He, his mother and his younger sister moved to North Carolina when he was 7. It was his mother who encouraged him, beginning in elementary school, to reach for college. “I don’t want you to live the life we’re living now,” she told him. In high school, he was an honor student and varsity wrestler and runner, working nights and weekends at McDonald’s in his Outer Banks town. When he received the email telling him he was an opportunity scholar, he said: “I hugged my mom and cried for two hours. The only reason I stopped was I had to go to work. ” Indira told the harrowing story that led to her own family’s departure from Mexico. In 2004, when she was 6, three masked gunmen broke into their home, which housed her parents’ clinic, and robbed them of everything — money, jewelry, a new computer, a television, cameras and medications. They filed a report with the police, they said, who didn’t investigate, in deference to cartels then taking over Guerrero, now the most violent state in Mexico. An uncle of her father’s already had been killed. In subsequent years, a cousin of her mother’s, a veterinarian, was kidnapped and never found. Two nephews disappeared. Her mother’s sister has been kidnapped twice — most recently this past November — and returned only after her family paid steep ransoms. Weeks after the robbery, Indira’s family of five arrived in the United States on a tourist visa that her father procured a month earlier in hopes of taking everyone to Disney World. Instead, they went to Gainesville, where her father’s brother worked in construction — one of thousands of Mexican workers who flocked to the north Georgia community in the last 25 years, swelling the Hispanic population to more than 40 percent in 2013 from 8 percent in 1990. Indira said her parents are certain they would have been killed had they stayed. They decided to forfeit their careers for their family’s safety. “I no longer saw my future, but I saw my children’s future,” her father said to me. Antonio Patino, a major who is a lifeguard and plays bass and guitar in his spare time, told the group about riding with his family in their car in 2015 in Lawrenceville, Ga. when a police officer pulled them over, though none of them understood why. His father, who is undocumented and processes returns for a local manufacturer, was driving but did not have a license. Antonio and his mother, younger sister and brother all watched in terror as his father was handcuffed, placed in a police cruiser and driven off to jail. As it turned out, he was released the next day after paying a fine of more than $800 and was not referred to immigration court for further proceedings, but the incident shook Antonio’s sense of belonging in America. “I felt like I got slapped in the face just for living, trying to be a normal person in this beautiful country,” he said. “It feels like a hole inside me. ” He said he now found himself gripped with fears for his parents’ safety at random moments during his days at D. S. U. It is as if he has swapped roles with his mother and father. “Like I’m now the parent and they’re the child, and I’m worried for them,” he told me. “Not being there, all these swarm into my mind. What if out of nowhere they get pulled over again?” Calling them and hearing their voices usually comforts him. But after one such call, he said: “I went outside, and I had to cry a little. I was feeling like I couldn’t help them. ” A number of students shared the enormous sacrifices they had seen their parents make for them. Juan Chavez, 23, who grew up in Plymouth, Ind. and worked for five years after high school, told of his mother suffering a breakdown after her divorce from his father. He saw it as a response to the crushing instability of their lives, moving from one home to another in search of shelter. “She’s the strongest person I’ll ever know,” he said. “She’s my role model. My father figure as well as my mother. ” He continued: “I felt so helpless to make things better. I decided almost right then I’ll go to college and medical school if it takes me the rest of my life. ” He is now a psychology and major, intending to become a psychiatrist. On and on the students went until almost 3 a. m. the common threads in their stories drawing them closer. It was the first time most of them had talked openly about being undocumented, but instead of feeling exposed, they felt safer. Until then, Antonio had gone out of his way to avoid conversations with at D. S. U. about his scholarship, not wanting to have to explain that he got it because he was undocumented. The next day, though, he fell into conversation with a student who asked him how he happened to come all the way from Georgia to D. S. U. and he said without hesitation: “I got a scholarship. ” “What for?” “I’m undocumented,” Antonio said, surprised at how comfortable this felt. “O. K. man, that’s cool,” the student said. After their long night talking, the scholars also better understood what had propelled them all for as long as they could remember. Throughout high school, the opportunity scholars watched undocumented friends and siblings give up and drop out, shamed and beaten down by public scorn over illegal immigration and the options awaiting even those who excelled in high school. But they kept on striving, steeled to the insults, positioning themselves for a breakthrough they couldn’t yet see. Now this all made sense. “This pain — it pushes us,” Estephany said. “It’s motivation. It has made me who I am. It makes me go through every day. ” “Now we know what drives us,” Indira said. One morning in at 9:50 a. m. 10 minutes before Indira’s class was scheduled to start, she and two other opportunity scholars were already ensconced in the three center seats, notebooks, pens and textbooks at the ready. Indira was wearing a Harvard sweatshirt that a classmate bought for her when their A. P. class visited Boston. (Indira couldn’t afford to go.) “I’m going to get there one day,” she said with a confident smile. Most of the other students didn’t arrive until class was about to begin — or later — and there was little competition for the front rows. A similar scene unfolded that morning in the ultramodern science center, in class, where Antonio and Jose Reyes Rios, another major, sat front and center with an classmate named Hanqaamo Lintisio, who is from Maryland and has a track scholarship. The three had formed a study group and tutored one another so effectively that they all scored above 100 on the midterm. (They nailed the bonus question.) Theirs were the only A’s in the class. The Dreamers gather daily at a long Formica table in a D. S. U. cafeteria for food and conversation. At lunch, Carla Moreno propped her English composition textbook, “Patterns for College Writing,” against a napkin holder, securing it with an apple. She paged through a chapter while eating her salad and chili dog. “It’s just a quiz,” she said, “but I want to keep my A. ” “I deal with a lot of students, and I feel like the Dreamers are at a different level,” says Kevin Noriega, the adviser for their scholarships. “They’re saying, ‘I’ve got to make this happen because it’s my only option. ’’u2009” Of the 488 scholars funded by TheDream. US who began college in 2014, 94 percent remain enrolled after their sophomore year research shows that only 66 percent of college students nationally return after one year. “This is a population with retention rates like Harvard’s,” Donald Graham says. Because beneficiaries of TheDream. US have full rides, they avoid a common problem faced by other disadvantaged students: running short of money for costs not covered by Pell grants or other forms of aid. One night in October before a biology exam, Indira went to the D. S. U. athletic center for a workout to relieve stress. She was armed with a stack of homemade flash cards and her iPhone, on which she had downloaded discussions of test topics from various websites. While pounding out three miles on the treadmill, she flipped through her study cards, then plugged in her earbuds for a YouTube lecture on glycolysis. Returning to her dorm, she sat down at her desk for a final review. Hanging on the wall in front of her was a collage of family photographs. One showed the whole family of nine around their dinner table. “When I’m struggling, I look at a picture of my mom or dad, and I say, ‘I’m working for that person,’’u2009” she said. That night, her studying complete, she took a last look at her parents’ picture and fell asleep listening to recordings of her biology professor’s lectures. She got an A on the exam. Indira’s determination to become a doctor requires more than a little imagination, because under current law in Georgia and many other states, licenses to practice medicine are reserved for citizens and legal residents. “I’m not planning my life based on the way things are today,” she said. “I’m thinking of the future. ” In her eyes, America is a land of opportunity. Over Columbus Day weekend, she visited Washington for the first time with her roommate, Karen Baltazar, who is from Lawrenceville, Ga. and also wants to be a doctor. At the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Indira stood underneath Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear — her arms raised high above her head, as if exulting in the message. Her smile was radiant. Karen snapped a picture, and Indira posted it on her Facebook page along with the caption, “I have never forgotten the reasons my parents brought me to this great country. ” Such unsinkable optimism, which I heard from many D. S. U. Dreamers in the early fall, is hard to maintain, and many of the estimated 65, 000 undocumented immigrants who graduate from high school every year — and thousands who drop out — simply can’t muster it. In a recent book, “Lives in Limbo,” Roberto G. Gonzales, an assistant professor at Harvard’s graduate school of education, writes that academically successful Dreamers are far outnumbered by those who become casualties of “the deeper and more consequences of being undocumented: living in poverty, having parents and family members who also bear the burdens of being undocumented, watching friends moving forward but being unable to join them, watching opportunities pass you by, navigating a world of exclusions while constantly looking over your shoulder. ” At least some of the opportunity scholars’ optimism last fall came from their assumption, based on reported polls, that Hillary Clinton would be the next president. They were heartened by her speeches about keeping families together and pursuing comprehensive immigration reform. At the very least, they were confident that DACA would remain in effect under her leadership. Though they didn’t believe Trump could win, he unnerved them with his speeches branding Mexicans criminals who stole Americans’ jobs and lived off their tax dollars. They took this rhetoric as a personal affront and were horrified by the hatred they saw on the faces of those who cheered his words. “The only thing that depresses me is so many people support him,” Jose Reyes Rios, the major, who aspires to work at Google one day, said in late September. On election night, a group of Dreamers gathered around the TV in the dorm lobby, many of them studying as they watched returns. Indira had exams the next day in math and biology and arrived equipped with her flash cards. The mood turned dark after Trump won Florida. Everyone’s mind flooded with his vows that they had discounted until now — to revoke DACA, to deputize local police departments to enforce federal immigration laws. “We will issue detainers for all illegal immigrants who are arrested for any crime whatsoever, and they will be placed into immediate removal proceedings,” Trump said last summer in Arizona. As all of them knew well, these crimes included one of their parents’ daily activities — driving without a license. If DACA disappeared, and with it their Social Security numbers, their own driver’s licenses would be worthless. So would their federal work authorization, meaning most would lose the jobs that paid for their books, phones, clothes, travel home and anything else they needed. By 1 a. m. Indira became too distressed to concentrate. Olivia Bekale was one of four opportunity scholars who watched until Trump was declared the . “We were just looking at each other and crying,” she says. “We hugged each other and went to our rooms. ” On the Sunday after the election, when they gathered in the dorm lobby, the opportunity scholars were struggling with something unfamiliar: despair. They had registered for DACA with the Department of Homeland Security, which now knew exactly where they were. “Life is going to be like it is for our parents,” said Victor Hernandez of Coats, N. C. stunned and shaking his head. “They could come pick us up and take us away any time. ” Social media brought aftershocks for all of them as they discovered that many of their best friends voted for Trump. Almost all of Antonio’s swim teammates in Lawrenceville had Trump filters on their Facebook and Snapchat profile pictures. “All I could think was: You voted against me,” he said. “What did I do to you?” The day after the election, Indira couldn’t bear to call her mother until the afternoon. Instead, she confided her fears in text messages to her former science teacher, Teresa Leach. “I’ve never been so disappointed in this country,” she wrote. “I’ve never felt so powerless. . .. I’m scared about my family, my mom. . .. Not sure if I’ll even get my degree, much less go to medical school here. ” When Indira finally did call home, her mother insisted she was not afraid and told Indira that education was now even more important. Several of Indira’s friends back home told her they doubted Trump would follow through on all his campaign promises, and in any case, they couldn’t imagine he would target her. “These are people who helped me get to where I am, who remind me they love me, and I love them,” she said. “But they’ll never understand what we feel. They say, ‘He won’t do that.’ Do they think he’s going to send back all the immigrants except Indira?” A lifeline of sorts arrived the week after the election, when the students received letters from TheDream. US, Governor Markell and the president of D. S. U. pledging to stand behind their scholarships no matter what became of DACA. Donald Graham lined up attorneys to represent them if anyone challenged their right to be in school. But their bigger fears were for their parents. Antonio and Indira went home for Christmas to find their families filled with trepidation. “We’re trying to be invisible, trying to stay hidden,” Antonio’s father said, “do only the things we have to do to live, like go to work, go buy groceries. ” During the 2015 holiday season, they took a driving tour of the Christmas lights and celebrated New Year’s Eve in downtown Lawrenceville. “Now we can’t go to any festivities because for us it’s very dangerous,” his mother told me in their apartment in a complex in Buford, Ga. “There are a lot of police there. ” Antonio’s father said he worries about driving his daughter, Litzy, 15, home from her practice at rush hour, when the police presence increases. Litzy was born in Georgia, and he thought of asking her to leave the team until she is old enough to drive because, as a citizen, she will be able to get a driver’s license. “But then I said to myself: ‘No! That’s crazy. That’s why we’re here — for our kids. So they can take advantage of every opportunity. ’’u2009” He continues to ferry her — carefully — during rush hour. Indira found her mother more frightened than at any time since receiving her deportation order. Her mother says she has no choice but to drive when someone at her church asks for help, when her children call for rides home and when she is needed at a charity medical clinic where she volunteers as a doctor’s assistant and translator. “Life changed after the election,” she told me in December, in her living room decorated with framed academic awards for each child. She was surrounded by her kids, who listened carefully. “The children know I don’t have a driver’s license. They know at any time maybe the police will take me again. ‘If I can’t come back,’ I tell them, ‘you have to go to school every day. You have to study hard — even harder. ’’u2009” By the time Indira and the other opportunity scholars returned to campus in January, all of them had come to the same conclusion: There was now only one thing they could control — their education. “The only way we can fight back is to excel in school,” Indira wrote to me in a text message. She felt weary in the aftermath of the election, but when she had this epiphany, she said: “I wasn’t tired anymore. I had that drive, that hunger to just come out on top. I was angry. I was staying at the library longer, going to the gym a lot more. ” Estephany Martinez focused on her life’s mission. “My goal is being a police chief — something that makes my voice louder,” said the major. “I have to educate myself to get there. I want to show people who don’t believe in us: ‘I got all the way here. I’m starting from the bottom with education, and I’m going to get there. ’’u2009” As they settled into the semester, they monitored everything Trump and his close allies were saying about immigration, their moods shifting with each utterance. Back in December, they felt hopeful when Trump, in his interview as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, said approving things about Dreamers and indicated that he would deport serious criminals before other undocumented immigrants. They were discouraged in January when Jeff Sessions, in his confirmation hearing to become attorney general, appeared unconcerned about the consequences of revoking DACA. They took heart two days later when Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, said in a CNN meeting that he wanted Congress to pass legislation making Dreamers “right with the law. ” Indira and other Georgia scholars were exhilarated in early January when a state court ordered the Board of Regents to allow DACA holders to pay tuition. But their hopes collapsed when a state appeals court stayed the decision Trump appeared likely to revoke DACA before Georgia Dreamers could reap the benefits. “I said: ‘I don’t know what’ll happen next, but we’re here in this place, and the only way we can win is to succeed in our education,’’u2009” Indira told me. Soon after classes started, the opportunity scholars learned that their collective grade point average for the first semester was a 3. 76. Six of the 34 students had achieved a perfect 4. 0. Indira was one of them. “Succeeding for me is how I can get my revenge,” she told me over the phone, interrupting her biology homework for a few minutes. “I want to break the stereotype of us being here taking jobs away and not helping the economy. I want Trump to see we’re the total opposite of what he thinks. ” | 1 |
UNITED NATIONS — The shock is gone. Panic is subsiding. Now, diplomats who represent the nations of the world are entering what one described as the third stage of grief: figuring out how to deal with President Trump. They’re scrambling to speak with his advisers and poring over his Twitter posts — or if they’re old school, ordering their minions to print out lists of presidential outbursts. They’re watching anxiously how he reacts to a series of tests (military provocations by separatists in Ukraine, for instance) while trying to parse the contradictory statements coming out of his administration (what exactly is the United States’ view on Russia? ). And they’re counting on his United Nations envoy, Nikki R. Haley, to be a coolheaded adviser, even as they wonder whether she, his critic, has her mercurial boss’s ear. Their doubts surfaced late Friday over the abruptly annulled appointment of a Palestinian leader for a senior United Nations post. Diplomats said they had been led to believe the appointment of the Palestinian, Salam Fayyad, had been approved by all Security Council members — only to be greeted with a statement from Ms. Haley’s office, quashing the appointment. The United States does not recognize Palestine as a state, the statement read, raising questions about whether Ms. Haley had been overridden by the White House. So far, she has revealed little of her world views, except an opening salvo that did not go down very well among her peers. “For those who don’t have our back, we’re taking names,” she said of America’s allies in her first remarks at the United Nations headquarters, and then repurposed it into a hashtag: #TakingNames. So far on Mr. Trump’s watch, Iran and North Korea have carried out ballistic missile tests, Israel has expanded settlements and fighting has escalated between Ukraine and rebels — all regarded as early tests for the White House. His travel ban on seven nations has given ballast to the Islamic State, his somersaults on Taiwan are seen to have strengthened China’s hand, and his unpleasant exchanges with the leaders of close allies like Mexico and Australia have left many diplomats wondering whether they can count on the world’s most powerful nation as a reliable partner. Mr. Trump’s supporters see his edicts and outbursts as perfectly consistent with his campaign promise to upend the establishment, reassert America’s primacy and put all on notice not to trifle with him — a kind of chaos theory of management to leave everyone guessing, all the time. For America’s friends in the world, the uncertainty is complicated by not knowing exactly whom to talk to. The warrens of the State Department are unusually empty. Obama administration officials have packed up new appointments have yet to be made. And a series of contradictory statements have emerged from cabinet officials about crucial issues — not least Russia. Mr. Trump has continued to express his admiration for his counterpart in the Kremlin, Vladimir V. Putin. Yet Ms. Haley has taken a different posture. In both her confirmation hearing and in her first open remarks in the Security Council, she condemned Russia’s “aggressive actions” in Ukraine and insisted that United States sanctions on Moscow would remain. Several Western envoys breathed a sigh of relief, but not without doubts. Was she speaking for herself, or for the administration? Was the inconsistency deliberate, or did it reflect a lack of consensus? Who is setting United States policy, and whom should they be talking to? “Unanswerable right now,” advised Kathleen Hicks, a Pentagon official under President Barack Obama and now a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “They’re smartest to have multiple points of entry. Backups to backups. ” Ms. Haley will have to weigh in on difficult, contentious issues that are already on the United Nations’ agenda: how to save South Sudan from what could be a genocide, say, or whether to punish the president of Syria, Bashar for unleashing chemical weapons on his people, or how to stanch the spread of terrorism in West Africa. Yet she has not expressed opinions on much. On Twitter, she posted selfies with her husband, Michael, and a YouTube video of Billy Joel singing “New York State of Mind. ” She admitted to being excited to see the movie “Deepwater Horizon,” and offered a new hashtag: #WeekendsInNYC. On the last Sunday of January, as Mr. Trump’s travel ban left immigrants and refugees stranded across the world, Ms. Haley wrote a Twitter post about her husband driving up to New York with the family’s pets, including two frogs and a fish. On Saturday night, after North Korea tested a missile, Ms. Haley posted a Twitter message about her admiration for Joan Jett, the 1980s rock star. What kind of influence she may have on the White House remains unknown. She is far from being a confidante of Mr. Trump’s, and it’s unclear how much sway she will have over him on any of the big crises facing the world. “Nikki Haley will be a perfectly normal politician sent to be ambassador,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a former Bush administration official. Mr. Trump, he warned, has “instincts and prejudices which are out of the norm of American diplomatic belief and practice. ” The diplomatic corps is queuing up to see her — and those who score face time are wasting no time sharing it. “The #SpecialRelationship comes to @UN,” the British ambassador, Matthew Rycroft, posted on Twitter, along with a photo of the two of them shoulder to shoulder. “Very positive meeting,” offered the Ukrainian ambassador, Volodymyr Y. Yelchenko, posting a picture of his own. At a crowded reception one recent evening, one diplomat described the first weeks of the Trump presidency as “surreal,” as though he were describing a Luis Buñuel movie. Then he spotted Ms. Haley and deftly snaked through the crowd to introduce himself. I spoke to more than a dozen diplomats for this article, and nearly all described Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, as a natural politician and a refreshing contrast to the president. “Cordial,” one envoy said. “Businesslike,” said another. “We need to find a way to engage with the new administration, particularly with Ambassador Haley, and to explore with them what we can do together,” said João Vale de Almeida, the envoy representing the European Union’s 28 member nations. “In doing so, we should try to avoid dangers and pitfalls. ” Vitaly I. Churkin, the Russian ambassador and perhaps Ms. Haley’s most important colleague on the Council, complimented her “very powerful record” as governor. On Twitter, he said cryptically that he looked forward to working with her according to the “ of their capitals. ” (Her boss, in Washington, has lavished praise on his, in Moscow.) Few people at the United Nations need to be on her good list more than the man who heads the world body, António Guterres. Mr. Trump has dismissed Mr. Guterres’s entire operation as a social club. Republicans in Congress have threatened to pull funding. And Ms. Haley has made it clear that she intends to scrutinize how the United Nations spends its money and eliminate things that do not serve United States interests, while also taking pains to say she would not take a “slash and burn” approach. The United States pays for more than a fifth of the United Nations’ core budget, and controls key jobs in the world body’s system. So Mr. Guterres must strike a balance between keeping United States officials on board and not being seen as subservient to United States interests. He faced that challenge over Mr. Trump’s travel ban. Mr. Guterres was criticized as not speaking out against it directly enough, quickly enough. Finally, he told reporters that the restrictions “violate our basic principles” and called for them to be discontinued. Mr. Guterres is a former socialist prime minister of Portugal. Ms. Haley is a conservative from the American South. But both are politicians, as Richard Gowan, a research fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, pointed out. And, he argued, they could help each other — Ms. Haley in prodding him to show that America gets value at the United Nations, Mr. Guterres by using pressure from her to make the reforms he thinks are necessary. As Mr. Gowan put it in a recent essay, “Their political fortunes are inseparable. ” | 1 |
Dienstag, 8. November 2016 Trump froh, dass er sich ab morgen endlich nicht mehr zurückhalten muss New York (dpo) - Bald kann er wieder ganz so sein wie er ist: Nach Monaten taktischer Zurückhaltung und höchster Achtsamkeit auf Seriosität und Political Correctness freut sich Donald Trump eigenen Angaben zufolge bereits auf die Zeit nach der Präsidentschaftswahl – ganz unabhängig von deren Ausgang. "Egal ob ich gewinne oder verliere: Ab morgen kann ich endlich wieder ich selbst sein und muss mich nicht mehr ständig zusammenreißen", freute sich Trump heute in einem Interview mit dem Fernsehsender Fox News. "Diese ständige Rücksichtnahme war in den letzten Monaten echt anstrengend. Ich musste wirklich jedes Wort auf die Goldwaage legen, damit ich niemanden beleidige." Zu mehreren Bevölkerungsgruppen wären Trump noch ganz andere Dinge eingefallen, hätte er sich nicht mit aller Kraft beherrscht: "Gerade Mexikaner habe ich betont sachlich als 'Mörder und Vergewaltiger' beschrieben, da hätte ich durchaus auch ausfallend werden können", so Trump. Vom Wahlkampf jedenfalls hat der Geschäftsmann die Nase gestrichen voll: "Wissen Sie, wievielen Frauen, die glatte Zehns waren, ich nicht an die Pussy greifen konnte, weil ich Kandidat war? Meine Tic-Tac-Packung von letztem November ist immer noch nicht aufgebraucht, weil ich so wenig geküsst habe. Was bin ich froh, wenn das alles endlich vorbei ist!" Dabei kann Trump auch einer möglichen Niederlage positive Aspekte abgewinnen. "Selbst wenn ich die Wahl verlieren sollte, bin ich immerhin wieder frei", erklärte er. "Ob ich dann so richtig vom Leder ziehe und das Land in einen Bürgerkrieg stürze oder einfach wieder wie früher die nackten Kandidatinnen meiner Schönheitswettbewerbe ausspanne, weiß ich nocht nicht. Ich würde aber auf jeden Fall das beste aus der Zeit machen und meine Freiheit genießen." Am liebsten würde er jedoch die Wahl gewinnen. "Selbst als berühmter Milliardär kann man sich nicht so austoben wie als US-Präsident. Das wird ein Feuerwerk! Wenn ich erstmal frei von dem Zwang bin, immer auf Umfragen achten zu müssen, beginnt der Spaß erst richtig. Mächtigster Mann der Welt sage ich da nur", so Trump mit einem Augenzwinkern. | 0 |
by Outis Philalithopoulos In yesterday’s episode of this series , Outis came up with an attractive synthesis about the trajectory of modern progressivism. He was then thrown into confusion by the arrival of a Phantom, and cryptic references to “neoliberalism’s intellectual and cultural border guard.” I felt like a snake, compelled to painfully tear away one skin after another. The outline of my conclusions was the same, but in the cold light of Reed’s words, things somehow appeared differently. Is it true that we have surpassed postmodernism? We still look negatively at right wingers and others who believe in non-trendy absolutes. We still pay lip service to the idea that other cultures are just as praiseworthy as upper middle class American liberal culture. But looking beneath the surface, it does seem like postmodernism has been consigned to the graveyard of history. But rather than post-postmodernists who have learned from the mistakes of postmodernism, we are neo-modernists who have successfully forgotten that postmodernism ever existed. Already in the 90s, parts of the left/liberal world were uncomfortable with postmodernism, and Wendy Brown argued that they had set up their own “reactionary foundationalism.” By that she meant that they had selected one aspect of their dogma, and then declared all attempts to interpret it critically to be subversive. Our newfound unity is based on two prongs. On the one hand, we have consolidated our alliance with key sectors of modern capitalism, and thereby cemented our branding as well-educated, intelligent people. It is working out wonderfully – but have we paid a price for it? Daniel Bell argued in 1976 ( The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism ) that conservatives supporting capitalism were thereby supporting a cultural engine that undermined the social values central to their conservatism. Have we, by letting the cultural arm of the economy fight our battles for us, clouded our ability to radically critique that economy? In the complex relationship between modern progressivism and the cultural sector of capitalism, who is using whom? On the other hand, we have fixed certain instances of suffering as foundational texts, and can now blast anyone who seems to doubt their centrality in understanding the world. Earlier attempts to create a liberal culture based on a consensus about oppression tended to produce a hodgepodge of groups that centrifugal forces could easily pull apart. What was different now? Maybe, as I had suggested to Foucault, the Internet had played a role. But 9/11 seemed relevant as well. As Osama bin Laden had hoped, the image of the planes striking the towers appeared on television as a dramatic flash of absolute reality. In the new rhetorical world thus created, “squishy” postmodernism came off as inane and decadent; meanwhile, neocon Republicans happily twitted liberals over their lack of moral clarity. The Right surged from one apparent victory to another, while liberals seethed with humiliation. Maybe there was no epistemological breakthrough that enabled us to answer the postmodernists’ gnawing doubts about objectivity. Maybe we changed the nature of liberalism, absorbed the stubborn moral clarity of Rush Limbaugh’s conservatism, and went on to forge a rough-and-ready consensus between unruly interest groups, simply because we believed we had to. Morality As stylized images of suffering inject us with potent shots of certainty, we become addicted to empathy with suffering, as an antidote for existential disorientation. This leads to a natural desire to expand our attention to micro-aggressions and hurtful ways of thinking. But then, if we commit to being on the side of people who experience micro-aggressions, almost everyone might be able to find something in their life that could qualify. And in fact, many groups for whom we feel little sympathy are not unwilling to talk about their pain and humiliation. We have dodged this trap by finding a principle that will disqualify unintended groups from empathy – that way we can classify their pain as notreal. The simple rule that does the trick is: “If a group has suffered something historical that we agree is really, unmistakably horrible , then it is also allowed to claim micro-aggressions as real.” We dress it up in academic language about what counts as “structural” oppression, but in simple words, the rule is, “if a group suffered, and we have canonized their suffering as a source of moral clarity for us , then they should be allowed to freely discover further incitements to suffering.” So in Judy’s movie, mocking older people, or rural people, or government employees, or overweight people, is all entirely acceptable , while carrying around fox repellent, thinking a sheep’s fur is fluffy, calling a bunny cute, or not supporting a baby fox who wants to be an elephant are all entirely unacceptable. T he principle isn’t that prejudice is wrong. The principle is that the latter examples are code for liberal flash points. I thought about something Brown said: In its emergence as a protest against marginalization or subordination, politicized identity […] instills its pain over its unredeemed history in the very foundation of its political claim […] Politicized identity enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future – for itself or others – that triumphs over this pain. By “instilling” pain at the center of our epistemological universe, we condemn ourselves to endless efforts to shuttle around, direct, and amplify that pain. Brown emphasized revenge as a key technique in dealing with pain: […] a will that makes not only a psychological but a political practice of revenge, […] an identity whose present past is one of insistently unredeemable injury. Zootopia offers plenty of examples of hurting people the way they hurt others, so they can see what it feels like, and learn. The response to Nick tricking Judy and telling her “it’s a hustle, sweetheart” is for her to trick him and then announce, “it’s a hustle, sweetheart.” The same line is then used on the evil female sheep at the end of the movie. The movie sees cultural insensitivity as not only the primary evil in the world, but also the most appropriate punishment – the final prison episode also came to mind, when I had laughed at the evil sheep’s anger at her wool getting touched. The culmination of Judy’s apology is announcing that she really is “just a dumb bunny” – her guilt is so great that she knows she deserves the pain of stereotyping. Brown worried about the insatiable dead end of “insistently irredeemable injury.” Here, though, modern liberal culture proposesa way out of the cycle of suffering and revenge – Judy models it for us in her apology to Nick. If the oppressor voluntarily decides to submit to the worst tortures the oppressed can inflict, and to bind herself as an instrument of his revenge, then he may choose to forgive her, making possible a triumph over pain. I had always thought that when people do something wrong, they should just stop caring about their own feelings and, like Judy, really, deeply apologize. In the movie, Nick had forgiven her. But in real life, if someone apologized like that, say in a professional context, and the other person chose to be unmerciful – what then? Imagining the Future Wendy Brown said that right wing fundamentalists were trying to “foreclose democratic conversation about our collective condition and future.” Are we doing the same thing? Adolph Reed maybe thought so. What did he mean when he said we had become “border guards of neoliberalism,” policing “the boundaries of the thinkable”? Of course we work hard to stigmatize certain sorts of prejudices. Do we thereby successfully repress them? Foucault, in his History of Sexuality , recalled that it is often supposed that the Victorian era’s rules of manners and taboos on sexuality were aimed at making sex “driven out, denied, and reduced to silence.” He argued instead that those restrictions had the effect, and maybe the purpose, of inciting and intensifying the power of sexuality: a “complex deployment for compelling sex to speak, for fastening our attention and concern upon” it. If Foucault was right about sexuality, are our attempts at “repressing” prejudice and trauma serving to amplify them as a force in society, by “compelling prejudice and trauma to speak,” “fastening our attention” upon them? Is the result then to drown out attempts to speak in other ways, and so to police “the boundaries of the thinkable”? Is the neoliberal order safeguarded by the fact that certain conversations just don’t happen in mainstream progressive circles? Well, it does seem that Star Trek is better at imagining an economic system without money than modern progressives Maybe we see a radical stance on the economy as a quick way to brand oneself as edgy, while privately assuming that there is no alternative to modern capitalism. If so, why continue to be so moralistic about it? Is our compulsive focus on mental sin a way we cover up despair at our inability to change the deep structure of the world? A lot of ordinary people are convinced not that capitalism is perfect, but that any alternative to it is will necessarily involve the collapse of technological civilization or severe restrictions on freedom. If this isn’t true, are there some progressives trying to explain why? I struggled with what I had perceived. Were we, despite our idealistic vision of ourselves, simply agents of the system, tentacles that it uses to smash some people, complete with the pretext of defending others? Was it a labyrinthine, twisted joke? Hope At that point, I rebelled at the implications of my thought. Maybe modern progressives are much less self-critical than we imagined ourselves to be. Maybe we do indulge in some prejudices while criticizing and often tokenizing others. Maybe we have acquiesced in a long series of accommodations with power. But Polyphemus had spoken not just of wretchedness, but of idealism and grandeur. Maybe I didn’t agree with the postmodernists after all. Maybe there is something good, or at least potentially good, in the way we have tried to turn back to sincerity and moral conviction, to humility and introspection. Brown said that in the postmodern world, individuals are buffeted and controlled by global configuations of […] power of extraordinary proportions, and are at the same time nakedly individuated, stripped of reprieve […] Since she wrote, the way the world makes many feel precarious and lost has only gotten worse. Maybe she was right that when we feel this way, we try to rebuild a sense of something we can really believe in. But was she right in assuming that this was mainly a bad thing? When Judy apologizes to Nick, she treats herself as utterly insignificant, and her victim as omnipotent, exactly mimicking the relationship between the sinner and God in traditional Christian confession. This was extreme, but could it also be seen as the sign of a great and widely-shared loneliness? Of the longing we feel for more dramatically intimate relationships between people, or between a person and some sort of transcendence? Could we salvage what was hopeful in modern progressivism and disentangle it from what wasn’t? That sounds… hard, I thought to myself. Anyway, I’m dead. Maybe someone else will worry about it. Then I remembered Judy Hopps. She wouldn’t accept me being dead as a reason for me not to try to help people. What could I do? “Polyphemus,” I cried out. “You’re back.” He surveyed me. “WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED?” his voice boomed. I thought for a moment. Then I realized how to solve this problem. “Polyphemus,” I said. “I have learned that I have been ignorant and irresponsible and small-minded. When I hear criticism of liberals that I don’t want to think about, I deal with it by explaining how right-wingers caused the problem, or are worse than us, or are scary or horrible. Or I say the criticism is justified, but only as a criticism of not-real-progressives. Or I divert attention by accusing critics of ignoring the horrible things that have been done to marginalized people. I say I am against prejudice and trauma, but my attempts to repress certain forms of them have the predictable effect of intensifying their power throughout society. I say I am against prejudice, but I don’t mind making fun of old people, Millennials, hicks, wingnuts, adults who live with their parents, and a whole slew of other categories and stereotypes. I say I am against capitalism, but I’m completely fine with corporate action when it imposes antiracism, feminism, and other aspects of liberal culture. If someone raises an objection, I accuse them of opposing antiracism or feminism. I have the privilege of knowing that I can repel any attack on my basic understanding of reality. I really am a horrible hypocrite; some of the things I do hurt people, abet an atmosphere of shaming and guilt, and ultimately foreclose any possibility of positive change.” “How do you feel now?” Polyphemus inquired. “Great,” I responded. “I feel great.” “So will you honor the spirit of true progressivism in your heart, and try to keep it always?” he demanded. “Perhaps,” I said. “But not just now. A bootleg copy of the latest Game of Thrones season just made it past Charon. And anyway, I’ve faced my fears, I’ve recognized my progressive privilege, and I feel like I’ve really grown through this experience.” Polyphemus smirked at me. I smirked back. Epilogue: And so I thought no more about these matters, and have been able to return to my comfortable existence in the underworld. I no longer need this diary, and am casting it into a bottle so that it can dance along the eddies of fate, troubling whom it may. Outis Philalithopoulos | 0 |
Sun, 23 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC Heather Ann Thompson's book " Blood in the Water : The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy" is a detailed study of the inner workings of America. The blueprint for social control employed before and after the crushing of the Attica revolt is the same blueprint used today to keep tens of millions of poor people, especially poor people of color, caged or living in miniature police states. Thompson meticulously documents the innumerable ways the state oppresses the poor by discrediting their voices, turning the press into a megaphone for government propaganda and lies, stoking the negative stereotypes of black people, exalting white supremacy, ruining the lives of people who speak the truth, manipulating the courts and law enforcement, and pressuring state witnesses to lie to obstruct justice. Her book elucidates not only the past but also the present, which, she concedes, is worse. "America by the early twenty-first century had, in disturbing ways, come to resemble America in the late nineteenth century," Thompson writes near the end of her book. "In 1800 the three-fifths clause gave white voters political power from a black population that was itself barred from voting, and after 2000 prison gerrymandering was doing exactly the same thing in numerous states across the country. After 1865, African American desires for equality and civil rights in the South following the American Civil War led whites to criminalize African American communities in new ways and then sent record numbers of blacks to prison in that region. Similarly, a dramatic spike in black incarceration followed the civil rights movement—a movement that epitomized Attica. And just as businesses had profited from the increased number of Americans in penal facilities after 1870, so did they seek the labor of a growing captive prison population after 1970. In both centuries, white Americans had responded to black claims for freedom by beefing up, and making more punitive, the nation's criminal justice system." On Sept. 9, 1971, prisoners at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York rebelled in the face of intolerable conditions . They were sick of the racist-fueled violence of the white, rural guards; angry at poor medical care and the dearth of vocational and educational programs; underfed (the prison allocated only 63 cents a day to feed a prisoner); unhappy about their mail being censored, or destroyed if it was in Spanish; living in poorly ventilated cells with little or no heat or stifling heat; unable to buy basic commissary items on salaries that averaged 6 cents a day; and tired of being given only one bar of soap and one roll of toilet paper a month and allowed only one shower a week. The uprising was not premeditated. It took place when prisoners, trapped inadvertently by guards in a tunnel that led to the yard, thought they were going to be given another beating by sadistic correction officers. The spontaneous uprising took place "because ordinary men, poor men, disenfranchised men, and men of color had simply had enough of being treated as less than human, " Thompson writes. Four hundred fifty prisoners had previously staged a peaceful sit-down strike in the prison's metal shop to protest wages that, as a witness later testified at a New York state hearing, were "so low that working at Attica [was] tantamount to slavery." Prisoners had formed committees and sent respectful letters to prison authorities asking them to address their concerns. The requests were largely ignored. Despite authorities' promises that there would be no retribution, those who organized the protests were put in isolation or transferred to other prisons. The callousness of the officials was especially unconscionable in light of the fact that the state had netted huge sums for sales of products made by the prisoners. Comment: The slave labor system continues to this day, forcing inmates to begin hunger strikes and work stoppages to end prison slavery: End prison slavery!' 24,000+ inmates join nationwide jail strike causing lockdowns (VIDEO) After three days of negotiations, in which the prison authorities refused to grant the rebellious prisoners amnesty, 550 New York state troopers, 200 sheriff's deputies and numerous Attica prison guards were issued high-powered weapons, including rifles loaded with especially destructive bullets that expanded on impact, bullets banned in warfare under the Geneva Conventions. The prisoners had no firearms. The assault force members were fed a steady diet of lies and unfounded rumors to stoke their hatred of the prisoners. Black radicals were coming, they were falsely told, to the town of Attica to kidnap white children, a rumor that led to the closing of the schools. Through clouds of CS gas , the assault force stormed the yard, where some 1,200 prisoners held 42 guards and civilian staff members. It unleashed a blizzard of gunfire, shooting 130 people. Twenty-nine prisoners and nine hostages died. (One guard beaten by prisoners in the first moments of the uprising died later in a hospital.) The assault force, which had done all the killings that day, immediately began to hide evidence of its crimes. State officials told the press outside the prison that seven or eight of the hostages had died when the prisoners slit their throats. They claimed that the genitals of one of the guards were cut off and stuffed in his mouth. These reports were untrue, but they dominated the news coverage. Meanwhile, inside the retaken institution, many prisoners were suffering from gunshot wounds that would not be treated for days. Some were stripped and made to run gantlets in which they were beaten by guards with ax handles, baseball bats and rifle butts. Those singled out as the leaders of the rebellion were marked with Xs on their backs, forced to crawl through mud, tortured and in few cases, it appears, executed. New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and the Nixon White House feared that the rebellion presaged armed revolution. The scores of dead and wounded were, for them, a message to the rest of the country— defy us and we will kill you . Today, any citizen who seriously resists the corporate state can expect the same response. Comment: A perfect example: Private security mercenaries pepper spray and sic dogs on Dakota Access Pipeline protesters Thompson writes, "All of those assembled in the president's office agreed that while the morning's events made a particularly 'gruesome story,' news of the slashings and castration would go a long way toward discrediting America's 'bleeding hearts' like 'the Tom Wicker s of the world.' 'I think this is going to have a hell of a salutary effect on future prison riots,' Nixon said. 'Just as Kent State [the May 4, 1970, shooting by National Guardsmen of unarmed students that left four dead and nine wounded] had a hell of a salutary effect. ... They can talk all they want about force, but that is the purpose of force.' " The avalanche of government lies permeates the narrative —not a surprise to anyone who has reported on the inner workings of power or spent time in our prisons and marginal communities. There are heroes in the narrative. Their fate, which is almost universally bleak, is also instructive. The prisoner Sam Melville, who was serving an 18-year sentence in Attica for setting off explosives in government buildings to protest the Vietnam War, who taught classes to other inmates and who researched prison operations to show how the institution cruelly exploited prisoner labor for profit, was executed by guards after the uprising, according to other prisoners. So, apparently, was Elliot "L.D." Barkley, who was in prison for violating parole by driving without a license and who, although he was only 21, was one of the most articulate spokespeople for the prisoners. Prisoners such as Frank "Big Black" Smith, savagely tortured by guards after the uprising, and Bernard "Shango" Stroble rose up majestically during the revolt to protect hostages and maintain order, and they fought for justice long after their release from prison. Civil rights attorneys such as Ernie Goodman and William Kunstler came to the prisoners' defense. A few within the governmental system exhibited rare moral courage. Among them were Dr. John Edland of the Monroe County medical examiner's office, who refused to falsify autopsy reports and told the public that the hostages had been killed by state gunfire; Attica guard Michael Smith, who defied his own fraternity to speak the truth about state abuse; and government attorney Malcolm Bell, who exposed the state cover-up of the killings by the state troopers, sheriff's deputies and prison guards. However, most who knew the truth remained silent. Edland was especially singled out for condemnation. He was attacked as incompetent by state officials and called a clown and, although a Republican, a radical left-winger. (State troopers were dispatched to local funeral homes to prevent morticians from informing families of the cause of death of hostages.) Edland received death threats and other hate mail, was shunned by the local community and saw state troopers menacingly idle their automobiles in front of his home. Edland called the day he released the autopsy findings "the worst day of my life." When the state decides to isolate, discredit and crush you it has innumerable ways to do so. The press often is manipulated. Employers blacklist you. A gullible population is made to believe the caricature of you as a traitor or an enemy . Such smear campaigns are now directed against Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. New York State Police Capt. Henry "Hank" Williams oversaw the investigation into the 1971 assault. This meant that, in Thompson's words, "the main investigators of the crimes of Attica were those who may well have committed them." Williams made sure that "nothing related to the shooting—shell casings, the weapons themselves—was collected." No chalk outlines, usually required at a crime scene, were drawn to indicate where the bodies had fallen. No calculations were made regarding bullet trajectories. The yard where the killings took place was cleaned up under Williams' supervision as quickly as possible. Prisoners were threatened with violence or indictment if they refused to incriminate the leaders of the uprising. The goal was not justice; it was to punish and isolate the prisoner leadership and protect law enforcement. "When strong-arm tactics still proved ineffective," Thompson writes concerning one interrogation, "they switched their approach: should this witness help them, investigators suggested, they would, in turn, help him get paroled. In addition to enticing the witness with the possibility of parole, they also promised to make prison life easier for him in the meantime." Scores of prisoners were indicted in connection with the uprising; only one member of the assault force was charged, with a minor offense. The state's entire case when it went to the courts was built on a scaffolding of lies designed to exonerate the assault force and punish prisoner leaders. Jurors, who saw doctored films and photographs, never knew they were being presented with fabricated and tainted evidence, including photos of crude knives that had been planted next to slain prisoners. Witnesses recited stories fed to them by government investigators. The state has never admitted wrongdoing for the Attica assault, and important parts of the record —autopsies, ballistics reports, trooper statements, and depositions— remain sealed nearly five decades later . Thompson stumbled onto Attica files in the Erie County courthouse and the New York State Museum, but since her discovery, she writes, they have vanished or "been removed from anyone's view." "American voters ultimately did not respond to this prison uprising by demanding that states rein in police power, " she concludes. "Instead they demanded that police be given even more support and even more punitive laws to enforce. Comment: And despite the curent wave of police brutality, the sheeple continue to support them: Respect for police among Americans surges to highs not seen since late '60s "Indeed, the 1960s and 1970s were all about the politics of the ironic. At the Democratic National Convention protests of 1968, Kent State in 1970, and Wounded Knee in 1973, unfettered police power each time turned protests violent, and yet, after each of these events, the nation was sent the message that the people, not the police, were dangerous. Somehow, voters came to believe that democracy was worth curtailing and civil rights and liberties were worth suspending for the sake of 'order' and maintaining the status quo." Though immediately after the Attica uprising there were minor reforms, these improvements were soon rolled back. Conditions in prisons today are worse than those that led to the 1971 revolt. Control of prison populations is more brutal, more sophisticated and more inhumane. It is doubtful that the press, unlike at Attica in 1971, would ever be allowed inside a prison during an uprising to air the voices of the prisoners. Much of the worst damage was done during the Clinton administration . President Bill Clinton signed into law, with Republican support, the draconian 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. It provided $9.7 billion to build more prisons. By 1995 the prison population exceeded 1 million. It would soon double. "The fact that so many of these people now in prison had been arrested because they were drug addicts, mentally ill, poor, and racially profiled concerned few if any politicians , whether in a statehouse or in Washington, D.C.," Thompson writes. "Then, to make sure that this now enormous group of the incarcerated did not resist their deteriorating conditions of confinement via the nation's legal system as they had done so effectively both before and after the Attica uprising, in 1996 legislators passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA)." The PLRA made it difficult and often impossible for prisoners to use the courts to protect their Eighth Amendment right not to endure cruel and unusual punishment. The New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, who was part of the negotiating team that tried to resolve the Attica uprising without bloodshed, singled out white fear as the central issue in the 1971 case. "White fear fixed itself upon the literal presence of black human beings. Black people, to whites, were the symbolic representation of the evil in man and thus were also the handy instruments by which white people could hold themselves symbolically innocent of that evil." Wicker concluded, "The heart of the matter was the fear of blackness." This white fear remains unexamined in America. It allows us to stand by passively and watch the daily murders by police of unarmed black men and women. It allows us to maintain a prison system that holds a staggering 25 percent of the world's prisoners, the majority of them poor people of color. This white fear condemns us as a nation. It perpetuates the evil of white supremacy. Poor people of color have been robbed of the most elemental forms of justice and basic constitutional rights. But the state, in the age of deindustrialization, has no intention of stopping there. These forms of social control, so familiar to poor people of color, will bear upon all of us. | 0 |
Thursday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi ( ) called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign over allegations he met with Russian officials from a Washington Post story published late Wednesday night. Pelosi said, “What a week, huh? Last night we learned that Jeff Sessions, the attorney general of the United States, lied under oath to his colleagues in the Senate and to the American people about his communications with the Russians. There are standard of professional conduct for attorneys, especially the top law enforcement officer in our country. ” “What is the message that that sends to the country, to the lawyers in the State Department, to the American Bar Association, which has standards of moral and professional conduct, to the state of Alabama, which has standard for professional conduct for its attorneys?” she continued. “The fact that the attorney general, the top cop in our country, lied under oath to the American people is grounds for him to resign. It’s grounds for him to resign. He has proved that he is unqualified and unfit to serve in that position of trust. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
Globalization and technology are routinely cited as drivers of inequality over the last four decades. While the relative importance of these causes is disputed, both are often viewed as natural and inevitable products of the working of the economy, rather than as the outcomes of deliberate policy. In fact, both the course of globalization and the distribution of rewards from technological innovation are very much the result of policy. Insofar as they have led to greater inequality, this has been the result of conscious policy choices.
Starting with globalization, there was nothing pre-determined about a pattern of trade liberalization that put U.S. manufacturing workers in direct competition with their much lower paid counterparts in the developing world. Instead, that competition was the result of trade pacts written to make it as easy as possible for U.S. corporations to invest in the developing world to take advantage of lower labor costs, and then ship their products back to the United States. The predicted and actual result of this pattern of trade has been to lower wages for manufacturing workers and non-college educated workers more generally, as displaced manufacturing workers crowd into other sectors of the economy.
Instead of only putting manufacturing workers into competition with lower-paid workers in other countries, our trade deals could have been crafted to subject doctors, dentists, lawyers and other highly-paid professionals to international competition. As it stands, almost nothing has been done to remove the protectionist barriers that allow highly-educated professionals in the United States to earn far more than their counterparts in other wealthy countries.
This is clearest in the case of doctors. For the most part, it is impossible for foreign-trained physicians to practice in the United States unless they have completed a residency program in the United States. The number of residency slots, in turn, is strictly limited, as is the number of slots open for foreign medical students. While this is a quite blatantly protectionist restriction, it has persisted largely unquestioned through a long process of trade liberalization that has radically reduced or eliminated most of the barriers on trade in goods. The result is that doctors in the United States earn an average of more than $250,000 a year, more than twice as much as their counterparts in other wealthy countries. This costs the country roughly $100 billion a year in higher medical bills compared to a situation in which U.S. doctors received the same pay as doctors elsewhere. Economists, including trade economists, have largely chosen to ignore the barriers that sustain high professional pay at enormous economic cost.
In addition to the items subject to trade, the overall trade balance is also very much the result of policy choices. The textbook theory has capital flowing from rich countries to poor countries, which means that rich countries run trade surpluses with poor countries. While this accurately described the pattern of trade in the 1990s up until the East Asian financial crisis (a period in which the countries of the region enjoyed very rapid growth), in the last two decades developing countries taken as a whole have been running large trade surpluses with wealthy countries.
This implies large trade deficits in rich countries, especially the United States, which in turn has meant a further loss of manufacturing jobs with the resulting negative impact on wage inequality. However, there was nothing inevitable about the policy shifts associated with the bailout from the East Asian financial crisis that led the developing world to become a net exporter of capital.
The pattern of gains from technology has been even more directly determined by policy than is the case with gains from trade. There has been a considerable strengthening and lengthening of patent and copyright and related protections over the last four decades. The laws have been changed to extend patents to new areas such as life forms, business methods, and software. Copyright duration has been extended from 55 years to 95 years. Perhaps even more important, the laws have become much more friendly to holders of these property claims to tilt legal proceedings in their favor, with courts becoming more patent-friendly and penalties for violations becoming harsher. And, the United States has placed stronger intellectual property (IP) rules at center of every trade agreement negotiated in the last quarter century.
In this context, it would hardly be surprising if the development of “technology” was causing an upward redistribution of income. The people in a position to profit from stronger IP rules are almost exclusively the highly educated and those at the top end of the income distribution. It is almost definitional that stronger IP rules will result in an upward redistribution of income.
This upward redistribution could be justified if stronger IP rules led to more rapid productivity growth, thereby benefitting the economy as a whole. However, there is very little evidence to support that claim. Michele Boldrin and David Levine have done considerable research on this topic and generally found the opposite. My own work , using cross-country regressions with standard measures of patent strength, generally found a negative and often significant relationship between patent strength and productivity growth.
There is also a substantial amount of money at stake. In the case of prescription drugs alone, the United States is on path to spend more than $430 billion in 2016 for drugs that would likely cost one-tenth of this amount in the absence of patent and related protections. While we do need mechanisms for financing innovation and creative work, it is almost certainly the case that patent and copyright monopolies as currently structured are not the most efficient route, even if their negative consequences for distribution are quite evident.
The structuring of trade and rules on IP are two important ways in which policy has been designed to redistribute income upward over the last four decades. There are many other ways in which the market has been structured to disadvantage those at the middle and bottom of the income distribution, perhaps most notably macroeconomic policies that result in high unemployment. While tax and transfer policies that reduce poverty and inequality may be desirable, we should also be aware of the ways in which policy has been designed to increase inequality. It is much easier to have an economic system that produces more equality rather than one that needlessly generates inequality, which we then try to address with redistributive policies.
This article was originally published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking .
Dean Baker is a macroeconomist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He previously worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor at Bucknell University. | 0 |
— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) October 28, 2016
She did finally land … Everyone at Hillary's Cedar Rapids "rally" knew about the FBI reopening the case before she did. pic.twitter.com/WoPaBmhF3v
— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) October 28, 2016
Sounds like there was a wait on the tarmac for Hillary … but it supposedly wasn’t FBI story related. Clinton delay on tarmac wasn't about the FBI, it turns out. Pool report notes that Annie Leibovitz came off after, likely had a photo shoot. pic.twitter.com/xE5pm3ITRC
— Ruby Cramer (@rubycramer) October 28, 2016
Photo shoot must be code for a “holy crap, what do we do with this FBI thing” meeting. Trending | 0 |
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In classical mythology, the Acheron is one of the rivers of the Underworld. It marks the boundary between the living and the dead. The ferryman Charon ferries the dead across the Acheron to a place where they lose memory. Nothing of what made them human remains—happiness, suffering, love, hatred, guilt, regret, redemption, betrayal, forgiveness.
From Gilgamesh to Odysseus to Aeneas, the living heroes of the epic descend into the Underworld at a point of despair in the sense of their quest. Burdened by a fate that requires momentous courage and tragic self-sacrifice for the sake of their people’s survival, they resent the absurdity of their lot. Down there on a visit, they return from the shadow land strengthened. They recognize that the business of living is not oblivion but action.
John Marciano’s recently published book, The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration ? functions as such a Charon in reverse. It ferries readers back to the realm of remembering. This slim volume could not have come at a more opportune moment. American political culture is punch-drunk with the pursuit of war. The altered state is reaching the point of delirium tremens. Thwarted in the neocolonial scheme of annexing Syria by Russia’s legal intervention, the American elite are pushing for confrontation. Though it is hard to think the unthinkable, the nuclear holocaust may happen if not by intention then by spontaneous combustion from over-intoxication with the fumes of war.
This reckless confrontation results from decades of accumulated unaccountable power. Its boldness reflects a cumulative experience of impunity for aggressive behavior by soft and hard neocolonial postures since the end of WW II. The war in Vietnam, as Marciano suggests, should have functioned as the lesson that checked the nation’s historical thrust for conquest, but the turning point would have required a national effort to relinquish the myth of the Noble Cause, the delusion that America is vested with a divine mandate to assimilate the people of the world to the American image–for the people’s own good. Britain had its White Man’s Burden; France its mission civilatrise ; America its Manifest Destiny.
This timely volume traces the war to the apocalyptic finale of the most powerful military in the world defeated by the determination, courage, and self-sacrifice of a peasant people unwilling to be enslaved. But this is as much a book about the past as it is about the present. It reminds us, with Tolstoy, “The reality of war is in the killing, “ a realization officialdom would like to block. In fact, they have prepared a falsifying celebration of that moral and military debacle.
As Marciano writes in his introduction,
“In May 2012, President Barack Obama and the Pentagon announced a Commemoration of the Vietnam War to continue through 2025, the fiftieth anniversary of the conflict’s end. Among the Commemoration’s objectives, three stand out: ‘to thank and honor’ veterans and their families . . . ‘to highlight the advances in technology, science, and medicine related to military research conducted during’ the war; and to ‘recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by the allies’.”
President Obama claimed in the commemoration announcement speech that the war had been “an honorable cause.” Marciano challenges this notion. America’s historic ideology of the Noble Cause, he writes, rests on the belief that the United States is
“A unique force for good in the world, superior not only in its military and economic power, but in the quality of its government and institutions, the character and morality of its people, and its way of life.”
This is the mystical bigotry of a messianic faith typical of empires. Imperial militarism seeks in a Noble Cause the justification for subjugating large chunks of humanity. In the distant past, the Noble Cause may have received the sword directly from a god—as it did in postcolonial America when it sought to exterminate the native inhabitants. By the anointment of the sword, the divinity also endowed, supposedly, the conquering “race” with moral superiority. Thus, imperialism, in the perverse arrogance of its twisted psyche, contains the germ of genocide. As a result, the superstition of a superior “race” has been endured by most of the “races” on the planet as a most Ignoble Cause. In Vietnam alone, the Big Lie of the Noble Cause sent four million Vietnamese to their death.
Marciano leaves us in no doubt that the White House and the Pentagon are commemorating a crime. They are falsifying history in order to shape the future, which will be and is the reenactment of the war against Vietnam on a global scale. They want to establish the altar for a “sacred union,” the nation united behind the Noble Cause of war. On the altar will sit the fetish of the export of the “miracle of democracy, ” in reality the imposition of regimes of terror such as the Vietnam War planners established in Saigon. We see today in Ukraine that the “miracle of democracy,” brought to Kiev by the US in 2014 to the tune of five billion dollars, amounts to a handful of dry dust, collected from the WW II graveyard of European Nazism, inciting a lot of blind, anti-democratic and noxious nationalism.
As through a glass darkly, Marciano shows us that in the war crime against Vietnam we can see reflected the crimes perpetrated today from Afghanistan to Yemen, from Iraq to Syria, from Yugoslavia to Libya and across the African continent. As in Vietnam (the fakery of the Gulf of Tonkin incident), today’s war are based on fabricated pretexts; as in Vietnam (napalm and agent orange), today’s wars are chemical wars (depleted uranium for Yugoslavia and Iraq; phosphorus for Falluja); as in Vietnam (Hanoi and Haiphong) the bombings destroy urban life, vital infrastructure, schools and hospitals; as in Vietnam (Laos, Cambodia) the bombings spreads out (today to Yemen); as in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh) the leaders who resist US penetration are demonized (Milosevic, Saddam, Qaddafi, Assad) as enemies of humanity. As in Vietnam, all the wars of today are fought mostly to prevent or reverse independence and self-determination of former colonial places.
Finally, as in Vietnam the USSR, today’s Russia is emerging as the displacement of all the guilt that weighs on the shoulders of the Noble Cause. The Washington Post recently wrote “the Kremlin annexed Ukraine.” I read it twice—not “annexed Crimea,” the standard disinformation, but the whole of Ukraine! Does one laugh or weep? Does one have to take a hallucinogenic to see Russian flags and images of Putin blanketing Kiev instead of Neo-Nazi emblems and images of Bandera?
The next president will certainly be Hillary Clinton, whom I call “the centripetal president.” From Republicans to Democrats to Neo-Cons, all converge on endorsing the war candidate. In her consensus war regime, the elite will decide everything. We will not be consulted. This is why The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? is a vital read. It calls for our re-democratization–to question our leaders, to be skeptical of the media, to avert our eyes from the petrifying stare of the Medusa decked with the aegis of the Noble Cause; to challenge—even ridicule– the vaunted humanitarianism of an elite of bloodhounds baying for war; to refuse to commemorate war crimes and to work to stop them.
Above all, we need to remember that the crimes of other governments are the responsibility of the people of those governments—not of our bombs. Though our elite have abrogated to themselves the power and the right to remake the map of the world by force, we need to reassert the legal principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign states if we are serious about peace. We, citizens, do not have the right (or the power, unless we line up behind the power of the militarist state) to change the practices of other states, but we do have the right to demand change for those of our own. Let’s start exercising that right. We did for Vietnam; we can do it again. Commemorate the people who protested the war in Vietnam, not the crime the governing elite committed there in our name, as Marciano’s book amply documents.
The US government is now engaged in waging eight wars. We better get busy. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — When the call came in that a bomb had exploded in Manhattan, Amy Hess quickly got to work. She helped direct teams of F. B. I. agents to New York to collect evidence, set up secure command posts in the streets so agents could discuss classified information, and alerted the digital forensics, fingerprint and facial recognition experts she manages in Quantico, Va. site of the F. B. I. academy and its lab. By the next day, she and her team had played a crucial role in identifying Ahmad Khan Rahami, the man charged with planting the bomb in Chelsea along with a second, unexploded device. “We pulled out all the stops,” said Ms. Hess, who as head of the bureau’s science and technology branch oversees more than 6, 000 F. B. I. employees. Inside the F. B. I. women in particular look up to Ms. Hess, and not just because they have nicknamed her the “rocket scientist” with a degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Purdue University. She is also the first woman to head the science branch — one of few female agents commanding such an important job at the F. B. I. a clubby agency where men are more predominant in senior positions than they were even three years ago. Ms. Hess, 50, put it simply: “There is a lack of women in leadership roles. ” Today at the F. B. I. women hold 12 percent of 220 senior agent positions, including nine who run field offices in places like Los Angeles Oklahoma City Louisville, Ky. and Knoxville, Tenn. That is a decline from 2013, when women held about 20 percent of senior agent jobs and 15 women ran field offices. “It seems to be going backwards,” said Janice K. Fedarcyk, now retired, who ran the New York office, with about 2, 000 employees, from 2010 to 2012. “They need to do something to turn that around. ’’ James B. Comey, the F. B. I. director, has described the lack of women — and also minorities — in the F. B. I. as a serious problem that can undermine investigations and keep the agency out of touch with the communities it serves. Of the bureau’s 13, 523 agents over all, 2, 683 — or about 20 percent — are women. About 83 percent of the agents over all are white. “The big challenge we’ve been confronting over the last two years is, how do we get women and people of color” to join the F. B. I. Mr. Comey said last Sunday at a conference of police chiefs in San Diego. “That’s been our big trouble, and I’ve described it as a crisis. ” In response, the F. B. I. put a plan in place to try to increase the overall number of female agents to 33 percent. The bureau will also soon start providing field offices with recruitment data, something it had never done. That will allow the F. B. I. to track where it has successfully recruited employees and perhaps tie the data to performance reviews and bonuses. “Our ability to be believed is at risk,” Mr. Comey said in a speech earlier this year. “The F. B. I. must be able to stand on any corner in the U. S. or before any jury and be believed. ” The F. B. I. has long struggled to promote women. It was not until after J. Edgar Hoover’s death in 1972 that women were accepted as agents — the people at the agency who carry guns, run investigations and are at the heart of the F. B. I. ’s macho culture. It took another two decades before Burdena G. Pasenelli, known as Birdie, was appointed the first female agent to run a field office. Her assignment? Anchorage, which was not then, or now, at the center of the action. But for women in the bureau, Ms. Pasenelli, who died this year, was a trailblazer. “It opened the door for a lot of women to think about the possibilities,” said Stephanie Douglas, who in 2012 became the first woman to run the F. B. I. ’s national security branch. Ms. Douglas, who worked with prosecutors to investigate the destruction of C. I. A. videotapes that depicted the torture of terrorism suspects overseas, retired in 2013. F. B. I. officials say they cannot explain completely the step backward for women in leadership roles at the bureau, but they say retirements and the timing of openings are partly responsible. David Schlendorf, assistant director for the F. B. I. ’s human resources division, called it a “worrisome” trend, although not intractable. “I am optimistic we can do better,” said Valerie Parlave, Mr. Schlendorf’s boss, who in 2013 became the first woman to run the Washington field office. Women cite three important reasons so few of them are in the F. B. I. ’s senior ranks. First, the F. B. I. ’s path to promotion is often less appealing to women, more than a dozen former and current female agents said. F. B. I. agents can be transferred at a moment’s notice, which often requires leaving a family behind. Traditionally, that has meant that men in the bureau have to uproot without their children and spouses for long stretches of time, a sacrifice women may be less willing to make. Ms. Douglas, who does not have children, said that she once moved from San Francisco to Washington in four days and that she relocated four times from 2005 to 2013. Each time a call came, she feared that if she said no, she might not get another chance. “The bureau is incredibly competitive,” Ms. Douglas said. “If you don’t take advantage of that opportunity, somebody else will. ” Second, women say the F. B. I. does not have enough female role models or mentors. Although women hold senior agent jobs, a woman has never been in charge of a large F. B. I. operational division like counterterrorism, which in the world has been dominated by men who went on to bigger jobs — including the F. B. I. ’s No. 2 position, deputy director. A woman has never been deputy director, or director. Ms. Fedarcyk, the former head of the New York field office who was also the top agent in charge of terrorism in Los Angeles and managed the bureau’s effort to track terrorism financing, said her success was, in part, because people took an interest in her work and helped her along the way. “I had a great career,” she said. “There are a lot of different reasons why that is the case. Some women don’t want to take that next step. Some guys don’t want to take that next step. I was fortunate coming up in the bureau. I had strong mentors. ” A third problem, women say, is that far fewer women apply for top F. B. I. jobs than men. For every dozen or so applicants for a senior job, Ms. Hess said, only one or two are women. In part, that is because there are fewer women in the agency to begin with, but women also shy away from applying for top F. B. I. jobs, Ms. Hess said, for the same reason that many men do: They see sitting behind a desk, even with more seniority and pay, as inferior to what many consider the dream job of agent — working the streets, meeting with informants, making cases and putting criminals in jail. “That’s the reason you come into the bureau,” said Ms. Hess, who once worked violent crimes, gangs and drugs and briefly ran F. B. I. counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan. “Not to push paper. ” This month, Ms. Hess will take over the office in Louisville, the eighth move in her career. At the F. B. I. there have been many challenges for women. Female agents have repeatedly sued the F. B. I. for sexual harassment and discrimination. This year, a former agent accused her male in the Denver office of behaving inappropriately and making disparaging comments. According to the lawsuit, a male agent was overheard talking about a female colleague: “I hope she quits. She can stay home in the kitchen. ” Beverly Andress, who joined the agency in 1983 and retired in 2006, recalled that she was often introduced as a “female agent” rather than just an agent. “You have to have a good sense of humor,” she said. “It’s a man’s world. ” F. B. I. officials say that if the numbers are looked at as an average over the last decade, the agency has a better record of women in senior agent positions — about 16 percent — than other federal law enforcement agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Only the Secret Service had a slightly higher percentage of women in senior agent positions. Female agents say they will know the F. B. I. has made progress when a woman is finally put in charge of counterterrorism, criminal investigations, counterintelligence or is appointed as deputy director. For now, the stars in those divisions are overwhelmingly male. “We are playing ” said Voviette Morgan, a senior agent who runs the bureau’s internal investigations section and is a seasoned counterterrorism investigator. “In 2016, I hate the fact we say firsts. ” “We are behind the curve,” Ms. Morgan added. “There is no doubt about it. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — Just days before Election Day, and with voters in many states already going to the polls, the F. B. I. director made a stunning announcement on Friday: Agents had discovered new emails that might be relevant to the completed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server, a case that she had seemingly put behind her in July. Never in recent history has the F. B. I. been so enmeshed in a presidential race. With a vague statement to Congress, the F. B. I. sent jolts through the campaign, leaving many voters unsure what to make of a case involving national security secrets, a disgraced congressman, racy text messages and a dispute among the country’s top law enforcement officers. Here’s what we know so far. What happened on Friday? The F. B. I. director, James B. Comey, sent a letter to Congress that said agents had uncovered new emails that could be connected to the Clinton investigation. That investigation had examined whether Mrs. Clinton and her aides had mishandled classified information by sending it through Mrs. Clinton’s private email server. The inquiry was completed in July with no charges filed. Mr. Comey said on Friday that agents would review the new emails to see whether they contained classified information. The letter was sent 11 days before the presidential election, and it set off fierce criticism of Mr. Comey for appearing to meddle in politics. The F. B. I. director’s letter did not reopen the Clinton inquiry, though some Republicans, including Donald J. Trump, characterized the move that way. Agents could open a new inquiry if they find evidence that the earlier investigation had been impeded or that classified materials had been intentionally mishandled. Where did these new emails come from? Mr. Comey did not say in his letter. But law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation said that agents had discovered the emails on a laptop owned by Anthony D. Weiner, the disgraced former congressman and estranged husband of Mrs. Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin. Last month, the F. B. I. began investigating allegations that Mr. Weiner had exchanged sexually explicit messages with a teenager. On Oct. 3, agents in New York executed a search warrant to obtain Mr. Weiner’s iPhone, an iPad and the laptop. Searching the laptop, they found evidence of a trove of emails similar to ones that had been examined in the Clinton investigation. Mr. Comey decided last week that agents should examine those emails to determine whether they contained national security information. That requires a court order, and officials said agents had not yet begun reading the emails. Why does the F. B. I. care if there is classified information in the emails? Under federal law, mishandling national security information is a crime, one that the F. B. I. is responsible for investigating. In 2015, the bureau began investigating the personal email account that Mrs. Clinton had used exclusively as secretary of state. As part of that investigation, the bureau tried to find every electronic device — phones, tablets, computers — that Mrs. Clinton and her aides used. Agents could not find many of them, including several of Mrs. Clinton’s cellphones and two iPads. The agents knew that those devices, and others they were not aware of, might someday surface. But they completed the Clinton case because they found no evidence that anyone had intentionally broken the law. The newly discovered emails may — or may not — provide new information to the F. B. I. Why did Mr. Comey send the letter? In July, Mr. Comey told Congress that the Clinton investigation was complete but that if new information came to light, the bureau would examine it. Mr. Comey pledged to be as transparent as he could with Congress about the investigation, and has since made public hundreds of pages of documents related to the inquiry. According to senior F. B. I. officials, Mr. Comey felt that he would be breaking his pledge of transparency to Congress if he did not reveal the new information from the Weiner case. And he believed that the bureau would be accused of suppressing details to benefit Mrs. Clinton — an accusation that he believed could do lasting damage to the F. B. I. ’s credibility. Who is upset with Mr. Comey for sending the letter? Many Democrats and even some Republicans have called the letter vague, troubling and unprecedented. Senior officials at the Justice Department urged Mr. Comey not to send the letter, saying it violated the spirit of longstanding policies not to discuss current investigations or do anything that could be seen as meddling in an election. In the letter, Mr. Comey said that the F. B. I. had yet to determine whether “this material may be significant,” and that he could not predict how long the review would take. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has pushed Mr. Comey to release more information about the emails. Her campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, said that “by providing selective information, he has allowed partisans to distort and exaggerate to inflict maximum political damage. ” What does all of this mean for Mrs. Clinton and her campaign? The short answer is that it is not yet clear. Polling on weekends can be unreliable, so it may be a few days before the effect of the development can be fully assessed. What is evident is that a campaign that has largely been a referendum on Mr. Trump — particularly since the first debate — is now not so . The email development will certainly matter, but the question is just how much. Twenty million people have already voted, and millions more have already determined whom they will support. The country was already politically polarized before this election, and opinions are overwhelmingly cemented about these two nominees. The email news could matter most in races. After being on the defensive for weeks because of Mr. Trump’s behavior, Republican candidates now have a more helpful news media environment in which to make their closing arguments. And Republican voters who are otherwise demoralized may have been given one final nudge to show up to the polls. What happens now? In the coming days, the F. B. I. will begin conducting a smaller version of the larger investigation it completed in July. Agents will go through the emails found on the laptop to determine whether they contain classified information. If so, the bureau will again look at the question of whether anyone intentionally committed a crime. Clinton campaign officials have said that Ms. Abedin gave the authorities all of the electronic devices that she believed had emails on them. Many of the newly discovered messages are likely to be duplicates of others that the F. B. I. has already examined, investigators say. The review will be conducted by the same F. B. I. agents who led the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails. F. B. I. agents are all but certain that it will not be completed by Election Day, and believe it will take at least several weeks. Neither Justice Department officials nor F. B. I. agents say they know what to expect from Mr. Comey over the coming days. Normally, investigations are conducted secretly, but Mr. Comey’s public remarks have opened him up to demands from both campaigns that he make as much information public as possible as soon as it is available. What’s the scenario for Mrs. Clinton and her aides? In July, Mr. Comey announced that the bureau had not found enough evidence to charge anyone with a crime for the mishandling of classified materials on Mrs. Clinton’s server. If the new emails indicate intentional efforts by her or her aides to move such information outside secure government systems, or if they tried to impede the earlier inquiry, the F. B. I. will most likely want to investigate further. But the bureau has just begun the process of combing through the new emails, and officials believe that at least some are duplicates of messages that have already been examined. How rare is it for the F. B. I. to make a development like this public? Extremely rare. At times during trials or after cases are closed, the F. B. I. finds new evidence and either discloses it to defense lawyers or reopens a case. An F. B. I. director has never made such a disclosure to Congress so close to a presidential election. How did Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department feel about Mr. Comey’s letter? Senior Justice Department officials tried to discourage Mr. Comey from sending the letter, saying that it would violate department guidelines that advise against talking about current criminal investigations or being seen as meddling in elections. They urged Mr. Comey not to do anything before Election Day, and they said he should tell Congress when agents had read the emails, understood whether they were relevant and could put them in context. They stopped short, however, of issuing a direct order prohibiting him from sending the letter. | 1 |
La crisis de Twitter: nada es para siempre No es un hecho que Twitter quiebre y desaparezca, pero sí es algo que podría suceder: un recordatorio para todos de que no es bueno establecer su estrategia de comunicación únicamente en las redes sociales. Así como las computadoras se hacen obsoletas más rápido que antes, las aplicaciones (apps) y las redes sociales también tendrán una existencia más efímera, incluido Facebook que hasta el momento parece invencible, como en su momento lo parecían IBM y también Microsoft.
Socios | 7 de noviembre de 2016 Gonzalo Monterrosa
Todo lo que sube tiene que bajar. Al principio nadie entendía Twitter. Al poco tiempo parecía indispensable; pero la lección es que nada es realmente indispensable, así que podría seguir el mismo camino que su app de videos cortos, Vine.
Hace un par de semanas Twitter se cimbró con la caída de sus acciones, derivada de que se hizo público (seguramente con esa intención) que existía un desinterés generalizado de grandes empresas por la red social de los 140 caracteres.
Recién se anunció que eliminarían Vine, su plataforma de videos cortos que hace 4 años anunciaba con bombo y platillo y que logró llamar la atención de millones de personas. “Un paso en la dirección correcta”, decían todos.
Ahora se encuentra en una franca reestructuración con despidos que afectarán aproximadamente al 9 por ciento de sus trabajadores, el tipo de problemas de cualquier empresa que está perdiendo su capital y el ingreso de ganancias no es claro. La publicidad avanza lenta y no es fácil para los pequeños negocios utilizarla, a diferencia de Twitter que además de llevarte de la mano insiste sobre los posibles beneficios a sus usuarios.
La red social cuenta con millones de usuarios registrados pero no todos se encuentran activos, no los que necesita Twitter para seguir brillando. Nos encontramos en un momento histórico en el que podría quebrar uno de los productos insignia que representaron por mucho tiempo el concepto de red social.
La app de video Vine se enfrentó a Snapchat y a Instagram y no ha podido competir con ellos a pesar de haber recibido mucho apoyo. Facebook ha ingresado a cada nuevo nicho que aparece en redes sociales, adquiriendo empresas o clonando conceptos que ofrece con algunas variaciones a sus miles de millones de usuarios.
Snapchat es una app para compartir fotografías y videos que se autodestruyen; comparte la misma circunstancia que vivió Twitter cuando surgió: nadie entendía para qué servía, aun así, Snapchat se está convirtiendo en el enemigo a vencer.
Vine no terminaba de posicionarse cuando Twitter comenzó a promocionar Periscope, que representa la posibilidad de la transmisión de video en vivo y que se hizo famoso por que los usuarios transmitían eventos deportivos de pago por evento desde países donde ese mismo evento aparecía en televisión abierta sin costo alguno. Vine estaba limitado a grabar unos cuantos segundos. Se percibió que lo habían abandonado a pesar de que para muchos fomentaba una creatividad visual para narrar historias en seis segundos (que después se incrementaron), al igual que Twitter lo hace al limitar lo que escribimos, lo que presenta un reto muy a pesar de sus detractores generacionales.
Fue en 2015 cuando la app poco a poco dejó de ser popular, desapareció de los listados de las 100 más descargadas tanto en la plataforma de Apple como en la de Android. Se acusa también a quienes generaban contenido de ser repetitivos y copiar las mismas historias, la gente se aburre. Quizá un aviso para los sitios que clonan notas todo el tiempo y generan la sensación de que todos los medios y los agregadores de noticias traen la misma información. Un aburrimiento que provoca que se busque otras fuentes, otros contenidos. Y con ellos se llevarán a los pocos anunciantes.
Y son los anunciantes un factor para la migración de los denominados influencers de Vine, que poco a poco se fueron a Instagram o Youtube, porque además de más herramientas que les facilitaban el trabajo, existían mejores posibilidades de monetizar su trabajo. Como ya se mencionó, Twitter no tiene una buena estrategia para monetizarse. Vine no es diferente, no cuenta con un sistema de monetización sencillo como sí lo tienen Instagram y Youtube.
Dentro de la debacle que sufre Twitter, aparece la noticia de que el sitio de pornografía Pornhub ofrece comprar la app como una propuesta que permitiría a Twitter obtener dinero que ya considera perdido. No se sabe qué tan serio sea el ofrecimiento pero sí genera dudas sobre el contenido final y sobre todo el contenido existente: se mezclará con pornografía o qué contenido planean subir. Lo más extraño será que las personas que subieron videos a la app, ahora pertenecerán y serán relacionados a una empresa de pornografía.
Gonzalo Monterrosa
[BLOQUE: OPINIÓN][SECCIÓN: SOCIEDAD BETA]
Contralínea 513 /del 07 al 12 de Noviembre 2016 | 0 |
Getty - Jemall Countess/Stringer The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR.
Megyn Kelly is a bit of a hot commodity nowadays, though one might not be able to tell that from the ire she is drawing from Trump fans.
The Week, and other publications, kicked up a media frenzy this summer by speculating that Megyn Kelly was leaving Fox News, much to the delight of her Trump-supporting detractors:
Megyn Kelly's contract at Fox News will expire after the election, and the star anchor has publicly confessed that she doesn't know what's going to happen after that. “I've had a great 12 years here, and I really like working for Roger Ailes. I really like my show, and I love my team. But, you know, there's a lot of brain damage that comes from the job,” she told Variety this spring. Image Credit: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for People.com
In an “exclusive” report from Breitbart, the bigwigs at the network were purportedly forming an alliance to “block” her, and in an eye-opening bit of potential foreshadowing for TrumpTV , the website wrote:
At least one top talent inside Fox News has confirmed to Breitbart News that a major talent meeting among various different hosts is scheduled, and they are considering leaving with Roger Ailes to form a new network to compete with Fox.
“Everyone here hates Gretchen and Megyn,” the anonymous source reportedly told the website. Gretchen Carlson would later leave Fox News .
Of course, Roger Ailes was to be forced out after he was blitzed by sexual harassment accusations from a number of female employees, including a claim by Megyn Kelly. New York Magazine reported :
According to two sources briefed on parent company 21st Century Fox’s outside probe of the Fox News executive, led by New York–based law firm Paul, Weiss, Kelly has told investigators that Ailes made unwanted sexual advances toward her about ten years ago when she was a young correspondent at Fox. Kelly, according to the sources, has described her harassment by Ailes in detail. Image Credit: Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images
Ailes would find safe harbor with the Trump campaign , whose presidential nominee Donald Trump later found himself under siege from sexual assault accusations . Recently, Vanity Fair published a story that the two media potentates had a “ falling out .”
In August, Fox News appointed two executives to attempt filling Ailes' shoes: Bill Shine and Jack Abernethy, who were named as co-presidents. Due to a colossal media merger of AT&T and Time Warner, CNN executive Jeff Zucker is believed by some to have the inside track on taking over at Fox News. The Hollywood Reporter writes :
CNN’s Jeff Zucker who, having worked for GE when he ran NBC, might be considered a more logical bridge to AT&T and, if rebuffed, might likely be open to the Murdoch sons' interest in having him come to run Fox News.
The Murdoch brothers are not believed to share their father's conservative sensibilities, and thus there are concerns that the two would reshape the network into a much less conservative one. Image Credit: Paul Zimmerman/Getty Images
With Sean Hannity riding high as a conservative pundit on the strength of his vocal Trump support, his ratings have even eclipsed Kelly's... at least for now. There is a strong belief by many that the host's unwavering support is an audition for TrumpTV, should The Donald lose the election.
It's in this tumultuous environment — filled with intrigue at the network and turmoil across the media landscape — that Megyn Kelly's future has become uncertain. A leaked discussion of her contract negotiations sheds more light.
As reported by Politico:
Contract negotiations between Megyn Kelly and Fox News Channel have spilled into the media, with Fox News interim CEO Rupert Murdoch talking on the record to The Wall Street Journal (which he also owns via his other company, News Corp.) about the matter.
According to the Journal's Joe Flint, “Mr. Murdoch said in an interview that she is important to the network and he hopes to get a contract signed 'very soon,' but noted, 'it’s up to her.'”
Then Murdoch hinted, not unsubtly, “We have a deep bench of talent, many of whom would give their right arm for her spot.”
As noted by the publication, Kelly is shopping around her talents as well, booking an expected appearance as co-host of ABC's “Live with Kelly!” Image Credit: Paul Morigi/Getty Images
Megyn Kelly is also seeking a more lucrative contract:
Flint reports that Kelly, who will make around $15 million this year, is aiming to get north of $20 million per year with her new contract. He also said he wants to keep Bill O'Reilly on as the channel's 8 PM host. O'Reilly's contract is also up next year.
Murdoch also attempted to put rumors of a less conservative Fox News outlet to rest in the Wall Street Journal interview:
“We’re not changing direction…that would be business suicide.”
If TrumpTV indeed becomes a reality, the winds of change may shift again. Fox News will have a very different look — with or without Megyn Kelly — as a feud looms over who is the real “conservative” leader in cable news. | 0 |
. FBI Wants you to Believe It Examined 650,000 Emails in 691,000 Seconds In no surprise to anyone paying even marginal attention, the FBI’s clearing Hillary Clinton of wrong... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/fbi-wants-you-to-believe-it-examined.html In no surprise to anyone paying even marginal attention, the FBI’s clearing Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing in its briefly reopened investigation — however, the time the agency took to reach this conclusion is not only bereft of logic and reason, it constitutes the most hubristic of insults to the public’s intelligence. In just 691,000 seconds from announcement to conclusion, FBI Director James Comey wants you to believe agents thoroughly examined over 650,000 emails newly ‘discovered’ on Anthony Weiner’s computer — including any threads resulting, as well as all attachments — before deciding Clinton innocent of wrongdoing.We, the people of this planet, are just not that stupid — nor are we even mildly amused by this farcical bullshit passed off as a credible investigation.Seriously.Indeed, the lightning pace of this putative second investigation not only boggles the mind, it forces uneasy questions concerning the true motivation and apparent exceeding necessity to ensure Hillary Clinton walks away scot-free amid rapidly mushrooming evidence of flagrant corruption and mendacious collusion.Just a cursory comparison of two investigations shows such marked differences it would be impossible not to question legitimacy of the FBI’s findings.In the summer of 2015, the FBI commenced its first probe into the former secretary of state’s use of a private email server during her tenure in office, after John Giacalone — then Director of the National Security Branch — met with Comey to voice concerns emanating from the Intelligence community about classified information possibly handled carelessly.For nearly a full year — 365 days, or 31,536,000 seconds — a sizable task force of FBI agents pored over an enormous cache , first comprised of 30,000 emails, but later totaling 44,900 after additional documents not originally handed over by the Clinton camp to the State Department were discovered. This means — rounding off the rough estimate of one year — the bureau combed an average of just over 123 documents every day. While that might seem to be manageable with a slew of investigators on the job, a basic comparison of the two probes proves the literal inanity of the reopened investigation.Later in the day on October 28, Comey announced the commencement of the secondary probe — albeit to the consternation of current and former officials who felt his telling Congress broke a number of investigatory guidelines, including possibly influencing the outcome of the presidential race.According to Comey, an additional 650,000 documents located on the computer of Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s now-disgraced and estranged husband Anthony Weiner deserved careful scrutiny for pertinence and relevance to the original investigation of the Democratic nominee.Public and official speculation predicted a months- or years-long investigation, even with substantial manpower dedicated to the task.But on Sunday, November 6, in yet another shocker of an announcement from the FBI director, Comey inexplicably declared nothing of relevance to the Clinton investigation —“ no new conclusions ”— had been revealed in its secondary probe. This means — again rounding for brevity to eight days the total length of the investigation — FBI agents inspected some 81,250 documents each day. Granted, both estimates have been averaged and roughened, but only for comparison’s sake — and that contrast doesn’t survive the scantiest litmus test of believability.Not at all.Before the nay-sayers jump in with a there’s no comparison deflection, consider the following points.Although an algorithm or program combing those documents might indeed retrieve subjects of interest to investigators — keywords, germane subjects, accordant people’s names, and the like — in no way would such technological gatekeepers reveal subtle nuance as has been displayed in emails published by Wikileaks from Hillary Clinton, campaign chair John Podesta , and the Democratic National Committee.Such fine gradations of meaning, naturally found in the English language but also purposefully employed to throw off investigators and interlopers, could not possibly be revealed by artificial means — at least not that quickly and particularly not with currently-available technologies.Still not convinced?Consider that if such technology did indeed exist to that discerning level of scrutiny in our heightened and overarching surveillance and police states, no criminal would ever roam free.Law enforcement departments and the National Security Agency together have amassed astonishingly voluminous data sets on every person in this country, including through emails and online activities. A technology advanced enough to comb for subtleties in language would hone in on criminal behavior and activity with incredible frequency.And while NSA programs have been revealed to hunt for keywords, there are limits to its effectiveness — no terrorist plot has yet been halted in progress because the intelligence to discover it hasn’t yet solidified to that point.Technology experts immediately weighed in claiming such technology does indeed exist, is frequently employed, and can do the job perfectly in a mere eight days — no worries.But, as Wikileaks rebutted in a number of tweets, it isn’t quite so simple.Emails between Clinton, her campaign staff, the DNC, and other insiders have proven to be a literal trove of revealing details — including Hillary’s use of the name of aide Huma Abedin as a deflection, and President Obama’s use of a pseudonym to communicate on the private server in an attempt to thwart future investigators.Programs and algorithms would have to be fed such information, but not all of those pseudonyms were known — and that represents only one such complication. Even working around the clock, as Comey alleged the FBI did in its second probe, 82,000 documents daily isn’t even worth comparing to the 123 averaged each day in the initial investigation. So, what are we to believe about the clearing of Hillary Clinton for a second time?That’s up to you — to each of us — to draw a conclusion.But to characterize that second investigation as anything other than a charade to placate an irate public would be criminal willful denial of conspicuous evidence — criminal willful denial that the utter bullshit the FBI just brazenly served the American people doesn’t somehow stink. By Claire Bernish Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue.
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GARDEN CITY, N. Y. — Mary Crosson, a housing activist, remembers moving to Long Island from Bayside, Queens, in the 1990s and being struck by the sharp divisions that seemed to keep blacks and whites apart. “I come from South Carolina, so I understand discrimination,” said Mrs. Crosson, 68, who is black and lives in the village of Hempstead, where nearly half the residents are . “In Queens, it was more of a mixed neighborhood. I came out here and I felt like I went back to the South all over again. ” A federal appeals court found last month that such segregation was not an accident. The court ruled that Hempstead’s neighbor, Garden City, a wealthy village where 1. 2 percent of the residents were black in 2010, had violated federal antidiscrimination law by rezoning land specifically to block multifamily housing — and the potential for minorities to move in. “Something was amiss here,” a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote in its decision. “Garden City’s abrupt shift in zoning in the face of vocal opposition to changing the character of Garden City represented acquiescence to animus. ” The ruling, which affirmed a 2013 decision by a Federal District Court judge, is a pivotal development in the long struggle to dismantle housing segregation as the federal government, courts and advocacy groups shift the battle beyond cities to white suburban enclaves that have deliberately erected barriers to integration. The more aggressive posture reflects a growing impatience with the persistence of segregation a after the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act, and an effort to apply more pressure on communities to finally open themselves up to black and Latino residents. “It’s another signal that the tide is turning in terms of fair housing,” said Prof. Robert M. Silverman, of the School of Architecture and Planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who has written extensively on the subject of housing segregation. “There’s a historic pattern of segregation that those places have experienced. ” In the case of Garden City, however, the legal victory may have come too late. The litigation dragged on for so long that a courthouse is now planned for the land at the center of the case, and local officials, advocates said, claim there are few other parcels on which to build. The judges who ruled in the Garden City case raised the possibility that discrimination went beyond one community, directing the district court to determine whether officials in Nassau County, which includes Garden City and Hempstead, had deliberately steered affordable housing to areas with largely minority populations. Experts on fair housing say discrimination cases are flaring where the need for more affordable housing is greatest: cities where housing costs are high and their suburbs. In recent years, legal challenges have been raised in Westchester County, N. Y. Marin County, Calif. and the city of Dallas, among other places. The litigation in Nassau County is entering its next phase as a new rule issued by the Obama administration takes effect, requiring communities that receive federal housing aid to detail how they plan to reduce racial inequality in housing. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has given local governments data and mapping tools to help them address segregation. Bryan Greene, the agency’s general deputy assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity, said the requirement would help prevent what happened in Westchester, where some of the country’s most affluent communities sit next to hardscrabble towns and where, a judge found, officials had failed to consider race when they certified that the county had taken steps to promote fair housing. Westchester, which entered a sweeping desegregation agreement with the federal government in 2009, helped “illustrate to many people nationwide that communities were getting millions and millions of dollars in block grant funding” without evaluating the problem of racial segregation, Mr. Greene said. In the case of Garden City, local officials had not received federal housing money, but the Fair Housing Act applies to all housing transactions and policies, even when federal money is not involved. The lawsuit that led to the appeals court ruling last month was filed against the village and Nassau County in 2005. It accused the village of discrimination by catering to residents who had protested the board of trustees’ initial embrace of a zoning classification that would have allowed multifamily housing on a parcel that the county owned and planned to sell to a private developer. While the classification did not specifically refer to affordable housing, the appeals court said, residents who opposed the move raised the specter of such housing being built and urged the trustees to “play it safe” by allowing only townhouses or homes on the property. The trustees did just that. Using what the appeals court called code words, residents said that multifamily housing would change the “flavor” and “character” of the village and would lead to “four or 10 people in an apartment,” and demanded a guarantee that the housing be “upscale. ” “The tenor of the discussion at public hearings,” the judges wrote, and a flier that circulated in the village, “shows that citizen opposition, though not overtly was directed at a potential influx of poor, minority residents. ” Garden City officials have yet to decide whether to appeal. The trustees said in a statement that the village had already begun to apply remedies ordered by the district court judge, Arthur D. Spatt, adopting a resolution and appointing a compliance officer. Judge Spatt also ordered Garden City to require that 10 percent of new residential developments with five units or more be set aside for residents with household incomes of 80 percent or less of Long Island’s median income. Advocates doubt the village will create such housing anytime soon. “They’ve been saying to us the whole time that they don’t have enough land to build anything,” said Diane Goins, chairwoman of the Long Island chapter of New York Communities for Change, a plaintiff in the case. Nonetheless, Ms. Goins, who lives in Hempstead, called the ruling historic. “Having grown up in communities on Long Island, I always knew that we were locked into certain places,” she explained. “You could visit Garden City, but you could not stay. ” The lawyers for the plaintiffs said Garden City and Nassau County were not unusual. “There are many violations going on all across the country, but unless someone catches them, it’s of no moment,” one of the lawyers, Frederick K. Brewington, said. The broader implications of the case, and the appeals court’s question about whether Nassau had engaged in racial steering, could be . Nassau “is one of the most segregated counties in the country,” said Stanley J. Brown, another lawyer for the plaintiffs. In Westchester, the events that eventually produced a desegregation agreement started with a challenge by an advocacy group, the Center, which accused the county of lying when it claimed to have followed requirements while applying for federal housing money. A federal judge agreed, ruling that the county had “utterly failed” to meet its obligations. The county said it would build 750 units of affordable housing in 31 overwhelmingly white communities. The units — intended for working, families — were to be aggressively marketed to nonwhite residents. At the end of 2015, according to county officials, financing was in place for 649 units, 588 of which had building permits or certificates of occupancy. But a thornier element of the Westchester settlement required the county to “use all available means as appropriate” to promote nondiscriminatory housing. That included pressing local governments to change zoning rules that discouraged the construction of apartments. The federal housing agency has repeatedly accused Rob Astorino, the Westchester County executive, of moving too slowly on the issue. He, in turn, has accused the agency of trying to expand the agreement’s scope. In a recent opinion article in a local newspaper, Mr. Astorino, a Republican, said the housing agency was trying to “assault local zoning. ” The Nassau and Westchester cases have their roots in a much older battle near New York: a seminal case in Mount Laurel, N. J. The Mount Laurel case began in the 1960s when a group of found themselves priced out of the township, a Philadelphia suburb. They sued in 1971, after local officials blocked an project. The case reached New Jersey’s highest court, which in two key rulings limited the use of exclusionary zoning to prevent the construction of affordable housing. More important, the ruling, known as the Mount Laurel doctrine, asserted that all municipalities had an obligation to provide a “fair share” of affordable housing. Since the a total of more than 65, 000 units have been built across New Jersey’s 21 counties. Professor Silverman of SUNY Buffalo said continued litigation of cases highlighted both the intractable nature of the problem and the robust enforcement now unfolding nationally. “The fact that discrimination has been sustained over time, despite a series of different court challenges, has kept the issue salient,” he said. “People see the inequalities. ” | 1 |
It has been said a number of times over the past year, that WWIII could be on the horizon. Recent events and statements between Russia and the United States have people believing it’s closer than ever. But is this really the case? Should we be worried?
Via CollectiveEvolution
Since almost everything real and important taking place is kept from the masses while we are distracted by mainstream media and pop culture, it’s tough to say what is really going on. But if we begin to look at the various things going on in the world, we can piece together some interesting things.
Scroll Down For Video Below In this case, anonymous is hinting that WWIII is inching closer. Some people even believe it has already begun. But you know what? I’m not sure we need to move into fear. First check out the video, then read on.
Not All Bad News Right off the bat many start worrying about nuclear bombs, and that’s fair. But there is also an interesting fact to consider: UFOs have been shooting down nuclear threats over the last few decades.
Dozens of foreign governments have released thousands of pages of UFO related documents –here is an example of the latest batch released from the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense in June 2013. Other country’s governments who have done the same include Mexico, France, Argentina, Russia and Belgium, just to name a few.
The fact that governments have released and documented information that detail UFO encounters with the military, as well as supposed extraterrestrial encounters with people, tells us that they’ve had and do have a high level of interest when it comes to the topic of UFOs and extraterrestrials. Had this information remained classified, nobody would officially be able to say that governments have allocated resources to investigate this phenomenon, and it would have remained in the “conspiracy” realm. At the same time, it’s important to remember that this issue goes far beyond and well above government control.
“It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects which both congress and the commander in chief know nothing about.” – Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defense Minister (source)
“Everything is in a process of investigation both in the United States and in Spain, as well as the rest of the world. The nations of the world are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon. There is an international exchange of data.” – General Carlos Castro Cavero (1979). From “UFOs and the National Security State, Volume 2″, Written by Richard Dolan
“Behind the scenes, high ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” Former head of CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, 1960 (source)
Just last year at the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure , a United States congresswoman voiced her opinion that the US government should disclose this existence, pointing to the fact that a number of foreign governments have already done so -you can read more about that story here.
War is something none of us want I’m sure we could agree on, and just because UFO’s may be shooting down nukes doesn’t mean we are OK with war. But what can we do when it comes to such large worldly events? There must be something… Consciousness!
What you focus on, what your thoughts are each day, how you feel and how you treat one another is important. It has a huge impact on what plays out in our world. This has been proven numerous times when studies examine the impact of people meditating or focusing on something specific. Collective consciousness is real and it can be impacted.
Here is an example of meditation helping in war zones.
You are not small, you can impact millions, we can impact billions because we are all connected. Focus on the world you want and share that with others.
As for physical action, again what you choose to do to be in alignment with your purpose is powerful. But we can also continue to raise awareness about what is going on in our world and make decisions and choices that opt out of the things we no longer want to see and support.
Meditation, intention, being a good person, aligning with your soul purpose, being of service to others and doing things like voting with your dollar is no passive, it is powerful when you understand how our reality works.
Transcript of video:
Greetings World, We are Anonymous.
For the last two months, we have been consistently reporting on a possible global conflict, World War 3 between the United States and its allies in the West, and Russia and its allies in the East.
The dispute on the South China Sea has severely damaged the United States relations with the Peoples Republic of China. After the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that China’s nine-dash-line claim in the South China Sea, and its land reclamation activities on islets are invalid and unlawful, the United States has been preparing to sail in the area under a so-called Freedom of Navigation principle.
This has angered the Chinese. In August, the Chinese Defense Minister, Chang Wanquan told his country’s citizens to prepare for, what he described as the peoples war at sea. Mr Wanquan was referring directly to the United States planned provocation under the pretext of Freedom of Navigation. China has since vowed to take all necessary measures available to protect its sovereignty over the South China Sea, revealing that it had the right to set up an air defense zone on the sea.
China has also since been positioning and testing its nuclear weapons, and planning military drills on its waters with Russia. Even the United States has confirmed that China has tested an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, which is capable of striking everywhere in the world within half an hour.
Moving away from the South China Sea, we arrive in Syria. It is an open secret that the civil war in Syria is a proxy war between the United States and Russia. Russia has even intervened physically on the request of the Syrian government. The United States, unable to get any invitation, has been openly and secretly arming many rebel groups in the country, with open plans to overthrow the Syrian government.
Of course, since Russia honored the invitation of the Syrian government last year, the war has been turning in favor of the Syrian government, which was falling before Russia’s intervention.
As we speak now, tension is mounting between the United States and Russia. Nerves are at their highest since the Cold War era. The United States, at the moment, is sitting on tenterhooks. Many officials in the president Obama administration are frustrated and confused regarding the situation in Syria.
The United States has announced that it has ended all contacts with Russia in Syria. This announcement by the United States comes as Russia, beginning on September. 22nd, intensified its military operations in Syria, with the intentions to capture the city of Aleppo for the Syrian government. Diplomatic efforts to put an end to the fighting in Syria, have collapsed.
As the Aleppo operation continues, Russia has given the United States a stern warning not to take any action against the Syrian government forces. In fact, there are many Russian jet fighters stationed in Syria, ready to shoot down any United States jet fighter that attempts to strike on the Syrian government forces.
These developments from Moscow are not going down easily with the United States. The United States Secretary of State, John Kerry, is said to have urged president Obama to intervene and face the consequences from Russia. He is said to have even favored a nuclear deterrent against Russia.
However, it appears that before Kerry could even make this suggestion to president Obama, the Russians had already gathered intelligence on the happenings within the White House. According to Zvezda, a Russian defense ministry Television channel, the country has started preparing its citizens for a possible nuclear war with the United States – because of the mounting tensions in Syria. Russia has since moved to deploy nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in its western-most region, Kaliningrad, which borders on NATO members of Poland and Lithuania.
Due to how the situation has become, some top officials at the United States defense headquarters have finally spoken. These Pentagon officials have admitted that World War 3 is imminent, and that its going to be deadly and fast. The military generals were speaking on a future-of-the-army panel in Washington.
“A conventional conflict in the near future will be extremely lethal and fast, and we will not own the stopwatch,” Major General William Hix said. General Hix also stated that China and Russia’s armies are becoming increasingly technological, and that the Pentagon was getting ready for violence on the scale that the United States Army has not seen since Korea.
His comments were also echoed by lieutenant Gen Joseph Anderson and Chief of Staff, Gen Mark A. Milley, who described war between nation states as almost guaranteed. The generals also said apart from the conventional battle, cyber battle, too, has become a reality against the United States, revealing that even smaller nations are launching it against the country.
We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.
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SAN SALVADOR — Veronica picked up some modeling clay, molded it into little human figures with her hands — and then dug holes into the sculpture’s face. “Look,” said Veronica, 9, showing off the creation to her aunt. “That’s how Mamá ended up. ” For more than a year, Veronica and her sister have been in hiding here in El Salvador, hoping to receive refugee status in the United States. The two girls were doing homework at their dining room table when masked men burst in and gunned down their grandparents — the community’s only two health workers — on rumors that the couple had been tipping off the police about gangs in the neighborhood. Like many thousands of others, Veronica and her sister applied for sanctuary in the United States under a special Obama administration effort to grapple with the violence that has gutted Central America and sent waves of its people on a desperate march toward the American border. But on Monday, the Trump administration announced a suspension on all refugee admissions to the United States so security procedures can be improved and, perhaps most significantly, cut the number of total refugees allowed into the country by more than half. “We can’t remain in the same place,” said the girls’ aunt, Reina, who is seeking refugee status for her nieces, witnesses to the double homicide. “We got a call last weekend telling us that they’d find us under whatever rock we were hiding. ” When President Trump first tried to freeze the nation’s refugee program in January, the courts jumped in and thwarted his executive order. But one vital limit that the courts did allow — and which Mr. Trump’s new order continues — is a drastic reduction in the number of refugees admitted to the United States this fiscal year, from 110, 000 under President Barack Obama to Mr. Trump’s revised cap: 50, 000. And those seats are mostly taken already. More than 37, 000 refugees from around the world have been admitted to the United States since the fiscal year began in October. By Monday morning, with seven months to go in the fiscal year, fewer than 12, 700 slots remained under Mr. Trump’s limit. In a statement on Monday, John F. Kelly, the homeland security secretary, said the new executive order would “make America safer, and address concerns about the security of our immigration system. ” “We must undertake a rigorous review of our visa and refugee vetting programs to increase our confidence in the entry decisions we make for visitors and immigrants to the United States,” he said. “We cannot risk the prospect of malevolent actors using our immigration system to take American lives. ” Altogether, the United Nations referred more than 100, 000 refugees from around the globe last year for resettlement in the United States. The Obama administration accepted nearly 85, 000 of them in the 2016 fiscal year, before raising the ceiling considerably for 2017. Now Mr. Trump’s order will effectively leave tens of thousands of families in limbo, all vying for the sliver of seats still available. Veronica and her sister — whose last names are being withheld to protect their identities — have been waiting to find out whether they will be among the chosen. They and their father have been interviewed a total of four times, but months have passed. Members of El Salvador’s most notorious gang, have made menacing phone calls suggesting that more killings are coming, the family says. So the girls, their father, aunts and uncles abandoned their houses and ran. But in a country the size of Massachusetts, there are only so many places to hide. They have already moved twice. Officials and immigrant advocates in Central America fear that as the Trump administration cites the danger of admitting potential terrorists cloaked as refugees from nations like Syria, it is disregarding the tens of thousands of people here who are being terrorized by street gangs that actually originated in the United States. In 2014, the Obama administration began setting up a program to offer refugee status or special entry for some Central American children, hoping to stanch the tide of minors making the dangerous journey to the United States on their own. More than 11, 000 people have applied through the program, and just over 2, 400 had been admitted to the United States by Feb. 22, according to the State Department. In Mr. Trump’s first month in office, 316 people were admitted, the department said. The undertaking has always been slow. With the bar for eligibility high, and the application process lengthy, comparatively few of the people at risk applied. Many children chose to flee the country rather than wait for approval and risk danger while their cases were reviewed. American officials expanded the program in July to include additional family members, not just children. But countless adolescents all over El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are hoping to leave their countries because gang members are stalking the young, forcing boys to join their ranks and threatening to rape girls. “I have a client who has not left his house since July,” said Berta Guevara, a lawyer at the Independent Monitoring Group of El Salvador, which helps people with their refugee applications. Ms. Guevara said that many people in danger now believe that the United States no longer wants them. “A delay to a person who, on any day if they are seen, they will be killed — to that person, every day is a terrible day,” Ms. Guevara said. Even before Mr. Trump’s executive order on Monday, officials at the Department of Homeland Security said they had not been taking on any new cases since the president first sought to suspend refugee admissions in late January, effectively freezing new applications to the program. The new executive order will prolong that freeze for at least another 120 days, leaving children under threat in the region with some daunting choices, including staying where they are or making the long, dangerous trek to the southwest border of the United States to apply for asylum or some other form of humanitarian relief. “There’s still this ambivalence in regarding the Central American situation as a refugee crisis,” said Wendy Young, the president of Kids in Need of Defense, a Washington organization that offers legal assistance to unaccompanied immigrant children. “There’s a perception in today’s world that refugees are people who are fleeing war, and that gang and drug violence is not war,” she said. Longer term, the Obama program in Central America could also be under threat because of its frequent reliance on a special provision called humanitarian parole, which allows certain immigrants to enter the United States temporarily even if they do not qualify as refugees. Some Republicans who want to limit immigration call humanitarian parole an overused back door to entering the United States. And Mr. Trump, in an executive order last month that sought to tighten border security, took aim at “the abuse of parole and asylum provisions. ” Veronica’s aunt, Reina, said she was more scared than ever. Arrests have been made in the case, prompting more threats in recent days. “I have been offered help to leave the country, but I just cannot leave here until these girls are safe,” Reina said. She said she already borrowed $6, 000 to pay a smuggler to take her son, who also witnessed the killings, to Dallas. Oscar Torres, a prosecutor who runs the homicide division in the area where Reina’s mother and stepfather were killed, acknowledged that the entire family was in grave danger, whether they witnessed the murders or not. Of the seven people who participated in the killings, he said, four are in jail pending trial, one is still wanted, another was killed in a shootout with the police and a minor is out on bail. One of the accused is a gang leader known as El Tigre. Gang members are particularly known to kill the families of potential witnesses when a gang leader has been accused, he said. “If these guys come to be sentenced, they are not going to like that their gang leader, their homeboy as they say, was convicted, so this family becomes a target,” Mr. Torres said. “Where do these people go? What path is left for them?” | 1 |
US intelligence warns public of pre-election day terror November 04, 2016 The rising sun lights One World Trade as it stands over the Manhattan borough of New York, U.S., November 2, 2016. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
U.S. intelligence officials have warned authorities in New York, Texas, and Virginia about possible attacks by al Qaeda on the day prior to election day. No specific locations were mentioned, but polling station are suspected as targets. U.S. intelligence officials alerted joint terrorism task forces about the possible threat. Senior FBI official: “The FBI, working with our federal, state and local counterparts, shares and assesses intelligence on a daily basis and will continue to work closely with law enforcement and intelligence community partners to identify and disrupt any potential threat to public safety.” Local authorities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin and Florida said they are not boosting election-related law enforcement personnel or resources above 2012 levels.
(ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA) U.S. intelligence officials have warned local authorities in New York, Texas and Virginia about possible attacks by al Qaeda on Monday, a day before the U.S. presidential election, CBS News reported on Friday, citing unnamed sources.
No specific locations were mentioned, but U.S. intelligence officials alerted joint terrorism task forces about the possible threat, CBS reported.
“The FBI, working with our federal, state and local counterparts, shares and assesses intelligence on a daily basis and will continue to work closely with law enforcement and intelligence community partners to identify and disrupt any potential threat to public safety,” a senior FBI official told CBS.
TRUNEWS could not immediately verify the report, and officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment. | 0 |
WashingtonsBlog
CNN’s Jake Tapper hit the nail on the head last night, as he was speaking about why people voted for Trump.
Tapper said that most Americans are sick of the income inequality, globalization, and politics-as-usual that the status quo have given us.
He even pointed out that only a handful of people have gotten rich off of globalization, and a lot of people have been left behind .
Indeed, exit polls last night showed that the economy was the number 1 concern for voters. The Guardian reports :
“It’s the economy, stupid” was a phrase coined by her husband’s adviser James Carville in the 1992 election and, in many ways, it ought to have helped Democrats again in 2016. Barack Obama helped rescue the US from the financial crash and presided over a record series of consecutive quarters of job growth.
Unfortunately for Clinton, many Americans simply did not feel as positive. Stagnant wage levels and soaring inequality were symptoms of the malaise felt by many voters. Trump successfully convinced them to believe this was caused by bad trade deals and a rigged economy.
Despite being pushed in this direction by Sanders in the Democratic primary, Clinton never really found a satisfactory response. Her volte-face on trade sounded – and was later proved by leaked emails – unconvincing at best; deeply cynical at worst.
Similarly, Brexit – the other recent vote which went against all political forecasts – was largely a vote by those who lost out on the benefits of globalization … that only a handful of fatcats really profited from.
Leaders of the Brexit campaign noted the confluence of the two votes:
Jeremy Corbyn described Mr Trump’s victory as “an unmistakable rejection of political establishment” .
Ukip leader Nigel Farage – who went to the US to appear at a Trump campaign rally – said he was handing over his mantle as the creator of political earthquakes to the new President, saying that 2016 was “the year of two great political revolutions”, adding: “I thought Brexit was big, but boy, this looks like it’s going to be even bigger”.
N igel Farage has issued this statement following Donald Trump’s victory.
“Today, the establishment is in deep shock. Even more so than after Brexit. What we are witnessing is the end of a period of big business and big politics controlling our lives.
Voters across the Western world want nation state democracy, proper border controls and to be in charge of their own lives.
I commend Donald Trump for the courage with which he has fought this campaign and I look forward to a closer relationship between the USA and the UK. We now have a President who likes our country and understands our post-Brexit values.
Prepare for further political shocks in the years to come.”
Voters in the UK and the world’s strongest nation, the U.S., have both rebuked the status quo, including neoliberal trade and economic policies.
What’s next?
The rebellion will spread …
For example, it’s so probable that Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party will be thrown out on its ear that Merkel is already trying to distract with silly claims that the Russians will hack the German election.
Postscript: There are, of course, other reasons that Trump won. But the economy is the main one. | 0 |
BURLINGAME, Calif. — This is the most populous state in the nation, but in presidential elections, it has almost always found itself on the sidelines. The last time a Republican primary in California mattered was 52 years ago, when the party nominated Barry Goldwater. But California will finally play an important role in the drama of presidential politics. The 172 Republican delegates up for grabs in the state’s June 7 primary, which in most years has taken place well after the party’s presidential was known, will determine whether Donald J. Trump can clinch the nomination on the last day of voting and avoid having to wrangle uncommitted delegates at the national convention in July. All three Republican presidential candidates, along with hundreds of reporters, turned up for the party’s state convention here over the weekend, the biggest show in memory of presidential candidate firepower at this yearly gathering. “California is at a crossroads — California is going to decide this Republican primary,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who may need a win in Indiana on Tuesday to keep his hopes alive here, told hundreds of conventiongoers Saturday. “Who’d have thunk it?” The sudden interest in California, on one hand, has been a cause for celebration in a state that has been starved for attention in presidential contests. A meaningful primary means extensive campaigning, and a national focus on issues of particular concern to the electorate here, rather than the usual brief touchdowns to raise money or appear on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Mr. Cruz, for one, drew appreciative applause when he denounced environmental regulations that he said were depriving farmers of water in the Central Valley. A rival, Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, all but gushed: “I’m not a big panderer, but I do have to tell you, I love California. I have been coming here for a very long time. ” As desirable as the attention may be, the prospect of the presidential campaign’s arrival in California also poses a threat to the state’s Republican Party, which has been politically marginalized, with Republican registration at just 28 percent. A Republican has not won a statewide election since Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor in 2006. Republican leaders are in the midst of a major effort to reposition the party ideologically as it seeks to revive its appeal in a state that is increasingly Democratic and Latino. In large part, that means distancing the state party from national Republicans on issues like immigration and marriage. Yet Mr. Trump landed on Thursday night in Orange County with a blistering speech attacking immigrants who are in the country illegally and suggesting that Mexicans illegally crossing the border were responsible for a recent spike in crime in Los Angeles. And Mr. Cruz trumpeted the endorsement of former Gov. Pete Wilson, who championed a state initiative in 1994 that would have cut benefits to those in the country illegally and that is widely seen as one of the reasons the party is struggling today. Even if Mr. Trump wins in Indiana and convincingly proclaims himself the presumptive nominee, he is almost certain to continue campaigning aggressively in California to amass enough delegates to fend off any challenges at the Republican National Convention. That is a prospect some Republicans here do not welcome. “It does set back Republican efforts in California,” said Bill Whalen, a fellow with the conservative Hoover Institution who served as a senior adviser to Mr. Wilson. “The California party is in a phase of rebuilding and rebranding. And that means toning down the message and developing a message that appeals to a widening swath of Californians. I can’t think of a more toxic situation than him coming in alienating women and Mexicans. ” Chuck Page, a Republican State Senate candidate from Saratoga, said he was worried about how the presidential campaign here might affect Republicans like him. “It makes it harder for me,” he said in the atrium of the convention hotel here, protests against Mr. Trump clearly audible outside. “I’m a kind of guy. ” There was a time when it seemed the fight between Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont would also remain up in the air until June, providing California Democrats with their own rare opportunity to help decide a national primary. But with Mr. Sanders’s chances of overtaking Mrs. Clinton fading, the biggest question here may be whether he will make a strong enough showing to provide her one more embarrassment as the primary calendar runs out. In general elections, California’s 55 electoral votes are the biggest prize on the map. But the state has swung decisively Democratic in recent years: A Republican has not carried the state since George Bush beat Michael S. Dukakis in 1988. California’s presidential primary is most often scheduled to coincide with the June state primary — largely to avoid the cost of separate elections. By that point, though, presidential nominations have usually been decided. And when the presidential primary has been held earlier — as in 2008, when Mrs. Clinton defeated Barack Obama in the state — California has had to compete for attention with other states holding contests the same day. “We were pretty relevant in ’68,” said John Burton, the state Democratic chairman, who has been involved in state politics for 50 years. He paused. “Yeah, that’s a long time ago. ” Understandably, the prospect of another relevant campaign here has stirred much excitement. When Mr. Kasich, who has won just one state this year, showed up on Friday for an evening news conference, 15 television cameras awaited him. The convention hotel’s atrium was packed with volunteers passing out buttons for Mr. Cruz or trying to sign up delegates for Mr. Kasich. (Strikingly, no such organizational presence was visible for Mr. Trump.) “I’ve never seen anything like this this far out,” said Jim Brulte, the state Republican chairman, who was besieged by delegates, campaign aides and reporters as he moved through the convention hall. The convention site, as it happened, was 10 miles from the Cow Palace, the scene of the bitterly divided Republican National Convention that picked Mr. Goldwater in 1964. The party is reaping a windfall from the heightened interest: Tickets to hear Mr. Cruz, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kasich speak were $100 each. Yet there was a cost, too, in the protests outside, and in a banner smuggled into the hotel and unfurled down a wall, reading, “Stop Hate. ” A greater cost, some Republicans fear, could come in setting back efforts to reposition the party on immigration and to appeal to political independents in a state where Latinos make up 39 percent of the population. Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz, by contrast, are appealing to core Republican primary voters who, polls show, embrace their tough immigration language. “It’s devastating to us here,” said Rob Stutzman, who was deputy chief of staff to Mr. Schwarzenegger and is leading the movement in California. “It’s so toxic to our brand. ” And Marty Wilson, a Republican strategist, said the damage extended beyond Latino voters. “It hurts us even more with Asian voters,” he said. “Our growth in California comes because of immigrants from the Pacific. ” Lanhee J. Chen, a California Republican who advised Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, warned that “a discussion that is as caustic and bitter about immigration as Trump wants is problematic for the prospects of the party. ” He said that prospects for state candidates in 2016 were “nearly impossible” already, and that even 2018 would be tough. “It’s hard to get good candidates,” he added, “to do kamikaze missions. ” | 1 |
Indian princess watches over rare paleontological remains Thu Oct 27, 2016 3:12AM News Bulletin This picture taken on September 1, 2016 shows "Dinosaur Princess" Aaliya Sultana Babi holding a fossilised dinosaur egg at her palace in Balasinor. © AFP
A member of an Indian royal family is leading excavations in an area nicknamed India’s Jurassic Park. Aaliya Sultana Babi is a princess by birth. She has been dubbed the “Dinosaur Princess” because of her love for archeology.
Babi’s passion started when she accepted to decide a group of foreign geologists to a site in Balasinor which was formerly a princely state. The site is now a Dinosaur park and welcomes a large number of visitors every year.
Aaliya is pushing the authorities towards better preservation of the thousands of eggs and bones buried in the area. She believes with more coordination between government departments she can win the UNESCO Geo Park status for the site.
Tourists can enjoy a luxurious stay at Aaliya’s family’s palace and see her personal collection when visiting the park. Loading ... | 0 |
I didn't see anything racist in this.
Is this how you dispel the truth when you dont agree with it, you just pull a race card. You just exposed yourself MR. In two words you described what you are....Well done. | 0 |
Home / Be The Change / Antiwar / ‘Unlawful’ US Airstrikes Kill 300 Civilians In Syria — Bombs Dropped a Second Time to Kill First Responders ‘Unlawful’ US Airstrikes Kill 300 Civilians In Syria — Bombs Dropped a Second Time to Kill First Responders John Vibes October 27, 2016 Leave a comment
As the media and the general population in the United States remain distracted by the sham elections, the US military is waging undeclared war across the middle east. Just t his week, we reported that 60 civilians were killed, and over 200 injured during a US-led airstrike in Iraq.
Now, only a day later in Syria, 300 innocent civilians have died as a result of 11 different airstrikes conducted by a US-led coalition.
The killings were largely absent from the major headlines in American mainstream media, but the operations were condemned by human rights organization Amnesty International.
The organization stated that the US Central Command (CENTCOM) “may have… carried out unlawful attacks” in Syria, killing civilians.
Lynn Maalouf, Deputy Director for Research at Amnesty International’s Beirut regional office said that the CENTCOM is downplaying the human cost of the recent attacks
“We fear the US-led coalition is significantly underestimating the harm caused to civilians in its operations in Syria,” she said.
“It’s high time the US authorities came clean about the full extent of the civilian damage caused by coalition attacks in Syria. Independent and impartial investigations must be carried out into any potential violations of international humanitarian law and the findings should be made public,” she added.
According to witnesses, “double tap” airstrikes, in which the same target is attacked multiple times, ended up killing numerous first responders who were trying to save innocent victims trapped in the rubble of collapsed buildings.
Amnesty international estimated that 300 civilians were killed in the attacks based on satellite imagery, eyewitness reports as well as media documentation from the front lines.
“At this point, I had a two-month-old baby boy in my arms whom I had rescued. The hit caused me to fall and drop him… I fell into the hole made by the air strike. That was what saved me… My mother, aunt, wife and children – a daughter who was four years old and a son who was two and a half were all killed. The woman and her son who I’d rescued were killed. Everyone but me was killed,” one survivor told reporters.
“Given the likely increase in air strikes by the US-led Coalition as part of the Iraqi offensive to recapture Mosul, it is even more pressing that CENTCOM be fully transparent about the impact of their military actions on civilians. And it is crucial that they adhere scrupulously to international humanitarian law, including by taking all feasible precautions to spare civilians and to minimize harm to civilian homes and infrastructure,” Maalouf of Amnesty International said.
This is not the first time such a large death toll has occurred recently in Syria. Amnesty also documented that over 200 civilians were killed in a US-led attack on the city of Manbij, Syria. John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. John is currently battling cancer naturally , without any chemo or radiation, and will be working to help others through his experience, if you wish to contribute to his treatments please donate here . Share Social Trending ‘Unlawful’ US Airstrikes Kill 300 Civilians In Syria — Bombs Dropped a Second Time to Kill First Responders October 27, 2016 | 0 |
If Hillary wants to know what new information the FBI has, Sharyl Attkisson knows someone she could ask Posted at 4:34 pm on October 29, 2016 by Brett T. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
As Twitchy reported, Hillary Clinton held a brief press conference Friday to address news that the FBI had found — in the process of investigating Anthony Weiner’s alleged sexting of a 15-year-old girl — new emails that warranted further investigation into her own email scandal.
Obviously not pleased by this latest development, Clinton called on the FBI to release whatever it had. Hillary Clinton: "We don't know the facts, which is why we're calling on the FBI to release all the information it has … let’s get it out."
— New York Post (@nypost) October 28, 2016
Despite that not being how FBI investigations work, Hillary’s call for the FBI to lay its cards on the table inspired Sharyl Attkisson of Full Measure News to make a simple suggestion: There's no mystery as to what's in the Huma Abedin emails–to Huma. She can fill in the Hillary campaign.
— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) October 29, 2016
What didn’t Hillary think of that? Abedin is right there with her on board her campaign plane — it’s not like she’s hard to track down. Unless, of course, neither one can recall what they wrote to each other. It happens. More than 1,000 potentially relevant emails found on Weiner computer, including some between Huma and HRC. https://t.co/hVHL61vqrk
— Rosalind Helderman (@PostRoz) October 28, 2016 @SharylAttkisson @RobbyMook can bring them when he's on @FoxNewsSunday and clear this all up. | 0 |
Gov. Bill Weld Encourges Supporters to Stop Trump page: 1 Statement by Gov. Bill Weld This is basically a backwards endorsement of Hillary. “Against that backdrop, I would like to address myself to all those in the electorate who remain torn between two so-called major party candidates whom they cannot enthusiastically support. I’m speaking particularly to those Republicans who feel that our President should exhibit commonly accepted standards of decency and discipline. *snip “After careful observation and reflection, I have come to believe that Donald Trump, if elected President of the United States, would not be able to stand up to this pressure and this criticism without becoming unhinged and unable to perform competently the duties of his office. I wonder what effect this will have on Libertarian Party members if any. I think it's unfortunate that people are feeling forced to support Hillary in order to stop Trump. Trump supporters need to take a long hard look in the mirror and realize that such a repulsive person, a man some voted for just for the lulz has ensured a Clinton presidency. You didn't stand up to the establishment you sent people fleeing to it. a reply to: Kali74 Check out the pretend libertarian! If I were libertarian, I'd be ticked off. Here's part of my supposed ticket endorsing one of the least libertarian candidates ever by making a fear play. what a bunch of doo doo feces this thread is. so voting for trump isnt standing up to the establisment? have you not watched veritas? have you not read anything from wikileaks? at this point im completely convinced if hillary wins this election, every women in america will be wearing a hijab within her presidency. the draft will make a return because we will be at war with russia and china. ok trump isnt a politician. and at this point, i dont think thats what we need. being president doesnt mean you have to be involved in politics your whole life. president of the us should be someone who has the values of america instilled in their heart. they should have america first mentality. hillary wants a 550% increase in muslim refugees. the same ones murdering and raping women throughout europe. the same ones who think because a woman isnt islamic, they can do whatever they want to them. hillary wants amnesty and open borders... great, so lots more columbian drug lords sending people over our border i want to feel safe in my own country. thats all i want. not fancy tax plans, free college, more jobs. trump makes me feel safe. | 0 |
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STUDIES have shown that websites which fill their pages with headlines that end with three dots and a question mark have to do very little else to attract thousands of clicks from unsuspecting web users.
The findings come after a year-long internet study, which found that content hosting sites can survive simply by exploiting the human brain’s natural tendency to seek the answer to a question that is seemingly directed straight at them, even if they have very little interest in the subject at hand.
Web users are just as likely to click through on headlines such as ‘Did Amy Huberman show too much flesh at last night’s event…?’ as they are on headlines such as ‘Can this tractor pull this other tractor up a hill…?’, meaning that little or no effort is required to run a thriving media empire.
“Can this kitten reach his food…? Does this grandmother know all the words to Lose Yourself…? Who cares, it’s all clicks” said one entertainment website owner.
“Once we worked out the old three dots and a question mark formula, then we knew we were set for life. People just can’t help but click on that. It’s like catnip for the bored mind”.
It is believed that the success of the formula is so great, that all news will come in that format in the near future. Already, Brian Dobson is working on his delivery of news headlines such as ‘Were there many people killed in the Middle East today…?’ and ‘Did the government get the 8th amendment sorted out…?’. | 0 |
With the exception of the sun, Jupiter is bigger than everything in the solar system put together. But little is known about the interior beneath its colorful cloud stripes. Now that Juno has arrived at its destination, it will orbit the planet 37 times over the next 20 months, with the hopes that it will collect data and images that offer clues to the origins of our solar system and the formation of the planets and moons. Several spacecraft have flown past Jupiter, beginning with Pioneer 10 in 1973. NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, entering orbit in 1995, dropped a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere, sending back data that showed Jupiter had strong, turbulent winds and offering details about the composition of its atmosphere. During its eight years at Jupiter, Galileo confirmed ideas of how Jupiter’s diaphanous rings formed out of dust particles blasted off Jupiter’s small inner moons. It measured the sizzling temperatures of volcanoes on Io, one of the planet’s four large moons, and it found evidence of oceans on the other three moons of Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Unlike Galileo, Juno will be in an orbit passing over Jupiter’s poles, providing a first close look at those regions. With repeated close passes over the cloud tops, the spacecraft will measure microwave emissions, the gravity field and the magnetic field, offering glimpses into what is deep inside Jupiter. It might seem odd to care about the water on Jupiter, but it is one of the main issues that Juno scientists are focusing on. “That’s in some ways our premier measurement,” said Steven Levin, the mission’s project scientist. On Mars, NASA’s strategy seeks to find out whether there was water there that would have ever made Mars cozy enough for life. Jupiter, with its crushing gravity and radiation, clearly is not a hospitable place for life, but that’s not why scientists are interested about water there. Rather, the question is, “Where’s the oxygen?” Jupiter has greater concentrations than the sun of most of the heavier elements like nitrogen and carbon, except for oxygen, which is scarce. Thus, scientists expect that oxygen atoms have each been tied up with two hydrogens to form water molecules. The measurements collected by Juno of microwave emissions emanating out of Jupiter will tell both the temperature and how much water there is, because water molecules absorb microwaves. If Juno finds a lot of water, that suggests Jupiter formed farther from the sun in the colder, icier regions and later migrated to its current orbit. Why does Jupiter have more of the heavier elements, anyway? That’s a mystery, too. One hypothesis is that the heavier elements came from comets that crashed into Jupiter and it absorbed them. Does Jupiter have a rocky core at its center? Measuring Jupiter’s gravity field will tell the distribution of mass within. If there is a rocky core, planetary scientists will have to explain how rocky bodies formed that early in the solar system. If there is not, then Jupiter formed out of a collapse of a gas cloud, much as the sun did. Jupiter is almost entirely hydrogen and helium, the two simplest and most abundant elements in the universe. Cool these two gases, and they change to a liquid. Inside Jupiter, hydrogen is believed to undergo another transformation, to a metal. Scientists have not been able to recreate metallic hydrogen on Earth. In laboratory experiments, hydrogen, squeezed to tens of millions of pounds per square inch between two diamonds, has remained stubbornly nonmetallic. The pressure inside Jupiter is hundreds of millions of pounds per square inch. By studying Jupiter’s magnetic fields, probably generated by currents of metallic hydrogen, scientists will receive hints about the properties of this elusive substance. Lots. “I’m confident it’s going to work,” Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator, said before the announcement Monday night that the spacecraft had arrived, “but I’ll be happy when it’s over and we’re in orbit. ” Some of the ways that this could have turned into a bad day: If Juno blew up. In August 1993, NASA’s Mars Observer spacecraft vanished. An inquiry concluded that a fuel leak caused the spacecraft to spin quickly and fall out of communication. While Juno’s setup is different, there is always a chance of an explosion with rocket fuel. If the engine did not fire at all. The Japanese probe Akatsuki was all set to arrive at Venus in December 2010, but its engine didn’t fire properly, and Akatsuki sailed right past Venus. Last year, Akatsuki crossed paths with Venus again, and this time, using smaller thrusters, it was able to enter orbit. If it crashed into something. Jupiter does not possess the majestic rings of Saturn, but it does have a thin ring of debris orbiting it. Juno passed through a region that appeared clear, but that did not mean it actually was. Even a dust particle could cause significant damage, as Juno was going 130, 000 miles per hour relative to Jupiter. If it flew too close to Jupiter and was ripped to pieces. In one of NASA’s most embarrassing failures, the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft was lost in 1999 because of a between English and metric units. Climate Orbiter went far deeper into Mars’ atmosphere than planned. Juno traveled within 2, 900 miles of Jupiter’s cloud tops, so a miscalculation could have been catastrophic. If the computer crashed. On July 4 last year, the mission controllers of the New Horizons spacecraft that was about to fly by Pluto experienced some nervous moments when the spacecraft stopped talking to them. The computer on New Horizons crashed while trying to interpret some new commands and compressing some images it had taken, the electronic equivalent of walking while chewing gum. The controllers put New Horizons back in working order within a few days, and the flyby occurred without a hitch. For Juno, the scientific instruments have been turned off for its arrival at Jupiter. “We turn off everything that is not necessary for making the event work,” said Dr. Levin, the project scientist. “This is very important to get right, so you don’t do anything extra. ” The intense barrage of radiation at Jupiter could have knocked out Juno’s computer, even though it is shielded in a titanium vault. Usually, when there is a glitch, a spacecraft goes into “safe mode” to await new instructions from Earth, but in this case, that would have been too late to save Juno. The spacecraft had been programmed to automatically restart the engine to allow it to enter orbit. “If that doesn’t go just right, we fly past Jupiter, and of course, that’s not desirable,” Dr. Bolton said. Juno has been executing an automated sequence of actions since Thursday. A timeline of Juno’s arrival (all Eastern time): 9:13 p. m. Start of transmission of single frequency “tones” that will provide updates on the spacecraft’s condition. 9:16 p. m. Juno begins turning away from the sun to position the engine in the right direction to slow the spacecraft for its arrival at Jupiter. 10:41 p. m. With the main antenna pointing away from the sun, Juno switches to a smaller antenna for sending the tones. 10:45 p. m. Juno adjusts itself to eliminate any wobbling. 10:56 p. m. Juno speeds up its spin rate from two rotations a minute to five rotations a minute, a process that takes about five minutes. 11:18 p. m. The main engine begins firing. 11:38 p. m. The spacecraft has slowed down enough to be captured into orbit around Jupiter. 11:53 p. m. The main engine shuts off, leaving Juno in the desired orbit. 11:55 p. m. The spacecraft starts slowing its spin rate back down to two revolutions per minute. 12:07 a. m. Tuesday Juno changes direction to point its antenna back at Earth. 12:11 a. m. Juno ends the transmission of status tones and switches to its antenna. 12:16 a. m. Juno begins transmitting detailed telemetry, although it may take 20 minutes or longer to lock into the signal. The first two highly elliptical orbits will be 53 days in duration, lasting until . Then Juno will fire its engine again on Oct. 19 to move to a orbit when the science measurements begin in earnest. Three solar panels provide a mere 500 watts to power Juno and its instruments. On Nov. 3, people will be able to start voting on where Juno should point its camera. On the 37th orbit, on Feb. 20, 2018, Juno is to make a suicidal dive into Jupiter, ending the mission, the same way the Galileo spacecraft was disposed in 2003. That is to ensure there is no possibility that Juno would crash into Europa and contaminate it with microbial hitchhikers from Earth. Europa is regarded as one of the most likely places in the solar system to look for life. It took five years to get to Jupiter, and the mission costs $1. 1 billion, yet Juno will have a far shorter stay than the eight years Galileo spent exploring Jupiter in the moons. The close approaches to Jupiter means Juno will pass through intense bombardment of the radiation belts. As the mission progresses, Juno’s orbits will receive more direct hits of radiation. In the best outcome, the mission might be extended for a few months. But over time, the spacecraft’s electronics will fail. | 1 |
By Deirdre Fulton Facing an increasingly outraged public, the leading Big Pharma lobby group is hiking its annual dues by more than 50 percent as it prepares to defend its pharmaceutical company... | 0 |
Remember the last debate when the internet blew up because Donald Trump said he wouldn’t necessarily accept the results of the election ? People were bemoaning him as a fascist and no one in the mainstream wanted to admit that our election process is entirely rigged. The trouble is, voter fraud on a grand scale can be tough to prove . As it turns out, voter fraud on a smaller scale has been detected in 6 locations already, according to today’s Drudge Report . But don’t worry. These are just “glitches” or “too few to make a difference.” 1) Chicago In the Windy City, the dead have been voting for decades. Two investigators have admitted finding proof of this, but they refuse to say that there is fraud. Relatives of the Voting Dead feel differently. They say that they’ve reported the deaths of their loved ones repeatedly, but that the names have not been removed from the rolls. But that isn’t the worst of it – not only are these people on the rolls – they’ve repeatedly voted since their deaths. Don’t worry, though. It’s just a few hundred dead voters that they’ve been able to confirm. No biggie. ( source ) 2) Philadelphia Chicago is not alone with the dead folks voting.There are also reports from Philadelphia that people are making their voices heard from beyond the grave. *cough* Local station Action News 6 investigated and found that a stunning number of people have been deemed “active voters” for many years since their deaths. Don’t worry, though. The local voting board says these mistakes are simply “human error” and that there aren’t enough dead voters to actually sway the election. ( source ) 3) Hollywood, Maryland A woman in Maryland has reported another incidence of “vote flipping.” She voted a straight Republican ticket, then checked after it was submitted. Her vote for Trump had been switched to a vote for Clinton. Don’t worry, though. The election officials there told her to just vote again. Of course, this would “undo” the vote for Clinton, but would it really count as a vote for Trump? I’m sure it’s fine. The election officials would want to be scrupulous about something like that. ( source ) 4) Miami-Dade County, Florida Two women have been charged with felony counts of tampering with the election. One, a temporary election worker, was caught marking ballots by her co-workers. The other was caught filling out voter registration paperwork for people who did not exist. Don’t worry, though. These were isolated incidents that have been dealt with. In the words of State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle, a Democrat, “Anyone who attempts to undermine the democratic process should recognize that there is an enforcement partnership between the elections department and our prosecution task force in place to thwart such efforts and arrest those involved. Now we need to move forward with the election.” ( source ) 5) Alexandria, Virginia A guy in Virginia who was formerly employed by the New Virginia Majority, an advocacy group aligned with the Democratic party, was caught using fake names to fill out voter registration applications. But don’t worry. Commonwealth Attorney Bryan Porter said, “Since the fraudulent applications involved fictitious people, had the fraud not been uncovered the risk of actual fraudulent votes being cast was low.” ( source ) 6) Lots of places in Texas Much like the report in Maryland, voters in various locations in Texas have reported that when they chose a straight Republican ticket, the voting machines opted for Clinton/Kaine instead of Trump/Pence. Voters in Amarillo, Arlington, Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Cypress, Mesquite, and El Paso have all reported vote flipping from Trump to Clinton. But don’t worry. Election officials in the state say it’s not a problem with the equipment. It’s just those silly voters who don’t know how to use it. ““Typically, we’ve found it’s voter error with the equipment. Sometimes they vote straight party and then click on other candidates … or do something with the wheel….There is not an issue with the equipment.” ( source ) If you’re worried about election fraud… You can add a smartphone app by True the Vote called VoteStand to report incidents of fraud. Don’t let anything slide. If you are voting, make sure your choice is accurately recorded. Article first posted at DaisyLuther.com Submit your review | 0 |
WASHINGTON — On the fourth floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the staff of the White House chief technology officer has been virtually deleted, down from 24 members before the election to, by Friday, only one. Scores of departures by scientists and Silicon Valley technology experts who advised President Trump’s predecessor have all but wiped out the larger White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Mr. Trump has not yet named his top advisers on technology or science, and so far, has made just one hire: Michael Kratsios, the former chief of staff for Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor and one of the president’s wealthiest supporters, as the deputy chief technology officer. Neither Mr. Kratsios, who has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Princeton, nor anyone else still working in the science and technology office regularly participates in Mr. Trump’s daily briefings, as they did for President Barack Obama. “The impression this leaves is that Trump isn’t interested in science and that scientific matters are a low priority at the White House,” said Vinton G. Cerf, a computer scientist, vice president of Google and one of the chief architects of the internet. The dwindling of the White House science and technology staff for scientific research could have consequences, Mr. Cerf said. It is unclear whether the vacancies are the result of the Trump administration’s overall slowness in hiring or a signal that the president places less importance on science and technology than Mr. Obama did. A White House official who asked not to be identified cast the issue as one of timing: Mr. Trump, the official said, is still reviewing candidates to be his chief science adviser, considers the science and technology office important and will soon have a new staff for it. But critics see the empty offices as part of a devaluation of science throughout the Trump administration, including the reversal of Mr. Obama’s climate change policies and proposals to sharply reduce spending for research on climate change, science and health. They note that Mr. Obama appointed his top science adviser, John P. Holdren, a Harvard physicist and expert, in December 2008, weeks before his inauguration. At the same time, conservatives — including a member of Mr. Trump’s transition team — have called for getting rid of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. (The chief technology officer is a part of that larger office.) They argue that the office, created by Congress in 1976, is a bloated bureaucracy that duplicates expertise already found at government agencies. “Eliminating the O. S. T. P. (or at least electing not to staff it until Congress can act) would not block the president from access to science and technology advice,” James Jay Carafano, who advised Mr. Trump’s transition team, wrote in a report issued last summer by the conservative Heritage Foundation. “Rather, it eliminates a formal office whose purpose is unclear and whose capabilities are largely redundant. ” Mr. Trump has echoed that sentiment, at least when it comes to government jobs over all. Last month he responded to criticism about the high number of vacancies across his administration by telling Fox News that “a lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint, because they’re unnecessary to have. ” “You know, we have so many people in government, even me,” Mr. Trump said. “I look at some of the jobs and it’s people over people over people. I say, ‘What do all these people do?’ You don’t need all those jobs. ” If Mr. Trump applies that logic to the science and technology office, he will end decades of tradition in which the president increasingly relied on his own advisers for expertise on federal research budgets, emerging trends and technical crises. Mr. Trump’s first budget proposes slashing $5. 8 billion, or 18 percent, from the National Institutes of Health and $900 million, or about 20 percent, from the Energy Department’s Office of Science, which runs basic research at the national laboratories. The Environmental Protection Agency would be cut by 31 percent. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump issued executive orders that roll back Mr. Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would have closed hundreds of power plants in an effort to curb carbon dioxide emissions. Those actions have been taken without advice or guidance from scientists and engineers inside the White House. The few remaining policy advisers have ceased distributing daily memos on policy issues like climate change, regulation, or the ethics of big data collection. “They are flying blind when it comes to science and tech issues,” said Kumar Garg, who left the Office of Science and Technology Policy as a senior adviser after the election. There is no question that the science and technology bureaucracy at the White House expanded in recent years. In the George W. Bush administration, there were 50 people in the office, but Mr. Obama more than doubled the staff, to 130, and moved the office into a building on the White House grounds. Mr. Obama turned to the science office during crises like the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa the 2011 nuclear spill in Fukushima, Japan and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The staff of the science office developed the White House’s recommendations for regulation of commercial drones and driverless cars at the Transportation Department. Last year, the staff produced an report that raised concerns about the threat that robots posed to employment and that advocated retraining Americans for jobs. The staff also put on the annual White House science fair. In 2011, when lawmakers proposed an online piracy bill known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, internet architecture engineers on the team advised the president to veto the bill because of security and privacy issues it would create. “The agenda was always huge in scope and ambition, and something was always happening,” said Nicole Wong, a former deputy chief technology officer under Mr. Obama. The departure of science and technology experts from the White House means dozens of science and technology programs begun under Mr. Obama have gone untended in the weeks since Inauguration Day. “The O. S. T. P. is the conduit for scientific perspective and scrutiny to the president and is a priority in White House decision making,” said Danny Weitzner, a former deputy chief technology officer in the Obama administration and now the director of internet policy research at M. I. T. Under Mr. Obama, the science and technology office included 19 policy advisers in the environment and energy division, 14 in the national security and international affairs division, nine in the science division and 20 in the technology and innovation division. “We are all sitting on the edge of our seats hoping nothing catastrophic happens in the world,” said Phil Larson, a former senior science and technology adviser to Mr. Obama. “But if it does, who is going to be advising him?” Current White House officials declined to say how many people remained in each division. But four former officials who recently left the office said that a wave of departures scheduled for Friday could potentially reduce the number of people left to a handful, not counting about eight administrative staff members. | 1 |
NEWARK — Prosecutors opened the case against two former aides to Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey with a stunning assertion: The governor himself knew during the lane closings at the George Washington Bridge that they were meant to punish a mayor for declining to endorse him. Over the past six weeks in federal court, prosecutors have portrayed Mr. Christie and his top aides as relentlessly and crassly political. Orders to freeze out enemies came “directly from gov,” as his campaign manager relayed in one text message. “Gov!” Lee Cortes, a prosecutor, said in his closing argument. “The governor!” But to borrow an old legal term, having rung that bell loudly and repeatedly, prosecutors now want jurors to pretend they did not hear it. The jury began deliberations on Monday about the two aides: Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni. To decide their fate, the jury has to confront two apparent contradictions in the prosecution’s case. One is the fact that Mr. Christie, a Republican, is not on trial, even though prosecution witnesses have described it as practically Christie administration policy to use government resources to promote his ambitions. The other is the government’s star witness, David Wildstein, who has pleaded guilty to orchestrating the scheme. Prosecutors admit he is a serial liar and inveterate prankster who, as lawyers repeatedly reminded the jury, once stole the jacket of a United States senator to embarrass him in a debate. “The guy who stole Frank Lautenberg’s coat? That’s who you relied on?” Mr. Cortes challenged Mr. Baroni in his . That is also whom the government is relying on, as Mr. Baroni’s lawyer happily noted in his summation. If prosecutors so trusted Mr. Wildstein as a witness, the jury might wonder, why did they not bring charges against Mr. Christie, who, Mr. Wildstein testified, was told about the plot midway through the week of the lane closings in September 2013, when he had the power to reverse them? Judge Susan D. Wigenton instructed the jury not to pay attention to Mr. Christie or the other names prosecutors have mentioned over and over. “The fact that these persons are not on trial here must play no part in your deliberations,” she told jurors. “Their absence should not influence your verdict with respect to the defendants on trial at this time. You are not called upon to return a verdict as to the guilt or innocence of any other person or persons. ” But will jurors decide, in the memorable words of Ms. Kelly’s lawyer, Michael Critchley, that prosecutors went after a whale and ended up with a minnow? When Paul J. Fishman, the United States attorney for New Jersey, announced the indictments in May 2015, he said that he was bringing charges against only the people prosecutors believed a jury would convict. There is not as much documentary evidence that others in the administration were involved in the lane closings and the Ms. Kelly alone sent the notorious email proclaiming “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee. ” But given everything the jury has heard about Mr. Christie and his other aides punishing local officials, and scrambling to cover up the lane closings, will jurors decide that Mr. Baroni and Ms. Kelly are more guilty? Or were they simply less discreet in doing what everyone else was doing, too? And if the jury believes that others were involved, what would be more unfair: that it convicted two for the sins of many, or that it acquitted them, and no one paid for the catastrophic traffic jams that paralyzed Fort Lee? The prosecution did not call many potential witnesses who could have told more about what was really happening in the governor’s office. The judge, in a conference with lawyers, said she could think of “about five” potential witnesses for the jury, suggesting as a start Kevin O’Dowd, the governor’s former chief of staff, and Bill Stepien, his campaign manager. Mr. Critchley seized the point in his closing argument on Monday, cupping his hands to his mouth and hollering: “Chris Christie, where are you? Kevin O’Dowd, where are you?” And, referring to another Christie confidante, he said, “Michele Brown, where are you?” “You know what that’s called?” Mr. Critchley told the jury. “Cowards. They want the mother of four to take the fall for them. ” The best example of the fine line the government is walking is an episode that prosecutors portrayed as kind of a preview of the main event: the Christie administration’s retribution against Mayor Steven Fulop of Jersey City. Like Mayor Mark Sokolich of Fort Lee, he was a Democrat who had declined to endorse Mr. Christie after a long courtship. Three weeks before Ms. Kelly’s infamous email, Mr. Stepien, then the campaign manager, wrote in an email to her that Mr. O’Dowd, then the chief of staff, would be calling her to cancel a special day’s worth of meetings set up between Mr. Fulop and administration officials. Ms. Kelly told Mr. Stepien to tell the mayor that the meetings had been canceled. “Boom,” Mr. Stepien wrote. “Thanks. ” Ms. Kelly, then in her new job as deputy chief of staff for about three months, expressed regret about having to cancel the meetings. Mr. Stepien, whom prosecutors characterize as her mentor, reassured her: “No, this is perfect. It will send a good message to this guy. ” Mr. Baroni asked whether one of Mr. Christie’s closest confidants, the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was allowed to reschedule a meeting with the mayor. “Per Stepien, no meetings with Fulop,” Mr. Wildstein responded in a text message. “Order that Fulop be frozen out comes directly from gov. ” Will the jury accept that in the scheme to freeze out Mr. Sokolich just three weeks later, Mr. Wildstein, Ms. Kelly and Mr. Baroni acted on their own? Prosecutors also savaged Mr. Baroni, once Mr. Christie’s top appointed official at the Port Authority, for his trust in Mr. Wildstein. The defendants said they believed that the lane closings were a legitimate traffic study because Mr. Wildstein told them so. “Noted traffic expert David Wildstein?” Mr. Cortes asked Mr. Baroni. Mr. Baroni’s lawyer, Michael Baldassare, told the jury it was “insulting” for prosecutors to make fun of his client for relying on Mr. Wildstein. “It’s O. K. for them to trust him,” Mr. Baldassare said. “It’s O. K. for them to ask you to trust him. But when Bill trusts the guy, suddenly, apparently, it’s a crime. ” In their closing arguments, prosecutors accused defense lawyers of trying to divert attention from the defendants’ actions. The case, they argued, did not hinge solely on Mr. Wildstein. It is backed up by emails, in which Mr. Baroni and Ms. Kelly seem to know about the attempt to punish Mr. Sokolich and delight in it. “Is it wrong that I am smiling?” Ms. Kelly wrote, hearing of Mr. Sokolich’s complaint that schoolchildren were stuck in the traffic jams. The defendants spoke of “radio silence” as their strategy to ignore his panicked calls for help. “That’s not the language of victimization,” a prosecutor, Vikas Khanna, said in a final rebuttal on Monday. “Those emails, those text messages, those actions, those are the actions of the defendants, that no one did to them,” he said. “They chose exactly what they were doing. ” | 1 |
A spectacular explosion of a SpaceX rocket on Thursday destroyed a $200 million communications satellite that would have extended Facebook’s reach across Africa, dealing a serious setback to Elon Musk, the billionaire who runs the rocket company. The blast is likely to disrupt NASA’s cargo deliveries to the International Space Station, exposing the risks of the agency’s growing reliance on private companies like SpaceX to carry materials and, soon, astronauts. The explosion, at Cape Canaveral, Fla. intensified questions about whether Mr. Musk is moving too quickly in his headlong investment in some of the biggest and most complex industries, not just space travel but carmakers and electric utilities. This is not the first problem Mr. Musk has suffered as he tries to create space travel that is cheap and commonplace. Each of his companies, including Tesla and SolarCity, has hit major stumbling blocks recently. The owner of a Tesla car died in May in a crash using the company’s autopilot software, and SolarCity faces major financial challenges. “SpaceX is running a punishing schedule,” said Scott Pace, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and a former NASA official. “There is probably some human factor involved here. To what extent was human error part of this? And if so, why? Are you running your people too hard? What are your safety requirements?” Dr. Pace said an internal investigation would have to look at the company’s operations as it tried to ramp up the pace of launches. The company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, said in a statement, “Our No. 1 priority is to safely and reliably return to flight for our customers, and we will carefully investigate and address this issue.“ The Falcon 9 rocket burst into flames in a violent series of blasts starting at 9:07 a. m. spewing plumes of dark smoke around the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and sending vibrations felt by residents nearby. The rocket had been set to launch on Saturday, carrying a satellite for Spacecom, an Israeli company. The explosion was particularly painful news for Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, who is touring Kenya, promoting a program reliant on the satellite, known as with entrepreneurs in the country. He had promised them connectivity. Just hours after the news of the explosion broke, Mr. Zuckerberg expressed disappointment on his Facebook page “that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite,” a swipe at Mr. Musk and his team, who were still trying to figure out what went wrong. Mr. Musk did not respond publicly to Mr. Zuckerberg. But he posted a brief explanation on Twitter: “Loss of Falcon vehicle today during propellant fill operation. Originated around upper stage oxygen tank. Cause still unknown. More soon. ” The Falcon 9, developed by SpaceX with NASA financing, has had previous problems. In June 2015, a rocket carrying NASA cargo to the International Space Station fell apart when a strut holding a helium bottle snapped, setting off a chain of events that destroyed the rocket moments later. This latest episode is likely to push back the timetable NASA had after hiring SpaceX and Boeing to carry astronauts to the space station by the end of next year. NASA said it was too soon to say how the explosion would affect its space station operations, asserting that it remained “confident” in its commercial partners. “Today’s incident — while it was not a NASA launch — is a reminder that spaceflight is an incredible challenge, but our partners learn from each success and setback,” the agency said. SpaceX’s next cargo mission to the space station is scheduled for November. Coincidentally on Thursday, a report released by NASA’s inspector general, Paul K. Martin, said SpaceX and Boeing were likely to face additional delays in their launch schedules anyway. Launches with crews will probably not lift off before the second half of 2018, three years later than planned, the inspector general said. Changes that SpaceX is making to the design of the capsule, to allow landing in water instead of on land, are causing the latest delays, Mr. Martin said. In addition, NASA has been slow in examining safety reviews submitted by the companies, and as a result, late and costly redesigns might be needed, Mr. Martin said. SpaceX lists about 40 launches of satellites and other cargo on its manifest for commercial companies, NASA and the Air Force. Space industry experts say that Mr. Musk faces risks in balancing SpaceX’s backlog of contracts — spanning the next few years — without cutting corners to stay on the company’s busy schedule. “Whenever you have a failure along these lines, you of course face delays, which inevitably sets back some of your commercial and government satellite contracts,” said Marco Cáceres, senior space analyst and director of space studies at The Teal Group, an aerospace research firm. “They have to fight the temptation to keep to a schedule, even if that means setting back their launches into next year. ” SpaceX had hoped for 18 rocket launches this year so far, eight have occurred. Over all, SpaceX has had 27 successful launches of Falcon 9 rockets. An episode like Thursday’s is rare. Jonathan McDowell of the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. who tracks rocket history, said the last time such an explosion happened on a Cape Canaveral launchpad, before the ignition of engines for liftoff, was in 1959. SpaceX is rebuilding a separate launchpad, one of the two formerly used for NASA’s space shuttle missions, for the astronaut launches. That launchpad is scheduled to be ready by the end of the year. Business analysts were mixed on the effects of the explosion on Mr. Musk’s other investments at a time when he is under considerable financial pressure with the planned merger of Tesla and SolarCity. Mr. Musk draws vocal admirers and detractors, some of whom are “short” investors betting that Tesla cannot execute on its business plan. Trip Chowdry, a senior analyst at Global Equities Research who studies Tesla’s performance, described Mr. Musk’s situation as a “ sword. ” “When things work out well, people believe Musk to be a superstar,” Mr. Chowdry said. But when things go wrong like an explosion at a separate company, Tesla investors tend to make more general inferences, too. “When all is said and done, does it have any impact on Tesla stock? No,” he said. “But events at SpaceX do create headline risk for Tesla stockholders. ” The demise of the satellite, called puts a significant damper on Facebook’s Internet. org initiative, a grand plan spearheaded by Mr. Zuckerberg to provide wireless connectivity to nations across the world that do not otherwise have easy internet access. In a partnership with Eutelsat, a French satellite provider, Facebook planned to use to offer internet coverage to large parts of Africa. Along with satellite coverage, Facebook is teaming with local internet providers to offer access, and is also building its own drones — the first of which is named Aquila — to beam internet connectivity down to cities. Its Internet. org initiative had already sustained a setback when the company’s aggressive overtures were rejected by local regulators in India earlier this year. On Thursday, Mr. Zuckerberg struck an upbeat tone in his post about the rocket failure, noting that the company has other strategies in the works to expand internet connectivity across the world. Aquila, the drone, he noted, recently undertook its first successful flight in the desert. Still, the setback will delay Facebook’s ambitious plans and even more ambitious timetable. Shortly after his SpaceX comments, Mr. Zuckerberg struck a cheerier note by posting some “good news” from the region: A family of baby giraffes was seen on his safari. | 1 |
LONDON — The European Union’s highest court waded into the politically explosive issue of public expressions of Muslim identity on Tuesday, finding that private employers can ban female workers from wearing head scarves on the job. The ruling comes as Europe is beginning a critical election season, with races in the Netherlands, France and Germany, and with populism rising in many countries. Dutch voters go to the polls on Wednesday, and the party of the politician Geert Wilders is expected to fare well. In its ruling, the European Court of Justice found that company regulations banning “the visible wearing of any political, philosophical or religious sign” did not constitute direct discrimination — so long as such prohibitions applied to religious garb from all faiths, a requirement that legal experts say could also encompass a Sikh turban and a Jewish skullcap, among other religious symbols. “It is a very bold step,” said Camino a research fellow at the Center for European Reform in Brussels, describing the ruling as a landmark decision, if also a political and pragmatic one. “Recently we have seen the court being much more attentive to the political winds rather than being so legalistic, because of the recognition that the E. U. is at risk of collapse. ” She characterized the ruling as further evidence that the European court has been pivoting after years of rulings that favored the rights of minorities. This month, the court ruled that European Union member states were not obliged to issue visas to people who planned to seek asylum in their countries, even if they were vulnerable to inhuman treatment or were threatened with torture. leaders surely would have pounced had the court ruled differently. Along with Mr. Wilders, the French leader Marine Le Pen has stirred up anger by accusing Muslims of failing to integrate. Europe has been struggling to accommodate huge numbers of migrants, many from predominantly Muslim countries. Few issues are more politically fraught in Europe than the issue of the rights of observant Muslim women to cover their faces and bodies. Last summer, for instance, a few French municipalities generated global headlines — and outrage — when Muslim women were prohibited from swimming in the sea while wearing a body covering known as the burkini. Several countries — including France, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands — have either passed laws that led to bans on full veils in public, or are considering legislation that would do so. Those laws, however, apply to public and government spaces. The ruling on Tuesday, which experts said was the first time the court had issued a ruling on women wearing head scarves while on the job, applies only to the workplace and provides a minimum legal standard that member states must meet. The European Court of Justice, based in Luxembourg, interprets the law for the European Union, and its decisions are binding for member states. Its ruling on Tuesday followed advisory opinions in two distinct cases before the court. In a case in May, Juliane Kokott, an advocate general with the court, issued an opinion saying that a company could prohibit a Muslim employee from wearing a head scarf, provided that the policy applied to attire for all religions and did not single out Islam. That opinion came after a complaint by Samira Achbita, a Muslim woman in Belgium, who was fired as a receptionist for the international security services company G4S after she insisted that she be allowed to wear a head scarf at work. Ms. Achbita sued the company, and the Belgian Court of Cassation asked the European Court of Justice for clarification about what European law required. The Court of Justice concurred on Tuesday with the advisory ruling, saying that Ms. Achbita had not been subject to discrimination because the internal directive was broadly written and did not single out Islam. The court said it was up to the Belgian Court of Cassation to determine whether an employer had committed “indirect discrimination” if any directive ultimately affected “persons adhering to a particular religion or belief. ” In a separate case, from July, Eleanor Sharpston, another advocate general for the court, said that Micropole, an information technology consultancy, had engaged in unlawful discrimination when it fired a Muslim woman, Asma Bougnaoui, in 2009 for refusing to remove her head scarf when dealing with clients. Ms. Bougnaoui took her case to a French court, which referred it to the European Court of Justice. In her advisory opinion, Ms. Sharpston said the company’s decision to dismiss Ms. Bougnaoui had constituted “direct discrimination” based on religion or belief. Ms. Sharpston said there was no evidence to suggest that Ms. Bougnaoui’s scarf interfered with her ability to perform her job as a design engineer. If she had covered her face completely, the opinion found, the situation would have been different, because contact was important in Western business interactions. But the court on Tuesday found that, in the absence of an internal company policy, it was not enough for an employer to simply justify a dismissal by pointing to a customer’s desire not to interact with someone wearing a head scarf. Legal experts said the court’s ruling could give greater leeway to employers across Europe to regulate religious attire in the workplace, as long as they did so with neutral policies that did not target Muslims. Simon Cox, a senior legal officer specializing in issues with the Open Society Foundations, said the ruling “will force employers to choose which side they are on and open the door to a greater willingness not to employ women in head scarves. ” Maryam H’madoun, a policy adviser who is also with the Open Society Foundations, expressed concern that the ruling could potentially help exclude many Muslim women from the work force. “This disappointing ruling weakens the guarantee of equality that is at the heart of the E. U.’s directive,” she said. Colm O’Cinneide, a professor of human rights and constitutional law at University College London, said the ruling could lead to more bans on religious attire in workplaces. He also noted that the ruling required that any ban on religious attire be “objectively justified” and that imposing a ban could be difficult when employees were not the public face of the company or interacting with customers directly. “Depending on a country and its internal debates, companies that want to have a head scarf ban will feel more comfortable doing so, and this ruling gives them some legal cover,” Mr. O’Cinneide said. | 1 |
RIO DE JANEIRO — The expulsions of ticket holders from Olympic sites after they protested Michel Temer, Brazil’s interim president, is fueling a debate over the limits of freedom of expression in a country that remains on edge amid a period of extraordinary political upheaval. Videos, news reports and accounts that circulated widely in Brazil on Sunday on social media showed the removal of several fans at a women’s soccer match in the city of Belo Horizonte. They had lined up wearing reading “Out with Temer” while holding aloft letters that read in English, “Come back democracy. ” Juca Kfouri, one of Brazil’s most prominent sports columnists, called the expulsions “repressive stupidity. ” “This will only encourage new demonstrations,” Mr. Kfouri said. The protest in Belo Horizonte, along with others at sites in Rio de Janeiro, pointed to the low approval ratings of Mr. Temer, 75, the career politician who emerged victorious in a power struggle against Dilma Rousseff, who was suspended to face an impeachment trial over claims that she had manipulated the federal budget to conceal economic problems. Ms. Rousseff, like Mr. Temer, is also deeply unpopular. But as she strays from the spotlight, Mr. Temer is receiving greater scrutiny over testimony tying him to illegal campaign financing operations. Executives at the construction giant Odebrecht told investigators that Mr. Temer had requested more than $3 million for his centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party. As part of a plea deal they are seeking, the Odebrecht executives said the payment had been made in cash through a unit used to deliver bribes, according to Veja, a newsmagazine. Mr. Temer has already been found guilty of violating campaign finance limits, a conviction that could make him ineligible to run for office for five years. In a statement, Mr. Temer’s media office acknowledged that he had requested the funds from Odebrecht but said they had been legally declared to the electoral authorities. Mr. Temer endured a chorus of boos when he briefly declared the start of the Olympics during the opening ceremony on Friday. Ticket holders appeared at various Olympic events over the weekend with placards reading, “Fora Temer” (Out with Temer.) A video of security personnel forcibly removing a protesting man from the stands of an archery competition provoked outrage among bystanders who witnessed the episode. Brazil’s Justice Ministry said in a statement that the man had been removed because he was “disrupting the concentration of the athletes. ” (Curiously, many Brazilian fans calling attention to themselves for loudly booing during an array of other Olympic competitions have not faced similar treatment from the security forces.) Mario Andrada, a spokesman for the Rio Olympics organizing committee, said in an interview that the Olympic charter included a policy prohibiting political propaganda in venues. “People who violate this requirement will kindly be asked to leave,” Mr. Andrada said. Still, many Brazilians are in no mood to be told where they can protest as the country fumes over colossal graft scandals involving political figures across the ideological spectrum. “Citizens should have the right to express their views in a peaceful way,” said Gabriel do Nascimento Guimarães, 31, an engineering professor. “I’m against removing anyone from a venue who is exercising their right of freedom of expression. ” | 1 |
Trump has an excuse now to audit any vote with these machines , trust the UN to be involved . He neds them to take a photo of their vote with phones , and be onto the polling booths for the bus loads of illegal voters going from booth to booth , he can bust this whole scam wide open if he is smart . Soros gave 10 million to Clinton , this must be ilegal surely ... | 0 |
November 21, 2016 - Fort Russ News - PolitRussia - translated by J. Arnoldski -
Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Mikhail Saakashvili’s governorship of Odessa was an insult to the Ukrainian people.
"This was simply a slap and insult to Odessans and the whole Ukrainian people. He couldn’t even get a working visa to the US and the universities he tried to find work at didn’t want to employ him in a permanent job. This means that he can’t fulfill the duties of being the governor of Odessa. And what, are there no decent, professional, and capable Ukrainians for such a job?”, Putin said in an interview with Oliver Stone for the documentary “Ukraine in Flames.”
In early November, Saakashvili announced his intention to resign from the post of governor of the Odessa region over the unwillingness of Ukrainian authorities to fight against corruption. He also blamed Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko for patronizing criminal clans in the region.
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BERLIN (AP) — Germany has published a timeline of authorities’ handling of the Tunisian man who drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and wounding scores. [The chronology, published Monday details Anis Amri’s whereabouts in Germany, his risk evaluation and his criminal behavior. It shows he said as early as December 2015 that he wanted to buy firearms “to commit attacks in Germany” — a full year before the Dec. 19 attack. Last February, state authorities declared him a potential threat. He was under surveillance by several German agencies, but they repeatedly concluded he did not pose a concrete or immediate danger. Amri, who came to Germany in had been rejected for asylum but authorities had been unable to deport him due to paperwork problems. | 1 |
For her wedding, Hannah Spinrad welcomed 250 guests to Greensboro, N. C. her hometown, on Memorial Day weekend last year. The guests stayed at the Grandover Resort and enjoyed a stream of activities, from a golf tournament to snacking in the hospitality suite. The bride was always there to ensure that details were executed flawlessly and that guests were mingling and happy. For a few hours on that Saturday, however, Mrs. Spinrad, 30, who now lives in Atlanta with her husband, Kyle Spinrad, took a break from playing the perfect host to go on a run with her father. Escaping her guests to exercise may have seemed odd since she was already inundated with activities and wanted to be there for everyone. But this was her tradition with her dad, something she always did when she was home, and it was a chance for them to connect and relax. In retrospect, it was one of the best decisions she made. Before the run, she felt stressed, worrying about how everything was going. Afterward, she had a clear head and a new perspective. “Much of that weekend was a blur to me, but I actually remember that run,” she said. “It was a sense of normalcy, a chance to say, ‘Everyone is here, everyone is happy, and we’re O. K.’ It was my relaxing moment. ” She didn’t get upset even when she had to move the ceremony inside because of rain. Most brides and grooms feel jittery, said Allison a psychotherapist based in Mass. who specializes in counseling . Couples have the logistical stress of pulling off a wedding and dealing with all of the people and perspectives involved. They are also going through an emotional transformation. “You are making this profound identity change, and you are doing it in public, and you don’t know how you are going to react,” Ms. said. “It’s overwhelming, and that’s O. K. It should be. ” Instead of being caught off guard by that tension, some brides and grooms are taking creative steps to calm themselves on the big weekend, some not all that far removed from having their teddy bears accompany them down the aisle. Some, like Mrs. Spinrad, are reserving time to exercise. Ben Oberman, 32, a doctor in Durham, N. C. was particularly nervous about his wedding because some relatives disapproved of his fiancée, now his wife, Jacquelyn Scott Oberman. “I knew part of my family wasn’t going to be there,” he said. “I thought, was I alienating my family? Was everything going to be fine?” Dr. Oberman and his best man took off on a hike in a petrified forest near the wedding site in Sonoma County, Calif. He shared his fears, rehearsed his vows and took in the natural beauty around him. By the end of the trail, he was ready to get married. “It was a soothing environment, and I was with someone I could trust and who would be there for me no matter what,” he said. Rachael Babington, a Manhattan yoga instructor, has received so many requests from women who wanted to attend a class before their weddings that she started the company Brides Love Yoga. In the busy summer, she has two clients a day. She arrives at sites with a yoga mat and shows brides poses that help to open their hearts and focus their minds. Mrs. Spinrad said it could be strange to do something restorative on your wedding day. “It’s already a experience that is already supposed to be all about you, so you don’t necessarily think you need to take time for yourself,” she said. “But that means you have to do things to keep your perspective even more, because everything else seems like the biggest deal. ” Before leaving for her rehearsal diner at the Atlantic Golf Club in Bridgehampton, N. Y. last September, Claudia Davidson, 28, who works for UberEats in Washington, packed her clutch. Alongside her wallet and lip balm she put in a piece of her childhood blanket, which her late grandmother made. “It’s sort of something I take with me when I feel like I need backup,” she said. “I knew I was going to be overwhelmed being in the center of attention, so it was nice to have a little sentimental keepsake in my purse just in case. ” She turned to it during her rehearsal dinner, but felt confident enough to forgo it on her wedding day. Ms. said: “I’ll call that a transitional object. Bringing along something that brings you comfort, why not? You are feeling vulnerable. ” Laurie Mehlman, 31, of Marietta, Ga. let her mother slip a red ribbon, an item that Jewish tradition says wards off evil, into her shoe before her wedding ceremony. “I had just started getting nervous, and having that little connection calmed me down,” she said. Her husband, Ross Mehlman, 30, had his own batch of nerves. “I think it was the and everyone looking at you and you have to make a speech and everyone wants to talk to you that night,” he said. He dealt with his another way: He and his groomsmen watched his college team play football on television. “It quickly morphed from me sitting in a temple in a conference room waiting for my wedding to me and my best friends sitting around chilling out,” he said. Some people ask mental health professionals to help them with their anxiety. Hillary Evans, a hypnotherapist in Charleston, S. C. has brides come to her many reasons: They want to lose weight and can’t, they are fighting with relatives or friends, they are obsessing over details or they are terrified of giving their speeches. She uses traditional hypnosis to give them new perspectives. She teaches them how to visualize their success and slow down moments so they don’t get out of control and can be savored. Ellyn Gamberg, a psychotherapist in New York, encourages clients to see weddings as rehearsals for real life. “How you navigate what you do in preparing for the wedding and the actual wedding day will be the exact same issues, the same concerns, the same fears, the same dynamics with people and within your self that you will have to struggle with for the rest of your life,” she said. “So I say, ‘Get them right during the process so you get them right for life. ’” She spends months, even years, helping clients figure out the roots of their anxieties. But sometimes even that is not enough. Every year she attends many ceremonies, just to be there for clients in case they panic. “People bring things to weddings, their baby blanket, their pet, their lucky charm,” Dr. Gamberg said. “And some people bring their therapist. It makes them feel better. ” | 1 |
LONDON — Hundreds of officers and other employees of the police in Britain have used their power to sexually abuse vulnerable people, a report released on Thursday by a national watchdog said, the latest in a string of institutional abuse accusations in the country. Among those targeted, in what the independent agency called “the most serious corruption issue facing the service,” were victims of domestic abuse, drug and alcohol addicts, and people who work in the sex industry, some of whom were in custody at the time. The inquiry by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, which assesses national police forces, found that there had been 436 accusations of sexual abuse by police officers in England and Wales over the two years through the end of March. It said the accusations involved 334 police employees, including 306 officers. The watchdog also emphasized that the scale of the problem was much larger. The leader of the inquiry, Mike Cunningham, a former chief constable of the Staffordshire police in central England, said the abuse was an egregious breach of officers’ roles as guardians and protectors. “What can be worse than a guardian abusing the trust and confidence of an abused person? There can be no greater violation of public trust,” he said in the report. “It is an exploitation of power where the guardian becomes the abuser. ” Britain has been grappling with a series of scandals that have called into question how institutions, including the news media, the church and sports teams, respond to those who are vulnerable to abuse. In February, a three set up by the BBC concluded that a culture of fear and an overly permissive approach to celebrities had allowed Jimmy Savile, a celebrated TV and radio personality, to sexually abuse 72 victims, including children. A scathing report concluded that the entertainer, who died in 2011 at 84, had raped at least eight people during his tenure at the BBC, including an . More recently, the world of soccer was deeply shaken after the police said that at least 350 people had come forward in the last two weeks of November to report abuse by youth coaches in Britain. The issue came under the spotlight after at least six former professional players spoke out about having been molested as boys in youth programs. This year, Prime Minister Theresa May, who was then the home secretary, asked the independent agency to investigate the issue of sexual abuse by the police, saying she was concerned that victims were not being taken seriously enough by officers. Lurid cases of sexual abuse by the police have been reported in the news media in recent years, but many say that the problem has not received sufficient attention. In 2011, Stephen Mitchell, a police constable in Northumbria, in northern England, was sentenced to life in prison for raping and sexually assaulting women he had arrested or met on the job. Prosecutors said that Mr. Mitchell, a Glasgow native, had demanded sexual favors from his victims, who included heroin addicts and a disabled teenager. In another case, Steven Walters, a West Midlands police officer, who served in Birmingham, was sentenced in October to four years in prison for groping a woman at her home and, on another occasion, for assaulting a woman in his patrol car. | 1 |
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As part of the Democratic Party’s response to President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of congress, former Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear referred to himself as a “proud Republican. ”[Addressing the camera from a diner in Kentucky, former Gov. Beshear appeared to tangle his words, stating that “I’m a proud Democrat, but first and foremost, I’m a proud Republican, and Democrat, and mostly, American. ” Beshear went on to attack Trump on a number of issues, claiming that Trump planned to “rip affordable health insurance from Americans who must need it,” as Trump and Republicans formulate plans to fully repeal Obamacare. The former governor also accused Trump of being “Wall Street’s champion,” after one of Trump’s executive orders “makes it harder for families to even afford a mortgage,” while “rolling back rules that provide oversight of the financial industry and protect us against another economic meltdown. ” He also criticized Donald Trump’s cabinet picks, describing them as a “cabinet of billionaires and Wall Street insiders who want to eviscerate the protections that most Americans count on and help level the playing field. ” The tone of the response appeared to be a pitch to the working class Americans who helped propel Trump to victory last November, with the video set in a modest diner surrounded by people Beshear claimed were his neighbors, as well as a mix of both Democrats and Republicans. Donald Trump’s speech covered a number of issues, such as healthcare, defense spending, cutting the size of government, and the need for unity in a divided America. A CNN poll later found that nearly four out of five Americans had a “positive reaction” to the speech. You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart. com | 1 |
JUST VOTE TRUMP LETs PUT THE HAG OUT TO PASTURE SHE IS A SELLOUT LIAR!!! | 0 |
748 Views November 07, 2016 18 Comments Moveable Feast Herb Swanson
2016/11/07 14:00:01Welcome to the ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’. The ‘Moveable Feast’ is an open thread where readers can post wide ranging observations, articles, rants, off topic and have animate discussions of the issues of the day.
The ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’ will have two new open threads each week.
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ASTANA, Kazakhstan — The first meeting between Syrian rebel fighters and government officials in nearly six years of civil war ended abruptly on Monday when diplomatic talks quickly devolved into harsh words and competing accusations. The new round of talks arranged by Russia and Turkey in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, was meant to showcase Moscow’s increasingly dominant role in the diplomacy and its new understanding with the Turkish government, a leading sponsor of the rebels. But the Syrian delegations almost immediately began arguing and refused to negotiate directly. Mohammad of the Army of Islam, in his opening statement, labeled the government “a bloody despotic regime” backed by “vengeful sectarian militias,” and called for it to release what he said were 13, 000 women being held as political prisoners and to end starvation sieges. That led to a heated exchange around a large circular table that forced Kazakh officials to call for calm, several participants said. The lead government negotiator, Bashar speaking to reporters after the opening session, responded by calling the opposition delegation “armed terrorist groups,” and accused them of “impertinent” and “provocative” behavior. The tension demonstrated the challenges that remain for Russia, the Syrian government’s most powerful backer, as the Russian government tries to show its approach can accomplish more than the largely fruitless efforts led in past years by the United States and the United Nations. Expectations for progress had been low. Many diplomats and analysts say the more meaningful talks are those that have been held in recent months, largely in secret, among Russia, Turkey and Iran. The meeting in Astana, meant to send the message that Russia would seek to resolve the conflict in its sphere of influence, was markedly different from the United talks that have taken place in recent winters in Geneva. Delegates crisscrossed the towering atrium of the Rixos Hotel in the remote Kazakh capital built 20 years ago on the orders of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former Communist boss who has been the country’s president since it became independent with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He has a reputation as a pragmatic strongman and enjoys good relations with Russia and Turkey. Palm trees planted indoors belied the subzero temperatures and blowing snow outside, as a duo wearing evening gowns played “Strangers in the Night” and the theme from “Titanic. ” Western diplomats, largely sidelined, huddled in the hotel’s Irish pub, and the United States ambassador to Kazakhstan, who was invited over Iran’s objections and attended only as an observer, avoided reporters. When the Americans had participated in previous rounds of talks in Geneva, the meetings took place at the Palace of Nations, one of the stolid lakeside edifices built in the first half of the 20th century that have housed the United Nations since it was formed after World War II. Those buildings symbolized a postwar order that tried to institutionalize human rights and the laws of war, an order associated with American leadership — or domination — amid the tensions of the Cold War. Now, the role of the United States in Syria and across the Middle East is widely seen as having receded under former President Barack Obama, and its future remains uncertain. Mr. Obama, while backing some rebel groups, resisted deeper American involvement in the Syrian conflict, ceding the leading role to Russia. His successor, President Trump, has signaled broad approval of Russian leadership and policies and sent mixed messages on Syria. Officially, all sides in the Syrian conflict describe the goal of the talks in Astana as reaffirming a tenuous in order to revive the Geneva talks. The started in December and known formally as a cessation of hostilities, is largely ignored in many parts of the country and excludes jihadist groups, including the Levant Conquest Front and the Islamic State. A strengthening of the cessation across Syria, the United Nations envoy Staffan de Mistura said Monday, could pave the way for discussion of more substantive political issues at talks scheduled for February in Geneva. The United Nations initially resisted anything more than an observer role in the talks in Astana, but Mr. de Mistura at the last minute agreed to act as a mediator and was shuttling between the delegations who were in separate rooms. Western diplomats were also watching warily to see whether the talks in Astana could be a Russian effort to ultimately replace the Geneva discussions, which the Russian government has criticized. The Syrian government and the Russians have long argued that the Geneva framework, calling for a transitional body with full governing powers, does not require President Bashar to step down, while the opposition has insisted that it does. But as a practical matter, an increasing number of Western countries, including the United States, and even some of the rebels’ backers in the Middle East, like Turkey, have moved toward the Russian position. With Turkey mainly concerned about checking Kurdish militants within its borders and in Syria, and the United States focused on battling Islamic State militants, they have stopped pushing loudly for Mr. Assad to step down ahead of a settlement, instead signaling that they could accept some role for him in a transitional political arrangement. There were signs on Monday of Russian willingness to apply pressure on the Syrian government to keep the talks on track. The tense exchanges in Astana were followed by a Russian statement unusually critical of the Syrian government: The news agency RIA Novosti said monitors of a in Syria were “particularly concerned about sporadic violations of truce by the Syrian government forces” — echoing a complaint of rebels. Russia’s air campaign, which began in the fall of 2015, helped forces loyal to Mr. Assad drive rebels from their foothold late last year in half of the important city of Aleppo, an offensive criticized by the opposition for indiscriminate air and artillery attacks on civilians. Some rebel groups also shelled civilians in areas. Now one of the main battles is over Wadi Barada, a besieged area in the watershed that provides most of the drinking water for Damascus, the Syrian capital. Water supplies have been cut off for weeks, with the government blaming rebels and rebels blaming the government. Mr. Jaafari, the chief Syrian government negotiator and his country’s envoy to the United Nations, was incensed that Mr. Alloush, the rebel representative, had sounded the alarm over the plight of people in Wadi Barada. He said raising concerns about government attacks on Wadi Barada was tantamount to defending the Nusra Front, the former name of the Levant Conquest Front, which is excluded from the . Residents and rebel fighters in Wadi Barada say that some Nusra fighters are present, but they are a minority among other rebel groups and civilians. Mr. Jaafari said that rebel groups had “misunderstood” the terms of the adding, “We had guarantees from their guarantors that they would behave, but they did not behave. ” Fares Bayoush, a negotiator from an rebel group who defected from the Syrian Army, said, “He is the one who misunderstood. ” | 1 |
Can The Oligarchy Still Steal The Presidential Election?
Paul Craig Roberts
The election was set up to be stolen from Trump. That was the purpose of the polls rigged by overweighting Hillary supporters in the samples. After weeks of hearing poll results that Hillary was in the lead, the public would discount a theft claim. Electronic voting makes elections easy to steal, and I have posted explanations by election fraud experts of how it is done.
Clearly the Oligarchy does not want Donald Trump in the White House as they are unsure that they could control him, and Hillary is their agent.
With the reopening of the FBI investigation of Hillary and related scandals exploding all around her, election theft is not only more risky but also less likely to serve the Oligarchy’s own interests.
Image as well as money is part of Oligarchic power. The image of America takes a big hit if the American people elect a president who is currently under felony investigation.
Moreover, a President Hillary would be under investigation for years. With so much spotlight on her, she would not be able to serve the Oligarchy’s interests. She would be worthless to them, and, indeed, investigations that unearthed various connections between Hillary and oligarchs could damage the oligarchs.
In other words, for the Oligarchy Hillary has moved from an asset to a liability.
A Hillary presidency could put our country into chaos. I doubt the oligarchs are sufficiently stupid to think that once she is sworn in, Hillary can fire FBI Director Comey and shut down the investigation. The last president that tried that was Richard Nixon, and look where that got him.
Moreover, the Republicans in the House and Senate would not stand for it. House Committee on oversight and Government Reform chairman Jason Chaffetz has already declared Hillary to be “a target-rich environment. Even before we get to day one, we’ve got two years worth of material already lined up.” House Speaker Paul Ryan said investigation will follow the evidence.
If you were an oligarch, would you want your agent under this kind of scrutiny? If you were Hillary, would you want to be under this kind of pressure?
What happens if the FBI recommends the indictment of the president? Even insouciant Americans would see the cover-up if the attorney general refused to prosecute the case. Americans would lose all confidence in the government. Chaos would rule. Chaos can be revolutionary, and that is not good for oligarchs.
Moreover, if reports can be believed, salacious scandals appear to be waiting their time on stage. For example, last May Fox News reported:
“Former President Bill Clinton was a much more frequent flyer on a registered sex offender’s infamous jet than previously reported, with flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the “Lolita Express” — even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail for at least five of the flights, according to records obtained by FoxNews.com.
“Clinton’s presence aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s Boeing 727 on 11 occasions has been reported, but flight logs show the number is more than double that, and trips between 2001 and 2003 included extended junkets around the world with Epstein and fellow passengers identified on manifests by their initials or first names, including “Tatiana.” The tricked-out jet earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls.”
Fox News reports that Epstein served time in prison for “solicitation and procurement of minors for prostitution. He allegedly had a team of traffickers who procured girls as young as 12 to service his friends on ‘Orgy Island,’ an estate on Epstein’s 72-acre island, called Little St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.” http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/05/13/flight-logs-show-bill-clinton-flew-on-sex-offenders-jet-much-more-than-previously-known.html
Some Internet sites, the credibility of which is unknown to me, have linked Hillary to these flights. http://truepundit.com/breaking-bombshell-nypd-blows-whistle-on-new-hillary-emails-money-laundering-sex-crimes-with-children-child-exploitation-pay-to-play-perjury/
This kind of behavior seems reckless even for Bill and Hillary, who are accustomed to getting away with everything. Nevertheless, if you are an oligarch already worried about the reopened Hillary email case and additional FBI investigations, such as the one into the Clinton Foundation, and concerned about what else might emerge from the 650,000 emails on former US Rep. Weiner’s computer and the NYPD pedophile investigation, putting Hillary in the Oval Office doesn’t look like a good decision.
At this point, I would think that the Oligarchy would prefer to steal the election for Trump, instead of from him, rather than allow insouciant Americans to destroy America’s reputation by choosing a person under felony investigations for president of the United States.
Being the “exceptional nation” takes on new meaning when there is a criminal at the helm.
The post Can The Oligarchy Still Steal The Presidential Election? — Paul Craig Roberts appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org . | 0 |
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Amateur footage emerged on Saturday showing what appears to be Turkish soldiers executing two female PKK insurgents at point-blank range.
Al-Masdar News that released the footage says they are not able to independently verify it.
A ceasefire between Turkey and the PKK ended last year and clashes have since claimed hundreds of lives on both sides.
The PKK operates primarily in the mountanious terrain of southeastern Turkey and often uploads footage of its Kurdish fighters ambushing Turkish government troops.
MORE... 2 bombers, stopped by police, blew themselves up in Turkey Dispute over Kurds and Coup attempt threatens U.S.-Turkey alliance The attempted coup d’état made Turkey band together Erdogan vows heavy price for coup plotters The tension between Kurdish fighters and Turkish government have always been high in past years. In yet one of the most recent cases, a Turkish court banned the co-leader of Turkey's pro-Kurdish opposition from traveling abroad as part of a court case in which she has been accused of being a member of an armed terrorist group, Hurriyet daily reported on Saturday, Reuters reported.
Figen Yuksekdag, co-chair of Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), is facing jail time up to 15 years over comments she made last year in the southeastern border town of Suruc. The prosecutor of the case requested the ban.
HDP described the court's decision to bar Yuksekdag from foreign travel as 'political and arbitrary', saying in a statement that it will make a formal appeal for its overturn.
The move comes days after the co-mayors of Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, were detained as part of a security crackdown. Turkey's largely Kurdish southeast has been rocked by violence following the collapse of a ceasefire between the state and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) last year.
President Tayyip Erdogan has accused the HDP of being a political extension of the outlawed PKK and repeatedly called for the prosecution of its members. He has also said the removal of elected officials and civil servants accused of links to the PKK was a vital part of the battle against it.
Several other HDP lawmakers including co-chair Selahattin Demirtas are also being prosecuted, largely over terrorism charges, after the parliament earlier this year lifted the immunity of HDP deputies, along with the immunity of MPs from other parties.
Meanwhile three Turkish soldiers were killed and five others were wounded by mortar fire from PKK militants near the southeastern town of Cukurca, security sources said.
Soldiers who were on an operation in Cukurca in Hakkari province bordering Iraq and Iraq returned the fire, sources said. Operations were under way to hunt down the militants.
The autonomy-seeking PKK took up arms in 1984, and more than 40,000 people have died in the conflict. It is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. | 0 |
Home » Dear Foreign Friends, Here’s Why Trump Won (From A Clevelander) Dear Foreign Friends, Here’s Why Trump Won (From A Clevelander) Andrew Korybko
Hi everybody. As you may know, I’m an American who was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, although I made a life decision four years ago to permanently leave the US and move to the Russian Federation. If you’re interested in my specific background and what motivated me to take that step, I suggest that you check out the interview that I gave to Serbian-American journalist Stephen Karganovic about this last spring when I visited him in Belgrade.
I’m addressing you all directly in a form which I never use in my articles, and that’s the first-person. I know that so many of you guys are confused and struggling to understand why Trump won, and I totally understand what you’re feeling because it’s very difficult for any foreigner to truly comprehend what just happened in the US. The best way for me to convey this to you all is to talk on a personal level in the hopes that my delivery will get through to you. I’m not expecting anyone to agree with the points that I make, but just to understand what motivated Trump supporters to get out to the polls and shake up The Establishment.
Although I don’t live in the US anymore, I was born and raised in one of the most quintessential representations of what constitutes modern-day “average America”, and that’s Cleveland, Ohio. Despite being nearly halfway across the world, I never lost touch with where I came from and will always remember the formative experiences which shaped my worldview. I still stay in contact with my American family and several close friends so I remain up to date on what’s going on “back home”, and as they say, “you can take someone out of their homeland, but you can’t take the homeland out of the person”.
For better or for worse, I’ll always embody certain “American” characteristics forged from my upbringing in Cleveland, and given that these idiosyncrasies are now representative of the prevailing political zeitgeist in the US as evidenced by Trump’s Triumph, I want to share some of them with you all in the hopes that everyone can get a better grasp on the fundamental changes that are taking place in the US today. A man who I call “Uncle Vinny” once inspiringly advised me when I was younger that “the difference between genius and crazy is in getting others to understand you”, so with that wisdom in mind, here’s the best that I can do in trying to help all my foreign friends understand the mentality of the typical Trump supporter.
So many toxic individuals said that I and tens of millions of other people were “racists”, “fascists”, and “white supremacists” just because we’ve been publicly sharing our observations over the past year and a half that Trump’s rhetoric and platform represent the desires of many Americans, but we held our ground and doubled down because we knew that we were right and that the American People would ultimately choose Donald J. Trump to be the next President of the United States.
This is why “outsiders” such as myself and everyone else who rallied behind Trump are so valuable to the larger conversations taking place because we consistently break through the narrow-minded groupthink of The Establishment and express what’s really going on, “political correctness” be damned. No foreigner can ever fully understand what happened yesterday, not even if they lived in the US for years unless they experienced what the middle class (not the academic-governmental-business class) experienced for their entire lives.
Michael Moore, who’s also a native of the “Rust Belt” like myself and understands the mentality of the millions of Americans who revolted against The Establishment and historically broke through Hillary’s Midwest “firewall”, conveyed the reason why voters in this dilapidated and socio-economically “backward/forgotten” corner of the US would flock towards Trump in an address which was ironically supposed to be against the future President-elect. Trump supporters, however, decided to turn the most relevant and motivational part of Moore’s speech into a YouTube video filled with dramatic images and music, and I strongly suggest that everyone take five minutes out of their day to listen to what he had to say.
When you live a life surrounded by drugs, poverty, crime, potholes, and hopelessness, the only thing that you feel that you have going for you are the sexual, alcoholic, and musical distractions that The Establishment shoves down everyone’s throat each and every day in order to placate the masses by “making it all better” just for a little bit of (“fun”) time. Turn off the TV or go to sleep after the party, and the same problems that people sought to escape from are still there the very next morning and not a damned thing has tangibly changed for the better, except that some people have now found a socially acceptable “go-to medicine” for dealing with the repulsive reality that they feel they have to put up with each and every day for the rest of their lives.
A lot of Americans where I’m from don’t know what a “real vacation” is, in that they don’t go globetrotting around the world like the Europeans do on what they call their “holidays”. Many Midwesterners even have a hard time going from one part of the country to another just for fun because it’s a huge financial burden for the average Clevelander in our cheap and low-wage economy to gather up the funds necessary to jet set out to costly California just to take in some sunshine, for example. Another thing that most foreigners don’t realize is that people from my part of the country don’t even have the vacation/holiday days like the rest of the world does. If you’re working a low-wage service-sector job or are in a low-level office position, then you might never receive two back-to-back weeks of vacation in your life. If you get married, the best that you can dream for is a honeymoon to Niagara Falls for a week and that’s it, just because it’s conveniently nearby and not overly expensive.
We grew up our whole lives hearing from The Establishment and its media shills how “great” and “powerful” the US is, how it’s the “best country in the history of the world”, yet all that we see around us is socio-economic devastation and we can’t imagine how it could ever be any different. So many factories have closed up shop and moved to Mexico, China, and countries that the average American in my part of the US never heard of or can even pronounce, and it’s all because of the post-Cold War globalization that started under Bill Clinton and NAFTA. But at the same time, however, we see that there are indeed some people around us who seem to be living a pretty good life but haven’t had to do much to achieve it.
You foreigners might be shocked to hear this, but a lot of Clevelanders can’t believe that “refugees”, some minorities, and illegal immigrants are able to live ‘high off the hog’ as we say just because of the huge amounts of tax-payer-provided government assistance that they receive for not really doing a lot of anything other than being the “politically correct” category of people that they are. I don’t expect people outside of the US to understand this, and even many Americans who don’t live in the “Rust Belt” (and even some who do) will probably find this to be inconceivable, but so many of these types of folks who I just mentioned – and including a lot of whites, too – abuse the “benefits” system just so that they can get the most amount of free stuff as they can for the absolute least amount of work and effort.
In the “politically correct” dystopian society that the “liberal-progressives” and Cultural Marxists of the Democratic Party have strove to create for decades, the state will house, feed, and pay people just because of their race and class, and while this might have been “originally intended” to temporarily help those who fell on hard times and couldn’t properly help themselves, it has been abused by so many people and turned into a slush fund for paying off loyal leftists who willingly choose to remain indefinitely dependent on The Establishment. These people have made a conscious choice to “settle for less” than they could ever hope to achieve if they worked hard and stayed focused because “The American Dream” is out of reach for many of them in this part of the country and they figured out how easy it is to scheme the system and have other Americans subsidize the less-than-ideal lifestyles that they’ve settled for.
Remember, I’m not asking you guys to agree with any of what I’ve written, but I’m just telling you as a “voice from the inside” about why so many people in Ohio and the “Rust Belt” support Trump and are drawn to his promises to smash The Establishment that they’ve spent their whole lives seeing steal from them, neglect them, and unjustly help others who pledge their loyalty to the existing state of affairs. Don’t forget that it was people who think the way that I just described who decisively changed the course of American history on Election Day, and they take pride in being “politically incorrect” and rebelling against the system that they feel has held them down their entire lives. Be it through the abovementioned examples of unfairness and injustice, or through the incessant attempts to dismantle their identity by suppressing and trashing their religious liberties and traditions, people in the “Rust Belt” have had enough.
See, that’s the thing that foreigners don’t realize, and it’s that Americans in this part of the country feel that they’re living under the boot of a tyrannical and totalitarian ideology which censors their dissent with “racist”, “fascist”, and “white supremacist” reputation-killing accusations and works 24/7/365 to brainwash them into thinking that they – and not the system – are the problem. Imagine George Orwell’s 1984 and you’ll have an idea about how a lot people view the ideology of “political correctness”. It is so pervasive, so controlling, that those who are suffering under it were bound to eventually revolt once the time was ripe. All of these anti-“political correctness” dissidents thought that they were alone and were the “crazy outlier” amongst their brainwashed compatriots, but then Donald Trump came along and gave them all the signal that this was the historic moment that they had been waiting their entire lives for to finally rebel against this totalitarian ideology. If there was no “political correctness”, then there would never have risen a Donald Trump to save the hard-working blue collar folks of the USA.
The majority-blue collar inhabitants of the “Rust Belt” have been voiceless for decades and were seething with rage this whole time. They couldn’t speak out against the majority-black crime that ravages their neighborhoods because otherwise they’d be tarred and feathered as “racists”. They couldn’t condemn globalization and the outsourcing of their livelihoods to Mexico, China, and other countries or else they’d be mercilessly attacked as “fascists”. God forbid these people ever spoke publicly about building a wall with Mexico to stop the tens of millions of illegal immigrants and uncountable tons of deadly narcotics that have flooded the US since NAFTA, since then they’d be called the ultimate insult and accused of being “white supremacists”. These people thought that they were largely alone with their feelings because the system did such an effective job of self-censoring them and thus separating them from the silent majority of likeminded Americans, but then Donald Trump emerged on the scene and millions of people were finally united via his rallies and social-alternative medias to finally muster up the courage to collectively resist The Establishment and its allied social-pop culture-academic-political elite’s intimidation.
When Election Day came, these dispossessed Americans didn’t back down and buy into The Establishment’s propaganda that Hillary was going to trounce Trump with an historic landslide but instead went to vote anyhow, knowing that this was the only hope left for them to ever possibly change their inescapably dismal life situations.
The most intense psychological warfare operation ever conducted against Americans was a complete failure. The Establishment’s War on the People sought to convince them that Trump didn’t stand a chance to win and that voting for him just showed how “racist”, “fascist”, and “white supremacist” you were. “Political correctness”, globalization, and the unfettered illegal immigration and unvetted “refugee” resettlement of millions of people who staunchly refuse to assimilate and integrate into American Society or even speak English is just a fact of life that these “deplorable” citizens will be forced to put up and deal with until they die (or are killed by some of the “new arrivals” who flocked into their hometowns). But The Establishment and its social-pop culture-academic-political shills were wrong and Trump supporters knew it because they had finally connected with one another and were convinced that they truly embodied the silent majority, and the frustration, hopelessness, and pain that comes every single day living in a “politically correct” system is what sent millions of Americans into a rage against the system which was so widespread that it became impossible for Hillary to steal the election.
The War on the People was waged by Americans, on Americans, and against everything that the silent majority believes that America stands for, which is why it was totally unprecedented in American history. Not even the divide-and-rule Color Revolution tactics that The Establishment dangerously and irresponsibly relied on with the help of George Soros and his “Black Lives Matter” urban extremists could succeed in intimidating the Trump Movement and compelling them to stop, which testifies to the deep conviction that Trump supporters have in their beliefs and the hope that they have that their candidate of choice will finally free them from the misery that has come to define their lives.
Dear foreign friends, forget everything that you may have ever thought about the US system, national ideology, and the American People – from here on out, you and 99% of all other non-American observers begin at Day 1 in working to understand the inner nuances of Trump Country and Trump’s America. My state of Ohio had the highest honor of being the biggest upset to Hillary Clinton by 9%, something which has shocked The Establishment. We, the people of Ohio, are the heart of Trumpland. He didn’t win by a few percentage points like in every other swing state, but by almost double digits. This should be more than enough proof that everything that I, as a born-and-raised Clevelander, am revealing to you about how and why Trump won the “Rust Belt” and broke through Hillary’s firewall. Where I’m from, people don’t just have 1 or 2 Trump signs in their yard – they have 5, 10, or 20 of them, especially if they live in the farmland right outside of the city.
I’m not expecting you to understand everything that I wrote, let alone to agree with it, but I felt obligated to do the best that I can to inform you all about why Trump won and the reasons behind the “Rust Belt” revolt against The Establishment which handed him the Presidency. For all of what you might think are their personal and ideological faults, Trump supporters feel validated by this election because it proved that the system and all of its shills were lying about Hillary’s “imminent landslide” this entire time. What had been derided for over a year and a half as the “conspiratorial thinking” of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” (one with phantasmal and invented links to the Russian secret services) was exposed as a fact – The Establishment was indeed lying this entire time and desperately waged what amounts to the most intense psychological operation against Americans ever conducted in history, and that’s the War on the People. Nobody can deny it any longer, the facts are the facts and all the “official” “thinkers”, pundits, and “experts” were wrong because they either deliberately refused to recognize the reality that was before their eyes or were complicit in siding with the system out of the self-interested expectation that they’ll somehow end up benefiting from its perpetuation.
Tough times are ahead, and the nation is more divided and polarized than ever before, though this is largely due to the lingering psychological effects of The Establishment’s War on the People than anything else. The Second American Revolution was indeed a victory of the American People over The Establishment, but it’s now under threat from the Clintonian Counter-Revolution that’s broken out in the streets of many pro-Democrat American cities. It’s the height of irony that the people who just a few days ago criticized Trump for not pledging to blindly respect the results of the vote are now the ones who don’t recognize its outcome and are poised to tear America’s inner cities apart just because they couldn’t pull off stealing the election of our lifetime.
I don’t think anybody knows how far the rioters will be directed/misled by their Hillary-Soros-neoconservative handlers to go, nor how President-elect Trump will respond to their unrest once he takes office in mid-January, but what I can in fact tell each and every one of you without an inkling of doubt in my mind is that the Trump supporters of the Midwestern “Rust Belt” who helped hand him his victory in the first place will form the vanguard Second Amendment-wielding citizens leading the Reverse-Color Revolution movement to legally safeguard the 45th President’s constitutional legitimacy if things disastrously get out of control. Related links | 0 |
The Fatal Expense Of American Imperialism
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Boston Globe " - THE SINGLE MOST important issue in allocating national resources is war versus peace, or as macroeconomists put it, guns versus butter. The United States is getting this choice profoundly wrong, squandering vast sums and undermining national security. In economic and geopolitical terms, America suffers from what Yale historian Paul Kennedy calls imperial overreach. If our next president remains trapped in expensive Middle East wars, the budgetary costs alone could derail any hopes for solving our vast domestic problems.
It may seem tendentious to call America an empire, but the term fits certain realities of US power and how its used. An empire is a group of territories under a single power. Nineteenth-century Britain was obviously an empire when it ruled India, Egypt, and dozens of other colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. The United States directly rules only a handful of conquered islands (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands), but it stations troops and has used force to influence who governs in dozens of other sovereign countries. That grip on power beyond Americas own shores is now weakening.
The scale of US military operations is remarkable. The US Department of Defense has (as of a 2010 inventory) 4,999 military facilities, of which 4,249 are in the United States; 88 are in overseas US territories; and 662 are in 36 foreign countries and foreign territories, in all regions of the world. Not counted in this list are the secret facilities of the US intelligence agencies. The cost of running these military operations and the wars they support is extraordinary, around $900 billion per year, or 5 percent of US national income, when one adds the budgets of the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, homeland security, nuclear weapons programs in the Department of Energy, and veterans benefits. The $900 billion in annual spending is roughly one-quarter of all federal government outlays.
The United States has a long history of using covert and overt means to overthrow governments deemed to be unfriendly to US interests, following the classic imperial strategy of rule through locally imposed friendly regimes. In a powerful study of Latin America between 1898 and 1994, for example, historian John Coatsworth counts 41 cases of successful US-led regime change, for an average rate of one government overthrow by the United States every 28 months for a century. And note: Coatsworths count does not include the failed attempts, such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
This tradition of US-led regime change has been part and parcel of US foreign policy in other parts of the world, including Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Wars of regime change are costly to the United States, and often devastating to the countries involved. Two major studies have measured the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. One, by my Columbia colleague Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes, arrived at the cost of $3 trillion as of 2008. A more recent study, by the Cost of War Project at Brown University, puts the price tag at $4.7 trillion through 2016. Over a 15-year period, the $4.7 trillion amounts to roughly $300 billion per year, and is more than the combined total outlays from 2001 to 2016 for the federal departments of education, energy, labor, interior, and transportation, and the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
It is nearly a truism that US wars of regime change have rarely served Americas security needs. Even when the wars succeed in overthrowing a government, as in the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Moammar Khadafy in Libya, the result is rarely a stable government, and is more often a civil war. A successful regime change often lights a long fuse leading to a future explosion, such as the 1953 overthrow of Irans democratically elected government and installation of the autocratic Shah of Iran, which was followed by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In many other cases, such as the US attempts (with Saudi Arabia and Turkey) to overthrow Syrias Bashar al-Assad, the result is a bloodbath and military standoff rather than an overthrow of the government.
WHAT IS THE DEEP motivation for these profligate wars and for the far-flung military bases that support them?
From 1950 to 1990, the superficial answer would have been the Cold War. Yet Americas imperial behavior overseas predates the Cold War by half a century (back to the Spanish-American War, in 1898) and has outlasted it by another quarter century. Americas overseas imperial adventures began after the Civil War and the final conquests of the Native American nations. At that point, US political and business leaders sought to join the European empires especially Britain, France, Russia, and the newly emergent Germany in overseas conquests. In short order, America grabbed the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, and Hawaii, and joined the European imperial powers in knocking on the doors of China.
As of the 1890s, the United States was by far the worlds largest economy, but until World War II, it took a back seat to the British Empire in global naval power, imperial reach, and geopolitical dominance. The British were the unrivaled masters of regime change for example, in carving up the corpse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Yet the exhaustion from two world wars and the Great Depression ended the British and French empires after World War II and thrust the United States and Russia into the forefront as the two main global empires. The Cold War had begun.
The economic underpinning of Americas global reach was unprecedented. As of 1950, US output constituted a remarkable 27 percent of global output, with the Soviet Union roughly a third of that, around 10 percent. The Cold War fed two fundamental ideas that would shape American foreign policy till now. The first was that the United States was in a struggle for survival against the Soviet empire. The second was that every country, no matter how remote, was a battlefield in that global war. While the United States and the Soviet Union would avoid a direct confrontation, they flexed their muscles in hot wars around the world that served as proxies for the superpower competition.
Over the course of nearly a half century, Cuba, Congo, Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Namibia, Mozambique, Chile, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and even tiny Granada, among many others, were interpreted by US strategists as battlegrounds with the Soviet empire. Often, far more prosaic interests were involved. Private companies like United Fruit International and ITT convinced friends in high places (most famously the Dulles brothers, Secretary of State John Foster and CIA director Allen) that land reforms or threatened expropriations of corporate assets were dire threats to US interests, and therefore in need of US-led regime change. Oil interests in the Middle East were another repeated cause of war, as had been the case for the British Empire from the 1920s.
These wars destabilized and impoverished the countries involved rather than settling the politics in Americas favor. The wars of regime change were, with few exceptions, a litany of foreign policy failure. They were also extraordinarily costly for the United States itself. The Vietnam War was of course the greatest of the debacles, so expensive, so bloody, and so controversial that it crowded out Lyndon Johnsons other, far more important and promising war, the War on Poverty, in the United States.
The end of the Cold War, in 1991, should have been the occasion for a fundamental reorientation of US guns-versus-butter policies. The occasion offered the United States and the world a peace dividend, the opportunity to reorient the world and US economy from war footing to sustainable development. Indeed, the Rio Earth Summit, in 1992, established sustainable development as the centerpiece of global cooperation, or so it seemed.
Alas, the blinders and arrogance of American imperial thinking prevented the United States from settling down to a new era of peace. As the Cold War was ending, the United States was beginning a new era of wars, this time in the Middle East. The United States would sweep away the Soviet-backed regimes in the Middle East and establish unrivalled US political dominance. Or at least that was the plan.
THE QUARTER CENTURY since 1991 has therefore been marked by a perpetual US war in the Middle East, one that has destabilized the region, massively diverted resources away from civilian needs toward the military, and helped to create mass budget deficits and the buildup of public debt. The imperial thinking has led to wars of regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, across four presidencies: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The same thinking has induced the United States to expand NATO to Russias borders, despite the fact that NATOs supposed purpose was to defend against an adversary the Soviet Union that no longer exists. Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev has emphasized that eastward NATO expansion was certainly a violation of the spirit of those declarations and assurances that we were given in 1990, regarding the future of East-West security.
There is a major economic difference, however, between now and 1991, much less 1950. At the start of the Cold War, in 1950, the United States produced around 27 percent of world output. As of 1991, when the Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz dreams of US dominance were taking shape, the United States accounted for around 22 percent of world production. By now, according to IMF estimates, the US share is 16 percent, while China has surpassed the United States, at around 18 percent. By 2021, according to projections by the International Monetary Fund, the United States will produce roughly 15 percent of global output compared with Chinas 20 percent. The United States is incurring massive public debt and cutting back on urgent public investments at home in order to sustain a dysfunctional, militarized, and costly foreign policy.
Thus comes a fundamental choice. The United States can vainly continue the neoconservative project of unipolar dominance, even as the recent failures in the Middle East and Americas declining economic preeminence guarantee the ultimate failure of this imperial vision. If, as some neoconservatives support, the United States now engages in an arms race with China, we are bound to come up short in a decade or two, if not sooner. The costly wars in the Middle East even if continued much less enlarged in a Hillary Clinton presidency could easily end any realistic hopes for a new era of scaled-up federal investments in education, workforce training, infrastructure, science and technology, and the environment.
The far smarter approach will be to maintain Americas defensive capabilities but end its imperial pretensions. This, in practice, means cutting back on the far-flung network of military bases, ending wars of regime change, avoiding a new arms race (especially in next-generation nuclear weapons), and engaging China, India, Russia, and other regional powers in stepped-up diplomacy through the United Nations, especially through shared actions on the UNs Sustainable Development Goals, including climate change, disease control, and global education.
Many American conservatives will sneer at the very thought that the United States room for maneuver should be limited in the slightest by the UN. But think how much better off the United States would be today had it heeded the UN Security Councils wise opposition to the wars of regime change in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Many conservatives will point to Vladimir Putins actions in Crimea as proof that diplomacy with Russia is useless, without recognizing that it was NATOs expansion to the Baltics and its 2008 invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, that was a primary trigger of Putins response.
In the end, the Soviet Union bankrupted itself through costly foreign adventures such as the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and its vast over-investment in the military. Today the United States has similarly over-invested in the military, and could follow a similar path to decline if it continues the wars in the Middle East and invites an arms race with China. Its time to abandon the reveries, burdens, and self-deceptions of empire and to invest in sustainable development at home and in partnership with the rest of the world.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and author of The Age of Sustainable Development. | 0 |
Lots of people make a living from the seasonal business of Christmas — lights, trees, stocking stuffers, eggnog — but the business of Hanukkah products is tougher. Some entrepreneurs have made it work (or are trying) with quirky products whether earnest (like the Star of David tree topper) or mildly subversive (like the Santa Claus yarmulke or a bong). Some purveyors of these seasonal products, like Neal Hoffman, never expected to be in the Hanukkah business. Mr. Hoffman was shopping in a Nordstrom in 2012 when his son ran up to him holding an Elf on the Shelf, the popular Christmas toy. That turned out to be both complicated and fortuitous: complicated, because Mr. Hoffman is Jewish, his wife is Catholic, and they had decided to raise their children Jewish. And fortuitous because of what happened next. “I was like, ‘Dude, you can’t have that,’” said Mr. Hoffman, who previously had worked at Hasbro, the toy giant. “‘You can have a’ — and I was like, what would be Jewish I could rhyme with?” he said. “And then I said, ‘I’m going to get you a Mensch on a Bench. ’” After raising more than $22, 000 on Kickstarter, Mr. Hoffman produced his first run of Mensch on a Bench dolls for the next holiday season, and he has been selling them ever since. They come with a storybook that situates the bearded character, who wears a black hat and a Jewish prayer shawl, in the Hanukkah story: He watches over the oil in the Maccabees’ temple to ensure it burns for eight days. “Elf on a Shelf is a great product,” Mr. Hoffman said. “But they just left the Jewish market sitting there saying: ‘What about us? What about our kids? ’” That first year, 2013, sales of Mensch on a Bench, which retails for $30, reached about $100, 000, mostly through Mr. Hoffman’s own website. In 2014, Bed Bath Beyond picked up the product and Mr. Hoffman appeared on “Shark Tank,” and sales climbed to $900, 000. Revenues were $800, 000 last year and will be about the same this year — which suits Mr. Hoffman, who works out of his home and enjoys the lifestyle of a niche product entrepreneur. “We pull in a profit, I get to do something I love, and I work maybe 20 hours a week during most of the year,” said Mr. Hoffman, who this season introduced a plush talking toy, Ask Bubbe. Amy Kritzer, who with her brother Andrew owns Modern Tribe, an online Judaica store with an offbeat edge, said that Hanukkah accounted for about 40 percent of annual revenue. Popular this year is the Emoji Menorah from Rite Lite ($30) with each candle base wearing a different expression, and the Jewdolph Knit Koozie ($12) a bottle sleeve with a reindeer whose antlers form a menorah, from Freakers. Also on the website is the Yamaclaus, a fluffy Santa Claus hat in the shape of a yarmulke. Alan Masarsky started Yamaclaus with his boyfriend, Larik Malish. Both grew up in interfaith homes, and both were fans of the 2003 episode of “The OC” that popularized the term “Chrismukkah,” a portmanteau for a merged Christmas and Hanukkah celebration. On the episode, characters wore what they called a yamaclaus. The couple had no inkling of starting a business when, in 2011, they hosted a holiday party and made their guests a crude version of the beanies out of red construction paper and cotton balls. They were a hit, so they checked to see if the trademark for Yamaclaus was available (it was) and if they could raise $2, 500 on Kickstarter to start production (they did). In 2013, Yamaclaus ($11) began selling on the company’s website, which today accounts for about 70 percent of sales. Mr. Masarsky, a marketing manager at Facebook who lives in San Francisco, said sales had increased 200 percent this year, as it had the previous two, but declined to provide more financial details. Yamaclaus wearers who post photos on social media tend to be in nonreligious settings. “Tons of our customers wear them when they’re lighting a menorah,” Mr. Masarsky said. “But not at shul — not at a synagogue. ” Michael Krasny, author of “Let There Be Laughter,” a book about Jewish humor, said many jokes make light of Jews’ “anxiety of being assimilated and turning into Christians. ” Products that intertwine Christian and Jewish culture may be a positive force, he said. “They can have it both ways,” Mr. Krasny said. “We can call it an homage to Christians at the same time as it’s bringing to the fore something that’s associated with Jewishness. ” Interfaith households are on the rise. From 2005 to 2013, 58 percent of Jews who wed married gentiles (usually Christians) compared with 35 percent who did so from 1970 to 1974, according to the Pew Research Center. Morri Chowaiki grew up in a Jewish home his wife, Marina, grew up in an interfaith one. “She always wanted a Christmas tree, and I was like, no way,” said Mr. Chowaiki, who in 2005, after they were married about a decade, relented. “I said, ‘All right, just don’t go crazy — if I walk into the front room and there’s a nativity scene there, I might have a little issue with it. ’” Ms. Chowaiki bought and decorated a tree, then unveiled it. And her husband was impressed — it was festooned with dreidels and blue and silver ornaments. But at the top of the tree: a star. “I laughed and said, ‘You couldn’t at least find a Jewish star to put at the top of the tree? ’” Mr. Chowaiki said. She told him she had looked — and found nothing. By 2009, he had designed and trademarked one, the Hanukkah Tree Topper, and sold about 2, 000. By 2013, the product had been picked up by retailers including Bed Bath Beyond and SkyMall and sold 35, 000 units — and earned Mr. Chowaiki a spot on “Shark Tank. ” On that episode, Daymond John, the investor who founded FUBU, purchased a 35 percent stake in the business for $50, 000, and Mr. Chowaiki agreed to license out the product to Kurt S. Adler, a wholesaler that specializes in holiday items. There are now several versions of the product available online, starting at about $12. Once the tree topper was licensed, Mr. Chowaiki ceased to be involved in operations. And in April, Mr. John hired him to head the sales and retail division of his company, the Shark Group. The Menorah Tree grew out of a similar marital dynamic: Michael Patchen, who is Jewish, wanted something festive to suit his wife, Jenny, who is half Catholic and half Jewish. In 2006, Mr. Patchen and his brother, Alex, made a menorah out of wood and artificial pine garland, decorated it with ornaments and lights, and surprised her with it. Now they sell a metal version that is seven feet high, assembles like an artificial tree and sells for $295 on their website. They’ve sold in the “low to ” since introducing the product in 2013, said Alex Patchen, who declined to be more specific. In 2012, David Daily had an idea for how to make the Hanukkah party he and his wife were hosting in Austin, Tex. memorable: a menorah bong. Mr. Daily, who owns Grav Labs, a glass bong and pipe manufacturer in Austin with annual sales of $12 million, made the bong himself. It was about two feet long and had eight bowls with stems that could hold candles. “I definitely had a Jewish experience growing up of enjoying cannabis with all my cousins,” Mr. Daily said. “And this menorah bong obviously is meant to be shared. ” Their guests were, in every sense, bowled over, but Mr. Daily never planned on marketing the menorah bong. It sat on a shelf in his home for a couple of years. Then an online head shop, 420 Science, borrowed it and made a video of it in action. It garnered about two million views on Facebook and YouTube and has been shared on social media about 100, 000 times. Grav recently produced 100 menorah bongs. At 14 inches, they are less cumbersome than the original. They cost $700 from retailers including 420 Science. But Dr. Dreidel may not be widely available until next Hanukkah. Hannah Rothstein, a conceptual artist, conceived of the dreidel in 2014 and has made fewer than a hundred of the wooden tops on a commission basis, charging $150. The dreidel features images of Dr. Dre, the rapper and record producer, and a version will retail for about $40 — barring complications. “I have not gotten any letters from Dr. Dre’s lawyers,” Ms. Rothstein said. “And if he wants to go in on the idea, we could make a million together. ” Next year she also hopes to produce a Hanukkah homage to Macklemore, another artist: the . | 1 |
Brave, a and browser, raised $35 million from its initial coin offering (ICO) in under 30 seconds this week, according to a report. [The free browser, which automatically blocks and tracking cookies, has been growing in popularity since its 2015 release and is currently in open beta. “ICOs operate by selling investors cryptocurrency, which can be used to store value in many ways beyond a traditional share,” explained Tech Crunch in their report. “For its sale, Brave created its own coin — The Basic Attention Token, or BAT — and sold one billion of them. That collection of BAT cost 156, 250 ETH, which is just over $35 million. ” “A further 500 million BAT is stored for user growth and ‘BAT development,’ according to Brave, which is not planning another token sale in the future,” they continued. “The ICO is the highest grossing to date, and Brave’s business itself is one of the more interesting to make use the blockchain. ” Eich, who created JavaScript but left Mozilla in 2014 in controversial circumstances, had raised $7 million from investors including Founders Fund for Brave. He believes the current internet advertising system is inherently broken, and his ambitious proposal uses the blockchain to make things more efficient for all parties, advertisers, publishers and users, too. ” Brave, which was founded by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich after he was targeted by social justice warriors over a $1, ooo donation to support Proposition 8, plans to use the proceeds of their ICO to “develop its advertising platform. ” Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 1 |
by Augustina Ursino
Matthew Gage Downing-Powers passed away on October 9, 2013. He was 5 ½ months old and died less than 2 days after receiving 8 vaccines. After Matthew’s lifeless body was taken to the hospital, his parents were kept from seeing him, to say their good-byes. A month and a half later, he was returned cremated. Then Matthew’s parents were denied a copy of his autopsy report.
Matthew’s mother, Crystal Downing-Powers, found a vaccine injury attorney to help her file a vaccine injury claim. This vaccine injury attorney was handling this case for six months and then one day, he sent Crystal a letter in the mail saying he didn’t have enough evidence regarding the death of Matthew, so he was dropping them. That was it. There was no further correspondence from him.
With no progression on their case, Matthew’s parents were further shattered. They were unsure of what to do next, because the deadline to file a vaccine injury claim is two years after a parent loses their baby to vaccines. This left them with barely any time to find another vaccine injury attorney to help them.
Crystal was distraught and in tears, feeling more helpless than ever at this point. The VacTruth team immediately helped her find another vaccine injury attorney. It is very difficult for any vaccine injury attorney to win a vaccine injury case, involving a child who died after being vaccinated. Nearly seventy percent of vaccine injury claims get denied. It takes a lot of time to fight these cases and some attorneys just aren’t willing to put in the time or effort. Others just don’t have the experience.
Thankfully, this new attorney has been fully supportive and understanding of the situation and is willing to fight for Matthew’s family. Crystal was thankful that her new attorney filed their claim in September 2015, less than one month before the deadline. He also submitted a request to receive Matthew’s autopsy report, being denied to his parents. Weeks continued to pass after the request was put in.
In January 2016, Matthew’s autopsy report was finally provided in full to the lawyer, detailing the vaccines Matthew received prior to his death, the time he was vaccinated and the time he passed away.
Matthew’s death was ruled UNDETERMINED.
Crystal was thankful the autopsy report was finally available but had no words to describe the pain this has caused them and the frustration of having to wait more than two years and three months to get a copy of their son’s autopsy report.
When her lawyer viewed the report, he mentioned of the many autopsy reports he has reviewed, viewing Matthew’s was one of the most difficult to look at. Even he felt it would be too much for Crystal to look at, or for anyone to look at. The images of her son in that report remain unseen by Crystal to this day.
After losing her son, Crystal wants us to know she is optimistic they will win their case. Once they do win, she wants to go as far as she can go, to open people’s eyes! She has seen 13 babies die in the past year from vaccines, even though the vaccines are denied as the cause of death, parents know the truth. This breaks her heart to see this and makes her relive the worst nightmare in her own life.
Crystal wants people to know that these innocent children dying from vaccines needs to stop and if she has to be that person to stop this, then she will be.
Crystal has since given birth to their rainbow baby Wyatt. This term represents a baby born after a baby lost. Wyatt is an extremely healthy child. She has witnessed first-hand, like many parents before her, how he is the healthiest child of hers, because he is unvaccinated.
Crystal reminds us that none of their children will ever receive any further vaccines and she has filed vaccine exemptions for them in California. She is also disgusted that SB277 passed, after what happened to her son. It became clearer to her that these politicians don’t care about people’s health, because when the vaccines harm, the injured get ignored.
Matthew’s parents always feel a part of them missing. Their precious gift of life is dead now because of poisonous injections that didn’t protect him from any disease.
We are outraged at what is happening to families and at those who are in a position to do something, to change things, but continue to do nothing to help the vaccine-injured community and to prevent these tragedies from continuing.
We are incredibly sorry for Matthew’s loss. His parents live each day with so much pain, knowing the vaccines took the life of their fourth son. Matthew’s brothers suffer each day too, they miss their brother tremendously.
Matthew would be turning 3 years old today.
We hope you never forget him and what his short life has taught us.
Original Publication: February 26, 2015
Parents in California are distraught after losing their infant son after being vaccinated. He died in his sleep and was taken to the hospital already deceased. Hospital staff ruled his death as sudden infant death syndrome. The couple was told an autopsy was required to be performed on their son.
After returning home, waiting to get an update, they never received one. Numerous phone calls were made to get answers. Weeks went by. Finally, they received verbal confirmation and told their son was best not to be seen prior to being cremated, because of the condition he was in. Once cremated, they could pick up the remains of their child from the crematory. They were not given the chance to say their goodbyes.
More than one year and four months have passed and the family has yet to receive his autopsy report. It turns out their son was given a vaccine not approved for his age and an extra dose of the hepatitis B vaccine that he shouldn’t have received until later on.
This harrowing story is a reminder that vaccines can be lethal. Parents shall maintain the rights to choose what medical interventions they feel are safe for their child. After all, they are the ones who have to live with the consequences.
Crystal Downing shares with us what happened to her son Matthew, in hopes to remind parents to research vaccines before offering their child to be injected with whatever the doctor says.
One Less Baby Boy
“Our sweet little fussy bear Matthew Gage Downing-Powers was born healthy on April 26, 2013. In the hospital, he was given the Hepatitis B vaccine after birth. That’s what they do here in the United States and what the CDC recommends newborns receive, following the current schedule. His reactions to the shot were deemed normal and I have older children that have been fully vaccinated, so I was aware of what to expect.
I took Matthew in for his 2 month well baby checkup on July 2, 2013. During this appointment, he was given 8 vaccines for DTaP (3 in 1), Polio, Hib, Hep B, Pneumococcal PCV and the oral Rotavirus vaccine. Then I was late getting him to his 4 month checkup. I brought him as soon as I was able.
On Monday October 7, 2013, when Matthew was 5 ½ month’s old, I brought him in for his 4 month delayed visit. The doctor said they could get him caught up on his shots. I thought ok, you can do that. Matthew received 8 vaccines, DTaP, Polio, Hib, Pneumococcal, Hep B and Hep A. These would be the last vaccines he would ever receive.
After the shots, he didn’t have a fever or a low grade one. We didn’t give him Tylenol. He was just grumpy and crying some. We checked him every hour. His temperature stayed normal but he wasn’t his happy go lucky self. All my kids got grumpy after their shots.
I didn’t call the doctor on Tuesday. I knew these were typical behaviors after the kids received the vaccines. He is my 4th son. We had our other 3 vaccinated and knew what to expect.
I thought I would give it another day to see if he was still grumpy but we didn’t get to the next day. Matthew was gone by then. He was found lifeless. He went to bed that Tuesday night and my husband found him Wednesday morning.
My husband Zack and I both performed CPR on our son and so did my dad and step mom. He had some light pinkish-brown tinged mucous coming from his nose and mouth. I wasn’t willing to believe he was gone. None of us were willing to give up on him.
My husband called 911 but they were taking so long. I ran my baby to the hospital that was 2 blocks away. I took him to Needles hospital which is called Colorado River Medical Center in Needles, CA. The hospital also did CPR on him and said he died of SIDS, soon after I brought him in. He had been gone for hours they said. They told me he passed sometime between 11 PM (after he was put to bed) and 7 AM Wednesday morning (shortly before he was found).
My life has been full of heartache since we lost our baby. That was the worst day of my life, seeing my son that way but still believing he would come back to me.
Hospital staff said I would be under investigation and it was California law when a baby passes, to undergo an autopsy. From the hospital in Needles, Matthew was transferred from that hospital to the coroner’s office, in San Bernardino, CA. We had chosen to have Matthew cremated at a funeral home in San Bernardino.
After leaving Matthew at the hospital, we were told to go home and wait for an update when the autopsy would be done. We planned to see him at the funeral home we picked out, after deciding we would have him cremated. I was told I’d be informed when the autopsy was to be done and when it would be completed and that I could view him before being cremated.
I didn’t write down the names of the staff members I left my son with. I didn’t think of that when it happened. But I should have. No one called me to inform me what was going on. I called numerous times and kept getting the runaround. Absolutely no one would give me answers.
Weeks went by before I received a call back. By this time, I was informed Matthew was not in a condition I’d want to remember him in. I felt helpless and convinced I should sign a paper letting them cremate him. Prior to this, the funeral home confirmed the remains were Matthew’s. They asked me what urn I would like and then confirmed it was him. I also sent a picture of him, to make sure.
Matthew didn’t get brought back to our home in Needles, California until November 20, 2013. A month and a half after he passed away.
I don’t think they cremated him before telling me but part of me feels they did, to cover up his death. I will never know but my instincts tell me something was being hidden. I think the funeral home did a nice job, they were very patient with me, they understood why I kept calling them so many times, to see if somebody there could tell me what happened to my son’s body.
I didn’t know where my sons body was. I didn’t know what was going on at the coroner’s office. I was never notified whatsoever and to be honest, I was really flipping out. I wanted to know what was going on with my baby and what answers did they have for me so far.
The coroner was informed of the vaccines Matthew had just received. I had even asked the coroner if it was possible the vaccines killed my son. The coroner straight lied to my face, or more, over the phone, saying that no, it was not the vaccinations that killed him.
There was only one time they contacted me and that was over how many people had done CPR on him. And that was the last time I heard from them.
I did contact him after we had received his death certificate saying pending investigation still and I asked if they had finished with his autopsy report. They told me no. I called once more and they told me that they couldn’t give me anymore information and that I would have to call the coroner’s office here in Needles, California. I have done that and still no answer, no nothing.
The coroner said it wasn’t my fault and sometimes this just happens. I couldn’t believe what I was just told.
It took me a long time to speak up and share my story because of this pain. I decided to come forward because I don’t want Matthew to die in vain because of vaccine manufacturers not doing a better job making safer vaccines, before pushing them onto unsuspecting parents and their innocent babies they view as profitable beings.
Why are infants getting so many at one time? Has it been proven it’s safe to give these kids all the vaccines they are shooting them up with during these well baby checkups? From what I’ve learned since all of this, the answer is no.
Later, I learned two of the vaccines given at his last appointment, should not have been given to him. Babies are not supposed to be given the Hepatitis A vaccine until at least 1 year of age and this was given to Matthew at 5 1/2 months old.
I also learned he was given the third dose of Hepatitis B too soon. Matthew wasn’t supposed to get that until his next visit during the 6 month checkup which would’ve also been delayed to space out the shots, because we were late getting him the 4 month vaccines.
I think it was right after the funeral I learned that they had given him the Hep A vaccine too soon. When I had learned this, it killed me. I started blaming my self and still do because I never took the time to know what vaccines were supposed be given to a child, at what month, how many doses, etc.
I felt because I didn’t do the research until after Matthew died, I was foolish and this was somehow my fault. I felt in some way this was my fault because I was late on his vaccinations. My thoughts were if I would’ve followed the CDC’s schedule and not been late to that 4 month check up, he probably would not have gotten the wrong vaccines. Now he’s gone.
I do understand he could’ve been taken sooner even if the correct vaccines were given on the schedule. It’s just something I live with.
It’s been over a year and four months since Matthew passed on October 9, 2013 and I still haven’t gotten the autopsy report that I told them I wanted a copy of. I keep getting the run around!
I went to the doctor’s office recently and found out the nurse that injected Matthew is no longer working there. I was told she got fired because she didn’t know what she was doing when giving vaccines.
I said to the office if it turns out his death was because of her ignorance, I will be going after them all. My son shouldn’t have died because you guys were too lazy to train her to give vaccines properly. They didn’t even apologize to me. I’m just beyond angry at this point. I can’t wait to get my answers.
They said my baby is the only one who had passed away since she started working, until the end of her working. Who knows if that is true? There could’ve been more lives taken and they wouldn’t admit it.
I want to tell other parents, they say vaccinations are safe, but in reality, they aren’t.
Ask questions and know which vaccines they plan to give to your baby. Know the risks associated with all of the vaccines they plan to give during the checkup. And remember, it’s your choice. It’s your child. And whatever you do, don’t let them mix the vaccines into one needle or give them so many at once because if you don’t think this won’t harm your child, then look at the child I lost. It is possible.
Matthew was given DTaP, IPV, Hib, PCV, Hep B and Hep A in 3 shots, one in his right arm and two in his left leg.
Now I’m pregnant with my 5th child. I have to stay strong. I have too. I have to remain less stressed for my family and during my pregnancy. I have 3 boys, a hubby and soon my rainbow baby, all counting on me, to hold this family together.
In all honesty though, sometimes I feel so overwhelmed because I miss Matthew so much and people are so unaware how often vaccines take the lives of infants. I’m beyond angry that this has happened to my baby. And scared it can happen again with the kids I do have. And that I’ll be forced to vaccinate this unborn baby.
A bill was currently put forth by our California state politicians to take away my right to exempt my children from further vaccines due to personal beliefs. If this passes, this would take my parental right away, to choose vaccinating my children in the future. What they should do is create a new exemption for parents to file that took one for the team! We should be able to opt out for that reason alone.
Was it not enough Matthew was taken? He should be honored by these people but instead, they deny his existence by pushing bills that slap parents in the face that have lost their child to vaccines or to those parents with vaccine injured children. Maybe if they would make safer vaccines, more would want to get them.
My son was injected with 8 vaccines, if you don’t know what is in them, learn! When I did, I was shocked and mad at myself for not questioning this before. Matthew is the reason I opened my eyes, to see what vaccines can really do to a baby, let alone anyone. I’m not the only one who believes vaccines are not what they claim they are. I really hope this opens parent’s eyes who do vaccinate their children.
My older son is having a hard time, my second son said he is afraid of the shots now and my third son is 3 years old, he just knows his baby brother is gone. As for my hubby, he keeps it in, so it’s kind of hard to know what he is feeling.
To this day, I still haven’t received his autopsy report. They keep giving me the run around. So the investigation is still pending. I have filed a report with the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). I’ve learned they sometimes don’t follow up with parents, which prevents them from reporting a reaction. Until I receive an autopsy report, it makes it difficult to file a claim with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP). I feel they are stalling us because the time frame to file when you lose a child to vaccines is 2 years, it’s going on a 1 ½ years for us. We won’t give up. My son should still be here.
His shot records don’t lie! They shouldn’t cover up these reactions to vaccines these kids suffer from. They should not stifle parents from pursuing the already time consuming and deterring recourse they’ve set up, talking about the vaccine injury compensation program.
Since I looked into this more, I’ve learned how common it is for babies to die right after getting vaccinated. I just want it to be known that this can happen and I hope mothers ask questions first, before handing their child over to get shot up. How many of us moms helped hold our own child down, to keep them restrained while being vaccinated, knowing we helped them hurt our own?
Matthew’s death was a high price to pay in the name of preventing any of these diseases my kid would’ve been fine dealing with.
I didn’t believe a few people who told me this can happen, but it did. And now I have to live with that for the rest of my life, knowing I should have asked questions and researched first, before blindly agreeing to them injecting or giving him anything. I didn’t research. I didn’t question what vaccines were given to all of my children. I had no reason to distrust doctors, until now. Since this happened to Matthew, my eyes are wide open now. Now I’m not afraid to question everything that is done to my children.
It’s a parent’s decision to make, to vaccinate their child or not. Parents need to research both sides, for and against. Then make their decision on the matter. My dad told me I didn’t get sick till after I started school and had to have those required vaccines. After that, my dad never vaccinated me again. My dad said it a few times before all of this happened, but I didn’t pay attention. I wish I had listened to him.
I just let the doctors and nurses do what they said was needed. No questions asked. I thought they would tell me if there were severe risks involved. Nobody told me anything like that. I trusted them with my child’s life and would’ve liked to have known that death from vaccination is an associated risk. Why didn’t the doctors or nurse tell me this? I really wished I researched and asked questions instead of just trusting the system and doctors. And now because I didn’t, my child is gone.
There are a lot more parents out there like me. Some don’t come forward due to fact they are afraid of what people would say. Sometimes people can be really cruel and not understand what parents like me go through.
I just want his story to be told. My hubby and I say thank you to everyone lending their support. We are so blessed to have the short time we had with our little fussy bear. I hope sharing this will help mothers know it can happen.
I want it well known I’m not telling parents not to vaccinate their child. I’m simply saying to research before you vaccinate. Learn if you choose to vaccinate, then that is your choice, not someone else’s to make because you will be stuck with the consequences.
Don’t disrespect parents like me, who have lost their child to vaccines. And don’t disrespect parents of living vaccine injured children. Our rights to choose these medical interventions need to be preserved. It is beyond disturbing that bought politicians think they can choose what gets injected into our children. They don’t care about your child’s health. Clearly many are dying and getting injured from these vaccines and they turn a blind eye. That should tell you something.
I miss my baby so much. A huge part of me was taken when he was. I cannot let this happen again. I cannot put my other children at risk of being vaccine injured any longer.
Matthew took one for the team and his life didn’t matter to those wanting to strip my rights to opt out of further vaccinating. Why does he not matter? Why do mild cases involving the measles get reported all over the news, but not babies dying after getting the MMR shot or other vaccinations? Why don’t the vaccine injured children matter?
We miss and love you so much Matthew. You are always thought of every day. You are always in my heart and I will never stop loving you.
Love Your Momma, | 0 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. Mourners lined the streets and police cars filled church parking lots as funerals were held for some of the five Dallas officers killed by a sniper last week. President Obama gathered law enforcement officials, civil rights activists and political figures at the White House and spoke about building trust between law enforcement and communities of color. Our latest poll shows that almost 70 percent of Americans say race relations are generally bad, an extraordinarily high level of racial discontent. _____ 2. Hillary Clinton portrayed Donald Trump as an existential threat to American democracy in a speech in Illinois, and mocked him for egotism and ignorance. She also addressed police violence and attacks on the police, invoking Abraham Lincoln, who in the same spot in 1858 proclaimed that “a house divided against itself cannot stand. ” With enough work for unity, she said, “We, in fact, will be indivisible — with liberty and justice for all. ” _____ 3. Mr. Trump, who is in the final stages of choosing a running mate, met with several candidates in Indiana, after his plane broke down. He also called for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to resign from the Supreme Court. “Her mind is shot,” he tweeted after she publicly disparaged him twice. Separately, our political reporter interviewed dozens of people, including Trump supporters, white nationalists and scholars of race, to understand how Mr. Trump fosters a sense of white identity. “Everyone’s sticking together in their groups,” explained a Long Island housewife, “so white people have to, too. ” _____ 4. “We face a time of great national change,” Britain’s new prime minister, Theresa May, said. It was an understatement, given the country’s internal ruptures and profound uncertainty over the vote to leave the European Union. She appointed Boris Johnson, the provocative former London mayor and Brexit leader, as foreign secretary, naming his predecessor, Philip Hammond, as chancellor of the Exchequer. _____ 5. Ringling Bros. bowing to concerns, is debuting its new circus in Los Angeles. Its show, “Out of This World,” offers some old standbys, like aerialists, a lion tamer and acrobats on horseback, but adds an ice floor, an elaborate narrative and a smartphone app. There are still plenty of animals: tigers, dogs, pigs and even a kangaroo. _____ 6. Police officers flooded a gritty patch of Brooklyn, N. Y. a day after 33 people suffered what appeared to be overdoses of synthetic marijuana known as or Spice. “It’s like a scene out of a zombie movie, a horrible scene,” said a man who saw three people collapse. Mayor Bill de Blasio said any stores found selling the drug would be shut down, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo compared its prevalence to the crack epidemic. _____ 7. The renowned portraitist Chuck Close, 76, has radically upended his style and his life, leaving his wife and worrying his children. In one of our stories today, a man who has known the artist for years grapples with the metamorphosis. “He was producing startling new work that I wanted to understand,” the author writes, “but it seemed to emerge from a spirit of liberation that left a path of devastation behind. ” _____ 8. The U. N. Security Council met to decide whether to send more troops to South Sudan, where a devastating civil war has entered its third year. The U. N. peacekeepers have struggled with the mandate to protect civilians, coming under harsh criticism for failing to prevent an ethnic massacre at this U. N. camp in . _____ 9. The Federal Election Commission fined three nonprofit groups for activities in 2010, when they were linked to the political network overseen by the wealthy, conservative Koch brothers. The groups agreed to pay more than $200, 000 in fines, but did not concede that accepting guidance from a Koch consultant had led to violations of federal rules. _____ 10. Finally, Boston is a city lacking tall major landmarks. No Statue of Liberty, no Space Needle. So this Citgo sign is, for many Bostonians, their icon. Now that the building on which it sits is being sold, a preservation group is trying to have it designated as a landmark, arguing that it is “a wonderful piece of American Pop Art from the 1960s. ” _____ 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 |
UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations Security Council reached a surprisingly swift consensus Wednesday on its choice for the next secretary general of the United Nations: António Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal. Mr. Guterres, 67, who ran the United Nations refugee agency for 10 years, had been the clear for the last several months. That a deeply divided Security Council rallied around him was a clear signal that Russia and the West saw him as someone they could work with. Thirteen candidates, including a record seven women, had vied for the job two had dropped out. “We have a clear favorite, and his name is António Guterres,” said Vitaly I. Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, who is presiding over the Security Council this month. Mr. Churkin made the announcement outside the Council’s chamber on Wednesday, flanked by his American counterpart, Samantha Power, in an unusual display of cooperation. The envoys of all the other members of the Council were also there, looking as if they, too, were surprised by their unity. “In the end, there was a candidate whose experience, vision and versatility across a range of areas proved compelling, and it was remarkably uncontentious, uncontroversial,” Ms. Power said. “And I think it speaks to the fact that each of us represents our nation and each of us know how fundamentally important this position is in terms of the welfare of our own citizens. “Every day we go into Security Council, we aspire for the kind of unity we saw today,” she added. “And on a crisis with carnage as horrific as that in Syria, the urgency of achieving that unity is no secret to anyone. And it’s not something we’ve achieved up to this point. ” Mr. Guterres will face a formal Council vote on Thursday morning and will then have his name submitted to the General Assembly for approval, which will most likely happen next week. If elected, he will succeed the current secretary general, Ban whose second term expires at the end of this year. The United Nations is faltering in carrying out its chief mandate, to stop the scourge of war, and is confronting a widening rift between Russia and the West. Mr. Guterres was in Portugal when the announcement was made. The Portuguese mission to the United Nations said he would comment publicly only after Thursday’s formal vote. The choice of Mr. Guterres dashed the hopes of many diplomats and activists that the United Nations would be led by a woman for the first time in its history. One of the women contending for the job, Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica, said on Twitter that the results were bittersweet: “Bitter: not a woman. Sweet: by far the best man in the race. Congrats Antonio Guterres!” Mr. Guterres has promised gender parity in senior posts within the organization, but beyond that, what he will do to advance the rights of women through the work of the United Nations remains to be seen. Antonia Kirkland, program manager for Equality Now, an advocacy group, said that while it was “disappointing” that a man would run the body again, “we are at least hopeful that he will continue the feminist agenda, including, first of all, ensuring gender parity among his staff at the Secretariat, and also prioritizing violence and discrimination against women as a pivotal issue. ” Trained as a theoretical physicist, Mr. Guterres is a veteran politician and a member of his country’s Socialist Party. His first major diplomatic test will be to rally Russia and whoever wins the presidency in the United States to address the carnage in Syria. He will also face a range of thorny conflicts elsewhere, from South Sudan to Yemen, and nuclear brinkmanship in North Korea. He will have to repair the United Nations’ reputation for peacekeeping, sullied by repeated accusations of sexual abuse, and show that the secretary general’s office can stand up to political pressure from rich and powerful countries. Michael W. Doyle, a former United Nations official who is now a Columbia University professor, said that as the high commissioner for refugees, Mr. Guterres had demonstrated both charisma and an ability to maneuver. “In the agency, he was known as someone who could sit down and hammer out agreements under difficult circumstances,” he said. “Moscow has to understand that. ” Mr. Guterres’s first order of business will be to fill plum posts, and there, he is likely to face lobbying by the world powers. Russia had insisted that it was an Eastern European’s turn to be secretary general, so it remains to be seen how much it will push for its favored diplomats for key positions, including deputy secretary general and head of the United Nations’ political affairs division. The way the Council selects the world’s top civil servant has long been opaque, though frustration on the part of many countries and a campaign by groups have allowed a bit of sunlight into the process. This year, for the first time, candidates faced hearings with members of the Security Council. Most of them took part in public debates and took questions from the news media. The Council had taken five informal polls over the last few months, but there was no way to distinguish how the five permanent members had voted. On Wednesday, for the first time, the permanent five — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — voted on red ballots, and the others on white ballots. This was designed to show which candidates might face a veto. When the counting was finished, it was clear that Mr. Guterres would not. | 1 |
President Donald Trump described the first day of his overseas trip in Saudi Arabia as “a tremendous day” — referring to billions in investments — in his first remarks at the top of one of several bilateral meetings. [Trump’s first remarks to reporters on Saturday included: That was a tremendous day. I just want to thank everybody. But tremendous investments in to the United States, and our military community is very happy, and we want to thank you and Saudi Arabia. But hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs. During a signing ceremony, the U. S. President signed a joint vision statement, private sector agreements, and defense cooperation agreements with Saudi Arabia. The defense agreements are worth $110 billion effective immediately and worth an additional $350 billion over ten years, according to a White House official. At one point during the day, the President’s Chief Economic Advisor Gary Cohn answered reporters’ questions as to what was being signed. He said that the signing was “to invest a lot of money in the U. S. and have a lot of U. S. companies invest and build things over here. ” He continued, “They’re going to hire U. S. companies … a bunch of infrastructure related things … A lot of money. Big dollars. Big dollars. ” Cohn told reporters that things were going “really well. ” During brief remarks to reporters at the top of a meeting between President Trump and the Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, Trump said, “It was a great day. ” Jared Kushner, Cohn, Stephen K. Bannon, and Dina Powell were also in the room. Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana | 1 |
Given the shameless, over-the-top, almost breathtakingly cloying pro-Hillary promotional hype that Michael Moore has been spouting recently (roughly, since mid-July), the only explanation is that this man—this pride of Flint, Michigan, this modest film documentarian who grew up middle-class but is now worth upwards of $50 million—secretly harbors a desire to play a role in a Hillary Clinton administration.
If not a Cabinet post, then something else. It’s more likely he has his eye on an ambassadorship. Maybe he covets being posted in a fun country, preferably a “resort country,” a country with a temperate climate and friendly people, a country where they speak English and don’t get all carried with civil unrest. The Honorable Michael Francis Moore, U.S. Ambassador to the Commonwealth of the Bahamas. You have to admit, it has a nice ring to it.
Don’t laugh. How do you think people get these ambassadorships? It’s never been about anything having to do with “qualifications.” Ambassadorships are handed out in return for loyal service, in return for an important political favor, in return for keeping a potential troublemaker quiet, and in return for helping to raise a shit-pot of campaign donations. It’s “quid pro quo” writ large.
Of course, when it comes to countries that might actually require a modicum of diplomatic ability, the administration has to be careful. You can’t just take someone off the street and make them ambassador to a place like Russia or China or Brazil, not if the U.S. wishes to maintain its credibility. But still, there are plenty of places in the world where you can pretty much dump anybody.
Take President Clinton’s administration, for example. In 1994, Bill Clinton rewarded congresswoman Maxine Waters for her long-time support, along with her role in securing African-American votes, by appointing her husband, Sidney Williams, to the post of U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas. Prior to becoming an ambassador, Williams played football in the NFL, and ran a Cadillac dealership in Los Angeles. Life in Nassau was good.
Again: “Michael Francis Moore: U.S. Ambassador to the Commonwealth of the Bahamas” has a nice ring to it. If not the Bahamas, then how about Barbados? There’s whole array of places to pick from. Granted, picturing Moore in a silk top hat and coattails instead of his usual baseball cap and sweatshirt is a bit of a stretch, but with a little coaching, there’s no doubt he can pull it off. After all, isn’t that why people in these positions have “personal assistants”?
So best of luck to you, Michael. Let’s hope that when you or your “people” casually mention to Hillary that being an ambassador would be a cool job, she gets the hint. On the other hand, don’t count your chickens before they hatch (to coin a phrase). Because this is big-time politics, there will be a long list of people seeking the same job. Debbie Wasserman and Donna Brazile immediately come to mind.
David Macaray is a playwright and author. His newest book is “ Nightshift: 270 Factory Stories .” He can be reached at [email protected] | 0 |
WASHINGTON — President Obama said for the first time on Friday that he had held back from retaliating against Russia’s meddling in the presidential race for fear of inciting further hacking “that could hamper vote counting. ” But he said he was weighing a mix of public and covert actions against the Russians in his last 34 days in office, actions that would increase “the costs for them. ” Mr. Obama said he was committed to sending the Kremlin a message that “we can do stuff to you,” but without setting off an escalating cyberconflict. “There have been folks out there who suggest somehow if we went out there and made big announcements and thumped our chests about a bunch of stuff, that somehow it would potentially spook the Russians,” he said. “I think it doesn’t read the thought process in Russia very well. ” The president did not reveal what steps he was considering and suggested that some of the options, if they were carried out, could remain secret. “Some of it we will do in a way that they will know, but not everybody will,” he said. Mr. Obama made his comments at an annual news conference. His remarks were tinged with melancholy at the impending end of his presidency, with foreboding about the changes that could follow Donald J. Trump into office next month and with uneasiness about the role Russia played in the political upheaval that has resulted from his election. The president spoke hours after Hillary Clinton, addressing campaign donors in New York, bluntly accused President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia of orchestrating the hacks of her campaign and the Democratic National Committee computers “to undermine our democracy,” as part of a “personal beef against me. ” Mr. Obama declined to place the blame so squarely on Mr. Putin, though he noted, “Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin. ” Mr. Obama also sought to diminish the specter of Russian influence over the American political process, saying Russia was a smaller, weaker country that “doesn’t produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms. ” Still, the president was clearly wrestling with what he said the hacking affair and the reaction to it revealed about the state of American politics. Citing a recent poll that showed more than a third of Trump voters saying they approved of Mr. Putin — “Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave,” Mr. Obama said — the president appealed to Americans not to allow partisan hatred and feuds to blind them to manipulation by foreign powers. “Unless that changes,” Mr. Obama said, “we’re going to continue to be vulnerable to foreign influence because we’ve lost track of what it is that we’re about and what we stand for. ” Mr. Obama offered a long list of accomplishments that he said marked his eight years in office. But the messy aftermath of Mr. Trump’s victory has raised questions about Mr. Obama’s response to the hacking, ignited a nasty squabble between Mr. Trump and the nation’s intelligence agencies, and left a residue of suspicion over the vote itself. The president continued to defend his cautious approach to reports of hacking — an approach that has come under criticism from Democrats after it emerged last week that the intelligence agencies had concluded Russia was trying to help Mr. Trump win the election. “We were playing this thing straight — we weren’t trying to advantage one side or the other,” Mr. Obama said. “Imagine if we had done the opposite. It would have become one more political scrum. ” The president, however, is likely to face further questions after his C. I. A. director, John O. Brennan, issued a statement Friday disputing reports of a rift between the intelligence agencies and the C. I. A. over Russia’s motives in hacking the D. N. C. and handing over emails to WikiLeaks, which released them in the weeks leading up to the vote. In his statement, first reported by The Washington Post, Mr. Brennan said he had met with the director of the F. B. I. James B. Comey, and the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper, and “there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election. ” That statement will also challenge Mr. Trump, who has seized on reports of an interagency squabble to undermine the credibility of the hacking findings. He has criticized the C. I. A. analysis, saying it was supplied by the same agency that provided erroneous intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq War. Mr. Obama held out hope that when Mr. Trump takes office, he would take a more sober approach. He said he had had “cordial” conversations with his successor, and that Mr. Trump had listened to his suggestions about “maintaining the effectiveness, integrity, cohesion of our office, our various democratic institutions,” though he was not specific. The president defended the F. B. I. which has come under fierce criticism from Mrs. Clinton and her aides because of Mr. Comey’s announcement that the bureau was considering reopening its investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s email, which she has said cost her the election. Mrs. Clinton’s remarks on Thursday underscored longstanding differences she has had with her former boss in how the United States should view Mr. Putin. For his part, Mr. Obama also made a startling admission as he described how his administration had reacted to the Russian hack: He said it was not until the “beginning of the summer” that the White House was “alerted to the possibility that the D. N. C. has been hacked. ” That was nine months after an F. B. I. agent had first contacted the Democratic National Committee with evidence that a major, hacking group was inside the committee’s networks, raising the question of why it took so long for that news to reach the president. Mr. Obama made it clear that he went out of his way to play down the news, because “in this hyperpartisan atmosphere” he did not think he or anyone else at the White House could talk about it without risking to appear to be acting on behalf of Mrs. Clinton. But the unintended result, as some of Obama aides concede, was that the Russians faced very little resistance. Not until September, when Mr. Obama pulled Mr. Putin aside at a Group of 20 meeting in Hanghzhou, China, was the Russian leader given a warning directly from the United States. Mr. Obama said he told him “to cut it out, there were going to be serious consequences if he did not. ” The president made it sound like that worked, saying “we did not see further tampering of the election process. ” But the leaks of D. N. C. emails, and those of John D. Podesta, the Clinton campaign manager, continued, because they were already in the hands of WikiLeaks, which doled them out to an eager news media until the last days of the campaign. The Russian government’s motives were hardly a mystery, Mr. Obama said, “because you guys wrote about it every day, every single leak about every little juicy piece of political gossip, including John Podesta’s risotto recipe. ” | 1 |
5
Most American spend over 9 hours a day using media. Is this making us dumber??
Are you living in a media induced trace? Do you know the truth of the world or do you know what the manipulators want you to know?!
Professor Jerry Kroth (Ph. D. Psychology) examines the ties between advertising and factual knowledge. Most people can name every mascot of most companies, but they can not name hardly any historical figures. How did we get here?
These are questions that Professor Kroth explains in this well thought out presentation.
This talk is based on Dr. Kroth's recent book, "Duped! Delusion, Denial, and the end of the American dream."
More information at collectivepsych.com | 0 |
As the dust settles on Russian interference in the United States election, journalists are confronting an aspect that has received less scrutiny than the hacking itself but poses its own thorny questions: Moscow’s ability to steer Western media coverage by doling out hacked documents. Reporters have always relied on sources who provide critical information for reasons. The duty, tricky but familiar, is to publicize information that serves the public interest without falling prey to the source’s agenda. But in this case, the source was Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G. R. U. — operating through shadowy fronts who worked to mask that fact — and its agenda was to undermine the American presidential election. By releasing documents that would tarnish Hillary Clinton and other American political figures, but whose news value compelled coverage, Moscow exploited the very openness that is the basis of a free press. Its tactics have evolved with each such operation, some of which are still unfolding. Thomas Rid, a professor of security studies at King’s College London who is tracking the Russian influence campaign, said it goes well beyond hacking: “It’s political engineering, social engineering on a strategic level. ” Great powers have long meddled in one another’s affairs. But Russia, throughout 2016, developed a previously unseen tactic: setting up fronts to seed into the press documents it had obtained by hacking. “Doing public relations work in order to get the hacked material out as an exclusive story with the Daily Caller or Gawker or the Smoking Gun, that is new,” Mr. Rid said. That public relations work was initially done by two web presences that appeared this summer, Guccifer 2. 0 and DCLeaks, each posing as in the mold of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks chief. Though neither acknowledged it, and the links were not immediately known, online security experts later concluded that both were Russian fronts. Guccifer 2. 0 claimed to be a Romanian ”freedom fighter” who had hacked the Democratic National Committee. Using Twitter’s private message service, the account conducted weekslong exchanges with journalists, pointing them to certain documents that had been hacked from the D. N. C. and other targets. “Whoever is doing this understands media. They understand the way that media works and how to manipulate media,” said Sheera Frenkel, a BuzzFeed News reporter who interacted with the fronts throughout the summer. DCLeaks, established separately and with its own sets of hacked documents, claimed to be “launched by the American hacktivists who respect and appreciate freedom of speech. ” The fronts sold the act by peppering their messages with slang and emojis. When Ms. Frenkel asked Guccifer whether it would release more D. N. C. documents, the reply came, “Yeah baby :)” Journalists who interacted with the accounts say their tone and facility with English varied widely, suggesting each was run by multiple users. A reporter with Motherboard, a technology site, quizzed Guccifer on the technical aspects of the hacking and on rudimentary Romanian. Guccifer failed both, lending credence to theories that it was a front. Those suspicions were initially restricted to security experts, trickling out only after firms such as ThreatConnect were able to unmask the fronts in detailed reports. In July, for instance, DCLeaks published emails belonging to retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove. The Intercept, a site, covered the emails in a story that portrayed Mr. Breedlove as trying to foment hostility against Russia. The story did not note Russian links to the hack. Its lead author, Lee Fang, said he had no interactions with DCLeaks and pointed out that the group’s suspected Russian ties were not widely publicized at that time. Some reporters were offered documents exclusively, a familiar tactic of government press offices and public relations firms that want to shape coverage. In September, DCLeaks contacted Peter Hasson, a reporter at the Daily Caller, a site, with an offer: access to hacked emails belonging to Colin Powell, the former secretary of state. The Daily Caller’s story also did not note the growing belief that the documents had been hacked by Russia and leaked as part of an influence operation. Mr. Hasson said he was unaware of the alleged Russian links at the time. After awareness grew, the front organizations dropped the pretense. The newest group called itself Fancy Bears Hack Team — a breathtakingly overt reference to “fancy bear,” the name that some Western security groups use for G. R. U. hackers. Tom Cheshire, a reporter with the British network Sky News who has dealt with Fancy Bears, said they behaved “almost more like a P. R. firm, really” and were “very businesslike,” doling out scoops and trying to shape coverage. “It’s the sort of horse trading you do with all sorts of sources, really,” Mr. Cheshire said, hitting on a key to the operation’s impact: the way that it played within the bounds of established journalistic norms. Any leak by any source — Russian agent or citizen — poses a similar set of quandaries for reporters. Do you emphasize the hacking itself in your coverage, knowing that this will undercut the source’s agenda but could also be a disservice to readers by putting less focus on newsworthy information in the release? Do you withhold newsworthy documents, even only temporarily, to check their veracity and provenance? What if they have already been reported by other outlets that were shown the documents first? If they did turn out to be hacked as part of a hostile foreign operation, does that really make their contents less newsworthy? These are old questions for journalists, but they have taken on new urgency with the scale of Russia’s hackings and aims. Though the calculus of reporting on leaks may be familiar, one aspect of the Russian operation stands out: the lengths to which the fronts go to mask their identities and motives. Because the internet gives any outlet the potential to reach millions, all it takes is one leak to send the document flying across the web. Last year, hackers infiltrated the United States Agency, most likely in retaliation for accusations of doping among Russia’s Olympic athletes. But Fancy Bears struggled to place the stolen documents with American or British outlets. Reporters who saw the files said their news value did not outweigh the risk of serving Russian interests. When Fancy Bears offered the files to The Associated Press, the reporters instead published a story on the group itself. Fancy Bears ultimately persuaded sportswriters with Spiegel, a prominent German outlet, to report on emails that appeared to show American athletes requesting medical exceptions to take restricted drugs. The article noted a possible Russian link only in the final lines, alongside a quote from an American official arguing that the leak was intended to distract from doping. If mainstream outlets pass on a hacking, fronts can always pass the documents to peripheral outfits who will lend them less weight but can still send them across social media. That has often included the website InfoWars, which was founded by the radio host Alex Jones and often publishes conspiracy theories. Guccifer 2. 0 approached Mikael Thalen, a writer for InfoWars, with D. N. C. documents that showed Democrats’ plans for attacking Paul Manafort, a campaign manager to Donald J. Trump who had worked on behalf of the Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, a Kremlin ally. Mr. Thalen had come to believe, after many interactions with the front groups, that they “would reach out based on who would best carry the story the way they wanted it carried. ” He feared that Moscow was hoping InfoWars, by publishing the files, would muddy the water around accusations against Mr. Manafort, indirectly aiding Mr. Trump’s campaign. Breaking with InfoWars’ usual reliance on such files, he declined to publish the documents. Because everyone has secrets, even if it’s only a few embarrassing personal emails, and because no network is impenetrable, skilled hackers can dig up compromising material on virtually any target. Democracies, which give privilege to competitive politics and free media, are particularly susceptible. “An open society is by choice more vulnerable than a closed society to some form of influence operation,” said Mr. Rid. “That is why we’re strong, but it’s also why we’re weak. ” The more that journalists and readers understand the motivations of foreign government leakers, he argued, the better they will be able to place those leaks in context, undercutting the hackers’ agenda without hiding newsworthy information. He compared this to a healthy body developing antibodies against a disease — foreign influence operations — that cannot be wholly immunized against while maintaining democratic openness. Still, some media trends — polarization, fake news, the nature of social media — cut against those hopes. “This polarized election presented itself as a target of opportunity of the first order,” Mr. Rid said. Reporters may at times be hindered by a lack of transparency between media organizations, which are often highly competitive and prize speed and scoops. This has left reporters vulnerable because they cannot easily pool lessons on spotting foreign operations or, say, warn one another that a certain front is exaggerating the newsworthiness of its latest leak. “The more light shone on this, the more information you have when dealing with a source, the better decisions you’re going to make,” Mr. Cheshire said. Mr. Thalen, the InfoWars reporter, said he was increasingly turning down leaks that he knows his audience would read avidly and reward with acclaim, but that he considered exaggerated to advance Russian interests. Still, he was unsure it had made much difference. “A lot of people have swayed their reporting with their biases, and I didn’t want to do that,” he said. “People are believing what they want to be true. ” | 1 |
The grass of a baseball field in Prospect Park shuddered under the blades of a New York Police Department helicopter on Friday afternoon. Dust flew in the air. Soon, Mayor Bill de Blasio clambered aboard. In a car, it might have taken 30 minutes or longer for him to make the roughly drive from his old Brooklyn stamping grounds to an event in Queens. By air, the trip — a fantasy of nearly every New Yorker ever caught in traffic on the Expressway — was considerably shorter. But the headache it caused Mr. de Blasio on Monday might not have been worth the trip, as a photograph and a video of the copter incongruously parked in the middle of a city park ricocheted around the internet, and reporters waited outside City Hall to ask him about it. The attention to his flight presented a situation for Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat who has been criticized for arriving late to events and now finds himself justifying his attempts to arrive on time. The mayor, like his predecessors, has occasionally availed himself of the Police Department’s helicopters to get to important events. Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, an experienced helicopter pilot, did not hesitate to use city helicopters when necessary, or his own private helicopter. In 2012, Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent, was caught using a helipad in Midtown Manhattan for weekend jaunts during times when it was closed. Mr. de Blasio, for his part, has been less of a fan. Last year he told Grace Rauh of the news channel NY1 that riding in a helicopter was “not my thing. ” And in January, he announced a reduction in flights of tourist copters, citing “the nonstop din of helicopters” as a “major issue for New Yorkers living near heavily trafficked routes. ” Eric F. Phillips, the mayor’s top spokesman, said Mr. de Blasio had flown to Rikers Island to Jacobi Medical Center, to be at the bedside of injured firefighters and to Hofstra University, for the first presidential debate last month between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton, whose campaign Mr. de Blasio has ardently supported. He traveled by plane to campaign for her in Ohio on Saturday. In each case, Mr. Phillips said, the decision to go by helicopter was made by the mayor’s police detail. He described the flights as “infrequent,” and directed questions about the total number of trips to the Police Department, whose officials declined to provide the data, saying it would have to be requested under the state Freedom of Information Law. “The security and transportation of the mayor are determined by the N. Y. P. D.,” the department said in a statement attributed to John Miller, the deputy commissioner for counterterrorism and intelligence. “We do not discuss the specifics of security. ” Besides saying Mr. de Blasio had a “series of meetings,” City Hall officials would not describe the mayor’s preflight activities in Brooklyn, where he regularly travels to go to the gym and also goes for meetings at favorite restaurants in his old neighborhood. His public schedule listed a morning speech and two radio appearances earlier in the day. “We don’t detail internal or personal meetings,” Mr. Phillips said, raising the possibility that Mr. de Blasio had been engaged in a personal errand that delayed him enough to necessitate air travel over the Expressway. “He had a series of meetings in Brooklyn. ” Pressed as to whether the meetings were personal or city business, Mr. Phillips repeated himself: “I’m saying he had a series of meetings in Brooklyn, and I’m declining to make public the details of nonpublic meetings. ” Maggie Lehrman took video of the helicopter landing in Prospect Park just before 4:30 p. m. on Friday as she walked her son in a stroller near 15th Street in Park Slope. “I’ve never seen that before in Prospect Park I’ve lived in Park Slope for a long time,” she said. “I don’t want to judge too harshly. It was definitely unusual. It seemed a little odd. ” The mayor took the helicopter and landed in another city green space, Hunters Point South Park, in Long Island City, Queens, before traveling to a training center in the area for a 6:30 p. m. event hosted by the Joint Industry Board of the Electrical Industry. The administration’s explanation that the police detail had made the decision to use the helicopter recalled the mayor’s response early in his tenure when, after unveiling a traffic safety plan that included lowering of the speed limit on most city roads, his city vehicle was caught speeding. “I have great respect for N. Y. P. D. security training and protocols,” Mr. de Blasio said after the incident, pointing to a remark by the commissioner at the time, William J. Bratton, who said the detail had been moving with the flow of traffic as it was trained to do. “I’m very comfortable with what Commissioner Bratton said, and I refer you to his comments. ” As the mayor arrived at City Hall on Monday afternoon — by sport utility vehicle — Mr. de Blasio was asked about his helicopter trip. He declined to comment. | 1 |
CLEVELAND — President Obama on Friday implored voters here to “reject a dark and pessimistic vision” offered by Donald J. Trump and urged a robust turnout on behalf of Hillary Clinton in a state where the presidential candidates are locked in a contest. Following by a day Michelle Obama’s deeply personal denunciation of Mr. Trump, the president also assailed the Republican nominee as a morally compromised and intellectually inferior person who fakes his concern for the working class in America. “The guy spent 70 years on this earth showing no regard for working people,” Mr. Obama said, describing Mr. Trump as a wealthy opportunist who is pretending to be something he has never been. “And then suddenly, he’s going to be the champion of working people? Come on. Come on, man. ” Mr. Obama cited a litany of statements from Mr. Trump as evidence that the Republican nominee is unfit to be president, and said people do not have to be “a husband or a father” to know that Mr. Trump’s comments about women were unacceptable. “You just have to be a decent human being,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of Democrats at a rally on the banks of Lake Erie, with Cleveland skyscrapers as a backdrop. The president’s searing critique of Mr. Trump is an indication of the Clinton campaign’s hope that it can emerge victorious in Ohio despite recent polling that suggests a very close race in the Buckeye State. Just weeks ago, Ohio — with its many economically struggling communities of mostly white, voters — seemed to be trending toward Mr. Trump, with several polls indicating a small lead for the Republican nominee. Mrs. Clinton went several weeks this fall without visiting the state. But the avalanche of news since the publication of a lewd recording in which Mr. Trump demeans women appears to have benefited Mrs. Clinton’s chances here. An NBC Street poll released Friday showed the race in Ohio between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton essentially tied among likely voters, with Gary Johnson, the libertarian candidate, getting almost 10 percent of the vote. For Mrs. Clinton to win Ohio’s 18 electoral votes, she will need overwhelming support in centers like Cleveland, where slightly more than half of the residents are black. Early voting began this week, and Mr. Obama on Friday repeatedly urged the crowd and those watching on television to take nothing for granted. “Ohio is always close,” Mr. Obama told the crowd. “You can go vote early right now. Early voting started on Wednesday. This is an opportunity for you to exercise your right to vote, your civic responsibility. ” The president’s stump speech has evolved over the last several weeks, with Mr. Obama testifying to Mrs. Clinton’s qualifications, but also lashing out at Mr. Trump in increasingly blunt terms. As Mrs. Obama was in her assault on Mr. Trump in New Hampshire on Thursday, the president has become unleashed in his criticism of the Republican nominee. In a speech Thursday night to Democrats in Columbus, Ohio, Mr. Obama assailed what he called “the swamp of crazy” that Republicans have allowed to fester in recent years. He said Mr. Trump was merely the outgrowth of a political worldview that Republicans have increasingly embraced in Washington and around the country. “You claim the mantle of the party of family values, and this is the guy you nominate?” Mr. Obama told the crowd in Columbus. “You’re the party that is tough on foreign policy and opposes Russia, and then you nominate this guy, whose role model is Vladimir Putin, the former head of the K. G. B.? I’m sorry, what happened?” Mr. Obama repeated that criticism of Republicans on Friday morning, blaming the party’s elected officials for failing to stand up to Mr. Trump’s brand of politics until polls showed that it might damage their own fortunes. “Republicans who knew better stood by silently and even during the course of this campaign didn’t say anything,” Mr. Obama said. He acknowledged that a number of Republicans have denounced Mr. Trump in the wake of the lewd recording, but added, “What, you weren’t appalled earlier when he was saying degrading things about women?” During much of his speech, Mr. Obama seemed almost bemused by the turn the campaign has taken, with Mr. Trump becoming an easy target for the president’s criticism on domestic policy, foreign affairs and personal temperament. But the president clearly understands that Mrs. Clinton needs help in establishing the kind of passionate connection with voters that he had in 2008. Several times during his remarks, Mr. Obama described Mrs. Clinton as tough and qualified and urged voters to embrace her. During the campaign, he said, Mrs. Clinton has not been “complaining or whining or fighting. ” “She was just doing the work,” he said. “And that’s what you want from a president: someone who is going to sit there and do the work for you. ” As he has in the past, Mr. Obama described his secretary of state as the most qualified person ever to seek the presidency. He said “she’s going to be great at it,” and he urged those who supported Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who challenged Mrs. Clinton in the primaries, to back her now. “If you ‘felt the Bern’ in the primaries, you need to vote,” he said to big cheers from the crowd. But in the end, the case Mr. Obama made Friday morning was to reject Mr. Trump. His voice rising in a singsong cadence, the president said that courtesy, equality, honesty and kindness were all on the ballot. “Democracy itself is on the ballot right now,” the president bellowed above a roar from the crowd. “Send a message of progress. Send a message of hope. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — It was “find the Affordable Care Act replacement” day on Thursday as Democrats — and one frustrated Republican — scampered through Capitol corridors, hunting for an elusive copy of a bill that Republican leaders have withheld from the public as they search for party unity. Just a week before two powerful House committees plan to vote on the measure, opponents spent hours making the point that almost no one has actually seen legislation that would affect the lives and pocketbooks of millions of Americans. “The Republicans have played with us,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas. Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin said party leaders were determined to plow ahead with repeal legislation, despite lingering disagreements among Republicans and outright opposition from Democrats. “I am perfectly confident that when it’s all said and done, we’re going to unify, because we all, every Republican, ran on repealing and replacing, and we’re going to keep our promises,” Mr. Ryan said. The Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid, and the Ways and Means Committee, which is responsible for tax legislation, are tentatively scheduled to vote next week on the repeal bill, setting the stage for the full House to vote on it later this month, House Republican leaders said. While Republicans discussed details of the health care bill, Democrats went from office to office, hunting for a copy. Lawmakers were told that Republican members of the Energy and Commerce Committee could inspect the bill on Thursday in the basement of a House office building. When Democrats arrived, they were directed to a room on the first floor of the Capitol. The House Democratic whip, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, and Representative Paul Tonko, Democrat of New York, went to that room, but could not find the bill there. Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has criticized the repeal bill, also tried and failed to see it. “I have been told that the House Obamacare bill is under lock key, in a secure location, not available for me or the public to view,” Mr. Paul said on Twitter as he set off in search of the document, carrying a portable copy machine and trailed by television cameras and a pack of journalists. Mr. Paul supports repealing the Affordable Care Act, but said the measure described publicly by House Republican leaders included “Democratic ideas dressed up in Republican clothing. ” Mr. Hoyer, whose quest for the bill was broadcast live on Facebook, paused to address a large bust of Abraham Lincoln. “I can’t find the bill,” he said, adding, “I know, Mr. Lincoln, you are as upset with your party as I am today. ” The theatrics reflected serious concerns. “Republicans are hiding their draft A. C. A. repeal bill in a basement room,” said the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi of California. The bill, she said, would produce “a big transfer of wealth to the wealthiest people in our country,” cutting their taxes while increasing costs for others. It is not unusual for controversial bills to be written by the majority party, with little or no input from the minority. But Democrats relished the opportunity to turn the tables on Republicans. In 2009 and 2010, Republicans excoriated Democrats for making “ deals” to pass the Affordable Care Act. Democrats, defending the bill they had written with President Barack Obama, were shouted down at town meetings by Tea Party members chanting, “Read the bill. ” Representative Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon and chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, denied he was hiding the bill or doing anything out of the ordinary. Republicans, he said, “are continuing to discuss and refine draft legislative language. ” Asked if he was hiding the bill, Representative Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said: “We don’t have a bill. We’re continuing to work with the Congressional Budget Office and our members on the final product. ” Republicans had promised an open process. Speaking on the House floor on Jan. 13, Representative Doug Collins of Georgia, the vice chairman of the House Republican Conference, said the health law had been enacted “after months of deals, in the middle of the night, deals, and without giving the American people enough time to even read the bill. ” “That is not what is going to happen this time,” he said. The Congressional Budget Office has not completed an estimate of the cost of the repeal bill or its effects on coverage, and Republicans are still trying to narrow their differences on issues like Medicaid and tax credits to help people buy insurance. But, as of Thursday, they were determined to move ahead. “We are going to mark up the legislation next week,” said Representative Billy Long, Republican of Missouri and a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, after a meeting of House Republicans. “They say we’ll be there all night. I’m going to bring an air mattress. ” Mr. Ryan presented members of his party on Thursday with a timeline leading to passage of the bill by the House within three weeks. The Senate is working closely with House leaders. Mr. Ryan told House Republicans that President Trump supported the bill drafted by House Republican leaders, according to aides who were in the room. Ever since Mr. Obama signed the law in March 2010, Republicans have been trying to uproot it. When Congress convened this year, Republicans thought they could achieve their goal with a quick strike on the law, which has provided insurance to some 20 million Americans. The task has proved more difficult than they expected. Polls show the law has become somewhat more popular as Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans try to kill it. Under a draft of the bill that became public last week, the government would offer tax credits to help lower the cost of insurance for people who did not have access to coverage through an employer or a government program. The tax credits, as initially proposed, would be available to people regardless of their income. Representative Phil Roe, Republican of Tennessee, said the credit should not be available to people with incomes above a certain level, around $118, 000. “I don’t think I need a tax credit, with my salary,” Mr. Roe said. As a member of Congress, he has been paid $174, 000 a year. | 1 |
IZMIR, Turkey — Turkish officials handed down punishments on Tuesday to two leaders of a major opposition party who have become casualties of a crackdown on dissent that escalated after a failed coup in July. Selahattin Demirtas, a leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, was sentenced on Tuesday to five months in jail for insulting the Turkish state, the Turkish nation and their institutions. Hours earlier, Figen Yuksekdag, the other leader of the party, was expelled from Parliament after the country’s top court upheld her conviction for a terrorism offense. Both have been in custody since being detained in raids in November. Thousands of members of their party, known as the H. D. P. have also been arrested since the breakdown of Kurdish peace talks in 2015, including at least a dozen of their 59 members of Parliament. The arrests of party members accelerated after the failed coup, which also set off an even larger purge of government officials and people suspected of being dissidents. More than 45, 000 government officials, soldiers, police officers, teachers and journalists have been arrested since the coup attempt, most of them suspected of having connections to the Gulenist movement, a group led by Fethullah Gulen, an exiled cleric living in the United States, that Turkey believes was behind the attempted putsch. The government accuses the H. D. P. of links to a Kurdish militia that has been designated a terrorist group by Turkey, NATO and the European Union. But on Tuesday, the H. D. P. said it was being targeted as part of a wider crackdown on political opposition ahead of a controversial April referendum in which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is encouraging Turks to grant him greater executive powers. “It is totally about the referendum,” Hisyar Ozsoy, an H. D. P. member of Parliament, said by telephone on Tuesday. “He’s committed to paralyzing the H. D. P. organizationally so that we can’t carry out an effective ‘no’ campaign. ” The H. D. P. Turkey’s party, received just over 10 percent of the vote in the most recent parliamentary elections, but its leaders believe its supporters could make the difference in a close vote on the referendum. A charismatic leader, Mr. Demirtas had widened the party’s appeal beyond its Kurdish base before the crackdown intensified. Mr. Erdogan’s opponents say that a victory for him in the referendum would lead to rule, while his supporters argue that it would merely create a United presidency and bring stability to Turkey. The Turkish news media has reported that the government is worried enough about a victory for the “no” campaign that officials in Konya, a city in central Turkey, recently withdrew from circulation an antismoking pamphlet that contained the word “no. ” A local member of Parliament there from Turkey’s governing party said the pamphlets had been recalled to avoid “confusion,” the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet Daily News reported. Mr. Erdogan has previously told reporters “those who say no will be siding with July 15,” referring to the date of the coup attempt. Andrew Gardner, the Turkey researcher for Amnesty International, said, “It’s hard to imagine how the situation could get any worse in the to the April referendum. ” | 1 |
Like millions of Americans who are paying thousands of dollars a year for health insurance no doctors will take, I would love to be flying to Washington this week, pleading with members of Congress, spearheading campaigns and appearing as a witness, to tell everyone about my experiences with Obamacare. [But none of us can, because we’re too busy working so we can afford to pay for the health care of 22 million poor, entitled or irresponsible people under Obamacare. Just yesterday, for example, in addition to working, I had to spend an hour — on top of days and days last month — figuring out which few remaining clinics provide mammograms under my now third Obamacare insurance plan. My original plan was made “illegal” by Obamacare, and the next two plans — fully approved under Obamacare — went bankrupt and were shut down by state and federal regulators. Now I just have to pray I don’t get cancer or break a bone before Obamacare is repealed because, even at $700 a month with a gigantic deductible, there is NO PLAN on the individual market accepted by the two premier hospitals in my area for cancer or broken bones. Those $700 premiums go to pay for the pregnancies and dental care of welfare recipients and immigrants, not cancer treatment for Ann. Democrats love to get on their high horses about the wonderful things Obamacare has done for the uninsured. They should be asked why they refuse to live under it. After they spend 800 hours changing insurance plans every year, ending up with increasingly expensive and increasingly useless plans — all so that their premiums can pay for the poor — I’ll be fascinated to hear about their love for the downtrodden. Same with Republicans who are, once again, being bamboozled by lobbyists, to the detriment of their taxpaying constituents who don’t have time or money to fly to Washington and tell them our stories. Insurance lobbyists have somehow convinced politicians, who have very little experience in the private sector, that health insurance is wildly different from every other product — even car insurance and homeowner’s insurance — because of its need for a large pool of enrollees. Everyone talks about the enrollment problem as if this is a bug unique to the health insurance industry. What product, do they imagine, does not need lots of customers? How could restaurants afford those chefs, fresh flowers, industrial kitchens, one hundred sets of plates, napkins and silverware and a staff of waiters — without customers? AHHHH! THEY’LL GO OUT OF BUSINESS! !! THE MODEL DOESN’T WORK WITHOUT LOTS OF PARTICIPANTS! CONGRESS MUST GET INVOLVED. Publishers couldn’t have editors, proofreaders, lawyers, paper plants and marketing departments — unless there’s a large pool of book buyers. Pipe manufacturers couldn’t have hundreds of employees, huge machines and factories unless — you get the idea. Why is “having customers” treated like some freakish need of this one industry? People are a lot less interested in buying hotel rooms, restaurant meals and pipes than they are in buying health insurance. Everyone knows someone who has died of cancer or had some other major medical problem, and most people are not insane. Even with the hell of Obamacare, requiring hundreds of hours of work — to research, sign up for, be thrown off of, then sign up for a different, plan, year after year — the taxpayer is doing all that in order to maintain some form of health insurance. So apparently, no matter how awful you make it, this is a product Americans are desperate to buy! Republicans all say they want to save the “good parts” of Obamacare. Because who knows better what the American consumer wants than a member of Congress! I keep imagining Congress designing a “comprehensive hotel reform bill,” promising to save the popular parts: “BUT PEOPLE LIKE HAVING TV’S IN THEIR HOTEL ROOMS!” How could we ever get TVs in hotel rooms without Congress writing a law? It turns out, people running a business have an uncanny ability to figure out what’s popular with their customers. Any “popular” features of Obamacare obviously, manifestly, inevitably will be preserved by the free market. If parents like keeping their useless millennial kids on their plans, guess what? Any insurance company forced to compete with other insurance companies WILL OFFER THAT. As for covering people with “ conditions” — there are conditions and conditions. Does this mean the unfortunate few with some exorbitantly expensive medical problem? Or does it mean people who have a “ condition” because they waited to be diagnosed with cancer before buying insurance? The first category of people was dealt a bad hand. Eventually, they will be taken care of by the market when excess coverage policies are common and reinsurance companies pop up to cover the primary insurance companies. Until then, a separate program can pay for the unlucky. That’s not a reason to wreck the health insurance market for everyone else. There aren’t 22 million people with horrifyingly expensive medical conditions. They’re being used as the baby seals to sell subsidized health care for the irresponsible. The second category is a lot less sympathetic, which is precisely why the two cases are always conflated. You can’t buy flood insurance after your house has already floated away. But we won’t let people die in the streets, so — as Trump said at the very first GOP debate — they will be dealt with “through a different system. ” They probably can’t go to Sloan Kettering, but then again, neither can I. Right now, my $700 a month pays for them to go to Sloan Kettering. Both cases are of zero practical importance to the vast majority of people who just want to buy health insurance on the free market, rather than what we’re doing now, which is giving shiftless layabouts and irresponsible an unlimited health care credit card — paid for through our insurance premiums. We’d come to Washington and tell you that, but we’re working to pay for the pediatric dental care of illegal aliens. | 1 |
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In 2013, Americans learned that AT&T had been providing data about countless telephone calls to federal drug agents without proper search warrants as part of a secret program called Project Hemisphere . Now it emerges that the telecommunications giant is not just eagerly cooperating with the government but also turning a hefty profit — at taxpayer expense — in the process.
The New York Times broke the 2013 story about Hemisphere based on a PowerPoint presentation obtained from West Coast police agencies by a Washington state peace activist. The paper described the program as “a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T” whereby “the government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country,” where they “supply [agents] with the phone data from as far back as 1987” on the basis of a subpoena issued by the agency, not a search warrant approved by a judge.
“The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act,” the Times wrote, noting that “Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch” and “includes information on the locations of callers.”
As bad as that makes Hemisphere sound, the reality is much worse. The Daily Beast ’s Kenneth Lipp reported Tuesday: Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.
AT&T, which owns more than three-quarters of U.S. landline switches and is second only to Verizon when it comes to wireless infrastructure and cellphone towers, “stores details for every call, text message, Skype chat, or other communication that has passed through its infrastructure,” wrote Lipp, adding that this comes to “trillions of records.” What’s more, the company retains those records much longer than other carriers.
“The database,” penned Lipp, “allows its analysts to detect hidden patterns and connections between call detail records, and make highly accurate inferences about the associations and movements of the people Hemisphere is used to surveil.”
Not surprisingly, government agencies love having access to this vast treasure trove of data, especially since they can obtain it without a warrant. Thus, even though Hemisphere may initially have been created to fight the unconstitutional war on drugs, its use quickly expanded to other types of investigations, including Medicaid fraud and homicide.
How much does the program cost taxpayers? According to Lipp, “Sheriff and police departments pay from $100,000 to upward of $1 million a year or more for Hemisphere access.” And since they love having access to this kind of data, they’ll keep shelling out more for it every year, particularly since Washington is picking up the tab. Harris County, Texas, started out paying the relatively modest sum of $77,924 in 2007; four years later, its annual tab had shot up to $940,000.
“Did you see that movie Field of Dreams ?” American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) technology policy analyst Christopher Soghoian asked Lipp. “It’s like that line, ‘if you build it, they will come.’ Once a company creates a huge surveillance apparatus like this and provides it to law enforcement, they then have to provide it whenever the government asks. They’ve developed this massive program and of course they’re going to sell it to as many people as possible.”
Besides matters of cost, there are “serious Fourth Amendment concerns” and “profound privacy concerns” with Hemisphere, ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer told the Times in 2013. That explains why the program is kept so hush-hush. The slides obtained by that newspaper told law enforcement “to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document.” An AT&T statement of work obtained by the Daily Beast says, “The Government agency agrees not to use the data as evidence in any judicial or administrative proceedings unless there is no other available and admissible probative evidence.”
“I’d speculate that one reason for the secrecy of the program is that it would be very hard to justify it to the public or the courts,” Jaffer told the Times .
That’s why investigators who obtain leads from Hemisphere often turn around and use more legal and constitutional means to obtain the same evidence, a practice known as “parallel construction.” By doing so, they can introduce the evidence in court without revealing where they first obtained it.
“At a minimum there is a very serious question whether they should be doing it [searching Hemisphere] without a warrant,” Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Lipp. “A benefit to the parallel construction is they never have to face that crucible. Then the judge, the defendant, the general public, the media, and elected officials never know that AT&T and police across America funded by the White House are using the world’s largest metadata database to surveil people.”
AT&T claims that it is merely complying with lawful requests for data, not doing anything special. Soghoian begs to differ, telling Lipp, “They say they only cooperate with law enforcement as required, and frankly, that’s offensive when they are mining the data of millions of innocent people, and really built a business and services around the needs of law enforcement.”
Some are wondering if these revelations will have any effect on AT&T’s attempt to merge with Time Warner, which has yet to be approved by federal regulators. Reason ’s Scott Shackford thinks that, if anything, the fact that AT&T has been so helpful will only play in its favor. “AT&T is essentially the company the federal government made it become,” he wrote, recalling what happened to telecom companies like Qwest that didn’t play ball with Uncle Sam. “Imagine them trying to get permission for this merger with Time Warner if they hadn’t been so cooperative with the federal government with surveillance.”
Americans who are concerned about their privacy should keep that in mind. Outrage at AT&T is certainly warranted, but the brunt of their anger should be directed at the politicians and bureaucrats who have created a government with the power to compel — or at least strongly encourage — businesses to collaborate in the destruction of our God-given liberties. | 0 |
Things India should do to improve its Olympic performance Posted on Tweet (Image via catchnews.com)
In August 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had formed a task force to plan for the next three Olympics. This was followed by our mainstream media writing the usual “ 10 things the task force should do to improve Indian sports ”, “ 7 ways India can ensure a better showing at Tokyo 2020 Olympics ”, “ How to win 20 Olympic medals by 2020 ” or “ India can get you 10 medals in 2020 if you spend Rs 480 crore ” kind of stuff. Two months down the line, all is forgotten.
Since we are not a satire site but a serious website, it was against our ethos to jump the gun and write such an article. Instead we have done painstaking research for the last 2 months and come up with our suggestions.
Here are our suggestions:
(A) Due to our colonial mindset, cricket dominates the sporting scene in India. Cricket in its purest form was meant for the aristocratic families of England who had nothing better to do with their time and wanted a game which would keep them occupied for days. It is not suitable for common working class Indians who have to earn a living. India was once the superpower in hockey and there is no reason why we cannot be once again.
Our Verdict: Create a social media campaign to boycott cricket. Force organizations who sponsor cricket to donate at least 5 Crore rupees for sponsoring other sports. Impose hefty fines on cricket commentators. Force Ravi Shastri to do commentary for hockey and kabaddi matches.
(B) It is common to find people in Delhi and the surrounding NCR region flaunting their power and influence. One has often heard the phrase “Tu Janta hai mera baap kaun hai?” flaunted by these folks. This craving for recognition through power has prompted several impressionable kids in the NCR Region to take up aggressive sports to flaunt their power. Just look at the number of Olympic medalists from the NCR region who have won Olympic medals in aggressive sports:
Abhinav Bindra(2008) – Shooting Sushil Kumar (2008 and 2012) – Wrestling Yogeshwar Dutt (2012) – Wrestling Sakshi Malik(2016) – Wrestling
Further, Gagan Narang who won the bronze in shooting in 2012, was brought up in Chennai and Hyderabad but his parents hail from the NCR region which explains it.
The ripple effect from NCR is so strong that even Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore from neighboring Rajasthan won silver medal for shooting in 2004.
Poor Saina Nehwal found it difficult to practice a non-aggressive sport like badminton in NCR and had to shift to Hyderabad to become a champion and win a bronze medal in 2012 Olympics.
Our verdict: Channelize the aggressive and power flaunting energy of the NCR kids early on and we can be assured of a few medals from here in every Olympics.
(C) Eastern and southern India has produced many Olympic medalists like Karnam Malleswari in Weightlifting, Mary Kom in Boxing, Leander Paes in Tennis and P. V. Sindhu and Saina Nehwal in badminton along with the likes of Dipa Karmakar who show a promise in a sport where India was never in the reckoning.
Our verdict: Just provide encouragement and things will improve.
(D) Our intellectuals and elites attribute the poor showing of India to poverty. But then what explains western India’s poor show considering that it has two of the most prosperous states, Gujarat and Maharashtra.
The last medal a person from Maharashtra won at the Olympics was Khashaba Dadasaheb Jadhav in Wrestling in 1952. But then Maharashtra is home to cricket legends like Sunil Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar and of course the cricket commentary of Ravi Shastri. This explains it.
But what about Gujarat then? We are not mainstream media and we do not claim to have expertise on everything and we admit we do not have the answer. But the mainstream media which questioned Modi on everything else has kept quiet about this. Why?
Our verdict: We do not have an answer to this. But we will not keep quiet like the mainstream media. Why did Gujarat not produce a single Olympic medal winner? Will Modi answer?
(E) Given that the elites blame the lack of facilities in our country for our poor show in Olympics, what stops the kids of these elites from excelling at sports? With cheap skilled manpower to help, they should have done well. Unfortunately, the Indian elites believe in a sense of entitlement and are not willing to work hard. Sport is a meritocratic activity and only performance matters. That is the reason sport is one stream in India which is dynasty free, except for brave exceptions like Rohan Gavaskar who are willing to fight against all odds.
A friendly media and intellectuals’ ecosystem can make a failed politician look successful, a failed actor a superstar or a news trader a journalist. But this ecosystem cannot make a cricket duck look like a cricket century.
This explains why the son of one of India’s greatest cricketers, Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, who captained Indian cricket team despite having vision in only one eye, chose his mother’s profession rather than his father’s. His biggest sporting achievement to date remains winning a 100 meters sprint in an Amul Macho ad.
Now, you also know why the daughter of Prakash Padukone chose acting or why the son of Dilip Sardesai chose journalism.
Of course, there are exceptions like Leander Paes who went on to become a tennis star despite his father being a member of Indian hockey team and mother being member of Indian basketball team. He is also wise in that he choose tennis over hockey or basketball. Given his ability to get in trouble with his doubles partners, may it be Mahesh Bhupathi, Rohan Bopanna or Sania Mirza, one wonders how he would have fared in basketball or hockey which has a team of more than 2 players.
Our verdict: Lack of facilities is not an excuse, at least for the Indian elites.
(F) Every other Indian boy wants to become a cricketer. For those boys who look beyond cricket, analysis of Indian Olympic winners show that men have only won in hockey and aggressive sports like shooting, boxing and wrestling, except for Norman Pritchard in 1900 who was anyway born to British parents and moved to Britain soon after winning the medals.
Of course Leander Paes is an exception but we already told you why he did not play hockey and also how aggressive he is even towards his partners.
Our verdict: Do not expect anything from Indian men beyond hockey and aggressive sports.
(G) Compared to Indian men, Indian women have won medals in a variety of sports and have been very inclusive, such as Karnam Malleswari in weightlifting, Saina Nehwal and P. V. Sindhu in badminton, Mary Kom in boxing and Sakshi Malik in wrestling. The fact that women got opportunity to train and win in sports like boxing and wrestling that are considered the domain of men show how fake the propaganda of the feminist intellectuals is.
These feminists intellectuals will form stereotypes based on their opinions and peddle it as facts. Being into responsible journalism, we cannot do that. So we decided to explore an angle we thought was a cause for concern. While it’s true that this decade has seen the rise of likes of P. V. Sindhu and Sakshi Malik, what concerned us was, “Why is there no one to carry forward the legacy of P. T. Usha and Anju George? Why is Indian falling backwards in women’s athletics?”
We did some investigative journalism and the results will shock you. The reason is not patriarchy but colonial hangover. All of India’s women medal winners have won in indoor sports like boxing, wrestling, badminton and weightlifting. As per our investigation, small school girls are interested in participating in difficult indoor games like gymnastics but they are scared to play any outdoor games for fear that it will darken their skin. Naturally, India is falling behind in women’s athletics.
Our verdict: Ban fair skin creams. This single action will ensure India wins more medals. Change the slogan “Beti bachao, beti padhao” to “Beti bachao, beti padhao, gorepan ka dabaav na dalo.” | 0 |
I think if a woman from the age of 50 has a mammogram every year, or every two years, she’s going to get breast cancer as a direct result from that – Dr. Patrick Kingsley, Clinical Ecologist (take from the documentary trailer below) Breast screening, also known as a mammogram, is a regular examination of breasts in order to detect breast cancer in its early stages. According to the Centers For Disease Control (CDC), it’s the most effective way to detect breast cancer, as opposed to a breast self examine – where you check your own breasts for lumps – or a clinical breast exam where a doctor or nurse will examine the breast for a lump. In 2011 (latest year with available data) 220,097 women and 2,078 men were diagnosed with breast cancer, and 40,931 women and 443 men died from breast cancer. It has become the most common type of cancer among women. Below is a trailer to a documentary entitled, “ The Promise .” The film interviews various researchers, scientists, doctors (and more), all of whom are hoping to shed light on a practice which is turning out to be not only useless, but harmful to those taking part. There is more information below the video, but I highly recommend you watch the documentary. The Science & Research
There is a wealth of scientific data concluding that mammograms are not, as the CDC claims, the most effective way to detect breast cancer. In fact, having a mammogram is likely the last thing you want to do if you have breast cancer.
Let’s take a look at some research that has many scientists, policy makers, and members of the medical community questioning the practice of breast screenings.
Starting off with recent research, a 2014 study published in The European Journal of Public Health titled “Trends in breast cancer stage distribution before, during and after introduction of a screening programme in Norway ” found that breast screenings actually increase the incidence of localized stage cancers without reducing the incidence of advanced cancers. ( 1 )
The study, which used a huge population sample of 1.8 million Norwegian women diagnosed with breast cancer from 1987 – 2010, found that:
“The annual incidence of localized breast cancer among women aged 50–69 years rose from 63.9 per 100 000 before the introduction of screening to 141.2 afterwards, corresponding to a ratio of 2.21 (95% confidence interval: 2.10; 2.32). The incidence of more advanced cancers increased from 86.9 to 117.3 per 100 000 afterwards, corresponding to a 1.35 (1.29; 1.42)-fold increase. Advanced cancers also increased among younger women not eligible for screening, whereas their incidence of localized cancers remained nearly constant.” ( 1 ) This study outlines how Norway’s breast screening program has actually increased the chance of being diagnosed with early stage breast cancer by more than 200%, as well contributing to an increased chance of receiving advanced stage breast cancer diagnosis by 35%. This is the opposite of what mammograms are supposed to do; if they were useful then the incidence of cancers would be lower and not higher. The study concluded that: Incidence of localized breast cancer increased significantly among women aged 50–69 years old after introduction of screening, while the incidence of more advanced cancers was not reduced in the same period when compared to the younger unscreened age group.( 1 ) It’s important to note that, “ although the study did measure the impact of Norway’s breast screening programme, a comparison of trends between participants and non-participants in the age group eligible for screening warrants further investigation. Also the causal link between stage distribution and mortality needs to be investigated in the context of screening .” ( 1 ) A paper published in 2011 in the British Medical Journal set out to prove that breast screening by mammography is associated with a steeper fall in mortality cancer compared to other countries who were not offering this service. They did not expect to find the complete opposite; they found a drop in breast cancer mortality among women who were not screened. They concluded that the recent downward trend in breast cancer mortality had nothing to do with screening and everything to do with improvements in treatment and service provision. ( 2 ) The new data published in the BMJ now suggests that none of the gratifying falls in breast cancer can be attributed to screening and that the very existence of a NHSBSP (national breast screening programme) should be questioned. Unless there is public pressure for an independent inquiry to challenge the status quo, it will be business as usual for the screening programme. Furthermore, the Department of Health has painted itself into a corner and it is no longer a question of scientific debate – the subject has become too politicized by those who like to avoid U-turns at all costs. – Michael Baum, Professor Emeritus of Surgery and visiting Professor of Medical Humanities at University College London, is a leading British surgical oncologist who specializes in breast cancer treatment ( source ) This would be an asymptomatic woman walking along the high street, having a mammogram, and then two weeks later she’s told she has to have a mastectomy. This is so cruel that it should make you weep. (quote taken from the documentary trailer above) As Sayer Ji, founder of Greenmedinfo.com points out, a National Cancer Institute commissioned expert panel concluded that “early stage cancers” are not cancer, they are benign or indolent growths. This means that millions of women were wrongly diagnosed with breast cancer over the past few decades and have been subjected to harmful treatment, when they would have been better off leaving it untreated or diagnosed; frighteningly, it is not uncommon for a breast cancer misdiagnosis to occur. Another study that was recently published in the British Medical Journal concluded that regular mammogram screenings do not reduce breast cancer death rates. And they found no evidence to suggest that mammograms are more effective than personal breast exams at detecting cancer in the designated age group. The study involved 90, 000 Canadian women and compared breast cancer incidence and mortality up to 25 years in women aged 40-59.( 3 ) The study was conducted over a period of 25 years. Many Studies Showing The Same Thing The sheer number of studies that have been published on breast mammography examinations and their failure to produce a benefit in screened populations is overwhelming. What’s even more disturbing is the fact that these types of examinations have also been shown to increase the risk of breast cancer, and to have negative implications for both physical and mental health.
For a database of published studies on this topic, you can click HERE . You can also find access to more research here . U-turns do not embarrass clinical scientists, unlike politicians: if the evidence changes then our minds must change. As the national programme began to run its course, two disturbing observations made me begin to question my original support. First, about 10 years after the initiation of the service, updated analyses of the original data set by independent groups in Europe and the US found that the initial estimate of benefit in the reduction of breast cancer mortality was grossly exaggerated. – Michael Baum, Professor Emeritus of Surgery and visiting Professor of Medical Humanities at University College London, is a leading British surgical oncologist who specializes in breast cancer treatment ( source ) Source: | 0 |
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s top diplomat said Monday his country will spend about $50 million to hire lawyers for migrants in the United States facing deportation. [advertisement | 1 |
ROME (AP) — Italian rescue ships have plucked some 2, 000 migrants from unseaworthy smugglers’ boats off the coast of Libya, with hundreds of them arriving Saturday in southern Italian ports. [advertisement | 1 |
Russia's opposition leader Navalny declares presidential bid Prominent opposition figure and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny has announced he plans to run for the presidency, with criminal charges against him suspended. However, Russia’s experts are divided in their assessments of his chances in the 2018 presidential elections Prominent opposition figure and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny has announced he plans to run for the presidency, with criminal charges against him suspended. However, Russia’s experts are divided in their assessments of his chances in the 2018 presidential elections.
Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny during an interview to the Associated Press in Moscow. Photo: AP
Last week Russia’s Supreme Court suspended the criminal charges against Russia’s well-known opposition activist and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, who was accused of embezzlement of assets belonging to ;the state-run timber company ;Kirovles.
The decision came after the European Court of Human Rights reviewed and endorsed Navalny’s complaint about the trial, which the defendant found unfair and politically motivated. The Russian authorities are to reassess their decision in light of the February ruling, which called for Navalny to be fully acquitted and for Russia to pay $8,000 each to him and his co-defendant Pyotr Ofitserov plus legal costs.
Also read: " Khodorkovsky drums up support in Europe for an alternative to Putin " All this means that the criminal charges against Navalny are at least suspended, if not canceled. The accused is rehabilitated and has chances to stand for Russia’s presidency in 2018. Navalny confirmed his presidential bid last week and has left his intention to run as an alternative candidate in no doubt. Russian oligarch and opposition activist Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who now lives in London, has approved Navalny’s candidacy . Meanwhile, the Kremlin is reticent about the anti-corruption campaigner’s intentions to run for the presidency.
“This question is not on our agenda now,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. “The presidential elections will take place in 2018.” ; ; ; ; ; ;
Too early for forecasts Meanwhile, experts argue that it is too early to talk about the 2018 presidential elections and the chances of their candidates. For example, democratic activist and politician Leonid Gozman believes that Navalny has enough political heft, but the fact that he is associated with the opposition will hinder his chances.
“Alexei Navalny is a celebrity,” he said. “He is a well-known figure with an interesting history, which has its own flaws and advantages.” ; ;
Gozman argues that t he opposition candidate’s major disadvantage is an unfavorable political environment within the country and people's distrust of opposition, with him fighting against those at the helm . However, Navalny might be able to turn this disadvantage into an advantage and earn political credentials not only inside, but also outside Russia. According to Gozman, Navalny’s anti-corruption political platform is a valuable and very meaningful asset, which he will be able to use in his favor.
Likewise, Mikhail Vinogradov, the chairman of the Petersburg Politics Foundation, argues that Navalny has enough political heft and can be compared with Russian President Vladimir Putin to a certain extent.
“Navalny is the No. 2 politician in Russia’s public politics,” he told ; Russia Direct . “That’s why he’s more effective and interesting than the leaders of the parliamentary parties, which have been competing with each other for so long. He has well-developed political instincts. In addition, he has much better chances in the elections than those retirees who head the parliamentary parties. From the point of view of populist potential, Putin and Navalny are comparably equal.”
Vinogradov is sure that Navalny is capable of recruiting a large number of supporters in a short period of time, as indicated by the results of the 2013 Moscow mayoral elections, when he won more than 27 percent of the vote. However, at that time he focused primarily on the protest electorate . Today, there are a lot of people who are not satisfied with the current situation in the country and Navalny is capable of winning their votes as well as the votes of those who support the authorities, Vinogradov speculates.
However, it remains to be seen if the opposition activist will be able to use his tactics to help win nationwide support. “This is one of the major intrigues,” said Vinogradov.
A dose of legitimacy for Russia’s elections At the same time, Gozman argues that the participation of Navalny in the presidential elections will make them more interesting and less artificial.
“His bid is useful for the elections themselves,” he said. “This means that a campaign with Navalny will look more real than one without him.”
Also read: " Hawks vs. doves: Who will dominate in the Kremlin before the 2018 elections? " Gozman gives an example of the 2013 mayoral campaign, which he sees as "more natural” because Navalny challenged Sergei Sobyanin and encouraged him to change his tactics. In contrast, Alexei Mukhin, the ;general director of the Center for Political Information, ;a Moscow-based think tank, argues that the participation of Navalny will be a bigger disadvantage for regional campaigns rather than an advantage. According to him, the opposition figure will bring instability and disorder, while pursuing a sole goal: self-promotion."
“Navalny is a professional troublemaker,” he told ; Russia Direct . “He is likely to look for a trade-off with the authorities. For example, he will withdraw his bid if the Kremlin offers him some political privileges."
“It is a matter of a pure political calculation. He is not a populist — he is a political strategist," Mukhin added. " He is a sort of dealer within politics and he can use skills to earn political points. Moreover, a refusal to register Navalny as a presidential candidate will be a big asset for him, because it will give him a reason to claim that the authorities are afraid of him. It may strengthen his political heft .”
Populist or not?
Unlike Mukhin, Gozman sees Navalny as a potential populist in the upcoming presidential campaign. However, it is too early to talk about specific positions or a platform he is going to stick since it is unclear what kind of environment the 2018 elections will be held in.
“A populist is easy to recognize only in a specific environment,” he said. “Most importantly, it is necessary to know what position his opponents will take. It is a matter of debates: You’re inclined to take a tougher position in a dispute than under other circumstances, at least because you need to prove your point of view.” ;
When discussing populism in presidential campaigns, most Russian experts give the example of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the firebrand leader of Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR). Throughout his political career, he has garnered about 10 percent of the vote. For instance, the results of the recent parliamentary elections showed that his party even improved its record in comparison with previous years. This indicates that Russians are easy to manipulate and they are ready to support a populist candidate. However, the populism of Zhirinovsky is not taken very seriously.
Recommended: " Inside the anti-corruption campaign against Russia's liberals " “If a new populist like [U.S.-President-elect Donald] Trump , who would avoid Zhirinovsky’s buffoonish style, emerges in Russia’s political arena, the rest of the politicians, including Navalny himself, are likely to take a more moderate position. If such a populist doesn’t appear, somebody else will fill his shoes,” ;says Gozman.
Mukhin doesn’t agree. He argues that Russia’s political system prevents such populists from coming to power. The most obvious example is Zhirinovsky himself, who is seen as something of a clown. ;
What most pundits agree on is that Navalny’s odds of winning in the 2018 elections are slim: It will be extremely challenging for him to launch a presidential bid and win enough support from voters , partly because Putin , who still enjoys high approval rankings and wields political heft, doesn’t support his candidacy, according to Vinogradov and Gozman. This is the very logic of Russia’s current political system, in which elections are not a game-changer: Their results are always predictable.
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Federal Election Commission (“FEC”) Is Another Example of a Lazy Corrupt Agency ‹ › Israel Shamir is an internationally acclaimed political thinker, Internet columnist and writer. His comments about current affairs and their deeper meaning are published on his site IsraelShamir.net and elsewhere. They are also collected in three books, Galilee Flowers, Cabbala of Power and recently published Masters of Discourse available in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Hungarian etc. Shamir is a Russian-born Jew who converted to Orthodox Christianity. Originally from Novosibirsk, Siberia, Shamir moved to Israel in 1969. He lives in Jaffa and and spends much time in Moscow and Stockholm ; and is an outspoken critic of Israel and Zionism. Israel Shamir can be reached at [email protected] I envy you, American citizens By Israel Shamir on November 4, 2016 I envy your chance to deal on 11/8 a decisive blow to the rule of the Masters of Discourse.
by Israel Shamir
I envy you, American citizens. I do not care about your military might, nor for your supreme currency, the US dollar. I envy your chance to deal on 11/8 a decisive blow to the rule of the Masters of Discourse.
Though the Masters control the entirety of world media, and they decide what people may think and say from Canada to Hong Kong, only you, American citizens, can defeat them. This is a great chance, a unique opportunity not to be missed.
The Masters of Discourse can be defeated. They are not stronger than any ruler of past. Trump has a great quality making him fit for the task: he is impervious to labels and libels. He had been called everything in the book: anti-Semite, racist, women hater, you name it. And he still survived that flak. Such people are very rare.
We know he is against the Masters because every newspaper is against him. I never saw a similar onslaught but once, in Russia in 1996. Then President Yeltsin, an old drunkard who had brought Russia to collapse, had to run for his second term. His popularity was next to zero. Two per cent of Russians intended to vote for him. And then the oligarchs turned on their propaganda machine. Yeltsin’s competitor Gennady Zyuganov, a mild church-going post-communist, had been presented like a Hitler of his days. All the Russian media of the day belonged to oligarchs, and all of it participated in the onslaught. Zyuganov surrendered.
Perhaps he won the election, but he congratulated Yeltsin with his victory. It was said that he was threatened with assassination unless… Others say he was bribed. I do not exclude both explanations, but for sure the might of united media can crush a timid man.
In the days of the Jewish Temple, there was a Magrepha, a wind instrument able to produce diverse and frightening sounds. There is no agreement among the scholars about what sort of thing it was. Whenever it sounded, people were scared.
The media of our days is a new Magrepha. If all of its outputs are united, they produce a terrible roar. A Magrepha, the organ of the ancient Hebrews in the synagogue.
Yes, the onslaught of the media upon Trump has been exceedingly unfair, but he survived it.
What is even more important, you survived it, it does not matter what the polls say: they say what the newspapers tell them to say. Even people answer the polls according to the media prognoses: they are shy of saying they would vote for a man who … But at the moment of actual vote, they do what they know is right for them. Not for transgenders, not for Muslim brokers, not even for single mothers, but for themselves.
You have a very good chance to win, and to defeat the witch and her supporters. We learned that the British people voted for Brexit, though all the media said that proposal had no chance. But we also learned from Brexit, that nothing is over until it is over. The Masters of Discourse will try every trick to steal the elections, and only their fear of armed rising may finally force them to acknowledge their inevitable defeat. We know that in 2015, when Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, was afraid of losing the elections, he revealed that the American intelligence has some superior software which allows them to falsify the elections. Perhaps, but he won despite this magical software, despite Obama’s wrath. Even in Israel, that favorite son of the Masters, the Masters are hated. The New York Times is always speaking good about Israel, but still Israelis do not like the newspaper. Nobody likes them, nobody likes an old aunt who tries to tell us what we can say and what we can’t. If Netanyahu could win, Trump can win twice. KEY STATES TILTING TOWARD TRUMP AFTER FBI’S OCTOBER SURPRISE
After the first debate of Trump and Clinton, people said: She won! But we shall vote for him. This was a very encouraging sign. Indeed every woman worth its salt would win an argument with her husband or son-in-law, let alone a pretender. That is the way we are made.
The story of sirens enforces the belief that if you listen to a woman, she will bewitch you. Sirens actually ate the bewitched sailors; our womenfolk do not go to such extremes, but they can cause us a lot of trouble.
Trump seems to be almost pure of heart and deed, as even the extremely prejudiced media could not find anything really incriminating about him but bragging about having his way with women.
I shall not recount so many proven accusations against Hillary. All of that can be found in the emails revealed by Julian Assange and his great Wikileaks team. The media kept mum about it, but the secrets can’t be kept forever.
There are many practical things Donald Trump will be able to fix. He can return industries home, he can return American GIs home from four ends of the world, he can improve life for a lot of working men and women. But he surely will set all of us free from the annoying bondage of the Masters. Just for that reason, go and vote, for yourself and for millions of us who aren’t entitled to. Israel Shamir can be reached at This article was first published at The Unz Review .
Also see: | 0 |
Everything said about President Trump’s “Muslim ban” is a lie — including that it’s a Muslim ban. [The New York Times wore out its thesaurus denouncing the order: “cruelty … injury … suffering … bigoted, cowardly, … breathtaking … inflammatory … callousness and indifference” — and that’s from a single editorial! Amid the hysteria over this prudent pause in refugee admissions from seven countries whose principal export is dynamite vests, it has been indignantly claimed that it’s illegal for our immigration policies to discriminate on the basis of religion. This is often said by journalists who are only in America because of immigration policies that discriminated on the basis of religion. For much of the last Soviet Jews were given nearly automatic entry to the U. S. as “refugees. ” Entering as a refugee confers all sorts of benefits unavailable to other immigrants, including loads of welfare programs, health insurance, job placement services, English language classes, and the opportunity to apply for U. S. citizenship after only five years. Most important, though, Soviet Jews were not required to satisfy the United Nations definition of a “refugee,” to wit: someone fleeing persecution based on race, religion or national origin. They just had to prove they were Jewish. This may have been good policy, but let’s not pretend the Jewish exception was not based on religion. If a temporary pause on refugee admissions from seven countries constitutes “targeting” Muslims, then our immigration policy “targeted” Christians for discrimination for about 30 years. Never heard a peep from the ACLU about religious discrimination back then! According to the considered opinion of the Cato Institute’s David J. Bier, writing in the New York Times, Trump’s executive order is “illegal” because the 1965 immigration act “banned all discrimination against immigrants on the basis of national origin. ” In 1966, one year after the 1965 immigration act, immigrants from Cuba suddenly got special immigration privileges. In 1986, immigrants from Ireland did. People from Vietnam and Indochina got special immigration rights for 20 years after the end of the Vietnam War. The 1965 law, quite obviously, did not prohibit discrimination based on national origin. (I was wondering why the Times would sully its pages with the legal opinion of a Grove City College B. A. like Bier! Any “expert” in a storm, I guess.) In fact, ethnic discrimination is practically the hallmark of America’s immigration policy — in addition to our perverse obsession with admitting the entire Third World. Commenting on these ethnic boondoggles back in 1996, Sen. Orrin Hatch said: “We have made a mockery” of refugee law, “because of politics and pressure. ” We let in one ethnic group out of compassion, then they form an ethnic power bloc to demand that all their fellow countrymen be let in, too. As the former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, described “diversity” in Der Spiegel: “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion. ” That’s our immigration policy — plus a healthy dose of Emma Lazarus’ insane idea that all countries of the world should send their losers to us. (Thanks, Emma!) Americans are weary of taking in these pricey Third World immigrants, who show their gratitude by periodically erupting in maniacal violence — in, for example, San Bernardino, Orlando, New York City, Fort Hood, Boston, Chattanooga, Bowling Green and St. Cloud. The Muslim immigrants currently being showcased by the left are not likely to change any minds. The Times could produce only 11 cases of temporarily blocked immigrants that the newspaper would even dare mention. (Imagine what the others are like!) For purposes of argument, I will accept the Times’ glowing descriptions of these Muslim immigrants as brilliant scientists on the verge of curing cancer. (Two of the Times’ 11 cases actually involved cancer researchers.) Point one: If the Times thinks that brilliance is a desirable characteristic in an immigrant, why can’t we demand that of all our immigrants? To the contrary! Our immigration policy is more likely to turn away the brilliant scientist — in order to make room for an Afghani goat herder, whose kid runs a coffee stand until deciding to bomb the New York City subway one day. (That was Najibullah Zazi, my featured “Immigrant of the Week,” on May 1, 2012.) Point two: I happened to notice that even the stellar Muslim immigrants dug up by the Times seem to bring a lot of elderly and sickly relatives with them. Guess who gets to support them? House Speaker Paul Ryan’s driving obsession (besides being the Koch brothers’ lickspittle) is “entitlement reform,” i. e. cutting benefits or raising the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare. I have another idea. How about we stop bringing in immigrants who immediately access government programs, who bring in elderly parents who immediately access government programs, or who run vast criminal enterprises, stealing millions of dollars from government programs? (I illustrated the popularity of government scams with immigrants in Adios, America! by culling all the news stories about these crimes over a period and listing the perps’ names.) Point three: Contrary to emotional blather about the horrors refugees are fleeing, a lot are just coming to visit their kids or to get free health care. One of the Times’ baby seals — an Iraqi with diabetes and “a respiratory ailment” — was returning from performing his responsibilities as an elected official in Kirkuk. That’s not exactly fleeing the Holocaust. While it’s fantastic news that most Muslim refugees aren’t terrorists, the downside is: They’re not refugees, they’re not brilliant, they don’t have a constitutional right to come here, and they’re very, very expensive. Until politicians can give us more government services for less money, they need to stop bringing in the poor of the world on our dime. | 1 |
BREAKING: Muslim shot dead after trying to KILL GUARD at US EMBASSY in Kenya Oct 28, 2016 Previous post
Earlier today, TGR (The Geller Report) published news accounts of Muslims in Kenya going on a murder spree as’part of a campaign to kill unbelievers.’ This looks like it may very well be part of that Muslim war.
Kenya, once the beacon of leight of democracy on the dark continent, now under siege by jihad, thanks in large part to their native son, Obama.
“Man shot dead after stabbing guard at US Embassy in Kenya,” By Tom Odula | AP October 27 at 1:01 PM
NAIROBI, Kenya — A man was shot dead after stabbing a policeman guarding the perimeter wall of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi and trying to take his gun, a Kenyan police official said Thursday.
The policeman who had been stabbed opened fire in self-defense and killed the attacker, said Vitalis Otieno, the officer in charge of the Gigiri area that hosts several embassies and the U.N’s African headquarters.
“He fired first and shot the person and the person died on the spot,” Otieno said.
The identity of the attacker, a Kenyan from the volatile region of Wajir near Somalia, is known to police, Otieno said.
Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel were seen collecting evidence at the scene of the shooting.
The U.S. Embassy confirmed | 0 |
Share This Hillary Clinton is undoubtedly having a terrible day after finding out the FBI investigation has been reopened. However, she’s was instantly steamrolled with more devastating news concerning her recent poll lead.
Hillary Clinton and her leftist lapdog media have been busy celebrating her “imminent” victory, practically declaring her president before the election is even over. However, in an unbelievable turn of events, she just received some potentially devastating news about her poll lead over Donald Trump that has the nation in an uproar.
Just recently, Hillary and her team of liberal shills were busted “rigging elections” with both massive voter fraud at the polls and working with mainstream media outlets to perpetuate a bias against Trump to cover her own felonious scandals. The partiality and voter fraud are so severe that many were left wondering if there’s really any way to beat Hillary or if it’s a predetermined selection from the liberal elitists.
Just as Hillary thought she was going to hobble straight into the White House again, however, she received some news that crucially threatens her election during the most critical time.
Breitbart reports that less than one week after Trump was suffering an immense lag behind Hillary in the polls, the gap is suddenly coming to a close with the Republican nominee leaping forward a massive 5 points, leaving him just 4 behind the Democratic opponent. Even though Trump was at 38 percent on October 22, he has since rapidly climbed to 44 percent and is expected to seal the gap.
The unbelievable rise in Trump’s support comes just before the FBI announced that it is reopening their investigation into Hillary’s private email server, meaning that his approval rating is sure to skyrocket even further with the great chance that he’ll surpass the scandalous liberal candidate just as voters head to the polls. Even before the FBI announced it will re-investigate Hillary Clinton’s private email server, Trump was already closing the polling gap. It’s likely that he will easily catch up to her since more classified emails have been leaked.
What’s even more miraculous is that Trump is fighting against all odds, including a stifling media bias that’s found to wholly working against him with 91 percent of 184 opinionated statements considered to be negative. However, even this buying of the mainstream media hasn’t stopped the hypothetical Trump train, as the underdog candidate even won early votes in Florida and is the only Republican to do so in the critical swing state.
Although Hillary and her media pets have been tirelessly scheming around the clock to discourage citizens from voting for Trump, reporting fake poll numbers that show her in a major lead, even the left-leaning ABC and Washington Post couldn’t deny Trump’s rapid incline. Not only has Trump gained 5 points, according to their tracking poll, Hillary fell 2, meaning that either undecided or Hillary voters are beginning to support Trump.
Ironically, even Hillary’s campaign manager Robby Mook was forced to admit that Trump could very well be the next U.S. President.
“Donald Trump has been going around telling people not to listen to the polls, and saying that he can still win this race. Well, you know what, he’s absolutely right,” Mook announced in a video.
Just minutes after FBI Director James Comey officially announced the reopened investigation, the stocks suddenly started to tank , which many believe is indicative of a Trump win. It appears as though the liberal elite and Wall Street bankers are panicking at the idea that the easily bought Hillary might not make it to November 8.
Regardless of your stance on the presidential election, it’s clear that the mainstream media has been purchased and is striving to scare Trump voters away from the polls. Considering that this is true, imagine just how many more potential Trump voters are staying home because they feel as though a victory is hopeless — when, indeed, it’s obviously not. | 0 |
What Is At Stake In This Election — Paul Craig Roberts ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. The Clinton Crime Family. “Hillary is the Most Dangerous Presidential Aspirant in US History” By VNN on October 30, 2016 Hillary is the most recklessly dangerous presidential aspirant in US history,
by Stephen Lendman
The Bill and Hillary crime family long ago should have been held accountable for high crimes against peace and numerous others. Hillary is the most recklessly dangerous presidential aspirant in US history, supporting endless imperial wars and state terror, once saying “(w)hat do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life.” There was never a war Hillary did not support – Crimes against Humanity She endorses first-strike nuclear weapons use, calling them peacekeeping deterrents, mindless of their power to destroy life on earth. She’s militantly anti-Russia, earlier compared the nation to Nazi Germany, Putin to Hitler, claiming “he doesn’t have a soul,” has revanchist aims, wanting Russian greatness restored – all of the above a perversion of truth, not to mention a pretext to wage war on Russia. The so-called Clinton Foundation is a suspected criminal enterprise, masquerading as a charitable NGO. It promotes Big Lies about “improving global health, increasing opportunity for women and girls, reducing childhood obesity and preventable diseases, (as well as) creating economic opportunity and growth…” Film producer Frank Huguenard believes Hillary Clinton faces impending federal racketeering charges under the 1970 Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Enacted to fight organized and white collar crime, racketeering is defined to include fraud, bribery, money laundering, embezzlement, drugs trafficking, murder, and various other offenses under the Federal criminal code (Title 18), even acts of terrorism. According to Huguenard, Obama-appointed FBI chief James Comey will recommend Attorney General Loretta Lynch treat “the Clinton Foundation (as) an ongoing criminal enterprise engaged in money laundering and soliciting bribes in exchange for political, policy and legislative favors to individuals, corporations and even governments both foreign and domestic.” Morning Joe Destroys Corrupt Clinton Foundation – “Total Corruption” Strong stuff if only partly true! Huguenard cites credible evidence, indicating the Clinton Foundation is largely a money laundering, influence peddling racket. Less than 10% of “tens of millions of dollars donated” went for charitable purposes, the rest for self-enrichment. “There is ample evidence already in the public record that the Clinton Foundation qualifies as a criminal enterprise and there’s no doubt that the FBI is privy to significantly more evidence than has already been made public,” said Huguenard. If Comey recommends Attorney General Lynch indict Hillary Clinton, it’s unlikely she’ll prosecute a woman she’s had close ties to for years. Bill Clinton appointed her US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York – serving from 1999 – 2001. From 2003 – 2005, she was a Wall Street controlled New York Federal Reserve Bank of New York board member – the mother bank most complicit with its member bank crooks. From 2002 – 2010, she was a Washington-headquartered Hogan & Hartson (H & H) law firm partner. Its New York-based partner Howard Topaz filed income tax returns for Bill and Hillary Clinton, beginning in 2004. In May 2004, H & H filed patent trademark documents for Denver-based MX Logic Inc., the computer software firm responsible for developing email encryption technology used to manage Hillary’s private email server, beginning in July 2013. Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton According to Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton, if H & H (now Hogan Lovells following a 2010 merger) “represented the Clintons on tax matters,” Lynch is responsible for disclosing any involvement she may have had, direct or indirect. In April 2008 during Hillary’s first presidential campaign, The American Lawyer called H & H one of her largest legal industry supporters. Partner Christine Varney was chief counsel to the Clinton/Gore 1992 campaign. The ties between H & H, Lynch and the Clintons are longstanding. In November 2014, Obama announced her appointment as attorney general, succeeding Eric Holder, effective April 27, 2015 after Senate confirmation. It’s hard imagining her biting a hand contributing greatly to her career advancement. Key for Clinton is how much more of her dark side becomes public knowledge besides what’s already known. If enough despite Lynch declining to indict and supportive media scoundrels downplaying or whitewashing her offenses, the Democratic (sic) National Committee (DNC) might be forced to jettison her as damaged goods. She’d be red meat for Trump to take full advantage of in the fall campaign. Would Bernie Sanders party bosses don’t want become Democrat standard bearer in July? Or will Joe Biden or another high-profile party member perhaps be chosen as a late-stage establishment nominee, a brokered convention manipulating things? America’s political system is too debauched to fix. Duopoly power eliminates governance of, by and for everyone equitably. Republicans and Democrats are two sides of the same coin – special interests served exclusively, ordinary people betrayed, the same outcome every electoral cycle. Whoever succeeds Obama, likely worse than ever governance will follow. The greatest concern is preventing possible WW III. Clinton’s rage for endless wars, along with her Sino/Russian hostility makes the unthinkable possible. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at . His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html . Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
A historical milestone need not come at the expense of America. | 0 |
Obamacare tax penalty? I'll take it, millions say "Has not been large enough to motivate people to sign up for insurance' Published: 1 hour ago
(New York Times) The architects of the Affordable Care Act thought they had a blunt instrument to force people — even young and healthy ones — to buy insurance through the law’s online marketplaces: a tax penalty for those who remain uninsured.
It has not worked all that well, and that is at least partly to blame for soaring premiums next year on some of the health law’s insurance exchanges.
The full weight of the penalty will not be felt until April, when those who have avoided buying insurance will face penalties of around $700 a person or more. But even then that might not be enough: For the young and healthy who are badly needed to make the exchanges work, it is sometimes cheaper to pay the Internal Revenue Service than an insurance company charging large premiums, with huge deductibles. | 0 |
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