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Photo of the day: Honor guard Reuters
A honor guard stands at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by the Kremlin wall in central Moscow. Facebook | 0 |
Carol Adl in Middle East , News , US // 0 Comments
According to President Assad’s media adviser, the way the US-led coalition is conducting its operation in Mosul suggests that Washington may be planning to “navigate” ISIS terrorists into Syria in accordance with its longstanding strategy for the region.
Islamic State terrorists fleeing from Mosul into Syria would become a “huge danger to our sovereignty, to our country,” Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban told RT adding that “Russia and Syria are looking at this issue extremely seriously. We’re not going to sit and watch… The way they encircle Mosul shows they would like these terrorists to move into to Syria…”
RT reports:
“They’re navigating terrorism from one place to another, limiting terrorism in one place, directing it to another place. That’s the absolute truth of what is happening in our region,” she explained.
Western states only “speak about fighting terrorism” and in meantime supply so-called “moderates” who eagerly share Western aid with not so “moderate” militants, according to the aide.
“Unfortunately, Western partners speak about fighting terrorism, but they honestly do not. Quite the contrary, what they do on the ground is to supply weapons and armaments to terrorists whom they call ‘moderate’, while we know that on the ground there’s no ‘moderate terrorism.’ They all exchange weapons and armaments on the ground. And they all constitute danger not only to Syria, but to the region and to mankind as well,” Shaaban said.
“We see Western countries announcing that they will be supporting what they call ‘Syrian moderates’. There are no ‘Syrian moderates’, they are carrying on butchering people. Those are not ‘moderates’ for sure.”
A never-ending storm in Western media, which are trying to diminish all the counter-terrorism efforts of Damascus and its allies, is a deliberate campaign that started at the very beginning of the Syrian crisis, Shaaban said. It was always “absolutely incredible, full of lies and falsifications” and totally “irrelevant to reality.”
“One of the great challenges we’re facing in the 21st century is the Western corporate media, that is no longer a media that depends on investigation, or cares about its credibility, or cares about the truth. Give me the names of Western journalists who are on the ground on Syria and who are actually looking at what is happening and reporting to Western people…”
The attempts to pin the alleged airstrike on an Idlib school on Damascus or Moscow is one of the most recent examples of that campaign. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, which debunked the Idlib “hoax,” the latest smear campaign is waged with a purpose to diverse the attention of international community away from the “war crimes committed by the US-led coalition” during the Mosul offensive.
The US-led coalition and the US itself proved to be very untrustworthy partners in battling terrorism, unable to live up to their pledges, she said.
“Russia signed an agreement with the United States and the United States was not able to implement its own agreement… The Pentagon prevented the White House from implementing an agreement.”
Following Friday’s meeting between Russian, Iranian and Syrian diplomats, Shaaban said Damascus is interested in attracting additional “credible” partners to the alliance, in order to battle the “most challenging” issue of our age.
“We’re in an alliance against terrorism, we’re in a war against terrorism, we have so many joint interests among our countries. … [The meeting was] focused on what is the best way to try and gather more regional and international forces to truly and honestly engage in a battle against terrorism, as we all understand that terrorism is the most challenging issue for the humanity in the 21st century,” Assad’s adviser said.
Damascus believes more countries will join in the counter-terrorism alliance of Russia, Iran and Syria, Shaaban said.
“I’m sure this nucleus of alliance is going to attract more countries. Now, if you think of India, or Brazil, or South Africa, or Algeria, or Tunisia, naturally you believe that there’s no problem that these countries probably in the future joining… I’m sure there are many countries who would like to be more active, China for example, who should be more active in fighting terrorism.” | 0 |
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are continuing to defend themselves against the national media which continues to mischaracterize the role and intent of the of criminal aliens. [Media reports have called the Operation Cross Check arrests of criminal aliens a effort by ICE officials and the Trump Administration, despite the fact that this operation has been carried out in the past. More than 2, 000 criminal aliens were rounded up in March 2015, Breitbart Texas reported at the time. The nearly 700 arrests in last week’s operation pales in comparison, yet the mainstream media appears to have lost total perspective in its attacks on the men and women tasked to protect our nation from these criminals. When ICE agents arrested Daniel Ramirez Medina, a Mexican national, media outlets quickly jumped on his DACA status granted by the Obama Administration. Outlets failed to report Medina was targeted because of his alleged “gang member” status, Breitbart Texas reported. “Daniel must be given his freedom, now,” said United We Dream Advocacy Director Greisa Martinez in the Washington Times. “Under Trump’s America, no one is safe. Donald Trump and Republicans must say in no uncertain terms that DACA recipients are safe. ” Being a gang member is a activity. ICE officials tweeted a reference to an April 2012 Operation Cross Check where more than 3, 100 criminal aliens were arrested. “As part of U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) ongoing commitment to prioritizing the removal of criminal aliens and egregious immigration law violators, the agency announced today the results of a national ‘Cross Check’ enforcement led to the arrest of more than 3, 100 convicted criminal aliens, immigration fugitives and immigration violators,” ICE officials wrote in a press 2012 press release. #TBT April 2012: ICE arrests more than 3, 100 convicted criminal aliens immigration fugitives in nationwide ophttps: . pic. twitter. — ICE (@ICEgov) February 16, 2017, ICE immigration officers carried out a routine, targeted operation aimed at taking dangerous criminal aliens off the streets. The operation resulted in the arrest of nearly 700 criminal aliens. “ICE conducts these kind of targeted enforcement operations regularly and has for many years,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said in a written statement obtained by Breitbart Texas. “The focus of these enforcement operations is consistent with the routine, targeted arrests carried out by ICE’s Fugitive Operations teams on a daily basis. ” This operation was planned well in advance of the Trump Administration taking office. It is a regularly scheduled targeted operation. Despite this, media outlets have questioned the intent of the operation and even gone as far as calling it retaliation for immigration protests. U. S. Representative Joaquin Castro ( ) questioned ICE’s intent stating, “I am asking ICE to clarify whether these individuals are in fact dangerous, violent threats to our communities, and not people who are here peacefully raising families and contributing to our state. I will continue to monitor this situation. ” The Austin added fuel to the fires of speculation when it reported a fake news Facebook post by Austin City Councilman Greg Casar. “I believe ICE is out in public arresting people in order to retaliate against our community for standing up for our values against people like Abbott and Trump,” Councilman Casar posted on Facebook. “Trump and his allies will do everything they can to divide Americans, invoke fear in vulnerable neighborhoods, and demonize an entire community of people. ” ICE firmly responded to these types of statements by officials and media, calling them “false, Dangerous, and irresponsible. ” #TBT April 2012: ICE arrests more than 3, 100 convicted criminal aliens immigration fugitives in nationwide ophttps: . pic. twitter. — ICE (@ICEgov) February 16, 2017, The agency following that up with two additional tweets saying, “These reports create mass panic and put communities and law enforcement personnel in unnecessary danger,” and “Any groups falsely reporting such activities are doing a disservice to those they claim to support. ” These reports create mass panic and put communities and law enforcement personnel in unnecessary danger. — ICE (@ICEgov) February 16, 2017, Any groups falsely reporting such activities are doing a disservice to those they claim to support. — ICE (@ICEgov) February 16, 2017, Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX. | 1 |
BARCELONA, Venezuela — By morning, three newborns were already dead. The day had begun with the usual hazards: chronic shortages of antibiotics, intravenous solutions, even food. Then a blackout swept over the city, shutting down the respirators in the maternity ward. Doctors kept ailing infants alive by pumping air into their lungs by hand for hours. By nightfall, four more newborns had died. “The death of a baby is our daily bread,” said Dr. Osleidy Camejo, a surgeon in the nation’s capital, Caracas, referring to the toll from Venezuela’s collapsing hospitals. The economic crisis in this country has exploded into a public health emergency, claiming the lives of untold numbers of Venezuelans. It is just part of a larger unraveling here that has become so severe it has prompted President Nicolás Maduro to impose a state of emergency and has raised fears of a government collapse. Hospital wards have become crucibles where the forces tearing Venezuela apart have converged. Gloves and soap have vanished from some hospitals. Often, cancer medicines are found only on the black market. There is so little electricity that the government works only two days a week to save what energy is left. At the University of the Andes Hospital in the mountain city of Mérida, there was not enough water to wash blood from the operating table. Doctors preparing for surgery cleaned their hands with bottles of seltzer water. “It is like something from the 19th century,” said Dr. Christian Pino, a surgeon at the hospital. The figures are devastating. The rate of death among babies under a month old increased more than a hundredfold in public hospitals run by the Health Ministry, to just over 2 percent in 2015 from 0. 02 percent in 2012, according to a government report provided by lawmakers. The rate of death among new mothers in those hospitals increased by almost five times in the same period, according to the report. Here in the Caribbean port town of Barcelona, two premature infants died recently on the way to the main public clinic because the ambulance had no oxygen tanks. The hospital has no fully functioning or kidney dialysis machines because they broke long ago. And because there are no open beds, some patients lie on the floor in pools of their blood. It is a battlefield clinic in a country where there is no war. “Some come here healthy, and they leave dead,” Dr. Leandro Pérez said, standing in the emergency room of Luis Razetti Hospital, which serves the town. This nation has the largest oil reserves in the world, yet the government saved little money for hard times when oil prices were high. Now that prices have collapsed — they are around a third what they were in 2014 — the consequences are casting a destructive shadow across the country. Lines for food, long a feature of life in Venezuela, now erupt into looting. The bolívar, the country’s currency, is nearly worthless. The crisis is aggravated by a political feud between Venezuela’s leftists, who control the presidency, and their rivals in congress. The president’s opponents declared a humanitarian crisis in January, and this month passed a law that would allow Venezuela to accept international aid to prop up the health care system. “This is criminal that we can sit in a country with this much oil, and people are dying for lack of antibiotics,” says Oneida Guaipe, a lawmaker and former hospital union leader. But Mr. Maduro, who succeeded Hugo Chávez, went on television and rejected the effort, describing the move as a bid to undermine him and privatize the hospital system. “I doubt that anywhere in the world, except in Cuba, there exists a better health system than this one,” Mr. Maduro said. Late last fall, the aging pumps that supplied water to the University of the Andes Hospital exploded. They were not repaired for months. So without water, gloves, soap or antibiotics, a group of surgeons prepared to remove an appendix that was about to burst, even though the operating room was still covered in another patient’s blood. Even in the capital, only two of nine operating rooms are functioning at the J. M. de los Ríos Children’s Hospital. “There are people dying for lack of medicine, children dying of malnutrition and others dying because there are no medical personnel,” said Dr. Yamila Battaglini, a surgeon at the hospital. Yet even among Venezuela’s failing hospitals, Luis Razetti Hospital in Barcelona has become one of the most notorious. In April, the authorities arrested its director, Aquiles Martínez, and removed him from his post. Local news reports said he was accused of stealing equipment meant for the hospital, including machines to treat people with respiratory illnesses, as well as intravenous solutions and 127 boxes of medicine. Around 10 one recent night, Dr. Freddy Díaz walked down a hall there that had become an impromptu ward for patients who had no beds. Some clutched bandages and called from the floor for help. One, brought in by the police, was handcuffed to a gurney. In a supply room, cockroaches fled as the door swung open. Dr. Díaz logged a patient’s medical data on the back of a bank statement someone had thrown in the trash. “We have run out of paper here,” he said. On the fourth floor, one of his patients, Rosa Parucho, 68, was one of the few who had managed to get a bed, though the rotting mattress had left her back covered in sores. But those were the least of her problems: Ms. Parucho, a diabetic, was unable to receive kidney dialysis because the machines were broken. An infection had spread to her feet, which were black that night. She was going into septic shock. Ms. Parucho needed oxygen, but none was available. Her hands twitched and her eyes rolled into the back of her head. “The bacteria aren’t dying they’re growing,” Dr. Díaz said, noting that three of the antibiotics Ms. Parucho needed had been unavailable for months. He paused. “We will have to remove her feet. ” Three relatives sat reading the Old Testament before an unconscious woman. She had arrived six days before, but because a scanning machine had broken, it was days before anyone discovered the tumor occupying a quarter of her frontal lobe. Samuel Castillo, 21, arrived in the emergency room needing blood. But supplies had run out. A holiday had been declared by the government to save electricity, and the blood bank took donations only on workdays. Mr. Castillo died that night. For the past two and a half months, the hospital has not had a way to print . So patients must use a smartphone to take a picture of their scans and take them to the proper doctor. “It looks like tuberculosis,” said an emergency room doctor looking at the scan of a lung on a cellphone. “But I can’t tell. The quality is bad. ” Finding medicine is perhaps the hardest challenge. The pharmacy here has bare shelves because of a shortage of imports, which the government can no longer afford. When patients need treatment, the doctors hand relatives a list of medicines, solutions and other items needed to stabilize the patients or to perform surgery. Loved ones are then sent back the way they came to find sellers who have the goods. The same applies to just about everything else one might need here. “You must bring her diapers now,” a nurse told Alejandro Ruiz, whose mother had been taken to the emergency room. “What else?” he asked, clutching large trash bags he had brought filled with blankets, sheets, pillows and toilet paper. Nicolás Espinosa sat next to his tiny daughter, who has spent two of her five years with cancer. He was running out of money to pay for her intravenous solutions. Inflation had increased the price by 16 times what he paid a year ago. He flipped through a list of medicines he was trying to find here in Barcelona and in a neighboring city. Some of the drugs are meant to protect the body during chemotherapy, yet the girl’s treatments ended when the oncology department ran out of the necessary drugs a month and a half ago. Near him, a handwritten sign read, “We sell antibiotics — negotiable. ” A seller’s number was listed. Biceña Pérez, 36, scanned the halls looking for anyone who would listen to her. “Can someone help my father?” she asked. Her father, José Calvo, 61, had contracted Chagas’ disease, a sickness caused by a parasite. But the medication Mr. Calvo had been prescribed ran out in his part of Venezuela that year, and he began to suffer heart failure. Six hours after Ms. Pérez’s plea, a scream was heard in the emergency room. It was Mr. Calvo’s sister: “My darling, my darling,” she moaned. Mr. Calvo was dead. His daughter paced the hall alone, not knowing what to do. Her hands covered her face, and then clenched into fists. “Why did the director of this hospital steal that equipment?” was all she could say. “Tell me whose fault is this?” The ninth floor of the hospital is the maternity ward, where the seven babies had died the day before. A room at the end of the hall was filled with broken incubators. The glass on one was smashed. Red, yellow and blue wires dangled from another. “Don’t use — nonfunctional,” said a sign dated last November. Dr. Amalia Rodríguez stood in the hallway. “I had a patient just now who needed artificial respiration, and I had none available,” Dr. Rodríguez said. “A baby. What can we do?” The day of the power blackout, Dr. Rodríguez said, the hospital staff tried turning on the generator, but it did not work. Doctors tried everything they could to keep the babies breathing, pumping air by hand until the employees were so exhausted they could barely see straight, she said. How many babies died because of the blackout was impossible to say, given all of the other deficiencies at the hospital. “What can we do here?” Dr. Rodríguez said. “Every day I pass an incubator that doesn’t heat up, that is cold, that is broken. ” | 1 |
Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti (pictured) Muhammad Ahmad Hussein on Friday claimed that Donald Trump’s reported plans to relocated the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem represented an “assault” on Muslims worldwide. [Hussein, who preaches at the Al Aqsa Mosque, was appointed to his position by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. mosques routinely utilize Friday afternoon prayers to incite against Israel. “The pledge to move the embassy is not just an assault against Palestinians but against Arabs and Muslims, who will not remain silent,” Hussein said in his sermon. “The transfer of the embassy violates international charters and norms which recognize Jerusalem as an occupied city,” Hussein claimed, without mentioning Trump by name. Hussein seems to be fulfilling a pledge by Palestinian leaders who called earlier this week for Friday prayers to be used to protest reports that Trump may move the embassy to Jerusalem. Earlier todayit was reported that Abbas this month met with American businessmen who allegedly told him Trump was serious about moving the embassy to Jerusalem. The Palestinians claim eastern Jerusalem as their future capital. Last month, a U. S. abstention allowed the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution calling the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem “occupied Palestinian territories,” and demanding a halt to Israeli construction in those areas. Some of the holiest sites in Judaism are located in eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank, including the Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City the Cave of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron, which was home to the oldest continuous Jewish community in the world until the Jews of Hebron were massacred and expelled the Tomb of Rachel in Bethlehem and Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus — biblical Shechem. Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. ” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook. | 1 |
Thursday on CNN’s “The Lead,” 2008 GOP nominee and former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin said on the mark of President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office she was “extremely thankful that he has been elected. ” Partial transcript as follows: TAPPER: So let me ask you, we’re approaching President Trump’s 100th day. It will be a week from Saturday. What do you think? What kind of grade would you give him? PALIN: I’m obviously extremely thankful that he has been elected because, you know, so many of us in America knew that the status quo had to go. And we could not afford another term of Obama via Hillary Clinton’s presidency if she were to be elected. So very thankful Trump was elected. Thankful that he understands that Americans expect America to be great and to be strong in order for the world to be more peaceful and more safe, more secure. So very thankful Trump is fulfilling a lot of the promises that he made to lead, not from behind but to have America lead from up front, letting the rest of the world know that, you know, we expect peace in this world. We don’t want to have to intervene in other nations. We don’t want to have to intervene and try this regime change throughout other lands, and we can get to that as long as America is safe and secure and is a leader on the globe, and that to me is Trump’s mission, which I appreciate. TAPPER: But they have called for regime change in Syria. PALIN: Well, I think what the objective is though is to not have to intervene and tell any other country who should rule and how they should live and whether they should have a democracy ruling the people or not. And we’re able to, like I say, get there by leading as an example, having our own ports swept, if you will, in America before we’re over there telling other countries they better sweep their porch. We have to get it together here in America, be safe, be secure, be sovereign and solvent so we can be that shining light, an example for other countries. Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
WASHINGTON — The senior United States commander in Iraq said on Tuesday that an American airstrike most likely led to the collapse of a building in Mosul that killed scores of civilians this month. But the commander, Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, indicated that an investigation would also examine whether the attack might have set off a larger blast from explosives set by militants inside the building or nearby. It was the fullest acceptance of responsibility by an American commander since the March 17 airstrike. “My initial assessment is that we probably had a role in these casualties,” said General Townsend, who commands the task force that is fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But he asserted that “the munition that we used should not have collapsed an entire building. ” “That is something we have got to figure out,” he added. With an increase in reports of civilian casualties from the American bombing of Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria, some human rights groups have questioned whether the rules of engagement have been loosened since President Trump took office. Pentagon officials said this week that the rules had not changed. But General Townsend said on Tuesday that he had won approval for “minor adjustments” to rules for the use of combat power, although he insisted they were not a factor in the Mosul attack. General Townsend acknowledged, however, that steps had been taken to speed up the process of providing air power to support Iraqi troops and their American Special Operations advisers at the leading edge of the offensive to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State. The goal, he said, was to “decentralize” . General Townsend did not describe the changes in detail, but he cast them as a return to the military’s standard offensive doctrine, in contrast to the “very centralized” approach he said was initially put in place after President Barack Obama sent American forces back to Iraq to combat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Maj. Gen. Maan an Iraqi special forces commander, has said that his men called in a coalition airstrike to take out snipers on the roofs of three houses in a Mosul neighborhood called Mosul Jidideh. The Iraqi forces, General Saadi said, were unaware that at least some of the houses were filled with civilians. General Townsend said he did not have information on the Iraqi commander’s specific role, but explained that the United States had been training Iraqi military officers how to call in airstrikes that are carried out by Iraqi aircraft. Any American airstrike requested by the Iraqis, General Townsend said, would need to be approved by American officers. “If he said his guy was calling for fire, he could have been,” he said. “Now how that works is that they don’t call directly to a U. S. fighter overhead and suddenly a U. S. fighter is rolling in on their grid coordinates. ” Iraqi forces have been eager for the help of American air power as they take on the toughest phase of the more than battle to retake Mosul. American officials have said that 500 Iraqi troops were killed and about 3, 000 wounded in taking the eastern half of the city. General Townsend said the battle for the western half of the city was even more difficult because of what he called its “claustrophobically close terrain” of narrow streets and buildings. He repeated several times that the fighting was the most intense urban combat since World War II. Adding to the challenge is a factor he did not mention: the decision by Iraq’s governments to urge Mosul’s residents to shelter in place instead of trying to flee. When American troops retook Falluja in 2004, the fierce urban fighting took place in a city that had already been abandoned by most civilians. Though the Iraqis are doing the main fighting on the ground in Mosul, American and coalition forces have been playing an essential role. United States Army Paladin howitzers have been firing rounds into Mosul from their positions outside the city. Task Force Thor, which is based at Qayyarah West Airfield 40 miles south of Mosul, has been firing Himars rockets into the city. American Apache attack helicopters have added to the firepower. This year, the United States increased the number of soldiers who have been advising Iraqi troops as they have pushed into the city. While the mission of the advisers is not to directly engage in combat, many are in harm’s way as they advise Iraqi units carrying out the fight. On Monday, American military officials said that two infantry companies from the 82nd Airborne Division were being sent to help protect those United States advisers and that a “route clearance” platoon was also being deployed to clear away roadside bombs. Together, the deployment adds about 240 troops to the mission. The troop cap that the Obama administration established for the operation in Iraq — what the Pentagon calls the “force manning level” — is 5, 260. But that formal limit, which the Trump administration is likely to eliminate, does not count temporary deployments. The actual number of troops in Iraq is certainly higher. With more American forces in Iraq, and more United States advisers near the front lines, the need for timely airstrikes is much greater. Brig. Gen. Matthew C. Isler, an Air Force officer who serves as deputy to General Townsend, is in charge of the investigation into the Mosul airstrike. A team of American experts has visited the site to collect evidence to determine what caused the significant loss of civilian life. American officials said they were investigating a number of possibilities, including whether the militants herded the civilians into the building to use as human shields whether the building was rigged with explosives or whether a nearby car bomb exploded. “My initial impression is the enemy had a hand in this, and there’s also a fair chance that our strike had some role in it,” General Townsend said in a briefing broadcast to the Pentagon from Iraq. “I think it’s probably going to play out to be some sort of combination. But you know what, I can’t really say for sure, and we’ve just got to let the investigation play out. ” General Townsend said the results of the investigation would be reported publicly, “unlike our enemy. ” While General Townsend acknowledged an American role in the Mosul strike, he said the allegations that the United States had bombed a school full of refugees in Syria were not credible. That airstrike, which has garnered considerable attention, occurred during an operation in which Syrian fighters were trying to seal off the western approaches to Raqqa, the Islamic State’s capital. But General Townsend said that the evidence he had seen indicated that it was about 30 Islamic State fighters who were killed in that attack. “I think that was a clean strike,” he said. He also dismissed reports, publicized by the Islamic State, that an American airstrike had endangered the Tabqa Dam west of Raqqa, saying that the structure was not in imminent danger. “If something happens to the Tabqa Dam, it will be at the hands of ISIS, not the coalition,” he said. Still, the reports of desperate civilians in Mosul prompted Zeid Ra’ad the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, to urge on Tuesday that the coalition reconsider its tactics. The United Nations has said that at least 61 people were killed in the March 17 strike in Mosul. Amnesty International said as many as 150 might have died. “The fact that Iraqi authorities repeatedly advised civilians to remain at home, instead of fleeing the area, indicates that coalition forces should have known that these strikes were likely to result in a significant number of civilian casualties,” Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International said in a statement. | 1 |
Airbnb, October 29, 2016
Hi,
Earlier this year, we launched a comprehensive effort to fight bias and discrimination in the Airbnb community. As a result of this effort, we’re asking everyone to agree to a Community Commitment beginning November 1, 2016. Agreeing to this commitment will affect your use of Airbnb, so we wanted to give you a heads up about it.
What is the Community Commitment?
You commit to treat everyone–regardless of race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age–with respect, and without judgment or bias.
How do I accept the commitment?
On or after November 1, we’ll show you the commitment when you log in to or open the Airbnb website, mobile or tablet app and we’ll automatically ask you to accept.
What if I decline the commitment?
If you decline the commitment, you won’t be able to host or book using Airbnb, and you have the option to cancel your account. Once your account is canceled, future booked trips will be canceled. You will still be able to browse Airbnb but you won’t be able to book any reservations or host any guests.
What if I have feedback about the commitment?
We welcome your feedback about the Community Commitment and all of our nondiscrimination efforts. Feel free to read more about the commitment. You can also reach out to us at [email protected]
The Airbnb Team | 0 |
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ISIS releases new, even more barbaric video in an effort to regain mantle from Planned Parenthood
Impressed by Fox News stellar rating during GOP debates, CNN to use same formula on Democrat candidates asking tough, pointed questions about Republicans
Shocking new book explores pros and cons of socialism, discovers they are same people
Pope outraged by Planned Parenthood's "unfettered capitalism," demands equal redistribution of baby parts to each according to his need
John Kerry accepts Iran's "Golden Taquiyya" award, requests jalapenos on the side
Citizens of Pluto protest US government's surveillance of their planetoid and its moons with New Horizons space drone
John Kerry proposes 3-day waiting period for all terrorist nations trying to acquire nuclear weapons
Chicago Police trying to identify flag that caused nine murders and 53 injuries in the city this past weekend
Cuba opens to affordable medical tourism for Americans who can't afford Obamacare deductibles
State-funded research proves existence of Quantum Aggression Particles (Heterons) in Large Hadron Collider
Student job opportunities: make big bucks this summer as Hillary’s Ordinary-American; all expenses paid, travel, free acting lessons
Experts debate whether Iranian negotiators broke John Kerry's leg or he did it himself to get out of negotiations
Junior Varsity takes Ramadi, advances to quarterfinals
US media to GOP pool of candidates: 'Knowing what we know now, would you have had anything to do with the founding of the United States?'
NY Mayor to hold peace talks with rats, apologize for previous Mayor's cowboy diplomacy
China launches cube-shaped space object with a message to aliens: "The inhabitants of Earth will steal your intellectual property, copy it, manufacture it in sweatshops with slave labor, and sell it back to you at ridiculously low prices"
Progressive scientists: Truth is a variable deduced by subtracting 'what is' from 'what ought to be'
Experts agree: Hillary Clinton best candidate to lessen percentage of Americans in top 1%
America's attempts at peace talks with the White House continue to be met with lies, stalling tactics, and bad faith
Starbucks new policy to talk race with customers prompts new hashtag #DontHoldUpTheLine
Hillary: DELETE is the new RESET
Charlie Hebdo receives Islamophobe 2015 award ; the cartoonists could not be reached for comment due to their inexplicable, illogical deaths
Russia sends 'reset' button back to Hillary: 'You need it now more than we do'
Barack Obama finds out from CNN that Hillary Clinton spent four years being his Secretary of State
President Obama honors Leonard Nimoy by taking selfie in front of Starship Enterprise
Police: If Obama had a convenience store, it would look like Obama Express Food Market
Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males
NASA: We're 80% sure about being 20% sure about being 17% sure about being 38% sure about 2014 being the hottest year on record
People holding '$15 an Hour Now' posters sue Democratic party demanding raise to $15 an hour for rendered professional protesting services
Cuba-US normalization: US tourists flock to see Cuba before it looks like the US and Cubans flock to see the US before it looks like Cuba
White House describes attacks on Sony Pictures as 'spontaneous hacking in response to offensive video mocking Juche and its prophet'
CIA responds to Democrat calls for transparency by releasing the director's cut of The Making Of Obama's Birth Certificate
Obama: 'If I had a city, it would look like Ferguson'
Biden: 'If I had a Ferguson (hic), it would look like a city'
Obama signs executive order renaming 'looters' to 'undocumented shoppers'
Ethicists agree: two wrongs do make a right so long as Bush did it first
The aftermath of the 'War on Women 2014' finds a new 'Lost Generation' of disillusioned Democrat politicians, unable to cope with life out of office
White House: Republican takeover of the Senate is a clear mandate from the American people for President Obama to rule by executive orders
Nurse Kaci Hickox angrily tells reporters that she won't change her clocks for daylight savings time
Democratic Party leaders in panic after recent poll shows most Democratic voters think 'midterm' is when to end pregnancy
Desperate Democratic candidates plead with Obama to stop backing them and instead support their GOP opponents
Ebola Czar issues five-year plan with mandatory quotas of Ebola infections per each state based on voting preferences
Study: crony capitalism is to the free market what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity
Fun facts about world languages: the Left has more words for statism than the Eskimos have for snow
African countries to ban all flights from the United States because "Obama is incompetent, it scares us"
Nobel Peace Prize controversy: Hillary not nominated despite having done even less than Obama to deserve it
Obama: 'Ebola is the JV of viruses'
BREAKING: Secret Service foils Secret Service plot to protect Obama
Revised 1st Amendment: buy one speech, get the second free
Sharpton calls on white NFL players to beat their women in the interests of racial fairness
President Obama appoints his weekly approval poll as new national security adviser
Obama wags pen and phone at Putin; Europe offers support with powerful pens and phones from NATO members
White House pledges to embarrass ISIS back to the Stone Age with a barrage of fearsome Twitter messages and fatally ironic Instagram photos
Obama to fight ISIS with new federal Terrorist Regulatory Agency
Obama vows ISIS will never raise their flag over the eighteenth hole
Harry Reid: "Sometimes I say the wong thing"
Elian Gonzalez wishes he had come to the U.S. on a bus from Central America like all the other kids
Obama visits US-Mexican border, calls for a two-state solution
Obama draws "blue line" in Iraq after Putin took away his red crayon
"Hard Choices," a porno flick loosely based on Hillary Clinton's memoir and starring Hillary Hellfire as a drinking, whoring Secretary of State, wildly outsells the flabby, sagging original
Accusations of siding with the enemy leave Sgt. Bergdahl with only two options: pursue a doctorate at Berkley or become a Senator from Massachusetts
Jay Carney stuck in line behind Eric Shinseki to leave the White House; estimated wait time from 15 min to 6 weeks
100% of scientists agree that if man-made global warming were real, "the last people we'd want to help us is the Obama administration"
Jay Carney says he found out that Obama found out that he found out that Obama found out that he found out about the latest Obama administration scandal on the news
"Anarchy Now!" meeting turns into riot over points of order, bylaws, and whether or not 'kicking the #^@&*! ass' of the person trying to speak is or is not violence
Obama retaliates against Putin by prohibiting unionized federal employees from dating hot Russian girls online during work hours
Russian separatists in Ukraine riot over an offensive YouTube video showing the toppling of Lenin statues
"Free Speech Zones" confuse Obamaphone owners who roam streets in search of additional air minutes
Obamacare bolsters employment for professionals with skills to convert meth back into sudafed
Gloves finally off: Obama uses pen and phone to cancel Putin's Netflix account
Joe Biden to Russia: "We will bury you by turning more of Eastern Europe over to your control!"
In last-ditch effort to help Ukraine, Obama deploys Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson's Rainbow Coalition to Crimea
Al Sharpton: "Not even Putin can withstand our signature chanting, 'racist, sexist, anti-gay, Russian army go away'!"
Mardi Gras in North Korea: " Throw me some food! "
Obama's foreign policy works: "War, invasion, and conquest are signs of weakness; we've got Putin right where we want him"
US offers military solution to Ukraine crisis: "We will only fight countries that have LGBT military"
Putin annexes Brighton Beach to protect ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, Obama appeals to UN and EU for help
The 1980s: "Mr. Obama, we're just calling to ask if you want our foreign policy back . The 1970s are right here with us, and they're wondering, too."
In a stunning act of defiance, Obama courageously unfriends Putin on Facebook
MSNBC: Obama secures alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine
Study: springbreak is to STDs what April 15th is to accountants
Efforts to achieve moisture justice for California thwarted by unfair redistribution of snow in America
North Korean voters unanimous: "We are the 100%"
Leader of authoritarian gulag-site, The People's Cube, unanimously 're-elected' with 100% voter turnout
Super Bowl: Obama blames Fox News for Broncos' loss
Feminist author slams gay marriage: "a man needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"
Beverly Hills campaign heats up between Henry Waxman and Marianne Williamson over the widening income gap between millionaires and billionaires in their district
Biden to lower $10,000-a-plate Dinner For The Homeless to $5,000 so more homeless can attend
Kim becomes world leader, feeds uncle to dogs; Obama eats dogs, becomes world leader, America cries uncle
North Korean leader executes own uncle for talking about Obamacare at family Christmas party
White House hires part-time schizophrenic Mandela sign interpreter to help sell Obamacare
Kim Jong Un executes own " crazy uncle " to keep him from ruining another family Christmas
OFA admits its advice for area activists to give Obamacare Talk at shooting ranges was a bad idea
President resolves Obamacare debacle with executive order declaring all Americans equally healthy
Obama to Iran: "If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program"
Bovine community outraged by flatulence coming from Washington DC
Obama: "I'm not particularly ideological; I believe in a good pragmatic five-year plan"
Shocker: Obama had no knowledge he'd been reelected until he read about it in the local newspaper last week
Server problems at HealthCare.gov so bad, it now flashes 'Error 808' message
NSA marks National Best Friend Day with official announcement: "Government is your best friend; we know you like no one else, we're always there, we're always willing to listen"
Al Qaeda cancels attack on USA citing launch of Obamacare as devastating enough
The President's latest talking point on Obamacare: "I didn't build that"
Dizzy with success, Obama renames his wildly popular healthcare mandate to HillaryCare
Carney: huge ObamaCare deductibles won't look as bad come hyperinflation
Washington Redskins drop 'Washington' from their name as offensive to most Americans
Poll: 83% of Americans favor cowboy diplomacy over rodeo clown diplomacy
GOVERNMENT WARNING: If you were able to complete ObamaCare form online, it wasn't a legitimate gov't website; you should report online fraud and change all your passwords
Obama administration gets serious, threatens Syria with ObamaCare
Obama authorizes the use of Vice President Joe Biden's double-barrel shotgun to fire a couple of blasts at Syria
Sharpton: "British royals should have named baby 'Trayvon.' By choosing 'George' they sided with white Hispanic racist Zimmerman"
DNC launches 'Carlos Danger' action figure; proceeds to fund a charity helping survivors of the Republican War on Women
Nancy Pelosi extends abortion rights to the birds and the bees
Hubble discovers planetary drift to the left
Obama: 'If I had a daughter-in-law, she would look like Rachael Jeantel'
FISA court rubberstamps statement denying its portrayal as government's rubber stamp
Every time ObamaCare gets delayed, a Julia somewhere dies
GOP to Schumer: 'Force full implementation of ObamaCare before 2014 or Dems will never win another election'
Obama: 'If I had a son... no, wait, my daughter can now marry a woman!'
Janet Napolitano: TSA findings reveal that since none of the hijackers were babies, elderly, or Tea Partiers, 9/11 was not an act of terrorism
News Flash: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) can see Canada from South Dakota
Susan Rice: IRS actions against tea parties caused by anti-tax YouTube video that was insulting to their faith
Drudge Report reduces font to fit all White House scandals onto one page
Obama: the IRS is a constitutional right, just like the Second Amendment
White House: top Obama officials using secret email accounts a result of bad IT advice to avoid spam mail from Nigeria
Jay Carney to critics: 'Pinocchio never said anything inconsistent'
Obama: If I had a gay son, he'd look like Jason Collins
Gosnell's office in Benghazi raided by the IRS: mainstream media's worst cover-up challenge to date
IRS targeting pro-gay-marriage LGBT groups leads to gayest tax revolt in U.S. history
After Arlington Cemetery rejects offer to bury Boston bomber, Westboro Babtist Church steps up with premium front lawn plot
Boston: Obama Administration to reclassify marathon bombing as 'sportsplace violence'
Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program
US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration?
Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy
This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb's blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester
White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras
Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world's sexiest corpse
Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school
Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition
Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State
Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: 'rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good'
Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as 'undocumented sex partners'
Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested
Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead
Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending
Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances
Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg's ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons
Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago
Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new 'Republicans For Democrats' strategy aimed at losing elections
Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country
Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to 'Traps'
White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out
New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman's economic policies stolen
White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class
To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead
State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations
Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they're just running forward
President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward
Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects
World ends; S&P soars
Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood
Meek inherit Earth, can't afford estate taxes
Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway
Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013
Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama
As Santa's workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of 'naughty and nice' list
Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves
Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium
Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future
Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs
Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion's latter day prophet
Imam Rauf's peaceful solution: 'Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt'
Study: Obama's threat to burn tax money in Washington 'recruitment bonanza' for Tea Parties
Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov't raises retirement age to at least 814 years
Obama attends church service, worships self
Obama proposes national 'Win The Future' lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov't spending
Historical revisionists: "Hey, you never know"
Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh
Israelis to Egyptian rioters: "don't damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild"
Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness
Al Gore: It's a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears
Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke
Obama's teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights
Obama calls new taxes 'spending reductions in tax code.' Elsewhere rapists tout 'consent reductions in sexual intercourse'
Obama's teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter:"Too few words"
Obama's Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov't
Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost
Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity "Religion of Peace," praises "moderate Christians," promises to send one into space
Republicans block Obama's $420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck
White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus
Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed
Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book "The Road to Smurfdom"
Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth's atmosphere
Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people's suffering: "When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?"
Obama regrets the US government didn't provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college
Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill!
Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: 'Come again soon!'
Obama to tornado victims: 'We inherited this weather from the previous administration'
Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome
People's Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies
Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, "only 1% allowed to reach Israel"
Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans
Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law
Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama's bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond
Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics
Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof
Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels
Poll: Progressive slogan 'We should be more like Europe' most popular with members of American Nazi Party
Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend
May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above
Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel "50 Shades of Hay"
Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name
Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich
Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag
Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its "President for Life"
Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off
Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named "Fat And Furious"
Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed
White House: "Let them eat statistics"
Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama | 0 |
Inventor Elon Musk is into driverless cars and space missions to Mars, but now he’s excited about his boring machine. [Make that the Boring Machine, monikered Godot, a reference to a mysterious character that never appears in a Samuel Beckett play called “Waiting for Godot. ” Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, announced last week that his new venture is ready for its first project. The Boring Company will be creating a network of underground tunnels connecting Los Angeles International Airport and L. A.’s westside neighborhoods: First tunnel for The Boring Company begins … Full length of first tunnel will run from LAX to … https: . — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2017, “First tunnel for The Boring Company begins … Full length of first tunnel will run from LAX to Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood and Sherman Oaks. Future tunnels will cover all of greater LA,” Musk wrote in his Instagram account. After completion, cars may be loaded onto a “electric sled,” which would allow a vehicle to be transported from “Westwood to LAX in 5 minutes,” according to Musk. To those unfamiliar with Los Angeles, the most congested city in the U. S. (according to Forbes) a typical drive between LAX and Westwood takes about 30 minutes. It’s not unusual to take an hour or more to traverse those 10 miles on the 405 Freeway during heavy traffic hours. Musk posted a video of a test run on the sled inside the nearly experimental Hyperloop tunnel he had built outside SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, just south of LAX: [Warning, this may cause motion sickness or seizures]This is a test run of our electric sled … https: . — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2017, There is no word yet on when the project will officially start or be completed. But for Angelenos perpetually stuck in traffic, this could be the best news until flying cars come along. (Then again, if you have to wait a long time in line to get on the sled … but we’re way ahead of ourselves now.) Follow Samuel Chi on Twitter @ThePlayoffGuru. | 1 |
As a hedge fund manager, Goldman Sachs trader and bank chief executive, Steven T. Mnuchin has long been a member of the financial elite. Yet even on Wall Street he was not widely known before Donald J. Trump chose him to be his campaign last spring. Now, Mr. Mnuchin is on a path to become the first hedge fund manager to head the Treasury. As befitting that world of finance, Mr. Mnuchin’s record shows a willingness to take on risks and a penchant for secrecy that members of both parties expect will be a focus of his Senate confirmation hearing. A case in point is a Delaware company that he owns, Steven T. Mnuchin Inc. whose existence has not been reported outside of official records. Mr. Mnuchin set up the company months before Goldman went public in May 1999. It had a Goldman mailing address and at least one Goldman director. It stayed that way years after he left the Wall Street bank in 2002 to start his hedge fund career. Its purpose is a mystery. The only clue is in a description on corporate filings in Delaware calling the entity an “investment in partnerships. ” Barney Keller, a representative for Mr. Mnuchin, said the company “held small legacy Goldman Sachs investments” and “hasn’t made any new investments since 2002. ” Over the course of his career, Mr. Mnuchin, 53, has kept a low profile and has rarely granted interviews. His one previous spell in the limelight was when he ran OneWest Bank. He and other investors cobbled together the California bank out of the wreckage of IndyMac, a lender that the federal government seized in 2008 as the financial crisis grabbed hold of the nation. His tenure at OneWest spurred controversy because tens of thousands of borrowers — many of them older people — were foreclosed on. When a group of protesters gathered outside his Los Angeles house in October 2011 to voice their anger at OneWest’s foreclosure practices, police officers were called to disperse the crowd. He responded later by periodically scrubbing the internet of any reference to his home address to protect the privacy of his three young children, according to a filing Mr. Mnuchin made in a 2014 divorce proceeding. He is more comfortable in his own element — wealthy hedge fund managers like himself. Days after being tapped by Mr. Trump to be his finance chairman in May, Mr. Mnuchin flew out to a hedge fund conference at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. There, in a swirl of rock concerts, pool parties and casino nights, he schmoozed with billionaires. Mr. Mnuchin dined with Kenneth C. Griffin, the Chicago hedge fund titan, and government veterans like David H. Petraeus, the former C. I. A. director and retired general, and John A. Boehner, the former House speaker. He shook hands with Leon Cooperman, a pioneer in the industry and another Goldman Sachs alumnus. The courting paid off: Not long after the hedge fund conference, Mr. Mnuchin helped bring the billionaire investor John A. Paulson on as a donor, as well as Wilbur L. Ross Jr. now Mr. Trump’s commerce secretary nominee. It is these ties, however, that are expected to be fertile ground of investigation for senators who must confirm his selection as Treasury secretary. “I think he would be controversial — former Treasury secretaries have been top bankers and businessmen or lawyers and they were top leaders in their professions,” said Prof. Richard Sylla at the Stern School of Business of New York University, whose research focuses on financial history and economics. “But Mnuchin wasn’t that famous as a Goldman Sachs guy, and probably not even as a hedge fund guy, so why is he there? Well, he took the job of raising money for Trump. ” Mr. Mnuchin shares a network with some of the biggest names in the $3 trillion hedge fund industry, but his work with Mr. Paulson is of particular interest. An adviser to Mr. Trump, Mr. Paulson, who is best known for making a $15 billion wager that the housing market would collapse, has managed some money for the . The day after Mr. Trump formally selected him, Mr. Mnuchin said that the government should get out of the business of running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant mortgage finance firms that the federal government bailed out in 2008. The shares of the two companies soared in response to his words — some of the sharpest gains for the stocks since the government conservatorship began. The seemingly declaration was cheered by hedge fund managers and others who have bet big on the privatization of Fannie and Freddie. One of Mr. Paulson’s bigger bets is that the federal government will return Fannie and Freddie to private investors largely unfettered. And Mr. Mnuchin’s remark may have benefited someone else: Mr. Trump has invested $3 million to $15 million with Mr. Paulson’s hedge fund, according to the financial disclosure statement filed during his run for president. To date, the Trump transition team has not commented on whether Mr. Trump continues to own stakes in Mr. Paulson’s firm and other hedge funds listed on the disclosure statement. “We’re not sharing any additional information at this time,” said Jason Miller, a Trump representative. The has said that he will announce a plan for separating himself from his many business interests before his inauguration on Jan. 20. Similarly, Mr. Mnuchin will have to file financial disclosures with the Senate Finance Committee before his confirmation hearing. On Monday, he began the process by filing three years of tax returns. Mr. Mnuchin’s time at his hedge fund, Dune Capital Management, which he formed with two former Goldman colleagues in 2004, is one area that the Senate Finance Committee is expected to examine more closely. At its peak, the firm had roughly $2 billion and was backed by the billionaire investor George Soros. It had a taste for real estate, movie financing deals and exotic investments including life insurance policies, which Dune bought through a third party at discounted prices from older Americans. Dune had plans to package the insurance policies — called life settlements — into bonds that could be sold to investors. Life settlements represent one of the most macabre actuarial bets that Wall Street has dreamed up. It’s a wager that the elderly person selling the policy will die sooner rather than later, meaning the hedge fund does not have to make many premium payments to keep the insurance policy in force and collect the payout upon that person’s death. But the market for life settlements largely collapsed during the financial crisis. Eventually, Dune, like many hedge funds during the worst of the crisis, faced investor withdrawals. Mr. Mnuchin and one of his partners, Chip Seelig, decided to wind down the operation. The real estate arm of Dune was spun off into a firm led by Dune’s third Daniel M. Neidich. After the split, Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Seelig set up shop in Southern California. Both became big players in movie financing, lending money to hits like “Avatar” and “Gravity” along with flops like “In the Heart of the Sea. ” But it was the deal for a failed California bank, IndyMac, that contributed mightily to Mr. Mnuchin’s personal fortune and the one deal that has created the most political heat. On Friday, Senate Democrats, in a sign that they intend to go hard after Mr. Mnuchin, set up a website that calls him the “foreclosure king,” and asked customers of OneWest to submit complaints in advance of the confirmation hearing. In late 2008, Mr. Mnuchin joined with Mr. Paulson to put together the OneWest deal. They were part of the initial round of bidding for the assets of IndyMac, which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation had seized that summer. The group, which also included Mr. Soros and other investors, won the deal with a $1. 55 billion bid. One of the competing bids was put together by J. Tomilson Hill, head of the Blackstone Group’s hedge fund and asset management group, and Goldman. “As a deal person, I had nothing but admiration for how entrepreneurial he was and how quickly he adapted to the circumstances,” Mr. Hill said in a recent interview. He was one of the first to call Mr. Mnuchin to congratulate him on his new job as campaign finance chairman. The remnants of IndyMac reopened under the name OneWest with Mr. Mnuchin as chairman and chief executive. But controversy followed, including complaints over foreclosures on soured mortgages that IndyMac had written before the crisis. In particular, it drew scrutiny for its business in reverse mortgages — products pitched to older people who had paid off their initial mortgages but needed cash. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is investigating complaints about the foreclosure practices of OneWest’s reverse mortgage business, which resulted in 16, 000 foreclosures alone. CIT Group, which merged with OneWest last year in a $3. 4 billion deal that provided a hefty payout for Mr. Mnuchin and his has said it is trying to resolve the HUD inquiry. It is also dealing with a $230 million charge the company said in July it had to take in connection with accounting issues from the reverse mortgage business. An analysis in 2015 presented by the California Reinvestment Coalition, which lobbied against the merger, found that 68 percent of the 36, 000 foreclosures in California by OneWest, including those on reverse mortgages, occurred in communities that were primarily nonwhite. A government filing shows OneWest offered to modify about 101, 000 mortgages for its customers. Mr. Mnuchin stepped down from the helm of OneWest in March, not long before he became among the first in finance to come out for Mr. Trump and against Hillary Clinton. Mr. Keller said Mr. Mnuchin was “proud of his record at OneWest. ” Still, the worlds of finance and politics can be small ones, and Mr. Mnuchin even has a connection to Mrs. Clinton. The accountant at Goldman who prepared a tax filing for Steven T. Mnuchin Inc. many years ago has among her clients, at her current accounting firm, the former Democratic presidential candidate. | 1 |
When allegations surfaced last month that Facebook routinely suppressed conservative points of view in its Trending Topics news section, the company worked aggressively to convince the public that it wasn’t intentionally tilting to the left of the political spectrum. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s and chief executive, invited conservative luminaries to Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters, and over some fancy snacks, they seemed to make peace. The issue blew over. Yet it also seemed to raise deeper questions about Facebook’s power to influence how we understand what’s going on in the world. Measured by web traffic, ad revenue and influence over the way the rest of the media makes money, Facebook has grown into the most powerful force in the news industry. But the social network has never quite labeled itself as something analogous to a news organization, and it has been both uncomfortable with and unprepared to answer questions about whether it strives to adhere to journalistic ethics. Should we be thinking of Facebook as a news site? Is that how Facebook thinks of itself? No, not primarily, Facebook now says. In a document posted on Wednesday, the company explained, for the first time, the “values” that govern its news feed, the scrolling list of posts that Facebook presents to its 1. 65 billion users every time they log on. Though it is couched in the anodyne language of a corporate news release, the document’s message should come as a shock to everyone in the media business. According to these values, Facebook has a single overriding purpose, and it isn’t news. Facebook is mainly for telling you what’s up with your friends and family. Adam Mosseri, the Facebook manager in charge of the news feed, said in a recent interview that informing and entertaining users was also part of the company’s mission. But he made clear that news and entertainment were secondary pursuits. “We think more, spend more time and work on more projects that try to help people express themselves with their friends or learn about their friends or have conversations with their friends,” he said. As if to underscore the point, the company is making a tweak to its news feed ranking system to increase the prominence of content from your friends and family over posts by news companies and other organizations. It is also warning news companies that their traffic might decline as a result of the change. These moves highlight a truth that tends to get lost in commentary about the social network’s influence over the news: At Facebook, informing users about the world will always take a back seat to cute pictures of babies (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Because Facebook does not think of itself primarily as a news company, it seems to want us to stop expecting it to act like one. Whether we should, though, is a more complicated matter. The company has long been hounded by journalists and activists over its power to shape the news through its algorithms, or the code that determines which stories you see, in the news feed. The question of how to think about Facebook’s role in the news — and whether we should demand the same standards of accuracy, objectivity, transparency and fairness that we expect from traditional outlets — may be the primary puzzle of our new media age. According to Facebook, the values outlined in the document have been the informal governing philosophy of its news feed since it was started a decade ago, and Mr. Zuckerberg and Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, were deeply involved in drafting the new document. Mr. Mosseri says Facebook uses a variety of tools to make sure that the feed is delivering what users want. One of the main ones, he said, is user surveys, which give Facebook a rich trove of data. These surveys, and the fact that about 200 people are involved in building the news feed, act as a bulwark against any one person’s bias infecting it, Mr. Mosseri said. People’s preferences, and how Facebook adjusts to them, also mean that the feature will constantly change. “We view our work as only 1 percent finished,” the post says. But in another way, Facebook’s values only further complicate our picture of the network. If Facebook does not think of its main mission as news, what should we make of all its recent overtures to news companies? Last year it started Instant Articles, a feature that allows news companies, including The New York Times, to host their stories on Facebook. More recently, it signed contracts with lots of news companies to produce videos. The Times is among the companies that are receiving payments from Facebook to create live videos. Also, how should we react to the fact that for millions of Americans, Facebook has become the most important source of news about the world? The Pew Research Center found that for adults in their 20s and 30s, Facebook is far and away the most popular source of news about government and politics. And how should news companies think about ever deeper partnerships with Facebook, in some instances relying on the company as a primary part of their business models, if Facebook is disclaiming news as its main mission — and is also promising to keep changing the news feed as it sees fit? “This is a funny kind of transparency,” said Robyn Caplan, an analyst at the research group Data Society. “Even though they appear to have been making a bet that news is where they want their business to go, they’re now indicating that their first priority is to maintain that environment that they’ve been known for, which is information from friends and family. ” Ms. Caplan pointed out that even when Facebook’s values do superficially align with those of the news business, at a deeper level the two sides seem to see things in very different ways. For instance, Facebook’s document takes no stand on what kind of content it considers “informative. ” Instead, informative content is in the eye of the user. “Something that one person finds informative or interesting may be different from what another person finds informative or interesting — this could be a post about a current event, a story about your favorite celebrity, a piece of local news or a recipe,” the document says. Facebook also steps back from any responsibility for choosing certain ideas over others. Its news feed, it says, is instead about giving you more of what you want: “Our aim is to deliver the types of stories we’ve gotten feedback that an individual person most wants to see. ” That kind of relativism is likely to strike an odd chord among in the media, many of whom have worried about the possibility that algorithmic news selection could reinforce people’s beliefs. In a newsroom, news isn’t just what people want to see, and ideas worth promoting aren’t just those that people click on. News is supposed to exist outside those desires it’s supposed to be an objective good. So while it’s good that Facebook is telling us how it thinks about the news, it’s hard not to see a turbulent future as the views of Facebook and the news industry collide. Facebook isn’t primarily a news site, and it doesn’t see itself as a news site, except that for many users, it functions as the world’s biggest news site — and its sway, partnerships and money are now consuming the news industry. . | 1 |
Editor’s Note: We can only hope that the following is finally the real deal. As noted by Zero Hedge in the report below, the FBI is re-opening the probe into the Hillary Clinton email scandal. With less than two weeks to go before election day, however, we’re not convinced anything will come of it because once Hillary has been selected to the highest office of the land, it is quite likely that any and all investigations into all matters Clinton will cease instantly. So, unless charges are filed in the next week or so, chances are this “probe” will end just like the last one.
Via Zero Hedge :
Donald Trump has opined:
*TRUMP SAYS HE NOW HAS `GREAT RESPECT’ FOR FBI, DOJ *TRUMP ON FBI NEWS: `PERHAPS FINALLY JUSTICE WILL BE DONE’ *TRUMP: FBI WILL RIGHT THE SHIP *TRUMP SAYS FBI NEWS SHOWS SYSTEM MAY NOT BE `RIGGED’ * * *
As we detailed earlier, in a stunning development moments ago Jason Chaffetz tweeted that the FBI’s probe into Hillary Clinton emails has been reopened: saying that “ The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation .”
FBI Dir just informed me, “The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” Case reopened
— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) October 28, 2016
After being briefed by his investigative team, Comey “agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to asses their importance to our investigation.” Comey said he could not predict how long it would take the bureau to assess whether the new emails are “significant.”
Moments later, NBC News reported that the agency was reopening the investigation and shared a letter from FBI director James Comey informing key lawmakers of the investigation.. .
“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote. “I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information,” Comey wrote
The full letter to members of Congress, in which FBI director James Comey said the agency had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” in connection with an unrelated case, is shown below.
BIG: The FBI is reopening its investigation into @HillaryClinton ‘s email server. Here’s the letter from the FBI to Congress: pic.twitter.com/OKjipTeiJp
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) October 28, 2016
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Posted on October 28, 2016 by Edmondo Burr in Health // 0 Comments A man diagnosed with cancer 50 years ago and told by doctors that he had not got long to live, drank wine to forget his sorrows and found that it saved his life and cured his cancer.
98-year old Stamatis Moraitis who had refused chemotherapy and expensive medical procedures for his lung cancer decades ago lived long enough to share his story.
He even outlived his doctors before dying at the ripe old age of 100 from natural causes in 2013.
Underground Reporter :
There are now many studies proving chemotherapy can make cancer more malignant (deadly).
Some attest that chemotherapy and radiotherapy are both intrinsically carcinogenic treatments — so if a 98-year old man can live through a cancer diagnosis, without resorting to these treatments, what can we learn from him?
The answer is surprisingly simple.
Stamatis Moraitis was diagnosed with lung cancer in his 60s, and wanted his doctors to tell him how long he had to live. He was surprised by the diagnosis, but even more by the prognosis — that he was to live only six to nine months, according to medical ‘experts.’
Moraitis hails from the Greek island of Ikaria, known as a place where people ‘forget to die,’ as they have such high longevity rates. He opted to forgo chemotherapy and other medications, not because this was the Greek way, necessarily, but because he considered funeral costs to be too exorbitant in the U.S. where he had moved in 1943 to seek treatment for a combat injury. Upon learning he had little time, he opted to return to his native Ikaria.
Moraitis simply continued to work, and drank two to three glasses of wine every day, waiting for his certain death. At about age 50, he started to question the doctor’s prognosis, and at 98 years of age he says, “ I’m no doctor, but I think the wine helped. I’ve done nothing else except eat pure food, [drink] pure wine, [take] pure herbs. ”
His actions to cure his cancer are decidedly simple, but that’s what makes them so surprising. Americans have been taught to believe they need to spend thousands of dollars on chemotherapy drugs, and practically go into bankruptcy while also killing their healthy cells with chemo and radiation, instead of simply changing their lifestyle habits.
Moraitis is living proof that eating right, working in fresh air , and giving the body the proper nutrients — that scavenge free radicals and create an environment in which cancer cannot thrive — might be all it truly takes to live well and prosper.
Moraitis may not be a doctor, he quipped, but there are over 2,200 peer-reviewed scientific studies suggesting that his lifestyle was very conducive to his recovery.
Instead of spending more than $120,000 on pharmaceutical ‘cures’ which don’t necessarily work, he likely spent a few bucks every week on wine, fruit, and vegetables. He also happened to avoid the cost of an American funeral .
So, in essence, he spent less to live, than to die at the hands of modern, Western medicine.
“ I found my friends in the village where I was born, and we started drinking. I thought, at least I’ll die happy, ” he said when first given his death-sentence. | 0 |
New Reports Link Russia With Donald Trump’s Campaign Posted on Nov 1, 2016 Donald Trump at a rally in Nevada. ( Gage Skidmore / CC 2.0 )
A trove of new allegations has surfaced suggesting a relationship between Russia and the Donald Trump campaign.
In this unprecedented election season, the Republican presidential nominee has been accused repeatedly of fostering a friendly relationship with forces within the Russian government, and an adviser to his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, recently suggested that Russia has participated in illicit cyberattacks to further Trump’s campaign.
On Monday, Slate added fuel to the controversy by publishing an investigative piece in which journalist Franklin Foer alleged that a Trump computer server was communicating with an elite Russian bank. Foer wrote:
The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. …
The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank. …
Tea Leaves [a pseudonym for one of the researchers] and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States.
Another article, written by David Corn at Mother Jones on the same day, alleged that a former intelligence officer provided the FBI with information on a Russian scheme to help Trump win the presidency.
“There’s no way to tell whether the FBI has confirmed or debunked any of the allegations contained in the former spy’s memos,” Corn wrote. “But a Russian intelligence attempt to co-opt or cultivate a presidential candidate would mark an even more serious operation than the hacking.”
Is there any way to substantiate these claims? Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argued that while the “stories are overblown,” Russian interference in the current U.S. election is a serious problem. Beauchamp explained:
The problem with these stories isn’t just that they’re speculative. It’s that they obscure and even discredit the more sober evidence about Trump’s troubling attitude toward the Russian state.
There is basically conclusive evidence that Russia is interfering in the US election, and that this interference has been designed to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. There is strong evidence linking Trump’s foreign policy advisers to Russia, and Trump’s stated policy ideas are extremely favorable to Russian interests.
Beauchamp listed various “confluence[s] of interest” between the Kremlin and Trump, pointing to WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic campaign emails, Trump’s pro-Russia pronouncements and economic ties to Russian interests.
And NBC reported Tuesday that the FBI has launched a “preliminary investigation” into former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s possible “foreign ties” with Russia and Ukraine. The FBI has not commented and Manafort told NBC that “none of it is true.”
Vox’s Matthew Yglesias also cautioned against getting too excited about the new influx of allegations, writing that “Trump’s policy views on matters related to Russia are a lot clearer than any of these cloak-and-dagger allegations.”
Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers of The New York Times asserted, in an article published Monday, that the FBI has not “found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.”
“Intelligence officials have said in interviews over the last six weeks that apparent connections between some of Mr. Trump’s aides and Moscow originally compelled them to open a broad investigation ... ,” Lichtblau and Lee Meyers wrote. “[N]o evidence has emerged that would link him or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations.”
The renewed focus on the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia comes as Clinton is again making headlines for her potential misuse of a private email server. On Friday, FBI Director James Comey revealed that another round of emails related to the Clinton campaign is under review.
While the FBI investigation has not been formally reopened, many Clinton supporters are outraged at Comey’s timing, suggesting that his announcement so close to the election violated the Hatch Act .
With only a week until Election Day, it is unlikely that the accusations on either side will be proven or refuted before voters head to the polls. | 0 |
By Whitney Webb The Bureau of Land Management plans to hold an online auction next month which will grant fossil fuel companies the right to frack Ohio’s only national forest. The Bureau of... | 0 |
posted by Eddie Treasures may be found everywhere for those who have eyes to see—a perfect example of this being Shilajit, one of the most prized medicines throughout Asia for the last few thousand years. In its “wild habitat” you could be forgiven for simply thinking that it was a tar-like substance. oozing from the cracks in between rocks high up in the Himalayan Mountains. And the locals did for many thousands of years; however, in ancient times one had to look for clues from nature to better understand their natural habitat—particularly what was safe and what was poison. Upon seeing packs of native chimps snacking on the Shilajit tar and further observing that those who did seemed to be the strongest, most intelligent and long-lived of the bunch, the indigenous people began ingesting the night-black mineral pitch themselves. When they too began experiencing the benefits:—a rapid restoration of their health and enhanced cognitive and physical abilities—they knew they had stumbled on a great discovery. Oral tradition has it that this is how Shilajit was originally discovered. Maybe so, maybe not, but either way decades of intense scientific analysis and study have revealed that Shilajit is one of the most nutrient-dense substances on the planet. And what’s more, is that the nutrients it contains, such as naturally occurring humic and fulvic acids—two of nature’s most potent detoxifiers of heavy metals and other pollutants that disrupt the natural function of the body, and are quite rare to boot. Known euphemistically as the “destroyer of weakness,” much can be learned about the incredible properties and benefits of Shilajit by understanding the process of how it is created. Over the course of millions of years, the lush primeval vegetation that once blanketed Asia was decomposed by the forces of nature, eventually becoming highly compacted under the weight of the mountains, which later formed as continental plates collided. Over 6,500 different species of ancient plants spent many millennia in a sort of geological alchemy that created a thick, black, resin-like substance trapped deep within the Himalyan, Caucasus, and other famous mountain ranges in the region. The relentless monsoons and ever-increasing pressure eventually caused this “tar” to begin seeping from cracks in rocks in the sides of the mountains. “Intense scientific analysis and study have revealed that Shilajit is one of the most nutrient-dense substances on the planet.” Laboratory analysis of Shilajit reveals a complete spectrum of every essential mineral on the planet in ionic form—the most easily absorbable and assimilated by the human body. Scientists also found amino acids, fulvic and humic acids, ellagic acid, fatty acids and plant sterols, which tend to have a harmonizing effect on the hormonal/endocrine system, among many others. purified ladakhi shilajit resin from a tenth-generational family of herbal alchemists, considered by many to be some of the world’s best shilajit. it can be cut with a knife and is similar in texture to a hard candy, although more pliable. photo: lerina winter Although shamans and medicine men of the time could not possibly have understood its complex and unusual composition, they could easily discern the beneficial effects Shilajit was having on the people they treated, which was a massive restoration of health and wellbeing. The Benefits of Shilajit Shilajit acts on many different systems in the body, earning it a place among the prized natural medicines known as adaptogens, meaning it helps to restore balance to one’s system, whether that is through reducing excess (stress and cortisol, for example) or nourishing deficiencies (promoting sound sleep and giving endurance, strength and stamina) within the body’s various systems. One of the primary ways it does this is through its action on the endocrine system. As the master controllers of the body’s thousands of delicately tuned processes, hormones—or the lack thereof—have a very large influence on your health. They control mood, libido, sleep-wake cycles, hair growth, cognition, energy, consciousness and much more. Therefore it should come as no surprise that Shilajit has long been valued for its ability to restore sexual function, promote cognitive abilities, reduce anxiety and stress, improve mood and generally extend one’s lifespan. Quite impressive, to be sure. However, Shilajit’s beneficial medicinal properties are not solely limited to the endocrine system. It has also been shown to reduce pain and inflammation, making it one of the most sought after remedies for those suffering from arthritis. It also has a healing effect on the digestive tract, with the notable ability to repair ulcerated intestines and keep harmful bacteria in check. And, of course, it is also a great remineralizer and detoxifier, removing heavy metals and replacing them with those the body needs for health and wellbeing. It has also been used to treat allergies, malnutrition, anemia, and broken bones. It’s kind of like water: life is just better when you consume it regularly. Selecting Quality Shilajit Shilajit can be found seeping wildly in many mountain ranges across Asia, although each culture tends to have its own name for the substance. In Western and Central Asia it is typically referred to as Moomiyo, but in the areas in and around the Himalayas, it is referred to as Shilajit. While this may seem semantical, it is an important distinction due to the fact that, depending on the source, Shilajit/Moomiyo will have different compositions. Generally speaking, the best quality Shilajit is believed to originate from the Himalaya area. shilajit is harvested in remote regions of the himalayan mountains. However, because Shilajit is somewhat rare and difficult to collect, as well as the fact that the world’s supply originates in developing countries, the quality varies widely in the products currently available through various health food stores and websites worldwide. The most sought after and rare form is the night-black mineral resin, with only a handful of companies selling it worldwide. It is a sticky, wet-looking “tar” that is an intensely concentrated and purified form of Shilajit. It can be pricey, although a little goes a long way, making even a small amount last for months, even at higher dosages. That being said, there are many excellent, more affordable Shilajit products that come in a powdered form—though they will generally be slightly less concentrated and potent than the pure resin. The primary benefits of the powder are the ease of use, price, and the ability to measure precise amounts, if needed, as the resin itself is quite sticky. When using a powder discernment is needed, as not all brands are equal. (In the section that follows we recommend some high quality, potent and high integrity Shilajit powders that are not adulterated). The vast majority of products available worldwide are actually diluted Shilajit powders. Pure Shilajit resin is composed of approximately 2% to 10% naturally occurring humic and fulvic acids with the remaining portion composed of minerals and other medicinal substances. However, adulterated products are typically 10% to 30% actual Shilajit powder and about 70% to 90% extracted humic and fulvic acids, which can be produced cheaply in a lab and added afterwards. While not dangerous, the adulterated Shilajit powders do not posses the same powerful medicinal properties. Authentic, quality Shilajit always has a distinct, strong piercing tar-like odor that is unmistakable. If the product you have does not have a noticeably intense smell or seems ‘faint’, then it is likely old or diluted Shilajit. Shilajit is not grown like most herbs and foods, so there are no organic or conventional distinctions. If authentic and unadulterated, Shilajit is wildcrafted, which is truly what lends it such incredible healing properties. source: | 0 |
Lowlifes — and they act so self-righteous, scorning and smearing those of us who are fighting in defense of freedom and pursuit of truth. Crooks, liars, cheaters and worse.
If America elects these criminals, she deserves what’s to come.
Hacked email suggests Donna Brazile leaked question to Hillary Clinton campaign ahead of CNN primary debate, ” Business Insider, October 31, 2016:
Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, appeared to tip off Hillary Clinton’s campaign about a question in advance of a CNN Democratic primary debate in March, hacked emails published by WikiLeaks on Monday suggested.
“One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash,” Brazile emailed John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, and Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director.
Brazile added: “Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint.” That exact question was not asked the next night at the debate in Flint, Michigan. But Mikki Wade, a public-housing program manager who subsequently said in an interview that her son had developed a rash from the contaminated water, asked Clinton about the situation with the water in Flint.”If elected president, what course will you take to regain my trust in government?” Wade asked. Article posted with permission from Pamela Geller. Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here . shares | 0 |
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Videos Off-Duty Black Cop Profiled And Beaten By White Officer I went to the ground I kept saying, ‘I’m the police, I’m the police.’ There were two other officers there. I felt their presence and they placed me in handcuffs, and then somebody hit me in the right side of my face.” Be Sociable, Share! Washington D.C. police officer Robert Parker.
An off duty D.C. police officer says he was brutalized by a Prince George’s County police officer who profiled him as a suspect after a shooting at Iverson Mall on Tuesday.
A few minutes after a man was shot and wounded at the mall, Prince George’s County police descended on the Temple Hills neighborhood looking for a suspect who was only described as a black male wearing a hoodie and blue jeans, according to Paul Wagner of Fox 5 .
Robert Parker, an off-duty D.C. police officer who was also dressed in a hoodie and blue jeans, was walking away from the mall down Iverson Street. That’s when he says a black Prince George’s County officer pulled up alongside him in a police cruiser.
Obeying what he was told by the officer didn’t do Parker any good. Even though he obeyed, he was still thrown to the floor and punched in the head. “And I can’t remember if I said okay or was just kind of baffled at the moment, and he walked up to me and he started patting me down and I’m just thinking, is this really happening? Because I know the protocol because I’m a police officer,” Parker said. “He reaches around and feels my sidearm, my firearm and I look at him and I see the look in his eye and I say, ‘I’m the police.’ I’m literally slammed. I went to the ground I kept saying, ‘I’m the police, I’m the police.’ There were two other officers there. I felt their presence and they placed me in handcuffs, and then somebody hit me in the right side of my face.”
Parker says he wasn’t resisting and felt the take down and punch were totally unwarranted. He says he hates to pull the race card, but believes had he been white, the take down and what he views as excessive force would not have happened.
Parker injured his wrist when he was assaulted and went for treatment at the police and fire clinic as well as a hospital emergency room.
Prince George’s County police are defending their officer that assaulted an innocent man. They say he’s a 20-year veteran with a lot of experience, and is a supervisor in that section of the county. They also issued a lengthy statement which reads: “Based on our preliminary investigation and preliminary review of an audio recording of the encounter in question, we believe our officer acted professionally and with restraint. This encounter took place within several minutes of the shooting being reported at the mall and approximately three blocks from the scene. Our officer who was responding to the shooting, which had just prompted the lock-down of two nearby schools – spotted a man walking who matched the description. Our officer, a sergeant assigned to our district 4 station, got out of his cruiser and began an investigatory stop. During a pat down, our officer discovered the man had a gun on his waistband. At that point, our officer took the man to the ground during a brief struggle. Our preliminary investigation reveals that it was only after the man was restrained by the original officer and backup officers did he identify himself as a police officer.”
Even off duty officers are not immune to police brutality. Parker had a right to carry a concealed firearm and Maryland allows concealed carry of firearms, so even if he did not identify himself as an officer, there is still no reason to believe he was breaking any laws and still no reason to treat him the way they did. Will these officers be held accountable for assaulting an innocent man?
Watch the video below… | 0 |
RT :
For the first time since its inception in 2006, Russia has lost an election to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) after being narrowly beaten by Croatia in a vote. Saudi Arabia was successfully re-elected, despite criticism from human rights organizations.
The 47 places on the council are distributed on a regional basis, with staggered ballots seeing a third of the body re-elected each year. Russia had finished its three-year term and was running against Hungary and Croatia for the two available seats from Eastern Europe.
With Hungary far ahead, Croatia received the votes of 114 of the 193 member countries, and Russia was selected on 112 ballots.
“We’ve been in the UNHRC for several years, and I am sure next time we will stand and get back in,” said Russia’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin. Russia is eligible to run next year, against a new set of countries.
Saudi Arabia sailed through the Asian ballot with 152 votes, and will represent the region on the UNHRC alongside China, Japan and Iraq for the next three years.
South Africa, Rwanda, Egypt and Tunisia were chosen from the African group, Cuba and Brazil from Latin America and the Caribbean, and the US and the UK will represent the Western bloc, which comprises Western Europe and North America.
Russia is a normal Western country.
Saudi Arabia tortures and stones people to death for minor crimes.
Saudi Arabia has floggings for bloggings.
They are allowed to marry little girls and have sex with them when they’re nine.
They have public beheadings with swords.
They have a special machine to mutilate the hands of people caught reading the Bible.
They have a special machine for hanging homosexuals.
Okay, that one I basically agree with, but I don’t agree with brutally torturing them first, which they also do.
To have a “human rights council” and include Saudi Arabia is like some kind of sick joke.
And okay, I get that Russia wasn’t running directly against Saudi Arabia. But the whole thing is totally politicized in the first place. This is all manipulated based on favorite-picking.
And Saudi Arabia was running against a whole bunch of other countries which don’t do what they do – they are included in Asia .
There are a whole bunch of other countries which don’t do what Saudi Arabia does that could have been included on this list. In fact, no other country in the world does what Saudi Arabia does, including other Moslem countries, besides the Emeritae (also on the council) and Qatar.
This could have been to Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan – or any yellow Asian country.
The UN is a friggin joke. | 0 |
Breitbart News Senior Joel Pollak was a Breitbart News Daily guest on Tuesday to talk about his new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution. [Pollak told SiriusXM host Alex Marlow he chose the title for the book after the election was settled because he originally thought Donald Trump’s presidential campaign “was going to be a spectacular defeat — not necessarily a big defeat, but definitely one worth writing about. ” “I think the frame of mind that I was in was concern about what was going to happen to conservatism after Trump lost,” he revealed,“that there was so much infighting, that there had been a kind of civil war in the GOP, that all the knives were out — for you and me in particular, but for other people, as well, once this election was over. And so I started working on this, I pitched it to various people who I knew had an interest in publishing something, and started writing it with a view to trying to frame the debate after the election. ” “I knew Trump could win. I was one of the few people on that traveling press corps plane who thought he could still win. But I didn’t think it was likely, and so I wanted to make sure that the whole conservative movement didn’t collapse into infighting, and I wanted to try to frame what his defeat would mean so that going forward, there would be something productive and positive to do,” he said. “Larry Schweikart, my was quite the opposite. He had predicted in August 2015 that Trump would not only win the nomination, but would win the election,” Pollak recalled. “So there’s a healthy tension there in the book. ” “Larry had data that few other people had, and he talks about that data in the book,” he said. “He had people, for example, in various counties that were crucial to the outcome of the election tracking voter registration numbers. He knew that a large number of people in Ohio, for example, had switched their voter registration from Democratic to Republican, and he knew that coming out of certain parts of Ohio, coming out of Cleveland, for example, Democrats needed to have a certain advantage to balance out the Republican advantage in the rest of the state. And he began to see, very early on, they weren’t going to have that advantage, if people simply voted on partisan lines. ” “So he got the signal that if Trump managed to dominate the primary, which he did and was doing, he was going to win the election. There were enough people who were disgusted with the Democratic Party, there were enough Democrats willing to make the switch, that if a candidate came along who pitched a message to them, that was going to happen. So he talks about that in the book,” Pollak said. “I had the sense Trump was going to win the nomination only in about December 2015, when I went to my first Trump campaign event and saw with my own eyes this wasn’t a vanity candidacy this wasn’t a kind of joke,” he recalled. “This was a very real campaign and a real connection with the voters, who clearly felt tied in to what he was saying and doing. ” “That same visit also told me that the mainstream media had no idea what was going on because I went to a perfectly exciting, warm, fun Trump rally with about 3, 000 people in Nevada, and the next day, I saw it reported as a kind of Nazi rally by NBC. And that clued me in as to what was going on. I’d never been to an event where the description the day after was more different than the reality on the night of. That just was a cold bucket of water to the face, that this was going to be a campaign unlike any other, and Trump was going to have to go around the media to win,” he said. Pollak testified there were some “really interesting people” in the traveling press corps, “some great people, some professional people. ” “But generally, the consensus was that Trump didn’t have a chance,” he said. “It was almost a feeling like, we don’t know why we’re doing this anymore. You’d think the media would have an interest in playing up the contest, that the horse race would be interesting to people, that the drama of an election campaign would motivate people, but I think people were just exhausted. Trump was keeping a really tough pace, and they couldn’t really see the point of it all. ” He summed up the Trump press corps mindset as, “Why is he spending all this time on the road? Why are we doing seven states in one day? What’s the point? He’s not going to win, this is pointless, and the only way it’s interesting to us is to pick out little things he does that are weird, zany, unusual, and likely damaging. ” “They just couldn’t see the between Trump and the Clinton campaign. I think they just didn’t have a sense that it was going to be fun. That changed a little bit with the Comey announcement, which I saw in New Hampshire . It was more of a horse race. The media perked up a little bit,” he said. “But what was really interesting to me was that even though you might think commercially it was in their interest to play up the chance that Trump might win, they really seemed to have no interest in it, and no belief that he could,” Pollak said. “And so it was kind of almost a death march through all these different campaign rallies and stops in different states. I just don’t think they thought it possible, and some certainly were completely dismissive and mocking of him. ” He said one of the most surprising things he discovered on the Trump campaign trail was “just how determined the audiences were to vote for this man, to crawl over broken glass to vote for him, as our colleague John Nolte likes to say. ” He cited a rally in Virginia that had been scheduled to start at 9:30 p. m. on the Sunday before Election Day: “Trump had scheduled a lot of different events, and there was a large amount of traffic in one city because the police couldn’t clear the entire highway and so forth. In any event, the rally didn’t happen at 9:30 p. m. It happened at 12:30 a. m. in Virginia, the next morning. This is on a Sunday night into a Monday morning. It’s a school night. There are families there. We get there, thousands of people not only inside the hall, but outside, in the cold, young children with their parents, sleeping almost on their parents’ shoulders, waiting to see Donald Trump. Nobody had gone home! People had stayed there, and they were determined to be there. And when I asked people why they were there, they said, ‘We’re here to be a part of history. ’” “To the people in those audiences, there was no doubt that Trump was going to win,” Pollak observed. “They sensed a connection with this candidate that they hadn’t sensed with any other Republican candidate in decades. That felt new enough to them that they were convinced he was going to win. And that was really the first moment where I thought Trump might win, even though I thought the odds were still stacked against him and even though Election Day looked pretty rough until late in the evening. ” “The surprise to me was seeing the determination of the audiences,” he related. “At another rally in Michigan, I asked two young women why they were there, and they said something which I would hear repeated by others, which is: ‘He doesn’t have to be doing this for us, and we’re here because he loves us’ — which is odd, and it’s always strange as a journalist to hear that from people because you have something of a critical distance. ” “Even though we’re a conservative website, and we were more on the side of Trump, obviously, than the side of Clinton, you feel some kind of connection to what’s going on,” Pollak explained. “You never really get to that level of emotional investment. But people felt that because he had given up his Hollywood career, because he had suffered personal damage, because he had taken a hit in his businesses, he was sacrificing for them. That moved them to come out for him. And that was something I don’t think people really picked up on. That was surprising and I think part of the secret of why Trump actually won. ” Marlow asked Pollak for his list of the major storylines heading into Trump’s inauguration on Friday. “I think there are three main storylines,” Pollak replied. “The first is the outgoing administration, the Obama administration, casting doubt on Trump’s legitimacy. You’ll notice on Sunday, Meet the Press, Obama’s chief of staff would not say that Trump was legitimate. They said ‘freely elected,’ but they didn’t say ‘legitimate’ because they’re riding this Russian hacking conspiracy theory. They’re saying what John Lewis is saying. It makes me think that John Lewis is, in some ways, a surrogate for the administration. ” “They’re talking about what a great job they’re doing in the transition, while they’re totally undermining the premise of the transition. So I think the Obama administration is going out on a really sour note. That’s one storyline,” he said. “Another storyline is the inauguration itself and the protests that are going to be there,” he continued. “The day after, there’s going to be quite a bit of protests. The security services, the officials are preparing for that. But there’s a certain amount of unknown. We just don’t know how many people. We don’t know exactly what they’re going to do. James O’Keefe has been releasing videos about the inside planning that’s going on at some of these events, so we’re starting to lift the veil on that a little bit. That’s another uncertain element. And we know that MoveOn. org and other groups are planning nationwide protests on Inauguration Day and thereafter, so that’s another storyline, how the Left is trying to regroup. ” “And then the third storyline is the storyline about the Trump administration itself and how it’s going to start,” Pollak concluded. “This is now real. This is happening. He’s going to be President Trump on Friday. And he is beginning to unroll his agenda. We’re seeing some policies beginning to take shape. We’re seeing some very interesting clashes with Congress. ” “I think one of the more interesting elements of the Trump presidency is that the leading opposition force right now, at least, is going to be the conservatives in Congress, not Democrats,” he contended. “Democrats are busy whining about Russian hacking, and about John Lewis, and about deplorables and the or whatever. They’re still reliving the election and trying to undermine it. They haven’t yet connected with the fact that they lost for a reason. It wasn’t just that Trump won. It’s also that they completely lost touch with their voters, with their issues, and they haven’t pulled that together yet. ” “It’s the conservatives in Congress who are putting forward policies that Trump is agreeing with in many cases, disagreeing with in some cases — the fight right now with Paul Ryan over taxation. It’s going to be interesting to see the two sides hammer that out,” he said. “But if you’re a conservative, this is the kind of debate you want to see. You want to see a debate between alternate versions of conservatism. You don’t want to see a debate where conservatives always have to compromise with the far Left. So it’s an encouraging, positive sign if you’re a conservative, watching the administration in its first few days. ” Marlow noted that the media praised Obama for putting together a cabinet that didn’t agree on everything, while Trump’s transition has been portrayed as disastrous because he did the same thing with nominees. Pollak noted the media believe it has “a civic duty to oppose the Trump administration,” which is very different from the supportive role it saw for itself with Obama. “They believed the same thing during the campaign. It was their job to protect America from this Republican nominee,” he argued. “They failed at that job. Now they’re trying to set themselves up as the political opposition. There’s an element of that in the media’s role that is appropriate. I think where it starts to blend into inappropriate is where they’re starting to make very biased assessments against Trump that they didn’t make against Obama. ” He added to Marlow’s point about the transition that Obama was actually compared to Abraham Lincoln for assembling his “team of rivals,” even though he was to remember when “a member of Obama’s cabinet actually dissented about anything. ” As he recalled, the few officials who might have disagreed with President Obama about anything of importance left early in his first term, under somewhat cloudy circumstances. If anything, Obama’s cabinet was even less concerned with vibrant diversity of opinion than Bill Clinton’s, which saw the occasional public spat, and even resignations, over policy differences. Pollak suggested this lack of actual intellectual diversity in the Obama administration planted the seed of Hillary Clinton’s downfall, since she had great difficulty running as anything other than Barack Obama’s third term — something Americans clearly did not want. “Trump really has appointed people with very different views, compared to what his views are presumed to be,” he said. “We saw that with some of the questions in the confirmation hearings about waterboarding. We saw it about Russia policy. I’m not so sure Russia policy is an area where Trump has a completely defined view, by the way, so I don’t think that clash is particularly set. ” “But nevertheless, he has said openly he welcomes this exchange of views. He welcomes people with different views. That’s the sign of a person who has led organizations before, who is confident in having people with different opinions around the table, who’s also confident in his own ability to make the choice between those opinions, between different courses of action,” Pollak proposed. “It says something about his nominees, as well, that they are prepared to come into an administration knowing they may disagree on one or two points, but knowing that they have something to contribute nonetheless, and their job is to advocate for their point of view and to work together as a team if they decide to take, collectively, a different course,” he said. “So I think it’s a very encouraging sign. The media say it’s some kind of sign of incompetence — did Trump not know these people had these views? Or maybe Trump just doesn’t care. It’s always given a negative spin,” he observed, regretfully noting the media seemed to have learned nothing from its experiences on the 2016 campaign trail. Marlow argued that Trump has already done “a tremendous amount of good in putting the global elite on notice,” even though he has not been sworn in yet, citing the collapse of the planned policy summit in Paris this week as an example. “It’s amazing,” Pollak agreed. “But I also think it’s the inevitable result of the rest of the world coming to grips with the reality of what’s happening on Friday, to an extent that Democrats haven’t yet done. ” He suggested the political fallout from “that U. N. Security Council resolution that Obama pushed, where all of the other countries on the Security Council also supported this resolution, and the reaction from the Trump administration was quite stern” might have the Left’s realization that the Obama era is over. “It was clear that this was not acceptable to the incoming administration. This approach to Israel was done, it was over, and there was going to be a radical shift towards a stance, towards a strong U. S. relationship, and away from the confrontation that Obama had sought, when he wanted to put distance between the U. S. and Israel,” Pollak noted. “That’s why I think you already saw the U. K. walking back some of its statements. You saw Australia criticizing the U. N. Security Council. When John Kerry gave that speech at the State Department attacking the Israeli government, saying it was the most government and everything, Prime Minister Teresa May of the United Kingdom said we don’t do that we don’t criticize the composition of other democratic countries. And she rebuked John Kerry. And so I think people understood there was a new sheriff coming to town,” he said. “I think the original plan for the Paris conference, by the French and by Obama, had been to use that as a springboard for some kind of declaration of Palestinian statehood in the days before Obama leaves office,” he speculated. “Who knows? He’s got 72 hours or so left we’ll see what damage he can do. But I think that the reaction of the Trump transition team, and the to what happened at the U. N. put the rest of the world on notice that we are not going to continue Obama’s foreign policy. Not just with regard to the great powers, China and Russia and so forth, but we’re also going to make a break with the way he handled the conflict. Trump talks about negotiation and that sort of thing, but he wants to make clear that the U. S. is a strong ally of Israel — and not, as Obama did, make clear the opposite. ” Marlow turned back to the earlier discussion of how Democrats are challenging Trump’s legitimacy by playing a clip of Senator Marco Rubio ( ) essentially endorsing Rep. John Lewis’ moral authority. He asked why so many Republicans are still willing to fight under the Democrats’ rules of engagement. Pollak responded by quoting another of Trump’s rivals from the Republican primary, Senator Rand Paul ( ) who declared that he was capable of disagreeing with Rep. Lewis today without opposing the civil rights movement. “This is a conflation even the media don’t believe, but they’ve set it up this way,” he argued. “John Lewis has a track record, unfortunately, over the last ten years or so, of making these kinds of accusations, false accusations of racism against Republicans. He did it to John McCain. He did it in a more subtle way when Mitt Romney was running for president. Now, he’s doing it to Donald Trump. Eventually, you have to be called out on what you’re doing, and that’s legitimate to do. John Lewis is exploiting the civil rights struggle in a negative way. You could even say he’s demeaning it, by bringing it into this very partisan debate, the idea that the election was illegitimate. ” “What John Lewis is basically doing is disenfranchising the millions of voters who voted for Donald Trump, by saying that their vote didn’t count, that they were part of some Russian conspiracy,” Pollak charged. “To me, that’s the irony, that the civil rights movement is about marching for the right to vote, and here you are telling people that their votes don’t matter, that they’re part of some nefarious foreign plot. To me, that’s an irony for which John Lewis has to answer. ” He denounced Lewis’ tactics as an example of “politics distorting history,” given the implication that Trump is somehow worse than the racists who physically assaulted Lewis during the civil rights era and whom he forgave. As Pollak put it, Lewis is effectively stating he’s “not even willing to reconcile with the guy who had nothing to do with Jim Crow — and, in fact, for most of his life, Donald Trump was a Democrat, often seen in the company of Jesse Jackson and other people in the civil rights tableaux in New York City and urban America. ” “Now, I think John Lewis has made positive contributions,” he added. “I actually remember writing John Lewis a letter about a year ago because he spoke at my wife’s graduation. I expected him to give a very partisan address, and he didn’t. He gave a very nonpartisan, speech, and I wrote to him to say how impressed I was with the speech. I think you’ve got to reward these politicians when they do the right thing. But he is clearly not doing the right thing. ” As for Senator Rubio, Pollak suggested he is “trying to find his way” and “jockeying for a position among the leading voices in opposition, sort of conservative opposition, in Congress to Donald Trump. ” “There are some positive things in that. What’s missing, weirdly, from Rubio’s statement there and other issues is the sort of peppy joyfulness, the kind of optimism you associated once with Marco Rubio’s speaking style,” he lamented. “He seems very stern, very severe, sort of talking over the national anthem in the background. I mean, it’s just sort of weird. I don’t know where Rubio’s head is. ” Pollak ventured that it was unwise for a Republican with White House aspirations, such as Rubio, to give any degree of support to tactics that will be turned against him, should he realize his ambition to succeed President Trump. He also wondered if those tactics were going to pay off for Democrats, as they have done in the past, since they’ve made a habit of attacking voters, not just opposition political figures. “They’re not reaching out to those Obama voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan who switched their vote to Trump,” Pollak observed. “They’re not reaching out to them and saying, ‘Hey, we need to get back in touch with you. We need to understand your issues. You used to vote for us, you voted the other way this time. We need to figure that out and a relationship with you.’ No, what they’re telling those people is, ‘You’re part of a Russian conspiracy. ’” “It’s almost like back to the fifties and the McCarthy era, basically saying this is a Communist plot against the United States. Donald Trump is a Manchurian candidate who’s sent by the Kremlin to take over America,” he said. “It’s so ridiculously outlandish. It’s like birtherism elevated to a national political platform. Donald Trump pulled some shenanigans when he was going up against Barack Obama in 2011, 2012, we all know that, but a lot of that washed out by the time the presidential campaign happened, and he’s not doing that any more. Republicans as a whole never did that. Democrats are going down this really weird road, and it’s going to isolate them further from their own voters in the end,” he predicted. Pollak contended that the strength of the civil rights movement came from its unifying nature, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “succeeded by reaching out to what Americans held in common and refocusing it in a direction that he wanted to take the country. ” He noted that modern problems, such as persistent poverty, could only be solved through inclusive efforts, not by framing it as “a struggle by one group of Americans against another,” as today’s Left prefers. “One thing we forget about the civil rights struggle was how much faith was a part of it, how much religion, how much the Christian tradition was really brought to bear, and Americans were challenged to live up to it,” he added. “You don’t hear that when John Lewis is challenging Donald Trump and saying he wouldn’t invite him to Selma. I mean, that’s just silly. ” “Donald Trump’s statement that Lewis was ‘all talk and no action,’ I think, in a way, hit the nail on the head because he’s not talking about the civil rights movement. He’s talking about what Lewis is doing in politics today,” Pollak argued. He ran through the list of questions that flowed naturally from Trump’s response to Lewis: “What is John Lewis doing for his district? What is John Lewis doing for these problems of poverty in America? What are the Democrats doing? They’ve been in the minority now for six years, in the House. Have they achieved anything? What are they doing other than politics? What are they doing other than trying to take control again? Are they actually making any progress on those issues that they talk about every two years, around election time?” “I think that’s the challenge that John Lewis has to face, and I think every congressman has to face, but especially John Lewis. People who are elected to where they are partly because of who they are, partly because of their history, have a special burden to live up to that. Trump is saying, ‘Okay, well, where is it? What are you doing? Is this just about setting yourself up as a partisan every time somebody wants to attack the Republican Party, and you use the civil rights history — which, by the way, Republicans were much more on the side of civil rights than Democrats. The civil rights movement was largely a struggle against southern Democrats,” he noted. “Is that what you’re going to do — you’re going to just use this as a partisan hatchet every time? Or are you actually going to do something? I think that was a very appropriate challenge,” Pollak declared. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. LISTEN: | 1 |
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A load of manure was dumped outside the Democratic Party headquarters in Warren County.
“What reasonable person thinks this is OK????” party chair Bethe Goldenfield said in a post in the Greater Cincinnati Politics Facebook Group . “I won’t be responding to anyone who thinks this is acceptable behavior. It is ILLEGAL!”
The same thing happened in 2012, Goldenfield noted. The suburban Cincinnati county is overwhelmingly Republican; Mitt Romney got 69 percent of the vote four years ago. It’s been almost 40 years since a Democrat was elected to countywide office.
Goldenfield told The Enquirer the Warren County Sheriff’s Office called her around 7:45 a.m. Saturday alerting her to the manure pile outside the Lebanon building. Deputies met party officials later to review video.
“Hopefully the perps will be held accountable for their actions,” she said.
Jeff Monroe, chairman of the Warren County Republican Party, said the GOP had nothing to do with the manure “and has offered to help clean things up.” | 0 |
Bobby Freeman, whose “Do You Want to Dance” climbed the pop charts in 1958 and endured long afterward in covers by the Beach Boys, the Ramones, Bette Midler and others, died on Jan. 23 at his home in Daly City, Calif. He was 76. The cause was a heart attack, his son Robert Freeman Jr. said on Monday. The death had not been widely reported. Mr. Freeman was still a teenager when he wrote and recorded the song that became his signature. Sung with infectious enthusiasm and featuring a driving Latin rhythm and a joyful guitar solo, “Do You Want to Dance” reached No. 5 on the Billboard singles chart. An energetic showman and dancer, Mr. Freeman was soon touring with Fats Domino and Jackie Wilson and appearing on television shows like “American Bandstand” and “The Dick Clark Saturday Night Beechnut Show. ” Mr. Freeman’s version of “Do You Want to Dance” (also known as “Do You Wanna Dance,” with and without the question mark) embodied the spirit of early rock ’n’ roll, but the secret to the song’s longevity was that artists interpreted it in myriad ways. The Beach Boys reached No. 12 on the Billboard chart in 1965 with a typically interpretation. John Lennon recorded a dreamy reggae version. The Ramones ramped up Mr. Freeman’s energy to levels. Both the Mamas and the Papas and Ms. Midler slowed the song down Ms. Midler’s version, a sensual ballad, reached No. 17 on the Billboard chart in 1973. She told CBS News in 2006 that “Do You Want to Dance” was her favorite song. The song was also featured on the soundtrack of George Lucas’s rock ’n’ roll film “American Graffiti” (1973). Mr. Freeman was not a wonder. “C’mon and Swim” (1964) — a young Sly Stone was its producer and a — reached No. 5 on the Billboard chart. “Betty Lou Got a New Pair of Shoes” (1958) also charted. Robert Thomas Freeman was born in Northern California on June 13, 1940, and raised in San Francisco. He attended Mission High School there before joining the Romancers, a group. In addition to his son Robert, his survivors include another son, Jerrald his partner of 17 years, Michele Ellen two daughters, April Freeman and Nichole Hackett and several grandchildren. Mr. Freeman released a handful of songs after 1964, but none became hits. He spent years performing at clubs in San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Reno, Las Vegas and other cities, and that was fine with him. “I’m just as content as I could be with what I’m doing,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. “I have no complaints whatsoever. ” | 1 |
While relatives and supporters of Adnan Syed celebrated a Maryland judge’s decision to grant him a new trial in the 1999 murder of his former girlfriend Hae Min Lee, members of Ms. Lee’s family on Friday expressed disappointment in the decision and said they remained convinced of his guilt. “We do not speak as often or as loudly as those who support Adnan Syed, but we care just as much about this case,” the family said in a statement released by the office of the Maryland attorney general. “We continue to grieve. We continue to believe justice was done when Mr. Syed was convicted of killing Hae. ” “While we continue to put our faith in the courts and hope the decision will be reversed, we are very disappointed by the judge’s decision,” the statement continued. The family expressed gratitude to prosecutors “for standing by the true victims and for giving Hae Min Lee a voice. ” Mr. Syed, whose case was chronicled in the first season of the hit podcast “Serial,” was granted a retrial on Thursday by Judge Martin P. Welch of the Baltimore City Circuit Court. It was a major victory for an inmate who has maintained his innocence for almost two decades. He has served 16 years of a life sentence after being convicted in 2000 of murder and kidnapping. On Friday, Mr. Syed’s lawyer, C. Justin Brown, said on Twitter that his client had been “informed of the decision. ” At a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Brown said of the possibility that Mr. Syed might eventually be freed: “I’m feeling pretty confident right now. This was the biggest hurdle. It’s really hard to get a new trial. ” Charles P. Ewing, a law professor at the University at Buffalo who was interviewed in the podcast, said in an email, “The state now has the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that he is guilty, and that is much more difficult after years. ” He added, “Some of the evidence is no longer available, witnesses will be unavailable, evidence is stale and people’s memories are not the same after that period of time. ” Mr. Brown has said that he believed the retrial would not have been granted if “Serial” had not turned Mr. Syed’s case into a pop culture touchstone in 2014. The podcast, which examined whether Mr. Syed had received a fair trial, was downloaded more than 100 million times and won a Peabody Award. The judge’s decision came after three days of postconviction hearings in February. Lawyers for Mr. Syed presented new evidence, including testimony from a new alibi witness. They also argued that his original defense counsel, Maria Cristina Gutierrez, had been grossly negligent when she decided not to question a state’s expert about the reliability of cellphone tower data prosecutors had submitted as evidence. Ms. Gutierrez died in 2004. Mr. Syed’s brother, Yusuf, 26, said on Thursday, “We really felt 100 percent that the judge would rule in our favor. ” Rabia Chaudry, a family friend of Mr. Syed’s who introduced Sarah Koenig, the host of “Serial,” to the case, thanked the judge and witnesses, writing on Twitter: “WE WON. WE WON. WE WON. WE WON. ” With Friday’s statement, Ms. Lee’s family continued to push back at the attention and support Mr. Syed has drawn. In February, her relatives expressed their anguish over his request for a new trial. A family statement released by the office of the Maryland attorney general then said it had been painful to see the case resurrected and watch a man convicted of killing their daughter attract public support. “It remains hard to see so many run to defend someone who committed a horrible crime, who destroyed our family, who refuses to accept responsibility, when so few are willing to speak up for Hae,” the family said at the time. Ms. Lee was last seen on Jan. 13, 1999, and her body was discovered a few weeks later in a shallow grave in a West Baltimore park by a according to The Baltimore Sun. Her mother, Youn Wha Kim, took the stand at Mr. Syed’s sentencing hearing in 2000 and, through an interpreter, told the court that she could not bring herself to forgive him for her daughter’s death, The Baltimore Sun reported. “When I die, my daughter will die with me,” she told the court. “As long as I live, my daughter is buried in my heart. ” | 1 |
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, who has championed the arts and welcomed refugees while in office, said on Saturday that he would visit Broadway to see a new musical that highlights Canadian generosity toward stranded airline passengers after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The show, “Come From Away,” is the rare Broadway musical by and about Canadians, and has been greeted enthusiastically by audiences in that country. It is now in previews on Broadway and is set to open March 12. Mr. Trudeau said he and his wife, Sophie, would attend the show on March 15, joining a group of about 600 people attending with the Consulate General of Canada in New York. “Come From Away,” with music, lyrics and book by a married Canadian couple, Irene Sankoff and David Hein, is about the encounter between the residents of Gander, Newfoundland, and thousands of international air travelers who were diverted there on the day of the attacks. The show was nurtured by the Canadian Music Theater Project at Sheridan College near Toronto, which is trying to cultivate more musical theater by Canadian writers. The founder of the project, Michael Rubinoff, said the show was only the fifth musical with a Canadian writing team to reach Broadway, after “Rockabye Hamlet” in 1976, “Billy Bishop Goes to War” in 1980, “The Drowsy Chaperone” in 2006 and “The Story of My Life” in 2009. All but “The Drowsy Chaperone” were considered flops. “This is extremely culturally significant, having a Canadian musical, written by Canadians about Canadians, on Broadway — that’s historic,” Mr. Rubinoff said. He said the show would probably appeal to Mr. Trudeau because of his interest in the arts — he once taught high school drama — and because of his political agenda. “The show speaks to his values,” Mr. Rubinoff said. “Welcoming refugees, kindness — these are issues he’s been championing since he’s been prime minister, and those themes speak to him now more than ever, given the international political climate. ” Mr. Trudeau’s spokesman, Cameron Ahmad, said Sunday that the prime minister is coming in part to “support the success of a great Canadian cultural production. ” But he made clear that the show’s themes are also a consideration. “Both our countries share a deep relationship, that extends far beyond our economic ties, and is made stronger by cultural connections and shared values,” Mr. Ahmad said. “And we embrace the opportunity to highlight how we are there for each other in times of need. ” The show has had multiple productions — at the La Jolla Playhouse, Seattle Repertory Theater, Ford’s Theater in Washington and the Royal Alexandra Theater in Toronto. The Toronto production was a particular success, and the show’s producers have announced that they will begin a second production of the show in Toronto next February. Several Canadian politicians have already seen the show. Last fall, when the cast performed a concert version of the show in Gander, the audience included Dwight Ball, the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as Frank F. Fagan, the province’s lieutenant governor. Mayor John Tory of Toronto saw the show in his city. The mayor of Calgary, Alberta, Naheed Nenshi, attended a Broadway preview, and then declared it the “best musical I’ve ever seen. ” The show has also prompted quite a bit of interest among American government officials. Among those who saw the production in Washington were Justice Elena Kagan of the Supreme Court Laura Bush, the former first lady members of Congress and some military officials. Several members of the Obama administration also attended a performance, including Samantha Power, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, and Susan E. Rice, the former national security adviser. | 1 |
On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” host Chris Matthews argued that people in the White House would be frightened of disagreeing with Jared Kushner and made another comparison between Kushner and Saddam Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusay. Matthews said, “[W]ho wants to take on Jared Kushner in a meeting on the Middle East, have that conversation? Scared to death. everybody — oh my God, is like ‘Oh I — ‘ they don’t want to say nothing. A little bit like Uday and Qusay. Not that bad. … I shouldn’t be that tough, but I am. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf wants to fund a $32 million budget deficit by grabbing millions in revenue from November’s soda tax initiative — and critics are accusing her of a “ . ”[According to the East Bay Times, three of the nine members of the City Council are blasting Mayor Libby Schaaf’s plan to repurpose the soda tax revenue away from health spending to plug the city’s budget that she plans to present on May 5. The mayor’s spokesperson, Erica Derryck, issue a statement on May 1 claiming that Schaaf’s plan’s use of the revenues is “consistent with the goals of the measure. ” City of Oakland voters approved Measure HH on the November ballot by an over 61 percent majority. The initiative assessed a tax of on the distribution of beverage products including sodas, sports drinks, sweetened teas, energy drinks and fruit products that were not 100 percent pure juice. The City Council’s big selling point to voters for the tax increase was the Oakland City Auditor’s “Impartial Analysis of Measure HH’”that promised soda tax revenues would be managed by a ‘Community Advisory Board comprised of medical, dental and School District parents to determine “how and to what extent the City Council should establish and fund programs to prevent or reduce the health consequences of consuming beverages in Oakland. ” The big reason that the City of Oakland is willing to anger voters is that the union wage and pension costs from the city council’s July 2014 passage of a $15 minimum wage are jumping. With the latest spike to $12. 86 an hour on January 1, the mayor and her 5 council allies are desperate to find new cash. The Oakland City Council’s own December 2014 minimum wage staff report highlighted that that there was no “legislative solution” to address the annual impact from thousands of unionized city recreational aides, senior aides and student trainees jumping in cost by 35 percent from $18, 155 to $24, 500 per year. The city’s SEIU contract also requires equivalent higher contributions for sick leave and pension benefits. The California Policy Center reported that the Oakland’s Human Resources Management Department also expected a $15 minimum wage to have a contractual ripple effect from the “compaction” of city wage comparisons. SEIU labor contracts mandate that public employees must also receive compaction wage and pension increases. Councilman Noel Gallo told the San Francisco CBS TV affiliate that there is no problem with how the soda tax will now be spent because “It will be used to support children and family activities. ” Gallo says the soda tax will support libraries, parks, fix potholes, and build affordable housing. Critics point out that the burden of the soda tax falls disproportionately on the poor. The first hearing of the mayor’s budget will be on May 5. The final City of Oakland budget must be adopted by June 30. | 1 |
Once called the world’s greatest purveyor of violence by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the US government has made a habit of issuing vapid self-serving and hypocritical statements about humanitarian crises all over the world.
In some cases, a flack standing behind a government podium will give a boilerplate condemnation of the violence and horrors, while in many cases a simple press release will do.
So it was the normal routine on Tuesday, when UN Ambassador Samantha Power issued another typical empty condemnation of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, where thousands have been killed and thousands more are starving to death. But the bullshit did not stand long.
Activists immediately pointed out it was the government for which Power was speaking that was leading the slaughter, providing the very weapons the Saudis were using to bomb civilians and damage the food supply.
In fact, it was a US-made bomb that Saudi Arabia used on a Doctors Without Borders hospita l in Northern Yemen in August that forced the organization to leave the country. The Saudis have targeted hospitals, schools, and other civilian targets in their brutal bombing campaign to destroy the Shiite Houthi rebels.
In October, the Saudis even bombed a funeral, which an analysis by Shadowproof reveals happened just weeks after the US shipped hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons to Saudi Arabia.
Among the weapons the Saudis have received from the US are the controversial CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapon from Textron Systems of Wilmington, Massachusetts. The CBU-105 is a cluster bomb, which are banned by a large number of a countries for their lethality on civilians both during and after conflicts. Cluster munitions may detonate well after they are dropped, maiming and killing children and others.
Saudi Arabia received the weapons as part of one of the biggest arms deals in US history, negotiated by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton completed the historic arms deal despite telling John Podesta in a private email that she knew Saudi Arabia was financing and arming ISIS.
The Saudis appeared quite appreciative of Clinton’s work and even made millions of dollars worth of donations to Hillary Clinton’s favorite charity, the Clinton Foundation.
So, yes, no one is going to take the US condemnations of Saudi war crimes in Yemen seriously when the US is knowingly supplying the weapons used to commit them. Ambassador Power can point her blood-soaked finger at herself.
The post US Condemnation Of Yemen Slaughter Backfires As World Blames US appeared first on Shadowproof .
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Veteran IT Training Program Leads to 100% Job Placement ‹ › SARTRE is the pen name of James Hall, a reformed, former political operative. This pundit's formal instruction in History, Philosophy and Political Science served as training for activism, on the staff of several politicians and in many campaigns. A believer in authentic Public Service, independent business interests were pursued in the private sector. As a small business owner and entrepreneur, several successful ventures expanded opportunities for customers and employees. Speculation in markets, and international business investments, allowed for extensive travel and a world view for commerce. He is retired and lives with his wife in a rural community. "Populism" best describes the approach to SARTRE's perspective on Politics. Realities, suggest that American Values can be restored with an appreciation of "Pragmatic Anarchism." Reforms will require an Existential approach. "Ideas Move the World," and SARTRE'S intent is to stir the conscience of those who desire to bring back a common sense, moral and traditional value culture for America. Not seeking fame nor fortune, SARTRE's only goal is to ask the questions that few will dare ... Having refused the invites of an academic career because of the hypocrisy of elite's, the search for TRUTH is the challenge that is made to all readers. It starts within yourself and is achieved only with your sincere desire to face Reality. So who is SARTRE? He is really an ordinary man just like you, who invites you to join in on this journey. BREAKING ALL THE RULES hosts SARTRE Commentary. BATR.org and BATR.net Globalist Plan for Human Control By Sartre on November 8, 2016
Recognizing that there is and has been a century’s long shrouded plan to mastermind a worldwide Weltanschauung that puts a diabolical elite mastery over the billions of human beings, which make up the vast hordes of divinely created life on this planet, is a taboo topic in most cultures. The entire system of socially manufactured perception is a plot to keep people in line and docile. Mass societal pressure is dumped on anyone, who dares to put forth a confederacy organism of global rule explanation for understanding political, social and economic affairs. Keeping the enigma program for extending a cruel and deadly supremacy over mankind cannot be kept secret any longer.
A brief and concise definition of The Globalist Agenda follows:
“Simply put, the globalist movement is an alliance based on self-interest of the private international financiers and the royal, dynastic and hereditary land owning families of Britain, Europe and America which over the years have intermarried to create a self regenerating power structure that through lies and deception seeks to control everything and everyone on earth.”
Review the glaring elements that make up the demented mindset and ultimate objections of these demonic demons devoted to their satanic master.
Elite Belief System / Values
The Ends Justify the Means Mystery Religions / Occult
Population Reduction to less than 1 Billion people Post Industrial Feudalism Transhumanism End of the Age – New Age
This summary of attitudes and aims might not be earth shattering for dedicated observers of the power elite, but for those who avoid any appearance of being tagged as a tin foil wearing conspiracy kook, mustering up the courage to confront the facts of real history may be too much to contemplate. Nullifying one’s comfort zone, even if it is totally false, is not an attribute for those who never developed character of sincerity or intellectual honesty.
Prof. Dr. MUJAHID KAMRAN provides a well documented account of Who Really Controls the World? Coming from a non Western perspective, it is most encouraging that the exposure of the force beyond the scene is resonating in every corner of the planet.
“The wealthiest families on planet earth call the shots in every major upheaval that they cause. Their sphere of activity extends over the entire globe, and even beyond, their ambition and greed for wealth and power knows no bounds, and for them, most of mankind is garbage – “human garbage.” It is also their target to depopulate the globe and maintain a much lower population compared to what we have now.”
When The Communist Takeover Of America – 45 Declared Goals from “ The Naked Communist ,” by Cleon Skousen was published, most people were diverted to thinking that a Marxist ideology was the primary enemy during the cold war. Left to the perceptive and astute, the most informed understand that the totalitarian creed of collectivism was originated and implemented by Jews. The influence of designed destruction for Western institutions and heritage, which facilitate and spreads the New World Order power structure, is the sacred canon of the privileged Globalist elites.
A serious researcher cannot ignore or circumvent this historic fact. Academic censorship would have the timid stay clear of this detail to avoid being smeared as a critic of the “so called” chosen tribe. Those who buy into this asinine prerequisite, which is the height of chutzpah, would be petrified to actually review the sentiments of What world famous men said about the Jews .
Now not every wicked globalist is exclusively Jewish. However, the proportion of Judaic race identity and Talmud proponents within the Globalist circle of black magic is overwhelmingly disproportionate to their population numbers. Also, there is no one single mythos viewpoint among globalists as The Two Jewish-led Globalist Camps… In Competition For Global Control illustrates. “There are two distinct ideological globalist camps, both led by Jews — each camp competes with the other for global control: 1) THE LIBERAL CAMP 2) THE NEOCON CAMP”
The inquiry into the influence of Jewish Faces in the Government can fill several books. Yet, the bias against covering this topic is so strong that only brave souls venture into the cauldron of popular culture ostracization.
If you have the courage to venture where most will not dare, take a close look at the lists provided on THE GLOBALISTS site. The lead rundown presents: “The global elite march in four essential columns: Corporate, Academic, Political and Organized Religion . In general, the goals for globalism are created by Corporate. Academic then provides studies and white papers that justify Corporate goals. Political sells Academic’s arguments to the public and if necessary, changes laws to accommodate and facilitate Corporate in getting what it wants. Organized Religion along with church and state secures corporate, academic and political rule into a global order.”
The lists of oligarch families, Committee of 300 and organized groups of the ruling class is a combination of dynasty elements that make up their cabal syndicate of power and dominance. The Rothschild linage bears the most attention for the central blood line of the international finance and the global cartel. Nevertheless, the choreographed architecture for governance goes well beyond an analysis of money, politics and force.
In order to restrict the world view and impose a rigid abidance into an occult Babylonian religion, The Globalist Agenda contends: New Religion Based on Earth Worship
“Today, the elite are seeking to destroy the old religious belief systems and replace them with a “new age” religion based on a form of earth worship. Doing so will accomplish multiple objectives – to get people to accept lower standards of living; to accept voluntary sterilization to save mother earth thus helping to depopulate the planet; and to accept restrictions on rights and freedoms in the name of saving the environment.”
The Globalist Plan to take-down the whole World by Preston James, Ph.D postulates:
“ Set up a comprehensive multi-level secret Luciferian matrix used to induce and promote selected individuals who are willing to do anti-human debased acts in exchange for extreme rewards of fame, money and power in return for their willingness to give up their souls. This provides a cadre of deeply committed sold-out top controllers who can be later disposed of when no longer needed. With abject secrecy their whole system becomes exposed and crumbles.”
This certainly sounds similar to the way the Plutocrat Jewery deviltry operates. For an evaluation on how The Dark Agenda Behind Globalism And Open Borders works, Zero Hedge sounds a familiar theme.
“ The people behind the effort to enforce globalism are tied together by a particular ideology, perhaps even a cult-like religion , in which they envision a world order as described in Plato’s Republic. They believe that they are “chosen” either by fate, destiny or genetics to rule as philosopher kings over the rest of us. They believe that they are the wisest and most capable that humanity has to offer , and that through evolutionary means, they can create chaos and order out of thin air and mold society at will.”
Now what group of self proclaimed super elites does this most scrupulously describe?
The globalist plan for human servitude and ultimate liquidation is a direct result of the hubris from these deranged omnipotent imposters. Only through a sincere and dedicated investigation into the working of the “ Khazarian Mafia ”, a term penned by Dr. James, can one begin to comprehend the nature of the pandemic ethos that is at the core of the globalist cult.
Who better to conclude a dissecting of the Globalist Plan for Human Control than the teaching of Texe Marrs? From his Exclusive Intelligence Examiner Report you get an account you will not read in the controlled media.
“Children of hell, that’s what Jesus called the Jewish religious teachers. That was almost 2,000 years ago. Well, guess what? The Jewish religionists are even worse now, in the 21st century. They’ve had almost 2,000 years more to practice and perfect their evil religion. Today, those who practice satanic cabalism and believe in the Talmud are the children of hell a hundred times over.”
The globalists adopt the practices and mores of this perversion from the Old Testament faith of Moses, Isaac, Jacob, and the prophets. Their design for a soulless existence and final mass annihilation is the essence of archfiend wickedness. The New World Order structure of global submission basically wants to remove free will from the human condition.
Every thinking and God fearing person must resist and oppose the autocracy of the Tempter for global secularization. As more individuals assimilate into a reprobate culture that lacks faith in the divine word of God, the end collapse of society and all decency is inevitable.
SARTRE – November 8, 2016 | 0 |
Researchers, academic officials and science policy makers are expressing alarm at President Trump’s order barring entry to the United States to people from certain predominantly Muslim countries, saying it could hinder research, affect recruitment of top scientists and dampen the free exchange of scientific ideas. The executive order, issued on Friday and clarified somewhat over the weekend by administration officials, potentially affects thousands of students and researchers from Iran, Iraq and five other countries. Foreigners fill the undergraduate and especially graduate ranks at many American universities, and newly minted Ph. D. s from overseas flock to the United States for research and teaching positions in academic laboratories. Mary Sue Coleman, the president of the Association of American Universities, said that by one estimate, there were about 17, 000 students from the seven countries at American universities. “I’m concerned about it hampering our ability to recruit outstanding graduate students,” said Samuel L. Stanley Jr. the president of Stony Brook University on Long Island. Dr. Stanley spent the weekend monitoring the work of immigration lawyers in a successful effort to release a Stony Brook graduate student from Iran, Vahideh Rasekhi, who was en route to Kennedy Airport when the order was issued and was detained after she landed. “Immigration into the United States is tremendously important to science,” said Soumya Raychaudhuri, a Harvard Medical School professor whose Iranian postdoctoral researcher, Samira Asgari, was barred on Saturday from boarding a flight to begin her job in his laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “There are other countries competing for this talent pool, and walking away from that jeopardizes our standing. ” Some foreign universities, while condemning the ban, also pointed out that they still welcomed students and researchers from anywhere. The University of British Columbia announced the establishment of a task force, with an initial budget of 250, 000 Canadian dollars (about $190, 000) “to determine what assistance the university can offer those affected. ” Since the restrictions, some institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California system, have advised students or faculty members from Iran, Iraq and the other affected countries not to travel overseas until further notice. The order could prevent many foreign researchers from making trips to attend conferences and other scientific meetings overseas for fear of not being able to return. The restrictions could also affect meetings in the United States, as some foreign scientists would not be allowed to travel here. The country’s largest general scientific organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said it was worried that the restrictions might reduce attendance at its annual meeting in two weeks in Boston. Hundreds of foreigners normally attend the conference. “We are of course concerned that this issue may affect scientists and students traveling to Boston,” said Tiffany Lohwater, an official with the association. She said the organization was considering alternative measures, including free of sessions, for those who could not attend. Jennifer Golbeck, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, said her department had a number of Iranian students and researchers. Using social media, Dr. Golbeck in recent days has organized a database of people willing to shelter scientists and others who were in transit to the United States and were halted by the order. “There’s a lot of people from these seven countries,” Dr. Golbeck said. “And suddenly there’s this possibility that faculty members, students, postdocs and others who are outside the country for one reason or another suddenly can’t come back. ” Solmaz Shariat Torbaghan, an Iranian neuroscience researcher at New York University who was awaiting a green card, said the order would force her to soon make a decision: stay and take her chances, or move to Canada. “My partner and I just moved into a new place here, we are waiting for our furniture, and were hoping to have our parents visit us in a couple of months, which is not a possibility anymore,” she said. “Now, I don’t know what’s coming next. ” The uncertainty, she added, is not good for her research colleagues, either. “People in my lab are very supportive,” she said, “but in an experimental lab, people need to know they can count on you, that you’re not going to be suddenly gone and leave the project. ” The order may also affect work at some of the country’s most prestigious medical institutions. Eleven patients from the seven affected countries, which also include Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen, were planning to travel to Johns Hopkins University for medical treatment within the next 90 days, said Pamela Paulk, the president of Johns Hopkins Medicine International. All have visas, she said, but now it is not clear whether or when they may come. “We are taking steps to see what the ban means for them,” she said. “Right now the ban is vague, and we don’t know if there will be health exceptions. ” She said that patients who travel from the Middle East to the United States for treatment generally have severe illnesses that cannot be treated in their home countries, and need complex treatments like neurosurgery, heart operations or bone marrow transplants for cancer or blood diseases. Some cannot afford, medically, to wait. Johns Hopkins may also lose at least one graduate student. Omid Zobeiri, 28, is an Iranian citizen who began working on his doctorate in biomedical engineering in September 2015 at McGill University in Montreal. His mentor and supervisor at McGill moved to Johns Hopkins last summer and hoped to take Mr. Zobeiri with her so he could continue the research he had begun in her laboratory. Mr. Zobeiri applied for a visa during the summer, but had not received one yet when the ban was announced on Friday. “After this ban, I basically give up right now, or wait some months,” Mr. Zobeiri said. “I don’t know my future. ” Kathleen Cullen, Mr. Zobeiri’s supervisor and a professor of biomedical engineering, described him as “phenomenally talented and a wonderful scientist,” and said he had been selected from among many applicants. She said his being kept out of the United States was “a major impediment and is slowing the pace of research in my group. ” | 1 |
Economic Collapse October 27, 2016
Could we see violence no matter who wins on November 8th? Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen, but as you will see below, anti-Trump violence is already sweeping the nation.
If Trump were to actually win the election, that would likely send the radical left into a violent post-election temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Alternatively, there is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton. And as I showed yesterday, it appears that voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, that also may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country.
At this moment there is less than two weeks to go until November 8th, and a brand new survey has found that a majority of Americans are concerned “about the possibility of violence” on election day…
A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; one in five are “very concerned.” Three of four say they have confidence that the United States will have the peaceful transfer of power that has marked American democracy for more than 200 years, but just 40% say they are “very confident” about that.
More than four in 10 of Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square.
But many on the left are not waiting until after the election to commit acts of violence. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame was smashed into pieces by a man with a sledgehammer and a pick-ax…
Donald Trump took a lot of hits today, and not just in the Presidential race. With less than two weeks to go before America decides if the ex- Apprentice host will pull off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed early Wednesday morning by a man dressed as a city construction worker and wielding a sledgehammer and pick-ax in what looks to be a Tinseltown first.
And there were two other instances earlier this year when Donald Trump’s star was also vandalized. One came in January, and the other happened in June …
This is of course not the first time the GOP candidate’s star has been attacked or defaced since Trump announced his White House bid in summer 2015. The most extreme measure was a reverse swastika being sprayed on the star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd in late January. In June this summer, a mute sign was painted on Trump’s star in a seemingly protest against the antagonistic language and policies some have accused Trump of promoting and reveling in during the campaign. In both cases, Trump’s star was quickly cleaned and back as new within a day.
We have seen anti-Trump violence on the east coast as well. Earlier this month, someone decided to firebomb the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina. On the building next to the headquarters, someone spray-painted “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” along with a swastika.
There have also been other disturbing incidents of anti-Trump violence all over the nation in recent days. A recent Lifezette article put together quite a long list, and the following is just a short excerpt from that piece…
On Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine, vandals spray-painted about 20 parked cars outside a Trump rally. Trump supporter Paul Foster, whose van was hit with white paint, told reporters, “Why can’t they do a peaceful protest instead of painting cars, all of this, to make their statement?”
Around Oct. 3, a couple of Trump supporters were assaulted in Zeitgeist, a San Francisco bar, after they were allegedly refused service for expressing support for Trump, GotNews reports. “The two Trump supporters were attacked, punched, and chased into the street by ‘some thugs’ that a barmaid called out from the back.” Lilian Kim of ABC 7 Bay Area tweeted a photo of the men, in which one was wearing a Trump T-shirt and the other was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt.
On Sept. 28 in El Cajon, California, an angry mob at a Black Lives Matter protest beat 21-year-old Trump supporter Feras Jabro for wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The assault was broadcast live using the smartphone app Periscope.
There is a move to get Trump supporters to wear red on election day, but in many parts of America that might just turn his supporters into easy targets. Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see the kind of violent confrontations at voting locations that many experts are anticipating.
Of course there are also many on the right that are fighting mad, and a Hillary Clinton victory under suspicious circumstances may be enough to push them over the edge.
For example, this week former Congressman Joe Walsh said that he is “grabbing my musket” if Donald Trump loses the election…
Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president.
Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?”
And without a doubt, many ordinary Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition just in case Hillary Clinton is victorious. The following comes from USA Today …
“Since the polls are starting to shift quite a bit towards Hillary Clinton, I’ve been buying a lot more ammunition,” says Rick Darling, 69, an engineer from Harrison Township, in Michigan’s Detroit suburbs. In a follow-up phone interview after being surveyed, the Trump supporter said he fears progressives will want to “declare martial law and take our guns away” after the election.
Today America is more divided than I have ever seen it before, and the mainstream media is constantly fueling the hatred and the anger that various groups feel toward one another.
Ironically, Donald Trump has been working very hard to bring America together. In fact, he is solidly on track to win a higher percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 .
If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies. The Clintons used the power of the White House to go after their enemies the first time around, and Hillary is even more angry and more bitter now than she was back then.
And the radical left is very clear about who their enemies are. This is something that I discussed on national television earlier this month …
As I write this, it is difficult for me to even imagine how horrible a Hillary Clinton presidency would be.
But at this point that appears to be the most likely outcome .
Out of all the candidates that we could have chosen, the American people are about to put the most evil one by far into the White House.
Perhaps Donald Trump can still pull off a miracle and we can avoid that fate, but time is rapidly slipping away and November 8th will be here before we know it. 50 | 0 |
Yisrael Kristal, like many a bar mitzvah boy before him, celebrated the event last weekend, reading the Torah and enjoying the company of his family, who danced, sang and threw candies. But Mr. Kristal was surrounded at the ceremony in southern Israel by his two surviving children, nine grandchildren and 30 . He is 113, and he had to wait a century to mark the occasion. “My father is a religious man, and it was his dream his whole life to have a bar mitzvah,” his daughter Shulamith Kristal Kuperstoch said by telephone from her home in Haifa, Israel. “It was a miracle after everything that he has been through in his life. What else can you call it?” When Allied troops liberated Auschwitz in 1945, she said, Mr. Kristal weighed 82 pounds. He was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. She said her father had smiled widely after the bar mitzvah, which celebrates the moment when a boy can participate fully in Jewish life and traditions, including being allowed to be called in religious ceremonies to read from the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Mr. Kristal was born Izrael Icek Krysztal in the village of Malenie, in what is now Poland, on Sept. 15, 1903. When he was 11, Franz Joseph, the emperor of passed through his town. The boy threw sweets at the emperor, perhaps presaging Izrael’s career in the chocolate and candy business. By his 13th birthday, World War I was raging and he missed his bar mitzvah, Ms. Kristal Kuperstoch said. His father was in the Russian Army, and his mother had died three years earlier. By age 16, after his father had died of typhus, he was an orphan. After the war, he opened a candy store in the Polish city of Lodz with an uncle and prospered. But after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Mr. Kristal, his wife and their two children were moved to the ghetto in Lodz, where the children died. In August 1944, he and his wife were sent to Auschwitz, where his wife was killed. After the war, he returned to Lodz, remarried, and in 1950 he moved to Haifa with his second wife and their son. He rebuilt his life, again becoming a successful confectioner. In March, at the age of 112 years and 178 days, he was declared the oldest man in the world by Guinness World Records. Ms. Kristal Kuperstoch said her father had prayed every morning for the past 100 years. She attributed his longevity to “the above. ” “He believes in God,” she said. “He is a simple man, a wise and intelligent man. He believes in himself. He is someone who takes happiness in everything. ” She said part of his secret for getting to age 113 was “eating to live rather than living to eat. ” When he does eat, Ms. Kristal Kuperstoch added, he enjoys daily helpings of pickled herring and, as a younger man in his 80s, had a taste for wine and beer. He lives in his own home with a housekeeper. He remains sharp and still likes speaking Yiddish and listening to Yiddish songs, Ms. Kristal Kuperstoch said. “He wakes up early each morning, catches up on the news and eats a simple breakfast,” she said. “He is interested in politics and used to read the newspaper every day. Now I read it to him since his eyesight is failing. ” Mr. Kristal’s granddaughter Liat Bashan, a social worker, said that seeing her grandfather at his bar mitzvah ceremony, in a room spilling over with relatives and loved ones, had left her overcome with joy — and mindful of all those who perished in the Holocaust. “All those people from one person,” she said. “Imagine how many rooms could be filled if six million had lived. ” She added: “Every time I see my grandfather, I want to make a blessing. ” | 1 |
Daily Mail October 26, 2016 A newlywed couple have claimed their big day was ruined when a man burst inside the church shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and then started tearing down wedding decorations. Groom Marcel Lohbeck, 35, and bride Friederike were celebrating their wedding with 90 guests in the Karmel Church in Duisburg, a city in western Germany . Lochbeck said: ‘At the beginning of the ceremony, a man with a thick jumper and a hat on came into the church and sat in the back row. ‘Shortly afterwards, he stood up and wandered around the candles. He laughed in a disturbing manner and then fondled the statue of Mary. ‘He had been speaking in Arabic and partly English. He then started destroying the flowers and kept shouting “Allahu Akbar”.’ This article was posted: Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 9:31 am Share this article | 0 |
Project Veritas: "I've Known the President Since He Was a Community Organizer in Chicago" October 26, 2016 Daniel Greenfield
Another great video from Project Veritas that shows you just how blurred the lines between politics and organized crime have become.
The latest of the Project Veritas videos shows once again that it's all one integrated system, despite any protests to the contrary. The same Democratic machine that spouts off about "dark money" lives on it, breathes it and thrives on it. And will take it no matter how dark and dubious it is, whether it's routed from foreign interests, through foreign institutions and through roundabout ways.
The system runs of money, on power and favors traded and influence bought and sold. For all the leftist politics on the surface, beneath the waters is the murkier tide in which folks like the Clintons swim. It's the dark water in which money gets you access to Hillary or Obama. In which the royal courts of the royal left are filled with power brokers who do the things that make the money move around. | 0 |
HONG KONG — For Chinese banks, the decision to lend to companies like Bohai Steel was for years a . Lenders took heart from its state backing, which appeared as solid as the millions of tons of steel pipes that rolled off its production lines each year. That ironclad image is now tarnished. Plunging demand and a worsening glut in production capacity have left Bohai Steel struggling to repay as much as $30 billion in debt. Worried creditors — more than 100 of them — are locked in negotiations with the company and local officials. China’s bad loans are on the rise, as companies that borrowed heavily in headier times struggle against a slowing Chinese economy. Underscoring the slowdown, China said on Friday that growth in the first three months of this year fell to 6. 7 percent, a low. Growth might have been even slower, had China not revved up lending during the quarter — a solution that could add to debt problems later on. The stakes are high for banks and for the Communist Party, which ultimately controls wide swaths of China’s economy. China’s total local currency loans have more than tripled since the start of 2009, to 98. 6 trillion renminbi, or about $15 trillion, at the end of March, according to official Chinese figures from CEIC, a data provider. That is equal to 144 percent of China’s gross domestic product in the 12 months to the end of March — relatively high for China’s level of development, and still rising. In January, Goldman Sachs said other countries that experienced similar debt faced either financial crises or prolonged slowdowns. Defaults tend not to pose a risk to individual Chinese banks because the government is perceived as standing behind them. But a chain of defaults could lead to a pullback in lending that could crimp China’s economic output, said Anne a of J Capital Research. “Companies that default are not individually all that important,” she said. “But if you allow them to default categorically, then you are sending a message that type of debt can default, and people stop lending. ” Profit growth at China’s biggest banks stalled in the first three months of the years as bad loans mounted. Bad loans as a share of their total portfolio remains low, at less than 2. 5 percent, but economists believe the figure understates the problem because banks often extend the payment dates for problem debt. Bohai Steel has not disclosed details of its debt, and it is unclear which banks might be affected. But it regularly did business with China’s biggest banks, as well as local and regional banking groups also tied to the state. Since the beginning of this year, company executives have lobbied for more support from banks, as slowing growth and a property slump have reduced China’s demand for steel. In January it met with officials from China Bohai Bank, a lender that like Bohai Steel counts the city of Tianjin as a major shareholder. At the meeting, according to a statement from Bohai Steel, Yan Zesheng, general manager of Bohai Steel Group, said he hoped the bank would “continue to offer robust financial support” to the company. Over the years, the company stressed its ties to lenders including the Bank of China, Industrial Bank and Citic Bank, among others, according to statements on its website. In 2013, the company said, it received a roughly $4. 6 billion line of credit from Bank of China. A recent article in Caixin, a respected Chinese financial news outlet, said Bohai Steel’s 105 creditors included at least three local banks in Tianjin and Beijing that were each owed more than 10 billion renminbi. One of those lenders identified by Caixin, the Bank of Tianjin, raised nearly $1 billion in a Hong Kong public offering last month. The bank’s listing document did not mention Bohai Steel but said that nonperforming corporate loans — or loans that had gone sour — rose 46 percent between the end of 2014 and September of 2015, the most recent data available. It cited the Chinese economy and problems in the steel industry. Neither Bohai Steel nor the banks responded to requests for comment. Xu Zhongbo, a professor of metallurgy at the University of Science and Technology in Beijing, described the situation at Bohai Steel as one where “the banks are now hijacked by the company, and it will take magic to bring the company back. ” “Economically, it’s really hard to get the company back to life, but politically the government needs to support it,” Mr. Xu added. Other recent examples of corporate defaults in China offer, perhaps, less room for confidence. Dongbei Special Steel Group, based in the northeastern port city of Dalian, has defaulted on its bonds multiple times since its chairman, Yang Hua, was found hanged in his home last month. China Railway Materials, a supplier of construction materials to the railroad industry, became one of the first companies that is directly owned by the central government to run into debt trouble. The company suspended trading this month on more than $2 billion worth of bonds and said it would seek to restructure its debt. For China’s banking system, the coming months are almost certain to bring more defaults, bankruptcies and other debt problems, according to economists. “The low default rates that we have seen in recent years are perhaps too good to be true,” said Tao Wang, the of Asia Economics at UBS. “The rise is natural considering the economic circumstances,” Ms. Wang said. The Bohai Steel case also demonstrates how China’s mountains of corporate debt extend beyond just traditional bank loans. One of the company’s main subsidiaries, Tianjin Steel, also sought to raise money from ordinary investors. Tianjin Steel sought to raise as much as $100 million in investments known in China as trust products, according to a review of the marketing materials for those investments. Trust products, which are often used by industries that have a hard time getting funding, are lightly regulated and difficult to track. National Trust, a trust company that issued some of these investment products on behalf of the steel maker, has said that some of the products have run into problems. | 1 |
Sox is the new Sox — just uglier. [Leave aside Manny Machado spiking Dustin Pedroia on a slide or Dylan Bundy nailing Mookie Betts with his fastest pitch of the night. The nastiness between the AL East rivals extended from the field to the stands Monday at Fenway Park. “A disrespectful fan threw a bag of peanuts at me,’’ Orioles center fielder Adam Jones told USA Today after Baltimore’s victory that saw Machado a homer and the Red Sox melt down in the field. “I was called the a handful of times tonight. Thanks. Pretty awesome. ’’ Catering to a more Proper Bostonian crowd than Gillette Stadium, Fenway Park seems like an unlikely venue to hear exploding. Does any fan, drunk or sober, really feel comfortable in that cramped “lyric little bandbox” singing off a racist sheet of music? It seems hard to believe but the Red Sox acknowledged the abuse with an apology. Marty Walsh, mayor of America’s second whitest major city, apologized as well. And it’s not as though nobody before Adam Jones complained about bigots in Boston. Earlier this year, for instance, Saturday Night Live performer Michael Che sparked a controversy by labeling the Bay State’s capital city “the most racist city I’ve ever been to. ” Professional athletes, from former Celtics guard Dee Brown taken at gunpoint by local cops mistaking him for a bank robber to Bruins fans barraging PK Subban with racist tweets, sometimes second that. About a decade ago, Gary Matthews Jr. called Fenway Park “one of the few places you’ll hear racial comments. ” Five years ago, Red Sox outfielder Carl Crawford, while on a rehab assignment for a affiliate, complained of an Massachusetts cop taunting him with the word “Monday,” which he took as a veiled racial insult. The Red Sox not only came in last in the race to racially integrate the major leagues, they honored the owner who blocked black players by naming a block outside of the park after him. The city’s progressivism hides a parochial underbelly. At sporting events mistaken by the primitives as tribal meetings this ugly insular quality screeches as gratingly as, well, a racial insult at a ballgame. When citizens believe they live in the Athens of America, it’s not long before they behave like the Asses of America. | 1 |
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As members of Congress wind up their Easter break back in their districts, a website honoring former President Barack Obama is providing “progressives” with the information and tools they need to disrupt town hall meetings that lawmakers are holding over the remainder of this week. [Visitors to the townhallproject. com website can find everything from detailed information on each scheduled town hall meeting to how to make signs and even specific questions to ask to push the agenda on a range of talking points including: investigating President Donald Trump, Trump’s “starvation budget” on foreign policy, climate change, supporting illegal aliens, and LGBT rights. By clicking on the “about” icon, the first thing that pops up is a quote from Obama’s farewell speech in Chicago on Jan. 10, 2017. “It falls to each of us to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy to embrace the joyous task we’ve been given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours. Because for all our outward differences, we all share the same proud title: Citizen,” Obama said. The website states: Town Hall Project empowers constituents across the country to have conversations with their elected representatives. We are campaign veterans and first time volunteers. We come from a diversity of backgrounds and live across the country. We share progressive values and believe strongly in civic engagement. We research every district and state for public events with members of Congress. Then we share our findings to promote participation in the democratic process. The page also reveals the kind of progressives who are manning the town hall effort by naming its “sponsors,” including moveon. org and the Center for American Progress — the latter under direction from John Podesta, longtime Obama operative and Hillary Clinton campaign manager. The town hall website links to the websites of both organizations as well as the sponsoring “Indivisible” website, which features a video of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC reporting about the power of the town hall “movement. ” “If the Tea Party was able to take on a historically popular President Obama with a Democratic supermajority to slow and sometimes defeat his federal agenda, we can surely take on Donald Trump and the members of Congress who would do his bidding,” the Indivisible website states. All three of the sponsors of the Town Hall Project website offer instructions. On the Indivisible website, protesters are told: “Your job isn’t to convince your MoC (member of Congress) of anything. It is to create the political conditions necessary to force them into a new position — or to replace them. This is a marathon, not a sprint and every mark against them will matter — especially footage of them flailing in a town hall with you and your group. ” The moveon. org instructs protesters on “ ” lawmakers — “ is fun and easy!” — the website states. How to bird dog successfully, states, in part: ● Arrive in advance. ○ You want to get a seat close to or in front of the stage or platform to make sure that you have the ability to ask a question and that your MoC can hear you. ○ If your group is protesting and is not invited in, make sure you find all the entrances and know where the parking lot is, if applicable, to try to map out the route your MoC will take in and out of the facility, to increase the chances that they see you. ● Don’t give yourself away. ○ Do not wear clothing or wave signs that will let people know that you are coming to your MoC. You want to make sure that you have an opportunity to ask your questions. ● Know your MoC’s positions, • Study your MoC’s positions on your topic of issues. You want to make sure that they know that you know what you are talking about. Many times, in an attempt to dismiss and discredit, elected officials look for ways to make you seem less informed and thus not qualified to ask your question. However, it is your right as a constituent to ask your question, and being informed will make it harder for you to be dismissed. CAP’s “Recess toolbox” is entitled “Resist” and provides questions protesters should ask at town hall meetings: • Will you call on President Trump to release his tax returns? We must know whether he’ll profit from the GOP’s tax reform plan. The long list of town halls promoted on the website totals 87 meetings this week for both Republican and Democrat lawmakers across the country. The website also encourages visitors who can’t go to a town hall in person to call their representative, and contact information for members of Congress is provided. “You have more power than you think,” the website states. “Town halls are one of the most effective ways to use it. ” | 1 |
in: Civil Rights , Free Speech , Multimedia , Politics , Protestors & Activists , Special Interests This week political cartoonist Ben Garrison returns to the program to discuss the revival of his political visual commentary in the midst of the most tumultuous presidential campaign in recent history. Garrison also discusses his struggle with online trolls over the past several years, the broader war on free speech and political dissent, and how such phenomena are illustrated in the defamatory campaign against Canadian Professor Anthony Hall in October 2016 that led to the academic’s suspension from his university earlier this month. In a sea of homogeneity Ben Garrison’s trailblazing work offers a truly unique perspective on political and economic concerns. A longtime professional painter and freelance graphic artist, his first cartoons appeared in The San Angelo Standard Times in the early 1980s. Garrison has since been a graphic artist at the The San Antonio Express News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer . In 2008 the big banks were bailed out, which served as Garrison’s wake-up call. The bailout marked the point where he felt he had to do something. Using his graphic art skills he wanted to ring alarm bells and so he became a citizen muckraker. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN In 2009 Garrison began drawing editorial cartoons that skewered the Federal Reserve and the growing police state in America. The Internet made it possible for his cartoons to be seen by millions all over the world. The Internet also made it possible for anonymous entities to deface his work, libel his name and make him into the most trolled cartoonist in the world. Garrison’s wife Tina Garrison is also a cartoonist and in 2010 they began the web site “ grrr.graphics.com .” It features a growling bulldog named “GRRR” who takes a bite out of tyranny. Their dog is doing the job as watchdog that the mainstream media now seems reluctant to do. | 0 |
Meteor Or Alien Ship? Mystery Surrounds Bright Green 'Orb' Spotted In Japan # Grey 378
A mysterious fireball darts across the predawn skies of Niigata Prefecture in northern Japan on October 31, 2016. Many people speculated the green light emitting body might have been a UFO while others said the object was a bright meteor or space debris burning up in the atmosphere. The event lasted for about 15 seconds and was captured by several cameras. Tags | 0 |
Carol Adl in News , UK // 0 Comments
Former prime minister Tony Blair suggested Britain should keep its “options open” over Brexit and that might mean a second referendum.
During an interview with the BBC on Friday the former Labour leader said it may be a chance to reverse the Brexit “catastrophe”.
However, the current PM Theresa May rejected Blair’s appeal for a Brexit rethink and insisted there would be no second running of the historic EU referendum.
The Express reports:
The former Labour leader argued the British people must be able to “change our minds” despite a majority voting for Brexit on June 23.
Long-time europhile Mr Blair suggested Britain’s departure from the EU could be blocked “either through parliament, or through an election, possibly through another referendum”.
He claimed recent talks with French president Francois Hollande had convinced him the “catastrophe” of Brexit would lead to “very, very tough” negotiations with the Brussels-based bloc.
But Downing Street dismissed Mr Blair’s appeal for a Brexit rethink and insisted there would be no second running of the historic EU referendum.
A Number 10 spokesman also brushed off concerns Mr Blair appeared to have been plotting with Mr Hollande.
He said: “Tony Blair is entitled to put his views to whom he so chooses.
“But what’s important is the PM has been absolutely clear – the British people have spoken, we are listening, we’re going to leave the European Union.
“And not only has the PM been clear here but she’s also been clear when she’s met European leaders.
“There will be no second referendum, Britain is leaving the EU.”
Prime Minister Theresa May has repeatedly promised to lead Britain out of the EU, introduce controls on EU freedom of movement and end the meddling of EU judges on British laws.
Despite more than 17million voters backing Brexit, Mr Blair has insisted he is not trying to ignore the will of the British people.
He suggested as Brexit negotiations take place and “facts” come to light the British public’s wishes could “shift”.
Earlier this month, Mr Blair hinted he could return to UK politics following his exile since quitting Downing Street. | 0 |
TEHRAN — With the death of Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani on Sunday, Iran’s political factions knew immediately that any space by reformers to maneuver had just significantly decreased. Change had come, and it did not favor those seeking to turn Iran into a less revolutionary country with more tolerance and outreach to the West — especially the United States. Mr. Rafsanjani, a former president who helped found the Islamic republic, had been the one man too large to be sidelined by conservative . Now he was suddenly gone, dead from what state media described as cardiac arrest — and with no one influential enough to fill his shoes. Iran’s reformists and moderates, who would use Mr. Rafsanjani’s regular calls for more personal freedoms and requests to establish better relations with the United States to advance their political agendas, suddenly felt exposed and weakened. Who would now warn publicly against “Islamic fascism,” when the sought to influence elections? Who would state openly that there should be a nuclear compromise? Mr. Rafsanjani said things others would not dare to say, all agreed, and his voice had at least created some tolerance for debates. “ will be happy, but this is the start of a period of anxiety for many,” said Fazel Meybodi, a cleric from the holy city Qum who supports reforms in Iran. “His death disturbs the fragile balance we had in Iran. ” There simply are no replacements for Mr. Rafsanjani, analysts from all factions say. His death also reflects the dwindling number of leaders from the generation that overthrew the shah nearly four decades ago. Most are now in their 80s or even older. “It is a very powerful reminder that Iran is at the beginning of a major leadership transition that will play a very psychological role in Iran’s politics,” said Vali R. Nasr, a Middle East scholar who is dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “I think this in some ways rattles Iran’s political system, in that it underscores the fact that with everything else going on — Syria, the nuclear deal — there will be a passing of the baton to the next generation,” Mr. Nasr said. Two of Mr. Rafsanjani’s most important protégés — Hassan Rouhani, the current president, and Mohammad Khatami, a former president — both owe their political careers to him. But Mr. Rouhani, up for this year, is fighting for his political life. Mr. Khatami, who has been sidelined by conservative adversaries for years, is now even weaker. Mr. Rouhani managed to create a coalition to win the elections in 2013, with Mr. Rafsanjani’s support. Having successfully negotiated a nuclear agreement with the United States and other big powers, partly from encouragement by Mr. Rafsanjani, Mr. Rouhani promised a bright economic future for Iran — which has yet to happen. With the demise of his mentor and protector, Iran’s president will find it hard to gather the same level of support he received four years ago with the backing of Mr. Rafsanjani, analysts say. “He was a very powerful figure for Mr. Rouhani to rely upon,” said Mohammad Marandi, a professor at Tehran University who is close to Iran’s leaders. “Many worked with him because of that support. The passing of Mr. Rafsanjani complicates the president’s position and makes his less certain. ” Mr. Khatami won presidential elections in 1997 after having received Mr. Rafsanjani’s support, and led Iran through an era of greater personal freedoms and Western outreach that was quashed by unelected, centers of power. “It is Mr. Khatami who should take on the burden of the late Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani’s responsibility,” said Mohammadreza Shamsolvaezin, a former reformist politician and activist. But Mr. Khatami is all but paralyzed politically. The judiciary has ordered all Iranian media not to carry his picture or even quote his website. Besides appearances at theater plays, religious gatherings and art exhibitions, Mr. Khatami has remained silent. Mr. Rafsanjani could speak more freely than others, not only because of his revolutionary credentials, but also because of his friendship with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom he helped become supreme leader in 1989. Ayatollah Khamenei, who has skillfully played all Iranian factions, would never go as far as to completely isolate Mr. Rafsanjani, even when he supported protests that followed the disputed 2009 presidential election. While the presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi were placed under house arrest in 2011 for their criticisms, Mr. Rafsanjani was stripped of several functions but never purged. In a statement, Ayatollah Khamenei lamented the passing of Mr. Rafsanjani. Still, it was clear to many that Ayatollah Khamenei regarded him not only as a friend but a rival, whose absence could now make the role of supreme leader even more powerful. “The loss of a comrade and ally, with whom I share a friendship that dates back to 59 years ago, is difficult and ” said a statement posted on Ayatollah Khamenei’s website on Sunday. He also referred obliquely to their disagreements. “Differences in views and interpretations of Islamic law in various points of this long time could never break the friendship,” the statement said. “After him, I cannot think of anyone with whom I share such long history and experience along the highs and lows of historical moments. ” joined in on the mourning, giving public statements of condolence, but with the realization that the political wind in Iran would now blow even more in their favor. For them Mr. Rafsanjani had been a wild card, who could evoke rulings from the founder of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, that would oppose their rigid narrative of isolation and . Mr. Rafsanjani was especially dangerous, they said, because of his conviction that Iran had changed and that establishing relations with the United States was the only way to secure the future of the Islamic republic. Mr. Rafsanjani also had cordial ties with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Iran’s principal rival in the Middle East, who share a mutual hostility with Ayatollah Khamenei. also have faulted Mr. Rafsanjani for having founded a chain of affordable universities during the reconstruction that followed the war. Some conservatives now blame these schools for having helped sow what they regard as the dangerous modernist aspirations of Iran’s middle class. Many conservatives in Iran also suspected Mr. Rafsanjani of having used his contacts to undercut Ayatollah Khamenei on issues where Ayatollah Khamenei would choose ideology over diplomacy. Mr. Rafsanjani preferred pragmatism and change to keep the ruling system in power. “The invisible hands of the late Ali Akbar Rafsanjani are gone,” said Hamidreza Taraghi, a political analyst who has close relations with many of Iran’s top leaders. “This means an end to secret meetings by reformists and moderates seeking closer ties with America from now on we can make decisions much easier and with more coordination. ” | 1 |
Families minister Manuela Schwesig has pledged to do more to protect children in Germany from right wing “hipsters” who post messages about migrant criminality on social media. [The Social Democratic Party (SPD) minister was speaking at a press conference last week at which youth protection website Jugendschutz. net said “right wing extremists” are using rap music and social media trends to “spread hate against refugees, Muslims and other minorities”. “Right wing extremists are using stylish memes and videos to convey their messages,” said the website’s deputy director Stefan Glaser. Speaking in Berlin he warned that “false messages are being launched in a targeted manner to fuel hate” and said activists are posting “false messages” intended to “spread hate” in between “photographs of strawberry and muesli” and other apolitical content. A common tactic of the new wave of right wing extremists, whom Glaser calls “nipsters” — a portmanteau of the words ‘Nazi’ and ‘hipster’ is posting on social media about “the supposed criminality of refugees”. According to Glaser, this typically involves taking messages ‘such as press releases from the police’ out of context to post about “sex jihadists” and “mass rape by Islamists” on Facebook. Jugendschutz. net also warned “the identitarian movement is packaging its propaganda in cool songs” highlighting ‘Komplott’ a rapper who says that mass migration poses a threat to Europe. Condemning the youth protection website’s findings, Schwesig pledged to expand “media competence” programmes which the chairman of the Federal Centre for Civic Education says teach “young people to recognise fake news, oppose incitement, and show solidarity with victims of hatred”. The minister for family affairs also called for stronger laws to be put in place to ensure that social media companies like Facebook delete hate posts more quickly, “with no ifs or buts”. Jugendschutz. net reports that in 2016 it found 1, 678 examples of “far right content that poses a threat the development of children and adolescents” 94 per cent of which were found on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The organisation was able to get offending content either removed, or access to the material blocked in Germany, in more than 80 per cent of cases after reporting it. | 1 |
Two days after Donald Trump was elected president, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, sat onstage at a outside San Francisco and spoke of his deep understanding of the feelings of American voters. He was appearing at Techonomy’s annual retreat, a meeting of thought leaders in the worlds of technology, government, academia and business, and he was responding to a common criticism — the notion that Trump’s unconventional path to victory had benefited from a detour through Facebook, where a “filter bubble” distorts the flow of information and fake news stories loom large. “There is a certain profound lack of empathy,” he said, “in asserting that the only reason why someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news. If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message that Trump supporters are trying to send in this election. ” When asked to articulate that message, he dodged the question. “Empathy” is one of Facebook’s favorite buzzwords. For years, Zuckerberg has hopped from conference to conference in a selection of muted hoodies and delivering variations on the same pitch. “More people are using Facebook to share more stuff,” he said in 2010. “That means that if we want, there’s more out there that we can go look at and research and understand what’s going on with the people around us. And I just think that leads to broader empathy, understanding — just a lot of good, core, human things that make society function better. ” If you think Facebook may have had a hand in tipping popular opinion toward Trump, Zuckerberg seemed to suggest at the Ritz, then something was wrong with you — something that could be fixed by spending more time on Facebook. He is not the only one shopping empathy as a cure for what ails us. In recent months, the Inspired Life blog of The Washington Post suggested “empathy for Trump voters. ” In a Times article, Glenn Beck wrote, “Wouldn’t we all benefit from trying to empathize with people we disagree with?” It all feels like a bit of a throwback: Just as many of our modern, scientific mechanisms for gauging the national mood — things like polling and data journalism — failed to predict Trump’s victory, there has been a call for Americans to reach out and touch one another more directly. But there is a curiously strategic underpinning to these calls for empathy, too. Empathy, after all, is not sympathy. Sympathy encourages a close affinity with other people: You feel their pain. Empathy suggests something more technical — a dispassionate approach to understanding the emotions of others. And these days, it often seems to mean understanding their pain just enough to get something out of it — to manipulate political, technological and consumerist outcomes in our own favor. “Empathy” first arose to explain our relationship to objects, not to other human beings. The word comes from the German einfühlung (ein for “in” and fühlung for “feeling”) a concept in aesthetics. Einfühlung described the act of “feeling into” art and nature, or projecting yourself into an aesthetic object. Soon “empathy” came to describe how human beings related to one another as objects: Like modern neuroscience, it looked for the roots of human emotions in “the material body and the interworking of its parts,” in the study of “muscles and nerves. ” This turn toward “empathy” let people cast off the cultural baggage of “sympathy,” a word suddenly seen as soaked in sentimentality, tied up with ideas of Christian virtue, moral obligation and pity. The Indiana University professor Rae Greiner, author of a book about sympathy in fiction, has written that by the dawn of the 20th century, “sympathy seemed to belong to the Victorians, empathy to us. ” A century later, the rise of social networking means our interactions are once again mediated through our relationship with objects. The theorist Marshall McLuhan once assumed this computerization of culture would lead to a rise in empathetic connection. “The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology,” he wrote in “Understanding Media,” published in 1964 the computer promised a “Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. ” But it wound up offering something else too: a convenient alternative to costly, messy interactions with human beings. What social networks like Facebook really offer is empathy in the aggregate — an illusion of having captured the mood of entire families and friend networks from a safe, neutral distance. Then they turn around and offer advertisers a read on more than a billion users at once. Buzz Andersen — a tech veteran who has worked for Apple, Tumblr and Square — told me that in Silicon Valley, “empathy is basically a more way of saying ‘market research. ’’u2009” And in a marketplace, you’re not trying to understand other people out of altruism or moral responsibility you’re doing it out of . In the days after the election, many commenters chafed at the idea that they ought to perform the work of empathizing with Trump’s supporters. Shouldn’t they — the people who elected him — try a little empathy for the lives that stand to be crushed by his policies? The market’s answer to this question is “no. ” There is no movement for Americans to be more empathetic because they won. The nation has already bought what they were selling. The call for to cultivate empathy isn’t about finding instructive truths in others’ worldviews it’s about understanding their motivations well enough to persuade them to vote differently. Empathy is naturally irrational, cautions the Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom, author of a new book titled “Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. ” It’s more likely to activate in the face of one sad story than on the scale of widespread human tragedy. It’s manipulative too: Directing a crowd’s empathy toward one victim can cultivate anger and aggression toward other targets, even if they’re not responsible for the victim’s suffering. In a case like Zuckerberg’s, empathy can be a strategy for avoiding responsibility. On a recent rainy day, I left my office to see empathy leveraged in yet another way. Upworthy, a purveyor of viral content, had constructed a “empathy lab” in a nearby park. A black curtain was pulled around a chair and a computer outfitted with software that could map the face at 500 points and analyze its emotional expressions. Participants watched a video — in my case, a short clip about a young boy with Down syndrome. Outside, a crowd watched a Jumbotron, on which squiggly lines tracked the participant’s empathetic expressions against the average reaction. At the video’s conclusion, an “empathy score” flashed on the screen. Upworthy is invested in empathy because it has found that emotionally engaging content shares well on Facebook — but also, its reps say, because it can prompt action. Upworthy’s business model relies mainly on the former. Shortly after I arrived, a woman emerged from behind the curtain to spontaneous applause. She had received an empathy rating of 98 — the day’s high score. It was an odd image, like Facebook projected into real life: A woman lauded for sitting alone, watching a video. In the Victorian era, some critics worried that moralistic novels would channel people’s sympathy into books instead of out into the world. Facebook takes it a step further, rerouting our attempts at empathetic connection back at us. When we reach out to one another, we’re often just feeling ourselves. | 1 |
Why don’t they teach this to the starving people in third world countries? | 0 |
In her cramped apartment in Upper Manhattan, Paola Infante cooked chicken and rice on a gas stove, stirring the meal as she kept an eye on her daughter, Geraliz, racing around the room. Each time the girl came near the flames and kitchen knives, Ms. Infante used her body to gently push her away. Geraliz, who is 4 and has autism, eventually distracted herself watching children’s shows on a iPad. For the moment, the possibility that she might get hurt had passed. “So much nervousness,” Ms. Infante, 27, said in Spanish. “I wish for a bigger apartment with all of my soul. A separate kitchen, this is all I need. ” She added, “There’s been a lot of breaks and spills. ” Almost every surface in the small apartment doubles as a space for something else: pots and pans on top of magazines, children’s toys atop cleaning supplies and food wrappers. With no formal kitchen area, a gas stove, a refrigerator and cabinets line the living room’s back wall. Ms. Infante, who immigrated from the Dominican Republic, is raising Geraliz and her son, Joshua, by herself. Geraliz communicates in screeches and tugs at her mother. Joshua was born with a deformed heart, but will not be healthy enough for surgery until he turns 1 in April. Ms. Infante said the children’s father, her former boyfriend, had moved out because he did not feel that he could cope with the challenges involved in raising Geraliz. “He couldn’t handle it emotionally,” she said as she sat in one of the apartment’s only chairs, a tiny seat for her children. “It was too much for him to accept. ” During the day, Ms. Infante works as a cashier at a Key Food grocery store, earning $800 a month and struggling because of her limited ability to speak English to earn a promotion. She said she did not want to depend on public assistance but had to, collecting about $1, 050 a month combined in food stamps and disability benefits. At night, almost everything is a chore. While she prepares dinner or cleans the apartment, she tries to distract Geraliz with the iPad while hoping that Joshua does not start to cry. Doing the laundry meant lugging the dirty clothes to a laundromat two blocks away with the children in tow. To save money on drying, she would carry the wet clothes back to her and hang them on a line in the hallway leading into the apartment. That cumbersome task was recently made easier. Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New York, one of the eight organizations supported by The New York Times’s Neediest Cases Fund, gave her $350 toward a $800 washing machine and helped to have it installed in her apartment. Ms. Infante still the clothes. It has also become less stressful to make sure that her children are safe while she is at work. Catholic Charities guided Ms. Infante to enroll Geraliz at the Kennedy Child Study Center, an affiliate agency that provides free services for children with developmental challenges. Ms. Infante said her daughter was getting better at communicating and, with the help of workers at the center, had learned how to grab ahold of her when she needed attention. The center also helped Ms. Infante enroll in English classes at the City College of New York, which start in February. She said she wanted to earn a bachelor’s degree in childhood education and get a job as a teacher within five years. For those plans to work out, she will need to find a babysitter for Joshua by the time classes begin. The center is also helping her make those arrangements. Ms. Infante said that her former boyfriend was still around. He lives in a separate apartment in Upper Manhattan, works at another grocery store and pays the rent on Ms. Infante’s place. He visits the children “once or twice a week” at their apartment, she said, but she is not ready to welcome him back full time. “I don’t need anyone or anything,” she said, rising quickly to stir the rice and check on the chicken. “I’m fine. What I need is a separate kitchen so I can cook without worrying about the kids. ” | 1 |
business , russia , ranking
The Central Bank sees Russia’s moving up in the Doing Business rating as a good sign, Deputy CEO of the Central Bank Vladimir Chistyukhin told reporters.
"That is a very significant leap and a very positive sign for us. It shows that the efforts we made in many fields, in particular in corporate management were not in vain," he said.
Earlier this week it was reported that Russia moved up to the 40th position in the Doing Business-2017 rating, which is annually prepared by the World Bank.
In 2012, Russia ranked 124th in that rating.
In his May decrees issued in 2012 President Vladimir Putin set the task for the country to reach the 20th position in the rating of the World Bank by 2018.
In 2016, Russia was on the 51st place in the Doing Business rating.
However the methods of calculation of the World Bank’s rating changed earlier this year. Taking into account these changes Russia could have been on the 36th place already in 2015.
First published by TASS . | 0 |
BEDMINSTER, N. J. — Donald J. Trump has turned the vital, but normally inscrutable, process of forming a government into a spectacle, parading his finalists for top administration positions this weekend before reporters and the world. The two days unfolded like a pageant, with the many officials striding up the circular driveway at Trump National Golf Club here, meeting Mr. Trump below three glass chandeliers at the entrance and shaking hands while facing the cameras. To build suspense, Mr. Trump offered teasing hints about coming announcements. “I think so,” he said about whether he would make any appointments on Sunday. “I think so. It could very well happen. ” Among the contenders he met with was James N. Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general. He appears — according to Mr. Trump’s own words on Twitter — to be the leading candidate for defense secretary. Outside the club’s farmhouse on Saturday, the poked a finger in General Mattis’s direction and called him “a great man. ” The next morning, at 8:39, Mr. Trump gushed again, this time on Twitter, calling him “very impressive” and saying he was “a true general’s general!” Perhaps by design, the roster of figures arriving at the club was difficult to pigeonhole: There were loyalists (Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor) former adversaries (Mitt Romney, who once called Mr. Trump a “phony”) Democrats (Michelle A. Rhee, the former schools chief in Washington) and scientists (Patrick a billionaire cancer doctor). But despite that appearance of diversity, Mr. Trump’s choices so far for national security posts seem to show a preference for older white men with similar views on immigration, the military and terrorism. Most of the leading candidates for other jobs appear to be white men, as well, including Mr. Giuliani, whose own business activities have faced scrutiny. If he is nominated as secretary of state, Mr. Giuliani would face questions over his security firm’s ties to the government of Qatar and the speeches he gave to an Iranian exile opposition group that until 2012 was on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. Asked whether he was concerned about Mr. Giuliani’s business dealings, Mr. Trump said, “No, not at all. ” Mr. Trump, as he used his golf resort as the backdrop for his official activities, gave no indication that he was concerned about news reports over the weekend that he had held meetings last week with three Indian business partners even as he was starting to assemble his administration. The very public process — CNN trained a camera on the golf club’s wooden front door throughout the day on Sunday — has borne few similarities to attempts by Mr. Trump’s predecessors to project an image of careful, private vetting of hopefuls. Officials running President Obama’s transition in late 2008 took pains to keep under wraps his plans to select Hillary Clinton for secretary of state, and they orchestrated a secret meeting at the firehouse at Reagan National Airport to discuss keeping Robert M. Gates as defense secretary. But for Mr. Trump and his aides, many of whom have long rejected the capital’s customs, such traditions are best discarded. “This has been a year and election cycle where the normal conventions and past history has been challenged,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist whose longtime boss, Mr. Romney, discussed the secretary of state post with Mr. Trump. “Why would the transition and the first few months of the administration be any different?” Mr. Madden said. “Trump does things Trump’s way. ” After each interview, Mr. Trump, dressed in a suit and tie, emerged from the club next to an American flag to see the candidates off to their vehicles and once again speak with reporters. “Tremendous talent — we’re seeing tremendous talent,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday. “People that, as I say, we will ‘make America great again.’ These are really great people. These are really, really talented people. ” By the evening, however, Mr. Trump had announced no appointments, leaving reporters waiting on the cold, gusty day to speculate about Mr. Trump’s brief comments. “We made a couple of deals,” he said as his weekend of interviews drew to a close. Mr. Giuliani is apparently in competition with several others for the secretary of state position, including David H. Petraeus, the retired general who served as Mr. Obama’s C. I. A. director before leaving amid revelations that he had provided classified information to a woman with whom he was having an affair. Mr. Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee and one of Mr. Trump’s fiercest critics during the 2016 campaign, met with the on Saturday. If he becomes secretary of state, he could be a moderating influence on the Mr. Trump has chosen for attorney general, national security adviser and C. I. A. director. “I can say that Governor Romney is under active and serious consideration to serve as secretary of state of the United States,” Vice Mike Pence said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program. Mr. Trump’s consideration of General Mattis, who is widely respected throughout the military, could also signal an effort to ease concerns among members of the Washington establishment about the shape of his cabinet. General Mattis, who led the First Marine Division during the 2003 invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, later commanded American troops during the battle to retake Falluja from Sunni insurgents in 2004. But his argument for a tougher military posture against Iran at times clashed with the views of Mr. Obama and his national security team. General Mattis, who would be the first former ranking general to become defense secretary since George Marshall in the early 1950s, would need a congressional waiver to take office because federal law stipulates that the Pentagon chief be out of uniform for seven years. General Mattis retired from the Marines in 2013. As Mr. Trump moves to complete his national security team, he may soon turn his attention to domestic affairs. Aides have said members of the transition effort’s economic and domestic policy teams will fan out to meet with agency officials starting on Monday. Mr. Obama, asked Sunday at a summit meeting in Lima, Peru, about stances Mr. Trump has taken that align with the views of his nascent national security team, said: “I can’t guarantee that the won’t pursue some of the positions that he’s taken. But what I can guarantee is that reality will force him to adjust how he approaches many of these issues. That’s just the way this office works. ” Mr. Trump also continued his practice of bursts on Twitter this weekend. Before attending church with Mr. Pence, Mr. Trump condemned the cast of “Hamilton” for its onstage appeal on Friday night to the vice — who was in the audience — to uphold the rights of a “diverse America. ” “The cast and producers of ‘Hamilton,’ which I hear is highly overrated, should immediately apologize to Mike Pence for their terrible behavior,” Mr. Trump wrote. In another Twitter post, the expressed his disapproval of “Saturday Night Live,” calling it a “totally biased show — nothing funny at all. ” Mr. Trump was portrayed on the show as being overwhelmed by the prospect of being president. Even as Mr. Trump bemoaned the actions of the cast of “Hamilton,” a smash hit on Broadway, Mr. Pence said on Sunday morning that he was not offended or bothered. In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Pence said he would “leave it to others” to decide whether the theater was an appropriate place for a political message. “‘Hamilton’ is just an incredible production and just incredibly talented people,” Mr. Pence said. “It was a real joy to be there. ” | 1 |
Putin awards Emir Kusturica with Order of Friendship 27 October 2016 TASS Kusturica has been given many awards for his activities. Facebook putin , serbia , award
Russian President Vladimir Putin has awarded a number of cultural workers with Orders and Medals, one of them being Serbian movie director Emir Kusturica. The related decree was published on the official legal information website on Thursday.
"Emir Kusturica, director of the Rasta International production company, citizen of the Republic of Serbia, is being awarded with the Order of Friendship for his significant contribution to promoting friendship and cooperation between peoples, preserving and promoting the Russian language and culture in foreign countries," the presidential decree says.
Emir Kusturica was born on November 24, 1954 in Sarajevo, former Yugoslavia. He initiated the International the Kustendorf International Film and Music Festival and a short documentaries festival in Visegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2005, he was President of the Cannes Film Festival Jury, in 2011 he presided over the jury of the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival official selection.
Kusturica has been given many awards for his activities, including the Order of Arts and Literature (France, 2007), Order of the Legion of Honor (France, 2011), Order of St. Sava (Serbian Orthodox Church, 2012), Order of St. King Milutin (Serbian Orthodox Church, 2014), Order of St. Stephen (Serbian Orthodox Church, 2016). In 2009, he received the Unity of Orthodox Nations International Foundation Award.
First published by TASS . | 0 |
Four men have been arrested after the truck attack in Sweden, with one thought to be a supporter of the Islamic State terror group. Explosives were reportedly found in the vehicle and children targeted. [Three men were seen running from the beer truck on Friday, which injured 15 and killed at least four, after ramming pedestrians and smashing into Stockholm’s largest shopping centre. Investigating officers found explosives in the hijacked truck, Swedish television claimed on Saturday morning, citing multiple unnamed police sources. According to one eyewitness, speaking to Reuters, the truck was deliberately steered towards people and could have intentionally targeted children. “I turned around and saw a big truck coming towards me. It swerved from side to side. It didn’t look out of control. It was trying to hit people,” said Glen Foran, an Australian tourist in his 40s. “It hit people it was terrible. It hit a pram with a kid in it, demolished it,” he said. “It took a long time for police to get here. I suppose from their view it was quick, but it felt like forever. ” A was arrested in the northern suburb of Marsta later that night, Aftonbladet reports. Police said he was from Uzbekistan and he reported confessed to involvement in the attack. According to the Swedish newspaper, he had posted Islamic State propaganda on Facebook and liked pictures of casualties after the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013. Heavily armed police detained a second man at around 11 pm in the Stockholm suburb of Hjulsta, Expressen reports. The man, who appeared younger, was handcuffed and taken away in a police car. According to Swedish television, the two arrested men are linked. “There were about 15 police cars at the scene. There was a specialist terrorist SWAT team and sniffer dogs” Janne Akkeson, a photographer who witnessed the sting explained. Another two people were brought in for questioning, police said in a statement, but “are currently not suspected of any crime. ” | 1 |
Piers Morgan sharply criticized Meryl Streep’s Trump Lifetime Achievement Award acceptance speech at the Golden Globes Sunday night, calling it “hypocritical” and “the worst performance of her career. ”[Morgan writes in the Daily Mail: Last night, Streep received a Lifetime Achievement award at the Golden Globes, and chose the moment to launch a very personal attack on Donald Trump. She began by saying that Hollywood, foreigners and the press are ‘the most vilified segments of American society right now’. At which point the cameras panned out to hundreds of the richest, most privileged people in American society sitting in the audience in their $10, 000 tuxedos and $20, 000 dresses, loudly cheering this acknowledgement of their dreadful victimhood. She then said that if all the ‘outsiders and foreigners’ were kicked out of Hollywood, ‘you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.’ Wow. I haven’t heard such elitist snobbery since Hillary Clinton branded Trump supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’. … But putting all that to one side for a moment — and if Trump WAS mocking a man’s disability then I agree it was disgraceful — let’s move to what Streep said next: ‘Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.’ At this point, I laughed out loud with incredulity. Not at the words themselves, which are laudable. No, it was at the hypocrisy. You’d be to find an industry that encourages more disrespect and violence than Hollywood. … Read Morgan’s full column at the Daily Mail. | 1 |
Mises.org October 28, 2016
A recent op-ed piece in The New York Times urged the Republican Party not to “throw away free enterprise” and embrace populism. Arthur C. Brooks, the author of the article, makes two bold but erroneous claims. First, he asserts that populist moments throughout history — including the Trumpian moment in the US — are triggered by severe financial crises that result in protracted and uneven recoveries that exacerbate existing income and wealth disparities.
In resorting to naïve economic determinism to explain populism, Brooks completely overlooks the awakening of the broad American middle class to political institutions and policies that have been designed by the entrenched elites of both parties to oppress and plunder them. The never-ending and immensely costly war against “terror;” the Federal bailout of multi-billion dollar financial institutions both domestically and abroad; the ineffective and grossly expensive war on drugs; the pandemic of political correctness unleashed by Federal mandates and regulations that has infected American colleges and universities, and the egregious and unrestrained spying on American citizens by the bloated US security apparatus. All of these issues seem to count for nothing in Brooks’s simplistic analysis. For Brooks, “The real issue is weak, unevenly shared growth.” Brooks’s attribution of the rise of populism in the US and elsewhere almost exclusively to increasing income and wealth inequality is not only peculiar but absurd on the face of it and I will refrain from further comment on it.
The second claim that Brooks makes is more commonly accepted and is fervently promoted by the mainstream media, and academics and political analysts of the “responsible” left and right. This claim is that populism comprises specific ideological positions and policies. Thus, Brooks refers to “populist positions on issues such as trade and immigration” and to “populists who specialize in identifying culprits: rich elites who are ripping you off; immigrants who want your job; a free trade that’s killing our nation’s competitiveness.” According to Brooks, populist policies thus “involve some combination of increased redistribution, protectionism, and restrictionism.” In other words, on economic issues at least, populism is the polar opposite of classical liberalism and libertarianism.
Left-wing and Right-wing Populists
But nothing could be further from the truth. For populism is not a right-wing ideology but a strategy that may be used by any ideological group whose political agenda differs radically from that of the ruling class. Surely, Brooks has heard of left-wing populists such as Juan and Eva Perón, Huey Long, the “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chávez. And what about classical-liberal and libertarian populists such as Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams, Richard Cobden and John Bright, and more recently, Dr. Ron Paul? Lately, we have seen the dramatic rise in popularity of the populist Pirate Party in Iceland , which may win the next election and whose membership is ideologically diffuse and comprises libertarians, hackers, Web geeks, and anti-globalist anarchists.
Although populism may be either ideologically left or right, libertarian or statist, it is always hated and feared by the political center. The reason is that the center is occupied by those individuals and groups comprising the “moderate” left wing and right wing who are allies in defending the political status quo and take turns ruling and operating the levers of power to distribute privilege and wealth to themselves and their cronies.
What Populists Stand For
Regardless of ideological bent, populist thinkers and movement builders take to heart, at least implicitly, the profound insight of great political theorists from La Boétie and David Hume to Mises and Rothbard that there is no such thing as an unpopular government. They thus set about exposing the moderates who run the State apparatus as a powerful and wealthy elite whose interests are inherently opposed to those of the masses of productive workers and entrepreneurs. In order to grab the attention of people who are not yet fully conscious that they are being exploited — or in Marxian terms, to help them develop a class consciousness — it is only natural that populist leaders employ extreme, emotional, and embittered rhetoric. Such inflammatory rhetoric is especially necessary for the US today and most European countries where the mainstream media, while ostensibly free, operate as a privileged mouthpiece for government and spew non-stop propaganda designed to camouflage State exploitation of the productive class and to discredit dissenting political movements.
Harsh and extreme populist rhetoric, such as that used by Donald Trump, strikes a responsive chord among the US electorate, but not because Americans are subject to irrational bouts of envy, xenophobia, and insecurity brought on by crises and recessions, as Brooks would have us believe. Rather, Americans are being awakened to the cold, hard fact that they have been plundered and oppressed by the “moderate” American globalist political establishment since World War Two. What Rothbard said about the populist French Poujadist movement of the early 1950s applies to the US and other interventionist democratic states today:
[T]here’s a lot to be bitter about: crushingly high taxes on businesses and individuals, submergence of national sovereignty in international organizations and alliances, fumbling and incompetent government, endless fighting in colonial wars. Especially taxes.
A final point: once it has penetrated into the public discourse, populism — precisely because it is the only effective political strategy for radical political change — will not wither away as a result of a few more percentage points of “evenly distributed” economic growth. Trump’s threat to contest the election, Brexit, the continuing growth of right-wing populist movements throughout Europe, all attest to the fact that populism is here to stay. This should be cause for celebration among the libertarians who for the first time since its inception in the mid-1960s have at their disposal an effective strategy for rolling back the US welfare-warfare State.
Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute. The Best of Joseph T. Salerno Tags: Joseph Salerno [ ] is academic vice president of the Mises Institute , chairman of the graduate program in economics at Pace University, and editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics . | 0 |
Home › POLITICS › NOW FIVE FBI FIELD OFFICES ARE PROBING CLINTON CHARITY, ADDING FUEL TO THE FIRE NOW FIVE FBI FIELD OFFICES ARE PROBING CLINTON CHARITY, ADDING FUEL TO THE FIRE 4 SHARES
[10/31/16] FBI field offices in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Little Rock, Ark., are investigating the Clinton Foundation concerning allegations of pay-to-play financial and political corruption, according to a Wall Street Journal report Sunday.
Mirroring information provided by a former senior law enforcement official that “multiple FBI investigations are underway involving potential corruption charges against the Clinton Foundation,” the Journal confirms what The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reported in August .
FBI field offices in three cities, specifically, New York, Little Rock and Washington, D.C., were coordinating with the U.S. Attorneys working in those cities. FBI agents in Miami are also joining the probe, TheDCNF has since learned.
The Clinton Foundation has numerous programs operating in Haiti, the Caribbean, Latin America and South America.
“Los Angeles agents had picked up information about the Clinton Foundation from an unrelated public corruption case and had issued some subpoenas for bank records related to the foundation” and described the unusual field office initiative as “at times a sprawling cross-country effort,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Several polls released Saturday and Sunday show a rapid deterioration of presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s lead in the wake of Friday’s disclosure by FBI Director James Comey that he is reopening the email server investigation. Comey said in August that he did not believe the FBI’s investigation of Clinton and her use of private servers and private email addresses to conduct official diplomatic business would be productive.
Comey’s announcement Friday was related to a separate investigation of child pornography allegations against former Rep. Anthony Weiner, a New York Democrat who is married to Clinton’s closest confidant, Huma Abedin. Weiner and Abedin separated earlier this year following a third disclosure of his sexting with an underage girl. Post navigation | 0 |
Club for Growth President David McIntosh released a statement expressing the influential conservative group’s strong opposition to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s as Republicans are now calling the GOP leadership healthcare plan that does not follow through on GOP campaign promises to repeal and replace Obamacare. [McIntosh said in his statement: The problems with this bill are not just what’s in it, but also what’s missing: namely, the critical solution of selling health insurance across state lines. Such an injection of competition would lead to hundreds of billions of dollars in savings, nullifying any argument by Congressional Republicans that this provision cannot be included in the current bill. If this substitute for health care remains unchanged, the Club for Growth will key vote against it. Republicans should be offering a full and immediate repeal of Obamacare’s taxes, regulations, and mandates, an end to the Medicaid expansion, and inclusion of reforms, like interstate competition. The Club for Growth is an influential conservative organization that has helped many Republicans get elected in recent years, and with the group’s strong opposition to the package it may peel off enough House Republicans to hurt the bill’s chances in that chamber. Many House Republicans, including Reps. Jim Jordan ( ) and Mark Meadows ( ) — the former and current chairs of the House Freedom Caucus — are publicly opposed to Paul Ryan’s bill already. There are also questions as to whether the bill can pass the U. S. Senate as well, with at least two U. S. Senators publicly opposed to the legislation and one promising he would oppose it — more than enough to kill a bill without bipartisan support, as this is unlikely to receive, in the Senate. | 1 |
PARIS (AP) — France and Germany formed a united front Saturday in the face of President Donald Trump’s halt in the U. S. refugee program, with the German foreign minister noting that loving thy neighbor forms part of America’s Christian traditions. [After meeting Saturday, the foreign ministers of both nations, Ayrault and Germany’s Sigmar Gabriel, said they want to meet with Rex Tillerson, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state who is still awaiting confirmation. Ayrault said Trump’s order on Friday that bars all refugees from entering the United States for four months — and those from Syria indefinitely — “can only worry us. ” “There are many other issues that worry us,” he added. “That is why Sigmar and I also discussed what we are going to do. When our colleague, Tillerson, is officially appointed, we will both contact him. ” Gabriel — on his first trip abroad since his appointment Friday — said offering refuge to the persecuted and those fleeing death are western values that Europe and the United States share. “Love thy neighbor is part of this tradition, the act of helping others,” he said. “This unites us, we Westerners. And I think that this remains a common foundation that we share with the United States, one we aim to promote. ” Trump declared the ban necessary to prevent “radical Islamic terrorists” from entering the United States. The order immediately suspended a program that last year resettled to the U. S. roughly 85, 000 people displaced by war, political oppression, hunger and religious prejudice. | 1 |
At Bill Cunningham’s funeral on Thursday morning, Anna Wintour wore blue Carolina Herrera, Annette de la Renta had on a light pleated summer dress that went to the knee, and Mercedes Bass opted for basic black. They came to the Church of St. Thomas More on East 89th Street in Manhattan to pay their respects to a man who had taken their pictures for the last 40 to 50 years. One of the many sad things about this day was that there were no photographers, in keeping with a request by Mr. Cunningham’s family, who asked that things stay simple and private. In a way, it made sense. Although Mr. Cunningham, who died on Saturday at 87, had been photographing New Yorkers since 1967, the year the illustrator Antonio Lopez gave him his first camera, he hardly appreciated being the subject of attention. A documentary was made about Mr. Cunningham in 2010, and he said until the end of his life that he had not seen it. Standing outside the church, David Wolfson, a longtime friend of Mr. Cunningham’s, told a story about a birthday dinner that was organized last October in Mr. Cunningham’s honor. “He looked great,” Mr. Wolfson said. “Even though he didn’t like the fuss of it. ” That was Mr. Cunningham’s way. He was the sort of fellow who found his greatest enjoyment in simply doing his work. And he did it all the way to the wire, darting around town on his bicycle to attend everything from galas at the Museum of Modern Art to raucous parties with drag queens and gym bunnies. Susanne Bartsch, who arrived in a leatherette and lace jacket with exaggerated shoulder detailing, had seen Mr. Cunningham at one of those parties back in April. For once, she thought, he had seemed a little off his game. “I could tell it was getting hot for him,” she said. “He wasn’t running around as fast as he usually did. He couldn’t hear well anymore. He looked more frail. ” Yet Mr. Cunningham nevertheless took her picture, wearing a very baroque pink and gold biker jacket with lacy boots and one of her trademark wigs, for The New York Times. Shortly before Mr. Cunningham had a stroke and wound up in the hospital, he encountered Dean Baquet, The Times’s executive editor, and his wife, the writer Dylan Landis, at a party. Mr. Cunningham snapped their picture. A few days later, Mr. Baquet recalled, Mr. Cunningham walked into the office and dropped off a print. Which was business as usual with the people he photographed. Right around 10:30 a. m. on Thursday, a group of Mr. Cunningham’s nieces and nephews arrived at the church, along with the procession. A car from the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home delivered the coffin that carried Mr. Cunningham. It was covered with an American flag, and carried into the church by a group of men in boxy suits. A simple religious ceremony followed, along with an emotional tribute from John Kurdewan, Mr. Cunningham’s assistant at The Times. He said that even in the hospital, toward the end, Mr. Cunningham was counting the photos for a layout of his Evening Hours column. After the service, mourners streamed onto the sidewalk as a kilted bagpiper played a solemn tune. Pallbearers carried out the coffin and marched with it toward the car. A trumpeter began to blow a rendition of “America the Beautiful. ” The flag was removed from the coffin, and the crowd looked out at the summer sky. It was not a crowded scene, though a memorial planned for this summer certainly will be. On this day there were just a hundred or so of Mr. Cunningham’s closest friends, relatives and admirers. On one side of the stairs was Ms. Wintour, who began appearing in Mr. Cunningham’s columns years before she became the editor of Vogue. On the other was Ms. de la Renta, who long ago discovered that Mr. Cunningham’s favorite shots were not of her traipsing around in couture, but of her stepping into a puddle. In life, Mr. Cunningham had always been a little elusive, yet here he was surrounded by the patchwork of families he had amassed. There were blood relatives, colleagues from The Times, including the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. and people Mr. Cunningham had discovered on the street. Among this last group was Louise Doktor, an administrative assistant at a Midtown holding company, who wore a black pleated Issey Miyake shawl and carried a Céline bag covered in feathers. With her was Jenny Kee, with a big red pair of glasses and a dark red kimono. Nearby was a more simply dressed man in his 30s, looking over the funeral program, which ended with a quote from Mr. Cunningham: “It is as true today as it ever was. He who seeks beauty shall find it. ” | 1 |
CHICAGO — For hours, the body lay where it had landed, just steps from the wooden sign someone had put up — a painted gun with a red slash through it. Inside a nearby house, Lee Baez had heard the gunshots in the darkness and got up to move his car so his fiancée would not have to walk past the body as she left for work before dawn. Down the block, Sandra Harris rose later to care for her ailing mother and saw the body, by then draped with a sheet. After the authorities finally carried away Lee Martin, the man who was shot in his head and back and died here on Walnut Street in the middle of an August night, another neighbor emerged to scrub the red streaks off the sidewalk. “I just pray that nothing comes through the window and hits Mother,” Ms. Harris, 58, said, glancing over at the spot where Mr. Martin’s body had been a few hours earlier. Living on Chicago’s West Side, where the dazzling downtown skyline always seems to shimmer in view but out of reach, means mornings like these grow strangely normal. The blue lights, the yellow tape, the next day’s quiet moving on — all of it. Over Memorial Day weekend, when The New York Times tracked every shooting in this city, the largest concentration of them happened here, in about six square miles that make up Chicago’s 11th police district. Of 64 people shot that weekend, 16 were in this district. Three people were shot on this same stretch of Walnut Street. The Times returned to the blocks in the 11th District where the Memorial Day weekend shootings occurred to try to better understand Chicago’s crisis of violence. Residents along Walnut Street and at other crime scenes told of a fractured community — isolated by this city’s entrenched segregation, hollowed out by joblessness and poverty, and battered by resignation and indifference. Here, graystone homes and brick cottages line elegant boulevards with wide, grassy medians. Garfield Park, once known as Chicago’s Central Park, sits in the 11th’s middle. But on Walnut Street, one vacant lot has been there so long that walking paths are worn through it. Young men gather on this section of the street, and neighbors say they hear calls for “Pills!” or “Flats!” — slang for drugs — in the middle of the day. In places like this, cycles reinforce themselves: Poverty and joblessness breed an underground economy that leads to jail and makes it harder to get jobs. Struggling, emptying schools result in the closings of the very institutions that hold communities together. Segregation throws up obstacles to economic investment. And people and programs with good intentions come and go, thwarting hopes, reinforcing frustrations while never quite addressing the underlying problems, anyway. Into it all comes a lethal mix of readily available guns, a growing number of splintering gangs and groups, and a sense among some here that the punishment for carrying a weapon on these streets will never be larger than the risk of not carrying one. “It’s about desperation, decadence, depression and rage,” the Rev. Marshall E. Hatch Sr. who has given eulogies for at least 12 victims of violence this year, says of the district, home to his New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church. “It’s the concentration of all of that, all in one place. ” Homicides citywide are up about 56 percent compared to last year and shootings are up about 49 percent, but just five of Chicago’s 22 police districts are driving the bulk of Chicago’s rise. All are on the South or West Sides. In the 11th, shootings are up by 78 percent compared to a year ago, and homicides are up 89 percent. So far in 2016, 91 people have been killed in this district, where only about 74, 000 people live. That is more homicides than in all of last year in entire cities, such as Seattle (population 684, 000) Omaha (444, 000) and Buffalo (258, 000). Early on the morning of May 28, a gray car pulled up on Walnut Street, several teenage witnesses told a Times reporter, and men with big guns got out and started firing at other young men on a porch. Shell casings littered the street. The police say witnesses were uncooperative, and no one has been arrested. Within weeks, that shooting was a hazy memory. “Now which one was that?” asked a woman who lives directly across the street. Soon after, neighbors say the large homemade sign of a gun with a condemning slash through it appeared beside a vacant lot. People were unsure who put up the sign, and more have followed, one beneath the clattering “L” train track to downtown, another across from a children’s playground. By November, someone had split the Walnut Street sign in two, a curse word scrawled on part of the crumpled remains. “It’s mostly a camouflage,” Ms. Harris said. “I mean what’s really changed when people are getting shot dead right next to that sign?” On the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, a woman was shot in the back while driving in a car around 4:30 a. m. The police say two men approached and started shooting. No arrests have been made. Weeks later, less than a block from that shooting on West Wilcox, a preacher led people holding hands in a circle, praying, singing and swaying. The group seemed not to notice as traffic rumbled down Pulaski Road, a crowded strip lined with storefronts promising tax preparation, hairbraiding, candy and liquor. Zaree Pendleton, a stranger to those in the circle, suddenly wandered up, agitated. He said he was recently out of prison and desperately needed help. He carefully set the Bud Light he had been drinking for breakfast on the sidewalk in the center of the swaying circle. Then he reached for the preacher’s hand. “I’ve been watching y’all out here every morning, praying,” Mr. Pendleton told the group, turning weepy. “Y’all want to pray with me?” Jamie Thompson, the pastor of Reborn Community Church, often holds services here, just outside the church he created at a shuttered fire station. The need is greatest among the people who cluster along Pulaski’s corners in the middle of the day, many out of work or only working some, the preacher said. In 2014, almost half of the families in the community areas that make up much of the 11th District — East Garfield Park, West Garfield Park and Humboldt Park — had incomes under $25, 000, close to the family poverty threshold that year. Industry once flourished here. The original headquarters and distribution center of Sears, Roebuck Co. provided thousands of jobs. But the area changed in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, as whites moved away and blacks moved in. In 2014, almost a quarter of the housing units in the neighborhoods in the district were vacant, census data show. “The steel mills, the factories, those big economic engines aren’t there,” said Eric Washington, a deputy chief for the Chicago Police Department and a former commander of the 11th District, “and we need to see what can be the new engines in this district. It can’t be the drug trade. ” Residents like Mr. Pendleton say they feel stuck in an economic trap: go to jail for a crime, struggle to find work, wind up back in jail. “People have gotten to a place where they don’t have any hope and they don’t feel like they have any hope of getting any,” Mr. Thompson said. “You accept all kinds of ways to make money when you’re hopeless. ” Mr. Thompson used to live in a gentrifying neighborhood a few miles away, but he moved his family here a dozen years ago. He caught neighbors’ attention when he brought his prayers to the streets. “‘What’s a white guy doing over here?’ people would laugh,” he recalled. “Now they’re used to me. ” Mr. Pendleton came to the prayer circle with a plea. “I need a job,” he said. He said he felt lost. “I need everything. ” “I’m an alkie, God knows,” he said. “But I need a job. I want a job as bad as hell. ” Mr. Thompson told him: “The Lord wants to fill you completely, man. You’re trying to fill up with alcohol, but you’re taking a step. ” They made plans to get Mr. Pendleton an identification card — the first task on what could be a long road to employment. Mr. Pendleton needed to come back with some documents, Mr. Thompson told him. That was weeks ago. Mr. Thompson said Mr. Pendleton had not been back. On Memorial Day, two men, 21 and 28, were shot and wounded just before 11 a. m. The police say they were gang members, and that neither has cooperated with the police. Witnesses said a black car sped away after the shooting. No arrests have been made. Steps from Gladys Avenue, where the two men were shot, Garfield Park opens up to 184 acres of plush lawns shaded by old trees and surrounded by curving paths and historic buildings. For visitors, the park is a tourist attraction, a jewel of the city. Its lavish conservatory is jammed with hundreds of exotic plants and a dewy, tropical aroma even through Chicago’s bleakest winter. Yet for many of the people who live here — some of whom say they rarely enter the conservatory — Garfield Park can be harrowing. Its nearby side streets, like Gladys, can feel menacing. On a bright afternoon not long ago, a man stepped out of an apartment onto a crowded sidewalk and a gust of wind blew his shirt up, revealing a gun. Residents say the park’s perimeter can be a magnet for drug sales and violence. Seven of the 16 people shot over Memorial Day weekend were nearby. The police say statistics show the park is actually safer than it has been in several years, but Cardell Bradley, who fishes for catfish with sausage bait in the Garfield Park lagoon, said he was cautious. “If I see a group of people gathering, I get out of here. ” “It’s scary,” he said. “And it’s just heartbreaking to see these kids involved in all this — they’re only young schoolkids, you know. ” Part of the problem is this: The district straddles the Eisenhower Expressway, a major thoroughfare that has long been known as the Heroin Highway. Suburbanites use it to drive into the city for drugs. Rivalries between Chicago’s increasingly splintered gangs and cliques over sales of heroin, Ecstasy, prescription drugs and marijuana have given way to gunfire — even among sellers who see themselves as only peripherally involved. This year, a dimpled was shot as he rode his bicycle outside his house. “Our block was making a lot of money doing what they’re doing, so I guess people get jealous,” said the teenager, who wore an arm brace for weeks and who says his stomach still aches when he sneezes. The teenager said he only occasionally helped sell drugs and just happened to be there when competitors turned up, armed. At the time, he was enrolled in middle school and working with a mentor, who asked that the youth’s name not be published for his safety. The teenager, the mentor said, was registered to attend a “peace conference” with him on the very evening he was shot. Early on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, a man, 37, was shot in his arm and his leg as he stood in an alley here. Police say the victim was uncooperative. No arrests have been made. An incongruously upbeat song plays loudly along this battered block all day every day: Scott Joplin’s ragtime classic, “The Entertainer. ” The cheery tune tinkles from a ice cream truck that is permanently parked in a vacant lot on the block where the man was shot in the alley. Mina Marquez, the owner, also lives on the block — an odd amalgam of empty lots and homes, now decked with elaborate Christmas displays. In a police district that is mostly black, Ms. Marquez, 35, is unusual. She came from Mexico at 16, and after living in other Chicago neighborhoods, she and her husband and their three children moved to the 11th District because it was a place they could afford. Much of what happens here is driven by economics. People who can afford to leave, do. For Ms. Marquez, plunking down an ice cream truck on an empty lot next door was far cheaper than the family’s effort a few years ago to open in a storefront in a different neighborhood. Competition is scarce here. Sub shops and food marts struggle, and chain stores mostly stay away. Most of Ms. Marquez’s ice cream customers are black, though there is a growing Hispanic population in this northern section of the district. Chicago is now made up of nearly equal thirds whites, blacks and Hispanics, but many of the city’s stark lines of segregation still exist. New policies have actually hardened some lines. When Chicago’s public housing projects were scheduled for demolition more than a decade ago, city leaders expected residents to spread across the city. But rental prices and other factors have concentrated many of those with government housing vouchers into neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, and kept many black residents out of richer, whiter areas. Ms. Marquez says her family coexists, if a bit awkwardly, with her customers. “We don’t let them mess with us,” Ms. Marquez said in Spanish. “They’re not comfortable that we’re here. ” Still, Ms. Marquez, who keeps her two youngest children in view as she stands at the truck window, said she had grown used to life on this block. She said that she sold more than 100 ice creams most days, and that she planned to stay. A line often forms outside the truck, where milkshakes are in high demand. On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, a man was walking along just before 5 a. m. when two men approached, told him to lie down on the ground and shot him. The victim has not cooperated with the police, the police say. No arrests have been made. In this neighborhood, Marconi Elementary Community Academy was once the glue. Since the public school opened decades ago at the corner of Maypole and Kolmar Avenues — several blocks from where the man was shot over Memorial Day weekend — best friends were made there, parents kept in touch during children were taught by teachers who had once taught their parents. “We all went there,” said Kenny Harvey, who attended the school half a century ago and still lives right here. In 2013, though, facing a fiscal crisis, the city closed Marconi and about 50 other public schools. Chicago’s education leaders cited poor student performances and low enrollments in what was then the largest simultaneous closing for any school district in the nation. Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration has defended the closings as needed, and a University of Chicago research group found that most of the displaced students wound up in schools. Since 2012, the city has spent $178 million on capital improvements in the 11th District and added programs and services, city officials said. But six schools here were also shuttered, including Marconi. To get to their new school, Tilton Elementary, the children from Marconi had to cross different gang lines and new drug turfs, parents at Marconi complained. There were new teachers, new students and, in some cases, a longer walk. And the neighborhood itself was losing one more bit of precious ballast: the rare public institution that held them together. There is also this: Based on the city’s own criteria, Tilton barely rated a “good standing” designation, and so was only marginally better than Marconi. For many parents, the difference was hardly worth the effort. Tasha Walker, her husband and her oldest daughter had all once gone to Marconi, but she chose not to send her younger daughter on to Tilton. Instead, her children attend charter schools in a different neighborhood. “I’m not letting my kids get lost,” Ms. Walker said. For a brief time, Ms. Walker’s family had lived in a Chicago suburb, and she hopes to save enough money to move again. “I want them to be able to be teenagers,” she said. On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, two men, ages 28 and 29, were shot and wounded as they stood on the sidewalk here at nearly midnight. The police say that both were gang members, and that neither would cooperate. No arrests have been made. Sonja Bellephant, 48, grew up in an apartment building just across from the stoop where the two men were shot over Memorial Day weekend. These days, she lives in a Chicago suburb but works as youth director at the church her grandfather started on the corner. “Their life,” she said of the young people, “I wish it could be like my life. ” Ms. Bellephant wants to create an urban boarding school for young men in a shuttered, hulking church, school and convent on this block. She envisions an arts studio in a church down the street. She regularly stops strangers, asking if their children are in day care, if they have found a job, if they are in school. “Did you graduate from high school?” she called to a young man one morning. He looked puzzled but said yes, then hiked up his pants. “I want to tell them: ‘You don’t have to dodge bullets. You can finish school,’” Ms. Bellephant said. Ms. Bellephant, a former public school principal, is one in a vast array of individuals, government agencies, nonprofit groups and religious organizations with ideas for how to fix this area. The mayor’s office this fall announced plans for $36 million for mentoring in areas like this, and for a $100 million fund to bring economic development to neighborhoods. “The mayor is determined to turn around decades of neglect in the South and West Side neighborhoods that have been challenged by violence for generations,” said the mayor’s spokesman, Adam Collins. Mr. Emanuel’s “comprehensive strategy,” he said, “will add nearly 1, 000 new police officers, invest new dollars in our most challenged communities, make mentoring universal for young men in areas, spur economic development, strengthen sentencing for violent gun offenders, and bring together community and faith leaders around a plan to provide youth with better opportunities. ” Missing, though, community leaders say, is a single, overarching blueprint. Mentoring programs come and go with shifting grants. Job programs last a few months. “That’s the thing,” said Tio Hardiman, an activist who founded an group that has worked along these blocks. “Nobody’s answering to nobody out there. Everybody’s in their own response mode. Sometimes, it’s more between the various community groups than it is on the streets. ” Leaders have long been trying to draw attention to this part of Chicago. In 1966, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. moved into an apartment near this district as part of his Chicago Freedom Movement campaign to desegregate neighborhoods and get fair, affordable housing. In 1986, Jimmy Carter helped build a Habitat for Humanity townhouse but it caught fire years later, and was eventually torn down. Ms. Bellephant is still trying to figure out how to pay for her urban boarding school. An old banner is plastered on the shuttered building, a vestige from a different plan to turn it into a family life center, gym and school of performing arts. “It’s on the way 2013,” the banner promises. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump will allow corporations and wealthy individuals to make large donations to fund the activities surrounding his inauguration, complicating his promise to eliminate special interests from influencing his government. Mr. Trump plans to ban money from registered lobbyists, whom he has purged from his transition team and barred from working for his administration. But the restrictions will be lighter on corporations and individuals — the groups that have traditionally provided a vast majority of funding for the festivities surrounding the transfer of power. The restrictions, which members of the Presidential Inaugural Committee cautioned have yet to be finalized, represent a continued march back from standards set in 2009, when Barack Obama banned gifts from lobbyists, political action committees and corporations, and put a cap of $50, 000 on individuals. Mr. Obama relaxed his own rules in 2012, after what was then the most expensive presidential campaign in history had depleted his donor base, lifting the ban on corporate gifts and restrictions on the size of those from individuals. Mr. Trump, who like Mr. Obama campaigned on reducing the influence of money in politics, appears poised to relax them further. Officials planning the inauguration said Mr. Trump would solicit corporate donations up to $1 million and allow money to be transferred from political action committees on a basis. The inaugural committee has not reached a decision on where to cap gifts from individuals, if at all. All told, Mr. Trump hopes to raise roughly $65 million to $75 million to fund the parade, balls and other festivities surrounding his as president, according to several people involved in the planning efforts. Such a total, if it materializes, would easily surpass the $43 million Mr. Obama’s team raised for his 2013 inauguration and the $53 million, a record, that it raised for his first inauguration in 2009. Thomas Barrack Jr. a private equity investor who is heading the committee responsible for planning the events surrounding Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, said the decision to limit donations from certain groups was “in line with the ’s thoughts on ethics reform. ” But campaign finance experts said the restrictions left much to be desired, targeting groups that traditionally provide little funding for the occasion while seemingly letting bigger donors — including corporate interests that Mr. Trump took aim at on the campaign trail — off the hook. “For the most part, they are illusory, because they are restricting money that doesn’t really play any significant role in funding the inauguration,” said Fred Wertheimer, a longtime advocate of campaign finance overhaul, referring to the restrictions on lobbyists and foreign interests. The corporate and individual money that does traditionally play a significant role, he added, would be allowed to flow more or less unabated, leaving the potential of undue influence in place. “You can’t have a more ideal opportunity to buy influence and ingratiate yourself with a new administration than by giving a huge contribution to pay for their inauguration,” Mr. Wertheimer said. Bob Biersack, a senior fellow at the Center for Responsive Politics, was more forgiving toward Mr. Trump, but he said it would take a fundamental change in the way inaugurations were funded to meaningfully root out special interests. “I don’t find it fundamentally inconsistent with what he is saying,” he said. “I just think the rhetoric and the reality are different. ” Presidential transition committees, which coordinate and finance most of the festivities that surround the federally funded ceremony, face few of the restrictions campaigns do, and their practices vary from president to president. President George W. Bush did not restrict who could support his inaugural festivities, but he put caps on gifts. The committee is still in the early stages of assembling what will be an operation employing hundreds of people responsible for planning dozens of events. As of Wednesday morning, the packages that are typically used to solicit donations were still being vetted by lawyers, and subcommittees were still taking shape to handle issues like security and entertainment. “It’s like putting on the Olympics in 61 days,” Mr. Barrack said, adding that the committee was racing to finalize plans by the end of the week. Two people working with the committee said it planned to roll out tiered giving packages next week, most likely ranging from $25, 000 to $1 million, that will reward donors with progressively more access to more intimate events with Mr. Trump and his team. The committee is planning to hold two official balls, according to two people involved in the planning. By comparison, Mr. Obama attended 10 official balls in 2009. Mr. Trump is not expected to donate to the festivities himself, as he did to the campaign, according to members of the committee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans that had not been finalized. Sara Armstrong, a longtime Republican National Committee official who helped plan the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer, has been appointed chief executive and is leading the team that Mr. Barrack said would eventually total 350 people out of an office building just off the National Mall. As of Wednesday, the committee had hired about 100 people, he said. The committee includes generous donors to Mr. Trump’s campaign, like Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets Gail Icahn, the wife of the investor Carl Icahn and the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam. Several stalwart backers of Republican causes, like Stephen A. Wynn and Lewis M. Eisenberg, are on the committee, as is Brian Ballard, Mr. Trump’s longtime Florida lobbyist. The overall cost of the inauguration and related festivities is likely to run to as much as $200 million. Most of that burden will fall on taxpayers, though, who fund everything from security to the ceremony and inaugural luncheon organized by a joint committee of Congress. Mr. Trump’s team said it was expecting two million to three million people to flood Washington for the ceremony, a crowd that could surpass the 1. 8 million estimated to have been on hand for Mr. Obama’s first inauguration, which was a record. Planners are also expecting more protesters than usual around the event. Mr. Barrack said Mr. Trump had instructed him to plan events tailored to the political moment. “It’s one of the greatest opportunities that this president has to put his fingerprints on bridging the divide,” Mr. Barrack said on Wednesday. Mike Litterst, a spokesman for the National Park Service, which controls the Mall and other public spaces where the inauguration will take place, said on Monday that the Park Service did not expect to meet with officials from the group until after Thanksgiving. But across Washington, the physical preparations for Jan. 20 are well underway, even as the city’s political establishment is struggling to come to terms with the election outcome. Capitol architects have been hammering away since September on the more than inaugural platform overlooking the Mall. And outside the White House, Park Service staff members are at work on the presidential reviewing stand where Mr. Trump will review his inaugural parade. | 1 |
Lloyd H. Conover, a chemist whose breakthrough invention of one of the most effective and widely prescribed antibiotics, tetracycline, led to a whole new approach to developing such drugs, died on Saturday in St. Petersburg, Fla. He was 93. His death was confirmed by his son Craig. Dr. Conover started his research at Pfizer in Brooklyn in 1950, when pharmaceutical companies, spurred by the success of penicillin against battlefield infections during World War II, were racing to find new antibiotics. Most early antibiotics were naturally occurring chemicals produced by microorganisms that lived in soil or on decaying fruit the strain of penicillin used to protect wounded soldiers came from a moldy melon. Few scientists at the time thought it was possible to improve on antibiotics, which they viewed as a result of an evolutionary process that had equipped microorganisms with the ultimate chemical weapons to survive. Dr. Conover, however, became intrigued with two naturally occurring antibiotics that, except for two atoms, were chemically identical. To Dr. Conover, the atoms seemed out of place. Each antibiotic had a chlorine or oxygen atom where he expected to find a hydrogen atom. Would swapping in hydrogen improve the potency of the drugs? Using a routine chemical procedure, he stripped chlorine from one antibiotic and inserted hydrogen, creating a more stable molecule. He worked with a single assistant. “I didn’t want an audience if we failed,” he told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1992. The result was tetracycline, a powerful antibiotic with fewer side effects than the drug from which it was derived — proof, Dr. Conover wrote, that “a superior drug could be made by chemical modification. ” Virtually all antibiotics today are semisynthetic, meaning they are chemically altered to increase the number of infections that can be treated or to reduce side effects. Hailed as a wonder drug, tetracycline proved effective against numerous potentially deadly infections — including salmonella, which causes food poisoning — and bacteria responsible for bloodstream, skin and urinary infections gonorrhea pneumonia and strep throat. Hog and chicken farmers embraced the drug, which was used to encourage growth and ward off infections among animals raised in close quarters. Fruit growers sprayed tetracycline in orchards to prevent fire blight and other diseases. With tetracycline’s commercial success, however, came a slew of patent challenges. Three pharmaceutical companies claimed that their scientists had discovered tetracycline before Dr. Conover, although their patent applications were filed later. After Pfizer licensed tetracycline to its competitors to end the dispute, the federal government challenged the licensing deals as anticompetitive, along with the validity of the patent. “I had essentially a second career, preparing for and giving depositions and testifying,” Dr. Conover wrote in a 1984 article in the journal Research Management. At scientific meetings, he wrote, he felt a coolness from peers who thought that his patent claim was false. A federal appeals court in Philadelphia finally affirmed the patent — and, by extension, the licensing agreements — in 1982, three decades after Dr. Conover invented tetracycline. By the time the litigation ended, widespread use of tetracycline had caused many kinds of bacteria to become resistant to the antibiotic, reducing its potency against many infections. Tetracycline is still commonly used against acne and certain diseases, such as Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever and Q fever. To control bacterial resistance, many European countries and the United States now restrict the nontherapeutic use of tetracycline in agriculture. Lloyd Hillyard Conover was born on June 13, 1923, in Orange, N. J. His father, John, was a lawyer his mother, the former Marguerite Anna Cameron, was an artist. His interest in chemistry began in childhood when he watched his father mix cement to repair a retaining wall. “There was something about the physical change in matter that really fascinated me,” he said in an interview for this obituary. To feed his curiosity, he devised science projects with items he found around his house. In one instance, he took his mother’s pots and pans and melted down lead left behind by a plumber to make a miniature cannon that fired lead pellets, powered by steam. He entered Amherst College in 1941 to study chemistry, but his education was interrupted by World War II. He spent three years in the Navy, serving on an amphibious ship in the Pacific and rising to lieutenant junior grade. After the war, he returned to Amherst, and he received his bachelor’s degree in 1947. He received his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Rochester in 1950 and went to work for Pfizer, where salaries were higher than in academia, to support his family. His first wife, the former Virginia Kirk, died in 1988 his second wife, the former Marie Solomons, died in 2003. Besides his son Craig, survivors include his wife, the former Katharine Meacham two other sons, Kirk and Roger a daughter, Heather Conover four stepdaughters, Sue Love, Virginia Karpovich, Katharine Meacham and Laura Keane two stepsons, Walter Solomons and Andrew Meacham 16 grandchildren and seven . At Pfizer, Dr. Conover was assigned to a team working to determine the chemical structures of the antibiotics oxytetracycline and chlortetracycline — a project that laid the groundwork for Dr. Conover’s discovery. After the team completed its task, the senior scientists went off to write papers about their findings, leaving Dr. Conover with time on his hands. “Everyone thought that was the end of the project,” Dr. Conover said in the interview. “But I wanted to keep working with these wonderfully interesting molecules. ” Dr. Conover completed his tetracycline experiment in a matter of months. “It worked the first time, unlike most of the experiments I ever ran,” he said. Within a year, Pfizer was testing tetracycline on people. Dr. Conover spent his entire career at Pfizer. He went on to help invent Pyrantel and Morantel, which are used to treat parasitic worm infections, and rose through the company’s executive ranks to become senior vice president for agricultural products research and development. He retired in 1984. Although Pfizer vigorously defended Dr. Conover’s patent, the company was less aggressive than competitors in marketing his invention. “Pfizer sold tetracycline but never pushed it,” Dr. Conover said. “That was a disappointment. ” | 1 |
November 14, 2016 - Fort Russ News - RusVesna - translated by J. Arnoldski -
Around 500 terrorists have been killed by Russian air forces and the Syrian army in western Aleppo.
Bandits from the Jaish al-Fath Islamist coalition suffered large losses after a failed offensive in western Aleppo which began at the end of October. More than 500 militants and dozens of units of military vehicles were destroyed under fire from Russian and Syrian aircraft and Syrian troops.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the bandits’ losses reach up to 260 killed.
As a result of the numerous defeats inflicted upon the Jaish al-Fath coalition in western Aleppo, government troops and their allies are preparing to switch their efforts to the southern districts of the Aleppo.
Lebanese Hezbollah is preparing a major special operation in the district of Khan-Tuman with the aim of ousting terrorists from positions along the Aleppo-Damscus M-5 highway.
Following the retreat of the Jaish al-Fath gang, the Syrian army intends to exploit the fleeing and disorganized Islamists to regain control over a number of villages and commanding heights.
As reported earlier , on November 11th the Syrian army and its allies continued to advance in western Aleppo. After breaking through militants’ line of defense, they took the Minyan and Al-Assad districts…
Fierce fighting is ongoing between militants and the SAA in the Al-Assad district with the use of heavy artillery and volley-fire rocket systems…
In addition, the liquidation of the field commander of the 314th militant regiment, Osama Darwish, known as Abu Il Harman, during clashes with SAA units in the Al-Assad and Minyan districts has been reported.
During clashes, Syrian troops managed to regain control over the southern triangle of the Al-Assad district and the Hamat Ad-Diyar and Al-Amal schools.
Russian and Syrian air forces are launching strikes at militant headquarters and roaming gangs in the Rashidin 4, Khan al-Asal, Gabat al-Basil, Al-Mansura, Maskana, and Kashish airport districts. This has resulted in the elimination of dozens of armored vehicles and large numbers of militants.
Meanwhile, it has been repotred that groups involved in the Euphrates Shield operation, supported by Turkey, have announced the capture of the village of Talil north of the city of al-Bab northeast of Aleppo as a result of fighting against ISIS.
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Mikhail Saakashvili quits as Odessa governor Source: REX The Governor of the Odessa region, Mikhail Saakashvili , who is best known for eating his tie on TV while serving as President of Georgia, announced his resignation on Monday, November 7. "I have decided to resign and start a new stage of the struggle. I am not going to give up. I am a soldier who walks as much as he can and then continues walking as much as he must," Mikhail Saakashvili, former president of Georgia said at a press briefing. According to him, it is difficult to improve the state of affairs in one region, while corruption continues prospering in the rest of Ukraine "capitalizing on the blood of soldiers, victims of the Maidan and betraying the idea of the Ukrainian revolution." Saakashvili has repeatedly accused the Ukrainian authorities of corruption. On September 13, he called Petro Poroshenko's Bloc a criminal group. In December 2015, at a meeting of Ukraine's National Board of Reforms, an open conflict sparked between Saakashvili and Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov. The Interior Minister asked Saakashvili a question about the privatization of the Odessa Portside Plant. In response, the former president of Georgia stated that he was not going to discuss anything on the subject. Instead, Saakashvili added, he was going to prove that "you [Avakov] are a thief." Avakov splashed water from his glass at Saakashvili during the scandal. President of Ukraine called the incident shameful. Saakashvili was appointed the head of the Odessa region on May 30, 2015. Prior to the appointment, he received Ukrainian citizenship in accordance with the decree signed by President Petro Poroshenko. From 2004 to 2013, Saakashvili served as the President of Georgia. He has rarely visited Georgia since then, where there are four criminal cases pending against him. One of them was filed on charges of embezzlement of public funds for personal needs. Pravda.Ru Circus from Georgia moves to Ukraine | 0 |
When the River Ran Red Arthur Kemp, American Renaissance, September 2008
The year is 1838. Dodging a flurry of spears, the Boer commander, Andries Pretorius, rides forward to seize a Zulu warrior. In the midst of an epic battle between more than 15,000 warriors and just 468 Boers, Pretorius has decided to take a Zulu alive. He wants to send the captive back to his king, Dingaan, to convey surrender terms to the Zulu nation.
The warrior has no intention of being taken alive, and jabs viciously at Pretorius with his assegai. This is a Zulu spear, normally a long-shafted throwing weapon, but the warrior broke its shank earlier for close-quarter stabbing. Pretorius gives up on capturing the Zulu, and tries to shoot him.
With a single-shot, muzzle-loading musket, he has only one chance of a hit. There is no time to reload in close combat. To his horror, Pretorius sees the smoke-trailing ball whiz past the Zulu’s ear. At the same time, the Zulu lunges forward, causing Pretorius’s horse to stumble backwards, throwing the white commander to the ground.
Leaping to his feet, he meets the attacking Zulu, who knows he is now on equal terms with the white man, who can no longer use his magic shooting stick and carries no weapon comparable to the assegai. Pretorius is now fighting for his life. He just manages to sidestep the spear point, striking it away with the butt of his gun.
Spinning round, the Zulu raises his spear high above his head and thrusts down, as he has been trained to do in the Zulus’ disciplined army. It is a blow that will be fatal if it strikes home, but Pretorius sees it coming. He grabs the spear point with his left hand to ward it away from his chest. The sharp point cuts deeply into his palm, embedding itself at an angle that makes it impossible for the Zulu to pull it out. Pretorius seizes the Zulu by the throat with his free right hand and throws him to the ground in an attempt to strangle him.
The Zulu struggles, and with the help of two good hands is about to break free, when one of Pretorius’s men comes upon the scene. He pulls the assegai out of the commander’s hand, and plunges it into the Zulu’s side, ending the struggle.
Pretorius remounts and heads back to the Boer camp for treatment. He is not worried, as he knows by now that this greatest of all battles between Boers and Zulus has already been won. The main Zulu army has been broken in two, and the river that runs along one side of the Boer camp is stained red with Zulu blood. The place and the tributary known previously as the Ncome will be renamed Blood River. Pretorius knows that the Zulu defeat, which will include some 3,000 killed on the battlefield, is a fit revenge for the deception and murder committed by the Zulus 10 months earlier.
Prelude to War
The great clash between the Boer and Zulu nations was not, as leftist historians like to claim, the result of ruthless white colonialism suppressing an indigenous people. It came about because the Zulus rejected an extremely reasonable attempt at negotiation by the Boers.
The Boers, pioneers of Dutch, French, and German descent, were the people who opened up much of what was later to become South Africa. Their first antecedents had landed on the southernmost tip of Africa in 1652, only 45 years after the Virginia Company settled on Jamestown Island.
When they arrived in the area now known as Cape Town, whites came into contact only with Hottentots and Bushmen. As the number of Europeans increased, they expanded east and north, only meeting their first black tribe, the Xhosa, some 500 miles away, on South Africa’s east coast. The Xhosas were migrating south, fleeing the warlike Zulu to the north, who were engaged in imperialist expansion of their own.
For just under a century white settlement halted at this eastern frontier border formed by the coast and firm Xhosa settlement. It was not, however, a time of peace, as Xhosa were constantly raiding the Boers who lived on the border. This caused much harm and discontent among the farmers, who blamed the Dutch-ruled colonial government back in Cape Town for the lawlessness.
It only added to the border farmers’ grievances when the British took the Cape Colony from the Dutch in 1806 to prevent the colony from falling into French hands during the Napoleonic Wars. It was vital to control the merchant and naval refitting station on the way to the Far East. The new colonial masters not only started anglicizing the colony, when they abolished slavery they offered compensation that amounted to hardly a quarter of a slave’s value.
Exasperated by incessant Xhosa attacks and British attempts to suppress their language and culture, groups of frontier farmers, filled with a sense of manifest destiny not seen again until the opening of the American West, set forth to the north and the east in a movement known as the Great Trek. The trekkers (they became known as Voortrekkers, or pioneers, only after 1880) bypassed the Xhosa in search of new, unsettled territory, in which they could establish independent Boer nations. All told, it was only a small minority of no more than 12,000 Boers who made the trek to the future Natal, Orange Free State, and Transvaal regions. They traveled in several waves of covered, ox-drawn wagons much like the Conestogas in which Americans opened the West.
The Boer leader of the time, Piet Retief, had written the trekker “manifesto,” in which he spelled out the farmers’ long-held grievances against the British. By1836, the Boer wagons had crossed the great mountain range into Natal, in an act of audacity that few thought possible. The range, the highest in southern Africa, had been named the Drakensberg—the Dragon Mountains—because they were said to be impassable.
Retief had identified a large piece of uninhabited land to the north of the Zulu kingdom, which lay open to settlement. Retief knew that if he wanted the land for his people, he could take it unopposed. However, he wanted to live in peace with his Zulu neighbors, and before taking possession, he opened negotiations with the Zulu king, Dingaan. He wanted no misunderstanding between the two peoples.
He sent a letter to the Zulu king explaining why he wanted to speak to him, and first visited Dingaan’s capital—a large circle of reed and grass huts—on November 5, 1837. Retief left the main body of trekkers and went to the Zulu king’s capital, Umgungundhlovo (“the place of the elephant”), to negotiate a treaty that would allow Boers peacefully to settle land adjoining the Zulu kingdom. Dingaan said he would let the Boers live in Natal if they recovered cattle stolen by a Tlokwa chieftain. Retief and his men did so, and Dingaan agreed to give the land to the Boers.
Retief returned to Umgungundhlovo on February 3, 1838, to finalize the agreement. He arrived with 60 volunteers, including his own son and three children of other men—it was common for children to accompany their fathers on expeditions of this kind. The next day, Retief and Dingaan formally signed a treaty—the Zulu king made his mark by scratching an “X” on the document—giving possession of the land to the Boers. Delighted, the Boers sent scouts back to the main encampments to report the successful outcome and made ready to leave. As Retief and his party were about to saddle up, a messenger arrived from Dingaan inviting the Boer party to a special celebration to mark the signing. Retief was suspicious but did not want to offend Dingaan. As they had on previous visits, the Boers stacked their firearms neatly outside the reed walls and entered the royal enclosure unarmed.
As they ate and drank, a Zulu impi, or warrior unit, put on a dance for the guests. According to the account of a white missionary who was present, the dancing warriors drew ever closer to the Boers, till they were just in front of the seated whites. When the Zulu king leaped to his feet and shouted, “Kill the white wizards!” the impi fell upon the surprised Boers. Some of them drew their hunting knives and tried to fight off the attackers, but they were quickly overwhelmed.
The Zulu warriors bound the whites with reed ropes and dragged them to Hlomo Amabutho, the Hill of Execution, near the Zulu capital. There they clubbed the Boers to death, one by one, with Retief kept until last and forced to watch his son being murdered. After Retief’s heart was extracted and presented to Dingaan as proof that the Boer leader was dead, the bodies were left for the vultures, in accordance with Zulu custom.
Dingaan then gave orders for the full might of his army to attack the Boer camps. The settlers had received the message Retief had sent earlier and believed everything had gone well. They were therefore completely unprepared and badly undermanned. The 60 men in Retief’s party were all dead. Many other men had gone hunting, leaving only a light guard for the women and children. The Boers were so confident there would be peace that they had not even posted sentries. Just before dawn, barking dogs aroused the outlying wagons. Then, thousands of Zulu warriors attacked the several hundred trekkers — women, children, and old men — as they lay sleeping.
The Boer historian, Gustav Preller, who interviewed survivors, left a harrowing account of the aftermath: “All around dozens and dozens of bodies … babies who had had their heads smashed open against the wagon wheels, women, dishonored and in some Zulu custom, their breasts cut off … [I]n a wagon, blood filled to a height of several inches, the life blood of an entire family ebbed out where they lay … Jan Bezuidenhout, one of the few young men who had not gone ahead with the Retief party, grabbed his four-month-old baby daughter out of her crib and ran off through the undergrowth … [H]aving lost his pursuers a few miles away, Bezuidenhout checked for the first time on his daughter in his arms. She was dead; a single spear stroke had killed her.”
The slaughter became known as the Weenen, the Dutch word for weeping, and a town of that name still stands near the site. Of the 600 Boers camped in the area, Zulus killed some 300, including 185 children. The rest survived because grazing requirements for their animals meant that the Boer camps had to be widely dispersed. If Dingaan’s men had scouted more thoroughly, found all the encampments, and attacked them simultaneously, the slaughter would have been far greater.
Pretorius arrives
The Boers now faced their greatest challenge. Their camps were full of wounded men, orphaned children, and widows. The Zulus had stolen an estimated 25,000 head of cattle and sheep during the Weenen slaughter, and ammunition was running low. The Zulu armies might return at any time, and they were a formidable force, as the Boers discovered when they launched a raid to avenge the massacre. On April 6, 1838, 347 trekkers under a divided command of Piet Uys and Hendrik Potgieter rode into Zulu territory only to be defeated by some 7,000 warriors not far from Umgungundhlovo in what became known as the Battle of Italeni.
This new disaster forced the Boers to face reality: They had to either abandon their quest for independence and return to the Cape Colony, or find some means to fight their way through. The widows and orphans argued strongly for pushing on. They knew that if they fell back to the Cape they would have to live on charity, whereas if Dingaan could be defeated they could at least recover their livestock. Many Boers were also convinced that God favored them, and that setbacks were only a test of faith.
It was at this moment of indecision that a popular lawyer named Andries Pretorius answered the trekker call for reinforcements, and rode into camp with 60 men and a brass cannon. The Boers appointed him commander in chief on November 25, and he immediately began preparing a strike against the Zulu.
His means were few. A force of only about 468 Boers, including three Scotsmen, set out on November 27 seeking battle. For extra protection, the Boer column of 64 wagons traveled four abreast, instead of the usual single file. Each night, they formed a circular defensive formation, known as a laager.
Pretorius realized that even with two front-loading cannon, his force was too weak to defeat the Zulu army in an open field. He therefore decided to draw the enemy into an attack on the Boer encampment. Each day patrols and scouting parties rode ahead, sometimes led by Pretorius himself, to make sure no unexpected surprises were waiting over the horizon.
On December 9, 1838, the Boer party reached the Zandspruit tributary of the Waschbank River. It was here that the Boer chaplain, Sarel Cilliers, first pledged during his nightly sermon that if God helped them defeat the Zulus, they and their descendents would celebrate that day in honor of God, and that they would build a church in commemoration. The Boers repeated this oath, known in Afrikaner folklore as “the covenant,” every night until they met the enemy.
There appeared to be no movement from the Zulu side. On December 12, Pretorius decided to move camp to the Buffalo River, hoping to provoke the Zulus by moving farther into their territory. That day, he sent out two patrols, one under the command of his deputy, Commandant Hans De Lange, and another, under the Scotsman Edward Parker. This latter group saw action when they came upon a small group of Zulus. They killed the warriors and took the women prisoner.
Pretorius drew up a message for Dingaan on a white cloth, explaining that he was leading a commando to punish the Zulus. If, however, Dingaan was willing to cooperate, Pretorius wrote, he was still willing to make peace—a generous offer in light of the earlier betrayal. He freed the prisoners and told them to give the message to Dingaan. He received no answer.
On December 13, the Boers spotted Zulus and what appeared to be a large number of cattle near their camp. Piet Uys had been tricked by such a ploy at the Battle of Italeni. Zulu warriors, crouching behind toughened animal-skin shields, looked like cattle from a distance, and Uys dropped his guard. He was killed in a surprise attack by the “cattle.”
Pretorius did not make the same mistake, and he sent a 120-strong mounted unit to investigate the “cattle.” They turned out to be Zulus, and in the short fight that followed the Boers killed eight warriors but suffered no casualties. Pretorius now suspected that the Zulus were preparing for battle.
On December 15 he moved the Boer camp to a position alongside the Ncome River, itself a tributary of the Buffalo River. A scouting expedition that day confirmed the presence of two huge Zulu armies a short distance away.
Pretorius prepared for battle. His men drew the wagons into a D-shaped formation, one side overlooking a large hippopotamus path facing the Ncome River, another side facing a soil erosion ditch, and the third side facing the open plain. Pretorius chose the site to limit the directions from which the Zulus could attack.
The laager was large enough to contain all the horses and oxen. The defenders tied the wagons together with leather ropes, and closed off all openings between and below the wagons with a Pretorius innovation, so-called fighting gates, which were slatted wood fixtures through which defenders could fire. They left two small openings, sealed with removable fighting gates, so cavalry could leave the laager. Finally, they attached lanterns to the ends of large ox-whips planted upright in the ground. These dangled in front of the laager and were to serve as forward lighting during the dark hours when Zulu usually attacked. Zulus captured after the battle said they had believed the lights waving in the breeze above the Boer camp were spirits, and that fear of the spirits kept them from attacking that night.
Battle is joined
In Pretorius’s own account of the battle, he wrote that as the mist cleared on the morning of December 16, he saw that the Boer camp was completely encircled by tens of thousands of Zulu warriors, even where the terrain would have made an attack difficult. Estimates placed the number of Zulus at between 15,000 and 25,000, although no official count was possible. Whatever the figure, Pretorius wrote that it was a “terrible sight.”
The Boers had been ready and armed since two hours before daybreak. The two cannon were in position, and the fighting gates closed. The defenders expected to run out of ammunition for the cannon, and had stacked up suitably sized stones at strategic points along the perimeter to fire as a last resort. The Boers would fire stones that day.
The front lines of the Zulu force were still, squatting, only about 40 paces from the wagons, waiting for the signal to attack. Pretorius decided to strike first. At his signal, three bursts of fire from the Boer guns and two blasts from the cannon broke the silence. The Boers’ orders were to then hold their fire. As the billows of gunpowder smoke lifted, they saw that the surviving Zulus had fled some 500 paces from their former front line, leaving behind dozens of dying and dead comrades.
The Boers then heard the noise of the Zulus breaking their spear shafts to make them into short, stabbing weapons. A frontal assault was coming. A few minutes later, the Zulu force stormed the wagons, screaming wildly, shields held high, and assegais in readiness. Withering gunfire ripped through the Zulu ranks, and while some managed to reach the wagons, they were gunned down before they could cut through the wagon canvasses.
Another group of Zulus tried to attack from inside the erosion ditch by standing on each others’ shoulders and scrambling over the edge. Pretorius ordered Cilliers, the fighting churchman, to see off the attack. He led a group of men out of the relative safety of the wagon perimeter, and they proceeded to kill some 400 Zulus. One Boer, Philip Fourie, was wounded when an assegai struck him in the side.
The Boers then wheeled one of their cannon out of the laager, pointed it into the ditch, and fired a shot that literally blew apart the assaulting party. The survivors fled the ditch in disarray. This sparked a temporary retreat by the Zulu, and marked the end of the second unsuccessful attempt to break the Boer lines. The wounded Boer, Fourie, returned to the wagon circle for treatment.
As the Zulus waited for new orders, Pretorius ordered another burst of cannon fire into their ranks, provoking a spontaneous charge against the wagons. Although it was the longest single assault of the nine-hour battle, it was utterly defeated, as the Boers cut down wave after wave of attackers. Gun barrels got so hot men had to hold them with wet cloths for reloading.
As the third attack fell back, the Boers launched their first surprise counterattack, as the mobile fighting gates swung open and a cavalry unit charged the Zulu lines. Shooting from the saddle, the Boers tried to turn the Zulu lines to their left. Desperate Zulu resistance, which saw hundreds more of their number killed, stopped the encircling action, and the Boer horsemen rode back to the wagons. They regrouped and launched a second attempt, driving the Zulus further away. A third mounted charge finally broke through the Zulu lines. The Boer cavalry then turned and attacked the Zulus from the rear. Pinned between the cavalry and cannon fire from within the wagon circle, the main Zulu force facing the open plain scattered.
A reserve Zulu force tried to cross the Ncome River to attack the laager but so many warriors were gunned down that their blood stained the water red. Pretorius himself then led another cavalry charge from within the laager. Cut to pieces, with thousands dead, the Zulu army, which had courageously charged repeatedly against a better-armed enemy, finally broke ranks and fled.
Pretorius divided his cavalry into two units and sent them in pursuit. Mounted Boers killed hundreds of warriors during a three-hour chase. It was during this pursuit that Pretorius was wounded. Two other Boers, including Fourie, suffered nonfatal assegai wounds, but these were the only Boer casualties. An estimated 3,000 Zulus died on the battlefield, and many more died later from wounds.
The Aftermath
Early the next morning, Pretorius ordered the camp broken, and marched the commando straight to the Zulu king’s capital. He was confident the Zulus no longer posed any significant threat, but he hardly expected the sight that awaited him on December 20 at Umgungundhlovo. Dingaan had fled with his wives and cattle, leaving the circular camp of reed huts burning, as a symbol of the destruction of Zulu power.
On the outskirts of the capital the Boers found the skeletons of Retief and his men. “Their hands and feet were still bound fast with thongs of ox hide,” wrote Cilliers, “and in nearly all the corpses a spike as thick as an arm had been forced into the anus so that the point of the spike was in the chest.” Retief, who was identified by the remains of a satin vest he had worn, still had a leather bag draped over his shoulder bone. In it was the treaty, signed by Dingaan, giving the Boers the unoccupied land to the north. According to one of the Boers who saw it, the treaty was astonishingly well preserved—as if it had been “left in a closed box.” Pretorius’s men buried Retief and his party on Christmas Day 1838.
Dingaan fled north but was captured by a rival tribe, the Swazis. Earlier, he had persecuted the Swazis, and they murdered him in revenge. The new Zulu king, Mpande, was officially installed in 1840, and confirmed the contents of the treaty with the Boers, who established their first republic in southern Africa. Also in 1840, in fulfillment of their covenant, the Boers built a church to mark the Blood River victory.
The Battle of Blood River entered the Afrikaner psyche as a divinely-inspired victory, and December 16 became a public holiday in South Africa, celebrated each year with festivals, church services, and reenactments. The battle represented the victory of European civilization over the darkness of Africa, of Christianity over heathens. It helped justify white supremacy and the self-appointed right of Afrikaners to rule over, not apart from, the black tribes.
Yet the Battle of Blood River, in many ways, symbolized all that was wrong with the white settlement of southern Africa, and why that experiment failed. The Boers are to be praised for wanting to settle unoccupied land peacefully, and for seeking the friendship of neighboring peoples, but neither they nor their descendents understood that demography is the arbiter of nations. Those who form the majority population of a territory will rule that territory, no matter how powerful a ruling elite may be. They will determine its culture and society. A majority-European population will create a society that reflects European values and norms. A majority-African population will create a society that reflects African norms.
The Boers never understood this. Even at the Battle of Blood River they had at least 60 black servants and an indeterminate number of mixed-race servants, who helped load weapons. Parker, one of the Scotsman, had more than 100 black servants.
To the present day, the overwhelming majority of Afrikaners have black servants who work on farms, in factories, and in homes. Afrikaners failed to understand that by giving the native population the benefits of European civilization, blacks would grow in numbers and overwhelm their society. The Cape Colony and the original Boer republics, which were largely uninhabited by natives when they were settled by Europeans, are today home to tens of millions of Africans.
The Church of the Vow, built by the Boers in 1840, still stands in the town of Pietermaritzburg, named after Piet Retief. But Pietermaritzburg, supposedly the symbol of the Boer victory over the Zulus, is today part of a municipality called Umgungundhlovo, named after Dingaan’s capital. It is also the capital of the South African province of Kwa-Zulu Natal, and its population is more than 95 percent black.
The Church of the Vow stands alone, graffiti-scarred and abandoned, in a dirty downtown slum. Its decay illustrates the fatal error made by the victors of the Battle of Blood River, that of ignoring the demographics of race. If whites had taken possession of those unoccupied lands and kept them for themselves alone the history of South Africa would have been entirely different.
If the Boers had inhabited and worked their own land rather than rely on black labor, the states they created might still be strong and independent today. Their decision to use non-white labor was a critical error that undid all of the sacrifices of the early pioneers.
The only way to maintain a civilization is for the majority to occupy its own land with its own people, and to do its own manual labor. This law governs the rise and fall of civilizations, and the victors of Blood River ignored it, to their cost. | 0 |
By Kurt Nimmo, Blacklisted News The Iraqis found missiles at an Islamic State base in Mosul stamped with USA and DOD. The discovery did not... | 0 |
Rep. Al Green ( ) speaking on the House floor Wednesday morning, said President Trump “must be impeached. ”[“It’s a position of conscience for me,” Green said. “This is about what I believe. And this is where I stand. I will not be moved. The president must be impeached”: Rep. Al Green calls for Trump’s impeachment: ’No one is above the law and that includes the president’ pic. twitter. — Philip Lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) May 17, 2017, Green joined other Democratic lawmakers to call for the president’s impeachment, although Democratic leadership in Congress said it was too soon to move ahead with such action, Fox News reported. “I rise today, Mr. Speaker, to call for the impeachment of the President of the United States of America for obstruction of justice,” Green said, suggesting that Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey obstructed an investigation into his campaign’s alleged ties to Russia. “We cannot allow this to go unchecked — the president is not above the law, it is time for the American people to weigh in. ” Green was the first of his Democratic colleagues in the House to call for Trump’s impeachment, inspired by a New York Times report claiming that Trump asked Comey to end an investigation into the former National Security adviser, Michael Flynn. The Hill reported that Green started calling for Trump’s impeachment on Monday, when he said his colleagues in Congress should take up the mantra “ITN: Impeach Trump Now. ” Green originally said that he would wait a few weeks before starting impeachment proceedings, KHOU reported. Many Democrats and Republicans in Congress, however, are not ready to jump on the impeachment bandwagon just yet. “Members are reminded to refrain from engaging in personalities toward the president such as accusations that he committed an impeachable offense,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick ( ) told lawmakers after the speech. Ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff ( ) said Wednesday that impeachment is not something that should be rushed. “No one should rush to embrace the most extraordinary remedy for removing a president,” Schiff said. | 1 |
Ever since the advent of the iPhone and iPad, some people have been using their laptops a lot less. It made me wonder if I need one at all. So I asked Kimber Streams, who tests laptops at The Wirecutter, a product reviews website owned by The New York Times, for some advice. For people who basically use their laptop to browse the web and send email, is there a cheap option? Definitely. For those people, I recommend a Chromebook. It’s a laptop in the traditional sense, but it runs Chrome OS, a lighter operating system by Google that’s basically just a web browser. And you can get a great one for around $400. A Windows laptop that’s just as good costs at least $500, and they tend to be bigger and heavier, with worse battery life. With a Chromebook, can I use all the Google apps and store documents and spreadsheets on Google Drive? Yes. Google’s apps (which I use all the time for work) can open spreadsheets and documents, including those created in Microsoft Office. And most Chromebooks come with 100 gigabytes of free Google Drive storage for two years. Chromebooks encourage people to store documents in the cloud, because the machines have very little local storage (usually about 32 gigabytes). Microsoft also offers Office 365, a way to access Word, Excel and such on the web, if you need to use those particular programs. What’s the cheapest Chromebook to buy and what do you recommend? There are $200 Chromebooks, but we don’t recommend them because they usually have two gigabytes of memory and poor processors, which means you can’t have more than a couple of tabs open and everything loads very slowly. They’re truly painful to use, even for light browsing. Our top pick, the Lenovo ThinkPad 13 Chromebook, is $430, and our budget pick, the Dell Chromebook 3380 Education, costs $300. That one is fast enough, but it has a shallow keyboard and a dim, screen. Even so, it’s the cheapest viable Chromebook. I always wondered why these things can’t run the apps that can run on phones, so I can do more things with them. Well, Google’s working on that! But it’s pretty rough around the edges right now. Google perpetually updates Chrome OS, so it’s possible apps will improve over the next couple of years. When I buy a laptop, do I still need to be concerned about specs? Yes, but only a little bit. Right now, a Chromebook shouldn’t have fewer than four gigabytes of memory, and a Celeron processor. A Windows laptop for everyday work needs at least eight gigs, and we recommend a Core i3 or Core i5 processor and a drive. For gaming or video editing, you’ll need 16 gigabytes of memory, at least a Core i5 or i7 processor, a dedicated graphics card and a drive. Processors aren’t improving as quickly as before, so any of the past few generations are fine, as long as they’re Core i processors. If I still need a real laptop, what should I be thinking about? Do you even recommend the best cheap Windows machine? Not really. Chances are, if all you need is a cheap laptop, then a Chromebook would work just as well and offer better performance. If you have only $500 to spend, then the cheap Windows laptop is your only option. It’ll do everything you need it to, but it’s large, bulky and has poor quality. If possible, I highly encourage people to save up an additional $200 or so and get the budget pick from our review of the best Windows ultrabooks: the Asus ZenBook UX330UA. It’s thin, lightweight, has excellent quality and battery life, and costs only $750. It’s an amazing computer for the price. It’s so good that we seriously discussed whether to recommend it over the Dell XPS 13, which has been our best Windows ultrabook since it was introduced in early 2015. We ultimately decided that Dell’s superior trackpad, Thunderbolt 3 support and portability made it worth the splurge if you can swing it, but the ZenBook is still a great option. In fact, my mom is shopping for a laptop right now, and that’s the one I told her to buy. | 1 |
The humorist and social commentator says her ideal literary dinner party is one that nobody is invited to: “My idea of a great literary dinner party is Fran, eating alone, reading a book. ” What books are on your night stand now? There are no books on my night stand, because I’m a lifelong insomniac, so eight or nine years ago, I thought: “Don’t read in bed. It’s too stimulating. Watch TV instead. It’s boring. ” And it’s true. TV is boring, but apparently not boring enough to make me fall asleep. So now instead of being overstimulated and awake, I’m bored and awake. What has your postelection reading looked like? My postelection reading has looked pretty much like tea leaves, with just exactly the success you might imagine. I’ve definitely noticed since the election that even though generally I have a lifelong preference for reading fiction, I have less interest in it now. Except for rereading, which I’ve been doing a lot. Especially John O’Hara. I suppose this is my way of comforting myself. What’s the last great book you read? This really kind of stumped me. Unlike almost everyone else I can think of, when I say great, I mean great. Not just great this year or not just extremely good. I know you’re not supposed to have this kind of hierarchy of books. But I do. So I’m trying to think of the last really great book I read. And all I can come up with is something I reread, which was “Memoirs of Hadrian,” by Marguerite Yourcenar, which is actually great, and by great, I mean forever. What’s the best classic novel you recently read for the first time? “Little Dorrit. ” I never was a Dickens fanatic. Except for “Martin Chuzzlewit,” which I loved. But I was looking for something to read and I asked Deborah Eisenberg and she said, “Have you ever read ‘Little Dorrit’?” Which I had not, and I was so startled — since she rarely recommends a book that wasn’t written by a dead Hungarian — that I immediately read it, and I loved it. What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of? This is a question that I really find odd. How do I know what no one else has heard of? I can name books that I think are fairly obscure. I could say Henry Green. But now, as of last summer, everyone is reading Henry Green. There is a writer named Wyndham Lewis, whom you’re supposed to hate, but I don’t. He wrote a book called, “The Apes of God,” which is a book I particularly like and am interested in. I suppose other people like it and have heard of it, but I assume it is obscure enough for this answer. Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most? This is something I usually avoid answering, because you always leave someone out. But I wrote up a list. Toni Morrison, Deborah Eisenberg, Lynne Tillman, Wallace Shawn, Junot Díaz, Ben Katchor and Cynthia Ozick. Who is shockingly smart. Whose opinion on books do you most trust? Mine. When do you read? Pretty much all the time. Especially if I’m supposed to be doing something else. I was very frequently punished for reading as a child because I was reading when I was supposed to be doing homework. I got in trouble in school for reading, I got in trouble at home for reading. My mother would actually bang on my door and say, “I know you’re reading in there!” In my adult life, I’ve gotten in trouble for reading because I’m not writing when I’m reading. So it’s really rare that reading is unaccompanied by guilt for me. But I’ve learned to live with it. I feel guilty pretty much all the time. The only time I read without feeling guilty is on a plane, because what else could I possibly be doing? What moves you most in a work of literature? I think it might be the word “move” that kind of perplexes me, because that’s a word connected with emotion. I don’t really seek out emotion when reading. The feeling that’s most important to me when reading is that I’m absorbed. I just want to be taken away. I really like being dazzled. That would be nice. The thing I care least about in reading is the story. I just don’t care that much about stories. That may have to do with being older. Tell me a story I don’t know. But really, I read in order not to be in life. Reading is better than life. Without reading, you’re stuck with life. Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? In my lifetime, I’ve read one zillion mysteries. This is not because I care about who did it. I don’t care. And I almost never figure it out. I don’t have that kind of mind at all. I don’t care who did it. I have reread mysteries numerous times and I don’t even remember who did it. I’ve read all the Agatha Christies. I’ve read all the Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout. He wrote many of them, but not enough for Fran. I’m always hoping to find one I’ve never read. It’s the same as the New Yorker’s dream of finding an extra room in your apartment that you didn’t know was there. One thing I like about mysteries is that they end. Which is true of so little else. I have avoided science fiction my entire life, or any kind of fantasy. When the Harry Potter books came out, I bought the first one because everyone said how great it was. But I didn’t like it. And I realized I would not have liked it as a child either. I’m not saying I don’t love her, because she did a great thing. To see children lined up outside bookstores — that was fantastic. But those kinds of books. . ’u2008. ’u2008. It’s like adventures or people who climb mountains or jump out of airplanes I find real life challenging enough. How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or several simultaneously? Obviously, paper. I mean, actually, on his show once, Jimmy Fallon gave me a Kindle. He actually gave it to me as a present. I said: “I know you gave me this because I don’t have one. You know what else I don’t have? A Bentley. ” I don’t think they’re horrible. I don’t object to them. I’m just not interested in them. People are always showing me this stuff like I’m from outer space and I’ve never heard of it. I have really bad eyesight, so they always tell me you can make the type bigger. I suppose that would be a good thing for me, but I don’t care. I’d rather squint. I see people using them on the subway. It seems to me that the majority of people you see reading on these things are in their 40s. I see fewer kids reading on them, and by kids I mean people in their 20s. These are the people I see most frequently reading actual books, which I find very encouraging. How do you organize your books? My books are organized first by category. Fiction, letters, essays. Those kinds of categories. And then there are many subdivisions. Then within categories, they’re alphabetized. I always have arguments with the guy who helps me organize my books, because I have a biography section. He says: “You can’t have a biography section. You have to have them arranged by writer. For instance, Henry James’s fiction, then the letters, the biographies, etc. ” And I say: “I know. That’s the right way to do it. But that would take up too much space. ” All the apartments I buy or rent are for my books, not for myself. I don’t need the space. I’m . I have a whole bookcase that this guy calls “your crazy books. ” The crazy book category. Those books are not alphabetized. I also have a large reference library. I have numerous encyclopedias I have many, many dictionaries. I actually bought myself the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1978. I always wanted it, and when I wrote my first book and had some money, I bought it. I didn’t have it growing up I had the World Book, because it was less expensive. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was so hard to buy, I can’t tell you. I had to make one million phone calls. Because it was generally sold on an installment plan. They didn’t know how to send these books to someone who is just going to send a check. Nobody uses these books anymore, but I do. When the second edition of the O. E. D. came out, there was nothing I wanted more. It was like $10, 000. I had a friend who owned a bookstore, and I begged her to let me buy it at cost, and she did. It was still several thousand dollars, but I’m delighted to own it, even though I think it’s now free on the internet. You’re in the process of moving your personal library. What’s that been like? Believe me, I’m not in the process of it yet. Because it’s so awful, I keep putting it off. But I just did it a year and a half ago. They come and pack the books. That takes three days. But two times before that, it took two months to organize them first. I have many bookcases. They have glass doors. They are mostly . The books all go in certain places in my apartment. I like to have fiction in the living room, reference books in the writing room. I have 10, 000 books. I know this because I move them. When I move, I go through them and take some out. Many books come to this house unbidden. And unbidden books, I don’t want to keep them. Once the books are all rearranged, I can put my hand on any book. I know where they all are. What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? I don’t know. Maybe my small library of soap carving books, because most people don’t have them. People are surprised at the fairly large number of cookbooks I have, because I don’t cook. I hate cooking, and I never cook. But I like to eat, and I like to read about food. The very first book in my library was a book my mother bought me at a house sale in the late 1950s called “Six Little Cooks. ” She bought it for a quarter. I couldn’t believe that I was allowed to have such a beautiful thing. This was my first book that I thought of as very valuable. It’s a story about a woman who goes to visit her niece and her friends and decides to spend the summer teaching them how to cook. It’s signed by the author and all the girls. Maybe because of this book, and maybe because they used to be so cheap (they no longer are) I have quite a few cookbooks. What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift? I don’t know. I’ve received some really wonderful books as gifts. I have some first editions of Dawn Powell, whom I love. I would never buy these books. I buy books to read. It adds about 80 zillion dollars to the price of a book to have a signed or first edition. I have some first edition Thurbers. I’m thrilled to have them, believe me. I got a first edition Thurber for my birthday this year, and that was the last book to make me laugh out loud when I reread it. I got kicked out of class in third grade reading Thurber. I couldn’t contain myself. I could not stop laughing. But not all funny writers are necessarily funny in that way. Oscar Wilde is probably the wittiest writer in English, but he doesn’t make me laugh out loud. There was a writer named Peter De Vries who did make me laugh out loud, so hard that when I was reading one of his books when I was in the hospital as a teenager, the nurse took it away from me because she thought I was going to break my stitches. Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? I don’t really have these kinds of favorites. I probably had them as a child. I associate having favorite things with being a child. I’m not youthful enough to have these kinds of favorites. What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? I was a constant reader. Just like I am now. I was constantly reading. I read under the covers with a flashlight. I loved “The Secret Garden. ” The ones every girl my age read. I also have a lot of my mother’s books. Mostly I went to the library as a child. “Heidi,” Nancy Drew. I would say mostly conventional kinds of books. You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? None. I would never do it. My idea of a great literary dinner party is Fran, eating alone, reading a book. That’s my idea of a literary dinner party. When I eat alone, I spend a lot of time, before I sit down to my meager meal, choosing what to read. And I’m a lot better choosing a book than preparing a meal. And I never eat anything without reading. Ever. If I’m eating an apple, I have to get a book. Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? I wouldn’t say disappointing or not good, but I will say that I have never enjoyed reading William Faulkner. I am not saying he’s not a great writer. I will just say that I prefer not to read him. I don’t enjoy reading him. I did not acquire the ability to not finish a book until I was 50 years old, which probably has to do with scarcity as a child: You have a book — finish it! But I’ve made a number of decisions since then. If you don’t like a book, stop reading it. If you don’t like a movie, walk out. Life is not a jail sentence. When I used to be able to go into bookstores all the time, when there were lots of bookstores, I could read a few sentences and put it down. Now I hear about a book and get someone to order it on the internet, and when the book arrives I find I don’t like it. I only read for pleasure. I don’t have to finish a book. Sometimes, I don’t realize how little I care about a book. Sometimes, I start reading a book and then realize I forgot I was reading it. And it disappears under a pile of books. Whom would you want to write your bio? I would say Carolyn Keene. Because then at least I know they would find the culprit. If I’d known Carolyn Keene was not a person as a child, I would have been crushed. All women my age loved Nancy Drew books. In the ’80s, they had this Nancy Drew party to celebrate some new editions, and every single woman writer in New York was there, dying to talk about Nancy Drew. There weren’t many books about girls, let’s face it. It was pretty uncommon. What do you plan to read next? I don’t plan my reading. I really don’t. I’m always surprised. I can’t believe that people keep these lists of the books they read. People are so organized! This is a cast of mind so different from mine. I do have piles of books that I haven’t read yet. When I finish a book, I go through that pile. I recently noticed a book that hadn’t been read through two moves. I’ll give it to someone. It’s a good book. It’s just not for Fran. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? It would depend on who’s reading it to him. | 1 |
Julian Assange has undoubtedly been on a run, exposing endless and shocking truths regarding Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton just days before the election is set to reveal the path the next four years will take in the U.S. Via CollectiveEvolution
And now there’s more news to be baffled over, with Assange claiming Hillary Clinton misled Americans about the reality of Islamic State’s support from Washington’s Middle East allies. Last month, Assange’s WikiLeaks made a 2014 email public that exposed how then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged then adviser to President Barack Obama John Podesta to “bring pressure” on Qatar and Saudi Arabia, saying that they were “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [Islamic State, IS, ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups.” In a video, Assange called the email the “most important” of the entire collection of ammo WikiLeaks has obtained against the Clinton campaign: All serious analysts know, and even the US government has agreed, that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS and funding ISIS, but the dodge has always been that it is some “rogue” princes using their oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that it is the government of Saudi Arabia, and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.
Assange sat down with veteran journalist John Pilger for a 25-minute interview within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Assange has been living as a refugee since 2012. He discussed in detail the conflict of interest between Clinton’s official position, which occurred during Obama’s first term, husband Bill Clinton’s nonprofit, and the Middle East officials, claiming the output or urgency to fight terrorism may not have been heartfelt.
Here is a valuable excerpt from the interview:
John Pilger: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the first two, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton is secretary of state, and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly Saudi Arabia.
Julian Assange: Under Hillary Clinton – and the Clinton emails reveal a significant discussion of it – the biggest-ever arms deal in the world was made with Saudi Arabia: more than $80 billion. During her tenure, the total arms exports from the U.S. doubled in dollar value
JP: Of course, the consequence of that is that this notorious jihadist group, called ISIL or ISIS, is created largely with money from people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation?
JA: Yes.
Pilger asked Assange if he thought the accusations against the Clinton campaign would have any effect on the Democratic nominee winning the 2016 presidential election. Assange also believes that next Tuesday’s election is absolutely rigged, and is in favor of Hillary Clinton. He said,
My analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he has had every establishment off his side. Trump does not have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment. Banks, intelligence, arms companies, foreign money, etc. are all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well. Media owners, and the journalists themselves.
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PORTLAND, Me. — Facing urgent calls to stabilize his candidacy and declining poll numbers, Donald J. Trump struggled on Thursday to refocus his message after threatening to withhold his endorsement from top Republican officeholders, including Paul D. Ryan, the speaker of the House. Snarling Mr. Trump’s efforts to move past the controversy, he and his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, broke ranks for the second time in two days on questions of party unity. Having already split with Mr. Trump over his refusal to endorse Mr. Ryan, Mr. Pence went his own way again Thursday, telling WTKR, a television news station in Norfolk, Va. that he supported senators running for whom Mr. Trump had snubbed, John McCain of Arizona and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. Mr. Pence at first gave an equivocal answer on Thursday regarding the senators. But when asked by the television station to clarify whether he supported them, he said, “Well of course I support John McCain and Kelly Ayotte and all of our Republican incumbents. ” In his own travels, Mr. Trump was frustrated in his effort to go back on the offensive with an audacious foray into Maine, a solidly Democratic state in presidential elections. Visiting Portland, a liberal downstate city, Mr. Trump was repeatedly interrupted by young demonstrators brandishing copies of the Constitution — a reference to Khizr Khan, the father of an American soldier killed in Iraq, who charged during the Democratic National Convention last week that Mr. Trump had never read the document. Mr. Trump’s campaign has been in crisis for a full week, since his criticism of the Khan family set off a war of words between Mr. Trump and a host of Republicans who have repudiated his comments. There were only scattered signs of healing on Thursday between Mr. Trump and the party he nominally leads. There is mounting pressure on Mr. Trump to regain his footing in the race and repair some of the damage he has sustained in swing states. Trailing Hillary Clinton in national polls, Mr. Trump has also fallen badly behind in a battery of surveys released over the course of the week. He trailed Mrs. Clinton by 6 percentage points in Florida, according to a Suffolk University poll, and by 11 points in Pennsylvania in a poll taken by Franklin Marshall College. Polls by local television stations in New Hampshire and Michigan found Mr. Trump well behind Mrs. Clinton in both states. This dire polling may further undermine Mr. Trump’s deteriorating relationship with Republicans in Washington. Mr. Trump played down the friction between him and Mr. Ryan at a campaign stop here on Thursday, calling Mr. Ryan a “good guy” and discouraging a supportive crowd from booing Mr. Ryan’s name. In turn, Mr. Ryan said he continued to support Mr. Trump, calling it a matter of respect for the will of the voters. Mr. Trump also projected feisty optimism during the visit to Maine, one of two states with the practice of awarding their Electoral College votes based on the popular vote in each congressional district. Mr. Trump said that some people believed that he could pick up a single Electoral College vote in the northernmost of the state’s two districts. But in an auditorium in Portland’s City Hall, Mr. Trump said he was hopeful about turning the whole state red for the first time since 1988. “We have such incredible people up here,” he said. “We have people that like Donald Trump. ” He drew rounds of applause with riffs about keeping dangerous refugees out of the United States and building a wall on the border with Mexico. Attacking President Obama for arranging a large financial payment to Iran, Mr. Trump described seeing a video of a plane landing in Iran bearing cash in several currencies — even though there is no evidence that such a video exists. (At a news conference shortly after, Mr. Obama denounced criticism by Mr. Trump and others of the payments.) Mr. Trump told supporters that Mr. Pence had come to seek his permission before endorsing Mr. Ryan. “He said, ‘I like him, he’s a friend of mine, would you mind if I endorsed him, and I will not do it if you say no,’” Mr. Trump said. “I say, ‘Mike, you like him? Yes. Go ahead and do it. ” Yet Mr. Trump found a turbulent reception inside and outside the hall, where a crowd of demonstrators assembled. Several held up signs describing Mr. Trump as a fascist, and a few women held placards quoting Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine senator who vocally opposed Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. During his remarks, Mr. Trump drew interruptions from the demonstrators who silently held up miniature copies of the Constitution, some of them with the logo of the American Civil Liberties Union on the back. As they were escorted out, the protesters faced jeers from Mr. Trump’s supporters several said they had been jostled or had their pocket Constitutions snatched away. Julia Legler, one of more than a dozen demonstrators, said the group objected to “Islamophobic, garbage” emanating from the Trump campaign. She said their inspiration was Mr. Khan. “The goal was to make a statement, support Khizr Khan and, honestly, expose that Trump supporters have no ideas what they are talking about,” said Ms. Legler, 24. Mr. Trump was dismissive of the protest, calling it “sort of rude. ” As the crowd chanted over the demonstrators, Mr. Trump said several times in a weary tone, “Do whatever you want. ” As Mr. Trump’s candidacy has come under intensifying strain this week, he has sharpened his attacks on Mrs. Clinton, at times wielding unusually barbed language, even by the standards of his campaign. In Pennsylvania on Monday, Mr. Trump described the Democratic nominee as “the devil. ” And in Maine, Mr. Trump responded with approval when his top supporter in the state, Gov. Paul LePage, whipped up the crowd in a speech branding Mrs. Clinton “the queen of corruption. ” “We need to reject corrupt politicians,” Mr. LePage said. “We need to reject . We need to make sure that we, the people of this country, defeat the queen of corruption. ” Joining Mr. LePage onstage, Mr. Trump responded enthusiastically. “I think,” he said, “we are going to have to use that. ” | 1 |
New Wikileaks documents show that Hillary Clinton, in association with the mainstream media, was given debate questions ahead of time. It’s also been rumored that the former First Lady may have used an ear piece at one of the debates, giving her a significant advantage.
Last week footage of the final Presidential debate begain circling the internet and showed that Clinton may have been using some sort of screen at her podium. While many dismissed this as a lighting effect, an investigation by Piper McGowin at The Daily Sheeple suggests that Hillary may have actually been using some sort of tablet device .
The following video will leave little doubt that something just wasn’t right at the last debate. As you’ll see, Hillary, who claims she was merely taking notes, was actually reading directly off of the podium, almost as if someone was feeding her answers and bullet points.
Moreover, and quite damning, the notes Hillary was supposedly taking were were being written down with a pen that didn’t have a tip on it . So, either she wasn’t taking notes, or, she was using a stylus on an electronic device.
Watch this incredible video and decide for yourself:
( Watch directly at Youtube )
For an extensive breakdown of the Wikileaks notes that add further legitimacy to the claims that Hillary’s podium is loaded with cheat-tech, we encourage you read Leaked Emails Reveal Hillary Can’t Speak for Very Long Without a Podium
Related: Leaked Email: ‘If She Wins, Hillary Will Own the Supreme Court for the Next 30 to 40 Years’ and Did You Notice the Secret Message Behind Hillary During Last Night’s Debate? | 0 |
CAIRO — The cockpit voice recorder from the EgyptAir flight that crashed in the Mediterranean last month has been recovered, according to a statement Thursday by Egyptian investigators. The recovery of the black box came a day after the Egyptian Aircraft Accident Investigation Committee announced that searchers had found wreckage from the doomed Flight 804 scattered along the seabed. The French Bureau of Investigations and Analyses at the civil aviation authority confirmed that the cockpit voice recorder had been found. All 66 people aboard the Airbus A320 jetliner bound for Cairo from Paris were killed in the crash on May 19, as the plane was near the end of its trip, in Egyptian airspace. The investigation committee said in a statement that the cockpit voice recorder had been found in a “damaged state. ” A team aboard the search vessel John Lethbridge, owned by Deep Ocean Search, was able to recover parts of the recorder, including its memory card. The statement said that the device would be sent to prosecutors and investigators in Alexandria, Egypt, and then to the investigative committee’s lab for analysis. Investigators are expected to spend the coming days removing, drying and testing the circuits of the voice recorder’s flash memory chip before trying to download its contents for analysis. If the recordings are readable, investigators can begin transcribing the conversations of the crew and other cockpit sounds captured — roughly two hours of data, which could provide clues about what happened during the plane’s descent. Air traffic controllers have said the crew did not communicate any emergency to the ground before radio contact was lost and the plane disappeared from their radar screens. Underwater search teams will also continue to scour the wreckage for the second black box, the flight data recorder, which tracks more than 1, 000 different data points, including the plane’s position, speed, altitude and direction when it began to experience difficulties. Investigators located the cockpit voice recorder, along with several sections of aircraft wreckage, less than two weeks after search teams first detected signals from its underwater beacons, which emit a distinctive metronomic “ping. ” Provided the second recorder is found undamaged, investigators can try to synchronize its data with the voice recorder’s to make a timeline of what happened in the flight’s final moments. Since the start of the underwater search, however, investigators have only been able to isolate the pings of a single recorder, suggesting that the beacon on the flight data recorder either may not be emitting a signal, or that something — perhaps a large piece of wreckage or rock formations on the seabed — is muting or obstructing its propagation. Egyptian investigators have said that the batteries powering the EgyptAir jet’s beacons should last until around June 24. The chairman of EgyptAir, Safwat Musallam, said Thursday that “the search team has not picked up anything from the flight data recorder,” but he welcomed the news of the recovery of the cockpit voice recorder. “Of course, thank God, they found something,” Mr. Musallam said. “I was worried they wouldn’t, but I just want quick results. I just want to know what caused this. ” Mr. Musallam also said that he had been in touch regularly with the families of the passengers aboard Flight 804 and that after the discovery Thursday, they are “doing better after this, more or less. ” Wagdy Gerges, a relative of one of the victims, said families were hoping that the information from the voice recorder would “settle things and help them process what happened. ” “We want to know what will be heard,” Mr. Gerges said. “Was it a bomb? The exact details don’t matter to us because they are all gone. We just want to know the main cause. ” | 1 |
A female student at an elite prep school in New Hampshire who accused a male senior of rape in 2014 only for him to be convicted of misdemeanor charges revealed her identity on Tuesday in an interview with NBC, saying she hoped to support other victims by discussing the difficulties she has faced, including being shunned when she returned to the school. “I want everyone to know that I am not afraid or ashamed anymore, and I never should have been,” the teenager, Chessy Prout, who was 15 at the time of the assault at St. Paul’s School in Concord, said on “Today. ” “It’s been two years now since the whole ordeal, and I feel ready to stand up and own what happened to me and make sure other people, other girls and boys, don’t need to be ashamed, either,” she said with her parents at her side. Ms. Prout said she was attacked in a mechanical room at the school in May 2014. In the trial that ended last August, a senior, Owen Labrie, was cleared of felony sexual assault charges but convicted of misdemeanor charges, including having sex with someone below the age of consent. Mr. Labrie, now 20, was sentenced to a year in prison and had to register as a sex offender in New Hampshire. He was freed on $15, 000 bail pending his appeal, during which he was ordered to comply with a 5 p. m. curfew at his mother’s home in Vermont. The case cast a spotlight on a culture of secret rites and sexual conquest at St. Paul’s, including the “senior salute,” in which older students tried to engage younger ones in intimate acts: kissing, touching or more. The trial included details about the tradition, in which a key to the mechanical room on campus was passed around by senior classmates. Prosecutors said Mr. Labrie had drawn up a list of potential girls for his senior salute, and according to an affidavit, he told the police that he was “trying to be No. 1 in the sexual scoring at St. Paul’s School. ” Ms. Prout spent days testifying on the stand during the trial, saying that the accused had bitten her during the encounter and that she had told him “no” more than once. Mr. Labrie said the encounter had been consensual and had stopped short of sex. A statement from his lawyers on Tuesday said, “We remain hopeful that Mr. Labrie will receive a new trial where the full truth of what occurred with be revealed. ” In the interview on Tuesday, Ms. Prout described the difficulties of testifying. “It was something that was necessary,” she said, “although it was scary. ” “I wouldn’t be where I am today without having been able to speak up for myself during that time. ” She added, “I want other people to feel empowered and just strong enough to be able to say: ‘I have the right to my body. I have the right to say no. ’” Ms. Prout said she was upset by how Mr. Labrie’s testimony was received by the jury of nine men and three women. “They said that they didn’t believe that he did it knowingly, and that frustrated me a lot because he definitely did do it knowingly,” she said. “And the fact that he was still able to pull the wool over a group of people’s eyes bothered me a lot and just disgusted me in some way. ” The aftermath of the trial was also troubling, Ms. Prout said. She was determined to return to the school, she said, but some male friends refused to speak to her. On one occasion, she said, two senior football players organizing a Powder Puff football game said, “‘We’re only directing this at the upper formers because we’re not allowed to look at lower formers anymore. ’” She said she was “thinking that that had to be approved by the rector of the school. ” “And they let those boys go up there and make a joke about consent and the age. ” “I tried my best to go back to my school and try to have a normal life again. But if they’re going to treat this topic as a joke, this is not a place I want to be,” she added. Ms. Prout’s parents are suing the school for failing to “meet its most basic obligations to protect the children entrusted to its care,” The Concord Monitor reported in June, quoting a copy of the filing. In an emailed statement about Ms. Prout on Tuesday, the school said it “admires her courage and condemns unkind behavior toward her. ” It added, “We feel deeply for her and her family. ” “We have always placed the safety and of our students first and are confident that the environment and culture of the school have supported that,” the school said. “We categorically deny that there ever existed at the school a culture or tradition of sexual assault. However, there’s no denying the survivor’s experience caused us to look anew at the culture and environment. ” Ms. Prout said she was working on a new social media campaign with the nonprofit organization Pave to support victims of sexual assault. Mr. Labrie was jailed in March after a judge ruled that he had violated his curfew in Vermont. But in May, a judge released Mr. Labrie again on bail. | 1 |
After a long struggle, Sri Lanka, the large island nation southeast of India, was declared free of malaria last week by the World Health Organization. It has been more than three years since the last case. “This is a big success story,” said Dr. Pedro L. Alonso, the director of the W. H. O. ’s global malaria program. “And it’s an example for other countries. ” Sri Lanka almost succeeded in eliminating malaria 50 years ago, but its huge effort fell apart. The country became the example most frequently cited by malariologists to show how defeat could be pried from the jaws of victory. Through the 1940s, Sri Lanka routinely had a million cases of malaria a year. Then officials began an intensive public health campaign, relying on DDT to kill mosquitoes and chloroquine to cure the disease. By 1963, the annual caseload had fallen to a mere 17. Then the drive ran out of money and faltered, and annual cases of malaria rose above 500, 000 by 1969. By then, mosquitoes had evolved resistance to DDT, and by 1992 to its successor, malathion. Malaria parasites first showed resistance to chloroquine in 1984. But the failure also was political: The country’s ethnic fabric disintegrated. Sri Lanka had been the British colony of Ceylon, an exporter of tea and cinnamon. After its independence in 1948, the majority Buddhist Sinhalese began discriminating against the Hindu Tamils, whom the British had favored. Decades of civil war between the government and the Tamil Tigers ensued, with the latter aided covertly by India, until the rebellion was crushed in 2009. In 2000, outside the areas in the northeast, malaria cases began dropping as the government, with donor help, deployed a mix of indoor spraying, bed nets, rapid diagnostic kits and medicines that combined artemisinin, an effective treatment, with other drugs. The government also screened blood samples drawn — for any reason — in public clinics and hospitals for malaria infection, and officials established a nationwide electronic system. In areas, the disease retreated more slowly, although the Tigers often cooperated with teams because their villages and fighters also suffered. Nonetheless, in a population of 20 million, it took years to get rid of the last few hundred annual cases. Most were soldiers and itinerant laborers, often from India, who worked in remote farming areas and in logging and camps. The Sri Lankan health ministry set up mobile clinics near the camps, as well as at airports and ferry landings where migrants arrived, offering diagnosis and treatment to all. Free malaria care is still a core part of the country’s effort to prevent an imported case from leading to a new outbreak. “They don’t ask if anyone is legal or illegal,” Dr. Alonso said of the medical staff at the clinics. “If you ask questions, people won’t go. ” | 1 |
Elitists Will Reap Grapes of Wrath Michael Moore speaks the truth, but won't support Trump The Alex Jones Show - October 28, 2016 Comments
Although he’s too tribal & too partisan to support Trump, Michael Moore eloquently lays out Trump supporters’ anger about what globalism has done to the middle class.
He knows that we know who, how and why the elites destroyed our economic life.
But he misses the optimism of Americanism and he turns a blind eye to Hillary’s corruption. | 0 |
A mural painted on state property near San Diego — depicting an ICE Agent strangling a Mexican worker as he sends money home — is stirring up a new controversy, according to a San Diego Union Tribune news story. [The new mural is located on the south support pillar under Coronado Bridge at the Interstate 5 underpass in what is now called, “Chicano Park. ” The location of the park was scheduled to become a new CHP substation in the early 1970’s, but protestors from the “Barrio Logan” community staved off the plan, facing off against the state — seizing the land for “chicanos” and demanding that a park be constructed to showcase chicano art. The mural — painted by Salvador “Sal” Barajas — one of the artists who painted the first “Historical Mural” in the park in 1973 that highlights key figures and history of the Chicano movement, was commissioned by a border activist group known as Border Angels. Border Angel’s founder, Enrigue Morones has been trying to raise the $10, 000 for nearly a decade — but credits Trumps election with the new enthusiasm. Morones spoke to NBC 7 — a local NBC affiliate out of San Diego: “Since November 8 things have changed … People are outraged, more volunteers, more funds. ” He added, “We’re totally opposed to the wall … We know that the wall kills people. ” Not everyone is happy about the new mural. Some San Diego county residents are outraged — calling the mural ‘incendiary’ and ‘ .’ Suellen Shea of Vista, who took issue with some of the imagery Barajas used, told the : “The artist has talent, but, in my opinion, much of it is offensive and especially the ICE agent choking the migrant worker,” Shea reportedly said via email. “American Citizens want safety sovereignty (enforced borders) for our country. Nothing strange or racist about that — Mexico does too. ” Mural painter Barajas thinks the graphic violence depicted is justified, according to the the Los Angeles Times: “One hand represents U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is responsible for deporting people from the U. S. [and t]he other hand represents Mexican government officials, whose corruption makes it necessary for Mexicans to migrate for work. ” Barajas admits that the “text ‘No Border Wall’ was one of the last things added to the piece,” and is likely what inspired donors to put up the money to denounce the looming border wall. San Diego has become the locus of the fight over President Trump’s wall over the past few months — as prototypes will soon be constructed nearby in order to meet DHS’s June 1st target date. Organized protests and violent resistance is expected by the agency — and contractors are required to provide adequate security as part of their bids. A number of Californians have taken to social media to make their opposition known reports the LA Times. “San Diego has many parks,” wrote Carol Hamilton, of Imperial Beach. “Only one is splattered with garish posters and slurs — Chicano Park. A national shrine? I don’t think so. It’s time to whitewash it and use it as a park and not for politics. ” Chicano Park is not under the control of the city or county of San Diego — the land on which it stands is part of a state easement controlled by CalTrans, who reportedly could revoke the right for any mural to be on California state property. Tim Donnelly is a former California State Assemblyman and author who is doing a book tour for his new book: Patriot Not Politician: Win or Go Homeless. He ran for governor in 2014. FaceBook: https: . facebook. . donnelly. Twitter: @PatriotNotPol | 1 |
in: Government , Multimedia , Sleuth Journal , Special Interests U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (© Carlos Barria / Reuters) The FBI has learned of more emails involving Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she headed the State Department, FBI Director James Comey told several members of Congress, telling them he is reopening the investigation. “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of email that appear to be pertinent” to Clinton’s investigation, Comey wrote to the chairs of several relevant congressional committees, adding that he was briefed about the messages on Thursday. “I agree that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.”
The FBI director cautioned, however, that the bureau has yet to assess the importance of the material, and that he doesn’t know how long that will take.
The Clinton campaign has yet to comment, but an aide told CNN: “We’re learning about this just like you all are.”
Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine was asked about Comey’s letter while campaigning at an early voting site in Tallahassee, Florida. “Gotta read a little more, gotta read a little more,” he told reporters.
Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, praised the decision to reopen the case. “Now that the FBI has reopened the matter, it must conduct the investigation with impartiality and thoroughness,”he said in a statement. “The American people deserve no less and no one should be above the law.”
Almost 15,000 new Clinton emails were discovered in September, but it’s unclear if the announced investigation relates to them or other correspondence. The newly discovered emails are not related to Wikileaks or the Clinton Foundation, law enforcement sources told CNN’s Evan Perez.
The messages were not found on the private email server in the Clintons’ New York residence, a government source told Reuters.
The emails were apparently discovered as part of the sexting probe into former Representative Anthony Weiner (D-New York), the New York Times reported. His electronic devices, as well as those belonging to his wife, senior Clinton aide Huma Abedin, were seized during that investigation.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) renewed his call for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to “suspend all classified briefings for Secretary Clinton until this matter is fully resolved.” “Yet again, Hillary Clinton has nobody but herself to blame,” Ryan said in a statement. “This decision, long overdue, is the result of her reckless use of a private email server, and her refusal to be forthcoming with federal investigators.” Kellyanne Conway, Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign manager, applauded the decision. “That is superb. That is extraordinary news for the American people,”she told Yahoo News. “A great day in our campaign just got even better,” she tweeted. “They are reopening the case into her criminal and illegal conduct that threatens the security of the United States,”Trump said in Manchester, New Hampshire, 10 minutes after learning about the reopening of the case. “We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.” “I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the Department of Justice have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made,”he said. “This was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully understand, and it is everybody’s hope that it is about to be corrected.” “With that being said, the rest of my speech is going to be so boring. Should I even make the speech?”he joked before turning to his prepared remarks. The “FBI reopening investigation isn’t an October surprise, it’s an October nuclear explosion,”conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro wrote as part of a tweetstorm, adding that “Comey [is] trying to cover his a** 11 days before [the] election”and wondering if a “pre-emptive impeachment of a president elect”is possible because “the odds on President Tim Kaine just rose substantially.” An ‘October Surprise‘ is a major event that happens in the month before the election that affects the outcome of the vote. In response to the announcement, the Democratic Coalition Against Trump filed a complaint with the Department of Justice against Comey. “It is absolutely absurd that FBI Director Comey would support Donald Trump like this with only 11 days to go before the election,” Scott Dworkin, senior advisor to the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, said in a statement . “It is an obvious attack from a lifelong Republican who used to serve in the Bush White House, just to undermine her campaign. Comey needs to focus on stopping terrorists and protecting America, not investigating our soon to be President-Elect Hillary Clinton.” Stocks fell after Comey’s announcement, CNBC reported. | 0 |
It was and relations between Donald J. Trump and the news media had taken another dreadful turn. He had already vowed to change the libel laws to make it easier to sue journalists, and his personal insults were becoming more vicious. (One news correspondent was a “sleaze” another was “third rate. ”) Most troubling was that he was keeping a blacklist of news organizations he was banning from his rallies, and it was growing. I called him at the time, to see what this would look like in a Trump administration. Would he deny White House credentials to select reporters and news organizations? No, he said. “There, I’m taking something away, where I’m representing the nation. ” We can only hope he means it. Because if Mr. Trump keeps up the posture he displayed during the campaign — war footing — the future will hold some very grim days, not just for news reporters but also for the American constitutional system that relies on a free and strong press. It’s one thing to wage a press war as a candidate, when the most you can do is enforce reporting bans at your rallies, hurl insults and deny interviews and access (all of which are plenty bad). It’s another thing to do it from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where you have control over what vital government information is made public, and where you have sway over the Justice Department, which under President Obama has shown an overexuberance in investigating journalists and the who leak to them. Imagine what somebody with a press vendetta and a dim view of the First Amendment would do with that kind of power. For their part, American newsrooms are conducting their own reassessments, vowing to do a better job covering the issues that animated his supporters, and acknowledging that Mr. Trump tapped into something in the national mood, the power of which they failed to grasp. They now know they underestimate him again at their own peril. Yet they also know that the need to continue with probing, unflinching reporting that promotes the truth in the face of whatever comes at them will be great. In the days immediately after Mr. Trump’s victory, journalists that don’t work at organizations with Breitbart in their names were preparing for potential reporting challenges, the likes of which they have never seen, while lawyers were gaming out possible legal strategies should Mr. Trump move against press freedoms. Right after his victory Mr. Trump was telegraphing a gentler tone, declaring to The Wall Street Journal, “It’s different now. ” Perhaps he was making his “pivot” to become “more presidential than anybody” save Abraham Lincoln. But then came the Saturday night release of his “60 Minutes” interview in which he said he would keep his Twitter account so that when any news organization gave him “a bad story,” he would “have a method of fighting back. ” And he didn’t skip a beat on Sunday morning, when he attacked The New York Times with a Twitter post that read, “Wow, the @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the ‘Trump phenomena. ’” The statement was false. The paper said Sunday that postelection cancellations were so substantially outstripped by a surge of new subscriptions that its subscription growth rate in the period that followed Tuesday’s result was four times the growth rate in the same period of last quarter. In an atmosphere in which it’s not shocking to hear about literature being sent to the home of a Jewish reporter — the address having been published online by supporters of Mr. Trump — it was hard to see any of this as very presidential, though the definition may be changing. The funny thing is that few major political figures have had a more codependent and at times friendly relationship with the press than Mr. Trump. Before he stopped doing news briefings in the later phase of the campaign, he was shaping up to be the most accessible nominee in modern history. But displeasing him could have an intensely personal cost, which the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly vividly recalls in her new book, “Settle for More. ” Ms. Kelly, who became Mr. Trump’s leading television nemesis during the primary campaign, writes about how the candidate, unhappy with a segment she did in July 2015, threatened to unleash “my beautiful Twitter account against you. ” After enduring her tough questioning at the first presidential primary debate, he made good on his Twitter promise, which in turn led to death threats against her, she said. (“I would spend many days of the coming months accompanied by security,” she writes.) It didn’t help, she wrote, that Mr. Trump’s special counsel, Michael Cohen, recirculated a Trump supporter’s tweet that read “we can gut her. ” That was followed by what she took as another threat, from Mr. Trump’s campaign manager at the time, Corey Lewandowski. As Mr. Lewandowski unsuccessfully lobbied a senior Fox News executive to remove Ms. Kelly from the next Fox debate, she writes, he said he would hate to see her go through such a “rough couple of days” again. (Fox News described the conversation the same way earlier this year.) Mr. Lewandowski had been the living embodiment of Mr. Trump’s aggressive approach to the press. He was, after all, arrested on charges that he manhandled the former Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields. (Prosecutors in Florida ultimately dropped the charges.) After a paid stint at CNN, Mr. Lewandowski returned to the Trump fold last week, and could wind up in the administration or at the Republican Party headquarters. Another member of Mr. Trump’s transition team, the Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, broke new ground this year by financing the “Hulk Hogan” lawsuit against Gawker, which resulted in Gawker’s bankruptcy and sale to Univision. Though that was technically an case, it was a model for what Mr. Trump has said he wants to see in opening up libel laws. Most First Amendment lawyers agree that fundamentally changing the libel law would require a reversal of the landmark Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan. And while that might seem like a long shot, Laura R. Handman, a First Amendment lawyer, said in an interview that Mr. Trump could find ways to “chip away” at it. First Amendment lawyers are more immediately concerned with potential leak investigations, as well as Freedom of Information Act requests, which can provide the best way to expose government secrets. Look no farther than the potential attorney general candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani, who as mayor of New York was so allergic to records requests that news organizations and others regularly sued him for basic information. Success at court was meaningless given that proceedings kept the information out of public view for so long that “he really won,” said George Freeman, who was the assistant general counsel for The New York Times then and is now the executive director of the Media Law Resource Center. I’ve said it before, but the solution will be what it has always been — good, tough reporting. For all the appropriate discussion about how they missed some key dynamics of the race, mainstream news outlets produced a lot of journalism. They provided a glimpse into the tax returns Mr. Trump wouldn’t share showed how he and Mrs. Clinton ran their charities investigated their family business dealings and bluntly called out falsehoods, more of which came from Mr. Trump. The wrong lesson to take from the past year is that reporters should let up in their mission of reporting the truth, wherever it leads. That’s more important than ever, given how adept Mr. Trump and his allies have proved to be at promoting conspiracy theories that can spread faster than ever through social media. But if there is one thing we learned this year, it was the wisdom of the old mnemonic device for the spelling of “assume” (makes an “ass” out of “u” and “me”). Mr. Trump campaigned through surprise and may well govern through surprise. We’ll know how this thing is going to go only when we know. Now, where’s my seatbelt? | 1 |
October 26, 2016 Feds Once Again Threatening States Over REAL ID;
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security once again ramped up its sabre-rattling routine, threatening that residents in states that have not complied with REAL ID will not be able to use their driver’s licenses to board aircraft beginning in 2018. States should ignore the DHS bluster, stand their ground and continue their refusal to implement this unconstitutional national ID program.
REAL ID essentially coopts the states into creating a national ID system. The federal government has no constitutional authority to mandate a national ID.
The federal government repeats this song and dance every couple of years, and has done so since Pres. George W. Bush signed REAL ID into law in 2005. Instead of following through on threats the feds simply keep extending their deadlines.
Under the law, all 50 states were supposed comply with the federal law by 2009. But, states rebelled against REAL ID for several reasons, including privacy concerns and the fact that Congress didn’t provide any funding for the mandates it expects states to implement. Some states passed laws expressly prohibiting implementation of the act. | 0 |
NBC News’ Megyn Kelly can’t get any love. On Saturday, journalist Yashar Ali obtained an unedited video of Kelly’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the HuffPost and promptly eviscerated the “nervous” Kelly for asking Putin “softball” questions. He wrote that the unedited footage “shows a nervous Kelly who asked the authoritarian leader softball questions and failed to hold him accountable on key topics. ” “Most troubling, Kelly devoted precious time in her short interview to a question that led one former CIA Russia analyst to say that it sounded as if Putin had written the question himself,” he continues. According to the HuffPost piece, the “last question Kelly asked Putin, which was not aired, was startling in its pandering. ” Kelly asks Putin in the unaired footage: We have been here in St. Petersburg for about a week now. And virtually every person we have met on the street says what they respect about you is they feel that you have returned dignity to Russia, that you’ve returned Russia to a place of respect. You’ve been in the leadership of this country for 17 years now. Has it taken any sort of personal toll on you? A former CIA Russia analyst told HuffPost that the Kremlin could use Kelly’s interview for propaganda purposes: I can’t begin to tell you what this did for Putin’s ego, and I wouldn’t put it past the Kremlin to use it for propaganda purposes. Putin’s obsession is, by his definition, making Russia great again. He’s obsessed with the idea that he has returned the country to what he sees as the glory days of the USSR. He feels that since the breakup of the USSR, Russia has too often ceded ground where it shouldn’t have. And he’s obsessed with people seeing him as the one who brought dignity back to Russia. According to the HuffPost piece, “Kelly’s questions were so weak and she missed so many opportunities that several network news reporters asked HuffPost the unthinkable: ‘Did NBC News, in their negotiations with the Kremlin, agree to terms and conditions on questions or topics? ’” NBC sources reportedly confirmed that that there were no conditions, but the piece noted that “a spokesman for NBC News declined to comment on Kelly’s choice of questions. ” Though establishment media journalists patted Kelly on the head when she tried to undercut Donald Trump during the 2016 election cycle, they mostly slammed Kelly for being way out of her league after Putin’s interview. The Los Angeles Times noted that Kelly’s interview was “child’s play” for Putin, who “outmaneuvered” her “as he displayed an elusive and ultimately dismissive demeanor toward Kelly. ” According to the Times, Kelly’s party delivered “more of a fizzle than a bang. ” “The interview, which was teased for weeks on NBC as a exclusive, lasted less than 10 minutes,” the Times continued. “But that was just about enough time to confirm that she’s still not a great interviewer. ” Yahoo’s Ken Tucker wrote that Putin’s “a load of nonsense” comment could have described “most of the premiere of Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly. ” He added that Kelly was “no match” for Putin. On the day before Kelly’s controversial interview with Alex Jones is set to air, HuffPost noted that “multiple sources at NBC News” have wondered if network executives “misjudged Kelly’s skill set, popularity and savvy as a reporter. ” A television executive reportedly told CNN that NBC’s “fundamental mistake” was thinking that Kelly was a “superstar. ” The New York Times also doubted Kelly’s ability to do a interview with Jones, pointing out that “NBC has not released a transcript of Ms. Kelly’s interview, leading some to speculate that her interrogation of Mr. Jones over his more contentious views — for instance, that Sandy Hook was a hoax and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were carried out by the United States government — was less than ferocious. ” Despite all of the hype, Kelly has failed to deliver ratings for NBC. The debut of Kelly’s show could not even beat out a rerun of 60 Minutes two weeks ago. Last Sunday, her second show tanked as well, losing to another rerun of 60 Minutes in addition to a rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos. After just two shows, NBC executives are already reportedly “freaking out” over the “ratings disaster” that is Kelly. | 1 |
With the Miami Dolphins out of the playoffs after losing to Pittsburgh last week, no more National Anthem kneelers remain in the NFL playoffs. [So for the patriots out there who stayed away from the NFL, this weekend might be a good time to come back to enjoy some great matchups in the divisional playoff round. While the Houston England Patriots shouldn’t be much of a game, the other three contests, Seattle Falcons, Green Bay Cowboys and Pittsburgh City Chiefs have the potential to be terrific games. Let’s preview the action: Seattle Seahawks at Atlanta Falcons, Saturday, January 14, 4:35 PM on FOX Georgia Dome, Atlanta, Georgia, The Falcons return from a playoff bye week and enter this game very healthy. In fact, they have no players listed on their injury report. Atlanta is led by quarterback Matt Ryan who comes off perhaps the best season of his career. During the regular season, he threw 38 touchdowns and just seven interceptions with a stellar 117. 1 QB rating. “His accuracy is phenomenal,” said Seahawks coach Pete Carroll. Spearheaded by Ryan, the Falcons averaged 34 points per game this season. The Falcons love throwing deep, so Seattle missing star safety Earl Thomas could be a problem. He actually picked off Ryan when Seattle beat Atlanta in Week 6 of the regular season. But while the Seahawks will be without Thomas, the Falcons will also be without a standout defensive back, cornerback Desmond Trufant, so perhaps this evens things out. There is a good chance this game will be an offensive shootout featuring two of the NFL’s finest quarterbacks, Ryan and Seattle’s Russell Wilson. This game is a . Houston Texans at New England Patriots, Saturday, January 14, 8:15 PM on CBS Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, Massachusetts, In Week 3 of the regular season, the Patriots, led by QB Jacoby Brissett, beat the Texans . So if the Patriots blew out the Texans behind a rookie QB making his first start, what will they do to them with great Tom Brady under center? Speaking of rookie quarterbacks, the Texans beat Oakland’s Connor Cook and the Raiders to advance to the second round of the playoffs. Going from facing Cook to Brady is quite a competitive quantum leap for the Texans’ defense. This could get ugly, and Las Vegas agrees, making the Patriots a favorite. Texans coach Bill O’Brien was asked if the insulting point spread bothered him. “What does that matter?” O’Brien asked. “The only thing that matters is what takes place between the white lines on Saturday night. ” The Patriots coaches had two weeks in the lab to come up with new wrinkles to their erudite playbook. You give Bill Belichick and his coordinators Josh McDaniels (offense) and Matt Patricia (defense) two weeks, and they will come up with the mother of all game plans. Expect the Patriots to win this game easily. Green Bay Packers at Dallas Cowboys, Sunday, January 15, 4:40 PM on FOX ATT Stadium, Arlington, Texas, With their wildcard playoff win over the New York Giants last week, the Packers have won six straight. Entering last week’s wildcard the Giants defense played on a very but the Packers toyed with them, putting up 38 points led by QB Aaron Rodgers, who is in a zone right now. And for what it’s worth, the Cowboys only lost three games during their regular season, two of them to the Giants, and the Packers just blew out the Giants. This might mean nothing, but it’s certainly food for thought. The Packers’ passing attack could be down two wide receivers. Rodgers’ favorite target, Jordy Nelson, is out with broken ribs. Key reserve Jeff Janis could also be out with a quad injury. And the Cowboys secondary, which will need all hands on deck against Rodgers, gets cornerback Morris Claiborne back from a groin injury. The Cowboys beat the Packers in the regular season led by running back Zeke Elliott, who rushed for 157 yards. While the Cowboys are 4. 5 point favorites, Rodgers is playing on such a high level right now, this game is too close to call. Pittsburgh Steelers at Kansas City Chiefs, Sunday, January 15, 8:20 PM on NBC Arrowhead Stadium, Kansas City, Missouri, This game moved from a 1 p. m. to 8:20 p. m. due to weather concerns. Kansas City is expecting one of the worst ice storms to hit the Midwest in a decade. While public safety is the reason for the change, this could turn into rating bonanza in prime time for the NFL with these two iconic franchises squaring off. Coming off a playoff bye, the Chiefs enter this game very healthy with nobody listed on their injury report. The Steelers will be without speedy tight end Ladarius Green due to a concussion. Also, their franchise QB Ben Roethlisberger was seen in a walking boot after the Steelers’ wildcard win over Miami. He says he’s fine, but you never know. Steelers runner Le’Veon Bell might be the best back in football right now. Bell torched the Dolphins last week with 167 yards rushing. In Week Four of the regular season, the Chiefs destroyed the Steelers but don’t expect a repeat of that. Chiefs coach Andy Reid is considered a strategic genius, and had two weeks to prepare for this game. He should have a great game plan. This game could go either way. | 1 |
BERLIN — About five decades since the surge in modern feminism, it is unlikely that most women — in the United States, at least — would have anticipated the current political climate in which gender equality remains almost as elusive as ever and rights are under siege. What is more, a man criticized by many for his treatment of women will be sworn in as president of the United States on Friday. And in 2016, a woman still could not be elected to the job. After the gamut of emotions engendered by Hillary Clinton’s surprising loss to Donald J. Trump, women are once more confronting the big questions that have long enveloped the feminist quest. Put bluntly, is it sexism or the system that has so far prevented a woman from becoming president of the United States? And what lessons might be drawn from Europe, or places further afield, that could help an American woman get to the top one day? As members of the global elite gather this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, gender issues in politics and beyond will be hotly debated. If the fight for women’s rights has taught activists one thing, it is that simple questions have complex answers. Melanne Verveer, executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and former ambassador at large for global women’s issues under President Obama, said that “to just look at this election through the gender lens is not to understand it fully. ” Though many women saw Mrs. Clinton, a former senator and secretary of state, as the most qualified candidate, other women felt no tug to help one of their own shatter a glass ceiling and instead “reached a conclusion that they might be better off with a change,” Ms. Verveer said. “I think people would like to think there has to be one good explanation,” said Shauna Lani Shames, an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers in New Jersey. “But there is not. It’s many. ” What she called the “deeply ingrained sexism” of a country fond of cowboy myths and tales of the Wild West is one. There are others. For starters, look at how the United States chooses candidates. “Selection is mostly about people ” Dr. Shames said. “You have to as a candidate, and often win a primary before the party will take note of you. ” Just the expense and time away from family involved turn many women off, leaving a smaller pipeline. Even the basic act of asking for money — essential to any political bid in the United States — hurts women more, she argued: “Women hate it more than men do. Men tend to be in social circles where they can raise more money. ” Mrs. Clinton was criticized last summer when her annual sojourn in the wealthy enclaves of the Hamptons became studded with . (Mr. Trump made his own round of there, to perhaps less attention.) In Europe, women can work their way up the ladder of their party, which tends to have a distinct ideological identity and is often subsidized by government funds from which all legal parties can benefit. In addition, Dr. Shames said, research has shown that the proportional representation that is a cornerstone of many European political systems is far more likely to get women elected to national legislatures. Europeans have also been much readier to adopt quotas to bolster women’s part in politics. Americans steeped in individualism have been reluctant to legislate in this way. “The concept of quotas in the U. S. as you know, is antithetical to the American position and possibly the myth that holds that everyone pulls themselves up by their bootstraps,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. Of course, Europeans have not always proved able to use quotas to the full advantage for women. In France, for example, where law dictates that 40 percent of candidates be female, parties, particularly conservative ones, have often preferred to pay fines rather than find the mandated number of women. Joanna Maycock is secretary general of the European Women’s Lobby, which brings together about 2, 500 women’s groups from each of the 28 European Union nations, and from neighbors like Norway and aspiring members like Turkey and Serbia. She said she detected a change in attitudes since Mrs. Clinton’s defeat that starkly highlighted the quirks of the American system, in particular the Electoral College. (The college affirmed Mr. Trump’s ascension to the presidency despite his loss of the popular vote.) Ms. Maycock cited a workshop at the end of November that brought together about 25 American and European activists examining how to get more women into politics. “When we planned it, we thought we would be celebrating Hillary’s success,” she said. Instead, the meeting reflected “the shock of Trump. ” “A lot of the American participants were so horrified and shocked, there was a big difference,” she said, a readiness to explore other methods and reinforce the need to train women in public speaking, and building networks. Ms. Walsh’s center at Rutgers runs nonpartisan campaign training in New Jersey and assists in such training in 17 other states. She reported a “dramatic increase” in women’s signing up. “Women are seeking a way to have a voice,” Ms. Walsh said. “This election has made citizens — men and women — see things through the gender blend. ” She added that women “can have an enormous impact on their lives, families, identities” and that “they can’t sit on the sidelines they have to figure out a way to get engaged. ” In modern Europe, the trail to the top was blazed by the somewhat unlikely figure of Margaret Thatcher, who was the first woman elected as prime minister in Britain in 1979. (Theresa May is now the second, with the tough task of negotiating the country’s exit from the European Union.) Mrs. Thatcher had no outright feminist agenda and stood accused of fomenting social hardship with her conservative policies and iron will, for instance, to break Britain’s trade unions. Close to 40 years later, similar policies of austerity are associated with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, often called the world’s most powerful woman after 11 years in office. Her unwillingness to loosen Europe’s purse strings while Germany, Europe’s No. 1 economy, benefits substantially from the euro currency, makes her anything but a heroine in many feminist eyes. “The obsession with austerity across Europe has been really bad,” Ms. Maycock said. It hits women doubly, she argued, cutting public service jobs often held by women and leaving them bereft of the infrastructure — care for children and seniors, for instance — that enables them to work. Over the past decade, Ms. Maycock contended, austerity has been a big brake on women’s empowerment. “We’ve actually stopped progressing, more or less,” she said, citing a gender inequality index compiled by her group that showed 51. 5 percent progress toward full equality 10 years ago, compared with 52. 5 percent now. In general, she said, European countries with quotas tend to show an effect once the female membership of legislatures passes she said. Over all in Europe, women account for about of legislators, she said. The range is large: In Poland, for instance, a female prime minister, Beata Szydlo, is among 27 percent of female lawmakers in the lower house of Parliament after the 2015 elections introduced a quota system. But the upper house, which has no such mechanism, is only 13 percent women. Norway, one of the first European countries to adopt quotas, has had two female prime ministers and a female defense minister, mandates 40 percent female board membership in business. Ms. Maycock pointed to recently elected female mayors in Paris, Barcelona, Madrid and Rome as more examples of women’s getting power where it matters. But in the United States, Dr. Shames said, women are far more likely to be city council members than mayors and state legislators than governors. On both sides of the Atlantic, women still have important territory to take: While France has had a female defense minister, and Germany currently has one — Ursula von der Leyen, a married mother of seven — neither Britain nor the United States has entrusted defense to a woman. American finance, too, has remained firmly in the hands of men, on Wall Street as at the Treasury. And 2016 shocked many not just with Mrs. Clinton’s defeat — but with the triumph of Mr. Trump, despite accusations of misogyny, and with the murder of Jo Cox, a Labour Party legislator, who was stabbed by a man reportedly shouting “Britain First” days before the country voted to leave the European Union, which Ms. Cox opposed. In democracies from Australia through the United States and Europe, the thin pipeline of women ready to step up to the top in politics (and business) is an added cause for concern. In the United States, there are just five female governors right now, and 21 women in the Senate, Ms. Walsh said. “The bench is very small, and the potential pool of candidates is really very small,” she said, noting that most modern presidents (if not Mr. Trump) have been governors or senators first. That makes it doubly significant that more women are expressing an interest in entering politics after Mrs. Clinton’s defeat, she said. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — When the Los Angeles hairstylist Chaz Dean pitched his almond mint and hair care products — endorsed by celebrities like Brooke Shields and Alyssa Milano — he sold millions. But his formula got an unexpected result: itching, rashes, even hair loss in large clumps, in both adults and children. More than 21, 000 complaints have been lodged against his Wen Hair Care, and Mr. Dean, the stylist to the stars, has found himself at the center of a fierce debate over the government’s power to ensure the safety of a cosmetics industry with about $50 billion in annual sales. The Santa Monica, Calif. national distributor of Mr. Dean’s hair care line is part of a beauty care trade association that has been aggressively lobbying Congress to block the passage of tough new legislation that would give the Food and Drug Administration the authority to test ingredients used in cosmetics and issue mandatory recalls for products found to be unsafe. The fight has pitted smaller independent players against the giants of the beauty products industry, which back the proposed regulations, seeing them as an avenue toward regaining public trust, and have the size and muscle to comply with them. Each side has its champions in Congress: Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, for the larger companies, and Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, coming to the aid of his company, Mary Kay, which joined the Independent Cosmetic Manufacturers and Distributors to fight the legislation. Mr. Sessions has introduced competing legislation backed and largely drafted by Mary Kay and the independent companies. “If you are in business and are not involved in politics, then politics will run your business,” explained a presentation prepared by Mary Kay last summer for sales representatives and obtained by The New York Times. The comes amid growing consumer concern about the safety of beauty care products and follows a string of other scares, including the discovery of hair products and skin creams containing hazardous ingredients such as formaldehyde and mercury. “People don’t realize there is effectively no regulation of cosmetics,” said Representative Frank Pallone Jr. Democrat of New Jersey. He, along with Ms. Feinstein and Ms. Collins, has pushed to strengthen a 1938 law that was passed to regulate the pharmaceutical industry but contained two pages that addressed cosmetics, leaving it essentially unregulated. Joe Hixson, a spokesman for the distributor of Wen, said the company has “evidence and studies that we believe demonstrate Wen is safe and does not cause hair loss. ” Mr. Dean’s hair care product does not actually lather. Instead, Mr. Dean promotes it as “a revolutionary way to cleanse” the hair without the use of traditional detergents or sulfates, chemicals some consumers have objected to. “In addition to it sounding like ‘Zen,’ the system is a completely reverse way of looking at cleansing the hair,” the product’s website boasts. “Thus, ‘Wen’ is ‘new’ spelled backwards. ” The company also sells what it calls “unique formulations gentle for pediatric use. ” Miriam Lawrence of Denver said she used Wen’s Sweet Almond Mint Cleansing Conditioner on the hair of her daughter, Eliana, then 9, about three times in late 2014. Within days, her daughter’s brush was full of hair. Three weeks later, Eliana was bald. “It changed our life in just a couple shampoos. It’s ridiculous,” said Ms. Lawrence, whose daughter has grown back most of her hair and eyebrows. “It was marketed to be extra gentle, no harsh chemicals. ” Mr. Pallone, in a letter to the F. D. A. and has pressed for answers about the Wen case. And in an interview he cited it as an example of why current law is failing and more rigorous regulation is needed. For legal reasons, the government’s hands are tied. That is in part because unlike pharmaceutical companies, cosmetic companies are not required to notify the government of “adverse reaction” reports — even if someone dies. The F. D. A. instead has had to depend on consumers stepping forward, and as of July 7, only 127 reports had been filed to the agency detailing problems with the Wen hair care line. But inspectors sent to the company’s facilities dating back to 2011 learned that complaints to the company and distributor total more than 21, 000, the agency said last month. “You know how the stars were saying it was so good and it made your hair more manageable, more shinier?” said Bonnie Iqbal, 55, of Albany, who last year was among those who sued the company after her hair began falling out. “So I figured, you know, I’d try it. ” Patricia J. Zettler, a health law and policy expert at Georgia State University and a former F. D. A. lawyer, said that under existing law, the agency could take action against the company only if it could prove a product had been mislabeled or contaminated. If the product turns out to be dangerous but legal, the government has no recourse. “The bottom line is, if the company has not violated the law, there isn’t really anything F. D. A. can do,” Ms. Zettler said. Even in the absence of federal action, in a “business decision,” agreed in late June to a $26. 25 million legal settlement — still not approved by a federal court judge — that would repay up to $25 to every person who has bought a bottle since Wen products were introduced and as much as $20, 000 to individuals claiming hair loss or other injury. Yet the product is still being sold, and the F. D. A. other than issuing a notice saying it is looking at the matter, has taken no action. The bill is intended to eliminate such stalemates. It would, for the first time, require that cosmetics manufacturers report “serious adverse” reactions to their products to the F. D. A. as they come in, as well as create an annual report of all “adverse events. ” It would also give the agency the power to order companies to recall products found to be dangerous. The bill would collect about $20 million in fees annually from beauty care companies to help cover the cost of confirming the safety of about five ingredients each year that are suspected of causing problems, such as lead acetate, a color additive in hair dyes, and a preservative used in certain shampoo and cosmetics. The legislation has won the endorsement of heavyweights including Estée Lauder, whose brands include Clinique, Origins, MAC, La Mer, and Bobbi Brown Johnson Johnson, maker of Neutrogena and Aveeno and Procter Gamble, whose brands include Pantene, Head Shoulders, Herbal Essences and Olay. Industry officials said they decided to embrace the legislation after becoming increasingly concerned that a decline in consumer confidence could hurt their sales. “The bill is supported by a vast and diverse group of people and groups who all want the same thing — cosmetic regulations that best serve the public health and give consumers confidence in the products and ingredients they choose for their families,” Darrel Jodrey, a top federal lobbyist at Johnson Johnson, said in a statement. Major national environmental, consumer and health nonprofits, such as the American Cancer Society, the Environmental Working Group and the Good Housekeeping Institute, have also backed the plan. But even before Ms. Feinstein formally introduced her legislation in April 2015, the Independent Cosmetic Manufacturers and Distributors, in which has been a member for over a decade, moved to defeat it, internal documents obtained by The Times show. During a March 2015 strategy session in the New York law offices of a trade association legal adviser, Locke Lord, industry executives were briefed by their lobbying team, who explained that it had already approached the office of Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, with jurisdiction over the F. D. A. Michael Lunceford, a senior vice president at Mary Kay overseeing the company’s lobbying and public affairs divisions, had done groundwork through the Direct Selling Association, where he is on the board, to help Mr. Upton’s 2012 effort. The organization bought billboard, radio and newspaper ads “to gain the attention of the candidate in order to cultivate a champion for the direct selling industry,” according to an industry newsletter. hired its own Washington help: William R. Nordwind, a lawyer and lobbyist who spent a dozen years working as a staff member and campaign aide to Mr. Upton. Mr. Hixson, the spokesman, said the company had not publicly taken a position on the bill, although it financially supported the independent cosmetics industry association. Mr. Nordwind’s team, from the Venable lobbying firm, has contacted Capitol Hill on behalf of the company, Mr. Hixson said. “They have got a bad story out there right now,” Robert Harmala, a former House aide who lobbies for the Independent Cosmetic Manufacturers and Distributors, said regarding and its Wen product line. “They don’t want to be the face of the industry for having done this. ” Mary Kay claims credit for persuading Mr. Sessions, whose district is near its headquarters, to sponsor alternative legislation. Mr. Sessions’s proposal still would require beauty care companies to notify the F. D. A. of “serious cosmetic adverse events,” but it would not grant the agency the power to order a recall or collect industry fees to pay for new programs, such as the safety evaluation of cosmetics ingredients. Most important for direct sellers like Mary Kay and other members of the independent cosmetics group, it would broadly and retroactively any tougher state laws. “We can’t just be out there saying, ‘No, we don’t like Feinstein’s bill,’” Mr. Harmala said in an interview. Mr. Sessions, after introducing the legislation, became a favorite of the cosmetics industry, campaign finance records show, emerging as the top recipient in Congress of donations from Mary Kay employees, and taking donations from at least 10 other industry executives, including Pam Busiek, the president of the Independent Cosmetic Manufacturers and Distributors. Executives at were not among the donors. More industry donations were sent to Representatives Eddie Bernice Johnson, Democrat of Texas, and Bill Flores, Republican of Texas, the only other two House lawmakers to help sponsor the bill. Crayton W. Webb, a spokesman for Mary Kay, said the company was committed to helping pass a law that increased the federal government’s oversight of the industry, but opposed Ms. Feinstein’s bill because “it falls short in providing one clear national and uniform safety standard. ” Ms. Busiek added, “We want something that is not overreaching. ” Mr. Dean declined to comment. The F. D. A. would not comment on the proposals. So far, the agency said, it has found no evidence of contamination or misbranding in Wen products, the only two product flaws it can use to press a company to agree to a voluntary recall. The agency has requested the results of safety tests and other manufacturing data, but it cannot compel the company to release any information. “That’s why it is so critical that we get information directly from consumers and their health care providers,” said Susan Mayne, the director of the F. D. A. ’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. For consumers dealing with thinning hair, itchy scalps and other problems, the additional responsibility of bringing their case to the government can be a tall order — and certainly a confusing one. The government should be helping them, they say. “I think it would be great for the F. D. A. to step in a little bit more,” said Melanie Guitzkow, a student, who said her hair began to fall out when she used Wen in high school. “Some things, like, shouldn’t be on the market because they’re damaging. ” | 1 |
Willy Wimmer, ex vicepresidente de la OSCE, aborda el tema sirio
«Nos empujan a la guerra» por Willy Wimmer El mundo vive hoy los momentos más peligrosos de la historia posterior al fin de la guerra fría. En entrevista concedida a Ilona Pfeffer para la agencia de prensa Sputnik, Willy Wimmer, ex secretario de Estado del ministerio de Defensa de Alemania, aborda la crisis siria y denuncia a los responsables de la grave situación creada alrededor de ese conflicto.
Red Voltaire | 31 de octubre de 2016 Sputnik : Señor Wimmer, los combates en Siria no se detienen y los ceses de hostilidades pactados se violan constantemente. La implicación de Estados Unidos y Rusia se comenta de forma sesgada en los medios de prensa occidentales. ¿Cómo ve usted la situación en Siria?
Willy Wimmer : Estamos ante una situación que venía incubándose desde hace tiempo y que trágicamente llegó, hace 5 años, a transformarse en guerra civil y conflicto en el preciso momento en que creíamos haber resuelto la situación conflictiva entre Siria e Israel vinculada a las alturas del Golán. Iba a concluirse un acuerdo que hubiera podido llevar paz a todo el Medio Oriente si no hubiese sido por la existencia de fuerzas desfavorables a un acuerdo de paz. Sabemos que, al inicio de la tragedia siria, fuerzas especiales del Reino Unido, Francia y Estados Unidos se hallaban en el terreno para crear esta situación de guerra civil y darle una dimensión internacional.
Existían por tanto antecedentes portadores de esperanza, si no se hubiese invertido ese movimiento. Desde entonces estamos asistiendo a una tragedia y el pueblo sirio parece exhausto. Ahora es importante poner fin a la tragedia y tratar de evitar por todos los medios que las chispas del enfrentamiento iniciado en Siria se extiendan a otros países, incluyendo los nuestros [en Occidente] porque eso significaría una gran guerra.
En ese contexto, quiero referirme –con toda intención– al informe presentado en Holanda sobre la destrucción del avión de pasajeros de Malasia. Tenemos que preguntarnos si existe realmente algún interés en aclarar esa tragedia o si alguien está buscando un pretexto para desatar la guerra.
Esa es la situación que tenemos ante nosotros y es por eso que Siria no está muy lejos de ese tema. Tenemos que hacer todo lo posible por contribuir a una solución pacífica y eso quiere decir no enviar armas, dinero ni tropas a la región.
Sputnik : Rusia está en el terreno desde hace un año. ¿Qué éxitos pueden verse? ¿Qué papel están desempeñando Estados Unidos y sus aliados?
Willy Wimmer : La implicación de Estados Unidos y de Europa occidental en Siria es una clara violación del derecho internacional. Es una intervención militar en territorio de otro Estado sin autorización de la ONU ni del derecho internacional. Son esas las fuerzas que han originado toda esta tragedia en Siria.
La única posibilidad de poner fin al baño de sangre en Siria es la acción de la Federación Rusa, que intervino a favor del derecho internacional a nivel global para que evitar que fuese pisoteado. Eso es lo que Estados Unidos ha venido demostrando desde la guerra desatada contra Yugoslavia, también en flagrante violación del derecho internacional.
Se trata, por una parte, del combate en Siria misma. Pero también se trata por otra parte, desde 1999, de saber si el intento de Estados Unidos de llevar adelante su ofensiva global va a prosperar o si el mundo tiene aún una posibilidad de restablecer la cooperación pacífica entre los pueblos. Sin la implicación rusa en Siria, del lado del gobierno legítimo, el mundo ya no tendría ninguna posibilidad.
Sputnik : En su opinión, ¿cuáles son los objetivos de Estados Unidos en Siria?
Willy Wimmer : Es evidente que Estados Unidos pretende rediseñar el mundo, al sur de Europa occidental y de la Federación Rusa. Es por eso que estamos viendo toda una sucesión de conflictos y guerras que van desde Afganistán, Irak y Siria hacia las costas del Mediterráneo y Mali. Estados Unidos está implicado en todas esas regiones, donde libra guerras y contribuye a empeorar la miseria de sus pueblos y la destrucción de sus civilizaciones, lo cual sigue haciendo pese a todo.
Rusia entró en el conflicto sirio debido a su legítima alianza con la República Árabe Siria y el presidente Bachar al-Assad, lo cual es totalmente conforme con el derecho internacional. En eso reside la gran diferencia entre Estados Unidos y la Federación Rusa. Estados Unidos es responsable de sangrientos crímenes en nuestro entorno y es igualmente responsable de buena parte de los flujos migratorios que actualmente enfrentamos. La Federación Rusa se compromete a favor de un regreso a la negociación y a la razón y a una cooperación pacífica entre los pueblos.
La tragedia en Siria es que quien está pagando los platos rotos es el pueblo sirio y por eso es absolutamente necesario encontrar la manera de reinstaurar la paz. Más allá de las rupturas, quizás sea posible despertar el resto de sentido común que aún pudiera quedar en Washington.
El problema con Estados Unidos es que en este momento, antes de la elección presidencial, el mundo se halla en una situación extremadamente peligrosa. Las fuerzas que realmente dominan la política estadounidense quieren poder decidir todo lo que hará el futuro gobierno de Estados Unidos. Eso quiere decir que lo más probable es la guerra: una guerra que iría más allá de Siria.
Sputnik : La cooperación entre las dos grandes potencias funciona hasta ahora bastante mal, aunque Rusia expresa a menudo su deseo de cooperación. ¿Cuáles son las causas de estos fracasos y qué posibilidades ve usted para la cooperación?
Willy Wimmer : A pesar de la falta de transparencia, yo soy optimista en cuanto a la posibilidad de un entendimiento entre ambas partes, porque lo que está en juego es enorme y las consecuencias serían mucho peores que las imágenes que actualmente nos llegan de Siria.
Y eso podría afectarnos mañana, en una región mucho más extensa, ya que los intentos de Rusia por impedir ese escenario y contener el conflicto no corresponden a los intereses de Estados Unidos. No es la administración Obama quien define esos intereses sino las fuerzas que apuestan por la victoria de Hillary Clinton.
Es un esquema bastante conocido. Dada la dramática envergadura del conflicto, sólo puedo esperar que Washington acepte llegar a un acuerdo. Si eso no sucede, tendremos que vivir un desastre ampliamente superior al de Siria.
Sputnik : Las informaciones de los medios occidentales dan la impresión de que Rusia es el principal responsable de la destrucción y las víctimas civiles en Siria. ¿Qué piensa usted de esa presentación de los hechos?
Willy Wimmer : En cuanto a esto, hay que establecer diferencias. Todo lo que tiene que ver con Rusia, corresponde a la misma Rusia dar respuesta y eso es lo que está haciendo.
En lo que me concierne, como consumidor de los medios occidentales, lo que me parece indignante es la falsificación de los hechos que venimos viviendo desde hace años. Hubo una época en la que el pluralismo era parte integrante de nuestra cobertura mediática, pero eso ya no existe. Están empujándonos a la guerra. Eso es lo que ha podido observarse nuevamente este año. Jamie Shea, el vocero de la OTAN que nos forzó a desatar la guerra contra Yugoslavia en 1999, fue solemnemente homenajeado este año en Berlín por los servicios prestados. ¡Eso demuestra en qué estado se halla nuestro panorama mediático! La democracia en Europa está seriamente amenazada.
Sputnik : ¿Quién defiende tales intereses y qué mensaje se quiere transmitir?
Willy Wimmer : El mensaje es este: estamos tocando los tambores de guerra, y también lo hacemos en relación con Rusia. Hace 2 años, en el momento del golpe de Estado de Maidan, en Kiev, evitamos por un pelo el conflicto con la Federación Rusa. Ese es el objetivo de la política estadounidense que observamos desde 1999 y es lo que puede acabar con nosotros.
Sputnik : Usted se ha referido a los intereses de Estados Unidos pero ¿cuál es el papel de Alemania?
Willy Wimmer : Helmut Kohl et Gerhard Schroder todavía mantenían la fuerza de carácter necesaria para hacer valer los interereses de Alemania en el seno de la OTAN, para no involucrarse en los conflictos armados.
Mire usted la situación actual: nuestra ministra de Defensa viaja a Irak para anunciar allí una nueva implicación militar de Alemania en ese país. Siento mucho tener que decir que Berlín no está a la altura de Bonn en lo que se refiere a salvaguardar los intereses de Alemania.
Willy Wimmer Fuente
Sputnik | 0 |
By wmw_admin on October 30, 2016 Introduction — Oct 30, 2016 It begins to look like Americans don’t have a real choice in the presidential election. On the one hand Hillary Clinton seems ready to adopt a much more aggressive stance with Russia, which could well escalate into open military conflict between the two powers. While on the other hand Donald Trump has pledged to scrap the nuclear accord reached with Tehran and to stand up to Israel’s enemies, “like Iran”. In other words Trump seems ready to adopt the same belligerent stance over Iran as the Bush administration. Such a policy could easily escalate into military conflict and given Tehran’s growing ties to Moscow that could also lead to military conflict with Russia too. So the choice faced by American voters boils down to six of one, or half-a-dozen of the other. Both candidates have outlined foreign policies that could inevitably lead to war with Russia. It’s just that Clinton has chosen a more direct path while Trump has opted for a more roundabout route. Either way American voters seem to have little REAL choice in the matter. Ed. Trump to Israelis: together we’ll stand up to Iran The Jewish Press.com — Oct 27, 2016
A taped one-minute address by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, screened at an election rally organized by Republicans Overseas Israel in Jerusalem Wednesday, left no room for doubt: should he be elected, Trump would be the biggest friend Israel has ever had — huge.
“My administration will stand side by side with the Jewish people and Israel’s leaders to continue strengthening the bridges that connect not only Jewish Americans and Israelis but also all Americans and Israelis,” Trump told the 200 or so in attendance at the event and the few dozens watching the rally live on Facebook. “Together, we will stand up to enemies like Iran bent on destroying Israel and her people. Together, we will make America and Israel safe again.”
It was a small crowd, admittedly, but the folks, many in Trump T-shirts and “Make America Great Again” baseball caps, made up for their number with enthusiasm, booing and crying “Lock her up” each time the name Hillary Clinton was mentioned.
“I love Israel and honor and respect the Jewish faith and tradition,” Trump told his Israeli-American voters. “For me, respect and reverence for Judaism is personal. My daughter Ivanka and my son-in-law Jared are raising their children in the Jewish faith.”
Trump’s VP, Gov. Mike Pence, told the Jerusalem rally: “Israel’s fight is our fight, Israel’s cause is our cause,” noting that Israel is “not just our strongest ally in the Middle East, it is our most cherished ally in the world.” Also, Pence said, Israel is “hated by too many progressives, because she is successful and her people are free,” and so, “Let the word go forth that Donald Trump and I are proud to stand with Israel.”
Local speakers included Caroline Glick, Trump’s adviser on Israel David Friedman, and David Peyman, Trump’s head of Jewish outreach, who told the gathering that he had delivered a note from Trump to God at the Kotel. Friedman promised that “a Trump administration will never pressure Israel into a two-state solution or any other solution that is against the will of the Israeli people.” Friedman warned against the seductive messages Trump’s opponent had given the AIPAC conference in March, saying “Hillary Clinton’s words are the cheapest currency on the political marker.”
According to media reports over the summer, Friedman and Trump’s other adviser on Israel, Jason Greenblatt, suggested the candidate stop elaborating on his vision of two states for two peoples living peacefully side by side. This after Trump had told Maggie Haberman and David E. Sanger of the NY Times in March: “Basically I support a two-state solution on Israel. But the Palestinian Authority has to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Have to do that. And they have to stop the terror, stop the attacks, stop the teaching of hatred, you know? The children, I sort of talked about it pretty much in the speech, but the children are aspiring to grow up to be terrorists. They are taught to grow up to be terrorists. And they have to stop. They have to stop the terror. They have to stop the stabbings and all of the things going on. And they have to recognize that Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. … And if they can’t, you’re never going to make a deal. One state, two states, it doesn’t matter: you’re never going to be able to make a deal.”
Trump concluded: “Now whether or not the Palestinians can live with that? You would think they could. It shouldn’t be hard except that the ingrained hatred is tremendous.” | 0 |
“Free State of Jones” begins on the battlefield, with a flurry of the kind of immersive combat action that has long been a staple of American movies. The setting is familiar in other ways, too. As a line of Confederate troops marches across a field into Union rifle and artillery fire, a haze of myth starts to gather over the action, a mist of sentiment about the tragedy of the Civil War and the symmetrical valor of the soldiers on both sides of it. But this is a sly piece of misdirection: The rest of the movie will be devoted to blowing that fog away, using the tools of Hollywood spectacle to restore a measure of clarity to our understanding of the war and its aftermath. Directed by Gary Ross (“Seabiscuit”) with blunt authority and unusual respect for historical truth, “Free State of Jones” explores a neglected and fascinating chapter in American history. Mr. Ross consulted some of the leading experts in the era — including Eric Foner of Columbia University, whose “Reconstruction” is the definitive study, and Martha Hodes of New York University, author of a prizewinning study of interracial sexuality in the South — and has done a good job of balancing the factual record with the demands of dramatic storytelling. The result is a riveting visual history lesson, whose occasional didacticism is integral to its power. The hero of this tale is Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Jones County, Miss. who led a guerrilla army of white deserters and escaped slaves against the Confederacy during the war. Afterward, he tried to hold this coalition together as a political force in the face of Ku Klux Klan terror. As played by Matthew McConaughey, Newton is an ordinary man radicalized by circumstances. His hollow cheeks and wild whiskers suggest a zealous temperament, but the kindness in his eyes conveys the decency and compassion that lie at the heart of his moral commitment. Mr. McConaughey is too rugged and ragged to sink into saintliness, which is one reason that his righteous characters — including Ron Woodroof in “Dallas Buyers Club” and Mick Haller in “The Lincoln Lawyer” — are sometimes more fun than the movies they inhabit. And while Mr. Ross’s story makes Newton unambiguously heroic, this is not yet another film about a white savior sacrificing himself on behalf of the oppressed. Nor for that matter is it the story of a white sinner redeemed by the superhuman selflessness of black people. “Free State of Jones” is a rarer thing: a film that tries to strike sparks of political insight from a genre template. It’s a western of sorts, and a romantic rebel movie of sorts — there are hints of “Viva Zapata!” and “Shane” and a other underdog classics — but with an unusually clear ideological focus. After fleeing the army, where he had served as a battlefield nurse, and witnessing Confederate authorities confiscating his neighbors’ livestock and grain, Newton takes refuge in a swamp with a small group of slaves who have run away from a nearby plantation, including a man named Moses (Mahershala Ali) who becomes his friend and confidant. Through his conversations with Moses and with Rachel (Gugu ) a domestic slave who brings the fugitives news and supplies from the plantation house, Newton comes to believe that the slaves share a common enemy and a common interest with poor white farmers like himself. “Free State of Jones” is careful not to suggest that the conditions endured by disenfranchised white and enslaved black Mississippians were identical. The system may be rigged against both, but in different ways. Especially after the war, the alliance proves fragile, as white supremacy reasserts itself with renewed brutality. Its persistence is emphasized by a subplot that takes place 85 years after the war in a Mississippi courtroom, where Davis Knight (Brian Lee Franklin) a descendant of Newton’s, is on trial for breaking the state’s law against interracial marriage. The question of Davis’s racial identity turns on whether he is descended from Rachel or Serena (Keri Russell) Newton’s wife at the beginning of the movie. The romance between a white man and an enslaved black woman is, to say the least, a delicate issue for a movie like this to deal with, but Mr. Ross handles this and other fraught matters with impressive tact and sensitivity. The film does not minimize the violence of slavery, including the sexual violence that was the daily experience of women like Rachel, but it also refrains from turning cruelty into spectacle. Mr. Ross has an faith in the power of editing, and in the ability of the audience to imagine what he refrains from showing explicitly. Which is not to say that “Free State of Jones” is a subtle movie. Why should it be? There is nothing wrong with a story that has clear heroes and villains, especially when such roles have been misconceived for so long. The wily and charismatic Newton Knight is a revisionist archetype, a white Southern rebel fighting against the mythology that such figures usually embody. He takes down the Stars and Bars and raises Old Glory above his territory this movie holds no truck with nonsense about a genteel Southern way of life menaced by Yankee aggression. It is obvious to Newton, and certainly to Moses, that the Glorious Cause of the Confederacy was a rapacious and exploitative capitalist economy, and that the resistance to Reconstruction was intended to restore that system. This view reflects the current scholarly consensus, but much of American popular culture, like much of American politics, remains besotted by the old mythology. Freedom is a long struggle. “Free State of Jones” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gory wartime violence and less explicit but equally upsetting postwar brutality. Running time: 2 hours 19 minutes. | 1 |
Email
Who would have thought right? Hillary’s campaign establishing what appears to be some very close ties with the largest social media company (Facebook) on the Internet, right in the midst of her presidential campaign? It’s not enough that Hillary has Google hiding various stories from Clinton search queries, but it looks like she had to go and get Facebook on board to help her cheat as well. But should Trump supporters take any issue with that?
Sure, there’s been issues in the past with Facebook banning conservatives for merely looking at their monitors the wrong way, but all that changed this week right? If you recall, earlier this week we learned that despite donating huge amounts of money to Hillary’s campaign, allegedly Mark Zuckerberg betrayed Hillary Clinton, and actually jumped on board the Trump Train … or is there more to this? In the video below I dig a bit deeper into both these stories…
Emails Show Connection Between Facebook Executive, Clinton Campaign
… kept the interactions with Clinton private …
A new WikiLeaks email dump shows Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg eager and willing to be involved in helping Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Sandberg’s role in helping the research-driven Clinton campaign was revealed in a WikiLeaks email from Clinton aide Cheryl Mills.
“I have arranged for Sheryl Sandberg and her researcher to be available on 5 March at 10 am to step through the research on gender and leadership by women,” Mills wrote in a February 2015 email.
Two months after that meeting, Sandberg offered to do more for the campaign in response to an email from campaign chairman John Podesta expressing sympathy for the death of her husband.
“I still want HRC to win badly ,” Sandberg wrote in May 2015. “I am still here to help as I can. She came over and was magical with my kids.”
Facebook has said that Sandberg was acting in a private capacity in sharing research with the Clinton campaign. Sandberg kept the interactions with Clinton private, and did not formally, publicly endorse Clinton until early 2016.
However, she kept in touch with the campaign. In August 2015, she emailed Podesta offering to put him in touch with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg , a staunch opponent of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump .
“Mark is meeting with people to learn more about next steps for his philanthropy and social action and it’s hard to imagine someone better placed or more experienced than you to help him,” she wrote.
“He’s begun to think about whether/how he might want to shape advocacy efforts to support his philanthropic priorities and is particularly interested in meeting people who could help him understand how to move the needle on the specific public policy issues he cares most about,” she added.
“He wants to meet folks who can inform his understanding about effective political operations to advance public policy goals on social oriented objectives (like immigration, education or basic scientific research),” she wrote.
The WikiLeaks emails from Podesta’s account imply a meeting was arranged later that month.
SOCIAL MEDIA GIANTS ARE ACTUALLY GOVERNMENT CREATIONS:
If you doubt that the CIA made Google, and Google made the NSA, but you don’t read the following: save your worthless drivel for someone who cares. If you don't have the facts presented, how can you presume to dispute then? Conversely, if you dispute the facts presented with evidence stacked higher than Mt. Everest, by all means… let’s hear it, but support your opinions with FACTS, not platitudes. | 0 |
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In this amusing but alarming musical number, famed songstress Rachel Bloom joins a star-studded crew to pen a parody of “We Are The World” as a last-ditch attempt to remind American voters of just what exactly is at stake in this election, pleading with the American people to please, please not vote for Donald Trump.
Joined by such star-studded names like Zach Reino, Jack Dolgen, Moby, Mayim Bialik, Adam Scott, Adam Pally, Melissa Rauch, Jane Lynch, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Bloom has a simple statement for everyone: “Holy Sh*t, Get Out And Vote.”
“ I can’t believe I’ve had to stoop so low. But an orange talking STD has driven me to this recording studio! And now Moby is on the drums while Elizabeth Banks plays bass. So we can try to convince the USA not to shoot itself in the face.”
At this point in the game, if you haven’t accepted that Donald Trump is a serial sexual predator who has made his entire business career off the backs of others and his entire political career off of appalling and un-American ethnonationalism who would destroy our economy and leave the world at the mercy of the predatory ambitions of dictators like Vladimir Putin, this song isn’t going to convince you. But it’s a fun little diversion that still hits home just how critical the result of this election is going to be.
Watch it here: | 0 |
‘Informed Rant’: The Violence of Borders, Racist Mascots and The Real News Posted on Nov 4, 2016 Detail from the cover of Reece Jones’ book, “Violent Borders.” (Verso Books)
In this week’s episode of “Informed Rant,” the podcast of Joshua Scheer, Scheer speaks with Reece Jones, associate professor of Geography at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, about Jones’ book, “V iolent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move ” and the human cost of borders.
Scheer also speaks with Paul Jay, co-founder and editor in chief of The Real News, about the site’s significance, and Robert Holden, deputy director of the National Congress of American Indians, about racism and sports mascots after the world series.
A rushed transcript follows.
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Joshua Scheer: My guest right now is Professor Reece Jones, he’s a geopolitical expert. He teaches geography at the University of Hawaii Manila. His book is “Violent Borders”. We’re discussing refugees. Thank you for joining me.
Reece Jones: Thanks for having me on.
Scheer: You ask this question in the book, and obviously every day there’s some big story about migrants and refugees and what’s happening in the world. We just saw it yesterday with the so-called jungle being torn down in France. This morning I woke up to the BBC saying 238 migrants may have drowned outside of Libya. You study this, talking about limiting the movements of the poor and you ask this question in the beginning of your book. Talk about this. The limiting of the movements of these refugees and what you’ve seen, both in your field research, but also in the media reports and everything else that we’re all seeing right now. We’ve seen over the last, certainly the last few years, but this is not a new movement as you write about in your book.
Jones: I’ve been studying borders for about 15 years now, and over that period of time, I’ve seen two big changes happening at borders. The first is the construction of a lot of border infrastructure that is designed to limit the movement of people across border spaces and to deter people from trying to make trips across borders. This infrastructure is both the deployment of a lot more border agents at borders, the use of new surveillance technologies and military technologies in border spaces, but it’s probably most evident if you look at walls.
Walls are a good way to symbolize the hardening of borders that’s happened in the past 15 years. In 1990 there were about 15 border walls around the world, so relatively few. Today there are almost 70 walls on borders around the world, so there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of walls. Those walls symbolize all of the other infrastructure that goes along with that. The militarization of the security in these spaces.
The second trend that I’ve noticed that goes along with that is a dramatic increase in the number of people dying at borders. If you look at the edges of the European Union, in the 1990s there were less than a hundred deaths per year at the edges of the EU, whereas in the past decade, those numbers have gone up dramatically. We’re talking about in the last 3 years in a row, over 3,500 people have died at the edges of the EU every single year.
That’s part of a global trend. From 2005 to 2014, 40,000 people globally died trying to cross the border. In the last 2 years, as you mentioned during your introduction, that’s increased even more. Over 10,000 people have died trying to cross a border in just 2015 and 2016.
Scheer: Yes, and you have the number in ... A lot of numbers in your book, and it’s very interesting walls. Can you explain, we’re going to get into the violence aspect, but explain this concept that was foreign to me, humanitarian fencing which you saw in Spain and elsewhere. What is humanitarian fencing? How does that relate?
Jones: In some border areas, there’s an effort to construct fencing that is meant to deter people from crossing rather than injure them in the crossing process. If you look at the US fence, the one that was built after the Secure Fence Act passed in 2006, it doesn’t have a lot of barbed wire on it, instead it’s a wall, it prevents movement, but it doesn’t have the ways to injure people crossing. The EU fencing in Spain for example, is also similar in that respect. It doesn’t have all the barbed wire that we see in other borders around the world.
That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a dangerous effect on people’s lives, because what we see over and over again is that as particular border crossing routes are closed, fences are always built in the easier places for people to cross between cities, it diverts people to ever more dangerous routes. That’s why there’s been this dramatic increase in deaths, because as borders become harder to cross, we’ve seen that it doesn’t deter people from crossing as it was predicted to do. Instead, it forces them to cross in these very dangerous places, which means the deserts of the US Southwest.
In Arizona for example, where the number of deaths increased dramatically as fences were built on the US border. At the edges of the EU it means the people are crossing in the Mediterranean. They’re having to go to Libya, and having to use smugglers and are put in these very dangerous situations, which results in these really high death rates of people trying to cross into Europe.
Scheer: My guest is Reece Jones, he’s a geography professor at the University of Hawaii Manila, and his book is Violent Borders, Refugees and the Right to Move. This is not a new concept as you write about though. The Great Wall of China you write about, Hadrian’s wall, it created a defensive control. Good taxes, and let’s get into that a little bit. The walls that were created, like for the Great Wall of China, and then with feudal lords and common lands using hedges and other mechanisms.
We start to shift the conversation into the state’s responsibility, because as you write in your book, this is not ... One, as you write or as other geographers have also written, to be modern is to be ... Modern citizen it to be a mobile citizen, and also we have been always in migration. Our history’s in migration. Let’s talk about the history of basically creating walls and then where we have reached today in which states are protecting us and we have this national identity based on borders.
Jones: What I argue in the book, the broader argument that I make in the book is that the walls that we see today and all of the security infrastructure that goes along with them at borders, the idea of citizenship, the use of passports, the imposition of border patrols, is new in the way that it’s happening at borders, but I argue that it’s part of a much longer term history that’s part of this contest between people moving around and states’ efforts to try to control that movement.
I argue that a powerful historical process is the state using movement restrictions to contain the poor to particular places to lower their wages to to make them have no wages. What we see today is part of that longer history. In the past it was things like slavery, or serfdom, or vagrancy laws or poor laws, that kept the poor locked into particular places and allowed the wealthy to access their wages to they work at low wages or no wages. Today we see that with borders.
The poor are restricted to the countries of their birth and this creates pools of low-wage labor that lets corporations move factories to locations where it’s advantageous to them, but doesn’t allow workers to move to places where they could demand higher wages. What I argue in the book is that the violence we see at borders today is part of that effort to contain the poor to particular places to protect the privileges and wealth that have accrued in other places. | 0 |
A New Paradigm for Diagnosis and Treatment of Modern Chronic Illnesses Dr. Judy Mikovits
by John P. Thomas Health Impact News
The persistent investigation of Dr. Mikovits into the cause and treatment of modern illnesses, along with a handful of other scientists and healthcare providers such as the late Dr. Jeff Bradstreet, M.D., is leading us toward a new understanding of modern illness and its treatment.
Dr. Mikovits sees the bigger picture of health and illness that few scientists and healthcare providers have the courage to examine. She had great respect for the work of Dr. Bradstreet and his successful use of the new paradigm for treating difficult illnesses. Dr. Mikovits stated:
Dr. Bradstreet recognized that what we call autism is in fact an acquired immune deficiency. What we know of as autism is part of a collection of more than 60 diseases that is spiraling and increasing in our environment.
It is acquired immune deficiency resulting from all the toxins, all the vaccines and other contaminants in our environment from these biologicals that in fact means that what we know of as autism spectrum disorder is an acquired immune deficiency. [1] A Family of Acquired Immune Deficiency Diseases
Many who read this may be initially confused or may even balk at the use of the term Acquired Immune Deficiency , because of the association with HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS is one of many acquired immune deficiency syndromes (diseases). It is an acquired immune deficiency caused by the virus that is commonly called HIV. However, HIV is not the only acquired immune deficiency disease – there are more than 60 others, which can result in non-HIV AIDS.
When the human immune system is repeatedly stressed and weakened by toxic food, by toxins in the environment, and by toxic vaccines, then chronic retrovirus related illnesses can begin to emerge from their slumber. We can give a general name to all these illnesses. We can simply call them Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes or non-HIV AIDS.
The conventional healthcare system struggles to accurately diagnose these modern diseases, because there are so many overlapping sets of symptoms. Beyond the specific symptoms is the same underlying problem, which is immune system dysregulation and dysfunction.
People with these diseases have immune systems that have been pushed to the max by various stressors. Their immune systems have been pushed to the point of breakage where retroviral infections can be released from their confinement and begin to reproduce in the body.
Once this happens, the immune system is no longer able to adequately respond to the insults that it was formerly able to control. Various immune system pathways keep trying to fix the situation, but can’t overcome the damage.
An acquired immune deficiency is simply an immune system that has been broken to such a degree that it cannot properly respond to the conditions that are causing illness. It is so broken that it cannot even repair itself. The result of such severe immune dysfunction is chronic disabling illness. The Central Tenet of Modern Chronic Illnesses
Dr. Mikovits explains more about the new understanding of the immune system and the paradigm shift that is leading healthcare providers to reconsider long-held assumptions about health and illness. It is causing them to rethink what it means to bring about a “cure” for modern illnesses. Dr. Mikovits stated:
The paradigm shift was recognizing that the macrophage was the central tenet of disease. Our central hypothesis, which we have held for more than three decades, is that there is a critical threshold of immune activation, and when the activation rises above that level, damage to the immune system is being created. Damage is created at a distance.
The damage may be subclinical and it will create imbalance not only in the macrophages, but also in other parts of the immune system. What we want to do is to stop this process.
We want to stop the disease engine, stop the microbial switch from turning on the oxidative stress, and turning on the inflammatory cytokines — and doing this over and over again. If we can limit the damage to the subsets of the immune system, then it is possible to modulate and rebalance the immune system and cure the disease. [2] The Power of the Immune System can Heal Modern Diseases
The new paradigm offers the possibility of true cure, because it relies on the power of the human immune system to bring about a cure. Cure is not seen as the eradication of pathogens by pharmaceutical drugs or other means, rather, the goal is to restore the immune system so that it can once again control or manage pathogens.
In the case of retroviral infection such as HIV, HTLV-1 Leukemia virus, and others, these viruses cannot be eradicated from the body once they have imbedded themselves into human DNA. Once retroviruses have inserted themselves into cells, they cannot be removed – they are there for life.
This means that successful treatments will need to prevent further viral reproduction and enable the immune system to control the existing viral load. When this is done, then the symptoms of disease subside and people are able to live normal lives again.
The illnesses we are discussing first appeared after the dawn of the genetic age or they had a sudden increase in prevalence since it began. Many of these diseases were once considered only diseases of the elderly; but today they are appearing in children and even in newborn babies. This is especially true for cancer.
We are seeing babies born with cancer, two-year-olds dying of cancer, children being unable to digest food, teens dropping dead while playing sports, children with severe physical and intellectual delays, young adults in their twenties with disabling neurological failure, people in their 40s and 50s with deteriorating brain function and memory loss, and people of all ages developing brain fog and physical weakness to the point where they can no longer work or even take care of themselves.
Such things were virtually unheard of before the dawning of the genetic Age. The Bad Fruit of the Genetic Age
The diseases listed below are some of the illnesses that are associated with retroviral infection and immune system damage. We cannot say these diseases are caused by retroviruses, but only that retroviruses are often expressed in patients who have these diseases. Aberrant retrovirus expression and a compromised immune system are the common threads that link these diseases together. The prevalence of these diseases has increased dramatically over the past four decades.
Illnesses Associated with Retroviral Infection [3]
Cancers: Prostate, Breast, Lymphoma, Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, Mantle Cell Lymphoma, Adult T-Cell Leukemia, Hairy Cell Leukemia, Liver, Bladder, Kidney, Pancreas, Colorectal, Ovarian, and Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
Auto-Immune Diseases: Rheumatoid Arthritis, Lupus, Crohn’s Disease, Peripheral Neuropathy, Primary Biliary Cirrhosis, Sjogren’s Syndrome, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, Polymyositis, and Bechet’s Disease.
Neuro-Immune Diseases: Myalgic Encephalomyelitis or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Multiple Sclerosis, Fibromyalgia, Gulf-War Syndrome, Morgellons Disease, treatment resistant Lyme disease, and idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP).
Central Nervous System Diseases: Alzheimer’s, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, multiple system atrophy, Autism Spectrum Disorders, and Parkinson’s.
A central sign of immune system dysfunction in these diseases is extreme fatigue. Many people also note unexplained weight loss or gain. These symptoms are early warning signs of cancer, but also are hallmarks of all the other diseases mentioned above.
In addition, there will be: signs of inflammation, significant hormone dysregulation, highly elevated reactive oxygen species (ROS), highly elevated reactive nitrogen species (RNS), changes in gene expression without a change to DNA (epigenetics), actual changes in DNA through the process of insertional mutagenesis in which exogenous genetic material is incorporated within the DNA of a host, and serious immune system deficiency. Proper Treatment of Immune System Dysfunction can Help Patients
This is a grim reality that Dr. Mikovits has been working to change.
The proper treatment of immune system dysfunction can help patients with these types of illnesses. These types of treatments enable the body’s normal immune defenses to take up their task and gain control over out-of-control situations in the body. Multiple Factors are Causing Illness and Death in Our Modern Age
These are some of the major factors that work together to damage immune system functioning. Alterations in human DNA caused by the presence of retroviruses, Opportunistic co-infections that accompany retroviral infections, Vaccines and most pharmaceutical drugs, Highly processed food and its toxic ingredients such as GMOs, glyphosate, preservatives, artificial flavorings, hydrogenated oil products, etc., Electromagnetic pollution, Toxic chemical exposure in the environment, Chlorinated and fluoridated drinking water, Biologically inactive and chemically contaminated agricultural soil, Antibiotics and incompatible GMO feed given to animals raised in confined feeding operations, Toxins and artificial fragrances in cleaning products and body care products, Mold infested homes and schools, and Of course, the high sugar and high carbohydrate diet.
These factors, plus many others, which are common to “modern life” in America, interact synergistically to damage the immune system. The combined harm is much higher than would be expected by simply adding the potential dangers together. Over time, the stress they produce on the immune system will cause it to crash, and one or more of the illnesses listed above will manifest.
Conventional physicians cannot seem to accept the reality that the modern diseases that plague the world today are linked to multiple factors. They have trouble believing there is synergy between these factors, and that together they could be disrupting the human immune system to the point where disease results. Question for Dr. Mikovits
Is Your Approach Really New?
Basically what I am describing is old-fashioned medicine, and it is rarely done anymore. There are some, of course, who do use these protocols. We need to look at the patient. Talk to the patient. Look at the family. That is what we do. That’s what we have always done.
Based on the fact that damage to the immune system is associated with a complex set of interconnected factors, many of which cannot be clearly assessed, then is it reasonable to think that the selection of treatment options needs to be based more on the dysfunctions in immune system pathways, than on the potential triggers of the dysfunction?
Yes, that is correct.
There are any number of therapies – both natural products and otherwise – that could be put together to address immune system dysfunction. But, there is no simple fix. Physicians tend to want to just hand a patient an antidepressant, which is not going to work, or give Lyrica or pain medication, which is going to mask the problem. Even steroids mask the problem and prevent immune system functioning, and down the road a few years things are going to get even worse and spin out of control.
Treating these patients is a lot like the protocol we used for treating AIDS patients. If the AIDS patient had TB or mycoplasma we couldn’t treat the retrovirus first. We had to clear the terrain. We had to stop some of the other overwhelming infections and prevent the downstream effects on their bodies. Otherwise, they couldn’t respond to the treatment. What we learned that was most significant was to never let the CD4 T cells get too low, because if they get too low then patients can’t respond to antiretroviral or antimicrobial treatments.
We are also learning which microbes in the human microbiome are key to drug responses, because they modulate the immune system, interferon and things like that.
Most people want natural products for their illnesses. Baicalin, medical marijuana, vitamin D binding protein (GcMAF), and HEEL Lymphomyosot are some of the natural products that we have studied. The New Paradigm must Address Vaccines and Vaccine Injury
Big Pharma and the government scientists who do their will want us to believe that the science regarding vaccine safety is settled, and the current vaccination schedule is safe. However, some scientists object to this conclusion and insist that the science is not settled and the schedule is not safe!
In fact, the science that has been produced since 2010 concerning vaccines is unsettling Big Pharma. It contradicts their past conclusions and is threatening their profitability.
Agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have lost touch with their original mandates to protect and serve the public. These U.S. government regulators continue to ignore the new science and pursue an informal program that discredits scientists who expose the harmful nature of current vaccines, and they discredit those who dare to criticize the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule.
As we saw with the MMR vaccine, the FDA knowingly approves vaccines and drugs when research shows a high potential for harm, and even destroys data and alters its findings for the sake of keeping its corporate funders happy. [4] While the FDA is keeping its head buried in the sand, the CDC is promoting a schedule of childhood vaccination which has caused harm to millions of children.
Despite this level of corruption, strong voices can be heard from outside the corporate and regulatory world declaring the truth about vaccines and their schedule of administration.
Among the voices raising concern about the safety of vaccines and their schedule of administration is the respectful voice of scientist Dr. Judy A. Mikovits, Ph.D. She continues to speak out on the mechanisms of immune system injury and the treatments for retroviral and vaccine related illness. Her clear voice is a wake-up call to all people who value health freedom and independent thinking.
Her teaching is life-enriching, because she is addressing the needs of real people with serious illness, and is speaking directly to doctors who are beginning to realize they need new tools to understand and treat the modern illnesses of their patients.
Her teaching is not anti-vaccine, because Dr. Mikovits is not anti-vaccine. However, Dr. Mikovits is not afraid to raise serious questions about the safety of the vaccines being used today. She is not afraid to give a strong warning about the vaccine schedule used for infants and children, and will not remain silent about the lack of wisdom associated with vaccinating pregnant women and seniors.
Dr. Mikovits allows the science to speak. She works hard to avoid standing on the pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine soapbox. Instead, she quietly asks us to use our intelligence to make decisions concerning the use of vaccines based on everything that is known about the functioning of the human immune system and its reaction to vaccines. Dr. Mikovits is Challenging All of Us to Wake Up
Dr. Mikovits is inserting a healthy dose of common sense into the discussion of vaccine safety. She stated:
You will hear, “the science is settled, vaccines are safe.” They aren’t safe. What science is settled? We learn new things every day!
Dr. Mikovits is challenging all of us to wake up.
Physicians are being challenged to think twice whenever they consider recommending that all their patients receive vaccines according to the schedule promoted by the CDC. The general public is being challenged to think twice before agreeing to receive vaccines or permit vaccines to be given to their children. Patients are being challenged to engage their physicians in a dialogue about the potential harm that might result from being vaccinated, because vaccine injury is a real possibility whenever a vaccine is given, and the use of clever marketing slogans such as “the science is settled” does not remove the possibility of vaccine injury.
Comment on this article at VaccineImpact.com. About the Author
John P. Thomas is a health writer for Health Impact News. He holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Science in Public Health (M.S.P.H.) from the School of Public Health, Department of Health Administration, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. References
[1] Judy Mikovits, Seeking Health Educational Institute 2016, 4/21/2016. https://seekinghealth.org/sheicon2016/
[2] Dr. Mikovits is referencing the analysis of researchers David J. Dowling and Ofer Levy; “Ontogeny of Early Life Immunity,” Trends Immunol, July 2014, PMCID PMC4109609. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4109609/
[3] This information was derived from my conversation with Dr. Mikovits and from her slides available from: “PRT 2013 Presentation,” MAR Consulting Inc., retrieved 12/ 18/2015. http://www.marconsultinginc.com/prt-2013-presentation.html
[4] “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” Official Website, Retreived 10/20/2016. http://vaxxedthemovie.com/ Leaving a lucrative career as a nephrologist (kidney doctor), Dr. Suzanne Humphries is now free to actually help cure people. In this autobiography she explains why good doctors are constrained within the current corrupt medical system from practicing real, ethical medicine. FREE Shipping Available! Order here . Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced? eBook – Available for immediate download.
One of the biggest myths being propagated in the compliant mainstream media today is that doctors are either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, and that the anti-vaccine doctors are all “quacks.”
However, nothing could be further from the truth in the vaccine debate. Doctors are not unified at all on their positions regarding “the science” of vaccines, nor are they unified in the position of removing informed consent to a medical procedure like vaccines.
The two most extreme positions are those doctors who are 100% against vaccines and do not administer them at all, and those doctors that believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective for ALL people, ALL the time, by force if necessary.
Very few doctors fall into either of these two extremist positions, and yet it is the extreme pro-vaccine position that is presented by the U.S. Government and mainstream media as being the dominant position of the medical field.
In between these two extreme views, however, is where the vast majority of doctors practicing today would probably categorize their position. Many doctors who consider themselves “pro-vaccine,” for example, do not believe that every single vaccine is appropriate for every single individual.
Many doctors recommend a “delayed” vaccine schedule for some patients, and not always the recommended one-size-fits-all CDC childhood schedule. Other doctors choose to recommend vaccines based on the actual science and merit of each vaccine, recommending some, while determining that others are not worth the risk for children, such as the suspect seasonal flu shot.
These doctors who do not hold extreme positions would be opposed to government-mandated vaccinations and the removal of all parental exemptions.
In this eBook, I am going to summarize the many doctors today who do not take the most extremist pro-vaccine position, which is probably not held by very many doctors at all, in spite of what the pharmaceutical industry, the federal government, and the mainstream media would like the public to believe. Read : Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced? on your mobile device! | 0 |
Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” host Fareed Zakaria said President Donald Trump’s “erratic foreign policy” was “damaging” to America. Zakaria said, “But first here’s my take. There has been much focus onDonaldd Trump’s erratic foreign policy. The out landish positions, the many the outright mistakes, but far more damaging in the long run might be what some have termed the Trump effect. The impact of Donald Trump on the domestic politics of other countries. That effect appears to be powerful, negative, and enduring. It could undermine decades of American foreign policy successes. He added, “In foreign policy, great statesmen always keep in mind one crucial reality, every country has its own domestic politics. crude rhetoric, outlandish demands, poorly thought through policies, cheap shots, all place foreign leaders in a box. They cannot be perceived as surrendering to America and certainly not to an America led by someone who insists on showing that for America to win others must lose. That’s one big difference among many between doing a real estate deal and managing foreign policy. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
WASHINGTON — A widely publicized by House Democrats. A bipartisan compromise proposal in the Senate. Neither is very likely to lead to any legislative action in Congress on gun safety this year. Election Day is too close, and most of the Republican opposition is too dug in. But the fact that a legislative response remains elusive does not mean there has been no movement on the issue. Members of both parties say they sensed a shift in the gun debate after the mass killing in Orlando, Fla. a notable difference in attitude from the reaction on Capitol Hill after previous horrific shootings. Eight Senate Republicans joined with 44 Democrats on a compromise that would deny people on two different federal watch lists the ability to buy weapons unless they could successfully appeal that decision. Several other Republican senators showed some willingness to accept new restrictions on gun purchases if they could be structured in an acceptable way. A bipartisan companion measure also was introduced in the House. These are incremental steps, but in the gridlocked world of gun control politics, they count for something. One explanation for the change is that Omar Mateen, the Orlando killer, used his legally purchased firearms in the commission of a terrorist act. Some Republicans say they are willing to challenge the of no new gun control — and the National Rifle Association — in the interest of trying to prevent similar terrorist attacks. Republicans find it much easier to explain enacting gun restrictions to constituents devoted to the Second Amendment if they can frame their position as an act against terrorism. “The Constitution’s a sacred document, but it is not a suicide pact,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a gun owner. “This is not hard for me. Due process is important, but at the end of the day, we are at war. ” To Democrats, any hint of daylight between some Republicans and the N. R. A. is welcome. “For the first time in quite a while you’re seeing some Republicans buck the N. R. A. ,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, who is likely to be the Democratic leader next year. After watching Democrats tie up the Senate with a filibuster and Democrats occupy the House floor with a that exploded on social media, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, is eager to take up other issues. “Clearly, we have got to move on,” Mr. McConnell said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” though he added, “This is an issue, obviously, we’ll be revisiting again in the future. ” “Whether people like it or not, there is a constitutional right in our country to own and possess a firearm,” he said. Mr. McConnell was heavily invested in making sure the compromise plan offered by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and opposed by the N. R. A. ended up short of the level of 60 votes. He does not want to be remembered as the leader of a Senate that defied the gun rights group, one of the most powerful allies of his party. And he allowed a competing alternative by Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, that probably siphoned Republican votes from the Collins plan. But the votes exposed a small universe of Republican senators who might eventually be willing to support gun restrictions in the interest of preventing terrorism, perhaps enough to eventually push a compromise proposal to the hallowed level. “The fact that terrorism has become intertwined with the gun issue puts greater pressure on Republican senators and Senator McConnell to get something done,” Mr. Schumer said. Mr. Schumer and his fellow Democrats acknowledge the latest round of debate on gun control is good politics for them, particularly in swing states like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Ohio that will be crucial to deciding control of the Senate in November. Polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans would deny those on terrorism watch lists the ability to buy guns, which the Collins bill proposed. As the Collins proposal gained steam after the defeat of other, more partisan proposals, Democrats discussed opposing it. They worried that strong Democratic backing would allow a handful of embattled Republicans the opportunity to cast a politically helpful gun safety vote even though no legislation would pass — an opportunity to “get well” on guns as it is known. Democrats said they decided to give the plan their full support to show they were serious about moving ahead with gun control even though the compromise fell short of their legislative goals and could benefit some Republicans. Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, top Democratic targets, were among those voting for the Collins plan. Though the immediate legislative prospects look dim, the gun control debate is not going to quiet down anytime soon. Energized by the attention to their House Democrats branded Wednesday a “National Day of Action” on guns and held news conferences and protests around the country while lawmakers were home for the Fourth of July recess. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, on Monday urged Democrats to hold family to “keep the drumbeat for action growing. ” Democrats expect to return to their guerrilla tactics when the House convenes next week. Backers of the Collins proposal say they will continue to press for added support as well. Perceiving a shift in congressional sentiment and a distinct political advantage, gun control advocates are not about to give up now. | 1 |
Two earthquakes, which struck Italy this week, were “retribution” for the country’s support of the UNESCO resolution disregarding the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, Israeli Deputy Minister for Regional Cooperation Ayoob Kara said.
“I’m sure that the earthquake happened because of the UNESCO decision,” Kara, a member of the ruling Likud Party, wrote in a memo, Ynetnews website reported.
Ironically, the Israeli politician was on a state visit to the Vatican when the quakes hit central Italy on Wednesday, killing one and injuring 10 people.
Earlier the same day, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), passed a resolution criticizing Israel for its handling of the holy site in Jerusalem – called Temple Mount by Jews, and Haram al-Sharif by Muslims.
The document was adopted after heated debate over its wording, and particularly the Arabic names used in the document. Italy was among the nations voting in favor of the resolution.
Israel blasted UNESCO and its Arab members for trying to undermine Jewish connections to the holy site.
Kara arrived in the Vatican in a fruitless effort to avert the resolution, but still managed to have a small chat with the leader of the Catholic Church.
According to Kara, Pope Francis “strongly disagreed” with the resolution.
“He (the Pope) even said publicly that the holy land is connected to the Nation of Israel,” the deputy minister stressed.
As for surviving the natural disaster, the Israeli politician said that “going through the earthquake was not the most comfortable of experiences, but we trusted that the Holy See would keep us safe.”
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Tuesday on MSNBC, Rep. Luis Gutiérrez ( ) said he was confident Americans will fight back against President Donald Trump’s agenda because he explained, “I’m really not that used to, and I’ve been in Congress 24 years, the number of white women coming up to talk to me. ” Gutiérrez said, “He at this point enters into the presidency with an approval rating that we have not seen in recent history for a president beginning, and he hasn’t had an auspicious start with his, you know, alternate realities and alternate facts that he gives us. Everything in Trump’s world is something that he manufactures to fit his scheme of the world. And his scheme of the world is not one that’s fitting with the reality. That’s why you saw over half a million — you know, I was there, so half a million, I’ll accept it, but I think there were a lot more women than that, and they came truly, truly organically. ” He continued, “I had a town hall meeting last night unprecedented in my congressional district. It was around immigration. That was the issue that we were called to discuss last night. I got to tell you, my heart was just so touched to see people unaffected by our broken immigration system, to see people from, especially white women, the number of white women who felt a need to come out and join and learn and be in solidarity. I’ve got to tell you something, there is something mystical, magical happening out there in the American public, and I want to say thank you to women, because if it had not been for the women calling that march, we would have not come together as Muslims, as immigrants, as environmentalist — you know why we’ll push back on Keystone? Because there was a women’s march in Washington, D. C. and that women’s march was a march for environmental standards, and for our native Americans. ” He added, “I want to talk real quickly about identity politics. Look, I’m used to Latino women coming up and talking to me, pretty used to women and Asian women approaching me and talking to me. I’m really not that used to, and I’ve been in Congress 24 years, the number of white women coming up to talk to me in my congressional district, the number of them calling, the kind of exchanges. I was on the airplane going back Sunday from the march, they all clapped for me, right? Is that really identity politics? A Latino male from the city of Chicago from a Hispanic district with a majority of white women on an airplane were all clapping and celebrating because they felt a kinship with me and I was so thankful to them, for the gift that they gave me of their love, of their applause, and of their approval. We’re each connecting with one another in ways we haven’t ever before. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
Brock Turner, the former Stanford University student convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a Dumpster on campus, described his actions as the product of a culture of drinking, peer pressure and “sexual promiscuity,” according to his courtroom statement. In a letter he submitted before being sentenced to six months in jail by Judge Aaron Persky of the Santa Clara County Superior Court, obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Turner said: “I am the sole proprietor of what happened on the night that changed these people’s lives forever. I would give anything to change what happened. ” The case has spurred a national uproar because of a sentence criticized as far too lenient and a statement by the defendant’s father complaining that his son’s life had been ruined for “20 minutes of action. ” The judge is also facing a recall effort and has received threats of violence to him and his family, an official said. The victim read her own statement in court, recounting the horror of finding out details of her attack on the news (she had been intoxicated and could not remember the assault) and having to break the news to her family. Mr. Turner said the events of that night had left him “a changed person. ” In addition to his jail sentence — far less than the maximum — he will serve three years’ probation and must register as a sex offender. He also lost his swimming scholarship to Stanford. In his letter, he said the woman had consented to the sexual encounter, even as he admitted “imposing trauma and pain” on her. He repeatedly cited an environment of peer pressure, drinking and promiscuity, factors he said he would use his time on probation to advocate against. “I want to demolish the assumption that drinking and partying are what make up a college lifestyle,” he wrote. “I made a mistake, I drank too much, and my decisions hurt someone. ” The woman passionately denounced his interpretation — especially his emphasis on alcohol and promiscuity — in her statement “Alcohol is not an excuse,” she wrote. “Regretting drinking is not the same as regretting sexual assault,” she added. “We were both drunk the difference is I did not take off your pants and underwear, touch you inappropriately and run away. ” The victim’s statement went viral after it was published last week by BuzzFeed. It was read live on CNN by the anchor Ashleigh Banfield on Monday. On Wednesday afternoon, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said that his wife, Chirlane McCray, and other figures would read the statement from Gracie Mansion in a video posted to his Facebook page. . | 1 |
BEIJING — Xu Zhengming was lugging a television through the Beijing West Railway Station on his way home for China’s Lunar New Year. Another passenger was hauling a tub of meat. And many migrant workers returning to their home villages carried bundles of clothes and gifts for children they see maybe once a year. They all said that they could not go home for China’s biggest holiday. Even if that meant carting a television for two days across 1, 000 miles. “I get to go back just once a year. It’s a long way,” Mr. Xu said as he heaved the television, bundled in protective clothing, through the railway station. He was headed to a village outside Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan, a journey he estimated would take about 20 hours. “My father is in the countryside, and the family is hard up,” said Mr. Xu, a construction laborer in Beijing, the Chinese capital. “He always wanted a television, so I’m taking mine home to give him. ” He and most other passengers at this cavernous, thrumming station were among hundreds of millions of Chinese on the move for the Lunar New Year. Many wore red hats or scarves, the color of good luck. While the total number of holiday travelers is hard to pin down, this is the world’s largest annual migration. Zhang Kemin, a restaurant worker dragging a plastic tub holding about 18 pounds of beef and lamb, said he was taking the meat home to Hebei Province, adjacent to Beijing, to make boiled dumplings filled with a mix of meat and vegetables, an essential part of the holiday food in northern China. “There’s pork at home,” he explained. In the days before the holiday, big cities, like Beijing, and the coastal industrial regions exhale tens of millions of workers who head back to their hometowns and villages by train, plane, bus, car and motorbike for this family holiday of marathon eating, fireworks and paying respects to relatives. This year, the festivities start on Friday evening, when the country says goodbye to the Year of the Monkey and welcomes the Year of the Rooster. On Thursday, the Beijing West Railway Station hummed like a giant boot camp, with the police, paramilitary troops and station staff members hustling passengers into waiting rooms to be corralled onto trains. Workers at the station said the holiday rush was more orderly than a decade ago, when heaving crowds threatened to overwhelm stations. “It used to be crazy, but it’s a lot better now,” said Yang Guibao, a bald cleaner at the station. “They add many more trains for the Spring Festival, and the passengers don’t have to be so packed,” he said, using another name for the Lunar New Year. With a wag of his finger, he warned, “There are still pickpockets around, but there are also plainclothes cops. ” China’s trains have become more numerous and faster than even a few years ago. More people go by car or plane, and they are not as bent on all going home at the same time. Some visit at quieter times of the year. China’s expanding rail network now covers about 12, 500 miles of track. The railway administration has cracked down on ticket scalpers, and it has become common to order tickets online or from vending machines. So while the holiday migration is still daunting, it’s not as crazy as before. “Before it took a day on a train, but now it takes three and a half hours,” said Zhang Guiping, a businesswoman waiting for a train to Fuping, a county in Hebei Province. She said she had been in Beijing petitioning the government over a land dispute. Despite her feud with officialdom, she said she was happy with the better trains. “There are more trains, the security checks take less time, and it’s easier to buy tickets,” she said. The Chinese transportation authorities have estimated that people will make close to three billion journeys over this Lunar New Year travel period, including 356 million trips by train. But those numbers can sound misleadingly large. Many people take multiple journeys — by train and bus — to get home and then return to work, so the actual number of bodies on the move is lower than those numbers may suggest. That does not mean that the holiday rush is a tranquil experience. The Beijing West Railway Station, in particular, is an unsightly monument to poor planning that opened in 1996, and its construction was blighted by corruption. Officials estimated that in the holiday travel period that began in the station would send off 11. 8 million passengers, 6 percent more than last year, Chinese state radio reported. People must steel themselves for big crowds, and then they scramble to jump on trains and find space for the gifts and treats that many take home. The official Lunar New Year break lasts a week, but the traditional festival ends after its 15th day. Many migrant workers from the countryside linger at home for precious time with children and parents, whom they rarely or never see the rest of the year. But Wang Tianchang, a migrant laborer who had been sleeping on a sack of bedding in a train station waiting room, said he was not taking home any gifts for his children. His boss on a building site had not paid him $150 owed in wages. “Things are expensive here. I haven’t bought a thing,” he said. But he said, “It’s really important to go home for the Spring Festival. You can see your wife and kids. ” | 1 |
John Moore has an interesting political background. Currently, he is serving Assembly District 8 (AD8) as a Republican and has changed parties to seek re-election as a Libertarian for the November 8, 2016, legislative election. Moreover, before he was a right-wing politician, he ran for office as Democrat. One could certainly question where this candidate’s allegiances lie.
John Moore’s Legislative Candidacies This election marks the third time Moore has sought election for Nevada’s Legislative office.
In 2012, Moore ran for office as a Democrat. He competed against the incumbent, Jason Frierson and lost in the primary race to the incumbent. His loss was 32.4 percent of the vote to Frierson’s 67.6. In 2014 Moore sought the office once again, this time, he ran as a Republican. His opponent was incumbent Democrat, Frierson. Moore barely won his bid in the general election. He won with a 40 vote lead; he garnered 50.2 percent versus the incumbent’s 49.8. Interestingly, he never officially changed parties. After winning the election, as a Republican, he was still listed as a Democrat with the Secretary of State. As a Libertarian in the 2016 race, he is the Republican incumbent. AD8 has three men seeking to serve Nevadans in Carson City. The assemblyman’s opponents are Republican Norm Ross and Democrat Jason Frierson. The assemblyman in the only minor-party incumbent on the November ballot. When he changed his party in January 2016, his explanation was that he locked horns with many of his Republican counterparts. He further explained his party affiliation move to Libertarian as his desire to be an in-the-middle candidate and to avoid pandering to any individual party, according to Las Vegas Review-Journal.
John Moore’s History During the 2015 Legislative Session As with any Republican, Moore ran on the promise of no new taxes for Nevada. Unfortunately, for the Republican-held Assembly, the state’s Governor, Brain Sandoval (R) and lobbyists had a different agenda.
Due to his health problems, Moore missed several crucial votes. In fact, the Conservative Scorecard indicates that during the general session in 2015 he cast two votes and missed eight – or 20 percent. However, when he managed to be present and cast his ballot, his choices did not support the GOP party-line. His two votes were on the following pro-conservation bills.
There was a special session in December 2015. Moore voted his consent to give a foreign corporation a tax break. An electric car manufacturer called Faraday Future received $335 million in incentives to bring the Chinese-backed American start-up company specializing in technology to Nevada.
In a special session during October 2016, Moore cast a yes vote on the Stadium bill. While constituents opinions are split about the stadium being built in Las Vegas, Republicans typically do not vote to increase taxes.
Norm Ross, one of his 2016 opponents, states that Moore supports open borders, as evident with his vote to give money to a foreign-owned company. Furthermore, the incumbent assemblyman calls himself a conservative Libertarian, which is essentially an oxymoron.
John L. Smith chastised the assemblyman’s past. He pointed out that the assemblyman-elect appeared to be a sharp dresser who looks as though he could succeed in Carson City. Whereas, he looked less sure of himself in the wanted poster issued by the Las Vegas City Marshal’s Office. Smith pointed out that the fine was $792, and it was almost the same amount he spent on his campaign; $800.
Moore has been called a lawmaker and a lawbreaker. He appears to change parties on a whim, but there may be underlying reasons or deals that encourage his allegiance discrepancies. Perhaps he merely wants to win no matter the consequences. The question remains: Who is John Moore and which ideology does he truly believe?
By Cathy Milne
Sources:
Ballotpedia: John Moore (Nevada)
Las Vegas Sun: New taxes pass Assembly; no-tax Republicans can’t undermine Sandoval
Las Vegas Review-Journal: Nevada’s independent, minor party candidates face long odds
USA Today: Nevada lands $1 billion Faraday electric car plant
Conservation Scorecard: 2014 Assembly Scorecard
Las Vegas Review-Journal: THIS NEW LAWMAKER IS A LAW BREAKER
Image Courtesy of Gage Skidmore’s moore | 0 |
Donald Trump has had quite a full schedule in the days and weeks leading up to his inauguration, and has met and broken bread with all the power players in and out of Washington with whom he will work with over the next eight years. [On Tuesday, the made time to meet with power brokers from the world of sports, and Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred and Yankees President Randy Levine made the trip to Trump Tower. A pic was captured and tweeted by ’s Howard Mortman: NY Yankees pres. Randy Levine at Trump Tower, MLB Commish Rob Manfred … seen on #elevatorcam cc: @Ourand_SBJ @dcsportsbog @danielhalper pic. twitter. — Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) January 10, 2017, Commissioner Manfred described the meeting as simply a chance for all to get to know each other. Manfred told the Daily News, “I had a really nice meeting with the . He explained to me his history with the game and what a great baseball fan he is, and we are glad that we had an opportunity to get together before his inauguration. ” The Daily News also points out that, “Trump was good friends with the late Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, and Trump and Levine have known each other for over 25 years. ” Trump has had other ties to baseball over the years as well. Trump attempted to purchase the Cleveland Indians at one point. He has also deepened his ties with the baseball world since the election, most notably by selecting Todd Ricketts, part of the Chicago Cubs ownership, as the next deputy commerce secretary. So, this means that Trump once tried to buy last year’s American League champion, and he also hired a piece of last year’s National League and World Series champion. Not too shabby. Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter: @themightygwinn | 1 |
Who can argue with this young lady’s speech?
I bet if Donald Trump had a brick for every lie Hillary has told he could build two walls.
…
As a thirteen year old even I know Hillary Clinton is working for her own success and ways to control my life, my family’s life and your lives… She wants to make it Hillary’s America… not The Peoples’ America.
Hattip Gateway Pundit
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Next Prev Swipe left/right Super Mitchell Bros is the Mario parody every EastEnders fan must see
Inspired by the success of Super Mario Bros – YouTubers Douggy Pledger and Osysmo have created an EastEnder’s version where you get to play as a drunken crack pipe smoking Phil Mitchell that fights his way through Albert Square. In the film a 16-bit Phil runs through Walford, gathering scotch eggs challenged along the way by adversaries such as Ian Beale, Dot Cotton and Sharon.
The duo’s previous Mitchell tributes include;
A Lego Eastenders set;
a Phil action toy;
and conceptual art pieces… Speaking exclusively to The Poke Douggy said “I start doing these photoshopped images about 15 years ago, just to stick up in the office as a joke. Over the years I noticed Phil was cropping up on the odd funny picture floating around online so I decided to go do a bunch more of my own. I met Osymyso in 2001 and used to go to all the Bastard nights he DJ’d at, he was famous at the time for his ‘Pat and Peg’ song so we’d both been dabbling in messing around with Eastenders, despite the fact that neither of us watch the show. Nowadays we just skip through the episodes and pick out Phil’s bits. Which in itself is quite weird as we only know Eastenders from Phil’s perspective.”
for more wonderfully warped Mitchell magic visit Utter Philth | 0 |
Topics: Donald Trump , Jesus , God , Satan , Bible , End Times Wednesday, 26 October 2016
In a late afternoon press conference, Jesus made a shocking confession: "I screwed up.""I don't get to say that very often, but remember that I'm only mostly divine, you know? Nobody's perfect - well, except my dad. The Creator rarely messes up, except for Canada, even he admits that was a mistake."
When asked what he had "screwed up," he explained. "Well, there was all that talk about the world ending in 2012, right before my birthday, December 21st. I was supposed to come down, since I was still was working in the family business, and make sure everything ran smoothly with the End Times. My old man was worried that the Days of Revelation could really go bad and he didn't want another Dark Ages on his hands. He pretty much never recovered from that one in the history books. Anyway, I got off track there. I was supposed to handle the situation, but I looked down and everything seemed fine so I figured I would just take Mary and the kids down to Florida for a few weeks. She had been breaking my balls for centuries to go to Miami and see Peter and Paul, do a little fishing, you know? So, I go away for a few weeks and apparently, well, I dropped the ball."Jesus further admitted that he thought things "were just fine" when he went on vacation in 2012, so he never bothered to check back on the world and what was going on "down there.""That's when the whole End-Times thing started, all because I wasn't doing my job."One reporter pressed Jesus for specifics. The Alpha and the Omega responded by stating what he believed was the obvious: "This whole Trump thing, of course. Isn't it obvious?"
The Blessed One deferred to his old friend, mouthpiece and PR man, John of the New Testament fame: "It's true. Trump is, as far as we can tell, the Beast of the Book of Revelations. All the signs are there. We've definitely looked into this. Take into account his hair, which is a sin, every time he opens his mouth it's total blasphemy - against everything basically - and, yes, he derives his power directly from the Devil himself."
No one in the shocked crowd questioned that Trumps hair was a sin, or the quality of his speech, but several clamored to ask what proof existed that Trump's power was diabolical. Joseph then gave the floor to his long-time adversary and rival, Lucifer. "We usually don't work together on these big projects, maybe a small economic recession or a collapse of the housing market or an earthquake in Haiti. Usually, Jesus's dad handles the big stuff, but he's tired of the business, so we got together, and, yes, I can tell you that Trump does derive his power directly from me. It was totally a bad call on my part. I mean, hey, he's a salesman. He could sell me a pitchfork if he had to, but he's out of control. Quite frankly, one guy with that much power is bad for business."
"We're bringing Jesus out of retirement to handle this one," Joseph announced to the buzzing crowd of reporters. It says right there in the Good Book that he's the only one who can handle this kind of thing."
Asked if this meant the long-awaited Second Coming, Jesus was supremely cautious. "Wo, wo, wo, let's slow it down, people. I don't want to start making promises we can't keep here. Let's not start throwing around that kind of weighty language. Besides, you know, retirement's made me kind of soft. I don't know if I'm ready for another forty days in the desert or another crucifixion. I'm no spring chicken. "
Joseph closed the press conference by assuring everyone that, although no concrete details had been put in place, the rest of the Apostles would be rounded up, and with the assistance of Lucifer and his dark minions, the forces of both light and dark will combine to battle this Sign of the Times. Make Chris Dahl's | 0 |
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