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WASHINGTON — The United States on Monday suspended talks with Russia over the protracted conflict in Syria, accusing the Kremlin of joining with the Syrian Air Force in carrying out a brutal bombing campaign against the besieged city of Aleppo. Anticipating the end of the talks after repeated warnings from American officials, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia responded by withdrawing from a landmark arms control agreement that calls for each side to dispose of 34 tons of plutonium, a material used in nuclear weapons. The developments signaled the further deterioration of relations between the United States and Russia, which are now bitterly at odds over Syria, Ukraine and other issues. “Cooperation over Syria was the Obama administration’s last and best shot for arresting the downward spiral in the bilateral relationship with Russia,” said Andrew S. Weiss, a former White House expert on Russia who is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The mistrust and hostility toward the United States by the Russian leadership is real and growing. It is going to be the driving force behind Russian external behavior for many years to come. ” Just a month ago, it appeared that Secretary of State John Kerry was on the verge of securing the cooperation of Russia on Syria through an agreement with Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, that called for a reduction of violence, access to humanitarian aid and the joint targeting of jihadist groups. But no sooner was the agreement announced than it began to fray — first because of the accidental bombing of Syrian troops by the coalition and then because of what the United States claimed was a deliberate bombing by Russian aircraft and Syrian helicopters of a humanitarian convoy headed to Aleppo. In recent days, Russian and Syrian aircraft have carried out attacks, mainly in Aleppo, using bombs, incendiary munitions, cluster bombs, barrel bombs and thermobaric bombs, which scatter a cloud of explosive particles before detonating in devastating blasts, according to American intelligence officials. About 275, 000 civilians are trapped in those areas, including an estimated 100, 000 children. Hundreds of people have been killed in the past week, international aid groups say. President Obama’s administration was poised to halt the talks last week unless the Russians stopped the bombing and persuaded President Bashar of Syria to do the same. But Mr. Kerry asked the White House for more time to continue his discussions. Mr. Kerry talked a few times with Mr. Lavrov, and teams of American and Russian experts had what the State Department called “very robust discussions” throughout the weekend. At one point, a lasting several days appeared to be under discussion. But by Monday, it was clear that the gulf between Russia and the Western powers was as wide as ever. “This is not a decision that was taken lightly,” John Kirby, the State Department spokesman, said in a statement issued on Monday. “The United States spared no effort in negotiating and attempting to implement an arrangement with Russia aimed at reducing violence, providing unhindered humanitarian access and degrading terrorist organizations operating in Syria,” including fighters for the Islamic State and the Levant Conquest Front, an affiliate of Al Qaeda formerly known as the Nusra Front. “Unfortunately, Russia failed to live up to its own commitments,” the statement added. “Rather, Russia and the Syrian regime have chosen to pursue a military course, inconsistent with the cessation of hostilities, as demonstrated by their intensified attacks against civilian areas,” which American officials say have included hospitals. Notably missing from the statement was any reference to steps the United States might take to strengthen the Syrian opposition by providing antiaircraft weapons or imposing economic sanctions to punish Russian organizations that are helping the Syrian government. The Obama administration has announced that it will consider “options and alternatives. ” But with Mr. Obama reluctant to intervene in the escalating Syrian civil war or to risk an inadvertent confrontation with the Russian military, it is not clear how much interest the White House has in pursuing such options. Mr. Kerry said in a meeting with Syrian civilians last month that he was one of three or four people in the administration who had previously argued for using force against the Assad government, and that he had lost the argument. But Mr. Putin had a move of his own. Saying relations with the United States had deteriorated in a “radically changed environment,” he issued a decree suspending his country’s participation in an agreement on the disposal of plutonium that was concluded in 2000 as one of the framework disarmament deals of the early War period. The deal has no bearing on the number of nuclear weapons deployed by the United States or Russia. Instead, it concerns the plutonium kept in storage in those countries that in theory could be used to make nuclear weapons. Gary Samore, who oversaw the negotiations of the plutonium agreement for President Bill Clinton’s administration, said Mr. Putin’s response had more political than military significance. “It is a political gesture that is part of the deterioration of relations, particularly after the collapse of the Syrian agreement,” said Mr. Samore, now the executive director for research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. “We can both afford to get rid of 34 tons of plutonium without putting much of a dent in the plutonium that is available for military use. ” Still, a senior Obama administration official said the move was worrisome. Even with the growing tensions in relations, the United States has argued that agreements regarding weapons of mass destruction should be sacrosanct because they are in both sides’ interest, the official said. “The Kremlin has not bought that argument,” said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations. Mr. Putin’s decision to withdraw from the treaty may not have much practical effect beyond depriving each side of the opportunity to verify what the other is doing. The Russians had interpreted the treaty as requiring that the plutonium be irreversibly transformed into nonexplosive materials by being used in civilian nuclear power plants as mixed oxide fuel, or mox. Russia has signaled that it plans to press ahead with that undertaking despite Mr. Putin’s order today. But glitches and cost overruns at the mox plant near Aiken, S. C. delayed the American program. This year, Mr. Obama proposed canceling the program in the 2017 budget and sending the plutonium for storage at a nuclear waste site in Carlsbad, N. M. The State Department has said the move complies with the treaty, but the Russians have said it does not, as Mr. Putin reaffirmed on Monday. At the United Nations, France is pushing the Security Council to adopt a toughly worded resolution that calls on the Syrian government to halt aerial bombardments and let in humanitarian aid. But on Monday, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly I. Churkin, ruled out any immediate prospect for a stop to the airstrikes, saying that the Nusra Front had taken eastern Aleppo “hostage” and that Russian intervention had stopped its advance. “We’re trying to make sure black flags won’t fly over Damascus,” Mr. Churkin told reporters at a news conference. | 1 |
As more and more details emerge concerning Friday’s Ramadan attack on a busload of Christians on pilgrimage, the more it becomes evident that these 29 martyrs died solely because they were Christians. [Survivors of the attack said that the ten masked Islamic State militants did not merely open fire on the bus full of Christian pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of Saint Samuel the Confesor, but that the victims were made to descend from the bus and asked one by one whether they were Christians before being shot by the assailants. According to one of the chaplains of the group, Father Rashed, as each pilgrim came off the bus they were asked to renounce their Christian faith and profess belief in Islam, but all of them — even the children — refused. Each was killed in cold blood with a gunshot to the head or the throat. In a statement Friday, President Donald Trump said the “merciless slaughter of Christians in Egypt tears at our hearts and grieves our souls. ” “Wherever innocent blood is spilled, a wound is inflicted upon humanity,” the statement said. “But this attack also steels our resolve to bring nations together for the righteous purpose of crushing the evil organizations of terror, and exposing their depraved, twisted, and thuggish ideology. ” The attack occurred in the midst of a state of emergency period in Egypt following twin attacks on Coptic churches on Palm Sunday last month that killed some 46 Christians who were in church honoring the celebrations. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for those attacks as well. On Saturday, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for Friday’s slaughter through its Amaq news agency. BREAKING: #ISIS claimed credit through its ‘Amaq News Agency for the killing of Coptic Christians in #Minya in southern #Egypt pic. twitter. — SITE Intel Group (@siteintelgroup) May 27, 2017, On learning more details of Friday’s attack, Pope Francis declared that the victims were “martyrs,” telling thousands of pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday that the murdered Christians, amongst whom were a number of children, “were killed after having refused to renounce their Christian faith. ” Reiterating his closeness to the whole Egyptian nation that two days ago suffered “another act of ferocious violence,” the Pope prayed that the Lord might “welcome these courageous witnesses, these martyrs, in his peace and convert the hearts of the terrorists. ” On Saturday, during a pastoral visit to Genoa, Francis prayed for the victims of the attack and lamented that there were more martyrs today than in early Christian times. He also tweeted about the event, requesting prayers for “our Coptic brethren in Egypt” and highlighting the religious motivation behind the assault. Let us pray for our Coptic brethren in Egypt who were killed because they did not want to renounce the faith. — Pope Francis (@Pontifex) May 27, 2017, While European leaders repeatedly stressed the importance of combating “global warming” during a recent meeting of the G7 in Taormina, Italy, President Donald Trump stressed the absolute priority of fighting the real and present danger of Islamic terrorism. The President delivered a powerful speech against Islamist terrorism before 55 world leaders from Arab and other nations in Riyadh earlier this week. In that speech, Trump called for unity in pursuing “the one goal that transcends every other consideration. That goal is to meet history’s great test — to conquer extremism and vanquish the forces of terrorism. ” In this unique and preeminent task, Trump said, “ countries must take the lead in combating radicalization. ” “Every time a terrorist murders an innocent person, and falsely invokes the name of God, it should be an insult to every person of faith,” Mr. Trump said. “Terrorists do not worship God, they worship death. ” Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome | 1 |
Students expressed their “fear” over a Trump presidency in messages to each other that were being shared on Twitter today: “Literally scared for their lives” is the new “literally Hitler”. #NotMyPresident pic.twitter.com/8cKfQdF2Ce
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) November 9, 2016
And finally, this ridiculous and totally biased email was sent from University of Michigan President to the students offering them assistance to help them through the results of our Presidential election last night. The President wants to ensure the students that the university remains committed to their “most important responsibility” at their school which is apparently, “to remain committed to education, discovery and intellectual honesty – and to diversity, equity and inclusion.”:
To All Members of the University Community:
As I’m sure many of you did, I watched the election coverage late into the night, and had the opportunity to visit with students and staff at a results-watching event sponsored by the Ginsberg Center at the Michigan Union. It will take quite some time to completely absorb the results from yesterday’s election, understand the full implications, and discern the long-term impact on our university and our nation . More immediately, in the aftermath of a close and highly contentious election we continue to embrace our most important responsibility as a university community. Our responsibility is to remain committed to education, discovery and intellectual honesty – and to diversity, equity and inclusion. We are at our best when we come together to engage respectfully across our ideological differences; to support ALL who feel marginalized, threatened or unwelcome; and to pursue knowledge and understanding, as we always have, as the students, faculty and staff of the University of Michigan. There are reports of members of our community offering support to one another. Students are planning a vigil tonight on the Diag at 6 p.m. Our Center for Research on Teaching and Learning also has numerous resources available for faculty seeking help in cultivating classroom environments that are responsive to national issues. I also want to make everyone aware of some of the plans and events we have had in place for today and beyond. · Our Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy is holding a Post-Election Analysis from 4 to 5:30 p.m. today in the Weill Hall’s Annenberg Auditorium. Speakers include former U.S. Congressman John Dingell, former Ambassador Ron Weiser, and faculty members Mara Ostfeld, Betsey Stevenson and Marina Whitman. · Our History Department has organized a community discussion led by faculty and students to include historical perspectives at 6 p.m. tonight in 1014 Tisch Hall. · The Office of Student Life will provide resources and referrals for support on campus to students, faculty and staff at a location in the Michigan Union’s Willis Ward Lounge. It will be open today from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. · Our Office of Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs is offering an open space of support to help members of our community connect during open hours today. MESA’s office is in the Michigan Union, Room 2202. · Tomorrow, our Ginsberg Center and Counseling and Psychological Services office is facilitating a Post-election Dialogue: Impact, Perspective-taking, and Moving Forward. This event is part of the Student Life Professional Development Conference at 1 – 2 p.m. in the Michigan League’s Henderson Room. I know that other schools, colleges and offices across our campus are planning events as well. I thank everyone who is helping us come together and ask anyone scheduling a post election event post it on the University of Michigan Events Calendar. I hope all of us will continue to proudly embrace the opportunities before us as the students, faculty and staff of a great public research university governed by the people. Elections are often times of great change, but the values we stand for at U-M have been shaped over the course of nearly 200 years. Our mission remains as essential for society as ever: “…to serve the people of Michigan and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.” I look forward to working together with all of you to advance the work we do in service of the public – and to ensure that the University of Michigan will always be a welcoming place for all members of society. Sincerely,
Mark Schlissel President | 0 |
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Thursday night and Friday morning were but acts for Loserpalooza, which erupted into violent riots and crazy stunts after Donald Trump took the oath of office and formally became President of the United States. Some scenes from the madness on Friday afternoon:[Vandalism against vehicles, especially limousines, became all the rage. Anarchist graffiti was scrawled on this one after its windows were smashed: ”We the people” #DCProtests #NBCBoston pic. twitter. — Nick Emmons TV (@nicknbcboston) January 20, 2017, Another limousine was looted for water by thirsty thugs: Wrecked limo being looted for water pic. twitter. — dorkasaurus_rex (@dorkasaurus_rex) January 20, 2017, Even Larry King’s wheels were vandalized, evidently while his driver was still inside: Protestors in DC smashed the windows of my hired SUV many other cars. I was working am ok, but my driver is a bit rattled. — Larry King (@kingsthings) January 20, 2017, Outside the offices of the Washington Post, the brownshirts took things to a new level by setting a limousine on fire: They just lit this limo in front of The Washington Post on fire. Massive black smoke. #inauguration pic. twitter. — Tauhid Chappell (@TauhidChappell) January 20, 2017, Limo on fire pic. twitter. — Vann R. Newkirk II (@fivefifths) January 20, 2017, And, of course, a Fox News vehicle was targeted: . @EamonJavers reports that protesters just smashed apart this vehicle belonging to Fox News that is parked in DC pic. twitter. — Steve Kopack (@SteveKopack) January 20, 2017, The “protesters” have shown such a predilection for attacking Starbucks coffee shops that all of their locations in D. C. closed for safety: All DC Starbucks shops are closed for safety concerns after riot damage, according to one of the managers pic. twitter. — Emily Shire (@eshire) January 20, 2017, The rioters are also fond of taunting the police, revealing links to Black Lives Matter and the rest of the anger machine: Protesters yelling ”cops, pigs, murderers” pic. twitter. — Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) January 20, 2017, As noted previously, they’re brimming with respect for America’s armed forces, too. They “PIGS” on an Army truck: Army truck leaves after someone spray paints ”pigs” on it pic. twitter. — Robbie Gramer (@RobbieGramer) January 20, 2017, The madness isn’t confined to Washington, D. C. An protester was caught on video spitting in the face of a police officer in Cleveland: Caught on video: protester spits in Cleveland officer’s face https: . pic. twitter. — fox8news (@fox8news) January 20, 2017, While Cleveland settles for spit, D. C. thugs are throwing bricks of cement at the police: MORE: Protesters throwing bricks of cement at police officers in D. C. as situation devolves, @jeffpeguescbs reports https: . pic. twitter. — CBS News (@CBSNews) January 20, 2017, As WFAA News documents, it hasn’t been the most dignified day for some: The demonstrators are really into starting fires, because nothing says “respect for democracy and freedom” like setting a blaze. Trump supporters stepped up to put some of the fires out … Trump supporter tries to stamp out trash fire set by a . pic. twitter. — Kevin Johnson (@bykevinj) January 20, 2017, … only to be assaulted for their trouble. Someone in a MAGA hat just put out the K St. fire, amid resistance, and that hat was taken by a protestor pic. twitter. — Mark W. Smith (@markdubya) January 20, 2017, The Media Research Center put together a vandalism supercut: The goons did a good job of shutting down vital intersections, which makes them feel powerful, but annoys the heck out of citizens with jobs to do. Also, it helped blogs get their precious “Trump inauguration was !” meme rolling. #BREAKING: Protesters block traffic on Freeway near 6th Street exit in #DC: https: . #inauguration (via @JDLand) pic. twitter. — ABC 7 News — WJLA (@ABC7News) January 20, 2017, protesters have blocked the . pic. twitter. — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) January 20, 2017, The chaos was not without its moments of levity. Here we see bemused authorities dealing with a gang of protesters who themselves together: Some protested have duct taped selves together pic. twitter. — Andy Sher (@AndySher1) January 20, 2017, Let it be known that capitalism is alive and well in the midst of the chaos: This dude has buttons for sale with swag on the flip side of his display pic. twitter. — Hunter Walker (@hunterw) January 20, 2017, The Satanists showed up to declare war on Trump, too: Satanists against Trump arrive in DC. pic. twitter. — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) January 20, 2017, Best of all, there was the viral video of an supporter just plain losing it when the new President was sworn in: An protester screams ’no’ as Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th US President pic. twitter. — ITV News (@itvnews) January 20, 2017, | 1 |
Actor Jeffrey Wright tweeted that our nation has “too many stupid asses” with “too many fucking guns” following news that a man opened fire on Wednesday’s congressional baseball practice. [The facts of the shooting are not in yet. The shooter’s motivation has not been confirmed, nor has the shooter’s identity or background been released. Wright tweeted: Too many stupid asses in our country with too many fucking guns. — Jeffrey Wright (@jfreewright) June 14, 2017, What is known is that five people were injured when a gunman opened fire on members of the House and Senate on the field. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was among the injured. The gunman was slowed down because someone at the practice had a firearm and returned fire. Rep. Mike Bishop ( ) told WWJ News Radio, “The only reason why any of us walked out of this thing, by the grace of God, one of the folks here had a weapon to fire back and give us a moment to find cover. ” AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com. | 1 |
Email
Well, here we are, gang.
This morning America woke up and found we’d elected as president an overgrown bully, a huckster without a drop of decency in his pizza-dough body. “How the heck did we get here?” I’ll bet you wondered. “What the heck happened?” Well, there’s a lot we don’t know yet about this election, but I’ll tell you this: Maybe you shouldn’t have made fun of my exclamation point.
Yeah, remember the exclamation point? The big ’n’ red mark plopped next to my serifed-up name like a trout on the counter? We put that logo out, and you people laughed. Oh, how you laughed. “Hey, looks like ol’ Wonder Bread Jeb’s trying to squeeze some enthusiasm out of his limp little campaign!” You think I didn’t hear you? You think I didn’t see what you wrote? Of course I did. The taunts, the memes, the novelty Twitter handles, typed with a sneer. I saw all of it, and it hurt me. It hurt Jeb.
You turned me and my exclamation mark into a big dippy joke, and look what it got you. Dread. Defeat. Humiliation. Feel that despair in your gut today, and now imagine if you had “JEB!” in your life right now, splashed across every TV and touchscreen. Hey, there’s some punctuation that’d put pep in your step! But nope, the guy who sticks his neck out to make electoral politics just a keystroke more exciting gets ribbed, roasted, raked over the coals, and hung out to dry.
Look, I wasn’t a perfect candidate. I know that. But that doesn’t mean you had to steer this country straight into a xenophobic hellhole.
That exclamation point was plain fun. It stood out from the pack. It even looked nice on a T-shirt or a coozy. You made a huge mistake the moment you collectively decided to rip my exclamation point to shreds.
I was up all night coming up with it, you know. That “!” was a John Ellis Bush original. I’d already tried out a question mark (too uncertain), an ellipsis (too ambiguous), even two exclamation points (too forceful), so when I hit on the idea of an exclamation point I really thought I had something special. I was so excited to share my excitement with you. Turns out I might as well have slapped my thick, pink matte dick into my hand and waggled it all over Facebook Live like a dang date palm frond, for all the love you gave me.
Look, I wasn’t a perfect candidate. I know that. But that doesn’t mean you had to steer this country straight into a xenophobic hellhole. All you had to do was be nice about that exclamation point for a few months. But you couldn’t leave it alone, could you? You just could not resist having a good, old laugh! Well, take a look around and tell me what you see. A divided nation headed for the falls with a dipshit at the helm, belting out one last drunken shanty before it all goes to chunks and splinters. You bullies deserve it all.
Goodbye, America. I would have been delightful. | 0 |
Getty - John Shearer / Staff
Comedian Patton Oswalt can still recall the details of that horrible day in April where he lost his beloved wife, Michelle McNamara.
The night before, the 46-year-old McNamara, a true crime author, was exhausted from her day and night search for a serial murderer she had dubbed the “Golden State Killer.” She was convinced she was closing in on the man she believed killed dozens in the 1970s and '80s.
Oswalt, who was concerned about her health, suggested that she “sleep until you wake up," a common phrase of the parents used, according to a recent interview with The New York Times:
So the weary McNamara took a Xanax and quickly fell into a deep sleep. She would never wake up.
That morning Oswalt took their 7-year-old daughter, Alice, to school and even picked up Michelle's favorite coffee on the way home.
At 9:40 a.m., when Owsalt returned, she was still sound asleep and snoring. Image Credit: Daniel Knighton/Getty Images
By 12:42 that afternoon the paramedics had arrived and McNamara was pronounced dead at the scene.
While no official cause of death was announced at the time, Oswalt seems to know what tragically killed the mother of their child.
He believes it was the Xanax, he told the Times:
“I have a feeling it might have been an overdose. That’s what the paramedics there were saying while I was screaming and throwing up.”
The dangers of the prescription drug Xanax, a brand of benzodiazepines, or “benzos,” cannot be understated. The medication is meant to treat anxiety, but it can easily be abused .
In combination with alcohol, Xanax (and other benzos) can cause users to experience complete “blackouts” for extended periods of time.
It's incredibly addicting and very easy to overdose on. Image Credit: Flickr CC/ Dean812
Even with these very dangerous side effects, Xanax remains one of the most prescribed and best-selling drugs in the United States.
It is very easily accessible to children, teens, and adults.
While the coroner hasn't officially announced what killed Oswalt's wife, he is still working towards living a normal life with his daughter.
He has returned to the stage to continue his first love, stand-up comedy. It has given him a break from the never-ending grief that comes with the territory of losing such a close loved one. Image Credit: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for The New Yorker
The 47-year-old told The New York Times that going onstage has been:
“...a rebuke to grief, an acceptance of the messiness of life. I’ll never be at 100 percent again, but that won’t stop me from living this.”
For now, Oswalt will continue to grow and live with his daughter. With help from a journalist and a researcher, he's determined to solve the “Golden State Murders” on behalf of his late wife's hard work. | 0 |
FOX NEWS reports: A U. S. Navy destroyer had another close encounter with an Iranian Revolutionary Guard “fast attack craft” in the Persian Gulf Monday. Two U. S. officials tell Fox News that the Iranian ship came within 1, 000 yards of the guided missile destroyer USS Mahan with its weapons manned. [The officials said the Mahan altered course to avoid the Iranian warship, sounded the danger signal, fired flares and manned its own weapons. The Iranian ship did not come closer than 1, 000 yards and no warning shots were fired. “Coming inbound at a high rate of speed like that and manning weapons, despite clear warnings from the ship, is obviously provocative behavior,” said one American official in describing the Iranian actions. Read more here. | 1 |
The storm over bans on burkinis in more than 30 French beach towns has all but drowned out the voices of Muslim women, for whom the swimsuits were designed. The New York Times solicited their perspective, and the responses — more than 1, 000 comments from France, Belgium and beyond — went much deeper than the question of swimwear. What emerged was a portrait of life as a Muslim woman, veiled or not, in parts of Europe where terrorism has put people on edge. One French term was used dozens of times: “un combat,” or “a struggle,” to live day to day. Many who were born and raised in France described confusion at being told to go home. Courts have struck down some of the bans on burkinis — the one in Nice, the site of a horrific terror attack on Bastille Day, was overturned on Thursday — but the debate is far from over. “For years, we have had to put up with dirty looks and threatening remarks,” wrote Taslima Amar, 30, a teacher in Pantin, a suburb of Paris. “I’ve been asked to go back home (even though I am home). ” Now, Ms. Amar said, she and her husband were looking to leave France. Laurie Abouzeir, 32, said she was considering starting a business caring for children in her home in Toulouse, southern France, because that would allow her to wear a head scarf, frowned upon and even banned in some workplaces. Many women wrote that bias had intensified after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, and in Brussels, Paris and Nice more recently. Halima Djalab Bouguerra, a student in France, dated the change further back, to the killings by Mohammed Merah in the southwest of the country in 2012. “The way people look at us has changed,” Ms. Bouguerra wrote. “Tongues have loosened. No one is afraid of telling a Muslim to ‘go back home’ anymore. ” Here are some excerpts from the comments we received. They have been condensed and edited for clarity, and translated for those who wrote in French. _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ | 1 |
Next Prev Swipe left/right Watch Mary Berry challenge the Great British Bake Off contestants to make a Victoria Beckham sandwich Even though the Great British Bake Off will lose its iconic judge, Mary Berry , once it moves to Channel 4, there will always be footage of her being undeniably awesome, and sometimes accidentally – we think – downright filthy. This isn’t one of those moments; this is YouTube comedy channel ‘Yes it’s funny’ adding some additional touches to the Beeb’s original footage to come up with something a little different. And yes – it is funny! | 0 |
FBI Releases Clinton Foundation Investigation Records 11/02/2016
DAILY CALLER
The FBI on Tuesday released documents related to a now-closed federal investigation of an alleged pay-to-play scheme involving Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.
The documents, which are heavily redacted, regard the investigation of Clinton’s last-minute pardon of Marc Rich, a billionaire fugitive who was wanted in the U.S. for tax evasion.
The Jan. 20, 2001 pardon sparked the last controversy to befall the scandal-plagued Clinton administration. Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, donated more than $1 million to various Clinton and Democratic entities, including the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign and the Clinton Foundation.
The release provides little in the way of information that has not already been publicized. But the dump is noteworthy for two reasons. It reminds voters that the Clinton White House and Clinton Foundation were embroiled in an investigation concerning pay-to-play allegations. The Clinton Foundation is reportedly being investigated at the present by multiple FBI field offices.
It also comes as the FBI is locked in a bitter standoff with the Clinton Foundation and the Justice Department over FBI director James Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
The newly-released files include one entry which shows that “the required pardon standards and procedures were not followed” prior to the Rich pardon.
Roger Adams, the U.S. Pardon Attorney at the time, testified to Congress in Feb. 2001 that “none of the regular procedures were followed” ahead of the Rich reprieve.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder is also mentioned in the file. It cites Holder’s testimony that he was the only person who worked at DOJ — he was deputy attorney general at the time — about the Rich pardon. From the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigation files
A grand jury was convened to weigh the merits of the case, but no indictments were handed down. Ironically, the law enforcement official who closed the case was FBI director Comey. He served as deputy attorney general in the George W. Bush administration.
The FBI’s website suggests that more Clinton Foundation investigation records could be coming in the future.
“This initial release consists of material from the FBI’s files related to the William J. Clinton Foundation , a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization,” the site reads. “The bulk of these records come from a 2001 FBI investigation into the pardon of Marc Rich (1934-2013), aka Marcell David Reich, by President Clinton in 2001; it was closed in 2005.”
The FBI did not respond to a request for more information on future releases.
Update: Clinton campaign press secretary Brian Fallon questioned the release.
The FBI issued a statement late Tuesday afternoon saying that the file was released in response to a FOIA request.
“The FBI’s Records Management Division receives thousands of FOIA requests annually which are processed on a first in, first out (FIFO) basis,” the statement reads.
“By law, FOIA materials that have been requested three or more times are posted electronically to the FBI’s public reading room shortly after they are processed. Per the standard procedure for FOIA, these materials became available for release and were posted automatically and electronically to the FBI’s public reading room in accordance with the law and established procedures.” | 0 |
Saker Message: No current Saker messages. TV channel “Zvezda” posted a footage of SU-33 and MiG-29KUB landings and takeoffs from the aircraft carrier “Admiral Kuznetsov” 102 Views November 03, 2016 No Comments Watch List Scott
The Su-33 is a single-seat ship-based STOBAR fighter, with upward folding wings and horizontal tail surfaces (for hangar storage); it is equipped with probe-and-drogue flight refuelling capability. The Su-33 is designed for defence of naval ships from aerial threats.
Both the MiG-29K (single seat) and MiG-29KUB (double seat) aircraft are the “4++” generation multi-role fighters intended for air-defense missions of naval forces, air superiority gaining, sea & ground targets destruction with the high precision guided weapons day and night and in any weather conditions.
The MiG-29K/KUB carrier-based fighters are the basic aircraft of a new unified family including also the MiG-29M/M2 and MiG-35/MiG-35D aircraft.
The MiG-29K/KUB aircraft are based on the aircraft-carriers with tonnage from 28,000 tons, equipped with take-off ramp and landing arrestor, as well as at the airfields.
Main technical and technological innovations, applied on the MiG-29K/KUB fighters are the following:
– improved airframe with about 15% composite materials application;
– folding wing with upgraded high-lift devices improving take-off/landing performance;
– fly-by-wire control system with quadruple redundancy;
– significantly reduced signature in radar range;
– increased weapons load, stored at eight external hard points;
– increased internal fuel capacity and in-flight refueling possibility;
– possibility of other aircraft refueling being equipped with “PAZ-1MK” refueling unit. The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95 Be the First to Comment! Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs: ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The "Live Preview" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Search articles | 0 |
Kp Message 10-27-16… “Passage through the Storm Waters”
Although I often post here a variety of “news type” things here, there’s so much that I have no understanding of, and perhaps never will. I feel I do not belong to the outer “crap appearances”, or the things that are seemingly so “out of whack” with the Light of us all. And I also am not aligned with the idea that “I am responsible for (and caused) it all.” Sorry… no.
This particular time upon this planet often feels like we are dealing with “the storm waters”… winds blowing one way, then another way, waves coming from one direction, then another direction, and who knows what is going on with the political waves. Enough already.
But as I’ve learned by bodysurfing at Sandy Beach, on a strong trades swell day, it is possible to flow with the rapid changing waves, and even catch a few, kick out, and get ready for the next one(s). And truly enjoy the experience of the “going with the flow”. We all have tools, and we all can find our place in this time of massive transformation.
Also I remember that even though there is this massive transformation going on, this is simply a passage… we’re passing through. We will not be living in “the Storm Waters” every moment.
There’s nothing wrong with not being able to relate to this, but some can sense what’s happening, and it is quite big.
So we’ll see where it all goes. In the end, BEing and SHINING our Lights, whatever they are, is perhaps the most valuable thing we can do to pass through those “Stormy Waters”.
Aloha, Kp | 0 |
Anybody with kids can tell you that getting them to develop healthy eating habits is no easy feat. We know that children in the US are in the midst of an obesity epidemic—that they are eating processed foods and drinking sugary drinks and sodas at an alarming rate. But studies now show that children are hardwired to like sweet, high-caloric foods (the theory is that this preference gives them an evolutionary advantage for growth, particularly in circumstances when calories are scarce). So how can we counteract these biological impulses in our kids and also make sure they are eating plenty of fresh vegetables?
Kids may not gravitate naturally toward vegetables, but when they are responsible for growing them and harvesting them from their own gardens, they are much more likely to taste their efforts. In addition, there are a few very sweet things you can grow in your garden that acts as introductory veggies, a kind of “gateway” to the world of vegetables. Once you win kids over with a few known favorites, you can sneak in the less sugary veggies and open them up to a lifetime of flavorful, healthy choices.
6 ‘Gateway Veggies’ Kids Will Love! Carrots You can thank Bugs Bunny for making carrots appealing to young kids. Carrots are often the only vegetable picky eaters will agree to, but it’s not a bad starting point. Kids are great at pulling these up from the garden by themselves and leaving the leafy green tops on makes the act of eating them more like the cartoons. The sweet flavor comes in at about 6 grams per cup (for comparison, a typical candy bar has more than 25 grams of sugar) and they are a handy snack that almost every kid loves to crunch on.
Cherry Tomatoes Tomatoes are technically a fruit, of course, but the sweet, flavorful garden favorite has just 3.9 grams of sugar for a cup serving. A single cherry tomato plant can provide a huge harvest and kids love that they can be popped right into their mouths for a treat. Even if you have a big garden, you might want to plant tomatoes in planters on your patio so that they are always readily available to add to salads or snacks. Once kids are sold on the cherry variety, you can introduce them to the various other types of tomatoes available to them.
Sugar Snap Peas These veggies have “sugar” in their name for a reason, and kids love to help pick and pop out these sweet, healthy peas. They taste great raw and are fast growing so kids can quickly see their progress in the garden. A cup has just 2.5 grams of sugar
Sweet Corn It isn’t the easiest vegetable to grow, but if you are able to, sweet corn is a huge favorite for kids. It can be used in salads and soups and is a great side dish, but perhaps the best way to enjoy corn is to eat it straight from the garden. Adding this more difficult plant to your garden will help kids to see how their hard work and effort pays off. Corn has 6.8 grams of sugar per cup, though it is a higher glycemic food that raises blood sugar levels a bit more than the other veggies in this list.
Rutabagas Though it is not the prettiest veggie in town, the rutabaga is a sweet treat that is often overlooked. It is a hardy, cool-weather biennial grown as an annual and it’s easy to maintain. It has a sweet woody flavor and can be cut into sticks and eaten raw (at our house we call them rutabaga fries). Rutabagas have 6 grams of sugar per cup, the same amount as a carrot.
Beets People think of beets as an adult vegetable that you have to trick kids into eating, something along the lines of Brussels sprouts. In reality, kids are naturally attracted to the bright red color and the unusual shape and, if your kids fascinated with bodily functions like mine are, they will be all too excited to see the “result” (i.e., bright red poop!) that comes from eating a meal of beets. Like other root veggies, beets are easy for kids to pull out of the ground themselves. The beet is actually sweeter than any other vegetable in this list, coming in at 9 grams per cup, but the fiber and other nutrients make it a very healthy choice.
Pamela Bofferding is a native Texan who now lives with her husband and sons in New York City. She enjoys hiking, traveling, and playing with her dogs.
This information has been made available by Ready Nutrition
Originally published November 22nd, 2016 How Farmers Markets Can Teach Your Kids the Values of Local… Delicious and Healthy Quinoa Coconut Granola Bars Fruit By Design: The Cotton Candy Grape Top powerful fall foods for your health Spice Up Your Vacation With These 7 Spices | 0 |
The editor of Think Progress, the publication of the progressive Center for American Progress, slammed Audi on Sunday for pandering to feminists by airing a Super Bowl ad advocating gender pay equality while its board of directors is all male. [“Audi, new champion of women’s equity at work, has no women on their board,” editor Judd Legum wrote on Twitter: Audi, new champion of women’s equity at work, has no women on their board pic. twitter. — Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 6, 2017, No women sit on Audi’s Management Board, but its team of American executives includes two women. Legum was not alone in his criticism of the ad 25 percent of the comments on the ad across social media were negative, Business Insider reports. The ad begins with a father watching his daughter in a race, asking himself, “What do I tell my daughter?” “Do I tell her that her grandpa is worth more than her grandma? That her dad is worth more than her mom?” the narrator asks. The father wonders how he can tell his daughter that despite “her education, her drive, her skills, her intelligence,” she still runs the risk of “being valued less than every man she ever meets. ” At the end, his daughter wins the race, and she and her father walk to an Audi right before the slogan “progress is for everyone” flashes across the screen. The company decided to make a statement about gender pay equality on Twitter by saying, “At Audi, we are committed to equal pay for equal work. ” Despite what Audi claims in the ad, the gender pay gap is not wide. According to the Daily Beast, the gender pay gap is merely the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working fulltime. The statistic does not take into account factors such as differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week. Once those factors are included, the wage gap is only a difference, and no one knows whether the cause is discrimination or some other difference between the genders. | 1 |
Claire Bernish
In a thoroughly stunning development, the FBI has announced the relaunch of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and personal server , after learning of “ the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation ,” as Rep. Jason Chaffetz tweeted Friday afternoon. 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
With just ten days to go before the presidential election, this development could knock the Clinton campaign for quite the loop — particularly amid growing controversy in revelations from campaign chair John Podesta’s emails , which continue to be published by Wikileaks on a daily basis.
FBI Director James Comey penned a letter to Congress Friday, noting the bureau had learned additional documents had become apparent that could have bearing in the investigation of Clinton, stating , in part, via NBC News :
“Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony.”
Although Comey did not initially make it apparent the content nor source of the documents, Federal Law Enforcement officials did acknowledge that the content originated from devices owned by one of Mrs. Clinton’s top aides, Huma Abedin and her husband, Anthony Weiner . After consulting with the team of investigators, 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 made no suggestion whether or not the documents could be “significant,” but the fact the investigation has now been reopened certainly piques additional questions about both the new items as well as how they might have originally escaped the FBI’s attention.
“There are outstanding questions . . . regarding a possible conflict of interest into this case,” stated House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz in a letter to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, as cited by the Washington Post . Chaffetz requested McCabe provide documentation concerning his wife’s 2015 bid for the Senate, which, as the Post notes, received financial support from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who is close to Hillary Clinton.
Chaffetz requested documents from McCabe concerning “when you first became aware the State Department was pressuring the FBI to reverse its decision regarding the classification of one of Secretary Clinton’s emails,” and, “when you first became aware the FBI had opened an investigation into Secretary Clinton’s email server.”
Indeed, Chaffetz notes several discrepancies in interdepartmental interactions during the course of the prior investigation, such as:
“In the spring and summer of 2015, the FBI interacted with multiple agencies regarding Secretary Clinton’s emails. In April or May of 2015, Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy began contacting officials in the FBI’s National Security Branch, which you headed prior to serving as the head of the Washington Field Office. Under Secretary Kennedy pressured FBI officials to reverse a decision regarding an email deemed by the FBI to contain classified information. …”
Considering the increasingly embattled campaign of Hillary Clinton, and the late date for initiating further investigation, one wonders whether the abrupt discovery could be related to the putatively missing 30,000 emails which have been the subject of both consternation and ridicule for months.
Although Comey did not reveal, well, much of anything about the decision to relaunch the investigation, it’s clear this will have a direct and resounding impact on Hillary Clinton’s contentious bid for the White House. Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this: | 0 |
Source: ForeignPolicy.com
Encroaching waters off the coast of Togo, Ghana, Mauritania, and others are destroying homes, schools, fish, and a way of life.
FUVEMEH, Ghana — The tide is just starting to come in when David Buabasah begins nervously checking the waters creeping up the coastline toward his partially destroyed home.
As the high tide mounts the steep shore of this small Ghanaian fishing village perched on a shrinking peninsula between the Atlantic Ocean and the Volta River estuary, he and other inhabitants prepare for the worst.
“When the big waves come, they can easily kill you. Last week, the ocean took away part of my house while my family was sleeping inside,” says the 32-year-old fisherman, gesturing toward a crumbling brick wall and a pair of door frames, the only remains of his family’s compound.
Growing stronger by the minute, the tide begins to push wave after wave into the village, pounding the dilapidated dwellings with unrepentant force. House walls collapse under the fury of the ocean, and huge pools of saltwater fill the center of town. Those whose houses are the closest to the shoreline can only watch as the waves carry away all of their belongings.
Twenty years ago, Fuvemeh was a thriving community of 2,500 people, supported by fishing and coconut plantations that are now completely underwater. But in the past two decades, climate change and industrial activity — such as sand mining and the construction of dams and deep-sea ports, which trap sediments and prevent them from reaching the coastline — have accelerated coastal erosion here. Gradually but inexorably, the ocean has swallowed up hundreds of feet of coastline, drowning the coconut plantations and eventually sweeping away houses.
For a time, villagers retreated, rebuilding destroyed houses farther away from the advancing shoreline. But eventually they ran out of land to fall back on: The narrow peninsula is now less than 1,000 feet across, and high tides routinely wash over the entire sandy expanse. The last trees have been uprooted by the waves and lie dead along the shore, a grim omen of what awaits fishermen like Buabasah, who have seen their livelihoods destroyed in the span of a single generation. A young boy carries his two turkeys to save them from the flood caused by the rising sea level in Fuvemeh.
Fuvemeh is one of thousands of communities along the western coast of sub-Saharan Africa, stretching more than 4,000 miles from Mauritania to Cameroon, at risk of being washed away. Spurred by global warming, rising sea levels are causing massive erosion — in some places eating away more than 100 feet of land in a single year. Sea levels around the world are expected to rise by more than two-and-a-half feet by the end of the century, but they are expected to rise faster than the global average in West Africa, according to the West African Economic and Monetary Union. In a region where 31 percent of population lives along the coastline, generating 56 percent of total GDP, according to the World Bank , this is a potentially catastrophic problem.
“In West Africa, infrastructure and economic activities are centered along the coastal region, so as sea levels continue to rise, it threatens our very existence and source of income,” says Kwasi Appeaning Addo, a professor in the University of Ghana’s department of marine and fisheries sciences. “We are sitting on a time bomb.” Togbe Agbavi Koffi, 60, is the chief of village of Agbavi in Togo. “The sea advances all year long,” he said. “It has devastated our villages and many of our people have already left.”
And it’s not just small fishing villages that are being threatened. Low-lying areas in Lagos, the Nigerian megalopolis that is the seventh-fastest growing city in the world, as well as in the Ghanaian capital of Accra, whose annual economic output is around $3 billion, are at risk of inundation. Already, both cities are grappling with more frequent — and severe — flooding than in the past. Low-lying areas of Accra now flood every year during the rainy season. Last year, at least 25 people died as a result.
The southern parts of Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, lose up to 80 feet of beach every year, and coastal erosion has already damaged several hotels in Gambia and Senegal,as well as vital water treatment facilities in Cotonou, Benin’s economic hub. The situation is the same in neighboring Togo, where last year the coast retreated 118 feet in some places, according to local authorities. On the outskirts of the capital, Lomé, rows of destroyed buildings line the beach in the town of Agbavi.
“The national route used to pass there, just beside my first and second house,” says Togbe Agbavi Koffi, the town’s 60-year-old chief, pointing to the faint outline of a highway that is now submerged deep in the ocean. “My third house is about to crumble into the sea as well. I would like to cry, but a chief cannot cry.” Local boys stand on the terrace of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Castle. Originally built in 1653, it was an important slave trading post along the West Africa coast; now it’s one of Ghana’s main attractions.
But it’s not just homes and businesses that are being swept away. Livelihoods, cultural heritage, and the social fabric of entire communities are disappearing as well. Rising temperatures have precipitated the migration of fish stocks while erosion and salinization have reduced arable land and contaminated freshwater reserves. Near Fuvemeh in Ghana, breeding grounds for sea turtles are disappearing, and the populations of dolphins, sharks, and whales are rapidly dwindling. At risk also are the UNESCO-protected colonial forts along the coasts of Ghana and Ivory Coast that served as conduits for the slave trade.
Stripped of their livelihoods and their heritage, coastal communities lose their most resourceful young people to migration while unemployment fuels drug and alcohol consumption at home. In Agbavi, the situation is so desperate that droves of young men have joined criminal syndicates involved in fuel smuggling and beach-sand mining, an illegal enterprise that worsens erosion.
“Some of our children go mining as soon as they come back from school, in order to gain some money,” Koffi says. “People are hungry, and small kids are forced to steal. We are suffering a lot.” People living in Fuvmeh walk across the village flooded by the rising sea level. A little girl stands on a traditional fishing boat holding her doll in Baguida, on the Togo coastline. The town is experiencing massive coastal erosion, forcing the local population to relocate away from the sea. Tanks filled with petrol are lined along the ocean. As fishing has become less remunerative due to the effects of climate change on the fish stocks, several local fishermen have resorted to fuel smuggling, a highly lucrative but illegal practice which consists in trafficking jerrycans of petrol from Nigeria through Benin and Togo by sea. Alice Kwashi, 68, sits outside her house in the village of Blekusu. The ocean has destroyed part of her house, filling it with sand and contaminating the freshwater well with saltwater. In order to prevent water from seeping into the house, the woman built a small barrier of soil just outside the entrance. ´“When I fall sleep, I don't know if the sea will come and take me away” she said. Two schoolgirls stand on the ruins of their school. Two years ago, the Dzita EP Basic School had one of its four compounds destroyed by coastal erosion during the rainy season. Four classrooms were lost, forcing the school management to combine classes in order to shelter all the 670 students.
Instead of investing in ecologically sustainable techniques to manage rising sea levels, like developing aquatic farms or restoring mangrove shrubs, governments in West Africa have so far largely resorted to engineering less time-intensive defenses like sea walls and groins. When built properly and maintained well, groins — vertical structures erected perpendicular to the coastline that trap sediments and prevent them from moving along the coast — are an effective short- to medium-term solution. But because they disrupt the natural flow of sediments, they can worsen erosion elsewhere on the coast, sometimes starving neighboring communities of much needed sand.
The eastern coast of Ghana offers a stark illustration of the trade-offs involved with groins. Once a thriving trading hub, the city of Keta has suffered massive coastal erosion in recent decades that forced more than half of the population to flee. Fort Prinzenstein, a landmark Danish castle that was once at the center of town now teeters on the shoreline, partially destroyed by the waves. A late government intervention allowed the construction of a sea defense wall and a series of groins that have saved what remains of the city’s elegant colonial buildings, which retain the eerie atmosphere of a ghost town.
But the last-ditch effort to save Keta has further exacerbated erosion in the village of Blekusu, located a little more than six miles to the east. “We are having so many problems because of those groins,” explains 68-year-old Alice Kwashi, a widow whose house has already been partially damaged by the waves. “The ocean has destroyed electric[al] lines and contaminated water wells. Every time I go to sleep, I know it could be my last night, because the waves could take me away.” A home destroyed by rising sea levels in the village of Agbavi in Togo.
A more environmentally friendly method of replenishing the coast involves pumping enormous amounts of sand from the seabed back on shore. But beach nourishment, which has been tried in the United States, Mexico, Australia, and the Netherlands,among other places, is extremely expensive and has to be repeated every few years in order to keep pace with erosion. Even without such costly interventions, adapting to coastal erosion by rebuilding infrastructure farther inland and resettling endangered communities is expected to cost between 5 and 10 percent of GDP in affected countries, according to the United Nations. It’s an open question how one of the poorest regions in the world should come up with the resources for costly sea walls and beach replenishment schemes.
And as long as man-made climate change continues, such costs will continue to incur. That is why countries around the world face the challenge not only of pursuing projects to help manage the environment, but also of exploring new ways to better live in harmony with it, and thus slow the rate of global warming.
“If we can’t find a balance between our insatiable appetite for modernity and allowing nature to replenish itself,” says Fredua Agyeman, the environment director at Ghana’s Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology, and Innovation, “we will always run into problems, no matter the advancements in modern science or engineering.”
The people of Fuvemeh are among hundreds of millions who are paying a heavy price for a problem they didn’t create. At the current erosion rate, villagers predict that their homes will disappear in less than six months. Left with the bitter choice of staying to be swept out to sea or abandoning his land, history, and way of life, Buabasah doesn’t know what to do. He has moved his wife and children to another village, but he can’t follow them because Fuvemeh serves as his fishing base. Migrating would mean giving up on his job and his ability to feed his family, since the government will only facilitate resettlement to inland communities.
“I am very afraid for the future of this place,” he says in despair. “Sooner or later we will have to leave, but we have nowhere to go.”
View the photo essay companion piece on the devastating effects of climate change on the region “ The Waves Will Take Us Away ,” by Matilde Gattoni. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — The Senate on Monday failed to advance four separate measures aimed at curbing gun sales, the latest display of congressional inaction after a mass shooting. Eight days after a gunman claiming allegiance to the Islamic State killed 49 people in an Orlando, Fla. nightclub, the Senate deadlocked, largely along party lines, on amendments to block people on the federal terrorism watch list from buying guns and to close loopholes in background check laws. Families of gun violence victims looked on from the Senate chamber as the votes were held. Further action on gun safety measures or mental health provisions seemed unlikely before the fall election, given the rush to finish a series of spending bills and the relatively limited time that Congress will be in session before November. In addition, the four gun measures were attached to legislation that contains several other thorny issues, such as the question of whether to take passports away from terrorism suspects, which suggests there will be little chance for further debate. Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, has been working on a compromise, disliked by both party leaders, that would bar the sale of guns to terrorism suspects who appear on either the government’s list or the selectee list of people who receive additional scrutiny at airports. That bill, which is not as broad as the Democratic measure that failed on Monday, could surface later in the week. Partisanship and the power of the gun lobby played a large role in the amendments’ failure. Democrats structured their bills in a way that was almost certain to repel Republicans, while Republicans responded with bills equally distasteful to Democrats. Democrats vowed to hammer Republicans during the campaign this fall. “Our constituents see a disturbing pattern of inaction,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said on the Senate floor on Monday. “Sadly, our efforts are blocked by the Republican Congress, who take their marching orders from the National Rifle Association. ” Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, introduced one of the failed measures, which could have prevented anyone on the federal terrorism watch list and other terrorist databases from buying firearms or explosives. Democrats tried unsuccessfully to pass the measure after the shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. in December. “It’s time for us to stand up,” Ms. Feinstein said. Republicans, arguing that the list of people affected would be too broad and that the measure would not offer proper due process, put forward a competing measure. That amendment would have required the government to delay, during a review period, the purchase of a gun by anyone who is a terrorism suspect or has been the subject of a terrorism investigation within the last five years. “No one wants terrorists to be able to buy guns or explosives,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said on the Senate floor on Monday. The two other measures that failed included one offered by Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, who led a filibuster last week to make a point on guns. His measure sought to tighten background checks for most gun buyers. Republicans offered a measure that was more focused on the mental health system. The Obama administration, which has been pushing for a variety of new gun control legislation, vowed to press on. “The view of the administration is that the American people should be engaged in the debate,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said on Monday. “So the fact that this is something that is being actively debated and considered in the Senate does represent incremental progress. ” Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has largely supported the positions of most Republicans, who want to preserve gun rights. Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has made her support for gun control a central tenet of her campaign. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Mrs. Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, voted with the party from the Senate chamber, looking glum as colleagues came to greet him. The votes were taken on the same day that the Supreme Court declined to hear a Second Amendment challenge to a Connecticut law, enacted in 2013 after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, that bans many semiautomatic rifles. The Senate measures seemed doomed almost as soon as they were offered. After the Sandy Hook massacre, a bipartisan background check measure failed, even though Democrats controlled the Senate. Democrats, now in the minority, replaced that measure with the amendment sponsored by Mr. Murphy, which would have expanded background checks to all gun sales except loans and gifts between family members. Republicans said it was too broad. And even Senator Jon Tester of Montana, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, voted against it. Some Republicans in tough fights had to consider each measure carefully. One of them, Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, said the measures to prevent terrorism suspects from getting guns were inadequate, but voted for both. While the politics of gun control tend to recede in general election campaigns, the Orlando shooting has brought the issue back to the front burner. “We will keep pushing,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, “until they see the light. ” | 1 |
Posted by Isaac Davis
“How is the government going to get people to pay their taxes if the government is not viewed as legitimate?” ~ Catherine Austin Fitts
The world economy is designed to fail through the mechanism of a banking system that requires all users of money to pay usury every time a transaction takes place. In this way, the financial systems of the world can be manipulated into a managed collapse, thereby causing global chaos so that the world’s nations and citizens can be tricked into demanding a global currency managed by a global elite.
Problem, reaction, solution. Economic hit man John Perkins wrote about this strategy as it was used in the 20th century to bring developing nations under the control of the international monetary fund and transnational profiteers, and at present this scheme is being globalized.
“If an EHM is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal. Of course, the debtor still owes us the money—and another country is added to our global empire.” ~John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
For decades now, the dollar has been in a slow burn style of collapse, and while many journalists, primarily outside of the mainstream, have been warning the world about how and why this is happening, we’re quickly approaching a turning point, where the slow burn moves into something more severe. While at first glance this seems like a frightening potentiality, the truth is that an economic collapse may very well be our best chance at freeing ourselves from the rule of the Gods of Money . A Whistleblower Warns Us and Gives Us Hope
Speaking to Greg Hunter of USA Watchdog news , former Wall Street banker and former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration , Catherine Austin Fitts explains why the slow burn is about to come to an end.
“The system has the capacity with monetary policy in one sense to keep going forever if the force and military capacity is there to do it, but at some point, you burn through the fat, you burn through the muscle and then you have to change institutions.” ~ Catherine Austin Fitts
During the financial crisis of 2008, the government was able to prevent an uncontrolled firestorm collapse of the system by colluding with the chiefs of the financial sector, giving them bailouts of extraordinary magnitude , then inflating the dollar by the Federal Reserve’s introduction of quantitative easing . Eight years later, this tactic has reached its limit, however it has given the public significant reason and time to understand why our economy functions the way it does, and people are losing faith in our leadership.
“It’s going to be extremely difficult to get people to continue to pay their taxes when they’re highly confident the money’s not being spent legally and it’s going to the advantage of small parties or things that they don’t understand. And so you can’t move further without institutional overhaul.” ~Catherine Austin Fitts
The thing that frightens her most is the fact that groups within the U.S., such as ALEC , are already calling for changes in the law and even a new constitutional convention to overhaul these institutions. The financial sector has already been operating outside of the law and beyond the constitution for some twenty plus years, and if we haven’t been using the constitution, she notes, then why do they wish to change it?
“If you want to enforce the Constitution or fix things, that’s what you do. The reason you get a Constitutional Convention is you want to tear it up because you’re worried, now that people realize the extent of the corruption, that they’re going to try and enforce.” ~Catherine Austin Fitts
Her warning is that as people continue to wake up to the corruption of our government and financial rulers, the entrenched elites who are fully invested in destroying the middle class will fight tooth and nail to prevent us from holding them accountable, by means of bringing more Draconian laws into place to protect themselves.
In this light, the economic war that is brewing isn’t completely technical, it is social as well, quickly becoming class warfare. The world’s financial elite are in grave danger of being held to the fire for their crimes, and surely they know they how quickly things can change in favor of the populous, as historical events like the French Revolution have shown. Prepare Now
As individuals stuck in the debt-slave matrix , there is very little we can do to challenge this sort of massive global scheme as it’s happening, however, preparing now for collapse is our best chance of chucking our burden of debt to these people, if they are even human , and of creating a future without such obvious criminal financial tyranny holding us back.
Working now to expose these criminals is imperative so that when the ball drops, ordinary people understand why, how and who is truly to blame, thereby making resisting to the takeover possible. Taking care of personal emergency preparations by gathering healthy storable foods , networking in your community, and having plans in place to survive are absolutely necessary at this stage, and once this is done, efforts to awaken others are critical.
View the full interview here : Read more articles by Isaac Davis .
Isaac Davis is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and OffgridOutpost.com Survival Tips blog. He is an outspoken advocate of liberty and of a voluntary society. He is an avid reader of history and passionate about becoming self-sufficient to break free of the control matrix. Follow him on Facebook, here . This article ( Financial Whistleblower Explains What’s About to Happen to the Economy ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Isaac Davis and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. | 0 |
Author and prolific Tweeter Joyce Carol Oates openly pondered the state of Christianity in America in a post to her Twitter account Thursday afternoon — and believes Christianity is now indistinguishable from white nationalism in many parts of America. [Those (of us) who could not believe in Christianity as a religion nonetheless believed that its tenets ideals were noble, profound. But, — Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) January 13, 2017, @JoyceCarolOates what has happened to Christians in recent years! Virtually synonymous white nationalism in many parts of country. — Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) January 13, 2017, Of course, many of the author’s 160, 000 social media followers (and presumably some Christians) took umbrage at the suggestion that their faith automatically makes them a white nationalist. @JoyceCarolOates so all those Yazidis massacred in Syria. White Nationalists? — ZendoDeb (@ZendoDeb) January 13, 2017, . @JoyceCarolOates Country is full of black churches packed every Sunday, they’re Christians. Or are you not aware Baptists are Christians? — Michelle (@1MonthLeft) January 13, 2017, @JoyceCarolOates It’s only ”virtually synonymous” in your own head. And that’s about YOU, not Christianity. But don’t worry, you’re forgiven, — The Department of No (@SantasTavern) January 13, 2017, @JoyceCarolOates I’m not even Christian and still find this a disgusting, bigoted generalization. — Cate (@ArmyofBlonde) January 13, 2017, Then again, Oates has a long history of issuing questionable tweets in June of 2015, the National Book expressed her outrage that director Steven Spielberg had posed for a photograph with what appeared to be a dead animal. So barbaric that this should still be allowed … No conservation laws in effect wherever this is? https: . — Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) June 9, 2015, viewers, or anyone that has seen the 1993 film Jurassic Park, knew that Spielberg was posing with an animatronic dinosaur prop from the film. This guy thinks it’s cool to kill defenceless animals then take a selfie. Jerk. pic. twitter. — Chris Tilly (@TillyTweets) June 9, 2015, In November, Oates was roundly mocked for issuing a tweet about ISIS. The author wanted to know whether there were any “celebratory or joyous” aspects of the murderous terrorist group, rather than the “puritanical and “punitive” aspects she had heard so much about. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
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Putin Takes On The NWO, October 2016 # thinkbig 18
Let me get this straight - if leaders of the world combined forces, we could alleviate poverty and the constant fear of terrorism? Could the Middle East be left alone, and not pillaged for oil, sending millions of refugees into Europe, creating an unprecedented cultural catastrophe in waiting? Could certain players on the global arena stop financing terror groups abroad, thus removing the threat entirely? But wait, there's more - Mr Putin is not calling for war with "the others", because only WE are the good guys? Unlike Nobel Peace Prize holder over there. Tags | 0 |
Fairies can be so fickle. One night, all you want to do is break a spell. The next, with ice in your veins and a malicious flourish, you put a curse into action. On Thursday, Sara Mearns, the glamorous New York City Ballet principal, made an unlikely debut: the evil Fairy Carabosse in “The Sleeping Beauty. ” Her usual role, which she performed Wednesday, is the Lilac Fairy, Princess Aurora’s shimmering protector who counteracts Carabosse’s curse of death. Ms. Mearns, 31, is no polite ballerina, but an dancer who reacts on the spot through her deep connection with music. Speaking twice in her dressing room on Thursday — once during intermission and later after her brief, ferocious appearance in the second act — Ms. Mearns reflected on the two roles. “Carabosse is like spitfire — short and sweet,” she said. “With the Lilac Fairy, I feel very empowered. You’re sort of in charge of the whole extravaganza. You’re always there. ” After a parting hug so she could take her bow — “Don’t get caught in the wing,” she said, referring not to the stage but to the appendage on her glittering black dress — she headed back out. For the record, the crowd roared. Ms. Mearns grinned with delight. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. Who did you model Carabosse on? I wanted her to be the Maleficent Disney [animated] version where she just stands there. She’s actually somewhat nice and doesn’t scream in the beginning. Peter [Martins, the ballet master in chief] told me: “Carabosse is just as beautiful as the Lilac Fairy. You should be above it all. But what’s different is that your soul is evil. ” Your rage seemed to bubble up inside of you. Is that what it felt like? Yes. I actually didn’t think that was going to happen! When I’ve seen people do that, I’ve been like, there’s no way that I could get myself to do that. I would feel so stupid. And then when I got onstage, there was no one standing in front of me. I was just like, oh my God, this feels right. What did you not want Carabosse to be? I didn’t want to come out screaming like a crazy person. I feel like I have a really different approach. The music makes you want to go there because it’s so powerful — it makes you want to scream. The costume does it. You just standing there already does it. You just have to rein it in. It was hard, but once I really committed to the way I was going to do it, I felt comfortable. Was the experience what you thought it would be like? Yes and no. I was waiting for this thrill of being evil onstage. I was more nervous than I thought I would be. I don’t think I’ve actually done a character role that doesn’t require dancing. There was such a different nervousness, such a different placement of your feet and your stance. Lilac Fairy is so much a part of me that I can grab it at a moment’s notice, but Carabosse is so much deeper and harder to find that it took everything out of me. I actually get more tired doing this because my whole body is so tense. You can’t hide behind your dancing, which is your comfort zone. Were you dancing with your hands? Yes. The first time I had used the nails was in the stage rehearsal, and I saw how much you can do because your fingers are much longer than they normally are. I came up with this thing that I was doing on my chest. [She drummed her fingers slowly.] That part made me laugh. I came up with it in the shower this morning. I felt like my hands were dancing instead of my feet. Your nails are scary. What are they? They’re plastic fingers, and we have to tape them on. In the dress rehearsal, I lost two nails when I pulled off [the master of ceremonies] Catalabutte’s wig because I didn’t tape them right. I can’t really feel my fingertips right now because they’re so tight, but it’s good. They won’t fall off. Does Carabosse produce a different kind of adrenaline than the Lilac Fairy? Yes. Dancing adrenaline is excitement — it’s like, I can’t wait to do those steps, I can’t wait to have that feeling. This is deeper. It’s a thing happening. You transform your soul to a dark place. You’re not really happy when you come offstage. I couldn’t tell if you were annoyed because you had to do an interview, or if you were still in character. [Laughs.] No. I’m still so mad! When you come off, you’re not like, I did such a great job. You’re simmering. With Carabosse, you can really go for it. You can scare people, throw people, just do whatever. I want to shock them. | 1 |
Since even before the presidential primaries began, the idea of a Donald Trump presidency made some celebrities threaten they would leave the country if it happened. Here are 18 celebrities who pledged to flee the United States and live in exile in the event of a Trump win. Let’s make them to stick to it!
Via Yournewswire 1. Barbra Streisand
“I can’t believe it. I’m either coming to your country if you’ll let me in, or Canada,” the singer told 60 Minutes in an interview in August. Streisand has been a vocal supporter of Clinton’s candidacy, and appeared at a high-profile fundraiser for the candidate in New York City earlier this year.
2. Bryan Cranston
“I would definitely move. It’s not real to me that that would happen. I hope to God it won’t,” Cranston said in October of the possibility of a Trump victory. The Breaking Bad star suggested he would take a permanent vacation to Vancouver.
3. Miley Cyrus
The young pop star said she would “move out da country” if Trump, whom she called a “ f*cking nightmare ” were to win the election.
“My heart is broken into a 1 pieces…I am moving if this is my president! I don’t say things I don’t mean!” she wrote in an Instagram post.
4. Lena Dunham
The Girls star said there is a “ 100 percent chance ” she will pick up and move to Canada if Trump prevails on Election Day.
“I love Canada. I think that it’s a great place, and there’s an area in Vancouver that I find beautiful and appealing, and I can conduct business from there,” the actress and Clinton surrogate said.
5. Amy Schumer
The comedian and Trainwreck actress said Spain would be her destination of choice if Trump wins the presidency.
“My act will change because I will need to learn to speak Spanish,” Schumer said in an appearance on the BBC’s Newsnight in September. “Because I will move to Spain or somewhere. It’s beyond my comprehension if Trump won. It’s just too crazy.”
6. Jon Stewart
The former Daily Show funnyman may want to connect with billionaire space pioneer Elon Musk if Trump wins; he told People magazine last year that he would consider “getting in a rocket and going to another planet, because clearly this planet’s gone bonkers.”
7. Cher
The same goes for pop icon Cher, who wrote on Twitter that she would be moving to Jupiter if Trump wins. The “Believe” singer has appeared with Hillary Clinton at campaign events this year.
8. Chelsea Handler
The comedian and talk-show host said she had already made a contingency plan in the event of a Trump win.
“I did buy a house in another country just in case,” Handler said in an interview on ABC’s Live with Kelly and Michael in May. “So all these people that threaten to leave the country and then don’t — I actually will leave that country.”
9. Samuel L. Jackson
“If that motherf*cker becomes president, I’m moving my black ass to South Africa,” he later told Jimmy Kimmel.
10. Whoopi Goldberg
The comedian and The View co-host has repeatedly trashed Trump on the ABC daytime talk show.
“Listen, he can be whatever party he wants to be,” she said during an episode in January. “What he can’t be is he can’t be the guy that says it’s your fault stuff isn’t working. That’s not the president I want. Find a way to make stuff work.”
“Maybe it’s time for me to move, you know. I can afford to go,” she added.
11. Neve Campbell
The Scream and House of Cards actress said she would move back to her native Canada if Trump wins the election.
“They see someone off the cuff and broad, and they think ‘ok, that’s the voice we need, just someone honest,’” Campbell told the Huffington Post of the motivation behind the Republican candidate’s support. “But his honesty is terrifying.”
12. Keegan-Michael Key
The Key and Peele star also said he’d flee north to Canada in the event of a Trump presidency.
“It’s like, 10 minutes from Detroit,” the comedian told TMZ in January. “That’s where I’m from; my mom lives there. It’d make her happy too.”
13. George Lopez
“If he wins, he won’t have to worry about immigration. We’ll all go back,” the Latino comedian and TV star told TMZ shortly after Trump announced his candidacy in 2015.
14. Ne-Yo
The R&B singer said he’d be moving to Canada “straight away” if Trump wins.
“Me and Drake gonna be neighbors if Donald Trump becomes president,” the singer told TMZ in October.
15. Rev. Al Sharpton
The civil rights activist told attendees at a Center for American Progress event in February that he would be looking for flight reservations if Clinton did not triumph on Election Day.
“I’m also reserving my ticket to get out of here if he wins. Only because he’d probably have me deported anyhow,” Sharpton said.
16. Raven Symoné
The former View co-host and Disney Channel star is probably already on a flight out. During a February episode of the talk show, the actress said she would move to Canada “if any Republican gets nominated.”
17. Amber Rose
Where would she move? Unspecified.
“I can’t even think about it! I’m moving, I’m out! I can’t. And I am taking my son with me!” she told US Weekly.
18. Ruth Bader Ginsburg
The Supreme Court Justice claimed she will move to New Zealand.
“I can’t imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president… Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand,” she told The New York Times.
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Diversity Macht Frei October 29, 2016
Conservatism is the defence of ancestral peoplehood. It is an affirmation of a people’s uniqueness, their culture, traditions, values and trans-generational connectedness; in short, their ethnic identity. In America, however, thanks to infiltration and subversion of the movement by Jewish intellectuals, conservatism has been defined as its opposite. Instead of affirming ancestral peoplehood, this ersatz or kosher conservatism denies it; furthermore, it depicts genuine conservatism – the attempt to preserve a people’s distinctiveness – as somehow shameful or morally tainted. This it accomplishes by expansively redefining the peoplehood to embrace outsiders. In place of a time-honoured community linked by genetic descent, the new criteria for “tribal” belonging become shallow and abstract: place of birth; an administrative status; a bit of paper from the government; a list of “values”, usually ones such as “openesss” or “tolerance” that are simply disguised demands for ethnic self-dissolution.
This redefinition of European, and only European, peoplehood into something abstract is a form of intellectual genocide, one largely effected by Jewish intellectuals who have mastered the art of manipulating Europeans by evoking shame responses. And insofar as this intellectual redefinition of our peoplehood prevails in the public conversation, which it does to the point of being almost unchallenged, it forms the basis for government policies that must necessarily bring about an actual genocide in which the ancestral ethnic community is dissolved through an influx of outsiders. Since, according to the rules of kosher conservatism, Europeans are not allowed to define themselves as an ancestral community, they cannot defend themselves as such.
What we see in the Trump movement and the various populisms springing up around Europe is a response to this twin genocide, the intellectual and the actual, being perpetrated on Europeans by Jewish intellectuals whose ideas have achieved an ascendancy in our public conversation. These kosher conservatives are mortified by the sight of genuine conservatism, the element of ethnic self-defence that is manifest in the Trump movement. Here neo-con (((David Brooks))) of the New York Times laments the good old days when the goy knew their place.
I feel very lucky to have entered the conservative movement when I did, back in the 1980s and 1990s. I was working at National Review, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journalâs editorial page. The role models in front of us were people like Bill Buckley, Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, Russell Kirk and Midge Decter.
… The Buckley-era establishment self-confidently enforced intellectual and moral standards. It rebuffed the nativists like the John Birch Society, the apocalyptic polemicists who popped up with the New Right, and they exiled conspiracy-mongers and anti-Semites, like Joe Sobran, an engaging man who was rightly fired from National Review.
Source
Sobran was one of the old-school, proudly Christian, conservatives who attempted to resist the Jewish takeover of the American conservative movement, failed and paid the price for his failure. Here are some extracts from his New York Times obituary.
Joseph Sobran, a hard-hitting conservative writer and moralist whose outspoken antipathy to Israel and what he saw as the undue influence of a Jewish lobby on American foreign policy led to his removal as a senior editor of National Review in 1993, died on Thursday in Fairfax, Va. He was 64 and lived in Burke, Va.
Mr. Sobran (pronounced SO-brun), one of the conservative whiz kids whom William F. Buckley draft-picked for National Review straight out of college, made his mark with witty, thoughtful essays on moral and social questions. He was an unapologetic paleoconservative, opposed to military intervention abroad, big government at home and moral permissiveness everywhere.
… In the mid-1980s he ran into trouble with Mr. Buckley for the first time after writing several columns critical of American policy in the Middle East. Matters came to a head in 1993. Mr. Sobran, unhappy with National Reviewâs support for the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and with Mr. Buckleyâs criticism of his writing on Jews and the Middle East, attacked Mr. Buckley in his âWashington Watchâ column in The Wanderer, a traditionalist Roman Catholic weekly. When informed by National Reviewâs editor in chief, John OâSullivan, that the column amounted to a letter of resignation, Mr. Sobran was fired.
Mr. Buckley, angry that Mr. Sobran had included conversations from a private dinner that the two had had, and stung by the depiction of him as kowtowing to Manhattanâs social elite, wrote in a letter to The Wanderer that the column âgives evidence of an incapacitation moral and perhaps medical, which news is both bad, and sad,â adding that Mr. Sobranâs criticisms were âa breath-catching libel.â
The two men later reconciled. Mr. Sobranâs isolationist views on American foreign policy and Israel became increasingly extreme. He took a skeptical line on the Holocaust and said the Sept. 11 terror attacks were a result of American foreign policy in the Middle East, which he believed that a Jewish lobby directed. Not surprisingly, he spent much of his time defending himself against charges of anti-Semitism.
âNobody has ever accused me of the slightest personal indecency to a Jew,â he said in a speech delivered at a 2002 conference of the Institute for Historical Review. âMy chief offense, it appears, has been to insist that the state of Israel has been a costly and treacherous âallyâ to the United States. As of last Sept. 11, I should think that is undeniable. But I have yet to receive a single apology for having been correct.â
Source
Brooks laments the corrosion of the establishment media monolith that has allowed the dumb goy plebs to have a voice.
The conservative intellectual landscape has changed in three important ways since then, paving the way for the ruination of the Republican Party. First, talk radio, cable TV and the internet have turned conservative opinion into a mass-market enterprise. Small magazines have been overwhelmed by Rush, OâReilly and Breitbart.
Todayâs dominant conservative voices try to appeal to people by the millions. You win attention in the mass media through perpetual hysteria and simple-minded polemics and by exploiting social resentment. In search of that mass right-wing audience that, say, Coulter enjoys, conservatism has done its best to make itself offensive to people who value education and disdain made-for-TV rage.
Itâs ironic that an intellectual tendency that champions free markets was ruined by the forces of commercialism, but that is the essential truth. Conservatism went down-market in search of revenue. It got swallowed by its own anti-intellectual media-politico complex â from Beck to Palin to Trump. Hillary Clinton is therefore now winning among white college graduates by 52 to 36 percent.
SourceÂ
That more highly educated Europeans now tend disproportionately to embrace their own destruction is the result of their heightened exposure to Jewish sophistry through academia and Establishment media.
All over (see here and here for other examples), the Kosher conservatives are wringing their hands in anguish at the Trump movement, hoping it will go away soon. But the ethnic anguish the Trump movement channels is not going away any time soon, driven, as it is, by the harsh reality that Europeans are being turned into ethnic minorities in almost all of their ancestral living spaces. Even if Trump falls by the wayside, their anguish will continue to deepen and seek other forms of expression. | 0 |
By Andrew P. Napolitano October 27, 2016
When FBI Director James Comey announced on July 5 that the Department of Justice would not seek the indictment of Hillary Clinton for failure to safeguard state secrets related to her email use while she was secretary of state, he both jumped the gun and set in motion a series of events that surely he did not intend. Was his hand forced by the behavior of FBI agents who wouldn’t take no for an answer? Did he let the FBI become a political tool?
Here is the back story.
The FBI began investigating the Clinton email scandal in the spring of 2015, when The New York Times revealed Clinton’s use of a private email address for her official governmental work and the fact that she did not preserve the emails on State Department servers, contrary to federal law. After an initial collection of evidence and a round of interviews, agents and senior managers gathered in the summer of 2015 to discuss how to proceed. It was obvious to all that a prima-facie case could be made for espionage, theft of government property and obstruction of justice charges. The consensus was to proceed with a formal criminal investigation.
Six months later, the senior FBI agent in charge of that investigation resigned from the case and retired from the FBI because he felt the case was going “sideways”; that’s law enforcement jargon for “nowhere by design.” John Giacalone had been the chief of the New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., field offices of the FBI and, at the time of his “sideways” comment, was the chief of the FBI National Security Branch.
The reason for the “sideways” comment must have been Giacalone’s realization that DOJ and FBI senior management had decided that the investigation would not work in tandem with a federal grand jury. That is nearly fatal to any government criminal case. In criminal cases, the FBI and the DOJ cannot issue subpoenas for testimony or for tangible things; only grand juries can.
Giacalone knew that without a grand jury, the FBI would be toothless, as it would have no subpoena power. He also knew that without a grand jury, the FBI would have a hard time persuading any federal judge to issue search warrants. A judge would perceive the need for search warrants to be not acute in such a case because to a judge, the absence of a grand jury can only mean a case is “sideways” and not a serious investigation.
As the investigation dragged on in secret and Donald Trump simultaneously began to rise in the Republican presidential primaries, it became more apparent to Giacalone’s successors that the goal of the FBI was to exonerate Clinton, not determine whether there was enough evidence to indict her. In late spring of this year, agents began interviewing the Clinton inner circle.
When Clinton herself was interviewed on July 2 — for only four hours, during which the interviewers seemed to some in the bureau to lack aggression, passion and determination — some FBI agents privately came to the same conclusion as their former boss: The case was going sideways.
A few determined agents were frustrated by Clinton’s professed lack of memory during her interview and her oblique reference to a recent head injury she had suffered as the probable cause of that. They sought to obtain her medical records to verify the gravity of her injury and to determine whether she had been truthful with them. They prepared the paperwork to obtain the records, only to have their request denied by Director Comey himself on July 4.
Then some agents did the unthinkable; they reached out to colleagues in the intelligence community and asked them to obtain Clinton’s medical records so they could show them to Comey. We know that the National Security Agency can access anything that is stored digitally, including medical records. These communications took place late on July 4.
When Comey learned of these efforts, he headed them off the next morning with his now infamous news conference, in which he announced that Clinton would not be indicted because the FBI had determined that her behavior, though extremely careless, was not reckless, which is the legal standard in espionage cases. He then proceeded to recount the evidence against her. He did this, no doubt, to head off the agents who had sought the Clinton medical records, whom he suspected would leak evidence against her.
Three months later — and just weeks before Clinton will probably be elected president — we have learned that President Barack Obama regularly communicated with Clinton via her personal email servers about matters that the White House considered classified. That means that he lied when he told CBS News that he learned of the Clinton servers when the rest of us did.
We also learned this week that Andrew McCabe, Giacalone’s successor as head of the FBI Washington field office and presently the No. 3 person in the FBI, is married to a woman to whom the Clinton money machine in Virginia funneled about $675,000 in lawful campaign funds for a failed 2015 run for the Virginia Senate. Comey apparently saw no conflict or appearance of impropriety in having the person in charge of the Clinton investigation in such an ethically challenged space.
Why did this case go sideways?
Did President Obama fear being a defense witness at Hillary Clinton’s criminal trial? Did he so fear being succeeded in office by Donald Trump that he ordered the FBI to exonerate Clinton, the rule of law be damned? Did the FBI lose its reputation for fidelity to law, bravery under stress and integrity at all times?
This is not your grandfather’s FBI — or your father’s. It is the Obama FBI.
Reprinted with the author’s permission. The Best of Andrew P. Napolitano Tags: Andrew P. Napolitano [ send him mail ], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written nine books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty . To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit creators.com. Copyright © 2016 Andrew P. Napolitano | 0 |
posted by Eddie Mandatory vaccinations are about to open up a new frontier for government control. Through the war on drugs, bureaucrats arbitrarily dictate what people can and can’t put into their bodies, but that violation pales in comparison to forcibly medicating millions against their will. Voluntary and informed consent are essential in securing individual rights, and without it, self-ownership will never be respected. The liberal stronghold of California is trailblazing the encroaching new practice and recently passed laws mandating that children and adults must have certain immunizations before being able to attend schools or work in certain professions. The longstanding religious and philosophical exemptions that protect freedom of choice have been systematically crushed by the state. California’s Senate Bill 277 went into effect on July 1st, 2016, and marked the most rigid requirements ever instituted for vaccinations. The law forces students to endure a total of 40 doses to complete the 10 federally recommended vaccines while allowing more to be added at any time. Any family that doesn’t go along will have their child barred from attending licensed day care facilities, in-home daycares, public or private schools, and even after school programs. Over the years, California has developed a reputation for pushing vaccines on their youth. Assembly Bill 499 was passed in 2011 and lowered the age of consent for STD prevention vaccines to just 12 years old. Included in the assortment of shots being administered was the infamous Gardasil , which just a few years later was at the center of a lawsuit that yielded the victims a $6 million settlement from the U.S. government, which paid out funds from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program . The Vaccinate All Children Act of 2015 is an attempt to implement this new standard nationwide, and although it has stalled in the House, it will likely be reintroduced the next time the country is gripped by the fear of a pandemic. The debate surrounding vaccinations is commonly framed as a moral struggle between the benefits to the collective and the selfish preferences of the individual. But since the outbreak scares of Zika , measles , and ebola , the rhetoric has taken a turn toward authoritarianism. It’s commonly stated by the CDC and most mainstream doctors that the unvaccinated are putting the health of everyone else at risk, but the truth isn’t so black and white . The herd immunity theory has been consistently used to validate the expansion of vaccine programs, but it still doesn’t justify the removal of choice from the individual. The classic exchange of freedom for perceived safety is a no brainer for the millions of Americans who are willing to use government to strap their neighbors down and forcibly inject them for the greater good. Anyone who expresses concern about possible side effects is immediately branded as conspiratorial or anti-science. Yet controversial claims that certain vaccine variants cause neurological disorders like autism have led some people to swear off inoculations altogether. This all-or-nothing dynamic has completely polarized the issue and prevents any reasonable discussion from taking place. Either you accept all of the CDC’s recommended 69 doses of 16 vaccines between birth and age 18, or you want to bring back measles, polio, and probably the black plague. On the other extreme side of the debate, if you fail to acknowledge all vaccines as dangerous, you’re an ignorant sheep. Through the internet, disinformation has become widespread and created a movement of people that have written off all the benefits accomplished through immunizations. These individuals are unable or unwilling to separate the science from the shady institutions that develop and distribute new vaccines. Even if thimerosal and mercury based preservatives cause adverse reactions in some patients, it doesn’t detract from the advantages vaccine technology provides. In this debate, like most others in the US, both sides are swept up in emotion and ignorance. Regardless, the public’s trust in vaccinations has been eroded by the reputations of those companies producing them. Pharmaceutical giants like Merck and Pfizer make billions from the distribution of these shots, and the potential profits after a mandate are enough to corrupt the morals of almost anyone. In one example, former CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding left her post at the government agency in 2009 to work in Merck’s vaccine division. An investigative report published by the British Medical Journal last year found the CDC downplays its ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Further, by buying the support of politicians like Hillary Clinton — who received more donations from pharmaceutical companies and their employees than any other candidate this year — these huge companies are able to expand their influence in directing government policy . Maintaining control over what we put into our own bodies is a fundamental right, but for now, standing up to these government decrees only means ostracism from the education system and criticism from peers. In the future, however, the punishments for disobedience will likely only grow stricter. An Orange County doctor named Bob Sears is already in the crosshairs of California’s medical board after excusing a two-year-old from future vaccinations. The mother expressed concern that her daughter had an adverse reaction to a previous shot, describing the child as becoming limp “like a ragdoll” for 24 hours after the last dose. Dr. Sears’ alternative treatment recommendations break from the rules dictated by S.B. 277, and now his reputation, as well as his career, are in jeopardy. This new authority to strip doctors of their medical licenses for simply going against the state-imposed standards opens the door for the persecution of medical professionals who resist any government regulation. A vaccination is an invasive medical procedure that can have different effects on each and every individual. The Nuremberg Code’s first principle is voluntary consent, but it seems the lessons of history have been completely forgotten by today’s leaders. The transition of these shots from “recommended” to “required” is well underway, and those who think the ends justify the means are willing to forcibly make sure everyone else complies. The new benchmark set by California symbolizes a precedent that could be mimicked across the nation. Without having the discretion to choose which medications are injected into your body — or your child’s — how can anyone convince themselves they are free? This overreach and collusion can often be dismissed as a trivial issue, but the fact that voluntary consent is under attack speaks volumes to the extent that state power has metastasized. source: | 0 |
Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” host Bill O’Reilly weighed in on the allegations that Attorney General Jeff Sessions failed to acknowledge meeting with the Russian ambassador during his confirmation hearing earlier this year. O’Reilly declared Sessions was right to recuse himself from any investigations involving the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. However, he said this situation exposed hypocrisy of Democrats, who were silent on General Loretta Lynch’s recusal when presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was being investigated for her use of an unauthorized server while secretary of state. Transcript as follows: O’REILLY: Hi, I am Bill O’Reilly. Thanks for watching us tonight. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recuses himself in the Russian investigation. That is a subject of this evening’s “Talking Points” memo. Okay. Here’s the deal. The Democratic Party in much of the national press wants to produce evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government in defeating Hillary Clinton. There is no question about that. The cost of the Russian hacking, a serious issue, there were hearings held in Congress. And by extension, when then Senator Jeff Sessions testified at his confirmation hearing for Attorney General, the Russian issue came up. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SEN. AL FRANKEN (D) MINNESOTA: If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do? JEFF SESSIONS (R) SENATOR: Senator Franken, I am not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians. And I am unable to comment on it. (END VIDEO CLIP) O’REILLY: Now, last night, “The Washington Post” publish a story that said, Sessions did meet with the Russian ambassador twice last year. But if you are listening closely, the question was about the Trump campaign, not the former senators duties on the Armed Services Committee. Today in a press conference, the Attorney General reiterated that he was answering the Russian question in the context of the Trump campaign. He said he did nothing wrong, told the truth, but is recusing himself from the case. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SESSIONS: My staff recommended recusal. They said that since I had involvement with the campaign, I should not be involved in any campaign investigation. I have studied the rules and considered their comments and evaluations. I believe those recommendations are right and just. Therefore, I have recused myself in the matters that deal with the Trump campaign. (END VIDEO CLIP) O’REILLY: “Talking Points” believes Mr. Sessions did the right thing. The FBI is currently investigating whether Russians influence the presidential vote and he was involved. The investigation has to be above reproach. And that is why the Attorney General is now out of it. One footnote. Not one single Democrat in Congress, not one, called for General Loretta Lynch to recuse herself from the Hillary Clinton investigation after she met with Bill Clinton at a Phoenix Airport. There was absolutely no call for recusal by the Democrats, so once again, hypocrisy is on full display. Now, here is what should happen going forward. The FBI should continue with its investigation and Director Comey should testify in front of Congress. If during that testimony there is evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in any way, then, a special prosecutor should be appointed. That is what should happen. A methodical investigation by the FBI and a determination by Congress whether a special independent probe is necessary. I think that is a fair, honest, and efficient game plan in this intense political climate. Finally, even though the press does want to destroy President Trump, the American people should want to know, we should want to know if there were any secret dealings with the Russians during the campaign. That is a very important story that should be defined. And that is the memo. Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 1 |
“Homeland,” a series always conscious of current events, tries for some enforced topicality in its sixth season, which begins on Sunday on Showtime. Moving out of the fall for the first time, the show has a story line pegged to its new winter slot and to the recent election: The season is set during a presidential transition, with a whose relationship to intelligence agencies is dicey. Not even the most prescient of shows can see the future perfectly, though. The fictional incipient president is a woman (played by Elizabeth Marvel) and her politics appear to be dovish: She floats the idea of the United States’ pulling all its troops out of the Middle East. Those details put quite a distance between “Homeland” and the reality of the real Donald J. Trump. But it’s not gender or views that make the show feel out of tune with the times. It’s the courtesy the characters exhibit as they argue and negotiate, their automatic respect for the traditional processes of government. Life, at the moment, is scarier than fiction, and compared with the wholesale disintegration of civility taking place in Washington, “Homeland” looks quaint. It’s as if it were happening in another century. And that’s not a bad thing. There’s something comforting about the normalcy of plot and counterplot, action and intrigue. Those have always been the series’s strong points, not ideas, and it may be easier to focus on them without worrying about how closely the story is mimicking events. This peripatetic show is set for the first time in New York, where the former C. I. A. officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) is working for an outpost of the German foundation that employed her in Season 5. Otto Düring (Sebastian Koch) her boss and (as far as we know) unrequited admirer, asks why she’s wasting her time doing work, helping Muslim Americans negotiate the legal system. The answer is that it’s where she can keep an eye on her soul mate, Quinn (Rupert Friend) who’s living in a veterans’ hospital after being last season. The show’s usual roles have been reversed: Quinn is a mess, and Carrie, who appears to be safely on her meds, is the caretaker. By the end of the season premiere, Quinn has moved into her basement. episodes of “Homeland” tend to be a bit labored, as the elaborate machinery of the plot is put into place, and having only two episodes to review (presumably a defense against spoilers) makes it impossible to tell how the machinery will be. Sunday’s premiere introduces two plot strands that we know will eventually, somehow, converge: A young Muslim video blogger (J. Mallory McCree) is arrested on what seem to be shaky grounds, and Dar (F. Murray Abraham) worries about a C. I. A. mission that needs to be completed quickly. Who’s the mole? When will Saul (Mandy Patinkin) stop doubting Carrie? In “Homeland” (as in “24,” also from the executive producer Howard Gordon) we look forward to the questions almost as much as to the answers. In the meantime, there’s more than enough pleasure to be had from the cast to keep us interested. Mr. Abraham and Mr. Patinkin, as his C. I. A. colleague Saul, have perfected their partnership: Their scenes together are little masterpieces of gamesmanship and exasperation. Mr. Friend’s performance of addiction may not convince every viewer, but it is, counterintuitively, fun to watch — he brings the same edge of sardonic humor to Quinn the junkie that he brought to Quinn the killing machine in past seasons. And Ms. Danes continues to deliver an interesting and sympathetic portrayal of a character whose trademark is her lack of humor. That’s a far more impressive trick than telling the future. | 1 |
License DMCA In a recent advancement, 12 men are in the process of going legal against the state of Utah in the Federal court challenging a law which allows mothers to put their babies up for adoption without the biological father's consent, or knowledge.
Our family court system must re-access this provision and make amendments in a way that establishes the fact that fathers are an integral part of a child's life. Every other weekend and one night a week is not a parent child relationship for sure and hence, cannot be considered as equal parenting. Until the courts cease ordering visitation and start affiliating the fathers with the same rights as mothers, children of divorce will continue to suffer.
Children's best interest lies in equal parenting. Even after a couple goes through a divorce, equal parenting must be advocated for children's best interest. Some reasons for this are listed below; Fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, suicide, poor educational performance, teen pregnancy, and criminality." Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, Survey on Child Health, Washington, DC, 1993. "Teenagers living in single-parent households are more likely to abuse alcohol and at an earlier age compared to children reared in two-parent households." Source: Terry E. Duncan, Susan C. Duncan and Hyman Hops, "The Effects of Family Cohesiveness and Peer Encouragement on the Development of Adolescent Alcohol Use: A Cohort-Sequential Approach to the Analysis of Longitudinal Data", Journal of Studies on Alcohol 55 (1994). "The absence of the father in the home affects significantly the behavior of adolescents and results in the greater use of alcohol and marijuana." Source: Deane Scott Berman "Risk Factors Leading to Adolescent Substance Abuse", Adolescence 30 (1995) Researchers in Michigan determined that "49 percent of all child abuse cases are committed by single mothers." Source: Joan Dotson and Sharon Shay, "A Study of Child Abuse in Lansing, Michigan", Child Abuse and Neglect, 8 (1984).
Such studies and reports as mentioned above are many and we will provide additional data in future articles. We started Fathers4Justice in an effort to garner Father's rights against the corrupt courts and address the concerns regarding the family law, including child custody and child support that affect fathers and their children. There is a serious need for a change of the law since a decision about a child's future, its well-being cannot and should not be taken by the mother alone. It's high time that equal parenting rights must be brought into implementation. - Advertisement - | 0 |
هل تلتزم واشنطن بقواعد اللعبة في سوريا؟
تاريخ النشر: 26.10.2016 | 12:20 GMT | أعلنت هيئة الأركان للقوات المسلحة الروسية 25 أكتوبر/تشرين الأول، عن تمديد تعليق ضربات القوات الجوية الفضائية الروسية في محيط حلب، والذي دخل حيز التنفيذ يوم 18 أكتوبر/تشرين الأول.
وتواصل روسيا اتخاذ خطوات أحادية الجانب ترمي إلى تخفيف الأزمة الإنسانية في حلب.
وسبق للولايات المتحدة وروسيا أن قامتا بمحاولات مشتركة للتأثير على أطراف النزاع: على دمشق من جهة، وعلى فصائل المعارضة السورية من جهة أخرى. لكن تنفيذ الاتفاقات الروسية الأمريكية بهذا الشأن حمل طابعا أحاديا بقدر كبير، إذ لم تتمكن الولايات المتحدة من إقناع المعارضين بالوفاء بالاتفاقات بشكل كامل.
هدنة فبراير
في يوم 22 فبراير/شباط عام 2016، أعلنت روسيا والولايات المتحدة عن نظام وقف إطلاق نار بسوريا، دخل حيز التنفيذ يوم 27 من الشهر نفسه. وبحلول هذا الموعد، انضمت القوات السورية الحكومية إلى الهدنة. RT
لكن واشنطن لم تتمكن من ضمان التزام إلا جزء معين مما يسمى بـ"المعارضة المعتدلة"، بشروط الهدنة. وواصل 20 فصيلا مسلحا آخر العمليات القتالية، متجاهلة الاتفاقات الروسية الأمريكية.
وحسب بيانات من المصادر المفتوحة، سُجّل في الفترة بين 27 فبراير/شباط و1 سبتمبر/أيلول عام 2016، 2031 خرقا للهدنة، ما أدى إلى مقتل ما يربو عن 3500 عسكري من الجيش السوري وقرابة 13 ألف مدني. كما أصيب جراء تلك الهجمات قرابة 9 آلاف عسكري وما يربو عن 25.5 ألف مدني بجروح مختلفة.
في سياق تبادل المعلومات حول فصائل المعارضة بسوريا، قدم الجانب الروسي قائمة بـ47 فصيلا. أما القائمة التي قدمها الجانب الأمريكي، فضمت 138 فصيلا. ومن قائمة "المعتدلين" التابعة للعسكريين الأمريكيين، كان فصيلان اثنان يتبعان تنظيم "داعش"، و8 فصائل أخرى كانت تدخل في قوام التحالف بقيادة "جبهة النصرة". RT
ولم تقدم واشنطن أي معلومات حول حدود المناطق التي تنشط فيها "الفصائل المعتدلة" في قوام "جبهة النصرة"، ولم يتم الفصل بين الإرهابيين والمعارضين حتى الآن.
وخلال الفترة التي مضت على دخول الهدنة حيز التنفيذ، تمكن المسلحون من استعادة قدراتهم القتالية، وواصلوا هجماتهم على الجيش السوري والهجمات الإرهابية ضد المدنيين. RT
وحسب المعلومات المتوفرة، كانت القوات الجوية الفضائية الروسية توجه يوميا ما يصل إلى 150 ضربة إلى مواقع "داعش" و"جبهة النصرة"، فيما لم تتجاوز كثافة غارات التحالف بقيادة واشنطن توجيه 15 ضربة يوميا إلى مسلحي "داعش"، مع تجاهل تام من قبل طائرات التحالف لمواقع "جبهة النصرة".
وسمحت هذه التهدئة لجناح "القاعدة" السوري، بزيادة عدد الهجمات الإرهابية ضد المدنيين إلى الضعفين بالمقارنة مع عدد الأعمال الإرهابية في عام 2015.
وبمساندة القوات الجوية والفضائية الروسية، تمكن الجيش السوري من تحرير 586 مدينة وبلدة من أيدي المسلحين، فيما تم القضاء على قرابة 35 ألف إرهابي
اتفاقات سبتمبر
في سبتمبر/أيلول عام 2016، وضع وزيرا الخارجية الروسي سيرغي لافروف والأمريكي جون كيري حزمة جديدة من الاتفاقات الرامية إلى استئناف عملية تسوية النزاع في سوريا.
ونصت الاتفاقات الروسية الأمريكية على فتح ممر إنساني في حلب، وسحب القوات الحكومية وقوات المعارضة من طريق الكاستيلو، والتخطيط لتوجيه ضربات مشتركة إلى مواقع "داعش" و"جبهة النصرة". RT RT
على الرغم من تصريحات ممثلي التحالف الذين أكدوا أنهم يتمتعون بتأثير كبير على زعماء فصائل المعارضة، خرقت المعارضة "المعتدلة" الهدنة في الفترة 12- 19 سبتمبر/أيلول، 302 مرة، ما أدى إلى مقتل 83 مدنيا، وإصابة 252 آخرين.
كما بقي الجانب الأمريكي عاجزا عن التأثير على المعارضة من أجل تنظيم إجلاء المدنيين من حلب. وقام المسلحون بتفخيخ المخارج من المناطق الخاضعة لسيطرتهم، ولم يسمحوا للسكان المسالمين بمغادرة المدينة. كما رفض الإرهابيون السماح لقوافل المساعدات الأممية بالدخول إلى المدينة.
وواصل الطيران الروسي العملية ضد الإرهابيين، وهو كان يوجه ما يصل إلى 150 ضربة يوميا إلى مواقع "داعش" و"جبهة النصرة". أما التحالف الدولي فكان يوجه أقل من 10 ضربات يوميا إلى مواقع "داعش"، ولم يستهدف "جبهة النصرة" على الإطلاق. RT
على الرغم من أن البيانات المذكورة أعلاه، تدل بوضوح على عجز الولايات المتحدة والتحالف الذي تقوده واشنطن، عن ممارسة أي تأثير على فصائل المعارضة، وهو أمر أدى إلى تردي الوضع الإنساني في حلب، إلا أن واشنطن ألقت باللوم الكامل على موسكو. RT
أكثر من مرة اتهم الأمريكيون وحلفاؤهم الأوروبيون روسيا بانتهاك التزاماتها، وبالتهرب من المفاوضات، والسعي إلى إحراز الانتصار بسوريا بطرق عسكرية. وأعلنت وزارة الخارجية الأمريكية في نهاية المطاف عن تعليق قنوات الاتصال مع روسيا بشأن سوريا، ولم تحتفظ واشنطن إلا على قنوات الحوار بين العسكريين الروس والأمريكيين من أجل منع وقوع صدامات في المجال الجوي السوري.
مصادر متطابقة تعليمات استخدام خدمة التعليقات على صفحات موقع قناة "RT Arabic" (اضغط هنا) العناوين | 0 |
Donald J. Trump proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime in federal income taxes for years on end. He insists he merely exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire — loopholes he says Hillary Clinton failed to close during her years in the United States Senate. “Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I couldn’t use them?” Mr. Trump asked during a campaign rally last month. But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited. Thanks to this one maneuver, which was later outlawed by Congress, Mr. Trump potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Mr. Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his returns, breaking a practice followed by every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate for more than four decades. Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s. Moreover, the tax experts said the maneuver trampled a core tenet of American tax policy by conferring enormous tax benefits on Mr. Trump for losing vast amounts of other people’s money — in this case, money investors and banks had entrusted to him to build a casino empire in Atlantic City. As that empire floundered in the early 1990s, Mr. Trump pressured his financial backers to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in debt he could not repay. While the cancellation of so much debt gave new life to Mr. Trump’s casinos, it created a potentially crippling problem with the Internal Revenue Service. In the eyes of the I. R. S. a dollar of canceled debt is the same as a dollar of taxable income. This meant Mr. Trump faced the painful prospect of having to report the hundreds of millions of dollars of canceled debt as if it were hundreds of millions of dollars of taxable income. But Mr. Trump’s audacious maneuver gave him a way to simply avoid reporting any of that canceled debt to the I. R. S. “He’s getting something for absolutely nothing,” John L. Buckley, who served as the chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation in 1993 and 1994, said in an interview. The new documents, which include correspondence from Mr. Trump’s tax lawyers and bond offering disclosure statements, might also help explain how Mr. Trump reported a staggering loss of $916 million in his 1995 tax returns, portions of which were first published by The Times last month. United States tax laws allowed Mr. Trump to use that $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income. But tax experts have been debating how Mr. Trump could have legally declared a deduction of that magnitude at all. Among other things, they have noted that Mr. Trump’s huge casino losses should have been offset by the hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income he surely must have reported to the I. R. S. in the form of canceled casino debt. By avoiding reporting his canceled casino debt in the first place, however, Mr. Trump’s $916 million deduction would not have been reduced by hundreds of millions of dollars. He could have preserved the deduction and used it instead to avoid paying income taxes he might otherwise have owed on books, TV shows or branding deals. Under the rules in effect in 1995, the $916 million loss could have been used to wipe out more than $50 million a year in taxable income for 18 years. Mr. Trump declined to comment for this article. “Your email suggests either a fundamental misunderstanding or an intentional misreading of the law,” Hope Hicks, Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, said in a statement. “Your thesis is a criticism, not just of Mr. Trump, but of all taxpayers who take the time and spend the money to try to comply with the dizzyingly complex and ambiguous tax laws without paying more tax than they owe. Mr. Trump does not think that taxpayers should file returns that resolve all doubt in favor of the I. R. S. And any tax experts that you have consulted are engaged in pure speculation. There is no news here. ” Mr. Trump financed his three Atlantic City gambling resorts with $1. 3 billion in debt, most of it in the form of high interest junk bonds. By late 1990, after months of escalating operating losses, New Jersey casino regulators were warning that “a complete financial collapse of the Trump Organization was not out of the question. ” By 1992, all three casinos had filed for bankruptcy, and bondholders were ultimately forced to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to salvage at least part of their investment. The story of how Mr. Trump sidestepped a potentially ruinous tax bill from that forgiven debt emerged from documents recently discovered by The Times during a search of the casino bankruptcy filings. The documents offer only a partial description of events, and none of Mr. Trump’s tax lawyers agreed to be interviewed for this article. At the time, Mr. Trump would have been to pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes. According to assessments of his financial stability by New Jersey casino regulators, there were times in the early 1990s when Mr. Trump had no more than a few million dollars in his various bank accounts. He was so strapped for cash that his creditors were apoplectic when they learned that Mr. Trump had bought Marla Maples an engagement ring estimated to be worth $250, 000. It is unclear who first glimpsed a way for Mr. Trump to dodge a huge tax bill. But the basic maneuver he used was essentially a new twist on a contentious strategy corporations had been using for years to avoid taxes created by canceled debt. The strategy, known among tax practitioners as a “ swap,” relies on mathematical sleight of hand. Say a company can repay only $60 million of a $100 million bank loan. If the bank forgives the remaining $40 million, the company faces a large tax bill because it will have to report that canceled $40 million debt as taxable income. Clever tax lawyers found a way around this inconvenience. The company would simply swap stock for the $40 million in debt it could not repay. This way, it would look as if the entire $100 million loan had been repaid, and presto: There would be no tax bill due for $40 million in canceled debt. Best of all, it did not matter if the actual market value of the stock was considerably less than the $40 million in canceled debt. (Stock in an effectively insolvent company could easily be next to worthless.) Even in the opaque, rarefied world of gaming impenetrable tax regulations, this particular maneuver was about as close as a company could get to waving a magic wand and making taxes disappear. Alarmed by the obvious potential for abuse, Congress and the I. R. S. made repeated efforts during the 1980s to curb this brand of tax wizardry before banning its use by corporations altogether in 1993. But while policy makers were busy trying to stop corporations from using this particular ploy, the endlessly creative club of elite tax advisers was inventing a new way to circumvent the ban, this time through the use of partnerships. This was the twist that was especially beneficial to Mr. Trump. Wealthy families like the Trumps often own real estate and other assets through partnerships rather than corporations. Mr. Trump, for example, owned all three of his Atlantic City casinos through partnerships, an arrangement that allowed casino profits to flow directly to his personal tax returns when times were good. But what if times were bad? What if Mr. Trump’s casino partnerships could not repay hundreds of millions of dollars they owed to bondholders? And what if the bondholders were persuaded to forgive this debt? Wouldn’t that force the partnerships — i. e. Mr. Trump — to report hundreds of millions of dollars of taxable income in the form of canceled debt? Enter the tax advisers with their audacious plan: Why not eliminate all that taxable income from canceled debt by swapping “partnership equity” for debt in exactly the same way corporations had been swapping company stock for debt? True enough, the I. R. S. and Congress had clearly signaled their disapproval of the basic concept. Fred T. Goldberg, who was the I. R. S. commissioner under George Bush, recalled in an interview that the I. R. S. frowned on partnership swaps for the same reason it objected to corporate swaps. “The fiction is that the partnership interest has the same value as the debt,” he said. Lee A. Sheppard, a contributing editor to Tax Notes, wrote in 1991 that trying to find a legal justification for this tactic was akin to proving “the existence of the Loch Ness monster. ” On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump boasts of his mastery of tax loopholes and claims no other candidate for the White House has ever known more about the tax code. This background, he argues with evident disgust, gives him special insight into the way wealthy elites buy off politicians and hire lawyers and accountants to rig the tax system — just as, he claims, they rig elections. That insight was on display in 1991 and 1992 when he was laying the groundwork to make a tax bill disappear. Before proceeding with his plan, Mr. Trump did what most prudent taxpayers do: He sought a formal tax opinion letter. Such letters, typically written by highly paid lawyers who spend entire careers mastering the roughly 10, 000 pages of statutes that make up the United States tax code, can provide important protection to taxpayers. As long as a tax adviser blesses a particular tax strategy in a formal opinion letter, the taxpayer most likely will not face penalties even if the I. R. S. ultimately rules the strategy was improper. The language used in tax opinion letters has a specialized meaning understood by all tax professionals. So, for example, when a tax lawyer writes that a shelter is “more likely than not” going to be approved by the I. R. S. this means there is at least a 51 percent chance the shelter will withstand scrutiny. (This is known as an “M. L. T. N. ” letter in the vernacular of tax lawyers.) A “should” letter means there is about a 75 percent chance the I. R. S. will not object. The gold standard, a “will” letter, means the I. R. S. is all but certain to bless the tax avoidance strategy. But the opinion letters Mr. Trump received from his tax lawyers at Willkie Farr Gallagher were far from the gold standard. The letters bluntly warned that there was no statute, regulation or judicial opinion that explicitly permitted Mr. Trump’s tax gambit. “Due to the lack of definitive judicial or administrative authority,” his lawyers wrote, “substantial uncertainties exist with respect to many of the tax consequences of the plan. ” One letter, 25 pages long, analyzed seven distinct components of Mr. Trump’s proposed tax maneuver. It found only “substantial authority” for six of the components. In the stilted language of tax opinion letters, the phrase “substantial authority” is a red flag that the lawyers believe the I. R. S. can be expected to rule against the taxpayer roughly of the time. In other words, Mr. Trump’s tax lawyers were telling him there were at least six different reasons the I. R. S. would probably cry foul if he were audited. In anticipation of that possibility, the lawyers even laid out a fallback plan that would have allowed Mr. Trump to spread the pain of a large tax hit over many years if the I. R. S. ultimately balked. It is unclear whether the I. R. S. ever challenged Mr. Trump’s use of this specific tax maneuver. According to a financial disclosure statement prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants, he was under audit by the tax authorities as of 1993, only a year after he avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income because of this legally suspect tactic. But the results of that audit are unknown, and the agency declined to comment on Monday. Regardless of whether the I. R. S. objected, Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance in this case violated a central principle of American tax law, said Mr. Buckley, the former chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, who later served as chief tax counsel for Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee. “He deducted somebody else’s losses,” Mr. Buckley said. By that, Mr. Buckley meant that only the bondholders who forgave Mr. Trump’s unpaid casino debts should have been allowed to use those losses to offset future income and reduce their taxes. That Mr. Trump used the same losses to reduce his taxes ultimately increases the tax burden on everyone else, Mr. Buckley explained. “He is double dipping big time. ” In any event, Mr. Trump can no longer benefit from the same maneuver. Just as Congress acted in 1993 to ban swaps by corporations, it acted in 2004 to ban swaps by partnerships. Among the members of Congress who voted to finally close the loophole: Senator Hillary Clinton of New York. | 1 |
Welcome to the hyperbole hour>>>>Where rhetoric and fact are mixed with speculation and dissemination of logic……Those that own the press rule the minds of the week! | 0 |
After a traumatic breakup, Julia Scinto, a fashion designer in Manhattan, found herself searching online sites far and wide, looking for any available resource to help her feel better. “I even considered hypnosis,” said Ms. Scinto, who designs women’s wear for Macy’s private label. Instead, she discovered Mend, an app and online community that serves as part personal trainer, part online refuge for the brokenhearted. On the Mend app, users are introduced to an animated avatar of the Mend founder, Ellen Huerta, and her reassuring voice offers guidance on how to move forward, with topics like “detoxing” from your ex redefining your sense of self — even how to get a better night’s sleep. “It’s this charming and endearing voice of a friend,” Ms. Scinto said. “And there’s a line, ‘We never get tired of hearing about your breakup,’ and those words are like an oasis in the desert. ” Geri Dugan, who works as a psychiatric nurse practitioner in Chicago, knows all too well the mixed emotions that come after a love affair ends. After being stunned by a relationship that didn’t work out, she said, she felt like an “emotional basket case. ” Ms. Dugan found Mend through Ms. Huerta’s podcast “Love Is Like a Plant. ” Now, for more than eight months, she has been applying Mend’s daily regime, which includes monitoring one’s journaling exercises, a Spotify playlist and a book club on Good Reads. She has also navigated through difficult days with support from Mend’s Facebook group. It “really helped normalize the experience,” Ms. Dugan said, adding, “I’m even recommending it to some of my patients going through things like divorce. ” In her Santa Monica, Calif. office, just blocks from the Pacific, Ms. Huerta, 30, with a tumble of dark hair and giant blue eyes, admitted that she had always been drawn to matters of the heart. “Mend started very organically after I went through a breakup,” she said between sips of her rooibos tea. “I had a lot of resources at my disposal — I had supportive friends and access to therapy — but I still was having such a hard time moving forward. ” Ms. Huerta, identified by the name Elle on Mend, found online sites that offer breakup advice to be disappointing, with generic insights like “It just takes time” or wearisome directives like “Post a photo on social media of yourself with someone new. ” She said she set out to build a better digital experience for the newly solo, where users could shake their feeling of helplessness and take action. As a former Google employee, she was familiar with the tech field and took her cues from fitness and apps. “We are taking those parts of our lives very seriously,” she said. “Yet we weren’t doing that with our love lives, which is at the core of who we are. ” Mend started as a newsletter focused on recovering from heartbreak. Now the company is working with Silicon Beach’s highly selective business accelerator MuckerLab (whose portfolio includes tech companies like TaskRabbit and the Black Tux). MuckerLab invested seed money in Mend and assists Ms. Huerta with business development, including product design and marketing. Still less than a year old, the app has been downloaded in more than 100 countries, and many Mend users return for the supportive community, which spills over with tales of solidarity. “One of my personal missions is to erase the shame and taboo of heartbreak as something to just get over,” Ms. Huerta said. One way she addresses that is by drawing on her background in science. (She has a degree in geosciences from Wellesley, and her father is a geophysicist.) She counsels the Mend community that it’s not just emotion that causes a wave of intense feelings, it’s also biology. “It’s different for everyone,” Ms. Huerta said, “but when you go through a separation with someone who you have been intimate with, your body can tell that there’s been a separation. You’re giving off hormones, and they are giving off hormones, over time you become addicted to that source of hormones. ” She pointed to a 2016 study published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal, in which researchers found that romantic love stimulates the same area of the brain as addiction does, with symptoms like euphoria, craving and emotional and physical dependence. Love’s addictionlike qualities, the study states, have developed in humans to encourage procreation and, thus, our very existence. Although much of Ms. Huerta’s advice for Mend users is grounded either in science or in her own romantic mistrials, and she encourages a range of options, like meditation and teas, she firmly believes in the magic and mystery of love, which no data, chart or study can pinpoint. It is that belief that will inform a Mend app update scheduled to roll out in the spring. One sentiment remains: “It’s true what they say,” Ms. Huerta said. “Love really is the drug. ” | 1 |
Syrian refugee Anas Modamani filed a lawsuit against Facebook after his selfie with German Chancellor Angela Merkel was used in allegedly “defamatory” posts on the platform. [“Mr. Modamani has filed for an injunction in a court in Würzburg, in the southern German state of Bavaria, that would require Facebook to remove any content linking him to terrorism,” reported the New York Times on Monday. “His lawyer, Jun, says that although his client deleted the photograph and requested that it be taken down in some postings, it still appears on other people’s social media pages and in fake news reports accusing him of having links to terrorism. ” “I took the selfie because my hobby is taking photos,” said Modamani to The Independent in January. “It was for me, not for other people. ” “I came to Germany because I wanted to live in peace, away from danger,” he continued. “I don’t want anyone to continue using my photo on Facebook. I want to live in peace without any problems. ” | 1 |
Pop singer Katy Perry is once against facing fierce backlash online after jokingly comparing her “old black hair” to former President Barack Obama. [“Oh, someone says, ‘I miss your old black hair,’” the “Firework” singer said in an Instagram video over the weekend. “Oh, really? Do you miss Barack Obama as well? Oh, Okay. Times change. Bye! See you guys later. ” Perry has since deleted the Instagram video. The joke, however, did not go over well, with many social media users taking offense to Perry likening her old hairstyle to the first black U. S. president. I’m sure we can all do without @katyperry right ? ?? #Loser pic. twitter. — DJ SCREAM (@DJSCREAM) April 30, 2017, Katy Perry joke was just very tasteless. What does black hair have to do with Barack Obama … … … … … . .just bad. — Nia (@faggerella) April 30, 2017, @katyperry 😒 that was very disrespectful what you said about Obama I’m very disappointed smh, — TrE (@dat_leo_mYcAh) May 1, 2017, Wow Katy Perry. The reference to former Pres. Obama was offensive a poor, tasteless attempt at humor. Your privilege is showing. — Paris C. (@pariscarerra) April 30, 2017, Katy Perry really fucking tried it with that white ass joke. What does Barack Obama have to do with your dry ass white hair? — Ᏸecca🕊 (@MJStarLover) April 30, 2017, people are not reaching with this Katy Perry ”joke”it wasn’t outwardly racist but it was a microagression with racial undertones, — Kadevin. (@SupaastarJones) April 30, 2017, @katyperry look at this bald headed scalawag ass bitch. . Your lame ass haircut had nothing to do with Obama. Even ur friends didn’t laugh🙄 https: . — 🌹Muva moon 🌙 (@_zolarmoon) April 30, 2017, katy perry is such a mess first she copied daft punk now she’s got an ugly haircut and is dissing obama omg, — miggy (@sehunfat) April 30, 2017, Wow Katy Perry. The reference to former Pres. Obama was offensive a poor, tasteless attempt at humor. Your privilege is showing. — Paris C. (@pariscarerra) April 30, 2017, What does black hair have to do with Barack Obama? You’re cancelled @katyperry. — Tonio The Divo ♕ (@_JayAntonio) April 30, 2017, One Twitter user pointed out that President Obama has more Grammy Awards than Perry, who has been nominated 13 times. Sometimes when I think that the world is an awful place, I remember that Barack Obama has more Grammys than Katy Perry, and I feel better. — Steph (@stphfrndz) April 30, 2017, Perry supported Obama’s reelection in 2012. To be sure, not everyone was offended by her joke. @PerezHilton @katyperry y’all twisted this up. she wants Obama back but can’t have him back … the same way people want her old hair won’t get it back its gone, — Jessica (@Jes00sica) May 1, 2017, Katy Perry meant she wants Obama back and can’t have him same way ppl want her black hair and won’t get it back … Christ ppl lol, — Wally Szczerbiak (@findingwhitney) April 30, 2017, Perry has increasingly found herself on the receiving end of online fury for what appear to be innocuous social media posts. Last month, the star came under fire after posting an image of a Hindu goddess on her Instagram page, captioning the photo “current mood. ” Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson | 1 |
Zika transmission has been confirmed in two neighborhoods in the Miami area, and pregnant women have been advised to avoid both locations. Federal health officials have also suggested that pregnant women and their sexual partners consider avoiding the entire Miami area. Zika infections are also occurring in Puerto Rico and in Latin American and Caribbean countries. • The vast majority of Americans have little to fear from the Zika virus. For almost everyone, including older adults, young children and people with compromised immune systems, it is a mild disease that usually causes nothing more serious than a low fever and an itchy rash. But because it can cross the placenta and attack fetal brain cells, it is dangerous to unborn children. Health officials have emphatically advised pregnant women to do everything they can to avoid it. • Although thousands of Americans have returned from Latin America and the Caribbean with the virus, almost all have recovered within a week or two. A few have passed it to sexual partners, but in nearly all cases, those partners have also recovered quickly. • Once people have had Zika, they are immune to the virus. They cannot get it again or pass it to their child. It is not yet known whether this immunity is for life, but it appears to be . • People can also pass the virus to Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which can spread it to other people. So far, that type of transmission has been found only in one small area of the continental United States, in County. How far it will spread is unknown, but diseases in that region normally begin to decline only when cold weather kills mosquitoes or makes them dormant. • Although Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have been found in 30 states in the past, it is unusual to find them in large numbers or for long periods anywhere except along the Gulf Coast and in parts of Hawaii. Mosquitoes can pick the virus up from a human during the roughly period that it is in a person’s blood. • people in southern Florida are believed to have caught the Zika virus from local mosquitoes. Of those, health officials believe 25 were bitten in or near Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood and five were bitten in or near the South Beach section of Miami Beach. In the remaining cases, some of them as far as 70 miles away, it is unclear where the patients were infected. Most of the cases were found in local residents, but some were not detected until visitors had returned home to New York, Texas or Taiwan. • Intense efforts, including aerial spraying, truck and backpack foggers, water treatments to kill larvae and requests to homeowners to empty containers, have been conducted in the Wynwood area since July. Aedes aegypti mosquito populations there have been reduced, but not eliminated. Control efforts will be intensified in Miami Beach, but aerial spraying cannot be included because the area has too many tall buildings and too much wind. Tourists and residents will be asked to wear repellent, but officials acknowledge that avoiding bites will be difficult because people there often wear shorts and bathing suits. • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have advised pregnant women to avoid both affected neighborhoods, and also suggested that pregnant women and their sexual partners stay away from all of County. • Obstetricians in the area have been asked to distribute “Zika prevention kits” to pregnant women. They contain insect repellent, condoms, mosquito nets and other items to help prevent and sexual transmissions. • No cases of syndrome, or other immediate but rare consequences of Zika infection, have been detected. Studies from other areas suggest that syndrome occurs in about one out of 4, 000 infections. The syndrome, a form of ascending paralysis that is usually temporary, can strike anyone but is more common in men and people over 50. • How much of southern Florida now has mosquitoes transmitting Zika is undetermined. There can be long delays between the time transmission starts and when it is detected. Most victims have silent infections and are never tested. When symptoms do occur, they can take three to 10 days to appear. Testing can take another two weeks and then, to confirm local transmission, officials must interview people about their travel histories. The state has many kinds of mosquitoes and only a fraction of the relevant species, Aedes aegypti, need to be infected to sustain an epidemic. In fact, no mosquitoes containing the virus have been found in Florida, but officials said they are not surprised. Finding an infected mosquito is like finding “a needle in a haystack,” officials have said. • How long cases will continue to occur is also unknown. The C. D. C. has said it expects Zika outbreaks to resemble those of similar viruses, like dengue and chikungunya, because they are carried by the same mosquito. In 2009, three dengue cases were found in Key West, the first occurrence of dengue in Florida since 1934. Although the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District rolled out a huge campaign, employing helicopter sprayers, backpack foggers, larvicide and teams of officers, the outbreak lasted two years. During that outbreak, 90 symptomatic cases were confirmed and blood samples showed that 5 percent of Key West had been infected. Key West is a small vacation island with a wealthy, highly educated population. County has a population of 2. 7 million. • How many of the Florida cases are in pregnant women. | 1 |
A list of witnesses scheduled to appear at a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Open Hearing on “Russian Active Measures” contains a glaring problem: the only technical experts scheduled to testify are from CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is a firm hired by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and has become the primary source of the narrative about “Russian hacking” of the 2016 election and has acted as a mouthpiece for the Democrats since last June. [The initial witness list released by House Intelligence includes a number of intelligence officials, all appointed during the Obama administration, such as former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, but the sole technical people on the invitation list are two representatives of CrowdStrike, President Shawn Henry, and the Dmitri Alperovitch. Breitbart News has interviewed tech experts who do not agree with the CrowdStrike assessment or Obama administration’s claims that the hacks clearly committed by Russian state actors, with much criticism aimed at the Joint Analysis Report (JAR) “Grizzly Steppe” that was released at the end of December. As ZDNet reported after the JAR report was released by the Obama administration on the same day that they announced sanctions against Russia: The JAR included “specific indicators of compromise, including IP addresses and a PHP malware sample. ” But what does this really prove? Wordfence, a WordPress security company specializing in analyzing PHP malware, examined these indicators and didn’t find any hard evidence of Russian involvement. Instead, Wordfence found the attack software was P. AS. 3. 1. 0, an hacking tool. The newest version, 4. 1. 1b, is more sophisticated. Its website claims it was written in the Ukraine. Mark Maunder, Wordfence’s CEO, concluded that since the attacks were made “several versions behind the most current version of P. A. S sic which is 4. 1. 1b. One might reasonably expect Russian intelligence operatives to develop their own tools or at least use current malicious tools from outside sources. ” True, as Errata Security CEO Rob Graham pointed out in a blog post, P. A. S is popular among hackers. But it’s “used by hundreds if not thousands of hackers, mostly associated with Russia, but also throughout the rest of the world. ” In short, just because the attackers used P. A. S. that’s not enough evidence to blame it on the Russian government. Independent cybersecurity experts, such as Jeffrey Carr, have cited numerous errors that the media and CrowdStrike have made in discussing the hacking in what Carr refers to as a “runaway train” of misinformation. For example, CrowdStrike has named a threat group that they have given the name “Fancy Bear” for the hacks and then said this threat group is Russian intelligence. In December 2016, Carr wrote in a post on Medium: A common misconception of “threat group” is that [it] refers to a group of people. It doesn’t. Here’s how ESET describes SEDNIT, one of the names for the threat group known as APT28, Fancy Bear, etc. This definition is found on p. 12 of part two “En Route with Sednit: Observing the Comings and Goings”: As security researchers, what we call “the Sednit group” is merely a set of software and the related network infrastructure, which we can hardly correlate with any specific organization. Unlike CrowdStrike, ESET doesn’t assign to a Russian Intelligence Service or anyone else for a very simple reason. Once malware is deployed, it is no longer under the control of the hacker who deployed it or the developer who created it. It can be copied, modified, shared and redeployed again and again by anyone. Despite these and other criticisms from technical experts with no political axe to grind, the House Intelligence committee has called no independent cybersecurity professionals to challenge the Democrats’ claims of “Russian hacking” that have been repeated ad naseum by the media. Instead of presenting to allow the general public to make up their own minds, the House committee has invited Shawn Henry and Dmitri Alperovitch from CrowdStrike, The danger is especially high since the subject involves technical details that the public — and, frankly, most politicians — don’t understand and can be easily fooled about. A presentation with no rebuttal at all from other technical experts will lead to even more disinformation being given to the American people. There are a number of reasons to be skeptical of the objectivity of CrowdStrike’s assessments. As Esquire reported in a long profile piece, the DNC specifically used Alperovitch and Henry as part of an publicity plan related to the hacking in early June 2016: The DNC wanted to go public. At the committee’s request, Alperovitch and Henry briefed a reporter from The Washington Post about the attack. … Alperovitch told me he was thrilled that the DNC decided to publicize Russia’s involvement. “Having a client give us the ability to tell the full story” was a “milestone in the industry,” he says. “Not just highlighting a rogue ’s actions but explaining what was taken and how and when. These stories are almost never told. ” The Esquire piece also indicates that as the election wore on, the Obama administration was also using Alperovitch and CrowdStrike’s claims to push the Democrat narrative that the Russians were behind the attack: On October 7, two days before the second presidential debate, Alperovitch got a phone call from a senior government official alerting him that a statement identifying Russia as the sponsor of the DNC attack would soon be released. (The statement, from the office of the director of national intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, appeared later that day.) It is worth noting that CrowdStrike and Alperovitch’s story has evolved over time to match a Democrat narrative. In an article in Inc. on June 14, 2016, titled “Why the DNC Hired This Cybersecurity Firm to Fight Russian Spies,” Alperovitch claimed that the purpose of the DNC hack was to expose Donald Trump: On Tuesday, it was revealed that the Russian government is implicated in a security breach of the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, through which opposition research on the bombastic presidential candidate was lifted. “Every world leader is trying to figure out who Mr. Trump is, especially if he’s elected president, and they want to know what his foreign policies would be. Russia is no exception,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, and CTO of CrowdStrike. His firm was hired to manage the breach. “The actors are also interested in any other information the DNC might have in their opposition research to use it against Trump if he becomes president,” says Alperovitch, who leads the Intelligence, Technology and CrowdStrike Labs teams. There is no justification for a technical expert like Alperovitch ascribing motives to the hackers or making statements about what “world leaders” think. It is simply outside his area of expertise, but the point of the Democrats using Alperovitch and Henry to promote their “Russian hacking” narrative is to provide a technical veneer to their story to score political points. Shawn Henry, the other House witness from CrowdStrike scheduled to testify on March 20 before House Intelligence, said on his LinkedIn page that he also works for NBC News, where he says his role is to “advise NBC News on all aspects of national, homeland, and cyber security, to include appearances on all NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC News programs. ” He added that he is to “regularly appear on Nightly News, The Today Show, and MSNBC news programming. ” CrowdStrike also has a financial connection to one of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats’ most supporters in Silicon Valley: Google. In 2015, CrowdStrike raised $100 million in a new round of financing, according to the New York Times, which reported that “the investment was led by Google Capital, one of the technology giant’s venture capital arms, in its first cybersecurity deal. ” As Breitbart News reported, the WikiLeaks releases showed that Eric Schmidt, executive of Google Capital parent company and financier Alphabet, appeared to be working directly with the Clinton campaign. All of this makes the reliance of the House Committee and the media on CrowdStrike disturbing, but even worse, earlier this year, BuzzFeed reported that the FBI did not examine the servers of the Democratic National Committee but, instead, based their assessment on CrowdStrike’s evaluation: Six months after the FBI first said it was investigating the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, the bureau has still not requested access to the hacked servers, a DNC spokesman said. No US government entity has run an independent forensic analysis on the system, one US intelligence official told BuzzFeed News. … The FBI has instead relied on computer forensics from a tech security company, CrowdStrike, which first determined in May of last year that the DNC’s servers had been infiltrated by hackers, the U. S. intelligence official told BuzzFeed News. … “CrowdStrike is pretty good. There’s no reason to believe that anything that they have concluded is not accurate,” the intelligence official said, adding they were confident Russia was behind the widespread hacks. Despite that claim by an unnamed intelligence official, there is reason to believe that what CrowdStrike has concluded is not accurate. At this point, however, the House Committee and the American people will not see it. Breitbart News has requested an interview with Dmitri Alperovitch, but at press time there was no response. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence says that initial witness invitation lists “may be expanded or modified as warranted. ” Follow Breitbart News investigative reporter and Citizen Journalism School founder Lee Stranahan on Twitter at @Stranahan. | 1 |
When Sofia Richie chopped her hair and visited a doctor’s office recently, Us Weekly was there. Not to be outdone, People heralded Mindy McKnight as “the voice for millennial moms. ” And In Touch offered an “adorable” picture of Sarah Wright Olsen’s infant napping next to a plush rabbit. Meet the striving celebrity underclass that has risen to dominate the gossip machine. Aspiring models, reality show stars, actors, YouTube vloggers and viral news subjects can now all curry coverage just by replenishing their social media accounts with photos of their babies, their butts or both. These are people you’ve probably never heard of — or have a nagging suspicion you might have, but don’t quite know why. For the record, Ms. Richie is a teenager best known for appearing on Justin Bieber’s Instagram account (not to mention being Lionel Richie’s daughter). Ms. McKnight films hair tutorials on YouTube. And because In Touch didn’t bother to explain who Ms. Wright Olsen even is, I Googled it. Turns out that after a supporting role on the NBC sitcom “Marry Me,” she now runs a parenting blog. These have crept onto our radar through our supermarket tabloids and Facebook news feeds, and a crop of publications has emerged to cover them, whether sincerely or satirically. The relentless Instagram gossip outpost The Shade Room airs their dirty laundry, the deliciously absurd podcast “Who? Weekly” pokes fun at their claims to fame, and Time Inc. ’s shiny new digital celebrity site, Instant. me, hopes to build on their brands. It used to be that the only way a person could land in the pages of the glossy celebrity magazines was to lose 100 pounds, serve as some heartwarming testimony to American values, or be murdered. But in the early aughts, the magazines started diversifying their coverage of Hollywood’s leading Jens and Bens with stories on the romantic dupes and plastic surgery nightmares of reality television. Now, as the rise of social media demolishes the leverage that celebrity tabloids once had over their most famous subjects, the gossip industry keeps defining celebrity downward. (After all, no magazine can match the reach of Taylor Swift’s more than 90 million Instagram fans or Kim Kardashian West’s 47 million Twitter followers.) When Ms. Kardashian West first rose to prominence, commentators sneered that she was “famous for nothing. ” The accusation seems quaint now: Tabloids have moved on from covering reality television stars like Ms. Kardashian West to following reality TV supporting characters, former reality TV stars, friends and exes of former reality TV stars — even people who post their own family dramas straight to YouTube. These days, gossip sites are also fueled by figures largely famous for doing nothing much. Jeremy Meeks, whose image went viral when Twitter swooned for his hot mug shot, has popped up on the websites of Us Weekly and People since his release from prison earlier this year. Instagram models like Ms. Richie, Sahara Ray and Bronte Blampied can milk months of coverage out of a couple of shots of themselves posing with Mr. Bieber. And Refinery29 recently ran a spread on the “Gucci Gang,” a group of four stylish Parisian girls whose central accomplishment is attracting a combined 50, 000 Instagram followers. As the de facto crew leader, Angelina Woreth, put it, “It’s easy to hate us, actually, because we are not doing something, we’re not really doing anything. ” Across the web, a new gossip press further enables these lesser celebrity castes. Drama generated by the young stars of YouTube, Vine and Musical. ly churns through nimble aggregation centers like Superfame and Trending All Day. The freewheeling Guru Gossip forum cuts through the glittery facade of online beauty gurus, while Get Off My Internets deflates the egos of the set. And The Shade Room, a gossip site focusing on black celebrities, pulls in 6. 1 million Instagram followers. While it posts plenty of news on known quantities (Beyoncé, Drake, Kevin Durant) it recognizes that some of the juiciest material comes from the smaller players (Tameka Harris, Karlie Redd, Keke Wyatt) who keep their names circulating on Twitter by spilling their guts on Instagram. Then there is “Who? Weekly,” the cutting podcast in which the hosts, Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger, guide listeners through celebrity’s confounding new frontier. The podcast’s name derives from the typical reaction of a layperson to reading a noncelebrity’s name in the news. As the hosts explained in a handy primer published in July, “the subjects of gossip coverage can be divided into two categories: Whos (as in: *furrows brow* Who?) and Thems (as in: ‘Oh, them. ’)” On a recent episode, they take on Brittany Farrar, the of Aaron Rodgers’s little brother, Jordan Rodgers (who is now dating the “Bachelorette” star JoJo Fletcher) who recently accused Jordan of cheating in a series of Instagram posts. “Why are we still hearing about her?” Ms. Weber asked. Mr. Finger replied: “Because she wants us — she did her due diligence in making sure we talked about her. ” And just like that: A Who was born. Legacy media companies are dancing as fast as they can to keep up. In May, Time Inc. debuted Instant. me, dedicated to covering the foot soldiers of social media. Instant sells its subjects — a constellation of YouTube creators, Snapchat fitness models and pets — as “The New Famous. ” It’s illustrated with a Tumblr aesthetic (dancing pizzas, glimmering diamonds, waving koalas) and littered with emoji. The institutional voice is synergetic like: “We’re hungryyyyyy and these slow cooker chicken tamales from Cooking Light sound amazinggggg. ” (Cooking Light is a Time Inc. property.) The site is sponsored exclusively by Degree, and every few minutes, Instant. me’s social stars jump eagerly into a deodorant ad. Instant’s prerogative is to constantly surface social faces (the recurring segment “Who to Follow” offers dossiers on emerging talents) while inspiring Instant viewers to join their ranks (“Just the Tip,” another segment, gives advice on how to build your own social fandom). A can watch Instant. me for hours without seeing a recognizable name, and that’s kind of the point. “The goal with Instant is for my grandmother to be able to go onto the site and enjoy herself and get caught up,” Kirstin Benson, Instant’s editorial director, told Adweek in July. Time Inc. has started a kind of publication on the just as the internet has atomized celebrity into a zillion tiny fandoms. Few people are typically energized by the generic category of “social media figure. ” They get their kicks by closely following a select few of their favorite stars, the stars’ friends and family, and a network of (often infighting) fans. The obsessive monitoring of all these channels drums up sufficient drama to create an enduring story line, even if only a few thousand people can manage to follow along. Plus, the setup provides fans the illusion of power in determining which Whos become Thems (Blac Chyna, a rap video vixen engaged to Rob Kardashian, is on her way toward recognition) and which seem destined to fade into permanent obscurity (I’m sorry, Sarah Wright Olsen). But these modern fandoms produce grist for too. There’s something deliciously surreal about monitoring the online movements of the barely famous, a class of people who are just unpolished, desperate and savvy enough to act mad, sloppy and sexy. The fact that publications like People and Us Weekly are covering it with a straight face adds another absurd layer. Besides, these people are assaulting our social feeds every day whether we like it or not. Outlets like The Shade Room and “Who? Weekly” have managed to extract bits of hilarity, delight and shame out of that arid media landscape. They have intuited what the traditional tabloids don’t quite get: The pursuit of celebrity has emerged as a grand tabloid narrative in and of itself. | 1 |
Management sees woman's untapped potential to work weekends 02-11-16 A MANAGER has identified one of his employees as having what it takes to work most weekends. Nikki Hollis, a junior marketing executive, has been working at her current job for just three weeks, but her manager has already singled her out as being what he calls ‘a weekender’. Manager Denys Finch Hatton said: “Nikki has the lack of social life and deep fear of losing her job that will drive her to slog her guts out on more Saturdays and Sundays than she can count. “She is a great fit for the company and has already responded to subtle manipulations to stay late, even on a Friday. “With the right continued guilt-tripping from me, combined with a gradual build-up of workload and stress, I’m confident she has a very bright future working here at weekends.” The company currently runs a rewards scheme for weekend-working employees called ‘Go Hard But Don’t Go Home’, which offers vouchers at an office cafe with the same name.
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ALPHARETTA, Ga. — A gray mood has settled over voters in some of the country’s most reliably Republican congressional districts, as the party’s stumbles in Washington demoralize them and leave lawmakers scrambling to energize supporters in a series of elections. While the next nationwide elections are not until 2018, Republicans have grown fearful that these voters are recoiling from what they see as lamentable conditions in Washington: a government entirely in Republican hands that has failed to deliver on fundamental goals like overhauling the health care system. Early missteps by President Trump and congressional leaders have weighed heavily on voters from the party’s more affluent wing, anchored in suburbs around major cities in the South and Midwest. Never beloved in these precincts, Mr. Trump appears to be struggling to maintain support from certain voters who backed him last year mainly as a way of defeating Hillary Clinton. Interviews with voters in four suburban districts — in Georgia, Kansas, Minnesota and New Jersey — revealed a sour outlook on the party. These voters, mainly white professionals, say they expected far more in the way of results by now, given the Republican grip on power in the capital. In opinion polls, they consistently give Mr. Trump mediocre approval ratings, even as he remains solidly popular with whites. In the past, presidents have suffered grievous losses in midterm elections, when their party’s voters have stayed home while the opposition party has marched to the barricades. Former President Barack Obama saw Democrats lose 63 House seats in 2010 after Republicans and disaffected independents stampeded to the polls and grumbling Democrats did not. It is too early to say if the same dynamic is afflicting Mr. Trump. But already, Republicans have strained to prop up their candidates in a pair of special House elections in the areas around Atlanta and Wichita, Kan. both in districts that have voted overwhelmingly Republican in past congressional races. Republicans spent nearly $100, 000 in ads boosting Ron Estes, a candidate in Kansas, who won a relatively narrow victory Tuesday night as turnout from the party’s voters slumped. Wary national Democrats invested little money in the race, prompting criticism from activists seeking to fight Mr. Trump’s party on every possible front. Republicans may face a tougher test next week in Georgia, where both parties have poured millions into contesting the seat vacated by Tom Price, Mr. Trump’s new health and human services secretary. At a shopping mall outside Atlanta, Eric Riehm, 48, said he was beginning to question the point of casting his ballot for Republicans. “The vote seems to matter less and less, because nothing can be done, just like repealing Obamacare,” said Mr. Riehm, who works in information technology sales and voted for Mr. Trump. That malaise cuts across regional lines: In the New Jersey district held by Representative Leonard Lance, a Republican, Joe Boyle, 61, said he took a dim view of Mr. Trump but still hoped he would turn things around. Mr. Boyle, who said he usually votes Republican, faulted the party for failing to “do the homework” on health care, and criticized lawmakers for focusing on their own interests instead of forging bipartisan agreements. “It’s all about ‘me,’ not about the better good of the overall population,” said Mr. Boyle, who recently retired as a marketing executive at Johnson Johnson. Of Mr. Trump, he added: “He’s a mess. ” Where Democratic activists have flocked to races, hustling to volunteer, donate money and quickly cast their ballots in periods, Republicans have seen no comparable energy on their side. They have taken special measures to drum up interest: In Kansas, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas held a rally to draw attention to the race, and Mr. Trump praised Mr. Estes on Twitter on Tuesday morning. But in an illustration of the rising frustration among Republicans, Mr. Cruz received his loudest ovation when he rebuked his own party. “We have a Republican president, we have a Republican House, we have a Republican Senate — how about we act like it!” he demanded. Mr. Estes ultimately won by 7 points, compared with a nearly victory margin last fall for the district’s previous congressman, Mike Pompeo, who now leads the C. I. A. And the enthusiasm gap between the parties was on vivid display: Mr. Estes won 62 percent fewer votes than Mr. Pompeo did last fall, while the Democratic vote was only 32 percent lower than in November. Should Republican voters remain so demoralized — and Democrats so fired up — it could imperil dozens of congressional seats that are usually safe. Midterm elections typically turn on which party is more enthusiastic about sending a message in the past special elections have served as political omens, like when former Senator Scott Brown’s upset win in Massachusetts in 2010 foreshadowed a building conservative wave. Republican anxieties run deeper than just the House. The gloomy environment has hampered their recruiting in a number of Senate seats, alarming the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, according to Republican officials who have spoken to him, who insisted on anonymity to describe those conversations. Joel McElhannon, a Republican strategist in Georgia, said intraparty wounds from the presidential race remained raw in areas Republicans badly need to win, making it difficult for them to turn out their voters. “It makes it hard to energize the broader Republican base when there are still these unresolved conflicts,” said Mr. McElhannon, predicting: “You’ll see it in various suburbanized districts throughout the country. ” Far from Atlanta, along the shoreline of Lake Minnetonka, Minn. — where the accents could scarcely be more different, but the taste in cars and politics is the same — voters in Representative Erik Paulsen’s district voiced a similar sense of unease. Mr. Paulsen has been easily since managing a victory the year Mr. Obama was first elected president. But Hillary Clinton won his district by 10 points in November, making it terrain that could turn competitive if centrist voters recoil from the G. O. P. That would mean a insurrection from the type of voters strolling along Lake Street in Wayzata or dropping off their dogs at the Lulu and Luigi grooming parlor, as Jackie Carley did with Tiny Bubbles and Viggo, two of her rescues. Ms. Carley, a moderate, said she would be more likely to support a congressman who would slow or halt the president’s agenda. “I’m a Minnesota person so I don’t want to be rude, but I’m not a fan,” Ms. Carley, a said of Mr. Trump. Others were less diplomatic. “It’s a mess,” said Gretchen Gilbertson, 51, a mother out walking her own dog, Pancake. “Congress can’t get anything done, and our president is a buffoon. ” Ms. Gilbertson vowed to do whatever she could to send Mr. Trump a message of disapproval in next year’s election. Paul Anderson, a state senator from nearby Plymouth, Minn. said voters there would judge their congressman on his own record. But for Mr. Paulsen to win Mr. Anderson suggested, he would probably “have to separate himself at some point from Trump. ” It remains to be seen if Democrats can fully exploit the turbulent environment. They hoped last fall that Mr. Trump’s unpopularity would drag down Republican candidates across the country, but the party won full control of government. And Democrats may face a tricky balancing act if the explosion of energy on the left collides with the native sensitivities of the districts they aim to win. Representative Josh Gottheimer, a moderate Democrat who captured a seat in the New Jersey suburbs last November, said he believed even some conservatives would be “ to voting for Democrats, with the right approach. ” “You have to find a very approach and one that is not ideologically rigid on either side,” Mr. Gottheimer said. “People are so fired up on the left, too, you have to make sure you are responsive there as well. ” In Georgia, the Democrat running for Congress, Jon Ossoff, has tried to walk that line, promising in ads to check Mr. Trump’s power, while also pledging to cut wasteful spending. He faces a fractious array of Republicans in an open primary on Tuesday. While the district easily Mr. Price, Mr. Trump barely carried it against Mrs. Clinton. Strolling briskly past Banana Republic and Orvis storefronts, Helen Thompson, 72, said she was dismayed that Republican disorder had endangered the seat. “I think the Republican Party needs to get together — they need to get their together,” she said. “I love Donald Trump, but I just wish he’d keep his mouth shut sometimes and I wish he’d listen to the people who know what they’re doing. ” Ms. Thompson, who worked at a brokerage firm before retiring, said she had voted early in the special election for Dan Moody, a former state senator, from a throng of candidates that includes Karen Handel, a former county commissioner in Fulton County, and Judson Hill, a former state senator. Other voters were less committed: Edward Holben, 62, an engineer on his way into Whole Foods, said he was not following the race closely but expected to vote Republican. Yet Mr. Holben said he was turned off by partisan rancor in Washington, and unsure of Mr. Trump’s ability to enact major legislation. He called the attempt to restructure the health care system so inept he was unsure Republicans were ever determined to pass it. “You want a rating?” Mr. Holben asked of the Congress. “How about a ?” | 1 |
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A voyage across the US-Mexico border, stitched together from 200,000 satellite images. Directed by Josh Begley. Read more here . [watch video below] | 0 |
Here is the problem . The USA constitution states only Congress can declare war yet Sanctions are a declaration of war made by non other than the bankster elite that has everrything to do with profit and nothing to do with defence . Far too much power for banksters to have and the profits they make are huge , The Office of Foreign Assets Control ("OFAC") of the US Department of the Treasury administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on US foreign policy and national security goals against targeted foreign countries and regimes, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers, those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other threats to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States. It is an issue no one has ever adressed anywhere . So no matter who you vote for its the banksters who go to war and no one ever elects them . | 0 |
Why isn’t that PIG son of a diseased whore not in jail? Don Duncan
Shouldn’t you post the follow up with this? SFCRetired
If they are so in fear for their lives that they must shoot every family pet that approaches them, they need to find themselves another job. Suzanne Morrison Dixon
Ain’t that the truth! I understand that some dogs are protective and can be aggressive, especially when something chaotic is happening in front of them. So, had the officer shot the little girl and killed her, would people be outraged? Or, would the officer be defended? I have no doubt there would be any accountability and people would say “He was just doing his job. His life was in danger. He feared for his life.” Give me a break! I agree with you though! Cops should never shoot their guns for any other reason than to injure, or kill and ONLY if their lives are really in danger. We have way too many trigger happy cops that shoot first and ask questions later. Sad thing is, this is what they are being taught to do. I know a few people who dropped out of BLET because of what they were being taught to do. They were also taught how to shoot and kill and how to make it justified. One of the BLET teachers was actually fired because of things he was saying and teaching his students to do. A student actually voice recorded him during class and when the accusation came out, before anyone knew about the voice recording, the officer teacher, the sherrifs dept. and the community, said that it was preposterous these accusations were being made against one of the most dedicated, and long time serving, officer. Then, when the recordings were released, people were just soooo shocked and couldn’t believe it! I mean, officers are honest and would never do things like lie and commit illegal activities, or cover up things, or plant evidence, or commit murder, or sexually assault women. No, because all cops are good and everything they do is justified. People need to wake up and smell the coffee. There are plenty of amazing officers who take their position seriously and live by their oath. But there are also lots of cops who are horrible people. Who are criminals with a badge and a license to kill, who have no damn place being a cop. Cops are human beings just like everyone else….they definitely can already be corrupt, or become corrupt. There are way too many cops out there who feel they are above the law. Sgt. Grimsley USMC
The officer has not been disciplined??? What? How? Freak accident or not, a little girl got shot. The cop needs to explain himself. Publicly. 2broke4 her
I cant remember the law as the actual way it goes but in general cops arent liable for there inept actions.. that is why they use the fearing for my life saying! While I was in Denver in 1992 to 1994.. a Black male with a criminal record running away from cops on a foot pursuit, got cornered by one cop in an multiple level Apartment complex. no outlet.. the man stopped put his hands in the air.. he was wearing only, tennis shoes and a pair of shorts.. as witnesses stated and they all said the same thing.. the cop drew down on him..the man turned around slowly with his hands in the air, no weapons on him.. he started begging for the cop not to shoot him.. the cop shot and killed him, while the tenants of the complex watched from their windows.. the cop claimed he feared for his life.. the chief of Police stated it was a good kill and IA cleared him of the shooting.. due to public outcry, 6 months later, the DA submitted to the Grand Jury a murder charge and the Grand Jury came back with a Charge for the DA, murder in the first degree! I left Colorado by then so I dont know the end result! Suzanne Morrison Dixon
And that happens way too much unfortunately. More of these incidents are being brought to attention thanks to smartphones…It sickens me though that even with proof of what cops have done, they still are hardly ever held accountable. Too many cops play arrestor, judge, jury, and executioner. It is sickening. Social Trending | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Continuing his sustained critique of the American capital justice system, Justice Stephen G. Breyer on Monday issued an unusual dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case of a Florida death row inmate who said his conviction had been based on flawed evidence and false testimony. Justice Breyer did not discuss the evidence against the inmate, Henry P. Sireci. Instead, he again urged his colleagues to reconsider the use of the death penalty, which he said was unreliable, arbitrary and shot through with racism. In the process, he addressed two other recent death penalty cases, from Ohio and Alabama, in which he said the court had also gone astray. In Mr. Sireci’s case, Justice Breyer returned to a longstanding concern, saying the court should have considered whether the inmate’s four decades on death row violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. “He has lived in prison under threat of execution for 40 years,” Justice Breyer wrote of Mr. Sireci. “When he was first sentenced to death, the Berlin Wall stood firmly in place. Saigon had just fallen. Few Americans knew of the personal computer or the internet. And over half of all Americans now alive had not yet been born. ” “Forty years is more time than an average person could expect to live his entire life when America constitutionally forbade the infliction of cruel and unusual punishments,” Justice Breyer wrote. Justice Breyer has long been troubled by what he said were excessive delays between death sentences and executions. “It is difficult to deny the suffering inherent in a prolonged wait for execution,” Justice Breyer wrote in a dissent in 1999, adding that “our Constitution was written at a time when delay between sentencing and execution could be measured in days or weeks, not decades. ” In response at the time, Justice Clarence Thomas said he found that argument unpersuasive. “I am unaware,” Justice Thomas wrote, “of any support in the American constitutional tradition or in this court’s precedent for the proposition that a defendant can avail himself of the panoply of appellate and collateral procedures and then complain when his execution is delayed. ” Justice Breyer also used his dissent on Monday in Sireci v. Florida, No. to explain his thinking about two other cases. He said he would have agreed to hear the case of an Ohio death row inmate, Romell Broom, who had sought to avoid a second attempt to execute him after a first one had gone awry. “Medical team members tried for over two hours to find a usable vein, repeatedly injecting him with needles and striking bone in the process, all causing ‘a great deal of pain,’” Justice Breyer wrote of the first attempt to execute Mr. Broom, quoting a court decision. “The state now wishes to try to execute Broom once again. Given its first failure, does its second attempt amount to a ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment?” Justice Breyer said the question was at least worthy of the court’s attention, and he suggested that the answer was yes. But the Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear the case, Broom v. Ohio, No. . As is their custom, the justices in the majority gave no reasons for turning down the case. Justice Elena Kagan indicated that she had voted to hear it, but she did not join Justice Breyer’s dissent. Justice Breyer is the court’s leading critic of the death penalty. In a sweeping dissent last year, he urged the court to take a fresh look at the constitutionality of the punishment. On Monday, he summarized part of his critique. “As I and other justices have previously pointed out,” Justice Breyer wrote, “individuals who are executed are not the ‘worst of the worst,’ but, rather, are individuals chosen at random, on the basis, perhaps of geography, perhaps of the views of individual prosecutors, or still worse on the basis of race. ” He gave one recent example of another case in which he said he would have granted review. On Thursday, he wrote, “this court, by an equally divided vote, denied a stay of execution” to Ronald B. Smith, an Alabama man who was sent to death row after the trial judge rejected the jury’s vote in favor of a life sentence. Mr. Smith was executed that night. | 1 |
ISTANBUL — The Turkish authorities extended their purge of state institutions on Tuesday, suspending more than 15, 000 employees of the education ministry for suspected links to a failed military coup last week. Shortly after the suspensions were announced, the High Education Board ordered the resignation of more than 1, 500 deans from universities across the country and revoked the licenses of 21, 000 teachers, Turkish officials said. By Tuesday night, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had either purged or detained nearly 35, 000 members of the military, security forces and judiciary in an effort to remove from the government bureaucracy and loyalists of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric whom the government has accused of orchestrating Friday’s coup attempt. Prime Minister Binali Yildirim likened Mr. Gulen’s followers to a “parallel terrorist organization. ” “We will dig them up by their roots so that no clandestine terrorist organization will have the nerve to betray our blessed people again,” Mr. Yildirim told Parliament on Tuesday. The purges of educational institutions are intended to blunt the influence of followers of Mr. Gulen, a rival of Mr. Erdogan’s who has been in exile in Pennsylvania since 1999. Mr. Gulen has inspired an international network of schools, including more than 160 public charter schools in the United States, which have won grants from the federal government. But Mr. Gulen’s movement has said it has no direct ties to these schools and he has denied involvement in the coup. Western diplomats have criticized Turkey for the sweeping expulsions and arrests in the wake of the attempted coup, urging Mr. Erdogan’s government to remain committed to democratic principles including respect for human rights and for the rule of law. Turkish officials say their response is appropriate considering that the plotters have been accused of trying to kill or capture the president. “It took several thousand soldiers to carry out this coup attempt,” the president’s spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin, said on Tuesday. “We have seen many of them on the streets and there are those that hijacked helicopters and . Many of those shot at innocent people and blocked the roads. ” “Then there were the generals that planned the coup and declared martial law,” he continued. “It is only natural that we apply the rule of law to arrest these people on charges of treason and trying to change the constitutional order of the country illegally. ” The Turkish government also widened its crackdown on news outlets sympathetic to Mr. Gulen by canceling licenses on Tuesday for a number of radio and television channels. Earlier this year, this Turkish authorities seized Turkey’s most popular newspaper, Zaman, after a court ruling placed it under state control. The newspaper was closely associated with Mr. Gulen and had become fiercely critical of Mr. Erdogan and his government. | 1 |
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President Donald Trump should expand the economy by welcoming illegal immigrant consumers, rather than by boosting Americans’ wages and productivity, says a growing chorus of establishment voices on Wall Street, the federal government, and industry. [“There are millions of [illegal] immigrants living in this country … [who] are not going out and shopping,” because of Trump’s enforcement policies, said Robert Kaplan, the head of the Federal Reserve of Dallas, and a voting member of the Federal Reserve which regulates the economy by adjusting interest rates. “They are staying home,” Kaplan complained during a May 31 presentation at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “They’re afraid if they go out they may not come home. ” Advocates for greater immigration rarely describe legal and illegal immigrants as imported customers. But those advocates are often quick to declare that enforcement of immigration laws will reduce consumer spending in the United States, to the disadvantage of businesses. For example, one advocacy group declared in March 2017 that: The Partnership for a New American Economy (PNAE) for instance, estimates that undocumented [illegal] immigrants wielded $157. 3 billion in purchasing power as of 2014 — which is money spent in numerous U. S. businesses. The PNAE is a group run by major business leaders who stand to gain from more imported consumers. That demand for imported consumers is also echoed by Wall Street advisors, such as Mark Zandi, at Moody’s Analytics, who predicted that reduced immigration would lower housing prices. In 2015, Google chairman Eric Schmidt bluntly called on the federal government to import more consumers. “Most stock markets assume modest growth, so how are you over a couple of decades to deal with the fact that of your [aging] customers are going to go away? … Well, one [way] is to produce more customers through immigration,” he said, adding that companies could also grow if they export more products and services. But business will get more consumers in American once a better economy draws more absent Americans from the sidelines and into the economy, said an official at Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. “We do expect consumption growth to be faster going forward than it has been in recent years, but this is more a of faster economic growth overall spurred by productivity growth,” said an official. “As firms invest more because of the Administration’s policies, labor productivity growth will rise and overall output will be higher. This is the main source of the increased growth in consumption that we expect,” he added. Business executives and their allies are already complaining that Trump’s immigration policies are nudging up Americans’ wages, as well as reducing consumer spending. For example, Patrick Harker, president of the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia, recently complained that Trump’s immigration policies are forcing up wages by enabling a labor shortage. “We’re feeling real tightness [in the labor market] and part of this is related to immigration policy,” he said. “Tightness” is the term used to describe a shortage in workers in the labor market. In a “loose” market for labor, workers compete against other workers for jobs, so allowing employers to pay lower wages. In a tight market, where there are plenty of unfilled jobs, employers must bargain with employees by offering higher wages and benefits, plus better condition and treatment. That “tight labor market” pressure also prods employers to find, recruit and train marginalized workers, including some of the millions of men who have quit the labor market since 2008. A tight labor market also pressures employers to invest in boost their workers’ productivity by buying machinery, such as tractors, forklifts, and robots. In turn, higher productivity means the employees can be paid more while still creating profits for Wall Street investors. Overall, the economy grows in line with growing productivity and growing population, either born or imported. The last time the nation achieved a tight labor market was in the late 1990s, just before President George W. Bush largely ended enforcement of immigration in 2001. The head of Trump’s main budget office, former Rep. Mike Mulvaney, recently dismissed business complaints about a tight labor market. Millions of Americans have fallen out of the labor market since the 2000s, he pointed out, saying “if you created economic opportunity and jobs that they want, they would come back. ” “So I’m not worried about the tightness of the labor supply,” Mulvaney told The Wall Street Journal. The OMB official told Breitbart: The participation rate among averaged 84. 0 percent in 2000, but by 2016 had dropped to 81. 3 percent. If the same labor force participation rate had obtained in this age demographic in 2016 as it had in 2000, that would imply an extra 3. 4 million people working [and consuming] in 2016. This is only a rough, but illustrative, indicator of the number of people who could hypothetically be in the labor force if we had maintained the peak participation rate that we had achieved in 2000. In fact, that huge number of missing workers are caused by the government policies, admitted a top economic advisor to President Barack Obama. “This [dropout] is caused by policies and institutions, not by technology,” said Jason Furman, an economist who chaired Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. “We shouldn’t accept it as inevitable,” he told a Brookings Institute expert, Dave Wessel in August 2016. Furman continued: The fraction of prime age men who are working or looking for work has fallen continuously since the 1950s. In the early 1950s, 98 percent of men in that age bracket had a job … [or] were actively looking for one. Today, that fraction has fallen down to 88 percent. … Understand it is quite large. The difference between a recession and a normal economic period is maybe two percentage points on the employment population ratio … so this is something that is more like 10 percentage points … The fraction of prime age men who are working or looking for work has fallen continuously since the 1950s. In the early 1950s, 98 percent of men in that age bracket had a job … [or] were actively looking for one. Today, that fraction has fallen down to 88 percent. In another measurement, dubbed the “employment to population ratio,” the percentage of men is stuck at 85. 3 percent, well below the 89. 7 percent rate in 1999, leaving at least 2 million men sidelined and out of sight. Take a closer look at the EPOP from today’s #JobsReport with @EconomicPolicy’s Autopilot Economy Tracker https: . pic. twitter. — Teresa Kroeger (@teresakroeger) June 2, 2017, In April, Kaplan called for the work participation be raised via additional training of workers — not via higher wages that would encourage workers to get their own training. He said: Although the labor force participation rate for workers is about 88 percent for college graduates and 81 percent for those who have attended some college, it is only 76 percent for those with a high school diploma and only 66 percent for those who have less than a high school diploma. In short, where there is substantial labor slack in the economy, it is highly correlated with segments of the population with lower levels of educational attainment. While there are a variety of reasons for this correlation, individuals in these segments would benefit from additional skills training in order to be more productive members of the workforce. The U. S. employment rate for men lags far behind the rate in Germany. During the 2016 campaign, Trump promised to change immigration rules to favor Americans, saying: When politicians talk about “immigration reform” they mean: amnesty, cheap labor and open borders. The [2013] immigration bill was nothing more than a giveaway to the corporate patrons who run both parties. Real immigration reform puts the needs of working people first — not wealthy globetrotting donors. We are the only country in the world whose immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own. Since his election, Trump has sharply reduced the inflow of illegal immigrants — but has not yet penalized companies that employ illegals. He has begun reforms to the programs, such as the program, but has not tried to slow or pause legal immigration. Each year, the federal government provides companies with 1 million new legal immigrants, plus 1 million temporary such as and workers. This inflow loosens the labor market, to the huge disadvantage of working Americans, and especially the four million Americans who enter the workforce each year. For example, the inflow of cheap labor cuts Americans’ wages and salaries by roughly $500 billion per year, nearly all of which is transferred to company owners and investors, according to data provided by the National Academies of Sciences in 2016. Also, the NAS report shows that federal, state and local government provide legal and illegal immigrants with at least $56 billion of taxpayer cash and aid each year, nearly all of which flow back into companies selling food, shelter, autos, retail products, and other consumables. So far, there is no hard data evidence of a national surge in Americans’ wages, despite handwringing about labor shortage by business groups. But there are a growing number of anecdotes about employers grudgingly raising wages, although mostly for workers. According to May 31 edition of the Federal Reserve’s “Beige Book”: Labor markets continued to tighten, with most Districts citing shortages across a broadening range of occupations and regions. Despite supply constraints impeding the ability of firms to attract and retain qualified workers, most Districts reported that employment continued to grow at a modest to moderate pace. Similarly, most firms across the Districts noted little change to the recent trend of modest to moderate wage growth, although many firms reported offering higher wages to attract workers where shortages were most severe. A manufacturing firm in the Chicago District reported attracting better applicants and improving retention for its unskilled workforce by raising wages 10 percent … Respondents in several sectors [in the Boston region] mentioned tight labor markets. None of our manufacturing contacts reported any significant hiring moves either up or down. A maker of envelopes said that they expected to hire significantly in the near future but not right now. Several manufacturing contacts said it was hard to find qualified workers. A manufacturer of semiconductors and related goods said that they had to raise starting wages to fill vacant positions in New England. A manufacturer of furniture said that retaining new hires was a major challenge as some workers quit within days of being hired. Staffing firms continued to report strong labor demand and tight labor supply. They singled out the following positions as particularly hard to fill: systems administrator, network engineer, and medical assistant. All contacted staffing firms indicated that bill and pay rates had increased … Pennsylvania staffing firms have remained very busy since the start of the year. Contacts from staffing firms in labor markets with lower unemployment rates have noted greater wage pressure, while contacts operating in markets with higher unemployment rates report minimal wage pressure … [Near Cleveland,] High turnover remains an issue in the freight transportation industry. In order to retain drivers, one firm increased driver pay by 3 cents per mile, equating to a 7. 5 percent wage increase. Attracting qualified applicants for manufacturing jobs is difficult, and many newly hired workers prove to be unreliable. That said, competition for workers is strong and is driving up starting wages … [In Richmond] Generally, contacts reported labor shortages for computer scientists, computer engineers, data scientists, welders, and technicians. Also, more manufacturers had difficulty finding quality workers for technical roles. Wages increased modestly for firms in most industries, and employment agencies said that clients had started to increase wages for positions that remained unfilled … There are also some anecdotes about companies which respond to wage pressure by buying machinery — much of which is made by Americans workers. According to Bloomberg: At Task Force Tips, which makes nozzles, a robot performs a task a person used to do, grabbing a valve from a miller and handing it off to a mechanized partner that feeds it into the final processor. By adding a dozen bots over the past four years, McMillan said, he’s been able to keep the family business thriving in the face of stiff competition from countries including China. And the company payroll in Valparaiso, Indiana, has stayed steady at about 250. Task Force Tips doesn’t fire anyone when it brings in a robot, McMillan said. Instead, people are for jobs such as machine operator or technician. That keeps morale up and allows employees to see the machines as an advantage, gadgets that can do menial chores humans find tedious … But many other companies are hoping imported labor can keep wage increases off the table. The Wall Street Journal reported: Ariens Co. a maker of lawnmowers and snowblowers, faces a bottleneck in its plans to raise production 40%. It can’t find enough workers. The Brillion, Wis. company bused some Somali refugees from nearby Green Bay to help, but they weren’t enough, and it is spending up to $15, 000 a month on recruiting. “We see the demand right in front us,” said Chief Executive Dan Ariens. “It’s very frustrating. ” Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart. com | 1 |
The comic book author and screenwriter Marc Andreyko felt unfathomable horror when he heard the news of the June 12 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Feeling compelled to help, he posted on Facebook a suggestion to create a comic book that would benefit the victims. The result is “Love Is Love,” a anthology filled with original work by contributors both familiar and unexpected. The book, which will be available Dec. 28, includes pages from the documentarian Morgan Spurlock, the actor Matt Bomer, the comedians Patton Oswalt and Taran Killam, and other entertainers. “I went through my Rolodex — to use a word for something that doesn’t even exist anymore — and looked for people who I’m friends with and had name value,” Mr. Andreyko said. “I want this book to be in as many hands as possible. ” Proceeds from the book, which will cost $9. 99 and be available in comic stores and for download online (with additional pages) will benefit Equality Florida, which has set up a fund for the victims of the Pulse shooting and their families. Mr. Andreyko, 46, said the inspiration for the book could be traced to his childhood. He fondly recalled the musical acts that came together for benefit concerts such as Band Aid and Live Aid and the song “We Are the World. ” He noted that the format of the book — no story is over two pages long — had been chosen to help lure contributors who had tight schedules. But Mr. Andreyko found the biggest motivator was the act of expression. “It was therapeutic,’’ he said. “By doing the art, it was purging for us. ” The offerings are diverse: There are stories that directly address the victims, some pinups, wistful ruminations and more. Brian Michael Bendis, one of Marvel’s most prolific writers, teamed up with his oldest daughter, Olivia, to capture a glimmer of a moment from the shooting at Pulse. They came up with a spread of revelrous dancers and a lone person in shadow looking upon them. “The idea that someone could stand in the middle of that club full of joy and fun and be drowning in madness was something we couldn’t get past,” Mr. Bendis said. Michael Avon Oeming drew the artwork, and Taki Soma colored it. Mr. Spurlock, who is working on a documentary about superheroes for the History Channel, wrote a story, with art by Kieron Dwyer, in support of the nation’s dedicated police officers. Mr. Spurlock said officers were sometimes tarnished as a group because of the actions of a few. “These guys still have to show up and do their jobs,” he said. One of the most unusual contributions comes by way of J. K. Rowling, who allowed the use of a quote from “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. ” It serves as a caption to an image of Harry and his friends drawn by Jim Lee, a of DC Comics. The pairing seemed only natural, Mr. Andreyko said. “If we get the author on the planet, we need the biggest artist,” Mr. Andreyko said. Mark Chiarello, a senior vice president of art and design at DC, added a watercolor rainbow flag to the drawing. The quote is by Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Harry’s school, who Ms. Rowling has said is gay, and drives home the point of the anthology: “Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open. ” | 1 |
Another reason as to why Ryan tried to sabotage Trump’s campaign?
Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com October 27, 2016 Hillary Clinton’s campaign circulated the name of one of Paul Ryan’s relatives as a potential Supreme Court pick, suggesting a conflict of interest that could feed in to the Republican Speaker of the House’s dislike for Donald Trump. An email released in part 19 of the Wikileaks Podesta dump features an article sent by Hillary advisor Sara Solow to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and Hillary’s foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan on February 29, 2016. The piece draws attention to Ketanji Brown Jackson, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “She was confirmed by without any Republican opposition in the Senate not once, but *twice*. She was confirmed to her current position in 2013 by unanimous consent – that is, without any stated opposition. She was also previously confirmed unanimously to a seat on the U.S. Sentencing Commission (where she became vice chair),” reads the email. “Her family is impressive. She is married to a surgeon and has two young daughters. Her father is a retired lawyer and her mother a retired school principal. Her brother was a police officer (in the unit that was the basis for the television show *The Wire*) and is now a law student, and she is related by marriage to Congressman (and Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan.” Earlier this month, Ryan said that he would no longer defend or campaign for Donald Trump. A poll released this week found that nearly two thirds of Republicans trust Donald Trump more than Ryan to lead the GOP. Many Trump supporters speculated that Ryan was involved in the leaking of the infamous Billy Bush tape, in which Trump made lewd comments about women, as part of a plot to sabotage the Republican nominee’s campaign. Could the fact that one of his relatives is being touted as a likely Clinton Supreme Court pick be another reason as to why Ryan – who has been accused by many of being in bed with the Washington establishment – has abandoned his support for Donald Trump?
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by Peter Schiff, Schiff Gold :
Next to Donald Trump’s economic policies, one of the most spirited economic debates at the moment involves which direction the dollar will move in the coming months. While Goldman Sachs is predicting the dollar and euro will reach a value equivalency by Q4 of 2017, other analysts see the greenback trending downward next year.
The dollar has risen 4.4% against the euro and 2% against a basket of world currencies since Trump’s win on November 8, according to Fortune. Big moves within securities and bonds markets since Trump’s victory are creating a general sense of uncertainty, making predicting anything a difficult task.
But for market veterans like Jim Paulsen of Wells Capital Management and Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital, the dollar’s demise is clear given inflationary anticipations mixed with short and long-term interest rate increases.
Paulsen recently described the weakening dollar as “the big wild card in 2017,” according to CNBC, and stating, “As inflation expectations go north, that’s a deterrent and a negative for the US dollar,” he said. Underpinning Paulsen’s theory are historical trends in funds rate increases. “There [have] been five major increases in the funds rates since the 1970s, and every one of them, when the Fed raised rates, the dollar came down.”
Schiff said he sees higher interest rates, stemming from inflationary pressures, as detrimental to the dollar. Despite the spike in bond yields, investors seem to be looking to Trump’s fiscal stimulus and tax cuts to provide demand side pressure, increasing consumer spending. Schiff explains: “So far the stock market is remaining oblivious to the spike in bond yields because they think the stimulus that might result from tax cuts and spending increases will be enough to offset the drag of higher interest rates. I think they are woefully mistaken.”
Paulsen also sees at a weak dollar providing a good opportunity for international investments. A weak dollar means US exports will be less competitive. Overseas markets could benefit as a result. Paulsen provides his analysis:
“I think those markets are under-owned, they’ve under-performed for several years … They’re better relative values,” Paulsen said. “They have younger earnings cycles than the more mature cycle in the United States. They’re going to have longer policy support than the United States will.”
A weak dollar will mean gold is likely to grow in value. Schiff thinks the recent drop if bullion’s price is only a head fake, stating: “people who are betting on the dollar and betting against gold have no idea the impact of higher interest rates. Buying gold and silver in the coming weeks could put investors looking to diversify their portfolio ahead of the curve. | 0 |
Well, duh. Wheat is no longer wheat, but a gmo hybrid. Many animals are fed this knock-off food, and now their milk and meat is contaminated. Promoted as the foods to eat, people have been getting poisoned for the past 25 years. Now we see the results. The government should never have been allowed to dictate what we should eat for health, because they have a vested interest in the profits from these unhealthy foods. The only fruits and veg that will be affordable is the mutant crap that monsanto sells seeds for, that can be made to yield ten-fold versus it’s counterparts. Time to move to a hippe commune! | 0 |
A male colleague grabbing her leg. Another one suggestively rubbing her back. Others at work dinners discussing who they’d want to sleep with. Jane Park talked about experiencing all of this behavior in her career in business consulting and strategy. Never has she reported any of it to human resources or management. “It’s made into such a big deal that you have to make a decision: Do you want to ruin your career? Do you want this to be everything that you end up being about?” said Ms. Park, who is now chief executive of Julep, a beauty company she founded. “What you really want to happen is that it doesn’t happen again. ” Her choice is more common than not, social science research shows. Employers, judges and juries often use women’s failure to report harassment as evidence that it was not a problem or that plaintiffs had other motives. But only a quarter to a third of people who have been harassed at work report it to a supervisor or union representative, and 2 percent to 13 percent file a formal complaint, according to a of studies by Lilia Cortina of the University of Michigan and Jennifer Berdahl of the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business. Mostly they fear retaliation, and with good reason, research shows. In response to a New York Times report this month of payouts to women who had accused the Fox news host Bill O’Reilly of sexual harassment, 21st Century Fox, Fox News’s parent company, said: “No current or former Fox News employee ever took advantage of the 21st Century Fox hotline to raise a concern about Bill O’Reilly, even anonymously. ” In interviews, women who worked at Fox said they didn’t complain to human resources because they feared they would be fired. Some women who experience harassment confront the perpetrator or confide in friends or family, the found. But the most common response is to avoid the person, play down what happened or ignore the behavior. Some don’t report a problem because they don’t think their experience qualifies as illegal harassment. An analysis of 55 representative surveys found that about 25 percent of women report having experienced sexual harassment, but when they are asked about specific behaviors, like inappropriate touching or pressure for sexual favors, the share roughly doubles. Those numbers are broadly consistent with other survey findings. Many victims, who are most often women, fear they will face disbelief, inaction, blame or societal and professional retaliation. That could be hostility from supervisors, a bad reference to future employers or the loss of job opportunities. Their fears are grounded in reality, researchers have concluded. In one study of employees, of workers who had complained about mistreatment described some form of retaliation in a survey. “They become troublemakers — nobody wants to hire them or work with them anymore,” Ms. Berdahl said. Paradoxically, official harassment policies and grievance procedures often end up creating obstacles to women’s ability to assert their rights, according to research by Marshall, a sociologist at the University of Illinois. “That is in part because companies put them into place as mini litigation defense centers,” Ms. Marshall said. “The way employers deal with it is to prepare to show a court or jury that they did everything they could, rather than to protect women in the workplace. ” There are many ways that company cultures discourage people who are harassed from reporting it. Sometimes the harasser is a superstar — someone who makes the company so much money that he feels powerful and uninhibited in his behavior because the company has considerable incentive to look the other way. The more someone has a reputation for harassing, the less likely a woman is to complain, Ms. Berdahl said: “It’s natural to conclude that if he’s been getting away with this for a long time, then the organization tolerates it, so why become the problem yourself by going to H. R.?” Other times the human resources department has no interest in helping the employee — or there is no such department at all. This is common in Silicon Valley, where companies grow so fast — and where disdain for bureaucracy runs so deep — that human resources officials often serve only to recruit employees. In February, a former Uber engineer, Susan Fowler, wrote that when she reported to the Uber human resources department that her manager had tried persuading her to have sex with him on her first official day on her new team, the department declined to take action. It said she could change teams or accept what would probably be a poor performance review from the manager. Uber has a new human resources executive and is doing an internal investigation. Ellen Pao, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, described an atmosphere of sexism and harassment at the venture capital firm — with little recourse. In fact, it had no human resources department. She sued and lost a trial. Organizations that are very hierarchical or masculine can breed more harassment, and less reporting of it, according to studies, because gendered power dynamics are a big driver. That’s one reason that harassment has been rampant — and underreported — in the military. Most sizable companies have policies banning sexual harassment and require some sort of training in what it is and how to report it. But much of the training has been shown to be ineffective, and at worst can backfire. The best way to avoid sexual harassment and ensure that it’s reported when it happens is to bake it into company culture, from the top leaders on down, executives and researchers say. “When you have an effective H. R. department that is supported by leadership, people feel safe about reporting harassment,” said Bettina Deynes, vice president for H. R. at the Society for Human Resource Management, a professional association. “It has a lot to do with the type of H. R. department: The motive is not the legal liability, but the culture you want. ” Culture is a squishy concept, but companies can do concrete things. One counterintuitive idea is to reward managers when complaints of harassment increase in their department, because it means they’re creating an environment where people are comfortable reporting it, according to a frank report published in June by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Here are some other ideas from the commission and researchers in the field: ■ Authorize dozens of employees throughout the organization to receive complaints, so that people can report to someone they’re comfortable with. ■ Hire an ombudsman. ■ Promote more women to positions of power. ■ Train people not in what not to do, but in how to be civil to colleagues, and how to speak up as a bystander — and have senior leaders attend the training sessions. ■ Put in proportional consequences, so that instances can be handled with conversations instead of firings or legal action. Ms. Pao, now the chief diversity and inclusion partner at the Kapor Center, a research, advisory and investment group that tries to make the tech industry more diverse, says she is pessimistic that company cultures will change unless it starts at the very top. “If you could fix the problem, then everybody could move on and thrive,” she said. “But often it’s not just the one bad player, so you may want to get out of the culture. ” | 1 |
Border Patrol agents found tens of thousands of of marijuana stashed inside a hearse. [Willcox Border Patrol Agents arrested a U. S. citizen attempting to smuggle 67 pounds of marijuana into the United States from Mexico on Saturday evening, CBP Arizona reported. Agents working at the State Route 80 Immigration Checkpoint near Tombstone stopped the hearse and after further investigation, decided to inspect the vehicle. During questioning, agents noticed several inconsistencies in the suspect’s story at which point they decided to bring in a Border Patrol to check the vehicle for possible narcotics. The service dog alerted agents to the presence of narcotics in the vehicle, and after searching the hearse, found multiple bricks of marijuana hidden inside a casket worth an estimated $33, 000. The driver attempted to mask the smell of the marijuana by mixing the bricks in with bags of manure. Border Patrol agents seized the vehicle after placing the man under arrest for alleged narcotics smuggling. Ryan Saavedra is a contributor for Breitbart Texas and can be found on Twitter at @RealSaavedra. | 1 |
The "74 year old senator from Vermont" would fit in 1917 Russia, but not America 1776. BTW there are PLENTY of founding father types around now. It is just that the statists who want freebies, and the statists that promise freebies have carried the day. Both of these groups then wonder why there aren't enough freebies to go around. Go figure. | 0 |
GERMANY: Christian priest gets stoned by illegal alien Muslim children shouting “Allahu Akbar” The Ethiopian vicar was visiting the town of Raunheim on the outskirts of Frankfurt when the pre-teens started throwing stones at him. The three Muslim children, aged between 10 and 12-years-old, shouted “Allahu Akhbar” as they threw the stones, the other priest who was visiting from a nearby church said. UK Express Dressed in traditional priest’s gear and wearing a cross around his neck, the 47-year-old was walking to the Russian Orthodox chapel in Frankfurter Straße with a local priest, who wished to remain anonymous, when he was attacked. Both priests tried to take photos of the children with their mobile phones, but the youngsters were too quick and managed to escape. Raunheim social worker Dr Isack Majura said he was going to do everything possible to get hold of the children. He said: “What happened is absolutely unacceptable.” (Get used to it) There have been a number of news reports of Christians facing attacks by Muslims at German camps, such as a case from October 2015 where a convert to Christianity was reportedly beaten unconscious with a baton by Muslim refugees at a camp in Hamburg-Eidelstedt. For example, a report earlier this year revealed that there had been no less than 743 reported attacks by Muslims upon Christians in invader centers in Germany. Yesterday, Express.co.uk revealed pupils at a girl’s primary school in the German ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen are being forced to chant “Allahu Akhbar” and “there is no God but Allah.” A father of a pupil claimed his daughter had been “forced” by teachers to memorize the Islamic chants. Weeks before, parents complained their children’s nursery was refusing to acknowledge “Christmas rituals” such as putting up a Christmas tree or singing carols to accommodate the “diverse (Muslim) cultures” of other pupils. In Germany, Christian refugees have to be separated from Muslim refugees because they are being peesecuted by the Muslims in the asylum centers. | 0 |
DNC Head Leaked 2nd Debate Question to Hillary October 31,
We're not talking about Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the ex-muppet in charge of the DNC who was forced to resign because of the way the DNC rigged the process to favor Hillary. This is Donna Brazile who was brought in to replace her to bring back integrity to the DNC. Since Brazile is another Clinton loyalist, that was never going to happen.
But the latest leak reveals that Brazile had passed along a second debate question to Hillary. All this just emphasizes how fraudulent and rigged the whole debate process was.
Another leaked email has emerged showing Democratic National Committee boss and former CNN contributor Donna Brazile sharing a debate question in advance with the Hillary Clinton campaign -- despite Brazile's persistent claims to the contrary.
CNN announced in a statement soon after the email became public Monday that Brazile had tendered her resignation and the network accepted it on Oct. 14, days after the controversy over Brazile tipping off the Clinton campaign initially broke.
According to documents released Monday by WikiLeaks, Brazile sent Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri an email titled, “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash,” the night before the March 6 CNN primary debate in Flint, Mich.
“Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint,” Brazile wrote.
The following night, Lee-Anne Walters, a mom whose twin boys stopped growing and whose daughter lost her hair during the Flint water contamination crisis, posed a question to both Clinton, the eventual Democratic presidential nominee, and her primary opponent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Clinton responded with a lengthy answer that moderator Anderson Cooper had to twice interrupt in an attempt to keep to the agreed-upon time limit.
How pervasive is this kind of thing in the process? We're getting a snapshot of how Clinton's people rigged the process and faked the results to favor them at every turn. | 0 |
Ian Greenhalgh is a photographer and historian with a particular interest in military history and the real causes of conflicts. His studies in history and background in the media industry have given him a keen insight into the use of mass media as a creator of conflict in the modern world. His favored areas of study include state sponsored terrorism, media manufactured reality and the role of intelligence services in manipulation of populations and the perception of events. Rock star Roger Waters said to lose $4m over anti-Israel activism By Ian Greenhalgh on October 28, 2016 [Editor’s note: This sorry tale of the persecution of a famous musician due to his moral stance against the fascist, racist, genocidal apartheid state of Israel starkly illustrates why so many others choose not to speak out – they know that they will be attacked and it will probably end up hurting them financially, in Water’s case, to the tune of 4 million dollars. As Waters himself said in an interview, celebrities are ‘scared shitless’ to criticise Israel. Ian] Rock star Roger Waters said to lose $4m over anti-Israel activism
Roger Waters’ anti-Israel activism has cost the British rock star millions of dollars and an American Express sponsorship, the New York Post reported.
The credit giant took off the table a $4-million sponsorship of Waters’ 2017 tour in North America following his partisan and anti-Israel rhetoric this month at a festival that American Express sponsored, according to the tabloid’s report Thursday.
“Roger is putting on a huge show. The company was asked to sponsor his tour for $4 million, but pulled out because it did not want to be part of his anti-Israel rhetoric,” an unnamed source from American Express is quoted as saying.
But an official spokesperson for the firm said it never formally offered to sponsor Waters’ 2017 tour. “When we were approached with the options, we passed on making a bid,” the spokesperson said.
At the “Oldchella” festival, Waters used his time on stage to blast the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and to call for a boycott against Israel, according to the Post.
“F - - k Trump and his wall,” Waters said at that event, calling Trump “arrogant, lying, racist, sexist.” He then voiced his solidarity with students protesting for Palestinians. He also urged people to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
Waters did not reply to requests for a reaction by the Post.
Earlier this year, Waters said during an interview that celebrities are afraid to “speak out against Israel’s policies,” as he termed it, because of what he described as financial consequences attached to doing so.
“I’ve talked to a lot of them, and they are scared s - - tless. If they say something in public, they will no longer have a career. They will be destroyed,” he said.
Waters, the 69-year-old co-founder of the classic rock group Pink Floyd, has been widely criticized for his anti-Israel activities and accused of espousing anti-Semitic symbols, though he has denied doing so.
In a 2013 concert in Brussels, Waters performed on a stage featuring a giant pig balloon emblazoned with a Star of David, among other symbols.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center called Waters “an open hater of Jews.” And the Anti-Defamation League’s then leader, Abraham Foxman, in an open letter to Waters earlier this month, said his “views on Israel are in fact colored by offensive and dangerous undercurrents of anti-Jewish sentiment.” Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by Ian Greenhalgh on October 28, 2016, With 474 Reads Filed under World . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . Both comments and pings are currently closed. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, signaling Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change — and much of the E. P. A. itself. Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the ’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal. ” Mr. Pruitt has been in lock step with those views. “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,” he wrote in National Review earlier this year. “That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime. ” A meeting on Monday between the and former Vice President Al Gore may have given environmental activists a glimmer of hope that Mr. Trump was moderating his campaign stance. Mr. Trump told New York Times editors and reporters that he does “think there is some connectivity” between human activity and a warming planet. With the choice of Mr. Pruitt, that hope will have faded. “During the campaign, Mr. Trump regularly threatened to dismantle the E. P. A. and roll back many of the gains made to reduce Americans’ exposures to industrial pollution, and with Pruitt, the would make good on those threats,” said Ken Cook, head of the Environmental Working Group, a Washington research and advocacy organization. “It’s a safe assumption that Pruitt could be the most hostile E. P. A. administrator toward clean air and safe drinking water in history,” he added. Mr. Pruitt, 48, is a hero to conservative activists, one of a group of Republican attorneys general who formed an alliance with some of the nation’s top energy producers to push back against the Obama regulatory agenda. Fossil fuel interests greeted Mr. Trump’s selection with elation. “Attorney General Scott Pruitt has long been a defender of states’ rights and a vocal opponent of the current administration’s overreaching E. P. A. ,” said Laura Sheehan, a spokeswoman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which works on behalf of the coal industry. “Mr. Pruitt will be a significant voice of reason when it comes to energy and environmental regulations. ” At the heart of Mr. Obama’s efforts to tackle climate change are a collection of E. P. A. regulations aimed at forcing power plants to significantly reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide pollution. Mr. Trump cannot unilaterally cancel the rules, which were released under the 1970 Clean Air Act. But a legally experienced E. P. A. chief could substantially weaken, delay or slowly take them apart. Beyond climate change, the E. P. A. itself may be endangered. Mr. Trump campaigned on a pledge to greatly shrink — or even dismantle — it. “We are going to get rid of it in almost every form,” he once pledged. Mr. Pruitt may be the right man to do that. As attorney general, Mr. Pruitt created a “federalism unit” in his office, explicitly designed to fight President Obama’s health care law and environmental regulations. “You could see from him an increasing effort to delegate environmental regulations away from the federal government and towards the states,” said Ronald Keith Gaddie, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma. Although Mr. Obama’s climate rules were not completed until 2015, Mr. Pruitt and a handful of other attorneys general began planning as early as 2014 for a coordinated legal effort to fight them. That resulted in a lawsuit against the administration’s rules. A decision on the case is pending in a federal court, but it is widely expected to advance to the Supreme Court. As Mr. Pruitt has sought to use legal tools to fight environmental regulations on the oil and gas companies that are a major part of his state’s economy, he has also worked with those companies. A 2014 investigation by The Times found that energy lobbyists drafted letters for Mr. Pruitt to send, on state stationery, to the E. P. A. the Interior Department, the Office of Management and Budget and even President Obama, outlining the economic hardship of the environmental rules. The close ties have paid off for Mr. Pruitt politically: Harold G. Hamm, the chief executive of Continental Energy, an Oklahoma oil and gas company, was a of Mr. Pruitt’s 2013 campaign. Mr. Pruitt, who grew up in Kentucky, moved to Oklahoma to go to law school. An avid baseball fan, for eight years he and managed the Oklahoma City Redhawks, a minor league team. He won a seat in the Oklahoma Legislature and opened a small legal office, which he called Christian Legal Services, to challenge government actions that he saw as compromising individual rights. As he ran for attorney general of Oklahoma in 2010, he made clear that he intended to use his power as the state’s top law enforcement official to attempt to force the E. P. A. to back down, convinced that it was wrongly stepping on state government powers. “There’s a mentality emanating from Washington today that says, ‘We know best.’ It’s a strategy, a kind of approach, and we’ve got to make sure we know how to respond to that,” Mr. Pruitt was quoted as saying during his election campaign in 2010. But that campaign, once Mr. Pruitt was sworn in, quickly became an opportunity to work secretly with some of the largest oil and gas companies, and the state’s electric utility, to try to overturn a large part of the Obama administration’s regulations on air emissions, water pollution and endangered animals, documents obtained by The Times show. As attorney general, Mr. Pruitt took the unusual step of jointly filing an antiregulatory lawsuit with industry players, such as Oklahoma Gas and Electric, the electric utility, and the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, a nonprofit group backed by major oil and gas executives, including Mr. Hamm. Behind the scenes, he was taking campaign contributions from many of the industry players on his team, or helping deliver even larger sums of money to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which he became the chairman of. Mr. Pruitt’s office also began to send letters to federal regulators — including the E. P. A. and even President Obama — that documents obtained through open records requests show were written by energy industry lobbyists from companies including Devon Energy. Mr. Pruitt’s staff put these ghostwritten letters on state government stationery and then sent them to Washington, moves that the companies often then praised in their own news releases, without noting that they had actually drafted the letters in the first place. Mr. Pruitt understood that he was being painted as a tool of industry, but in interviews and his own writing, he rejected that analysis, saying that he at times formed alliances with private sector players that shared his views — and was determined to help the energy industry and individual citizens in his home state. “It is the job of the attorney general to defend the interests and of the citizens and state of Oklahoma,” Mr. Pruitt’s office said in a statement in 2014 to The Times. “This includes protecting Oklahoma’s economy from the perilous effects of federal overreach by agencies like the E. P. A. The energy sector is a major driver of the Oklahoma economy. ” Mr. Pruitt repeatedly explained that he thought states themselves were in the best position to regulate local industries, be it oil and gas companies, or other players that might affect the local environment, such as Devon Energy, which has been a contributor to his political causes, and which he has helped push back against federal regulations. With so much at stake, Mr. Pruitt’s confirmation hearings promise to be heated. “At a time when climate change is the great environmental threat to the entire planet, it is sad and dangerous that Mr. Trump has nominated Scott Pruitt to lead the E. P. A. ,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, who sits on the committee that must confirm him. “The American people must demand leaders who are willing to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels. I will vigorously oppose this nomination. ” | 1 |
Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” during a discussion about the perceived policy changes between President Donald Trump’s campaign and administration, former CBS “Evening News” anchor Dan Rather likened Trump to a frog “jumping around” in a hot skillet. Rather said, “In terms of policy, including foreign policy, President Trump has been jumping around like a frog in a hot skillet. He’s reversed himself on any number of things. He questioned NATO and now he’s all in favor of NATO. He said the U. S. military is a disaster during the campaign now he’s for the military. He questioned the Federal Reserve, now he is maybe reappointing the head of the Federal Reserve. There’s a long list of these things. Chinese currency, first he said China is a currency manipulator. Now he says they aren’t currency manipulators. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes. This business of jumping around from place to place. Being unpredictable is sometimes helpful for a leader. But, if you are this unpredictable, you run the risk of running a dysfunctional presidency. That’s what Donald Trump is battling at the moment. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
Readers who picked up The New York Times on March 13, 1852, might have seen a small advertisement on Page 3 for a serial tale set to begin the next day in a rival newspaper. “A RICH REVELATION,” the ad began, teasing a rollicking story touching on “the Manners and Morals of Boarding Houses, some Scenes from Church History, Operations in . ,” and “graphic Sketches of Men and Women” (presented, fear not, with “explanations necessary to properly understand what it is all about”). It was a less than tantalizing brew, perhaps. The story, which was never reviewed or reprinted, appears to have sunk like a stone. But now comes another rich revelation: The anonymously published tale was nothing less than a complete novel by Walt Whitman. The “Life and Adventures of Jack Engle,” which was discovered last summer by a graduate student, is being republished online on Monday by The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and in book form by the University of Iowa Press. A tale of an orphan’s adventures, it features a villainous lawyer, virtuous Quakers, politicians, a sultry Spanish dancer and more than a few unlikely plot twists and jarring narrative shifts. “This is Whitman’s take on the city mystery novel, a popular genre of the day that pitted the ‘upper 10 thousand’ — what we would call the 1 percent — against the lower million,” said David S. Reynolds, a Whitman expert at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. But it also, Mr. Reynolds and other scholars who have seen it say, offers clues to another mystery: how a workaday journalist and mostly conventional poet transformed himself into the author of the sensuous, philosophical, wildly experimental and altogether unclassifiable free verse of “Leaves of Grass. ” “It’s like seeing the workshop of a great writer,” said Ed Folsom, the editor of The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. “We’re discovering the process of Whitman’s own discovery. ” That transformation was one that Whitman himself wished to obscure. He said little about the early 1850s, when he hung a shingle as a carpenter in Brooklyn and published almost nothing, working instead on what became the 1855 first edition of “Leaves of Grass. ” Later, he all but disowned his successful 1842 temperance novel “Franklin Evans or The Inebriate,” and had little interest in seeing his short fiction revived. “My serious wish,” he wrote in 1882, “were to have all those crude and boyish pieces quietly dropp’d in oblivion. ” In 1891, when a critic was planning on republishing some of his early tales, he was blunt: “I should almost be tempted to shoot him if I had an opportunity. ” That doesn’t faze Zachary Turpin, the graduate student at the University of Houston who found the “Jack Engle. ” In fact, this is the second time archival lightning has struck Mr. Turpin. Last year, he announced the discovery of “Manly Health and Training,” a previously unknown treatise that Whitman published in The New York Atlas in 1858. “A friend joked that that’s what would be on my gravestone,” Mr. Turpin said. The library of lost American literature includes many “known unknowns,” as Mr. Turpin put it (channeling Donald H. Rumsfeld) like Herman Melville’s “The Isle of the Cross” (the eighth and final novel he may, or may not, have finished) and Whitman’s “The Sleeptalker,” a seemingly completed 1850 novel he discusses in his letters, but which does not survive. Mr. Turpin has made a specialty of looking for the “unknown unknowns,” using vast online databases that compile millions of pages of newspapers. One day last May, he entered some names and phrases from fragmentary notes for a possible story concerning an embezzling lawyer named Covert and an orphan named Jack Engle — one of many entries in Whitman’s voluminous notebooks that the online Walt Whitman Archive had deemed to have no clear connection to any known published material. Up popped the advertisement that included the name Jack Engle. The serial was to run in The Sunday Dispatch, a New York paper Whitman was known to have contributed to. “My was really tingling,” Mr. Turpin said. Mr. Turpin ordered a scan of the first page from the Library of Congress, which held the only known (and as yet undigitized or microfilmed) copy of that day’s Dispatch. A month later, he was stunned to open a file showing a yellowing page containing “Jack Engle” and other names from Whitman’s notes. “I was at my ’ setting up a Pack ’n Play, when the email arrived,” he recalled. “From that day until now, I’ve had this simmering inside me. ” The tale, published in six installments, may not belong in the American literary canon. “It’s not a great novel, though it’s not a bad read either,” said Mr. Reynolds, the author of “Walt Whitman’s America. ” Mr. Turpin called it “rollicking, interesting, beautiful, beautiful and bizarre,” with antic twists, goofy names and suddenly revealed conspiracies that recall “a Thomas Pynchon” or even, he ventured, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. ” This may sound a long way from “Leaves of Grass. ” But Jack Engle and the other raffish young male characters, Mr. Reynolds said, are reminiscent of the persona — “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs” — he created with “Leaves of Grass. ” And then there’s Chapter 19, which Mr. Folsom called “a magical moment. ” Here, Jack enters the cemetery at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, and the madcap plot grinds to a halt in favor of reveries about nature, immortality and the oneness of being that strikingly echo the imagery of Whitman’s great work. “Long, rank grass covered my face,” says Jack, the narrator. “Over me was the verdure, touched with brown, of trees nourished from the decay of the bodies of men. ” Jack wanders among those bodies of men, copying out the inscriptions of the tombstones of Alexander Hamilton, the War of 1812 hero Capt. James Lawrence (of “Don’t give up the ship!” fame) and other lost lives. Then, he exits onto the streets, where “onward rolled the broad, bright current” — and quickly and rather indifferently wraps up his own story. “Throughout the novel, you constantly see Whitman wandering off the plot, looking for life in all the nooks and crannies of the city,” Mr. Folsom said. “With the visit to the cemetery, where all plots end, it’s as if he’s suddenly lost interest in all plots — or at least this plot. ” Today, we think of the radically expansive free verse of “Leaves of Grass,” with its wandering “I” who “contains multitudes,” as one of the fixed signposts in American literary history. But in his notebooks from the early 1850s, Mr. Turpin noted, Whitman was toying with other forms for his great work. “You see him asking, Should it be a novel? Or a play, with thousands of people onstage, chanting in unison?” he said. “It’s amazing to think that ‘Leaves of Grass’ could have taken a different form entirely. ” Mr. Turpin said the graveyard chapter put him in mind of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” one of the most famous poems in “Leaves of Grass,” where Whitman declares, “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence. ” But when asked how it felt to be the first in many generations to read Whitman’s novel, Mr. Turpin reached for another line. “Whitman said something really great: ‘Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,’” he said. “You really do start to believe it after a while. ” | 1 |
Home › POLITICS › IF HILLARY CLINTON IS CHARGED WITH OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE SHE COULD GO TO PRISON FOR 20 YEARS IF HILLARY CLINTON IS CHARGED WITH OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE SHE COULD GO TO PRISON FOR 20 YEARS 0 SHARES
[10/31/16] MICHAEL SNYDER -In the world of politics, the cover-up is often worse than the original crime. It was his role in the Watergate cover-up that took down Richard Nixon, and now Hillary Clinton’s cover-up of her email scandal could send her to prison for a very, very long time. When news broke that the FBI has renewed its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, it sent shockwaves throughout the political world . But this time around, we aren’t just talking about an investigation into the mishandling of classified documents. I haven’t heard anyone talking about this, but if the FBI discovers that Hillary Clinton altered, destroyed or concealed any emails that should have been turned over to the FBI during the original investigation, she could be charged with obstruction of justice. That would immediately end her political career, and if she was found guilty it could send her to prison for the rest of her life.
I have not seen a single news report mention the phrase “obstruction of justice” yet, but I am convinced that there is a very good chance that this is where this scandal is heading. The following is the relevant part of the federal statute that deals with obstruction of justice …
Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsified, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under Title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
If Hillary Clinton is sent to prison for 20 years, that would essentially be for the rest of her life.
I have a feeling that the FBI is going to find a great deal of evidence of obstruction of justice in Huma Abedin’s emails. But unfortunately there is not likely to be a resolution to this matter before November 8th, because according to the Wall Street Journal there are approximately 650,000 emails to search through…
As federal agents prepare to scour roughly 650,000 emails to see how many relate to a prior probe of Hillary Clinton ’s email use, the surprise disclosure that investigators were pursuing the potential new evidence lays bare building tensions inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential nominee.
Metadata found on the laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide, suggests there may be thousands of emails sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter. It will take weeks, at a minimum, to determine whether those messages are work-related from the time Ms. Abedin served with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe.
Of those 650,000 emails, an inside source told Fox News that “ at least 10,000 ” would be of interest to the investigation.
At this point, FBI officials have not even begun searching through the emails, because a search warrant has not been secured yet. The following comes from CNN …
Government lawyers haven’t yet approached Abedin’s lawyers to seek an agreement to conduct the search. Sources earlier told CNN that those discussions had begun, but the law enforcement officials now say they have not.
Either way, government lawyers plan to seek a search warrant from a judge to conduct the search of the computer, the law enforcement officials said.
But the FBI is reportedly already searching a laptop that was co-owned by Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin, and no warrant was necessary for that search because Weiner is cooperating with the FBI.
Many have been wondering why FBI Director James Comey would choose to make such a bold move just over a week until election day. Surely he had to know that this would have a dramatic impact on the election, and it is unlikely that he would have done so unless someone had already found something really big. In addition, Comey was reportedly eager to find an opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of his peers at the FBI. The following is an excerpt from a Daily Mail article that was written by Ed Klein, the author of a recently released New York Times bestseller about the Clintons entitled “ Guilty As Sin “…
‘The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn’t recommend an indictment against Hillary,’ said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass every week.
‘Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,’ said the source. ‘They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.’
According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice.
He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom.
So what happens next?
In the most likely scenario, the FBI will not have time to complete the investigation and decide whether or not to charge Hillary Clinton before the election. This means that we would go into November 8th with this scandal hanging over the Clinton campaign, and that would seem to be very good news for Donald Trump.
However, it is possible that once the FBI starts searching through these emails that they could come to the conclusion very rapidly that charges against Clinton are warranted, and if that happens we could still see some sort of announcement before election day.
In the unlikely event that does happen, we could actually see Hillary Clinton forced out of the race before November 8th.
Once again, this appears to be very unlikely at this point, but it is still possible.
If Clinton was forced to step aside, the Democrats would need to come up with a new nominee, and that process would take time. In an article later today on The Most Important News I will reveal who I believe that nominee would be.
In such a scenario, the Democrats would desperately need time to get their act together, and so we could actually see Barack Obama attempt to delay or suspend the election . The legality of such a move is highly questionable, but Barack Obama has not allowed a little thing like the U.S. Constitution to stop him in the past.
This week is going to be exceedingly interesting – that is for sure.
The craziest election in modern American history just keeps getting crazier, and I have a feeling that even more twists and turns are ahead.
It sure seems ironic that Anthony Weiner is playing such a central role this late in the story, and I can’t wait to see what is in store for the season finale. Post navigation | 0 |
When I attempt to share your stuff on Facebook it rejects it.Also some pop up tabs appear every timr I try to comment.Is your site safe? | 0 |
Federal District Court Judge James Robart’s ruling on Friday placed a temporary restraining order (TRO) on many elements of President Trump’s executive order temporarily banning refugees from all countries and blocking the issuance of visas from seven Middle Eastern companies. [It did not, however, put a stop to what may be the most significant element of the executive order, Section 5 d, which limited the number of refugees allowed to enter the United States in FY 2017 to 50, 000. By doing so, even the federal judge who has most broadly asserted powers to limit the executive powers exercised by President Trump acknowledged what legal experts on both sides of the issue have long known: The Refugee Act of 1980 grants the president the sole authority to determine the number of refugees allowed into the country in a year. That spells bad news for advocates. In the four months and five days since FY 2017 began on October 1, 2016, a total of 32, 968 refugees have legally entered the country. That means that over the next seven months and 23 days that remain in FY 2017, the maximum that can come into the country is 17, 032, or slightly more than 2, 000 month. That contrasts significantly with the 8, 000 plus per month that have arrived in FY 2017 to date, and the 7, 000 per month that arrived in FY 2016, when a total of 84, 995 refugees legally entered the country. Although Washington State Attorney General Robert W. Ferguson’s complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief, filed in United States District Court, Western District of Washington on January 30, criticized all the key elements of the executive order as unconstitutional, his prayer for relief specifically did not request a temporary restraining order halting Section 5( d) which stated: Pursuant to section 212( f) of the INA, 8 U. S. C. 1182( f) I hereby proclaim that the entry of more than 50, 000 refugees in fiscal year 2017 would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and thus suspend any such entry until such time as I determine that additional admissions would be in the national interest. Judge Robart’s temporary restraining order (TRO) signed on February 3, ordered: (a) Enforcing Section 3( c) of the Executive Order( b) Enforcing Section 5( a) of the Executive Order( c) Enforcing Section 5( b) of the Executive Order( d) Enforcing Section 5( c) of the Executive Order( e) Enforcing Section 5( e) of the Executive Order to the extent Section 5( e) purports to prioritize refugee claims of certain religious minorities. Notably, Robarts did not go beyond the prayer for relief in the complaint filed by the Washington State Attorney General, which was joined prior to his order by the Attorney General for the state of Minnesota, and made no attempt to challenge President Trump’s legal and constitutional authority to set an annual limit on the number of refugees allowed to enter the country. Robarts did take the unusual step to grant the TRO “on a nationwide basis. ” Robarts explained in his order: Although Federal Defendants argued that any TRO should be limited to the States at issue (see Resp. at 30) the resulting partial implementationof the Executive Order “would undermine the constitutional imperative of ‘a uniform Rule of Naturalization’ and Congress’s instruction that ‘the immigration laws of the United States should be enforced vigorously and uniformly. ” Texas v. United States, 809 F. 3d 134, 155 (5th Circ. 2015). Many other important elements of the executive order also remain standing after Judge Robart’s ruling, among them: Sec. 3 (a) Suspension of Issuance of Visas and Other Immigration Benefits to Nationals of Countries of Particular Concern. The Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence, shall immediately conduct a review to determine the information needed from any country to adjudicate any visa, admission, or other benefit under the INA (adjudications) in order to determine that the individual seeking the benefit is who the individual claims to be and is not a security or threat. Sec. 4 (a) Implementing Uniform Screening Standards for All Immigration Programs. The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation shall implement a program, as part of the adjudication process for immigration benefits, to identify individuals seeking to enter the United States on a fraudulent basis with the intent to cause harm, or who are at risk of causing harm subsequent to their admission. Sec. 5 (g) State and local jurisdiction involvement, It is the policy of the executive branch that, to the extent permitted by law and as practicable, State and local jurisdictions be granted a role in the process of determining the placement or settlement in their jurisdictions of aliens eligible to be admitted to the United States as refugees. To that end, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall examine existing law to determine the extent to which, consistent with applicable law, State and local jurisdictions may have greater involvement in the process of determining the placement or resettlement of refugees in their jurisdictions, and shall devise a proposal to lawfully promote such involvement. Judge Robart’s past conduct has raised some eyebrows. “According to a video posted on the federal court’s website, Robart said “black lives matter” during a court hearing in August 2016. Citing FBI statistics, he said, “Police shootings resulting in deaths involved 41% black people, despite being only 20% of the population living in those cities,” CNN reported. Then there’s the question of whether he should have recused himself from hearing this case. At his confirmation hearings in 2004, Sen. Orrin Hatch revealed that Robart had done “pro bono work” for refugees. Mr. Robart has exceptional qualifications for the Federal bench. After graduating from Georgetown University Law Center in 1973 where he was the administrative editor of the Georgetown University Law Review, he joined the law firm of Lane, Powell, Moss Miller, which is now known as Lane Powell Spears Lubersky LLP. Mr. Robart became a partner in that firm in 1980, and subsequently became the partner and later the sole managing partner — a position that he holds today. During his time at the firm, Mr. Robart has specialized in complex commercial litigation with an emphasis on class actions, securities, and employment law. He brings a wealth of trial experience to the Federal bench after trying in excess of 50 cases to verdict or judgment as sole or lead counsel, and he has been active in the representation of the disadvantaged through his work with Evergreen Legal Services and the the independent representation of Southeast Asian refugees. The question of recusal was apparently not raised by attorneys from the Department of Justice during the pleadings before Judge Robarts, but it may arise on appeal. | 1 |
Chart Of The Day: Sorry, Mario! The Printing Press Can't Fix The Welfare State By David Stockman. Posted On Monday, November 21st, 2016
David Stockman's Contra Corner is the only place where mainstream delusions and cant about the Warfare State, the Bailout State, Bubble Finance and Beltway Banditry are ripped, refuted and rebuked. Subscribe now to receive David Stockman’s latest posts by email each day as well as his model portfolio, Lee Adler’s Daily Data Dive and David’s personally curated insights and analysis from leading contrarian thinkers. | 0 |
Philippines Will Not Be a ‘Dog Barking for Crumbs’
Well, thank goodness for that. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — President Trump has no regrets. His staff has no defense. After weeks of assailing reporters and critics in diligent defense of their boss, Mr. Trump’s team has been uncharacteristically muted this week when pressed about his explosive — and so far — Twitter posts on Saturday accusing President Barack Obama of tapping phones in Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. The accusation — and the F. B. I. director, James B. Comey, and the former national intelligence director, James R. Clapper Jr. emphatically deny that any such wiretap was requested or issued — constitutes one of the most consequential accusations made by one president against another in American history. So for Mr. Trump’s allies inside the West Wing and beyond, the tweetstorm spawned the mother of all messaging migraines. Over the past few days, they have executed what amounts to a strategic political retreat — trying to publicly validate Mr. Trump’s suspicions without overtly endorsing a claim some of them believe might have been generated by Breitbart News and other outlets. “No, that’s above my pay grade,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary and a feisty Trump loyalist, when asked on Tuesday at an briefing if he had seen any evidence to back up Mr. Trump’s accusation. The reporters kept at him, but Mr. Spicer pointedly and repeatedly refused to offer personal assurances that the president’s statements were true. “No comment,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said earlier in the day. Last week, Mr. Sessions recused himself from any investigations involving the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia. “I don’t know anything about it,” John F. Kelly, the homeland security secretary, said on CNN on Monday. Mr. Kelly shrugged and added that “if the president of the United States said that, he’s got his reasons to say it. ” Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, have said they will add Mr. Trump’s request to inquiries into intelligence community leaks. But Mr. Nunes and Mr. Burr said they had not seen specific evidence backing up Mr. Trump’s claim. Other Hill Republicans have responded with similar verbal shrugs. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a member of the Intelligence Committee, said on Tuesday that he “didn’t know what the basis” of Mr. Trump’s statement was. Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts, viewed with amazement outside the West Wing bubble, often create crises on the inside. That was never truer than when Mr. Trump began posting from his weekend retreat at his estate in Florida shortly after sunrise on Saturday. His groggy staff realized quickly that this was no typical Trump broadside, but an allegation with potentially implications that threatened to derail a coming week that included the rollout of his redrafted travel ban and the unveiling of the Republican plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. It began at 6:35 a. m. with a Twitter post reading: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Three other posts quickly followed, capped by a 7:02 rocket that read: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is . Bad (or sick) guy!” That led to a succession of frantic staff conference calls, including one consultation with the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, as staff members grasped the reality that the president had opened an attack on his predecessor. Mr. Trump, advisers said, was in high spirits after he fired off the posts. But by midafternoon, after returning from golf, he appeared to realize he had gone too far, although he still believed Mr. Obama had wiretapped him, according to two people in Mr. Trump’s orbit. He sounded defiant in conversations at with his friend Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media, Mr. Ruddy said. In other conversations that afternoon, the president sounded uncertain of the procedure for obtaining a warrant for secret wiretaps on an American citizen. Mr. Trump also canvassed some aides and associates about whether an investigator, even one outside the government, could substantiate his charge. People close to Mr. Trump had seen the pattern before. The episode echoed repeated instances in the 2016 presidential campaign. During the primary contests, Mr. Trump seized on a false National Enquirer article that raised a connection between the father of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Later, Mr. Trump justified it to skeptical campaign aides by saying, “Even if it isn’t totally true, there’s something there,” according to a former campaign official. Over the weekend, aides to Mr. Trump decided the only real solution to the presidential Twitter posts was to kick the allegations to Congress. On Sunday, Mr. Spicer issued a statement saying that the matter was effectively closed and that the president would not address it again until the intelligence committees had released their findings — which could be many months away. But that has not quieted the uproar. Mr. Comey was incensed by Mr. Trump’s accusation because it implied that the F. B. I. had broken the law, and he pressed the Justice Department, unsuccessfully, to deny it. On Tuesday, even as Mr. Spicer was telling reporters that the matter was above his pay grade, he said the president had “absolutely” no intention of taking back his accusations. Mr. Trump has not spoken to Mr. Comey about the matter, Mr. Spicer said, offering a muted response when asked if the F. B. I. director retained the president’s confidence. “I have no reason to believe he doesn’t,” Mr. Spicer said, adding that Mr. Trump “has not suggested that to me. ” Mr. Spicer bristled when pressed by a reporter to weigh in on the veracity of the president’s wiretapping allegation. “I get that that’s a cute question to ask,” he said. “I think we’ve tried to play this game before. I’m not here to speak for myself. I’m here to speak for the president of the United States and our government. ” | 1 |
The assassin who gunned down a prominent Russian opposition figure on a sidewalk in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev was identified by Ukrainian officials on Friday as a Russian agent. Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the country’s interior minister, identified the agent as Pavel Parshov, who had undergone “a special course at a school for saboteurs,” he said in a Facebook post. The gunman was himself grievously wounded by a bodyguard for the target, Denis N. Voronenkov, and subsequently died in the hospital. The allegation was immediately dismissed by Dmitri S. Peskov, the spokesman for the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, as “absurd. ” Mr. Voronenkov was a member of the Russian Parliament before defecting to Ukraine last year with his wife, Maria Maksakova, also a politician. He had offered to testify for the prosecution in a criminal case against Viktor F. Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine who was driven from office by street demonstrators in 2014. He promised to deliver an insider’s account of the Kremlin’s deliberations and actions during the annexation of Crimea the same year. A former prosecutor before joining Parliament, Mr. Voronenkov had socialized with people in Mr. Putin’s circle, including Vladislav Surkov, a political adviser to Mr. Putin who attended Mr. Voronenkov’s wedding. The Ukrainian National Guard released a statement saying that Mr. Parshov had enlisted and served from 2015 to 2016, before being dismissed for breach of contract. His exact offense was not specified. Critics and opponents of Mr. Putin and his Kremlin cronies have been assassinated in a variety of ways over the years, often in spectacular fashion so as to send a message, Kremlin watchers say. The most celebrated was the poisoning of Alexander V. Litvinenko with a rare and deadly radioactive isotope, polonium 210, administered in a drink in the Millennium Hotel in London in 2006. When the prominent opposition figure Boris Y. Nemtsov was murdered in 2015, his body fell on the sidewalk of a bridge with the Kremlin and the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral as a backdrop. Sometimes the killings are more prosaic. Numerous potential witnesses to the death of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer who died of neglect in a Russian prison, have disappeared, been poisoned or suffered “heart attacks” that were later found to be the result of ingesting a rare Chinese herb. | 1 |
BREAKING : Desperate Iraqi Christians PRAY for a TRUMP VICTORY BREAKING : Desperate Iraqi Christians PRAY for a TRUMP VICTORY Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 7, 2016 Donald Trump is the ONLY one who can rid the world of ISIS.
After all, Hillary, Qatar, and the Saudis created them, so trust me, with her, ISIS isn’t going anywhere.
The world knows this – Americans need to understand it as well – Hillary is a foreign policy wrecking ball of failure.
She’s made a massive mess of everything in the Middle East – Lybia being the biggest DISASTER yet.
Thanks in large part to Hillary Clinton’s disastrous decisions, we live in a SCARY world.
She’s destabilized an entire continent (Africa) and caused a massive migration of these refugees, which are destroying Europe.
…..and now, she wants to go to war with Russia.
She’s a warmongering NIGHTMARE.
The Christians people in Iraq who have felt the WRATH of ISIS “get it.”
They’re praying for a Trump victory.
Join them in prayer and VOTE.
If we vote, we win. First mass in over two years in the city of Qaraqosh, Iraq. pic.twitter.com/QrAyqmfifv
— Ali Ajeena (@AliAjeena) November 3, 2016
From Express.co
IRAQI Christians will pray for Donald Trump’s election victory after they condemned US Government for “abandoning” them to the barbaric terror of Islamic State.
The Christian community in the latest Iraqi town to be freed from ISIS have opened up about how they were terrorised at the hands of the twisted jihadi militants.
The once-bustling Qaraqosh, which boasted of more than 50,000 Christian residents, was recaptured from the jihadis last week.
Residents who stayed in the town have described how ISIS told every Christian to pay a massive tax, convert to Islam or face execution…
…Those who survived the terror have now voiced their outrage that President Obama refused to protect them when Iraq’s largest Christian city fell to ISIS more than two years ago.
A man in the village said he hopes Donald Trump – a widely favoured candidate in the town – will bring a different approach to Iraqi Christians.
He told the camera: “Obama has never helped the Christians. In fact, he despises them. In the last 26 months, he has shown he despises all of them.
“But we have hope in the new president, Trump. This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First ! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. | 0 |
Hillaryous! Huckabee Compares Clintons to THESE Famous Mobsters. Posted at 4:11 pm on October 29, 2016 by Evie L.
The Clintons, much like a mob family, have managed to avoid being caught or held accountable for any of its many, serious wrongdoings — except there’s another infamous mob family who bested the Clintons in one particular way. Difference between Clintons and Sopranos? Sopranos didn't leave an email trail.
— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) October 28, 2016
After news broke Friday about the FBI re-opening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails due to her use of a private and unsecured server, the former Republican Arkansas governor tweeted that the only difference between the Democratic presidential nominee, her husband Bill Clinton and the fictional mob family from the popular HBO series “The Sopranos” was that the Sopranos “didn’t leave an email trail.” Trending | 0 |
In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil. A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe. Flanked on the stage by twin columns of attendants, she was a galactic goddess in a white ermine cape. In November, on “Saturday Night Live,” her sister, Solange Knowles, flaunted a headdress of crystals and braids, looking every inch a regal visitor from distant planet. Each was in her way a beacon of Afrofuturism, a social, political and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors and their heroic like into a fantasy landscape, one that has long been the province of their mostly white counterparts. [See more Year in Style articles] Familiar to some, exotic to others, the term refers loosely to an unlikely fusion of parts: Egyptian and other mythologies, mysticism and magical realism with Afrocentricity, modern technology and science fiction. A freighted concept in more ways than one, it gained traction this year, muscling its way into the pop cultural mainstream via the intertwined worlds of entertainment, art and style. In part, Afrofuturism, an aesthetic dating roughly from the 1970s, has taken on a new public face through a new generation of recording artists — Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott and Janelle Monáe among them — who have given it not only a voice, but also a look. You will likely know it when you see it: a of cyborg themes, loosely tribal motifs, android imagery and gleaming metallics that might be appropriate for a voyage to Pluto’s outer reaches. Its latest incarnation seems timely, if not downright inevitable. “With the diversity of the nation and world increasingly standing in stark contrast to the diversity in futuristic works, it’s no surprise that Afrofuturism emerged,” writes Ytasha L. Womack, who chronicled and popularized the evolution of the genre in her 2013 book, “Afrofuturism: The World of Black and Fantasy Culture. ” “But when, even in the imaginary future,” she goes on, “people can’t fathom a person of descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down. ” The internet has lent the movement a force unknown in previous incarnations. A visual metaphor for empowerment on sites like the Afrofuturist Affair and influential Instagram accounts like Inkrayable_girafe, it permits black men and women to take charge of their image. Today, Ms. Womack writes, “a fledgling filmmaker can shoot his web series on a $500 DV cam, post it on YouTube, and promote it on Instagram and Twitter. ” Lina Iris Viktor, a artist in New York who paints queenly with a futuristic edge, picked up the thread. “The internet democratized the playing field,” she said. “Now the voices you hear are authentically ours. Instead of everybody else telling you stories, explaining to you what our work is about, we are telling you what it’s about. ” An Afrofuturist narrative is embedded as well in a recent flurry of museum shows. On view through November at El Museo del Barrio were the fashion illustrations of Antonio Lopez, a pioneer in the genre whose works of the ’70s and ’80s featured a multiracial cast of robotlike figures and astronauts propelled into a Tomorrowland. It is a brave new world, as a review in The New York Times noted in June, “in which race and gender were fluid, and existing social inequities corrected or transcended. ” Afrofuturism is a current in the multimedia installations of the artist Saya Woolfalk, whose utopian universes and Empathics, a future race fusing — and all but erasing — racial and ethnic boundaries, were featured this year in shows at the Brooklyn Museum, a light show in Times Square and, just this month, an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach. Afrofuturist allusions crop up less overtly in the sprawling canvases of Kerry James Marshall, whose exhibition at the Met Breuer, through Jan. 29, includes idealized portraits of Boy and Girl Scouts wreathed in halos of the kind often seen on heroes. This summer, the movement flexed its muscle at the megaplex, where “Captain America: Civil War” featured the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) a superhero who in 2018 will star in “Black Panther” as the king and protector of the imaginary nation of Wakanda. Afrofuturism’s resurgence could not be more timely, arriving as it does in a climate perceived as indifferent, if not downright inimical, to racial and ethnic minorities. In her book, Ms. Womack recalls a time when black or brown characters were all but invisible in the culture at large. As a girl, she would fantasize that she was Princess Leia of “Star Wars. ” “While it was fun to be the chick from outer space in my imagination,” Ms. Womack writes, “the quest to see myself or browner people in this space age, galactic epic was important to me. ” It was in the absence of minorities from pop lore, she goes on, “that seeds were planted in the imaginations of countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in spaceship too. ” Count among them Tim Fielder, a New York graphic artist and animator whose illustrations, produced over a span, drew visitors last spring to “Black Metropolis,” at the Gallatin Galleries at New York University. Mr. Fielder’s pioneering cartoon narratives — notably those of “Matty’s Rocket,” his spirited black female cosmonaut, who will lift off next year in graphic novel form — are particularly relevant now, he maintained: “They let young artists know that they’re not on dangerous turf, that someone has gone there before them. ” Afrofuturism’s epic imagery offers youth a mirror, Mr. Fielder said. “These kids are able now to see themselves in environments that are expansive, both technologically and in terms of social mores and gender,” he said. They also see themselves newly reflected in the comic books that remain a potent form of Afrofuturist expression. Last spring, the Black Panther, lately of “Captain America,” was resurrected by Marvel as the noble protagonist of his own comic book series, written by Coates, the author of “Between the World and Me. ” And this year, Riri Williams, an teenage superheroine with an M. I. T. degree, will slip into the fabled power suit in the “Iron Man” comic series. Such vanguard characters can trace their genesis to early champions of Afrofuturism, paramount among them Sun Ra, the jazz composer, poet and philosopher who incorporated themes into his music and his seminal film, “Space Is the Place,” a tale of interplanetary time travel. Afrofuturism owes as important a debt to the writer Octavia Butler, whose 1979 “Kindred,” posits an alternate reality in which an heroine is transported from Los Angeles to early Maryland. It owes a debt as well to the music of George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, with their prophetic lyrics in “Mothership Connection”: Time to move on Light years in time Ahead of our time. Afrofuturist themes were revisited in the ’90s, but still as a genre without a name until the cultural critic Mark Dery formally christened it in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future,” after which it flourished for a time before retreating to the shadows. Now the movement has returned in force, beamed down to the concert stage. Last month, the ’70s disco diva Grace Jones, Afrofuturism’s mascot, toured in the British Isles, her stage persona, covered in tribal paint and feathers, a reprise of her performance at the Afropunk Fest in Brooklyn last year. On a broadcast of “The Tonight Show” in February, the singer FKA Twigs seemed to alight from the clouds swathed in a incandescent white. Her costume, in crystals, was created with Grace Wales Bonner, a London designer whose work in the past has been rife with Afrofuturist allusions. In her “Lemonade” album, released in April, Beyoncé reigns in an utopia, leading a phalanx of women in ethereal white dresses that simultaneously conjure ancient and societies. The style world, too, has now embraced the movement, if only, perhaps, to reinforce its stature as an arbiter of cool. For the W September cover and editorial feature shot by Steven Klein, Rihanna’s costumes were cobbled from scratch. “She’s a a queen,” said Edward Enninful, the magazine’s fashion and style director. “A queen does not wear clothes off the runways. ” Instead she wears an otherworldly pastiche of vanguard creations by Gareth Pugh, Prada, Proenza Schouler and others, clothes conceived, Mr. Enninful said, to emphasize Rihanna’s majestic persona. “It’s a look that many young black females out there haven’t seen before,” he said. Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy was among the first to integrate Afrofuturist imagery into his runway shows. Two years earlier, he signed Ms. Badu as the face of the brand. Mr. Tisci followed up repeatedly, most recently with a fall 2016 line replete with cosmological symbols, including that familiar Afrofuturist talisman, the Egyptian Eye of Horus. Calvin Klein released a fall advertising campaign starring the rapper Young Thug, dressed in flares and a fitted pinstripe chasuble, its neckline embellished with an orb. A recent campaign from Chanel featured Willow Smith festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels. Others are advancing this aesthetic in more subtle ways, thrusting aside clichés as they go. “Afrofuturism has to become something more than just an idea of black people in shiny metallic clothing,” said Michelle Busayo Olupona, the designer behind Busayo NYC, a label incorporating Afrofuturist themes in a abstract way. “In my own work, I try to create an aesthetic and style evocative of the past but very much grounded in the now. ” Ms. Olupona said her abstract, Afrocentric designs, some incorporating fantasy fauna and futurist imagery, “suggest ways in which we can differentiate ourselves. ” “What they say about the future,” she continued, “is that we’re always going to be here. ” Another showcase for contemporary, less literal interpretations of Afrofuturism is 9J, a boutique and gallery recently sprung up on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx. It aims to usher in the movement’s next wave, with items like a ribbed sweater worthy of “Star Wars,” created by a local designer Jesenia Lopez Birkenstock platforms covered in feathers and Swarovski “gems” and an outsize headdress of spiraling silver wire. These pieces mingle technology, fantasy and Afrocentric themes with a streamlined opulence. The shop’s owner, Jerome LaMaar, whose line, 5:31 Jérôme, has drawn clients like Beyoncé and the model Hailey Baldwin, wore goggles the other week while presiding at the opening of Africollision, an installation at 9J that eschewed the hallmarks of old school Afrofuturism. “We want to play with the idea of what is tribe, what is Africa, what is the future, and mix it all up without being predictable. ” Mr. LaMaar insisted. “Who wants to see what’s already been done?” | 1 |
SUNDERLAND, England — In places like Sunderland, with its shipyards silent and dead and its citizens leery of both London and Brussels, the idea of the European Union never really took hold. Although the city in England’s northeast heartland benefited from the bloc, the campaign that became known as “Brexit” found many adherents and brought grievances into the open. And when the decision to pull out of the European Union sent markets into a tailspin, Ken Walker, a retired construction worker, was unfazed. “I don’t have any money in the stock market,” Mr. Walker, 59, said as he drank a pint of beer in a pub. “So what’s it to me?” The pub, called the Speculation, still had “Vote Leave” posters on its walls, and a fellow drinker exclaimed “Aye!” and banged the counter in agreement. Sunderland stunned the country when voters overwhelmingly opted to leave Europe in Thursday’s referendum, by 61 percent to 39 percent. It was a far higher vote for Britain’s exit than pollsters had predicted, and it was the first sign that Prime Minister David Cameron’s gamble on staying in the bloc had lost. Sunderland’s citizens seem to have voted against their own interests. Not only has the city been a big recipient of European money, it is also the home of a Nissan car factory, Britain’s largest, and automobiles produced there are exported, duty free, to Europe. The plant, which absorbed workers from the dying shipyards after it opened 30 years ago, became a symbol of the benefits of European Union membership, and Nissan opposed the British exit. Yet Edward Pennal, 64, a former army mechanic who voted to leave, took the uncertainty in stride, dismissing it as scaremongering. “No, I can’t see them cutting off ties,” he said of Nissan, because the company has received government grants to stay in Sunderland. And the pound’s fall is a good thing for exports, he said. “I was very pleased with the result. ” Sunderland’s decision was also a vote against the Labour Party, which pushed for Britain to remain in the union but is no longer seen by many voters in Sunderland as a champion of the working class. Instead, they and voters across Britain are increasingly moving right over the issue of immigration, switching to the U. K. Independence Party, which campaigned for the exit so Britain could control its borders. Nationwide, young voters provided much of the support for the Remain campaign, but that was not the case in Sunderland. John Todd, 18, an information technology apprentice, voted for the first time, and said he supported the U. K. Independence Party. “We’re segregated from the south, and the north is a barren wasteland,” he said, wearing a heavy black leather jacket with metal studs despite the summer heat. “It’s us against them. ” “The E. U. is a mystery to us,” he added. “We’ve never heard about it up here. ” The outcome of the vote in the large section of industrial northeast England that includes Sunderland exposed deep regional divisions and a rift between classes — a working class that feels it has lost out from globalization, and a more mobile, educated class of people who have prospered from free trade and movement. Similar trends are emerging in France, where Marine Le Pen’s National Front has had success in poor cities across the country’s former industrial heartland. Now, Ms. Le Pen is calling for a similar referendum in France to pull out of the European Union. In Sunderland, a city of 273, 000 on the North Sea coast, there were few signs of “bregret” or “regrexit” — terms shared on social media to describe the pangs of remorse some felt as they watched billions of dollars get wiped off world markets. voters said they had nothing to lose because they had little to gain from globalization in the first place. “Give Brexit a chance,” said Maria Taylor, 58, a florist on a street where rows of brick houses, a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, shove against one another. “It can’t get worse than what’s been going on already,” she added. In Washington, a neighborhood close to the Nissan plant, shops on Street appeared as if out of a time warp: a hairdresser with bonnet hair dryers, a candy shop where a single ceiling bulb illuminates rows of dusty containers filled with sweets. To people like Mr. Walker, the turmoil in the financial markets was a distant rumble, a problem for the rich “down south” in London and for those with enough resources to take a bet on the vast flows of speculative money that shift around the globe. As deindustrialization and other factors have hollowed what was once a manufacturing stronghold, the region has struggled to catch up with its wealthier southern neighbors despite efforts by recent governments to bridge the divide. “All the industries, everything, has gone,” said Michael Wake, 55, forklift operator, gesturing toward Roker Beach, once black from the soot of the shipyards. “We were powerful, strong. But Brussels and the government, they’ve taken it all away. ” In 1988, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher closed the last of the shipyards that once lined the River Wear. The European Union contributed a 45 million pound, or $60 million, aid package to help workers, but Sunderland never recovered from the loss. It consistently has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, about 9 percent. The referendum, Mr. Wake said, was an opportunity to “poke the eye” of Mr. Cameron and the London establishment. Fears over job security from an influx of cheap European laborers was another motivation. Heather Govan, 28, a decorator, said cheap labor helped big businesses by keeping costs down, but not people like her. Some residents, however, said they had benefited from European Union membership. “I’m shocked — it’s bad for the industry,” said John Thompson, 53, who has worked for more than 30 years in a components factory. “There is a lot of uncertainty now, and people who were going to invest here are going to think twice. ” Many engineers in the shipbuilding industry took jobs at Nissan. They became part of an upwardly mobile class able to afford houses along the now beach. To them and their families, the European Union is appealing. They can swim at the Sunderland Aquatic Center, a £20 million project with an pool that the European Union helped finance. They can send their children to the sleek, modern Sunderland University campus, which also received union financing. European Union money also helped establish Sunderland Software City, a business center that offers support and advice to aspiring software entrepreneurs. However splashy these projects may be, they remain largely inaccessible to Sunderland’s working class. Many cannot afford the £30 monthly fees at the Aquatic Center, and people in the nearby Washington neighborhood said they had never set foot inside. As for Sunderland University, the tuition, which the government recently raised, is too much for many young people. “All the money is going back to the rich,” said Ms. Taylor, the florist. “The working class is completely hammered. They’ve sold us down the river. ” John Hall, 54, a neighbor, looked determined. “All the people here are looking out for their grandchildren,” he said, adding, “In 20 years’ time, it would be a better place for them. ” “We’re big, we’re strong enough,” he said. “It might be hard, but we’ll still eat. ” | 1 |
BANJUL, Gambia — A week after he was inaugurated in another country, Adama Barrow landed in Gambia on Thursday afternoon, setting foot inside his own national borders for the first time as the new president. Throngs of supporters, some holding Gambian flags, lined the roads to greet Mr. Barrow, who had flown in from Dakar, Senegal, where he had fled more than a week earlier out of security concerns after his predecessor, Yahya Jammeh, refused to step down. As he entered Banjul, the capital, Mr. Barrow, dressed in all white, poked out of a white Land Cruiser surrounded by military vehicles and waved to onlookers. “Today is freedom day,” said Mariama Bah, a nurse from Serekunda, a town nearby, who came to the airport to welcome President Barrow. “We now have a president that we can be proud of. ” Mr. Barrow defeated the longtime president, Mr. Jammeh, in a surprising outcome to an election in December. Mr. Jammeh, who had been in power since 1994, when he led a successful coup, initially accepted defeat. A few days after the vote, he changed his mind, declared the election results invalid and vowed to use the power of his military to stay in charge. It took repeated personal overtures from West African presidents and finally a regional coalition of troops that crossed into Gambia to persuade Mr. Jammeh, known for human rights abuses, to step down. He flew out of the country on Saturday, accompanied by a cargo plane containing his and other luxury automobiles, and has settled in Equatorial Guinea, which has its own record of human rights violations. Mr. Barrow’s arrival capped a tense period for many Gambians who had feared a bloody end to the presidential standoff. Tens of thousands of residents had been so worried that they fled the country, though many have already returned. But Mr. Jammeh still has supporters left in Gambia, and some residents worry that divisions could lead to problems in the new administration. Mr. Barrow has dismissed his predecessor’s supporters as a minority. Most of all, many residents said they were weary of the regional troops who were still roaming the capital. They had arrived at the statehouse to search it and make sure all was safe for Mr. Barrow’s return, but their presence on the streets was unsettling to many. Mr. Barrow’s aides said the soldiers were likely to remain in Gambia for weeks as the new administration makes the transition. Some Gambians worried that it was still too early for Mr. Barrow to come home. “Yahya Jammeh was not acting alone,” said Ishmael Ceesay, 24, a mobile phone salesman in Serekunda. “His people are still around. ” Mr. Barrow’s aides said the president would stay at a private residence until the regional troops finished securing the statehouse. Mr. Jammeh’s rule penetrated the psyche of many Gambians who feared him, so much so that thousands fled years ago. Their departure further damaged an already shaky economy that Mr. Barrow has said will be a priority for him. Mr. Jammeh jailed journalists and his opponents, some of whom died in prison, carried out hunts for people believed to be witches and forced patients to stop taking medication so he could test what he said was his homemade cure for AIDS — herbs, prayers and a banana. Residents of Gambia talked about Mr. Jammeh only in hushed tones, and rarely in public, and even some members of the diaspora said they were convinced he was monitoring their communications. Mohamed Jalloh, who sells fabric at the entrance to the statehouse, said he had spent the past two decades praying a bullet would not come flying toward him. “Yahya Jammeh brought so much fear in us,” Mr. Jalloh said. The paranoia was evident even this week, with Mr. Jammeh hundreds of miles away, when a Gambian newspaper reported that he had left toxins in the vents in the statehouse to poison his successor. Mr. Barrow’s team said the report was false. For many Gambians, the pain of Mr. Jammeh’s rule was all too real. Some residents said part of Mr. Barrow’s new job would be comforter in chief. Mr. Barrow has vowed to create a truth and reconciliation commission to look into injustices during Mr. Jammeh’s more than administration. On Wednesday afternoon in Brikama, the region where Mr. Barrow received the most votes, three women sat on a long wooden bench. They wore yellow #GambiaHasDecided a motto adopted by the opposition that wanted Mr. Jammeh to leave. Like many others across Gambia, each of the women said a relative had been killed by security forces loyal to Mr. Jammeh. As they sold sugar at the market, the three spoke of their losses. It was during the 2011 presidential election campaign that Nyima Jabang’s father, an ambulance driver, was tortured and killed while in custody at the National Intelligence Agency. His crime: driving two men to a hospital who had been wounded at a rally in a clash between Mr. Jammeh’s party and the main opposition party, the United Democratic Party. The next day, the brother of Nyima Sanyang, another of the friends selling sugar, was arrested by security forces in connection with the campaign clash and was beaten to death. The third woman, Bintu Sonko, 30, described the long, speeding motorcades that carried Mr. Jammeh and his aides, who would toss packets of cookies to supporters. In 2013, Ms. Sonko’s son, Lamine, 7, heard Mr. Jammeh’s cars approaching. He ran out with his friends to wave to the passing president. Lamine darted into the street to catch a cookie and was struck and killed by a car in the motorcade. “They did not even stop,” Ms. Sonko said. “They kept going and throwing cookies at the rest of the kids. We can’t even report the matter to the chief or the police. ” “That was my only child. ” | 1 |
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — A bitter legal war between the bond investor William H. Gross and Pimco, the company he built into one of the biggest asset managers in the world, is over. A lawyer representing Mr. Gross filed a request in California state court on Monday to dismiss the investor’s lawsuit over his 2014 ouster. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, although both sides noted in a joint statement that “any proceeds from the suit will be donated to charity. ” People briefed on the matter said that Pimco would pay more than $80 million to the William and Sue Gross Family Foundation. Mr. Gross, who helped found the firm in 1971, will add from his own fortunes to make the contribution total more than $100 million, some of these people said. Pimco did say that it would dedicate a room in his headquarters here to its founders and that Mr. Gross would be named a “director emeritus. ” “Bill Gross has always been larger than life,” Dan Ivascyn, Pimco’s chief investment officer, said in the statement. “Bill has had an enormous influence on Pimco and the careers of many who have passed through its halls,” he added. In the joint statement, Mr. Gross said: “Pimco has always been family to me, and, like any family, sometimes there are disagreements. I’m glad that we have had the opportunity to work through those. ” Those cordial words stand in stark contrast to the invectives that were lobbed at each after Mr. Gross sued the firm in October 2015, accusing it of breach of contract and breach of covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Yet the litigation had been a frustrating distraction for Pimco as it sought to recover from the damage done by Mr. Gross’s departure. Since his exit in September 2014, Pimco’s assets have slid to $1. 47 trillion, from more than $2 trillion at the peak. For Mr. Gross, the settlement comes as he seeks to refurbish his image and start again at a competitor, Janus Capital Group. Details that emerged on his split with Pimco portrayed him as erratic and authoritarian before and after he was forced out. The settlement may also provide some sort of resolution psychologically for the investor, who has said he closely monitors his performance against Pimco and is “fixated” on proving it was wrong to force him out. In his lawsuit, Mr. Gross had claimed that he was wrongfully pushed out as the chief investment officer by a “cabal” of greedy partners among the company’s top executives. The colorfully worded lawsuit took particular aim at Mohamed the firm’s former chief executive, and Mr. Ivascyn. “Driven by a lust for power, greed, and a desire to improve their own financial position and reputation at the expense of investors and decency, a cabal of Pimco managing directors plotted to drive founder Bill Gross out of Pimco in order to take, without compensation, Gross’s percentage ownership in the profitability of Pimco,” the complaint said. Pimco executives’ “improper, dishonest, and unethical behavior must now be exposed. ” Pimco had called the suit “legally groundless” and asked for its dismissal. “Pimco has moved forward since Mr. Gross’s resignation,” the firm said in 2015. “It is time for him to do the same. ” Pacific Investment Management Company, or Pimco, has also been working to distance itself from the events of 2014. With diminished money under management generating fees, the asset manager, based in Newport Beach, Calif. has trimmed its work force to 2, 200 from about 2, 400 in 2014. It has also closed some funds to decrease costs. Emmanuel Roman, the former chief of the British hedge fund manager Man Group, started as chief executive in November. He took over for Douglas Hodge, the former chief operating officer who was tapped to lead the company after Mr. ’s departure. In the three years that Mr. Roman led Man Group, he helped stabilize its business and made multiple acquisitions as it aimed to push into the United States markets and expand its global reach to institutional clients. He joined Pimco at a critical time for the money manager, as it tried to assure investors that a manager could weather a downturn in markets, as interest rates rose. Clients began to pull money from the Pimco Total Return fund in 2013, while Mr. Gross was still at the helm, as the Federal Reserve signaled it would end its stimulus programs, roiling bond markets. The firm’s flagship total return fund underperformed most peers that year and the next, data from Morningstar show. The departures of Mr. and Mr. Gross within the span of seven months accelerated client withdrawals. That year, investors pulled more than $100 billion from Total Return, once the world’s biggest mutual fund. Withdrawals have since slowed as performance steadied, and assets now stand at $74. 2 billion. In its first full year without Mr. Gross, returns surged to rank 15th among comparable funds, according to Morningstar, but fell below the middle of the pack last year. This year it has ranked in the top decile of comparable funds, Morningstar data show. The Pimco Income Fund, managed by Mr. Ivascyn, tells a different story. For the past five years, its performance has beaten benchmarks and most comparable funds, and as a result, clients have poured money into it. This year, it surpassed Pimco Total Return as the company’s biggest fund. At Janus, Mr. Gross started an “unconstrained” fund, which has attracted just under $2 billion. Performance in the new fund fared better than most of its peers in 2015 and 2016, including the similar fund at Pimco, by Mr. Ivascyn. This year it has trailed competitors. Mr. Gross’s complaint took aim at those in line to succeed him, including Mr. Ivascyn, who the suit claimed threatened to resign if Mr. Gross was not forced out, and Mr. . Mr. has served as chief economic adviser to Pimco’s parent company, the German insurer Allianz, since he left in March 2014. The complaint portrays Mr. Gross as a defender of investment products, Pimco’s traditional focus, while Mr. and Mr. Ivascyn pushed to take on more risk in products in the interest of bigger bonuses. The suit also said that top Pimco executives were motivated to unseat Mr. Gross for his 20 percent cut of the bonus pool, which in 2013 alone was $300 million. Pimco recently resolved other outstanding litigation from the same time period, paying $20 million to settle with the Securities and Exchange Commission over claims it did not properly value securities in its fund version of Total Return. The company did not admit any wrongdoing, and it will retain an independent compliance consultant as part of the agreement. | 1 |
In a truly shocking twist, the Supreme Court of Austria has decided to acquit the Iraqi man, “that may not have realised the 10-year-old Austrian boy did not want to be sexually abused by him.” Amir, 20, was visiting the Theresienbad pool in the Austrian capital of Vienna in December 2015, as part of a trip to encourage integration, when the rape incident occurred.
Europe, if you can’t stand up for your children, who will? Of course there is the fact that Western Europe has supported the US in their violent destruction of the Middle East over the past 20 years. Is it a guilty conscience that seems to appease the blatant criminal activity on behalf of some newcomers? Or are they George Soros puppets implanted into the judicial system that are at work?
Russia is a multicultural and multi-religious society, and has been for 1000 years. The law applies to everyone equally – whether you’re a Crimean Tatar or a Slavic Russian – every Russian citizen is ‘native’ as such and subject to the same protocols.
A migrant has just raped a child in one of the European countries. The court found him “NOT GUILTY” based on two things: the migrant did not understand the language of his host country, and he did not understand that the boy – and it was a boy – didn’t want this.
Vladimir Putin was outraged when he heard about the incident and here’s what he had to say:
It doesn’t fit into my head what on Earth they’re thinking over there. This is the result of the dilution of national values [identity].
I can’t even explain the rationale – is it a sense of guilt before the migrants? What’s going on? It’s not clear.
But a society that cannot defend its children today has no tomorrow. It has no future.
So relying on their [migration policy] experience is not the best thing to do, if I can be frank.
But we have a 1000 year history of forming a multicultural society – our understanding of [these intricacies] is much deeper.
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Pointless winner won’t let £500 prize change his life 27-10-16 THE joint winner of a £1000 jackpot on BBC series Pointless has said that he won’t let his new wealth change him. Norman Steele, who won £500 after splitting his prize with workmate Tom Booker, will even keep his current job as a postman. He said: “I could have earned a million pounds on some fancy ITV game show, but doing it on the BBC means so much more. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to spend, spend, spend, mainly on a return train journey to Manchester. “It’ll be cab there and cab home, which will set me back another £75, and, of course, a slap up, three-course meal for two at Pizza Express with several glasses of house white. “On the way home, I’ll visit our local and buy a pint for all the regulars. No crisps, mind, I don’t want them to get ideas. “Then I’ll go home, have a bath and think about how I’m going to spend my remaining £3.73.”
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Dr. David Duke & Farren Shoaf – Countdown 7 days left to Trump’s Presidency and the critical first primary to send Dr. Duke to the U.S. Senate! October 31, 2016 at 10:11 am
Dr. David Duke & Farren Shoaf – Countdown 7 days left to Trump’s Presidency and the critical first primary to send Dr. Duke to the U.S. Senate!
Today Dr. Duke had radio talk show host Farren Shoaf as his guest for the hour. They went into the various criminal aspects of the revelations about Hillary Clinton. In addition to the outrages of Hillary’s support for ISIS via massive weapons shipments to Saudi Arabia, Mr. Shoaf pointed out that the media failing use the words “obstruction of justice,” which was actually the crime that forced Richard Nixon from the White House.
Mr. Shoaf also raised the fact that never before has there been a major party candidate for president whose criminality was so obvious BEFORE the election, yet more than 40% of voters appear ready to put her in the oval office.
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Democrats and open border advocates are staging a hunger strike in Texas against the State’s proposed city bill. Its backers are asking for support using #FastAgainstSB4. [One Texas Democrat said a communion wafer on Sunday was the last meal she is going to have until after Wednesday when the Texas House debates the bill. Thank you @Victoria4Texas for leading the #FastAgainstSB4! Don’t forget to wear black when you head to ATX on Wed. to #FillTheGallery! pic. twitter. — Texas Young Dems (@TexasYDs) April 24, 2017, Representative Victoria Neave ( ) announced her intention to conduct the fast after Mass at the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadeloupe in Dallas. She encouraged people to “wear black when you head to ATX on Wed. to #FillTheGallery. ” The Texas House will debate the sanctuary city bill on Wednesday. Those with the “Indivisible” movement in Texas tweeted, “We’ve gotten word from several people who will join @Victoria4Texas’ fast in solidarity. ” The group wants those who plan to fast to tag them so they can retweet. We’ve gotten word from several people who will join @Victoria4Texas‘ fast in solidarity. Planning to #FastAgainstSB4? Tag us so we can RT. https: . — Indivisible #Txlege (@IndvsbleTXLege) April 24, 2017, The movement in the state and the country follows the “Indivisible Guide” whose stated mission is “stopping Trump from implementing an agenda built on racism, authoritarianism, and corruption. ” Indivisible chapters have all over Texas. Their guide also provides “A local strategy targeting individual Members of Congress. ” The guide is written in English and Spanish, and there is audio as well as written versions. House members are being urged “to do everything possible to #StopSB4. ” Today, I’m joining @Victoria4Texas in the #fastagainstsb4. Now, it’s time for the @TexasHDC to do everything possible to #StopSB4 pic. twitter. — Jay Malone (@jmmalone2305) April 24, 2017, SB 4 was passed by the Texas Senate in early February, right after the start of the new legislative session. The House State Affairs Committee held a hearing on March 15 after holding the “emergency item” for almost a month. More than 600 people signed up to testify. Democrat organized witnesses who testified were overwhelmingly against the legislation. The committee approved the bill by a vote of along partisan lines. The bill was placed on the emergency calendar for April 26 after being considered in Calendars on April 20. As reported by Breitbart Texas, the version extracts the teeth of the bill by cutting the provisions that would strip state criminal justice grants to renegade cities and counties. It also removes civil liabilities from government officials who did not honor immigration detainers and released criminal aliens that later commit crimes. The House version bars law enforcement officers from asking a person about their immigration status unless they have been arrested. Texas Governor Greg Abbott listed addressing sanctuary cities as an emergency item during his 2017 State of the State Address before a joint session of the legislature in January. As reported by Breitbart Texas, he told the members of the Texas House and Senate, “Elected officials don’t get to pick and choose which laws they obey. ” The Governor responded after SB 4 was passed in February by reiterating that message and stating, “As Governor, I will not tolerate sanctuary city policies that put the citizens of Texas at risk. ” Apparently expressing his desire for the bill’s passage, Abbott tweeted to the Texas House on March 19, “It’s time to get this Sanctuary city bill passed to my desk for signing. ” It’s time to get this Sanctuary city bill passed to my desk for signing. #txlege #tcot https: . — Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) March 19, 2017, The communications director for Texas Speaker of the House Joe Straus responded to a Breitbart Texas inquiry in December by stating, “Speaker Straus will work with fellow House Members, Governor Abbott, and law enforcement to ensure that there are no sanctuary cities in Texas. ” Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook. | 1 |
OMG! Video of Michelle Obama’s Angry Tirade Against Hillary Went VIRAL Overnight Oct 28, 2016 Previous post HILLARY WANTS THIS DELETED FOREVER! Michelle Obama was praised by the mainstream media all day long yesterday after she attacked Trump as a sexist, cruel bigot. Well, a video just surfaced that will absolutely expose her as a lying hypocrite. It already has 19 Million views! You might remember the First Lady’s is known for her slogan, “When they go low, we go high…” Well she might need to change her slogan… In the video, Michelle Obama PERSONALLY
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Subscribe My daughter and me
Yesterday was National Daughter’s Day! I know this because Facebook told me so; well, maybe not Mark Zuckerberg himself, but all my friends on Facebook were posting pictures of their daughters and celebrating National Daughter’s Day so it must be true, right?
Actually, I Googled it, and guess what??? September 24 is NOT National Daughter’s Day…According to Wikipedia , National Daughter’s Day is August 11th. This little snippet in Wikipedia also stated that National Daughter’s Day originated from the Bible. I have done some more digging, and honestly, I can’t find proof for either the day or the fact that the Bible calls for it. So it got me to thinking…
How did a day, which didn’t actually exist, go viral in just a few hours on Facebook? There has to be a need which something like this fills or else the entire Facebook population wouldn’t have jumped on it so quickly.
Then it hit me. We love our daughters! It really is that simple. We love our daughters so much that we felt we needed to tell them so publicly on Facebook. I saw some of the cutest baby pictures and some of the sweetest words of love scroll through my Facebook feed yesterday. Mothers and fathers discussing how sweet their little girls were and exclaiming pride in the women they had become. All ages were represented. It was really quite moving, and it was a wonderful change from the politics and hatred I normally see there.
My question is, why did we need to create a fictitious holiday to say these things. We all know our society is in desperate need of love, but yesterday also proved that our society is desperate to show love. It is OK to tell the world you love your daughter, or for that matter, your son, your wife, your husband, your life partner, your best friend, your ex, your mailman, your mother, your dog, or your local friendly hardware store worker. You don’t need a special occasion or an official day. We don’t have to all agree it is OK to do it on that particular day.
Just love. Show it openly. Tell the world and Facebook. Do it every day. It’s in your DNA. You need it.
I declare today National I Am Going To Post About Who I Love Day…every day.
By the way… My daughter, Mallory, is intelligent, beautiful, and compassionate, and I am blessed that she calls me Mom. Just thought I would throw that in since it is National I Am Going To Post About Who I Love Day! Now faith, hope, and love remain—these three things—and the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13 About Melanie Tubbs
Melanie Tubbs is a professor, pastor, mother, Mimi, and true Arkansas woman. She lives with six cats and two dogs on a quiet hill in a rural county where she pastors a church and teaches history at the local university. Her slightly addictive personality comes out in shameful Netflix binges and a massive collection of books. Vegetarian cooking, reading mountains of books for her seminary classes, and crocheting for the churches prayer shawl ministry take up most of her free time, and sharing the love of Christ forms the direction of her life. May the Peace of Christ be with You. Connect | 0 |
Print version Font Size The number of predictions about the state of affairs in the US-Russian relations after the presidential election in the United States continues to grow. Former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky did not stay aside and predicted that there would be nothing good in the US-Russian relations after the election, regardless of who wins the vote. If Hillary Clinton takes office as president, the relations between Russia and the United States will deteriorate further. According to the ex-oligarch, Putin was originally prepared for Clinton's victory in the election, therefore, he has been allegedly trying to damage the relations between the two countries during the recent months. The logic is as follows: "He'd better to go down to the bottom so that she could make only one step - up." "If Mrs. Clinton wins, then the bottom that Putin sees will not be the real bottom. She knows how to hit Putin to make him fall even lower. She has an extensive experience, and she will not forgive - I'm talking about the American establishment here - she will not forgive interference in the internal electoral process in the United States," Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Open Russia told Politico . When Khodorkovsky speaks about Clinton's "extensive experience" does he have Libya in mind? And of course, it is only Hillary Clinton, who knows all about the real bottom. If the Russian president was originally prepared for the victory of the former Secretary of State, then it is not clear why he would need to interfere in the "internal electoral process." Did he want to cause even greater damage to the US-Russian relations to give Clinton a chance to start it all over again? Or Putin? Or both? Why would he need to interfere, if she would not "forgive?" Noteworthy, on the eve of election day in the USA, former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul gave an interview to Russian media. McFaul stated in the interview that he did not think of Hillary Clinton as a supporter of a hard line course against Russia."I think the claim that the fear-mongering that Trump himself and Trump supports say to scare American voters that Secretary Clinton is going to start a war with Russia is completely absurd, completely has nothing to do with the reality. Only a total crazy person would start a war with Russia," McFaul told Interfax . Clinton understands that there will be no war between the U.S. and Russia, "she is not crazy," he added. "I think she takes a very pragmatic approach to defend America's national interests and security and economic interests of our allies," McFaul said. "She's not going to become president to say "it is my goal to improve relations with Russia". What is she's going to do instead is she is going to say that "it is my goal with Russia to accomplish policy items A, B and C." And then she is going to decide which strategy, which instrument of policy [will achieve that]. Sometimes it will be engagement and sometimes [it will] be containment," Michael McFaul said, Interfax reports. Unlike the former ambassador, Mikhail Khodorkovsky does not leave Hillary Clinton any room for maneuver. What if Donald Trump leaves? There will not be anything good for Russia anyway, Khodorkovsky believes. A conflict between the two countries will be highly likely as well, because Putin is not going to cozy up to Washington. "We all know people like Trump, and it is unlikely that Putin will play up to Trump's ambition, like, for example, Kadyrov (Chechen President - ed.) plays up to Putin's ambition," Khodorkovsky said.What does Kadyrov got to do with it? Is it just because his name rings the bell in the West? According to Khodorkovsky, it is difficult to predict what will happen after Putin refuses to subordinate Russia to Trump's will. "Putin will not be able to do this, so it means that a conflict with Trump is inevitable."Why is the ex-oligarch confident that the Republican candidate will wish to subjugate Russia? What does he know about Trump's thoughts on Russia? Does Khodorkovsky know something that everyone else does not know? The former oligarch does not expect anything positive in relations between Russia and the United States, and it seems that this is the most desirable option for him. Anton Kulikov | 0 |
Russian navy honors Cuban independence leader and Soviet soldiers October 28, 2016 TASS cuba , navy The patrol ship Yaroslav Mudry. Source: Mil.ru
Russian sailors from the Baltic Fleet’s Yaroslav Mudry frigate and the Lena tanker paid tribute to Cuba’s national hero, Jose Marti, and to Soviet soldiers, the Baltic Fleet’s spokesman Roman Martov told TASS.
"In the port of Havana, the Baltic Fleet sailors laid wreaths at monuments dedicated to Cuba’s independence leader, Jose Marti, and to Soviet soldiers," Martov said, noting it was the first call of Russia’s Baltic Fleet warships at the port of Cuba’s capital in the post-Soviet era.
During the visit, the group’s commanders held talks with defense officials from the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces’ external relations department, commanders of the Revolutionary Navy and representatives of Havana’s Mayor’s Office. The sailors also visited the city’s historic district and museums. In the meantime, the Yaroslav Mudry frigate hosted tours onboard the ship for Havana’s local residents and tourists.
The Yaroslav Mudry set sail on a lengthy voyage from the Russian city of Baltiysk on June 1, in line with the Russian Navy’s combat training plan. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — James E. Cartwright, a retired Marine Corps general who as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff served as a key member of President Obama’s national security team, agreed to plead guilty on Monday to lying to the F. B. I. about his discussions with reporters about Iran’s nuclear program. General Cartwright entered the guilty plea before Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. As part of the deal, prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed that under sentencing guidelines, the punishment could range from a $500 fine to six months in prison. However, the government reserved the right to argue for a higher sentence, and the judge is not bound by the guidelines. Judge Leon set a sentencing hearing for Jan. 17. During the hearing, General Cartwright spoke stoically and in a calm voice, answering “Yes, sir” to a series of questions posed by the judge to make sure he understood what he was doing. He did not speak to reporters afterward, but in a statement said that he was not the original source of the information. “It was wrong for me to mislead the F. B. I. on Nov. 2, 2012, and I accept full responsibility for this,” General Cartwright said. “I knew I was not the source of the story and I didn’t want to be blamed for the leak. My only goal in talking to the reporters was to protect American interests and lives I love my country and continue to this day to do everything I can to defend it. ” His lawyer, Gregory B. Craig, said in a statement that his client had spoken to journalists after they had already reported their stories and that his motive was to prevent publication of information that might have harmed national security. The investigation focused on leaks to reporters for The New York Times and Newsweek. For General Cartwright, who was known as “Obama’s favorite general” before his retirement in 2011, the plea amounts to a stunning fall. It also adds a new twist to a surge of criminal cases in the Obama era. The case grew out of a period of political furor over leaks in the summer of 2012, when numerous books and articles appeared about Mr. Obama’s national security record during his first term. Republicans in Congress accused the White House of deliberately leaking government secrets, endangering national security to make Mr. Obama look tough in an election year. The administration denied that charge, and the attorney general at the time, Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed two United States attorneys to look into two specific disclosures, one of which was the cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear program. NBC News reported in 2013 that the Iran cyberattack investigation was focused on General Cartwright. The cyberattack was Operation Olympic Games, a joint United effort to sabotage Iranian nuclear centrifuges with a computer virus sometimes called Stuxnet. A description of it was contained in “Confront and Conceal,” a book by David E. Sanger, a New York Times reporter, that was also adapted as an article published by The Times. “In researching his book ‘Confront and Conceal’ and his stories for The New York Times, David E. Sanger relied on multiple sources in Washington, Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity,” The Times said in a statement on Monday. “As in the past, neither The Times nor Mr. Sanger will discuss whether a particular person was a source or the sourcing of particular information that was published, beyond what has been disclosed in our stories and in the book,” the statement continued. “Reporting like this serves a vital public interest: explaining how the United States is using a powerful new technology against its adversaries and the concern that it raises about how similar weapons can be used against the U. S. We will continue to pursue that reporting vigorously. “We are disappointed that the Justice Department has gone forward with the leak investigation that led to today’s guilty plea by General Cartwright,” it added. “These investigations send a chilling message to all government employees that they should not speak to reporters. The inevitable result is that the American public is deprived of information that it needs to know. ” Prosecutors also accused General Cartwright of lying about his conversations with another reporter, Daniel Klaidman, then of Newsweek. They said that the general had falsely told investigators that he had never discussed an unnamed country with Mr. Klaidman, but that he had sent an email to that reporter that “confirmed certain classified information relating” to that country in February 2012. Mr. Klaidman wrote an article in February 2012 about the Obama administration’s policy toward disrupting the Iranian nuclear program, including a section about a conversation between General Cartwright and Mr. Obama in early 2009 about various covert sabotage efforts. The list included cyberwarfare programs to damage centrifuges. He declined to comment on Monday. It was reported by Foreign Policy in the fall of 2013 that General Cartwright had been stripped of his security clearance. But with no official word from the Justice Department since then, it had seemed that the case was being handled administratively rather than criminally. On Monday morning, however, federal prosecutors filed criminal information against General Cartwright stating that on Nov. 2, 2012, investigators showed him “a list of quotes and quotations from David Sanger’s book, a number of which contained classified information,” but that he falsely told investigators that “he was not the source of any of the quotes and statements” and that “he did not provide or confirm classified information to David Sanger. ” General Cartwright’s guilty plea — not for leaking, but for lying to agents pursuing an investigation into an apparent leak — was reminiscent of the case prosecutors brought during the George W. Bush administration against I. Lewis Libby, a former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby was charged with lying about his conversations with journalists to investigators looking into the disclosure of a C. I. A. official’s identity, but was not charged over the leak itself. Before General Cartwright’s plea, the Obama administration had already brought criminal charges in more than twice as many cases involving leaks of government secrets to the news media as were brought under all previous presidents combined. They included eight officials it charged under the Espionage Act, although in some cases that charge was dropped. In a ninth case in the Obama era, the government struck a deal with David H. Petraeus, a prominent retired general who served as director of the C. I. A. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information related to accusations that he let his biographer read notebooks containing national security secrets, although she did not publish any of them. Mr. Petraeus also admitted to lying to the F. B. I. but he was not charged with that offense under his plea deal. He paid a fine and was sentenced to two years of probation. | 1 |
What Lessons America Can Learn From This Election Cycle Close With the 2016 presidential election now concluded after 18 months, Americans can look back for lessons on how to move forward as a nation. Here’s what the nation can learn from this election cycle:
How the old elementary school is holding up
It’s possible to start from great wealth and privilege and rise to the highest office in the land
Americans have a great capacity for forgiveness when it comes to sexual assault
Your father/son/brother/mother/daughter/uncle/aunt is a fucking moron
Never pick up the phone from an unknown number within six months of Election Day
Mankind is a fickle creature whose intentions are often contradictory and harmful to the self
Gary Johnson was the governor of New Mexico
There’s a slight chance America is not yet a post-racial society
For as little as $3, you can receive unwanted emails every day indefinitely
That while conservative fiscal reform through spending restraint and privatization could theoretically lead to economic growth, a more liberal program of tax relief for impoverished citizens, restricting corporate inversions, and enforcing exit taxes on businesses operating abroad also has reason for implementation
It’s only a matter of time until Eric Trump turns 35
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By Heather Callaghan, Editor There’s no denying that nature – and our exposure to it – has a profound effect on our mental well-being. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is only... | 0 |
FLINT, Mich. — State prosecutors filed criminal charges against six more government workers here on Friday in connection with Flint’s water contamination crisis, accusing them of concealing urgent information about the lead that was leaching into the city’s drinking water and doing nothing to stop it. The charges bring to nine the number of public employees criminally charged in the public health crisis, all midlevel bureaucrats or lower. Flint residents have been outraged that officials have so far escaped any consequences. But the Michigan attorney general, Bill Schuette, hinted at a news conference on Friday that charges against officials might follow, saying that investigators were “moving up the chain” and “going where the truth takes us, period. ” The widening inquiry comes as Flint’s residents continue to cope with the effects of the contamination. Concerns about the water emerged more than two years ago, but residents’ complaints were brushed off until last fall, when Gov. Rick Snyder acknowledged the scope of the problem. Tests continue to show that unfiltered tap water is still not safe to drink, and public health workers are trying to monitor thousands of Flint children who may have been exposed to high levels of lead, which can profoundly affect growth, behavior and intelligence over time. Mr. Schuette said the employees charged Friday — three from Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services and three from its Department of Environmental Quality — all “attempted to bury or cover up, to downplay or hide information” about the lead contamination that began in April 2014, when Flint began using the Flint River as its water supply to save money. “Their story was, there is nothing wrong with Flint water and it was perfectly safe to use,” said Mr. Schuette, a Republican who is seen as a possible candidate for governor in 2018. “In essence, these individuals concealed the truth. They were criminally wrong to do so. ” The accused include Liane Shekter Smith, who led the state environmental agency’s Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance unit until she was fired in February. Prosecutors said she withheld information about the severe health risks of using the water after the lead contamination was underway and failed to protect the citizens of Flint. She was charged with one count of misconduct in office, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison, and one count of willful neglect of duty, a misdemeanor. The other Department of Environmental Quality employees charged were Adam Rosenthal, a water regulator who prosecutors said doctored reports about lead levels in Flint’s water, and Patrick Cook, another regulator they said misled officials with the federal Environmental Protection Agency about the city’s water quality. Both men were charged with misconduct in office and conspiracy. Mr. Cook was also charged with willful neglect of duty, and Mr. Rosenthal with tampering with evidence. Also charged were Nancy Peeler, the Early Childhood Health Section manager in the state’s Department of Health and Human Services Robert Scott, a data analyst for the department and Corinne Miller, a state epidemiologist. Prosecutors said the three employees learned last July of a spike in the number of Flint children with elevated blood lead levels but concealed the results. After seeing an internal report showing the increase, Mr. Schuette said, Ms. Peeler and Mr. Scott “produced a bogus report” that showed no worrisome rise in lead levels. Ms. Miller, who was the state’s top epidemiologist but has since left the job, instructed others not to take action on the initial report, Mr. Schuette said. The three are charged with one count each of misconduct in office, conspiracy and willful neglect of duty. The four employees charged Friday who were still working for the state were suspended without pay. Todd Flood, the special counsel for the investigation, noted that on the same day that the health officials learned about the spike in blood lead levels, July 28 of last year, the environmental officials charged were doctoring water quality reports, and he hinted at a broader conspiracy. “You have two agencies manipulating reports on the same day,” Mr. Flood said, “and that lock step, going to stage left, that seems significant to me. ” Mr. Schuette, who said last month that investigators were having trouble getting documents they had requested from Governor Snyder’s private lawyers, said they had since had “great constructive dialogue” with Mr. Snyder’s team. The investigators refused to say whether they had interviewed Mr. Snyder, but one, Andrew Arena, said, “Nobody’s off limits, and the facts will take us to the truth. ” He likened the investigation to an organized crime case, which starts with people with the expectation that they can lead them to those at the top. “You don’t start at the top with organized crime,” Mr. Arena said. “That’s what we’re doing here. ” Flint began using the Flint River as its water supply to save money, but state regulators failed to require the city to add chemicals to prevent pipe corrosion, causing lead to leach into the water system. Brian P. Morley, a lawyer for Ms. Shekter Smith, said he was “surprised at these charges” and expected his client to plead not guilty. A lawyer for Ms. Miller declined to comment other defendants did not immediately return calls. Two other state employees and a Flint municipal employee — Michael Prysby, a district engineer with the environmental quality department, Stephen Busch, a district supervisor in the same department, and Michael Glasgow, Flint’s utilities manager — were charged in April in connection with the lead contamination. Mr. Glasgow has since agreed to cooperate with investigators in exchange for reduced charges. A report last month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that children drinking Flint water had a nearly 50 percent higher chance of elevated blood lead levels during the period that the city was using river water. A local pediatrician, Dr. Mona completed her own study in September 2015 and was the first to publicly warn of the spike in lead levels. The investigators said they were also investigating a possible connection between the water contamination and an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease that sickened at least 87 people in the Flint region, with nine known deaths, from June 2014 through October 2015. “You can rest assured that that is on our radar every day,” Mr. Flood said. “That is an investigation that is ongoing, and we have the best experts in the world working with us. ” | 1 |
OAKLAND, Calif. — Before excuses are made for LeBron James, before the bulk of the blame for consecutive horror shows at Oracle Arena is heaped on a supporting cast of Cleveland Cavaliers that has turned to dust when removed from a comfy Eastern Conference refuge, it must be reiterated that this was the team the King himself courted. This was the crew James left Miami for, the one he reconfigured with leverage upon returning home and then stood by approvingly when a coach with an impeccable (albeit limited) N. B. A. record was dismissed for a replacement with no record at all. That is not to say that Tyronn Lue, who slid over into David Blatt’s seat midseason, is the primary reason — if a reason at all — that the Cavaliers are down, two games to none, against the Golden State Warriors in the N. B. A. finals and, thus far, are embarrassing themselves. Losing in the finals to a Golden State team that won a record 73 games, if that is the inevitable result, would be no disgrace. But if the series continues this way, and so far it has not been remotely competitive, the epitaph for the Cavaliers’ season should be: This is the team James wanted, and assembled. After waiting outside the interview room for Lue to finish with reporters on Sunday night, James sat down, removed his sunglasses, picked up the microphone as if he were hosting a charity event and took responsibility for Game 2’s obliteration of his team on top of the beating it took in Game 1. He called himself out for carelessness with the ball, for committing seven of his team’s 17 turnovers in Game 2, for not making life easier for his overwhelmed teammates. “I’m not disappointed in our guys or frustrated,” he said. “I’m one of the guys who kind of always wants to shoulder the blame and take the blame when we don’t play as well as we should. It’s just who I am, and I’ve got to be better. ” Sloppy as he was, James was still the best performing Cavalier, with Richard Jefferson, a role player, as the . Against the Warriors, that was a formula for the disaster Game 2 became in the third quarter, with the Cavaliers sending most of the East Coast to bed early with an unconditional, emotionless surrender. After Game 1, Lue said it was mandatory that the Cavaliers pick up the pace on offense. After Game 2, James cited the turnovers and the Cavaliers’ inability to get back and set up their defense. This sounded good, but, well, whatever. The Warriors scored only 14 points to the Cavaliers’ 11, and who cannot see that the Cavaliers, on defense, have no clue how to deal with the Warriors in their sets? The Warriors had 55 assists in the two games here. The Cavaliers had 32. This disparity speaks to an athletic Golden State defense of interchangeable parts but also to Cleveland’s lack of the same and its poor defensive habits. When the ball and bodies start moving, the Cavaliers look like children scrambling to find a seat in a game of musical chairs. Klay Thompson takes two dribbles toward the lane, kicks it out to a scorching Draymond Green, and the Cavaliers’ rotation is too slow, or nonexistent. “He drove and kicked, and their defense was collapsing,” said Green, who torched the Cavaliers for 28 points, with five . Collapsing was the right characterization, literally and figuratively. Forget Stephen Curry. Green and Andre Iguodala, who both play at forward, look like point guards, shredding Cleveland’s defense with pinpoint passing for uncontested shots at the rim. On the Warriors’ last possession of the third quarter, the ball whipped around the perimeter, touching the hands of all five players before Thompson nailed a 3. The Cavaliers should have sued for whiplash. “These guys put you in so many mental positions where you have to figure it out, and they make you pay for it when you don’t,” James said. He has always been a willing and able defender, but what can we say about Kyrie Irving, who habitually loses his man, and J. R. Smith, who loses his focus and occasionally his mind? Irving was supposed to carry an offensive load in this series, ease the burden on James. He has taken 36 shots and made 12. Kevin Love was forced out of the game with a possible concussion after taking an inadvertent elbow to the head from Harrison Barnes. There was more to the story. Love had his back to Barnes, bracing to rebound a attempt by Thompson. He was also allowing Barnes to leap over him, another illustration of how difficult it has been for the Cavaliers to hide Love’s lack of athleticism. Love is just one example — although the most egregious — of what can happen when a player, even the very best player, enjoys the kind of executive leverage James has had since rejoining the Cavaliers in the summer of 2014. The denials from his camp and the Cleveland front office have naturally been vehement. They say James did not insist on trading Andrew Wiggins, the No. 1 pick of that year’s draft, to Minnesota for the overrated Love, a deal that deprived the Cavaliers of a superior young athlete James might have mentored. Nor, they contend, did James badger the Cavaliers’ general manager, David Griffin, into trading for the compulsively erratic Smith — who scored a combined 8 points in the two games here — or point a thumb down on the status of Blatt after publicly emasculating him during the 2015 playoffs. But agents who have had business with the Cavaliers speak of Griffin’s telling them he would get back to them after checking matters with James. League people remind you that Michael Jordan never had such power in Chicago and, based on the personnel decisions he opposed, probably would not have won six titles if he did have it. James has been and remains a superb player spokesman for the league in ways that Jordan never was. On Saturday, speaking of Muhammad Ali, he said, among other things gracious and smart, “I would never compare myself to Muhammad Ali because I never had to go through what those guys had to go through back in those times. ” He can and has affected his community in ways that his predecessors could not, thanks to staggering wealth and corporate support. But the one thing he — or any player — should never be is in charge of a franchise. He was not in Miami, where Pat Riley ruled, and James just happened to win two rings. Let’s remember that the Warriors looked ragged and lost in recent consecutive blowouts in Oklahoma City. But based on what we saw here, the Cavaliers had better win both games in Cleveland, or summer vacation will begin by early next week. And that is when we will learn how James really feels about the team he chose, the players he pushed for. Will he accept the blame then, or put the cool sunglasses back on and turn an executive thumb down? | 1 |
Medscape
Excerpts:
BALTIMORE — New findings from a large national claims database show the use of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs to be associated with an increased risk for Parkinson’s disease (PD), contrary to previous research suggesting the drugs have a protective effect for PD.
“We identified 20,000 Parkinson’s disease patients and looked at whether using statins was associated with a higher or lower risk, and we found people using statins have a higher risk of the disease, so this is the opposite of what has been hypothesized,” senior author Xuemei Huang, MD, PhD, vice chair for research at Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania, told Medscape Medical News .
While high cholesterol has been shown to have a protective effect on the risk for PD, the role of statin use has been the subject of debate. Published on October 31, 2016 | 0 |
HANGZHOU, China — President Obama sought on Sunday to heal a rift with Turkey, expressing his wholehearted support for its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the wake of a failed effort to oust him and promising America’s help in bringing the coup plotters to justice. Mr. Obama’s comments, after he met with Mr. Erdogan before a Group of 20 summit meeting here, seemed calculated to smooth over hard feelings in Turkey, where some officials had blamed the United States for fomenting the July 15 uprising by elements of the military. He said nothing about Mr. Erdogan’s crackdown after the coup, in which tens of thousands of people were arrested. And his reference to helping Turkey bring the perpetrators of the uprising to justice was not accidental: Mr. Erdogan is demanding that the United States extradite Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish Muslim cleric living in Pennsylvania whom he accused of inciting the coup. “This is the first opportunity that I’ve had to meet face to face with President Erdogan since the terrible attempted coup,” Mr. Obama said, facing the Turkish leader across a long table. “We’re glad you’re here, safe, and that we are able to continue to work together. ” He papered over the fact that Turkey’s interests have diverged recently from those of the United States, particularly in Syria, where Turkish forces have intervened to prevent Syrian Kurds from making further gains in the northern part of the country. The Kurds are trained and equipped by the United States, which views them as critical in the military campaign against the Islamic State. But Mr. Erdogan fears they are trying to create an unbroken Kurdish corridor just south of Turkey’s border with Syria. The Syrian Kurds have links to Turkish Kurds, who have been fighting his government. Mr. Erdogan said it was important for the United States and Turkey to fight against all terrorist groups, not just the Islamic State. He mentioned the acronyms of two Syrian Kurdish groups. “We have to embrace the same stance against all terrorist organizations around the world,” he said. “Our hope is never to see a belt of terrorism, a corridor of terrorism emerging in or around our region. ” Still, Mr. Erdogan was more conciliatory to Mr. Obama than he had been toward Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. when Mr. Biden traveled to Turkey last month. Mr. Biden apologized for not having visited sooner, but Mr. Erdogan sat complaining that Mr. Gulen used his home in Pennsylvania as a base to destabilize the Turkish government. On Sunday, Mr. Erdogan did not repeat those claims. He merely said that the Turkish government planned to submit additional legal evidence against Mr. Gulen to the Justice Department, which will recommend to a federal judge whether to extradite him. Mr. Erdogan noted that the Justice Department had sent officials to Turkey to investigate the case. Earlier in the day, Mr. Obama held his first meeting with Britain’s new prime minister, Theresa May. He reassured her, as he had her predecessor, David Cameron, that Britain’s vote to leave the European Union would have no effect on its relationship with the United States. | 1 |
KABUL, Afghanistan — Approximately 300 United States Marines will return this spring to help fight a resurgent Taliban in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, the site of a yearslong bloody campaign, American officials in Afghanistan said on Saturday. An American military spokesman in Kabul said the Marines would replace an Army unit stationed in Helmand, and would offer training and advice to members of the Afghan military and the national police. “The Marine rotation is to replace soldiers currently here conducting the train, advise and assist mission,” said Brig. Gen. Charles H. Cleveland, a spokesman for United States forces in Afghanistan. “We’re very pleased that the Marines will rotate in, as they have tremendous institutional history in the region. ” The Marines were last in Helmand, a hotbed of Taliban fighters and poppy cultivation, in October 2014. Since then, Afghan forces, suffering from leadership woes and plagued by corruption, have struggled to hold territory, with district after district falling to the Taliban. For months now, the insurgents have been at the gates of the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. The Afghan military welcomed the news of the Marines’ return. “We have been asking our foreign counterparts in security meetings to increase the level of their troops in Helmand Province to help us on the battlefields,” said Shakil Ahmad, an Afghan Army spokesman. Mr. Ahmad said the security situation in region was rapidly deteriorating. The Taliban appeared unfazed by the news of the Marines’ return. “Our mujahedeen continued their progress in the presence of tens of thousands of Americans and other invading forces,” said Qari Yousef Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman. “A few hundred other soldiers won’t become an obstacle on the way of our progress. ” Fewer than 8, 400 American troops are currently in Afghanistan, deployed either through NATO to train Afghan forces or as part of a smaller American counterterrorism mission. President Obama declared the United States combat mission in Afghanistan over in December 2014. But in the past year, as violence has spread across the country, the line for the American military between consulting and fighting has increasingly blurred. At the peak of a troop surge in 2011, there were about 20, 000 Marines fighting across Helmand alongside thousands of British soldiers. Western troops fought the Taliban village to village, and tried to win civilians’ hearts and minds by doling out cash for bridges and roads. The Taliban recently told Lashkar Gah residents to store food items, warning that they would once again cut off Helmand’s main highway to the regional economic hub, Kandahar Province. Unlike in the past, fighting between government troops and the Taliban has not diminished with the coming of this year’s winter. Many fear that when fighting intensifies in the spring, the Taliban will be starting from a position of strength around several provincial capitals. Ensuring that Afghan leaders take advantage of the winter to improve leadership and root out corruption will be critical to how they tackle Taliban pressure in the spring, American officials said. | 1 |
Report: Friend Has Been Going By Middle Name This Whole Fucking Time CALABASAS, CA—Astounded that it had never come up at any point in the six years they had known each other, local woman Lucy Reed, 25, reported Tuesday that her friend Nicole Silberthau had apparently been going by her middle name this whole fucking time. Cake Just Sitting There Take It CHICAGO—Assuring you that there was nothing to worry about and not a soul around who would see you, sources confirmed Tuesday that a large piece of chocolate cake was just sitting there and that you should go ahead and take it. Man Approaches Box Of Powdered Doughnuts Like Snake Discovering Unguarded Clutch Of Bird Eggs ASHEBORO, NC—Quietly slinking into his office’s break room after spying the unattended confections from afar, area marketing associate Dan Keegan reportedly approached a box of powdered doughnuts Monday like a pine snake discovering an unguarded clutch of bluebird eggs. Reality Of Fatherhood Never Truly Dawned On Man Until He Held Newborn Son’s Hospital Bill MISSOULA, MT—Describing how he suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a flood of intense emotions, local man Mike Bentzen told reporters Monday the reality of fatherhood didn’t truly set in for him until the moment he held his newborn son’s hospital bill. All-Business Adult In Halloween Shop Beelines It Straight For Pinhead Mask BROOKLINE, MA—Without so much as glancing at the seasonal store’s wide selection of other Halloween-themed merchandise, all-business 34-year-old Brian Aubin reportedly strode right past several aisles of costumes and accessories Friday and beelined it straight for the Pinhead masks. | 0 |
SHANGHAI — President Trump appeared to follow through on Friday on his promises to get tough on trade with China, less than a week before he is to meet with President Xi Jinping of China. In two executive orders, Mr. Trump called for tighter enforcement of tariffs imposed in and trade cases, as well as a comprehensive review of the United States trade deficits — measures that reflect America’s economic tensions with China. A pair of earlier presidential Twitter posts played to the tough talk: Mr. Trump said next week’s meeting with China “will be a very difficult one,” given the “massive trade deficits” and “job losses. ” But beneath the surface, the moves betrayed a trade policy in disarray, with the administration troubled by staffing deficiencies and a lack of consensus over strategic direction. With more talk than action, the orders so far seem more like a delaying tactic that gives administration officials the time to come up with a unified trade policy, which has eluded them so far. The delays in instituting an overall trade policy, particularly the 90 days for reviewing trade deficits, could also have geopolitical advantages. By putting off decisions on economic policy, Mr. Trump gets an opportunity to focus next week with Mr. Xi on North Korea. American officials are increasingly concerned that North Korea may already have mounted a nuclear weapon on an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach the United States or will very soon be able to do so. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump criticized China for unfair trade practices, accusing it of draining millions of jobs from the United States through a huge imbalance. In Mr. Trump’s view, that deficit was fed by Chinese currency manipulation, government subsidies to exporters and other directives aimed at giving China’s homegrown players an edge. The executive orders, though, do not really address those problems. The review of the trade deficit, described as a comprehensive examination of the products and countries responsible for the gap, looks more like an economics classroom exercise than a foundation for policy. While portrayed as a new approach, it is the latest in a very long lineup of federal reports on trade. Every year, the Office of the United States Trade Representative produces a voluminous report on foreign failures to protect intellectual property and another massive report on foreign trade barriers. The United States International Trade Commission, a separate federal agency, is constantly being asked by administrations and by Congress to produce lengthy reports on specific issues. And the Commerce Department produces a very detailed monthly report on trade statistics that includes data by country and by industry. As for improving enforcement, that is a somewhat technical issue. In the order, Mr. Trump wants to ensure that the steep tariffs imposed in and cases are collected. Over the years entrepreneurs have been suspected of setting up new companies in the United States to import goods, often from China, in the monthslong period after the government imposes such tariffs but before their exact amount is calculated. The companies bring the goods into the United States and sell them, and then the companies disappear or file for bankruptcy before the final duties can be collected. “There are many unscrupulous tricks of the trade being used — especially by China — to evade duties and thus continue cheating through the use of dumping and subsidies,” said Thomas M. Sneeringer, a former steel industry lawyer who is now the president of the Committee to Support U. S. Trade Laws, a manufacturing trade group. “These include falsifying the country of origin, transshipping, misclassifying products and outright criminal fraud. ” But these cases aren’t an economic game changer. As little as 1 percent of American imports are covered by steep tariffs, and the actual effect of illegal violations of these tariffs is far narrower still. “They’re politically sensitive, but in terms of the overall trade balance, they’re going to have a limited effect,” said Alan Wolff, a former American trade official who is now a senior counsel at the law firm Dentons. What really could make a difference for the trade deficit would be if the United States imposed a tax. Such a move would essentially impose a tax on goods from other countries. It would strike at the heart of the trade deficit. Each year, the United States buys $4 worth of Chinese goods for each $1 worth of American goods that China buys. The tax has strong similarities to the way China and the European Union assess taxes. The combined value of import tariffs and average state sales taxes in the United States is just 9 percent. Import taxes plus value added taxes — a kind of sales tax — total 27 percent in China and roughly 25 percent in Western Europe. Above all, the Trump administration still has not made the most fundamental strategic decision. Will the main priority on trade be a tax as part of tax reform in Congress? Or will the main priority be a long series of narrow, trade disputes? Peter Navarro, the director of Mr. Trump’s National Trade Council, and Wilbur Ross, the choice for commerce secretary, appear to favor a more aggressive approach like the border tax. Others, like Gary Cohn, the head of the National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, could have a moderating influence. Chinese officials have been watching the issue with rapt attention. Zhong Shan, China’s new minister of commerce, was asked at a news conference during the National People’s Congress annual session in early March which of two difficult outcomes he might prefer. A tax would impose a heavy financial burden on Chinese exports and the Chinese economy, but it might result in limited diplomatic friction. The tax would amount to a single action by the United States and would apply equally to trade with all foreign countries — not just China. A flurry of trade restrictions by the United States might not add up to a lot of money, because bilateral trade is divided into thousands of categories. But it could produce a long series of diplomatic confrontations. Mr. Zhong, in the usual fashion of trade ministers, did not address the question directly, endorsing a continuation of existing trade relationships. “No protectionism,” he said, “serves the interests of the two countries. ” | 1 |
By her own admission, Geena Davis is not the norm when it comes to gender disparity onscreen. “I’ve been really lucky to play a lot of important roles in movies, and I got to be really cool things,” she said, ticking off a list that includes a baseball phenomenon (“A League of Their Own”) a pirate captain (“Cutthroat Island”) and, perhaps the coolest of them all, a housewife on the lam in “Thelma and Louise. ” Now she’s Angela Rance, a Chicago hotel manager, wife and mother of two daughters, in Fox’s “The Exorcist,” a retooling of the 1973 horror classic with a debut on Friday. She turns to her priest (Alfonso Herrera) when something in her home seems amiss. By the time “Tubular Bells” plays, you can be sure some heads are going to spin. It’s the kind of tantalizing role that Ms. Davis, now 60, had spent the last decade searching for since “Commander in Chief,” in which she played the first female president of the United States. And she knows it’s rare. In 2007, she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media to study how girls and women are presented onscreen, which she discussed in a phone interview from Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, daughter and twin sons. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. The pilot is scary, but I hear the show gets even scarier. We’re blown away, because every time we get the next script we’re like, “Oh my God, now what’s happening?” It’s going to get hella scary. [Laughs] There’s evil afoot, and the story grows to be far beyond what happens in our family. Had you seen the original movie? I was scarred for life when it came out. I already had enough problems with ghosts under the bed, ghosts in the closet and believing in every possible superstition. Seeing that added to the pile. Why did you found your gender institute? The impetus was my daughter. I was very aware of the lack of great female characters in film, because I was living it. And when “Thelma and Louise” came out, the reaction was so overwhelming that it made me realize how few opportunities we have for women to feel like that coming out of a movie — to feel empowered and inspired by the female characters. I had no clue that children’s media in the 21st century would be wildly imbalanced. And as a mother, I was horrified because what message is that sending to kids from the very beginning if the female characters are narrowly stereotyped or hypersexualized or not even there at all? How do you make your point? I go to meetings at the guilds and networks and studios and production companies and present the research in a private and collegial way. And the reaction is fantastic, because they’re shocked and horrified, and they want to make change. You recently introduced a tool that can measure not only how much time women are onscreen but also how much they speak. What have you learned? Women are not only fewer characters and have fewer lines, but they’re onscreen less when they are speaking than men. In other words, they were cutting to a male or something else when the females were talking — enough so that it was noteworthy. Many women said “Thelma and Louise” changed their lives. What about yours? It dramatically changed my life, because that’s what made me so interested in how women are represented onscreen and wanting to help change that. And this is my passion now. | 1 |
Leave a reply Charles Hugh Smith – The sole output of America’s Establishment/Ruling Elite is self-serving hubris. America’s Ruling Elite is freaking out because a significant percentage of the American public is trying to fire them. The Ruling Elite has failed and deserves to be fired, and deep down, they know it–and this awareness of their self-serving failure fuels their panic and their loathing of the non-elite Americans who are trying to fire them. If you think this chart of soaring student loan debt is a sign of “success,” you are 1) delusional 2) protected from the dire consequences of this failure 3) getting your paycheck from this failed system. That in a nutshell is the state of the nation: those who are protected from the consequences of failure are loyal to the Establishment, as are the millions drawing a paycheck from systems they know are irredeemable failures. Let’s review the central institutions of the nation: 1. Healthcare: a failed system doomed to bankrupt the nation. 2. Defense: a failed system of cartels and Pentagon fiefdoms that have saddled the nation with enormously costly failed weapons systems like the F-35 and the LCS. 3. Higher Education: a bloated, failed system that is bankrupting an entire generation while mis-educating them for productive roles in the emerging economy. (I cover this in depth in The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy and Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy .) 4. Foreign policy: Iraq: a disaster. Afghanistan: a disaster. Libya: a disaster. Syria: a disaster. Need I go on? 5. Political governance: a corrupt system of self-serving elites, lobbyists, pay-to-play, corporate puppet-masters, and sociopaths who see themselves as above the law. In Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform , I explain why the only possible output of these systems is failure. The sole output of America’s Establishment/Ruling Elite is self-serving hubris. In the open market, failed leadership has consequences. Customers vanish and the enterprise goes bankrupt, or shareholders and employees rally to fire the failed leadership. In our state-cartel system, failed leadership only tightens its grip on the nation’s throat. The Deep State can’t be fired, nor does it ever stand for election. The two political parties are interchangeable, as are the politicos who race from fund-raiser to fund-raiser. It’s tempting to blame the individuals who inhale the wealth and power of our failed system, but it’s the system, not the individuals, though a more corrupt, craven, self-serving lot cannot easily be assembled. In broad brush, the Establishment and its Ruling Elite are still fighting World War II. The solution to the Great Depression and fascism was to cede complete control of the economy, the media and the social order to the central state. Tens of millions of people were aggregated into vast industrial corporations or the Armed Forces. Everyone heard the same “news” and had the same limited choices of work and consumption. It was easier for the federal government to control a handful of cartel-corporations and unions, and this cemented the state-cartel system that remains dominant today. But the world and the economy changed, and this model was no longer efficient or effective. Sprawling corporations with captive domestic markets started facing global competition, and networks of interchangeable suppliers were much more efficient than vertically organized corporations. Adding layers of government bureaucracy to manage increasing complexity was no longer effective or affordable as labor costs rose and the efficiencies of networks outpaced cumbersome hierarchies. People lost faith in their government and their cartel-corporations because the truth broke through the state-managed propaganda. Industrial corporations were revealed as greedy polluters; auto manufacturers churned out vehicles with scant care for safety, and the federal government lied to the citizens about the war in Vietnam, and much else. The Internet was the stake through the heart of this inefficient, ineffective state-cartel hierarchy. The Internet enabled a level of transparency that was impossible in the old state-cartel model in which everyone watched the same three TV networks and read the same managed “news.” Consumers could now access the experience of other consumers directly, bypassing the filtering mechanisms of a complicit state and the corporate PR/marketing machinery. Governments were pressured to (very reluctantly) make public all sorts of material that was safely private in the good old days of backroom dealing and sweetheart contracts with pals. The central state’s resistance to transparency only reinforced the public’s loss of trust. The more money and power the state grabbed, the greater the level of corruption and self-serving insider dealing. The more the state managed the private cartels of banking, Big Pharma, higher education, the military-industrial complex, healthcare insurers, etc., the more costs soared while the quality of the output plummeted. The current self-serving Ruling Elite deserves to be fired for its abject failure of leadership. The nation desperately needs leaders who understand the economy and nation are in the midst of a new industrial/digital revolution that favors networks over hierarchy and transparency over state-cartel corruption. Unfortunately, as I explain in Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change , the central state has no mechanisms for devolving power to decentralized networks, or surrendering either power or budgets. The central state only knows how to aggregate more power and skim more money from the private economy. The last failed remnants of the state-cartel hierarchies left over from World War II must implode before we can move forward. Healthcare, defense, pharmaceuticals, higher education, the mainstream media and the systems of governance must all decay to the point that no one can be protected from the destructive consequences of their failure, and no paychecks can be issued by these failed systems. Only then can we face the reality that failure has consequences. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Senator Jeff Sessions was confirmed on Wednesday as President Trump’s attorney general, capping a bitter and racially charged nomination battle that crested with the procedural silencing of a leading Democrat, Senator Elizabeth Warren. Mr. Sessions, an Alabama Republican, survived a vote, 52 to 47, in the latest sign of the extreme partisanship at play as Mr. Trump strains to install his cabinet. No Republicans broke ranks in their support of a colleague who will become the nation’s top law enforcement official after two decades in the Senate. But the confirmation process — ferocious even by the standards of moldering decorum that have defined the body’s recent years — laid bare the Senate’s deep divisions at the outset of the Trump presidency. At the same time, the treatment of Ms. Warren, who was forced to stop speaking late Tuesday after criticizing Mr. Sessions from the Senate floor, rekindled the politics that animated the presidential election and the women’s march protesting Mr. Trump the day after his inauguration last month. Mr. Sessions cast his final vote as a senator to note that he was present for Wednesday’s tally. His confirmation was met by applause from his colleagues, including a few Democrats, on the Senate floor. “I can’t express how appreciative I am for those of you who stood by me during this difficult time,” Mr. Sessions said shortly after the vote. “By your vote tonight, I have been given a real challenge. I’ll do my best to be worthy of it. ” Democrats spent the hours before the vote on Wednesday seething over the rebuke of Ms. Warren, of Massachusetts, who had been barred from speaking on the floor the previous night. Late Tuesday, Republicans voted to formally silence Ms. Warren after she read from a 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King that criticized Mr. Sessions for using “the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens” while serving as a United States attorney in Alabama. Since Mr. Trump announced his choice for attorney general, Mr. Sessions’s history with issues of race had assumed center stage. A committee hearing on his nomination included searing indictments from black Democratic lawmakers like Representative John Lewis of Georgia, the civil rights icon, and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who broke with Senate tradition to testify against a peer. For weeks, Republicans rejected suggestions that Mr. Sessions could not be trusted on civil rights, arguing that he had been tarnished unfairly over accusations of racial insensitivity that have dogged him since the 1980s. “Everybody in this body knows Senator Sessions well, knows that he is a man of integrity, a man of principle,” Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, said during the debate on Wednesday afternoon. The “twisting” of Mr. Sessions’s record offended him, he said, even as Democrats continued their attacks on the nominee. As the 84th attorney general, Mr. Sessions brings a sharply conservative bent to the Justice Department and its 113, 000 employees. A former prosecutor, he promises a focus aligned with Mr. Trump in pushing a “law and order” agenda that includes tougher enforcement of laws on immigration, drugs and gun trafficking. Civil rights advocates worry, however, that he will reverse steps taken by the Obama administration in the last eight years to bring more accountability to police departments, state and local governments, and employers. Advocates point to his history of votes against various civil rights measures, as well as the accusations of racial insensitivity. Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, said on Wednesday that on civil rights, immigration, abortion, criminal sentencing guidelines and a range of other issues, Mr. Sessions had been far outside the mainstream and had pushed “extreme policies” often targeting minorities. That criticism peaked with Tuesday night’s rebuke of Ms. Warren, based on an arcane Senate rule that prevents members from impugning the character of a fellow senator, as she read the letter from Mrs. King, the widow of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Mrs. King wrote the letter in response to Mr. Sessions’s 1986 nomination for a federal judgeship, for which he was ultimately rejected in part because of accusations that he had been insensitive to minorities as a prosecutor. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, led the objection against Ms. Warren. His explanation afterward — “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted” — instantly became a liberal rallying cry, Ms. Warren as a leading voice of Democratic resistance to Mr. Trump. “What hit me the hardest was, it is about silence,” Ms. Warren told a group of civil rights leaders on Wednesday at the Capitol. “It’s about trying to shut people up. It’s about saying: ‘No, no, no. Just go ahead and vote. ’” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said on Wednesday that the censure was “totally, totally ” and that it reflected an “ attitude” emanating from the White House. He and other Democrats said it served to mute legitimate criticism of Mr. Sessions’s record on civil rights and racial issues — one of their main avenues of attack at his contentious nomination hearing last month. The vote on Mr. Sessions came a day after Senate Republicans broke through a bottleneck in Mr. Trump’s nominees by approving Betsy DeVos, the embattled Republican donor, as education secretary with the help of a tiebreaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence. With Mr. Sessions’s confirmation, votes are expected in coming days on the nominations of Representative Tom Price of Georgia for secretary of health and human services and Steven T. Mnuchin for Treasury secretary. Mr. Sessions’s path to confirmation hit another snag that riled Democrats and energized opponents of his nomination: Mr. Trump’s dramatic firing of the acting leader of the Justice Department. Last week, Mr. Trump abruptly dismissed Sally Q. Yates, the acting attorney general, setting off a fierce backlash from Democrats against Mr. Sessions’s nomination to fill her job permanently. Ms. Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, had refused to defend Mr. Trump’s controversial order barring travel by some foreigners, which is now tied up in litigation in federal courts. Democrats seized on her firing to say that Mr. Sessions is too close to the president to be independent or stand up to him. As the first senator to support Mr. Trump’s bid for president last year, Mr. Sessions became an influential campaign adviser. While he pledged repeatedly not to be “a mere rubber stamp” for the White House, Democrats asserted that he would not be willing to challenge legally questionable policies like the travel ban or the president’s threats to reinstitute the use of torture on terrorism suspects. The arguments failed to sway any Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which voted, 11 to 9, along party lines last week to approve Mr. Sessions’s nomination. Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who leads the Senate Judiciary Committee, expressed confidence that Mr. Sessions would be a “fair and evenhanded” attorney general and would make good on his pledges to enforce even the laws he voted against in the Senate. “There should be no question,” Mr. Grassley said, “that he is more than qualified to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer. ” | 1 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. President Obama returned to Elkhart, Ind. the first city he visited after taking office, to celebrate it as a showcase for his economic policies’ success. He took his most forceful stance yet on the presidential election, accusing Republicans of aiming to help the rich at the expense of the struggling middle class. He did not mention Donald Trump by name, but railed against his pledge to roll back rules on Wall Street. _____ 2. Hillary Clinton also attacked Mr. Trump. She cited testimony from former employees portraying Trump University as unscrupulous and predatory and called him “a fraud. ” Above, a rally in New Jersey. On Thursday, she plans to use a speech in San Diego to lay out the damage a Trump presidency could do to national security. Meanwhile, the list of prominent Republicans who say they will not attend the Republican National Convention keeps growing. _____ 3. A French naval vessel picked up a signal believed to be from a data recorder belonging to EgyptAir Flight 804, the jet that crashed into the Mediterranean on May 19. Officials said it could take days to locate the source precisely, and then more time for underwater robots and sonar equipment to hunt for wreckage. _____ 4. Switzerland opened a rail tunnel — the world’s longest and deepest — clearing the way for a rail link under the Alps. The E. U.’s transportation minister called the Gotthard Base Tunnel “a milestone in European rail history. ” The new route should cut an hour off the trip between the economic hubs of Zurich and Milan. _____ 5. It’s been nine years since the seventh and last “Harry Potter” book came out. One of our stories today looks at how J. K. Rowling has kept her creative hand in like outing Dumbledore as gay a few years ago. And her “official” eighth installment is nigh. “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a play in which the boy wizard is all grown up, begins previews in London next week. _____ 6. A huge wildfire is still ripping through western Canada. But the flames are out in the city of Fort McMurray, a hub of the industry. Thousands of residents are being allowed back, if only to document damage for insurance claims. Crews are spraying sealant over toxic ash and rubble, and the government is working on a rail plan to remove masses of refrigerators and freezers ruined by spoiled food. _____ 7. Uber, Silicon Valley’s most valuable private business, has collected billions from investors over the last three years as it seeks to build a global empire. Now, Saudi Arabia is in, too, with $3. 5 billion, Uber’s biggest single infusion. The Saudis are seeking to expand their economy beyond oil. _____ 8. A strange, gruesome murder in Plano, Tex. played out partly on social media. This man told the police that he’d made a suicide pact with his girlfriend but that she’d “chickened out,” so he stabbed her to death. He also posted photos of each of them after the fact. He has been charged with murder, and Facebook has been criticized for leaving the photos up for 36 hours. _____ 9. The Syrian government eased limits on aid convoys, allowing the first trucks with food and medicine to reach the besieged town of Daraya, on the outskirts of Damascus. Aid groups said the government was simply trying to stop the U. N. from turning to airdrops. Some critics have accused the government of trying to starve its opponents. _____ 10. Finally, many Americans worried about high blood pressure try to limit their salt intake, but the table shaker isn’t the problem. Processed and prepared foods tend to send sodium levels off the charts. The F. D. A. released voluntary guidelines for food manufacturers and restaurants urging gradual reductions. Public health advocates say the standards could eventually help avert thousands of heart attacks and strokes. _____ Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a. m. Sundays. Want to look back? Here’s last night’s briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
Judith Clark, who drove a getaway car in the infamous 1981 robbery of a Brink’s armored car in Rockland County, N. Y. that left a guard and two police officers dead, went into prison defiant, with seemingly little chance of getting out. The judge who sentenced her saw her as beyond rehabilitation, giving her a minimum of 75 years in prison and all but ensuring she would die there. But Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, citing what he called Ms. Clark’s long sentence and “exceptional strides in ” commuted her sentence on Friday. Mr. Cuomo’s action does not undo Ms. Clark’s conviction on murder and robbery charges, but it reduces her sentence to 35 years to life and makes her eligible for parole in 2017. If Ms. Clark is freed, it would be in recognition of her evolution from radical to model prisoner, and serve as a coda to a notorious case that was among the last gasps of violent extremism seen in the 1960s and 1970s. Ms. Clark, 67, must still win over the parole board, and law enforcement groups are expected to fight her release. Ms. Clark’s efforts to obtain clemency have gained wide attention in recent years, particularly as other participants in the Brink’s robbery have been released or granted parole hearings. Two of those involved, Mutulu Shakur, the stepfather of the rapper Tupac Shakur and described as the ringleader of the holdup, and David Gilbert, a leader of the Weather Underground who was also involved, remain incarcerated. Mr. Cuomo noted that Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia University, was released in 2003 after receiving a as part of a plea deal. The commutation was part of a raft of clemencies announced by the governor on Friday, which were hailed by a wide swath of criminal justice advocates. About 100 people who had finished serving time for nonviolent crimes they had committed as minors were pardoned, and the sentences of several other inmates were commuted. The clemency actions were the largest number by a governor in the state’s history, a spokesman said. The governor met Ms. Clark, who had one of the longest sentences of those in the Brink’s case, during a prison visit this year. A range of people have attested to Ms. Clark’s transformation, including Elaine Lord, former superintendent of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women, the prison where she has spent almost all of her 35 years behind bars. Ms. Lord wrote to . David A. Paterson in 2010 that she had seen Ms. Clark “change into one of the most perceptive, thoughtful, helpful and profound human beings that I have ever known, either inside or outside of a prison. ” A group of 13 former presidents of the New York City bar association signed a letter seeking clemency for her this year. In the years before the robbery, Ms. Clark had bounced from mainstream civil rights causes to a group called the May 19th Communist Organization, an offshoot of the Weather Underground that believed a revolution was in the offing. She did not quickly renounce her radical ideology once in prison. Deemed a major security risk, she spent two years in solitary confinement after being caught helping to plan an escape. But her attitudes began to change. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees while incarcerated, and led educational programs for inmates, including a prenatal course and an program. Her release has been opposed by law enforcement groups and by some relatives of the men who were killed in the robbery and ensuing search: Sgt. Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly Brown of the Nyack police, and Peter Paige, a Brink’s guard. Ed Day, county executive of Rockland County, called the push for clemency for Ms. Clark, “a vicious slap in the face to every member of law enforcement. ” “The blood of Nyack police Sgt. Edward O’Grady, Officer Waverly ‘Chipper’ Brown and Brinks guard Peter Paige will be on her hands until the day she dies,” he said in a statement on Friday. “Judith Clark is a domestic terrorist. Her only place in a civilized society is behind bars. ” Ms. Clark’s lawyer, Steven Zeidman, said on Friday that his client was aware of the concerns of the victims’ families. “She’s grateful for this opportunity and is very ecstatic, but is very fully aware that it’s painful and difficult for those who lost loved ones that day,” he said. Though Ms. Clark did not fire any shots, she was a willing participant in the robbery, which the militant group viewed as an “expropriation” for what they called the Republic of New Afrika. According to her account from that day, she had parked in a corner of a mall in Nanuet where other members of the group attacked an armored car, grabbing $1. 6 million while leaving Mr. Paige dead and another guard in a pool of blood. Gunfire was also exchanged later with the police. Ms. Clark’s radicalism had hardened by the trial. She called herself a “freedom fighter” and called the court officers “fascist dogs. ” In an email on Friday, Edward J. O’Grady III, the son of the slain officer, said that he was still processing the news. He called his father a hero and said he felt the pain of his loss every day. But, he said, “the release of Judith Clark will take no more away from me and will bring no more hurt to my life. ” He also wrote about Ms. Clark’s daughter, Harriet, a lecturer at Stanford, who was 11 months old when her mother was arrested. “She did no more to deserve her lot than my sisters and I did to deserve ours,” he wrote. “If it brings an end to the suffering that Harriet has to deal with every day, then perhaps I can be happy for both of them, and I can assure you, I’ll still be able to sleep at night. ” | 1 |
The French film icon Brigitte Bardot has urged her fellow countrymen not to vote for Emmanuel Macron in France’s presidential election on Sunday, saying you can see his lack of compassion in “the coldness of his steel eyes”. [The animal rights campaigner tweeted to her followers that they should not vote Macron, fearing the situation for animals would deteriorate under his presidency. “The contempt he gives to animal suffering can be seen in the total lack of empathy reflected in the coldness of his steel eyes. “Whilst the scandals are increasing, he takes the side of the animal breeders and the hunters against animal rights associations that are fighting with the lobbies that seem to have power over this candidate. ” One of the sex symbols of the 1950s and 1960s, Bardot came out as a supporter of populist candidate Marine Le Pen at the beginning of the year. In a interview with Le Figaro that touched upon cultural issues, Ms. Bardot was asked what she thought of contemporary culture. “We live in a period when everything is vulgar, ordinary, and mediocre,” Bardot said. “France no longer has the radiance, the majesty it had. ” When asked if she was close to Le Pen’s migration party, the Front National, the actress responded: “I am very patriotic. I was raised by a father and a grandfather who fought for France and instilled in me a love of my homeland. I am not proud of what France is today … I’m not a ‘facho’ [fascist] any more than Marine Le Pen is. ” “Marine Le Pen has the will to take France in hand, to restore borders and give priority to the French. ” Acknowledged as a symbol of woman’s liberation, Bardot told Le Figaro she was against the Muslim face veil. “Communitarianism takes on too much importance. It is the culmination of thirty years of laxity. ” She is also a vocal opponent of Muslim halal slaughter, which often involves slaughtering an animal without stunning it, causing pain and distress before death. Regarded as a free speech activist, the actress has faced trial five times between 1997 and 2008 for “inciting racial hatred” including for comments criticising mass Muslim immigration in France. On one of these occasions, she was convicted for “decrying the loss of French identity and tradition due to the ‘multiplication of mosques while our church bells fall silent for want of priests’”. | 1 |
Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” discussing FBI director James Comey testimony last week and the investigations into Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election, Sen. Mike Lee ( ) said there was not a “scintilla” of evidence that President Donald Trump colluded with the Russians or obstructed justice. Lee said, “Look, in this circumstance, if he’s got evidence of collusion bring it forward. If he’s got evidence of corruption, of obstruction, bring it forward. I have yet to see anything even a scintilla and so it’s time to wrap this up and time to move on. I don’t see any evidence of anything happening here and it is a result I think it’s time to move forward. ” He added, “I don’t see that that amounts to obstruction. I don’t see any evidence of intent to obstruct. I don’t see any indication that there was even the potential for corruption here or for obstruction of justice. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
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