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US air strikes in Afghanistan increase in 2016 Sun Oct 30, 2016 6:12PM A US drone aircraft lands at Afghanistan's Jalalabad Airport. © AFP
Amin AlemiPress TV, Kabul
A number of US military officials have declared that America has conducted 700 air raids in Afghanistan in 2016. The figure shows a 4 percent increase in such strikes compared to last year. Afghan officials, however, believe that the country can fight terror groups without support from US forces. Loading ... | 0 |
YANJIAO, China — Artists in need of cheap, affordable studio space are often drawn to or hardscrabble neighborhoods. The visual artists who flocked to SoHo in Manhattan decades ago helped resurrect what had been a deteriorating factory and warehouse district. Young artists also helped revive parts of Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Bushwick, and a similar pattern has occurred in many other major cities, including Berlin, Paris and Detroit. In China, a small and decidedly nondescript city called Yanjiao, about an hour’s drive from Beijing, has been experiencing a similar influx of artists, though it is highly unlikely that they will initiate the kind of renaissance that has tourists flocking to Williamsburg and SoHo. That’s because the artists’ inexpensive studios in Yanjiao lack exposed brick walls or distressed wood beams. Instead, they tend to feature concrete walls and cheap metal fittings, and they are generally in large, uninspired apartment blocks. Yanjiao, with a population of about 300, 000, was once known mostly as a “sleeper city,” whose residents commuted to jobs in Beijing. During the day, its wide, dusty streets are nearly empty, flanked by apartment buildings waiting for tenants to return from work. The idealistic but impoverished artists here, many of them young graduates from Beijing’s elite art schools, work and live in these apartment blocks. Driven by high rents and the constant threat of demolition in Beijing, many artists who might previously have hunkered down in the city, China’s unofficial cultural capital, are flocking to Yanjiao as a spot from which to chase their dreams. “The only reason for artists living in Yanjiao is that it’s cheap,” one of them, Zhang Yongji, 27, said with a laugh. Like many young artists, Mr. Zhang dreamed of making it big in Beijing. But after graduating from the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts there in 2012, he looked into renting a studio in the city and found he could not afford one. A friend of his was living in Yanjiao, and after visiting, he decided to move here. Eventually, he settled into an apartment complex called the South Side of Hawaii, one of the city’s many sprawling, colorfully named residential complexes designed in a faux European style. (Others include the North Side of Hawaii, Hawaii Valley and Sweet Seoul City.) In 2013, he and a group of friends founded On Space, an apartment turned experimental art gallery. In the last decade, urbanization and gentrification have accelerated in Beijing. “These forces are pushing artists to think of alternative models for running art spaces, including, yes, spaces in Yanjiao,” said Kira a and the director of China Residencies, a nonprofit arts organization. Many of China’s most famous contemporary artists emerged from artist villages on the urban fringes of Beijing, where rent was low and distractions from making art were few. One of the best known of these enclaves is Caochangdi Village, which became an artists’ hub after Ai Weiwei built his studio there in 1999. However, as Beijing’s city limits have expanded, many smaller artist villages have been torn down to make way for new development. “Art is always pushed to the edge,” said He Miao, a curator of contemporary art in Beijing. “In China, contemporary art cannot be made in cities. Where the urban meets the rural, that’s where art happens. ” Yanjiao initially attracted attention from the artistic community in 2006, when the Central Academy of Fine Arts established a satellite campus not far from the South Side of Hawaii. Art supply, printing and framing shops quickly popped up to serve the students, teachers and artists who would be living and working nearby. The first artists found it lonely. “When I first got here, my building was completely empty, and there were no lights at night,” said Pange Yang, 26, who arrived in 2012. “I was the only person in the building. ” But as word of mouth about Yanjiao spread, more artists began coming. “I was preparing to really do the poor, starving artist thing in Songzhuang,” a artist village about a away, said Li Tianqi, 24, another founder of On Space. “But why rent a tiny shack in Songzhuang when you can have a nice studio in Yanjiao?” No one knows how many young artists now call Yanjiao home, though the On Space founders estimate that at least several hundred have space here. Last year, the gallerists tried an informal census of the city’s artists, but ran out of time after conducting interviews with about 60 people. Yanjiao has also caught the eye of established artists. Its most famous tenants are the Gao brothers, a pair of multimedia artists internationally known for their irreverent sculptures. In 2013, they bought a former factory building and turned it into an airy studio complex they call Blessgo, which they use for making larger works. Referring to the quickly gentrifying 798 Art District in Beijing, Gao Zhen, the older brother, said in an interview, “In 798, we still won’t be allowed to exhibit certain works of art, and you just can’t completely let go of your worries because even renting studios in 798 isn’t completely stable, with demolitions and relocations. ” The siblings still maintain a studio in the 798 district, but plan to eventually relocate entirely to Yanjiao. Most artists in Yanjiao work in more humble circumstances. Much of the city’s surplus of residential space takes the form of cheap, unfinished apartments called maopifang. Little more than concrete shells, they are perfect for artists looking to create studios on a shoestring. Because of the dominance of residential space in Yanjiao, its atmosphere differs markedly from the gritty industrial hipness of Caochangdi or the more touristic 798, where cafes, boutiques and galleries have sprung up alongside artists’ studios. In Yanjiao, virtually nothing comparable has appeared. But many of the Yanjiao artists have embraced its decidedly suburban aesthetic. Zhang Zhanzhan, a painter, has completely transformed his maopifang over the years, covering the concrete floors with whitewashed pine slats and the empty doorways with colored fabric. Pictures of his chic studio have been viewed by thousands of users on WeChat, a Chinese social media app. “I once went to drop off some paintings at a Beijing gallery, and the person there asked me if I was the artist with the ‘ studio,’” he recalled. Yanjiao’s days as an affordable outpost may be numbered. Rents have more than tripled since the first artists moved in, mainly because of property speculation, and the number of unfinished maopifangs has dwindled. Moreover, despite the city’s now solid reputation as an offshoot artistic community, Beijing’s allure remains. While a fresh wave of graduates from the capital’s art academies move into Yanjiao each summer, many older artists have already left. Last year, On Space decided not to renew its lease, because most of its events are now held in collaboration with organizations in Beijing. Zhang Yongji is going back to the capital to pursue a master’s degree. “This is a very temporary place,” he said. “We’re all here still hoping to someday make it in Beijing. ” | 1 |
Wed, 26 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC Triggered journalists from across the nation are bemoaning the treatment members of the press are receiving at Trump campaign rallies from the Trump supporters the media routinely misrepresents as ignorant racists, fascist Nazis, or disenchanted working whites. With increasing regularity, these journalist snowflakes are "reporting" their victimization at the hands Trump supporters who chant mean things like, "CNN sucks" and call them names like "presstitutes." For members of the media elite, the occasional taunts and jeers signal a dangerous threat to the free press. During an interview with Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer breathlessly asked Trump's campaign manager to ask Trump to stop calling out the press at his rallies because he is scared "there could be an ugly incident" between Trump supporters and the "hardworking young journalists" who cover his rallies. A quick review of media stories over the last two weeks reveals more than a dozen articles in major publications with the same "journalists victimized by Trump supporters at rallies" narrative. Trump supporters endure long waits, messy parking, and often obstructed view seating to rally for their candidate. The press, on the other hand, is given their own entrance, sectioned off seating, and protection from event security and the Secret Service. After an exhaustive search, this Breitbart reporter could find exactly zero incidences of members of the media being physically attacked or assaulted at Trump rallies. None of this has stopped the misleading characterization of Trump supporters creating a "menacing" and "dangerous" environment for these special snowflakes. The narrative sprung up briefly in August when NBC 's Katy Tur wrote a long piece in Marie Claire in which she gives her account of her confrontational relationship with Trump and the backlash his "insults" on her reporting created with his supporters. Here is a small piece from her "no-holds-barred" account: I was six months into covering the Trump campaign for MSNBC and NBC News, and there I was, in the belly of a World War II battleship, in a press pen made out of bicycle racks, surrounded by thousands of whipped-up Trump supporters. ... Trump decided to go further in Mount Pleasant, pointing his finger squarely at me and launching a personal attack as millions of Americans watched at home. "What a lie it was," Trump said, referring to the claim that he had left the stage abruptly. "What a lie. Katy Tur. What a lie it was. Third. Rate. Reporter. Remember that." The crowd's boos ricocheted off the iron hull of the USS Yorktown. Just a few days after the Tur piece was published, two other NBC press employees — Frank Thorp and Ali Vitali — tweeted out pictures and videos of Trump supporters showing insufficient deference to the press. It was so very traumatic that it inspired several stories, including this one in Real Clear Politics . On October 13th, the victimhood narrative kicked off in earnest when the "Committee to Protect Journalists" issued a statement claiming that Donald Trump is a "threat to press freedom." The same day Politico's Ben Schreckinger ran an article titled, "Trump crowds rain hate on the press" and CNN 's Jim Acosta claimed to have found a crudely written sign with a swastika and "media" written on it. The next day, on October 14th, the narrative of violent Trump supporters scaring the press was being pushed across the media . The Huffington Post 's Ed Mazza wrote a piece titled, "Frenzied Donald Trump Supporters Are Turning On The Media — And It's Getting Scary." The Washington Post 's Paul Farhi wrote , "The press always got booed at Trump rallies. But now the aggression is menacing." Ed Kilgore at New York Magazine titled his piece, "Trump's Dangerous Game of 'Beat the Press'." Tierney Mcafee 's article in People Magazine was titled, "Press Corps with Trump Now Needs Police Escort as Crowd Shouts 'Whores!'." Even the Wall St. Journal got in on the action when Reid Epstein wrote, "Trump Rally-Goers Dismiss His Vulgarities, Offer Their Own for Clinton, News Media." Just to name a few. The stories have continued until the time of this writing with similar articles in the New York Times , Media Matters , Washington Post (again), AlterNet , and on and on. Every special snowflake reporter with a Twitter account wanted in on the sweet victimhood action. McKay Coppins from Buzzfeed tweeted a seven-second video of someone "heckling reporters." Jose DelReal from the Washington Post tweeted that the "vitriol towards the media" was as bad as he has ever seen with the "boos and cursing and middle fingers." Poor little guy, Eric Boehlert from Media Matters didn't get his own video so he compiled several from other reporters for his own breathless article. Frank Thorp tweeted video of people chanting "CNN sucks." The horror! Rosie Gray , another Buzzfeed reporter, found a new angle to keep the narrative going when an attendee used the term Lugenpresse, a German term for "lying press." You know who else used the German term Lugenpresse? The Nazi's. As CNN 's Jake Tapper pointed out. CNN 's Jim Acosta wanted everyone to know just how hard it is to do a live shot when people are yelling at you. After weeks of nonstop reporting about the "menacing" and "scary" treatment of reporters at the hands of Trump supporters, one of the most regular victims, Sopan Deb from CBS, got a nice note from a do-gooding White Knight. At a rally in Naples Florida recently, Trump supporters heckled the press for refusing to stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance. Dustin Stockton is a political reporter for Breitbart News, a community liaison for Gun Owners of America, and a political strategist. | 0 |
Indoor farming is quickly becoming a growing trend because of consumers’ mistrust in GMOs, the yearning to buy as local as possible, and a decline in usable land. There are a variety of indoor... | 0 |
Is google and YouTube in the Hillary’s purse? page: 1 link After I posted my opening post (OP) on “Hillary Clinton Wants a Strong Russia. Wait, what did she say?” , mysteriously, my YouTube account gets wiped out. The next thing I notice, is that the youtube video that I used in my OP, www.abovetopsecret.com... suddenly won’t work. Has anyone else experienced this bizarre behavior before? Is this what we are to expect if Hillary becomes POTUS? I went to the Youtube site and the video is available. www.youtube.com... I frankly, don't know what to think about this. link a reply to: Violater1 yes, so is almost all the major media, magazines (that are left), most of hollywood, GOP kinda, most of the bush's. Who else? Google is pro clinton like drudge is pro trump without a doubt Just about every news story under google news is pro hillary and negative towards trump. If I recall correctly they even advice her campaign edit on 511031America/ChicagoThu, 27 Oct 2016 21:51:09 -05 p3142 by interupt42 because: (no reason given) Is the dead link the same as the good one in the following reply? Same vid#? No errors? link I'm getting the feeling that the gun control,Hillary as dictator,is not unlike Obamacare,forced on us,this is socialism and being the Corporations own the candidates,they want this we have no choice,they have the UN,plus a bunch of immigrants to join the UN forces to attack the american freedom fighters,you may think I'm crazy but they said I was crazy when I said 9/11 was a controlled demolition,look at the past,put common sense to it,the big ball is rolling,too much money at stake here thats the goal rich get richer,no more middle class,upper middle class,those making like 1 or 2 million a year,will be joining the crowd,unless your a member of the party,Known many an immigrant who lived under communist rule,all storys kind of same,all bad,no sense of identity | 0 |
Oakland's Honor Band Kneels in Protest of Police Violence Oakland's Honor Band Kneels in Protest of Police Violence By 0 43
A group of middle and high school students in Oakland, California, recently made international news when they joined San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest against racism and police violence in the United States. The students, members of the Oakland Unified School District’s Honour Band, knelt as they played the national anthem before a professional baseball game.
The year 7 and 8 students spoke to Red Flag about their decision to “take the knee.” Inspired by Kaepernick, high school members of the district’s school band first proposed the idea. Right away, the middle schoolers knew that it would be controversial. From their first day of school, US children are taught to show extreme reverence for the national flag during the anthem. This includes standing with hats off and hands on their hearts. Anything else is seen as highly disrespectful.
Despite this, some of the students felt so passionately about the need to take a stand against recent police killings that they still wanted to do it.
One student, Mikayla, 14, delivered an impassioned speech to the others about the need to stand up against racism. “I wanted us to kneel because as a country we need to have a conversation about what is going on here,” she said, explaining why she felt so strongly. “We have been turning our backs on murder and racism, and I was tired of not doing anything about it.”
Before the game, band conductor Zack Pitt-Smith made it clear the decision to kneel would be each student’s choice. Even as they took the field, no-one was sure who was going to do it.
Serena, 14, remembers, “I was scared to kneel because I wasn’t sure if anyone else would join me. I was thinking, ‘Should I kneel? I feel very strongly about this — I’m going to do it.’ But I was still shaking because I didn’t know what everyone else would do.”
Nearly all of the 155 band members knelt as they played. Everyone had their own reasons. “I’m learning about human rights in history class, and the number… | 0 |
The man waited outside a day care center in Hoboken, N. J. He had a question for the owner: How was he going to tell his daughter that she would never see her mother again? His wife, Fabiola Bittar de Kroon, had been killed by falling debris after a commuter train barreled into Hoboken Terminal during the Thursday morning rush. She was the one fatality. Now, hours later, her husband, Adrianus de Kroon, was at Smart Start Academy, a day care center not far from the train station. He met with its owner, Karlos Magner, outside. “He said, ‘What should I tell her? How should I handle this? ’” Mr. Magner said. Mr. Magner had known children who had lost a parent to illness, he said, but never a death as sudden and violent as this. “I told him honestly: ‘I don’t know. There’s no book. Life, we’re not trained. We don’t know. So just stand strong,’” Mr. Magner recalled during an interview on Friday. Ms. de Kroon, 34, had dropped her daughter, Julia, at the center on Thursday morning about an hour before the crash. Her life ended just as she was paving a new beginning in the United States with her husband and her daughter, whom they had 20 months ago in her native Brazil. Mr. Magner said Ms. de Kroon left Julia at the center and picked her up every day, sending a flurry of kisses in her daughter’s way. “Her daughter is attached to her,” he said. The girl grew restless on Thursday as the hour that her mother normally arrived to get her came and went, Mr. Magner added. “She knew something was off,” Mr. Magner said. Ms. de Kroon moved to Hoboken in April. She had planned to look for a bigger place for her family on the day she died. “Maybe a house in Brooklyn,” she had told a close friend, Roberta Lima. Ms. de Kroon and Ms. Lima had communicated through cellphone messages over WhatsApp, a messaging app, on Tuesday, as they often did. Ms. Lima, 35, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, asked Ms. de Kroon when she would return to Brazil for a visit. Ms. de Kroon told her that she had planned a trip for December, in time to celebrate Julia’s second birthday. Ms. de Kroon was “a bit apprehensive to be living far from her family now that she had a child,” Ms. Lima said, but living away from family was nothing new to her. She and her husband, whom everyone knows as Daan, spent four years in Miami before moving to Brazil in 2011, where he led global business development for a Jamaican beer and a Brazilian cachaça brand owned by an international distributor, Diageo. Mr. de Kroon, who is Dutch, was working in the Brazilian city of São Paulo when he met his wife. Ms. de Kroon had grown up in Santos, on the Atlantic Coast, but moved to São Paulo for law school, Ms. Lima said. The couple moved to Miami in 2007, and they both studied business at Florida International University. “They were very focused on their careers and very much in love,” Ms. Lima said. Four years later they were back in Brazil. According to Ms. Lima, as the country’s economy sputtered, Mr. de Kroon moved to Asunción, Paraguay, to lead Diageo’s expansion there. Ms. de Kroon was pregnant at the time and decided to stay in São Paulo, close to her mother, Sueli Bittar. Mr. de Kroon would travel home on weekends, Ms. Lima said. Ms. de Kroon told her that moving to the United States would give the couple and their daughter a chance to spend more time together. In April, Ms. Lima helped organize a farewell gathering for the couple in Santos. They went out dancing, had some drinks, had fun, she said. “They were both very happy, full of plans, really excited about the move,” Ms. Lima said. Now, Mr. de Kroon will have to be “both mom and dad,” Mr. Magner said. The only advice he could think of offering the widowed father was not to broach what had happened with his daughter until he felt the timing was right. “Only the parent will know what is the right time and when to disclose it,” he said. “Children are like a sponge, they absorb so much, but they understand. ” Of Mr. de Kroon, Mr. Magner said, “He was strong, as strong as you can be in this situation. ” Ms. Lima and Ms. de Kroon were both 14 when they met, through a mutual friend. They last saw each other in Rio, at a birthday party for Ms. de Kroon’s twin nephews, shortly before she left for the United States. When a bomb exploded in Manhattan recently, Ms. Lima sent Ms. de Kroon a message to make sure she, her husband and their daughter were all right. “She told me, ‘Don’t worry, everything is fine,’” Ms. Lima recalled. “She said where they lived, on the other side of the river, was very safe. ” | 1 |
With more and more people learning about the importance of eating healthy and safe produce, consumer demand for all things “organic” has skyrocketed. In the US alone, annual organic food sales have... | 0 |
Democrat Chelsea Clinton condemned comedian Kathy Griffin for posing with President Donald Trump’s bloody, decapitated head for a photo shoot, calling Griffin’s act “vile and wrong” on Tuesday. [Griffin’s gruesome photo was “vile and wrong,” Clinton tweeted, adding: “It is never funny to joke about killing a president. ” This is vile and wrong. It is never funny to joke about killing a president. https: . — Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) May 30, 2017, Hi Melissa — just me. I hope we all can agree that it’s never funny to joke about killing the president — or anyone. https: . — Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) May 30, 2017, In a video posted to her Twitter account, Griffin stared at the camera while clutching the president’s severed head by his hair and slowly raising it up to eye level. She defended her murderous photo by saying she was “mocking the Mocker in Chief. ” I caption this ”there was blood coming out of his eyes, blood coming out of his … wherever” Also @tylershields great maker. pic. twitter. — Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) May 30, 2017, OBVIOUSLY, I do not condone ANY violence by my fans or others to anyone, ever! I’m merely mocking the Mocker in Chief. — Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) May 30, 2017, Griffin also said Tuesday that holding up the president’s severed head was a statement about him mocking Fox News debate moderator Megyn Kelly in 2015. Griffin later apologized for the photo. I am sorry. I went too far. I was wrong. pic. twitter. — Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) May 30, 2017, | 1 |
Susan Estrich is known for being first. A celebrated feminist legal scholar, Ms. Estrich was the first female president of The Harvard Law Review. Working for Michael S. Dukakis in 1988, she was the first woman to manage a presidential campaign. And in 1991 she coined the term “nuts and sluts” to describe the campaign Clarence Thomas supporters waged to discredit Anita Hill. Ms. Estrich took a different position in a 1998 opinion column defending President Bill Clinton. She wrote, “The reason men resort to the ‘nuts and sluts’ defense is because it may be the only way to undermine the credibility of a woman who is not, in fact, telling the truth. ” And that seems to be part of her strategy as the chief defender of the former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, who lost his job after a number of women accused him of sexual harassment. Ms. Estrich, the author of the 1988 book “Real Rape: How the Legal System Victimizes Women Who Say No,” is now one of the last voices vigorously insisting that Mr. Ailes did nothing wrong. Even the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, seems not to agree. And that twist is bringing her back into the spotlight, and is puzzling, not to mention enraging, some of the people who once saw her as a role model. When the accusations first surfaced this summer, it shocked many feminists that Ms. Estrich, of all people, would represent Mr. Ailes, a political operative and the guiding force of Fox News. But it wasn’t entirely surprising. For many years, Ms. Estrich was a lively liberal commentator on Fox News and she has defended another Republican man accused of sexual misconduct, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California. In a phone interview, Ms. Estrich described Mr. Ailes — whom she met on the campaign trail in 1988, when he was advising George W. Bush — as a close friend. “In the 18 years I was at Fox News, Roger has never told me what to say, what to do or what to wear,” Ms. Estrich said. “He kept me on the payroll for seven months when I was too sick to work. ” But what really turned heads was Ms. Estrich’s zeal in attacking the New York magazine reporter who first broke the scandal. Interviewed for an article in The Daily Beast, she said, “Ultimately, it will become clear that the real enemy of women is Gabe Sherman. ” That sounded a little like a “jerks and perks” defense, and Ms. Estrich went on to suggest that Mr. Sherman, who published an unflattering biography of Mr. Ailes in 2014, had his own agenda for pursuing the story. She told The Daily Beast that Mr. Sherman was willing to “use and abuse” vulnerable women to pursue a vendetta against Mr. Ailes. (Mr. Sherman declined to comment.) The response on social media was vivid, to say the least. “Everyone knows @GabrielSherman is a brilliant journalist and Susan Estrich is a Fox hack,” is how Joan Walsh, a Washington political reporter, put it. Those close to Ms. Estrich say that she is staunchly supportive of her friends and clients and feels particularly beholden to Mr. Ailes for the way he stood by her when she fell gravely ill after a botched gastrointestinal operation in 2014. “Susan is fiercely loyal, to a detriment,” said Cathy Moran, a nurse in Los Angeles who took care of Ms. Estrich during her illness. “She will not bail on him. ” Ms. Moran said that as a friend, she wished Ms. Estrich wasn’t involved in defending Mr. Ailes but that once she takes on a cause, she won’t let it drop — even after 21st Century Fox reached a $20 million settlement with Gretchen Carlson and apologized to her publicly. Ms. Moran grimly likened Ms. Estrich’s position to an unwanted pregnancy: “At some point you reach the point where you can’t terminate. ” Ms. Estrich, a partner in the Los Angeles office of the litigation firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Sullivan, said that she first heard the allegations against Mr. Ailes on her return from London, and that by the time she got to her apartment there were 10 messages from her old friend on her home voice mail. She didn’t hesitate to take the case, aware that some feminists say that she sold out. “It is painful, but at the same time I am a lawyer: Once she takes on a case she stands by her client,” Ms. Estrich said in a phone interview. “Roger needs someone to help him through this extremely difficult process. The last thing any client needs is a lawyer sitting in judgment. ” Ms. Estrich is a busy lawyer. In addition to her work at Quinn, Emanuel, she is a professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law and writes a syndicated political column. Although Mr. Ailes has been advising the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, Ms. Estrich recently referred to “the demagogue’s angry rants” and his “feet of clay. ” Ms. Estrich, who understandably is less visible on television these days, has a strong, somewhat disconcerting presence. She speaks in a raspy, day voice (although she no longer smokes) has an intense gaze and a disarmingly animated manner — as if Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her Supreme Court decisions, put a circle over the I instead of a dot. Her writing is eclectic. In “Real Rape,” a book often cited in legal papers on sexual assault, she describes her own rape by a stranger wielding an ice pick. Ten years later, she published “Making the Case for Yourself: A Diet Book for Smart Women. ” In 2006 she had two more books, “The Case for Hillary Clinton” and one on the conservative writer Ann Coulter, “Soulless: Ann Coulter and the Right Wing Church of Hate. ” Ms. Coulter said that she likes and admires Ms. Estrich — and that she had forgotten about the book. “She is one of the few lawyers I have debated on TV who actually knew what she was talking about,” Ms. Coulter said. She said she understood her decision to defend Mr. Ailes. “Getting her was a brilliant move on Ailes’s part,” she said, and noted that no matter how alarming the allegation, “this is what lawyers do. If she were doing it pro bono, I would have a different assessment. ” Ms. Coulter noted that she had long dismissed the rumors about Mr. Ailes’s mistreatment of female employees. “I figured that if even one tenth of it were true, there would be a lawsuit. ” She paused. “Then there was a lawsuit. ” There could be a case to be made that Ms. Estrich is being held to a higher standard than male litigators. There was no such outcry when a male colleague at her law firm briefly took on Bill Cosby as a client in 2015. But some feminists say they do expect more of Ms. Estrich. “She has a higher level of accountability,” said Andi Zeisler, a of Bitch Magazine. “For someone who was such a pioneering legal scholar to make Ailes an exception to the trenchant line she has drawn is a depressing irony. ” But there are some amusing incongruities as well. Andrea Tantaros, a former Fox anchor who also filed a suit, thanks Mr. Ailes in the acknowledgements of her “Tied Up in Knots: How Getting What We Wanted Made Women Miserable. ” Mostly, she complains about how successful women compete with one another, writing, “In my experience, men in positions of power tend to be less inclined to act as roadblocks. ” While Ms. Estrich’s reputation is hotly debated, few observers believe the Ailes case will hurt her practice. “I think in many respects it will increase her status as a lawyer,” said Richard Sauber, a Washington litigator. “There will be people who will never hire her again, but there may be more who will say, ‘That’s the kind of lawyer I want. ’” | 1 |
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.
Courtesy of Michael Snyder | 0 |
It appears that threatening Republican Electoral College electors with death and violence if they don’t flip their votes to Hillary isn’t the only strategy being implemented by the Democrats and Clinton campaign.
According to computer security experts, the election was rigged in favor of Donald Trump in the key states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida, and they are urging Clinton to demand a recount:
Hillary Clinton could have been robbed of the presidency by hackers, a group of experts claims – and now they’re calling for her to demand a recount.
The team, which includes voting rights experts and computer security buffs, says it has compelling evidence that Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania could have been hacked to artificially lower turnout .
They’re now pressuring the Clinton group to call for an independent recount that could swing the needle of the election in the Democrats’ favor, New York magazine reported.
…
According to their calculations, such a hack could have cost Clinton 30,000 votes in Wisconsin. She lost that state – and its ten Electoral College votes – by 27,000.
Michigan was too close to call with a gap of 11,000, denying Clinton its 16 Electoral College votes, and she lost Pennsylvania’s 20 Electoral College votes by 68,236.
Though there’s been no suggestion of possible culprits in the potential hacking, the DNC blamed Russia for mid-election-season hacks of Democrat email accounts.
If an independent investigation could prove hacking – and a recount granted Clinton those three states – then she would be made President after all.
Full Report: The Daily Mail
Ahead of the election unnamed sources in the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities spoke to the mainstream media and warned that, while the electronic voting machines used to register a candidate were completely safe, Russia could try to undermine U.S. elections by releasing fraudulent documentation showing that the election was hacked. As we reported at the time :
According to Reuters, U.S. voting authorities are now warning that while the Russians may not actually hack the Presidential election, they may fake hacking the Presidential election .
What they’re saying without actually saying it is that if Hillary Clinton wins the election and Trump supporters show proof of any fraudulent activity, the “proof” will have been fabricated
It sounds almost too crazy to believe, but this is now being disseminated to the public via mainstream pipelines:
….
U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are warning that hackers with ties to Russia’s intelligence services could try to undermine the credibility of the presidential election by posting documents online purporting to show evidence of voter fraud.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said however, that the U.S. election system is so large, diffuse and antiquated that hackers would not be able to change the outcome of the Nov. 8 election.
But hackers could post documents, some of which might be falsified, that are designed to create public perceptions of widespread voter fraud, the officials said. ( Reuters )
Full report: It’s A Setup: U.S. Officials Warn That Russians Will Undermine Elections With Fake Documents Showing Voter Fraud
In short, when the media expected a Hillary Clinton landslide the public was told that any “evidence” of wrong-doing was completely false, as hacking the U.S. election system was impossible.
Following Trump’s win, this has apparently changed. The “experts” say our voting systems were, in fact, compromised by hackers and they were able to change the outcome of the election in favor of Donald Trump.
So who do we believe? The experts, who claim they have evidence of voter fraud? Or the Obama administration’s intelligence apparatus, which claimed that any such post-election hacking evidence would be a fraudulent attempt to undermine voter confidence?
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In 2006, after nearly a decade at CNN, Rudi Bakhtiar came to the Fox News Channel’s headquarters in New York with a command of foreign policy, an appealing personality and a delivery that easily switched between light and serious. After a freelance arrangement, the network signed her to a deal. Pretty quickly, she said, she was spending half her time in Washington, where the network sent her to fill in temporarily as a weekend correspondent, a post she hoped to win permanently. Her break seemed to come in early 2007, she said, when she met for coffee in the lobby of her Washington hotel with a friend and colleague, Brian Wilson. He told her he would soon become Washington bureau chief and wanted to help her get the weekend job. Then he said, “You know how I feel about you, Rudi. ” Recalling the encounter in a recent phone interview, Ms. Bakhtiar said she was thrilled and told Mr. Wilson she would make him proud. But, she said, he repeated himself, asking, “You know how I feel about you?” When she asked him what he meant, he said, “Well, I’d like to see the inside of your hotel room,” adding that he wanted a relationship. She politely rebuffed him, she said, apologizing for giving him any wrong impression. After that rejection, she felt caught in a whirlwind in which, she said, network executives canceled her Washington appearances, directed her to report her allegations to human resources and, a few weeks later, let her go, with the Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, telling her that her tenure was ending because of her performance. On Saturday, a senior Fox News executive repeated that assertion. In a short time, she went from thinking she was in line to land the job she coveted to unemployment. After a mediation process, she reached a settlement in which Fox News paid her an undisclosed amount. Contacted on Friday, Mr. Wilson, who went on to get the bureau chief job, said of Ms. Bakhtiar’s account: “I take strong exception to the facts of the story as you have relayed it to me, period. Beyond that, I will have no further comment. ” Ms. Bakhtiar concedes that she agreed in her settlement not to speak of her experience. But she said she was emboldened to step forward by the sexual harassment lawsuit that the former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson brought against Mr. Ailes this month, and a subsequent investigation that has brought to light at least 10 other claims of improper behavior involving him. Mr. Ailes resigned from Fox News on Thursday. The investigation by Fox News’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, focused narrowly on Mr. Ailes. But in interviews with The New York Times, current and former employees described instances of harassment and intimidation that went beyond Mr. Ailes and suggested a broader problem in the workplace. The Times spoke with about a dozen women who said they had experienced some form of sexual harassment or intimidation at Fox News or the Fox Business Network, and half a dozen more who said they had witnessed it. Two of them cited Mr. Ailes and the rest cited other supervisors. With the exception of Ms. Bakhtiar, they all spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing embarrassment and fear of retribution. Most continue to work in television and worry that speaking out could damage their careers. They told of strikingly similar experiences at Fox News. Several said that inappropriate comments about a woman’s appearance and sex life were frequent. Managers tried to set up their employees on dates with superiors. In a statement on Friday, Julie Henderson, a spokeswoman for 21st Century Fox, said, “As we’ve made clear, there’s absolutely no room anywhere at our company for behavior that disrespects women or contributes to an uncomfortable work environment. ” The company also pointed out that its business standards manual includes instructions on how to report harassment and inappropriate behavior. There are several options, including an anonymous hotline. The women interviewed by The Times described similarly troubling experiences at Fox News and the Fox Business Network, a sprawling operation with about 2, 000 employees on several floors of News Corporation’s headquarters on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. The networks were run with an iron fist by Mr. Ailes, the founding chairman and a former Republican strategist, who established the channels as a lucrative profit center and an influential voice in conservative politics. One woman who is still there said that a producer of a show on which she frequently appeared persuaded her to go on dates with him. When she decided after two uneventful outings that she had had enough, he ceased to have her on his show, she said. One former Fox News staff member described walking into a dark office in 2009 to find a senior manager receiving oral sex from a junior employee. It is difficult to know exactly how much Mr. Ailes set the tone. The investigation into his conduct revealed findings troubling enough to compel 21st Century Fox executives to move quickly and arrange his exit. Beyond inappropriate language, Mr. Ailes was also accused by employees of kissing and intimate physical contact, according to three people briefed on the investigation, and of making propositions that included quid pro quo arrangements. One former reporter said that behind closed doors, Mr. Ailes often made provocative comments about her appearance, her body and the dresses she wore. She also said that each meeting with Mr. Ailes began and ended with a hug and a kiss, a ritual that made her uncomfortable and sometimes prompted her to turn her head to avoid being kissed on the lips. Messages sent to Mr. Ailes’s lawyers seeking comment were not returned. Female staff members told of problems with other supervisors as well. One current employee said that she was with a male supervisor in a meeting in 2009 when she asked to work on an assignment. He turned to her and said, “Sure,” then conditioned it on oral sex. The woman said she laughed it off, thinking that she would face retaliation and be demoted if she told him that the comment was inappropriate. This woman also said that meetings were filled with sexual innuendo and that supervisors had routinely asked her about her sex life. She said that she was at a happy hour outside the office last year and an executive approached her and whispered in her ear that the zipper on the back of her dress was quite provocative. Almost all the women said they were reluctant to go to the human resources department with their complaints for fear that they would be fired. Some of the women said they went to their parents instead with their complaints. Other women, however, said the environment was not as bad as recent news suggested. Ashana Clark, who worked as a makeup artist for Fox News from 2003 to 2014, said in an interview that the company held sexual harassment training sessions at which employees were instructed not to make sexual jokes or references. “After that,” she said, “you didn’t see a lot of it. ” She also said many of the women she worked with “loved Roger Ailes” and were “very grateful to him. ” Several former Fox News employees said that people were afraid to speak up but that many women viewed the behavior there as par for the course in the broadcasting industry, where appearance is so highly valued. “There is a culture where, not that you accept it, you just deal with it,” one former employee said. Ms. Bakhtiar, who now works as a producer for Reuters, said she was risking a lawsuit to speak out because her experience “ruined my life” and also because she said she believed that “this environment has to change. ” Two former colleagues of hers confirmed to The Times that she had told them of her experience at the time. After her encounter over coffee with Mr. Wilson, Ms. Bakhtiar said, she informed a manager, Bill Shine, of the incident, and Mr. Shine urged her to make a formal complaint. (Mr. Shine is part of the interim leadership team that 21st Century Fox says will be leading Fox News until it names a new chairman.) She initially resisted filing a complaint and told her managers: “I know what happens to women. We’re expected to shut up about it. ” But she said she did as she was told. Ms. Bakhtiar had landed the temporary Washington role at Fox News, she said, before one of her proudest accomplishments — gaining entry to Iran for a summit meeting between the Iranian and Iraqi leaders. (She is of Persian descent, speaks fluent Farsi and spent parts of her childhood living in Iran, and had relatives high up during the last shah’s reign.) She said that things changed after she rejected Mr. Wilson’s advances, and got worse after she filed her complaint, which was followed by Fox’s decision to exercise an option terminating her contract a few weeks later. “Rudi, we’re letting you go,” she said Mr. Ailes told her. “I said, ‘You know very well why I’m getting let go, and it has nothing to do with my abilities. You guys came to me and sought me out,’” Ms. Bakhtiar said. “I said, ‘This is all about what happened with Brian. You know it, and I know it.’ He kept on saying, ‘Oh, no, no, no. ’” Ms. Bakhtiar said that Mr. Ailes, referring to a senior news executive, John Moody, told her, “Moody doesn’t think you’re a good reporter. ” In an interview on Saturday, Mr. Moody said, “My lack of confidence in her reporting predated any knowledge that I had of her claims of sexual harassment. ” But in Ms. Bakhtiar’s view, it was because she had spoken up. “Once they got my H. R. statement, I was finished, finished — 10 years in the business,” Ms. Bakhtiar said. Mr. Wilson became bureau chief and stayed at the network for two more years, but then left. Ms. Bakhtiar said she received moral support from colleagues, including the anchor Megyn Kelly. Ms. Bakhtiar retained a lawyer, the Atlanta litigator L. Lin Wood, who, she said, thought she had a strong case. During mediation, as it became clear that a settlement was getting close, she said Mr. Wood encouraged her not to settle. But she said she did not want to make it into a public legal fight. “I thought, if this gets out, I’ll never get another job in this business because nobody likes it when a girl cries sexual harassment. ” She accepted a settlement. But as her agent looked for new jobs, he determined that her best route was to go to local news and work her way back up, she said. She could not bring herself to do it. “It took a couple of years for me to bounce back,” she said. Ms. Bakhtiar eventually became a senior adviser at Voice of America’s service and more recently has served as a producer for Reuters. She is currently working on a documentary about Kurdish pesh merga forces. When The Times contacted Fox News on Thursday about Ms. Bakhtiar’s story, the network contacted her old lawyer, Mr. Wood, she said, to warn her that she was in breach of her agreement. She decided to go forward anyway. “What are they going to do? Come after me for money? Garnish my wages? It’ll make a bigger story out of it,” she said. “I just feel like I shut up because I didn’t want to hurt my career,” she said. “It’s awful what happened to me, and to other people, with a nod from management. ” | 1 |
BEIJING — China signaled on Thursday that it had installed weapons on disputed South China Sea islands and would use them like a “slingshot” to repel threats, compounding tensions with the incoming Trump administration. The Chinese message, in a Defense Ministry statement, suggested that China was further watering down a pledge made by its president, Xi Jinping, to not militarize the islands. The comments left little doubt that such installations were part of China’s plan to deepen its territorial claim over the islands, which has raised tensions with its neighbors over their rival claims and with Washington over freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, one of the world’s busiest commercial waterways. They were also likely to further complicate China’s already testy relations with Donald J. Trump. China’s rapid creation of artificial islands in the South China Sea, expanding former reefs and outcrops into guarded permanent outposts, has already become a major source of tension with Washington. Repeatedly this year, the Chinese have accused the United States of making “provocative” moves by sending warships near some of these islands, known as the Spratlys. The Chinese have been creating harbors, runways and reinforced hangars big enough for military aircraft on the islands. But new satellite images made public this week appeared to reveal weapons emplacements for the first time. The Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, which released the images through its Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, said they showed “large antiaircraft guns and probable weapons systems,” which can theoretically thwart cruise missile attacks. The Defense Ministry statement, posted on its website in response to the images, did not specify what kinds of weapons the images showed but said any military hardware on the islands was reasonable. It repeated China’s contention that its construction on the islands is mainly for civilian purposes. “As for necessary military facilities, they are primarily for defense and and this is proper and legitimate,” the Defense Ministry said. “For instance, if someone was at the door of your home, cocky and swaggering, how could it be that you wouldn’t prepare a slingshot?” There was no immediate comment from Mr. Trump or his transition team. Mr. Trump recently angered Chinese officials by holding a phone conversation with Tsai the president of Taiwan, an island that Beijing deems a breakaway province of China. It had been nearly four decades since a United States president or had such direct contact with a Taiwanese leader. In an interview broadcast on Sunday, Mr. Trump also criticized China over its trade imbalance with America, its military activities in the South China Sea and its ties to North Korea. China was “building a massive fortress in the middle of the South China Sea, which they shouldn’t be doing,” he said in the interview on Fox News. During his campaign, Mr. Trump dwelled on accusations that China had systematically sapped American industrial might, and he has indicated that trade issues will be a priority in dealings with Beijing. But the latest disclosures suggest how seemingly remote islands in the South China Sea could become a source of serious tensions, even military strife. The Spratlys, which China calls the Nansha Islands, are the subject of an especially volatile mix of competing claims. Parts of the archipelago are also claimed by the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and Taiwan. And the possibility of undersea oil and gas deposits has exacerbated the rivalries. President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines has moved in recent months to ease tensions with China, and to distance his country from Washington. Even so, the Philippines keeps defense treaties with the United States. But China, with the world’s economy and a swelling military budget, has established an intimidating dominance across much of the South China Sea. And the latest satellite images appeared to confirm its deepening military grip on the Spratlys. The steps “show that Beijing is serious about defense of its artificial islands in case of an armed contingency in the South China Sea,” the Asia Maritime Defense Initiative said in its report about the images. “Among other things, they would be the last line of defense against cruise missiles launched by the United States or others” against air bases that may soon go into operation on the islands, it said. The images showed that the facilities were in place before Mr. Trump’s comments. The Obama administration sought to play down both the images and the Chinese Defense Ministry’s response. “We watch Chinese naval developments very carefully, and we urge all parties in the South China Sea to avoid actions that raise tensions,” said Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman. The images elicited a far more contentious response from hawkish Republicans, who do not necessarily share Mr. Trump’s views on China trade policy but see Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea as an aggressive challenge to the United States. Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the images confirmed “what has long been evident: China is militarizing the South China Sea, its leaders continue to lie about that fact, and Beijing is paying little to no price for its behavior. ” Some American military officials suggested privately that the antiaircraft emplacements were purely defensive in nature, with a limited range, useful only if the outposts were under attack. Of greater concern, they said, was the possibility that China could one day install more advanced antiaircraft missile systems on the islands, which can fire at targets hundreds of miles away. Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr. head of the United States Pacific Command, said on Wednesday that America would not abandon its military presence across the region. He indicated that American naval ships would continue passing through the South China Sea to show that the United States “will not allow the shared domains to be closed down unilaterally, no matter how many bases are built on artificial features in the South China Sea. ” The Chinese government has said it respects freedom of civilian passage in the South China Sea but also called American naval “freedom of navigation operations” dangerous meddling. The Chinese navy has not tried to block the operations. The latest images raised new doubts about the intent of comments made by China’s president, Mr. Xi, after he met President Obama in the White House in September last year. With Mr. Obama at his side, Mr. Xi told reporters that “China does not intend to pursue militarization” of the islands. Previous satellite pictures of the islands, released by the Asia Maritime Defense Initiative in August, already indicated that China was building military facilities there. Those images appeared to show reinforced aircraft hangars at the Fiery Cross, Subi and Mischief Reefs, all part of the disputed parts of the archipelago. A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday that his government had been entitled to take such steps and said they did not count as “militarization. ” The spokesman, Geng Shuang, said he could not confirm the precise findings from the latest satellite images but disputed they indicated any change on China’s part. “If China constructing normal facilities on its own islands and deploying necessary territorial defense facilities counts as ‘militarization,’” he said, “then what about sending fleets through the South China Sea?” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — As news outlets round the world continued to publish revelations from the Panama Papers, the nonprofit organization that coordinated the project was preparing to move out of its offices here in an effort to cut costs. The organization, called the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, was already forced to part with three contract journalists who had helped its small staff shepherd the project. And three other budgeted positions, it was told, would have to be left unfilled for now. Its brief shining moment in the journalistic spotlight was being complicated by much more familiar issues. Like so many of its peers in nonprofit journalism, the consortium is subject to the financial headwinds buffeting the industry as a whole. In this case, it is feeling ripple effects from the financial struggles of its parent organization, the Center for Public Integrity, the venerable nonprofit investigative news organization that controls the consortium’s budget. The financial pinch has created dual realities for the consortium, damping morale and escalating tensions with its parent, even as the impact of the Panama Papers has dramatically increased its global profile. The consortium’s problems also represent a potential setback in the search for new ways to finance and pursue journalism at a time when traditional news organizations, and even new digital operations, are seeking workable business models. In the nonprofit segment of the industry, which has inspired hope as a way forward, it has exposed a particularly hard truth: Financing even the most successful investigative reporting unit is hard and often inconsistent. “You always want more staff and more funding,” the consortium’s director, Gerard Ryle, said. “But I have to accept the situation as it is. My job is to get on with things no matter what. ” Financial uneasiness is nothing new for the Center for Public Integrity, which ran yearly operating deficits from 2005 to 2007, and again in 2011. Peter Bale, who took over the organization last year after a stint at CNN International, said the organization was still trying to recover from that legacy — including a $2. 1 million deficit in unrestricted net assets that he said he had inherited from his predecessor, whose editorial gambles have drawn criticism. That deficit, which the board has said cannot grow, has forced him to make cuts, Mr. Bale said, while honoring funding agreements and the center’s editorial imperatives. But Bill Buzenberg, who led the center from 2007 to 2015, disputed that assessment, saying that a deficit in general support is not unusual for nonprofits. It becomes a problem, he said, when annual from specific programs and objectives declines. “I kept telling them, you have to raise money like crazy this year for next,” Mr. Buzenberg said. “I’m not sure that happened. ” The center is expected to raise $9. 3 million this year, down from around $11 million last year, Mr. Bale said, noting that grants to the center are often paid out over multiple years. He has had to consider cuts anywhere he can find them, not just at the consortium. The Center for Public Integrity laid off two prizewinning senior investigative reporters of its own in May and is delaying hiring for open positions. The financial woes have strained the relationship between two organizations that David E. Kaplan, who ran the consortium from 2008 to 2011, says have always been awkward partners. The consortium was founded in 1997 as a branch of the center to focus on international investigations, but it quickly developed its own ethos. “These are two different organizations in culture, structure and methodology,” said Mr. Kaplan, who resigned in protest in 2011 during a period of particular tension between the groups. The differences have only intensified as the consortium has grown under Mr. Ryle, an investigative journalist who worked in Australia before taking the position. Its budget has roughly tripled, to almost $2 million this year, and its staff has grown threefold, to about a dozen, including contractors, after the cuts. It has also deliberately moved away from the journalistic model of its parent organization, in search of a more effective way to investigate and distribute stories across borders at a relatively low cost. The model, in which the consortium coordinates teams of reporters around the world to work collaboratively on a single big source base, has been increasingly successful, aiding in investigations of international interest, like “Lux Leaks,” which in 2014 exposed how Luxembourg had helped hundreds of international companies cut their taxes through preferential deals, and “Swiss Leaks,” which a year later exposed how HSBC helped the rich evade taxes. With the Panama Papers, the consortium assembled its largest team to date, carefully coordinating with almost 400 journalists from 70 countries to pore over a single enormous leak of documents. Using research tools developed by the consortium, the team exposed a vast network of offshore banks and shell companies used by the world’s powerful and rich to hide their wealth. Their findings have prompted investigations in dozens of countries, forced political ousters — including the prime minister of Iceland — and inspired policy debates around the world. The Panama Papers also brought a new level of renown to the consortium. And it prompted peers and supporters to wonder whether the organization could provide a model for a segment of the journalism industry particularly hard hit by shrinking budgets and other market forces. “Given the need to operate within the budgets we have, I. C. I. J. has done an astounding job,” Mr. Bale said of the consortium, adding that he hoped the Center for Public Integrity could incorporate some of its techniques. Mr. Bale acknowledged that tensions between the two groups had increased and might fan the desire by some at the consortium to spin off into a separate organization. That, he said, would be a mistake the center’s board opposes such a move. could help, and both Mr. Bale and Mr. Ryle said they hoped the consortium’s increased profile would attract support to help stabilize the center’s overall finances. But for now, the cutbacks at the consortium are particularly painful. The group has spent much of the last two weeks moving up five floors from its own offices into the center’s. And though Mr. Ryle said he hoped to be able to hire back some of the contractors he had let go, for now, he said, he would have to make do with less. “It gives you an enormous amount of freedom in the journalism,” Mr. Ryle said of the nonprofit model, “but you have to accept that there is a cost sometimes on the other side. ” For Ryan Chittum, one of the three contractors who left last month after more than a year working on the Panama Papers, the timing is as frustrating as it is ironic. “There’s still a lot to do on that story — it’s just kind of an unfortunate commentary on the fragility of journalism,” Mr. Chittum said. “It’s not like I make huge dollars, but we don’t have money to do it right now. ” | 1 |
According to a new Wikileaks email, Bernie Sanders was just a Manchurian candidate and a Clinton puppet all along. We finally have confirmation of what we have suspected since Bernie said “people are sick of hearing about your damn emails” all the way back in 2015 during one debate. That was a big give-away and a huge red flag which many have raised back then but now we finally have irrefutable proof that Bernie Sanders was just a SCAM candidate and a con artist.
Bernie’s ONLY role was gather millennials plus the angry people on the left, the Democrats who feel disappointed with the Obama establishment which could later be passed over to Hillary Clinton. These people would have never came directly to Hillary Clinton in the first place so they needed an intermediary, like a vessel. Some eventually came to Hillary but not too many since it was discovered that the nomination was stolen from Bernie and he didn’t protest at all.
Now yet ANOTHER email by Robby Mook who is Hillary’s campaign strategist and manager has come out thanks to Wikileaks where it appears that Hillary Clinton had “leverage” to use against Bernie Sanders in case he ever stepped over the line and that they had to “signal” him after he violated their “agreement”.
Wikileaks Emails ID 47397 reveals the following disturbing information:
This isn’t in keeping w the agreement . Since we clearly have some leverage , would be good to flag this for him. I could send a signal via Welch–or did you establish a direct line w him
We now have written confirmation that there was an agreement between Hillary Clinton and false revolutionary Bernie Sanders from the beginning. So now we know why Bernie isn’t appalled by Hillary calling his supporters basement dwellers , bucket of losers and dumb millennials . Now we know why he continues to campaign with her despite being investigated by the FBI for child pornography, Satanic rituals and was even caught causing riots in places like Chicago with paid protesters dressed as Bernie Sanders supporters so they can get the blame.
If you are a former Bernie Sanders supporter who feels disappointed after this one, here’s the reason why you should vote for Donald Trump and why we believe Trump is the real socialist you were all looking for.
So despite everything, he’s still with her. Now we know why! I mean we always felt like we knew why but we didn’t have any proof. Now we have the proof to back up our claims.
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Email
The boat, along with other means of travel, are often undertaken as matters of freedom. Movement keeps one alive in times of peace, and in conflict. The Australian government, and those backing its practices, have wished over the years to limit, if not halt such movement altogether.
Since the last decade, extreme measures have been implemented that effectively qualify Australian sovereignty while singling out a particular breed of asylum seeker. The former aspect of that policy was specifically undertaken to excise the entire mainland from being qualified as territorially valid to arrive in.
The entire policy effectively assumed a military character, most conspicuously under the Abbott government’s embrace of a creepily crypto-fascist border protection force, equipped with uniforms and patriotic purpose. Operation Sovereign Borders effectively meant that the refugee and asylum seeker were fair game – not to be processed and settled equitably with a minimum of fuss, but to be repelled, their boats towed back to Indonesia, and people smugglers bribed.
An entire intelligence-security complex has also been created, fed by private contractors and held in place by the promise of a two-year prison sentence for entrusted officials in possession of “protected” information.
Such statements as those made today by Prime Minister Turnbull, announced with note of grave urgency at a press conference, tend to resemble a typical pattern in Australian politics since the Howard years.
The borders, even if supposedly secure, are deemed to be in a permanent state of siege, forever battered by potential invaders keen to swindle Parliament and the Australian people. Yes, boasted the Abbott, and now Turnbull government, the boats laden with desperate human cargo have stopped coming. Yes, all is well on the sea lanes in terms of repelling such unwanted arrivals. But for all of this, the island continent is being assaulted by characters of will, those keen to avail themselves of desperate people and their desire for a secure, safe haven.
The policy has also received international attention from such establishment institutions as The New York Times. “While that arrangement,” went an editorial this month, “largely stopped the flow of boats packed with people that set off from Indonesia weekly, it has landed these refugees – many from Iran, Myanmar, Iraq and Afghanistan – in what amounts to cruel and indefinite detention.”
As the editorial continued to observe, “This policy costs Australian taxpayers a staggering $US419,000 per detainee a year and has made a nation that has historically welcomed immigrants a violator of international law.”
While this obscenity has been powdered and perfumed as humanitarian, designed to halt the spate of drowning cases at sea, the latest announcements have abandoned the stance. “They must know,” claimed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, “that the door to Australia is closed to those who seek to come here by boat with a people smuggler.”
Finally, an honest statement twinning two perceived demons in Australian refugee policy: the people smuggler and the asylum seeker, both equivalently horrible to Australian authorities. To that end, not a single asylum seeker arriving by boat will be permitted to settle in Australia. This policy will also affect arrivals from July 2013.
Such a stance of finality seems little different to pervious ones made by Abbott’s predecessor, Kevin Rudd. What is troubling about it is the element of monomania: never will any asylum seeker, who had arrived after a certain date, will be permitted to settle in Australia.
The intention there is to make sure that those designated refugees on Manus Island and Nauru, facilitated by Australia’s draconian offshore regime, will have the doors shut, effectively ensuring a more prolonged, torturous confinement. Absurdly, they will then be permitted to slum away indefinitely in such indigent places as Nauru, with a population hostile to those from the Middle East and Africa.
Turnbull’s stance may also suggest a degree of desperation. Not all has gone swimmingly with the offshore detention complex. The PNG Supreme Court rendered an aspect of the Australian refugee policy redundant in finding that detaining individuals indefinitely on Manus Island breached constitutional rights.
Peter Dutton, the hapless Minister for Immigration, has struggled in managing what can only be described by the border security obsessives as an administrative disaster. Rather than admitting to the realities that searching for refuge over dangerous routes will always find a market, the Australian government persists in a cruel delusion that continues to deny international refugee law while punishing the victims. | 0 |
by the Real News Network Will Trump Erase the "Progress" of the Obama Administration Send by email Help Us Keep Doing This Do you value Black Agenda Report? Then please help us to keep doing this. with a one-time donation in any amount today. Or better yet, make a recurring monthly donation to help guarantee our survival. Choose an amount & click "subscribe."
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The capitalist ruling class is frightened, for good reason: the empire cannot peacefully contain the rising economic powers of the South and East. “The Lords of Capital know there is no future for them in a world where the dollar is not supreme and where Wall Street’s stocks, bonds and derivatives are not backed by the full weight of unchallenged... 00:00 Read the article: view The Obama Legacy: It’s No Crime For Corporations To Steal From the Public, or the Poor by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
After 8 years of the first black president, it’s time to take stock of what we’ve won and lost, what’s changed and not. Today we look at the Obama administration’s abysmal record on corporate crime, in which Democrats went far beyond the atrocities of their Republican colleagues to protect and immunize corporate thieves from prosecution or lawsuits from their victims. ... | 0 |
On Friday’s broadcast of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, host and comedian Bill Maher told Breitbart News Alex Marlow “Thanks for having me [pointing to himself] because you are the head of Breitbart News. I want the Democrats to have a little bit of what you guys are drinking, because you have balls, and you fight better. ” He added, “You’re here on my show. I can’t get Democrats to come here. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
When several Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphones spontaneously exploded in August, the South Korean company went into overdrive. It urged hundreds of employees to quickly diagnose the problem. None were able to get a phone to explode. Samsung’s engineers, on a tight deadline, initially concluded the defect was caused by faulty batteries from one of the company’s suppliers. Samsung, which announced a recall of the Note 7 devices in September, decided to continue shipping new Galaxy Note 7s containing batteries from a different supplier. The solution failed. Reports soon surfaced that some of the replacement devices were blowing up too. Company engineers went back to the drawing board, according to a person briefed on the test process who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the internal workings were confidential. As of this week, Samsung’s testers were still unable to reproduce the explosions. By then, it was too late. On Tuesday, Samsung said it was killing the Galaxy Note 7 entirely. The drastic move is highly unusual in the technology industry, where companies tend to keep trying to improve a product rather than pull it altogether. And it caps a nearly fall for Samsung, which has taken a beating from investors, safety regulators and consumers over its trustworthiness — especially with a marquee product that was supposed to rival Apple’s iPhone. The damage has been severe. Even before Samsung announced it was ceasing production of the Galaxy Note 7, its South shares fell more than 8 percent, its biggest daily drop since 2008, knocking $17 billion off the company’s market value. Strategy Analytics, a research firm, had estimated earlier that Samsung could lose more than $10 billion because of the phone’s problems. Samsung’s smartphone business has helped its other divisions by buying their computer chips and panel screens. Scotching the Note 7 does not end the questions facing Samsung. It still has not disclosed what specifically caused the Note 7s to smoke and catch fire — or even whether it knows what the problem was. And the company may face questions about the safety of its other products, such as kitchen appliances and washing machines. Samsung has received at least 92 reports of Note 7 batteries overheating in the United States, with 26 reports of burns and 55 reports of property damage, according to information posted by the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission. The agency is now working on a potential second recall of the Note 7s, this time focused on the devices that Samsung had shipped to replace the original smartphones. “The fact that we are dealing with potentially a second recall on top of a first recall is not your normal situation and indicative of a process that should have involved earlier coordination with the government,” Elliot F. Kaye, chairman of the safety commission, said in an interview. A Samsung spokeswoman referred to an earlier statement from the company: “For the benefit of consumers’ safety, we stopped sales and exchanges of the Galaxy Note 7 and have consequently decided to stop production. ” In killing the Note 7, Samsung made a move reminiscent of Tylenol’s 1980s recall, which is held up as a case study in business schools today. In 1982, seven people died after taking capsules of Tylenol, the company’s product. Tylenol yanked 31 million bottles of capsules from stores. Two months later, its painkiller was back on the market with packaging and an extensive media campaign. How quickly Samsung will emerge from the Note 7 fiasco is less clear. The company is facing an immediate, and substantial, financial blow. Perhaps more worrisome is how people may lose trust in the Samsung brand. An editorial in South Korea’s largest newspaper, the Chosun Ilbo, said: “You cannot really calculate the loss of consumer trust in money. ” It said that Samsung must realize that it “didn’t take many years for Nokia to tumble from its position as the world’s top cellphone maker. ” Eric Schiffer, chairman of Reputation Management Consultants, which helps celebrities and companies manage brand crises, said Samsung’s decision to kill the Note 7 might help it in the long run. “They made a really intelligent, hard choice that saved their brand and prevented what could have been a complete melting down of all the good will they had built over the last five years,” he said. The Galaxy Note 7 was one of the most ambitious products Samsung had begun marketing under the leadership of its vice chairman, Lee who took the helm of the country’s largest conglomerate, or chaebol, after his father, Lee the chairman, became ill in 2014. The senior Mr. Lee, who has not been seen in public since, famously burned a pile of 150, 000 defective Samsung phones 21 years ago to demonstrate the company’s commitment to quality. The Galaxy Note 7 was released in August, largely to acclaim from reviewers. In the month before the rollout, Samsung had hundreds of “beta testers” using early versions of the units, including testers like its carrier partners ATT and Verizon. None identified a problem that might cause phones to explode, according to the person briefed on the testing process. Samsung’s chief smartphone rival, Apple, announced new iPhones last month. Samsung’s fight to compete with Apple by cramming increasingly sophisticated features into the device may not have helped. Industry experts are scrutinizing Samsung’s supply chain to see whether the rush to market caused technical problems or led to corners being cut. Internally, Samsung’s corporate culture may also have compounded any issues. Two former Samsung employees, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation from the company, described the workplace as militaristic, with a approach where orders came from people high above who did not necessarily understand how product technologies actually worked. “Maybe they should look harder and closer at what is happening at the management level,” said Roberta Cozza, a research director with Gartner Research, who cited the damage to Samsung’s credibility with customers as well as telecommunications carriers. After the original Note 7s began running into exploding problems in August, Samsung initially concluded that the problem was batteries supplied by its subsidiary, Samsung SDI, according to documents from the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards, a government regulator, which were leaked to South Korea’s SBS TV. The plates inside the SDI battery were too close to each other near its rounded corners, making it vulnerable to a short circuit, according to the documents, and the battery also had defects in its insulating tape and the coating of its negative electrode. On Sept. 2, Samsung decided to recall 2. 5 million Note 7s with SDI batteries. But the company was working on an alternative. Both Samsung and the regulatory agency decided that batteries from another supplier, ATL, did not have the same defects. And so Samsung continued to ship Note 7s with ATL batteries, offering them as replacement phones. That decision backfired. “It was too quick to blame the batteries I think there was nothing wrong with them or that they were not the main problem,” said Park former director of the Center for Advanced Batteries at the Korea Electronics Technology Institute, who said he reviewed the regulatory agency’s documents. It did not help that the hundreds of Samsung testers trying to pinpoint the problem could not easily communicate with one another: Fearing lawsuits and subpoenas, Samsung told employees involved in the testing to keep communications about the tests offline — meaning no emails were allowed, according to the person briefed on the process. Mr. Park said he had talked with some Samsung engineers but none seemed to know what happened, nor were they able to replicate the problem. Replication would have been quick and easy if the problem was with the chip board and designs, he said. “The problem seems to be far more complex,” Mr. Park said in a phone interview. “The Note 7 had more features and was more complex than any other phone manufactured. In a race to surpass iPhone, Samsung seems to have packed it with so much innovation it became uncontrollable. ” | 1 |
Country: Syria
Europe today is a powder keg, and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal … A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all … Otto von Bismarck, Congress of Berlin, 1878 Just when you think the loons have emptied their bag of tricks we get a week like the past one to prove you are wrong. The alleged massacre of students and teachers in the village of Hass, at the hands of the Syrian or Russian Air Forces, has had several revisions already, the truth exposed in stages. When news of the attack first broke, we saw the crazies at the UN pouring gas on a totally unproven story, delivered to us by the flagrantly CIA Syrian Observatory news front. The initial claims were backed up by the “White Helmets”, another Western-NATO front supplying aid and comfort to the terrorists tormenting Syria under the guise of emergency workers and a multimillion NGO budget. These two “sources” have fed Western media a non-stop flow of alleged Damascus atrocity stories to make the casual observer think that Assad was competing with Attila the Hun for the world’s most bloodthirsty killer award. Professional journalist and mainstream media almost never validate the claims independently as it is too dangerous for them to do so in the land of the head choppers. The Russians had little to say formally the first day, unlike all those who instantly claimed to know what happened. As they usually do they checked with all their command resources to look into what had happened. The post-strike Russian drone surveillance found no bomb holes in the roof of the school, or craters anywhere near it. The initial photo analysis mentioned images taken at different time during the day and of different locations showing damage, indicating the Islamic State media crew was using its stock footage archive once again to create a phony atrocity story. And then comes Maria Zakharovah the following day to tell us, “An expert analysis of the photos of the Haas village in Syria revealed that there had been no air strike at the local school and that there had been no casualties. The photos are the products of computer graphics, and the killed schoolchildren are a horrible fantasy of ‘activists’ from Al-Jazeera and The Independent.” This news did not make the West very happy as they have walked away from the initial story like it never happened, which seems now was the case. I just checked Google and there is no updated Western media supporting the original faked version of events. Zakharovah’s press conference report of the hoax does not even show up on Google, no surprise there. Continuing on with Syria, we have just finished another chapter in that saga, of another failed ceasefire for humanitarian purposes, getting the wounded and civilians out, and badly needed aid in, only to find the US supported insurgents blocking both. We hear only six tons of supplies were delivered to civilians. But the “aid convoy”s must have been flowing somewhere. With the Syrian coalition planes staying ten kilometers away from Aleppo, once again the jihadis were able to get enough supplies to launch another major offensive on SW Aleppo with armored suicide vehicles, heavy artillery and armor. After making some initial gains the “assault” petered out and the Syrian countered attacked to recover most of the lost ground, and yet the Western press stories of Assad killing civilians in Aleppo continue to flow. The crazy award goes to the incredible media hype over the Russian flotilla heading to it station of the Syrian coast. It became a comedy like the American movie “The Russian are Coming!” The military and Intel factions of the NATO countries along the route spared nothing in their shameless Russian Bear mongering. Phil Butler did a wonderful piece on this story that I urge you all to read to enjoy his rapier wit. Moving over to Iraq we find the offensive to retake Mosul is being challenged by Erdogan’s threat to send armored columns into Iraq to do a repeat “buffer zone” play as he did in Syria. We may see another defacto Balkanizing of a Mideast country of what has now become a Neo-pirate black flag. All you have to so is claim you are doing it to protect yourself from terrorism and invade any country you want. Iraq’s president Abdi tells of that if Turkey follows up with its threat it will cause the breakup of Turkey, but he did not explain to us how this would happen, as I am sure Turkey would. Erdogan’s Iraq invasion threat buried the big story of thousands of Mosul trained, head chopping, women raping, burying people alive jihadis were going to be moved to Syria to continue working for Western interests there. There was much talk of making sure they could not escape, but we do not hear a one report about one of these escaping units being shot to pieces or captured. Iran’s famous General Qasem Soleimani has even set up a command post west of Mosul to devise an effective strategy of making sure the IS jihadis do not escape. If anybody can do it he can. Lavrov has also weighed in that the Mosul jihadis must be prevented from shifting to a new location. The war zones were not the only scenes where we say crazy things going on. We learned of Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s promising to stop swearing because God threatened to take his plane down if he did not. Could the US be giving him some payback by experimenting new brain wave weapons on him for the nasty things he has said to the US? FBI Director Comey went crazy, breaking with tradition of not informing Congressional leaders about investigations, which could be leaked, especially just before an election which could be influenced. He announced an investigation into new Hillary emails on an unsecure computer, against strong Justice Department objections. We already are hearing calls for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate his motives in doing this. Head of Britain’s MI-5, Andrew Parker flips out and jumps into Director Comey’s boat on breaking with tradition by doing a public interview which an incumbent chief has never done in over 100 years. And what was his big concern he wanted to warn us about? He also was wagging the Russian Bear threat about an aggressive, expansionist Russia that was “pushing its foreign policy abroad” by all means. We have all been here before where the public gets the scare mongering treatment to help assure funding for way beyond the needs for real defense. A bogeyman must be dressed up and presented to justify sacrificing domestic spending to feed the military industrial complex. One would hope that Western publics would not be crazy enough to buy into this silliness. Russia is clearly interested only in protecting its most vital interests, which include helping create a multi-polar world to defend the Russian people, and others, from a US hegemony that fewer and fewer trust has benevolent intentions. The Western crazies have been indoctrinating their own people that any country or region that cannot be dominated militarily and economically as a serious threat. The official US defense policy, change under Bill Clinton, now has a clause that justifies a pre-emptive strike on a country that “could become” a threat in the future, even when the US and NATO defense spending and military power far surpass anyone else’s. This of course is a blank check for wanton aggression, but to serve whose interests? Someone is either lying through their teeth to us…or they are crazy…or both. Jim W. Dean, managing editor for Veterans Today, producer/host of Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “ New Eastern Outlook ”. Popular Articles | 0 |
I just bought an item called “My Little Steamer. ” Obviously I was fiscally impaired. Would I buy a product called “My Little Sneakers” or “My Little Automobile”? This steamer is about as effective as taking a sip of hot tea and then exhaling over a garment. Actually, exhaling would be more effective because then you might spot the garment and be forced to take it to a dry cleaner. Where does it come from, this compulsion to buy things we know we will never use, the things that, when we are sane, we can instantly spot as tomorrow’s thrift shop contributions? Is it boredom? Anxiety? The attempt to fill a hole in one’s life that one would prefer to fill with a schnauzerpoo or, failing that, a child? It’s not a new problem, that’s for sure. In fact, clinical fiscal impairment was first identified by Sigmund Freud after his own purchase of a nonrefundable vest in a Viennese in May 1879. Mental health professionals note that fiscal impairment is likely to hit when you are an emotional shambles, desperate for a quick fix. My love life is nonexistent. I will buy a set of sake cups. It will set a mood. Bonus fiscal impairment tip: If you are one of those people who cannot tell if you are fiscally imbalanced but you find yourself gravitating toward a sake set, you have your answer. Sake sets are the Breathalyzers of fiscal impairment. They are, for anyone not born in Japan, the ultimate dumb purchase. You might as well buy that sake set and take it directly over to Housing Works. You will never use it. Never. And this time of year, with the unrelenting ads and the pressure of holiday shopping, we are all at risk of fiscal impairment. At this very moment my neighborhood has been overtaken by the Union Square Holiday Market, a maze of shops that, once you enter, takes hours to find your way out. (Every year, when it is disassembled, we find the bodies of a family from Ohio.) The stock is proof of how dark a force Etsy has become: curated handicrafts, novelty socks, soaps with essential oils, skin creams with essential oils, votive candles so you can pray to never have to hear the words “essential oils” again. There are also shops for craft pastry and exotic chocolates that are otherwise available in New York City only 365 days a year. Normally when this market appears I feel hatred and want to smash it to rubble — a healthy New York City response — because it is making the neighborhood even more crowded. That is followed by a concern that the market is a draw for terrorists, who I can only hope will stuff themselves with so much artisanal pastry that they will become so torpid with artisanal pastry that they will forget their purpose. Or maybe they will become fiscally impaired themselves. I loathe the Union Square Holiday Market. But once in a while I stroll through. Support my local baker. Snag a salted caramel sample because if you eat something while feeling guilty it doesn’t count. O. K. let’s see what they have this year: A section called Lil Brooklyn. (You’ve got your own borough, go home!) An organic, macadamia oil facial serum ($40) which the saleslady picks out just for me but I decline, possibly because it’s called “Mature Serum. ” soap handmade in small batches from saponified coconut, olive, palm and almond oils with pure essential oils added for aroma. Alpaca hats. trivets. Snow globes with pictures of dogs. Oh, the useless junk. Some of it is kind of charming, but fiscally sane as I am, I keep moving. Until I see the black and white photos at the “1980s N. Y. C. Subway Stuff” kiosk. The stuff includes photos on carryalls and tiles. The late ’70s are also represented. I kind of like these photos. So gritty. So urban. Nobody would have put up a curated market in Union Square in the early ’80s back then, the only thing they were curating in this park was crack. And yet, in a lot of ways, the city was better. More affordable, especially for writers. More authentic. I buy a ceramic tile with a photo of a cop and his dog. It will go nicely with the sake set. | 1 |
NEW DELHI — Finally coming to terms with the enormity of its tuberculosis problem, India is preparing a radical overhaul and expansion of its national treatment program to fight an affliction that kills more adults worldwide than any other infectious disease. The severity of the matter was underscored on Thursday when the World Health Organization substantially increased its estimate of the number of new patients with TB in India, to 2. 8 million in 2015, compared with 2. 2 million in 2014 — more than in any other country in the world and more than a quarter of the world total. The organization’s estimate of new global TB patients rose to 10. 4 million, from 9. 6 million a year earlier, in large part because of the revised numbers in India. But increases were noted in Indonesia and several other countries. The revision in India follows a study published in August in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases that estimated the number of Indians afflicted with TB at 3. 6 million, about 50 percent higher than previous Indian government and W. H. O. figures for 2014. The increase confirms numerous Indian district and state studies from recent years. Tuberculosis, an ancient and deadly bacterial disease that most commonly affects the lungs, has been curable for decades using a cocktail of antibiotics taken for six months. India brought this cure to the masses in the 1990s and had early success in reducing the number of cases. But that faded, in part because it failed to reach patients in the private sector, where the vast majority of Indians get medical care. The disease killed 480, 000 people in India last year, accounting for about a quarter of the 1. 8 million deaths worldwide, the W. H. O. report said. When not treated properly, tuberculosis not only spreads but also mutates into more forms, which are far more difficult to treat. TB, in which the two most powerful drugs are ineffective, is contagious and curable only about 60 percent of the time. A Mumbai pulmonologist, Dr. Zarir Udwadia, warned in a paper in 2011 that he had found four TB patients who were totally drug resistant. Experts say the severe underestimation of TB patients in the country was the result of undercounting of patients in the private sector. The government and international experts simply tallied the patients in government programs and added to those a guess at the number being treated privately. It turns out the world “had little idea of the true scale of the problem in India — the country,” said Dr. Nimalan Arinaminpathy, the lead author of the Lancet paper and a senior lecturer at Imperial College London. The Lancet authors calculated the amount of TB medicine sold in the private sector and then worked backward to estimate how many people were taking the drugs. Dr. Sunil Khaparde, the manager of India’s TB program and a of the study, agreed in an interview that it had given India a better estimate of its TB problem. But he added that the country plans to conduct a prevalence study over the next three years to determine with more certainty the actual number of cases. To reach more patients, Dr. Khaparde said, the government planned to provide free TB drugs and diagnostic tools to patients being cared for by private medical practitioners, as it does now for patients in government programs. To do so, Dr. Khaparde said, the government will expand several pilot programs that have proved successful in involving private medical practitioners. The goal is to ensure their patients are adequately treated and monitored so they finish the regimen to be cured of regular tuberculosis, or a longer course of nine months to two years to have the best chance of overcoming disease. The World Health Organization’s representative to India, Dr. Henk Bekedam, credited the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with not only acknowledging the evidence of greater prevalence of the disease but also being ready to carry out significant changes to the government’s longstanding TB program. India plans to increase spending to $300 million from $96 million, Dr. Khaparde said. Mr. Modi personally led a review of the country’s TB programs with top health officials and state officials this year, demanding improvements. “It’s good he’s interested and wants to see things changed,” Dr. Bekedam said, adding that the main question now was how quickly and effectively the country could put the changes in place. A new plan scheduled to take effect in 2017 is still being drafted. Dr. Udwadia, in an interview, called the revised estimates of tuberculosis in India “long overdue” but expressed skepticism that the government would successfully expand the pilot programs. “I don’t see them rolling out on a countrywide basis,” he said. “They will remain small pockets in isolation. ” Jagat Prakash Nadda, India’s minister of health and family welfare, was not available for an interview. To succeed, the program will have to persuade private practitioners and their patients to use the free diagnostics and medicines provided by the government, said Dr. Sreenivas A. Nair, the W. H. O. ’s tuberculosis officer in India. In the past, the government failed to persuade private practitioners to send their patients to the government programs. The new program does not try to persuade private practitioners to give up their patients, but instead allows them to continue treating the patients while they register for the government’s free diagnostics and drugs. Once registered, the patients are monitored by the government, which offers home visits, counseling and screening of household members. The greatest dangers are an interruption in treatment or a cocktail of medicines too weak to kill the bacteria, which can help breed forms of the disease. To improve the monitoring, the government plans to instruct patients to call after taking their daily doses. If no call is made, reminders will be sent to patients, their family members and, finally, health workers. “For TB, what’s required is proper surveillance,” Dr. Sreenivas said. “Why we eradicated polio is we know where the cases are and take action. ” India already derives more than half of its funding for fighting TB from international aid groups. Dr. Sreenivas said India would need more assistance to expand its programs. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which expects to spend $119 million on tuberculosis programs in India in 2016, “will definitely consider any proposal that supports a major expansion of India’s programs on TB,” said Seth Faison, a spokesman. | 1 |
La revolución viene del Mar peruano
Los grandes cambios en el transporte marítimo y negocios portuarios por César Reaño Reaño Socios | 26 de octubre de 2016 Los grandes cambios en el transporte marítimo y negocios portuarios ¡Imprescindible modernizar la concepción del negocio marítimo y portuario en Perú para convertir al puerto del Callao en la salida hacia el Asia! La meta indudable, para los próximos decenios es llevar a cabo la gran revolución que viene desde el mar y ponernos a tono con el mundo moderno!
El sistema tradicional del sector comercial marítimo se ve totalmente alterado como consecuencia de la revolución emprendida por el descubrimiento del contenedor el 26 de abril de 1956, cuando Malcolm Mc Lean, transportó en la barcaza “IDEAL X”, los primeros 50 contenedores desde New Jersey a Houston; este impacto continuó y en 1966 se transformó el buque tanque Fairland, siendo el primer buque tanque petrolero convertido en portacontenedores, que estableció la ruta entre New York-Bremen; en 1967 se creó la primera línea naviera norteamericana, con 2 buques cargueros de la segunda Guerra Mundial, los denominados Liberty, transformados en portacontenedores, estableciendo la ruta San Francisco-Los Angeles-Tokio.
En 1968 la naviera japonesa NYK, construyó los primeros 2 buques especialmente diseñados para transporte de contenedores, primera línea competidora de la línea norteamericana.
La evolución y crecimiento de los buques portacontenedores no se detiene, contando el día de hoy con los buques 3E “Económicos, Eficientes y Ecológicos”, con una capacidad de transporte de hasta 21,000 Teus (contenedores de 20 pies), construidos en astilleros de Corea del Sur, por encargo de la CSCL (China Shipping Container Line) de Hong Kong, que cuenta con un motor MAN, de 17 metros de altura, con capacidad de ahorro de combustible, hasta en 20%, en comparación a otros buques que transportan 10,000 Teus.
Esta revolución en el transporte marítimo y negocio portuario se consolida en la década del 70, donde los transportistas marítimos de todo el mundo, se ponen de acuerdo e inician la construcción masiva de buques portacontenedores, como a la vez se inicia la gran transformación de los puertos del mundo para poder dar atención a este nuevo tipo de transporte, para lo cual había que dotar a los puertos de áreas de almacenamiento de contenedores y equiparlos con grúas para la carga y descarga de contenedores.
Lamentablemente los países en vías de desarrollo del Pacífico Sur, no atendieron estos cambios, por el contrario continuaron sus operaciones con el sistema tradicional, con excepción de Chile, que envió a 50 profesionales en el tema comercial marítimo a Europa a prepararse en el nuevo sistema, siendo el puerto de Valparaíso el primero en dar el paso a la modernización desde 1980, continuando el puerto de Santos-Brasil, México, Colombia, Ecuador.
Recién en el 2010 Perú recién asume esta responsabilidad, dotándose al puerto del Callao con las primeras 2 grúas Pórtico Panamax, con un brazo de alcance de 36 metros, siendo ya obsoletas para esa época, porque ya surcaban los mares buques Post Panamax, que necesitaban de grúas modernas y de mayor alcance.
Los temas señalados, sumados a la pésima visión del desarrollo de infraestructura portuaria, falta de vías de comunicación, como carreteras y líneas ferroviarias que alimenten al puerto, están originando que los puertos del Perú, y muy en especial el puerto del Callao, estén quedando rezagados, teniendo el agravante que hasta la fecha, 2016, el gobierno no asigna las zonas de expansión y crecimiento portuario, para crear confianza en los transportistas marítimos, captar nuevos clientes y fidelizarlos; por el contrario el actual gobierno ha quitado competencias a la Autoridad Portuaria Nacional, cediéndolas al sector Defensa, que no tiene competencia ni injerencia en este importante sector comercial, con el subalterno propósito de desaparecerla para engordar las arcas del sector Defensa, dirigidas a la Marina de Guerra del Perú; este manejo no técnico, menos profesional, no permite enganchar a los puertos nacionales en la cadena portuaria internacional.
César Reaño Reaño | 0 |
In early 2012, a neuropathologist named Daniel Perl was examining a slide of human brain tissue when he saw something odd and unfamiliar in the wormlike squiggles and folds. It looked like brown dust a distinctive pattern of tiny scars. Perl was intrigued. At 69, he had examined 20, 000 brains over a career, focusing mostly on Alzheimer’s and other degenerative disorders. He had peered through his microscope at countless malformed proteins and twisted axons. He knew as much about the biology of brain disease as just about anyone on earth. But he had never seen anything like this. The brain under Perl’s microscope belonged to an American soldier who had been five feet away when a suicide bomber detonated his belt of explosives in 2009. The soldier survived the blast, thanks to his body armor, but died two years later of an apparent drug overdose after suffering symptoms that have become the hallmark of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: memory loss, cognitive problems, inability to sleep and profound, often suicidal depression. Nearly 350, 000 service members have been given a diagnosis of traumatic brain injury over the past 15 years, many of them from blast exposure. The real number is likely to be much higher, because so many who have enlisted are too proud to report a wound that remains invisible. For years, many scientists have assumed that explosive blasts affect the brain in much the same way as concussions from football or car accidents. Perl himself was a leading researcher on chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C. T. E. which has caused dementia in N. F. L. players. Several veterans who died after suffering blast wounds have in fact developed C. T. E. But those veterans had other, nonblast injuries too. No one had done a systematic study of troops. That was exactly what the Pentagon asked Perl to do in 2010, offering him access to the brains they had gathered for research. It was a rare opportunity, and Perl left his post as director of neuropathology at the medical school at Mount Sinai to come to Washington. Perl and his lab colleagues recognized that the injury that they were looking at was nothing like concussion. The hallmark of C. T. E. is an abnormal protein called tau, which builds up, usually over years, throughout the cerebral cortex but especially in the temporal lobes, visible across the stained tissue like brown mold. What they found in these cases was totally different: a dustlike scarring, often at the border between gray matter (where synapses reside) and the white matter that interconnects it. Over the following months, Perl and his team examined several more brains of service members who died well after their blast exposure, including a highly decorated Special Operations Forces soldier who committed suicide. All of them had the same pattern of scarring in the same places, which appeared to correspond to the brain’s centers for sleep, cognition and other classic trouble spots. Then came an even more surprising discovery. They examined the brains of two veterans who died just days after their blast exposure and found embryonic versions of the same injury, in the same areas, and the development of the injuries seemed to match the time elapsed since the blast event. Perl and his team then compared the damaged brains with those of people who suffered ordinary concussions and others who had drug addictions (which can also cause visible brain changes) and a final group with no injuries at all. No one in these control groups had the pattern. Perl’s findings, published in the scientific journal The Lancet Neurology, may represent the key to a medical mystery first glimpsed a century ago in the trenches of World War I. It was first known as shell shock, then combat fatigue and finally PTSD, and in each case, it was almost universally understood as a psychic rather than a physical affliction. Only in the past decade or so did an elite group of neurologists, physicists and senior officers begin pushing back at a military leadership that had long told recruits with these wounds to “deal with it,” fed them pills and sent them back into battle. If Perl’s discovery is confirmed by other scientists — and if one of blast’s signatures is indeed a pattern of scarring in the brain — then the implications for the military and for society at large could be vast. Much of what has passed for emotional trauma may be reinterpreted, and many veterans may step forward to demand recognition of an injury that cannot be definitively diagnosed until after death. There will be calls for more research, for drug trials, for better helmets and for expanded veteran care. But these palliatives are unlikely to erase the crude message that lurks, unavoidable, behind Perl’s discovery: Modern warfare destroys your brain. The physics behind blast forces was almost unknown until the modern era, and it remains so mysterious and terrifying that scientists sometimes invoke the word “magic” when talking about it. A blast begins simply: A detonator turns a lump of solid matter into a deadly fireball. Within that moment, three distinct things happen. The first is the blast wave, a wall of static pressure traveling outward in all directions faster than the speed of sound. Next, a blast wind fills the void and carries with it any objects it encounters. This is the most manifestly destructive part of the blast, capable of hurling cars, people and shrapnel against buildings and roadsides. The remaining effects include fire and toxic gases, which can sear, poison and asphyxiate anyone within range. The effects of all of this on the human body are myriad and more complicated than the blast itself. People who have been exposed to blasts at close range usually describe it as an overpowering, experience unlike anything they have ever known. Many soldiers do not recall the moment of impact: it gets lost in the flash of light, the deafening sound or unconsciousness. Those who do remember it often speak of a simultaneous punching and squeezing effect, a feeling at once generalized and intensely violent, as if someone had put a board against your body and then struck it with dozens of hammers. From a distance, a blast makes a distinctive thump, the sound of air pressure clapping outward. When I lived in Baghdad, reporting for this newspaper, I would sometimes be awakened by that sound early in the morning. I would sit up in bed, instantly alert, with a surreal and awful realization: Someone who was just as healthy as me 30 seconds ago has been shredded to pieces. Trinitrotoluene, or TNT, was first used in artillery shells by the German Army in 1902. Soon after the First World War started in 1914, a rain of these devices was falling on the hapless men on each side of the front. It was a level of violence and horror far beyond the cavalry charges of earlier wars. Very quickly, soldiers began emerging with bizarre symptoms they shuddered and gibbered or became unable to speak at all. Many observers were struck by the apparent capacity of these blasts to kill and maim without leaving any visible trace. The British journalist Ellis famously described the sight of seven Turks at Gallipoli in 1915, sitting together with their rifles across their knees: “One man has his arm across the neck of his friend and a smile on his face as if they had been cracking a joke when death overwhelmed them. All now have the appearance of being merely asleep for of the several I can only see one who shows any outward injury. ” For those who survived a blast and suffered the mysterious symptoms, soldiers quickly coined their own phrase: shell shock. One period lyric went like this: Perhaps you’re broke and paralyzed Perhaps your memory goes But it’s only just called shell shock For you’ve nothing there that shows. One British doctor, Frederick Mott, believed the shock was caused by a physical wound and proposed dissecting the brains of men who suffered from it. He even had some prescient hunches about the mechanism of blast’s effects: the compression wave, the concussion and the toxic gases. In a paper published in The Lancet in February 1916, he posited a “physical or chemical change and a break in the links of the chain of neurons which subserve a particular function. ” Mott might not have seen anything abnormal in the soldiers’ brains, even if he had examined them under a microscope neuropathology was still in its infancy. But his prophetic intuitions made him something of a hero to Perl. Mott’s views were soon eclipsed by those of other doctors who saw shell shock more as a matter of emotional trauma. This was partly a function of the intellectual climate Freud and other early psychologists had recently begun sketching provocative new ideas about how the mind responds to stress. Soldiers suffering from shell shock were often described as possessing “a neuropathic tendency or inheritance” or even a lack of manly vigor and patriotic spirit. Many victims were derided as shirkers some were even sentenced to death by firing squad after fleeing the field in a state of mental confusion. This consensus held sway for decades, even as the terminology shifted, settling in 1980 on “ stress disorder,” a coinage tailored to the unique social and emotional strain of returning veterans of the war in Vietnam. No one doubted that blasts had powerful and mysterious effects on the body, and starting in 1951, the U. S. government established the Blast Overpressure Program to observe the effects of large explosions, including atomic bombs, on living tissue. One of my uncles recalls standing in the Nevada desert as an Army private in 1955, taking photographs of a nuclear blast amid a weird landscape of test objects: cars, houses and mannequins in Chinese and Soviet military uniforms. At the time, scientists believed blasts would mainly affect air pockets in the body like the lungs, the digestive system and the ears. Few asked what it would mean for the body’s most complex and vulnerable organ. Only after yet another European war broke out did scientists begin looking again at blast’s effects on the brain. When the Balkans collapsed into fratricidal violence in the early 1990s, Ibolja Cernak, a small, tenacious woman who grew up in the countryside of what is now Serbia, was working as a doctor and researcher at a military hospital in Belgrade. She soon began seeing large numbers of soldiers with blast trauma, usually from mortars and artillery fire, a common feature of that war. As in World War I, the men often suffered from striking mental impairments but few visible wounds. Cernak, whose colleagues call her Ibi, has an appealing blend of briskness and warmth, along with a clinician’s conviction that you must listen to your patients. It is easy to imagine her running around the battlefields of Bosnia and Serbia, collecting blood samples from soldiers. That is what she did for several years, at no small risk to her life, for a study cataloging the neurological effects of blast on 1, 300 recruits. “The blast covers the entire body,” she told me. “It has a squeezing effect. Ask soldiers what they felt: The first thing they say is that their ears were popped out, they were gasping for air, like some huge fist is squeezing them. The entire body is involved in that interaction. ” Cernak became convinced that blast ripples through the body like rings on a pond’s surface. Its speed changes when it encounters materials of different density, like air pockets or the border between the brain’s gray and white matter, and can inflict greater damage in those places. As it happens, physicists would later theorize some very similar models for how blast damages the brain. Several possibilities have now been explored, including surges of blood upward from the chest shearing loads on brain tissue and the brain bouncing back and forth inside the skull, as happens with concussion. Charles Needham, a renowned authority on blast physics, told me on blast injuries have lent some support to all of those theories, and the truth may be that several are at play simultaneously. A decade after her initial battlefield surveys in the Balkans, Cernak took a position at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she did animal research that bolstered her conviction about blast’s effects. She found that even if an animal’s head is protected during a blast, the brain can sustain damage, because the blast wave transfers through the body via blood and tissue. Cernak also came to believe that blast injuries to the brain were cumulative and that even small explosions with no discernible effects could, if repeated, produce terrible and irreversible damage. Much of this would later be confirmed by other scientists. Even Cernak’s limited conclusions about blast injuries were heresy to much of the establishment at the time. She presented some of her findings at a conference in Vienna in the late 1990s, and before she was even finished, “an older gentleman stood up, a military doctor from the U. S. A. ,” she recalled. “He said: ‘Stop with this nonsense. If you give soldiers fluid replacement, they’ll do fine after 24 hours, so it’s not this.’ . .. I was taken aback. It’s been an uphill battle. ” It was not until 2001, when America embarked on what became an era of constant warfare, that doctors began to move slowly toward Cernak’s way of thinking. A new generation of more powerful roadside bombs — improvised explosive devices, or I. E. D. s, in military parlance — became a signature of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, yielding an epidemic of blast injury. Medics soon noticed an oddity of blast: It reflects off hard surfaces and multiplies, so that people who appear to be protected inside an enclosed space like a Humvee often suffer much worse brain injuries than those outside. Military and civilian researchers began focusing their work on the brain rather than just the body. But it was still very difficult to isolate blast from all the other physical and mental effects of being exposed to an explosion in a combat zone. A landmark advance came in 2007, when an engineering firm called Applied Research Associates received a call from the SWAT team of the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado. The officers were worried about possible neurological effects from breaching, the practice of blowing open doors with small explosive charges. Almost every major city in the United States has breacher teams, as do militaries in war zones. The Applied Research team quickly recognized that monitoring breachers would allow them to observe blast in its pure form, because the charges are too small to knock soldiers over or give them concussions they are subject to the blast wave only. Plus, the researchers could bypass any ethical concerns about running tests on human subjects, because the breachers were doing it anyway. The Applied Research team quickly designed and led a study on military breachers, rigging its own blast gauges and subjecting the recruits and trainers to neuropsychological tests at the beginning and end of a breaching course. The resulting report, circulated in 2008, found a small but distinct decline in performance among the instructors, who are exposed to far more blasts than students. It was only a pilot study, but one author, Leanne Young, told me it added to “converging evidence that there is a cumulative effect with chronic exposure to blast,” even at relatively low levels. The military was still reluctant to take blast seriously or even to concede that the symptoms it caused were a matter of physical harm. As late as 2008, researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research published a paper suggesting that the symptoms of traumatic brain injury could be caused in large part by PTSD and brushing off “theoretical concern” about neurological effects of the blast wave. By that time, American doctors who had gained Cernak’s unusual blend of medical expertise and battle experience were starting to draw their own conclusions. One of the first to challenge the military from within was a Army lieutenant colonel named Christian Macedonia. In March 2008, Macedonia was in Arlington, Va. listening to a group of scientists and government bureaucrats talk about roadside bombs. The talk was dry and technical, and finally Macedonia, a man with an air of urgent candor, could no longer contain himself. He lashed out against the military’s inaction on brain injury, using what he recalls as “some pretty salty language” to make his point. “I see no movement, and I’m kind of sick of it,” he concluded. As the meeting broke up, Macedonia expected other participants to politely avoid him. Instead, a younger aide approached, gave him a business card and urged him to get in touch with Adm. Michael Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Macedonia contacted Mullen and repeated his pitch. To his surprise, Mullen hired him. At the time, “you had an entrenched community that did not want to go down that road,” Macedonia told me. “They didn’t want to give any credence to the idea that these symptoms were anything other than emotional difficulty. ” Macedonia, an obstetrician as well as a soldier, knew otherwise. He did a tour in Anbar province in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 with soldiers who were being targeted frequently by mortars and roadside bombs. As an officer and doctor, he felt responsible for younger soldiers and their injuries. “Kids exposed to explosions were asking for help, and I was mouthing the party line: ‘You’ll be O. K.’ I was part of the machine that didn’t help. That’s what haunts me. ” Like Macedonia, some senior officers, including Gen. Peter Chiarelli of the Army and Gen. James Amos of the Marines, were also frustrated. They had seen too many soldiers discharged for disciplinary issues that were related to brain injury. Mullen hired several other experts to join Macedonia, asking them to monitor and improve the treatment of brain injury across the entire military. They called it the “Gray Team” — partly a play on gray matter and partly because the men were mostly in their 40s and going gray. They were an extraordinary group: mostly military officers, all of them had advanced degrees in medicine or science. And almost all of them had seen combat. One of them was Jim Hancock, an emergency physician and Navy captain whose main qualification, he told me, was that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury himself, in southern Afghanistan. He also suffered concussions twice as a college athlete, so he had a basis for comparison. “The theory at the time was, it was a concussive event,” Hancock told me. “I said, ‘B. S.’ I’ve been concussed. I’ve never had anything like blast. ” Like other members of the team, Hancock had noticed that soldiers exposed to blasts often had memory and focus problems that did not go away and that seemed distinct from battlefield trauma. If the blasts were repeated, the lapses sometimes devolved into mental and behavioral struggles. The Gray Team shared a belief that a blast wave’s effects on the body were far more extreme, and more complex, than the concussion model could account for. But their main task was to push the military to take brain injury more seriously, whatever its causes. In early 2009, the Gray Team’s first five members traveled to military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, meeting with trauma surgeons and other doctors to see how they handled brain injury. They found a wildly inconsistent picture. There were three extraordinary doctors who understood brain trauma and how to handle it. But “our fear was, those three rotate out, and it disappears,” said Dr. Geoffrey Ling, another member of the Gray Team. When they got home, the team identified the most valuable practices and, along with Chiarelli and Amos, had them codified. Any soldier who was within 50 meters of a blast or who was in a vehicle behind or ahead of one struck by a bomb would have to be screened for brain injury. Anyone who suffered a concussion would have to be pulled out of combat. The Gray Team used a checklist to help identify concussed soldiers, although they were soon forced to write six different versions of it, because so many Marines memorized the correct answers to avoid being pulled out of combat. They also found a civilian contractor to build blast gauges, like the ones used in the breacher study. Every recruit or officer in a combat zone now wears three of these tiny devices, which weigh 20 grams each. The gauges are designed to turn red if they register a force of more than 12 pounds per square inch, the lower limit indicating a possible concussion or brain injury. The soldiers can no longer brush it off: If your sensor is red, you must be screened for brain injury. The military has taken the new rules seriously. Less than a year after its first tour, the Gray Team went out to the field again and found that 90 percent of the bases they visited were in compliance. Still, the larger question of blast’s residue inside the skull remained a mystery. Brandon Matthews is built like a tank, with huge humps of muscle outlining his back and shoulders. Ugly scars run down his biceps and forearms, cutting deep creases into the muscle. Others line his legs and sides, the legacy of an career as an Army Ranger. Matthews, registered with the military as Brandon Matthew Sipp, was exposed to so many blasts, in Iraq and other places, that he cannot count them all. The worst was a suicide bombing that sent him flying down a corridor and left him in a coma. He was hospitalized for months, and his military career was over. But his struggles with brain injury were only starting. “I have moments when I forget everything: who I am, where I am, what I’m doing,” he told me. “It happens almost every day,” sometimes while he is driving. Decisions, once easy, have become impossible. He turns the kitchen burner on and then walks out, returning to discover a fire raging. Matthews has 24 names tattooed down the center of his back. Eighteen are former war buddies who were killed in action. The more painful losses, in a sense, are five others: friends who have killed themselves since returning from the war. One of them, another Special Operations veteran with an undiagnosed traumatic brain injury, threatened his wife and children with a gun six months ago, Matthews told me, then shot himself in the head. Matthews spoke at the funeral. Undiagnosed blast injuries are common among the Special Operations soldiers, he said, because members of this military elite prize their toughness and do not want to risk losing their careers. “Here’s the harsh reality,” another veteran told me. “In the Special Forces especially, if I fail my physical, I’m done. That’s all there is to it. My stuff is done. ” So they keep their heads down, say nothing and suffer more blasts. Until one day, like Brandon Matthews, they are too damaged to fight. I met Matthews at a hotel in Scottsdale, Ariz. where he now lives, and within an hour he had consumed several . He was warm and talkative, but every now and then he got a lost, plaintive look in his green eyes I had the impression of a man who is clinging to a precipice. Before I could turn in, he insisted on steering me to a series of nightclubs, where he drank round after round and regaled strangers with his war stories. I asked him about friends, and he told me that almost all of them were dead. He lives on his military pension, and at 33, seems to have given up on holding down a job. All this is fairly typical of service members and veterans who have suffered serious or repeated blast injuries, I was told by Susan Ullman, who runs an outreach network called Warrior2Warrior. (Ullman’s own husband, a Green Beret who suffered a traumatic brain injury, killed himself in 2013.) When I asked Matthews about other veterans and suicide, he grimaced and unleashed a string of obscenities about the cowardice of taking your own life. It felt cruel, and a little unnecessary, to ask if he had been tempted that way himself. (He has his own name tattooed on his back after those of friends who have killed themselves.) Even if the underlying wounds of men like Matthews cannot be treated, the symptoms of brain injury, like those of trauma, can often be alleviated. The distinction between organic and emotional injury can be very blurry trauma changes neuronal patterns, and therapy can alter a brain that has been physically damaged. “Everything we know suggests that people with structural lesion will also respond to pharmacological and psychological treatment,” said David Brody, a neurologist who has worked extensively with the military. Finding the right treatment is the key. Many veterans told me that they had gone to the V. A. and been handed pills indiscriminately. A number of mostly untested treatments have gained traction in the past few years, from hyperbaric chambers to ergonomic mouth guards, and some veterans swear by them. For all his mental confusion, Matthews told me that he thinks he can now distinguish between the emotional wounds he suffered — the survivor’s guilt, the bad dreams and night terrors — and the more concrete cognitive problems that he traces to his blast exposure. A number of Special Operations soldiers said the same thing. They also said it makes a big difference to be told they have a physical wound rather than a mental one, even if it is incurable. Some brain injuries can now be seen on M. R. I. brain scans of living people, though precise diagnoses remain elusive. Matthews told me he would find some solace in simply being able to see what was going on inside his head. Daniel Perl is continuing to examine the brains of soldiers. After five years of working with the military, he feels sure, he told me, that many blast injuries have not been identified. “We could be talking many thousands,” he said. “And what scares me is that what we’re seeing now might just be the first round. If they survive the initial injuries, many of them may develop C. T. E. years or decades later. ” Perl takes some solace from the past. He has read a great deal about the men who suffered from shell shock during World War I and the doctors who struggled to treat them. He mentioned a monument in central England called “Shot at Dawn,” dedicated to British and Commonwealth soldiers who were executed by a firing squad after being convicted of cowardice or desertion. It is a stone figure of a blindfolded man in a military storm coat, his hands bound behind him. At his back is a field of thin stakes, each of them bearing a name, rank, age and date of execution. Some of these men, Perl believes, probably had traumatic brain injuries from blasts and should not have been held responsible for their actions. He has begun looking into the possibility of obtaining brain samples of shellshocked soldiers from that war. He hopes to examine them under the microscope, and perhaps, a century later, grant them and their descendants the diagnoses they deserve. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — President Trump and his top aides coordinated their response to North Korea’s missile test on Saturday night in full view of diners at Mr. Trump’s resort in Florida — a remarkable public display of presidential activity that is almost always conducted in highly secure settings. The scene — of aides huddled over their computers and the president on his cellphone at his club’s terrace — was captured by a club member dining not far away and published in pictures on his Facebook account. The images also show Mr. Trump conferring with his guest at the resort, Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister. Shortly before the club member, Richard DeAgazio, who joined Mr. Trump’s club recently, took the pictures, North Korea a ballistic missile into the sea off its eastern coast. Mr. DeAgazio posted his photographs to Facebook as the two leaders and their staff members reviewed documents and worked on their laptops, using cellphones as flashlights. “HOLY MOLY ! !! It was fascinating to watch the flurry of activity at dinner when the news came that North Korea had launched a missile in the direction of Japan,” Mr. DeAgazio wrote later on Facebook, describing how the two leaders “conferred and then went into another room for hastily arranged press conference. ” “Wow. .... the center of the action! !!” Mr. DeAgazio wrote in the post. The scene at was first reported by CNN. Mr. DeAgazio did not respond to a call seeking comment. The fact that the national security incident played out in public view drew swift condemnation from Democrats, who said it was irresponsible for Mr. Trump not to have moved his discussion to a more private location. “There’s no excuse for letting an international crisis play out in front of a bunch of country club members like dinner theater,” Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader in the House, wrote on Twitter. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Tom Udall of New Mexico, Democrats who have called for Mr. Trump’s club to release a list of its members, denounced the president on Monday for discussing the North Korean missile launch in the open. “This is America’s foreign policy, not this week’s episode of ‘Saturday Night Live,’” the senators said in a statement. “We urge our Republican colleagues to start taking this administration’s rash and unprofessional conduct seriously before there are consequences we all regret. ” Republican senators also seemed puzzled by the president’s actions. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said, “Usually that’s not a place where you do that kind of thing. ” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, could barely find words. “Can’t make it up,” he said. Michael J. Morell, a former acting C. I. A. director under President Barack Obama, said, “Every president with whom I have worked would have gone to a private room to have what was potentially a classified discussion. ” Mr. Trump was at his resort in Palm Beach, Fla. — known casually as the Winter White House — for a weekend with Mr. Abe, including time with the prime minister on the golf course and dinners with their spouses. Around 8 p. m. on Saturday, the two leaders appeared for a brief together at the main entrance to the resort. Mr. Trump ignored a shouted question from a reporter about the North Korean missile test, which had occurred about an hour earlier. The president and his guests dined at the resort’s restaurant during the next two hours, eventually providing the flurry of national security activity that Mr. DeAgazio captured. Around 10:30 p. m. Mr. Trump and Mr. Abe made short statements to a small group of reporters brought to a separate room in the resort. Sean Spicer, the president’s press secretary, told reporters at the White House that Mr. Trump and Mr. Abe had not reviewed classified material on the resort’s patio. Mr. Spicer said the president was briefed about North Korea in a secure location on the property. It is against the law for officials to be handling classified materials in a nonsecure setting. Mr. Spicer said Mr. Trump and his aides were reviewing “news conference logistics” about the North Korean missile test. But national security veterans of past administrations still expressed surprise that Mr. Trump and his staff would not have excused themselves to be able to have candid conversations about the North Korean situation and to review sensitive or classified documents. Discussions about how to respond to international incidents involving adversaries like North Korea are almost always conducted in places that have protections against eavesdropping, like the White House Situation Room. When presidents are away from the White House, they often conduct important business in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, a location that can be made temporarily impervious to eavesdropping. Such facilities can be installed permanently in places that the president visits frequently, like . And a communications team travels with the president wherever he goes to ensure that he can communicate securely regardless of where he is. There are examples from the previous administration. In 2011, the White House released a photograph of Mr. Obama and members of his national security team sitting in a secure tent while on a trip to Brazil. Mr. Obama had begun attacks on Libya and was conferring about the military operation. Two years later, Mr. Obama held a dinner with President Xi Jinping of China at the Sunnylands resort in Rancho Mirage, Calif. But the dinner between the leaders was out of sight of members of the public, in a private dining room. Mr. Trump and White House aides who joined him and Mr. Abe for dinner on Saturday, including Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, did not relocate the discussion to a secure location. Mr. Trump appears to enjoy presenting the spectacle of his presidency to those at his privately held club, where members pay $200, 000 to join. While the club is not open to the public, Mr. Trump’s dinner with Mr. Abe was in the club’s dining room, where members and their guests were likely to be. Individual club members can invite guests, submitting a list of names of table guests to security officials ahead of time. But none of that would give them clearance to see sensitive or classified material handled by the president or his aides. In addition to posting the pictures of the North Korea conversation, Mr. DeAgazio also published pictures of himself standing with a person he described as Mr. Trump’s military aide responsible for carrying the nuclear “football” — the briefcase that contains codes for launching nuclear weapons. After news reports were published about Mr. DeAgazio’s Facebook account, the account was deleted, along with the photographs. Representatives of the resort did not respond to requests for comment about Mr. DeAgazio’s use of social media to post photographs of the president. | 1 |
Welcome to Our Picks, a guide to the best stuff to read, watch and listen to from around the internet. We know you don’t want to read only political news, so we’re collecting great articles, podcasts, videos and other web treasures you might like when you need a break. And yes, we’re also tooting our own horn here. We’ll share can’ Times stories from the week and surface some gems you might have overlooked. We want to hear from you! Send us feedback about our selections to ourpicks@nytimes. com. • “If the girls play, this will be the end of your season. You won’t play in the playoffs. ” This was the ultimatum posed to a coed basketball team on Friday night before the penultimate game of its season. The team members’ response was swift and unanimous: They would sacrifice their record to maintain team unity. Squad goals, indeed. [NJ. com] ______ • The heart shape may have been inspired by the seed pods of an ancient, plant known as Silphium. In addition to treating fevers, corns and stomach aches, the plant may also have been used as a contraceptive. Nothing more romantic than birth control. [Atlas Obscura] ______ • Dreaming of taking a vacation to some place very far away? People have been thinking about how to make hotels in space a reality since the Lunar Hilton was proposed in 1967. But as this brief history points out, you may want to hold off on that reservation until astronomical pipe dreams are replaced with actual pipes. [The Outline] ______ • Rhonda McCoy is the most unlikely of heroes. Ms. McCoy, the food service director for the public schools of Cabell County, W. Va. is a local person who figured out how to do what the celebrity chef and Jamie Oliver could not: feed tasty, nutritious food to the children of one of America’s unhealthiest cities. [Huffington Post Highline] ______ • Consider it a story of rehabilitation. Ken Lowson was the “most infamous ticket scalper of all time,” using bots to buy and sell concert tickets at marked up prices. After his arrest in 2010, however, Mr. Lowson devoted himself to fighting the industry he once pioneered to make sure that real, human fans got the first opportunity to buy tickets to their favorite bands’ shows. [Motherboard] ______ • Happy Valentine’s Day! We asked New York Today readers to share their experiences with subway romance, and we were tickled to hear about so many encounters — on enough train lines to cover the alphabet — that led to marriage. Here are a handful of those stories. ______ • “I had a permanent smile on my face. I felt like I belonged there. ” Those are the words of Joe Maldonado, 9, on his first meeting as a member of the Maplewood Cub Scouts in New Jersey. He became one of the first transgender children to join the organization after the Boy Scouts of America reversed its policy of more than a century on Jan. 30, accepting members based on the gender listed on their application. ______ • James Lowell Gibbs Jr. was a graduate student at Harvard and the school’s first resident tutor. Jewelle Taylor Gibbs was a senior at Radcliffe and the only black student in her class. They were married in 1956 and became one of the earliest couples to appear in The New York Times’s wedding announcements. We caught up with them in our continuing Committed series. ______ • Dog break: Marvel up close at the wrinkles of Glitter the Chinese stare into the eyes of Duo the Australian shepherd, or see the Westminster Dog Show through the eyes of a pup in our 360 video. (Unfortunately — or fortunately — you’ll just have to imagine touching these dogs that “feel like ‘warm bologna’. ”) ______ • Let this cyclist be an inspiration to us all. And this too: ______ ______ • Beautiful and comforting in a “ ’ ” kind of way, these photographs of ice fishermen covered in single sheets of plastic are worth a scroll. [The Calvert Journal] ______ • In 2012, John Collins constructed a paper airplane that flew a 226 feet. Now, you can fold one of your own airplanes and impress your friends and family. Just watch this video released by Harvard, and, remember, it’s all in the wrist. [Harvard Gazette via Gizmodo] ______ • While you’re waiting for your date tonight or lounging at home alone, you should listen to this episode of the “Mortified” podcast. In it, a man reads a humorously love letter he wrote as a teen. It will make you blush with secondhand embarrassment and feel lucky that — whatever your relationship status is this Valentine’s Day — you didn’t write this note. [“Tom: My Funny Valentine” episode on SoundCloud, iTunes ] ______ Want Our Picks delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the What We’re Reading newsletter, a email featuring great stories from around the web selected by members of the New York Times staff. | 1 |
Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders, who stands a chance of being the Netherlands’ next prime minister, has said the demise of the European Union (EU) is now “irreversible” and that attempts by the bloc to punish the UK for leaving would backfire. [Speaking just five weeks before the Netherlands goes to the polls to decide on the composition of their next government, Mr. Wilders told The Telegraph he would seek to form a coalition government after the election if his vote share was comparable to the level presently being predicted by opinion polling. While the polls have failed to predict the outcome of major electoral battles in the United Kingdom and the U. S. in the past year, Mr. Wilders’ PVV had topped or tied every national poll for months. Of the EU, Mr. Wilders said the nationalist “genie” was now out of the bottle and the European elite had not only totally failed to grasp what it was, but couldn’t now do anything about it. Comparing the crumbling political bloc to the final days of the Roman Empire, beset by decadence and lack of direction, Mr. Wilders said: “The days of the old Roman Empire, which the European Union is, are over. They know it and they have been fighting for the last few years to extend it a bit, but this process is irreversible. ” Mr. Wilders was bullish in the interview about his ambitions for the coming election, telling The Telegraph: “I want to be prime minister. The question is if they want me to be prime minister … The odds of me becoming prime minister, are perhaps not in my favour, but I’m confident that if we get the result, according to the current polls that it is a real possibility. ” If the PVV took power, they would prioritise taking back “the key to our own front door” — a reference to the present open borders with the rest of the EU. But Mr. Wilders admitted it was possible other parties could refuse to cooperate with him, opening the way for a minority coalition to rule although he could command the largest single party. A similar fate could await his colleagues in other European nations, he said, but even if Marine Le Pen in France and Sebastian Kurz in Austria failed to top the ballots in 2017 the populist revolution would carry on going. The PVV leader’s remarks come just days after he called on Rotterdam to allow his party to place political on the sides of their trams in the to the elections. The proposed design which features the phrase “Stop Islam” written in large letters along the sides of the vehicles was turned down by the authority, who told press, “We do not work with politically tinged statements. We never do. ” | 1 |
Pope Francis this week signaled receptiveness to appeals from bishops in the remote and overwhelmed corners of the Roman Catholic Church to combat a deepening shortage of priests by ordaining married men who are already committed to the church. In an interview with a German newspaper, the pope made clear that he was not advocating an end to celibacy for current priests or those aspiring to join the clergy. But his seeming openness about the prospect of ordaining married men in places hardest hit by a dearth of priests was unusually explicit and brought the issue to the forefront. “We need to think about whether ‘viri probati’ could be a possibility,” Francis, using the Latin phrase for such “tested” men, said in an interview with the newspaper, Die Zeit. “If so, we would need to determine what duties they could undertake, for example, in remote communities. ” For years, the pope has noted that an element of married clergy already exists in the church. Eastern Rite priests in union with Rome have married for centuries. In 1980, John Paul II created a provision by which some married Protestant ministers who converted to Catholicism could maintain their ministry. And historically, priests in the first centuries of the church were free to marry But monastic influences at the turn of the millennium led to the adoption of a celibacy requirement at the First Lateran Council of 1123, and that tradition has held ever since. It is not doctrine or dogma, but instead a code of canon law that essentially reasons that priests unburdened by spouses or children are both more reflective of Christ and devoted to pastoral demands. Francis, who has made clear that he sees little possibility for allowing women to be priests, called the vocation crisis an “enormous problem. ” The issue is less a question of theology than arithmetic. In the United States, there are now about 2, 500 Catholics per priest, compared with 851 per priest in 1972, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which is affiliated with Georgetown University. The chasms are far wider in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where the faithful can go months without access to a priest and married deacons are increasingly called on to conduct the business of parishes. In Brazil, according to the center, there are roughly 8, 000 Catholics per priest. The Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest and senior analyst for The National Catholic Reporter, said that in the face of such a crisis, the church had to decide whether upholding the celibacy rule was worth depriving the faithful of Mass and confession, which can only be performed by priests. He said that while the pontiff’s most recent predecessors had hoped for a turnaround in the diminishing numbers of priests, Francis seemed eager to push the issue. “This is now an open topic in the church today,” Father Reese said, “whereas under John Paul II or Benedict, you could not talk about this. ” Before being chosen as pope in 2013, Francis — who was then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio — said in remarks included in the book “On Heaven and Earth” that clerical celibacy was “a matter of discipline, not of faith. It can change. ” In 2014, as pope, he took a step that made it easier for married men to serve as priests, when he lifted a ban imposed in 1929 that had prohibited Eastern Catholic bishops from ordaining married men to the priesthood in Australia, Canada and the United States. Until Francis made that change, the Eastern Rite churches could ordain married men only in their own territories. Also in 2014, Bishop Erwin Krautler, of Xingu, Brazil, a territory where only 27 priests served 700, 000 Catholics, brought up the issue with Francis. The bishop told an Austrian newspaper at the time that the pope had told him such a change could not be done by Francis in Rome, but that “local bishops, who are best acquainted with the needs of our faithful, should be ‘corajudos,’ that is ‘courageous’ in Spanish, and make concrete suggestions. ” Soon after, in 2015, Bishop Leo O’Reilly of Kilmore, Ireland, said that the pope’s message to be creative in confronting priest shortages had led him to establish a commission on the possibility of ordaining married men. “I think the other bishops would be open to the idea,” he told the Catholic Herald newspaper. Veteran observers of Francis have noted that the pope appears especially willing to broach the issue. In August, the papal biographer Austen Ivereigh wrote on the Catholic news website Crux that “Francis has given many signals of his willingness to open up the question of ordaining married men, even encouraging local Churches to put forward proposals. ” Any formal discussion of changing the rule would surely engender opposition among a small but intense group of canon lawyers and traditionalists upset about Francis’ flexibility on issues of church law. In the meantime, the pope seems to be using the media to plant the idea directly with the faithful. “The glacier is moving forward, but there are forces that want to move it back,” said Paul Bumbar, a former priest and the of Corpus, an organization founded more than 40 years ago by men who had left the priesthood to marry. “And Francis has made it clear that he does not want to stop. I just pray his health holds out. ” | 1 |
Monday on Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said the House Freedom Caucus saved House Republicans from a politically destructive vote when they refused to support the House Republican health care bill which only had a 17 percent approval rating among voters. Gingrich said, “Not voting on Friday was really good. The Democrats lost their majority for the first time in 40 years after they tried to push through Hillarycare. The Democrats lost the majority again in 2010 after they pushed through Obamacare. If we had all the House Republicans line up and vote yes on a bill that was at 17 percent approval — that means four out of five Americans were not approving — I will guarantee you the Democrats would have had a field day. ” “So I think the Freedom Caucus whether they intended to or not may have saved House Republican from a vote that would have been potentially very destructive,” he continued. “Now everybody ought to just get over it. Look at the future. Let’s learn the lessons and recognize it took Reagan eight months to pass a tax cut. It took us 18 months to pass welfare reform. It took Pelosi and Obama eight months to pass Obamacare. We’re not in a rush here. We don’t have to get everything done by Easter. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
NTEB Ads Privacy Policy Last Minute Millions Pour In From Republican Donors As Donald Trump Surges Towards The Top Billionaire Sheldon Adelson just committed $25 million to an anti-Hillary Clinton Super PAC to try and help tilt the presidential race and down ballot House and Senate races to Republicans, Fox News learned Monday. There are indications the casino magnate will pony up even more by the end of the week. by Geoffrey Grider October 31, 2016 Adelson pours $25 million into White House race, more may be coming
Billionaire Sheldon Adelson just committed $25 million to an anti-Hillary Clinton Super PAC to try and help tilt the presidential race and down ballot House and Senate races to Republicans, Fox News learned Monday. There are indications the casino magnate will pony up even more by the end of the week.
Two senior Republican sources familiar with the donation described it to Fox News as a “massive” amount of money to be spent during the final week of the presidential race and a sign that Adelson, who has largely been on the sidelines after initially suggesting he would give $100 million to help Donald Trump, is now going all in on the Republican nominee. GOP donors pouring-last minute money into the race:
The money will benefit Future 45 , a Super PAC launched by the Ricketts family in Chicago, founders of TD Ameritrade. The group has recently been running a television ad in battlegrounds comparing Clinton to Richard Nixon, calling her a “secretive, paranoid politician who destroyed 30,000 pieces of evidence.”
The Republican sources said the contribution was made in the last few days as the FBI re-ignited its investigation of Clinton’s email server, and could spark other big GOP donors – who may have thought the Democratic nominee was coasting to victory just days ago — to step up their support of Trump in the final days.
Most importantly, one source familiar with the Adelson contribution revealed he is considering pouring as much as another $25 million dollars into the race before Election Day on November 8.
The first major contribution came as Trump visited Adelson’s Venetian resort and casino in Las Vegas for a rally with supporters on Sunday. Trump praised Adelson and his wife, Miriam, without any reference to the money that went to the Super PAC. source SHARE THIS ARTICLE Geoffrey Grider NTEB is run by end times author and editor-in-chief Geoffrey Grider. Geoffrey runs a successful web design company, and is a full-time minister of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to running NOW THE END BEGINS, he has a dynamic street preaching outreach and tract ministry team in Saint Augustine, FL. NTEB #TRENDING | 0 |
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For friends and family who loved him dearly, the death of Robert Harkin in early August was sudden and unexpected. But despite their sadness, they can take comfort in knowing that his legacy will live on. His sister Karen has taken over his Facebook page and honors her brother by continuing to share Islamophobic rhetoric in his memory.
Absolutely beautiful.
They rarely chose to talk about politics while he was alive, but Karen has been able to reconnect with her brother since his death by discovering his fear and hatred of Islam. It’s been a steep learning curve, but in time she’s been able to understand so much about what he cared about most, and she now feels closer to him than ever. The threat Syrian refugees pose to our freedom, the politicians who willingly turn a blind eye to the rising threat of Islamic terrorism—all of the bigoted beliefs that made Robert who he was.
Since picking up the mantle of his Facebook account, Karen has committed to maintaining the xenophobia that exemplified her brother’s life. When Time magazine ran a story about a Muslim woman who felt unsafe in America, Karen understood right away that Robert would want to share the article with the comment “Maybe she’d feel more safe if she moved to Saudia Arabia where she can practice Sharia Law with the rest of them.” Sometimes a sister just knows.
For those who were close to Robert, seeing a backwards, misinformed post decrying the spread of radical Islam is like being with him again. His page is a place where those who knew him can come share a memory and talk about the spread of Sharia law—exactly what Robert would have wanted. Whenever she posts about the inherent violence in the Muslim faith, Karen takes comfort in knowing that with every like and share, her brother remains a vibrant part of peoples’ lives.
“In the wake of Robert’s death, I think everyone was just looking for a place to see hateful rhetoric,” says Karen, who remembers her brother by spending two to three hours per day scouring the internet for signs of a larger Islamic conspiracy. “I miss him every day. But as long as I continue to invite his Facebook friends to like a group whose mission is to block the construction of mosques in America, it’s like he’s still here.”
Wow, if only everyone had such a devoted sister! Wherever he is, Robert must be resting easy knowing his sister is there to share his hateful, paranoid beliefs with the world. | 0 |
Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” host Brian Stelter debated BuzzFeed Ben Smith over BuzzFeed News’ decision to publish an unverified dossier about Donald Trump and Russia. Partial transcript as follows: STELTER: Were you trying to just get clicks? SMITH: I think Sean quoted me in saying it was unverified. There’s obviously an attempt right now to divide the press, to turn us on each other and turn reasonable differences about editorial decisions into screaming matches between us on this show. I think that’s a trap that the media has repeatedly fallen into over the last couple of years. I think it’s better not to right now. STELTER: There’s a tension between there’s reasons to have unity and the other hand as Jake Tapper said what you did is irresponsible and that hurts us all. SMITH: I wouldn’t say it was irresponsible to say we have a secret document and we’re not going to share it. I would disagree with that but I think it’s a reasonable thought. STELTER: It’s not possible to have unity in the press corps if Buzzfeed is acting more like Wikileaks just dumping material on the internet and telling the audience to decide if it’s true or not. SMITH: I think we reported a very important story — STELTER: there’s a difference between publishing and reporting. SMITH: We explained the origin of the document. we described the extent to which it was accurate and inaccurate and we shared information that was being — by the way that not just the head of the CIA, dozens if not hundreds of journalists, intelligence officials, elected leaders were seeing and acting on. I do think when you have a document in that kind of circulation among the country’s elites at the center of an incredibly heated political battle, the argument of keeping it away from the American people has to be really really strong. Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
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Paul Craig Roberts – The American electorate’s preference for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders has established two facts. One is that the majority of the American people do not believe the media presstitutes. The other is that only the “progressives” and “liberals” who inhabit the Atlantic Northeast and Pacific West coasts believe the presstitutes.
Trump’s election to the presidency has confirmed these holier-than-thou souls in their strongly held belief that America is a white trash racist country. They have told us this all day long today.
From these people and from the presstitutes we hear that white supremacy elected Trump. This is their propaganda, the intention of which is to discredit a Trump administration before it is inaugerated. Funny how white supremacy elected black Obama twice previously.
Truthout has lost it completely. John Knefel declares “The David Dukes of the World Prevail.”
Kelly Hayes declares “White Supremacy Elected Donald Trump.”
William Rivers Pitt declares “We have elected a fascist that Mussolini would have recognized on sight.”
Hillary carried only a handful of states, the states that comprise the One Percent’s stomping grounds. Yet Amy Goodman of Democracy Now sees meaning in political writer John Nichols claim that as Hillary carried New York and California, she won the popular vote and should be in the White House. I remember a few days ago George Soros saying that Trump would win the popular vote, but that the electoral vote would go to Hillary, thus ridding the oligarchs of Trump.
Earth Justice promises to hold Trump accountable. Trump who promises to end the threat of nuclear war with Russia and China, thereby doing more to save animal and human life than the entirety of the Democratic Party and environmental organizations, is going to be held accountable by an organization that allegedly is beyond politics and is dedicated to preserving animals from destruction.
The ACLU, of which I am a member, has also put “on notice” the president-elect who has said he will save us from nuclear war. Faced with this idiocy from the ACLU, I will not renew my membership.
Feminists tell us that we are “grieving, scared, and in shock,” and that “it is critical that we stand together and support each other.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami of the J Street Jewish Community tells us that it is “an incredibly sad and difficult day. For tens of millions of Americans who share a core belief in tolerance, decency and social justice, the election results are a severe shock. In this challenging moment, we turn to one another for comfort and community. During this election, J Street made unequivocally clear our conviction that Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States.”
Van Jones, a CNN commentator, said that Trump’s election is a nightmare, “a deeply painful moment,” a “whitelash” against minorities. While he bemoaned the pain inflicted upon poor little presstitute Van Jones, he didn’t mind insulting the American electorate and the President-elect of the United States. After all, Van Jones sees that as his racist prerogative.
And so, the holier-than-thou crowd prefers Hillary, despite her unambigious position that she would maximize conflict with Russia and China, provoke direct military conflict between the US and Russia by imposing a no-fly zone in Syria, attack Iran and other of Israel’s targets, further enrich her Wall Street handlers by privatizing Social Security, and prevent any dissent from the lowly people class of her high-handed ways. If William Rivers Pitt sees Trump as a Mussolini fascist, Trump is too mild for Pitt. He prefers Hillary, a Hitler to the third power.
The progressives have totally discredited themselves just as the presstitutes have done. Their need for a bogyman to nourish their hysteria indicates serious psychological disturbance. They actually prefer the risk of Armageddon to peace among nuclear powers. As their 501(c)3s live off corporate contributions, they prefer globalist corporate profits to jobs for ordinary Americans.
These are the people who think of themselves as our instructors and our betters.
If only Trump could exile the lot of them. They are anti-American to the core. SF Source Paul Craig Roberts | 0 |
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SWANSEA, Wales — The protests started even before the humiliation was done. Zlatan Ibrahimovic had yet to score his second goal, which would be Manchester United’s final one in a victory over Swansea City on Sunday, but already the dull hum of mutiny flickered around the losing team’s Liberty Stadium. The songs began in the corner of the East Stand, where Swansea’s most vocal supporters are corralled. Each chant was greeted with a ripple of applause from the rest of the stadium. “We want our club back,” the first chorus went. The second demanded that “greedy” members of the board leave the club. A third suggested an explicit use for “dollars,” an allusion to the recent American takeover of the team. Bob Bradley, Swansea’s American manager, heard what he called the “back and forth” but tried to shut it out of his mind and focus on the game unfolding in front of him. The fans kept voicing their dissent as Manchester United waltzed through, almost unchallenged, once more. Over the last decade or so, Swansea has been British soccer’s story, with an improbable rise that seemed to belong to another age. The tale proved so irresistible that it even made it onto celluloid. That movie, “Jack to a King,” depicts a club saved from financial ruin by lifelong fans and then lifted from oblivion and into the elite by a succession of young, imaginative managers preaching an adventurous style of play. It is, strictly speaking, a documentary, but it follows the narrative arc of a romance. For a while, it seemed that Swansea would have its happily ever after. In 2013, the club won its first major trophy in more than a century of existence, prevailing in the English tournament now known as the EFL Cup. The following season, the team, not far removed from the threat of extinction, earned a rare spot in one of the prestigious European competitions, the Europa League. That was only two years ago, but it seems like a lifetime. Devotion, all of a sudden, is in short supply in this corner of South Wales. Managers have come and gone with alarming, uncharacteristic frequency: Michael Laudrup, Garry Monk and Francesco Guidolin, who yielded to Bradley last month. Cornerstone players have departed. New owners — Steve Kaplan and Jason Levien, American sports executives — have arrived. The mounting discontent among supporters suggests that rapid change has not been universally welcomed. Results make it hard to disagree: Swansea has not won a game since the opening day of the season Bradley has picked up just 1 point from his first four matches in charge. The club is 19th in the Premier League, with the same point total as Sunderland. The threat of relegation to a lower division is very real. Who is to blame is not entirely clear. The accusations of greed might have been directed at Kaplan and Levien, seen as speculators coming to profit from others’ hard work. Or the song might have been meant for Huw Jenkins, the chairman, and a number of other directors who made millions from the club’s sale this year but retain their places on the board. Who will play the role of lightning rod, though, is not in question. Bradley has spent much of his career awaiting a chance in the Premier League. Now he has it, and he is getting the full experience: not just the full stadiums, the razzmatazz and the chance to pit his wits against the likes of José Mourinho and Arsène Wenger, but the politics, the impatience and the cutthroat Darwinism, too. Wisely, he chose to avoid the issue of the protests, insisting after the match that the only way to “win the support of the fans is to play better and take points. ” He added, “The players, the coaches, the professionals — we have to focus on the only part we can control. ” Bradley, though, will not be afforded the chance to be neutral. To some fans, he is a manifestation of the second transformation in Swansea’s recent history. After its gleeful metamorphosis into a Premier League fixture, there is now the grudging mutation from local institution into international concern. It is Bradley’s nationality that condemns him. Danny Gabbidon, a former Wales international, said on the radio after the game that the accent of Bradley, a New Jersey native, meant that he “could not take him seriously. ” One fan, as the game petered out, loudly suggested that Bradley was “out of his depth. ” By that point, a goal from the Dutch defender Mike van der Hoorn had given the final score a veneer of respectability for Swansea and muted the worst of the dissent for the final 20 minutes of the match. The lull will not last. Some fans are convinced that Swansea is managed by an American because it is owned by Americans. To them, Bradley is a reason for unrest, not a victim of it. There are holes in this particular plotline. Swansea’s dramatic elevation was characterized by stability. From 2007 to 2014, Swansea employed four managers: Roberto Martínez, Paulo Sousa, Brendan Rodgers and Laudrup. Each joined a club with a clear vision of not only where it was going but also how it wanted to get there. Since Laudrup’s acrimonious exit, Swansea has had four managers in less than three years. The smoothness, that mentality in which the club rolled on regardless of the man on the sideline, has long since disappeared. In December, Monk, a former player, was replaced by Alan Curtis, a trusted coach and local hero, on a temporary basis because the board did not have a successor in mind. Guidolin, an experienced Italian, eventually took the post — after not working for two years. He was hardly an obvious extension of Swansea’s reputation for stylish play. The players like Bradley and enjoy his training sessions, and the club’s staff members admire his insatiable work ethic, but the concerns about Guidolin apply to him, too. Whatever else he is, and whatever his passport says, Bradley is not cast from the same mold as Martínez and Rodgers. That does not mean he will be a failure, of course, and it does not mean he should be run out of town. But it does speak of a club that has, somehow, lost its sense of self. That development, most likely, lies at the root of the discontent among Swansea’s supporters. Swansea won admiration during its romantic period because of what it stood for: the idea that fans could run a club, and run it well the belief that style could bring success. Now, that story has ended, but nothing has emerged in its place. Swansea was different now it looks like any other Premier League club, owned from afar, its only ambition to survive, thinking from one game to the next. Wins would lift the pressure from Bradley, but they may not heal the deeper rift. What the club that wrote a tale worthy of a film needs, more than anything, is another script. | 1 |
i actually think your on to something i looked at the rim of the crater and found what looks like a structure/base
28° 6’14.37″N 6°38’27.81″V | 0 |
posted by Eddie History has been suppressed in the biggest, long-term cover-up ever and the Vatican knows all the secrets. The Vatican is constantly monitoring things with the Lucifer device and they are secretly preparing for the arrival of alien savior. They seem to be intentionally creating something that is going to position the Roman Catholic Church to be at the forefront of an official disclosure multi-value get easy above the ufology ways that they can’t even imagine. History has been literally rewritten and the archaeological establishment as well as the as well as the educational establishment would like us to believe that thousands of years ago mankind was in the anthology and that we were in the infancy of our species and we were banging stones together and barely able to build a mud hut let alone the amazing megalithic structures that are present all over the earth standing in testimony testifying in themselves of a superior race society. Those who control the past control the future and no organization on earth has a tighter grip on the official history than the Roman Catholic Church. Connect the dots and present evidence of a long plot to cover up the history of the pre-flood world and to prepare humanity for the arrival of our space brothers bringing a different gospel. Timothy Alberino, director and host of the new documentary ‘True Legends: The UnHoly See’, discusses evidence that the Vatican is behind a vast cover-up of pre-Flood history.
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(Before It's News)
CCTV at Woodbank Valley Urban Farm, Birmingham.
The capacity of urban farms to tackle major issues such as poverty and reducing food miles should not be underestimated, and with more ambitious projects starting up every day, it might not be long until you see one appearing in your neighbourhood.
By Michael Hardman
Lecturer in Geography, University of Salford
The Conversation
Oct 26, 2016
Excerpt:
Despite these barriers, our 2016 study into the state of urban farming showed that huge positives can come out of these spaces. For example, urban farms often act as a social incubator, bringing together communities and connecting cultures. Many also impact significantly on health and well-being, allowing city-dwellers to access fresh food and sometimes even supplement diets.
We found that those connected to The Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens were strongest. They gained value from the networking with other such sites across the UK.
A few in this extensive network have existed for over 30 years, and are still going due to the excellent support from both locals and the wider network. Ultimately, the idea of urban farming is not to replace traditional rural farms, but rather to complement and add value.
To push forward with urban farming, there’s a need to build on what works – in particular, to learn from urban farms in the US, which are expanding and are on a different scale entirely to anywhere else.
Read the complete article here. | 0 |
Over the last eight years, as cameras have become smaller and smaller — tiny enough to fit on a pair of glasses or inside a swallowable pill — John Reuter has been working to stave off extinction of one of the largest cameras ever made, so big and irredeemably analog that it feels, he says, “as if we’re pulling oil paintings out of the back of it. ” The camera, the Polaroid, was born as a kind of industrial stunt. Five of the wooden behemoths, weighing more than 200 pounds each and sitting atop a quartet of gurney wheels, were made in the late 1970s at the request of Edwin H. Land, the company’s founder, to demonstrate the quality of his film. But the cameras found their true home in the art world, taken up by painters like Chuck Close and Robert Rauschenberg and photographers like William Wegman, David Levinthal and Mary Ellen Mark to make instant images that had the size and presence of sculpture. In 2008, Polaroid, in bankruptcy, stopped producing instant film. Mr. Reuter, who had worked at the company for decades, swooped in with the help of an investor, buying one of the original cameras and hundreds of cases of the remaining film. The dream was to make enough money to be able to recreate the manufacturing process for the film and its unwieldy chemicals and to make more of the big cameras. But in an interview last week, Mr. Reuter said he had finally decided to bow to the inevitable: There will never be a large enough demand for the cameras and he can no longer maintain his quixotic effort to keep them alive. The company he runs, the 20x24 Studio, based in central Massachusetts, plans to close by the end of next year, by which time he hopes that much of the remaining film stock will be used up. “I’ve been doing this for 40 years now, and I understand the importance of the history maybe better than anyone else,” said Mr. Reuter, who is also a photographer and filmmaker. “But there is a time when things have to come to an end. These are not materials that were designed to last indefinitely, and the investment to keep making them would be huge, multimillions. ” News of the wind down has been spreading for several months through the art world, where it has been met more often with disbelief than disappointment. “I haven’t given up,” said Mr. Close, one of the first artists to begin using the camera in the late 1970s to make photographs as both the basis for painted portraits and as works themselves. “Here’s yet another medium that will be lost to history, and it just shouldn’t be allowed to happen. If it does, I don’t know what I’m going to do, to tell you the truth. It’s so integrated into everything I do. I can always imagine what making a painting from one of those pictures will look like. ” Like other artists he knows who have used the camera, he said, its attraction is not just in its size and endearingly oddball personality, like a creature from an obsessive hobbyist’s garage. The immediacy of making the picture, Mr. Close said, changes the relationship between the subject and the artist, who together witness the image come into being after the photograph is pulled from the camera and the chemicals perform their function. “You both work together to get something that you want out of it. Your subject knows what you’re trying to do. ” (He described a 2012 session with President Obama in a hotel room so tiny that the camera and Mr. Close’s wheelchair — a collapse more than two decades ago left him partially paralyzed — crowded out the Secret Service.) The filmmaker Errol Morris, who is making a documentary about the photographer Elsa Dorfman — besides Mr. Reuter, perhaps the camera’s most devoted partisan — said that the camera had become a character in its own right in his film. “It’s an objet d’art, with these wheels like bicycle wheels, this huge box,” he said. “When Elsa pulls the film down from the camera and cuts across it and then the photo is brought over to a table and the cover is peeled back and this image slowly appears, there’s something quite magical about it. ” Mr. Reuter said maintaining that magic has exhausted him and the two people who work with him, Nafis Azad and Ted McLelland. Together, they help operate the cameras, store the photographic paper and assemble the chemical pods, a highly complicated process accomplished with a machine. With no real publicity operation, the initial financial challenges of the Great Recession and prices he probably set too high, Mr. Reuter said, “the demand for the cameras really just never materialized at the levels that it did during the Polaroid years I think a lot of people had no idea the process was still in existence. ” (The camera costs $1, 750 a day to rent and each exposure costs $125, down from $200 at the company’s beginning.) Though Mr. Close and a handful of other artists, like Peter Tunney and Joyce Tenneson, still use the camera, the death of Ms. Mark last year meant that a consistent financial mainstay — and a widely respected ambassador for the camera — was gone. “My goal is for people to use the rest of the material we have before all of it is really past its prime,” Mr. Reuter said. “It would be a shame to end that way. ” As for the cameras themselves, he said with resignation, “I hope that they go to some place like the Smithsonian or the George Eastman collection in Rochester. ” Mr. Morris, known for his own love of rapidly rarefying film stocks like 35 millimeter and Super 8, said he continued to believe that the cameras would not end up as museum pieces. “Maybe there won’t be many — and maybe there will be a time when the process goes out of existence for a while — but I think there will be people who won’t let it go away forever. ” | 1 |
Opponents of French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen have launched an “Obama17” campaign to draft the former U. S. President to run against her. [Frustrated with the choice of candidates running against the Eurosceptic, candidate, organisers are hoping to draft President Obama as a last resort. One campaign organiser, who chose only to give the name ‘Antoine’ told CNN: “It’s totally crazy, but the cool thing is that once you get past that, you start thinking that maybe it’s possible. Who cares that he’s not French? He’s Barack Obama. ” The campaign has so far put up 500 posters around Paris and has launched a website with the slogan “Oui on peut!” [Yes we can]. They are aiming to get one million people to sign a petition urging the former U. S. President to run, although the organisers admit the prospects are low. “We want to show that people are fed up with the politicians here. People are tired about it and they like this joke. It gives people a little fun amid all these scandals,” Antoine said. France goes to the polls in late April in the first round of the presidential election. If no candidate wins 50 per cent of the vote, the top two go through to a two weeks later. Marine Le Pen, leader of the populist immigration Front National is favourite to win the first round, although she is unlikely to win outright. Antoine says he is not a fan of the frontrunner: “We are so fed up with what Marine Le Pen is doing, and with the fact that we weren’t able to find a candidate to vote for, only one to vote against,” he said. “We started talking about that and it came up that Obama is free — so why not hire him?” Although he admits the campaign started as a joke, he said supporters have been getting in touch with serious suggestions as to how they could get around basic problems, such as the fact President Obama is not French. “We’ve had some funny emails from lawyers telling us how it could be possible. He would have to be naturalized by the president of the French Assembly. ” Ms Le Pen hailed the victory of Donald Trump last November as a “victory of the people against the elites” and said a “global revolution” was underway against “unfettered globalisation”. | 1 |
We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] Young Fellas Made Of Nothing These Days, Finds Scientific Study November 10, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS , HEALTH Share 0 Add Comment
DOCTORS studying the make-up of young fellas have found that they are made of nothing these days, in contrast to the men of old.
The scientific study, carried out by a team of genetic experts at Trinity College Dublin, found that the majority of Irish males aged between 16-30 have grown a lot weaker physically and less resilient to cold temperatures over the past 60 years. Of 100 Irish males tested in physical work environments, 67% percent moaned about being tired and fatigued after just two minutes.
“We put the study group to work on a local farm picking spuds, weeding gardens and doing general old time shit,” lead researcher Professor Conor Tracey explains, “We even made them travel to work in their bare feet. The results we got back were absolutely appalling to tell you the truth. Only a small minority of the men got on with their chores without complaining”.
In fact, further testing found that 89% of those studied were ‘perishers’, a trait increasing in modern day males.
“Nearly every one of them began whinging about the cold during the picking stones in the frost task,” Dr. Tracey added, “They began complaining that their ikkle fingies were sore, and that they couldn’t feel their hands or feet from the cold. Poor pets. Several lads even tried to pretend they were sick in a bid to get out of the job, and one 18-year-old subject began crying for his mammy like a big baby, so he did”.
The study concluded that 92% of Irish men were found to be made of nothing these days, compared to the young fellas of years ago who used to walk to school in their bare feet, before then going to work in the mines for 18 hours a day. | 0 |
By Nathaniel Mauka
Congress overwhelmingly voted for the Patriot Act nearly 16 years ago, and our civil liberties have never been the same since. As if this singular bill, passed by George W. Bush, wasn’t invasive enough, allowing big banks to demand our internet data, and more — the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act ( CISA ) makes cyber-spying by the shadow government and the financial entities controlling it, a forgone conclusion.
As with most shadow government legislation, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is packed with hidden surveillance allowances. CISA was quietly passed to allow government to demand that private companies hand over personal information to them at will. It also allows companies to mine data, under the auspices of government-created urgency.
The mere fact that this act passed in late 2015 is monumental, since it has been before Congress in different forms for over a decade . The election seems to have offered the perfect cover, as Americans and activists were too busy arguing over Trump vs. Hillary.
Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government relations at the Electronic Transactions Association believes the value of sharing our personal data as a means to be alerted of ‘cyber threats’ outweighs any hazard to our civil liberties. Talbott states ,
“The value is that everyone can be alerted to cyber threats and take precautionary countermeasures before they materialize and spread,” he said. “Before CISA, corrective measures could be taken only after the cyber threat had done its damage. CISA allows each company to serve as an early warning system to the entire economy.”
Who exactly would be determining if someone is a ‘threat’ is the meat of the sandwich, though. CISA is ripe for abuse, just as the Patriot Act has been.
The Patriot Act has made it legal for law enforcement to spy on people, without probable cause – to enter their homes, or even to strip search them before they’ve been to court, had the opportunity to argue a case, or given ‘authorities’ a motive for this type of interrogation.
The stated purpose of the Patriot Act was to deter terrorist acts in the United States, but what do you do when the terrorists have already taken over your country? CISA simply expands the reach of a shadow government which has already been proven to reach beyond the boundaries of constitutional law.
More importantly, who specifically is CISA targeting? After multiple hackers have infiltrated computer systems at the White House , the State Department , the Pentagon , and the Office of Personnel Management, along with the Democratic National Committee , and numerous multinational banks run by the cabal, is the shadow government simply trying to create a stop-gap before their most elusive, yet damning information is made public?
CISA certainly will expand the reach of government surveillance on citizens as it has been conducted by the the National Security Agency (NSA) before former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed it.
“I think this bill was meant to be a surveillance bill from the start,” said Justin Harvey, CSO of Fidelis Cybersecurity, adding that he is dubious that the stated intent of the bill – to use collective intelligence to warn of potential cyber attacks and possibly stop them before they occur – will result.
Under the guise of ‘sharing cyber threats’ CISA allows companies to wholesale-collect information that may not even be a threat – and then pass it along for government bodies to determine if it is, indeed a threat. If this sounds like circular logic – it is just the beginning of the odd verbiage within the bill. It’s justifications for entering every possible orifice for data-gathering are more confounded than an octopus in a straight jacket.
The government can already enter your personal property including your home, your body , your cell, and your computer , but now they will have a legal in-roads to declare you a cyber-threat, simply for sending an email . This begs the question – who is the real cyber-bully? CISA seems to be nothing more than a prevarication, covering the acts of an elite few who don’t want their secrets exposed.
Nathaniel Mauka is a researcher of the dark side of government and exopolitics, and a staff writer for Waking Times .
Source: Waking Times
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David Brock went from a Right Wing CS to a Left Wing money laundering CS. That's quite odd, but then David is quite odd. | 0 |
A bishop of the Protestant Church of Norway has launched a proposal urging Christians to hire illegal migrants, a move that the minister of immigration called “irresponsible. ”[Tor Berger Jørgensen, formerly the bishop of in northern Norway, sent out a series of letters last week to various Christian organizations requesting that they provide employment for those unable to work legally in Norway. Although employing illegal immigrants is against the law, the bishop said that his campaign was about giving people “in a hopeless situation” the chance at a livelihood. Jørgensen, who is also a agitator for gay rights, said he has already received “several positive responses” from people who would like to help. “I am quite optimistic that we can achieve something among church organizations and with church connections,” he said. Jørgensen was inspired by learning that an evangelical church in Stavanger, Norway, had employed an Eritrean woman named Tita who had been living in the country illegally for 8 years, a move he called “brave” and “important. ” The bishop has reportedly requested a meeting with Immigration Minister Sylvi Listhaug (FRP) who has called the bishop’s proposal “irresponsible. ” “What he is in fact doing is creating false hopes for people who have to return to their homeland,” she said. “Individuals who have received a final rejection of their asylum application are obliged to return home. ” For his part, Jørgensen posted on Facebook that what the Minister calls illegal is really just “ . ” “Sylvi Listhaug calls us irresponsible,” the bishop responded in a recent “because we encourage people to do something illegal. But Listhaug doesn’t know what degrading and dehumanizing experiences many ‘undocumented’ have had over the years. ” According to current legislation, employers who hire illegal foreign workers are subject to fines or imprisonment. Christian Wedler, a local leader for the Progress Party (FRP) in Stavanger, said that he understands the desire to help people who find themselves in a difficult situation, yet people must also consider “what is right for the country and the big picture. ” “If an asylum application has no consequences, then the system will collapse altogether and we are going to experience arrangements that ensure that the whole asylum system is in jeopardy,” he said. Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter | 1 |
Re: what are your plans for defeating the demiurge Follow the words of Jesus and Buddah. Not the whole bible though. Quoting: Anonymous Coward 31310212 Alot of whats in the bible has been written by the demiurge so you have to be careful. Quoting: Anonymous Coward 31310212 If it's in this existence, I don't trust it. And that certainly goes for ALL religions and the new age bullshit too. I don't think it's gonna be a case of saying some little bullshit quote and being able to go free. As for the question, that's what I'm still struggling with. I'd love to take a baseball bat to it and whatever else has trapped us here but I somehow don't think that's gonna work. All I know is I'm not gonna fall for this shit ever again and I'm not coming back to this shithole of a world either. Page 1 | 0 |
The meeting between Donald J. Trump and the nation’s tech elite was hyped as something out of “The Apprentice”: The new boss tells his minions to shape up. It turned out to be a charm offensive, a kind of “Dancing With the Silicon Valley Stars. ” “This is a truly amazing group of people,” the said on Wednesday in a conference room at Trump Tower in Manhattan. The gathering included Jeff Bezos of Amazon Elon Musk of Tesla Timothy D. Cook of Apple Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Alphabet, Google’s parent company and Satya Nadella of Microsoft, among others. “I’m here to help you folks do well,” Mr. Trump said. He kept going in that vein. “There’s nobody like you in the world,” he enthused. “In the world! There’s nobody like the people in this room. ” Anything that the government “can do to help this go along,” he made clear, “we’re going to be there for you. ” And that was just in the first few minutes. The candidate who warned during the presidential campaign that Amazon was going to have antitrust problems, that Apple needed to build its iPhones in the United States instead of China, was nowhere to be seen. Even after the press was ushered out, the meeting continued its genial way. Among the topics discussed, according to several corporate executives and a transition official briefed on the meeting, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, were vocational education and the need for more of it, the promise and peril of trade with China and immigration (Mr. Trump wants “smart and talented people here”). The also asked the executives to see if they could not apply data analysis technology to detect and help get rid of government waste. There are plans for quarterly meetings of a smaller group of tech executives, to be organized by Mr. Trump’s and adviser, Jared Kushner, said one of the executives briefed on the meeting. They will focus mainly on immigration and education issues. The meeting lasted more than 90 minutes, longer than expected. Mr. Trump was seated next to Peter Thiel, the tech investor who is a member of the ’s transition team. In another sign of Mr. Trump mixing family, business and government hats, three of his adult children — Donald Jr. Ivanka and Eric — also attended. “I won’t tell you the hundreds of calls we’ve had asking to come to this meeting,” Mr. Trump told his guests. Everyone laughed. To get to the conference room, the tech leaders entered the golden elevators of Trump Tower the same way anyone would — by punching a button. This gave the news media, cordoned off a few feet away, time to shout questions. None of the executives took the bait. Neither did they talk on the way out, although by that time the building was being closed for Trump Tower’s holiday party. Safra Catz, the of Oracle who attended the meeting, gave a thumbs up. Mr. Bezos later issued a statement that said he found the meeting “very productive. ” “I shared the view that the administration should make innovation one of its key pillars, which would create a huge number of jobs across the whole country, in all sectors, not just tech — agriculture, infrastructure, manufacturing — everywhere,” he said. The technology world had been in turmoil as the meeting drew near. Some argued the chief executives should boycott the event to show their disdain for Mr. Trump’s values. Others maintained they should go and forthrightly make their values clear. And still others thought they should attend and make their accommodations with the new reality. “There is a wide spectrum of feeling in the Valley,” said Aaron Levie, the chief executive of the cloud storage company Box. Complicating the debate was the fact that the most fervently elements in Silicon Valley seem to be the and venture capitalists, few of which were invited to the meeting. (Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir Technologies, was the only head of a privately held tech company at the meeting.) Some tech companies were also notable for their absence. Twitter, the ’s medium of choice for communication, was not invited. Twitter declined to comment on why it was not included. A campaign official complained last month in a Medium post that Twitter had killed a #CrookedHillary emoji. On Wednesday, Sean Spicer, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said that Twitter had been left out of the meeting because of space considerations in a gathering that many other technology executives were “dying to get into. ” In the days and hours before the meeting, various factions made their positions clear. A group of engineers and other tech workers issued a statement asserting that they would refuse to participate in the creation of databases that could be used by the government to target people based on their race, religion or national origin. The proclamation immediately drew more than 500 signatories, including employees at Google, Apple and Microsoft. During the campaign, Mr. Trump did not rule out the idea of a database of Muslims. Another group of entrepreneurs assembled virtually this week with the same goal of preventing any erosion of civil liberties. They also accepted “a responsibility to partner with communities where the effects of rapidly changing technologies have hurt our fellow Americans. ” Among those signing were Aileen Lee, a venture capitalist Dave McClure, of the 500 incubator and Lenny Mendonca, an angel investor. Mr. Levie, of Box, was a Hillary Clinton supporter but believes in engagement with the new administration. “We have to face reality that this is the next four years, and the best way to make sure our values are upheld is actually push on them,” he said. Other tech chief executives also took the same route. Hours before Mr. Trump’s meeting with tech leaders, the announced that Mr. Musk and Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, would be among those joining his Strategic and Policy Forum, which is already stacked with businesspeople from finance and other industries. Ginni Rometty, the chief executive of IBM, had previously joined the forum. More than values and policy are at stake in the relationship between the administration and the Valley. Money is, too. In the wake of Mr. Trump’s victory, Forrester Research is cutting back its growth estimate for the United States tech market in 2017 to 4. 3 percent from 5. 1 percent. One reason is simple caution, as large multinational manufacturers navigate a new and unpredictable administration. Another reason: less tech spending by the government. “There are so many cabinet secretaries who are explicitly hostile to the mission of their agencies,” said Andrew Bartels, a Forrester principal analyst. As for 2018, there are so many ways things could go that a forecast is impossible. “It’s up for grabs,” the analyst said. So, too, is the relationship of Mr. Trump and the tech industry. For the moment, though, Silicon Valley seems to have dodged a bullet. | 1 |
Karlie Kloss apologized Wednesday after her appearance in a Vogue photoshoot was condemned on social media as critics called the fashion model’s spread an example of “yellowface” and cultural appropriation. [“These images appropriate a culture that is not my own and I am truly sorry for participating in a shoot that was not culturally sensitive,” Kloss said in a statement she posted to social media. “My goal is, and always will be, to empower and inspire women. I will ensure my future shoots and projects reflect that mission. ” pic. twitter. — Karlie Kloss (@karliekloss) February 15, 2017, Floss was featured in the magazine’s March “diversity” issue. She was dressed as a Japanese geisha, wearing black wig posed with Asian artwork in the backdrop. Kloss also posed alongside a sumo wrestler. Some social media users ripped Vogue for casting a white model for a Japanese photoshoot, while others said they didn’t find it offensive. Karlie Kloss is under fire for culture appropriation after the release of her March 2017 Vogue US photoshoot. Thoughts? pic. twitter. — Pop Crave (@PopCrave) February 15, 2017, There is a whole country called Japan with Japanese women and they picked a white girl. Wow. https: . — busan babe (@melaninbarbie) February 14, 2017, Looks like that Condé Nast diversity panel really did some good 🙃 (ed note: karlie kloss as a geisha in vogue diversity issue) pic. twitter. — lindsay peoples (@lrpeoples) February 14, 2017, SHE DID YELLOW FACE IN THE DIVERSITY ISSUE 🙃🙃🙃 https: . — Ainee Athar (@AineeWrites) February 14, 2017, In 2017, Karlie Kloss is featured in US Vogue in yellow face. Absolute madness but I can’t say I’m shocked. — Christiana A Mbakwe (@Christiana1987) February 14, 2017, Emma Stone, Scarlett Johansson, and Tilda Swinton turn to Karlie Kloss. ”Your turn, girl.” Karlie on phone: ”Hello, Vogue? Make me Asian.” pic. twitter. — Ira Madison III (@ira) February 14, 2017, @karliekloss I am Japanese and actually love these images. I didn’t feel any uncomfortableness with them. Please don’t be sorry. — めで鯛 (@skrokr) February 15, 2017, @skrokr @karliekloss I guarantee you 99. 99% of the people pretending to be offended here are American. — Andri (@TechSwiftie) February 15, 2017, The Vogue drama is just the latest cultural appropriation offense for Kloss. The apologized after she wore Native headdress at the 2012 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. I am deeply sorry if what I wore during the VS Show offended anyone. I support VS’s decision to remove the outfit from the broadcast. — Karlie Kloss (@karliekloss) November 11, 2012, Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson | 1 |
Good morning. Here’s what you need to know: • An intense manhunt is on across Europe for a young Tunisian man whose identity card was in the truck that rammed into a Christmas market in Berlin on Monday, Germany’s worst terrorist attack in decades. The authorities said they had been watching him on suspicion of plotting an attack and almost deported him in June. The attack has rendered Chancellor Angela Merkel, the prime defender of the European Union and one of the bloc’s last bulwarks against populism, even more vulnerable as national elections approach in 2017. _____ • The choking smog that has blanketed China’s northeast should ease today. A photograph of hundreds of children in Henan Province, taking a test outdoors in dense, filthy air became a flash point for public anger. _____ • A news service with ties to the Syrian government said that evacuations from the last enclaves of Aleppo could be finished within hours. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, literally embraced one of the evacuated families: that of Bana 7, who became famous for Twitter messages describing life in a war zone. _____ • South Korea’s Constitutional Court begins hearings on the impeachment of President Park . The panel of nine judges has up to 180 days to decide whether to uphold or reject the National Assembly’s motion. _____ • Intense jockeying for ambassadorships in the coming administration of Donald J. Trump has begun among donors, loyalists and others. We look at how Mr. Trump’s choice for secretary of state, the Exxon chief Rex W. Tillerson, a critic, cultivated a relationship with Vladimir Putin. _____ • “The Great Wall,” a pioneering joint production between Hollywood and China has made a strong $82 million since its Chinese opening on Friday. The epic opens in North America in February, and producers are gambling that Western audiences will pay for a movie that is very much Chinese, even if it does have a bankable American star, Matt Damon. • Cyrus Mistry, the ousted chairman of Tata Sons, deepened his fight with the Indian giant, filing a request to block Ratan Tata, the son of the company’s founder, from attending board meetings. Mr. Mistry, above right, with Mr. Tata in 2012. • The U. S. Trade Representative restored Alibaba to its annual “notorious markets” blacklist, reserved for websites and markets that proliferate in fake goods. • Hyundai Motor America removed its top executive in a surprise move that comes as the South Korean automaker struggles to boost U. S. sales. • Australia’s housing market is showing signs of cooling. • In a blow to Didi Chuxing, China’s leader, Beijing and Shanghai ruled that only local residents could be hired as drivers. • A Singaporean banker faces sentencing today on four counts of obstructing justice in a case related to the looting of the Malaysian state investment fund 1MDB. • U. S. stocks were mostly lower. Here’s a snapshot of global markets. • A chain of explosions at Mexico’s largest fireworks market — certified last month “the safest in all of Latin America” — killed at least 27 people and injured scores. [The New York Times] • Taiwan said the tiny West African island nation of Sao Tome and Principe had made “astronomical” aid requests before ending diplomatic recognition — one report put the demand at $100 million. Taiwan now has just 21 diplomatic partners. [Bloomberg] • India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, visits the city of Varanasi, his political base, for the first time since his ban on bank notes disrupted the economy. [NDTV] • James Taylor, the American canceled a concert in Manila to protest the Philippines’ brutal antidrug campaign. [The New York Times] • And a reporter went out with Philippine police officers to see, from their perspective, the effects of the nation’s crackdown on drug users. [The New York Times] • In Canberra, a van packed with gas canisters rammed into the office of a Christian political action group and exploded overnight. Only the driver was reported injured. [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] • China and Europe are moving away from using paraquat, a chemical weedkiller that has been linked to Parkinson’s disease. But both still allow its production for export, and use in the United States is growing. [The New York Times] • An extreme winter in Mongolia is decimating livestock and sending temperatures to minus 56 degrees Celsius (minus 70 Fahrenheit). Aid groups warn of a possible humanitarian crisis. [Associated Press] • The lives they lived: We remember Muhammad Ali, David Bowie, Natalie Cole, Prince and more of those we lost in the past year. • More than a billion people regularly use WhatsApp to send text messages and make phone calls for free over the internet. Founded by a Ukrainian who immigrated to the U. S. as a teenager, the app has helped transform the experience of migrant life around the world. • A wig and puckered lips are not all it takes for Alec Baldwin, an outspoken liberal, to get into character to impersonate Mr. Trump in his running skit on “Saturday Night Live. ” The momentous changes in Cuba — a warming relationship with the U. S. and the recent death of Fidel Castro — have been accompanied by a surge in tourism. But visitors should be warned. Their vocabulary might not seamlessly translate to the streets of Havana. Want to know “What’s up?” The usual “Qué tal?” is “qué bola?” People head home to “el gao” rather than “la casa,” and a carless Cuban rides el chivo, not la bicicleta. Language is fluid, and borders tightly controlled since 1961 blocked some linguistic seepage from the rest of the Hispanosphere. Such distinctions, shaped by geography and history, play out worldwide. There’s the French of Canada, which to the citoyens of France can sound archaic. The Portuguese of Portugal versus that of its colonial heirs, including Brazil, Angola and Mozambique. English, carried by colonialism and capitalism, is all over the place. There are lesser known cases, too. Hungarian isn’t limited to Hungary. The Szeklers, in Romania, and the Paloc, in Slovakia, speak distinct versions. And in some places, languages marry when they meet. In Brazil, a tongue derived from German immigrants, Riograndenser Hunsrückish, blends Portuguese words with Teutonic suffixes and the lilt of Italian. Sandra E. Garcia and Palko Karasz contributed reporting. _____ Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings. What would you like to see here? Contact us at asiabriefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
Man decides first 10 minutes of new Adam Curtis film should be enough to bluff it 27-10-16 A MAN who saw the first 10 minutes of Adam Curtis’s new documentary is to pretend he watched the whole thing. Tom Logan thought he would enjoy Hypernormalisation after hearing positive reviews from people but he quickly found the subject matter a little bit heavy and quite confusing. Logan said: “If anyone in the pub mentions it I’ll just say the stuff about Trump at the beginning was really fascinating and that I loved all the weird stock footage of stuff and the lovely, warm voice over. “ I’m sure if I’d have stuck with it I’d have definitely understood it, but it’s also nearly three hours long and Vin Diesel isn’t in it. “ Whose got that much time on their hands to watch a documentary? Especially as I still haven’t yet gotten round to watching all six series of American Horror Story .”
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WASHINGTON — The fight to retake Raqqa, the Syrian city that serves as the capital of the Islamic State, must begin soon — within weeks — to disrupt planning believed to be underway there to stage terrorist attacks on the West, senior Defense Department and military officials said on Wednesday. Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the top American military commander in Iraq, declined to name a specific threat against Western targets emanating from Raqqa, but described a “sense of urgency. ” He said it was imperative that operations to isolate the city begin soon to prevent attacks on the West that could be launched or planned from the militants’ capital. In announcing that the fight to retake Raqqa is imminent, American officials are sweeping aside objections from Turkey and moving forward with plans to rely on a ground fighting force that includes Kurdish militia fighters in Syria. The Turkish government, which has become a complicated ally in the fight against the Islamic State, fears that aspirations for autonomy may spread among its own Kurdish population. General Townsend stressed that Kurdish militia fighters would be a part of the ground force used to isolate Raqqa. “We’re going to go with who can go, who’s willing to go soon,” General Townsend told reporters at the Pentagon during a video news briefing from Baghdad. “And then, once we get the initial isolation in position, we’ll look at how we prosecute the operation further. ” The politics of the matter have bedeviled American military planners trying to thread a needle through enmity between the Turks and the Kurds. Turkey regards the Syrian Kurdish fighters, known collectively as the Y. P. G. as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the Kurdish rebel group that has sought autonomy from Turkey since the 1980s. Ankara has demanded that the Y. P. G. not take part in the fight to retake Raqqa. But American military officials say the Y. P. G. personnel are the best fighters they have. “The facts are these,” General Townsend said. “The only force that is capable on any timeline is the Syrian Democratic Forces, of which the Y. P. G. are a significant portion. ” While the Kurdish militia will make up the bulk of the operation, General Townsend said many of the more than 300 American Special Operations forces now in Syria would help recruit, train and equip local forces in and around Raqqa who are predominantly Syrian Arabs. The impending operation is further complicated, some independent experts say, because neither the Turks nor the Syrian Kurds view the recapture of Raqqa as one of their top priorities — unlike Washington. “The Syrian Kurdish Y. P. G. do not truly desire to shed blood to capture a Arab city far from their vision of their autonomous borders, while Turkey cares about the operation only insofar as the Syrian Kurdish Y. P. G. is not allowed to participate in it,” said Christopher Kozak, a Syria researcher at the Institute for the Study of War. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said in Brussels on Wednesday that the offensive to oust the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, from Raqqa would begin within weeks. “This is, as always, a matter when you’re positioning forces and so forth, we have a plan to do that and a schedule to do that,” Mr. Carter told reporters. “We’re going to execute to that plan. ” Mr. Carter met with the Turkish defense minister, Fikri Isik, and the French defense minister, Le Drian, on Wednesday in Brussels, where he emphasized the “need for the coalition to maintain pressure on ISIL on multiple fronts,” according to a Pentagon news release. “All sides agreed to maintain frequent communication on the full range of security interests, and to continue their close coordination and continued transparency in the coalition effort to deal ISIL a lasting defeat,” the statement said. An American military official said the Raqqa operation would take place in roughly three phases. Phase one, he said, is what the coalition fighting the Islamic State has been doing for months: preparatory airstrikes in and around Raqqa to knock out and fighting positions. Phase two, to begin in the coming weeks, will be to isolate Raqqa with the available forces — mostly Syrian Kurds, with Syrian Arabs, too. Phase three will be the fight for Raqqa itself, which American officials say they hope will be conducted mostly by Syrian Arabs, given that the city is majority Sunni Arab. General Townsend compared Islamic State plotting in Raqqa to planning by the group in Manbij, which was retaken from the Islamic State in August. Manbij was the last stop on the route out of Syria for Islamic State militants headed to Europe. But the actual plotting regularly began in Raqqa. Militants moved from there to Manbij before slipping over the border into Turkey and then onward to Europe. Plotting underway in Raqqa now, General Townsend said, “is not unlike what emanated from Manbij” before that city was retaken. “Coming out of Manbij, we found links to individuals and plot streams to France, the United States, other European countries,” he said. “We know that this is going on in Raqqa as well,” General Townsend said. “And so I think that’s why it’s necessary to get down there to Raqqa. ” The Raqqa fight will take place even as the battle for Mosul, next door in Iraq, is continuing, American military planners say. Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, said last week that it was “extraordinarily important” to keep simultaneous pressure on Mosul and Raqqa, if not with ground forces, as with Mosul, at least with a steady pounding of airstrikes. General Votel acknowledged the challenges of dealing with two pivotal allies in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria who essentially loathe each other — the Turks and the Syrian Kurds. One of his main goals now, he said, is to maintain momentum and “to keep everyone moving in the right direction. ” | 1 |
Military Operation to Retake Mosul From Daesh ( 91 ) 0 13 0 0 Hundreds of Yazidi hostages are being held captive by Daesh in Mosul, and the Yazidis hope the impending operation there will liberate them, Yezidi representative of the Regional Government of Iraqi Kurdistan Xeyri Bozan told Sputnik Turkiye. © AFP 2016/ Safin Hamed 'Their Persecution Never Stops': The Forgotten Yazidis Still Held by Daesh Thousands of Yazidi hostages are still in the hands of Daesh, more than two years after the terror group attacked the predominantly Yadizi town of Sinjar , in north-west Iraq.
In August 2014 Daesh overran the town and the surrounding areas, massacred 5,000 Yazidi men and took thousands of people hostage.
More than 40,000 Yazidis were forced to flee to the Sinjar mountains, where they were surrounded by Daesh forces and dependent on helicopter drops of food and water.
Xeyri Bozan, Yezidi representative of the Office of Religious Affairs of the Regional Government of Iraqi Kurdistan , told Sputnik Turkiye that dozens of Yazidis from Sinjar were rescued during recent anti-terror operations in Iraq and Syria.
"We were able to carry out a special operation to free 70 Yazidis held captive by Daesh. The majority of them are women and children," Bozan said. "The militants were holding them in Mosul, Hawija and Tall Afar in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria. The Yazidis who were saved were residents of Sinjar. We brought them home to their relatives and close ones. Some of them, in accordance with their wishes, were taken to refugee camps," Bozan said.
On the second anniversary of the Sinjar attack on August 3, the UN reported that more than 3,200 women and children are still held by the terror group and being subjected to almost-unimaginable violence.
Bozan said that many of them are being held in Mosul, approximately 120 km east of Sinjar. EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Yazidi Activists Release Daesh Prisoner From Sex Captivity The Iraqi army, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and allied forces have been advancing for more than a week in preparation for an assault on Mosul, the terror group's last major urban stronghold in Iraq. "More than 3,000 Yazidis are still being held by Daesh fighters, who are waiting to be rescued. In particular, hundreds of Yazidi prisoners are being held in Mosul. We intend to make every effort to ensure their release as soon as possible," Bozan said.
As well as the Iraqi National Army and the Peshmerga, several other groups are supporting the assault on Mosul, including the largely Shiite Popular Mobilization Units, which are reportedly bombing Daesh tunnels. Yazidi self-defense forces have also taken up arms against the Daesh terror group, including an all-female battalion . ... | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Intelligence showing that the Islamic State is developing a bomb hidden in portable electronics spurred the United States and Britain on Tuesday to bar passengers from airports in a total of 10 countries from carrying laptop computers, iPads and other devices larger than a cellphone aboard direct inbound flights, two senior American counterterrorism officials said. Two additional American officials said the explosives were designed to be hidden in laptop batteries. All four spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to publicly discuss the sensitive information. The Trump administration maintained that the new restrictions did not signal a credible, specific threat of an imminent attack. Officials said the alert reflects concerns that the Islamic State is ready — or soon will be — to launch new capabilities against the West. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, declined to address the intelligence during a news media briefing on Tuesday. Officials said passengers still could carry cellphones and other small devices into the airplane’s cabin, while larger items like laptops would have to be stowed with checked luggage. In all, airports in 10 countries, stretching from North Africa to the Mideast and into Turkey, are affected by the new restrictions. Both the United States and Britain have imposed the ban on flights from some airports in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Washington also has restricted some flights from Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. London, meanwhile, has additionally restricted flights from some airports in Lebanon and Tunisia. The targeting of a jetliner using explosives shows how the Islamic State, which has long worked to inspire terrorist attacks, is trying to compete with groups like Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. The Qaeda affiliate has spent years inventing explosives that are difficult to detect, including trying to disguise bombs in devices like cellphones. Now, American intelligence officials believe the Islamic State has also developed explosives that can be hidden in electronic devices, one of the senior counterterror officials said. Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, who sits on the House Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees, said that government officials had called him on Saturday to alert him to the impending ban. “It was based on intelligence reports that are fairly recent,” Mr. King said in a telephone interview. “Intelligence of something possibly planned. ” The Department of Homeland Security said the restricted items on flights to the United States included laptop computers, tablets, cameras, travel printers and games bigger than a phone. The restrictions would not apply to aircraft crews, officials said in a briefing to reporters to outline the terms of the ban. The American ban on electronics applies only to flights on foreign carriers. It does not affect airlines, since they do not fly directly to the United States from 10 designated airports in eight countries — Amman, Jordan Cairo Istanbul Jidda and Riyadh in Saudi Arabia Kuwait City Casablanca, Morocco Doha, Qatar and Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Officials did not say how long the ban would remain in place or if other airports would be added. In all, an estimated 50 flights each day into the United States would be affected. One of the world’s busiest airports, in Abu Dhabi, already requires passengers to undergo strict screening by United States customs officials before boarding flights. Abu Dhabi is one of 15 airports in the world to employ the Homeland Security preclearance techniques. Several hours after the American action, the British government announced its own ban on electronic devices on flights. The British ban affects domestic and foreign airlines, including British Airways, the country’s largest. Foreign airlines affected by the order include Turkish Airlines, EgyptAir and Royal Jordanian, among others, and it affects direct flights to the United Kingdom from Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. A British official said the U. K. ban resulted from the combination of an evolving threat picture and a proliferation of electronic devices that airline passengers carry on board. Examples of attacks by extremist groups against transportation hubs over the past two years include the October 2015 bombing of an airliner in Egypt, the attempted airliner downing in Somalia last year and armed attacks against airports in Brussels and Istanbul in 2016. The new bans on electronic devices have prompted a round of protests from passengers who now face the prospect of flying long hours without the use of laptops or tablets. Banu Akdenizli, an associate professor of communication at Northwestern University’s campus in Doha, complained that the ban would affect her ability to work during a long flight to Greensboro, N. C. for a conference in April. “This is a flight,” she said. “I think as an academic or any business traveler, the function of a work flight is to be able to work on it, especially if you’re going to a conference. ” Osama Sharshar, a prominent Egyptian lawmaker and journalist who frequently travels to the United States, was critical of the changes and suggested President Trump issued the order simply to “please the extremists in America. ” “It will terribly affect me as a journalist, a lawmaker and a regular Egyptian,” he said. “I work on planes all the time. And the flight to the States is very long. ” The Homeland Security Department’s new ban appeared to take officials from some of the affected countries by surprise. Ahmet Arslan, Turkey’s transport, maritime and communication minister, said the ban would be harmful to the United States’ airline industry — and to Turkey’s. “Our problem is not how the practice would take place,” Mr. Arslan said. “The issue is, it can decrease the comfort of the passengers and reduce the numbers of passengers. We are emphasizing that this is not in the benefit of passengers, and we think that they should step back from this or ease it. ” Counterterrorism experts seemed equally divided over the need for the device ban. Michael Chertoff, the former Homeland Security secretary, said the new policy made sense given the threats to aircraft from explosive devices and concerns about screening at the targeted airports. “The challenge is to balance security without making it impossible to fly,” Mr. Chertoff said. But Erroll Southers, director of the Homegrown Violent Extremism Studies Program at the University of Southern California, said the new guidance would do little to enhance security. “This does little to minimize the threat of a I. E. D. ,” he said, referring to improvised explosive devices hidden in checked baggage. American intelligence officials did not cite threats against domestic airports, but one said the Transportation Security Administration has been on heightened alert at several airports. It was not clear if that alert was related to the new restrictions on electronic devices. The restrictions follow other recent changes the T. S. A. has made in aviation security. Two weeks ago, the agency adopted enhanced searches for passengers at United States airports, a response to what it said were weaknesses in airport screening measures. Under the new rules, passengers will no longer be allowed to choose what type of searches they undergo in security lines. | 1 |
AP News reported on Nov. 19, 2016, that a father and son duo played an important part in a cocaine trafficking trial. The trial persecuted the nephew of the first lady of Venezuela.
The United States Federal Government and several other law enforcement agencies paid Jose Santos-Penta an estimated $1 million. They also paid over $100,000 more to his son Jose Santos-Hernandez.The U.S. Federal Government purchased information from them on drug trafficking.
The two men traveled to several different countries. Some of the countries the DEA are not welcome. The duo made secret recordings of people allegedly believed to be involved in the illegal drug trade.
One of the nations involved was Venezuela, where the Santos-Pena family recorded two of Cilia Flores nephews. Cilia Flores is the wife of the nation’s president who was handling a large amount of cocaine.
However, in April 2016, federal agents discovered that the father-son duo was illegally involved in illegal drug trafficking. Just as the nephew of the Venezuelan first lady was about to go on trial in New York, the duo pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges.
They also admitted to trafficking drugs while they were assisting the DEA of building the Venezuelan case last fall. However, prosecutors continue their case against Cilia Flores’ two nephews, although Jose Santos-Hernandez did not testify at their trial.
Written by John A. Federico
Edited by Cathy Milne
Source:
AP: Latin America Father-son informants trafficked drugs while on US payroll
Featured Image Courtesy of Julio César Mesa’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License Duo , HOmeless Veterans | 0 |
Everyone loved the SpaceX video of spaceship going to Jupiter with same solar panels it uses back in vicnity of Earth.
Nobody noticed, just cheered. Elon has these clowns figured out. | 0 |
Hi folks! Eddie Lampert, CEO of Sears Holdings here! I’ve been reliably informed that everyone who’s anyone in conservative America reads MILO, and he has been gracious enough to lend me his column today to send you a simple message — Sears and our other failing brand fucking hate you! [We’re not the first company to think of this innovative customer relations strategy. Nordstrom took the bold first leap into openly shitting on their own shoppers by dumping Ivanka Trump’s clothing line — but be realistic conservatives, that particularly racist cissexist misogynistic antisemitic transphobic fatphobic treephobic icecreamphobic autoerotasphyxiaphobic member of the first family had it coming. Never mind that she is a woman married to a Jewish man, just trust my ! It makes sense for Sears and to dump the Trump Home Collection. In fact, I’m struggling to figure out why we didn’t do it sooner. I guess we can’t be accused of being the rocket scientists of the retail world. Just think of the advantages this presents. We’re closing 150 stores by April. If we didn’t piss off half of America with a move against the democratically elected commander in chief and his family, imagine how crowded our remaining stores could be! And we don’t think we’ll see much blowback on our brands. Conservatives are certainly more likely to buy products from our most famous line of products, Craftsman tools, because you like to do things like fix machines and follow disgusting patriarchal gender roles like being handy. Most liberals either live in a big city with no lawn, or have illegal Mexicans working for below minimum wage mow their lawn, so Craftsman tractors are in the same boat. Well, that doesn’t matter because we’ve sold off our best known products anyway! Yes, I will allow we are slightly concerned about some of our other brands. Our Diehard line of vehicle products might turn off metrosexuals, but at least the lesbians still enjoy some automotive maintenance. And the vegans who remind you on Facebook every five minutes that they are vegan will line up to buy Kenmore grills and barbeque equipment, right? We are still working out the details, as you can see, but we know Sears and can still excel in certain areas. Our high quality sheets can represent a valid fashion alternative for America’s most obese shoppers, a market we will not surrender to competitor JC Penney. Beyond the numbers, dumping Trump is going to make us feel damn good. We will be able to bask in the glow of Hollywood liberals, who we stand beside in making empty gestures against the President of the United States. Heck, maybe J. K. Rowling will like this move so much, she’ll write me in as the next Headmaster at Hogwarts! Let’s be honest — we at Sears Holdings have to put feelings before facts. Our stock has cratered in the past six months from almost $18 to $7, and I can’t bear to look at a chart that goes back further. If you did something crazy like read this report from FOX Business, you’d see we are doing terrible by every conceivable retail metric. Falling revenue, terrible comparable store sales and questionable survivability. We’ve pumped $12 billion into Sears Holdings to keep the lights on, and I have to keep loaning my own company money to make suppliers feel comfortable sending us products to put on the shelves. Some companies facing hard times will carefully examine the market and build a business plan that doesn’t actively antagonize half of the country. Sears isn’t one of those companies. Other companies might also review what happened when other companies in their industry took similar steps. We aren’t one of those companies either — we really don’t care that Target has had a tough road following their own special to conservatives. In summary, the Sears and family knows it is making the right decision in telling you to get stuffed, and we think our business track record speaks for our judgement on making smart decisions. Sincerely, Eddie, DANGEROUS is available to now via Amazon, in hardcover and Kindle editions. And yes, MILO is reading the audiobook version himself! Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Hear him every Friday on The Milo Yiannopoulos Show. Write to Milo at milo@breitbart. com. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — The chiefs of America’s intelligence agencies last week presented President Obama and Donald J. Trump with a summary of unsubstantiated reports that Russia had collected compromising and salacious personal information about Mr. Trump, two officials with knowledge of the briefing said. The summary is based on memos generated by political operatives seeking to derail Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Details of the reports began circulating in the fall and were widely known among journalists and politicians in Washington. The summary, first reported by CNN, was presented as an appendix to the intelligence agencies’ report on Russian hacking efforts during the election, the officials said. The material was not corroborated, and The New York Times has not been able to confirm the claims. But intelligence agencies considered it so potentially explosive that they decided Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump and congressional leaders needed to be told about it and informed that the agencies were actively investigating it. Intelligence officials were concerned that the information would leak before they informed Mr. Trump of its existence, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it publicly. The author of the memos is Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with who once served in Moscow. After Mr. Steele retired in 2009, he founded a private firm called Orbis Business Intelligence in London. Former C. I. A. officials described him as an expert on Russia who is well respected in the spy world. On Tuesday night, Mr. Trump responded to the memos on Twitter: In an appearance recorded for NBC’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, Kellyanne Conway, said of the claims in the opposition research memos, “He has said he is not aware of that. ” On Wednesday, a spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia dismissed the allegations. “The Kremlin has no compromising dossier on Trump, such information isn’t consistent with reality and is nothing but an absolute fantasy,” the spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said at a news conference. Since the intelligence agencies’ report on Friday that Mr. Putin of Russia had ordered the hacking and leaks of Democratic emails in order to hurt his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, and help Mr. Trump, the and his aides have said that Democrats are trying to mar his election victory. The decision of top intelligence officials to give the president, the and the Gang of Eight — Republican and Democratic leaders of Congress and the intelligence committees — what they know to be unverified, defamatory material was extremely unusual. The appendix summarized opposition research memos prepared mainly by a retired British intelligence operative for a Washington political and corporate research firm. The firm was paid for its work first by Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals and later by supporters of Mrs. Clinton. The Times has checked on a number of the details included in the memos but has been unable to substantiate them. The memos suggest that for many years, the Russian government of Mr. Putin has looked for ways to influence Mr. Trump, who has traveled repeatedly to Moscow to investigate real estate deals or to oversee the Miss Universe competition, which he owned for several years. Mr. Trump never completed any major deals in Russia, though he discussed them for years. Mr. Steele, who gathered the material about Mr. Trump, is considered a competent and reliable operative with extensive experience in Russia, American officials said. But he passed on what he heard from Russian informants and others, and what they told him has not yet been vetted by American intelligence. The memos describe sex videos involving prostitutes with Mr. Trump in a 2013 visit to a Moscow hotel. The videos were supposedly prepared as “kompromat,” or compromising material, with the possible goal of blackmailing Mr. Trump in the future. The memos also suggest that Russian officials proposed various lucrative deals, essentially as disguised bribes in order to win influence over Mr. Trump. The memos describe several purported meetings during the 2016 presidential campaign between Trump representatives and Russian officials to discuss matters of mutual interest, including the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta. If some of the unproven claims in the memos are merely titillating, others would amount to extremely serious, potentially treasonous acts. One of the opposition research memos quotes an unidentified Russian source as claiming that the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails was carried out “with the full knowledge and support of TRUMP and senior members of his campaign team. ” In return, the memo said, “the TRUMP team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue” because Mr. Putin “needed to cauterize the subject. ” Michael Cohen, a lawyer and adviser to Mr. Trump, also went to Twitter to deny a specific claim in the opposition research involving him. One of the memos claims that Mr. Cohen went to Prague in August or September to meet with Kremlin representatives and to talk about Russian hacking of Democrats. Mr. Cohen tweeted on Tuesday night: In addition, in a recent interview with The Times, one of the Russian officials named in the memo as having met with Mr. Cohen, Oleg Solodukhin, denied that he had met with Mr. Cohen or any other Trump representative. “I don’t know where that rumor came from,” Mr. Solodukhin, of the Russian organization Rossotrudnichestvo, which promotes Russian culture and interests abroad, said in a telephone interview. The Times reported before the election that the F. B. I. was looking into possible evidence of links between the Trump campaign and Russia. But the investigation surfaced again at a Senate hearing on Tuesday in a series of questions from Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, to the F. B. I. director, James B. Comey. Mr. Wyden, trying to draw Mr. Comey out on information he may have heard during a classified briefing, asked if the F. B. I. had investigated the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia. Mr. Comey demurred, saying he could not discuss any investigations that might or might not be underway. Mr. Wyden kept pressing, asking Mr. Comey to provide a written answer to the question before Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 because he feared there would be no declassification of the information once Mr. Trump took office. After the hearing, Mr. Wyden posted on Twitter: The F. B. I. obtained the material long before the election, and some of the memos in the opposition research dossier are dated as early as June. But agents have struggled to confirm it, according to federal officials familiar with the investigation. Allies of Senator Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader from Nevada who retired at the end of the year, said the disclosures validated his call last summer for an investigation by the F. B. I. into Mr. Trump’s links to Russia. Democrats on Tuesday night pressed for a thorough investigation of the claims in the memos. Representative Eric Swalwell of California, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, called for law enforcement to find out whether the Russian government had had any contact with Mr. Trump or his campaign. “The has spoken a number of times, including after being presented with this evidence, in flattering ways about Russia and its dictator,” Mr. Swalwell said. “Considering the evidence of Russia hacking our democracy to his benefit, the would do a service to his presidency and our country by releasing his personal and business income taxes, as well as information on any global financial holdings. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — After all the ways that this year’s presidential election has made history, Donald J. Trump found a new line to cross on Wednesday, when he said at a news conference that Russia should hack his opponent, Hillary Clinton. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30, 000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said, in reference to the private email server Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. ” There is simply no precedent for this: A presidential candidate publicly appealing to a foreign adversary to intervene in the election on his behalf. “This is unprecedented — it is one of those things that seems to be genuinely new in international relations,” said Paul Musgrave, a University of Massachusetts professor who studies American foreign policy. After a long pause, Mr. Musgrave added, “Being shocked into speechlessness is not the sort of thing you’re really used to in the business of foreign policy analysis. ” As part of an investigation into her private server, Mrs. Clinton handed over 30, 000 emails to the State Department. But she deleted a similar number of emails that she said were unrelated to her work at the department. American presidential elections are events. Russia would not be the first foreign power, friendly or hostile, to pursue its preferred outcome. Nor would Mr. Trump be the first politician to leverage foreign actors for electoral benefit. But this is the first time that a presidential candidate has openly asked a foreign power to meddle in the democratic process to his benefit. More than that, Mr. Trump seemed to be suggesting that Russia should violate United States law on his behalf. Were Russia to follow Mr. Trump’s suggestion, the foreign intervention into American politics would be among the most severe of the past century. In 1940, as the United States debated whether to enter World War II, British spies disseminated rumors to discredit prominent American isolationists and worked to promote politicians who favored intervention. When President Jimmy Carter ran for in 1980, he lost in part because he had failed to secure the freedom of 52 American hostages held in Iran. They were released on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. Iranian negotiators later told the journalist Mark Bowden that they had stalled to deliberately hurt Mr. Carter, as punishment for his having sheltered the former Iranian shah. Nations pursue their interests, whether other countries like it or not. Great powers in particular, including the United States, often meddle in foreign elections. But such operations are conducted in secret because they are hostile acts, meant to subvert the will of the targeted country’s population and the sanctity of its institutions. Mr. Trump, in openly inviting such foreign interference, was undercutting one of the most fundamental national interests of a democratic state. “Nobody ever — and I think I can be confident about this — nobody ever stood up at a podium and said, ‘Bring it on,’” said Jeremy Shapiro, a Brookings Institution scholar of foreign policy, referring to Mr. Trump’s invitation for a foreign power to meddle in his own country’s politics. Though rare, previous American politicians have looked abroad for help with votes at home. In 1968, as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration tried to broker peace talks in Vietnam, a Republican activist encouraged South Vietnamese officials to resist the talks, which they did. The activist, who represented herself as speaking for the Republican presidential candidate, Richard M. Nixon, said Mr. Nixon would get South Vietnam a better deal. According to documents that were later declassified, a South Vietnamese official was recorded as saying that his government had refused to participate in the talks as a way “to help Nixon. ” More recently, in 2012, the Republican presidential challenger, Mitt Romney, cultivated ties with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. While Mr. Netanyahu did not explicitly endorse Mr. Romney, he frequently voiced his acute dissatisfaction with President Obama in comments to the American news media. Three years later, as Mr. Obama tried to strike a nuclear deal with Iran, congressional Republicans invited Mr. Netanyahu to condemn the proposed accord in a speech to Congress. While this arguably violated the norms of foreign policy by circumventing the White House on a matter of foreign relations, and by inviting an ally to intervene against the president in a domestic political dispute, Mr. Trump went a large step further in soliciting an adversary, and encouraging it to violate United States law on his behalf. In the hours after Mr. Trump’s statement, foreign policy and legal analysts struggled to articulate the scale of his deviation from political norms. William Inboden, a University of Texas professor who served on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council, told Politico the comments were “an assault on the Constitution” and “tantamount to treason. ” Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, wrote on Twitter, “I never thought a serious candidate for US President could be a serious threat against the security of the West. But that’s where we are. ” It is doubtful that Russia will alter its espionage practices based on public suggestions from Mr. Trump, which some defenders argue was meant as a joke. But Mr. Musgrave worried that such language could weaken norms, even if only slightly, against foreign involvement in American politics. “Trump is legitimating behaviors that nobody ever thought could be legitimated,” Mr. Musgrave said, calling the incident “one of those reminders about how fragile norms are. ” Mr. Shapiro, the Brookings Institution scholar, sounded physically exhausted by Mr. Trump’s comments and suggested they were driven by something more banal than collusion with a foreign power. “To me what it demonstrates is not that he’s necessarily in cahoots with the Russians, or that he’s intending to commit treason or sway the election by this act, but that he just has no sense of what the norms are,” Mr. Shapiro said, adding: “He has no sense of what an extraordinary statement that was. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — In 2012, B. Rowe Winecoff, a retired social worker from Newton, Iowa, contributed $120 to President Obama’s campaign. But he has yet to give any money to Hillary Clinton in this election. “This year just seems dirtier than ever,” said Mr. Winecoff, a Democrat, explaining why he has not contributed to the candidate he intends to vote for. Even as newly released financial disclosures reveal that Mrs. Clinton enjoys a substantial advantage over Donald J. Trump, she is struggling to replicate the sort of juggernaut that Mr. Obama enjoyed in his campaigns and Senator Bernie Sanders relied on in this year’s Democratic primaries. In an illustration of the lack of enthusiasm for her among some liberal activists, just 24 percent of the contributors to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign so far have given $200 or less. In 2012, 43 percent of the money to Mr. Obama was from contributors who gave $200 or less, and this year 58 percent of the giving to Mr. Sanders’s bid came from donors. Without this online network, Mrs. Clinton is being made to continue with an aggressive calendar of with rich donors as Election Day grows near — events that can limit her time in swing states and reinforce concerns that give Democrats pause. “Hillary has been at so many and off the campaign trail,” said Mr. Winecoff, bringing up her schedule without prompting. “And a lot of money is coming from special interests, so we’re concerned about what that’s going to mean. ” Since Labor Day, the traditional start of general election campaigns, Mrs. Clinton has appeared at nine while attending five public events in swing states. And that does not include the multiple money events she was set to attend in California, but instead sent Bill Clinton to after she came down with pneumonia. Mrs. Clinton has tried to meld her need to raise money for advertisements and efforts with her retail campaign. But it can be a stretch. After addressing college students at Temple University this week, for example, she attended a hosted by David L. Cohen, a Comcast executive and Philadelphia Democratic powerhouse, that brought in roughly $3 million. Trying to keep with the day’s theme, college students and young Comcast employees were also invited, to interact with Mrs. Clinton in the kind of rarefied small setting typically reserved for wealthy contributors. “What Bernie did in the primary was truly incredible, but we’re very happy with the state of our ” said Josh Scherwin, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, adding that “September is shaping up to be our best month for online . ” But the campaign’s traditional approach to raising money is maddening to many Democrats, particularly liberals who have witnessed the evolution of online and are baffled at why Mrs. Clinton is so committed to an approach they see as nearly as dated as torchlight parades. “It boggles my mind that the Clinton campaign didn’t learn their lessons from 2012 or even earlier this year, and haven’t moved toward a more open and public campaign, one that constantly has her in front of real people instead of rich people,” said Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the blog Daily Kos. He continued: “Sanders certainly proved that if you focus all of your energy on the voting public, that core supporters will reward that love with real money. Instead, Clinton’s campaign still seems stuck on the old model of . As a result, she looks secluded and out of reach, further reinforcing the notion that she cares more about the wealthy than regular folks. ” This close to the election, though, Mrs. Clinton may not have much of a choice. Given Democratic fears of Mr. Trump and her advantage in the race, there is an intense demand for her in the ranks of major Democratic givers. “Just trying to find a date has been a challenge,” said James Hodges, a former South Carolina governor who has been trying to organize an event for Mrs. Clinton before the election. Further, the very model she is depending on demands a continued stream of events with contribution levels that begin at five figures and often run higher. It is an approach that she and Mr. Clinton are well acquainted with, dating to the 1990s when raising soft money for the national parties was legal. They have enduring relationships with donors in all 50 states going back to those days. So unlike in the campaigns of Mr. Obama and Mr. Sanders, who began as insurgents, necessity has not demanded that Mrs. Clinton raise money any other way. (Mr. Obama ultimately fashioned a network that relied on both modest givers and the wealthy.) “She’s invested heavily in the infrastructure of human beings: finance directors across the country, photo lines and membership,” said Scott Goodstein, the founder of Revolution Messaging, an online Democratic firm. “Now they’ve got to play that out. She, unfortunately, made that commitment to do those five house parties or what have you in New York and now she has to stand on that because her bundler network needs it. ” Mr. Goodstein, whose firm ran Mr. Sanders’s online effort, added that “the mistake that I think they made was not reaching deeper, building deeper infrastructure and a deeper coalition. ” Instead, she is relying on the sort of that is a staple of Washington. And she is not the only one making herself available to major contributors who want to influence policy. This month, for example, Michele Flournoy, who is seen as a favorite to be Mrs. Clinton’s defense secretary, headlined a in Northern Virginia where the top contribution requested was $5, 000. Mrs. Clinton’s has picked up in recent months, and over half of the total money she raised last month came through online contributions, according to a campaign aide. And with polls tightening, Democrats expect Mrs. Clinton’s online success to pick up. “Urgency really drives action,” said Mitch Stewart, a veteran of Mr. Obama’s campaigns. It is Mr. Trump who is drawing more from modest givers as a percentage of his total contributions. percent of his donations through the end of July were in amounts of $200 or less, a figure that is partly explained by the resistance to his candidacy from wealthy Republican contributors. Yet many in Mrs. Clinton’s own party believe she could have done far better had she made Democratic activists feel as invested as the party’s elites. “The campaigns with the most effective networks of donors are the campaigns where donors feel their donations matter,” said Ari a SiriusXM radio host who has worked on online campaigns for Democrats. | 1 |
Since its release last month, “Ghostbusters,” the reboot of the 1984 action comedy updated with a cast of female leads, has conjured up a series of heated debates about how women are depicted in movies and how they are treated online and in social media. The film has also shined a spotlight on Kate McKinnon, the comic actress who plays the “Ghostbusters” team member Dr. Jillian Holtzmann, a scientist and technology whiz who hides a mischievous sense of humor behind a pair of goggle glasses, a trench coat and a deadpan delivery. Playing off celebrated like Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig, she is able to steal even the scenes in which she has no dialogue with just a gaudy grimace or a roll of her eyes. As Manohla Dargis wrote in her review of “Ghostbusters” for The New York Times, Ms. McKinnon “makes for a sublime nerd goddess,” bringing “a dash of the young Jerry Lewis to the role with a glint of Amy Poehler. ” Like her cinematic counterpart, Ms. McKinnon, 32, seems to have been hiding in plain sight. A Long Island native and Columbia University graduate, she has become an integral cast member at “Saturday Night Live,” where, over five seasons, she has delivered reliably eccentric impersonations of Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Angela Merkel, as well as a roster of oddball celebrities, foreigners and barflies. She received her fourth Emmy nomination in July and is poised for the kind of career breakout enjoyed by her “S. N. L. ” predecessors and personal heroes like Tina Fey, Ms. Poehler and Ms. Wiig. Not that Ms. McKinnon thinks of herself this way. “I pride myself on being tragically uncool,” she explained in an interview on Tuesday. “I’m wearing cat socks right now,” she said in her dry, drawl. “But I’m wearing them just for the utilitarian purpose of wearing socks. ” Over lunch at a vegan restaurant in Manhattan, she spoke about her “Ghostbusters” experience and the distinctions she draws between her characters and herself. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. You made such specific choices in your portrayal of Holtzmann. How did you approach the role? I just wanted to make a character who was very alien but so joyful and earnest and fascinated by the world that you would relate to her anyway. In the script, there were these moments where she would be talking so lackadaisically about an extraordinarily lethal piece of equipment. I thought, what sort of a person could let that terror slide off her shoulders? But I noticed that I underreact in a similar way, in a lot of situations. How so? In most combat scenarios, I find that I’m pretty steady. [laughs] No, seriously. “S. N. L. ” can be a stressful environment, and I am panicking constantly, but I guess I keep it pretty internal. Because I’ve been told that I seem . Did you consult with any scientists? I’ve been a big astrophysics nut since I was 12. I have always had a real soft spot for the bizarreness of quantum mechanics. But I gave up on being a scientist in high school — I’m just not that good at math. So that ticks me off, that I’ve limited myself and my life choices in that way. I will never be a theoretical physicist. Who devised her wardrobe and hairstyle? The costume designer, Jeffrey Kurland, had gotten all these wacky things, and when I saw them initially, I thought, this is way too cool. I wanted to be the plainest of the plain. But then I rationalized it by saying that, to her, it’s not even cool. She just has these objects and throws them on. The hair was a collaboration between me and Brenda McNally, my hairstylist. I was like, what hair would a person who doesn’t care about an exploding nuclear reactor have? Probably Tilda Swinton’s hair. Some people who have seen the movie believe that Holtzmann is gay. Do you have any thoughts on her sexuality? No. I’m so sorry. Do you think it’s significant that moviegoers who don’t see themselves represented onscreen are identifying with her? I wanted Holtzmann to be a general champion for the disenfranchised and the other. And I hope that she appeals to anyone who feels like that. Leslie Jones, your “Ghostbusters” and “S. N. L. ” nearly quit Twitter after she became the target of intense online abuse. Did you speak to her during this period? She did text, and she was deeply, deeply disturbed and upset. As anyone would be. I said that I love her and she’s gorgeous. And she should get off Twitter. [chuckles] But that’s not a solution. “Just don’t read it” is not a solution. You don’t have a social media presence — I imagine that didn’t change your mind? Even when Facebook came out and I was in college, I found myself never putting anything on it. It just feels unnatural to me to broadcast anything other than the character I’ve created. You’re very modest in person, yet you play many characters. Where do they come from, I wonder? You and my therapist. [laughs] There must be some exhibitionist tendency that I funnel into these other people. I think it comes from wanting to share and to connect, to offer up for display something that I find delightful and fascinating. I hope that if other people feel the same way then we’ve made a connection. That’s the way I feel most comfortable connecting. Are you paying close attention to the presidential election to gather more material on Hillary Clinton? I’m following it because we’re at a real moment right now. But also because I feel very connected to her, in a strange way. I spend so many hours studying her and imagining her inner life that I feel like we’re very close. Even though I don’t have her phone number. Did you feel that when you appeared in an “S. N. L. ” sketch with her last season? She was very warm and charming and sincere. And I liked being around her, and I felt a similarity to her, in that I am a very accomplished legal scholar and have spent my life crusading for the middle class. Have you ever met Justice Ginsburg? No, ay yi yi. What I wouldn’t do. I’d crawl in that robe and never leave. Are you already thinking about “S. N. L. ” starting up in the fall? Yes, I think it’s a good time to be a comedian. Some people look at movies and think, oh my gosh, that’s so amazing. But to me, I look at a politician or a scientist and think, they’re creating the content of humanity. I can’t believe I get to even comment on this in some small way. This whole year, with Larry [David] as Bernie [Sanders] and me getting to play Hillary was, like, the closest I’ll ever come to being involved in something that’s as important as politics or science. Comedy has become, I think, a very important branch of public intellectualism. But it still ain’t Washington. Will you go back to “S. N. L. ” with more visibility because of all the praise you’ve received this summer? That would be hellish. What makes this current cast so strong is that there’s fairly equitable distribution of real estate within the show, and everyone has such a different voice and really gets to use that. It feels like a real ensemble. Before getting hired there, I did mostly shows, and I liked being the only weird one onstage. But that gets old real fast, not just for me but for people watching. Has there been any talk of a “Ghostbusters” sequel? I haven’t heard. I haven’t been doing that much. I literally don’t know what I did the last two weeks. I know that I had a consultation about window dressings with a lady who was very knowledgeable. That took up a big part of my psychic energy. What would be your dream role to play? My manager asks me this every day, and I don’t quite have the answer. What I want is to play as many as possible. I really like collections of things. I love antique botanical prints with a bunch of different weeds and seeds. I love the produce section at the grocery store. A panoply of gorgeous, fascinating distinct objects with a common theme, is what I would love to build for the rest of my career, as long as they’ll have me. | 1 |
A once highly recognized high school girl’s track star from New Britain, Connecticut, has lost her usual first place spot to a boy who “identifies” as a girl on an opposing high school track team, and her loss sparks many questions about fairness and rights. [Kate Hall, a junior at a Stonington High School, has spent several years typically coming in at the top in track competition. Until this year, that is. This year she has routinely lost that top spot because opposing Cromwell High accepted a boy claiming to be a transgender girl onto its track team. Freshman Andraya Yearwood, 15, a biological male who identifies as a girl, received permission to join the Cromwell High girls track team after competing as a boy in middle school. Not surprisingly, Yearwood has been extremely successful as a male competing against females. Yearwood has thoroughly defeated every female opponent. According to the Hartford Courant, “Andraya’s times in the 100 and the 200 are fast. A year ago, her 11. 99 in the 100 would have won the Class M title and put her second at the State Open, . 01 seconds behind the winning time. And Andraya ran Wednesday in cold conditions, and without starting blocks. She is expected to get faster. ” “It feels really good. I’m really happy to win both titles,” Yearwood recently bragged to the media after winning the Class M contest. “I kind of expected it. I’ve always gotten first, so I expected it to some extent. … I’m really proud of it. ” And, all of this has occurred quite despite the fact that Yearwood has taken no steps to transition into a girl. The runner stands taller than opponents, is clearly far more muscular, and even sports a faint, mustache. Yearwood’s top opponent, Kate Hall, seems sadly resigned to constantly losing to a “girl” who has all the more powerful attributes of a boy. “There’s not much I can do,” Hall said after losing the Class M to Yearwood. “Second doesn’t work for me. Yeah, it does, in a way, for the team. But you come into a state championship meet looking to win a state title. I had an awesome chance. I could have done a lot of things (differently). If I’d run my best, I could have won it. ” “It’s frustrating,” Hall added. “But that’s just the way it is now. ” But, Yearwood’s easy wins against biological girls continue to raise questions in New Britain. Even as most break their necks trying desperately to avoid being seen as criticizing a “transgender athlete,” many are still wondering if it is fair that a powerful, biological boy should be allowed to compete against frailer high school girls. Jeff Jacob of the Hartford Courant raised the questions in a recent column, saying that “on a biologically competitive basis,” Yearwood’s victories are not fair to the competitors. Ultimately, Jacobs felt that the results of the competition have been tainted. “Humanity counts. So does biology,” Jacobs wrote. But, he went on saying, “For me, somebody who has observed sports and written about all kinds of athletes for four decades, the integrity of the state competition for these two races Tuesday was compromised. ” Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 1 |
tfw the pussy doesn't want to be grabbed.... | 0 |
Financial Markets , Gold , Market Manipulation , Precious Metals , U.S. Economy Bretton Woods , Gresham's Law , silver coins , silver eagles , Tesla fraud admin
Gold is unobtainable for most people in the world the way it’s priced right now. If a global crisis hits silver is going to be remonetized by the free market. If it’s not just an industrial metal, like it is today, if governments and central banks start holding it (silver), and this is a copy-cat effect, because obviously you know this, once one of the central banks does something the rest will do it because they don’t want to be different. – Lior Gantz, The Daily Coin, Silver Will Be Re-Monetized By The Market
In 1965 Lyndon Johnson signed the Coinage Act of 1965, which removed the silver content from dimes and quarters and took the silver content in half-dollars down to 40%. In 1970 silver was removed completely from the half-dollars. The excuse given was that the country was running out of silver. But the truth is that the U.S. Government in conjunction with England was dumping its Central Bank stock of silver (and gold) onto the market in order to prevent the price of these precious metals from rising against the U.S. dollar, which had been effectively the world’s reserve currency for 20 years.
In fact, the silver-based U.S. coins were disappearing from the market because the value of the silver content in these coins had risen above the face value of the coins. It was real-time proof of Gresham’s Law. In effect, it was an effort by the U.S. Government to de-monetize silver, which has been civilized history’s oldest monetary metal. The U.S. could not yet de-monetize gold because, based on the Bretton Woods Agreement, the U.S. was required to back all Treasuries bonds issued to foreign buyers with gold. But a year after the last remnants of silver were removed from U.S.-minted coins, the Nixon Government disconnected gold from the reserve currency.
Ultimately, silver will become re-monetized. Silver has been, is and always will be “poor man’s gold.” In today’s episode of The Daily Coin, we discuss the eventual re-monetization of silver. As a bonus, we describe the fraudulent nature of Tesla’s latest earnings report.
No State shall…coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts. – U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 10, Clause 1 Share this: | 0 |
Did you know that cinnamon can boost intelligence?
Saturday, October 29, 2016 by: Amy Goodrich Tags: cinnamon , intelligence , Parkinsons disease (NaturalNews) Cinnamon is one of the world's most consumed spices. For thousands of years, it has been prized for its medicinal properties and sweet, warming taste. Aside from sprinkling cinnamon on top of your lattes or adding magic to grandma's apple pie, researchers have found that consuming this tasty household spice also might enhance learning skills.Scientists at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found that increased ingestion of cinnamon significantly improved the memory of "poor learning" mice. Recently, their findings were published in the Journal of Neuroimmune Pharmacology in an article entitled "Cinnamon Converts Poor Learning Mice to Good Learners: Implications for Memory Improvement."The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Alzheimer's Association. How cinnamon affects the brain For the study, lead researcher Kalipada Pahan, a neurology professor at Rush University Medical Center, and his team zoomed in on two key proteins, GABRA5 and CREB, located in the hippocampus region of the brain. The hippocampus is a small part of the brain that generates, organizes, and stores memory. Previous research has shown that lower levels of CREB and higher levels of GABRA5 occur in the brain of poor learners.To see if ground cinnamon could improve the memory of slow learners, the researchers took a group of mice and placed them in a maze with 20 holes. The experiment was focused on watching the mice learn how to locate their target hole.When they tested the mice again after one month of cinnamon feeding, the researchers found that the mice determined to be poor learners had significantly improved their memory and learning skills. They could find their target hole twice as fast.Pahan and his team explained that when cinnamon is ingested the body converts it into sodium benzoate, a chemical compound used to treat brain damage. Furthermore, they discovered that when benzoate entered the mice's brains, it increased CREB, decreased GABRA5, and stimulated hippocampal neurons, which led to improved memory and learning skills."We have successfully used cinnamon to reverse biochemical, cellular and anatomical changes that occur in the brains of mice with poor learning," Pahan said.However, no significant improvements were seen in the mice that were considered good learners. But Pahan added that if these results could be replicated in slow learning students, cinnamon could become one of the safest and easiest approaches to convert weaker students to good learners. Cinnamon may halt the progression of Parkinson's disease Pahan and his colleagues previously found that cinnamon had a positive effect on the brains of mice with Parkinson's disease. When cinnamon transforms into sodium benzoate, it works to protect the neurons, normalize brain cells, and improve communication within the brain, which slows down the progression of the disease.Given their promising results, Pahan and his team - supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health – plan on moving forward with testing in human patients with Parkinson's disease."This could potentially be one of the safest approaches to halt disease progression in Parkinson's patients," Pahan said. "It would be a remarkable advance in the treatment of this devastating neurodegenerative disease," he added.Before starting to add cinnamon to all your dishes, know that not all cinnamon is created equal. Pahan explained that there are two major types of cinnamon available in the United States - Chinese or cassia cinnamon and Ceylon cinnamon. While both metabolize into sodium benzoate, Ceylon cinnamon is much better than Chinese cinnamon. Chinese cinnamon contains coumarin, a molecule that can damage the liver . Sources: | 0 |
Tom Cahill | November 17, 2016
In a stunning move, President Obama has announced he won’t allow any oil and gas leases on land deemed sacred by the Blackfeet Tribe.
After the announcement, Devon Energy, which was hoping to drill on 130,000 acres in Montana — some of which housed Glacier National Park and Blackfeet land — will have all of its oil and gas leases cancelled on the disputed land. The Bureau of Land Management had previously granted 15 leases to Devon Energy in the northwestern part of the Big Sky State.
“We are proud to have worked alongside the Blackfeet Nation, U.S. Forest Service and Devon Energy to achieve this important milestone, rolling back decades-old leases and reinforcing the importance of developing resources in the right ways and the right places,” said Department of the Interior Secretary Sally Jewell in a public statement .
National Parks Conservation Association official Michael Jamison told the Washington Post that the cancellation of the leases is an important milestone for the preservation of various protected species like wolf, bear, and elk.
“There aren’t many places like this left in the lower 48,” Jamison said.
The move is particularly significant in the context of the ongoing protests at the construction site of the Dakota Access Pipeline, where hundreds of indigenous tribes have gathered with the Standing Rock Sioux to prevent the pipeline from being built. Protesters say the pipeline, which would run underneath the Missouri River, would endanger a crucial drinking water supply for millions of people in several states.
For its part, Devon will receive a little over $200,000 for the cancellation of the leases, which were issued in the 1980s with no drilling occurring since the leases were granted.
Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact him via email at [email protected] | 0 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. _____ 1. Funerals began for some of the 41 victims of a suicide bombing at Istanbul’s main airport on Tuesday. The airport also reopened and the city appeared determined to get back to business as usual. Turkey, which faces terrorist threats from both Islamic State militants and Kurdish groups, has endured 14 major attacks in the past year. The government blames the Islamic State for this one, although it has not claimed responsibility. _____ 2. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain returned to London from a European Union summit meeting, leaving the leaders of the other 27 member countries to discuss Britain’s decision to exit. Candidates to replace Mr. Cameron when he steps down this fall have begun to come forward, and talk of an early general election is growing. Juan Jasso, above, a who drew attention after video captured him enduring xenophobic insults in Manchester, said he was actually in favor of Britain’s leaving the E. U. _____ 3. There’s one thing Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump seem to agree on: toughening trade policies to protect American jobs. The two presidential contenders are deadlocked, according to a new poll, and each has the potential to draw voters from the opposite party. We look at how Mr. Trump has shifted his stances on issues, usually with few political consequences. _____ 4. Accusations surfaced on Wednesday that the Trump Institute, a education business to which Mr. Trump lent his name and likeness, plagiarized materials from an obscure real estate manual in 2005. (The institute’s owners were a couple accused of fraud.) The complaint comes as lawsuits from another of Mr. Trump’s forays into education, Trump University, cast a shadow over his presidential campaign. _____ 5. Mexico, Canada and the United States will use sources to generate half their electric power by 2025, their leaders announced at a summit meeting in Canada. Marketed as a gathering of the “three amigos,” the meeting of President Obama, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico also served as a farewell of sorts for Mr. Obama and a debut for Mr. Trudeau. _____ 6. The extradition of the Mexican drug kingpin known as El Chapo has stalled. A lawyer for the drug lord, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, who escaped from prison twice in Mexico, said two appeals filed this week could take years to resolve. The decision to extradite Mr. Guzmán to the United States, where he faces charges in multiple jurisdictions, was made shortly after he was recaptured in January. _____ 7. Changes are coming to your Facebook news feed, and they aren’t good for publishers. (Ahem.) Expect more updates from your friends and family members, and fewer links posted by news media sites. Facebook says it’s concerned that the growth of publisher posts is making it harder for users to connect with people they know. _____ 8. Wimbledon served up a match on Wednesday, pitting Marcus Willis, who is ranked 772nd, against the Roger Federer, above right. Federer won. But Willis, who teaches tennis at a boat club in England, captured the hearts of fans and received a standing ovation from the crowd. “It was a pleasure to play against him,” Federer said. _____ 9. William Shakespeare was a social climber. Previously unknown records shed new light on the playwright’s pursuit of a coat of arms on behalf of his father, which would have cemented his own status as a gentleman. They also rebut the idea that Shakespeare wasn’t the author of the works attributed to him. _____ 10. Mermaid schools, which have been teaching girls in the United States how to swim with a tail for quite some time, are spreading to France. The teacher who began classes in that country said 500 people took her introductory course in Marseille, and she has plans to expand. Swim on, mermaids. _____ 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 |
President Donald Trump’s White House has released the text of his new “hire American” Executive Order, which orders a reform of the nation’s many programs to help raise Americans’ wages and salaries. [“To create higher wages and employment rates for workers in the United States, and to protect their economic interests, it shall be the policy of the executive branch to rigorously enforce and administer the laws governing entry into the United States of workers from abroad, including section 212( a)(5) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U. S. C. 1182( a)(5)),” says the “Buy American, Hire American” Executive Order. The memo ordered officials to develop new rules and regulations for the many federal programs which keep a population of up to 1. 8 million visas workers in the United States. The order does not give a deadline for the process but says: Sec. 5. Ensuring the Integrity of the Immigration System in Order to “Hire American. ” (a) In order to advance the policy outlined in section 2( b) of this order, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall, as soon as practicable, and consistent with applicable law, propose new rules and issue new guidance, to supersede or revise previous rules and guidance if appropriate, to protect the interests of United States workers in the administration of our immigration system, including through the prevention of fraud or abuse. (b) In order to promote the proper functioning of the visa program, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall, as soon as practicable, suggest reforms to help ensure that visas are awarded to the or petition beneficiaries. The White House also released a statement from Steve Miller, one of Trump’s senior advisors and one of the White House’s strongest advocates for and immigration reform. “This historic act of leadership from President Trump makes unequivocally clear that this Administration will serve and protect the American worker — fighting for fair trade and immigration policies that promote rising wages and employment for our hardworking citizens,” said the statement attributed to Miller. The new policy was praised by reformers. even though there’s a big gap between a Trump directive and actual government policy amid intense industry pressure for cheaper labor. “The president’s Executive Order is a shot in the arm for America’s struggling workers, and must now be followed up with legislation that makes permanent changes to our immigration system so it truly benefits America and its citizens,” said a statement from Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. He continued: Employers should be required to hire American workers who meet minimum job requirements and the foreign workers they do hire must be required to be paid a fair, market wage. We cannot achieve the goal of ‘hiring American’ while maintaining a policy that allows them to bypass Americans in favor of foreign guest workers. GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate’s judiciary committee, praised the directive, saying: The program was designed to fill gaps in America’s workforce with foreign workers, but as we’ve seen in recent years, the program has been abused and exploited at the expense of American workers and foreign workers. We’ve seen companies use the program to fire American workers and replace them with foreign counterparts. The visa lottery system makes this problem worse by rewarding visas randomly, instead of prioritizing foreign workers with greater experience, skill, and qualifications. I’ve introduced bipartisan legislation with Senator Durbin to address these problems, and I’ve expressed to President Trump the need to take action to restore the integrity in the Program. I’m grateful that President Trump has taken my suggestions to heart by taking steps today to protect American workers and preserve limited visas for truly qualified, foreign workers. Industry officials rolled with the punch. A statement from Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD. us group praised the new directive but also asked for even more foreign workers. The statement said: We are hopeful today’s announcement will do what FWD. us has long advocated improve our high skilled immigration system. We should do so in a targeted manner by increasing the wage floor, treating companies (50 employees and 50% or more of domestic workforce ) differently and banning their ability to do placement. immigrants create new American jobs, raise wages for workers, and contribute enormously to growing our economy. Finally, congress should expand the number of visas offered while reforming the system to protect American workers. Read the directive here. The annual inflow of foreign contract workers is huge, adding up to roughly 1 million or workers, either in or jobs. The imported contract workers are not immigrants, not citizens, nor green card holders, but are temporary workers slated to return home after several years. Generally, employers do not have to interview Americans before hiring foreigners for the U. S. jobs. Many of the contract workers stay for several or more years, ensuring the resident population of and contract workers is much larger than the annual inflow and may reach a resident population of 1. 8 million. The Economic Policy Institute pegs the resident population at 1. 4 million. Many workers stay for just one season, filling jobs as landscapers or beach workers, waiters and foresters, fish processors and farm workers. These temp programs get a lot of criticism, partly because some employers cheat their foreign workers, but they are supported by many local politicians who are trying to help donors and influential business leaders. This seasonal inflow has sharply reduced the number of Americans teenagers working during the summer. Most of the workers stay for several or more years, ensuring the resident population of contract workers is must larger than the annual inflow. For example, the annual inflow of is roughly 110, 000, but the resident population is almost one million, according to a recent estimate by Goldman Sachs. The federal government releases little data on the many different programs, but the available evidence says the national population of contract workers is up to 1. 5 million. That population is roughly twice the population of 800, 000 Americans who graduate from college with skilled degrees each year. Several sites, including here and here, show numbers of outsourcing visas requested by companies and . The sites also show where the requested workers will work, their job titles and their supposed wages. For example, the sites show the number of visas for foreign pharmacists sought by CVS and other companies and the number of visas for architects and industrial designers sought by “job shop” firms which outsource their imported workers to other U. S. companies. The inflow of contract workers forces down wages paid to Americans and immigrants, partly because the inflow reduces wage pressure on and employers. Moreover, many of the contract workers rationally and decently will take jobs are low wages because their employers can promise to eventually reward them with the massively valuable deferred bonus of a green card and then U. S. citizenship. Each year, companies request and receive 140, 000 green cards for their employees and their families, further boosting the supply of professionals in the labor market. Employers say they need the foreign workers because they can’t hire enough Americans for jobs, even at wages of $12 per hour or higher. But critics — and much evidence — say the programs are rife with corruption, including fake resumes, fraudulent visa applications, payments, workplace and hiring discrimination against Americans, as well as false claims by lobbyists and corporates that too few Americans want to work at companies such as Goldman Sachs or Facebook or in the New York fashion industry. A 2016 report by the National Academies of Science showed that programs, plus the must large inflow of legal immigrants, annually transfers roughly $500 billion from American employees over to investors and employers. | 1 |
Donald J. Trump, who said last week that a judge was biased against him because of his heritage, said on Tuesday that his remarks had been “misconstrued” and that he did not think that the judge’s ethnicity created a conflict of interest. “I do not feel that one’s heritage makes them incapable of being impartial,” Mr. Trump said in a long statement in which he continued to raise questions about his treatment in the Trump University case. Mr. Trump created a firestorm last week when he suggested that Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, who was born in Indiana, was not handling his case fairly because of his immigration policies, which include deporting immigrants in the country illegally and building a wall along the southern border. The remarks were considered racist by Democrats and Republicans, several of whom distanced themselves from the presumptive Republican nominee. Mr. Trump said in his statement that he had many friends of Hispanic and Mexican descent and that he thought that his words had been twisted. The reversal was a rare one for Mr. Trump, who has tended to dig in after his provocative remarks have stirred controversy. However, after many Republicans started to panic about the direction of his campaign he tempered his tone toward the judge. “It is unfortunate that my comments have been misconstrued as a categorical attack against people of Mexican heritage,” Mr. Trump said. “I am friends with and employ thousands of people of Mexican and Hispanic descent. ” “The American justice system relies on fair and impartial judges,” he added . “All judges should be held to that standard. ” Mr. Trump, who did not apologize for the remarks, continued to express doubts about Judge Curiel, noting that he was appointed to the federal bench by President Obama. “Due to what I believe are unfair and mistaken rulings in this case and the judge’s reported associations with certain professional organizations, questions were raised regarding the judge’s impartiality,” Mr. Trump said. “It is a fair question. I hope it is not the case. ” Heeding calls from Republican leaders to focus on issues that matter to Americans, Mr. Trump said he remained focused on bringing jobs back to the country. He also insisted that he would win the Trump University case. “While this lawsuit should have been dismissed, it is now scheduled for trial in November,” Mr. Trump said. “I do not intend to comment on this matter any further. ” In an interview with The New York Times last week, Mr. Trump said it was clear that he considered Judge Curiel’s heritage an issue: “I’m building the wall, I’m building the wall. I have a Mexican judge. He’s of Mexican heritage. He should have recused himself, not only for that, for other things. ” Some of Mr. Trump’s critics said that his statement did not go far enough. Jeb Bush, a former rival for the Republican nomination whose wife is from Mexico, has been largely silent since exiting the race but on Tuesday said that Mr. Trump should fully retract what he said. “Donald Trump should retract his comments, not defend them,” Mr. Bush wrote in a post on Twitter. “There is no place for racism in the GOP, or this country. ” | 1 |
WikiLeaks: ‘How is what Bill Clinton did different from what Bill Cosby did?’ #PodestaEmails20 Posted at 10:29 am on October 27, 2016 by Greg P. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
WikiLeaks’ 20th release of John Podesta’s email is out, and this one caught our eye . Apparently team Clinton was discussing how they could answer questions on Bill Clinton’s past, including comparisons of his behavior to accused rapist Bill Cosby:
Yeah, John … how do you handle question No. 4? Trending | 0 |
We asked stars and filmmakers about their holiday traditions. Here are edited excerpts from their answers: My husband [Dwyane Wade of the Chicago Bulls] has been playing on Christmas Day for as long as we’ve been together. So I watch my husband play basketball. And how Christmas goes really depends on how the game goes. There was the infamous “Kobe shot” that ruined Christmas. And then there was the big Heat win over the Cavs, so we had a good Christmas. Before I started seeing Dwyane, [my family] would listen to the Broadway cast album of “Dreamgirls” and choose different parts. Some years, I got to be James Early, and some years Deena — but those were the rare years. Our favorite thing in our family wasn’t really the presents under the tree. We loved the stockings, especially my mom’s. She loved to open things, [and] we’d wrap, like, six beautiful boxes, so she’d think she was going to get down to a necklace or something. After about 10 minutes of opening all these packages and getting down to a Tiffany box, it would be a cotton ball. We still do that. [My son] Levi wrapped a in five boxes. And [my wife] Camila really thought she was going to get this awesome thing we found in our travels. You’ve got to have a sense of humor to live in this family. I think one of the greatest Christmas movies of all times is “It’s a Wonderful Life. ” As clichéd as it sounds, it says a lot about the idea that we don’t know the profound effect we have on one another’s lives. I’m also a huge fan of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas. ” My kids are 24 and 27, and we always used to make a family tradition of watching it. I love that the Grinch is such a miserable soul. We can all relate to that sometimes. We’re actually going to Cuba this year, and I’ve got “The Grinch” on a DVD. When I was younger, “Home Alone” was one of my favorite movies to watch around the holidays. Something about being around family and watching a family movie like that just got me in the spirit. You watched so much that you knew it like the back of your hand. Christmas in my family is when everybody is dropping everything to come together. I live in Atlanta, but I always go back to home to Milwaukee, where I’m from, because a holiday without snow or cold weather is weird. My favorite Christmas movie is always “It’s a Wonderful Life. ” But I like to listen to music more than anything else: the Phil Spector Christmas album [“A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector”] some Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, maybe make myself feel smarter with some Bach. In New Orleans, where I live, they have a tradition on Christmas Eve called the Réveillon, where they start eating about midnight, gumbo and all sorts of foods. I’m going to miss it this year. I’ll be in New York [performing in “The Front Page” on Broadway] which is always a treat. As a fortunate member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, that is the time of year that we try to catch up on all of the different films that we hear good things about. My family is grown up now, so they’re in different cities, but we try to spend Christmas together. We have a screening room, and we light a fire and have dinner and watch a movie every night. Bring your pajamas. My sister and I come home [to Canada] and regress into narcissists and make everybody watch home movies of us and applaud how cute we are. My mom tries to class it up with “Miracle on 34th Street,” but we’re not drawn to that as much as our recorded lives. I just got a house in Los Angeles, and now there’s a whole new world of people to invite over and be like, “Bet you guys haven’t seen this. ” I celebrate Christmas in Spain, where my family lives, and we sit down to dinner with 20 [to] 30 people. [We also] go to the movies. We normally choose a movie everyone can watch, and it’s always a big argument, trying to get 10 or more people to agree. I remember when I was a kid, the first movie I saw was “Superman,” and my parents took me during Christmas. This year, I think for sure we want to see the “Star Wars” movie. This year we’re going to go see my mom in Oklahoma City. She’s 95 and confined to a bed in her own home with care, thanks to “Will Grace,” so we’re going to arrange for her to get to a theater to see [“Why Him? ”]. She wants to see it. It [will] be a bit of a production. She can’t sit up for extended periods of time, so [she’s] going in her reclining wheelchair, and we’re taking at least two of her beautiful caregivers with us. The movie is really dirty, but she liked a good dirty joke back in the day. My boyfriend [the writer and director Sebastian Gutierrez] is from South America, and so Christmas Eve is our big celebration. While cooking and [drinking] wine and opening presents each hour, we watch “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — just because it’s one of the best movies ever made. I love Karen Allen’s performance so much. You’re on fire with your cooking when that movie is playing. And in the ultimate Christmas spirit, “Raiders” is about Jewish artifacts that are going to defeat evil. So it’s appropriate to the day. | 1 |
movies , culture , interview Director Alexei Mizgiryov at a news conference before the premiere of the film "The Duelist" in Moscow. Source:Ekaterina Chesnokova/RIA Novosti
Even during the stage of production, Alexei Mizgirev’s The Duelist caught the attention of the international cinema industry. The world premiere of the movie was held the Toronto Film Festival and, in collaboration with IMAX, the film is being released in the U.S. and other countries.
Before The Duelist, Mizgirev was considered to be only a “festival” director in Russia – all his previous pictures had gone out on limited release, and were seen by only a few thousand people. However, suddenly, in cooperation with producer Alexander Rodnyansky ( Jayne Mansfield’s Car , Cloud Atlas , Leviathan ), he has made one of the most expensive projects in the history of Russian cinema.
Set in the 1860s, The Duelist is a costume drama about a killer, the officer Yakovlev, who engages in duels for other people. For some mystical reason bullets cannot kill him, so he always wins his duels.
Before the film released, Mizgirev spoke to RIR about his new film.
RIR: How does it feel, after directing only low-budget auteur films, to be a director of a film that cost such a large amount of money, going by standards of the Russian film industry?
Alexei Mizgirev: People ask me this a lot. At first I was a bit lost and didn’t know how to answer, because I hadn’t really noticed a big difference. With The Duelist we had no problems, for example with decoration and costume, because we could shoot where we wanted and didn’t have to save on props. I was now rid of many problems that had cropped up in previous films, because the producers were able to solve them perfectly.
Video by SonyPicturesRU / YouTube
This was all very pleasant. However such changes indirectly affect the creative process. We were constantly discussing points to work on, but it was all very democratic, because we both understood that there are mass-produced, cookie-cutter films, and others that are single, unique pieces. The Duelist is a unique film, in which individuality and the author’s style is important – with the background of a great story and modern visual effects, of course.
RIR: All your preceding films have been about acute social issues in modern Russian life. And here we have balls, costumes, duels, and nobles in waistcoats. Where has this interest in this period come from?
A.M.: Any director wants millions of people to watch his films. But when you’re given a budget of $1-2 million, it’s difficult to create beautiful and spectacular cinema . You would like to, but it’s impossible for objective reasons. Therefore, an interest in contemporary affairs is in some respects necessary, simply because you don’t have to waste money on expensive decorations and computer effects.
The concept of The Duelist has already been in the works for several years, it was just lying somewhere, literally two paragraphs long. And then something happened, and I thought to myself, this needs to happen now. Even though realizing this idea was very far off, I already thought then that the biggest problem I’d have with it would not be to do with finance.
RIR: What sort of difficulties are you talking about?
A.M.: I am talking about the 19 th century itself, or rather, its image, which is difficult to portray in audiovisual art. You probably won’t disagree that Russian viewers only know about the 19 th century from TV series, since the last proper film made for the big screen was [Vladimir Motyl’s] The Captivating Star of Happiness , shot in 1975. But even this film was riddled with a mass of clichés and openly mistaken information about the 19 th century.
A common film market for Russia, India and China?
When I was preparing for The Duelist I sifted through a mass of sources on this period. It turns out that we don’t really know anything about them, what they really ate, drank, talked about, and how they really dressed, apart from some pleasant misconceptions we have. The 19 th century for the contemporary viewer is a load of old mothballs at granny’s place or some sedate play from a provincial theatre.
I’d like to get rid of this stereotype and show this period like no one else has done – bright, harsh, echoing with our times. This is of course a grandiose task, but I’m not afraid of the work, or the public reaction to this new style of discussion about the past. This is a complete breaking of the mould.
RIR: However the visual style of The Duelist has several times been compared to Sherlock Holmes by Guy Ritchie and the film Vidoqc by Pitof. Do you like having such parallels with your work?
A.M.: Such comparisons have a lot of truth in them. However this is a very decorative work, a celebration of the genre in its purest form. The Duelist is a little different, including if we talk about its visual effects.
RIR: With The Duelist , everyone asks you about the idea of honour, which is the main trigger for the film. You answer, expectedly, that honour is a timeless thing, and for this reason a story about this will always resound with the present. But it seems in your film fatalism plays just as important a role, one which is peculiar to the film’s characters. We’re guessing that this emphasis on the doomed characters’ relationship with fate is not an accidental one?
A.M.: Yes, this is one of the driving forces of the film. Delving into stories about duels, I stumbled across an eloquent fact. In the 19 th century, in the birthplace of duels, France, they practically disappeared, like in many other countries. This is linked to the spread of firearms, which were far more dangerous than swords and which greatly levelled the playing field.
For exactly this reason, duels flourished in Russia, I think for the most part thanks to fatalism, which to this day remains as one of the principle characteristics of the Russian mentality. Sink or swim – it is very much our thing, even if we are talking about life and death. The Duelist is precisely about this. Facebook | 0 |
BOISSEUIL, France — A furious Ducourtioux shouted with his fellow union members as they banged on the plexiglass window of a meeting hall in France. Inside was Manuel Valls, the former Socialist prime minister, who was campaigning for president in this bastion of the French left. A member of France’s oldest trade union, Mr. Ducourtioux, 52, was a stalwart Socialist Party voter who once might have been inside, cheering. But no longer. His hands callused by three decades as a metalworker, Mr. Ducourtioux is angry that the Socialist government has failed to stop French automakers from moving factories outside the country, as manufacturing declines in this decaying region. He said he was at risk of losing his job at an automotive subcontractor. “Mr. Valls knew the situation here,” Mr. Ducourtioux said. “He did nothing. ” France’s presidential election this year is being closely watched as a barometer of European public disaffection, and no party is more visibly out of favor than the governing Socialists. President François Hollande, a Socialist, is so deeply unpopular that he is not running for . Mr. Valls came in second out of seven candidates in a primary of parties on Sunday. With about 31 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Valls trailed the top Benoît Hamon, a former education minister in Mr. Hollande’s government, who took about 36 percent of the votes. More worrisome for the left was that turnout was roughly 50 percent lower than it was in 2011, when the the parties last held a primary. Few analysts believe that any of the Socialists have a real shot at retaining the presidency in the April general election. The collapse of the establishment left in France is hardly a unique phenomenon. Across Europe, populist parties are gaining strength, including in France, while the mainstream left, which played a central role in building modern Europe, is in crisis. From Italy to Poland to Britain and beyond, voters are deserting parties, as leftist politicians struggle to remain relevant in a moment when politics is inflamed by Union anger. “Wherever you look in Europe the Socialists are not doing well, with the exception of Portugal,” said Philippe Marlière, a professor of French and European politics at University College London. He added that the left lacked “a narrative that tries to unite the different sectors of the working class. ” Each country has its distinctive dynamics, but one common theme is the difficulty many mainstream left parties are having in responding to the economic and social dislocation caused by globalization. In Italy, constituencies that used to routinely back the Democratic Party are turning to the new Five Star Movement, which is Euroskeptic and — just as some voters in France are now looking at the National Front. “We have a population cut in half by globalization,” said Thomas Guénolé, a political science professor at Sciences Po in Paris and the author of “Unhappy Globalization,” who sees the winners and losers of globalization as the axis of European politics. A breakdown of voting patterns in the December referendum in Italy, which resulted in the fall of the government, revealed that urban centers, the southern half of the country and young, unemployed workers overwhelmingly rejected the reform measures put forward by Matteo Renzi, then the prime minister. “Those very voters who were traditionally represented by the left in this case, veered to the Five Star Movement,” said Marco Damilano, a political commentator for the newsmagazine L’Espresso. He added that the new party had built on popular anger even though it did not offer answers for the malaise. The coalition of Poland’s two biggest parties, the Democratic Left Alliance and Your Movement, suffered a humiliating defeat in 2015. Not only did the conservatives win an absolute majority in Parliament for the first time since the collapse of communism, but the left garnered so little support that not a single politician represents those interests in Parliament. In Britain, the Labour Party is in tatters with a leader who appeals to activists but has failed to build a coalition. Across Europe, the old Socialist blocs have fractured into smaller parties, partly because their voting bases have changed but also because rampant inequality and the decline of the middle class have created fertile ground for more extreme parties. “On the left they are trying to stand up for their old core group, industrial workers,” said Steve Coulter, who teaches political economy at the London School of Economics. “But then there’s another group on the left, who are trade, L. G. B. T. drinking, bearded hipsters — and that’s the part of their support. ” The result in France is that the National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, “has moved into the old traditionalist, protectionist precincts of the authoritarian left,” Mr. Coulter said. In Limousin, a relatively poor area of central France best known for the succulent beef from its cattle industry, its yellow apples and its elegant Limoges porcelain, these broader economic forces are evident. Mr. Ducourtioux said that he had voted for Mr. Hollande in the last election, but that this time he was looking toward the National Front, although he stopped short of naming it. “You have Trump — who do you think I am going to vote for?” Mr. Ducourtioux said. For years, the regional economy was built on agriculture, manufacturing and small businesses that were subcontractors to larger enterprises like the automakers Renault and Peugeot. And for most of the last 100 years it was a stronghold. The Socialist mayor of Limoges, Alain Rodet, served multiple terms until he was toppled in 2014 by a psychiatrist, Lombertie. He had no government experience and ran as an outsider (although on the eve of the election he became a member of the mainstream conservative party, now known as the Republicans). In those same local elections, National Front candidates won an unprecedented 17 percent of the votes in the first round, a high figure given the leftist traditions of the area, which was the birthplace in 1895 of France’s leading trade union. In a small storefront office, Vincent Gérard, a representative of the National Front in the region, said the party’s growth was telling because the left was so entrenched there. His own story is typical of many people in the region. His small electrical supply business once had five employees but now has two, including himself. “Eighty percent of my clients were industrial, and in five years I lost all of them,” he said. “The markets are no longer local,” he said. “They have gone to Romania, or the Czech Republic, I don’t know exactly. They’re in Europe, but in Eastern Europe. ” Compounding the sense of a changing world, even a modest wave of immigration disturbed many local residents. Beginning about six years ago, a small number of Africans arrived in Limoges, soon followed by bigger numbers of Eastern Europeans. “So, here in our street, we had principally Bulgarians, afterwards Romanians and then Albanians,” Mr. Gérard said. “Why? This I know, because Europe no longer has any borders. ” At the same time, many affluent people began moving to the suburbs for bigger houses and left the city center to older people and newcomers, many of whom were migrants. Mr. Rodet, the mayor who was toppled, said that just weeks before the election, there had been a rumor that an abandoned military base near the center of Limoges would become a home for “3, 000 Kosovars. ” “It was not true, but I did not respond quickly enough,” he said, and by then the idea had gained currency. Not all traditional centrist voters are concerned about immigration or dwindling manufacturing jobs. Alexis Mons, a entrepreneur, has a digital marketing firm, Emakina, which does branding worldwide for companies, many of them high end. His worry is the politicians and citizens who want to turn back the clock and stop the pace of change, so he is looking closely at the policies of Emmanuel Macron, the former economy minister under Mr. Hollande. Mr. Macron is running for president as an independent, favors international trade and is rising in the polls. “You have an old industrial base that is very much intertwined with the political milieu in some fashion,” Mr. Mons said. “All this little world talks to each other, it has its customs, it does business and then a new economy is born, a new economy with with people coming from the internet, and that no one foresaw. ” There are now more than 100 firms just in Limoges, Mr. Mons said, yet few people in the area know about the business park where the companies are. “I have the impression that a good part of the establishment lives wearing the spectacles of the 20th century,” he said. He added that politicians were manipulating the picture so that “in the neighborhoods, there has been a sense of abandonment that pushes people into the arms of the National Front. ” “The world has changed,” he said, “and a certain number of people do not want to see that. ” | 1 |
I’m a fairly big guy — with plenty of mass to soak up alcohol — but I was being particularly careful as I hopped (no pun intended) from brewery to brewery in San Diego. Touring the dozens of worthy beer options in the sprawling, beautiful city requires a car, and I was being conservative with my intake. But this Electric Youth coffee pale ale from Thunderhawk Alements was just too good. I’d never had a coffee beer that tasted so intensely and convincingly of coffee. There was a sweetness to the coffee component that tasted of berries and flowers, juxtaposed with the hoppy, bitter malt of the ale. Even better? A small pour was only $3. Delicious drinks played a significant role during my trip to San Diego, but they certainly weren’t the only thing I enjoyed. You may have already heard of attractions like Balboa Park and the San Diego Zoo, but the city also has great nightlife, scenic cliffside hikes, and boardwalks and beaches as welcoming as you will find anywhere in the country. My challenge: to take it all in as inexpensively as possible. Today, San Diego is the city in the country, but at the turn of the 20th century, its population stood at under 20, 000. That changed after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when the military expanded San Diego’s naval operations, and the city hasn’t stopped growing since. People know about San Diego’s surf breaks, but fewer know that it has the largest concentration of military personnel in the nation, with around 100, 000 members. I drove into town from the Salton Sea in my $ rental from Hertz as the last leg of a fun Southern California road trip. I headed to the Lafayette Hotel, on El Cajon Boulevard — a good location, right near the border of University Heights and North Park. My room on the second floor of the 1946 building was adequate, and a good deal for the $85 per night I paid through Hotels. com — room rates on the hotel’s website range from $109 to $289 per night. My experience was marred only by the fact that I left my coat in the room — completely my fault, but my attempts to get assistance by calling and emailing were met with rather strong indifference by the staff. The Red Fox Steakhouse and Piano Bar, parts of which supposedly date back to a 1600s English inn, was a stone’s throw from my room. I arrived to the strains of live music and sat in a booth, eyes adjusting to the dim light and taking in the cozy, homey atmosphere. I would pass on the slightly mealy crab cakes ($9. 95) but the dinner salad with garlic toast ($5. 75) was a winner. Two men were loudly discussing politics at the bar (this was my first trip) and I got roped into the conversation. “I didn’t vote,” Chuck Hogan, 33, said. “But I’m a conservative. If I had, I would have voted for Trump. ” I asked him why, and he replied: “Hillary would have just been more of the same. At least this will be different. ” Our waitress, a immigrant from Russia, chimed in. She said that she, too, supported President Trump. She spent years legally going through the immigration process, she said, and didn’t like that others didn’t play by the rules. Not all of my encounters were quite so political — most were just friendly and transactional. I stopped by the Home Brewing Co. one evening right as they were closing (many small breweries with tasting rooms close early — as early as 6 p. m.) but a very nice guy named Scott gave me a couple of tastes on the house. One, a 10 percent alcohol porter, was heady and . The other, an American pale ale called Pun Killer, tasted wonderfully of citrus and mango. I stopped for a decent plate of pulled pork ($9. 99) at the BBQ Pit on University Avenue before continuing on to ChuckAlek Biergarten, a spot in North Park with a great outdoor area. I tried the 1850 Runner brown porter and the Moonstomper Oat IPA (the names of these beers, like race horses, are half the fun). The tasters cost only $2. The glut of beer and breweries is almost overwhelming — seemingly every other storefront in North Park is an independent microbrewery or a brewing supply store. And that’s to say nothing of the Miramar neighborhood, or the famed “hops highway,” a stretch of Route 78 just north of the city with a large concentration of brewers. San Diego is considered by some to be the beer capital of America, and is “clearly one of the best brewing communities in the world,” said Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association. “The city came on board with a tourism grant for the San Diego Brewers Guild that helped with promotion,” Mr. Gatza added, offering a theory as to why the beer community in San Diego, in particular, was able to take hold and flourish. And there is something for everyone: Bottlecraft is a curator of bottled craft brews. Young Hickory combines the ethoses of a coffee shop and brewery — a room of people on laptops, half consuming caffeine, half enjoying one of varieties of craft beer. Even the most casual of burger joints, like Crazee Burger, have a healthy selection of craft beer on tap. One does not live by drink alone, however, and so I headed to Pacific Beach on a different day to walk along the ocean and take in the sea air. After enjoying a brisk walk and inhaling an unreasonably large breakfast burrito stuffed with egg, bacon, cheese, potato and hot sauce from Kono’s Cafe, I struck up a conversation with Dennis Miller, who has lived in Pacific Beach for over 50 years. I first noticed his parrot, actually — a Amazon named Dry Rot, which was rescued from an abandoned ship. “See that place right there?” Mr. Miller asked me, pointing to the 710 Beach Club, a live music venue next to Kono’s. “I used to have a card room right there. ” He explained that gambling and “card rooms” were once popular in San Diego but that few now remained. We walked out toward the ocean on Crystal Pier, a structure dating back nearly 100 years that now holds vacation cottages. The day was gorgeous, and a light breeze ruffled Dry Rot’s thinning feathers (the parrot is over 30 years old). Mr. Miller told me stories about rabbit hunting in the Clairemont neighborhood and how local kids used to go abalone fishing off the coast. The natural beauty and casual atmosphere of San Diego isn’t strictly relegated to the beaches. Point Loma extends down like an elephant’s trunk from Sunset Cliffs and stretches south, hugging San Diego Bay and a large naval supply center. At the tip of the appendage is the Cabrillo National Monument ($10 admission per car, or $5 for bicycles) and Old Point Loma Lighthouse, built in 1854. I recommend walking around and taking in the incredible views of downtown and other sights, like nearby Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, which is magnificent. The real treat, though, is heading down to the Point Loma tide pools and exploring these hiking along the cliffs and taking in the Pacific vistas. Entire ecosystems flourish in the tide pools — and you can get right up next to them. You might see kelp, mussels, abalone, chitons and sandcastle worms. (It’s a great activity if you have curious children in tow.) After a semirigorous cliffside walk, it was time to make up those expended calories with more drinks. I met up with my cousin Adrienne, a fashion designer who grew up in the area. We headed to the downtown tasting room of Stone Brewing, an Escondido brewery that may not have invented the craft IPA, but has done has much as anyone to promulgate the bitter, West Coast style. We shared a flight of four beers at $3 apiece the Tangerine Express IPA was particularly good. We walked up through the Gaslamp Quarter, a popular nightlife district — if not my cousin’s favorite, owing to “aggressive men who don’t respect women. ” We settled on Resident Brewing, inside of the restaurant the Local, for $2 pours of a tasty blonde ale and a nice saison before grabbing an Aero Mule (a take on a Moscow Mule, $6. 50) at the charming and divey Aero Club in Middletown. One of my favorite beer selections was at Border X Brewing, a Mexican craft beer specialist in Barrio Logan. Driving down Logan Avenue toward the brewery, you will see huge colorful murals in Chicano Park one, from the 1970s, reads, “Varrio si, yonkes no!” (Neighborhood yes, junkyards no!) Border X has pours for a mere $1. 50 and an happy hour on Tuesday with discounts on some pints. I recommend the Blood Saison, made with hibiscus and agave — it’s sweet, tart and refreshing. The Abuelita’s chocolate stout, vaguely spicy and tasting of cinnamon, is good, too. A perfect chaser (or appetizer) is an order of tacos al vapor (steamed tacos) from the restaurant Salud across the street (three for $6 on Thursdays). Believe it or not, I haven’t been able to account for all of the excellent beers I sampled on this trip. Mikkeller, Alesmith, the list goes on and on. I recommend heading to San Diego to experience it yourself — taking occasional breaks now and then to enjoy the natural beauty and a pristine ocean view or two, of course. | 1 |
By Les Visible on November 1, 2016 Reflections in a Petri Dish — Nov 1, 2016 Dog Poet Transmitting……. It’s one week until the ‘to be hijacked elections’ are supposed to take place. It stands to reason that at some point in the next seven days a bombshell, or several bombshells, are going to go off in the American political landscape. I do not know what these will be composed of. One of them will certainly have to do with the emails but I don’t know what shape it will take. I suspect that the Trump camp has got some things up its sleeve but they want to wait until no amount of following spin will possess the amount of time necessary to undo the damage. I feel pretty confident saying this. I have this strong impression that the Trumpsters are sitting on some seriously damaging information. You’ve got to love The Apocalypse in times like these. The latest news is that Huma Abedin is seeking immunity . How real all of this is , I don’t know. When I read things like Hillary has a predilection for underage girls, it makes me scratch my head. It isn’t like I put anything past these people but sometimes I get the feeling people are reaching and more than willing to believe anything whether it is true or not. I’m not saying it isn’t true, what I am saying is that, “I don’t know.” Still, there is a lot of chatter going on about the emails and sundry. Suffice to say that we can be certain there is a lot more known by those in a position to know than we are being told. I have been feeling a certain uneasiness for two days now. I’ve no idea what it pertains to but I feel sure something is about to rise to the surface and it is going to be significant. There are so many agendas at work and many who are employed by our oppressors and abusers have had it with the Satanic behavior of their employers. I don’t know what we are looking at but it’s “hour has come round at last.” We are definitely living in interesting times. There are so many ways to look at the state of the world in this period. If you are a Satanist, a materialist, an atheist, a fear driven entity, or any permutation of similar perspectives, it is either, as Dickens put it; “the best of times and the worst of times.” On the surface it certainly has the appearance of being a time for plunder or flight. On the one hand, those orchestrating or promoting the chaos are confident that they can steal and murder at will, under the darkness being generated for that purpose. On the other hand, certainly some amount of people are looking for a place to weather the sum of their fears. They want some place to hide. I don’t know where that might be. Maybe they do. Many are already in that bunker mentality with all those guns and footstuffs. Certainly the agents of the dark side have got their boltholes put together. None of these folk have a plan for anything Lady Nature may come up with. For myself, I know that the almighty is screening a movie that was written out of the combined destinies of every life form on the planet. This has been going on for such a length of time that no human mind can measure or comprehend the extent of it. No human mind can comprehend the extent of one go round of Yugas; a Kalpa, whut is that? It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks it is. All that matters is what it really is and the essence and detail of that has been long known to those so informed of the warf and woof of the process. It was all delineated back in the time of the Rishis. The nature of existence and the protocol of existence were all mapped out and remain to the present for any inquiring mind to peruse at their leisure. Of course there are and will be many arguments to the contrary. The separated human mind is capable of endless arguments, depending of what that separated mind wants to realize out of it. It is of no importance to me what others wish to believe. All that is important to me is what is true. I make no claims to be in possession of this information. What I can say is that I have been convinced of the divine architecture of existence and it is only important for me to recognize this and seek to align myself with it. Experience has proven to me that when I go along with the inner voice and rely on the certitude of the presence of the ineffable, things go well for me. When I rely on my own imperfect awareness of circumstance then I find out what is what and what is not. It is never an easy thing to talk about what one only has a partial understanding of. It is next to impossible to discuss the ineffable when it exists forever beyond the parameter of words. This is the telling argument for Faith. “Faith is the substance of things unseen.” We are here to find ourselves and nothing more. Surely we can give our time and attention to all manner of pointless exercises and some of them have a long enough shelf life as to seem convincing to many. The evidence of the life successes of those who have prospered in the material world stand as examples for the ambitious and those who believe that, “he who dies with the most toys wins.” This is certainly not true. It wouldn’t even be true if there were no invisible hierarchy or worlds beyond this one. If you are dead forever then what is the point of the toys? The good and bad news is that this is not a one time event; life on this Earth. The cyclicity of Nature is consistent in all of its productions and an unwavering theme of justice and balance runs through the whole. Richard Dawkins can roll out all of his specious arguments, as can the rest of those whose primary intention is to kill our faith, or provide justifications for bad behavior, as is the motive behind the machinations of all those Tribe representatives, who work to bring about the managed chaos that is the ongoing game plan of their dark master. If it gets intense or seems hopeless at times, this is all permitted for the purpose of seeing what we will do in such moments. The witness watches and the actors perform. Strive always to keep the goal uppermost in your mind. The bumps and bruises, the treacheries and disappointments of this world are temporary. The possibilities and potential are everlasting. You will become the sum total of your investments. You will be representative and emblematic of what you put your Love and industry into. It matters not if it took you all this time to find out what the right road was. It matters not if you made a passel of mistakes in your time of ignorance. I am living proof that redemption awaits, without respite, for so long as you remain here and the opportunity to try again, should you fail and fail and fail, will always be there. You can make remarkable strides right from the point at which you sit in this moment. You can rouse yourself with an optimism that you may have not previously believed to exist. Extreme measures of physical effort are not required of you. We are talking about mental work and the ability to stand guard at the gateway of the mind. Anyone who has attempted this has discovered that it is not easy. This is why people chant. This is why people seek to pray without ceasing. This is why people attempt to practice the presence of God. All the many disciplines are for this single purpose. My version is to ‘cast out thought’. Then what is permanent in the mind, prior to all thought, will reveal itself given a consistency of effort in this respect. Then… in the emptiness of that place, I get to say, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” over and over and over. For each of us the time required will vary. You have to be equal to what is necessary for you. Ultimately there is only one thing you need to remember; if you do not quit, you cannot fail. It doesn’t matter what Hillary does or what Trump does or all those thousands of people who pass you by in the supermarkets and department stores, on the sidewalks and in the park, on the highway in their cars, or who populate the astral plane when you dream. It only matters what you do and which, of all the desires that come and go in your being, is uppermost in your mind. Once you can reduce the chatter of all those unimportant desires, the power invested in your single greatest desire will increase to impressive proportions. Once you can concentrate so that all other thought is excluded from your focus, you can accomplish amazing results. ‘Concentration is the secret of the magical art’…. “All magic lies in the will.” I am not here to promote magical enterprise. My understanding of and application of this dynamic is much different than the common understanding of the medium which, works equally for good or ill, depending on the intention of the practitioner. My employment of magic- should that even be the correct term- is to come into the presence of the ineffable and nothing else. So… I suppose it wouldn’t be magic really but… the results… should one succeed, could certainly be called magical. End Transmission……. | 0 |
In an extraordinary coincidence, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D. .) announced the release of her new book This Fight Is Our Fight Tuesday, the same day she gave the remarks about General Jeff Sessions which led the presiding officer of the senate to rule her out of order and senators to vote to restrict her speaking privileges in the Sessions debate. [The hardcover of the book and its Kindle version, along woth two versions of her previous book A Fighting Chance, now hold the top four slots in Amazon’s Congressional Bestsellers List. Timeline of Feb. 7 events: 3:09 p. m.: Warren’s publisher Henry Holt retweeted out the news about the book and added that it would release the book April 18. Just announced! Elizabeth Warren’s new book, THIS FIGHT IS OUR FIGHT, is on April 18th. https: . — Henry Holt (@HenryHolt) February 7, 2017, 4:40 p. m.: Warren posted about the book on her campaign’s Facebook page: Washington works great for the rich and the powerful, but it’s not working for everyone else. And it’s not because of some inevitable force of nature, like gravity — it’s because of decades of deliberate policy choices to help those at the top. Our middle class is on the ropes, and Donald Trump is looking to deliver the knockout punch. At this moment in history, it’s time to fight back. That’s why I’m glad to announce that my 11th book, This Fight is Our Fight, will be out in April. 6:57 p. m.: Warren began her remarks regarding Jeff Sessions, then a Republican senator from Alabama, and his pending confirmation to lead the Department of Justice. Roughly 15 minutes into her speech, presiding officer Sen. Steven Daines (R. .) warned Warren that when she quoted Sen. Edward Kennedy saying in 1986 that Sessions was a “disgrace to the Justice Department,” she was in violation of Senate Rule XIX. The rule forbids senators demeaning the character of fellow senators, regardless of whether they are speaking in their voice or quoting someone else. After Daines warned Warren about her referring to Sessions as a disgrace, the Massachusetts senator began to read from a letter from Coretta Scott King. In the 1986 letter, King wrote that Sessions used his power as a federal prosecutor to keep black citizens from voting. 7:46 p. m.: Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R. .) made a point of order that Warren had violated Rule XIX, which Daines agreed to, but Warren appealed the ruling to the whole Senate. 7:47 p. m.: Daines ordered Warren to take her seat. 8:01 p. m.: McConnell called senators to the floor. 8:42 p. m.: Senators voted to sustain the ruling of the chair that Warren violated Rule XIX. 9:32 p. m.: Senators voted to restrict Warren from rejoining the debate over the Sessions confirmation. 9:50 p. m.: Warren called into MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show. 10:52 p. m.: On her official Senate Facebook page, Warren posted: “During the debate on whether to make Jeff Sessions the next Attorney General, I tried to read a letter from Coretta Scott King on the floor of the Senate. The letter, from 30 years ago, urged the Senate to reject the nomination of Jeff Sessions to a federal judgeship. The Republicans took away my right to read this letter on the floor — so I’m right outside, reading it now. ” Then, she read the letter on Facebook Live. 11:06 p. m.: Elizabeth for Massachusetts sent out a fundraising email with her version of what happened on the Senate floor and a text of the King letter. 11:19 p. m.: Warren called into CNN Tonight host Don Lemon. The next day, Henry Holt retweeted its own tweet that kicked off the January launch of its own Coretta Scott King book, My Life, My Love, My Legacy, which featured the very same letter Warren read from the Senate floor. Seems King and Warren share a publisher Henry Holt is an imprint of MacMillan, King’s publisher. Coretta Scott King’s writings resonated as her 1986 letter to Congress . Read it here: https: . @washingtonpost pic. twitter. — Henry Holt (@HenryHolt) January 11, 2017, Then, in case somebody missed the point, Henry Holt retweeted a post from the Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe, Arizona: She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, #ShePersisted. pic. twitter. — Changing Hands (@changinghands) February 8, 2017, | 1 |
By Kalee Brown
While I was at university, many of my peers would take Adderall, a drug commonly used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (A.D.H.D.), to help them study or maintain focus while writing an exam. It was somewhat of a social norm and no one seemed to care why because it was so popular; however, I believe it is a clear representation of the social and academic pressures imposed on children to be “successful.”
It also begs the question: How are so many kids gaining access to Adderall? Author and journalist Alan Schwarz explains that American children are not only severely over-diagnosed with A.D.H.D., but also frighteningly under-educated on the drugs they’re being prescribed, so they end up selling the pills instead of taking them. Well-known for his investigative reporting on how Big Pharma manufactured the “A.D.H.D. Nation” through advertising and doctor bribery, Schwarz recently published his book A.D.H.D. Nation using a term he coined to describe the widespread mishandling and misdiagnosis of the disorder.
How A.D.H.D. Became An Over-Diagnosed Disorder According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 11% of children between the ages of 4 and 17 have been diagnosed with A.D.H.D. as of 2011. However, if you ask the American Psychiatric Association, they maintain that even though only 5% of American children suffer from the disorder, the diagnosis is actually given to around 15% of American children. This number has been steadily rising , jumping from 7.8% in 2003 to 9.5% in 2007. Schwarz identifies two main themes involved with A.D.H.D. misdiagnosis: the pharmaceutical industry’s role in pushing A.D.H.D. drugs, and doctors failing to identify the root cause of children’s behavioural issues.
In an interview with Scientific American , Schwarz explains: “Many kids have problems and need help—but those problems in many cases will derive from trauma, anxiety, family discord, poor sleep or diet, bullying at school and more. We must not abandon them. We must help. But we must also be more judicious in how we do that, rather than reflexively giving them a diagnosis of what is generally described as a serious, lifelong brain disorder.”
Big Pharma’s Role in Widespread A.D.H.D. Misdiagnosis It’s no secret that pharmaceutical companies essentially buy out the medical industry. As with many other diseases and disorders, when it comes to A.D.H.D., pharmaceutical companies have paid doctors and researchers to overstate the dangers of A.D.H.D. and the benefits of taking their drugs and understate the negative side effects. It’s easy for people to believe this misguided information when it’s affiliated with well-known universities like Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Many people don’t even realize that these studies are funded by the very companies that profit from the drugs’ sale because that relationship is hidden in small print ( source ). Even though many of the advertisements Big Pharma has released state that A.D.H.D. medication is “ safer than aspirin ,” these drugs can have significant side effects and are actually considered to be within the same class as morphine and oxycodone due to high risk of abuse and addiction. You can’t just blame all doctors, either; many of them genuinely believe they’re helping these children because of the information they’ve been given in these studies and by Big Pharma.
Big Pharma creates advertisements for A.D.H.D. drugs that are specifically targeted at parents, describing how these drugs can improve test scores and behaviour at home, among other false claims. One of the most controversial ones was a 2009 ad for Intuniv, Shire’s A.D.H.D. treatment, which included a child in a monster costume taking off his terrifying mask to reveal his calm, smiling self with a text reading, “There’s a great kid in there.” The FDA has stepped in multiple times, sending pharmaceutical companies warning letters or even forcing them to take down their ads because they are false, misleading, and/or exaggerate the effects of their drugs ( source ).
The following New York Times video was created by Schwarz and Poh Si Teng:
What Is A.D.H.D. and Is It Even Real? If brain scans are performed on people with A.D.H.D., there are clear structural differences; however, the majority of A.D.H.D. diagnoses are confirmed by observation, and often not even by a doctor. Parents or school teachers are typically responsible for observing a child’s actions, and if they fit the “criteria” for A.D.H.D., doctors confirm the diagnosis and hand them a prescription. Instead of getting to the root of these children’s “attention deficit,” they are told they have a medical condition that can only be fixed with medication. This is not only unethical, but also clearly damaging to a child’s self esteem. Many of these kids could simply be uninterested in the subject matter, suffering from some sort of emotional trauma, or even have heightened creativity and energy!
Many doctors question the legitimacy of A.D.H.D. in general and whether or not it should be classified as a mental disorder. This is largely because the definition of this and similar disorders is usually heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. American psychologist Lisa Cosgrove and others investigated financial ties between the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) panel members and the pharmaceutical industry. Their findings showed that, of the 170 DSM panel members, 95 (56%) had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry and 100% of the members of the panels on ‘mood disorders’ and ‘schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders’ had financial ties to drug companies (read our article about it here ).
Neurologist Richard Saul spent his career examining patients who struggle with short attention spans and difficulty focusing. His extensive experience has led him to believe that A.D.H.D. isn’t actually a disorder, but rather an umbrella of symptoms that shouldn’t be considered a disease. Thus, Saul believes it shouldn’t be listed as a separate disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual. You can read more about his opinion in our article here .
No matter what your stance on A.D.H.D. is, it is clear that too many children are being diagnosed with it and handed prescriptions without proper medical evaluations. If you or a loved one has just been diagnosed with A.D.H.D., I suggest you do your own research on the subject instead of simply taking drugs for a “mental disorder” that may have been falsely diagnosed.
Source: Collective Evolution
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Free Thought Project – by Claire Bernish
Cannon Ball, N.D. — On Thursday, police from no less than five states sporting full riot gear and armed with heavy lethal and nonlethal weaponry, pepper spray, mace, a number of ATVs, five tanks, two helicopters, and military-equipped humvees showed up to tear down an encampment of Standing Rock Sioux water protectors and supporters armed with … nothing.
Under orders from the now-notorious Morton County Sheriff’s Office, this ridiculously heavy-handed standing army came better prepared to do battle than some actual military units fighting overseas.
But the target of their operation — a group of slightly more than 200 Native American water protectors and supporters opposing construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline — never intended to do battle with the armed, taxpayer-funded, corporate-backed, state-sponsored aggressors.
Reports vary, but no less than 141 people were arrested Thursday, and — according to witnesses — police marked numbers on arrestees’ arms and housed them in cement-floored dog kennels , without any padding, before they were transported as far away as Fargo.
“It goes back to concentration camp days,” asserted Oceti-Sakowin coordinator Mekasi Camp-Horinek, who, along with his mother, was marked and detained in a mesh kennel, reports the Los Angeles Times .
Although Thursday’s incident remained relatively peaceful for some time, with only shouts, chants, and occasional attempts by water protectors to convince this standing army to examine its motives and reconsider, clashes nonetheless broke out — solely because of gratuitous police aggression.
After facing off for a couple hours, these militant cops began closing in on the water protectors to shut down the Treaty of 1851 camp — in reference to the Fort Laramie Treaty of that year, which established a large parcel of land designated exclusively Native American territory not to be disturbed by the U.S. government. Prior to his arrest, Camp-Horinek had established the camp, stating, as cited by Indigenous Rising :
“Today, the Oceti Sakowin has enacted eminent domain on DAPL lands, claiming 1851 treaty rights. This is unceded land. Highway 1806 as of this point is blockaded. We will be occupying this land and staying here until this pipeline is permanently stopped. We need bodies and we need people who are trained in non-violent direct action. We are still staying non-violent and we are still staying peaceful.”
Despite the water protectors’ commitment to nonviolence, the militarized police response went as would be expected — horribly awry.
“A prayer circle of elders, including several women, was interrupted and all were arrested for standing peacefully on the public road,” stated a press release from Indigenous Environment Network. “A tipi was erected in the road and was recklessly dismantled, despite law enforcement statements that they would merely mark the tipi with a yellow ribbon and ask its owners to retrieve it. A group of water protectors was also dragged out of a sweat lodge ceremony erected in the path of the pipeline, thrown to the ground, and arrested.”
Claims to the contrary by Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier aside, Native American and Indigenous water protectors and supporters have refrained from violent acts on the whole, preferring instead peaceful prayer vigils and acts of civil disobedience.
No matter how peacefully the opposition acts, armed defenders of Big Oil interests seem determined to brutalize , disrespect, and generally incite and inflict violence against those who desire unsullied water for generations to come.
In fact, at the beginning of September, a private security firm hired by Energy Transfer Partners, the company responsible for pipeline construction, indiscriminately unleashed vicious attack dogs on water protectors, press, and supporters — for reasons as yet unknown.
During the savage attack, a pregnant woman, young girl, and many others suffered serious dog bites thanks to the ineptitude of the dogs’ handlers. Afterward, a warrant for inciting a riot was issued Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman — for doing her job, filming events as they happened — though charges were subsequently thrown out.
Although ETP and some law enforcement officers defended the barbarous actions of the private security mercenaries, the Guardian now reports that — because the guards lacked proper licensing — they could now face criminal charges. On Wednesday, the Morton County Sheriff’s Office made the determination that “dog handlers were not properly licensed to do security work in the state of North Dakota.”
Bob Frost, owner of Ohio-based Frost Kennels, told the Guardian , “All the proper protocols … were already done. I pulled my guys out the next day because we weren’t there to go to war with these protesters.”
Frost insisted he had cooperated with authorities investigating the incident — but the sheriff’s department disagrees. Seven handlers and dogs were deployed to the scene in early September, allegedly in response to reports of trespassers; but, according to the Guardian , police have only managed to identify two people.
The sheriff’s department claims Frost has not provided necessary information, and unnamed security officials cited in the report said that “there were no intentions of using the dogs or handlers for security work. … However, because of the protest events, the dogs were deployed as a method of trying to keep the protesters under control.”
In a statement cited by the Guardian , Morton County Captain Jay Gruebele said, “Although lists of security employees have been provided, there is no way of confirming whether the list is accurate or if names have been purposely withheld.”
Water protectors, in the meantime, are left to deal with absurdly disproportionate state violence — and the altogether unacceptable, disrespectful, and demeaning insult of being relegated to dog kennels after being arrested for exercising their rights.
As Lakota Country Times editor Brandon Ecoffey wrote in an editorial Thursday,
“Over the course of the last several months the abuse of detainees by Morton County Law Enforcement has overstepped every boundary guaranteed by the American constitution. Water protectors have been seen being bound and hooded by police. People are being stripped searched and abused within their jail for misdemeanor crimes. And police have employed the use of mass surveillance through drones on the protector camps. This isn’t a war zone this is North Dakota.” Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/like-concentration-camp-police-marking-dapl-protesters-numbers-locking-dog-kennels/#6bMhpGeg5Ggp5MgG.99 Share this: | 0 |
RIO DE JANEIRO — Maya DiRado saved her best race for last, winning the backstroke in her final race before retiring to start a job with a management consulting firm in Atlanta. DiRado trailed Hungary’s Katinka Hosszu for the first 150 meters. Swimming next to Hosszu in the third lane, DiRado caught Hosszu with less than 25 meters left and her by of a second. DiRado, 23, was timed in 2 minutes 5. 99 seconds. Hilary Caldwell of Canada placed third in 2:07. 54. The duel between DiRado and Hosszu pitted two of the most successful swimmers of this Olympics. DiRado finished with two golds, one silver and a bronze. Hosszu, 27, who failed to win a medal of any color in her first three Games, collected three golds to go with her silver. The final was missing the holder and defending champion, Missy Franklin, and the reigning world champion, Emily Seebohm, as neither advanced past the semifinals. DiRado was in Franklin’s semifinal heat on Thursday, and when she saw the times on the scoreboard, she swam over to a tearful Franklin and consoled her. DiRado said she had told Franklin that she was an amazing teammate and that the United States team loved her no less because she failed to make the final. The gesture meant the world to Franklin, who choked up as she said she would be rooting hard for her in the final. “For her to support me in the way she has is so incredible,” Franklin said. Hosszu said she was pleased with her medal haul. “Honestly, I’m superexcited,” she said. “This Olympics was a good one for me. ” It was dreamlike for DiRado, who finished second behind Hosszu in the 400 I. M. and placed third in the 200 I. M. also won by Hosszu. Her other gold came in the 4x200 freestyle relay, where DiRado took the place of a struggling Franklin. DiRado considered the backstroke event her “fun third event. ” She looked shocked when she glanced at her time at the end of the final and saw a “1” next to her name. “The emotions definitely came out as soon as I finished,” DiRado said. And she is done. To end her career with an Olympic gold medal, DiRado said, “is the perfect way to go out. ” | 1 |
Evil Russian Propaganda From The Evil Russian Invaders By Craig Murray
" TruePublica " - If you would like to listen to some evil Russian propaganda, here is my new interview on Sputnik News .
The BBC World Service was founded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and funded by them directly for six decades, until a cosmetic change last year. Its specific purpose is to spread British values and the British view of the world abroad. It specifically, on its dozens of different national services, gives an opportunity to dissident voices who cannot get on their mainstream media. The Americans spend hundreds of millions annually on outfits like RFE/RL to do the same. Yet when the Russians do precisely the same thing on a much smaller scale, for example by enabling you to listen to me, this is portrayed as evil propaganda.
Fortunately we have the Henry Jackson Society to defend you from it. The Henry Jackson Society, supported by Liam Fox, Jim Murphy and pretty well every other right wing enthusiast you can name, is of course a great believer in free markets. And its sense of the market has detected that its old product of a constant stream of Islamophobia is becoming dated, and currently buyers want Russophobia. Whatever your phobia, the Henry Jackson Society will have some to sell you, so here we have their new Manual of Russophobia .
Written by Dr Andrew Foxall, Director of the Henry Jackson Societys so-called Centre for Russian Studies, has by brilliant research exposed the fact that Jeremy Corbyn, Seumas Milne, Tommy Sheridan and Colin Fox have all appeared on Russia Today television. And that a tiny group of left wingers I have never heard of once met in a pub with some Russian nationalists from the Ukraine. Funniest of all is the contention that CND is funded by the Russians.
Given that the Henry Jackson Society is, and always has been, financed by CIA money laundered through American New World Order supporting private foundations, this is rather amusing. This pathetically thin hate manual is now on the desk of every Conservative and New Labour Progress Group MP.
It is of course no coincidence that the overt security service operations operate in close co-ordination with the supposedly covert ones. The same day that the Henry Jackson Society paper was released, the head of MI5 gave an interview to the Guardian about the Russian threat. The Russians are not just coming, they are here! You cant see them because they are inside your laptop, where the Russian government apparently want to steal all your secrets. Our security services dont like the competition. That is their job.
Apparently the Russians are out to steal Britains industrial secrets, like how the Nissan Qasghqai is built or how the Chinese and French build Hinkley Point. I hope they dont get the blueprints of the new Dyson. Andrew Parker has of course to work hard as MI5 to find a new enemy. While he has yet again repeated the ludicrous claim that there are 3,000 Islamic terrorists in the UK, he must realise people will query the low productivity of these terrorists when it comes to killing anybody.
Russophobia has of course peaked in the US with Clintons claims that it is Russia which is revealing her gross corruption and all her opponents are servants of Russia. She wants to face down Russia in Syria, in order to give it to the Islamic terrorists of whom Andrew Parker worries we have 3,000 in the UK. Clintons claims of Russian involvement in hacking her entourage are totally unfounded, hence the lack of evidence. I am however surprised there have been no serious attempts to fabricate some.
Who benefits from this ratcheting up of anti-Russian rhetoric to hotter than cold war levels? Why the armaments and security industries, of course. Expect more donations to politicians and their foundations, and more pesky corruption investigations to be dropped by prosecuting authorities.
The truth is that Russia is not our enemy. There is no chance that Russia will attack the UK or US. It has never happened and it never will. Nor is it remotely likely that Russia will attack any EU member state. The only thing that can make such a contingency even a 0.1% possibility, is the continuing gross anti-Russian rhetoric and propaganda and continued forward stationing of NATO assets. History from WWI to the Gulf shows that military build-up can in itself cause conflict.
The danger to the world is us.
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was a British Ambassador from August 2002 to October 2004. Murray complained to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in November 2002, 2003 and in June 2004 that intelligence linking the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to al-Qaeda was unreliable, immoral and illegal, as it was thought to have been obtained through torture. For that the British government sacked him. | 0 |
Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said President Donald Trump’s tweet about a good government shutdown means he was willing “to think outside the box and do things differently” in order to “ . ” Mulvaney said, “I think the president is frustrated that the process in Washington is broken. What we just did this week was fine and passable but not ideal. The appropriations, the spending process, Congress using the power of the purse has been broken here in Washington for more than 10 years. And I think a good shutdown would be one that could help fix that. It’s part of that overall mentality about Washington, D. C.. This president is willing to think outside the box and do things differently around here in order to change Washington. And if that comes to a shutdown in September, so be it. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
Because the mission is military.
Not energy, agriculture, etc. | 0 |
(AFP) UNITED NATIONS, United States — US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power on Friday warned that cutting US funding to the United Nations would be “extremely detrimental” to American interests, one week before Donald Trump’s administration takes office. [Addressing her final news conference, Power told reporters that “countries like Russia and China” would benefit from Washington’s reduced standing at the United Nations if funding were withdrawn. “We lead the world, in part, by leading at the UN,” said Power, who is stepping down next week after four years as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations. “If we were to tie our hands behind our back or strip this organization of programming” to support peace mediation or humanitarian work, “this would be extremely detrimental to US interests,” she said. Power spoke after a bill was introduced in the US Senate that would slash all US funding to the United Nations until a Security Council resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlements is repealed. The United States refrained from using its veto to block the resolution and instead abstained, allowing the measure to pass by a vote of in the council, triggering a furious response from Israel. Power said Israel would not benefit if there is “less US leadership” at the UN as a result of a funding cut, citing a string of changes the Obama administration has supported. Much of Power’s parting words were in defense of US engagement at the United Nations, saying that while the “UN system is flawed” with a bloated bureaucracy, there is a need for a global body to pool common efforts. “The United States needs the UN,” Power said. “The UN goes to places that the US will not go,” she added, pointing to peace missions in Mali and South Sudan, where African troops are taking the lead. “If there’s less US leadership at the UN, it will be other countries that step in to fill the void,” many of which do not share the US view on fighting terrorism or advancing human rights, she noted. Power also warned the incoming Trump administration that it would be “very wise” to preserve the Iran nuclear deal that the has vowed to scrap. The United States is by far the UN’s biggest financial contributor, providing 22 percent of its operating budget and funding 28% of peacekeeping missions, which currently cost $8 billion annually. Trump, who will take office on January 20, has dismissed the United Nations as “just a club for people to get together and have a good time. ” After the council voted to demand an end to Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Trump warned on Twitter: “As to the UN, things will be different after Jan. 20th. ” Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike fumed over the UN’s reprimand of Israel. The US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly last week to condemn the resolution, noting that the Obama administration’s refusal to use its veto power “undermined” Washington’s position of shielding its closest Middle East ally at the United Nations. The Safeguard Israel Act of 2017 — introduced by Senate Republicans Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham — aims to push back against the UN by threatening to pull billions of dollars in funding. It was not immediately clear whether the bill would garner major support. | 1 |
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter The healing art of Reiki has been practiced and taught around the world for many years, with many believing its origins to be as ancient as those of humans themselves. With scientific research now emerging attesting to the ability of human thoughts, emotions, and intentions to affect the physical material world, an increasing number of scientists, quantum physicists in particular, are stressing the importance of studying factors associated with consciousness and its relation to our physical world. One of these factors is human intention. Reiki essentially uses human intention to heal another person’s ailments. Practitioners usually place their hands on the patient in order to channel energy into them by means of touch. It can be roughly defined as using compassionate mental action and physical touch, energy healing, shamanic healing, nonlocal healing, or quantum touch. The popularity of this practice is exemplified by the fact that, as of 2000, there were more ‘distant healers’ in the United Kingdom than therapists practicing any other form of complementary or alternative medicine, and the same goes for the United States. ( Barnes PM, Powell-Griner E, McFann K, Nahin RL. Complementary and alternative medicine use among adults: United States, 2002 . Adv Data. 2004. May 27;( 343 ):1–19. [ PubMed ]) Quantum physicists have been advocating for the effectiveness of such treatment for some time. For example, Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory — winning him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 — stated that he “regards consciousness as fundamental” “ and derivative from consciousness.” He also maintained t hat “everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Distant healing involves factors associated with consciousness. Eugene Wigner, a well-known theoretical physicist and mathematician, emphasized that “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Richard C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, takes this idea even further in his article “The Mental Universe,” published in the journal Nature : A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial—mental and spiritual. With so much evidence to support these ideas and with so many studies published on the subject, that this field remains the subject of ridicule to many in mainstream academia is simply baffling. A study published in The American Journal of Chinese Medicine, as seen in the US National Library of Medicine, demonstrated that a women with special abilities was and is able to accelerate the germination of specific seeds for the purposes of developing a more robust seed stock. The study determined that this woman could induce plant seeds to grow shoots and roots several cm long within 20 min using mentally projected qi energy. For a selected list of downloadable peer-reviewed journal articles reporting studies of psychic phenomena, mostly published in the 21st century, you can click HERE . Distant Healing Intention Therapies (DHI): An Overview of the Scientific Evidence Did you know that clinical trials testing the effectiveness of DHI have been being conducted since the mid-1990s? Serious scientific inquiry has been ongoing and continues to this day, with both systematic and meta-analytic reviews being published, many of which have concluded that, with nearly half of all the published studies on this topic exhibiting statistically significant results, further study is desperately needed. Your Inbox Will Never Be The Same Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. A number of studies involving DHI experiments using simple life forms and animals have also reported statistically significant results, which have been seen under randomized and blinded conditions which include enzymes, fungi, yeast, bacteria, cancer cells, red blood cells, fibroblasts, tendon cells, (tenocytes), and bone cells. Distant Mental Interactions With Living Systems (DMILS) Hundreds of experiments in this area, which is closely related to DHI, have been conducted as well. DMILS is not concerned with healing, but rather with searching for measurable empirical evidence that A can affect B in any way, rather than if A can heal B. These studies investigate the influence of A’s intention on B’s physiological state — a process referred to as “remote intention.” They further examine the influence of A’s attention on B’s physiological state while A gazes at B over a 1 way video link, called “remote staring.” Last but not least, they study the influence of A’s intention on B’s attention or behaviour, which is referred to as “remote helping.” The effects of distant mental interactions are measured using electrodermal activity, heart rate, blood volume pulse, and electrocortical activity (EEG electrodermal activity, heart rate, blood volume pulse, brain blood oxygenation [MRI], and electrogastrogram [EGG]). These studies have yielded remarkable results which have since been successfully repeated in laboratories around the world. An Overview Of The Scientific Evidence DHI is very popular as an alternative healing method, but scientific experiments thus far have failed to produce clinical results which can be reliably assessed. As Dean Radin ( Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences ) argues: The contradiction between persistent popularity and lack of clinical effectiveness may be due on the one hand to some healers, in some contexts, who do seem to produce remarkable outcomes, and on the other hand by conventional RCT protocols that may be incompatible with the nature of DHI phenomena. Tools must match the requirements of the subject, and if the right tools are not available, then new ones must be devised. In other words, it is inadvisable to use a sledgehammer to study the surface structure of a soap bubble. On the other hand, DMILS experiments, which relate to distant healing, more clearly indicate the existence of genuine interactions between people at a distance. As Dean Radin explains, this offers up some challenges: But the proof-of-principle offered by DMILS experiments more clearly indicates the existence of genuine interactions between distant people. This presents us with an evidence-based enigma worthy of serious consideration. However, for many researchers, the mere concept of distant healing continues to elicit significant resistance for two main reasons. The first is based on the assumption that “action at a distance” is impossible because it violates one or more physical or biological laws. The second is founded on the neuroscience-based assumption that the mind is identical to the brain, in which case it does not make sense to propose that the brain activity we call “healing intention” can interact with anything outside of the brain’s own body ( source ) While it’s quite clear that healing at a distance hasn’t yet been proven scientifically, DMILS effects do indeed manifest shifts in physiological measures, lending credibility to reports of distant healing being successful. Dean Radin himself maintains that “the implications of DHI for basic science epistemology and ontology and for pragmatic efforts to improve health healing are vast, deep, and perennially intriguing.” A Few Other Strange Reported Anomalies I find it interesting to consider how much scientific investigation into ‘psychic’ phenomena has been conducted by the Department of Defense. In the United States, for example, they had project Star Gate, which lasted more than two decades before being unexpectedly shut down. ( source ) One of the most popular projects within that program was remote viewing. According to a declassified report which has since been published in multiple journals: To summarize, over the years, the back-and-forth criticism of protocols, refinement of methods, and successful replication of this type of remote viewing in independent laboratories has yielded considerable scientific evidence for the reality of the [remote viewing] phenomenon. Adding to the strength of these results was the discovery that a growing number of individuals could be found to demonstrate high-quality remote viewing, often to their own surprise. . . . The development of this capability at SRI has evolved to the point where visiting CIA personnel with no previous exposure to such concepts have performed well under controlled laboratory conditions. ( source ) I just want to make it clear that psychic phenomena have been investigated at the highest levels of government, and probably still are. Who knows what information from these programs remains classified? And why do so many mainstream scientists criticize this research when scientists working at the highest levels of government are studying it? This topic has piqued the interest of more than just Western intelligence agencies, as China also actively works to identify individuals with extended human capacities. For example, a paper published in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in September 1981 in the journal Ziran Zazhi (Nature Journal) tilted “Some Experiments on the Transfer of Objects Performed by Unusual Abilities of the Human Body” (Shuhuang et al., 1981) reported that ‘gifted children’ were able to teleport small physical objects from one place to another. ( source ) A publication titled “Exceptional Functions of the Human Body” also makes some extraordinary claims, reporting highly accurate parapsychological effects, including clairvoyance, psychokinetic effects, and more. ( source ) A report published in 2010 by retired research chemist Dong Shen describes an experiment involving mental teleportation of bits of paper out of a sealed plastic film container. Fascinatingly, these methods were taught to others with a success rate of 40 percent. ( source ) “The results of the Chinese p-Teleportation experiments can simply be explained as a human consciousness phenomenon that somehow acts to move or rotate test specimens through a 4th spatial dimension, so that the specimens are able to penetrate the solid walls/barriers of their containers without physically breaching them.” – Eric Davis, Ph.D, FBIS ( source )
Source Used & Suggested Reading: | 0 |
Posted by Pam Lemieux | Oct 30, 2016 | Testimonials | 0 |
After the implants removal, the DNA activation and soul alignment, the release of past life traumas and Karma was a must! I loved Pam and she was amazing at communicating even weeks after sessions if we had questions, so I questioned my body: am I comfortable with Jerry working in my energy field? He called me right after the sessions and even offered a Skype communication if I wanted. He knew that I had done lots of work on myself in past lives, which confirmed to me that he was real, because I was a Tibetan Monk and they spend a life time working on their karma. He is as good as Pam was as a healer.
That same night I had lots of energy, I could not sleep, I felt well. The next 4 days I felt very tired, I could not get enough sleep. Then came the times of the essences and oils. Alexandra and Steven had emailed me and called me to follow up on how I was doing. They truly are amazing at what they do in every ways. The potions were on their way. They hit me like a brick, I went emotional, not grounded and vertiginous. I was able to catch my mind by finding the gratitude for the opportunity that these 3 people, the oils and essences had been given me, I was to be free in a big way, and that to me was worth a couple of weeks of symptoms of emotional, physical and spiritual release. Joelle | 0 |
posted by Eddie A voting machine has been caught on camera casting a ballot for a Democrat after the voter selected a Republican. Donald Trump thinks Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are going to steal the next election. “ I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest ,” he told a campaign rally last week. The mainstream media are trying to portray him as mad, but take a look at this evidence:
This is attempted election theft through manipulation of the computerized voting machines – and it must be stopped. The party in power in a given state controls the programming of the voting machines. When the establishment asked Trump if he would accept the outcome of the election a whole three weeks before the event, it was like asking a sports coach if he thinks the game was refereed fairly before the game is played. And the Democrats are now attempting to cover all bases. They are sueing the RNC over Trump’s election rigging claims, and also suggesting if any evidence of voter fraud does emerge, then it is probably Russia’s fault. Do not believe that voter fraud does not exist. It’s real, the numbers are huge, and it’s undermining true democracy in the United States. We must fight to eradicate it. If you notice any sign if possible voter fraud or election rigging, call the Trump Ballot Security Project toll free on 1-855-245-4634 or email [email protected] source: | 0 |
After the killings in Dallas, David O. Brown, the city’s police chief, became the face of the nation’s shock. At multiple news conferences, he sorted through a jumble of reports, some of them wrong, as he narrated the standoff between his officers and the gunman. But he also offered simple, emotional words: “We’re hurting,” he said on Friday morning, in a moment of shared public grief. His appearances may also have evoked a more personal grief. Just weeks after Chief Brown became the leader of the Dallas Police Department in 2010, his own son fatally shot a police officer and another man before being killed in a confrontation with the police. “My family has not only lost a son, but a fellow police officer and a private citizen lost their lives at the hands of our son,” he said in a statement at the time. “That hurts so deeply I cannot adequately express the sadness I feel inside my heart. ” Since taking over the Dallas department, one of the nation’s largest, Chief Brown, 55, has earned a national reputation as a progressive leader whose top priority is improving relations and reducing distrust between the police department and the city’s minority residents. His efforts began long before 2014, when the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. and the chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York made such initiatives a necessity for many police chiefs. Chief Brown “has been doing this before he had to,” said Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy group. “He recognized what happened, what is going on in the country. ” Chief Brown, who is and a Dallas native, joined the city’s police force in 1983. In a panel discussion with Mr. Wexler’s group in 2014, he said that his 30 years on the force as well as stories told by his grandparents had taught him how, in some neighborhoods, police abuses are remembered for decades. In Dallas, he has invited public scrutiny as police chiefs in few other cities have. While other departments often try to delay the public identification of officers involved in shootings, his department often releases the names. Chief Brown’s main push has been geared toward reducing the use of force by officers in encounters with citizens. And he has had some success. Still, though the overall number of police shootings appears to have dropped substantially on his watch, the circumstances of some — including the fatal shooting of a man holding a screwdriver last year — have continued to draw criticism. Chief Brown has drawn attention for his willingness to question even the most basic tenets of policing — like chasing bad guys under any circumstance. While some departments have put restrictions on car chases — which can end in fatal — Chief Brown began to question whether officers should even give chase on foot in certain instances, said Mr. Wexler, whose organization assisted in the city’s search for a police chief in 2010. Chief Brown’s concern, Mr. Wexler said, was whether such chases increased the risk of shootings by the police. “It’s ironic this madman would pick Dallas, one of the cities that is a leader in reducing shootings,” Mr. Wexler said. A press representative for the City of Dallas said Chief Brown was declining interview requests. Yet Chief Brown’s efforts have left him as a somewhat embattled figure in Dallas. He has fought with the police union over his emphasis on community policing — the use of enforcement strategies — and his willingness to fire officers, dozens of them, often publicly. “Chief Brown thinks that we should clean our own house before we expect others to clean theirs,” said Don Stafford, a retired member of the department who was one of the first black police officers to rise high in the ranks. Chief Brown has been grappling with some grim statistics this year. Crime has ticked up, with the governor offering to send in state troopers. Criticism does not seem to easily faze him. “Chief Vindictive, yadda, yadda, yadda,” he said during an interview in February, dismissing his critics within the department. “I mean that’s the badge of honor right there. ” In the same interview, with the Dallas Observer, he said his goal of orienting the department toward community policing was “worth getting fired over. ” The Dallas department’s national reputation had long been shaped by the events of November 1963. After President Kennedy was assassinated, his killer was gunned down in the basement of Police Headquarters while in custody, under lax security. “This happened in their town and then the guy gets killed in their police station,” Thomas A. Reppetto, a police historian, said in an interview. “It just destroyed the reputation of the department. ” Chief Brown’s efforts have raised the department’s profile while putting it at the forefront of a national debate over how the police can regain the trust of citizens. In Thursday’s attack, the deadliest for law enforcement officers in America since Sept. 11, 2001, he saw further urgency in this debate. “All I know is that this must stop — this divisiveness between our police and our citizens,” he said on Friday. | 1 |
Abby Martin Exposes What Hillary Clinton Really Represents ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. Morning Joe Destroys Corrupt Clinton Foundation (Laughable) “Total Corruption” By VNN on October 28, 2016 'Pay for Play' and 'Quid Pro Quo' 'Shut Down The Foundation'
Inside the Clinton’s Foundation and Personal Gains They are bragging that they can shake down foundation clients, for Bill Clinton money… This is sleazy… Joe Scarborough.
Follow the money. | 0 |
WARSAW — The Polish government will seek the extradition of a who prosecutors say carried out atrocities in 1944 that killed scores of civilians. The family of the man, Michael Karkoc, who entered the United States in 1949 and now lives in a nursing home in Minneapolis, says that he is innocent of the charges and that he has dementia and is not fit to stand trial. In a June 2013 investigation, The Associated Press reported that Mr. Karkoc, then 94, had commanded the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion, which carried out mass killings in villages in eastern Poland and helped suppress the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Mr. Karkoc did not tell the federal authorities in 1949 that he had worked for the legion and, later, for the SS Galician Division, both of which were on a list of organizations whose members were forbidden to enter the United States, The A. P. reported. In a subsequent article in November 2013, The A. P. citing files from the Ukrainian intelligence agency’s archive, reported that a private under Mr. Karkoc’s command testified in 1968 that Mr. Karkoc had ordered an assault on the village of Chlaniow as retribution for the killing of an SS major. The village was razed. In a memoir published in 1995, Mr. Karkoc said he had helped found the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion in 1943, in collaboration with Nazi officers, to fight on behalf of Germany and against the Soviet Union. The A. P.’s articles led to investigations in Germany and Poland. German prosecutors ended their investigation in 2015, saying Mr. Karkoc was unfit to stand trial, but the Polish inquiry continued. In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Robert Janicki, an official with the Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes Against the Polish Nation, said there was “no doubt” that the man living in Minnesota was the same man “who carried out the pacification of the villages in the Lubelskie region in 1944,” referring to Chlaniow and the nearby village of Wladyslawin. More than 40 civilians were killed. Mr. Janicki referred to the man as Michael K. citing Polish privacy laws. “We have also discovered a signature of Michael K. on documents related to the unit from that time,” he said. “Our forensic experts have determined that this is a signature of the man who lives in the States. ” The commission, which is part of the country’s Institute of National Remembrance, a body that has prosecutorial powers and is tasked with investigating and crimes, filed a request on Monday to a court in Lublin for a temporary arrest warrant for the man. The warrant would be the first step toward requesting extradition, Mr. Janicki said. In Washington, Nicole Navas, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said that while the department took “all credible allegations of participation in World War II Nazi crimes very seriously,” it did not comment on extradition requests. The charges carry a potential term of life in prison. Mr. Janicki rejected the argument that prosecuting Mr. Karkoc would be pointless given his age and health. “First of all, age is not a factor when it comes to bringing anyone to justice,” he said. “As for the state of his health, that will be for expert witnesses to determine. ” The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a human rights organization, has criticized Poland for not doing more to track down those who committed atrocities during the Nazi era. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Germans killed 1. 9 million Polish civilians during the war, along with at least three million Polish Jews. Mr. Janicki acknowledged the criticisms, but said it took time to assemble evidence. “It’s incredibly difficult to gather the necessary evidence to put someone on trial today,” he said. “It requires international cooperation, and it takes years to reconcile all the efforts. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth pursuing. ” “Some say that it’s too late to hunt the criminals down, but I don’t think it is,” he added. “The case of Michael K. proves that. Besides, try telling it’s too late to a woman who as a girl was hiding in a field, watching her parents being executed. ” Mr. Karkoc’s son and spokesman, Andriy Karkoc, said in an interview on Tuesday in Minneapolis that his father was not guilty. “My father is an innocent man who never did anything wrong,” Mr. Karkoc said, adding that his father was a victim of German reprisals against Ukrainian resistance fighters. At a restaurant near the Ukrainian Orthodox Church where many family weddings had taken place, Andriy Karkoc, 63, said the allegations had been deeply painful for the family, even though his father had scoffed at them. “He lived a public life here in Minnesota,” Andriy Karkoc said. “We have fought for human rights. If he was a Nazi, why would he do that?” Michael Karkoc, an ethnic Ukrainian, was born in the city of Lutsk on March 6, 1919. Claimed by Czarist Russia in the late 18th century, the area became part of Poland after World War I, was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and was occupied by the Germans in 1941. Since 1945, it has been part of Ukraine. After the war, Mr. Karkoc ended up in a camp for displaced people in Germany. His first wife died in 1948, a year before he and their two sons immigrated to the United States, where he worked as a carpenter, remarried and had four more children. | 1 |
Posted on October 30, 2016 by The Free Thought Project
Decade-old audio exposes then-Senator Hillary Clinton saying the US should have manipulated Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 to prevent a Hamas victory. The presidential candidate lamented that the US didn’t “determine who was going to win.”
“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” then-New York Senator Clinton told the Jewish Press, a New York-based weekly newspaper, several months after the January election.
“And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win,” she said.
Until Friday, the comment Clinton made on September 5, 2006, only existed on a private audio cassette belonging to journalist Eli Chomsky. An editor and a staff writer for the Jewish Press, he interviewed Clinton at the newspaper’s office in Brooklyn.
Chomsky, who shared and played the tape for the Observer, says it is the only existing copy of that meeting with Clinton, during which the Palestinian parliamentary election was among primary topics. The comments have been posted on SoundCloud.
Speaking to the news portal, he recalled being confused by the fact that “anyone could support the idea — offered by a national political leader, no less — that the US should be in the business of fixing foreign elections.” 2006 audio emerges of Clinton proposing election rigging in Palestine; censored by Israeli press for past 10 years https://t.co/LsMYcUzJR4
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 28, 2016
The interview took place nine months after the Hamas movement claimed 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats, pushing aside the US-favored Fatah movement and securing the right to form a new cabinet. That victory was neither welcomed in Israel, nor in the US. In Washington, where Hamas is considered a terrorist organization, officials repeatedly stated that they would not work with a Palestinian Authority that included Hamas.
Then-President George W. Bush spoke of the elections as symbolizing the “power of democracy,” but refused to deal with Hamas as long as it opposed Israel’s existence and espoused violence.
That day in September 2006, Clinton made “odd and controversial comments,” all now saved on the 45-minute record that Chomsky “held onto all these years.”
“I went to my bosses at the time,” Chomsky told the Observer. “The Jewish Press had this mindset that they would not want to say anything offensive about anybody — even a direct quote from anyone — in a position of influence because they might need them down the road. My bosses didn’t think it was newsworthy at the time. I was convinced that it was and I held onto it all these years.” 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 |
Posted on November 1, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog 75% of Americans Believe the Media Is Biased For Hillary
A Suffolk University/USA Today poll released Friday found that 75.9% of Americans believe the mainstream media “would like to see [Hillary Clinton] elected president.”
The poll also found that only 10% of Americans believe that “foreign interests such as Russian hackers” are “the primary threat that might try to change the election results”. In contrast, 45.53% believe “the news media” is the primary threat to the election:
Indeed, the New York Times , Boston Globe , Los Angeles Times , CNN and other mainstream media admitted to us they were going to try to throw the election for Hillary. (And leaked emails show widespread collusion between the media and the Clinton campaign.) | 0 |
ISTANBUL — A military coup attempt plunged Turkey into a long night of violence and intrigue on Friday, threatening its embattled president, leaving nearly 200 dead and injecting new instability into a crucial NATO member and American ally in the chaotic Middle East. The coup attempt was followed hours later by an equally dramatic public appearance by the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose whereabouts had been unknown for hours after the plotters claimed to have taken control. Flying into Istanbul Ataturk Airport from an undisclosed location early Saturday, Mr. Erdogan signaled that the coup was failing. “A minority within the armed forces has unfortunately been unable to stomach Turkey’s unity,” Mr. Erdogan said after the private television channel NTV showed him greeting supporters. Blaming political enemies, Mr. Erdogan said: “What is being perpetrated is a rebellion and a treason. They will pay a heavy price for their treason to Turkey. ” Mr. Erdogan suggested that the plotters had tried to assassinate him, referring to a bombing in the Turkish Mediterranean resort town of Marmaris after he left on Friday. “It would appear that they thought I was there,” he said. Supporters of Mr. Erdogan responded to his call to take to the streets in Istanbul, and by Saturday morning, the coup appeared to be unraveling. The Anadolu Agency reported that about 200 unarmed soldiers had surrendered to the police in Ankara. CNN Turk showed video of soldiers abandoning tanks in Istanbul, and by morning, civilians were climbing onto the tanks and waving flags, according to images posted on social media. Anadolu said more than 1, 500 members of the armed forces linked to the plot had been detained across Turkey, including a brigadier general in the country’s northeast. Nonetheless, the abrupt turn of events in Turkey left Mr. Erdogan’s grip on power uncertain. The country has been reeling from a wave of deadly extremism by the Islamic State, struggling to accommodate hundreds of thousands of refugees from the war in neighboring Syria and fighting a resurgent Kurdish rebellion in the Turkish southeast. Mr. Erdogan, an Islamist who has dominated politics for more than a decade, has also alienated many Turks with his increasingly autocratic behavior. Turkey’s acting chief of general staff, Gen. Umit Dundar, said on Saturday that 194 people had been killed, and he called 104 of them “coup plotters. ” Of the 90 others killed, 47 were civilians, the general said at a news conference in Ankara, the capital. Seventeen police officers were killed in a military helicopter attack by coup plotters on a police special forces headquarters outside Ankara, Anadolu Agency had reported earlier. CNN Turk reported that 12 civilians had died in an explosion at the Parliament building. Martial law was declared after the coup attempt in the country, which has been convulsed by military takeovers at least three times in the past . Before he made his televised remarks from the airport, Mr. Erdogan was forced to use his iPhone’s FaceTime app from a secret location to broadcast messages beseeching the public to resist the coup attempt. “There is no power higher than the power of the people,” he said amid contradictory accounts of who was in control. “Let them do what they will at public squares and airports. ” After Mr. Erdogan spoke, many followers obeyed his orders to go into the streets, and mosque loudspeakers urged his supporters to protest the coup attempt. The United States Embassy said in a statement that “shots have been heard in Ankara” and urged Americans to take shelter. Social media outlets worked intermittently or were blocked. The events began unfolding around 10 p. m. Friday as the military moved to stop traffic over two of Istanbul’s bridges, which cross the Bosporus and connect the European and Asian sides of the city. There were reports of gunfire in Taksim Square, in central Istanbul, where supporters had gathered, but there were no reports of injuries, and it appeared that security forces were acting with restraint. On the Bosporus Bridge, closed earlier in the evening by the military, there were reports of gunfire as protesters approached, and according to NTV, three people were hurt. Some military officials spoke out against a coup, including the commander of the First Army, Gen. Umit Guler, who issued a statement, carried by a news channel, saying, “The armed forces do not support this movement comprised of a small group within our ranks. ” Leaders of opposition political parties, who have otherwise worked against Mr. Erdogan’s government, also spoke out against a seizure of the government by the military. “This country has suffered a lot from coups,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the main secular opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, known by its Turkish initials, C. H. P. said in a statement quoted by The Hurriyet Daily News. “It should be known that the C. H. P. fully depends on the free will of the people as indispensable of our parliamentary democracy. ” By 2 a. m. a large group of protesters had gathered at Istanbul Ataturk Airport, and the military had begun withdrawing, according to CNN Turk. In the back streets of Istanbul’s European districts, bars and restaurants were showing footage on television of scenes at the bridge, while partygoers were glued to their mobile phones trying to learn what was happening. “Some people illegally undertook an illegal action outside of the chain of command,” Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said in comments broadcast on NTV. “The government elected by the people remains in charge. This government will only go when the people say so. ” After Mr. Yildirim spoke, factions of the Turkish military issued a statement, according to the news agency DHA, claiming they had taken control of the country. “Turkish armed forces seized the rule of the country completely with the aim of reinstalling the constitutional order, democracy, human rights and freedoms, to make rule of law pervade again, to the ruined public order,” the statement quoted by DHA said. “All the international agreements and promises are valid. We hope our good relations with all global countries goes on. ” Senior Pentagon officials in Washington said they were still trying to determine what was happening in Turkey. They said the United States had not adjusted its military posture in the region. The Defense Department has roughly 2, 200 uniformed military personnel and civilians in Turkey. About 1, 500 of them are based at Incirlik, an air base in southern Turkey near Syria. The United States has used the base to launch airstrikes against the Islamic State. Since March, Incirlik has been on an “elevated force protection level” amid concerns that militants were targeting it. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter in May ordered all family members of military personnel based at Incirlik to leave the country. Mr. Erdogan placed blame for the coup attempt on followers of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and who was once an ally before the two had a bitter in 2013 over a corruption inquiry that targeted Mr. Erdogan and his inner circle. Over many years, followers of Mr. Gulen built up a presence in Turkey’s police and judiciary, and Mr. Erdogan blamed them for the corruption inquiry. Mr. Erdogan and his allies then purged the judiciary and the police of those linked to Mr. Gulen, going so far as to call him the leader of a terrorist organization and seeking, unsuccessfully, to have him extradited from the United States. Mr. Gulen denied any role in the attempted coup, saying he condemned it “in the strongest terms. ” “As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt,” he said in an emailed statement. “I categorically deny such accusations. ” Since the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, the military has staged coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980, and has intervened in 1997. The military had long seen itself as the guardian of the secular system, established by the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. But in recent years, a series of sensational trials had pushed the military back to its barracks, which analysts said had secured civilian leadership over the military. Across Istanbul on Friday night, rumors swirled and evening plans were upended. In the Arnavutkoy neighborhood, people flooded out of bars and restaurants, hailing taxis and urging loved ones to get home to safety. “There’s a coup,” one man shouted in the street. “There’s a coup, and blood will be shed. ” Mr. Erdogan attracted a constituency in the early years of his tenure, including many liberals who supported his plans to overhaul the economy and remove the military from politics. But in recent years, he has alienated many Turks with his increasingly autocratic ways, cracking down on freedom of expression, imposing a significant role for religion in public life and renewing war with Kurdish militants in the southeast. “The people tried to stand up against President Erdogan, but they couldn’t, they were crushed, so the military had no choice but to take over,” said Cem Yildiz, a taxi driver. Mr. Yildiz said that recent terrorism in the country attributed to Islamic State militants, including an attack on Istanbul Ataturk Airport that killed dozens, was “the tipping point” for him. He blamed Turkey’s policy on Syria for the terrorist attacks. Early in the civil war there, Turkey supported rebel groups fighting the Syrian government. Many of the fighters who traveled through Turkey to Syria joined the Islamic State, and critics have blamed Mr. Erdogan for enabling its rise. “He has destroyed this country, and no one will stand up to him but the military,” Mr. Yildiz said. “There was no choice but this. ” Seyda Yilmaz, a teacher who was out in Istanbul on Friday when the news broke, said: “The country is in chaos, and Erdogan needs to be put in his place, but I’m afraid. I’m very afraid because in the past a lot of innocent blood was shed in these coups. I’m anxious. I don’t know what to say at this point. We are all in shock. ” | 1 |
When Donald J. Trump spoke on the phone with Taiwan’s president on Friday, he was wading into one of Asia’s and sensitive issues: the dispute between Taiwan and mainland China. Though the call alarmed experts, who say it risks upending decades of American efforts to manage the dispute, nonexperts could be forgiven for scratching their heads about the uproar. What follows, then, is a guide to the issue: why it is so delicate, what role the United States has in the matter and why the phone call is significant. Both players claimed, at least formally, to represent all of China — which they considered to include each other’s territory. That created problems, including periodic risks of war, for decades. The disagreement dates to 1927, when civil war broke out in the Republic of China. The war culminated in Communist revolutionaries, led by Mao Zedong, mostly defeating China’s Nationalist government in 1949. But the Nationalist leaders fled to Taiwan, which their forces still controlled. Though fighting eventually stopped, both sides continued to claim all of China. The government considered mainland China to be controlled by illegitimate Communist rebels. The government considered Taiwan a breakaway province. In this sense, the civil war was never fully resolved. Thus, Taiwan’s formal name is still the Republic of China. Mainland China — controlled by the Communist government in Beijing — is called the People’s Republic of China. Their dispute became a global Cold War issue. The Soviet Union and its allies recognized Beijing as China’s rightful government, while the United States and its allies recognized the Nationalists in Taiwan. The Taiwan government even held the United Nations seat for all of China. In the 1970s, the world began accepting the reality of a divided China. Beijing took over the United Nations seat in 1971. President Richard M. Nixon traveled to mainland China the next year. In 1979, America switched its recognition from the Taiwan government to Beijing’s. Many other countries followed suit. Since then, no American president or is believed to have spoken with a Taiwanese president — until the phone call on Friday. This would be extremely difficult for either government. The Beijing government has never given up hope of reintegrating Taiwan. Territorial integrity is an existential issue for all countries, but it is especially sensitive for Beijing, which fears emboldening separatism in Tibet and other regions. The Taiwan government is constrained on both sides. It cannot offer to reintegrate with the mainland, as the island is a democracy and Taiwanese people would be unwilling to surrender their freedoms. At the same time, Beijing has credibly threatened war should Taiwan declare independence. Taiwan cannot formally drop its claim to mainland China, because it would be seen as tantamount to declaring independence. This led, in 1992, to a semiofficial arrangement: Both countries agreed that there is only one China, encompassing the mainland and Taiwan. But they also agreed to disagree about what that means. Beijing is adamant about upholding this policy because it carries the promise of reunification. But in Taiwan, it has been controversial. Some prefer warm ties with their fellow Chinese and have sought to bolster trade. Others, particularly younger voters, distrust Beijing. Over time, Taiwan’s citizens have become more likely to call themselves Taiwanese — a distinct national identity — than Chinese. Some Taiwanese leaders have questioned the current arrangement, including President Tsai who was elected this year. She has promised to uphold the status quo but stopped short of endorsing the 1992 understanding — exacerbating Beijing’s fears that Taiwan could declare independence. Mr. Trump, by speaking with Ms. Tsai on the phone and referring to her as “the President of Taiwan” in a Twitter post, indulged those fears — and upended the traditional American stance, known as the “One China” policy. Because both Taiwan and Beijing claim the same territory, foreign states cannot recognize both. Beijing forces countries to choose, as the policy’s name indicates, “one China. ” Nearly all countries have chosen Beijing, which controls the world’s economy. The United States has a particular kind of One China policy, meant to accomplish three main goals: keep positive relations with Beijing, with which the United States has a host of agreements and interests protect and assist Taiwan, a fellow democracy and prevent the outbreak of war. Though the United States officially broke off relations with Taiwan in 1979, it maintains a nonprofit center known as the American Institute in Taiwan, which acts as a barely unofficial embassy. The United States has also worked to promote Taiwan’s democracy and has sold it advanced military equipment, though these sales have declined in recent years. In this way, the United States is able to deny Taiwan recognition, yet also ensure it is strong enough to remain functionally independent. The policy should not be mistaken as a favor or handout to Beijing. Rather, it is intended to maintain American interests in both mainland China and Taiwan and prevent instability or war. As the United States has come to play a crucial balancing role, both sides have scrutinized any hint of change in the American position. In 1995, Washington broke with practice by granting a visa to Taiwan’s president. Beijing considered this a possible step toward recognition of Taiwanese independence and, in response, fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait. The United States, in turn, placed two aircraft carrier groups nearby. Though the crisis ended peacefully, it underscored the United States’ role in maintaining stability and the risk or war. The call does not in itself change policy, but it implies the possibility of a shift, forcing both China and Taiwan to guess at Mr. Trump’s intentions. Mr. Trump’s transition team, by categorizing his call with Ms. Tsai of Taiwan alongside calls with other heads of state, implied that Mr. Trump recognized her as the leader of a sovereign state. Mr. Trump also wrote on Twitter that he had spoken to the “President of Taiwan. ” Recognizing Ms. Tsai as a sovereign leader would communicate that the United States considered Taiwan an independent nation. Such a position would force both Taiwan and Beijing into a difficult choice. Either ignore American policy on the issue — perhaps ending the American role in balancing relations — or confront Taiwanese independence, which Beijing has said would provoke war. Both Beijing and Taiwan have played down the phone call, suggesting that they would prefer to see Mr. Trump’s words as a mistake rather than a deliberate policy shift. Still, Mr. Trump has retained some advisers who advocate more fully siding with the democratic Taiwan over the authoritarian China, perhaps even granting the former partial or full recognition. China and Taiwan, preparing for potential changes in America’s policy, must ask whether the call hints at a coming change, or at least at the possibility that on Mr. Trump’s team could steer policy in radically new directions. If they are unsure, prudence would seem to require at least preparing for the possibility of a shift. Many Americans might reasonably wonder about this question, which Mr. Trump raised in a Twitter post in defense of the phone call. United States arms sales to Taiwan have indeed been controversial, particularly with Beijing. But they are an approach intended to maintain the status quo. By selling Taiwan arms, the United States ensures that the island can deter an invasion from the mainland’s far larger military. This maintains a balance of power that, while fragile, is intended to prevent war. Granting Taiwan’s leader informal recognition, or even an unofficial upgrade in ties, is different because it disturbs the status quo. To be fair to Mr. Trump, past presidents have adjusted the level of support for Taiwan, for example by increasing or reducing arms sales. But those policy shifts typically came with an explanation, so that China and Taiwan understood American intentions and knew what was and was not changing. What is different is that Mr. Trump has not made clear whether or not he intends to end America’s policy on Taiwan and China. The fact of the phone call implies that he does intend to do so, but the possibility that he erred implies that maybe he does not. In this way, the issue is not that he caused offense or broke with tradition, but rather that he introduced real uncertainty about how the United States will approach this issue under his leadership. In international relations, especially on tense issues, a lack of clarity or predictability can be destabilizing because it forces all states to plan for the worst. The American policy on Taiwan and China is already ambiguous by design. In 2004, when asked about the One China policy, a senior State Department official told a congressional hearing, “I didn’t really define it, and I’m not sure I very easily could define it. ” While the policy may be tough to articulate, it has at least been predictable. Mr. Trump, intentionally or not, has added a layer of ambiguity that is wholly new. | 1 |
The leader of the Republican Study Committee chose to remain outside the conservative coalition fighting Speaker Paul Ryan (R. ) and his American Health Care Act, which amends the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act so as to stabilize insurance company margins. [“We’re a yes and we’re excited to be there,” said Rep. Mark Walker (R. ) the chairman of the RSC. Founded in the 1970s, the RSC was the conservative bloc in the House of Representatives, until the session of Congress, when Speaker John Boehner (R. ) pressured members to support moderate Rep. Steve Scalise (R. ). Under Scalise, the RSC was incorporated into the House GOP leadership’s own whip system. Walker spoke at the White House Thursday after meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House flanked by Rep. Mia Love ( ) Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R. ) and other Republican congressmen, including Scalise, who is now the GOP’s Majority Whip. “We appreciate the opportunity to discuss with the president the best ways forward to repeal and replace Obamacare,” Walker said. “For over six weeks, we’ve been working with the White House, House leadership, congressional committees and members of the Republican Study Committee to address conservative concerns and make the bill better for the American people,” he said. “Based on our conversations with the president, several measures to improve the bill will be added in the final product,” he said. Walker said the president agreed that the RyanCare bill would be amended before it reached his desk to create a work requirement for Medicaid recipients without dependents and remove provisions in the Ryan bill that would have allowed tax credits for abortions. “On balance and with the changes we agreed to in the bill’s final text, I can vote for it,” he said. “We will continue working to advocate changes to the bill, and hope the legislation improves in the Senate. At the end of the day,” Walker said, “we are all committed to repealing Obamacare. ” The RSC has a membership of more than 170 members, which would make it the most powerful militia on Capitol Hill, but its own membership is now so diverse across ideological lines that it rarely votes as a bloc. Before Scalise took over the RSC, Rep. Jim Jordan (R. ) tried to lead the committee as the conservative bloc in the House, but when he ran afoul of Boehner, he was turned out in favor of Scalise. This was the immediate reason why Jordan founded the House Freedom Caucus. As of this publication, the House Freedom Caucus, along with random libertarian congressmen and House Republicans from liberal districts, have the votes to block the RyanCare bill when it comes up for a vote scheduled for Thursday. The HFC does not release its whip count, but a Capitol Hill source familiar with the whip count told Breitbart News that the HFC still has the votes to defeat the bill, if the Democrats also vote against the bill. There are 237 Republicans and 193 Democrats in the House. With five vacancies, Speaker Ryan needs 216 votes to pass his Obamacare amendment, but if 21 HFC Republicans hold the line, the bill fails. If the bill fails, which is still a very strong possibility, members of the House Republican Conference are going to have to not only figure out what to do next about their promise to repeal and replace Obamacare, they are also going to have to decide if Ryan is still the man to be holding the gavel. The same votes needed to defeat RyanCare are enough to pass a motion to vacate the chair and force out Ryan the same way conservatives forced out Boehner. Watch Rep. Mark Walker (R. ) make remarks about his support of RyanCare in a video posted by House GOP Whip’s office: | 1 |
The F. B. I. is investigating whether the crash of a small plane in East Hartford, Conn. that killed a passenger on Tuesday was intentional, according to four federal law enforcement officials. The pilot, who survived the crash, told investigators that it was not an accident. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing. Officials identified the passenger as Feras M. Freitekh, 28. Public records show he had lived in Orland Hills, Ill. about 35 miles southwest of Chicago. Federal Aviation Administration records show he was issued a private pilot certificate on May 29, 2015, and was certified to fly a plane. The F. A. A. said the Piper PA 34 crashed around 3:40 p. m. on Main Street as it was on a final approach to Airport in Hartford. Mayor Marcia Leclerc of East Hartford said the plane took off from a flight school at the airport. The police chief of East Hartford, Scott M. Sansom, said during a news conference that the police sought the help of the Federal Bureau of Investigation because the plane went down near a Pratt Whitney factory on Main Street, which he described as being “critical infrastructure. ” The company, which has its headquarters in East Hartford, is a global manufacturer of jet engines for commercial, military and general aviation aircraft. Ray Hernandez, a spokesman for the company, said in an email on Tuesday that the company was aware of the crash and that it did “not appear at this time that any Pratt Whitney employees or contractors were involved. ” The mayor said the pilot, who was interviewed by detectives, was taken to Bridgeport Hospital with serious burns. Two people who were in a minivan near the crash had minor injuries and were taken to a hospital, the police chief said. Officials from the Federal Aviation Administration were at the site on Tuesday, and members of the National Transportation Safety Board were expected to arrive on Wednesday morning, he added. | 1 |
Federal Judge: “Where are the Christians”? November 01, 2016 Iraqi refugees that fled violence in Mosul and internally displaced Syrians who fled Islamic State controlled areas in Deir al-Zor,...
A federal judge has rebuked the Obama administration over the lack of Syrian Christians being admitted from the war-zone.
Judge Daniel Manion addressed the refugee issue and took aim at the Obama administration over how few Christians had been admitted to the U.S. The Judge called it a "perplexing discrepancy" that only 56 of 11,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S. in fiscal 2016 were Christian. The rebuke came in a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals opinion on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center. A report from Fox News singled out the following quotes from Manion.
“It is well‐documented that refugees to the United States are not representative of that war‐torn area of the world. Perhaps 10 percent of the population of Syria is Christian, and yet less than one‐half of one percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States this year are Christian,” he wrote.
“To date, there has not been a good explanation for this perplexing discrepancy,” Manion noted.
Religious Freedom Coalition / TRUNEWS analysis listen to show dated 11/1/2016
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We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories | 0 |
Videos Wikileaks Founder Targets Clinton’s Saudi Connection In Scathing Interview In an exclusive interview with John Pilger, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks argues that Hillary is the “central cog" of the establishment and is funded by the same countries backing the ISIS. | November 8, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal, right, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, center, and Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah Khaled al-Hamad Al-Sabah, left, stand together prior to a group photo before a US- Gulf Cooperation Council forum at the Gulf Cooperation Council Secretariat in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Saturday, March 31, 2012.
Last week, Julian Assange, Editor-In-Chief of WikiLeaks, sat down with John Pilger, Australian journalist and filmmaker, for what is arguably Assange’s most provocative interview ever . During the interview, Assange expounded on the thousands of Clinton emails WikiLeaks has released this past year, highlighting the findings that he personally found to be most significant. According to Assange, the most significant emails in the entire collection involve Clinton’s connections to Saudi Arabia and Qatar who she knew were funding the Islamic State and other radical jihadist groups in the Middle East. Despite this, Clinton accepted millions of dollars via the Clinton Foundation from these very same countries, often demanding payments of millions of dollars for access to her and her husband. Emails showed that a Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollars, while Hillary was paid twelve million dollars to attend a party hosted by the Moroccan government. Pilger remarked that the fact that “the notorious terrorist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation” was an “extraordinary” revelation. The interview was also full of other scathing remarks against Clinton and her past crimes. However, Assange said that he personally feels “quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person” because she seems to have been “eaten alive by [her] ambitions, tormented literally to the point where [she became] sick.” He went on to say that Clinton is a “central cog” of the establishment, surviving as a point of connection between the Intelligence community, Wall Street, the State Department, and wealthy foreign donors like Saudi Arabia. Assange then highlighted another significant revelation from the Podesta emails, which exposed that Obama’s 2008 cabinet had been hand-picked by Citibank, one of the world’s largest banks. Assange also responded to allegations that WikiLeaks is working on behalf of the Russians to support Clinton’s opponent Donald Trump. In response, he argued that Trump “would not be permitted to win” as the “establishment,” which includes the big banks, intelligence agencies, arms companies, foreign money, the media, and even journalists themselves, are “all united behind Hillary Clinton.” Assange then confirmed what many had already suspected, that Russia was not the source of the leaks and that Clinton’s accusations to the contrary were nothing more than “neo-McCarthy hysteria.” He reminded viewers that WikiLeaks has published 800,000 documents related to the Russian government, most of which are critical, proving that neither WikiLeaks nor Assange has any kind of relationship to the country. The latter part of the interview revolved almost exclusively around Assange’s asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Assange spoke out against the false charges against him, emphasizing the fact that he has never been charged with a crime and that the UN found that he was being “arbitrarily detained” due to US pressure to extradite him. Assange has long feared extradition to the US where he would likely face espionage charges and perhaps the death penalty. Indeed, Julian Assange is one of the most well-known casualties of the US’ horrendous and inexcusable war against whistleblowers. Though US politicians such as President Obama speak of the importance of “freedom of speech,” Assange’s situation, as well as that of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden , proves that freedom of speech in the US is only allowed as long as it doesn’t expose the many crimes of the US government. Watch the interview below: This work by True Activist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. Be Sociable, Share! | 0 |
Posted on October 31, 2016 by Gilad Atzmon
Over the years, American governments have invested in building a huge infrastructure designed, in the name of public safety and national security, to spy on each and every one of us.
It was the whistleblower Edward Snowdon who taught us about the extent of the cooperation between the NSA, telecommunication companies and European governments. Some of us were extremely concerned about these revelations while others learned to live with them—but very few of us realised that sooner rather than later, it would be we the people who actually gained such free access to the secrets of our big brothers.
Just a week or so before the American presidential election, it has become clear that, rather than them looking at us and making us feel vulnerable and exposed, it is actually us, the people, who are sitting in front of our TV screens being entertained by Clinton’s emails and the revelations about her ties with the most horrible people on the planet.
It seems as if us ‘little brothers’ are growing tired of our ‘big brother’ and such a realisation points to a shift in consciousness that could lead to complete social revolution. The awareness is certainly here already.
Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli jazz musician, author and political activist. His new book, “The Wandering Who,” may be ordered from amazon.com or amazon.co.uk . | 0 |
Hillary’s Secret Is Out With What Camera Caught Her Doing Before Rally Posted on November 1, 2016 by Amanda Shea in Politics Share This Screenshots of Hillary Clinton in alarming cell phone footage
There’s a reason Hillary Clinton doesn’t let certain people have cell phones around her, but no matter how much she tries, she can’t control everyone. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker doesn’t care about her recording “rule” as he caught her in the act with his cell phone camera. Now that the alarming video is out, so is her nasty secret.
It’s safe to say that Hillary is dealing with a lot of stress as the campaign she thought she had sufficiently rigged in her favor slips out of her grasp, now that she’s under FBI investigation. It’s becoming harder for her to hide who she really is, despite having done a pretty good job of it up until this campaign, but now we know how she deals with her many challenges after what Booker recorded her doing right before a campaign rally.
The Democratic candidate was in New Jersey on June 1 for one of her few campaign stops at the time and seemed to have some “help” with getting through the challenges of her day. After getting out of her black van, she walked right up to the Senator who she could probably see was recording, acting as if she had not a care in the world as she sang and awkwardly danced for the camera looking rather drunk, despite it being the early afternoon. With Secretary Clinton in Newark. pic.twitter.com/w9Z7Gc482i
— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) June 1, 2016
As Hannity.com described the strange footage, “the video captured and shared by New Jersey Senator Cory Booker ahead of a June 1st rally in Newark, New Jersey shows an unusually jovial Clinton singing and dancing shortly before appearing with rock musician Jon Bon Jovi.” While it’s not the first time she’s been suspected of day drinking to the point of intoxication before it’s even 5 p.m., it’s just added proof that she can’t seem to cope with her campaign or much of life in general, without alcohol.
When you live as dishonestly as Hillary has, the only way to avoid the guilt of her decisions is probably to stay a little — or a lot — tipsy throughout the day. That’s unacceptable behavior for anyone, but especially someone who is trying to be the leader of the free world. America doesn’t need a drunk president. | 0 |
BAGHDAD — Iraqi forces quickly entered central areas of Falluja on Friday after weeks of battling the Islamic State, fighting that had forced thousands of civilians to flee and overwhelmed the ability of aid agencies to care for them. Reporting little resistance from Islamic State fighters, counterterrorism forces raised the Iraqi flag over the main government building in central Falluja, officers and state television reports said. They said that forces moved on to besiege the city’s main hospital, which was the first target of American forces when they invaded the city in 2004 and in recent months has served as a headquarters complex for the Islamic State. The rapid and unexpected gains suggested a shift in tactics by the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, or perhaps a sign of their weakness, as they abandoned their positions and regrouped in western neighborhoods of Falluja. That allowed thousands of civilians, who aid groups had said were being held as human shields, to flee across two bridges over the Euphrates River beginning on Thursday. Though the battle appeared far from over, Iraqi commanders on the ground were optimistic that the advance, which had slowed in the face of Islamic State snipers, roadside bombs and tunnel networks that allowed fighters to move around undetected, would continue. “ISIS has lost its power to defend Falluja,” Col. Jamal Lateef, a police commander in Anbar Province, said in an interview. “Its defensive lines have collapsed, and the battle of Falluja will be over in no time. ” Lt. Gen. Adbulwahab a commander of Iraq’s counterterrorism forces who is in charge of the Falluja operation, said in a brief telephone interview that “ISIS has collapsed in Falluja very fast,” and that his forces were moving to northern and western neighborhoods. The United States, which has led a coalition targeting the Islamic State with airstrikes for almost two years in Iraq, has supported the battle for Falluja with air power, even as it has raised concerns about the role of Shiite militias backed by Iran in the fight. Washington has expressed fear that the participation of Shiite forces in assaulting a Sunni city like Falluja would heighten sectarian tensions. Col. Christopher C. Garver, an American military spokesman in Baghdad, said coalition airstrikes on Friday aided the taking of the government building in Falluja by knocking out two heavy machine guns nearby that were slowing the advance of Iraqi forces. “There will still be tough fighting ahead in the days coming,” Colonel Garver said. Referring to the Islamic State in Falluja, he said: “It’s certainly not one big amorphous mass. You have different fighters making different decisions for themselves. ” Prime Minister Haider was quick to declare victory, even as he acknowledged that there was still resistance in the city. In a speech Friday night, he said, “Falluja has come back to the country’s bosom,” and vowed to focus on the next Islamic State target, the city of Mosul. Falluja, a major population center just 40 miles west of Baghdad, has been in the hands of the Islamic State since the end of 2013, longer than any other settlement in its caliphate that straddles parts of Iraq and Syria. The city was a stronghold, and something of a birthplace, for Al Qaeda in Iraq, the precursor of the Islamic State that formed after the United States invasion in 2003. In Falluja, the Islamic State exploited the grievances of the Sunni population toward the sectarian policies of the former prime minister, Nuri Kamal and was able to rapidly take control of the city two and a half years ago after Iraqi security forces assaulted a protest camp in the city. Officials speculated that the change in the complexion of the battle might have been because local tribal fighters who had been loyal to the Islamic State’s leadership and its transnational ambitions had now distanced themselves from the group’s foreign fighters. Or at least, the officials surmised, the tribal fighters had come to believe that victory by the Iraqi government was inevitable and were trying to get their families to safety. Lise Grande, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, said she was receiving reports that perhaps 10, 000 families, or 60, 000 people, were on the move toward areas of western Anbar Province, where camps for the displaced are already overwhelmed and lack basic supplies, such as tents and clean drinking water. Karl Schembri, a spokesman for the Norwegian Refugee Council in Baghdad, said that, beginning on Thursday, Islamic State militants had been withdrawing from positions inside the city, allowing civilians to begin fleeing. Mr. Schembri said they had withdrawn from checkpoints at two bridges on the Euphrates, “and then people could just walk out. ” He expressed concern for the thousands of civilians stuck in the city, including those that are unable to walk out on their own — the elderly, disabled and pregnant. Referring to the militants, he said, “We don’t know where they have gone to or what their plan is. ” Tens of thousands of civilians have now fled Falluja since an offensive began late last month, and most have reached camps that are running low on supplies. There are also growing concerns of diseases because of a lack of clean drinking water. Civilians in Falluja had also lived for months under siege conditions, without enough food or medicine, and many children have not been vaccinated for conditions like measles. According to Mr. Schembri, who has spoken to doctors recently in the camps, the majority of displaced civilians arrive with ailments like diarrhea, the flu and skin rashes. The latest exodus of civilians has not only added to the grave humanitarian crisis that has been unfolding for weeks in Anbar Province, but it has also presented a serious security challenge to the Iraqi government’s ability to carry out security screenings of civilians so that Islamic State militants are not able to escape by blending in. It has been a longstanding, and controversial, practice of the Iraqi authorities to separate men and boys from women, children and the elderly, among those fleeing Islamic State areas. The boys and men are taken to detention centers where they are interrogated about any ties to the Islamic State. The process is seen as necessary for security reasons, but vulnerable to abuses, especially if the Shiite militias take part. There have already been some abuses: Sunni officials have said that many men have been tortured by the militias, and the governor of Anbar Province has said that 49 men have been executed. A spokesman for Prime Minister Abadi has said that some people suspected of abuse have been arrested as a result. But with so many people fleeing in recent days, the ability of the security forces to carry out adequate screening has been strained, raising concerns that militants are also escaping amid the flow of the civilian population. Sajad Jiyad, who runs an Iraqi research organization, the Center, and who sometimes advises the office of Mr. Abadi, wrote on Twitter on Friday, referring to the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, “Daesh fighters escaping as civilians is a massive concern. ” | 1 |
DETROIT — The record pace of auto sales in the United States is slowing down, leaving investors increasingly bearish on auto stocks. But there is one exception. Tesla, the upstart, continues to surge. On Monday, Tesla surpassed Ford Motor in market value for the first time and moved within striking distance of General Motors, starkly illustrating the growing gap in investors’ optimism over its future versus the prospects for the traditional carmakers from Detroit. While G. M. and Ford may have strong profits and healthy balance sheets, Tesla offers something Wall Street loves much more: the potential for dramatic growth. “Investors want something that is going to go up in orders of magnitude in six months to six years, and Tesla is that story,” said Karl Brauer, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book. “Nobody thinks Ford or G. M. is going to do that. ” Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has shattered the conventional wisdom that automakers should be viewed as a stable, reliable investment. Instead, he promotes his company as a dynamic vehicle for growth, despite the risks and challenges ahead of it. In his vision, Tesla is going to change the world, and is primed to cash in on the two transformative trends in the industry: the shift to electric vehicles as part of a broader societal move to cleaner energy, and the advent of automated driving. “Tesla is very vocal in talking about how they are positioned as we move from humans driving cars powered by gasoline to computers driving cars powered by batteries,” Mr. Brauer said. At the end of Monday’s trading, Tesla reached a market capitalization of $48. 7 billion compared with Ford’s $45. 6 billion, according to Bloomberg. General Motors was at $51. 2 billion. Tesla’s market milestone came at the intersection of two countervailing trends. On Sunday, Tesla said its sales were up 69 percent from the same period a year ago. On Monday, monthly sales figures for the conventional automakers showed them struggling to meet last March’s performance. That sent stocks in the Detroit automakers down for the day — G. M. was off 3. 4 percent and Ford 1. 7 percent — while Tesla’s stock soared by more than 7 percent. Despite the recent boom years for the American motor industry, in which G. M. and Ford have been the biggest beneficiaries, executives are working overtime just to convince Wall Street that their business model can produce incremental improvements. Mr. Brauer said that reception was unfortunate for G. M. and Ford because “the reality is, they’re as financially healthy as they’ve ever been, and they’re in very good position for the future. ” Both companies have rebounded steadily since the recession, although G. M. needed a bankruptcy filing and $49 billion government bailout to recover. And both have taken advantage of the consumer demand for new vehicles in recent years, especially for pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles. But neither automaker has convinced Wall Street that it has shed its reputation tied to broader economic cycles, or is at the forefront of new technology being developed for vehicles and electric cars. The Detroit automakers are hardly sitting still in their efforts to improve current results and future prospects. G. M. made the momentous decision recently to sell its European division, and Ford is adding jobs to accelerate its shift toward electric and autonomous vehicles. Both automakers have bought technology companies to bolster their engineering expertise, and their executives have embraced the chance to work with the Trump administration on scaling back government regulations. All the same, both companies are ranked near the bottom in ratios for the companies that make up the Standard Poor’s 500 index. Last week, one of G. M.’s large investors, the hedge fund Greenlight Capital, proposed the creation of two classes of stock — one that strictly pays dividends, and a second tied directly to earnings and future growth in areas like cars and services. G. M. directors flatly rejected the idea as too risky, and the chief executive, Mary Barra, said there was no need to deviate from “executing a plan that is delivering record financial and operation results. ” Yet while industry analysts generally supported the decision, G. M.’s share price barely budged on the news that it was staying the course. And Monday’s data, showing total industry sales off 1. 6 percent, underscored that overall demand for new vehicles is slipping despite a bevy of discounts and incentives. G. M. showed a slight gain from the prior March, while Ford sales fell sharply. Several other automakers, such as Toyota, Fiat Chrysler and Hyundai, also reported declines. Of course, based on the number of cars actually being made, they are in a different league from Tesla. G. M. sold 256, 000 vehicles in the United States last month, and Ford 234, 000. Tesla’s sales for the same period: 4, 000. But it was the growth and the outlook, not the raw numbers, that moved the markets. Investors tend to look at Tesla as a technology rather than an automaker. “It’s almost like Tesla is positioned in people’s minds as an energy storage company that happens to put most of its batteries on wheels,” said Andrew Stewart, chief investment officer at Exchange Capital Management, an investment firm in Ann Arbor, Mich. Tesla is also prone to more volatile stock movements because Mr. Musk and other board members and top executives own a large chunk of shares, leaving a relative few that change hands frequently, he said. “Whenever there’s interesting news, the people trying to buy are buying from a limited number of people who are willing to sell,” Mr. Stewart said. “While you have Ford and G. M. and they’re these industrial companies. ” Because of Tesla’s acclaim and the limited number of shares being traded, the company draws more individual investors, and its share price tends to spike whenever Tesla or Mr. Musk makes news. This week’s jump in its stock price was set off by a brief news release on Sunday that said Tesla had delivered more than 25, 000 cars in the first quarter, exceeding analysts’ estimates. While Tesla may enjoy the favor of investors, it still faces some daunting hurdles to reach its goals. This summer, the company is supposed to start making the Model 3, a compact electric model that Tesla plans to sell for $35, 000 and produce in significantly higher volumes. It currently offers two vehicles, the Model S luxury sedan and the Model X S. U. V. both of which sell for $90, 000 or more when options are added in. (People who buy its cars benefit from a $7, 500 federal tax credit on environmentally friendly cars, a selling point with an uncertain future.) Once Tesla begins producing the Model 3, Mr. Musk expects production to ramp up quickly, with a goal of making 500, 000 cars a year by 2018. Achieving that target will not be easy, Mr. Brauer said. “That’s five times growth in volume,” he said. “I don’t know of any car company that’s ever done that in a period. ” | 1 |
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