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<p />
<p>Just hours before his death he had moderated a “Times Talks” conversation with Edward Snowden, director Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald about the documentary “Citizenfour,” which chronicles Snowden’s leak of National Security Agency documents. Carr, engaged as always, drew them out with pointed questions and wry observations to speak candidly about the film.</p>
<p>The Times’ publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., said Carr had “formidable talent” and was “one of the most gifted journalists who has ever worked at The New York Times.” He called him “an indispensable guide to modern media.”</p>
<p>Executive Editor Dean Baquet also heaped praise on Carr and said he was special.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>“He was the finest media reporter of his generation, a remarkable and funny man who was one of the leaders of our newsroom,” Baquet told Carr’s colleagues in an email. “He was our biggest champion, and his unending passion for journalism and for truth will be missed by his family at The Times, by his readers around the world, and by people who love journalism.”</p>
<p>Carr, who grew up in Minnesota, joined the Times in 2002 as a business reporter, covering magazine publishing. His Media Equation column appeared in the Monday business section. It focused on issues of media in relation to business, culture and government, said the Times, which confirmed his death.</p>
<p>Carr, who lived in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife and their daughter and had two other daughters, also wrote “The Night of the Gun,” a 2008 memoir about addiction and recovery.</p>
<p>New York Times journalist David Carr poses for a photograph as he arrives for the French premiere of the documentary “Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times,” in Paris. (Michel Euler/The Associated Press)</p>
<p>The book, published by Simon &amp; Schuster, traces Carr’s rise from cocaine addict to single dad raising twin girls to sobered-up media columnist for the Times.</p>
<p>Carr said he wrote a book proposal “on a dare to myself” in two days. After an agent sold the idea, Carr ended up interviewing about 60 people and working on the book for three years. He took the transcribed interviews, numerous documents and pictures to his family’s cabin in the Adirondacks, where he wrote the book.</p>
<p>Comedian and actor Tom Arnold, who started his standup career in Minneapolis, was pals with Carr on the city’s party circuit in the 1980s and is featured in the book. In a 2008 interview, Arnold called Carr’s story redemptive.</p>
<p>“He did some outrageous things, and he did some horrible things, and yet that’s not who he is. … But that’s what drugs will do to you,” Arnold said. “He survived, and people can survive.”</p>
<p>In the book, Carr didn’t flinch from describing his arrests (including one for punching a taxi driver), his trips to rehab (five times) and his bout with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Carr’s rise in journalism paralleled his recovery from drug addiction. After stints helming the Twin Cities Reader, a Minneapolis-based alternative weekly, and the Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly in D.C., Carr went on to gigs writing for Inside.com, an online media news website co-founded by Spy magazine co-founder Kurt Andersen, and New York and The Atlantic Monthly magazines before landing at The New York Times.</p>
<p>“I’ve always thought it (the Times) was a magnificent thing to read and look at,” Carr once said. “I just never pictured the likes of me working here.”</p>
<p>Last year, Carr began teaching a Boston University class that explored the creative business models to support digital journalism. It was among the first professorships dedicated to evaluating how media organizations can sustain themselves financially as readers and advertisers migrate to digital platforms, a crisis that has doomed some news organizations and threatens the viability of others.</p>
<p>Carr had written about the issue extensively.</p>
<p>“I think a lot of journalism education that is going on is broadly not preparing kids for the world that they are stepping into,” Carr told The Boston Globe.</p>
<p>The dean of the College of Community at Boston University, Thomas Fiedler, called Carr’s death “a terrible blow.”</p>
<p>“What an extraordinary talent and a remarkable human being,” Fiedler told the Globe.</p>
<p>——</p>
<p>AP Film Writer Jake Coyle contributed to this report.</p>
|
New York Times media columnist David Carr dies at age 58
| false |
https://abqjournal.com/541001/new-york-times-media-columnist-david-carr-dies-at-age-58.html
| 2least
|
New York Times media columnist David Carr dies at age 58
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>Just hours before his death he had moderated a “Times Talks” conversation with Edward Snowden, director Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald about the documentary “Citizenfour,” which chronicles Snowden’s leak of National Security Agency documents. Carr, engaged as always, drew them out with pointed questions and wry observations to speak candidly about the film.</p>
<p>The Times’ publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., said Carr had “formidable talent” and was “one of the most gifted journalists who has ever worked at The New York Times.” He called him “an indispensable guide to modern media.”</p>
<p>Executive Editor Dean Baquet also heaped praise on Carr and said he was special.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>“He was the finest media reporter of his generation, a remarkable and funny man who was one of the leaders of our newsroom,” Baquet told Carr’s colleagues in an email. “He was our biggest champion, and his unending passion for journalism and for truth will be missed by his family at The Times, by his readers around the world, and by people who love journalism.”</p>
<p>Carr, who grew up in Minnesota, joined the Times in 2002 as a business reporter, covering magazine publishing. His Media Equation column appeared in the Monday business section. It focused on issues of media in relation to business, culture and government, said the Times, which confirmed his death.</p>
<p>Carr, who lived in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife and their daughter and had two other daughters, also wrote “The Night of the Gun,” a 2008 memoir about addiction and recovery.</p>
<p>New York Times journalist David Carr poses for a photograph as he arrives for the French premiere of the documentary “Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times,” in Paris. (Michel Euler/The Associated Press)</p>
<p>The book, published by Simon &amp; Schuster, traces Carr’s rise from cocaine addict to single dad raising twin girls to sobered-up media columnist for the Times.</p>
<p>Carr said he wrote a book proposal “on a dare to myself” in two days. After an agent sold the idea, Carr ended up interviewing about 60 people and working on the book for three years. He took the transcribed interviews, numerous documents and pictures to his family’s cabin in the Adirondacks, where he wrote the book.</p>
<p>Comedian and actor Tom Arnold, who started his standup career in Minneapolis, was pals with Carr on the city’s party circuit in the 1980s and is featured in the book. In a 2008 interview, Arnold called Carr’s story redemptive.</p>
<p>“He did some outrageous things, and he did some horrible things, and yet that’s not who he is. … But that’s what drugs will do to you,” Arnold said. “He survived, and people can survive.”</p>
<p>In the book, Carr didn’t flinch from describing his arrests (including one for punching a taxi driver), his trips to rehab (five times) and his bout with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Carr’s rise in journalism paralleled his recovery from drug addiction. After stints helming the Twin Cities Reader, a Minneapolis-based alternative weekly, and the Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly in D.C., Carr went on to gigs writing for Inside.com, an online media news website co-founded by Spy magazine co-founder Kurt Andersen, and New York and The Atlantic Monthly magazines before landing at The New York Times.</p>
<p>“I’ve always thought it (the Times) was a magnificent thing to read and look at,” Carr once said. “I just never pictured the likes of me working here.”</p>
<p>Last year, Carr began teaching a Boston University class that explored the creative business models to support digital journalism. It was among the first professorships dedicated to evaluating how media organizations can sustain themselves financially as readers and advertisers migrate to digital platforms, a crisis that has doomed some news organizations and threatens the viability of others.</p>
<p>Carr had written about the issue extensively.</p>
<p>“I think a lot of journalism education that is going on is broadly not preparing kids for the world that they are stepping into,” Carr told The Boston Globe.</p>
<p>The dean of the College of Community at Boston University, Thomas Fiedler, called Carr’s death “a terrible blow.”</p>
<p>“What an extraordinary talent and a remarkable human being,” Fiedler told the Globe.</p>
<p>——</p>
<p>AP Film Writer Jake Coyle contributed to this report.</p>
| 7,800 |
|
<p />
<p>A reader contacted me today with an important question for consideration: When is it appropriate to wear clothing, jewelry, or other items associated with your&#160;religion to an <a href="https://www.recruiter.com/interview.html" type="external">interview Opens a New Window.</a> or to work?&#160; This reader was concerned about&#160;being judged in the office for her religious affiliation.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>This is a very tricky and personal question, and it's a very individual choice.</p>
<p>I often think of a job interview much like a dinner party. At a dinner party, you meet many new people who may have different viewpoints from&#160;your own. Conversations tend to be high level and centered on pleasant topics, such as the weather. Etiquette experts say that the potentially taboo topics to avoid include politics, religion, and money. This holds true for&#160;interviews as well.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, when it comes to getting hired, studies show that managers aren't free of biases. Those biases can influence who lands the job offer. Details as minor as hair and makeup can influence the interviewer's impression of a candidate. Even a candidate's height can make a difference.</p>
<p>Religion, however, is more personal and much more important than hair, makeup, or height. It can be a large part of one's identity. In today's climate, sharing your religious viewpoints with others can cause them to judge you, either positively or negatively. When they judge you negatively, it can potentially hurt your chances of getting hired.</p>
<p>A great organization to share your religious views with is one whose perspective aligns well with yours. For example, some private universities, nonprofits, and corporations are founded on specific religious beliefs.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>A vast majority of organizations, however, are not based upon religious&#160;views. They employ people from around the U.S. and the world who have a host of different affiliations. When interviewing at an organization like this, it's important to be aware of&#160;how choosing to publicly display your religious affiliation may affect the interviewer's decision.</p>
<p>If you want to minimize the likelihood that someone will&#160;unfairly judge you, think of all of the ways in which you may send out cues about your views during the job hunt. Check the volunteer opportunities on your resume. Look at the organizations you follow on LinkedIn. Check your Facebook privacy settings. Consider the pieces of your interview outfit that may signal some personal beliefs to an interviewer.</p>
<p>As I mentioned in the beginning of the column, this is a personal choice. I'm not here to influence you in one direction or another or to discourage you from holding true to your beliefs. That being said,&#160;it is wise to consider the positive and negative implications of your decision – and to make a&#160;conscious decision based upon what you feel most comfortable with.</p>
<p>After you've landed a job, you have a new choice to make: whether or not you want to share your views with your new coworkers. While it's important to be yourself, remember that you also have to earn your colleagues' respect and trust. Your story will come out over time.</p>
<p>A version of this article originally appeared in the&#160; <a href="https://www.memphisdailynews.com/news/2016/jul/27/always-avoid-taboo-topics/" type="external">Memphis Daily News Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>Angela Copeland is a career coach and CEO at her firm,&#160; <a href="http://www.copelandcoaching.com/" type="external">Copeland Coaching Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
|
Where Does Religion Fit Into the Interview Process?
| true |
http://foxbusiness.com/features/2016/07/27/where-does-religion-fit-into-interview-process.html
|
2016-08-01
| 0right
|
Where Does Religion Fit Into the Interview Process?
<p />
<p>A reader contacted me today with an important question for consideration: When is it appropriate to wear clothing, jewelry, or other items associated with your&#160;religion to an <a href="https://www.recruiter.com/interview.html" type="external">interview Opens a New Window.</a> or to work?&#160; This reader was concerned about&#160;being judged in the office for her religious affiliation.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>This is a very tricky and personal question, and it's a very individual choice.</p>
<p>I often think of a job interview much like a dinner party. At a dinner party, you meet many new people who may have different viewpoints from&#160;your own. Conversations tend to be high level and centered on pleasant topics, such as the weather. Etiquette experts say that the potentially taboo topics to avoid include politics, religion, and money. This holds true for&#160;interviews as well.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, when it comes to getting hired, studies show that managers aren't free of biases. Those biases can influence who lands the job offer. Details as minor as hair and makeup can influence the interviewer's impression of a candidate. Even a candidate's height can make a difference.</p>
<p>Religion, however, is more personal and much more important than hair, makeup, or height. It can be a large part of one's identity. In today's climate, sharing your religious viewpoints with others can cause them to judge you, either positively or negatively. When they judge you negatively, it can potentially hurt your chances of getting hired.</p>
<p>A great organization to share your religious views with is one whose perspective aligns well with yours. For example, some private universities, nonprofits, and corporations are founded on specific religious beliefs.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>A vast majority of organizations, however, are not based upon religious&#160;views. They employ people from around the U.S. and the world who have a host of different affiliations. When interviewing at an organization like this, it's important to be aware of&#160;how choosing to publicly display your religious affiliation may affect the interviewer's decision.</p>
<p>If you want to minimize the likelihood that someone will&#160;unfairly judge you, think of all of the ways in which you may send out cues about your views during the job hunt. Check the volunteer opportunities on your resume. Look at the organizations you follow on LinkedIn. Check your Facebook privacy settings. Consider the pieces of your interview outfit that may signal some personal beliefs to an interviewer.</p>
<p>As I mentioned in the beginning of the column, this is a personal choice. I'm not here to influence you in one direction or another or to discourage you from holding true to your beliefs. That being said,&#160;it is wise to consider the positive and negative implications of your decision – and to make a&#160;conscious decision based upon what you feel most comfortable with.</p>
<p>After you've landed a job, you have a new choice to make: whether or not you want to share your views with your new coworkers. While it's important to be yourself, remember that you also have to earn your colleagues' respect and trust. Your story will come out over time.</p>
<p>A version of this article originally appeared in the&#160; <a href="https://www.memphisdailynews.com/news/2016/jul/27/always-avoid-taboo-topics/" type="external">Memphis Daily News Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>Angela Copeland is a career coach and CEO at her firm,&#160; <a href="http://www.copelandcoaching.com/" type="external">Copeland Coaching Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
| 7,801 |
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<p />
<p>Probable starters: Isotopes RHP Barry Enright (0-2, 8.04) vs. Redbirds LHP Marco Gonzalez (2-1, 3.45).</p>
<p>Radio: 610 AM</p>
<p>Promotion: Adult fun run</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Tuesday: Xavier Scruggs smashed a two-run home run off reliever Scott Elbert in the top of the ninth inning to give the Memphis Redbirds a 5-3 win over Albuquerque in front of 7,513 at Isotopes Park.</p>
<p>Joc Pederson’s 27th home run of the season in the bottom of the eight had tied the game at 3-3 for the Isotopes (56-68).</p>
<p>This and that: The SportsNet LA network will televise five of Albuquerque’s remaining 12 home games. … RHP Pedro Baez rejoined the Isotopes on Tuesday in time to start a four-game suspension for his role in last month’s brawl with the Reno Aces. … RHP Josh Ravin was placed on the DL with a strained groin.</p>
<p>REDBIRDS 5, ISOTOPES 3</p>
<p>MEMPHIS ALBUQUERQUE</p>
<p>ab r h bi ab r h bi</p>
<p>Pham CF 4 1 1 0 Baxter RF 4 1 1 1</p>
<p>Grichuk LF 4 1 1 0 Pederson CF 3 2 2 1</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Moore 3B 3 1 1 1 Federowicz C 4 0 2 0</p>
<p>Piscotty RF 3 1 1 2 Peterson 1B 3 0 2 0</p>
<p>Scruggs 1B 4 1 1 2 Romak 3B 3 0 0 1</p>
<p>Garcia 2B 4 0 2 0 Guerrero LF 4 0 0 0</p>
<p>Perez C 4 0 0 0 Garcia P 0 0 0 0</p>
<p>Kozma SS 3 0 1 0 Ibarra 2B 4 0 1 0</p>
<p>Kiekhefer P 0 0 0 0 Triunfel SS 4 0 0 0</p>
<p>Fornataro P 0 0 0 0 Bennett P 2 0 0 0</p>
<p>O’Neill PH 1 0 0 0 CRobinson PH 1 0 0 0</p>
<p>Rondon P 0 0 0 0 Carpenter P 0 0 0 0</p>
<p>Cooney P 2 0 0 0 Elbert P 0 0 0 0</p>
<p>Wyatt P 0 0 0 0 TRobinson LF 1 0 0 0</p>
<p>Mateo SS 1 0 1 0 Totals 33 5 9 5 Totals 33 3 8 3</p>
<p>Memphis 000 102 002 – 5</p>
<p>Albuquerque 200 000 010 – 3E – Kozma (14), Garcia, G (8), Baxter (3). DP – Memphis 1, Albuquerque 1. LOB – Memphis 3, Albuquerque 6. 2B – Pham (12), Garcia, G (11), Ibarra, W (9). HR – Piscotty (8), Scruggs (16), Baxter (6), Pederson (27). CS – Kozma (6). S – Piscotty. SF – Romak. IP H R ER BB SO</p>
<p>Memphis</p>
<p>Cooney 6 5 2 2 1 4</p>
<p>Wyatt (H, 2) 2/3 1 0 0 0 1</p>
<p>Kiekhefer (BS, 4) 2/3 1 1 1 0 1</p>
<p>Fornataro (W, 4-4) 2/3 1 0 0 1 0</p>
<p>Rondon (S, 7) 1 0 0 0 0 0</p>
<p>Albuquerque</p>
<p>Bennett 7 6 3 3 0 6</p>
<p>Carpenter 1 1 0 0 0 0</p>
<p>Elbert (L, 0-2) 1/3 2 2 2 0 0</p>
<p>Garcia 2/3 0 0 0 0 1T – 2:53. A – 7,513.</p>
|
‘Topes today
| false |
https://abqjournal.com/445094/topes-today-290.html
| 2least
|
‘Topes today
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>Probable starters: Isotopes RHP Barry Enright (0-2, 8.04) vs. Redbirds LHP Marco Gonzalez (2-1, 3.45).</p>
<p>Radio: 610 AM</p>
<p>Promotion: Adult fun run</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Tuesday: Xavier Scruggs smashed a two-run home run off reliever Scott Elbert in the top of the ninth inning to give the Memphis Redbirds a 5-3 win over Albuquerque in front of 7,513 at Isotopes Park.</p>
<p>Joc Pederson’s 27th home run of the season in the bottom of the eight had tied the game at 3-3 for the Isotopes (56-68).</p>
<p>This and that: The SportsNet LA network will televise five of Albuquerque’s remaining 12 home games. … RHP Pedro Baez rejoined the Isotopes on Tuesday in time to start a four-game suspension for his role in last month’s brawl with the Reno Aces. … RHP Josh Ravin was placed on the DL with a strained groin.</p>
<p>REDBIRDS 5, ISOTOPES 3</p>
<p>MEMPHIS ALBUQUERQUE</p>
<p>ab r h bi ab r h bi</p>
<p>Pham CF 4 1 1 0 Baxter RF 4 1 1 1</p>
<p>Grichuk LF 4 1 1 0 Pederson CF 3 2 2 1</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Moore 3B 3 1 1 1 Federowicz C 4 0 2 0</p>
<p>Piscotty RF 3 1 1 2 Peterson 1B 3 0 2 0</p>
<p>Scruggs 1B 4 1 1 2 Romak 3B 3 0 0 1</p>
<p>Garcia 2B 4 0 2 0 Guerrero LF 4 0 0 0</p>
<p>Perez C 4 0 0 0 Garcia P 0 0 0 0</p>
<p>Kozma SS 3 0 1 0 Ibarra 2B 4 0 1 0</p>
<p>Kiekhefer P 0 0 0 0 Triunfel SS 4 0 0 0</p>
<p>Fornataro P 0 0 0 0 Bennett P 2 0 0 0</p>
<p>O’Neill PH 1 0 0 0 CRobinson PH 1 0 0 0</p>
<p>Rondon P 0 0 0 0 Carpenter P 0 0 0 0</p>
<p>Cooney P 2 0 0 0 Elbert P 0 0 0 0</p>
<p>Wyatt P 0 0 0 0 TRobinson LF 1 0 0 0</p>
<p>Mateo SS 1 0 1 0 Totals 33 5 9 5 Totals 33 3 8 3</p>
<p>Memphis 000 102 002 – 5</p>
<p>Albuquerque 200 000 010 – 3E – Kozma (14), Garcia, G (8), Baxter (3). DP – Memphis 1, Albuquerque 1. LOB – Memphis 3, Albuquerque 6. 2B – Pham (12), Garcia, G (11), Ibarra, W (9). HR – Piscotty (8), Scruggs (16), Baxter (6), Pederson (27). CS – Kozma (6). S – Piscotty. SF – Romak. IP H R ER BB SO</p>
<p>Memphis</p>
<p>Cooney 6 5 2 2 1 4</p>
<p>Wyatt (H, 2) 2/3 1 0 0 0 1</p>
<p>Kiekhefer (BS, 4) 2/3 1 1 1 0 1</p>
<p>Fornataro (W, 4-4) 2/3 1 0 0 1 0</p>
<p>Rondon (S, 7) 1 0 0 0 0 0</p>
<p>Albuquerque</p>
<p>Bennett 7 6 3 3 0 6</p>
<p>Carpenter 1 1 0 0 0 0</p>
<p>Elbert (L, 0-2) 1/3 2 2 2 0 0</p>
<p>Garcia 2/3 0 0 0 0 1T – 2:53. A – 7,513.</p>
| 7,802 |
|
<p>CHINO, Calif. (AP) — Authorities caught an inmate who had escaped from a Southern California prison.</p>
<p>State prison officials say Michael Garrett was unaccounted for during a Sunday night count at the California Institution for Men in Chino, east of Los Angeles.</p>
<p>An emergency search was conducted of the facility and the 33-year-old was not immediately found.</p>
<p>Garrett was seen outside a Vons grocery store Monday and was taken into custody without incident.</p>
<p>He was serving a four year, eight month sentence for first-degree burglary, evading or attempting to evade a peace officer while driving recklessly, and vehicle theft. He was scheduled for parole in October 2019.</p>
<p>CIM, which opened in 1941, houses approximately 3,400 minimum- and medium-security inmates.</p>
<p>CHINO, Calif. (AP) — Authorities caught an inmate who had escaped from a Southern California prison.</p>
<p>State prison officials say Michael Garrett was unaccounted for during a Sunday night count at the California Institution for Men in Chino, east of Los Angeles.</p>
<p>An emergency search was conducted of the facility and the 33-year-old was not immediately found.</p>
<p>Garrett was seen outside a Vons grocery store Monday and was taken into custody without incident.</p>
<p>He was serving a four year, eight month sentence for first-degree burglary, evading or attempting to evade a peace officer while driving recklessly, and vehicle theft. He was scheduled for parole in October 2019.</p>
<p>CIM, which opened in 1941, houses approximately 3,400 minimum- and medium-security inmates.</p>
|
Police catch inmate who escaped California prison
| false |
https://apnews.com/amp/0614d8544ffb4ca8a9d015b92b0a11f0
|
2018-01-16
| 2least
|
Police catch inmate who escaped California prison
<p>CHINO, Calif. (AP) — Authorities caught an inmate who had escaped from a Southern California prison.</p>
<p>State prison officials say Michael Garrett was unaccounted for during a Sunday night count at the California Institution for Men in Chino, east of Los Angeles.</p>
<p>An emergency search was conducted of the facility and the 33-year-old was not immediately found.</p>
<p>Garrett was seen outside a Vons grocery store Monday and was taken into custody without incident.</p>
<p>He was serving a four year, eight month sentence for first-degree burglary, evading or attempting to evade a peace officer while driving recklessly, and vehicle theft. He was scheduled for parole in October 2019.</p>
<p>CIM, which opened in 1941, houses approximately 3,400 minimum- and medium-security inmates.</p>
<p>CHINO, Calif. (AP) — Authorities caught an inmate who had escaped from a Southern California prison.</p>
<p>State prison officials say Michael Garrett was unaccounted for during a Sunday night count at the California Institution for Men in Chino, east of Los Angeles.</p>
<p>An emergency search was conducted of the facility and the 33-year-old was not immediately found.</p>
<p>Garrett was seen outside a Vons grocery store Monday and was taken into custody without incident.</p>
<p>He was serving a four year, eight month sentence for first-degree burglary, evading or attempting to evade a peace officer while driving recklessly, and vehicle theft. He was scheduled for parole in October 2019.</p>
<p>CIM, which opened in 1941, houses approximately 3,400 minimum- and medium-security inmates.</p>
| 7,803 |
<p>To get an idea of how we humans might act if unfettered by cultural restraints, we could <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060727/sc_space/abriefhistoryofhumansex;_ylt=AlggI28dBR5q6oeilTJwXvEDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBhZDJjOXUyBHNlYwNtdm5ld3M-" type="external">look at bonobo chimpanzees</a>, which engage in frequent sexual acts - "a fairly quick, perfunctory and relaxed activity that functions as a social cement," according to an expert.</p>
<p>Live Science:</p>
<p>Birds do it, bees do it, humans since the dawn of time have done it.</p>
<p>But just how much has the act really changed through the millennia and even in past decades? Are humans doing it more? Are we doing it better? Sort of, say scientists. But it's how people fess up to the truth about their sex lives that has changed the most over the years.</p>
<p />
<p>Humans have basically been the same anatomically for about 100,000 years'so what is safe to say is that if we enjoy it now, then so did our cave-dwelling ancestors and everyone else since, experts say.</p>
<p>"Just as our bodies tell us what we might like to eat, or when we should go to sleep, they lay down for us our pattern of lust," says University of Toronto psychologist Edward Shorter. "Sex has always offered pleasure."</p>
<p><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060727/sc_space/abriefhistoryofhumansex;_ylt=AlggI28dBR5q6oeilTJwXvEDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBhZDJjOXUyBHNlYwNtdm5ld3M-" type="external">Link</a></p>
|
A Brief History of Human Sex
| true |
https://truthdig.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-human-sex/
|
2006-07-28
| 4left
|
A Brief History of Human Sex
<p>To get an idea of how we humans might act if unfettered by cultural restraints, we could <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060727/sc_space/abriefhistoryofhumansex;_ylt=AlggI28dBR5q6oeilTJwXvEDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBhZDJjOXUyBHNlYwNtdm5ld3M-" type="external">look at bonobo chimpanzees</a>, which engage in frequent sexual acts - "a fairly quick, perfunctory and relaxed activity that functions as a social cement," according to an expert.</p>
<p>Live Science:</p>
<p>Birds do it, bees do it, humans since the dawn of time have done it.</p>
<p>But just how much has the act really changed through the millennia and even in past decades? Are humans doing it more? Are we doing it better? Sort of, say scientists. But it's how people fess up to the truth about their sex lives that has changed the most over the years.</p>
<p />
<p>Humans have basically been the same anatomically for about 100,000 years'so what is safe to say is that if we enjoy it now, then so did our cave-dwelling ancestors and everyone else since, experts say.</p>
<p>"Just as our bodies tell us what we might like to eat, or when we should go to sleep, they lay down for us our pattern of lust," says University of Toronto psychologist Edward Shorter. "Sex has always offered pleasure."</p>
<p><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060727/sc_space/abriefhistoryofhumansex;_ylt=AlggI28dBR5q6oeilTJwXvEDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBhZDJjOXUyBHNlYwNtdm5ld3M-" type="external">Link</a></p>
| 7,804 |
<p>The Arab Spring revolutions began in Tunisia. The protests there began after a street vendor, frustrated by government corruption, set himself on fire.</p>
<p>Almost a year later, there was a similar incident today in Tunisia.</p>
<p>This time it was an unemployed man who immolated himself.</p>
<p>It's a reminder of the challenges still facing Tunisia's new, democratically-elected government.</p>
<p>The government is headed by the formerly-banned Islamist party called Ennahda.</p>
<p>It bills itself as a moderate Islamist party. Soumaya Ghannouchi is the daughter of the party's leader. She was 12-years-old when her family fled Tunisia. Rachid Ghannouchi, her father, has been in charge of Ennahda, which means "renaissance," for two decades. The Ghannouchi family lived in exile until last January, when the Tunisian uprising drove former dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali into exile.</p>
<p>"We were able to come back, which was great, to see our relatives, and see our country after such a long time, an incredible time," Ghannouchi said. "We are really grateful. And since then really incredible things have been happening."</p>
<p>The first incredible thing was the way people greeted her father's return to Tunisia after more than 20 years in exile.</p>
<p>Thousands gathered at the Tunis airport on January 30, 2011, when Ghannouchi arrived. Ten months later, Tunisians held their first free and fair elections since the country gained independence from France in 1957. Ennahda won 40 percent of the seats in parliament.</p>
<p>Ghannouchi said Ennahda's success in the election is partly due to its history over the past few decades.</p>
<p>"It's been at the forefront of the struggle against the dictatorship, it's given many sacrifices so people appreciate that," she said. "And even though there was no organized structure on ground before the revolution because of the crackdown on the party, the people still kept their allegiance to the party. And once they were able to express that they did so and very quickly organized themselves."</p>
<p>Dressed conservatively in a bulky coat and a hijab wrapped tightly around her head, Ghannouchi is a practicing, observant Muslim and a professional woman. She says Ennahda is one of the most progressive political parties in the Arab world — Islamist or otherwise.</p>
<p>"We said clearly that it's not the duty or right of the state to interfere in people's personal choices, " she said. "What they eat, drink, or how they live. We don't believe in a theocracy that imposes a lifestyle or thoughts or ways of life on people, we believe in right of every Tunisian woman and man to make that choice."</p>
<p>Tunisia is by far the most secular country in the region. After independence, women were given the right to vote and be elected to parliament, to earn equal wages to men and to divorce, among other things. Ghannouchi said Ennahda looks to protect, and advance, these aspects of Tunisian society.</p>
<p>"We want to strengthen the gains made by Tunisian women, we are proud of those gains, and we want to developed them further," she said.</p>
<p>Since the party's founding, Ennahda's leadership has also disavowed violence and endorsed tolerance and pluralism. Ghannouchi and other party officials say they look to countries like Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia as models for the role Islam can play in the state. But there are plenty of skeptics. Even among religious Tunisians, there is uneasiness with an Islamist party — no matter how moderate — in power.</p>
<p>Saleh Basharre said he didn't like the idea of mixing religion and the state, and he didn't vote for them.</p>
<p>"I was afraid that Ennahda, if they win, they will be narrow minded and extremist," Basharre said. "And you should know I'm Muslim, and I love Islam, but I don't want people to push me to do things, and to order me to do things. Religion is between me and God."</p>
<p>Ennahda dismisses these fears, saying it's the same old propaganda about Islamists that regional dictators have always thrown around. But some would welcome a truly Islamist government.</p>
<p>A picture of Islam's holiest site, the Ka'ba, in Mecca, adorns the walls of a grocery store in a middle class neighborhood outside Tunis. 29-year-old Bareech Hathnawy said he voted for Ennahda because he wants the party to impose moral order on society.</p>
<p>"We want them to stop bad language on the streets," he said. "You go on street with your sister or mother and hear bad words on the streets. The government should stop this. They need to stop other bad things like people drinking alcohol on the street and girls wearing short skirts. "</p>
<p>Hathnaway is from the south, where Tunisians are more conservative. He said people there voted for Ennahda for many of the same reasons he did.</p>
<p>"People in the cities are more open-minded, but in the south they are more conservative," Hathnaway said. "For example, if I saw my sister with a cigarette I would kill her. This is why people voted for Ennahda in the south – to stop girls from wearing short skirts, these kinds of things."</p>
<p>Still, even Hathnawy doesn't think women should be obligated to wear the veil.</p>
<p>Ziad Mahearsee, the head of the Tunisian news website "Tunisia Live," said he doesn't think Ennahda has a plan to drastically change society. He says most people probably voted for Ennahda because they seem honest, not because of how they practice Islam. Besides, he said, Ennahda realizes that the country faces huge issues.</p>
<p>"What we need now more than anything is 750,000 jobs," Mahearsee sais. "And these people are aware of the challenges of the working poor in Tunisia. So I think most Tunisians will judge Ennahda on capacity to create jobs and allow Tunisian economy to flourish rather than the religious aspect of things."</p>
<p>Ennahda is also part of a diverse governing coalition. Its partners are two determinedly secular parties. And party leader Rachid Ghannouchi seems eager to continue the western friendly traditions that have been hallmarks of Tunisia's foreign policy, and to put western governments at ease about his party's newfound position.</p>
|
Tunisia's Democratic Intentions Questioned
| false |
https://pri.org/stories/2012-01-05/tunisias-democratic-intentions-questioned
|
2012-01-05
| 3left-center
|
Tunisia's Democratic Intentions Questioned
<p>The Arab Spring revolutions began in Tunisia. The protests there began after a street vendor, frustrated by government corruption, set himself on fire.</p>
<p>Almost a year later, there was a similar incident today in Tunisia.</p>
<p>This time it was an unemployed man who immolated himself.</p>
<p>It's a reminder of the challenges still facing Tunisia's new, democratically-elected government.</p>
<p>The government is headed by the formerly-banned Islamist party called Ennahda.</p>
<p>It bills itself as a moderate Islamist party. Soumaya Ghannouchi is the daughter of the party's leader. She was 12-years-old when her family fled Tunisia. Rachid Ghannouchi, her father, has been in charge of Ennahda, which means "renaissance," for two decades. The Ghannouchi family lived in exile until last January, when the Tunisian uprising drove former dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali into exile.</p>
<p>"We were able to come back, which was great, to see our relatives, and see our country after such a long time, an incredible time," Ghannouchi said. "We are really grateful. And since then really incredible things have been happening."</p>
<p>The first incredible thing was the way people greeted her father's return to Tunisia after more than 20 years in exile.</p>
<p>Thousands gathered at the Tunis airport on January 30, 2011, when Ghannouchi arrived. Ten months later, Tunisians held their first free and fair elections since the country gained independence from France in 1957. Ennahda won 40 percent of the seats in parliament.</p>
<p>Ghannouchi said Ennahda's success in the election is partly due to its history over the past few decades.</p>
<p>"It's been at the forefront of the struggle against the dictatorship, it's given many sacrifices so people appreciate that," she said. "And even though there was no organized structure on ground before the revolution because of the crackdown on the party, the people still kept their allegiance to the party. And once they were able to express that they did so and very quickly organized themselves."</p>
<p>Dressed conservatively in a bulky coat and a hijab wrapped tightly around her head, Ghannouchi is a practicing, observant Muslim and a professional woman. She says Ennahda is one of the most progressive political parties in the Arab world — Islamist or otherwise.</p>
<p>"We said clearly that it's not the duty or right of the state to interfere in people's personal choices, " she said. "What they eat, drink, or how they live. We don't believe in a theocracy that imposes a lifestyle or thoughts or ways of life on people, we believe in right of every Tunisian woman and man to make that choice."</p>
<p>Tunisia is by far the most secular country in the region. After independence, women were given the right to vote and be elected to parliament, to earn equal wages to men and to divorce, among other things. Ghannouchi said Ennahda looks to protect, and advance, these aspects of Tunisian society.</p>
<p>"We want to strengthen the gains made by Tunisian women, we are proud of those gains, and we want to developed them further," she said.</p>
<p>Since the party's founding, Ennahda's leadership has also disavowed violence and endorsed tolerance and pluralism. Ghannouchi and other party officials say they look to countries like Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia as models for the role Islam can play in the state. But there are plenty of skeptics. Even among religious Tunisians, there is uneasiness with an Islamist party — no matter how moderate — in power.</p>
<p>Saleh Basharre said he didn't like the idea of mixing religion and the state, and he didn't vote for them.</p>
<p>"I was afraid that Ennahda, if they win, they will be narrow minded and extremist," Basharre said. "And you should know I'm Muslim, and I love Islam, but I don't want people to push me to do things, and to order me to do things. Religion is between me and God."</p>
<p>Ennahda dismisses these fears, saying it's the same old propaganda about Islamists that regional dictators have always thrown around. But some would welcome a truly Islamist government.</p>
<p>A picture of Islam's holiest site, the Ka'ba, in Mecca, adorns the walls of a grocery store in a middle class neighborhood outside Tunis. 29-year-old Bareech Hathnawy said he voted for Ennahda because he wants the party to impose moral order on society.</p>
<p>"We want them to stop bad language on the streets," he said. "You go on street with your sister or mother and hear bad words on the streets. The government should stop this. They need to stop other bad things like people drinking alcohol on the street and girls wearing short skirts. "</p>
<p>Hathnaway is from the south, where Tunisians are more conservative. He said people there voted for Ennahda for many of the same reasons he did.</p>
<p>"People in the cities are more open-minded, but in the south they are more conservative," Hathnaway said. "For example, if I saw my sister with a cigarette I would kill her. This is why people voted for Ennahda in the south – to stop girls from wearing short skirts, these kinds of things."</p>
<p>Still, even Hathnawy doesn't think women should be obligated to wear the veil.</p>
<p>Ziad Mahearsee, the head of the Tunisian news website "Tunisia Live," said he doesn't think Ennahda has a plan to drastically change society. He says most people probably voted for Ennahda because they seem honest, not because of how they practice Islam. Besides, he said, Ennahda realizes that the country faces huge issues.</p>
<p>"What we need now more than anything is 750,000 jobs," Mahearsee sais. "And these people are aware of the challenges of the working poor in Tunisia. So I think most Tunisians will judge Ennahda on capacity to create jobs and allow Tunisian economy to flourish rather than the religious aspect of things."</p>
<p>Ennahda is also part of a diverse governing coalition. Its partners are two determinedly secular parties. And party leader Rachid Ghannouchi seems eager to continue the western friendly traditions that have been hallmarks of Tunisia's foreign policy, and to put western governments at ease about his party's newfound position.</p>
| 7,805 |
<p>Kellogg Co. Chief Executive John Bryant will step down next week, making him the fourth head of a major food company to depart in a tumultuous year for the industry.</p>
<p>Throughout his nearly seven years running the cereal and snack giant, Mr. Bryant battled sluggish sales as Americans abandoned longstanding brands in favor of fresher, more niche alternatives. Kellogg posted just one quarter of sales growth during his tenure.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>"Kellogg is in the middle of a transformation," Mr. Bryant said in an interview.</p>
<p>The shift in tastes has also confounded executives at other big food makers that filled U.S. grocery carts for more than a century. Mondelez International Inc., Hershey Co. and General Mills Inc. also announced new chief executives in the past year.</p>
<p>Unlike some of its competitors, Kellogg has chosen an outsider to revive its sales and refresh a stable of products that includes Frosted Flakes, Pop-Tarts and Pringles. Steven Cahillane, the 52-year-old chief executive of health-and-wellness company Nature's Bounty and a former Coca-Cola Co. executive, will succeed Mr. Bryant, 51.</p>
<p>Mr. Bryant said Mr. Cahillane's experience running a company that sells natural and organic supplements will help Kellogg expand its own health-conscious product offerings.</p>
<p>"Steve can hit the ground running on Monday," Mr. Bryant said. Mr. Bryant will remain chairman of Kellogg's board until March, when Mr. Cahillane will assume that role, too. Mr. Bryant, who has worked for Kellogg since 1998, said he is leaving to spend more time with his family.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Kellogg wouldn't say when directors began looking for Mr. Bryant's successor. Mr. Bryant said Kellogg has worked on succession plans with executive search firm Spencer Stuart for years. Some Kellogg executives passed over in favor of Mr. Cahillane were offered retention packages, Mr. Bryant said.</p>
<p>Mr. Cahillane emerged as a strong contender early in Kellogg's multimonth search for a new CEO, said a person familiar with the company. Kellogg board members hope Mr. Cahillane can quickly reignite sales growth, the person said. "The biggest challenge obviously is accelerating growth again on the top line," because Kellogg already has cut costs and made significant acquisitions, the person said.</p>
<p>Mr. Cahillane, who joined Nature's Bounty as CEO in 2014, produced "good returns for the investor" partly by bringing in a new management team, one longtime acquaintance of his said. In July, private-equity firm KKR said it was acquiring a majority stake Nature's Bounty.</p>
<p>But Mr. Cahillane had a mixed record at Coke, where he worked for seven years, this person said. He "got blamed" for poor performance in North America, where he ran Coca-Cola Americas, then the company's largest division, the acquaintance said.</p>
<p>Kellogg declined to make Mr. Cahillane available for an interview. Mr. Bryant said Mr. Cahillane has had "a distinguished career."</p>
<p>"We don't expect major changes in Kellogg's strategy, but we believe Mr. Cahillane's fresh perspective will be good" said Brittany Weissman, a consumer analyst at Edward Jones.</p>
<p>Kellogg's core business, selling cereal in the U.S., has weighed on its performance for years. Over the past year, Kellogg's stock has fallen 19%, similar to its peers. Its shares were flat in Thursday afternoon trading.</p>
<p>Mr. Bryant had stints at Kellogg as finance chief and as chief operating officer before taking over as chief executive from fellow Australian David Mackay in 2011. Mr. Bryant inherited a stable of cereal brands like Special K and Rice Krispies that were losing favor among consumers in favor of fresher and more natural products. The rise of high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets also hurt traditional cereals heavy in grains and sugar. Breakfast bars and egg sandwiches eclipsed cereal in the morning routine of many Americans.</p>
<p>About a year into Mr. Bryant's tenure, Kellogg acquired Pringles chips, signaling an effort to focus more on snacks and the potential for growth outside the U.S.</p>
<p>"We have dramatically expended in emerging markets, and we are committed to being on trend with snacking occasions around the world," Mr. Bryant said.</p>
<p>The acquisition has served the company well, but its main cereal business has continued to suffer. Last month, Kellogg said sales in its most recent quarter fell 2.5% to $3.19 billion, including a 2% drop in North America.</p>
<p>Like its competitors, Kellogg is hoping to boost sales by reformulating its brands with a focus on fewer and more natural ingredients. Removing artificial coloring from products like frozen Eggo waffles has improved their sales, the company says.</p>
<p>Kellogg has also mirrored its peers in cutting costs by laying off employees at its headquarters and closing factories. The yearslong effort has boosted Kellogg's operating profit margin. Since Mr. Bryant took over as CEO, the stock has climbed about 24%.</p>
<p>Write to Annie Gasparro at [email protected] and Joann S. Lublin at [email protected]</p>
<p>(END) Dow Jones Newswires</p>
<p>September 28, 2017 15:10 ET (19:10 GMT)</p>
|
Kellogg CEO John Bryant to Step Down -- 2nd Update
| true |
http://foxbusiness.com/features/2017/09/28/kellogg-ceo-john-bryant-to-step-down-2nd-update.html
|
2017-09-28
| 0right
|
Kellogg CEO John Bryant to Step Down -- 2nd Update
<p>Kellogg Co. Chief Executive John Bryant will step down next week, making him the fourth head of a major food company to depart in a tumultuous year for the industry.</p>
<p>Throughout his nearly seven years running the cereal and snack giant, Mr. Bryant battled sluggish sales as Americans abandoned longstanding brands in favor of fresher, more niche alternatives. Kellogg posted just one quarter of sales growth during his tenure.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>"Kellogg is in the middle of a transformation," Mr. Bryant said in an interview.</p>
<p>The shift in tastes has also confounded executives at other big food makers that filled U.S. grocery carts for more than a century. Mondelez International Inc., Hershey Co. and General Mills Inc. also announced new chief executives in the past year.</p>
<p>Unlike some of its competitors, Kellogg has chosen an outsider to revive its sales and refresh a stable of products that includes Frosted Flakes, Pop-Tarts and Pringles. Steven Cahillane, the 52-year-old chief executive of health-and-wellness company Nature's Bounty and a former Coca-Cola Co. executive, will succeed Mr. Bryant, 51.</p>
<p>Mr. Bryant said Mr. Cahillane's experience running a company that sells natural and organic supplements will help Kellogg expand its own health-conscious product offerings.</p>
<p>"Steve can hit the ground running on Monday," Mr. Bryant said. Mr. Bryant will remain chairman of Kellogg's board until March, when Mr. Cahillane will assume that role, too. Mr. Bryant, who has worked for Kellogg since 1998, said he is leaving to spend more time with his family.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Kellogg wouldn't say when directors began looking for Mr. Bryant's successor. Mr. Bryant said Kellogg has worked on succession plans with executive search firm Spencer Stuart for years. Some Kellogg executives passed over in favor of Mr. Cahillane were offered retention packages, Mr. Bryant said.</p>
<p>Mr. Cahillane emerged as a strong contender early in Kellogg's multimonth search for a new CEO, said a person familiar with the company. Kellogg board members hope Mr. Cahillane can quickly reignite sales growth, the person said. "The biggest challenge obviously is accelerating growth again on the top line," because Kellogg already has cut costs and made significant acquisitions, the person said.</p>
<p>Mr. Cahillane, who joined Nature's Bounty as CEO in 2014, produced "good returns for the investor" partly by bringing in a new management team, one longtime acquaintance of his said. In July, private-equity firm KKR said it was acquiring a majority stake Nature's Bounty.</p>
<p>But Mr. Cahillane had a mixed record at Coke, where he worked for seven years, this person said. He "got blamed" for poor performance in North America, where he ran Coca-Cola Americas, then the company's largest division, the acquaintance said.</p>
<p>Kellogg declined to make Mr. Cahillane available for an interview. Mr. Bryant said Mr. Cahillane has had "a distinguished career."</p>
<p>"We don't expect major changes in Kellogg's strategy, but we believe Mr. Cahillane's fresh perspective will be good" said Brittany Weissman, a consumer analyst at Edward Jones.</p>
<p>Kellogg's core business, selling cereal in the U.S., has weighed on its performance for years. Over the past year, Kellogg's stock has fallen 19%, similar to its peers. Its shares were flat in Thursday afternoon trading.</p>
<p>Mr. Bryant had stints at Kellogg as finance chief and as chief operating officer before taking over as chief executive from fellow Australian David Mackay in 2011. Mr. Bryant inherited a stable of cereal brands like Special K and Rice Krispies that were losing favor among consumers in favor of fresher and more natural products. The rise of high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets also hurt traditional cereals heavy in grains and sugar. Breakfast bars and egg sandwiches eclipsed cereal in the morning routine of many Americans.</p>
<p>About a year into Mr. Bryant's tenure, Kellogg acquired Pringles chips, signaling an effort to focus more on snacks and the potential for growth outside the U.S.</p>
<p>"We have dramatically expended in emerging markets, and we are committed to being on trend with snacking occasions around the world," Mr. Bryant said.</p>
<p>The acquisition has served the company well, but its main cereal business has continued to suffer. Last month, Kellogg said sales in its most recent quarter fell 2.5% to $3.19 billion, including a 2% drop in North America.</p>
<p>Like its competitors, Kellogg is hoping to boost sales by reformulating its brands with a focus on fewer and more natural ingredients. Removing artificial coloring from products like frozen Eggo waffles has improved their sales, the company says.</p>
<p>Kellogg has also mirrored its peers in cutting costs by laying off employees at its headquarters and closing factories. The yearslong effort has boosted Kellogg's operating profit margin. Since Mr. Bryant took over as CEO, the stock has climbed about 24%.</p>
<p>Write to Annie Gasparro at [email protected] and Joann S. Lublin at [email protected]</p>
<p>(END) Dow Jones Newswires</p>
<p>September 28, 2017 15:10 ET (19:10 GMT)</p>
| 7,806 |
<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico's largest university and the Navajo Nation have teamed up to provide dormitory space for as many as 118 tribal students at a new campus housing development.</p>
<p>Officials announced the partnership Friday. The move comes after tribal lawmakers approved the use of nearly $1.5 million in supplemental funding for the effort.</p>
<p>Navajo President Russell Begaye said one of the primary reasons for the high dropout rate for Native American college students is financial distress. He says this will help alleviate some of the burden.</p>
<p>Navajo students will occupy two floors of the downtown Albuquerque development, known as the Lobo Rainforest.</p>
<p>The space will reflect the cultural and historical values of the Navajo Nation, which spans parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.</p>
<p>The tribe will determine eligibility for Navajo students who wish to live in the apartment-style units.</p>
<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico's largest university and the Navajo Nation have teamed up to provide dormitory space for as many as 118 tribal students at a new campus housing development.</p>
<p>Officials announced the partnership Friday. The move comes after tribal lawmakers approved the use of nearly $1.5 million in supplemental funding for the effort.</p>
<p>Navajo President Russell Begaye said one of the primary reasons for the high dropout rate for Native American college students is financial distress. He says this will help alleviate some of the burden.</p>
<p>Navajo students will occupy two floors of the downtown Albuquerque development, known as the Lobo Rainforest.</p>
<p>The space will reflect the cultural and historical values of the Navajo Nation, which spans parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.</p>
<p>The tribe will determine eligibility for Navajo students who wish to live in the apartment-style units.</p>
|
Navajos, New Mexico university reach housing partnership
| false |
https://apnews.com/amp/2ea6a6120c474dfdab3a987a1177a50b
|
2018-01-12
| 2least
|
Navajos, New Mexico university reach housing partnership
<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico's largest university and the Navajo Nation have teamed up to provide dormitory space for as many as 118 tribal students at a new campus housing development.</p>
<p>Officials announced the partnership Friday. The move comes after tribal lawmakers approved the use of nearly $1.5 million in supplemental funding for the effort.</p>
<p>Navajo President Russell Begaye said one of the primary reasons for the high dropout rate for Native American college students is financial distress. He says this will help alleviate some of the burden.</p>
<p>Navajo students will occupy two floors of the downtown Albuquerque development, known as the Lobo Rainforest.</p>
<p>The space will reflect the cultural and historical values of the Navajo Nation, which spans parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.</p>
<p>The tribe will determine eligibility for Navajo students who wish to live in the apartment-style units.</p>
<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico's largest university and the Navajo Nation have teamed up to provide dormitory space for as many as 118 tribal students at a new campus housing development.</p>
<p>Officials announced the partnership Friday. The move comes after tribal lawmakers approved the use of nearly $1.5 million in supplemental funding for the effort.</p>
<p>Navajo President Russell Begaye said one of the primary reasons for the high dropout rate for Native American college students is financial distress. He says this will help alleviate some of the burden.</p>
<p>Navajo students will occupy two floors of the downtown Albuquerque development, known as the Lobo Rainforest.</p>
<p>The space will reflect the cultural and historical values of the Navajo Nation, which spans parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.</p>
<p>The tribe will determine eligibility for Navajo students who wish to live in the apartment-style units.</p>
| 7,807 |
<p>Jan 22 (Reuters) - AXA:</p> * ACQUIRES MAESTRO HEALTH ‍​
<p>* TOTAL CONSIDERATION FOR THE ACQUISITION WOULD AMOUNT TO USD 155 MILLION‍​</p>
<p>* TOTAL CONSIDERATION FOR THE ACQUISITION WOULD AMOUNT TO USD 155 MILLION (OR EURO 127 MILLION)‍​ Source text: <a href="http://bit.ly/2n0PM4N" type="external">bit.ly/2n0PM4N</a> Further company coverage: (Gdynia Newsroom)</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>(Reuters) - At least seven companies said on Thursday they were dropping advertisements from Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show after the conservative pundit mocked a teenage survivor of the Florida school massacre on Twitter and he responded with a call for a boycott.</p>
<p>Parkland student David Hogg, 17, tweeted a list of a dozen companies that advertise on “The Ingraham Angle” and urged his supporters to demand that they cancel their ads.</p>
<p>Hogg is a survivor of the Feb. 14 mass shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the Parkland suburb of Fort Lauderdale. He and other classmates have become the faces of a new youth-led movement calling for tighter restrictions on firearms.</p>
<p>Hogg took aim at Ingraham’s advertisers after she taunted him on Twitter on Wednesday, accusing him of whining about being rejected by four colleges to which he had applied.</p>
<p>On Thursday, Ingraham tweeted an apology “in the spirit of Holy Week,” saying she was sorry for any hurt or upset she had caused Hogg or any of the “brave victims” of Parkland.</p>
<p>“For the record, I believe my show was the first to feature David ... immediately after that horrific shooting and even noted how ‘poised’ he was given the tragedy,” Ingraham tweeted.</p>
<p>But her apology did not stop companies from departing.</p>
<p>Nutrish, the pet food line created by celebrity chef Rachael Ray, travel website TripAdvisor Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=TRIP.O" type="external">TRIP.O</a>), online home furnishings seller Wayfair Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=W.N" type="external">W.N</a>), the world’s largest packaged food company, Nestle SA ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=NESN.S" type="external">NESN.S</a>), online streaming service Hulu, travel website Expedia Group Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=EXPE.O" type="external">EXPE.O</a>) and online personal shopping service Stitch Fix ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=SFIX.O" type="external">SFIX.O</a>) all said they were canceling their advertisements.</p>
<p>Wayfair said in a statement it supports dialogue and debate, but “the decision of an adult to personally criticize a high school student who has lost his classmates in an unspeakable tragedy is not consistent with our values.”</p>
<p>Replying to Hogg’s boycott call, Nutrish tweeted: “We are in the process of removing our ads from Laura Ingraham’s program.”</p> A combination of file photos show media personality Laura Ingraham in Washington October 14, 2017 and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student David Hogg, at a rally in Washington March 24, 2018. REUTERS/Mary F. Calvert, Jonathan Ernst/Files
<p>Responding to public pressure, Nestle wrote on Twitter that it had “no plans to buy ads on the show in future.”</p>
<p>Hulu said on Twitter: “We’d like to confirm that we are no longer advertising on Laura Ingraham’s show and are monitoring all of our ad placements carefully.”</p>
<p>CNBC cited a TripAdvisor spokesman as saying the company does not condone “inappropriate comments” by Ingraham that “cross the line of decency.”</p>
<p>TripAdvisor representatives did not immediately reply to a request for comment.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=TRIP.O" type="external">TripAdvisor Inc</a> 40.89 TRIP.O Nasdaq +0.28 (+0.69%) TRIP.O W.N NESN.S EXPE.O SFIX.O
<p>Expedia, which was not on Hogg’s list or another list of sponsors that Hogg retweeted, “no longer advertises on this show,” Expedia spokeswoman Maureen Thon said in an email.</p>
<p>Hogg wrote on Twitter that an apology just to mollify advertisers was insufficient. He said he would accept it only if Ingraham denounced the way Fox News treated him and his friends.</p>
<p>“It’s time to love thy neighbor, not mudsling at children,” Hogg tweeted.</p>
<p>Ingraham’s show runs on Fox News, part of Rupert Murdoch’s Twenty-First Century Fox Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=FOXA.O" type="external">FOXA.O</a>).</p>
<p>Reporting by Suzannah Gonzales in Chicago; Additional reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York, Andrew Hay; Editing by David Gregorio, Matthew Lewis and Diane Craft</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Investigators probing whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russia have been questioning witnesses about events at the 2016 Republican National Convention, according to two sources familiar with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiries.</p>
<p>Mueller’s team has been asking about a convention-related event attended by both Russia’s U.S. ambassador and Jeff Sessions, the first U.S. senator to support Trump and now his attorney general, said one source, who requested anonymity due to the ongoing investigation.</p>
<p>Another issue Mueller’s team has been asking about is how and why Republican Party platform language hostile to Russia was deleted from a section of the document related to Ukraine, said another source who also requested anonymity.</p>
<p>Mueller’s interest in what happened at the Republican convention in Cleveland, Ohio in July 2016, is an indication that Trump campaign contacts and actions related to Russia remain central to the special counsel’s investigation.</p>
<p>Trump, who was nominated as the Republican Party candidate for the November 2016 election during the convention, has denied any collusion with Russia during the campaign. Moscow has denied U.S. intelligence agencies’ findings that it interfered in the campaign to try to tilt the election in Trump’s favor.</p>
<p>Investigators have asked detailed questions about conversations that Sessions, then a Trump campaign adviser, had at a convention event attended by then-Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak, said the first source, who was questioned by Mueller about the event.</p>
<p>The same source said Mueller’s team also has been asking whether Sessions had private discussions with Kislyak on the sidelines of a campaign speech Trump gave at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel in April 2016.</p>
<p>Sessions’ spokespersons have denied repeatedly that he had any private discussions with Kislyak at the Mayflower. Sessions told lawmakers last year he could not recall any conversations with Russian officials at the hotel but could not rule out that a “brief interaction” with Kislyak may have occurred there.</p>
<p>Spokespersons for Mueller and Sessions declined to comment on Mueller’s interest in Sessions’ activities at the convention and other convention-related events.</p> Delegates celebrate at the conclusion of the final day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. July 21, 2016. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein UKRAINE LANGUAGE
<p>The special counsel’s investigators have also interviewed attendees of the committee meetings that drafted the Republican Party platform in Cleveland.</p>
<p>At one committee meeting, according to people in attendance, Diana Denman, a member of the platform committee’s national security subcommittee, proposed language calling for the United States to supply “lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine’s armed forces and greater coordination with NATO on defense planning.”</p>
<p>But the final platform language deleted the reference to “lethal defensive weapons,” a change that made the platform less hostile to Russia, whose troops had invaded the Crimean peninsula and eastern Ukraine.</p>
<p>After the convention, Denman told Reuters in 2016, J.D. Gordon, a Trump foreign policy adviser, told her he was going to speak to Trump about the language on Ukraine, and that Trump’s campaign team played a direct role in softening the platform language.</p> FILE PHOTO: Special Counsel Robert Mueller (R) departs after briefing members of the U.S. Senate on his investigation into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 21, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
<p>The Trump campaign has denied playing any role in the weakening of the party’s position regarding Ukraine. Gordon has called Denman’s version of events “inaccurate.”</p>
<p>Stephen Yates, co-chair of the platform committee’s national security subcommittee, said he has “heard nothing about other members of the subcommittee being called in for questioning, and I have had no interaction with anyone working on the investigation.”</p>
<p>Sessions recused himself last year from the federal probe into Russian election meddling after it emerged that he had failed to say during his Senate confirmation hearing to be attorney general that he had met with Russia’s ambassador in 2016.</p>
<p>(This version of the story corrects paragraph 8 to show Sessions did not rule out a “brief interaction” with Kislyak instead of he admitted to speaking briefly to Kislyak)</p>
<p>Reporting By Mark Hosenball; Editing by John Walcott and Frances Kerry</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A Facebook Inc executive said in an internal memo in 2016 that the social media company needed to pursue adding users above all else, BuzzFeed News reported on Thursday, prompting disavowals from the executive and Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.</p> Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks on stage during the Facebook F8 conference in San Francisco, California April 12, 2016. REUTERS/Stephen Lam
<p>The memo from Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook vice president, had not been previously reported as Facebook faces inquiries over how it handles personal information and the tactics the social media company has used to grow to 2.1 billion users.</p>
<p>Zuckerberg stood by Bosworth, who goes by the nickname “Boz,” while distancing himself from the memo’s contents. Bosworth confirmed the memo’s authenticity but in a statement he disavowed its message, saying its goal had been to encourage debate.</p>
<p>Facebook users, advertisers and investors have been in an uproar for months over a series of scandals, most recently privacy practices that allowed political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to obtain personal information on 50 million Facebook members. Zuckerberg is expected to testify at a hearing with U.S. lawmakers as soon as April.</p>
<p>“Boz is a talented leader who says many provocative things. This was one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly. We’ve never believed the ends justify the means,” Zuckerberg said in a statement.</p>
<p>Bosworth wrote in the June 2016 memo that some “questionable” practices were all right if the result was connecting people.</p>
<p>“That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends,” he wrote in the memo, which BuzzFeed published on its website.</p> Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks on stage during the Facebook F8 conference in San Francisco, California April 12, 2016. REUTERS/Stephen Lam
<p>He also urged fellow employees not to let potential negatives slow them down.</p>
<p>“Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people,” he wrote.</p>
<p>Bosworth said Thursday that he did not agree with the post today “and I didn’t agree with it even when I wrote it.</p>
<p>“Having a debate around hard topics like these is a critical part of our process and to do that effectively we have to be able to consider even bad ideas, if only to eliminate them,” Bosworth’s statement said.</p>
<p>Reporting by David Ingram; editing by Grant McCool</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired by the Trump administration but has said he was terminated because he is a crucial witness in the Russia investigation, has raised more than $292,000 in seven hours to help cover costs defending against other ongoing government probes, the funding website showed.</p> FILE PHOTO: FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (C) arrives to testify behind closed doors before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., December 21, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
<p>A statement on the GoFundMe internet page unveiled earlier on Thursday said the goal was to raise $150,000 from the public but it was raised to $250,000 because of a response that “has been remarkable and beyond our expectations.”</p>
<p>The action represents an escalation of the battle between McCabe and the administration over his firing amid heavy criticism by President Donald Trump. It also raises the prospect that McCabe could legally challenge his termination in the future.</p>
<p>"Andrew McCabe’s FBI career was long, distinguished, and unblemished," the statement said. "His reward for that has been a termination that was completely unjustified, amidst repeated ad hominem attacks by the President of the United States." <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/andrewmccabelegaldefensefund" type="external">here</a></p>
<p>The page features a photo of McCabe with his wife, two children and the family dog, Jeremiah.</p>
<p>On March 16, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he was terminating McCabe after the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation veteran had leaked information to the press and misled investigators about his actions.</p>
<p>The report used as the basis for the firing has still not been made public. Following McCabe’s termination, Trump took to Twitter, where he declared it was a “great day for Democracy.”</p>
<p>McCabe’s dismissal came less than two days before his 50th birthday, when he would have been eligible to retire from the Federal Bureau of Investigation with his full pension.</p>
<p>McCabe has disputed the findings by the inspector general’s office. He said he believes he is facing administration retaliation because he is a crucial witness into whether Trump may have tried to obstruct a criminal probe now being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.</p>
<p>While he was the FBI’s No. 2 official, McCabe was deeply involved in overseeing investigations related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, and whether Russia colluded with Trump’s campaign. Trump has denied that any collusion occurred and Russia has denied meddling.</p>
<p>Reuters has reported that McCabe kept contemporaneous notes following his conversations with Trump, as well as notes related to former FBI Director James Comey’s conversations with Trump.</p>
<p>Trump fired Comey in 2017, prompting Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint Mueller as special counsel. Trump later acknowledged in a televised interview that he fired Comey over “this Russia thing.”</p>
<p>Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Additional reporting by Eric Walsh; Editing by Toni Reinhold</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
|
BRIEF-AXA Acquires Maestro Health Ads pulled from Ingraham show after she mocked Parkland survivor Mueller probing Russia contacts at Republican convention: sources Zuckerberg disavows memo saying all user growth is good Ex-FBI deputy McCabe's online legal defense fund nears $300,000 in hours
| false |
https://reuters.com/article/brief-axa-acquires-maestro-health/brief-axa-acquires-maestro-health-idUSFWN1PH0X4
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2018-01-22
| 2least
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BRIEF-AXA Acquires Maestro Health Ads pulled from Ingraham show after she mocked Parkland survivor Mueller probing Russia contacts at Republican convention: sources Zuckerberg disavows memo saying all user growth is good Ex-FBI deputy McCabe's online legal defense fund nears $300,000 in hours
<p>Jan 22 (Reuters) - AXA:</p> * ACQUIRES MAESTRO HEALTH ‍​
<p>* TOTAL CONSIDERATION FOR THE ACQUISITION WOULD AMOUNT TO USD 155 MILLION‍​</p>
<p>* TOTAL CONSIDERATION FOR THE ACQUISITION WOULD AMOUNT TO USD 155 MILLION (OR EURO 127 MILLION)‍​ Source text: <a href="http://bit.ly/2n0PM4N" type="external">bit.ly/2n0PM4N</a> Further company coverage: (Gdynia Newsroom)</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>(Reuters) - At least seven companies said on Thursday they were dropping advertisements from Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show after the conservative pundit mocked a teenage survivor of the Florida school massacre on Twitter and he responded with a call for a boycott.</p>
<p>Parkland student David Hogg, 17, tweeted a list of a dozen companies that advertise on “The Ingraham Angle” and urged his supporters to demand that they cancel their ads.</p>
<p>Hogg is a survivor of the Feb. 14 mass shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the Parkland suburb of Fort Lauderdale. He and other classmates have become the faces of a new youth-led movement calling for tighter restrictions on firearms.</p>
<p>Hogg took aim at Ingraham’s advertisers after she taunted him on Twitter on Wednesday, accusing him of whining about being rejected by four colleges to which he had applied.</p>
<p>On Thursday, Ingraham tweeted an apology “in the spirit of Holy Week,” saying she was sorry for any hurt or upset she had caused Hogg or any of the “brave victims” of Parkland.</p>
<p>“For the record, I believe my show was the first to feature David ... immediately after that horrific shooting and even noted how ‘poised’ he was given the tragedy,” Ingraham tweeted.</p>
<p>But her apology did not stop companies from departing.</p>
<p>Nutrish, the pet food line created by celebrity chef Rachael Ray, travel website TripAdvisor Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=TRIP.O" type="external">TRIP.O</a>), online home furnishings seller Wayfair Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=W.N" type="external">W.N</a>), the world’s largest packaged food company, Nestle SA ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=NESN.S" type="external">NESN.S</a>), online streaming service Hulu, travel website Expedia Group Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=EXPE.O" type="external">EXPE.O</a>) and online personal shopping service Stitch Fix ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=SFIX.O" type="external">SFIX.O</a>) all said they were canceling their advertisements.</p>
<p>Wayfair said in a statement it supports dialogue and debate, but “the decision of an adult to personally criticize a high school student who has lost his classmates in an unspeakable tragedy is not consistent with our values.”</p>
<p>Replying to Hogg’s boycott call, Nutrish tweeted: “We are in the process of removing our ads from Laura Ingraham’s program.”</p> A combination of file photos show media personality Laura Ingraham in Washington October 14, 2017 and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student David Hogg, at a rally in Washington March 24, 2018. REUTERS/Mary F. Calvert, Jonathan Ernst/Files
<p>Responding to public pressure, Nestle wrote on Twitter that it had “no plans to buy ads on the show in future.”</p>
<p>Hulu said on Twitter: “We’d like to confirm that we are no longer advertising on Laura Ingraham’s show and are monitoring all of our ad placements carefully.”</p>
<p>CNBC cited a TripAdvisor spokesman as saying the company does not condone “inappropriate comments” by Ingraham that “cross the line of decency.”</p>
<p>TripAdvisor representatives did not immediately reply to a request for comment.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=TRIP.O" type="external">TripAdvisor Inc</a> 40.89 TRIP.O Nasdaq +0.28 (+0.69%) TRIP.O W.N NESN.S EXPE.O SFIX.O
<p>Expedia, which was not on Hogg’s list or another list of sponsors that Hogg retweeted, “no longer advertises on this show,” Expedia spokeswoman Maureen Thon said in an email.</p>
<p>Hogg wrote on Twitter that an apology just to mollify advertisers was insufficient. He said he would accept it only if Ingraham denounced the way Fox News treated him and his friends.</p>
<p>“It’s time to love thy neighbor, not mudsling at children,” Hogg tweeted.</p>
<p>Ingraham’s show runs on Fox News, part of Rupert Murdoch’s Twenty-First Century Fox Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=FOXA.O" type="external">FOXA.O</a>).</p>
<p>Reporting by Suzannah Gonzales in Chicago; Additional reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York, Andrew Hay; Editing by David Gregorio, Matthew Lewis and Diane Craft</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Investigators probing whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russia have been questioning witnesses about events at the 2016 Republican National Convention, according to two sources familiar with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiries.</p>
<p>Mueller’s team has been asking about a convention-related event attended by both Russia’s U.S. ambassador and Jeff Sessions, the first U.S. senator to support Trump and now his attorney general, said one source, who requested anonymity due to the ongoing investigation.</p>
<p>Another issue Mueller’s team has been asking about is how and why Republican Party platform language hostile to Russia was deleted from a section of the document related to Ukraine, said another source who also requested anonymity.</p>
<p>Mueller’s interest in what happened at the Republican convention in Cleveland, Ohio in July 2016, is an indication that Trump campaign contacts and actions related to Russia remain central to the special counsel’s investigation.</p>
<p>Trump, who was nominated as the Republican Party candidate for the November 2016 election during the convention, has denied any collusion with Russia during the campaign. Moscow has denied U.S. intelligence agencies’ findings that it interfered in the campaign to try to tilt the election in Trump’s favor.</p>
<p>Investigators have asked detailed questions about conversations that Sessions, then a Trump campaign adviser, had at a convention event attended by then-Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak, said the first source, who was questioned by Mueller about the event.</p>
<p>The same source said Mueller’s team also has been asking whether Sessions had private discussions with Kislyak on the sidelines of a campaign speech Trump gave at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel in April 2016.</p>
<p>Sessions’ spokespersons have denied repeatedly that he had any private discussions with Kislyak at the Mayflower. Sessions told lawmakers last year he could not recall any conversations with Russian officials at the hotel but could not rule out that a “brief interaction” with Kislyak may have occurred there.</p>
<p>Spokespersons for Mueller and Sessions declined to comment on Mueller’s interest in Sessions’ activities at the convention and other convention-related events.</p> Delegates celebrate at the conclusion of the final day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. July 21, 2016. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein UKRAINE LANGUAGE
<p>The special counsel’s investigators have also interviewed attendees of the committee meetings that drafted the Republican Party platform in Cleveland.</p>
<p>At one committee meeting, according to people in attendance, Diana Denman, a member of the platform committee’s national security subcommittee, proposed language calling for the United States to supply “lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine’s armed forces and greater coordination with NATO on defense planning.”</p>
<p>But the final platform language deleted the reference to “lethal defensive weapons,” a change that made the platform less hostile to Russia, whose troops had invaded the Crimean peninsula and eastern Ukraine.</p>
<p>After the convention, Denman told Reuters in 2016, J.D. Gordon, a Trump foreign policy adviser, told her he was going to speak to Trump about the language on Ukraine, and that Trump’s campaign team played a direct role in softening the platform language.</p> FILE PHOTO: Special Counsel Robert Mueller (R) departs after briefing members of the U.S. Senate on his investigation into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 21, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
<p>The Trump campaign has denied playing any role in the weakening of the party’s position regarding Ukraine. Gordon has called Denman’s version of events “inaccurate.”</p>
<p>Stephen Yates, co-chair of the platform committee’s national security subcommittee, said he has “heard nothing about other members of the subcommittee being called in for questioning, and I have had no interaction with anyone working on the investigation.”</p>
<p>Sessions recused himself last year from the federal probe into Russian election meddling after it emerged that he had failed to say during his Senate confirmation hearing to be attorney general that he had met with Russia’s ambassador in 2016.</p>
<p>(This version of the story corrects paragraph 8 to show Sessions did not rule out a “brief interaction” with Kislyak instead of he admitted to speaking briefly to Kislyak)</p>
<p>Reporting By Mark Hosenball; Editing by John Walcott and Frances Kerry</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A Facebook Inc executive said in an internal memo in 2016 that the social media company needed to pursue adding users above all else, BuzzFeed News reported on Thursday, prompting disavowals from the executive and Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.</p> Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks on stage during the Facebook F8 conference in San Francisco, California April 12, 2016. REUTERS/Stephen Lam
<p>The memo from Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook vice president, had not been previously reported as Facebook faces inquiries over how it handles personal information and the tactics the social media company has used to grow to 2.1 billion users.</p>
<p>Zuckerberg stood by Bosworth, who goes by the nickname “Boz,” while distancing himself from the memo’s contents. Bosworth confirmed the memo’s authenticity but in a statement he disavowed its message, saying its goal had been to encourage debate.</p>
<p>Facebook users, advertisers and investors have been in an uproar for months over a series of scandals, most recently privacy practices that allowed political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to obtain personal information on 50 million Facebook members. Zuckerberg is expected to testify at a hearing with U.S. lawmakers as soon as April.</p>
<p>“Boz is a talented leader who says many provocative things. This was one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly. We’ve never believed the ends justify the means,” Zuckerberg said in a statement.</p>
<p>Bosworth wrote in the June 2016 memo that some “questionable” practices were all right if the result was connecting people.</p>
<p>“That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends,” he wrote in the memo, which BuzzFeed published on its website.</p> Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks on stage during the Facebook F8 conference in San Francisco, California April 12, 2016. REUTERS/Stephen Lam
<p>He also urged fellow employees not to let potential negatives slow them down.</p>
<p>“Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people,” he wrote.</p>
<p>Bosworth said Thursday that he did not agree with the post today “and I didn’t agree with it even when I wrote it.</p>
<p>“Having a debate around hard topics like these is a critical part of our process and to do that effectively we have to be able to consider even bad ideas, if only to eliminate them,” Bosworth’s statement said.</p>
<p>Reporting by David Ingram; editing by Grant McCool</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired by the Trump administration but has said he was terminated because he is a crucial witness in the Russia investigation, has raised more than $292,000 in seven hours to help cover costs defending against other ongoing government probes, the funding website showed.</p> FILE PHOTO: FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (C) arrives to testify behind closed doors before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., December 21, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
<p>A statement on the GoFundMe internet page unveiled earlier on Thursday said the goal was to raise $150,000 from the public but it was raised to $250,000 because of a response that “has been remarkable and beyond our expectations.”</p>
<p>The action represents an escalation of the battle between McCabe and the administration over his firing amid heavy criticism by President Donald Trump. It also raises the prospect that McCabe could legally challenge his termination in the future.</p>
<p>"Andrew McCabe’s FBI career was long, distinguished, and unblemished," the statement said. "His reward for that has been a termination that was completely unjustified, amidst repeated ad hominem attacks by the President of the United States." <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/andrewmccabelegaldefensefund" type="external">here</a></p>
<p>The page features a photo of McCabe with his wife, two children and the family dog, Jeremiah.</p>
<p>On March 16, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he was terminating McCabe after the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation veteran had leaked information to the press and misled investigators about his actions.</p>
<p>The report used as the basis for the firing has still not been made public. Following McCabe’s termination, Trump took to Twitter, where he declared it was a “great day for Democracy.”</p>
<p>McCabe’s dismissal came less than two days before his 50th birthday, when he would have been eligible to retire from the Federal Bureau of Investigation with his full pension.</p>
<p>McCabe has disputed the findings by the inspector general’s office. He said he believes he is facing administration retaliation because he is a crucial witness into whether Trump may have tried to obstruct a criminal probe now being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.</p>
<p>While he was the FBI’s No. 2 official, McCabe was deeply involved in overseeing investigations related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, and whether Russia colluded with Trump’s campaign. Trump has denied that any collusion occurred and Russia has denied meddling.</p>
<p>Reuters has reported that McCabe kept contemporaneous notes following his conversations with Trump, as well as notes related to former FBI Director James Comey’s conversations with Trump.</p>
<p>Trump fired Comey in 2017, prompting Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint Mueller as special counsel. Trump later acknowledged in a televised interview that he fired Comey over “this Russia thing.”</p>
<p>Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Additional reporting by Eric Walsh; Editing by Toni Reinhold</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
| 7,808 |
<p>CRAIGSVILLE, W.Va. (AP) — The 19th century farmhouse, now covered in white vinyl paneling, sits amid rolling hills in the West Virginia heartland. No one has lived in the Nicholas County house for at least a decade.</p>
<p>Why, then, is there is a lock on the front door of a house in which the chimney flue has collapsed, leaving a pile of blackened bricks in a downstairs room? Why is there another lock on a second-floor bedroom no one has occupied for perhaps a half-century or more?</p>
<p>Pat Woods digs into a pocket of his jeans for his keys to unlock the doors and reveal a mystery in search of a history.</p>
<p>The locks are meant to protect remarkable oil paintings that need a champion to preserve them in the long unheated building — or a new place not coming apart at the seams to house them.</p>
<p>“It’s fallen on me to try to do something about it,” says Woods, as he prepares to enter the house and unspool a history that reads like a Hollywood script.</p>
<p>And just like a Hollywood movie, the family lore has it that the house may have a connection with a marquee name — one of the notorious gentlemen outlaws of the Dalton Gang of Wild West fame.</p>
<p>A Dalton Gang researcher will later in this story cast serious doubt on that connection. But the mystery of the paintings still involves pistols, an armed 19th-century mystery artist and some amazing $5 brushwork that begs a question.</p>
<p>Who the heck was this guy?</p>
<p>The Woods family has owned the property the farmhouse rests upon since before West Virginia became a state in 1863. At that time, the family possessed more than a thousand acres in the area.</p>
<p>The farmhouse itself dates from the late 1850s. It is jammed full of a flea market-worthy collection of old clothes, dusty bottles, musty baby dolls and other boxed-up stuff stacked everywhere.</p>
<p>On a recent frigid December day, Woods steps onto the snow-flecked porch to creak open a screen door and unlock the entrance. He enters the house, then climbs a stairwell, running one hand up a curving wooden banister, carved and installed long ago by his great-great-grandfather. The banister, like the house, was made from wood hewn on the property.</p>
<p>At the top of the steps, his keys jangle again as he unlocks a second-floor room and pushes open the door.</p>
<p>The first thing a visitor notices is that the ceiling has fallen in over part of the room.</p>
<p>But immediately the eyes latch onto accomplished artwork on every wall. Someone has stretched and tacked canvas onto all four walls and the ceiling, too. Some serious painting adorns the canvas.</p>
<p>One wall features a Native American village seen in the distance, with teepees in the midst of what looks like a stand of lodgepole pine. Plumes of white smoke curl from a campfire as an Indian man stands, hefting a rifle.</p>
<p>Front and center on the wall is a cavalryman, a long-barrel rifle slung to his saddle, as he reins in an alert brown horse. In the distance, a man poles a canoe to the dock of a lake, where a woman in an ankle-length dress awaits.</p>
<p>Another wall features a picturesque white-steepled church at dusk, with churchgoers visible through tall, yellow-lit windows. Nearby stands another building that might be a tavern. A couple stands near a sign that reads “Gold Bug” — the name of the tavern or of the village?</p>
<p>A third wall displays a mountain range, viewed by two tiny figures in the foreground. Family lore suggests these are the mountains of Ararat, which the book of Genesis says is where Noah’s ark came to rest after the flood.</p>
<p>A fourth wall features the room’s piece de resistance, a bravura painting of a classic sailing ship in mid-ocean. Its sails and complex rigging strain in the wind, as the ship dashes through white-capped waves.</p>
<p>Woods flips on his cellphone flashlight. He wants to bring attention to two things. The first is a tiny wooden barrel on the deck of the ship. On it, the painter has daubed the initials “WD.”</p>
<p>Then, Woods points to the prow of the ship.</p>
<p>“Right here is the ’Dalton B,’” he says, reading off the words painted on the ship’s wave-flecked prow. “I guess that was the name of the ship.”</p>
<p>Or the name of the man who painted the ship?</p>
<p>WD? William Dalton?</p>
<p>Or, as William was better known, Bill Dalton, who rode with the Doolin-Dalton Gang, the Wild West bad boys immortalized in the Eagles song “Doolin-Dalton” from the band’s famous “Desperado” album.</p>
<p>The family thinks so. Or maybe this was some other William Dalton? Or another random man entirely with those initials, like, say, Wallace Dunn or Willie Douglas?</p>
<p>But what about the boat’s name?</p>
<p>There were a lot of question marks, not the least of them coming from Woods himself.</p>
<p>By day, Woods works at Fisher Auto Parts in nearby Summersville. He is hard-pressed to be a spokesman, much less an historically informed representative of the provenance of these paintings.</p>
<p>But the fact of the matter is, they have fallen into his lap now, and he is trying to figure out how to save them.</p>
<p>Woods stumbles apologetically for words when asked about their history. He defers instead to a five-minute videotape his late grandfather, Milton Woods Jr., and father, Kelly, recorded years ago, to put down for the record some intriguing family lore about how these paintings came to be.</p>
<p>Woods lives in a small house on a hill across from the farmhouse. It has taken him a week to track down a copy of the video to show to a visiting reporter. He fires it up.</p>
<p>The video depicts Milton and Kelly seated in “the painted room,” as Woods calls it, as a videocam pans across the paintings and records them talking about what they see.</p>
<p>Milton recalls the family story about a man who appeared one day, apparently sometime in the 1890s. No one in the family has a more specific date, and even this one may be just a guess.</p>
<p>“The best that I know of it, there was a man came here and asked if he could board with them for the winter,” Milton says on the video.</p>
<p>The man said, if the family would pay him $5, when he left, “He would paint this room,” Milton says.</p>
<p>The fellow exhibited some odd behavior as he settled into his new abode as winter came.</p>
<p>“He would lock the door behind him, and he kept it locked at all times. My father would come up and knock on the door. He always came to the door, and he’d have a gun in his hand,” Milton says.</p>
<p>Then, there was what he wore.</p>
<p>“He had a vest that was made special, evidently, to carry two guns. And he kept them on him at all times,” Milton continues.</p>
<p>“When he’d come downstairs to eat, he’d always be the last one down — the last one to come into the room. He sat in the corner with the wall to his back and all. But he was ‘a real polite somebody,’ my father told me.”</p>
<p>The video shifts to Kelly, who goes up to the sailing ship and points to the initials on the barrel and to the boat’s name.</p>
<p>“I’ve always felt he’s left this as a clue to who he really was,” Kelly says.</p>
<p>Milton observes, “The similarities in the name lead us to believe that it was probably one of the Daltons, being as he was evidently running from the law.”</p>
<p>Milton goes on to direct the viewer’s attention to a bouquet of flowers and leaves painted on the ceiling. This was the only painting in the room that was never finished, he says.</p>
<p>“He just up and decided to leave. He asked for his $5.”</p>
<p>After the man left, in short order, so did a new school teacher recently hired at the local Cottle school, Milton says.</p>
<p>“Two weeks after this fellow left, that teacher, he quit and left. And the way the story was told to me, they found out later he was a Pinkerton. A detective. So, evidently, for some reason or other, the fellow that was staying here knew that they were closing in on him.</p>
<p>“And that’s the last we heard of him.”</p>
<p>Let us now shift our attention westward. Not at first to the Wild West, through which the Dalton Gang roamed and robbed, etching their names into the region’s history and ultimately into American legend.</p>
<p>But it’s time to check in on a man who has delved deep into Dalton Gang history — David Allin — who calls Albuquerque, New Mexico, home.</p>
<p>Allin is a Vietnam War veteran, awarded a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars, who went on to become an arms-control inspector in the Soviet Union. He has done a lot of writing on the side, including several novels about the Vietnam War.</p>
<p>Then, there is his 488-page book, “The Dalton Boys: The Real Story of the Dalton Gang,” which interested readers can find on Amazon.</p>
<p>Allin wrote the self-published book, he says in a telephone interview, in part because his family history has Dalton Gang connections, and he also wished to correct the record on some of the gang’s backstory.</p>
<p>His great-great-grandfather founded one of the first two banks in Coffeyville, Kansas, the town near where the Dalton brothers grew up, and where the Dalton Gang met its dramatic demise trying to rob those banks.</p>
<p>“I grew up hearing about the Dalton Gang and decided I wanted to know more about them,” he said.</p>
<p>Allin delved deep into court records in the National Archives. He read all the contemporaneous newspaper stories about the gang he could find, which was a lot. The Dalton Gang haunted and thrilled the imagination of the American public during its heyday from 1890 to 1892.</p>
<p>The gang was so notorious for its bank and train robberies that its members were blamed for crimes they never could have committed, according to Allin’s research.</p>
<p>To the extent possible, given the vagaries of frontier history, he traced the whereabouts of the brothers from the roots of the gang to its end in a fusillade of bullets on the Coffeyville streets.</p>
<p>“In those days, the newspapers tended to blame everything on the Daltons — even after they were dead,” Allin said.</p>
<p>The Daltons came from a family of 15 and were cousins to the Younger brothers, who rode with two other outlaw legends, Frank and Jesse James.</p>
<p>The family history began on the right side of the law, as several of the Dalton boys were legitimate lawmen, or started out as ones.</p>
<p>The oldest, Frank, was a deputy U.S. marshal, killed in the line of duty in 1887. Three other brothers, Robert “Bob” Dalton, Gratton “Grat” and Emmett “Em,” had turns as lawmen, too, often riding with Frank.</p>
<p>But Bob grew bored with the job, Allin said.</p>
<p>“He was mostly serving warrants and gathering up witnesses. He really wanted more excitement and turned to crime because it was more exciting and fun,” he said.</p>
<p>Bob drew Grat and Em along with him to form the Dalton Gang. They headed out on the Owl Hoot Trail, as it was called — the renegade, nighttime trail a man who had left the straight and narrow took.</p>
<p>The brothers recruited other wannabe outlaws to join their crime spree. The gang planned to cap its legend with an audacious heist on Oct. 5, 1892, which gang leader Bob Dalton hoped would eclipse even the iconic outlaw star of Jesse James.</p>
<p>His plan called for the double daytime robbery of two banks in Coffeyville.</p>
<p>“In a town where everyone knows them,” Allin said, and you can imagine him shaking his head on the other end of the phone line at the craziness of the idea.</p>
<p>Five gang members parked their horses in an alley, later dubbed Death Alley, in acknowledgment of that day’s fateful events. Half the gang headed for one bank, half the other.</p>
<p>“They were recognized as they were walking towards the banks,” Allin said.</p>
<p>Word spread. Two hardware stores passed out rifles and ammunition to townsfolk.</p>
<p>“Townspeople took up positions all around the two banks. When the Daltons tried to come out of the banks, a huge firefight erupted. It was pretty bloody,” Allin said.</p>
<p>It was so bloody that Coffeyville, to this day, has etched onto its streets outlines of the bodies of those who died that day, along with memorializing the event at its Dalton Defenders Museum.</p>
<p>In the hail of bullets that blazed and ricocheted through town, Bob and Grat Dalton dropped dead, along with two other gang members. The town marshal and three Coffeyville citizens were killed. A number of others were injured, as was Emmet Dalton, who received 23 gunshot wounds but survived, going on to serve 14 years in prison.</p>
<p>So, stop a moment. This is a story about West Virginia, not Kansas, right?</p>
<p>What about that other Dalton brother — Bill Dalton — whose initials, “WD,” and family name can be found in a decaying farmhouse in the middle of West Virginia?</p>
<p>Allin swiftly poured some cold water on the chance Bill Dalton was ever on the run near central West Virginia, as Woods family lore suggests.</p>
<p>“From all the research I did, he seemed to be a very straightforward guy, a family man,” Allin said.</p>
<p>Bill Dalton, who moved from Kansas to California, was one of the few Dalton men that even had a family, he added. “The other Dalton men mostly remained bachelors.”</p>
<p>There are stacks of articles and books that cite the possibility of a sixth gang member in Coffeyville that day. Bill Doolin is proposed as one candidate, but so is Bill Dalton.</p>
<p>Allin disputed the idea of either being there. His research indicates Bill Dalton showed up in Coffeyville only later to organize the defense of the surviving brother, Emmett.</p>
<p>“When his brothers became outlaws, he initially tried to help them go straight, or at least avoid being arrested,” Allin said. “Then, he got caught up in it.”</p>
<p>After Coffeyville, Bill Dalton appeared to set out on the Owl Hoot Trail himself.</p>
<p>With Dalton Gang leaders dead or behind bars, Bill Doolin formed the Doolin-Dalton Gang. They were better known as The Wild Bunch, the Oklahombres and the Oklahoma Long Riders because of the long dusters they wore.</p>
<p>“Once Emmet went to jail, Bill was seen in Oklahoma, in Indian territory, riding with the Doolin gang,” Allin said.</p>
<p>People said they thought he might have been involved in a robbery or two.</p>
<p>“But there was not real evidence of it,” Allin said. “There were not arrest warrants. He wasn’t on the run.”</p>
<p>Yet a posse of lawmen tracked Bill Dalton to a house near Ardmore, Oklahoma, where he was gunned down in 1894. Curiously, the lawmen were later charged with murder, though court records of what happened next were lost in a fire, Allin said.</p>
<p>But that led Allin to a theory about Bill Dalton.</p>
<p>“My theory is, he may have been working undercover with the U.S. marshals, because he had never shown any inclination to criminality — and suddenly he’s working with the Doolin Gang.”</p>
<p>It is a theory not shared by many chroniclers of the Daltons, who see Bill Dalton as just as much a cutthroat outlaw as his bandit brothers.</p>
<p>Whatever the truth is, Allin — whose research sought to track the brothers’ whereabouts month to month in their heyday — sees no period when Bill Dalton might have settled in West Virginia.</p>
<p>That’s not to mention having the skill to conduct a private master class in scenic painting for an audience of one.</p>
<p>Of course, there is no definitive record of every movement, every day of the Dalton brothers on the Owl Hoot Trail, he acknowledged.</p>
<p>“One could probably find enough loopholes in the historical record to believe that Bill Dalton went to West Virginia,” Allin said. “But the odds against that are astronomical.”</p>
<p>Newspapers at the time tended to embellish the fearsome reputation of all things Dalton, Nancy B. Samuelson said. She self-published a book on the brothers, “The Dalton Gang Story: Lawmen to Outlaws,” as she has family ties to the Dalton line.</p>
<p>She did a lot of research on Bill Dalton, she said.</p>
<p>“I’m still not convinced he ever did much of anything as an outlaw. Most of it was newspaper hype. There are a lot of god-awful stories in newspapers about him that you cannot find any evidence he had anything to do with it — or that the event even happened.”</p>
<p>If not Bill, then, who was “WD”?</p>
<p>Playing the wild guessing game, an observer might note that Bill Doolin also had those initials. And he was on the run as one of the Wild West’s most wanted men during the early 1890s.</p>
<p>A U.S. marshal — one of the so-called “Three Guardsmen” who relentlessly hunted The Wild Bunch gang — blasted him with a shotgun in Oklahoma territory, where Doolin died in August 1896.</p>
<p>But there is no evidence Doolin ever made it to the Mountain State or had any skill with anything but a Winchester rifle.</p>
<p>That leaves the paintings still a mystery — and in dire need of a caretaker. Along with perhaps a historian researcher or maybe a master’s thesis.</p>
<p>People sometimes ask how newspapers come to report a story like the Nicholas County mystery paintings. This one traces to that great communal water-cooler conversation called Facebook.</p>
<p>Karen Price is a friend of Woods’ aunt, Mary.</p>
<p>“She asked me over a year ago if I could find someone interested in preserving and saving these paintings,” Price said. “I saw the paintings, and I’m like, ‘OK, we’ve got to save these!’ I’m on a mission!”</p>
<p>She reached out to the Clay Center and the state Culture Center in Charleston. To West Virginia University and the Huntington Museum of Art.</p>
<p>She came up shy. No interest.</p>
<p>As “my last ditch effort,” as she put it, she posted a plea to save the paintings to her Facebook timeline, which is where the Sunday Gazette-Mail heard about them.</p>
<p>“Hopefully we get someone interested in preserving this piece of West Virginia,” Price said. “Otherwise, they’re going to go when the house goes.”</p>
<p>A reporter suggested Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, which describes itself as “America’s official national museum and education center for intuitive, self-taught artistry.”</p>
<p>Price liked that idea. For certainly, whoever did the paintings was either a self-taught, intuitive painter, or they had formal schooling in art.</p>
<p>And guns, too, it should be recalled.</p>
<p>What kind of person, one wonders, wears a pistol vest and can also paint a lifelike sailing ship, American Indian encampment, a horseman, a churchscape and Mount Ararat, behind a locked door at the height of a West Virginia winter?</p>
<p>And then just leaves.</p>
<p>There is the question, too, of where all the canvas and oil paint came from, given that the entire room is painted, ceiling to floor. Woods family lore reveals no hint about this. Was the canvas already on the walls?</p>
<p>“That was never mentioned,” Woods says of the room. “Maybe my great-great-grandmother went down and picked up supplies for the winter. And he painted it for them.”</p>
<p>Whomever “he” was.</p>
<p>Woods has considered trying to remove the paintings himself to save them. But he thought better of it, he says. “To be honest, I’d rather have a professional come in to do it.”</p>
<p>Before his dad died, Woods talked with him about his father’s desire to keep the mystery artist’s work on the family property.</p>
<p>“He wanted to keep it here,” Woods says, standing outside the house after a visit to the paintings.</p>
<p>He gestures to the farmhouse and the surprise that awaits visitors inside.</p>
<p>“But, now, seeing how the house is going and everything, I’d rather get it taken somewhere where it can be preserved, you know? For people to see.</p>
<p>“To me, it’s like a treasure. I want to share it with everybody else.”</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, <a href="http://wvgazettemail.com." type="external" /> <a href="http://wvgazettemail.com" type="external">http://wvgazettemail.com</a>.</p>
<p>CRAIGSVILLE, W.Va. (AP) — The 19th century farmhouse, now covered in white vinyl paneling, sits amid rolling hills in the West Virginia heartland. No one has lived in the Nicholas County house for at least a decade.</p>
<p>Why, then, is there is a lock on the front door of a house in which the chimney flue has collapsed, leaving a pile of blackened bricks in a downstairs room? Why is there another lock on a second-floor bedroom no one has occupied for perhaps a half-century or more?</p>
<p>Pat Woods digs into a pocket of his jeans for his keys to unlock the doors and reveal a mystery in search of a history.</p>
<p>The locks are meant to protect remarkable oil paintings that need a champion to preserve them in the long unheated building — or a new place not coming apart at the seams to house them.</p>
<p>“It’s fallen on me to try to do something about it,” says Woods, as he prepares to enter the house and unspool a history that reads like a Hollywood script.</p>
<p>And just like a Hollywood movie, the family lore has it that the house may have a connection with a marquee name — one of the notorious gentlemen outlaws of the Dalton Gang of Wild West fame.</p>
<p>A Dalton Gang researcher will later in this story cast serious doubt on that connection. But the mystery of the paintings still involves pistols, an armed 19th-century mystery artist and some amazing $5 brushwork that begs a question.</p>
<p>Who the heck was this guy?</p>
<p>The Woods family has owned the property the farmhouse rests upon since before West Virginia became a state in 1863. At that time, the family possessed more than a thousand acres in the area.</p>
<p>The farmhouse itself dates from the late 1850s. It is jammed full of a flea market-worthy collection of old clothes, dusty bottles, musty baby dolls and other boxed-up stuff stacked everywhere.</p>
<p>On a recent frigid December day, Woods steps onto the snow-flecked porch to creak open a screen door and unlock the entrance. He enters the house, then climbs a stairwell, running one hand up a curving wooden banister, carved and installed long ago by his great-great-grandfather. The banister, like the house, was made from wood hewn on the property.</p>
<p>At the top of the steps, his keys jangle again as he unlocks a second-floor room and pushes open the door.</p>
<p>The first thing a visitor notices is that the ceiling has fallen in over part of the room.</p>
<p>But immediately the eyes latch onto accomplished artwork on every wall. Someone has stretched and tacked canvas onto all four walls and the ceiling, too. Some serious painting adorns the canvas.</p>
<p>One wall features a Native American village seen in the distance, with teepees in the midst of what looks like a stand of lodgepole pine. Plumes of white smoke curl from a campfire as an Indian man stands, hefting a rifle.</p>
<p>Front and center on the wall is a cavalryman, a long-barrel rifle slung to his saddle, as he reins in an alert brown horse. In the distance, a man poles a canoe to the dock of a lake, where a woman in an ankle-length dress awaits.</p>
<p>Another wall features a picturesque white-steepled church at dusk, with churchgoers visible through tall, yellow-lit windows. Nearby stands another building that might be a tavern. A couple stands near a sign that reads “Gold Bug” — the name of the tavern or of the village?</p>
<p>A third wall displays a mountain range, viewed by two tiny figures in the foreground. Family lore suggests these are the mountains of Ararat, which the book of Genesis says is where Noah’s ark came to rest after the flood.</p>
<p>A fourth wall features the room’s piece de resistance, a bravura painting of a classic sailing ship in mid-ocean. Its sails and complex rigging strain in the wind, as the ship dashes through white-capped waves.</p>
<p>Woods flips on his cellphone flashlight. He wants to bring attention to two things. The first is a tiny wooden barrel on the deck of the ship. On it, the painter has daubed the initials “WD.”</p>
<p>Then, Woods points to the prow of the ship.</p>
<p>“Right here is the ’Dalton B,’” he says, reading off the words painted on the ship’s wave-flecked prow. “I guess that was the name of the ship.”</p>
<p>Or the name of the man who painted the ship?</p>
<p>WD? William Dalton?</p>
<p>Or, as William was better known, Bill Dalton, who rode with the Doolin-Dalton Gang, the Wild West bad boys immortalized in the Eagles song “Doolin-Dalton” from the band’s famous “Desperado” album.</p>
<p>The family thinks so. Or maybe this was some other William Dalton? Or another random man entirely with those initials, like, say, Wallace Dunn or Willie Douglas?</p>
<p>But what about the boat’s name?</p>
<p>There were a lot of question marks, not the least of them coming from Woods himself.</p>
<p>By day, Woods works at Fisher Auto Parts in nearby Summersville. He is hard-pressed to be a spokesman, much less an historically informed representative of the provenance of these paintings.</p>
<p>But the fact of the matter is, they have fallen into his lap now, and he is trying to figure out how to save them.</p>
<p>Woods stumbles apologetically for words when asked about their history. He defers instead to a five-minute videotape his late grandfather, Milton Woods Jr., and father, Kelly, recorded years ago, to put down for the record some intriguing family lore about how these paintings came to be.</p>
<p>Woods lives in a small house on a hill across from the farmhouse. It has taken him a week to track down a copy of the video to show to a visiting reporter. He fires it up.</p>
<p>The video depicts Milton and Kelly seated in “the painted room,” as Woods calls it, as a videocam pans across the paintings and records them talking about what they see.</p>
<p>Milton recalls the family story about a man who appeared one day, apparently sometime in the 1890s. No one in the family has a more specific date, and even this one may be just a guess.</p>
<p>“The best that I know of it, there was a man came here and asked if he could board with them for the winter,” Milton says on the video.</p>
<p>The man said, if the family would pay him $5, when he left, “He would paint this room,” Milton says.</p>
<p>The fellow exhibited some odd behavior as he settled into his new abode as winter came.</p>
<p>“He would lock the door behind him, and he kept it locked at all times. My father would come up and knock on the door. He always came to the door, and he’d have a gun in his hand,” Milton says.</p>
<p>Then, there was what he wore.</p>
<p>“He had a vest that was made special, evidently, to carry two guns. And he kept them on him at all times,” Milton continues.</p>
<p>“When he’d come downstairs to eat, he’d always be the last one down — the last one to come into the room. He sat in the corner with the wall to his back and all. But he was ‘a real polite somebody,’ my father told me.”</p>
<p>The video shifts to Kelly, who goes up to the sailing ship and points to the initials on the barrel and to the boat’s name.</p>
<p>“I’ve always felt he’s left this as a clue to who he really was,” Kelly says.</p>
<p>Milton observes, “The similarities in the name lead us to believe that it was probably one of the Daltons, being as he was evidently running from the law.”</p>
<p>Milton goes on to direct the viewer’s attention to a bouquet of flowers and leaves painted on the ceiling. This was the only painting in the room that was never finished, he says.</p>
<p>“He just up and decided to leave. He asked for his $5.”</p>
<p>After the man left, in short order, so did a new school teacher recently hired at the local Cottle school, Milton says.</p>
<p>“Two weeks after this fellow left, that teacher, he quit and left. And the way the story was told to me, they found out later he was a Pinkerton. A detective. So, evidently, for some reason or other, the fellow that was staying here knew that they were closing in on him.</p>
<p>“And that’s the last we heard of him.”</p>
<p>Let us now shift our attention westward. Not at first to the Wild West, through which the Dalton Gang roamed and robbed, etching their names into the region’s history and ultimately into American legend.</p>
<p>But it’s time to check in on a man who has delved deep into Dalton Gang history — David Allin — who calls Albuquerque, New Mexico, home.</p>
<p>Allin is a Vietnam War veteran, awarded a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars, who went on to become an arms-control inspector in the Soviet Union. He has done a lot of writing on the side, including several novels about the Vietnam War.</p>
<p>Then, there is his 488-page book, “The Dalton Boys: The Real Story of the Dalton Gang,” which interested readers can find on Amazon.</p>
<p>Allin wrote the self-published book, he says in a telephone interview, in part because his family history has Dalton Gang connections, and he also wished to correct the record on some of the gang’s backstory.</p>
<p>His great-great-grandfather founded one of the first two banks in Coffeyville, Kansas, the town near where the Dalton brothers grew up, and where the Dalton Gang met its dramatic demise trying to rob those banks.</p>
<p>“I grew up hearing about the Dalton Gang and decided I wanted to know more about them,” he said.</p>
<p>Allin delved deep into court records in the National Archives. He read all the contemporaneous newspaper stories about the gang he could find, which was a lot. The Dalton Gang haunted and thrilled the imagination of the American public during its heyday from 1890 to 1892.</p>
<p>The gang was so notorious for its bank and train robberies that its members were blamed for crimes they never could have committed, according to Allin’s research.</p>
<p>To the extent possible, given the vagaries of frontier history, he traced the whereabouts of the brothers from the roots of the gang to its end in a fusillade of bullets on the Coffeyville streets.</p>
<p>“In those days, the newspapers tended to blame everything on the Daltons — even after they were dead,” Allin said.</p>
<p>The Daltons came from a family of 15 and were cousins to the Younger brothers, who rode with two other outlaw legends, Frank and Jesse James.</p>
<p>The family history began on the right side of the law, as several of the Dalton boys were legitimate lawmen, or started out as ones.</p>
<p>The oldest, Frank, was a deputy U.S. marshal, killed in the line of duty in 1887. Three other brothers, Robert “Bob” Dalton, Gratton “Grat” and Emmett “Em,” had turns as lawmen, too, often riding with Frank.</p>
<p>But Bob grew bored with the job, Allin said.</p>
<p>“He was mostly serving warrants and gathering up witnesses. He really wanted more excitement and turned to crime because it was more exciting and fun,” he said.</p>
<p>Bob drew Grat and Em along with him to form the Dalton Gang. They headed out on the Owl Hoot Trail, as it was called — the renegade, nighttime trail a man who had left the straight and narrow took.</p>
<p>The brothers recruited other wannabe outlaws to join their crime spree. The gang planned to cap its legend with an audacious heist on Oct. 5, 1892, which gang leader Bob Dalton hoped would eclipse even the iconic outlaw star of Jesse James.</p>
<p>His plan called for the double daytime robbery of two banks in Coffeyville.</p>
<p>“In a town where everyone knows them,” Allin said, and you can imagine him shaking his head on the other end of the phone line at the craziness of the idea.</p>
<p>Five gang members parked their horses in an alley, later dubbed Death Alley, in acknowledgment of that day’s fateful events. Half the gang headed for one bank, half the other.</p>
<p>“They were recognized as they were walking towards the banks,” Allin said.</p>
<p>Word spread. Two hardware stores passed out rifles and ammunition to townsfolk.</p>
<p>“Townspeople took up positions all around the two banks. When the Daltons tried to come out of the banks, a huge firefight erupted. It was pretty bloody,” Allin said.</p>
<p>It was so bloody that Coffeyville, to this day, has etched onto its streets outlines of the bodies of those who died that day, along with memorializing the event at its Dalton Defenders Museum.</p>
<p>In the hail of bullets that blazed and ricocheted through town, Bob and Grat Dalton dropped dead, along with two other gang members. The town marshal and three Coffeyville citizens were killed. A number of others were injured, as was Emmet Dalton, who received 23 gunshot wounds but survived, going on to serve 14 years in prison.</p>
<p>So, stop a moment. This is a story about West Virginia, not Kansas, right?</p>
<p>What about that other Dalton brother — Bill Dalton — whose initials, “WD,” and family name can be found in a decaying farmhouse in the middle of West Virginia?</p>
<p>Allin swiftly poured some cold water on the chance Bill Dalton was ever on the run near central West Virginia, as Woods family lore suggests.</p>
<p>“From all the research I did, he seemed to be a very straightforward guy, a family man,” Allin said.</p>
<p>Bill Dalton, who moved from Kansas to California, was one of the few Dalton men that even had a family, he added. “The other Dalton men mostly remained bachelors.”</p>
<p>There are stacks of articles and books that cite the possibility of a sixth gang member in Coffeyville that day. Bill Doolin is proposed as one candidate, but so is Bill Dalton.</p>
<p>Allin disputed the idea of either being there. His research indicates Bill Dalton showed up in Coffeyville only later to organize the defense of the surviving brother, Emmett.</p>
<p>“When his brothers became outlaws, he initially tried to help them go straight, or at least avoid being arrested,” Allin said. “Then, he got caught up in it.”</p>
<p>After Coffeyville, Bill Dalton appeared to set out on the Owl Hoot Trail himself.</p>
<p>With Dalton Gang leaders dead or behind bars, Bill Doolin formed the Doolin-Dalton Gang. They were better known as The Wild Bunch, the Oklahombres and the Oklahoma Long Riders because of the long dusters they wore.</p>
<p>“Once Emmet went to jail, Bill was seen in Oklahoma, in Indian territory, riding with the Doolin gang,” Allin said.</p>
<p>People said they thought he might have been involved in a robbery or two.</p>
<p>“But there was not real evidence of it,” Allin said. “There were not arrest warrants. He wasn’t on the run.”</p>
<p>Yet a posse of lawmen tracked Bill Dalton to a house near Ardmore, Oklahoma, where he was gunned down in 1894. Curiously, the lawmen were later charged with murder, though court records of what happened next were lost in a fire, Allin said.</p>
<p>But that led Allin to a theory about Bill Dalton.</p>
<p>“My theory is, he may have been working undercover with the U.S. marshals, because he had never shown any inclination to criminality — and suddenly he’s working with the Doolin Gang.”</p>
<p>It is a theory not shared by many chroniclers of the Daltons, who see Bill Dalton as just as much a cutthroat outlaw as his bandit brothers.</p>
<p>Whatever the truth is, Allin — whose research sought to track the brothers’ whereabouts month to month in their heyday — sees no period when Bill Dalton might have settled in West Virginia.</p>
<p>That’s not to mention having the skill to conduct a private master class in scenic painting for an audience of one.</p>
<p>Of course, there is no definitive record of every movement, every day of the Dalton brothers on the Owl Hoot Trail, he acknowledged.</p>
<p>“One could probably find enough loopholes in the historical record to believe that Bill Dalton went to West Virginia,” Allin said. “But the odds against that are astronomical.”</p>
<p>Newspapers at the time tended to embellish the fearsome reputation of all things Dalton, Nancy B. Samuelson said. She self-published a book on the brothers, “The Dalton Gang Story: Lawmen to Outlaws,” as she has family ties to the Dalton line.</p>
<p>She did a lot of research on Bill Dalton, she said.</p>
<p>“I’m still not convinced he ever did much of anything as an outlaw. Most of it was newspaper hype. There are a lot of god-awful stories in newspapers about him that you cannot find any evidence he had anything to do with it — or that the event even happened.”</p>
<p>If not Bill, then, who was “WD”?</p>
<p>Playing the wild guessing game, an observer might note that Bill Doolin also had those initials. And he was on the run as one of the Wild West’s most wanted men during the early 1890s.</p>
<p>A U.S. marshal — one of the so-called “Three Guardsmen” who relentlessly hunted The Wild Bunch gang — blasted him with a shotgun in Oklahoma territory, where Doolin died in August 1896.</p>
<p>But there is no evidence Doolin ever made it to the Mountain State or had any skill with anything but a Winchester rifle.</p>
<p>That leaves the paintings still a mystery — and in dire need of a caretaker. Along with perhaps a historian researcher or maybe a master’s thesis.</p>
<p>People sometimes ask how newspapers come to report a story like the Nicholas County mystery paintings. This one traces to that great communal water-cooler conversation called Facebook.</p>
<p>Karen Price is a friend of Woods’ aunt, Mary.</p>
<p>“She asked me over a year ago if I could find someone interested in preserving and saving these paintings,” Price said. “I saw the paintings, and I’m like, ‘OK, we’ve got to save these!’ I’m on a mission!”</p>
<p>She reached out to the Clay Center and the state Culture Center in Charleston. To West Virginia University and the Huntington Museum of Art.</p>
<p>She came up shy. No interest.</p>
<p>As “my last ditch effort,” as she put it, she posted a plea to save the paintings to her Facebook timeline, which is where the Sunday Gazette-Mail heard about them.</p>
<p>“Hopefully we get someone interested in preserving this piece of West Virginia,” Price said. “Otherwise, they’re going to go when the house goes.”</p>
<p>A reporter suggested Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, which describes itself as “America’s official national museum and education center for intuitive, self-taught artistry.”</p>
<p>Price liked that idea. For certainly, whoever did the paintings was either a self-taught, intuitive painter, or they had formal schooling in art.</p>
<p>And guns, too, it should be recalled.</p>
<p>What kind of person, one wonders, wears a pistol vest and can also paint a lifelike sailing ship, American Indian encampment, a horseman, a churchscape and Mount Ararat, behind a locked door at the height of a West Virginia winter?</p>
<p>And then just leaves.</p>
<p>There is the question, too, of where all the canvas and oil paint came from, given that the entire room is painted, ceiling to floor. Woods family lore reveals no hint about this. Was the canvas already on the walls?</p>
<p>“That was never mentioned,” Woods says of the room. “Maybe my great-great-grandmother went down and picked up supplies for the winter. And he painted it for them.”</p>
<p>Whomever “he” was.</p>
<p>Woods has considered trying to remove the paintings himself to save them. But he thought better of it, he says. “To be honest, I’d rather have a professional come in to do it.”</p>
<p>Before his dad died, Woods talked with him about his father’s desire to keep the mystery artist’s work on the family property.</p>
<p>“He wanted to keep it here,” Woods says, standing outside the house after a visit to the paintings.</p>
<p>He gestures to the farmhouse and the surprise that awaits visitors inside.</p>
<p>“But, now, seeing how the house is going and everything, I’d rather get it taken somewhere where it can be preserved, you know? For people to see.</p>
<p>“To me, it’s like a treasure. I want to share it with everybody else.”</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, <a href="http://wvgazettemail.com." type="external" /> <a href="http://wvgazettemail.com" type="external">http://wvgazettemail.com</a>.</p>
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Paintings in 19th century farmhouse have mysterious history
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https://apnews.com/1cfff3f8309c446f85bc333c9531dfd6
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2018-01-13
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Paintings in 19th century farmhouse have mysterious history
<p>CRAIGSVILLE, W.Va. (AP) — The 19th century farmhouse, now covered in white vinyl paneling, sits amid rolling hills in the West Virginia heartland. No one has lived in the Nicholas County house for at least a decade.</p>
<p>Why, then, is there is a lock on the front door of a house in which the chimney flue has collapsed, leaving a pile of blackened bricks in a downstairs room? Why is there another lock on a second-floor bedroom no one has occupied for perhaps a half-century or more?</p>
<p>Pat Woods digs into a pocket of his jeans for his keys to unlock the doors and reveal a mystery in search of a history.</p>
<p>The locks are meant to protect remarkable oil paintings that need a champion to preserve them in the long unheated building — or a new place not coming apart at the seams to house them.</p>
<p>“It’s fallen on me to try to do something about it,” says Woods, as he prepares to enter the house and unspool a history that reads like a Hollywood script.</p>
<p>And just like a Hollywood movie, the family lore has it that the house may have a connection with a marquee name — one of the notorious gentlemen outlaws of the Dalton Gang of Wild West fame.</p>
<p>A Dalton Gang researcher will later in this story cast serious doubt on that connection. But the mystery of the paintings still involves pistols, an armed 19th-century mystery artist and some amazing $5 brushwork that begs a question.</p>
<p>Who the heck was this guy?</p>
<p>The Woods family has owned the property the farmhouse rests upon since before West Virginia became a state in 1863. At that time, the family possessed more than a thousand acres in the area.</p>
<p>The farmhouse itself dates from the late 1850s. It is jammed full of a flea market-worthy collection of old clothes, dusty bottles, musty baby dolls and other boxed-up stuff stacked everywhere.</p>
<p>On a recent frigid December day, Woods steps onto the snow-flecked porch to creak open a screen door and unlock the entrance. He enters the house, then climbs a stairwell, running one hand up a curving wooden banister, carved and installed long ago by his great-great-grandfather. The banister, like the house, was made from wood hewn on the property.</p>
<p>At the top of the steps, his keys jangle again as he unlocks a second-floor room and pushes open the door.</p>
<p>The first thing a visitor notices is that the ceiling has fallen in over part of the room.</p>
<p>But immediately the eyes latch onto accomplished artwork on every wall. Someone has stretched and tacked canvas onto all four walls and the ceiling, too. Some serious painting adorns the canvas.</p>
<p>One wall features a Native American village seen in the distance, with teepees in the midst of what looks like a stand of lodgepole pine. Plumes of white smoke curl from a campfire as an Indian man stands, hefting a rifle.</p>
<p>Front and center on the wall is a cavalryman, a long-barrel rifle slung to his saddle, as he reins in an alert brown horse. In the distance, a man poles a canoe to the dock of a lake, where a woman in an ankle-length dress awaits.</p>
<p>Another wall features a picturesque white-steepled church at dusk, with churchgoers visible through tall, yellow-lit windows. Nearby stands another building that might be a tavern. A couple stands near a sign that reads “Gold Bug” — the name of the tavern or of the village?</p>
<p>A third wall displays a mountain range, viewed by two tiny figures in the foreground. Family lore suggests these are the mountains of Ararat, which the book of Genesis says is where Noah’s ark came to rest after the flood.</p>
<p>A fourth wall features the room’s piece de resistance, a bravura painting of a classic sailing ship in mid-ocean. Its sails and complex rigging strain in the wind, as the ship dashes through white-capped waves.</p>
<p>Woods flips on his cellphone flashlight. He wants to bring attention to two things. The first is a tiny wooden barrel on the deck of the ship. On it, the painter has daubed the initials “WD.”</p>
<p>Then, Woods points to the prow of the ship.</p>
<p>“Right here is the ’Dalton B,’” he says, reading off the words painted on the ship’s wave-flecked prow. “I guess that was the name of the ship.”</p>
<p>Or the name of the man who painted the ship?</p>
<p>WD? William Dalton?</p>
<p>Or, as William was better known, Bill Dalton, who rode with the Doolin-Dalton Gang, the Wild West bad boys immortalized in the Eagles song “Doolin-Dalton” from the band’s famous “Desperado” album.</p>
<p>The family thinks so. Or maybe this was some other William Dalton? Or another random man entirely with those initials, like, say, Wallace Dunn or Willie Douglas?</p>
<p>But what about the boat’s name?</p>
<p>There were a lot of question marks, not the least of them coming from Woods himself.</p>
<p>By day, Woods works at Fisher Auto Parts in nearby Summersville. He is hard-pressed to be a spokesman, much less an historically informed representative of the provenance of these paintings.</p>
<p>But the fact of the matter is, they have fallen into his lap now, and he is trying to figure out how to save them.</p>
<p>Woods stumbles apologetically for words when asked about their history. He defers instead to a five-minute videotape his late grandfather, Milton Woods Jr., and father, Kelly, recorded years ago, to put down for the record some intriguing family lore about how these paintings came to be.</p>
<p>Woods lives in a small house on a hill across from the farmhouse. It has taken him a week to track down a copy of the video to show to a visiting reporter. He fires it up.</p>
<p>The video depicts Milton and Kelly seated in “the painted room,” as Woods calls it, as a videocam pans across the paintings and records them talking about what they see.</p>
<p>Milton recalls the family story about a man who appeared one day, apparently sometime in the 1890s. No one in the family has a more specific date, and even this one may be just a guess.</p>
<p>“The best that I know of it, there was a man came here and asked if he could board with them for the winter,” Milton says on the video.</p>
<p>The man said, if the family would pay him $5, when he left, “He would paint this room,” Milton says.</p>
<p>The fellow exhibited some odd behavior as he settled into his new abode as winter came.</p>
<p>“He would lock the door behind him, and he kept it locked at all times. My father would come up and knock on the door. He always came to the door, and he’d have a gun in his hand,” Milton says.</p>
<p>Then, there was what he wore.</p>
<p>“He had a vest that was made special, evidently, to carry two guns. And he kept them on him at all times,” Milton continues.</p>
<p>“When he’d come downstairs to eat, he’d always be the last one down — the last one to come into the room. He sat in the corner with the wall to his back and all. But he was ‘a real polite somebody,’ my father told me.”</p>
<p>The video shifts to Kelly, who goes up to the sailing ship and points to the initials on the barrel and to the boat’s name.</p>
<p>“I’ve always felt he’s left this as a clue to who he really was,” Kelly says.</p>
<p>Milton observes, “The similarities in the name lead us to believe that it was probably one of the Daltons, being as he was evidently running from the law.”</p>
<p>Milton goes on to direct the viewer’s attention to a bouquet of flowers and leaves painted on the ceiling. This was the only painting in the room that was never finished, he says.</p>
<p>“He just up and decided to leave. He asked for his $5.”</p>
<p>After the man left, in short order, so did a new school teacher recently hired at the local Cottle school, Milton says.</p>
<p>“Two weeks after this fellow left, that teacher, he quit and left. And the way the story was told to me, they found out later he was a Pinkerton. A detective. So, evidently, for some reason or other, the fellow that was staying here knew that they were closing in on him.</p>
<p>“And that’s the last we heard of him.”</p>
<p>Let us now shift our attention westward. Not at first to the Wild West, through which the Dalton Gang roamed and robbed, etching their names into the region’s history and ultimately into American legend.</p>
<p>But it’s time to check in on a man who has delved deep into Dalton Gang history — David Allin — who calls Albuquerque, New Mexico, home.</p>
<p>Allin is a Vietnam War veteran, awarded a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars, who went on to become an arms-control inspector in the Soviet Union. He has done a lot of writing on the side, including several novels about the Vietnam War.</p>
<p>Then, there is his 488-page book, “The Dalton Boys: The Real Story of the Dalton Gang,” which interested readers can find on Amazon.</p>
<p>Allin wrote the self-published book, he says in a telephone interview, in part because his family history has Dalton Gang connections, and he also wished to correct the record on some of the gang’s backstory.</p>
<p>His great-great-grandfather founded one of the first two banks in Coffeyville, Kansas, the town near where the Dalton brothers grew up, and where the Dalton Gang met its dramatic demise trying to rob those banks.</p>
<p>“I grew up hearing about the Dalton Gang and decided I wanted to know more about them,” he said.</p>
<p>Allin delved deep into court records in the National Archives. He read all the contemporaneous newspaper stories about the gang he could find, which was a lot. The Dalton Gang haunted and thrilled the imagination of the American public during its heyday from 1890 to 1892.</p>
<p>The gang was so notorious for its bank and train robberies that its members were blamed for crimes they never could have committed, according to Allin’s research.</p>
<p>To the extent possible, given the vagaries of frontier history, he traced the whereabouts of the brothers from the roots of the gang to its end in a fusillade of bullets on the Coffeyville streets.</p>
<p>“In those days, the newspapers tended to blame everything on the Daltons — even after they were dead,” Allin said.</p>
<p>The Daltons came from a family of 15 and were cousins to the Younger brothers, who rode with two other outlaw legends, Frank and Jesse James.</p>
<p>The family history began on the right side of the law, as several of the Dalton boys were legitimate lawmen, or started out as ones.</p>
<p>The oldest, Frank, was a deputy U.S. marshal, killed in the line of duty in 1887. Three other brothers, Robert “Bob” Dalton, Gratton “Grat” and Emmett “Em,” had turns as lawmen, too, often riding with Frank.</p>
<p>But Bob grew bored with the job, Allin said.</p>
<p>“He was mostly serving warrants and gathering up witnesses. He really wanted more excitement and turned to crime because it was more exciting and fun,” he said.</p>
<p>Bob drew Grat and Em along with him to form the Dalton Gang. They headed out on the Owl Hoot Trail, as it was called — the renegade, nighttime trail a man who had left the straight and narrow took.</p>
<p>The brothers recruited other wannabe outlaws to join their crime spree. The gang planned to cap its legend with an audacious heist on Oct. 5, 1892, which gang leader Bob Dalton hoped would eclipse even the iconic outlaw star of Jesse James.</p>
<p>His plan called for the double daytime robbery of two banks in Coffeyville.</p>
<p>“In a town where everyone knows them,” Allin said, and you can imagine him shaking his head on the other end of the phone line at the craziness of the idea.</p>
<p>Five gang members parked their horses in an alley, later dubbed Death Alley, in acknowledgment of that day’s fateful events. Half the gang headed for one bank, half the other.</p>
<p>“They were recognized as they were walking towards the banks,” Allin said.</p>
<p>Word spread. Two hardware stores passed out rifles and ammunition to townsfolk.</p>
<p>“Townspeople took up positions all around the two banks. When the Daltons tried to come out of the banks, a huge firefight erupted. It was pretty bloody,” Allin said.</p>
<p>It was so bloody that Coffeyville, to this day, has etched onto its streets outlines of the bodies of those who died that day, along with memorializing the event at its Dalton Defenders Museum.</p>
<p>In the hail of bullets that blazed and ricocheted through town, Bob and Grat Dalton dropped dead, along with two other gang members. The town marshal and three Coffeyville citizens were killed. A number of others were injured, as was Emmet Dalton, who received 23 gunshot wounds but survived, going on to serve 14 years in prison.</p>
<p>So, stop a moment. This is a story about West Virginia, not Kansas, right?</p>
<p>What about that other Dalton brother — Bill Dalton — whose initials, “WD,” and family name can be found in a decaying farmhouse in the middle of West Virginia?</p>
<p>Allin swiftly poured some cold water on the chance Bill Dalton was ever on the run near central West Virginia, as Woods family lore suggests.</p>
<p>“From all the research I did, he seemed to be a very straightforward guy, a family man,” Allin said.</p>
<p>Bill Dalton, who moved from Kansas to California, was one of the few Dalton men that even had a family, he added. “The other Dalton men mostly remained bachelors.”</p>
<p>There are stacks of articles and books that cite the possibility of a sixth gang member in Coffeyville that day. Bill Doolin is proposed as one candidate, but so is Bill Dalton.</p>
<p>Allin disputed the idea of either being there. His research indicates Bill Dalton showed up in Coffeyville only later to organize the defense of the surviving brother, Emmett.</p>
<p>“When his brothers became outlaws, he initially tried to help them go straight, or at least avoid being arrested,” Allin said. “Then, he got caught up in it.”</p>
<p>After Coffeyville, Bill Dalton appeared to set out on the Owl Hoot Trail himself.</p>
<p>With Dalton Gang leaders dead or behind bars, Bill Doolin formed the Doolin-Dalton Gang. They were better known as The Wild Bunch, the Oklahombres and the Oklahoma Long Riders because of the long dusters they wore.</p>
<p>“Once Emmet went to jail, Bill was seen in Oklahoma, in Indian territory, riding with the Doolin gang,” Allin said.</p>
<p>People said they thought he might have been involved in a robbery or two.</p>
<p>“But there was not real evidence of it,” Allin said. “There were not arrest warrants. He wasn’t on the run.”</p>
<p>Yet a posse of lawmen tracked Bill Dalton to a house near Ardmore, Oklahoma, where he was gunned down in 1894. Curiously, the lawmen were later charged with murder, though court records of what happened next were lost in a fire, Allin said.</p>
<p>But that led Allin to a theory about Bill Dalton.</p>
<p>“My theory is, he may have been working undercover with the U.S. marshals, because he had never shown any inclination to criminality — and suddenly he’s working with the Doolin Gang.”</p>
<p>It is a theory not shared by many chroniclers of the Daltons, who see Bill Dalton as just as much a cutthroat outlaw as his bandit brothers.</p>
<p>Whatever the truth is, Allin — whose research sought to track the brothers’ whereabouts month to month in their heyday — sees no period when Bill Dalton might have settled in West Virginia.</p>
<p>That’s not to mention having the skill to conduct a private master class in scenic painting for an audience of one.</p>
<p>Of course, there is no definitive record of every movement, every day of the Dalton brothers on the Owl Hoot Trail, he acknowledged.</p>
<p>“One could probably find enough loopholes in the historical record to believe that Bill Dalton went to West Virginia,” Allin said. “But the odds against that are astronomical.”</p>
<p>Newspapers at the time tended to embellish the fearsome reputation of all things Dalton, Nancy B. Samuelson said. She self-published a book on the brothers, “The Dalton Gang Story: Lawmen to Outlaws,” as she has family ties to the Dalton line.</p>
<p>She did a lot of research on Bill Dalton, she said.</p>
<p>“I’m still not convinced he ever did much of anything as an outlaw. Most of it was newspaper hype. There are a lot of god-awful stories in newspapers about him that you cannot find any evidence he had anything to do with it — or that the event even happened.”</p>
<p>If not Bill, then, who was “WD”?</p>
<p>Playing the wild guessing game, an observer might note that Bill Doolin also had those initials. And he was on the run as one of the Wild West’s most wanted men during the early 1890s.</p>
<p>A U.S. marshal — one of the so-called “Three Guardsmen” who relentlessly hunted The Wild Bunch gang — blasted him with a shotgun in Oklahoma territory, where Doolin died in August 1896.</p>
<p>But there is no evidence Doolin ever made it to the Mountain State or had any skill with anything but a Winchester rifle.</p>
<p>That leaves the paintings still a mystery — and in dire need of a caretaker. Along with perhaps a historian researcher or maybe a master’s thesis.</p>
<p>People sometimes ask how newspapers come to report a story like the Nicholas County mystery paintings. This one traces to that great communal water-cooler conversation called Facebook.</p>
<p>Karen Price is a friend of Woods’ aunt, Mary.</p>
<p>“She asked me over a year ago if I could find someone interested in preserving and saving these paintings,” Price said. “I saw the paintings, and I’m like, ‘OK, we’ve got to save these!’ I’m on a mission!”</p>
<p>She reached out to the Clay Center and the state Culture Center in Charleston. To West Virginia University and the Huntington Museum of Art.</p>
<p>She came up shy. No interest.</p>
<p>As “my last ditch effort,” as she put it, she posted a plea to save the paintings to her Facebook timeline, which is where the Sunday Gazette-Mail heard about them.</p>
<p>“Hopefully we get someone interested in preserving this piece of West Virginia,” Price said. “Otherwise, they’re going to go when the house goes.”</p>
<p>A reporter suggested Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, which describes itself as “America’s official national museum and education center for intuitive, self-taught artistry.”</p>
<p>Price liked that idea. For certainly, whoever did the paintings was either a self-taught, intuitive painter, or they had formal schooling in art.</p>
<p>And guns, too, it should be recalled.</p>
<p>What kind of person, one wonders, wears a pistol vest and can also paint a lifelike sailing ship, American Indian encampment, a horseman, a churchscape and Mount Ararat, behind a locked door at the height of a West Virginia winter?</p>
<p>And then just leaves.</p>
<p>There is the question, too, of where all the canvas and oil paint came from, given that the entire room is painted, ceiling to floor. Woods family lore reveals no hint about this. Was the canvas already on the walls?</p>
<p>“That was never mentioned,” Woods says of the room. “Maybe my great-great-grandmother went down and picked up supplies for the winter. And he painted it for them.”</p>
<p>Whomever “he” was.</p>
<p>Woods has considered trying to remove the paintings himself to save them. But he thought better of it, he says. “To be honest, I’d rather have a professional come in to do it.”</p>
<p>Before his dad died, Woods talked with him about his father’s desire to keep the mystery artist’s work on the family property.</p>
<p>“He wanted to keep it here,” Woods says, standing outside the house after a visit to the paintings.</p>
<p>He gestures to the farmhouse and the surprise that awaits visitors inside.</p>
<p>“But, now, seeing how the house is going and everything, I’d rather get it taken somewhere where it can be preserved, you know? For people to see.</p>
<p>“To me, it’s like a treasure. I want to share it with everybody else.”</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, <a href="http://wvgazettemail.com." type="external" /> <a href="http://wvgazettemail.com" type="external">http://wvgazettemail.com</a>.</p>
<p>CRAIGSVILLE, W.Va. (AP) — The 19th century farmhouse, now covered in white vinyl paneling, sits amid rolling hills in the West Virginia heartland. No one has lived in the Nicholas County house for at least a decade.</p>
<p>Why, then, is there is a lock on the front door of a house in which the chimney flue has collapsed, leaving a pile of blackened bricks in a downstairs room? Why is there another lock on a second-floor bedroom no one has occupied for perhaps a half-century or more?</p>
<p>Pat Woods digs into a pocket of his jeans for his keys to unlock the doors and reveal a mystery in search of a history.</p>
<p>The locks are meant to protect remarkable oil paintings that need a champion to preserve them in the long unheated building — or a new place not coming apart at the seams to house them.</p>
<p>“It’s fallen on me to try to do something about it,” says Woods, as he prepares to enter the house and unspool a history that reads like a Hollywood script.</p>
<p>And just like a Hollywood movie, the family lore has it that the house may have a connection with a marquee name — one of the notorious gentlemen outlaws of the Dalton Gang of Wild West fame.</p>
<p>A Dalton Gang researcher will later in this story cast serious doubt on that connection. But the mystery of the paintings still involves pistols, an armed 19th-century mystery artist and some amazing $5 brushwork that begs a question.</p>
<p>Who the heck was this guy?</p>
<p>The Woods family has owned the property the farmhouse rests upon since before West Virginia became a state in 1863. At that time, the family possessed more than a thousand acres in the area.</p>
<p>The farmhouse itself dates from the late 1850s. It is jammed full of a flea market-worthy collection of old clothes, dusty bottles, musty baby dolls and other boxed-up stuff stacked everywhere.</p>
<p>On a recent frigid December day, Woods steps onto the snow-flecked porch to creak open a screen door and unlock the entrance. He enters the house, then climbs a stairwell, running one hand up a curving wooden banister, carved and installed long ago by his great-great-grandfather. The banister, like the house, was made from wood hewn on the property.</p>
<p>At the top of the steps, his keys jangle again as he unlocks a second-floor room and pushes open the door.</p>
<p>The first thing a visitor notices is that the ceiling has fallen in over part of the room.</p>
<p>But immediately the eyes latch onto accomplished artwork on every wall. Someone has stretched and tacked canvas onto all four walls and the ceiling, too. Some serious painting adorns the canvas.</p>
<p>One wall features a Native American village seen in the distance, with teepees in the midst of what looks like a stand of lodgepole pine. Plumes of white smoke curl from a campfire as an Indian man stands, hefting a rifle.</p>
<p>Front and center on the wall is a cavalryman, a long-barrel rifle slung to his saddle, as he reins in an alert brown horse. In the distance, a man poles a canoe to the dock of a lake, where a woman in an ankle-length dress awaits.</p>
<p>Another wall features a picturesque white-steepled church at dusk, with churchgoers visible through tall, yellow-lit windows. Nearby stands another building that might be a tavern. A couple stands near a sign that reads “Gold Bug” — the name of the tavern or of the village?</p>
<p>A third wall displays a mountain range, viewed by two tiny figures in the foreground. Family lore suggests these are the mountains of Ararat, which the book of Genesis says is where Noah’s ark came to rest after the flood.</p>
<p>A fourth wall features the room’s piece de resistance, a bravura painting of a classic sailing ship in mid-ocean. Its sails and complex rigging strain in the wind, as the ship dashes through white-capped waves.</p>
<p>Woods flips on his cellphone flashlight. He wants to bring attention to two things. The first is a tiny wooden barrel on the deck of the ship. On it, the painter has daubed the initials “WD.”</p>
<p>Then, Woods points to the prow of the ship.</p>
<p>“Right here is the ’Dalton B,’” he says, reading off the words painted on the ship’s wave-flecked prow. “I guess that was the name of the ship.”</p>
<p>Or the name of the man who painted the ship?</p>
<p>WD? William Dalton?</p>
<p>Or, as William was better known, Bill Dalton, who rode with the Doolin-Dalton Gang, the Wild West bad boys immortalized in the Eagles song “Doolin-Dalton” from the band’s famous “Desperado” album.</p>
<p>The family thinks so. Or maybe this was some other William Dalton? Or another random man entirely with those initials, like, say, Wallace Dunn or Willie Douglas?</p>
<p>But what about the boat’s name?</p>
<p>There were a lot of question marks, not the least of them coming from Woods himself.</p>
<p>By day, Woods works at Fisher Auto Parts in nearby Summersville. He is hard-pressed to be a spokesman, much less an historically informed representative of the provenance of these paintings.</p>
<p>But the fact of the matter is, they have fallen into his lap now, and he is trying to figure out how to save them.</p>
<p>Woods stumbles apologetically for words when asked about their history. He defers instead to a five-minute videotape his late grandfather, Milton Woods Jr., and father, Kelly, recorded years ago, to put down for the record some intriguing family lore about how these paintings came to be.</p>
<p>Woods lives in a small house on a hill across from the farmhouse. It has taken him a week to track down a copy of the video to show to a visiting reporter. He fires it up.</p>
<p>The video depicts Milton and Kelly seated in “the painted room,” as Woods calls it, as a videocam pans across the paintings and records them talking about what they see.</p>
<p>Milton recalls the family story about a man who appeared one day, apparently sometime in the 1890s. No one in the family has a more specific date, and even this one may be just a guess.</p>
<p>“The best that I know of it, there was a man came here and asked if he could board with them for the winter,” Milton says on the video.</p>
<p>The man said, if the family would pay him $5, when he left, “He would paint this room,” Milton says.</p>
<p>The fellow exhibited some odd behavior as he settled into his new abode as winter came.</p>
<p>“He would lock the door behind him, and he kept it locked at all times. My father would come up and knock on the door. He always came to the door, and he’d have a gun in his hand,” Milton says.</p>
<p>Then, there was what he wore.</p>
<p>“He had a vest that was made special, evidently, to carry two guns. And he kept them on him at all times,” Milton continues.</p>
<p>“When he’d come downstairs to eat, he’d always be the last one down — the last one to come into the room. He sat in the corner with the wall to his back and all. But he was ‘a real polite somebody,’ my father told me.”</p>
<p>The video shifts to Kelly, who goes up to the sailing ship and points to the initials on the barrel and to the boat’s name.</p>
<p>“I’ve always felt he’s left this as a clue to who he really was,” Kelly says.</p>
<p>Milton observes, “The similarities in the name lead us to believe that it was probably one of the Daltons, being as he was evidently running from the law.”</p>
<p>Milton goes on to direct the viewer’s attention to a bouquet of flowers and leaves painted on the ceiling. This was the only painting in the room that was never finished, he says.</p>
<p>“He just up and decided to leave. He asked for his $5.”</p>
<p>After the man left, in short order, so did a new school teacher recently hired at the local Cottle school, Milton says.</p>
<p>“Two weeks after this fellow left, that teacher, he quit and left. And the way the story was told to me, they found out later he was a Pinkerton. A detective. So, evidently, for some reason or other, the fellow that was staying here knew that they were closing in on him.</p>
<p>“And that’s the last we heard of him.”</p>
<p>Let us now shift our attention westward. Not at first to the Wild West, through which the Dalton Gang roamed and robbed, etching their names into the region’s history and ultimately into American legend.</p>
<p>But it’s time to check in on a man who has delved deep into Dalton Gang history — David Allin — who calls Albuquerque, New Mexico, home.</p>
<p>Allin is a Vietnam War veteran, awarded a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars, who went on to become an arms-control inspector in the Soviet Union. He has done a lot of writing on the side, including several novels about the Vietnam War.</p>
<p>Then, there is his 488-page book, “The Dalton Boys: The Real Story of the Dalton Gang,” which interested readers can find on Amazon.</p>
<p>Allin wrote the self-published book, he says in a telephone interview, in part because his family history has Dalton Gang connections, and he also wished to correct the record on some of the gang’s backstory.</p>
<p>His great-great-grandfather founded one of the first two banks in Coffeyville, Kansas, the town near where the Dalton brothers grew up, and where the Dalton Gang met its dramatic demise trying to rob those banks.</p>
<p>“I grew up hearing about the Dalton Gang and decided I wanted to know more about them,” he said.</p>
<p>Allin delved deep into court records in the National Archives. He read all the contemporaneous newspaper stories about the gang he could find, which was a lot. The Dalton Gang haunted and thrilled the imagination of the American public during its heyday from 1890 to 1892.</p>
<p>The gang was so notorious for its bank and train robberies that its members were blamed for crimes they never could have committed, according to Allin’s research.</p>
<p>To the extent possible, given the vagaries of frontier history, he traced the whereabouts of the brothers from the roots of the gang to its end in a fusillade of bullets on the Coffeyville streets.</p>
<p>“In those days, the newspapers tended to blame everything on the Daltons — even after they were dead,” Allin said.</p>
<p>The Daltons came from a family of 15 and were cousins to the Younger brothers, who rode with two other outlaw legends, Frank and Jesse James.</p>
<p>The family history began on the right side of the law, as several of the Dalton boys were legitimate lawmen, or started out as ones.</p>
<p>The oldest, Frank, was a deputy U.S. marshal, killed in the line of duty in 1887. Three other brothers, Robert “Bob” Dalton, Gratton “Grat” and Emmett “Em,” had turns as lawmen, too, often riding with Frank.</p>
<p>But Bob grew bored with the job, Allin said.</p>
<p>“He was mostly serving warrants and gathering up witnesses. He really wanted more excitement and turned to crime because it was more exciting and fun,” he said.</p>
<p>Bob drew Grat and Em along with him to form the Dalton Gang. They headed out on the Owl Hoot Trail, as it was called — the renegade, nighttime trail a man who had left the straight and narrow took.</p>
<p>The brothers recruited other wannabe outlaws to join their crime spree. The gang planned to cap its legend with an audacious heist on Oct. 5, 1892, which gang leader Bob Dalton hoped would eclipse even the iconic outlaw star of Jesse James.</p>
<p>His plan called for the double daytime robbery of two banks in Coffeyville.</p>
<p>“In a town where everyone knows them,” Allin said, and you can imagine him shaking his head on the other end of the phone line at the craziness of the idea.</p>
<p>Five gang members parked their horses in an alley, later dubbed Death Alley, in acknowledgment of that day’s fateful events. Half the gang headed for one bank, half the other.</p>
<p>“They were recognized as they were walking towards the banks,” Allin said.</p>
<p>Word spread. Two hardware stores passed out rifles and ammunition to townsfolk.</p>
<p>“Townspeople took up positions all around the two banks. When the Daltons tried to come out of the banks, a huge firefight erupted. It was pretty bloody,” Allin said.</p>
<p>It was so bloody that Coffeyville, to this day, has etched onto its streets outlines of the bodies of those who died that day, along with memorializing the event at its Dalton Defenders Museum.</p>
<p>In the hail of bullets that blazed and ricocheted through town, Bob and Grat Dalton dropped dead, along with two other gang members. The town marshal and three Coffeyville citizens were killed. A number of others were injured, as was Emmet Dalton, who received 23 gunshot wounds but survived, going on to serve 14 years in prison.</p>
<p>So, stop a moment. This is a story about West Virginia, not Kansas, right?</p>
<p>What about that other Dalton brother — Bill Dalton — whose initials, “WD,” and family name can be found in a decaying farmhouse in the middle of West Virginia?</p>
<p>Allin swiftly poured some cold water on the chance Bill Dalton was ever on the run near central West Virginia, as Woods family lore suggests.</p>
<p>“From all the research I did, he seemed to be a very straightforward guy, a family man,” Allin said.</p>
<p>Bill Dalton, who moved from Kansas to California, was one of the few Dalton men that even had a family, he added. “The other Dalton men mostly remained bachelors.”</p>
<p>There are stacks of articles and books that cite the possibility of a sixth gang member in Coffeyville that day. Bill Doolin is proposed as one candidate, but so is Bill Dalton.</p>
<p>Allin disputed the idea of either being there. His research indicates Bill Dalton showed up in Coffeyville only later to organize the defense of the surviving brother, Emmett.</p>
<p>“When his brothers became outlaws, he initially tried to help them go straight, or at least avoid being arrested,” Allin said. “Then, he got caught up in it.”</p>
<p>After Coffeyville, Bill Dalton appeared to set out on the Owl Hoot Trail himself.</p>
<p>With Dalton Gang leaders dead or behind bars, Bill Doolin formed the Doolin-Dalton Gang. They were better known as The Wild Bunch, the Oklahombres and the Oklahoma Long Riders because of the long dusters they wore.</p>
<p>“Once Emmet went to jail, Bill was seen in Oklahoma, in Indian territory, riding with the Doolin gang,” Allin said.</p>
<p>People said they thought he might have been involved in a robbery or two.</p>
<p>“But there was not real evidence of it,” Allin said. “There were not arrest warrants. He wasn’t on the run.”</p>
<p>Yet a posse of lawmen tracked Bill Dalton to a house near Ardmore, Oklahoma, where he was gunned down in 1894. Curiously, the lawmen were later charged with murder, though court records of what happened next were lost in a fire, Allin said.</p>
<p>But that led Allin to a theory about Bill Dalton.</p>
<p>“My theory is, he may have been working undercover with the U.S. marshals, because he had never shown any inclination to criminality — and suddenly he’s working with the Doolin Gang.”</p>
<p>It is a theory not shared by many chroniclers of the Daltons, who see Bill Dalton as just as much a cutthroat outlaw as his bandit brothers.</p>
<p>Whatever the truth is, Allin — whose research sought to track the brothers’ whereabouts month to month in their heyday — sees no period when Bill Dalton might have settled in West Virginia.</p>
<p>That’s not to mention having the skill to conduct a private master class in scenic painting for an audience of one.</p>
<p>Of course, there is no definitive record of every movement, every day of the Dalton brothers on the Owl Hoot Trail, he acknowledged.</p>
<p>“One could probably find enough loopholes in the historical record to believe that Bill Dalton went to West Virginia,” Allin said. “But the odds against that are astronomical.”</p>
<p>Newspapers at the time tended to embellish the fearsome reputation of all things Dalton, Nancy B. Samuelson said. She self-published a book on the brothers, “The Dalton Gang Story: Lawmen to Outlaws,” as she has family ties to the Dalton line.</p>
<p>She did a lot of research on Bill Dalton, she said.</p>
<p>“I’m still not convinced he ever did much of anything as an outlaw. Most of it was newspaper hype. There are a lot of god-awful stories in newspapers about him that you cannot find any evidence he had anything to do with it — or that the event even happened.”</p>
<p>If not Bill, then, who was “WD”?</p>
<p>Playing the wild guessing game, an observer might note that Bill Doolin also had those initials. And he was on the run as one of the Wild West’s most wanted men during the early 1890s.</p>
<p>A U.S. marshal — one of the so-called “Three Guardsmen” who relentlessly hunted The Wild Bunch gang — blasted him with a shotgun in Oklahoma territory, where Doolin died in August 1896.</p>
<p>But there is no evidence Doolin ever made it to the Mountain State or had any skill with anything but a Winchester rifle.</p>
<p>That leaves the paintings still a mystery — and in dire need of a caretaker. Along with perhaps a historian researcher or maybe a master’s thesis.</p>
<p>People sometimes ask how newspapers come to report a story like the Nicholas County mystery paintings. This one traces to that great communal water-cooler conversation called Facebook.</p>
<p>Karen Price is a friend of Woods’ aunt, Mary.</p>
<p>“She asked me over a year ago if I could find someone interested in preserving and saving these paintings,” Price said. “I saw the paintings, and I’m like, ‘OK, we’ve got to save these!’ I’m on a mission!”</p>
<p>She reached out to the Clay Center and the state Culture Center in Charleston. To West Virginia University and the Huntington Museum of Art.</p>
<p>She came up shy. No interest.</p>
<p>As “my last ditch effort,” as she put it, she posted a plea to save the paintings to her Facebook timeline, which is where the Sunday Gazette-Mail heard about them.</p>
<p>“Hopefully we get someone interested in preserving this piece of West Virginia,” Price said. “Otherwise, they’re going to go when the house goes.”</p>
<p>A reporter suggested Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, which describes itself as “America’s official national museum and education center for intuitive, self-taught artistry.”</p>
<p>Price liked that idea. For certainly, whoever did the paintings was either a self-taught, intuitive painter, or they had formal schooling in art.</p>
<p>And guns, too, it should be recalled.</p>
<p>What kind of person, one wonders, wears a pistol vest and can also paint a lifelike sailing ship, American Indian encampment, a horseman, a churchscape and Mount Ararat, behind a locked door at the height of a West Virginia winter?</p>
<p>And then just leaves.</p>
<p>There is the question, too, of where all the canvas and oil paint came from, given that the entire room is painted, ceiling to floor. Woods family lore reveals no hint about this. Was the canvas already on the walls?</p>
<p>“That was never mentioned,” Woods says of the room. “Maybe my great-great-grandmother went down and picked up supplies for the winter. And he painted it for them.”</p>
<p>Whomever “he” was.</p>
<p>Woods has considered trying to remove the paintings himself to save them. But he thought better of it, he says. “To be honest, I’d rather have a professional come in to do it.”</p>
<p>Before his dad died, Woods talked with him about his father’s desire to keep the mystery artist’s work on the family property.</p>
<p>“He wanted to keep it here,” Woods says, standing outside the house after a visit to the paintings.</p>
<p>He gestures to the farmhouse and the surprise that awaits visitors inside.</p>
<p>“But, now, seeing how the house is going and everything, I’d rather get it taken somewhere where it can be preserved, you know? For people to see.</p>
<p>“To me, it’s like a treasure. I want to share it with everybody else.”</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, <a href="http://wvgazettemail.com." type="external" /> <a href="http://wvgazettemail.com" type="external">http://wvgazettemail.com</a>.</p>
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<p>The state of Utah is going to allow death row inmate Ronnie Lee Gardner to choose how he dies–as long as he chooses either lethal injection or a firing squad.</p>
<p>Gardner has been on death row since 1985, when he was convicted of killing an attorney during an escape attempt at the Salt Lake Metro Hall of Justice. A judge will likely sign Gardner’s death warrant next week, with an execution date set in June. Under Utah law, he is one of a handful of longtime death row prisoners who has the right to choose between two execution methods.</p>
<p>According to Terry Lenamon’s Death Penalty blog, “In Utah, it was only recently that their state legislature nixed the option of a death penalty by firing squad–and when it acted, four men sat on Death Row for whom the new law did not apply. These four men were ‘grandfathered’ into the prior law, and the execution methods that were options when they were sentenced are legally still available to them today. Ronnie Lee Gardner is one of these men.”</p>
<p>After a hearing on Monday, assistant Utah Attorney General Thomas Brunker said the state would not contest Gardner’s choice. “And to help him decide,” the Salt Lake City Tribune reports, ”the Utah Department of Corrections has agreed to release general information about the execution methods to Gardner’s lawyers.” In response to a request from Gardner, the DOC will provide his attorneys with “relevant documents [that] detail the training and expertise of the execution team. The identity of the team members and other information affecting security will not be included.”</p>
<p>Tom Patterson, executive director of the DOC, said the department is prepared to muster a firing squad, if need be. “If Mr. Gardner would like to be executed in that format and the court orders that, then we will carry that out,” he said. But according to a report by Fox 13 in Salt Lake City, corrections officials are concerned about a death by firing squad creating a media ”circus.” An execution by this method would be “novel” even for Utah, Patterson said. What’s more, “We are the only state that has firing squad at this point, and so yeah, it does become a bit of a novelty, nationwide and even worldwide.”</p>
<p>The most famous U.S. execution by firing squad in modern times also took place in Utah: In 1977, multiple murderer Gary Gilmore was killed by five men with rifles, while strapped to a chair with a hood over his head and a target pinned over his heart. (Gilmore’s choice had been between firing squad and hanging.) He was the first person to be executed in the United States for nearly ten years, after the Supreme Courts lifted an effective ban on capital punishment. Since that time, one other man, John Albert Taylor, has chosen to die by firing squad, also in Utah. According to the New York Times, Taylor chose this method for his 1996 execution “to make a statement that Utah was sanctioning murder.”</p>
<p>While firing squads are unique to Utah (or almost–see Oklahoma, below), a number of other states still give condemned prisoners a choice of execution methods. The “primary” or “default” method in all cases is lethal injection. But some states still still offer their previous method, as well–often, like Utah, only to inmates who were originally sentenced to die by that method.</p>
<p>In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, some prisoners can choose between a lethal injection and the electric chair. In Arizona, California, Maryland, and Missouri, they can opt for the gas chamber. Hanging is still permitted in Washington (if the prisoner requests it) and New Hampshire (if a lethal injection for some reason can’t be given).</p>
<p>Many state laws even designate “backup” methods, just in case the primary method is struck down. Oklahoma, in particular, seems determined not to take any chances. According to the Death Penalty Information Center (which maintains detailed data on execution methods), the state of Oklahoma “authorizes electrocution if lethal injection is ever held to be unconstitutional and firing squad if both lethal injection and electrocution are held unconstitutional.”</p>
<p>There is one way of dying, however, that no state allows its prisoners to choose: Suicide. Last month, an Ohio inmate named Lawrence Reynolds tried to overdose on stockpiled antidepressants two days before his execution date. Prison officials rushed him to the hospital, where he was revived. An investigation by the state concluded that Reynolds, who had been on death row for 16 years, wanted to ”end it” by his own hand, so as to ”not give the state any satisfaction of killing him.” But the state reserved its right to be Reynolds’ executioner: Nine days after his suicide attempt, it put him to death in the lethal injection chamber.</p>
<p>Suicide attempts by death row inmates are not uncommon, though they are rarely successful. (Some advocates have suggested, however, that condemned prisoners who waive their rights to appeal are committing a form of legal suicide). Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and expert on the effects of solitary confinement and death row, has stated that “the conditions of confinement are so oppressive, the helplessness endured in the roller coaster of hope and despair so wrenching and exhausting, that ultimately the inmate can no longer bear it,” and choosing to die may be the only way “that he has any sense of control over his fate.”</p>
<p>According to the Salt Lake City Tribune, during his 25 years on death row, Ronnie Lee Gardner “periodically asked judges to allow him to die, either saying he was frustrated with delays in the case or racked with pain from rheumatoid arthritis, but then continued to challenge his sentence.” His appeals were finally exhausted in March. Since then, Gardner has been left to ponder the only choice left to him by a state that has power over his life and death: Whether to be poisoned by lethal injection, or shot through the heart.</p>
<p>James Ridgeway and Jean Casella can be reached at <a href="http://solitarywatch.wordpress.com/" type="external">Solitary Watch</a>, where this article originally appeared.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
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The Machinery of Death
| true |
https://counterpunch.org/2010/04/09/the-machinery-of-death/
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2010-04-09
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The Machinery of Death
<p>The state of Utah is going to allow death row inmate Ronnie Lee Gardner to choose how he dies–as long as he chooses either lethal injection or a firing squad.</p>
<p>Gardner has been on death row since 1985, when he was convicted of killing an attorney during an escape attempt at the Salt Lake Metro Hall of Justice. A judge will likely sign Gardner’s death warrant next week, with an execution date set in June. Under Utah law, he is one of a handful of longtime death row prisoners who has the right to choose between two execution methods.</p>
<p>According to Terry Lenamon’s Death Penalty blog, “In Utah, it was only recently that their state legislature nixed the option of a death penalty by firing squad–and when it acted, four men sat on Death Row for whom the new law did not apply. These four men were ‘grandfathered’ into the prior law, and the execution methods that were options when they were sentenced are legally still available to them today. Ronnie Lee Gardner is one of these men.”</p>
<p>After a hearing on Monday, assistant Utah Attorney General Thomas Brunker said the state would not contest Gardner’s choice. “And to help him decide,” the Salt Lake City Tribune reports, ”the Utah Department of Corrections has agreed to release general information about the execution methods to Gardner’s lawyers.” In response to a request from Gardner, the DOC will provide his attorneys with “relevant documents [that] detail the training and expertise of the execution team. The identity of the team members and other information affecting security will not be included.”</p>
<p>Tom Patterson, executive director of the DOC, said the department is prepared to muster a firing squad, if need be. “If Mr. Gardner would like to be executed in that format and the court orders that, then we will carry that out,” he said. But according to a report by Fox 13 in Salt Lake City, corrections officials are concerned about a death by firing squad creating a media ”circus.” An execution by this method would be “novel” even for Utah, Patterson said. What’s more, “We are the only state that has firing squad at this point, and so yeah, it does become a bit of a novelty, nationwide and even worldwide.”</p>
<p>The most famous U.S. execution by firing squad in modern times also took place in Utah: In 1977, multiple murderer Gary Gilmore was killed by five men with rifles, while strapped to a chair with a hood over his head and a target pinned over his heart. (Gilmore’s choice had been between firing squad and hanging.) He was the first person to be executed in the United States for nearly ten years, after the Supreme Courts lifted an effective ban on capital punishment. Since that time, one other man, John Albert Taylor, has chosen to die by firing squad, also in Utah. According to the New York Times, Taylor chose this method for his 1996 execution “to make a statement that Utah was sanctioning murder.”</p>
<p>While firing squads are unique to Utah (or almost–see Oklahoma, below), a number of other states still give condemned prisoners a choice of execution methods. The “primary” or “default” method in all cases is lethal injection. But some states still still offer their previous method, as well–often, like Utah, only to inmates who were originally sentenced to die by that method.</p>
<p>In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, some prisoners can choose between a lethal injection and the electric chair. In Arizona, California, Maryland, and Missouri, they can opt for the gas chamber. Hanging is still permitted in Washington (if the prisoner requests it) and New Hampshire (if a lethal injection for some reason can’t be given).</p>
<p>Many state laws even designate “backup” methods, just in case the primary method is struck down. Oklahoma, in particular, seems determined not to take any chances. According to the Death Penalty Information Center (which maintains detailed data on execution methods), the state of Oklahoma “authorizes electrocution if lethal injection is ever held to be unconstitutional and firing squad if both lethal injection and electrocution are held unconstitutional.”</p>
<p>There is one way of dying, however, that no state allows its prisoners to choose: Suicide. Last month, an Ohio inmate named Lawrence Reynolds tried to overdose on stockpiled antidepressants two days before his execution date. Prison officials rushed him to the hospital, where he was revived. An investigation by the state concluded that Reynolds, who had been on death row for 16 years, wanted to ”end it” by his own hand, so as to ”not give the state any satisfaction of killing him.” But the state reserved its right to be Reynolds’ executioner: Nine days after his suicide attempt, it put him to death in the lethal injection chamber.</p>
<p>Suicide attempts by death row inmates are not uncommon, though they are rarely successful. (Some advocates have suggested, however, that condemned prisoners who waive their rights to appeal are committing a form of legal suicide). Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and expert on the effects of solitary confinement and death row, has stated that “the conditions of confinement are so oppressive, the helplessness endured in the roller coaster of hope and despair so wrenching and exhausting, that ultimately the inmate can no longer bear it,” and choosing to die may be the only way “that he has any sense of control over his fate.”</p>
<p>According to the Salt Lake City Tribune, during his 25 years on death row, Ronnie Lee Gardner “periodically asked judges to allow him to die, either saying he was frustrated with delays in the case or racked with pain from rheumatoid arthritis, but then continued to challenge his sentence.” His appeals were finally exhausted in March. Since then, Gardner has been left to ponder the only choice left to him by a state that has power over his life and death: Whether to be poisoned by lethal injection, or shot through the heart.</p>
<p>James Ridgeway and Jean Casella can be reached at <a href="http://solitarywatch.wordpress.com/" type="external">Solitary Watch</a>, where this article originally appeared.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p><a href="http://greentags.bigcartel.com/" type="external">WORDS THAT STICK</a></p>
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<p><a href="" type="internal" />ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Nonprofit lender, job consultant and trainer WESST said Friday Wells Fargo has become a one-year $50,000 “Expansion Partner” for its program to help entrepreneurs learn about and incorporate technology tools that will move their business to the next level.</p>
<p>Support from Wells Fargo will help expand its “Technology Toolkit” into more communities statewide in New Mexico. Its essential elements are training workshops that teach technology tools and access to streamlined loans to help entrepreneurs purchase technology for their businesses.</p>
<p>“Wells Fargo is proud to support WESST and is committed to helping small business owners succeed in the 21st Century,” said Lisa Riley, Regional President for Wells Fargo’s New Mexico/Western Border Region.</p>
<p>“This initiative will greatly benefit small business owners and their ability to market their products across different mediums.”</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
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Wells Fargo kicking in $50K to WESST program
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https://abqjournal.com/334493/wells-fargo-kicking-in-50k-to-wesst-program.html
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Wells Fargo kicking in $50K to WESST program
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<p><a href="" type="internal" />ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Nonprofit lender, job consultant and trainer WESST said Friday Wells Fargo has become a one-year $50,000 “Expansion Partner” for its program to help entrepreneurs learn about and incorporate technology tools that will move their business to the next level.</p>
<p>Support from Wells Fargo will help expand its “Technology Toolkit” into more communities statewide in New Mexico. Its essential elements are training workshops that teach technology tools and access to streamlined loans to help entrepreneurs purchase technology for their businesses.</p>
<p>“Wells Fargo is proud to support WESST and is committed to helping small business owners succeed in the 21st Century,” said Lisa Riley, Regional President for Wells Fargo’s New Mexico/Western Border Region.</p>
<p>“This initiative will greatly benefit small business owners and their ability to market their products across different mediums.”</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
| 7,811 |
|
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p>Access to fresh fruits and vegetables doesn’t necessarily mean healthier eating habits. (Associated Press Photo)</p>
<p>PULLMAN, Wash.—The largest study of its kind has found that organic foods and crops have a suite of advantages over their conventional counterparts, including more antioxidants and fewer, less frequent pesticide residues.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>The study looked at an unprecedented 343 peer-reviewed publications comparing the nutritional quality and safety of organic and conventional plant-based foods, including fruits, vegetables, and grains. The study team applied sophisticated meta-analysis techniques to quantify differences between organic and non-organic foods.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“Science marches on,” said Charles Benbrook, a Washington State University researcher and the lone American co-author of the paper, published in the British Journal of Nutrition. “Our team learned valuable lessons from earlier reviews on this topic, and we benefited from the team’s remarkable breadth of scientific skills and experience.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Most of the publications covered in the study looked at crops grown in the same area, on similar soils. This approach reduces other possible sources of variation in nutritional and safety parameters.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>The research team also found the quality and reliability of comparison studies has greatly improved in recent years, leading to the discovery of significant nutritional and food safety differences not detected in earlier studies. For example, the new study incorporates the results of a research project led by WSU’s John Reganold that compared the nutritional and sensory quality of organic and conventional strawberries grown in California. Responding to the new paper’s results, Reganold said, “This is an impressive study, and its major nutritional findings are similar to those reported in our 2010 strawberry paper.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>The British Journal of Nutrition study was led by scientists at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, with Benbrook helping design the study, write the paper, and review the scientific literature, particularly on studies in North and South America. In general, the team found that organic crops have several nutritional benefits that stem from the way the crops are produced. A plant on a conventionally managed field will typically have access to high levels of synthetic nitrogen, and will marshal the extra resources into producing sugars and starches. As a result, the harvested portion of the plant will often contain lower concentrations of other nutrients, including health-promoting antioxidants.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Without the synthetic chemical pesticides applied on conventional crops, organic plants also tend to produce more phenols and polyphenols to defend against pest attacks and related injuries. In people, phenols and polyphenols can help prevent diseases triggered or promoted by oxidative-damage like coronary heart disease, stroke and certain cancers.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Overall, organic crops had 18 to 69 percent higher concentrations of antioxidant compounds. The team concludes that consumers who switch to organic fruit, vegetables, and cereals would get 20 to 40 percent more antioxidants. That’s the equivalent of about two extra portions of fruit and vegetables a day, with no increase in caloric intake.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>The researchers also found pesticide residues were three to four times more likely in conventional foods than organic ones, as organic farmers are not allowed to apply toxic, synthetic pesticides. While crops harvested from organically managed fields sometimes contain pesticide residues, the levels are usually 10-fold to 100-fold lower in organic food, compared to the corresponding, conventionally grown food.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“This study is telling a powerful story of how organic plant-based foods are nutritionally superior and deliver bona fide health benefits,” said Benbrook.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>In a surprising finding, the team concluded that conventional crops had roughly twice as much cadmium, a toxic heavy metal contaminant, as organic crops. The leading explanation is that certain fertilizers approved for use only on conventional farms somehow make cadmium more available to plant roots. A doubling of cadmium from food could push some individuals over safe daily intake levels.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>More than half the studies in the Newcastle analysis were not available to the research team that carried out a 2009 study commissioned by the UK Food Standards Agency. Another review published by a Stanford University team in 2011 failed to identify any significant clinical health benefits from consumption of organic food, but incorporated less than half the number of comparisons for most health-promoting nutrients.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“We benefited from a much larger and higher quality set of studies than our colleagues who carried out earlier reviews,” said Carlo Leifert, a Newcastle University professor and the project leader.</p>
<p>– See more at: http://www.stonehearthnewsletters.com/organic-farming-major-study-documents-nutritional-food-safety-benefits/organic-food/#sthash.WhgKh9GM.dpuf</p>
|
New study: Organic does matter
| false |
https://abqjournal.com/511541/new-study-organic-does-matter.html
| 2least
|
New study: Organic does matter
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p>Access to fresh fruits and vegetables doesn’t necessarily mean healthier eating habits. (Associated Press Photo)</p>
<p>PULLMAN, Wash.—The largest study of its kind has found that organic foods and crops have a suite of advantages over their conventional counterparts, including more antioxidants and fewer, less frequent pesticide residues.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>The study looked at an unprecedented 343 peer-reviewed publications comparing the nutritional quality and safety of organic and conventional plant-based foods, including fruits, vegetables, and grains. The study team applied sophisticated meta-analysis techniques to quantify differences between organic and non-organic foods.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“Science marches on,” said Charles Benbrook, a Washington State University researcher and the lone American co-author of the paper, published in the British Journal of Nutrition. “Our team learned valuable lessons from earlier reviews on this topic, and we benefited from the team’s remarkable breadth of scientific skills and experience.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Most of the publications covered in the study looked at crops grown in the same area, on similar soils. This approach reduces other possible sources of variation in nutritional and safety parameters.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>The research team also found the quality and reliability of comparison studies has greatly improved in recent years, leading to the discovery of significant nutritional and food safety differences not detected in earlier studies. For example, the new study incorporates the results of a research project led by WSU’s John Reganold that compared the nutritional and sensory quality of organic and conventional strawberries grown in California. Responding to the new paper’s results, Reganold said, “This is an impressive study, and its major nutritional findings are similar to those reported in our 2010 strawberry paper.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>The British Journal of Nutrition study was led by scientists at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, with Benbrook helping design the study, write the paper, and review the scientific literature, particularly on studies in North and South America. In general, the team found that organic crops have several nutritional benefits that stem from the way the crops are produced. A plant on a conventionally managed field will typically have access to high levels of synthetic nitrogen, and will marshal the extra resources into producing sugars and starches. As a result, the harvested portion of the plant will often contain lower concentrations of other nutrients, including health-promoting antioxidants.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Without the synthetic chemical pesticides applied on conventional crops, organic plants also tend to produce more phenols and polyphenols to defend against pest attacks and related injuries. In people, phenols and polyphenols can help prevent diseases triggered or promoted by oxidative-damage like coronary heart disease, stroke and certain cancers.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Overall, organic crops had 18 to 69 percent higher concentrations of antioxidant compounds. The team concludes that consumers who switch to organic fruit, vegetables, and cereals would get 20 to 40 percent more antioxidants. That’s the equivalent of about two extra portions of fruit and vegetables a day, with no increase in caloric intake.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>The researchers also found pesticide residues were three to four times more likely in conventional foods than organic ones, as organic farmers are not allowed to apply toxic, synthetic pesticides. While crops harvested from organically managed fields sometimes contain pesticide residues, the levels are usually 10-fold to 100-fold lower in organic food, compared to the corresponding, conventionally grown food.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“This study is telling a powerful story of how organic plant-based foods are nutritionally superior and deliver bona fide health benefits,” said Benbrook.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>In a surprising finding, the team concluded that conventional crops had roughly twice as much cadmium, a toxic heavy metal contaminant, as organic crops. The leading explanation is that certain fertilizers approved for use only on conventional farms somehow make cadmium more available to plant roots. A doubling of cadmium from food could push some individuals over safe daily intake levels.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>More than half the studies in the Newcastle analysis were not available to the research team that carried out a 2009 study commissioned by the UK Food Standards Agency. Another review published by a Stanford University team in 2011 failed to identify any significant clinical health benefits from consumption of organic food, but incorporated less than half the number of comparisons for most health-promoting nutrients.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“We benefited from a much larger and higher quality set of studies than our colleagues who carried out earlier reviews,” said Carlo Leifert, a Newcastle University professor and the project leader.</p>
<p>– See more at: http://www.stonehearthnewsletters.com/organic-farming-major-study-documents-nutritional-food-safety-benefits/organic-food/#sthash.WhgKh9GM.dpuf</p>
| 7,812 |
|
<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — The deal that ended the government shutdown also further cut taxes, adding billions more to the national deficit.</p>
<p>The tax cuts were a little noticed element of the much discussed deal, which provided funding to keep government agencies operating for about three weeks and renewed a popular health insurance program for poor children. They were added to entice Republicans to line up behind the temporary spending bill, even before the Democrats dug in and forced the three-day shutdown.</p>
<p>The bill enacted late Monday suspended three taxes that came in under President Barack Obama’s signature health care law: a tax on medical devices, one on high-cost health care plans offered by employers, and another on health insurance companies.</p>
<p>The Republicans were relieved when enough Democrats flipped and supported the spending bill so that the government could reopen. And, they were gleeful at the chipping away of the health care law by delaying or suspending the three taxes.</p>
<p>Just a few weeks after the Republicans catapulted a sweeping, $1.5 trillion tax plan into law, here they were cutting taxes again, they told the public. Even the shutdown “couldn’t keep this Congress from finding new ways to cut taxes and let the American people keep more of their hard-earned money,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday.</p>
<p>Delaying the three taxes will add $32 billion over 10 years to the deficit, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, in addition to the anticipated $1.5 trillion in federal red ink from the new GOP tax law.</p>
<p>Amid the furious negotiations over the spending bill, GOP leaders used the tax cuts as “sweeteners” to attract the support of balking Republican conservatives in the House..</p>
<p>“It was just for the sake of buying time,” said Thomas Cooke, a professor of business law and tax expert at Georgetown University.</p>
<p>The taxes also are opposed by plenty of Democrats. That’s in contrast to many of the tax levies, credits and deductions in the comprehensive tax legislation, which starkly split Republicans and Democrats in a bitter battle last year.</p>
<p>But despite the bipartisan support for repealing the health care taxes, the delays embedded in the spending bill may have a short shelf life, Cooke said. With Feb. 8 looming as the next deadline for Congress to reach agreement on immigration and long-term government funding to avert another showdown, he said, “Everything is still on the table, subject to negotiation. ... I see (the tax delays) almost getting pushed to the side.”</p>
<p>Several major manufacturers of medical devices have their headquarters in solidly Democratic states — like Medtronic in Minnesota, and GE Healthcare, Baxter International and Abbott Laboratories in Illinois. Some Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have sounded the alarm on tens of thousands of jobs in the industry flying out of the U.S. because of the tax — a claim based largely on industry-funded studies.</p>
<p>The 2.3 percent tax on makers of medical devices applies to equipment such as surgical instruments, X-ray equipment, MRI machines and cardiac pacemakers.</p>
<p>Powerful industry lobbies have agitated against the health care levies. They aimed early last year for their repeal in the Republican bill to replace the Obama health care law — a stunning failure for the GOP — and then pushed for it, unsuccessfully, in the tax legislation.</p>
<p>An array of big insurers, including UnitedHealth, Aetna and Blue Cross-Blue Shield, have lined up against the health insurance tax, which is based on a company’s market share. Some analysts have warned that the companies could try to soften their tax blow by raising the cost of premiums for consumers.</p>
<p>Congress has repeatedly delayed or suspended the taxes’ effective dates in recent years. Now with the government spending bill, the medical devices tax — on hold since 2016 and previously scheduled to land this past Jan. 1 — is delayed two years to 2020. The tax on health insurance providers, also on hold for two years but in effect Jan. 1, gets a one-year suspension for 2019. The tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, a 40 percent levy on employers that offer the generous plans, is deferred from 2020 to 2022.</p>
<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — The deal that ended the government shutdown also further cut taxes, adding billions more to the national deficit.</p>
<p>The tax cuts were a little noticed element of the much discussed deal, which provided funding to keep government agencies operating for about three weeks and renewed a popular health insurance program for poor children. They were added to entice Republicans to line up behind the temporary spending bill, even before the Democrats dug in and forced the three-day shutdown.</p>
<p>The bill enacted late Monday suspended three taxes that came in under President Barack Obama’s signature health care law: a tax on medical devices, one on high-cost health care plans offered by employers, and another on health insurance companies.</p>
<p>The Republicans were relieved when enough Democrats flipped and supported the spending bill so that the government could reopen. And, they were gleeful at the chipping away of the health care law by delaying or suspending the three taxes.</p>
<p>Just a few weeks after the Republicans catapulted a sweeping, $1.5 trillion tax plan into law, here they were cutting taxes again, they told the public. Even the shutdown “couldn’t keep this Congress from finding new ways to cut taxes and let the American people keep more of their hard-earned money,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday.</p>
<p>Delaying the three taxes will add $32 billion over 10 years to the deficit, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, in addition to the anticipated $1.5 trillion in federal red ink from the new GOP tax law.</p>
<p>Amid the furious negotiations over the spending bill, GOP leaders used the tax cuts as “sweeteners” to attract the support of balking Republican conservatives in the House..</p>
<p>“It was just for the sake of buying time,” said Thomas Cooke, a professor of business law and tax expert at Georgetown University.</p>
<p>The taxes also are opposed by plenty of Democrats. That’s in contrast to many of the tax levies, credits and deductions in the comprehensive tax legislation, which starkly split Republicans and Democrats in a bitter battle last year.</p>
<p>But despite the bipartisan support for repealing the health care taxes, the delays embedded in the spending bill may have a short shelf life, Cooke said. With Feb. 8 looming as the next deadline for Congress to reach agreement on immigration and long-term government funding to avert another showdown, he said, “Everything is still on the table, subject to negotiation. ... I see (the tax delays) almost getting pushed to the side.”</p>
<p>Several major manufacturers of medical devices have their headquarters in solidly Democratic states — like Medtronic in Minnesota, and GE Healthcare, Baxter International and Abbott Laboratories in Illinois. Some Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have sounded the alarm on tens of thousands of jobs in the industry flying out of the U.S. because of the tax — a claim based largely on industry-funded studies.</p>
<p>The 2.3 percent tax on makers of medical devices applies to equipment such as surgical instruments, X-ray equipment, MRI machines and cardiac pacemakers.</p>
<p>Powerful industry lobbies have agitated against the health care levies. They aimed early last year for their repeal in the Republican bill to replace the Obama health care law — a stunning failure for the GOP — and then pushed for it, unsuccessfully, in the tax legislation.</p>
<p>An array of big insurers, including UnitedHealth, Aetna and Blue Cross-Blue Shield, have lined up against the health insurance tax, which is based on a company’s market share. Some analysts have warned that the companies could try to soften their tax blow by raising the cost of premiums for consumers.</p>
<p>Congress has repeatedly delayed or suspended the taxes’ effective dates in recent years. Now with the government spending bill, the medical devices tax — on hold since 2016 and previously scheduled to land this past Jan. 1 — is delayed two years to 2020. The tax on health insurance providers, also on hold for two years but in effect Jan. 1, gets a one-year suspension for 2019. The tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, a 40 percent levy on employers that offer the generous plans, is deferred from 2020 to 2022.</p>
|
How Congress used the shutdown deal to cut more taxes
| false |
https://apnews.com/3ff6492bf7264c03bc728c82bdbc0df2
|
2018-01-25
| 2least
|
How Congress used the shutdown deal to cut more taxes
<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — The deal that ended the government shutdown also further cut taxes, adding billions more to the national deficit.</p>
<p>The tax cuts were a little noticed element of the much discussed deal, which provided funding to keep government agencies operating for about three weeks and renewed a popular health insurance program for poor children. They were added to entice Republicans to line up behind the temporary spending bill, even before the Democrats dug in and forced the three-day shutdown.</p>
<p>The bill enacted late Monday suspended three taxes that came in under President Barack Obama’s signature health care law: a tax on medical devices, one on high-cost health care plans offered by employers, and another on health insurance companies.</p>
<p>The Republicans were relieved when enough Democrats flipped and supported the spending bill so that the government could reopen. And, they were gleeful at the chipping away of the health care law by delaying or suspending the three taxes.</p>
<p>Just a few weeks after the Republicans catapulted a sweeping, $1.5 trillion tax plan into law, here they were cutting taxes again, they told the public. Even the shutdown “couldn’t keep this Congress from finding new ways to cut taxes and let the American people keep more of their hard-earned money,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday.</p>
<p>Delaying the three taxes will add $32 billion over 10 years to the deficit, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, in addition to the anticipated $1.5 trillion in federal red ink from the new GOP tax law.</p>
<p>Amid the furious negotiations over the spending bill, GOP leaders used the tax cuts as “sweeteners” to attract the support of balking Republican conservatives in the House..</p>
<p>“It was just for the sake of buying time,” said Thomas Cooke, a professor of business law and tax expert at Georgetown University.</p>
<p>The taxes also are opposed by plenty of Democrats. That’s in contrast to many of the tax levies, credits and deductions in the comprehensive tax legislation, which starkly split Republicans and Democrats in a bitter battle last year.</p>
<p>But despite the bipartisan support for repealing the health care taxes, the delays embedded in the spending bill may have a short shelf life, Cooke said. With Feb. 8 looming as the next deadline for Congress to reach agreement on immigration and long-term government funding to avert another showdown, he said, “Everything is still on the table, subject to negotiation. ... I see (the tax delays) almost getting pushed to the side.”</p>
<p>Several major manufacturers of medical devices have their headquarters in solidly Democratic states — like Medtronic in Minnesota, and GE Healthcare, Baxter International and Abbott Laboratories in Illinois. Some Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have sounded the alarm on tens of thousands of jobs in the industry flying out of the U.S. because of the tax — a claim based largely on industry-funded studies.</p>
<p>The 2.3 percent tax on makers of medical devices applies to equipment such as surgical instruments, X-ray equipment, MRI machines and cardiac pacemakers.</p>
<p>Powerful industry lobbies have agitated against the health care levies. They aimed early last year for their repeal in the Republican bill to replace the Obama health care law — a stunning failure for the GOP — and then pushed for it, unsuccessfully, in the tax legislation.</p>
<p>An array of big insurers, including UnitedHealth, Aetna and Blue Cross-Blue Shield, have lined up against the health insurance tax, which is based on a company’s market share. Some analysts have warned that the companies could try to soften their tax blow by raising the cost of premiums for consumers.</p>
<p>Congress has repeatedly delayed or suspended the taxes’ effective dates in recent years. Now with the government spending bill, the medical devices tax — on hold since 2016 and previously scheduled to land this past Jan. 1 — is delayed two years to 2020. The tax on health insurance providers, also on hold for two years but in effect Jan. 1, gets a one-year suspension for 2019. The tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, a 40 percent levy on employers that offer the generous plans, is deferred from 2020 to 2022.</p>
<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — The deal that ended the government shutdown also further cut taxes, adding billions more to the national deficit.</p>
<p>The tax cuts were a little noticed element of the much discussed deal, which provided funding to keep government agencies operating for about three weeks and renewed a popular health insurance program for poor children. They were added to entice Republicans to line up behind the temporary spending bill, even before the Democrats dug in and forced the three-day shutdown.</p>
<p>The bill enacted late Monday suspended three taxes that came in under President Barack Obama’s signature health care law: a tax on medical devices, one on high-cost health care plans offered by employers, and another on health insurance companies.</p>
<p>The Republicans were relieved when enough Democrats flipped and supported the spending bill so that the government could reopen. And, they were gleeful at the chipping away of the health care law by delaying or suspending the three taxes.</p>
<p>Just a few weeks after the Republicans catapulted a sweeping, $1.5 trillion tax plan into law, here they were cutting taxes again, they told the public. Even the shutdown “couldn’t keep this Congress from finding new ways to cut taxes and let the American people keep more of their hard-earned money,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday.</p>
<p>Delaying the three taxes will add $32 billion over 10 years to the deficit, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, in addition to the anticipated $1.5 trillion in federal red ink from the new GOP tax law.</p>
<p>Amid the furious negotiations over the spending bill, GOP leaders used the tax cuts as “sweeteners” to attract the support of balking Republican conservatives in the House..</p>
<p>“It was just for the sake of buying time,” said Thomas Cooke, a professor of business law and tax expert at Georgetown University.</p>
<p>The taxes also are opposed by plenty of Democrats. That’s in contrast to many of the tax levies, credits and deductions in the comprehensive tax legislation, which starkly split Republicans and Democrats in a bitter battle last year.</p>
<p>But despite the bipartisan support for repealing the health care taxes, the delays embedded in the spending bill may have a short shelf life, Cooke said. With Feb. 8 looming as the next deadline for Congress to reach agreement on immigration and long-term government funding to avert another showdown, he said, “Everything is still on the table, subject to negotiation. ... I see (the tax delays) almost getting pushed to the side.”</p>
<p>Several major manufacturers of medical devices have their headquarters in solidly Democratic states — like Medtronic in Minnesota, and GE Healthcare, Baxter International and Abbott Laboratories in Illinois. Some Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have sounded the alarm on tens of thousands of jobs in the industry flying out of the U.S. because of the tax — a claim based largely on industry-funded studies.</p>
<p>The 2.3 percent tax on makers of medical devices applies to equipment such as surgical instruments, X-ray equipment, MRI machines and cardiac pacemakers.</p>
<p>Powerful industry lobbies have agitated against the health care levies. They aimed early last year for their repeal in the Republican bill to replace the Obama health care law — a stunning failure for the GOP — and then pushed for it, unsuccessfully, in the tax legislation.</p>
<p>An array of big insurers, including UnitedHealth, Aetna and Blue Cross-Blue Shield, have lined up against the health insurance tax, which is based on a company’s market share. Some analysts have warned that the companies could try to soften their tax blow by raising the cost of premiums for consumers.</p>
<p>Congress has repeatedly delayed or suspended the taxes’ effective dates in recent years. Now with the government spending bill, the medical devices tax — on hold since 2016 and previously scheduled to land this past Jan. 1 — is delayed two years to 2020. The tax on health insurance providers, also on hold for two years but in effect Jan. 1, gets a one-year suspension for 2019. The tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, a 40 percent levy on employers that offer the generous plans, is deferred from 2020 to 2022.</p>
| 7,813 |
<p>Investing.com – Poland stocks were higher after the close on Monday, as gains in the , and sectors led shares higher.</p>
<p>At the close in Warsaw, the added 0.47%.</p>
<p>The best performers of the session on the were Polski Koncern Naftowy ORLEN SA (WA:), which rose 2.90% or 3.47 points to trade at 122.97 at the close. Meanwhile, Alior Bank SA (WA:) added 2.52% or 1.85 points to end at 75.40 and LPP SA (WA:) was up 2.42% or 200.00 points to 8470.00 in late trade.</p>
<p>The worst performers of the session were PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna SA (WA:), which fell 2.51% or 0.31 points to trade at 12.04 at the close. ING Bank Śląski SA (WA:) declined 2.01% or 4.10 points to end at 199.90 and Grupa Lotos SA (WA:) was down 1.60% or 1.00 points to 61.50.</p>
<p>Falling stocks outnumbered advancing ones on the Warsaw Stock Exchange by 253 to 238 and 181 ended unchanged.</p>
<p>Crude oil for January delivery was down 1.59% or 0.94 to $58.01 a barrel. Elsewhere in commodities trading, Brent oil for delivery in February rose 0.14% or 0.09 to hit $63.56 a barrel, while the December Gold Futures contract rose 0.64% or 8.29 to trade at $1295.59 a troy ounce.</p>
<p>EUR/PLN was down 0.05% to 4.2079, while USD/PLN rose 0.10% to 3.5314.</p>
<p>The US Dollar Index Futures was unchanged 0.00% at 92.72.</p>
<p />
<p>Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.</p>
|
Poland stocks higher at close of trade; WIG30 up 0.47%
| false |
https://newsline.com/poland-stocks-higher-at-close-of-trade-wig30-up-0-47/
|
2017-11-27
| 1right-center
|
Poland stocks higher at close of trade; WIG30 up 0.47%
<p>Investing.com – Poland stocks were higher after the close on Monday, as gains in the , and sectors led shares higher.</p>
<p>At the close in Warsaw, the added 0.47%.</p>
<p>The best performers of the session on the were Polski Koncern Naftowy ORLEN SA (WA:), which rose 2.90% or 3.47 points to trade at 122.97 at the close. Meanwhile, Alior Bank SA (WA:) added 2.52% or 1.85 points to end at 75.40 and LPP SA (WA:) was up 2.42% or 200.00 points to 8470.00 in late trade.</p>
<p>The worst performers of the session were PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna SA (WA:), which fell 2.51% or 0.31 points to trade at 12.04 at the close. ING Bank Śląski SA (WA:) declined 2.01% or 4.10 points to end at 199.90 and Grupa Lotos SA (WA:) was down 1.60% or 1.00 points to 61.50.</p>
<p>Falling stocks outnumbered advancing ones on the Warsaw Stock Exchange by 253 to 238 and 181 ended unchanged.</p>
<p>Crude oil for January delivery was down 1.59% or 0.94 to $58.01 a barrel. Elsewhere in commodities trading, Brent oil for delivery in February rose 0.14% or 0.09 to hit $63.56 a barrel, while the December Gold Futures contract rose 0.64% or 8.29 to trade at $1295.59 a troy ounce.</p>
<p>EUR/PLN was down 0.05% to 4.2079, while USD/PLN rose 0.10% to 3.5314.</p>
<p>The US Dollar Index Futures was unchanged 0.00% at 92.72.</p>
<p />
<p>Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.</p>
| 7,814 |
<p>Current TV continued to fill out its primetime lineup yesterday with the announcement yesterday that they were adding a new show at 9 p.m. beginning in January that will be hosted by former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm.</p>
<p />
<p>According to the Current TV press release, Granholm’s program “will shed light on the news of the day and will feature in-studio commentary by political insiders, campaign veterans, opinion leaders and newsmakers whose unique perspective will both inform and inspire.”</p>
<p>One person who is already inspired by the forthcoming show is Current TV co-founder and Chairman Al Gore who was quoted as follows in the company’s press release:</p>
<p>“THE WAR ROOM WITH JENNIFER GRANHOLM is at the core of Current TV’s strategy to be a trusted resource for intelligent and compelling commentary during what is sure to be a critically important election year with many complicated and emotional issues.“ He added: “Jennifer Granholm is a supremely talented and dedicated public servant whose deep understanding of the issues makes her one of the most relevant voices in politics today. She would be an asset to any news organization, and I am delighted that she has chosen Current TV as her new home. I have no doubt that her ability to illuminate and provide context to the issues of the 2012 election will prove to be of inestimable value to Current’s audience as well as to the public policy discussion surrounding the election.”</p>
<p>Apparently only Gore had enough vision to hire Granholm to host her own show rather than serve as a political commentator, which she has been doing on MSNBC since she left office earlier this year.</p>
<p>Gore is so enthusiastic that he was even quoted by Mediaite as saying that had Granholm not been born in Canada “she would have been a leading candidate for President of the United States, and would have been, very possibly, the first woman President of the United States.”</p>
<p>I wonder what Hillary Clinton thinks of that. The addition of Granholm will nearly complete Current TV’s goal of filling the primetime hours with its own news shows. Next month former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur will launch “The Young Turks” in the 7 p.m. hour as a lead-in to “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”</p>
<p>Current is hoping that the addition of these shows will give it a badly needed ratings boost. Olbermann’s show, which launched in June, is receiving much better ratings that what Current had previously programmed at 8 p.m., but after a hopeful start has sputtered. This obviously isn’t what Gore or Olbermann had envisioned. The signing of Uygur and Granholm will certainly give Current a ratings boost, considering the lack of any substantive programming except for Olbermann on the network at the present time.&#160; But if Olbermann, who was a proven ratings star at MSNBC, is struggling to maintain an audience even one-fifth the size of his former show, what will Uygur, whose ratings were unspectacular at MSNBC, or Granholm, who isn’t a proven television host, be able to do?</p>
<p>Granholm said that the show will be for political junkies like herself. She said that Democrats will love it and the far right will hate it and that she was eager to get started.</p>
<p>That may be, but with a potential audience only two-thirds the size of MSNBC’s her challenge will be finding enough of an audience, Democrat or otherwise, to rise to even the low baseline level already established at Current.</p>
|
Former Michigan Gov. Granholm Gets Her Own Show on Current TV
| true |
http://aim.org/don-irvine-blog/former-michigan-gov-granholm-gets-her-own-show-on-current-tv/
|
2011-10-13
| 0right
|
Former Michigan Gov. Granholm Gets Her Own Show on Current TV
<p>Current TV continued to fill out its primetime lineup yesterday with the announcement yesterday that they were adding a new show at 9 p.m. beginning in January that will be hosted by former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm.</p>
<p />
<p>According to the Current TV press release, Granholm’s program “will shed light on the news of the day and will feature in-studio commentary by political insiders, campaign veterans, opinion leaders and newsmakers whose unique perspective will both inform and inspire.”</p>
<p>One person who is already inspired by the forthcoming show is Current TV co-founder and Chairman Al Gore who was quoted as follows in the company’s press release:</p>
<p>“THE WAR ROOM WITH JENNIFER GRANHOLM is at the core of Current TV’s strategy to be a trusted resource for intelligent and compelling commentary during what is sure to be a critically important election year with many complicated and emotional issues.“ He added: “Jennifer Granholm is a supremely talented and dedicated public servant whose deep understanding of the issues makes her one of the most relevant voices in politics today. She would be an asset to any news organization, and I am delighted that she has chosen Current TV as her new home. I have no doubt that her ability to illuminate and provide context to the issues of the 2012 election will prove to be of inestimable value to Current’s audience as well as to the public policy discussion surrounding the election.”</p>
<p>Apparently only Gore had enough vision to hire Granholm to host her own show rather than serve as a political commentator, which she has been doing on MSNBC since she left office earlier this year.</p>
<p>Gore is so enthusiastic that he was even quoted by Mediaite as saying that had Granholm not been born in Canada “she would have been a leading candidate for President of the United States, and would have been, very possibly, the first woman President of the United States.”</p>
<p>I wonder what Hillary Clinton thinks of that. The addition of Granholm will nearly complete Current TV’s goal of filling the primetime hours with its own news shows. Next month former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur will launch “The Young Turks” in the 7 p.m. hour as a lead-in to “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”</p>
<p>Current is hoping that the addition of these shows will give it a badly needed ratings boost. Olbermann’s show, which launched in June, is receiving much better ratings that what Current had previously programmed at 8 p.m., but after a hopeful start has sputtered. This obviously isn’t what Gore or Olbermann had envisioned. The signing of Uygur and Granholm will certainly give Current a ratings boost, considering the lack of any substantive programming except for Olbermann on the network at the present time.&#160; But if Olbermann, who was a proven ratings star at MSNBC, is struggling to maintain an audience even one-fifth the size of his former show, what will Uygur, whose ratings were unspectacular at MSNBC, or Granholm, who isn’t a proven television host, be able to do?</p>
<p>Granholm said that the show will be for political junkies like herself. She said that Democrats will love it and the far right will hate it and that she was eager to get started.</p>
<p>That may be, but with a potential audience only two-thirds the size of MSNBC’s her challenge will be finding enough of an audience, Democrat or otherwise, to rise to even the low baseline level already established at Current.</p>
| 7,815 |
<p>Investing.com – Australia stocks were lower after the close on Friday, as losses in the , and sectors led shares lower.</p>
<p>At the close in Sydney, the declined 0.39% to hit a new 1-month low.</p>
<p>The best performers of the session on the were Syrah Resources Ltd (AX:), which rose 4.85% or 0.160 points to trade at 3.460 at the close. Meanwhile, Resolute Mining Ltd (AX:) added 3.25% or 0.040 points to end at 1.270 and Isentia Group Ltd (AX:) was up 3.26% or 0.053 points to 1.663 in late trade.</p>
<p>The worst performers of the session were Flexigroup Ltd (AX:), which fell 3.81% or 0.063 points to trade at 1.577 at the close. Breville Group Ltd (AX:) declined 3.43% or 0.375 points to end at 10.545 and Retail Food Group Ltd (AX:) was down 3.22% or 0.155 points to 4.665.</p>
<p>Falling stocks outnumbered advancing ones on the Sydney Stock Exchange by 590 to 588 and 383 ended unchanged.</p>
<p>Shares in Flexigroup Ltd (AX:) fell to 5-year lows; falling 3.81% or 0.063 to 1.577.</p>
<p>The , which measures the implied volatility of S&amp;P/ASX 200 options, was down 0.18% to 13.553.</p>
<p>Gold Futures for December delivery was up 0.73% or 9.92 to $1360.22 a troy ounce. Elsewhere in commodities trading, Crude oil for delivery in October rose 0.16% or 0.08 to hit $49.17 a barrel, while the November Brent oil contract rose 0.44% or 0.24 to trade at $54.73 a barrel.</p>
<p>AUD/USD was up 0.89% to 0.8120, while AUD/JPY rose 0.26% to 87.50.</p>
<p>The US Dollar Index Futures was down 0.45% at 91.08.</p>
<p />
<p>Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.</p>
|
Australia stocks lower at close of trade; S&P/ASX 200 down 0.39%
| false |
https://newsline.com/australia-stocks-lower-at-close-of-trade-spasx-200-down-0-39/
|
2017-09-08
| 1right-center
|
Australia stocks lower at close of trade; S&P/ASX 200 down 0.39%
<p>Investing.com – Australia stocks were lower after the close on Friday, as losses in the , and sectors led shares lower.</p>
<p>At the close in Sydney, the declined 0.39% to hit a new 1-month low.</p>
<p>The best performers of the session on the were Syrah Resources Ltd (AX:), which rose 4.85% or 0.160 points to trade at 3.460 at the close. Meanwhile, Resolute Mining Ltd (AX:) added 3.25% or 0.040 points to end at 1.270 and Isentia Group Ltd (AX:) was up 3.26% or 0.053 points to 1.663 in late trade.</p>
<p>The worst performers of the session were Flexigroup Ltd (AX:), which fell 3.81% or 0.063 points to trade at 1.577 at the close. Breville Group Ltd (AX:) declined 3.43% or 0.375 points to end at 10.545 and Retail Food Group Ltd (AX:) was down 3.22% or 0.155 points to 4.665.</p>
<p>Falling stocks outnumbered advancing ones on the Sydney Stock Exchange by 590 to 588 and 383 ended unchanged.</p>
<p>Shares in Flexigroup Ltd (AX:) fell to 5-year lows; falling 3.81% or 0.063 to 1.577.</p>
<p>The , which measures the implied volatility of S&amp;P/ASX 200 options, was down 0.18% to 13.553.</p>
<p>Gold Futures for December delivery was up 0.73% or 9.92 to $1360.22 a troy ounce. Elsewhere in commodities trading, Crude oil for delivery in October rose 0.16% or 0.08 to hit $49.17 a barrel, while the November Brent oil contract rose 0.44% or 0.24 to trade at $54.73 a barrel.</p>
<p>AUD/USD was up 0.89% to 0.8120, while AUD/JPY rose 0.26% to 87.50.</p>
<p>The US Dollar Index Futures was down 0.45% at 91.08.</p>
<p />
<p>Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.</p>
| 7,816 |
<p>TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's Revolutionary Guard said on Sunday that the nation and its security forces have ended the wave of unrest linked to anti-government protests that erupted last month.</p>
<p>In a statement on its website, the force blamed the unrest on the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as an exiled opposition group known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, and supporters of the monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.</p>
<p>Price hikes sparked protests in a number of cities and towns late last month, and at least 21 people were killed in scattered clashes.</p>
<p>The protests, which vented anger at high unemployment and official corruption, were the largest seen in Iran since the disputed 2009 presidential election, and some demonstrators called for the overthrow of the government.</p>
<p>Authorities have said in the past few days that the protests are waning but The Associated Press could not independently verify that.</p>
<p>The Revolutionary Guard is a powerful paramilitary force loyal to the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many of the demonstrators protested against the Guard's massive budget, its costly interventions across the region, and against the supreme leader himself.</p>
<p>Hundreds of people have been detained since the protests began. They include around 90 university students, reformist lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi was quoted as saying by the semi-official ISNA news agency.</p>
<p>Later on Sunday, Tehran prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, said that 70 of the detained protesters have been released on bail during the last 48 hours. He added that there would be more releases from detention, except for the main instigators of the riots who will be "dealt with seriously."</p>
<p>Iranian lawmakers held a closed session on Sunday in which senior security officials briefed them on the protests and the conditions of the detainees, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.</p>
<p>"It was emphasized that foreign elements, and in particular the United States, played a basic role in forming and manipulating the recent unrest," IRNA quoted lawmaker Jalal Mirzaei as saying.</p>
<p>The United States and Israel have expressed support for the protests, which began on Dec. 28 in Iran's second largest city, Mashhad, but deny allegations of fomenting them.</p>
<p>In recent days, government supporters have held several mass rallies across the country to protest the unrest.</p>
<p>TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's Revolutionary Guard said on Sunday that the nation and its security forces have ended the wave of unrest linked to anti-government protests that erupted last month.</p>
<p>In a statement on its website, the force blamed the unrest on the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as an exiled opposition group known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, and supporters of the monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.</p>
<p>Price hikes sparked protests in a number of cities and towns late last month, and at least 21 people were killed in scattered clashes.</p>
<p>The protests, which vented anger at high unemployment and official corruption, were the largest seen in Iran since the disputed 2009 presidential election, and some demonstrators called for the overthrow of the government.</p>
<p>Authorities have said in the past few days that the protests are waning but The Associated Press could not independently verify that.</p>
<p>The Revolutionary Guard is a powerful paramilitary force loyal to the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many of the demonstrators protested against the Guard's massive budget, its costly interventions across the region, and against the supreme leader himself.</p>
<p>Hundreds of people have been detained since the protests began. They include around 90 university students, reformist lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi was quoted as saying by the semi-official ISNA news agency.</p>
<p>Later on Sunday, Tehran prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, said that 70 of the detained protesters have been released on bail during the last 48 hours. He added that there would be more releases from detention, except for the main instigators of the riots who will be "dealt with seriously."</p>
<p>Iranian lawmakers held a closed session on Sunday in which senior security officials briefed them on the protests and the conditions of the detainees, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.</p>
<p>"It was emphasized that foreign elements, and in particular the United States, played a basic role in forming and manipulating the recent unrest," IRNA quoted lawmaker Jalal Mirzaei as saying.</p>
<p>The United States and Israel have expressed support for the protests, which began on Dec. 28 in Iran's second largest city, Mashhad, but deny allegations of fomenting them.</p>
<p>In recent days, government supporters have held several mass rallies across the country to protest the unrest.</p>
|
Iran's Guard claims victory against anti-government protests
| false |
https://apnews.com/amp/c12b181e7feb4f26a08116b1ff7734c5
|
2018-01-07
| 2least
|
Iran's Guard claims victory against anti-government protests
<p>TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's Revolutionary Guard said on Sunday that the nation and its security forces have ended the wave of unrest linked to anti-government protests that erupted last month.</p>
<p>In a statement on its website, the force blamed the unrest on the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as an exiled opposition group known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, and supporters of the monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.</p>
<p>Price hikes sparked protests in a number of cities and towns late last month, and at least 21 people were killed in scattered clashes.</p>
<p>The protests, which vented anger at high unemployment and official corruption, were the largest seen in Iran since the disputed 2009 presidential election, and some demonstrators called for the overthrow of the government.</p>
<p>Authorities have said in the past few days that the protests are waning but The Associated Press could not independently verify that.</p>
<p>The Revolutionary Guard is a powerful paramilitary force loyal to the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many of the demonstrators protested against the Guard's massive budget, its costly interventions across the region, and against the supreme leader himself.</p>
<p>Hundreds of people have been detained since the protests began. They include around 90 university students, reformist lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi was quoted as saying by the semi-official ISNA news agency.</p>
<p>Later on Sunday, Tehran prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, said that 70 of the detained protesters have been released on bail during the last 48 hours. He added that there would be more releases from detention, except for the main instigators of the riots who will be "dealt with seriously."</p>
<p>Iranian lawmakers held a closed session on Sunday in which senior security officials briefed them on the protests and the conditions of the detainees, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.</p>
<p>"It was emphasized that foreign elements, and in particular the United States, played a basic role in forming and manipulating the recent unrest," IRNA quoted lawmaker Jalal Mirzaei as saying.</p>
<p>The United States and Israel have expressed support for the protests, which began on Dec. 28 in Iran's second largest city, Mashhad, but deny allegations of fomenting them.</p>
<p>In recent days, government supporters have held several mass rallies across the country to protest the unrest.</p>
<p>TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's Revolutionary Guard said on Sunday that the nation and its security forces have ended the wave of unrest linked to anti-government protests that erupted last month.</p>
<p>In a statement on its website, the force blamed the unrest on the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as an exiled opposition group known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, and supporters of the monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.</p>
<p>Price hikes sparked protests in a number of cities and towns late last month, and at least 21 people were killed in scattered clashes.</p>
<p>The protests, which vented anger at high unemployment and official corruption, were the largest seen in Iran since the disputed 2009 presidential election, and some demonstrators called for the overthrow of the government.</p>
<p>Authorities have said in the past few days that the protests are waning but The Associated Press could not independently verify that.</p>
<p>The Revolutionary Guard is a powerful paramilitary force loyal to the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many of the demonstrators protested against the Guard's massive budget, its costly interventions across the region, and against the supreme leader himself.</p>
<p>Hundreds of people have been detained since the protests began. They include around 90 university students, reformist lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi was quoted as saying by the semi-official ISNA news agency.</p>
<p>Later on Sunday, Tehran prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, said that 70 of the detained protesters have been released on bail during the last 48 hours. He added that there would be more releases from detention, except for the main instigators of the riots who will be "dealt with seriously."</p>
<p>Iranian lawmakers held a closed session on Sunday in which senior security officials briefed them on the protests and the conditions of the detainees, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.</p>
<p>"It was emphasized that foreign elements, and in particular the United States, played a basic role in forming and manipulating the recent unrest," IRNA quoted lawmaker Jalal Mirzaei as saying.</p>
<p>The United States and Israel have expressed support for the protests, which began on Dec. 28 in Iran's second largest city, Mashhad, but deny allegations of fomenting them.</p>
<p>In recent days, government supporters have held several mass rallies across the country to protest the unrest.</p>
| 7,817 |
<p>It is inherent in the concept of a terrorist act that it aims at an effect very much larger than the direct physical destruction it causes. Proponents of what used to be called the ‘propaganda of the deed’ also believed that in the illuminating glare of terror the vulnerability of a corrupt order would be starkly revealed. Once corruption and oppression were stripped away, a sacred or natural order–the nation, the religious community, the people–would come into its own.</p>
<p>The instigators of September 11 brought off a far more spectacular coup than any exponent of the propaganda of the deed, threaten more than a dozen of the world’s most autocratic and corrupt rulers and aim to summon to arms a religious community of well over a billion people. The resources disposed of by these men transcend those traditionally associated with terrorism and are closer to those of a small state, but a state without boundaries whose headquarters hops from country to country.</p>
<p>Given the extent of the destruction wrought by the September 11 attack it is sobering to realise that the effect aimed at is qualitatively larger, namely that of re-ordering world politics around a ‘clash of civilisations’, allowing the Islamic world to free itself of all infidel trammels. Whether the strategic director of the Al Qaeda network is Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri or someone else, their aim from the outset was to provoke the United States into a counter-reaction that would alienate Muslim opinion; to expose the hypocrisy of the hereditary and autocratic rulers of the Muslim world; to create conditions in which the forces of Islamic jihad could seize or manipulate power in one or another of the larger or more significant Muslim states.</p>
<p>The new Caliphates at which they aim might appear a medieval fantasy but are to be equipped with the military and financial resources of modernity. They urge believers to consider the awesome power of Muslim leaders equipped with Islamic virtue, oil and nuclear weapons. Given the frustrated or desperate condition of much of the Muslim world, this is a message that has great resonance even amongst Muslims who are uneasy at, or repelled by, terror actions. The message targets the military actions and dispositions of the United States and Israel, especially as they are deemed to encroach on Muslim holy places, but it is also aimed at the existing governments of the Islamic world, seen as pawns of the West.</p>
<p>The September 11 attack invited a response and Al Qaeda did little to cover its tracks. The leaders of Al Qaeda, and those close to them in the Taliban leadership, may have felt that they needed to widen the conflict and escape the problems of famine and drought. The latter were forcing them into dependency on the international aid agencies and the US anti-drug program. In such desperate circumstances the goal of Al Qaeda was probably to draw the United States into the Afghan minefield while boosting its position elsewhere in the Muslim world.</p>
<p>The US president responded to September 11 by proclaiming a global, US-led ‘war on terrorism’. Washington sought every conceivable ally or partner but insisted on retaining complete control of its ‘war’. The UN and the Security Council were asked to support the US effort, and each of their members to help in whatever way they could, but there was to be no formal anti-terrorism coalition and no supranational organisation to embody it. If this is the new ‘cold war’, as some have suggested, it is very differently structured. On one side there is the world’s most powerful state, with its 20th century weapons systems and a global system of alliances. On the other there is a terror network of perhaps no more than a few thousand men, acting as a self-proclaimed ‘Muslim vanguard’, but occasionally able to ignite the resentments and frustrations of tens or even hundreds of millions in the Islamic world. At the height of the Cold War the Communist states ruled one third of the world’s population, had military means that seemed a match for those of its global competitor and believed that they could beat the capitalist west at its own game of economic growth. Al Qaeda may have the economic and military resources of a statelet but it aims to shape the thinking of a civilisation. Its members are drawn from many nationalities and have been active in Central Asia, the Balkans, Europe, North America, Kashmir, China, Indonesia and the Phillippines as well as the Middle East and Africa. Its ideology is fuelled by a sense of injury and wounded pride rather than material aspiration. It is virulently anti-infidel and misogynist, anti-secular without being at all anti-capitalist, and egalitarian without being democratic. Islamic civilisation has always left great scope for mercantile capitalism. The neo-fundamentalism of the eighties and nineties, forged in a battle with godless Communism and in reaction to royalist bureaucracy and corruption, accentuated this legacy by basing itself on strong and responsible Islamic business and faith-based charity. While prepared to work with a variety of Islamic political authorities the project of Al Qaeda transcends such boundaries aiming to unite the faithful against the infidels who have insulted and oppressed Islam.</p>
<p>In World War II liberal capitalism and autocratic Communism fought as allies against fascism. But in the postwar period the West feared a loss of control in the Middle East and so it allied with the most conservative forces in the Islamic world. The Saudi and Iranian monarchies were chosen as the strategic allies needed to protect Middle Eastern oil resources while secular nationalists like Mossadegh in Iran or Kassem in Iraq were destabilised and replaced. In fact the Western system of alliances is not simply a relic of the Cold War but rather a palimpsest that reflects, layer on layer, a longer history and a colonialism that mummified an extraordinary collection of archaic or pseudo-archaic regimes. This embraces Saudi Arabia with its 30,000-strong Royal Family, the Shaikhs of Bahrein, Qattar and Kuwait, the Sultan of Oman, and the Emirates–boasting the world’s longest-serving head of state, Shaikh Sakir al-Qasimi of Ras al-Khaimah, who ascended his throne in 1948. When we add to those the Sultan of Brunei in the South China sea it is as if oil is a pickling fluid akin to formaldehyde projecting into the 21st century simulacra of the Anciens Regimes of former times. Pakistan, with its notorious ‘feudals’, does not have oil but enjoys an intimate pact with the oil sheikhdoms. The paradox here for liberal, bourgeois and nationalist forces in the Middle East was that the power that should have been their great ally, the United States, actually blocked them at every turn and preferred to do business with royal absolutists.</p>
<p>The US-sponsored Arabian and Gulf regime associates the West with corruption, autocracy and stagnation at a time when there is a yearning for a new start in the Arab world. The dilemma of US policy is that it understandably wishes to avoid a ‘clash of civilisations’ while remaining fearful of renewal within the Muslim world. It was a tribute to Washington’s diplomacy that its assault on Afghanistan aroused so little official censure in the Muslim world, but an indication of the fragility of this success that no Muslim state was willing to play an active and public role in the attack. Notwithstanding continuing corrections and adjustments–dumping the terms ‘crusade’ and ‘infinite justice’ for the campaign against Al Qaeda, strenuously cultivating old and new Muslim allies–the US failed to extricate itself from the strategic trap it faces. It prefered to talk of war than of a police operation. And it was planning a new government in Afghanistan based on ‘moderate’ Taliban and Northern warlords and mercenary tribal elders under the aegis of the former monarch, Zahir Shah. So far as the wider Islamic world is concerned this strategy simultaneously offends the Islamicists and those who yearn for more democracy, autonomy and self-respect. Religious fanatics and bourgeois or petty-bourgeois democrats are not natural allies–in Iran they are at loggerheads–but in the territories where the United States has allied itself with feudal and autocratic reaction these two currents find a common antagonist. The White House may genuinely believe that the interests of global capitalism are best promoted by its pact with the oil dynasties and their Pakistani and Egyptian hangers-on, but this is not true. The pact may deliver slightly cheaper oil, and privileges to Western oil corporations, but it stifles the growth of an autonomous business culture and circuits of accumulation in the region itself. The resulting frustrations create conditions which politicise religious fanaticism, especially in those countries where such fanaticism is one of the few officially-tolerated species of public activity.</p>
<p>The US attack on Afghanistan was certainly anticipated. Just a few days before September 11 Massoud, the commander of the anti-Taliban forces, was assassinated by agents of Al Qaeda, posing as journalists. This action was calculated to both please and strengthen the Taliban, by ridding them of their most dangerous enemy, and to leave the United States with less credible local allies. The warlords of the Northern Alliance are dependent on autocratic governments in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan that are seen as stooges of neighbouring powers. With all its failings the Northern Alliance is preferable to the Taliban, but it does not represent a force for democracy and does not shield the invaders from the charge of being alien to Islam. Matters will not be improved by giving key positions to ‘moderate Taliban’ and royalists. This approach risks the worst of both world–discouraging those who yearn for a more tolerant social order, for secular progress and for an Afghan regime not beholden to foreigners while failing to win over or appease the religious fanatics, or seriously to erode their appeal.</p>
<p>Washington strives not to inflame Muslim opinion, or to allow the conflict to be defined as a war of religions. It hopes that the danger can be avoided by allowing its Muslim allies to adopt a low profile, or even to stand aside. The UN may be handed responsibility for occupied areas of Afghanistan but Iranian and Egyptian proposals that the UN should take charge of the anti-terrorism campaign were rejected. Given the UN’s long history giving cover to US military campaigns, from Korea to Kosovo, entrusting it with nominal responsibility post facto will be of limited value in averting the danger of a ‘clash of civilisations’. The UN could sponsor an accord against terrorism and the creation of a supranational force to police it. But such an approach would have little legitimacy if credible governments from the Muslim world are excluded. An international and supranational approach would be far more effective longterm at tackling terrorism than a US-led and defined ‘war’.but will not easily be accepted in Washington since it would challenge imperial ideology and control. The Bush team see themselves as champions of the American people and US capitalism but in fact neither require direct US control of Middle Eastern oil, as we will see below.</p>
<p>The most difficult thing for the strategists of Empire to perceive, or explain to the American people, is that the best and perhaps only effective coalition against Al Qaeda and the Taliban will be one that they do not lead and do not control. The leaflets dropped on with the food packages carried a message that this was a contribution from ‘The Partnership of Nations’ in English and Pushtu. The use of this hollow rubric–perhaps sounding like United Nations in translation–testified to a deficit of legitimacy. The United States has standing against Al Qaeda because of what its citizens have suffered at its hands. But nobody really believes that the Taliban ordered the September 11.</p>
<p>While I will focus on Washington’s sins of omission and commission I believe it would be wrong to slight the ability of the Bush administration to impose its own definitions on domestic opponents, and on allies and even enemies, abroad. The US president has sometimes been presented as a figure of fun but this has not stopped him having the last laugh on those who ridiculed him. Unlike more brilliant leaders he surrounds himself with a capable and experienced team, and sometimes heeds words of caution. The secret of his strength–and his fatal flaw–may be the instinctive rapport he enjoys with those gripped by US national messianism, the idea that only the United States can tackle the really big global threats and that whatever the US does is ipso facto favourable to freedom. These sentiments are often accompanied by deprecation of international organisations, an unwillingness to consider global complexities, or to contemplate any sacrifice of US sovereignty. The casualties on September 11 were on a terrible scale but our world bristles with these and greater dangers, notably that of encouraging a ‘clash of civilisations’ linked to weapons of mass destruction.</p>
<p>Jonathan Schell has drawn out attention to what he calls, in a book of that name, The Unfinished Twentieth Century. Schell argues that with the end of the Cold War in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the huge apparatus of nuclear deterrence became redundant, yet it was neither scrapped or negotiated away. Russia, China and the other nuclear powers were not invited to dismantle–or even to drastically reduce–their nuclear weapons systems. The 1972 treaty against biological weapons was useless because there was no enforcement agency nor mandatory inspection. Sixty major overseas US military bases were maintained in forty countries, backed up by over seven hundred other military installations. What was true of weapons systems and overseas bases also applied to alliances. NATO was not disbanded, nor widened to include Russia. Instead it expanded eastwards and a type of ghostly and surreptitious Cold War against unnamed ‘global competitors’ (actually Russia and China) was perpetuated.</p>
<p>Also still in place was that palimpsest of alliances inherited from colonialism and the Cold War, so that the United States entered the new century encumbered and compromised by all that was most backward-looking and discredited in the Islamic world. During the Cold war the military confrontation was precariously regulated by the ‘balance of terror’. Today not only is this lacking but the ‘war against terrorism’ will stoke Muslim resentment in a widening arc of states and could eventually give Al Qaeda the influence it aims at in a nuclear state. The dangers of an escalation of terror, and of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, are very much increased if hundreds of millions of people believe themselves to be nursing legitimate grievances.</p>
<p>The imperial role is justified on the grounds that the United States has a special destiny as world leader and champion of freedom. These roles, it is believed, require Washington to meet the threat of rogue states acquiring weapons of mass destruction, to pre-empt ‘global competitors’, to secure sources of scarce raw materials (especially oil), and to guarantee the personal security of ordinary Americans. Yet the truth is that the empire does not secure these goals, and actually makes ‘blowback’ more likely, as Chalmers Johnson so presciently argued. A healthier US polity could dispense with the cumbersome and expensive apparatus of empire, set the scene for a broader, more pluralistic global capitalism, and promote the competence and authority of supranational agencies in the fields of disarmament, anti-terrorism and peace-keeping. But the vested interests which stand in the way of these goals are those of a bloated military-industrial complex and re-charged presidency.</p>
<p>Chapter 2</p>
<p><a href="robin2.html" type="external">The Imperial Presidency and National Messianism</a></p>
|
The Field of Battle
| true |
https://counterpunch.org/2001/11/11/the-field-of-battle/
|
2001-11-11
| 4left
|
The Field of Battle
<p>It is inherent in the concept of a terrorist act that it aims at an effect very much larger than the direct physical destruction it causes. Proponents of what used to be called the ‘propaganda of the deed’ also believed that in the illuminating glare of terror the vulnerability of a corrupt order would be starkly revealed. Once corruption and oppression were stripped away, a sacred or natural order–the nation, the religious community, the people–would come into its own.</p>
<p>The instigators of September 11 brought off a far more spectacular coup than any exponent of the propaganda of the deed, threaten more than a dozen of the world’s most autocratic and corrupt rulers and aim to summon to arms a religious community of well over a billion people. The resources disposed of by these men transcend those traditionally associated with terrorism and are closer to those of a small state, but a state without boundaries whose headquarters hops from country to country.</p>
<p>Given the extent of the destruction wrought by the September 11 attack it is sobering to realise that the effect aimed at is qualitatively larger, namely that of re-ordering world politics around a ‘clash of civilisations’, allowing the Islamic world to free itself of all infidel trammels. Whether the strategic director of the Al Qaeda network is Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri or someone else, their aim from the outset was to provoke the United States into a counter-reaction that would alienate Muslim opinion; to expose the hypocrisy of the hereditary and autocratic rulers of the Muslim world; to create conditions in which the forces of Islamic jihad could seize or manipulate power in one or another of the larger or more significant Muslim states.</p>
<p>The new Caliphates at which they aim might appear a medieval fantasy but are to be equipped with the military and financial resources of modernity. They urge believers to consider the awesome power of Muslim leaders equipped with Islamic virtue, oil and nuclear weapons. Given the frustrated or desperate condition of much of the Muslim world, this is a message that has great resonance even amongst Muslims who are uneasy at, or repelled by, terror actions. The message targets the military actions and dispositions of the United States and Israel, especially as they are deemed to encroach on Muslim holy places, but it is also aimed at the existing governments of the Islamic world, seen as pawns of the West.</p>
<p>The September 11 attack invited a response and Al Qaeda did little to cover its tracks. The leaders of Al Qaeda, and those close to them in the Taliban leadership, may have felt that they needed to widen the conflict and escape the problems of famine and drought. The latter were forcing them into dependency on the international aid agencies and the US anti-drug program. In such desperate circumstances the goal of Al Qaeda was probably to draw the United States into the Afghan minefield while boosting its position elsewhere in the Muslim world.</p>
<p>The US president responded to September 11 by proclaiming a global, US-led ‘war on terrorism’. Washington sought every conceivable ally or partner but insisted on retaining complete control of its ‘war’. The UN and the Security Council were asked to support the US effort, and each of their members to help in whatever way they could, but there was to be no formal anti-terrorism coalition and no supranational organisation to embody it. If this is the new ‘cold war’, as some have suggested, it is very differently structured. On one side there is the world’s most powerful state, with its 20th century weapons systems and a global system of alliances. On the other there is a terror network of perhaps no more than a few thousand men, acting as a self-proclaimed ‘Muslim vanguard’, but occasionally able to ignite the resentments and frustrations of tens or even hundreds of millions in the Islamic world. At the height of the Cold War the Communist states ruled one third of the world’s population, had military means that seemed a match for those of its global competitor and believed that they could beat the capitalist west at its own game of economic growth. Al Qaeda may have the economic and military resources of a statelet but it aims to shape the thinking of a civilisation. Its members are drawn from many nationalities and have been active in Central Asia, the Balkans, Europe, North America, Kashmir, China, Indonesia and the Phillippines as well as the Middle East and Africa. Its ideology is fuelled by a sense of injury and wounded pride rather than material aspiration. It is virulently anti-infidel and misogynist, anti-secular without being at all anti-capitalist, and egalitarian without being democratic. Islamic civilisation has always left great scope for mercantile capitalism. The neo-fundamentalism of the eighties and nineties, forged in a battle with godless Communism and in reaction to royalist bureaucracy and corruption, accentuated this legacy by basing itself on strong and responsible Islamic business and faith-based charity. While prepared to work with a variety of Islamic political authorities the project of Al Qaeda transcends such boundaries aiming to unite the faithful against the infidels who have insulted and oppressed Islam.</p>
<p>In World War II liberal capitalism and autocratic Communism fought as allies against fascism. But in the postwar period the West feared a loss of control in the Middle East and so it allied with the most conservative forces in the Islamic world. The Saudi and Iranian monarchies were chosen as the strategic allies needed to protect Middle Eastern oil resources while secular nationalists like Mossadegh in Iran or Kassem in Iraq were destabilised and replaced. In fact the Western system of alliances is not simply a relic of the Cold War but rather a palimpsest that reflects, layer on layer, a longer history and a colonialism that mummified an extraordinary collection of archaic or pseudo-archaic regimes. This embraces Saudi Arabia with its 30,000-strong Royal Family, the Shaikhs of Bahrein, Qattar and Kuwait, the Sultan of Oman, and the Emirates–boasting the world’s longest-serving head of state, Shaikh Sakir al-Qasimi of Ras al-Khaimah, who ascended his throne in 1948. When we add to those the Sultan of Brunei in the South China sea it is as if oil is a pickling fluid akin to formaldehyde projecting into the 21st century simulacra of the Anciens Regimes of former times. Pakistan, with its notorious ‘feudals’, does not have oil but enjoys an intimate pact with the oil sheikhdoms. The paradox here for liberal, bourgeois and nationalist forces in the Middle East was that the power that should have been their great ally, the United States, actually blocked them at every turn and preferred to do business with royal absolutists.</p>
<p>The US-sponsored Arabian and Gulf regime associates the West with corruption, autocracy and stagnation at a time when there is a yearning for a new start in the Arab world. The dilemma of US policy is that it understandably wishes to avoid a ‘clash of civilisations’ while remaining fearful of renewal within the Muslim world. It was a tribute to Washington’s diplomacy that its assault on Afghanistan aroused so little official censure in the Muslim world, but an indication of the fragility of this success that no Muslim state was willing to play an active and public role in the attack. Notwithstanding continuing corrections and adjustments–dumping the terms ‘crusade’ and ‘infinite justice’ for the campaign against Al Qaeda, strenuously cultivating old and new Muslim allies–the US failed to extricate itself from the strategic trap it faces. It prefered to talk of war than of a police operation. And it was planning a new government in Afghanistan based on ‘moderate’ Taliban and Northern warlords and mercenary tribal elders under the aegis of the former monarch, Zahir Shah. So far as the wider Islamic world is concerned this strategy simultaneously offends the Islamicists and those who yearn for more democracy, autonomy and self-respect. Religious fanatics and bourgeois or petty-bourgeois democrats are not natural allies–in Iran they are at loggerheads–but in the territories where the United States has allied itself with feudal and autocratic reaction these two currents find a common antagonist. The White House may genuinely believe that the interests of global capitalism are best promoted by its pact with the oil dynasties and their Pakistani and Egyptian hangers-on, but this is not true. The pact may deliver slightly cheaper oil, and privileges to Western oil corporations, but it stifles the growth of an autonomous business culture and circuits of accumulation in the region itself. The resulting frustrations create conditions which politicise religious fanaticism, especially in those countries where such fanaticism is one of the few officially-tolerated species of public activity.</p>
<p>The US attack on Afghanistan was certainly anticipated. Just a few days before September 11 Massoud, the commander of the anti-Taliban forces, was assassinated by agents of Al Qaeda, posing as journalists. This action was calculated to both please and strengthen the Taliban, by ridding them of their most dangerous enemy, and to leave the United States with less credible local allies. The warlords of the Northern Alliance are dependent on autocratic governments in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan that are seen as stooges of neighbouring powers. With all its failings the Northern Alliance is preferable to the Taliban, but it does not represent a force for democracy and does not shield the invaders from the charge of being alien to Islam. Matters will not be improved by giving key positions to ‘moderate Taliban’ and royalists. This approach risks the worst of both world–discouraging those who yearn for a more tolerant social order, for secular progress and for an Afghan regime not beholden to foreigners while failing to win over or appease the religious fanatics, or seriously to erode their appeal.</p>
<p>Washington strives not to inflame Muslim opinion, or to allow the conflict to be defined as a war of religions. It hopes that the danger can be avoided by allowing its Muslim allies to adopt a low profile, or even to stand aside. The UN may be handed responsibility for occupied areas of Afghanistan but Iranian and Egyptian proposals that the UN should take charge of the anti-terrorism campaign were rejected. Given the UN’s long history giving cover to US military campaigns, from Korea to Kosovo, entrusting it with nominal responsibility post facto will be of limited value in averting the danger of a ‘clash of civilisations’. The UN could sponsor an accord against terrorism and the creation of a supranational force to police it. But such an approach would have little legitimacy if credible governments from the Muslim world are excluded. An international and supranational approach would be far more effective longterm at tackling terrorism than a US-led and defined ‘war’.but will not easily be accepted in Washington since it would challenge imperial ideology and control. The Bush team see themselves as champions of the American people and US capitalism but in fact neither require direct US control of Middle Eastern oil, as we will see below.</p>
<p>The most difficult thing for the strategists of Empire to perceive, or explain to the American people, is that the best and perhaps only effective coalition against Al Qaeda and the Taliban will be one that they do not lead and do not control. The leaflets dropped on with the food packages carried a message that this was a contribution from ‘The Partnership of Nations’ in English and Pushtu. The use of this hollow rubric–perhaps sounding like United Nations in translation–testified to a deficit of legitimacy. The United States has standing against Al Qaeda because of what its citizens have suffered at its hands. But nobody really believes that the Taliban ordered the September 11.</p>
<p>While I will focus on Washington’s sins of omission and commission I believe it would be wrong to slight the ability of the Bush administration to impose its own definitions on domestic opponents, and on allies and even enemies, abroad. The US president has sometimes been presented as a figure of fun but this has not stopped him having the last laugh on those who ridiculed him. Unlike more brilliant leaders he surrounds himself with a capable and experienced team, and sometimes heeds words of caution. The secret of his strength–and his fatal flaw–may be the instinctive rapport he enjoys with those gripped by US national messianism, the idea that only the United States can tackle the really big global threats and that whatever the US does is ipso facto favourable to freedom. These sentiments are often accompanied by deprecation of international organisations, an unwillingness to consider global complexities, or to contemplate any sacrifice of US sovereignty. The casualties on September 11 were on a terrible scale but our world bristles with these and greater dangers, notably that of encouraging a ‘clash of civilisations’ linked to weapons of mass destruction.</p>
<p>Jonathan Schell has drawn out attention to what he calls, in a book of that name, The Unfinished Twentieth Century. Schell argues that with the end of the Cold War in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the huge apparatus of nuclear deterrence became redundant, yet it was neither scrapped or negotiated away. Russia, China and the other nuclear powers were not invited to dismantle–or even to drastically reduce–their nuclear weapons systems. The 1972 treaty against biological weapons was useless because there was no enforcement agency nor mandatory inspection. Sixty major overseas US military bases were maintained in forty countries, backed up by over seven hundred other military installations. What was true of weapons systems and overseas bases also applied to alliances. NATO was not disbanded, nor widened to include Russia. Instead it expanded eastwards and a type of ghostly and surreptitious Cold War against unnamed ‘global competitors’ (actually Russia and China) was perpetuated.</p>
<p>Also still in place was that palimpsest of alliances inherited from colonialism and the Cold War, so that the United States entered the new century encumbered and compromised by all that was most backward-looking and discredited in the Islamic world. During the Cold war the military confrontation was precariously regulated by the ‘balance of terror’. Today not only is this lacking but the ‘war against terrorism’ will stoke Muslim resentment in a widening arc of states and could eventually give Al Qaeda the influence it aims at in a nuclear state. The dangers of an escalation of terror, and of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, are very much increased if hundreds of millions of people believe themselves to be nursing legitimate grievances.</p>
<p>The imperial role is justified on the grounds that the United States has a special destiny as world leader and champion of freedom. These roles, it is believed, require Washington to meet the threat of rogue states acquiring weapons of mass destruction, to pre-empt ‘global competitors’, to secure sources of scarce raw materials (especially oil), and to guarantee the personal security of ordinary Americans. Yet the truth is that the empire does not secure these goals, and actually makes ‘blowback’ more likely, as Chalmers Johnson so presciently argued. A healthier US polity could dispense with the cumbersome and expensive apparatus of empire, set the scene for a broader, more pluralistic global capitalism, and promote the competence and authority of supranational agencies in the fields of disarmament, anti-terrorism and peace-keeping. But the vested interests which stand in the way of these goals are those of a bloated military-industrial complex and re-charged presidency.</p>
<p>Chapter 2</p>
<p><a href="robin2.html" type="external">The Imperial Presidency and National Messianism</a></p>
| 7,818 |
<p>Even America’s major media can’t duck a crime this grave – attacking and slaughtering up to 20 Gaza Freedom Flotilla activists and injuring dozens more.</p>
<p>New York Times writer Isabel Kershner headlined “At Least 10 Killed as Israel Intercepts Aid Flotilla, saying:</p>
<p>“The Israeli Navy raided a flotilla carrying thousands of tons of supplies for Gaza in international waters on Monday morning….The incident drew widespread international condemnation, with Israeli envoys summoned to explain their country’s actions in several European countries….The killings also coincided with preparations for a planned visit to Washington on Tuesday (June 1) by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”</p>
<p>Late word is it’s postponed.</p>
<p>The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times carried similar reports, trying, but hardly able to downplay a major crime.</p>
<p>The UK-based Stop the War Coalition called it “Yet another act of Israeli barbarism” in announcing an “emergency demonstration” at 2:00PM near the prime minister’s Downing Street residence, saying spread the word and come.</p>
<p>In Gaza, thousands protested, expressing anger, outrage and sympathy, carrying banners condemning willful crimes, and calling for Arab solidarity. Similar demonstrations turned out in Amman, Cairo, Damascus, Tehran, Ankara, Istanbul, Beirut and other regional cities.</p>
<p>Defense Minister Ehud Barak blamed the Flotilla organizers for inciting the attack, while his deputy, Danny Alalon said they were connected to international terrorist organizations and were trying to smuggle in arms. Weapons were found on board, he claimed.</p>
<p>At a hastily called news conference, sparsely attended, he referred to “the armada of hate and violence in support of the Hamas terror organization,” accusing peaceful activists of a “premeditated and outrageous provocation,” saying “The organizers are well known for their ties with global Jihad, Al Qaeda and Hamas. (Their) intent was violent, their method was violent, and the results were unfortunately violent.”</p>
<p>Shameless lies from a criminal caught red-handed, Haaretz’s Gideon Levy saying:</p>
<p>“The Israeli propaganda machine has reached new highs (distributing) false information. It embarrassed itself by entering a futile public relations battle….There is nothing to explain, certainly not to a world that will never buy (its) web of explanations, lies and tactics.”</p>
<p>In Washington, of course, they’re echoed along with toned down pious indignation publicly, but privately, assurances of solid US-Israeli relations are affirmed.</p>
<p>On May 31, White House spokesman William Burton said:</p>
<p>“The United States deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries sustained, and is currently working to understand the circumstances surrounding this tragedy,” stopping short of condemning crimes too grave to ignore and demanding harsh measures in response to premeditated slaughter.</p>
<p>Much the same from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (a reliable Israeli ally) stating:</p>
<p>“It is vital that there is a full investigation to determine exactly how this bloodshed took place. I believe Israel must urgently provide a full explanation,” stopping short of demanding it and full accountability.</p>
<p>Saying he “deplored in the strongest terms the killing of civilians,” Italian Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, like his EU counterparts, said it was “indispensable that there be an inquest to ascertain the facts, which are still not clear.”</p>
<p>They’re very clear. Israeli forces planned and executed a premeditated attack against peaceful humanitarian activists, trying to deliver essential to life aid to Gazans under siege – to break Israel’s attempt to suffocate and starve them.</p>
<p>The Wall Street Journal online headlined “More than 10 Dead After Israel Intercepts Gaza Aid Convoy,” saying (like most US media reports) that “An Israeli military spokesman said later in the day that some activists ‘appeared’ to be armed with guns, and fired at the Israeli soldiers, though it wasn’t clear who fired first.”</p>
<p>The activists, in fact, were unarmed civilians, delivering vitally needed humanitarian aid to 1.5 million Gazans, trapped under siege for three years this month. Without provocation, they were maliciously and willfully attacked in international waters by armed Israeli commandos with orders to open fire if the convoy failed to abort its mission.</p>
<p>The best Journal writer Joshua Mitnick could say was “whether the military action was warranted or not (it) threatens to further sully Israel’s international reputation, after a series of recent diplomatic setbacks.”</p>
<p>No mention of the Gaza war, daily West Bank and East Jerusalem incursions, the three-year siege, a 43-year occupation, daily killings, targeted assassinations, homes bulldozed, mass arrests, torture, and Palestinian communities throughout the Territories and in Israel threatened by daily terror.</p>
<p>No mention by European nations either, the EU merely calling for a full inquiry, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner (a staunch Israeli supporter) saying he was “deeply shocked by the ‘tragic’ consequences of Israel’s military operation (against) a humanitarian initiative,” but little else. The same hypocrisy echoed from most European capitals, much like already from Washington.</p>
<p>Turkey’s Communist Party’s press statement, in contrast, said:</p>
<p>“The pirate commandos trained by Israel Naval Forces mounted an operation this morning to capture the flotilla carrying aid to Gaza and slaughtered unarmed civilians in the course of this outrageous operation.”</p>
<p>Calling the attack “barbarous,” it “demanded” immediate deportation of Israel’s diplomatic mission, cancellation of Turkish-Israeli military and other agreements, and Israel held fully accountable for its crime against humanity – its specialty against civilians and nonviolent activists.</p>
<p>Al Jazeera reported that “Thousands of Turkish protesters tried to storm the Israeli consulate in Istanbul soon after the news (shouting) ‘Damn Israel’ as police blocked them.”</p>
<p>It also said Israeli radio confirmed at least 19 were killed and dozens injured, quoting IDF spokeswoman, Avital Leibovich, saying, “This happened in waters outside Israeli territory, but we have the right to defend ourselves,” – the usual response from scoundrels caught red-handed.</p>
<p>Video footage on board the Turkish passenger ship Mavi Marmara showed Israeli commandos opened fire during the assault, activists saying it began immediately after storming on board.</p>
<p>Al Zazeera’s Jamal Elshayyal, on the ship, said “a white surrender flag was raised (and) there was no live fire coming from the passengers.”</p>
<p>The Free Gaza Movement reported that “Under darkness of night, Israeli commandos dropped from a helicopter onto the Turkish passenger ship, Mavi Marmara, and began to shoot the moment their feet hit the deck.” No action on board provoked it. It was premeditated, willful slaughter.</p>
<p>The Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement expressed sorrow in denouncing the attack, citing it as further “proof that despite claims to the contrary, Israel never ‘disengaged’ from the Gaza Strip but rather continues to control its borders – land, air and sea….hermetically (cutting off) 1.5 million human beings (from) access to the outside world” and vitally needed humanitarian aid.</p>
<p>Netanyahu’s spokesman, Mark Regev, claimed “They initiated the violence,” and the IDF insisted it responded when its forces “were attacked with knives, clubs, and even live fire.” Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi said soldiers were forced by violent acts to respond with live fire.</p>
<p>They lied.</p>
<p>Viewing the video footage, Al Jazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin reported that:</p>
<p>“All the images being shown from the activists on board those ships show clearly that they were civilians and peaceful in nature, with medical (and other humanitarian) supplies on board.”</p>
<p>Other footage showed black-clad commandos descending from helicopters, then immediately opening fire on deck against peaceful activists.</p>
<p>Israeli forces seized the ship and a smaller one, took them to Israel’s port of Ashdod, and censored all information on the assault.</p>
<p>The Flotilla, with 700 activists, left Cyprus at 3:00PM (1200 GMT) Sunday, on the last leg of their journey, heading for Gaza, hoping to arrive by daylight. Six hours after departure, three Israeli missile boats left Haifa to interdict it, according to reporters on board before being ordered to turn off their cell phones.</p>
<p>The convoy hoped to break the siege and deliver over 10,000 tons of vitally needed aid, including food, medicines, educational, construction, and other materials. Israel warned it would intercept and abort the mission, giving no details except to say ships would be seized, then taken to Ashdod.</p>
<p>A May 31 Gaza Freedom March.org press release called for a “global response to killings on the Freedom Flotilla,” saying:</p>
<p>“We, Gaza based Palestinian Civil Society Organizations and international activists, call on the international community and civil society to pressure their governments and Israel to cease the abductions and killings….against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla….and begin a global response to hold Israel accountable for the murder of foreign civilians at sea and illegal piracy of civilian vessels carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza.”</p>
<p>“We, from Gaza, call on you to demonstrate and support the courageous men and women on the Flotilla and join the many now murdered on a humanitarian aid mission. We insist on severance of diplomatic ties with Israel, trials for war crimes and the international protection of the civilians of Gaza. We call on you to join the growing international boycott, divestment and sanction campaign of a country proving again” to be an international outlaw.</p>
<p>“Join a growing critical mass around the world with a commitment to the day when Palestinian are entitled to the same rights as (all) other people, when the siege is lifted, the occupation over and the 6 million Palestinian refugees are finally granted justice.”</p>
<p>Stand in solidarity for their freedom in peace, and demand nothing less, including full accountability for Israeli officials responsible for high crimes of war and against humanity.</p>
<p>On board the Flottilla are over 700 activists from 40 countries, including 35 politicians and a Nobel Peace laureate, Mairead McGuire, who protesting with Bil’in village activists against Israel’s Separation Wall, in April 2007, was shot and injured with a rubber bullet, then tear-gassed, overcome, and had to be taken by stretcher to an ambulance.</p>
<p>Again, she and 700 others risked their lives to deliver vitally needed aid. In solidarity, people of conscience everywhere must support them and demand full accountability for the latest Israeli crimes too grave to ignore.</p>
<p>STEPHEN LENDMAN lives in Chicago and can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a>.</p>
<p />
<p>&#160;</p>
<p><a href="http://greentags.bigcartel.com/" type="external">WORDS THAT STICK</a></p>
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|
Slaughter at Sea
| true |
https://counterpunch.org/2010/05/31/slaughter-at-sea/
|
2010-05-31
| 4left
|
Slaughter at Sea
<p>Even America’s major media can’t duck a crime this grave – attacking and slaughtering up to 20 Gaza Freedom Flotilla activists and injuring dozens more.</p>
<p>New York Times writer Isabel Kershner headlined “At Least 10 Killed as Israel Intercepts Aid Flotilla, saying:</p>
<p>“The Israeli Navy raided a flotilla carrying thousands of tons of supplies for Gaza in international waters on Monday morning….The incident drew widespread international condemnation, with Israeli envoys summoned to explain their country’s actions in several European countries….The killings also coincided with preparations for a planned visit to Washington on Tuesday (June 1) by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”</p>
<p>Late word is it’s postponed.</p>
<p>The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times carried similar reports, trying, but hardly able to downplay a major crime.</p>
<p>The UK-based Stop the War Coalition called it “Yet another act of Israeli barbarism” in announcing an “emergency demonstration” at 2:00PM near the prime minister’s Downing Street residence, saying spread the word and come.</p>
<p>In Gaza, thousands protested, expressing anger, outrage and sympathy, carrying banners condemning willful crimes, and calling for Arab solidarity. Similar demonstrations turned out in Amman, Cairo, Damascus, Tehran, Ankara, Istanbul, Beirut and other regional cities.</p>
<p>Defense Minister Ehud Barak blamed the Flotilla organizers for inciting the attack, while his deputy, Danny Alalon said they were connected to international terrorist organizations and were trying to smuggle in arms. Weapons were found on board, he claimed.</p>
<p>At a hastily called news conference, sparsely attended, he referred to “the armada of hate and violence in support of the Hamas terror organization,” accusing peaceful activists of a “premeditated and outrageous provocation,” saying “The organizers are well known for their ties with global Jihad, Al Qaeda and Hamas. (Their) intent was violent, their method was violent, and the results were unfortunately violent.”</p>
<p>Shameless lies from a criminal caught red-handed, Haaretz’s Gideon Levy saying:</p>
<p>“The Israeli propaganda machine has reached new highs (distributing) false information. It embarrassed itself by entering a futile public relations battle….There is nothing to explain, certainly not to a world that will never buy (its) web of explanations, lies and tactics.”</p>
<p>In Washington, of course, they’re echoed along with toned down pious indignation publicly, but privately, assurances of solid US-Israeli relations are affirmed.</p>
<p>On May 31, White House spokesman William Burton said:</p>
<p>“The United States deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries sustained, and is currently working to understand the circumstances surrounding this tragedy,” stopping short of condemning crimes too grave to ignore and demanding harsh measures in response to premeditated slaughter.</p>
<p>Much the same from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (a reliable Israeli ally) stating:</p>
<p>“It is vital that there is a full investigation to determine exactly how this bloodshed took place. I believe Israel must urgently provide a full explanation,” stopping short of demanding it and full accountability.</p>
<p>Saying he “deplored in the strongest terms the killing of civilians,” Italian Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, like his EU counterparts, said it was “indispensable that there be an inquest to ascertain the facts, which are still not clear.”</p>
<p>They’re very clear. Israeli forces planned and executed a premeditated attack against peaceful humanitarian activists, trying to deliver essential to life aid to Gazans under siege – to break Israel’s attempt to suffocate and starve them.</p>
<p>The Wall Street Journal online headlined “More than 10 Dead After Israel Intercepts Gaza Aid Convoy,” saying (like most US media reports) that “An Israeli military spokesman said later in the day that some activists ‘appeared’ to be armed with guns, and fired at the Israeli soldiers, though it wasn’t clear who fired first.”</p>
<p>The activists, in fact, were unarmed civilians, delivering vitally needed humanitarian aid to 1.5 million Gazans, trapped under siege for three years this month. Without provocation, they were maliciously and willfully attacked in international waters by armed Israeli commandos with orders to open fire if the convoy failed to abort its mission.</p>
<p>The best Journal writer Joshua Mitnick could say was “whether the military action was warranted or not (it) threatens to further sully Israel’s international reputation, after a series of recent diplomatic setbacks.”</p>
<p>No mention of the Gaza war, daily West Bank and East Jerusalem incursions, the three-year siege, a 43-year occupation, daily killings, targeted assassinations, homes bulldozed, mass arrests, torture, and Palestinian communities throughout the Territories and in Israel threatened by daily terror.</p>
<p>No mention by European nations either, the EU merely calling for a full inquiry, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner (a staunch Israeli supporter) saying he was “deeply shocked by the ‘tragic’ consequences of Israel’s military operation (against) a humanitarian initiative,” but little else. The same hypocrisy echoed from most European capitals, much like already from Washington.</p>
<p>Turkey’s Communist Party’s press statement, in contrast, said:</p>
<p>“The pirate commandos trained by Israel Naval Forces mounted an operation this morning to capture the flotilla carrying aid to Gaza and slaughtered unarmed civilians in the course of this outrageous operation.”</p>
<p>Calling the attack “barbarous,” it “demanded” immediate deportation of Israel’s diplomatic mission, cancellation of Turkish-Israeli military and other agreements, and Israel held fully accountable for its crime against humanity – its specialty against civilians and nonviolent activists.</p>
<p>Al Jazeera reported that “Thousands of Turkish protesters tried to storm the Israeli consulate in Istanbul soon after the news (shouting) ‘Damn Israel’ as police blocked them.”</p>
<p>It also said Israeli radio confirmed at least 19 were killed and dozens injured, quoting IDF spokeswoman, Avital Leibovich, saying, “This happened in waters outside Israeli territory, but we have the right to defend ourselves,” – the usual response from scoundrels caught red-handed.</p>
<p>Video footage on board the Turkish passenger ship Mavi Marmara showed Israeli commandos opened fire during the assault, activists saying it began immediately after storming on board.</p>
<p>Al Zazeera’s Jamal Elshayyal, on the ship, said “a white surrender flag was raised (and) there was no live fire coming from the passengers.”</p>
<p>The Free Gaza Movement reported that “Under darkness of night, Israeli commandos dropped from a helicopter onto the Turkish passenger ship, Mavi Marmara, and began to shoot the moment their feet hit the deck.” No action on board provoked it. It was premeditated, willful slaughter.</p>
<p>The Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement expressed sorrow in denouncing the attack, citing it as further “proof that despite claims to the contrary, Israel never ‘disengaged’ from the Gaza Strip but rather continues to control its borders – land, air and sea….hermetically (cutting off) 1.5 million human beings (from) access to the outside world” and vitally needed humanitarian aid.</p>
<p>Netanyahu’s spokesman, Mark Regev, claimed “They initiated the violence,” and the IDF insisted it responded when its forces “were attacked with knives, clubs, and even live fire.” Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi said soldiers were forced by violent acts to respond with live fire.</p>
<p>They lied.</p>
<p>Viewing the video footage, Al Jazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin reported that:</p>
<p>“All the images being shown from the activists on board those ships show clearly that they were civilians and peaceful in nature, with medical (and other humanitarian) supplies on board.”</p>
<p>Other footage showed black-clad commandos descending from helicopters, then immediately opening fire on deck against peaceful activists.</p>
<p>Israeli forces seized the ship and a smaller one, took them to Israel’s port of Ashdod, and censored all information on the assault.</p>
<p>The Flotilla, with 700 activists, left Cyprus at 3:00PM (1200 GMT) Sunday, on the last leg of their journey, heading for Gaza, hoping to arrive by daylight. Six hours after departure, three Israeli missile boats left Haifa to interdict it, according to reporters on board before being ordered to turn off their cell phones.</p>
<p>The convoy hoped to break the siege and deliver over 10,000 tons of vitally needed aid, including food, medicines, educational, construction, and other materials. Israel warned it would intercept and abort the mission, giving no details except to say ships would be seized, then taken to Ashdod.</p>
<p>A May 31 Gaza Freedom March.org press release called for a “global response to killings on the Freedom Flotilla,” saying:</p>
<p>“We, Gaza based Palestinian Civil Society Organizations and international activists, call on the international community and civil society to pressure their governments and Israel to cease the abductions and killings….against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla….and begin a global response to hold Israel accountable for the murder of foreign civilians at sea and illegal piracy of civilian vessels carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza.”</p>
<p>“We, from Gaza, call on you to demonstrate and support the courageous men and women on the Flotilla and join the many now murdered on a humanitarian aid mission. We insist on severance of diplomatic ties with Israel, trials for war crimes and the international protection of the civilians of Gaza. We call on you to join the growing international boycott, divestment and sanction campaign of a country proving again” to be an international outlaw.</p>
<p>“Join a growing critical mass around the world with a commitment to the day when Palestinian are entitled to the same rights as (all) other people, when the siege is lifted, the occupation over and the 6 million Palestinian refugees are finally granted justice.”</p>
<p>Stand in solidarity for their freedom in peace, and demand nothing less, including full accountability for Israeli officials responsible for high crimes of war and against humanity.</p>
<p>On board the Flottilla are over 700 activists from 40 countries, including 35 politicians and a Nobel Peace laureate, Mairead McGuire, who protesting with Bil’in village activists against Israel’s Separation Wall, in April 2007, was shot and injured with a rubber bullet, then tear-gassed, overcome, and had to be taken by stretcher to an ambulance.</p>
<p>Again, she and 700 others risked their lives to deliver vitally needed aid. In solidarity, people of conscience everywhere must support them and demand full accountability for the latest Israeli crimes too grave to ignore.</p>
<p>STEPHEN LENDMAN lives in Chicago and can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a>.</p>
<p />
<p>&#160;</p>
<p><a href="http://greentags.bigcartel.com/" type="external">WORDS THAT STICK</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
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<p />
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<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Shares of Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ: TTPH), a clinical-stage biotech developing antibiotics, continued its impressive climb with another gain of about 15.8%, as of 11:46 a.m. EST on Friday. Following the company's fourth-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, Wall Street analysts continue to raise their price targets for the stock.</p>
<p>Tetraphase doesn't have any products to sell yet, but investors are more confident that this could change following the company's fourth-quarter and full-year earnings report. Earlier this week, Tetraphase highlighted its progress with its lead antibiotic candidate, intravenous eravacycline for the treatment ofcomplicated intra-abdominal infection (cIAI).</p>
<p>Image source: Getty Images.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>In November, the company released data showing eravacycline was as good, or better, at fighting off infection as carbapenem, a class of antibiotics generally used to treat hospitalized patients with infections caused by bacteria resistant to multiple drugs. The company is running a similar trial pitting its candidate against meropenem,another commonly used antibiotic used to treat cIAI, and expects to announce the results in the fourth quarter this year.</p>
<p>Another win in the ongoing head-to-head trial against meropenem should be able to support applications to regulatory bodies in the U.S. and the European Union. Hospitals are clamoring for fresh options to treat life-threatening bacterial infections that are increasingly resistant to available antibiotics.</p>
<p>Longtime Tetraphase shareholders can still feel the sting of a market thrashing in 2015 after an oral version of eravacycline flopped in a late-stage trial. Despite somewhat lower demand for the less convenient intravenous version, the antibiotic could go on to generate perhaps $200 million in annual sales. With a market capof about $260 million, this high-flying biotech stock might have plenty more room to run.</p>
<p>10 stocks we like better than Tetraphase PharmaceuticalsWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*</p>
<p>David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the <a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-dyn%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=4a0df52d-8fd0-4c8c-bf8b-aeb52699d39c&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">10 best stocks Opens a New Window.</a> for investors to buy right now... and Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.</p>
<p><a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-dyn%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=4a0df52d-8fd0-4c8c-bf8b-aeb52699d39c&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Click here Opens a New Window.</a> to learn about these picks!</p>
<p>*Stock Advisor returns as of February 6, 2017</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/crenauer/info.aspx" type="external">Cory Renauer Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
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Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals Inc Is Climbing Again Today -- Here's Why
| true |
http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/03/10/tetraphase-pharmaceuticals-inc-is-climbing-again-today-here-why.html
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2017-03-17
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Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals Inc Is Climbing Again Today -- Here's Why
<p />
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Shares of Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ: TTPH), a clinical-stage biotech developing antibiotics, continued its impressive climb with another gain of about 15.8%, as of 11:46 a.m. EST on Friday. Following the company's fourth-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, Wall Street analysts continue to raise their price targets for the stock.</p>
<p>Tetraphase doesn't have any products to sell yet, but investors are more confident that this could change following the company's fourth-quarter and full-year earnings report. Earlier this week, Tetraphase highlighted its progress with its lead antibiotic candidate, intravenous eravacycline for the treatment ofcomplicated intra-abdominal infection (cIAI).</p>
<p>Image source: Getty Images.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>In November, the company released data showing eravacycline was as good, or better, at fighting off infection as carbapenem, a class of antibiotics generally used to treat hospitalized patients with infections caused by bacteria resistant to multiple drugs. The company is running a similar trial pitting its candidate against meropenem,another commonly used antibiotic used to treat cIAI, and expects to announce the results in the fourth quarter this year.</p>
<p>Another win in the ongoing head-to-head trial against meropenem should be able to support applications to regulatory bodies in the U.S. and the European Union. Hospitals are clamoring for fresh options to treat life-threatening bacterial infections that are increasingly resistant to available antibiotics.</p>
<p>Longtime Tetraphase shareholders can still feel the sting of a market thrashing in 2015 after an oral version of eravacycline flopped in a late-stage trial. Despite somewhat lower demand for the less convenient intravenous version, the antibiotic could go on to generate perhaps $200 million in annual sales. With a market capof about $260 million, this high-flying biotech stock might have plenty more room to run.</p>
<p>10 stocks we like better than Tetraphase PharmaceuticalsWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*</p>
<p>David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the <a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-dyn%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=4a0df52d-8fd0-4c8c-bf8b-aeb52699d39c&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">10 best stocks Opens a New Window.</a> for investors to buy right now... and Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.</p>
<p><a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-dyn%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=4a0df52d-8fd0-4c8c-bf8b-aeb52699d39c&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Click here Opens a New Window.</a> to learn about these picks!</p>
<p>*Stock Advisor returns as of February 6, 2017</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/crenauer/info.aspx" type="external">Cory Renauer Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
| 7,820 |
<p>Russian athletes are bitterly disappointment by the collective punishment and the option offered by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which banned the Russian national team, while allowing only individual athletes to compete under a neutral flag and anthem.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/412029-russia-ioc-2018-olympics-participation/" type="external">READ MORE: Russian Olympic Committee banned from 2018 Winter Games</a></p>
<p>On Tuesday, the IOC declared Russia guilty of alleged state-sponsored doping, and banned the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) from competing in the upcoming Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Athletes who can prove they are “clean,” however, will be allowed to compete, but not under the Russian flag.</p>
<p>The despair and bitter disappointment were clearly visible on the faces of Russian Olympic athletes in Davos Tuesday as the IOC announced their decision. Some ground their fingers, other stared down and some left the room soon after the directives were read out.</p>
<p>Those who can compete are now faced with a difficult choice. On the one hand, they spent years polishing their skills and to perform on the world’s premier stage, but on the other hand, their sport spirit dictates they compete as a united national team, under the Russian flag.</p>
<p>Irina Avvakumova, a member of the ski jumping team, does not want to go to South Korea and perform under a neutral flag. “I do not know how other athletes will react, but I did not prepare for so many years to just go and compete without representing my country,” Avvakumova said, adding, that competing as neutral lack the “sports spirit.”</p>
<p>Russian snowboarder Nikolai Olyunin has not yet decided on the whether or not he is ready to compete at the 2018 Olympic Games under a neutral flag.</p>
<p>“The decision of the IOC did not shock me, it was all leading to this. We were ready,” Olyunin said, adding that the snowboard federation will now wait and see how the situation develops further. “No one understands how to proceed further. I would like to compete for our flag, but at the same time, I understand that what has happened is a great disrespect to our country. I don’t want to compete under a neutral flag, but I still have to think about it.”</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>Legendary figure skating trainer Tatyana Tarasova called the IOC’s decision to ban the Russian team as “the murder of our national sport.”</p>
<p>“It is such a pity that we will not perform as a team, it’s a pity, that we won’t be the most beautiful team, it’s a pity that our flags won’t be raised,” Tarasova said in Moscow Tuesday.</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>While most of the athletes slammed the widely anticipated IOC announcement, the heads of the various Russian sports federations urged Russians not to condemn any decisions made by individual athletes.</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/412029-russia-ioc-2018-olympics-participation/" type="external" /></p>
<p>Two-time Olympic champion, biathlete Sergei Chepikov, urged people not to criticize the athletes who eventually decide to compete under a neutral flag at the Winter Olympics.</p>
<p>“These are very severe measures against our national team. I ask you not to condemn the guys who decide to come out under a neutral flag. We know that they are Russians, and we need to support them,” Chepikov was quoted as <a href="http://tass.ru/sport/4786997" type="external">saying</a> by Tass.</p>
<p>The head of the Russian Bobsled Federation Alexander Zubkov meanwhile told the news agency that he stands behind the Russian athletes.</p>
<p>“It was all leading to [the possibility that] our athletes will be admitted to the Olympics under a neutral status,” Zubkov said. “Now the athletes themselves must decide whether or not to go to the Games in South Korea. The management of the Bobsleigh Federation will help those athletes who want to perform in Pyeongchang.”</p>
<p>But not all share the same kind of patriotic sentiment. The head of the Ski Jumping Federation, Dmitry Dubrovsky, believes Russian athletes should compete under a neutral flag.</p>
<p>“We will defend our athletes; I will talk with them, they will have to decide on their participation themselves. I am convinced that the world sports leaders representing Russia should go and fight not only for themselves but also for others,” Dubrovsky said.</p>
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‘The murder of our national sport’: Russian athletes forced to compete under neutral flag
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https://newsline.com/the-murder-of-our-national-sport-russian-athletes-forced-to-compete-under-neutral-flag/
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2017-12-05
| 1right-center
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‘The murder of our national sport’: Russian athletes forced to compete under neutral flag
<p>Russian athletes are bitterly disappointment by the collective punishment and the option offered by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which banned the Russian national team, while allowing only individual athletes to compete under a neutral flag and anthem.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/412029-russia-ioc-2018-olympics-participation/" type="external">READ MORE: Russian Olympic Committee banned from 2018 Winter Games</a></p>
<p>On Tuesday, the IOC declared Russia guilty of alleged state-sponsored doping, and banned the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) from competing in the upcoming Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Athletes who can prove they are “clean,” however, will be allowed to compete, but not under the Russian flag.</p>
<p>The despair and bitter disappointment were clearly visible on the faces of Russian Olympic athletes in Davos Tuesday as the IOC announced their decision. Some ground their fingers, other stared down and some left the room soon after the directives were read out.</p>
<p>Those who can compete are now faced with a difficult choice. On the one hand, they spent years polishing their skills and to perform on the world’s premier stage, but on the other hand, their sport spirit dictates they compete as a united national team, under the Russian flag.</p>
<p>Irina Avvakumova, a member of the ski jumping team, does not want to go to South Korea and perform under a neutral flag. “I do not know how other athletes will react, but I did not prepare for so many years to just go and compete without representing my country,” Avvakumova said, adding, that competing as neutral lack the “sports spirit.”</p>
<p>Russian snowboarder Nikolai Olyunin has not yet decided on the whether or not he is ready to compete at the 2018 Olympic Games under a neutral flag.</p>
<p>“The decision of the IOC did not shock me, it was all leading to this. We were ready,” Olyunin said, adding that the snowboard federation will now wait and see how the situation develops further. “No one understands how to proceed further. I would like to compete for our flag, but at the same time, I understand that what has happened is a great disrespect to our country. I don’t want to compete under a neutral flag, but I still have to think about it.”</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>Legendary figure skating trainer Tatyana Tarasova called the IOC’s decision to ban the Russian team as “the murder of our national sport.”</p>
<p>“It is such a pity that we will not perform as a team, it’s a pity, that we won’t be the most beautiful team, it’s a pity that our flags won’t be raised,” Tarasova said in Moscow Tuesday.</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>While most of the athletes slammed the widely anticipated IOC announcement, the heads of the various Russian sports federations urged Russians not to condemn any decisions made by individual athletes.</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/412029-russia-ioc-2018-olympics-participation/" type="external" /></p>
<p>Two-time Olympic champion, biathlete Sergei Chepikov, urged people not to criticize the athletes who eventually decide to compete under a neutral flag at the Winter Olympics.</p>
<p>“These are very severe measures against our national team. I ask you not to condemn the guys who decide to come out under a neutral flag. We know that they are Russians, and we need to support them,” Chepikov was quoted as <a href="http://tass.ru/sport/4786997" type="external">saying</a> by Tass.</p>
<p>The head of the Russian Bobsled Federation Alexander Zubkov meanwhile told the news agency that he stands behind the Russian athletes.</p>
<p>“It was all leading to [the possibility that] our athletes will be admitted to the Olympics under a neutral status,” Zubkov said. “Now the athletes themselves must decide whether or not to go to the Games in South Korea. The management of the Bobsleigh Federation will help those athletes who want to perform in Pyeongchang.”</p>
<p>But not all share the same kind of patriotic sentiment. The head of the Ski Jumping Federation, Dmitry Dubrovsky, believes Russian athletes should compete under a neutral flag.</p>
<p>“We will defend our athletes; I will talk with them, they will have to decide on their participation themselves. I am convinced that the world sports leaders representing Russia should go and fight not only for themselves but also for others,” Dubrovsky said.</p>
| 7,821 |
<p />
<p>As earnings season kicks into high gear, the markets managed to move higher for the week despite tumbling slightly lower over the past couple of days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&amp;P 500 both notched gains of 0.59%.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>In terms of economic data out this week, home resales rebounded in March signaling increasing demand in the housing market. Sales moved 5.1% to a 5.33 million seasonally adjusted annual rate, or SAAR, according to the National Association of Realtors on Wednesday. Further, the sales pace over the first quarter was a 4.8% improvement compared to the same period in 2015. Also moving higher this week was the price of oil as the global oil benchmark, Brent crude, ended Friday's session up 1.3% to $45.11 per barrel, notching its third week of gains.</p>
<p>With those details out of the way, here are three companies making big moves this week.</p>
<p><a href="http://ycharts.com/companies/NFLX/intraday_price" type="external">NFLX Price</a> data by <a href="http://ycharts.com" type="external">YCharts Opens a New Window.</a></p>
<p>Must see TV One of the biggest movers in the S&amp;P 500 this week was Viacom , which announced it had finally agreed to a multiyear contract renewal with DISH Network. The media company had previously let it be known that the negotiations with DISH Network weren't going so well, and DISH noted that Viacom was asking for far too much with its dollar increases.</p>
<p>IMAGE SOURCE: VIACOM.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>That all came to a close Thursday when DISH Chairman and CEO Charlie Ergen announced a deal had been reached. Ergen noted the agreement extends a nearly 20 year relationship, and said, "We appreciate Viacom's willingness to continue with us on our journey as we work to deliver the best, most innovative television services available."</p>
<p>Ultimately, this is a sigh of relief for investors who were preparing to head into Viacom's fiscal second-quarter earnings call next week without a deal in place. Now with the deal done, investors will hope for further details about the financial terms during the conference call.</p>
<p>Solid first quarter Speaking of conference calls, satisfied investors helped send shares of Tile Shop Holdings up 12% on Tuesday after the company posted a stronger-than-anticipated first-quarter result. Looking at the top line, revenue increased 16% during the first quarter, compared to the prior year, to $84.7 million, above estimates that called for $80 million.</p>
<p>Further, thanks in part to increasing gross margins, Tile Shop's adjusted net income checked in at $7.2 million, up substantially from last year's $4 million during the first quarter. That equates to a diluted per share earnings of $0.14, again ahead of analysts' estimates calling for $0.11 per share.</p>
<p>"Our continued efforts against our key initiatives concluded with another quarter of very strong results and significant momentum for our business," CEO Chris Homeister said in a press release.</p>
<p>Last but not least, management increased guidance for the full year. Tile Shop now expects revenue to check in between $320 million and $329 million, up from the previous guidance of $312 million to $325 million, and comparable-store sales growth to be in the mid- to high single digits.</p>
<p>Roller-coasterride Looking at the grand scheme of things, Netflix remains a huge winner, but shares fell midweek after the company posted guidance that disappointed some investors. Netflix has been, and will likely continue to be, pretty unpredictable in terms of its stock price.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the first quarter wasn't a bad one, with Netflix's net additions reaching a record 6.74 million, beyond the previous record mark of 5.59 million during the fourth quarter of 2015, and better than the previous year's 4.88 million.</p>
<p>Revenue rose 18% year-over-year in the U.S. and international revenue jumped 57%. However, operating income checked in at $49 million compared to $97 million during last year's first-quarter as the company continues to invest in original content and international markets.</p>
<p>The sell-off is likely due to the company's second-quarter projections, when it expects just 2.5 million total new subscribers, which would be the slowest quarterly growth pace since 2014. Despite the midweek sell-off, Netflix's long-term investing thesis remains intact.</p>
<p>The article <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/22/what-investors-might-have-missed-in-the-stock-mark.aspx" type="external">What Investors Might Have Missed in the Stock Market This Week Opens a New Window.</a> originally appeared on Fool.com.</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/TMFTwoCoins/info.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">Daniel Miller Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Netflix and Tile Shop Holdings. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services <a href="http://www.fool.com/shop/newsletters/index.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">free for 30 days Opens a New Window.</a>. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that <a href="http://wiki.fool.com/Motley?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">considering a diverse range of insights Opens a New Window.</a> makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/help/index.htm?display=about02" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
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What Investors Might Have Missed in the Stock Market This Week
| true |
http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/04/22/what-investors-might-have-missed-in-stock-market-this-week.html
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2016-04-22
| 0right
|
What Investors Might Have Missed in the Stock Market This Week
<p />
<p>As earnings season kicks into high gear, the markets managed to move higher for the week despite tumbling slightly lower over the past couple of days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&amp;P 500 both notched gains of 0.59%.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>In terms of economic data out this week, home resales rebounded in March signaling increasing demand in the housing market. Sales moved 5.1% to a 5.33 million seasonally adjusted annual rate, or SAAR, according to the National Association of Realtors on Wednesday. Further, the sales pace over the first quarter was a 4.8% improvement compared to the same period in 2015. Also moving higher this week was the price of oil as the global oil benchmark, Brent crude, ended Friday's session up 1.3% to $45.11 per barrel, notching its third week of gains.</p>
<p>With those details out of the way, here are three companies making big moves this week.</p>
<p><a href="http://ycharts.com/companies/NFLX/intraday_price" type="external">NFLX Price</a> data by <a href="http://ycharts.com" type="external">YCharts Opens a New Window.</a></p>
<p>Must see TV One of the biggest movers in the S&amp;P 500 this week was Viacom , which announced it had finally agreed to a multiyear contract renewal with DISH Network. The media company had previously let it be known that the negotiations with DISH Network weren't going so well, and DISH noted that Viacom was asking for far too much with its dollar increases.</p>
<p>IMAGE SOURCE: VIACOM.</p>
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<p>That all came to a close Thursday when DISH Chairman and CEO Charlie Ergen announced a deal had been reached. Ergen noted the agreement extends a nearly 20 year relationship, and said, "We appreciate Viacom's willingness to continue with us on our journey as we work to deliver the best, most innovative television services available."</p>
<p>Ultimately, this is a sigh of relief for investors who were preparing to head into Viacom's fiscal second-quarter earnings call next week without a deal in place. Now with the deal done, investors will hope for further details about the financial terms during the conference call.</p>
<p>Solid first quarter Speaking of conference calls, satisfied investors helped send shares of Tile Shop Holdings up 12% on Tuesday after the company posted a stronger-than-anticipated first-quarter result. Looking at the top line, revenue increased 16% during the first quarter, compared to the prior year, to $84.7 million, above estimates that called for $80 million.</p>
<p>Further, thanks in part to increasing gross margins, Tile Shop's adjusted net income checked in at $7.2 million, up substantially from last year's $4 million during the first quarter. That equates to a diluted per share earnings of $0.14, again ahead of analysts' estimates calling for $0.11 per share.</p>
<p>"Our continued efforts against our key initiatives concluded with another quarter of very strong results and significant momentum for our business," CEO Chris Homeister said in a press release.</p>
<p>Last but not least, management increased guidance for the full year. Tile Shop now expects revenue to check in between $320 million and $329 million, up from the previous guidance of $312 million to $325 million, and comparable-store sales growth to be in the mid- to high single digits.</p>
<p>Roller-coasterride Looking at the grand scheme of things, Netflix remains a huge winner, but shares fell midweek after the company posted guidance that disappointed some investors. Netflix has been, and will likely continue to be, pretty unpredictable in terms of its stock price.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the first quarter wasn't a bad one, with Netflix's net additions reaching a record 6.74 million, beyond the previous record mark of 5.59 million during the fourth quarter of 2015, and better than the previous year's 4.88 million.</p>
<p>Revenue rose 18% year-over-year in the U.S. and international revenue jumped 57%. However, operating income checked in at $49 million compared to $97 million during last year's first-quarter as the company continues to invest in original content and international markets.</p>
<p>The sell-off is likely due to the company's second-quarter projections, when it expects just 2.5 million total new subscribers, which would be the slowest quarterly growth pace since 2014. Despite the midweek sell-off, Netflix's long-term investing thesis remains intact.</p>
<p>The article <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/22/what-investors-might-have-missed-in-the-stock-mark.aspx" type="external">What Investors Might Have Missed in the Stock Market This Week Opens a New Window.</a> originally appeared on Fool.com.</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/TMFTwoCoins/info.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">Daniel Miller Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Netflix and Tile Shop Holdings. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services <a href="http://www.fool.com/shop/newsletters/index.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">free for 30 days Opens a New Window.</a>. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that <a href="http://wiki.fool.com/Motley?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">considering a diverse range of insights Opens a New Window.</a> makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/help/index.htm?display=about02" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
| 7,822 |
<p>Food regulators recently uncovered <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57569588/u.k-finds-horsemeat-in-school-meals-hospitals/" type="external">horsemeat</a> masquerading as beef in Burger Kings, school cafeterias, and hospitals across Europe and the UK, prompting multiple product recalls and widespread horror. The horsemeat scandal has not touched the US, and many experts and journalists have rushed to <a href="http://gawker.com/5985330/are-you-eating-horse-europes-growing-horsemeat-scandal-explained" type="external">reassure</a> Americans that their burgers are <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Health/european-horse-meat-scandal-happen-us/story?id=18506026" type="external">safe</a> from horse contamination. But compared to the dangerous pathogens hiding in US-produced meat, Americans might want to consider replacing their beef patties with European horsemeat.</p>
<p>The debacle has exposed weaknesses in the EU’s food safety procedures. However, horsemeat poses a negligible health risk. There have been no reported deaths or illnesses caused by this contamination. Though a harmful horse painkiller called bute was found in 8 of the 206 horses, a human would have to eat more than 500 burgers made entirely of horsemeat to <a href="http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_22588344/uk-horse-drug-entered-human-food-chain-france?source=rss" type="external">ingest a human dose</a>.</p>
<p>On the other side of the Atlantic, the average American consumes <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/06/27/155527365/visualizing-a-nation-of-meat-eaters" type="external">roughly 270 pounds</a> of meat per year, and it’s unlikely that horsemeat is in the mix. There is, however, plenty of evidence that many Americans are inadvertently eating a side of deadly bacteria like salmonella or e. coli with their burgers. According to <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/" type="external">Center for Disease Control estimates</a>, 48 million Americans get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne illnesses every year. In comparison, the entire European Union had roughly <a href="http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/01/food-ills-sicken-45000-kill-32-in-eu/#.USPEKqWcdyw" type="external">45,000 illnesses and 32 deaths</a> from contaminated food in 2008. That means foodborne illness strikes 15 percent of Americans each year, but only&#160;.00009 percent of Europeans.</p>
<p>American meat also often exceeds <a href="http://naturalsociety.com/heavy-metals-drug-contaminants-commonly-found-in-us-meat/" type="external">levels of contamination</a> considered unacceptable in most of the developed world. Mexico refused a shipment of American beef in 2008 because it exceeded Mexico’s upper regulatory limit for copper contamination. Because the US has no such restrictions, the beef <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/WN/report-contaminated-meat-supermarkets/story?id=10375805" type="external">returned to the US</a> to be sold to Americans instead.</p>
<p>The most common <a href="http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/campaign/food-safety/" type="external">culprits</a> behind foodborne illness are salmonella, norovirus, Campylobacter, toxoplasma gondii, and E. coli 0157, which are carried through feces. These pathogens have also been discovered in some <a href="http://blog.aarp.org/2013/02/20/spinach-recall-yes-again-hits-39-states/" type="external">fruit and vegetables</a> that have soaked up infected waste runoff from nearby factory farms. But food safety regulators continue to avert their eyes when confronted with the appalling conditions in which the vast majority of American meat is produced. The New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html?pagewanted=all" type="external">highlighted</a> the regulatory failure after a 2007 e. coli outbreak:</p>
<p>Within weeks of the Cargill outbreak in 2007, U.S.D.A. officials swept across the country, conducting spot checks at 224 meat plants to assess their efforts to combat E. coli. Although inspectors had been monitoring these plants all along, officials found serious problems at 55 that were failing to follow their own safety plans. […] In the weeks before [an e. coli outbreak], federal inspectors had repeatedly found that Cargill was violating its own safety procedures in handling ground beef, but they imposed no fines or sanctions, records show. After the outbreak, the department threatened to withhold the seal of approval that declares “U.S. Inspected and Passed by the Department of Agriculture.”</p>
<p>The USDA is not the only agency that has dropped the regulatory ball. The Environmental Protection Agency recently <a href="" type="internal">abandoned an effort</a> that would require factory farms to report basic information, such as their location, number of animals, and the amount of manure they discharge. Congress would go even further; the stalled House Farm Bill included provisions <a href="" type="internal">banning all state regulation</a> of nearly any agricultural product. The fast-approaching sequester cuts will also eliminate roughly <a href="" type="internal">600 food inspector positions</a> at meat and poultry plants.</p>
<p>Several states have also passed <a href="" type="internal">“ag gag laws”</a> to criminalize whistleblowers who secretly film inside facilities or take a job under false pretenses. These laws became popular after a Humane Society video documented a California slaughterhouse routinely abusing and killing sick cattle in 2008. The video triggered the <a href="http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2012/11/16/500-million-settlement-reached-in-california-slaughterhouse-abuse-case/" type="external">largest beef recall</a> in US history and resulted in a $500 million settlement, the largest penalty ever awarded for an animal abuse case. In response to the video, President Obama also <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29691788/" type="external">banned</a> the slaughter of these so-called “downer” cows, which have an increased risk of contracting mad cow disease and bacterial infections like e. coli. He did, however, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/30/horse-meat-consumption-us_n_1120623.html" type="external">lift the ban</a> on horsemeat in the US last year.</p>
|
Why Americans Might Be Better Off If Their Burgers Were Made Of Horsemeat
| true |
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/02/20/1601231/meat-industry-horsemeat/
|
2013-02-20
| 4left
|
Why Americans Might Be Better Off If Their Burgers Were Made Of Horsemeat
<p>Food regulators recently uncovered <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57569588/u.k-finds-horsemeat-in-school-meals-hospitals/" type="external">horsemeat</a> masquerading as beef in Burger Kings, school cafeterias, and hospitals across Europe and the UK, prompting multiple product recalls and widespread horror. The horsemeat scandal has not touched the US, and many experts and journalists have rushed to <a href="http://gawker.com/5985330/are-you-eating-horse-europes-growing-horsemeat-scandal-explained" type="external">reassure</a> Americans that their burgers are <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Health/european-horse-meat-scandal-happen-us/story?id=18506026" type="external">safe</a> from horse contamination. But compared to the dangerous pathogens hiding in US-produced meat, Americans might want to consider replacing their beef patties with European horsemeat.</p>
<p>The debacle has exposed weaknesses in the EU’s food safety procedures. However, horsemeat poses a negligible health risk. There have been no reported deaths or illnesses caused by this contamination. Though a harmful horse painkiller called bute was found in 8 of the 206 horses, a human would have to eat more than 500 burgers made entirely of horsemeat to <a href="http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_22588344/uk-horse-drug-entered-human-food-chain-france?source=rss" type="external">ingest a human dose</a>.</p>
<p>On the other side of the Atlantic, the average American consumes <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/06/27/155527365/visualizing-a-nation-of-meat-eaters" type="external">roughly 270 pounds</a> of meat per year, and it’s unlikely that horsemeat is in the mix. There is, however, plenty of evidence that many Americans are inadvertently eating a side of deadly bacteria like salmonella or e. coli with their burgers. According to <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/" type="external">Center for Disease Control estimates</a>, 48 million Americans get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne illnesses every year. In comparison, the entire European Union had roughly <a href="http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/01/food-ills-sicken-45000-kill-32-in-eu/#.USPEKqWcdyw" type="external">45,000 illnesses and 32 deaths</a> from contaminated food in 2008. That means foodborne illness strikes 15 percent of Americans each year, but only&#160;.00009 percent of Europeans.</p>
<p>American meat also often exceeds <a href="http://naturalsociety.com/heavy-metals-drug-contaminants-commonly-found-in-us-meat/" type="external">levels of contamination</a> considered unacceptable in most of the developed world. Mexico refused a shipment of American beef in 2008 because it exceeded Mexico’s upper regulatory limit for copper contamination. Because the US has no such restrictions, the beef <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/WN/report-contaminated-meat-supermarkets/story?id=10375805" type="external">returned to the US</a> to be sold to Americans instead.</p>
<p>The most common <a href="http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/campaign/food-safety/" type="external">culprits</a> behind foodborne illness are salmonella, norovirus, Campylobacter, toxoplasma gondii, and E. coli 0157, which are carried through feces. These pathogens have also been discovered in some <a href="http://blog.aarp.org/2013/02/20/spinach-recall-yes-again-hits-39-states/" type="external">fruit and vegetables</a> that have soaked up infected waste runoff from nearby factory farms. But food safety regulators continue to avert their eyes when confronted with the appalling conditions in which the vast majority of American meat is produced. The New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html?pagewanted=all" type="external">highlighted</a> the regulatory failure after a 2007 e. coli outbreak:</p>
<p>Within weeks of the Cargill outbreak in 2007, U.S.D.A. officials swept across the country, conducting spot checks at 224 meat plants to assess their efforts to combat E. coli. Although inspectors had been monitoring these plants all along, officials found serious problems at 55 that were failing to follow their own safety plans. […] In the weeks before [an e. coli outbreak], federal inspectors had repeatedly found that Cargill was violating its own safety procedures in handling ground beef, but they imposed no fines or sanctions, records show. After the outbreak, the department threatened to withhold the seal of approval that declares “U.S. Inspected and Passed by the Department of Agriculture.”</p>
<p>The USDA is not the only agency that has dropped the regulatory ball. The Environmental Protection Agency recently <a href="" type="internal">abandoned an effort</a> that would require factory farms to report basic information, such as their location, number of animals, and the amount of manure they discharge. Congress would go even further; the stalled House Farm Bill included provisions <a href="" type="internal">banning all state regulation</a> of nearly any agricultural product. The fast-approaching sequester cuts will also eliminate roughly <a href="" type="internal">600 food inspector positions</a> at meat and poultry plants.</p>
<p>Several states have also passed <a href="" type="internal">“ag gag laws”</a> to criminalize whistleblowers who secretly film inside facilities or take a job under false pretenses. These laws became popular after a Humane Society video documented a California slaughterhouse routinely abusing and killing sick cattle in 2008. The video triggered the <a href="http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2012/11/16/500-million-settlement-reached-in-california-slaughterhouse-abuse-case/" type="external">largest beef recall</a> in US history and resulted in a $500 million settlement, the largest penalty ever awarded for an animal abuse case. In response to the video, President Obama also <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29691788/" type="external">banned</a> the slaughter of these so-called “downer” cows, which have an increased risk of contracting mad cow disease and bacterial infections like e. coli. He did, however, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/30/horse-meat-consumption-us_n_1120623.html" type="external">lift the ban</a> on horsemeat in the US last year.</p>
| 7,823 |
<p>Global spending on government space programs dropped for the first time in almost two decades in 2013, a report showed on Thursday, as rising investment among emerging nations failed to offset cuts by the United States.</p>
<p>An <a href="http://www.euroconsult-ec.com/research-reports/space-industry-reports/profiles-of-government-space-programs-38-37.html" type="external">annual report</a>by consultancy Euroconsult showed global budgets for space programs dropped to $72.1 billion from $72.9 billion in 2012, the first drop since 1995.</p>
<p>The United States invested $38.7 billion in civil- and defense-related space projects, $8.8 billion down from its 2009 peak but still more than half of the global total.</p>
<p>Russia, by contrast, has ramped up its spending by an average of more than 30 percent over the last five years and is now the only country after the United States to spend more than $10 billion a year.</p>
<p>Japan, China, France, Germany, Italy and India all invested more than $1 billion a year. China, currently in eighth place globally, is expected to ramp up spending considerably over the next decade.</p>
<p>"The current global context for public space programs shows many positive signs brought by new leading space nations and an ever-growing number of countries who have initiated plans to build up their space-based capabilities," said Steve Bochinger, chief operating officer at Euroconsult.</p>
<p>"We anticipate government space spending to recover in the second part of the decade in many countries currently experiencing intense budget pressure."</p>
<p>The need to cut spending could itself help fuel innovative technologies that would push space exploration and other projects forward, Euroconsult said.</p>
<p>Some experts say the U.S. space shuttle program in particular wasted millions if not billions that could have been more usefully spent on other projects.</p>
<p>The U.S. space shuttle flew its last flight in 2011. Since then, American astronauts have flown to and from the International Space Station on Russian rockets.</p>
<p>China sent three of its own astronauts into space last year to dock with an orbital laboratory in what Beijing said was a step towards its own manned space station.</p>
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Cosmic Shift? Global Spending on Space Programs Dips
| false |
http://nbcnews.com/science/space/cosmic-shift-global-spending-space-programs-dips-n29861
|
2014-02-13
| 3left-center
|
Cosmic Shift? Global Spending on Space Programs Dips
<p>Global spending on government space programs dropped for the first time in almost two decades in 2013, a report showed on Thursday, as rising investment among emerging nations failed to offset cuts by the United States.</p>
<p>An <a href="http://www.euroconsult-ec.com/research-reports/space-industry-reports/profiles-of-government-space-programs-38-37.html" type="external">annual report</a>by consultancy Euroconsult showed global budgets for space programs dropped to $72.1 billion from $72.9 billion in 2012, the first drop since 1995.</p>
<p>The United States invested $38.7 billion in civil- and defense-related space projects, $8.8 billion down from its 2009 peak but still more than half of the global total.</p>
<p>Russia, by contrast, has ramped up its spending by an average of more than 30 percent over the last five years and is now the only country after the United States to spend more than $10 billion a year.</p>
<p>Japan, China, France, Germany, Italy and India all invested more than $1 billion a year. China, currently in eighth place globally, is expected to ramp up spending considerably over the next decade.</p>
<p>"The current global context for public space programs shows many positive signs brought by new leading space nations and an ever-growing number of countries who have initiated plans to build up their space-based capabilities," said Steve Bochinger, chief operating officer at Euroconsult.</p>
<p>"We anticipate government space spending to recover in the second part of the decade in many countries currently experiencing intense budget pressure."</p>
<p>The need to cut spending could itself help fuel innovative technologies that would push space exploration and other projects forward, Euroconsult said.</p>
<p>Some experts say the U.S. space shuttle program in particular wasted millions if not billions that could have been more usefully spent on other projects.</p>
<p>The U.S. space shuttle flew its last flight in 2011. Since then, American astronauts have flown to and from the International Space Station on Russian rockets.</p>
<p>China sent three of its own astronauts into space last year to dock with an orbital laboratory in what Beijing said was a step towards its own manned space station.</p>
| 7,824 |
<p><a href="" type="internal" />When it comes to many antics from the Republican party, I often find myself uttering the phrase, “You just can’t make this up.” &#160;This is often in response to some situation or comment being pushed by Republicans that often reeks of total irony or absolute hypocrisy.</p>
<p>Let’s go back to 2008 when President Obama was just a presidential candidate. &#160;It was at that time “birthers” began to emerge, claiming he had no right to be President of the United States. &#160;As we all know, these people ranted on continuously about his “fake” birth certificates, “fake” birth announcements and their claim that he was ineligible to run for president because the “overwhelming facts” proved that he was indeed born in Kenya.</p>
<p>All of this, of course, was absurd. &#160;To believe that President Obama somehow had the power to fake birth certificates, birth announcements and fool every federal agency we have that can verify someone’s eligibility to become president is so laughable I was actually a bit surprised the “movement” became as popular as it was—and honestly still is.</p>
<p>Well, not surprised as much as I just can’t grasp that level of stupidity. &#160;And sadly, there is still a good portion of the Republican party (mainly tea party Republicans) who believe President Obama isn’t eligible to be president.</p>
<p>But for the sake of argument, let’s assume President Obama was born in Kenya to a Kenyan father. &#160;His mother is&#160;still&#160;an American citizen which makes him a “natural born” American by right—and eligible to be president.</p>
<p>Now enter Ted Cruz. &#160;Someone who was undoubtedly born in Canada, to a father that isn’t an American, but whose mother is.</p>
<p>In other words,&#160; <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/aug/20/ted-cruz-born-canada-eligible-run-president/" type="external">the exact same situation tea party Republicans have claimed makes President Obama ineligible to be the president</a>. &#160;</p>
<p>Only, as it stands now, Ted Cruz is a front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination. &#160;Not only that, but he’s also&#160;extremely popular with tea party Republicans.</p>
<p>So, many of the same people who to this day still don’t believe President Obama has a right to be president, are the biggest cheerleaders of a man&#160;they&#160;want to run for president—whose citizenship would be granted by the&#160;exact&#160;situation which they claim makes President Obama ineligible.</p>
<p>It’s like when, after years and years of campaigning against “Obamacare, ” Republicans chose the&#160;one&#160;candidate for president who actually signed into law almost&#160;the exact same healthcare law&#160;while he was governor of Massachusetts. &#160;In fact, “Obamacare” is more or less an identical healthcare law.</p>
<p>The best comedy writers couldn’t come up with a better joke.</p>
<p>“After years of saying Barack Obama was born in Kenya, therefore ineligible to be president, tea party Republicans turn to Ted Cruz—a man who was born in Canada.”</p>
<p>Oh, and as an added kicker, Cruz’s father is an immigrant from a socialist country.</p>
<p>Which isn’t a big deal to those of us who use logic, of course. &#160;But hell, if Obama having a father who was Muslim somehow makes&#160;him&#160;a Muslim, imagine if he had a father that came from a socialist country?</p>
<p>Well, Cruz does.</p>
<p>It’s just irony you couldn’t make up if you tried.</p>
<p>Tea party Republicans, who have attacked President Obama for years and accused him of not being born in the United States — now want a man who was born in Canada to run for president.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">John Boehner's Trashing of Ted Cruz &amp; the Tea Party Proved Liberals were Right All Along (Video)</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">So What Exactly Does Ted Cruz Stand For? The Answer is Simple - Only Himself</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Republican Congressman From Texas Refuses to Say Obama Was Legitimately Elected President</a></p>
<p>0 Facebook comments</p>
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The Tea Party’s Infatuation with Ted Cruz Proves What Ignorant Hypocrites They Truly Are
| true |
http://forwardprogressives.com/the-tea-partys-infatuation-with-ted-cruz-proves-what-ignorant-hypocrites-they-truly-are/
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2013-10-24
| 4left
|
The Tea Party’s Infatuation with Ted Cruz Proves What Ignorant Hypocrites They Truly Are
<p><a href="" type="internal" />When it comes to many antics from the Republican party, I often find myself uttering the phrase, “You just can’t make this up.” &#160;This is often in response to some situation or comment being pushed by Republicans that often reeks of total irony or absolute hypocrisy.</p>
<p>Let’s go back to 2008 when President Obama was just a presidential candidate. &#160;It was at that time “birthers” began to emerge, claiming he had no right to be President of the United States. &#160;As we all know, these people ranted on continuously about his “fake” birth certificates, “fake” birth announcements and their claim that he was ineligible to run for president because the “overwhelming facts” proved that he was indeed born in Kenya.</p>
<p>All of this, of course, was absurd. &#160;To believe that President Obama somehow had the power to fake birth certificates, birth announcements and fool every federal agency we have that can verify someone’s eligibility to become president is so laughable I was actually a bit surprised the “movement” became as popular as it was—and honestly still is.</p>
<p>Well, not surprised as much as I just can’t grasp that level of stupidity. &#160;And sadly, there is still a good portion of the Republican party (mainly tea party Republicans) who believe President Obama isn’t eligible to be president.</p>
<p>But for the sake of argument, let’s assume President Obama was born in Kenya to a Kenyan father. &#160;His mother is&#160;still&#160;an American citizen which makes him a “natural born” American by right—and eligible to be president.</p>
<p>Now enter Ted Cruz. &#160;Someone who was undoubtedly born in Canada, to a father that isn’t an American, but whose mother is.</p>
<p>In other words,&#160; <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/aug/20/ted-cruz-born-canada-eligible-run-president/" type="external">the exact same situation tea party Republicans have claimed makes President Obama ineligible to be the president</a>. &#160;</p>
<p>Only, as it stands now, Ted Cruz is a front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination. &#160;Not only that, but he’s also&#160;extremely popular with tea party Republicans.</p>
<p>So, many of the same people who to this day still don’t believe President Obama has a right to be president, are the biggest cheerleaders of a man&#160;they&#160;want to run for president—whose citizenship would be granted by the&#160;exact&#160;situation which they claim makes President Obama ineligible.</p>
<p>It’s like when, after years and years of campaigning against “Obamacare, ” Republicans chose the&#160;one&#160;candidate for president who actually signed into law almost&#160;the exact same healthcare law&#160;while he was governor of Massachusetts. &#160;In fact, “Obamacare” is more or less an identical healthcare law.</p>
<p>The best comedy writers couldn’t come up with a better joke.</p>
<p>“After years of saying Barack Obama was born in Kenya, therefore ineligible to be president, tea party Republicans turn to Ted Cruz—a man who was born in Canada.”</p>
<p>Oh, and as an added kicker, Cruz’s father is an immigrant from a socialist country.</p>
<p>Which isn’t a big deal to those of us who use logic, of course. &#160;But hell, if Obama having a father who was Muslim somehow makes&#160;him&#160;a Muslim, imagine if he had a father that came from a socialist country?</p>
<p>Well, Cruz does.</p>
<p>It’s just irony you couldn’t make up if you tried.</p>
<p>Tea party Republicans, who have attacked President Obama for years and accused him of not being born in the United States — now want a man who was born in Canada to run for president.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">John Boehner's Trashing of Ted Cruz &amp; the Tea Party Proved Liberals were Right All Along (Video)</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">So What Exactly Does Ted Cruz Stand For? The Answer is Simple - Only Himself</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Republican Congressman From Texas Refuses to Say Obama Was Legitimately Elected President</a></p>
<p>0 Facebook comments</p>
| 7,825 |
<p>Bruce A. Dixon</p>
<p>For the last three elections now, 2010, 2012 and 2015, corporate media and corporate politicians have ceaselessly assured us that “the economy” whatever that is, is “back on track”, wherever that is.</p>
<p>Despite what corporate media and politicians tell us, the positive indicators of soaring stock market valuations, rising real estate prices and the rigged unemployment figures that don’t count the jailed, the recently released from jails and prisons, and those who’ve given up on finding work or those working part time who desperately want full time hours real life for most real people hasn’t got any better since 2008 or 2009.</p>
<p>Last week an extraordinary and shameful study emerged from the <a href="http://new.homelesschildrenamerica.org/mediadocs/280.pdf" type="external">National Center on Family Homelessness</a> confirmed it by demonstrating that almost 2.5 million children in the US were homeless at some point during 2013. That’s one child in every thirty, in what we’re accustomed to thinking of as the richest nation on earth. In the most recent months for which statistics exist, the rate of homelessness among children is spiking, increased 8% nationally from 2012 to 2013, and by 10% or more in 13 states and the District of Columbia. In 2006 one in 50 children were homeless. In 2010 it was one in 45. Now, in the age of Obama, the 2013 number is 1 in 30.</p>
<p>The causes of homelessness among children are not your comforting stereotypes of drug use and mental illness. These are “comforting” because they encourage us to blame the drug-addicted, and pity the mentally ill, and our comfort keeps us from questioning the capitalist system which declares that we must have poverty in the midst of plenty, or wondering why we ourselves are no more than a month or two from homelessness.</p>
<p>America’s shameful surge in homeless children is caused by the fact that wages are NOT rising, low income housing is NOT being built, and the stock of available housing is being demolished or cannibalized by gentrifying speculators. Speculators can’t make money off stable neighborhoods, so the poorest have to leave wherever they are to make room for something else.</p>
<p>In California, the nation’s most populous state 34% of households are paying more than half their annual income for rent, and while the state’s minimum wage is $8 an hour, a 2 bedroom apartment at a third of annual income would require tripling the minimum wage to $25.78 an hour. The issue then, is poverty.</p>
<p>Millions of children are not suffering because their parents have suddenly become addicted, or neglectful or lazy or stupid. Their parents, many of whom are working as hard as they can, are simply not able to afford a roof over their heads. This is just capitalism. It may be a scandal, but it’s no surprise.</p>
<p>This happens to be just the way that “the economy” works when it’s “back on track.” It’s time to tear up those tracks.</p>
<p>For Black Agenda Radio I’m Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com, and subscribe to our free weekly email updates at www.blackagendareport.com/subscribe. That’s www.blackagendareport.com/subscribe.</p>
<p>Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. He lives and works in Marietta GA and can be reached via this site’s contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.&#160; <a href="" type="internal">This piece</a> was reprinted by <a href="" type="internal">RINF Alternative News</a> with permission or license.</p>
|
If “The Economy is Recovering” Why Is There a Surge in Homeless Children?
| true |
http://rinf.com/alt-news/money/economy-recovering-surge-homeless-children/
|
2014-11-19
| 4left
|
If “The Economy is Recovering” Why Is There a Surge in Homeless Children?
<p>Bruce A. Dixon</p>
<p>For the last three elections now, 2010, 2012 and 2015, corporate media and corporate politicians have ceaselessly assured us that “the economy” whatever that is, is “back on track”, wherever that is.</p>
<p>Despite what corporate media and politicians tell us, the positive indicators of soaring stock market valuations, rising real estate prices and the rigged unemployment figures that don’t count the jailed, the recently released from jails and prisons, and those who’ve given up on finding work or those working part time who desperately want full time hours real life for most real people hasn’t got any better since 2008 or 2009.</p>
<p>Last week an extraordinary and shameful study emerged from the <a href="http://new.homelesschildrenamerica.org/mediadocs/280.pdf" type="external">National Center on Family Homelessness</a> confirmed it by demonstrating that almost 2.5 million children in the US were homeless at some point during 2013. That’s one child in every thirty, in what we’re accustomed to thinking of as the richest nation on earth. In the most recent months for which statistics exist, the rate of homelessness among children is spiking, increased 8% nationally from 2012 to 2013, and by 10% or more in 13 states and the District of Columbia. In 2006 one in 50 children were homeless. In 2010 it was one in 45. Now, in the age of Obama, the 2013 number is 1 in 30.</p>
<p>The causes of homelessness among children are not your comforting stereotypes of drug use and mental illness. These are “comforting” because they encourage us to blame the drug-addicted, and pity the mentally ill, and our comfort keeps us from questioning the capitalist system which declares that we must have poverty in the midst of plenty, or wondering why we ourselves are no more than a month or two from homelessness.</p>
<p>America’s shameful surge in homeless children is caused by the fact that wages are NOT rising, low income housing is NOT being built, and the stock of available housing is being demolished or cannibalized by gentrifying speculators. Speculators can’t make money off stable neighborhoods, so the poorest have to leave wherever they are to make room for something else.</p>
<p>In California, the nation’s most populous state 34% of households are paying more than half their annual income for rent, and while the state’s minimum wage is $8 an hour, a 2 bedroom apartment at a third of annual income would require tripling the minimum wage to $25.78 an hour. The issue then, is poverty.</p>
<p>Millions of children are not suffering because their parents have suddenly become addicted, or neglectful or lazy or stupid. Their parents, many of whom are working as hard as they can, are simply not able to afford a roof over their heads. This is just capitalism. It may be a scandal, but it’s no surprise.</p>
<p>This happens to be just the way that “the economy” works when it’s “back on track.” It’s time to tear up those tracks.</p>
<p>For Black Agenda Radio I’m Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com, and subscribe to our free weekly email updates at www.blackagendareport.com/subscribe. That’s www.blackagendareport.com/subscribe.</p>
<p>Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. He lives and works in Marietta GA and can be reached via this site’s contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.&#160; <a href="" type="internal">This piece</a> was reprinted by <a href="" type="internal">RINF Alternative News</a> with permission or license.</p>
| 7,826 |
<p>It’s funny how much an album cover matters. In the world of the digital download, the cover of an old LP found at a junk store can make an enormous impact. I stumbled across a record like this a couple years ago, a gorgeous Pedro Bell-style album cover featuring a giant purple hand on the front with a spider’s face replacing the middle finger and doodles of everything from helicopters to rhinoceroses on the back. I dug deep into my pockets and coughed up the 50 cents that the storeowner was asking and promptly dumped the LP in one of the many milk crates that litter my apartment.</p>
<p>Months later organizing my records (It’s not habit-forming, I promise, I can quit anytime I want), I found that same record and put it on the platter for the same reason that I bought it. Bracing myself for disappointment, I watched robot arm of the needle hit the wax and was immediately captivated. Tighter than tight drums punch in a funky groove and a bass that could only be played by Ed Watkins sounds so purposeful it’s hard to listen to anything else. And those horns. Those fucking horns come in like Memphis in 1965. Meanwhile, the singer sounds like Stevie Wonder would have if the eighties had never hit. The voice has got all the controlled openness and generosity of emotion that so many people try and fail to imitate.</p>
<p>Turns out the record is called Gone and it’s by a guy named Jerry Williams. A quick background search shows that Williams had been playing for a long time before Gone came out. At the tender age of sixteen he began his career by playing rhythm guitar for Little Richard, where the lead guitar player, one Jimmy James (who would soon change his last name to Hendrix) served as a mentor and advisor. After the authorities found out about his age, Williams was forced to leave the Little Richard tour and founded his own band, the Top Beats. When the Top Beats were less than successful and a solo record failed, Williams spent a few years working at a dairy farm. It would be nearly five years before he tried again.</p>
<p>In 1979 Williams released Gone and it is aptly named. Serious disagreements with Warner Brothers immediately after its release meant that the recording would never be as widely accepted as Williams had hoped. Today Gone is virtually unknown. Even so, one glance at the credits and it’s obvious that the cuts were made in the promotion, not the production. The liner notes could serve as a who’s who of late seventies session musicians, not to mention the historic figures. It’s the only album that both of the great pioneers of electric bass, James Jamerson and Donald “Duck” Dunn, appear on together. But even with all of these big names, Gone still sounds like one voice. There’s a continuity that flows between all of the songs, even the ones not penned by Williams himself. This is about as close to perfect as you can get and still have enough flaws to be human.</p>
<p>Records like this one are what make those milk crates in my apartment important. That urge to search junk stores can’t be just a twisted obsession if discoveries like Gone can come from it. And I can honestly say that just this once, I’m glad that I judged a book by its cover.</p>
<p>LORENZO WOLFF is a musician living in New York. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
|
An Album That Lives Up to Its Cover
| true |
https://counterpunch.org/2009/01/16/an-album-that-lives-up-to-its-cover/
|
2009-01-16
| 4left
|
An Album That Lives Up to Its Cover
<p>It’s funny how much an album cover matters. In the world of the digital download, the cover of an old LP found at a junk store can make an enormous impact. I stumbled across a record like this a couple years ago, a gorgeous Pedro Bell-style album cover featuring a giant purple hand on the front with a spider’s face replacing the middle finger and doodles of everything from helicopters to rhinoceroses on the back. I dug deep into my pockets and coughed up the 50 cents that the storeowner was asking and promptly dumped the LP in one of the many milk crates that litter my apartment.</p>
<p>Months later organizing my records (It’s not habit-forming, I promise, I can quit anytime I want), I found that same record and put it on the platter for the same reason that I bought it. Bracing myself for disappointment, I watched robot arm of the needle hit the wax and was immediately captivated. Tighter than tight drums punch in a funky groove and a bass that could only be played by Ed Watkins sounds so purposeful it’s hard to listen to anything else. And those horns. Those fucking horns come in like Memphis in 1965. Meanwhile, the singer sounds like Stevie Wonder would have if the eighties had never hit. The voice has got all the controlled openness and generosity of emotion that so many people try and fail to imitate.</p>
<p>Turns out the record is called Gone and it’s by a guy named Jerry Williams. A quick background search shows that Williams had been playing for a long time before Gone came out. At the tender age of sixteen he began his career by playing rhythm guitar for Little Richard, where the lead guitar player, one Jimmy James (who would soon change his last name to Hendrix) served as a mentor and advisor. After the authorities found out about his age, Williams was forced to leave the Little Richard tour and founded his own band, the Top Beats. When the Top Beats were less than successful and a solo record failed, Williams spent a few years working at a dairy farm. It would be nearly five years before he tried again.</p>
<p>In 1979 Williams released Gone and it is aptly named. Serious disagreements with Warner Brothers immediately after its release meant that the recording would never be as widely accepted as Williams had hoped. Today Gone is virtually unknown. Even so, one glance at the credits and it’s obvious that the cuts were made in the promotion, not the production. The liner notes could serve as a who’s who of late seventies session musicians, not to mention the historic figures. It’s the only album that both of the great pioneers of electric bass, James Jamerson and Donald “Duck” Dunn, appear on together. But even with all of these big names, Gone still sounds like one voice. There’s a continuity that flows between all of the songs, even the ones not penned by Williams himself. This is about as close to perfect as you can get and still have enough flaws to be human.</p>
<p>Records like this one are what make those milk crates in my apartment important. That urge to search junk stores can’t be just a twisted obsession if discoveries like Gone can come from it. And I can honestly say that just this once, I’m glad that I judged a book by its cover.</p>
<p>LORENZO WOLFF is a musician living in New York. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
| 7,827 |
<p />
<p>6 places to find jobs created by Obamacare</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>There's been a lot of noise about the broad impact on jobs from the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. For example, debate rages about whether employers will make cuts to avoid the mandate that they must offer health insurance if they have more than 50 full-time workers.</p>
<p>But the law raises narrower employment questions, such as: Will Obamacare create jobs, specifically in health care? And what will those jobs be?</p>
<p>Those aren't easy questions to answer, in part because the constant churn of hiring and firing in a complex economy makes it difficult to isolate specific trends, says Dennis Hoffman, an economics professor and researcher at Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business.</p>
<p>"It's too early to tell whether the ACA is playing a significant role in job creation and hiring," says Hoffman. "While we can see general employment trends, including health care job numbers, it will take more analysis to determine the motivation behind any movement."</p>
<p>But there already is widespread, if anecdotal, evidence that some sectors have been hiring to gear up for the law's implementation. Here are six examples, including pay information largely from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' most recent Occupational Outlook Handbook.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Lawyers</p>
<p>Median annual salary: About $113,000</p>
<p>"With any new law, there's always a need for interpretation," says Craig B. Garner, a Santa Monica, Calif., lawyer and health care consultant. "Not surprisingly, the larger-in-scope the law, the greater the demand for interpreters."</p>
<p>The more than 900-page Affordable Care Act and its many related regulations have created a bonanza for lawyers, and for more of them.</p>
<p>"The increased demand has two driving factors," says Garner. "First, the ACA is complicated and long (and) few people really want to read it. Second, there is an abundance of incorrect information freely disseminated (about the law)."</p>
<p>Prior experience with the subject matter isn't required.</p>
<p>"Health care law covers just about every topic of the legal profession," he says. "As a result, there are opportunities for just about any attorney to transition into health care."</p>
<p>But Garner stresses that even those who have invested three years in law school and several years practicing law need to realize health care law presents some very specific challenges. He points to what he describes as the "sheer volume" of health-related statutes at both the state and federal levels.</p>
<p>Management consultants</p>
<p>Median annual salary: About $78,000</p>
<p>Health care is big business, so it's not surprising to hear that consultants, who already are involved in virtually every American industry, stand to gain at least somewhat from health insurance reform.</p>
<p>Garner says there may be some uptick in hiring at consulting firms specializing in health care, though he adds that there's already an "abundance of consultants right now who may be able to assist in these issues."</p>
<p>Still, the Obamacare online insurance exchanges, or marketplaces, the employer requirements and the expansion of Medicaid in some states all present opportunities for consultants catering to businesses and government.</p>
<p>For the most part, consultants are advising these institutional insurance customers on how to meet the law's requirements without breaking the bank. Consultants also are advising pharmaceutical firms and medical device makers on how to exploit opportunities presented by the ACA, and they're helping doctors adapt their practices for the potential influx of new patients.</p>
<p>Applicants seeking consulting jobs need top-notch math skills, says Garner, explaining that health care is becoming increasingly dominated by quantitative analysis.</p>
<p>The definition of "consultant" can be incredibly broad. At the same time, the pay is often quite good.</p>
<p>Insurance sales agents</p>
<p>Median annual salary: About $47,000</p>
<p>The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that as many as 33 million uninsured Americans will gain health coverage from the Affordable Care Act.</p>
<p>To explain health insurance products to the potential new pool of customers, Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies across the U.S. are ramping up operations, says Eric Lail, a spokesman for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, the nationwide umbrella group for the 37 separate "Blues."</p>
<p>Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, for example, is opening its first-ever retail stores to help enroll new customers. Lail says the Blues have more than a dozen new outreach programs underway in various states, though he says it's too early to say how many new jobs are being generated by those initiatives.</p>
<p>Beyond the Blues, some online listings for insurance jobs now ask for candidates who have some knowledge of Obamacare. One company with insurance sales openings shouts in its job postings that Obamacare will create an "explosion" of sales.</p>
<p>Customer service representatives</p>
<p>Median annual salary: About $30,000</p>
<p>The Affordable Care Act represents a large customer service undertaking. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has said that up to 9,000 new customer service agents would be needed to assist consumers using the Obamacare health insurance exchanges.</p>
<p>Many of those jobs are for call center operators, to explain insurance options and answer questions by phone. In one example, the consulting firm Challenger, Gray &amp; Christmas says an Iowa call center added 120 jobs after winning a contract related to the health care law.</p>
<p>The employment opportunities will ebb and flow with the market, says Bruce Caswell, president of health services for Maximus, a contractor handling customer service functions for several of the online marketplaces.</p>
<p>"The ACA will certainly create an initial hiring spike, although this increase will vary across different states," says Caswell. "Most states will ramp up hiring for the first open enrollment, and then adjust staffing accordingly."</p>
<p>The best candidates for those jobs are people with strong interpersonal skills and, ideally, some health care experience. But, says Caswell, "they don't need to be health care professionals … and all operators receive comprehensive training."</p>
<p>Navigators</p>
<p>Estimated average pay: $29.20 per hour</p>
<p>"Navigator" is a new class of job created by the health care law. The Obamacare navigators are charged with helping people work through enrollment paperwork. They educate consumers about the new marketplaces and determine if they qualify for a federal tax credit to save on the cost of health insurance.</p>
<p>The job functions are similar to those of a call center operator, says Caswell.</p>
<p>"Call center operators are not navigators, although both are working toward the same goal of getting people insured," he says. "Navigators are funded by either the federal government or the state-based exchanges and will provide face-to-face assistance to those individuals in need of such help."</p>
<p>Consumers looking for a navigator's help must check with their state's exchange for contact information.</p>
<p>The federal government has awarded $67 million in grant money to more than 100 local community and other groups to hire navigators. Caswell's company has been contracted by at least one state to help hire and manage navigators, who will undergo 20-30 hours of certification before they can work with the general public.</p>
<p>As for pay, you won't get rich being a navigator. The pay also is similar to that of a call center operator, says Caswell.</p>
<p>IT professionals</p>
<p>Median annual salary: About $71,000</p>
<p>Increasingly, it's a technology-driven world, and health care is no exception. Those who work at the intersection between health care and information technology say the Affordable Care Act will only bring the two fields even closer.</p>
<p>"The ACA mandate for the implementation of electronic medical records has created a strong need for IT professionals, which creates excellent job opportunities," says Amanda Bleakney, managing director for health services at The ExecuSearch Group, a New York City staffing firm.</p>
<p>According to Bleakney, there's already been a "strong uptick" in demand for IT professionals with health care experience.</p>
<p>The IT crowd also is benefiting from the Obamacare health insurance marketplaces. Reston, Va.-based hCentive, which is helping insurers connect to the exchanges, recently filled 150 new jobs, the bulk of which are in the IT field, according to Manoj Agarwala, the company's president and chief operating officer.</p>
<p>"These online marketplaces are a new technology for the health insurance market, requiring quick development of an entirely new cottage industry," says Agarwala. "In addition to software development, IT resources are required on the plan and exchange side in order to keep the exchanges up to date and operational."</p>
|
6 Fields Where ObamaCare is Creating Jobs
| true |
http://foxbusiness.com/features/2013/10/24/6-fields-where-obamacare-is-creating-jobs.html
|
2016-03-04
| 0right
|
6 Fields Where ObamaCare is Creating Jobs
<p />
<p>6 places to find jobs created by Obamacare</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>There's been a lot of noise about the broad impact on jobs from the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. For example, debate rages about whether employers will make cuts to avoid the mandate that they must offer health insurance if they have more than 50 full-time workers.</p>
<p>But the law raises narrower employment questions, such as: Will Obamacare create jobs, specifically in health care? And what will those jobs be?</p>
<p>Those aren't easy questions to answer, in part because the constant churn of hiring and firing in a complex economy makes it difficult to isolate specific trends, says Dennis Hoffman, an economics professor and researcher at Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business.</p>
<p>"It's too early to tell whether the ACA is playing a significant role in job creation and hiring," says Hoffman. "While we can see general employment trends, including health care job numbers, it will take more analysis to determine the motivation behind any movement."</p>
<p>But there already is widespread, if anecdotal, evidence that some sectors have been hiring to gear up for the law's implementation. Here are six examples, including pay information largely from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' most recent Occupational Outlook Handbook.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Lawyers</p>
<p>Median annual salary: About $113,000</p>
<p>"With any new law, there's always a need for interpretation," says Craig B. Garner, a Santa Monica, Calif., lawyer and health care consultant. "Not surprisingly, the larger-in-scope the law, the greater the demand for interpreters."</p>
<p>The more than 900-page Affordable Care Act and its many related regulations have created a bonanza for lawyers, and for more of them.</p>
<p>"The increased demand has two driving factors," says Garner. "First, the ACA is complicated and long (and) few people really want to read it. Second, there is an abundance of incorrect information freely disseminated (about the law)."</p>
<p>Prior experience with the subject matter isn't required.</p>
<p>"Health care law covers just about every topic of the legal profession," he says. "As a result, there are opportunities for just about any attorney to transition into health care."</p>
<p>But Garner stresses that even those who have invested three years in law school and several years practicing law need to realize health care law presents some very specific challenges. He points to what he describes as the "sheer volume" of health-related statutes at both the state and federal levels.</p>
<p>Management consultants</p>
<p>Median annual salary: About $78,000</p>
<p>Health care is big business, so it's not surprising to hear that consultants, who already are involved in virtually every American industry, stand to gain at least somewhat from health insurance reform.</p>
<p>Garner says there may be some uptick in hiring at consulting firms specializing in health care, though he adds that there's already an "abundance of consultants right now who may be able to assist in these issues."</p>
<p>Still, the Obamacare online insurance exchanges, or marketplaces, the employer requirements and the expansion of Medicaid in some states all present opportunities for consultants catering to businesses and government.</p>
<p>For the most part, consultants are advising these institutional insurance customers on how to meet the law's requirements without breaking the bank. Consultants also are advising pharmaceutical firms and medical device makers on how to exploit opportunities presented by the ACA, and they're helping doctors adapt their practices for the potential influx of new patients.</p>
<p>Applicants seeking consulting jobs need top-notch math skills, says Garner, explaining that health care is becoming increasingly dominated by quantitative analysis.</p>
<p>The definition of "consultant" can be incredibly broad. At the same time, the pay is often quite good.</p>
<p>Insurance sales agents</p>
<p>Median annual salary: About $47,000</p>
<p>The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that as many as 33 million uninsured Americans will gain health coverage from the Affordable Care Act.</p>
<p>To explain health insurance products to the potential new pool of customers, Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies across the U.S. are ramping up operations, says Eric Lail, a spokesman for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, the nationwide umbrella group for the 37 separate "Blues."</p>
<p>Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, for example, is opening its first-ever retail stores to help enroll new customers. Lail says the Blues have more than a dozen new outreach programs underway in various states, though he says it's too early to say how many new jobs are being generated by those initiatives.</p>
<p>Beyond the Blues, some online listings for insurance jobs now ask for candidates who have some knowledge of Obamacare. One company with insurance sales openings shouts in its job postings that Obamacare will create an "explosion" of sales.</p>
<p>Customer service representatives</p>
<p>Median annual salary: About $30,000</p>
<p>The Affordable Care Act represents a large customer service undertaking. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has said that up to 9,000 new customer service agents would be needed to assist consumers using the Obamacare health insurance exchanges.</p>
<p>Many of those jobs are for call center operators, to explain insurance options and answer questions by phone. In one example, the consulting firm Challenger, Gray &amp; Christmas says an Iowa call center added 120 jobs after winning a contract related to the health care law.</p>
<p>The employment opportunities will ebb and flow with the market, says Bruce Caswell, president of health services for Maximus, a contractor handling customer service functions for several of the online marketplaces.</p>
<p>"The ACA will certainly create an initial hiring spike, although this increase will vary across different states," says Caswell. "Most states will ramp up hiring for the first open enrollment, and then adjust staffing accordingly."</p>
<p>The best candidates for those jobs are people with strong interpersonal skills and, ideally, some health care experience. But, says Caswell, "they don't need to be health care professionals … and all operators receive comprehensive training."</p>
<p>Navigators</p>
<p>Estimated average pay: $29.20 per hour</p>
<p>"Navigator" is a new class of job created by the health care law. The Obamacare navigators are charged with helping people work through enrollment paperwork. They educate consumers about the new marketplaces and determine if they qualify for a federal tax credit to save on the cost of health insurance.</p>
<p>The job functions are similar to those of a call center operator, says Caswell.</p>
<p>"Call center operators are not navigators, although both are working toward the same goal of getting people insured," he says. "Navigators are funded by either the federal government or the state-based exchanges and will provide face-to-face assistance to those individuals in need of such help."</p>
<p>Consumers looking for a navigator's help must check with their state's exchange for contact information.</p>
<p>The federal government has awarded $67 million in grant money to more than 100 local community and other groups to hire navigators. Caswell's company has been contracted by at least one state to help hire and manage navigators, who will undergo 20-30 hours of certification before they can work with the general public.</p>
<p>As for pay, you won't get rich being a navigator. The pay also is similar to that of a call center operator, says Caswell.</p>
<p>IT professionals</p>
<p>Median annual salary: About $71,000</p>
<p>Increasingly, it's a technology-driven world, and health care is no exception. Those who work at the intersection between health care and information technology say the Affordable Care Act will only bring the two fields even closer.</p>
<p>"The ACA mandate for the implementation of electronic medical records has created a strong need for IT professionals, which creates excellent job opportunities," says Amanda Bleakney, managing director for health services at The ExecuSearch Group, a New York City staffing firm.</p>
<p>According to Bleakney, there's already been a "strong uptick" in demand for IT professionals with health care experience.</p>
<p>The IT crowd also is benefiting from the Obamacare health insurance marketplaces. Reston, Va.-based hCentive, which is helping insurers connect to the exchanges, recently filled 150 new jobs, the bulk of which are in the IT field, according to Manoj Agarwala, the company's president and chief operating officer.</p>
<p>"These online marketplaces are a new technology for the health insurance market, requiring quick development of an entirely new cottage industry," says Agarwala. "In addition to software development, IT resources are required on the plan and exchange side in order to keep the exchanges up to date and operational."</p>
| 7,828 |
<p>We keep hearing that what Russia allegedly did was hack the election.</p>
<p>Hack seems to mean so many things. You can hack the electoral process. You can hack a recipe. And apparently, you can <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_hack" type="external">hack life</a>.</p>
<p>Its association with technology goes back to MIT in the 1950s, says Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.&#160;</p>
<p>“It actually all goes back to an undergraduate group at MIT called the Tech Model Railroad Club,” Zimmer says.&#160;Unsurprisingly, this nerdy-sounding club kept copious records and in the minutes of one of their 1955 meetings there’s one of the first mentions of the word:</p>
<p>“Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing.”</p>
<p>In 1959, the TMRC put out a dictionary of their club’s terminology, which included the word “hack.”</p>
<p>“They gave definitions including, ‘something done without constructive end; a project undertaken on bad self-advice; an entropy booster; or as a verb to produce or to attempt to produce a hack,’” says Zimmer.</p>
<p>MIT is known for its elaborate pranks and,&#160;according to Zimmer, the word garnered an association with mischief early on.&#160;There are mentions in the MIT newspapers of the 1960s about pranks involving the “hackers” of the MIT phone system. As computers took off, the term was seamlessly adopted by computer programmers.</p>
<p>The etymology of the word “hack” can be traced to two different iterations of the word, according to Zimmer. One version of the word goes back to the Middle English of the 13th century and means “to cut with heavy blows” and chopping.</p>
<p>“This idea of chopping something ends up getting used in sports, in which you can talk about a golf player who isn’t really good and just ‘hacks’ at the ball,” Zimmer says.</p>
<p>The other version of the word goes back to the old French word “hackney,”&#160;which meant an average work horse that could be leased out for a horse and carriage.</p>
<p>“That ordinary horse then got extended to people —&#160;if you were hackneyed or [a] hack, that meant you were a drudge. So we also have things like political hacks or party hacks or a hack writer — all of these since that come out of the oridinary horse, back in the olden days,” says Zimmer.</p>
<p>The term today is an intermingling of these two different etymologies and the word really caught on in the 1980s, according to Zimmer.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p>“There was a book about the computer programming revolution called ‘Hackers’ that used it in a generally positive way,”&#160;Zimmer says. “Then there were all of these media accounts of people taking over computer systems and doing bad things; hijacking computer systems for malicious ends and that’s when the negative sense of it really caught on in the public consciousness.”</p>
<p>However, the pejorative sense of the word that we hear in the media (think Russian hackers) was just a tiny portion of the word’s meaning within programming circles.</p>
<p>“There were positive and negative uses of that word ‘hack’ going back to the MIT days,” Zimmer says.&#160;“You could do something as a hack that was clever and create&#160;a solution to a problem that an engineer might come up — but then there was also this darker side that we also see that’s more like malicious meddling.”</p>
<p>In fact, in software developer Eric Raymond’s 1975 “comprehensive compendium of hacker slang”&#160;— known as <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html" type="external">the Jargon File</a>&#160;—&#160;the word “hacker” has a list of eight definitions, and only the last entry has a negative connotation.&#160;</p>
<p>"8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence&#160;password hacker,&#160;network hacker. The correct term for this sense is cracker.”</p>
<p>For a time in the 1980s, computer programmers, self-identified “hackers,” tried to reclaim the word by trying to create a distinction between good and bad hacks.</p>
<p>“They said, ‘People who do these bad things of breaking into computer systems, those are actually ‘crackers.’ Well that didn’t really work and hacker to this day has this negative connotation frequently,” Zimmer&#160;says.</p>
|
What the ‘hack’?
| false |
https://pri.org/stories/2017-01-04/what-hack
|
2017-01-04
| 3left-center
|
What the ‘hack’?
<p>We keep hearing that what Russia allegedly did was hack the election.</p>
<p>Hack seems to mean so many things. You can hack the electoral process. You can hack a recipe. And apparently, you can <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_hack" type="external">hack life</a>.</p>
<p>Its association with technology goes back to MIT in the 1950s, says Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.&#160;</p>
<p>“It actually all goes back to an undergraduate group at MIT called the Tech Model Railroad Club,” Zimmer says.&#160;Unsurprisingly, this nerdy-sounding club kept copious records and in the minutes of one of their 1955 meetings there’s one of the first mentions of the word:</p>
<p>“Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing.”</p>
<p>In 1959, the TMRC put out a dictionary of their club’s terminology, which included the word “hack.”</p>
<p>“They gave definitions including, ‘something done without constructive end; a project undertaken on bad self-advice; an entropy booster; or as a verb to produce or to attempt to produce a hack,’” says Zimmer.</p>
<p>MIT is known for its elaborate pranks and,&#160;according to Zimmer, the word garnered an association with mischief early on.&#160;There are mentions in the MIT newspapers of the 1960s about pranks involving the “hackers” of the MIT phone system. As computers took off, the term was seamlessly adopted by computer programmers.</p>
<p>The etymology of the word “hack” can be traced to two different iterations of the word, according to Zimmer. One version of the word goes back to the Middle English of the 13th century and means “to cut with heavy blows” and chopping.</p>
<p>“This idea of chopping something ends up getting used in sports, in which you can talk about a golf player who isn’t really good and just ‘hacks’ at the ball,” Zimmer says.</p>
<p>The other version of the word goes back to the old French word “hackney,”&#160;which meant an average work horse that could be leased out for a horse and carriage.</p>
<p>“That ordinary horse then got extended to people —&#160;if you were hackneyed or [a] hack, that meant you were a drudge. So we also have things like political hacks or party hacks or a hack writer — all of these since that come out of the oridinary horse, back in the olden days,” says Zimmer.</p>
<p>The term today is an intermingling of these two different etymologies and the word really caught on in the 1980s, according to Zimmer.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p>“There was a book about the computer programming revolution called ‘Hackers’ that used it in a generally positive way,”&#160;Zimmer says. “Then there were all of these media accounts of people taking over computer systems and doing bad things; hijacking computer systems for malicious ends and that’s when the negative sense of it really caught on in the public consciousness.”</p>
<p>However, the pejorative sense of the word that we hear in the media (think Russian hackers) was just a tiny portion of the word’s meaning within programming circles.</p>
<p>“There were positive and negative uses of that word ‘hack’ going back to the MIT days,” Zimmer says.&#160;“You could do something as a hack that was clever and create&#160;a solution to a problem that an engineer might come up — but then there was also this darker side that we also see that’s more like malicious meddling.”</p>
<p>In fact, in software developer Eric Raymond’s 1975 “comprehensive compendium of hacker slang”&#160;— known as <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html" type="external">the Jargon File</a>&#160;—&#160;the word “hacker” has a list of eight definitions, and only the last entry has a negative connotation.&#160;</p>
<p>"8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence&#160;password hacker,&#160;network hacker. The correct term for this sense is cracker.”</p>
<p>For a time in the 1980s, computer programmers, self-identified “hackers,” tried to reclaim the word by trying to create a distinction between good and bad hacks.</p>
<p>“They said, ‘People who do these bad things of breaking into computer systems, those are actually ‘crackers.’ Well that didn’t really work and hacker to this day has this negative connotation frequently,” Zimmer&#160;says.</p>
| 7,829 |
<p>Caricatures of Catholic belief have been a staple of American life since the Colonial period. Once upon a time, the cartoons were drawn and the caricatures were promoted by Protestant bigots. That’s rarely the case anymore, except on the fringes of the religious fever swamps (and, to be sure, among certain devout secularists). In an odd historical twist, cartoon Catholicism and the crudest caricatures of Catholic belief are often promoted today by Catholic political leaders. Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino is a case in point.</p>
<p>In the course of his recent remarks to the Catholic Charities Greater Boston Christmas dinner, the mayor confessed that ”what moves me about being a Christian is what Jesus taught us about being religious. He did not give priority to piety. He didn’t make holiness the big thing. And he did not tell us to go around talking up God, either.”</p>
<p>Really? One wonders what Menino makes of the last two verses of the Gospel of St. Matthew: ”Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” It is not, shall we say, self-evidently clear how that ”Great Commission” can be fulfilled without ”talking up God.”</p>
<p>As for Jesus being anti-pietistic and unconcerned about holiness, it is true that Jesus criticized the formulaic piety that some people of his time mistook for genuine religious conversion. But did the Master who gave his disciples what we know as the Lord’s Prayer really not care about prayer? Did the Christ who called on all to ”change your ways” for ”the kingdom of heaven is at hand” not care about holiness? Don’t organizations such as Catholic Charities help fulfill Christ’s command to ”let your light shine before men, so that they may see the good you do and give glory to your Father in heaven”?</p>
<p>Menino further muddied the waters by commenting that: ”When the pope speaks on doctrine, that’s absolute. I don’t think choice and gay marriage are doctrine.” Wrong again.</p>
<p>Ten years ago, in the encyclical ”Evangelium Vitae”, the late Pope John Paul II underscored the Church’s centuries-old conviction that abortion is always and in every circumstance a grave moral evil. Theologians will debate forever whether that teaching is ”doctrine” in the sense that the trinity is ”doctrine;” but those debates are irrelevant here, for the mayor was using ”doctrine” as a synonym for ”settled Catholic conviction” and suggesting that the abortion question is unsettled. It is not. Moreover, that teaching is not going to change, because it is rooted in the facts of embryology and in elementary principles of justice. To suggest otherwise is either culpable ignorance or willful misrepresentation.</p>
<p>John Paul II defended and promoted marriage as the stable union of a man and a woman for more than 26 years. The bishops of Massachusetts, following the papal lead on this settled question, have rejected the usurpation of politics by the Supreme Judicial Court and will press to restore to the people of Massachusetts their democratic right to determine how the state understands ”marriage.” For the mayor to suggest that the nature of marriage is also an unsettled question for the teaching authority of the Catholic Church is, again, either ignorant or mendacious.</p>
<p>So it seems that Menino knows neither the Bible, nor the catechism, nor the teaching of popes and bishops. Why should anyone beyond Catholics care? Because Americans will continue to debate the role of religiously informed moral reason in public life. That debate can be intelligent or dumb; it can strengthen democracy or weaken it; it can build bridges of understanding through serious conversation or fracture communities and stoke animosities. If political leaders like Mayor Menino continue to promote caricatures and cartoons of Catholic conviction, the debate will be unintelligible and fractious. And American democracy will be the weaker for it.</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p>
|
Menino’s Catholic Fallacies
| false |
https://eppc.org/publications/meninos-catholic-fallacies/
| 1right-center
|
Menino’s Catholic Fallacies
<p>Caricatures of Catholic belief have been a staple of American life since the Colonial period. Once upon a time, the cartoons were drawn and the caricatures were promoted by Protestant bigots. That’s rarely the case anymore, except on the fringes of the religious fever swamps (and, to be sure, among certain devout secularists). In an odd historical twist, cartoon Catholicism and the crudest caricatures of Catholic belief are often promoted today by Catholic political leaders. Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino is a case in point.</p>
<p>In the course of his recent remarks to the Catholic Charities Greater Boston Christmas dinner, the mayor confessed that ”what moves me about being a Christian is what Jesus taught us about being religious. He did not give priority to piety. He didn’t make holiness the big thing. And he did not tell us to go around talking up God, either.”</p>
<p>Really? One wonders what Menino makes of the last two verses of the Gospel of St. Matthew: ”Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” It is not, shall we say, self-evidently clear how that ”Great Commission” can be fulfilled without ”talking up God.”</p>
<p>As for Jesus being anti-pietistic and unconcerned about holiness, it is true that Jesus criticized the formulaic piety that some people of his time mistook for genuine religious conversion. But did the Master who gave his disciples what we know as the Lord’s Prayer really not care about prayer? Did the Christ who called on all to ”change your ways” for ”the kingdom of heaven is at hand” not care about holiness? Don’t organizations such as Catholic Charities help fulfill Christ’s command to ”let your light shine before men, so that they may see the good you do and give glory to your Father in heaven”?</p>
<p>Menino further muddied the waters by commenting that: ”When the pope speaks on doctrine, that’s absolute. I don’t think choice and gay marriage are doctrine.” Wrong again.</p>
<p>Ten years ago, in the encyclical ”Evangelium Vitae”, the late Pope John Paul II underscored the Church’s centuries-old conviction that abortion is always and in every circumstance a grave moral evil. Theologians will debate forever whether that teaching is ”doctrine” in the sense that the trinity is ”doctrine;” but those debates are irrelevant here, for the mayor was using ”doctrine” as a synonym for ”settled Catholic conviction” and suggesting that the abortion question is unsettled. It is not. Moreover, that teaching is not going to change, because it is rooted in the facts of embryology and in elementary principles of justice. To suggest otherwise is either culpable ignorance or willful misrepresentation.</p>
<p>John Paul II defended and promoted marriage as the stable union of a man and a woman for more than 26 years. The bishops of Massachusetts, following the papal lead on this settled question, have rejected the usurpation of politics by the Supreme Judicial Court and will press to restore to the people of Massachusetts their democratic right to determine how the state understands ”marriage.” For the mayor to suggest that the nature of marriage is also an unsettled question for the teaching authority of the Catholic Church is, again, either ignorant or mendacious.</p>
<p>So it seems that Menino knows neither the Bible, nor the catechism, nor the teaching of popes and bishops. Why should anyone beyond Catholics care? Because Americans will continue to debate the role of religiously informed moral reason in public life. That debate can be intelligent or dumb; it can strengthen democracy or weaken it; it can build bridges of understanding through serious conversation or fracture communities and stoke animosities. If political leaders like Mayor Menino continue to promote caricatures and cartoons of Catholic conviction, the debate will be unintelligible and fractious. And American democracy will be the weaker for it.</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p>
| 7,830 |
|
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>New Mexico is the only state with a 24/7 registered nurse call center that is free to all residents, whether insured or not. In operation since 2006, it has kept tens of thousands of New Mexicans out of emergency rooms and saved the state more than $68 million in health care expenses.</p>
<p>Besides providing a basic form of health advice to thousands of residents and relieving demand on doctors and hospitals in a state where all but a few counties have a shortage of health care providers, it has generated real-time public health data that has served as an early warning system during epidemics.</p>
<p>In April, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will recommend New Mexico’s advice line as a national model that other states adopt during an emergency preparedness summit in Atlanta.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>“We did a thorough search to find out whether anyone had an ongoing telephone triage system that could be used as a model,” said Lisa Koonin, a senior adviser in the CDC’s influenza coordination unit. “New Mexico’s NurseAdvice line is the only one we found. It really is one-of-a-kind,” she said.</p>
<p>New Mexico’s advice line is free. Using one well-published telephone number (877-725-2552), anyone in the state can reach a registered nurse who picks up the line in less than three minutes. Most nurses who answer calls work part time in local hospitals or clinics. All but a few answer phone calls from their homes.</p>
<p>“I just think it’s one of the most promising aspects of technology’s potential to improve health care quality and reduce cost,” said David Roddy, executive director of New Mexico Primary Care Association which has a network of clinics throughout the state, primarily in rural areas. The Association also has a contract to provide information technology support for the hotline.</p>
<p>Roddy said the hotline gets calls from every county in the state and provides much needed after-hours backup support for rural clinics.</p>
<p>“It really provides a tremendous benefit not only to the patients but to rural practitoners,” Roddy said.</p>
<p>Financial support for the line comes from a public-private partnership that includes nearly every insurance carrier and managed care organization in the state, the state’s Medicaid and public health departments, the University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Center, Indian Health Services, and numerous hospitals, physician practices and community health centers.</p>
<p>How it works</p>
<p>After asking a series of questions, moving from most serious to least serious symptoms, a registered nurse uses medical algorithms and professional judgment to formulate a diagnosis. He or she then instructs the caller on what to do immediately and then often sets up an appointment with a local doctor. In a smaller number of cases, nurses tell callers to get to an emergency room as quickly as possible.</p>
<p>“We always err on the conservative side,” said registered nurse and program director Connie Fiorenzio.</p>
<p>“It’s really important that the nurses who answer the line are familiar with the state’s health care system and its unique culture and lifestyles,” said former state Sen. Dede Feldman, who sponsored $500,000 in start-up funding for the service in 2006. Feldman said a major selling point was the call center would be state-based.</p>
<p>Journal staff contributed to this report.</p>
<p />
<p />
|
Health hotline in NM touted as model for nation
| false |
https://abqjournal.com/547046/health-hotline-in-nm-touted-as-model-for-nation.html
| 2least
|
Health hotline in NM touted as model for nation
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>New Mexico is the only state with a 24/7 registered nurse call center that is free to all residents, whether insured or not. In operation since 2006, it has kept tens of thousands of New Mexicans out of emergency rooms and saved the state more than $68 million in health care expenses.</p>
<p>Besides providing a basic form of health advice to thousands of residents and relieving demand on doctors and hospitals in a state where all but a few counties have a shortage of health care providers, it has generated real-time public health data that has served as an early warning system during epidemics.</p>
<p>In April, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will recommend New Mexico’s advice line as a national model that other states adopt during an emergency preparedness summit in Atlanta.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>“We did a thorough search to find out whether anyone had an ongoing telephone triage system that could be used as a model,” said Lisa Koonin, a senior adviser in the CDC’s influenza coordination unit. “New Mexico’s NurseAdvice line is the only one we found. It really is one-of-a-kind,” she said.</p>
<p>New Mexico’s advice line is free. Using one well-published telephone number (877-725-2552), anyone in the state can reach a registered nurse who picks up the line in less than three minutes. Most nurses who answer calls work part time in local hospitals or clinics. All but a few answer phone calls from their homes.</p>
<p>“I just think it’s one of the most promising aspects of technology’s potential to improve health care quality and reduce cost,” said David Roddy, executive director of New Mexico Primary Care Association which has a network of clinics throughout the state, primarily in rural areas. The Association also has a contract to provide information technology support for the hotline.</p>
<p>Roddy said the hotline gets calls from every county in the state and provides much needed after-hours backup support for rural clinics.</p>
<p>“It really provides a tremendous benefit not only to the patients but to rural practitoners,” Roddy said.</p>
<p>Financial support for the line comes from a public-private partnership that includes nearly every insurance carrier and managed care organization in the state, the state’s Medicaid and public health departments, the University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Center, Indian Health Services, and numerous hospitals, physician practices and community health centers.</p>
<p>How it works</p>
<p>After asking a series of questions, moving from most serious to least serious symptoms, a registered nurse uses medical algorithms and professional judgment to formulate a diagnosis. He or she then instructs the caller on what to do immediately and then often sets up an appointment with a local doctor. In a smaller number of cases, nurses tell callers to get to an emergency room as quickly as possible.</p>
<p>“We always err on the conservative side,” said registered nurse and program director Connie Fiorenzio.</p>
<p>“It’s really important that the nurses who answer the line are familiar with the state’s health care system and its unique culture and lifestyles,” said former state Sen. Dede Feldman, who sponsored $500,000 in start-up funding for the service in 2006. Feldman said a major selling point was the call center would be state-based.</p>
<p>Journal staff contributed to this report.</p>
<p />
<p />
| 7,831 |
|
<p>Go to your local supermarket and look at the produce section. You’ll probably see some oranges, some organically-grown red delicious apples, some cucumbers; if you’re making the trek out to Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, you might even see some star fruit or <a href="http://www.messynessychic.com/2014/08/13/the-fruit-that-tastes-like-chocolate-pudding/" type="external">black sapotes</a>.</p>
<p>But there’s one constant when it comes to all the produce on display: it all looks wonderful. There aren’t a lot of blemishes or bruises, and the fruits and vegetables are usually a consistent color. Everything seems ready for&#160; <a href="http://www.foodandwine.com/" type="external">Food &amp; Wine</a>.</p>
<p>Turns out, there’s a cost to all this, and it’s a world away from <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/08/05/whole-foods-oops-asparagus-water-mistake/31152405/" type="external">spending $6 on a bottle of “asparagus water” at Whole Foods</a>. No, to make room for the wonderful-looking stuff, much of the “ugly” “misshapen” produce <a href="http://www.fastcoexist.com/3046170/this-startup-will-sell-you-weird-looking-fruit-and-bulbous-veggies-for-cheap" type="external">is thrown out</a>, even though the food is usually completely edible.</p>
<p>This produce is part of the <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-ip.pdf" type="external">billions of pounds</a> of food that’s wasted in America every year. And it’s not just supermarkets throwing out fruit because it doesn’t look pretty. Food waste comes from farmers culling unmarketable but edible fruit, stores ditching food close to its “sell by” date even when it could still be eaten, and consumers misjudging the amount of food they’ll need and throwing out what they haven’t gotten around to.</p>
<p>This all adds up to tremendous waste; Americans toss about 40 percent of their food. Meanwhile, <a href="http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/hunger/" type="external">nearly 50 million Americans don't know where their next meal will come from</a>.</p>
<p>Ashley Stanley wanted to help solve this problem. Her journey started in 2009, when she was grabbing lunch at a small restaurant in Boston. After she and her friends had finished eating, there was still enough food to feed at least five or six people. Stanley thought about all the other tables at all the other restaurants with wasted food, and <a href="http://wgbhnews.org/post/boston-nonprofit-rescues-food-waste-needy-families" type="external">realized that the food we throw away could be put to better uses</a>. After more research, and a deepening feeling that she wanted to change the system, Stanley founded <a href="http://www.lovinspoonfulsinc.org/" type="external">Lovin’ Spoonfuls</a>. Lovin’ Spoonfuls is a nonprofit that takes perfectly edible food that grocery stores and produce wholesalers would otherwise throw away, and distributes it to families who need it. So far, <a href="http://www.lovinspoonfulsinc.org/who-we-are/about-us/" type="external">it’s rescued two million pounds of fresh food</a> that would have otherwise gone to a landfill (making it&#160;part of an ecosystem of organizations with similar goals, like <a href="http://www.foodforfree.org/" type="external">Food For Free</a>&#160;and <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/14/us/cnn-heroes-lee/" type="external">Rescuing Leftover Cuisine</a>).</p>
<p>Besides the obvious benefit of providing low-income people with food, there’s also an environmental boon to keeping wasted food out of landfills. For starters, food that decomposes in landfills <a href="http://www.nrdc.org/food/wasted-food.asp" type="external">accounts for 25 percent of US methane emissions</a>. (Methane <a href="http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html" type="external">is a particularly potent greenhouse gas</a>.)</p>
<p>Then there’s the environmental cost of food production. Stanley wants to call attention to “the amount of resources that it takes to go into the production of food, only to burn it. [After all] we are in a water crisis, we are in an oil crisis. The amount of water and oil we’re using to produce and incinerate food is mind blowing.” Agriculture accounts for <a href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-practices-management/irrigation-water-use.aspx" type="external">80 percent of America’s water use</a>.</p>
<p>Stanley believes that dealing more effectively with food comes down to shifting the way food is perceived.</p>
<p>From catering companies using smaller vessels so that more food can be rescued, to assessing your own food needs so you won’t throw away stuff from your fridge, there are definitely ways to reduce the amount of wasted food. It may be difficult, but Stanley thinks it’s absolutely vital:</p>
<p>“Culturally... we need a reframe on how we look at food. On how we value food. It’s not just a commodity, it’s not just something that we’re producing, it’s not just something that we’re importing and exporting. We talk so much about food being a right, not a privilege, people having access to healthy food. I think we’re seeing the consequences of that not happening in extreme ways.”</p>
<p>This <a href="http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/2015/9/25/america-wastes-40-its-food-heres-what-we-can-do-about-it/" type="external">story</a> first aired as an interview on PRI's <a href="http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/" type="external">Innovation Hub</a>. Subscribe to the <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/innovation-hub/id517249700" type="external">Innovation Hub podcast</a>.</p>
|
How to get the 40 percent of food the US wastes to 50 million hungry Americans
| false |
https://pri.org/stories/2015-09-26/us-wastes-40-percent-its-food-heres-how-fix
|
2015-09-26
| 3left-center
|
How to get the 40 percent of food the US wastes to 50 million hungry Americans
<p>Go to your local supermarket and look at the produce section. You’ll probably see some oranges, some organically-grown red delicious apples, some cucumbers; if you’re making the trek out to Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, you might even see some star fruit or <a href="http://www.messynessychic.com/2014/08/13/the-fruit-that-tastes-like-chocolate-pudding/" type="external">black sapotes</a>.</p>
<p>But there’s one constant when it comes to all the produce on display: it all looks wonderful. There aren’t a lot of blemishes or bruises, and the fruits and vegetables are usually a consistent color. Everything seems ready for&#160; <a href="http://www.foodandwine.com/" type="external">Food &amp; Wine</a>.</p>
<p>Turns out, there’s a cost to all this, and it’s a world away from <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/08/05/whole-foods-oops-asparagus-water-mistake/31152405/" type="external">spending $6 on a bottle of “asparagus water” at Whole Foods</a>. No, to make room for the wonderful-looking stuff, much of the “ugly” “misshapen” produce <a href="http://www.fastcoexist.com/3046170/this-startup-will-sell-you-weird-looking-fruit-and-bulbous-veggies-for-cheap" type="external">is thrown out</a>, even though the food is usually completely edible.</p>
<p>This produce is part of the <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-ip.pdf" type="external">billions of pounds</a> of food that’s wasted in America every year. And it’s not just supermarkets throwing out fruit because it doesn’t look pretty. Food waste comes from farmers culling unmarketable but edible fruit, stores ditching food close to its “sell by” date even when it could still be eaten, and consumers misjudging the amount of food they’ll need and throwing out what they haven’t gotten around to.</p>
<p>This all adds up to tremendous waste; Americans toss about 40 percent of their food. Meanwhile, <a href="http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/hunger/" type="external">nearly 50 million Americans don't know where their next meal will come from</a>.</p>
<p>Ashley Stanley wanted to help solve this problem. Her journey started in 2009, when she was grabbing lunch at a small restaurant in Boston. After she and her friends had finished eating, there was still enough food to feed at least five or six people. Stanley thought about all the other tables at all the other restaurants with wasted food, and <a href="http://wgbhnews.org/post/boston-nonprofit-rescues-food-waste-needy-families" type="external">realized that the food we throw away could be put to better uses</a>. After more research, and a deepening feeling that she wanted to change the system, Stanley founded <a href="http://www.lovinspoonfulsinc.org/" type="external">Lovin’ Spoonfuls</a>. Lovin’ Spoonfuls is a nonprofit that takes perfectly edible food that grocery stores and produce wholesalers would otherwise throw away, and distributes it to families who need it. So far, <a href="http://www.lovinspoonfulsinc.org/who-we-are/about-us/" type="external">it’s rescued two million pounds of fresh food</a> that would have otherwise gone to a landfill (making it&#160;part of an ecosystem of organizations with similar goals, like <a href="http://www.foodforfree.org/" type="external">Food For Free</a>&#160;and <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/14/us/cnn-heroes-lee/" type="external">Rescuing Leftover Cuisine</a>).</p>
<p>Besides the obvious benefit of providing low-income people with food, there’s also an environmental boon to keeping wasted food out of landfills. For starters, food that decomposes in landfills <a href="http://www.nrdc.org/food/wasted-food.asp" type="external">accounts for 25 percent of US methane emissions</a>. (Methane <a href="http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html" type="external">is a particularly potent greenhouse gas</a>.)</p>
<p>Then there’s the environmental cost of food production. Stanley wants to call attention to “the amount of resources that it takes to go into the production of food, only to burn it. [After all] we are in a water crisis, we are in an oil crisis. The amount of water and oil we’re using to produce and incinerate food is mind blowing.” Agriculture accounts for <a href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-practices-management/irrigation-water-use.aspx" type="external">80 percent of America’s water use</a>.</p>
<p>Stanley believes that dealing more effectively with food comes down to shifting the way food is perceived.</p>
<p>From catering companies using smaller vessels so that more food can be rescued, to assessing your own food needs so you won’t throw away stuff from your fridge, there are definitely ways to reduce the amount of wasted food. It may be difficult, but Stanley thinks it’s absolutely vital:</p>
<p>“Culturally... we need a reframe on how we look at food. On how we value food. It’s not just a commodity, it’s not just something that we’re producing, it’s not just something that we’re importing and exporting. We talk so much about food being a right, not a privilege, people having access to healthy food. I think we’re seeing the consequences of that not happening in extreme ways.”</p>
<p>This <a href="http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/2015/9/25/america-wastes-40-its-food-heres-what-we-can-do-about-it/" type="external">story</a> first aired as an interview on PRI's <a href="http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/" type="external">Innovation Hub</a>. Subscribe to the <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/innovation-hub/id517249700" type="external">Innovation Hub podcast</a>.</p>
| 7,832 |
<p>Michael Conroy/AP</p>
<p />
<p>Donald Trump won the Indiana Republican primary Tuesday night, dealing what is likely a fatal blow to the Ted Cruz campaign and the movement to deny Trump the presidential nomination.</p>
<p>The major networks called the race for Trump shortly after polls closed at 6 p.m. Central Time. With 10 percent reporting, Trump was winning 54 percent of the vote, to 34 percent for Cruz and 9 percent for John Kasich.</p>
<p>Trump’s victory in Indiana <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/29/upshot/donald-trump-doesnt-need-indiana-anymore.html" type="external">puts him in a strong position</a> to reach the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention in July. Indiana will send 57 bound delegates to the convention in Cleveland. Trump is likely to take most or even all of them.</p>
<p>Cruz was hoping for a comeback in Indiana following a series of defeats. After Trump dominated two weeks of primaries in the Northeast, including in his home state of New York, the primary map shifted away from the East Coast, where Trump has been dominant. Indiana’s large working-class white population presented an advantage for Trump, but the state’s Republican voters are also socially conservative, and its <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/20/upshot/the-most-important-primary-is-wait-indiana.html" type="external">demographics</a> resemble those of Missouri, where Cruz essentially tied Trump, more so than Michigan or Illinois, where Trump dominated.</p>
<p>But Trump’s momentum coming off his East Coast wins helped him gain steam in Indiana, and his lead in the polls grew steadily over the past week, leaving him with an 11-point lead over Cruz in the Real Clear Politics <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/in/indiana_republican_presidential_primary-5786.html" type="external">polling average</a> heading into Tuesday. Cruz also suffered an unforced error last week when, in the course of pandering to basketball fans in Indiana, he called the hoop a “ <a href="http://www.indystar.com/story/sports/2016/04/26/cruz-calls-hoop-basketball-ring-and-twitter-erupts/83573574/" type="external">basketball ring</a>.”</p>
<p>The delegate math grew more daunting for Cruz after the East Coast primaries. Cruz was mathematically eliminated from clinching the nomination on the first ballot at the convention. Instead, he needs to keep Trump under 1,237 delegates in order to force a contested convention, where he could challenge the front-runner.</p>
<p>Looking for a reset, Cruz announced last week in Indianapolis that Carly Fiorina would be his running mate—an unprecedented step since Cruz is far from securing the nomination. But as tonight’s results showed, his Hail Mary wasn’t enough to stop Trump.</p>
<p />
|
Trump Wins Indiana, All But Sealing the GOP Nomination
| true |
https://motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/donald-trump-ted-cruz-indiana-primary-results/
|
2016-05-03
| 4left
|
Trump Wins Indiana, All But Sealing the GOP Nomination
<p>Michael Conroy/AP</p>
<p />
<p>Donald Trump won the Indiana Republican primary Tuesday night, dealing what is likely a fatal blow to the Ted Cruz campaign and the movement to deny Trump the presidential nomination.</p>
<p>The major networks called the race for Trump shortly after polls closed at 6 p.m. Central Time. With 10 percent reporting, Trump was winning 54 percent of the vote, to 34 percent for Cruz and 9 percent for John Kasich.</p>
<p>Trump’s victory in Indiana <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/29/upshot/donald-trump-doesnt-need-indiana-anymore.html" type="external">puts him in a strong position</a> to reach the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention in July. Indiana will send 57 bound delegates to the convention in Cleveland. Trump is likely to take most or even all of them.</p>
<p>Cruz was hoping for a comeback in Indiana following a series of defeats. After Trump dominated two weeks of primaries in the Northeast, including in his home state of New York, the primary map shifted away from the East Coast, where Trump has been dominant. Indiana’s large working-class white population presented an advantage for Trump, but the state’s Republican voters are also socially conservative, and its <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/20/upshot/the-most-important-primary-is-wait-indiana.html" type="external">demographics</a> resemble those of Missouri, where Cruz essentially tied Trump, more so than Michigan or Illinois, where Trump dominated.</p>
<p>But Trump’s momentum coming off his East Coast wins helped him gain steam in Indiana, and his lead in the polls grew steadily over the past week, leaving him with an 11-point lead over Cruz in the Real Clear Politics <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/in/indiana_republican_presidential_primary-5786.html" type="external">polling average</a> heading into Tuesday. Cruz also suffered an unforced error last week when, in the course of pandering to basketball fans in Indiana, he called the hoop a “ <a href="http://www.indystar.com/story/sports/2016/04/26/cruz-calls-hoop-basketball-ring-and-twitter-erupts/83573574/" type="external">basketball ring</a>.”</p>
<p>The delegate math grew more daunting for Cruz after the East Coast primaries. Cruz was mathematically eliminated from clinching the nomination on the first ballot at the convention. Instead, he needs to keep Trump under 1,237 delegates in order to force a contested convention, where he could challenge the front-runner.</p>
<p>Looking for a reset, Cruz announced last week in Indianapolis that Carly Fiorina would be his running mate—an unprecedented step since Cruz is far from securing the nomination. But as tonight’s results showed, his Hail Mary wasn’t enough to stop Trump.</p>
<p />
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<p />
<p>More broadly, I'm regretting the kind of discourse I fear will invade the Capitol when New Mexico's 30-day legislative session heats up next week.</p>
<p>A Twitter response Wednesday to an innocent-sounding tweet by Skandera illustrates my concern.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>The controversial education secretary-designate tweeted in the morning that her "little sister" - referring to the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program, a longstanding volunteer youth mentoring program that I much admire - was joining her for a day at the Roundhouse.</p>
<p>"Excited to have my little sister join me in the Capitol today (Big Brothers, Big Sisters day)! Happy to be a part of such a great program," Skandera tweeted.</p>
<p>Fourteen minutes later, someone identified as @AngryNMTeacher, tweeted a response, attaching it to Skandera's cheery note.</p>
<p>"Are you teaching her to lie to our citizens or ignore research, teachers, and parents like you do?" asked @AngryNMTeacher.</p>
<p>My point is not to defend Skandera's policies, so intensely opposed by many educators. I'm just here to say that lack of respect, or hate, doesn't help advance or resolve any debate.</p>
<p>Here, insults are perceived by both sides.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Many teachers think it was disrespectful for Republican Gov. Susana Martinez to appoint someone with no regular classroom teaching experience to mandate policy to the people who are doing the work every day in New Mexico public schools. The administration and many government observers think Democrats in the New Mexico Senate are disrespectful in trying to deny the governor the choice of whom she wants to carry out her administration's policies.</p>
<p>My argument is that you have to bury the hatchets somewhere, that respect has to be given wherever possible, in order for debate to proceed and resolutions to be reached. Otherwise, it's just Hatfields and McCoys, just a gang war.</p>
<p>And look at who gets caught in the crossfire. I can only hope that Hanna Skandera's "little sister" didn't see the tweet from @AngryNMTeacher.</p>
<p>I know it's only a tweet. But tweeting clearly has become an element of public discourse, available for anyone to see.</p>
<p>I started tweeting only last August, figuring I needed to keep pushing my dinosaur bones forward. But I vowed when I started that Will Rogers would be my role model: If I didn't have something good to say about someone or something, I wouldn't say anything at all.</p>
<p>Today I am breaking my vow. @AngryNMTeacher made me do it.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>I'm still cringing at the hateful-sounding suggestion that Hanna Skandera would teach her little sister to lie.</p>
<p>@AngryNMTeacher, I unfollow you.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
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At the Roundhouse: Tweeting hate
| false |
https://abqjournal.com/345103/at-the-roundhouse-tweeting-hate.html
| 2least
|
At the Roundhouse: Tweeting hate
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<p />
<p>More broadly, I'm regretting the kind of discourse I fear will invade the Capitol when New Mexico's 30-day legislative session heats up next week.</p>
<p>A Twitter response Wednesday to an innocent-sounding tweet by Skandera illustrates my concern.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>The controversial education secretary-designate tweeted in the morning that her "little sister" - referring to the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program, a longstanding volunteer youth mentoring program that I much admire - was joining her for a day at the Roundhouse.</p>
<p>"Excited to have my little sister join me in the Capitol today (Big Brothers, Big Sisters day)! Happy to be a part of such a great program," Skandera tweeted.</p>
<p>Fourteen minutes later, someone identified as @AngryNMTeacher, tweeted a response, attaching it to Skandera's cheery note.</p>
<p>"Are you teaching her to lie to our citizens or ignore research, teachers, and parents like you do?" asked @AngryNMTeacher.</p>
<p>My point is not to defend Skandera's policies, so intensely opposed by many educators. I'm just here to say that lack of respect, or hate, doesn't help advance or resolve any debate.</p>
<p>Here, insults are perceived by both sides.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Many teachers think it was disrespectful for Republican Gov. Susana Martinez to appoint someone with no regular classroom teaching experience to mandate policy to the people who are doing the work every day in New Mexico public schools. The administration and many government observers think Democrats in the New Mexico Senate are disrespectful in trying to deny the governor the choice of whom she wants to carry out her administration's policies.</p>
<p>My argument is that you have to bury the hatchets somewhere, that respect has to be given wherever possible, in order for debate to proceed and resolutions to be reached. Otherwise, it's just Hatfields and McCoys, just a gang war.</p>
<p>And look at who gets caught in the crossfire. I can only hope that Hanna Skandera's "little sister" didn't see the tweet from @AngryNMTeacher.</p>
<p>I know it's only a tweet. But tweeting clearly has become an element of public discourse, available for anyone to see.</p>
<p>I started tweeting only last August, figuring I needed to keep pushing my dinosaur bones forward. But I vowed when I started that Will Rogers would be my role model: If I didn't have something good to say about someone or something, I wouldn't say anything at all.</p>
<p>Today I am breaking my vow. @AngryNMTeacher made me do it.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>I'm still cringing at the hateful-sounding suggestion that Hanna Skandera would teach her little sister to lie.</p>
<p>@AngryNMTeacher, I unfollow you.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
| 7,834 |
|
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.</p>
<p>~H.L. Mencken, 1956</p>
<p>Despite a last-minute false smear campaign accusing his victorious opponent Ned Lamont with hacking the Lieberman website (a lie which has gained the attention of FBI investigators), three-term Sen. Joe Lieberman lost the Connecticut Primary by over 10,000 votes. Upon losing, instead of the usual “rally round the victor” concession speech, Bush’s favorite Democrat used the occasion to tout his “independent” fall campaign for the same seat he’d just lost (most states have “anti-spoiler” laws which would not allow such a travesty.) Speaking of Spoilers</p>
<p>Heard the one about how Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election and gave us Bush and his disastrous policies (most all favorably voted on by Lieberman)?</p>
<p>You might remember the Democratic Party stalwarts’ and media flaks vicious false charges against Nader:</p>
<p>Senator Harry Reid D-NV said of Nader the day after that fateful stolen election, “I hope Ralph Nader is proud of himself,” said Reid. “One of the joys of waking up this morning was that egotistic bum didn’t get 5 percent of the vote (which would have qualified the Green Party for federal funds).”</p>
<p>“He can wallow in his mud. That is what he likes to wallow in anyway,” Reid said. “`I had very little respect for him and what I had is gone.”</p>
<p>Reid directly blamed Nader for Gore’s “loss.”</p>
<p>“You could be a second-grade math student and figure that out,” the senator said.</p>
<p>Now Senate Minority Leader, Harry Reid had this to say when faced with another independent/third party challenge — from Lieberman in the Connecticut Senate Race this fall; “I don’t think it is fair for me to judge what he (Lieberman) should or shouldn’t do. He has told me what he was going to do. He told me that before the election. I think his decision has been made,” Reid said.</p>
<p>“I love Joe Lieberman. Joe and I have campaigned together, legislated together. But it is pretty simple when you’re Democratic leader and somebody wins a Democratic primary,” Reid says he considered not backing Lamont and instead sticking with Lieberman, “but I think I’d be subject to a lot of criticism.” From the Horse’s Mouth</p>
<p>In announcing his independent run on the “Connecticut for Lieberman” ticket this fall, the ever-sanctimonious Lieberman noted that he received an election-eve “good luck” call from none other than Karl Rove. Ironically, the senator’s own campaign manager issued a statement falsely accusing Lamont supporters of “Rovian tactics” — i.e. hacking the Lieberman website.</p>
<p>Lieberman also said it would be “irresponsible and inconsistent with my principles” to not run again in the fall. That “principle” must be the same one that saw him hedge his bets and continue his Senate reelection campaign while running for vice-president in 2000, even though a Gore/Lieberman victory would have meant a Republican governor replacing Lieberman in the evenly-split Senate with a Republican!</p>
<p>Yet, here’s what Lieberman said while losing the 2000 vice-presidency, “A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. I ask those who are thinking about voting for Ralph Nader to decide how they feel – how George Bush feels – about protecting the environment, protecting consumers, protecting a woman’s right to choose, because all of those may well be in jeopardy if George Bush is elected president.”</p>
<p>Lieberman saved some of his fire after defeat for his erstwhile running mate whom he described as “too populist” and that Gore’s “people vs. the powerful” rhetoric had a detrimental impact on the campaign. (Any wonder Gore was nowhere to be seen touting Joe this time around?)</p>
<p>Now we have the spectacle of Lieberman who once positioned himself decidedly against third party/independent campaigns, now taking money from Republicans for his own such campaigns. He once said, “For Republicans to be putting Ralph Nader on television in a paid ad, certainly might lead your average observer to be cynical.” The Lockstep Pundits</p>
<p>The Liberal punditry joined the Democratic Party’s attacks on Nader and on anyone so “smug” as to vote for the candidate of their choice. Eric Alterman wrote in The Nation, “An honest Nader campaign slogan might have read, ‘Vote your conscience and lose your union — or your reproductive freedom,” Alterman even called Nader’s three million votes “pathetic” and dismissed the entire campaign as “a quixotic quest to elect a reactionary Republican to the presidency.”</p>
<p>Maybe Alterman’s had a change of heart. Here’s what he wrote just prior to Lamont’s victory: “If Connecticut Democratic Primary voters think Lieberman has been a bad senator and will likely continue to be so, they should vote him out of office.&#160;The fact that he continues to believe that invading Iraq was a good idea, that creating a Department of Homeland Security was a good idea, that overruling Terri Schiavo’s family was a good idea, that joining in the Republican vendetta against Bill Clinton was a good idea, well, that argues that what you’ve gotten from the man in the past is likely what you’ll get in the future. People like Broder, the Washington Post editorial page, Lani Davis and Al Hunt seem to think there’s something unfair in people voting their democratic preferences in their own primary’s party. We’ll see.”</p>
<p>Indeed, we did see. (How did Alterman not see, or believe that we did not?)</p>
<p>Slate ran a woeful piece by Jacob Weisberg yesterday titled “Dead with Ned” likening Lamont’s victory to some weird sort of Democrat Vietnam Syndrome! “Whether Democrats can avoid playing their Vietnam video to the end depends on their ability to project military and diplomatic toughness in place of the elitism and anti-war purity represented in 2004 by Howard Dean and now by Ned Lamont.” The (neo)Con Is Up.</p>
<p>The fall of perhaps the most insufferable of the Democrat neo-cons has to be seen as a good thing. Remember, Lieberman first was elected himself when he attacked a true progressive, Sen. Lowell Weicker, who was attacked by Lieberman as “soft on Castro” and “no friend of Israel.”</p>
<p>Once again, Nader has been proven correct. All one has to do is witness the collective apoplectic response to Lamont’s victory — from the Democratic Party and its captive pundits. As Harry Reid would say, “You could be a second-grade math student and figure that out.”</p>
<p>MICHAEL DONNELLY is a decidedly independent voter. He has run for office thrice–twice as a Democrat and once as a Green. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
|
Sore Loserman, Redux
| true |
https://counterpunch.org/2006/08/11/sore-loserman-redux/
|
2006-08-11
| 4left
|
Sore Loserman, Redux
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.</p>
<p>~H.L. Mencken, 1956</p>
<p>Despite a last-minute false smear campaign accusing his victorious opponent Ned Lamont with hacking the Lieberman website (a lie which has gained the attention of FBI investigators), three-term Sen. Joe Lieberman lost the Connecticut Primary by over 10,000 votes. Upon losing, instead of the usual “rally round the victor” concession speech, Bush’s favorite Democrat used the occasion to tout his “independent” fall campaign for the same seat he’d just lost (most states have “anti-spoiler” laws which would not allow such a travesty.) Speaking of Spoilers</p>
<p>Heard the one about how Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election and gave us Bush and his disastrous policies (most all favorably voted on by Lieberman)?</p>
<p>You might remember the Democratic Party stalwarts’ and media flaks vicious false charges against Nader:</p>
<p>Senator Harry Reid D-NV said of Nader the day after that fateful stolen election, “I hope Ralph Nader is proud of himself,” said Reid. “One of the joys of waking up this morning was that egotistic bum didn’t get 5 percent of the vote (which would have qualified the Green Party for federal funds).”</p>
<p>“He can wallow in his mud. That is what he likes to wallow in anyway,” Reid said. “`I had very little respect for him and what I had is gone.”</p>
<p>Reid directly blamed Nader for Gore’s “loss.”</p>
<p>“You could be a second-grade math student and figure that out,” the senator said.</p>
<p>Now Senate Minority Leader, Harry Reid had this to say when faced with another independent/third party challenge — from Lieberman in the Connecticut Senate Race this fall; “I don’t think it is fair for me to judge what he (Lieberman) should or shouldn’t do. He has told me what he was going to do. He told me that before the election. I think his decision has been made,” Reid said.</p>
<p>“I love Joe Lieberman. Joe and I have campaigned together, legislated together. But it is pretty simple when you’re Democratic leader and somebody wins a Democratic primary,” Reid says he considered not backing Lamont and instead sticking with Lieberman, “but I think I’d be subject to a lot of criticism.” From the Horse’s Mouth</p>
<p>In announcing his independent run on the “Connecticut for Lieberman” ticket this fall, the ever-sanctimonious Lieberman noted that he received an election-eve “good luck” call from none other than Karl Rove. Ironically, the senator’s own campaign manager issued a statement falsely accusing Lamont supporters of “Rovian tactics” — i.e. hacking the Lieberman website.</p>
<p>Lieberman also said it would be “irresponsible and inconsistent with my principles” to not run again in the fall. That “principle” must be the same one that saw him hedge his bets and continue his Senate reelection campaign while running for vice-president in 2000, even though a Gore/Lieberman victory would have meant a Republican governor replacing Lieberman in the evenly-split Senate with a Republican!</p>
<p>Yet, here’s what Lieberman said while losing the 2000 vice-presidency, “A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. I ask those who are thinking about voting for Ralph Nader to decide how they feel – how George Bush feels – about protecting the environment, protecting consumers, protecting a woman’s right to choose, because all of those may well be in jeopardy if George Bush is elected president.”</p>
<p>Lieberman saved some of his fire after defeat for his erstwhile running mate whom he described as “too populist” and that Gore’s “people vs. the powerful” rhetoric had a detrimental impact on the campaign. (Any wonder Gore was nowhere to be seen touting Joe this time around?)</p>
<p>Now we have the spectacle of Lieberman who once positioned himself decidedly against third party/independent campaigns, now taking money from Republicans for his own such campaigns. He once said, “For Republicans to be putting Ralph Nader on television in a paid ad, certainly might lead your average observer to be cynical.” The Lockstep Pundits</p>
<p>The Liberal punditry joined the Democratic Party’s attacks on Nader and on anyone so “smug” as to vote for the candidate of their choice. Eric Alterman wrote in The Nation, “An honest Nader campaign slogan might have read, ‘Vote your conscience and lose your union — or your reproductive freedom,” Alterman even called Nader’s three million votes “pathetic” and dismissed the entire campaign as “a quixotic quest to elect a reactionary Republican to the presidency.”</p>
<p>Maybe Alterman’s had a change of heart. Here’s what he wrote just prior to Lamont’s victory: “If Connecticut Democratic Primary voters think Lieberman has been a bad senator and will likely continue to be so, they should vote him out of office.&#160;The fact that he continues to believe that invading Iraq was a good idea, that creating a Department of Homeland Security was a good idea, that overruling Terri Schiavo’s family was a good idea, that joining in the Republican vendetta against Bill Clinton was a good idea, well, that argues that what you’ve gotten from the man in the past is likely what you’ll get in the future. People like Broder, the Washington Post editorial page, Lani Davis and Al Hunt seem to think there’s something unfair in people voting their democratic preferences in their own primary’s party. We’ll see.”</p>
<p>Indeed, we did see. (How did Alterman not see, or believe that we did not?)</p>
<p>Slate ran a woeful piece by Jacob Weisberg yesterday titled “Dead with Ned” likening Lamont’s victory to some weird sort of Democrat Vietnam Syndrome! “Whether Democrats can avoid playing their Vietnam video to the end depends on their ability to project military and diplomatic toughness in place of the elitism and anti-war purity represented in 2004 by Howard Dean and now by Ned Lamont.” The (neo)Con Is Up.</p>
<p>The fall of perhaps the most insufferable of the Democrat neo-cons has to be seen as a good thing. Remember, Lieberman first was elected himself when he attacked a true progressive, Sen. Lowell Weicker, who was attacked by Lieberman as “soft on Castro” and “no friend of Israel.”</p>
<p>Once again, Nader has been proven correct. All one has to do is witness the collective apoplectic response to Lamont’s victory — from the Democratic Party and its captive pundits. As Harry Reid would say, “You could be a second-grade math student and figure that out.”</p>
<p>MICHAEL DONNELLY is a decidedly independent voter. He has run for office thrice–twice as a Democrat and once as a Green. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
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<p>Guatemala’s Efrain Rios Montt earned the nickname “the General” after taking power in a 1982 coup d’etat. His sixteen-month rule is considered one of Guatemala’s bloodiest periods since the Spanish conquest. Under the General’s command, entire villages were massacred in a bloody counterinsurgency campaign, and some 150,000 mostly indigenous Guatemalans were killed. Despite his gruesome history, Rios Montt remained a powerful political figure and in 2003 ran as a presidential candidate despite a constitutional ban prohibiting former dictators from entering the race. In 1999, Maya activist Rigoberta Menchú submitted an indictment against the former dictator, but over six years later, the trial is still pending.</p>
<p>Rios Montt is not an anomaly in Latin America. F! rom El Salvador to Chile, ex-military leaders guilty of violent crimes perpetrated during the region’s “dirty wars” of the 70’s and 80s roam free. Many, like Rios Montt, wield enough political power to ensure that their macabre pasts remain buried from public scrutiny. Throughout Latin America, human rights groups are seeking to convict these criminals, but most have confronted the greatest obstacle to a functioning justice system–impunity. In Guatemala, the state has made little attempt to investigate or prosecute those responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of war victims–most likely because a large percentage of these criminals still hold high government positions. In the few cases that have ended in conviction, only the material authors, those at the lowest level of the military, have been punished, while the intellectual author! s remain immune to prosecution.</p>
<p>Failing justice systems represent just one example of the weak institutions pervasive to Latin American societies, where corrupt bureaucracies create de facto inequality through clientelistic practices. This, coupled with rampant poverty and lack of education, perpetuates the region’s inequities, thwarting any hope for widespread political participation and democracy. These barriers to democracy could be eliminated, at least in part, by a strong state–that is, one with a ubiquitous and fair legal system and efficient bureaucratic institutions with the power to effectively regulate social relationships. Absent a state that fosters some sort of redistributi! on, however, equality, and therefore democracy, is unachievable.</p>
<p>To that end, the state must play a role in bolstering institutions that level the playing field for all citizens. That is, the state must provide equal access to education–so that citizens cast an informed vote–as well as access to markets through credit institutions and property rights to ensure equal economic opportunities. Most importantly, a key component to promoting equality lies in a strong judicial system that guarantees equality before the law. But how can such institutions be strengthened in states rife with corruption and favoritism?</p>
<p>Perhaps the best hope for the future of Latin American judicial systems lies in the past. By bringing perpetrators of the region’s “dirty wars” to trial, the state can prove that judicial institutions actually function. Justice systems in most Latin American nations have been ineffective for so long that citizens have lost any hope in their functionality. However, only by addressing past crimes can the system transform to become fair and effective in the future.</p>
<p>Convicting figures like Rios Montt is not only important to building state institutions; it is also central to overcoming Latin America’s culture of violence, the terrible relic of decades of conflict. In many Guatemalan indigenous communities, men and women are tormented by the memory of civil war. Tensions are palpable in villages where victims’ family members live alongside ex-paramilitaries that were forced to carry out atrocities against their own and neighboring villages. The effects of this brutal conflict will not easily dissipate. Despite a comprehensive UN report citing atrocities committed during the 36-year war, individual perpetrators have not been denounced, thus undermining the notion of universal justice enshrined in the Guatemalan constitution. This type of selective justice reinforces the ethnically exclusive nature of the country’s political system, leaving scant hope for universal participatory democracy.</p>
<p>The task of reforming Latin America’s judicial systems is daunting, especially given the immense political power of those who will suffer if justice is implemented. However, in order for equality and democracy to take root, all citizens must be afforded the same rights and opportunities and be held to the same standards. Only then will their votes be meaningful.</p>
<p>LISA VISCIDI is a graduate student at NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
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Justice and Impunity in Latin America
| true |
https://counterpunch.org/2006/03/27/justice-and-impunity-in-latin-america/
|
2006-03-27
| 4left
|
Justice and Impunity in Latin America
<p>Guatemala’s Efrain Rios Montt earned the nickname “the General” after taking power in a 1982 coup d’etat. His sixteen-month rule is considered one of Guatemala’s bloodiest periods since the Spanish conquest. Under the General’s command, entire villages were massacred in a bloody counterinsurgency campaign, and some 150,000 mostly indigenous Guatemalans were killed. Despite his gruesome history, Rios Montt remained a powerful political figure and in 2003 ran as a presidential candidate despite a constitutional ban prohibiting former dictators from entering the race. In 1999, Maya activist Rigoberta Menchú submitted an indictment against the former dictator, but over six years later, the trial is still pending.</p>
<p>Rios Montt is not an anomaly in Latin America. F! rom El Salvador to Chile, ex-military leaders guilty of violent crimes perpetrated during the region’s “dirty wars” of the 70’s and 80s roam free. Many, like Rios Montt, wield enough political power to ensure that their macabre pasts remain buried from public scrutiny. Throughout Latin America, human rights groups are seeking to convict these criminals, but most have confronted the greatest obstacle to a functioning justice system–impunity. In Guatemala, the state has made little attempt to investigate or prosecute those responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of war victims–most likely because a large percentage of these criminals still hold high government positions. In the few cases that have ended in conviction, only the material authors, those at the lowest level of the military, have been punished, while the intellectual author! s remain immune to prosecution.</p>
<p>Failing justice systems represent just one example of the weak institutions pervasive to Latin American societies, where corrupt bureaucracies create de facto inequality through clientelistic practices. This, coupled with rampant poverty and lack of education, perpetuates the region’s inequities, thwarting any hope for widespread political participation and democracy. These barriers to democracy could be eliminated, at least in part, by a strong state–that is, one with a ubiquitous and fair legal system and efficient bureaucratic institutions with the power to effectively regulate social relationships. Absent a state that fosters some sort of redistributi! on, however, equality, and therefore democracy, is unachievable.</p>
<p>To that end, the state must play a role in bolstering institutions that level the playing field for all citizens. That is, the state must provide equal access to education–so that citizens cast an informed vote–as well as access to markets through credit institutions and property rights to ensure equal economic opportunities. Most importantly, a key component to promoting equality lies in a strong judicial system that guarantees equality before the law. But how can such institutions be strengthened in states rife with corruption and favoritism?</p>
<p>Perhaps the best hope for the future of Latin American judicial systems lies in the past. By bringing perpetrators of the region’s “dirty wars” to trial, the state can prove that judicial institutions actually function. Justice systems in most Latin American nations have been ineffective for so long that citizens have lost any hope in their functionality. However, only by addressing past crimes can the system transform to become fair and effective in the future.</p>
<p>Convicting figures like Rios Montt is not only important to building state institutions; it is also central to overcoming Latin America’s culture of violence, the terrible relic of decades of conflict. In many Guatemalan indigenous communities, men and women are tormented by the memory of civil war. Tensions are palpable in villages where victims’ family members live alongside ex-paramilitaries that were forced to carry out atrocities against their own and neighboring villages. The effects of this brutal conflict will not easily dissipate. Despite a comprehensive UN report citing atrocities committed during the 36-year war, individual perpetrators have not been denounced, thus undermining the notion of universal justice enshrined in the Guatemalan constitution. This type of selective justice reinforces the ethnically exclusive nature of the country’s political system, leaving scant hope for universal participatory democracy.</p>
<p>The task of reforming Latin America’s judicial systems is daunting, especially given the immense political power of those who will suffer if justice is implemented. However, in order for equality and democracy to take root, all citizens must be afforded the same rights and opportunities and be held to the same standards. Only then will their votes be meaningful.</p>
<p>LISA VISCIDI is a graduate student at NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
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<p>More U.S. sanctions against Russia are "teed up" and ready to be put in place if Moscow does not honor a peace deal on Ukraine, President Barack Obama said Thursday.</p>
<p>The U.S. and Russia <a href="" type="internal">signed an accord in Geneva last week</a> committing to a plan to solve the crisis by diplomatic means.</p>
<p>But speaking at a press conference in Japan, Obama reiterated U.S. concerns that Moscow was encouraging armed pro-Russian separatists on the ground in eastern Ukraine.</p>
<p>"So far at least we have seen them not abide by the spirit or the letter of the agreement in Geneva," Obama said. "We have prepared for the possibility of applying additional sanctions."</p>
<p>The president was <a href="" type="internal">speaking in Tokyo</a> on the second day of his five-day tour of Asia.</p>
<p>Although the U.S. <a href="" type="internal">announced Wednesday it was sending 600 additional troops to Eastern Europe</a> in response to Russia's actions, Obama outright dismissed the idea of using force to solve the crisis. He said the U.S. would only add to <a href="http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl23331.aspx" type="external">sanctions imposed by the Treasury in March</a> in response to Russia's annexation of Crimea.</p>
<p>The difference in tone from Moscow was spelled out in an interview by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday. He <a href="" type="internal">compared the situation in Ukraine to its 2008 war with Georgia, another ex-Soviet neighbor,</a> and said Russia would be prepared act in a similar way if its "interests" were attacked.</p>
<p>Obama said Thursday he had not been "overly optimistic" that Russia would follow through on the Geneva deal and urged other countries to put pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to change course.</p>
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Barack Obama Says More U.S. Sanctions Are ‘Teed Up’ Against Russia
| false |
http://nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/barack-obama-says-more-u-s-sanctions-are-teed-against-n88391
|
2014-04-24
| 3left-center
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Barack Obama Says More U.S. Sanctions Are ‘Teed Up’ Against Russia
<p>More U.S. sanctions against Russia are "teed up" and ready to be put in place if Moscow does not honor a peace deal on Ukraine, President Barack Obama said Thursday.</p>
<p>The U.S. and Russia <a href="" type="internal">signed an accord in Geneva last week</a> committing to a plan to solve the crisis by diplomatic means.</p>
<p>But speaking at a press conference in Japan, Obama reiterated U.S. concerns that Moscow was encouraging armed pro-Russian separatists on the ground in eastern Ukraine.</p>
<p>"So far at least we have seen them not abide by the spirit or the letter of the agreement in Geneva," Obama said. "We have prepared for the possibility of applying additional sanctions."</p>
<p>The president was <a href="" type="internal">speaking in Tokyo</a> on the second day of his five-day tour of Asia.</p>
<p>Although the U.S. <a href="" type="internal">announced Wednesday it was sending 600 additional troops to Eastern Europe</a> in response to Russia's actions, Obama outright dismissed the idea of using force to solve the crisis. He said the U.S. would only add to <a href="http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl23331.aspx" type="external">sanctions imposed by the Treasury in March</a> in response to Russia's annexation of Crimea.</p>
<p>The difference in tone from Moscow was spelled out in an interview by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday. He <a href="" type="internal">compared the situation in Ukraine to its 2008 war with Georgia, another ex-Soviet neighbor,</a> and said Russia would be prepared act in a similar way if its "interests" were attacked.</p>
<p>Obama said Thursday he had not been "overly optimistic" that Russia would follow through on the Geneva deal and urged other countries to put pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to change course.</p>
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<p>Shale crude-oil production from seven major U.S. oil plays is expected to climb in August, according to <a href="https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/drilling/#tabs-summary-2" type="external">monthly report from the Energy Information Administration Opens a New Window.</a> released Monday. Shale output is seen rising by 113,000 barrels a day to 5.585 million barrels a day in August from July, the EIA said. Oil output from the Permian Basin, which covers parts of western Texas and southeastern New Mexico, is expected to see the largest climb among the big shale plays, with an increase of 64,000 barrels a day. August West Texas Intermediate oil continued to trade lower, losing 42 cents, or 0.9%, to $46.12 a barrel, less than a half hour before the settlement on the New York Mercantile Exchange.</p>
<p>Copyright © 2017 MarketWatch, Inc.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
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U.S. Shale Oil Output Expected To Rise By 113,000 Barrels a Day In August: EIA
| true |
http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/07/17/us-shale-oil-output-expected-to-rise-by-113000-barrels-day-in-august-eia.html
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2017-07-17
| 0right
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U.S. Shale Oil Output Expected To Rise By 113,000 Barrels a Day In August: EIA
<p>Shale crude-oil production from seven major U.S. oil plays is expected to climb in August, according to <a href="https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/drilling/#tabs-summary-2" type="external">monthly report from the Energy Information Administration Opens a New Window.</a> released Monday. Shale output is seen rising by 113,000 barrels a day to 5.585 million barrels a day in August from July, the EIA said. Oil output from the Permian Basin, which covers parts of western Texas and southeastern New Mexico, is expected to see the largest climb among the big shale plays, with an increase of 64,000 barrels a day. August West Texas Intermediate oil continued to trade lower, losing 42 cents, or 0.9%, to $46.12 a barrel, less than a half hour before the settlement on the New York Mercantile Exchange.</p>
<p>Copyright © 2017 MarketWatch, Inc.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
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<p>Mahershala Ali scooped up some gold hardware at Sunday night’s Oscars, winning best actor in a supporting role for “Moonlight,” which also won best picture.</p>
<p>Which means he’s graduated to a secure spot on Hollywood’s A-list now.</p>
<p>But he hasn’t forgotten his roots – in addition to thanking his onetime teacher, the late Zelda Fichandler, who headed Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage for decades, in his onstage acceptance speech, Ali also gave credit to his role on “House of Cards” for his Oscar win. In the Netflix series, he played Remy Danton, a former staffer to President Frank Underwood who goes on to become an energy lobbyist fluent in the backstabbing, Machiavellian maneuvering his old boss was known for.</p>
<p>It was hardly a star-making role, but in an interview backstage at the Oscars, Ali said it set him up to be where he is now. After a dozen years or so of steady work on his part, he noted, the breakout political drama became one of the first shows that viewers binge-watched.</p>
<p>“So to be a part of that and that being something that feels really authentic for our culture and a real option in how we view and absorb and embrace content … that’s the reason I’ve been able to put certain things together and even have this moment because of the – the four years I spent on ‘House of Cards,'” he said.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
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Mahershala Ali: Playing a shady lobbyist on ‘House of Cards’ paved way for Oscar win
| false |
https://abqjournal.com/959089/mahershala-ali-playing-a-shady-lobbyist-on-house-of-cards-paved-way-for-oscar-win.html
| 2least
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Mahershala Ali: Playing a shady lobbyist on ‘House of Cards’ paved way for Oscar win
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p>Mahershala Ali scooped up some gold hardware at Sunday night’s Oscars, winning best actor in a supporting role for “Moonlight,” which also won best picture.</p>
<p>Which means he’s graduated to a secure spot on Hollywood’s A-list now.</p>
<p>But he hasn’t forgotten his roots – in addition to thanking his onetime teacher, the late Zelda Fichandler, who headed Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage for decades, in his onstage acceptance speech, Ali also gave credit to his role on “House of Cards” for his Oscar win. In the Netflix series, he played Remy Danton, a former staffer to President Frank Underwood who goes on to become an energy lobbyist fluent in the backstabbing, Machiavellian maneuvering his old boss was known for.</p>
<p>It was hardly a star-making role, but in an interview backstage at the Oscars, Ali said it set him up to be where he is now. After a dozen years or so of steady work on his part, he noted, the breakout political drama became one of the first shows that viewers binge-watched.</p>
<p>“So to be a part of that and that being something that feels really authentic for our culture and a real option in how we view and absorb and embrace content … that’s the reason I’ve been able to put certain things together and even have this moment because of the – the four years I spent on ‘House of Cards,'” he said.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
| 7,839 |
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<p>There are millions more low-income Californians than there are places they can afford to live, and the problem could only get worse in the coming years.</p>
<p>But if Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins (D) gets her way this year, the left coast will take one significant step toward reestablishing the link between hard work and a roof over one’s head. Atkins <a href="http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/02/25/50034/state-democrats-roll-out-plan-to-fund-construction/" type="external">wants to create</a> an enduring, independent source of affordable housing money in the state by <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-plan-to-fund-more-affordable-housing-20150225-story.html" type="external">charging a $75 fee</a> on some real estate document filings.</p>
<p>The fees — a rounding error compared to the amounts of money involved in most property sales and development projects — would go to the California Housing Trust Fund, a dedicated body for facilitating affordable housing development projects. Such trust funds are a common and effective way for both states and local governments to not only supplement the limited federal resources available for affordable housing work, according to Mary Brooks, a senior adviser to the Center for Community Change’s Housing Trust Fund Project. They also help keep such development work grounded in local communities.</p>
<p>The hundreds of state and local housing trust funds and associated community oversight bodies around the country are “an expression that we do need to make that kind of commitment and not just rely on the federal government,” Brooks said. “Cities and counties and states need to pitch in as well.”</p>
<p>Atkins’ proposal is adapted from a similar bill that has stalled twice in recent years, falling two votes short of passage last time around. Realtors <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-plan-to-fund-more-affordable-housing-20150225-story.html" type="external">opposed the idea in the past</a> as an addition to the cost of closing deals, but Atkins’ new version might find a way around those objections. <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2015/02/26/legislative-leader-proposes-new-fees-tax-credits.html" type="external">Only the first three documents</a> tied to a given deal would face the fee, according to the Sacramento Business Journal’s report on the proposal.</p>
<p>There is healthy precedent for the idea beyond California’s previous attempts. “Document recording fees are the second most popular revenues source that states use” for financing affordable housing trust funds, Brooks told ThinkProgress. The group’s site lists 47 states that maintain a housing trust fund, and nine of them fund it using fees on real estate documents of the sort that Atkins is proposing.</p>
<p>Linking the fund to a dedicated and steady stream of money would go a long way. “That ongoing source of public revenue enables the state not only to be smart and strategic about how it uses those resources,” Brooks said, “but also enables the nonprofit and for-profit affordable housing communities to be able to use those funds in productive ways.” Document fees in Ohio furnish about $50 million a year to support “a variety of programs from addressing homelessness to the production and preservation of affordable housing.” Illinois uses the fees to finance a state-level rental subsidy program modeled on the federal Section 8 voucher system, which leaves other tax revenue from real estate deals available for helping to build more such housing.</p>
<p>And California desperately needs the boost Atkins’ proposes. In Los Angeles County alone, the affordable housing shortfall is about a half-million units. In the spring of 2014, there were 490,000 more low-income families than there were housing units they could afford to live in, according to the Southern California Association of Non-Profit Housing (SCANPH), and executive director Alan Greenlee expects that number to rise when the group’s new study is finished later this spring. “It’s not getting any better,” Greenlee told ThinkProgress.</p>
<p>The statewide shortfall is closer to a million units, according to similar research by the California Housing Partnership Corporation, and there is <a href="http://www.chpc.net/dnld/CHPCHousingNeedReport020814FINAL.pdf" type="external">not a single county or legislative district in California</a> that has enough affordable housing for extremely low-income families who earn less than a third of the median earnings in their area.</p>
<p>The documents fee would inject hundreds of millions of dollars into the state’s long-dormant Housing Trust Fund with the specific purpose of increasing the stock of affordable units and slowing the rate at which currently affordable units get overhauled into high-income living space. But the state and federal tax codes would remain <a href="http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&amp;id=4067" type="external">stuffed with incentives that favor wealthier homeowners and encourage unaffordable development</a>.</p>
<p>Still, additional resources like the kind that Atkins’ plan would generate are critical to maintaining the network of programs that attempt to serve affordable housing needs — “a step in the right direction,” Eric Tars of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. The revenue wouldn’t address the underfunding of federal rent vouchers that help match existing housing units with tenants who need subsidies, but it would be a boon to the construction side of the affordable housing policy landscape.</p>
<p>“With all of these programs, the level of resources is below the level of need,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Senior Policy Analyst Will Fischer said, noting that just one family out of every four who are eligible ever receive federal housing vouchers. “There’s long been a shortfall in rental assistance, and waiting lists, because it’s never been funded as an entitlement like assistance for other basic needs.” Unlike food stamps and other safety net programs tied to things defined as essentials, federal housing programs “are funded in limited quantity through the appropriations process.” Political winds and budget pressures end up robbing even the most effective affordable housing programs of the money they need to meet demand for their services.</p>
<p>The lack funding for affordable housing dates much further back than the Obama-era fixation on federal deficits, to the Reagan presidency. Federal spending on low- and moderate-income housing through Housing and Urban Development (HUD) peaked in 1978. By 1996, HUD was spending <a href="http://www.wraphome.org/downloads/2010%20Update%20Without%20Housing.pdf" type="external">75 percent less each year</a> on those programs, after adjusting for inflation. In that time, a 300,000-unit surplus of affordable housing nationwide turned into a multi-million-family shortfall. The Great Recession exacerbated the problem — the gap hit <a href="http://www.icphusa.org/filelibrary/ICPH_PolicyBrief_AHomeByAnyOtherName.pdf" type="external">5.5 million housing units</a> in 2009 — but the broad shape of the failure to connect people to places they could afford <a href="" type="internal">was already locked into place</a> long before the downturn.</p>
<p>If Atkins’ plan goes through, it would finally fix a 20-year-old unforced error. California appears on the Center for Community Change’s Housing Trust Fund Project list of 47 states that has a Housing Trust Fund because it established one in the mid-80s, but it’s a sort of honorary degree. Tax revenues from the fossil fuel industry were supposed to keep the fund funded, but it never got off the ground. “There was some money put in in year one, but never since,” Housing California executive director Shamus Roller told ThinkProgress. “For practical purposes, there is really no housing trust fund in California.”</p>
<p>Affordable housing has always relied on a mixture of federal money and state-level programs, and California recently gutted the primary generator of state money for building the kinds of projects that would bring federal rent voucher money for residents and tax incentives for builders. For years, California government agencies used property tax revenue to finance targeted redevelopment projects around the state. The redevelopment agencies were required to spend 20 percent of the money they raised from the bond markets to build affordable housing.</p>
<p>But Gov. Jerry Brown (D) eliminated the redevelopment agencies a few years ago because the system required the state treasury to reimburse the local school districts for the property tax revenue the schools lost when their area was designated as a redevelopment zone. The move saved California nearly $2 billion a year by putting an end to the schools payments. But it also wiped out a billion dollars in annual affordable housing money, “a huge blow” according to Roller. “In 2007, there was $1.2 or $1.3 billion per year flowing into affordable development. That essentially all went away by 2012.” By comparison, he said, “we spend about $7.7 billion subsidizing mostly higher income people” through tax breaks for developers and homeowners.</p>
|
California’s Innovative Plan To Crack The Code For Affordable Housing
| true |
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/03/10/3631475/california-proposal-addresses-broken-promises-affordable-housing/
|
2015-03-10
| 4left
|
California’s Innovative Plan To Crack The Code For Affordable Housing
<p>There are millions more low-income Californians than there are places they can afford to live, and the problem could only get worse in the coming years.</p>
<p>But if Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins (D) gets her way this year, the left coast will take one significant step toward reestablishing the link between hard work and a roof over one’s head. Atkins <a href="http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/02/25/50034/state-democrats-roll-out-plan-to-fund-construction/" type="external">wants to create</a> an enduring, independent source of affordable housing money in the state by <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-plan-to-fund-more-affordable-housing-20150225-story.html" type="external">charging a $75 fee</a> on some real estate document filings.</p>
<p>The fees — a rounding error compared to the amounts of money involved in most property sales and development projects — would go to the California Housing Trust Fund, a dedicated body for facilitating affordable housing development projects. Such trust funds are a common and effective way for both states and local governments to not only supplement the limited federal resources available for affordable housing work, according to Mary Brooks, a senior adviser to the Center for Community Change’s Housing Trust Fund Project. They also help keep such development work grounded in local communities.</p>
<p>The hundreds of state and local housing trust funds and associated community oversight bodies around the country are “an expression that we do need to make that kind of commitment and not just rely on the federal government,” Brooks said. “Cities and counties and states need to pitch in as well.”</p>
<p>Atkins’ proposal is adapted from a similar bill that has stalled twice in recent years, falling two votes short of passage last time around. Realtors <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-plan-to-fund-more-affordable-housing-20150225-story.html" type="external">opposed the idea in the past</a> as an addition to the cost of closing deals, but Atkins’ new version might find a way around those objections. <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2015/02/26/legislative-leader-proposes-new-fees-tax-credits.html" type="external">Only the first three documents</a> tied to a given deal would face the fee, according to the Sacramento Business Journal’s report on the proposal.</p>
<p>There is healthy precedent for the idea beyond California’s previous attempts. “Document recording fees are the second most popular revenues source that states use” for financing affordable housing trust funds, Brooks told ThinkProgress. The group’s site lists 47 states that maintain a housing trust fund, and nine of them fund it using fees on real estate documents of the sort that Atkins is proposing.</p>
<p>Linking the fund to a dedicated and steady stream of money would go a long way. “That ongoing source of public revenue enables the state not only to be smart and strategic about how it uses those resources,” Brooks said, “but also enables the nonprofit and for-profit affordable housing communities to be able to use those funds in productive ways.” Document fees in Ohio furnish about $50 million a year to support “a variety of programs from addressing homelessness to the production and preservation of affordable housing.” Illinois uses the fees to finance a state-level rental subsidy program modeled on the federal Section 8 voucher system, which leaves other tax revenue from real estate deals available for helping to build more such housing.</p>
<p>And California desperately needs the boost Atkins’ proposes. In Los Angeles County alone, the affordable housing shortfall is about a half-million units. In the spring of 2014, there were 490,000 more low-income families than there were housing units they could afford to live in, according to the Southern California Association of Non-Profit Housing (SCANPH), and executive director Alan Greenlee expects that number to rise when the group’s new study is finished later this spring. “It’s not getting any better,” Greenlee told ThinkProgress.</p>
<p>The statewide shortfall is closer to a million units, according to similar research by the California Housing Partnership Corporation, and there is <a href="http://www.chpc.net/dnld/CHPCHousingNeedReport020814FINAL.pdf" type="external">not a single county or legislative district in California</a> that has enough affordable housing for extremely low-income families who earn less than a third of the median earnings in their area.</p>
<p>The documents fee would inject hundreds of millions of dollars into the state’s long-dormant Housing Trust Fund with the specific purpose of increasing the stock of affordable units and slowing the rate at which currently affordable units get overhauled into high-income living space. But the state and federal tax codes would remain <a href="http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&amp;id=4067" type="external">stuffed with incentives that favor wealthier homeowners and encourage unaffordable development</a>.</p>
<p>Still, additional resources like the kind that Atkins’ plan would generate are critical to maintaining the network of programs that attempt to serve affordable housing needs — “a step in the right direction,” Eric Tars of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. The revenue wouldn’t address the underfunding of federal rent vouchers that help match existing housing units with tenants who need subsidies, but it would be a boon to the construction side of the affordable housing policy landscape.</p>
<p>“With all of these programs, the level of resources is below the level of need,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Senior Policy Analyst Will Fischer said, noting that just one family out of every four who are eligible ever receive federal housing vouchers. “There’s long been a shortfall in rental assistance, and waiting lists, because it’s never been funded as an entitlement like assistance for other basic needs.” Unlike food stamps and other safety net programs tied to things defined as essentials, federal housing programs “are funded in limited quantity through the appropriations process.” Political winds and budget pressures end up robbing even the most effective affordable housing programs of the money they need to meet demand for their services.</p>
<p>The lack funding for affordable housing dates much further back than the Obama-era fixation on federal deficits, to the Reagan presidency. Federal spending on low- and moderate-income housing through Housing and Urban Development (HUD) peaked in 1978. By 1996, HUD was spending <a href="http://www.wraphome.org/downloads/2010%20Update%20Without%20Housing.pdf" type="external">75 percent less each year</a> on those programs, after adjusting for inflation. In that time, a 300,000-unit surplus of affordable housing nationwide turned into a multi-million-family shortfall. The Great Recession exacerbated the problem — the gap hit <a href="http://www.icphusa.org/filelibrary/ICPH_PolicyBrief_AHomeByAnyOtherName.pdf" type="external">5.5 million housing units</a> in 2009 — but the broad shape of the failure to connect people to places they could afford <a href="" type="internal">was already locked into place</a> long before the downturn.</p>
<p>If Atkins’ plan goes through, it would finally fix a 20-year-old unforced error. California appears on the Center for Community Change’s Housing Trust Fund Project list of 47 states that has a Housing Trust Fund because it established one in the mid-80s, but it’s a sort of honorary degree. Tax revenues from the fossil fuel industry were supposed to keep the fund funded, but it never got off the ground. “There was some money put in in year one, but never since,” Housing California executive director Shamus Roller told ThinkProgress. “For practical purposes, there is really no housing trust fund in California.”</p>
<p>Affordable housing has always relied on a mixture of federal money and state-level programs, and California recently gutted the primary generator of state money for building the kinds of projects that would bring federal rent voucher money for residents and tax incentives for builders. For years, California government agencies used property tax revenue to finance targeted redevelopment projects around the state. The redevelopment agencies were required to spend 20 percent of the money they raised from the bond markets to build affordable housing.</p>
<p>But Gov. Jerry Brown (D) eliminated the redevelopment agencies a few years ago because the system required the state treasury to reimburse the local school districts for the property tax revenue the schools lost when their area was designated as a redevelopment zone. The move saved California nearly $2 billion a year by putting an end to the schools payments. But it also wiped out a billion dollars in annual affordable housing money, “a huge blow” according to Roller. “In 2007, there was $1.2 or $1.3 billion per year flowing into affordable development. That essentially all went away by 2012.” By comparison, he said, “we spend about $7.7 billion subsidizing mostly higher income people” through tax breaks for developers and homeowners.</p>
| 7,840 |
<p>Shares of Fulgent Genetics Inc. jumped 13% in their market debut Thursday, after pricing at the low end of the $9 to $11 range for the company's initial public offering. The company sold 4.2 million shares to raise $37.8 million. Shares are trading on Nasdaq, under the ticker symbol 'FLGT'. Credit Suisse and Piper Jaffray were lead underwriters on the deal. The underwriters have a 30-day option to purchase up to 630,000 additional shares at the IPO price and the company's chief executive has indicated interest in buying up to 1.05 million shares at that price.</p>
<p>Copyright © 2016 MarketWatch, Inc.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
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Fulgent Genetics Shares Up 13% In Trading Debut
| true |
http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/09/29/fulgent-genetics-shares-up-13-in-trading-debut.html
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2016-09-29
| 0right
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Fulgent Genetics Shares Up 13% In Trading Debut
<p>Shares of Fulgent Genetics Inc. jumped 13% in their market debut Thursday, after pricing at the low end of the $9 to $11 range for the company's initial public offering. The company sold 4.2 million shares to raise $37.8 million. Shares are trading on Nasdaq, under the ticker symbol 'FLGT'. Credit Suisse and Piper Jaffray were lead underwriters on the deal. The underwriters have a 30-day option to purchase up to 630,000 additional shares at the IPO price and the company's chief executive has indicated interest in buying up to 1.05 million shares at that price.</p>
<p>Copyright © 2016 MarketWatch, Inc.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
| 7,841 |
<p>Easy victories can be dangerous to the politicians who achieve them, a lesson that Hillary Rodham Clinton may be learning as she seeks her party’s presidential nomination. Coasting to re-election last fall has done her as much harm as good — because until now, she was never forced to confront her own equivocal positioning on Iraq.</p>
<p>Neither the weak antiwar candidate whom she ignored in the Senate primary last year nor the cloddish conservative Republican whom she trounced in the general election could test her. While the national consensus against the war hardened, she hesitated. If her opposition had been more effective, she would be better off now.</p>
<p>Clinton complains that opponents who accuse her of vacillation are distorting her record. She says that her enthusiasm for invading Iraq has been exaggerated, but she still tries to show toughness by refusing to admit error. She says that the president should bring the troops home before he leaves office in January 2009, without acknowledging that she had previously opposed any date certain for withdrawal.</p>
<p>Today, she says that she wouldn’t have voted to authorize the use of force had she known in September 2002 what we all know now about the mythical arsenal of mass destruction. Two years ago, she said that she felt “no regrets” about casting that same vote. And yet she remains reluctant to confess — as former Sen. John Edwards finally did concerning his vote — that she was wrong.</p>
<p />
<p>In fairness, it is true that as long ago as March 2003 Clinton voiced her preference for “coercive inspection” rather than preemptive war. When the moment of the invasion arrived, she released a supportive statement that mentioned a forlorn yearning for “more international support.”</p>
<p>None of her murmured dissents, however, approached the fervor of the floor speech she made this month. “If I had been president in October of 2002, I would have never asked for authority to divert our attention from Afghanistan to Iraq,” she declared, “and I certainly would never have started this war.”</p>
<p>Like most Americans, Clinton has changed her mind. Unfortunately for her, Sen. Barack Obama didn’t have to change his mind. As her campaign rival, he is understandably emphasizing that fact. “Even at the time, it was possible to make judgments that this would not work out well,” he noted recently.</p>
<p>Then again, at the time very few people cared what Obama said about the war, because he was an Illinois state senator and only an aspiring contender for the U.S. Senate. He didn’t have to cast an actual vote to authorize the use of military force. He cannot now suggest that anyone who voted for that resolution is unfit to be president. In 2004, after all, he delivered a stirring speech seconding the presidential nomination of Sen. John Kerry, who also voted to authorize the war — and who failed to explain that decision adequately during his stumbling campaign.</p>
<p>The most convincing explanation is simple and happens to be true. When the president asked for the authorization, he told America he would use that power to “keep the peace.” He said the authorization would force Saddam Hussein to permit the U.N. weapons inspectors to return to Iraq and fulfill the pertinent resolutions. He promised that he would invade only as “a last resort.”</p>
<p>Those false promises persuaded Clinton to support the resolution. She endorsed the potential use of force because she wanted the inspectors to return to Iraq — as she has said many times. She then watched President Bush terminate the inspections unilaterally, violating his pledge to seek a peaceful resolution. Trusting him was a mistake that she should no longer be unwilling to admit.</p>
<p>She would have fewer difficulties as a presidential candidate if she had effectively addressed that error last year. Instead, she listened to the same circle of strategists who stupidly warned her not to oppose the war too vocally, lest she appear “weak.”</p>
<p>Is Clinton strong enough to reject that kind of bad advice in the future?</p>
<p>She might begin to demonstrate that strength not only by opposing the escalation of the war effort in Iraq but by speaking out against the provocation of a military conflict with Iran. She should lead the Democratic Party in demanding that the president reverse course and accept the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, including diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria.</p>
<p>She can play an important role in preventing another foreign-policy disaster. She can prove that experience matters — by showing what she has learned from hers.</p>
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Time for Hillary to Admit Error -- and Act
| true |
https://truthdig.com/articles/time-for-hillary-to-admit-error-and-act/
|
2007-02-15
| 4left
|
Time for Hillary to Admit Error -- and Act
<p>Easy victories can be dangerous to the politicians who achieve them, a lesson that Hillary Rodham Clinton may be learning as she seeks her party’s presidential nomination. Coasting to re-election last fall has done her as much harm as good — because until now, she was never forced to confront her own equivocal positioning on Iraq.</p>
<p>Neither the weak antiwar candidate whom she ignored in the Senate primary last year nor the cloddish conservative Republican whom she trounced in the general election could test her. While the national consensus against the war hardened, she hesitated. If her opposition had been more effective, she would be better off now.</p>
<p>Clinton complains that opponents who accuse her of vacillation are distorting her record. She says that her enthusiasm for invading Iraq has been exaggerated, but she still tries to show toughness by refusing to admit error. She says that the president should bring the troops home before he leaves office in January 2009, without acknowledging that she had previously opposed any date certain for withdrawal.</p>
<p>Today, she says that she wouldn’t have voted to authorize the use of force had she known in September 2002 what we all know now about the mythical arsenal of mass destruction. Two years ago, she said that she felt “no regrets” about casting that same vote. And yet she remains reluctant to confess — as former Sen. John Edwards finally did concerning his vote — that she was wrong.</p>
<p />
<p>In fairness, it is true that as long ago as March 2003 Clinton voiced her preference for “coercive inspection” rather than preemptive war. When the moment of the invasion arrived, she released a supportive statement that mentioned a forlorn yearning for “more international support.”</p>
<p>None of her murmured dissents, however, approached the fervor of the floor speech she made this month. “If I had been president in October of 2002, I would have never asked for authority to divert our attention from Afghanistan to Iraq,” she declared, “and I certainly would never have started this war.”</p>
<p>Like most Americans, Clinton has changed her mind. Unfortunately for her, Sen. Barack Obama didn’t have to change his mind. As her campaign rival, he is understandably emphasizing that fact. “Even at the time, it was possible to make judgments that this would not work out well,” he noted recently.</p>
<p>Then again, at the time very few people cared what Obama said about the war, because he was an Illinois state senator and only an aspiring contender for the U.S. Senate. He didn’t have to cast an actual vote to authorize the use of military force. He cannot now suggest that anyone who voted for that resolution is unfit to be president. In 2004, after all, he delivered a stirring speech seconding the presidential nomination of Sen. John Kerry, who also voted to authorize the war — and who failed to explain that decision adequately during his stumbling campaign.</p>
<p>The most convincing explanation is simple and happens to be true. When the president asked for the authorization, he told America he would use that power to “keep the peace.” He said the authorization would force Saddam Hussein to permit the U.N. weapons inspectors to return to Iraq and fulfill the pertinent resolutions. He promised that he would invade only as “a last resort.”</p>
<p>Those false promises persuaded Clinton to support the resolution. She endorsed the potential use of force because she wanted the inspectors to return to Iraq — as she has said many times. She then watched President Bush terminate the inspections unilaterally, violating his pledge to seek a peaceful resolution. Trusting him was a mistake that she should no longer be unwilling to admit.</p>
<p>She would have fewer difficulties as a presidential candidate if she had effectively addressed that error last year. Instead, she listened to the same circle of strategists who stupidly warned her not to oppose the war too vocally, lest she appear “weak.”</p>
<p>Is Clinton strong enough to reject that kind of bad advice in the future?</p>
<p>She might begin to demonstrate that strength not only by opposing the escalation of the war effort in Iraq but by speaking out against the provocation of a military conflict with Iran. She should lead the Democratic Party in demanding that the president reverse course and accept the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, including diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria.</p>
<p>She can play an important role in preventing another foreign-policy disaster. She can prove that experience matters — by showing what she has learned from hers.</p>
| 7,842 |
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<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The UNM Anderson School is presenting a “Be Fraud Smart” workshop from 4-7 p.m. May 9 by noted fraud expert and Anderson professor Richard G. Brody.</p>
<p>Organizers said in a news release that fraud occurs in businesses of all sizes, but small organizations suffer the most. In addition, fraud is almost always committed by a person of trust within an organization.</p>
<p>This workshop will outline the conditions that lead to fraud; provide an understanding of why small businesses are more susceptible to fraud; and provide strategies to help prevent and detect fraud in your organization.</p>
<p>Brody is the Douglas Minge Brown Professor of Accounting, associate director of the Center for Information Assurance Research and Education, and a Daniels Fund Business Ethics Fellow at the Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>He also is a Certified Public Accountant, a Certified Fraud Examiner, a Forensic Certified Public Accountant, and a Chartered Global Management Accountant.</p>
<p>The free talk will be at UNM Anderson School of Management’s Jackson Student Center. Space is limited; RSVP is required.</p>
<p>Contact Roxanne Blair at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a> or by calling 505-277-1504</p>
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Business fraud is workshop topic
| false |
https://abqjournal.com/102862/business-fraud-is-workshop-topic.html
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2012-04-30
| 2least
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Business fraud is workshop topic
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The UNM Anderson School is presenting a “Be Fraud Smart” workshop from 4-7 p.m. May 9 by noted fraud expert and Anderson professor Richard G. Brody.</p>
<p>Organizers said in a news release that fraud occurs in businesses of all sizes, but small organizations suffer the most. In addition, fraud is almost always committed by a person of trust within an organization.</p>
<p>This workshop will outline the conditions that lead to fraud; provide an understanding of why small businesses are more susceptible to fraud; and provide strategies to help prevent and detect fraud in your organization.</p>
<p>Brody is the Douglas Minge Brown Professor of Accounting, associate director of the Center for Information Assurance Research and Education, and a Daniels Fund Business Ethics Fellow at the Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>He also is a Certified Public Accountant, a Certified Fraud Examiner, a Forensic Certified Public Accountant, and a Chartered Global Management Accountant.</p>
<p>The free talk will be at UNM Anderson School of Management’s Jackson Student Center. Space is limited; RSVP is required.</p>
<p>Contact Roxanne Blair at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a> or by calling 505-277-1504</p>
| 7,843 |
<p>Aug. 27 (UPI) — ESPN analysts Teddy Atlas and Stephen A. Smith compared <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Floyd_Mayweather/" type="external">Floyd Mayweather</a> to a burger flipper after his win against <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Conor-McGregor/" type="external">Conor McGregor</a>.</p>
<p>The boisterous duo took the set to discuss the fight Saturday in Las Vegas.</p>
<p>It quickly became heated after Smith sounded as if he was slighting Mayweather’s style in winning the bout against the UFC star.</p>
<p>“He was what he had to be,” Atlas said on ESPN. “His character. His championship character and his big, big, big advantage of experience and belief in himself in this kind of format allowed him to dominate the guy in a way that he usually doesn’t dominate guys. He was able to pull that ace out of the deck when he had to.”</p>
<p>Smith disagreed with the legendary trainer-turned-analyst and said that Mayweather “was not great.”</p>
<p>The exchange then became very lively.</p>
<p>“What I’m saying is McGregor forced a gourmet chef to be a fast order cook,” Atlas said. “That’s what he did. He fought a gourmet chef. “</p>
<p>“But doesn’t that make him fast food?” Smith asked.</p>
<p>The duo then argued about steaks and fast food before Atlas’ response.</p>
<p>“He made him go in there and he made him flip cheeseburgers,” Atlas said. “He made him do something that he doesn’t normally do.”</p>
<p>Then Atlas got super heated.</p>
<p />
<p>“What I’m saying to you is this,” Smith said. “If you go to a restaurant and get some steak, some fillet minion, and instead you get a burger, ain’t it a burger? I mean it’s just a burger. That’s what we saw tonight.”</p>
<p>“It’s still a cheeseburger,” Smith said. “It’s not a steak.”</p>
<p>“But who’s eating it?” Atlas screamed. “Floyd’s eating it. The other guy’s not.”</p>
<p>Mayweather won the bout in the 10th round after a TKO. Referee <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Robert_Byrd/" type="external">Robert Byrd</a> stopped the fight.</p>
|
Mayweather vs. McGregor: Teddy Atlas calls 'Money' a burger flipper
| false |
https://newsline.com/mayweather-vs-mcgregor-teddy-atlas-calls-039money039-a-burger-flipper/
|
2017-08-27
| 1right-center
|
Mayweather vs. McGregor: Teddy Atlas calls 'Money' a burger flipper
<p>Aug. 27 (UPI) — ESPN analysts Teddy Atlas and Stephen A. Smith compared <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Floyd_Mayweather/" type="external">Floyd Mayweather</a> to a burger flipper after his win against <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Conor-McGregor/" type="external">Conor McGregor</a>.</p>
<p>The boisterous duo took the set to discuss the fight Saturday in Las Vegas.</p>
<p>It quickly became heated after Smith sounded as if he was slighting Mayweather’s style in winning the bout against the UFC star.</p>
<p>“He was what he had to be,” Atlas said on ESPN. “His character. His championship character and his big, big, big advantage of experience and belief in himself in this kind of format allowed him to dominate the guy in a way that he usually doesn’t dominate guys. He was able to pull that ace out of the deck when he had to.”</p>
<p>Smith disagreed with the legendary trainer-turned-analyst and said that Mayweather “was not great.”</p>
<p>The exchange then became very lively.</p>
<p>“What I’m saying is McGregor forced a gourmet chef to be a fast order cook,” Atlas said. “That’s what he did. He fought a gourmet chef. “</p>
<p>“But doesn’t that make him fast food?” Smith asked.</p>
<p>The duo then argued about steaks and fast food before Atlas’ response.</p>
<p>“He made him go in there and he made him flip cheeseburgers,” Atlas said. “He made him do something that he doesn’t normally do.”</p>
<p>Then Atlas got super heated.</p>
<p />
<p>“What I’m saying to you is this,” Smith said. “If you go to a restaurant and get some steak, some fillet minion, and instead you get a burger, ain’t it a burger? I mean it’s just a burger. That’s what we saw tonight.”</p>
<p>“It’s still a cheeseburger,” Smith said. “It’s not a steak.”</p>
<p>“But who’s eating it?” Atlas screamed. “Floyd’s eating it. The other guy’s not.”</p>
<p>Mayweather won the bout in the 10th round after a TKO. Referee <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Robert_Byrd/" type="external">Robert Byrd</a> stopped the fight.</p>
| 7,844 |
<p>I've never really had any desire to go on a cruise until I heard there would be one with HOT CHEFS ON BOARD. Bravo's "Top Chef" has announced a five-day voyage, which will set sail in April of 2013. Best part: Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons will be hosting along with some other favorite "Top Chef" and "Top Chef Masters' contestants from past seasons including - I'm only mentioning the boys - Hubert Keller, Tim Love, Michael Isabella, Spike Mendelsohn, Hosea Rosenberg and Angelo Sosa (who actually kind of frightens me). No mention of the Voltagggio brothers YET. But they are besties with Mike Isabella so maybe" Guests will eat their way from Miami to Cozumel, Mexico while participating in fun activities like mock "Quickfire" challenges. Um, yes please. <a href="http://topchefthecruise.com/" type="external">Tickets are on sale now</a>&#160;for a $699 per foodie fan. I need it. [ <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/top-chef-cruise-362759" type="external">Hollywood Reporter</a>]</p>
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I Want To Go To There: The 'Top Chef' Cruise
| true |
http://thefrisky.com/2012-08-17/i-want-to-go-to-there-the-top-chef-cruise/
|
2018-10-02
| 4left
|
I Want To Go To There: The 'Top Chef' Cruise
<p>I've never really had any desire to go on a cruise until I heard there would be one with HOT CHEFS ON BOARD. Bravo's "Top Chef" has announced a five-day voyage, which will set sail in April of 2013. Best part: Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons will be hosting along with some other favorite "Top Chef" and "Top Chef Masters' contestants from past seasons including - I'm only mentioning the boys - Hubert Keller, Tim Love, Michael Isabella, Spike Mendelsohn, Hosea Rosenberg and Angelo Sosa (who actually kind of frightens me). No mention of the Voltagggio brothers YET. But they are besties with Mike Isabella so maybe" Guests will eat their way from Miami to Cozumel, Mexico while participating in fun activities like mock "Quickfire" challenges. Um, yes please. <a href="http://topchefthecruise.com/" type="external">Tickets are on sale now</a>&#160;for a $699 per foodie fan. I need it. [ <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/top-chef-cruise-362759" type="external">Hollywood Reporter</a>]</p>
| 7,845 |
<p />
<p>Could what you don’t know about IRAs hurt your retirement?</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Individual retirement accounts can be used as a tool which allows you to save money for retirement with tax-free growth or on a tax-deferred basis. But financial advisors say many who could benefit know little or nothing about this saving option.</p>
<p>TIAA’s fifth annual IRA survey found that 33 percent of American adults have an IRA. And only 41 percent of those who are not currently contributing to an IRA would consider one as part of their retirement strategy – a decline from 56 percent in 2015.</p>
<p>Cindy Wilson, a Pasadena, Calif.-based financial advisor at TIAA, discussed with FOXBusiness.com some of the differences among IRAs and the full range of benefits they offer.&#160;Here is what you need to know.</p>
<p>Boomer: What are some of the generally unknown benefits that an IRA provider can offer?</p>
<p>Wilson:&#160;An IRA can be more than just a place to invest your savings. Some IRAs offer access to helpful financial advice and an option to convert your savings into a steady stream of income in retirement. However, in our fifth annual TIAA IRA survey, we found that many Americans do not consider the range of benefits an IRA provider can offer when selecting one. A surprising 56% said there is no difference or do not know if there is a difference among IRAs.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>But the fact is that many Americans are living longer in retirement, and retirement planning is often complicated. It is important that people take a big-picture view of their savings and investments. The professional advice that some IRA providers may offer can help you figure it all out — which investments are right for you, how much to put in each, and how to receive income in retirement.</p>
<p>Boomer:&#160;How can an IRA convert your savings into a stream of income in retirement?</p>
<p>Wilson:&#160;Many people focus on a lump sum of money they want to have saved before they retire, but a wiser approach is to think about how your savings will provide a steady source of income during retirement. The right IRA can help ensure you have the necessary funds to pay for the essentials, such as housing and medical care.</p>
<p>If you or a family member has worked for a nonprofit organization, you can invest in annuities through a TIAA IRA. Adding an annuity to your IRA can provide you with retirement income that you can’t outlive.</p>
<p>Boomer:&#160;When it comes to the understanding and involvement with IRAs, what are some of the generational differences?</p>
<p>Wilson:&#160;Our survey revealed an opportunity for Gen Y individuals to learn more about IRAs. Thirty-five percent who are not contributing to an IRA said they do not know enough about IRAs to consider using one, compared to 25 percent of respondents overall.</p>
<p>Gen Xers were more likely to say they don’t have enough money to save more than they already do. This group is often juggling multiple priorities and feels stretched to the limit. That’s why it’s important to keep in mind that choosing an IRA provider that offers advice can help you figure out a way to balance the need to save with other financial priorities.</p>
<p>An IRA provider that offers access to financial advice can also help individuals handle any extra income wisely. Our survey found that only 6 percent of respondents would contribute to an IRA if they had an extra $5,000 to spend or invest. About one-fourth said they would pay down debt or create or add to an emergency savings fund instead. But 30 percent would spend the money on home renovations, a vacation, technology upgrades or a shopping spree.</p>
<p>Boomer:&#160;What are some of the other unknown benefits of an IRA?</p>
<p>Wilson:&#160;An IRA can create flexible income options in retirement, and also offer tax savings and allow investments to compound over time. A Roth IRA can add tax diversification to a portfolio – pay taxes now, for tax free growth in a Roth IRA, or defer taxes now, and pay later with an IRA.&#160; Not enough people are aware of these benefits. Our survey found that only 33 percent of American adults have an IRA, and only 41 percent of Americans who are not currently contributing to an IRA would consider one as part of their retirement strategy.</p>
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What You Don't Know About IRAs
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http://foxbusiness.com/features/2016/07/21/what-dont-know-about-iras.html
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2016-07-21
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What You Don't Know About IRAs
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<p>Could what you don’t know about IRAs hurt your retirement?</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Individual retirement accounts can be used as a tool which allows you to save money for retirement with tax-free growth or on a tax-deferred basis. But financial advisors say many who could benefit know little or nothing about this saving option.</p>
<p>TIAA’s fifth annual IRA survey found that 33 percent of American adults have an IRA. And only 41 percent of those who are not currently contributing to an IRA would consider one as part of their retirement strategy – a decline from 56 percent in 2015.</p>
<p>Cindy Wilson, a Pasadena, Calif.-based financial advisor at TIAA, discussed with FOXBusiness.com some of the differences among IRAs and the full range of benefits they offer.&#160;Here is what you need to know.</p>
<p>Boomer: What are some of the generally unknown benefits that an IRA provider can offer?</p>
<p>Wilson:&#160;An IRA can be more than just a place to invest your savings. Some IRAs offer access to helpful financial advice and an option to convert your savings into a steady stream of income in retirement. However, in our fifth annual TIAA IRA survey, we found that many Americans do not consider the range of benefits an IRA provider can offer when selecting one. A surprising 56% said there is no difference or do not know if there is a difference among IRAs.</p>
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<p>But the fact is that many Americans are living longer in retirement, and retirement planning is often complicated. It is important that people take a big-picture view of their savings and investments. The professional advice that some IRA providers may offer can help you figure it all out — which investments are right for you, how much to put in each, and how to receive income in retirement.</p>
<p>Boomer:&#160;How can an IRA convert your savings into a stream of income in retirement?</p>
<p>Wilson:&#160;Many people focus on a lump sum of money they want to have saved before they retire, but a wiser approach is to think about how your savings will provide a steady source of income during retirement. The right IRA can help ensure you have the necessary funds to pay for the essentials, such as housing and medical care.</p>
<p>If you or a family member has worked for a nonprofit organization, you can invest in annuities through a TIAA IRA. Adding an annuity to your IRA can provide you with retirement income that you can’t outlive.</p>
<p>Boomer:&#160;When it comes to the understanding and involvement with IRAs, what are some of the generational differences?</p>
<p>Wilson:&#160;Our survey revealed an opportunity for Gen Y individuals to learn more about IRAs. Thirty-five percent who are not contributing to an IRA said they do not know enough about IRAs to consider using one, compared to 25 percent of respondents overall.</p>
<p>Gen Xers were more likely to say they don’t have enough money to save more than they already do. This group is often juggling multiple priorities and feels stretched to the limit. That’s why it’s important to keep in mind that choosing an IRA provider that offers advice can help you figure out a way to balance the need to save with other financial priorities.</p>
<p>An IRA provider that offers access to financial advice can also help individuals handle any extra income wisely. Our survey found that only 6 percent of respondents would contribute to an IRA if they had an extra $5,000 to spend or invest. About one-fourth said they would pay down debt or create or add to an emergency savings fund instead. But 30 percent would spend the money on home renovations, a vacation, technology upgrades or a shopping spree.</p>
<p>Boomer:&#160;What are some of the other unknown benefits of an IRA?</p>
<p>Wilson:&#160;An IRA can create flexible income options in retirement, and also offer tax savings and allow investments to compound over time. A Roth IRA can add tax diversification to a portfolio – pay taxes now, for tax free growth in a Roth IRA, or defer taxes now, and pay later with an IRA.&#160; Not enough people are aware of these benefits. Our survey found that only 33 percent of American adults have an IRA, and only 41 percent of Americans who are not currently contributing to an IRA would consider one as part of their retirement strategy.</p>
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<p>During a 60 Minutes interview Sunday night, CBS’ Lesley Stahl asked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) about the GOP’s intransigence when it comes to raising any new federal revenue, pointing out that Cantor’s hero, Ronald Reagan, raised taxes when the occasion called for it. Before Cantor could even attempt to explain anything, one of his spokesmen, <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/cantor-defends-house-g-o-p-stance-on-tax-increases/" type="external">Brad Dayspring</a>, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/2102-18560_162-57348499.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody" type="external">interrupted the interview</a>, taking issue with the notion that Reagan increased taxes:</p>
<p>STAHL: What’s the difference between compromise and cooperate?</p>
<p>CANTOR: Well, I would say cooperate is let’s look to where we can move things forward where we agree. Comprising principles, you don’t want to ask anybody to do that. That’s who they are as their core being.</p>
<p>STAHL: But you know, your idol, as I’ve read anyway, was Ronald Reagan. And he compromised.</p>
<p>CANTOR: He never compromised his principles.</p>
<p>STAHL: Well, he raised taxes and it was one of his principles not to raise taxes.</p>
<p>CANTOR: Well, he — he also cut taxes.</p>
<p>STAHL: But he did compromise —</p>
<p>CANTOR: Well I —</p>
<p>DAYSPRING: That just isn’t true. And I don’t want to let that stand.</p>
<p>Watch it:</p>
<p>Dayspring <a href="" type="internal">has had some trouble</a> with the facts regarding taxes before, but the notion that it “just isn’t true” that Reagan raised taxes is absurd. He raised taxes in <a href="" type="internal">seven of his eight years</a> in office, including one stretch of four tax increases in just two years. As Paul Krugman put it, “no peacetime president has <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/opinion/the-great-taxer.html?src=pm" type="external">raised taxes so much on so many people</a>.” Reagan also completely equalized the tax treatment of investment income with that of wage income, a position <a href="" type="internal">putting him to the left</a> of many of today’s Democrats, never mind Republicans.</p>
<p>Cantor’s office tried to clarify later that Dayspring’s remark “ <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/cantor-defends-house-g-o-p-stance-on-tax-increases/" type="external">referred to the cumulative effect</a> of Mr. Reagan’s tax policies, pointing out that he cut taxes more than he raised them, and that Mr. Reagan expressed regret making tax deals with Democrats because the spending cuts they agreed to never materialized.” But the point is, as historian Douglas Brinkley put it, “Ronald Reagan <a href="http://www.npr.org/2011/02/04/133489113/Reagan-Legacy-Clouds-Tax-Record" type="external">was never afraid to raise taxes</a>. He knew that it was necessary at times. And so there’s a false mythology out there about Reagan as this conservative president who came in and just cut taxes and trimmed federal spending in a dramatic way. It didn’t happen that way. It’s false.” And this is a truth that today’s GOP <a href="" type="internal">just hasn’t been able to handle</a>.</p>
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Cantor Spokesman Interrupts ’60 Minutes’ Interview To Falsely Claim Reagan Never Raised Taxes
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http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/01/03/396439/cantor-taxes-spokesman-reagan/
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2012-01-03
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Cantor Spokesman Interrupts ’60 Minutes’ Interview To Falsely Claim Reagan Never Raised Taxes
<p>During a 60 Minutes interview Sunday night, CBS’ Lesley Stahl asked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) about the GOP’s intransigence when it comes to raising any new federal revenue, pointing out that Cantor’s hero, Ronald Reagan, raised taxes when the occasion called for it. Before Cantor could even attempt to explain anything, one of his spokesmen, <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/cantor-defends-house-g-o-p-stance-on-tax-increases/" type="external">Brad Dayspring</a>, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/2102-18560_162-57348499.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody" type="external">interrupted the interview</a>, taking issue with the notion that Reagan increased taxes:</p>
<p>STAHL: What’s the difference between compromise and cooperate?</p>
<p>CANTOR: Well, I would say cooperate is let’s look to where we can move things forward where we agree. Comprising principles, you don’t want to ask anybody to do that. That’s who they are as their core being.</p>
<p>STAHL: But you know, your idol, as I’ve read anyway, was Ronald Reagan. And he compromised.</p>
<p>CANTOR: He never compromised his principles.</p>
<p>STAHL: Well, he raised taxes and it was one of his principles not to raise taxes.</p>
<p>CANTOR: Well, he — he also cut taxes.</p>
<p>STAHL: But he did compromise —</p>
<p>CANTOR: Well I —</p>
<p>DAYSPRING: That just isn’t true. And I don’t want to let that stand.</p>
<p>Watch it:</p>
<p>Dayspring <a href="" type="internal">has had some trouble</a> with the facts regarding taxes before, but the notion that it “just isn’t true” that Reagan raised taxes is absurd. He raised taxes in <a href="" type="internal">seven of his eight years</a> in office, including one stretch of four tax increases in just two years. As Paul Krugman put it, “no peacetime president has <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/opinion/the-great-taxer.html?src=pm" type="external">raised taxes so much on so many people</a>.” Reagan also completely equalized the tax treatment of investment income with that of wage income, a position <a href="" type="internal">putting him to the left</a> of many of today’s Democrats, never mind Republicans.</p>
<p>Cantor’s office tried to clarify later that Dayspring’s remark “ <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/cantor-defends-house-g-o-p-stance-on-tax-increases/" type="external">referred to the cumulative effect</a> of Mr. Reagan’s tax policies, pointing out that he cut taxes more than he raised them, and that Mr. Reagan expressed regret making tax deals with Democrats because the spending cuts they agreed to never materialized.” But the point is, as historian Douglas Brinkley put it, “Ronald Reagan <a href="http://www.npr.org/2011/02/04/133489113/Reagan-Legacy-Clouds-Tax-Record" type="external">was never afraid to raise taxes</a>. He knew that it was necessary at times. And so there’s a false mythology out there about Reagan as this conservative president who came in and just cut taxes and trimmed federal spending in a dramatic way. It didn’t happen that way. It’s false.” And this is a truth that today’s GOP <a href="" type="internal">just hasn’t been able to handle</a>.</p>
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<p>The World Health Organisation officially certified India and 10 other Asian countries free of polio on Thursday, a milestone lauded as a “momentous victory” over an ancient scourge. The Southeast Asian region, which includes India but excludes Afghanistan…</p>
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<p>Pakistani health teams will Sunday launch a drive to vaccinate some 750,000 children in the troubled northwest, with thousands of police guarding against attacks by militants who claim the polio campaign is a front for spying. The campaign in Peshawar…</p>
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<p />
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WHO Certifies India and Other Asian Nations Polio Free While Pakistan Struggles to Keep Up
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https://truthdig.com/articles/who-certifies-india-and-other-asian-nations-polio-free-while-pakistan-struggles-to-keep-up/
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2014-03-29
| 4left
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WHO Certifies India and Other Asian Nations Polio Free While Pakistan Struggles to Keep Up
<p />
<p>The World Health Organisation officially certified India and 10 other Asian countries free of polio on Thursday, a milestone lauded as a “momentous victory” over an ancient scourge. The Southeast Asian region, which includes India but excludes Afghanistan…</p>
<p />
<p>Pakistani health teams will Sunday launch a drive to vaccinate some 750,000 children in the troubled northwest, with thousands of police guarding against attacks by militants who claim the polio campaign is a front for spying. The campaign in Peshawar…</p>
<p />
<p />
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<p>There’s something unfortunate about me and holidays.</p>
<p>Like the time my hand got slammed in a door just as I was going in to the sanctuary to preach on Christmas Eve.&#160; There’s nothing like standing in front of 500 people, who are filled with joy and excitement on that most special night, wondering if you are either going to be sick or pass out right there on the platform.&#160; I whispered to one deacon as we walked in together that the sermon was in the pulpit.&#160; “If I go down, just pull it out and read it.”</p>
<p>I had similar flashbacks last month as we planned for Holy Week.&#160; I was asked to participate in the Tenebrae service on Good Friday… and broke out in a cold sweat.&#160; It’s really a pretty simple task.&#160; Light the candles at the appropriate time. &#160;Easy enough.&#160; Unless, of course, you’re in your 40’s and have recently entered that no man’s land between needing glasses to read and needing glasses all the time.&#160; Some of you have been there and already know where this is going.</p>
<p>There’s great denial when you’re first wandering in that valley.&#160; And a lot of squinting.&#160; But one Good Friday evening I discovered a fail safe way to determine if you’ve crossed over to the dark side of the visual spectrum… and middle age.</p>
<p>Not having any reading parts in the service, I confidently and vainly left my glasses in my office.&#160; All was holy and beautiful as the choir sang and the orchestra played.&#160; On cue, I approached the communion table with reverence where multiple candles were artfully and solemnly displayed, a large Christ candle in the center of the table.&#160; The first sign of trouble came when the wick at the end of my long, brass candle lighter kept missing the flame atop the Christ candle.</p>
<p>Apparently, the difference between what I was seeing and reality was about one inch.</p>
<p>Though the brass lighter was eventually lit, my hesitancy deepened in that moment, as did my prayer life.&#160; Like a basketball player who misses the first of two free throws in a big game, I approached the lighting of the first candle with fear and trembling…. Literally.&#160; My one inch gap was now a one inch dancing ring of fire around the candle as I tried to find the wick to light it.&#160; Had the lighter been a sparkler on a dark night, I’m sure all of my shaking would have spelled out “Help me, please!” in the night sky.&#160; Anxious stares were coming from the front row of the choir loft.&#160; “Go left!&#160; Go left!” I’m sure I heard one soprano whisper.</p>
<p>I sweat blood with Jesus in the Garden that night.&#160; I can laugh about it now, on this side of my progressive lenses. &#160;But that feeling has come back to me many times since then.&#160; Perhaps you’ve experienced it somewhere along the way.</p>
<p>When the gap between what you see and reality is one inch, or one misunderstood conversation, or one regrettable moment, and you just can’t seem to fix it.</p>
<p>When you struggle to connect where you are in your life with where you want to be, and don’t know which way to go.</p>
<p>When the flame God seeks to light can’t seem to find a wick to take hold of in you, and you’re about ready to stop trying.</p>
<p>Those are the moments when we live between the tomb and resurrection.&#160; Helpless.&#160; Hopeless.</p>
<p>Faith is choosing to believe in resurrection when you are in the tomb.&#160; To believe that God can change your situation, though you have neither the strength nor the know-how to roll the stone away.&#160; &#160;To dare to imagine God’s dream for your relationship, for your circumstance, for all of the daily and difficult tomb-like places in your life, even when you can’t fathom what that might look like; even, and especially, when darkness seems inevitable.</p>
<p>Because candles get lit, so often despite our own inadequacies and failings and pride.</p>
<p>Our God is a God of resurrection; a God who brings new life in places where we thought new life was not possible.&#160; Holy Week calls us to believe beyond ourselves.</p>
<p>Light a candle today.&#160; Allow it to burn brightly as a reminder that God sees what we often cannot see, and as an act of trust in the power of the God who calls you out of darkness into his marvelous light.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
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Tenebrae & Trust
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https://baptistnews.com/article/tenebrae-trust/
| 3left-center
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Tenebrae & Trust
<p>There’s something unfortunate about me and holidays.</p>
<p>Like the time my hand got slammed in a door just as I was going in to the sanctuary to preach on Christmas Eve.&#160; There’s nothing like standing in front of 500 people, who are filled with joy and excitement on that most special night, wondering if you are either going to be sick or pass out right there on the platform.&#160; I whispered to one deacon as we walked in together that the sermon was in the pulpit.&#160; “If I go down, just pull it out and read it.”</p>
<p>I had similar flashbacks last month as we planned for Holy Week.&#160; I was asked to participate in the Tenebrae service on Good Friday… and broke out in a cold sweat.&#160; It’s really a pretty simple task.&#160; Light the candles at the appropriate time. &#160;Easy enough.&#160; Unless, of course, you’re in your 40’s and have recently entered that no man’s land between needing glasses to read and needing glasses all the time.&#160; Some of you have been there and already know where this is going.</p>
<p>There’s great denial when you’re first wandering in that valley.&#160; And a lot of squinting.&#160; But one Good Friday evening I discovered a fail safe way to determine if you’ve crossed over to the dark side of the visual spectrum… and middle age.</p>
<p>Not having any reading parts in the service, I confidently and vainly left my glasses in my office.&#160; All was holy and beautiful as the choir sang and the orchestra played.&#160; On cue, I approached the communion table with reverence where multiple candles were artfully and solemnly displayed, a large Christ candle in the center of the table.&#160; The first sign of trouble came when the wick at the end of my long, brass candle lighter kept missing the flame atop the Christ candle.</p>
<p>Apparently, the difference between what I was seeing and reality was about one inch.</p>
<p>Though the brass lighter was eventually lit, my hesitancy deepened in that moment, as did my prayer life.&#160; Like a basketball player who misses the first of two free throws in a big game, I approached the lighting of the first candle with fear and trembling…. Literally.&#160; My one inch gap was now a one inch dancing ring of fire around the candle as I tried to find the wick to light it.&#160; Had the lighter been a sparkler on a dark night, I’m sure all of my shaking would have spelled out “Help me, please!” in the night sky.&#160; Anxious stares were coming from the front row of the choir loft.&#160; “Go left!&#160; Go left!” I’m sure I heard one soprano whisper.</p>
<p>I sweat blood with Jesus in the Garden that night.&#160; I can laugh about it now, on this side of my progressive lenses. &#160;But that feeling has come back to me many times since then.&#160; Perhaps you’ve experienced it somewhere along the way.</p>
<p>When the gap between what you see and reality is one inch, or one misunderstood conversation, or one regrettable moment, and you just can’t seem to fix it.</p>
<p>When you struggle to connect where you are in your life with where you want to be, and don’t know which way to go.</p>
<p>When the flame God seeks to light can’t seem to find a wick to take hold of in you, and you’re about ready to stop trying.</p>
<p>Those are the moments when we live between the tomb and resurrection.&#160; Helpless.&#160; Hopeless.</p>
<p>Faith is choosing to believe in resurrection when you are in the tomb.&#160; To believe that God can change your situation, though you have neither the strength nor the know-how to roll the stone away.&#160; &#160;To dare to imagine God’s dream for your relationship, for your circumstance, for all of the daily and difficult tomb-like places in your life, even when you can’t fathom what that might look like; even, and especially, when darkness seems inevitable.</p>
<p>Because candles get lit, so often despite our own inadequacies and failings and pride.</p>
<p>Our God is a God of resurrection; a God who brings new life in places where we thought new life was not possible.&#160; Holy Week calls us to believe beyond ourselves.</p>
<p>Light a candle today.&#160; Allow it to burn brightly as a reminder that God sees what we often cannot see, and as an act of trust in the power of the God who calls you out of darkness into his marvelous light.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
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<p>While the Catholic Church may be dominating U.S. religious headlines as of right now, six of the top ten <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/Government/Religion-in-the-News--Islam-and-Politics-Dominate-Religion-Coverage-in-2011.aspx" type="external">religious stories of 2011</a> were about Islam. With national focus on religious freedom this election cycle centered on the hot-button issue of contraception and the right of conscience, a leading American Muslim organization is gearing up to promote their own religious rights through a nationwide outreach campaign to combat Islamophobia.</p>
<p>The initiative, headed by the <a href="http://www.icna.org/" type="external">Islamic Circle of North America</a> (ICNA), also aims to educate the broader American public on the Islamic faith and address questions about Shariah.</p>
<p>“The First Amendment guarantees religious freedom for every citizen. Muslim Americans are asking for the same fundamental rights to observe Shariah, a component of the Islamic faith, in our personal, familial and religious affairs within the boundaries of the United States Constitution and all local, state and federal laws.” says Dr. Zahid H Bukhari, President, Islamic Circle of North America.</p>
<p>A recently released study by the <a href="http://faithcommunitiestoday.org/2011-mosque-report-ihsan-bagby" type="external">Hartford Institute for Religion Research</a> shows the number of Islamic places of worship have increased 74% in the past decade. States with the most mosques are New York, California and Texas. Despite a decline in negative perception compared to last year, <a href="http://publicreligion.org/research/2012/02/january-tracking-poll-2012/" type="external">14% of Americans</a> agree that Muslims want to establish Shariah, or Islamic law, as the law of the land. For ICNA, this number is still clearly too high.</p>
<p>In the next six months, the campaign “Defending Religious Freedom, Understanding Shariah” will tour 25 cities nationwide. In each city ICNA will host town hall events aimed at open dialogue and addressing misconceptions about Shariah.</p>
<p>“ICNA is making an honest attempt to reach out and connect to our fellow Americans and introduce them to our Islamic faith,” says Naeem Baig, Vice President of ICNA Public Affairs. “We see it as our responsibility to clarify misconceptions about American Muslims.”</p>
<p>Events will be held in Miami on March 10th, Washington D.C. on March 27th and Los Angeles on April 17th. Additional dates are yet to be announced, but are planned in New York City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Houston, Dallas, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Kansas City and Detroit.</p>
<p>In addition to town hall meetings, the organization is airing public service announcements and radio ads in 20 cities, as well as hosting seminars on college campuses. Billboards will go up in high traffic areas, including one near the Lincoln Tunnel, seen by over 120,000 people a day. There is also a national hotline dedicated to answering questions about Shariah and the Islamic faith. The toll-free number is 1-855-SHARIAH.</p>
<p>http://www.youtube.com/eQzbc8nu1mc</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
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Nationwide Shariah Education Campaign Set to Launch
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https://ivn.us/2012/03/09/nationwide-shariah-education-campaign-set-to-launch/
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2012-03-09
| 2least
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Nationwide Shariah Education Campaign Set to Launch
<p>While the Catholic Church may be dominating U.S. religious headlines as of right now, six of the top ten <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/Government/Religion-in-the-News--Islam-and-Politics-Dominate-Religion-Coverage-in-2011.aspx" type="external">religious stories of 2011</a> were about Islam. With national focus on religious freedom this election cycle centered on the hot-button issue of contraception and the right of conscience, a leading American Muslim organization is gearing up to promote their own religious rights through a nationwide outreach campaign to combat Islamophobia.</p>
<p>The initiative, headed by the <a href="http://www.icna.org/" type="external">Islamic Circle of North America</a> (ICNA), also aims to educate the broader American public on the Islamic faith and address questions about Shariah.</p>
<p>“The First Amendment guarantees religious freedom for every citizen. Muslim Americans are asking for the same fundamental rights to observe Shariah, a component of the Islamic faith, in our personal, familial and religious affairs within the boundaries of the United States Constitution and all local, state and federal laws.” says Dr. Zahid H Bukhari, President, Islamic Circle of North America.</p>
<p>A recently released study by the <a href="http://faithcommunitiestoday.org/2011-mosque-report-ihsan-bagby" type="external">Hartford Institute for Religion Research</a> shows the number of Islamic places of worship have increased 74% in the past decade. States with the most mosques are New York, California and Texas. Despite a decline in negative perception compared to last year, <a href="http://publicreligion.org/research/2012/02/january-tracking-poll-2012/" type="external">14% of Americans</a> agree that Muslims want to establish Shariah, or Islamic law, as the law of the land. For ICNA, this number is still clearly too high.</p>
<p>In the next six months, the campaign “Defending Religious Freedom, Understanding Shariah” will tour 25 cities nationwide. In each city ICNA will host town hall events aimed at open dialogue and addressing misconceptions about Shariah.</p>
<p>“ICNA is making an honest attempt to reach out and connect to our fellow Americans and introduce them to our Islamic faith,” says Naeem Baig, Vice President of ICNA Public Affairs. “We see it as our responsibility to clarify misconceptions about American Muslims.”</p>
<p>Events will be held in Miami on March 10th, Washington D.C. on March 27th and Los Angeles on April 17th. Additional dates are yet to be announced, but are planned in New York City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Houston, Dallas, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Kansas City and Detroit.</p>
<p>In addition to town hall meetings, the organization is airing public service announcements and radio ads in 20 cities, as well as hosting seminars on college campuses. Billboards will go up in high traffic areas, including one near the Lincoln Tunnel, seen by over 120,000 people a day. There is also a national hotline dedicated to answering questions about Shariah and the Islamic faith. The toll-free number is 1-855-SHARIAH.</p>
<p>http://www.youtube.com/eQzbc8nu1mc</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
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<p />
<p>Many more students have defaulted on or failed to pay back their college loans than the U.S. government previously believed.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Last Friday, the Education Department released a memo saying that it had overstated&#160;student&#160;loan repayment rates at most colleges and trade schools and provided updated numbers.</p>
<p>When The Wall Street Journal analyzed the new numbers, the data revealed that the Department previously had inflated the repayment rates for 99.8% of all colleges and trade schools in the country.</p>
<p>The new analysis shows that at more than 1,000 colleges and trade schools, or about a quarter of the total, at least half the students had defaulted or failed to pay down at least $1 on their debt within seven years.</p>
<p>The changes could have implications for federal policy. Some lawmakers have endorsed the idea of punishing colleges if enough students aren't paying back the loans.</p>
<p>A spokeswoman for the Education Department said that the problem resulted from a technical programming error.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>This isn't the first time data problems have affected the Education Department. A recent government report criticized how the department tracks information including the budgetary implications of&#160;student&#160;loan forgiveness.</p>
<p>"This is a quality control issue with a Department of Education that has been facing criticism already for other data issues," Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall University. The department "needs to be regularly audited so these issues can be discovered sooner."</p>
<p>The&#160;student&#160;loan repayment rates were originally released in 2015 as part of the Obama administration's College Scorecard, which followed an aborted attempt to rate colleges and tie federal funds to those ratings.</p>
<p>At the time, the Journal reported that at 347 colleges and vocational schools, more than half of students had defaulted or failed to pay down their debt within seven years. Those figures were based on students were supposed to start repaying loans in 2006 and 2007.</p>
<p>In September, the Department released data tracking students who should have begun repayment in 2007 and 2008, and that number rose to 477. But with the updated number released last week, that number grew to 1,029.</p>
<p>No college saw its repayment rate improve under the revision, and some schools saw their seven-year repayment rates fall by as much as 29 percentage points.</p>
<p>The University of Memphis had one of the largest drops in its repayment rate following the recalculation. Previously, the Department said that 67% of its students were repaying loans within seven years of entering the repayment period. That number fell to 47% after the recalculation.</p>
<p>In a statement, the school said it "was not contacted by or made aware of the data changes" from the Education department.</p>
<p>"Given the magnitude of the numerical changes in the report released by the Department of Education, the University of Memphis will be challenging the accuracy of the newly adjusted data," the statement said.</p>
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Student-Debt Picture Darkens
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http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/01/19/student-debt-picture-darkens.html
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2017-01-19
| 0right
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Student-Debt Picture Darkens
<p />
<p>Many more students have defaulted on or failed to pay back their college loans than the U.S. government previously believed.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Last Friday, the Education Department released a memo saying that it had overstated&#160;student&#160;loan repayment rates at most colleges and trade schools and provided updated numbers.</p>
<p>When The Wall Street Journal analyzed the new numbers, the data revealed that the Department previously had inflated the repayment rates for 99.8% of all colleges and trade schools in the country.</p>
<p>The new analysis shows that at more than 1,000 colleges and trade schools, or about a quarter of the total, at least half the students had defaulted or failed to pay down at least $1 on their debt within seven years.</p>
<p>The changes could have implications for federal policy. Some lawmakers have endorsed the idea of punishing colleges if enough students aren't paying back the loans.</p>
<p>A spokeswoman for the Education Department said that the problem resulted from a technical programming error.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>This isn't the first time data problems have affected the Education Department. A recent government report criticized how the department tracks information including the budgetary implications of&#160;student&#160;loan forgiveness.</p>
<p>"This is a quality control issue with a Department of Education that has been facing criticism already for other data issues," Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall University. The department "needs to be regularly audited so these issues can be discovered sooner."</p>
<p>The&#160;student&#160;loan repayment rates were originally released in 2015 as part of the Obama administration's College Scorecard, which followed an aborted attempt to rate colleges and tie federal funds to those ratings.</p>
<p>At the time, the Journal reported that at 347 colleges and vocational schools, more than half of students had defaulted or failed to pay down their debt within seven years. Those figures were based on students were supposed to start repaying loans in 2006 and 2007.</p>
<p>In September, the Department released data tracking students who should have begun repayment in 2007 and 2008, and that number rose to 477. But with the updated number released last week, that number grew to 1,029.</p>
<p>No college saw its repayment rate improve under the revision, and some schools saw their seven-year repayment rates fall by as much as 29 percentage points.</p>
<p>The University of Memphis had one of the largest drops in its repayment rate following the recalculation. Previously, the Department said that 67% of its students were repaying loans within seven years of entering the repayment period. That number fell to 47% after the recalculation.</p>
<p>In a statement, the school said it "was not contacted by or made aware of the data changes" from the Education department.</p>
<p>"Given the magnitude of the numerical changes in the report released by the Department of Education, the University of Memphis will be challenging the accuracy of the newly adjusted data," the statement said.</p>
| 7,851 |
<p>Satellites are integral for modern communication, navigation&#160;and weather forecasting. But advances in satellite technology, however, are allowing for new political and archaeological applications.&#160;</p>
<p>“It's amazing ... the questions that you can answer that you didn’t even know you could answer once you start digging in and exploring what the options are," says Susan Wolfinbarger, director of the Geospatial Technologies Project at AAAS.&#160;</p>
<p>Wolfinbarger has been using satellite imagery to track cultural crimes&#160;like the looting and destruction of culturally significant sites in hard-to-access parts of the globe.</p>
<p>“The destruction that we were seeing has not been just an ISIS phenomenon,” Wolfinbarger says. "That's something I can't say enough times. There was destruction happening across many sites long before ISIS entered the picture. ... We’ve seen a lot of damage happening across the entirety of the the Syrian civil war. And it's not just a new phenomenon.”</p>
<p>Satellite imagery, which is now precise enough to highlight things as small as ten inches across, has been used to uncover previously undiscovered archaeological ruins. Sarah Parcak, a self-described “space archaeologist” has helped to uncover more than a dozen pyramids and 1,000 forgotten tombs in Egypt. Her latest satellite find is a potential Viking camp in Newfoundland — which would make it only the second&#160;settlement found in North America.</p>
<p>She’s currently working to develop a platform that would allow anyone to help in the search for cultural maps, potentially from their iPad.&#160;</p>
<p>“It's like Google Maps in that people are going to see imagery,” Parcak says.&#160;“Users will register, they'll be trained, and they'll then get to compare these different satellite images just like we do in the lab. They'll be doing good science and seeing if they can see anything — do they see site looting? Do they see any potential archaeological features? ... There will not be any mapping data&#160;or GPS data connected to the images they're seeing because, of course, we have to protect the sites.”</p>
<p>But satellites aren’t just being used in modern-day archaeology. They’re also being used in political and humanitarian applications.&#160;</p>
<p>“A lot of the work that we do is in non-permissive environments. We work in a lot of conflict zones, we work in documenting things that are happening in countries where the governments probably don't want to let us come in and investigate,” says Wolfinbarger.&#160;“We've used satellite imagery to look for mass graves. We look at attacks on civilians, housing demolitions, a whole range of different human rights-related issues.”</p>
<p>And Wolfinbarger says the data collected by satellite imagery tends to be more respected and helpful than many other types of data collection, including eyewitness accounts.&#160;</p>
<p>“That is one of the great things that we can do with with satellite imagery because, you know, it's a very respected type of scientific analysis,” Wolfinbarger says.&#160;“It's date-stamped, it's location-specific and so we've used that in a number of different ways to counter propaganda that's going on….We used it during the conflict between Russia and Ukraine when Russia was saying that they weren't moving troops to the border, we were obtaining satellite imagery that was actually showing massive troops moving towards the border. So it's really great for being able to say ‘No, this is actually what's going on.’”&#160;</p>
<p>This article is based on an&#160; <a href="http://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/satellite-snapshots-help-pinpoint-and-protect-the-past/" type="external">interview</a> <a href="http://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/confessions-of-a-meteorite-hunter/" type="external">&#160;</a>that aired on PRI's&#160; <a href="http://www.sciencefriday.com/" type="external">Science Friday</a>.</p>
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'Space archaeologists' and activists are using satellites to unearth history
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https://pri.org/stories/2016-04-26/space-archaeologists-and-activists-are-using-satellites-unearth-history
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2016-04-26
| 3left-center
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'Space archaeologists' and activists are using satellites to unearth history
<p>Satellites are integral for modern communication, navigation&#160;and weather forecasting. But advances in satellite technology, however, are allowing for new political and archaeological applications.&#160;</p>
<p>“It's amazing ... the questions that you can answer that you didn’t even know you could answer once you start digging in and exploring what the options are," says Susan Wolfinbarger, director of the Geospatial Technologies Project at AAAS.&#160;</p>
<p>Wolfinbarger has been using satellite imagery to track cultural crimes&#160;like the looting and destruction of culturally significant sites in hard-to-access parts of the globe.</p>
<p>“The destruction that we were seeing has not been just an ISIS phenomenon,” Wolfinbarger says. "That's something I can't say enough times. There was destruction happening across many sites long before ISIS entered the picture. ... We’ve seen a lot of damage happening across the entirety of the the Syrian civil war. And it's not just a new phenomenon.”</p>
<p>Satellite imagery, which is now precise enough to highlight things as small as ten inches across, has been used to uncover previously undiscovered archaeological ruins. Sarah Parcak, a self-described “space archaeologist” has helped to uncover more than a dozen pyramids and 1,000 forgotten tombs in Egypt. Her latest satellite find is a potential Viking camp in Newfoundland — which would make it only the second&#160;settlement found in North America.</p>
<p>She’s currently working to develop a platform that would allow anyone to help in the search for cultural maps, potentially from their iPad.&#160;</p>
<p>“It's like Google Maps in that people are going to see imagery,” Parcak says.&#160;“Users will register, they'll be trained, and they'll then get to compare these different satellite images just like we do in the lab. They'll be doing good science and seeing if they can see anything — do they see site looting? Do they see any potential archaeological features? ... There will not be any mapping data&#160;or GPS data connected to the images they're seeing because, of course, we have to protect the sites.”</p>
<p>But satellites aren’t just being used in modern-day archaeology. They’re also being used in political and humanitarian applications.&#160;</p>
<p>“A lot of the work that we do is in non-permissive environments. We work in a lot of conflict zones, we work in documenting things that are happening in countries where the governments probably don't want to let us come in and investigate,” says Wolfinbarger.&#160;“We've used satellite imagery to look for mass graves. We look at attacks on civilians, housing demolitions, a whole range of different human rights-related issues.”</p>
<p>And Wolfinbarger says the data collected by satellite imagery tends to be more respected and helpful than many other types of data collection, including eyewitness accounts.&#160;</p>
<p>“That is one of the great things that we can do with with satellite imagery because, you know, it's a very respected type of scientific analysis,” Wolfinbarger says.&#160;“It's date-stamped, it's location-specific and so we've used that in a number of different ways to counter propaganda that's going on….We used it during the conflict between Russia and Ukraine when Russia was saying that they weren't moving troops to the border, we were obtaining satellite imagery that was actually showing massive troops moving towards the border. So it's really great for being able to say ‘No, this is actually what's going on.’”&#160;</p>
<p>This article is based on an&#160; <a href="http://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/satellite-snapshots-help-pinpoint-and-protect-the-past/" type="external">interview</a> <a href="http://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/confessions-of-a-meteorite-hunter/" type="external">&#160;</a>that aired on PRI's&#160; <a href="http://www.sciencefriday.com/" type="external">Science Friday</a>.</p>
| 7,852 |
<p />
<p>Image source: Intel.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>In a previous <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/09/02/intel-corporation-may-have-pushed-7-nanometer-tech.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">column Opens a New Window.</a>, I wrote about an interesting job listing that I found on Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) website. In particular, it seemed to suggest that products based on the company's upcoming 7-nanometer manufacturing technology might not arrive until either 2021 or 2022.</p>
<p>I recently stumbled across something, hidden in plain view, that seems to corroborate this idea. Let's take a closer look.</p>
<p>At Intel's recent developer forum, two executives gave a presentation disclosing some key details about recently announced and future chip manufacturing technologies, as well as the company's strategy to provide contract chip manufacturing services to third parties.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>In one slide, Intel showed how it intended to offer three different iterations of its 10-nanometer technology known as 10-nanometer, 10-nanometer+, and 10-nanometer++. Each successive iteration is expected to deliver better performance "to support multiple leading-edge products."</p>
<p>Looking more closely at the slide reveals something interesting:</p>
<p>Image source: Intel.</p>
<p>Notice that the circle denoting the third iteration of the company's 10-nanometer manufacturing technology, known as 10-nanometer++, actually sits solidly beyond the 2020 time-frame.</p>
<p>If Intel really isn't planning to get its 10-nanometer++ technology out there until sometime past 2020, then this could mean one of two things.</p>
<p>The first, and certainly the more pessimistic, implication is that the company's 7-nanometer technology won't arrive until well beyond 2020. Indeed, if 10-nanometer++ is expected to arrive in 2021 or even 2022, we could be looking at late 2022 or early 2023 before the chipmaker transitions to its 7-nanometer technology.</p>
<p>Such a significant delay, particularly in light of the fact that contract chip manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE: TSM) plans to put its 5-nanometer technology into production in 2020, would mean that Intel will fall behind its biggest competitor in terms of chip area scaling. (TSMC's 5-nanomater technology is likely to be similar in terms of transistor density to Intel's 7-nanometer technology.)</p>
<p>An alternative explanation is that Intel actually intends 10-nanometer++ and 7-nanometer to co-exist. For applications that absolutely need to be on the latest, densest manufacturing technology, Intel could design products on the newer, and potentially more expensive, 7-nanometer technology. For products that don't need to adopt bleeding-edge manufacturing technologies -- for example, desktop processors -- 10-nanometer++ could be a better, more cost-effective choice.</p>
<p>In fact, we are already going to see something similar to this next year. Intel's next-generation desktop processors, code-named Coffee Lake, are expected to be manufactured on the company's 14-nanometer technology, while the low-power notebook and 2-in-1 processors, code-named Cannon Lake, that are expected to arrive at the same time will be built on the company's newer 10-nanometer technology.</p>
<p>At Intel's investor meeting later this year, I expect the company to go into more depth on its chip manufacturing strategy and how it views the competitive landscape. It will be interesting to see if the company talks at all about the potential timing of its 7-nanometer and potentially even its future 5-nanometer technologies.</p>
<p>I'm not going to hold my breath for such disclosures, although given how aggressively the competition is advertising its technology plans, they would be most welcome.</p>
<p>A secret billion-dollar stock opportunity The world's biggest tech company forgot to show you something, but a few Wall Street analysts and the Fool didn't miss a beat: There's a small company that's powering their brand-new gadgets and the coming revolution in technology. And we think its stock price has nearly unlimited room to run for early in-the-know investors! To be one of them, <a href="http://www.fool.com/mms/mark/ecap-foolcom-apple-wearable?aid=6965&amp;source=irbeditxt0000017&amp;ftm_cam=rb-wearable-d&amp;ftm_pit=2668&amp;ftm_veh=article_pitch&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">just click here Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/aeassa/info.aspx" type="external">Ashraf Eassa Opens a New Window.</a> owns shares of Intel. The Motley Fool recommends Intel. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services <a href="http://www.fool.com/shop/newsletters/index.aspx?source=isiedilnk018048&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">free for 30 days Opens a New Window.</a>. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that <a href="http://www.fool.com/knowledge-center/motley.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">considering a diverse range of insights Opens a New Window.</a> makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
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Intel Corporation Drops Clues About 7-Nanometer Technology
| true |
http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/09/13/intel-corporation-drops-clues-about-7-nanometer-technology.html
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2016-09-13
| 0right
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Intel Corporation Drops Clues About 7-Nanometer Technology
<p />
<p>Image source: Intel.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>In a previous <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/09/02/intel-corporation-may-have-pushed-7-nanometer-tech.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">column Opens a New Window.</a>, I wrote about an interesting job listing that I found on Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) website. In particular, it seemed to suggest that products based on the company's upcoming 7-nanometer manufacturing technology might not arrive until either 2021 or 2022.</p>
<p>I recently stumbled across something, hidden in plain view, that seems to corroborate this idea. Let's take a closer look.</p>
<p>At Intel's recent developer forum, two executives gave a presentation disclosing some key details about recently announced and future chip manufacturing technologies, as well as the company's strategy to provide contract chip manufacturing services to third parties.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>In one slide, Intel showed how it intended to offer three different iterations of its 10-nanometer technology known as 10-nanometer, 10-nanometer+, and 10-nanometer++. Each successive iteration is expected to deliver better performance "to support multiple leading-edge products."</p>
<p>Looking more closely at the slide reveals something interesting:</p>
<p>Image source: Intel.</p>
<p>Notice that the circle denoting the third iteration of the company's 10-nanometer manufacturing technology, known as 10-nanometer++, actually sits solidly beyond the 2020 time-frame.</p>
<p>If Intel really isn't planning to get its 10-nanometer++ technology out there until sometime past 2020, then this could mean one of two things.</p>
<p>The first, and certainly the more pessimistic, implication is that the company's 7-nanometer technology won't arrive until well beyond 2020. Indeed, if 10-nanometer++ is expected to arrive in 2021 or even 2022, we could be looking at late 2022 or early 2023 before the chipmaker transitions to its 7-nanometer technology.</p>
<p>Such a significant delay, particularly in light of the fact that contract chip manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE: TSM) plans to put its 5-nanometer technology into production in 2020, would mean that Intel will fall behind its biggest competitor in terms of chip area scaling. (TSMC's 5-nanomater technology is likely to be similar in terms of transistor density to Intel's 7-nanometer technology.)</p>
<p>An alternative explanation is that Intel actually intends 10-nanometer++ and 7-nanometer to co-exist. For applications that absolutely need to be on the latest, densest manufacturing technology, Intel could design products on the newer, and potentially more expensive, 7-nanometer technology. For products that don't need to adopt bleeding-edge manufacturing technologies -- for example, desktop processors -- 10-nanometer++ could be a better, more cost-effective choice.</p>
<p>In fact, we are already going to see something similar to this next year. Intel's next-generation desktop processors, code-named Coffee Lake, are expected to be manufactured on the company's 14-nanometer technology, while the low-power notebook and 2-in-1 processors, code-named Cannon Lake, that are expected to arrive at the same time will be built on the company's newer 10-nanometer technology.</p>
<p>At Intel's investor meeting later this year, I expect the company to go into more depth on its chip manufacturing strategy and how it views the competitive landscape. It will be interesting to see if the company talks at all about the potential timing of its 7-nanometer and potentially even its future 5-nanometer technologies.</p>
<p>I'm not going to hold my breath for such disclosures, although given how aggressively the competition is advertising its technology plans, they would be most welcome.</p>
<p>A secret billion-dollar stock opportunity The world's biggest tech company forgot to show you something, but a few Wall Street analysts and the Fool didn't miss a beat: There's a small company that's powering their brand-new gadgets and the coming revolution in technology. And we think its stock price has nearly unlimited room to run for early in-the-know investors! To be one of them, <a href="http://www.fool.com/mms/mark/ecap-foolcom-apple-wearable?aid=6965&amp;source=irbeditxt0000017&amp;ftm_cam=rb-wearable-d&amp;ftm_pit=2668&amp;ftm_veh=article_pitch&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">just click here Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/aeassa/info.aspx" type="external">Ashraf Eassa Opens a New Window.</a> owns shares of Intel. The Motley Fool recommends Intel. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services <a href="http://www.fool.com/shop/newsletters/index.aspx?source=isiedilnk018048&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">free for 30 days Opens a New Window.</a>. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that <a href="http://www.fool.com/knowledge-center/motley.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">considering a diverse range of insights Opens a New Window.</a> makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
| 7,853 |
<p>RENO, Nev. (AP) — The Latest on the winter storm headed for the Sierra Nevada (all times local, PDT):</p>
<p>3:30 p.m.</p>
<p>The National Weather Service in Reno has issued a winter storm warning for the greater Lake Tahoe area beginning Thursday afternoon as the biggest storm so far this season makes its way toward the Sierra Nevada.</p>
<p>The service also has upgraded a high wind watch to a high wind warning for much of the Sierra's eastern front, including Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Gardnerville and Virginia City.</p>
<p>The storm is expected to bring as much as 2 feet (0.6 meters) of snow to the upper elevations around Lake Tahoe with winds over the ridgetops potentially gusting in excess of 100 mph (161 kph) Thursday night and early Friday.</p>
<p>The storm warning is in effect from 4 p.m. Thursday to 4 p.m. Friday. The wind warning is in effect Thursday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.</p>
<p>The Sierra Avalanche Center in Truckee, California also issued a backcountry avalanche watch Wednesday for the Tahoe area because of the forecast of heavy snow combined with strong winds.</p>
<p>2:45 p.m.</p>
<p>The biggest storm so far this winter is headed for the Sierra Nevada, with up to 2 feet (0.6 meters) of snow possible in the mountains by early Friday and winds potentially gusting in excess of 100 mph (161 kph) over the ridgetops.</p>
<p>The National Weather Service issued a winter storm watch in effect form Thursday afternoon though Friday afternoon for the Lake Tahoe area stretching north of Reno to Susanville, California.</p>
<p>The strongest winds are expected Thursday afternoon and night, but snowfall in the valleys could snarl the Friday morning commute in Reno, Sparks and Carson City, where gusts of 60 to 80 mph (97 to 129 kph) are possible in wind-prone areas.</p>
<p>The service warns the winds could create whiteout conditions, damage trees, trigger power outages and delay flights.</p>
<p>RENO, Nev. (AP) — The Latest on the winter storm headed for the Sierra Nevada (all times local, PDT):</p>
<p>3:30 p.m.</p>
<p>The National Weather Service in Reno has issued a winter storm warning for the greater Lake Tahoe area beginning Thursday afternoon as the biggest storm so far this season makes its way toward the Sierra Nevada.</p>
<p>The service also has upgraded a high wind watch to a high wind warning for much of the Sierra's eastern front, including Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Gardnerville and Virginia City.</p>
<p>The storm is expected to bring as much as 2 feet (0.6 meters) of snow to the upper elevations around Lake Tahoe with winds over the ridgetops potentially gusting in excess of 100 mph (161 kph) Thursday night and early Friday.</p>
<p>The storm warning is in effect from 4 p.m. Thursday to 4 p.m. Friday. The wind warning is in effect Thursday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.</p>
<p>The Sierra Avalanche Center in Truckee, California also issued a backcountry avalanche watch Wednesday for the Tahoe area because of the forecast of heavy snow combined with strong winds.</p>
<p>2:45 p.m.</p>
<p>The biggest storm so far this winter is headed for the Sierra Nevada, with up to 2 feet (0.6 meters) of snow possible in the mountains by early Friday and winds potentially gusting in excess of 100 mph (161 kph) over the ridgetops.</p>
<p>The National Weather Service issued a winter storm watch in effect form Thursday afternoon though Friday afternoon for the Lake Tahoe area stretching north of Reno to Susanville, California.</p>
<p>The strongest winds are expected Thursday afternoon and night, but snowfall in the valleys could snarl the Friday morning commute in Reno, Sparks and Carson City, where gusts of 60 to 80 mph (97 to 129 kph) are possible in wind-prone areas.</p>
<p>The service warns the winds could create whiteout conditions, damage trees, trigger power outages and delay flights.</p>
|
The Latest: Storm, wind warnings upgraded in Sierra
| false |
https://apnews.com/amp/122a4fb4d6454ebdb04ec9e8fc288dac
|
2018-01-17
| 2least
|
The Latest: Storm, wind warnings upgraded in Sierra
<p>RENO, Nev. (AP) — The Latest on the winter storm headed for the Sierra Nevada (all times local, PDT):</p>
<p>3:30 p.m.</p>
<p>The National Weather Service in Reno has issued a winter storm warning for the greater Lake Tahoe area beginning Thursday afternoon as the biggest storm so far this season makes its way toward the Sierra Nevada.</p>
<p>The service also has upgraded a high wind watch to a high wind warning for much of the Sierra's eastern front, including Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Gardnerville and Virginia City.</p>
<p>The storm is expected to bring as much as 2 feet (0.6 meters) of snow to the upper elevations around Lake Tahoe with winds over the ridgetops potentially gusting in excess of 100 mph (161 kph) Thursday night and early Friday.</p>
<p>The storm warning is in effect from 4 p.m. Thursday to 4 p.m. Friday. The wind warning is in effect Thursday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.</p>
<p>The Sierra Avalanche Center in Truckee, California also issued a backcountry avalanche watch Wednesday for the Tahoe area because of the forecast of heavy snow combined with strong winds.</p>
<p>2:45 p.m.</p>
<p>The biggest storm so far this winter is headed for the Sierra Nevada, with up to 2 feet (0.6 meters) of snow possible in the mountains by early Friday and winds potentially gusting in excess of 100 mph (161 kph) over the ridgetops.</p>
<p>The National Weather Service issued a winter storm watch in effect form Thursday afternoon though Friday afternoon for the Lake Tahoe area stretching north of Reno to Susanville, California.</p>
<p>The strongest winds are expected Thursday afternoon and night, but snowfall in the valleys could snarl the Friday morning commute in Reno, Sparks and Carson City, where gusts of 60 to 80 mph (97 to 129 kph) are possible in wind-prone areas.</p>
<p>The service warns the winds could create whiteout conditions, damage trees, trigger power outages and delay flights.</p>
<p>RENO, Nev. (AP) — The Latest on the winter storm headed for the Sierra Nevada (all times local, PDT):</p>
<p>3:30 p.m.</p>
<p>The National Weather Service in Reno has issued a winter storm warning for the greater Lake Tahoe area beginning Thursday afternoon as the biggest storm so far this season makes its way toward the Sierra Nevada.</p>
<p>The service also has upgraded a high wind watch to a high wind warning for much of the Sierra's eastern front, including Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Gardnerville and Virginia City.</p>
<p>The storm is expected to bring as much as 2 feet (0.6 meters) of snow to the upper elevations around Lake Tahoe with winds over the ridgetops potentially gusting in excess of 100 mph (161 kph) Thursday night and early Friday.</p>
<p>The storm warning is in effect from 4 p.m. Thursday to 4 p.m. Friday. The wind warning is in effect Thursday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.</p>
<p>The Sierra Avalanche Center in Truckee, California also issued a backcountry avalanche watch Wednesday for the Tahoe area because of the forecast of heavy snow combined with strong winds.</p>
<p>2:45 p.m.</p>
<p>The biggest storm so far this winter is headed for the Sierra Nevada, with up to 2 feet (0.6 meters) of snow possible in the mountains by early Friday and winds potentially gusting in excess of 100 mph (161 kph) over the ridgetops.</p>
<p>The National Weather Service issued a winter storm watch in effect form Thursday afternoon though Friday afternoon for the Lake Tahoe area stretching north of Reno to Susanville, California.</p>
<p>The strongest winds are expected Thursday afternoon and night, but snowfall in the valleys could snarl the Friday morning commute in Reno, Sparks and Carson City, where gusts of 60 to 80 mph (97 to 129 kph) are possible in wind-prone areas.</p>
<p>The service warns the winds could create whiteout conditions, damage trees, trigger power outages and delay flights.</p>
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<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>“This is probably the busiest time that I’ve had in my life so far,” the 40-year-old actor said in a recent interview. “Busy is good, you know. Busy is better than bored and there’s more recognition, like I try to feign the anonymity which I had before ‘O.J.'”</p>
<p>“It has opened doors in terms of opportunities like auditions that would probably not have come my way in the past are now starting to become available to me so I’m enjoying it. It’s really cool,” he said.</p>
<p>“This Is Us” airs Tuesday on NBC (9 p.m. EST). The show also stars Milo Ventimiglia, Mandy Moore, Chrissy Metz and Justin Hartley.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Brown plays Randall, who was adopted by a white family. The story is told in two timelines, the past and the present.</p>
<p>“It’s a really simple story,” he said. “It’s about a family, but the twist is that you get a chance to see the parents at the same age as the children in sort of this mid-thirties (time period) when you have all of these sort of critical decisions that sort of chart the rest of your life, you know? … It reminds me of that moment when you say like, ‘Oh, my parents — they’re not perfect and it’s OK that they’re not perfect because they did the best that they knew how to do.'”</p>
<p>He recalls getting the script for the pilot episode while he was shooting “The People v. O.J.” (Brown said he keeps his Emmy in the garage because it’s sharp and he has two young children.)</p>
<p>“I was probably sitting at the prosecution’s desk next to Sarah (Paulson), and I go, ‘Yo, Sarah, I think I found something that I want to do.’ She was like, ‘Really? Is it really good?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s really good.'”</p>
<p>Brown especially enjoys reading fan reaction to “This Is Us” on social media as developments in the characters’ lives are revealed in the present timeline.</p>
<p>“I love seeing the questions that the fans have like, ‘When did Miguel (played by Jon Huertas) pop into the scene? Like, how the heck did that happen? What happened to his wife?’ he laughed.</p>
<p>Brown says he counts himself as a fan and enjoys tuning in to see the various stories on the show unfold.</p>
<p>“I love the show and to be on something that you would love watching whether you are on it or not? That’s the stuff.”</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Follow Alicia Rancilio online at <a href="http://www.twitter.com/aliciar" type="external">http://www.twitter.com/aliciar</a></p>
|
After Emmy, Sterling K Brown still winning with ‘This Is Us’
| false |
https://abqjournal.com/902509/after-emmy-sterling-k-brown-still-winning-with-this-is-us.html
|
2016-12-05
| 2least
|
After Emmy, Sterling K Brown still winning with ‘This Is Us’
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>“This is probably the busiest time that I’ve had in my life so far,” the 40-year-old actor said in a recent interview. “Busy is good, you know. Busy is better than bored and there’s more recognition, like I try to feign the anonymity which I had before ‘O.J.'”</p>
<p>“It has opened doors in terms of opportunities like auditions that would probably not have come my way in the past are now starting to become available to me so I’m enjoying it. It’s really cool,” he said.</p>
<p>“This Is Us” airs Tuesday on NBC (9 p.m. EST). The show also stars Milo Ventimiglia, Mandy Moore, Chrissy Metz and Justin Hartley.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Brown plays Randall, who was adopted by a white family. The story is told in two timelines, the past and the present.</p>
<p>“It’s a really simple story,” he said. “It’s about a family, but the twist is that you get a chance to see the parents at the same age as the children in sort of this mid-thirties (time period) when you have all of these sort of critical decisions that sort of chart the rest of your life, you know? … It reminds me of that moment when you say like, ‘Oh, my parents — they’re not perfect and it’s OK that they’re not perfect because they did the best that they knew how to do.'”</p>
<p>He recalls getting the script for the pilot episode while he was shooting “The People v. O.J.” (Brown said he keeps his Emmy in the garage because it’s sharp and he has two young children.)</p>
<p>“I was probably sitting at the prosecution’s desk next to Sarah (Paulson), and I go, ‘Yo, Sarah, I think I found something that I want to do.’ She was like, ‘Really? Is it really good?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s really good.'”</p>
<p>Brown especially enjoys reading fan reaction to “This Is Us” on social media as developments in the characters’ lives are revealed in the present timeline.</p>
<p>“I love seeing the questions that the fans have like, ‘When did Miguel (played by Jon Huertas) pop into the scene? Like, how the heck did that happen? What happened to his wife?’ he laughed.</p>
<p>Brown says he counts himself as a fan and enjoys tuning in to see the various stories on the show unfold.</p>
<p>“I love the show and to be on something that you would love watching whether you are on it or not? That’s the stuff.”</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Follow Alicia Rancilio online at <a href="http://www.twitter.com/aliciar" type="external">http://www.twitter.com/aliciar</a></p>
| 7,855 |
<p>House Majority Whip Steve Scalise is out of the intensive care unit again after surgery for an infection, <a href="http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Rep-Scalise-Out-of-ICU-Nearly-Month-After-Shooting-434060123.html" type="external">NBC Washington reported.</a></p>
<p>Scalise, the third ranking Republican in the House, was shot in the hip and badly wounded in last month’s shooting at an Alexandria baseball field and has undergone several surgeries to repair damage to internal organs and bones.</p>
<p>Scalise went in for surgery last week after the <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/US-Congressman-Shot/2017/07/07/id/800382/" type="external">infection scare.</a></p>
<p>Scalise was close to death upon arrival at the hospital after the June 14 shooting.</p>
|
Report: Steve Scalise Out of ICU After Infection Scare
| false |
https://newsline.com/report-steve-scalise-out-of-icu-after-infection-scare/
|
2017-07-12
| 1right-center
|
Report: Steve Scalise Out of ICU After Infection Scare
<p>House Majority Whip Steve Scalise is out of the intensive care unit again after surgery for an infection, <a href="http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Rep-Scalise-Out-of-ICU-Nearly-Month-After-Shooting-434060123.html" type="external">NBC Washington reported.</a></p>
<p>Scalise, the third ranking Republican in the House, was shot in the hip and badly wounded in last month’s shooting at an Alexandria baseball field and has undergone several surgeries to repair damage to internal organs and bones.</p>
<p>Scalise went in for surgery last week after the <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/US-Congressman-Shot/2017/07/07/id/800382/" type="external">infection scare.</a></p>
<p>Scalise was close to death upon arrival at the hospital after the June 14 shooting.</p>
| 7,856 |
<p>Shir Hever is an economist working at The Real News Network. His economic research focuses on Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory; international aid to the Palestinians and to Israel; the effects of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories on the Israeli economy; and the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns against Israel. His first book: Political Economy of Israel's Occupation: Repression Beyond Exploitation, was published by Pluto Press.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p /> JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jaisal Noor in Baltimore.
<p />
<p />Today we're going to be discussing the latest developments for the boycott, divest, and sanction campaign coming out of Israel.
<p />
<p />Joining us today is Shir Hever. He's an economist studying the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories for the Alternative Information Center, a joint Palestinian-Israeli organization dedicated to publishing alternative information and analysis.
<p />
<p />Thank you for joining us.
<p />
<p />So, Shir, can you tell us about this major conference that was just held last week in Israel?
<p />
<p />SHIR HEVER, ECONOMIST, ALTERNATIVE INFORMATION CENTER: This conference was organized by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It's called the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism. It took place between May&#160;28 and May&#160;30.
<p />
<p />And this is a very interesting development for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel, because the ministry is very concerned about the kind of criticism that is growing around the world regarding Israel, the apartheid system, the abuse of Palestinian human rights, the mass use of violence against innocent civilians. And that is, of course, something that is being manifested also with the boycott movement, the boycott, divestment, sanction movement, or BDS. And this conference was supposed to be about something else. It was supposed to be about anti-Semitism.
<p />
<p />Now, usually the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at least in the past several years, tried to make it very clear that they don't accuse everyone who criticizes Israel of anti-Semitism, because this sort of argument tends to backfire. Most of the people who express such criticism against Israel on basis of Israel's violations of human rights are people who are defenders of human rights and would also defend the rights of Jews against attacks based on their race or religion.
<p />
<p />Basically they're saying that those who criticize Israel, those who accuse Israel of crimes are in fact anti-Semites. So this is--I think in many ways it shows that the Israeli ministry is running out of excuses, running out of ideas.
<p />
<p />This was a very high-level conference. Many very important speakers were invited. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, gave the opening speech, and in the speech he said that there are three vilifications. And he listed those three. He said the first one was that Israel is accused of committing war crimes. The second one: Israel is accused of not wanting peace. And the third one: Israel is guilty of violating the human rights of Palestinians.
<p />
<p />So these three accusations are not vilifications at all. In fact, they are well-documented and well-proven accusations based on international organizations, as well as on many Israeli organizations that say the very same thing. I think most Israelis would actually agree that the Israeli government is not really interested in peace, and yet they continue to vote for it. The fact that the Israeli army committed war crimes has been well established by, for example, the Goldstone Commission, which was actually headed by a Jewish Zionist. The fact that Israel is guilty of violating human rights is even periodically repeated by the U.S. Department of State.
<p />
<p />It completely undermines the entire meaning of the word anti-Semitic. And that's something very concerning, because there are, of course, still in the world people who hate Jews just for being Jews. There are still anti-Semites. But these anti-Semites are now completely confused and obfuscated with legitimate criticism of Israel. What we see basically is that Israel is so desperate because of the decline of its international legitimacy, because the international media is reporting the crimes committed by Israel, that they're willing to drag with them Jews, wherever they may be, and to allow these Jews to be unprotected from real kinds of anti-Semitism, just so that they could have yet another weapon or another sort of threat mechanism that they can use against those who would criticize them.
<p />
<p />NOOR: Now, Shir, a lot of the presentations and documents made at this conference have now been made public. What do you think are the most interesting points or arguments coming out of this conference, particularly concerning what Israel is to do about this growing Palestinian solidarity and BDS movement?
<p />
<p />HEVER: If you actually go into the contents of this conference, you see that it's in many ways a very empty conference. There is not that much interesting content in it.
<p />
<p />[snip] an interesting document, although it's interesting mainly because of what it doesn't include, and that is a document about online anti-Semitism, which actually talks about various homepages or Facebook profiles which have anti-Semitic contents in them. Well, I don't think it's very surprising that such things exist on the web. But the fact that it takes such a central place in a conference hosted by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a way shows that they really don't have much content to talk about.
<p />
<p />But when it comes to strategy, when it comes to how they're going to deal and act regarding anti-Semitism, suddenly the target changes, and instead of targeting anti-Semitism, they start to target the BDS movement.
<p />
<p />The Israeli strategy on dealing with BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) is threefold. It has three layers. One of the layers is about quantity rather than quality. That means that they're investing large amounts of money. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has recently dedicated $6&#160;million for--in budget to fund various organizations. They're called GONGOs, which is government organizations, non-government organizations, or GONGO, which means organizations that pretend to be civil society organizations but are actually funded by government, which would promote Israel's message. They're paying people to write topics in websites and news sites to promote Israel's message. So they're trying to fill the web with their content. I think it's very easy for anyone to go in, to do a search. And if you do a search on various topics that are controversial, you will find a lot of pro-Zionist content, because this is paid content.
<p />
<p />The second layer of strategy that was promoted in this conference and promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is to change the subject. That means that instead of talking about the occupation, instead of talking about apartheid, about the rights of Palestinians under Israeli law and so on, which is, of course, a topic that would embarrass pro-Israeli speakers very much, they say, let's change the topic and talk about things like Israeli technology, so as if--if Israel has very advanced technology, that somehow would convince people not to boycott Israel or not to make Israel accountable for its crimes.
<p />
<p />This is something that we've seen quite a lot. Even when Stephen Hawking decided to cancel his visit to Israel as an act of protest, the argument that was made against him, that he's using a chip that was produced in Israel, and because of that he's being a hypocrite and he shouldn't boycott Israel.
<p />
<p />So changing the subject is a strategy that has been recommended to the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs by marketing specialists that got a lot of money from the ministry to promote their strategy, and the ministry has wholeheartedly adopted this policy. If you go into websites of various Israeli embassies around the world, you will see that their news release talk about Israeli technological innovation all the time, and they're not even trying to engage in a discussion about the peace process, about Palestinian rights, about the occupation, and so on.
<p />
<p />So the third level that is promoted by this conference, and also by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is intimidation, basically to threaten pro-Palestinian activists or BDS activists with some kind of retaliation or a action by the Israeli army or the Israeli Mossad. The Israeli military has created a new unit to track BDS activists online and their activities. And the Mossad has also vowed to become active in tracking activists who criticize Israel.
<p />
<p />And the point in this is to intimidate activists and try to deter them from getting involved, building on the procedure of the Israeli intelligence as very effective and very violent. I don't think it's very likely that the Mossad is going to try to assassinate BDS activists or to directly harm them, because, of course, this policy will backfire and only make the criticism against Israel more powerful. But they're hoping that just by making the threat they can deter people from making any criticism whatsoever.
<p />
<p />And I think it's very interesting that they're making that sort of threat against activists at the same time that their argument is, we are going to try to--Israel is a democracy, Israel has freedom of speech. Well, it's freedom of speech, but if you criticize Israel, then there is a military unit that's going to track you and follow what you say. So that I think kind of shows their desperation as well.
<p />
<p />What's most interesting about this is that we have all these arguments that are--these three arguments that are made by this conference, and we see them all the time in the media. It's called called by Israeli speakers Hasbara. Hasbara means explanation. And they repeat these three strategies, which are quantity over quality, changing the subject, and talking about technology instead of the occupation, and intimidation, threatening those people who criticize Israel.
<p />
<p />But there's a fourth one that we don't see. And the fourth one is what we would expect to see, which is Israel trying to argue that their policies are right. We don't see the Israeli government trying to say, we have a right to occupy these territories, or Palestinians are actually treated fairly by the Israeli government, because they know this argument doesn't fly. They know that nobody will buy it. The facts are extremely clear against them. And more than anything, this attests to the growth and the strengthening of the BDS movement.
<p />
<p />NOOR: So, Shir, for BDS and Palestinian solidarity activists around the world, what lessons can they take out of this conference?
<p />
<p />HEVER: First of all, the fact that this conference even took place, the fact that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is reverting to strategies that they've abandoned because they've proven un-useful shows that the movement is gaining momentum and is becoming stronger. And I think activists should be heartened by this.
<p />
<p />Second, I would say it's very important for activists not to be intimidated, because, of course, if they allow themselves to be intimidated, if they allow this kind of argument to work, then this is exactly what emboldens the Israeli government to pursue more violent action, and not just against Palestinians but also against international activists. And we should be very clear that this is something that will not deter us.
<p />
<p />And the third point, and I think maybe the most important point, is that we should not fall into the trap which the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is trying to lay for us, by which criticizing Israel means criticizing Jews, meaning we should not become anti-Semites. And that is something that is very clearly defined in the BDS movement, and the call for BDS says very clearly, we refuse to cooperate with any organization or individual that is racist or anti-Semite. This is not part of the movement, and we refuse to get assistance, even, from organizations like that.
<p />
<p />And they're right in doing so, they're very right in doing so, because the Israeli government has shown that it's willing to sacrifice Jews around the world and their safety in the name of protecting Israeli interests. And in our criticism against Israel and Zionism and Israeli policies, we should of course not go into that trap that is laid for us in which we also accuse Jews as if they have some kind of responsibility for this.
<p />
<p />NOOR: Shir Hever, thank you for joining us.
<p />
<p />HEVER: Thank you, Jaisal, very much.
<p />
<p />NOOR: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
<p />
<p />End
<p />
<p />DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
|
Netanyahu Says it's Anti-Semitism to Accuse Israel of War Crimes or Violating Human Rights
| true |
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option%3Dcom_content%26task%3Dview%26id%3D767%26Itemid%3D74%26jumival%3D10276
|
2013-06-06
| 4left
|
Netanyahu Says it's Anti-Semitism to Accuse Israel of War Crimes or Violating Human Rights
<p>Shir Hever is an economist working at The Real News Network. His economic research focuses on Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory; international aid to the Palestinians and to Israel; the effects of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories on the Israeli economy; and the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns against Israel. His first book: Political Economy of Israel's Occupation: Repression Beyond Exploitation, was published by Pluto Press.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p /> JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jaisal Noor in Baltimore.
<p />
<p />Today we're going to be discussing the latest developments for the boycott, divest, and sanction campaign coming out of Israel.
<p />
<p />Joining us today is Shir Hever. He's an economist studying the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories for the Alternative Information Center, a joint Palestinian-Israeli organization dedicated to publishing alternative information and analysis.
<p />
<p />Thank you for joining us.
<p />
<p />So, Shir, can you tell us about this major conference that was just held last week in Israel?
<p />
<p />SHIR HEVER, ECONOMIST, ALTERNATIVE INFORMATION CENTER: This conference was organized by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It's called the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism. It took place between May&#160;28 and May&#160;30.
<p />
<p />And this is a very interesting development for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel, because the ministry is very concerned about the kind of criticism that is growing around the world regarding Israel, the apartheid system, the abuse of Palestinian human rights, the mass use of violence against innocent civilians. And that is, of course, something that is being manifested also with the boycott movement, the boycott, divestment, sanction movement, or BDS. And this conference was supposed to be about something else. It was supposed to be about anti-Semitism.
<p />
<p />Now, usually the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at least in the past several years, tried to make it very clear that they don't accuse everyone who criticizes Israel of anti-Semitism, because this sort of argument tends to backfire. Most of the people who express such criticism against Israel on basis of Israel's violations of human rights are people who are defenders of human rights and would also defend the rights of Jews against attacks based on their race or religion.
<p />
<p />Basically they're saying that those who criticize Israel, those who accuse Israel of crimes are in fact anti-Semites. So this is--I think in many ways it shows that the Israeli ministry is running out of excuses, running out of ideas.
<p />
<p />This was a very high-level conference. Many very important speakers were invited. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, gave the opening speech, and in the speech he said that there are three vilifications. And he listed those three. He said the first one was that Israel is accused of committing war crimes. The second one: Israel is accused of not wanting peace. And the third one: Israel is guilty of violating the human rights of Palestinians.
<p />
<p />So these three accusations are not vilifications at all. In fact, they are well-documented and well-proven accusations based on international organizations, as well as on many Israeli organizations that say the very same thing. I think most Israelis would actually agree that the Israeli government is not really interested in peace, and yet they continue to vote for it. The fact that the Israeli army committed war crimes has been well established by, for example, the Goldstone Commission, which was actually headed by a Jewish Zionist. The fact that Israel is guilty of violating human rights is even periodically repeated by the U.S. Department of State.
<p />
<p />It completely undermines the entire meaning of the word anti-Semitic. And that's something very concerning, because there are, of course, still in the world people who hate Jews just for being Jews. There are still anti-Semites. But these anti-Semites are now completely confused and obfuscated with legitimate criticism of Israel. What we see basically is that Israel is so desperate because of the decline of its international legitimacy, because the international media is reporting the crimes committed by Israel, that they're willing to drag with them Jews, wherever they may be, and to allow these Jews to be unprotected from real kinds of anti-Semitism, just so that they could have yet another weapon or another sort of threat mechanism that they can use against those who would criticize them.
<p />
<p />NOOR: Now, Shir, a lot of the presentations and documents made at this conference have now been made public. What do you think are the most interesting points or arguments coming out of this conference, particularly concerning what Israel is to do about this growing Palestinian solidarity and BDS movement?
<p />
<p />HEVER: If you actually go into the contents of this conference, you see that it's in many ways a very empty conference. There is not that much interesting content in it.
<p />
<p />[snip] an interesting document, although it's interesting mainly because of what it doesn't include, and that is a document about online anti-Semitism, which actually talks about various homepages or Facebook profiles which have anti-Semitic contents in them. Well, I don't think it's very surprising that such things exist on the web. But the fact that it takes such a central place in a conference hosted by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a way shows that they really don't have much content to talk about.
<p />
<p />But when it comes to strategy, when it comes to how they're going to deal and act regarding anti-Semitism, suddenly the target changes, and instead of targeting anti-Semitism, they start to target the BDS movement.
<p />
<p />The Israeli strategy on dealing with BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) is threefold. It has three layers. One of the layers is about quantity rather than quality. That means that they're investing large amounts of money. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has recently dedicated $6&#160;million for--in budget to fund various organizations. They're called GONGOs, which is government organizations, non-government organizations, or GONGO, which means organizations that pretend to be civil society organizations but are actually funded by government, which would promote Israel's message. They're paying people to write topics in websites and news sites to promote Israel's message. So they're trying to fill the web with their content. I think it's very easy for anyone to go in, to do a search. And if you do a search on various topics that are controversial, you will find a lot of pro-Zionist content, because this is paid content.
<p />
<p />The second layer of strategy that was promoted in this conference and promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is to change the subject. That means that instead of talking about the occupation, instead of talking about apartheid, about the rights of Palestinians under Israeli law and so on, which is, of course, a topic that would embarrass pro-Israeli speakers very much, they say, let's change the topic and talk about things like Israeli technology, so as if--if Israel has very advanced technology, that somehow would convince people not to boycott Israel or not to make Israel accountable for its crimes.
<p />
<p />This is something that we've seen quite a lot. Even when Stephen Hawking decided to cancel his visit to Israel as an act of protest, the argument that was made against him, that he's using a chip that was produced in Israel, and because of that he's being a hypocrite and he shouldn't boycott Israel.
<p />
<p />So changing the subject is a strategy that has been recommended to the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs by marketing specialists that got a lot of money from the ministry to promote their strategy, and the ministry has wholeheartedly adopted this policy. If you go into websites of various Israeli embassies around the world, you will see that their news release talk about Israeli technological innovation all the time, and they're not even trying to engage in a discussion about the peace process, about Palestinian rights, about the occupation, and so on.
<p />
<p />So the third level that is promoted by this conference, and also by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is intimidation, basically to threaten pro-Palestinian activists or BDS activists with some kind of retaliation or a action by the Israeli army or the Israeli Mossad. The Israeli military has created a new unit to track BDS activists online and their activities. And the Mossad has also vowed to become active in tracking activists who criticize Israel.
<p />
<p />And the point in this is to intimidate activists and try to deter them from getting involved, building on the procedure of the Israeli intelligence as very effective and very violent. I don't think it's very likely that the Mossad is going to try to assassinate BDS activists or to directly harm them, because, of course, this policy will backfire and only make the criticism against Israel more powerful. But they're hoping that just by making the threat they can deter people from making any criticism whatsoever.
<p />
<p />And I think it's very interesting that they're making that sort of threat against activists at the same time that their argument is, we are going to try to--Israel is a democracy, Israel has freedom of speech. Well, it's freedom of speech, but if you criticize Israel, then there is a military unit that's going to track you and follow what you say. So that I think kind of shows their desperation as well.
<p />
<p />What's most interesting about this is that we have all these arguments that are--these three arguments that are made by this conference, and we see them all the time in the media. It's called called by Israeli speakers Hasbara. Hasbara means explanation. And they repeat these three strategies, which are quantity over quality, changing the subject, and talking about technology instead of the occupation, and intimidation, threatening those people who criticize Israel.
<p />
<p />But there's a fourth one that we don't see. And the fourth one is what we would expect to see, which is Israel trying to argue that their policies are right. We don't see the Israeli government trying to say, we have a right to occupy these territories, or Palestinians are actually treated fairly by the Israeli government, because they know this argument doesn't fly. They know that nobody will buy it. The facts are extremely clear against them. And more than anything, this attests to the growth and the strengthening of the BDS movement.
<p />
<p />NOOR: So, Shir, for BDS and Palestinian solidarity activists around the world, what lessons can they take out of this conference?
<p />
<p />HEVER: First of all, the fact that this conference even took place, the fact that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is reverting to strategies that they've abandoned because they've proven un-useful shows that the movement is gaining momentum and is becoming stronger. And I think activists should be heartened by this.
<p />
<p />Second, I would say it's very important for activists not to be intimidated, because, of course, if they allow themselves to be intimidated, if they allow this kind of argument to work, then this is exactly what emboldens the Israeli government to pursue more violent action, and not just against Palestinians but also against international activists. And we should be very clear that this is something that will not deter us.
<p />
<p />And the third point, and I think maybe the most important point, is that we should not fall into the trap which the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is trying to lay for us, by which criticizing Israel means criticizing Jews, meaning we should not become anti-Semites. And that is something that is very clearly defined in the BDS movement, and the call for BDS says very clearly, we refuse to cooperate with any organization or individual that is racist or anti-Semite. This is not part of the movement, and we refuse to get assistance, even, from organizations like that.
<p />
<p />And they're right in doing so, they're very right in doing so, because the Israeli government has shown that it's willing to sacrifice Jews around the world and their safety in the name of protecting Israeli interests. And in our criticism against Israel and Zionism and Israeli policies, we should of course not go into that trap that is laid for us in which we also accuse Jews as if they have some kind of responsibility for this.
<p />
<p />NOOR: Shir Hever, thank you for joining us.
<p />
<p />HEVER: Thank you, Jaisal, very much.
<p />
<p />NOOR: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
<p />
<p />End
<p />
<p />DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
| 7,857 |
<p>There’s more evidence that Zika virus infection can cause a paralyzing side effect called Guillain-Barré syndrome.</p>
<p>Instances of Guillain-Barré skyrocketed in countries hit by Zika virus epidemics — by as much as 877 percent in Venezuela, health officials and researchers from Latin America reported. At the very least, rates doubled, the officials said in a <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1609015" type="external">letter to the New England Journal of Medicine.</a></p>
<p>“During the weeks of Zika virus transmission, there were significant increases in the incidence of the Guillain–Barré syndrome, as compared with the pre-Zika virus baseline incidence, in (Brazil’s) Bahia State (an increase of 172 percent), Colombia (211 percent), the Dominican Republic (150 percent), El Salvador (100 percent), Honduras (144 percent), Suriname (400 percent), and Venezuela (877 percent),” they wrote. “When the incidence of Zika virus disease increased, so did the incidence of the Guillain–Barré syndrome.”</p>
<p>Doctors are fairly certain that Zika can cause Guillain-Barré syndrome, a little understood reaction in which the immune system attacks the nerves. It can cause temporary but often severe paralysis. In extreme cases, patients must be put on ventilators to help them breathe until they recover.</p>
<p>Related: <a href="" type="internal">Rare Zika Complication Hits 30 in Puerto Rico</a></p>
<p>It can be fatal — Guillain-Barré caused by Zika <a href="" type="internal">killed a man in Puerto Rico</a> last month. It's usually seen in about every 5,000 to 10,000 infections like Zika. Other infections also can cause Guillain-Barré.</p>
<p>Zika’s worst effect is the brain and nerve damage it causes in developing fetuses. It can devastate the growing brain and there is no way to prevent or reverse the effects.</p>
<p>Pregnant women in Zika-affected zones are warned to avoid mosquito bites if they possibly can by using repellents, covering up with clothing and staying inside behind screens and air conditioning. But these facilities are often not available in some of the worst-hit places.</p>
<p>The researchers found more women than men reported Zika infections, but said that might be because women are more aware of the risks because of the pregnancy link. However, men were more likely to develop Guillain-Barré.</p>
<p>“From April 1, 2015, to March 31, 2016, a total of 164,237 confirmed and suspected cases of Zika virus disease and 1,474 cases of the Guillain–Barré syndrome were reported in Bahia, Brazil; Colombia; the Dominican Republic; El Salvador; Honduras; Suriname; and Venezuela,” they wrote. “The reported incidence of the Guillain–Barré syndrome was 28 percent higher among males than among females and consistently increased with age, findings that are in line with previous reports.”</p>
<p>Zika has often circulated quietly, in part because it doesn’t cause symptoms in most people and in part because it looks like so many other mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue virus.</p>
<p>The health officials suggested that watching for Guillain-Barré cases might be one way to spot Zika outbreaks.</p>
<p>Related: <a href="" type="internal">Zika Link to Birth Defects, Guillain-Barré 'Alarming'</a></p>
<p>“Approximately 500 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean are at risk for Zika virus infection,” they wrote.</p>
<p>“It is clear that increases in the incidence of the Guillain–Barré syndrome to a level that is 2 and 9.8 times as high as baseline, as we have reported here, impose a substantial burden on populations and health services in this region.”</p>
|
As Zika Spread, Paralyzing Guillain-Barré Syndrome Skyrocketed
| false |
http://nbcnews.com/storyline/zika-virus-outbreak/study-finds-strong-link-between-zika-paralyzing-guillain-barr-syndrome-n641276
|
2016-09-01
| 3left-center
|
As Zika Spread, Paralyzing Guillain-Barré Syndrome Skyrocketed
<p>There’s more evidence that Zika virus infection can cause a paralyzing side effect called Guillain-Barré syndrome.</p>
<p>Instances of Guillain-Barré skyrocketed in countries hit by Zika virus epidemics — by as much as 877 percent in Venezuela, health officials and researchers from Latin America reported. At the very least, rates doubled, the officials said in a <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1609015" type="external">letter to the New England Journal of Medicine.</a></p>
<p>“During the weeks of Zika virus transmission, there were significant increases in the incidence of the Guillain–Barré syndrome, as compared with the pre-Zika virus baseline incidence, in (Brazil’s) Bahia State (an increase of 172 percent), Colombia (211 percent), the Dominican Republic (150 percent), El Salvador (100 percent), Honduras (144 percent), Suriname (400 percent), and Venezuela (877 percent),” they wrote. “When the incidence of Zika virus disease increased, so did the incidence of the Guillain–Barré syndrome.”</p>
<p>Doctors are fairly certain that Zika can cause Guillain-Barré syndrome, a little understood reaction in which the immune system attacks the nerves. It can cause temporary but often severe paralysis. In extreme cases, patients must be put on ventilators to help them breathe until they recover.</p>
<p>Related: <a href="" type="internal">Rare Zika Complication Hits 30 in Puerto Rico</a></p>
<p>It can be fatal — Guillain-Barré caused by Zika <a href="" type="internal">killed a man in Puerto Rico</a> last month. It's usually seen in about every 5,000 to 10,000 infections like Zika. Other infections also can cause Guillain-Barré.</p>
<p>Zika’s worst effect is the brain and nerve damage it causes in developing fetuses. It can devastate the growing brain and there is no way to prevent or reverse the effects.</p>
<p>Pregnant women in Zika-affected zones are warned to avoid mosquito bites if they possibly can by using repellents, covering up with clothing and staying inside behind screens and air conditioning. But these facilities are often not available in some of the worst-hit places.</p>
<p>The researchers found more women than men reported Zika infections, but said that might be because women are more aware of the risks because of the pregnancy link. However, men were more likely to develop Guillain-Barré.</p>
<p>“From April 1, 2015, to March 31, 2016, a total of 164,237 confirmed and suspected cases of Zika virus disease and 1,474 cases of the Guillain–Barré syndrome were reported in Bahia, Brazil; Colombia; the Dominican Republic; El Salvador; Honduras; Suriname; and Venezuela,” they wrote. “The reported incidence of the Guillain–Barré syndrome was 28 percent higher among males than among females and consistently increased with age, findings that are in line with previous reports.”</p>
<p>Zika has often circulated quietly, in part because it doesn’t cause symptoms in most people and in part because it looks like so many other mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue virus.</p>
<p>The health officials suggested that watching for Guillain-Barré cases might be one way to spot Zika outbreaks.</p>
<p>Related: <a href="" type="internal">Zika Link to Birth Defects, Guillain-Barré 'Alarming'</a></p>
<p>“Approximately 500 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean are at risk for Zika virus infection,” they wrote.</p>
<p>“It is clear that increases in the incidence of the Guillain–Barré syndrome to a level that is 2 and 9.8 times as high as baseline, as we have reported here, impose a substantial burden on populations and health services in this region.”</p>
| 7,858 |
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Meth is a hell of a drug, in fact, it might even be the million dollar dream. For one Sioux City man in Iowa, that million dollar dream is going to have to remain a fantasy.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>33 Year Old Dennis Strickland tried to make his dreams come true however, when he walked into Northwest Bank on West 7th Street in Sioux City, and tried to deposit a $1,000,000.00 bill.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Police say that bank tellers then called them to report that something wasn't quite right about the would-be millionaire, since his bank account has never had more than $500 in it at a time.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>After officers arrived to the scene they say the man was acting anxious, and kept fidgeting with something in his pocket that sounded like paper so they asked if he had more million dollar bills on him.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Law enforcement says that once they asked him, he then began to empty his pockets of all his belongings, and a small baggy of methamphetamine fell out.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Police then arrested Strickland and charged him with Possession of a Controlled substance. They didn't however charge him for the million dollar bill.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>He's currently being held in the Woodbury County Jail on a $1,000 bond. His next court date is scheduled for August 14th at 9:00 AM, but there's no word yet if the courts will accept his million dollar bill as per bond.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Source:</p>
<p />
<p><a href="http://www.siouxlandproud.com/news/local-news/sioux-city-man-arrested-for-meth-while-trying-to-deposit-million-dollar-bill/783369680" type="external">siouxlandproud.com/news/local-news/sioux-city-man-arrested-for-meth-while-trying-to-deposit-million-dollar-bill/783369680</a></p>
|
Iowa Man Tries To Deposit Million Dollar Bill In Bank, Police Find Meth On Him
| true |
http://thegoldwater.com/news/6130-Iowa-Man-Tries-To-Deposit-Million-Dollar-Bill-In-Bank-Police-Find-Meth-On-Him
|
2017-08-05
| 0right
|
Iowa Man Tries To Deposit Million Dollar Bill In Bank, Police Find Meth On Him
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Meth is a hell of a drug, in fact, it might even be the million dollar dream. For one Sioux City man in Iowa, that million dollar dream is going to have to remain a fantasy.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>33 Year Old Dennis Strickland tried to make his dreams come true however, when he walked into Northwest Bank on West 7th Street in Sioux City, and tried to deposit a $1,000,000.00 bill.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Police say that bank tellers then called them to report that something wasn't quite right about the would-be millionaire, since his bank account has never had more than $500 in it at a time.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>After officers arrived to the scene they say the man was acting anxious, and kept fidgeting with something in his pocket that sounded like paper so they asked if he had more million dollar bills on him.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Law enforcement says that once they asked him, he then began to empty his pockets of all his belongings, and a small baggy of methamphetamine fell out.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Police then arrested Strickland and charged him with Possession of a Controlled substance. They didn't however charge him for the million dollar bill.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>He's currently being held in the Woodbury County Jail on a $1,000 bond. His next court date is scheduled for August 14th at 9:00 AM, but there's no word yet if the courts will accept his million dollar bill as per bond.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Source:</p>
<p />
<p><a href="http://www.siouxlandproud.com/news/local-news/sioux-city-man-arrested-for-meth-while-trying-to-deposit-million-dollar-bill/783369680" type="external">siouxlandproud.com/news/local-news/sioux-city-man-arrested-for-meth-while-trying-to-deposit-million-dollar-bill/783369680</a></p>
| 7,859 |
<p />
<p>Sony's <a href="" type="internal">PlayStation Network</a> has been down for the last six days after being attacked by hackers, and <a href="" type="internal">Sony</a> has just posted one of the scariest <a href="http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/26/update-on-playstation-network-and-qriocity/" type="external">status messages Opens a New Window.</a> we've ever seen.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The relevant excerpt:</p>
<p>"Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility."</p>
<p>Worst case scenario: if you use the same password and email address to register for other services like online banking, the attacker will have very little problem getting into those accounts, too.</p>
<p>Sony has shut down the network and engaged an outside security firm to try and figure out what happened. Sony is rebuilding the network and says it will have some services back up in a week.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>The PlayStation Network has 70 million members.</p>
<p>More from Business Insider:</p>
|
Sony: Hackers Stole Personal Info From PlayStation Network
| true |
http://foxbusiness.com/features/2011/04/26/sony-hackers-stole-personal-info-playstation-network.html
|
2016-03-04
| 0right
|
Sony: Hackers Stole Personal Info From PlayStation Network
<p />
<p>Sony's <a href="" type="internal">PlayStation Network</a> has been down for the last six days after being attacked by hackers, and <a href="" type="internal">Sony</a> has just posted one of the scariest <a href="http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/26/update-on-playstation-network-and-qriocity/" type="external">status messages Opens a New Window.</a> we've ever seen.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The relevant excerpt:</p>
<p>"Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility."</p>
<p>Worst case scenario: if you use the same password and email address to register for other services like online banking, the attacker will have very little problem getting into those accounts, too.</p>
<p>Sony has shut down the network and engaged an outside security firm to try and figure out what happened. Sony is rebuilding the network and says it will have some services back up in a week.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>The PlayStation Network has 70 million members.</p>
<p>More from Business Insider:</p>
| 7,860 |
<p />
<p>George W. Bush came into office with immigration reform at the top of his agenda; then came Sept. 11, and the issue dropped out of sight. Now, with the general election approaching, the question of what to do about America’s massive population of illegal immigrants has resurfaced. On Tuesday the president unveiled a proposal to give work visas of indeterminate length to millions of so-called “undocumented workers.” Many congressional conservatives say the plan, effectively an amnesty for illegals, rewards law-breaking, and they promise to give it a rough ride. But whether or not it passes, Bush is calculating that his proposal will win him the goodwill — that is, the votes — of Latinos.</p>
<p>The new “temporary worker program” would allow some of the nation’s approximately 10 million undocumented workers (60 percent of whom are estimated to be Mexicans) who hold jobs to receive permits allowing them to work legally for an unspecified period of time. It would also allow workers outside the U.S. to be matched up with domestic employers — potentially giving employers significant power over their temporary employees. Workers could travel freely between their home country and the U.S., and apply for permanent residency.</p>
<p>In his announcement, the President explained that America has always been a source of <a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;cid=514&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;e=1&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;u=/ap/20040107/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_immigration_32" type="external">employment for immigrants</a>. “Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans are not filling,” he said.</p>
<p>Critics say the proposal amounts to a mass amnesty program rewarding illegal behavior. “If it’s truly an amnesty program, it’s <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-immig6jan06,1,4699422.story?coll=la-home-headlines" type="external">dead on arrival</a>” said Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley). “Even those of us who strongly support George W. Bush don’t agree with him on every issue. I wasn’t elected to be a rubber stamp.”</p>
<p>Latinos account for 13 percent of the population, and 7 percent of the electorate — many of whom polls have shown to define themselves as politically independent. Although it is doubtful Congress will make any progress on the proposal in the near future, the president’s efforts could pay off for his campaign. In 2000 Bush won 35 percent of the Hispanic vote. Advocating for mass amnesty could greatly increase his popularity, whether the plan passes Congress or not.</p>
<p>In a Wednesday debate between Pat Buchanan and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, Democrat of California on NBC, Buchanan accused the president of <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3887721&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;p1=0" type="external">poltically-motivated concessions</a>.</p>
<p>“The president of the United States is making a concession in order to win Hispanic votes. … He cannot or will not do his duty to enforce the immigration laws of the United States and to protect the borders of the United States.”</p>
<p>But Sanchez made the familiar, and accurate, argument that the labor market requires immigrants to work in jobs many Americans are unwilling to do.</p>
<p />
<p>“While there are many unemployed in the United States, the fact of the matter is there are a lot of sectors that go begging for people to come and do those jobs, and we’ve seen so many come to us and say, ‘We need to get some status for these people because we need them to do those jobs.’ Secondly, it’s a homeland security issue. We need to know who’s here. We have limited amount of resources and we need to target those resources on people who are here to do us harm, not on people who are here working, who are here as part of our community, whose children are probably United States citizens. We need to get a handle on that and to give them status in this country. And it’s also about family reunification. We need to keep those families together instead of deporting pieces of them out of the country.”</p>
<p>(Mark Krikorian of the National Review Online makes the rather startling counterargument that <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/krikorian200401070923.asp" type="external">the U.S., far from needing foreign workers, should do away with them,</a> because they put a brake on workplace modernization.)</p>
<p>In the Denver Post, columnist Al Knight argues that since Americans generally don’t support amnesty for those who have broken the law, the president’s <a href="http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~148~1874268,00.html" type="external">proposal</a> might easily backfire politically.</p>
<p />
<p>“Bush is apparently intent upon offering some kind of amnesty proposal hidden in a guest worker program.</p>
<p>It won’t work. Any worker program that accepts applications from those currently in this country illegally is likely to unite the opposition, especially in an election year. It is also true that immigration groups will adamantly oppose any program that didn’t accept such applications.”</p>
<p>Even those advocating on behalf of immigrants reacted to Bush’s plan with caution. Many advocates are concerned that “coming out” as an illegal will ultimately increase an immigrant’s chances of being deported when the term of his or her guest visa is up. Cecilia Munoz, vice-president of the National Council of La Raza, told the Guardian that Bush <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1117635,00.html" type="external">isn’t advocating</a> on behalf of immigrants. “The Latino community knows the difference between political posturing and a real policy debate.”</p>
<p>Illegal immigrants seem impressed, though. The Christian Science Monitor quotes Fernando, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0108/p01s01-uspo.html" type="external">an undocumented worker in Houston</a>, as saying, “Everyone is very excited. It would be perfect for so many of us.”</p>
|
Playing the Visa Card
| true |
https://motherjones.com/politics/2004/01/playing-visa-card/
|
2004-01-08
| 4left
|
Playing the Visa Card
<p />
<p>George W. Bush came into office with immigration reform at the top of his agenda; then came Sept. 11, and the issue dropped out of sight. Now, with the general election approaching, the question of what to do about America’s massive population of illegal immigrants has resurfaced. On Tuesday the president unveiled a proposal to give work visas of indeterminate length to millions of so-called “undocumented workers.” Many congressional conservatives say the plan, effectively an amnesty for illegals, rewards law-breaking, and they promise to give it a rough ride. But whether or not it passes, Bush is calculating that his proposal will win him the goodwill — that is, the votes — of Latinos.</p>
<p>The new “temporary worker program” would allow some of the nation’s approximately 10 million undocumented workers (60 percent of whom are estimated to be Mexicans) who hold jobs to receive permits allowing them to work legally for an unspecified period of time. It would also allow workers outside the U.S. to be matched up with domestic employers — potentially giving employers significant power over their temporary employees. Workers could travel freely between their home country and the U.S., and apply for permanent residency.</p>
<p>In his announcement, the President explained that America has always been a source of <a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;cid=514&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;e=1&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;u=/ap/20040107/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_immigration_32" type="external">employment for immigrants</a>. “Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans are not filling,” he said.</p>
<p>Critics say the proposal amounts to a mass amnesty program rewarding illegal behavior. “If it’s truly an amnesty program, it’s <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-immig6jan06,1,4699422.story?coll=la-home-headlines" type="external">dead on arrival</a>” said Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley). “Even those of us who strongly support George W. Bush don’t agree with him on every issue. I wasn’t elected to be a rubber stamp.”</p>
<p>Latinos account for 13 percent of the population, and 7 percent of the electorate — many of whom polls have shown to define themselves as politically independent. Although it is doubtful Congress will make any progress on the proposal in the near future, the president’s efforts could pay off for his campaign. In 2000 Bush won 35 percent of the Hispanic vote. Advocating for mass amnesty could greatly increase his popularity, whether the plan passes Congress or not.</p>
<p>In a Wednesday debate between Pat Buchanan and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, Democrat of California on NBC, Buchanan accused the president of <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3887721&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;p1=0" type="external">poltically-motivated concessions</a>.</p>
<p>“The president of the United States is making a concession in order to win Hispanic votes. … He cannot or will not do his duty to enforce the immigration laws of the United States and to protect the borders of the United States.”</p>
<p>But Sanchez made the familiar, and accurate, argument that the labor market requires immigrants to work in jobs many Americans are unwilling to do.</p>
<p />
<p>“While there are many unemployed in the United States, the fact of the matter is there are a lot of sectors that go begging for people to come and do those jobs, and we’ve seen so many come to us and say, ‘We need to get some status for these people because we need them to do those jobs.’ Secondly, it’s a homeland security issue. We need to know who’s here. We have limited amount of resources and we need to target those resources on people who are here to do us harm, not on people who are here working, who are here as part of our community, whose children are probably United States citizens. We need to get a handle on that and to give them status in this country. And it’s also about family reunification. We need to keep those families together instead of deporting pieces of them out of the country.”</p>
<p>(Mark Krikorian of the National Review Online makes the rather startling counterargument that <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/krikorian200401070923.asp" type="external">the U.S., far from needing foreign workers, should do away with them,</a> because they put a brake on workplace modernization.)</p>
<p>In the Denver Post, columnist Al Knight argues that since Americans generally don’t support amnesty for those who have broken the law, the president’s <a href="http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~148~1874268,00.html" type="external">proposal</a> might easily backfire politically.</p>
<p />
<p>“Bush is apparently intent upon offering some kind of amnesty proposal hidden in a guest worker program.</p>
<p>It won’t work. Any worker program that accepts applications from those currently in this country illegally is likely to unite the opposition, especially in an election year. It is also true that immigration groups will adamantly oppose any program that didn’t accept such applications.”</p>
<p>Even those advocating on behalf of immigrants reacted to Bush’s plan with caution. Many advocates are concerned that “coming out” as an illegal will ultimately increase an immigrant’s chances of being deported when the term of his or her guest visa is up. Cecilia Munoz, vice-president of the National Council of La Raza, told the Guardian that Bush <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1117635,00.html" type="external">isn’t advocating</a> on behalf of immigrants. “The Latino community knows the difference between political posturing and a real policy debate.”</p>
<p>Illegal immigrants seem impressed, though. The Christian Science Monitor quotes Fernando, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0108/p01s01-uspo.html" type="external">an undocumented worker in Houston</a>, as saying, “Everyone is very excited. It would be perfect for so many of us.”</p>
| 7,861 |
<p>Please submit transitions — including staff changes, ordinations, anniversaries or deaths — to&#160; <a href="" type="internal">Barbara Francis</a>. This page will be updated weekly.</p>
<p>Louise Barger, to First Baptist Church, Dayton, Ohio, as interim pastor.</p>
<p>Eric Costanzo, to South Tulsa (Okla). Baptist Church, as lead pastor. He comes from First Baptist Church, Tulsa, Okla., where he served as associate pastor.</p>
<p>Chris Davis, to Groveton Baptist Church, Alexandria, Va., as pastor. He comes from the pastorate of Whitton Avenue Bible Church, Phoenix, Ariz.</p>
<p>Bart Glatt, to First Baptist Church, Muskogee, Okla., as pastor of volunteer ministries.</p>
<p>Carol Green, to First Baptist Church, Stillwater, Okla., as director of children’s ministry.</p>
<p>Mark Mitchell, to Haran Baptist Church, Roanoke, Va., as youth minister.</p>
<p>Alan Selig, to Upper Merion Baptist Church, King of Prussia, Pa., as interim pastor.</p>
<p>Adam Triplett, to Waverly Place Baptist Church, Roanoke, Va., as pastor.</p>
<p>Sean Williams, to First Baptist Church, McMinnville, Oregon, as children’s and youth ministries coordinator.&#160;</p>
<p>Ray Landis, retiring after 15 years as director of music at First Baptist Church, Dayton, Ohio.</p>
<p>Patricia Outlaw, retiring after 15 years as professor at Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Ala. She is pastor of Bethel A.M.E. Church-Rising in Birmingham. She was the first woman to graduate from Beeson’s doctor of ministry program in 2002</p>
<p>Fausto Vasconcelos, retiring after more than 10 years as director of the Missions, Evangelism and Theological Reflection division of the Baptist World Alliance, effective Aug. 31. &#160;&#160;</p>
<p>Riley W. Eubank Jr., 91, died June 13 in Austin, Texas. He was pastor of four Texas Baptist churches: &#160;Seventh and James in Waco; Woodlawn in Austin; Webb in Arlington; Pawnee in Pawnee; and University Heights Baptist Church, Stillwater, Okla. He was vice chair of the Baptist General Convention of Texas Christian Life Commission, trustee of Baylor University, member of the BGCT executive board and co-founder of the Waco Pastoral Counseling Center. He is predeceased by his wife, Wynelle. He is survived by a son, Dean; daughter, Nancy Eubank Lewis; stepson, Larry Vickery; stepdaughter, Raelyn Vickrey Olson; four granddaughters; and three great-granddaughters.&#160;</p>
<p>Wyndee Holbrook, 5 years with the Academy of Preachers, located in Louisville, Ky. She currently serves as its executive director.</p>
<p>Bonnie Western, 5 years as pianist at Cradock Baptist Church, Portsmouth, Va.</p>
<p>In case you missed them:</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Transitions for the week of 07.08.16</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Transitions for the week of 07.01.16</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Transitions for the week of 06.17.16</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Transitions for the week of 06.10.16</a></p>
|
Transitions for the week of 07.15.16
| false |
https://baptistnews.com/article/transitions-for-the-week-of-07-15-16/
| 3left-center
|
Transitions for the week of 07.15.16
<p>Please submit transitions — including staff changes, ordinations, anniversaries or deaths — to&#160; <a href="" type="internal">Barbara Francis</a>. This page will be updated weekly.</p>
<p>Louise Barger, to First Baptist Church, Dayton, Ohio, as interim pastor.</p>
<p>Eric Costanzo, to South Tulsa (Okla). Baptist Church, as lead pastor. He comes from First Baptist Church, Tulsa, Okla., where he served as associate pastor.</p>
<p>Chris Davis, to Groveton Baptist Church, Alexandria, Va., as pastor. He comes from the pastorate of Whitton Avenue Bible Church, Phoenix, Ariz.</p>
<p>Bart Glatt, to First Baptist Church, Muskogee, Okla., as pastor of volunteer ministries.</p>
<p>Carol Green, to First Baptist Church, Stillwater, Okla., as director of children’s ministry.</p>
<p>Mark Mitchell, to Haran Baptist Church, Roanoke, Va., as youth minister.</p>
<p>Alan Selig, to Upper Merion Baptist Church, King of Prussia, Pa., as interim pastor.</p>
<p>Adam Triplett, to Waverly Place Baptist Church, Roanoke, Va., as pastor.</p>
<p>Sean Williams, to First Baptist Church, McMinnville, Oregon, as children’s and youth ministries coordinator.&#160;</p>
<p>Ray Landis, retiring after 15 years as director of music at First Baptist Church, Dayton, Ohio.</p>
<p>Patricia Outlaw, retiring after 15 years as professor at Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Ala. She is pastor of Bethel A.M.E. Church-Rising in Birmingham. She was the first woman to graduate from Beeson’s doctor of ministry program in 2002</p>
<p>Fausto Vasconcelos, retiring after more than 10 years as director of the Missions, Evangelism and Theological Reflection division of the Baptist World Alliance, effective Aug. 31. &#160;&#160;</p>
<p>Riley W. Eubank Jr., 91, died June 13 in Austin, Texas. He was pastor of four Texas Baptist churches: &#160;Seventh and James in Waco; Woodlawn in Austin; Webb in Arlington; Pawnee in Pawnee; and University Heights Baptist Church, Stillwater, Okla. He was vice chair of the Baptist General Convention of Texas Christian Life Commission, trustee of Baylor University, member of the BGCT executive board and co-founder of the Waco Pastoral Counseling Center. He is predeceased by his wife, Wynelle. He is survived by a son, Dean; daughter, Nancy Eubank Lewis; stepson, Larry Vickery; stepdaughter, Raelyn Vickrey Olson; four granddaughters; and three great-granddaughters.&#160;</p>
<p>Wyndee Holbrook, 5 years with the Academy of Preachers, located in Louisville, Ky. She currently serves as its executive director.</p>
<p>Bonnie Western, 5 years as pianist at Cradock Baptist Church, Portsmouth, Va.</p>
<p>In case you missed them:</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Transitions for the week of 07.08.16</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Transitions for the week of 07.01.16</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Transitions for the week of 06.17.16</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Transitions for the week of 06.10.16</a></p>
| 7,862 |
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<p>U.S. regulators are warning consumers to avoid 65 bogus products hawked on the internet with false claims that they can cure, treat, diagnose or prevent cancer.</p>
<p>The Food and Drug Administration says these products , mostly sold on websites and social media sites, can be harmful, waste money and result in people not getting approved, effective treatments.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The pills, creams and teas are untested and not approved by the FDA, which called them a "cruel deception." Some contain ingredients that can be risky or interact dangerously with prescription drugs. The FDA on Tuesday posted the warning letters it sent to 14 manufacturers, telling them to remove their fraudulent claims describing the products as drugs, or face stiff penalties.</p>
<p>"Anyone who suffers from cancer, or know someone who does, understands the fear and desperation that can set in," FDA consumer safety officer Nicole Kornspan said in a statement. "There could be a great temptation to jump at anything that appears to offer a chance for a cure."</p>
<p>Many of the treatments are touted with illegal claims, such as "miraculously kills cancer cells in tumors," ''more effective than chemotherapy," and "treats all forms of cancer," the FDA said. Often, they're advertised as safe, natural products or dietary supplements.</p>
<p>Some of the products are marketed for cats and dogs.</p>
<p>The FDA said it has issued more than 90 warning letters over the past decade to companies selling fraudulent cancer products. The agency said many of those companies stopped selling the products or making fraudulent claims, yet numerous unsafe products are still for sale because it's easy for scammers to switch to new websites.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Follow Linda A. Johnson at https://twitter.com/LindaJ_onPharma</p>
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FDA: Avoid fake 'miracle' cancer treatments sold on internet
| true |
http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/04/25/fda-avoid-fake-miracle-cancer-treatments-sold-on-internet.html
|
2017-04-25
| 0right
|
FDA: Avoid fake 'miracle' cancer treatments sold on internet
<p>U.S. regulators are warning consumers to avoid 65 bogus products hawked on the internet with false claims that they can cure, treat, diagnose or prevent cancer.</p>
<p>The Food and Drug Administration says these products , mostly sold on websites and social media sites, can be harmful, waste money and result in people not getting approved, effective treatments.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The pills, creams and teas are untested and not approved by the FDA, which called them a "cruel deception." Some contain ingredients that can be risky or interact dangerously with prescription drugs. The FDA on Tuesday posted the warning letters it sent to 14 manufacturers, telling them to remove their fraudulent claims describing the products as drugs, or face stiff penalties.</p>
<p>"Anyone who suffers from cancer, or know someone who does, understands the fear and desperation that can set in," FDA consumer safety officer Nicole Kornspan said in a statement. "There could be a great temptation to jump at anything that appears to offer a chance for a cure."</p>
<p>Many of the treatments are touted with illegal claims, such as "miraculously kills cancer cells in tumors," ''more effective than chemotherapy," and "treats all forms of cancer," the FDA said. Often, they're advertised as safe, natural products or dietary supplements.</p>
<p>Some of the products are marketed for cats and dogs.</p>
<p>The FDA said it has issued more than 90 warning letters over the past decade to companies selling fraudulent cancer products. The agency said many of those companies stopped selling the products or making fraudulent claims, yet numerous unsafe products are still for sale because it's easy for scammers to switch to new websites.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Follow Linda A. Johnson at https://twitter.com/LindaJ_onPharma</p>
| 7,863 |
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“One small step for marijuana, one great leap for science”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Pot, weed, grass, reefer, joint, marijuana – by whatever name it is called – cannabis (most commonly called marijuana) is being decriminalized. A bi-partisan group of senators have prepared a bill that The Daily Beast calls “One small step for marijuana, one great leap for science.”</p>
<p>The federal government now makes it illegal to use the cannabis plant (marijuana) in any form; but if The Compassionate Access, Research Expansion and Respect States Act (CARERS) is passed by Congress it will eliminate the federal ban on medical marijuana in the states that have legalized marijuana for medical purposes. Currently, 23 states and the District of Columbia have laws permitting use of medical marijuana. Texas recently introduced legislation to allow medical use of marijuana and Florida will have the issue on its 2016 ballot.</p>
<p>The Appropriations Act that was passed in December, 2014, contained a Section (538) that prohibited the Department of Justice from using its funds to interfere in the implementation of state marijuana laws and also forbade any federal agency from interfering with state laws. CARERS goes further: It reclassifies marijuana from a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 2 drug. Schedule 1 drugs are defined as having high potential for abuse, no accepted medical use, and lack of accepted safety for use. Some examples are heroin, LSD, and ecstasy. &#160;Schedule 2 drugs are described as having less potential for abuse, possibility of leading to psychological or physical dependence, but also having a currently accepted use in medical treatment. Examples include cocaine, Demerol, and OxyContin.</p>
<p>Until it was illegalized in 1937, extract of cannabis sative (marijuana) was among the top three most prescribed medicines in the U.S. &#160;Needless to say, its use as a medicine was extremely limited after it became illegal. Today, it is used to treat pain, muscle spasticity (seizures), nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy, and loss of appetite in HIV/AIDS patients. For many seriously ill people it is the only drug that helps them without causing debilitating side effects.</p>
<p>In recent years national polls have shown that 70% of voters approve use of medical marijuana. Notably, many republicans over the age of 34 years do not. The average age of 2012 republicans voting in the presidential primary election was 51 years.</p>
<p>Opponents of CARERS cite insufficient data about the safety and effectiveness of the drug as reasons for their opposition. Because cannabis is being removed from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2, large scale tests can now be conducted and researchers can gather evidence as to the medical value of the drug. Meanwhile, many ill people can have legal access to the medicine that works best for them.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
|
Marijuana To Be Federally Decriminalized
| true |
http://politicalblindspot.com/marijuana-to-be-federally-decriminalized-2/
|
2015-03-18
| 4left
|
Marijuana To Be Federally Decriminalized
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“One small step for marijuana, one great leap for science”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Pot, weed, grass, reefer, joint, marijuana – by whatever name it is called – cannabis (most commonly called marijuana) is being decriminalized. A bi-partisan group of senators have prepared a bill that The Daily Beast calls “One small step for marijuana, one great leap for science.”</p>
<p>The federal government now makes it illegal to use the cannabis plant (marijuana) in any form; but if The Compassionate Access, Research Expansion and Respect States Act (CARERS) is passed by Congress it will eliminate the federal ban on medical marijuana in the states that have legalized marijuana for medical purposes. Currently, 23 states and the District of Columbia have laws permitting use of medical marijuana. Texas recently introduced legislation to allow medical use of marijuana and Florida will have the issue on its 2016 ballot.</p>
<p>The Appropriations Act that was passed in December, 2014, contained a Section (538) that prohibited the Department of Justice from using its funds to interfere in the implementation of state marijuana laws and also forbade any federal agency from interfering with state laws. CARERS goes further: It reclassifies marijuana from a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 2 drug. Schedule 1 drugs are defined as having high potential for abuse, no accepted medical use, and lack of accepted safety for use. Some examples are heroin, LSD, and ecstasy. &#160;Schedule 2 drugs are described as having less potential for abuse, possibility of leading to psychological or physical dependence, but also having a currently accepted use in medical treatment. Examples include cocaine, Demerol, and OxyContin.</p>
<p>Until it was illegalized in 1937, extract of cannabis sative (marijuana) was among the top three most prescribed medicines in the U.S. &#160;Needless to say, its use as a medicine was extremely limited after it became illegal. Today, it is used to treat pain, muscle spasticity (seizures), nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy, and loss of appetite in HIV/AIDS patients. For many seriously ill people it is the only drug that helps them without causing debilitating side effects.</p>
<p>In recent years national polls have shown that 70% of voters approve use of medical marijuana. Notably, many republicans over the age of 34 years do not. The average age of 2012 republicans voting in the presidential primary election was 51 years.</p>
<p>Opponents of CARERS cite insufficient data about the safety and effectiveness of the drug as reasons for their opposition. Because cannabis is being removed from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2, large scale tests can now be conducted and researchers can gather evidence as to the medical value of the drug. Meanwhile, many ill people can have legal access to the medicine that works best for them.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
| 7,864 |
<p>GILLETTE, Wyo. (AP) — A 22-year-old Wyoming man has been sentenced to life in prison for the first-degree murder of his girlfriend’s 3-year-old boy.</p>
<p>The Gillette News Record <a href="http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com/news/local/article_cea89434-48bc-52ff-a9a0-5a9171b77e99.html" type="external">reports</a> that Joseph Nielsen, of Gillette, was sentenced Friday by District Judge Michael “Nick” Deegan.</p>
<p>Nielsen maintained his innocence throughout his trial and during his sentencing when he read a prepared statement in which he accused law enforcement and prosecutors of building a false case against him.</p>
<p>He was convicted in September of first-degree murder and child abuse in the 2016 death of the child.</p>
<p>Nielsen’s attorney, Nick Carter, said he plans to appeal.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: The Gillette (Wyo.) News Record, <a href="http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com" type="external" /> <a href="http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com" type="external">http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com</a></p>
<p>GILLETTE, Wyo. (AP) — A 22-year-old Wyoming man has been sentenced to life in prison for the first-degree murder of his girlfriend’s 3-year-old boy.</p>
<p>The Gillette News Record <a href="http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com/news/local/article_cea89434-48bc-52ff-a9a0-5a9171b77e99.html" type="external">reports</a> that Joseph Nielsen, of Gillette, was sentenced Friday by District Judge Michael “Nick” Deegan.</p>
<p>Nielsen maintained his innocence throughout his trial and during his sentencing when he read a prepared statement in which he accused law enforcement and prosecutors of building a false case against him.</p>
<p>He was convicted in September of first-degree murder and child abuse in the 2016 death of the child.</p>
<p>Nielsen’s attorney, Nick Carter, said he plans to appeal.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: The Gillette (Wyo.) News Record, <a href="http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com" type="external" /> <a href="http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com" type="external">http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com</a></p>
|
Wyoming man gets life in prison for killing 3-year-old
| false |
https://apnews.com/9f1f1c0e0bb64b058eae65d53db65331
|
2018-01-19
| 2least
|
Wyoming man gets life in prison for killing 3-year-old
<p>GILLETTE, Wyo. (AP) — A 22-year-old Wyoming man has been sentenced to life in prison for the first-degree murder of his girlfriend’s 3-year-old boy.</p>
<p>The Gillette News Record <a href="http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com/news/local/article_cea89434-48bc-52ff-a9a0-5a9171b77e99.html" type="external">reports</a> that Joseph Nielsen, of Gillette, was sentenced Friday by District Judge Michael “Nick” Deegan.</p>
<p>Nielsen maintained his innocence throughout his trial and during his sentencing when he read a prepared statement in which he accused law enforcement and prosecutors of building a false case against him.</p>
<p>He was convicted in September of first-degree murder and child abuse in the 2016 death of the child.</p>
<p>Nielsen’s attorney, Nick Carter, said he plans to appeal.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: The Gillette (Wyo.) News Record, <a href="http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com" type="external" /> <a href="http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com" type="external">http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com</a></p>
<p>GILLETTE, Wyo. (AP) — A 22-year-old Wyoming man has been sentenced to life in prison for the first-degree murder of his girlfriend’s 3-year-old boy.</p>
<p>The Gillette News Record <a href="http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com/news/local/article_cea89434-48bc-52ff-a9a0-5a9171b77e99.html" type="external">reports</a> that Joseph Nielsen, of Gillette, was sentenced Friday by District Judge Michael “Nick” Deegan.</p>
<p>Nielsen maintained his innocence throughout his trial and during his sentencing when he read a prepared statement in which he accused law enforcement and prosecutors of building a false case against him.</p>
<p>He was convicted in September of first-degree murder and child abuse in the 2016 death of the child.</p>
<p>Nielsen’s attorney, Nick Carter, said he plans to appeal.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: The Gillette (Wyo.) News Record, <a href="http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com" type="external" /> <a href="http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com" type="external">http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com</a></p>
| 7,865 |
<p>Undercounting Unemployment and its Consequences</p>
<p>Although unemployment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) have been less discouraging of late, the news would be far worse if the media reported the total number of Americans currently out of work. And if the number of Americans who are under employed or who work full time but earn poverty wages were reported widely on a regular basis, the U.S. economic outlook would appear worse still. Instead, the official unemployment rate reflects a rather narrow definition of unemployment and obscures debates that we should be having about the overall health of the U.S. economy and its ability to provide decent, family-supporting jobs to all its citizens. Arguments about how to calculate the nation's unemployment rate aren't new, but the issue has fallen off the public's radar screen in recent years. Most Americans accept that the unemployment statistic is what it purports to be: an accurate assessment of those looking for work.</p>
<p>Mainstream media devote little attention to the limitations of the official unemployment rate, especially during periods of growth. During recessions, articles examining deeper economic issues may appear, but they almost never address just how many Americans are left out of the count-and how many others aren't doing well by other measures. Many middle- and lower income Americans have a visceral understanding that the economy is worse than our official economists admit, but their knowledge is not reflected in the nation's unemployment statistics. Even during the boom years of the mid- and late 1990s, income inequality expanded for many Americans, and lower income Americans with less education enjoyed fewer opportunities for meaningful employment than the headlines about record low levels of unemployment suggested.</p>
<p>The government first began collecting simple information about the nation's unemployed in 1880, but it wasn't until the Great Depression that efforts to collect unemployment statistics began in earnest. At the onset of that major calamity, estimates of the nation's unemployed were unofficial and varied, often provided by private agencies. Inaccurate information about just how many Americans needed jobs made it more difficult for New Dealers to craft coherent employment policies. The depression firmly established the critical importance of more precise data, and the government instituted the monthly Current Population Survey in 1940. The CPS is a sample survey of (currently) sixty thousand households from which the official unemployment rate is derived. It was originally administered by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal work relief program that ceased to exist in 1943, and it is now cosponsored by the U.S. Census Bureau and the BLS. The depression also gave birth in 1935 to our unemployment insurance system, which continues to provide benefits for unemployed Americans lucky enough to qualify. The system operates largely at the s...</p>
<p />
|
Numbers Games
| true |
https://dissentmagazine.org/article/numbers-games
|
2018-10-06
| 4left
|
Numbers Games
<p>Undercounting Unemployment and its Consequences</p>
<p>Although unemployment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) have been less discouraging of late, the news would be far worse if the media reported the total number of Americans currently out of work. And if the number of Americans who are under employed or who work full time but earn poverty wages were reported widely on a regular basis, the U.S. economic outlook would appear worse still. Instead, the official unemployment rate reflects a rather narrow definition of unemployment and obscures debates that we should be having about the overall health of the U.S. economy and its ability to provide decent, family-supporting jobs to all its citizens. Arguments about how to calculate the nation's unemployment rate aren't new, but the issue has fallen off the public's radar screen in recent years. Most Americans accept that the unemployment statistic is what it purports to be: an accurate assessment of those looking for work.</p>
<p>Mainstream media devote little attention to the limitations of the official unemployment rate, especially during periods of growth. During recessions, articles examining deeper economic issues may appear, but they almost never address just how many Americans are left out of the count-and how many others aren't doing well by other measures. Many middle- and lower income Americans have a visceral understanding that the economy is worse than our official economists admit, but their knowledge is not reflected in the nation's unemployment statistics. Even during the boom years of the mid- and late 1990s, income inequality expanded for many Americans, and lower income Americans with less education enjoyed fewer opportunities for meaningful employment than the headlines about record low levels of unemployment suggested.</p>
<p>The government first began collecting simple information about the nation's unemployed in 1880, but it wasn't until the Great Depression that efforts to collect unemployment statistics began in earnest. At the onset of that major calamity, estimates of the nation's unemployed were unofficial and varied, often provided by private agencies. Inaccurate information about just how many Americans needed jobs made it more difficult for New Dealers to craft coherent employment policies. The depression firmly established the critical importance of more precise data, and the government instituted the monthly Current Population Survey in 1940. The CPS is a sample survey of (currently) sixty thousand households from which the official unemployment rate is derived. It was originally administered by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal work relief program that ceased to exist in 1943, and it is now cosponsored by the U.S. Census Bureau and the BLS. The depression also gave birth in 1935 to our unemployment insurance system, which continues to provide benefits for unemployed Americans lucky enough to qualify. The system operates largely at the s...</p>
<p />
| 7,866 |
<p>Call it the comeback kid.</p>
<p>A new ranking of the competitiveness of the world's top 25 exporting countries says the United States is once again a "rising star" of global manufacturing thanks to falling domestic natural gas prices, rising worker productivity and a lack of upward wage pressure.</p>
<p>The report, released on Friday by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG,) found that while China remains the world's No. 1 country in terms of manufacturing competitiveness, its position is "under pressure" as a result of rising labor and transportation costs and lagging productivity growth.</p>
<p>The United States, meanwhile, which has lost nearly 7.5 million industrial jobs since employment in the sector peaked in 1979 as manufacturers shipped production to low-cost countries, is now No. 2 in terms of overall competitiveness, BCG said.</p>
<p>The biggest factor driving the U.S. rebound, according to BCG: cheap natural gas prices, which have tumbled 50 percent over the last decade as a result of the shale gas revolution.</p>
<p>Also contributing to the country's attractiveness, according to BCG, is "stable wage growth" - a euphemism for the fact that, in inflation-adjusted terms, industrial wages here are lower today than they were in the 1960s even though worker productivity has doubled over the same period of time.</p>
<p>Here is BCG's ranking of the world's Top 10 countries in terms of manufacturing competitiveness:</p>
|
U.S. Is a ‘Rising Star’ in Global Manufacturing
| false |
http://nbcnews.com/business/economy/u-s-rising-star-global-manufacturing-n89561
|
2014-04-25
| 3left-center
|
U.S. Is a ‘Rising Star’ in Global Manufacturing
<p>Call it the comeback kid.</p>
<p>A new ranking of the competitiveness of the world's top 25 exporting countries says the United States is once again a "rising star" of global manufacturing thanks to falling domestic natural gas prices, rising worker productivity and a lack of upward wage pressure.</p>
<p>The report, released on Friday by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG,) found that while China remains the world's No. 1 country in terms of manufacturing competitiveness, its position is "under pressure" as a result of rising labor and transportation costs and lagging productivity growth.</p>
<p>The United States, meanwhile, which has lost nearly 7.5 million industrial jobs since employment in the sector peaked in 1979 as manufacturers shipped production to low-cost countries, is now No. 2 in terms of overall competitiveness, BCG said.</p>
<p>The biggest factor driving the U.S. rebound, according to BCG: cheap natural gas prices, which have tumbled 50 percent over the last decade as a result of the shale gas revolution.</p>
<p>Also contributing to the country's attractiveness, according to BCG, is "stable wage growth" - a euphemism for the fact that, in inflation-adjusted terms, industrial wages here are lower today than they were in the 1960s even though worker productivity has doubled over the same period of time.</p>
<p>Here is BCG's ranking of the world's Top 10 countries in terms of manufacturing competitiveness:</p>
| 7,867 |
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p>On Saturday, Jan. 24, the Albuquerque Baseball Academy will host the third annual “Throw Cancer a Curve All Skills Baseball Camp.” The camp will feature numerous pro players with New Mexico ties, among them Blake Swihart, Austin House, Mitchell Garver, Alex Allbritton, Shilo McCall and Max Walla. Last year the camp raised $10,800 to benefit Justin Solomon, a former Piedra Vista player who has battled leukemia. This year, the camp will raise money for the Justin Solomon Foundation; South Valley Little League in memory of Martin Romero, who passed away this year from brain cancer; and Faith Kuhn, who is the daughter of Valley baseball coach Chad Kuhn and is suffering from spina bifida and scoliosis. “It’s a good cause, 100 percent of the proceeds go to them,” Swihart said. “Being able to give back to the community like this is awesome.”</p>
<p />
<p />
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
|
Pros to help at ABA camp
| false |
https://abqjournal.com/525278/pros-to-help-at-aba-camp.html
| 2least
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Pros to help at ABA camp
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p>On Saturday, Jan. 24, the Albuquerque Baseball Academy will host the third annual “Throw Cancer a Curve All Skills Baseball Camp.” The camp will feature numerous pro players with New Mexico ties, among them Blake Swihart, Austin House, Mitchell Garver, Alex Allbritton, Shilo McCall and Max Walla. Last year the camp raised $10,800 to benefit Justin Solomon, a former Piedra Vista player who has battled leukemia. This year, the camp will raise money for the Justin Solomon Foundation; South Valley Little League in memory of Martin Romero, who passed away this year from brain cancer; and Faith Kuhn, who is the daughter of Valley baseball coach Chad Kuhn and is suffering from spina bifida and scoliosis. “It’s a good cause, 100 percent of the proceeds go to them,” Swihart said. “Being able to give back to the community like this is awesome.”</p>
<p />
<p />
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
| 7,868 |
|
<p />
<p>The Foundation for National Progress, which publishes Mother Jones magazine, announced today that it will spin off its hugely popular online publication, the MoJo Wire, and take it public on the NASDAQ stock exchange.</p>
<p>“What could be more logical for a keystone of public-interest media than to literally go public?” said executive producer Jack Blinsky in a statement issued this morning.</p>
<p>Sources close to the deal say the upside on motherjones.com is nearly limitless. It has a stellar, six-year track record with the business model that has proved successful for most Internet-based businesses: virtual profits.</p>
<p>“We are a non-profit,” said Cora Perrat Celowt, the MoJo Wire’s business development manager. “We have always been a non-profit. We will continue our dedication to not turning a profit as long as Wall Street continues to embrace the model.”</p>
<p>The site’s current revenue model has proven popular on Wall Street for cyber-ventures. Just as Netscape “gave away” its core product — the Navigator browser — as a loss leader, the MoJo Wire gives away its core product — something it calls “investigative journalism,” better known as “content.”</p>
<p>The product is useful to the public, and keeps them coming back for more, becoming loyal customers for life, according to a spokesman from W.R. Grace, one of the underwriters of the proposed IPO. Other underwriters include GM, Ford, Exxon, and Charles Keating.</p>
<p>“We’ve been burning capital since before Jeff Bezos could read a 10K,” said one MoJo Wire employee, on condition of anonymity. “The MoJo Wire has long been the industry standard for profit potential.”</p>
<p>Plans are in the works for an ecommerce adjunct to tap into the underserved <a href="/commentary/columns/1999/12/radgifts.html" type="external">progressive activist market</a>. The site will offer everything from gas masks for WTO-style protests, to gallon jugs of organic wheat paste, to reusable “Free ____” buttons with changeable stick-ons reading “Mumia,” “Peltier,” and “Trade Sucks.”</p>
<p>“We want to make smashing the state easy and fun for our readers, and lucrative for us,” said Celowt. “Hey hey, ho ho, our market share has got to grow!”</p>
<p>“You can’t beat an online venture grounded in a brand like Mother Jones which has an immense positive public image,” said Blinsky. “Mother Jones has been building its brand for nearly a quarter century. Consumer confidence is off the charts on this one.”</p>
<p>The date for the IPO and the initial offering price have not yet been set. Analysts from Hambricht &amp; Quest estimate the offering could bring upwards of $17 gajillion.</p>
<p />
|
MoJo Wire to Go Public
| true |
https://motherjones.com/politics/2000/04/mojo-wire-go-public/
|
2000-04-01
| 4left
|
MoJo Wire to Go Public
<p />
<p>The Foundation for National Progress, which publishes Mother Jones magazine, announced today that it will spin off its hugely popular online publication, the MoJo Wire, and take it public on the NASDAQ stock exchange.</p>
<p>“What could be more logical for a keystone of public-interest media than to literally go public?” said executive producer Jack Blinsky in a statement issued this morning.</p>
<p>Sources close to the deal say the upside on motherjones.com is nearly limitless. It has a stellar, six-year track record with the business model that has proved successful for most Internet-based businesses: virtual profits.</p>
<p>“We are a non-profit,” said Cora Perrat Celowt, the MoJo Wire’s business development manager. “We have always been a non-profit. We will continue our dedication to not turning a profit as long as Wall Street continues to embrace the model.”</p>
<p>The site’s current revenue model has proven popular on Wall Street for cyber-ventures. Just as Netscape “gave away” its core product — the Navigator browser — as a loss leader, the MoJo Wire gives away its core product — something it calls “investigative journalism,” better known as “content.”</p>
<p>The product is useful to the public, and keeps them coming back for more, becoming loyal customers for life, according to a spokesman from W.R. Grace, one of the underwriters of the proposed IPO. Other underwriters include GM, Ford, Exxon, and Charles Keating.</p>
<p>“We’ve been burning capital since before Jeff Bezos could read a 10K,” said one MoJo Wire employee, on condition of anonymity. “The MoJo Wire has long been the industry standard for profit potential.”</p>
<p>Plans are in the works for an ecommerce adjunct to tap into the underserved <a href="/commentary/columns/1999/12/radgifts.html" type="external">progressive activist market</a>. The site will offer everything from gas masks for WTO-style protests, to gallon jugs of organic wheat paste, to reusable “Free ____” buttons with changeable stick-ons reading “Mumia,” “Peltier,” and “Trade Sucks.”</p>
<p>“We want to make smashing the state easy and fun for our readers, and lucrative for us,” said Celowt. “Hey hey, ho ho, our market share has got to grow!”</p>
<p>“You can’t beat an online venture grounded in a brand like Mother Jones which has an immense positive public image,” said Blinsky. “Mother Jones has been building its brand for nearly a quarter century. Consumer confidence is off the charts on this one.”</p>
<p>The date for the IPO and the initial offering price have not yet been set. Analysts from Hambricht &amp; Quest estimate the offering could bring upwards of $17 gajillion.</p>
<p />
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<p />
<p>The NCI initiative creates a virtual “formulary” – a kind of clearinghouse – that initially will include 15 different medications donated by six manufacturers. The formulary will allow the institute to act as an intermediary between the drug companies and scientists at 69 NCI-designated cancer centers and to streamline the process by which researchers get the therapies.</p>
<p>The new system could be especially helpful to scientists who want to test combinations of drugs – which is where many cancer trials are headed.</p>
<p>It can take several months or longer for researchers to negotiate agreements with manufacturers, and the process can be even more protracted if multiple medications made by different companies are involved. The new public-private partnership, NCI officials said, will hold manufacturers to tighter timelines in deciding whether to provide drugs for proposed clinical trials.</p>
<p>James Doroshow, deputy NCI director for clinical and translational research, said the institute is negotiating with “a substantial number” of additional pharmaceutical companies, which could lead to double the number of drugs included by year’s end.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Doroshow and other officials said they have long wanted to set up such a formulary, and the idea picked up momentum when it was made a priority as part of the Obama administration’s “cancer moonshot” effort this year.</p>
<p>The officials said they applied lessons learned in conducting their big precision-medicine trial, NCI-Match, which tests various medications on people with specific genetic mutations. It took the government officials about a year to negotiate agreements to get the drugs used in that trial.</p>
<p>The drug companies involved in the new formulary are Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Genentech, Kyowa Kirin Pharmaceutical Development, Loxo Oncology and Xcovery.</p>
<p>In a statement, NCI Acting Director Douglas Lowy said the initiative “will help researchers begin testing promising drug combinations more quickly, potentially helping patients much sooner.”</p>
|
National Cancer Institute and drug companies aim to speed up clinical trials
| false |
https://abqjournal.com/925789/national-cancer-institute-and-drug-companies-aim-to-speed-up-clinical-trials.html
| 2least
|
National Cancer Institute and drug companies aim to speed up clinical trials
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>The NCI initiative creates a virtual “formulary” – a kind of clearinghouse – that initially will include 15 different medications donated by six manufacturers. The formulary will allow the institute to act as an intermediary between the drug companies and scientists at 69 NCI-designated cancer centers and to streamline the process by which researchers get the therapies.</p>
<p>The new system could be especially helpful to scientists who want to test combinations of drugs – which is where many cancer trials are headed.</p>
<p>It can take several months or longer for researchers to negotiate agreements with manufacturers, and the process can be even more protracted if multiple medications made by different companies are involved. The new public-private partnership, NCI officials said, will hold manufacturers to tighter timelines in deciding whether to provide drugs for proposed clinical trials.</p>
<p>James Doroshow, deputy NCI director for clinical and translational research, said the institute is negotiating with “a substantial number” of additional pharmaceutical companies, which could lead to double the number of drugs included by year’s end.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Doroshow and other officials said they have long wanted to set up such a formulary, and the idea picked up momentum when it was made a priority as part of the Obama administration’s “cancer moonshot” effort this year.</p>
<p>The officials said they applied lessons learned in conducting their big precision-medicine trial, NCI-Match, which tests various medications on people with specific genetic mutations. It took the government officials about a year to negotiate agreements to get the drugs used in that trial.</p>
<p>The drug companies involved in the new formulary are Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Genentech, Kyowa Kirin Pharmaceutical Development, Loxo Oncology and Xcovery.</p>
<p>In a statement, NCI Acting Director Douglas Lowy said the initiative “will help researchers begin testing promising drug combinations more quickly, potentially helping patients much sooner.”</p>
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<p />
<p>The mutual actions – curbing atomic work in exchange for some sanctions relief – start a six-month clock for Tehran and the world powers to negotiate a final accord that the Obama administration and its European allies say will be intended to ensure Iran cannot build a nuclear weapon.</p>
<p>Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iranian technicians were at the Natanz facility Monday as centrifuges enriching uranium to 20 percent were unplugged. An accord to scale back nuclear work went into effect Monday. (IRNA, Kazem Ghane/The Associated Press)</p>
<p>In the meantime, the interim deal puts limits on Iran’s program – though it continues low levels of uranium enrichment. Tehran denies its nuclear program is intended to produce a bomb.</p>
<p>The payoff to Iran is an injection of billions of dollars into its crippled economy over the next six months from the suspension of some sanctions – though other sanctions remain in place.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>In part a reflection of a thaw between Washington and Tehran, the moves coincidentally occurred on the 33rd anniversary of the end of the Iran hostage crisis. The holding of 52 Americans for 444 days by radical Iranian students that ended Jan. 20, 1981 was followed by more than three decades of U.S.-Iranian enmity that only began to ease last year with signs that Iran was ready to meet U.S. demands and scale back its nuclear activities.</p>
<p>British Foreign Secretary William Hague called the deal “an important milestone” – but not the ultimate goal.</p>
<p>“It’s important that other sanctions are maintained and the pressure is maintained for a comprehensive and final settlement on the Iranian nuclear issue,” Hague said.</p>
<p>The Europeans are aiming to start negotiations on a final deal in February, though no date or venue has been agreed on yet. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Saturday that Tehran is ready to enter talks as soon as the interim deal goes into force.</p>
<p>In the first step of the interim accord, Iranian state TV said authorities disconnected cascades of centrifuges producing 20-percent enriched uranium at the Natanz facility in central Iran. The broadcast said international inspectors were on hand to witness the stoppage before leaving to monitor suspension of enrichment at Fordo, another site in central Iran.</p>
<p>Iran also started Monday to convert part of its stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium to oxide, which can be used to produce nuclear fuel but is difficult to reconvert for weapons use, the official IRNA news agency said.</p>
<p>After receiving independent confirmation of the steps from the United Nations watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, EU foreign ministers in Brussels approved the partial sanctions suspension. The White House also announced the suspension of some American sanctions on Iran.</p>
<p>“These actions represent the first time in nearly a decade that Iran has verifiably enacted measures to halt progress on its nuclear program, and roll it back in key respects,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>He said Iran is also providing U.N. inspectors with increased transparency, including more frequent and intrusive inspections. “Taken together, these concrete actions represent an important step forward,” he said.</p>
<p>Under the deal reached in November in Geneva, Iran agreed to halt its 20 percent enrichment program but continue enrichment up to 5 percent.</p>
<p>Iranian Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi said his country has a total of 432 pounds of 20 percent enriched uranium and will convert half of it to oxide over a period of six months. The remaining half will be diluted to a level below 5 percent level within three months.</p>
<p>Uranium enriched to a high degree – above 90 percent – can be used to build a nuclear warhead. Enriched below 5 percent, it can power an electricity-generating reactor, and at 20 percent it can power reactors used to produce medical isotopes. The enrichment is done by spinning the uranium in a series of centrifuges.</p>
<p>Iran will also refrain from commissioning its heavy water reactor, now under construction.</p>
<p />
<p />
|
Iran curtails nuclear program as pact begins
| false |
https://abqjournal.com/340081/iran-curtails-nuclear-program-as-pact-begins.html
| 2least
|
Iran curtails nuclear program as pact begins
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>The mutual actions – curbing atomic work in exchange for some sanctions relief – start a six-month clock for Tehran and the world powers to negotiate a final accord that the Obama administration and its European allies say will be intended to ensure Iran cannot build a nuclear weapon.</p>
<p>Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iranian technicians were at the Natanz facility Monday as centrifuges enriching uranium to 20 percent were unplugged. An accord to scale back nuclear work went into effect Monday. (IRNA, Kazem Ghane/The Associated Press)</p>
<p>In the meantime, the interim deal puts limits on Iran’s program – though it continues low levels of uranium enrichment. Tehran denies its nuclear program is intended to produce a bomb.</p>
<p>The payoff to Iran is an injection of billions of dollars into its crippled economy over the next six months from the suspension of some sanctions – though other sanctions remain in place.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>In part a reflection of a thaw between Washington and Tehran, the moves coincidentally occurred on the 33rd anniversary of the end of the Iran hostage crisis. The holding of 52 Americans for 444 days by radical Iranian students that ended Jan. 20, 1981 was followed by more than three decades of U.S.-Iranian enmity that only began to ease last year with signs that Iran was ready to meet U.S. demands and scale back its nuclear activities.</p>
<p>British Foreign Secretary William Hague called the deal “an important milestone” – but not the ultimate goal.</p>
<p>“It’s important that other sanctions are maintained and the pressure is maintained for a comprehensive and final settlement on the Iranian nuclear issue,” Hague said.</p>
<p>The Europeans are aiming to start negotiations on a final deal in February, though no date or venue has been agreed on yet. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Saturday that Tehran is ready to enter talks as soon as the interim deal goes into force.</p>
<p>In the first step of the interim accord, Iranian state TV said authorities disconnected cascades of centrifuges producing 20-percent enriched uranium at the Natanz facility in central Iran. The broadcast said international inspectors were on hand to witness the stoppage before leaving to monitor suspension of enrichment at Fordo, another site in central Iran.</p>
<p>Iran also started Monday to convert part of its stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium to oxide, which can be used to produce nuclear fuel but is difficult to reconvert for weapons use, the official IRNA news agency said.</p>
<p>After receiving independent confirmation of the steps from the United Nations watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, EU foreign ministers in Brussels approved the partial sanctions suspension. The White House also announced the suspension of some American sanctions on Iran.</p>
<p>“These actions represent the first time in nearly a decade that Iran has verifiably enacted measures to halt progress on its nuclear program, and roll it back in key respects,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>He said Iran is also providing U.N. inspectors with increased transparency, including more frequent and intrusive inspections. “Taken together, these concrete actions represent an important step forward,” he said.</p>
<p>Under the deal reached in November in Geneva, Iran agreed to halt its 20 percent enrichment program but continue enrichment up to 5 percent.</p>
<p>Iranian Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi said his country has a total of 432 pounds of 20 percent enriched uranium and will convert half of it to oxide over a period of six months. The remaining half will be diluted to a level below 5 percent level within three months.</p>
<p>Uranium enriched to a high degree – above 90 percent – can be used to build a nuclear warhead. Enriched below 5 percent, it can power an electricity-generating reactor, and at 20 percent it can power reactors used to produce medical isotopes. The enrichment is done by spinning the uranium in a series of centrifuges.</p>
<p>Iran will also refrain from commissioning its heavy water reactor, now under construction.</p>
<p />
<p />
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<p><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/" type="external">Mike Mozart</a> / <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" type="external">CC BY 2.0</a></p>
<p>The retail giant Walmart announced it is working to transfer 10,000 U.S. employees to nearby stores as its CEO says the closings are “necessary to keep the company strong.”</p>
<p>The Guardian reports:</p>
<p>Walmart is closing 269 stores, more than half of them in the US and another big chunk in its challenging Brazilian market. The stores being shuttered account for a fraction of the company’s 11,000 stores worldwide and less than 1% of its global revenue, but according to workers’ group Making Change at Walmart, this announcement will affect 10,000 US employees.</p>
<p />
<p>More than 95% of the stores set to be closed in the US are within 10 miles of another Walmart. The Bentonville, Arkansas, company said it is working to ensure that workers are placed in nearby locations.</p>
<p>The store closures will start at the end of the month, and many closures will be of the company’s Walmart Express stores: all 102 of them (out of the 154 locations to be shuttered in the US).</p>
<p>Read more <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/15/walmart-closing-store-employee-brazil" type="external">here</a>.</p>
<p>— Posted by <a href="" type="internal">Alexander Reed Kelly</a>.</p>
|
Walmart to Close 269 Stores, Most of Them in the United States
| true |
https://truthdig.com/articles/walmart-to-close-269-stores-most-of-them-in-the-united-states/
|
2016-01-16
| 4left
|
Walmart to Close 269 Stores, Most of Them in the United States
<p><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/" type="external">Mike Mozart</a> / <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" type="external">CC BY 2.0</a></p>
<p>The retail giant Walmart announced it is working to transfer 10,000 U.S. employees to nearby stores as its CEO says the closings are “necessary to keep the company strong.”</p>
<p>The Guardian reports:</p>
<p>Walmart is closing 269 stores, more than half of them in the US and another big chunk in its challenging Brazilian market. The stores being shuttered account for a fraction of the company’s 11,000 stores worldwide and less than 1% of its global revenue, but according to workers’ group Making Change at Walmart, this announcement will affect 10,000 US employees.</p>
<p />
<p>More than 95% of the stores set to be closed in the US are within 10 miles of another Walmart. The Bentonville, Arkansas, company said it is working to ensure that workers are placed in nearby locations.</p>
<p>The store closures will start at the end of the month, and many closures will be of the company’s Walmart Express stores: all 102 of them (out of the 154 locations to be shuttered in the US).</p>
<p>Read more <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/15/walmart-closing-store-employee-brazil" type="external">here</a>.</p>
<p>— Posted by <a href="" type="internal">Alexander Reed Kelly</a>.</p>
| 7,872 |
<p>PARIS (AP) — The head of French dairy company Lactalis says that a recall of baby milk products because of a salmonella scare has been extended to 83 countries from around 30.</p>
<p>In an interview with French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche, the president of Lactalis, Emmanuel Besnier, said that more than 12 million boxes of infant milk products are now concerned. They represent all lots from the Lactalis factory in Craon, northwest France, where the salmonella bacteria was discovered in December.</p>
<p>The move comes after Besnier met Friday with France’s economy minister — and a bungled recall operation whose responsibility remains unclear.</p>
<p>The paper said 35 babies were diagnosed with salmonella in France, one in Spain and a possible case in Greece.</p>
<p>PARIS (AP) — The head of French dairy company Lactalis says that a recall of baby milk products because of a salmonella scare has been extended to 83 countries from around 30.</p>
<p>In an interview with French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche, the president of Lactalis, Emmanuel Besnier, said that more than 12 million boxes of infant milk products are now concerned. They represent all lots from the Lactalis factory in Craon, northwest France, where the salmonella bacteria was discovered in December.</p>
<p>The move comes after Besnier met Friday with France’s economy minister — and a bungled recall operation whose responsibility remains unclear.</p>
<p>The paper said 35 babies were diagnosed with salmonella in France, one in Spain and a possible case in Greece.</p>
|
Recall of French baby milk products extended to 83 countries
| false |
https://apnews.com/1881cdd444e64de1a8f5bbe8b52370a3
|
2018-01-14
| 2least
|
Recall of French baby milk products extended to 83 countries
<p>PARIS (AP) — The head of French dairy company Lactalis says that a recall of baby milk products because of a salmonella scare has been extended to 83 countries from around 30.</p>
<p>In an interview with French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche, the president of Lactalis, Emmanuel Besnier, said that more than 12 million boxes of infant milk products are now concerned. They represent all lots from the Lactalis factory in Craon, northwest France, where the salmonella bacteria was discovered in December.</p>
<p>The move comes after Besnier met Friday with France’s economy minister — and a bungled recall operation whose responsibility remains unclear.</p>
<p>The paper said 35 babies were diagnosed with salmonella in France, one in Spain and a possible case in Greece.</p>
<p>PARIS (AP) — The head of French dairy company Lactalis says that a recall of baby milk products because of a salmonella scare has been extended to 83 countries from around 30.</p>
<p>In an interview with French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche, the president of Lactalis, Emmanuel Besnier, said that more than 12 million boxes of infant milk products are now concerned. They represent all lots from the Lactalis factory in Craon, northwest France, where the salmonella bacteria was discovered in December.</p>
<p>The move comes after Besnier met Friday with France’s economy minister — and a bungled recall operation whose responsibility remains unclear.</p>
<p>The paper said 35 babies were diagnosed with salmonella in France, one in Spain and a possible case in Greece.</p>
| 7,873 |
<p>The US House of Representatives passed legislation on Wednesday to impose sanctions on Venezuelan government officials found to have violated protesters' rights during demonstrations earlier this year.</p>
<p>The Senate approved the measure on Monday, so the House's approval by voice vote sends it to the White House, where President Barack Obama's administration has signaled he would sign the legislation into law.</p>
<p>The measure would deny visas and freeze assets of officials involved in what the law considers a crackdown on political opponents during three months of street protests in Venezuela over crime and the economy that left 43 dead.</p>
<p>Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro railed against the measure's "insolent imperialist sanctions" after it was passed by the Senate. Venezuela has accused the opposition of plotting with Washington to topple his government.</p>
<p>Senator Robert Menendez, who sponsored the bill, called on other countries to follow the US lead.</p>
<p>"Governments in our hemisphere and throughout the world must stand in solidarity with the citizens of Venezuela by denying Venezuelan officials involved in human rights violations entry into their countries and access to their financial systems," he said.</p>
<p>(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)</p>
|
US Congress passes sanctions on Venezuelan officials
| false |
https://pri.org/stories/2014-12-11/us-congress-passes-sanctions-venezuelan-officials
|
2014-12-11
| 3left-center
|
US Congress passes sanctions on Venezuelan officials
<p>The US House of Representatives passed legislation on Wednesday to impose sanctions on Venezuelan government officials found to have violated protesters' rights during demonstrations earlier this year.</p>
<p>The Senate approved the measure on Monday, so the House's approval by voice vote sends it to the White House, where President Barack Obama's administration has signaled he would sign the legislation into law.</p>
<p>The measure would deny visas and freeze assets of officials involved in what the law considers a crackdown on political opponents during three months of street protests in Venezuela over crime and the economy that left 43 dead.</p>
<p>Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro railed against the measure's "insolent imperialist sanctions" after it was passed by the Senate. Venezuela has accused the opposition of plotting with Washington to topple his government.</p>
<p>Senator Robert Menendez, who sponsored the bill, called on other countries to follow the US lead.</p>
<p>"Governments in our hemisphere and throughout the world must stand in solidarity with the citizens of Venezuela by denying Venezuelan officials involved in human rights violations entry into their countries and access to their financial systems," he said.</p>
<p>(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)</p>
| 7,874 |
<p>When it comes to Donald Trump's first few months in office, you're either someone who thinks they've been very successful and some of the most productive in history - <a href="" type="internal">or you believe in facts</a>. Trump's administration <a href="" type="internal">has been an ineffective joke</a>, plagued with a growing list of scandals and incompetence unlike anything we've ever seen.</p>
<p>While Trump didn't go into office with high <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-approval.aspx" type="external">approval numbers</a> (his first Gallup rating was 45 percent - the lowest for any newly elected president), things have actually managed to get worse for "The Donald." Since <a href="" type="internal">hitting 35 percent on March 28th</a>, a low Barack Obama never experienced during his entire eight years in office, Trump's approval number has floated around 40 percent over the last few weeks.</p>
<p>These historically low numbers are bad, but they're even worse once a little context and perspective is added to the discussion.</p>
<p>For starters, let's take a look at the approval numbers for Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama upon entering and exiting office:</p>
<p>So, of the last three presidents spanning the last 25 years, Trump entered office with an approval rating 12-23 percent lower than any of his predecessors, which is significant. Especially when you remember that Bush was elected under a cloud of controversy. He clearly wasn't as disliked as Trump was going into office, but like our current "Commander-in-Chief," he was still "elected" despite receiving fewer votes than his opponent.</p>
<p>Even as controversial as Bush's 2000 win was, and as disliked as he was going into office, his approval number was still much better. While Bush inherited a better economy, as well as a balanced budget, both men inherited strong economic conditions.</p>
<p>That's a big part of what makes Trump's approval rating worse than it actually appears.</p>
<p>Right now Trump's enjoying a strong economy - yet his approval rating is barely above where Bush's was right in the middle of the Great Recession. In fact, at its lowest point a few weeks ago, it was barely one percent above Bush's final Gallup rating.</p>
<p>Trump's teetering on a favorable rating close to what Bush's was at during an economic meltdown despite the fact that he's still presiding over a strong, stable economy thanks to eight years of competent leadership under President Obama. If anything negative happens, especially an economic downturn, his approval rating is going to sink to unprecedented levels of futility.</p>
<p>The truth is, one of the biggest things keeping Trump's approval rating from sinking lower is <a href="" type="internal">the fictional belief</a> by many of his supporters that the economy has improved since he's been in office. It's not true, but it's what many of them think. So if things turn south economically, that will almost certainly erode support from even some of his most loyal backers, causing his approval rating to really sink.</p>
<p>Another issue for Trump is that some of his supporters have admitted things aren't going how they expected them to under his leadership, but because they want to give him the benefit of the doubt (at least for now), they're essentially saying "in Trump we trust." But that's not going to last forever. As time goes on, with more and more of his promises getting broken, even some of his most loyal supporters are going to get sick and tired of making excuses for him.</p>
<p>This all comes back to my point about Trump's approval rating actually being worse than it seems. While hovering around 40 isn't good for any presidency, as sad as it is, that number is actually artificially inflated due to the fact that:</p>
<p>He's still benefiting from a strong economy he had nothing to do with and he's still being given the "benefit of the doubt" by a sizable chunk of his supporters due to his brief time in office.</p>
<p>It speaks to the awfulness of Donald Trump that, with the same economy that propelled Obama to a 59 percent approval rating upon leaving office just a few weeks ago, his number is much closer to Bush's 34 percent <a href="" type="internal">at the end of his presidency</a> - right in the middle of the worst economic crash in nearly a century.</p>
<p />
<p><a href="" type="internal">Trump's Favorite Poll Just Proved What a Humiliating Failure His Presidency Has Been</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Trump's Obsession with Obama Reached a Sad New Low on Sunday</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">On Monday, Trump Hit a Humiliating Level of Futility Neither Obama nor Clinton Ever Achieved</a></p>
<p>4 Facebook comments</p>
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Here's Why Trump's Embarrassing Approval Rating is Worse Than Most Realize
| true |
https://forwardprogressives.com/why-trumps-embarrassing-approval-rating-worse-realize/
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2017-05-21
| 4left
|
Here's Why Trump's Embarrassing Approval Rating is Worse Than Most Realize
<p>When it comes to Donald Trump's first few months in office, you're either someone who thinks they've been very successful and some of the most productive in history - <a href="" type="internal">or you believe in facts</a>. Trump's administration <a href="" type="internal">has been an ineffective joke</a>, plagued with a growing list of scandals and incompetence unlike anything we've ever seen.</p>
<p>While Trump didn't go into office with high <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-approval.aspx" type="external">approval numbers</a> (his first Gallup rating was 45 percent - the lowest for any newly elected president), things have actually managed to get worse for "The Donald." Since <a href="" type="internal">hitting 35 percent on March 28th</a>, a low Barack Obama never experienced during his entire eight years in office, Trump's approval number has floated around 40 percent over the last few weeks.</p>
<p>These historically low numbers are bad, but they're even worse once a little context and perspective is added to the discussion.</p>
<p>For starters, let's take a look at the approval numbers for Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama upon entering and exiting office:</p>
<p>So, of the last three presidents spanning the last 25 years, Trump entered office with an approval rating 12-23 percent lower than any of his predecessors, which is significant. Especially when you remember that Bush was elected under a cloud of controversy. He clearly wasn't as disliked as Trump was going into office, but like our current "Commander-in-Chief," he was still "elected" despite receiving fewer votes than his opponent.</p>
<p>Even as controversial as Bush's 2000 win was, and as disliked as he was going into office, his approval number was still much better. While Bush inherited a better economy, as well as a balanced budget, both men inherited strong economic conditions.</p>
<p>That's a big part of what makes Trump's approval rating worse than it actually appears.</p>
<p>Right now Trump's enjoying a strong economy - yet his approval rating is barely above where Bush's was right in the middle of the Great Recession. In fact, at its lowest point a few weeks ago, it was barely one percent above Bush's final Gallup rating.</p>
<p>Trump's teetering on a favorable rating close to what Bush's was at during an economic meltdown despite the fact that he's still presiding over a strong, stable economy thanks to eight years of competent leadership under President Obama. If anything negative happens, especially an economic downturn, his approval rating is going to sink to unprecedented levels of futility.</p>
<p>The truth is, one of the biggest things keeping Trump's approval rating from sinking lower is <a href="" type="internal">the fictional belief</a> by many of his supporters that the economy has improved since he's been in office. It's not true, but it's what many of them think. So if things turn south economically, that will almost certainly erode support from even some of his most loyal backers, causing his approval rating to really sink.</p>
<p>Another issue for Trump is that some of his supporters have admitted things aren't going how they expected them to under his leadership, but because they want to give him the benefit of the doubt (at least for now), they're essentially saying "in Trump we trust." But that's not going to last forever. As time goes on, with more and more of his promises getting broken, even some of his most loyal supporters are going to get sick and tired of making excuses for him.</p>
<p>This all comes back to my point about Trump's approval rating actually being worse than it seems. While hovering around 40 isn't good for any presidency, as sad as it is, that number is actually artificially inflated due to the fact that:</p>
<p>He's still benefiting from a strong economy he had nothing to do with and he's still being given the "benefit of the doubt" by a sizable chunk of his supporters due to his brief time in office.</p>
<p>It speaks to the awfulness of Donald Trump that, with the same economy that propelled Obama to a 59 percent approval rating upon leaving office just a few weeks ago, his number is much closer to Bush's 34 percent <a href="" type="internal">at the end of his presidency</a> - right in the middle of the worst economic crash in nearly a century.</p>
<p />
<p><a href="" type="internal">Trump's Favorite Poll Just Proved What a Humiliating Failure His Presidency Has Been</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Trump's Obsession with Obama Reached a Sad New Low on Sunday</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">On Monday, Trump Hit a Humiliating Level of Futility Neither Obama nor Clinton Ever Achieved</a></p>
<p>4 Facebook comments</p>
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<p />
<p>I recently ran across <a href="http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/quotes.aspx#list" type="external">the American Film Institute's list of 100 top movie quotes</a>, and couldn’t help thinking that many of them might apply to leadership in the newsroom.&#160;</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Topping the list, to the surprise of no one, is Clark Gable's immortal line from 1939 in "Gone with the Wind":&#160;</p>
<p>"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."</p>
<p>By now we all know what an uproar his expletive caused at the time.&#160;These days, of course, such language seems mild by newsroom standards -– which&#160;is a shame.&#160;Profanity inflation has drained the power out of words that once packed real punch.&#160;The most articulate leaders I know use words with great precision and discretion, cursing about as often as southern gentleman Rhett Butler, which is to say, rarely indeed.&#160;&#160;</p>
<p>One of the critical challenges facing journalism leaders is the number of newsroom cynics who&#160;appear truly not to care.&#160;Some seem as bitter as Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront" (1954), who makes the AFI list at number 3 with:</p>
<p>"You don't understand!&#160;I coulda had class.&#160;I coulda been a contender. I could've been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am."</p>
<p>Disillusioned, disenchanted people are tough to inspire, tough to motivate, tough even to reach.&#160; Many managers might recognize that, in the words of "Cool Hand Luke" from 1967 (number 11 on the AFI list):</p>
<p>"What we have here is a failure to communicate."</p>
<p>It has become a news business cliche that those who make their living communicating with the public are notoriously poor at communicating among themselves.&#160;Clarity and consistency in communication by leaders helps staffers at all levels understand what's expected of them and how they are doing –- two key indicators of on-the-job satisfaction and success.&#160;</p>
<p>Recognizing that, open-minded managers have begun to explore leadership styles other than the gruff bluster that dominated newsrooms for so long.&#160;Still, some seem unable to see what's plain to those around them:&#160;that they'll never be the boss Brando was in "The Godfather" (from 1972, at number 2 on the list), imposing compliance with promises like:</p>
<p>"I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse."&#160;</p>
<p>Apparently, it's not necessary to look the part for many managers to believe they can intimidate with the "Sudden Impact" of Clint Eastwood (1983, number 6 on the list), who immortalized the line:</p>
<p>"Go ahead, make my day."&#160;</p>
<p>Holders of career passes to fantasy land might also enjoy imagining themselves dispatching a pesky employee with the words of now-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from "Terminator 2:&#160;Judgment Day" (1991, number 76 on the list):</p>
<p>"Hasta la vista, baby."&#160;</p>
<p>My advice to managers who take their leadership cues from bloody action movies comes from "Moonstruck" (1987, number 96 on the list):</p>
<p>"Snap out of it!"</p>
<p>Or, for those of you who prefer political satire, how about these wise words from "Dr. Strangelove" (1964, number 64 on the list):</p>
<p>"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here!&#160;This is the War Room!"</p>
<p>An entire generation of moviegoers afraid of dentists might remember the nightmarish mantra from "Marathon Man" (1976, number 70 on the list):</p>
<p>"Is it safe?"</p>
<p>At the risk of invoking a scene that involved torture, the question is actually a good one for any journalism leader to ask about his or her newsroom:&#160;Is it the kind of workplace where people really can take risks, ask questions, and share ideas without fear?</p>
<p>A sadder, sappier, far less violent movie line might appeal to bosses who use their passion and dedication to justify being jerks. From "Love Story" (1970, number 13 on the list):</p>
<p>"Love means never having to say you're sorry."</p>
<p>No, it doesn't.&#160;For more on why that won't work for leaders, check out <a href="" type="internal">Jill Geisler's great column on the power of apology</a>.</p>
<p>Here's one we might well be hearing a lot of these days at all levels of traditional media organizations, as credibility erodes, readership declines, viewership fragments, and economic models crumble. From "Apollo 13" (1995, number 50 on the list):</p>
<p>"Houston, we have a problem."&#160;</p>
<p>In fact, going back a bit further, to "All About Eve" (1950, number 7 on the list), it might be wise to:</p>
<p>"Fasten your seatbelts.&#160;It's going to be a bumpy night."</p>
<p>Because, from "The Wizard of Oz" (1939, number 4 on the list):</p>
<p>"Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."</p>
<p>Clearly, this could go on way too long.&#160;If you're up for more, help yourself:&#160;You'll find the list at <a href="http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/quotes.aspx#list" type="external">http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/quotes.aspx#list</a>.&#160;There about 87 more great lines there, many of which might help you look at leadership, your own and that of others, in a different, entertaining way.&#160;</p>
<p>That is, unless –- to quote "A Few Good Men" (1992, number 29 on the list) -- "You can't handle the truth!"</p>
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Leading Men, Leading Women, Leading Lines
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https://poynter.org/news/leading-men-leading-women-leading-lines
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2005-06-24
| 2least
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Leading Men, Leading Women, Leading Lines
<p />
<p>I recently ran across <a href="http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/quotes.aspx#list" type="external">the American Film Institute's list of 100 top movie quotes</a>, and couldn’t help thinking that many of them might apply to leadership in the newsroom.&#160;</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Topping the list, to the surprise of no one, is Clark Gable's immortal line from 1939 in "Gone with the Wind":&#160;</p>
<p>"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."</p>
<p>By now we all know what an uproar his expletive caused at the time.&#160;These days, of course, such language seems mild by newsroom standards -– which&#160;is a shame.&#160;Profanity inflation has drained the power out of words that once packed real punch.&#160;The most articulate leaders I know use words with great precision and discretion, cursing about as often as southern gentleman Rhett Butler, which is to say, rarely indeed.&#160;&#160;</p>
<p>One of the critical challenges facing journalism leaders is the number of newsroom cynics who&#160;appear truly not to care.&#160;Some seem as bitter as Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront" (1954), who makes the AFI list at number 3 with:</p>
<p>"You don't understand!&#160;I coulda had class.&#160;I coulda been a contender. I could've been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am."</p>
<p>Disillusioned, disenchanted people are tough to inspire, tough to motivate, tough even to reach.&#160; Many managers might recognize that, in the words of "Cool Hand Luke" from 1967 (number 11 on the AFI list):</p>
<p>"What we have here is a failure to communicate."</p>
<p>It has become a news business cliche that those who make their living communicating with the public are notoriously poor at communicating among themselves.&#160;Clarity and consistency in communication by leaders helps staffers at all levels understand what's expected of them and how they are doing –- two key indicators of on-the-job satisfaction and success.&#160;</p>
<p>Recognizing that, open-minded managers have begun to explore leadership styles other than the gruff bluster that dominated newsrooms for so long.&#160;Still, some seem unable to see what's plain to those around them:&#160;that they'll never be the boss Brando was in "The Godfather" (from 1972, at number 2 on the list), imposing compliance with promises like:</p>
<p>"I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse."&#160;</p>
<p>Apparently, it's not necessary to look the part for many managers to believe they can intimidate with the "Sudden Impact" of Clint Eastwood (1983, number 6 on the list), who immortalized the line:</p>
<p>"Go ahead, make my day."&#160;</p>
<p>Holders of career passes to fantasy land might also enjoy imagining themselves dispatching a pesky employee with the words of now-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from "Terminator 2:&#160;Judgment Day" (1991, number 76 on the list):</p>
<p>"Hasta la vista, baby."&#160;</p>
<p>My advice to managers who take their leadership cues from bloody action movies comes from "Moonstruck" (1987, number 96 on the list):</p>
<p>"Snap out of it!"</p>
<p>Or, for those of you who prefer political satire, how about these wise words from "Dr. Strangelove" (1964, number 64 on the list):</p>
<p>"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here!&#160;This is the War Room!"</p>
<p>An entire generation of moviegoers afraid of dentists might remember the nightmarish mantra from "Marathon Man" (1976, number 70 on the list):</p>
<p>"Is it safe?"</p>
<p>At the risk of invoking a scene that involved torture, the question is actually a good one for any journalism leader to ask about his or her newsroom:&#160;Is it the kind of workplace where people really can take risks, ask questions, and share ideas without fear?</p>
<p>A sadder, sappier, far less violent movie line might appeal to bosses who use their passion and dedication to justify being jerks. From "Love Story" (1970, number 13 on the list):</p>
<p>"Love means never having to say you're sorry."</p>
<p>No, it doesn't.&#160;For more on why that won't work for leaders, check out <a href="" type="internal">Jill Geisler's great column on the power of apology</a>.</p>
<p>Here's one we might well be hearing a lot of these days at all levels of traditional media organizations, as credibility erodes, readership declines, viewership fragments, and economic models crumble. From "Apollo 13" (1995, number 50 on the list):</p>
<p>"Houston, we have a problem."&#160;</p>
<p>In fact, going back a bit further, to "All About Eve" (1950, number 7 on the list), it might be wise to:</p>
<p>"Fasten your seatbelts.&#160;It's going to be a bumpy night."</p>
<p>Because, from "The Wizard of Oz" (1939, number 4 on the list):</p>
<p>"Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."</p>
<p>Clearly, this could go on way too long.&#160;If you're up for more, help yourself:&#160;You'll find the list at <a href="http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/quotes.aspx#list" type="external">http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/quotes.aspx#list</a>.&#160;There about 87 more great lines there, many of which might help you look at leadership, your own and that of others, in a different, entertaining way.&#160;</p>
<p>That is, unless –- to quote "A Few Good Men" (1992, number 29 on the list) -- "You can't handle the truth!"</p>
| 7,876 |
<p>A Muzak rendition of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" echoed through the Jakarta airport's domestic terminal shortly after dawn. A 40-year-old man wearing knockoff Ray-Ban Wayfarers and an Al Jazeera baseball cap shuffled along with a large cardboard box poked with holes tucked under his arm. A minor celebrity within the world of international jihad, Farihin Ibnu Ahmad, aka "Yasir," was barely known outside of it. He was renowned for his violent pedigree, although few people other than militants would have recognized his broad, hangdog face. He sidled up to a plainclothes security officer and thrust the box toward him.</p>
<p>On the ride to Sulawesi, Ibnu Ahmad listened to John Lennon's "Imagine" over and over through a pair of flimsy earphones. "Al Jazeera," he would joke from time to time, pointing to his cap.</p>
<p>"Will the X-ray machine kill them?" he asked. The officer pulled back one of the box's dog-eared corners to reveal a pair of rabbits, mottled black and white, noses twitching wildly at the unfamiliar smells of stale coffee and perfume. Ibnu Ahmad (ibnu in Indonesian, like bin in Arabic, means "son of") wanted to know if he should check the rabbits or if he could carry them on the plane. The officer glanced up from the rabbits to Ibnu Ahmad's face, half hidden beneath the baseball cap. Though I was there to meet Ibnu Ahmad, I scooted furtively to the other side of the corridor, certain he was about to be arrested.</p>
<p>The rabbits should have been the least of the security officer's concerns: Ibnu Ahmad was a killer, and member of Jemaah Islamiyah, a lethal group of Southeast Asian militants notorious for the 2002 Bali bombings, which left 202 people dead. The militants' ties to al Qaeda were precisely through men like Ibnu Ahmad.</p>
<p>For generations, Ibnu Ahmad's family has been part of an Islamist movement first opposing Western colonialism and later fighting for Indonesia to become an Islamic state. When he was 16, Ahmad's family offered him a choice: Did he want to be an Islamic teacher or a fighter? He chose to be a fighter, and in 1987 he shipped out to al Qaeda's Al-Sadda camp in the saw-toothed, snowy mountains on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, to fight in the jihad against the Soviets. He learned to build explosives and heard a couple of sermons given by Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian preacher who served as Osama bin Laden's spiritual mentor. Azzam believed that every Muslim was duty bound to fight or pay for global jihad until the holy lands of Islam were restored to their former glory. He preached that Islam's future lay in reviving its ideal, seventh-century past by whatever means necessary.</p>
<p>When Ibnu Ahmad returned to Indonesia in the '90s, he brought with him a bloody, millennarian worldview intended to overthrow the secular government, and a network of contacts. In Jakarta, the nation's buzzing capital, he became one of Jemaah Islamiyah's most ardent deputies. In 1996, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks, visited Jakarta, Ibnu Ahmad served as his tour guide. He did the personal bidding of Hambali (aka Riduan bin Isomuddin, known as al Qaeda's kingpin in Southeast Asia), and he helped plan an attack on the American embassy in Jakarta.</p>
<p>"The instruction was to drive a suicide truck into the U.S. embassy, or get a helicopter to bomb them from above," Ibnu Ahmad said. The plan, apparently, did not work out. His surveillance photographs of the embassy building proved too blurry to show to al Qaeda higher-ups in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>In August 2000, the group ended up bombing the Philippine ambassador's residence instead, killing two Indonesians and injuring the ambassador. Most recently, Ibnu Ahmad was imprisoned twice for waging jihad against Christians on the island of Sulawesi, one of the largest of the 17,000 islands that make up Indonesia's vast archipelago.</p>
<p>With 240 million people, eight of 10 of whom are Muslims, Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world. (Protestants make up about 6 percent of the rest of population; Catholics, 3 percent; Hindus, less than 5 percent.) Indonesia is also a vibrant young democracy, which held its first presidential elections only in 2004. In 1998, after 32 years in power, the strong centralized government of President Suharto collapsed and political power spread to the outlying islands. On Sulawesi, power became something worth fighting for, and Christians and Muslims began to battle over local elections. As in Nigeria (where military dictatorship ended in 1999), in Indonesia's wobbly new democracy, political and religious affiliations soon reinforced one another.</p>
<p>Once the religious violence began, Ibnu Ahmad traveled by boat to Sulawesi to train his Muslim brothers in how to fight a guerrilla war against infidels. His training in Afghanistan hadn't been about killing Christians, however, but about overthrowing the secular government. Back at home in Indonesia, there were arguments among the militants as to whether these skirmishes were the right ones to fight. Ibnu Ahmad went to Sulawesi anyway, where he was caught carrying 31,000 rounds of ammunition, tried, convicted, and imprisoned. He wasn't interested in talking about the electroshock or waterboarding he was subjected to in prison. "My brain doesn't work right, it's like a broken computer," was all he would say. But evidence of his treatment seemed all too visible in his absent stares and broken teeth.</p>
<p>Apparently the security officer at the Jakarta airport didn't recognize Ibnu Ahmad: After allowing the rabbits to be checked, he let him go without incident. Ibnu Ahmad strolled back across the gleaming terminal to where I stood with Zamira Loebis, a journalism professor and Time reporter in her forties, who was traveling along with us to interpret. From beneath her blunt bob, Loebis' eyes found mine in disbelief that Ibnu Ahmad had been allowed to check the rabbits as luggage. An animal lover, she had a household full of cats and dogs; she'd even rescued two parrots from different religious battlegrounds.</p>
<p>These rabbits were a gift for Ibnu Ahmad's newborn son and his second wife, Farhia, 28, whom he had met while still in prison on Sulawesi, where the three of us were headed this morning. "Fathers used to come to the prison to marry their daughters off to us," he said wistfully.</p>
<p>Start and finish your day with the top stories from The Daily Beast.</p>
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<p>Otherwise, Ibnu Ahmad was broke. This is where I came in. For the price of his plane ticket home, and the chance to see his wife and child, he was going to show me how he had grafted a war of worlds onto this local conflict. He missed the days when he was a folk hero, when the difference between good and evil was glaringly clear, when identity and ideology were as simple as fear, a face mask, and the scrawl of a cross or a crescent on a wall. For the past two years, lack of funding and divisions over the meaning of jihad had been tearing Jemaah Islamiyah militants apart, and their beliefs and tactics seemed to have lost favor among local people and prospective recruits. Several months before our trip, three Christian teenage girls had been beheaded on Sulawesi while walking to school; one's head, wrapped in a black plastic bag, was dropped on the front step of a local church. A fourth teenager, Noviana Malewa, had also been attacked, but survived. No one had been arrested yet for these crimes, but most thought the attackers must have come from among the hard-core fighters such as Ibnu Ahmad. Now the former heroes were pariahs.</p>
<p>On the ride to Sulawesi, Ibnu Ahmad listened to John Lennon's "Imagine" over and over through a pair of flimsy earphones. "Al Jazeera," he would joke from time to time, pointing to his cap. He liked to tease me about the differences between our two worlds, which he viewed as being in opposition: America and I and all Christians on one side, he and Al Jazeera and the world's Muslims on the other. The conflict in Indonesia, however, was much more complicated. Every government arm that received counterterrorism funding from the international community, namely the U.S. and Australia, had a stake in the conflict. It was clear that the conflict had little to do with religion per se and everything to do with competition over who controlled the local government and, by extension, the economy. These realities hadn't occurred to Ibnu Ahmad, who clung to his worldview and the peace of mind it seemed to provide him, oblivious to the fact that the rest of his country had moved beyond the jihad he thought he was fighting.</p>
<p>Ibnu Ahmad's rabbits were shivering but alive when they came out of baggage claim, their brown fur spiked like hedgehog quills. We were in Palu, central Sulawesi's main city; the dingy airport was full of scowling men in sunglasses and short-sleeve button-down shirts, the universal uniform of intelligence. Along with jungle rot and sea brine, menace hung in the moist air. Palu felt like a place of exile and disappearances.</p>
<p>Excerpted from The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold. Published in August 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright - 2010 by Eliza Griswold. All rights reserved.</p>
<p>Plus: <a href="" type="internal">Check out Book Beast, for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books</a>.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Eliza Griswold</a> is a Schwartz fellow at the <a href="http://www.newamerica.net/" type="external">New America Foundation</a>. Her book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374273189/thedaibea-20" type="external">The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Islam and Christianity</a> comes out this month from FSG.</p>
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The Tenth Parallel: Eliza Griswold Takes a Trip with a Terrorist
| true |
https://thedailybeast.com/the-tenth-parallel-eliza-griswold-takes-a-trip-with-a-terrorist
|
2018-10-03
| 4left
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The Tenth Parallel: Eliza Griswold Takes a Trip with a Terrorist
<p>A Muzak rendition of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" echoed through the Jakarta airport's domestic terminal shortly after dawn. A 40-year-old man wearing knockoff Ray-Ban Wayfarers and an Al Jazeera baseball cap shuffled along with a large cardboard box poked with holes tucked under his arm. A minor celebrity within the world of international jihad, Farihin Ibnu Ahmad, aka "Yasir," was barely known outside of it. He was renowned for his violent pedigree, although few people other than militants would have recognized his broad, hangdog face. He sidled up to a plainclothes security officer and thrust the box toward him.</p>
<p>On the ride to Sulawesi, Ibnu Ahmad listened to John Lennon's "Imagine" over and over through a pair of flimsy earphones. "Al Jazeera," he would joke from time to time, pointing to his cap.</p>
<p>"Will the X-ray machine kill them?" he asked. The officer pulled back one of the box's dog-eared corners to reveal a pair of rabbits, mottled black and white, noses twitching wildly at the unfamiliar smells of stale coffee and perfume. Ibnu Ahmad (ibnu in Indonesian, like bin in Arabic, means "son of") wanted to know if he should check the rabbits or if he could carry them on the plane. The officer glanced up from the rabbits to Ibnu Ahmad's face, half hidden beneath the baseball cap. Though I was there to meet Ibnu Ahmad, I scooted furtively to the other side of the corridor, certain he was about to be arrested.</p>
<p>The rabbits should have been the least of the security officer's concerns: Ibnu Ahmad was a killer, and member of Jemaah Islamiyah, a lethal group of Southeast Asian militants notorious for the 2002 Bali bombings, which left 202 people dead. The militants' ties to al Qaeda were precisely through men like Ibnu Ahmad.</p>
<p>For generations, Ibnu Ahmad's family has been part of an Islamist movement first opposing Western colonialism and later fighting for Indonesia to become an Islamic state. When he was 16, Ahmad's family offered him a choice: Did he want to be an Islamic teacher or a fighter? He chose to be a fighter, and in 1987 he shipped out to al Qaeda's Al-Sadda camp in the saw-toothed, snowy mountains on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, to fight in the jihad against the Soviets. He learned to build explosives and heard a couple of sermons given by Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian preacher who served as Osama bin Laden's spiritual mentor. Azzam believed that every Muslim was duty bound to fight or pay for global jihad until the holy lands of Islam were restored to their former glory. He preached that Islam's future lay in reviving its ideal, seventh-century past by whatever means necessary.</p>
<p>When Ibnu Ahmad returned to Indonesia in the '90s, he brought with him a bloody, millennarian worldview intended to overthrow the secular government, and a network of contacts. In Jakarta, the nation's buzzing capital, he became one of Jemaah Islamiyah's most ardent deputies. In 1996, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks, visited Jakarta, Ibnu Ahmad served as his tour guide. He did the personal bidding of Hambali (aka Riduan bin Isomuddin, known as al Qaeda's kingpin in Southeast Asia), and he helped plan an attack on the American embassy in Jakarta.</p>
<p>"The instruction was to drive a suicide truck into the U.S. embassy, or get a helicopter to bomb them from above," Ibnu Ahmad said. The plan, apparently, did not work out. His surveillance photographs of the embassy building proved too blurry to show to al Qaeda higher-ups in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>In August 2000, the group ended up bombing the Philippine ambassador's residence instead, killing two Indonesians and injuring the ambassador. Most recently, Ibnu Ahmad was imprisoned twice for waging jihad against Christians on the island of Sulawesi, one of the largest of the 17,000 islands that make up Indonesia's vast archipelago.</p>
<p>With 240 million people, eight of 10 of whom are Muslims, Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world. (Protestants make up about 6 percent of the rest of population; Catholics, 3 percent; Hindus, less than 5 percent.) Indonesia is also a vibrant young democracy, which held its first presidential elections only in 2004. In 1998, after 32 years in power, the strong centralized government of President Suharto collapsed and political power spread to the outlying islands. On Sulawesi, power became something worth fighting for, and Christians and Muslims began to battle over local elections. As in Nigeria (where military dictatorship ended in 1999), in Indonesia's wobbly new democracy, political and religious affiliations soon reinforced one another.</p>
<p>Once the religious violence began, Ibnu Ahmad traveled by boat to Sulawesi to train his Muslim brothers in how to fight a guerrilla war against infidels. His training in Afghanistan hadn't been about killing Christians, however, but about overthrowing the secular government. Back at home in Indonesia, there were arguments among the militants as to whether these skirmishes were the right ones to fight. Ibnu Ahmad went to Sulawesi anyway, where he was caught carrying 31,000 rounds of ammunition, tried, convicted, and imprisoned. He wasn't interested in talking about the electroshock or waterboarding he was subjected to in prison. "My brain doesn't work right, it's like a broken computer," was all he would say. But evidence of his treatment seemed all too visible in his absent stares and broken teeth.</p>
<p>Apparently the security officer at the Jakarta airport didn't recognize Ibnu Ahmad: After allowing the rabbits to be checked, he let him go without incident. Ibnu Ahmad strolled back across the gleaming terminal to where I stood with Zamira Loebis, a journalism professor and Time reporter in her forties, who was traveling along with us to interpret. From beneath her blunt bob, Loebis' eyes found mine in disbelief that Ibnu Ahmad had been allowed to check the rabbits as luggage. An animal lover, she had a household full of cats and dogs; she'd even rescued two parrots from different religious battlegrounds.</p>
<p>These rabbits were a gift for Ibnu Ahmad's newborn son and his second wife, Farhia, 28, whom he had met while still in prison on Sulawesi, where the three of us were headed this morning. "Fathers used to come to the prison to marry their daughters off to us," he said wistfully.</p>
<p>Start and finish your day with the top stories from The Daily Beast.</p>
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<p>Otherwise, Ibnu Ahmad was broke. This is where I came in. For the price of his plane ticket home, and the chance to see his wife and child, he was going to show me how he had grafted a war of worlds onto this local conflict. He missed the days when he was a folk hero, when the difference between good and evil was glaringly clear, when identity and ideology were as simple as fear, a face mask, and the scrawl of a cross or a crescent on a wall. For the past two years, lack of funding and divisions over the meaning of jihad had been tearing Jemaah Islamiyah militants apart, and their beliefs and tactics seemed to have lost favor among local people and prospective recruits. Several months before our trip, three Christian teenage girls had been beheaded on Sulawesi while walking to school; one's head, wrapped in a black plastic bag, was dropped on the front step of a local church. A fourth teenager, Noviana Malewa, had also been attacked, but survived. No one had been arrested yet for these crimes, but most thought the attackers must have come from among the hard-core fighters such as Ibnu Ahmad. Now the former heroes were pariahs.</p>
<p>On the ride to Sulawesi, Ibnu Ahmad listened to John Lennon's "Imagine" over and over through a pair of flimsy earphones. "Al Jazeera," he would joke from time to time, pointing to his cap. He liked to tease me about the differences between our two worlds, which he viewed as being in opposition: America and I and all Christians on one side, he and Al Jazeera and the world's Muslims on the other. The conflict in Indonesia, however, was much more complicated. Every government arm that received counterterrorism funding from the international community, namely the U.S. and Australia, had a stake in the conflict. It was clear that the conflict had little to do with religion per se and everything to do with competition over who controlled the local government and, by extension, the economy. These realities hadn't occurred to Ibnu Ahmad, who clung to his worldview and the peace of mind it seemed to provide him, oblivious to the fact that the rest of his country had moved beyond the jihad he thought he was fighting.</p>
<p>Ibnu Ahmad's rabbits were shivering but alive when they came out of baggage claim, their brown fur spiked like hedgehog quills. We were in Palu, central Sulawesi's main city; the dingy airport was full of scowling men in sunglasses and short-sleeve button-down shirts, the universal uniform of intelligence. Along with jungle rot and sea brine, menace hung in the moist air. Palu felt like a place of exile and disappearances.</p>
<p>Excerpted from The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold. Published in August 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright - 2010 by Eliza Griswold. All rights reserved.</p>
<p>Plus: <a href="" type="internal">Check out Book Beast, for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books</a>.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Eliza Griswold</a> is a Schwartz fellow at the <a href="http://www.newamerica.net/" type="external">New America Foundation</a>. Her book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374273189/thedaibea-20" type="external">The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Islam and Christianity</a> comes out this month from FSG.</p>
| 7,877 |
<p>JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Republican Gov. Phil Bryant failed to acknowledge many of Mississippi's problems in the State of the State address, a lawmaker said in the Democrats' televised response.</p>
<p>Bryant gave the speech Tuesday at the Capitol, saying critics are portraying Mississippi in a negative light.</p>
<p>Rep. Jay Hughes of Oxford said Mississippi is last in public education, last in mental health care and first in poverty. He also said the state suffers from a "brain drain," with large numbers of college graduates leaving.</p>
<p>While the governor mentioned low unemployment and robust job creation, Hughes said too many communities are stuck with low-paying jobs that don't provide a way out of poverty.</p>
<p>"Unfortunately, the policies that impact our quality of life have merely gone unchanged and underfunded," Hughes said. "Simply ignoring a problem is not a solution."</p>
<p>Other response to the State of the State:</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn of Clinton:</p>
<p>Gunn said not to read too much into Bryant's failure to mention road and bridge funding, saying he and Bryant have had "ongoing conversations."</p>
<p>"The governor can't cover everything in a 20-minute speech."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat:</p>
<p>"The governor did a good job showing what's bright with our economy, but he doesn't talk about things that are going to cost money, like roads and bridges."</p>
<p>"The job of government is to fix problems, and you've got to talk about the problems to fix them. You've got to talk about money."</p>
<p>Hood said he thought it was a missed opportunity that lawmakers weren't doing more to try to aid the city of Jackson with its infrastructure problems. "You've got porta-potties outside the Capitol building."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican Sen. Lydia Chassaniol of Winona:</p>
<p>Chassaniol said she thought the governor's emphasis on racial reconciliation recognized the honesty of the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. "It needs to be acknowledges that we pretty much laid ourselves bare."</p>
<p>"I was excited to hear his interest in improving not only the health care and the education, but the job opportunities for poor people."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Democratic Sen. Sollie Norwood of Jackson:</p>
<p>"The governor had some good expressions. I was listening for the how-to's on some of it."</p>
<p>Norwood said education funding is a problem that needs the governor's involvement if the state is going to guarantee a good teacher to every child: "We've got to have the resources to make that happen."</p>
<p>Norwood said he was pleased by the governor's call for the state to train another class of state troopers, as well his advocacy for the Department of Child Protective Services.</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican Sen. Briggs Hopson of Vicksburg:</p>
<p>"I thought the themes were very good, especially in light of the fact that we celebrated our bicentennial..... I think the acknowledgment of some of the difficulties of Mississippi were appropriate, but he gave a hopeful and optimistic vision of Mississippi."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Democratic Rep. Sonya Williams Barnes of Gulfport:</p>
<p>"He did say he wants all citizens of Mississippi to be equal. So, is he going to support equal pay for women? ... It is imperative to the economy in our state that all citizens, regardless of gender or race, get equal pay for the same work."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican Rep. Robert Foster of Hernando:</p>
<p>"We are seeing positive returns for some of the decisions we have made." Foster cited as an example the "third grade gate" law enacted in recent years, requiring students to achieve certain reading standards before moving to the fourth grade. "We are seeing positive results through that. Long-term, it was good policy."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Rep. Abe Hudson, a Democrat from Shelby:</p>
<p>"Though I share the same passion as Gov. Bryant, I believe the way to achieve success in some areas is different, particularly in the area of public education. In order for our state to move forward from an educational perspective, we must continue to try to find a way so that every child gets an opportunity for success. I get concerned when we spend an equal amount of time discussing chargers and vouchers as we do public education."</p>
<p>JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Republican Gov. Phil Bryant failed to acknowledge many of Mississippi's problems in the State of the State address, a lawmaker said in the Democrats' televised response.</p>
<p>Bryant gave the speech Tuesday at the Capitol, saying critics are portraying Mississippi in a negative light.</p>
<p>Rep. Jay Hughes of Oxford said Mississippi is last in public education, last in mental health care and first in poverty. He also said the state suffers from a "brain drain," with large numbers of college graduates leaving.</p>
<p>While the governor mentioned low unemployment and robust job creation, Hughes said too many communities are stuck with low-paying jobs that don't provide a way out of poverty.</p>
<p>"Unfortunately, the policies that impact our quality of life have merely gone unchanged and underfunded," Hughes said. "Simply ignoring a problem is not a solution."</p>
<p>Other response to the State of the State:</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn of Clinton:</p>
<p>Gunn said not to read too much into Bryant's failure to mention road and bridge funding, saying he and Bryant have had "ongoing conversations."</p>
<p>"The governor can't cover everything in a 20-minute speech."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat:</p>
<p>"The governor did a good job showing what's bright with our economy, but he doesn't talk about things that are going to cost money, like roads and bridges."</p>
<p>"The job of government is to fix problems, and you've got to talk about the problems to fix them. You've got to talk about money."</p>
<p>Hood said he thought it was a missed opportunity that lawmakers weren't doing more to try to aid the city of Jackson with its infrastructure problems. "You've got porta-potties outside the Capitol building."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican Sen. Lydia Chassaniol of Winona:</p>
<p>Chassaniol said she thought the governor's emphasis on racial reconciliation recognized the honesty of the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. "It needs to be acknowledges that we pretty much laid ourselves bare."</p>
<p>"I was excited to hear his interest in improving not only the health care and the education, but the job opportunities for poor people."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Democratic Sen. Sollie Norwood of Jackson:</p>
<p>"The governor had some good expressions. I was listening for the how-to's on some of it."</p>
<p>Norwood said education funding is a problem that needs the governor's involvement if the state is going to guarantee a good teacher to every child: "We've got to have the resources to make that happen."</p>
<p>Norwood said he was pleased by the governor's call for the state to train another class of state troopers, as well his advocacy for the Department of Child Protective Services.</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican Sen. Briggs Hopson of Vicksburg:</p>
<p>"I thought the themes were very good, especially in light of the fact that we celebrated our bicentennial..... I think the acknowledgment of some of the difficulties of Mississippi were appropriate, but he gave a hopeful and optimistic vision of Mississippi."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Democratic Rep. Sonya Williams Barnes of Gulfport:</p>
<p>"He did say he wants all citizens of Mississippi to be equal. So, is he going to support equal pay for women? ... It is imperative to the economy in our state that all citizens, regardless of gender or race, get equal pay for the same work."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican Rep. Robert Foster of Hernando:</p>
<p>"We are seeing positive returns for some of the decisions we have made." Foster cited as an example the "third grade gate" law enacted in recent years, requiring students to achieve certain reading standards before moving to the fourth grade. "We are seeing positive results through that. Long-term, it was good policy."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Rep. Abe Hudson, a Democrat from Shelby:</p>
<p>"Though I share the same passion as Gov. Bryant, I believe the way to achieve success in some areas is different, particularly in the area of public education. In order for our state to move forward from an educational perspective, we must continue to try to find a way so that every child gets an opportunity for success. I get concerned when we spend an equal amount of time discussing chargers and vouchers as we do public education."</p>
|
Dem response: Bryant failed to note Mississippi problems
| false |
https://apnews.com/amp/47b443c76aee48bdb67dd027f36e6d33
|
2018-01-10
| 2least
|
Dem response: Bryant failed to note Mississippi problems
<p>JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Republican Gov. Phil Bryant failed to acknowledge many of Mississippi's problems in the State of the State address, a lawmaker said in the Democrats' televised response.</p>
<p>Bryant gave the speech Tuesday at the Capitol, saying critics are portraying Mississippi in a negative light.</p>
<p>Rep. Jay Hughes of Oxford said Mississippi is last in public education, last in mental health care and first in poverty. He also said the state suffers from a "brain drain," with large numbers of college graduates leaving.</p>
<p>While the governor mentioned low unemployment and robust job creation, Hughes said too many communities are stuck with low-paying jobs that don't provide a way out of poverty.</p>
<p>"Unfortunately, the policies that impact our quality of life have merely gone unchanged and underfunded," Hughes said. "Simply ignoring a problem is not a solution."</p>
<p>Other response to the State of the State:</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn of Clinton:</p>
<p>Gunn said not to read too much into Bryant's failure to mention road and bridge funding, saying he and Bryant have had "ongoing conversations."</p>
<p>"The governor can't cover everything in a 20-minute speech."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat:</p>
<p>"The governor did a good job showing what's bright with our economy, but he doesn't talk about things that are going to cost money, like roads and bridges."</p>
<p>"The job of government is to fix problems, and you've got to talk about the problems to fix them. You've got to talk about money."</p>
<p>Hood said he thought it was a missed opportunity that lawmakers weren't doing more to try to aid the city of Jackson with its infrastructure problems. "You've got porta-potties outside the Capitol building."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican Sen. Lydia Chassaniol of Winona:</p>
<p>Chassaniol said she thought the governor's emphasis on racial reconciliation recognized the honesty of the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. "It needs to be acknowledges that we pretty much laid ourselves bare."</p>
<p>"I was excited to hear his interest in improving not only the health care and the education, but the job opportunities for poor people."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Democratic Sen. Sollie Norwood of Jackson:</p>
<p>"The governor had some good expressions. I was listening for the how-to's on some of it."</p>
<p>Norwood said education funding is a problem that needs the governor's involvement if the state is going to guarantee a good teacher to every child: "We've got to have the resources to make that happen."</p>
<p>Norwood said he was pleased by the governor's call for the state to train another class of state troopers, as well his advocacy for the Department of Child Protective Services.</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican Sen. Briggs Hopson of Vicksburg:</p>
<p>"I thought the themes were very good, especially in light of the fact that we celebrated our bicentennial..... I think the acknowledgment of some of the difficulties of Mississippi were appropriate, but he gave a hopeful and optimistic vision of Mississippi."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Democratic Rep. Sonya Williams Barnes of Gulfport:</p>
<p>"He did say he wants all citizens of Mississippi to be equal. So, is he going to support equal pay for women? ... It is imperative to the economy in our state that all citizens, regardless of gender or race, get equal pay for the same work."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican Rep. Robert Foster of Hernando:</p>
<p>"We are seeing positive returns for some of the decisions we have made." Foster cited as an example the "third grade gate" law enacted in recent years, requiring students to achieve certain reading standards before moving to the fourth grade. "We are seeing positive results through that. Long-term, it was good policy."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Rep. Abe Hudson, a Democrat from Shelby:</p>
<p>"Though I share the same passion as Gov. Bryant, I believe the way to achieve success in some areas is different, particularly in the area of public education. In order for our state to move forward from an educational perspective, we must continue to try to find a way so that every child gets an opportunity for success. I get concerned when we spend an equal amount of time discussing chargers and vouchers as we do public education."</p>
<p>JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Republican Gov. Phil Bryant failed to acknowledge many of Mississippi's problems in the State of the State address, a lawmaker said in the Democrats' televised response.</p>
<p>Bryant gave the speech Tuesday at the Capitol, saying critics are portraying Mississippi in a negative light.</p>
<p>Rep. Jay Hughes of Oxford said Mississippi is last in public education, last in mental health care and first in poverty. He also said the state suffers from a "brain drain," with large numbers of college graduates leaving.</p>
<p>While the governor mentioned low unemployment and robust job creation, Hughes said too many communities are stuck with low-paying jobs that don't provide a way out of poverty.</p>
<p>"Unfortunately, the policies that impact our quality of life have merely gone unchanged and underfunded," Hughes said. "Simply ignoring a problem is not a solution."</p>
<p>Other response to the State of the State:</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn of Clinton:</p>
<p>Gunn said not to read too much into Bryant's failure to mention road and bridge funding, saying he and Bryant have had "ongoing conversations."</p>
<p>"The governor can't cover everything in a 20-minute speech."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat:</p>
<p>"The governor did a good job showing what's bright with our economy, but he doesn't talk about things that are going to cost money, like roads and bridges."</p>
<p>"The job of government is to fix problems, and you've got to talk about the problems to fix them. You've got to talk about money."</p>
<p>Hood said he thought it was a missed opportunity that lawmakers weren't doing more to try to aid the city of Jackson with its infrastructure problems. "You've got porta-potties outside the Capitol building."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican Sen. Lydia Chassaniol of Winona:</p>
<p>Chassaniol said she thought the governor's emphasis on racial reconciliation recognized the honesty of the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. "It needs to be acknowledges that we pretty much laid ourselves bare."</p>
<p>"I was excited to hear his interest in improving not only the health care and the education, but the job opportunities for poor people."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Democratic Sen. Sollie Norwood of Jackson:</p>
<p>"The governor had some good expressions. I was listening for the how-to's on some of it."</p>
<p>Norwood said education funding is a problem that needs the governor's involvement if the state is going to guarantee a good teacher to every child: "We've got to have the resources to make that happen."</p>
<p>Norwood said he was pleased by the governor's call for the state to train another class of state troopers, as well his advocacy for the Department of Child Protective Services.</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican Sen. Briggs Hopson of Vicksburg:</p>
<p>"I thought the themes were very good, especially in light of the fact that we celebrated our bicentennial..... I think the acknowledgment of some of the difficulties of Mississippi were appropriate, but he gave a hopeful and optimistic vision of Mississippi."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Democratic Rep. Sonya Williams Barnes of Gulfport:</p>
<p>"He did say he wants all citizens of Mississippi to be equal. So, is he going to support equal pay for women? ... It is imperative to the economy in our state that all citizens, regardless of gender or race, get equal pay for the same work."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Republican Rep. Robert Foster of Hernando:</p>
<p>"We are seeing positive returns for some of the decisions we have made." Foster cited as an example the "third grade gate" law enacted in recent years, requiring students to achieve certain reading standards before moving to the fourth grade. "We are seeing positive results through that. Long-term, it was good policy."</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>Rep. Abe Hudson, a Democrat from Shelby:</p>
<p>"Though I share the same passion as Gov. Bryant, I believe the way to achieve success in some areas is different, particularly in the area of public education. In order for our state to move forward from an educational perspective, we must continue to try to find a way so that every child gets an opportunity for success. I get concerned when we spend an equal amount of time discussing chargers and vouchers as we do public education."</p>
| 7,878 |
<p><a href="" type="internal" />It’s springtime in South America and just last week, somewhere on that green continent, a farmer planted the world’s 3 billionth acre of Genetically Modified (GM) crops, signaling another milestone in biotechnology’s steady ascent toward conventionality.&#160; This is celebrated news for biotech companies like Monsanto, but it’s been received as a gloomy portent by farmers who’ve invested big in the promises of GM crops only to discover the harsh truth about Big Ag’s zero-sum game.</p>
<p>The biotech-friendly group Truth about Trade &amp; Technology (TTT) provided the 3 billion acre figure in a news release last Friday. For years, the American-based non-profit organization has kept track of biotech-crop acreage by compiling official data from governments across the world.</p>
<p>“How big is 3 billion acres? It’s bigger than the Amazon rainforest. It’s bigger than all of Brazil. It’s big enough to say with absolute certainty that biotechnology is now a thoroughly conventional variety of agriculture,” says TTT.</p>
<p>Indeed, GM seeds have penetrated conventional markets to the extent that 15.4 million farmers planted these crops on 365 million acres around the world in 2010 alone. Not bad for a product that was non-existent over a decade ago and that has set itself up as a direct competitor to mother nature herself.</p>
<p>Proponents of patented plants make pretty lofty claims about them: that through them, farmers get paid more, yields increase and petrochemical applications are reduced. A talking point that biotech apologists often rely upon is that current world population levels could not be sustained without GM crops.</p>
<p>In actuality, all of the “facts” mentioned above are hotly contested, and there is evidence supporting both sides of the argument (in the interest of fairness, it is important to note that biotech firms provide the vast majority of funding for all research performed on GMOs – Genetically Modified Organisms). But there are food producers out there who don’t buy all of the hype, mainly because they’ve experienced the brave new world of GM farming.</p>
<p>In a&#160; <a href="http://gmcropsfarmertofarmer.com/" type="external">short documentary film</a>, agriculturalist/researcher Michael Hart interviews a number of farmers from across the country who tell him that GM crops don’t live up to their promised potential. In fact, given enough time, GM crops are bound to disappoint, they say. Among complaints by farmers is that GM crops require increasingly more pesticide and herbicide applications to maintain their viability. Biotech crops that have built-in glyphosate resistance tend to harbor fields of “superweeds” – weeds that have transgenically assumed the herbicidal immunities of the cash crop around which they grow, driving some farmers to remove them by hand. Across the board, farmers have taken issue with escalating prices for seeds, pesticides, and herbicides. Remember, patented seeds must be bought year after year and cannot be saved under penalty of law. These circumstances work to trap farmers within the biotech system. Once caught, farmers watch helplessly as the price of seeds and sprays outpaces crop prices.</p>
<p>Then, there is the scariest issue of all for farmers: if patented GM crops are “substantially equivalent” to conventional ones like the FDA says, that means the two can reproduce together (a frightening reality witnessed in a train of patent-infringement lawsuits brought against farmers unlucky enough to have their conventional crops within wind-pollination range of biotech-owned plants). It’s hard to fathom a state of coexistence between patented plants and non-patented plants when the former has a proven track record of being an unchecked invader/occupier of the latter.</p>
<p>Part of the reason that GMOs have been allowed to develop and prosper in the shadows of civic discourse is that they are not required to be labeled on food ingredient lists. This has allowed GMOs to expand into most areas of agriculture (and thus take up habitation in most of our bodies) without much public attention or debate. The FDA has relied upon the philosophy of “substantial equivalence” when comparing genetically altered ingredients with their natural, whole-food counterparts. This has forced consumer and health advocates to pose the obvious question, “why are genetically altered substances allowed intellectual property protection if they are substantially equivalent to the real deal?”</p>
<p>Proper product labeling is the simplest, most effective route towards informed consumer consent when it comes to GM foods. If consumer and health advocacy groups have their way, California would be the first state with mandatory GMO labeling laws through a&#160; <a href="http://organicconsumersfund.org/label/" type="external">2012 California Ballot Initiative</a>. Over 80 percent of Californians polled support mandatory labeling. As the 8th largest economy in the world, California’s labeling laws affect packaging and ingredient decisions nationwide.</p>
|
Billions of acres of genetically modified crops can’t be wrong, right?
| false |
https://ivn.us/2011/11/10/billions-of-acres-of-genetically-modified-crops-cant-be-wrong-right/
|
2011-11-10
| 2least
|
Billions of acres of genetically modified crops can’t be wrong, right?
<p><a href="" type="internal" />It’s springtime in South America and just last week, somewhere on that green continent, a farmer planted the world’s 3 billionth acre of Genetically Modified (GM) crops, signaling another milestone in biotechnology’s steady ascent toward conventionality.&#160; This is celebrated news for biotech companies like Monsanto, but it’s been received as a gloomy portent by farmers who’ve invested big in the promises of GM crops only to discover the harsh truth about Big Ag’s zero-sum game.</p>
<p>The biotech-friendly group Truth about Trade &amp; Technology (TTT) provided the 3 billion acre figure in a news release last Friday. For years, the American-based non-profit organization has kept track of biotech-crop acreage by compiling official data from governments across the world.</p>
<p>“How big is 3 billion acres? It’s bigger than the Amazon rainforest. It’s bigger than all of Brazil. It’s big enough to say with absolute certainty that biotechnology is now a thoroughly conventional variety of agriculture,” says TTT.</p>
<p>Indeed, GM seeds have penetrated conventional markets to the extent that 15.4 million farmers planted these crops on 365 million acres around the world in 2010 alone. Not bad for a product that was non-existent over a decade ago and that has set itself up as a direct competitor to mother nature herself.</p>
<p>Proponents of patented plants make pretty lofty claims about them: that through them, farmers get paid more, yields increase and petrochemical applications are reduced. A talking point that biotech apologists often rely upon is that current world population levels could not be sustained without GM crops.</p>
<p>In actuality, all of the “facts” mentioned above are hotly contested, and there is evidence supporting both sides of the argument (in the interest of fairness, it is important to note that biotech firms provide the vast majority of funding for all research performed on GMOs – Genetically Modified Organisms). But there are food producers out there who don’t buy all of the hype, mainly because they’ve experienced the brave new world of GM farming.</p>
<p>In a&#160; <a href="http://gmcropsfarmertofarmer.com/" type="external">short documentary film</a>, agriculturalist/researcher Michael Hart interviews a number of farmers from across the country who tell him that GM crops don’t live up to their promised potential. In fact, given enough time, GM crops are bound to disappoint, they say. Among complaints by farmers is that GM crops require increasingly more pesticide and herbicide applications to maintain their viability. Biotech crops that have built-in glyphosate resistance tend to harbor fields of “superweeds” – weeds that have transgenically assumed the herbicidal immunities of the cash crop around which they grow, driving some farmers to remove them by hand. Across the board, farmers have taken issue with escalating prices for seeds, pesticides, and herbicides. Remember, patented seeds must be bought year after year and cannot be saved under penalty of law. These circumstances work to trap farmers within the biotech system. Once caught, farmers watch helplessly as the price of seeds and sprays outpaces crop prices.</p>
<p>Then, there is the scariest issue of all for farmers: if patented GM crops are “substantially equivalent” to conventional ones like the FDA says, that means the two can reproduce together (a frightening reality witnessed in a train of patent-infringement lawsuits brought against farmers unlucky enough to have their conventional crops within wind-pollination range of biotech-owned plants). It’s hard to fathom a state of coexistence between patented plants and non-patented plants when the former has a proven track record of being an unchecked invader/occupier of the latter.</p>
<p>Part of the reason that GMOs have been allowed to develop and prosper in the shadows of civic discourse is that they are not required to be labeled on food ingredient lists. This has allowed GMOs to expand into most areas of agriculture (and thus take up habitation in most of our bodies) without much public attention or debate. The FDA has relied upon the philosophy of “substantial equivalence” when comparing genetically altered ingredients with their natural, whole-food counterparts. This has forced consumer and health advocates to pose the obvious question, “why are genetically altered substances allowed intellectual property protection if they are substantially equivalent to the real deal?”</p>
<p>Proper product labeling is the simplest, most effective route towards informed consumer consent when it comes to GM foods. If consumer and health advocacy groups have their way, California would be the first state with mandatory GMO labeling laws through a&#160; <a href="http://organicconsumersfund.org/label/" type="external">2012 California Ballot Initiative</a>. Over 80 percent of Californians polled support mandatory labeling. As the 8th largest economy in the world, California’s labeling laws affect packaging and ingredient decisions nationwide.</p>
| 7,879 |
<p>At a forum in New Hampshire today, a voter called out Hillary Clinton for labeling Republicans “the enemy.”</p>
<p>But instead of admitting she was wrong or apologizing, Hillary attempted to justify her statement by saying Republicans “sometimes view me that way.”</p>
<p />
<p>“As a student of history, I feel right now this country is the most divided since the Civil War,” the Hew Hampshire voter said. “My question to you is, for the first time in all the times I’ve listened to you, you said ‘Republicans as your enemy’ is disheartening. I’m not asking you to retract it, what I’m asking you is when you are president, will you please extend the olive branch because we are all Americans.”</p>
<p>Clinton answered, “I agree with that,” but then attempted to shift the blame by saying, “You know, I was answering — I think they sometimes view me that way, like the Iranians, etc.”</p>
<p>Hillary said Republicans say “great things” about her when she’s in office, but “it’s a little different” when she’s running.</p>
|
VIDEO: ‘Disheartened’ NH voter confronts Hillary
| true |
http://theamericanmirror.com/video-voter-confronts-hillary-for-calling-republicans-the-enemy/
|
2015-11-09
| 0right
|
VIDEO: ‘Disheartened’ NH voter confronts Hillary
<p>At a forum in New Hampshire today, a voter called out Hillary Clinton for labeling Republicans “the enemy.”</p>
<p>But instead of admitting she was wrong or apologizing, Hillary attempted to justify her statement by saying Republicans “sometimes view me that way.”</p>
<p />
<p>“As a student of history, I feel right now this country is the most divided since the Civil War,” the Hew Hampshire voter said. “My question to you is, for the first time in all the times I’ve listened to you, you said ‘Republicans as your enemy’ is disheartening. I’m not asking you to retract it, what I’m asking you is when you are president, will you please extend the olive branch because we are all Americans.”</p>
<p>Clinton answered, “I agree with that,” but then attempted to shift the blame by saying, “You know, I was answering — I think they sometimes view me that way, like the Iranians, etc.”</p>
<p>Hillary said Republicans say “great things” about her when she’s in office, but “it’s a little different” when she’s running.</p>
| 7,880 |
<p>Investing.com – Gold price rose slightly in Asia on Friday as investors digested a triple load of central bank view from the Fed, ECB and Bank of England that pointed to continued easy liquidity.</p>
<p>for February delivery on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange edged up 0.02% to $1,257.40 a troy ounce.</p>
<p>Overnight, gold prices traded close to session highs on Thursday, shrugging off a rebound in the dollar as the European Central Bank said it would continue its ultra-accommodative monetary policy measures.</p>
<p>The European Central Bank left its benchmark rate unchanged on Thursday, reiterating its commitment to running an asset-purchase stimulus programme until at least next September.</p>
<p>“Domestic price pressures remain muted overall and have yet to show convincing signs of a sustained upward trend,” European Central bank president Mario Draghi said in a press conference on Thursday, adding that an “ample degree” of stimulus is still needed.</p>
<p>Gold prices reversed a two-day slide on Wednesday against the backdrop of a widely expected Federal Reserve rate hike, and an unchanged outlook on the path of monetary policy tightening with three rate hikes expected in 2018.</p>
<p>In a sign of confidence, the Federal Reserve revised upward its projection for economic growth in 2017 to 2.5%, while forecasting growth for 2018 at 2.5%.</p>
<p>Also supporting sentiment on gold prices were reports of renewed brexit uncertainty after UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s government was defeated on Wednesday, when lawmakers forced through changes to its Brexit plan that ministers said could threaten Britain’s departure from the European Union.</p>
<p>In other precious metal trade, rose 0.45% to $15.94 a troy ounce, while gained 0.80% to $882.40.</p>
<p>traded at $3.07, up 0.67%, while fell by 1.22% to $2.68 despite data showing natural gas storage fell more than expected last week.</p>
<p />
<p>Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.</p>
|
Gold Prices Edge Higher In Asia As Easy Liquidity Views In Place
| false |
https://newsline.com/gold-prices-edge-higher-in-asia-as-easy-liquidity-views-in-place/
|
2017-12-14
| 1right-center
|
Gold Prices Edge Higher In Asia As Easy Liquidity Views In Place
<p>Investing.com – Gold price rose slightly in Asia on Friday as investors digested a triple load of central bank view from the Fed, ECB and Bank of England that pointed to continued easy liquidity.</p>
<p>for February delivery on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange edged up 0.02% to $1,257.40 a troy ounce.</p>
<p>Overnight, gold prices traded close to session highs on Thursday, shrugging off a rebound in the dollar as the European Central Bank said it would continue its ultra-accommodative monetary policy measures.</p>
<p>The European Central Bank left its benchmark rate unchanged on Thursday, reiterating its commitment to running an asset-purchase stimulus programme until at least next September.</p>
<p>“Domestic price pressures remain muted overall and have yet to show convincing signs of a sustained upward trend,” European Central bank president Mario Draghi said in a press conference on Thursday, adding that an “ample degree” of stimulus is still needed.</p>
<p>Gold prices reversed a two-day slide on Wednesday against the backdrop of a widely expected Federal Reserve rate hike, and an unchanged outlook on the path of monetary policy tightening with three rate hikes expected in 2018.</p>
<p>In a sign of confidence, the Federal Reserve revised upward its projection for economic growth in 2017 to 2.5%, while forecasting growth for 2018 at 2.5%.</p>
<p>Also supporting sentiment on gold prices were reports of renewed brexit uncertainty after UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s government was defeated on Wednesday, when lawmakers forced through changes to its Brexit plan that ministers said could threaten Britain’s departure from the European Union.</p>
<p>In other precious metal trade, rose 0.45% to $15.94 a troy ounce, while gained 0.80% to $882.40.</p>
<p>traded at $3.07, up 0.67%, while fell by 1.22% to $2.68 despite data showing natural gas storage fell more than expected last week.</p>
<p />
<p>Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.</p>
| 7,881 |
<p />
<p />
<p>From the looks of <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/01/60minutes/main3440577.shtml" type="external">this press release</a> not much. Here’s the news they’re claiming to break:</p>
<p>Curve Ball is an Iraqi defector named Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who arrived at a German refugee center in 1999. To bolster his asylum case and increase his importance, he told officials he was a star chemical engineer who had been in charge of a facility at Djerf al Nadaf that was making mobile biological weapons. 60 Minutes has learned that Alwan’s university records indicate he did study chemical engineering but earned nearly all low marks, mostly 50s. Simon’s investigation also uncovered an arrest warrant for theft from the Babel television production company in Baghdad where he once worked.</p>
<p>Ok, his name is new. And that’s big. But him being a liar, and a thief (and also, a sex offender) and a whole bunch of other things 60 Minutes is claiming to have uncovered have in actuality been known for years. You can read all about the Curve Ball saga in our <a href="/bush_war_timeline/" type="external">Iraq War Timeline</a>. And much of the original reporting on Curve Ball was done by the LA Times. And former CIA official Tyler Drumheller, the apparent big source for 60 Minutes, has been speaking out for years.</p>
<p>Which is not to say that Bob Simon’s two year investigation won’t yield some great new stuff. I’m sure it will. But I just wish they’d give credit to the LAT and others who broke or championed the Curve Ball story back before it was fashionable to call out the Bush administration.</p>
<p />
<p />
|
What Does 60 Minutes Tell Us About “Curve Ball” We Didn’t Already Know?
| true |
https://motherjones.com/politics/2007/11/what-does-60-minutes-tell-us-about-curve-ball-we-didnt-already-know/
|
2007-11-02
| 4left
|
What Does 60 Minutes Tell Us About “Curve Ball” We Didn’t Already Know?
<p />
<p />
<p>From the looks of <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/01/60minutes/main3440577.shtml" type="external">this press release</a> not much. Here’s the news they’re claiming to break:</p>
<p>Curve Ball is an Iraqi defector named Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who arrived at a German refugee center in 1999. To bolster his asylum case and increase his importance, he told officials he was a star chemical engineer who had been in charge of a facility at Djerf al Nadaf that was making mobile biological weapons. 60 Minutes has learned that Alwan’s university records indicate he did study chemical engineering but earned nearly all low marks, mostly 50s. Simon’s investigation also uncovered an arrest warrant for theft from the Babel television production company in Baghdad where he once worked.</p>
<p>Ok, his name is new. And that’s big. But him being a liar, and a thief (and also, a sex offender) and a whole bunch of other things 60 Minutes is claiming to have uncovered have in actuality been known for years. You can read all about the Curve Ball saga in our <a href="/bush_war_timeline/" type="external">Iraq War Timeline</a>. And much of the original reporting on Curve Ball was done by the LA Times. And former CIA official Tyler Drumheller, the apparent big source for 60 Minutes, has been speaking out for years.</p>
<p>Which is not to say that Bob Simon’s two year investigation won’t yield some great new stuff. I’m sure it will. But I just wish they’d give credit to the LAT and others who broke or championed the Curve Ball story back before it was fashionable to call out the Bush administration.</p>
<p />
<p />
| 7,882 |
<p>More tests are needed to ensure that toxins are out of Toledo's water supply, the mayor said Sunday, instructing the 400,000 people in the region to avoid drinking tap water for a second day.</p>
<p>Mayor D. Michael Collins said Sunday that although new samples have shown the level of toxins in the water appears to have decreased, "this is not over yet."</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Toledo officials issued the warning early Saturday after tests at one treatment plant showed two sample readings for microsystin above the standard for consumption, possibly because of algae on lake Erie. The city also said not to boil the water because that would only increase the toxin's concentration. The mayor also warned that children should not shower or bathe in the water and that it shouldn't be given to pets.</p>
<p>As a result, long lines formed at water distribution centers and store shelves were quickly emptied of bottled water. The warning effectively cut off the water supply to Toledo, most of its suburbs and a few areas in southeastern Michigan.</p>
<p>Worried residents told not to drink, brush their teeth or wash dishes with the water emptied store shelves and waited hours for deliveries of bottled water from across Ohio as the governor declared a state of emergency.</p>
<p>Gov. John Kasich pledged that state agencies were working to bring water and other supplies to areas around Toledo while also assisting hospitals and other businesses impacted. The state also was making plans to make more deliveries if the water problem lingered, he said.</p>
<p>"What's more important than water? Water's about life," Kasich said. "We know it's difficult. We know it's frustrating."</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>The governor said it was too early to say how long the water advisory will last or what caused toxins to spike suddenly in the drinking water.</p>
<p>"We don't really want to speculate on this," Kasich said. "When it comes to this water, we've got be very careful."</p>
<p>Families toting empty coolers, milk jugs and even cookie jars topped them off with well water funneled out of the back of a pickup truck.</p>
<p>John Myers, a farmer from nearby Swanton, loaded 450 gallons of well water into a container in the back of his pickup truck Saturday and gave it out for free in a high school parking lot.</p>
<p>"The more you got, the more we'll fill," he told residents carrying empty containers. "I never thought I'd see the day that I'd be giving water away."</p>
<p>Myers said his concern was that the advisory could go on for days. "This is a lot more serious than anybody's thinking about," he said.</p>
<p>Tyshanta DeLoney, of Toledo, filled up a big plastic container after spending much of the day searching for water. "That was a blessing," she said.</p>
<p>Late Saturday, Kasich ordered the state's National Guard to deliver water purification systems, pallets of bottled water and meals ready to eat, or MREs, to residents in Lucas, Wood and Fulton counties.</p>
<p>The first tests indicating trouble came Friday night and additional testing confirmed the elevated readings, said Craig Butler, director of the state's Environmental Protection Agency.</p>
<p>Water coming from the lake into Toledo's water plant had relatively low toxicity levels this summer compared with a year ago until this sudden spike.</p>
<p>Algae blooms during the summer have become more frequent and troublesome around the western end of Lake Erie, the shallowest of the five Great Lakes.</p>
<p>The algae growth is fed by phosphorus mainly from farm fertilizer runoff and sewage treatment plants, leaving behind toxins that have contributed to oxygen-deprived dead zones where fish can't survive. The toxins can kill animals and sicken humans.</p>
<p>Scientists had predicted a significant bloom of the blue-green algae this year, but they didn't expect it to peak until early September.</p>
<p>There were no reports yet of people becoming sick from drinking the water, Collins said.</p>
<p>Stores in cities up to 50 miles away were reporting shortages of bottled water. Some neighboring communities that aren't connected to Toledo's water system were offering their water to people who brought their own bottles and containers.</p>
<p>Operators of water plants all along Lake Erie, which supplies drinking water for 11 million people, have been concerned over the last few years about toxins fouling their supplies.</p>
<p>Almost a year ago, one township just east of Toledo told its 2,000 residents not to drink or use the water coming from their taps. That was believed to be the first time a city has banned residents from using the water because of toxins from algae in the lake.</p>
<p>Most water treatment plants along the western Lake Erie shoreline treat their water to combat the algae. Toledo spent about $4 million last year on chemicals to treat its water and combat the toxins.</p>
|
On 2nd day without water, Toledo mayor says more tests are needed to ensure toxins are gone
| true |
http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2014/08/03/on-2nd-day-without-water-toledo-mayor-says-more-tests-are-needed-to-ensure.html
|
2016-03-09
| 0right
|
On 2nd day without water, Toledo mayor says more tests are needed to ensure toxins are gone
<p>More tests are needed to ensure that toxins are out of Toledo's water supply, the mayor said Sunday, instructing the 400,000 people in the region to avoid drinking tap water for a second day.</p>
<p>Mayor D. Michael Collins said Sunday that although new samples have shown the level of toxins in the water appears to have decreased, "this is not over yet."</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Toledo officials issued the warning early Saturday after tests at one treatment plant showed two sample readings for microsystin above the standard for consumption, possibly because of algae on lake Erie. The city also said not to boil the water because that would only increase the toxin's concentration. The mayor also warned that children should not shower or bathe in the water and that it shouldn't be given to pets.</p>
<p>As a result, long lines formed at water distribution centers and store shelves were quickly emptied of bottled water. The warning effectively cut off the water supply to Toledo, most of its suburbs and a few areas in southeastern Michigan.</p>
<p>Worried residents told not to drink, brush their teeth or wash dishes with the water emptied store shelves and waited hours for deliveries of bottled water from across Ohio as the governor declared a state of emergency.</p>
<p>Gov. John Kasich pledged that state agencies were working to bring water and other supplies to areas around Toledo while also assisting hospitals and other businesses impacted. The state also was making plans to make more deliveries if the water problem lingered, he said.</p>
<p>"What's more important than water? Water's about life," Kasich said. "We know it's difficult. We know it's frustrating."</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>The governor said it was too early to say how long the water advisory will last or what caused toxins to spike suddenly in the drinking water.</p>
<p>"We don't really want to speculate on this," Kasich said. "When it comes to this water, we've got be very careful."</p>
<p>Families toting empty coolers, milk jugs and even cookie jars topped them off with well water funneled out of the back of a pickup truck.</p>
<p>John Myers, a farmer from nearby Swanton, loaded 450 gallons of well water into a container in the back of his pickup truck Saturday and gave it out for free in a high school parking lot.</p>
<p>"The more you got, the more we'll fill," he told residents carrying empty containers. "I never thought I'd see the day that I'd be giving water away."</p>
<p>Myers said his concern was that the advisory could go on for days. "This is a lot more serious than anybody's thinking about," he said.</p>
<p>Tyshanta DeLoney, of Toledo, filled up a big plastic container after spending much of the day searching for water. "That was a blessing," she said.</p>
<p>Late Saturday, Kasich ordered the state's National Guard to deliver water purification systems, pallets of bottled water and meals ready to eat, or MREs, to residents in Lucas, Wood and Fulton counties.</p>
<p>The first tests indicating trouble came Friday night and additional testing confirmed the elevated readings, said Craig Butler, director of the state's Environmental Protection Agency.</p>
<p>Water coming from the lake into Toledo's water plant had relatively low toxicity levels this summer compared with a year ago until this sudden spike.</p>
<p>Algae blooms during the summer have become more frequent and troublesome around the western end of Lake Erie, the shallowest of the five Great Lakes.</p>
<p>The algae growth is fed by phosphorus mainly from farm fertilizer runoff and sewage treatment plants, leaving behind toxins that have contributed to oxygen-deprived dead zones where fish can't survive. The toxins can kill animals and sicken humans.</p>
<p>Scientists had predicted a significant bloom of the blue-green algae this year, but they didn't expect it to peak until early September.</p>
<p>There were no reports yet of people becoming sick from drinking the water, Collins said.</p>
<p>Stores in cities up to 50 miles away were reporting shortages of bottled water. Some neighboring communities that aren't connected to Toledo's water system were offering their water to people who brought their own bottles and containers.</p>
<p>Operators of water plants all along Lake Erie, which supplies drinking water for 11 million people, have been concerned over the last few years about toxins fouling their supplies.</p>
<p>Almost a year ago, one township just east of Toledo told its 2,000 residents not to drink or use the water coming from their taps. That was believed to be the first time a city has banned residents from using the water because of toxins from algae in the lake.</p>
<p>Most water treatment plants along the western Lake Erie shoreline treat their water to combat the algae. Toledo spent about $4 million last year on chemicals to treat its water and combat the toxins.</p>
| 7,883 |
<p>The New York TimesMarch 23, 2003</p>
<p>By Warren St. John</p>
<p>For a few days after the Dixie Chicks' lead singer, Natalie Maines, told a London audience, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas," there was not a ripple about the remark. The American ambassador to Britain, William S. Farish, was at the show on March 10, and made it a point to greet the Texas trio at a reception afterward. Though six critics reviewed the concert, only one mentioned the comment in print.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Four days later, all that had changed. Reports of the remark spread to the United States through Web sites — notably the Drudge Report and a conservative site called <a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/" type="external">Freerepublic.com</a> — and in no time, the Dixie Chicks, who had been riding the top of the charts with their album "Home" after winning Grammy Awards in February, found themselves the subject of radio boycotts and public CD burnings. Ms. Maines apologized for the remark, but by week's end, the boycotts had contributed to a 20 percent drop in airplay of the band's music.</p>
<p>For celebrities considering taking a public stance on the Iraq war these days, and in particular using the platform that the Academy Awards presents to address an audience of millions, the Dixie Chicks episode has become a cautionary tale.</p>
|
The Backlash Grows Against Celebrity Activists
| false |
https://poynter.org/news/backlash-grows-against-celebrity-activists
|
2003-03-24
| 2least
|
The Backlash Grows Against Celebrity Activists
<p>The New York TimesMarch 23, 2003</p>
<p>By Warren St. John</p>
<p>For a few days after the Dixie Chicks' lead singer, Natalie Maines, told a London audience, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas," there was not a ripple about the remark. The American ambassador to Britain, William S. Farish, was at the show on March 10, and made it a point to greet the Texas trio at a reception afterward. Though six critics reviewed the concert, only one mentioned the comment in print.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Four days later, all that had changed. Reports of the remark spread to the United States through Web sites — notably the Drudge Report and a conservative site called <a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/" type="external">Freerepublic.com</a> — and in no time, the Dixie Chicks, who had been riding the top of the charts with their album "Home" after winning Grammy Awards in February, found themselves the subject of radio boycotts and public CD burnings. Ms. Maines apologized for the remark, but by week's end, the boycotts had contributed to a 20 percent drop in airplay of the band's music.</p>
<p>For celebrities considering taking a public stance on the Iraq war these days, and in particular using the platform that the Academy Awards presents to address an audience of millions, the Dixie Chicks episode has become a cautionary tale.</p>
| 7,884 |
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>Unfortunately, this “scholar” didn’t do the slightest bit of research, and not one of his points holds water.</p>
<p>Molitor’s accusation that my union and I are making financially ruinous and destructive pension “demands” couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, it’s arguable that no union in the country has done more to fix pension plans than AFSCME has in New Mexico.</p>
<p>These plans have many moving parts, and a lot can be done without adversely impacting taxpayers and while still treating retirees and workers fairly.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>The Journal’s editorial page, not exactly predisposed to supporting unions, has praised AFSCME’s pension reform proposals. With AFSCME’s significant input over the last three years, the PERA Board has just finalized a proposal to attain 100 percent funding in 16 years.</p>
<p>We even were the main supporters of Republican Majority Leader Sen. Stuart Ingle’s 2012 bill to reform the education pension plan. Had Molitor followed the Legislature over the last few years, he’d know that AFSCME is in the trenches working with members of both parties to ensure the long-term solvency of the pension funds.</p>
<p>Rather than making “demands,” AFSCME is finding solutions.</p>
<p>Molitor and the Rio Grande Foundation then claim that unions force the government to grow and grow. The facts? Since the advent of public employee unions in New Mexico state government in 2003, employment in state government has actually declined by about 10 percent per capita – even before the Martinez administration.</p>
<p>Molitor is similarly ill-informed on basic budget issues, saying, “Government-employee unions have played a key role in causing bankruptcy in most American states.” First, not a single American state has declared bankruptcy. Whoops. Second, we didn’t have any budget problems until revenues plummeted in the great recession.</p>
<p>It shows a real lack of understanding of economics and a lot of temerity for the Rio Grande Foundation to blame our national housing bubble and Wall Street’s financial collapse on janitors, groundskeepers, nurses and correctional officers.</p>
<p>Third, those who have survived government downsizing have been asked to bear a huge part of our budget fixes. In fact, for fiscal 2009 through 2013, our state members took pay cuts and furlough that for a typical AFSCME member making about $35,000 a year, means a pay cut of over $4,500 over those years to balance the budget.</p>
<p>Union workers played a major role in saving New Mexico’s state budget. What did the Rio Grande Foundation do to help?</p>
<p>In his zest to blame unions for everything, Molitor even makes the unsubstantiated statement that the “enormous power” of public labor unions “effectively transfers the power to tax from voters to the unions.” The reality? Since unions came back, a Democratic State Legislature coupled with Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson – most of whom were supported by AFSCME – cut top tax rates by over 40 percent.</p>
<p>In another bogus claim of too much public employee power in our state, Molitor notes that “when a city goes on strike, there is no school and no garbage collection.” But if he’d bothered to read our state’s labor law, he’d know it’s illegal for public employee unions to strike (and cities don’t run schools in New Mexico).</p>
<p>Oddly, when Molitor ran for state representative in 2010, he sought AFSCME’s endorsement. Asked whether he supported public employee collective bargaining, he wrote “Yes,” with no equivocation. He didn’t get our endorsement, and now he’s making one sloppy false statement after another, trashing hardworking nurses, correctional officers, janitors and librarians, all at the bidding of the ideologically charged, research-deficient, billionaire-backed Rio Grande Foundation.</p>
|
The Truth on Unions in N.M.
| false |
https://abqjournal.com/118958/the-truth-on-unions-in-nm.html
|
2012-07-18
| 2least
|
The Truth on Unions in N.M.
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>Unfortunately, this “scholar” didn’t do the slightest bit of research, and not one of his points holds water.</p>
<p>Molitor’s accusation that my union and I are making financially ruinous and destructive pension “demands” couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, it’s arguable that no union in the country has done more to fix pension plans than AFSCME has in New Mexico.</p>
<p>These plans have many moving parts, and a lot can be done without adversely impacting taxpayers and while still treating retirees and workers fairly.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>The Journal’s editorial page, not exactly predisposed to supporting unions, has praised AFSCME’s pension reform proposals. With AFSCME’s significant input over the last three years, the PERA Board has just finalized a proposal to attain 100 percent funding in 16 years.</p>
<p>We even were the main supporters of Republican Majority Leader Sen. Stuart Ingle’s 2012 bill to reform the education pension plan. Had Molitor followed the Legislature over the last few years, he’d know that AFSCME is in the trenches working with members of both parties to ensure the long-term solvency of the pension funds.</p>
<p>Rather than making “demands,” AFSCME is finding solutions.</p>
<p>Molitor and the Rio Grande Foundation then claim that unions force the government to grow and grow. The facts? Since the advent of public employee unions in New Mexico state government in 2003, employment in state government has actually declined by about 10 percent per capita – even before the Martinez administration.</p>
<p>Molitor is similarly ill-informed on basic budget issues, saying, “Government-employee unions have played a key role in causing bankruptcy in most American states.” First, not a single American state has declared bankruptcy. Whoops. Second, we didn’t have any budget problems until revenues plummeted in the great recession.</p>
<p>It shows a real lack of understanding of economics and a lot of temerity for the Rio Grande Foundation to blame our national housing bubble and Wall Street’s financial collapse on janitors, groundskeepers, nurses and correctional officers.</p>
<p>Third, those who have survived government downsizing have been asked to bear a huge part of our budget fixes. In fact, for fiscal 2009 through 2013, our state members took pay cuts and furlough that for a typical AFSCME member making about $35,000 a year, means a pay cut of over $4,500 over those years to balance the budget.</p>
<p>Union workers played a major role in saving New Mexico’s state budget. What did the Rio Grande Foundation do to help?</p>
<p>In his zest to blame unions for everything, Molitor even makes the unsubstantiated statement that the “enormous power” of public labor unions “effectively transfers the power to tax from voters to the unions.” The reality? Since unions came back, a Democratic State Legislature coupled with Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson – most of whom were supported by AFSCME – cut top tax rates by over 40 percent.</p>
<p>In another bogus claim of too much public employee power in our state, Molitor notes that “when a city goes on strike, there is no school and no garbage collection.” But if he’d bothered to read our state’s labor law, he’d know it’s illegal for public employee unions to strike (and cities don’t run schools in New Mexico).</p>
<p>Oddly, when Molitor ran for state representative in 2010, he sought AFSCME’s endorsement. Asked whether he supported public employee collective bargaining, he wrote “Yes,” with no equivocation. He didn’t get our endorsement, and now he’s making one sloppy false statement after another, trashing hardworking nurses, correctional officers, janitors and librarians, all at the bidding of the ideologically charged, research-deficient, billionaire-backed Rio Grande Foundation.</p>
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<p>(Screenshot via YouTube.)</p>
<p>Morrissey defends Kevin Spacey and questions Anthony Rapp’s sexual misconduct allegation in a recent interview with German publication&#160; <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/morrissey-ueber-brexit-kevin-spacey-und-merkels-fluechtlingspolitik-a-1178545.html" type="external">Der Spiegel.</a></p>
<p>The 58-year-old former frontman of the Smiths explained that he is against sexual assault but thinks many victims only tell their stories because they are “disappointed” with the encounter.</p>
<p>“I hate rape, I hate assault, I hate people being forced into a sexual situation,” Morrissey says. “But in quite a few cases, you look at the situation and think that the people being described as victims are simply disappointed. In the whole history of Rock ‘n’ Roll there’ve been musicians who’ve slept with groupies. If you go through the history, almost everyone is guilty of sleeping with minors. Why don’t we throw everyone in jail?”</p>
<p>He went on to say that Spacey has been “unnecessarily attacked” and questioned Rapp’s allegation by saying the actor, who was 14 at the time, knew what would happen.</p>
<p>“You have to ask, where were the boy’s parents. You ask yourself, if the boy didn’t know what could happen. I don’t know what it was like for him but in my youth, I was never in a situation like that. Never. It was always clear to me what could happen. If you’re in someone’s bedroom, you have to know where it could lead. That’s why I don’t find the whole thing very believable. It seems to me Spacey has been unnecessarily attacked,” Morrissey continues.</p>
<p>Since Rapp released his account with Spacey numerous other victims have come forward with their own allegations. The Old Vic theater in London has now received 20 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/theater/old-vic-kevin-spacey-misconduct-report.html" type="external">reports</a> of misconduct involving Spacey, who was the theater’s former&#160;Artistic Director.</p>
<p>Morrissey also gave his input on Harvey Weinstein’s numerous sexual misconduct allegations saying that the victims wouldn’t have come forward if their encounters had helped them with their career.</p>
<p>“Those people knew exactly what would happen [when they went up to Weinstein’s hotel room], and they played along. Afterwards, they were embarrassed or they didn’t enjoy it,” Morrissey says. “And then they turn it around and say: ‘I was attacked, I was surprised, I was pulled into the room.’ But if everything went well, and it helped them to a big career, they wouldn’t be talking about it.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Anthony Rapp</a> <a href="" type="internal">Der Spiegel</a> <a href="" type="internal">Harvey Weinstein</a> <a href="" type="internal">Kevin Spacey</a> <a href="" type="internal">Morrissey</a></p>
|
Morrissey defends Kevin Spacey, questions Anthony Rapp’s account
| false |
http://washingtonblade.com/2017/11/20/morrissey-defends-kevin-spacey-questions-anthony-rapps-account/
| 3left-center
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Morrissey defends Kevin Spacey, questions Anthony Rapp’s account
<p>(Screenshot via YouTube.)</p>
<p>Morrissey defends Kevin Spacey and questions Anthony Rapp’s sexual misconduct allegation in a recent interview with German publication&#160; <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/morrissey-ueber-brexit-kevin-spacey-und-merkels-fluechtlingspolitik-a-1178545.html" type="external">Der Spiegel.</a></p>
<p>The 58-year-old former frontman of the Smiths explained that he is against sexual assault but thinks many victims only tell their stories because they are “disappointed” with the encounter.</p>
<p>“I hate rape, I hate assault, I hate people being forced into a sexual situation,” Morrissey says. “But in quite a few cases, you look at the situation and think that the people being described as victims are simply disappointed. In the whole history of Rock ‘n’ Roll there’ve been musicians who’ve slept with groupies. If you go through the history, almost everyone is guilty of sleeping with minors. Why don’t we throw everyone in jail?”</p>
<p>He went on to say that Spacey has been “unnecessarily attacked” and questioned Rapp’s allegation by saying the actor, who was 14 at the time, knew what would happen.</p>
<p>“You have to ask, where were the boy’s parents. You ask yourself, if the boy didn’t know what could happen. I don’t know what it was like for him but in my youth, I was never in a situation like that. Never. It was always clear to me what could happen. If you’re in someone’s bedroom, you have to know where it could lead. That’s why I don’t find the whole thing very believable. It seems to me Spacey has been unnecessarily attacked,” Morrissey continues.</p>
<p>Since Rapp released his account with Spacey numerous other victims have come forward with their own allegations. The Old Vic theater in London has now received 20 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/theater/old-vic-kevin-spacey-misconduct-report.html" type="external">reports</a> of misconduct involving Spacey, who was the theater’s former&#160;Artistic Director.</p>
<p>Morrissey also gave his input on Harvey Weinstein’s numerous sexual misconduct allegations saying that the victims wouldn’t have come forward if their encounters had helped them with their career.</p>
<p>“Those people knew exactly what would happen [when they went up to Weinstein’s hotel room], and they played along. Afterwards, they were embarrassed or they didn’t enjoy it,” Morrissey says. “And then they turn it around and say: ‘I was attacked, I was surprised, I was pulled into the room.’ But if everything went well, and it helped them to a big career, they wouldn’t be talking about it.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Anthony Rapp</a> <a href="" type="internal">Der Spiegel</a> <a href="" type="internal">Harvey Weinstein</a> <a href="" type="internal">Kevin Spacey</a> <a href="" type="internal">Morrissey</a></p>
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<p>“There is a religious war going on in this country,” former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan told the 1992 Republican convention in a primetime address. Mitt Romney has declared that President Obama is waging a war on religion. Whether one actually thinks there’s an ongoing war on religion, it’s time to raise the white flag on warring rhetoric.</p>
<p>In an advertisement released on August 9th, the Romney campaign said, “President Obama used his health care plan to declare war on religion, forcing religious institutions to go against their faith.” Not only does this skew many facts, it belittles the power of the word. “War” stands a synonymous word for “disagreement,” when in actuality it’s nowhere near a real war.</p>
<p>Using “war on religion” only belittles the actual wars men and women currently fight in the Middle East. Soldiers are still dying, and many of those soldiers fight a battle within themselves once they return home. I wonder how those, soldiers and civilians, that died in an actual war might feel about the “war on religion.”</p>
<p>Not only does the word “war” miserably fail metaphorically, it also belittles the incredible impact of violence within the world. Whether Aurora, Colorado, New York City, or Washington D.C., within the past month our country has experienced unparalleled violence. While they are tragedies and have shaken our society, we continue to use the rhetoric of war as though actual violence didn’t already exist.</p>
<p>Whether we want a new Oval Office tenant or not, perhaps we could agree that using “war” in reference to political debates oversteps reality. Though we are free to utilize that those that have been injured or died in actual wars have secured language free exercise.</p>
<p>For people of faith, specifically Christians, to use “war on religion” does not frighten me so much as cause great concern. We have ignored passages concerned with love and neighbor in favor of political fright. Instead of calling for mindfulness in political debate, many have done nothing more than exacerbate the rousing rhetoric.</p>
<p>There is no more a “war on religion” now than there was in 1992. The one constant, both then and now, is that no justifiable use of “war” can ever be used when soldiers are living and dying carrying out a war that is at best, unjust. With violence palpable in every city to continue to both profit from and utilize “war on religion” we find an eerie comfort with violence, even in our language.</p>
<p>Language creates our world. How many debates have we heard about using gendered language for God? If it’s not really that big of a deal, then why don’t more Christian churches use “Allah” for God? Language matters, and to ignore the violence at work within the word “war” reflects an ignorance of the violence within our society.</p>
<p>I’ve never served in the military, but I can imagine if I did that war would seem very different than the one Mitt Romney &amp; Company currently engage. Before candidates, on either side, attempt to scare up votes they must be cognizant of the world they seek to create.</p>
|
Romney and ‘war’ on religion
| false |
https://baptistnews.com/article/romney-and-war-on-religion/
| 3left-center
|
Romney and ‘war’ on religion
<p>“There is a religious war going on in this country,” former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan told the 1992 Republican convention in a primetime address. Mitt Romney has declared that President Obama is waging a war on religion. Whether one actually thinks there’s an ongoing war on religion, it’s time to raise the white flag on warring rhetoric.</p>
<p>In an advertisement released on August 9th, the Romney campaign said, “President Obama used his health care plan to declare war on religion, forcing religious institutions to go against their faith.” Not only does this skew many facts, it belittles the power of the word. “War” stands a synonymous word for “disagreement,” when in actuality it’s nowhere near a real war.</p>
<p>Using “war on religion” only belittles the actual wars men and women currently fight in the Middle East. Soldiers are still dying, and many of those soldiers fight a battle within themselves once they return home. I wonder how those, soldiers and civilians, that died in an actual war might feel about the “war on religion.”</p>
<p>Not only does the word “war” miserably fail metaphorically, it also belittles the incredible impact of violence within the world. Whether Aurora, Colorado, New York City, or Washington D.C., within the past month our country has experienced unparalleled violence. While they are tragedies and have shaken our society, we continue to use the rhetoric of war as though actual violence didn’t already exist.</p>
<p>Whether we want a new Oval Office tenant or not, perhaps we could agree that using “war” in reference to political debates oversteps reality. Though we are free to utilize that those that have been injured or died in actual wars have secured language free exercise.</p>
<p>For people of faith, specifically Christians, to use “war on religion” does not frighten me so much as cause great concern. We have ignored passages concerned with love and neighbor in favor of political fright. Instead of calling for mindfulness in political debate, many have done nothing more than exacerbate the rousing rhetoric.</p>
<p>There is no more a “war on religion” now than there was in 1992. The one constant, both then and now, is that no justifiable use of “war” can ever be used when soldiers are living and dying carrying out a war that is at best, unjust. With violence palpable in every city to continue to both profit from and utilize “war on religion” we find an eerie comfort with violence, even in our language.</p>
<p>Language creates our world. How many debates have we heard about using gendered language for God? If it’s not really that big of a deal, then why don’t more Christian churches use “Allah” for God? Language matters, and to ignore the violence at work within the word “war” reflects an ignorance of the violence within our society.</p>
<p>I’ve never served in the military, but I can imagine if I did that war would seem very different than the one Mitt Romney &amp; Company currently engage. Before candidates, on either side, attempt to scare up votes they must be cognizant of the world they seek to create.</p>
| 7,887 |
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<p>Cyndi Lauper, Sara Ramirez, and Justin Baldoni are among those who joined the Biden Foundation’s two newly created advisory councils dedicated to helping&#160;end violence against women and advancing LGBTQ equality. Those selected to join the&#160;LGBTQ Equality Advisory Council and the&#160;Ending Violence Against Women Advisory Council are considered&#160;leaders, experts and advocates at the forefront of their […]</p>
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Cyndi Lauper, Sara Ramirez Among Ambassadors to Biden Foundation’s LGBTQ, Women’s Violence Advisory Councils
| false |
https://newsline.com/cyndi-lauper-sara-ramirez-among-ambassadors-to-biden-foundations-lgbtq-womens-violence-advisory-councils/
|
2018-01-26
| 1right-center
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Cyndi Lauper, Sara Ramirez Among Ambassadors to Biden Foundation’s LGBTQ, Women’s Violence Advisory Councils
<p>Cyndi Lauper, Sara Ramirez, and Justin Baldoni are among those who joined the Biden Foundation’s two newly created advisory councils dedicated to helping&#160;end violence against women and advancing LGBTQ equality. Those selected to join the&#160;LGBTQ Equality Advisory Council and the&#160;Ending Violence Against Women Advisory Council are considered&#160;leaders, experts and advocates at the forefront of their […]</p>
| 7,888 |
<p>I first met Denmark’s last truly Social Democratic Prime Minister, Anker Joergensen in his state office, unannounced, in late 1980.</p>
<p>Grethe and I had just been married. We had met the year before in Los Angeles where I had been a “participatory journalist”, and activist for social/racial/gender equality and against the Vietnam War. I wanted to start a new life with Grethe in her peaceful, social democratic land.</p>
<p>I took odd jobs and did freelance writing for some Danish media, and for progressive media in the US and England. As such, I often walked from Grethe’s centrally located Copenhagen apartment to Christiansborg. The palace is the only building in the world that houses all government branches. The royal palace stood beside the seat of economic power, Denmark’s Stock Exchange (Boersen).</p>
<p>Sometimes I covered official politics from my “palace playground”, as my new wife quipped. The six-story building is a labyrinth of hard wooden stairs, long hallways and hundreds of offices. On my second trip inside, I ambled about unable to find the stairs that led directly to the balcony reserved for journalists covering the parliament. There were no guards and no signs on most doors. I stopped before a high door and turned the bronze polished handle. A small man sat behind a large desk. He turned about to look at me, a smile on his face. I flushed and spurted an apology for disturbing what I realized was the nation’s political leader.</p>
<p>“That’s quite alright. No problem,” replied the prime minister unperturbed. His face wrinkled cozily through a black-white mustache and goatee. Thinning black hair was brushed back revealing a partially bald scalp. No guards or assistants appeared as I quietly closed the big door.</p>
<p>Later in the 1980s, I spoke a few times with the unassuming man when he was no longer prime minister yet still the Social Democratic (SD) party leader. We attended Danish union meetings with delegates from unions in Central America, men and women under threat by death squads working with the CIA and US military “advisors” backing murderous dictatorial regimes. In 1985, I again met Anker, as he was known by all, standing beside his old-fashioned, gearless bicycle in the dead of winter. I asked him, as I had Palme, if he would be on standby if we had use for his political influence during the Central American peace-solidarity march. Anker readily agreed, and he did act when our marcher in El Salvador got arrested.</p>
<p>Anker started his working life as a bicycle messenger, then as an unskilled warehouse worker. He quickly was made a shop steward and worked his way up the union ladder. In the 1960s, he actively opposed the US war against Vietnam. Anker participated in Danish sessions of the Russell-Sartre Tribunal, in 1968. He was a supporter of the oppressed in many parts of the world, and of the 1968 Danish student uproar. It was therefore with sadness for many on the left and the more militant class-conscious workers that he decided to support Denmark’s admission to the EU, then called the EF, in 1972. Anker often found himself in the middle of political controversies.</p>
<p>During his two terms as Prime Minister, 1972-82 (minus 1973-5), he extended the social welfare system, the last state leader to do so. He got the pre-retirement benefits law passed, (at 62 years instead of waiting for old age pension at 67); increased paid vacations to five weeks for everyone; guaranteed pay raises for public employees; guaranteed social assistance, and more.</p>
<p>In Anker’s time, Denmark was known abroad as a tolerant, peaceful, civil liberties/freedom-loving land. Its foreign policy was based on peace. Anker supported the so-called “footnote” foreign policy (1982-8) when Denmark opposed placing NATO nuclear missiles in Europe. The anti-war movement had already convinced the Establishment not to allow NATO military exercises and atomic weapons on its territory. There were several serious confrontations between the US and Denmark because of this.</p>
<p>Anker died peacefully, March 20, 2016, at 93. A people’s man, he lived all his adult life, until he entered a senior’s home, in a modest apartment in a working-class district of the capital city.</p>
<p>Denmark was a vanguard country in sexual freedom and gender equality. Brothels were legal as far back as in the 1870s. For some of 1900s sex for sale was illegal but allowed. Denmark was the first country in the world to legalize pornography, July 1969. Freetown Christiania is a major tourist attraction. It belonged to the military when, on September 4, 1971, the abandoned military area of 34 hectares was occupied by neighbors who broke down the fence. They set up living quarters in abandoned barracks and some built their own housing. Youth House was a legal underground Copenhagen center for music and free lifestyle, mainly used by autonomists and leftists for two decades until 2007. Denmark was also the first country to legalize same-sex sexual activity, in 1933; and legalize homosexual/lesbian/transvestite marriage, on June 15, 2012. Since 1977, the consent age for sex of any kind by any gender is 15. Nevertheless, as a member of NATO and EU, Denmark cooperates with both pro-US institutions, including in war games. Ironically, it was after the fall of “communism” and the end of the cold war that Denmark decided to begin its “activist foreign policy,” based upon following the US into its wars, including breaking up Yugoslavia, the last European socialist state, and warring in the Middle East and Africa.</p>
<p>Denmark losing its peace and social democracy</p>
<p>Denmark’s 5.5 million residents support a permanent military force of about 20,000. Although there is a draft, one can choose to perform civil service instead. No one is forced to go to war unless Denmark is attacked, so those who war are volunteer mercenaries and earn more money.</p>
<p>The last Social Democratic Prime Minister, Helle Thorning Schmidt, was the first woman in the post. During her term, October 2011-June 2015, her enthusiasm for war included offering Barak Obama her military for “regime change” in Syria. She seemed disappointed that a war to remove Bashar al-Assad had been averted when Syria turned over all its chemical weapons for destruction, “no thanks” to Vladimir Putin’s input. She declared (September 2, 2014): “Denmark is one of those countries that deliver most. We are at the level with Americans, and in that way we also consider Denmark a strong, active and very solidarity NATO land.” Obama seemed to echo Schmidt when he welcomed Denmark’s current liberal Prime Minister (PM) Lars Loekke Rasmussen, and the other four Nordic land leaders, to a State Dinner on May 13, 2016.</p>
<p>“The world would be better if more countries were like the Nordic lands.” “We share common interest and values”. You “punch above [your] weight.” He underscored Denmark’s recent decision to increase its military and economic aid to Afghanistan, and expressed thanks for DONG’s wind energy projects in Massachusetts.</p>
<p>Denmark’s public television correspondent, Stephanie Surrugue, interpreted this praise as an American receipt for Denmark’s role in the “war on terror”. The most important matter discussed that day was US and Nordic governments’ response to “Russian aggression,” reminiscent of 2014 when Russia reclaimed Crimea after 97% of voters there so asked. Denmark had already temporarily sent 6 F-16s and rotating troops to the Baltic and Poland. When PM Rasmussen returned to Denmark after dinner, he sent another 150 troops. NATO will now have 6000 permanent troops in these four countries plus in Rumania and Bulgaria. In Obama’s dinner welcome, he extended another hand to Prime Minister Rasmussen, whose government and ally parties are known for being anti-immigrant. Obama referred to media critique against the new “Jewelry Law” as disproportional. The law cuts way back on immigration and asylum-seekers, even for those fleeing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where Denmark has long had hostile troops. The government even places ads around the continent warning refugees not to come.</p>
<p>The jewelry law allows police to seize personal belongings worth over $1,450 (jewelry and cash) from those who apply for asylum, reviving memories of how Jews were dispossessed of their belongings. One of the positive aspects Denmark is known for is its rescue of Jews when Hitler gave orders to eliminate them. Danes quickly took them to Sweden, which was neutral.</p>
<p>A few days after Obama justified Denmark’s grim treatment of refugees fleeing wars, Syrian families seeking exile started legal action against a new law that forbids the joining of family members for three years; it had been one year. Thousands of exiles are split from their closest ones due to civil conflicts where they come from. The refugees have a good chance of winning the court case especially as it was filed the day after the European Human Rights Court judged Denmark in violation of human rights regarding a law that discriminates against immigrants. An immigrant who marries someone living in another land cannot bring his/her partner to Denmark before they are 24 years old. This law is connected to another that only allows equality of natives and immigrants once the immigrant has been a citizen for 26 years. The main lawmaker considered these laws as making Denmark Europe’s “pioneer” in “hardening laws” against immigrants-refugees.</p>
<p>The current Foreign-Integration Minister, Inger Stoejberg, expressed disdain for the Court’s decision. She said that she would find a way to maintain and extend tightening immigration-refugee rules. “If we can’t do it one way, we’ll do it another.”</p>
<p>On the occasion of the White House State dinner, the five Nordic nations signed a “summit joint statement” with the US reaffirming “our deep partnership on shared fundamental values” that include strengthening NATO, backing the Baltic States and Poland with weaponry, aircraft and troops, pressing Russia on many fronts, “stabilizing” Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other areas.</p>
<p>Finland and Sweden also planned to end their neutrality and join NATO, where Denmark, Norway and Iceland already sit. Sweden signed a Host County Agreement with NATO after the dinner giving the war alliance rights to military troops and exercises on Swedish territory and even the right to war on Swedish territory “if a crisis” warrants it. Finland signed a similar agreement. Danish PM Loekke Rasmussen diligently prepared to please his host.</p>
<p>Since 9/11 all the Danish governments (so-called blue/conservative and red/liberal block coalitions) support the many regime shifts outlined by the first George Bush government, about which I will write in future pieces. During the April 2016 Danish parliament debate to invade Syria and extend Denmark’s military capacity in Iraq, the foreign minister, Kristian Jensen, made no bones about it: “Our goal is quite simple. In relationship to Syria our goal is to remove Assad, as one of the worst dictators in the world at this time.” He also stated that Denmark would fight the Islamic State.</p>
<p>According to United Nations law, as well as Denmark’s own constitution, war must not be waged if: there is no UN mandate, or the country in question is not attacking the nation. With Syria, no specific plans are stated about directly attacking government forces. However, the Syrian government has not asked Denmark or the “coalition of the willing” to aid it in its defense against IS, and thus the invasion is illegal.</p>
<p>Pleasing the United States before dinner</p>
<p>1. April 19, Denmark’s parliament voted 90 to 19 to send 460 military instructors and technicians, including 60 Special Forces soldiers, to Syria and Iraq, along with seven F-16s, and a C-130J transport aircraft. Why did 40% of the parliament (70 highly paid members) not vote on the most important question: whether to kill people and do so against international law?</p>
<p>2. May 10, parliament decided to send16 more soldiers to Afghanistan bringing their numbers to 100. This came after the US stated it will increase its troops there by 7-800. It now has about 10,000. The tiny country also did the US’s bidding against Libya in 2011 with 6 F-16s and 120 soldiers. As the US discusses the possibility of warring there once again, Denmark is ready.</p>
<p>3. May 12, the day before the Nordic state and foreign ministers were to eat at Obama’s table, Denmark’s government decided to buy 27 F-35 jet fighters before they were built by the world’s largest weapons company, Lockheed-Martin. The initial cost of 20 billion kroner ($3 billion) is the largest military expense in Danish history. Danish defense experts estimate that the real cost will run between three and four times that with upkeep and 30 years “normal” use. (Note: Canada’s new government just cancelled its order for F-35s, saying it wanted planes that were cheaper and that were known to actually work.) The government ignored 53.3% of Danes, who opposed buying more bomber jets, with only 30.8% favoring buying them. The poll was commissioned by Denmark’s most right-wing daily. Last year, <a href="" type="internal">a Gallup poll found</a>&#160;that the same percentage of Danes opposed the proposal.</p>
<p>4. On the same day, Denmark’s energy company DONG stated it plans an initial public offering (IPO) of at least 15 percent of its shares on the Nasdaq Copenhagen stock exchange this summer. The estimated value is around $11 billion. This will be the largest IPO in Danish history.</p>
<p>The state-controlled utility said the move would reduce the government’s stake in the company from 58.8 percent to 50.1 percent, and the government could sell more of its share in 2020 and lose control. It was originally all state-owned. In 2014, Goldman Sachs, the world’s most powerful and infamous investment firm, bought 18 percent of DONG for $1.2 billion. But it wasn’t even the New York GS company, rather a subsidiary in Luxembourg owned by a shell company tax haven in Delaware and Cayman Islands. With its minority ownership, GS insisted on determining Denmark’s energy company’s leadership. It then pushed DONG to go IPO, and threatened to shut down renewable energy sources if the government didn’t increase its subsidies.</p>
<p>Eighty percent of Danes opposed the sale; 200,000 signed petitions. Nevertheless, the Social Democrat government refused to explain why it did not sell those shares to Danish pension fund companies which made offers. SD’s junior partner Socialist People’s Party (SF) quit the government over the scandal. The deal was so undemocratic that Goldman Sachs hired the former prime minister and ex-NATO general secretary, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as its PR man in Denmark to smooth over the controversy. Just days after the White House State Dinner, the stock exchange valued DONG to be three times its underrated value in 2014, from about $5 billion to $13-15 billion. The “incentive plan” for DONG leadership garnered them $70 million, which raises suspicions that the company’s worth was deliberately undervalued. And the $1.2-$1.5 billion profit that Goldman Sachs plucked could have benefited Danish society had the shares been sold to Danish owned workers pension fund companies. The Social Democrat government’s finance minister at the time, Bjarne Corydon, is seen as the bourgeoisie’s Trojan Horse.</p>
<p>The May 27, 2016 editorial in “Politiken”, a liberal capitalist daily, called the course of events “ugly”, and said it has “increased mistrust”, so much so that a staff writer wrote “This is the stuff that makes ordinary people turn their back on the powers that be and look towards Donald Trump”. While half of DONG’s electricity and heat generation comes from renewable sources, it also buys coal mined in Colombia where death squads operate. In December 2015, Danish and international media revealed how DONG and Sweden’s government-own Vattenfall bought coal from the murderous Prodeco mining firm owned by Glencore. BBC reported (2012) that Prodeco paid for the murder of ten residents, in 2002, so it could take their land.</p>
<p>In 2014, PAX NGO documented (including with testimonies of nine former paramilitary members) that Prodeco and another mining company had paid death squads for murdering 3000 people—workers, local residents and milieu activists—between 1996 and 2006; “disappearing” 200 people, and forcing 55,000 to leave their homes. Colombian authorities merely fined and temporarily locked down Prodeco for causing serious environmental damage. (See:” The Dark Side of Coal” report. <a href="http://www.paxforpeace.nl/stay-informed/news/danish-media-and-politicians-take-interest-in-dongs-ties-to-blood-coal" type="external">http://www.paxforpeace.nl/stay-informed/news/danish-media-and-politician…</a>, and Glencore’s reply: <a href="http://www.glencore.com/public-positions/related-information/" type="external">http://www.glencore.com/public-positions/related-information/</a>) One-third of Danish electricity comes from coal—4.5 million tons in 2014—and half of that comes from Colombia. DONG bought 950,000 tons of coal from Prodeco, in 2014, and 160,000 tons in 2015, after exposure about its murders. As of this writing DONG has not severed ties with Prodeco, and it is hard to find workers who still believe the Social Democratic party represents workers. Denmark comes to dinner Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen came gleefully to dinner bearing those many gifts for America, and he thanked his world leader host for the “lucrative export contracts for Danish businesses.” These war-profiteering “gifts” offered to the world’s policeman belie Bernie Sanders portrayal of Denmark as socialist and humanitarian as he has so often proclaimed during the long US Democratic Party primary campaign.</p>
<p>Sanders is a social democrat, who mistakenly yet bravely refers of himself as a socialist. He thinks well of Scandinavia because, after class struggle there like in all of Europe, it introduced social benefits: “providing health care to all people as a right” and “medical and family paid leave,” as he repeatedly says.</p>
<p>A few days after his initiated this postulate early in the primary campaign, the Danish prime minister set Sanders straight, saying, “I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy…with a flexible labor market that makes it easy to hire or fire.”</p>
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Denmark: SOS Save Our Sovereignty
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https://counterpunch.org/2016/08/03/denmark-sos-save-our-sovereignty/
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2016-08-03
| 4left
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Denmark: SOS Save Our Sovereignty
<p>I first met Denmark’s last truly Social Democratic Prime Minister, Anker Joergensen in his state office, unannounced, in late 1980.</p>
<p>Grethe and I had just been married. We had met the year before in Los Angeles where I had been a “participatory journalist”, and activist for social/racial/gender equality and against the Vietnam War. I wanted to start a new life with Grethe in her peaceful, social democratic land.</p>
<p>I took odd jobs and did freelance writing for some Danish media, and for progressive media in the US and England. As such, I often walked from Grethe’s centrally located Copenhagen apartment to Christiansborg. The palace is the only building in the world that houses all government branches. The royal palace stood beside the seat of economic power, Denmark’s Stock Exchange (Boersen).</p>
<p>Sometimes I covered official politics from my “palace playground”, as my new wife quipped. The six-story building is a labyrinth of hard wooden stairs, long hallways and hundreds of offices. On my second trip inside, I ambled about unable to find the stairs that led directly to the balcony reserved for journalists covering the parliament. There were no guards and no signs on most doors. I stopped before a high door and turned the bronze polished handle. A small man sat behind a large desk. He turned about to look at me, a smile on his face. I flushed and spurted an apology for disturbing what I realized was the nation’s political leader.</p>
<p>“That’s quite alright. No problem,” replied the prime minister unperturbed. His face wrinkled cozily through a black-white mustache and goatee. Thinning black hair was brushed back revealing a partially bald scalp. No guards or assistants appeared as I quietly closed the big door.</p>
<p>Later in the 1980s, I spoke a few times with the unassuming man when he was no longer prime minister yet still the Social Democratic (SD) party leader. We attended Danish union meetings with delegates from unions in Central America, men and women under threat by death squads working with the CIA and US military “advisors” backing murderous dictatorial regimes. In 1985, I again met Anker, as he was known by all, standing beside his old-fashioned, gearless bicycle in the dead of winter. I asked him, as I had Palme, if he would be on standby if we had use for his political influence during the Central American peace-solidarity march. Anker readily agreed, and he did act when our marcher in El Salvador got arrested.</p>
<p>Anker started his working life as a bicycle messenger, then as an unskilled warehouse worker. He quickly was made a shop steward and worked his way up the union ladder. In the 1960s, he actively opposed the US war against Vietnam. Anker participated in Danish sessions of the Russell-Sartre Tribunal, in 1968. He was a supporter of the oppressed in many parts of the world, and of the 1968 Danish student uproar. It was therefore with sadness for many on the left and the more militant class-conscious workers that he decided to support Denmark’s admission to the EU, then called the EF, in 1972. Anker often found himself in the middle of political controversies.</p>
<p>During his two terms as Prime Minister, 1972-82 (minus 1973-5), he extended the social welfare system, the last state leader to do so. He got the pre-retirement benefits law passed, (at 62 years instead of waiting for old age pension at 67); increased paid vacations to five weeks for everyone; guaranteed pay raises for public employees; guaranteed social assistance, and more.</p>
<p>In Anker’s time, Denmark was known abroad as a tolerant, peaceful, civil liberties/freedom-loving land. Its foreign policy was based on peace. Anker supported the so-called “footnote” foreign policy (1982-8) when Denmark opposed placing NATO nuclear missiles in Europe. The anti-war movement had already convinced the Establishment not to allow NATO military exercises and atomic weapons on its territory. There were several serious confrontations between the US and Denmark because of this.</p>
<p>Anker died peacefully, March 20, 2016, at 93. A people’s man, he lived all his adult life, until he entered a senior’s home, in a modest apartment in a working-class district of the capital city.</p>
<p>Denmark was a vanguard country in sexual freedom and gender equality. Brothels were legal as far back as in the 1870s. For some of 1900s sex for sale was illegal but allowed. Denmark was the first country in the world to legalize pornography, July 1969. Freetown Christiania is a major tourist attraction. It belonged to the military when, on September 4, 1971, the abandoned military area of 34 hectares was occupied by neighbors who broke down the fence. They set up living quarters in abandoned barracks and some built their own housing. Youth House was a legal underground Copenhagen center for music and free lifestyle, mainly used by autonomists and leftists for two decades until 2007. Denmark was also the first country to legalize same-sex sexual activity, in 1933; and legalize homosexual/lesbian/transvestite marriage, on June 15, 2012. Since 1977, the consent age for sex of any kind by any gender is 15. Nevertheless, as a member of NATO and EU, Denmark cooperates with both pro-US institutions, including in war games. Ironically, it was after the fall of “communism” and the end of the cold war that Denmark decided to begin its “activist foreign policy,” based upon following the US into its wars, including breaking up Yugoslavia, the last European socialist state, and warring in the Middle East and Africa.</p>
<p>Denmark losing its peace and social democracy</p>
<p>Denmark’s 5.5 million residents support a permanent military force of about 20,000. Although there is a draft, one can choose to perform civil service instead. No one is forced to go to war unless Denmark is attacked, so those who war are volunteer mercenaries and earn more money.</p>
<p>The last Social Democratic Prime Minister, Helle Thorning Schmidt, was the first woman in the post. During her term, October 2011-June 2015, her enthusiasm for war included offering Barak Obama her military for “regime change” in Syria. She seemed disappointed that a war to remove Bashar al-Assad had been averted when Syria turned over all its chemical weapons for destruction, “no thanks” to Vladimir Putin’s input. She declared (September 2, 2014): “Denmark is one of those countries that deliver most. We are at the level with Americans, and in that way we also consider Denmark a strong, active and very solidarity NATO land.” Obama seemed to echo Schmidt when he welcomed Denmark’s current liberal Prime Minister (PM) Lars Loekke Rasmussen, and the other four Nordic land leaders, to a State Dinner on May 13, 2016.</p>
<p>“The world would be better if more countries were like the Nordic lands.” “We share common interest and values”. You “punch above [your] weight.” He underscored Denmark’s recent decision to increase its military and economic aid to Afghanistan, and expressed thanks for DONG’s wind energy projects in Massachusetts.</p>
<p>Denmark’s public television correspondent, Stephanie Surrugue, interpreted this praise as an American receipt for Denmark’s role in the “war on terror”. The most important matter discussed that day was US and Nordic governments’ response to “Russian aggression,” reminiscent of 2014 when Russia reclaimed Crimea after 97% of voters there so asked. Denmark had already temporarily sent 6 F-16s and rotating troops to the Baltic and Poland. When PM Rasmussen returned to Denmark after dinner, he sent another 150 troops. NATO will now have 6000 permanent troops in these four countries plus in Rumania and Bulgaria. In Obama’s dinner welcome, he extended another hand to Prime Minister Rasmussen, whose government and ally parties are known for being anti-immigrant. Obama referred to media critique against the new “Jewelry Law” as disproportional. The law cuts way back on immigration and asylum-seekers, even for those fleeing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where Denmark has long had hostile troops. The government even places ads around the continent warning refugees not to come.</p>
<p>The jewelry law allows police to seize personal belongings worth over $1,450 (jewelry and cash) from those who apply for asylum, reviving memories of how Jews were dispossessed of their belongings. One of the positive aspects Denmark is known for is its rescue of Jews when Hitler gave orders to eliminate them. Danes quickly took them to Sweden, which was neutral.</p>
<p>A few days after Obama justified Denmark’s grim treatment of refugees fleeing wars, Syrian families seeking exile started legal action against a new law that forbids the joining of family members for three years; it had been one year. Thousands of exiles are split from their closest ones due to civil conflicts where they come from. The refugees have a good chance of winning the court case especially as it was filed the day after the European Human Rights Court judged Denmark in violation of human rights regarding a law that discriminates against immigrants. An immigrant who marries someone living in another land cannot bring his/her partner to Denmark before they are 24 years old. This law is connected to another that only allows equality of natives and immigrants once the immigrant has been a citizen for 26 years. The main lawmaker considered these laws as making Denmark Europe’s “pioneer” in “hardening laws” against immigrants-refugees.</p>
<p>The current Foreign-Integration Minister, Inger Stoejberg, expressed disdain for the Court’s decision. She said that she would find a way to maintain and extend tightening immigration-refugee rules. “If we can’t do it one way, we’ll do it another.”</p>
<p>On the occasion of the White House State dinner, the five Nordic nations signed a “summit joint statement” with the US reaffirming “our deep partnership on shared fundamental values” that include strengthening NATO, backing the Baltic States and Poland with weaponry, aircraft and troops, pressing Russia on many fronts, “stabilizing” Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other areas.</p>
<p>Finland and Sweden also planned to end their neutrality and join NATO, where Denmark, Norway and Iceland already sit. Sweden signed a Host County Agreement with NATO after the dinner giving the war alliance rights to military troops and exercises on Swedish territory and even the right to war on Swedish territory “if a crisis” warrants it. Finland signed a similar agreement. Danish PM Loekke Rasmussen diligently prepared to please his host.</p>
<p>Since 9/11 all the Danish governments (so-called blue/conservative and red/liberal block coalitions) support the many regime shifts outlined by the first George Bush government, about which I will write in future pieces. During the April 2016 Danish parliament debate to invade Syria and extend Denmark’s military capacity in Iraq, the foreign minister, Kristian Jensen, made no bones about it: “Our goal is quite simple. In relationship to Syria our goal is to remove Assad, as one of the worst dictators in the world at this time.” He also stated that Denmark would fight the Islamic State.</p>
<p>According to United Nations law, as well as Denmark’s own constitution, war must not be waged if: there is no UN mandate, or the country in question is not attacking the nation. With Syria, no specific plans are stated about directly attacking government forces. However, the Syrian government has not asked Denmark or the “coalition of the willing” to aid it in its defense against IS, and thus the invasion is illegal.</p>
<p>Pleasing the United States before dinner</p>
<p>1. April 19, Denmark’s parliament voted 90 to 19 to send 460 military instructors and technicians, including 60 Special Forces soldiers, to Syria and Iraq, along with seven F-16s, and a C-130J transport aircraft. Why did 40% of the parliament (70 highly paid members) not vote on the most important question: whether to kill people and do so against international law?</p>
<p>2. May 10, parliament decided to send16 more soldiers to Afghanistan bringing their numbers to 100. This came after the US stated it will increase its troops there by 7-800. It now has about 10,000. The tiny country also did the US’s bidding against Libya in 2011 with 6 F-16s and 120 soldiers. As the US discusses the possibility of warring there once again, Denmark is ready.</p>
<p>3. May 12, the day before the Nordic state and foreign ministers were to eat at Obama’s table, Denmark’s government decided to buy 27 F-35 jet fighters before they were built by the world’s largest weapons company, Lockheed-Martin. The initial cost of 20 billion kroner ($3 billion) is the largest military expense in Danish history. Danish defense experts estimate that the real cost will run between three and four times that with upkeep and 30 years “normal” use. (Note: Canada’s new government just cancelled its order for F-35s, saying it wanted planes that were cheaper and that were known to actually work.) The government ignored 53.3% of Danes, who opposed buying more bomber jets, with only 30.8% favoring buying them. The poll was commissioned by Denmark’s most right-wing daily. Last year, <a href="" type="internal">a Gallup poll found</a>&#160;that the same percentage of Danes opposed the proposal.</p>
<p>4. On the same day, Denmark’s energy company DONG stated it plans an initial public offering (IPO) of at least 15 percent of its shares on the Nasdaq Copenhagen stock exchange this summer. The estimated value is around $11 billion. This will be the largest IPO in Danish history.</p>
<p>The state-controlled utility said the move would reduce the government’s stake in the company from 58.8 percent to 50.1 percent, and the government could sell more of its share in 2020 and lose control. It was originally all state-owned. In 2014, Goldman Sachs, the world’s most powerful and infamous investment firm, bought 18 percent of DONG for $1.2 billion. But it wasn’t even the New York GS company, rather a subsidiary in Luxembourg owned by a shell company tax haven in Delaware and Cayman Islands. With its minority ownership, GS insisted on determining Denmark’s energy company’s leadership. It then pushed DONG to go IPO, and threatened to shut down renewable energy sources if the government didn’t increase its subsidies.</p>
<p>Eighty percent of Danes opposed the sale; 200,000 signed petitions. Nevertheless, the Social Democrat government refused to explain why it did not sell those shares to Danish pension fund companies which made offers. SD’s junior partner Socialist People’s Party (SF) quit the government over the scandal. The deal was so undemocratic that Goldman Sachs hired the former prime minister and ex-NATO general secretary, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as its PR man in Denmark to smooth over the controversy. Just days after the White House State Dinner, the stock exchange valued DONG to be three times its underrated value in 2014, from about $5 billion to $13-15 billion. The “incentive plan” for DONG leadership garnered them $70 million, which raises suspicions that the company’s worth was deliberately undervalued. And the $1.2-$1.5 billion profit that Goldman Sachs plucked could have benefited Danish society had the shares been sold to Danish owned workers pension fund companies. The Social Democrat government’s finance minister at the time, Bjarne Corydon, is seen as the bourgeoisie’s Trojan Horse.</p>
<p>The May 27, 2016 editorial in “Politiken”, a liberal capitalist daily, called the course of events “ugly”, and said it has “increased mistrust”, so much so that a staff writer wrote “This is the stuff that makes ordinary people turn their back on the powers that be and look towards Donald Trump”. While half of DONG’s electricity and heat generation comes from renewable sources, it also buys coal mined in Colombia where death squads operate. In December 2015, Danish and international media revealed how DONG and Sweden’s government-own Vattenfall bought coal from the murderous Prodeco mining firm owned by Glencore. BBC reported (2012) that Prodeco paid for the murder of ten residents, in 2002, so it could take their land.</p>
<p>In 2014, PAX NGO documented (including with testimonies of nine former paramilitary members) that Prodeco and another mining company had paid death squads for murdering 3000 people—workers, local residents and milieu activists—between 1996 and 2006; “disappearing” 200 people, and forcing 55,000 to leave their homes. Colombian authorities merely fined and temporarily locked down Prodeco for causing serious environmental damage. (See:” The Dark Side of Coal” report. <a href="http://www.paxforpeace.nl/stay-informed/news/danish-media-and-politicians-take-interest-in-dongs-ties-to-blood-coal" type="external">http://www.paxforpeace.nl/stay-informed/news/danish-media-and-politician…</a>, and Glencore’s reply: <a href="http://www.glencore.com/public-positions/related-information/" type="external">http://www.glencore.com/public-positions/related-information/</a>) One-third of Danish electricity comes from coal—4.5 million tons in 2014—and half of that comes from Colombia. DONG bought 950,000 tons of coal from Prodeco, in 2014, and 160,000 tons in 2015, after exposure about its murders. As of this writing DONG has not severed ties with Prodeco, and it is hard to find workers who still believe the Social Democratic party represents workers. Denmark comes to dinner Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen came gleefully to dinner bearing those many gifts for America, and he thanked his world leader host for the “lucrative export contracts for Danish businesses.” These war-profiteering “gifts” offered to the world’s policeman belie Bernie Sanders portrayal of Denmark as socialist and humanitarian as he has so often proclaimed during the long US Democratic Party primary campaign.</p>
<p>Sanders is a social democrat, who mistakenly yet bravely refers of himself as a socialist. He thinks well of Scandinavia because, after class struggle there like in all of Europe, it introduced social benefits: “providing health care to all people as a right” and “medical and family paid leave,” as he repeatedly says.</p>
<p>A few days after his initiated this postulate early in the primary campaign, the Danish prime minister set Sanders straight, saying, “I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy…with a flexible labor market that makes it easy to hire or fire.”</p>
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<p>Sirius XM Holdings Inc. said Tuesday it had net income of $135 million, or 3 cents per share during its fiscal fourth quarter. That's compared with net income of $143 million, or 3 cents a share in the year-prior period. The FactSet consensus for earnings was 3 cents per share. Revenue for the quarter hit $1.2 billion, up from $1.1 billion the previous year and in-line with the FactSet consensus of $1.2 billion. Sirius added 2.3 million net new subscribers over the course of 2015, the company's largest growth since 2007, according to a news release. The company spent $369 million to buy back 92 million shares and in January bought back an additional 52 million shares, spending $200 million. Looking to 2016, Sirius is expecting subscriber growth to slow to 1.4 million for the full year and for revenue to be $4.9 billion, in-line with FactSet's consensus of $4.9 billion and up from $4.6 billion for 2015. The FactSet 2016 consensus for revenue is . Sirius shares were down 0.3% in pre-market trade.</p>
<p>Copyright © 2016 MarketWatch, Inc.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
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Sirius XM Reports Solid Q4 Earnings, Expects Slowed 2016 Subscriber Growth
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http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/02/02/sirius-xm-reports-solid-q4-earnings-expects-slowed-2016-subscriber-growth.html
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2016-02-02
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Sirius XM Reports Solid Q4 Earnings, Expects Slowed 2016 Subscriber Growth
<p>Sirius XM Holdings Inc. said Tuesday it had net income of $135 million, or 3 cents per share during its fiscal fourth quarter. That's compared with net income of $143 million, or 3 cents a share in the year-prior period. The FactSet consensus for earnings was 3 cents per share. Revenue for the quarter hit $1.2 billion, up from $1.1 billion the previous year and in-line with the FactSet consensus of $1.2 billion. Sirius added 2.3 million net new subscribers over the course of 2015, the company's largest growth since 2007, according to a news release. The company spent $369 million to buy back 92 million shares and in January bought back an additional 52 million shares, spending $200 million. Looking to 2016, Sirius is expecting subscriber growth to slow to 1.4 million for the full year and for revenue to be $4.9 billion, in-line with FactSet's consensus of $4.9 billion and up from $4.6 billion for 2015. The FactSet 2016 consensus for revenue is . Sirius shares were down 0.3% in pre-market trade.</p>
<p>Copyright © 2016 MarketWatch, Inc.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
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<p>Probably the single most important constitutional issue facing women who seek abortions is whether a state may <a href="" type="internal">enact a sham health law</a> which, on its surface, appears designed to make abortions safer — but which, in reality, is designed to create regulatory burdens that limit access to abortions. An Alabama law that was <a href="http://d35brb9zkkbdsd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Myron-Thompson-abortion-opinion.pdf" type="external">declared unconstitutional on Monday</a> is one of the most aggressive examples of these sham health laws.</p>
<p>Under this law, every doctor performing abortions in Alabama must “have staff privileges at an acute care hospital within the same standard metropolitan statistical area as the facility is located that permit him or her to perform dilation and curettage, laparotomy procedures, hysterectomy, and any other procedures reasonably necessary to treat abortion-related complications.” Clinic administrators who employ doctors in violation of this law face felony charges, and the clinic can lose its license to operate. Moreover, as Judge Myron Thompson explains in his opinion striking down the law, it “would have the striking result of closing three of Alabama’s five abortion clinics.”</p>
<p>In striking down this law, Judge Thompson begins with the Supreme Court’s decision in <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/91-744.ZO.html" type="external">Planned Parenthood v. Casey</a>, a <a href="" type="internal">vague opinion</a> that has largely enabled anti-abortion judges to uphold restrictions on women’s reproductive health while simultaneously allowing judges who support the right to choose to do the opposite. As Thompson interprets the Supreme Court’s precedents, his court “must determine whether, examining the regulation in its real-world context,” it imposes an obstacle to women’s right to choose an abortion that “is more significant than is warranted by the State’s justifications for the regulation.”</p>
<p>His opinion is long — sweeping through a full 172 pages of discussion of the Alabama law, its impact on women and health providers and its inadequate justification as a health law. According to Thompson, “none of the doctors who provide abortions in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Mobile would be able to obtain staff privileges that satisfy the requirements” of the Alabama law, and “no doctors who currently hold or could obtain such privileges would begin performing abortions in those cities.” The doctors who currently perform abortions in these cities do not live in Alabama, and many hospitals will only grant staff privileges to physicians who live locally. Others won’t grant privileges to these doctors because they object to abortion on religious or other grounds, or because doctors who perform abortions are unlikely to admit enough patients to justify granting them privileges at a hospital.</p>
<p>Nor are any new doctors likely to step forward if the current abortion providers are no longer able to do so in Alabama. Judge Thompson outlines numerous reasons why this is the case — fear of professional consequences, a general decline in abortion providers, especially in the South — but one part of his analysis stands out. Even doctors who believe that women should have greater access to abortion are unlikely to perform this procedure because they fear outright terrorism by abortion opponents. “In 1993,” Thompson explains, “a gunman shot and killed Dr. David Gunn, an Alabama resident who provided abortions throughout the State and in northern Florida. Dr. Gunn was the first doctor in the nation to be murdered for performing abortions.” A few years later, an abortion clinic in West Alabama was firebombed.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, some of the doctors who currently perform abortions in the state testified to their fear for their own safety. “Every time I go to work,” one doctor testified, “whether it’s in Birmingham or Mobile, I’m always afraid that there will be somebody who is in the crowd who is passionate enough about the topic that they’re willing to shoot. I worry about my children. I worry about my husband, my extended family.” Because of this fear, “her home is under FBI surveillance and has a security system. She also takes additional precautionary measures in order to maintain anonymity, including disguising her clothes, covering her face, and renting a different car every time she drives from her Atlanta residence to an Alabama clinic.”</p>
<p>So the Alabama law would stop several existing providers from performing abortions, and no one else is likely to step up to replace them. Meanwhile, Thompson lays out just how unnecessary the law is if it is justified as a health regulation. “it is first necessary to recognize how vanishingly rare it is for women to have serious complications from early-term abortions,” Thompson writes. “Complications that require hospitalization occur in only 0.05 to 0.3 % of such abortions.” Indeed, according to one doctor’s testimony, “penicillin is more than two to three times more likely to kill a patient than an early-term abortion.”</p>
<p>So there is no good reason to require abortion providers to have hospital admission privileges, much less the very specific privileges required by this Alabama law. And the law works significant harm to a woman’s right to choose in Alabama. Given this imbalance, Judge Thompson strikes the law.</p>
<p>It is an open question, however, whether Thompson’s decision will survive further review. Thompson’s opinion will appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, a court which includes some very conservative judges. Moreover, even if the Eleventh Circuit upholds Thompson’s decision, the conservative Fifth Circuit recently <a href="" type="internal">upheld a similar Texas law</a>. When federal appeals courts divide in similar cases, the Supreme Court often steps in to resolve the dispute.</p>
<p>If the justices do step in, that is probably bad news for Team Choice. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the ostensible swing vote in abortion cases, <a href="" type="internal">has not cast a pro-choice vote in the last 22 years</a>.</p>
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Federal Court Strikes Alabama Anti-Abortion Law, Citing Violence Against Abortion Providers
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http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/08/04/3467263/federal-court-strikes-alabama-law-that-would-shut-down-three-of-the-states-five-abortion-clinics/
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2014-08-04
| 4left
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Federal Court Strikes Alabama Anti-Abortion Law, Citing Violence Against Abortion Providers
<p>Probably the single most important constitutional issue facing women who seek abortions is whether a state may <a href="" type="internal">enact a sham health law</a> which, on its surface, appears designed to make abortions safer — but which, in reality, is designed to create regulatory burdens that limit access to abortions. An Alabama law that was <a href="http://d35brb9zkkbdsd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Myron-Thompson-abortion-opinion.pdf" type="external">declared unconstitutional on Monday</a> is one of the most aggressive examples of these sham health laws.</p>
<p>Under this law, every doctor performing abortions in Alabama must “have staff privileges at an acute care hospital within the same standard metropolitan statistical area as the facility is located that permit him or her to perform dilation and curettage, laparotomy procedures, hysterectomy, and any other procedures reasonably necessary to treat abortion-related complications.” Clinic administrators who employ doctors in violation of this law face felony charges, and the clinic can lose its license to operate. Moreover, as Judge Myron Thompson explains in his opinion striking down the law, it “would have the striking result of closing three of Alabama’s five abortion clinics.”</p>
<p>In striking down this law, Judge Thompson begins with the Supreme Court’s decision in <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/91-744.ZO.html" type="external">Planned Parenthood v. Casey</a>, a <a href="" type="internal">vague opinion</a> that has largely enabled anti-abortion judges to uphold restrictions on women’s reproductive health while simultaneously allowing judges who support the right to choose to do the opposite. As Thompson interprets the Supreme Court’s precedents, his court “must determine whether, examining the regulation in its real-world context,” it imposes an obstacle to women’s right to choose an abortion that “is more significant than is warranted by the State’s justifications for the regulation.”</p>
<p>His opinion is long — sweeping through a full 172 pages of discussion of the Alabama law, its impact on women and health providers and its inadequate justification as a health law. According to Thompson, “none of the doctors who provide abortions in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Mobile would be able to obtain staff privileges that satisfy the requirements” of the Alabama law, and “no doctors who currently hold or could obtain such privileges would begin performing abortions in those cities.” The doctors who currently perform abortions in these cities do not live in Alabama, and many hospitals will only grant staff privileges to physicians who live locally. Others won’t grant privileges to these doctors because they object to abortion on religious or other grounds, or because doctors who perform abortions are unlikely to admit enough patients to justify granting them privileges at a hospital.</p>
<p>Nor are any new doctors likely to step forward if the current abortion providers are no longer able to do so in Alabama. Judge Thompson outlines numerous reasons why this is the case — fear of professional consequences, a general decline in abortion providers, especially in the South — but one part of his analysis stands out. Even doctors who believe that women should have greater access to abortion are unlikely to perform this procedure because they fear outright terrorism by abortion opponents. “In 1993,” Thompson explains, “a gunman shot and killed Dr. David Gunn, an Alabama resident who provided abortions throughout the State and in northern Florida. Dr. Gunn was the first doctor in the nation to be murdered for performing abortions.” A few years later, an abortion clinic in West Alabama was firebombed.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, some of the doctors who currently perform abortions in the state testified to their fear for their own safety. “Every time I go to work,” one doctor testified, “whether it’s in Birmingham or Mobile, I’m always afraid that there will be somebody who is in the crowd who is passionate enough about the topic that they’re willing to shoot. I worry about my children. I worry about my husband, my extended family.” Because of this fear, “her home is under FBI surveillance and has a security system. She also takes additional precautionary measures in order to maintain anonymity, including disguising her clothes, covering her face, and renting a different car every time she drives from her Atlanta residence to an Alabama clinic.”</p>
<p>So the Alabama law would stop several existing providers from performing abortions, and no one else is likely to step up to replace them. Meanwhile, Thompson lays out just how unnecessary the law is if it is justified as a health regulation. “it is first necessary to recognize how vanishingly rare it is for women to have serious complications from early-term abortions,” Thompson writes. “Complications that require hospitalization occur in only 0.05 to 0.3 % of such abortions.” Indeed, according to one doctor’s testimony, “penicillin is more than two to three times more likely to kill a patient than an early-term abortion.”</p>
<p>So there is no good reason to require abortion providers to have hospital admission privileges, much less the very specific privileges required by this Alabama law. And the law works significant harm to a woman’s right to choose in Alabama. Given this imbalance, Judge Thompson strikes the law.</p>
<p>It is an open question, however, whether Thompson’s decision will survive further review. Thompson’s opinion will appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, a court which includes some very conservative judges. Moreover, even if the Eleventh Circuit upholds Thompson’s decision, the conservative Fifth Circuit recently <a href="" type="internal">upheld a similar Texas law</a>. When federal appeals courts divide in similar cases, the Supreme Court often steps in to resolve the dispute.</p>
<p>If the justices do step in, that is probably bad news for Team Choice. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the ostensible swing vote in abortion cases, <a href="" type="internal">has not cast a pro-choice vote in the last 22 years</a>.</p>
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<p>A: Never mind college; she needs to learn now about plagiarism. Teens are so used to sharing information <a href="" type="internal" />online that many don't understand that they can't just grab a photo, poem or paragraph, and then weave it into an assignment and pass the work off as their own.</p>
<p>Yes, schools do teach proper research and writing practices. Educators from the elementary grades through high school incorporate research and attribution skills into media literacy lessons and specific classes, such as social studies and language arts.</p>
<p>Many schools have crafted explicit policies to combat plagiarism. For example, the policy at White Station Middle School in Memphis, Tenn., provides "students with guidelines to enable academic judgment, develop integrity, and preserve honor." It spells out how to give proper credit to another's work and outlines consequences for failing to do so.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Teaching students how to do research without plagiarizing is part of the Common Core Standards. The Grade 8 English Language Arts Standards state that students will learn to "gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, using search terms effectively; assess the credibility and accuracy of each source; and quote or paraphrase the data and conclusions of others while avoiding plagiarism and following a standard format for citation."</p>
<p>Award-winning California middle-school teacher Heather Wolpert-Gawron is aware of the challenge. "How do we as educators help students respect other people's work and not abuse it in this era of accessible information?" she writes in a blog post at <a href="http://edutopia.org" type="external">edutopia.org</a>. "The answer is, of course, to teach ethical academic behavior in a targeted way, to model it yourself and to hold students accountable."</p>
<p>She has created a terrific online scavenger hunt that teaches online ethics. The "hunt" leads students to a definition of ethics, a quiz to test "netiquette savvy," and Internet explorations through links to Creation Commons, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Library and the Library of Congress.</p>
<p>The final step in the hunt "is a contract of sorts," writes Wolpert-Gawron, where students type their names, stating that they "understand that every image and piece of music must be cited on every project from here on in throughout this school year."</p>
<p>Find Wolpert-Gawron's scavenger hunt on her blog post, "Common Core in Action: Teaching Online Ethics," at <a href="http://edutopia.org" type="external">edutopia.org</a>.</p>
<p>It's always been a parent's job to teach kids that appropriating the work of others is cheating. It's just a little harder in today's online world. To make it easier, Wolpert-Gawron has written a fun teacher resource, "Internet Literacy, Grades 6-8" (Teacher Created Resources, 2010). It shows teens how to read through layers of links and use reliable research methods; it also covers "netiquette," online ethics, safety, privacy and laws. There are also tips for networking, collaborating and contributing online.</p>
<p>You might be surprised how much you both can learn from this little volume!</p>
<p>Do you have a question about your child's education? Email it to <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a>. Leanna Landsmann is an education writer who began her career as a classroom teacher. She has served on education commissions, visited classrooms in 49 states to observe best practices and founded Principal for a Day in New York City.</p>
<p />
|
Is it research - or is it just plagiarism?
| false |
https://abqjournal.com/391171/is-it-research-or-is-it-just-plagiarism.html
| 2least
|
Is it research - or is it just plagiarism?
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>A: Never mind college; she needs to learn now about plagiarism. Teens are so used to sharing information <a href="" type="internal" />online that many don't understand that they can't just grab a photo, poem or paragraph, and then weave it into an assignment and pass the work off as their own.</p>
<p>Yes, schools do teach proper research and writing practices. Educators from the elementary grades through high school incorporate research and attribution skills into media literacy lessons and specific classes, such as social studies and language arts.</p>
<p>Many schools have crafted explicit policies to combat plagiarism. For example, the policy at White Station Middle School in Memphis, Tenn., provides "students with guidelines to enable academic judgment, develop integrity, and preserve honor." It spells out how to give proper credit to another's work and outlines consequences for failing to do so.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Teaching students how to do research without plagiarizing is part of the Common Core Standards. The Grade 8 English Language Arts Standards state that students will learn to "gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, using search terms effectively; assess the credibility and accuracy of each source; and quote or paraphrase the data and conclusions of others while avoiding plagiarism and following a standard format for citation."</p>
<p>Award-winning California middle-school teacher Heather Wolpert-Gawron is aware of the challenge. "How do we as educators help students respect other people's work and not abuse it in this era of accessible information?" she writes in a blog post at <a href="http://edutopia.org" type="external">edutopia.org</a>. "The answer is, of course, to teach ethical academic behavior in a targeted way, to model it yourself and to hold students accountable."</p>
<p>She has created a terrific online scavenger hunt that teaches online ethics. The "hunt" leads students to a definition of ethics, a quiz to test "netiquette savvy," and Internet explorations through links to Creation Commons, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Library and the Library of Congress.</p>
<p>The final step in the hunt "is a contract of sorts," writes Wolpert-Gawron, where students type their names, stating that they "understand that every image and piece of music must be cited on every project from here on in throughout this school year."</p>
<p>Find Wolpert-Gawron's scavenger hunt on her blog post, "Common Core in Action: Teaching Online Ethics," at <a href="http://edutopia.org" type="external">edutopia.org</a>.</p>
<p>It's always been a parent's job to teach kids that appropriating the work of others is cheating. It's just a little harder in today's online world. To make it easier, Wolpert-Gawron has written a fun teacher resource, "Internet Literacy, Grades 6-8" (Teacher Created Resources, 2010). It shows teens how to read through layers of links and use reliable research methods; it also covers "netiquette," online ethics, safety, privacy and laws. There are also tips for networking, collaborating and contributing online.</p>
<p>You might be surprised how much you both can learn from this little volume!</p>
<p>Do you have a question about your child's education? Email it to <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a>. Leanna Landsmann is an education writer who began her career as a classroom teacher. She has served on education commissions, visited classrooms in 49 states to observe best practices and founded Principal for a Day in New York City.</p>
<p />
| 7,892 |
|
<p>OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An Oklahoma woman has been sentenced to three years in federal prison for embezzling more than $450,000 from a retirement and health benefits plan for unionized engineers.</p>
<p><a href="http://newsok.com/yukon-woman-sentenced-for-embezzling-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars/article/5580634" type="external">The Oklahoman reports</a> that 51-year-old Susan Michelle Tyson of Yukon had pleaded guilty to wire fraud for making dozens of unauthorized transfers to her bank account. A federal judge ordered Tuesday for Tyson to pay nearly $310,000 in restitution, in addition to the sentence.</p>
<p>Prosecutors say Tyson was a bookkeeper at Zenith American Solutions Inc., an Oklahoma City company that managed assets owned by Oklahoma Operating Engineers Welfare Plan. Tyson submitted duplicate invoices to the benefits plan to make her transfers appear legitimate.</p>
<p>Prosecutors say she used the stolen money to make house renovations, buy a motorcycle and take vacations.</p>
<p>An attorney for Tyson says she’s remorseful.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: The Oklahoman, <a href="http://www.newsok.com" type="external" /> <a href="http://www.newsok.com" type="external">http://www.newsok.com</a></p>
<p>OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An Oklahoma woman has been sentenced to three years in federal prison for embezzling more than $450,000 from a retirement and health benefits plan for unionized engineers.</p>
<p><a href="http://newsok.com/yukon-woman-sentenced-for-embezzling-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars/article/5580634" type="external">The Oklahoman reports</a> that 51-year-old Susan Michelle Tyson of Yukon had pleaded guilty to wire fraud for making dozens of unauthorized transfers to her bank account. A federal judge ordered Tuesday for Tyson to pay nearly $310,000 in restitution, in addition to the sentence.</p>
<p>Prosecutors say Tyson was a bookkeeper at Zenith American Solutions Inc., an Oklahoma City company that managed assets owned by Oklahoma Operating Engineers Welfare Plan. Tyson submitted duplicate invoices to the benefits plan to make her transfers appear legitimate.</p>
<p>Prosecutors say she used the stolen money to make house renovations, buy a motorcycle and take vacations.</p>
<p>An attorney for Tyson says she’s remorseful.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: The Oklahoman, <a href="http://www.newsok.com" type="external" /> <a href="http://www.newsok.com" type="external">http://www.newsok.com</a></p>
|
Oklahoma woman convicted of retirement plan embezzlement
| false |
https://apnews.com/4080c8f7a5174efda88d73fc770b2ceb
|
2018-01-24
| 2least
|
Oklahoma woman convicted of retirement plan embezzlement
<p>OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An Oklahoma woman has been sentenced to three years in federal prison for embezzling more than $450,000 from a retirement and health benefits plan for unionized engineers.</p>
<p><a href="http://newsok.com/yukon-woman-sentenced-for-embezzling-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars/article/5580634" type="external">The Oklahoman reports</a> that 51-year-old Susan Michelle Tyson of Yukon had pleaded guilty to wire fraud for making dozens of unauthorized transfers to her bank account. A federal judge ordered Tuesday for Tyson to pay nearly $310,000 in restitution, in addition to the sentence.</p>
<p>Prosecutors say Tyson was a bookkeeper at Zenith American Solutions Inc., an Oklahoma City company that managed assets owned by Oklahoma Operating Engineers Welfare Plan. Tyson submitted duplicate invoices to the benefits plan to make her transfers appear legitimate.</p>
<p>Prosecutors say she used the stolen money to make house renovations, buy a motorcycle and take vacations.</p>
<p>An attorney for Tyson says she’s remorseful.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: The Oklahoman, <a href="http://www.newsok.com" type="external" /> <a href="http://www.newsok.com" type="external">http://www.newsok.com</a></p>
<p>OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An Oklahoma woman has been sentenced to three years in federal prison for embezzling more than $450,000 from a retirement and health benefits plan for unionized engineers.</p>
<p><a href="http://newsok.com/yukon-woman-sentenced-for-embezzling-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars/article/5580634" type="external">The Oklahoman reports</a> that 51-year-old Susan Michelle Tyson of Yukon had pleaded guilty to wire fraud for making dozens of unauthorized transfers to her bank account. A federal judge ordered Tuesday for Tyson to pay nearly $310,000 in restitution, in addition to the sentence.</p>
<p>Prosecutors say Tyson was a bookkeeper at Zenith American Solutions Inc., an Oklahoma City company that managed assets owned by Oklahoma Operating Engineers Welfare Plan. Tyson submitted duplicate invoices to the benefits plan to make her transfers appear legitimate.</p>
<p>Prosecutors say she used the stolen money to make house renovations, buy a motorcycle and take vacations.</p>
<p>An attorney for Tyson says she’s remorseful.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: The Oklahoman, <a href="http://www.newsok.com" type="external" /> <a href="http://www.newsok.com" type="external">http://www.newsok.com</a></p>
| 7,893 |
<p>Sinatra and Gardner attending a Hollywood party in February 1952.</p>
<p>Sinatra and Gardner leaving London for a trip to Africa, where she was to make a film in November 1952.</p>
<p>Gardner arranges Sinatra's bow tie at London's Washington Hotel on December 9, 1951, prior to their leaving for the Coliseum Theater for the "Midnight Matinee."</p>
<p>Sinatra poses for a photograph with Gardner at the gala debut of Ernest Hemingway's romantic adventure drama Snows of Kilimanjaro on September 18, 1952, at the Rivoli Theater in New York.</p>
<p>Gardner and Sinatra during a visit to Hawaii in the 1950s.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra is The Voice.</p>
<p>Fans surround Frank Sinatra as he arrives in Pasadena, California, August 11, 1943, for Hollywood film and singing engagements.</p>
<p>The iconic mug shot. Defiance, style, and the astonishing intelligence of the pale, wide-set eyes.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra in Higher and Higher, 1943.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly play a couple of sailors on shore leave in MGM's Anchors Aweigh, 1945.</p>
<p>Gloria DeHaven and Frank Sinatra in Step Lively, 1944.</p>
<p>The Sinatras at home,1948.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra and his wife Nancy at the Mocambo in Hollywood.</p>
<p>Frank recording at Capitol Studio C, West Hollywood.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra is seen in Las Vegas with new love interest, actress Ava Gardner. Sinatra split with his first wife, Nancy, to marry Gardner in 1951.</p>
<p>Singer Frank Sinatra and screen actress Ava Gardner cut their wedding cake following their marriage in Philadelphia, November 7, 1951.</p>
<p>Sinatra and Donna Reed hold their Oscars for From Here to Eternity, 1954.</p>
<p>American actress Grace Kelly smiles as she points a camera at Frank Sinatra during a pause in production of the film High Society, January 19, 1956.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra sings "You're Sensational" to Grace Kelly in High Society, 1956.</p>
<p>American singer and actor Frank Sinatra is presented to Queen Elizabeth II in the foyer of the Odeon Theater, Leicester Square, London, October 27, 1958, at the premiere of Danny Kaye's film, Me and the Colonel.</p>
<p>The Rat Pack takes a stroll in front of the Sands in Ocean's Eleven, 1960.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ursula Andress and Anita Ekberg in 4 For Texas, 1963.</p>
<p>Accompanied by daughters Tina, 17, left, and Nancy, 25, Frank Sinatra arrives at a Beverly Hills hotel for his 50th birthday celebration in December, 1965. The party was given by Sinatra's ex-wife, Nancy, and Sinatra's children Tina, Nancy, and Frank, Jr.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra in the director's chair during None but the Brave, 1965, his first and only role as director.</p>
<p>Actress Mia Farrow walks with husband Frank Sinatra in Miami, January 17, 1967.</p>
<p>Entertainer Frank Sinatra and his wife Barbara are the center of attention in the lobby of the Jerusalem Hilton on April 5, 1978, after the couple arrived from the United States. Sinatra dedicated a student center, which bears his name, at the Jerusalem University.</p>
|
Frank Sinatra's Life and Loves
| true |
https://thedailybeast.com/frank-sinatras-life-and-loves
|
2018-10-06
| 4left
|
Frank Sinatra's Life and Loves
<p>Sinatra and Gardner attending a Hollywood party in February 1952.</p>
<p>Sinatra and Gardner leaving London for a trip to Africa, where she was to make a film in November 1952.</p>
<p>Gardner arranges Sinatra's bow tie at London's Washington Hotel on December 9, 1951, prior to their leaving for the Coliseum Theater for the "Midnight Matinee."</p>
<p>Sinatra poses for a photograph with Gardner at the gala debut of Ernest Hemingway's romantic adventure drama Snows of Kilimanjaro on September 18, 1952, at the Rivoli Theater in New York.</p>
<p>Gardner and Sinatra during a visit to Hawaii in the 1950s.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra is The Voice.</p>
<p>Fans surround Frank Sinatra as he arrives in Pasadena, California, August 11, 1943, for Hollywood film and singing engagements.</p>
<p>The iconic mug shot. Defiance, style, and the astonishing intelligence of the pale, wide-set eyes.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra in Higher and Higher, 1943.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly play a couple of sailors on shore leave in MGM's Anchors Aweigh, 1945.</p>
<p>Gloria DeHaven and Frank Sinatra in Step Lively, 1944.</p>
<p>The Sinatras at home,1948.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra and his wife Nancy at the Mocambo in Hollywood.</p>
<p>Frank recording at Capitol Studio C, West Hollywood.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra is seen in Las Vegas with new love interest, actress Ava Gardner. Sinatra split with his first wife, Nancy, to marry Gardner in 1951.</p>
<p>Singer Frank Sinatra and screen actress Ava Gardner cut their wedding cake following their marriage in Philadelphia, November 7, 1951.</p>
<p>Sinatra and Donna Reed hold their Oscars for From Here to Eternity, 1954.</p>
<p>American actress Grace Kelly smiles as she points a camera at Frank Sinatra during a pause in production of the film High Society, January 19, 1956.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra sings "You're Sensational" to Grace Kelly in High Society, 1956.</p>
<p>American singer and actor Frank Sinatra is presented to Queen Elizabeth II in the foyer of the Odeon Theater, Leicester Square, London, October 27, 1958, at the premiere of Danny Kaye's film, Me and the Colonel.</p>
<p>The Rat Pack takes a stroll in front of the Sands in Ocean's Eleven, 1960.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ursula Andress and Anita Ekberg in 4 For Texas, 1963.</p>
<p>Accompanied by daughters Tina, 17, left, and Nancy, 25, Frank Sinatra arrives at a Beverly Hills hotel for his 50th birthday celebration in December, 1965. The party was given by Sinatra's ex-wife, Nancy, and Sinatra's children Tina, Nancy, and Frank, Jr.</p>
<p>Frank Sinatra in the director's chair during None but the Brave, 1965, his first and only role as director.</p>
<p>Actress Mia Farrow walks with husband Frank Sinatra in Miami, January 17, 1967.</p>
<p>Entertainer Frank Sinatra and his wife Barbara are the center of attention in the lobby of the Jerusalem Hilton on April 5, 1978, after the couple arrived from the United States. Sinatra dedicated a student center, which bears his name, at the Jerusalem University.</p>
| 7,894 |
<p>While Enbridge (NYSE: ENB) and Williams Partners (NYSE: WPZ) both operate energy infrastructure assets like pipelines, these companies are quite different otherwise. For starters, Williams Partners is a natural gas pipeline-focused&#160; <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/09/09/master-limited-partnership-5-characteristics-inves.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">master limited partnership Opens a New Window.</a> (MLP) controlled by Williams Companies (NYSE: WMB) while Enbridge is a corporation that <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/18/how-enbridge-inc-makes-most-of-its-money.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">operates the world's longest oil pipeline system Opens a New Window.</a> and it manages several MLPs. That difference in corporate structure is one reason Williams currently yields 6.2% while Enbridge's payout is 4.7%. That higher yield might tilt the scale for some income-focused investors.</p>
<p>That said, there are several other key differences between the two, ranging from their financial profiles to growth prospects to valuation, that make the choice between these two less obvious.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Often, income-focused investors get mesmerized by current yields and use them as the primary deciding factor in picking stocks. However, what's more important to consider is whether those payouts are sustainable, and the likelihood a company will be able to increase them in the coming years. To determine those answers, we need to drill down a bit deeper. Here's how these two businesses compare:</p>
<p>As the chart shows, Enbridge has a slightly better credit rating despite having a much higher leverage ratio. There are several reasons for this. First, Enbridge is in the midst of a major expansion phase that will see the company complete a whopping 13 billion Canadian dollars ($10.5 billion) of capital projects this year alone, and a total of CA$31 billion ($25 billion) worth by 2020. As those projects enter service, they'll supply the company with the incremental earnings to push leverage below its 5.0 times target by 2019. Another factor that plays a role in Enbridge's higher credit rating is its greater dividend coverage, which provides it with excess cash to help finance some of those expansion projects. Finally, while Williams Partners' leverage ratio is lower, when it's combined with the debt of Williams Companies, the consolidated ratio is 5.25 times.</p>
<p>The two also diverge widely on their projected dividend growth rates. Williams Partners anticipates increasing its payout by 5% to 7% annually over the next couple of years as its current slate of expansion projects enter service. Enbridge, on the other hand, expects to increase its payout at nearly twice that rate because it has a much larger and more visible series of projects coming down the pike. That positions the company to deliver a total annual return of 16% when adding its current yield with the midpoint of its dividend growth forecast while Williams Partners is on pace for about a 12% annual total return.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Typically, if a company is growing faster than its rivals, it would trade at a premium valuation, but that's not necessarily the case with Enbridge:</p>
<p>As the table shows, Enbridge's higher leverage ratio skews things a bit on the EV-to-EBITDA ratio since it has a larger proportional enterprise value. That said, when looking at things on a cash flow basis, it currently gets a much cheaper valuation. Because of that, investors have the potential to earn an even greater total return should Enbridge eventually revert closer to a mid-teens multiple, the neighborhood where Williams and <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/09/24/is-kinder-morgan-inc-a-buy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">other pipeline companies currently trade Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>Williams Partners offers investors a low-risk way to earn a high yield, with a payout that should increase by mid-single-digit percentages over the next few years. However, unless an investor needs that larger income stream in the near term, Enbridge is the better choice because it has the potential to produce much higher total returns over the long haul. That greater upside, at a cheaper valuation no less, makes it the better buy of the two in my opinion.</p>
<p>10 stocks we like better than EnbridgeWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*</p>
<p>David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the <a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-static%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=90a968fb-523b-4766-8c96-0a05dfbf6000&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">10 best stocks Opens a New Window.</a> for investors to buy right now... and Enbridge wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.</p>
<p><a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-static%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=90a968fb-523b-4766-8c96-0a05dfbf6000&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Click here Opens a New Window.</a> to learn about these picks!</p>
<p>*Stock Advisor returns as of September 5, 2017</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/TMFmd19/info.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Matthew DiLallo Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Enbridge. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
|
Better Buy: Enbridge Inc. vs. Williams Partners L.P.
| true |
http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/04/23/better-buy-enbridge-inc-vs-williams-partners-lp.html
|
2017-09-26
| 0right
|
Better Buy: Enbridge Inc. vs. Williams Partners L.P.
<p>While Enbridge (NYSE: ENB) and Williams Partners (NYSE: WPZ) both operate energy infrastructure assets like pipelines, these companies are quite different otherwise. For starters, Williams Partners is a natural gas pipeline-focused&#160; <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/09/09/master-limited-partnership-5-characteristics-inves.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">master limited partnership Opens a New Window.</a> (MLP) controlled by Williams Companies (NYSE: WMB) while Enbridge is a corporation that <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/18/how-enbridge-inc-makes-most-of-its-money.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">operates the world's longest oil pipeline system Opens a New Window.</a> and it manages several MLPs. That difference in corporate structure is one reason Williams currently yields 6.2% while Enbridge's payout is 4.7%. That higher yield might tilt the scale for some income-focused investors.</p>
<p>That said, there are several other key differences between the two, ranging from their financial profiles to growth prospects to valuation, that make the choice between these two less obvious.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Often, income-focused investors get mesmerized by current yields and use them as the primary deciding factor in picking stocks. However, what's more important to consider is whether those payouts are sustainable, and the likelihood a company will be able to increase them in the coming years. To determine those answers, we need to drill down a bit deeper. Here's how these two businesses compare:</p>
<p>As the chart shows, Enbridge has a slightly better credit rating despite having a much higher leverage ratio. There are several reasons for this. First, Enbridge is in the midst of a major expansion phase that will see the company complete a whopping 13 billion Canadian dollars ($10.5 billion) of capital projects this year alone, and a total of CA$31 billion ($25 billion) worth by 2020. As those projects enter service, they'll supply the company with the incremental earnings to push leverage below its 5.0 times target by 2019. Another factor that plays a role in Enbridge's higher credit rating is its greater dividend coverage, which provides it with excess cash to help finance some of those expansion projects. Finally, while Williams Partners' leverage ratio is lower, when it's combined with the debt of Williams Companies, the consolidated ratio is 5.25 times.</p>
<p>The two also diverge widely on their projected dividend growth rates. Williams Partners anticipates increasing its payout by 5% to 7% annually over the next couple of years as its current slate of expansion projects enter service. Enbridge, on the other hand, expects to increase its payout at nearly twice that rate because it has a much larger and more visible series of projects coming down the pike. That positions the company to deliver a total annual return of 16% when adding its current yield with the midpoint of its dividend growth forecast while Williams Partners is on pace for about a 12% annual total return.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Typically, if a company is growing faster than its rivals, it would trade at a premium valuation, but that's not necessarily the case with Enbridge:</p>
<p>As the table shows, Enbridge's higher leverage ratio skews things a bit on the EV-to-EBITDA ratio since it has a larger proportional enterprise value. That said, when looking at things on a cash flow basis, it currently gets a much cheaper valuation. Because of that, investors have the potential to earn an even greater total return should Enbridge eventually revert closer to a mid-teens multiple, the neighborhood where Williams and <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/09/24/is-kinder-morgan-inc-a-buy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">other pipeline companies currently trade Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>Williams Partners offers investors a low-risk way to earn a high yield, with a payout that should increase by mid-single-digit percentages over the next few years. However, unless an investor needs that larger income stream in the near term, Enbridge is the better choice because it has the potential to produce much higher total returns over the long haul. That greater upside, at a cheaper valuation no less, makes it the better buy of the two in my opinion.</p>
<p>10 stocks we like better than EnbridgeWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*</p>
<p>David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the <a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-static%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=90a968fb-523b-4766-8c96-0a05dfbf6000&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">10 best stocks Opens a New Window.</a> for investors to buy right now... and Enbridge wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.</p>
<p><a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-static%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=90a968fb-523b-4766-8c96-0a05dfbf6000&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Click here Opens a New Window.</a> to learn about these picks!</p>
<p>*Stock Advisor returns as of September 5, 2017</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/TMFmd19/info.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Matthew DiLallo Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Enbridge. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7697306e-a2c7-11e7-ab1d-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
| 7,895 |
<p>(Reuters) – U.S. companies’ borrowing to spend on capital investment rose 1.3 percent in August from a year earlier, the Equipment Leasing and Finance Association (ELFA) said.</p>
<p>Companies signed up for $7.8 billion in new loans, leases and lines of credit last month, up from $7.7 billion a year earlier. However, their borrowing fell 1.3 percent from July.</p>
<p>“Despite Washington lawmakers’ inability — at least, thus far — to agree on necessary changes in tax and financial services policy, U.S. business owners appear optimistic about the health of the economy,” ELFA President and CEO Ralph Petta said.</p>
<p>Washington-based ELFA, a trade association that reports economic activity for the $1 trillion equipment finance sector, said credit approvals totaled 75.3 percent in August, down slightly from 76.0 percent in July.</p>
<p>ELFA’s leasing and finance index measures the volume of commercial equipment financed in the United States. It is designed to complement the U.S. Commerce Department’s durable goods orders report, which it typically precedes by a few days.</p>
<p>ELFA’s index is based on a survey of 25 members that include Bank of America Corp (N:), BB&amp;T Corp (N:), CIT Group Inc (N:) and the financing affiliates or subsidiaries of Caterpillar Inc (N:), Deere &amp; Co (N:), Verizon Communications Inc (N:), Siemens AG (DE:), Canon Inc (T:) and Volvo AB (ST:).</p>
<p>The Equipment Leasing &amp; Finance Foundation, ELFA’s non-profit affiliate, said its confidence index was 63.7 for September, down from 64.4 in August.</p>
<p>A reading of above 50 indicates a positive outlook.</p>
<p />
<p>Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.</p>
|
U.S. business borrowing for equipment up 1.3 percent in August: ELFA
| false |
https://newsline.com/u-s-business-borrowing-for-equipment-up-1-3-percent-in-august-elfa/
|
2017-09-25
| 1right-center
|
U.S. business borrowing for equipment up 1.3 percent in August: ELFA
<p>(Reuters) – U.S. companies’ borrowing to spend on capital investment rose 1.3 percent in August from a year earlier, the Equipment Leasing and Finance Association (ELFA) said.</p>
<p>Companies signed up for $7.8 billion in new loans, leases and lines of credit last month, up from $7.7 billion a year earlier. However, their borrowing fell 1.3 percent from July.</p>
<p>“Despite Washington lawmakers’ inability — at least, thus far — to agree on necessary changes in tax and financial services policy, U.S. business owners appear optimistic about the health of the economy,” ELFA President and CEO Ralph Petta said.</p>
<p>Washington-based ELFA, a trade association that reports economic activity for the $1 trillion equipment finance sector, said credit approvals totaled 75.3 percent in August, down slightly from 76.0 percent in July.</p>
<p>ELFA’s leasing and finance index measures the volume of commercial equipment financed in the United States. It is designed to complement the U.S. Commerce Department’s durable goods orders report, which it typically precedes by a few days.</p>
<p>ELFA’s index is based on a survey of 25 members that include Bank of America Corp (N:), BB&amp;T Corp (N:), CIT Group Inc (N:) and the financing affiliates or subsidiaries of Caterpillar Inc (N:), Deere &amp; Co (N:), Verizon Communications Inc (N:), Siemens AG (DE:), Canon Inc (T:) and Volvo AB (ST:).</p>
<p>The Equipment Leasing &amp; Finance Foundation, ELFA’s non-profit affiliate, said its confidence index was 63.7 for September, down from 64.4 in August.</p>
<p>A reading of above 50 indicates a positive outlook.</p>
<p />
<p>Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.</p>
| 7,896 |
<p />
<p>At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insights-and-innovation/ces-2014-ciscos-internet-of-everything-vision/d/d-id/1113407" type="external">Cisco chief executive John Chambers Opens a New Window.</a> said the Internet of Things (IoT) will generate $19 trillion in revenue by 2020. He went on to say, “It will be bigger than anything that’s ever been done in high tech.”</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>This from a CEO and a company desperately struggling to stay relevant.</p>
<p>Not to be a buzz kill, but overhyping the next big thing isn’t exactly new to the tech industry or the media that covers it. Unless your 3-D virtual reality avatar is reading this on a superconducting computer in <a href="http://secondlife.com" type="external">Second Life Opens a New Window.</a>, you know exactly what I’m talking about.</p>
<p>The irony is that all the real innovations that changed our lives sort of crept up on us.</p>
<p>Pundits thought Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) was crazy to get into the dog-eat-dog cell phone business. In 2007, <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-should-pull-the-plug-on-the-iphone" type="external">John Dvorak Opens a New Window.</a> wrote, “Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone. There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive.”</p>
<p>Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were told by dozens of VCs that a standalone Web-search company wouldn’t go anywhere. And nobody saw word processing, personal computers, the Internet, or social media coming. And I mean nobody.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>So forgive me if I dispense with all the wild fish tales of refrigerators that know they’re about to run out of milk and eggs and order their own food, sensor-laden ingestible nanobots that can diagnose and cure what ails you, and prescient cities that know when disaster is about to strike.</p>
<p>Yes, that is all plausible – eventually – but for once I thought I’d keep it real and tell you what goodies the IoT might bring before you’re too old for it to matter. First, it helps to know what the heck we’re talking about.</p>
<p>What is it and why do we need it?</p>
<p>The best way to understand the IoT is by comparing it to something we all know. The Internet is a web of interconnected networks (thus inter-net) that allows people to communicate information to others. And each node on the network has a smart router that sends and receives information.</p>
<p>Likewise, the IoT is a web of interconnected sensor networks that automatically communicate data to people and computers in the cloud. Each node on the network consists of a tiny smart device with built-in sensors and circuitry for monitoring, communicating, and controlling just about anything in the physical world.</p>
<p>Why do we need it? The world is now full of complex machines and systems. It’s too expensive and time consuming to manage them efficiently. Instead, we’ll have millions of smart sensor networks that allow us to virtually and automatically monitor and control systems, machines, resources, and assets.</p>
<p>This is actually nothing new. Japan has had smart highways with displays that warn drivers of congestion and offer alternative routes since the 1980s. Modern cars and engines are full of smart-sensor networks. We already have loads of smart factories, buildings, and homes. And our cities and energy grids are getting smarter all the time.</p>
<p>Going forward, there are three major categories that I think will hit closer to home and impact your lives in material ways that may prove to make you safer, healthier, and more effective at your jobs.</p>
<p>Automotive Safety</p>
<p>Add a few sensor networks and you can significantly reduce the number and severity of auto accidents by alerting drivers to potentially dangerous situations such as collisions, tire blowouts, and brake failures before they happen. We can’t entirely eliminate accidents but we can easily make cars much smarter and safer.</p>
<p>Sure, it will initially add cost, but that will come down in time. We went through the same learning curve with power steering and brakes, fuel injection, airbags, and anti-lock brakes. Today’s cars are already full of embedded microprocessors, sensors, and networks. They can handle a few more.</p>
<p>Personal Health Care</p>
<p>Considering how full of technology our home and work lives have become, modern health care is still in the dark ages. While there are thousands of third-party applications, electronic devices, and large-scale software systems, none of them talk to each other. It’s a fragmented mess that’s long overdue for integration and de facto standardization.</p>
<p>Enter Apple. The tech giant is readying the <a href="" type="internal">launch of HealthKit</a>, a personal health information system that will use sensors in <a href="" type="internal">Apple’s iWatch</a> and other devices to monitor blood pressure, pulse, weight and other data and upload it to the cloud. Apple is reportedly working with a host of health-care providers and software makers to integrate HealthKit with their systems and apps.</p>
<p>Whether that effort is successful or not, it is only a matter of time before the health-care industry joins the rest of us in the 21st century … if federal and state regulators don’t screw it up.</p>
<p>Enterprise Business</p>
<p>At the risk of overhyping Apple: While its recently announced <a href="" type="internal">enterprise pact with IBM</a> does face significant challenges, there is enormous potential to put big data analytics into the hands of workers and decision-makers across a wide range of markets and industries such as retail, insurance, banking, and airlines.</p>
<p>The two companies are already working to co-develop hundreds of apps for vertical markets and IBM (NYSE:IBM) has said it will deploy 100,000 consultants and salespeople to accelerate the penetration of iOS devices such as iPad and iPhone – which IBM will resell – into the enterprise.</p>
<p>Given the size of this joint effort by two technology giants, I think it’s safe to say that many of you will have a lot more data to make smart decisions at your fingertips in the not-too-distant future.</p>
<p>During his CES address, Cisco’s Chambers added a prophecy, "If you look back a decade from today at the impact of the Internet of Everything, I predict you will see it will be five to 10 times more impactful than the whole Internet has been today.”</p>
<p>Hyperbole if I’ve heard it, especially considering that much of the impact of the IoT will be transparent to you. Still, if it makes you safer, healthier, and better at your job, who am I to question it?</p>
|
What the Internet of Things Means to You
| true |
http://foxbusiness.com/features/2014/08/14/what-internet-things-means-to.html
|
2016-03-04
| 0right
|
What the Internet of Things Means to You
<p />
<p>At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insights-and-innovation/ces-2014-ciscos-internet-of-everything-vision/d/d-id/1113407" type="external">Cisco chief executive John Chambers Opens a New Window.</a> said the Internet of Things (IoT) will generate $19 trillion in revenue by 2020. He went on to say, “It will be bigger than anything that’s ever been done in high tech.”</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>This from a CEO and a company desperately struggling to stay relevant.</p>
<p>Not to be a buzz kill, but overhyping the next big thing isn’t exactly new to the tech industry or the media that covers it. Unless your 3-D virtual reality avatar is reading this on a superconducting computer in <a href="http://secondlife.com" type="external">Second Life Opens a New Window.</a>, you know exactly what I’m talking about.</p>
<p>The irony is that all the real innovations that changed our lives sort of crept up on us.</p>
<p>Pundits thought Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) was crazy to get into the dog-eat-dog cell phone business. In 2007, <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-should-pull-the-plug-on-the-iphone" type="external">John Dvorak Opens a New Window.</a> wrote, “Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone. There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive.”</p>
<p>Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were told by dozens of VCs that a standalone Web-search company wouldn’t go anywhere. And nobody saw word processing, personal computers, the Internet, or social media coming. And I mean nobody.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>So forgive me if I dispense with all the wild fish tales of refrigerators that know they’re about to run out of milk and eggs and order their own food, sensor-laden ingestible nanobots that can diagnose and cure what ails you, and prescient cities that know when disaster is about to strike.</p>
<p>Yes, that is all plausible – eventually – but for once I thought I’d keep it real and tell you what goodies the IoT might bring before you’re too old for it to matter. First, it helps to know what the heck we’re talking about.</p>
<p>What is it and why do we need it?</p>
<p>The best way to understand the IoT is by comparing it to something we all know. The Internet is a web of interconnected networks (thus inter-net) that allows people to communicate information to others. And each node on the network has a smart router that sends and receives information.</p>
<p>Likewise, the IoT is a web of interconnected sensor networks that automatically communicate data to people and computers in the cloud. Each node on the network consists of a tiny smart device with built-in sensors and circuitry for monitoring, communicating, and controlling just about anything in the physical world.</p>
<p>Why do we need it? The world is now full of complex machines and systems. It’s too expensive and time consuming to manage them efficiently. Instead, we’ll have millions of smart sensor networks that allow us to virtually and automatically monitor and control systems, machines, resources, and assets.</p>
<p>This is actually nothing new. Japan has had smart highways with displays that warn drivers of congestion and offer alternative routes since the 1980s. Modern cars and engines are full of smart-sensor networks. We already have loads of smart factories, buildings, and homes. And our cities and energy grids are getting smarter all the time.</p>
<p>Going forward, there are three major categories that I think will hit closer to home and impact your lives in material ways that may prove to make you safer, healthier, and more effective at your jobs.</p>
<p>Automotive Safety</p>
<p>Add a few sensor networks and you can significantly reduce the number and severity of auto accidents by alerting drivers to potentially dangerous situations such as collisions, tire blowouts, and brake failures before they happen. We can’t entirely eliminate accidents but we can easily make cars much smarter and safer.</p>
<p>Sure, it will initially add cost, but that will come down in time. We went through the same learning curve with power steering and brakes, fuel injection, airbags, and anti-lock brakes. Today’s cars are already full of embedded microprocessors, sensors, and networks. They can handle a few more.</p>
<p>Personal Health Care</p>
<p>Considering how full of technology our home and work lives have become, modern health care is still in the dark ages. While there are thousands of third-party applications, electronic devices, and large-scale software systems, none of them talk to each other. It’s a fragmented mess that’s long overdue for integration and de facto standardization.</p>
<p>Enter Apple. The tech giant is readying the <a href="" type="internal">launch of HealthKit</a>, a personal health information system that will use sensors in <a href="" type="internal">Apple’s iWatch</a> and other devices to monitor blood pressure, pulse, weight and other data and upload it to the cloud. Apple is reportedly working with a host of health-care providers and software makers to integrate HealthKit with their systems and apps.</p>
<p>Whether that effort is successful or not, it is only a matter of time before the health-care industry joins the rest of us in the 21st century … if federal and state regulators don’t screw it up.</p>
<p>Enterprise Business</p>
<p>At the risk of overhyping Apple: While its recently announced <a href="" type="internal">enterprise pact with IBM</a> does face significant challenges, there is enormous potential to put big data analytics into the hands of workers and decision-makers across a wide range of markets and industries such as retail, insurance, banking, and airlines.</p>
<p>The two companies are already working to co-develop hundreds of apps for vertical markets and IBM (NYSE:IBM) has said it will deploy 100,000 consultants and salespeople to accelerate the penetration of iOS devices such as iPad and iPhone – which IBM will resell – into the enterprise.</p>
<p>Given the size of this joint effort by two technology giants, I think it’s safe to say that many of you will have a lot more data to make smart decisions at your fingertips in the not-too-distant future.</p>
<p>During his CES address, Cisco’s Chambers added a prophecy, "If you look back a decade from today at the impact of the Internet of Everything, I predict you will see it will be five to 10 times more impactful than the whole Internet has been today.”</p>
<p>Hyperbole if I’ve heard it, especially considering that much of the impact of the IoT will be transparent to you. Still, if it makes you safer, healthier, and better at your job, who am I to question it?</p>
| 7,897 |
<p>Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, is the author of the bestselling <a href="" type="internal">Blowback</a> and <a href="" type="internal">The Sorrows of Empire</a>. He appeared in the 2005 prizewinning documentary film Why We Fight. He lives near San Diego.</p>
<p>Kreisler: Once upon a time you&#160; called yourself a “spear-carrier for the empire.”</p>
<p>Johnson: “—for the empire,” yes, yes.</p>
<p>That’s the prologue to <a href="" type="internal">Blowback</a>; I was a consultant to the Office of National Estimates of the CIA during the time of the Vietnam War. But what caused me to change my mind and to rethink these issues? Two things: one analytical, one concrete. The first was the demise of the Soviet Union. I expected much more from the United States in the way of a peace dividend. I believe that Russia today is not the former Soviet Union by any means. It’s a much smaller place. I would have expected that as a tradition in the United States, we would have demobilized much more radically. We would have rethought more seriously our role in the world, brought home troops in places like Okinawa. Instead, we did every thing in our power to shore up the Cold War structures in East Asia, in Latin America. The search for new enemies began. That’s the neoconservatives. I was shocked, actually, by this. Did this mean that the Cold War was a cover for something deeper, for an American imperial project that had been in the works since World War II? I began to believe that this is the case.</p>
<p>The second thing that led me to write Blowback in the late 1990s was something concrete. Okinawa prefecture, which is Japan’s southernmost prefecture, is the poorest place in Japan, the equivalent of Puerto Rico; it’s always been discriminated against by the Japanese since they seized it at the end of the nineteenth century. The governor at that time, Masahide Ota, is a former professor. He invited me to Okinawa in February of 1996 to give a speech to his associates in light of what had happened on September 4, 1995, when two marines and a sailor from Camp Hansen in cen-tral Okinawa abducted, beat, and raped a twelve-year-old girl. It led to the biggest single demonstration against the United States since the Security Treaty was signed. I had not been in Okinawa before. Back during the Korean War, when I was in the navy, I took the ship in to what was then called Buckner Bay, now Nakagusuku Bay, and dropped anchor. Other officers on board went ashore. I took a look at the place through the glasses, and I thought, “This is not for me.” But we were anchored in the most beautiful lagoon, so I went swimming around the ship. So I had been in Okinawan waters, but I’d never touched ground before.</p>
<p>I have to say I was shocked to see the impact of thirty-eight American bases located on an island smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands, with 1.3 million people living cheek-by-jowl with warplanes . . . the Third Marine Division is based there; the only marine division we have outside the country. And I began to investigate the issues.</p>
<p>The reaction to the rape of 1995 from, for example, General Richard Meyers, who became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—he was then head of U.S. forces in Japan—and all he said was that these were just three bad apples, a tragic incident, unbelievably exceptional. After research, you discover that the rate of sexually violent crimes committed by our troops in Okinawa leading to court-martial is two per month! This was not an exceptional incident, expect for the fact that the child was so young and, differing from many Okinawan women who would not come forward after being raped, she was not fully socialized and she wanted to get even. This led to the creation of a quite powerful organization that I greatly admire called Okinawan Women Act Against Military Violence.</p>
<p>I began to research Okinawa, and my first impulse—again, as a defensive American imperialist—was that Okinawa was exceptional: it’s off the beaten track, the press never goes there, the military is comfortable. I discovered over time, looking at these kinds of bases and other places around the world, that there’s nothing exceptional about it. It’s typical. Maybe the concentration is a little greater than it is elsewhere, but the record of environmental damage, sexual crimes, bar brawls, drunken driving, one thing after another, these all occur in the 725 bases (the Department of Defense–acknowledged number; the real number is actually considerably larger than that) that we have in other people’s countries. That led me to write Blowback, first as a warning.</p>
<p>But it also led you to publish this book <a href="" type="internal">Okinawa: Cold War Island</a>, edited by you, which looks at the various aspects of this. And what you’re saying is, it’s not only the social cost; it has impinged on the people of Okinawa’s right to have some kind of democratic existence.</p>
<p>Essentially, Okinawa is used as a dumping ground by the Japanese. They want the security treaty, but they don’t want American troops anywhere near mainland Japanese. So they put them down, as I say, in the equivalent of Puerto Rico, and the conditions fester. The governor of Okinawa today, a very considerably con servative man, Mr. Inamine, is still, nonetheless, always saying, “We’re living on the side of a volcano. You can hear the magma down there. It may blow. And when it does, it’ll have the same effect on your empire that the breaching of the Berlin Wall had on the Soviet empire.”</p>
<p>In one of your books you say that as a consultant or an adviser to the CIA, you were not impressed with the reports and analysis that you were viewing. So we were not in a position to understand what was going on, just as a matter of the information we were getting.</p>
<p>This is what blowback means. “Blowback” is a CIA term that means retaliation, or payback. It was first used in the after-action report on our first clandestine overthrow of a foreign government, the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, when, for the sake of the British Petroleum Company, we claimed he was a Communist when he just didn’t want the British to keep stealing Iranian resources. In the report, which was finally declassifi ed in 2000, the CIA says, “We should expect some blowback from what we have done here.” This was the first model clandestine operation.</p>
<p>By blowback we do not mean just the unintended conse-quences of events. We mean unintended consequences of events that were kept secret from the American public, so that when the retaliation comes, the public has no way to put it into context. Just as after 9/11, you have the president saying, “Why do they hate us?” The people on the receiving end know full well that they hate us because of what was done to them. It’s the American public that is in the dark on that subject.</p>
<p>I conceived of Blowback—written in 1999, published in 2000—as a warning to the American public. It was: you should expect retaliation from the people on the receiving end of now innumerable clandestine activities, including the biggest one of all, the recruiting, arming, and putting into combat of mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s who are the main recruiting group for Al Qaeda today.</p>
<p>The warning was not heeded. The book, when it was first published, was more or less ignored in this country. It was very nicely received in Germany, and in Japan, and in Italy, in places like that. But then after 9/11, when all of a sudden, inattentive Americans were mobilized to seek, at least on an emergency basis, some understanding of what they were into, it became a best-seller.</p>
<p>You’re raising a very important point, which is that our policies often lack an understanding of our own actions. But also—</p>
<p>Not just lack of understanding. They’ve been kept secret. That’s why the subtitle of <a href="" type="internal">The Sorrows of Empire</a> is “Militarism, Secrecy”—I want to stress secrecy and say a word or two about that in a moment—“and the End of the Republic.”</p>
<p>Two days after 9/11, when the president addressed Congress and asked rhetorically, “Why do they hate us?” my response was: “The people immediately around you are the ones who could tell you with precision why. That is, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage”—these are the&#160; people who ran the largest clandestine operation we ever carried out, in Afghanistan in the 1980s.</p>
<p>“They could explain to you, in detail, why.” Once the Soviet Union had been expelled in 1989 from Afghanistan and we simply walked away from it, the people we had recruited, trained, and equipped with things like Stinger missiles—the first time the Stinger was ever used against a Soviet gunship was in Afghanistan. Once we had achieved our purposes, we just walked away, and these highly armed young men felt, “We’ve been used. We were cannon fodder in a little exercise in the Cold War, in a bipolar competition between the Soviet Union and the United States.” Then we compounded that with further mistakes like placing infidel troops (our troops) in Saudi Arabia after 1991, which was insulting to any number of Saudi Arabians, who believe that they are responsible for the most sacred sites in Islam: Mecca and Medina. Osama bin Laden is so typical of the kinds of figures in our history, like Manuel Noriega or Saddam Hussein, who were close allies of ours at one time. We know Saddam at one time had weapons of mass destruction because we have the receipts!</p>
<p>Osama bin Laden comes from a wealthy family of a construction empire in Saudi Arabia. He’s the sort of person that you would more likely expect to see on the ski slopes of Gstaad with a Swiss girl on his arm, or as a houseguest in Kennebunkport with the first President Bush and the notorious “petroleum complex” of America. But he was insulted. He had been in Afghanistan. The base where he trained mujahideen, at Khost, the CIA built for him. It was one of the few times we knew where to hit. Because we built it, we did know where they were. He then was disgusted with us and certainly gave us fair warning in the attack in 1993 on the World Trade Center.</p>
<p>Talk a little about what militarism is, and what imperialism is.</p>
<p>What I want to introduce here is what I call the “base world.” According to the “Base Structure Report”, an annual report of the Department of Defense, in the year 2002 we had 725 bases in other people’s countries. Actually, that number understates in that it does not include any of the espionage bases of the National Security Agency, such as RAF Menwith Hill in Yorkshire.</p>
<p>So these are bases where we have listening devices?</p>
<p>These are huge bases. Menwith Hill downloads&#160; every single e-mail, telephone call, and fax between Europe and the United States every day and puts them into massive computers where dictionaries then read them out. There are hundreds of these. The official Base Structure Report also&#160; doesn’t include any of the main bases in England disguised as Royal Air Force bases even though there are no Britons on them. It&#160; doesn’t include any of the bases in Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan, any of the bases in Afghanistan, the four bases that are, as we talk, being built in Iraq. They put down one major marine base for Okinawa—there are ten—and things like that. So there is a lot of misleading information in it, but it’s enough to say 700 looks like a pretty good number, whereas it’s probably around 1,000.</p>
<p>The base world is secret. Americans don’t know anything about it. The Congress&#160; doesn’t do oversight on it. You must remember, 40 percent of the defense budget is black. No congressman can see it. All of the intelligence budgets are black.</p>
<p>No public discussion.</p>
<p>In violation of the first article of the Constitution that says, “The American public shall be given, annually, a report on how their tax money was spent.” That has not been true in the United States since the Manhattan Project of World War II, even though it is the clause that gives Congress the power of the purse, the power to supervise.</p>
<p>The base world is complex. It has its own airline. It has 234 golf courses around the world. It has something like seventy Lear Jet luxury airplanes to fly generals and admirals to the golf courses, to the armed forces ski resort at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps. Inside the bases, the military does every thing in its power to make them look like Little America.</p>
<p>There are large numbers of women in the armed forces to-day, [yet] you can’t get an abortion at a military hospital abroad. Sexual assaults are not at all uncommon in the armed forces. If you were a young woman in the armed forces today and you were based in Iraq, and you woke up one morning and found yourself pregnant, you have no choice but to go on the open market in Baghdad looking for an abortion, which is not a very happy thought.</p>
<p>Militarism is not defense of the country. By milita rism, I mean corporate interest in a military way of life. It derives above all from the fact that service in the armed forces is, today, not an obligation of citizenship. It is a career choice. It has been since 1973. I thought it was wonderful when PFC Jessica Lynch, who was wounded at Nasiriyah, was asked by the press, “Why did you join the Army?” She said, “I come from Palestine, West Virginia; I couldn’t get a job at Wal-Mart.” She said, “I joined the Army to get out of Palestine, West Virginia”—a perfectly logical answer on her part. And it’s true of a great many people in the ranks to-day. They do not expect to be shot at. That’s one of the points you should understand; it’s a career choice, like a kid deciding to work his way up to Berkeley by going through a community col-lege, and a state college, and then transferring in at the last minute or something like that.</p>
<p>Standing behind it is the military-industrial complex. We must, once again, bear in mind the powerful warnings of probably the two most prominent generals in our history. George Washington, in his farewell address, warns about the threat of standing armies to liberty, and particularly republican liberty. He was not an isolationist; he was talking about what moves power toward the imperial presidency,&#160; toward the state. It requires more taxes. Everything else which he said has come true. The other, perhaps more famous one was Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address, where he invented the phrase “military-industrial complex.” We now know that he intended to say “military-industrial-congressional complex,” but he was advised not to go that far.</p>
<p>What interests me here is that we’re talking about something that looks very much like the end of the Roman Republic—which was, in many ways, a model for our own republic—and its conversion into a military dictatorship called the Roman Empire as the troops began to take over. The kind of figure that the Roman Republic began to look for was a military populist; of course, the most obvious example was Julius Caesar. But after Caesar’s assassination in 44B.C., the young Octavian becomes the “god” Augustus Caesar.</p>
<p>I’m not trying to be a sensationalist, but I actually do worry about the future of the United States; whether, in fact, we are tending in the same path as the former Soviet Union, with domestic, ideological rigidity in our economic institutions, im perial overstretch—that’s what we’re talking about here—the belief that we have to be every where at all times. We have always been a richer place than Russia was, so it will take longer. But we’re overextended. We can’t afford it.</p>
<p>One of my four “sorrows of empire” at the end of the book is bankruptcy. The military is not productive. They do provide certain kinds of jobs, as you discover in the United States whenever you try and close a military base—no matter how con servative or liberal your congressional representatives are, they will go mad to try and keep it open, keep it functioning. And the military-industrial complex is very clever in making sure that the building of a B-2 bomber is spread around the country; it is not all located at Northrop in El Segundo, California.</p>
<p>I have grave difficulty believing that that any president can bring under control the Pentagon, the secret intelligence agencies, the military-industrial complex. The Department of Defense is not, today, a department of defense. It’s an alternative seat of government on the south bank of the Potomac River. And, typical of militarism, it’s expanding into many, many other areas in our life that we have, in our traditional political philosophy, reserved for civilians. [For example,] domestic policing:&#160; they’re slowly expanding into that.</p>
<p>Probably the most severe competition in our government today is between the Special Forces in the DOD and the CIA over who runs clandestine operations.</p>
<p>What you’re really saying is that, lo and behold, we’ve created an empire of bases, a different kind of empire, and that it’s basically changing who we are and the way our government operates.</p>
<p>The right phrase is exactly what you said: “lo and behold.” It reminds you of the Roman Republic, which existed in its final form with very considerable rights for Roman citizens, much like ours, for about two centuries. James Madison and others, in writing the defense of the Constitution in the Federalist Papers, signed their name “Publius.” Well, who is Publius? He was the first Roman consul. That is where the whole world of term limits, of separation of powers, things like that, [began].</p>
<p>Yet by the end of the first century B.C., Rome had seemingly “inadvertently” acquired an empire that surrounded the entire Mediterranean Sea. They then discovered that the inescapable accompaniment, the Siamese twin of imperialism, is militarism. You start needing standing armies. You start having men who are demobilized after having spent their entire lives in the military. It’s expensive to pay them. You have to provide them, in the Roman Empire, with farms or things of this sort. They become irritated with the state. And then along comes a military populist, a figure who says, “I understand your problems. I will represent your interests against the Roman Senate. The only requirement is that I become dictator for life.” Certainly, Julius Caesar is the model for this . . . Napoleon Bonaparte, Juan Perón, this is the type of figure.</p>
<p>Indeed, one wonders whether we have already crossed our Rubicon, whether we can go back. I don’t know.</p>
<p>In your indictment of what we are becoming, or maybe have become, you go through a list. We can’t do all of it; we don’t have enough time. But, essentially, civilians who think in military ways now making decisions, the Pentagon expropriating the functions of the State Department, a policy being perceived as military policy as opposed to all of the dimensions of—</p>
<p>People around the world who meet Americans meet soldiers. That’s how we represent ourselves abroad, just as the Roman Empire represented itself abroad as the Legionaires. People have to conclude, even if they don’t come into military or armed conflict with us, that this is the way the Americans think. This is the way they represent themselves today. It’s not foreign aid any longer. It’s not our diplomats. It’s not the Fulbright program. It’s the military. It’s uniformed eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old young men and some young women.</p>
<p>As a student of Asian political economy, you wrote the classic on MITI. In the final analysis, your judgment is that we will not only suffer political but also economic bankruptcy.</p>
<p>So, what do I suggest probably will happen? I think we will stagger along under a façade of constitutional government, as we are now, until we’re overcome by bankruptcy. We are not paying our way. We’re financing it off of huge loans coming daily from our two leading creditors, Japan and China.</p>
<p>It’s a rigged system that reminds you of Herb Stein, [who], when he was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in a Republican administration, rather famously said, “Things that can’t go on forever don’t.” That’s what we’re talking about today. We’re massively indebted, we’re not manufacturing as much as we used to, we maintain our lifestyle off &#160;huge capital imports from countries that don’t mind taking a short, small beating on the exchange rates so long as they can continue to develop their own economies and supply Americans: above all, China within twenty to twenty-five years will be both the world’s largest social system and the world’s most productive social system, barring truly unforeseen developments.</p>
<p>Bankruptcy would not mean the literal end of the United States, any more than it did for Germany in 1923, or China in 1948, or Argentina just a few years ago, in 2001 and 2002. But it would certainly mean a catastrophic recession, the collapse of our stock exchange, the end of our level of living, and a vast series of new attitudes that would now be appropriate to a much poorer country. Marshall Auerbach is a financial analyst whom I admire who refers to the United States as a “Blanche Dubois economy.” Blanche Dubois, of course, was the leading character in Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, and she said, “I’ve always depended upon the kindness of strangers.” We’re also increasingly dependent on the kindness of strangers, and there are not many of them left who care, any more than there were for Blanche. I suspect if the United States did start to go down, it would not elicit any more tears than the collapse of the Soviet Union did.</p>
<p>Do you see a configuration of external power, Japan, China, the EU, that will be a balancer that might not just confront us but might help guide us to changes that would be good for us and them?</p>
<p>Once you go down the path of empire, you inevitably start a process of overstretch, of tendencies toward bankruptcy, and, in the rest of the world, a tendency toward the uniting of people who are opposed to your im perialism simply on grounds that it’s yours, but maybe also on the grounds that you’re incompetent at it. There was a time when the rest of the world did trust the United States a good deal as a result of the Marshall Plan, foreign aid, things of this sort. They probably trusted it more than they should have. Today that is almost entirely dissipated At some point, we must either reduce our empire of bases from 737 to maybe 37—although I’d just as soon get rid of all of them. If we don’t start doing that, then we will go the way of the former Soviet Union.</p>
<p>HARRY KREISLER’s interview with Chalmers Johnson is taken from his new book <a href="" type="internal">Political Awakenings, just published by the New Press, printed here by permission</a> of the publisher.</p>
<p>Copyright 2010 HARRY KREISLER.</p>
<p><a href="http://greentags.bigcartel.com/" type="external">WORDS THAT STICK</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
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Talking With Chalmers Johnson
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https://counterpunch.org/2010/05/06/talking-with-chalmers-johnson/
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2010-05-06
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Talking With Chalmers Johnson
<p>Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, is the author of the bestselling <a href="" type="internal">Blowback</a> and <a href="" type="internal">The Sorrows of Empire</a>. He appeared in the 2005 prizewinning documentary film Why We Fight. He lives near San Diego.</p>
<p>Kreisler: Once upon a time you&#160; called yourself a “spear-carrier for the empire.”</p>
<p>Johnson: “—for the empire,” yes, yes.</p>
<p>That’s the prologue to <a href="" type="internal">Blowback</a>; I was a consultant to the Office of National Estimates of the CIA during the time of the Vietnam War. But what caused me to change my mind and to rethink these issues? Two things: one analytical, one concrete. The first was the demise of the Soviet Union. I expected much more from the United States in the way of a peace dividend. I believe that Russia today is not the former Soviet Union by any means. It’s a much smaller place. I would have expected that as a tradition in the United States, we would have demobilized much more radically. We would have rethought more seriously our role in the world, brought home troops in places like Okinawa. Instead, we did every thing in our power to shore up the Cold War structures in East Asia, in Latin America. The search for new enemies began. That’s the neoconservatives. I was shocked, actually, by this. Did this mean that the Cold War was a cover for something deeper, for an American imperial project that had been in the works since World War II? I began to believe that this is the case.</p>
<p>The second thing that led me to write Blowback in the late 1990s was something concrete. Okinawa prefecture, which is Japan’s southernmost prefecture, is the poorest place in Japan, the equivalent of Puerto Rico; it’s always been discriminated against by the Japanese since they seized it at the end of the nineteenth century. The governor at that time, Masahide Ota, is a former professor. He invited me to Okinawa in February of 1996 to give a speech to his associates in light of what had happened on September 4, 1995, when two marines and a sailor from Camp Hansen in cen-tral Okinawa abducted, beat, and raped a twelve-year-old girl. It led to the biggest single demonstration against the United States since the Security Treaty was signed. I had not been in Okinawa before. Back during the Korean War, when I was in the navy, I took the ship in to what was then called Buckner Bay, now Nakagusuku Bay, and dropped anchor. Other officers on board went ashore. I took a look at the place through the glasses, and I thought, “This is not for me.” But we were anchored in the most beautiful lagoon, so I went swimming around the ship. So I had been in Okinawan waters, but I’d never touched ground before.</p>
<p>I have to say I was shocked to see the impact of thirty-eight American bases located on an island smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands, with 1.3 million people living cheek-by-jowl with warplanes . . . the Third Marine Division is based there; the only marine division we have outside the country. And I began to investigate the issues.</p>
<p>The reaction to the rape of 1995 from, for example, General Richard Meyers, who became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—he was then head of U.S. forces in Japan—and all he said was that these were just three bad apples, a tragic incident, unbelievably exceptional. After research, you discover that the rate of sexually violent crimes committed by our troops in Okinawa leading to court-martial is two per month! This was not an exceptional incident, expect for the fact that the child was so young and, differing from many Okinawan women who would not come forward after being raped, she was not fully socialized and she wanted to get even. This led to the creation of a quite powerful organization that I greatly admire called Okinawan Women Act Against Military Violence.</p>
<p>I began to research Okinawa, and my first impulse—again, as a defensive American imperialist—was that Okinawa was exceptional: it’s off the beaten track, the press never goes there, the military is comfortable. I discovered over time, looking at these kinds of bases and other places around the world, that there’s nothing exceptional about it. It’s typical. Maybe the concentration is a little greater than it is elsewhere, but the record of environmental damage, sexual crimes, bar brawls, drunken driving, one thing after another, these all occur in the 725 bases (the Department of Defense–acknowledged number; the real number is actually considerably larger than that) that we have in other people’s countries. That led me to write Blowback, first as a warning.</p>
<p>But it also led you to publish this book <a href="" type="internal">Okinawa: Cold War Island</a>, edited by you, which looks at the various aspects of this. And what you’re saying is, it’s not only the social cost; it has impinged on the people of Okinawa’s right to have some kind of democratic existence.</p>
<p>Essentially, Okinawa is used as a dumping ground by the Japanese. They want the security treaty, but they don’t want American troops anywhere near mainland Japanese. So they put them down, as I say, in the equivalent of Puerto Rico, and the conditions fester. The governor of Okinawa today, a very considerably con servative man, Mr. Inamine, is still, nonetheless, always saying, “We’re living on the side of a volcano. You can hear the magma down there. It may blow. And when it does, it’ll have the same effect on your empire that the breaching of the Berlin Wall had on the Soviet empire.”</p>
<p>In one of your books you say that as a consultant or an adviser to the CIA, you were not impressed with the reports and analysis that you were viewing. So we were not in a position to understand what was going on, just as a matter of the information we were getting.</p>
<p>This is what blowback means. “Blowback” is a CIA term that means retaliation, or payback. It was first used in the after-action report on our first clandestine overthrow of a foreign government, the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, when, for the sake of the British Petroleum Company, we claimed he was a Communist when he just didn’t want the British to keep stealing Iranian resources. In the report, which was finally declassifi ed in 2000, the CIA says, “We should expect some blowback from what we have done here.” This was the first model clandestine operation.</p>
<p>By blowback we do not mean just the unintended conse-quences of events. We mean unintended consequences of events that were kept secret from the American public, so that when the retaliation comes, the public has no way to put it into context. Just as after 9/11, you have the president saying, “Why do they hate us?” The people on the receiving end know full well that they hate us because of what was done to them. It’s the American public that is in the dark on that subject.</p>
<p>I conceived of Blowback—written in 1999, published in 2000—as a warning to the American public. It was: you should expect retaliation from the people on the receiving end of now innumerable clandestine activities, including the biggest one of all, the recruiting, arming, and putting into combat of mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s who are the main recruiting group for Al Qaeda today.</p>
<p>The warning was not heeded. The book, when it was first published, was more or less ignored in this country. It was very nicely received in Germany, and in Japan, and in Italy, in places like that. But then after 9/11, when all of a sudden, inattentive Americans were mobilized to seek, at least on an emergency basis, some understanding of what they were into, it became a best-seller.</p>
<p>You’re raising a very important point, which is that our policies often lack an understanding of our own actions. But also—</p>
<p>Not just lack of understanding. They’ve been kept secret. That’s why the subtitle of <a href="" type="internal">The Sorrows of Empire</a> is “Militarism, Secrecy”—I want to stress secrecy and say a word or two about that in a moment—“and the End of the Republic.”</p>
<p>Two days after 9/11, when the president addressed Congress and asked rhetorically, “Why do they hate us?” my response was: “The people immediately around you are the ones who could tell you with precision why. That is, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage”—these are the&#160; people who ran the largest clandestine operation we ever carried out, in Afghanistan in the 1980s.</p>
<p>“They could explain to you, in detail, why.” Once the Soviet Union had been expelled in 1989 from Afghanistan and we simply walked away from it, the people we had recruited, trained, and equipped with things like Stinger missiles—the first time the Stinger was ever used against a Soviet gunship was in Afghanistan. Once we had achieved our purposes, we just walked away, and these highly armed young men felt, “We’ve been used. We were cannon fodder in a little exercise in the Cold War, in a bipolar competition between the Soviet Union and the United States.” Then we compounded that with further mistakes like placing infidel troops (our troops) in Saudi Arabia after 1991, which was insulting to any number of Saudi Arabians, who believe that they are responsible for the most sacred sites in Islam: Mecca and Medina. Osama bin Laden is so typical of the kinds of figures in our history, like Manuel Noriega or Saddam Hussein, who were close allies of ours at one time. We know Saddam at one time had weapons of mass destruction because we have the receipts!</p>
<p>Osama bin Laden comes from a wealthy family of a construction empire in Saudi Arabia. He’s the sort of person that you would more likely expect to see on the ski slopes of Gstaad with a Swiss girl on his arm, or as a houseguest in Kennebunkport with the first President Bush and the notorious “petroleum complex” of America. But he was insulted. He had been in Afghanistan. The base where he trained mujahideen, at Khost, the CIA built for him. It was one of the few times we knew where to hit. Because we built it, we did know where they were. He then was disgusted with us and certainly gave us fair warning in the attack in 1993 on the World Trade Center.</p>
<p>Talk a little about what militarism is, and what imperialism is.</p>
<p>What I want to introduce here is what I call the “base world.” According to the “Base Structure Report”, an annual report of the Department of Defense, in the year 2002 we had 725 bases in other people’s countries. Actually, that number understates in that it does not include any of the espionage bases of the National Security Agency, such as RAF Menwith Hill in Yorkshire.</p>
<p>So these are bases where we have listening devices?</p>
<p>These are huge bases. Menwith Hill downloads&#160; every single e-mail, telephone call, and fax between Europe and the United States every day and puts them into massive computers where dictionaries then read them out. There are hundreds of these. The official Base Structure Report also&#160; doesn’t include any of the main bases in England disguised as Royal Air Force bases even though there are no Britons on them. It&#160; doesn’t include any of the bases in Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan, any of the bases in Afghanistan, the four bases that are, as we talk, being built in Iraq. They put down one major marine base for Okinawa—there are ten—and things like that. So there is a lot of misleading information in it, but it’s enough to say 700 looks like a pretty good number, whereas it’s probably around 1,000.</p>
<p>The base world is secret. Americans don’t know anything about it. The Congress&#160; doesn’t do oversight on it. You must remember, 40 percent of the defense budget is black. No congressman can see it. All of the intelligence budgets are black.</p>
<p>No public discussion.</p>
<p>In violation of the first article of the Constitution that says, “The American public shall be given, annually, a report on how their tax money was spent.” That has not been true in the United States since the Manhattan Project of World War II, even though it is the clause that gives Congress the power of the purse, the power to supervise.</p>
<p>The base world is complex. It has its own airline. It has 234 golf courses around the world. It has something like seventy Lear Jet luxury airplanes to fly generals and admirals to the golf courses, to the armed forces ski resort at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps. Inside the bases, the military does every thing in its power to make them look like Little America.</p>
<p>There are large numbers of women in the armed forces to-day, [yet] you can’t get an abortion at a military hospital abroad. Sexual assaults are not at all uncommon in the armed forces. If you were a young woman in the armed forces today and you were based in Iraq, and you woke up one morning and found yourself pregnant, you have no choice but to go on the open market in Baghdad looking for an abortion, which is not a very happy thought.</p>
<p>Militarism is not defense of the country. By milita rism, I mean corporate interest in a military way of life. It derives above all from the fact that service in the armed forces is, today, not an obligation of citizenship. It is a career choice. It has been since 1973. I thought it was wonderful when PFC Jessica Lynch, who was wounded at Nasiriyah, was asked by the press, “Why did you join the Army?” She said, “I come from Palestine, West Virginia; I couldn’t get a job at Wal-Mart.” She said, “I joined the Army to get out of Palestine, West Virginia”—a perfectly logical answer on her part. And it’s true of a great many people in the ranks to-day. They do not expect to be shot at. That’s one of the points you should understand; it’s a career choice, like a kid deciding to work his way up to Berkeley by going through a community col-lege, and a state college, and then transferring in at the last minute or something like that.</p>
<p>Standing behind it is the military-industrial complex. We must, once again, bear in mind the powerful warnings of probably the two most prominent generals in our history. George Washington, in his farewell address, warns about the threat of standing armies to liberty, and particularly republican liberty. He was not an isolationist; he was talking about what moves power toward the imperial presidency,&#160; toward the state. It requires more taxes. Everything else which he said has come true. The other, perhaps more famous one was Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address, where he invented the phrase “military-industrial complex.” We now know that he intended to say “military-industrial-congressional complex,” but he was advised not to go that far.</p>
<p>What interests me here is that we’re talking about something that looks very much like the end of the Roman Republic—which was, in many ways, a model for our own republic—and its conversion into a military dictatorship called the Roman Empire as the troops began to take over. The kind of figure that the Roman Republic began to look for was a military populist; of course, the most obvious example was Julius Caesar. But after Caesar’s assassination in 44B.C., the young Octavian becomes the “god” Augustus Caesar.</p>
<p>I’m not trying to be a sensationalist, but I actually do worry about the future of the United States; whether, in fact, we are tending in the same path as the former Soviet Union, with domestic, ideological rigidity in our economic institutions, im perial overstretch—that’s what we’re talking about here—the belief that we have to be every where at all times. We have always been a richer place than Russia was, so it will take longer. But we’re overextended. We can’t afford it.</p>
<p>One of my four “sorrows of empire” at the end of the book is bankruptcy. The military is not productive. They do provide certain kinds of jobs, as you discover in the United States whenever you try and close a military base—no matter how con servative or liberal your congressional representatives are, they will go mad to try and keep it open, keep it functioning. And the military-industrial complex is very clever in making sure that the building of a B-2 bomber is spread around the country; it is not all located at Northrop in El Segundo, California.</p>
<p>I have grave difficulty believing that that any president can bring under control the Pentagon, the secret intelligence agencies, the military-industrial complex. The Department of Defense is not, today, a department of defense. It’s an alternative seat of government on the south bank of the Potomac River. And, typical of militarism, it’s expanding into many, many other areas in our life that we have, in our traditional political philosophy, reserved for civilians. [For example,] domestic policing:&#160; they’re slowly expanding into that.</p>
<p>Probably the most severe competition in our government today is between the Special Forces in the DOD and the CIA over who runs clandestine operations.</p>
<p>What you’re really saying is that, lo and behold, we’ve created an empire of bases, a different kind of empire, and that it’s basically changing who we are and the way our government operates.</p>
<p>The right phrase is exactly what you said: “lo and behold.” It reminds you of the Roman Republic, which existed in its final form with very considerable rights for Roman citizens, much like ours, for about two centuries. James Madison and others, in writing the defense of the Constitution in the Federalist Papers, signed their name “Publius.” Well, who is Publius? He was the first Roman consul. That is where the whole world of term limits, of separation of powers, things like that, [began].</p>
<p>Yet by the end of the first century B.C., Rome had seemingly “inadvertently” acquired an empire that surrounded the entire Mediterranean Sea. They then discovered that the inescapable accompaniment, the Siamese twin of imperialism, is militarism. You start needing standing armies. You start having men who are demobilized after having spent their entire lives in the military. It’s expensive to pay them. You have to provide them, in the Roman Empire, with farms or things of this sort. They become irritated with the state. And then along comes a military populist, a figure who says, “I understand your problems. I will represent your interests against the Roman Senate. The only requirement is that I become dictator for life.” Certainly, Julius Caesar is the model for this . . . Napoleon Bonaparte, Juan Perón, this is the type of figure.</p>
<p>Indeed, one wonders whether we have already crossed our Rubicon, whether we can go back. I don’t know.</p>
<p>In your indictment of what we are becoming, or maybe have become, you go through a list. We can’t do all of it; we don’t have enough time. But, essentially, civilians who think in military ways now making decisions, the Pentagon expropriating the functions of the State Department, a policy being perceived as military policy as opposed to all of the dimensions of—</p>
<p>People around the world who meet Americans meet soldiers. That’s how we represent ourselves abroad, just as the Roman Empire represented itself abroad as the Legionaires. People have to conclude, even if they don’t come into military or armed conflict with us, that this is the way the Americans think. This is the way they represent themselves today. It’s not foreign aid any longer. It’s not our diplomats. It’s not the Fulbright program. It’s the military. It’s uniformed eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old young men and some young women.</p>
<p>As a student of Asian political economy, you wrote the classic on MITI. In the final analysis, your judgment is that we will not only suffer political but also economic bankruptcy.</p>
<p>So, what do I suggest probably will happen? I think we will stagger along under a façade of constitutional government, as we are now, until we’re overcome by bankruptcy. We are not paying our way. We’re financing it off of huge loans coming daily from our two leading creditors, Japan and China.</p>
<p>It’s a rigged system that reminds you of Herb Stein, [who], when he was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in a Republican administration, rather famously said, “Things that can’t go on forever don’t.” That’s what we’re talking about today. We’re massively indebted, we’re not manufacturing as much as we used to, we maintain our lifestyle off &#160;huge capital imports from countries that don’t mind taking a short, small beating on the exchange rates so long as they can continue to develop their own economies and supply Americans: above all, China within twenty to twenty-five years will be both the world’s largest social system and the world’s most productive social system, barring truly unforeseen developments.</p>
<p>Bankruptcy would not mean the literal end of the United States, any more than it did for Germany in 1923, or China in 1948, or Argentina just a few years ago, in 2001 and 2002. But it would certainly mean a catastrophic recession, the collapse of our stock exchange, the end of our level of living, and a vast series of new attitudes that would now be appropriate to a much poorer country. Marshall Auerbach is a financial analyst whom I admire who refers to the United States as a “Blanche Dubois economy.” Blanche Dubois, of course, was the leading character in Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, and she said, “I’ve always depended upon the kindness of strangers.” We’re also increasingly dependent on the kindness of strangers, and there are not many of them left who care, any more than there were for Blanche. I suspect if the United States did start to go down, it would not elicit any more tears than the collapse of the Soviet Union did.</p>
<p>Do you see a configuration of external power, Japan, China, the EU, that will be a balancer that might not just confront us but might help guide us to changes that would be good for us and them?</p>
<p>Once you go down the path of empire, you inevitably start a process of overstretch, of tendencies toward bankruptcy, and, in the rest of the world, a tendency toward the uniting of people who are opposed to your im perialism simply on grounds that it’s yours, but maybe also on the grounds that you’re incompetent at it. There was a time when the rest of the world did trust the United States a good deal as a result of the Marshall Plan, foreign aid, things of this sort. They probably trusted it more than they should have. Today that is almost entirely dissipated At some point, we must either reduce our empire of bases from 737 to maybe 37—although I’d just as soon get rid of all of them. If we don’t start doing that, then we will go the way of the former Soviet Union.</p>
<p>HARRY KREISLER’s interview with Chalmers Johnson is taken from his new book <a href="" type="internal">Political Awakenings, just published by the New Press, printed here by permission</a> of the publisher.</p>
<p>Copyright 2010 HARRY KREISLER.</p>
<p><a href="http://greentags.bigcartel.com/" type="external">WORDS THAT STICK</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
| 7,898 |
<p><a href="http://www.gettyimages.com/license/660133122" type="external">PeopleImages/Getty Images</a></p>
<p>A pharmaceutical company that manufactures the prescription&#160;painkiller fentanyl repeatedly misrepresented its product and the patients using it in order to boost sales, according to a blistering report released Wednesday by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).</p>
<p>The report, part of the senator’s&#160; <a href="" type="internal">investigation</a> into opioid manufacturers, focuses on a major pharmaceutical company called Insys, which manufactures a fentanyl spray, Subsys, for cancer patients experiencing extreme pain. The spray is extraordinarily potent stuff—this is the same synthetic compound&#160;that is illicitly produced and is now f <a href="" type="internal">ueling the opioid epidemic</a>.&#160;Before covering it, insurers require&#160;authorization from a doctor in order to make sure that the patient indeed has an active cancer diagnosis, has extreme pain as&#160;a result, and has tried other painkillers and is thus tolerant to opioids.</p>
<p>But this prior authorization process was a barrier to sales: in 2012, Insys found that the medication was covered by insurers in only about 30 percent of cases. So the company created a special unit called the Insys Reimbursement Center (IRC) that would press insurers to cover the drug—in some cases by misleading&#160;them to believe they were speaking with representatives from doctor’s offices of prospective patients. To boost the rate of authorizations, executives used sales tactics like quotas and individual bonuses.</p>
<p>IRC representatives deployed all sorts of shady techniques that ultimately led the prescription to get into the hands of patients for whom it was unsafe, according to the investigation.&#160;The company reportedly&#160;fabricated medical histories of prospective patients, falsely stating that the patients had a cancer diagnosis or extreme pain from it. Insys executives allegedly instructed employees to say they were calling “from” a doctor’s office or “on behalf” of a specific physician. The company set up a 1-800 number so that calls couldn’t be traced back to Insys.&#160;</p>
<p>According to a class action lawsuit, Insys management “was aware that only about 10% of prescriptions approved through the Prior Authorization Department were for cancer patients.”</p>
<p>All of this came to a head in the case of Sarah Fuller, a 32-year-old Subsys patient from New Jersey who died in March of 2016 “due to allegedly improper and excessive Subsys use.” Fuller suffered from a number of health conditions, including fibromyalgia and back pain, and had overcome an addiction to opioid painkillers. Despite all this, and despite her lack of a cancer diagnosis, her doctor prescribed Subsys, in addition to a number of other opioid medications. (The investigation notes that the doctor received $600 in payments from Insys in 2015.) But the medication would require Envision, a pharmacy benefits manager, to get prior authorization from the doctor ensuring that they Ms. Fuller met all the requirements for Subsys.</p>
<p>McCaskill’s team uncovered audio, embedded below, from conversations that Insys representatives had with Envision, in which the Insys rep said she was “with” the office of Fuller’s doctor. When asked if Fuller had breakthrough cancer pain, the rep said, “it’s for breakthrough pain”—pointedly declining to mention the lack of cancer.</p>
<p>Audio Player</p>
<p />
<p>According to a lawsuit filed by her parents, Fuller died “due to an adverse reaction to prescription medications.” Over 14 months, Medicare paid as much as $24,000 per month for Fuller’s prescription.</p>
<p>Insys president and CEO Saeed Matahari responded to McCaskill’s investigation&#160;saying that the company has “invested significant resources in establishing an effective compliance program,” adding that he hopes “to play a positive and productive role in helping our nation overcome the opioid epidemic.”</p>
|
These Are The Insane Tactics One Pharma Company Used to Sell An Incredibly Powerful Opioid
| true |
https://motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/insys-fentanyl-mccaskill-investigation/
|
2017-09-06
| 4left
|
These Are The Insane Tactics One Pharma Company Used to Sell An Incredibly Powerful Opioid
<p><a href="http://www.gettyimages.com/license/660133122" type="external">PeopleImages/Getty Images</a></p>
<p>A pharmaceutical company that manufactures the prescription&#160;painkiller fentanyl repeatedly misrepresented its product and the patients using it in order to boost sales, according to a blistering report released Wednesday by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).</p>
<p>The report, part of the senator’s&#160; <a href="" type="internal">investigation</a> into opioid manufacturers, focuses on a major pharmaceutical company called Insys, which manufactures a fentanyl spray, Subsys, for cancer patients experiencing extreme pain. The spray is extraordinarily potent stuff—this is the same synthetic compound&#160;that is illicitly produced and is now f <a href="" type="internal">ueling the opioid epidemic</a>.&#160;Before covering it, insurers require&#160;authorization from a doctor in order to make sure that the patient indeed has an active cancer diagnosis, has extreme pain as&#160;a result, and has tried other painkillers and is thus tolerant to opioids.</p>
<p>But this prior authorization process was a barrier to sales: in 2012, Insys found that the medication was covered by insurers in only about 30 percent of cases. So the company created a special unit called the Insys Reimbursement Center (IRC) that would press insurers to cover the drug—in some cases by misleading&#160;them to believe they were speaking with representatives from doctor’s offices of prospective patients. To boost the rate of authorizations, executives used sales tactics like quotas and individual bonuses.</p>
<p>IRC representatives deployed all sorts of shady techniques that ultimately led the prescription to get into the hands of patients for whom it was unsafe, according to the investigation.&#160;The company reportedly&#160;fabricated medical histories of prospective patients, falsely stating that the patients had a cancer diagnosis or extreme pain from it. Insys executives allegedly instructed employees to say they were calling “from” a doctor’s office or “on behalf” of a specific physician. The company set up a 1-800 number so that calls couldn’t be traced back to Insys.&#160;</p>
<p>According to a class action lawsuit, Insys management “was aware that only about 10% of prescriptions approved through the Prior Authorization Department were for cancer patients.”</p>
<p>All of this came to a head in the case of Sarah Fuller, a 32-year-old Subsys patient from New Jersey who died in March of 2016 “due to allegedly improper and excessive Subsys use.” Fuller suffered from a number of health conditions, including fibromyalgia and back pain, and had overcome an addiction to opioid painkillers. Despite all this, and despite her lack of a cancer diagnosis, her doctor prescribed Subsys, in addition to a number of other opioid medications. (The investigation notes that the doctor received $600 in payments from Insys in 2015.) But the medication would require Envision, a pharmacy benefits manager, to get prior authorization from the doctor ensuring that they Ms. Fuller met all the requirements for Subsys.</p>
<p>McCaskill’s team uncovered audio, embedded below, from conversations that Insys representatives had with Envision, in which the Insys rep said she was “with” the office of Fuller’s doctor. When asked if Fuller had breakthrough cancer pain, the rep said, “it’s for breakthrough pain”—pointedly declining to mention the lack of cancer.</p>
<p>Audio Player</p>
<p />
<p>According to a lawsuit filed by her parents, Fuller died “due to an adverse reaction to prescription medications.” Over 14 months, Medicare paid as much as $24,000 per month for Fuller’s prescription.</p>
<p>Insys president and CEO Saeed Matahari responded to McCaskill’s investigation&#160;saying that the company has “invested significant resources in establishing an effective compliance program,” adding that he hopes “to play a positive and productive role in helping our nation overcome the opioid epidemic.”</p>
| 7,899 |
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