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<p />
<p>My recent article here on Poynter Online, " <a href="" type="internal">The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism</a>," generated a lot of e-mail back to me -- comments, feedback, and tips about projects and trends I didn't mention.</p>
<p>In the spirit of the topic, I'm including the great information that people sent me on this webpage. The information significantly adds to the discussion already underway in <a href="" type="internal">the feedback area</a>. And as the citizen-journalism ethos demands, the writer of an article does not know it all; readers should be able to add what they know, in order to enhance and supplement the original piece.</p>
<p>(I decided not to rewrite the original article with reader follow-up information, because I felt that would be too confusing. Subsequent readers of the "11 Layers" article will be pointed here. Additional tips from readers will be added to this supplementary article as I receive them.)</p>
<p>(6-14-05) I heard from numerous people about the choice of the term "citizen journalism." For now, it's the most commonly used term for what also has been called "personal," "individual," "participatory," or "grassroots" media. And even though I used it in the "11 Layers" article and elsewhere in my writing on the topic, I'm not convinced that it's the best term.</p>
<p>Most who dislike the "citizen journalism" label point out that it seems to imply that professional journalists are not citizens. They worry that people will read the term that way, rather than what's really meant: citizens practicing amateur journalism.</p>
<p>(6-14-05) <a href="http://www.nowpublic.com/" type="external">NowPublic.com</a> is an interesting experiment that takes advantage of a couple elements discussed in my 11 Layers articles. First, it's a citizen-media site that anyone can post an original story to. The innovation comes in a system that allows anyone to add a text report or a photo to the original report.</p>
<p>In some cases, someone has posted a text article alone -- say, a report about a local festival. Then, people who took photos at the event can add their photos to the original report. This is an interesting implementation of the "add-on" idea discussed in 11 Layers. It makes it easy for people to add on to an original report, whether the original was created by an amateur/citizen or a professional journalist.</p>
<p>(6-14-05) Paul Conley, who <a href="http://paulconley.blogspot.com/" type="external">blogs</a> about the trade press, notes a trend where professional journalists are turning into "citizen journalists." An example can be found at <a href="http://www.baristanet.com" type="external">Baristanet.com</a>, a neighborhood site edited by Debbie Galant, long-time Jersey columnist for the New York Times. Another is the international edition of <a href="http://english.ohmynews.com/" type="external">Ohmynews.com</a>, which also has professional journalists among its many "citizen reporters," writing for free or for very low fees.</p>
<p>Or take <a href="http://www.coastsider.com" type="external">Coastsider.com</a>, a citizen-journalism site edited by former news executive Barry Parr. The site seeks contributions from community members in the coastal Peninsula area south of San Francisco -- but those have been sparse so far and Parr has turned out to be the site's chief reporter, frequently breaking local news that the monopoly community weekly (the Half Moon Bay Review) has missed. Parr&#160;says of his site: "It's more heavily edited than the typical citizen-journalism site and has loftier goals."</p>
<p>Is it "citizen" journalism when a pro does it? When Galant publishes on her own time, is that citizen journalism, even though she's really a professional journalist?</p>
<p>Perhaps there is a place in my 11 Layers taxonomy for this in-between status: part pro, part "citizen."</p>
<p>(6-14-05) Dan Gillmor, who wrote <a href="http://wethemedia.oreilly.com/" type="external">The Book</a> on citizen/grassroots media, says that I left out some of the truly bottom-up stuff that's going on in grassroots media, especially discussion lists and forums. "There's real journalism going on there, too," he says.</p>
<p>By that, he means discussion forums where people discuss narrow topics; they're typically populated by people who are passionate about and/or experts on the topic. The people who populate such online gathering places often introduce new ideas or break news that's not been reported elsewhere. You can consider that to be part of the citizen/grassroots journalism movement.</p>
<p>(6-14-05) The site <a href="http://www.deepblog.com" type="external">DeepBlog.com</a> is compiling a <a href="http://deepblog.com/db2.html" type="external">list of local citizen-journalism sites</a>. It's U.S.-heavy right now, with a few listings from Canada, and only one from Asia -- but a promise of more coming from elsewhere in the world. Take a look, as the site lists some initiatives that I did not include in the 11 Layers article.</p>
<p>(6-14-05) Jack Driscoll of MIT Media Lab points out an interesting initiative that's within the realm of citizen/grassroots journalism. For the last four years, La Republicca's <a href="http://www.kataweb.it" type="external">Kataweb</a> site has been publishing about 6,000 middle- and high-school online newspapers from 84 cities in Italy. When a student comes up with a particularly good story, it goes on the homepage. "It's not unusual for those stories to be the buzz in Italy, I'm told," he says. The Estado Media Group in Sao Paulo, Brazil, does <a href="http://www.extraextra.com.br" type="external">something similar</a> with about 100 high schools.</p>
<p>(6-14-05) Driscoll also says the "SilverStringers" are worth a mention in a discussion of citizen journalism, in part because they've been at this citizen-journalism game for so long -- 10 years now. Senior citizens in Melrose, Massachusetts, have been publishing the Melrose Mirror, an online publication sponsored by the MIT Media Lab and operated by the Melrose Senior Center. Anyone can contribute an article to the site.</p>
<p>Driscoll says the online publication has been the model for many other senior and teen grassroots-publishing sites, including the <a href="http://journal.jrsummit.net" type="external">Junior Journal</a>, which operated for more than six years -- with no adult involvement other than Driscoll serving as advisor -- before closing recently. He's currently involved with <a href="http://www.ryereflections.org" type="external">Rye Reflections</a>, another seniors community news site in his hometown of Rye, New Hampshire.</p>
<p>(6-14-05) You might think of journalism students as "citizen journalists." Indeed, at new citizen-media websites, tapping this pool of willing and able volunteer contributors could be a way to get the ball rolling in terms of content submissions.</p>
<p>Some of them surely will want to write blogs, so citizen-journalism sites might want to consider organizing some kind of "virtual internships," suggests Dennis Jerz, who administers a <a href="http://blogs.setonhill.edu/nmj/" type="external">collection of academic blogs</a> for faculty and students at Seton Hall University. That's a way to encourage promising student journalists and "make them think seriously about how they can develop their talents," he says, "moving them from personal rants to quality research and reporting."</p> | What You Had to Say About 'Citizen Journalism' | false | https://poynter.org/news/what-you-had-say-about-citizen-journalism | 2005-06-15 | 2least
| What You Had to Say About 'Citizen Journalism'
<p />
<p>My recent article here on Poynter Online, " <a href="" type="internal">The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism</a>," generated a lot of e-mail back to me -- comments, feedback, and tips about projects and trends I didn't mention.</p>
<p>In the spirit of the topic, I'm including the great information that people sent me on this webpage. The information significantly adds to the discussion already underway in <a href="" type="internal">the feedback area</a>. And as the citizen-journalism ethos demands, the writer of an article does not know it all; readers should be able to add what they know, in order to enhance and supplement the original piece.</p>
<p>(I decided not to rewrite the original article with reader follow-up information, because I felt that would be too confusing. Subsequent readers of the "11 Layers" article will be pointed here. Additional tips from readers will be added to this supplementary article as I receive them.)</p>
<p>(6-14-05) I heard from numerous people about the choice of the term "citizen journalism." For now, it's the most commonly used term for what also has been called "personal," "individual," "participatory," or "grassroots" media. And even though I used it in the "11 Layers" article and elsewhere in my writing on the topic, I'm not convinced that it's the best term.</p>
<p>Most who dislike the "citizen journalism" label point out that it seems to imply that professional journalists are not citizens. They worry that people will read the term that way, rather than what's really meant: citizens practicing amateur journalism.</p>
<p>(6-14-05) <a href="http://www.nowpublic.com/" type="external">NowPublic.com</a> is an interesting experiment that takes advantage of a couple elements discussed in my 11 Layers articles. First, it's a citizen-media site that anyone can post an original story to. The innovation comes in a system that allows anyone to add a text report or a photo to the original report.</p>
<p>In some cases, someone has posted a text article alone -- say, a report about a local festival. Then, people who took photos at the event can add their photos to the original report. This is an interesting implementation of the "add-on" idea discussed in 11 Layers. It makes it easy for people to add on to an original report, whether the original was created by an amateur/citizen or a professional journalist.</p>
<p>(6-14-05) Paul Conley, who <a href="http://paulconley.blogspot.com/" type="external">blogs</a> about the trade press, notes a trend where professional journalists are turning into "citizen journalists." An example can be found at <a href="http://www.baristanet.com" type="external">Baristanet.com</a>, a neighborhood site edited by Debbie Galant, long-time Jersey columnist for the New York Times. Another is the international edition of <a href="http://english.ohmynews.com/" type="external">Ohmynews.com</a>, which also has professional journalists among its many "citizen reporters," writing for free or for very low fees.</p>
<p>Or take <a href="http://www.coastsider.com" type="external">Coastsider.com</a>, a citizen-journalism site edited by former news executive Barry Parr. The site seeks contributions from community members in the coastal Peninsula area south of San Francisco -- but those have been sparse so far and Parr has turned out to be the site's chief reporter, frequently breaking local news that the monopoly community weekly (the Half Moon Bay Review) has missed. Parr&#160;says of his site: "It's more heavily edited than the typical citizen-journalism site and has loftier goals."</p>
<p>Is it "citizen" journalism when a pro does it? When Galant publishes on her own time, is that citizen journalism, even though she's really a professional journalist?</p>
<p>Perhaps there is a place in my 11 Layers taxonomy for this in-between status: part pro, part "citizen."</p>
<p>(6-14-05) Dan Gillmor, who wrote <a href="http://wethemedia.oreilly.com/" type="external">The Book</a> on citizen/grassroots media, says that I left out some of the truly bottom-up stuff that's going on in grassroots media, especially discussion lists and forums. "There's real journalism going on there, too," he says.</p>
<p>By that, he means discussion forums where people discuss narrow topics; they're typically populated by people who are passionate about and/or experts on the topic. The people who populate such online gathering places often introduce new ideas or break news that's not been reported elsewhere. You can consider that to be part of the citizen/grassroots journalism movement.</p>
<p>(6-14-05) The site <a href="http://www.deepblog.com" type="external">DeepBlog.com</a> is compiling a <a href="http://deepblog.com/db2.html" type="external">list of local citizen-journalism sites</a>. It's U.S.-heavy right now, with a few listings from Canada, and only one from Asia -- but a promise of more coming from elsewhere in the world. Take a look, as the site lists some initiatives that I did not include in the 11 Layers article.</p>
<p>(6-14-05) Jack Driscoll of MIT Media Lab points out an interesting initiative that's within the realm of citizen/grassroots journalism. For the last four years, La Republicca's <a href="http://www.kataweb.it" type="external">Kataweb</a> site has been publishing about 6,000 middle- and high-school online newspapers from 84 cities in Italy. When a student comes up with a particularly good story, it goes on the homepage. "It's not unusual for those stories to be the buzz in Italy, I'm told," he says. The Estado Media Group in Sao Paulo, Brazil, does <a href="http://www.extraextra.com.br" type="external">something similar</a> with about 100 high schools.</p>
<p>(6-14-05) Driscoll also says the "SilverStringers" are worth a mention in a discussion of citizen journalism, in part because they've been at this citizen-journalism game for so long -- 10 years now. Senior citizens in Melrose, Massachusetts, have been publishing the Melrose Mirror, an online publication sponsored by the MIT Media Lab and operated by the Melrose Senior Center. Anyone can contribute an article to the site.</p>
<p>Driscoll says the online publication has been the model for many other senior and teen grassroots-publishing sites, including the <a href="http://journal.jrsummit.net" type="external">Junior Journal</a>, which operated for more than six years -- with no adult involvement other than Driscoll serving as advisor -- before closing recently. He's currently involved with <a href="http://www.ryereflections.org" type="external">Rye Reflections</a>, another seniors community news site in his hometown of Rye, New Hampshire.</p>
<p>(6-14-05) You might think of journalism students as "citizen journalists." Indeed, at new citizen-media websites, tapping this pool of willing and able volunteer contributors could be a way to get the ball rolling in terms of content submissions.</p>
<p>Some of them surely will want to write blogs, so citizen-journalism sites might want to consider organizing some kind of "virtual internships," suggests Dennis Jerz, who administers a <a href="http://blogs.setonhill.edu/nmj/" type="external">collection of academic blogs</a> for faculty and students at Seton Hall University. That's a way to encourage promising student journalists and "make them think seriously about how they can develop their talents," he says, "moving them from personal rants to quality research and reporting."</p> | 800 |
<p>Jan 23 (Reuters) - ARCO VARA AS:</p>
<p>* SAYS ‍AS BALTPLAST NOW HOLDS 13.26 PERCENT OF VOTING SHARES Source text: <a href="http://bit.ly/2Bluljo" type="external">bit.ly/2Bluljo</a> Further company coverage: (Gdynia Newsroom)</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s air force has held another round of drills in the disputed South China Sea and the Western Pacific after passing though Japan’s southern islands, the air force said on Sunday, calling such exercises the best preparation for war.</p> FILE PHOTO: Chinese dredging vessels are purportedly seen in the waters around Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea in this still image from video taken by a P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft provided by the United States Navy May 21, 2015. U.S. Navy/Handout via Reuters/File Photo
<p>China is in the midst of an ambitious military modernization program overseen by President Xi Jinping with a heavy focus on its air force and navy, from building stealth fighters to adding aircraft carriers.</p>
<p>China insists it has no hostile intent, but its sabre-rattling in the busy South China Sea waterway, and around Taiwan, has touched a nerve in the region and in Washington.</p>
<p>In a statement, the air force said H-6K bombers and Su-30 and Su-35 fighters, among other aircraft, carried out combat patrols over the South China Sea and exercises in the Western Pacific after passing over the Miyako Strait, which lies between two southern Japanese islands.</p>
<p>It did not say when the exercises took place nor specify the parts of the South China Sea or the Western Pacific.</p>
<p>In a “freedom of navigation” operation on Friday, a U.S. Navy destroyer came within 12 nautical miles of an artificial island China has built in the South China Sea, provoking condemnation from China, which claims most of the strategic waterway.</p>
<p>Sending Su-35 fighters over the South China Sea aims to help increase the air force’s ability to fight far out at sea, the air force said in the statement on its microblog.</p>
<p>Flying across the Miyako Strait, which also sits to the northeast of the self-ruled island of Taiwan that China claims as its own, accorded with international law and practice, it added.</p>
<p>“Air Force exercises are rehearsals for future wars and are the most direct preparation for combat,” it said.</p>
<p>The more exercises China practices far from its shores the better it will be positioned as “an important force for managing and controlling crises, containing war and winning battles”, it added.</p>
<p>Reporting by Lusha Zhang and Ben Blanchard; Editing by Clarence Fernandez</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Chanting “never again,” hundreds of thousands of young Americans and their supporters answered a call to action from survivors of last month’s Florida high school massacre and rallied across the United States on Saturday to demand tighter gun laws.</p>
<p>In some of the biggest U.S. youth demonstrations for decades, protesters called on lawmakers and President Donald Trump to confront the issue. Voter registration activists fanned out in the crowds, signing up thousands of the nation’s newest voters.</p>
<p>At the largest March For Our Lives protest, demonstrators jammed Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue where they listened to speeches from survivors of the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.</p>
<p>There were sobs as one teenage survivor, Emma Gonzalez, read the names of the 17 victims and then stood in silence. Tears ran down her cheeks as she stared out over the crowd for the rest of a speech that lasted six minutes and 20 seconds, the time it took for the gunman to slaughter them.</p>
<p>The massive March For Our Lives rallies aimed to break legislative gridlock that has long stymied efforts to increase restrictions on firearms sales in a nation where mass shootings like the one in Parkland have become frighteningly common.</p>
<p>“Politicians: either represent the people or get out. Stand with us or beware, the voters are coming,” Cameron Kasky, a 17-year-old junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, told the crowd.</p>
<p>Another survivor, David Hogg, said it was a new day.</p>
<p>“We’re going to make sure the best people get in our elections to run not as politicians, but as Americans. Because this - this - is not cutting it,” he said, pointing at the white-domed Capitol behind the stage.</p>
<p>Youthful marchers filled streets in cities including Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, San Diego and St. Louis.</p>
<p>More than 800 demonstrations were scheduled in the United States and overseas, according to coordinators, with events as far afield as London, Mauritius, Stockholm and Sydney.</p> ‘TAKE THEIR LIBERTY AWAY’
<p>Underlining sharp differences among the American public over the issue, counter-demonstrators and supporters of gun rights were also in evidence in many U.S. cities.</p>
<p>Organizers of the anti-gun rallies want Congress, many of whose members are up for re-election in November, to ban the sale of assault weapons like the one used in the Florida rampage and to tighten background checks for gun buyers.</p>
<p>On the other side of the debate, gun rights advocates cite constitutional guarantees of the right to bear arms.</p>
<p>“All they’re doing is asking the government to take their liberty away from them without due process,” Brandon Howard, a 42-year-old Trump supporter, said of the protesters in the capital. He had a sign saying: “Keep your hands off my guns.”</p> Daisy Hernandez, age 22, joins students and gun control advocates for the "March for Our Lives" event demanding gun control after recent school shootings at a rally in Washington, U.S., March 24, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
<p>Wearing a red “Make America Great Again” sweatshirt, 16-year-old Connor Humphrey of San Luis Obispo, California, said: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”</p>
<p>Humphrey, who was visiting Washington with his family for spring break, said he owns guns for target shooting and hunting and uses them responsibly. His school had a lockdown exercise last week.</p>
<p>“I think teachers should have guns,” he said, echoing a proposal made by Trump after the Parkland killings.</p>
<p>Still, rallies for tighter firearm restrictions also sprang up in rural, Republican-leaning communities ranging from Lewiston, Idaho to Logan, Utah where there is strong support for the Second Amendment constitutional right to own guns.</p> Slideshow (30 Images) CELEBRITIES BACK STUDENTS
<p>Among those marching next to New York’s Central Park to call for tighter gun controls was pop star Paul McCartney, who said he had a personal stake in the debate.</p>
<p>“One of my best friends was shot not far from here,” he told CNN, referring to Beatles bandmate John Lennon, who was gunned down near the park in 1980.</p>
<p>Taking aim at the National Rifle Association gun lobby, teenagers chanted, “Hey, hey, NRA, how many kids have you killed today?”</p>
<p>The young U.S. organizers have won kudos and cash from dozens of celebrities, with singers Demi Lovato and Ariana Grande, as well as “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, among those performing in Washington. Actor George Clooney and his human rights attorney wife, Amal, donated $500,000 and said they would be at the Washington rally.</p>
<p>The U.S. football team the New England Patriots loaned its plane to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students and their families to travel to Washington.</p> Related Coverage
<a href="/article/us-usa-guns-voters/vote-them-out-thousands-register-to-vote-at-u-s-gun-control-marches-idUSKBN1H00RY" type="external">'Vote them out!': Thousands register to vote at U.S. gun-control marches</a>
<p>At the march in Washington, an elementary school student from Virginia, Naomi Wadler, 11, captivated demonstrators when she spoke up for African American girls who were victims of gun violence but whose stories “don’t make the front page.”</p>
<p>White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters said the administration applauded “the many courageous young Americans” who exercised their free-speech rights.</p>
<p>“Keeping our children safe is a top priority of the president’s,” said Walters, noting that on Friday the Justice Department proposed rule changes that would effectively ban “bump stock” devices that let semi-automatic weapons fire like a machine gun.</p>
<p>Also on Friday, Trump signed a $1.3-trillion spending bill including modest improvements to background checks for gun sales and grants to help schools prevent gun violence.</p>
<p>Former President Barack Obama said on Twitter that he and his wife Michelle were inspired by all the young people who made the marches happen.</p>
<p>“Keep at it. You’re leading us forward. Nothing can stand in the way of millions of voices calling for change,” Obama said.</p>
<p>Reporting by Ian Simpson, Lacey Johnson, Katanga Johnson and Lauren Young in Washington, Alice Popovici in New York, Phoenix Tso in Los Angeles, Zachary Fagenson in Parkland, Robert Chiarito in Chicago, Jim Oliphant in West Palm Beach and Andrew Hay in Taos; Editing by Daniel Wallis, James Dalgleish and Nick Zieminski</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>(Reuters) - The 23-year-old Texan blamed for a deadly Austin bombing spree described himself as a psychopath and showed no remorse in a confession he taped before blowing himself up as police closed in to arrest him, a U.S. congressman said on Saturday.</p> Law enforcement personnel investigate the home where Austin serial bomber Mark Anthony Conditt lived in Pflugerville, Texas, U.S., March 22, 2018. REUTERS/Loren Elliott
<p>Authorities had not previously disclosed details of the cellphone video in which Mark Conditt admitted being behind the string of bombings that began on March 2, killing two people and wounding five others, beyond saying that it showed a troubled young man.</p>
<p>“I think the best evidence we have at this point in time is the confession itself ... He did refer to himself as a psychopath. He did not show any remorse, in fact questioning himself for why he didn’t feel any remorse for what he did,” U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul told a news conference in Austin when asked about Conditt’s motive.</p>
<p>“It’s hard to imagine someone whose mind is so sick that they could commit bombings like this and feel absolutely no remorse,” he said.</p>
<p>McCaul said there did not appear to be anything in Conditt’s confession “that was sort of racially motivated, but I know that is still part of the ongoing investigation.”</p> Texas blast suspect Mark Anthony Conditt is seen in this undated handout photo released by Austin Community College in Austin, Texas, U.S. March 21, 2018. Austin Community College/Handout via REUTERS
<p>The first several bombing victims, including the two who died, were either African-American or Hispanic.</p>
<p>Federal investigators have been hunting clues about what drove Conditt, who was unemployed and lived with roommates in the Austin suburb of Pflugerville. They also want to know whether he had help building or planting the bombs.</p>
<p>Three of the devices were left as parcels outside victims’ homes, while another was placed on a sidewalk and attached to a trip-wire mechanism. Two more were shipped as FedEx parcels, which helped investigators unmask the bomber’s identity.</p>
<p>The second and third bombs went off while the Texas state capital was hosting its annual South by Southwest music, movies and tech festival, which draws about half a million people.</p>
<p>Conditt died after detonating a explosive device early on Wednesday as police ran toward his vehicle in an Austin suburb.</p>
<p>Reporting by Daniel Wallis in New York</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>SYDNEY (Reuters) - Almost a month after a deadly earthquake, Papua New Guinea is struggling to get aid to desperate survivors, having allocated just a fraction of its relief funds, while a rent dispute left disaster officials briefly locked out of their offices.</p> FILE PHOTO - A supplied image shows a landslide and damage to a road located near the township of Tabubil after an earthquake that struck Papua New Guinea's Southern Highlands, February 26, 2018. Jerome Kay/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
<p>The scale of the emergency is testing the finances and capacity of one of the world’s poorest countries, disaster and relief officials say, after the magnitude 7.5 quake rocked its remote mountainous highlands on Feb. 26, killing 100 people.</p>
<p>(For a graphic on 'Papua New Guinea quake' click <a href="http://tmsnrt.rs/2ow1YLR" type="external">tmsnrt.rs/2ow1YLR</a>)</p>
<p>Thousands of survivors have walked to remote airstrips and jungle clearings, awaiting helicopters bringing supplies of food, water and medicines, aid agencies and authorities say.</p>
<p>“To date, we do not have any money to do all the necessary things,” Tom Edabe, the disaster coordinator for the hardest-hit province of Hela, said by telephone from Tari, its capital.</p>
<p>“(The) government is trying to assist and have budgeted some money, but to date we have not received anything...we have only been given food, and non-food items supplied by other NGOs.”</p>
<p>Continuing aftershocks rattle residents, who have to collect water brought by daily rainstorms to ensure adequate supplies, Edabe, the disaster coordinator, said.</p>
<p>“The biggest thing that people need, apart from food, is water,” said James Pima, a helicopter pilot and flight manager at aviation firm HeliSolutions in the Western Highlands capital of Mt. Hagen, about 170 km (100 miles) from the disaster zone.</p>
<p>“They don’t have clean water to cook or drink ... they are standing there staring. The expression on their faces is blank.”</p>
<p>His firm’s three helicopters fly relief missions “fully flat-out every day,” Pima added.</p>
<p>Destruction to roads and runways means authorities must rely on helicopters to fly in relief. But while nimble, the craft can only carry smaller loads than fixed-wing aircraft and cannot fly during the afternoon thunderstorms.</p>
<p>The logistics problems wind all the way to PNG’s disaster center, where officials told Reuters they had been locked out of their office in Port Moresby, the capital, for two days last week after the government missed a rental payment.</p>
<p>“That was correct, Monday and Tuesday,” a spokeswoman said.</p>
<p>In a joint report with the United Nations published on Friday, the agency cited “lack of quality data” about food shortages, limited aircraft assets and “significant gaps” in sanitation support as being the biggest problems it faced.</p> Damage caused by an earthquake in Papua New Guinea is seen in this handout image released March 7, 2018. MAF International/Handout via REUTERS.
<p>The office of Prime Minister Peter O’Neill did not respond to emailed questions from Reuters.</p>
<p>On his website, O’Neill has previously said, “There will be no quick fix, the damage from this disaster will take months and years to be repaired.”</p> ‘POLITICAL GAMES’
<p>The government had approved relief funds amounting to 450 million kina ($130 million), O’Neill said initially, but a later statement mentioned only 3 million kina in initial relief - or less than 1 percent - had been allocated to the worst-hit areas.</p>
<p>In its November budget, the government made plans to rein in spending and trim debt projected to stand at 25.8 billion kina in 2018.</p> FILE PHOTO - A supplied image shows locals inspecting a landslide and damage to a road located near the township of Tabubil after an earthquake that struck Papua New Guinea's Southern Highlands, February 26, 2018. Jerome Kay/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
<p>The impoverished country is also missing its largest revenue earner, after the quake forced a shutdown of Exxon Mobil Corp’s liquefied natural gas project, which has annual sales of $3 billion at current LNG prices. The firm is still assessing quake damage at its facilities.</p>
<p>O’Neill last week hit out at critics of the aid effort for playing “political games,” while thanking Australia and New Zealand for military aircraft that provided assistance beyond the capacity of PNG’s own defense forces.</p>
<p>His political opponent, former Prime Minister Mekere Morauta, had called the government’s response “tardy” and inadequate.</p>
<p>“Relief sources say mobile medical centers and operating theaters are needed urgently, and that only international partners can supply them,” Morauta said last week.</p>
<p>Foreign aid pledges of about $49 million have come in from Australia, China, the European Union, Japan, New Zealand and the United States, says the United Nations, most of it provided by private companies.</p>
<p>Exxon and its partner, Oil Search Ltd, say they have provided $6 million in cash and kind for quake relief.</p>
<p>Local officials say the scale of destruction, with villages buried by landslides and provincial towns flattened, has overwhelmed authorities in Papua New Guinea, which straddles the geologically active Pacific Ring of Fire.</p>
<p>“Policemen are still struggling because there is no support flying in and out,” said Naring Bongi of the quake-damaged police station in the Southern Highlands capital of Mendi.</p>
<p>“There is not enough food to supply care centers, they need fresh water,” he added.</p>
<p>(For an interactive graphic on 'Aftermath of Papua New Guinea's earthquake' click <a href="http://tmsnrt.rs/2Fdu74B" type="external">tmsnrt.rs/2Fdu74B</a>)</p>
<p>Reporting by Tom Westbrook in SYDNEY; Editing by Clarence Fernandez</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | BRIEF-Arco Vara Says As Baltplast Now Holds 13.26 Percent Of Voting Shares China air force drills again in South China Sea, Western Pacific 'No more' or we vote you out: students lead huge U.S. anti-gun rallies Austin bomb suspect called self a 'psychopath,' congressman says A month after PNG quake, cash-strapped government struggles to help the hardest-hit | false | https://reuters.com/article/brief-arco-vara-says-as-baltplast-now-ho/brief-arco-vara-says-as-baltplast-now-holds-1326-percent-of-voting-shares-idUSFWN1PI112 | 2018-01-23 | 2least
| BRIEF-Arco Vara Says As Baltplast Now Holds 13.26 Percent Of Voting Shares China air force drills again in South China Sea, Western Pacific 'No more' or we vote you out: students lead huge U.S. anti-gun rallies Austin bomb suspect called self a 'psychopath,' congressman says A month after PNG quake, cash-strapped government struggles to help the hardest-hit
<p>Jan 23 (Reuters) - ARCO VARA AS:</p>
<p>* SAYS ‍AS BALTPLAST NOW HOLDS 13.26 PERCENT OF VOTING SHARES Source text: <a href="http://bit.ly/2Bluljo" type="external">bit.ly/2Bluljo</a> Further company coverage: (Gdynia Newsroom)</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s air force has held another round of drills in the disputed South China Sea and the Western Pacific after passing though Japan’s southern islands, the air force said on Sunday, calling such exercises the best preparation for war.</p> FILE PHOTO: Chinese dredging vessels are purportedly seen in the waters around Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea in this still image from video taken by a P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft provided by the United States Navy May 21, 2015. U.S. Navy/Handout via Reuters/File Photo
<p>China is in the midst of an ambitious military modernization program overseen by President Xi Jinping with a heavy focus on its air force and navy, from building stealth fighters to adding aircraft carriers.</p>
<p>China insists it has no hostile intent, but its sabre-rattling in the busy South China Sea waterway, and around Taiwan, has touched a nerve in the region and in Washington.</p>
<p>In a statement, the air force said H-6K bombers and Su-30 and Su-35 fighters, among other aircraft, carried out combat patrols over the South China Sea and exercises in the Western Pacific after passing over the Miyako Strait, which lies between two southern Japanese islands.</p>
<p>It did not say when the exercises took place nor specify the parts of the South China Sea or the Western Pacific.</p>
<p>In a “freedom of navigation” operation on Friday, a U.S. Navy destroyer came within 12 nautical miles of an artificial island China has built in the South China Sea, provoking condemnation from China, which claims most of the strategic waterway.</p>
<p>Sending Su-35 fighters over the South China Sea aims to help increase the air force’s ability to fight far out at sea, the air force said in the statement on its microblog.</p>
<p>Flying across the Miyako Strait, which also sits to the northeast of the self-ruled island of Taiwan that China claims as its own, accorded with international law and practice, it added.</p>
<p>“Air Force exercises are rehearsals for future wars and are the most direct preparation for combat,” it said.</p>
<p>The more exercises China practices far from its shores the better it will be positioned as “an important force for managing and controlling crises, containing war and winning battles”, it added.</p>
<p>Reporting by Lusha Zhang and Ben Blanchard; Editing by Clarence Fernandez</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Chanting “never again,” hundreds of thousands of young Americans and their supporters answered a call to action from survivors of last month’s Florida high school massacre and rallied across the United States on Saturday to demand tighter gun laws.</p>
<p>In some of the biggest U.S. youth demonstrations for decades, protesters called on lawmakers and President Donald Trump to confront the issue. Voter registration activists fanned out in the crowds, signing up thousands of the nation’s newest voters.</p>
<p>At the largest March For Our Lives protest, demonstrators jammed Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue where they listened to speeches from survivors of the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.</p>
<p>There were sobs as one teenage survivor, Emma Gonzalez, read the names of the 17 victims and then stood in silence. Tears ran down her cheeks as she stared out over the crowd for the rest of a speech that lasted six minutes and 20 seconds, the time it took for the gunman to slaughter them.</p>
<p>The massive March For Our Lives rallies aimed to break legislative gridlock that has long stymied efforts to increase restrictions on firearms sales in a nation where mass shootings like the one in Parkland have become frighteningly common.</p>
<p>“Politicians: either represent the people or get out. Stand with us or beware, the voters are coming,” Cameron Kasky, a 17-year-old junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, told the crowd.</p>
<p>Another survivor, David Hogg, said it was a new day.</p>
<p>“We’re going to make sure the best people get in our elections to run not as politicians, but as Americans. Because this - this - is not cutting it,” he said, pointing at the white-domed Capitol behind the stage.</p>
<p>Youthful marchers filled streets in cities including Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, San Diego and St. Louis.</p>
<p>More than 800 demonstrations were scheduled in the United States and overseas, according to coordinators, with events as far afield as London, Mauritius, Stockholm and Sydney.</p> ‘TAKE THEIR LIBERTY AWAY’
<p>Underlining sharp differences among the American public over the issue, counter-demonstrators and supporters of gun rights were also in evidence in many U.S. cities.</p>
<p>Organizers of the anti-gun rallies want Congress, many of whose members are up for re-election in November, to ban the sale of assault weapons like the one used in the Florida rampage and to tighten background checks for gun buyers.</p>
<p>On the other side of the debate, gun rights advocates cite constitutional guarantees of the right to bear arms.</p>
<p>“All they’re doing is asking the government to take their liberty away from them without due process,” Brandon Howard, a 42-year-old Trump supporter, said of the protesters in the capital. He had a sign saying: “Keep your hands off my guns.”</p> Daisy Hernandez, age 22, joins students and gun control advocates for the "March for Our Lives" event demanding gun control after recent school shootings at a rally in Washington, U.S., March 24, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
<p>Wearing a red “Make America Great Again” sweatshirt, 16-year-old Connor Humphrey of San Luis Obispo, California, said: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”</p>
<p>Humphrey, who was visiting Washington with his family for spring break, said he owns guns for target shooting and hunting and uses them responsibly. His school had a lockdown exercise last week.</p>
<p>“I think teachers should have guns,” he said, echoing a proposal made by Trump after the Parkland killings.</p>
<p>Still, rallies for tighter firearm restrictions also sprang up in rural, Republican-leaning communities ranging from Lewiston, Idaho to Logan, Utah where there is strong support for the Second Amendment constitutional right to own guns.</p> Slideshow (30 Images) CELEBRITIES BACK STUDENTS
<p>Among those marching next to New York’s Central Park to call for tighter gun controls was pop star Paul McCartney, who said he had a personal stake in the debate.</p>
<p>“One of my best friends was shot not far from here,” he told CNN, referring to Beatles bandmate John Lennon, who was gunned down near the park in 1980.</p>
<p>Taking aim at the National Rifle Association gun lobby, teenagers chanted, “Hey, hey, NRA, how many kids have you killed today?”</p>
<p>The young U.S. organizers have won kudos and cash from dozens of celebrities, with singers Demi Lovato and Ariana Grande, as well as “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, among those performing in Washington. Actor George Clooney and his human rights attorney wife, Amal, donated $500,000 and said they would be at the Washington rally.</p>
<p>The U.S. football team the New England Patriots loaned its plane to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students and their families to travel to Washington.</p> Related Coverage
<a href="/article/us-usa-guns-voters/vote-them-out-thousands-register-to-vote-at-u-s-gun-control-marches-idUSKBN1H00RY" type="external">'Vote them out!': Thousands register to vote at U.S. gun-control marches</a>
<p>At the march in Washington, an elementary school student from Virginia, Naomi Wadler, 11, captivated demonstrators when she spoke up for African American girls who were victims of gun violence but whose stories “don’t make the front page.”</p>
<p>White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters said the administration applauded “the many courageous young Americans” who exercised their free-speech rights.</p>
<p>“Keeping our children safe is a top priority of the president’s,” said Walters, noting that on Friday the Justice Department proposed rule changes that would effectively ban “bump stock” devices that let semi-automatic weapons fire like a machine gun.</p>
<p>Also on Friday, Trump signed a $1.3-trillion spending bill including modest improvements to background checks for gun sales and grants to help schools prevent gun violence.</p>
<p>Former President Barack Obama said on Twitter that he and his wife Michelle were inspired by all the young people who made the marches happen.</p>
<p>“Keep at it. You’re leading us forward. Nothing can stand in the way of millions of voices calling for change,” Obama said.</p>
<p>Reporting by Ian Simpson, Lacey Johnson, Katanga Johnson and Lauren Young in Washington, Alice Popovici in New York, Phoenix Tso in Los Angeles, Zachary Fagenson in Parkland, Robert Chiarito in Chicago, Jim Oliphant in West Palm Beach and Andrew Hay in Taos; Editing by Daniel Wallis, James Dalgleish and Nick Zieminski</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>(Reuters) - The 23-year-old Texan blamed for a deadly Austin bombing spree described himself as a psychopath and showed no remorse in a confession he taped before blowing himself up as police closed in to arrest him, a U.S. congressman said on Saturday.</p> Law enforcement personnel investigate the home where Austin serial bomber Mark Anthony Conditt lived in Pflugerville, Texas, U.S., March 22, 2018. REUTERS/Loren Elliott
<p>Authorities had not previously disclosed details of the cellphone video in which Mark Conditt admitted being behind the string of bombings that began on March 2, killing two people and wounding five others, beyond saying that it showed a troubled young man.</p>
<p>“I think the best evidence we have at this point in time is the confession itself ... He did refer to himself as a psychopath. He did not show any remorse, in fact questioning himself for why he didn’t feel any remorse for what he did,” U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul told a news conference in Austin when asked about Conditt’s motive.</p>
<p>“It’s hard to imagine someone whose mind is so sick that they could commit bombings like this and feel absolutely no remorse,” he said.</p>
<p>McCaul said there did not appear to be anything in Conditt’s confession “that was sort of racially motivated, but I know that is still part of the ongoing investigation.”</p> Texas blast suspect Mark Anthony Conditt is seen in this undated handout photo released by Austin Community College in Austin, Texas, U.S. March 21, 2018. Austin Community College/Handout via REUTERS
<p>The first several bombing victims, including the two who died, were either African-American or Hispanic.</p>
<p>Federal investigators have been hunting clues about what drove Conditt, who was unemployed and lived with roommates in the Austin suburb of Pflugerville. They also want to know whether he had help building or planting the bombs.</p>
<p>Three of the devices were left as parcels outside victims’ homes, while another was placed on a sidewalk and attached to a trip-wire mechanism. Two more were shipped as FedEx parcels, which helped investigators unmask the bomber’s identity.</p>
<p>The second and third bombs went off while the Texas state capital was hosting its annual South by Southwest music, movies and tech festival, which draws about half a million people.</p>
<p>Conditt died after detonating a explosive device early on Wednesday as police ran toward his vehicle in an Austin suburb.</p>
<p>Reporting by Daniel Wallis in New York</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>SYDNEY (Reuters) - Almost a month after a deadly earthquake, Papua New Guinea is struggling to get aid to desperate survivors, having allocated just a fraction of its relief funds, while a rent dispute left disaster officials briefly locked out of their offices.</p> FILE PHOTO - A supplied image shows a landslide and damage to a road located near the township of Tabubil after an earthquake that struck Papua New Guinea's Southern Highlands, February 26, 2018. Jerome Kay/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
<p>The scale of the emergency is testing the finances and capacity of one of the world’s poorest countries, disaster and relief officials say, after the magnitude 7.5 quake rocked its remote mountainous highlands on Feb. 26, killing 100 people.</p>
<p>(For a graphic on 'Papua New Guinea quake' click <a href="http://tmsnrt.rs/2ow1YLR" type="external">tmsnrt.rs/2ow1YLR</a>)</p>
<p>Thousands of survivors have walked to remote airstrips and jungle clearings, awaiting helicopters bringing supplies of food, water and medicines, aid agencies and authorities say.</p>
<p>“To date, we do not have any money to do all the necessary things,” Tom Edabe, the disaster coordinator for the hardest-hit province of Hela, said by telephone from Tari, its capital.</p>
<p>“(The) government is trying to assist and have budgeted some money, but to date we have not received anything...we have only been given food, and non-food items supplied by other NGOs.”</p>
<p>Continuing aftershocks rattle residents, who have to collect water brought by daily rainstorms to ensure adequate supplies, Edabe, the disaster coordinator, said.</p>
<p>“The biggest thing that people need, apart from food, is water,” said James Pima, a helicopter pilot and flight manager at aviation firm HeliSolutions in the Western Highlands capital of Mt. Hagen, about 170 km (100 miles) from the disaster zone.</p>
<p>“They don’t have clean water to cook or drink ... they are standing there staring. The expression on their faces is blank.”</p>
<p>His firm’s three helicopters fly relief missions “fully flat-out every day,” Pima added.</p>
<p>Destruction to roads and runways means authorities must rely on helicopters to fly in relief. But while nimble, the craft can only carry smaller loads than fixed-wing aircraft and cannot fly during the afternoon thunderstorms.</p>
<p>The logistics problems wind all the way to PNG’s disaster center, where officials told Reuters they had been locked out of their office in Port Moresby, the capital, for two days last week after the government missed a rental payment.</p>
<p>“That was correct, Monday and Tuesday,” a spokeswoman said.</p>
<p>In a joint report with the United Nations published on Friday, the agency cited “lack of quality data” about food shortages, limited aircraft assets and “significant gaps” in sanitation support as being the biggest problems it faced.</p> Damage caused by an earthquake in Papua New Guinea is seen in this handout image released March 7, 2018. MAF International/Handout via REUTERS.
<p>The office of Prime Minister Peter O’Neill did not respond to emailed questions from Reuters.</p>
<p>On his website, O’Neill has previously said, “There will be no quick fix, the damage from this disaster will take months and years to be repaired.”</p> ‘POLITICAL GAMES’
<p>The government had approved relief funds amounting to 450 million kina ($130 million), O’Neill said initially, but a later statement mentioned only 3 million kina in initial relief - or less than 1 percent - had been allocated to the worst-hit areas.</p>
<p>In its November budget, the government made plans to rein in spending and trim debt projected to stand at 25.8 billion kina in 2018.</p> FILE PHOTO - A supplied image shows locals inspecting a landslide and damage to a road located near the township of Tabubil after an earthquake that struck Papua New Guinea's Southern Highlands, February 26, 2018. Jerome Kay/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
<p>The impoverished country is also missing its largest revenue earner, after the quake forced a shutdown of Exxon Mobil Corp’s liquefied natural gas project, which has annual sales of $3 billion at current LNG prices. The firm is still assessing quake damage at its facilities.</p>
<p>O’Neill last week hit out at critics of the aid effort for playing “political games,” while thanking Australia and New Zealand for military aircraft that provided assistance beyond the capacity of PNG’s own defense forces.</p>
<p>His political opponent, former Prime Minister Mekere Morauta, had called the government’s response “tardy” and inadequate.</p>
<p>“Relief sources say mobile medical centers and operating theaters are needed urgently, and that only international partners can supply them,” Morauta said last week.</p>
<p>Foreign aid pledges of about $49 million have come in from Australia, China, the European Union, Japan, New Zealand and the United States, says the United Nations, most of it provided by private companies.</p>
<p>Exxon and its partner, Oil Search Ltd, say they have provided $6 million in cash and kind for quake relief.</p>
<p>Local officials say the scale of destruction, with villages buried by landslides and provincial towns flattened, has overwhelmed authorities in Papua New Guinea, which straddles the geologically active Pacific Ring of Fire.</p>
<p>“Policemen are still struggling because there is no support flying in and out,” said Naring Bongi of the quake-damaged police station in the Southern Highlands capital of Mendi.</p>
<p>“There is not enough food to supply care centers, they need fresh water,” he added.</p>
<p>(For an interactive graphic on 'Aftermath of Papua New Guinea's earthquake' click <a href="http://tmsnrt.rs/2Fdu74B" type="external">tmsnrt.rs/2Fdu74B</a>)</p>
<p>Reporting by Tom Westbrook in SYDNEY; Editing by Clarence Fernandez</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | 801 |
<p>HONOLULU (AP) — Honolulu city officials are asking residents to give panhandlers a special business card instead of cash.</p>
<p>The cards were made by the city to give panhandlers contact information for agencies that can help them find housing, Hawaii News Now <a href="http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/37155530/city-wants-you-to-give-panhandlers-a-special-business-card-instead-of-cash" type="external">reported</a> Thursday.</p>
<p>The cards read "Need Housing?" on the front and list the phone numbers for Aloha United Way, Honolulu Office of Housing and the statewide homeless help line on the back.</p>
<p>The cards are quick and simple alternative to giving panhandlers cash, which can enable people to continue living on the streets instead of seeking help, said Marc Alexander, head of the mayor's Office of Housing.</p>
<p>"We know the community wants to help and we want to give people an easy way that's also effective to get the word out about services," he said.</p>
<p>The program launched earlier this month.</p>
<p>The 15,000 business cards cost the city $400 to make.</p>
<p>The cards are currently being handed out by police officers, medics and some homeless service providers.</p>
<p>They will be available for anyone to distribute starting next year.</p>
<p>But residents are unsure how panhandlers will react to the cards.</p>
<p>"Half the battle is they don't want to," Wood Soueria said. "We offer all of these places and they don't really want to go."</p>
<p>When the TV station's crew handed one card to a panhandler only identified as Chris, he said he would call the numbers listed on the card and asked for more.</p>
<p>"It's hard because you feel like the whole world is caving in on you. But there's hope," Chris said. "You walked up to me and gave me this. Yeah, I think this could be a great help."</p>
<p>City officials plan to distribute the cards to neighborhood boards across Oahu in the coming months.</p>
<p>People interested in getting the cards beforehand can find them at Honolulu Hale.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: KGMB-TV, <a href="http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/" type="external">http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/</a></p>
<p>HONOLULU (AP) — Honolulu city officials are asking residents to give panhandlers a special business card instead of cash.</p>
<p>The cards were made by the city to give panhandlers contact information for agencies that can help them find housing, Hawaii News Now <a href="http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/37155530/city-wants-you-to-give-panhandlers-a-special-business-card-instead-of-cash" type="external">reported</a> Thursday.</p>
<p>The cards read "Need Housing?" on the front and list the phone numbers for Aloha United Way, Honolulu Office of Housing and the statewide homeless help line on the back.</p>
<p>The cards are quick and simple alternative to giving panhandlers cash, which can enable people to continue living on the streets instead of seeking help, said Marc Alexander, head of the mayor's Office of Housing.</p>
<p>"We know the community wants to help and we want to give people an easy way that's also effective to get the word out about services," he said.</p>
<p>The program launched earlier this month.</p>
<p>The 15,000 business cards cost the city $400 to make.</p>
<p>The cards are currently being handed out by police officers, medics and some homeless service providers.</p>
<p>They will be available for anyone to distribute starting next year.</p>
<p>But residents are unsure how panhandlers will react to the cards.</p>
<p>"Half the battle is they don't want to," Wood Soueria said. "We offer all of these places and they don't really want to go."</p>
<p>When the TV station's crew handed one card to a panhandler only identified as Chris, he said he would call the numbers listed on the card and asked for more.</p>
<p>"It's hard because you feel like the whole world is caving in on you. But there's hope," Chris said. "You walked up to me and gave me this. Yeah, I think this could be a great help."</p>
<p>City officials plan to distribute the cards to neighborhood boards across Oahu in the coming months.</p>
<p>People interested in getting the cards beforehand can find them at Honolulu Hale.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: KGMB-TV, <a href="http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/" type="external">http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/</a></p> | Honolulu officials handing out business cards to panhandlers | false | https://apnews.com/amp/b9a94121c77e4355a2b60351a8fd7d7e | 2017-12-29 | 2least
| Honolulu officials handing out business cards to panhandlers
<p>HONOLULU (AP) — Honolulu city officials are asking residents to give panhandlers a special business card instead of cash.</p>
<p>The cards were made by the city to give panhandlers contact information for agencies that can help them find housing, Hawaii News Now <a href="http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/37155530/city-wants-you-to-give-panhandlers-a-special-business-card-instead-of-cash" type="external">reported</a> Thursday.</p>
<p>The cards read "Need Housing?" on the front and list the phone numbers for Aloha United Way, Honolulu Office of Housing and the statewide homeless help line on the back.</p>
<p>The cards are quick and simple alternative to giving panhandlers cash, which can enable people to continue living on the streets instead of seeking help, said Marc Alexander, head of the mayor's Office of Housing.</p>
<p>"We know the community wants to help and we want to give people an easy way that's also effective to get the word out about services," he said.</p>
<p>The program launched earlier this month.</p>
<p>The 15,000 business cards cost the city $400 to make.</p>
<p>The cards are currently being handed out by police officers, medics and some homeless service providers.</p>
<p>They will be available for anyone to distribute starting next year.</p>
<p>But residents are unsure how panhandlers will react to the cards.</p>
<p>"Half the battle is they don't want to," Wood Soueria said. "We offer all of these places and they don't really want to go."</p>
<p>When the TV station's crew handed one card to a panhandler only identified as Chris, he said he would call the numbers listed on the card and asked for more.</p>
<p>"It's hard because you feel like the whole world is caving in on you. But there's hope," Chris said. "You walked up to me and gave me this. Yeah, I think this could be a great help."</p>
<p>City officials plan to distribute the cards to neighborhood boards across Oahu in the coming months.</p>
<p>People interested in getting the cards beforehand can find them at Honolulu Hale.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: KGMB-TV, <a href="http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/" type="external">http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/</a></p>
<p>HONOLULU (AP) — Honolulu city officials are asking residents to give panhandlers a special business card instead of cash.</p>
<p>The cards were made by the city to give panhandlers contact information for agencies that can help them find housing, Hawaii News Now <a href="http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/37155530/city-wants-you-to-give-panhandlers-a-special-business-card-instead-of-cash" type="external">reported</a> Thursday.</p>
<p>The cards read "Need Housing?" on the front and list the phone numbers for Aloha United Way, Honolulu Office of Housing and the statewide homeless help line on the back.</p>
<p>The cards are quick and simple alternative to giving panhandlers cash, which can enable people to continue living on the streets instead of seeking help, said Marc Alexander, head of the mayor's Office of Housing.</p>
<p>"We know the community wants to help and we want to give people an easy way that's also effective to get the word out about services," he said.</p>
<p>The program launched earlier this month.</p>
<p>The 15,000 business cards cost the city $400 to make.</p>
<p>The cards are currently being handed out by police officers, medics and some homeless service providers.</p>
<p>They will be available for anyone to distribute starting next year.</p>
<p>But residents are unsure how panhandlers will react to the cards.</p>
<p>"Half the battle is they don't want to," Wood Soueria said. "We offer all of these places and they don't really want to go."</p>
<p>When the TV station's crew handed one card to a panhandler only identified as Chris, he said he would call the numbers listed on the card and asked for more.</p>
<p>"It's hard because you feel like the whole world is caving in on you. But there's hope," Chris said. "You walked up to me and gave me this. Yeah, I think this could be a great help."</p>
<p>City officials plan to distribute the cards to neighborhood boards across Oahu in the coming months.</p>
<p>People interested in getting the cards beforehand can find them at Honolulu Hale.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Information from: KGMB-TV, <a href="http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/" type="external">http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/</a></p> | 802 |
<p>According to a <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/23/clothes-taken-search-missing-uva-student/16092955/" type="external">report</a> from The Associated Press, authorities have removed clothing from Hannah Graham suspect Jesse Matthew’s home.</p>
<p>Hannah, a sophomore at the University of Virginia, went missing on September 13. Matthew, a suspect in Hannah’s disappearance, worked at the university.</p>
<p>Citing&#160;Charlottesville Police Capt. Gary Pleasants, The AP notes that the clothing taken from Matthew’s residence is being analyzed by a lab.</p>
<p>An earlier <a href="http://www.wjhl.com/story/26590536/man-seen-with-uva-student-faces-driving-charge" type="external">AP report</a> noted&#160;that Matthew is thought to be the last person seen with Graham before she vanished. In addition to being wanted on two counts of reckless driving, police want to speak with Jesse about Hannah’s disappearance.</p>
<p>“I believe Jesse Matthew was the last person she was seen with before she vanished off the face of the Earth because it’s been a week and we can’t find her,” Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo said at a news conference on Sunday. “I’ve made no mistake about it. We want to talk to Jesse Matthew. We want to talk to him. We want to talk to him about his interaction with this sweet, young girl we can’t find.”</p>
<p>Last weekend, more than 1,000 volunteers searched for Hannah, but were unable to uncover any sign of the 18 year old.</p>
<p>“Hannah is beyond precious to us,” Hannah’s parents said in a statement released shortly after she disappeared. “We are truly devastated by her disappearance. It’s totally out of character for us not to have heard from her, and we fear foul play.”</p>
<p>According to Matthew’s <a href="https://localtvwtkr.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/wanted1.jpg" type="external">wanted poster</a>, a $50,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the safe return of Hannah Graham.</p>
<p /> | Report: Police remove clothing from Hannah Graham suspect Jesse Matthew’s residence | false | http://natmonitor.com/2014/09/23/report-police-remove-clothing-from-hannah-graham-suspect-jesse-matthews-home/ | 2014-09-23 | 3left-center
| Report: Police remove clothing from Hannah Graham suspect Jesse Matthew’s residence
<p>According to a <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/23/clothes-taken-search-missing-uva-student/16092955/" type="external">report</a> from The Associated Press, authorities have removed clothing from Hannah Graham suspect Jesse Matthew’s home.</p>
<p>Hannah, a sophomore at the University of Virginia, went missing on September 13. Matthew, a suspect in Hannah’s disappearance, worked at the university.</p>
<p>Citing&#160;Charlottesville Police Capt. Gary Pleasants, The AP notes that the clothing taken from Matthew’s residence is being analyzed by a lab.</p>
<p>An earlier <a href="http://www.wjhl.com/story/26590536/man-seen-with-uva-student-faces-driving-charge" type="external">AP report</a> noted&#160;that Matthew is thought to be the last person seen with Graham before she vanished. In addition to being wanted on two counts of reckless driving, police want to speak with Jesse about Hannah’s disappearance.</p>
<p>“I believe Jesse Matthew was the last person she was seen with before she vanished off the face of the Earth because it’s been a week and we can’t find her,” Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo said at a news conference on Sunday. “I’ve made no mistake about it. We want to talk to Jesse Matthew. We want to talk to him. We want to talk to him about his interaction with this sweet, young girl we can’t find.”</p>
<p>Last weekend, more than 1,000 volunteers searched for Hannah, but were unable to uncover any sign of the 18 year old.</p>
<p>“Hannah is beyond precious to us,” Hannah’s parents said in a statement released shortly after she disappeared. “We are truly devastated by her disappearance. It’s totally out of character for us not to have heard from her, and we fear foul play.”</p>
<p>According to Matthew’s <a href="https://localtvwtkr.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/wanted1.jpg" type="external">wanted poster</a>, a $50,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the safe return of Hannah Graham.</p>
<p /> | 803 |
<p>Rush Limbaugh is taking issue with President Donald Trump over his handling of the NFL and players who refuse to stand in honor of the American Flag and the National Anthem.</p>
<p>On his show Wednesday, he said it was the NFL owners’ job – not President Trump’s – to control the actions of their employees.</p>
<p>Advertisement - story continues below</p>
<p>Trump and most Americans have been livid that the NFL has allowed protest demonstrations and displays during their games. Some players – or entire teams will “take a knee” during the game now, without fear of repercussion.</p>
<p>Limbaugh said that no matter how this shakes out, standing up for the American Flag, for our veterans, for the military – for America is going to be a political victory for Trump. He just doesn’t think any government employee should be mandating patriotism. From his <a href="https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2017/10/11/its-nfl-owners-job-not-the-presidents-to-control-their-employees/" type="external">website</a>:</p>
<p>Breaking news updates and daily headlines from a news source you can trust.</p>
<p>Trump is continually tweeting — I know what he’s doing, and I understand why he’s doing it, and his motives are pure; don’t misunderstand. But I don’t think that it is useful or helpful for any employee anywhere to be forced to do something because the government says they must. That scares hell out of me. This should come from the league, as it looks like Goodell wants it to. The owners should be demanding this, not the president. The commissioner should be demanding this, not the president.</p>
<p>We don’t want the president being able to demand anybody that he’s unhappy with behave in a way he requires. That’s scary to me, even if the president’s somebody I happen to like. This is a workplace issue. It’s the owners and the league that let this get out of hand because they didn’t know how to deal with it or were afraid to.</p>
<p>And if this is gonna be made to work, the players are gonna have to be told who the boss is and they’re gonna have to be given specific workplace rules and regulations that they know have nothing to do with the Constitution, the First Amendment, freedom of speech. If you want to work for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, you are gonna stand for the anthem. If you want to work for Dallas Cowboys, you’re gonna stand for the anthem.</p>
<p>But I’m really nervous if all that happens because the president makes it happen. He can make it happen by forcing the owners. But this is a slippery slope to me, and it hit me a while ago and crystallized last night. Trump is in the right, don’t misunderstand. But no president should have dictatorial power over individual behavior.</p>
<p>A president should not be able to tell the owners of a business how their employees are gonna act and what they’re gonna swear allegiance to and all that. That’s up to the owners to do, and it’s up to the owners to come up with a system of punishment if their employees violate company policy, like it is in any other business.</p>
<p>They don’t own the stage, they don’t have a right to it. Theirs is a privilege just like every employee’s is. You don’t own where you work unless you do. You’re always subject to the rules, guidelines, and wishes of the people who do own the business. The NFL should be no different. But when the NFL misjudges its audience and doesn’t know who its audience is and the NFL is afraid of its players, then the inmates start running the asylum.</p>
<p>What do you think? Now that Trump has brought this to light, should he back off and let the owners sort it out? Sound off below!</p>
<p>What do you think? Scroll down to comment below.</p> | Rush Limbaugh BREAKS With Trump Over NFL Kneelers | true | http://thefederalistpapers.org/us/rush-limbaugh-breaks-trump-nfl-kneelers | 0right
| Rush Limbaugh BREAKS With Trump Over NFL Kneelers
<p>Rush Limbaugh is taking issue with President Donald Trump over his handling of the NFL and players who refuse to stand in honor of the American Flag and the National Anthem.</p>
<p>On his show Wednesday, he said it was the NFL owners’ job – not President Trump’s – to control the actions of their employees.</p>
<p>Advertisement - story continues below</p>
<p>Trump and most Americans have been livid that the NFL has allowed protest demonstrations and displays during their games. Some players – or entire teams will “take a knee” during the game now, without fear of repercussion.</p>
<p>Limbaugh said that no matter how this shakes out, standing up for the American Flag, for our veterans, for the military – for America is going to be a political victory for Trump. He just doesn’t think any government employee should be mandating patriotism. From his <a href="https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2017/10/11/its-nfl-owners-job-not-the-presidents-to-control-their-employees/" type="external">website</a>:</p>
<p>Breaking news updates and daily headlines from a news source you can trust.</p>
<p>Trump is continually tweeting — I know what he’s doing, and I understand why he’s doing it, and his motives are pure; don’t misunderstand. But I don’t think that it is useful or helpful for any employee anywhere to be forced to do something because the government says they must. That scares hell out of me. This should come from the league, as it looks like Goodell wants it to. The owners should be demanding this, not the president. The commissioner should be demanding this, not the president.</p>
<p>We don’t want the president being able to demand anybody that he’s unhappy with behave in a way he requires. That’s scary to me, even if the president’s somebody I happen to like. This is a workplace issue. It’s the owners and the league that let this get out of hand because they didn’t know how to deal with it or were afraid to.</p>
<p>And if this is gonna be made to work, the players are gonna have to be told who the boss is and they’re gonna have to be given specific workplace rules and regulations that they know have nothing to do with the Constitution, the First Amendment, freedom of speech. If you want to work for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, you are gonna stand for the anthem. If you want to work for Dallas Cowboys, you’re gonna stand for the anthem.</p>
<p>But I’m really nervous if all that happens because the president makes it happen. He can make it happen by forcing the owners. But this is a slippery slope to me, and it hit me a while ago and crystallized last night. Trump is in the right, don’t misunderstand. But no president should have dictatorial power over individual behavior.</p>
<p>A president should not be able to tell the owners of a business how their employees are gonna act and what they’re gonna swear allegiance to and all that. That’s up to the owners to do, and it’s up to the owners to come up with a system of punishment if their employees violate company policy, like it is in any other business.</p>
<p>They don’t own the stage, they don’t have a right to it. Theirs is a privilege just like every employee’s is. You don’t own where you work unless you do. You’re always subject to the rules, guidelines, and wishes of the people who do own the business. The NFL should be no different. But when the NFL misjudges its audience and doesn’t know who its audience is and the NFL is afraid of its players, then the inmates start running the asylum.</p>
<p>What do you think? Now that Trump has brought this to light, should he back off and let the owners sort it out? Sound off below!</p>
<p>What do you think? Scroll down to comment below.</p> | 804 |
|
<p>GREEN BAY — The <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Green_Bay_Packers/" type="external">Green Bay Packers</a> got a huge lift Tuesday when cornerback Davon House returned to practice.</p>
<p>House was a free-agent acquisition this offseason expected to challenge for Green Bay’s No. 1 cornerback job. But House injured his hamstring on Aug. 5 and has been out ever since.</p>
<p>“He looked good. He looked good,” Packers cornerbacks coach Joe Whitt said of House. “I was pleased with what he did.”</p>
<p>House played in Green Bay from 2011-14, so he has tremendous familiarity with the defense and the coaching staff. Third-year players Damarious Randall and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Quinten-Rollins/" type="external">Quinten Rollins</a> are trying to rebound from brutal 2016 seasons and rookie second-round draft pick Kevin King has had an up-and-down summer.</p>
<p>So, the Packers are clearly looking for House to provide some stability to an otherwise uncertain positional group.</p>
<p>“There’s naturally going to be some rust, being away for however many weeks he was and not being in football-type shape,” Whitt said. “Hopefully, we have enough time to knock all of that off and get him ready for when games matter.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Green Bay is dangerously thin at outside linebacker, and had former <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/San-Francisco-49ers/" type="external">San Francisco 49ers</a> Pro Bowler Ahmad Brooks in for a visit Tuesday.</p>
<p>Brooks, 33, isn’t the Pro-Bowl player he once was. But he’s had at least 5.0 sacks for eight straight seasons and has 53.5 career sacks.</p>
<p>“Tough. Tough. Physically imposing,” Packers linebackers coach Winston Moss said of Brooks. “A rusher. Can play very, very well versus the run. Can play stout versus the tight end. He can do everything that we would ask him to do in our scheme.”</p>
<p>The Packers have high-level – and highly compensated – starters in <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Nick-Perry/" type="external">Nick Perry</a> and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Clay-Matthews/" type="external">Clay Matthews</a>. But reserves Jayrone Elliott and Kyler Fackrell have both had disappointing training camps.</p>
<p>In addition, Matthews is battling a groin injury, while Perry suffered an ankle injury in the third preseason game. Both are expected to be ready for the season opener, but each player has extremely long injury histories.</p>
<p>By signing Brooks, the Packers could add a player who is familiar with their base 3-4 defense and provide help immediately.</p>
<p>“He can play to the tight-end side, he can play to the open-end side,” Moss said. “He can play the outside linebacker, he can play the elephant. If he were to be placed on our roster – however that decision goes down – he could come right in and fit right in.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Detroit made quarterback <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Matthew_Stafford/" type="external">Matthew Stafford</a> the highest-paid player in NFL history Monday when they signed him to a five-year, $135 million contract extension. That’s an average of $27 million per season.</p>
<p>One of the great beneficiaries of that deal could be Green Bay’s <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Aaron_Rodgers/" type="external">Aaron Rodgers</a>.</p>
<p>Rodgers signed a five-year, $110 million extension in 2013 – an average of $22 million per year. The case can certainly be made that Rodgers is now underpaid, and there’s a chance his next contract could make him the NFL’s first $200 million man.</p>
<p>“I’m happy for Matt. I mean, Matt and I have battled over the years,” Rodgers said. “I really respect him as a player. I love watching him throw. He can do it from a number of different platforms and arm angles. It’s fun to watch.</p>
<p>“I think he’s one of the good guys in the league at quarterback. When it comes to how that affects my own status, nothing’s changed. I have this year and two more years to play, and that stuff takes care of itself.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Packers head coach <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Mike_McCarthy/" type="external">Mike McCarthy</a> has called the plays for the majority of his 11 seasons in Green Bay. But McCarthy lets his offensive coordinator handle play-calling duties in the final preseason game.</p>
<p>That means Edgar Bennett will handle that job Thursday when the Packers host the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/los-angeles-rams/" type="external">Los Angeles Rams</a>.</p>
<p>“It’s exciting to get that opportunity, one that I certainly appreciate having that opportunity from coach McCarthy so I’m excited about it,” Bennett said. “Anytime you get an opportunity to get more experience in an area, it’s unique and I’m excited about it.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Packers second-year defensive end Dean Lowry hyperextended his knee in Green Bay’s second preseason game and missed nine days. But Lowry was back at practice Tuesday and fully expects to play in the regular-season opener.</p>
<p>“I was engaged with the center on that play and the guard came and hit me in pass protection,” Lowry said. “I tried to plant my left foot and then my knee kind of extended outward. After watching it, I think I dodged a bullet.”</p>
<p>The Packers dodged a bullet, as well.</p>
<p>Green Bay’s depth up front is suspect, as rookie Montravius Adams has been sidelined with a foot injury since the second day of training camp. So, getting Lowry back at full strength is critical.</p>
<p>“I thought Dean was making strides in the right direction,” Packers defensive line coach Mike Trgovac said. “His arrow is pointing up. He hasn’t been out that long, so hopefully he’ll pick right back up where he left off. It’s not like he’s missed a month or whatever.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>One of the Packers’ most improved players this summer has been second-year wide receiver Trevor Davis.</p>
<p>Davis has four receptions for 51 yards and is averaging 24.4 yards per punt return. Davis has also fumbled away a punt, something that cost him that job in 2016.</p>
<p>“Trevor’s had a fantastic camp for us, a guy who runs an incredible time on the clock, didn’t play maybe as fast last year,” Rodgers said of Davis. “This year he’s playing fast because he’s thinking less, he’s confident, he’s obviously done a great job for us on the punt return team, but he’s become a legitimate receiver.</p>
<p>“So, I’m really happy about the strides he’s made and that’s a prime example of a guy who’s probably a little more focused this year and the mental part has come a lot easier than it did last year, which is natural.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Moss admitted that fourth-round outside linebacker Vince Biegel won’t be able to help much for a while. Biegel has been on the PUP list all of training camp with a broken foot, and even if he makes the 53-man roster, it’s doubtful he could contribute much early.</p>
<p>“We’re not going to ask him to do anything that he cannot do before he’s ready to,” Moss said. “We would all love for him be in game-ready, be in season-ready condition, but that’s not the case. But we’ll take it a day at a time, we’ll take it a week at a time, and whatever it takes.</p>
<p>“If he’s on the 53, we’ll work with whatever process and whatever measures it’s going to take for him to evolve into getting into condition, getting into shape, getting his techniques honed down. Or if he’s put on the PUP, then we’ll deal with that as it comes.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Packers general manager <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Ted_Thompson/" type="external">Ted Thompson</a> makes the final call on the 53-man roster. So, what is Thompson looking for during Thursday’s final preseason game?</p>
<p>“Kind of like it always is with me is, I’m trying to watch the whole thing,” Thompson said. “Sometimes I’m on the field, sometimes I’m up in the booth. In both instances, you’re looking for how they get along, how they meld with everybody else.</p>
<p>“The personalities. I always think that’s important, even though everybody’s got a little different twist on how they’re going to play or react. But we look forward to see them compete and get after it. I’m sure they’re ready to go, too.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Packers No. 2 quarterback Brett Hundley has had an impressive summer. Hundley has completed 37-of-55 passes (67.3 percent) for 383 yards, thrown two touchdowns and been intercepted once. That’s a passer rating of 91.7.</p>
<p>With Rodgers entrenched for potentially several more years, Hundley will likely have to go elsewhere for a chance to start. Hundley will enter the final year of his contract in 2018, so the Packers would love to try trading him this offseason.</p>
<p>Hundley’s impressive summer should have helped his stock.</p>
<p>“Brett, when he gets in his rhythm and he’s moving around well he’s really showed a lot,” Rodgers said of Hundley. “He’s just playing really well.”</p> | Green Bay Packers CB Davon House returns to practice | false | https://newsline.com/green-bay-packers-cb-davon-house-returns-to-practice/ | 2017-08-30 | 1right-center
| Green Bay Packers CB Davon House returns to practice
<p>GREEN BAY — The <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Green_Bay_Packers/" type="external">Green Bay Packers</a> got a huge lift Tuesday when cornerback Davon House returned to practice.</p>
<p>House was a free-agent acquisition this offseason expected to challenge for Green Bay’s No. 1 cornerback job. But House injured his hamstring on Aug. 5 and has been out ever since.</p>
<p>“He looked good. He looked good,” Packers cornerbacks coach Joe Whitt said of House. “I was pleased with what he did.”</p>
<p>House played in Green Bay from 2011-14, so he has tremendous familiarity with the defense and the coaching staff. Third-year players Damarious Randall and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Quinten-Rollins/" type="external">Quinten Rollins</a> are trying to rebound from brutal 2016 seasons and rookie second-round draft pick Kevin King has had an up-and-down summer.</p>
<p>So, the Packers are clearly looking for House to provide some stability to an otherwise uncertain positional group.</p>
<p>“There’s naturally going to be some rust, being away for however many weeks he was and not being in football-type shape,” Whitt said. “Hopefully, we have enough time to knock all of that off and get him ready for when games matter.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Green Bay is dangerously thin at outside linebacker, and had former <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/San-Francisco-49ers/" type="external">San Francisco 49ers</a> Pro Bowler Ahmad Brooks in for a visit Tuesday.</p>
<p>Brooks, 33, isn’t the Pro-Bowl player he once was. But he’s had at least 5.0 sacks for eight straight seasons and has 53.5 career sacks.</p>
<p>“Tough. Tough. Physically imposing,” Packers linebackers coach Winston Moss said of Brooks. “A rusher. Can play very, very well versus the run. Can play stout versus the tight end. He can do everything that we would ask him to do in our scheme.”</p>
<p>The Packers have high-level – and highly compensated – starters in <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Nick-Perry/" type="external">Nick Perry</a> and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Clay-Matthews/" type="external">Clay Matthews</a>. But reserves Jayrone Elliott and Kyler Fackrell have both had disappointing training camps.</p>
<p>In addition, Matthews is battling a groin injury, while Perry suffered an ankle injury in the third preseason game. Both are expected to be ready for the season opener, but each player has extremely long injury histories.</p>
<p>By signing Brooks, the Packers could add a player who is familiar with their base 3-4 defense and provide help immediately.</p>
<p>“He can play to the tight-end side, he can play to the open-end side,” Moss said. “He can play the outside linebacker, he can play the elephant. If he were to be placed on our roster – however that decision goes down – he could come right in and fit right in.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Detroit made quarterback <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Matthew_Stafford/" type="external">Matthew Stafford</a> the highest-paid player in NFL history Monday when they signed him to a five-year, $135 million contract extension. That’s an average of $27 million per season.</p>
<p>One of the great beneficiaries of that deal could be Green Bay’s <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Aaron_Rodgers/" type="external">Aaron Rodgers</a>.</p>
<p>Rodgers signed a five-year, $110 million extension in 2013 – an average of $22 million per year. The case can certainly be made that Rodgers is now underpaid, and there’s a chance his next contract could make him the NFL’s first $200 million man.</p>
<p>“I’m happy for Matt. I mean, Matt and I have battled over the years,” Rodgers said. “I really respect him as a player. I love watching him throw. He can do it from a number of different platforms and arm angles. It’s fun to watch.</p>
<p>“I think he’s one of the good guys in the league at quarterback. When it comes to how that affects my own status, nothing’s changed. I have this year and two more years to play, and that stuff takes care of itself.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Packers head coach <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Mike_McCarthy/" type="external">Mike McCarthy</a> has called the plays for the majority of his 11 seasons in Green Bay. But McCarthy lets his offensive coordinator handle play-calling duties in the final preseason game.</p>
<p>That means Edgar Bennett will handle that job Thursday when the Packers host the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/los-angeles-rams/" type="external">Los Angeles Rams</a>.</p>
<p>“It’s exciting to get that opportunity, one that I certainly appreciate having that opportunity from coach McCarthy so I’m excited about it,” Bennett said. “Anytime you get an opportunity to get more experience in an area, it’s unique and I’m excited about it.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Packers second-year defensive end Dean Lowry hyperextended his knee in Green Bay’s second preseason game and missed nine days. But Lowry was back at practice Tuesday and fully expects to play in the regular-season opener.</p>
<p>“I was engaged with the center on that play and the guard came and hit me in pass protection,” Lowry said. “I tried to plant my left foot and then my knee kind of extended outward. After watching it, I think I dodged a bullet.”</p>
<p>The Packers dodged a bullet, as well.</p>
<p>Green Bay’s depth up front is suspect, as rookie Montravius Adams has been sidelined with a foot injury since the second day of training camp. So, getting Lowry back at full strength is critical.</p>
<p>“I thought Dean was making strides in the right direction,” Packers defensive line coach Mike Trgovac said. “His arrow is pointing up. He hasn’t been out that long, so hopefully he’ll pick right back up where he left off. It’s not like he’s missed a month or whatever.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>One of the Packers’ most improved players this summer has been second-year wide receiver Trevor Davis.</p>
<p>Davis has four receptions for 51 yards and is averaging 24.4 yards per punt return. Davis has also fumbled away a punt, something that cost him that job in 2016.</p>
<p>“Trevor’s had a fantastic camp for us, a guy who runs an incredible time on the clock, didn’t play maybe as fast last year,” Rodgers said of Davis. “This year he’s playing fast because he’s thinking less, he’s confident, he’s obviously done a great job for us on the punt return team, but he’s become a legitimate receiver.</p>
<p>“So, I’m really happy about the strides he’s made and that’s a prime example of a guy who’s probably a little more focused this year and the mental part has come a lot easier than it did last year, which is natural.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Moss admitted that fourth-round outside linebacker Vince Biegel won’t be able to help much for a while. Biegel has been on the PUP list all of training camp with a broken foot, and even if he makes the 53-man roster, it’s doubtful he could contribute much early.</p>
<p>“We’re not going to ask him to do anything that he cannot do before he’s ready to,” Moss said. “We would all love for him be in game-ready, be in season-ready condition, but that’s not the case. But we’ll take it a day at a time, we’ll take it a week at a time, and whatever it takes.</p>
<p>“If he’s on the 53, we’ll work with whatever process and whatever measures it’s going to take for him to evolve into getting into condition, getting into shape, getting his techniques honed down. Or if he’s put on the PUP, then we’ll deal with that as it comes.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Packers general manager <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Ted_Thompson/" type="external">Ted Thompson</a> makes the final call on the 53-man roster. So, what is Thompson looking for during Thursday’s final preseason game?</p>
<p>“Kind of like it always is with me is, I’m trying to watch the whole thing,” Thompson said. “Sometimes I’m on the field, sometimes I’m up in the booth. In both instances, you’re looking for how they get along, how they meld with everybody else.</p>
<p>“The personalities. I always think that’s important, even though everybody’s got a little different twist on how they’re going to play or react. But we look forward to see them compete and get after it. I’m sure they’re ready to go, too.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Packers No. 2 quarterback Brett Hundley has had an impressive summer. Hundley has completed 37-of-55 passes (67.3 percent) for 383 yards, thrown two touchdowns and been intercepted once. That’s a passer rating of 91.7.</p>
<p>With Rodgers entrenched for potentially several more years, Hundley will likely have to go elsewhere for a chance to start. Hundley will enter the final year of his contract in 2018, so the Packers would love to try trading him this offseason.</p>
<p>Hundley’s impressive summer should have helped his stock.</p>
<p>“Brett, when he gets in his rhythm and he’s moving around well he’s really showed a lot,” Rodgers said of Hundley. “He’s just playing really well.”</p> | 805 |
<p>At 7:30 a.m., on March 16, 1968, Task Force Barker descended on the small hamlet of My Lai in the Quang Nai province of South Vietnam. Two squads cordoned off the village and one, led by Lieutenant William Calley, moved in and, accompanied by US Army Intelligence officers, began to slaughter all the inhabitants. Over the next eight hours US soldiers methodically killed 504 men,&#160; women and children.</p>
<p>As the late Ron Ridenhour, who first exposed the massacre, said years later to one of the present authors, “Above My Lai were helicopters filled with the entire command staff of the brigade, division and task force. All three tiers in the chain of command were literally flying overhead while it was going on. It takes a long time to kill 600 people. It’s a dirty job, you might say. These guys were flying overhead from 7:30 in the morning, when the unit first landed and began to move into those hamlets. They were there at least two hours, at 500 feet, 1000 feet and 1500 feet.”</p>
<p>The cover-up of this operation began almost from the start. The problem wasn’t the massacre itself: polls right after the event showed 65 percent of Americans approved of the US action. The cover-up was instead to disguise the fact that My Lai was part of the CIA killing program called Operation Phoenix. As Douglas Valentine writes in his brilliant book, <a href="" type="internal">The Phoenix Program</a>,</p>
<p>the My Lai massacre was a result of Phoenix, the ‘jerry-built’ counter-terror program that provided an outlet for the repressed fears and anger of the psyched-up men of Task Force Barker. Under the aegis of neutralizing the infrastructure, old men, women and children became the enemy. Phoenix made it as easy to shoot a Vietnamese child as it was to shoot a sparrow in a tree. The ammunition was faulty intelligence provided by secret agents harboring grudges – in violation of the agreement that Census Grievance intelligence would not be provided to the police. The trigger was the blacklist.</p>
<p>The My Lai operation was principally developed by two men, the CIA’s Paul Ramsdell and a Colonel Khien, the Quang Nai province chief. Operating under cover of the US Agency for International Development, Ramsdell headed the Phoenix program in Quang Nai province, where it was his task to prepare lists of suspected NLF (called by the Americans “Viet Cong”) leaders, organizers &#160;and sympathizers. Ramsdell would then pass these lists on to the US Army units that were carrying out the killings. In the case of My Lai, Ramsdell told Task Force Barker’s intelligence officer, Captain Koutac, that “anyone in that area was considered a VC sympathizer because they couldn’t survive in that area unless they were sympathizers.”</p>
<p>Ramsdell had acquired this estimate from Col. Khien, who had his own agenda. For one thing, his family had been hit hard by the Tet offensive launched by the NLF earlier in the year. In addition, the NLF had seriously disrupted his business enterprises. Khien was notorious for being one of South Vietnam’s most corrupt chieftains, an officer who had his hand in everything from payroll fraud to prostitution. But Khien apparently made his really big money from heroin sales to US soldiers.</p>
<p>For the CIA, the need to cover its involvement in the My Lai massacre became acute in August 1970, when Sergeant David Mitchell, a member of Task Force Barker, was put on trial for killing dozens of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. Mitchell claimed that the My Lai operation had been conducted under the supervision of the CIA. The Agency’s lawyer, John Greaney, successfully prevented Mitchell’s lawyers from lodging subpoenas against any Agency personnel. But despite such maneuvers, high CIA and army brass were worried that the truth might trickle out, and so General William Peers of US Army Intelligence was given the task – so to speak – of straightening out the furniture.</p>
<p>Peers was a former CIA man whose ties to Agency operations in Southeast Asia dated back to World War II, when he supervised the OSS’s Detachment 101, the Burma campaign that often operated under the cover of Shan opium trafficking. Peers had also served as CIA station chief in Taiwan in the early 1950s, when the Agency was backing the exiled KMT supremo, Chiang Kai-shek and his henchman Li Mi, Peers had helped design the pacification strategy for South Vietnam and was a good friend of Evan Parker, the CIA officer who headed ICEX (Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation), the command structure that oversaw Phoenix and other covert killing operations. It’s not surprising, then, that the Peers investigation found no CIA fingerprints on the massacre and instead placed the blame on the crazed actions of the enlisted men and junior officers of Task Force Barker.</p>
<p>In the immediate aftermath of My Lai the polls may have shown 65 percent approval by Americans, but it’s doubtful whether such momentary enthusiasm would have survived the brute facts of what Operation Phoenix involved. As Bart Osborn, a US Army Intelligence officer collecting names of suspects in the Phoenix Program testified before Congress in 1972,</p>
<p>I never knew in the course of all of these operations any detainee to live through his interrogation. They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died and the majority were either tortured to death or things like thrown out of helicopters.</p>
<p>One of the more outlandish efforts to protect the true instigators of My Lai came during the 1970 congressional hearings run by Senator Thomas Dodd (father of the present US senator from Connecticut). Dodd was trying to pin the blame for My Lai on drug use by US soldiers. He had seized on this idea <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859842585/counterpunchmaga" type="external" />after seeing a CBS news item showing a US soldier smoking marijuana in the jungle after a fire-fight. The senator forthwith convened hearings of his subcommittee on juvenile deliquency, and his staff contacted Ron Ridenhour, the man who had first brought the massacre to light prior to Seymour Hersh’s journalistic exposé. Ridenhour had long made it his quest to show that My Lai was planned from the top, so he agreed to testify on the condition that he would not have to deal with any foolishness about blaming the murder of over 500 people on dope.</p>
<p>But no sooner had Ridenhour presented himself in the hearing chamber than Dodd began to issue pronouncements about the properties of marijuana so outlandish that Harry Anslinger himself would have approved. Ridenhour got nowhere, denounced the proceedings and expostulated outside the hearing room that “Dodd is stacking the evidence. Nobody mentioned drugs at My Lai after it happened and they would have been looking for any excuse. Many, many Americans are looking for any reason other than a command decision.”</p>
<p>Although Dodd had simply wanted to blame My Lai on drugs and move on, the press now began to take an interest in the whole question of drug use in Vietnam by US forces. The attention prompted a congressional delegation to travel to Vietnam headed by Rep. Robert Steele, a Connecticut Republican, and Rep. Morgan Murphy, a Democrat from Illinois. They spent a month in Vietnam talking to soldiers and medics and returned with a startling conclusion. “The soldier going to Vietnam,” Steele said, “runs a far greater risk of becoming a heroin addict than a combat casualty.” They estimated that as many as 40,000 soldiers in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. A follow-up investigation by the New York Times reckoned that the count might be even higher – perhaps as many as 80,000.</p>
<p>The Pentagon naturally preferred a lower figure, putting the total number of heroin addicts at between 100 and 200. But by this time President Nixon had begun to mistrust the flow of numbers out of the Defense Department and dispatched his White House domestic policy council chief, Egil Krogh Jr., to Vietnam for another look. Krogh didn’t spend time with the generals, but headed out into the field where he watched soldiers openly light up joints and Thai sticks and brag about the purity of the grades of heroin they were taking. Krogh came back with the news that as many as 20 percent of the US troops were heroin users. The figure made a big impression on Richard Nixon, who readily appreciated that although Americans might be prepared to see their sons die on the front lines battling communism, they would be far less enthusiastic at the news that hundreds of thousands of these same sons would be returning home as heroin addicts.</p>
<p>Partially in response to these findings Nixon recruited the CIA into his drug war. The man the Agency chose to put forward as coordinator with the White House was Lucien Conein, a veteran of the CIA’s station in Saigon, where he had been involved in the coup in 1963 that saw South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem, assassinated along with his brother Ngo Dhin Nhu. (The Diems were regarded by President Kennedy and his advisers as insufficiently robust in pursuing the war. What the CIA proposed, local South Vietnamese generals disposed, and the Diems died in a hail of machine-gun bullets.) At the time of his death Nhu was one of the largest heroin brokers in South Vietnam. His supplier was a Corsican living in Laos named Bonaventure Francisi.</p>
<p>Lucien Conein himself was of Corsican origin, and as part of his intelligence work had maintained ties to Corsican gangsters in Southeast Asia and in Marseilles. His role in the White House drug war team appears to have been not so much one of advancing an effective interdiction of drug supplies as in protecting CIA assets who were tied to the drug trade. For example, one of the CIA’s first recommendations – an instinctive reflex, really – was a “campaign of assassination” against global drug lords. The CIA argued that there were only a handful of heroin kingpins and that it would be easy to eliminate all of them. A White House policy memo from 1971 records this piece of Agency advice: “With 150 key assassinations the entire heroin-refining industry can be thrown into chaos.” On that list were relatively small-time players and those without any links to the CIA-backed KMT forces that controlled the crucial supply lines out of the Shan States. This discretion was nothing new, since there had been an agreement between Anslinger’s Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (the forerunner of the DEA) and the CIA not to run any of Anslinger’s agents in Southeast Asia, lest it discommode the CIA’s complex living arrangements in the region.</p>
<p>Another tactic advanced by Conein was to contaminate US cocaine supplies with methedrine, the theory being that users would react violently when dosing themselves with this potion and turn violently on their suppliers. There’s no evidence that either of these schemes – assassination or methedrine adulteration – was ever put into play. But the Agency was able to convince the Nixon administration that its eradication effort should be directed at Turkey rather than Southeast Asia, said effort culminating in an attempt at export substitution, with opium growers in Anatolia being helped to set up a factory to produce bicycles.</p>
<p>The CIA was well aware that Turkey provided only between 3 and 5 percent of the world’s supplies of raw opium at that time. In fact, the Agency had prepared an internal survey that estimated that 60 percent of the opium on the world market was coming from Southeast Asia and noted the precise whereabouts of the four largest heroin labs in the region, in villages in Laos, Burma and Thailand. This report was leaked to the New York Times, whose reporter relayed the main conclusions, without realizing that these villages were all next to CIA stations with the labs being run by people on the CIA’s payroll.</p>
<p>In April 1971, the CIA’s ties to the opium kings of Southeast Asia nearly sparked a major international confrontation. Crown Prince Sopsaisana had been appointed Laotian ambassador to France. On arrival in Paris, the prince angrily announced that some of his copious luggage was missing. He berated French airport officials, who meekly promised they would restore his property. In fact the prince’s bags had been intercepted by French customs after a tip that Sopsaisana was carrying high-grade heroin; indeed, his luggage contained 60 kilos of heroin, worth $13.5 million, then the largest drug seizure in French history. The prince had planned to ship his drug cargo on to New York. The CIA station in Paris convinced the French to cover up the affair, although the prince was not given back his dope. It hardly mattered. Sopsaisana returned two weeks later to Vientiane to nearly inexhaustible supplies of the drug.</p>
<p>Why the CIA interest in protecting the largest trafficker nabbed on the French soil? The opium used to manufacture the prince’s drugs had been grown in the highlands of Laos. It was purchased by a Hmong general, Vang Pao, who commanded the CIA’s secret air base in Laos, where it was processed into high-grade Number 4 heroin in labs just down the block from CIA quarters. The heroin was then flown to Vientiane on Vang Pao’s private airline, which consisted of two C-47s given to him by the CIA.</p>
<p>Vang Pao was the leader of a CIA-sponsored 30,000-man force of Hmong, which by 1971 consisted mostly of teenagers, fighting the Pathet Lao Communist forces. The Hmong had a reputation for fierceness, in part due to a century of conflict with the Chinese, who had, back in the nineteenth century, driven them into Laos after taking over their opium fields in Hunan. As one Hmong put it to Christopher Robbins, author of Air America, “They say we are a people who like to fight, a cruel people, enemy of everybody, always changing our region and being happy nowhere. If you want to know the truth about our people, ask the bear who is hurt why he defends himself, ask the dog who is kicked why he barks, ask the deer who is chased why he changes mountains.” The Hmong practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, with two crops – rice and opium, the first for sustenance and the latter for medicinal and trading purposes.</p>
<p>Vang Pao was born in 1932 in a Laotian hamlet called Nong Het. At the age of thirteen he served as an interpreter for the French forces then fighting the Japanese. Two years later he was battling Viet Minh incursions into Laos in the First Indochina War. He underwent officer training at the French military academy near Saigon, becoming the highest-ranking Hmong in the Royal Laotian Air Force. In 1954 Vang Pao led a group of 850 Hmong soldiers on a fruitless mission to relieve the beleaguered French during their debacle at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam.</p>
<p>The Hmong were first marshaled into a surrogate army by a French colonel called Roger Trinquier, who confronted a crisis in the French budget for local covert operations and intelligence in a fashion that covered more than one objective. “The money from the opium,” he wrote later, “financed the maquis [that is, the Hmong mercenaries] in Laos. It was flown to Cp. St. Jacques [a French military base sixty miles south of Saigon] in Vietnam in a DC-3 and sold.” The money was put into an account and used to feed and arm the guerrillas. Trinquier cynically added than the trade “was strictly controlled even though it was outlawed.” Overseeing the marketing in Saigon was the local French director of the Deuxiéme Bureau, Colonel Antoine Savani. A Corsican with ties to the Marseilles drug syndicates, Savani organized the Bin Xuyen River gang on the lower Mekong to run the heroin labs, manage the opium dens and sell the surplus to the Corsican drug syndicate. This enterprise, called Operation X, ran from 1946 through 1954.</p>
<p>Ho Chi Minh made opposition to the opium trade a key feature of his campaign to run the French out of Vietnam. The Viet Minh leader said, quite accurately, that the French were pushing opium on the people of Vietnam as a means of social control. A drugged people, Ho said, is less likely to rise up and throw off the oppressor.</p>
<p>During World War II, OSS officers working to oust the Japanese from Southeast Asia developed a cordial relationship with Ho Chi Minh, finding that the Viet Minh leader spoke fluent English and was well versed in American history. Ho quoted from memory lengthy passages from the Declaration of Independence, and chided the intelligence agents, noting that Vietnamese nationalists had been asking American presidents since Lincoln for help in booting out the French colonialists. As with Mao’s forces in China, the OSS operatives in Vietnam realized that Ho’s well-trained troops were a vital ally, more capable and less corrupt than Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army and the pro-French forces in Indochina. When Ho was stricken with malaria, the OSS sent one of its agents, Paul Helliwell, who would later head up the CIA’s Overseas Supply Company, to treat the ailing Communist. Similar to Joe Stilwell’s view of Mao, many military and OSS men recommended that the US should back Ho after the eviction of the Japanese.</p>
<p>After arriving in Vietnam in 1945, US Army General Phillip Gallagher asked the OSS to compile a detailed background on Ho. An OSS operative named Le Xuan, who would later work for the CIA during the Vietnam War, acquired a dossier on Ho from a disaffected Vietnamese nationalist: Le Xuan paid the man off with a bag of opium. The dossier disclosed to US intelligence agencies that Ho had had extended stays in the Soviet Union, a revelation that doomed any future aid from the Americans for his cause. Le Xuan would later turn on the CIA, showing up in Paris in 1968 to reveal his services to the Agency and denounce its murderous policies in Vietnam.</p>
<p>In 1953, Trinquier’s Operation X opium network was discovered by Colonel Edwin Lansdale, at the time the CIA’s military adviser in Southeast Asia. Lansdale later claimed that he protested about this French role in opium trafficking, but was admonished to hold his tongue because, in his words, exposure of “the operation would prove a major embarrassment to a friendly government.” In fact, the CIA’s director, Allen Dulles, was mightily impressed by Trinquier’s operation and, looking ahead to the time when the US would take over from the French in the region, began funneling money, guns and CIA advisers to Trinquier’s Hmong army.</p>
<p>The post–Dien Bien Phu accords, signed in Geneva in 1954, decreed that Laos was to be neutral, off-limits to all foreign military forces. This had the effect of opening Laos to the CIA, which did not consider itself a military force. The CIA became the unchallenged principal in all US actions inside Laos. Once in this position of dominance the CIA brooked no interference from the Pentagon. This point was driven home by the military attaché to Laos, Colonel Paul Pettigrew, who advised his replacement in Vientiane in 1961, “For God’s sake, don’t buck the CIA or you’ll find yourself floating face down on that Mekong River.”</p>
<p>From the moment the Geneva Accords were signed, the US government was determined to undermine them and do everything in its power to prevent the installation of Ho Chi Minh as president of all Vietnam, even though elections would have clearly showed he was the choice of most Vietnamese, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously admitted. Eisenhower and his advisers decreed that Laos’s neutral status should be subverted. On the ground this meant that the neutralist government of Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, which had amicable relations with the Pathet Lao, should be subverted by the CIA, whose preferred client was General Nosavan Phoumi. The Agency fixed elections in 1960 in an attempt to legitimize his rule. Also in 1960 the CIA began a more sustained effort to build up Vang Pao and his army, furnishing him with rifles, mortars, rockets and grenades.</p>
<p>After John Kennedy’s victory in 1960, Eisenhower advised him that the next big battleground in Southeast Asia would not be Vietnam but Laos. His counsel found its mark, even though Kennedy initially snooted Laos as “a country not worthy of engaging the attention of great powers.” In public Kennedy pronounced the country’s name as L-AY-o-s, thinking that Americans would not rally to the cause of a place pronounced “louse.” In 1960 there were but a thousand men in Vang Pao’s army. By 1961 “L’Armée Clandestine” had grown to 9,000. By the time of Kennedy’s assassination in late 1963, Vang Pao was at the head of some 30,000 troops. This army and its air force were entirely funded by the United States to the tune of $300 million, administered and overseen by the CIA.</p>
<p>Vang Pao’s original CIA case officer was William Young, the Baptist missionary-become-CIA-officer we met in the preceding chapter. Young never had any problem with the opium trafficking of the Hmong tribes. After Young was transferred out of the area in 1962, the CIA asked the Frenchman Trinquier to return as military adviser to the Hmong. Trinquier had just completed his tour of duty in the French Congo and consented to perform that function for a few months before the arrival of one of the most notorious characters in this saga, an American named Anthony Posephny, always known as Tony Poe.</p>
<p>Poe was a CIA officer, a former US Marine who had been wounded at Iwo Jima. By the early 1950s he was working for the Agency in Asia, starting with the training of Tibetan Khamba tribesmen in Colorado (thus breaching the law against CIA activities inside the US), prior to leading them back to retrieve the Dalai Lama. In 1958 Poe showed up in Indonesia in an early effort to topple Sukarno. In 1960 he was training KMT forces for raids into China; his right hand was by now mangled after ill-advised contact with a car’s fanbelt. In 1963 Poe became Vang Pao’s case officer and forthwith instituted new incentives to fire up the Hmong’s dedication to freedom’s cause, announcing that he would pay a cash bounty for every pair of Pathet Lao ears delivered to him. He kept a plastic bag on his front porch where the ears were deposited and strung his collection along the verandah. To convince skeptical CIA superiors, in this case Ted Shackley in Vientiane, that his body counts were accurate, Poe once stapled a pair of ears to a report and sent it to HQ.</p>
<p>This souvenir of early methods of computing the slaughter of native Americans was not as foolproof as Poe imagined. He himself later described going up country and finding a small boy with no ears, then was told that the boy’s father had sliced them off “to get money from the Americans.” Poe shifted his incentive to the entire heads of Pathet Lao, claiming that he preserved them in formaldehyde in his bedroom.</p>
<p>This man, described by an associate as an “amiable psychopath,” was running Phoenix-type operations into Lao villages near the Vietnam border. The teams were officially termed “home defense units,” though Poe more frankly described them as “hunter-killer teams.” Poe later claimed that he was booted out of Long Tieng because he had objected to CIA tolerance of Vang Pao’s drug trading, but his description suggests more an envy for the French style of direct supervision of the opium trade. In a filmed TV interview at his home in Northern Thailand Poe said in 1987,</p>
<p>&#160;You don’t let ’em run loose without a chain on ’em. They’re like any kind of animals, or a baby. You have to control ’em. Vang Pao was the only guy with a pair of shoes when I met him. Why does he need Mercedes and hotels and homes when he never had them before? Why are you going to give him them? He was making millions. He had his own avenue for selling heroin. He put his money in US bank accounts and Swiss banks, and we all knew it. We tried to monitor it. We controlled all the pilots. We were giving him free rides into Thailand. They were flying it [that is, the opium cargoes] into Danang, where it was picked up by the number two man to Thieu [at the time South Vietnam’s president]. It was all a contractual relationship, just like bankers and businessmen. A wonderful relationship. Just a Mafia. A big organized Mafia.</p>
<p>By the time Poe left this area of Laos in 1965, the situation was just as he described it twenty years later. The CIA’s client army was collecting and shipping the opium on CIA planes, which by now were flying under the American flag.</p>
<p>“Yes, I’ve seen the sticky bricks come on board, and no one challenged it,” Neal Hanson, an Air America pilot, said in a filmed interview in the late 1980s. “It was as if it was their personal property. We were a freebie airline. Whoever was put on our plane we flew. Primarily it was the smaller aircraft that would visit outlying villages and bring it [the opium] back to Long Tieng. If they put something on the airplane and told you not to look at it, you didn’t look at it.”</p>
<p>The Air America operation played a key role in expanding the opium market. CIA and US Agency for International Development funds went to the construction of more than 150 short, so-called LIMA landing strips in the mountains near the opium fields, thus opening these remote spots to the export trade – and also ensuring that such exports went to Vang Pao. The head of AID in that area at the time, Ron Rickenbach, said later, “I was on the air strips. My people were in charge of supplying the aircraft. I was in the areas where the opium was grown. I personally witnessed it being placed on Air America planes. We didn’t create the opium product. But our presence accelerated it dramatically.” In 1959 Laos was producing about 150 tons. By 1971 production had risen to 300 tons. Another boost to opium production, much of which was ultimately destined for the veins of Americans then fighting in Vietnam, was enabled by the USAID’s supplying rice to the Hmong, thus allowing them to stop growing this staple and use the land to cultivate opium poppies.</p>
<p>Vang Pao controlled the opium trade in the Plain of Jars region of Laos. By buying up the one salable crop the general could garner the allegiance of the hill tribes as well as stuff his own bank account. He would pay $60 a kilo, $10 over the prevailing rate, and would purchase a village’s crop if, in return, the village would supply recruits for his army. As a village leader described it, “Meo [that is, Hmong] officers with three or four stripes came from Long Tieng to buy their opium. They came in American helicopters, perhaps two or three men at one time. The helicopter leaves them here for a few days and they walk to the villages, then come back here and radio Long Tieng to send another helicopter for them and take the opium back.”</p>
<p>John Everingham, an Australian war photographer, was at that time based in Laos and visited the Hmong village of Long Pot; he recalled in the late 1980s that</p>
<p>&#160;I was given the guest bed in a district village leader’s house. I ended up sharing it with a military guy, who I later discovered was a leader in Vang Pao’s army. I was wakened by a great confusion of people and noise at the bottom of the bed, where there was a packet of black sticky stuff on bamboo leaves. And the village leader was weighing it out and paying quite a considerable amount of money. This went on several mornings. I found out it was raw opium. They all wore American uniforms. The opium went to Long Tieng by helicopters, Air America helicopters on contract to the CIA. I know as a fact that shortly after Vang Pao’s army was formed, the military officers gained control of the opium trade. It not only helped make them a lot of money. It also helped the villagers who needed their opium carried out, a difficult task in wartime. The officers were obviously paying a very good price because the villagers were very anxious to sell it to them.</p>
<p>In the early 1960s the trading chain from Long Tieng was as follows: the opium would be shipped into Vietnam on Laos Commercial Air, an airline run jointly by Ngo Dinh Nhu and the Corsican Bonaventure Francisi. Nhu, brother of South Vietnam’s President Diem, had presided over a huge expansion in Saigon’s opium parlors in order to fund his own security operation. But after the Diem brothers’ assassination, Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky, the man selected by the CIA as South Vietnam’s new leader, began bringing the opium in from Long Tieng on Vietnamese air force planes. (Ky had previously been head of South Vietnam’s air force.) A CIA man, Sam Mustard, testified to this arrangement in congressional hearings in 1968.</p>
<p>At the Laotian end, General Phoumi had placed Ouane Rattikone in charge of overall opium operations, and his dealings resulted in about a ton of opium a month being landed in Saigon. For his services, however, Rattikone was getting only about $200 a month from the parsimonious Phoumi. With the backing of the CIA, Rattikone rebelled and launched a coup in 1965 against Phoumi, driving his former boss into exile in Thailand. Rattikone now wanted to drop the contract with the Corsican’s Air Laos, which, despite Marshall Ky’s switch, was still doing business. Rattikone’s plan was to use the Royal Lao Air Force, entirely funded by the CIA. He referred to the opium shipments on the national air force as “requisitions militaires.” But CIA air commander Jack Drummond objected to what he deemed a logistically inefficient use of the Royal Lao Air Force’s T-28s and instead decreed that the CIA would furnish a C-47 for the dope runs “if they’d leave the T-28s alone.”</p>
<p>That’s precisely what happened. Two years later, in 1967, the CIA and USAID purchased two C-47s for Vang Pao, who opened up his own air transport company, which he called Xieng Khouang Air, known by one and all as Air Opium.</p>
<p>At the time the CIA decided to give Vang Pao his own airline, the CIA station chief in Vientiane was Ted Shackley, a man who had gotten his start in the CIA’s Paperclip project, recruiting Nazi scientists. Before he came to Laos Shackley had headed the Agency’s Miami station, where he orchestrated the repeated terror raids and assassination bids against Cuba and consorted with the local Cuban émigrés, themselves deeply involved in the drug trade. Shackley was an ardent exponent of the idea of purchasing the loyalty of CIA clients by a policy of economic assistance, calling this “the third option.” Tolerance – indeed active support – of the opium trade was therefore a proper military and diplomatic strategy. He also had a reputation for preferring to work with a team of long-term associates whom he would deploy in appropriate posts.</p>
<p>Thus one can follow, through the decades, the Shackley team from Miami, to Laos, to Vietnam (where he later became CIA station chief in Saigon) to his private business operations in Central America. When Shackley was in Vientiane, his associate, Thomas Clines, was handling business at Long Tieng. Another CIA man, Edwin Wilson, was delivering espionage equipment to Shackley in Laos. Richard Secord was supervising CIA operations, thus participating in a bombing program depositing more high explosive on peasants and guerrillas in the Plain of Jars than did the US on Germany and Japan during the whole of World War II. Shackley, Clines, Secord and Air America cargo kicker Eugene Hasenfus show up later in our story, in Central America, once again amid the CIA’s active complicity in the drug trade.</p>
<p>By the time Shackley moved to Saigon in 1968, the war had turned against Vang Pao. The Pathet Lao now had the upper hand. Over the next three years the story of the Hmong was one of forced marches and military defeats, and as the ground war went badly the CIA took to bombing campaigns that killed yet more Hmong. As Edgar “Pop” Buell, a missionary working in the hills, wrote in a memo to the CIA in 1968, “A short time ago we rounded up 300 fresh recruits [from the Hmong], 30 percent were 14 years old. Another 30 percent were 15 or 16. The remaining 40 percent were 45 or over. Where were the ages between? I’ll tell you – they’re all dead.”</p>
<p>By the end of the war in Laos a third of the entire population of the country had become refugees. In their forced marches the Hmong experienced 30 percent casualty rates, with young children often having to put their exhausted parents, prostrated along the trail, out of their misery. By 1971 the CIA was practicing a scorched-earth policy in Hmong territory against the incoming Pathet Lao. The land was drenched with herbicides, which killed the opium crop and also poisoned the Hmong. Later, when Hmong refugees in Thai refugee camps reported this “yellow rain,” CIA-patronized journalists spread the story that this was a Communist essay in biological warfare. The Wall Street Journal editorial page ran an extensive propaganda campaign on the issue in the early Reagan years. Vang Pao ended up in Missoula, Montana. General Ouane Rattikone went into exile in Thailand.</p>
<p>This CIA-transported opium engendered an addiction rate among US servicemen in Vietnam of up to 30 percent, with the soldiers spending some $80 million a year in Vietnam on heroin. In the early 1970s some of this same heroin was being smuggled back to the US in the body bags of dead servicemen, and when DEA agent Michael Levine attempted to bust the operation, he was warned off by his superiors because it might have led to exposure of the supply line from Long Tieng.</p>
<p>In 1971 a second-year grad student at Yale named Alfred McCoy met the poet Allen Ginsberg at a demonstration for Bobby Seale in New Haven. Ginsberg found out that McCoy had studied up on the drug trade and also knew several Southeast Asian languages as well as the political history of the region. He encouraged McCoy to research allegations about CIA involvement in the drug trade. McCoy finished his term papers and traveled to Southeast Asia in the summer of 1971, where he embarked on a courageous and far-reaching investigation that yielded brilliant results. He interviewed troops and officers in Saigon, and there also met John Everingham, the photographer who had witnessed the opium dealings in Laos. Everingham took him back into Laos to that same village. McCoy interviewed Hmong, both villagers and chiefs. He tracked down General Ouane Rattikone in Thailand. He interviewed Pop Buell and the CIA agent William Young.</p>
<p>Back in the United States by the spring of 1972, McCoy had finished the first draft of what was to be the path-breaking <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1556524838/counterpunchmaga" type="external">The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia</a>. In June of that year he was invited to testify before the US Senate by Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin. Following that testimony, he was called by his publisher Harper &amp; Row, demanding that he come to New York and meet with the company’s president, Winthrop Knowlton. Knowlton told McCoy that Cord Meyer, a top-ranking CIA officer, had paid a visit to the owner of Harper &amp; Row, Cass Canfield, and had told Canfield that McCoy’s book posed a national security threat. Meyer demanded that Harper &amp; Row cancel the contract. Canfield refused, but did agree to let the CIA review McCoy’s book before publication.</p>
<p>While McCoy was deliberating what to do, the CIA’s approach to Canfield leaked out to Seymour Hersh, then working at the New York Times. Hersh promptly published the story. As McCoy wrote in the preface to a new edition of his book published in 1990, “Humiliated in the public arena, the CIA turned to covert harassment. Over the coming months, my federal education grant was investigated. My phones were tapped. My income tax was audited and my sources were intimidated.” Some of his interpreters were threatened with assassination.</p>
<p>The book was duly published by Harper &amp; Row in 1972. Amid Congressional disquiet, the CIA told the Joint Committee on Intelligence that it was pressing forward with an internal review by the CIA’s Inspector General. The Agency sent twelve investigators into the field, where they spent two brief weeks in interviews. The report has never been released in its entirety, but this is its conclusion:</p>
<p>No evidence that the Agency or any senior officer of the Agency has ever sanctioned, or supported drug trafficking, as a matter of policy. Also we found not the slightest suspicion, much less evidence, that any Agency officer, staff or contact, has ever been involved with the drug business. With respect to Air America, we found that it has always forbidden, as a matter of policy, the transportation of contraband goods. We believe that its Security Inspection Service which is used by the cooperating air transport company as well, is now serving as an added deterrent to drug traffickers.</p>
<p>The one area of our activities in South East Asia that gives us some concern has to do with the agents and local officials with whom we are in contact and who have been or may still be involved in one way or another in the drug business. We are not referring here to those agents who are run as penetrations of the narcotics industry for collection of intelligence on the industry but, rather, to those with whom we are in touch in our other operations. What to do about these people is particularly troublesome in view of its implications for some of our operations, particularly in Laos. Yet their good will, if not mutual cooperation, considerably facilitates the military activities of the Agency-supported irregulars.</p>
<p>The report admitted that “the war has clearly been our over-riding priority in Southeast Asia and all other issues have taken second place in the scheme of things.” The report also suggested that there was no financial incentive for the pilots in Air America to be involved in smuggling, since they were “making good money.”</p>
<p>Reviews of McCoy’s book were hostile, suggesting that his hundreds of pages of well-sourced interviews and reporting amounted to conspiratorial rumor-mongering by a radical opponent of the war. McCoy’s charges were dismissed out of hand in the Church hearings of 1975, which concluded that allegations of drug smuggling by CIA assets and proprietaries “lacked substance.”</p>
<p>As McCoy himself summed it up in 1990, in words which no doubt strike a chord in the heart of Gary Webb, “Although I had scored in the first engagement with a media blitz, the CIA won the longer bureaucratic battle. By silencing my sources and publicly announcing its abhorrence of drugs, the Agency convinced Congress that it had been innocent of any complicity in the Southeast Asian opium trade.”</p>
<p>This article is adapted from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859842585/counterpunchmaga" type="external">Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press</a>.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>If Worries Was Dollar Bills</p>
<p />
<p>Sound Grammar</p>
<p>What I’m listening to this week…</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Ornette at 12 / Crisis</a> by Ornette Coleman <a href="" type="internal">New Magic</a> by Son Little <a href="" type="internal">14 Steps to Harlem</a> by Garland Jeffries <a href="" type="internal">Homecoming</a> by Vince Mendoza &amp; the WDR Big Band <a href="" type="internal">Ununiform</a> by Tricky</p>
<p>Booked Up</p>
<p>What I’m reading this week…</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">A Visit to Don Otavio: a Mexican Journey</a> by Sybille Bedford <a href="" type="internal">Spider Web: the Birth of American Anticommunism</a> by Nick Fischer <a href="" type="internal">An Odyssey: a Father, a Son and an Epic</a> by Daniel Mendelsohn</p>
<p>Lynching Music</p>
<p>Viet Thanh Nguyen:&#160;“Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland.” ( <a href="" type="internal">The Sympathizer</a>)</p> | Armies, Addicts and Spooks: the CIA in Vietnam and Laos | true | https://counterpunch.org/2017/09/29/armies-addicts-and-spooks-the-cia-in-vietnam-and-laos/ | 2017-09-29 | 4left
| Armies, Addicts and Spooks: the CIA in Vietnam and Laos
<p>At 7:30 a.m., on March 16, 1968, Task Force Barker descended on the small hamlet of My Lai in the Quang Nai province of South Vietnam. Two squads cordoned off the village and one, led by Lieutenant William Calley, moved in and, accompanied by US Army Intelligence officers, began to slaughter all the inhabitants. Over the next eight hours US soldiers methodically killed 504 men,&#160; women and children.</p>
<p>As the late Ron Ridenhour, who first exposed the massacre, said years later to one of the present authors, “Above My Lai were helicopters filled with the entire command staff of the brigade, division and task force. All three tiers in the chain of command were literally flying overhead while it was going on. It takes a long time to kill 600 people. It’s a dirty job, you might say. These guys were flying overhead from 7:30 in the morning, when the unit first landed and began to move into those hamlets. They were there at least two hours, at 500 feet, 1000 feet and 1500 feet.”</p>
<p>The cover-up of this operation began almost from the start. The problem wasn’t the massacre itself: polls right after the event showed 65 percent of Americans approved of the US action. The cover-up was instead to disguise the fact that My Lai was part of the CIA killing program called Operation Phoenix. As Douglas Valentine writes in his brilliant book, <a href="" type="internal">The Phoenix Program</a>,</p>
<p>the My Lai massacre was a result of Phoenix, the ‘jerry-built’ counter-terror program that provided an outlet for the repressed fears and anger of the psyched-up men of Task Force Barker. Under the aegis of neutralizing the infrastructure, old men, women and children became the enemy. Phoenix made it as easy to shoot a Vietnamese child as it was to shoot a sparrow in a tree. The ammunition was faulty intelligence provided by secret agents harboring grudges – in violation of the agreement that Census Grievance intelligence would not be provided to the police. The trigger was the blacklist.</p>
<p>The My Lai operation was principally developed by two men, the CIA’s Paul Ramsdell and a Colonel Khien, the Quang Nai province chief. Operating under cover of the US Agency for International Development, Ramsdell headed the Phoenix program in Quang Nai province, where it was his task to prepare lists of suspected NLF (called by the Americans “Viet Cong”) leaders, organizers &#160;and sympathizers. Ramsdell would then pass these lists on to the US Army units that were carrying out the killings. In the case of My Lai, Ramsdell told Task Force Barker’s intelligence officer, Captain Koutac, that “anyone in that area was considered a VC sympathizer because they couldn’t survive in that area unless they were sympathizers.”</p>
<p>Ramsdell had acquired this estimate from Col. Khien, who had his own agenda. For one thing, his family had been hit hard by the Tet offensive launched by the NLF earlier in the year. In addition, the NLF had seriously disrupted his business enterprises. Khien was notorious for being one of South Vietnam’s most corrupt chieftains, an officer who had his hand in everything from payroll fraud to prostitution. But Khien apparently made his really big money from heroin sales to US soldiers.</p>
<p>For the CIA, the need to cover its involvement in the My Lai massacre became acute in August 1970, when Sergeant David Mitchell, a member of Task Force Barker, was put on trial for killing dozens of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. Mitchell claimed that the My Lai operation had been conducted under the supervision of the CIA. The Agency’s lawyer, John Greaney, successfully prevented Mitchell’s lawyers from lodging subpoenas against any Agency personnel. But despite such maneuvers, high CIA and army brass were worried that the truth might trickle out, and so General William Peers of US Army Intelligence was given the task – so to speak – of straightening out the furniture.</p>
<p>Peers was a former CIA man whose ties to Agency operations in Southeast Asia dated back to World War II, when he supervised the OSS’s Detachment 101, the Burma campaign that often operated under the cover of Shan opium trafficking. Peers had also served as CIA station chief in Taiwan in the early 1950s, when the Agency was backing the exiled KMT supremo, Chiang Kai-shek and his henchman Li Mi, Peers had helped design the pacification strategy for South Vietnam and was a good friend of Evan Parker, the CIA officer who headed ICEX (Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation), the command structure that oversaw Phoenix and other covert killing operations. It’s not surprising, then, that the Peers investigation found no CIA fingerprints on the massacre and instead placed the blame on the crazed actions of the enlisted men and junior officers of Task Force Barker.</p>
<p>In the immediate aftermath of My Lai the polls may have shown 65 percent approval by Americans, but it’s doubtful whether such momentary enthusiasm would have survived the brute facts of what Operation Phoenix involved. As Bart Osborn, a US Army Intelligence officer collecting names of suspects in the Phoenix Program testified before Congress in 1972,</p>
<p>I never knew in the course of all of these operations any detainee to live through his interrogation. They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died and the majority were either tortured to death or things like thrown out of helicopters.</p>
<p>One of the more outlandish efforts to protect the true instigators of My Lai came during the 1970 congressional hearings run by Senator Thomas Dodd (father of the present US senator from Connecticut). Dodd was trying to pin the blame for My Lai on drug use by US soldiers. He had seized on this idea <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859842585/counterpunchmaga" type="external" />after seeing a CBS news item showing a US soldier smoking marijuana in the jungle after a fire-fight. The senator forthwith convened hearings of his subcommittee on juvenile deliquency, and his staff contacted Ron Ridenhour, the man who had first brought the massacre to light prior to Seymour Hersh’s journalistic exposé. Ridenhour had long made it his quest to show that My Lai was planned from the top, so he agreed to testify on the condition that he would not have to deal with any foolishness about blaming the murder of over 500 people on dope.</p>
<p>But no sooner had Ridenhour presented himself in the hearing chamber than Dodd began to issue pronouncements about the properties of marijuana so outlandish that Harry Anslinger himself would have approved. Ridenhour got nowhere, denounced the proceedings and expostulated outside the hearing room that “Dodd is stacking the evidence. Nobody mentioned drugs at My Lai after it happened and they would have been looking for any excuse. Many, many Americans are looking for any reason other than a command decision.”</p>
<p>Although Dodd had simply wanted to blame My Lai on drugs and move on, the press now began to take an interest in the whole question of drug use in Vietnam by US forces. The attention prompted a congressional delegation to travel to Vietnam headed by Rep. Robert Steele, a Connecticut Republican, and Rep. Morgan Murphy, a Democrat from Illinois. They spent a month in Vietnam talking to soldiers and medics and returned with a startling conclusion. “The soldier going to Vietnam,” Steele said, “runs a far greater risk of becoming a heroin addict than a combat casualty.” They estimated that as many as 40,000 soldiers in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. A follow-up investigation by the New York Times reckoned that the count might be even higher – perhaps as many as 80,000.</p>
<p>The Pentagon naturally preferred a lower figure, putting the total number of heroin addicts at between 100 and 200. But by this time President Nixon had begun to mistrust the flow of numbers out of the Defense Department and dispatched his White House domestic policy council chief, Egil Krogh Jr., to Vietnam for another look. Krogh didn’t spend time with the generals, but headed out into the field where he watched soldiers openly light up joints and Thai sticks and brag about the purity of the grades of heroin they were taking. Krogh came back with the news that as many as 20 percent of the US troops were heroin users. The figure made a big impression on Richard Nixon, who readily appreciated that although Americans might be prepared to see their sons die on the front lines battling communism, they would be far less enthusiastic at the news that hundreds of thousands of these same sons would be returning home as heroin addicts.</p>
<p>Partially in response to these findings Nixon recruited the CIA into his drug war. The man the Agency chose to put forward as coordinator with the White House was Lucien Conein, a veteran of the CIA’s station in Saigon, where he had been involved in the coup in 1963 that saw South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem, assassinated along with his brother Ngo Dhin Nhu. (The Diems were regarded by President Kennedy and his advisers as insufficiently robust in pursuing the war. What the CIA proposed, local South Vietnamese generals disposed, and the Diems died in a hail of machine-gun bullets.) At the time of his death Nhu was one of the largest heroin brokers in South Vietnam. His supplier was a Corsican living in Laos named Bonaventure Francisi.</p>
<p>Lucien Conein himself was of Corsican origin, and as part of his intelligence work had maintained ties to Corsican gangsters in Southeast Asia and in Marseilles. His role in the White House drug war team appears to have been not so much one of advancing an effective interdiction of drug supplies as in protecting CIA assets who were tied to the drug trade. For example, one of the CIA’s first recommendations – an instinctive reflex, really – was a “campaign of assassination” against global drug lords. The CIA argued that there were only a handful of heroin kingpins and that it would be easy to eliminate all of them. A White House policy memo from 1971 records this piece of Agency advice: “With 150 key assassinations the entire heroin-refining industry can be thrown into chaos.” On that list were relatively small-time players and those without any links to the CIA-backed KMT forces that controlled the crucial supply lines out of the Shan States. This discretion was nothing new, since there had been an agreement between Anslinger’s Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (the forerunner of the DEA) and the CIA not to run any of Anslinger’s agents in Southeast Asia, lest it discommode the CIA’s complex living arrangements in the region.</p>
<p>Another tactic advanced by Conein was to contaminate US cocaine supplies with methedrine, the theory being that users would react violently when dosing themselves with this potion and turn violently on their suppliers. There’s no evidence that either of these schemes – assassination or methedrine adulteration – was ever put into play. But the Agency was able to convince the Nixon administration that its eradication effort should be directed at Turkey rather than Southeast Asia, said effort culminating in an attempt at export substitution, with opium growers in Anatolia being helped to set up a factory to produce bicycles.</p>
<p>The CIA was well aware that Turkey provided only between 3 and 5 percent of the world’s supplies of raw opium at that time. In fact, the Agency had prepared an internal survey that estimated that 60 percent of the opium on the world market was coming from Southeast Asia and noted the precise whereabouts of the four largest heroin labs in the region, in villages in Laos, Burma and Thailand. This report was leaked to the New York Times, whose reporter relayed the main conclusions, without realizing that these villages were all next to CIA stations with the labs being run by people on the CIA’s payroll.</p>
<p>In April 1971, the CIA’s ties to the opium kings of Southeast Asia nearly sparked a major international confrontation. Crown Prince Sopsaisana had been appointed Laotian ambassador to France. On arrival in Paris, the prince angrily announced that some of his copious luggage was missing. He berated French airport officials, who meekly promised they would restore his property. In fact the prince’s bags had been intercepted by French customs after a tip that Sopsaisana was carrying high-grade heroin; indeed, his luggage contained 60 kilos of heroin, worth $13.5 million, then the largest drug seizure in French history. The prince had planned to ship his drug cargo on to New York. The CIA station in Paris convinced the French to cover up the affair, although the prince was not given back his dope. It hardly mattered. Sopsaisana returned two weeks later to Vientiane to nearly inexhaustible supplies of the drug.</p>
<p>Why the CIA interest in protecting the largest trafficker nabbed on the French soil? The opium used to manufacture the prince’s drugs had been grown in the highlands of Laos. It was purchased by a Hmong general, Vang Pao, who commanded the CIA’s secret air base in Laos, where it was processed into high-grade Number 4 heroin in labs just down the block from CIA quarters. The heroin was then flown to Vientiane on Vang Pao’s private airline, which consisted of two C-47s given to him by the CIA.</p>
<p>Vang Pao was the leader of a CIA-sponsored 30,000-man force of Hmong, which by 1971 consisted mostly of teenagers, fighting the Pathet Lao Communist forces. The Hmong had a reputation for fierceness, in part due to a century of conflict with the Chinese, who had, back in the nineteenth century, driven them into Laos after taking over their opium fields in Hunan. As one Hmong put it to Christopher Robbins, author of Air America, “They say we are a people who like to fight, a cruel people, enemy of everybody, always changing our region and being happy nowhere. If you want to know the truth about our people, ask the bear who is hurt why he defends himself, ask the dog who is kicked why he barks, ask the deer who is chased why he changes mountains.” The Hmong practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, with two crops – rice and opium, the first for sustenance and the latter for medicinal and trading purposes.</p>
<p>Vang Pao was born in 1932 in a Laotian hamlet called Nong Het. At the age of thirteen he served as an interpreter for the French forces then fighting the Japanese. Two years later he was battling Viet Minh incursions into Laos in the First Indochina War. He underwent officer training at the French military academy near Saigon, becoming the highest-ranking Hmong in the Royal Laotian Air Force. In 1954 Vang Pao led a group of 850 Hmong soldiers on a fruitless mission to relieve the beleaguered French during their debacle at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam.</p>
<p>The Hmong were first marshaled into a surrogate army by a French colonel called Roger Trinquier, who confronted a crisis in the French budget for local covert operations and intelligence in a fashion that covered more than one objective. “The money from the opium,” he wrote later, “financed the maquis [that is, the Hmong mercenaries] in Laos. It was flown to Cp. St. Jacques [a French military base sixty miles south of Saigon] in Vietnam in a DC-3 and sold.” The money was put into an account and used to feed and arm the guerrillas. Trinquier cynically added than the trade “was strictly controlled even though it was outlawed.” Overseeing the marketing in Saigon was the local French director of the Deuxiéme Bureau, Colonel Antoine Savani. A Corsican with ties to the Marseilles drug syndicates, Savani organized the Bin Xuyen River gang on the lower Mekong to run the heroin labs, manage the opium dens and sell the surplus to the Corsican drug syndicate. This enterprise, called Operation X, ran from 1946 through 1954.</p>
<p>Ho Chi Minh made opposition to the opium trade a key feature of his campaign to run the French out of Vietnam. The Viet Minh leader said, quite accurately, that the French were pushing opium on the people of Vietnam as a means of social control. A drugged people, Ho said, is less likely to rise up and throw off the oppressor.</p>
<p>During World War II, OSS officers working to oust the Japanese from Southeast Asia developed a cordial relationship with Ho Chi Minh, finding that the Viet Minh leader spoke fluent English and was well versed in American history. Ho quoted from memory lengthy passages from the Declaration of Independence, and chided the intelligence agents, noting that Vietnamese nationalists had been asking American presidents since Lincoln for help in booting out the French colonialists. As with Mao’s forces in China, the OSS operatives in Vietnam realized that Ho’s well-trained troops were a vital ally, more capable and less corrupt than Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army and the pro-French forces in Indochina. When Ho was stricken with malaria, the OSS sent one of its agents, Paul Helliwell, who would later head up the CIA’s Overseas Supply Company, to treat the ailing Communist. Similar to Joe Stilwell’s view of Mao, many military and OSS men recommended that the US should back Ho after the eviction of the Japanese.</p>
<p>After arriving in Vietnam in 1945, US Army General Phillip Gallagher asked the OSS to compile a detailed background on Ho. An OSS operative named Le Xuan, who would later work for the CIA during the Vietnam War, acquired a dossier on Ho from a disaffected Vietnamese nationalist: Le Xuan paid the man off with a bag of opium. The dossier disclosed to US intelligence agencies that Ho had had extended stays in the Soviet Union, a revelation that doomed any future aid from the Americans for his cause. Le Xuan would later turn on the CIA, showing up in Paris in 1968 to reveal his services to the Agency and denounce its murderous policies in Vietnam.</p>
<p>In 1953, Trinquier’s Operation X opium network was discovered by Colonel Edwin Lansdale, at the time the CIA’s military adviser in Southeast Asia. Lansdale later claimed that he protested about this French role in opium trafficking, but was admonished to hold his tongue because, in his words, exposure of “the operation would prove a major embarrassment to a friendly government.” In fact, the CIA’s director, Allen Dulles, was mightily impressed by Trinquier’s operation and, looking ahead to the time when the US would take over from the French in the region, began funneling money, guns and CIA advisers to Trinquier’s Hmong army.</p>
<p>The post–Dien Bien Phu accords, signed in Geneva in 1954, decreed that Laos was to be neutral, off-limits to all foreign military forces. This had the effect of opening Laos to the CIA, which did not consider itself a military force. The CIA became the unchallenged principal in all US actions inside Laos. Once in this position of dominance the CIA brooked no interference from the Pentagon. This point was driven home by the military attaché to Laos, Colonel Paul Pettigrew, who advised his replacement in Vientiane in 1961, “For God’s sake, don’t buck the CIA or you’ll find yourself floating face down on that Mekong River.”</p>
<p>From the moment the Geneva Accords were signed, the US government was determined to undermine them and do everything in its power to prevent the installation of Ho Chi Minh as president of all Vietnam, even though elections would have clearly showed he was the choice of most Vietnamese, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously admitted. Eisenhower and his advisers decreed that Laos’s neutral status should be subverted. On the ground this meant that the neutralist government of Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, which had amicable relations with the Pathet Lao, should be subverted by the CIA, whose preferred client was General Nosavan Phoumi. The Agency fixed elections in 1960 in an attempt to legitimize his rule. Also in 1960 the CIA began a more sustained effort to build up Vang Pao and his army, furnishing him with rifles, mortars, rockets and grenades.</p>
<p>After John Kennedy’s victory in 1960, Eisenhower advised him that the next big battleground in Southeast Asia would not be Vietnam but Laos. His counsel found its mark, even though Kennedy initially snooted Laos as “a country not worthy of engaging the attention of great powers.” In public Kennedy pronounced the country’s name as L-AY-o-s, thinking that Americans would not rally to the cause of a place pronounced “louse.” In 1960 there were but a thousand men in Vang Pao’s army. By 1961 “L’Armée Clandestine” had grown to 9,000. By the time of Kennedy’s assassination in late 1963, Vang Pao was at the head of some 30,000 troops. This army and its air force were entirely funded by the United States to the tune of $300 million, administered and overseen by the CIA.</p>
<p>Vang Pao’s original CIA case officer was William Young, the Baptist missionary-become-CIA-officer we met in the preceding chapter. Young never had any problem with the opium trafficking of the Hmong tribes. After Young was transferred out of the area in 1962, the CIA asked the Frenchman Trinquier to return as military adviser to the Hmong. Trinquier had just completed his tour of duty in the French Congo and consented to perform that function for a few months before the arrival of one of the most notorious characters in this saga, an American named Anthony Posephny, always known as Tony Poe.</p>
<p>Poe was a CIA officer, a former US Marine who had been wounded at Iwo Jima. By the early 1950s he was working for the Agency in Asia, starting with the training of Tibetan Khamba tribesmen in Colorado (thus breaching the law against CIA activities inside the US), prior to leading them back to retrieve the Dalai Lama. In 1958 Poe showed up in Indonesia in an early effort to topple Sukarno. In 1960 he was training KMT forces for raids into China; his right hand was by now mangled after ill-advised contact with a car’s fanbelt. In 1963 Poe became Vang Pao’s case officer and forthwith instituted new incentives to fire up the Hmong’s dedication to freedom’s cause, announcing that he would pay a cash bounty for every pair of Pathet Lao ears delivered to him. He kept a plastic bag on his front porch where the ears were deposited and strung his collection along the verandah. To convince skeptical CIA superiors, in this case Ted Shackley in Vientiane, that his body counts were accurate, Poe once stapled a pair of ears to a report and sent it to HQ.</p>
<p>This souvenir of early methods of computing the slaughter of native Americans was not as foolproof as Poe imagined. He himself later described going up country and finding a small boy with no ears, then was told that the boy’s father had sliced them off “to get money from the Americans.” Poe shifted his incentive to the entire heads of Pathet Lao, claiming that he preserved them in formaldehyde in his bedroom.</p>
<p>This man, described by an associate as an “amiable psychopath,” was running Phoenix-type operations into Lao villages near the Vietnam border. The teams were officially termed “home defense units,” though Poe more frankly described them as “hunter-killer teams.” Poe later claimed that he was booted out of Long Tieng because he had objected to CIA tolerance of Vang Pao’s drug trading, but his description suggests more an envy for the French style of direct supervision of the opium trade. In a filmed TV interview at his home in Northern Thailand Poe said in 1987,</p>
<p>&#160;You don’t let ’em run loose without a chain on ’em. They’re like any kind of animals, or a baby. You have to control ’em. Vang Pao was the only guy with a pair of shoes when I met him. Why does he need Mercedes and hotels and homes when he never had them before? Why are you going to give him them? He was making millions. He had his own avenue for selling heroin. He put his money in US bank accounts and Swiss banks, and we all knew it. We tried to monitor it. We controlled all the pilots. We were giving him free rides into Thailand. They were flying it [that is, the opium cargoes] into Danang, where it was picked up by the number two man to Thieu [at the time South Vietnam’s president]. It was all a contractual relationship, just like bankers and businessmen. A wonderful relationship. Just a Mafia. A big organized Mafia.</p>
<p>By the time Poe left this area of Laos in 1965, the situation was just as he described it twenty years later. The CIA’s client army was collecting and shipping the opium on CIA planes, which by now were flying under the American flag.</p>
<p>“Yes, I’ve seen the sticky bricks come on board, and no one challenged it,” Neal Hanson, an Air America pilot, said in a filmed interview in the late 1980s. “It was as if it was their personal property. We were a freebie airline. Whoever was put on our plane we flew. Primarily it was the smaller aircraft that would visit outlying villages and bring it [the opium] back to Long Tieng. If they put something on the airplane and told you not to look at it, you didn’t look at it.”</p>
<p>The Air America operation played a key role in expanding the opium market. CIA and US Agency for International Development funds went to the construction of more than 150 short, so-called LIMA landing strips in the mountains near the opium fields, thus opening these remote spots to the export trade – and also ensuring that such exports went to Vang Pao. The head of AID in that area at the time, Ron Rickenbach, said later, “I was on the air strips. My people were in charge of supplying the aircraft. I was in the areas where the opium was grown. I personally witnessed it being placed on Air America planes. We didn’t create the opium product. But our presence accelerated it dramatically.” In 1959 Laos was producing about 150 tons. By 1971 production had risen to 300 tons. Another boost to opium production, much of which was ultimately destined for the veins of Americans then fighting in Vietnam, was enabled by the USAID’s supplying rice to the Hmong, thus allowing them to stop growing this staple and use the land to cultivate opium poppies.</p>
<p>Vang Pao controlled the opium trade in the Plain of Jars region of Laos. By buying up the one salable crop the general could garner the allegiance of the hill tribes as well as stuff his own bank account. He would pay $60 a kilo, $10 over the prevailing rate, and would purchase a village’s crop if, in return, the village would supply recruits for his army. As a village leader described it, “Meo [that is, Hmong] officers with three or four stripes came from Long Tieng to buy their opium. They came in American helicopters, perhaps two or three men at one time. The helicopter leaves them here for a few days and they walk to the villages, then come back here and radio Long Tieng to send another helicopter for them and take the opium back.”</p>
<p>John Everingham, an Australian war photographer, was at that time based in Laos and visited the Hmong village of Long Pot; he recalled in the late 1980s that</p>
<p>&#160;I was given the guest bed in a district village leader’s house. I ended up sharing it with a military guy, who I later discovered was a leader in Vang Pao’s army. I was wakened by a great confusion of people and noise at the bottom of the bed, where there was a packet of black sticky stuff on bamboo leaves. And the village leader was weighing it out and paying quite a considerable amount of money. This went on several mornings. I found out it was raw opium. They all wore American uniforms. The opium went to Long Tieng by helicopters, Air America helicopters on contract to the CIA. I know as a fact that shortly after Vang Pao’s army was formed, the military officers gained control of the opium trade. It not only helped make them a lot of money. It also helped the villagers who needed their opium carried out, a difficult task in wartime. The officers were obviously paying a very good price because the villagers were very anxious to sell it to them.</p>
<p>In the early 1960s the trading chain from Long Tieng was as follows: the opium would be shipped into Vietnam on Laos Commercial Air, an airline run jointly by Ngo Dinh Nhu and the Corsican Bonaventure Francisi. Nhu, brother of South Vietnam’s President Diem, had presided over a huge expansion in Saigon’s opium parlors in order to fund his own security operation. But after the Diem brothers’ assassination, Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky, the man selected by the CIA as South Vietnam’s new leader, began bringing the opium in from Long Tieng on Vietnamese air force planes. (Ky had previously been head of South Vietnam’s air force.) A CIA man, Sam Mustard, testified to this arrangement in congressional hearings in 1968.</p>
<p>At the Laotian end, General Phoumi had placed Ouane Rattikone in charge of overall opium operations, and his dealings resulted in about a ton of opium a month being landed in Saigon. For his services, however, Rattikone was getting only about $200 a month from the parsimonious Phoumi. With the backing of the CIA, Rattikone rebelled and launched a coup in 1965 against Phoumi, driving his former boss into exile in Thailand. Rattikone now wanted to drop the contract with the Corsican’s Air Laos, which, despite Marshall Ky’s switch, was still doing business. Rattikone’s plan was to use the Royal Lao Air Force, entirely funded by the CIA. He referred to the opium shipments on the national air force as “requisitions militaires.” But CIA air commander Jack Drummond objected to what he deemed a logistically inefficient use of the Royal Lao Air Force’s T-28s and instead decreed that the CIA would furnish a C-47 for the dope runs “if they’d leave the T-28s alone.”</p>
<p>That’s precisely what happened. Two years later, in 1967, the CIA and USAID purchased two C-47s for Vang Pao, who opened up his own air transport company, which he called Xieng Khouang Air, known by one and all as Air Opium.</p>
<p>At the time the CIA decided to give Vang Pao his own airline, the CIA station chief in Vientiane was Ted Shackley, a man who had gotten his start in the CIA’s Paperclip project, recruiting Nazi scientists. Before he came to Laos Shackley had headed the Agency’s Miami station, where he orchestrated the repeated terror raids and assassination bids against Cuba and consorted with the local Cuban émigrés, themselves deeply involved in the drug trade. Shackley was an ardent exponent of the idea of purchasing the loyalty of CIA clients by a policy of economic assistance, calling this “the third option.” Tolerance – indeed active support – of the opium trade was therefore a proper military and diplomatic strategy. He also had a reputation for preferring to work with a team of long-term associates whom he would deploy in appropriate posts.</p>
<p>Thus one can follow, through the decades, the Shackley team from Miami, to Laos, to Vietnam (where he later became CIA station chief in Saigon) to his private business operations in Central America. When Shackley was in Vientiane, his associate, Thomas Clines, was handling business at Long Tieng. Another CIA man, Edwin Wilson, was delivering espionage equipment to Shackley in Laos. Richard Secord was supervising CIA operations, thus participating in a bombing program depositing more high explosive on peasants and guerrillas in the Plain of Jars than did the US on Germany and Japan during the whole of World War II. Shackley, Clines, Secord and Air America cargo kicker Eugene Hasenfus show up later in our story, in Central America, once again amid the CIA’s active complicity in the drug trade.</p>
<p>By the time Shackley moved to Saigon in 1968, the war had turned against Vang Pao. The Pathet Lao now had the upper hand. Over the next three years the story of the Hmong was one of forced marches and military defeats, and as the ground war went badly the CIA took to bombing campaigns that killed yet more Hmong. As Edgar “Pop” Buell, a missionary working in the hills, wrote in a memo to the CIA in 1968, “A short time ago we rounded up 300 fresh recruits [from the Hmong], 30 percent were 14 years old. Another 30 percent were 15 or 16. The remaining 40 percent were 45 or over. Where were the ages between? I’ll tell you – they’re all dead.”</p>
<p>By the end of the war in Laos a third of the entire population of the country had become refugees. In their forced marches the Hmong experienced 30 percent casualty rates, with young children often having to put their exhausted parents, prostrated along the trail, out of their misery. By 1971 the CIA was practicing a scorched-earth policy in Hmong territory against the incoming Pathet Lao. The land was drenched with herbicides, which killed the opium crop and also poisoned the Hmong. Later, when Hmong refugees in Thai refugee camps reported this “yellow rain,” CIA-patronized journalists spread the story that this was a Communist essay in biological warfare. The Wall Street Journal editorial page ran an extensive propaganda campaign on the issue in the early Reagan years. Vang Pao ended up in Missoula, Montana. General Ouane Rattikone went into exile in Thailand.</p>
<p>This CIA-transported opium engendered an addiction rate among US servicemen in Vietnam of up to 30 percent, with the soldiers spending some $80 million a year in Vietnam on heroin. In the early 1970s some of this same heroin was being smuggled back to the US in the body bags of dead servicemen, and when DEA agent Michael Levine attempted to bust the operation, he was warned off by his superiors because it might have led to exposure of the supply line from Long Tieng.</p>
<p>In 1971 a second-year grad student at Yale named Alfred McCoy met the poet Allen Ginsberg at a demonstration for Bobby Seale in New Haven. Ginsberg found out that McCoy had studied up on the drug trade and also knew several Southeast Asian languages as well as the political history of the region. He encouraged McCoy to research allegations about CIA involvement in the drug trade. McCoy finished his term papers and traveled to Southeast Asia in the summer of 1971, where he embarked on a courageous and far-reaching investigation that yielded brilliant results. He interviewed troops and officers in Saigon, and there also met John Everingham, the photographer who had witnessed the opium dealings in Laos. Everingham took him back into Laos to that same village. McCoy interviewed Hmong, both villagers and chiefs. He tracked down General Ouane Rattikone in Thailand. He interviewed Pop Buell and the CIA agent William Young.</p>
<p>Back in the United States by the spring of 1972, McCoy had finished the first draft of what was to be the path-breaking <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1556524838/counterpunchmaga" type="external">The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia</a>. In June of that year he was invited to testify before the US Senate by Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin. Following that testimony, he was called by his publisher Harper &amp; Row, demanding that he come to New York and meet with the company’s president, Winthrop Knowlton. Knowlton told McCoy that Cord Meyer, a top-ranking CIA officer, had paid a visit to the owner of Harper &amp; Row, Cass Canfield, and had told Canfield that McCoy’s book posed a national security threat. Meyer demanded that Harper &amp; Row cancel the contract. Canfield refused, but did agree to let the CIA review McCoy’s book before publication.</p>
<p>While McCoy was deliberating what to do, the CIA’s approach to Canfield leaked out to Seymour Hersh, then working at the New York Times. Hersh promptly published the story. As McCoy wrote in the preface to a new edition of his book published in 1990, “Humiliated in the public arena, the CIA turned to covert harassment. Over the coming months, my federal education grant was investigated. My phones were tapped. My income tax was audited and my sources were intimidated.” Some of his interpreters were threatened with assassination.</p>
<p>The book was duly published by Harper &amp; Row in 1972. Amid Congressional disquiet, the CIA told the Joint Committee on Intelligence that it was pressing forward with an internal review by the CIA’s Inspector General. The Agency sent twelve investigators into the field, where they spent two brief weeks in interviews. The report has never been released in its entirety, but this is its conclusion:</p>
<p>No evidence that the Agency or any senior officer of the Agency has ever sanctioned, or supported drug trafficking, as a matter of policy. Also we found not the slightest suspicion, much less evidence, that any Agency officer, staff or contact, has ever been involved with the drug business. With respect to Air America, we found that it has always forbidden, as a matter of policy, the transportation of contraband goods. We believe that its Security Inspection Service which is used by the cooperating air transport company as well, is now serving as an added deterrent to drug traffickers.</p>
<p>The one area of our activities in South East Asia that gives us some concern has to do with the agents and local officials with whom we are in contact and who have been or may still be involved in one way or another in the drug business. We are not referring here to those agents who are run as penetrations of the narcotics industry for collection of intelligence on the industry but, rather, to those with whom we are in touch in our other operations. What to do about these people is particularly troublesome in view of its implications for some of our operations, particularly in Laos. Yet their good will, if not mutual cooperation, considerably facilitates the military activities of the Agency-supported irregulars.</p>
<p>The report admitted that “the war has clearly been our over-riding priority in Southeast Asia and all other issues have taken second place in the scheme of things.” The report also suggested that there was no financial incentive for the pilots in Air America to be involved in smuggling, since they were “making good money.”</p>
<p>Reviews of McCoy’s book were hostile, suggesting that his hundreds of pages of well-sourced interviews and reporting amounted to conspiratorial rumor-mongering by a radical opponent of the war. McCoy’s charges were dismissed out of hand in the Church hearings of 1975, which concluded that allegations of drug smuggling by CIA assets and proprietaries “lacked substance.”</p>
<p>As McCoy himself summed it up in 1990, in words which no doubt strike a chord in the heart of Gary Webb, “Although I had scored in the first engagement with a media blitz, the CIA won the longer bureaucratic battle. By silencing my sources and publicly announcing its abhorrence of drugs, the Agency convinced Congress that it had been innocent of any complicity in the Southeast Asian opium trade.”</p>
<p>This article is adapted from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859842585/counterpunchmaga" type="external">Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press</a>.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>If Worries Was Dollar Bills</p>
<p />
<p>Sound Grammar</p>
<p>What I’m listening to this week…</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Ornette at 12 / Crisis</a> by Ornette Coleman <a href="" type="internal">New Magic</a> by Son Little <a href="" type="internal">14 Steps to Harlem</a> by Garland Jeffries <a href="" type="internal">Homecoming</a> by Vince Mendoza &amp; the WDR Big Band <a href="" type="internal">Ununiform</a> by Tricky</p>
<p>Booked Up</p>
<p>What I’m reading this week…</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">A Visit to Don Otavio: a Mexican Journey</a> by Sybille Bedford <a href="" type="internal">Spider Web: the Birth of American Anticommunism</a> by Nick Fischer <a href="" type="internal">An Odyssey: a Father, a Son and an Epic</a> by Daniel Mendelsohn</p>
<p>Lynching Music</p>
<p>Viet Thanh Nguyen:&#160;“Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland.” ( <a href="" type="internal">The Sympathizer</a>)</p> | 806 |
<p><a href="" type="internal" />The now infamous letter to Iran sent by 47 Republican senators has been, in my opinion, one of the best <a href="" type="internal">displays of how shortsighted and small-minded conservative ideology really is</a>. All these senators seemed to have in mind was trying to “top” the disrespect that was shown when John Boehner bypassed the president and invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak in front of Congress.</p>
<p>While both House and Senate Republicans <a href="" type="internal">clearly are trying to sabotage the president’s negotiations with Iran</a>, neither one of these childish groups of supposed adults seemed to realize that their actions really did nothing more than <a href="" type="internal">embarrass themselves and this country</a> by putting petty partisan politics out there for all the world to see.</p>
<p>Basically, all Republicans did was make absolute fools out of themselves.</p>
<p>Well, during an interview with&#160;Vice scheduled to be released on Monday,&#160; <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/obama-embarassed-47-senators-wrote-iran-leader-article-1.2148457" type="external">President Obama didn’t hold back</a> when he said that he felt sorry for the GOP after they completely embarrassed themselves internationally.</p>
<p>“I’m embarrassed for them. For them to address a letter to the Ayatollah, who they claim is our mortal enemy, and their basic argument is ‘don’t deal with our president because you can’t trust him to follow through on an agreement,'” Obama said. “That’s close to unprecedented.”</p>
<p>There’s really no other way to say it – this letter has been an absolute disaster. By sending it, all Republicans really did was:</p>
<p>It’s one thing for Republicans to play <a href="" type="internal">these kinds of childish games</a> here at home when it comes to our own policies, but for them to have taken it to this level, weakening the United States on an international level, I don’t hesitate when I say that <a href="" type="internal">I fully believe this letter was treasonous</a>.</p>
<p>This letter not only tried to undermine international negotiations being conducted by the President of the United States and several of our allies, but it weakened us internationally and provided propaganda to those who oppose us. And it’s not&#160;just&#160;the fact that they sent this letter, but the context of what was written. This wasn’t an attempt to offer an alternate solution to the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, it was a letter to Iranian leaders essentially saying that our government is not to be trusted and they should ignore any promise this president makes to them.</p>
<p>So, to those who support this letter, what would you call it when members of our own government not only try to sabotage our president, but also weaken us internationally while providing tools for our enemies to use against us?</p>
<p>Because that sure as hell isn’t patriotism.</p>
<p>Watch part of President Obama’s comments below <a href="https://news.vice.com" type="external">via VICE</a>:</p>
<p />
<p />
<p><a href="" type="internal">The Republican Letter To Iran: An Embarrassment for the GOP, A Weapon for Iranian Extremists</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Republican Senator John Cornyn Posts Ridiculous Tweet Following Announcement of Iran Nuclear Deal</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Republican Sen. Joni Ernst Says President Obama Used Murdered Marines to Distract From Iran Deal</a></p>
<p>0 Facebook comments</p> | President Obama Brilliantly Hammers Republicans Over Iran Letter (Video) | true | http://forwardprogressives.com/president-obama-brilliantly-hammers-republicans-iran-letter-video/ | 2015-03-14 | 4left
| President Obama Brilliantly Hammers Republicans Over Iran Letter (Video)
<p><a href="" type="internal" />The now infamous letter to Iran sent by 47 Republican senators has been, in my opinion, one of the best <a href="" type="internal">displays of how shortsighted and small-minded conservative ideology really is</a>. All these senators seemed to have in mind was trying to “top” the disrespect that was shown when John Boehner bypassed the president and invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak in front of Congress.</p>
<p>While both House and Senate Republicans <a href="" type="internal">clearly are trying to sabotage the president’s negotiations with Iran</a>, neither one of these childish groups of supposed adults seemed to realize that their actions really did nothing more than <a href="" type="internal">embarrass themselves and this country</a> by putting petty partisan politics out there for all the world to see.</p>
<p>Basically, all Republicans did was make absolute fools out of themselves.</p>
<p>Well, during an interview with&#160;Vice scheduled to be released on Monday,&#160; <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/obama-embarassed-47-senators-wrote-iran-leader-article-1.2148457" type="external">President Obama didn’t hold back</a> when he said that he felt sorry for the GOP after they completely embarrassed themselves internationally.</p>
<p>“I’m embarrassed for them. For them to address a letter to the Ayatollah, who they claim is our mortal enemy, and their basic argument is ‘don’t deal with our president because you can’t trust him to follow through on an agreement,'” Obama said. “That’s close to unprecedented.”</p>
<p>There’s really no other way to say it – this letter has been an absolute disaster. By sending it, all Republicans really did was:</p>
<p>It’s one thing for Republicans to play <a href="" type="internal">these kinds of childish games</a> here at home when it comes to our own policies, but for them to have taken it to this level, weakening the United States on an international level, I don’t hesitate when I say that <a href="" type="internal">I fully believe this letter was treasonous</a>.</p>
<p>This letter not only tried to undermine international negotiations being conducted by the President of the United States and several of our allies, but it weakened us internationally and provided propaganda to those who oppose us. And it’s not&#160;just&#160;the fact that they sent this letter, but the context of what was written. This wasn’t an attempt to offer an alternate solution to the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, it was a letter to Iranian leaders essentially saying that our government is not to be trusted and they should ignore any promise this president makes to them.</p>
<p>So, to those who support this letter, what would you call it when members of our own government not only try to sabotage our president, but also weaken us internationally while providing tools for our enemies to use against us?</p>
<p>Because that sure as hell isn’t patriotism.</p>
<p>Watch part of President Obama’s comments below <a href="https://news.vice.com" type="external">via VICE</a>:</p>
<p />
<p />
<p><a href="" type="internal">The Republican Letter To Iran: An Embarrassment for the GOP, A Weapon for Iranian Extremists</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Republican Senator John Cornyn Posts Ridiculous Tweet Following Announcement of Iran Nuclear Deal</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Republican Sen. Joni Ernst Says President Obama Used Murdered Marines to Distract From Iran Deal</a></p>
<p>0 Facebook comments</p> | 807 |
<p />
<p />
<p>The mainstream media hardly reported on the death of a former Haitian government official on Tuesday. More importantly, they failed to establish the link between the mysterious death and his part in the investigations into the Clinton Foundation anomalies.</p>
<p />
<p>Klaus Eberwein, 50, the former director general of the Haitian government's economic development agency, allegedly shot himself in the head past midnight in his Quality Inn hotel room in Miami on Tuesday. Curiously, his apparent "suicide" comes just a week before he was scheduled to testify before the Haitian Senate Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.</p>
<p />
<p>The hearing is formally is about the management of PetroCaribe funds, but of course there's no stopping the side discussion on the crucial misappropriation of earthquake donations by the Clinton Foundation during the time of Hillary Clinton's stint as Secretary of State. The Clinton Foundation is, of course, a family affair ran then by former president Bill Clinton and only Clinton child, Chelsea.</p>
<p />
<p>Eberwein's death is the second reported suicide in a hotel room of a person who was investigating the Clinton family since May.</p>
<p />
<p>The former Haiti official once shared his strong sentiments about the Clintons while speaking at a protest outside he Clinton Foundation headquarters in 2016, as reported by WND. He said:? The Clinton Foundation, they are criminals, they are thieves, they are liars, they are a disgrace.?</p>
<p />
<p>Prior to his death, Eberwein expressed fears for his life to fiends for his strong criticisms of the Clinton family. Eberwein had accused the Clinton Foundation of misappropriating international donations meant for the killer-earthquake victims in Haiti, where a negligible amount of money actually ended up in the hands of Haitian organizations, while the bulk of the money was funneled to non-Haitian organizations of Clintons' choosing, and which are allied with them.</p>
<p />
<p>Eberwein's mysterious death follows other puzzling deaths related to the Clintons as well. On May 14, Republican big donor Peter W. Smith, 81, was found dead in his Minnesota hotel room also from "an apparent suicide." His death came 10 days before the publishing of a huge story he had provided to the Wall Street Journal regarding Russian hackers and Hillary's 33,000 missing emails which Eberwein has been seeking.</p>
<p />
<p>Smith was found lifeless in his hotel room after allegedly suffocating himself with a plastic bag and helium. Strangely, a suicide note supposedly claims there was no foul play involved, which in turn only raised further suspicions on the mysteries surrounding his death.</p>
<p />
<p>Last year, Shawn Lucas who served the Democratic National Committee as process server was also found dead in his apartment from a cocktail of fentanyl, cyclobenzaprine, and mitragynine. He was also involved in a class action lawsuit against DNC and its chairwoman Debbie Wasserman for fraud which DNC sought to dismiss prior to his mysterious death.</p>
<p />
<p>These three deaths were largely ignored by the mainstream media, unlike the case of Seth Rich, although their deaths seem to point to a similar direction- to benefit a family who lost big in last year's presidential elections. Unfortunately, many questions will be hard to answer now, if at all, with the silence their deaths have caused.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p>Source:</p>
<p />
<p />
<p><a href="http://bigleaguepolitics.com/former-haitian-official-set-testify-clinton-foundation-found-dead/" type="external">bigleaguepolitics.com/former-haitian-official-set-testify-clinton-foundation-found-dead</a></p> | Critic and Witness to Clinton Foundation's Haiti Fraud Found Dead | true | http://thegoldwater.com/news/5260-Critic-and-Witness-to-Clinton-Foundation-s-Haiti-Fraud-Found-Dead | 2017-07-17 | 0right
| Critic and Witness to Clinton Foundation's Haiti Fraud Found Dead
<p />
<p />
<p>The mainstream media hardly reported on the death of a former Haitian government official on Tuesday. More importantly, they failed to establish the link between the mysterious death and his part in the investigations into the Clinton Foundation anomalies.</p>
<p />
<p>Klaus Eberwein, 50, the former director general of the Haitian government's economic development agency, allegedly shot himself in the head past midnight in his Quality Inn hotel room in Miami on Tuesday. Curiously, his apparent "suicide" comes just a week before he was scheduled to testify before the Haitian Senate Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.</p>
<p />
<p>The hearing is formally is about the management of PetroCaribe funds, but of course there's no stopping the side discussion on the crucial misappropriation of earthquake donations by the Clinton Foundation during the time of Hillary Clinton's stint as Secretary of State. The Clinton Foundation is, of course, a family affair ran then by former president Bill Clinton and only Clinton child, Chelsea.</p>
<p />
<p>Eberwein's death is the second reported suicide in a hotel room of a person who was investigating the Clinton family since May.</p>
<p />
<p>The former Haiti official once shared his strong sentiments about the Clintons while speaking at a protest outside he Clinton Foundation headquarters in 2016, as reported by WND. He said:? The Clinton Foundation, they are criminals, they are thieves, they are liars, they are a disgrace.?</p>
<p />
<p>Prior to his death, Eberwein expressed fears for his life to fiends for his strong criticisms of the Clinton family. Eberwein had accused the Clinton Foundation of misappropriating international donations meant for the killer-earthquake victims in Haiti, where a negligible amount of money actually ended up in the hands of Haitian organizations, while the bulk of the money was funneled to non-Haitian organizations of Clintons' choosing, and which are allied with them.</p>
<p />
<p>Eberwein's mysterious death follows other puzzling deaths related to the Clintons as well. On May 14, Republican big donor Peter W. Smith, 81, was found dead in his Minnesota hotel room also from "an apparent suicide." His death came 10 days before the publishing of a huge story he had provided to the Wall Street Journal regarding Russian hackers and Hillary's 33,000 missing emails which Eberwein has been seeking.</p>
<p />
<p>Smith was found lifeless in his hotel room after allegedly suffocating himself with a plastic bag and helium. Strangely, a suicide note supposedly claims there was no foul play involved, which in turn only raised further suspicions on the mysteries surrounding his death.</p>
<p />
<p>Last year, Shawn Lucas who served the Democratic National Committee as process server was also found dead in his apartment from a cocktail of fentanyl, cyclobenzaprine, and mitragynine. He was also involved in a class action lawsuit against DNC and its chairwoman Debbie Wasserman for fraud which DNC sought to dismiss prior to his mysterious death.</p>
<p />
<p>These three deaths were largely ignored by the mainstream media, unlike the case of Seth Rich, although their deaths seem to point to a similar direction- to benefit a family who lost big in last year's presidential elections. Unfortunately, many questions will be hard to answer now, if at all, with the silence their deaths have caused.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p>Source:</p>
<p />
<p />
<p><a href="http://bigleaguepolitics.com/former-haitian-official-set-testify-clinton-foundation-found-dead/" type="external">bigleaguepolitics.com/former-haitian-official-set-testify-clinton-foundation-found-dead</a></p> | 808 |
<p>Lawyers for Aveo Pharmaceuticals Inc’s former chief medical officer are urging a federal judge to reject the Securities and Exchange Commission’s request for a “draconian” maximum penalty as part of a deal to resolve fraud charges.</p>
<p>Lawyers for William Slichenmyer in a motion filed on Tuesday in federal court in Boston argued against the $150,000 penalty that the SEC sought as part of a deal in which the former executive agreed to let a judge decide how much he should pay.</p>
<p>To read the full story on Westlaw Practitioner Insights, click here: <a href="http://bit.ly/2BcuHIW" type="external">bit.ly/2BcuHIW</a></p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>LONDON (Reuters) - Martin Sorrell quit as the head of WPP on Saturday, leaving the world’s biggest advertising agency 33 years after he founded it due to an investigation into personal misconduct.</p> FILE PHOTO: Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive Officer of WPP, attends the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 23, 2018. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo
<p>The British company stunned the industry last week when it said it had appointed lawyers to investigate alleged misconduct by Sorrell, who turned a two-man outfit into the world’s biggest advertising group with 200,000 employees.</p>
<p>The 73-year-old denied any misconduct “unreservedly” but in a letter to WPP staff published late on Saturday he said the “current disruption” was “putting too much unnecessary pressure on the business”.</p>
<p>He said he had decided that “in your interest, in the interest of our clients, in the interest of all shareowners, both big and small, and in the interest of all our other stakeholders, it is best for me to step aside”.</p>
<p>The company said Chairman Roberto Quarta will become executive chairman until a new chief executive is found while Mark Read, a WPP executive, and Andrew Scott, chief operating officer, Europe, have been appointed as joint chief operating officers of WPP.</p>
<p>Reporting by Kate Holton; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Alistair Bell</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>BERLIN (Reuters) - German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said on Saturday he would press for “reasonable results” in the next round of pay talks with more than two million public sector workers, but he rejected the Verdi union’s demand for a six percent increase.</p> FILE PHOTO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Justice Minister Katarina Barley and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer react as they pose for a group photo at the German government guesthouse Meseberg Palace in Meseberg, Germany, April 10, 2018. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
<p>Wage talks are due to resume on Sunday after 150,000 public sector employees staged warning strikes and walkouts last week that left thousands of passengers stranded at airports, and hit hospitals, childcare centres and waste depots.</p>
<p>Seehofer, the federal government’s top negotiator in the talks, underscored the importance of public sector workers and said it was “self-evident” that they should benefit from the country’s economic growth.</p>
<p>However, he said Verdi’s demand was unreasonable.</p>
<p>“It is and remains clear that the union demand for a six percent increase is too high for one year,” he said in a statement issued by his ministry. “We will continue the negotiations in such a way that we can quickly achieve reasonable results.”</p>
<p>Verdi said 17,000 people participated in walkouts on Friday, bringing the total for the week’s labour actions to 150,000.</p>
<p>Verdi leader Frank Bsirske said last week he expected a breakthrough in the third round of talks that will begin on Sunday in Potsdam, near Berlin. He said public sector workers should benefit from surging German tax revenues.</p>
<p>The federal government and municipalities have rejected the union’s demands, but the head of the VKA association of local employer organisations last week said he expected an agreement to emerge from the next round of talks.</p>
<p>In the industrial sector, 3.9 million workers agreed on a pay and flexible working hours deal in February that amounted to a roughly 4 percent rise per year for 2018 and 2019. Inflation edged up to 1.5 percent in March.</p>
<p>Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is in solid shape, with buoyant tax revenues and a record budget surplus. Falling unemployment, inflation-busting pay rises and low borrowing costs are fuelling a consumer-led upswing.</p>
<p>The European Central Bank (ECB) is keeping a close eye on the German pay talks for any sign that wage growth is picking up, potentially lifting inflation and giving the ECB added leeway to start winding down its massive stimulus programme.</p>
<p>Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Helen Popper</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>(Reuters) - Two multi-billion dollar takeovers of semiconductor makers are being stalled by Chinese regulatory reviews amid rising U.S.-China trade tensions, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing people familiar with the matter.</p> FILE PHOTO: A sign on the Qualcomm campus is seen in San Diego, California, U.S. November 6, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo
<p>Qualcomm Inc’s ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=QCOM.O" type="external">QCOM.O</a>) proposed $44 billion purchase of Dutch chip maker NXP Semiconductors NV ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=NXPI.O" type="external">NXPI.O</a>) could be at risk due to the delayed review. China is the only country that has not yet signed off on the deal, or on Toshiba Corp’s ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=6502.T" type="external">6502.T</a>) planned $19 billion sale of its chip unit to a Bain Capital consortium, according to the newspaper.</p> Slideshow (2 Images)
<p>Qualcomm’s merger agreement with NXP was extended for a second time in January, giving the two until to April 25, although the parties could decide to extend the deadline.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=QCOM.O" type="external">Qualcomm Inc</a> 55.73 QCOM.O Nasdaq +0.53 (+0.96%) QCOM.O NXPI.O 6502.T
<p>China’s Vice President, Wang Qishan, last month assured Qualcomm Chief Executive Steve Mollenkopf that the review would not be affected by politics, the newspaper said.</p>
<p>Qualcomm and Toshiba did not immediately respond to requests for comment.</p>
<p>In a move to force China to lower its $375 billion trade surplus with the U.S., the Trump administration this month unveiled tariffs representing about $50 billion on Chinese technology, transport and medical products, drawing an immediate threat of retaliatory action from Beijing.</p>
<p>At the same time, China pledged to further open the country’s economy and lower import tariffs on certain products, moves it said were unrelated to the trade spat.</p>
<p>Reporting by Gary McWilliams; editing by Diane Craft</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>CARACAS (Reuters) - President Nicolas Maduro has decreed extra powers to his oil czar Manuel Quevedo to try and halt sliding crude output in crisis-hit Venezuela, which has sunk to its lowest level since the 1950s.</p> FILE PHOTO: Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro gestures during a TV show with National Constituent Assembly member Diosdado Cabello in Caracas, Venezuela April 11, 2018. Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS
<p>Struggling with a deep economic recession, failed socialist policies, debt default, and U.S. financial sanctions, Venezuela’s crude production slipped to 1.586 million barrels per day in February, according to OPEC.</p>
<p>Maduro’s decree, seen by Reuters, gives Quevedo, a major general, powers to “create, annul or modify” deals involving state energy company PDVSA and its subsidiaries. The oil minister is also head of PDVSA.</p>
<p>It was not immediately clear what that might mean for PDVSA’s joint ventures. But Quevedo met late on Friday with some foreign partners including representatives of Total ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=TOTF.PA" type="external">TOTF.PA</a>), Statoil ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=STL.OL" type="external">STL.OL</a>), Chevron ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=CVX.N" type="external">CVX.N</a>), Rosneft ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=ROSN.MM" type="external">ROSN.MM</a>) and China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC).</p> FILE PHOTO: Venezuela's Oil Minister and President of the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA Manuel Quevedo attends the event launching the new Venezuelan cryptocurrency "Petro" in Caracas, Venezuela February 20, 2018. REUTERS/Marco Bello
<p>In a statement, PDVSA said the new measure would enable a reorganization of operations and minimization of bureaucracy.</p>
<p>“We are going to work with PDVSA to implement the measures and increase production,” Rosneft representative Pavel Kamenets was quoted as saying in the PDVSA statement.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=TOTF.PA" type="external">Total SA</a> 48.6 TOTF.PA Paris Stock Exchange -0.29 (-0.60%) TOTF.PA STL.OL CVX.N ROSN.MM
<p>The decree creates a “special regime” in the sector until Dec. 31, with the possibility of a year’s extension. “The Oil Minister will be able to ... establish norms and special contract procedures for products, assets and services,” it said.</p>
<p>One clause ordered all specialized personnel, on national or international assignments, to return to original workplaces.</p>
<p>Socialist leader Maduro has promised a vast anti-corruption purge to cleanse the oil industry of “mafias”.</p>
<p>At least 70 executives have been detained in recent months, panicking PDVSA workers, depriving the industry of much of its top brass and stalling decision-making in the company overseeing the world’s biggest crude reserves, insiders have said.</p>
<p>The opposition dismisses the probe as a power struggle within government, noting that the industry has been under tight control of the Socialist Party since early in former president Hugo Chavez’s 14-year rule.</p>
<p>Reporting by Deisy Buitrago; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by David Gregorio</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | Ex-Aveo Pharmaceuticals exec fights SEC 'draconian' penalty request Martin Sorrell quits as head of WPP advertising agency German interior minister rejects union's six percent wage demand China slows review of chip company mergers amid trade tensions: WSJ Venezuela empowers oil minister Quevedo to reform energy sector | false | https://reuters.com/article/health-aveo/ex-aveo-pharmaceuticals-exec-fights-sec-draconian-penalty-request-idUSL1N1PD0L7 | 2018-01-18 | 2least
| Ex-Aveo Pharmaceuticals exec fights SEC 'draconian' penalty request Martin Sorrell quits as head of WPP advertising agency German interior minister rejects union's six percent wage demand China slows review of chip company mergers amid trade tensions: WSJ Venezuela empowers oil minister Quevedo to reform energy sector
<p>Lawyers for Aveo Pharmaceuticals Inc’s former chief medical officer are urging a federal judge to reject the Securities and Exchange Commission’s request for a “draconian” maximum penalty as part of a deal to resolve fraud charges.</p>
<p>Lawyers for William Slichenmyer in a motion filed on Tuesday in federal court in Boston argued against the $150,000 penalty that the SEC sought as part of a deal in which the former executive agreed to let a judge decide how much he should pay.</p>
<p>To read the full story on Westlaw Practitioner Insights, click here: <a href="http://bit.ly/2BcuHIW" type="external">bit.ly/2BcuHIW</a></p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>LONDON (Reuters) - Martin Sorrell quit as the head of WPP on Saturday, leaving the world’s biggest advertising agency 33 years after he founded it due to an investigation into personal misconduct.</p> FILE PHOTO: Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive Officer of WPP, attends the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 23, 2018. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo
<p>The British company stunned the industry last week when it said it had appointed lawyers to investigate alleged misconduct by Sorrell, who turned a two-man outfit into the world’s biggest advertising group with 200,000 employees.</p>
<p>The 73-year-old denied any misconduct “unreservedly” but in a letter to WPP staff published late on Saturday he said the “current disruption” was “putting too much unnecessary pressure on the business”.</p>
<p>He said he had decided that “in your interest, in the interest of our clients, in the interest of all shareowners, both big and small, and in the interest of all our other stakeholders, it is best for me to step aside”.</p>
<p>The company said Chairman Roberto Quarta will become executive chairman until a new chief executive is found while Mark Read, a WPP executive, and Andrew Scott, chief operating officer, Europe, have been appointed as joint chief operating officers of WPP.</p>
<p>Reporting by Kate Holton; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Alistair Bell</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>BERLIN (Reuters) - German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said on Saturday he would press for “reasonable results” in the next round of pay talks with more than two million public sector workers, but he rejected the Verdi union’s demand for a six percent increase.</p> FILE PHOTO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Justice Minister Katarina Barley and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer react as they pose for a group photo at the German government guesthouse Meseberg Palace in Meseberg, Germany, April 10, 2018. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
<p>Wage talks are due to resume on Sunday after 150,000 public sector employees staged warning strikes and walkouts last week that left thousands of passengers stranded at airports, and hit hospitals, childcare centres and waste depots.</p>
<p>Seehofer, the federal government’s top negotiator in the talks, underscored the importance of public sector workers and said it was “self-evident” that they should benefit from the country’s economic growth.</p>
<p>However, he said Verdi’s demand was unreasonable.</p>
<p>“It is and remains clear that the union demand for a six percent increase is too high for one year,” he said in a statement issued by his ministry. “We will continue the negotiations in such a way that we can quickly achieve reasonable results.”</p>
<p>Verdi said 17,000 people participated in walkouts on Friday, bringing the total for the week’s labour actions to 150,000.</p>
<p>Verdi leader Frank Bsirske said last week he expected a breakthrough in the third round of talks that will begin on Sunday in Potsdam, near Berlin. He said public sector workers should benefit from surging German tax revenues.</p>
<p>The federal government and municipalities have rejected the union’s demands, but the head of the VKA association of local employer organisations last week said he expected an agreement to emerge from the next round of talks.</p>
<p>In the industrial sector, 3.9 million workers agreed on a pay and flexible working hours deal in February that amounted to a roughly 4 percent rise per year for 2018 and 2019. Inflation edged up to 1.5 percent in March.</p>
<p>Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is in solid shape, with buoyant tax revenues and a record budget surplus. Falling unemployment, inflation-busting pay rises and low borrowing costs are fuelling a consumer-led upswing.</p>
<p>The European Central Bank (ECB) is keeping a close eye on the German pay talks for any sign that wage growth is picking up, potentially lifting inflation and giving the ECB added leeway to start winding down its massive stimulus programme.</p>
<p>Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Helen Popper</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>(Reuters) - Two multi-billion dollar takeovers of semiconductor makers are being stalled by Chinese regulatory reviews amid rising U.S.-China trade tensions, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing people familiar with the matter.</p> FILE PHOTO: A sign on the Qualcomm campus is seen in San Diego, California, U.S. November 6, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo
<p>Qualcomm Inc’s ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=QCOM.O" type="external">QCOM.O</a>) proposed $44 billion purchase of Dutch chip maker NXP Semiconductors NV ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=NXPI.O" type="external">NXPI.O</a>) could be at risk due to the delayed review. China is the only country that has not yet signed off on the deal, or on Toshiba Corp’s ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=6502.T" type="external">6502.T</a>) planned $19 billion sale of its chip unit to a Bain Capital consortium, according to the newspaper.</p> Slideshow (2 Images)
<p>Qualcomm’s merger agreement with NXP was extended for a second time in January, giving the two until to April 25, although the parties could decide to extend the deadline.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=QCOM.O" type="external">Qualcomm Inc</a> 55.73 QCOM.O Nasdaq +0.53 (+0.96%) QCOM.O NXPI.O 6502.T
<p>China’s Vice President, Wang Qishan, last month assured Qualcomm Chief Executive Steve Mollenkopf that the review would not be affected by politics, the newspaper said.</p>
<p>Qualcomm and Toshiba did not immediately respond to requests for comment.</p>
<p>In a move to force China to lower its $375 billion trade surplus with the U.S., the Trump administration this month unveiled tariffs representing about $50 billion on Chinese technology, transport and medical products, drawing an immediate threat of retaliatory action from Beijing.</p>
<p>At the same time, China pledged to further open the country’s economy and lower import tariffs on certain products, moves it said were unrelated to the trade spat.</p>
<p>Reporting by Gary McWilliams; editing by Diane Craft</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>CARACAS (Reuters) - President Nicolas Maduro has decreed extra powers to his oil czar Manuel Quevedo to try and halt sliding crude output in crisis-hit Venezuela, which has sunk to its lowest level since the 1950s.</p> FILE PHOTO: Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro gestures during a TV show with National Constituent Assembly member Diosdado Cabello in Caracas, Venezuela April 11, 2018. Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS
<p>Struggling with a deep economic recession, failed socialist policies, debt default, and U.S. financial sanctions, Venezuela’s crude production slipped to 1.586 million barrels per day in February, according to OPEC.</p>
<p>Maduro’s decree, seen by Reuters, gives Quevedo, a major general, powers to “create, annul or modify” deals involving state energy company PDVSA and its subsidiaries. The oil minister is also head of PDVSA.</p>
<p>It was not immediately clear what that might mean for PDVSA’s joint ventures. But Quevedo met late on Friday with some foreign partners including representatives of Total ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=TOTF.PA" type="external">TOTF.PA</a>), Statoil ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=STL.OL" type="external">STL.OL</a>), Chevron ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=CVX.N" type="external">CVX.N</a>), Rosneft ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=ROSN.MM" type="external">ROSN.MM</a>) and China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC).</p> FILE PHOTO: Venezuela's Oil Minister and President of the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA Manuel Quevedo attends the event launching the new Venezuelan cryptocurrency "Petro" in Caracas, Venezuela February 20, 2018. REUTERS/Marco Bello
<p>In a statement, PDVSA said the new measure would enable a reorganization of operations and minimization of bureaucracy.</p>
<p>“We are going to work with PDVSA to implement the measures and increase production,” Rosneft representative Pavel Kamenets was quoted as saying in the PDVSA statement.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=TOTF.PA" type="external">Total SA</a> 48.6 TOTF.PA Paris Stock Exchange -0.29 (-0.60%) TOTF.PA STL.OL CVX.N ROSN.MM
<p>The decree creates a “special regime” in the sector until Dec. 31, with the possibility of a year’s extension. “The Oil Minister will be able to ... establish norms and special contract procedures for products, assets and services,” it said.</p>
<p>One clause ordered all specialized personnel, on national or international assignments, to return to original workplaces.</p>
<p>Socialist leader Maduro has promised a vast anti-corruption purge to cleanse the oil industry of “mafias”.</p>
<p>At least 70 executives have been detained in recent months, panicking PDVSA workers, depriving the industry of much of its top brass and stalling decision-making in the company overseeing the world’s biggest crude reserves, insiders have said.</p>
<p>The opposition dismisses the probe as a power struggle within government, noting that the industry has been under tight control of the Socialist Party since early in former president Hugo Chavez’s 14-year rule.</p>
<p>Reporting by Deisy Buitrago; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by David Gregorio</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | 809 |
<p>Sept. 27 (UPI) — Los Angeles was ranked No. 1 for most congested metro area in the United States in a study conducted by INRIX, a global traffic consulting firm.</p>
<p>Los Angeles had the highest overall Impact Factor based on severity as well as the high number of hotspots — 10,385 — <a href="http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/inrix-identifies-the-worst-traffic-hotspots-in-the-25-most-congested-us-cities-300526326.html" type="external">according to the report</a> released Wednesday by the Kirkland, Wash.-based company. L.A. has 10 of the 24 worst hotspots in the United States.</p>
<p>NRIX analyzed and ranked more than 100,000 traffic hotspots in the 25 most congested U.S. cities.</p>
<p>The economic cost was also calculated in terms of wasted time, lost fuel and carbon emissions through 2026. In 25 cities, that amounts to $481 billion by 2026 and a total of almost $2.2 trillion over the next decade</p>
<p>L.A. also pays the highest price of $91 billion over the next 10 years if congestion doesn’t improve, according to the report.</p>
<p>“Many cities are calling for increased transportation infrastructure spending to fix ailing roads, bridges and transit networks,” said Bob Pishue, senior economist at INRIX. “By identifying traffic hotspots and analyzing their root causes, cities can effectively combat congestion and maximize present and future investments.”</p>
<p>President <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Donald_Trump/" type="external">Donald Trump</a> has proposed $1 trillion to improve the <a href="https://www.upi.com/Trump-on-healthcare-infrastructure-The-Democrats-are-really-in-our-way/6391496860367/" type="external">nation’s infrastructure</a>.</p>
<p>Los Angeles’ potential cost to drivers was 42 percent higher than the No. 2, New York, at $63.9 billion, and three times higher than Washington, D.C., at $29.2 billion. Atlanta was ranked fourth, Dallas fifth, with Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Miami and Boston rounding out the top 10.</p>
<p>New York had more traffic hotspots — 13,608 — than any other city analyzed. Brooklyn Queens Expressway East at Exit 28A to West Shore Expressway was highest at No. 25, taking 64 minutes to travel the 4.37 miles on average.</p>
<p>The worst hotspot in terms of 2026 cost? The company ranked Washington, D.C., with the northwest stretch of the outer loop, between Baltimore National Pike in Catonsville and Providence Road in Towson. It took an average of 33 minutes to drive the 6.47-mile stretch with an impact of $2.3 billion.</p>
<p>Los Angeles has the second through fourth worst hotspots, led by Interstate 405 North at Exit 43 to Exit 21 with an average time of 23 minutes to travel the 5.12 miles. The 405 North at Exit 43 to Exit was second with a time of 23 miles to go 5.12 miles and third was U.S. 101 from Exit 3B to California 134/170, 3 hours, 55 minutes to go 4.22 miles.</p>
<p>The research group noted the Illinois Tollway’s project on I-90 in Chicago is “proving successful at increasing speeds.”</p> | Study: L.A. tops lists of traffic congestion in U.S. | false | https://newsline.com/study-l-a-tops-lists-of-traffic-congestion-in-u-s/ | 2017-09-27 | 1right-center
| Study: L.A. tops lists of traffic congestion in U.S.
<p>Sept. 27 (UPI) — Los Angeles was ranked No. 1 for most congested metro area in the United States in a study conducted by INRIX, a global traffic consulting firm.</p>
<p>Los Angeles had the highest overall Impact Factor based on severity as well as the high number of hotspots — 10,385 — <a href="http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/inrix-identifies-the-worst-traffic-hotspots-in-the-25-most-congested-us-cities-300526326.html" type="external">according to the report</a> released Wednesday by the Kirkland, Wash.-based company. L.A. has 10 of the 24 worst hotspots in the United States.</p>
<p>NRIX analyzed and ranked more than 100,000 traffic hotspots in the 25 most congested U.S. cities.</p>
<p>The economic cost was also calculated in terms of wasted time, lost fuel and carbon emissions through 2026. In 25 cities, that amounts to $481 billion by 2026 and a total of almost $2.2 trillion over the next decade</p>
<p>L.A. also pays the highest price of $91 billion over the next 10 years if congestion doesn’t improve, according to the report.</p>
<p>“Many cities are calling for increased transportation infrastructure spending to fix ailing roads, bridges and transit networks,” said Bob Pishue, senior economist at INRIX. “By identifying traffic hotspots and analyzing their root causes, cities can effectively combat congestion and maximize present and future investments.”</p>
<p>President <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Donald_Trump/" type="external">Donald Trump</a> has proposed $1 trillion to improve the <a href="https://www.upi.com/Trump-on-healthcare-infrastructure-The-Democrats-are-really-in-our-way/6391496860367/" type="external">nation’s infrastructure</a>.</p>
<p>Los Angeles’ potential cost to drivers was 42 percent higher than the No. 2, New York, at $63.9 billion, and three times higher than Washington, D.C., at $29.2 billion. Atlanta was ranked fourth, Dallas fifth, with Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Miami and Boston rounding out the top 10.</p>
<p>New York had more traffic hotspots — 13,608 — than any other city analyzed. Brooklyn Queens Expressway East at Exit 28A to West Shore Expressway was highest at No. 25, taking 64 minutes to travel the 4.37 miles on average.</p>
<p>The worst hotspot in terms of 2026 cost? The company ranked Washington, D.C., with the northwest stretch of the outer loop, between Baltimore National Pike in Catonsville and Providence Road in Towson. It took an average of 33 minutes to drive the 6.47-mile stretch with an impact of $2.3 billion.</p>
<p>Los Angeles has the second through fourth worst hotspots, led by Interstate 405 North at Exit 43 to Exit 21 with an average time of 23 minutes to travel the 5.12 miles. The 405 North at Exit 43 to Exit was second with a time of 23 miles to go 5.12 miles and third was U.S. 101 from Exit 3B to California 134/170, 3 hours, 55 minutes to go 4.22 miles.</p>
<p>The research group noted the Illinois Tollway’s project on I-90 in Chicago is “proving successful at increasing speeds.”</p> | 810 |
<p />
<p>Back in April of 2016, microprocessor giant Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) announced that it would be implementing restructuring actions that the company said were designed to achieve annual run rate operating expense savings of $1.4 billion.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>At the time, Intel said that the restructuring was intended to "accelerate [Intel's] evolution from a [personal computer] company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices."</p>
<p>A wafer of Intel's 7tg generation Core chips. Image source: Intel.</p>
<p>At its Feb. 9 investor meeting, Intel went into much more detail about how it has shifted around its spending. Let's take a closer look.</p>
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<p>Intel provided the following chart which illustrates a "bridge" from Intel's 2016 operating expenses to its projected 2017 operating expenses:</p>
<p>How Intel's research and development spending is shifting year-over-year. Image source: Intel.</p>
<p>This "bridge" shows that Intel expects operating expenses to drop year-over-year due to the spin-off of its Intel Security group (which will now be a stand-alone company called McAfee) as well as reductions in its Client Computing Group (CCG) investment levels.</p>
<p>Offsetting those declines, though, is an increase in investment levels in what the company collectively refers to as its "growth businesses" -- Data Center Group, Internet of Things Group, and Non-Volatile Solutions Group.</p>
<p>Additionally, Intel says it's investing more in Moore's Law, which means that it's boosting its investments in next generation manufacturing technologies. This makes sense because the company's new development methodology calls for the company to continue to enhance existing manufacturing technologies while simultaneously developing next-generation ones -- something that it didn't really do before.</p>
<p>All told, Intel is looking at a modest reduction in operating expenses, year-over-year.</p>
<p>In addition to the broad year-over-year spending shifts that Intel talked about above, CFO Bob Swan showed an additional slide that gives more insight into how much research and development spending by market segment is expected to shift from 2015 through 2017.</p>
<p>How Intel's research and development spending changed by product category. Image source: Intel.</p>
<p>Intel is apparently cutting its research and development spending in personal computer processors by 5% in 2017 relative to where it was in 2015. That's not all that much, to be blunt, and I'd imagine the bulk of that shift comes more from accounting changes (i.e. allocating less of its shared operating expenses to the PC segment and more of it to other segments, like the Data Center Group).</p>
<p>Data Center spending is expected to be up by 25% in that two-year period. I'd imagine that part of that increase is due to the shared expense allocation, but I also expect that Intel is increasing its investments here in ways beyond simply a reshuffling of expenses.</p>
<p>Intel's investments in non-volatile memory -- a business that Intel expects to be a key growth engine in the years ahead -- are going up 40%. Considering that technology strength is critical to succeeding in the non-volatile memory business (better technology usually translates into a better cost structure, allowing a company to more effectively compete at good margin levels), the boost in spending isn't a surprise.</p>
<p>The company's investments in mobile are going to be down 55% per the slide. That's not surprising considering that Intel has refocused its mobile business away from trying to build a broad range of platforms to address the broad range of smartphones toward focusing primarily on stand-alone cellular modems, with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) being the company's principal (only?) smartphone customer here.</p>
<p>And, finally, Intel is expecting a big boost in its investments within its Internet of Things Group. This business has been growing steadily over the last several years and management had indicated that they're making some big bets on new areas like self-driving cars, so a large increase in research and development spending here makes sense -- especially as the odds that those investments will ultimately pay off look good.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, these spending shifts are quite reasonable -- the company is feeding those business segments that have been growing and have the potential to continue to grow, and it's cutting back in areas that aren't expected to grow (i.e. PC processors) as well as in areas where its efforts have fallen flat and success appears unlikely (mobile system-on-chip).</p>
<p>Intel management is investing for the long-term, which is the right thing to do. However, investments in high technology usually take years to bear fruit, so don't expect these increased investments made today to pay off tomorrow. It'll be a couple of years before we know if Intel's increased investments will ultimately pay off.</p>
<p>10 stocks we like better than IntelWhen 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=a4ea9fec-a568-4d40-adde-6be5825f8a15&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 Intel 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=a4ea9fec-a568-4d40-adde-6be5825f8a15&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/aeassa/info.aspx" type="external">Ashraf Eassa Opens a New Window.</a> owns shares of Intel. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Apple. The Motley Fool has the following options: long January 2018 $90 calls on Apple and short January 2018 $95 calls on Apple. The Motley Fool recommends Intel. 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> | Intel Corporation's Resource Shift | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/02/14/intel-corporation-resource-shift.html | 2017-02-14 | 0right
| Intel Corporation's Resource Shift
<p />
<p>Back in April of 2016, microprocessor giant Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) announced that it would be implementing restructuring actions that the company said were designed to achieve annual run rate operating expense savings of $1.4 billion.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>At the time, Intel said that the restructuring was intended to "accelerate [Intel's] evolution from a [personal computer] company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices."</p>
<p>A wafer of Intel's 7tg generation Core chips. Image source: Intel.</p>
<p>At its Feb. 9 investor meeting, Intel went into much more detail about how it has shifted around its spending. Let's take a closer look.</p>
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<p>Intel provided the following chart which illustrates a "bridge" from Intel's 2016 operating expenses to its projected 2017 operating expenses:</p>
<p>How Intel's research and development spending is shifting year-over-year. Image source: Intel.</p>
<p>This "bridge" shows that Intel expects operating expenses to drop year-over-year due to the spin-off of its Intel Security group (which will now be a stand-alone company called McAfee) as well as reductions in its Client Computing Group (CCG) investment levels.</p>
<p>Offsetting those declines, though, is an increase in investment levels in what the company collectively refers to as its "growth businesses" -- Data Center Group, Internet of Things Group, and Non-Volatile Solutions Group.</p>
<p>Additionally, Intel says it's investing more in Moore's Law, which means that it's boosting its investments in next generation manufacturing technologies. This makes sense because the company's new development methodology calls for the company to continue to enhance existing manufacturing technologies while simultaneously developing next-generation ones -- something that it didn't really do before.</p>
<p>All told, Intel is looking at a modest reduction in operating expenses, year-over-year.</p>
<p>In addition to the broad year-over-year spending shifts that Intel talked about above, CFO Bob Swan showed an additional slide that gives more insight into how much research and development spending by market segment is expected to shift from 2015 through 2017.</p>
<p>How Intel's research and development spending changed by product category. Image source: Intel.</p>
<p>Intel is apparently cutting its research and development spending in personal computer processors by 5% in 2017 relative to where it was in 2015. That's not all that much, to be blunt, and I'd imagine the bulk of that shift comes more from accounting changes (i.e. allocating less of its shared operating expenses to the PC segment and more of it to other segments, like the Data Center Group).</p>
<p>Data Center spending is expected to be up by 25% in that two-year period. I'd imagine that part of that increase is due to the shared expense allocation, but I also expect that Intel is increasing its investments here in ways beyond simply a reshuffling of expenses.</p>
<p>Intel's investments in non-volatile memory -- a business that Intel expects to be a key growth engine in the years ahead -- are going up 40%. Considering that technology strength is critical to succeeding in the non-volatile memory business (better technology usually translates into a better cost structure, allowing a company to more effectively compete at good margin levels), the boost in spending isn't a surprise.</p>
<p>The company's investments in mobile are going to be down 55% per the slide. That's not surprising considering that Intel has refocused its mobile business away from trying to build a broad range of platforms to address the broad range of smartphones toward focusing primarily on stand-alone cellular modems, with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) being the company's principal (only?) smartphone customer here.</p>
<p>And, finally, Intel is expecting a big boost in its investments within its Internet of Things Group. This business has been growing steadily over the last several years and management had indicated that they're making some big bets on new areas like self-driving cars, so a large increase in research and development spending here makes sense -- especially as the odds that those investments will ultimately pay off look good.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, these spending shifts are quite reasonable -- the company is feeding those business segments that have been growing and have the potential to continue to grow, and it's cutting back in areas that aren't expected to grow (i.e. PC processors) as well as in areas where its efforts have fallen flat and success appears unlikely (mobile system-on-chip).</p>
<p>Intel management is investing for the long-term, which is the right thing to do. However, investments in high technology usually take years to bear fruit, so don't expect these increased investments made today to pay off tomorrow. It'll be a couple of years before we know if Intel's increased investments will ultimately pay off.</p>
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<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 owns shares of and recommends Apple. The Motley Fool has the following options: long January 2018 $90 calls on Apple and short January 2018 $95 calls on Apple. The Motley Fool recommends Intel. 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> | 811 |
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street led stocks higher globally on Thursday, more than offsetting declines in Asia, as an expected strong earnings season took front seat after U.S. President Donald Trump cast doubt over the timing of his threatened strike on Syria.</p> Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange shortly after the opening bell in New York, U.S., April 12, 2018. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
<p>The risk of clashes between Western powers and Russia in Syria over an alleged chemical attack eased somewhat as Trump reworded his Wednesday threat that missiles “will be coming” while taunting Russia for supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.</p>
<p>Trump wrote on Thursday that an attack on Syria “could be very soon or not so soon at all.” Later, he said decisions will be made “fairly soon.”</p>
<p>Investors turned their focus to U.S. corporate earnings as BlackRock ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=BLK.N" type="external">BLK.N</a>), the world’s largest asset manager, reported quarterly profit above Wall Street estimates with its shares up 1.5 percent.</p>
<p>BlackRock’s results boosted bank shares .SPXBK, which were the largest gainers on Thursday, likely on bets that increased exchange traded funds trading will benefit their bottom lines. Higher U.S. Treasury yields also gave banks support.</p>
<p>Analysts expect quarterly profit for U.S. benchmark S&amp;P 500 index companies to rise 18.4 percent from a year ago, the biggest gain in seven years, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.</p>
<p>“We’re hearing less talk of firing missiles and less talk of trade war. Earnings are coming up and expectations are high,” said Michael Antonelli, managing director of institutional sales trading at Robert W. Baird in Milwaukee. The stock market, he said, is “returning to normal.”</p>
<p>The Dow Jones Industrial Average <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.DJI" type="external">.DJI</a> rose 293.6 points, or 1.21 percent, to 24,483.05, the S&amp;P 500 <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.SPX" type="external">.SPX</a> gained 21.8 points, or 0.83 percent, to 2,663.99 and the Nasdaq Composite <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.IXIC" type="external">.IXIC</a> added 71.22 points, or 1.01 percent, to 7,140.25.</p>
<p>The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.FTEU3" type="external">.FTEU3</a> rose 0.67 percent and MSCI's gauge of stocks across the globe .MIWD00000PUS gained 0.37 percent.</p>
<p>Emerging market stocks rose 0.11 percent. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS closed 0.27 percent lower, while Japan's Nikkei <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.N225" type="external">.N225</a> lost 0.12 percent.</p>
<p>The higher risk appetite as geopolitical tensions eased boosted U.S. Treasury yields. The safe-haven Japanese yen also fell.</p>
<p>“There is less immediate concern about military strikes or action in Syria,” said Jim Vogel, interest rates strategist at FTN Financial in Memphis.</p>
<p>“It doesn’t move it to the back-burner, but it allows you to look around and trade other things and that gives room for rates to rise just a little bit from their sort of cramped or compressed levels,” he said.</p>
<p>Benchmark 10-year Treasury notes US10YT=RR last fell 14/32 in price to yield 2.8413 percent, from 2.79 percent late on Wednesday.</p>
<p>The 30-year bond US30YT=RR last fell 26/32 in price to yield 3.0455 percent, from 3.005 percent late on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Oil prices fell initially as geopolitical concerns eased somewhat, but later rose, supported partly by shrinking global oil inventories.</p> The German share price index, DAX board, is seen at the stock exchange in Frankfurt, Germany, March 21, 2018. REUTERS/Tilman Blasshofer
<p>OPEC Secretary-General Mohammad Barkindo told Reuters in New Delhi the global oil glut has effectively shrunk by nine-tenths since the start of 2017.</p>
<p>“We have seen an accelerated shrinkage of stocks in storage from unparalleled highs of about 400 million barrels to about 43 million above the five-year average,” Barkindo said.</p>
<p>U.S. crude CLc1 rose 0.43 percent to $67.11 per barrel and Brent LCOcv1 was last at $72.09, up 0.04 percent on the day.</p>
<p>Both are at levels not seen since 2014.</p>
<p>(GRAPHIC: Middle East tensions drive crude prices - <a href="https://reut.rs/2ILpqMy" type="external">reut.rs/2ILpqMy</a>)</p>
<a href="https://reut.rs/2ILpqMy" type="external" />
<p>The U.S. dollar index .DXY was on track to snap a four-day losing streak as it rose 0.21 percent, with the euro <a href="/finance/currencies/quote?srcCurr=EUR&amp;destCurr=USD" type="external">EUR=</a> down 0.3 percent to $1.2328.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=BLK.N" type="external">BlackRock Inc</a> 533.01 BLK.N New York Stock Exchange +7.70 (+1.47%) BLK.N .DJI .SPX .IXIC .FTEU3
<p>“It’s a reversal of the safe-haven trade that lifted the yen and the Swiss franc earlier in the week,” said Karl Schamotta, director of global product and market strategy at Cambridge Global Payments in Toronto.</p>
<p>The Japanese yen weakened 0.43 percent versus the greenback at 107.27 per dollar, while the dollar was up 0.48 percent against the Swiss franc <a href="/finance/currencies/quote?srcCurr=CHF&amp;destCurr=USD" type="external">CHF=</a>.</p>
<p>Sterling <a href="/finance/currencies/quote?srcCurr=GBP&amp;destCurr=USD" type="external">GBP=</a> was last trading at $1.4227, up 0.36 percent on the day.</p>
<p>Safe-haven gold XAU= fell from an 11-week high as the dollar edged higher and investors booked profits.</p>
<p>Spot gold XAU= dropped 1.3 percent to $1,335.06 an ounce. U.S. gold futures GCc1 fell 1.61 percent to $1,334.60 an ounce.</p>
<p>Copper CMCU3 lost 1.86 percent to $6,821.00 a ton.</p>
<p>Reporting by Rodrigo Campos, April Joyner, Chuck Mikolajczak, Saqib Iqbal Ahmed and Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss in New York; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Dan Grebler</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks climbed on Thursday as investors anticipated a strong earnings season and as U.S. President Donald Trump’s suggestion that a military strike on Syria may not be imminent ratcheted down geopolitical worries.</p>
<p>The S&amp;P 500 has now recouped nearly all its losses from earlier this year.</p>
<p>Trump said in a tweet on Thursday that a possible attack on Syria could occur “very soon or not so soon at all,” easing fears of confrontation with Russia.</p>
<p>That lifted U.S. Treasury yields US10YT=RR, leading to a 1.8 percent increase in financial stocks .SPSY, which had the biggest percentage advance among the S&amp;P’s 11 major sectors.</p>
<p>The technology sector .SPLRCT rose 1.3 percent, adding the most gains to the S&amp;P.</p>
<p>“We’re hearing less talk of firing missiles and less talk of trade war,” said Michael Antonelli, managing director of institutional sales trading at Robert W. Baird in Milwaukee. “Earnings are coming up and expectations are high.”</p>
<p>Strong quarterly results from BlackRock Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=BLK.N" type="external">BLK.N</a>) and Delta Air Lines Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=DAL.N" type="external">DAL.N</a>) added to the sanguine mood.</p>
<p>Delta topped profit estimates, sending its shares 2.9 percent higher and boosting other airline stocks.</p>
<p>BlackRock gained 1.5 percent after the asset manager’s quarterly profit rose more than expected.</p>
<p>The earnings season begins in earnest on Friday with reports from JPMorgan Chase &amp; Co ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=JPM.N" type="external">JPM.N</a>), Citigroup Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=C.N" type="external">C.N</a>) and Wells Fargo &amp; Co ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=WFC.N" type="external">WFC.N</a>).</p> Slideshow (3 Images)
<p>Analysts expect quarterly profit for S&amp;P 500 companies to rise 18.4 percent from a year ago, in what would be the biggest gain in seven years, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.</p>
<p>“People are looking forward to earnings season,” said Tracie McMillion, head of global asset allocation strategy at Wells Fargo Investment Institute in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “Market participants are not wanting to miss out if (earnings are) as good as the forecasts say they will be.”</p>
<p>The Dow Jones Industrial Average <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.DJI" type="external">.DJI</a> rose 293.6 points, or 1.21 percent, to 24,483.05, the S&amp;P 500 <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.SPX" type="external">.SPX</a> gained 21.8 points, or 0.83 percent, to 2,663.99, and the Nasdaq Composite <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.IXIC" type="external">.IXIC</a> added 71.22 points, or 1.01 percent, to 7,140.25.</p>
<p>Investor sentiment was also boosted by the weekly U.S. initial jobless claims report, which pointed to sustained labor market strength.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=BLK.N" type="external">BlackRock Inc</a> 533.01 BLK.N New York Stock Exchange +7.70 (+1.47%) BLK.N DAL.N JPM.N C.N WFC.N
<p>Facebook Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=FB.O" type="external">FB.O</a>) was a notable laggard among technology stocks, falling 1.5 percent following a 5.3 percent gain over the past two days when Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress on the social network’s data security.</p>
<p>Bed Bath &amp; Beyond Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=BBBY.O" type="external">BBBY.O</a>) shares dived 20.0 percent after the company’s full-year profit forecast missed estimates.</p>
<p>Advancing issues outnumbered decliners on the NYSE for a 1.20-to-1 ratio and on the Nasdaq, for a 1.84-to-1 ratio.</p>
<p>Volume on U.S. exchanges was 6.12 billion shares, compared to the 7.27 billion average for the full session over the last 20 trading days.</p>
<p>Additional reporting by Sruthi Shankar in Bengaluru and Chuck Mikolajczak in New York; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Leslie Adler</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>(Reuters) - Genuine Parts Co ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=GPC.N" type="external">GPC.N</a>) said on Thursday it would spin off its wholesale distribution business S.P. Richards and merge it with Essendant ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=ESND.O" type="external">ESND.O</a>) in a tax-free transaction for shareholders, as it focuses on its industrial and auto parts businesses.</p>
<p>The combined company will have more products and resources, giving its customers - mainly independent dealers - a one-stop shop as they grapple with intense competition from e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=AMZN.O" type="external">AMZN.O</a>) and big-box stores.</p>
<p>“This combination of our customer centric companies creates a stronger partner to support those dealers and help them to be more competitive with all the other options available to customers in the industry,” Essendant Chief Executive Officer Ric Phillips said on a call with analysts.</p>
<p>Essendant’s shares jumped 18 percent to $10.00, while those of Genuine Parts were up about 1 percent at $90.17 in morning trading.</p>
<p>Illinois-based Essendant is a wholesale distributor of workplace items including janitorial supplies, while Atlanta, Georgia-based S.P. Richards distributes products ranging from office furniture to school supplies.</p>
<p>The combined entity will be called Essendant and headed by Phillips. S.P. Richards CEO Rick Toppin will become chief operating officer of the new company. Essendant had a market capitalization of about $323.5 million as of Wednesday’s close.</p>
<p>Genuine Parts, one of the leading U.S. car parts distributors, said the deal implied a valuation of about $680 million for S.P. Richards.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=GPC.N" type="external">Genuine Parts Co</a> 90.13 GPC.N New York Stock Exchange +0.47 (+0.52%) GPC.N ESND.O AMZN.O
<p>Genuine Parts will get $347 million in cash and its shareholders 51 percent of the newly-formed combined company. Structured as a Reverse Morris Trust deal, the transaction will be tax-free for the companies’ shareholders.</p>
<p>The company has been evaluating options for the S.P. Richards business, which has been pressured by weak demand for office supplies.</p>
<p>Essendant has also been hit as large customers source products directly from manufacturers. Its net sales declined 6.2 percent to $5.04 billion in 2017, while adjusted profit fell more than 50 percent.</p>
<p>Genuine Parts has been focusing on its auto parts and industrial businesses. Last year, the company completed a deal to buy London-based Alliance Automotive Group and took a stake in Australia’s Inenco Group.</p>
<p>Citigroup Global Markets Inc was the financial adviser for Essendant, while J.P. Morgan advised Genuine Parts.</p>
<p>Reporting by Arunima Banerjee in Bengaluru; editing by Patrick Graham and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>LONDON/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The global oil stocks surplus is close to evaporating, OPEC said on Thursday, citing healthy energy demand and its own supply cuts while revising up its forecast for production from rivals who have benefited from higher oil prices.</p> A flag with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) logo is seen during a meeting of OPEC and non-OPEC producing countries in Vienna, Austria September 22, 2017. REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger
<p>U.S. shale oil output has been booming over the past year since OPEC reduced its own production in tandem with Russia to prop up global oil prices.</p>
<p>But as oil production collapsed in OPEC member Venezuela and is still facing hiccups in countries such as Libya and Angola, the oil exporters’ group is still producing below its targets meaning the world needs to use stocks to meet rising demand.</p>
<p>The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries said in its monthly report oil stocks in the developed world reversed a rise in January to fall by 17.4 million barrels in February to 2.854 billion barrels, around 43 million barrels above the latest five-year average.</p>
<p>“We have achieved an over 150 percent conformity level,” OPEC Secretary-General Mohammad Barkindo told Reuters in New Delhi, referring to OPEC’s commitments under the supply-cutting pact. He said the glut has effectively shrunk by nine-tenths since the start of 2017.</p>
<p>“We have seen an accelerated shrinkage of stocks in storage from unparalleled highs of about 400 million barrels to about 43 million above the five-year average,” Barkindo said.</p>
<p>Stock levels are now 207 million barrels below their level in February 2017, with crude stocks in a surplus of 55 million barrels and product stocks in a deficit of 12 million.</p>
<p>“Looking forward, a healthy global economic forecast for 2018, positive car sales data in recent months, stronger 2018 yea-on-year U.S. product consumption in January and potentially tighter global product markets are expected to boost gasoline and distillates demand ...,” OPEC said.</p>
<p>“High conformity levels observed by OPEC and non-OPEC producing countries ... should further enhance market stability and support crude and product markets in the months ahead.”</p>
<p>The 14-member, Vienna-based producer group said its collective output, according to secondary sources, fell 201,000 bpd to 31.96 million bpd in March from February, driven by declines in Angola, Algeria, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Libya.</p>
<p>The figure is below the 32.6 million bpd that OPEC sees as demand for its crude for the whole of 2018.</p>
<p>OPEC, Russia and several other non-OPEC producers began to cut supply in January 2017. The pact runs until the end of the year and OPEC meets in Vienna in June to decide on its next course of action.</p> THIRD YEAR OF CUTS
<p>OPEC’s leader Saudi Arabia has said it would like the pact to be extended into 2019.</p>
<p>“There is growing confidence that the declaration of cooperation will be extended beyond 2018,” Barkindo told Reuters. “Russia will continue to play a leading role.”</p>
<p>On Thursday, OPEC also revised its forecast for supply growth from its rivals, non-OPEC, which is now forecast to grow by a further 80,000 barrels per day this year to 1.71 million bpd, driven largely by higher-than-anticipated growth in the first quarter in the United States and the former Soviet Union.</p>
<p>At the same time, it increased its forecast for global oil demand growth for this year by 30,000 bpd to 1.63 million bpd.</p>
<p>“This mainly reflects the positive momentum in the OECD in the 1Q18 on the back of better-than-expected data, and supported by development in industrial activities, colder-than-anticipated weather and strong mining activities in the OECD Americas and the OECD Asia Pacific,” it said in the monthly market report.</p>
<p>Production in the United Arab Emirates posted the largest month-on-month increase, according to the secondary sources, rising by around 45,000 bpd in March to 2.86 million bpd.</p>
<p>OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia told the group it pumped 9.907 million bpd in March, 28,000 bpd below its February level.</p>
<p>Venezuela reported production of 1.509 million bpd in March, 77,000 bpd below the level it reported in February.</p>
<p>Reporting by Ahmad Ghaddar; Editing by Dale Hudson and David Evans</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | EMERGING MARKETS-Chilean, Argentine equities hit record highs Stocks, U.S. dollar rise as Trump amends previous comments on Syria Wall Street gains on earnings optimism, waning Syria jitters Genuine Parts to merge S.P. Richards business with Essendant OPEC sees oil markets tighten further even as U.S. shale booms | false | https://reuters.com/article/emerging-markets-latam/emerging-markets-chilean-argentine-equities-hit-record-highs-idUSL1N1PD2IA | 2018-01-18 | 2least
| EMERGING MARKETS-Chilean, Argentine equities hit record highs Stocks, U.S. dollar rise as Trump amends previous comments on Syria Wall Street gains on earnings optimism, waning Syria jitters Genuine Parts to merge S.P. Richards business with Essendant OPEC sees oil markets tighten further even as U.S. shale booms
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street led stocks higher globally on Thursday, more than offsetting declines in Asia, as an expected strong earnings season took front seat after U.S. President Donald Trump cast doubt over the timing of his threatened strike on Syria.</p> Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange shortly after the opening bell in New York, U.S., April 12, 2018. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
<p>The risk of clashes between Western powers and Russia in Syria over an alleged chemical attack eased somewhat as Trump reworded his Wednesday threat that missiles “will be coming” while taunting Russia for supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.</p>
<p>Trump wrote on Thursday that an attack on Syria “could be very soon or not so soon at all.” Later, he said decisions will be made “fairly soon.”</p>
<p>Investors turned their focus to U.S. corporate earnings as BlackRock ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=BLK.N" type="external">BLK.N</a>), the world’s largest asset manager, reported quarterly profit above Wall Street estimates with its shares up 1.5 percent.</p>
<p>BlackRock’s results boosted bank shares .SPXBK, which were the largest gainers on Thursday, likely on bets that increased exchange traded funds trading will benefit their bottom lines. Higher U.S. Treasury yields also gave banks support.</p>
<p>Analysts expect quarterly profit for U.S. benchmark S&amp;P 500 index companies to rise 18.4 percent from a year ago, the biggest gain in seven years, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.</p>
<p>“We’re hearing less talk of firing missiles and less talk of trade war. Earnings are coming up and expectations are high,” said Michael Antonelli, managing director of institutional sales trading at Robert W. Baird in Milwaukee. The stock market, he said, is “returning to normal.”</p>
<p>The Dow Jones Industrial Average <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.DJI" type="external">.DJI</a> rose 293.6 points, or 1.21 percent, to 24,483.05, the S&amp;P 500 <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.SPX" type="external">.SPX</a> gained 21.8 points, or 0.83 percent, to 2,663.99 and the Nasdaq Composite <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.IXIC" type="external">.IXIC</a> added 71.22 points, or 1.01 percent, to 7,140.25.</p>
<p>The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.FTEU3" type="external">.FTEU3</a> rose 0.67 percent and MSCI's gauge of stocks across the globe .MIWD00000PUS gained 0.37 percent.</p>
<p>Emerging market stocks rose 0.11 percent. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS closed 0.27 percent lower, while Japan's Nikkei <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.N225" type="external">.N225</a> lost 0.12 percent.</p>
<p>The higher risk appetite as geopolitical tensions eased boosted U.S. Treasury yields. The safe-haven Japanese yen also fell.</p>
<p>“There is less immediate concern about military strikes or action in Syria,” said Jim Vogel, interest rates strategist at FTN Financial in Memphis.</p>
<p>“It doesn’t move it to the back-burner, but it allows you to look around and trade other things and that gives room for rates to rise just a little bit from their sort of cramped or compressed levels,” he said.</p>
<p>Benchmark 10-year Treasury notes US10YT=RR last fell 14/32 in price to yield 2.8413 percent, from 2.79 percent late on Wednesday.</p>
<p>The 30-year bond US30YT=RR last fell 26/32 in price to yield 3.0455 percent, from 3.005 percent late on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Oil prices fell initially as geopolitical concerns eased somewhat, but later rose, supported partly by shrinking global oil inventories.</p> The German share price index, DAX board, is seen at the stock exchange in Frankfurt, Germany, March 21, 2018. REUTERS/Tilman Blasshofer
<p>OPEC Secretary-General Mohammad Barkindo told Reuters in New Delhi the global oil glut has effectively shrunk by nine-tenths since the start of 2017.</p>
<p>“We have seen an accelerated shrinkage of stocks in storage from unparalleled highs of about 400 million barrels to about 43 million above the five-year average,” Barkindo said.</p>
<p>U.S. crude CLc1 rose 0.43 percent to $67.11 per barrel and Brent LCOcv1 was last at $72.09, up 0.04 percent on the day.</p>
<p>Both are at levels not seen since 2014.</p>
<p>(GRAPHIC: Middle East tensions drive crude prices - <a href="https://reut.rs/2ILpqMy" type="external">reut.rs/2ILpqMy</a>)</p>
<a href="https://reut.rs/2ILpqMy" type="external" />
<p>The U.S. dollar index .DXY was on track to snap a four-day losing streak as it rose 0.21 percent, with the euro <a href="/finance/currencies/quote?srcCurr=EUR&amp;destCurr=USD" type="external">EUR=</a> down 0.3 percent to $1.2328.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=BLK.N" type="external">BlackRock Inc</a> 533.01 BLK.N New York Stock Exchange +7.70 (+1.47%) BLK.N .DJI .SPX .IXIC .FTEU3
<p>“It’s a reversal of the safe-haven trade that lifted the yen and the Swiss franc earlier in the week,” said Karl Schamotta, director of global product and market strategy at Cambridge Global Payments in Toronto.</p>
<p>The Japanese yen weakened 0.43 percent versus the greenback at 107.27 per dollar, while the dollar was up 0.48 percent against the Swiss franc <a href="/finance/currencies/quote?srcCurr=CHF&amp;destCurr=USD" type="external">CHF=</a>.</p>
<p>Sterling <a href="/finance/currencies/quote?srcCurr=GBP&amp;destCurr=USD" type="external">GBP=</a> was last trading at $1.4227, up 0.36 percent on the day.</p>
<p>Safe-haven gold XAU= fell from an 11-week high as the dollar edged higher and investors booked profits.</p>
<p>Spot gold XAU= dropped 1.3 percent to $1,335.06 an ounce. U.S. gold futures GCc1 fell 1.61 percent to $1,334.60 an ounce.</p>
<p>Copper CMCU3 lost 1.86 percent to $6,821.00 a ton.</p>
<p>Reporting by Rodrigo Campos, April Joyner, Chuck Mikolajczak, Saqib Iqbal Ahmed and Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss in New York; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Dan Grebler</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks climbed on Thursday as investors anticipated a strong earnings season and as U.S. President Donald Trump’s suggestion that a military strike on Syria may not be imminent ratcheted down geopolitical worries.</p>
<p>The S&amp;P 500 has now recouped nearly all its losses from earlier this year.</p>
<p>Trump said in a tweet on Thursday that a possible attack on Syria could occur “very soon or not so soon at all,” easing fears of confrontation with Russia.</p>
<p>That lifted U.S. Treasury yields US10YT=RR, leading to a 1.8 percent increase in financial stocks .SPSY, which had the biggest percentage advance among the S&amp;P’s 11 major sectors.</p>
<p>The technology sector .SPLRCT rose 1.3 percent, adding the most gains to the S&amp;P.</p>
<p>“We’re hearing less talk of firing missiles and less talk of trade war,” said Michael Antonelli, managing director of institutional sales trading at Robert W. Baird in Milwaukee. “Earnings are coming up and expectations are high.”</p>
<p>Strong quarterly results from BlackRock Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=BLK.N" type="external">BLK.N</a>) and Delta Air Lines Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=DAL.N" type="external">DAL.N</a>) added to the sanguine mood.</p>
<p>Delta topped profit estimates, sending its shares 2.9 percent higher and boosting other airline stocks.</p>
<p>BlackRock gained 1.5 percent after the asset manager’s quarterly profit rose more than expected.</p>
<p>The earnings season begins in earnest on Friday with reports from JPMorgan Chase &amp; Co ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=JPM.N" type="external">JPM.N</a>), Citigroup Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=C.N" type="external">C.N</a>) and Wells Fargo &amp; Co ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=WFC.N" type="external">WFC.N</a>).</p> Slideshow (3 Images)
<p>Analysts expect quarterly profit for S&amp;P 500 companies to rise 18.4 percent from a year ago, in what would be the biggest gain in seven years, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.</p>
<p>“People are looking forward to earnings season,” said Tracie McMillion, head of global asset allocation strategy at Wells Fargo Investment Institute in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “Market participants are not wanting to miss out if (earnings are) as good as the forecasts say they will be.”</p>
<p>The Dow Jones Industrial Average <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.DJI" type="external">.DJI</a> rose 293.6 points, or 1.21 percent, to 24,483.05, the S&amp;P 500 <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.SPX" type="external">.SPX</a> gained 21.8 points, or 0.83 percent, to 2,663.99, and the Nasdaq Composite <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.IXIC" type="external">.IXIC</a> added 71.22 points, or 1.01 percent, to 7,140.25.</p>
<p>Investor sentiment was also boosted by the weekly U.S. initial jobless claims report, which pointed to sustained labor market strength.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=BLK.N" type="external">BlackRock Inc</a> 533.01 BLK.N New York Stock Exchange +7.70 (+1.47%) BLK.N DAL.N JPM.N C.N WFC.N
<p>Facebook Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=FB.O" type="external">FB.O</a>) was a notable laggard among technology stocks, falling 1.5 percent following a 5.3 percent gain over the past two days when Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress on the social network’s data security.</p>
<p>Bed Bath &amp; Beyond Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=BBBY.O" type="external">BBBY.O</a>) shares dived 20.0 percent after the company’s full-year profit forecast missed estimates.</p>
<p>Advancing issues outnumbered decliners on the NYSE for a 1.20-to-1 ratio and on the Nasdaq, for a 1.84-to-1 ratio.</p>
<p>Volume on U.S. exchanges was 6.12 billion shares, compared to the 7.27 billion average for the full session over the last 20 trading days.</p>
<p>Additional reporting by Sruthi Shankar in Bengaluru and Chuck Mikolajczak in New York; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Leslie Adler</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>(Reuters) - Genuine Parts Co ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=GPC.N" type="external">GPC.N</a>) said on Thursday it would spin off its wholesale distribution business S.P. Richards and merge it with Essendant ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=ESND.O" type="external">ESND.O</a>) in a tax-free transaction for shareholders, as it focuses on its industrial and auto parts businesses.</p>
<p>The combined company will have more products and resources, giving its customers - mainly independent dealers - a one-stop shop as they grapple with intense competition from e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=AMZN.O" type="external">AMZN.O</a>) and big-box stores.</p>
<p>“This combination of our customer centric companies creates a stronger partner to support those dealers and help them to be more competitive with all the other options available to customers in the industry,” Essendant Chief Executive Officer Ric Phillips said on a call with analysts.</p>
<p>Essendant’s shares jumped 18 percent to $10.00, while those of Genuine Parts were up about 1 percent at $90.17 in morning trading.</p>
<p>Illinois-based Essendant is a wholesale distributor of workplace items including janitorial supplies, while Atlanta, Georgia-based S.P. Richards distributes products ranging from office furniture to school supplies.</p>
<p>The combined entity will be called Essendant and headed by Phillips. S.P. Richards CEO Rick Toppin will become chief operating officer of the new company. Essendant had a market capitalization of about $323.5 million as of Wednesday’s close.</p>
<p>Genuine Parts, one of the leading U.S. car parts distributors, said the deal implied a valuation of about $680 million for S.P. Richards.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=GPC.N" type="external">Genuine Parts Co</a> 90.13 GPC.N New York Stock Exchange +0.47 (+0.52%) GPC.N ESND.O AMZN.O
<p>Genuine Parts will get $347 million in cash and its shareholders 51 percent of the newly-formed combined company. Structured as a Reverse Morris Trust deal, the transaction will be tax-free for the companies’ shareholders.</p>
<p>The company has been evaluating options for the S.P. Richards business, which has been pressured by weak demand for office supplies.</p>
<p>Essendant has also been hit as large customers source products directly from manufacturers. Its net sales declined 6.2 percent to $5.04 billion in 2017, while adjusted profit fell more than 50 percent.</p>
<p>Genuine Parts has been focusing on its auto parts and industrial businesses. Last year, the company completed a deal to buy London-based Alliance Automotive Group and took a stake in Australia’s Inenco Group.</p>
<p>Citigroup Global Markets Inc was the financial adviser for Essendant, while J.P. Morgan advised Genuine Parts.</p>
<p>Reporting by Arunima Banerjee in Bengaluru; editing by Patrick Graham and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>LONDON/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The global oil stocks surplus is close to evaporating, OPEC said on Thursday, citing healthy energy demand and its own supply cuts while revising up its forecast for production from rivals who have benefited from higher oil prices.</p> A flag with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) logo is seen during a meeting of OPEC and non-OPEC producing countries in Vienna, Austria September 22, 2017. REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger
<p>U.S. shale oil output has been booming over the past year since OPEC reduced its own production in tandem with Russia to prop up global oil prices.</p>
<p>But as oil production collapsed in OPEC member Venezuela and is still facing hiccups in countries such as Libya and Angola, the oil exporters’ group is still producing below its targets meaning the world needs to use stocks to meet rising demand.</p>
<p>The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries said in its monthly report oil stocks in the developed world reversed a rise in January to fall by 17.4 million barrels in February to 2.854 billion barrels, around 43 million barrels above the latest five-year average.</p>
<p>“We have achieved an over 150 percent conformity level,” OPEC Secretary-General Mohammad Barkindo told Reuters in New Delhi, referring to OPEC’s commitments under the supply-cutting pact. He said the glut has effectively shrunk by nine-tenths since the start of 2017.</p>
<p>“We have seen an accelerated shrinkage of stocks in storage from unparalleled highs of about 400 million barrels to about 43 million above the five-year average,” Barkindo said.</p>
<p>Stock levels are now 207 million barrels below their level in February 2017, with crude stocks in a surplus of 55 million barrels and product stocks in a deficit of 12 million.</p>
<p>“Looking forward, a healthy global economic forecast for 2018, positive car sales data in recent months, stronger 2018 yea-on-year U.S. product consumption in January and potentially tighter global product markets are expected to boost gasoline and distillates demand ...,” OPEC said.</p>
<p>“High conformity levels observed by OPEC and non-OPEC producing countries ... should further enhance market stability and support crude and product markets in the months ahead.”</p>
<p>The 14-member, Vienna-based producer group said its collective output, according to secondary sources, fell 201,000 bpd to 31.96 million bpd in March from February, driven by declines in Angola, Algeria, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Libya.</p>
<p>The figure is below the 32.6 million bpd that OPEC sees as demand for its crude for the whole of 2018.</p>
<p>OPEC, Russia and several other non-OPEC producers began to cut supply in January 2017. The pact runs until the end of the year and OPEC meets in Vienna in June to decide on its next course of action.</p> THIRD YEAR OF CUTS
<p>OPEC’s leader Saudi Arabia has said it would like the pact to be extended into 2019.</p>
<p>“There is growing confidence that the declaration of cooperation will be extended beyond 2018,” Barkindo told Reuters. “Russia will continue to play a leading role.”</p>
<p>On Thursday, OPEC also revised its forecast for supply growth from its rivals, non-OPEC, which is now forecast to grow by a further 80,000 barrels per day this year to 1.71 million bpd, driven largely by higher-than-anticipated growth in the first quarter in the United States and the former Soviet Union.</p>
<p>At the same time, it increased its forecast for global oil demand growth for this year by 30,000 bpd to 1.63 million bpd.</p>
<p>“This mainly reflects the positive momentum in the OECD in the 1Q18 on the back of better-than-expected data, and supported by development in industrial activities, colder-than-anticipated weather and strong mining activities in the OECD Americas and the OECD Asia Pacific,” it said in the monthly market report.</p>
<p>Production in the United Arab Emirates posted the largest month-on-month increase, according to the secondary sources, rising by around 45,000 bpd in March to 2.86 million bpd.</p>
<p>OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia told the group it pumped 9.907 million bpd in March, 28,000 bpd below its February level.</p>
<p>Venezuela reported production of 1.509 million bpd in March, 77,000 bpd below the level it reported in February.</p>
<p>Reporting by Ahmad Ghaddar; Editing by Dale Hudson and David Evans</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | 812 |
<p>A 12-year-old girl who was raped by a grown man and then became pregnant, had to endure the agony of watching a judge <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/man-raped-12-old-awarded-114904992.html" type="external">award joint custody of the child</a> to the rapist nine years later.</p>
<p>Christopher Mirasolo, 27, who was convicted of rape in 2008, was awarded parenting time and joint legal custody of the eight-year-old boy after a paternity test was done and showed he had fathered the child.</p>
<p>To make matters worse, Mirasolo, from Brown City, Michigan, was convicted of another child sex assault and served four years in prison for that crime.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2017/10/06/rape-victim-attacker-joint-child-custody/106374256/" type="external">The Detroit News</a> reports that the 12-year-old girl who was raped is now 21. Her attorney, Rebecca Kiessling, is seeking protection under the federal Rape Survivor Child Custody Act so that the rapist has no access to the child.</p>
<p>Judge Gregory S Ross granted Mirasolo custody; in addition, Mirasolo was given the victim’s address. The rapist’s name was added to the birth certificate, although the 21-year-old victim did not give her consent.</p>
<p>The victim’s lawyer, Rebecca Kiessling, said furiously, “This is insane. Nothing has been right about this since it was originally investigated. He was never properly charged and should still be sitting behind bars somewhere, but the system is victimizing my client, who was a child herself when this all happened.”</p>
<p>Kiessling recounted what had happened when the rape occurred:</p>
<p>She, her 13-year-old sister and a friend all slipped out of their house one night to meet a boy and the boy’s older friend, Mirasolo, showed up and asked if they wanted to go for a ride. They thought they were going to McDonald’s or somewhere. Instead, he tossed their cellphones away, drove to Detroit where he stole gas from a station and then drove back to Sanilac County, where he kept them captive for two days in a vacant house near a relative, finally releasing the older sister in a park. He threatened to kill them if they told anyone what happened.</p>
<p>Mirasolo served only six and a half months in jail after being convicted of third-degree criminal sexual conduct; in March 2010, Mirasolo sexually assaulted a victim aged between 13 and 15 years; he served four years in prison for that crime.</p> | OUTRAGEOUS: Rapist Awarded Joint Custody Of Child He Fathered After DNA Test Proves He Is The Father | true | https://dailywire.com/news/22086/outrageous-rapist-awarded-joint-custody-child-he-hank-berrien | 2017-10-09 | 0right
| OUTRAGEOUS: Rapist Awarded Joint Custody Of Child He Fathered After DNA Test Proves He Is The Father
<p>A 12-year-old girl who was raped by a grown man and then became pregnant, had to endure the agony of watching a judge <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/man-raped-12-old-awarded-114904992.html" type="external">award joint custody of the child</a> to the rapist nine years later.</p>
<p>Christopher Mirasolo, 27, who was convicted of rape in 2008, was awarded parenting time and joint legal custody of the eight-year-old boy after a paternity test was done and showed he had fathered the child.</p>
<p>To make matters worse, Mirasolo, from Brown City, Michigan, was convicted of another child sex assault and served four years in prison for that crime.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2017/10/06/rape-victim-attacker-joint-child-custody/106374256/" type="external">The Detroit News</a> reports that the 12-year-old girl who was raped is now 21. Her attorney, Rebecca Kiessling, is seeking protection under the federal Rape Survivor Child Custody Act so that the rapist has no access to the child.</p>
<p>Judge Gregory S Ross granted Mirasolo custody; in addition, Mirasolo was given the victim’s address. The rapist’s name was added to the birth certificate, although the 21-year-old victim did not give her consent.</p>
<p>The victim’s lawyer, Rebecca Kiessling, said furiously, “This is insane. Nothing has been right about this since it was originally investigated. He was never properly charged and should still be sitting behind bars somewhere, but the system is victimizing my client, who was a child herself when this all happened.”</p>
<p>Kiessling recounted what had happened when the rape occurred:</p>
<p>She, her 13-year-old sister and a friend all slipped out of their house one night to meet a boy and the boy’s older friend, Mirasolo, showed up and asked if they wanted to go for a ride. They thought they were going to McDonald’s or somewhere. Instead, he tossed their cellphones away, drove to Detroit where he stole gas from a station and then drove back to Sanilac County, where he kept them captive for two days in a vacant house near a relative, finally releasing the older sister in a park. He threatened to kill them if they told anyone what happened.</p>
<p>Mirasolo served only six and a half months in jail after being convicted of third-degree criminal sexual conduct; in March 2010, Mirasolo sexually assaulted a victim aged between 13 and 15 years; he served four years in prison for that crime.</p> | 813 |
<p>EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article is the introduction to Charles Camosy’s&#160;For Love of Animals: Christian Ethics, Consistent Action, and is reprinted&#160;with the author’s permission.</p>
<p>Every once in a while, a book comes along that does something few books ever do, which is to change something fundamental about the way you live your life. For some people reading these words, theologian Charles Camosy’s&#160; <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1616366621" type="external">For Love of Animals</a>&#160;will be that book.</p>
<p>And for good reason: because its subjects — the rights and wrongs of our modern treatment of animals, especially though not only mammals, and especially though not only the creatures of factory farms — are simultaneously morally urgent and widely ignored by many people, including and inexplicably by many well-meaning but under-informed Christians.</p>
<p>Professor Camosy has now remedied that defect with this lively, thoughtful, and utterly original book. It ranges widely but with a teacherly touch over subjects as diverse as the history of Christian vegetarianism; papal and other pronouncements about creation; the development of Christian theology concerning nonhuman persons, such as angels; the morality of dog-fighting; the relevance of laws against child labor; the question of pets; the truth about factory farming; and much more. Throughout, the author aptly convinces the reader both that our culture’s treatment of defenseless creatures is morally indefensible much of the time; and also that “those of us who follow Jesus Christ,” in particular, “should give animals special moral consideration and attention.”</p>
<p>For Love of Animals&#160;applies the specific lens of Catholic teaching about social justice, pointing out among other details that the&#160;Catechism&#160;itself says that animals are&#160;owed&#160;moral treatment. Its author is surely right to attribute the horrors of factory farming, in particular, to an ethic of feckless consumption according to which more is better, all the time. It is rampant and unexamined Western consumerism, more than anything else, that “disconnect[s] us from the process by which pig meat gets on our plate.” I would add to that analysis the friendly amendment that this same consumerism encourages the formation of a habit that is suspect wherever and whenever it appears, but that chronically gets a pass where animals are involved: i.e., a practiced desire to remain ignorant of those things about which we wish not to know.</p>
<p>Of course reasonable and good people will disagree about some of what’s discussed in these pages. Moreover, as the author emphasizes, fundamental cultural change takes time — lots of it. But surely every reader, Christian or otherwise, will agree upon putting down this book that in the matter of animals, lines ought to be drawn and distinctions ought to be made that aren’t currently part of our Western moral topography — and need to be.</p>
<p>The map toward a better kind of stewardship has many and varied roads, some of them personal. Like the author, I also gave up eating mammals and birds some time back after decades of itinerant vegetarianism; and for me, too, this was a gradual and parallel effort toward becoming “more authentically and consistently pro-life,” as he puts it in describing his own path.</p>
<p>In my own case, as it turned out, that change had less to do with philosophical questions about social justice than with more visceral things. In particular, I simply could not get around a question raised vividly in Matthew Scully’s seminal and perennially powerful 2002 book&#160; <a href="http://old.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interrogatory120602.asp" type="external">Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy</a>: If I was unwilling to kill these creatures with my own bare hands (as I surely was, and am), then by what right or moral standard could I possibly delegate the brutal act of killing to others — especially to those poorer and darker and more desperate “others” who man America’s squealing slaughterhouses and shovel out its reeking chicken factories?</p>
<p>It took years and a number of other questions after that, but ultimately reading&#160;Dominion&#160;ended up having a decisive effect on my life; and the same will be true for other people in the wake of&#160;For Love of Animals.</p>
<p>In addition to being merciful, this book is also a mercifully good read. It can and should be paged with profit by anyone from high-school age on up. Readers seeking a thoughtful presentation to family or friends of their own reasons for abstaining from meat will find in it an especially useful primer; and readers who are nowhere near convinced will nonetheless find that it opens their eyes.</p>
<p>It would be gratifying if the book were also to start a serious and overdue discussion in Christian religious quarters. One wonders, for example, whether vegetarianism for some believers might be a unique “sign of contradiction” in its own right — particularly in a time of relative plenty marked by rampant consumerism, and particularly given what Blessed John Paul II decried as an accompanying “culture of death.” Wanton cruelty to animals, of the sort that is now pitiably routine, is arguably part and parcel of that same culture, and it further deadens the general moral sense at a time when it’s needed most.</p>
<p>As a vegetarian named Leo Tolstoy once put it, in a powerful 1909 essay that he wrote about a slaughterhouse: “We cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at what we do not wish to see, it will not exist.”</p>
<p>One also wonders after reading this book when, if ever, pro-life and pro-animal advocates will figure out how much they have in common and make common cause. To observe as much is hardly to posit moral equivalence. It’s rather to make the point that those who labor to protect unborn human life have more in common with many animal sympathizers than either side has yet understood, as some people reading these pages are about to find out. Similarly, readers might note the almost preternatural serendipity of this book’s appearance during the pontificate of a pope named Francis I, named for the greatest animal lover of all time — one more sign suggesting that the moment for a fair hearing of Professor Camosy’s argument is ripe.</p>
<p>In sum, whether you are a Catholic or an atheist, liberal or conservative, progressive or traditionalist, the pages ahead will give you much to think about. And you won’t be alone. Every year, more Western men and women are being driven to understand that solicitude for human animals and solicitude for other animals are not mutually exclusive expenditures of moral energy. More and more can now agree that stewardship is a call to clemency and mercy, not to ruthless exploitation; and that all life, including animal life, is too precious to be cavalierly and cruelly and routinely trashed.</p>
<p>The community of people now struggling to understand as much, and to do right by creatures both great and small, is in the process of constructing a wholly new big tent. Thanks to Professor Camosy’s welcome and auspiciously timed&#160; <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1616366621" type="external">new book</a>, it just got noticeably bigger.</p>
<p>Mary Eberstadt is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of &#160;How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization&#160;(Templeton Press).</p> | A Case for the Moral Consideration of Animals | false | https://eppc.org/publications/a-case-for-the-moral-consideration-of-animals/ | 1right-center
| A Case for the Moral Consideration of Animals
<p>EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article is the introduction to Charles Camosy’s&#160;For Love of Animals: Christian Ethics, Consistent Action, and is reprinted&#160;with the author’s permission.</p>
<p>Every once in a while, a book comes along that does something few books ever do, which is to change something fundamental about the way you live your life. For some people reading these words, theologian Charles Camosy’s&#160; <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1616366621" type="external">For Love of Animals</a>&#160;will be that book.</p>
<p>And for good reason: because its subjects — the rights and wrongs of our modern treatment of animals, especially though not only mammals, and especially though not only the creatures of factory farms — are simultaneously morally urgent and widely ignored by many people, including and inexplicably by many well-meaning but under-informed Christians.</p>
<p>Professor Camosy has now remedied that defect with this lively, thoughtful, and utterly original book. It ranges widely but with a teacherly touch over subjects as diverse as the history of Christian vegetarianism; papal and other pronouncements about creation; the development of Christian theology concerning nonhuman persons, such as angels; the morality of dog-fighting; the relevance of laws against child labor; the question of pets; the truth about factory farming; and much more. Throughout, the author aptly convinces the reader both that our culture’s treatment of defenseless creatures is morally indefensible much of the time; and also that “those of us who follow Jesus Christ,” in particular, “should give animals special moral consideration and attention.”</p>
<p>For Love of Animals&#160;applies the specific lens of Catholic teaching about social justice, pointing out among other details that the&#160;Catechism&#160;itself says that animals are&#160;owed&#160;moral treatment. Its author is surely right to attribute the horrors of factory farming, in particular, to an ethic of feckless consumption according to which more is better, all the time. It is rampant and unexamined Western consumerism, more than anything else, that “disconnect[s] us from the process by which pig meat gets on our plate.” I would add to that analysis the friendly amendment that this same consumerism encourages the formation of a habit that is suspect wherever and whenever it appears, but that chronically gets a pass where animals are involved: i.e., a practiced desire to remain ignorant of those things about which we wish not to know.</p>
<p>Of course reasonable and good people will disagree about some of what’s discussed in these pages. Moreover, as the author emphasizes, fundamental cultural change takes time — lots of it. But surely every reader, Christian or otherwise, will agree upon putting down this book that in the matter of animals, lines ought to be drawn and distinctions ought to be made that aren’t currently part of our Western moral topography — and need to be.</p>
<p>The map toward a better kind of stewardship has many and varied roads, some of them personal. Like the author, I also gave up eating mammals and birds some time back after decades of itinerant vegetarianism; and for me, too, this was a gradual and parallel effort toward becoming “more authentically and consistently pro-life,” as he puts it in describing his own path.</p>
<p>In my own case, as it turned out, that change had less to do with philosophical questions about social justice than with more visceral things. In particular, I simply could not get around a question raised vividly in Matthew Scully’s seminal and perennially powerful 2002 book&#160; <a href="http://old.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interrogatory120602.asp" type="external">Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy</a>: If I was unwilling to kill these creatures with my own bare hands (as I surely was, and am), then by what right or moral standard could I possibly delegate the brutal act of killing to others — especially to those poorer and darker and more desperate “others” who man America’s squealing slaughterhouses and shovel out its reeking chicken factories?</p>
<p>It took years and a number of other questions after that, but ultimately reading&#160;Dominion&#160;ended up having a decisive effect on my life; and the same will be true for other people in the wake of&#160;For Love of Animals.</p>
<p>In addition to being merciful, this book is also a mercifully good read. It can and should be paged with profit by anyone from high-school age on up. Readers seeking a thoughtful presentation to family or friends of their own reasons for abstaining from meat will find in it an especially useful primer; and readers who are nowhere near convinced will nonetheless find that it opens their eyes.</p>
<p>It would be gratifying if the book were also to start a serious and overdue discussion in Christian religious quarters. One wonders, for example, whether vegetarianism for some believers might be a unique “sign of contradiction” in its own right — particularly in a time of relative plenty marked by rampant consumerism, and particularly given what Blessed John Paul II decried as an accompanying “culture of death.” Wanton cruelty to animals, of the sort that is now pitiably routine, is arguably part and parcel of that same culture, and it further deadens the general moral sense at a time when it’s needed most.</p>
<p>As a vegetarian named Leo Tolstoy once put it, in a powerful 1909 essay that he wrote about a slaughterhouse: “We cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at what we do not wish to see, it will not exist.”</p>
<p>One also wonders after reading this book when, if ever, pro-life and pro-animal advocates will figure out how much they have in common and make common cause. To observe as much is hardly to posit moral equivalence. It’s rather to make the point that those who labor to protect unborn human life have more in common with many animal sympathizers than either side has yet understood, as some people reading these pages are about to find out. Similarly, readers might note the almost preternatural serendipity of this book’s appearance during the pontificate of a pope named Francis I, named for the greatest animal lover of all time — one more sign suggesting that the moment for a fair hearing of Professor Camosy’s argument is ripe.</p>
<p>In sum, whether you are a Catholic or an atheist, liberal or conservative, progressive or traditionalist, the pages ahead will give you much to think about. And you won’t be alone. Every year, more Western men and women are being driven to understand that solicitude for human animals and solicitude for other animals are not mutually exclusive expenditures of moral energy. More and more can now agree that stewardship is a call to clemency and mercy, not to ruthless exploitation; and that all life, including animal life, is too precious to be cavalierly and cruelly and routinely trashed.</p>
<p>The community of people now struggling to understand as much, and to do right by creatures both great and small, is in the process of constructing a wholly new big tent. Thanks to Professor Camosy’s welcome and auspiciously timed&#160; <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1616366621" type="external">new book</a>, it just got noticeably bigger.</p>
<p>Mary Eberstadt is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of &#160;How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization&#160;(Templeton Press).</p> | 814 |
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<p>Published time: 6 Aug, 2017 13:37Edited time: 6 Aug, 2017 14:04</p>
<p>A man carrying a knife and reportedly shouting “Allahu Akbar” tried to force his way through security checks at the Eiffel Tower on Saturday. French prosecutors have launched a counterterrorism investigation, according to reports citing judicial sources.</p>
<p>The man was arrested near the Eiffel Tower in Paris on Saturday at about 11:30 pm local time, according to media reports. The intruder was reportedly shouting “Allahu Akbar” when he approached the security officers, who quickly neutralized him, several French media outlets <a href="http://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/tour-eiffel-un-homme-arrete-la-nuit-derniere-avec-une-arme-blanche-06-08-2017-7178184.php" type="external">reported</a>.</p>
<p>A man crossed the first security barrier by pushing a security guard and hitting him on the shoulder. He then pulled out a knife and shouted “Allah Akbar,” according to a source close to the investigation, as quoted by AFP. “Operation Sentinel soldiers then ordered him to put his knife on the ground. He placed it there without resistance and was immediately detained,” the source added.</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>In police custody, the man claimed that “he wanted to commit an attack on a soldier and was linked to a member of the Islamic State jihadist group who encouraged him to carry out the act,” according to another source close to the investigation, AFP reports.</p>
<p>While the incident resulted in no injuries, the site was evacuated. The next morning the tourist site was opened again.</p>
<p>The suspect has not been identified yet, although Le Parisien <a href="http://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/tour-eiffel-un-homme-arrete-la-nuit-derniere-avec-une-arme-blanche-06-08-2017-7178184.php" type="external">reported</a> that he is a French citizen who was born in Mauritania in 1998.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/398755-france-terrorism-high-chance-collomb/" type="external">READ MORE:&#160;Terrorist attack potential ‘very high’ as 271 ISIS jihadists return to France – interior minister</a></p>
<p>While the incident was initially regarded as a common crime, French prosecutors <a href="http://www.ouest-france.fr/ile-de-france/paris-75000/paris-un-homme-avec-une-arme-blanche-arrete-au-pied-de-la-tour-eiffel-5175196" type="external">reclassified</a> it as a counterterrorism case and attempted murder of government officials after the interrogation of the intruder, according to media reports citing judicial sources.</p>
<p>France has been in a state of emergency following attacks in Paris in November 2015 which saw over 130 people killed. The measure gave police and administrative authorities more power.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/396798-france-bill-terrorism-emergency/" type="external">READ MORE: French Senate backs permanent state of emergency measures amid street protests (PHOTOS)</a></p>
<p>In June, French lawmakers adopted a controversial counterterrorism bill cementing some measures that were introduced by the state of emergency, including house searches and seizure of weapons.</p> | Eiffel Tower knife attack: French prosecutors launch counterterrorism investigation – source | false | https://newsline.com/eiffel-tower-knife-attack-french-prosecutors-launch-counterterrorism-investigation-source/ | 2017-08-06 | 1right-center
| Eiffel Tower knife attack: French prosecutors launch counterterrorism investigation – source
<p>Published time: 6 Aug, 2017 13:37Edited time: 6 Aug, 2017 14:04</p>
<p>A man carrying a knife and reportedly shouting “Allahu Akbar” tried to force his way through security checks at the Eiffel Tower on Saturday. French prosecutors have launched a counterterrorism investigation, according to reports citing judicial sources.</p>
<p>The man was arrested near the Eiffel Tower in Paris on Saturday at about 11:30 pm local time, according to media reports. The intruder was reportedly shouting “Allahu Akbar” when he approached the security officers, who quickly neutralized him, several French media outlets <a href="http://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/tour-eiffel-un-homme-arrete-la-nuit-derniere-avec-une-arme-blanche-06-08-2017-7178184.php" type="external">reported</a>.</p>
<p>A man crossed the first security barrier by pushing a security guard and hitting him on the shoulder. He then pulled out a knife and shouted “Allah Akbar,” according to a source close to the investigation, as quoted by AFP. “Operation Sentinel soldiers then ordered him to put his knife on the ground. He placed it there without resistance and was immediately detained,” the source added.</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>In police custody, the man claimed that “he wanted to commit an attack on a soldier and was linked to a member of the Islamic State jihadist group who encouraged him to carry out the act,” according to another source close to the investigation, AFP reports.</p>
<p>While the incident resulted in no injuries, the site was evacuated. The next morning the tourist site was opened again.</p>
<p>The suspect has not been identified yet, although Le Parisien <a href="http://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/tour-eiffel-un-homme-arrete-la-nuit-derniere-avec-une-arme-blanche-06-08-2017-7178184.php" type="external">reported</a> that he is a French citizen who was born in Mauritania in 1998.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/398755-france-terrorism-high-chance-collomb/" type="external">READ MORE:&#160;Terrorist attack potential ‘very high’ as 271 ISIS jihadists return to France – interior minister</a></p>
<p>While the incident was initially regarded as a common crime, French prosecutors <a href="http://www.ouest-france.fr/ile-de-france/paris-75000/paris-un-homme-avec-une-arme-blanche-arrete-au-pied-de-la-tour-eiffel-5175196" type="external">reclassified</a> it as a counterterrorism case and attempted murder of government officials after the interrogation of the intruder, according to media reports citing judicial sources.</p>
<p>France has been in a state of emergency following attacks in Paris in November 2015 which saw over 130 people killed. The measure gave police and administrative authorities more power.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/396798-france-bill-terrorism-emergency/" type="external">READ MORE: French Senate backs permanent state of emergency measures amid street protests (PHOTOS)</a></p>
<p>In June, French lawmakers adopted a controversial counterterrorism bill cementing some measures that were introduced by the state of emergency, including house searches and seizure of weapons.</p> | 815 |
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<p />
<p>In their quest to keep the 113-year-old race young, Tour organizers have again unearthed fresh challenges from the geography of France for the three-week slog, with new climbs and, on stage 18, an unprecedented mountain-top finish on the punishing Col d’Izoard high in the Alps — a rocky, hostile and lunar terrain that could be the final big battleground for the winner’s check of 500,000 euros ($550,000).</p>
<p>“That’s going to be one of the really decisive stages,” said Froome, the race winner for Team Sky in 2013, 2015 and again this year.</p>
<p>Before that, on stage 12 in the Pyrenees, the Tour climbs to the Peyragudes ski station where parts of the James Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies” were filmed in 1997.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>From its July 1 start in Dusseldorf, Germany, to the July 23 finish on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, the 3,516-kilometer (2,185-mile) route will wind over climbs in the Vosges, Jura, Massif Central, Pyrenees and Alps. Not since the Tour of 1992 have organizers made riders take on all five mountain ranges.</p>
<p>“It looks hard,” said Australian rider Richie Porte, who finished fifth for the BMC Racing team this year.</p>
<p>The toughest climbs — graded two, one and unclassified on cycling’s rising scale of difficulty — will be slightly fewer next year: 23 in total compared to 28 this year and 25 in both 2015 and 2014. But they will be scattered across a 14 day-spread, rather than being concentrated in two blocks in the Alps and Pyrenees, and will include six especially teeth-grindingly steep ascents. The Col du Grand Colombier in the Jura has 22-percent gradients. Riders will have to arrive at the Tour in good climbing form, and maintain that strength, to compete for the title.</p>
<p>With just three mountain-top finishes, including the Izoard, that are so often decisive on the Tour, title contenders like Froome may have to also race hard on other terrains to shake off their rivals.</p>
<p>“It could make the race a lot more tactical in the mountains,” Froome said. “It opens the door up for people to be more aggressive.”</p>
<p>Just five days in, the 198 riders will face the relatively short but very sharp shock of climbing to the Planche des Belles Filles ski station in the Vosges, with leg-searing 20-percent gradients, in eastern France.</p>
<p>“The first big shake-up,” Porte said.</p>
<p>With little time for riders to catch their breath, the Tour then swings south for more climbs on stages eight and nine in the Jura, before crossing France to the west.</p>
<p>The peloton will spend one very long day — 214 kilometers (133 miles) — followed by one short one — 100 kilometers (62 miles) — in the Pyrenees. The race then heads north again to the Massif Central range, where climbs and possible strong winds up high could catch out unwitting riders on stage 15 to Le Puy-en-Velay, part of it on roads so off the beaten track that they don’t appear on some maps.</p>
<p>“The sort of stage where we can hope for unusual things to happen,” said race director Thierry Gouvenou, who helped draw up the route.</p>
<p>Two individual time trials — the first over 13 kilometers (8 miles) on day one in Dusseldorf; the last, over 23 kilometers (14 miles), on the penultimate stage in Marseille — will bookend the Tour before the finish in Paris but promise to be too short to be decisive in the overall outcome.</p>
<p>“It’s very light on time trials, so, for sure, the race is going to be won or lost depending on what happens in the mountains,” said Froome, who named two-time runner-up Quintana first among his list of expected rivals. “I’m going to have to be as good as I can be in the mountains. That’s going to be my focus.”</p>
<p>In a remarkable piece of showmanship on the final stage in Paris, the riders will race through the iconic Grand Palais, a giant steel-and-glass structure built for the world’s fair in 1900, on their way to the sprint finish on the Champs-Elysees, with the aim of highlighting one of the sites that could be used for Olympic events if Paris wins its bid to host the 2024 Games.</p> | 2017 Tour will scale all of France’s mountains | false | https://abqjournal.com/869478/2017-tour-will-scale-all-of-frances-mountains.html | 2016-10-18 | 2least
| 2017 Tour will scale all of France’s mountains
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>In their quest to keep the 113-year-old race young, Tour organizers have again unearthed fresh challenges from the geography of France for the three-week slog, with new climbs and, on stage 18, an unprecedented mountain-top finish on the punishing Col d’Izoard high in the Alps — a rocky, hostile and lunar terrain that could be the final big battleground for the winner’s check of 500,000 euros ($550,000).</p>
<p>“That’s going to be one of the really decisive stages,” said Froome, the race winner for Team Sky in 2013, 2015 and again this year.</p>
<p>Before that, on stage 12 in the Pyrenees, the Tour climbs to the Peyragudes ski station where parts of the James Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies” were filmed in 1997.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>From its July 1 start in Dusseldorf, Germany, to the July 23 finish on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, the 3,516-kilometer (2,185-mile) route will wind over climbs in the Vosges, Jura, Massif Central, Pyrenees and Alps. Not since the Tour of 1992 have organizers made riders take on all five mountain ranges.</p>
<p>“It looks hard,” said Australian rider Richie Porte, who finished fifth for the BMC Racing team this year.</p>
<p>The toughest climbs — graded two, one and unclassified on cycling’s rising scale of difficulty — will be slightly fewer next year: 23 in total compared to 28 this year and 25 in both 2015 and 2014. But they will be scattered across a 14 day-spread, rather than being concentrated in two blocks in the Alps and Pyrenees, and will include six especially teeth-grindingly steep ascents. The Col du Grand Colombier in the Jura has 22-percent gradients. Riders will have to arrive at the Tour in good climbing form, and maintain that strength, to compete for the title.</p>
<p>With just three mountain-top finishes, including the Izoard, that are so often decisive on the Tour, title contenders like Froome may have to also race hard on other terrains to shake off their rivals.</p>
<p>“It could make the race a lot more tactical in the mountains,” Froome said. “It opens the door up for people to be more aggressive.”</p>
<p>Just five days in, the 198 riders will face the relatively short but very sharp shock of climbing to the Planche des Belles Filles ski station in the Vosges, with leg-searing 20-percent gradients, in eastern France.</p>
<p>“The first big shake-up,” Porte said.</p>
<p>With little time for riders to catch their breath, the Tour then swings south for more climbs on stages eight and nine in the Jura, before crossing France to the west.</p>
<p>The peloton will spend one very long day — 214 kilometers (133 miles) — followed by one short one — 100 kilometers (62 miles) — in the Pyrenees. The race then heads north again to the Massif Central range, where climbs and possible strong winds up high could catch out unwitting riders on stage 15 to Le Puy-en-Velay, part of it on roads so off the beaten track that they don’t appear on some maps.</p>
<p>“The sort of stage where we can hope for unusual things to happen,” said race director Thierry Gouvenou, who helped draw up the route.</p>
<p>Two individual time trials — the first over 13 kilometers (8 miles) on day one in Dusseldorf; the last, over 23 kilometers (14 miles), on the penultimate stage in Marseille — will bookend the Tour before the finish in Paris but promise to be too short to be decisive in the overall outcome.</p>
<p>“It’s very light on time trials, so, for sure, the race is going to be won or lost depending on what happens in the mountains,” said Froome, who named two-time runner-up Quintana first among his list of expected rivals. “I’m going to have to be as good as I can be in the mountains. That’s going to be my focus.”</p>
<p>In a remarkable piece of showmanship on the final stage in Paris, the riders will race through the iconic Grand Palais, a giant steel-and-glass structure built for the world’s fair in 1900, on their way to the sprint finish on the Champs-Elysees, with the aim of highlighting one of the sites that could be used for Olympic events if Paris wins its bid to host the 2024 Games.</p> | 816 |
<p>Trump’s new vision for our nation is not just un-American, but it is unchristian. And either, if not both, of those shortcomings should bother you.</p>
<p>During his inaugural address, the president announced that for at least the next four years, “Every decision … will be made to benefit American workers and American families.” Under the banner America First, Trump proclaimed the “crucial conviction, that a nation exists to serve its citizens. Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public.”</p>
<p>As Trump spoke, I began to understand more clearly why so many people packed into venues throughout the country to see him campaign. Who doesn’t like being put first, especially when you’ve felt that others — both foreign and domestic — have been receiving preferential treatment? It feels good to soak in the aplomb of first place for a minute. I’ve learned, though, everything that feels good to you is not good for you. In this case, America First is not good for us.</p>
<p>Trump’s own assertion begs a profound theological question: is “America First” what righteous people and a righteous public should want? It is difficult for me to reconcile the acknowledged selfishness of “America First” with a Christian’s call to common humanity. Trump said, “the bedrock of our politics is a total allegiance to the United States of America,” but, as American Christians, are we American first or Christian first? And if our primary allegiance is to Christ, how can we cheer on a foreign policy that countenances the richest nation on the planet being primarily concerned with itself when more than half the world lives on less than $2 per day? My faith calls me to have concern for the least of these and looks to a model of Christ, who by his own testimony did not “come to be served, but to serve and give his [own] life a ransom for many” (Matt 20:28). In fact, Jesus tells us that service to others, even when it comes at our own expense is one hallmark that distinguishes Christians from those who do not know him. Indeed, self-sacrifice and service is Jesus’s formula for greatness (v.26). In other words, humanity first, not America first.</p>
<p>You might ask, how can we serve others, if we have not given proper care to our own well-being? Without question, there are segments of American life that require our collective investment. American workers, vital infrastructure, neighborhoods and communities deserve attention. Still, these needs cannot justify abdication of our responsibility to those who live beyond our borders. For all its internal challenges, the United States is still the wealthiest nation in the world and “for everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required” (Luke 12:48).</p>
<p>In his speech, President Trump quoted Psalm 133: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.” I agree. I just hope access to “togetherness” and “unity” does not require an American passport.</p> | American first or Christian first? Why supporting Trump’s vision for the nation compromises our biblical mandate | false | https://baptistnews.com/article/american-first-or-christian-first-why-supporting-trumps-vision-for-the-nation-compromises-our-biblical-mandate/ | 3left-center
| American first or Christian first? Why supporting Trump’s vision for the nation compromises our biblical mandate
<p>Trump’s new vision for our nation is not just un-American, but it is unchristian. And either, if not both, of those shortcomings should bother you.</p>
<p>During his inaugural address, the president announced that for at least the next four years, “Every decision … will be made to benefit American workers and American families.” Under the banner America First, Trump proclaimed the “crucial conviction, that a nation exists to serve its citizens. Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public.”</p>
<p>As Trump spoke, I began to understand more clearly why so many people packed into venues throughout the country to see him campaign. Who doesn’t like being put first, especially when you’ve felt that others — both foreign and domestic — have been receiving preferential treatment? It feels good to soak in the aplomb of first place for a minute. I’ve learned, though, everything that feels good to you is not good for you. In this case, America First is not good for us.</p>
<p>Trump’s own assertion begs a profound theological question: is “America First” what righteous people and a righteous public should want? It is difficult for me to reconcile the acknowledged selfishness of “America First” with a Christian’s call to common humanity. Trump said, “the bedrock of our politics is a total allegiance to the United States of America,” but, as American Christians, are we American first or Christian first? And if our primary allegiance is to Christ, how can we cheer on a foreign policy that countenances the richest nation on the planet being primarily concerned with itself when more than half the world lives on less than $2 per day? My faith calls me to have concern for the least of these and looks to a model of Christ, who by his own testimony did not “come to be served, but to serve and give his [own] life a ransom for many” (Matt 20:28). In fact, Jesus tells us that service to others, even when it comes at our own expense is one hallmark that distinguishes Christians from those who do not know him. Indeed, self-sacrifice and service is Jesus’s formula for greatness (v.26). In other words, humanity first, not America first.</p>
<p>You might ask, how can we serve others, if we have not given proper care to our own well-being? Without question, there are segments of American life that require our collective investment. American workers, vital infrastructure, neighborhoods and communities deserve attention. Still, these needs cannot justify abdication of our responsibility to those who live beyond our borders. For all its internal challenges, the United States is still the wealthiest nation in the world and “for everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required” (Luke 12:48).</p>
<p>In his speech, President Trump quoted Psalm 133: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.” I agree. I just hope access to “togetherness” and “unity” does not require an American passport.</p> | 817 |
|
<p>Boston Herald A jury deliberated for more than 20 hours over five days before finding that the Herald and reporter David Wedge had libeled Superior Court Judge Ernest B. Murphy. Reporter Jules Crittenden was cleared. "I don't think the evidence supports the verdict," says the Herald's lead lawyer. The verdict, he adds, "reflects to some extent the views the general public has about the press these days." The paper plans to appeal. (Related <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/02/19/jury_orders_herald_to_pay_21m_in_libel_case?pg=full" type="external">Boston Globe</a>, <a href="http://www.bostonphoenix.com/medialog/2005/02/notes-on-herald-verdict.asp" type="external">Boston Phoenix</a> and <a href="http://nytimes.com/2005/02/19/national/19herald.html" type="external">New York Times</a> stories.)</p> | Boston Herald ordered to pay $2.1 million for libeling judge | false | https://poynter.org/news/boston-herald-ordered-pay-21-million-libeling-judge | 2005-02-18 | 2least
| Boston Herald ordered to pay $2.1 million for libeling judge
<p>Boston Herald A jury deliberated for more than 20 hours over five days before finding that the Herald and reporter David Wedge had libeled Superior Court Judge Ernest B. Murphy. Reporter Jules Crittenden was cleared. "I don't think the evidence supports the verdict," says the Herald's lead lawyer. The verdict, he adds, "reflects to some extent the views the general public has about the press these days." The paper plans to appeal. (Related <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/02/19/jury_orders_herald_to_pay_21m_in_libel_case?pg=full" type="external">Boston Globe</a>, <a href="http://www.bostonphoenix.com/medialog/2005/02/notes-on-herald-verdict.asp" type="external">Boston Phoenix</a> and <a href="http://nytimes.com/2005/02/19/national/19herald.html" type="external">New York Times</a> stories.)</p> | 818 |
<p />
<p>The UN <a href="http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=81954" type="external">pledged today</a> to preserve Dasht-e-Leili, a mass grave site in northern Afghanistan, which was recently excavated and emptied of bodies, allegedly by Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. Dostum is believed to have removed the corpses out of fear that shifts in Afghan leadership might open him to charges of war crimes. The story was <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/57649.html" type="external">first reported by McClatchy</a>.</p>
<p>Norah Niland, a spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters that the UN “remains ready to assist all Afghan stakeholders, including victim groups, to take immediate and concerted action to preserve grave sites.”</p>
<p>The move comes a little late, as the remains have already been excavated. The site was thought to contain the bodies of up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners captured by the Northern Alliance after the siege of Kunduz in late 2001. News reports at the time indicated that a small number of prisoners had suffocated by accident after being left in shipping containers. The truth, based on recent FOIA release from the US government, indicates that the deaths were not accidental and were far more numerous than previously thought.</p>
<p>From Physicians for Human Rights, a Washington-based NGO that initially investigated the deaths in 2002 and subsequently filed the FOIA request with the Defense Department, the State Department, and the CIA:</p>
<p>The <a href="http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/documents-2008-12-11.html" type="external">FOIA response</a> reveals startling information that contradicts official US public statements. The Bush Administration stated in 2002 that only several dozen prisoners had died during transport to Sheberghan prison after surrendering to General Dostum and to US Special Forces. The FOIA response, however, contains a State Department intelligence assessment from November 2002 advising government officials that the remains of between 1,500 and 2,000 individuals were deposited at the site, and that approximately four Afghans who witnessed the death of the prisoners and/or the disposal of their remains had been detained, tortured, killed, and/or disappeared. Despite having this information, the US Government did not revise its public statements on the issue, nor did it launch a vigorous investigation into the circumstances surrounding these alleged crimes.</p>
<p>According PHR chief Frank Donaghue, “removing evidence of an alleged mass atrocity is itself a war crime and must be investigated.” What about concealing knowledge that a war crime has taken place?</p>
<p /> | UN to Assist in Preserving Mass Graves in Afghanistan | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2008/12/un-assist-preserving-mass-graves-afghanistan/ | 2008-12-15 | 4left
| UN to Assist in Preserving Mass Graves in Afghanistan
<p />
<p>The UN <a href="http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=81954" type="external">pledged today</a> to preserve Dasht-e-Leili, a mass grave site in northern Afghanistan, which was recently excavated and emptied of bodies, allegedly by Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. Dostum is believed to have removed the corpses out of fear that shifts in Afghan leadership might open him to charges of war crimes. The story was <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/57649.html" type="external">first reported by McClatchy</a>.</p>
<p>Norah Niland, a spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters that the UN “remains ready to assist all Afghan stakeholders, including victim groups, to take immediate and concerted action to preserve grave sites.”</p>
<p>The move comes a little late, as the remains have already been excavated. The site was thought to contain the bodies of up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners captured by the Northern Alliance after the siege of Kunduz in late 2001. News reports at the time indicated that a small number of prisoners had suffocated by accident after being left in shipping containers. The truth, based on recent FOIA release from the US government, indicates that the deaths were not accidental and were far more numerous than previously thought.</p>
<p>From Physicians for Human Rights, a Washington-based NGO that initially investigated the deaths in 2002 and subsequently filed the FOIA request with the Defense Department, the State Department, and the CIA:</p>
<p>The <a href="http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/documents-2008-12-11.html" type="external">FOIA response</a> reveals startling information that contradicts official US public statements. The Bush Administration stated in 2002 that only several dozen prisoners had died during transport to Sheberghan prison after surrendering to General Dostum and to US Special Forces. The FOIA response, however, contains a State Department intelligence assessment from November 2002 advising government officials that the remains of between 1,500 and 2,000 individuals were deposited at the site, and that approximately four Afghans who witnessed the death of the prisoners and/or the disposal of their remains had been detained, tortured, killed, and/or disappeared. Despite having this information, the US Government did not revise its public statements on the issue, nor did it launch a vigorous investigation into the circumstances surrounding these alleged crimes.</p>
<p>According PHR chief Frank Donaghue, “removing evidence of an alleged mass atrocity is itself a war crime and must be investigated.” What about concealing knowledge that a war crime has taken place?</p>
<p /> | 819 |
<p>Barack Obama’s swan song as Comedian-in-Chief—scheduled for Saturday night at the <a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/04/28/white-house-correspondents-dinner-obama-nails-it-again.html" type="external">White House Correspondents Association Dinner</a>—will doubtless display his natural comic timing and pointed wit that are rare for any politician, let alone the head of state of the planet’s only superpower.</p>
<p>Obama’s appearance at the eighth such dinner of his presidency—in which he’ll be expected to aim jokes at Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and possibly even himself, while showing an expertly-produced and amusing video in the basement ballroom of the Washington Hilton—will also represent the apotheosis of a peculiarly American phenomenon.</p>
<p>Over the past five decades—spanning from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to Obama—playing the clown has become part of the presidential job description even if it isn’t an explicit constitutional duty. So presidents show up in late winter and early spring for endless black-tie banquets—roiling with journalists, government officials, pop-culture celebrities and other self-impressed types—and try to make them laugh.</p>
<p>No other nation on earth imposes on its leaders the requirement to be funny—especially not in the ritualized, professionalized fashion of modern, media-savvy presidents who are compelled to amuse their inferiors at the Gridiron, Alfalfa Club, Radio and Television Correspondents and, finally, this particular dinner on Saturday night that caps official Washington’s annual festival of self-celebration.</p>
<p>“The American context is one in which we like to think that our rulers are not that separate from us. We don’t like the distance,” says Texas A&amp;M political science professor George C. Edwards, the editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly. “The idea that you can make fun of somebody and that they will be sitting there while you’re making fun of them, and then they’ll make fun of you, reflects the genuine ethos of American egalitarianism.”</p>
<p>National Journal White House beat reporter George Condon, who’s at work on a definitive history of the 102-year-old correspondents’ association—of which he was president during the first year of Clinton’s administration—agrees.</p>
<p>“It’s in our DNA—that we didn’t have kings and queens, we have regular people as our leaders, and that they come from us,” Condon says. “And to show that you have a sense of humor is just one way of showing that you’re of the people.”</p>
<p>The first president to attend the dinner was Calvin Coolidge in the late 1920s, Condon says. Silent Cal gave a long and droning address about the separation of powers—prompting the association to tell future presidents not to worry about a speech, just to enjoy the show, which eventually featured big bands, comedians, and even Dinah Shore.</p>
<p>The gregarious and fun-loving Franklin Delano Roosevelt immensely enjoyed the dinner, although he schmoozed with reporters instead of performed—and a couple of times gave gravely serious, nationally broadcast talks about the progress of World War II.</p>
<p>FDR attended his last dinner in 1945 shortly before his death. Harry Truman hated the dinner and seldom attended. Ditto Dwight Eisenhower.</p>
<p>JFK was the first president to deliver extended comic speeches, and Lyndon John enlisted Bob Hope and future Jaws novelist Peter Benchley to feed him material.</p>
<p>Richard Nixon had little use for the correspondents association and in 1973, as the Watergate scandal blossomed and he was forced to sit on the dais with journalists who were on his Enemies List, he opened with: “It is a privilege to be here at the White House correspondents dinner. I suppose I should say it is an executive privilege”—a stilted reference to the bogus legal theory the Nixon White House was claiming to avoid handing over incriminating material in the ongoing investigations.</p>
<p>Start and finish your day with the top stories from The Daily Beast.</p>
<p>A speedy, smart summary of all the news you need to know (and nothing you don't).</p>
<p>Gerald Ford enjoyed the camaraderie of the dinner both years of his brief presidency, but Jimmy Carter resented that, as he wrote in his diary, he was being forced to sing for his supper and endure face-time with ink-stained wretches who spent the rest of the year attacking and belittling him.</p>
<p>Reagan, a Hollywood denizen who in 1954 emceed a variety show in Las Vegas, was a member of the Friars Club, and later, as governor of California, appeared on several Dean Martin Roasts, was a natural performer who loved having an audience. He was self-deprecating, and he killed. George H.W. Bush, not so much.</p>
<p>Condon tells me Bush 41 was thrilled in 1989 when Garry Shandling agreed on the <a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2016/03/25/my-white-house-night-out-with-garry-shandling.html" type="external">spur of the moment</a> to help him with his routine. (Obama, meanwhile, will be followed to the microphone by Comedy Central host Larry Wilmore.)</p>
<p>Clinton, who recruited the services of the pre-senatorial Al Franken and Everybody Loves Raymond showrunner Phil Rosenthal, among other comedy pros, was the first president to show videos at the dinner. His final performance in 2000 was graced by a <a href="https://charlierose.com/videos/186" type="external">memorable short film</a> in which he was depicted as a lame-duck chief executive with barely anything to do while his vice president, Al Gore, ran for president and his wife campaigned for a New York Senate seat.</p>
<p>Clinton was shown washing the presidential limo, mowing the South Lawn, playing Battleship in the Situation Room with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, riding a bicycle with his friend Terry McAuliffe up and down the corridors of Old Executive Office Building, and running after Hillary’s car with the bagged lunch she had forgotten to take with her.</p>
<p>It was, for Clinton, an unusual instance of making fun of himself—and the crowd at the Hilton roared.</p>
<p>By contrast, it is difficult to imagine that this the sort of tradition would flourish in, say, France (whose quintessential leader, Charles De Gaulle, purposely kept his citizens at bay, believing distance equaled dignity), the People’s Republic of China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or, for that matter, Turkey—whose authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, regularly jails political jokesters and recently demanded that the government of Germany <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/11/turkey-germany-prosecute-comedian-jan-bohmermann-erdogan-poem" type="external">prosecute a German (!) comedian</a> who had the temerity to mock the Turkish strongman on a German (!!) television program. At last report, the German state prosecutor (!!!) was looking into the possibility.</p>
<p>In Britain, Question Time in the House of Commons provides no shortage of wisecracks lobbed back and forth between the prime minister and his or her loyal opposition, and sharp humor intrudes on the occasional after-dinner speech delivered during a party conference. But the joshing and jesting have yet to achieve the formal, ceremonial status that has become compulsory in the Colonies.</p>
<p>The former Tory Leader William Hague of the late 1990s—later David Cameron’s foreign secretary—was renowned for his ripostes during parliamentary debate, ostensibly a technique for eroding the popularity of the governing Labour Party and then-Prime Minister Tony Blair.</p>
<p>“William thinks that humour is a very valuable weapon,” an ally once <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/how-a-political-joke-is-now-having-the-last-laugh-hague-used-to-be-a-joke-738424.html" type="external">confided to The Independent</a>. “The important thing about political jokes is not that they are funny in themselves but that they tell a political truth.”</p>
<p>But while Hague’s fleet-footed japes were applauded in the media, he couldn’t avoid the fact that they never helped him fulfill his ambition to obtain the top job.</p>
<p>“Fat lot of good it did me,” Hague ruefully noted, according to British journalist Phil Dampier, co-author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/White-House-Wit-Wisdom-Wisecracks/dp/0957379285/" type="external">White House Wit, Wisdom and Wisecracks</a>, a compendium of presidential one-liners.</p>
<p>“Humor is a good way of getting your message across,” Dampier says, noting that London Mayor Boris Johnson, a former journalist who regularly appeared on the popular BBC show, Have I Got News for You?, parlayed his television persona as an affably bumbling buffoon into elected office. “And now he’s being talked about as a possible prime minister,” Dampier says.</p>
<p>On the other hand, when Queen Elizabeth’s adult children, led by Prince Edward, ventured into slapstick comedy in 1987—dressing up as giant vegetables and hurling fake hams at each other and various celebrities to raise money for charity in a television special titled It’s A Royal Knockout—the spectacle was widely considered “a PR disaster,” Dampier says, “and seen as a real low point, a cheapening of the monarchy.”</p>
<p>The queen, at least, had the good sense not to participate in a farce that would have been a laugh too far even for an American president.</p>
<p>Indeed, University of Minnesota political scientist Lawrence R. Jacobs warns that excessive or misguided joking by a president could ring hollow and harm the office.</p>
<p>“The idea of presidents who wield this enormous and increasingly unaccountable power ‘having a laugh’?” Jacobs says. “Not so funny.”</p>
<p>An especially piquant example occurred at the Radio TV Correspondents dinner in April 2004, when George W. <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/03/26/bush.wmd.jokes/" type="external">Bush did shtick</a> about the U.S. military not being able to locate Saddam Hussein’s apparently nonexistent weapons of mass destruction—the stated rationale for going to war in Iraq</p>
<p>“Those weapons of mass destruction have to got to be somewhere,” Bush joked while an antic slide show played, showing him searching under furniture in the Oval Office. “Nope, no weapons over there… maybe under here?”</p>
<p>The public outrage was immediate concerning Bush’s attempt to find humor in an ill-advised military adventure that had resulted in thousands of Americans and Iraqis dead and wounded.</p>
<p>“There are lines you cannot cross,” Clinton White House joke-writer Mark Katz, an <a href="/content/dailybeast/contributors/mark-katz.html" type="external">occasional contributor to The Daily Beast</a>, told CNN at the time. “With regard to going to war, sending American troops to war to find weapons of mass destruction, that’s a joke that’s playing out on the world stage—and is at our expense.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Jacobs, a regular at comedy clubs in Minneapolis and New York, claims that Obama’s standup routines tend to be pugnacious rather than hilarious.</p>
<p>“His humor has always struck me as painful in the sense that it was less the joshing around where we’re all letting our hair down here, and more about settling scores,” Jacobs says.</p>
<p>Jacobs, for instance, didn’t appreciate Obama’s famous and widely praised ( <a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2011/05/01/obama-seth-meyers-joke-about-trump-at-white-house-correspondents-dinner.html" type="external">including by this reporter</a>) evisceration of Donald Trump—who at the time, on May 1, 2011, was not the Republican presidential frontrunner but simply a reality show billionaire and rabid birther who’d been loudly questioning the legitimacy of the president’s Hawaiian birth certificate.</p>
<p>“Donald Trump is here tonight!” Obama announced to the 3,000-odd dinner-goers in the Hilton ballroom, including Donald and Melania at The Washington Post table. “I know that he’s taken some flak lately. But no one is happier, no one is prouder, to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter—like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”</p>
<p>Trump’s smile stiffened as Obama continued, “All kidding aside, obviously we know about your credentials and breadth of experience.” At this, ripples of laughter coursed through the crowd. “For example—seriously—in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice, at the steak house, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately you didn’t blame Lil John or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night.”</p>
<p>The Trumps fled the ballroom that night, and the next day, Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden. Judd Apatow later claimed credit for writing those Trump jokes for the president—one of a team of comedy professionals, including Daily Show writer Kevin Bleyer, who regularly have contributed to Obama’s standup routine.</p>
<p>“Trump had it coming to him,” Jacobs concedes, “but that’s the whole point: The president isn’t there to use humor to get even. That was just him decimating Trump. To me, that’s not humorous. That’s abuse.”</p>
<p>Standup comic <a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2015/03/07/the-most-ubiquitous-comedian-in-l-a.html" type="external">Wayne Federman</a>, Jimmy Fallon’s former head monologue writer, has a more generous assessment of President Obama’s comedy stylings.</p>
<p>“I think he’s right up there with Reagan and John Kennedy as far as being a president who can use humor to his advantage,” Federman says. “I just hope that, as usual, he’s funny, that he’s warm and reflective about his eight years in office.”</p>
<p>In a shout-out to his fellow professional, Federman adds: “And I’m rooting for Larry Wilmore to do a good job.”</p> | Why The President Has The Last Laugh At The White House Correspondents’ Dinner | true | https://thedailybeast.com/why-the-president-has-the-last-laugh-at-the-white-house-correspondents-dinner | 2018-10-07 | 4left
| Why The President Has The Last Laugh At The White House Correspondents’ Dinner
<p>Barack Obama’s swan song as Comedian-in-Chief—scheduled for Saturday night at the <a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/04/28/white-house-correspondents-dinner-obama-nails-it-again.html" type="external">White House Correspondents Association Dinner</a>—will doubtless display his natural comic timing and pointed wit that are rare for any politician, let alone the head of state of the planet’s only superpower.</p>
<p>Obama’s appearance at the eighth such dinner of his presidency—in which he’ll be expected to aim jokes at Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and possibly even himself, while showing an expertly-produced and amusing video in the basement ballroom of the Washington Hilton—will also represent the apotheosis of a peculiarly American phenomenon.</p>
<p>Over the past five decades—spanning from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to Obama—playing the clown has become part of the presidential job description even if it isn’t an explicit constitutional duty. So presidents show up in late winter and early spring for endless black-tie banquets—roiling with journalists, government officials, pop-culture celebrities and other self-impressed types—and try to make them laugh.</p>
<p>No other nation on earth imposes on its leaders the requirement to be funny—especially not in the ritualized, professionalized fashion of modern, media-savvy presidents who are compelled to amuse their inferiors at the Gridiron, Alfalfa Club, Radio and Television Correspondents and, finally, this particular dinner on Saturday night that caps official Washington’s annual festival of self-celebration.</p>
<p>“The American context is one in which we like to think that our rulers are not that separate from us. We don’t like the distance,” says Texas A&amp;M political science professor George C. Edwards, the editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly. “The idea that you can make fun of somebody and that they will be sitting there while you’re making fun of them, and then they’ll make fun of you, reflects the genuine ethos of American egalitarianism.”</p>
<p>National Journal White House beat reporter George Condon, who’s at work on a definitive history of the 102-year-old correspondents’ association—of which he was president during the first year of Clinton’s administration—agrees.</p>
<p>“It’s in our DNA—that we didn’t have kings and queens, we have regular people as our leaders, and that they come from us,” Condon says. “And to show that you have a sense of humor is just one way of showing that you’re of the people.”</p>
<p>The first president to attend the dinner was Calvin Coolidge in the late 1920s, Condon says. Silent Cal gave a long and droning address about the separation of powers—prompting the association to tell future presidents not to worry about a speech, just to enjoy the show, which eventually featured big bands, comedians, and even Dinah Shore.</p>
<p>The gregarious and fun-loving Franklin Delano Roosevelt immensely enjoyed the dinner, although he schmoozed with reporters instead of performed—and a couple of times gave gravely serious, nationally broadcast talks about the progress of World War II.</p>
<p>FDR attended his last dinner in 1945 shortly before his death. Harry Truman hated the dinner and seldom attended. Ditto Dwight Eisenhower.</p>
<p>JFK was the first president to deliver extended comic speeches, and Lyndon John enlisted Bob Hope and future Jaws novelist Peter Benchley to feed him material.</p>
<p>Richard Nixon had little use for the correspondents association and in 1973, as the Watergate scandal blossomed and he was forced to sit on the dais with journalists who were on his Enemies List, he opened with: “It is a privilege to be here at the White House correspondents dinner. I suppose I should say it is an executive privilege”—a stilted reference to the bogus legal theory the Nixon White House was claiming to avoid handing over incriminating material in the ongoing investigations.</p>
<p>Start and finish your day with the top stories from The Daily Beast.</p>
<p>A speedy, smart summary of all the news you need to know (and nothing you don't).</p>
<p>Gerald Ford enjoyed the camaraderie of the dinner both years of his brief presidency, but Jimmy Carter resented that, as he wrote in his diary, he was being forced to sing for his supper and endure face-time with ink-stained wretches who spent the rest of the year attacking and belittling him.</p>
<p>Reagan, a Hollywood denizen who in 1954 emceed a variety show in Las Vegas, was a member of the Friars Club, and later, as governor of California, appeared on several Dean Martin Roasts, was a natural performer who loved having an audience. He was self-deprecating, and he killed. George H.W. Bush, not so much.</p>
<p>Condon tells me Bush 41 was thrilled in 1989 when Garry Shandling agreed on the <a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2016/03/25/my-white-house-night-out-with-garry-shandling.html" type="external">spur of the moment</a> to help him with his routine. (Obama, meanwhile, will be followed to the microphone by Comedy Central host Larry Wilmore.)</p>
<p>Clinton, who recruited the services of the pre-senatorial Al Franken and Everybody Loves Raymond showrunner Phil Rosenthal, among other comedy pros, was the first president to show videos at the dinner. His final performance in 2000 was graced by a <a href="https://charlierose.com/videos/186" type="external">memorable short film</a> in which he was depicted as a lame-duck chief executive with barely anything to do while his vice president, Al Gore, ran for president and his wife campaigned for a New York Senate seat.</p>
<p>Clinton was shown washing the presidential limo, mowing the South Lawn, playing Battleship in the Situation Room with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, riding a bicycle with his friend Terry McAuliffe up and down the corridors of Old Executive Office Building, and running after Hillary’s car with the bagged lunch she had forgotten to take with her.</p>
<p>It was, for Clinton, an unusual instance of making fun of himself—and the crowd at the Hilton roared.</p>
<p>By contrast, it is difficult to imagine that this the sort of tradition would flourish in, say, France (whose quintessential leader, Charles De Gaulle, purposely kept his citizens at bay, believing distance equaled dignity), the People’s Republic of China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or, for that matter, Turkey—whose authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, regularly jails political jokesters and recently demanded that the government of Germany <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/11/turkey-germany-prosecute-comedian-jan-bohmermann-erdogan-poem" type="external">prosecute a German (!) comedian</a> who had the temerity to mock the Turkish strongman on a German (!!) television program. At last report, the German state prosecutor (!!!) was looking into the possibility.</p>
<p>In Britain, Question Time in the House of Commons provides no shortage of wisecracks lobbed back and forth between the prime minister and his or her loyal opposition, and sharp humor intrudes on the occasional after-dinner speech delivered during a party conference. But the joshing and jesting have yet to achieve the formal, ceremonial status that has become compulsory in the Colonies.</p>
<p>The former Tory Leader William Hague of the late 1990s—later David Cameron’s foreign secretary—was renowned for his ripostes during parliamentary debate, ostensibly a technique for eroding the popularity of the governing Labour Party and then-Prime Minister Tony Blair.</p>
<p>“William thinks that humour is a very valuable weapon,” an ally once <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/how-a-political-joke-is-now-having-the-last-laugh-hague-used-to-be-a-joke-738424.html" type="external">confided to The Independent</a>. “The important thing about political jokes is not that they are funny in themselves but that they tell a political truth.”</p>
<p>But while Hague’s fleet-footed japes were applauded in the media, he couldn’t avoid the fact that they never helped him fulfill his ambition to obtain the top job.</p>
<p>“Fat lot of good it did me,” Hague ruefully noted, according to British journalist Phil Dampier, co-author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/White-House-Wit-Wisdom-Wisecracks/dp/0957379285/" type="external">White House Wit, Wisdom and Wisecracks</a>, a compendium of presidential one-liners.</p>
<p>“Humor is a good way of getting your message across,” Dampier says, noting that London Mayor Boris Johnson, a former journalist who regularly appeared on the popular BBC show, Have I Got News for You?, parlayed his television persona as an affably bumbling buffoon into elected office. “And now he’s being talked about as a possible prime minister,” Dampier says.</p>
<p>On the other hand, when Queen Elizabeth’s adult children, led by Prince Edward, ventured into slapstick comedy in 1987—dressing up as giant vegetables and hurling fake hams at each other and various celebrities to raise money for charity in a television special titled It’s A Royal Knockout—the spectacle was widely considered “a PR disaster,” Dampier says, “and seen as a real low point, a cheapening of the monarchy.”</p>
<p>The queen, at least, had the good sense not to participate in a farce that would have been a laugh too far even for an American president.</p>
<p>Indeed, University of Minnesota political scientist Lawrence R. Jacobs warns that excessive or misguided joking by a president could ring hollow and harm the office.</p>
<p>“The idea of presidents who wield this enormous and increasingly unaccountable power ‘having a laugh’?” Jacobs says. “Not so funny.”</p>
<p>An especially piquant example occurred at the Radio TV Correspondents dinner in April 2004, when George W. <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/03/26/bush.wmd.jokes/" type="external">Bush did shtick</a> about the U.S. military not being able to locate Saddam Hussein’s apparently nonexistent weapons of mass destruction—the stated rationale for going to war in Iraq</p>
<p>“Those weapons of mass destruction have to got to be somewhere,” Bush joked while an antic slide show played, showing him searching under furniture in the Oval Office. “Nope, no weapons over there… maybe under here?”</p>
<p>The public outrage was immediate concerning Bush’s attempt to find humor in an ill-advised military adventure that had resulted in thousands of Americans and Iraqis dead and wounded.</p>
<p>“There are lines you cannot cross,” Clinton White House joke-writer Mark Katz, an <a href="/content/dailybeast/contributors/mark-katz.html" type="external">occasional contributor to The Daily Beast</a>, told CNN at the time. “With regard to going to war, sending American troops to war to find weapons of mass destruction, that’s a joke that’s playing out on the world stage—and is at our expense.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Jacobs, a regular at comedy clubs in Minneapolis and New York, claims that Obama’s standup routines tend to be pugnacious rather than hilarious.</p>
<p>“His humor has always struck me as painful in the sense that it was less the joshing around where we’re all letting our hair down here, and more about settling scores,” Jacobs says.</p>
<p>Jacobs, for instance, didn’t appreciate Obama’s famous and widely praised ( <a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2011/05/01/obama-seth-meyers-joke-about-trump-at-white-house-correspondents-dinner.html" type="external">including by this reporter</a>) evisceration of Donald Trump—who at the time, on May 1, 2011, was not the Republican presidential frontrunner but simply a reality show billionaire and rabid birther who’d been loudly questioning the legitimacy of the president’s Hawaiian birth certificate.</p>
<p>“Donald Trump is here tonight!” Obama announced to the 3,000-odd dinner-goers in the Hilton ballroom, including Donald and Melania at The Washington Post table. “I know that he’s taken some flak lately. But no one is happier, no one is prouder, to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter—like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”</p>
<p>Trump’s smile stiffened as Obama continued, “All kidding aside, obviously we know about your credentials and breadth of experience.” At this, ripples of laughter coursed through the crowd. “For example—seriously—in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice, at the steak house, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately you didn’t blame Lil John or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night.”</p>
<p>The Trumps fled the ballroom that night, and the next day, Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden. Judd Apatow later claimed credit for writing those Trump jokes for the president—one of a team of comedy professionals, including Daily Show writer Kevin Bleyer, who regularly have contributed to Obama’s standup routine.</p>
<p>“Trump had it coming to him,” Jacobs concedes, “but that’s the whole point: The president isn’t there to use humor to get even. That was just him decimating Trump. To me, that’s not humorous. That’s abuse.”</p>
<p>Standup comic <a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2015/03/07/the-most-ubiquitous-comedian-in-l-a.html" type="external">Wayne Federman</a>, Jimmy Fallon’s former head monologue writer, has a more generous assessment of President Obama’s comedy stylings.</p>
<p>“I think he’s right up there with Reagan and John Kennedy as far as being a president who can use humor to his advantage,” Federman says. “I just hope that, as usual, he’s funny, that he’s warm and reflective about his eight years in office.”</p>
<p>In a shout-out to his fellow professional, Federman adds: “And I’m rooting for Larry Wilmore to do a good job.”</p> | 820 |
<p>In a new ad released via Instagram, Donald Trump’s campaign showcases the voices of women accusing Bill Clinton of sexual assault.</p>
<p>Watch the ad below.</p>
<p />
<p>“I was very nervous,” says the first woman, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/td_13acts.htm" type="external">Monica Lewinsky</a>. The audio clip was taken from a surreptitiously recorded conversation the former White House intern had with Linda Tripp.</p>
<p>“No woman should be subjected to it. It was an assault,” says the second woman, Kathleen Willey, who <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/11/08/kathleen-willey-claims-endured-harassment-from-clintons.html" type="external">accused</a> Bill Clinton of groping her in the White House in 1993.</p>
<p>“He starts to, uh, unbutton my top, and I try to pull away from him,” is the third distressed voice, belonging to Juanita Broaddrick, who <a href="http://www.mrctv.org/videos/full-dateline-nbc-juanita-broaddrick-bill-clinton-raping-her" type="external">accused</a> Bill Clinton of raping her in 1997.</p>
<p>As a black and white image of Bill Clinton focuses in against a backdrop of the White House, Hillary Clinton’s laugh concludes the presentation with a slide asking: HERE WE GO AGAIN?</p>
<p>Follow Robert Kraychik on <a href="https://twitter.com/" type="external">Twitter</a>.</p> | WATCH: Trump Goes There Again In New Instagram Ad | true | https://dailywire.com/news/5950/watch-trump-goes-there-again-new-instagram-ad-robert-kraychik | 2016-05-23 | 0right
| WATCH: Trump Goes There Again In New Instagram Ad
<p>In a new ad released via Instagram, Donald Trump’s campaign showcases the voices of women accusing Bill Clinton of sexual assault.</p>
<p>Watch the ad below.</p>
<p />
<p>“I was very nervous,” says the first woman, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/td_13acts.htm" type="external">Monica Lewinsky</a>. The audio clip was taken from a surreptitiously recorded conversation the former White House intern had with Linda Tripp.</p>
<p>“No woman should be subjected to it. It was an assault,” says the second woman, Kathleen Willey, who <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/11/08/kathleen-willey-claims-endured-harassment-from-clintons.html" type="external">accused</a> Bill Clinton of groping her in the White House in 1993.</p>
<p>“He starts to, uh, unbutton my top, and I try to pull away from him,” is the third distressed voice, belonging to Juanita Broaddrick, who <a href="http://www.mrctv.org/videos/full-dateline-nbc-juanita-broaddrick-bill-clinton-raping-her" type="external">accused</a> Bill Clinton of raping her in 1997.</p>
<p>As a black and white image of Bill Clinton focuses in against a backdrop of the White House, Hillary Clinton’s laugh concludes the presentation with a slide asking: HERE WE GO AGAIN?</p>
<p>Follow Robert Kraychik on <a href="https://twitter.com/" type="external">Twitter</a>.</p> | 821 |
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<p>Designing contracts is a tricky business. For their groundbreaking work on how to make contracts fairer and more effective, Oliver Hart of Harvard University and Bengt Holmstrom of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won the 2016 Nobel prize for economics Monday. They will share the 8 million kronor ($930,000) award for their contributions to contract theory.</p>
<p>For decades, the two men have studied practical problems involving the countless kinds of contracts that underlie modern commerce:</p>
<p>How should companies pay their executives? What types of tasks should government agencies outsource to private contractors? How best to write an auto insurance policy to protect drivers from financial loss without lulling them into carelessness?</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Pay packages, Holmstrom’s work suggests, are best tailored to avoid either punishing or rewarding CEOs for happenings beyond their control.</p>
<p>“You don’t want to reward the CEO because the S&amp;P 500 (stock index) has gone up 20 percent,” said Patrick Bolton of Columbia University Business School, who studied under Hart and has written a textbook on the economics of contracts. “You want to reward the CEO when his company outperforms the S&amp;P.”</p>
<p>Likewise, companies fare best when they establish pay packages that incentivize executives to prioritize the long term as much as the short term, to avoid focusing too much on quarterly profit expectations.</p>
<p>“These kinds of insights into how we should design contracts are very important because we don’t want to give the wrong incentives to people,” said Tomas Sjostrom, a member of the Nobel committee. “We don’t want to reward them for things that they were not responsible for. We want to reward the right thing.”</p>
<p>Hart, 68, is a London-born U.S. citizen who has taught at Harvard since 1993. Holmstrom, 67, is an academic from Finland who formerly served on the board of the country’s mobile phone company Nokia. Economists who have long known the two men and their work offered warm praise Monday.</p>
<p>“This is the Nobel Prize in economics at its best,” said George Akerlof of Georgetown University, who won the prize in 2001. “The character of both Bengt and Oliver shines through in their work and their character: They are true intellectuals and truly great people.”</p>
<p>At a news conference at MIT, Holmstrom declined to say whether he thought CEO pay — a hotly contentious issue in the United States and elsewhere — had become excessive.</p>
<p>“It is somewhat demand and supply working its magic,” he said.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>But he said companies can give executives the wrong incentives, as the energy firm Enron did, when it allowed insiders to unload their stock options as the company fell into a death spiral.</p>
<p>“The problem wasn’t options,” Holmstrom said. “The problem was the way people could sell out.”</p>
<p>The Internal Revenue Service used Hart as an expert witness in cases involving Black and Decker and Wells Fargo. At issue was whether some of the companies’ transactions had had a legitimate corporate purpose or had been designed just to reduce their tax bills.</p>
<p>Robert Gibbons at MIT’s Sloan School of Management notes that the term “contract theory” might make Holmstrom and Hart’s work sound narrower than it is. But, Gibbons explained, their research goes well beyond legally binding contracts. They have analyzed the practical arrangements worked out between many disparate players — partners within a law firm, say, or companies and their suppliers or government agencies and private contractors.</p>
<p>Gibbons says Holmstrom and Hart’s work is just now beginning to have a practical effect as it evolves from academic research to management training to real workplaces.</p>
<p>“The real-world stuff is coming,” he said. “You’re starting to see it.”</p>
<p>In his writing, Hart has expressed concern about private prisons: Would profit-seeking contractors overemphasize cost-cutting over maintaining quality?</p>
<p>His concerns proved perceptive: After discovering that private prisons were marred by more safety and security problems than government-run ones were, the Justice Department in August ordered the Bureau of Prisons to reduce and eventually end the use of private prisons.</p>
<p>The economics prize is not an original Nobel Prize. Formally called the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, it was added to the others in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank.</p>
<p>The Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize were announced last week. This year’s Nobel announcements will end Thursday with the literature award. The laureates will collect the awards on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.</p>
<p>At Harvard, Hart said it “means a lot” to share the prize with Holmstrom.</p>
<p>“I’m glad I won it with him,” Hart said. “It’s going to be fun to celebrate in Sweden with him.”</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Wiseman reported from Washington, Ritter from Stockholm. Associated Press writers Keith Moore in Stockholm, Mark Pratt in Boston and Philip Marcelo in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also contributed to this report.</p> | For showing how contracts work best, 2 economists win Nobel | false | https://abqjournal.com/863966/hart-holmstrom-share-economics-nobel-for-contract-theory.html | 2016-10-10 | 2least
| For showing how contracts work best, 2 economists win Nobel
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<p />
<p>Designing contracts is a tricky business. For their groundbreaking work on how to make contracts fairer and more effective, Oliver Hart of Harvard University and Bengt Holmstrom of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won the 2016 Nobel prize for economics Monday. They will share the 8 million kronor ($930,000) award for their contributions to contract theory.</p>
<p>For decades, the two men have studied practical problems involving the countless kinds of contracts that underlie modern commerce:</p>
<p>How should companies pay their executives? What types of tasks should government agencies outsource to private contractors? How best to write an auto insurance policy to protect drivers from financial loss without lulling them into carelessness?</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Pay packages, Holmstrom’s work suggests, are best tailored to avoid either punishing or rewarding CEOs for happenings beyond their control.</p>
<p>“You don’t want to reward the CEO because the S&amp;P 500 (stock index) has gone up 20 percent,” said Patrick Bolton of Columbia University Business School, who studied under Hart and has written a textbook on the economics of contracts. “You want to reward the CEO when his company outperforms the S&amp;P.”</p>
<p>Likewise, companies fare best when they establish pay packages that incentivize executives to prioritize the long term as much as the short term, to avoid focusing too much on quarterly profit expectations.</p>
<p>“These kinds of insights into how we should design contracts are very important because we don’t want to give the wrong incentives to people,” said Tomas Sjostrom, a member of the Nobel committee. “We don’t want to reward them for things that they were not responsible for. We want to reward the right thing.”</p>
<p>Hart, 68, is a London-born U.S. citizen who has taught at Harvard since 1993. Holmstrom, 67, is an academic from Finland who formerly served on the board of the country’s mobile phone company Nokia. Economists who have long known the two men and their work offered warm praise Monday.</p>
<p>“This is the Nobel Prize in economics at its best,” said George Akerlof of Georgetown University, who won the prize in 2001. “The character of both Bengt and Oliver shines through in their work and their character: They are true intellectuals and truly great people.”</p>
<p>At a news conference at MIT, Holmstrom declined to say whether he thought CEO pay — a hotly contentious issue in the United States and elsewhere — had become excessive.</p>
<p>“It is somewhat demand and supply working its magic,” he said.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>But he said companies can give executives the wrong incentives, as the energy firm Enron did, when it allowed insiders to unload their stock options as the company fell into a death spiral.</p>
<p>“The problem wasn’t options,” Holmstrom said. “The problem was the way people could sell out.”</p>
<p>The Internal Revenue Service used Hart as an expert witness in cases involving Black and Decker and Wells Fargo. At issue was whether some of the companies’ transactions had had a legitimate corporate purpose or had been designed just to reduce their tax bills.</p>
<p>Robert Gibbons at MIT’s Sloan School of Management notes that the term “contract theory” might make Holmstrom and Hart’s work sound narrower than it is. But, Gibbons explained, their research goes well beyond legally binding contracts. They have analyzed the practical arrangements worked out between many disparate players — partners within a law firm, say, or companies and their suppliers or government agencies and private contractors.</p>
<p>Gibbons says Holmstrom and Hart’s work is just now beginning to have a practical effect as it evolves from academic research to management training to real workplaces.</p>
<p>“The real-world stuff is coming,” he said. “You’re starting to see it.”</p>
<p>In his writing, Hart has expressed concern about private prisons: Would profit-seeking contractors overemphasize cost-cutting over maintaining quality?</p>
<p>His concerns proved perceptive: After discovering that private prisons were marred by more safety and security problems than government-run ones were, the Justice Department in August ordered the Bureau of Prisons to reduce and eventually end the use of private prisons.</p>
<p>The economics prize is not an original Nobel Prize. Formally called the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, it was added to the others in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank.</p>
<p>The Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize were announced last week. This year’s Nobel announcements will end Thursday with the literature award. The laureates will collect the awards on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.</p>
<p>At Harvard, Hart said it “means a lot” to share the prize with Holmstrom.</p>
<p>“I’m glad I won it with him,” Hart said. “It’s going to be fun to celebrate in Sweden with him.”</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Wiseman reported from Washington, Ritter from Stockholm. Associated Press writers Keith Moore in Stockholm, Mark Pratt in Boston and Philip Marcelo in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also contributed to this report.</p> | 822 |
<p />
<p>The United States and seven allies have held their first meeting to map out plans for joint operations of the new Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 stealth jet fighter in Europe in coming years.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The two-day gathering in Germany this week included officials from Denmark, Israel, Norway, the Netherlands, Italy, Turkey and Britain - all of which are buying the F-35, according to U.S. Air Force and Pentagon officials.</p>
<p>Several other European countries, including Belgium, Finland and Switzerland, are looking at possible orders of the aircraft at a time when tensions between NATO and Russia have increased.</p>
<p>Officials from Lockheed, the largest U.S. weapons maker, gave officials an update on the $379 billion program, the Pentagon's costliest arms project, as allies in Europe move toward increased use of the jets in coming years, they said.</p>
<p>"We've come together as a team of allies and partners to begin to set the conditions on ... operating the F-35 in the European theater," Major General Timothy Fay, deputy commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, said in a statement.</p>
<p>Italy, which participated in the meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, was the first nation to fly the new fighter outside the United States, and already has three jets in Italy.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Norway will have jets in country by the end of the year, Israel already has five on hand, and Britain will have jets flying in Europe next year, according to a Pentagon spokesman for the F-35 program. Several Dutch jets are participating in testing in the United States, he said.</p>
<p>Turkey's first aircraft is still being built, and Denmark last year decided to buy 27 jets in coming years.</p>
<p>Air Force General Tod Wolters, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, said the F-35 was a "force multiplier" and "game changer for missile defense".</p>
<p>Wolters urged military leaders to codify common tactics, techniques and procedures to prepare for joint use of the aircraft in Europe, which will mark the first time that U.S. allies are flying stealth aircraft.</p>
<p>Officials will meet again in October to address issues such as operations, maintenance, logistics and intelligence.</p>
<p>(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; editing by Mark Heinrich)</p> | US, 7 allies map joint F-35 jet operations in Europe | true | http://foxbusiness.com/politics/2017/07/21/us-7-allies-map-joint-f-35-jet-operations-in-europe.html | 2017-07-21 | 0right
| US, 7 allies map joint F-35 jet operations in Europe
<p />
<p>The United States and seven allies have held their first meeting to map out plans for joint operations of the new Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 stealth jet fighter in Europe in coming years.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The two-day gathering in Germany this week included officials from Denmark, Israel, Norway, the Netherlands, Italy, Turkey and Britain - all of which are buying the F-35, according to U.S. Air Force and Pentagon officials.</p>
<p>Several other European countries, including Belgium, Finland and Switzerland, are looking at possible orders of the aircraft at a time when tensions between NATO and Russia have increased.</p>
<p>Officials from Lockheed, the largest U.S. weapons maker, gave officials an update on the $379 billion program, the Pentagon's costliest arms project, as allies in Europe move toward increased use of the jets in coming years, they said.</p>
<p>"We've come together as a team of allies and partners to begin to set the conditions on ... operating the F-35 in the European theater," Major General Timothy Fay, deputy commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, said in a statement.</p>
<p>Italy, which participated in the meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, was the first nation to fly the new fighter outside the United States, and already has three jets in Italy.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Norway will have jets in country by the end of the year, Israel already has five on hand, and Britain will have jets flying in Europe next year, according to a Pentagon spokesman for the F-35 program. Several Dutch jets are participating in testing in the United States, he said.</p>
<p>Turkey's first aircraft is still being built, and Denmark last year decided to buy 27 jets in coming years.</p>
<p>Air Force General Tod Wolters, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, said the F-35 was a "force multiplier" and "game changer for missile defense".</p>
<p>Wolters urged military leaders to codify common tactics, techniques and procedures to prepare for joint use of the aircraft in Europe, which will mark the first time that U.S. allies are flying stealth aircraft.</p>
<p>Officials will meet again in October to address issues such as operations, maintenance, logistics and intelligence.</p>
<p>(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; editing by Mark Heinrich)</p> | 823 |
<p>While Mastercard's stock price has soared this year, shares actually fell the day after Mastercard Inc (NYSE: MA) reported its second quarter earnings. Long-term investors know to concentrate on business fundamentals, though, and when viewed in that light, Mastercard's numbers showed strong growth. The company's fourth-quarter revenue grew to $3.05 billion, up 14% year over year, and non-GAAP EPS rose to $1.10, a 16% year over year increase.</p>
<p>Two other&#160;important metrics, gross dollar volume and switched transactions, also showed healthy growth. The gross dollar volume grew to $1.3 trillion, a 9% increase (once adjusted for EU regulatory changes), and switched transactions came in at 16 billion, a 17% year-over-year increase.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Mastercard had more good news to share besides its consistent growth in the company's most important metrics; the company also shared that it had won some important new deals as well. Every quarter, credit card rivals like Mastercard and Visa Inc (NYSE: V) share news of new deals struck and others renewed but, more important for Mastercard investors might be the reasons why this quarter's deals were made.</p>
<p>In the conference call's (courtesy of&#160; <a href="http://marketintelligence.spglobal.com/" type="external">S&amp;P Global Market Intelligence</a>)opening remarks, Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga announced some of the company's new co-brand deals and bank portfolio renewals:</p>
<p>The last sentence is key: According to Banga, Mastercard didn't win these deals on price, but on its differentiating services and solutions. Some of these deals are nothing to sneeze at either: For instance, Kroger operated 3,885 retail locations and saw more than $115 billion in sales in 2016.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Over the past two years, Mastercard has internally developed and acquired several services that it has been able to bundle and sell to card-issuers and merchant partners. These products generally enhance security practices and remove friction points from the payment process. These services include diverse offerings from Mastercard's <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/05/mastercards-quest-for-the-holy-grail-of-payments.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">"Selfie Pay" program</a>, which requires users who opt in to the program to take a picture of themselves to authenticate online purchases, to its acquisition of <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/04/10/mastercard-inc-to-acquire-nudata-security-what-inv.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">NuData Security</a>, which uses passive biometrics to determine if purchases are fraudulent.</p>
<p>These services and products have helped boost Mastercard's revenue growth over the past several years. Unceremoniously categorized together under what Mastercard calls " <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/12/26/mastercards-recipe-for-extra-juice.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Other Revenues</a>", this revenue segment grew to $694 million this quarter, an 18% increase year over year. Besides security products, the revenue category also includes consulting and research, loyalty and reward program management, and data analytics.</p>
<p>What makes this quarter different, however, is that now there is evidence that this suite of products and services is not only giving revenue growth a shot in the arm, but also helping Mastercard secure new deals. These services can be extremely valuable to merchants and card issuers alike, as many of them fall far outside their circle of competence. As CFO Martina Hund-Mejean said during the conference call, "a lot of the banks ... have been grappling with a lot of these issues" but because Mastercard has " <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/13/mastercards-mission-to-become-a-full-service-payme.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">a fantastic digital suite of products</a>" the company has been able to "call out some wins" the past two quarters.</p>
<p>Mastercard has shown a sustained ability to develop and acquire solutions that enhance its core payment network capabilities. These offerings so appeal to its core banking and retail clients that, over the past several quarters, Mastercard has been able to charge a premium for its services. While we have seen firsthand how this drives the company's revenue growth over the past several quarters, the fact that it is now helping Mastercard secure new deals should encourage shareholders.</p>
<p>Mastercard has been a winner for investors since first going public, rising an amazing 2,680% since its IPO in 2006. Recent investors have nothing to complain about either as its stock price has risen more than 33% over the past year alone. Despite the stock's tepid response since earnings were released, if this quarter's results are any indication, I do not believe that Mastercard is done providing market-beating returns for investors.</p>
<p>10 stocks we like better than MastercardWhen 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=d4bad352-a7f5-4e1a-a6b9-00af4cdb5c8d&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">10 best stocks</a> for investors to buy right now... and Mastercard 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=d4bad352-a7f5-4e1a-a6b9-00af4cdb5c8d&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Click here</a> to learn about these picks!</p>
<p>*Stock Advisor returns as of August 1, 2017</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/CMFCochrane/info.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Matthew Cochrane</a> owns shares of Mastercard. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Mastercard and Visa. 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=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy</a>.</p> | Priceless: Mastercard Winning Deals With Its Differentiating Services | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/08/07/priceless-mastercard-winning-deals-with-its-differentiating-services.html | 2017-08-07 | 0right
| Priceless: Mastercard Winning Deals With Its Differentiating Services
<p>While Mastercard's stock price has soared this year, shares actually fell the day after Mastercard Inc (NYSE: MA) reported its second quarter earnings. Long-term investors know to concentrate on business fundamentals, though, and when viewed in that light, Mastercard's numbers showed strong growth. The company's fourth-quarter revenue grew to $3.05 billion, up 14% year over year, and non-GAAP EPS rose to $1.10, a 16% year over year increase.</p>
<p>Two other&#160;important metrics, gross dollar volume and switched transactions, also showed healthy growth. The gross dollar volume grew to $1.3 trillion, a 9% increase (once adjusted for EU regulatory changes), and switched transactions came in at 16 billion, a 17% year-over-year increase.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Mastercard had more good news to share besides its consistent growth in the company's most important metrics; the company also shared that it had won some important new deals as well. Every quarter, credit card rivals like Mastercard and Visa Inc (NYSE: V) share news of new deals struck and others renewed but, more important for Mastercard investors might be the reasons why this quarter's deals were made.</p>
<p>In the conference call's (courtesy of&#160; <a href="http://marketintelligence.spglobal.com/" type="external">S&amp;P Global Market Intelligence</a>)opening remarks, Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga announced some of the company's new co-brand deals and bank portfolio renewals:</p>
<p>The last sentence is key: According to Banga, Mastercard didn't win these deals on price, but on its differentiating services and solutions. Some of these deals are nothing to sneeze at either: For instance, Kroger operated 3,885 retail locations and saw more than $115 billion in sales in 2016.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Over the past two years, Mastercard has internally developed and acquired several services that it has been able to bundle and sell to card-issuers and merchant partners. These products generally enhance security practices and remove friction points from the payment process. These services include diverse offerings from Mastercard's <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/05/mastercards-quest-for-the-holy-grail-of-payments.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">"Selfie Pay" program</a>, which requires users who opt in to the program to take a picture of themselves to authenticate online purchases, to its acquisition of <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/04/10/mastercard-inc-to-acquire-nudata-security-what-inv.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">NuData Security</a>, which uses passive biometrics to determine if purchases are fraudulent.</p>
<p>These services and products have helped boost Mastercard's revenue growth over the past several years. Unceremoniously categorized together under what Mastercard calls " <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/12/26/mastercards-recipe-for-extra-juice.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Other Revenues</a>", this revenue segment grew to $694 million this quarter, an 18% increase year over year. Besides security products, the revenue category also includes consulting and research, loyalty and reward program management, and data analytics.</p>
<p>What makes this quarter different, however, is that now there is evidence that this suite of products and services is not only giving revenue growth a shot in the arm, but also helping Mastercard secure new deals. These services can be extremely valuable to merchants and card issuers alike, as many of them fall far outside their circle of competence. As CFO Martina Hund-Mejean said during the conference call, "a lot of the banks ... have been grappling with a lot of these issues" but because Mastercard has " <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/13/mastercards-mission-to-become-a-full-service-payme.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">a fantastic digital suite of products</a>" the company has been able to "call out some wins" the past two quarters.</p>
<p>Mastercard has shown a sustained ability to develop and acquire solutions that enhance its core payment network capabilities. These offerings so appeal to its core banking and retail clients that, over the past several quarters, Mastercard has been able to charge a premium for its services. While we have seen firsthand how this drives the company's revenue growth over the past several quarters, the fact that it is now helping Mastercard secure new deals should encourage shareholders.</p>
<p>Mastercard has been a winner for investors since first going public, rising an amazing 2,680% since its IPO in 2006. Recent investors have nothing to complain about either as its stock price has risen more than 33% over the past year alone. Despite the stock's tepid response since earnings were released, if this quarter's results are any indication, I do not believe that Mastercard is done providing market-beating returns for investors.</p>
<p>10 stocks we like better than MastercardWhen 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=d4bad352-a7f5-4e1a-a6b9-00af4cdb5c8d&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">10 best stocks</a> for investors to buy right now... and Mastercard wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.</p>
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<p>*Stock Advisor returns as of August 1, 2017</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/CMFCochrane/info.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Matthew Cochrane</a> owns shares of Mastercard. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Mastercard and Visa. 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=61f09908-771f-11e7-82dd-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy</a>.</p> | 824 |
<p />
<p>Anheuser-Busch&#160;InBev said Thursday that fourth-quarter net profit was pressured by falling emerging market currencies but that it remains on track to take over rival SABMiller this year.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The Belgium-based brewer reported net profit of $2.29 billion for the quarter, down from $2.53 billion a year earlier. Revenue slipped to $10.72 billion over the period from $12 billion, missing analysts' forecasts of $11.11 billion.</p>
<p>It proposed a final dividend of EUR2 a share ($2.20) for 2015, as it did the previous year, in addition to an interim dividend of EUR1.60 a share paid in November.</p>
<p>As in the previous quarter, the company said the weaker Brazilian real and the Mexican peso continued to weigh on earnings.</p>
<p>AB&#160;InBev's shares opened 2.2% lower following the earnings announcement.</p>
<p>In the U.S., revenue fell 1% in the quarter to $3.2 billion. The brewer said brand market share in the U.S. for Bud Light, one of the company's most important brands, shrunk by about 40 basis points last year. But the company said it expected the U.S.'s top-selling beer to benefit this year from a fresh visual brand identity and from a continuing campaign that it unveiled at this year's Super Bowl.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>The beer company said it still aims to close its $108 billion acquisition of beer rival SABMiller in the second half of the year--a combination that would create the world's largest brewing company.</p>
<p>"Integration planning is well under way but our focus is on getting the necessary regulatory clearances so we can close the transaction in the second-half of the year," Chief Financial Officer Felipe Dutra told reporters on Thursday.</p>
<p>AB&#160;InBev&#160;has already lined up buyers for some of the SABMiller's assets in a bid to win regulatory approval for the merger in the U.S. and Europe.</p>
<p>Earlier in February, AB&#160;InBev&#160;said it had an offer from Japan's Asahi Group Holdings Ltd. to buy SABMiller's European brands for about $2.9 billion in cash. The sale would include brands such as Peroni, Grolsch, the British craft brewer Meantime and Miller Brands U.K.</p>
<p>In the U.S. last November, AB&#160;InBev&#160;sold SABMiller's 58% stake in the MillerCoors joint venture to Molson Coors Brewing Co.--which holds the remaining stake--and the Miller portfolio outside the U.S. for $12 billion. The sale, contingent on the completion of the AB&#160;InBev-SABMiller deal, would make Molson the number two brewer in the U.S., after AB&#160;InBev.</p>
<p>Mr. Dutra said the company was making progress toward gaining regulatory clearance for the deal on all fronts, including China.</p>
<p>In its next move, AB&#160;InBev&#160;will likely sell SABMiller's stake in the China beer business CR Snow back to the China Resources Enterprise Ltd., which owns 51% of the joint venture.</p>
<p>The company said it expects revenue in 2016 to "grow organically ahead of inflation" across the world, partly as a result of management initiatives.</p>
<p>Write to Natalia Drozdiak at [email protected]</p> | AB InBev Profit Dented by Falling Emerging Market Currencies | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/02/25/ab-inbev-profit-dented-by-falling-emerging-market-currencies.html | 2016-07-06 | 0right
| AB InBev Profit Dented by Falling Emerging Market Currencies
<p />
<p>Anheuser-Busch&#160;InBev said Thursday that fourth-quarter net profit was pressured by falling emerging market currencies but that it remains on track to take over rival SABMiller this year.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The Belgium-based brewer reported net profit of $2.29 billion for the quarter, down from $2.53 billion a year earlier. Revenue slipped to $10.72 billion over the period from $12 billion, missing analysts' forecasts of $11.11 billion.</p>
<p>It proposed a final dividend of EUR2 a share ($2.20) for 2015, as it did the previous year, in addition to an interim dividend of EUR1.60 a share paid in November.</p>
<p>As in the previous quarter, the company said the weaker Brazilian real and the Mexican peso continued to weigh on earnings.</p>
<p>AB&#160;InBev's shares opened 2.2% lower following the earnings announcement.</p>
<p>In the U.S., revenue fell 1% in the quarter to $3.2 billion. The brewer said brand market share in the U.S. for Bud Light, one of the company's most important brands, shrunk by about 40 basis points last year. But the company said it expected the U.S.'s top-selling beer to benefit this year from a fresh visual brand identity and from a continuing campaign that it unveiled at this year's Super Bowl.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>The beer company said it still aims to close its $108 billion acquisition of beer rival SABMiller in the second half of the year--a combination that would create the world's largest brewing company.</p>
<p>"Integration planning is well under way but our focus is on getting the necessary regulatory clearances so we can close the transaction in the second-half of the year," Chief Financial Officer Felipe Dutra told reporters on Thursday.</p>
<p>AB&#160;InBev&#160;has already lined up buyers for some of the SABMiller's assets in a bid to win regulatory approval for the merger in the U.S. and Europe.</p>
<p>Earlier in February, AB&#160;InBev&#160;said it had an offer from Japan's Asahi Group Holdings Ltd. to buy SABMiller's European brands for about $2.9 billion in cash. The sale would include brands such as Peroni, Grolsch, the British craft brewer Meantime and Miller Brands U.K.</p>
<p>In the U.S. last November, AB&#160;InBev&#160;sold SABMiller's 58% stake in the MillerCoors joint venture to Molson Coors Brewing Co.--which holds the remaining stake--and the Miller portfolio outside the U.S. for $12 billion. The sale, contingent on the completion of the AB&#160;InBev-SABMiller deal, would make Molson the number two brewer in the U.S., after AB&#160;InBev.</p>
<p>Mr. Dutra said the company was making progress toward gaining regulatory clearance for the deal on all fronts, including China.</p>
<p>In its next move, AB&#160;InBev&#160;will likely sell SABMiller's stake in the China beer business CR Snow back to the China Resources Enterprise Ltd., which owns 51% of the joint venture.</p>
<p>The company said it expects revenue in 2016 to "grow organically ahead of inflation" across the world, partly as a result of management initiatives.</p>
<p>Write to Natalia Drozdiak at [email protected]</p> | 825 |
<p>The Machiavellian mind and the merchant mind are at one in their simple faith in the power of segmental division to rule all–in the dichotomy of power and morals and of money and morals.</p>
<p>Marshall McLuhan, 1962</p>
<p>Westerners, on their way to market, had been looking for a shortcut to the Silk Road, when by happenstance, they ran into a big nipple: The Americas. Knowingly or unknowingly, we live daily with Columbus’ conflict of what to do if confronted by a big nipple unexpectedly.</p>
<p>Columbus couldn’t wait to write the King and tell him about the New World that he had found; it wasn’t flat and it wasn’t a sphere. In his eyes, it was an erect juicy nipple pointed skyward toward God. For the untethered and bank-rolled, the Americas appeared as a Godly geographical go-ahead to suck in and on the garden at everybody else’s expense. After all, the God of the West had arranged all things in the time-space continuum and he liked big nipples pointed at him, so could Columbus.</p>
<p>The psychological unearthing of the New World in the form of a big juicy nipple was a glorious Gestalt that gave cohesion to unreconciled issues that had been painstakingly pared away from one another over centuries of Western religious and intellectual thought. For the explorer class, the Americas could be the horn of plenty, the sex horn, and the land were they could blow their own horns instead of having it blown for them by popes or kings, or pope-kings, or king-popes. But there were two problems that threatened the Nipples-Up from God: Puritans and Pagans.</p>
<p>So, over time in America, Columbus’ Gestalt has been successfully repurposed for the masses through the art of subliminal appeal and by the status quo acceptance that superior firepower is the same as diplomacy. Modern American culture is the push-pull combination of Columbus’ New World discovery, “mmm, juicy, sweet,” and the outsiders that squelched it, the Puritans. For the Puritans, who benefited none the less from Columbus’ savage and highly individuated conquest, their proclivities continue to be comprehensively about the power of sublimation: “There will be no ‘mmm, juicy, sweet’ –unless there is profit involved.”</p>
<p>So, how do Pagans threaten such developments? Because from time to time, their unwavering and patient proclamations hit air out beyond the reservations: “duh, ‘juicy, sweet’, that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you, now, please don’t kill us or convert us–again.”</p>
<p>Dr. Chomsky is right, in the beginning as in the present, the West arrives as a warrior-merchant. Presently, the warrior-merchants of the New Old World are mostly hardworking voyeurs who are not required to fight, one of the many benefits of purchasing power. And the nipples? Pixels.</p>
<p>LARAY POLK is an artist and activist who lives in Dallas, Texas. She can be contacted at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Columbus, the Horny Merchant | true | https://counterpunch.org/2006/08/15/columbus-the-horny-merchant/ | 2006-08-15 | 4left
| Columbus, the Horny Merchant
<p>The Machiavellian mind and the merchant mind are at one in their simple faith in the power of segmental division to rule all–in the dichotomy of power and morals and of money and morals.</p>
<p>Marshall McLuhan, 1962</p>
<p>Westerners, on their way to market, had been looking for a shortcut to the Silk Road, when by happenstance, they ran into a big nipple: The Americas. Knowingly or unknowingly, we live daily with Columbus’ conflict of what to do if confronted by a big nipple unexpectedly.</p>
<p>Columbus couldn’t wait to write the King and tell him about the New World that he had found; it wasn’t flat and it wasn’t a sphere. In his eyes, it was an erect juicy nipple pointed skyward toward God. For the untethered and bank-rolled, the Americas appeared as a Godly geographical go-ahead to suck in and on the garden at everybody else’s expense. After all, the God of the West had arranged all things in the time-space continuum and he liked big nipples pointed at him, so could Columbus.</p>
<p>The psychological unearthing of the New World in the form of a big juicy nipple was a glorious Gestalt that gave cohesion to unreconciled issues that had been painstakingly pared away from one another over centuries of Western religious and intellectual thought. For the explorer class, the Americas could be the horn of plenty, the sex horn, and the land were they could blow their own horns instead of having it blown for them by popes or kings, or pope-kings, or king-popes. But there were two problems that threatened the Nipples-Up from God: Puritans and Pagans.</p>
<p>So, over time in America, Columbus’ Gestalt has been successfully repurposed for the masses through the art of subliminal appeal and by the status quo acceptance that superior firepower is the same as diplomacy. Modern American culture is the push-pull combination of Columbus’ New World discovery, “mmm, juicy, sweet,” and the outsiders that squelched it, the Puritans. For the Puritans, who benefited none the less from Columbus’ savage and highly individuated conquest, their proclivities continue to be comprehensively about the power of sublimation: “There will be no ‘mmm, juicy, sweet’ –unless there is profit involved.”</p>
<p>So, how do Pagans threaten such developments? Because from time to time, their unwavering and patient proclamations hit air out beyond the reservations: “duh, ‘juicy, sweet’, that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you, now, please don’t kill us or convert us–again.”</p>
<p>Dr. Chomsky is right, in the beginning as in the present, the West arrives as a warrior-merchant. Presently, the warrior-merchants of the New Old World are mostly hardworking voyeurs who are not required to fight, one of the many benefits of purchasing power. And the nipples? Pixels.</p>
<p>LARAY POLK is an artist and activist who lives in Dallas, Texas. She can be contacted at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | 826 |
<p>Assorted leftists chanted "no more war" as Leon Panetta made his case for Hillary Clinton as a suitable commander in chief while deriding Donald Trump.</p>
<p>As Panetta claimed that Trump wants American soldiers to commit war crimes and utilize torture, the chanting began. He then claimed that Trump praised "dictators, from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin."</p>
<p>Convention operators then threw shade, literally, onto the agitators, described as supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT).</p>
<p>Hall darkens sections of protest <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DemsInPhilly?src=hash" type="external">#DemsInPhilly</a> as massive "USA!" chant spreads <a href="https://t.co/5nuBvWTCmr" type="external">pic.twitter.com/5nuBvWTCmr</a></p>
<p>The <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DNCinPHL?src=hash" type="external">#DNCinPHL</a> dimmed lights on Bernie supporters disrupting the speech. They just turned on their cell lights. <a href="https://t.co/udFIKOz1xR" type="external">pic.twitter.com/udFIKOz1xR</a></p>
<p>Bernie supporters disrupting Panetta. "No more war." Lots of them now. <a href="https://t.co/2d9us3kOqy" type="external">pic.twitter.com/2d9us3kOqy</a></p>
<p>Earlier in his address, Panetta credited Clinton with somehow contributing to the "tough decision" to liquidate Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Panetta neglected to mention that a special memo had been drafted in order to absolve President Barack Obama of any responsibility for possible failures had the operation gone awry.</p>
<p>Clinton regularly attempts to bolster her own national security credentials by taking credit, at least partially, for the killing of Bin Laden.</p>
<p>​</p>
<p>Follow Robert Kraychik on Tw <a href="https://twitter.com/kr3ch3k" type="external">https://twitter.com/kr3ch3k</a>itter.</p> | Leftists Chant 'No More War' As Panetta Says Clinton Is Tough On Terror | true | https://dailywire.com/news/7881/leftists-chant-no-more-war-panetta-says-clinton-robert-kraychik | 2016-07-27 | 0right
| Leftists Chant 'No More War' As Panetta Says Clinton Is Tough On Terror
<p>Assorted leftists chanted "no more war" as Leon Panetta made his case for Hillary Clinton as a suitable commander in chief while deriding Donald Trump.</p>
<p>As Panetta claimed that Trump wants American soldiers to commit war crimes and utilize torture, the chanting began. He then claimed that Trump praised "dictators, from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin."</p>
<p>Convention operators then threw shade, literally, onto the agitators, described as supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT).</p>
<p>Hall darkens sections of protest <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DemsInPhilly?src=hash" type="external">#DemsInPhilly</a> as massive "USA!" chant spreads <a href="https://t.co/5nuBvWTCmr" type="external">pic.twitter.com/5nuBvWTCmr</a></p>
<p>The <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DNCinPHL?src=hash" type="external">#DNCinPHL</a> dimmed lights on Bernie supporters disrupting the speech. They just turned on their cell lights. <a href="https://t.co/udFIKOz1xR" type="external">pic.twitter.com/udFIKOz1xR</a></p>
<p>Bernie supporters disrupting Panetta. "No more war." Lots of them now. <a href="https://t.co/2d9us3kOqy" type="external">pic.twitter.com/2d9us3kOqy</a></p>
<p>Earlier in his address, Panetta credited Clinton with somehow contributing to the "tough decision" to liquidate Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Panetta neglected to mention that a special memo had been drafted in order to absolve President Barack Obama of any responsibility for possible failures had the operation gone awry.</p>
<p>Clinton regularly attempts to bolster her own national security credentials by taking credit, at least partially, for the killing of Bin Laden.</p>
<p>​</p>
<p>Follow Robert Kraychik on Tw <a href="https://twitter.com/kr3ch3k" type="external">https://twitter.com/kr3ch3k</a>itter.</p> | 827 |
<p>Investing in real estate can be risky and complicated. Rather than invest directly in real estate by buying actual property, some investors instead opt to put money into REITs. REITs, or real estate investment trusts, are companies that own and operate income-producing real estate.</p>
<p>You can buy shares of an equity REIT or a mortgage REIT, though equity REITs tend to be more popular among investors. Equity REITs are real estate companies that purchase commercial properties and let them out in order to generate income. Equity REITs are a good choice for investors who want a piece of the commercial real estate action without actually having to go out and buy property.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>IMAGE SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES.</p>
<p>Purchasing shares of an equity REIT isn't so very different from buying shares of a publicly traded company's stock. Equity REITs acquire commercial properties that run the gamut from shopping centers to hotels to office complexes to apartments. The goal in acquiring these properties is to generate income by collecting rent from tenants and businesses who lease the space. Some equity REITs are diversified in that they own different types of properties, while others are more specialized. An equity REIT might, for example, focus solely on hotels, while another might focus solely on shopping malls.</p>
<p>Once they've covered the expenses associated with running their properties, equity REITs must pay at least 90% of the income they collect to their shareholders as dividends.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Mortgage REITs work similarly to equity REITs, but they invest in mortgages instead of physical properties. Equity REITs profit by generating rental income from the properties they operate, while mortgage REITs profit by selling mortgages and earning income from the interest on the mortgages they own. Like equity REITs, mortgage REITs are required to distribute at least 90% of their income to shareholders.</p>
<p>Both equity REITs and mortgage REITs may be listed on major stock exchanges, but they can also be traded privately. Of the two, equity REITs are far more common, accounting for roughly 90% of the REIT market.</p>
<p>One major benefit of investing in REITs is that they tend to offer higher dividend yields than other investments. REITs are requiredby the IRS to pay at least 90% of their taxable income to shareholders; they're not allowed to retain most of their profits to fuel their own growth. As such, their dividend payments tend to be high. Another benefit of investing in REITs is that they offer a degree of diversification. Those who buy REITs can add real estate to their portfolios without assuming the risk and workload of buying actual property.</p>
<p>Though REITs tend to offer attractive yields, there are some risks inherent in investing in them. Not all REITs trade on a public exchange, and those that don't are considered to be a fairly illiquid investment. Investors who buy shares of non-publicly traded REITs run the risk of being unable to sell off their shares quickly when they need money. Furthermore, it can be difficult to gauge the value of non-public REITs, as they don't generally provide per-share estimates until 18 months after their offerings close. Additionally, many non-public REITs come with hefty up-front fees. For these reasons, investors need to weigh all the pros and cons before investing in an equity REIT.</p>
<p>The $15,834 Social Security bonus most retirees completely overlook If you're like most Americans, you're a few years (or more) behind on your retirement savings. But a handful of little-known "Social Security secrets" could help ensure a boost in your retirement income. For example: one easy trick could pay you as much as $15,834 more... each year! Once you learn how to maximize your Social Security benefits, we think you could retire confidently with the peace of mind we're all after. <a href="http://www.fool.com/mms/mark/ecap-foolcom-social-security?aid=8727&amp;source=irreditxt0000002&amp;ftm_cam=ryr-ss-intro-report&amp;ftm_pit=3186&amp;ftm_veh=article_pitch&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Simply click here to discover how to learn more about these strategies. Opens a New Window.</a></p>
<p>This article is part of The Motley Fool's Knowledge Center, which was created based on the collected wisdom of a fantastic community of investors. We'd love to hear your questions, thoughts, and opinions on the Knowledge Center in general or this page in particular. Your input will help us help the world invest, better! Email us at <a href="http://mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected] Opens a New Window.</a>. Thanks -- and Fool on!</p>
<p>Try any of our Foolish newsletter services <a href="http://www.fool.com/shop/newsletters/index.aspx?source=isiedilnk018048" 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" 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" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | What Is an Equity REIT? | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/07/29/what-is-equity-reit.html | 2016-07-29 | 0right
| What Is an Equity REIT?
<p>Investing in real estate can be risky and complicated. Rather than invest directly in real estate by buying actual property, some investors instead opt to put money into REITs. REITs, or real estate investment trusts, are companies that own and operate income-producing real estate.</p>
<p>You can buy shares of an equity REIT or a mortgage REIT, though equity REITs tend to be more popular among investors. Equity REITs are real estate companies that purchase commercial properties and let them out in order to generate income. Equity REITs are a good choice for investors who want a piece of the commercial real estate action without actually having to go out and buy property.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>IMAGE SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES.</p>
<p>Purchasing shares of an equity REIT isn't so very different from buying shares of a publicly traded company's stock. Equity REITs acquire commercial properties that run the gamut from shopping centers to hotels to office complexes to apartments. The goal in acquiring these properties is to generate income by collecting rent from tenants and businesses who lease the space. Some equity REITs are diversified in that they own different types of properties, while others are more specialized. An equity REIT might, for example, focus solely on hotels, while another might focus solely on shopping malls.</p>
<p>Once they've covered the expenses associated with running their properties, equity REITs must pay at least 90% of the income they collect to their shareholders as dividends.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Mortgage REITs work similarly to equity REITs, but they invest in mortgages instead of physical properties. Equity REITs profit by generating rental income from the properties they operate, while mortgage REITs profit by selling mortgages and earning income from the interest on the mortgages they own. Like equity REITs, mortgage REITs are required to distribute at least 90% of their income to shareholders.</p>
<p>Both equity REITs and mortgage REITs may be listed on major stock exchanges, but they can also be traded privately. Of the two, equity REITs are far more common, accounting for roughly 90% of the REIT market.</p>
<p>One major benefit of investing in REITs is that they tend to offer higher dividend yields than other investments. REITs are requiredby the IRS to pay at least 90% of their taxable income to shareholders; they're not allowed to retain most of their profits to fuel their own growth. As such, their dividend payments tend to be high. Another benefit of investing in REITs is that they offer a degree of diversification. Those who buy REITs can add real estate to their portfolios without assuming the risk and workload of buying actual property.</p>
<p>Though REITs tend to offer attractive yields, there are some risks inherent in investing in them. Not all REITs trade on a public exchange, and those that don't are considered to be a fairly illiquid investment. Investors who buy shares of non-publicly traded REITs run the risk of being unable to sell off their shares quickly when they need money. Furthermore, it can be difficult to gauge the value of non-public REITs, as they don't generally provide per-share estimates until 18 months after their offerings close. Additionally, many non-public REITs come with hefty up-front fees. For these reasons, investors need to weigh all the pros and cons before investing in an equity REIT.</p>
<p>The $15,834 Social Security bonus most retirees completely overlook If you're like most Americans, you're a few years (or more) behind on your retirement savings. But a handful of little-known "Social Security secrets" could help ensure a boost in your retirement income. For example: one easy trick could pay you as much as $15,834 more... each year! Once you learn how to maximize your Social Security benefits, we think you could retire confidently with the peace of mind we're all after. <a href="http://www.fool.com/mms/mark/ecap-foolcom-social-security?aid=8727&amp;source=irreditxt0000002&amp;ftm_cam=ryr-ss-intro-report&amp;ftm_pit=3186&amp;ftm_veh=article_pitch&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Simply click here to discover how to learn more about these strategies. Opens a New Window.</a></p>
<p>This article is part of The Motley Fool's Knowledge Center, which was created based on the collected wisdom of a fantastic community of investors. We'd love to hear your questions, thoughts, and opinions on the Knowledge Center in general or this page in particular. Your input will help us help the world invest, better! Email us at <a href="http://mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected] Opens a New Window.</a>. Thanks -- and Fool on!</p>
<p>Try any of our Foolish newsletter services <a href="http://www.fool.com/shop/newsletters/index.aspx?source=isiedilnk018048" 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" 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" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | 828 |
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<p />
<p>The report showed 59 percent of those who selected a plan through the Health Exchange were new consumers — individuals who did not have a plan selection as of November this year. That would amount to more than 10,000 people. The remaining 41 percent were consumers who were re-enrolling in a plan offered through the Health Exchange marketplace.</p>
<p>The figures do not include people who were automatically re-enrolled in their current plans.</p>
<p>The open enrollment period for insurance available under the Affordable Care Act began on Nov. 15 and lasts until Feb. 15. Seventy-three percent of those in New Mexico who picked a plan during the first month of open enrollment qualified for financial assistance to lower their premiums, according to the report.</p>
<p>Nationwide, the report said, more than 4 million people signed up for the first time or re-enrolled in coverage for 2015 during the first month of open enrollment.</p>
<p>New Mexico launched its health exchange in October 2013 for the first open enrollment period, which lasted through the end of March this year. About 34,000 people statewide signed up during that first enrollment period.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>In mid-November, at the beginning of the latest open enrollment period, Health Exchange CEO Amy Dowd estimated there were still 160,000 New Mexicans not covered by an employer insurance plan, Medicaid or Medicare who were eligible to sign up through the exchange.</p>
<p>Individuals who sign up and make their first payment before Jan. 15 will receive coverage starting Feb. 1. Information about health coverage is available on the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange website <a href="http://www.bewellnm.com/" type="external">www.BeWellNM.com</a> or by calling the customer contact center at 1-855-99-NMHIX.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | More than 17,000 signed up for health insurance by mid-December | false | https://abqjournal.com/519062/more-than-17000-sign-up-for-health-insurance-by-mid-december.html | 2014-12-30 | 2least
| More than 17,000 signed up for health insurance by mid-December
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>The report showed 59 percent of those who selected a plan through the Health Exchange were new consumers — individuals who did not have a plan selection as of November this year. That would amount to more than 10,000 people. The remaining 41 percent were consumers who were re-enrolling in a plan offered through the Health Exchange marketplace.</p>
<p>The figures do not include people who were automatically re-enrolled in their current plans.</p>
<p>The open enrollment period for insurance available under the Affordable Care Act began on Nov. 15 and lasts until Feb. 15. Seventy-three percent of those in New Mexico who picked a plan during the first month of open enrollment qualified for financial assistance to lower their premiums, according to the report.</p>
<p>Nationwide, the report said, more than 4 million people signed up for the first time or re-enrolled in coverage for 2015 during the first month of open enrollment.</p>
<p>New Mexico launched its health exchange in October 2013 for the first open enrollment period, which lasted through the end of March this year. About 34,000 people statewide signed up during that first enrollment period.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>In mid-November, at the beginning of the latest open enrollment period, Health Exchange CEO Amy Dowd estimated there were still 160,000 New Mexicans not covered by an employer insurance plan, Medicaid or Medicare who were eligible to sign up through the exchange.</p>
<p>Individuals who sign up and make their first payment before Jan. 15 will receive coverage starting Feb. 1. Information about health coverage is available on the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange website <a href="http://www.bewellnm.com/" type="external">www.BeWellNM.com</a> or by calling the customer contact center at 1-855-99-NMHIX.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | 829 |
<p>Almost six years ago, President Putin proposed to Germany ‘the creation of a harmonious economic community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.’</p>
<p>This idea represented an immense trade emporium uniting Russia and the EU, or, in Putin’s words, “a unified continental market with a capacity worth trillions of dollars.”</p>
<p>In a nutshell: <a href="" type="internal">Eurasia integration</a>.</p>
<p>Washington panicked. The record shows how Putin’s vision – although extremely seductive to German industrialists – was eventually derailed by Washington’s controlled demolition of Ukraine.</p>
<p>Three years ago, in Kazakhstan and then Indonesia, President Xi Jinping expanded on Putin’s vision, proposing One Belt, One Road (OBOR), a.k.a. the New Silk Roads, enhancing the geoeconomic integration of Asia-Pacific via a vast network of highways, high-speed rail, pipelines, ports and fiber-optic cables.</p>
<p>In a nutshell: an even more ambitious version of Eurasia integration, benefiting two-thirds of the world population, economy and trade. The difference is that it now comes with immense financial muscle backing it up, via a Silk Road Fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the BRICS’s New Development Bank (NDB), and an all-out commercial offensive all across Eurasia, and the official entry of the yuan in the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights; that is, the christening of the yuan as a key currency worth holding by every single emerging market central bank.</p>
<p>At the recent G20 in Huangzhou, President Xi clearly demonstrated how OBOR is absolutely central to the Chinese vision of how globalization should proceed. Beijing is betting that the overwhelming majority of nations across Eurasia would rather invest in, and profit from, a “win-win” economic development project than be bogged down in a lose-lose strategic game between the US and China.</p>
<p>And that, for the Empire of Chaos, is absolute anathema. How to possibly accept that China is&#160; <a href="" type="internal">winning</a> the 21st century / New Great Game in Eurasia by building the New Silk Roads?</p>
<p>And don’t forget the Silk Road in Syria</p>
<p>Few in the West have noticed, as <a href="https://www.rt.com/business/357954-eastern-economic-forum-vladivostok/" type="external">reported</a>&#160;by RT, that the G20 was preceded by an Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. Essentially, that was yet another de facto celebration of Eurasia integration, featuring Russia, China, Japan and South Korea.</p>
<p>And that integration plank will soon merge with the Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union – which in itself is a sort of Russian New Silk Road.</p>
<p>All these roads lead to total connectivity. Take for instance cargo trains that are now regularly <a href="http://investkaluga.com/en/ploschadki/industrialnye-parki-2/industrialnyy-park-vorsino/" type="external">linking</a>Guangzhou, the key hub in southeast China, to the logistics center in&#160; Vorsino industrial park near Kaluga. The trip now takes just two weeks – saving no less than a full month if compared with shipping, and around 80 percent of the cost if compared with air cargo.</p>
<p>That’s yet another New Silk Road-style connection between China and Europe via Russia. Still another, vastly more ambitious, will be the high-speed rail expansion of the Transiberian; the Siberian Silk Road.</p>
<p>Then take the closer integration of China and Kazakhstan – which is also a member of the EEU. The duty-free Trans-Eurasia railway is already in effect, from Chongqing in Sichuan across Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Poland all the way to Duisburg in Germany. Beijing and Astana are developing a joint free trade zone at Horgos. And in parallel, a $135 million China-Mongolia Cross-Border Economic Cooperation Zone started to be built last month.</p>
<p>Kazakhstan is even flirting with the ambitious idea of a Eurasian Canal from the Caspian to the Black Sea and then further on to the Mediterranean. Sooner or later Chinese construction companies will come up with a feasibility study.</p>
<p>A virtually invisible Washington agenda in Syria – inbuilt in the Pentagon obsession to not allow any ceasefire to work, or to prevent the fall of its “moderate rebels” in Aleppo – is to break up yet another New Silk Road hub. China has been commercially connected to Syria since the original Silk Road, which snaked through Palmyra and Damascus. Before the Syrian “Arab Spring”, Syrian businessmen were a&#160; <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175935/tomgram%3A_pepe_escobar%2C_eurasian_integration_vs._the_empire_of_chaos/#more" type="external">vital presence</a> in Yiwu, south of Shanghai, the largest wholesale center for small-sized consumer goods in the world, where they would go to buy all sorts of products in bulk to resell in the Levant.</p>
<p>The “American lake”</p>
<p>Neocon/neoliberalcon Washington is totally paralyzed in terms of formulating a response – or at least a counter-proposal – to Eurasia integration. A few solid IQs at least may understand that China’s “threat” to the US is all about economic might. Take Washington’s deep hostility towards the China-driven&#160; <a href="http://euweb.aiib.org/html/aboutus/introduction/aiib/" type="external">AIIB</a> (Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank). Yet no amount of hardcore US lobbying prevented allies such as Germany, Britain, Australia and South Korea from joining in.</p>
<p>Then we had the mad dash to approve TPP – the China-excluding, NATO-on-trade arm of the pivot to Asia that was meant to be the cherry of the mostly flat Obama global economic policy cake. Yet the TPP as it stands is practically dead.</p>
<p>What the current geopolitical juncture spells out is the US Navy willing to go no holds barred to stop China from strategically dominating the Pacific, while TPP is deployed as a weapon to stop China dominating Asia-Pacific economically.</p>
<p>With the pivot to Asia configured as a tool to “deter Chinese aggression”, exceptionalists have graphically demonstrated how they are incapable of admitting the whole game is about post-ideological supply chain geopolitics. The US does not need to contain China; what it needs, badly, is key industrial, financial, commercial connection to crucial nodes across Asia to (re)build its economy.</p>
<p>Those were the days, in March 1949, when MacArthur could gloat, “the Pacific is now an Anglo-Saxon lake”. Even after the end of the Cold War the Pacific was a de facto American lake; the US violated Chinese naval and aerial space at will.</p>
<p>Now instead we have the US Army War College and the whole Think Tankland losing sleep over sophisticated Chinese missiles capable of denying US Navy access to the South China Sea. An American lake? No more.</p>
<p>The heart of the matter is that China has made an outstanding bet on infrastructure building – which translates into first-class connectivity to everyone – as the real global 21st century commons, way more important than “security”. After all a large part of global infrastructure still needs to be built. While China turbo-charges its role as the top global infrastructure exporter – from high-speed rail to low-cost telecom – the “indispensable” nation is stuck with a “pivoting”, perplexed, bloated military obsessed with containment.</p>
<p>Divide and rule those “hostile” rivals</p>
<p>Well, things haven’t changed much since Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski dreaming in the late 1990s of a Chinese fragmentation from within, all the way to Obama’s 2015 National Security Strategy, which is no more than futile rhetorical nostalgia about containing Russia, China and Iran.</p>
<p>Thus the basket of attached myths such as “freedom of navigation” – Washington’s euphemism for perennially controlling the sea lanes that constitute China’s supply chain – as well as an apotheosis of“China aggression” incessantly merging with “Russia aggression”;after all, the Eurasia integration-driven Beijing-Moscow strategic partnership must be severed at all costs.</p>
<p>Why? Because US global hegemony must always be perceived as an irremovable force of nature, like death and taxes (Apple in Ireland excluded).</p>
<p>Twenty-four years after the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guide, the same mindset prevails; “Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival…to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union and southwest Asia”.</p>
<p>Oops. Now even Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski is terrified. How to contain these bloody silky roads with Pentagon “existential threats” China and Russia right at the heart of the action? Divide and Rule – what else?</p>
<p>For a confused Brzezinski, the US&#160; <a href="" type="internal">should</a>&#160;“fashion a policy in which at least one of the two potentially threatening states becomes a partner in the quest for regional and then wider global stability, and thus in containing the least predictable but potentially the most likely rival to overreach. Currently, the more likely to overreach is Russia, but in the longer run it could be China.”</p>
<p>Have a pleasant nightmare.</p>
<p>This piece first appeared on <a href="https://www.rt.com/op-edge/361898-new-silk-roads-terrify/" type="external">RT</a>.</p> | Why the New Silk Roads terrify Washington | true | https://counterpunch.org/2016/10/10/why-the-new-silk-roads-terrify-washington/ | 2016-10-10 | 4left
| Why the New Silk Roads terrify Washington
<p>Almost six years ago, President Putin proposed to Germany ‘the creation of a harmonious economic community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.’</p>
<p>This idea represented an immense trade emporium uniting Russia and the EU, or, in Putin’s words, “a unified continental market with a capacity worth trillions of dollars.”</p>
<p>In a nutshell: <a href="" type="internal">Eurasia integration</a>.</p>
<p>Washington panicked. The record shows how Putin’s vision – although extremely seductive to German industrialists – was eventually derailed by Washington’s controlled demolition of Ukraine.</p>
<p>Three years ago, in Kazakhstan and then Indonesia, President Xi Jinping expanded on Putin’s vision, proposing One Belt, One Road (OBOR), a.k.a. the New Silk Roads, enhancing the geoeconomic integration of Asia-Pacific via a vast network of highways, high-speed rail, pipelines, ports and fiber-optic cables.</p>
<p>In a nutshell: an even more ambitious version of Eurasia integration, benefiting two-thirds of the world population, economy and trade. The difference is that it now comes with immense financial muscle backing it up, via a Silk Road Fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the BRICS’s New Development Bank (NDB), and an all-out commercial offensive all across Eurasia, and the official entry of the yuan in the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights; that is, the christening of the yuan as a key currency worth holding by every single emerging market central bank.</p>
<p>At the recent G20 in Huangzhou, President Xi clearly demonstrated how OBOR is absolutely central to the Chinese vision of how globalization should proceed. Beijing is betting that the overwhelming majority of nations across Eurasia would rather invest in, and profit from, a “win-win” economic development project than be bogged down in a lose-lose strategic game between the US and China.</p>
<p>And that, for the Empire of Chaos, is absolute anathema. How to possibly accept that China is&#160; <a href="" type="internal">winning</a> the 21st century / New Great Game in Eurasia by building the New Silk Roads?</p>
<p>And don’t forget the Silk Road in Syria</p>
<p>Few in the West have noticed, as <a href="https://www.rt.com/business/357954-eastern-economic-forum-vladivostok/" type="external">reported</a>&#160;by RT, that the G20 was preceded by an Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. Essentially, that was yet another de facto celebration of Eurasia integration, featuring Russia, China, Japan and South Korea.</p>
<p>And that integration plank will soon merge with the Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union – which in itself is a sort of Russian New Silk Road.</p>
<p>All these roads lead to total connectivity. Take for instance cargo trains that are now regularly <a href="http://investkaluga.com/en/ploschadki/industrialnye-parki-2/industrialnyy-park-vorsino/" type="external">linking</a>Guangzhou, the key hub in southeast China, to the logistics center in&#160; Vorsino industrial park near Kaluga. The trip now takes just two weeks – saving no less than a full month if compared with shipping, and around 80 percent of the cost if compared with air cargo.</p>
<p>That’s yet another New Silk Road-style connection between China and Europe via Russia. Still another, vastly more ambitious, will be the high-speed rail expansion of the Transiberian; the Siberian Silk Road.</p>
<p>Then take the closer integration of China and Kazakhstan – which is also a member of the EEU. The duty-free Trans-Eurasia railway is already in effect, from Chongqing in Sichuan across Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Poland all the way to Duisburg in Germany. Beijing and Astana are developing a joint free trade zone at Horgos. And in parallel, a $135 million China-Mongolia Cross-Border Economic Cooperation Zone started to be built last month.</p>
<p>Kazakhstan is even flirting with the ambitious idea of a Eurasian Canal from the Caspian to the Black Sea and then further on to the Mediterranean. Sooner or later Chinese construction companies will come up with a feasibility study.</p>
<p>A virtually invisible Washington agenda in Syria – inbuilt in the Pentagon obsession to not allow any ceasefire to work, or to prevent the fall of its “moderate rebels” in Aleppo – is to break up yet another New Silk Road hub. China has been commercially connected to Syria since the original Silk Road, which snaked through Palmyra and Damascus. Before the Syrian “Arab Spring”, Syrian businessmen were a&#160; <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175935/tomgram%3A_pepe_escobar%2C_eurasian_integration_vs._the_empire_of_chaos/#more" type="external">vital presence</a> in Yiwu, south of Shanghai, the largest wholesale center for small-sized consumer goods in the world, where they would go to buy all sorts of products in bulk to resell in the Levant.</p>
<p>The “American lake”</p>
<p>Neocon/neoliberalcon Washington is totally paralyzed in terms of formulating a response – or at least a counter-proposal – to Eurasia integration. A few solid IQs at least may understand that China’s “threat” to the US is all about economic might. Take Washington’s deep hostility towards the China-driven&#160; <a href="http://euweb.aiib.org/html/aboutus/introduction/aiib/" type="external">AIIB</a> (Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank). Yet no amount of hardcore US lobbying prevented allies such as Germany, Britain, Australia and South Korea from joining in.</p>
<p>Then we had the mad dash to approve TPP – the China-excluding, NATO-on-trade arm of the pivot to Asia that was meant to be the cherry of the mostly flat Obama global economic policy cake. Yet the TPP as it stands is practically dead.</p>
<p>What the current geopolitical juncture spells out is the US Navy willing to go no holds barred to stop China from strategically dominating the Pacific, while TPP is deployed as a weapon to stop China dominating Asia-Pacific economically.</p>
<p>With the pivot to Asia configured as a tool to “deter Chinese aggression”, exceptionalists have graphically demonstrated how they are incapable of admitting the whole game is about post-ideological supply chain geopolitics. The US does not need to contain China; what it needs, badly, is key industrial, financial, commercial connection to crucial nodes across Asia to (re)build its economy.</p>
<p>Those were the days, in March 1949, when MacArthur could gloat, “the Pacific is now an Anglo-Saxon lake”. Even after the end of the Cold War the Pacific was a de facto American lake; the US violated Chinese naval and aerial space at will.</p>
<p>Now instead we have the US Army War College and the whole Think Tankland losing sleep over sophisticated Chinese missiles capable of denying US Navy access to the South China Sea. An American lake? No more.</p>
<p>The heart of the matter is that China has made an outstanding bet on infrastructure building – which translates into first-class connectivity to everyone – as the real global 21st century commons, way more important than “security”. After all a large part of global infrastructure still needs to be built. While China turbo-charges its role as the top global infrastructure exporter – from high-speed rail to low-cost telecom – the “indispensable” nation is stuck with a “pivoting”, perplexed, bloated military obsessed with containment.</p>
<p>Divide and rule those “hostile” rivals</p>
<p>Well, things haven’t changed much since Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski dreaming in the late 1990s of a Chinese fragmentation from within, all the way to Obama’s 2015 National Security Strategy, which is no more than futile rhetorical nostalgia about containing Russia, China and Iran.</p>
<p>Thus the basket of attached myths such as “freedom of navigation” – Washington’s euphemism for perennially controlling the sea lanes that constitute China’s supply chain – as well as an apotheosis of“China aggression” incessantly merging with “Russia aggression”;after all, the Eurasia integration-driven Beijing-Moscow strategic partnership must be severed at all costs.</p>
<p>Why? Because US global hegemony must always be perceived as an irremovable force of nature, like death and taxes (Apple in Ireland excluded).</p>
<p>Twenty-four years after the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guide, the same mindset prevails; “Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival…to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union and southwest Asia”.</p>
<p>Oops. Now even Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski is terrified. How to contain these bloody silky roads with Pentagon “existential threats” China and Russia right at the heart of the action? Divide and Rule – what else?</p>
<p>For a confused Brzezinski, the US&#160; <a href="" type="internal">should</a>&#160;“fashion a policy in which at least one of the two potentially threatening states becomes a partner in the quest for regional and then wider global stability, and thus in containing the least predictable but potentially the most likely rival to overreach. Currently, the more likely to overreach is Russia, but in the longer run it could be China.”</p>
<p>Have a pleasant nightmare.</p>
<p>This piece first appeared on <a href="https://www.rt.com/op-edge/361898-new-silk-roads-terrify/" type="external">RT</a>.</p> | 830 |
<p>KARACHI, Pakistan - Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's top general, has issued a veiled warning&#160;to the nation's civilian leaders not to push their authority too far.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/world/pakistan-military-warns-civilians-on-power-660844/" type="external">According to The New York Times</a>, Kayani - the Pakistani&#160;Army chief of staff - published a statement saying that the country was passing through a "defining phase," and warning of "negative consequences" if the ruling institutions failed to work in harmony.</p>
<p>The statement comes as the Supreme Court continues criminal proceedings against a former army chief and and a former chief of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Service Intelligence spy agency for distributing public money to right-wing parties that opposed Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party in a powerful election-rigging case.&#160;</p>
<p><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/05/pakistan-army-politics-idUSL3E8M55GR20121105" type="external">According to Reuters</a>, the warning has stoked tensions between the court and the military that has ruled Pakistan for much of its history.</p>
<p>Without mentioning the court or its judges, Kayani's statement said:</p>
<p>"Any effort which wittingly or unwittingly draws a wedge between the people and Armed Forces of Pakistan undermines the larger national interest."&#160;</p>
<p>According to The Times - which said that Kayani was speaking to officers at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi - the statement continued:</p>
<p>"No individual or institution has the monopoly to decide what is right or wrong in defining the ultimate national interest."&#160;</p>
<p>As though in response, the office of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry released a nine-page speech hours later that seemed to counter Kayani's criticisms.</p>
<p>Noting that the Supreme Court's paramount authority was enshrined in the constitution, Chaudhry's statement said:</p>
<p>"Gone are the days when stability and security of the country was defined in terms of number of missiles and tanks as a manifestation of hard power available at the disposal of the state."&#160;</p>
<p>Though the local media initially lambasted the general for his statement, local news station Geo TV reported that aides close to Kayani said his statement was issued simply to relieve citizen's doubts about the military's competency. <a href="http://dawn.com/2012/11/06/kayani-hits-back-target-unclear-apparent-reaction-to-bashing-of-generals-believes-armys-role-being-undermined/" type="external">Dawn News also reported</a>that aides claimed that Kayani just wanted to boost the morale of troops fighting the militancy.&#160;</p>
<p>"Gen. Kayani's statement had been necessitated due to sagging morale of the ranks," an army officer explained, comparing it to a speech made by Kayani to quell unease amongst the ranks after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abottabad. &#160;</p>
<p>However, Arif Raif, an adjunct scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, told The Times that "Kayani is seeking to establish red lines for the activist Supreme Court. The army has historically seen itself as the guardian of Pakistan's stability and as a cleansing force in politics. The Supreme Court has in many ways usurped that role."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/world/pakistan-military-warns-civilians-on-power-660844/" type="external">McClatchy Newspapers wrote</a> that Pakistan had a long history of military involvement in its politics, including several coups against elected governments.&#160;</p>
<p>Gen. Pervez Musharraf handed authority to the government of President Asif Ali Zardari in 2008.</p>
<p>The Times cited analysts as saying that the tension between the military and judiciary was unlikely to lead to a direct military coup but could affect elections due by spring.</p> | Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's top general, warns civilian leaders against overstepping authority | false | https://pri.org/stories/2012-11-06/ashfaq-parvez-kayani-pakistans-top-general-warns-civilian-leaders-against | 2012-11-06 | 3left-center
| Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's top general, warns civilian leaders against overstepping authority
<p>KARACHI, Pakistan - Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's top general, has issued a veiled warning&#160;to the nation's civilian leaders not to push their authority too far.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/world/pakistan-military-warns-civilians-on-power-660844/" type="external">According to The New York Times</a>, Kayani - the Pakistani&#160;Army chief of staff - published a statement saying that the country was passing through a "defining phase," and warning of "negative consequences" if the ruling institutions failed to work in harmony.</p>
<p>The statement comes as the Supreme Court continues criminal proceedings against a former army chief and and a former chief of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Service Intelligence spy agency for distributing public money to right-wing parties that opposed Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party in a powerful election-rigging case.&#160;</p>
<p><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/05/pakistan-army-politics-idUSL3E8M55GR20121105" type="external">According to Reuters</a>, the warning has stoked tensions between the court and the military that has ruled Pakistan for much of its history.</p>
<p>Without mentioning the court or its judges, Kayani's statement said:</p>
<p>"Any effort which wittingly or unwittingly draws a wedge between the people and Armed Forces of Pakistan undermines the larger national interest."&#160;</p>
<p>According to The Times - which said that Kayani was speaking to officers at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi - the statement continued:</p>
<p>"No individual or institution has the monopoly to decide what is right or wrong in defining the ultimate national interest."&#160;</p>
<p>As though in response, the office of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry released a nine-page speech hours later that seemed to counter Kayani's criticisms.</p>
<p>Noting that the Supreme Court's paramount authority was enshrined in the constitution, Chaudhry's statement said:</p>
<p>"Gone are the days when stability and security of the country was defined in terms of number of missiles and tanks as a manifestation of hard power available at the disposal of the state."&#160;</p>
<p>Though the local media initially lambasted the general for his statement, local news station Geo TV reported that aides close to Kayani said his statement was issued simply to relieve citizen's doubts about the military's competency. <a href="http://dawn.com/2012/11/06/kayani-hits-back-target-unclear-apparent-reaction-to-bashing-of-generals-believes-armys-role-being-undermined/" type="external">Dawn News also reported</a>that aides claimed that Kayani just wanted to boost the morale of troops fighting the militancy.&#160;</p>
<p>"Gen. Kayani's statement had been necessitated due to sagging morale of the ranks," an army officer explained, comparing it to a speech made by Kayani to quell unease amongst the ranks after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abottabad. &#160;</p>
<p>However, Arif Raif, an adjunct scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, told The Times that "Kayani is seeking to establish red lines for the activist Supreme Court. The army has historically seen itself as the guardian of Pakistan's stability and as a cleansing force in politics. The Supreme Court has in many ways usurped that role."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/world/pakistan-military-warns-civilians-on-power-660844/" type="external">McClatchy Newspapers wrote</a> that Pakistan had a long history of military involvement in its politics, including several coups against elected governments.&#160;</p>
<p>Gen. Pervez Musharraf handed authority to the government of President Asif Ali Zardari in 2008.</p>
<p>The Times cited analysts as saying that the tension between the military and judiciary was unlikely to lead to a direct military coup but could affect elections due by spring.</p> | 831 |
<p><a href="//videos/37/63175" type="external" /></p>
<p>RUSH: These polling numbers? It’s time for the Republicans to man up and stop worrying about this apparent cliche that, no matter what happens, the Republicans are going to get blamed for the government shutdown, and because they don’t want to get blamed, they can’t do it. They can’t repeal Obamacare, they can’t do anything, ’cause it’s an unwritten rule in Washington:</p>
<p>“Whenever the government gets shut down, no matter who’s responsible for it, the Republicans get the blame,” and, as such, the Republicans take a giant weapon out of their arsenal of ammunition. It’s time to man up and start dealing with this thing. That’s what they were sent there to do. They were sent there to deal with these kind of lies and this obfuscation, these con games.</p>
<p>They were sent there to stop this.</p>
<p>They were not sent there to participate in it. They were not sent there to govern and participate and compromise and advance a little bit. They were sent there to stop it.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: Okay, very quickly, we’re gonna get back to this and the whole business of the idea that the Republicans can’t really do anything about Obamacare because they can’t shut down the government. “No matter how the government gets shut down, the Republicans are going to get the blame.” That is something that the elitists in the Beltway say Republicans cannot recover from.</p>
<p>“So we can’t even entertain it. We can’t even go there.” I think people who say that are actually doing their own version of Gruber: “Gruber said what? Gruber said that people are stupid. The American people are stupid. Even though they’re stupid, we’ve gotta lie to ’em. We’re gonna rely on the stupidity of the American people.”</p>
<p>Okay, if you believe… If you are an inside-the-Beltway media or elected official elitist or honcho, and, if you don’t want to get anywhere near action — like a series of bills that would deny Obama the funding necessary either to implement amnesty, or elements of Obamacare, because that would be a government shutdown, and the Republicans will get blamed no matter what happens, and they’ll never recovered from it, and it’s horrible, and it’s messy — aren’t you essentially the same as Jonathan Gruber?</p>
<p>Aren’t you really saying the American people are too stupid to understand what’s really going on?</p>
<p>Aren’t you saying, “No, no! We can’t have a series of bills that will defund various steps of amnesty. Why, that would shut down the government, and then we’ll get blamed for it.” So you believe the American people are so stupid that even though they just elected you to stop this, when you take action to stop it they’re gonna get so mad at you for shutting down the government, that they’re never gonna elect you again, and the media is gonna have a field day with you?</p>
<p>Aren’t you kind of just like Jonathan Gruber? Aren’t you, in essence saying, “No, we can’t do what’s right because the American people are too stupid to see what we’re doing, and they will blame us, and we don’t want to get blamed”? It seems to me that a year ago in December there was a government shutdown, and Ted Cruz got blamed for it left and right.</p>
<p>And the last I saw, the Republicans just won a landslide election a little over a week ago. So where is it written that government shutdowns destroy Republican electoral efforts? Where is it written that defunding this part of Obamacare or that part of amnesty equals a government shutdown anyway? I think it’s time for people to realize — Republicans, especially — that the people who voted for ’em are not stupid.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: Here’s Obama. This takes us to where we’re headed here in this segment. This is Sunday morning in Brisbane. This is the end of the G20 Summit, Obama at a press conference and CBS Correspondent Major Garrett said, “How much do you fear the government will shut down and to what degree does your anxiety about this or your team’s anxiety about this influence the timing of your decision on” amnesty.</p>
<p>OBAMA: I take Mitch McConnell at his word when he says that the government’s not gonna shut down. There’s no reason for it to shut down. Uh, we traveled down that path before. Uh, it was bad for the country.</p>
<p>RUSH: It was not.</p>
<p>OBAMA: It was, uh, bad for every elected official in the country —</p>
<p>RUSH: No, it wasn’t.</p>
<p>OBAMA: — and at the end of the day was resolved in the same way that it would have been resolved if we hadn’t shut the government down. So, uh, that’s not gonna be productive.</p>
<p>RUSH: That’s not even true.</p>
<p>Look, there was a government shutdown. I do this for a living, and I don’t even remember what it was about. That’s how big it was. Now Snerdley, who is a wonk, probably remembers. All I know is that Ted Cruz getting blamed for it everywhere. What was it over? (interruption) “Continuing resolution for funding.” Okay, so we shut down the government over the mechanism that we were gonna pay for the next series of months of government, the continuing resolution.</p>
<p>The Republicans have been trying to stop the Democrats and get ’em to do a budget as required by law, and they’ve been doing this continuing resolution stuff, which… (interruption) Well, I know. The typical sleigh ride guy at Jellystone got sidelined for a while, but he got his money back. They all do. The government workers that lost their jobs for a couple days got their Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys.</p>
<p>It always ends up that way. The point is, there was a government shutdown, and there was no politician that got hurt. The last I looked, the Republicans won a landslide election last week or week half ago — and they were the guys blamed for the shutdown last January, am I right? (interruption) The Republicans were blamed for the shutdown last December, 2013, right? (interruption) Okay.</p>
<p>Single-handedly! Ted Cruz and the Republicans were tarred and feathered and blamed and everything was laid at their feet and it was a disaster, and what happened? The Republicans win a landslide election less than a year later. So where is it written that government shutdowns… Now, granted, in a government shutdown, the media is going to hate you. The media is gonna say mean things about you.</p>
<p>The media is gonna call you racist and sexist and bigoted and homophobic, and the media is gonna call you mean-spirited, and the media is gonna call you extremist, and the media is gonna say, “You don’t like the little guy,” and the media is gonna lie about you. But it didn’t hurt, did it? If the Republicans shutting down the government last year was political disaster, somebody explain the results of ten days ago for me.</p>
<p>But I know how the inside-the-Beltway thinks, and it is typified here and personified by Brit Hume of Fox News. This is yesterday on Fox News Sunday during the panel discussion. The host Chris Wallace was speaking with senior political analyst Brit Hume about immigration reform and the federal budget, and Chris Wallace said, “If Republicans somehow tie funding of the government to opposition to this executive action, is it a smart political move or is it another mistake?”</p>
<p>The question is: If the Republicans tried to stop Obama from doing amnesty by denying funding for this aspect of it and that aspect of it — you know, a bunch of different aspects of it — Wallace is asking Hume: Is that a smart political move or would that be another mistake? Meaning: Would it be dumb to deny the government money, or would it be good politics?</p>
<p>HUME: It’s a total blunder to try that. It is an iron rule in Washington exemplified many times that if the government shuts down, the Republicans get the blame. Not some of the blame, not most of the blame, all of the blame. And one would surmise that — that they may have learned that by now. Their leaders seem to have, but there are some within the House and Senate who still think that that kind of a brinksmanship might work. I doubt it.</p>
<p>RUSH: And then Karl Rove this morning on Fox &amp; Friends was being interviewed by Elisabeth Hasselbeck — by the way, welcome back to her. She had a cancer scare out there. She’s been gone for a month, she’s back. She said, “Republicans are now weighing a government shutdown to put pressure against the president who seems to be ready to use executive actions as it relates to immigration. Is that a good move or not, Karl?”</p>
<p>ROVE: Actually it’s not Republicans, it’s a few Republicans. When we had the government shutdown last year, you may remember the poll in the immediate aftermath, 17% of the American people approved of it, 81% didn’t, and who’d they blame? I think it was like 59% blamed the Republicans. It took us a year to get back.</p>
<p>RUSH: Uh, what, uh, uhhh, you got back, though, right? And how’d you do that? It took a year to get back, but you got back. How did you get back? What happened? You got back because people wanted you to stop Obama. Now, on this shutdown business, I think, in the first place, this is not technically a government shutdown. Just telling Obama we’re not gonna give you the money for, say, a driver’s license for these people. We’re not gonna give you the money for Social Security cards for these people. We’re not gonna give you the money. How the hell is that a government shutdown, for crying out loud?</p>
<p>But even if it is, it seems to me — and I say this with all due respect. I am not a flamethrower here, and I’m not trying to pick a fight. I am just trying to serve this audience the best I can, and it seems to me that this fear that whenever anything happens, that the media can call a government shutdown and therefore we can’t do it ’cause the Republicans are gonna get blamed and don’t want that, aren’t you kind of being just like Jonathan Gruber in assuming the people are so stupid they won’t be able to figure out who’s really responsible for this?</p>
<p>Add to this the fact, if you want to talk polling data, whatever poll you want to cite, you’ve got 55 to 60% of the American people who disapprove of Obamacare and want it repealed. So if you take action to deny Obama funding to implement it and somebody calls that a government shutdown, how in the hell are the people gonna get mad at you for trying to stop the implementation of Obamacare when that’s what you were elected to do?</p>
<p>This inordinate fear that the Republicans are, no matter what happens, gonna get blamed for it seems to rely on the fact that the American people are so stupid that they will always believe what the media tells them and that they will never question it. If this is way you look at — why should the Republicans ever oppose anything? Because we know what the media is going to say about them.</p>
<p>The media is gonna call the Republicans names no matter what the Republicans do or say, and if our policy decisions are going to be rooted in trying to limit what the media says, aren’t we conceding defeat? And aren’t we at the same time pretty much saying that we are afraid that the American people are too stupid to see our actions for what they are, and that is, trying to save the country from the disasters of Obama’s policy implementations. And I would say the same thing about amnesty.</p>
<p>The majority of the American people, no matter where you look, no matter what poll, nobody’s in favor of it. Nobody wants executive amnesty. It’s not a majority position. Nothing Obama is doing is a majority position to support. So any action the Republicans might take after having won a landslide election, I mean, that has to be a factor here. They were just elected to stop this stuff, and so they take action to stop it, and the media accuses them of shutting down the government, and the American people are so stupid that right then and there they’re gonna regret that they voted for the Republicans.</p>
<p>And the Republicans are gonna be paying the price for, what, another year ’til the next election, another two years. How did the Republicans win this election if they got blamed for the shutdown last December? “Well, it took a year to get back.” Well, they got back. I don’t know. This is unnecessarily tying your own hands behind your back.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: Okay. So the establishment, they say they will not shut down the government. What that means is, they’re not gonna deny Obama any funding to implement his various schemes, so what are they gonna do? It’s a serious question. I mean, they were elected to do something here. They were elected to stop this. Even if you think they were elected to do more than that, fine and dandy. I don’t want to get into an argument about that. But you can’t deny that part and parcel of the reason for this electoral win was to stop what is happening.</p>
<p>If they’re not going to use the power of the purse, and if they’re not going to use impeachment, then what are they going to do to stop it? That’s gonna get them in more trouble with voters than any so-called government shutdown. The worst thing they could do is ignore the mandate the voters gave ’em. That looks like what they’re aiming for.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: This is Sally, Richmond, Virginia. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.</p>
<p>CALLER: Hey, Rush. How are you?</p>
<p>RUSH: I’m not well. Thank you very much.</p>
<p>CALLER: Good! I wanted to comment about your conversation about the Republicans and shutting down the government.</p>
<p>RUSH: Yeah?</p>
<p>CALLER: I actually think Ted Cruz and the Republicans that supported the government shutdown, caused the wake-up call and they were what caused people to pay attention and get engaged, and they drew people’s attention to the truth about Obamacare and what the negative impacts were gonna be. Not only on the economy, but the level of care that we were all gonna eventually experience, and the rising costs.</p>
<p>RUSH: That is an interesting take, because Ted Cruz did get the blame, right?</p>
<p>CALLER: He got the blame but he really should be getting the praise.</p>
<p>RUSH: Well, but wait. That’s what I’m saying. He did. The point is: Did Ted Cruz lose any popularity?</p>
<p>CALLER: He lost popularity outside of the Republican Party but also within the party.</p>
<p>RUSH: Well, no. I’m talk with the American people.</p>
<p>CALLER: No! No.</p>
<p>RUSH: No, he didn’t lose popularity. He might have been enemy number one inside the party, but in terms of the people? The voters didn’t take it out on Ted Cruz. That’s a good observation, interesting observation. Sally, I appreciate the call. Thank you very much.</p> | It’s Time to Man Up, GOP | true | http://rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/11/17/it_s_time_to_man_up_gop | 2014-11-17 | 0right
| It’s Time to Man Up, GOP
<p><a href="//videos/37/63175" type="external" /></p>
<p>RUSH: These polling numbers? It’s time for the Republicans to man up and stop worrying about this apparent cliche that, no matter what happens, the Republicans are going to get blamed for the government shutdown, and because they don’t want to get blamed, they can’t do it. They can’t repeal Obamacare, they can’t do anything, ’cause it’s an unwritten rule in Washington:</p>
<p>“Whenever the government gets shut down, no matter who’s responsible for it, the Republicans get the blame,” and, as such, the Republicans take a giant weapon out of their arsenal of ammunition. It’s time to man up and start dealing with this thing. That’s what they were sent there to do. They were sent there to deal with these kind of lies and this obfuscation, these con games.</p>
<p>They were sent there to stop this.</p>
<p>They were not sent there to participate in it. They were not sent there to govern and participate and compromise and advance a little bit. They were sent there to stop it.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: Okay, very quickly, we’re gonna get back to this and the whole business of the idea that the Republicans can’t really do anything about Obamacare because they can’t shut down the government. “No matter how the government gets shut down, the Republicans are going to get the blame.” That is something that the elitists in the Beltway say Republicans cannot recover from.</p>
<p>“So we can’t even entertain it. We can’t even go there.” I think people who say that are actually doing their own version of Gruber: “Gruber said what? Gruber said that people are stupid. The American people are stupid. Even though they’re stupid, we’ve gotta lie to ’em. We’re gonna rely on the stupidity of the American people.”</p>
<p>Okay, if you believe… If you are an inside-the-Beltway media or elected official elitist or honcho, and, if you don’t want to get anywhere near action — like a series of bills that would deny Obama the funding necessary either to implement amnesty, or elements of Obamacare, because that would be a government shutdown, and the Republicans will get blamed no matter what happens, and they’ll never recovered from it, and it’s horrible, and it’s messy — aren’t you essentially the same as Jonathan Gruber?</p>
<p>Aren’t you really saying the American people are too stupid to understand what’s really going on?</p>
<p>Aren’t you saying, “No, no! We can’t have a series of bills that will defund various steps of amnesty. Why, that would shut down the government, and then we’ll get blamed for it.” So you believe the American people are so stupid that even though they just elected you to stop this, when you take action to stop it they’re gonna get so mad at you for shutting down the government, that they’re never gonna elect you again, and the media is gonna have a field day with you?</p>
<p>Aren’t you kind of just like Jonathan Gruber? Aren’t you, in essence saying, “No, we can’t do what’s right because the American people are too stupid to see what we’re doing, and they will blame us, and we don’t want to get blamed”? It seems to me that a year ago in December there was a government shutdown, and Ted Cruz got blamed for it left and right.</p>
<p>And the last I saw, the Republicans just won a landslide election a little over a week ago. So where is it written that government shutdowns destroy Republican electoral efforts? Where is it written that defunding this part of Obamacare or that part of amnesty equals a government shutdown anyway? I think it’s time for people to realize — Republicans, especially — that the people who voted for ’em are not stupid.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: Here’s Obama. This takes us to where we’re headed here in this segment. This is Sunday morning in Brisbane. This is the end of the G20 Summit, Obama at a press conference and CBS Correspondent Major Garrett said, “How much do you fear the government will shut down and to what degree does your anxiety about this or your team’s anxiety about this influence the timing of your decision on” amnesty.</p>
<p>OBAMA: I take Mitch McConnell at his word when he says that the government’s not gonna shut down. There’s no reason for it to shut down. Uh, we traveled down that path before. Uh, it was bad for the country.</p>
<p>RUSH: It was not.</p>
<p>OBAMA: It was, uh, bad for every elected official in the country —</p>
<p>RUSH: No, it wasn’t.</p>
<p>OBAMA: — and at the end of the day was resolved in the same way that it would have been resolved if we hadn’t shut the government down. So, uh, that’s not gonna be productive.</p>
<p>RUSH: That’s not even true.</p>
<p>Look, there was a government shutdown. I do this for a living, and I don’t even remember what it was about. That’s how big it was. Now Snerdley, who is a wonk, probably remembers. All I know is that Ted Cruz getting blamed for it everywhere. What was it over? (interruption) “Continuing resolution for funding.” Okay, so we shut down the government over the mechanism that we were gonna pay for the next series of months of government, the continuing resolution.</p>
<p>The Republicans have been trying to stop the Democrats and get ’em to do a budget as required by law, and they’ve been doing this continuing resolution stuff, which… (interruption) Well, I know. The typical sleigh ride guy at Jellystone got sidelined for a while, but he got his money back. They all do. The government workers that lost their jobs for a couple days got their Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys.</p>
<p>It always ends up that way. The point is, there was a government shutdown, and there was no politician that got hurt. The last I looked, the Republicans won a landslide election last week or week half ago — and they were the guys blamed for the shutdown last January, am I right? (interruption) The Republicans were blamed for the shutdown last December, 2013, right? (interruption) Okay.</p>
<p>Single-handedly! Ted Cruz and the Republicans were tarred and feathered and blamed and everything was laid at their feet and it was a disaster, and what happened? The Republicans win a landslide election less than a year later. So where is it written that government shutdowns… Now, granted, in a government shutdown, the media is going to hate you. The media is gonna say mean things about you.</p>
<p>The media is gonna call you racist and sexist and bigoted and homophobic, and the media is gonna call you mean-spirited, and the media is gonna call you extremist, and the media is gonna say, “You don’t like the little guy,” and the media is gonna lie about you. But it didn’t hurt, did it? If the Republicans shutting down the government last year was political disaster, somebody explain the results of ten days ago for me.</p>
<p>But I know how the inside-the-Beltway thinks, and it is typified here and personified by Brit Hume of Fox News. This is yesterday on Fox News Sunday during the panel discussion. The host Chris Wallace was speaking with senior political analyst Brit Hume about immigration reform and the federal budget, and Chris Wallace said, “If Republicans somehow tie funding of the government to opposition to this executive action, is it a smart political move or is it another mistake?”</p>
<p>The question is: If the Republicans tried to stop Obama from doing amnesty by denying funding for this aspect of it and that aspect of it — you know, a bunch of different aspects of it — Wallace is asking Hume: Is that a smart political move or would that be another mistake? Meaning: Would it be dumb to deny the government money, or would it be good politics?</p>
<p>HUME: It’s a total blunder to try that. It is an iron rule in Washington exemplified many times that if the government shuts down, the Republicans get the blame. Not some of the blame, not most of the blame, all of the blame. And one would surmise that — that they may have learned that by now. Their leaders seem to have, but there are some within the House and Senate who still think that that kind of a brinksmanship might work. I doubt it.</p>
<p>RUSH: And then Karl Rove this morning on Fox &amp; Friends was being interviewed by Elisabeth Hasselbeck — by the way, welcome back to her. She had a cancer scare out there. She’s been gone for a month, she’s back. She said, “Republicans are now weighing a government shutdown to put pressure against the president who seems to be ready to use executive actions as it relates to immigration. Is that a good move or not, Karl?”</p>
<p>ROVE: Actually it’s not Republicans, it’s a few Republicans. When we had the government shutdown last year, you may remember the poll in the immediate aftermath, 17% of the American people approved of it, 81% didn’t, and who’d they blame? I think it was like 59% blamed the Republicans. It took us a year to get back.</p>
<p>RUSH: Uh, what, uh, uhhh, you got back, though, right? And how’d you do that? It took a year to get back, but you got back. How did you get back? What happened? You got back because people wanted you to stop Obama. Now, on this shutdown business, I think, in the first place, this is not technically a government shutdown. Just telling Obama we’re not gonna give you the money for, say, a driver’s license for these people. We’re not gonna give you the money for Social Security cards for these people. We’re not gonna give you the money. How the hell is that a government shutdown, for crying out loud?</p>
<p>But even if it is, it seems to me — and I say this with all due respect. I am not a flamethrower here, and I’m not trying to pick a fight. I am just trying to serve this audience the best I can, and it seems to me that this fear that whenever anything happens, that the media can call a government shutdown and therefore we can’t do it ’cause the Republicans are gonna get blamed and don’t want that, aren’t you kind of being just like Jonathan Gruber in assuming the people are so stupid they won’t be able to figure out who’s really responsible for this?</p>
<p>Add to this the fact, if you want to talk polling data, whatever poll you want to cite, you’ve got 55 to 60% of the American people who disapprove of Obamacare and want it repealed. So if you take action to deny Obama funding to implement it and somebody calls that a government shutdown, how in the hell are the people gonna get mad at you for trying to stop the implementation of Obamacare when that’s what you were elected to do?</p>
<p>This inordinate fear that the Republicans are, no matter what happens, gonna get blamed for it seems to rely on the fact that the American people are so stupid that they will always believe what the media tells them and that they will never question it. If this is way you look at — why should the Republicans ever oppose anything? Because we know what the media is going to say about them.</p>
<p>The media is gonna call the Republicans names no matter what the Republicans do or say, and if our policy decisions are going to be rooted in trying to limit what the media says, aren’t we conceding defeat? And aren’t we at the same time pretty much saying that we are afraid that the American people are too stupid to see our actions for what they are, and that is, trying to save the country from the disasters of Obama’s policy implementations. And I would say the same thing about amnesty.</p>
<p>The majority of the American people, no matter where you look, no matter what poll, nobody’s in favor of it. Nobody wants executive amnesty. It’s not a majority position. Nothing Obama is doing is a majority position to support. So any action the Republicans might take after having won a landslide election, I mean, that has to be a factor here. They were just elected to stop this stuff, and so they take action to stop it, and the media accuses them of shutting down the government, and the American people are so stupid that right then and there they’re gonna regret that they voted for the Republicans.</p>
<p>And the Republicans are gonna be paying the price for, what, another year ’til the next election, another two years. How did the Republicans win this election if they got blamed for the shutdown last December? “Well, it took a year to get back.” Well, they got back. I don’t know. This is unnecessarily tying your own hands behind your back.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: Okay. So the establishment, they say they will not shut down the government. What that means is, they’re not gonna deny Obama any funding to implement his various schemes, so what are they gonna do? It’s a serious question. I mean, they were elected to do something here. They were elected to stop this. Even if you think they were elected to do more than that, fine and dandy. I don’t want to get into an argument about that. But you can’t deny that part and parcel of the reason for this electoral win was to stop what is happening.</p>
<p>If they’re not going to use the power of the purse, and if they’re not going to use impeachment, then what are they going to do to stop it? That’s gonna get them in more trouble with voters than any so-called government shutdown. The worst thing they could do is ignore the mandate the voters gave ’em. That looks like what they’re aiming for.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: This is Sally, Richmond, Virginia. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.</p>
<p>CALLER: Hey, Rush. How are you?</p>
<p>RUSH: I’m not well. Thank you very much.</p>
<p>CALLER: Good! I wanted to comment about your conversation about the Republicans and shutting down the government.</p>
<p>RUSH: Yeah?</p>
<p>CALLER: I actually think Ted Cruz and the Republicans that supported the government shutdown, caused the wake-up call and they were what caused people to pay attention and get engaged, and they drew people’s attention to the truth about Obamacare and what the negative impacts were gonna be. Not only on the economy, but the level of care that we were all gonna eventually experience, and the rising costs.</p>
<p>RUSH: That is an interesting take, because Ted Cruz did get the blame, right?</p>
<p>CALLER: He got the blame but he really should be getting the praise.</p>
<p>RUSH: Well, but wait. That’s what I’m saying. He did. The point is: Did Ted Cruz lose any popularity?</p>
<p>CALLER: He lost popularity outside of the Republican Party but also within the party.</p>
<p>RUSH: Well, no. I’m talk with the American people.</p>
<p>CALLER: No! No.</p>
<p>RUSH: No, he didn’t lose popularity. He might have been enemy number one inside the party, but in terms of the people? The voters didn’t take it out on Ted Cruz. That’s a good observation, interesting observation. Sally, I appreciate the call. Thank you very much.</p> | 832 |
<p />
<p>From Beijing to Paris to San Francisco, the Apple Watch made its debut Friday. Customers were invited to try them on in stores and order them online.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The watch is Apple's first new product category since the iPad came out five years ago. Analysts are waiting to see how well the watch will sell beyond devoted Apple fans. Apple has a better chance at succeeding than any other smartwatch maker so far, yet it will likely take time before sales reach the kind of numbers that Apple gets for iPhones and iPads.</p>
<p>Watch prices start at $349, but can go as high as $17,000 for a luxury edition in gold. People can try the watch on in Apple stores, but for now all orders are being handled online. Shipments begin April 24.</p>
<p>It's available in the U.S. and eight other markets around the world. In the U.S., the watch is available only in Apple stores. In some countries, select department stores and resellers also have it.</p>
<p>Here's a look at developments surrounding Apple Watch, latest updates first:</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>3:01 a.m. EDT (12:01 a.m. in Cupertino, California):</p>
<p>Ready, set, go ...</p>
<p>Apple starts taking orders for the watch on its website and Apple Store app. Currently, this is the only way Apple is selling the watch. Even those visiting retail stores will have to order online — either at home or at a Web terminal inside the store.</p>
<p>The retail stores are meant for customers who aren't sure which watch case, band or size they want — or aren't sure they even want one. Staff will be on hand to help customers try on the watches and answer questions before buying. Customers are encouraged to make an appointment online, though walk-ins will be accepted — just expect a wait.</p>
<p>— Anick Jesdanun, AP Technology Writer</p> | APPLE WATCH LIVE: Try-on visits, online orders begin in the US, China and other markets | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2015/04/10/apple-watch-live-try-on-visits-online-orders-begin-in-us-china-and-other.html | 2016-03-06 | 0right
| APPLE WATCH LIVE: Try-on visits, online orders begin in the US, China and other markets
<p />
<p>From Beijing to Paris to San Francisco, the Apple Watch made its debut Friday. Customers were invited to try them on in stores and order them online.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The watch is Apple's first new product category since the iPad came out five years ago. Analysts are waiting to see how well the watch will sell beyond devoted Apple fans. Apple has a better chance at succeeding than any other smartwatch maker so far, yet it will likely take time before sales reach the kind of numbers that Apple gets for iPhones and iPads.</p>
<p>Watch prices start at $349, but can go as high as $17,000 for a luxury edition in gold. People can try the watch on in Apple stores, but for now all orders are being handled online. Shipments begin April 24.</p>
<p>It's available in the U.S. and eight other markets around the world. In the U.S., the watch is available only in Apple stores. In some countries, select department stores and resellers also have it.</p>
<p>Here's a look at developments surrounding Apple Watch, latest updates first:</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>3:01 a.m. EDT (12:01 a.m. in Cupertino, California):</p>
<p>Ready, set, go ...</p>
<p>Apple starts taking orders for the watch on its website and Apple Store app. Currently, this is the only way Apple is selling the watch. Even those visiting retail stores will have to order online — either at home or at a Web terminal inside the store.</p>
<p>The retail stores are meant for customers who aren't sure which watch case, band or size they want — or aren't sure they even want one. Staff will be on hand to help customers try on the watches and answer questions before buying. Customers are encouraged to make an appointment online, though walk-ins will be accepted — just expect a wait.</p>
<p>— Anick Jesdanun, AP Technology Writer</p> | 833 |
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A 21-year-old man is facing child abuse and weapon charges after sheriff’s deputies said he threatened his girlfriend and her children with a gun, fled from the scene and crashed his car into a pole near Rio Bravo and Loris.</p>
<p>A BCSO spokesman said Alfredo Montes-Ayala assaulted his girlfriend and threatened to kill himself this morning on the 200 block of Atrisco Vista. The girlfriend called 911, but Montes-Anaya left before deputies arrived.</p>
<p>He then returned to the house, the spokesman said, and deputies tried to stop him from fleeing. He drove south on Atrisco Vista before losing control near Rio Bravo and Loris, striking a pole and a traffic signal. He was sent to the University of New Mexico Hospital for observation, the spokesman said.</p>
<p>Montes-Ayala is facing charges of aggravated fleeing, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and child abuse.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | Man arrested on fleeing, assault, child abuse charges | false | https://abqjournal.com/326005/man-arrested-on-fleeing-assault-child-abuse-charges.html | 2least
| Man arrested on fleeing, assault, child abuse charges
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A 21-year-old man is facing child abuse and weapon charges after sheriff’s deputies said he threatened his girlfriend and her children with a gun, fled from the scene and crashed his car into a pole near Rio Bravo and Loris.</p>
<p>A BCSO spokesman said Alfredo Montes-Ayala assaulted his girlfriend and threatened to kill himself this morning on the 200 block of Atrisco Vista. The girlfriend called 911, but Montes-Anaya left before deputies arrived.</p>
<p>He then returned to the house, the spokesman said, and deputies tried to stop him from fleeing. He drove south on Atrisco Vista before losing control near Rio Bravo and Loris, striking a pole and a traffic signal. He was sent to the University of New Mexico Hospital for observation, the spokesman said.</p>
<p>Montes-Ayala is facing charges of aggravated fleeing, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and child abuse.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | 834 |
|
<p>For years, ethanol boosters have promised Americans that “cellulosic” ethanol lurks just ahead, right past the nearest service station. Once it becomes viable, this magic elixir — made from grass, wood chips, sawdust, or some other plant material — will deliver us from the evil clutches of foreign oil and make the U.S. “energy independent” while enriching farmers and strengthening small towns across the country.</p>
<p>Consider this claim: “From our cellulose waste products on the farm such as straw, corn-stalks, corn cobs and all similar sorts of material we throw away, we can get, by present known methods, enough alcohol to run our automotive equipment in the United States.”</p>
<p>That sounds like something you’ve heard recently, right? Well, fasten your seatbelt because that claim was made way back in 1921. That’s when American inventor Thomas Midgley proclaimed the wonders of cellulosic ethanol to the Society of Automotive Engineers in Indianapolis. And while Midgley was excited about the prospect of cellulosic ethanol, he admitted that there was a significant hurdle to his concept: producing the fuel would cost about $2 per gallon. That’s about $20 per gallon in current money.</p>
<p>Alas, what’s old is new again.</p>
<p>I wrote about the myriad problems of cellulosic ethanol in my book, <a href="" type="internal">Gusher of Lies</a>. But the hype over the fuel continues unabated. And it continues even though two of the most prominent cellulosic ethanol companies in the U.S., Aventine Renewable Energy Holdings and Verenium Corporation, are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. As noted last week by Robert Rapier on his R-Squared Energy blog, Verenium’s auditor, Ernst &amp; Young, recently expressed concern about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern and Aventine was recently delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.</p>
<p>On March 16, the accounting firm Ernst &amp; Young said Verenium may be forced to “curtail or cease operations” if it cannot raise additional capital. And in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company’s management said “We continue to experience losses from operations, and we may not be able to fund our operations and continue as a going concern.” Last week, the company’s stock was trading at $0.36 per share. It has traded for as much as $4.13 over the past year.</p>
<p>Aventine’s stock isn’t doing much better. Earlier this month, the company announced that it may seek bankruptcy protection if it cannot raise additional cash. Last Friday, Aventine’s shares were selling for $0.09. Over the past year, those shares have sold for as much as $7.86.</p>
<p>The looming collapse of the cellulosic ethanol producers deserves more than passing notice for this reason: cellulosic ethanol – which has never been produced in commercial quantities — has been relentlessly hyped over the past few years by a panoply of politicians and promoters.</p>
<p>The list of politicos includes Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, President Barack Obama, former vice president Al Gore, former Republican presidential nominee and U.S. Senator John McCain, former president Bill Clinton, former president George W. Bush and former CIA director James Woolsey.</p>
<p>There are plenty of others who deserve to take a bow for their role in promoting the delusion of cellulosic ethanol. Prominent among them: billionaire investor/technologist Vinod Khosla. In 2006, Khosla claimed that making motor fuel out of cellulose was “brain dead simple to do.” He went on, telling NBC’s Stone Phillips that cellulosic ethanol was “just around the corner” and that it would be a much bigger source of fuel than corn ethanol. Khosla also proclaimed that by making ethanol from plants “in less than five years, we can irreversibly start a path that can get us independent of petroleum.”</p>
<p>In 2007, Kholsa delivered a speech, “The Role of Venture Capital in Developing Cellulosic Ethanol,” during which he declared that cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels can be used to completely replace oil for transportation. More important, Khosla predicted that cellulosic ethanol would be cost competitive with corn ethanol production by 2009.</p>
<p>Two other promoters who have declared that cellulosic ethanol is just on the cusp of viability: Mars exploration advocate Robert Zubrin, and media darling Amory Lovins.</p>
<p>Of all the people on that list, Lovins has been the longest – and the most consistently wrong – cheerleader for cellulosic fuels. His boosterism began with his 1976 article in Foreign Affairs, a piece which arguably made his career in the energy field. In that article, called “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Lovins argued that American energy policy was all wrong. What America needed was “soft” energy resources to replace the “hard” ones (namely fossil fuels and nuclear power plants.) Lovins argued that the U.S. should be working to replace those sources with other, “greener” energy sources that were decentralized, small, and renewable. Regarding biofuels, he wrote that there are “exciting developments in the conversion of agricultural, forestry and urban wastes to methanol and other liquid and gaseous fuels now offer practical, economically interesting technologies sufficient to run an efficient U.S. transport sector.”</p>
<p>Lovins went on “Some bacterial and enzymatic routes under study look even more promising, but presently proved processes already offer sizable contributions without the inevitable climatic constraints of fossil-fuel combustion.” He even claims that given enough efficiency in automobiles, and a large enough bank of cellulosic ethanol distilleries, “the whole of the transport needs could be met by organic conversion.”</p>
<p>In other words, Lovins was making the exact same claim that Midgley made 45 years earlier: Given enough money – that’s always the catch isn’t it? – cellulosic ethanol would provide all of America’s transportation fuel needs.</p>
<p>The funny thing about Lovins is that between 1976 and 2004 — despite the fact that the U.S. still did not have a single commercial producer of cellulosic ethanol — he lost none of his skepticism. In his 2004 book Winning the Oil Endgame, Lovins again declared that advances in biotechnology will make cellulosic ethanol viable and that it “will strengthen rural America, boost net farm income by tens of billions of dollars a year, and create more than 750,000 new jobs.”</p>
<p>Lovins continued his unquestioning boosterism in 2006, when during testimony before the U.S. Senate, he claimed that “advanced biofuels (chiefly cellulosic ethanol)” could be produced for an average cost of just $18 per barrel.</p>
<p>Of course, Lovins isn’t the only one who keeps having visions of cellulosic grandeur. In his 2007 book, Winning Our Energy Independence, S. David Freeman, the former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, declared that to get away from our use of oil, “we must count on biofuels.” And a key part of Freeman’s biofuel recipe: cellulosic ethanol. Freeman claims that “there is huge potential to generate ethanol from the cellulose in organic wastes of agriculture and forestry.” He went on, saying that using some 368 million tons of “forest wastes” could provide about 18.4 billion gallons of ethanol per year, yielding “the equivalent of about 14 billion gallons gasoline [sic], or about 10 percent of current gasoline consumption.” Alas, Freeman fails to provide a single example of a company that has made a commercial success of cellulosic ethanol.</p>
<p>Cellulosic ethanol gained even more acolytes during the 2008 presidential campaign.</p>
<p>In May 2008, the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi touted the passage of the subsidy-packed $307 billion farm bill, declaring that it was an “investment in energy independence” because it providing “support for the transition to cellulosic ethanol.”</p>
<p>About the same time that Pelosi was touting the new farm bill, a spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol industry lobbying group in Washington, was claiming that corn ethanol was merely a starting point for other “advanced” biofuels. “The starch-based ethanol industry we have today, we’ll stick with it. It’s the foundation upon which we are building next-generation industries,” said Matt Hartwig, a spokesman for the lobby group.</p>
<p>In August 2008, Obama unveiled his “new” energy plan which called for “advances in biofuels, including cellulosic ethanol.”</p>
<p>After Obama’s election, the hype continued, particularly among Democrats on Capitol Hill. In January 2009, Tom Harkin, the Iowa senator who’s been a key promoter of the corn ethanol scam, told PBS: “ethanol doesn’t necessarily all have to come from corn. In the last farm bill, I put a lot of effort into supporting cellulose ethanol, and I think that’s what you’re going to see in the future…You’re going to see a lot of marginal land that’s not suitable for row crop production, because it’s hilly, or it’s not very productive for corn or soybeans, things like that, but it can be very productive for grasses, like miscanthus, or switchgrass, and you can use that to make the cellulose ethanol.”</p>
<p>Despite the hype, cellulosic ethanol is no closer to commercial viability than it was when Midgley first began talking about it back in 1921. Turning switchgrass, straw or corn cobs into sizable volumes of motor fuel is remarkably inefficient. It is devilishly difficult to break down cellulose into materials that can be fermented into alcohol. And even if that process were somehow made easier, its environmental effects have also been called into question. A September 2008 study on alternative automotive fuels done by Jan Kreider, a professor emeritus of engineering at the University of Colorado, and Peter S. Curtiss, a Boulder-based engineer, found that the production of cellulosic ethanol required about 42 times as much water and emitted about 50 percent more carbon dioxide than standard gasoline. Furthermore, Kreider and Curtiss found that, as with corn ethanol, the amount of energy that could be gained by producing cellulosic ethanol was negligible.</p>
<p>In a recent interview, Kreider told me that the key problem with turning cellulose into fuel is “that it’s such a dilute energy form. Coal and gasoline, dirty as they may be, are concentrated forms of energy. Hauling around biomass makes no sense.”</p>
<p>Indeed, the volumes of biomass needed to make any kind of dent in America’s overall energy needs are mind boggling. Let’s assume that the U.S. wants to replace 10 percent of its oil use with cellulosic ethanol. That’s a useful percentage as it’s approximately equal to the percentage of U.S. oil consumption that originates in the Persian Gulf. Let’s further assume that the U.S. decides that switchgrass is the most viable option for producing cellulosic ethanol.</p>
<p>Given those assumptions, here’s the math: The U.S. consumes about 21 million barrels of oil per day, or about 320 billion gallons of oil per year. New ethanol companies like Coskata and Syntec are claiming that they can produce about 100 gallons of ethanol per ton of biomass, which is also about the same yield that can be garnered by using grain as a feedstock.</p>
<p>At 100 gallons per ton, producing 32 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol would require the annual harvest and transport of 320 million tons of biomass. Assuming an average semi-trailer holds 15 tons of biomass, that volume of biomass would fill 21.44 million semi-trailer loads. If each trailer is a standard 48 feet long, the column of trailers (not including any trucks attached to them) holding that amount of switchgrass would stretch almost 195,000 miles. That’s long enough to encircle the earth nearly eight times. Put another way, those trailers would stretch about 80 percent of the distance from the earth to the moon.</p>
<p>But remember, ethanol’s energy density is only about two-thirds that of gasoline. So that 32 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol only contains the energy equivalent of about 21 billion gallons of gasoline. Thus, the U.S. would actually need to produce about 42.5 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol in order to supplant 10 percent of its oil needs. That would necessitate the production of 425 million tons of biomass, enough to fill about 28.3 million trailers. And that line of semi-trailer loads that stretch about 257,500 miles, plenty long enough to loop around the earth more than 10 times, or to stretch from the Earth to the Moon.</p>
<p>But let’s continue driving down this road for another mile or two. Sure, it’s possible to produce that much biomass, but how much land would be required to make it happen? Well, a report from Oak Ridge National Laboratory suggests that an acre of switchgrass can yield about 11.5 tons of biomass per year, and thus, in theory, 1,150 gallons of ethanol per year.</p>
<p>Therefore, to produce 425 million tons of biomass from switchgrass would require some 36.9 million acres to be planted in nothing but switchgrass. That’s equal to about 57,700 square miles, or an area just a little smaller than the state Oklahoma. For comparison, that 36.9 million acres is equal to about 8 percent of all the cropland now under cultivation in the U.S. Thus, to get 10 percent of its oil needs, the U.S. would need to plant an area equal to 8 percent of its cropland.</p>
<p>And none of that consider the fact that there’s no infrastructure available to plant, harvest, and transport the switchgrass or other biomass source to the biorefinery.</p>
<p>So just to review: There are still no companies producing cellulosic ethanol on a commercial basis. The most prominent companies that have tried to do so are circling the drain. Even if a company finds an efficient method of turning cellulose into ethanol, the logistics of moving the required volumes of biomass are almost surely a deal-killer.</p>
<p>And yet, Congress has mandated that it be done. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandates that a minimum of 16 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol be blended into the U.S. auto fuel mix by 2022.</p>
<p>Don’t hold your breath.</p>
<p>ROBERT BRYCE’s latest book is <a href="" type="internal">Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence”</a> which just came out in paperback.</p> | The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion | true | https://counterpunch.org/2009/03/30/the-cellulosic-ethanol-delusion/ | 2009-03-30 | 4left
| The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion
<p>For years, ethanol boosters have promised Americans that “cellulosic” ethanol lurks just ahead, right past the nearest service station. Once it becomes viable, this magic elixir — made from grass, wood chips, sawdust, or some other plant material — will deliver us from the evil clutches of foreign oil and make the U.S. “energy independent” while enriching farmers and strengthening small towns across the country.</p>
<p>Consider this claim: “From our cellulose waste products on the farm such as straw, corn-stalks, corn cobs and all similar sorts of material we throw away, we can get, by present known methods, enough alcohol to run our automotive equipment in the United States.”</p>
<p>That sounds like something you’ve heard recently, right? Well, fasten your seatbelt because that claim was made way back in 1921. That’s when American inventor Thomas Midgley proclaimed the wonders of cellulosic ethanol to the Society of Automotive Engineers in Indianapolis. And while Midgley was excited about the prospect of cellulosic ethanol, he admitted that there was a significant hurdle to his concept: producing the fuel would cost about $2 per gallon. That’s about $20 per gallon in current money.</p>
<p>Alas, what’s old is new again.</p>
<p>I wrote about the myriad problems of cellulosic ethanol in my book, <a href="" type="internal">Gusher of Lies</a>. But the hype over the fuel continues unabated. And it continues even though two of the most prominent cellulosic ethanol companies in the U.S., Aventine Renewable Energy Holdings and Verenium Corporation, are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. As noted last week by Robert Rapier on his R-Squared Energy blog, Verenium’s auditor, Ernst &amp; Young, recently expressed concern about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern and Aventine was recently delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.</p>
<p>On March 16, the accounting firm Ernst &amp; Young said Verenium may be forced to “curtail or cease operations” if it cannot raise additional capital. And in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company’s management said “We continue to experience losses from operations, and we may not be able to fund our operations and continue as a going concern.” Last week, the company’s stock was trading at $0.36 per share. It has traded for as much as $4.13 over the past year.</p>
<p>Aventine’s stock isn’t doing much better. Earlier this month, the company announced that it may seek bankruptcy protection if it cannot raise additional cash. Last Friday, Aventine’s shares were selling for $0.09. Over the past year, those shares have sold for as much as $7.86.</p>
<p>The looming collapse of the cellulosic ethanol producers deserves more than passing notice for this reason: cellulosic ethanol – which has never been produced in commercial quantities — has been relentlessly hyped over the past few years by a panoply of politicians and promoters.</p>
<p>The list of politicos includes Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, President Barack Obama, former vice president Al Gore, former Republican presidential nominee and U.S. Senator John McCain, former president Bill Clinton, former president George W. Bush and former CIA director James Woolsey.</p>
<p>There are plenty of others who deserve to take a bow for their role in promoting the delusion of cellulosic ethanol. Prominent among them: billionaire investor/technologist Vinod Khosla. In 2006, Khosla claimed that making motor fuel out of cellulose was “brain dead simple to do.” He went on, telling NBC’s Stone Phillips that cellulosic ethanol was “just around the corner” and that it would be a much bigger source of fuel than corn ethanol. Khosla also proclaimed that by making ethanol from plants “in less than five years, we can irreversibly start a path that can get us independent of petroleum.”</p>
<p>In 2007, Kholsa delivered a speech, “The Role of Venture Capital in Developing Cellulosic Ethanol,” during which he declared that cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels can be used to completely replace oil for transportation. More important, Khosla predicted that cellulosic ethanol would be cost competitive with corn ethanol production by 2009.</p>
<p>Two other promoters who have declared that cellulosic ethanol is just on the cusp of viability: Mars exploration advocate Robert Zubrin, and media darling Amory Lovins.</p>
<p>Of all the people on that list, Lovins has been the longest – and the most consistently wrong – cheerleader for cellulosic fuels. His boosterism began with his 1976 article in Foreign Affairs, a piece which arguably made his career in the energy field. In that article, called “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Lovins argued that American energy policy was all wrong. What America needed was “soft” energy resources to replace the “hard” ones (namely fossil fuels and nuclear power plants.) Lovins argued that the U.S. should be working to replace those sources with other, “greener” energy sources that were decentralized, small, and renewable. Regarding biofuels, he wrote that there are “exciting developments in the conversion of agricultural, forestry and urban wastes to methanol and other liquid and gaseous fuels now offer practical, economically interesting technologies sufficient to run an efficient U.S. transport sector.”</p>
<p>Lovins went on “Some bacterial and enzymatic routes under study look even more promising, but presently proved processes already offer sizable contributions without the inevitable climatic constraints of fossil-fuel combustion.” He even claims that given enough efficiency in automobiles, and a large enough bank of cellulosic ethanol distilleries, “the whole of the transport needs could be met by organic conversion.”</p>
<p>In other words, Lovins was making the exact same claim that Midgley made 45 years earlier: Given enough money – that’s always the catch isn’t it? – cellulosic ethanol would provide all of America’s transportation fuel needs.</p>
<p>The funny thing about Lovins is that between 1976 and 2004 — despite the fact that the U.S. still did not have a single commercial producer of cellulosic ethanol — he lost none of his skepticism. In his 2004 book Winning the Oil Endgame, Lovins again declared that advances in biotechnology will make cellulosic ethanol viable and that it “will strengthen rural America, boost net farm income by tens of billions of dollars a year, and create more than 750,000 new jobs.”</p>
<p>Lovins continued his unquestioning boosterism in 2006, when during testimony before the U.S. Senate, he claimed that “advanced biofuels (chiefly cellulosic ethanol)” could be produced for an average cost of just $18 per barrel.</p>
<p>Of course, Lovins isn’t the only one who keeps having visions of cellulosic grandeur. In his 2007 book, Winning Our Energy Independence, S. David Freeman, the former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, declared that to get away from our use of oil, “we must count on biofuels.” And a key part of Freeman’s biofuel recipe: cellulosic ethanol. Freeman claims that “there is huge potential to generate ethanol from the cellulose in organic wastes of agriculture and forestry.” He went on, saying that using some 368 million tons of “forest wastes” could provide about 18.4 billion gallons of ethanol per year, yielding “the equivalent of about 14 billion gallons gasoline [sic], or about 10 percent of current gasoline consumption.” Alas, Freeman fails to provide a single example of a company that has made a commercial success of cellulosic ethanol.</p>
<p>Cellulosic ethanol gained even more acolytes during the 2008 presidential campaign.</p>
<p>In May 2008, the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi touted the passage of the subsidy-packed $307 billion farm bill, declaring that it was an “investment in energy independence” because it providing “support for the transition to cellulosic ethanol.”</p>
<p>About the same time that Pelosi was touting the new farm bill, a spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol industry lobbying group in Washington, was claiming that corn ethanol was merely a starting point for other “advanced” biofuels. “The starch-based ethanol industry we have today, we’ll stick with it. It’s the foundation upon which we are building next-generation industries,” said Matt Hartwig, a spokesman for the lobby group.</p>
<p>In August 2008, Obama unveiled his “new” energy plan which called for “advances in biofuels, including cellulosic ethanol.”</p>
<p>After Obama’s election, the hype continued, particularly among Democrats on Capitol Hill. In January 2009, Tom Harkin, the Iowa senator who’s been a key promoter of the corn ethanol scam, told PBS: “ethanol doesn’t necessarily all have to come from corn. In the last farm bill, I put a lot of effort into supporting cellulose ethanol, and I think that’s what you’re going to see in the future…You’re going to see a lot of marginal land that’s not suitable for row crop production, because it’s hilly, or it’s not very productive for corn or soybeans, things like that, but it can be very productive for grasses, like miscanthus, or switchgrass, and you can use that to make the cellulose ethanol.”</p>
<p>Despite the hype, cellulosic ethanol is no closer to commercial viability than it was when Midgley first began talking about it back in 1921. Turning switchgrass, straw or corn cobs into sizable volumes of motor fuel is remarkably inefficient. It is devilishly difficult to break down cellulose into materials that can be fermented into alcohol. And even if that process were somehow made easier, its environmental effects have also been called into question. A September 2008 study on alternative automotive fuels done by Jan Kreider, a professor emeritus of engineering at the University of Colorado, and Peter S. Curtiss, a Boulder-based engineer, found that the production of cellulosic ethanol required about 42 times as much water and emitted about 50 percent more carbon dioxide than standard gasoline. Furthermore, Kreider and Curtiss found that, as with corn ethanol, the amount of energy that could be gained by producing cellulosic ethanol was negligible.</p>
<p>In a recent interview, Kreider told me that the key problem with turning cellulose into fuel is “that it’s such a dilute energy form. Coal and gasoline, dirty as they may be, are concentrated forms of energy. Hauling around biomass makes no sense.”</p>
<p>Indeed, the volumes of biomass needed to make any kind of dent in America’s overall energy needs are mind boggling. Let’s assume that the U.S. wants to replace 10 percent of its oil use with cellulosic ethanol. That’s a useful percentage as it’s approximately equal to the percentage of U.S. oil consumption that originates in the Persian Gulf. Let’s further assume that the U.S. decides that switchgrass is the most viable option for producing cellulosic ethanol.</p>
<p>Given those assumptions, here’s the math: The U.S. consumes about 21 million barrels of oil per day, or about 320 billion gallons of oil per year. New ethanol companies like Coskata and Syntec are claiming that they can produce about 100 gallons of ethanol per ton of biomass, which is also about the same yield that can be garnered by using grain as a feedstock.</p>
<p>At 100 gallons per ton, producing 32 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol would require the annual harvest and transport of 320 million tons of biomass. Assuming an average semi-trailer holds 15 tons of biomass, that volume of biomass would fill 21.44 million semi-trailer loads. If each trailer is a standard 48 feet long, the column of trailers (not including any trucks attached to them) holding that amount of switchgrass would stretch almost 195,000 miles. That’s long enough to encircle the earth nearly eight times. Put another way, those trailers would stretch about 80 percent of the distance from the earth to the moon.</p>
<p>But remember, ethanol’s energy density is only about two-thirds that of gasoline. So that 32 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol only contains the energy equivalent of about 21 billion gallons of gasoline. Thus, the U.S. would actually need to produce about 42.5 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol in order to supplant 10 percent of its oil needs. That would necessitate the production of 425 million tons of biomass, enough to fill about 28.3 million trailers. And that line of semi-trailer loads that stretch about 257,500 miles, plenty long enough to loop around the earth more than 10 times, or to stretch from the Earth to the Moon.</p>
<p>But let’s continue driving down this road for another mile or two. Sure, it’s possible to produce that much biomass, but how much land would be required to make it happen? Well, a report from Oak Ridge National Laboratory suggests that an acre of switchgrass can yield about 11.5 tons of biomass per year, and thus, in theory, 1,150 gallons of ethanol per year.</p>
<p>Therefore, to produce 425 million tons of biomass from switchgrass would require some 36.9 million acres to be planted in nothing but switchgrass. That’s equal to about 57,700 square miles, or an area just a little smaller than the state Oklahoma. For comparison, that 36.9 million acres is equal to about 8 percent of all the cropland now under cultivation in the U.S. Thus, to get 10 percent of its oil needs, the U.S. would need to plant an area equal to 8 percent of its cropland.</p>
<p>And none of that consider the fact that there’s no infrastructure available to plant, harvest, and transport the switchgrass or other biomass source to the biorefinery.</p>
<p>So just to review: There are still no companies producing cellulosic ethanol on a commercial basis. The most prominent companies that have tried to do so are circling the drain. Even if a company finds an efficient method of turning cellulose into ethanol, the logistics of moving the required volumes of biomass are almost surely a deal-killer.</p>
<p>And yet, Congress has mandated that it be done. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandates that a minimum of 16 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol be blended into the U.S. auto fuel mix by 2022.</p>
<p>Don’t hold your breath.</p>
<p>ROBERT BRYCE’s latest book is <a href="" type="internal">Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence”</a> which just came out in paperback.</p> | 835 |
<p />
<p>As India's biggest corporate showdown heads from the boardroom to the courtroom and brings in a Who's Who of the country's legal profession, ousted Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry vows a multi-layered battle for governance reforms at the $100 billion conglomerate, people close to him say.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Mistry, who was dismissed from his post in October and has since left boards at other Tata group companies, will step up his legal fight with patriarch Ratan Tata and others and make his case in any regulatory investigations into the Tata group, three people familiar with Mistry's strategy said.</p>
<p>Mistry has so far broadly laid out three sets of allegations: breaches of governance within the Tata group; misconduct at Tata ventures; and the illegality of his ouster.</p>
<p>"If all of those are put together, it paints a picture - of mis-governance and misappropriation," said one of those people. "I think there will be different elements, which will all be looked at in different forums."</p>
<p>Tata Sons, the holding company with stakes in listed firms operating in a range of industries, denies Mistry's allegations and says it has followed the highest standards of corporate governance.</p>
<p>Two lawyers representing Tata said the group is ready to defend itself and will challenge the merits of any legal action Mistry takes.</p>
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<p>In his first salvo, Mistry last week filed a petition at the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), a quasi-judicial body that deals with corporate grievances in India, alleging mismanagement and shareholder oppression by Tata Sons, and seeking the replacement of the group's board of directors.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, Tata hit back, filing a legal notice against Mistry, accusing him of breaching confidentiality rules, and alleging he shared "confidential data, business strategies, financial information" related to Tata Sons.</p>
<p>BURDEN OF PROOF</p>
<p>Tata legal advisers say the burden of proof is on Mistry, who will need to prove his assertions that decisions taken by Tata Sons were not in the interest of all shareholders, and it mismanaged group companies' affairs.</p>
<p>"He will first have to substantiate that something wrong happened and that there were actions intended to oppress him," Tata group counsel Mohan Parasaran said before the Tata filing.</p>
<p>Parasaran said Mistry would need to prove that certain decisions taken by Tata Sons - such as the $12 billion purchase of steelmaker Corus' assets in Europe or the decision to continue making the loss-making Nano car - were oppressive to the interest of minority shareholders in Tata Steel and Tata Motors .</p>
<p>"Only proving that these were bad decisions does not amount to anything," Parasaran said. "Broadly, we have a strong legal case."</p>
<p>Responding to Mistry's petition, the NCLT stopped short of granting his request to prevent the Tata Group from issuing new securities that would dilute his stakeholding. It will hear the petition again on Jan. 31.</p>
<p>Lawyers not involved in the proceedings say the legal battle could stretch from the Bombay High Court to the Securities Appellate Tribunal, and even to the Indian Supreme Court.</p>
<p>Corporate grievance cases in India can drag on. A dispute between the companies of billionaire brothers Mukesh and Anil Ambani over natural gas supplies lasted for two years and went all the way up to the Supreme Court.</p>
<p>Both the Tata and Mistry camps have hired some of India's top legal brains.</p>
<p>"The stage seems set for the next round where courts and regulators will be involved," said Vaneesa Agrawal, a securities lawyer at Suvan Law Advisors.</p>
<p>Mistry alleges misconduct in the way some Tata companies awarded contracts, and fraud at one of its aviation ventures.</p>
<p>He also alleges some trustees of Tata Trusts - charitable trusts that own two-thirds of Tata Sons - undermined the boards of Tata Sons and group companies by demanding a say in key internal matters - in breach of securities rules.</p>
<p>"The make or break will be whether Mistry can prove that the Trusts used their powers in the interest of their personal whims," said a Mumbai-based lawyer, who asked not to be named.</p>
<p>(Reporting by Aditi Shah and Promit Mukherjee, with additional reporting by Abhirup Roy and Euan Rocha in Mumbai and Douglas Busvine in New Delhi; Editing by Ian Geoghegan)</p> | Battle lines forming for Tata legal showdown | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2016/12/27/battle-lines-forming-for-tata-legal-showdown.html | 2016-12-27 | 0right
| Battle lines forming for Tata legal showdown
<p />
<p>As India's biggest corporate showdown heads from the boardroom to the courtroom and brings in a Who's Who of the country's legal profession, ousted Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry vows a multi-layered battle for governance reforms at the $100 billion conglomerate, people close to him say.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Mistry, who was dismissed from his post in October and has since left boards at other Tata group companies, will step up his legal fight with patriarch Ratan Tata and others and make his case in any regulatory investigations into the Tata group, three people familiar with Mistry's strategy said.</p>
<p>Mistry has so far broadly laid out three sets of allegations: breaches of governance within the Tata group; misconduct at Tata ventures; and the illegality of his ouster.</p>
<p>"If all of those are put together, it paints a picture - of mis-governance and misappropriation," said one of those people. "I think there will be different elements, which will all be looked at in different forums."</p>
<p>Tata Sons, the holding company with stakes in listed firms operating in a range of industries, denies Mistry's allegations and says it has followed the highest standards of corporate governance.</p>
<p>Two lawyers representing Tata said the group is ready to defend itself and will challenge the merits of any legal action Mistry takes.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>In his first salvo, Mistry last week filed a petition at the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), a quasi-judicial body that deals with corporate grievances in India, alleging mismanagement and shareholder oppression by Tata Sons, and seeking the replacement of the group's board of directors.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, Tata hit back, filing a legal notice against Mistry, accusing him of breaching confidentiality rules, and alleging he shared "confidential data, business strategies, financial information" related to Tata Sons.</p>
<p>BURDEN OF PROOF</p>
<p>Tata legal advisers say the burden of proof is on Mistry, who will need to prove his assertions that decisions taken by Tata Sons were not in the interest of all shareholders, and it mismanaged group companies' affairs.</p>
<p>"He will first have to substantiate that something wrong happened and that there were actions intended to oppress him," Tata group counsel Mohan Parasaran said before the Tata filing.</p>
<p>Parasaran said Mistry would need to prove that certain decisions taken by Tata Sons - such as the $12 billion purchase of steelmaker Corus' assets in Europe or the decision to continue making the loss-making Nano car - were oppressive to the interest of minority shareholders in Tata Steel and Tata Motors .</p>
<p>"Only proving that these were bad decisions does not amount to anything," Parasaran said. "Broadly, we have a strong legal case."</p>
<p>Responding to Mistry's petition, the NCLT stopped short of granting his request to prevent the Tata Group from issuing new securities that would dilute his stakeholding. It will hear the petition again on Jan. 31.</p>
<p>Lawyers not involved in the proceedings say the legal battle could stretch from the Bombay High Court to the Securities Appellate Tribunal, and even to the Indian Supreme Court.</p>
<p>Corporate grievance cases in India can drag on. A dispute between the companies of billionaire brothers Mukesh and Anil Ambani over natural gas supplies lasted for two years and went all the way up to the Supreme Court.</p>
<p>Both the Tata and Mistry camps have hired some of India's top legal brains.</p>
<p>"The stage seems set for the next round where courts and regulators will be involved," said Vaneesa Agrawal, a securities lawyer at Suvan Law Advisors.</p>
<p>Mistry alleges misconduct in the way some Tata companies awarded contracts, and fraud at one of its aviation ventures.</p>
<p>He also alleges some trustees of Tata Trusts - charitable trusts that own two-thirds of Tata Sons - undermined the boards of Tata Sons and group companies by demanding a say in key internal matters - in breach of securities rules.</p>
<p>"The make or break will be whether Mistry can prove that the Trusts used their powers in the interest of their personal whims," said a Mumbai-based lawyer, who asked not to be named.</p>
<p>(Reporting by Aditi Shah and Promit Mukherjee, with additional reporting by Abhirup Roy and Euan Rocha in Mumbai and Douglas Busvine in New Delhi; Editing by Ian Geoghegan)</p> | 836 |
<p />
<p>Shares in European banks fell on Wednesday after Donald Trump's election victory, reflecting fears of difficulties in raising capital and uncertainty over U.S. legal cases hanging over Deutsche Bank and other regional lenders.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Shares in Deutsche and Italy's UniCredit shed around 3 percent each on worries that the election result could smother investor appetite to support crucial fundraising plans at both banks in the coming months.</p>
<p>Deutsche is also in the midst of negotiations with the U.S. Department of Justice over a settlement for its alleged mis-selling of toxic mortgage securities in the run up to the financial crisis.</p>
<p>Trump's victory will cause more doubt over how long it will take to resolve those negotiations, which are being conducted as part of an initiative started by current President Barack Obama.</p>
<p>Spain's BBVA saw its stock slump by 6.4 percent in early trading, as shareholders fretted about its interests in Mexico and the potential economic damage caused by a record fall in the peso versus the U.S. dollar, as well as the border wall Trump has vowed to build.</p>
<p>Europe's largest lender HSBC fell 2.2 percent, as analysts raised questions about its ability to support its long-term dividend plans by redirecting billions of dollars from its U.S. unit to faster-growing businesses in Europe and Asia.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Shares in Asian-focused lender Standard Chartered fell 2.2 percent, while Barclays - which recently pledged to pursue a transatlantic strategy focused on the U.S. and Britain - dropped 1.7 percent.</p>
<p>Celebrity property magnate Trump paved his way to the White House with a series of surprise wins in key states like Florida and Ohio, rattling world markets that had expected Democrat Hillary Clinton to defeat the political outsider in Tuesday's U.S. election.</p>
<p>TURBULENT YEAR</p>
<p>The result caps a turbulent year for Europe's banking stocks, who have seen their earnings power crushed by record low interest rates and fickle demand for loans, mortgages and investment products among businesses and savers.</p>
<p>Any big shock to the U.S. economy could lead to a sharp decline in European bank earnings through higher risk.</p>
<p>Analysts at Bernstein said in a note on Wednesday that the election result would prevent a Federal Reserve rate rise "anytime soon", hurting HSBC and StanChart the most.</p>
<p>"It should also result in hits to investment banking earnings globally which are anyway going through rough times," the note continued, flagging particular pain for Barclays.</p>
<p>British state-backed banks Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group suffered falls of 1.5 percent and 1.9 percent respectively.</p>
<p>Investment managers running hundreds of billions of pounds in institutional and private wealth fared little better in shellshocked markets reminiscent of the morning after Britain's vote to quit the European Union in June.</p>
<p>Money managers Schroders and Aberdeen Asset Management saw stock prices fall by 1 percent and 1.5 percent respectively, while shares in emerging markets specialist Ashmore slid 1.8 percent.</p>
<p>Europe's largest listed hedge fund firm Man Group was close to bucking the downward trend, with shares flat by 0405 ET.</p>
<p>"The extent of further fallout over the trading day today will depend to some degree on the rhetoric from Trump," Derek Halpenny, European Head of Global Markets Research at MUFG said.</p>
<p>(Additional reporting by Lawrence White, Simon Jessop and Ritvik Carvalho, editing by Rachel Armstrong and Giles Elgood)</p> | Deutsche among fallers as Trump win clouds legal, investment outlook | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/11/09/deutsche-among-fallers-as-trump-win-clouds-legal-investment-outlook.html | 2016-11-09 | 0right
| Deutsche among fallers as Trump win clouds legal, investment outlook
<p />
<p>Shares in European banks fell on Wednesday after Donald Trump's election victory, reflecting fears of difficulties in raising capital and uncertainty over U.S. legal cases hanging over Deutsche Bank and other regional lenders.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Shares in Deutsche and Italy's UniCredit shed around 3 percent each on worries that the election result could smother investor appetite to support crucial fundraising plans at both banks in the coming months.</p>
<p>Deutsche is also in the midst of negotiations with the U.S. Department of Justice over a settlement for its alleged mis-selling of toxic mortgage securities in the run up to the financial crisis.</p>
<p>Trump's victory will cause more doubt over how long it will take to resolve those negotiations, which are being conducted as part of an initiative started by current President Barack Obama.</p>
<p>Spain's BBVA saw its stock slump by 6.4 percent in early trading, as shareholders fretted about its interests in Mexico and the potential economic damage caused by a record fall in the peso versus the U.S. dollar, as well as the border wall Trump has vowed to build.</p>
<p>Europe's largest lender HSBC fell 2.2 percent, as analysts raised questions about its ability to support its long-term dividend plans by redirecting billions of dollars from its U.S. unit to faster-growing businesses in Europe and Asia.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Shares in Asian-focused lender Standard Chartered fell 2.2 percent, while Barclays - which recently pledged to pursue a transatlantic strategy focused on the U.S. and Britain - dropped 1.7 percent.</p>
<p>Celebrity property magnate Trump paved his way to the White House with a series of surprise wins in key states like Florida and Ohio, rattling world markets that had expected Democrat Hillary Clinton to defeat the political outsider in Tuesday's U.S. election.</p>
<p>TURBULENT YEAR</p>
<p>The result caps a turbulent year for Europe's banking stocks, who have seen their earnings power crushed by record low interest rates and fickle demand for loans, mortgages and investment products among businesses and savers.</p>
<p>Any big shock to the U.S. economy could lead to a sharp decline in European bank earnings through higher risk.</p>
<p>Analysts at Bernstein said in a note on Wednesday that the election result would prevent a Federal Reserve rate rise "anytime soon", hurting HSBC and StanChart the most.</p>
<p>"It should also result in hits to investment banking earnings globally which are anyway going through rough times," the note continued, flagging particular pain for Barclays.</p>
<p>British state-backed banks Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group suffered falls of 1.5 percent and 1.9 percent respectively.</p>
<p>Investment managers running hundreds of billions of pounds in institutional and private wealth fared little better in shellshocked markets reminiscent of the morning after Britain's vote to quit the European Union in June.</p>
<p>Money managers Schroders and Aberdeen Asset Management saw stock prices fall by 1 percent and 1.5 percent respectively, while shares in emerging markets specialist Ashmore slid 1.8 percent.</p>
<p>Europe's largest listed hedge fund firm Man Group was close to bucking the downward trend, with shares flat by 0405 ET.</p>
<p>"The extent of further fallout over the trading day today will depend to some degree on the rhetoric from Trump," Derek Halpenny, European Head of Global Markets Research at MUFG said.</p>
<p>(Additional reporting by Lawrence White, Simon Jessop and Ritvik Carvalho, editing by Rachel Armstrong and Giles Elgood)</p> | 837 |
<p />
<p>Image Source: Getty Images</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>What:Shares of Merrimack Pharmaceuticals have fallen by close to 28% this year, according to data from <a href="http://www.spcapitaliq.com/" type="external">S&amp;P Global Market Intelligence Opens a New Window.</a>. Even apart from the recent sell-off stemming from the Brexit news, Merrimack's shares have struggled to shrug off the broader downturn among biotech and biopharma stocks that's hit cash flow negative companies like Merrimack particularly hard.</p>
<p><a href="http://ycharts.com/companies/MACK" type="external">MACK</a> data by <a href="http://ycharts.com" type="external">YCharts Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>So what:Merrimack's shares have crumbled despite the commercial launch of its advanced pancreatic cancer drugOnivyde that some industry experts project could be a blockbuster. Part of the problem has been the drug slightly missing consensus sales estimates in the first quarter, but that's probably not enough to explain the stock's dramatic slide.</p>
<p>Now what: The good news is that the Street has remained overtly bullish onOnivyde's nascent commercial launch.Specifically, analysts are forecasting Merrimack's revenues to climb by over 84% this year, and by another 40% next year. Put simply, Merrimack's stock is arguably grossly undervalued right now if these top-line estimates hold true going forward.</p>
<p>Then again, this biotech still won't break out of the red any time soon due to its costly clinical activities, and there's no telling when the market's mood will change. Until then, cash flow negative operations such as Merrimack are likely to continue to push lower, and investors might be best served keeping a close watch on this biotech from the safety of the sidelines for the time being.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>The article <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/27/heres-why-merrimack-pharmaceuticals-stock-has-been.aspx" type="external">Here's Why Merrimack Pharmaceuticals' Stock Has Been Getting Crushed in 2016 Opens a New Window.</a> originally appeared on Fool.com.</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/gbudwell/info.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">George Budwell Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. 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> | Here's Why Merrimack Pharmaceuticals' Stock Has Been Getting Crushed in 2016 | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/06/27/here-why-merrimack-pharmaceuticals-stock-has-been-getting-crushed-in-2016.html | 2016-06-27 | 0right
| Here's Why Merrimack Pharmaceuticals' Stock Has Been Getting Crushed in 2016
<p />
<p>Image Source: Getty Images</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>What:Shares of Merrimack Pharmaceuticals have fallen by close to 28% this year, according to data from <a href="http://www.spcapitaliq.com/" type="external">S&amp;P Global Market Intelligence Opens a New Window.</a>. Even apart from the recent sell-off stemming from the Brexit news, Merrimack's shares have struggled to shrug off the broader downturn among biotech and biopharma stocks that's hit cash flow negative companies like Merrimack particularly hard.</p>
<p><a href="http://ycharts.com/companies/MACK" type="external">MACK</a> data by <a href="http://ycharts.com" type="external">YCharts Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>So what:Merrimack's shares have crumbled despite the commercial launch of its advanced pancreatic cancer drugOnivyde that some industry experts project could be a blockbuster. Part of the problem has been the drug slightly missing consensus sales estimates in the first quarter, but that's probably not enough to explain the stock's dramatic slide.</p>
<p>Now what: The good news is that the Street has remained overtly bullish onOnivyde's nascent commercial launch.Specifically, analysts are forecasting Merrimack's revenues to climb by over 84% this year, and by another 40% next year. Put simply, Merrimack's stock is arguably grossly undervalued right now if these top-line estimates hold true going forward.</p>
<p>Then again, this biotech still won't break out of the red any time soon due to its costly clinical activities, and there's no telling when the market's mood will change. Until then, cash flow negative operations such as Merrimack are likely to continue to push lower, and investors might be best served keeping a close watch on this biotech from the safety of the sidelines for the time being.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>The article <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/27/heres-why-merrimack-pharmaceuticals-stock-has-been.aspx" type="external">Here's Why Merrimack Pharmaceuticals' Stock Has Been Getting Crushed in 2016 Opens a New Window.</a> originally appeared on Fool.com.</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/gbudwell/info.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">George Budwell Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. 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> | 838 |
<p>NEW YORK (AP) — Dr. Roger Crystal’s company was struggling to find new uses for an old drug that reverses overdoses. Then the opioid epidemic hit.</p>
<p>Naloxone had first gone on sale in 1971 but was injected with a syringe. Crystal and his colleagues came up with a naloxone nasal spray, intended to be more appealing than prefilled injectors or the other naloxone alternatives.</p>
<p>Crystal’s Opiant Pharmaceuticals Inc. partnered with Adapt Pharma to market the spray version. Adapt revived the brand name Narcan, which had fallen out of use after naloxone went generic.</p>
<p>The spray went on sale in the U.S. last year. It costs $125 for a twin-pack; police and other groups pay $75.</p>
<p>Crystal talked to The Associated Press about the development of Narcan. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Q: How did you come to develop Narcan?</p>
<p>A: The company started back in 2009. We were using naloxone nasally for binge-eating disorder. The first years of the company were all about that. We had some encouraging data but it was going to be difficult to establish a market in binge-eating disorder. At the time, the opioid crisis in the United States became apparent. In 2012, we thought ‘Let’s pivot.’ In this area of overdose, we really felt we could do something.</p>
<p>Q: Can you break down the market?</p>
<p>A: Not many people want to inject other people. Having a simple to use, reliable, FDA-approved nasal spray was extremely desirable. Once you have a nasal spray, you open up a huge patient population and bystander population who are now willing and able to use it.</p>
<p>We reported for the first half of 2017, net sales were at least $25 million. It’s fair to say that was a huge rise from 2016.</p>
<p>Q: You have conflicting pressures — from the public and stockholders. Is the price going to rise?</p>
<p>A: Not that I’m aware of, no. In a way I’m divorced from that because Adapt has entire control of pricing. But if you try and take the price to high levels, the margins will improve but there will be less customers as a result. You want people to keep coming back. You want them to be committed to using Narcan nasal spray. It’s encouraging that on Twitter you can see police officers in certain counties holding up Narcan like a trophy. They’re proud. They’re empowered. They can do something about an overdose rather than arriving to a cold body.</p>
<p>Q: Despite the spray’s availability, drug deaths rose last year, and many involved opioids.</p>
<p>A: When there is naloxone available it does make a difference. But there’s low penetration in the overall market. This is a problem that has grown over more than a decade. It’s not going to stop overnight.</p>
<p>NEW YORK (AP) — Dr. Roger Crystal’s company was struggling to find new uses for an old drug that reverses overdoses. Then the opioid epidemic hit.</p>
<p>Naloxone had first gone on sale in 1971 but was injected with a syringe. Crystal and his colleagues came up with a naloxone nasal spray, intended to be more appealing than prefilled injectors or the other naloxone alternatives.</p>
<p>Crystal’s Opiant Pharmaceuticals Inc. partnered with Adapt Pharma to market the spray version. Adapt revived the brand name Narcan, which had fallen out of use after naloxone went generic.</p>
<p>The spray went on sale in the U.S. last year. It costs $125 for a twin-pack; police and other groups pay $75.</p>
<p>Crystal talked to The Associated Press about the development of Narcan. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Q: How did you come to develop Narcan?</p>
<p>A: The company started back in 2009. We were using naloxone nasally for binge-eating disorder. The first years of the company were all about that. We had some encouraging data but it was going to be difficult to establish a market in binge-eating disorder. At the time, the opioid crisis in the United States became apparent. In 2012, we thought ‘Let’s pivot.’ In this area of overdose, we really felt we could do something.</p>
<p>Q: Can you break down the market?</p>
<p>A: Not many people want to inject other people. Having a simple to use, reliable, FDA-approved nasal spray was extremely desirable. Once you have a nasal spray, you open up a huge patient population and bystander population who are now willing and able to use it.</p>
<p>We reported for the first half of 2017, net sales were at least $25 million. It’s fair to say that was a huge rise from 2016.</p>
<p>Q: You have conflicting pressures — from the public and stockholders. Is the price going to rise?</p>
<p>A: Not that I’m aware of, no. In a way I’m divorced from that because Adapt has entire control of pricing. But if you try and take the price to high levels, the margins will improve but there will be less customers as a result. You want people to keep coming back. You want them to be committed to using Narcan nasal spray. It’s encouraging that on Twitter you can see police officers in certain counties holding up Narcan like a trophy. They’re proud. They’re empowered. They can do something about an overdose rather than arriving to a cold body.</p>
<p>Q: Despite the spray’s availability, drug deaths rose last year, and many involved opioids.</p>
<p>A: When there is naloxone available it does make a difference. But there’s low penetration in the overall market. This is a problem that has grown over more than a decade. It’s not going to stop overnight.</p> | Insider Q&A: Narcan exec talks merits of spray for overdoses | false | https://apnews.com/6b0970aa9f51435fa1a473a959043ce1 | 2017-12-31 | 2least
| Insider Q&A: Narcan exec talks merits of spray for overdoses
<p>NEW YORK (AP) — Dr. Roger Crystal’s company was struggling to find new uses for an old drug that reverses overdoses. Then the opioid epidemic hit.</p>
<p>Naloxone had first gone on sale in 1971 but was injected with a syringe. Crystal and his colleagues came up with a naloxone nasal spray, intended to be more appealing than prefilled injectors or the other naloxone alternatives.</p>
<p>Crystal’s Opiant Pharmaceuticals Inc. partnered with Adapt Pharma to market the spray version. Adapt revived the brand name Narcan, which had fallen out of use after naloxone went generic.</p>
<p>The spray went on sale in the U.S. last year. It costs $125 for a twin-pack; police and other groups pay $75.</p>
<p>Crystal talked to The Associated Press about the development of Narcan. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Q: How did you come to develop Narcan?</p>
<p>A: The company started back in 2009. We were using naloxone nasally for binge-eating disorder. The first years of the company were all about that. We had some encouraging data but it was going to be difficult to establish a market in binge-eating disorder. At the time, the opioid crisis in the United States became apparent. In 2012, we thought ‘Let’s pivot.’ In this area of overdose, we really felt we could do something.</p>
<p>Q: Can you break down the market?</p>
<p>A: Not many people want to inject other people. Having a simple to use, reliable, FDA-approved nasal spray was extremely desirable. Once you have a nasal spray, you open up a huge patient population and bystander population who are now willing and able to use it.</p>
<p>We reported for the first half of 2017, net sales were at least $25 million. It’s fair to say that was a huge rise from 2016.</p>
<p>Q: You have conflicting pressures — from the public and stockholders. Is the price going to rise?</p>
<p>A: Not that I’m aware of, no. In a way I’m divorced from that because Adapt has entire control of pricing. But if you try and take the price to high levels, the margins will improve but there will be less customers as a result. You want people to keep coming back. You want them to be committed to using Narcan nasal spray. It’s encouraging that on Twitter you can see police officers in certain counties holding up Narcan like a trophy. They’re proud. They’re empowered. They can do something about an overdose rather than arriving to a cold body.</p>
<p>Q: Despite the spray’s availability, drug deaths rose last year, and many involved opioids.</p>
<p>A: When there is naloxone available it does make a difference. But there’s low penetration in the overall market. This is a problem that has grown over more than a decade. It’s not going to stop overnight.</p>
<p>NEW YORK (AP) — Dr. Roger Crystal’s company was struggling to find new uses for an old drug that reverses overdoses. Then the opioid epidemic hit.</p>
<p>Naloxone had first gone on sale in 1971 but was injected with a syringe. Crystal and his colleagues came up with a naloxone nasal spray, intended to be more appealing than prefilled injectors or the other naloxone alternatives.</p>
<p>Crystal’s Opiant Pharmaceuticals Inc. partnered with Adapt Pharma to market the spray version. Adapt revived the brand name Narcan, which had fallen out of use after naloxone went generic.</p>
<p>The spray went on sale in the U.S. last year. It costs $125 for a twin-pack; police and other groups pay $75.</p>
<p>Crystal talked to The Associated Press about the development of Narcan. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Q: How did you come to develop Narcan?</p>
<p>A: The company started back in 2009. We were using naloxone nasally for binge-eating disorder. The first years of the company were all about that. We had some encouraging data but it was going to be difficult to establish a market in binge-eating disorder. At the time, the opioid crisis in the United States became apparent. In 2012, we thought ‘Let’s pivot.’ In this area of overdose, we really felt we could do something.</p>
<p>Q: Can you break down the market?</p>
<p>A: Not many people want to inject other people. Having a simple to use, reliable, FDA-approved nasal spray was extremely desirable. Once you have a nasal spray, you open up a huge patient population and bystander population who are now willing and able to use it.</p>
<p>We reported for the first half of 2017, net sales were at least $25 million. It’s fair to say that was a huge rise from 2016.</p>
<p>Q: You have conflicting pressures — from the public and stockholders. Is the price going to rise?</p>
<p>A: Not that I’m aware of, no. In a way I’m divorced from that because Adapt has entire control of pricing. But if you try and take the price to high levels, the margins will improve but there will be less customers as a result. You want people to keep coming back. You want them to be committed to using Narcan nasal spray. It’s encouraging that on Twitter you can see police officers in certain counties holding up Narcan like a trophy. They’re proud. They’re empowered. They can do something about an overdose rather than arriving to a cold body.</p>
<p>Q: Despite the spray’s availability, drug deaths rose last year, and many involved opioids.</p>
<p>A: When there is naloxone available it does make a difference. But there’s low penetration in the overall market. This is a problem that has grown over more than a decade. It’s not going to stop overnight.</p> | 839 |
<p>This story is a doozy!</p>
<p>A sixth grader in a West Virginia middle school walked in on his teacher watching pornography in his office. The student told the principal what he had seen, as one would expect any student to do when they saw their teacher watching inappropriate material on campus (and inadvertently exposing the student to content which was illegal for him to view).</p>
<p>Rather than expressing extreme shame and remorse for his pornographic habits in a school setting, the teacher, Thomas Yohn, stormed into another classroom where the boy was and publicly shamed him for opening his “big flap.” Yohn shouted at the boy and berated him for telling the principal, saying that as an adult, he is perfectly within his right to watch porn while at school.</p>
<p>The true sin here, according to Yohn, was that the sixth grade boy dared to enter the classroom without the teacher’s permission. The boy claims that he was simply the first student to arrive for the day and entered his classroom as usual.</p>
<p>The man’s insane rant toward the child should not have been allowed to continue, but his behavior is anything but normal. So far, the teacher has been suspended and the poor child has stayed huddled at home, afraid of what violent actions the clearly unhinged teacher might take.</p>
<p>Yohn’s verbal assault was fortunately captured on a cellphone camera and can be seen here:</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tristateupdate.com" type="external">WOWK 13 Charleston, Huntington WV News, Weather, Sports</a></p> | Middle School Teacher Goes Berserk After Student Catches Him Watching Porn In Class | true | http://trofire.com/2016/04/14/insane-middle-school-teacher-watches-porn-school-threatens-student-tells/ | 2016-04-14 | 4left
| Middle School Teacher Goes Berserk After Student Catches Him Watching Porn In Class
<p>This story is a doozy!</p>
<p>A sixth grader in a West Virginia middle school walked in on his teacher watching pornography in his office. The student told the principal what he had seen, as one would expect any student to do when they saw their teacher watching inappropriate material on campus (and inadvertently exposing the student to content which was illegal for him to view).</p>
<p>Rather than expressing extreme shame and remorse for his pornographic habits in a school setting, the teacher, Thomas Yohn, stormed into another classroom where the boy was and publicly shamed him for opening his “big flap.” Yohn shouted at the boy and berated him for telling the principal, saying that as an adult, he is perfectly within his right to watch porn while at school.</p>
<p>The true sin here, according to Yohn, was that the sixth grade boy dared to enter the classroom without the teacher’s permission. The boy claims that he was simply the first student to arrive for the day and entered his classroom as usual.</p>
<p>The man’s insane rant toward the child should not have been allowed to continue, but his behavior is anything but normal. So far, the teacher has been suspended and the poor child has stayed huddled at home, afraid of what violent actions the clearly unhinged teacher might take.</p>
<p>Yohn’s verbal assault was fortunately captured on a cellphone camera and can be seen here:</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tristateupdate.com" type="external">WOWK 13 Charleston, Huntington WV News, Weather, Sports</a></p> | 840 |
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>It’s time to vote out career politicians on Council</p>
<p>I’M SURE WE’RE all tired of the construction down Central stemming from the wasteful spending by our city officials. We have a chance to vote out the District 9 city councilor who voted yes on this project. This is an incumbent who’s been in office far too long. There’s an honest, reliable candidate running against this incumbent for City Council.</p>
<p>Paul Ryan McKenney is an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran, a loving father and a liberty-minded individual who will balance the budget. A man who will put an end to civil asset forfeiture in the city of Albuquerque, who will improve public safety through community policing, re-engage and invigorate small business by cutting restrictive and regressive regulations that hurt our local economic growth. McKenney will protect property rights, end unnecessary licensing and promote open government, public access and accountability.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>McKenney resides in the Northeast Heights and is dedicated to creating change and improving his own community, District 9, and the city. There’s an overwhelming need for change in the city and McKenney is the start to that change. It’s time we vote out career politicians in our city; it’s time we start to vote for change! Let’s vote in a city councilman who will cut wasteful spending and ease the burden on the taxpayers. Check out Paul Ryan McKenney for City Council District 9 on Facebook, visit his website, and support a candidate who’s truly for the people of District 9 and the city.</p>
<p>Support change in New Mexico! … Support Paul Ryan McKenney for Albuquerque City Council District 9!</p>
<p>STEPHEN DESPIN JR.</p>
<p>Albuquerque</p>
<p>Save money, suffering by fighting Alzheimer’s now</p>
<p>There are 38,000 people living with Alzheimer’s in New Mexico, and I am one. The impact of Alzheimer’s on families, including mine, is devastating. But I am not writing to tell my own story. I am writing to show how this public health crisis affects us all.</p>
<p>Alzheimer’s is the most expensive disease in the USA, (costing) an estimated $259 billion in 2017, increasing to $1.1 trillion by mid-century. Medicare and Medicaid cover the lion’s share – $175 billion, or 67 percent, of the total health care and long-term care payments for people with dementia. As the baby-boomer generation ages, the crisis only escalates.</p>
<p>Alzheimer’s needs to be a national priority. It is the sixth leading cause of death. It kills more than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined; and there is still no prevention, no proven treatment or cure. We need to ask our leaders to provide additional funding to the National Institute of Health for research that could lead to a breakthrough that would dramatically reduce the financial burden.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>And until that breakthrough, we have to make sure that our citizens affected by Alzheimer’s are getting the care they need. For people with advanced dementia, palliative care – which focuses on managing and easing symptoms, reducing pain and stress, and increasing comfort – is essential. It improves quality of life and controls costs. The Palliative Care and Hospice Education and Training Act (PCHETA, S. 2748/H.R. 3119) would ensure a well-trained and educated palliative work force to meet the growing demand of our aging population.</p>
<p>Ultimately, it will cost us much more to ignore this crisis. Without additional research funding and legislation such as PCHETA, the cost to Medicaid and Medicare will more than double.</p>
<p>(Last) month, I, along with 13 other New Mexicans, travel(ed) to Washington, D.C., to gather with over 1,200 advocates from around the country. Together, we … ask(ed) our congressional delegates to make disease research funding a priority and request their support for PCHETA. Even if you can’t physically go to D.C., your voice can still be heard. Visit alz.org/advocacy/take-action.asp to take the pledge to support the fight to end Alzheimer’s.</p>
<p />
<p>David Esquibel</p>
<p>Ambassador, Alzheimer’s Association N.M. Chapter</p>
<p>Take time to check out National Library Week</p>
<p>As a member of the Albuquerque Library Foundation Board, it is with great pleasure that I draw attention to National Library Week from April 9 — 15. If you are a library lover and user, you could mark this week by saying thanks to a staff person at your favorite branch or attend some scheduled programs. To find activities at different branches, go to the library’s home page (abqlibrary.org) and click on the dropdown “Events.”</p>
<p>… Also, don’t forget that most branches have Gizmo Garage sessions where patrons can get computer help checking out, downloading or transferring library materials to electronic devices. Our libraries are truly community centers for gathering and learning.</p>
<p />
<p>JUDY GIBBON</p>
<p>Albuquerque</p>
<p>Climate change as real as Russian nukes</p>
<p>RE: TOM CHILDRESS’ letter to the editor titled “We’re far from understanding climate change,” Albuquerque Journal, April 4.</p>
<p>To use Tom’s logic and language denying climate change, I would say: Have the Russians been developing an atomic bomb? Absolutely. Do the Russians have an effective atomic bomb? Absolutely. Do the Russians have multiple atomic bombs? Absolutely. Do the Russians have several ways to deliver and detonate these atomic bombs in the United States? Absolutely. Will the Russians’ ability to explode multiple atomic bombs in the United States cook 90 percent or more of us? Absolutely.</p>
<p>Do we have any credible evidence that the Russians intend to blow us up? No, not really. There is no absolute proof that the Russians intend to do this. But yet the U.S. has spent a huge amount of money to ensure national security.</p>
<p>So, since we don’t have absolute data on Russian intentions, we should not spend an additional $54 billion on our already budget-busting military.</p>
<p>Instead, I would propose spending that money on what 97 percent of our scientists are telling us about climate change, verified by rapidly melting ice caps around the world – that we had better address man-made climate change before we’re cooked. And the nice benefit is clean jobs that improve everyone’s quality of life, unlike an atomic bomb.</p>
<p>WARD MCCARTNEY</p>
<p>Los Lunas</p>
<p>Trump’s de-funding may have sinister motives</p>
<p>I PERSONALLY believe the Trump administration wants to de-fund anything that allows people to think for themselves, including PBS, art and the humanities, liberal colleges and public education. Why? I can only guess that there are ulterior motives beyond sheer greed and the mass accumulation of wealth – or withholding it from our rapidly shrinking middle class.</p>
<p>There’s a more disturbing, dark – even sinister – consideration, and that is the intentional “dumbing down” of America with violent video games, mind-numbing reality TV, corporate news and ad nauseum advertising. Keep us stupid, keep us shopping, keep us employed only enough to pay the bare minimum on our credit card debt.</p>
<p>The real terror in all of this is the woeful lack of meaningful employment offered to our children, giving them little choice but to enlist in the military – to fight the “king’s war” for the “king’s oil.” Some things never change. I don’t doubt that Trump’s primary argument against funding reproductive services for women to prevent unintended pregnancies is that he will have more cannon fodder in lands afar to continue fueling his empire.</p>
<p>ANNETTE AHLANDER</p>
<p>Albuquerque</p> | Letters to the editor | false | https://abqjournal.com/987558/climate-change-as-real-as-russian-nukes.html | 2least
| Letters to the editor
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>It’s time to vote out career politicians on Council</p>
<p>I’M SURE WE’RE all tired of the construction down Central stemming from the wasteful spending by our city officials. We have a chance to vote out the District 9 city councilor who voted yes on this project. This is an incumbent who’s been in office far too long. There’s an honest, reliable candidate running against this incumbent for City Council.</p>
<p>Paul Ryan McKenney is an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran, a loving father and a liberty-minded individual who will balance the budget. A man who will put an end to civil asset forfeiture in the city of Albuquerque, who will improve public safety through community policing, re-engage and invigorate small business by cutting restrictive and regressive regulations that hurt our local economic growth. McKenney will protect property rights, end unnecessary licensing and promote open government, public access and accountability.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>McKenney resides in the Northeast Heights and is dedicated to creating change and improving his own community, District 9, and the city. There’s an overwhelming need for change in the city and McKenney is the start to that change. It’s time we vote out career politicians in our city; it’s time we start to vote for change! Let’s vote in a city councilman who will cut wasteful spending and ease the burden on the taxpayers. Check out Paul Ryan McKenney for City Council District 9 on Facebook, visit his website, and support a candidate who’s truly for the people of District 9 and the city.</p>
<p>Support change in New Mexico! … Support Paul Ryan McKenney for Albuquerque City Council District 9!</p>
<p>STEPHEN DESPIN JR.</p>
<p>Albuquerque</p>
<p>Save money, suffering by fighting Alzheimer’s now</p>
<p>There are 38,000 people living with Alzheimer’s in New Mexico, and I am one. The impact of Alzheimer’s on families, including mine, is devastating. But I am not writing to tell my own story. I am writing to show how this public health crisis affects us all.</p>
<p>Alzheimer’s is the most expensive disease in the USA, (costing) an estimated $259 billion in 2017, increasing to $1.1 trillion by mid-century. Medicare and Medicaid cover the lion’s share – $175 billion, or 67 percent, of the total health care and long-term care payments for people with dementia. As the baby-boomer generation ages, the crisis only escalates.</p>
<p>Alzheimer’s needs to be a national priority. It is the sixth leading cause of death. It kills more than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined; and there is still no prevention, no proven treatment or cure. We need to ask our leaders to provide additional funding to the National Institute of Health for research that could lead to a breakthrough that would dramatically reduce the financial burden.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>And until that breakthrough, we have to make sure that our citizens affected by Alzheimer’s are getting the care they need. For people with advanced dementia, palliative care – which focuses on managing and easing symptoms, reducing pain and stress, and increasing comfort – is essential. It improves quality of life and controls costs. The Palliative Care and Hospice Education and Training Act (PCHETA, S. 2748/H.R. 3119) would ensure a well-trained and educated palliative work force to meet the growing demand of our aging population.</p>
<p>Ultimately, it will cost us much more to ignore this crisis. Without additional research funding and legislation such as PCHETA, the cost to Medicaid and Medicare will more than double.</p>
<p>(Last) month, I, along with 13 other New Mexicans, travel(ed) to Washington, D.C., to gather with over 1,200 advocates from around the country. Together, we … ask(ed) our congressional delegates to make disease research funding a priority and request their support for PCHETA. Even if you can’t physically go to D.C., your voice can still be heard. Visit alz.org/advocacy/take-action.asp to take the pledge to support the fight to end Alzheimer’s.</p>
<p />
<p>David Esquibel</p>
<p>Ambassador, Alzheimer’s Association N.M. Chapter</p>
<p>Take time to check out National Library Week</p>
<p>As a member of the Albuquerque Library Foundation Board, it is with great pleasure that I draw attention to National Library Week from April 9 — 15. If you are a library lover and user, you could mark this week by saying thanks to a staff person at your favorite branch or attend some scheduled programs. To find activities at different branches, go to the library’s home page (abqlibrary.org) and click on the dropdown “Events.”</p>
<p>… Also, don’t forget that most branches have Gizmo Garage sessions where patrons can get computer help checking out, downloading or transferring library materials to electronic devices. Our libraries are truly community centers for gathering and learning.</p>
<p />
<p>JUDY GIBBON</p>
<p>Albuquerque</p>
<p>Climate change as real as Russian nukes</p>
<p>RE: TOM CHILDRESS’ letter to the editor titled “We’re far from understanding climate change,” Albuquerque Journal, April 4.</p>
<p>To use Tom’s logic and language denying climate change, I would say: Have the Russians been developing an atomic bomb? Absolutely. Do the Russians have an effective atomic bomb? Absolutely. Do the Russians have multiple atomic bombs? Absolutely. Do the Russians have several ways to deliver and detonate these atomic bombs in the United States? Absolutely. Will the Russians’ ability to explode multiple atomic bombs in the United States cook 90 percent or more of us? Absolutely.</p>
<p>Do we have any credible evidence that the Russians intend to blow us up? No, not really. There is no absolute proof that the Russians intend to do this. But yet the U.S. has spent a huge amount of money to ensure national security.</p>
<p>So, since we don’t have absolute data on Russian intentions, we should not spend an additional $54 billion on our already budget-busting military.</p>
<p>Instead, I would propose spending that money on what 97 percent of our scientists are telling us about climate change, verified by rapidly melting ice caps around the world – that we had better address man-made climate change before we’re cooked. And the nice benefit is clean jobs that improve everyone’s quality of life, unlike an atomic bomb.</p>
<p>WARD MCCARTNEY</p>
<p>Los Lunas</p>
<p>Trump’s de-funding may have sinister motives</p>
<p>I PERSONALLY believe the Trump administration wants to de-fund anything that allows people to think for themselves, including PBS, art and the humanities, liberal colleges and public education. Why? I can only guess that there are ulterior motives beyond sheer greed and the mass accumulation of wealth – or withholding it from our rapidly shrinking middle class.</p>
<p>There’s a more disturbing, dark – even sinister – consideration, and that is the intentional “dumbing down” of America with violent video games, mind-numbing reality TV, corporate news and ad nauseum advertising. Keep us stupid, keep us shopping, keep us employed only enough to pay the bare minimum on our credit card debt.</p>
<p>The real terror in all of this is the woeful lack of meaningful employment offered to our children, giving them little choice but to enlist in the military – to fight the “king’s war” for the “king’s oil.” Some things never change. I don’t doubt that Trump’s primary argument against funding reproductive services for women to prevent unintended pregnancies is that he will have more cannon fodder in lands afar to continue fueling his empire.</p>
<p>ANNETTE AHLANDER</p>
<p>Albuquerque</p> | 841 |
|
<p>(RNS) — When President Obama rests his hand on two historic Bibles to take his second-term oath of office today, he’ll add a phrase not mentioned in the Constitution: “So help me God.”</p>
<p>But the Almighty’s role on the Capitol steps is a controversial one.</p>
<p>First, there was a myth that the tradition of adding God to the oath began with George Washington. It didn’t, say experts at the Library of Congress, the U.S. Senate Historical Office and the first president’s home, Mount Vernon.</p>
<p />
<p>Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. administers the oath of office to President Barack H. Obama during his first inauguration in 2009.&#160; (RNS photo by Noah K. Murray/The Star-Ledger)</p>
<p />
<p>Although the phrase was used in federal courtrooms since 1789, the first time it was used in a presidential oath of office was at Chester Arthur’s inauguration in September 1881.</p>
<p>Every president since, including Obama, has followed suit.</p>
<p>California atheist activist Michael Newdow has battled unsuccessfully in federal court to ban the phrase. Obama notified Chief Justice John Roberts, who administers the oath, that he wanted this phrase included. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Newdow’s last appeal.</p>
<p>Four years later, “so help me God” is unchallenged. Obama will once more use the Bible that Abraham Lincoln used in 1861. This term, he’ll add a second, the Bible that Martin Luther King Jr. carried with him in all his travels.</p>
<p>Myrlie Evers-Williams, past chairman of the NAACP and widow of murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers, will give the invocation. The first woman to offer the invocation, she’s not a member of the clergy.</p>
<p>The benediction will be offered by Luis Leon, the rector of St. John’s Church, an Episcopal congregation that sits across Lafayette Square from the White House. An evangelical pastor, Louie Giglio from Atlanta, withdrew from the program when his views opposing same-sex marriage drew criticism.</p>
<p>The inauguration has included blessings by clergy for two centuries. Originally, they were offered by the Senate chaplain. After 1933, the president-elect began naming his choices.</p>
<p>In between the first and the final blessing, there are always a lot of religious references in the president’s address.</p>
<p>“I challenge you to find any presidential speech that doesn’t make a lot of mention of God,” says constitutional historian R.B. Bernstein who teaches law at New York Law School and political science and history at City College of New York.</p>
<p>George Washington arrived at his inauguration to the sound of church bells. His speech began with “fervent supplications” to the “Almighty Being” and concluded by seeing God’s “divine blessing” for the nation.</p>
<p>Obama’s first inaugural speech called out to Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and, for the first time in any inaugural address, to nonbelievers as well. That’s a wide sweep now that one in five Americans say they have no religious identity.</p>
<p>Cathy Lynn Grossman writes for Religion News Service and USA Today.</p>
<p>Related stories:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.religiousherald.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=view&amp;id=6603&amp;Itemid=156" type="external">On Inauguration Day, Baptists in D.C. engage in service activities, prepare for huge crowds</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.religiousherald.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=view&amp;id=6593&amp;Itemid=156" type="external">National Journal editor ‘translates’ evangelical worldview for politicians, journalists</a></p> | ‘So help me God’ isn’t in official oath, but it’s been used by all presidents since 1881 | false | https://baptistnews.com/article/sohelpmegodisntinofficialoathbutitsbeenusedbyallpresidentssince1881/ | 3left-center
| ‘So help me God’ isn’t in official oath, but it’s been used by all presidents since 1881
<p>(RNS) — When President Obama rests his hand on two historic Bibles to take his second-term oath of office today, he’ll add a phrase not mentioned in the Constitution: “So help me God.”</p>
<p>But the Almighty’s role on the Capitol steps is a controversial one.</p>
<p>First, there was a myth that the tradition of adding God to the oath began with George Washington. It didn’t, say experts at the Library of Congress, the U.S. Senate Historical Office and the first president’s home, Mount Vernon.</p>
<p />
<p>Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. administers the oath of office to President Barack H. Obama during his first inauguration in 2009.&#160; (RNS photo by Noah K. Murray/The Star-Ledger)</p>
<p />
<p>Although the phrase was used in federal courtrooms since 1789, the first time it was used in a presidential oath of office was at Chester Arthur’s inauguration in September 1881.</p>
<p>Every president since, including Obama, has followed suit.</p>
<p>California atheist activist Michael Newdow has battled unsuccessfully in federal court to ban the phrase. Obama notified Chief Justice John Roberts, who administers the oath, that he wanted this phrase included. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Newdow’s last appeal.</p>
<p>Four years later, “so help me God” is unchallenged. Obama will once more use the Bible that Abraham Lincoln used in 1861. This term, he’ll add a second, the Bible that Martin Luther King Jr. carried with him in all his travels.</p>
<p>Myrlie Evers-Williams, past chairman of the NAACP and widow of murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers, will give the invocation. The first woman to offer the invocation, she’s not a member of the clergy.</p>
<p>The benediction will be offered by Luis Leon, the rector of St. John’s Church, an Episcopal congregation that sits across Lafayette Square from the White House. An evangelical pastor, Louie Giglio from Atlanta, withdrew from the program when his views opposing same-sex marriage drew criticism.</p>
<p>The inauguration has included blessings by clergy for two centuries. Originally, they were offered by the Senate chaplain. After 1933, the president-elect began naming his choices.</p>
<p>In between the first and the final blessing, there are always a lot of religious references in the president’s address.</p>
<p>“I challenge you to find any presidential speech that doesn’t make a lot of mention of God,” says constitutional historian R.B. Bernstein who teaches law at New York Law School and political science and history at City College of New York.</p>
<p>George Washington arrived at his inauguration to the sound of church bells. His speech began with “fervent supplications” to the “Almighty Being” and concluded by seeing God’s “divine blessing” for the nation.</p>
<p>Obama’s first inaugural speech called out to Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and, for the first time in any inaugural address, to nonbelievers as well. That’s a wide sweep now that one in five Americans say they have no religious identity.</p>
<p>Cathy Lynn Grossman writes for Religion News Service and USA Today.</p>
<p>Related stories:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.religiousherald.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=view&amp;id=6603&amp;Itemid=156" type="external">On Inauguration Day, Baptists in D.C. engage in service activities, prepare for huge crowds</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.religiousherald.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=view&amp;id=6593&amp;Itemid=156" type="external">National Journal editor ‘translates’ evangelical worldview for politicians, journalists</a></p> | 842 |
|
<p />
<p>Obama’s terrorism Policy will never eliminate tragedies like what happened&#160;in Orlando Florida, but it sure makes liberals feel good. Cartoon by A.F.Branco ©2016.</p>
<p>To see more Legal Insurrection Branco cartoons, <a href="http://legalinsurrection.com/tag/a-f-branco/" type="external">click here</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://patriotdepot.com/comically-incorrect-a-collection-of-politically-incorrect-comics-volume-1/" type="external">A.F.Branco Coffee Table Book</a> &lt;—- Order Here!</p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | Stupid POTUS Tricks | true | http://comicallyincorrect.com/2016/06/13/stupid-pet-tricks-2/ | 2016-06-13 | 0right
| Stupid POTUS Tricks
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<p>Obama’s terrorism Policy will never eliminate tragedies like what happened&#160;in Orlando Florida, but it sure makes liberals feel good. Cartoon by A.F.Branco ©2016.</p>
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<p><a href="http://paypal.me/AntonioBranco" type="external">Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated</a>&#160;– &#160;$1.00 – $5.00 – $10 – $100 – &#160;it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. –&#160;THANK YOU!</p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | 843 |
<p>NEW YORK (AP) — Congressional Democrats on Wednesday dug in on their threats to reject any government funding bill that isn't paired with protection for thousands of young immigrants — a hard-line stance celebrated by liberal groups who have shrugged off risks of a government shutdown.</p>
<p>Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer said there's "very, very strong" sentiment among his party's lawmakers to oppose GOP-drafted legislation that would only keep the government's doors open for four weeks past a looming Friday deadline. Schumer did not say his caucus was entirely unified, but the rhetoric signaled growing chances that a stop-gap measure could come up short of votes in the Senate and federal agencies could begin closing their doors Friday at midnight.</p>
<p>"The overwhelming number in our caucus have said they don't like this deal and they believe if we kick the can down the road this time we'll be back where we started from next time," Schumer told reporters. "So there's very, very strong support not to go along with their deal."</p>
<p>The hardening stance reflects the influence of an emboldened Democratic base clamoring for a showdown with a president many on the left view as racist and untrustworthy. The fight over the fate of the "dreamers" — some 700,000 people who were brought to the U.S. as children and are now here illegally — is increasingly becoming a test of Democrats' progressive mettle, surpassing health care or taxes as the top year-two priority for the liberal base.</p>
<p>"It needs to be very clear for vulnerable Republicans as well as for Democrats who do not act this week that there will be political consequences," said Cristina Jimenez of the immigrant activist group United We Dream. "The progressive movement who are going to be the boots on the ground for the Democrats to regain power" in November's midterm elections, she added, "are going to hold them accountable if they don't come through."</p>
<p>On Capitol Hill, Democrats are being urged to let federal funding expire unless Republicans and President Donald Trump agree to extend the expiring Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Protesters have rallied at offices of Senate Democrats, threatened primary foes for those who don't push hard enough for an immigration deal and promised to brand those deemed to have fallen short "the deportation caucus."</p>
<p>That approach undoubtedly comes with risks for the moderates in the party — senators from states won by Trump such as West Virginia, Montana and Indiana. While the tough talk carries weight in some Democratic circles, it's far from clear other voters will look kindly on using federal agencies as leverage in the fight over immigration.</p>
<p>Trump has telegraphed how the GOP would attack Democrats should there be a shutdown this weekend.</p>
<p>"The Democrats want to shut down the government over amnesty for all and border security," Trump tweeted Tuesday. "The biggest loser will be our rapidly rebuilding Military, at a time we need it more than ever."</p>
<p>On Wednesday, ongoing talks over a deal showed no signs of progress. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly met with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and expressed vague optimism about prospects — but attendees said Kelly would not commit to supporting one bipartisan proposal, introduced Tuesday by Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., which would provide protection for immigrants brought into the U.S. as young people and add resources for border security.</p>
<p>Immigration activists have been gearing up for this fight for months.</p>
<p>Clashes over health care and taxes dominated Trump's initial year in office, even as his administration cracked down on illegal immigration. The administration has given agents leeway to detain and try to deport a wide range of people in the country illegally, from criminals to otherwise law-abiding residents with jobs and U.S.-citizen children.</p>
<p>Those actions did not require congressional approval, and there was limited pressure activists could bring compared to the battle that helped stall repeal of President Barack Obama's health care law.</p>
<p>That changed in September when Trump announced he'd end, effective March 5, Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which let hundreds of thousands avoid deportation and legally work. Trump tossed the issue to Congress to act before March. That also turned the spotlight on those who have benefited from DACA, men and women who were raised in the United States and are the most sympathetic face of the immigrant rights movement.</p>
<p>The Trump administration was "out in front, advancing their agenda and they were basically getting away with it," said Frank Sharry of America's Voice, an immigrant rights group. "Then they picked a fight with well-organized, American kids. They picked the wrong fight and it's brought attention to all their immigration agenda."</p>
<p>It was during Oval Office negotiations over a potential DACA replacement last week that, in the course of dismissing one deal negotiated by Senate Democrats and Republicans, Trump used a vulgar word to describe African countries and wondered why the U.S. doesn't get more immigrants from places like Norway. That stiffened the resolve of liberal groups to push for a DACA deal this week, at the moment they feel Democrats have maximum leverage.</p>
<p>"Everything we've seen from this administration has been this effort to remove people of color and streamline the process for white people," said Angel Padilla of the anti-Trump group Indivisible. "This week is an opportunity for Congress to reject that racism."</p>
<p>Corey Stewart, a pro-Trump Republican Senate candidate in Virginia, said Trump is picking the right battle.</p>
<p>"It's a smart fight," Stewart said. "His biggest promise of the campaign trail was to crack down on illegal immigration and build a border wall. He cannot back down on this."</p>
<p>Still, Republicans fear they may lose their majority in the House of Representatives, where several of their vulnerable members represent diverse districts and support a DACA deal. Immigration advocates are confident popular opinion is on their side -- people from heads of companies like Amazon, Apple and Starbucks to TV personality Kim Kardashian have urged a deal.</p>
<p>Todd Schulte of FWD.US, which supports increased immigration, also noted that people previously safe under DACA already are losing protections every day. While the program technically doesn't expire until March 5, roughly 100 immigrants a day who didn't renew their enrollment in time are losing permission to work and protection from being deported. That number will rise to 1,200 a day after March 5.</p>
<p>NEW YORK (AP) — Congressional Democrats on Wednesday dug in on their threats to reject any government funding bill that isn't paired with protection for thousands of young immigrants — a hard-line stance celebrated by liberal groups who have shrugged off risks of a government shutdown.</p>
<p>Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer said there's "very, very strong" sentiment among his party's lawmakers to oppose GOP-drafted legislation that would only keep the government's doors open for four weeks past a looming Friday deadline. Schumer did not say his caucus was entirely unified, but the rhetoric signaled growing chances that a stop-gap measure could come up short of votes in the Senate and federal agencies could begin closing their doors Friday at midnight.</p>
<p>"The overwhelming number in our caucus have said they don't like this deal and they believe if we kick the can down the road this time we'll be back where we started from next time," Schumer told reporters. "So there's very, very strong support not to go along with their deal."</p>
<p>The hardening stance reflects the influence of an emboldened Democratic base clamoring for a showdown with a president many on the left view as racist and untrustworthy. The fight over the fate of the "dreamers" — some 700,000 people who were brought to the U.S. as children and are now here illegally — is increasingly becoming a test of Democrats' progressive mettle, surpassing health care or taxes as the top year-two priority for the liberal base.</p>
<p>"It needs to be very clear for vulnerable Republicans as well as for Democrats who do not act this week that there will be political consequences," said Cristina Jimenez of the immigrant activist group United We Dream. "The progressive movement who are going to be the boots on the ground for the Democrats to regain power" in November's midterm elections, she added, "are going to hold them accountable if they don't come through."</p>
<p>On Capitol Hill, Democrats are being urged to let federal funding expire unless Republicans and President Donald Trump agree to extend the expiring Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Protesters have rallied at offices of Senate Democrats, threatened primary foes for those who don't push hard enough for an immigration deal and promised to brand those deemed to have fallen short "the deportation caucus."</p>
<p>That approach undoubtedly comes with risks for the moderates in the party — senators from states won by Trump such as West Virginia, Montana and Indiana. While the tough talk carries weight in some Democratic circles, it's far from clear other voters will look kindly on using federal agencies as leverage in the fight over immigration.</p>
<p>Trump has telegraphed how the GOP would attack Democrats should there be a shutdown this weekend.</p>
<p>"The Democrats want to shut down the government over amnesty for all and border security," Trump tweeted Tuesday. "The biggest loser will be our rapidly rebuilding Military, at a time we need it more than ever."</p>
<p>On Wednesday, ongoing talks over a deal showed no signs of progress. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly met with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and expressed vague optimism about prospects — but attendees said Kelly would not commit to supporting one bipartisan proposal, introduced Tuesday by Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., which would provide protection for immigrants brought into the U.S. as young people and add resources for border security.</p>
<p>Immigration activists have been gearing up for this fight for months.</p>
<p>Clashes over health care and taxes dominated Trump's initial year in office, even as his administration cracked down on illegal immigration. The administration has given agents leeway to detain and try to deport a wide range of people in the country illegally, from criminals to otherwise law-abiding residents with jobs and U.S.-citizen children.</p>
<p>Those actions did not require congressional approval, and there was limited pressure activists could bring compared to the battle that helped stall repeal of President Barack Obama's health care law.</p>
<p>That changed in September when Trump announced he'd end, effective March 5, Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which let hundreds of thousands avoid deportation and legally work. Trump tossed the issue to Congress to act before March. That also turned the spotlight on those who have benefited from DACA, men and women who were raised in the United States and are the most sympathetic face of the immigrant rights movement.</p>
<p>The Trump administration was "out in front, advancing their agenda and they were basically getting away with it," said Frank Sharry of America's Voice, an immigrant rights group. "Then they picked a fight with well-organized, American kids. They picked the wrong fight and it's brought attention to all their immigration agenda."</p>
<p>It was during Oval Office negotiations over a potential DACA replacement last week that, in the course of dismissing one deal negotiated by Senate Democrats and Republicans, Trump used a vulgar word to describe African countries and wondered why the U.S. doesn't get more immigrants from places like Norway. That stiffened the resolve of liberal groups to push for a DACA deal this week, at the moment they feel Democrats have maximum leverage.</p>
<p>"Everything we've seen from this administration has been this effort to remove people of color and streamline the process for white people," said Angel Padilla of the anti-Trump group Indivisible. "This week is an opportunity for Congress to reject that racism."</p>
<p>Corey Stewart, a pro-Trump Republican Senate candidate in Virginia, said Trump is picking the right battle.</p>
<p>"It's a smart fight," Stewart said. "His biggest promise of the campaign trail was to crack down on illegal immigration and build a border wall. He cannot back down on this."</p>
<p>Still, Republicans fear they may lose their majority in the House of Representatives, where several of their vulnerable members represent diverse districts and support a DACA deal. Immigration advocates are confident popular opinion is on their side -- people from heads of companies like Amazon, Apple and Starbucks to TV personality Kim Kardashian have urged a deal.</p>
<p>Todd Schulte of FWD.US, which supports increased immigration, also noted that people previously safe under DACA already are losing protections every day. While the program technically doesn't expire until March 5, roughly 100 immigrants a day who didn't renew their enrollment in time are losing permission to work and protection from being deported. That number will rise to 1,200 a day after March 5.</p> | Democrats dig in on immigration, shutdown risk or no | false | https://apnews.com/amp/6196cc0e53ed4aaaa41c115f0c6001ad | 2018-01-17 | 2least
| Democrats dig in on immigration, shutdown risk or no
<p>NEW YORK (AP) — Congressional Democrats on Wednesday dug in on their threats to reject any government funding bill that isn't paired with protection for thousands of young immigrants — a hard-line stance celebrated by liberal groups who have shrugged off risks of a government shutdown.</p>
<p>Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer said there's "very, very strong" sentiment among his party's lawmakers to oppose GOP-drafted legislation that would only keep the government's doors open for four weeks past a looming Friday deadline. Schumer did not say his caucus was entirely unified, but the rhetoric signaled growing chances that a stop-gap measure could come up short of votes in the Senate and federal agencies could begin closing their doors Friday at midnight.</p>
<p>"The overwhelming number in our caucus have said they don't like this deal and they believe if we kick the can down the road this time we'll be back where we started from next time," Schumer told reporters. "So there's very, very strong support not to go along with their deal."</p>
<p>The hardening stance reflects the influence of an emboldened Democratic base clamoring for a showdown with a president many on the left view as racist and untrustworthy. The fight over the fate of the "dreamers" — some 700,000 people who were brought to the U.S. as children and are now here illegally — is increasingly becoming a test of Democrats' progressive mettle, surpassing health care or taxes as the top year-two priority for the liberal base.</p>
<p>"It needs to be very clear for vulnerable Republicans as well as for Democrats who do not act this week that there will be political consequences," said Cristina Jimenez of the immigrant activist group United We Dream. "The progressive movement who are going to be the boots on the ground for the Democrats to regain power" in November's midterm elections, she added, "are going to hold them accountable if they don't come through."</p>
<p>On Capitol Hill, Democrats are being urged to let federal funding expire unless Republicans and President Donald Trump agree to extend the expiring Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Protesters have rallied at offices of Senate Democrats, threatened primary foes for those who don't push hard enough for an immigration deal and promised to brand those deemed to have fallen short "the deportation caucus."</p>
<p>That approach undoubtedly comes with risks for the moderates in the party — senators from states won by Trump such as West Virginia, Montana and Indiana. While the tough talk carries weight in some Democratic circles, it's far from clear other voters will look kindly on using federal agencies as leverage in the fight over immigration.</p>
<p>Trump has telegraphed how the GOP would attack Democrats should there be a shutdown this weekend.</p>
<p>"The Democrats want to shut down the government over amnesty for all and border security," Trump tweeted Tuesday. "The biggest loser will be our rapidly rebuilding Military, at a time we need it more than ever."</p>
<p>On Wednesday, ongoing talks over a deal showed no signs of progress. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly met with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and expressed vague optimism about prospects — but attendees said Kelly would not commit to supporting one bipartisan proposal, introduced Tuesday by Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., which would provide protection for immigrants brought into the U.S. as young people and add resources for border security.</p>
<p>Immigration activists have been gearing up for this fight for months.</p>
<p>Clashes over health care and taxes dominated Trump's initial year in office, even as his administration cracked down on illegal immigration. The administration has given agents leeway to detain and try to deport a wide range of people in the country illegally, from criminals to otherwise law-abiding residents with jobs and U.S.-citizen children.</p>
<p>Those actions did not require congressional approval, and there was limited pressure activists could bring compared to the battle that helped stall repeal of President Barack Obama's health care law.</p>
<p>That changed in September when Trump announced he'd end, effective March 5, Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which let hundreds of thousands avoid deportation and legally work. Trump tossed the issue to Congress to act before March. That also turned the spotlight on those who have benefited from DACA, men and women who were raised in the United States and are the most sympathetic face of the immigrant rights movement.</p>
<p>The Trump administration was "out in front, advancing their agenda and they were basically getting away with it," said Frank Sharry of America's Voice, an immigrant rights group. "Then they picked a fight with well-organized, American kids. They picked the wrong fight and it's brought attention to all their immigration agenda."</p>
<p>It was during Oval Office negotiations over a potential DACA replacement last week that, in the course of dismissing one deal negotiated by Senate Democrats and Republicans, Trump used a vulgar word to describe African countries and wondered why the U.S. doesn't get more immigrants from places like Norway. That stiffened the resolve of liberal groups to push for a DACA deal this week, at the moment they feel Democrats have maximum leverage.</p>
<p>"Everything we've seen from this administration has been this effort to remove people of color and streamline the process for white people," said Angel Padilla of the anti-Trump group Indivisible. "This week is an opportunity for Congress to reject that racism."</p>
<p>Corey Stewart, a pro-Trump Republican Senate candidate in Virginia, said Trump is picking the right battle.</p>
<p>"It's a smart fight," Stewart said. "His biggest promise of the campaign trail was to crack down on illegal immigration and build a border wall. He cannot back down on this."</p>
<p>Still, Republicans fear they may lose their majority in the House of Representatives, where several of their vulnerable members represent diverse districts and support a DACA deal. Immigration advocates are confident popular opinion is on their side -- people from heads of companies like Amazon, Apple and Starbucks to TV personality Kim Kardashian have urged a deal.</p>
<p>Todd Schulte of FWD.US, which supports increased immigration, also noted that people previously safe under DACA already are losing protections every day. While the program technically doesn't expire until March 5, roughly 100 immigrants a day who didn't renew their enrollment in time are losing permission to work and protection from being deported. That number will rise to 1,200 a day after March 5.</p>
<p>NEW YORK (AP) — Congressional Democrats on Wednesday dug in on their threats to reject any government funding bill that isn't paired with protection for thousands of young immigrants — a hard-line stance celebrated by liberal groups who have shrugged off risks of a government shutdown.</p>
<p>Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer said there's "very, very strong" sentiment among his party's lawmakers to oppose GOP-drafted legislation that would only keep the government's doors open for four weeks past a looming Friday deadline. Schumer did not say his caucus was entirely unified, but the rhetoric signaled growing chances that a stop-gap measure could come up short of votes in the Senate and federal agencies could begin closing their doors Friday at midnight.</p>
<p>"The overwhelming number in our caucus have said they don't like this deal and they believe if we kick the can down the road this time we'll be back where we started from next time," Schumer told reporters. "So there's very, very strong support not to go along with their deal."</p>
<p>The hardening stance reflects the influence of an emboldened Democratic base clamoring for a showdown with a president many on the left view as racist and untrustworthy. The fight over the fate of the "dreamers" — some 700,000 people who were brought to the U.S. as children and are now here illegally — is increasingly becoming a test of Democrats' progressive mettle, surpassing health care or taxes as the top year-two priority for the liberal base.</p>
<p>"It needs to be very clear for vulnerable Republicans as well as for Democrats who do not act this week that there will be political consequences," said Cristina Jimenez of the immigrant activist group United We Dream. "The progressive movement who are going to be the boots on the ground for the Democrats to regain power" in November's midterm elections, she added, "are going to hold them accountable if they don't come through."</p>
<p>On Capitol Hill, Democrats are being urged to let federal funding expire unless Republicans and President Donald Trump agree to extend the expiring Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Protesters have rallied at offices of Senate Democrats, threatened primary foes for those who don't push hard enough for an immigration deal and promised to brand those deemed to have fallen short "the deportation caucus."</p>
<p>That approach undoubtedly comes with risks for the moderates in the party — senators from states won by Trump such as West Virginia, Montana and Indiana. While the tough talk carries weight in some Democratic circles, it's far from clear other voters will look kindly on using federal agencies as leverage in the fight over immigration.</p>
<p>Trump has telegraphed how the GOP would attack Democrats should there be a shutdown this weekend.</p>
<p>"The Democrats want to shut down the government over amnesty for all and border security," Trump tweeted Tuesday. "The biggest loser will be our rapidly rebuilding Military, at a time we need it more than ever."</p>
<p>On Wednesday, ongoing talks over a deal showed no signs of progress. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly met with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and expressed vague optimism about prospects — but attendees said Kelly would not commit to supporting one bipartisan proposal, introduced Tuesday by Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., which would provide protection for immigrants brought into the U.S. as young people and add resources for border security.</p>
<p>Immigration activists have been gearing up for this fight for months.</p>
<p>Clashes over health care and taxes dominated Trump's initial year in office, even as his administration cracked down on illegal immigration. The administration has given agents leeway to detain and try to deport a wide range of people in the country illegally, from criminals to otherwise law-abiding residents with jobs and U.S.-citizen children.</p>
<p>Those actions did not require congressional approval, and there was limited pressure activists could bring compared to the battle that helped stall repeal of President Barack Obama's health care law.</p>
<p>That changed in September when Trump announced he'd end, effective March 5, Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which let hundreds of thousands avoid deportation and legally work. Trump tossed the issue to Congress to act before March. That also turned the spotlight on those who have benefited from DACA, men and women who were raised in the United States and are the most sympathetic face of the immigrant rights movement.</p>
<p>The Trump administration was "out in front, advancing their agenda and they were basically getting away with it," said Frank Sharry of America's Voice, an immigrant rights group. "Then they picked a fight with well-organized, American kids. They picked the wrong fight and it's brought attention to all their immigration agenda."</p>
<p>It was during Oval Office negotiations over a potential DACA replacement last week that, in the course of dismissing one deal negotiated by Senate Democrats and Republicans, Trump used a vulgar word to describe African countries and wondered why the U.S. doesn't get more immigrants from places like Norway. That stiffened the resolve of liberal groups to push for a DACA deal this week, at the moment they feel Democrats have maximum leverage.</p>
<p>"Everything we've seen from this administration has been this effort to remove people of color and streamline the process for white people," said Angel Padilla of the anti-Trump group Indivisible. "This week is an opportunity for Congress to reject that racism."</p>
<p>Corey Stewart, a pro-Trump Republican Senate candidate in Virginia, said Trump is picking the right battle.</p>
<p>"It's a smart fight," Stewart said. "His biggest promise of the campaign trail was to crack down on illegal immigration and build a border wall. He cannot back down on this."</p>
<p>Still, Republicans fear they may lose their majority in the House of Representatives, where several of their vulnerable members represent diverse districts and support a DACA deal. Immigration advocates are confident popular opinion is on their side -- people from heads of companies like Amazon, Apple and Starbucks to TV personality Kim Kardashian have urged a deal.</p>
<p>Todd Schulte of FWD.US, which supports increased immigration, also noted that people previously safe under DACA already are losing protections every day. While the program technically doesn't expire until March 5, roughly 100 immigrants a day who didn't renew their enrollment in time are losing permission to work and protection from being deported. That number will rise to 1,200 a day after March 5.</p> | 844 |
<p />
<p>According to Canadian Police, there's a new type of cheater emerging from the Ashley Madison hack, which they called "the largest data breach in the world," and they're preying on people looking to find out who's on the list.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Last month's hack and subsequent exposure of millions of people on Toronto-based Avid Life Media's Ashley Madison affairs website is spawning more criminals who are luring people into giving information in order to find names of people they know in the data dump.</p>
<p>"Criminals have already engaged in online scams, by claiming to provide access to the leaked database," said Bryce Evans of the Toronto police.</p>
<p>"The public needs to be aware, that by clicking on these links, you are exposing your computers to malware, spyware, adware and viruses," he said.</p>
<p>In addition, some criminals are trying to extort money from Ashley Madison users by threatening to expose that they're on a list, unless payment is received, Evans explained. "This isn't fun and games anymore," Evans said. "It's affecting all of us." The fact that some people are offended by the Ashley Madison service, which matches up people who are looking to have affairs, doesn't matter, he said. This breach is a serious criminal act that will continue to socially impact our society, he said. "We're talking about families. We're talking about their children," he said. "We now have hate crimes resulting from this," he added, in addition to two unconfirmed reports of suicide related to the leaked information. Regardless of the social ramifications of the apparent "hactivists," who merge criminality with social outrage, even anyone who's just curious could expose their own data. Here's what you can do to protect yourself from this and other online criminal activity:Don't try to find names on Ashley Madison By logging onto a website that purports to provide access to the stolen data, you could be "unsuspectingly affected by malware," according to Jason Glassberg, founder of Casaba Security, a cyber security firm based in Redmond, Washington. As with any major hack, other nefarious criminals will set up websites claiming to help people who may have been exposed, or who are just curious to see who's on the list, he explained.</p>
<p>"By logging in, they may unknowingly give a bad guy an email account," said Glassberg, which is the start of yet another criminal data breach. Hackers need to establish the fact that they have a real person's information with a legitimate email account, and ultimately, a password, in order to steal valuable information like credit card or bank account numbers.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>"Right now, any site that purports you can search for yourself or anyone else [on Ashley Madison] is illegitimate," said Alex McGeorge, head of threat intelligence at Immunity Inc., a cyber security firm based in Miami, Florida.</p>
<p>According to McGeorge, the leaked information has already been replicated numerous times.</p>
<p>"Everyone who wants a copy, already has a copy," he said.</p>
<p>Cancel any credit card used with Ashley Madison or any other site to try and find names of its users.</p>
<p>McGeorge said that even though the data stolen from Ashley Madison supposedly included only the last four digits of people's credit cards numbers, the card should still be cancelled and replaced with a new one.</p>
<p>Going forward, he said people who don't want their name associated with an online website can use a prepaid credit card that doesn't have their name on it.</p>
<p>Avid Life Media is offering a $500,000 Canadian dollar reward payment to anyone who provides information that leads to the identification, arrest, and conviction of those responsible for the theft.</p> | How To Protect Yourself From The Ashley Madison Hack 'Ripple Effect' | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2015/08/25/how-to-protect-yourself-from-ashley-madison-hack-ripple-effect.html | 2016-03-06 | 0right
| How To Protect Yourself From The Ashley Madison Hack 'Ripple Effect'
<p />
<p>According to Canadian Police, there's a new type of cheater emerging from the Ashley Madison hack, which they called "the largest data breach in the world," and they're preying on people looking to find out who's on the list.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Last month's hack and subsequent exposure of millions of people on Toronto-based Avid Life Media's Ashley Madison affairs website is spawning more criminals who are luring people into giving information in order to find names of people they know in the data dump.</p>
<p>"Criminals have already engaged in online scams, by claiming to provide access to the leaked database," said Bryce Evans of the Toronto police.</p>
<p>"The public needs to be aware, that by clicking on these links, you are exposing your computers to malware, spyware, adware and viruses," he said.</p>
<p>In addition, some criminals are trying to extort money from Ashley Madison users by threatening to expose that they're on a list, unless payment is received, Evans explained. "This isn't fun and games anymore," Evans said. "It's affecting all of us." The fact that some people are offended by the Ashley Madison service, which matches up people who are looking to have affairs, doesn't matter, he said. This breach is a serious criminal act that will continue to socially impact our society, he said. "We're talking about families. We're talking about their children," he said. "We now have hate crimes resulting from this," he added, in addition to two unconfirmed reports of suicide related to the leaked information. Regardless of the social ramifications of the apparent "hactivists," who merge criminality with social outrage, even anyone who's just curious could expose their own data. Here's what you can do to protect yourself from this and other online criminal activity:Don't try to find names on Ashley Madison By logging onto a website that purports to provide access to the stolen data, you could be "unsuspectingly affected by malware," according to Jason Glassberg, founder of Casaba Security, a cyber security firm based in Redmond, Washington. As with any major hack, other nefarious criminals will set up websites claiming to help people who may have been exposed, or who are just curious to see who's on the list, he explained.</p>
<p>"By logging in, they may unknowingly give a bad guy an email account," said Glassberg, which is the start of yet another criminal data breach. Hackers need to establish the fact that they have a real person's information with a legitimate email account, and ultimately, a password, in order to steal valuable information like credit card or bank account numbers.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>"Right now, any site that purports you can search for yourself or anyone else [on Ashley Madison] is illegitimate," said Alex McGeorge, head of threat intelligence at Immunity Inc., a cyber security firm based in Miami, Florida.</p>
<p>According to McGeorge, the leaked information has already been replicated numerous times.</p>
<p>"Everyone who wants a copy, already has a copy," he said.</p>
<p>Cancel any credit card used with Ashley Madison or any other site to try and find names of its users.</p>
<p>McGeorge said that even though the data stolen from Ashley Madison supposedly included only the last four digits of people's credit cards numbers, the card should still be cancelled and replaced with a new one.</p>
<p>Going forward, he said people who don't want their name associated with an online website can use a prepaid credit card that doesn't have their name on it.</p>
<p>Avid Life Media is offering a $500,000 Canadian dollar reward payment to anyone who provides information that leads to the identification, arrest, and conviction of those responsible for the theft.</p> | 845 |
<p />
<p>Kia Motors &lt;000270.KS&gt; said on Thursday it is drawing up a contingency plan to cope with the policies of U.S. President Donald Trump, reflecting growing wariness by Asian exporters about the prospect of U.S. protectionism.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Trump has promised to revive U.S. industrial jobs by forcing automakers to stop making cars in Mexico, threatening to tax imports and promising to make it more attractive for businesses to operate in the United States.</p>
<p>South Korea-based Kia Motors last year started production at a new plant in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, while sister firm Hyundai Motor &lt;005380.KS&gt; will begin making cars at Kia's Mexico plant this year.</p>
<p>"We acknowledge that there are a lot of concerns about the uncertainty stemming from the new U.S. administration," Han Chun-soo, Kia's chief financial officer, said during an earnings conference call.</p>
<p>"While closely monitoring its policy directions, we are preparing to respond by setting up a step-by-step, scenario-based contingency plan."</p>
<p>Trump has warned German carmakers and Japan's Toyota &lt;7203.T&gt; of a "big border tax" if they build cars for the U.S. market in Mexico. So far however he has not commented on the South Korean carmakers' plans.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Kia plans to more than double its Mexico output this year to 250,000 vehicles and aims to boost U.S. sales by 8 percent to 699,000 vehicles. Hyundai and Kia together rank fifth in global car sales.</p>
<p>Hyundai Motor on Wednesday said it expected competition and protectionist measures to increase, after posting its lowest quarterly profit in about five years.</p>
<p>Hyundai Motor group, which includes Kia, last week said it planned to lift U.S. investment by 50 percent to $3.1 billion over five years and could build a new plant there.</p>
<p>KIA TARGETS SUVs</p>
<p>Kia on Thursday said it planned to launch a small sport utility vehicle in South Korea this year, in a bid to take advantage of a booming segment.</p>
<p>The model would be a "crossover utility vehicle (CUV)" based on its Pride sedan, also known as the Rio, the carmaker said without elaborating.</p>
<p>Kia Motors already sells a small SUV called Niro, a gasoline-electric hybrid model.</p>
<p>It also planned to introduce a small SUV in Europe this year, it added.</p>
<p>(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Stephen Coates and Tony Munroe)</p> | South Korea's Kia Motors drafts Trump contingency plan | true | http://foxbusiness.com/politics/2017/01/26/south-korea-kia-motors-drafts-trump-contingency-plan.html | 2017-01-26 | 0right
| South Korea's Kia Motors drafts Trump contingency plan
<p />
<p>Kia Motors &lt;000270.KS&gt; said on Thursday it is drawing up a contingency plan to cope with the policies of U.S. President Donald Trump, reflecting growing wariness by Asian exporters about the prospect of U.S. protectionism.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Trump has promised to revive U.S. industrial jobs by forcing automakers to stop making cars in Mexico, threatening to tax imports and promising to make it more attractive for businesses to operate in the United States.</p>
<p>South Korea-based Kia Motors last year started production at a new plant in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, while sister firm Hyundai Motor &lt;005380.KS&gt; will begin making cars at Kia's Mexico plant this year.</p>
<p>"We acknowledge that there are a lot of concerns about the uncertainty stemming from the new U.S. administration," Han Chun-soo, Kia's chief financial officer, said during an earnings conference call.</p>
<p>"While closely monitoring its policy directions, we are preparing to respond by setting up a step-by-step, scenario-based contingency plan."</p>
<p>Trump has warned German carmakers and Japan's Toyota &lt;7203.T&gt; of a "big border tax" if they build cars for the U.S. market in Mexico. So far however he has not commented on the South Korean carmakers' plans.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Kia plans to more than double its Mexico output this year to 250,000 vehicles and aims to boost U.S. sales by 8 percent to 699,000 vehicles. Hyundai and Kia together rank fifth in global car sales.</p>
<p>Hyundai Motor on Wednesday said it expected competition and protectionist measures to increase, after posting its lowest quarterly profit in about five years.</p>
<p>Hyundai Motor group, which includes Kia, last week said it planned to lift U.S. investment by 50 percent to $3.1 billion over five years and could build a new plant there.</p>
<p>KIA TARGETS SUVs</p>
<p>Kia on Thursday said it planned to launch a small sport utility vehicle in South Korea this year, in a bid to take advantage of a booming segment.</p>
<p>The model would be a "crossover utility vehicle (CUV)" based on its Pride sedan, also known as the Rio, the carmaker said without elaborating.</p>
<p>Kia Motors already sells a small SUV called Niro, a gasoline-electric hybrid model.</p>
<p>It also planned to introduce a small SUV in Europe this year, it added.</p>
<p>(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Stephen Coates and Tony Munroe)</p> | 846 |
<p>Spring marks the beginning of tea picking season in China, and with it brings the famous green tea renowned for its high quality, Longjing tea. Also known as Dragon Well tea, the leaves are typically picked and prepared entirely by hand, with the price of Longjing tea reaching around 2,000 yuan (about $320) per pound.</p>
<p>In the photo above, Chinese farmers pick Longjing tea leaves at a tea plantation in Longjing Village on Friday in Hangzhou.</p>
<p /> | Chinese Pickers Prepare ‘Ultimate Green Tea’ By Hand | false | http://nbcnews.com/news/world/chinese-pickers-prepare-ultimate-green-tea-hand-n66196 | 2014-03-28 | 3left-center
| Chinese Pickers Prepare ‘Ultimate Green Tea’ By Hand
<p>Spring marks the beginning of tea picking season in China, and with it brings the famous green tea renowned for its high quality, Longjing tea. Also known as Dragon Well tea, the leaves are typically picked and prepared entirely by hand, with the price of Longjing tea reaching around 2,000 yuan (about $320) per pound.</p>
<p>In the photo above, Chinese farmers pick Longjing tea leaves at a tea plantation in Longjing Village on Friday in Hangzhou.</p>
<p /> | 847 |
<p>Writing used to be easy for me.&#160; Now, nothing seems easy.&#160; Leaning in, I just stare at the screen.&#160; Occasionally, I try to type something.&#160; Despite my desperation to write, my mind is held captive in a former place.&#160; Police were shot. I was there. I was there because I saw film of police shooting a black man dead.</p>
<p>Bloody videos never leave you.&#160; Every image sticks.&#160; The officer took his gun and shot Alton Sterling dead.&#160; Amidst the screams, Philando Castile bled out.&#160; Everyone wanted to talk about their lives, but I couldn’t get past their deaths. I wasn’t alone.&#160; We put out a call, and more than a thousand people responded here in Dallas, Texas.</p>
<p>Downtown Dallas has been the site of dozens of rallies.&#160; Over the last year, we’ve repeatedly marched for endangered lives.&#160; This rally was large, and we didn’t hesitate.&#160; The crowd was ready to go.&#160; The speakers were ready to go.&#160; We were all ready to go as cries of justice rang out.</p>
<p>In the midst of misery, God is incarnate.&#160; When we believe all is lost, God speaks from the bones.&#160; The bones rise up and lead us on.&#160; They did that night.</p>
<p>I was nervous about speaking, but when I opened my mouth, everything seemed clear.&#160; Though I spoke for a long time, people have only remembered one phrase, “God Damn White America.”&#160; The gathered understood the adaptation of Jeremiah Wright’s infamous phrasing.&#160; The message of unity was simple.&#160; The message of love was heard.&#160; We must become one.&#160; There is no White America.&#160; There is only America.&#160; Violence has a way of creating confusion. I am white. I do not damn me or my fellow whites. I damn the idea of exclusive White America.</p>
<p>Fear is not a part of faith.&#160; I didn’t care.&#160; I was afraid.</p>
<p>Safety was at the front of my mind.&#160; The Dallas Police Department guided the marchers through downtown with tremendous grace.&#160; On multiple occasions, we stopped or changed routes to make sure that everyone had the chance to keep up.&#160; I stayed at the front of the line.&#160; In time, I settled into the rhythm of the movement.&#160; Throughout the march, anything seemed possible.&#160; Love and justice were within our grasp.&#160; Then, confusion reigned.</p>
<p>Darkness was all Jesus knew.&#160; The disciples professed their allegiance to him.&#160; Now, they couldn’t even stay awake.&#160; Unable to function, Jesus cried out in fear.&#160; No one awoke.</p>
<p>Our march wound through downtown.&#160; Stopping at the Old Courthouse, we took a minute to talk about the 1910 lynching of Allen Brooks.&#160; There was no denying that the march for love and justice was long.&#160; For a few seconds, I stared at the bricks.&#160; What did they know?&#160; What would they say?&#160; How much further is the journey?&#160; Organizers and the police shouted for me to run up to the front of the march.&#160; I did.</p>
<p>For the next few blocks, I talked to a DPD Major.&#160; In the midst of the rally and protest winding down, we talked about the success of the night.&#160; The conversation felt natural.&#160; There seemed to be a genuine connection.&#160; A few steps past Austin Street, everything changed.</p>
<p>Things seemed clearer before Babel.&#160; Now, no one speaks the same language.&#160; Confusion is all anyone knows.</p>
<p>“Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop…”&#160; I heard it, the violence, so clearly, no Babel, identical in any language.&#160; I’ve heard it ever since.&#160; The shots rang out. Bullets flew in every direction.&#160; Multiple people dropped.&#160; The echoes only enhanced the terror of it all.&#160; Pandemonium seized us.&#160; Grabbing my shirt to make sure I hadn’t been shot, I ran back toward the protestors.&#160; I was terrified that a thousand people were about to walk into the middle of a shootout.&#160; Throughout that evening, I carried a 10-foot cross.&#160; At that moment, I used it as a shepherd’s staff and started swinging it around while screaming, “Run! Run! Active Shooter! Active Shooter! Go! Go!” I exhorted as many people out of there as I could.</p>
<p>The march up to that point was beautiful.&#160; Every step was about stopping violence.&#160; Love and justice seemed so loud and so close, but evil wasn’t listening.&#160; Five officers were dead and devastation set in.</p>
<p>Total confusion.</p>
<p>For the next few days, I told my story on news outlets.&#160; The officers were never far from my mind.&#160; Repeatedly, I reminded people that our intention was a nonviolent, peaceful protest.&#160; “Love” and “justice” were the only words on my lips.&#160; I looked directly into the camera and declared, “Stop shooting America!”&#160; I don’t know if anyone heard me.&#160; Violence always confuses the ears.&#160; I saw it happen.&#160; I saw it happen again in Baton Rouge.&#160; Former words are confused, and present words are confusing.&#160; We will not be able to understand until we stand down.</p>
<p>Oh God, deliver us from Babel.</p>
<p>Amen.</p> | Deliver Us From Babel | true | https://counterpunch.org/2016/07/22/deliver-us-from-babel/ | 2016-07-22 | 4left
| Deliver Us From Babel
<p>Writing used to be easy for me.&#160; Now, nothing seems easy.&#160; Leaning in, I just stare at the screen.&#160; Occasionally, I try to type something.&#160; Despite my desperation to write, my mind is held captive in a former place.&#160; Police were shot. I was there. I was there because I saw film of police shooting a black man dead.</p>
<p>Bloody videos never leave you.&#160; Every image sticks.&#160; The officer took his gun and shot Alton Sterling dead.&#160; Amidst the screams, Philando Castile bled out.&#160; Everyone wanted to talk about their lives, but I couldn’t get past their deaths. I wasn’t alone.&#160; We put out a call, and more than a thousand people responded here in Dallas, Texas.</p>
<p>Downtown Dallas has been the site of dozens of rallies.&#160; Over the last year, we’ve repeatedly marched for endangered lives.&#160; This rally was large, and we didn’t hesitate.&#160; The crowd was ready to go.&#160; The speakers were ready to go.&#160; We were all ready to go as cries of justice rang out.</p>
<p>In the midst of misery, God is incarnate.&#160; When we believe all is lost, God speaks from the bones.&#160; The bones rise up and lead us on.&#160; They did that night.</p>
<p>I was nervous about speaking, but when I opened my mouth, everything seemed clear.&#160; Though I spoke for a long time, people have only remembered one phrase, “God Damn White America.”&#160; The gathered understood the adaptation of Jeremiah Wright’s infamous phrasing.&#160; The message of unity was simple.&#160; The message of love was heard.&#160; We must become one.&#160; There is no White America.&#160; There is only America.&#160; Violence has a way of creating confusion. I am white. I do not damn me or my fellow whites. I damn the idea of exclusive White America.</p>
<p>Fear is not a part of faith.&#160; I didn’t care.&#160; I was afraid.</p>
<p>Safety was at the front of my mind.&#160; The Dallas Police Department guided the marchers through downtown with tremendous grace.&#160; On multiple occasions, we stopped or changed routes to make sure that everyone had the chance to keep up.&#160; I stayed at the front of the line.&#160; In time, I settled into the rhythm of the movement.&#160; Throughout the march, anything seemed possible.&#160; Love and justice were within our grasp.&#160; Then, confusion reigned.</p>
<p>Darkness was all Jesus knew.&#160; The disciples professed their allegiance to him.&#160; Now, they couldn’t even stay awake.&#160; Unable to function, Jesus cried out in fear.&#160; No one awoke.</p>
<p>Our march wound through downtown.&#160; Stopping at the Old Courthouse, we took a minute to talk about the 1910 lynching of Allen Brooks.&#160; There was no denying that the march for love and justice was long.&#160; For a few seconds, I stared at the bricks.&#160; What did they know?&#160; What would they say?&#160; How much further is the journey?&#160; Organizers and the police shouted for me to run up to the front of the march.&#160; I did.</p>
<p>For the next few blocks, I talked to a DPD Major.&#160; In the midst of the rally and protest winding down, we talked about the success of the night.&#160; The conversation felt natural.&#160; There seemed to be a genuine connection.&#160; A few steps past Austin Street, everything changed.</p>
<p>Things seemed clearer before Babel.&#160; Now, no one speaks the same language.&#160; Confusion is all anyone knows.</p>
<p>“Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop…”&#160; I heard it, the violence, so clearly, no Babel, identical in any language.&#160; I’ve heard it ever since.&#160; The shots rang out. Bullets flew in every direction.&#160; Multiple people dropped.&#160; The echoes only enhanced the terror of it all.&#160; Pandemonium seized us.&#160; Grabbing my shirt to make sure I hadn’t been shot, I ran back toward the protestors.&#160; I was terrified that a thousand people were about to walk into the middle of a shootout.&#160; Throughout that evening, I carried a 10-foot cross.&#160; At that moment, I used it as a shepherd’s staff and started swinging it around while screaming, “Run! Run! Active Shooter! Active Shooter! Go! Go!” I exhorted as many people out of there as I could.</p>
<p>The march up to that point was beautiful.&#160; Every step was about stopping violence.&#160; Love and justice seemed so loud and so close, but evil wasn’t listening.&#160; Five officers were dead and devastation set in.</p>
<p>Total confusion.</p>
<p>For the next few days, I told my story on news outlets.&#160; The officers were never far from my mind.&#160; Repeatedly, I reminded people that our intention was a nonviolent, peaceful protest.&#160; “Love” and “justice” were the only words on my lips.&#160; I looked directly into the camera and declared, “Stop shooting America!”&#160; I don’t know if anyone heard me.&#160; Violence always confuses the ears.&#160; I saw it happen.&#160; I saw it happen again in Baton Rouge.&#160; Former words are confused, and present words are confusing.&#160; We will not be able to understand until we stand down.</p>
<p>Oh God, deliver us from Babel.</p>
<p>Amen.</p> | 848 |
<p>(Left)Protesters burn North Korean flag and images of the late Northern leader.(Right) North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, watches a submarine launched ballistic missile</p>
<p>Tensions across the world continue to heat up as South Korea enters a new level of readiness against northern aggression after the threat of attack raised to "an all time high" today.</p>
<p>In response to North Korea's&#160; <a href="" type="internal">recent ballistic missile launch</a>, and the&#160; <a href="" type="internal">restarting of the country's sole plutonium reactor</a>, the South is responding with "bone numbing" measures against&#160;Pyongyang.</p>
<p>From&#160; <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/18/asia/south-korea-north-korean-terror-attack-claim/index.html?sr=fbCNN021816south-korea-north-korean-terror-attack-claim0928AMStoryLink&amp;linkId=21370498" type="external">CNN</a>:</p>
<p>Seoul (CNN)&#160;North Korea is currently planning a "terrorist attack" on South Korea according to the South's spy agency.</p>
<p>A lawmaker, briefed by the National Intelligence Service (NIS), says leader Kim Jong Un himself gave the order to&#160;make preparations.</p>
<p>"North Korea's terrorist attack could be in the form of causing harms to anti-North Korean activists, North Korean defectors or government officials," said Saenuri Party member, Lee Chul-woo, when CNN contacted his office Thursday.</p>
<p>Members of the ruling Saenuri Party held a closed-door meeting with the NIS, defense ministry and other ministries.</p>
<p>South Korea's Presidential office said this latest NIS assessment highlights how important it is to pass an anti-terrorism bill they have been pushing for for some time.</p>
<p>Kim Sung-woo, a senior secretary at the Presidential office, known as the Blue House, said the law needs to be passed&#160;"so that there could be a legal and institutional framework on anti-terrorism so that it can protect our people's lives and property."</p>
<p>As we prepare to elect a new Commander-in-Chief, the world seems to be falling into a chaos that has never been seen before. China is absorbing more and of the South-East Asian seas, Iran is <a href="" type="internal">making a fool of the U.S.</a>&#160;on the world stage, and&#160; <a href="" type="internal">the racial divide is greater than it has been in decades.</a>&#160;The next president will have an intense task ahead of them. We here at FFS hope that the American people vote with this in mind?</p>
<p>0 comments</p> | South Korea prepares for sweeping terrorist attacks by North. | true | http://freedomsfinalstand.com/south-korea-prepares-for-sweeping-terrorist-attacks-by-north/ | 0right
| South Korea prepares for sweeping terrorist attacks by North.
<p>(Left)Protesters burn North Korean flag and images of the late Northern leader.(Right) North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, watches a submarine launched ballistic missile</p>
<p>Tensions across the world continue to heat up as South Korea enters a new level of readiness against northern aggression after the threat of attack raised to "an all time high" today.</p>
<p>In response to North Korea's&#160; <a href="" type="internal">recent ballistic missile launch</a>, and the&#160; <a href="" type="internal">restarting of the country's sole plutonium reactor</a>, the South is responding with "bone numbing" measures against&#160;Pyongyang.</p>
<p>From&#160; <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/18/asia/south-korea-north-korean-terror-attack-claim/index.html?sr=fbCNN021816south-korea-north-korean-terror-attack-claim0928AMStoryLink&amp;linkId=21370498" type="external">CNN</a>:</p>
<p>Seoul (CNN)&#160;North Korea is currently planning a "terrorist attack" on South Korea according to the South's spy agency.</p>
<p>A lawmaker, briefed by the National Intelligence Service (NIS), says leader Kim Jong Un himself gave the order to&#160;make preparations.</p>
<p>"North Korea's terrorist attack could be in the form of causing harms to anti-North Korean activists, North Korean defectors or government officials," said Saenuri Party member, Lee Chul-woo, when CNN contacted his office Thursday.</p>
<p>Members of the ruling Saenuri Party held a closed-door meeting with the NIS, defense ministry and other ministries.</p>
<p>South Korea's Presidential office said this latest NIS assessment highlights how important it is to pass an anti-terrorism bill they have been pushing for for some time.</p>
<p>Kim Sung-woo, a senior secretary at the Presidential office, known as the Blue House, said the law needs to be passed&#160;"so that there could be a legal and institutional framework on anti-terrorism so that it can protect our people's lives and property."</p>
<p>As we prepare to elect a new Commander-in-Chief, the world seems to be falling into a chaos that has never been seen before. China is absorbing more and of the South-East Asian seas, Iran is <a href="" type="internal">making a fool of the U.S.</a>&#160;on the world stage, and&#160; <a href="" type="internal">the racial divide is greater than it has been in decades.</a>&#160;The next president will have an intense task ahead of them. We here at FFS hope that the American people vote with this in mind?</p>
<p>0 comments</p> | 849 |
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<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p>For the second-consecutive week, the New Mexico Lobos are receiving no points in the Associated Press Top 25.</p>
<p>The only Mountain West Conference team receiving points in Monday morning’s updated poll is San Diego State, which checks in at No. 20 in the polls.</p>
<p>The Journal’s Geoff Grammer is one of the 65 AP voters this season. To view the ballot he turned in Monday morning, <a href="" type="internal">CLICK HERE</a>.</p>
<p>(rank, team, first place votes in parenthesis, record through Dec. 22, total points and last week’s ranking) 1. Arizona (63) 12-0 — 1,623 — 1 2. Syracuse (2) 11-0 — 1,528 — 2 3. Ohio State 12-0 — 1,462 — 3 4. Wisconsin 12-0 — 1,390 — 4 5. Michigan State 10-1 — 1,336 — 5 6. Louisville 11-1 — 1,274 — 6 7. Oklahoma State 11-1 — 1,221 — 7 8. Villanova 11-0 — 1,116 — 8 9. Duke 9-2 — 1,108 — 8 10. Wichita State 12-0 — 981 — 11 11. Baylor 10-1 — 970 — 12 12. Oregon 11-0 — 914 — 13 13. Florida 9-2 — 881 — 16 14. Iowa State 9-0 — 804 — 17 15. UConn 10-1 — 661 — 10 16. Kansas 8-3 — 659 — 18 17. Memphis 8-2 — 630 — 15 18. Kentucky 9-3 — 529 — 19 19. North Carolina 8-3 — 413 — 14 20. San Diego State 9-1 — 378 — 24 21. Colorado 10-2 — 345 — 20 22. Iowa 11-2 — 278 — 25 23. UMass 10-1 — 154 — 22 24. Gonzaga 10-2 — 79 — 21 25. Missouri 10-1 — 69 — 23 Others receiving votes: Oklahoma 65, Illinois 53, Texas 47, George Washington 43, Toledo 27, Florida St. 23, Michigan 15, Harvard 14, UCLA 14, Saint Mary’s (Cal) 8, Pittsburgh 6, Creighton 5, LSU 1, SMU 1.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | (View poll) Still no votes for Lobos in latest AP Top 25 | false | https://abqjournal.com/325461/view-poll-still-no-votes-for-lobos-in-latest-ap-top-25.html | 2least
| (View poll) Still no votes for Lobos in latest AP Top 25
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p>For the second-consecutive week, the New Mexico Lobos are receiving no points in the Associated Press Top 25.</p>
<p>The only Mountain West Conference team receiving points in Monday morning’s updated poll is San Diego State, which checks in at No. 20 in the polls.</p>
<p>The Journal’s Geoff Grammer is one of the 65 AP voters this season. To view the ballot he turned in Monday morning, <a href="" type="internal">CLICK HERE</a>.</p>
<p>(rank, team, first place votes in parenthesis, record through Dec. 22, total points and last week’s ranking) 1. Arizona (63) 12-0 — 1,623 — 1 2. Syracuse (2) 11-0 — 1,528 — 2 3. Ohio State 12-0 — 1,462 — 3 4. Wisconsin 12-0 — 1,390 — 4 5. Michigan State 10-1 — 1,336 — 5 6. Louisville 11-1 — 1,274 — 6 7. Oklahoma State 11-1 — 1,221 — 7 8. Villanova 11-0 — 1,116 — 8 9. Duke 9-2 — 1,108 — 8 10. Wichita State 12-0 — 981 — 11 11. Baylor 10-1 — 970 — 12 12. Oregon 11-0 — 914 — 13 13. Florida 9-2 — 881 — 16 14. Iowa State 9-0 — 804 — 17 15. UConn 10-1 — 661 — 10 16. Kansas 8-3 — 659 — 18 17. Memphis 8-2 — 630 — 15 18. Kentucky 9-3 — 529 — 19 19. North Carolina 8-3 — 413 — 14 20. San Diego State 9-1 — 378 — 24 21. Colorado 10-2 — 345 — 20 22. Iowa 11-2 — 278 — 25 23. UMass 10-1 — 154 — 22 24. Gonzaga 10-2 — 79 — 21 25. Missouri 10-1 — 69 — 23 Others receiving votes: Oklahoma 65, Illinois 53, Texas 47, George Washington 43, Toledo 27, Florida St. 23, Michigan 15, Harvard 14, UCLA 14, Saint Mary’s (Cal) 8, Pittsburgh 6, Creighton 5, LSU 1, SMU 1.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | 850 |
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<p>Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister who was known as the “Iron Lady” of British politics, has passed away at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke, her family announced on Monday.</p>
<p>Britain’s longest serving prime minister of the 20th century was also the only woman to hold the leadership post. Thatcher led the Conservative Party to three straight election victories, serving in office rom 1979 to 1990.</p>
<p>During her tenure as prime minister, Thatcher vastly reshaped Britain with her conservative economic policies, pulling it back from 35 years of socialism and ushering in an era of privatization.</p>
<p>The New York Times:</p>
<p />
<p>But by the time she left office, the principles known as Thatcherism — the belief that economic freedom and individual liberty are interdependent, that personal responsibility and hard work are the only ways to national prosperity, and that the free-market democracies must stand firm against aggression — had won many disciples. Even some of her strongest critics accorded her a grudging respect.</p>
<p>At home, Mrs. Thatcher’s political successes were decisive. She broke the power of the labor unions and forced the Labour Party to abandon its commitment to nationalized industry, redefine the role of the welfare state and accept the importance of the free market.</p>
<p>…To her enemies she was — as Denis Healey, chancellor of the Exchequer in Harold Wilson’s government, called her — “La Pasionaria of Privilege,” a woman who railed against the evils of poverty but who was callous and unsympathetic to the plight of the have-nots. Her policies, her opponents said, were cruel and shortsighted, widened the gap between rich and poor and worsened the plight of the poorest.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/world/europe/former-prime-minister-margaret-thatcher-of-britain-has-died.html?pagewanted=1&amp;_r=1&amp;hp" type="external">Read more</a></p> | Margaret Thatcher, Britain's 'Iron Lady,' Dies | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/margaret-thatcher-britains-iron-lady-dies/ | 2013-04-08 | 4left
| Margaret Thatcher, Britain's 'Iron Lady,' Dies
<p>Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister who was known as the “Iron Lady” of British politics, has passed away at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke, her family announced on Monday.</p>
<p>Britain’s longest serving prime minister of the 20th century was also the only woman to hold the leadership post. Thatcher led the Conservative Party to three straight election victories, serving in office rom 1979 to 1990.</p>
<p>During her tenure as prime minister, Thatcher vastly reshaped Britain with her conservative economic policies, pulling it back from 35 years of socialism and ushering in an era of privatization.</p>
<p>The New York Times:</p>
<p />
<p>But by the time she left office, the principles known as Thatcherism — the belief that economic freedom and individual liberty are interdependent, that personal responsibility and hard work are the only ways to national prosperity, and that the free-market democracies must stand firm against aggression — had won many disciples. Even some of her strongest critics accorded her a grudging respect.</p>
<p>At home, Mrs. Thatcher’s political successes were decisive. She broke the power of the labor unions and forced the Labour Party to abandon its commitment to nationalized industry, redefine the role of the welfare state and accept the importance of the free market.</p>
<p>…To her enemies she was — as Denis Healey, chancellor of the Exchequer in Harold Wilson’s government, called her — “La Pasionaria of Privilege,” a woman who railed against the evils of poverty but who was callous and unsympathetic to the plight of the have-nots. Her policies, her opponents said, were cruel and shortsighted, widened the gap between rich and poor and worsened the plight of the poorest.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/world/europe/former-prime-minister-margaret-thatcher-of-britain-has-died.html?pagewanted=1&amp;_r=1&amp;hp" type="external">Read more</a></p> | 851 |
<p>Pound slips below $1.28</p>
<p>U.K. stocks ended a choppy session little changed on Wednesday as a falling pound buoyed exporters, but the benchmark index still struggled to shake off a downbeat trend in European equities.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The FTSE 100 rose 0.91 point, or 0.01% to close at 7,382.65 after having opened in the red.</p>
<p>The FTSE 100 trudged slightly higher as the pound dipped below $1.28. Sterling also struggled against euro , visiting levels not seen since October 2009. Pound strength tends to weigh on shares of London-listed multinational companies with earnings in other currencies.</p>
<p>"The pound is weakening against the euro with the strong [eurozone] manufacturing PMI prints," said Henry Croft, research analyst at Accendo Markets.</p>
<p>As well, it appears "the Brexit position from the U.K. government is softening a little bit and ... that might mean we're not able to get some of the terms that had been set out by Theresa May in January, and she was pretty strong about that," Croft said. "We could end up not getting the concessions the government wanted in the first place and it's time to step back and re-evaluate the situation."</p>
<p>The pound traded hands at $1.2784, down from $1.2823 late Tuesday in New York. Against the shared currency, sterling fell to EUR1.0831 from EUR1.0903.</p>
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<p>WPP bruised: Shares of WPP PLC (WPP.LN)(WPP.LN) sank 11% after the advertising giant issued a disappointing growth outlook. The stock was on course for its largest percentage loss since October 1998, according to FactSet data.</p>
<p>In a trading update Wednesday, WPP cut its forecast for growth for 2017 (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wpp-revenue-stutters-as-client-spending-drops-2017-08-23), citing major slowdowns in client spending in key industries such as consumer goods and retail.</p>
<p>"This is the second time the sale forecast has been trimmed this year, and that is a warning sign to traders, as it could be the start of a trend," said David Madden, market analyst at CMC Markets.</p>
<p>"In 2017, the share price has created a series of lower lows and lower highs, which is a worrying sign," he said in a note.</p>
<p>In the media group, also exposed to trends in advertising, shares of broadcaster ITV PLC (ITV.LN) fell 1.9% and publisher Pearson PLC (PSON.LN) lost 1.4%. Informa PLC (INF.LN) , an events and publishing company, gave up 1.3%.</p>
<p>Other movers: On Tuesday, advances in the mining sector helped the FTSE 100 rise 0.9% to break a three-session losing streak (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ftse-100-led-higher-by-miners-as-provident-plunges-almost-60-2017-08-22) and log the biggest one-day percentage gain since July 12</p>
<p>Miners continued to move higher Wednesday, with BHP Billiton PLC (BLT.LN) (BHP.AU) (BHP.AU) and Antofagasta PLC (ANTO.LN) up 1.2% and 2.3%, respectively.</p>
<p>Shares of Tesco PLC (TSCO.LN) (TSCO.LN) rose 1.6%. Shareholders and bond investors who were affected by the supermarket's accounting scandal in 2014 were able on Wednesday to start making claims through Tesco's multi-billion pound compensation scheme. Tesco said in 2014 it overstated its profit by GBP250 million. Investors who bought shares or bonds between Aug. 29 and through Sept. 19, 2014 are eligible.</p>
<p>"Compensating investors is the final chapter in the accounting saga and Tesco is keen to put this episode behind them," said Hargreaves Lansdown's head of financial planning Danny Cox, in a note. "Stronger trading, particularly in the U.K., means that after a 2-plus year absence, Tesco is planning to restore its dividend this year."</p>
<p>Brexit update: A slate of policy papers on Brexit was set to be published by the U.K. government on Wednesday. Reports suggested the government was backing away (http://news.sky.com/story/may-accused-of-brexit-climbdown-over-role-of-european-court-of-justice-11000974) from a harder stance on the European Court of Justice's say in U.K. law.</p>
<p>(END) Dow Jones Newswires</p>
<p>August 23, 2017 12:16 ET (16:16 GMT)</p> | LONDON MARKETS: FTSE 100 Logs Minuscule Gain As Weak Pound Offsets Wider European Selloff | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2017/08/23/london-markets-ftse-100-logs-minuscule-gain-as-weak-pound-offsets-wider-european-selloff.html | 2017-08-23 | 0right
| LONDON MARKETS: FTSE 100 Logs Minuscule Gain As Weak Pound Offsets Wider European Selloff
<p>Pound slips below $1.28</p>
<p>U.K. stocks ended a choppy session little changed on Wednesday as a falling pound buoyed exporters, but the benchmark index still struggled to shake off a downbeat trend in European equities.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The FTSE 100 rose 0.91 point, or 0.01% to close at 7,382.65 after having opened in the red.</p>
<p>The FTSE 100 trudged slightly higher as the pound dipped below $1.28. Sterling also struggled against euro , visiting levels not seen since October 2009. Pound strength tends to weigh on shares of London-listed multinational companies with earnings in other currencies.</p>
<p>"The pound is weakening against the euro with the strong [eurozone] manufacturing PMI prints," said Henry Croft, research analyst at Accendo Markets.</p>
<p>As well, it appears "the Brexit position from the U.K. government is softening a little bit and ... that might mean we're not able to get some of the terms that had been set out by Theresa May in January, and she was pretty strong about that," Croft said. "We could end up not getting the concessions the government wanted in the first place and it's time to step back and re-evaluate the situation."</p>
<p>The pound traded hands at $1.2784, down from $1.2823 late Tuesday in New York. Against the shared currency, sterling fell to EUR1.0831 from EUR1.0903.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>WPP bruised: Shares of WPP PLC (WPP.LN)(WPP.LN) sank 11% after the advertising giant issued a disappointing growth outlook. The stock was on course for its largest percentage loss since October 1998, according to FactSet data.</p>
<p>In a trading update Wednesday, WPP cut its forecast for growth for 2017 (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wpp-revenue-stutters-as-client-spending-drops-2017-08-23), citing major slowdowns in client spending in key industries such as consumer goods and retail.</p>
<p>"This is the second time the sale forecast has been trimmed this year, and that is a warning sign to traders, as it could be the start of a trend," said David Madden, market analyst at CMC Markets.</p>
<p>"In 2017, the share price has created a series of lower lows and lower highs, which is a worrying sign," he said in a note.</p>
<p>In the media group, also exposed to trends in advertising, shares of broadcaster ITV PLC (ITV.LN) fell 1.9% and publisher Pearson PLC (PSON.LN) lost 1.4%. Informa PLC (INF.LN) , an events and publishing company, gave up 1.3%.</p>
<p>Other movers: On Tuesday, advances in the mining sector helped the FTSE 100 rise 0.9% to break a three-session losing streak (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ftse-100-led-higher-by-miners-as-provident-plunges-almost-60-2017-08-22) and log the biggest one-day percentage gain since July 12</p>
<p>Miners continued to move higher Wednesday, with BHP Billiton PLC (BLT.LN) (BHP.AU) (BHP.AU) and Antofagasta PLC (ANTO.LN) up 1.2% and 2.3%, respectively.</p>
<p>Shares of Tesco PLC (TSCO.LN) (TSCO.LN) rose 1.6%. Shareholders and bond investors who were affected by the supermarket's accounting scandal in 2014 were able on Wednesday to start making claims through Tesco's multi-billion pound compensation scheme. Tesco said in 2014 it overstated its profit by GBP250 million. Investors who bought shares or bonds between Aug. 29 and through Sept. 19, 2014 are eligible.</p>
<p>"Compensating investors is the final chapter in the accounting saga and Tesco is keen to put this episode behind them," said Hargreaves Lansdown's head of financial planning Danny Cox, in a note. "Stronger trading, particularly in the U.K., means that after a 2-plus year absence, Tesco is planning to restore its dividend this year."</p>
<p>Brexit update: A slate of policy papers on Brexit was set to be published by the U.K. government on Wednesday. Reports suggested the government was backing away (http://news.sky.com/story/may-accused-of-brexit-climbdown-over-role-of-european-court-of-justice-11000974) from a harder stance on the European Court of Justice's say in U.K. law.</p>
<p>(END) Dow Jones Newswires</p>
<p>August 23, 2017 12:16 ET (16:16 GMT)</p> | 852 |
<p>Electric-car maker Tesla Inc reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue and backed its delivery guidance for the second half of the year.</p>
<p>Shares of the company, which said it was averaging over 1,800 net reservations per day for its mass-market Model 3 since the handover of the launch vehicles last week, rose as much as 5 percent to $342.1 in after-hours trading on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Tesla, which had faced production issues, maintained its delivery guidance of 50,000 vehicles for the second half of the year.</p>
<p>Chief Executive Elon Musk said last week that the company would go through at least "six months of manufacturing hell."</p>
<p>The company said it had over $3 billion in cash and cash-equivalents as of June 30, compared with $4 billion at the end of the previous quarter and $3.25 billion from a year earlier.</p>
<p>Automotive gross margin, which excludes the sale of zero emission vehicle (ZEV) credits, rose to 25 percent from 23.6 percent a year earlier.</p>
<p>The company said it expects positive Model 3 gross margins in the fourth quarter.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Revenue rose to $2.79 billion from $1.27 billion, beating analysts' average estimate of $2.51 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.</p>
<p>Excluding items, the company lost $1.33 per share, smaller than the analysts' expectations of a loss of $1.82.</p>
<p>The company's net loss attributable to shareholders widened to $336.4 million in the second quarter ended June 30, from $293.2 million a year earlier. http://bit.ly/2uXmTL2</p>
<p>On a per share basis, net loss attributable to shareholders narrowed to $2.04 from $2.09.</p>
<p>(Reporting by Aishwarya Venugopal in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)</p> | Tesla's quarterly revenue beats estimates | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/08/02/teslas-quarterly-revenue-beats-estimates.html | 2017-08-02 | 0right
| Tesla's quarterly revenue beats estimates
<p>Electric-car maker Tesla Inc reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue and backed its delivery guidance for the second half of the year.</p>
<p>Shares of the company, which said it was averaging over 1,800 net reservations per day for its mass-market Model 3 since the handover of the launch vehicles last week, rose as much as 5 percent to $342.1 in after-hours trading on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Tesla, which had faced production issues, maintained its delivery guidance of 50,000 vehicles for the second half of the year.</p>
<p>Chief Executive Elon Musk said last week that the company would go through at least "six months of manufacturing hell."</p>
<p>The company said it had over $3 billion in cash and cash-equivalents as of June 30, compared with $4 billion at the end of the previous quarter and $3.25 billion from a year earlier.</p>
<p>Automotive gross margin, which excludes the sale of zero emission vehicle (ZEV) credits, rose to 25 percent from 23.6 percent a year earlier.</p>
<p>The company said it expects positive Model 3 gross margins in the fourth quarter.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Revenue rose to $2.79 billion from $1.27 billion, beating analysts' average estimate of $2.51 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.</p>
<p>Excluding items, the company lost $1.33 per share, smaller than the analysts' expectations of a loss of $1.82.</p>
<p>The company's net loss attributable to shareholders widened to $336.4 million in the second quarter ended June 30, from $293.2 million a year earlier. http://bit.ly/2uXmTL2</p>
<p>On a per share basis, net loss attributable to shareholders narrowed to $2.04 from $2.09.</p>
<p>(Reporting by Aishwarya Venugopal in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)</p> | 853 |
<p>LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — The Nebraska attorney general's decision not to prosecute alleged liquor law violations in Whiteclay will save the state an estimated $50,000 in legal fees.</p>
<p>The savings were disclosed in Gov. Pete Ricketts proposed budget released Wednesday.</p>
<p>The attorney general's office announced in October it would drop charges against the village's four stores in northwest Nebraska because they had already lost their liquor licenses. Authorities had accused the stores of violations including selling to bootleggers and failing to cooperate with investigators.</p>
<p>The Nebraska Liquor Control Commission originally requested the money to pay an attorney who had done most of the legal work on the case but was no longer employed by the state. The decision not to prosecute made his services unnecessary.</p>
<p>State regulators effectively closed the stores in April when they voted not to renew their licenses.</p>
<p>LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — The Nebraska attorney general's decision not to prosecute alleged liquor law violations in Whiteclay will save the state an estimated $50,000 in legal fees.</p>
<p>The savings were disclosed in Gov. Pete Ricketts proposed budget released Wednesday.</p>
<p>The attorney general's office announced in October it would drop charges against the village's four stores in northwest Nebraska because they had already lost their liquor licenses. Authorities had accused the stores of violations including selling to bootleggers and failing to cooperate with investigators.</p>
<p>The Nebraska Liquor Control Commission originally requested the money to pay an attorney who had done most of the legal work on the case but was no longer employed by the state. The decision not to prosecute made his services unnecessary.</p>
<p>State regulators effectively closed the stores in April when they voted not to renew their licenses.</p> | Decision not to prosecute Whiteclay case will save $50,000 | false | https://apnews.com/amp/b8eac42b1c724d19b4986101a307387c | 2018-01-13 | 2least
| Decision not to prosecute Whiteclay case will save $50,000
<p>LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — The Nebraska attorney general's decision not to prosecute alleged liquor law violations in Whiteclay will save the state an estimated $50,000 in legal fees.</p>
<p>The savings were disclosed in Gov. Pete Ricketts proposed budget released Wednesday.</p>
<p>The attorney general's office announced in October it would drop charges against the village's four stores in northwest Nebraska because they had already lost their liquor licenses. Authorities had accused the stores of violations including selling to bootleggers and failing to cooperate with investigators.</p>
<p>The Nebraska Liquor Control Commission originally requested the money to pay an attorney who had done most of the legal work on the case but was no longer employed by the state. The decision not to prosecute made his services unnecessary.</p>
<p>State regulators effectively closed the stores in April when they voted not to renew their licenses.</p>
<p>LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — The Nebraska attorney general's decision not to prosecute alleged liquor law violations in Whiteclay will save the state an estimated $50,000 in legal fees.</p>
<p>The savings were disclosed in Gov. Pete Ricketts proposed budget released Wednesday.</p>
<p>The attorney general's office announced in October it would drop charges against the village's four stores in northwest Nebraska because they had already lost their liquor licenses. Authorities had accused the stores of violations including selling to bootleggers and failing to cooperate with investigators.</p>
<p>The Nebraska Liquor Control Commission originally requested the money to pay an attorney who had done most of the legal work on the case but was no longer employed by the state. The decision not to prosecute made his services unnecessary.</p>
<p>State regulators effectively closed the stores in April when they voted not to renew their licenses.</p> | 854 |
<p>The fault lies not with its proprietor, but with his tongue. It keeps saying things that surprise both proprietor and hearer and in two recent cases its utterances were completely unexpected and, indeed, unwelcomed, suggesting as they did, a bigotry to which neither of the tongues’ proprietors acknowledges subscribing. In mid-October their tongues separately took off with startling pronouncements. The first came from the tongue of former Nobel Prize winner, James D. Watson.</p>
<p>Mr. Watson received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962 for deciphering the double Helix of DNA. In 2007 his tongue entered new territory. Echoing sentiments of an earlier Nobel Prize winner it made a pronouncement both startling and racist. Mr. Watson’s errant tongue expressed gloominess at the prospect for a solution to the myriad problems facing Africa. It was quoted in the Times of London as saying that its master was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” even though “there are many people of color who are very talented.” Elucidating, it explained “All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours-whereas all the testing says not really.” Such a pronouncement is startling at any time but being made when the free world is led by a madman of diminished mental capacity, surrounded by advisors of equal intellect, it is all the more startling.</p>
<p>Happily for Mr. Watson and his admirers, when informed of his tongue’s wanderings, he promptly disavowed its utterances, thus redeeming himself. In a statement to the Associated Press he said:</p>
<p>“I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. There is no scientific basis for such a belief.”</p>
<p>(Imagine George Bush disavowing his tongue’s utterances that there were weapons of mass destruction, things were going better in Iraq, etc.)</p>
<p>(This was not the first time that a Nobel Prize winner’s tongue assumed its master’s award gave it license to make racist utterances. William B. Shockley, a Nobel laureate who received the prize in physics for his work with transistors, eventually left the world of physics and began teaching at Stanford University where he formulated a theory that led him to promulgate the idea that African Americans were inherently less intelligent than Caucasians, a theory never disavowed by him and one that took considerable luster from the medal he had received as a Nobel prize winner. )</p>
<p>A day after Mr. Watson spoke, the tongue of another prominent American took flight and with an oratorical flourish that gave life insurance companies information that should increase their profits, denigrated minorities. The tongue took off while John Tanner, chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, was making a speech to the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles. One of Mr. Tanner’s responsibilities in the Justice Department is the protection of citizens’ voting rights, The tongue, whose master had recently expressed support for a Georgia law that requires voters to show identification cards before voting, told the Latino audience that a disproportionate share of elderly minority voters did not have identification cards. Acknowledging that that was a problem for them, according to reports of a video posted on YouTube, the tongue went on to say: “That’s a shame, you know, creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstances” Continuing, but not making matters better, it went on to say: “Of course, that also ties into the racial aspect because our society is such that minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do. They die first.”</p>
<p>The tongue then explained that there are lots of inequities in the U.S. and anything that “disproportionately impacts the elderly has the opposite impact on minorities. Just the math is such as that.” That was a startling bit of information for the tongue to impart and it is unlikely that the utterance will qualify Mr. Tanner or his tongue for a Nobel Prize. (It may affect premiums paid by minorities for life insurance since if the companies are aware that minorities have shorter life expectancies than non-minorities the premiums minorities pay for life insurance will almost certainly be higher than those paid by insureds with longer life expectancies. Quoting Mr. Tanner’s tongue: “Just the math is such as that.”)</p>
<p>Given the opportunity to disavow the tongue’s utterances, a Justice Department spokesman said Mr. Tanner’s remarks had been “grossly misconstrued.” He went on to explain that “nothing in his comments deviated from his firm commitment to enforce the law.” That may be, although Mr. Tanner’s support for Georgia’s voter identification law would suggest he and his tongue are not as out of synch as supporters of voting rights would have had a right to expect from the chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.</p>
<p>CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI is a laywer in Boulder, Colorado. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Racism in High Places | true | https://counterpunch.org/2007/11/02/racism-in-high-places/ | 2007-11-02 | 4left
| Racism in High Places
<p>The fault lies not with its proprietor, but with his tongue. It keeps saying things that surprise both proprietor and hearer and in two recent cases its utterances were completely unexpected and, indeed, unwelcomed, suggesting as they did, a bigotry to which neither of the tongues’ proprietors acknowledges subscribing. In mid-October their tongues separately took off with startling pronouncements. The first came from the tongue of former Nobel Prize winner, James D. Watson.</p>
<p>Mr. Watson received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962 for deciphering the double Helix of DNA. In 2007 his tongue entered new territory. Echoing sentiments of an earlier Nobel Prize winner it made a pronouncement both startling and racist. Mr. Watson’s errant tongue expressed gloominess at the prospect for a solution to the myriad problems facing Africa. It was quoted in the Times of London as saying that its master was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” even though “there are many people of color who are very talented.” Elucidating, it explained “All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours-whereas all the testing says not really.” Such a pronouncement is startling at any time but being made when the free world is led by a madman of diminished mental capacity, surrounded by advisors of equal intellect, it is all the more startling.</p>
<p>Happily for Mr. Watson and his admirers, when informed of his tongue’s wanderings, he promptly disavowed its utterances, thus redeeming himself. In a statement to the Associated Press he said:</p>
<p>“I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. There is no scientific basis for such a belief.”</p>
<p>(Imagine George Bush disavowing his tongue’s utterances that there were weapons of mass destruction, things were going better in Iraq, etc.)</p>
<p>(This was not the first time that a Nobel Prize winner’s tongue assumed its master’s award gave it license to make racist utterances. William B. Shockley, a Nobel laureate who received the prize in physics for his work with transistors, eventually left the world of physics and began teaching at Stanford University where he formulated a theory that led him to promulgate the idea that African Americans were inherently less intelligent than Caucasians, a theory never disavowed by him and one that took considerable luster from the medal he had received as a Nobel prize winner. )</p>
<p>A day after Mr. Watson spoke, the tongue of another prominent American took flight and with an oratorical flourish that gave life insurance companies information that should increase their profits, denigrated minorities. The tongue took off while John Tanner, chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, was making a speech to the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles. One of Mr. Tanner’s responsibilities in the Justice Department is the protection of citizens’ voting rights, The tongue, whose master had recently expressed support for a Georgia law that requires voters to show identification cards before voting, told the Latino audience that a disproportionate share of elderly minority voters did not have identification cards. Acknowledging that that was a problem for them, according to reports of a video posted on YouTube, the tongue went on to say: “That’s a shame, you know, creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstances” Continuing, but not making matters better, it went on to say: “Of course, that also ties into the racial aspect because our society is such that minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do. They die first.”</p>
<p>The tongue then explained that there are lots of inequities in the U.S. and anything that “disproportionately impacts the elderly has the opposite impact on minorities. Just the math is such as that.” That was a startling bit of information for the tongue to impart and it is unlikely that the utterance will qualify Mr. Tanner or his tongue for a Nobel Prize. (It may affect premiums paid by minorities for life insurance since if the companies are aware that minorities have shorter life expectancies than non-minorities the premiums minorities pay for life insurance will almost certainly be higher than those paid by insureds with longer life expectancies. Quoting Mr. Tanner’s tongue: “Just the math is such as that.”)</p>
<p>Given the opportunity to disavow the tongue’s utterances, a Justice Department spokesman said Mr. Tanner’s remarks had been “grossly misconstrued.” He went on to explain that “nothing in his comments deviated from his firm commitment to enforce the law.” That may be, although Mr. Tanner’s support for Georgia’s voter identification law would suggest he and his tongue are not as out of synch as supporters of voting rights would have had a right to expect from the chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.</p>
<p>CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI is a laywer in Boulder, Colorado. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | 855 |
<p>By Amy Butler</p>
<p>I recall once, in college, sitting in the congregation during a Sunday morning worship service and listening intently to the pastor’s sermon. About halfway through he began to talk about a session he’d recently had with his psychiatrist. I heard him going there; my stomach sank. As he went on and on talking about details far too personal to be sharing from the pulpit, I felt like I was watching a car accident in slow motion.</p>
<p>I remember that moment like it was yesterday, and I think about it sometimes when I think about relationships with the people I serve. Now that I’m on the other side of the pulpit, I worry some about the quality of my interactions. In the quest to be in genuine relationship, I find myself in the position of causing others to cringe.</p>
<p>For example, just recently during Holy Week, a congregant came up to me after Wednesday night worship and asked when my kids would be arriving for the Easter weekend. Because of schedules, I’d learned just that day that I wouldn’t see them until Easter Monday — the first Easter in all their lives we wouldn’t be together. As I explained the situation, I could feel the tears welling in my eyes, threatening to leak out of the corners. Noticing the threatening tears, the person who’d inquired said: “I’ve never seen a minister cry before. I have to go!,” and she turned around and left quickly.</p>
<p>The line between inappropriate disclosure and healthy vulnerability is a fine one, and it’s easy to step off either into a façade of our real selves or another moment of cringe-worthy over sharing. Many of my colleagues find walking that line too stressful, so we opt for safe and considerable distance. I understand that approach. But I was reminded this week why that safe course of action not only robs our people of developing a realistic view of their pastors; it also means we’re giving up some beautiful moments of real human engagement.</p>
<p>This week my daughter Hannah graduated from high school. At her graduation party, in addition to her group of friends, there was a sizable gathering of church folk who have known her since she was 6 years old. As we sat around the living room opening presents and sharing memories, a member of the search committee that called me to that church recalled meeting our family for the first time.</p>
<p>“Do you remember when I asked you how you would know if your church cared about you?” he asked me.</p>
<p>I couldn’t recall.</p>
<p>“You said, ‘I’ll know you care about me when I see you loving my kids.’”</p>
<p>As I sat there with these people who have watched our family live through many happy and some very sad moments, I realized that I know they love me. I know they love me because I can see their beaming faces just as proud as mine as they celebrate this kid’s next steps.</p>
<p>There are a lot of risks to being vulnerable with your congregation, not the least of which is subjecting perfectly nice people to the possibility of cringe-worthy over sharing moments. But I still think the risk is worth it. In summoning the courage to tell the truth about who we are, to let our people see us in our full humanity, we remind them that we are, all of us, beloved children of God.</p>
<p>We can demonstrate for our people the truth that nobody is perfect, but we are each created and loved in every expression of who we are. And we teach our people important lessons like that one when we’re vulnerable and real. When relationship deepens and years of shared life evolve, we then become the recipients of such love and care from them.</p>
<p>We begin as their pastor, for example, clutching the hand of a shy 6 year old, neither the pastor nor the 6 year old sure at all about these people and their intentions. And then we gather 12 years later to celebrate the launching of a confident young woman, someone we have loved collectively all these years because we dared to be in authentic relationship with one another.</p>
<p>What a risk. What a gift.</p> | Inappropriate disclosure or healthy vulnerability? | false | https://baptistnews.com/article/inappropriate-disclosure-or-healthy-vulnerability/ | 3left-center
| Inappropriate disclosure or healthy vulnerability?
<p>By Amy Butler</p>
<p>I recall once, in college, sitting in the congregation during a Sunday morning worship service and listening intently to the pastor’s sermon. About halfway through he began to talk about a session he’d recently had with his psychiatrist. I heard him going there; my stomach sank. As he went on and on talking about details far too personal to be sharing from the pulpit, I felt like I was watching a car accident in slow motion.</p>
<p>I remember that moment like it was yesterday, and I think about it sometimes when I think about relationships with the people I serve. Now that I’m on the other side of the pulpit, I worry some about the quality of my interactions. In the quest to be in genuine relationship, I find myself in the position of causing others to cringe.</p>
<p>For example, just recently during Holy Week, a congregant came up to me after Wednesday night worship and asked when my kids would be arriving for the Easter weekend. Because of schedules, I’d learned just that day that I wouldn’t see them until Easter Monday — the first Easter in all their lives we wouldn’t be together. As I explained the situation, I could feel the tears welling in my eyes, threatening to leak out of the corners. Noticing the threatening tears, the person who’d inquired said: “I’ve never seen a minister cry before. I have to go!,” and she turned around and left quickly.</p>
<p>The line between inappropriate disclosure and healthy vulnerability is a fine one, and it’s easy to step off either into a façade of our real selves or another moment of cringe-worthy over sharing. Many of my colleagues find walking that line too stressful, so we opt for safe and considerable distance. I understand that approach. But I was reminded this week why that safe course of action not only robs our people of developing a realistic view of their pastors; it also means we’re giving up some beautiful moments of real human engagement.</p>
<p>This week my daughter Hannah graduated from high school. At her graduation party, in addition to her group of friends, there was a sizable gathering of church folk who have known her since she was 6 years old. As we sat around the living room opening presents and sharing memories, a member of the search committee that called me to that church recalled meeting our family for the first time.</p>
<p>“Do you remember when I asked you how you would know if your church cared about you?” he asked me.</p>
<p>I couldn’t recall.</p>
<p>“You said, ‘I’ll know you care about me when I see you loving my kids.’”</p>
<p>As I sat there with these people who have watched our family live through many happy and some very sad moments, I realized that I know they love me. I know they love me because I can see their beaming faces just as proud as mine as they celebrate this kid’s next steps.</p>
<p>There are a lot of risks to being vulnerable with your congregation, not the least of which is subjecting perfectly nice people to the possibility of cringe-worthy over sharing moments. But I still think the risk is worth it. In summoning the courage to tell the truth about who we are, to let our people see us in our full humanity, we remind them that we are, all of us, beloved children of God.</p>
<p>We can demonstrate for our people the truth that nobody is perfect, but we are each created and loved in every expression of who we are. And we teach our people important lessons like that one when we’re vulnerable and real. When relationship deepens and years of shared life evolve, we then become the recipients of such love and care from them.</p>
<p>We begin as their pastor, for example, clutching the hand of a shy 6 year old, neither the pastor nor the 6 year old sure at all about these people and their intentions. And then we gather 12 years later to celebrate the launching of a confident young woman, someone we have loved collectively all these years because we dared to be in authentic relationship with one another.</p>
<p>What a risk. What a gift.</p> | 856 |
|
<p>Our bullying and reactionary elite media always, always, always enforces its depraved view of our culture, so the moment I read that "Guardians of the Galaxy" star Chris Pratt had promoted the idea of more movies that tell the stories of blue collar America, there was no question it could only end with Pratt backing down with an apology. And it did.</p>
<p>It all started late last week when an interview with Pratt was released by "Men's Fitness." He <a href="http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/04/22/chris-pratt-hollywood-doesnt-represent-average-blue-collar-americans" type="external">told the magazine</a>:</p>
<p>Pratt said he wants to work on a project someday that speaks to the people he feels Hollywood ignores, since the Washington State-native says he rarely sees his upbringing represented.</p>
<p>“I don’t see personal stories that necessarily resonate with me, because they’re not my stories,” Pratt, 37, told the magazine. “I think there’s room for me to tell mine, and probably an audience that would be hungry for them. The voice of the average, blue-collar American isn’t necessarily represented in Hollywood.”</p>
<p>The reaction from the elite was immediate, and the subtext went something like this: OMG! OMG! OMG! One of the biggest (and few) remaining movie stars in the whole wide world just stood up for those gross people who made Donald Trump president. Burn the witch! BUUUURN HIM!!</p>
<p>The backlash was so <a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;ion=1&amp;espv=2&amp;ie=UTF-8#q=chris+pratt,+blue+collar&amp;tbm=nws" type="external">intense</a> you would have thought Pratt suggested Hitler had a "good side" -- which makes sense; after all, the elite in this country do see Blue Collar America as nothing more than poorly-dressed Nazis.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimdalrympleii/chris-pratt-raised-eyebrows-while-trying-to-bridge-our?utm_term=.wePQOE4LA#.qh6O2lpWj" type="external">BuzzFeed:</a></p>
<p>Many people were less than pleased with Pratt's take on Hollywood's diversity problem, with some pointing out that there are many movies that show blue-collar Americans.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/news/a26684/chris-pratt-says-blue-collar-america-isnt-represented/?src=socialflowTW" type="external">Marie Claire</a> made it about race:</p>
<p>While it's nice that Chris wants to see more people like himself on-screen, he is a straight, white male. And Hollywood has an *actual* diversity problem at the moment—both in terms of race and gender. So, actually, maybe it's time for there to be less stories like Chris Pratt's, and more stories about, oh, you know, literally any other marginalized community in this country. …</p>
<p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/chris-pratt-admits-hes-pretty-stupid-for-blue-collar-americans-comment_us_58fcf3cce4b00fa7de152734" type="external">Huffington Post</a>:</p>
<p>Foot meet mouth.</p>
<p><a href="http://people.com/movies/chris-pratt-admits-saying-blue-collar-americans-arent-represented-movies-stupid-thing-to-say-apology/" type="external">People Magazine</a>:</p>
<p>Chris Pratt isn’t afraid to admit when he’s wrong.</p>
<p>And on and on…</p>
<p>Within just a few hours, and no doubt eager to avoid being CNN's "Villain Of The Day," Pratt almost immediately apologized via Twitter:</p>
<p>You can make the case that blue collar America does indeed enjoy representation in Hollywood, starting with Pratt's own roles in "Jurassic World" and "Passengers." Then there is pretty much every movie starring Mark Wahlberg, and just last year we saw "Manchester By the Sea" (handyman), "Fences" (garbage man), and "Hell or High Water" (rancher).</p>
<p>So, yes, if you are a hardcore literalist, there is plenty of documentation that allows you to throw a red flag at Mr. Pratt.</p>
<p>However…</p>
<p>Even though every time I turn on my television it is gay, gay, gay, we all know that if Pratt had said that he would like to see more Hollywood stories about homosexuals, he would have been hailed as fearless! brave! and ballsy! for saying … … … the least controversial and most popular thing anyone in Hollywood can say.</p>
<p>But because I understand nuance, I got what Pratt meant. Most movies with blue collar characters are, unfortunately, about something else: giant robots, dinosaurs, natural disasters, man-made disasters, plane crashes, racial issues ("Fences"), grief and family dysfunction ("Manchester")… That is not a complaint on my part. Oftentimes these everyday men are the heroes of the story, and that's a wonderful thing.</p>
<p>But where are the movies that portray blue collar America as it is, their "voice," as Pratt correctly put it? Where are the movies that show the everyday heroism and dignity in the work that these men and women do, the contentment of their lives, the importance of their role in our world?</p>
<p>Hollywood was once rife with stories about farmers, oil workers, builders, coal miners, truck drivers, factory workers -- the working class wasn't just represented as a means to tell a bigger story, they were the story in the same way movies about teachers today celebrate teaching and teachers, in the same way that movies today about scientists and artists and political activists and journalists celebrate who those people are and the importance of what they do.</p>
<p>When is the last time a movie about blue collar American reminded us that these are the people who grow and deliver our food, who keep our lights on, our toilets flushing, our cars on the road, our trash picked up, our sewage invisible, our meat slaughtered, our roofs repaired and our streets paved?</p>
<p>Name the last movie you saw that told the truth about blue collar America -- that without them our way of life would cease to exist in a matter of days.</p>
<p>Every opportunity I have to make this point, I do: If I went away tomorrow, some people might miss my work but the world would keep right on turning. If overnight everyone stopped writing, composing, acting, performing, punditing… If overnight there were no new movies, books, TV shows, songs… If overnight, your television disappeared, cable news went dark, blogs went dark… Yes, we would miss them but the world would keep right on turning.</p>
<p>Without the working class, however, without the people who wear the blue collars and the steel-toed boots, without the very people the elites at Marie Claire and BuzzFeed and CNN would exterminate in Death Camps if they could, our lives would be unthinkable, miserable…</p>
<p>A world without MSNBC, John Nolte, "Manchester By the Sea," Lady Gaga, Marvel, "CSI," and poetry is not a Dystopia.</p>
<p>But if all of our plumbers disappear tomorrow, by this time next week our world will literally be, well, crap.</p>
<p>Unless you are employed by our oh-so benevolent government (police, fire, etc), our elite culture looks down on blue collar work, portrays it as something to escape from, sees the rugged individualism and masculinity inherent in that culture as "toxic."</p>
<p>And now that those blue collars put Trump in the White House, Pratt -- who is already <a href="http://www.christianpost.com/news/passengers-star-chris-pratt-on-how-he-became-a-christian-changed-his-life-172679/" type="external">suspect</a> -- must be bullied into silence and contrition.</p>
<p>Follow John Nolte on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/NolteNC" type="external">@NolteNC</a>. Follow his Facebook Page <a href="https://www.facebook.com/JohnNolteNC/?skip_nax_wizard=true" type="external">here</a>.</p> | Chris Pratt Bullied Into Apology After Advocating For 'Voice Of Blue Collar America' In Movies | true | https://dailywire.com/news/15688/chris-pratt-bullied-apology-after-advocating-voice-john-nolte | 2017-04-24 | 0right
| Chris Pratt Bullied Into Apology After Advocating For 'Voice Of Blue Collar America' In Movies
<p>Our bullying and reactionary elite media always, always, always enforces its depraved view of our culture, so the moment I read that "Guardians of the Galaxy" star Chris Pratt had promoted the idea of more movies that tell the stories of blue collar America, there was no question it could only end with Pratt backing down with an apology. And it did.</p>
<p>It all started late last week when an interview with Pratt was released by "Men's Fitness." He <a href="http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/04/22/chris-pratt-hollywood-doesnt-represent-average-blue-collar-americans" type="external">told the magazine</a>:</p>
<p>Pratt said he wants to work on a project someday that speaks to the people he feels Hollywood ignores, since the Washington State-native says he rarely sees his upbringing represented.</p>
<p>“I don’t see personal stories that necessarily resonate with me, because they’re not my stories,” Pratt, 37, told the magazine. “I think there’s room for me to tell mine, and probably an audience that would be hungry for them. The voice of the average, blue-collar American isn’t necessarily represented in Hollywood.”</p>
<p>The reaction from the elite was immediate, and the subtext went something like this: OMG! OMG! OMG! One of the biggest (and few) remaining movie stars in the whole wide world just stood up for those gross people who made Donald Trump president. Burn the witch! BUUUURN HIM!!</p>
<p>The backlash was so <a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;ion=1&amp;espv=2&amp;ie=UTF-8#q=chris+pratt,+blue+collar&amp;tbm=nws" type="external">intense</a> you would have thought Pratt suggested Hitler had a "good side" -- which makes sense; after all, the elite in this country do see Blue Collar America as nothing more than poorly-dressed Nazis.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimdalrympleii/chris-pratt-raised-eyebrows-while-trying-to-bridge-our?utm_term=.wePQOE4LA#.qh6O2lpWj" type="external">BuzzFeed:</a></p>
<p>Many people were less than pleased with Pratt's take on Hollywood's diversity problem, with some pointing out that there are many movies that show blue-collar Americans.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/news/a26684/chris-pratt-says-blue-collar-america-isnt-represented/?src=socialflowTW" type="external">Marie Claire</a> made it about race:</p>
<p>While it's nice that Chris wants to see more people like himself on-screen, he is a straight, white male. And Hollywood has an *actual* diversity problem at the moment—both in terms of race and gender. So, actually, maybe it's time for there to be less stories like Chris Pratt's, and more stories about, oh, you know, literally any other marginalized community in this country. …</p>
<p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/chris-pratt-admits-hes-pretty-stupid-for-blue-collar-americans-comment_us_58fcf3cce4b00fa7de152734" type="external">Huffington Post</a>:</p>
<p>Foot meet mouth.</p>
<p><a href="http://people.com/movies/chris-pratt-admits-saying-blue-collar-americans-arent-represented-movies-stupid-thing-to-say-apology/" type="external">People Magazine</a>:</p>
<p>Chris Pratt isn’t afraid to admit when he’s wrong.</p>
<p>And on and on…</p>
<p>Within just a few hours, and no doubt eager to avoid being CNN's "Villain Of The Day," Pratt almost immediately apologized via Twitter:</p>
<p>You can make the case that blue collar America does indeed enjoy representation in Hollywood, starting with Pratt's own roles in "Jurassic World" and "Passengers." Then there is pretty much every movie starring Mark Wahlberg, and just last year we saw "Manchester By the Sea" (handyman), "Fences" (garbage man), and "Hell or High Water" (rancher).</p>
<p>So, yes, if you are a hardcore literalist, there is plenty of documentation that allows you to throw a red flag at Mr. Pratt.</p>
<p>However…</p>
<p>Even though every time I turn on my television it is gay, gay, gay, we all know that if Pratt had said that he would like to see more Hollywood stories about homosexuals, he would have been hailed as fearless! brave! and ballsy! for saying … … … the least controversial and most popular thing anyone in Hollywood can say.</p>
<p>But because I understand nuance, I got what Pratt meant. Most movies with blue collar characters are, unfortunately, about something else: giant robots, dinosaurs, natural disasters, man-made disasters, plane crashes, racial issues ("Fences"), grief and family dysfunction ("Manchester")… That is not a complaint on my part. Oftentimes these everyday men are the heroes of the story, and that's a wonderful thing.</p>
<p>But where are the movies that portray blue collar America as it is, their "voice," as Pratt correctly put it? Where are the movies that show the everyday heroism and dignity in the work that these men and women do, the contentment of their lives, the importance of their role in our world?</p>
<p>Hollywood was once rife with stories about farmers, oil workers, builders, coal miners, truck drivers, factory workers -- the working class wasn't just represented as a means to tell a bigger story, they were the story in the same way movies about teachers today celebrate teaching and teachers, in the same way that movies today about scientists and artists and political activists and journalists celebrate who those people are and the importance of what they do.</p>
<p>When is the last time a movie about blue collar American reminded us that these are the people who grow and deliver our food, who keep our lights on, our toilets flushing, our cars on the road, our trash picked up, our sewage invisible, our meat slaughtered, our roofs repaired and our streets paved?</p>
<p>Name the last movie you saw that told the truth about blue collar America -- that without them our way of life would cease to exist in a matter of days.</p>
<p>Every opportunity I have to make this point, I do: If I went away tomorrow, some people might miss my work but the world would keep right on turning. If overnight everyone stopped writing, composing, acting, performing, punditing… If overnight there were no new movies, books, TV shows, songs… If overnight, your television disappeared, cable news went dark, blogs went dark… Yes, we would miss them but the world would keep right on turning.</p>
<p>Without the working class, however, without the people who wear the blue collars and the steel-toed boots, without the very people the elites at Marie Claire and BuzzFeed and CNN would exterminate in Death Camps if they could, our lives would be unthinkable, miserable…</p>
<p>A world without MSNBC, John Nolte, "Manchester By the Sea," Lady Gaga, Marvel, "CSI," and poetry is not a Dystopia.</p>
<p>But if all of our plumbers disappear tomorrow, by this time next week our world will literally be, well, crap.</p>
<p>Unless you are employed by our oh-so benevolent government (police, fire, etc), our elite culture looks down on blue collar work, portrays it as something to escape from, sees the rugged individualism and masculinity inherent in that culture as "toxic."</p>
<p>And now that those blue collars put Trump in the White House, Pratt -- who is already <a href="http://www.christianpost.com/news/passengers-star-chris-pratt-on-how-he-became-a-christian-changed-his-life-172679/" type="external">suspect</a> -- must be bullied into silence and contrition.</p>
<p>Follow John Nolte on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/NolteNC" type="external">@NolteNC</a>. Follow his Facebook Page <a href="https://www.facebook.com/JohnNolteNC/?skip_nax_wizard=true" type="external">here</a>.</p> | 857 |
<p>GADSDEN, Ala. (AP) - A fire has destroyed the home of a woman who accused U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct. Authorities say, however, that there is no indication the blaze had anything to do with the allegations.</p>
<p>Moore accuser Tina Johnson of Gadsden lost her home Wednesday in a fire that's under investigation by arson specialists in Etowah County.</p>
<p>A statement from the sheriff's office says authorities are speaking to a person of interest about the fire. The statement says investigators don't believe the fire is linked to Moore or the allegations against him.</p>
<p>Johnson is among the women who publicly accused Moore of sexual misconduct. She told AL.com Moore groped her in his law office in 1991.</p>
<p>Moore denied any wrongdoing, but he lost the race to Democrat Doug Jones.</p>
<p>GADSDEN, Ala. (AP) - A fire has destroyed the home of a woman who accused U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct. Authorities say, however, that there is no indication the blaze had anything to do with the allegations.</p>
<p>Moore accuser Tina Johnson of Gadsden lost her home Wednesday in a fire that's under investigation by arson specialists in Etowah County.</p>
<p>A statement from the sheriff's office says authorities are speaking to a person of interest about the fire. The statement says investigators don't believe the fire is linked to Moore or the allegations against him.</p>
<p>Johnson is among the women who publicly accused Moore of sexual misconduct. She told AL.com Moore groped her in his law office in 1991.</p>
<p>Moore denied any wrongdoing, but he lost the race to Democrat Doug Jones.</p> | Sheriff: No apparent link between Moore accusation, fire | false | https://apnews.com/amp/85382966010d4b16ac09349e2699bb42 | 2018-01-05 | 2least
| Sheriff: No apparent link between Moore accusation, fire
<p>GADSDEN, Ala. (AP) - A fire has destroyed the home of a woman who accused U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct. Authorities say, however, that there is no indication the blaze had anything to do with the allegations.</p>
<p>Moore accuser Tina Johnson of Gadsden lost her home Wednesday in a fire that's under investigation by arson specialists in Etowah County.</p>
<p>A statement from the sheriff's office says authorities are speaking to a person of interest about the fire. The statement says investigators don't believe the fire is linked to Moore or the allegations against him.</p>
<p>Johnson is among the women who publicly accused Moore of sexual misconduct. She told AL.com Moore groped her in his law office in 1991.</p>
<p>Moore denied any wrongdoing, but he lost the race to Democrat Doug Jones.</p>
<p>GADSDEN, Ala. (AP) - A fire has destroyed the home of a woman who accused U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct. Authorities say, however, that there is no indication the blaze had anything to do with the allegations.</p>
<p>Moore accuser Tina Johnson of Gadsden lost her home Wednesday in a fire that's under investigation by arson specialists in Etowah County.</p>
<p>A statement from the sheriff's office says authorities are speaking to a person of interest about the fire. The statement says investigators don't believe the fire is linked to Moore or the allegations against him.</p>
<p>Johnson is among the women who publicly accused Moore of sexual misconduct. She told AL.com Moore groped her in his law office in 1991.</p>
<p>Moore denied any wrongdoing, but he lost the race to Democrat Doug Jones.</p> | 858 |
<p>What is perhaps most surprising about the abuses committed against civilians at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is the fact that they came as a surprise at all. The ‘sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses’ found by Major General Taguba has a long history within the tradition of US imperial policing of third world nations. The primary means for this policing had traditionally been counter-insurgency warfare which has always sought to contain and destroy social forces considered inimical to US interests. Given the fragile social base of the US occupation in Iraq coupled with the increasing ferocity of the Iraqi resistance it comes as little surprise that the US has turned to counter-insurgency warfare to help it undermine and destroy resistance to its rule. The reports and pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib merely confirm what has long been a legitimate tactic within US counter-insurgency warfare: the targeting and torture of civilians. This terror serves not only to break the will of those targeted but has a wider symbolic psychological function in that it dramatically raises the cost of dissent. Whether it is was a ‘war on communism’ during the Cold War, or a ‘war on terrorism’ in the post-9/11 era, the targets and tactics have remained the same and the abuses at Abu Ghraib are the logical outcome of what the US has long been teaching both its own counter-insurgency specialists and those of allied nations. This functional use of terror and torture becomes clearer when we examine the very manuals used by US counter-insurgency warfare experts to train others in the art of ‘unconventional warfare’. For example, in one US counter-insurgency manual called Psychological Operations the manual argued that the primary target ‘for tactical psychological operations is the local civilian population’.1 After other means have failed, the manual stated pro-US forces can legitimately target civilians to instil terror:</p>
<p>Civilians in the operational area may be supporting their own government or collaborating with an enemy occupation force. Themes and appeals disseminated to this group will vary accordingly, but the psychological objectives will be the same as those for the enemy military. An isolation program designed to instil doubt and fear may be carried out … If these programs fail, it may become necessary to take more aggressive action in the form of harsh treatment or even abductions. The abduction and harsh treatment of key enemy civilians can weaken the collaborators’ belief in the strength and power of their military forces.2</p>
<p>Another manual, entitled Handling Sources, continued along similar lines and advocated the harsh treatment of civilians. The manual was used to teach CI forces the art of cultivating government informants within alleged insurgent organisations. The manual states that good techniques to force people to inform were the targeting of family members and the use of physical violence. The ‘CI agent could cause the arrest of the employee’s parents, imprison the employee or give him a beating as part of the placement plan of said employee in the guerrilla organization’.3 The manual went on to outline how crucial successful informants are, with an informant’s worth increasing through the number of ‘arrests, executions, or pacification[s]’ the informants information led to, all the while ‘taking care not to expose the employee as the information source.’4 According to the manual even children were to be used as potential information sources: ‘Children are, at least, very observant and can provide precise information about things they have seen and heard, if they are interrogated in the appropriate manner’.5 The use of state terror was thus overtly advocated as a legitimate technique to be employed by counter-insurgency forces, with recipient militaries trained in the use of terrorism and the ‘abduction and harsh treatment’ of civilians advocated so as to raise the associated costs of dissent.</p>
<p>One of the key features of US-backed throughout the third world was the institutionalisation of torture against perceived enemies with torture practised routinely and on a wide scale by US-backed counter-insurgency forces.6 The use of coercive techniques as part of the overall counter-insurgency effort were advocated by US trainers and physical and mental coercion was openly advocated as a legitimate part of the counterinsurgents arsenal. For example, in the CIA’s Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, it was stated that although US trainers ‘do not stress the use of coercive techniques, we do want to make you aware of them and the proper way to use them’. The manual outlines a number of coercive techniques including sensory deprivation, solitary confinement and different forms of physical torture including bizarre forms of water torture whereby subjects were ‘suspended in water and wore black-out masks’. The manual continues that the</p>
<p>stress and anxiety become unbearable for most subjects … how much they are able to stand depends upon the psychological characteristics of the individual … the ‘questioner’ can take advantage of this relationship by assuming a benevolent role.7</p>
<p>The manual cautioned that if a ‘subject refuses to comply once a threat has been made, it must be carried out. If it is not carried out then subsequent threats will also prove ineffective’. The training manual concludes that ‘there are a few non-coercive techniques which can be used to induce regression, but to a lesser degree than can be obtained with coercive techniques’.8 This manual was based on an earlier manual used by the CIA. The older manual was called the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual and dates from 1963. In its introduction, the manual states that if bodily harm or ‘medical, chemical or electrical methods or materials are to be used to induce acquiescence’ then prior approval from CIA headquarters is required. The manual continues that if ‘a new safehouse is to be used as the interrogation site, it should be studied carefully to be sure that the total environment can be manipulated as desired. For example, the electric current should be known in advance, so that transformers or other modifying devices will be on hand if needed’.9 The Baltimore Sun conducted an investigation into the use of these manuals. They were told by an intelligence source that the ‘CIA has acknowledged privately and informally in the past that this referred to the application of electric shocks to interrogation suspects’.10 In sum, torture was condoned as part of the strategic arsenal available to counter-insurgency forces in combating alleged subversion. Importantly, torture not only provided an efficient means for inducing ‘regression’ but also acted to instil terror within target populations. The abuses committed at Abu Ghraib thus form part of a covert tradition within the history of US imperial policing and counter-insurgency warfare.</p>
<p>Dr. DOUG STOKES is a lecturer in International Politics. His new book ‘Terrorising Colombia: America’s Other War’ will be coming in the fall of 2004 with Zed books. He can be reached at:&#160; <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>1 US Department of the Army, Psychological Operations, FM33-5, 1962, p.125.</p>
<p>2 US Department of the Army, Psychological Operations, FM33-5, 1962, pp. 115-116.</p>
<p>3 Department of Defense, <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/archive/news/dodmans.htm" type="external">US Army School of the Americas, Manejo de Fuente</a>, p.65 translated by the National Security Archive.</p>
<p>4 Department of Defense, US Army School of the Americas, Manejo de Fuente, p.66.</p>
<p>5 Department of Defense, US Army School of the Americas, Manejo de Fuente, p.26; See also Latin American Working Group, <a href="" type="internal">Declassified Army and CIA Manuals</a>, February 1997.</p>
<p>6 On the use of torture by US-backed Latin American states see Cynthia Brown (ed.) With Friends Like These: The Americas Watch Report On Human Rights and US Policy In Latin America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).</p>
<p>7 Central Intelligence Agency, <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/" type="external">Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual</a>, 1983.; For background see Dana Priest, Washington Post, September 21, 1996.</p>
<p>8 Central Intelligence Agency, Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, 1983.</p>
<p>9 Central Intelligence Agency, <a href="" type="internal">KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual</a>, 1963; For background see Tom Blanton, <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/index.html" type="external">The CIA in Latin America</a>, National Security Archive, March 14, 2000.</p>
<p>10 The Baltimore Sun, <a href="http://eagle.westnet.gr/~cgian/ciatortu.htm" type="external">Monday, January 27, 1997</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Why Abu Ghraib Shouldn’t Surprise Us | true | https://counterpunch.org/2004/05/18/why-abu-ghraib-shouldn-t-surprise-us/ | 2004-05-18 | 4left
| Why Abu Ghraib Shouldn’t Surprise Us
<p>What is perhaps most surprising about the abuses committed against civilians at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is the fact that they came as a surprise at all. The ‘sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses’ found by Major General Taguba has a long history within the tradition of US imperial policing of third world nations. The primary means for this policing had traditionally been counter-insurgency warfare which has always sought to contain and destroy social forces considered inimical to US interests. Given the fragile social base of the US occupation in Iraq coupled with the increasing ferocity of the Iraqi resistance it comes as little surprise that the US has turned to counter-insurgency warfare to help it undermine and destroy resistance to its rule. The reports and pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib merely confirm what has long been a legitimate tactic within US counter-insurgency warfare: the targeting and torture of civilians. This terror serves not only to break the will of those targeted but has a wider symbolic psychological function in that it dramatically raises the cost of dissent. Whether it is was a ‘war on communism’ during the Cold War, or a ‘war on terrorism’ in the post-9/11 era, the targets and tactics have remained the same and the abuses at Abu Ghraib are the logical outcome of what the US has long been teaching both its own counter-insurgency specialists and those of allied nations. This functional use of terror and torture becomes clearer when we examine the very manuals used by US counter-insurgency warfare experts to train others in the art of ‘unconventional warfare’. For example, in one US counter-insurgency manual called Psychological Operations the manual argued that the primary target ‘for tactical psychological operations is the local civilian population’.1 After other means have failed, the manual stated pro-US forces can legitimately target civilians to instil terror:</p>
<p>Civilians in the operational area may be supporting their own government or collaborating with an enemy occupation force. Themes and appeals disseminated to this group will vary accordingly, but the psychological objectives will be the same as those for the enemy military. An isolation program designed to instil doubt and fear may be carried out … If these programs fail, it may become necessary to take more aggressive action in the form of harsh treatment or even abductions. The abduction and harsh treatment of key enemy civilians can weaken the collaborators’ belief in the strength and power of their military forces.2</p>
<p>Another manual, entitled Handling Sources, continued along similar lines and advocated the harsh treatment of civilians. The manual was used to teach CI forces the art of cultivating government informants within alleged insurgent organisations. The manual states that good techniques to force people to inform were the targeting of family members and the use of physical violence. The ‘CI agent could cause the arrest of the employee’s parents, imprison the employee or give him a beating as part of the placement plan of said employee in the guerrilla organization’.3 The manual went on to outline how crucial successful informants are, with an informant’s worth increasing through the number of ‘arrests, executions, or pacification[s]’ the informants information led to, all the while ‘taking care not to expose the employee as the information source.’4 According to the manual even children were to be used as potential information sources: ‘Children are, at least, very observant and can provide precise information about things they have seen and heard, if they are interrogated in the appropriate manner’.5 The use of state terror was thus overtly advocated as a legitimate technique to be employed by counter-insurgency forces, with recipient militaries trained in the use of terrorism and the ‘abduction and harsh treatment’ of civilians advocated so as to raise the associated costs of dissent.</p>
<p>One of the key features of US-backed throughout the third world was the institutionalisation of torture against perceived enemies with torture practised routinely and on a wide scale by US-backed counter-insurgency forces.6 The use of coercive techniques as part of the overall counter-insurgency effort were advocated by US trainers and physical and mental coercion was openly advocated as a legitimate part of the counterinsurgents arsenal. For example, in the CIA’s Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, it was stated that although US trainers ‘do not stress the use of coercive techniques, we do want to make you aware of them and the proper way to use them’. The manual outlines a number of coercive techniques including sensory deprivation, solitary confinement and different forms of physical torture including bizarre forms of water torture whereby subjects were ‘suspended in water and wore black-out masks’. The manual continues that the</p>
<p>stress and anxiety become unbearable for most subjects … how much they are able to stand depends upon the psychological characteristics of the individual … the ‘questioner’ can take advantage of this relationship by assuming a benevolent role.7</p>
<p>The manual cautioned that if a ‘subject refuses to comply once a threat has been made, it must be carried out. If it is not carried out then subsequent threats will also prove ineffective’. The training manual concludes that ‘there are a few non-coercive techniques which can be used to induce regression, but to a lesser degree than can be obtained with coercive techniques’.8 This manual was based on an earlier manual used by the CIA. The older manual was called the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual and dates from 1963. In its introduction, the manual states that if bodily harm or ‘medical, chemical or electrical methods or materials are to be used to induce acquiescence’ then prior approval from CIA headquarters is required. The manual continues that if ‘a new safehouse is to be used as the interrogation site, it should be studied carefully to be sure that the total environment can be manipulated as desired. For example, the electric current should be known in advance, so that transformers or other modifying devices will be on hand if needed’.9 The Baltimore Sun conducted an investigation into the use of these manuals. They were told by an intelligence source that the ‘CIA has acknowledged privately and informally in the past that this referred to the application of electric shocks to interrogation suspects’.10 In sum, torture was condoned as part of the strategic arsenal available to counter-insurgency forces in combating alleged subversion. Importantly, torture not only provided an efficient means for inducing ‘regression’ but also acted to instil terror within target populations. The abuses committed at Abu Ghraib thus form part of a covert tradition within the history of US imperial policing and counter-insurgency warfare.</p>
<p>Dr. DOUG STOKES is a lecturer in International Politics. His new book ‘Terrorising Colombia: America’s Other War’ will be coming in the fall of 2004 with Zed books. He can be reached at:&#160; <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>1 US Department of the Army, Psychological Operations, FM33-5, 1962, p.125.</p>
<p>2 US Department of the Army, Psychological Operations, FM33-5, 1962, pp. 115-116.</p>
<p>3 Department of Defense, <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/archive/news/dodmans.htm" type="external">US Army School of the Americas, Manejo de Fuente</a>, p.65 translated by the National Security Archive.</p>
<p>4 Department of Defense, US Army School of the Americas, Manejo de Fuente, p.66.</p>
<p>5 Department of Defense, US Army School of the Americas, Manejo de Fuente, p.26; See also Latin American Working Group, <a href="" type="internal">Declassified Army and CIA Manuals</a>, February 1997.</p>
<p>6 On the use of torture by US-backed Latin American states see Cynthia Brown (ed.) With Friends Like These: The Americas Watch Report On Human Rights and US Policy In Latin America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).</p>
<p>7 Central Intelligence Agency, <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/" type="external">Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual</a>, 1983.; For background see Dana Priest, Washington Post, September 21, 1996.</p>
<p>8 Central Intelligence Agency, Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, 1983.</p>
<p>9 Central Intelligence Agency, <a href="" type="internal">KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual</a>, 1963; For background see Tom Blanton, <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/index.html" type="external">The CIA in Latin America</a>, National Security Archive, March 14, 2000.</p>
<p>10 The Baltimore Sun, <a href="http://eagle.westnet.gr/~cgian/ciatortu.htm" type="external">Monday, January 27, 1997</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | 859 |
<p />
<p />
<p>A group of local Afghan children bump fists with U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to the 1775th Military Police Company during a mission to Kuchi village, Afghanistan, May 27, 2011. The purpose of the mission is to distribute radios and flyers to local villagers, and to evaluate the needs of the locals. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/5789394023/in/photostream" type="external">Photo</a> via US&#160;Army.</p>
<p /> | We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for June 7, 2011 | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/were-still-war-photo-day-june-7-2011/ | 2011-06-07 | 4left
| We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for June 7, 2011
<p />
<p />
<p>A group of local Afghan children bump fists with U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to the 1775th Military Police Company during a mission to Kuchi village, Afghanistan, May 27, 2011. The purpose of the mission is to distribute radios and flyers to local villagers, and to evaluate the needs of the locals. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/5789394023/in/photostream" type="external">Photo</a> via US&#160;Army.</p>
<p /> | 860 |
<p><a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p>Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post has been ranking the top ten Republican Presidential candidates on an occasional basis, and his latest ranking has a surprising #1: Florida Senator Marco Rubio.</p>
<p>Despite the rise of outsiders like Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, as well as the dominance of front-runner Donald Trump, Cillizza sees Rubio as the top contender, for several reasons. He notes Trump's recent slide in the polls, and a general reluctance by most Republican voters to unite behind Carson and Fiorina. He believes Rubio's strong debate performance and high approval rating makes him the most likely candidate for voters to get behind.</p>
<p>Cillizza's #2 is a bit more baffling: Jeb Bush. Even though he is free-falling in the polls, Bush still has a PAC with a $100 million war chest, which Cillizza believes makes him formidable enough to be ranked so high. Trump ranks #3, even with his recent slide in the polls, because he still has a loyal bloc of GOP voters supporting him through thick and thin.</p>
<p>Fiorina comes in at #4, after not even making the top ten in the last ranking. Her strong debate performances and ability to articulate conservative principles has won her new support. Ted Cruz ranks #5, by continuing to win over voters while flying under the radar.</p>
<p>The top ten rankings are:</p>
<p>1.Marco Rubio</p>
<p>2. Jeb Bush</p>
<p>3. Donald Trump</p>
<p>4. Carly Fiorina</p>
<p>5. Ted Cruz</p>
<p>6. Ben Carson</p>
<p>7. John Kasich</p>
<p>8. Mike Huckabee</p>
<p>9. Chris Christie</p>
<p>10. Rand Paul</p>
<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/25/the-top-10-gop-candidates-for-president-ranked/" type="external">You can read the entire top ten analysis at The Washington Post by clicking here</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p /> | The Washington Post's Top 10 GOP candidates has a new #1 | true | http://politicalillusionsexposed.com/the-washington-posts-top-10-gop-candidates-has-a-new-1/ | 0right
| The Washington Post's Top 10 GOP candidates has a new #1
<p><a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p>Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post has been ranking the top ten Republican Presidential candidates on an occasional basis, and his latest ranking has a surprising #1: Florida Senator Marco Rubio.</p>
<p>Despite the rise of outsiders like Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, as well as the dominance of front-runner Donald Trump, Cillizza sees Rubio as the top contender, for several reasons. He notes Trump's recent slide in the polls, and a general reluctance by most Republican voters to unite behind Carson and Fiorina. He believes Rubio's strong debate performance and high approval rating makes him the most likely candidate for voters to get behind.</p>
<p>Cillizza's #2 is a bit more baffling: Jeb Bush. Even though he is free-falling in the polls, Bush still has a PAC with a $100 million war chest, which Cillizza believes makes him formidable enough to be ranked so high. Trump ranks #3, even with his recent slide in the polls, because he still has a loyal bloc of GOP voters supporting him through thick and thin.</p>
<p>Fiorina comes in at #4, after not even making the top ten in the last ranking. Her strong debate performances and ability to articulate conservative principles has won her new support. Ted Cruz ranks #5, by continuing to win over voters while flying under the radar.</p>
<p>The top ten rankings are:</p>
<p>1.Marco Rubio</p>
<p>2. Jeb Bush</p>
<p>3. Donald Trump</p>
<p>4. Carly Fiorina</p>
<p>5. Ted Cruz</p>
<p>6. Ben Carson</p>
<p>7. John Kasich</p>
<p>8. Mike Huckabee</p>
<p>9. Chris Christie</p>
<p>10. Rand Paul</p>
<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/25/the-top-10-gop-candidates-for-president-ranked/" type="external">You can read the entire top ten analysis at The Washington Post by clicking here</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p /> | 861 |
|
<p>KARACHI, Pakistan —&#160;“I know how the street works,” boasts Umar.</p>
<p>Umar is 14 years old, but he’s been on the streets since he was 10. His father remarried four years ago and Umar’s new stepmother pushed him and his brother, Abdal, then 8, out of the house.</p>
<p>Lost in a city of more than 20 million, about 200,000 children live on the streets of Karachi — an invisible population. And now some of them are starting to work as spies and couriers for terrorist groups.</p>
<p>Karachi has long been a notoriously violent megacity where criminal gangs, political parties and Islamic extremists all jostle for control. But over the last few years the political, religious and ethnic tensions that define daily life have intensified. Taliban violence and the floods of 2010 and 2011 pushed waves of migrants to Karachi, challenging the Urdu-speaking Muhajirs’ longtime supremacy in the city’s government and on its streets.</p>
<p>The city didn’t prove to be the city of dreams many newcomers had hoped for. Many of their children were forced to live and work on the streets. Others were lured there by peer pressure and drug abuse, or pushed by domestic abuse, says Ali Bilgrami, a program director at the Azad Foundation, a local NGO that works with street children in Karachi.</p>
<p>The children are easy targets for both criminal gangs and the Taliban militants who began arriving in the city in late 2010, initially for rest and medical help. Since 2010 the Taliban has become more entrenched in the ethnic Pashtun parts of Karachi, competing with local criminal groups and politically sponsored mafias by using the city to raise funds through extortion and kidnapping. Both the Taliban and the local gangs now recruit messengers from the large population of street children the migration has created.</p>
<p>I met Umar, his brother Abdal, and another street kid, Sajjad — the names of all three have been changed as a precautionary measure, although none of them have traceable documentation — at the Azad Foundation’s offices in a residential area in central Karachi. On the walls of the basic office space are hand-drawn posters instructing people how to work with children. The fact that someone deemed them necessary is not reassuring. “Do not try to have sex with a child. It is a serious offence,” reads one recommendation. “Street children should treated with respect and dignity (sic),” reads another.</p>
<p>Sajjad (Annabel Symington)</p>
<p>The world that these boys inhabit is brutally harsh. Sajjad says he often gets into fights, but he only fights back when he thinks he can win. When he is challenged by someone bigger than him, he says with a hint of pride, he cuts himself, and watches them run away at the sight of blood. He produces a rusty razor blade from his pocket to show me, and pulls up his sleves to show me his arms. They are covered in scars. He has only three fingers on one hand, but doesn’t say how he lost the other two.</p>
<p>Abdal’s arms are also crossed with cuts. He wears a five-rupee coin in his ear. He says it looks cool.</p>
<p>All the boys live in Saddar Town, the heaving commercial centre of Karachi where business owners have reported a rise in recent months in extortion demands from Taliban-linked and politically backed groups. In Saddar Town, Karachi’s booming informal economy jostles for space along side the newly built offices of Pakistan’s emerging business elite.</p>
<p>Traffic crawls through streets crammed with cars, motorbikes and hawkers selling everything from auto parts to fresh fruit. Old colonial buildings have now been overshadowed by high-rise office blocks, home to some of Pakistan’s largest companies. Five-star hotels have sprung up just around the corner from markets selling second-hand clothes to Karachi’s poorest.</p>
<p>Umar works and sleeps outside a bank near a restaurant that often gives out leftovers to the street children, he says. Abdal works with a garbage collector, pushing a wheelbarrow around the streets collecting rubbish from local businesses. Sajjad is less specific about his work.</p>
<p>“The kids have to be affiliated with gangs for protection,” explains Yusuf Shah, a social mobilizer with the Azad Foundation, who has been working on the streets with the children for four years. Traditional street-children gangs are just made up of street kids, headed by an adult who also grew up on the streets, says Shah. The scrapes they get into arise mostly from turf wars, and drugs are mostly for personal use. But now, says Shah, these street-kid gangs are being infiltrated and used by larger criminal gangs and extremist groups.</p>
<p>The street children are an invisible population in the hundreds of thousands — ignored by the local administration, a pest to local residents, abused by the police — and that is precisely what makes them useful. They can carry weapons and bhatta (extortion) threats around the city. “They are giving weapons to the kids to take places for target killings,” says Bilal Ahmed, a consultant overseeing research into the links between street kids and crime in Karachi. Target killings are an almost daily occurrence in Karachi, and used by sectarian groups to kill members of minority groups, keeping the entire community in a state of fear.</p>
<p>Street kids are also being used to carry messages between members of terrorist groups, who fear phone-tapping by intelligence agencies and the police, says Ahmed.</p>
<p>“They use any tactics to gain access to the children,” says Ahmed, But generally extremists recruit the children through a promise of money and drugs rather than through Islamic ideology, he says. “They will not recite Quranic verses,” says Ahmed. “There are very few cases where they have a religious mindset.” Only a few older boys that he’s spoken to offered a religious justification for their acts.</p>
<p>More broadly, gangs and extremist groups seeking recruits profit from the fact that these kids are young and alone. “It’s the safety factor. The children feel secure with adults and adults have a certain power over the kids. The gang leaders, the community leaders, the criminals, they have more power and the kids are drawn to them because they feel more secure,” Ahmed says.</p>
<p>Bilgrami believes there are a further 600,000 youths in Karachi who are at risk of becoming street children, and warns that while the use of street children by extremist groups and large criminal syndicates is in its infancy, he expects it to grow.&#160;“No one is looking at them [street kids] as a potentially pivotal link in crime and extremist linked violence,” Bilgrami says,&#160;which he thinks is a mistake: “It will only grow because there is no strategy [to address it] within the government of Sindh [the provincial government].”</p>
<p>A twin suicide attack on a shrine in Karachi in 2010 may have been the work of street children recruited to be suicide bombers, said a police source who declined to be named. The attack was claimed by the Pakistani Taliban but a Sunni sectarian group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, is more likely to have orchestrated the attack, the police source said. The case remains unsolved, like most in Pakistan, where the investigation capabilities of the police are woefully poor.</p>
<p>Bilgrami says he heard unconfirmed reports at the end of last year that street kids from Karachi are being taken to Quetta, the violent capital of Balochistan province 400 miles from Karachi, to be used as suicide bombers by extremists groups.</p>
<p>Abdal (Annabel Symington)</p>
<p>The boys I met just talk about getting money and drugs. “I know all the police and everyone who sells [drugs],” says Abdal. He explains his daily routine, which revolves around selling bits of wire and metal to a trash collector, in order to buy hash — known as charas in Pakistan — and solvents. Later he produces a piece of paper carefully wrapped around a small hunk of charas, as if to prove his point.</p>
<p>I ask Abdal and his friends whether they have been approached by gang leaders or other people and asked to do things for money. They shrug but acknowledge they have. They are vague about what it is they get asked to do. Abdal mumbles something about carrying packages for police and other adults. Sajjad, who is about 17 but doesn’t know his exact age, gets a bit philosophical. “It's all fate. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose,” he says wistfully.</p>
<p>Shah says that some of the older boys Sajjad’s age wind up becoming recruiters for the gangs. Recruiters find children who have newly arrived on the streets and lure them to the gang headquarters. They are then kept there for a few days, given drugs and often sexually abused, says Shah. This is initiation into Karachi’s murky underbelly.</p>
<p>“Then the child doesn’t want to go home,” he says, adding, “It’s easy to brainwash a child.”</p> | Pakistan's criminal and terrorist gangs have new recruits: Street kids | false | https://pri.org/stories/2014-03-03/pakistans-criminal-and-terrorist-gangs-have-new-recruits-street-kids | 2014-03-03 | 3left-center
| Pakistan's criminal and terrorist gangs have new recruits: Street kids
<p>KARACHI, Pakistan —&#160;“I know how the street works,” boasts Umar.</p>
<p>Umar is 14 years old, but he’s been on the streets since he was 10. His father remarried four years ago and Umar’s new stepmother pushed him and his brother, Abdal, then 8, out of the house.</p>
<p>Lost in a city of more than 20 million, about 200,000 children live on the streets of Karachi — an invisible population. And now some of them are starting to work as spies and couriers for terrorist groups.</p>
<p>Karachi has long been a notoriously violent megacity where criminal gangs, political parties and Islamic extremists all jostle for control. But over the last few years the political, religious and ethnic tensions that define daily life have intensified. Taliban violence and the floods of 2010 and 2011 pushed waves of migrants to Karachi, challenging the Urdu-speaking Muhajirs’ longtime supremacy in the city’s government and on its streets.</p>
<p>The city didn’t prove to be the city of dreams many newcomers had hoped for. Many of their children were forced to live and work on the streets. Others were lured there by peer pressure and drug abuse, or pushed by domestic abuse, says Ali Bilgrami, a program director at the Azad Foundation, a local NGO that works with street children in Karachi.</p>
<p>The children are easy targets for both criminal gangs and the Taliban militants who began arriving in the city in late 2010, initially for rest and medical help. Since 2010 the Taliban has become more entrenched in the ethnic Pashtun parts of Karachi, competing with local criminal groups and politically sponsored mafias by using the city to raise funds through extortion and kidnapping. Both the Taliban and the local gangs now recruit messengers from the large population of street children the migration has created.</p>
<p>I met Umar, his brother Abdal, and another street kid, Sajjad — the names of all three have been changed as a precautionary measure, although none of them have traceable documentation — at the Azad Foundation’s offices in a residential area in central Karachi. On the walls of the basic office space are hand-drawn posters instructing people how to work with children. The fact that someone deemed them necessary is not reassuring. “Do not try to have sex with a child. It is a serious offence,” reads one recommendation. “Street children should treated with respect and dignity (sic),” reads another.</p>
<p>Sajjad (Annabel Symington)</p>
<p>The world that these boys inhabit is brutally harsh. Sajjad says he often gets into fights, but he only fights back when he thinks he can win. When he is challenged by someone bigger than him, he says with a hint of pride, he cuts himself, and watches them run away at the sight of blood. He produces a rusty razor blade from his pocket to show me, and pulls up his sleves to show me his arms. They are covered in scars. He has only three fingers on one hand, but doesn’t say how he lost the other two.</p>
<p>Abdal’s arms are also crossed with cuts. He wears a five-rupee coin in his ear. He says it looks cool.</p>
<p>All the boys live in Saddar Town, the heaving commercial centre of Karachi where business owners have reported a rise in recent months in extortion demands from Taliban-linked and politically backed groups. In Saddar Town, Karachi’s booming informal economy jostles for space along side the newly built offices of Pakistan’s emerging business elite.</p>
<p>Traffic crawls through streets crammed with cars, motorbikes and hawkers selling everything from auto parts to fresh fruit. Old colonial buildings have now been overshadowed by high-rise office blocks, home to some of Pakistan’s largest companies. Five-star hotels have sprung up just around the corner from markets selling second-hand clothes to Karachi’s poorest.</p>
<p>Umar works and sleeps outside a bank near a restaurant that often gives out leftovers to the street children, he says. Abdal works with a garbage collector, pushing a wheelbarrow around the streets collecting rubbish from local businesses. Sajjad is less specific about his work.</p>
<p>“The kids have to be affiliated with gangs for protection,” explains Yusuf Shah, a social mobilizer with the Azad Foundation, who has been working on the streets with the children for four years. Traditional street-children gangs are just made up of street kids, headed by an adult who also grew up on the streets, says Shah. The scrapes they get into arise mostly from turf wars, and drugs are mostly for personal use. But now, says Shah, these street-kid gangs are being infiltrated and used by larger criminal gangs and extremist groups.</p>
<p>The street children are an invisible population in the hundreds of thousands — ignored by the local administration, a pest to local residents, abused by the police — and that is precisely what makes them useful. They can carry weapons and bhatta (extortion) threats around the city. “They are giving weapons to the kids to take places for target killings,” says Bilal Ahmed, a consultant overseeing research into the links between street kids and crime in Karachi. Target killings are an almost daily occurrence in Karachi, and used by sectarian groups to kill members of minority groups, keeping the entire community in a state of fear.</p>
<p>Street kids are also being used to carry messages between members of terrorist groups, who fear phone-tapping by intelligence agencies and the police, says Ahmed.</p>
<p>“They use any tactics to gain access to the children,” says Ahmed, But generally extremists recruit the children through a promise of money and drugs rather than through Islamic ideology, he says. “They will not recite Quranic verses,” says Ahmed. “There are very few cases where they have a religious mindset.” Only a few older boys that he’s spoken to offered a religious justification for their acts.</p>
<p>More broadly, gangs and extremist groups seeking recruits profit from the fact that these kids are young and alone. “It’s the safety factor. The children feel secure with adults and adults have a certain power over the kids. The gang leaders, the community leaders, the criminals, they have more power and the kids are drawn to them because they feel more secure,” Ahmed says.</p>
<p>Bilgrami believes there are a further 600,000 youths in Karachi who are at risk of becoming street children, and warns that while the use of street children by extremist groups and large criminal syndicates is in its infancy, he expects it to grow.&#160;“No one is looking at them [street kids] as a potentially pivotal link in crime and extremist linked violence,” Bilgrami says,&#160;which he thinks is a mistake: “It will only grow because there is no strategy [to address it] within the government of Sindh [the provincial government].”</p>
<p>A twin suicide attack on a shrine in Karachi in 2010 may have been the work of street children recruited to be suicide bombers, said a police source who declined to be named. The attack was claimed by the Pakistani Taliban but a Sunni sectarian group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, is more likely to have orchestrated the attack, the police source said. The case remains unsolved, like most in Pakistan, where the investigation capabilities of the police are woefully poor.</p>
<p>Bilgrami says he heard unconfirmed reports at the end of last year that street kids from Karachi are being taken to Quetta, the violent capital of Balochistan province 400 miles from Karachi, to be used as suicide bombers by extremists groups.</p>
<p>Abdal (Annabel Symington)</p>
<p>The boys I met just talk about getting money and drugs. “I know all the police and everyone who sells [drugs],” says Abdal. He explains his daily routine, which revolves around selling bits of wire and metal to a trash collector, in order to buy hash — known as charas in Pakistan — and solvents. Later he produces a piece of paper carefully wrapped around a small hunk of charas, as if to prove his point.</p>
<p>I ask Abdal and his friends whether they have been approached by gang leaders or other people and asked to do things for money. They shrug but acknowledge they have. They are vague about what it is they get asked to do. Abdal mumbles something about carrying packages for police and other adults. Sajjad, who is about 17 but doesn’t know his exact age, gets a bit philosophical. “It's all fate. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose,” he says wistfully.</p>
<p>Shah says that some of the older boys Sajjad’s age wind up becoming recruiters for the gangs. Recruiters find children who have newly arrived on the streets and lure them to the gang headquarters. They are then kept there for a few days, given drugs and often sexually abused, says Shah. This is initiation into Karachi’s murky underbelly.</p>
<p>“Then the child doesn’t want to go home,” he says, adding, “It’s easy to brainwash a child.”</p> | 862 |
<p>FBN’s Charlie Gasparino reports that Hank Greenberg is looking to possibly expand in Cuba.</p>
<p>Insurance titan Maurice “Hank” Greenberg is the latest U.S. businessman looking to possibly expand in Cuba now that the Obama Administration has reversed more than 50 years of policy and has taken the first steps toward normalizing relations with the government there, the FOX Business Network has learned.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Greenberg, the chief executive of Starr International, traveled to Havana’s Jose Marti Airport last Thursday aboard his private jet, returning the next day following meetings with senior level Cuban government officials, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter, and according to flight records obtained by FOX Business.</p>
<p>In a telephone interview, Greenberg confirmed the trip and his meetings. The former long-time CEO of American International Group (NYSE:AIG) and now CEO of Starr International has been a pioneer in expanding insurance operations across the globe.</p>
<p>AIG, for instance, has a large presence in China thanks to Greenberg’s work with government officials, beginning in the mid 1970s.</p>
<p>Greenberg said that Starr is looking at possible insurance opportunities as American tourism companies expand in Cuba, though he added that he doesn’t see any short-term business dealings given the nature of the normalization process, which will likely be phased in over a number of years.</p>
<p>“I think there’s going to be more tourism, so there might be a business opportunity for us,” said Greenberg who declined to name the government officials he met with during his one-day trip.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Starr already owns a business known as Assist-Card, which offers insurance to people who want to travel to Cuba. But Greenberg confirmed that his trip involved broader discussions about possibly expanding other areas of Starr’s insurance business such as providing insurance for hotels.</p>
<p>Since President Obama announced that he was taking the first steps toward ending a 55-year economic blockade of the Cuba that began after the 1959 Cuban revolution, American businesses have been eyeing the business possibilities there.</p>
<p>American tourism-related business has a particularly keen interest in expanding in the island nation, though many are finding it easier said than done. For starters, the trade embargo still exists, and companies will have to deal with layers of laws and regulations from the U.S. and the Cuban governments to do business.</p>
<p>For instance, Hilton Worldwide Holdings (NYSE:HLT) has been observing the changes in U.S.-Cuban economic policy since the president announced his intentions to normalize relations in December of last year.</p>
<p>But the hotel company has yet to formally engage the Cuban government to expand its presence, and the closest it has come to doing so will be when Hilton officials take part in a cultural mission with other business leaders and travel to Cuban toward the end of the year, a person with knowledge of the matter says.</p>
<p>“The embargo still exists so there’s not much Hilton can do,” said one person with knowledge of the matter.</p>
<p>A Hilton spokesman had no comment.</p>
<p>Despite these obstacles, many businesses are looking at Cuba as the next big growth opportunity. Beginning on July 3, Jet Blue (NASDAQ:JBLU) will fly from JFK Airport in New York to Havana. Car rental company Avis (NASDAQ:CAR) has joined JetBlue as part of a program to rent cars including those on the island, according to people with knowledge of the matter.</p>
<p>Avis spokeswoman Alice Pereira didn’t return telephone calls for comment. A spokesman for JetBlue had no immediate comment.</p>
<p>Greenberg, who just turned 90, and started in the insurance business just around the time the US. trade embargo went into effect in 1960, says he doesn’t see opening a Starr office in Cuba anytime soon.</p>
<p>“Nothing over there will happen immediately,” he said.</p> | Exclusive: Maurice “Hank” Greenberg Cues Up for Cuba Biz | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2015/06/24/exclusive-maurice-hank-greenberg-cues-up-for-cuba-biz.html | 2016-03-05 | 0right
| Exclusive: Maurice “Hank” Greenberg Cues Up for Cuba Biz
<p>FBN’s Charlie Gasparino reports that Hank Greenberg is looking to possibly expand in Cuba.</p>
<p>Insurance titan Maurice “Hank” Greenberg is the latest U.S. businessman looking to possibly expand in Cuba now that the Obama Administration has reversed more than 50 years of policy and has taken the first steps toward normalizing relations with the government there, the FOX Business Network has learned.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Greenberg, the chief executive of Starr International, traveled to Havana’s Jose Marti Airport last Thursday aboard his private jet, returning the next day following meetings with senior level Cuban government officials, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter, and according to flight records obtained by FOX Business.</p>
<p>In a telephone interview, Greenberg confirmed the trip and his meetings. The former long-time CEO of American International Group (NYSE:AIG) and now CEO of Starr International has been a pioneer in expanding insurance operations across the globe.</p>
<p>AIG, for instance, has a large presence in China thanks to Greenberg’s work with government officials, beginning in the mid 1970s.</p>
<p>Greenberg said that Starr is looking at possible insurance opportunities as American tourism companies expand in Cuba, though he added that he doesn’t see any short-term business dealings given the nature of the normalization process, which will likely be phased in over a number of years.</p>
<p>“I think there’s going to be more tourism, so there might be a business opportunity for us,” said Greenberg who declined to name the government officials he met with during his one-day trip.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Starr already owns a business known as Assist-Card, which offers insurance to people who want to travel to Cuba. But Greenberg confirmed that his trip involved broader discussions about possibly expanding other areas of Starr’s insurance business such as providing insurance for hotels.</p>
<p>Since President Obama announced that he was taking the first steps toward ending a 55-year economic blockade of the Cuba that began after the 1959 Cuban revolution, American businesses have been eyeing the business possibilities there.</p>
<p>American tourism-related business has a particularly keen interest in expanding in the island nation, though many are finding it easier said than done. For starters, the trade embargo still exists, and companies will have to deal with layers of laws and regulations from the U.S. and the Cuban governments to do business.</p>
<p>For instance, Hilton Worldwide Holdings (NYSE:HLT) has been observing the changes in U.S.-Cuban economic policy since the president announced his intentions to normalize relations in December of last year.</p>
<p>But the hotel company has yet to formally engage the Cuban government to expand its presence, and the closest it has come to doing so will be when Hilton officials take part in a cultural mission with other business leaders and travel to Cuban toward the end of the year, a person with knowledge of the matter says.</p>
<p>“The embargo still exists so there’s not much Hilton can do,” said one person with knowledge of the matter.</p>
<p>A Hilton spokesman had no comment.</p>
<p>Despite these obstacles, many businesses are looking at Cuba as the next big growth opportunity. Beginning on July 3, Jet Blue (NASDAQ:JBLU) will fly from JFK Airport in New York to Havana. Car rental company Avis (NASDAQ:CAR) has joined JetBlue as part of a program to rent cars including those on the island, according to people with knowledge of the matter.</p>
<p>Avis spokeswoman Alice Pereira didn’t return telephone calls for comment. A spokesman for JetBlue had no immediate comment.</p>
<p>Greenberg, who just turned 90, and started in the insurance business just around the time the US. trade embargo went into effect in 1960, says he doesn’t see opening a Starr office in Cuba anytime soon.</p>
<p>“Nothing over there will happen immediately,” he said.</p> | 863 |
<p>The head of Pratt &amp; Whitney's military engine business said on Wednesday that driving down the cost of the F-35 fighter jet was "burned in our brain," but cuts sparked by U.S. budget woes could slow the effort.</p>
<p>Bennett Croswell, president of Pratt &amp; Whitney Military Engines, said he met with the Air Force general who heads the Pentagon's F-35 program in Australia after he accused Pratt and F-35 prime contractor Lockheed Martin Corp of trying to "squeeze every nickel" out of the U.S. government.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan told a conference on Tuesday that he had spoken with executives at Lockheed and Pratt &amp; Whitney several times in the past few days and had received assurances that they had "heard my message.</p>
<p>Croswell said Pratt, the United Technologies Corp unit that makes the F135 engine that powers the F-35, began a "war on cost" in 2009 that was already yielding results. He noted that Pratt had invested heavily to cut the cost of the engine by 40 percent since the first one was delivered.</p>
<p>"Since we launched that 'war on cost' in 2009, that message was burned in our brain from the very beginning," Croswell told reporters. "I concur with the general; he's right. We've got to continue to drive the cost down of this system."</p>
<p>The Pentagon plans to buy 2,443 of the new radar-evading fighter jets in coming decades, with the total cost of developing and procuring the planes forecast at $396 billion.</p>
<p>Pratt submitted a proposal to the Pentagon's F-35 program last June for a sixth batch of engines, and looked forward to beginning negotiations on that contract, Croswell said.</p>
<p>Current plans for the sixth batch of 39 engines include 23 conventional engines for the U.S. Air Force and international customers, seven carrier variant engines for the U.S. Navy, six engines for the Marine Corps' short takeoff, vertical landing planes, and three spare engines, according to a Pratt spokesman.</p>
<p>BUDGET CUTS</p>
<p>Croswell said the company would have to get updated pricing data from its suppliers, who account for 80 percent of the work on the engine, if the automatic U.S. budget cuts that took effect on March 1 result in a reduction in the number of F-35 jets to be built in fiscal 2013.</p>
<p>Air Force and Navy officials have said the program might lose four to nine jets, depending on how the cuts are implemented. Bogdan has said that his top priority is funding the F-35 development program, which is only about a third complete.</p>
<p>"We have made a proposal for a certain number of engines, and if that number of engines gets adjusted, then we'll have to re-propose," Croswell said.</p>
<p>Congress is still negotiating with the White House about possible alternatives to soften the impact of the mandatory budget reductions, about half of which would come from the U.S. defense budget. It remains unclear if the cuts will be averted.</p>
<p>Croswell said he expected negotiations about the sixth F-35 engine contract to proceed more quickly than the last time since Pratt had already signed a $65 million agreement with the Pentagon on maintenance of those planes.</p>
<p>The company also agreed to shoulder 100 percent of any cost overruns on the fifth batch of engines, which meant there was less new ground to cover in the next contract, he said.</p>
<p>Pratt reached agreement with the Pentagon last month on the fifth batch of jet engines to power 29 jets and three spares, a deal that lowered the cost of the engines by 5.5 percent.</p>
<p>Croswell said the company expected to lower costs further in the sixth batch, although he declined to say by how much. If the number to be purchased declined, he cautioned, the savings could well be less than currently proposed. "Potentially it could reduce the reduction," he said.</p>
<p>(Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Dan Grebler and Paul Tait)</p>
<p>Advertisement</p> | Pratt & Whitney says drive to lower F-35 costs "burned in our brain" | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2013/03/06/pratt-whitney-says-drive-to-lower-f-35-costs-burned-in-our-brain.html | 2016-01-29 | 0right
| Pratt & Whitney says drive to lower F-35 costs "burned in our brain"
<p>The head of Pratt &amp; Whitney's military engine business said on Wednesday that driving down the cost of the F-35 fighter jet was "burned in our brain," but cuts sparked by U.S. budget woes could slow the effort.</p>
<p>Bennett Croswell, president of Pratt &amp; Whitney Military Engines, said he met with the Air Force general who heads the Pentagon's F-35 program in Australia after he accused Pratt and F-35 prime contractor Lockheed Martin Corp of trying to "squeeze every nickel" out of the U.S. government.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan told a conference on Tuesday that he had spoken with executives at Lockheed and Pratt &amp; Whitney several times in the past few days and had received assurances that they had "heard my message.</p>
<p>Croswell said Pratt, the United Technologies Corp unit that makes the F135 engine that powers the F-35, began a "war on cost" in 2009 that was already yielding results. He noted that Pratt had invested heavily to cut the cost of the engine by 40 percent since the first one was delivered.</p>
<p>"Since we launched that 'war on cost' in 2009, that message was burned in our brain from the very beginning," Croswell told reporters. "I concur with the general; he's right. We've got to continue to drive the cost down of this system."</p>
<p>The Pentagon plans to buy 2,443 of the new radar-evading fighter jets in coming decades, with the total cost of developing and procuring the planes forecast at $396 billion.</p>
<p>Pratt submitted a proposal to the Pentagon's F-35 program last June for a sixth batch of engines, and looked forward to beginning negotiations on that contract, Croswell said.</p>
<p>Current plans for the sixth batch of 39 engines include 23 conventional engines for the U.S. Air Force and international customers, seven carrier variant engines for the U.S. Navy, six engines for the Marine Corps' short takeoff, vertical landing planes, and three spare engines, according to a Pratt spokesman.</p>
<p>BUDGET CUTS</p>
<p>Croswell said the company would have to get updated pricing data from its suppliers, who account for 80 percent of the work on the engine, if the automatic U.S. budget cuts that took effect on March 1 result in a reduction in the number of F-35 jets to be built in fiscal 2013.</p>
<p>Air Force and Navy officials have said the program might lose four to nine jets, depending on how the cuts are implemented. Bogdan has said that his top priority is funding the F-35 development program, which is only about a third complete.</p>
<p>"We have made a proposal for a certain number of engines, and if that number of engines gets adjusted, then we'll have to re-propose," Croswell said.</p>
<p>Congress is still negotiating with the White House about possible alternatives to soften the impact of the mandatory budget reductions, about half of which would come from the U.S. defense budget. It remains unclear if the cuts will be averted.</p>
<p>Croswell said he expected negotiations about the sixth F-35 engine contract to proceed more quickly than the last time since Pratt had already signed a $65 million agreement with the Pentagon on maintenance of those planes.</p>
<p>The company also agreed to shoulder 100 percent of any cost overruns on the fifth batch of engines, which meant there was less new ground to cover in the next contract, he said.</p>
<p>Pratt reached agreement with the Pentagon last month on the fifth batch of jet engines to power 29 jets and three spares, a deal that lowered the cost of the engines by 5.5 percent.</p>
<p>Croswell said the company expected to lower costs further in the sixth batch, although he declined to say by how much. If the number to be purchased declined, he cautioned, the savings could well be less than currently proposed. "Potentially it could reduce the reduction," he said.</p>
<p>(Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Dan Grebler and Paul Tait)</p>
<p>Advertisement</p> | 864 |
<p />
<p><a href="http://www.sonicyouth.com" type="external">Sonic Youth</a> (the legendary New York band <a href="http://www.motorbooty.com/" type="external">Motorbooty</a> magazine once called “definitely sonic, if no longer youthful”) is planning to perform special shows in seven cities this summer, at which they’ll play their 1988 album Daydream Nation in its entirety, reports <a href="http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/news/41845-sonic-youth-take-idaydreami-to-more-nations" type="external">Pitchfork</a>. Besides the fact it’s kind of like The Beatles saying they’re reuniting and playing all of Revolver, there are at least three more reasons this is cool:</p>
<p>1. Bringin’ it back. This album came out 19 years ago! I (thank God) and most people I know were barely out of our New Wave diapers at that point. Could we have been expected to cut English class and go to New York to see Sonic Youth perform these songs? No we could not. So, now we get our chance.</p>
<p>2. Slow on the uptake. More than almost any band, Sonic Youth makes music that rewards repeated listenings over time. My first exposure to der Yoof was seeing “Shadow of a Doubt,” an uncharateristically pretty song, on MTV’s “120 Minutes” back in 1986. I bought the album (EVOL), but my poor 15-year-old ears weren’t really ready for the rest of it. It was only a couple years later (after some stoned viewings of the full-length video to 1990’s Goo) that I went back and realized how great the other albums were. As life goes by and, ahem, “takes its crazy toll” (I’m quoting them), Daydream Nation means different things to me.</p>
<p>3. Well-adjusted. While Sonic Youth has, in the past few years, delved into obscure, avant-garde experimentalism, their latest album, Rather Ripped, proved they don’t mind sounding like the band they were 15 years ago, either. Unlike, say, Radiohead, whose neurotic relationship with their own musical past means you won’t ever see them perform “Creep,” Thurston, Kim &amp; crew seem to like their old songs. At the “Ain’t No Picnic” festival outside of LA in 1999, all the band’s gear <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/alt.music.sonic-youth/browse_thread/thread/179488b9b5ee2331/7270ff8994e508c4" type="external">was stolen</a>, including their uniquely tuned guitars. But instead of cancelling, they borrowed Sleater-Kinney’s gear and performed a set of “classics,” which turned out to be one of the highlights of my concert-going life (snif). You know that these performances will be anything but perfunctory.</p>
<p>Hooray, Sonic Youth. Tour dates are <a href="http://www.sonicyouth.com/calendar/index.html" type="external">here</a>.</p>
<p /> | Sonic Youth Brings Back Daydream Nation | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2007/03/sonic-youth-brings-back-daydream-nation/ | 2007-03-22 | 4left
| Sonic Youth Brings Back Daydream Nation
<p />
<p><a href="http://www.sonicyouth.com" type="external">Sonic Youth</a> (the legendary New York band <a href="http://www.motorbooty.com/" type="external">Motorbooty</a> magazine once called “definitely sonic, if no longer youthful”) is planning to perform special shows in seven cities this summer, at which they’ll play their 1988 album Daydream Nation in its entirety, reports <a href="http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/news/41845-sonic-youth-take-idaydreami-to-more-nations" type="external">Pitchfork</a>. Besides the fact it’s kind of like The Beatles saying they’re reuniting and playing all of Revolver, there are at least three more reasons this is cool:</p>
<p>1. Bringin’ it back. This album came out 19 years ago! I (thank God) and most people I know were barely out of our New Wave diapers at that point. Could we have been expected to cut English class and go to New York to see Sonic Youth perform these songs? No we could not. So, now we get our chance.</p>
<p>2. Slow on the uptake. More than almost any band, Sonic Youth makes music that rewards repeated listenings over time. My first exposure to der Yoof was seeing “Shadow of a Doubt,” an uncharateristically pretty song, on MTV’s “120 Minutes” back in 1986. I bought the album (EVOL), but my poor 15-year-old ears weren’t really ready for the rest of it. It was only a couple years later (after some stoned viewings of the full-length video to 1990’s Goo) that I went back and realized how great the other albums were. As life goes by and, ahem, “takes its crazy toll” (I’m quoting them), Daydream Nation means different things to me.</p>
<p>3. Well-adjusted. While Sonic Youth has, in the past few years, delved into obscure, avant-garde experimentalism, their latest album, Rather Ripped, proved they don’t mind sounding like the band they were 15 years ago, either. Unlike, say, Radiohead, whose neurotic relationship with their own musical past means you won’t ever see them perform “Creep,” Thurston, Kim &amp; crew seem to like their old songs. At the “Ain’t No Picnic” festival outside of LA in 1999, all the band’s gear <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/alt.music.sonic-youth/browse_thread/thread/179488b9b5ee2331/7270ff8994e508c4" type="external">was stolen</a>, including their uniquely tuned guitars. But instead of cancelling, they borrowed Sleater-Kinney’s gear and performed a set of “classics,” which turned out to be one of the highlights of my concert-going life (snif). You know that these performances will be anything but perfunctory.</p>
<p>Hooray, Sonic Youth. Tour dates are <a href="http://www.sonicyouth.com/calendar/index.html" type="external">here</a>.</p>
<p /> | 865 |
<p>(Greg Rikaart. Photo by Greg Hernandez via Wikimedia Commons.)</p>
<p>“Young and the Restless” star Greg Rikaart will be exiting the show after a 14-year run.</p>
<p>Rikaart, 40, announced the news in an Instagram post that he and his character&#160;Kevin Fisher would be leaving the show.</p>
<p>“Fourteen years ago, I booked a two-week long gig on The Young and the Restless. In my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined what it would turn into: a career-defining experience that has brought me so much happiness and fulfillment,” the out actor writes.</p>
<p>Kevin was introduced to the show in 2003 as&#160;an internet predator. The role was meant to be short-lived, but Kevin stayed in the fictional Genoa City. Rikaart’s portrayal of Kevin earned him a Daytime Emmy win and four nominations.</p>
<p>“Playing Kevin and watching him evolve over the years has mirrored my real life in so many ways. We both found love, both became dads and we both have more gray hair now than we did in 2003,” Rikaart, who has one child with his husband Robert Sudduth, writes.</p>
<p>Rikaart will film his last episode in June with his final episode airing in August.</p>
<p />
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Greg Rikaart</a> <a href="" type="internal">Young and the Restless</a></p> | ‘Young and the Restless’ star Greg Rikaart leaving after 14 years | false | http://washingtonblade.com/2017/05/05/young-restless-star-greg-rikaart-leaving-14-years/ | 3left-center
| ‘Young and the Restless’ star Greg Rikaart leaving after 14 years
<p>(Greg Rikaart. Photo by Greg Hernandez via Wikimedia Commons.)</p>
<p>“Young and the Restless” star Greg Rikaart will be exiting the show after a 14-year run.</p>
<p>Rikaart, 40, announced the news in an Instagram post that he and his character&#160;Kevin Fisher would be leaving the show.</p>
<p>“Fourteen years ago, I booked a two-week long gig on The Young and the Restless. In my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined what it would turn into: a career-defining experience that has brought me so much happiness and fulfillment,” the out actor writes.</p>
<p>Kevin was introduced to the show in 2003 as&#160;an internet predator. The role was meant to be short-lived, but Kevin stayed in the fictional Genoa City. Rikaart’s portrayal of Kevin earned him a Daytime Emmy win and four nominations.</p>
<p>“Playing Kevin and watching him evolve over the years has mirrored my real life in so many ways. We both found love, both became dads and we both have more gray hair now than we did in 2003,” Rikaart, who has one child with his husband Robert Sudduth, writes.</p>
<p>Rikaart will film his last episode in June with his final episode airing in August.</p>
<p />
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Greg Rikaart</a> <a href="" type="internal">Young and the Restless</a></p> | 866 |
|
<p>MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — A glance at the Australian Open:</p>
<p>LOOKAHEAD TO TUESDAY</p>
<p>It's the start of quarterfinals at Melbourne Park, and no one has a tougher task than Marin Cilic, who plays top-seeded Rafael Nadal. Nadal has won five of six matches against the hard-serving Croatian, including at the 2011 Australian Open, where Nadal won in straight sets in the fourth round. That's the only previous time the pair have met in a Grand Slam. Cilic, who won the 2014 U.S. Open, isn't overawed by Nadal. "Generally, throughout my career, I know that if I'm playing well, if I'm top of my game, that I can challenge most of the guys," he said. "With the win at the U.S. Open, I believe it became stronger."</p>
<p>The other men's quarterfinal has third-seeded Grigor Dimitrov against Kyle Edmund, the only British male in the draw after Andy Murray withdrew to have hip surgery. Edmund's ranking of 49 doesn't give Dimitrov confidence. "He's gone that far," Dimitrov said. "There is no place for underestimation or anything like that." The pair met just two weeks ago in the Brisbane quarterfinals, where Dimitrov won in three sets.</p>
<p>Second-seeded Caroline Wozniacki, who saved two match points in her second-round match and needed to come back from a 5-1 deficit against Jana Fett, can return to the No. 1 ranking she last held six years ago. She plays Carla Suarez Navarro with a 5-2 career edge, although Suarez Navarro won the last time they met — on clay last year in Madrid. "Hard courts are a little different," Wozniacki said. "But we've had a lot of tough encounters on hard courts as well, three-set grueling matches."</p>
<p>Also, fourth-seeded Elina Svitolina of Ukraine takes on Elise Mertens. While Svitolina should have the edge over the 36th-ranked Mertens, the Belgian is on a nine-match winning streak. She successfully defended her Hobart International title two weeks ago, and has won four rounds here. Svitolina's fourth-round match only ended at nearly 1 a.m. on Monday, so she's had less of a rest.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>TUESDAY FORECAST</p>
<p>Mostly sunny, high of 26 Celsius (79 Fahrenheit)</p>
<p>MONDAY'S WEATHER</p>
<p>Mostly sunny, high of 24 C (75 F)</p>
<p>MONDAY'S RESULTS</p>
<p>Men's Fourth Round: No. 2 Roger Federer beat Marton Fucsovics 6-4, 7-6 (3), 6-2; Tennys Sandgren beat No. 5 Dominic Thiem 6-2, 4-6, 7-6 (4), 6-7 (7), 6-3; Hyeon Chung beat No. 14 Novak Djokovic 7-6 (4), 7-5, 7-6 (3); No. 19 Tomas Berdych beat No. 25 Fabio Fognini 6-1, 6-4, 6-4;</p>
<p>Women's Fourth Round: No. 1 Simona Halep beat Naomi Osaka 6-3, 6-2; No. 6 Karolina Pliskova beat No. 20 Barbora Strycova 6-7 (5), 6-3, 6-2; No. 17 Madison Keys beat No. 8 Caroline Garcia 6-3, 6-2; No. 21 Angelique Kerber beat Hsieh Su-wei 4-6, 7-5, 6-2.</p>
<p>STAT OF THE DAY</p>
<p>0: Number of Grand Slam singles victories by American quarterfinalist Tennys Sandgren before the tournament.</p>
<p>QUOTE OF THE DAY</p>
<p>"Dreams come true tonight"— Chung after beating Djokovic.</p>
<p>_____</p>
<p>More AP coverage: <a href="" type="internal">www.apnews.com/tag/AustralianOpen</a></p>
<p>MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — A glance at the Australian Open:</p>
<p>LOOKAHEAD TO TUESDAY</p>
<p>It's the start of quarterfinals at Melbourne Park, and no one has a tougher task than Marin Cilic, who plays top-seeded Rafael Nadal. Nadal has won five of six matches against the hard-serving Croatian, including at the 2011 Australian Open, where Nadal won in straight sets in the fourth round. That's the only previous time the pair have met in a Grand Slam. Cilic, who won the 2014 U.S. Open, isn't overawed by Nadal. "Generally, throughout my career, I know that if I'm playing well, if I'm top of my game, that I can challenge most of the guys," he said. "With the win at the U.S. Open, I believe it became stronger."</p>
<p>The other men's quarterfinal has third-seeded Grigor Dimitrov against Kyle Edmund, the only British male in the draw after Andy Murray withdrew to have hip surgery. Edmund's ranking of 49 doesn't give Dimitrov confidence. "He's gone that far," Dimitrov said. "There is no place for underestimation or anything like that." The pair met just two weeks ago in the Brisbane quarterfinals, where Dimitrov won in three sets.</p>
<p>Second-seeded Caroline Wozniacki, who saved two match points in her second-round match and needed to come back from a 5-1 deficit against Jana Fett, can return to the No. 1 ranking she last held six years ago. She plays Carla Suarez Navarro with a 5-2 career edge, although Suarez Navarro won the last time they met — on clay last year in Madrid. "Hard courts are a little different," Wozniacki said. "But we've had a lot of tough encounters on hard courts as well, three-set grueling matches."</p>
<p>Also, fourth-seeded Elina Svitolina of Ukraine takes on Elise Mertens. While Svitolina should have the edge over the 36th-ranked Mertens, the Belgian is on a nine-match winning streak. She successfully defended her Hobart International title two weeks ago, and has won four rounds here. Svitolina's fourth-round match only ended at nearly 1 a.m. on Monday, so she's had less of a rest.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>TUESDAY FORECAST</p>
<p>Mostly sunny, high of 26 Celsius (79 Fahrenheit)</p>
<p>MONDAY'S WEATHER</p>
<p>Mostly sunny, high of 24 C (75 F)</p>
<p>MONDAY'S RESULTS</p>
<p>Men's Fourth Round: No. 2 Roger Federer beat Marton Fucsovics 6-4, 7-6 (3), 6-2; Tennys Sandgren beat No. 5 Dominic Thiem 6-2, 4-6, 7-6 (4), 6-7 (7), 6-3; Hyeon Chung beat No. 14 Novak Djokovic 7-6 (4), 7-5, 7-6 (3); No. 19 Tomas Berdych beat No. 25 Fabio Fognini 6-1, 6-4, 6-4;</p>
<p>Women's Fourth Round: No. 1 Simona Halep beat Naomi Osaka 6-3, 6-2; No. 6 Karolina Pliskova beat No. 20 Barbora Strycova 6-7 (5), 6-3, 6-2; No. 17 Madison Keys beat No. 8 Caroline Garcia 6-3, 6-2; No. 21 Angelique Kerber beat Hsieh Su-wei 4-6, 7-5, 6-2.</p>
<p>STAT OF THE DAY</p>
<p>0: Number of Grand Slam singles victories by American quarterfinalist Tennys Sandgren before the tournament.</p>
<p>QUOTE OF THE DAY</p>
<p>"Dreams come true tonight"— Chung after beating Djokovic.</p>
<p>_____</p>
<p>More AP coverage: <a href="" type="internal">www.apnews.com/tag/AustralianOpen</a></p> | Australian Open: A look ahead to Tuesday and recap of Monday | false | https://apnews.com/amp/26801bed604b49c482adae18b4e7851e | 2018-01-22 | 2least
| Australian Open: A look ahead to Tuesday and recap of Monday
<p>MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — A glance at the Australian Open:</p>
<p>LOOKAHEAD TO TUESDAY</p>
<p>It's the start of quarterfinals at Melbourne Park, and no one has a tougher task than Marin Cilic, who plays top-seeded Rafael Nadal. Nadal has won five of six matches against the hard-serving Croatian, including at the 2011 Australian Open, where Nadal won in straight sets in the fourth round. That's the only previous time the pair have met in a Grand Slam. Cilic, who won the 2014 U.S. Open, isn't overawed by Nadal. "Generally, throughout my career, I know that if I'm playing well, if I'm top of my game, that I can challenge most of the guys," he said. "With the win at the U.S. Open, I believe it became stronger."</p>
<p>The other men's quarterfinal has third-seeded Grigor Dimitrov against Kyle Edmund, the only British male in the draw after Andy Murray withdrew to have hip surgery. Edmund's ranking of 49 doesn't give Dimitrov confidence. "He's gone that far," Dimitrov said. "There is no place for underestimation or anything like that." The pair met just two weeks ago in the Brisbane quarterfinals, where Dimitrov won in three sets.</p>
<p>Second-seeded Caroline Wozniacki, who saved two match points in her second-round match and needed to come back from a 5-1 deficit against Jana Fett, can return to the No. 1 ranking she last held six years ago. She plays Carla Suarez Navarro with a 5-2 career edge, although Suarez Navarro won the last time they met — on clay last year in Madrid. "Hard courts are a little different," Wozniacki said. "But we've had a lot of tough encounters on hard courts as well, three-set grueling matches."</p>
<p>Also, fourth-seeded Elina Svitolina of Ukraine takes on Elise Mertens. While Svitolina should have the edge over the 36th-ranked Mertens, the Belgian is on a nine-match winning streak. She successfully defended her Hobart International title two weeks ago, and has won four rounds here. Svitolina's fourth-round match only ended at nearly 1 a.m. on Monday, so she's had less of a rest.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>TUESDAY FORECAST</p>
<p>Mostly sunny, high of 26 Celsius (79 Fahrenheit)</p>
<p>MONDAY'S WEATHER</p>
<p>Mostly sunny, high of 24 C (75 F)</p>
<p>MONDAY'S RESULTS</p>
<p>Men's Fourth Round: No. 2 Roger Federer beat Marton Fucsovics 6-4, 7-6 (3), 6-2; Tennys Sandgren beat No. 5 Dominic Thiem 6-2, 4-6, 7-6 (4), 6-7 (7), 6-3; Hyeon Chung beat No. 14 Novak Djokovic 7-6 (4), 7-5, 7-6 (3); No. 19 Tomas Berdych beat No. 25 Fabio Fognini 6-1, 6-4, 6-4;</p>
<p>Women's Fourth Round: No. 1 Simona Halep beat Naomi Osaka 6-3, 6-2; No. 6 Karolina Pliskova beat No. 20 Barbora Strycova 6-7 (5), 6-3, 6-2; No. 17 Madison Keys beat No. 8 Caroline Garcia 6-3, 6-2; No. 21 Angelique Kerber beat Hsieh Su-wei 4-6, 7-5, 6-2.</p>
<p>STAT OF THE DAY</p>
<p>0: Number of Grand Slam singles victories by American quarterfinalist Tennys Sandgren before the tournament.</p>
<p>QUOTE OF THE DAY</p>
<p>"Dreams come true tonight"— Chung after beating Djokovic.</p>
<p>_____</p>
<p>More AP coverage: <a href="" type="internal">www.apnews.com/tag/AustralianOpen</a></p>
<p>MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — A glance at the Australian Open:</p>
<p>LOOKAHEAD TO TUESDAY</p>
<p>It's the start of quarterfinals at Melbourne Park, and no one has a tougher task than Marin Cilic, who plays top-seeded Rafael Nadal. Nadal has won five of six matches against the hard-serving Croatian, including at the 2011 Australian Open, where Nadal won in straight sets in the fourth round. That's the only previous time the pair have met in a Grand Slam. Cilic, who won the 2014 U.S. Open, isn't overawed by Nadal. "Generally, throughout my career, I know that if I'm playing well, if I'm top of my game, that I can challenge most of the guys," he said. "With the win at the U.S. Open, I believe it became stronger."</p>
<p>The other men's quarterfinal has third-seeded Grigor Dimitrov against Kyle Edmund, the only British male in the draw after Andy Murray withdrew to have hip surgery. Edmund's ranking of 49 doesn't give Dimitrov confidence. "He's gone that far," Dimitrov said. "There is no place for underestimation or anything like that." The pair met just two weeks ago in the Brisbane quarterfinals, where Dimitrov won in three sets.</p>
<p>Second-seeded Caroline Wozniacki, who saved two match points in her second-round match and needed to come back from a 5-1 deficit against Jana Fett, can return to the No. 1 ranking she last held six years ago. She plays Carla Suarez Navarro with a 5-2 career edge, although Suarez Navarro won the last time they met — on clay last year in Madrid. "Hard courts are a little different," Wozniacki said. "But we've had a lot of tough encounters on hard courts as well, three-set grueling matches."</p>
<p>Also, fourth-seeded Elina Svitolina of Ukraine takes on Elise Mertens. While Svitolina should have the edge over the 36th-ranked Mertens, the Belgian is on a nine-match winning streak. She successfully defended her Hobart International title two weeks ago, and has won four rounds here. Svitolina's fourth-round match only ended at nearly 1 a.m. on Monday, so she's had less of a rest.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>TUESDAY FORECAST</p>
<p>Mostly sunny, high of 26 Celsius (79 Fahrenheit)</p>
<p>MONDAY'S WEATHER</p>
<p>Mostly sunny, high of 24 C (75 F)</p>
<p>MONDAY'S RESULTS</p>
<p>Men's Fourth Round: No. 2 Roger Federer beat Marton Fucsovics 6-4, 7-6 (3), 6-2; Tennys Sandgren beat No. 5 Dominic Thiem 6-2, 4-6, 7-6 (4), 6-7 (7), 6-3; Hyeon Chung beat No. 14 Novak Djokovic 7-6 (4), 7-5, 7-6 (3); No. 19 Tomas Berdych beat No. 25 Fabio Fognini 6-1, 6-4, 6-4;</p>
<p>Women's Fourth Round: No. 1 Simona Halep beat Naomi Osaka 6-3, 6-2; No. 6 Karolina Pliskova beat No. 20 Barbora Strycova 6-7 (5), 6-3, 6-2; No. 17 Madison Keys beat No. 8 Caroline Garcia 6-3, 6-2; No. 21 Angelique Kerber beat Hsieh Su-wei 4-6, 7-5, 6-2.</p>
<p>STAT OF THE DAY</p>
<p>0: Number of Grand Slam singles victories by American quarterfinalist Tennys Sandgren before the tournament.</p>
<p>QUOTE OF THE DAY</p>
<p>"Dreams come true tonight"— Chung after beating Djokovic.</p>
<p>_____</p>
<p>More AP coverage: <a href="" type="internal">www.apnews.com/tag/AustralianOpen</a></p> | 867 |
<p />
<p />
<p>UK Prime Minister Theresa May just can't catch a break in 2017.</p>
<p />
<p>From a botched re-election that saw her scraping by to stay on, to terror attacks allover Britain, to horrible Brexit negotiations over a falling pound, to Bombardier being threatened to lose its Northern Irish factory due to a US import dispute, she is now being presented with the latest scandal no female prime minister ever wants: sexual assault allegations for many of her male cabinet members.</p>
<p />
<p>Last week, <a href="" type="internal">we told you how Mr Mark Garnier</a>, the British Trade Minister, had quit his position after it became known that he had sent his PA to buy sex toys.</p>
<p />
<p>In the latest twist, the highly respected and ever so British Minister of Defense Michael Fallon has offered his resignation in the most British stiff upper lip press conference that you will see.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>"A number of allegations have surfaced about MPs in recent days, including some about my previous conduct. Many of these have been false but I accept that in the past I have fallen below the high standards that we require of the Armed Forces that I have the honour to represent."</p>
<p />
<p>Mr Fallon refers to the list that was leaked in recent days where female staffers of the House of Commons and the House of Lords warn each other for members of parliament that have "loose hands".</p>
<p />
<p>The "sleaze list", as it is called features 40 members of parliament of the Conservative Party, and has been causing widespread uproar in the past few weeks.</p>
<p />
<p>The document has been shared widely among members of the UK government, staff and an increasing numbers of journalists. It described some as having affairs, being "inappropriate" with female and male staff or in other cases being a bit too "handsy in taxis".</p>
<p />
<p>Some of those allegations can end political careers, as in the case of Mr Fallon they now have. UK journalists did confirm Mr Fallon was featured on the list.</p>
<p />
<p>The list has been published in the UK press with the names redacted. The allegations, in no particular order, are: handsy at parties, inappropriate with women + paid a female to be quiet, sexual relations / inappropriate with women, sexual relations with member of his private office, inappropriate with female and male staff, handsy with women, sexual relations with researcher and others, inappropriate with male researchers, inappropriate with female researchers, inappropriate with male researchers - long history, handsy with females, perpetually intoxicated and very inappropriate with women, inappropriate with female researchers + handsy in taxis, inappropriate with male researchers and heavy drinker, inappropriate with female researchers and XXXX, inappropriate with female researchers + uses prostitutes, inappropriate with male researchers, inappropriate with female private office staff, inappropriate with female researchers and journalists, inappropriate with females, asked female researcher to do odd things, affair with female researcher, video exists of XXXX, inappropriate with female researchers (historic).</p>
<p />
<p>Source:</p>
<p />
<p><a href="http://news2.onlinenigeria.com/news/general/672901-britain%E2%80%99s-defence-minister-resigns-in-growing-sexual-harassment-scandal.html" type="external">news2.onlinenigeria.com/news/general/672901-britain%E2%80%99s-defence-minister-resigns-in-growing-sexual-harassment-scandal.html</a></p> | Video: UK Defense Minister Resigns Over Sexual Assault Allegations | true | http://thegoldwater.com/news/10944-Video-UK-Defense-Minister-Resigns-Over-Sexual-Assault-Allegations | 2017-11-02 | 0right
| Video: UK Defense Minister Resigns Over Sexual Assault Allegations
<p />
<p />
<p>UK Prime Minister Theresa May just can't catch a break in 2017.</p>
<p />
<p>From a botched re-election that saw her scraping by to stay on, to terror attacks allover Britain, to horrible Brexit negotiations over a falling pound, to Bombardier being threatened to lose its Northern Irish factory due to a US import dispute, she is now being presented with the latest scandal no female prime minister ever wants: sexual assault allegations for many of her male cabinet members.</p>
<p />
<p>Last week, <a href="" type="internal">we told you how Mr Mark Garnier</a>, the British Trade Minister, had quit his position after it became known that he had sent his PA to buy sex toys.</p>
<p />
<p>In the latest twist, the highly respected and ever so British Minister of Defense Michael Fallon has offered his resignation in the most British stiff upper lip press conference that you will see.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>"A number of allegations have surfaced about MPs in recent days, including some about my previous conduct. Many of these have been false but I accept that in the past I have fallen below the high standards that we require of the Armed Forces that I have the honour to represent."</p>
<p />
<p>Mr Fallon refers to the list that was leaked in recent days where female staffers of the House of Commons and the House of Lords warn each other for members of parliament that have "loose hands".</p>
<p />
<p>The "sleaze list", as it is called features 40 members of parliament of the Conservative Party, and has been causing widespread uproar in the past few weeks.</p>
<p />
<p>The document has been shared widely among members of the UK government, staff and an increasing numbers of journalists. It described some as having affairs, being "inappropriate" with female and male staff or in other cases being a bit too "handsy in taxis".</p>
<p />
<p>Some of those allegations can end political careers, as in the case of Mr Fallon they now have. UK journalists did confirm Mr Fallon was featured on the list.</p>
<p />
<p>The list has been published in the UK press with the names redacted. The allegations, in no particular order, are: handsy at parties, inappropriate with women + paid a female to be quiet, sexual relations / inappropriate with women, sexual relations with member of his private office, inappropriate with female and male staff, handsy with women, sexual relations with researcher and others, inappropriate with male researchers, inappropriate with female researchers, inappropriate with male researchers - long history, handsy with females, perpetually intoxicated and very inappropriate with women, inappropriate with female researchers + handsy in taxis, inappropriate with male researchers and heavy drinker, inappropriate with female researchers and XXXX, inappropriate with female researchers + uses prostitutes, inappropriate with male researchers, inappropriate with female private office staff, inappropriate with female researchers and journalists, inappropriate with females, asked female researcher to do odd things, affair with female researcher, video exists of XXXX, inappropriate with female researchers (historic).</p>
<p />
<p>Source:</p>
<p />
<p><a href="http://news2.onlinenigeria.com/news/general/672901-britain%E2%80%99s-defence-minister-resigns-in-growing-sexual-harassment-scandal.html" type="external">news2.onlinenigeria.com/news/general/672901-britain%E2%80%99s-defence-minister-resigns-in-growing-sexual-harassment-scandal.html</a></p> | 868 |
<p>Chip-making heavyweight Texas Instruments Inc. (NYSE:TXN) reported better-than-anticipated second-quarter results Monday, but the company issued third-quarter guidance that was mostly below expectations, prompting shares to fall after the bell.</p>
<p>The Dallas-based maker of semiconductors forecast earnings for the current quarter between 55 cents and 65 cents a share on revenue in the range of $3.4 billion to $3.7 billion. That view was mostly below analyst expectations for earnings of 64 cents a share on revenue of $3.62 billion.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>In the second quarter, TI reported net income that fell 13% to $672 million, or 56 cents a share, compared with year-ago profit of $769 million, or 52 cents a share. The company said profit during the quarter was negatively impacted by about $50 million due to production disruptions and costs related to the earthquake in Japan. TI also disclosed $13 million in costs associated with its pending acquisition of National Semiconductor.</p>
<p>Revenue came in at $3.46 billion, down slightly from revenue of $3.5 billion the second quarter of 2010.</p>
<p>The results narrowly topped expectations, as analysts had predicted earnings 53 cents a share on revenue of $3.44 billion, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters.</p>
<p>"We are pleased with the continued success of the TI portfolio in Analog and Embedded Processing, said Rich Templeton, TI's chairman, president and chief executive officer.&#160;"Sequential revenue growth was driven by Embedded Processing up 12% and Analog up 3%, and we believe we again gained market share in both segments."</p>
<p>Inventory came to $1.76 billion at the end of the second quarter, as orders during the quarter fell 3% to $3.6 billion.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Shares of Texas Instruments fell 1% in Mondays session to close at $31.47 a share. The stock was down about 1% in after-hours trading.</p> | Texas Instruments Posts 2Q Results Ahead of Expectations | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2011/07/25/texas-instruments-posts-2q-results-ahead-expectations.html | 2016-03-07 | 0right
| Texas Instruments Posts 2Q Results Ahead of Expectations
<p>Chip-making heavyweight Texas Instruments Inc. (NYSE:TXN) reported better-than-anticipated second-quarter results Monday, but the company issued third-quarter guidance that was mostly below expectations, prompting shares to fall after the bell.</p>
<p>The Dallas-based maker of semiconductors forecast earnings for the current quarter between 55 cents and 65 cents a share on revenue in the range of $3.4 billion to $3.7 billion. That view was mostly below analyst expectations for earnings of 64 cents a share on revenue of $3.62 billion.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>In the second quarter, TI reported net income that fell 13% to $672 million, or 56 cents a share, compared with year-ago profit of $769 million, or 52 cents a share. The company said profit during the quarter was negatively impacted by about $50 million due to production disruptions and costs related to the earthquake in Japan. TI also disclosed $13 million in costs associated with its pending acquisition of National Semiconductor.</p>
<p>Revenue came in at $3.46 billion, down slightly from revenue of $3.5 billion the second quarter of 2010.</p>
<p>The results narrowly topped expectations, as analysts had predicted earnings 53 cents a share on revenue of $3.44 billion, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters.</p>
<p>"We are pleased with the continued success of the TI portfolio in Analog and Embedded Processing, said Rich Templeton, TI's chairman, president and chief executive officer.&#160;"Sequential revenue growth was driven by Embedded Processing up 12% and Analog up 3%, and we believe we again gained market share in both segments."</p>
<p>Inventory came to $1.76 billion at the end of the second quarter, as orders during the quarter fell 3% to $3.6 billion.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Shares of Texas Instruments fell 1% in Mondays session to close at $31.47 a share. The stock was down about 1% in after-hours trading.</p> | 869 |
<p>I’m standing at the base of the tree leaning back on my harness and peering at the platform sixty feet above. Ingmar is encouraging me to get up there. The press conference is supposed to start in forty-five minutes and we need to get into position. Ingmar’s fully informed about my slightly spastic condition and I can tell he’s not sure if I can still do this. I give him a thumbs up and start up the rope.</p>
<p>By the time the camera crews arrive, we’re both up on the platform with our feet dangling down. The cameras focus in as Ingmar rappels down the rope. I stay up in the tree. The CH TV guy comes over with a microphone and battery pack and attaches them to the end of the rope. I haul the rope up and clip the mike to my coat collar. The reporter calls her questions up to me and I shout back down at her, forgetting about the mike.</p>
<p>The reporters and cameras finally leave and I’m alone up in the tree. The platform is a pair of four by eight foot plywood sheets reinforced with two by fours. It looks like a raft on the open ocean. Ropes and rigging are everywhere and the white tarps billow in the wind like sails. The plywood planks are not quite level and they creak and sway as I move around.</p>
<p>It’s a two-room platform: one plank is the bedroom, with a tiny tent nailed to it. The other serves as the living room (a folding chair) and kitchen (a camp stove and a pot). The bathroom is a bucket hanging below the tree-sit. Everything is lashed down or clipped in, but things fall overboard anyway: two pens, my lighter, the lid to my thermos.</p>
<p>I’m tied to the tree on a ten-foot leash tethered to my harness that stays on every moment, even when I’m sleeping. The thing wraps itself around my legs every time I turn around and threatens to knock small untethered objects off the platform.</p>
<p>I’m afraid of falling. Everyone is; people are hardwired that way. Even though I have total confidence in the platform and the safety line, that giddy feeling comes and goes, especially when I’m moving around close to the edge or getting ready to descend down the rope.</p>
<p>There’s a constant wind up here and the roar of traffic is louder. Through the trees to the south I can just make out a bare knoll and the entrance to the Langford Cave, a 40-meter-long karst cavity that draws cavers from all over the region.</p>
<p>The Songhees First Nation named this place Spaet Mountain. The city of Langford calls it Skirt Mountain. The developer has re-named it Bear Mountain togo along with the marketing of their resort and property sales.</p>
<p>A pileated woodpecker flies into the grove of dead snags next to the platform and lands on a trunk at eye level. It hammers away at the wood for a few moments and then swoops over the trail and up a rotten stump. A hummingbird zips by, flashing green. The forest floor is carpeted with trillium and lilies.</p>
<p>As night falls, the traffic dies down and the frogs start up. The tree sways slightly in the wind and the thrushes sing their evening songs. I crawl into the tiny tent and curl up in my sleeping bag, tugging at the tether every time I turn over. Waking up in the middle of the night, I hear an owl hooting.</p>
<p>Thursday morning I wake up with the sun shining through the trees and a winter wren scolding me nearby. I crawl out of my cocoon, bleary-eyed, and go through the routine of making a pot of tea, taking a shit in the bucket, rolling a cigarette and surveying the forest. I feel wonderful.</p>
<p>People come to visit: local supporters, more journalists, and curious neighbours. Food donations are piling up under a tarp Ingmar tied up for a base camp. The food has to be dealt with because there are raccoons (and possibly bears) in the area, so I haul it up to the platform and make a space in a gear bag for cans of soup, noodles, oatmeal, and cookies.</p>
<p>Cheryl Bryce, the lands manager for the Songhees First Nation, stops by to lend her support and videotape the tree-sit. She’s disturbed that some members of the band council are supporting the development rather than voting to protect the environmental values of their traditional territory. I come down the rope and we chat for a half an hour.</p>
<p>The clouds gather and an icy wind picks up. I go to bed early, snuggled down in the bottom of the sleeping bag with an extra fleece blanket.</p>
<p>Friday dawns with threatening clouds. Then a threatening little man with a mustache: the lands manager for the Provincial Capitol Commission. He’s been sent to determine whether I’m on PCC land, and to grumble at me about the commission’s liability if someone gets hurt and sues them. I promise I won’t hurt anybody and I won’t sue anybody. He suggests if I’m trespassing, he may get the police involved. I invite him to the salmon barbecue scheduled for later tonight. He studies me for a minute without responding and then marches off into the forest with his maps in hand.</p>
<p>I don’t know if he’ll call the police, but even if they show up, they won’t be able to arrest me because I’m sixty feet up in a tree. The RCMP in Vancouver has a special climbing team for these kind of situations, but it takes a few days to assemble. I contemplate the legal implications of criminal trespass charges and court injunctions.</p>
<p>Later: I’m bored, so I use my borrowed cell phone to call the developers’ head office. Bear Mountain Resort and Bear Mountain Properties are the forces behind this project and I figure it’s only polite to introduce myself. But it seems no one is available on this Friday afternoon, not even a receptionist, so I leave a cheery message in the general mailbox describing the wildlife in the area and inviting them all to the salmon barbecue.</p>
<p>The rain holds off, miraculously. At dinnertime, three dozen tree-huggers are gathered around a small campfire devouring barbecued salmon, roasted weiners, mashed potatoes, and bags of fruit and cookies. Mary Vickers, a Nuxalk Nation woman from Bella Bella, provided the salmon, and she gets us all to join hands while she says a prayer to the spirits and the ancestors to bless our work here. Ingmar stands up on a stump and lays out the plan: seven people are needed to take charge of the tree-sit for one day a week. Each person would either sit in the tree for twenty-four hours or find another person to do it. He’ll provide the training.</p>
<p>By Saturday, I’m thoroughly weary of the tiny platform, the harness, and the shit bucket. My legs and arms are shaky from climbing up and down the rope. I’m longing for a hot shower and a soft bed. But still I sit for hours mesmerized, staring out into the forest, listening to the birds, and feeling my senses expand to the limit of hearing and vision.</p>
<p>On Sunday morning, the relief shift arrives. Keith lives nearby and he has no idea how to climb a tree, but he’s willing to learn and Ingmar’s willing to teach him. I rappel down for the last time. My man Dan is there to give me a ride home.</p>
<p>I don’t want folks to get the idea that I’m some kind of action hero. I’m retired from all that now. This was just a one-time special event–more of a vacation than an action; more of a cameo than a comeback. I joked with the folks watching me climb that I’m living proof: almost anyone can do this shit. And it’s true–the biggest obstacle is conquering the fear of falling, the fear of failing, the fear of powerlessness. The campaign is just now beginning, but folks are digging in for the long haul. Cheers to the Spaet Mountain defenders!</p>
<p>ZOE BLUNT writes for <a href="http://www.Lowbagger.com/" type="external">Lowbagger.com</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Tales from the Tree Tops | true | https://counterpunch.org/2007/05/23/tales-from-the-tree-tops/ | 2007-05-23 | 4left
| Tales from the Tree Tops
<p>I’m standing at the base of the tree leaning back on my harness and peering at the platform sixty feet above. Ingmar is encouraging me to get up there. The press conference is supposed to start in forty-five minutes and we need to get into position. Ingmar’s fully informed about my slightly spastic condition and I can tell he’s not sure if I can still do this. I give him a thumbs up and start up the rope.</p>
<p>By the time the camera crews arrive, we’re both up on the platform with our feet dangling down. The cameras focus in as Ingmar rappels down the rope. I stay up in the tree. The CH TV guy comes over with a microphone and battery pack and attaches them to the end of the rope. I haul the rope up and clip the mike to my coat collar. The reporter calls her questions up to me and I shout back down at her, forgetting about the mike.</p>
<p>The reporters and cameras finally leave and I’m alone up in the tree. The platform is a pair of four by eight foot plywood sheets reinforced with two by fours. It looks like a raft on the open ocean. Ropes and rigging are everywhere and the white tarps billow in the wind like sails. The plywood planks are not quite level and they creak and sway as I move around.</p>
<p>It’s a two-room platform: one plank is the bedroom, with a tiny tent nailed to it. The other serves as the living room (a folding chair) and kitchen (a camp stove and a pot). The bathroom is a bucket hanging below the tree-sit. Everything is lashed down or clipped in, but things fall overboard anyway: two pens, my lighter, the lid to my thermos.</p>
<p>I’m tied to the tree on a ten-foot leash tethered to my harness that stays on every moment, even when I’m sleeping. The thing wraps itself around my legs every time I turn around and threatens to knock small untethered objects off the platform.</p>
<p>I’m afraid of falling. Everyone is; people are hardwired that way. Even though I have total confidence in the platform and the safety line, that giddy feeling comes and goes, especially when I’m moving around close to the edge or getting ready to descend down the rope.</p>
<p>There’s a constant wind up here and the roar of traffic is louder. Through the trees to the south I can just make out a bare knoll and the entrance to the Langford Cave, a 40-meter-long karst cavity that draws cavers from all over the region.</p>
<p>The Songhees First Nation named this place Spaet Mountain. The city of Langford calls it Skirt Mountain. The developer has re-named it Bear Mountain togo along with the marketing of their resort and property sales.</p>
<p>A pileated woodpecker flies into the grove of dead snags next to the platform and lands on a trunk at eye level. It hammers away at the wood for a few moments and then swoops over the trail and up a rotten stump. A hummingbird zips by, flashing green. The forest floor is carpeted with trillium and lilies.</p>
<p>As night falls, the traffic dies down and the frogs start up. The tree sways slightly in the wind and the thrushes sing their evening songs. I crawl into the tiny tent and curl up in my sleeping bag, tugging at the tether every time I turn over. Waking up in the middle of the night, I hear an owl hooting.</p>
<p>Thursday morning I wake up with the sun shining through the trees and a winter wren scolding me nearby. I crawl out of my cocoon, bleary-eyed, and go through the routine of making a pot of tea, taking a shit in the bucket, rolling a cigarette and surveying the forest. I feel wonderful.</p>
<p>People come to visit: local supporters, more journalists, and curious neighbours. Food donations are piling up under a tarp Ingmar tied up for a base camp. The food has to be dealt with because there are raccoons (and possibly bears) in the area, so I haul it up to the platform and make a space in a gear bag for cans of soup, noodles, oatmeal, and cookies.</p>
<p>Cheryl Bryce, the lands manager for the Songhees First Nation, stops by to lend her support and videotape the tree-sit. She’s disturbed that some members of the band council are supporting the development rather than voting to protect the environmental values of their traditional territory. I come down the rope and we chat for a half an hour.</p>
<p>The clouds gather and an icy wind picks up. I go to bed early, snuggled down in the bottom of the sleeping bag with an extra fleece blanket.</p>
<p>Friday dawns with threatening clouds. Then a threatening little man with a mustache: the lands manager for the Provincial Capitol Commission. He’s been sent to determine whether I’m on PCC land, and to grumble at me about the commission’s liability if someone gets hurt and sues them. I promise I won’t hurt anybody and I won’t sue anybody. He suggests if I’m trespassing, he may get the police involved. I invite him to the salmon barbecue scheduled for later tonight. He studies me for a minute without responding and then marches off into the forest with his maps in hand.</p>
<p>I don’t know if he’ll call the police, but even if they show up, they won’t be able to arrest me because I’m sixty feet up in a tree. The RCMP in Vancouver has a special climbing team for these kind of situations, but it takes a few days to assemble. I contemplate the legal implications of criminal trespass charges and court injunctions.</p>
<p>Later: I’m bored, so I use my borrowed cell phone to call the developers’ head office. Bear Mountain Resort and Bear Mountain Properties are the forces behind this project and I figure it’s only polite to introduce myself. But it seems no one is available on this Friday afternoon, not even a receptionist, so I leave a cheery message in the general mailbox describing the wildlife in the area and inviting them all to the salmon barbecue.</p>
<p>The rain holds off, miraculously. At dinnertime, three dozen tree-huggers are gathered around a small campfire devouring barbecued salmon, roasted weiners, mashed potatoes, and bags of fruit and cookies. Mary Vickers, a Nuxalk Nation woman from Bella Bella, provided the salmon, and she gets us all to join hands while she says a prayer to the spirits and the ancestors to bless our work here. Ingmar stands up on a stump and lays out the plan: seven people are needed to take charge of the tree-sit for one day a week. Each person would either sit in the tree for twenty-four hours or find another person to do it. He’ll provide the training.</p>
<p>By Saturday, I’m thoroughly weary of the tiny platform, the harness, and the shit bucket. My legs and arms are shaky from climbing up and down the rope. I’m longing for a hot shower and a soft bed. But still I sit for hours mesmerized, staring out into the forest, listening to the birds, and feeling my senses expand to the limit of hearing and vision.</p>
<p>On Sunday morning, the relief shift arrives. Keith lives nearby and he has no idea how to climb a tree, but he’s willing to learn and Ingmar’s willing to teach him. I rappel down for the last time. My man Dan is there to give me a ride home.</p>
<p>I don’t want folks to get the idea that I’m some kind of action hero. I’m retired from all that now. This was just a one-time special event–more of a vacation than an action; more of a cameo than a comeback. I joked with the folks watching me climb that I’m living proof: almost anyone can do this shit. And it’s true–the biggest obstacle is conquering the fear of falling, the fear of failing, the fear of powerlessness. The campaign is just now beginning, but folks are digging in for the long haul. Cheers to the Spaet Mountain defenders!</p>
<p>ZOE BLUNT writes for <a href="http://www.Lowbagger.com/" type="external">Lowbagger.com</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | 870 |
<p>OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — An American health care worker who was exposed to the Ebola virus in Sierra Leone has not developed the disease and was released Thursday from a hospital in Nebraska.</p>
<p>The health worker was monitored for 21 days, which is the virus’ incubation period, the Nebraska Medical Center said in a news release. The patient arrived at the Omaha hospital’s biocontainment unit on Jan. 4.</p>
<p>“The patient was regularly tested for the disease since arriving here in early January, and every test came back negative for Ebola,” said Dr. Phil Smith, the biocontainment unit’s medical director.</p>
<p>The hospital has not identified the patient at the patient’s request.</p>
<p>The health worker said in the statement that the hardest part of the experience was “leaving my patients in Sierra Leone, who were some of the sickest I have ever seen.” The health worker plans to return to West Africa at some point to continue helping treat those with Ebola.</p>
<p>Nebraska Medical Center treated three people with Ebola last fall.</p>
<p>Dr. Rick Sacra and freelance video journalist Ashoka Mukpo both contracted Ebola in Liberia and recovered after being treated at the Omaha hospital. Dr. Martin Salia, who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone, was much more ill when he arrived in Nebraska and did not survive.</p>
<p>Sacra has said he’s returning to Liberia.</p>
<p>The Ebola outbreak has claimed more than 8,600 lives, mostly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.</p>
<p>OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — An American health care worker who was exposed to the Ebola virus in Sierra Leone has not developed the disease and was released Thursday from a hospital in Nebraska.</p>
<p>The health worker was monitored for 21 days, which is the virus’ incubation period, the Nebraska Medical Center said in a news release. The patient arrived at the Omaha hospital’s biocontainment unit on Jan. 4.</p>
<p>“The patient was regularly tested for the disease since arriving here in early January, and every test came back negative for Ebola,” said Dr. Phil Smith, the biocontainment unit’s medical director.</p>
<p>The hospital has not identified the patient at the patient’s request.</p>
<p>The health worker said in the statement that the hardest part of the experience was “leaving my patients in Sierra Leone, who were some of the sickest I have ever seen.” The health worker plans to return to West Africa at some point to continue helping treat those with Ebola.</p>
<p>Nebraska Medical Center treated three people with Ebola last fall.</p>
<p>Dr. Rick Sacra and freelance video journalist Ashoka Mukpo both contracted Ebola in Liberia and recovered after being treated at the Omaha hospital. Dr. Martin Salia, who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone, was much more ill when he arrived in Nebraska and did not survive.</p>
<p>Sacra has said he’s returning to Liberia.</p>
<p>The Ebola outbreak has claimed more than 8,600 lives, mostly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.</p> | Health worker exposed to Ebola released from Omaha hospital | false | https://apnews.com/e176717254434c979ba81f139318bbe8 | 2015-01-22 | 2least
| Health worker exposed to Ebola released from Omaha hospital
<p>OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — An American health care worker who was exposed to the Ebola virus in Sierra Leone has not developed the disease and was released Thursday from a hospital in Nebraska.</p>
<p>The health worker was monitored for 21 days, which is the virus’ incubation period, the Nebraska Medical Center said in a news release. The patient arrived at the Omaha hospital’s biocontainment unit on Jan. 4.</p>
<p>“The patient was regularly tested for the disease since arriving here in early January, and every test came back negative for Ebola,” said Dr. Phil Smith, the biocontainment unit’s medical director.</p>
<p>The hospital has not identified the patient at the patient’s request.</p>
<p>The health worker said in the statement that the hardest part of the experience was “leaving my patients in Sierra Leone, who were some of the sickest I have ever seen.” The health worker plans to return to West Africa at some point to continue helping treat those with Ebola.</p>
<p>Nebraska Medical Center treated three people with Ebola last fall.</p>
<p>Dr. Rick Sacra and freelance video journalist Ashoka Mukpo both contracted Ebola in Liberia and recovered after being treated at the Omaha hospital. Dr. Martin Salia, who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone, was much more ill when he arrived in Nebraska and did not survive.</p>
<p>Sacra has said he’s returning to Liberia.</p>
<p>The Ebola outbreak has claimed more than 8,600 lives, mostly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.</p>
<p>OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — An American health care worker who was exposed to the Ebola virus in Sierra Leone has not developed the disease and was released Thursday from a hospital in Nebraska.</p>
<p>The health worker was monitored for 21 days, which is the virus’ incubation period, the Nebraska Medical Center said in a news release. The patient arrived at the Omaha hospital’s biocontainment unit on Jan. 4.</p>
<p>“The patient was regularly tested for the disease since arriving here in early January, and every test came back negative for Ebola,” said Dr. Phil Smith, the biocontainment unit’s medical director.</p>
<p>The hospital has not identified the patient at the patient’s request.</p>
<p>The health worker said in the statement that the hardest part of the experience was “leaving my patients in Sierra Leone, who were some of the sickest I have ever seen.” The health worker plans to return to West Africa at some point to continue helping treat those with Ebola.</p>
<p>Nebraska Medical Center treated three people with Ebola last fall.</p>
<p>Dr. Rick Sacra and freelance video journalist Ashoka Mukpo both contracted Ebola in Liberia and recovered after being treated at the Omaha hospital. Dr. Martin Salia, who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone, was much more ill when he arrived in Nebraska and did not survive.</p>
<p>Sacra has said he’s returning to Liberia.</p>
<p>The Ebola outbreak has claimed more than 8,600 lives, mostly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.</p> | 871 |
<p>Though developing solid business skills is a key component of growing your career, <a href="https://www.fool.com/careers/2017/08/16/3-reasons-people-are-more-important-than-your-degr.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7ff3fb88-adc6-11e7-8484-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">networking Opens a New Window.</a> is equally important, if not more so. When you connect with the right people, you open the door to new opportunities and get to learn from their experiences. The problem, however, is that some folks struggle to network more so than others. <a href="https://www.fool.com/careers/2017/07/04/the-best-jobs-for-introverts.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7ff3fb88-adc6-11e7-8484-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Introverts Opens a New Window.</a>, in fact, often dread the idea of networking, so much so that they avoid it completely.</p>
<p>Now let's be clear: Being an introvert in no way implies that you're devoid of social skills. There are plenty of introverts who make great leaders and have active social lives to boot. At the same time, introverts tend to crave alone time, and often feel overwhelmed when faced with the notion of having to be "on" for extended periods of time. This can make networking difficult to varying degrees.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>For example, as an introvert, you might pass up an industry party if the idea of attending makes you antsy. In doing so, however, you could end up missing out on a key opportunity to connect with people who can help your career.</p>
<p>That said, you can be a natural introvert and still do a good job of networking. You may just need to tweak your approach. Here's how.</p>
<p>Introverts don't always do well in large crowds. If the thought of attending a bustling industry conference intimidates you, try building relationships by sitting down with contacts individually and getting to know them in a more subdued environment, like a quiet cafe or restaurant. Having trouble meeting those people in the first place? Ask your existing associates to introduce you, or reach out via sites like <a href="https://www.fool.com/careers/2017/08/06/5-ways-to-use-linkedin-to-get-a-job.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7ff3fb88-adc6-11e7-8484-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">LinkedIn Opens a New Window.</a> to make contact directly. Establishing your network one person at a time might make the process less daunting.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Though plenty of introverts are happy to network in person, if face-to-face interactions happen to make you uneasy, try reaching out to new associates by phone or by email. Some people find it easier to let their personalities shine through in writing, as opposed to live discussions, so if you're the type who tends to clam up on the spot, consider going the email route.</p>
<p>Networking isn't the sort of thing you do sporadically. Rather, it's something you should focus on consistently. That's why it's important to do so in a manner that doesn't turn you off. Knowing what parameters you're comfortable with will help you develop your own personalized approach to networking. For example, if you're at a conference, you may want to take breaks to retreat back to your hotel room between sessions or skip the group dinner if, after eight hours of nonstop interaction, you've simply had enough. Similarly, if you're at an industry happy hour and the crowd starts building, pick up and leave before the room really gets packed. Being aware of your limits will help ensure that you don't give up on networking when the going gets a bit tougher.</p>
<p>Successful networking doesn't necessarily mean building the largest business network; rather, it's a matter of building the right network. Instead of aiming to amass a certain number of contacts, focus on developing strong relationships with a few key people who can help grow your career and serve as resources as needed. Not only might this align better with your personality, but it'll also help you network more efficiently.</p>
<p>For better or worse, networking is an essential part of moving up in the business world and advancing your career. Rather than let your personality hinder your networking efforts, use it to your advantage. Introverts tend to be great listeners, and that's something others are sure to value. If you focus on your strengths and do things on your own terms, you'll be well on your way to building a solid network that proves valuable in more ways than one.</p>
<p>The $16,122 Social Security bonus most retirees completely overlook If you're like most Americans, you're a few years (or more) behind on your retirement savings. But a handful of little-known "Social Security secrets" could help ensure a boost in your retirement income. For example: one easy trick could pay you as much as $16,122 more... each year! Once you learn how to maximize your Social Security benefits, we think you could retire confidently with the peace of mind we're all after.&#160; <a href="http://www.fool.com/mms/mark/ecap-foolcom-social-security?aid=8727&amp;source=irreditxt0000002&amp;ftm_cam=ryr-ss-intro-report&amp;ftm_pit=3186&amp;ftm_veh=article_pitch&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7ff3fb88-adc6-11e7-8484-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Simply click here to discover how to learn more about these strategies Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>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=7ff3fb88-adc6-11e7-8484-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | 4 Ways Introverts Can Network Successfully | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/10/12/4-ways-introverts-can-network-successfully.html | 2017-10-12 | 0right
| 4 Ways Introverts Can Network Successfully
<p>Though developing solid business skills is a key component of growing your career, <a href="https://www.fool.com/careers/2017/08/16/3-reasons-people-are-more-important-than-your-degr.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7ff3fb88-adc6-11e7-8484-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">networking Opens a New Window.</a> is equally important, if not more so. When you connect with the right people, you open the door to new opportunities and get to learn from their experiences. The problem, however, is that some folks struggle to network more so than others. <a href="https://www.fool.com/careers/2017/07/04/the-best-jobs-for-introverts.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7ff3fb88-adc6-11e7-8484-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Introverts Opens a New Window.</a>, in fact, often dread the idea of networking, so much so that they avoid it completely.</p>
<p>Now let's be clear: Being an introvert in no way implies that you're devoid of social skills. There are plenty of introverts who make great leaders and have active social lives to boot. At the same time, introverts tend to crave alone time, and often feel overwhelmed when faced with the notion of having to be "on" for extended periods of time. This can make networking difficult to varying degrees.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>For example, as an introvert, you might pass up an industry party if the idea of attending makes you antsy. In doing so, however, you could end up missing out on a key opportunity to connect with people who can help your career.</p>
<p>That said, you can be a natural introvert and still do a good job of networking. You may just need to tweak your approach. Here's how.</p>
<p>Introverts don't always do well in large crowds. If the thought of attending a bustling industry conference intimidates you, try building relationships by sitting down with contacts individually and getting to know them in a more subdued environment, like a quiet cafe or restaurant. Having trouble meeting those people in the first place? Ask your existing associates to introduce you, or reach out via sites like <a href="https://www.fool.com/careers/2017/08/06/5-ways-to-use-linkedin-to-get-a-job.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7ff3fb88-adc6-11e7-8484-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">LinkedIn Opens a New Window.</a> to make contact directly. Establishing your network one person at a time might make the process less daunting.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Though plenty of introverts are happy to network in person, if face-to-face interactions happen to make you uneasy, try reaching out to new associates by phone or by email. Some people find it easier to let their personalities shine through in writing, as opposed to live discussions, so if you're the type who tends to clam up on the spot, consider going the email route.</p>
<p>Networking isn't the sort of thing you do sporadically. Rather, it's something you should focus on consistently. That's why it's important to do so in a manner that doesn't turn you off. Knowing what parameters you're comfortable with will help you develop your own personalized approach to networking. For example, if you're at a conference, you may want to take breaks to retreat back to your hotel room between sessions or skip the group dinner if, after eight hours of nonstop interaction, you've simply had enough. Similarly, if you're at an industry happy hour and the crowd starts building, pick up and leave before the room really gets packed. Being aware of your limits will help ensure that you don't give up on networking when the going gets a bit tougher.</p>
<p>Successful networking doesn't necessarily mean building the largest business network; rather, it's a matter of building the right network. Instead of aiming to amass a certain number of contacts, focus on developing strong relationships with a few key people who can help grow your career and serve as resources as needed. Not only might this align better with your personality, but it'll also help you network more efficiently.</p>
<p>For better or worse, networking is an essential part of moving up in the business world and advancing your career. Rather than let your personality hinder your networking efforts, use it to your advantage. Introverts tend to be great listeners, and that's something others are sure to value. If you focus on your strengths and do things on your own terms, you'll be well on your way to building a solid network that proves valuable in more ways than one.</p>
<p>The $16,122 Social Security bonus most retirees completely overlook If you're like most Americans, you're a few years (or more) behind on your retirement savings. But a handful of little-known "Social Security secrets" could help ensure a boost in your retirement income. For example: one easy trick could pay you as much as $16,122 more... each year! Once you learn how to maximize your Social Security benefits, we think you could retire confidently with the peace of mind we're all after.&#160; <a href="http://www.fool.com/mms/mark/ecap-foolcom-social-security?aid=8727&amp;source=irreditxt0000002&amp;ftm_cam=ryr-ss-intro-report&amp;ftm_pit=3186&amp;ftm_veh=article_pitch&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=7ff3fb88-adc6-11e7-8484-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Simply click here to discover how to learn more about these strategies Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>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=7ff3fb88-adc6-11e7-8484-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | 872 |
<p>MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A massive crowd of mostly barefoot Filipino Catholics joined a raucous procession of a centuries-old life-size statue of Jesus Christ under extra-tight security Tuesday after the Philippines came under a disastrous militant attack last year.</p>
<p>Although the Philippine police and military said they have not monitored any specific threat, they deployed more than 6,000 personnel, including snipers and bomb squads backed by a surveillance helicopter and drones, to secure the annual procession of the wooden Black Nazarene along Manila’s streets. By nightfall, nearly 1,000 devotees had been treated by Red Cross volunteers, mostly for minor injuries and ailments and exhaustion.</p>
<p>Authorities imposed a gun ban, cellphone signals were jammed sporadically in the vicinity of the procession and a team of bomb experts walked sniffer dogs along the route ahead of the crowd. Concrete barriers blocked the route, partly to prevent the kind of attacks that have been witnessed in Europe, where Islamic radicals have rammed vehicles into crowds, a military official said.</p>
<p>Hundreds of local and foreign militants laid siege for five months last year to southern Marawi city, leaving more than 1,100 combatants and civilians dead in the worst IS group-linked attack so far in Asia. Troops crushed the uprising in October, but an unspecified number of extremists managed to escape and other small but brutal groups in the country’s south still pose threats.</p>
<p>Security officials said they were also concerned with possible stampedes in a dawn-to-midnight event that national police chief Ronald dela Rosa said drew about 2.6 million devotees. It’s unclear how the police came up with the crowd estimate given that people joined and left the procession constantly.</p>
<p>Mobs of devotees in maroon shirts dangerously squeezed their way into the tight pack of humanity around a carriage carrying the Jesus statue. They threw small towels at volunteers on the carriage, which was being pulled by ropes, to wipe parts of the cross and the statue in the belief that the Nazarene’s powers would cure ailments and foster good health and fortune.</p>
<p>Ronald Malaguinio, a 38-year-old worker, carried a small replica of the Nazarene on a steel platform bedecked with yellow and white flowers for several kilometers (miles) from his home in Manila’s Tondo slum district to join the procession and pray for a son recovering from a heart ailment.</p>
<p>“If the doctor says your son has a 50-50 chance of surviving, where will you go?” Malaguinio asked. “If money can’t cure diseases, the only other option is prayers. Ours have been heard and we’re here to thank the Nazarene.”</p>
<p>Another devotee, Jeffrey Nolasco, said he joined the procession for the fifth year in a row to pray that his four children will finish school, his impoverished family could eat three times a day and he could overcome a bad habit.</p>
<p>“I’m a drunkard,” said Nolasco, who walked barefoot on the hot pavement and carried a small statue of the cross-carrying Nazarene.</p>
<p>Jim Coffin, an anthropology professor from Muncie, Indiana, said he and his wife flew in as tourists and were “absolutely moved” by the massive but peaceful procession and display of religious faith by the devotees, many of them poor.</p>
<p>“We watched them as they threw towels on the statue and rubbed it on their bodies,” Coffin said as the procession inched its way nearby. “If the people in power appreciate how bad off the people are and they truly want to better their lives, the people in power have got to be moved by this.”</p>
<p>Crowned with thorns and bearing a cross, the Nazarene statue is believed to have been brought from Mexico to Manila on a galleon in 1606 by Spanish missionaries. The ship that carried it caught fire, but the charred statue survived. Some believe the statue’s endurance, from fires and earthquakes through the centuries and intense bombings during World War II, is a testament to its powers.</p>
<p>The spectacle reflects the unique brand of Catholicism, which includes folk superstitions, in Asia’s largest Catholic nation. Dozens of Filipinos have themselves nailed to crosses on Good Friday in another tradition to emulate Christ’s suffering that draws huge crowds each year.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>AP journalists Bullit Marquez, Aaron Favila and Joeal Calupitan contributed to this report.</p>
<p>MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A massive crowd of mostly barefoot Filipino Catholics joined a raucous procession of a centuries-old life-size statue of Jesus Christ under extra-tight security Tuesday after the Philippines came under a disastrous militant attack last year.</p>
<p>Although the Philippine police and military said they have not monitored any specific threat, they deployed more than 6,000 personnel, including snipers and bomb squads backed by a surveillance helicopter and drones, to secure the annual procession of the wooden Black Nazarene along Manila’s streets. By nightfall, nearly 1,000 devotees had been treated by Red Cross volunteers, mostly for minor injuries and ailments and exhaustion.</p>
<p>Authorities imposed a gun ban, cellphone signals were jammed sporadically in the vicinity of the procession and a team of bomb experts walked sniffer dogs along the route ahead of the crowd. Concrete barriers blocked the route, partly to prevent the kind of attacks that have been witnessed in Europe, where Islamic radicals have rammed vehicles into crowds, a military official said.</p>
<p>Hundreds of local and foreign militants laid siege for five months last year to southern Marawi city, leaving more than 1,100 combatants and civilians dead in the worst IS group-linked attack so far in Asia. Troops crushed the uprising in October, but an unspecified number of extremists managed to escape and other small but brutal groups in the country’s south still pose threats.</p>
<p>Security officials said they were also concerned with possible stampedes in a dawn-to-midnight event that national police chief Ronald dela Rosa said drew about 2.6 million devotees. It’s unclear how the police came up with the crowd estimate given that people joined and left the procession constantly.</p>
<p>Mobs of devotees in maroon shirts dangerously squeezed their way into the tight pack of humanity around a carriage carrying the Jesus statue. They threw small towels at volunteers on the carriage, which was being pulled by ropes, to wipe parts of the cross and the statue in the belief that the Nazarene’s powers would cure ailments and foster good health and fortune.</p>
<p>Ronald Malaguinio, a 38-year-old worker, carried a small replica of the Nazarene on a steel platform bedecked with yellow and white flowers for several kilometers (miles) from his home in Manila’s Tondo slum district to join the procession and pray for a son recovering from a heart ailment.</p>
<p>“If the doctor says your son has a 50-50 chance of surviving, where will you go?” Malaguinio asked. “If money can’t cure diseases, the only other option is prayers. Ours have been heard and we’re here to thank the Nazarene.”</p>
<p>Another devotee, Jeffrey Nolasco, said he joined the procession for the fifth year in a row to pray that his four children will finish school, his impoverished family could eat three times a day and he could overcome a bad habit.</p>
<p>“I’m a drunkard,” said Nolasco, who walked barefoot on the hot pavement and carried a small statue of the cross-carrying Nazarene.</p>
<p>Jim Coffin, an anthropology professor from Muncie, Indiana, said he and his wife flew in as tourists and were “absolutely moved” by the massive but peaceful procession and display of religious faith by the devotees, many of them poor.</p>
<p>“We watched them as they threw towels on the statue and rubbed it on their bodies,” Coffin said as the procession inched its way nearby. “If the people in power appreciate how bad off the people are and they truly want to better their lives, the people in power have got to be moved by this.”</p>
<p>Crowned with thorns and bearing a cross, the Nazarene statue is believed to have been brought from Mexico to Manila on a galleon in 1606 by Spanish missionaries. The ship that carried it caught fire, but the charred statue survived. Some believe the statue’s endurance, from fires and earthquakes through the centuries and intense bombings during World War II, is a testament to its powers.</p>
<p>The spectacle reflects the unique brand of Catholicism, which includes folk superstitions, in Asia’s largest Catholic nation. Dozens of Filipinos have themselves nailed to crosses on Good Friday in another tradition to emulate Christ’s suffering that draws huge crowds each year.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>AP journalists Bullit Marquez, Aaron Favila and Joeal Calupitan contributed to this report.</p> | Huge Philippine procession secured tightly amid terror fears | false | https://apnews.com/ca5af8c7415c4f48bb80ef3f055c4856 | 2018-01-09 | 2least
| Huge Philippine procession secured tightly amid terror fears
<p>MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A massive crowd of mostly barefoot Filipino Catholics joined a raucous procession of a centuries-old life-size statue of Jesus Christ under extra-tight security Tuesday after the Philippines came under a disastrous militant attack last year.</p>
<p>Although the Philippine police and military said they have not monitored any specific threat, they deployed more than 6,000 personnel, including snipers and bomb squads backed by a surveillance helicopter and drones, to secure the annual procession of the wooden Black Nazarene along Manila’s streets. By nightfall, nearly 1,000 devotees had been treated by Red Cross volunteers, mostly for minor injuries and ailments and exhaustion.</p>
<p>Authorities imposed a gun ban, cellphone signals were jammed sporadically in the vicinity of the procession and a team of bomb experts walked sniffer dogs along the route ahead of the crowd. Concrete barriers blocked the route, partly to prevent the kind of attacks that have been witnessed in Europe, where Islamic radicals have rammed vehicles into crowds, a military official said.</p>
<p>Hundreds of local and foreign militants laid siege for five months last year to southern Marawi city, leaving more than 1,100 combatants and civilians dead in the worst IS group-linked attack so far in Asia. Troops crushed the uprising in October, but an unspecified number of extremists managed to escape and other small but brutal groups in the country’s south still pose threats.</p>
<p>Security officials said they were also concerned with possible stampedes in a dawn-to-midnight event that national police chief Ronald dela Rosa said drew about 2.6 million devotees. It’s unclear how the police came up with the crowd estimate given that people joined and left the procession constantly.</p>
<p>Mobs of devotees in maroon shirts dangerously squeezed their way into the tight pack of humanity around a carriage carrying the Jesus statue. They threw small towels at volunteers on the carriage, which was being pulled by ropes, to wipe parts of the cross and the statue in the belief that the Nazarene’s powers would cure ailments and foster good health and fortune.</p>
<p>Ronald Malaguinio, a 38-year-old worker, carried a small replica of the Nazarene on a steel platform bedecked with yellow and white flowers for several kilometers (miles) from his home in Manila’s Tondo slum district to join the procession and pray for a son recovering from a heart ailment.</p>
<p>“If the doctor says your son has a 50-50 chance of surviving, where will you go?” Malaguinio asked. “If money can’t cure diseases, the only other option is prayers. Ours have been heard and we’re here to thank the Nazarene.”</p>
<p>Another devotee, Jeffrey Nolasco, said he joined the procession for the fifth year in a row to pray that his four children will finish school, his impoverished family could eat three times a day and he could overcome a bad habit.</p>
<p>“I’m a drunkard,” said Nolasco, who walked barefoot on the hot pavement and carried a small statue of the cross-carrying Nazarene.</p>
<p>Jim Coffin, an anthropology professor from Muncie, Indiana, said he and his wife flew in as tourists and were “absolutely moved” by the massive but peaceful procession and display of religious faith by the devotees, many of them poor.</p>
<p>“We watched them as they threw towels on the statue and rubbed it on their bodies,” Coffin said as the procession inched its way nearby. “If the people in power appreciate how bad off the people are and they truly want to better their lives, the people in power have got to be moved by this.”</p>
<p>Crowned with thorns and bearing a cross, the Nazarene statue is believed to have been brought from Mexico to Manila on a galleon in 1606 by Spanish missionaries. The ship that carried it caught fire, but the charred statue survived. Some believe the statue’s endurance, from fires and earthquakes through the centuries and intense bombings during World War II, is a testament to its powers.</p>
<p>The spectacle reflects the unique brand of Catholicism, which includes folk superstitions, in Asia’s largest Catholic nation. Dozens of Filipinos have themselves nailed to crosses on Good Friday in another tradition to emulate Christ’s suffering that draws huge crowds each year.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>AP journalists Bullit Marquez, Aaron Favila and Joeal Calupitan contributed to this report.</p>
<p>MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A massive crowd of mostly barefoot Filipino Catholics joined a raucous procession of a centuries-old life-size statue of Jesus Christ under extra-tight security Tuesday after the Philippines came under a disastrous militant attack last year.</p>
<p>Although the Philippine police and military said they have not monitored any specific threat, they deployed more than 6,000 personnel, including snipers and bomb squads backed by a surveillance helicopter and drones, to secure the annual procession of the wooden Black Nazarene along Manila’s streets. By nightfall, nearly 1,000 devotees had been treated by Red Cross volunteers, mostly for minor injuries and ailments and exhaustion.</p>
<p>Authorities imposed a gun ban, cellphone signals were jammed sporadically in the vicinity of the procession and a team of bomb experts walked sniffer dogs along the route ahead of the crowd. Concrete barriers blocked the route, partly to prevent the kind of attacks that have been witnessed in Europe, where Islamic radicals have rammed vehicles into crowds, a military official said.</p>
<p>Hundreds of local and foreign militants laid siege for five months last year to southern Marawi city, leaving more than 1,100 combatants and civilians dead in the worst IS group-linked attack so far in Asia. Troops crushed the uprising in October, but an unspecified number of extremists managed to escape and other small but brutal groups in the country’s south still pose threats.</p>
<p>Security officials said they were also concerned with possible stampedes in a dawn-to-midnight event that national police chief Ronald dela Rosa said drew about 2.6 million devotees. It’s unclear how the police came up with the crowd estimate given that people joined and left the procession constantly.</p>
<p>Mobs of devotees in maroon shirts dangerously squeezed their way into the tight pack of humanity around a carriage carrying the Jesus statue. They threw small towels at volunteers on the carriage, which was being pulled by ropes, to wipe parts of the cross and the statue in the belief that the Nazarene’s powers would cure ailments and foster good health and fortune.</p>
<p>Ronald Malaguinio, a 38-year-old worker, carried a small replica of the Nazarene on a steel platform bedecked with yellow and white flowers for several kilometers (miles) from his home in Manila’s Tondo slum district to join the procession and pray for a son recovering from a heart ailment.</p>
<p>“If the doctor says your son has a 50-50 chance of surviving, where will you go?” Malaguinio asked. “If money can’t cure diseases, the only other option is prayers. Ours have been heard and we’re here to thank the Nazarene.”</p>
<p>Another devotee, Jeffrey Nolasco, said he joined the procession for the fifth year in a row to pray that his four children will finish school, his impoverished family could eat three times a day and he could overcome a bad habit.</p>
<p>“I’m a drunkard,” said Nolasco, who walked barefoot on the hot pavement and carried a small statue of the cross-carrying Nazarene.</p>
<p>Jim Coffin, an anthropology professor from Muncie, Indiana, said he and his wife flew in as tourists and were “absolutely moved” by the massive but peaceful procession and display of religious faith by the devotees, many of them poor.</p>
<p>“We watched them as they threw towels on the statue and rubbed it on their bodies,” Coffin said as the procession inched its way nearby. “If the people in power appreciate how bad off the people are and they truly want to better their lives, the people in power have got to be moved by this.”</p>
<p>Crowned with thorns and bearing a cross, the Nazarene statue is believed to have been brought from Mexico to Manila on a galleon in 1606 by Spanish missionaries. The ship that carried it caught fire, but the charred statue survived. Some believe the statue’s endurance, from fires and earthquakes through the centuries and intense bombings during World War II, is a testament to its powers.</p>
<p>The spectacle reflects the unique brand of Catholicism, which includes folk superstitions, in Asia’s largest Catholic nation. Dozens of Filipinos have themselves nailed to crosses on Good Friday in another tradition to emulate Christ’s suffering that draws huge crowds each year.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>AP journalists Bullit Marquez, Aaron Favila and Joeal Calupitan contributed to this report.</p> | 873 |
<p>ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday evening’s drawing of the New York Lottery’s “Numbers Evening” game were:</p>
<p>7-8-6, Lucky Sum: 21</p>
<p>(seven, eight, six; Lucky Sum: twenty-one)</p>
<p>ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday evening’s drawing of the New York Lottery’s “Numbers Evening” game were:</p>
<p>7-8-6, Lucky Sum: 21</p>
<p>(seven, eight, six; Lucky Sum: twenty-one)</p> | Winning numbers drawn in ‘Numbers Evening’ game | false | https://apnews.com/8d9d5de368164e70ae749f0aa568519f | 2018-01-26 | 2least
| Winning numbers drawn in ‘Numbers Evening’ game
<p>ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday evening’s drawing of the New York Lottery’s “Numbers Evening” game were:</p>
<p>7-8-6, Lucky Sum: 21</p>
<p>(seven, eight, six; Lucky Sum: twenty-one)</p>
<p>ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) _ The winning numbers in Thursday evening’s drawing of the New York Lottery’s “Numbers Evening” game were:</p>
<p>7-8-6, Lucky Sum: 21</p>
<p>(seven, eight, six; Lucky Sum: twenty-one)</p> | 874 |
<p>By <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/02/16/unlikely-critic-says-banks-still-too-big-fail-pose-nuclear-risk-us-economy" type="external">Deirdre Fulton / Common Dreams</a></p>
<p>A former Goldman Sachs executive—one credited as an architect of the 2008 banking bailout—said Tuesday that the country’s largest financial institutions are “still too big to fail and continue to pose a significant, ongoing risk to our economy.”</p>
<p>In his first <a href="https://www.minneapolisfed.org/news-and-events/presidents-speeches/lessons-from-the-crisis-ending-too-big-to-fail" type="external">speech</a> delivered as the newly appointed president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, Neel Kashkari “came out swinging,” Business Insider <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/neel-kashkari-first-speech-at-minneapolis-fed-president-2016-2" type="external">reported</a>.</p>
<p>He likened the risk posed by big banks to that of a nuclear reactor, noting: “The cost to society of letting a reactor melt down is astronomical.”</p>
<p />
<p>“Enough time has passed that we better understand the causes of the crisis, and yet it is still fresh in our memories,” Kashkari said at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, D.C. “Now is the right time for Congress to consider going further than Dodd-Frank with bold, transformational solutions to solve this problem once and for all.”</p>
<p>To that end, Kashkari continued, “the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis is launching a major initiative to develop an actionable plan to end [too-big-to-fail, or TBTF], and we will deliver our plan to the public by the end of the year. Ultimately Congress must decide whether such a transformational restructuring of our financial system is justified in order to mitigate the ongoing risks posed by large banks.”</p>
<p>Among the solutions he floated: “breaking up large banks into smaller, less connected, less important entities” and “turning large banks into public utilities by forcing them to hold so much capital that they virtually can’t fail (with regulation akin to that of a nuclear power plant).”</p>
<p>While Kashkari acknowledged that the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law has made “significant progress” in strengthening the financial system, he said it “did not go far enough” and warned that “we won’t see the next crisis coming, and it won’t look like what we might be expecting.”</p>
<p>Kashkari, who was the 2014 Republican nominee for California governor, also expressed skepticism about whether regulatory tools created in the wake of the bailout “will be useful to policymakers in the…scenario of a stressed economic environment.” He said:</p>
<p>Given the massive externalities on Main Street of large bank failures in terms of lost jobs, lost income and lost wealth, no rational policymaker would risk restructuring large firms and forcing losses on creditors and counterparties using the new tools in a risky environment, let alone in a crisis environment like we experienced in 2008. They will be forced to bail out failing institutions—as we were. We were even forced to support large bank mergers, which helped stabilize the immediate crisis, but that we knew would make TBTF worse in the long term. The risks to the U.S. economy and the American people were simply too great not to do whatever we could to prevent a financial collapse.</p>
<p>As the Guardian <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/16/finacial-crash-bank-bailout-2008-neel-kashkari-us-banks-too-big-to-fail" type="external">notes</a>, Kashkari’s comments “come as presidential candidates battle over whom has the best solution to prevent another banking crisis, and prevent a repeat of the economic collapse.”</p>
<p>“There are lines in your speech that I can imagine Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren saying,” David Wessel, director of Brookings’ Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, told Kashkari during a panel discussion after the speech.</p>
<p>“If I’m not willing to stand up and share my concerns, then I wouldn’t be doing my job,” Kashkari responded.</p> | Unlikely Critic Neel Kashkari Says Banks Still Pose 'Nuclear' Risk to U.S. Economy | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/unlikely-critic-neel-kashkari-says-banks-still-pose-nuclear-risk-to-u-s-economy/ | 2016-02-17 | 4left
| Unlikely Critic Neel Kashkari Says Banks Still Pose 'Nuclear' Risk to U.S. Economy
<p>By <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/02/16/unlikely-critic-says-banks-still-too-big-fail-pose-nuclear-risk-us-economy" type="external">Deirdre Fulton / Common Dreams</a></p>
<p>A former Goldman Sachs executive—one credited as an architect of the 2008 banking bailout—said Tuesday that the country’s largest financial institutions are “still too big to fail and continue to pose a significant, ongoing risk to our economy.”</p>
<p>In his first <a href="https://www.minneapolisfed.org/news-and-events/presidents-speeches/lessons-from-the-crisis-ending-too-big-to-fail" type="external">speech</a> delivered as the newly appointed president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, Neel Kashkari “came out swinging,” Business Insider <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/neel-kashkari-first-speech-at-minneapolis-fed-president-2016-2" type="external">reported</a>.</p>
<p>He likened the risk posed by big banks to that of a nuclear reactor, noting: “The cost to society of letting a reactor melt down is astronomical.”</p>
<p />
<p>“Enough time has passed that we better understand the causes of the crisis, and yet it is still fresh in our memories,” Kashkari said at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, D.C. “Now is the right time for Congress to consider going further than Dodd-Frank with bold, transformational solutions to solve this problem once and for all.”</p>
<p>To that end, Kashkari continued, “the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis is launching a major initiative to develop an actionable plan to end [too-big-to-fail, or TBTF], and we will deliver our plan to the public by the end of the year. Ultimately Congress must decide whether such a transformational restructuring of our financial system is justified in order to mitigate the ongoing risks posed by large banks.”</p>
<p>Among the solutions he floated: “breaking up large banks into smaller, less connected, less important entities” and “turning large banks into public utilities by forcing them to hold so much capital that they virtually can’t fail (with regulation akin to that of a nuclear power plant).”</p>
<p>While Kashkari acknowledged that the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law has made “significant progress” in strengthening the financial system, he said it “did not go far enough” and warned that “we won’t see the next crisis coming, and it won’t look like what we might be expecting.”</p>
<p>Kashkari, who was the 2014 Republican nominee for California governor, also expressed skepticism about whether regulatory tools created in the wake of the bailout “will be useful to policymakers in the…scenario of a stressed economic environment.” He said:</p>
<p>Given the massive externalities on Main Street of large bank failures in terms of lost jobs, lost income and lost wealth, no rational policymaker would risk restructuring large firms and forcing losses on creditors and counterparties using the new tools in a risky environment, let alone in a crisis environment like we experienced in 2008. They will be forced to bail out failing institutions—as we were. We were even forced to support large bank mergers, which helped stabilize the immediate crisis, but that we knew would make TBTF worse in the long term. The risks to the U.S. economy and the American people were simply too great not to do whatever we could to prevent a financial collapse.</p>
<p>As the Guardian <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/16/finacial-crash-bank-bailout-2008-neel-kashkari-us-banks-too-big-to-fail" type="external">notes</a>, Kashkari’s comments “come as presidential candidates battle over whom has the best solution to prevent another banking crisis, and prevent a repeat of the economic collapse.”</p>
<p>“There are lines in your speech that I can imagine Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren saying,” David Wessel, director of Brookings’ Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, told Kashkari during a panel discussion after the speech.</p>
<p>“If I’m not willing to stand up and share my concerns, then I wouldn’t be doing my job,” Kashkari responded.</p> | 875 |
<p />
<p>Hiring military veterans is good for business, according to a new study.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Conducted by the Washington think tank <a href="http://www.cnas.org" type="external">Center for a New American Security Opens a New Window.</a>, the study uncovers why companies hire veterans and the challenges they face in doing so.</p>
<p>The 69 businesses examined, including AT&amp;T, Bank of America, the Boeing Co., Kraft Foods and PepsiCo, provided a number of reasons behind their <a href="http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/1661-veteran-employment.html" type="external">decision to hire veterans Opens a New Window.</a>, including:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2574-jobs-veterans.html" type="external">[Best Companies for Veterans to Work For] Opens a New Window.</a></p>
<p>Despite the numerous benefits of hiring veterans, the research also revealed several reasons why so many <a href="http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2169-military-job-prospects.html" type="external">veterans remain unemployed Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>The study by the CNAS, a developer of defense policy proposals, points to a number of ways the Department of Defense and the Department of Labor can increase veteran hiring. They include aiding in translating military skills, better facilitating the transition process, providing guidance for companies to help them interpret which veteran candidates were successful in performing their duties while in uniform, and creating a résumé bank to help companies identify personnel who are leaving military service.</p>
<p>The study, "Employing America's Veterans: Perspectives from Businesses," was conducted byMargaret C. Harrell, director of the CNAS' Military, Veterans and Society Program,and Non-Resident Senior Fellow Nancy Berglass.</p>
<p>Follow Chad Brook on Twitter @ <a href="http://www.twitter.com/cbrooks76" type="external">cbrooks76 Opens a New Window.</a>or BusinessNewsDaily @BNDarticles. We're also on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/BusinessNewsDaily" type="external">Facebook Opens a New Window.</a> &amp; <a href="https://plus.google.com/113390396142026041164/posts" type="external">Google+ Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>Copyright 2012 <a href="http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/" type="external">BusinessNewsDaily Opens a New Window.</a>, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</p> | Ten Reasons to Hire a Veteran | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2012/06/13/ten-reasons-to-hire-veteran.html | 2016-03-23 | 0right
| Ten Reasons to Hire a Veteran
<p />
<p>Hiring military veterans is good for business, according to a new study.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Conducted by the Washington think tank <a href="http://www.cnas.org" type="external">Center for a New American Security Opens a New Window.</a>, the study uncovers why companies hire veterans and the challenges they face in doing so.</p>
<p>The 69 businesses examined, including AT&amp;T, Bank of America, the Boeing Co., Kraft Foods and PepsiCo, provided a number of reasons behind their <a href="http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/1661-veteran-employment.html" type="external">decision to hire veterans Opens a New Window.</a>, including:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2574-jobs-veterans.html" type="external">[Best Companies for Veterans to Work For] Opens a New Window.</a></p>
<p>Despite the numerous benefits of hiring veterans, the research also revealed several reasons why so many <a href="http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2169-military-job-prospects.html" type="external">veterans remain unemployed Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>The study by the CNAS, a developer of defense policy proposals, points to a number of ways the Department of Defense and the Department of Labor can increase veteran hiring. They include aiding in translating military skills, better facilitating the transition process, providing guidance for companies to help them interpret which veteran candidates were successful in performing their duties while in uniform, and creating a résumé bank to help companies identify personnel who are leaving military service.</p>
<p>The study, "Employing America's Veterans: Perspectives from Businesses," was conducted byMargaret C. Harrell, director of the CNAS' Military, Veterans and Society Program,and Non-Resident Senior Fellow Nancy Berglass.</p>
<p>Follow Chad Brook on Twitter @ <a href="http://www.twitter.com/cbrooks76" type="external">cbrooks76 Opens a New Window.</a>or BusinessNewsDaily @BNDarticles. We're also on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/BusinessNewsDaily" type="external">Facebook Opens a New Window.</a> &amp; <a href="https://plus.google.com/113390396142026041164/posts" type="external">Google+ Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>Copyright 2012 <a href="http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/" type="external">BusinessNewsDaily Opens a New Window.</a>, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</p> | 876 |
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>5:10 p.m.</p>
<p>The Border Patrol has asked for an internal investigation of the circumstances leading up to the arrest of a transgender woman in an El Paso courthouse.</p>
<p>Irvin Gonzalez was as she was seeking court-ordered protection from an abusive boyfriend. The arrest has led to questions about what lengths authorities will go to apprehend people under newly stepped-up immigration policies.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Advocates say Gonzalez’s abuser tipped off authorities about her Feb. 9 court hearing on a requested protective order. Gonzalez was taken into custody by a task force composed of Border Patrol agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who surrounded the exits of the courthouse until she was detained.</p>
<p>In a statement Friday, Customs and Border Protection spokesman Douglas Mosier said the case has been referred to the Office of Inspector General.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>12:10 p.m.</p>
<p>The arrest by federal authorities in El Paso of a transgender woman who was seeking protection from an abusive boyfriend has led to questions about what lengths authorities will go to apprehend people under newly stepped-up immigration policies.</p>
<p>Advocates say Irvin Gonzalez’s abuser tipped off authorities about her court hearing, resulting in her Feb. 9 arrest by a task force composed of Border Patrol agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who surrounded the exits of the courthouse until she was detained.</p>
<p>Her federal public defender on Wednesday filed a petition for her immediate release, saying in court documents that a Border Patrol agent perjured himself when he wrote in an affidavit that Gonzalez was arrested outside the building when surveillance shows agents conducting the arrest inside.</p>
<p>Gonzalez, 33, is transgender and began transitioning two years ago, according to one of her attorneys, Melissa Untereker. Gonzalez is distraught and suffering from the side effects of stopping her hormone therapy, which she hasn’t been able to get in jail, she said.</p>
<p>Gonzalez is in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service while she faces a federal charge of illegal re-entry into the United States.</p> | The Latest: Border Patrol wants probe of woman’s detention | false | https://abqjournal.com/957017/the-latest-border-patrol-wants-probe-of-womans-detention.html | 2017-02-24 | 2least
| The Latest: Border Patrol wants probe of woman’s detention
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>5:10 p.m.</p>
<p>The Border Patrol has asked for an internal investigation of the circumstances leading up to the arrest of a transgender woman in an El Paso courthouse.</p>
<p>Irvin Gonzalez was as she was seeking court-ordered protection from an abusive boyfriend. The arrest has led to questions about what lengths authorities will go to apprehend people under newly stepped-up immigration policies.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Advocates say Gonzalez’s abuser tipped off authorities about her Feb. 9 court hearing on a requested protective order. Gonzalez was taken into custody by a task force composed of Border Patrol agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who surrounded the exits of the courthouse until she was detained.</p>
<p>In a statement Friday, Customs and Border Protection spokesman Douglas Mosier said the case has been referred to the Office of Inspector General.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>12:10 p.m.</p>
<p>The arrest by federal authorities in El Paso of a transgender woman who was seeking protection from an abusive boyfriend has led to questions about what lengths authorities will go to apprehend people under newly stepped-up immigration policies.</p>
<p>Advocates say Irvin Gonzalez’s abuser tipped off authorities about her court hearing, resulting in her Feb. 9 arrest by a task force composed of Border Patrol agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who surrounded the exits of the courthouse until she was detained.</p>
<p>Her federal public defender on Wednesday filed a petition for her immediate release, saying in court documents that a Border Patrol agent perjured himself when he wrote in an affidavit that Gonzalez was arrested outside the building when surveillance shows agents conducting the arrest inside.</p>
<p>Gonzalez, 33, is transgender and began transitioning two years ago, according to one of her attorneys, Melissa Untereker. Gonzalez is distraught and suffering from the side effects of stopping her hormone therapy, which she hasn’t been able to get in jail, she said.</p>
<p>Gonzalez is in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service while she faces a federal charge of illegal re-entry into the United States.</p> | 877 |
<p>The good news for embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich in this report is that a Chicago artist is using the governor's likeness as inspiration for his latest painting. The bad news: "Hot Rod" is depicted handcuffed, behind bars, and in the altogether - and the painting is called "The Cavity Search."</p>
<p>Chicago Tribune:</p>
<p>A nude portrait of the governor, by artist Bruce Elliott, is nearly complete and will hang on the wall of Elliott's wife's bar, the Old Town Ale House, next to his infamous depiction of a naked Sarah Palin. It is the next installment in what Elliott loosely calls his "nude governor series."</p>
<p>Elliott cites many sources of inspiration for the painting, which shows the governor, who was arrested last week on corruption charges, preparing for a potential first day of incarceration. Among them: the extent of the governor's alleged misdeeds and the artist's desire to respond to criticism from Republicans and women about the Palin portrait by painting a Democrat in the buff.</p>
<p />
<p><a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/arts/chi-talk-ale-artdec19,0,5136319.story" type="external">Read more</a></p> | Blagojevich Immortalized in Nude Painting | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/blagojevich-immortalized-in-nude-painting/ | 2008-12-21 | 4left
| Blagojevich Immortalized in Nude Painting
<p>The good news for embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich in this report is that a Chicago artist is using the governor's likeness as inspiration for his latest painting. The bad news: "Hot Rod" is depicted handcuffed, behind bars, and in the altogether - and the painting is called "The Cavity Search."</p>
<p>Chicago Tribune:</p>
<p>A nude portrait of the governor, by artist Bruce Elliott, is nearly complete and will hang on the wall of Elliott's wife's bar, the Old Town Ale House, next to his infamous depiction of a naked Sarah Palin. It is the next installment in what Elliott loosely calls his "nude governor series."</p>
<p>Elliott cites many sources of inspiration for the painting, which shows the governor, who was arrested last week on corruption charges, preparing for a potential first day of incarceration. Among them: the extent of the governor's alleged misdeeds and the artist's desire to respond to criticism from Republicans and women about the Palin portrait by painting a Democrat in the buff.</p>
<p />
<p><a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/arts/chi-talk-ale-artdec19,0,5136319.story" type="external">Read more</a></p> | 878 |
<p />
<p>President Obama on Sept. 27, 2016, announced he has nominated U.S. Chief of Mission to Cuba Jeffrey DeLaurentis to become the country’s first ambassador to the Communist island in more than 50 years. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba)</p>
<p />
<p>“Jeff’s leadership has been vital throughout the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba,” said Obama in a statement the White House released. “The appointment of an ambassador is a common sense step forward toward a more normal and productive relationship between our two countries.”</p>
<p>DeLaurentis, a career diplomat, began his latest post in Havana in August 2014. Obama announced four months later the U.S. would begin the process of normalizing relations with Cuba that ended in 1961.</p>
<p>DeLaurentis officially became the chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Havana in July 2015 with the official restoration of diplomatic relations between the two countries.</p>
<p>Cuban Foundation for LGBTI Rights President Nelson Gandulla is among the independent Cuban activists who have met with DeLaurentis. The U.S. government granted Orquídea Martínez, the mother of <a href="" type="internal">Alejandro Barrios Martínez,</a> a Cuban national who was among the victims of the June massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., a visa that allowed her to attend her son’s funeral in Florida.</p>
<p>“He has expressed his interest in learning about the problems facing the Cuban LGBTI community,” Gandulla told the Washington Blade on Tuesday. “He has expressed his support for the work that we are doing in Cuba.”</p>
<p>Members of the <a href="" type="internal">Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington</a> and the <a href="" type="internal">Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles</a> met with DeLaurentis in Havana in July 2015 and in March of this year respectively. Evan Wolfson, founder of Freedom to Marry, and Freedom to Work President Tico Almeida sat down with DeLaurentis in May while they were in the Cuban capital to attend events around the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.</p>
<p>“President Obama has made an outstanding choice for U.S. Ambassador to Cuba,” Almeida told the Blade on Tuesday in a statement. “For Cuban Americans like me who travel regularly to visit our family members in Cuba, it’s important to know that we have such a smart and well respected diplomat representing us and America’s interests and values during this historic process of normalizing relations and opening new opportunities for both Americans and Cubans.”</p>
<p />
<p>From left: Freedom to Work President Tico Almeida, U.S. Chief of Mission in Cuba Jeffrey DeLaurentis and Freedom to Marry founder Evan Wolfson at the U.S. Embassy in Havana on May 13, 2016. (Photo courtesy of Tico Almeida/Freedom at Work)</p>
<p />
<p>U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who is of Cuban descent, has previously said he would block any potential ambassador to Cuba that Obama nominated. The Florida Republican reiterated his opposition in a statement his office issued on Tuesday.</p>
<p>“This nomination should go nowhere until the Castro regime makes significant and irreversible progress in the areas of human rights and political freedom for the Cuban people,” said Rubio, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/obama-nominates-ambassador-to-cuba-in-long-shot-move-228810" type="external">according to Politico.</a></p>
<p>U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whose father was born in Cuba, is also a vocal critic of the normalization of relations between the U.S. and the Communist island.</p>
<p>“It’s great to see Republicans like Sen. Jeff Flake and Rep. Tom Emmer praising Mr. DeLaurentis, and it would be shameful for hardliners like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio to continue relitigating old and tired debates by obstructing President Obama’s excellent choice,” Almeida told the Blade. “Rather than wasting time obstructing this nomination, Cruz and Rubio should take their first ever trip to Cuba to meet with Cuban entrepreneurs and citizens who will overwhelmingly tell them it’s long past time to end the failed embargo.”</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Alejandro Barrios Martínez</a> <a href="" type="internal">Barack Obama</a> <a href="" type="internal">bisexual</a> <a href="" type="internal">Cuba</a> <a href="" type="internal">Cuban Foundation for LGBTI Rights</a> <a href="" type="internal">Evan Wolfson</a> <a href="" type="internal">Freedom to Marry</a> <a href="" type="internal">Freedom to Work</a> <a href="" type="internal">gay</a> <a href="" type="internal">Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles</a> <a href="" type="internal">Gay Men's Chorus of Washington</a> <a href="" type="internal">intersex</a> <a href="" type="internal">Jeff Flake</a> <a href="" type="internal">Jeffrey DeLaurentis</a> <a href="" type="internal">lesbian</a> <a href="" type="internal">Marco Rubio</a> <a href="" type="internal">Nelson Gandulla</a> <a href="" type="internal">Orquidea Martínez</a> <a href="" type="internal">Patrick Murphy</a> <a href="" type="internal">Pulse Nightclub</a> <a href="" type="internal">Ted Cruz</a> <a href="" type="internal">Tico Almeida</a> <a href="" type="internal">Tom Emmer</a> <a href="" type="internal">transgender</a></p> | Obama nominates DeLaurentis to become Cuba ambassador | false | http://washingtonblade.com/2016/09/27/obama-nominates-delaurentis-become-cuba-ambassador/ | 3left-center
| Obama nominates DeLaurentis to become Cuba ambassador
<p />
<p>President Obama on Sept. 27, 2016, announced he has nominated U.S. Chief of Mission to Cuba Jeffrey DeLaurentis to become the country’s first ambassador to the Communist island in more than 50 years. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba)</p>
<p />
<p>“Jeff’s leadership has been vital throughout the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba,” said Obama in a statement the White House released. “The appointment of an ambassador is a common sense step forward toward a more normal and productive relationship between our two countries.”</p>
<p>DeLaurentis, a career diplomat, began his latest post in Havana in August 2014. Obama announced four months later the U.S. would begin the process of normalizing relations with Cuba that ended in 1961.</p>
<p>DeLaurentis officially became the chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Havana in July 2015 with the official restoration of diplomatic relations between the two countries.</p>
<p>Cuban Foundation for LGBTI Rights President Nelson Gandulla is among the independent Cuban activists who have met with DeLaurentis. The U.S. government granted Orquídea Martínez, the mother of <a href="" type="internal">Alejandro Barrios Martínez,</a> a Cuban national who was among the victims of the June massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., a visa that allowed her to attend her son’s funeral in Florida.</p>
<p>“He has expressed his interest in learning about the problems facing the Cuban LGBTI community,” Gandulla told the Washington Blade on Tuesday. “He has expressed his support for the work that we are doing in Cuba.”</p>
<p>Members of the <a href="" type="internal">Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington</a> and the <a href="" type="internal">Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles</a> met with DeLaurentis in Havana in July 2015 and in March of this year respectively. Evan Wolfson, founder of Freedom to Marry, and Freedom to Work President Tico Almeida sat down with DeLaurentis in May while they were in the Cuban capital to attend events around the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.</p>
<p>“President Obama has made an outstanding choice for U.S. Ambassador to Cuba,” Almeida told the Blade on Tuesday in a statement. “For Cuban Americans like me who travel regularly to visit our family members in Cuba, it’s important to know that we have such a smart and well respected diplomat representing us and America’s interests and values during this historic process of normalizing relations and opening new opportunities for both Americans and Cubans.”</p>
<p />
<p>From left: Freedom to Work President Tico Almeida, U.S. Chief of Mission in Cuba Jeffrey DeLaurentis and Freedom to Marry founder Evan Wolfson at the U.S. Embassy in Havana on May 13, 2016. (Photo courtesy of Tico Almeida/Freedom at Work)</p>
<p />
<p>U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who is of Cuban descent, has previously said he would block any potential ambassador to Cuba that Obama nominated. The Florida Republican reiterated his opposition in a statement his office issued on Tuesday.</p>
<p>“This nomination should go nowhere until the Castro regime makes significant and irreversible progress in the areas of human rights and political freedom for the Cuban people,” said Rubio, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/obama-nominates-ambassador-to-cuba-in-long-shot-move-228810" type="external">according to Politico.</a></p>
<p>U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whose father was born in Cuba, is also a vocal critic of the normalization of relations between the U.S. and the Communist island.</p>
<p>“It’s great to see Republicans like Sen. Jeff Flake and Rep. Tom Emmer praising Mr. DeLaurentis, and it would be shameful for hardliners like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio to continue relitigating old and tired debates by obstructing President Obama’s excellent choice,” Almeida told the Blade. “Rather than wasting time obstructing this nomination, Cruz and Rubio should take their first ever trip to Cuba to meet with Cuban entrepreneurs and citizens who will overwhelmingly tell them it’s long past time to end the failed embargo.”</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Alejandro Barrios Martínez</a> <a href="" type="internal">Barack Obama</a> <a href="" type="internal">bisexual</a> <a href="" type="internal">Cuba</a> <a href="" type="internal">Cuban Foundation for LGBTI Rights</a> <a href="" type="internal">Evan Wolfson</a> <a href="" type="internal">Freedom to Marry</a> <a href="" type="internal">Freedom to Work</a> <a href="" type="internal">gay</a> <a href="" type="internal">Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles</a> <a href="" type="internal">Gay Men's Chorus of Washington</a> <a href="" type="internal">intersex</a> <a href="" type="internal">Jeff Flake</a> <a href="" type="internal">Jeffrey DeLaurentis</a> <a href="" type="internal">lesbian</a> <a href="" type="internal">Marco Rubio</a> <a href="" type="internal">Nelson Gandulla</a> <a href="" type="internal">Orquidea Martínez</a> <a href="" type="internal">Patrick Murphy</a> <a href="" type="internal">Pulse Nightclub</a> <a href="" type="internal">Ted Cruz</a> <a href="" type="internal">Tico Almeida</a> <a href="" type="internal">Tom Emmer</a> <a href="" type="internal">transgender</a></p> | 879 |
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<p />
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<p>During Tuesday’s Democratic presidential candidate town hall at the University of South Carolina School of Law, CNN’s Chris Cuomo pressed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s on her continued refusal to release transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs.</p>
<p>“Will you agree to release these transcripts? They have become an issue,” Cuomo asked.</p>
<p>“Sure, if everybody does it, and that includes the Republicans, because we know they have made a lot of speeches,” Clinton said, before pivoting to a defense of her record on Wall Street regulation.&#160;</p>
<p>Cuomo pressed again: “All the more reason to remove this issue. You know not everybody is not going to bring up their transcripts.”</p>
<p>“Why is there one standard for me and not for everybody else, Chris?” Clinton responded, to sustained applause.</p>
<p>A few minutes after the exchange, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign took a shot at Clinton based on her answer:</p>
<p /> | At CNN Town Hall, Clinton Again Refuses to Release Goldman Sachs Transcripts | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2016/02/hillary-clinton-again-refuses-release-goldman-sachs-transcripts/ | 2016-02-24 | 4left
| At CNN Town Hall, Clinton Again Refuses to Release Goldman Sachs Transcripts
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>During Tuesday’s Democratic presidential candidate town hall at the University of South Carolina School of Law, CNN’s Chris Cuomo pressed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s on her continued refusal to release transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs.</p>
<p>“Will you agree to release these transcripts? They have become an issue,” Cuomo asked.</p>
<p>“Sure, if everybody does it, and that includes the Republicans, because we know they have made a lot of speeches,” Clinton said, before pivoting to a defense of her record on Wall Street regulation.&#160;</p>
<p>Cuomo pressed again: “All the more reason to remove this issue. You know not everybody is not going to bring up their transcripts.”</p>
<p>“Why is there one standard for me and not for everybody else, Chris?” Clinton responded, to sustained applause.</p>
<p>A few minutes after the exchange, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign took a shot at Clinton based on her answer:</p>
<p /> | 880 |
<p>by Scott Keeter, Director of Survey Research, Pew Research Center</p>
<p>Pollsters are continuing to monitor changes in telephone use by the U.S. public, since most surveys are still conducted using only landline telephones. Growing numbers of Americans are reachable only by cell phone, and an even larger number who have both a landline and a cell phone may be “functionally cell-only” because of their phone use habits. The latest Pew Research Center national survey, conducted June 18-29 with a sample of 2,004 adults including 503 on a cell phone, finds that the overall estimate of voter presidential preference is modestly affected by whether or not the cell phone respondents are included. Barack Obama holds a 48% to 40% lead in the sample that includes cell phones, and a 46% to 41% advantage in the landline sample. Estimates of congressional vote are the same in the landline and combined samples.</p>
<p>Other recent comparisons between landline samples and combined landline and cell samples have found little or no difference in overall results. In a <a href="http://people-press.org/report/391/the-impact-of-cell-onlys-on-public-opinion-polling" type="external">Pew primary election poll in December 2007</a>, Hillary Clinton held a 20-point lead over Obama in the combined sample and a 17-point lead in the landline sample. In a <a href="/pubs/80/cell-only-voters-not-very-different" type="external">congressional election poll in October 2006</a> there was no difference in voter preferences between the two samples. Despite the fact that cell-only respondents are often very different from those reached by landline, the relatively small impact from including cell phone samples is a consequence of the statistical weighting applied to surveys as a standard practice among professional pollsters.</p>
<p>The number of Americans who have a cell phone but no landline phone has continued to grow, reaching a total of 14.5% of all adults during the last six months of 2007, according to <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless200805.htm" type="external">U.S. government estimates</a>. In addition, 22.3% of all adults live in households with both landline and cell phones but say that they receive all or almost all calls on their cell phones.</p>
<p>The cell-only and cell-mostly respondents in the Pew poll are different demographically from others. Compared with all respondents reached on a landline, both groups are significantly younger, more likely to be male, and less likely to be white. But the cell-only and cell-mostly also are different from one another on many characteristics. Compared with the cell-only, the cell-mostly group is more affluent, better educated, and more likely to be married, to have children, and to own a home.</p>
<p>In the current poll, cell-only respondents are significantly more likely than either the landline respondents or the cell-mostly respondents to support Barack Obama and Democratic candidates for Congress this fall. They also are substantially less likely to be registered to vote and – among registered voters – somewhat less likely to say they are absolutely certain they will vote. Despite their demographic differences with the landline respondents, the cell-mostly group is not significantly different from the landline respondents politically.</p>
<p>Yet as Pew has found in the past, when data from landline and cell phone samples are combined and weighted to match the U.S. population on key demographic measures, the results are similar to those from the landline survey alone. Among registered voters in the combined cell and landline sample, support for Barack Obama is two percentage points higher than in the landline sample alone (48% vs. 46%); support for McCain is one point lower (40% vs. 41%). Narrowing the analysis to voters who are certain about their vote choice, there is almost no difference between the landline and combined samples: Obama has a 38%-28% advantage in the combined sample, while the margin is 38%-30% in the landline sample.</p>
<p>On two other key political measures, the pattern is similar. Voter intentions in congressional races are identical in both (52% Democratic, 37% Republican), and the balance of party affiliation among registered voters is changed two points by adding in the cell phone respondents (53% Democratic, 40% Republican among the landline sample vs. 52%-41% among the combined sample).</p>
<p>The more serious challenge to survey research posed by cell phones is the declining absolute numbers of certain types of respondents, most notably the young. In recent Pew Research Center surveys, only about 10% of respondents in landline samples are under age 30, which is roughly half of what it should be according to the U.S. Census. Young voters reached on landlines share many of the characteristics of the cell-only group, especially in terms of political views. That is why statistical weighting of the landline samples helps to correct for the absence of the cell-only. But the shortfall of young respondents in absolute numbers means that pollsters are limited in their ability to analyze differences within this age group.</p>
<p>The Pew Research Center will continue to track the cell phone issue throughout the 2008 campaign, periodically polling cell phone as well as landline samples to gauge the impact of including or excluding cell phone respondents.</p>
<p>Results for this survey are based on telephone interviews conducted under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International among a nationwide sample of 2,004 adults, 18 years of age or older, including an oversample of respondents ages 18-29, from June 18-29, 2008 (1,501 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 503 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 162 who had no landline telephone). Both the landline and cell phone samples were provided by Survey Sampling International.</p>
<p>The combined landline and cell phone data were weighted using demographic weighting parameters derived from the March 2007 Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, along with an estimate of current patterns of telephone status in the U.S. derived from the 2007 National Health Interview Survey, using an iterative technique that simultaneously balances the distributions of all weighting parameters. The weighting procedure also accounted for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones had a greater probability of being included in the sample.</p> | Cell Phones and the 2008 Vote: An Update | false | http://pewresearch.org/2008/07/17/cell-phones-and-the-2008-vote-an-update/ | 2008-07-17 | 2least
| Cell Phones and the 2008 Vote: An Update
<p>by Scott Keeter, Director of Survey Research, Pew Research Center</p>
<p>Pollsters are continuing to monitor changes in telephone use by the U.S. public, since most surveys are still conducted using only landline telephones. Growing numbers of Americans are reachable only by cell phone, and an even larger number who have both a landline and a cell phone may be “functionally cell-only” because of their phone use habits. The latest Pew Research Center national survey, conducted June 18-29 with a sample of 2,004 adults including 503 on a cell phone, finds that the overall estimate of voter presidential preference is modestly affected by whether or not the cell phone respondents are included. Barack Obama holds a 48% to 40% lead in the sample that includes cell phones, and a 46% to 41% advantage in the landline sample. Estimates of congressional vote are the same in the landline and combined samples.</p>
<p>Other recent comparisons between landline samples and combined landline and cell samples have found little or no difference in overall results. In a <a href="http://people-press.org/report/391/the-impact-of-cell-onlys-on-public-opinion-polling" type="external">Pew primary election poll in December 2007</a>, Hillary Clinton held a 20-point lead over Obama in the combined sample and a 17-point lead in the landline sample. In a <a href="/pubs/80/cell-only-voters-not-very-different" type="external">congressional election poll in October 2006</a> there was no difference in voter preferences between the two samples. Despite the fact that cell-only respondents are often very different from those reached by landline, the relatively small impact from including cell phone samples is a consequence of the statistical weighting applied to surveys as a standard practice among professional pollsters.</p>
<p>The number of Americans who have a cell phone but no landline phone has continued to grow, reaching a total of 14.5% of all adults during the last six months of 2007, according to <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless200805.htm" type="external">U.S. government estimates</a>. In addition, 22.3% of all adults live in households with both landline and cell phones but say that they receive all or almost all calls on their cell phones.</p>
<p>The cell-only and cell-mostly respondents in the Pew poll are different demographically from others. Compared with all respondents reached on a landline, both groups are significantly younger, more likely to be male, and less likely to be white. But the cell-only and cell-mostly also are different from one another on many characteristics. Compared with the cell-only, the cell-mostly group is more affluent, better educated, and more likely to be married, to have children, and to own a home.</p>
<p>In the current poll, cell-only respondents are significantly more likely than either the landline respondents or the cell-mostly respondents to support Barack Obama and Democratic candidates for Congress this fall. They also are substantially less likely to be registered to vote and – among registered voters – somewhat less likely to say they are absolutely certain they will vote. Despite their demographic differences with the landline respondents, the cell-mostly group is not significantly different from the landline respondents politically.</p>
<p>Yet as Pew has found in the past, when data from landline and cell phone samples are combined and weighted to match the U.S. population on key demographic measures, the results are similar to those from the landline survey alone. Among registered voters in the combined cell and landline sample, support for Barack Obama is two percentage points higher than in the landline sample alone (48% vs. 46%); support for McCain is one point lower (40% vs. 41%). Narrowing the analysis to voters who are certain about their vote choice, there is almost no difference between the landline and combined samples: Obama has a 38%-28% advantage in the combined sample, while the margin is 38%-30% in the landline sample.</p>
<p>On two other key political measures, the pattern is similar. Voter intentions in congressional races are identical in both (52% Democratic, 37% Republican), and the balance of party affiliation among registered voters is changed two points by adding in the cell phone respondents (53% Democratic, 40% Republican among the landline sample vs. 52%-41% among the combined sample).</p>
<p>The more serious challenge to survey research posed by cell phones is the declining absolute numbers of certain types of respondents, most notably the young. In recent Pew Research Center surveys, only about 10% of respondents in landline samples are under age 30, which is roughly half of what it should be according to the U.S. Census. Young voters reached on landlines share many of the characteristics of the cell-only group, especially in terms of political views. That is why statistical weighting of the landline samples helps to correct for the absence of the cell-only. But the shortfall of young respondents in absolute numbers means that pollsters are limited in their ability to analyze differences within this age group.</p>
<p>The Pew Research Center will continue to track the cell phone issue throughout the 2008 campaign, periodically polling cell phone as well as landline samples to gauge the impact of including or excluding cell phone respondents.</p>
<p>Results for this survey are based on telephone interviews conducted under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International among a nationwide sample of 2,004 adults, 18 years of age or older, including an oversample of respondents ages 18-29, from June 18-29, 2008 (1,501 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 503 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 162 who had no landline telephone). Both the landline and cell phone samples were provided by Survey Sampling International.</p>
<p>The combined landline and cell phone data were weighted using demographic weighting parameters derived from the March 2007 Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, along with an estimate of current patterns of telephone status in the U.S. derived from the 2007 National Health Interview Survey, using an iterative technique that simultaneously balances the distributions of all weighting parameters. The weighting procedure also accounted for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones had a greater probability of being included in the sample.</p> | 881 |
<p>Don’t Forget Those Inspired by bin Laden Robert Fisk writes in the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-was-he-betrayed-of-course-pakistan-knew-bin-ladens-hiding-place-all-along-2278028.html" type="external">Independent</a> that bin Laden’s goal was to destroy the pro-Western regimes in the Arab world and create an Islamic Caliphate. But over the past few months, Mideast dictatorships have fallen as Arab Muslims rose up in the name of freedom and democracy. As founder of al Qaeda, bin Laden voiced the opinions of many Arabs about American policies, though many of them found his actions extreme. But now, they can express themselves—making bin Laden superfluous. If there are going to be more attacks, they can be carried out without bin Laden; they may even be carried out by groups with no direct links to al Qaeda. Bin Laden’s own relations with the Muslim world were strange: Fisk says he initially feared the Taliban, hated Shia Muslims, and thought dictators were infidels. He was almost certainly betrayed—Pakistan must have known where he was hiding all along.</p>
<p>Gallery: <a href="/content/dailybeast/galleries/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-front-pages-around-the-world.html" type="external">The World Reacts to bin Laden’s Death</a></p>
<p>The Mythos of Obama and Osama</p>
<p>Larbi Sadiki argues on <a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/05/201152121358887979.html" type="external">Al Jazeera</a> that there are similarities between Obama and Osama. They are both in love with a set of ideals or dreams that they sought to bring to life. They are both iconic, and their iconic statuses conjure feelings from both ends of the emotional spectrum. Both have called for violence and death in the name of their ideals. Now as Americans celebrate the death of Osama Bin Laden, they should really be contemplating the consequences of the governments they elect to occupy the White House, and the non-American lives they are guilty, directly or indirectly, of taking. At the same time, Muslims can contemplate what new peaceful voices can become the new representatives of Islam, and a new U.S.-Muslim relationship can be forged.</p>
<p>Democrats’ Wimp Stereotype Is Over</p>
<p>• <a href="" type="internal">The Daily Beast's Complete Osama bin Laden Coverage</a>Peter Beinart argues in <a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2011/05/03/osama-bin-laden-killing-erases-democrats-and-obamas-weakness-stereotype.html" type="external">The Daily Beast</a> that the bin Laden killing has the potential to fundamentally alter the Democratic Party’s reputation on national security and “rewrites the narrative of Democratic weakness that Republicans have labored decades to build.” It plainly shows that Democrats are willing to use force. Though Democrats have certainly used force in the past, as with Bill Clinton’s mission in Kosovo and Bosnia, “barely anyone remembers those missions.” Beinart highlights the fact that back in 2001, George W. Bush sent only Afghan troops into Tora Bora—and Bin Laden escaped, whereas Obama sent a force of only Americans, whoc succeeded. Bin Laden’s killing also debunks the claim that Democrats rely too heavily on international institutions and are slaves to international law. This was already proven false—Clinton’s war in Kosovo lacked U.N. approval. Another claim that bin Laden’s killing will shred is that Democrats do not get along with the military. Beinart says Obama “is now fused in the public imagination with the most successful American mission since Inchon.” According to Beinart, for these reasons, Obama has finally liberated the Democrats from decades of unfair abuse.</p>
<p>Death of a “Moral Monster”</p>
<p>In Gawker, <a href="http://gawker.com/#!5797732/sometimes-a-little-bloodlust-is-in-order" type="external">John Cook</a> says Americans should not be ashamed for rejoicing and celebrating upon hearing of the demise of Osama bin Laden. While this celebrating has come under criticism by many columnists, Cook says it is entirely appropriate behavior. He says, “Moral clarity is a rare gift…Osama Bin Laden is a moral monster of the highest order, with gallons of blood on his hands, and he earned his fate in spades.”</p>
<p>Deadly, Two-Faced Pakistan</p>
<p><a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2011/05/02/salman-rushdie-pakistans-deadly-game.html" type="external">Salman Rushdie</a> complains that it is inconceivable that Pakistan did not know Osama bin Laden was hiding in a mansion in Abbottabad. He was almost hiding in plain sight, 800 yards from the military academy, in a large house with no Internet or telephone. It is very unlikely that no Pakistani authorities knew he was there. Rushdie argues that this fits into a general pattern of Pakistan’s deceptions and that Pakistanis have been playing a double game in the fight against terrorism. Rushdie writes, “perhaps it is time to declare it [Pakistan] a terrorist state and expel it from the comity of nations.”</p>
<p>Not Quite a Triumph</p>
<p>Ross Douthat argued in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/opinion/02douthat.html?ref=rossdouthat" type="external">The New York Times</a> that we overreacted in our fears after 9/11, “and what seemed like the horrifying opening offensive in a new and terrifying war stands instead as an isolated case.” The 10 years that have elapsed since then without any significant terrorist attacks have shown that we did not need to fear Osama bin Laden, and al Qaeda were not the force that we thought they were. So, while the death of Osama bin Laden is “a triumph for the United States of America…it is not quite the triumph it would have been if bin Laden had been captured a decade ago, because those 10 years have taught us that we didn’t need to fear him and his rabble as much as we thought wet did.”</p>
<p>Start and finish your day with the top stories from The Daily Beast.</p>
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<p>Don’t Get Cocky, America</p>
<p>Daveed Garterstein-Ross says that while the killing of Osama bin Laden is a blow to al Qaeda, the organization still poses a significant threat. Bin Laden’s experience fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan taught him the importance of economy; he watched the Soviet Union continue to fight until it ran out of money, and then he watched it collapse soon after. He thought these were completely linked. In 2004, he remarked that his organization was doing the same to the U.S, saying “continuing this policy is bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” In 2010, after a plot to put ink cartridges on planes, a Qaeda publication boasted that even though the plot did not kill anyone, it was still a success, because it meant “billions of dollars in new security measures” for America.” Garterstein-Ross argues that had U.S. officials understood this goal of bleeding America to collapse, they might have been more resistant to declaring a victory in Afghanistan and moving ahead with the invasion of Iraq. Garterstein-Ross warns of the dangers of similarly declaring victory in the <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/02/dont_get_cocky_america?page=0,0gm" type="external">war on terror</a>.</p>
<p>The New War to End All Wars?</p>
<p>Is the death of bin Laden a meaningless milestone in a needless war? <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-hochschild-war-20110503,0,5916760.story" type="external">Adam Hochschild</a>, author of To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, examines the similarities between the Iraq and Afghan wars and World War I. While the Iraq War has some of the most obvious comparisons—the flimsy excuses for war, the mistaken belief in quick victory—Hochschild writes that there are some important similarities between the war to end all wars and the Afghan war, too. While Hochschild does not deny the U.S.’s justification to enter Afghanistan in 2001, there is still the undeniable fact that many more Afghan civilians have died since the invasion, he argues. “Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today’s wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow as needless loss and folly as those millions of men who lie in the vast military cemeteries that spread along the old front line in France and Belgium—and tens of millions of Americans will feel a similar revulsion for the politicians and generals who were so spendthrift with other’s lives,” Hochschild writes.</p>
<p>How to Break the al Qaeda Franchise</p>
<p>Now that bin Laden is dead, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c2cc1372-74ee-11e0-a4b7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1LJ8LL6jy" type="external">Ahmed Rashid</a> writes in the Financial Times that Muslim leaders need to seize this opportunity to show once and for all it is possible to live freely without the burden of extremism. With bin Laden dead, there is no more symbol of extremism in the Muslim world—but Muslims and the West must take care not to let this moment slip by, and allow other extremists to take bin Laden’s place. “This is a watershed moment,” Rashid writes. “The question is can the West and the Muslim world grasp it?”</p>
<p>Bin Laden Was Irrelevant Even Before His Death</p>
<p>It was a question many wondered before bin Laden’s death: Given the turmoil fueled by democracy movements in the Arab World, had he become irrelevant? <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704436004576299110143040714.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop" type="external">Fouad Ajami</a> writes that American power had held steady in the Islamic world and helped foster the so-called Arab Spring democracy movements. “It was bin Laden’s deserved fate to be struck down when an entirely different Arab world was struggling to be born,” Ajami writes. “The Arab Spring is a repudiation of everything Osama bin Laden preached and stood for.” Not only had bin Laden’s message fallen on deaf ears in recent years, but his ignoble demise in a mansion in the suburbs—not in the caves of a martyr—just proved how much bin Laden had outlived his time and usefulness.</p>
<p>Was Killing bin Laden Legal?</p>
<p>Legal analyst <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/05/killing-osama-was-it-legal.html" type="external">Jeffrey Toobin</a> tackles this one in the New Yorker, writing that despite the executive order against political assassination, pretty much every president of the time has had a bounty out on bin Laden. Toobin notes that “no one is shedding any tears about bin Laden’s death,” but that his death did ignore the political assassination ban. “It is, to put it mildly, an easy power to abuse … but the number of people for whom that is true is small.” Bin Laden Was “Enormously Successful”</p>
<p>Given bin Laden’s death, and the fractured terrorist network he left behind, does it make sense to say he was “enormously successful”? <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/osama-bin-laden-didnt-win-but-he-was-enormously-successful/2011/05/02/AFexZjbF_story.html" type="external">Ezra Klein</a> writes that the trillions the U.S. has spent on the overseas wars and national security have severely hurt the U.S. economy—part of bin Laden’s plan for the America. Although Klein concedes that it’s inaccurate to say bin Laden cost the U.S. all that money—after all, it was the U.S.’s decision to go into Iraq and spend so much on homeland security—but at the same time, bin Laden was nearly able to provoke the country into bankrupting itself. “It’s a smart play against a superpower,” Klein writes, noting thatthe U.S. can learn from its mistakes.</p> | Osama bin Laden’s Death: The Pundits Weigh In With Opinions | true | https://thedailybeast.com/osama-bin-ladens-death-the-pundits-weigh-in-with-opinions | 2018-10-07 | 4left
| Osama bin Laden’s Death: The Pundits Weigh In With Opinions
<p>Don’t Forget Those Inspired by bin Laden Robert Fisk writes in the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-was-he-betrayed-of-course-pakistan-knew-bin-ladens-hiding-place-all-along-2278028.html" type="external">Independent</a> that bin Laden’s goal was to destroy the pro-Western regimes in the Arab world and create an Islamic Caliphate. But over the past few months, Mideast dictatorships have fallen as Arab Muslims rose up in the name of freedom and democracy. As founder of al Qaeda, bin Laden voiced the opinions of many Arabs about American policies, though many of them found his actions extreme. But now, they can express themselves—making bin Laden superfluous. If there are going to be more attacks, they can be carried out without bin Laden; they may even be carried out by groups with no direct links to al Qaeda. Bin Laden’s own relations with the Muslim world were strange: Fisk says he initially feared the Taliban, hated Shia Muslims, and thought dictators were infidels. He was almost certainly betrayed—Pakistan must have known where he was hiding all along.</p>
<p>Gallery: <a href="/content/dailybeast/galleries/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-front-pages-around-the-world.html" type="external">The World Reacts to bin Laden’s Death</a></p>
<p>The Mythos of Obama and Osama</p>
<p>Larbi Sadiki argues on <a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/05/201152121358887979.html" type="external">Al Jazeera</a> that there are similarities between Obama and Osama. They are both in love with a set of ideals or dreams that they sought to bring to life. They are both iconic, and their iconic statuses conjure feelings from both ends of the emotional spectrum. Both have called for violence and death in the name of their ideals. Now as Americans celebrate the death of Osama Bin Laden, they should really be contemplating the consequences of the governments they elect to occupy the White House, and the non-American lives they are guilty, directly or indirectly, of taking. At the same time, Muslims can contemplate what new peaceful voices can become the new representatives of Islam, and a new U.S.-Muslim relationship can be forged.</p>
<p>Democrats’ Wimp Stereotype Is Over</p>
<p>• <a href="" type="internal">The Daily Beast's Complete Osama bin Laden Coverage</a>Peter Beinart argues in <a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2011/05/03/osama-bin-laden-killing-erases-democrats-and-obamas-weakness-stereotype.html" type="external">The Daily Beast</a> that the bin Laden killing has the potential to fundamentally alter the Democratic Party’s reputation on national security and “rewrites the narrative of Democratic weakness that Republicans have labored decades to build.” It plainly shows that Democrats are willing to use force. Though Democrats have certainly used force in the past, as with Bill Clinton’s mission in Kosovo and Bosnia, “barely anyone remembers those missions.” Beinart highlights the fact that back in 2001, George W. Bush sent only Afghan troops into Tora Bora—and Bin Laden escaped, whereas Obama sent a force of only Americans, whoc succeeded. Bin Laden’s killing also debunks the claim that Democrats rely too heavily on international institutions and are slaves to international law. This was already proven false—Clinton’s war in Kosovo lacked U.N. approval. Another claim that bin Laden’s killing will shred is that Democrats do not get along with the military. Beinart says Obama “is now fused in the public imagination with the most successful American mission since Inchon.” According to Beinart, for these reasons, Obama has finally liberated the Democrats from decades of unfair abuse.</p>
<p>Death of a “Moral Monster”</p>
<p>In Gawker, <a href="http://gawker.com/#!5797732/sometimes-a-little-bloodlust-is-in-order" type="external">John Cook</a> says Americans should not be ashamed for rejoicing and celebrating upon hearing of the demise of Osama bin Laden. While this celebrating has come under criticism by many columnists, Cook says it is entirely appropriate behavior. He says, “Moral clarity is a rare gift…Osama Bin Laden is a moral monster of the highest order, with gallons of blood on his hands, and he earned his fate in spades.”</p>
<p>Deadly, Two-Faced Pakistan</p>
<p><a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2011/05/02/salman-rushdie-pakistans-deadly-game.html" type="external">Salman Rushdie</a> complains that it is inconceivable that Pakistan did not know Osama bin Laden was hiding in a mansion in Abbottabad. He was almost hiding in plain sight, 800 yards from the military academy, in a large house with no Internet or telephone. It is very unlikely that no Pakistani authorities knew he was there. Rushdie argues that this fits into a general pattern of Pakistan’s deceptions and that Pakistanis have been playing a double game in the fight against terrorism. Rushdie writes, “perhaps it is time to declare it [Pakistan] a terrorist state and expel it from the comity of nations.”</p>
<p>Not Quite a Triumph</p>
<p>Ross Douthat argued in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/opinion/02douthat.html?ref=rossdouthat" type="external">The New York Times</a> that we overreacted in our fears after 9/11, “and what seemed like the horrifying opening offensive in a new and terrifying war stands instead as an isolated case.” The 10 years that have elapsed since then without any significant terrorist attacks have shown that we did not need to fear Osama bin Laden, and al Qaeda were not the force that we thought they were. So, while the death of Osama bin Laden is “a triumph for the United States of America…it is not quite the triumph it would have been if bin Laden had been captured a decade ago, because those 10 years have taught us that we didn’t need to fear him and his rabble as much as we thought wet did.”</p>
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<p>Don’t Get Cocky, America</p>
<p>Daveed Garterstein-Ross says that while the killing of Osama bin Laden is a blow to al Qaeda, the organization still poses a significant threat. Bin Laden’s experience fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan taught him the importance of economy; he watched the Soviet Union continue to fight until it ran out of money, and then he watched it collapse soon after. He thought these were completely linked. In 2004, he remarked that his organization was doing the same to the U.S, saying “continuing this policy is bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” In 2010, after a plot to put ink cartridges on planes, a Qaeda publication boasted that even though the plot did not kill anyone, it was still a success, because it meant “billions of dollars in new security measures” for America.” Garterstein-Ross argues that had U.S. officials understood this goal of bleeding America to collapse, they might have been more resistant to declaring a victory in Afghanistan and moving ahead with the invasion of Iraq. Garterstein-Ross warns of the dangers of similarly declaring victory in the <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/02/dont_get_cocky_america?page=0,0gm" type="external">war on terror</a>.</p>
<p>The New War to End All Wars?</p>
<p>Is the death of bin Laden a meaningless milestone in a needless war? <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-hochschild-war-20110503,0,5916760.story" type="external">Adam Hochschild</a>, author of To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, examines the similarities between the Iraq and Afghan wars and World War I. While the Iraq War has some of the most obvious comparisons—the flimsy excuses for war, the mistaken belief in quick victory—Hochschild writes that there are some important similarities between the war to end all wars and the Afghan war, too. While Hochschild does not deny the U.S.’s justification to enter Afghanistan in 2001, there is still the undeniable fact that many more Afghan civilians have died since the invasion, he argues. “Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today’s wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow as needless loss and folly as those millions of men who lie in the vast military cemeteries that spread along the old front line in France and Belgium—and tens of millions of Americans will feel a similar revulsion for the politicians and generals who were so spendthrift with other’s lives,” Hochschild writes.</p>
<p>How to Break the al Qaeda Franchise</p>
<p>Now that bin Laden is dead, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c2cc1372-74ee-11e0-a4b7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1LJ8LL6jy" type="external">Ahmed Rashid</a> writes in the Financial Times that Muslim leaders need to seize this opportunity to show once and for all it is possible to live freely without the burden of extremism. With bin Laden dead, there is no more symbol of extremism in the Muslim world—but Muslims and the West must take care not to let this moment slip by, and allow other extremists to take bin Laden’s place. “This is a watershed moment,” Rashid writes. “The question is can the West and the Muslim world grasp it?”</p>
<p>Bin Laden Was Irrelevant Even Before His Death</p>
<p>It was a question many wondered before bin Laden’s death: Given the turmoil fueled by democracy movements in the Arab World, had he become irrelevant? <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704436004576299110143040714.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop" type="external">Fouad Ajami</a> writes that American power had held steady in the Islamic world and helped foster the so-called Arab Spring democracy movements. “It was bin Laden’s deserved fate to be struck down when an entirely different Arab world was struggling to be born,” Ajami writes. “The Arab Spring is a repudiation of everything Osama bin Laden preached and stood for.” Not only had bin Laden’s message fallen on deaf ears in recent years, but his ignoble demise in a mansion in the suburbs—not in the caves of a martyr—just proved how much bin Laden had outlived his time and usefulness.</p>
<p>Was Killing bin Laden Legal?</p>
<p>Legal analyst <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/05/killing-osama-was-it-legal.html" type="external">Jeffrey Toobin</a> tackles this one in the New Yorker, writing that despite the executive order against political assassination, pretty much every president of the time has had a bounty out on bin Laden. Toobin notes that “no one is shedding any tears about bin Laden’s death,” but that his death did ignore the political assassination ban. “It is, to put it mildly, an easy power to abuse … but the number of people for whom that is true is small.” Bin Laden Was “Enormously Successful”</p>
<p>Given bin Laden’s death, and the fractured terrorist network he left behind, does it make sense to say he was “enormously successful”? <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/osama-bin-laden-didnt-win-but-he-was-enormously-successful/2011/05/02/AFexZjbF_story.html" type="external">Ezra Klein</a> writes that the trillions the U.S. has spent on the overseas wars and national security have severely hurt the U.S. economy—part of bin Laden’s plan for the America. Although Klein concedes that it’s inaccurate to say bin Laden cost the U.S. all that money—after all, it was the U.S.’s decision to go into Iraq and spend so much on homeland security—but at the same time, bin Laden was nearly able to provoke the country into bankrupting itself. “It’s a smart play against a superpower,” Klein writes, noting thatthe U.S. can learn from its mistakes.</p> | 882 |
<p>PUERTO MALDONADO, Peru (Reuters) - Pope Francis issued a ringing defense of the people and the environment of the Amazon on Friday, saying big business and “consumerist greed” could not be allowed to destroy a natural habitat vital for the entire planet.</p> Pope Francis (R) greets members of an indigenous group from the Amazon region, at the Coliseum Madre de Dios, in Puerto Maldonado, Peru. REUTERS/Henry Romero
<p>Francis, who has made the environment and climate change a focus of his nearly five-year-old pontificate, made his appeal while visiting a corner of the Amazon in Peru where pristine rainforest and biodiversity is being blighted by mining and logging, much of it illegal.</p>
<p>“The native Amazonian peoples have probably never been so threatened on their own lands as they are at present,” the pope told a crowd of indigenous people from more than 20 groups including the Harakbut, Esse-ejas, Shipibos, Ashaninkas and Juni Kuin.</p> Related Coverage
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<a href="/article/us-pope-peru-flat/motorists-of-the-world-take-heart-even-popes-get-flat-tires-idUSKBN1F82US" type="external">Motorists of the world take heart: even popes get flat tires</a>
<p>Thousands of representative of the groups from across Peru walked before him, dressed in traditional regional costumes and feather headdresses and speaking in their native languages, as traditional wind instruments sounded mournfully in a small stadium built to look like a hut in the city of Puerto Maldonado.</p>
<p>Francis decried the “pressure being exerted by big business interests” seeking petroleum, gas, lumber, and gold and plundering “supplies for other countries without concern for its inhabitants.”</p>
<p>The pope, whose speech was punctuated by repeated applause and beating of drums, spoke after listening to rainforest residents decry what they called the rape of their land.</p>
<p>“They enter our territories without consulting us and we will suffer a lot when foreigners drill the earth... and destroy our rivers turning them into black waters of death,” Hector Sueyo, an indigenous Harakbut, told the pope forcefully.</p> Members of an indigenous group from the Amazon region carry a statue of Virgin Mary during a meeting at the Coliseo Regional Madre de Dios in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, January 19, 2018. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi
<p>The southeastern region of Peru known as “Madre de Dios,” Spanish for “Mother of God,” has been badly blighted in recent years by unregulated gold mining, with one effect being dangerous levels of mercury in rivers. Illegal loggers and drug traffickers in other parts of the Peruvian Amazon have killed activists and attacked indigenous tribes that shun contact with outsiders.</p>
<p>While more regulated, foreign companies have eagerly eyed the Camisea gas reserves in the neighboring region of Cusco. In northern Peru more than a dozen oil spills from a state-operated pipeline have polluted native lands.</p>
<p>“We cannot use goods meant for all as consumerist greed dictates. Limits have to be set that can help preserve us from all plans for a massive destruction of the habitat that makes us who we are,” the pope said.</p>
<p>On the first papal visit to the Amazon since John Paul II visited the northern Peruvian city of Iquitos in 1985, the Argentine pope said he had heard the “cry of the people.” He promised that he and the Church would offer them “a whole-hearted option for the defense of life, the defense of the earth and the defense of cultures.”</p>
<p>Indigenous chiefs in Peru hope the pope’s visit will persuade the government of President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a former Wall Street banker, to give native communities titles to ancestral land and help preserving it.</p>
<p>“We’re the ones who have been fighting to protect the Amazon the longest,” Julio Cusurichi, the chief of the indigenous federation FENAMAD in Madre de Dios, said in an interview.</p> Slideshow (12 Images) COLONIALISM ‘DISGUISED AS PROGRESS’
<p>Alberto Fernandez, a 44-year-old flower shop owner in Puerto Maldonado, said he hoped the Pope would help contain the social ills that have accompanied the city’s rapid growth.</p>
<p>“There’s a lot of need here ... every day there are more bars and cantinas, more prostitution, more illegal mining ... 30 years ago Puerto wasn’t like this,” Fernandez said. “There were only a couple paved streets, but we lived in peace.”</p>
<p>The pope urged local authorities and bishops to work to defend young people and women from violence and human trafficking and to improve education and preserve local cultures.</p>
<p>“Special care is demanded of us, lest we allow ourselves to be ensnared by ideological forms of colonialism, disguised as progress, that slowly but surely dissipate cultural identities and establish a uniform, single ... and weak way of thinking,” he said after watching traditional Ashaninka and Shipibo dances.</p>
<p>Isolated tribes that shun contact with outsiders were the most vulnerable and must be defended, he said.</p>
<p>Francis, who has also visited neighboring Chile on his trip to South America, bade goodbye to Puerto Maldonado in the Quechua language, and was presented with a native headdress and tapestry.</p>
<p>Writing by Caroline Stauffer; Editing by Frances Kerry</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>DURBAN, South Africa (Reuters) - Supporters of former South African president Jacob Zuma plan to march to the Durban High Court on Friday, where Zuma will face corruption charges related to a decades-old arms deal.</p> Supporters of former South African President Jacob Zuma hold a vigil before his court appearance in Durban, South Africa, April 5, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Hutchings
<p>Zuma plans to legally challenge a decision to prosecute him on 16 charges, including fraud, racketeering, corruption and money laundering, that stem from the $2.5 billion deal.</p> Supporters of former South African President Jacob Zuma hold a vigil before his court appearance in Durban, South Africa, April 5, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Hutchings
<p>The case, which is to be heard in Zuma’s home province of Kwa-Zulu Natal, is a dramatic development on a continent where leaders rarely face their accusers in court.</p>
<p>Religious organizations and pro-Zuma lobbyists held a night vigil on Thursday and planned to march to the court in the morning to protest against what they say is a politically motivated witch hunt.</p>
<p>“We want these cases to finish because we believe the reason why he is being charged is because he’s been pushing for radical economic transformation,” said Thobile Mthembu, 40, unemployed.</p>
<p>Around 100 people wearing T-shirts bearing Zuma’s portrait and the colors of the ruling African National Congress (ANC)sang “leave Zuma alone” at Albert Park in the port city of Durban.</p> Slideshow (4 Images)
<p>“Guilty or not guilty, we have to support him until the end,” said 26-year-old student, Richard Ngobese, draped in an ANC flag.</p>
<p>Police plan to deploy in strength at the Friday march, which is expected to attract more than 2,000 people.</p>
<p>“We are to make sure citizens are safe,” Kwa-Zulu Natal police spokeswoman Thembeka Mbhele said. “I want to appeal to the marchers to make sure they work hand-in-hand with the police. If anyone commits a crime, they will be arrested.”</p>
<p>Zuma was deputy president at the time of the 1990s arms deal, which has cast a shadow over politics in South Africa for years. Schabir Shaikh, his former financial adviser, was found guilty and jailed in 2005 for trying to solicit bribes for Zuma from a French arms company.</p>
<p>Charges were filed against Zuma but then dropped by national prosecutors shortly before he successfully ran for president in 2009.</p>
<p>Since his election nine years ago, his opponents have fought a lengthy legal battle to have the charges reinstated. Zuma countered with his own legal challenges, but prosecutors re-filed the charges after Zuma was forced from power by his own party in February.</p>
<p>Reporting by Nqobile Dludla; writing by Joe Brock and Tanisha Heiberg; editing by Andrew Roche</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States plans to sanction Russian oligarchs this week under a law targeting Moscow for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday, in what could be the most aggressive move so far against Russia’s business elite.</p>
<p>The action, which could affect people close to President Vladimir Putin, reflects Washington’s desire to hold Russia to account for allegedly interfering in the election - which Moscow denies - even as U.S. President Donald Trump holds out hope for good relations with Putin.</p>
<p>Trump has faced fierce criticism for doing too little to punish Russia for the election meddling and other actions, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller is probing whether his campaign colluded with the Russians, an allegation the president denies.</p> Related Coverage
<a href="/article/us-usa-russia-sanctions-kremlin/kremlin-well-wait-to-see-if-u-s-hits-russian-tycoons-with-sanctions-idUSKCN1HC14W" type="external">Kremlin: We'll wait to see if U.S. hits Russian tycoons with sanctions</a>
<p>The sanctions, which two sources said would be announced as early as Thursday, would follow the March 15 U.S. decision to sanction 19 people and five entities, including Russian intelligence services, for cyber attacks stretching back at least two years.</p>
<p>While the steps were the most significant taken against Moscow since Trump took office in January 2017, his decision at the time not to target oligarchs and government officials close to Putin drew criticism from U.S. lawmakers in both parties.</p>
<p>This week’s actions will include sanctions against Russian oligarchs, including some with ties to Putin as well as to the Russian government, according to two U.S. officials briefed on the deliberations.</p>
<p>Four sources said the sanctions would be imposed under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, also known as CAATSA, which was passed by Republicans and Democrats seeking to punish Russia for its 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, involvement in the Syrian civil war and meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.</p>
<p>U.S.-Russian ties have worsened with allegations, which Moscow denies, that Russia was responsible for a March 4 nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in Britain. On March 26, the United States and several European states announced plans to expel more than 100 Russian diplomats in response.</p>
<p>The White House and Treasury declined comment on whether they planned to impose sanctions this week. When asked about the issue, a senior U.S. official said:</p>
<p>“The administration is committed to implementing the CAATSA law as we have said many times. We published an oligarch designation recently and the secretary of the Treasury said further action would be taken. But at this time we don’t have anything specific to announce.”</p> A woman pushes a pram near the Kremlin in Tula, south of Moscow, Russia January 26, 2018. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov
<p>Complying with the law, the Trump administration on Jan. 30 published a list of the heads of Russian state-owned companies and “oligarchs,” including such prominent figures as Alexei Miller, the chief executive of Gazprom, and Igor Sechin, the chief executive of Rosneft.</p>
<p>Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Arshad Mohammed, Lesley Wroughton, Patricia Zengerle and Phil Stewart; Writing By Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Mary Milliken, Alistair Bell and Peter Cooney</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told Chinese President Xi Jinping during talks in Beijing last week that he agreed to return to six-party talks on his nation’s nuclear program and missile tests, the Nikkei newspaper said on Thursday.</p> North Korean leader Kim Jong Un shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, as he paid an unofficial visit to China, in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang March 28, 2018. KCNA/via Reuters
<p>Months of chill between Beijing and Pyongyang appeared to suddenly vanish during Kim’s secretive visit, with China saying that Kim had pledged his commitment to denuclearization.</p>
<p>Quoting multiple sources connected to China and North Korea, the Nikkei said that, according to documents issued after Kim and Xi met, Kim told Xi that he agreed to resuming the six-party talks, which were last held in 2009.</p>
<p>North Korea declared the on-again, off-again talks dead at the time, blaming U.S. aggression. The talks grouped the two Koreas, the United States, Russia, Japan and host China.</p>
<p>The sources said it was also possible that Kim could convey his willingness to resume the talks to U.S. President Donald Trump at a summit set to take place in May, but that it was far from clear if that meant the talks would actually resume.</p>
<p>Chinese officials were not immediately able to comment.</p>
<p>China has traditionally been secretive North Korea’s closest ally, though ties have been frayed by Kim’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and missiles and Beijing’s backing of tough U.N. sanctions in response.</p>
<p>North Korea has said in previous talks that it could consider giving up its nuclear arsenal if the United States removed its troops from South Korea and withdrew its so-called nuclear umbrella of deterrence from South Korea and Japan.</p>
<p>Some analysts have said Trump’s willingness to meet Kim handed North Korea a diplomatic win, as the United States had insisted for years that any such summit be preceded by North Korean steps to denuclearize.</p>
<p>Reporting by Elaine Lies; Editing by Nick Macfie</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>BRASILIA (Reuters) - A Brazilian judge on Thursday ordered former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to turn himself in to police within 24 hours to serve a 12-year sentence for a graft conviction, likely ending the presidential front-runner’s hopes of returning to power.</p>
<p>Lula was convicted last year for taking bribes from an engineering firm in return for help landing contracts with state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA.</p>
<p>Earlier on Thursday, Brazil’s Supreme Court rejected Lula’s plea to remain free until he exhausts all his appeals, in a case he calls a political witch hunt.</p>
<p>The ruling likely ends his political career and blows October’s election wide open.</p>
<p>Technically, Lula could still run. Under Brazilian electoral law, a candidate is forbidden from running for office for eight years after being found guilty of a crime. But some exemptions have been made in the past, and the ultimate decision would be made by the top electoral court if and when Lula officially files to be a candidate.</p>
<p>But that is considered unlikely and Brazilian financial markets rallied on Thursday after the Supreme Court decision, which increased the chances a market-friendly candidate will win the election, according to analysts and political foes.</p>
<p>A defiant Workers Party, founded by Lula, said its supporters would take to the streets to defend his right to run. The party called for a Thursday night rally near Lula’s home.</p>
<p>“Lula continues to be our candidate, because he is innocent, and because he is the leading candidate to become the next president of Brazil,” said Workers Party leader, Senator Gleisi Hoffmann.</p>
<p>Federal Judge Sergio Moro, who has handled the bulk of cases in Brazil’s biggest anti-corruption effort, ordered Lula to turn himself in by late Friday afternoon. In a court document, he wrote that Lula should not be handcuffed and would have a special cell in the southern city of Curitiba.</p> PLAN B
<p>Lula led Brazil in two four-year terms as president, from 2003 to January 2011, years of prosperity that were fueled by a commodity boom. He left office with an approval rating higher than 80 percent.</p>
<p>His endorsement was enough to get his hand-picked successor Dilma Rousseff elected twice. She was impeached and removed from office amid corruption scandals and economic crisis in mid-2016.</p>
<p>Now, his backing for a candidate would not be enough, analysts said, adding that voters will likely abandon his party in droves when they see that its charismatic leader was no longer in the game.</p> Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva inside a car in Sao Paulo, Brazil April 5, 2018. REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker
<p>“The Workers Party will have to move quickly to Plan B, which is former Sao Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad, or even Plan C to back a leftist from another party like former Ceara state governor Ciro Gomes,” said Lucas de Aragao, a political analyst with Arko Advice in Brasilia.</p>
<p>Opinion polls show that Gomes and environmentalist Marina Silva would gain the most from Lula not running in October. Extreme-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who is polling in second place, has largely focused on anti-left rhetoric and may need to find a new line of attack.</p>
<p>Disarray on the left could improve the chances for a centrist such as Geraldo Alckmin, governor of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s richest state, and candidate for the powerful Brazilian Social Democracy Party.</p>
<p>Center-right President Michel Temer is mulling a bid but has record unpopularity in opinion polls after his austerity program aimed at putting Brazil’s overdrawn fiscal accounts in order.</p>
<p>“Lula leaves no political heir and much of his electoral capital cannot be transferred,” said Leonardo Barreto, with the Brasilia-based political risk consultancy Factual. “This can only help candidates who advocate continuing the reforms.”</p> Slideshow (13 Images)
<p>Alckmin lamented the prison order against a former president but added in a Twitter message: “I believe this reflects an important change underway in Brazil: the end of impunity. The law is the same for everyone.”</p>
<p>Some observers fear that putting Lula in jail will turn him into a martyr and keep him in the public eye.</p>
<p>“The prison order against Lula will scramble the electoral process even more by putting him in the spotlight,” said Fitch Ratings director for Brazil, Rafael Guedes.</p>
<p>Reporting by Anthony Boadle; additional reporting by Eduardo Simoes, Brad Brooks and Aluisio Alves; editing by Brad Haynes and Rosalba O'Brien</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | Protect the Amazon from big business and greed, Pope Francis urges Supporters to march in support of South Africa's Zuma at court appearance U.S. plans to sanction Russian oligarchs this week: sources North Korea's Kim told Xi he wanted to resume six-party disarmament talks: Nikkei Brazil judge orders ex-president Lula jailed by Friday | false | https://reuters.com/article/pope-peru/protect-the-amazon-from-big-business-and-greed-pope-francis-urges-idUSL8N1PE4MB | 2018-01-19 | 2least
| Protect the Amazon from big business and greed, Pope Francis urges Supporters to march in support of South Africa's Zuma at court appearance U.S. plans to sanction Russian oligarchs this week: sources North Korea's Kim told Xi he wanted to resume six-party disarmament talks: Nikkei Brazil judge orders ex-president Lula jailed by Friday
<p>PUERTO MALDONADO, Peru (Reuters) - Pope Francis issued a ringing defense of the people and the environment of the Amazon on Friday, saying big business and “consumerist greed” could not be allowed to destroy a natural habitat vital for the entire planet.</p> Pope Francis (R) greets members of an indigenous group from the Amazon region, at the Coliseum Madre de Dios, in Puerto Maldonado, Peru. REUTERS/Henry Romero
<p>Francis, who has made the environment and climate change a focus of his nearly five-year-old pontificate, made his appeal while visiting a corner of the Amazon in Peru where pristine rainforest and biodiversity is being blighted by mining and logging, much of it illegal.</p>
<p>“The native Amazonian peoples have probably never been so threatened on their own lands as they are at present,” the pope told a crowd of indigenous people from more than 20 groups including the Harakbut, Esse-ejas, Shipibos, Ashaninkas and Juni Kuin.</p> Related Coverage
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<p>Thousands of representative of the groups from across Peru walked before him, dressed in traditional regional costumes and feather headdresses and speaking in their native languages, as traditional wind instruments sounded mournfully in a small stadium built to look like a hut in the city of Puerto Maldonado.</p>
<p>Francis decried the “pressure being exerted by big business interests” seeking petroleum, gas, lumber, and gold and plundering “supplies for other countries without concern for its inhabitants.”</p>
<p>The pope, whose speech was punctuated by repeated applause and beating of drums, spoke after listening to rainforest residents decry what they called the rape of their land.</p>
<p>“They enter our territories without consulting us and we will suffer a lot when foreigners drill the earth... and destroy our rivers turning them into black waters of death,” Hector Sueyo, an indigenous Harakbut, told the pope forcefully.</p> Members of an indigenous group from the Amazon region carry a statue of Virgin Mary during a meeting at the Coliseo Regional Madre de Dios in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, January 19, 2018. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi
<p>The southeastern region of Peru known as “Madre de Dios,” Spanish for “Mother of God,” has been badly blighted in recent years by unregulated gold mining, with one effect being dangerous levels of mercury in rivers. Illegal loggers and drug traffickers in other parts of the Peruvian Amazon have killed activists and attacked indigenous tribes that shun contact with outsiders.</p>
<p>While more regulated, foreign companies have eagerly eyed the Camisea gas reserves in the neighboring region of Cusco. In northern Peru more than a dozen oil spills from a state-operated pipeline have polluted native lands.</p>
<p>“We cannot use goods meant for all as consumerist greed dictates. Limits have to be set that can help preserve us from all plans for a massive destruction of the habitat that makes us who we are,” the pope said.</p>
<p>On the first papal visit to the Amazon since John Paul II visited the northern Peruvian city of Iquitos in 1985, the Argentine pope said he had heard the “cry of the people.” He promised that he and the Church would offer them “a whole-hearted option for the defense of life, the defense of the earth and the defense of cultures.”</p>
<p>Indigenous chiefs in Peru hope the pope’s visit will persuade the government of President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a former Wall Street banker, to give native communities titles to ancestral land and help preserving it.</p>
<p>“We’re the ones who have been fighting to protect the Amazon the longest,” Julio Cusurichi, the chief of the indigenous federation FENAMAD in Madre de Dios, said in an interview.</p> Slideshow (12 Images) COLONIALISM ‘DISGUISED AS PROGRESS’
<p>Alberto Fernandez, a 44-year-old flower shop owner in Puerto Maldonado, said he hoped the Pope would help contain the social ills that have accompanied the city’s rapid growth.</p>
<p>“There’s a lot of need here ... every day there are more bars and cantinas, more prostitution, more illegal mining ... 30 years ago Puerto wasn’t like this,” Fernandez said. “There were only a couple paved streets, but we lived in peace.”</p>
<p>The pope urged local authorities and bishops to work to defend young people and women from violence and human trafficking and to improve education and preserve local cultures.</p>
<p>“Special care is demanded of us, lest we allow ourselves to be ensnared by ideological forms of colonialism, disguised as progress, that slowly but surely dissipate cultural identities and establish a uniform, single ... and weak way of thinking,” he said after watching traditional Ashaninka and Shipibo dances.</p>
<p>Isolated tribes that shun contact with outsiders were the most vulnerable and must be defended, he said.</p>
<p>Francis, who has also visited neighboring Chile on his trip to South America, bade goodbye to Puerto Maldonado in the Quechua language, and was presented with a native headdress and tapestry.</p>
<p>Writing by Caroline Stauffer; Editing by Frances Kerry</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>DURBAN, South Africa (Reuters) - Supporters of former South African president Jacob Zuma plan to march to the Durban High Court on Friday, where Zuma will face corruption charges related to a decades-old arms deal.</p> Supporters of former South African President Jacob Zuma hold a vigil before his court appearance in Durban, South Africa, April 5, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Hutchings
<p>Zuma plans to legally challenge a decision to prosecute him on 16 charges, including fraud, racketeering, corruption and money laundering, that stem from the $2.5 billion deal.</p> Supporters of former South African President Jacob Zuma hold a vigil before his court appearance in Durban, South Africa, April 5, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Hutchings
<p>The case, which is to be heard in Zuma’s home province of Kwa-Zulu Natal, is a dramatic development on a continent where leaders rarely face their accusers in court.</p>
<p>Religious organizations and pro-Zuma lobbyists held a night vigil on Thursday and planned to march to the court in the morning to protest against what they say is a politically motivated witch hunt.</p>
<p>“We want these cases to finish because we believe the reason why he is being charged is because he’s been pushing for radical economic transformation,” said Thobile Mthembu, 40, unemployed.</p>
<p>Around 100 people wearing T-shirts bearing Zuma’s portrait and the colors of the ruling African National Congress (ANC)sang “leave Zuma alone” at Albert Park in the port city of Durban.</p> Slideshow (4 Images)
<p>“Guilty or not guilty, we have to support him until the end,” said 26-year-old student, Richard Ngobese, draped in an ANC flag.</p>
<p>Police plan to deploy in strength at the Friday march, which is expected to attract more than 2,000 people.</p>
<p>“We are to make sure citizens are safe,” Kwa-Zulu Natal police spokeswoman Thembeka Mbhele said. “I want to appeal to the marchers to make sure they work hand-in-hand with the police. If anyone commits a crime, they will be arrested.”</p>
<p>Zuma was deputy president at the time of the 1990s arms deal, which has cast a shadow over politics in South Africa for years. Schabir Shaikh, his former financial adviser, was found guilty and jailed in 2005 for trying to solicit bribes for Zuma from a French arms company.</p>
<p>Charges were filed against Zuma but then dropped by national prosecutors shortly before he successfully ran for president in 2009.</p>
<p>Since his election nine years ago, his opponents have fought a lengthy legal battle to have the charges reinstated. Zuma countered with his own legal challenges, but prosecutors re-filed the charges after Zuma was forced from power by his own party in February.</p>
<p>Reporting by Nqobile Dludla; writing by Joe Brock and Tanisha Heiberg; editing by Andrew Roche</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States plans to sanction Russian oligarchs this week under a law targeting Moscow for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday, in what could be the most aggressive move so far against Russia’s business elite.</p>
<p>The action, which could affect people close to President Vladimir Putin, reflects Washington’s desire to hold Russia to account for allegedly interfering in the election - which Moscow denies - even as U.S. President Donald Trump holds out hope for good relations with Putin.</p>
<p>Trump has faced fierce criticism for doing too little to punish Russia for the election meddling and other actions, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller is probing whether his campaign colluded with the Russians, an allegation the president denies.</p> Related Coverage
<a href="/article/us-usa-russia-sanctions-kremlin/kremlin-well-wait-to-see-if-u-s-hits-russian-tycoons-with-sanctions-idUSKCN1HC14W" type="external">Kremlin: We'll wait to see if U.S. hits Russian tycoons with sanctions</a>
<p>The sanctions, which two sources said would be announced as early as Thursday, would follow the March 15 U.S. decision to sanction 19 people and five entities, including Russian intelligence services, for cyber attacks stretching back at least two years.</p>
<p>While the steps were the most significant taken against Moscow since Trump took office in January 2017, his decision at the time not to target oligarchs and government officials close to Putin drew criticism from U.S. lawmakers in both parties.</p>
<p>This week’s actions will include sanctions against Russian oligarchs, including some with ties to Putin as well as to the Russian government, according to two U.S. officials briefed on the deliberations.</p>
<p>Four sources said the sanctions would be imposed under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, also known as CAATSA, which was passed by Republicans and Democrats seeking to punish Russia for its 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, involvement in the Syrian civil war and meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.</p>
<p>U.S.-Russian ties have worsened with allegations, which Moscow denies, that Russia was responsible for a March 4 nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in Britain. On March 26, the United States and several European states announced plans to expel more than 100 Russian diplomats in response.</p>
<p>The White House and Treasury declined comment on whether they planned to impose sanctions this week. When asked about the issue, a senior U.S. official said:</p>
<p>“The administration is committed to implementing the CAATSA law as we have said many times. We published an oligarch designation recently and the secretary of the Treasury said further action would be taken. But at this time we don’t have anything specific to announce.”</p> A woman pushes a pram near the Kremlin in Tula, south of Moscow, Russia January 26, 2018. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov
<p>Complying with the law, the Trump administration on Jan. 30 published a list of the heads of Russian state-owned companies and “oligarchs,” including such prominent figures as Alexei Miller, the chief executive of Gazprom, and Igor Sechin, the chief executive of Rosneft.</p>
<p>Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Arshad Mohammed, Lesley Wroughton, Patricia Zengerle and Phil Stewart; Writing By Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Mary Milliken, Alistair Bell and Peter Cooney</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told Chinese President Xi Jinping during talks in Beijing last week that he agreed to return to six-party talks on his nation’s nuclear program and missile tests, the Nikkei newspaper said on Thursday.</p> North Korean leader Kim Jong Un shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, as he paid an unofficial visit to China, in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang March 28, 2018. KCNA/via Reuters
<p>Months of chill between Beijing and Pyongyang appeared to suddenly vanish during Kim’s secretive visit, with China saying that Kim had pledged his commitment to denuclearization.</p>
<p>Quoting multiple sources connected to China and North Korea, the Nikkei said that, according to documents issued after Kim and Xi met, Kim told Xi that he agreed to resuming the six-party talks, which were last held in 2009.</p>
<p>North Korea declared the on-again, off-again talks dead at the time, blaming U.S. aggression. The talks grouped the two Koreas, the United States, Russia, Japan and host China.</p>
<p>The sources said it was also possible that Kim could convey his willingness to resume the talks to U.S. President Donald Trump at a summit set to take place in May, but that it was far from clear if that meant the talks would actually resume.</p>
<p>Chinese officials were not immediately able to comment.</p>
<p>China has traditionally been secretive North Korea’s closest ally, though ties have been frayed by Kim’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and missiles and Beijing’s backing of tough U.N. sanctions in response.</p>
<p>North Korea has said in previous talks that it could consider giving up its nuclear arsenal if the United States removed its troops from South Korea and withdrew its so-called nuclear umbrella of deterrence from South Korea and Japan.</p>
<p>Some analysts have said Trump’s willingness to meet Kim handed North Korea a diplomatic win, as the United States had insisted for years that any such summit be preceded by North Korean steps to denuclearize.</p>
<p>Reporting by Elaine Lies; Editing by Nick Macfie</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>BRASILIA (Reuters) - A Brazilian judge on Thursday ordered former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to turn himself in to police within 24 hours to serve a 12-year sentence for a graft conviction, likely ending the presidential front-runner’s hopes of returning to power.</p>
<p>Lula was convicted last year for taking bribes from an engineering firm in return for help landing contracts with state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA.</p>
<p>Earlier on Thursday, Brazil’s Supreme Court rejected Lula’s plea to remain free until he exhausts all his appeals, in a case he calls a political witch hunt.</p>
<p>The ruling likely ends his political career and blows October’s election wide open.</p>
<p>Technically, Lula could still run. Under Brazilian electoral law, a candidate is forbidden from running for office for eight years after being found guilty of a crime. But some exemptions have been made in the past, and the ultimate decision would be made by the top electoral court if and when Lula officially files to be a candidate.</p>
<p>But that is considered unlikely and Brazilian financial markets rallied on Thursday after the Supreme Court decision, which increased the chances a market-friendly candidate will win the election, according to analysts and political foes.</p>
<p>A defiant Workers Party, founded by Lula, said its supporters would take to the streets to defend his right to run. The party called for a Thursday night rally near Lula’s home.</p>
<p>“Lula continues to be our candidate, because he is innocent, and because he is the leading candidate to become the next president of Brazil,” said Workers Party leader, Senator Gleisi Hoffmann.</p>
<p>Federal Judge Sergio Moro, who has handled the bulk of cases in Brazil’s biggest anti-corruption effort, ordered Lula to turn himself in by late Friday afternoon. In a court document, he wrote that Lula should not be handcuffed and would have a special cell in the southern city of Curitiba.</p> PLAN B
<p>Lula led Brazil in two four-year terms as president, from 2003 to January 2011, years of prosperity that were fueled by a commodity boom. He left office with an approval rating higher than 80 percent.</p>
<p>His endorsement was enough to get his hand-picked successor Dilma Rousseff elected twice. She was impeached and removed from office amid corruption scandals and economic crisis in mid-2016.</p>
<p>Now, his backing for a candidate would not be enough, analysts said, adding that voters will likely abandon his party in droves when they see that its charismatic leader was no longer in the game.</p> Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva inside a car in Sao Paulo, Brazil April 5, 2018. REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker
<p>“The Workers Party will have to move quickly to Plan B, which is former Sao Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad, or even Plan C to back a leftist from another party like former Ceara state governor Ciro Gomes,” said Lucas de Aragao, a political analyst with Arko Advice in Brasilia.</p>
<p>Opinion polls show that Gomes and environmentalist Marina Silva would gain the most from Lula not running in October. Extreme-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who is polling in second place, has largely focused on anti-left rhetoric and may need to find a new line of attack.</p>
<p>Disarray on the left could improve the chances for a centrist such as Geraldo Alckmin, governor of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s richest state, and candidate for the powerful Brazilian Social Democracy Party.</p>
<p>Center-right President Michel Temer is mulling a bid but has record unpopularity in opinion polls after his austerity program aimed at putting Brazil’s overdrawn fiscal accounts in order.</p>
<p>“Lula leaves no political heir and much of his electoral capital cannot be transferred,” said Leonardo Barreto, with the Brasilia-based political risk consultancy Factual. “This can only help candidates who advocate continuing the reforms.”</p> Slideshow (13 Images)
<p>Alckmin lamented the prison order against a former president but added in a Twitter message: “I believe this reflects an important change underway in Brazil: the end of impunity. The law is the same for everyone.”</p>
<p>Some observers fear that putting Lula in jail will turn him into a martyr and keep him in the public eye.</p>
<p>“The prison order against Lula will scramble the electoral process even more by putting him in the spotlight,” said Fitch Ratings director for Brazil, Rafael Guedes.</p>
<p>Reporting by Anthony Boadle; additional reporting by Eduardo Simoes, Brad Brooks and Aluisio Alves; editing by Brad Haynes and Rosalba O'Brien</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | 883 |
<p>[Editors’ Note: What follows is a transcript of an April 12 debate on Fox News’s Hannity and Colmes show between Rep. Mark Foley and CounterPunch contributor Wayne Madsen over Rep. Cynthia McKinney’s suggestion that the US government knew more about the 9/11 attacks than it had been letting on. One out of four was right. Guess which one?]</p>
<p>Hannity &amp; Colmes</p>
<p>April 12, 2002</p>
<p>COLMES: Joining us tonight is Florida Congressman Mark Foley and Wayne Madsen, an investigative journalist who has worked with Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney for three years.</p>
<p>Now, before I defend Cynthia McKinney’s right to say what she said, Mr. Madsen, would you agree that to suggest that the United States or anybody in this country knew or — in the government had advance knowledge of this is preposterous?</p>
<p>Wayne Madsen, FRIEND OF REP. CYNTHIA MCKINNEY: I don’t think so.</p>
<p>I think what the congresswoman is asking is that, with the worst intelligence failure in the history of the United States, why cannot we have in this country a full independent congressional investigation of who knew what when. How was all this intelligence…</p>
<p>COLMES: I agree there should be.</p>
<p>MADSEN: Yes.</p>
<p>COLMES: But she went further than that. She accused the Bush administration, if not Bush himself, of knowing in advance, because he or his father would benefit because of The Carlyle Group, which we’ll get to in a moment. She accused him of having advance knowledge of this. Do you concur?</p>
<p>MADSEN: Well, you know who else is calling for an investigation in the financial</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>COLMES: But I’m not talking about an investigation. I’m talking about the accusation that the president — forget the investigation for the moment. I want to talk about an accusation that President Bush had advance knowledge. Do you agree with that?</p>
<p>MADSEN: Judicial Watch is asking for the same investigation of</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>COLMES: I didn’t say investigation, sir.</p>
<p>With all due respect, my question had to do with whether you concur that President Bush had advance knowledge of what happened on September 11. Do not use the word investigation, I beg of you, in your answer.</p>
<p>MADSEN: I won’t use it. All I’ll say is, let the facts come out. And that’s all Congresswoman McKinney is asking for at this point in time.</p>
<p>COLMES: Well, that’s not all she’s asking for. I would disagree that that’s all she’s saying.</p>
<p>HANNITY: Well, Mr. Madsen, I’ll go to you here. And I expect a direct answer to a very simple question. What evidence do you have that our president was, in any way, had any knowledge of these attacks? Do you have any evidence at all?</p>
<p>MADSEN: Sean, the evidence is out there. It was —</p>
<p>HANNITY: Wait a minute.</p>
<p>MADSEN: One place reported Salman Rushdie had been warned two weeks before September 11 not to fly. It was your paper, Mr. Murdoch’s paper, “The Times of London.”</p>
<p>HANNITY: What evidence, sir, do you have that links our president to that knowledge? Do you have any direct evidence, yes or no?</p>
<p>MADSEN: There is ample evidence out there reported in the media about advance knowledge of what happened on September 11.</p>
<p>Mr. Madsen, look, I don’t want you to tell me evidence is out there. This charge is against the president of the United States of America at a time we’re at war in a conflict. You’re making a charge that he has knowledge, prior knowledge of the September 11 attack. And I ask you, sir, specifically, what evidence do you have?</p>
<p>MADSEN: There was a warning that the congresswoman referred to from President Putin before the attack. ..</p>
<p>HANNITY: A warning to who?</p>
<p>MADSEN: … warnings from French intelligence, Israeli, to the United States, FBI and to the CIA. And I find it strange that, here we suffered the worst intelligence failure in the country’s history and George Tenet is still director of the CIA. Can you imagine if they were airliners that crashed into buildings in downtown Tokyo?</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>HANNITY: That’s a different issue, Mr. Madsen.</p>
<p>But, Mr. Madsen, an intelligence link or survey or something that came in does not represent — in any court of law, sir, does not represent…</p>
<p>MADSEN: Why does…</p>
<p>HANNITY: Hang on — enough evidence to convict — see, this is what’s going on here.</p>
<p>Congressman, I’ll throw it to you. This is just an irresponsible, irrational political assault on the president while we’re at war. That’s what’s so offensive here to me.</p>
<p>FOLEY: Well, in “The Washington Post” today, Cynthia says she has no evidence. However, if they would investigate, maybe some evidence would be turned up. So it’s like, what is she saying?</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>MADSEN: Why is the Bush administration against an investigation?</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>HANNITY: Mr. Madsen, you’re a journalist, sir. Would you even print this on this flimsy amount of evidence that you have here?</p>
<p>MADSEN: I’ve read the work of many journalists: “The Times of London,” the BBC, “Der Spiegel” in Germany. They have all been reporting the same thing about advance knowledge. Is everybody crazy? Are all these journalists not allowed to express their opinion?</p>
<p>COLMES: I agree with that. But the investigation aspect of it I think is something — maybe she has a point on that one.</p>
<p>I know you want to respond, Wayne. Go ahead.</p>
<p>MADSEN: Well, it’s typical. Attack the messenger.</p>
<p>I mean, isn’t it funny? The Republicans, when Bill Clinton was president, they dragged him into every possible conspiracy theory, except for linking him to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. I mean, now we see the same people saying Cynthia McKinney has no right to her opinion. She’s out there. I think it’s nonsense.</p>
<p>FOLEY: Wayne, let me just say this. When they said that President Clinton launched the war simply to take away the Monica Lewinsky story, I absolutely refuted that and said that was absolutely wrong and unnecessary. I have not let false statements stand, whether they were Democratically directed or Republican directed. I think, in this particular instance, she has a fiduciary, as a member of Congress, to tell the facts and not lie.</p>
<p>HANNITY: Absolutely. Good line.</p>
<p>MADSEN: I think the Congress has a responsibility to investigate.</p>
<p>HANNITY: Congressman Foley — we’re going to give you the last word. Thank you for being with us, Mr. Madsen. Appreciate your time tonight.</p> | Defending Cynthia McKinney | true | https://counterpunch.org/2002/05/17/defending-cynthia-mckinney/ | 2002-05-17 | 4left
| Defending Cynthia McKinney
<p>[Editors’ Note: What follows is a transcript of an April 12 debate on Fox News’s Hannity and Colmes show between Rep. Mark Foley and CounterPunch contributor Wayne Madsen over Rep. Cynthia McKinney’s suggestion that the US government knew more about the 9/11 attacks than it had been letting on. One out of four was right. Guess which one?]</p>
<p>Hannity &amp; Colmes</p>
<p>April 12, 2002</p>
<p>COLMES: Joining us tonight is Florida Congressman Mark Foley and Wayne Madsen, an investigative journalist who has worked with Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney for three years.</p>
<p>Now, before I defend Cynthia McKinney’s right to say what she said, Mr. Madsen, would you agree that to suggest that the United States or anybody in this country knew or — in the government had advance knowledge of this is preposterous?</p>
<p>Wayne Madsen, FRIEND OF REP. CYNTHIA MCKINNEY: I don’t think so.</p>
<p>I think what the congresswoman is asking is that, with the worst intelligence failure in the history of the United States, why cannot we have in this country a full independent congressional investigation of who knew what when. How was all this intelligence…</p>
<p>COLMES: I agree there should be.</p>
<p>MADSEN: Yes.</p>
<p>COLMES: But she went further than that. She accused the Bush administration, if not Bush himself, of knowing in advance, because he or his father would benefit because of The Carlyle Group, which we’ll get to in a moment. She accused him of having advance knowledge of this. Do you concur?</p>
<p>MADSEN: Well, you know who else is calling for an investigation in the financial</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>COLMES: But I’m not talking about an investigation. I’m talking about the accusation that the president — forget the investigation for the moment. I want to talk about an accusation that President Bush had advance knowledge. Do you agree with that?</p>
<p>MADSEN: Judicial Watch is asking for the same investigation of</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>COLMES: I didn’t say investigation, sir.</p>
<p>With all due respect, my question had to do with whether you concur that President Bush had advance knowledge of what happened on September 11. Do not use the word investigation, I beg of you, in your answer.</p>
<p>MADSEN: I won’t use it. All I’ll say is, let the facts come out. And that’s all Congresswoman McKinney is asking for at this point in time.</p>
<p>COLMES: Well, that’s not all she’s asking for. I would disagree that that’s all she’s saying.</p>
<p>HANNITY: Well, Mr. Madsen, I’ll go to you here. And I expect a direct answer to a very simple question. What evidence do you have that our president was, in any way, had any knowledge of these attacks? Do you have any evidence at all?</p>
<p>MADSEN: Sean, the evidence is out there. It was —</p>
<p>HANNITY: Wait a minute.</p>
<p>MADSEN: One place reported Salman Rushdie had been warned two weeks before September 11 not to fly. It was your paper, Mr. Murdoch’s paper, “The Times of London.”</p>
<p>HANNITY: What evidence, sir, do you have that links our president to that knowledge? Do you have any direct evidence, yes or no?</p>
<p>MADSEN: There is ample evidence out there reported in the media about advance knowledge of what happened on September 11.</p>
<p>Mr. Madsen, look, I don’t want you to tell me evidence is out there. This charge is against the president of the United States of America at a time we’re at war in a conflict. You’re making a charge that he has knowledge, prior knowledge of the September 11 attack. And I ask you, sir, specifically, what evidence do you have?</p>
<p>MADSEN: There was a warning that the congresswoman referred to from President Putin before the attack. ..</p>
<p>HANNITY: A warning to who?</p>
<p>MADSEN: … warnings from French intelligence, Israeli, to the United States, FBI and to the CIA. And I find it strange that, here we suffered the worst intelligence failure in the country’s history and George Tenet is still director of the CIA. Can you imagine if they were airliners that crashed into buildings in downtown Tokyo?</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>HANNITY: That’s a different issue, Mr. Madsen.</p>
<p>But, Mr. Madsen, an intelligence link or survey or something that came in does not represent — in any court of law, sir, does not represent…</p>
<p>MADSEN: Why does…</p>
<p>HANNITY: Hang on — enough evidence to convict — see, this is what’s going on here.</p>
<p>Congressman, I’ll throw it to you. This is just an irresponsible, irrational political assault on the president while we’re at war. That’s what’s so offensive here to me.</p>
<p>FOLEY: Well, in “The Washington Post” today, Cynthia says she has no evidence. However, if they would investigate, maybe some evidence would be turned up. So it’s like, what is she saying?</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>MADSEN: Why is the Bush administration against an investigation?</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>HANNITY: Mr. Madsen, you’re a journalist, sir. Would you even print this on this flimsy amount of evidence that you have here?</p>
<p>MADSEN: I’ve read the work of many journalists: “The Times of London,” the BBC, “Der Spiegel” in Germany. They have all been reporting the same thing about advance knowledge. Is everybody crazy? Are all these journalists not allowed to express their opinion?</p>
<p>COLMES: I agree with that. But the investigation aspect of it I think is something — maybe she has a point on that one.</p>
<p>I know you want to respond, Wayne. Go ahead.</p>
<p>MADSEN: Well, it’s typical. Attack the messenger.</p>
<p>I mean, isn’t it funny? The Republicans, when Bill Clinton was president, they dragged him into every possible conspiracy theory, except for linking him to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. I mean, now we see the same people saying Cynthia McKinney has no right to her opinion. She’s out there. I think it’s nonsense.</p>
<p>FOLEY: Wayne, let me just say this. When they said that President Clinton launched the war simply to take away the Monica Lewinsky story, I absolutely refuted that and said that was absolutely wrong and unnecessary. I have not let false statements stand, whether they were Democratically directed or Republican directed. I think, in this particular instance, she has a fiduciary, as a member of Congress, to tell the facts and not lie.</p>
<p>HANNITY: Absolutely. Good line.</p>
<p>MADSEN: I think the Congress has a responsibility to investigate.</p>
<p>HANNITY: Congressman Foley — we’re going to give you the last word. Thank you for being with us, Mr. Madsen. Appreciate your time tonight.</p> | 884 |
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<p>The Spartans (2-1) bounced back from their loss to top-ranked Duke with a win that will be remembered as being costly if Bridges’ injury lingers. Coach Tom Izzo said after the game that Bridges is day to day.</p>
<p>He was fouled with 8:32 left in the game and landed awkwardly on his left foot, rolling his ankle. After trying to stay in the game to shoot free throws, the preseason All-America player went back to the bench briefly before walking toward the locker room.</p>
<p>Nick Ward scored a season-high 22 points, Joshua Langford had a career-high 19 points and Cassius Winston scored a season-high 13 points and had six assists for the Spartans.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>The Seawolves (0-4) led for much of the first half, holding Bridges to two points as they led 22-15 midway through the first half.</p>
<p>Stony Brook’s Elijah Olaniyi scored 16, Akwasi Yeboah had 15 points, UC Iroegbu scored 12 and Tyrell Sturdivant added 10 points.</p>
<p>NO. 8 FLORIDA 70, NEW HAMPSHIRE 63</p>
<p>GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Jalen Hudson scored 26 points, including a dunk midway through the second half that put Florida ahead for good in the Gators’ victory over plucky New Hampshire.</p>
<p>The Gators (3-0) had been averaging a nation-leading 112 points per game in their first two wins. But they shot just 32 percent, and New Hampshire (1-2) took advantage.</p>
<p>A desperation 3-pointer at the halftime buzzer lifted the Wildcats into a 32-32 tie, and they continued their upset bid after the break.</p>
<p>A fall-back 3 by John Ogwuche gave New Hampshire the lead with under 10 minutes left. Hudson came back with a dunk, and later scored nine straight points to keep Florida in front.</p>
<p>Tanner Leissner finished with 23 points for the Wildcats.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>NO. 10 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 93, VANDERBILT 89, OT</p>
<p>NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Jordan McLaughlin scored a career-high 35 points, and Southern California rallied from a 10-point deficit midway through the second half to beat Vanderbilt in overtime.</p>
<p>McLaughlin forced overtime by hitting his fifth 3-pointer of the game with 25.8 seconds left in regulation. He then scored the first five points of OT as the Trojans (3-0) escaped with a victory in their first road game this season.</p>
<p>USC first rallied from a 14-point deficit to lead 35-34 at halftime, and the Trojans trailed 62-52 with 9:36 left. Bennie Boatwright started an 8-0 run with a 3-pointer, followed by a three-point play by McLaughlin to set up a thrilling finish and comeback.</p>
<p>Chimezie Metu added 23 points for the Trojans in the program’s first visit to Memorial Gym since Dec. 5, 1975. Boatwright finished with 14 before fouling out late in regulation.</p>
<p>Vanderbilt (2-2) had a chance to win in regulation, but Riley LaChance’s short jumper missed just before the buzzer.</p>
<p>NO. 14 MINNESOTA 92, WESTERN CAROLINA 64</p>
<p>MINNEAPOLIS — Jordan Murphy had 23 points and 11 rebounds, and Minnesota cruised past Western Carolina.</p>
<p>Five Gophers scored in double figures, and coach Richard Pitino leaned heavily on his bench as Minnesota (4-0) played the first of a four-game stretch this week. Amir Coffey had 15 points, Dupree McBrayer scored 14, Nate Mason had 13 and Isaiah Washington scored 10.</p>
<p>Freshman Matt Halvorsen hit 5 of 7 3-pointers and led the Catamounts (1-3) with 17 points. Deriece Parks added 11 points.</p>
<p>Murphy posted his fourth straight double-double to start the season, and he carried Minnesota offensively for much of the second half as Mason and center Reggie Lynch were limited by foul trouble. Murphy had 15 points and 9 rebounds after the break as the Gophers pulled away after leading 42-33 at halftime.</p>
<p>Mason picked up his fourth foul early in the second half with the Gophers protecting a five-point lead. Pitino turned the offense over to Washington, and the prized recruit from New York kept things running smoothly. He scored six points and didn’t turn the ball over, and by the time he came out with just over 8 minutes to play, the Gophers led by 20.</p>
<p>TEXAS TECH 85, NO. 20 NORTHWESTERN 49</p>
<p>UNCASVILLE, Conn. — Keenan Evans scored 25 points to lead Texas Tech over Northwestern in the championship game of the Hall of Fame Tip-Off Tournament.</p>
<p>The senior guard scored 54 points in two games over the weekend. Zach Smith added 11 points, while Tommy Hamilton IV and Niem Stevenson each had 10 for the Red Raiders (4-0).</p>
<p>Scottie Lindsay led the Wildcats (3-2) with 20 points. It was the most-lopsided loss in head coach Chris Collins’ five years at Northwestern, surpassing an 89-57 road defeat to then-No. 25 Indiana on Jan. 23, 2016.</p>
<p>Northwestern never led in the game. Texas Tech shot 76.5 percent in the second half, and 60.4 percent for the game.</p>
<p>Evans scored 17 points and the Red Raiders dominated the opening half to lead 41-25. Texas Tech raced out to a 9-0 lead, with two 3-pointers from Evans.</p>
<p>For much of the half, Northwestern had more turnovers (15) than points. Lindsey was the lone threat on offense with 17 points, but the rest of the team was 2-for-12 from the field.</p>
<p>NO. 21 SAINT MARY’S 79, SAN JOSE STATE 61</p>
<p>SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jock Landale had 22 points and nine rebounds, Emmett Naar matched his career high with 12 assists and Saint Mary’s beat San Jose State.</p>
<p>Calvin Hermanson added 14 points while Tanner Krebs also had a career-high 14 with four 3-pointers, all of them in the first half, as the Gaels (4-0) picked up their seventh consecutive win over the Spartans.</p>
<p>Saint Mary’s led by 10 at halftime and then pulled away in the second half behind Landale and Naar, who was mostly a facilitator before scoring six straight points to put the Gaels up 71-53.</p>
<p>San Jose State (1-3) cut the gap to 73-61 with 4:21 remaining, but Cullen Neal made a 3-pointer and a free throw and Jordan Ford added a short jumper to maintain the Gaels’ cushion.</p>
<p>Ryan Welage scored 20 points and Keith Fisher III added 14 for the Spartans. San Jose State has lost three straight.</p> | Bridges sprains ankle in No. 2 MSU’s win over Stony Brook | false | https://abqjournal.com/1095276/bridges-sprains-ankle-in-no-2-msus-win-over-stony-brook.html | 2017-11-19 | 2least
| Bridges sprains ankle in No. 2 MSU’s win over Stony Brook
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<p />
<p>The Spartans (2-1) bounced back from their loss to top-ranked Duke with a win that will be remembered as being costly if Bridges’ injury lingers. Coach Tom Izzo said after the game that Bridges is day to day.</p>
<p>He was fouled with 8:32 left in the game and landed awkwardly on his left foot, rolling his ankle. After trying to stay in the game to shoot free throws, the preseason All-America player went back to the bench briefly before walking toward the locker room.</p>
<p>Nick Ward scored a season-high 22 points, Joshua Langford had a career-high 19 points and Cassius Winston scored a season-high 13 points and had six assists for the Spartans.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>The Seawolves (0-4) led for much of the first half, holding Bridges to two points as they led 22-15 midway through the first half.</p>
<p>Stony Brook’s Elijah Olaniyi scored 16, Akwasi Yeboah had 15 points, UC Iroegbu scored 12 and Tyrell Sturdivant added 10 points.</p>
<p>NO. 8 FLORIDA 70, NEW HAMPSHIRE 63</p>
<p>GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Jalen Hudson scored 26 points, including a dunk midway through the second half that put Florida ahead for good in the Gators’ victory over plucky New Hampshire.</p>
<p>The Gators (3-0) had been averaging a nation-leading 112 points per game in their first two wins. But they shot just 32 percent, and New Hampshire (1-2) took advantage.</p>
<p>A desperation 3-pointer at the halftime buzzer lifted the Wildcats into a 32-32 tie, and they continued their upset bid after the break.</p>
<p>A fall-back 3 by John Ogwuche gave New Hampshire the lead with under 10 minutes left. Hudson came back with a dunk, and later scored nine straight points to keep Florida in front.</p>
<p>Tanner Leissner finished with 23 points for the Wildcats.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>NO. 10 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 93, VANDERBILT 89, OT</p>
<p>NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Jordan McLaughlin scored a career-high 35 points, and Southern California rallied from a 10-point deficit midway through the second half to beat Vanderbilt in overtime.</p>
<p>McLaughlin forced overtime by hitting his fifth 3-pointer of the game with 25.8 seconds left in regulation. He then scored the first five points of OT as the Trojans (3-0) escaped with a victory in their first road game this season.</p>
<p>USC first rallied from a 14-point deficit to lead 35-34 at halftime, and the Trojans trailed 62-52 with 9:36 left. Bennie Boatwright started an 8-0 run with a 3-pointer, followed by a three-point play by McLaughlin to set up a thrilling finish and comeback.</p>
<p>Chimezie Metu added 23 points for the Trojans in the program’s first visit to Memorial Gym since Dec. 5, 1975. Boatwright finished with 14 before fouling out late in regulation.</p>
<p>Vanderbilt (2-2) had a chance to win in regulation, but Riley LaChance’s short jumper missed just before the buzzer.</p>
<p>NO. 14 MINNESOTA 92, WESTERN CAROLINA 64</p>
<p>MINNEAPOLIS — Jordan Murphy had 23 points and 11 rebounds, and Minnesota cruised past Western Carolina.</p>
<p>Five Gophers scored in double figures, and coach Richard Pitino leaned heavily on his bench as Minnesota (4-0) played the first of a four-game stretch this week. Amir Coffey had 15 points, Dupree McBrayer scored 14, Nate Mason had 13 and Isaiah Washington scored 10.</p>
<p>Freshman Matt Halvorsen hit 5 of 7 3-pointers and led the Catamounts (1-3) with 17 points. Deriece Parks added 11 points.</p>
<p>Murphy posted his fourth straight double-double to start the season, and he carried Minnesota offensively for much of the second half as Mason and center Reggie Lynch were limited by foul trouble. Murphy had 15 points and 9 rebounds after the break as the Gophers pulled away after leading 42-33 at halftime.</p>
<p>Mason picked up his fourth foul early in the second half with the Gophers protecting a five-point lead. Pitino turned the offense over to Washington, and the prized recruit from New York kept things running smoothly. He scored six points and didn’t turn the ball over, and by the time he came out with just over 8 minutes to play, the Gophers led by 20.</p>
<p>TEXAS TECH 85, NO. 20 NORTHWESTERN 49</p>
<p>UNCASVILLE, Conn. — Keenan Evans scored 25 points to lead Texas Tech over Northwestern in the championship game of the Hall of Fame Tip-Off Tournament.</p>
<p>The senior guard scored 54 points in two games over the weekend. Zach Smith added 11 points, while Tommy Hamilton IV and Niem Stevenson each had 10 for the Red Raiders (4-0).</p>
<p>Scottie Lindsay led the Wildcats (3-2) with 20 points. It was the most-lopsided loss in head coach Chris Collins’ five years at Northwestern, surpassing an 89-57 road defeat to then-No. 25 Indiana on Jan. 23, 2016.</p>
<p>Northwestern never led in the game. Texas Tech shot 76.5 percent in the second half, and 60.4 percent for the game.</p>
<p>Evans scored 17 points and the Red Raiders dominated the opening half to lead 41-25. Texas Tech raced out to a 9-0 lead, with two 3-pointers from Evans.</p>
<p>For much of the half, Northwestern had more turnovers (15) than points. Lindsey was the lone threat on offense with 17 points, but the rest of the team was 2-for-12 from the field.</p>
<p>NO. 21 SAINT MARY’S 79, SAN JOSE STATE 61</p>
<p>SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jock Landale had 22 points and nine rebounds, Emmett Naar matched his career high with 12 assists and Saint Mary’s beat San Jose State.</p>
<p>Calvin Hermanson added 14 points while Tanner Krebs also had a career-high 14 with four 3-pointers, all of them in the first half, as the Gaels (4-0) picked up their seventh consecutive win over the Spartans.</p>
<p>Saint Mary’s led by 10 at halftime and then pulled away in the second half behind Landale and Naar, who was mostly a facilitator before scoring six straight points to put the Gaels up 71-53.</p>
<p>San Jose State (1-3) cut the gap to 73-61 with 4:21 remaining, but Cullen Neal made a 3-pointer and a free throw and Jordan Ford added a short jumper to maintain the Gaels’ cushion.</p>
<p>Ryan Welage scored 20 points and Keith Fisher III added 14 for the Spartans. San Jose State has lost three straight.</p> | 885 |
<p>A VW plant in Germany. &lt;a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory#/media/File:Wolfsburg_VW-Werk.jpg"&gt;Andreas Praefcke&lt;/a&gt;/Wikimedia Commons</p>
<p />
<p>Days after Volkswagen admitted that half a million cars it sold in the United States contained software enabling them to evade clean air laws, top Environmental Protection Agency officials say they are planning to toughen emissions testing for all automakers. The EPA now plans to examine vehicles for so-called defeat devices.</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/cert/documents/cd-mfr-guid-ltr-2015-09-25.pdf" type="external">letter</a> released this morning, the EPA said federal regulations allow the agency to “test or require testing on any vehicle at a designated location, using driving cycles and conditions that may reasonably be expected to be encountered in normal operation and use, for the purposes of investigating a potential defeat device.” The EPA said it planned to begin conducting these additional procedures when vehicles undergo emissions and fuel economy testing, and it warned that the new procedures “may add time to the confirmatory test process and…additional mileage may be accumulated.”</p>
<p>“We are stepping up our testing,” Janet McCabe, the EPA’s acting assistant administrator, told reporters. “We take seriously our responsibility to oversee the enforcement of clean air regulations. The VW violations have made it clear that we need to adapt our oversight.”</p>
<p>Last Friday, the EPA issued a citation to Volkswagen for equipping nearly 500,000 diesel-powered cars sold since 2009 with software that can detect when the car is undergoing federal testing for smog-forming emissions. During the test, the cars meet the standard; under normal driving conditions, emissions are up to 40 times higher. Similar devices were installed on some 11 million VW cars worldwide, producing illegal air pollution that <a href="" type="internal">may contribute</a> to thousands of deaths. The resulting scandal <a href="" type="internal">devastated VW’s share value</a> and <a href="" type="internal">forced the ouster of its CEO</a>.</p>
<p>The EPA is currently investigating the full extent of the illegal software program and could ultimately deliver up to $18 billion in fines. Today’s announcement doesn’t affect that investigation. Officials said no recall has been announced and that if one is eventually called for, VW drivers will hear about it directly from the company.</p>
<p>EPA chief Gina McCarthy <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/epa-to-overhaul-air-emissions-testing-in-wake-of-volkswagen-cheating-revelation-1443187913" type="external">said</a> the agency is concerned that other automakers could have similar devices that have gone undetected. Even if they don’t, VW is responsible for a new raft of regulatory headaches for all companies that want to sell cars in the United States.</p>
<p>Chris Grundler, director of the EPA’s Office of Transportation, wouldn’t say exactly how his agency would sniff out defeat devices. But it would add additional time and rigor to the testing process, he said.</p>
<p>“We’re not going to tell them what the test is,” he said. “They don’t need to know.”</p>
<p /> | The Feds Have a Secret Plan to Stop the Next Car Pollution Scandal | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2015/09/volkswagen-just-made-life-harder-all-automakers/ | 2015-09-25 | 4left
| The Feds Have a Secret Plan to Stop the Next Car Pollution Scandal
<p>A VW plant in Germany. &lt;a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory#/media/File:Wolfsburg_VW-Werk.jpg"&gt;Andreas Praefcke&lt;/a&gt;/Wikimedia Commons</p>
<p />
<p>Days after Volkswagen admitted that half a million cars it sold in the United States contained software enabling them to evade clean air laws, top Environmental Protection Agency officials say they are planning to toughen emissions testing for all automakers. The EPA now plans to examine vehicles for so-called defeat devices.</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/cert/documents/cd-mfr-guid-ltr-2015-09-25.pdf" type="external">letter</a> released this morning, the EPA said federal regulations allow the agency to “test or require testing on any vehicle at a designated location, using driving cycles and conditions that may reasonably be expected to be encountered in normal operation and use, for the purposes of investigating a potential defeat device.” The EPA said it planned to begin conducting these additional procedures when vehicles undergo emissions and fuel economy testing, and it warned that the new procedures “may add time to the confirmatory test process and…additional mileage may be accumulated.”</p>
<p>“We are stepping up our testing,” Janet McCabe, the EPA’s acting assistant administrator, told reporters. “We take seriously our responsibility to oversee the enforcement of clean air regulations. The VW violations have made it clear that we need to adapt our oversight.”</p>
<p>Last Friday, the EPA issued a citation to Volkswagen for equipping nearly 500,000 diesel-powered cars sold since 2009 with software that can detect when the car is undergoing federal testing for smog-forming emissions. During the test, the cars meet the standard; under normal driving conditions, emissions are up to 40 times higher. Similar devices were installed on some 11 million VW cars worldwide, producing illegal air pollution that <a href="" type="internal">may contribute</a> to thousands of deaths. The resulting scandal <a href="" type="internal">devastated VW’s share value</a> and <a href="" type="internal">forced the ouster of its CEO</a>.</p>
<p>The EPA is currently investigating the full extent of the illegal software program and could ultimately deliver up to $18 billion in fines. Today’s announcement doesn’t affect that investigation. Officials said no recall has been announced and that if one is eventually called for, VW drivers will hear about it directly from the company.</p>
<p>EPA chief Gina McCarthy <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/epa-to-overhaul-air-emissions-testing-in-wake-of-volkswagen-cheating-revelation-1443187913" type="external">said</a> the agency is concerned that other automakers could have similar devices that have gone undetected. Even if they don’t, VW is responsible for a new raft of regulatory headaches for all companies that want to sell cars in the United States.</p>
<p>Chris Grundler, director of the EPA’s Office of Transportation, wouldn’t say exactly how his agency would sniff out defeat devices. But it would add additional time and rigor to the testing process, he said.</p>
<p>“We’re not going to tell them what the test is,” he said. “They don’t need to know.”</p>
<p /> | 886 |
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<p>DELPHI, Ind. — Former Indianapolis Colts punter Pat McAfee says he and team owner Jim Irsay are nearly doubling the reward for information leading to an arrest in the killing of two northern Indiana girls.</p>
<p>McAfee and Indiana State Police Superintendent Doug Carter appear in a video posted on McAfee’s Twitter account Wednesday in which they appealed to the public for tips and said the reward fund was being raised by $97,000, to $200,000.</p>
<p>Fourteen-year-old Liberty German and 13-year-old Abigail Williams were found dead Feb. 14 in a wooded area near Delphi, which is about 60 miles northwest of Indianapolis. They had gone out hiking the day before.</p>
<p>McAfee urged viewers to review a photo and audio clip of a male saying “down the hill” that police say came from German’s cellphone.</p>
<p>The police tip line for the case is 844-459-5786.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | Colts owner, ex-punter boost Indiana teen deaths reward fund | false | https://abqjournal.com/959731/colts-owner-ex-punter-boost-indiana-teen-deaths-reward-fund.html | 2least
| Colts owner, ex-punter boost Indiana teen deaths reward fund
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<p>DELPHI, Ind. — Former Indianapolis Colts punter Pat McAfee says he and team owner Jim Irsay are nearly doubling the reward for information leading to an arrest in the killing of two northern Indiana girls.</p>
<p>McAfee and Indiana State Police Superintendent Doug Carter appear in a video posted on McAfee’s Twitter account Wednesday in which they appealed to the public for tips and said the reward fund was being raised by $97,000, to $200,000.</p>
<p>Fourteen-year-old Liberty German and 13-year-old Abigail Williams were found dead Feb. 14 in a wooded area near Delphi, which is about 60 miles northwest of Indianapolis. They had gone out hiking the day before.</p>
<p>McAfee urged viewers to review a photo and audio clip of a male saying “down the hill” that police say came from German’s cellphone.</p>
<p>The police tip line for the case is 844-459-5786.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | 887 |
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<p>The poll, conducted Jan. 2-11, also indicates that more than two-thirds of those sampled aren’t aware that some city officials want to create a city electric utility. Electric power failed to register when respondents were asked “unaided” — without a list of possible answers — about the biggest local issues.</p>
<p>In an e-mail obtained by the Journal, Ray Sandoval, PNM’s Santa Fe local government and community relations coordinator, highlighted some of the results for Mayor Javier Gonzales.</p>
<p>“I would like to point out that one of the most significant opinions revealed by the survey is that Santa Feans clearly want all the stakeholders — the City, the County, the Gas Company of New Mexico and PNM — to work on energy and environmental issues and find solutions together,” Sandoval wrote.</p>
<p>That option is similar to a resolution introduced by City Councilor Patti Bushee during a press conference that involved Sandoval last month. The resolution calls for PNM and New Mexico Gas Company to collaborate with the city to chart a Climate Protection Action Plan.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Mayor Gonzales, who last year formed a Climate Change Task Force that includes a PNM representative, was not swayed. “It doesn’t change the fact that I’m 100 percent focused on increasing the amount of renewable energy that we use in Santa Fe,” Gonzales said. “Santa Feans need to own our energy future.” PNM has faced criticism from some for its amount of coal-fueled power.</p>
<p>The survey, conducted by Albuquerque-based Research &amp; Polling, Inc., indicated that 53 percent of the 501 people sampled wanted the city to determine its environmental goals and then work with PNM and the gas company.</p>
<p>The other options were for the city to conduct a study costing $500,000-$800,000 — the poll question did mention the estimated cost — to determine whether to separate from PNM and create a city utility, which 22 percent favored; and creation of a city-funded power utility without delay, which 19 percent supported. The poll has a 4.4 percent margin of error.</p>
<p>Poll respondents put city-owned electric power 12th on a list of 13 issues they were asked to prioritize, with the economy and jobs ranked first.</p> | PNM says its poll finds little interest in a city-owned power utility in Santa Fe | false | https://abqjournal.com/532150/pnm-says-its-poll-finds-little-interest-in-a-city-owned-power-utility-in-santa-fe.html | 2least
| PNM says its poll finds little interest in a city-owned power utility in Santa Fe
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>The poll, conducted Jan. 2-11, also indicates that more than two-thirds of those sampled aren’t aware that some city officials want to create a city electric utility. Electric power failed to register when respondents were asked “unaided” — without a list of possible answers — about the biggest local issues.</p>
<p>In an e-mail obtained by the Journal, Ray Sandoval, PNM’s Santa Fe local government and community relations coordinator, highlighted some of the results for Mayor Javier Gonzales.</p>
<p>“I would like to point out that one of the most significant opinions revealed by the survey is that Santa Feans clearly want all the stakeholders — the City, the County, the Gas Company of New Mexico and PNM — to work on energy and environmental issues and find solutions together,” Sandoval wrote.</p>
<p>That option is similar to a resolution introduced by City Councilor Patti Bushee during a press conference that involved Sandoval last month. The resolution calls for PNM and New Mexico Gas Company to collaborate with the city to chart a Climate Protection Action Plan.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Mayor Gonzales, who last year formed a Climate Change Task Force that includes a PNM representative, was not swayed. “It doesn’t change the fact that I’m 100 percent focused on increasing the amount of renewable energy that we use in Santa Fe,” Gonzales said. “Santa Feans need to own our energy future.” PNM has faced criticism from some for its amount of coal-fueled power.</p>
<p>The survey, conducted by Albuquerque-based Research &amp; Polling, Inc., indicated that 53 percent of the 501 people sampled wanted the city to determine its environmental goals and then work with PNM and the gas company.</p>
<p>The other options were for the city to conduct a study costing $500,000-$800,000 — the poll question did mention the estimated cost — to determine whether to separate from PNM and create a city utility, which 22 percent favored; and creation of a city-funded power utility without delay, which 19 percent supported. The poll has a 4.4 percent margin of error.</p>
<p>Poll respondents put city-owned electric power 12th on a list of 13 issues they were asked to prioritize, with the economy and jobs ranked first.</p> | 888 |
|
<p>“In space, no one can hear you scream” was the tagline of the 1979 box office film success <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/" type="external">Alien</a>. And it’s true. Sound waves propagate mechanically as a vibration and therefore need a medium —&#160;solid, liquid or gas —&#160;to travel through. Although interplanetary (and interstellar) space is not completely empty, gas molecules and dust grains are so sparsely distributed that they do not form a continuous medium that would enable sound waves to be transmitted directly.</p>
<p>But there are many locations in the solar system where it might actually be quite noisy. Such places will have a medium through which sound waves can be transmitted —&#160;for example, an atmosphere or an ocean. And we have only started to explore what they sound like.</p>
<p>NASA announced that its next mission to Mars, <a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/mars-2020/" type="external">the Mars 2020 lander</a>, will carry a microphone so that the soundscape of the planet can be recorded. This is not the first time that a microphone has been sent to Mars —&#160;the US Planetary Society <a href="http://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/microphones/history.html" type="external">sponsored a microphone on the Mars Polar Lander mission</a> in 1999. Unfortunately, the spacecraft crashed before any recordings could be transmitted. A microphone was also part of one of the instruments on the <a href="http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/" type="external">Phoenix Lander of 2008</a>, but because of concerns about an interface problem with the landing system, the instrument was not switched on.</p>
<p />
<p>Titan</p>
<p>The point of an experiment like this is to use the sound to infer how the pressure of Titan’s atmosphere changes with depth. This can then be used to build a circulation model for Titan, similar to the ones we use on Earth to forecast the weather and understand changes in climate. Here's audio from Titan's haze:</p>
<p>And, at a time when <a href="http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta" type="external">ESA’s Rosetta mission</a> is drawing to a close, we should remember that its target comet, 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, <a href="https://soundcloud.com/esaops/a-singing-comet" type="external">was singing out</a> into the void as it approached the sun. We also heard <a href="https://soundcloud.com/esaops/philae-touchdown-thud#t=0:00" type="external">the thud of the comet lander Philae’s arrival</a> when it touched down on the comet in November 2014.</p>
<p>There are soundscapes of other solar system bodies including Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. But these are not direct audio recordings —&#160;they are a conversion of electromagnetic vibrations into audio signals. They sound pretty weird.</p>
<p>You only have to imagine being in a desert to realize the variety of sounds a microphone on the surface of Mars could record —&#160;and how they can be interpreted. First of all, the wind, whistling across the planetary landscape —&#160;how fast is it travelling? How often does it vary in speed or direction? What does a dust devil sound like? Or a dust storm? What about the crack of thunder associated with a lightning bolt? Or the variation in pressure during an electric storm? Once the wind drops, the gentle sounds that break the silence can be heard: the settling of dust grains disturbed by the wind.</p>
<p>There are <a href="http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2016/pdf/3044.pdf" type="external">several engineering advantages</a> to having a microphone carried by a rover on Mars. As the vehicle trundles across the landscape, we might hear the noise of crashing gears, and realise that sand had clogged the wheels. This would allow engineers to diagnose problems more efficiently, and work out strategies to ameliorate or avoid them.</p>
<p>We have heard some sounds of a rover on Mars already: NASA released audio from the Opportunity Rover’s 11-year marathon. But like the sounds of Jupiter and Saturn’s rings, these sounds were not recorded directly —&#160;they are a conversion of the vibrations of the rover into audio as it travelled across the surface. The microphone on the Mars 2020 mission will be the first to pick up the sounds of Mars directly and transmit them to Earth.</p>
<p>What is interesting about the proposal for the microphone is the instrument into which it will be incorporated. It’s not an accelerometer, as on Titan and the previous Mars microphones, but on an instrument that is designed to measure the chemical composition of the rocks and soil by vapourising them: a Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectrometer. This works by firing a laser at a target, which “explodes” as a plasma and creates a very sharp pressure wave —&#160;the acoustic signal of which is proportional to the mass of sample being destroyed. Using the microphone to set up, calibrate and focus the laser will help improve the instrument. But at the same time, a whole raft of new sounds from the surface of the Red Planet will be picked up.</p>
<p>So where else might it be interesting to listen? I’d like to hear Europa or Enceladus, the respective moons of Jupiter and Saturn. They both have an ice-covered surface, below which is a deep ocean. Imagine what a microphone might pick up as a spacecraft penetrated the ice. The groaning of the icebergs as they moved against each other. The suck and pluck of more mushy ice as it percolated up through the cracks. The sudden whoosh of an ice geyser. And then into the ocean below. Waves slapping against the base of the icesheet. Water of different temperatures mixing —&#160;what does that sound like? Will there be bubbles? And perhaps as the penetrator settles onto the ocean floor, we might hear an unexpected crab scuttle past.</p>
<p><a href="http://theconversation.com/profiles/monica-grady-125306" type="external">Monica Grady</a>&#160;is a professor of planetary and space sciences at&#160; <a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/the-open-university" type="external">The Open University</a>.&#160;This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com" type="external">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-does-the-solar-system-sound-like-63014" type="external">original article</a>.</p> | What does the solar system sound like? | false | https://pri.org/stories/2016-07-29/what-does-solar-system-sound | 2016-07-29 | 3left-center
| What does the solar system sound like?
<p>“In space, no one can hear you scream” was the tagline of the 1979 box office film success <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/" type="external">Alien</a>. And it’s true. Sound waves propagate mechanically as a vibration and therefore need a medium —&#160;solid, liquid or gas —&#160;to travel through. Although interplanetary (and interstellar) space is not completely empty, gas molecules and dust grains are so sparsely distributed that they do not form a continuous medium that would enable sound waves to be transmitted directly.</p>
<p>But there are many locations in the solar system where it might actually be quite noisy. Such places will have a medium through which sound waves can be transmitted —&#160;for example, an atmosphere or an ocean. And we have only started to explore what they sound like.</p>
<p>NASA announced that its next mission to Mars, <a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/mars-2020/" type="external">the Mars 2020 lander</a>, will carry a microphone so that the soundscape of the planet can be recorded. This is not the first time that a microphone has been sent to Mars —&#160;the US Planetary Society <a href="http://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/microphones/history.html" type="external">sponsored a microphone on the Mars Polar Lander mission</a> in 1999. Unfortunately, the spacecraft crashed before any recordings could be transmitted. A microphone was also part of one of the instruments on the <a href="http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/" type="external">Phoenix Lander of 2008</a>, but because of concerns about an interface problem with the landing system, the instrument was not switched on.</p>
<p />
<p>Titan</p>
<p>The point of an experiment like this is to use the sound to infer how the pressure of Titan’s atmosphere changes with depth. This can then be used to build a circulation model for Titan, similar to the ones we use on Earth to forecast the weather and understand changes in climate. Here's audio from Titan's haze:</p>
<p>And, at a time when <a href="http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta" type="external">ESA’s Rosetta mission</a> is drawing to a close, we should remember that its target comet, 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, <a href="https://soundcloud.com/esaops/a-singing-comet" type="external">was singing out</a> into the void as it approached the sun. We also heard <a href="https://soundcloud.com/esaops/philae-touchdown-thud#t=0:00" type="external">the thud of the comet lander Philae’s arrival</a> when it touched down on the comet in November 2014.</p>
<p>There are soundscapes of other solar system bodies including Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. But these are not direct audio recordings —&#160;they are a conversion of electromagnetic vibrations into audio signals. They sound pretty weird.</p>
<p>You only have to imagine being in a desert to realize the variety of sounds a microphone on the surface of Mars could record —&#160;and how they can be interpreted. First of all, the wind, whistling across the planetary landscape —&#160;how fast is it travelling? How often does it vary in speed or direction? What does a dust devil sound like? Or a dust storm? What about the crack of thunder associated with a lightning bolt? Or the variation in pressure during an electric storm? Once the wind drops, the gentle sounds that break the silence can be heard: the settling of dust grains disturbed by the wind.</p>
<p>There are <a href="http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2016/pdf/3044.pdf" type="external">several engineering advantages</a> to having a microphone carried by a rover on Mars. As the vehicle trundles across the landscape, we might hear the noise of crashing gears, and realise that sand had clogged the wheels. This would allow engineers to diagnose problems more efficiently, and work out strategies to ameliorate or avoid them.</p>
<p>We have heard some sounds of a rover on Mars already: NASA released audio from the Opportunity Rover’s 11-year marathon. But like the sounds of Jupiter and Saturn’s rings, these sounds were not recorded directly —&#160;they are a conversion of the vibrations of the rover into audio as it travelled across the surface. The microphone on the Mars 2020 mission will be the first to pick up the sounds of Mars directly and transmit them to Earth.</p>
<p>What is interesting about the proposal for the microphone is the instrument into which it will be incorporated. It’s not an accelerometer, as on Titan and the previous Mars microphones, but on an instrument that is designed to measure the chemical composition of the rocks and soil by vapourising them: a Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectrometer. This works by firing a laser at a target, which “explodes” as a plasma and creates a very sharp pressure wave —&#160;the acoustic signal of which is proportional to the mass of sample being destroyed. Using the microphone to set up, calibrate and focus the laser will help improve the instrument. But at the same time, a whole raft of new sounds from the surface of the Red Planet will be picked up.</p>
<p>So where else might it be interesting to listen? I’d like to hear Europa or Enceladus, the respective moons of Jupiter and Saturn. They both have an ice-covered surface, below which is a deep ocean. Imagine what a microphone might pick up as a spacecraft penetrated the ice. The groaning of the icebergs as they moved against each other. The suck and pluck of more mushy ice as it percolated up through the cracks. The sudden whoosh of an ice geyser. And then into the ocean below. Waves slapping against the base of the icesheet. Water of different temperatures mixing —&#160;what does that sound like? Will there be bubbles? And perhaps as the penetrator settles onto the ocean floor, we might hear an unexpected crab scuttle past.</p>
<p><a href="http://theconversation.com/profiles/monica-grady-125306" type="external">Monica Grady</a>&#160;is a professor of planetary and space sciences at&#160; <a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/the-open-university" type="external">The Open University</a>.&#160;This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com" type="external">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-does-the-solar-system-sound-like-63014" type="external">original article</a>.</p> | 889 |
<p />
<p>Image source: Gilead Sciences, Inc.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>While following blindly in the footsteps of billionaires is risky, it's always interesting to see what stocks legendary investing gurus are selling, especially when it involves a widely held stock like Gilead Sciences . Last quarter, five billionaires tracked by The Motley Fool sold 6 million shares of Gilead Sciences. With billionaires heading for the exits in this big biotech, is it time for you to sell shares, too?</p>
<p>Gilead Sciences' sales have rocketed higher over the past three years thanks to the launch of next-generation hepatitis C drugs that reduce treatment duration and deliver 90%-plus cure rates.</p>
<p>However, now that Gilead Sciences' revenue has tripled since the launch of Sovaldi and Harvoni, growth may be tougher to come by than it has been previously, especially following the introduction of competing HCV therapies from Bristol-Myers Squibb, AbbVie Inc., and Merck &amp; Co. All three of those companies are deep-pocketed and have shown a willingness to battle over price to win away market share in this big market.</p>
<p>Image source: Gilead Sciences, Inc.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Globally, more than 150 million people have hepatitis C, and in the United States alone, there are 3 million hepatitis C patients. Because of the size of this indication, revenue associated with hepatitis C treatments eclipses $20 billion annually.</p>
<p>Gilead Sciences, however, already controls the lion's share of that market, and since new competitors are driving down prices, Gilead Sciences' growth in this indication relies on increasing prescription volume by more than prices are falling.</p>
<p>So far, evidence suggests that script volume is climbing, but that the benefit of higher volume isn't offsetting the drag of lower prices. In Q1, Gilead Sciences' Harvoni revenue fell to $3 billion from $3.58 billion a year ago.</p>
<p>Anticipating stalling sales growth led some of Wall Street's biggest money managers to move to the sidelines in the company's stock last quarter.</p>
<p>The biggest billionaire seller of Gilead Sciences shares in Q1 was D.E. Shaw, the legendary manager of the quantitatively driven hedge fund that's named after him. In Q1, D.E. Shaw cut loose more than 3.9 million shares of Gilead Sciences.</p>
<p>James Simon, whose investing chops have allowed him to amass a net worth of $14 billion, also put Gilead Sciences' shares on the chopping block. Last quarter, Simon's Renaissance Technology sold 1.6 million shares of the company.</p>
<p>Billionaire Glenn Russell Dubin's Highbridge Capital Management also took shares in Gilead Sciences off the table in the first quarter, lightening his load by 672,600 shares.</p>
<p>Image source: Gilead Sciences, Inc.</p>
<p>Although it's disappointing to Gilead Sciences bulls to see these top investors walk away, they might want to take a long-term view and stick it out with their shares.</p>
<p>Gilead Sciences is rolling out a slate of new therapies addressing HIV, and those drugs are insulating the company's market share in that indication while also offering growth. Last quarter, Gilead Sciences' sales of its various HIV therapies improved by over 18% to $2.8 billion.</p>
<p>The company's also expecting an FDA decision soon on its latest hepatitis C drug. If approved, this drug can shore up market share and possibly firm up pricing. The drug, which delivers cure rates in the high 90% range, would be the first pan-genotype HCV drug approved by the FDA.</p>
<p>Additionally, GIlead Sciences' pipeline has intriguing therapies addressing potential blockbuster indications, including nonalcoholic steteohepatitis, a liver disease that's increasingly leading to liver transplants.</p>
<p>If Gilead Sciences can maintain market share in its key indications and then expand into new markets, then the pause in revenue could be short-term. Given that the company's got a balance sheet boasting more than $21 billion in cash, and that it recently upped its dividend payout so that its shares now yield more than 2%, picking up shares for the long haul while they're on sale might be savvy.</p>
<p>The article <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/05/25/billionaires-are-bailing-on-gilead-sciences-should.aspx" type="external">Billionaires Are Bailing on Gilead Sciences -- Should You, Too?</a> originally appeared on Fool.com.</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/EBCapitalMarkets/info.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">Todd Campbell</a> owns shares of Gilead Sciences.Todd owns E.B. Capital Markets, LLC. E.B. Capital's clients may have positions in the companies mentioned. Like this article? Follow him onTwitter where he goes by the handle <a href="https://twitter.com/intent/follow?original_referer=http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/26/can-skyworks-solutions-inc-overcome-the-smartphone.aspx?source=iaasitlnk0000003&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;region=follow_link&amp;screen_name=longtermmindset&amp;tw_p=followbutton&amp;source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">@ebcapital</a>to see more articles like this.The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Gilead Sciences. 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</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</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</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</a>.</p> | Billionaires Are Bailing on Gilead Sciences -- Should You, Too? | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/05/25/billionaires-are-bailing-on-gilead-sciences-should-too.html | 2016-05-25 | 0right
| Billionaires Are Bailing on Gilead Sciences -- Should You, Too?
<p />
<p>Image source: Gilead Sciences, Inc.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>While following blindly in the footsteps of billionaires is risky, it's always interesting to see what stocks legendary investing gurus are selling, especially when it involves a widely held stock like Gilead Sciences . Last quarter, five billionaires tracked by The Motley Fool sold 6 million shares of Gilead Sciences. With billionaires heading for the exits in this big biotech, is it time for you to sell shares, too?</p>
<p>Gilead Sciences' sales have rocketed higher over the past three years thanks to the launch of next-generation hepatitis C drugs that reduce treatment duration and deliver 90%-plus cure rates.</p>
<p>However, now that Gilead Sciences' revenue has tripled since the launch of Sovaldi and Harvoni, growth may be tougher to come by than it has been previously, especially following the introduction of competing HCV therapies from Bristol-Myers Squibb, AbbVie Inc., and Merck &amp; Co. All three of those companies are deep-pocketed and have shown a willingness to battle over price to win away market share in this big market.</p>
<p>Image source: Gilead Sciences, Inc.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Globally, more than 150 million people have hepatitis C, and in the United States alone, there are 3 million hepatitis C patients. Because of the size of this indication, revenue associated with hepatitis C treatments eclipses $20 billion annually.</p>
<p>Gilead Sciences, however, already controls the lion's share of that market, and since new competitors are driving down prices, Gilead Sciences' growth in this indication relies on increasing prescription volume by more than prices are falling.</p>
<p>So far, evidence suggests that script volume is climbing, but that the benefit of higher volume isn't offsetting the drag of lower prices. In Q1, Gilead Sciences' Harvoni revenue fell to $3 billion from $3.58 billion a year ago.</p>
<p>Anticipating stalling sales growth led some of Wall Street's biggest money managers to move to the sidelines in the company's stock last quarter.</p>
<p>The biggest billionaire seller of Gilead Sciences shares in Q1 was D.E. Shaw, the legendary manager of the quantitatively driven hedge fund that's named after him. In Q1, D.E. Shaw cut loose more than 3.9 million shares of Gilead Sciences.</p>
<p>James Simon, whose investing chops have allowed him to amass a net worth of $14 billion, also put Gilead Sciences' shares on the chopping block. Last quarter, Simon's Renaissance Technology sold 1.6 million shares of the company.</p>
<p>Billionaire Glenn Russell Dubin's Highbridge Capital Management also took shares in Gilead Sciences off the table in the first quarter, lightening his load by 672,600 shares.</p>
<p>Image source: Gilead Sciences, Inc.</p>
<p>Although it's disappointing to Gilead Sciences bulls to see these top investors walk away, they might want to take a long-term view and stick it out with their shares.</p>
<p>Gilead Sciences is rolling out a slate of new therapies addressing HIV, and those drugs are insulating the company's market share in that indication while also offering growth. Last quarter, Gilead Sciences' sales of its various HIV therapies improved by over 18% to $2.8 billion.</p>
<p>The company's also expecting an FDA decision soon on its latest hepatitis C drug. If approved, this drug can shore up market share and possibly firm up pricing. The drug, which delivers cure rates in the high 90% range, would be the first pan-genotype HCV drug approved by the FDA.</p>
<p>Additionally, GIlead Sciences' pipeline has intriguing therapies addressing potential blockbuster indications, including nonalcoholic steteohepatitis, a liver disease that's increasingly leading to liver transplants.</p>
<p>If Gilead Sciences can maintain market share in its key indications and then expand into new markets, then the pause in revenue could be short-term. Given that the company's got a balance sheet boasting more than $21 billion in cash, and that it recently upped its dividend payout so that its shares now yield more than 2%, picking up shares for the long haul while they're on sale might be savvy.</p>
<p>The article <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/05/25/billionaires-are-bailing-on-gilead-sciences-should.aspx" type="external">Billionaires Are Bailing on Gilead Sciences -- Should You, Too?</a> originally appeared on Fool.com.</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/EBCapitalMarkets/info.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">Todd Campbell</a> owns shares of Gilead Sciences.Todd owns E.B. Capital Markets, LLC. E.B. Capital's clients may have positions in the companies mentioned. Like this article? Follow him onTwitter where he goes by the handle <a href="https://twitter.com/intent/follow?original_referer=http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/26/can-skyworks-solutions-inc-overcome-the-smartphone.aspx?source=iaasitlnk0000003&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;region=follow_link&amp;screen_name=longtermmindset&amp;tw_p=followbutton&amp;source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">@ebcapital</a>to see more articles like this.The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Gilead Sciences. 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</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</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</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</a>.</p> | 890 |
<p>Wall Street Journal NBC "Today" show tech editor Corey Greenberg (left) has charged companies thousands of dollars to get their products on local news programs, reports James Bandler. Greenberg has also appeared CNBC's "The Wall Street Journal Report with Maria Bartiromo" to plug products made by Apple Computer and Creative Technology -- companies that have paid him in the past. "It should have been disclosed. He was bound by our policies" which require contributors to disclose such payments to the network, says a CNBC spokeswoman. PLUS: More TV news experts who collect money from companies they "cover."</p> | "Today" tech editor is paid by Sony, Epson, H-P, others | false | https://poynter.org/news/today-tech-editor-paid-sony-epson-h-p-others | 2005-04-19 | 2least
| "Today" tech editor is paid by Sony, Epson, H-P, others
<p>Wall Street Journal NBC "Today" show tech editor Corey Greenberg (left) has charged companies thousands of dollars to get their products on local news programs, reports James Bandler. Greenberg has also appeared CNBC's "The Wall Street Journal Report with Maria Bartiromo" to plug products made by Apple Computer and Creative Technology -- companies that have paid him in the past. "It should have been disclosed. He was bound by our policies" which require contributors to disclose such payments to the network, says a CNBC spokeswoman. PLUS: More TV news experts who collect money from companies they "cover."</p> | 891 |
<p>Los Angeles City has voted to rename the holiday named after Christopher Columbus to commemorate Native Americans. The measure was passed as statues of the 15th-century explorer have been destroyed in recent weeks.</p>
<p>Members of the Los Angeles City Council <a href="http://cityclerk.lacity.org/cvvs/search/votedetails.cfm?voteid=95103&amp;rnd=0.304167754813" type="external">voted</a> 14-1 to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day Wednesday. The day will remain a paid holiday for all city employees, but will not be officially renamed until 2019.</p>
<p>Councilman Mitch O’Farrell, a member of the Wyandotte Nation tribe who introduced the motion two years ago, said that by changing the name of the day, the city has established a “fitting holiday that we can all be proud of.”</p>
<p>“Today is a moment where we took a step that is righteous, that is just, that is healing, and that is historically clear,” O’Farrell said.</p>
<p>Councilman Joe Buscaino, a first-generation Italian-American, was the only opposition vote. He said the move would only serve to “cure one offense with another.”</p>
<p>“All of our individual cultures matter,” Buscaino said, according to the Los Angeles Times.</p>
<p>Buscaino and three other council members attempted to establish a holiday for indigenous peoples on August 9, a date the United Nations recognizes as Indigenous Peoples Day. However, the council rejected the measure in an 11-4 <a href="http://cityclerk.lacity.org/cvvs/search/votedetails.cfm?voteid=95102&amp;rnd=0.340747238075" type="external">vote</a> Wednesday.</p>
<p>The council established “Italian-American Heritage Day,” which will be observed on October 12, the date of Columbus’ arrival in America in 1492. It will however, will not be recognized as a paid holiday.</p>
<p>The vote came after council members heard arguments from a room filled with activists and protesters.</p>
<p>Chrissie Castro, vice chairwoman of the Los Angeles City-County Native American Indian Commission, said the city council needed to “dismantle a state-sponsored celebration of genocide of indigenous peoples.”</p>
<p>“To make us celebrate on any other day would be a further injustice,” Castro said, according to the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-indigenous-peoples-day-20170829-story.htmlv" type="external">Los Angeles Times</a>.</p>
<p>Patrick Korten, a board member of the National Christopher Columbus Association, told <a href="http://www.foxla.com/news/local-news/277409468-story" type="external">KTTV</a> that the city council made “a huge error” by blaming Columbus for the genocide of Native Americans.</p>
<p>“He bore no responsibility for it and as a matter of fact, if you do the slightest little bit of history on the man and read his diaries, and what was said about him following the years of the discovery, it is clear that Columbus personally had great affection for the indigenous people he encountered and went out of his way to order his men not to abuse them in any fashion,” Korten said.</p>
<p>Los Angeles joins San Francisco and Seattle, which have also replaced the holiday with Indigenous Peoples Day in previous years.</p>
<p>The measure was passed as several statues of the 15th-century explorer have been destroyed in recent weeks.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, a statue of Columbus was found beheaded in a park in New York City.</p>
<p>Bill De Blasio, the Mayor of New York City is considering ordering the removal of a landmark statue of the explorer that has stood in Columbus Circle since 1892. The statue was erected to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the explorer landing in the Americas.</p>
<p>After protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned deadly over the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, De Blasio announced a “90-day review of all symbols of hate on city property.”</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/400444-columbus-monument-vandalized-baltimore/" type="external" /></p>
<p>However, following a backlash from the community over his plans to remove the statue of Columbus, De Blasio said he would consider adding a plaque to the statue that would offer an explanation about the historical figure.</p>
<p>Last week, vandals destroyed the oldest statue of Columbus in the nation.</p>
<p>The 44-foot obelisk in Baltimore, Maryland, was found with a sign leaning at the base that reads “Racism: Tear it down,” and another lying in the grass nearby that read, “The future is racial and economic justice.”</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFSW0id36FA" type="external">video</a> posted by the vandals, a person can be seen smashing the monument with a sledge hammer while another person explains why they are destroying the 225-year-old monument.</p>
<p>“Racist monuments to slave owners and murderers have always bothered me,” a narrator says in the video. “Baltimore’s poverty is concentrated in African-American households, and these statues are just an extra slap in the face. They were built in the 20th century in response to a movement for African Americans’ human dignity. What kind of a culture goes to such lengths to build such hate-filled monuments? What kind of a culture clings to those monuments in 2017?”</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p> | LA changes Columbus Day to ‘Indigenous Peoples Day’ as statues continue to be destroyed | false | https://newsline.com/la-changes-columbus-day-to-indigenous-peoples-day-as-statues-continue-to-be-destroyed/ | 2017-08-31 | 1right-center
| LA changes Columbus Day to ‘Indigenous Peoples Day’ as statues continue to be destroyed
<p>Los Angeles City has voted to rename the holiday named after Christopher Columbus to commemorate Native Americans. The measure was passed as statues of the 15th-century explorer have been destroyed in recent weeks.</p>
<p>Members of the Los Angeles City Council <a href="http://cityclerk.lacity.org/cvvs/search/votedetails.cfm?voteid=95103&amp;rnd=0.304167754813" type="external">voted</a> 14-1 to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day Wednesday. The day will remain a paid holiday for all city employees, but will not be officially renamed until 2019.</p>
<p>Councilman Mitch O’Farrell, a member of the Wyandotte Nation tribe who introduced the motion two years ago, said that by changing the name of the day, the city has established a “fitting holiday that we can all be proud of.”</p>
<p>“Today is a moment where we took a step that is righteous, that is just, that is healing, and that is historically clear,” O’Farrell said.</p>
<p>Councilman Joe Buscaino, a first-generation Italian-American, was the only opposition vote. He said the move would only serve to “cure one offense with another.”</p>
<p>“All of our individual cultures matter,” Buscaino said, according to the Los Angeles Times.</p>
<p>Buscaino and three other council members attempted to establish a holiday for indigenous peoples on August 9, a date the United Nations recognizes as Indigenous Peoples Day. However, the council rejected the measure in an 11-4 <a href="http://cityclerk.lacity.org/cvvs/search/votedetails.cfm?voteid=95102&amp;rnd=0.340747238075" type="external">vote</a> Wednesday.</p>
<p>The council established “Italian-American Heritage Day,” which will be observed on October 12, the date of Columbus’ arrival in America in 1492. It will however, will not be recognized as a paid holiday.</p>
<p>The vote came after council members heard arguments from a room filled with activists and protesters.</p>
<p>Chrissie Castro, vice chairwoman of the Los Angeles City-County Native American Indian Commission, said the city council needed to “dismantle a state-sponsored celebration of genocide of indigenous peoples.”</p>
<p>“To make us celebrate on any other day would be a further injustice,” Castro said, according to the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-indigenous-peoples-day-20170829-story.htmlv" type="external">Los Angeles Times</a>.</p>
<p>Patrick Korten, a board member of the National Christopher Columbus Association, told <a href="http://www.foxla.com/news/local-news/277409468-story" type="external">KTTV</a> that the city council made “a huge error” by blaming Columbus for the genocide of Native Americans.</p>
<p>“He bore no responsibility for it and as a matter of fact, if you do the slightest little bit of history on the man and read his diaries, and what was said about him following the years of the discovery, it is clear that Columbus personally had great affection for the indigenous people he encountered and went out of his way to order his men not to abuse them in any fashion,” Korten said.</p>
<p>Los Angeles joins San Francisco and Seattle, which have also replaced the holiday with Indigenous Peoples Day in previous years.</p>
<p>The measure was passed as several statues of the 15th-century explorer have been destroyed in recent weeks.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, a statue of Columbus was found beheaded in a park in New York City.</p>
<p>Bill De Blasio, the Mayor of New York City is considering ordering the removal of a landmark statue of the explorer that has stood in Columbus Circle since 1892. The statue was erected to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the explorer landing in the Americas.</p>
<p>After protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned deadly over the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, De Blasio announced a “90-day review of all symbols of hate on city property.”</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/400444-columbus-monument-vandalized-baltimore/" type="external" /></p>
<p>However, following a backlash from the community over his plans to remove the statue of Columbus, De Blasio said he would consider adding a plaque to the statue that would offer an explanation about the historical figure.</p>
<p>Last week, vandals destroyed the oldest statue of Columbus in the nation.</p>
<p>The 44-foot obelisk in Baltimore, Maryland, was found with a sign leaning at the base that reads “Racism: Tear it down,” and another lying in the grass nearby that read, “The future is racial and economic justice.”</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFSW0id36FA" type="external">video</a> posted by the vandals, a person can be seen smashing the monument with a sledge hammer while another person explains why they are destroying the 225-year-old monument.</p>
<p>“Racist monuments to slave owners and murderers have always bothered me,” a narrator says in the video. “Baltimore’s poverty is concentrated in African-American households, and these statues are just an extra slap in the face. They were built in the 20th century in response to a movement for African Americans’ human dignity. What kind of a culture goes to such lengths to build such hate-filled monuments? What kind of a culture clings to those monuments in 2017?”</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p> | 892 |
<p>Bank of America logs profit rise; Wells Fargo results on deck</p>
<p>U.S. stock futures perked up Friday, shaping up to reclaim record levels, ahead of an update on inflation that could give investors a steer on the Federal Reserve's path for interest rates and the latest earnings from big banks.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Read:The S&amp;P 500 is poised to make stock-market history--for doing almost nothing (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/sp-500-is-poised-to-make-uncanny-stock-market-historyfor-doing-almost-nothing-2017-10-12)</p>
<p>What are the main benchmarks doing?</p>
<p>Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average picked up 34 points, or 0.1%, to 22,831. S&amp;P 500 futures tacked on 3 points, or 0.1%, at 2,552.50. Nasdaq-100 futures edged up 8.50 points, or 0.1%, to 6,083.</p>
<p>All three indexes closed lower on Thursday (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stock-indicators-ease-from-record-highs-as-bank-earnings-arrive-2017-10-12), retreating from records set in the previous session. The Dow industrials ended down 0.1%, while the S&amp;P 500 and the Nasdaq both lost 0.2%.</p>
<p>For the week, gains appeared modest for all three benchmarks as of the close Thursday. The Dow industrials was headed for a 0.3% rise, while the S&amp;P 500 teetered around a 0.1% increase. Both have risen for five straight weeks. The Nasdaq was looking at a gain of just about 2 points, but that would be enough to mark a third consecutively weekly win.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Thus far in 2017, the Dow has gained nearly 16%, the S&amp;P is up 14%, and the Nasdaq has risen 22%.</p>
<p>See: Howard Gold on 5 things to do when every investment is too expensive (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/five-things-to-do-when-every-investment-is-too-expensive-2017-10-12)</p>
<p>What is driving markets?</p>
<p>Investors will get the next tranche of bank earnings in what is likely to be strong season of third-quarter corporate results (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/third-quarter-earnings-seen-as-an-easy-beat-could-set-up-more-stock-market-records-2017-10-09).</p>
<p>The Trump administration said late Thursday it will end billions of dollars in subsidies to insurers (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-to-halt-obamacare-subsidies-to-health-insurers-2017-10-13) under the Affordable Care Act program. The White House said the government can't lawfully make the payments as there is no appropriation for them.</p>
<p>Read:How to invest in health-care stocks regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-to-invest-in-health-care-stocks-regardless-of-what-happens-in-washington-dc-2017-10-13).</p>
<p>What data are ahead?</p>
<p>8:30 a.m. Eastern</p>
<p>An update on inflation is due. Economists polled by MarketWatch forecast consumer prices to have risen 0.6% in September, compared with 0.4% in August, with core CPI at 0.2%.</p>
<p>The inflation readings will be weighed for their likely influence whether the Fed will raise interest rates in December (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fed-officials-disagree-on-need-for-interest-rate-hike-in-december-2017-10-12). Data on retail sales for September are scheduled for the same time. A gain of 1.9% expected, perhaps bolstered by buying connected with hurricane preparation, according to analysts.</p>
<p>10 a.m. Eastern</p>
<p>Reports on consumer sentiment in October and business inventories in August are due at 10 a.m. Eastern.</p>
<p>Check out:MarketWatch's Economic Calendar (http://www.marketwatch.com/economy-politics/calendars/economic)</p>
<p>Which Fed speakers are ahead?</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Chicago Fed President Charles Evans is due to give a speech on the economy at 10:25 a.m. Eastern, appearing at a financial literacy event in Green Bay, Wisc.</p>
<p>Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan is expected to take part in a moderated discussion (https://www.cfainstitute.org/learning/events/Pages/10122017_134634.aspx) at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, at the CFA Institute's 2017 fixed-income management conference in Boston.</p>
<p>What are strategists saying?</p>
<p>"Today's U.S. CPI and retail sales figures will be the key event of the day, as investors wait to see whether the data aligns with the more dovish views of some Federal Open Market Committee members," said Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG, in a note.</p>
<p>"And after J.P. Morgan and Citigroup beat estimates yesterday, we will wait to see if Bank of America can repeat the trick," he said.</p>
<p>Which stocks look like key movers?</p>
<p>Bank of America Corp.(BAC) shares rose 1% premarket after the lender posted a rise in third-quarter profit (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bank-of-america-profit-climbs-but-trading-slumps-2017-10-13). Wells Fargo &amp; Co.(WFC) is also reporting docket before the bell.</p>
<p>Check out:Bank stocks are soaring, but now it's time to go for quality (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bank-stocks-are-soaring-but-now-its-time-to-go-for-quality-2017-10-10)</p>
<p>And see:Third-quarter earnings seen as 'an easy beat,' may bring more market records (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/third-quarter-earnings-seen-as-an-easy-beat-could-set-up-more-stock-market-records-2017-10-09)</p>
<p>Shares of Applied Optoelectronics Inc.(AAOI) fell 21% in premarket trade. The fiber-optic networking company warned investors (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/applied-optoelectronics-down-more-than-17-on-profit-revenue-warning-2017-10-12) about lower-than-expected third-quarter profit and revenue late Thursday.</p>
<p>Antares Pharma Inc.(ATRS) shares sank 40% before the bell, after the company's announcement Thursday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had found deficiencies in the drug Xyosted (testosterone enanthate) during its review process.</p>
<p>Monsanto Co.(MON) shares moved 1.7% higher premarket after Bayer AG said it has reached a $7 billion deal to sell parts of its crop-science business (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bayer-agrees-7-billion-sale-of-assets-to-basf-in-aid-of-monsanto-megadeal-2017-10-13) to rival BASF SE . The sale will partially refinance the German conglomerate's purchase of Monsanto and should help assuage regulator concerns over that megadeal. U.S.-listed shares of Bayer (BAYN.XE) and (BAS.XE) were inactive ahead of the bell.</p>
<p>What are other assets doing?</p>
<p>Bitcoin recently traded 5% higher at $5,702, after climbing as high as $5,856 earlier Friday, according to CoinDesk data. The cryptocurrency began setting new records (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bitcoin-soars-to-a-new-all-time-high-above-5100-2017-10-12) after jumping on Thursday.</p>
<p>Check out:5 reasons bitcoin has roared to its highest level ever, defying Dimon's 'fraud' call (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/5-reasons-bitcoin-has-roared-to-its-highest-level-ever-defying-dimons-fraud-call-2017-10-12)</p>
<p>European stocks (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dax-on-track-for-another-record-as-bayer-rises-on-deal-news-2017-10-13) were modestly higher, while most Asian markets closed with gains, with Japan's Nikkei benchmark rising 1%.</p>
<p>Gold futures (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/gold-churns-below-key-1300-line-ahead-of-consumer-inflation-snapshot-2017-10-13) slipped 50 cents (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/gold-rises-tries-to-regain-grip-on-1300-level-2017-10-12), while oil futures (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/oil-prices-surge-on-strong-chinese-crude-imports-and-iran-uncertainty-2017-10-13) climbed 1.5% to trade above $51 a barrel.</p>
<p>The ICE U.S. Dollar Index (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dollar-in-holding-pattern-with-inflation-data-to-highlight-feds-aim-to-hike-rates-2017-10-13) was searching for firm direction, after slipping 0.1% on Thursday. The gauge was on track for its first weekly fall in five weeks.</p>
<p>(END) Dow Jones Newswires</p>
<p>October 13, 2017 08:04 ET (12:04 GMT)</p> | MARKET SNAPSHOT: U.S. Stocks Reach For Higher Open, With Inflation And Big Bank Earnings In Focus | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2017/10/13/market-snapshot-u-s-stocks-reach-for-higher-open-with-inflation-and-big-bank-earnings-in-focus2.html | 2017-10-13 | 0right
| MARKET SNAPSHOT: U.S. Stocks Reach For Higher Open, With Inflation And Big Bank Earnings In Focus
<p>Bank of America logs profit rise; Wells Fargo results on deck</p>
<p>U.S. stock futures perked up Friday, shaping up to reclaim record levels, ahead of an update on inflation that could give investors a steer on the Federal Reserve's path for interest rates and the latest earnings from big banks.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Read:The S&amp;P 500 is poised to make stock-market history--for doing almost nothing (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/sp-500-is-poised-to-make-uncanny-stock-market-historyfor-doing-almost-nothing-2017-10-12)</p>
<p>What are the main benchmarks doing?</p>
<p>Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average picked up 34 points, or 0.1%, to 22,831. S&amp;P 500 futures tacked on 3 points, or 0.1%, at 2,552.50. Nasdaq-100 futures edged up 8.50 points, or 0.1%, to 6,083.</p>
<p>All three indexes closed lower on Thursday (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stock-indicators-ease-from-record-highs-as-bank-earnings-arrive-2017-10-12), retreating from records set in the previous session. The Dow industrials ended down 0.1%, while the S&amp;P 500 and the Nasdaq both lost 0.2%.</p>
<p>For the week, gains appeared modest for all three benchmarks as of the close Thursday. The Dow industrials was headed for a 0.3% rise, while the S&amp;P 500 teetered around a 0.1% increase. Both have risen for five straight weeks. The Nasdaq was looking at a gain of just about 2 points, but that would be enough to mark a third consecutively weekly win.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Thus far in 2017, the Dow has gained nearly 16%, the S&amp;P is up 14%, and the Nasdaq has risen 22%.</p>
<p>See: Howard Gold on 5 things to do when every investment is too expensive (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/five-things-to-do-when-every-investment-is-too-expensive-2017-10-12)</p>
<p>What is driving markets?</p>
<p>Investors will get the next tranche of bank earnings in what is likely to be strong season of third-quarter corporate results (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/third-quarter-earnings-seen-as-an-easy-beat-could-set-up-more-stock-market-records-2017-10-09).</p>
<p>The Trump administration said late Thursday it will end billions of dollars in subsidies to insurers (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-to-halt-obamacare-subsidies-to-health-insurers-2017-10-13) under the Affordable Care Act program. The White House said the government can't lawfully make the payments as there is no appropriation for them.</p>
<p>Read:How to invest in health-care stocks regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-to-invest-in-health-care-stocks-regardless-of-what-happens-in-washington-dc-2017-10-13).</p>
<p>What data are ahead?</p>
<p>8:30 a.m. Eastern</p>
<p>An update on inflation is due. Economists polled by MarketWatch forecast consumer prices to have risen 0.6% in September, compared with 0.4% in August, with core CPI at 0.2%.</p>
<p>The inflation readings will be weighed for their likely influence whether the Fed will raise interest rates in December (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fed-officials-disagree-on-need-for-interest-rate-hike-in-december-2017-10-12). Data on retail sales for September are scheduled for the same time. A gain of 1.9% expected, perhaps bolstered by buying connected with hurricane preparation, according to analysts.</p>
<p>10 a.m. Eastern</p>
<p>Reports on consumer sentiment in October and business inventories in August are due at 10 a.m. Eastern.</p>
<p>Check out:MarketWatch's Economic Calendar (http://www.marketwatch.com/economy-politics/calendars/economic)</p>
<p>Which Fed speakers are ahead?</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Chicago Fed President Charles Evans is due to give a speech on the economy at 10:25 a.m. Eastern, appearing at a financial literacy event in Green Bay, Wisc.</p>
<p>Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan is expected to take part in a moderated discussion (https://www.cfainstitute.org/learning/events/Pages/10122017_134634.aspx) at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, at the CFA Institute's 2017 fixed-income management conference in Boston.</p>
<p>What are strategists saying?</p>
<p>"Today's U.S. CPI and retail sales figures will be the key event of the day, as investors wait to see whether the data aligns with the more dovish views of some Federal Open Market Committee members," said Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG, in a note.</p>
<p>"And after J.P. Morgan and Citigroup beat estimates yesterday, we will wait to see if Bank of America can repeat the trick," he said.</p>
<p>Which stocks look like key movers?</p>
<p>Bank of America Corp.(BAC) shares rose 1% premarket after the lender posted a rise in third-quarter profit (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bank-of-america-profit-climbs-but-trading-slumps-2017-10-13). Wells Fargo &amp; Co.(WFC) is also reporting docket before the bell.</p>
<p>Check out:Bank stocks are soaring, but now it's time to go for quality (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bank-stocks-are-soaring-but-now-its-time-to-go-for-quality-2017-10-10)</p>
<p>And see:Third-quarter earnings seen as 'an easy beat,' may bring more market records (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/third-quarter-earnings-seen-as-an-easy-beat-could-set-up-more-stock-market-records-2017-10-09)</p>
<p>Shares of Applied Optoelectronics Inc.(AAOI) fell 21% in premarket trade. The fiber-optic networking company warned investors (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/applied-optoelectronics-down-more-than-17-on-profit-revenue-warning-2017-10-12) about lower-than-expected third-quarter profit and revenue late Thursday.</p>
<p>Antares Pharma Inc.(ATRS) shares sank 40% before the bell, after the company's announcement Thursday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had found deficiencies in the drug Xyosted (testosterone enanthate) during its review process.</p>
<p>Monsanto Co.(MON) shares moved 1.7% higher premarket after Bayer AG said it has reached a $7 billion deal to sell parts of its crop-science business (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bayer-agrees-7-billion-sale-of-assets-to-basf-in-aid-of-monsanto-megadeal-2017-10-13) to rival BASF SE . The sale will partially refinance the German conglomerate's purchase of Monsanto and should help assuage regulator concerns over that megadeal. U.S.-listed shares of Bayer (BAYN.XE) and (BAS.XE) were inactive ahead of the bell.</p>
<p>What are other assets doing?</p>
<p>Bitcoin recently traded 5% higher at $5,702, after climbing as high as $5,856 earlier Friday, according to CoinDesk data. The cryptocurrency began setting new records (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bitcoin-soars-to-a-new-all-time-high-above-5100-2017-10-12) after jumping on Thursday.</p>
<p>Check out:5 reasons bitcoin has roared to its highest level ever, defying Dimon's 'fraud' call (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/5-reasons-bitcoin-has-roared-to-its-highest-level-ever-defying-dimons-fraud-call-2017-10-12)</p>
<p>European stocks (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dax-on-track-for-another-record-as-bayer-rises-on-deal-news-2017-10-13) were modestly higher, while most Asian markets closed with gains, with Japan's Nikkei benchmark rising 1%.</p>
<p>Gold futures (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/gold-churns-below-key-1300-line-ahead-of-consumer-inflation-snapshot-2017-10-13) slipped 50 cents (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/gold-rises-tries-to-regain-grip-on-1300-level-2017-10-12), while oil futures (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/oil-prices-surge-on-strong-chinese-crude-imports-and-iran-uncertainty-2017-10-13) climbed 1.5% to trade above $51 a barrel.</p>
<p>The ICE U.S. Dollar Index (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dollar-in-holding-pattern-with-inflation-data-to-highlight-feds-aim-to-hike-rates-2017-10-13) was searching for firm direction, after slipping 0.1% on Thursday. The gauge was on track for its first weekly fall in five weeks.</p>
<p>(END) Dow Jones Newswires</p>
<p>October 13, 2017 08:04 ET (12:04 GMT)</p> | 893 |
<p>U.S. home resales unexpectedly fell in July to their lowest monthly level of the year due to a lack of properties for sale, which also continued to push up prices.</p>
<p>The National Association of Realtors said on Thursday existing-home sales fell 1.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.44 million units last month. June’s sales pace was revised slightly lower to 5.51 million units.</p>
<p>Economists polled by Reuters had forecast sales rising 0.9 percent to a rate of 5.57 million units. Sales were up 2.1 percent from July 2016.</p>
<p>Supply was down 9.0 percent from a year ago. Housing inventory has declined for 26 consecutive months on a year-on-year basis.</p>
<p>A dearth of properties on the market has crimped the housing recovery and forced price appreciation to significantly outstrip wage gains.</p>
<p>The median house price was $258,300, a 6.2 percent rise from one year ago, reflecting the paucity of properties.</p>
<p>“Demand remains strong but inventory shortage is the choke point,” NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun said.</p>
<p>At the current sales rate, it would take 4.2 months to clear inventory, down from 4.8 months one year ago. Economists view a 6-month supply as a healthy balance between supply and demand.</p>
<p>The median number of days homes were on the market in July was 30, compared to 36 days one year ago.</p>
<p>Across the regions, the Northeast saw a decline of 14.5 percent and in the Midwest sales were down 5.3 percent. They jumped in the West by 5.0 percent while sales increased 2.2 percent in the South.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, new U.S. single-family home sales unexpectedly fell in July, dropping to their lowest in seven months amid a surge in prices.&#160;</p> | Existing-Home Sales Unexpectedly Fall, Hit Lowest Level of Year | false | https://newsline.com/existing-home-sales-unexpectedly-fall-hit-lowest-level-of-year/ | 2017-08-24 | 1right-center
| Existing-Home Sales Unexpectedly Fall, Hit Lowest Level of Year
<p>U.S. home resales unexpectedly fell in July to their lowest monthly level of the year due to a lack of properties for sale, which also continued to push up prices.</p>
<p>The National Association of Realtors said on Thursday existing-home sales fell 1.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.44 million units last month. June’s sales pace was revised slightly lower to 5.51 million units.</p>
<p>Economists polled by Reuters had forecast sales rising 0.9 percent to a rate of 5.57 million units. Sales were up 2.1 percent from July 2016.</p>
<p>Supply was down 9.0 percent from a year ago. Housing inventory has declined for 26 consecutive months on a year-on-year basis.</p>
<p>A dearth of properties on the market has crimped the housing recovery and forced price appreciation to significantly outstrip wage gains.</p>
<p>The median house price was $258,300, a 6.2 percent rise from one year ago, reflecting the paucity of properties.</p>
<p>“Demand remains strong but inventory shortage is the choke point,” NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun said.</p>
<p>At the current sales rate, it would take 4.2 months to clear inventory, down from 4.8 months one year ago. Economists view a 6-month supply as a healthy balance between supply and demand.</p>
<p>The median number of days homes were on the market in July was 30, compared to 36 days one year ago.</p>
<p>Across the regions, the Northeast saw a decline of 14.5 percent and in the Midwest sales were down 5.3 percent. They jumped in the West by 5.0 percent while sales increased 2.2 percent in the South.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, new U.S. single-family home sales unexpectedly fell in July, dropping to their lowest in seven months amid a surge in prices.&#160;</p> | 894 |
<p>AUCKLAND, New Zealand (AP) — American Steve Johnson struggled past Liam Caruana 7-5, 7-6 (4) to reach the second round of the ATP Tour's ASB Classic on Tuesday as the tournament's main draw was decimated by withdrawals.</p>
<p>Caruana, who was making his debut in the main draw of an ATP tournament, was one of four lucky losers promoted into the first round to replace players forced to withdraw because of injuries or fatigue.</p>
<p>Johnson was due to meet compatriot Ryan Harrison but Harrison withdrew after playing his way into the final of last week's Brisbane International, losing to Nick Kyrgios.</p>
<p>Argentina's Guido Pello withdrew with a shoulder injury, conceding his place in the main draw to Taro Daniel of Japan who along with Caruana, American Tennys Sandgren and Slovakia's Lukas Lacko were losers in the last round of qualifying.</p>
<p>Daniel was beaten 6-3, 6-2 by sixth-seeded Pablo Cuevas of Uruguay.</p>
<p>Eighth-seeded Andrey Rublev of Russia pulled out with an arm injury after reaching the final at Doha last week and Britain's Kyle Edmund withdrew with a sprained ankle.</p>
<p>Johnson, who struggled with his ball toss and couldn't always bring his big serve to bear, took time to make his way into the match but eventually gained a foothold.</p>
<p>The second set was also tight and Carruana had set points in a pivotal 10th game on Johnson's serve which lasted 7-1/2 minutes before the American was able to hold.</p>
<p>"Oh man, it's tough when you play someone you really don't know," Johnson said. "He swings hard and he hit it well."</p>
<p>AUCKLAND, New Zealand (AP) — American Steve Johnson struggled past Liam Caruana 7-5, 7-6 (4) to reach the second round of the ATP Tour's ASB Classic on Tuesday as the tournament's main draw was decimated by withdrawals.</p>
<p>Caruana, who was making his debut in the main draw of an ATP tournament, was one of four lucky losers promoted into the first round to replace players forced to withdraw because of injuries or fatigue.</p>
<p>Johnson was due to meet compatriot Ryan Harrison but Harrison withdrew after playing his way into the final of last week's Brisbane International, losing to Nick Kyrgios.</p>
<p>Argentina's Guido Pello withdrew with a shoulder injury, conceding his place in the main draw to Taro Daniel of Japan who along with Caruana, American Tennys Sandgren and Slovakia's Lukas Lacko were losers in the last round of qualifying.</p>
<p>Daniel was beaten 6-3, 6-2 by sixth-seeded Pablo Cuevas of Uruguay.</p>
<p>Eighth-seeded Andrey Rublev of Russia pulled out with an arm injury after reaching the final at Doha last week and Britain's Kyle Edmund withdrew with a sprained ankle.</p>
<p>Johnson, who struggled with his ball toss and couldn't always bring his big serve to bear, took time to make his way into the match but eventually gained a foothold.</p>
<p>The second set was also tight and Carruana had set points in a pivotal 10th game on Johnson's serve which lasted 7-1/2 minutes before the American was able to hold.</p>
<p>"Oh man, it's tough when you play someone you really don't know," Johnson said. "He swings hard and he hit it well."</p> | Withdrawals weaken main draw at ASB Classic | false | https://apnews.com/amp/d9a47fbdab354d738e9bbf4a7e82ed85 | 2018-01-09 | 2least
| Withdrawals weaken main draw at ASB Classic
<p>AUCKLAND, New Zealand (AP) — American Steve Johnson struggled past Liam Caruana 7-5, 7-6 (4) to reach the second round of the ATP Tour's ASB Classic on Tuesday as the tournament's main draw was decimated by withdrawals.</p>
<p>Caruana, who was making his debut in the main draw of an ATP tournament, was one of four lucky losers promoted into the first round to replace players forced to withdraw because of injuries or fatigue.</p>
<p>Johnson was due to meet compatriot Ryan Harrison but Harrison withdrew after playing his way into the final of last week's Brisbane International, losing to Nick Kyrgios.</p>
<p>Argentina's Guido Pello withdrew with a shoulder injury, conceding his place in the main draw to Taro Daniel of Japan who along with Caruana, American Tennys Sandgren and Slovakia's Lukas Lacko were losers in the last round of qualifying.</p>
<p>Daniel was beaten 6-3, 6-2 by sixth-seeded Pablo Cuevas of Uruguay.</p>
<p>Eighth-seeded Andrey Rublev of Russia pulled out with an arm injury after reaching the final at Doha last week and Britain's Kyle Edmund withdrew with a sprained ankle.</p>
<p>Johnson, who struggled with his ball toss and couldn't always bring his big serve to bear, took time to make his way into the match but eventually gained a foothold.</p>
<p>The second set was also tight and Carruana had set points in a pivotal 10th game on Johnson's serve which lasted 7-1/2 minutes before the American was able to hold.</p>
<p>"Oh man, it's tough when you play someone you really don't know," Johnson said. "He swings hard and he hit it well."</p>
<p>AUCKLAND, New Zealand (AP) — American Steve Johnson struggled past Liam Caruana 7-5, 7-6 (4) to reach the second round of the ATP Tour's ASB Classic on Tuesday as the tournament's main draw was decimated by withdrawals.</p>
<p>Caruana, who was making his debut in the main draw of an ATP tournament, was one of four lucky losers promoted into the first round to replace players forced to withdraw because of injuries or fatigue.</p>
<p>Johnson was due to meet compatriot Ryan Harrison but Harrison withdrew after playing his way into the final of last week's Brisbane International, losing to Nick Kyrgios.</p>
<p>Argentina's Guido Pello withdrew with a shoulder injury, conceding his place in the main draw to Taro Daniel of Japan who along with Caruana, American Tennys Sandgren and Slovakia's Lukas Lacko were losers in the last round of qualifying.</p>
<p>Daniel was beaten 6-3, 6-2 by sixth-seeded Pablo Cuevas of Uruguay.</p>
<p>Eighth-seeded Andrey Rublev of Russia pulled out with an arm injury after reaching the final at Doha last week and Britain's Kyle Edmund withdrew with a sprained ankle.</p>
<p>Johnson, who struggled with his ball toss and couldn't always bring his big serve to bear, took time to make his way into the match but eventually gained a foothold.</p>
<p>The second set was also tight and Carruana had set points in a pivotal 10th game on Johnson's serve which lasted 7-1/2 minutes before the American was able to hold.</p>
<p>"Oh man, it's tough when you play someone you really don't know," Johnson said. "He swings hard and he hit it well."</p> | 895 |
<p>America exports products all over the world, and often has no idea how those products will assimilate into different cultures.</p>
<p>The latest case? Pizza.</p>
<p>In Pakistan, Pizza Hut advertised an all-you-can-eat buffet to those fasting for Ramadan, but then&#160; <a href="" type="external">withdrew the offer</a>, enraging not a few hungry Pakistanis.</p>
<p>After this news broke today, GlobalPost wondered (with all its global-ness) what it would be like to see the world through the eyes of Pizza Hut.</p>
<p>The results were surprising.</p>
<p>Here's a collection of photos, with captions explaining Pizza Hut's uneasy history with globalization.</p>
<p />
<p>Pakistani fire-fighters extinguish a burning Pizza Hut after an angry mob set it on fire in Karachi on July 15, 2006. Protestors torched the restaurant, gas stations and a dozen cars after the funeral of Shiite cleric, Hassan Turabi, who was killed in a suicide bombing the previous day. (Photo by Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images).</p>
<p />
<p>Delivery boys attend an opening ceremony for a Pizza Hut delivery service on Jan. 18, 2007 in Nanjing, China. Pizza Hut has 37 stores in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Nanjing. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)</p>
<p />
<p>A Pizza Hut employee looks from a window broken during an anti-globalization protest on Sept. 12, 2003, in Cancun. Demonstrators, protesting the fifth World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference, claimed the WTO benefits the rich and not the poor. (Luis Acosta AFP/Getty Images).</p>
<p />
<p>Long lines formed outside Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut in Nepal&#160;on Nov. 25, 2009. Nepal's first international fast-food restaurants opened in the capital Kathmandu on that day, reflecting the country's cautious attempts to attract more investment from Western companies. (Subel Bhandari AFP/Getty Images).</p>
<p />
<p>A US soldier eats Pizza Hut pizza at&#160;Talil&#160;military base near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq on Dec. 1, 2003. Pizza Hut was one of several American restaurant chains that served troops at US military bases in Iraq.</p>
<p />
<p>Pedestrians pass a Dunkin' Donuts and Pizza Hut in Brooklyn, NY. On July 2006, New York City Council member Joel Rivera proposed legislation that would limit the number of fast food restaurants in the city (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)</p>
<p />
<p>On Dec. 23 1997, the last Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev shared Pizza Hut pizza with his granddaughter Anastasia. This picture is from a commercial shown on Russian TV on Jan. 1 that year. In the 30-second bit Gorbachev was seen as implying capitalism was better than communism because it makes luxuries like Pizza Hut pizza available.</p> | The world via Pizza Hut | false | https://pri.org/stories/2012-08-08/world-pizza-hut | 2012-08-08 | 3left-center
| The world via Pizza Hut
<p>America exports products all over the world, and often has no idea how those products will assimilate into different cultures.</p>
<p>The latest case? Pizza.</p>
<p>In Pakistan, Pizza Hut advertised an all-you-can-eat buffet to those fasting for Ramadan, but then&#160; <a href="" type="external">withdrew the offer</a>, enraging not a few hungry Pakistanis.</p>
<p>After this news broke today, GlobalPost wondered (with all its global-ness) what it would be like to see the world through the eyes of Pizza Hut.</p>
<p>The results were surprising.</p>
<p>Here's a collection of photos, with captions explaining Pizza Hut's uneasy history with globalization.</p>
<p />
<p>Pakistani fire-fighters extinguish a burning Pizza Hut after an angry mob set it on fire in Karachi on July 15, 2006. Protestors torched the restaurant, gas stations and a dozen cars after the funeral of Shiite cleric, Hassan Turabi, who was killed in a suicide bombing the previous day. (Photo by Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images).</p>
<p />
<p>Delivery boys attend an opening ceremony for a Pizza Hut delivery service on Jan. 18, 2007 in Nanjing, China. Pizza Hut has 37 stores in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Nanjing. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)</p>
<p />
<p>A Pizza Hut employee looks from a window broken during an anti-globalization protest on Sept. 12, 2003, in Cancun. Demonstrators, protesting the fifth World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference, claimed the WTO benefits the rich and not the poor. (Luis Acosta AFP/Getty Images).</p>
<p />
<p>Long lines formed outside Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut in Nepal&#160;on Nov. 25, 2009. Nepal's first international fast-food restaurants opened in the capital Kathmandu on that day, reflecting the country's cautious attempts to attract more investment from Western companies. (Subel Bhandari AFP/Getty Images).</p>
<p />
<p>A US soldier eats Pizza Hut pizza at&#160;Talil&#160;military base near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq on Dec. 1, 2003. Pizza Hut was one of several American restaurant chains that served troops at US military bases in Iraq.</p>
<p />
<p>Pedestrians pass a Dunkin' Donuts and Pizza Hut in Brooklyn, NY. On July 2006, New York City Council member Joel Rivera proposed legislation that would limit the number of fast food restaurants in the city (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)</p>
<p />
<p>On Dec. 23 1997, the last Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev shared Pizza Hut pizza with his granddaughter Anastasia. This picture is from a commercial shown on Russian TV on Jan. 1 that year. In the 30-second bit Gorbachev was seen as implying capitalism was better than communism because it makes luxuries like Pizza Hut pizza available.</p> | 896 |
<p />
<p>On Friday, the Washington Free Beacon reported that Hillary Clinton signed a nondisclosure agreement that laid out criminal penalties for “any unauthorized disclosure” of classified information.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://freebeacon.com/politics/clinton-signed-nda-laying-out-criminal-penalties-for-mishandling-of-classified-info/" type="external">Washington Free Beacon</a> said:</p>
<p>Experts have guessed that Clinton signed such an agreement, but a copy of her specific contract, obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute through an open records request and shared with the Washington Free Beacon, reveals for the first time the exact language of the NDA.</p>
<p>“I have been advised that the unauthorized disclosure, unauthorized retention, or negligent handling of SCI by me could cause irreparable injury to the United States or be used to advantage by a foreign nation,” the agreement states.</p>
<p>But it seems that there may be an effort underway to cover up what can only be described as another major Clinton scandal.</p>
<p><a href="http://lidblog.com/lexisnexis-search-shows-mainstream-media-covering-up-hillary-clinton-scandal/" type="external">Jeffrey Dunetz</a> wrote:</p>
<p>On Sunday morning, I ran the following Lexis/Nexis searches to see if Markay’s big story receive any media coverage, to make sure nothing was missed the search was run from the day before the Free Beacon story through Sunday morning.</p>
<p>Guess what?&#160; Dunetz added:</p>
<p>Not one of the above revealed coverage&#160;of the huge Free Beacon story. &#160;Lexis/Nexis does sometimes miss things, but even if one or two items were missed– if the story received the widespread coverage&#160;it&#160;deserved&#160;more than a few examples would show up.</p>
<p>In other words, the so-called “mainstream media,” better known here as the “ <a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/yes-virginia-there-is-a-democrat-media-complex" type="external">Democrat-media complex</a>,” appears to be covering the scandal up.&#160; Meanwhile, operatives of the complex are going bananas looking for anything they can find in Dr. Ben Carson’s past…</p>
<p>“The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the NDA,” the Free Beacon added.</p>
<p>Related:</p>
<p>If you haven’t checked out and liked our <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ConservativeFiringLine?fref=ts" type="external">Facebook</a> page, please go <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ConservativeFiringLine?fref=ts" type="external">here</a> and do so.</p> | Is the mainstream media covering up another major Clinton scandal? | true | http://conservativefiringline.com/is-the-mainstream-media-covering-up-another-major-clinton-scandal/ | 2015-11-08 | 0right
| Is the mainstream media covering up another major Clinton scandal?
<p />
<p>On Friday, the Washington Free Beacon reported that Hillary Clinton signed a nondisclosure agreement that laid out criminal penalties for “any unauthorized disclosure” of classified information.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://freebeacon.com/politics/clinton-signed-nda-laying-out-criminal-penalties-for-mishandling-of-classified-info/" type="external">Washington Free Beacon</a> said:</p>
<p>Experts have guessed that Clinton signed such an agreement, but a copy of her specific contract, obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute through an open records request and shared with the Washington Free Beacon, reveals for the first time the exact language of the NDA.</p>
<p>“I have been advised that the unauthorized disclosure, unauthorized retention, or negligent handling of SCI by me could cause irreparable injury to the United States or be used to advantage by a foreign nation,” the agreement states.</p>
<p>But it seems that there may be an effort underway to cover up what can only be described as another major Clinton scandal.</p>
<p><a href="http://lidblog.com/lexisnexis-search-shows-mainstream-media-covering-up-hillary-clinton-scandal/" type="external">Jeffrey Dunetz</a> wrote:</p>
<p>On Sunday morning, I ran the following Lexis/Nexis searches to see if Markay’s big story receive any media coverage, to make sure nothing was missed the search was run from the day before the Free Beacon story through Sunday morning.</p>
<p>Guess what?&#160; Dunetz added:</p>
<p>Not one of the above revealed coverage&#160;of the huge Free Beacon story. &#160;Lexis/Nexis does sometimes miss things, but even if one or two items were missed– if the story received the widespread coverage&#160;it&#160;deserved&#160;more than a few examples would show up.</p>
<p>In other words, the so-called “mainstream media,” better known here as the “ <a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/yes-virginia-there-is-a-democrat-media-complex" type="external">Democrat-media complex</a>,” appears to be covering the scandal up.&#160; Meanwhile, operatives of the complex are going bananas looking for anything they can find in Dr. Ben Carson’s past…</p>
<p>“The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the NDA,” the Free Beacon added.</p>
<p>Related:</p>
<p>If you haven’t checked out and liked our <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ConservativeFiringLine?fref=ts" type="external">Facebook</a> page, please go <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ConservativeFiringLine?fref=ts" type="external">here</a> and do so.</p> | 897 |
<p>RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — In the wake of a tied contest and other issues in last fall's elections, Republican leaders in the General Assembly announced Thursday that they will form a panel to address such situations at the polls in the future.</p>
<p>"There were numerous questions raised during the 2017 elections," said House Speaker Kirk Cox, who made the announcement alongside Senate Majority Leader Thomas Norment. "This subcommittee will have the ability to broadly review these questions and determine what, if any, steps should be taken."</p>
<p>Cox and Norment said the joint subcommittee will deal with concerns such as absentee ballots, the assignment of voters in split precincts and recount law and procedures.</p>
<p>"These issues are not about who wins or loses elections but about the confidence of the public in our elections," Norment said. "We never go through an election without a contentious result in a closely fought contest. Citizens expect us to protect and ensure the integrity of the process."</p>
<p>The subcommittee will be co-chaired by two Republicans - Del. Mark Cole of Spotsylvania County and Sen. Jill Vogel of Fauquier County. Cole chairs the House Privileges and Elections Committee, and Vogel chairs the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee.</p>
<p>"We need to examine these issues comprehensively, using a process that takes all viewpoints into account," Vogel said.</p>
<p>The announcement did not include how many Democrats would be on the subcommittee. Republicans hold a slim majority in both the House and Senate.</p>
<p>Some Democrats have their own ideas how to address the election issues. Backed by the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, Del. Marcia Price, D-Newport News, introduced a bill that called for a special election in the case of a tie vote.</p>
<p>A House subcommittee killed that proposal, HB 1581, on a 4-2 vote early Thursday morning. The panel was split along party lines, with Republicans in favoring of killing the measure and Democrats against.</p>
<p>This story was produced by Virginia Commonwealth University's Capital News Service.</p>
<p>RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — In the wake of a tied contest and other issues in last fall's elections, Republican leaders in the General Assembly announced Thursday that they will form a panel to address such situations at the polls in the future.</p>
<p>"There were numerous questions raised during the 2017 elections," said House Speaker Kirk Cox, who made the announcement alongside Senate Majority Leader Thomas Norment. "This subcommittee will have the ability to broadly review these questions and determine what, if any, steps should be taken."</p>
<p>Cox and Norment said the joint subcommittee will deal with concerns such as absentee ballots, the assignment of voters in split precincts and recount law and procedures.</p>
<p>"These issues are not about who wins or loses elections but about the confidence of the public in our elections," Norment said. "We never go through an election without a contentious result in a closely fought contest. Citizens expect us to protect and ensure the integrity of the process."</p>
<p>The subcommittee will be co-chaired by two Republicans - Del. Mark Cole of Spotsylvania County and Sen. Jill Vogel of Fauquier County. Cole chairs the House Privileges and Elections Committee, and Vogel chairs the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee.</p>
<p>"We need to examine these issues comprehensively, using a process that takes all viewpoints into account," Vogel said.</p>
<p>The announcement did not include how many Democrats would be on the subcommittee. Republicans hold a slim majority in both the House and Senate.</p>
<p>Some Democrats have their own ideas how to address the election issues. Backed by the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, Del. Marcia Price, D-Newport News, introduced a bill that called for a special election in the case of a tie vote.</p>
<p>A House subcommittee killed that proposal, HB 1581, on a 4-2 vote early Thursday morning. The panel was split along party lines, with Republicans in favoring of killing the measure and Democrats against.</p>
<p>This story was produced by Virginia Commonwealth University's Capital News Service.</p> | Virginia Republicans announce election review panel | false | https://apnews.com/amp/809fd6e73735404884d643a766af8325 | 2018-01-25 | 2least
| Virginia Republicans announce election review panel
<p>RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — In the wake of a tied contest and other issues in last fall's elections, Republican leaders in the General Assembly announced Thursday that they will form a panel to address such situations at the polls in the future.</p>
<p>"There were numerous questions raised during the 2017 elections," said House Speaker Kirk Cox, who made the announcement alongside Senate Majority Leader Thomas Norment. "This subcommittee will have the ability to broadly review these questions and determine what, if any, steps should be taken."</p>
<p>Cox and Norment said the joint subcommittee will deal with concerns such as absentee ballots, the assignment of voters in split precincts and recount law and procedures.</p>
<p>"These issues are not about who wins or loses elections but about the confidence of the public in our elections," Norment said. "We never go through an election without a contentious result in a closely fought contest. Citizens expect us to protect and ensure the integrity of the process."</p>
<p>The subcommittee will be co-chaired by two Republicans - Del. Mark Cole of Spotsylvania County and Sen. Jill Vogel of Fauquier County. Cole chairs the House Privileges and Elections Committee, and Vogel chairs the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee.</p>
<p>"We need to examine these issues comprehensively, using a process that takes all viewpoints into account," Vogel said.</p>
<p>The announcement did not include how many Democrats would be on the subcommittee. Republicans hold a slim majority in both the House and Senate.</p>
<p>Some Democrats have their own ideas how to address the election issues. Backed by the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, Del. Marcia Price, D-Newport News, introduced a bill that called for a special election in the case of a tie vote.</p>
<p>A House subcommittee killed that proposal, HB 1581, on a 4-2 vote early Thursday morning. The panel was split along party lines, with Republicans in favoring of killing the measure and Democrats against.</p>
<p>This story was produced by Virginia Commonwealth University's Capital News Service.</p>
<p>RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — In the wake of a tied contest and other issues in last fall's elections, Republican leaders in the General Assembly announced Thursday that they will form a panel to address such situations at the polls in the future.</p>
<p>"There were numerous questions raised during the 2017 elections," said House Speaker Kirk Cox, who made the announcement alongside Senate Majority Leader Thomas Norment. "This subcommittee will have the ability to broadly review these questions and determine what, if any, steps should be taken."</p>
<p>Cox and Norment said the joint subcommittee will deal with concerns such as absentee ballots, the assignment of voters in split precincts and recount law and procedures.</p>
<p>"These issues are not about who wins or loses elections but about the confidence of the public in our elections," Norment said. "We never go through an election without a contentious result in a closely fought contest. Citizens expect us to protect and ensure the integrity of the process."</p>
<p>The subcommittee will be co-chaired by two Republicans - Del. Mark Cole of Spotsylvania County and Sen. Jill Vogel of Fauquier County. Cole chairs the House Privileges and Elections Committee, and Vogel chairs the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee.</p>
<p>"We need to examine these issues comprehensively, using a process that takes all viewpoints into account," Vogel said.</p>
<p>The announcement did not include how many Democrats would be on the subcommittee. Republicans hold a slim majority in both the House and Senate.</p>
<p>Some Democrats have their own ideas how to address the election issues. Backed by the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, Del. Marcia Price, D-Newport News, introduced a bill that called for a special election in the case of a tie vote.</p>
<p>A House subcommittee killed that proposal, HB 1581, on a 4-2 vote early Thursday morning. The panel was split along party lines, with Republicans in favoring of killing the measure and Democrats against.</p>
<p>This story was produced by Virginia Commonwealth University's Capital News Service.</p> | 898 |
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>TransCanada is&#160; <a href="" type="internal">cancelling the Energy East pipeline</a>. Alberta Liberal MPs say they are "disappointed," but I don't believe them.</p>
<p>We just <a href="" type="internal">lost a $15.7 billion project.</a> It's a <a href="" type="internal">devastating blow</a> to the Canadian economy.</p>
<p>And if these liberal MPS actually cared about Alberta they would be outraged, mad at their own party, right?</p>
<p>Wrong.</p>
<p>Let's go through them one by one: Darshan Kang, Amarjeet Sohi, Kent Hehr and Randy Boissonneault.</p>
<p>They all say they’re so “disappointed” — but these MPs never once broke ranks with the Liberal Party to stick up for Alberta, where 204,000 people are suffering chronic unemployment.</p>
<p>They sided with their anti-oil and anti-Alberta boss against the very people who sent them to Ottawa.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Energy East: Alberta’s “disappointed” Liberal MPs side with party over constituents | true | https://therebel.media/energy_east_alberta_s_disappointed_liberal_mps_side_with_party_over_constituents | 2017-10-06 | 0right
| Energy East: Alberta’s “disappointed” Liberal MPs side with party over constituents
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>TransCanada is&#160; <a href="" type="internal">cancelling the Energy East pipeline</a>. Alberta Liberal MPs say they are "disappointed," but I don't believe them.</p>
<p>We just <a href="" type="internal">lost a $15.7 billion project.</a> It's a <a href="" type="internal">devastating blow</a> to the Canadian economy.</p>
<p>And if these liberal MPS actually cared about Alberta they would be outraged, mad at their own party, right?</p>
<p>Wrong.</p>
<p>Let's go through them one by one: Darshan Kang, Amarjeet Sohi, Kent Hehr and Randy Boissonneault.</p>
<p>They all say they’re so “disappointed” — but these MPs never once broke ranks with the Liberal Party to stick up for Alberta, where 204,000 people are suffering chronic unemployment.</p>
<p>They sided with their anti-oil and anti-Alberta boss against the very people who sent them to Ottawa.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | 899 |
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