Unnamed: 0
int64 0
20.8k
| text
stringlengths 13
143k
| label
int64 0
1
|
|---|---|---|
823 | ‘Suicide Squad’ Tops Box Office for Second Weekend - The New York TimesLOS ANGELES — anthropomorphic food. Meryl Streep as a clueless opera singer. A furry, folksy Disney dragon. Bank robbers in West Texas. It was a weekend of unusually new offerings at North American theaters, and it worked out well for Hollywood — for the most part. As expected, “Suicide Squad” (Warner) led the box office pack for a second weekend, taking in an estimated $43. 8 million, for a new domestic total of $222. 9 million, according to comScore. But the film also dropping 67 percent weekend to weekend, as its Rotten Tomatoes grade from critics caught up to it and the fanboy audience turned toward the animated “Sausage Party. ” Backed by a crackerjack marketing campaign, “Sausage Party” (Sony) collected about $33. 6 million, beating the prerelease expectations of some box office analysts and proving once again that audiences respond to original concepts. “Sausage Party,” with character voices provided by Seth Rogen and Kristen Wiig, was also relatively cheap: Sony and Annapurna Pictures split the $19 million in production expenses. “Pete’s Dragon” (Disney) was third. Ticket sales totaled $21. 5 million, a bit less than anticipated. This remake charmed most critics, but its crowd appeal was limited. Disney said on Sunday that 33 percent of the audience was under the age of 12. “Pete’s Dragon” cost about $65 million to make. Playing in less than half as many theaters, the Meryl Streep vehicle “Florence Foster Jenkins” (Paramount) began its run with $6. 6 million in ticket sales, on par with expectations for a period film aimed at older women. (Paramount said on Sunday that 97 percent of the audience was over the age of 25.) While Ms. Streep has lost some of her box office sizzle in recent years, she continues to be adored by critics, receiving strong enough reviews in this modestly budgeted film to spark early awards buzz. Also of note: “Hell or High Water” (Lionsgate and CBS Films) a $12 million Texas heist thriller that has received euphoric reviews and stars Jeff Bridges, began a slow, rollout, arriving in 32 theaters and collecting $592, 000, for a hefty average of $18, 500. | 1 |
824 | Health Insurers Plan Rate Hikes for Obamacare Exchanges - BreitbartSeveral health insurers will raise premiums by roughly 20 percent on plans sold through Obamacare exchanges. [The biggest Obamacare rate hikes will take place in Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland, which will ask for premiums on average higher than 30 percent in 2018. In Maryland, the average premium from CareFirst will rise by at least 50 percent. Oregon, North Carolina, and Maine health insurers will raise premiums by 20 percent or higher. The health insurers’ rate hikes reflect the continuing collapse of Obamacare, as many state Obamacare exchanges continue to experience insurers exiting the Obamacare exchanges. Insurers also remain concerned about President Donald Trump’s potential decision to discontinue subsidies for health insurers to lower the cost of premiums. Conservatives argue that the Obamacare subsidies amount to handouts to large health conglomerates. Rick Notter, an executive at Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan, said, “It’s still a very volatile market. There are so many uncertainties. ” Notter argues that the individual health care market continues to experience turbulence through the uncertainty that comes out of D. C. Republicans, who passed a health care bill through the House, point to insurers’ rate hikes and withdrawals from Obamacare exchanges as fundamental problems with the Affordable Care Act. “The laws of economics were in place long before today. These companies were losing hundreds of millions of dollars,” a White House official said. Sen. Tim Kaine ( ) argues that Republicans’ attempt to repeal Obamacare, as well as President Trump’s threat to remove subsidies to health insurers, created the health insurance rate hikes. Kaine said, “These actions, these statements, these inactions, this uncertainty, has created a huge set of chaos in the individual marketplace leading to instability for insurance carriers, higher premiums, and reduced competition. ” Kevin Lewis, the chief executive at Maine Community Health Options, said that its 19. 6 percent increase in 2018 arises from healthy people exiting the Obamacare markets. “It’s the classic case of people who are healthier jumping out of the market,” Lewis said. “It’s a bit of a prophecy. ” President Donald Trump, citing that two million Americans have withdrawn from their Obamacare plans since signing up in January, declared that Obamacare is in a “ . ” 2 million more people just dropped out of ObamaCare. It is in a death spiral. Obstructionist Democrats gave up, have no answer = resist! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2017, | 1 |
825 | Re: Looks Like Someone Thinks the Democrats in Ohio Are Full of ManureIn an epic demonstration of showing the that the Democrat Party if full of manure, someone took it upon themselves to dump a truckload of manure in front of the headquarters of the Warren County Democratic Party headquarters in Ohio.
The Washington Post reports :
For those who think this election season can't get crappier, we bring you to Warren County, Ohio, where a large truckload of manure was dumped in front of Warren County Democratic Party headquarters in Lebanon, about 35 miles northeast of Cincinnati.
A sheriff's deputy was the first to notice the pile and alerted office leaders of it about 8 a.m. Saturday, local party officials told The Washington Post.
Amanda Kelley with WLWT tweeted the following picture. Meanwhile today at Warren County Democratic Headquarters someone dumped a pile of manure #wlwt #Election2016 pic.twitter.com/1rYcOzGZjS
— Amanda Kelley (@AmandaWLWT) October 29, 2016
David Pepper commented: When they dump manure, we go high! One of our best performing offices, generating strong D early vote. Lesson: keep organizing while they bs pic.twitter.com/0pbrUEPG1O
— David Pepper (@DavidPepper) October 29, 2016
In 2012, something very similar occurred. A pile of manure was dumped almost in front of the headquarters in identical fashion.
"At the time, we did not have a camera system, because it kind of caught us by surprise," Bethe Goldenfield, chairwoman of the Warren County Democratic Party, said of the 2012 dump. "We didn't think something like that would happen."
This time, the act was caught on surveillance video that the Warren County Sheriff's Office is now reviewing, Goldenfield said. She did not want to elaborate on what the cameras captured because it was an open investigation, but she noted that it involved a dump truck.
"And I'm not going to jump to the conclusion that it was the same person [as in 2012], but of course that crossed my mind," Goldenfield said. "We just need to have a little more specifics, and then hopefully we'll bring the perpetrators to be accountable."
It appears to me this is something akin to the Boston Tea Party, only in this case whoever dumped the manure probably paid for it to make a political statement, one that we already know to be true and both the crimes of Barack Hussein Obama Soetoro Sobarkah and Hillary Clinton have demonstrated. That statement is that the Democrat Party is the BS party and cannot be trusted. shares | 0 |
826 | Syrian War Report – November 14, 2016: Govt Forces to Relaunch Offensive Operations inside and outside AleppoLeave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs: ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The "Live Preview" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name: | 0 |
827 | Mystery solved! So THIS is what gets Hillary Clinton to get movin’ – twitchy.com
— Liars Never Win (@liars_never_win) October 28, 2016
It’s hard not to think “frail old lady” when you think of Hillary Clinton, but today, she proved that she’s still got a little spring in her step: Reporters seeking comment on the email investigation got only a quick wave from @HillaryClinton pic.twitter.com/0m87gIOY8c
— Colleen Nelson (@ColleenMNelson) October 28, 2016 Wow! Thats the fastest #Hillary has EVER moved! Avoiding questions about James Comey and The FBI reopening the email investigation… pic.twitter.com/arLj9G7yav
— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) October 28, 2016
So, is that what it takes to get her movin’? @TimRunsHisMouth @anna12061 amazing how fast she can haul it when she's trying to avoid the press finally asking her relevant questions.
Just look at her go! @TimRunsHisMouth Suddenly got a rush of #STAMINA
— Sellrite Deals (@SellriteDeals) October 28, 2016 @TimRunsHisMouth AMAZING SHE WAS ALMOST RUNNING
— NOBODY HOME ON LI !! (@shadozmom) October 28, 2016 @TimRunsHisMouth The amazing part is that she was able to get in without help.
— Heeeere's Jonny (@jonsgardner) October 28, 2016
And look glamorous doing it. Thanks, apparently, to a photoshoot she’d wrapped up just moments earlier: It appears Clinton was doing an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot when the FBI news broke #2016 https://t.co/dofjBK6t9i
— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) October 28, 2016
Oh, how fun! Clinton delay on tarmac wasn't about the FBI, it turns out. Pool report notes that Annie Leibovitz came off after, likely had a photo shoot. pic.twitter.com/xE5pm3ITRC
— Ruby Cramer (@rubycramer) October 28, 2016 The American Empire in its twilight glow: https://t.co/jl0HSu38uG | 0 |
828 | Senate Narrowly Passes Rollback of Obama-Era ‘Auto-I.R.A.’ Rule - The New York TimesWASHINGTON — By a single vote, the Senate gave final approval on Thursday to a measure to block cities and counties from organizing retirement savings accounts for workers who have no access to plans. The vote reverses a Labor Department rule that allows local governments to automatically enroll workers in retirement plans unless they opt out. The vote was a startling reversal for many Republicans, who have argued for much of their careers that overzealous federal regulators were trampling the rights of state and local governments. In this case, congressional Republicans protested that President Barack Obama’s rules gave local regulators too much leeway. Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, a sponsor of the legislation, called it “unconscionable” that the Obama administration’s rule was denying workers federal consumer protections. The White House has indicated that President Trump will sign the measure into law. New York City, Philadelphia and Seattle all have considered retirement plans taking advantage of the Labor Department rule — what they call a “safe harbor” — that Republicans seek to reverse. Five states have also passed legislation permitted by a similar Labor Department regulation, which gives the states the power to appoint private money managers who would oversee portable savings accounts for workers. The Senate is expected to soon take up a separate House resolution rolling back that state rule. The consequences of the Senate’s votes could be significant. The Labor Department rules were designed to give around 13 million people in the five states access to retirement accounts, out of 55 million nationwide who lack retirement programs. Among those affected most by the measure passed on Thursday will be small business owners and employees who have blanched at the cost of conventional 401( k) plans or pensions. In a joint statement, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, the City Council president, the city’s public advocate and a council member said that they were “deeply disappointed that Congress has voted to overturn the Department of Labor rule providing a safe harbor for us to create retirement savings plans for private sector employees. ” “This vote does little more than block them — the majority of whom are women and people of color — from securing their futures,” the statement said. Thursday’s vote was only the latest regulation that Republicans have rolled back this year using the 1996 Congressional Review Act, which had hardly been used in the two decades before Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Seven rollbacks have been signed into law by President Trump, with several others awaiting his signature. But in this case, Republicans were replacing local regulatory authority with federal control — taking up a cause of investment banks that fear competition from state and local governments. The Obama Labor Department’s rule actually gave states more autonomy in reaching contracts with financial managers to handle the savings accounts. State governments could be administrative conduits, keeping records while passing on funding to private consultants, who would manage the money in place of state treasurers. “Too many states have made questionable decisions when it comes to managing retirement funding,” said Representative Phil Roe, Republican of Tennessee. Republicans maintained that retirement savings accounts free of federal consumer protection rules had an unfair advantage over plans from providers. Under the law that governs pensions, employers must show that they are managing their retirement programs on behalf of their workers, not the investment funds — a provision some Republicans argued that state and city plans could skirt. In fact, many states that have passed legislation to take advantage of the Labor Department regulation have included a similar “fiduciary responsibility” requirement in their programs. And Congress has acted to reverse an Obama administration regulation that demanded that retirement investment advisers make their clients’ interests paramount. Senators in both parties lobbed comments on the issue on the Senate floor Wednesday. Critical of what he called the “competitive advantage” that the rules might give cities and states over retirement offerings, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said the Labor Department statutes spelled “more government at the expense of the private sector. ” “These retirement savings regulations are a classic case of the whole being worse than the sum of its parts,” he said. Both of Oregon’s senators, who are Democrats, spoke on behalf of the Labor Department rules, which would protect their state’s “OregonSaves” retirement accounts, scheduled to open in July. “I hear all the time in here about states’ rights. I hear all the time about how states are the place for experimentation to see what works and what doesn’t work,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon said. “This Congressional Review Act proposal says the opposite. It says, ‘Let’s stomp out experiments by our municipalities. ’” Some liberals see the fight over the House bills as a proxy battle that Republicans were eager to wage on behalf of the financial services industry. “They’re ignoring the fact that the idea of the . R. A. came out of the Heritage Foundation and Brookings,” said Joshua Gotbaum, chairman of the board responsible for setting up Maryland’s version of the plan, referring to a conservative research institution and the more liberal Brookings Institution. “It’s supported by the Republican state treasurer of Utah and Indiana — real Republican states. ” “This is fundamentally a Republican idea,” Mr. Gotbaum added. David John, a policy adviser at AARP and the deputy director of the Brookings Institution’s Retirement Security Project, wrote papers defending the . R. A. concept while he was at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “This is a problem that could be just as easily dealt with at the federal level. But it’s not being dealt with. Rather than doing nothing, states are stepping in and recognizing that it’s in their financial interests to act and build these systems,” Mr. John said. “With the plans, we’re seeing for the first time hundreds of thousands of people who have access to these from the day they go to work to the day they retire,” he added. Mr. Gotbaum expressed confidence in states’ ability to defend their prerogatives. “There’s going to be a lawsuit, and the lawsuit is going to decide this,” he said of the next step for them. “They’re going to go ahead no matter what. ” | 1 |
829 | In Cramped and Costly Bay Area, Cries to Build, Baby, Build - The New York TimesSan Francisco does not have enough places to live. Sonja Trauss, a local activist, thinks the city should tackle this problem by building more housing. This may not sound like a controversial idea. But this is San Francisco. Ms. Trauss is a anarchist and the head of the SF Bay Area Renters’ Federation, an upstart political group that is pushing for more development. Its platform is simple: Members want San Francisco and its suburbs to build more of every kind of housing. More subsidized affordable housing, more rentals, more condominiums. Ms. Trauss supports all of it so long as it is built tall, and soon. “You have to support building, even when it’s a type of building you hate,” she said. “Is it ugly? Get over yourself. Is it housing? Get over yourself. Is it luxury housing? Get over yourself. We really need everything right now. ” Her group consists of a mailing list and a few dozen members — most of them young professionals who work in the technology industry — who speak out at government meetings and protest against the protesters who fight new development. While only two years old, Ms. Trauss’s Renters’ Federation has blazed onto the political scene with youth and bombast and by employing guerrilla tactics that others are too polite to try. In January, for instance, she hired a lawyer to go around suing suburbs for not building enough. The organization also inflamed Sierra Club volunteers in San Francisco by trying to elect its own candidate to the environmental group’s executive committee. That effort failed, and last week her candidate, Donald Dewsnup, was arrested and charged with voter fraud — a move that Ms. Trauss claims is political retaliation. “There’s no other explanation for why the district attorney of a major city would investigate and charge one person for registering at an inaccurate address,” she said. In an interview, Mr. Dewsnup said he was homeless and simply used an address near the place where he was sleeping at the time. Across the country, a reversal in urban flight has ignited debates over gentrification, wealth, generational change and the definition of the modern city. It’s a familiar battle in suburbs, where homeowners are an American archetype. In San Francisco, though, things get weird. Here the tech boom is clashing with tough development laws and resentment from established residents who want to choke off growth to prevent further change. Ms. Trauss is the result: a new generation of activist whose bent is the opposite of the San Francisco stereotypes — the lefties, the aging hippies and tolerance all around. Ms. Trauss’s cause, more or less, is to make life easier for real estate developers by rolling back zoning regulations and environmental rules. Her opponents are a generally older group of progressives who worry that an influx of corporate techies is turning a city that nurtured the Beat Generation into a gilded resort for the rich. Those groups oppose almost every new development except those reserved for subsidized affordable housing. But for many young professionals who are too rich to qualify for affordable housing, but not rich enough to afford $ rents, this is the problem. Adding to the strangeness is that the typical San Francisco progressive and the typical member of Ms. Trauss’s group are likely to have identical positions on every liberal touchstone, like marriage and climate change, and yet they have become bitter enemies on one very big issue: housing. “We have liberal Democrats, and very liberal Democrats, and yet we are as polarized as the rest of the country,” said Tim Colen, executive director of the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition. Ms. Trauss is smart and energetic and unpolished. She called her group the Bay Area Renters’ Federation because “federation” reminds her of “Star Trek” and because her roommate thought it would be funny if her group’s acronym spelled “BARF. ” Jennifer Fieber, policy director at the San Francisco Tenants Union, likened the group to the Tea Party, because it lacks nuance (“Just build! ”) and can be rude. BARF’s public message board does in fact veer into strident libertarianism and juvenile ribbings, like pictures that equate its opponents to Adolf Hitler. This might make it tempting to dismiss Ms. Trauss as just another colorful activist in a place where activism is a local sport. But the anger she has tapped into is real, reflecting a generational break that pits cranky homeowners and the San Francisco political establishment against a cast of newcomers who are demanding the region make room for them, too. To befriend a certain kind of techie on social media is to be bombarded with angry Facebook posts and retweeted news articles about how San Francisco doesn’t build enough housing or how it is also the suburbs’ fault and isn’t Seattle great? Every few weeks, when a company like Zillow puts out a new price report, both sides hold up the numbers as an example of how San Francisco has failed the middle class. Zillow puts the city’s median home price at $1. 1 million, neck and neck with Manhattan. The region’s rent, at $3, 500 a month for an average apartment, is the highest in the nation. Today Ms. Trauss’s group is one of several organizations (GrowSF and East Bay Forward are others) that represent a kind of “Yimby” party, built on the frustrations of young professionals who feel priced out of the Bay Area. BARF has won the backing of technology millionaires — Jeremy Stoppelman, and chief executive of Yelp, is the group’s largest individual donor — and the encouragement of local politicians. “BARF is an important voice in this housing debate, and that is the voice of young people who are asking the question: ‘What is my future in this city? ’” said Scott Wiener, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. “And you can agree or disagree with them, but they have activated a new generation of activists. ” The group’s platform may be politically contentious, but economically speaking, it is anything but controversial. The Bay Area was expensive even before the tech boom. And the supply of new projects, while increasing, remains decades behind population growth. This extends from Silicon Valley suburbs like Palo Alto, whose ratio of jobs to housing units is triple the median level in the Bay Area, to San Francisco, which despite an increase in new housing has lagged behind job growth, according to the Association of Bay Area Governments. Much of San Francisco’s progressive establishment feels the city is building too much housing. Some go so far as to argue that the appetite for real estate here is so high that rules don’t really apply. To get prices down, “You’d have to, like, build another city on top of the city,” said David Campos, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He thinks the city should focus the vast majority of future development on affordable housing limited to people making well below the city’s median income. This thinking is at odds with a February report on housing prices from the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, which said underdevelopment was the primary cause of the high prices that afflicted cities throughout the coastal part of the state, especially in the Bay Area. “Many housing programs — vouchers, rent control and inclusionary housing — attempt to make housing more affordable without increasing the overall supply,” the report said. “This approach does very little to address the underlying cause of California’s high housing costs: a housing shortage. ” Ms. Trauss, 34, is a born activist from Philadelphia whose father is a lawyer who defends homeowners against foreclosure. She moved to the Bay Area in 2011, shortly after getting her master’s degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis, and taught math at local community colleges. She intended to live in San Francisco, but settled across the bay in Oakland. Like nearly everyone who moves to the Bay Area, Ms. Trauss spent an inordinate amount of time complaining about rent. In 2014, after reading a history of Bay Area housing politics written by Cutler, a reporter at the TechCrunch news site who has gone on to help found a called Roam, Ms. Trauss started writing letters to the San Francisco Planning Commission in support of any new project with more than 30 units. She graduated from writing letters to attending planning meetings, and, after registering the SFBARF website, started recruiting members by finding voices on sites like Reddit and the comments sections of local news articles. “People say testifying doesn’t do anything — but guess what definitely doesn’t do anything: giving a dumb speech to your friend at the bar,” she said. Today BARF is her job, allowing her the financial wherewithal to become one of those strangely persistent people who speak regularly at City Hall. To an outside observer, this can feel like watching an obscure and sport. This is a town with an app for everything and where people get fussy when an Uber driver takes more than five minutes to arrive. City Hall, with its architecture and wait times, can feel like an anachronism. Ms. Trauss may be a millennial, but she loves it. “Even in this modern era of, whatever, the Internet and people like interacting in a place that’s no place at all, City Hall is still a center,” she said. One recent afternoon, she spent an hour on the hard wooden benches in the chamber of the Board of Supervisors. She was there to make a public comment in favor of a proposal to streamline the permitting process for some projects. Three days later she was back, this time to support a “density bonus” — a proposal to let developers build taller buildings in exchange for including more affordable housing as well. When she arrived, Mr. Campos, from the Board of Supervisors, was blasting the proposal from the City Hall steps, surrounded by 70 or so supporters. Ms. Trauss and another member of her group stood opposite and held up signs that said “Stop Affordable Housing. ” This was meant to be ironic. Their point was that Mr. Campos was opposing legislation that would create more housing — but also more affordable housing. Nobody seemed to get it, so Ms. Trauss went inside City Hall to add her name to a list of people making public comments before the planning commission. Her chance to speak would be hours away, so she trekked around City Hall, past bronze busts and wedding parties, in search of a quiet place to take a lunch break. She was joined by a man whose legal name is Starchild. Starchild is the sort of Francisco character you end up making friends with if you spend enough time at City Hall. He works nights as an “erotic service provider. ” Asked if this meant he was a prostitute, he said, “‘Prostitute’ is O. K. as long as it’s said in a respectful way. ” Starchild spends his days campaigning for libertarian causes and running doomed campaigns for office. The two ate on a marble ledge and discussed police brutality, pretrial detention and whether it was possible for an anarchist to be in favor of soda taxes. A short while later, Ms. Trauss headed back to a waiting room, where she took a selfie for the @SFyimby Twitter account and began a wait for a few more minutes at the microphone. “This is my life,” she whispered. “It’s ridiculous. ” Many longtime San Franciscans view groups like BARF as yet another example of how the technology industry is robbing San Francisco of its San . Far from the hippies of the 1960s, many of today’s migrants lean libertarian — drawn by dreams or to work for the likes of Google or Apple, two of the world’s most valuable companies. They tend to share a belief, either idealistically or naïvely, depending on who is judging, that corporations can be a force for social good and change. But BARF members are so about housing that they can be hard to label politically. They view San Francisco progressives as, in fact, fundamentally conservative. That is because, to the group members at least, progressive positions on housing seem less about building the city and more about keeping people like them out. On a drizzly Sunday in December, Ms. Trauss hosted the SF YIMBYParty Congress, a gathering of groups held at a Market Street space full of touches like mismatched furniture, a foosball table and lots of white men. Toward the beginning, a debate broke out about whether they should call themselves moderates to distinguish themselves from progressives. Ms. Trauss joked that she liked moderate because you can shorten it to mod, and mod sounds cool. Mr. Wiener, the supervisor, disagreed, noting that in San Francisco, a moderate Democrat “might have a Bernie Sanders sticker on their car. ” One man, who seemed exasperated by the discussion and the idea of using his Sunday to talk about politics, said, with more colorful language, that he did not give a hoot about progressives versus moderates — he just wanted some darn housing. The tech boom takes much of the blame for soaring housing prices. But the movement has less to do with tech as an industry, and everything to do with newcomers as a class. Brian Hanlon, a federation member who regularly attends Board of Supervisors meetings with Ms. Trauss, has a day job doing administrative work for the United States Forest Service. Two years ago, when he started worrying that his claim to an $ room in a apartment might be in jeopardy, he reacted in classic San Francisco fashion. He started marching in protests next to people beating drums and signs that said things like “Tech = Death. ” But he quickly broke ranks. Many of his fellow protesters also opposed building new apartments — putting him at odds with them. “They want to be on the side of tenants, but they don’t have any real plan for how do we become a welcoming metropolitan area for new people who don’t have money,” Mr. Hanlon said. “Their plans are only to allow current incumbent renters to stay in their place, presumably until they die and some rich person comes along. ” The progressive movement has played a guiding role in creating the quirky and picturesque San Francisco that many people love today. Progressives battled plans to crisscross the city with freeways and opposed urban renewal programs that destroyed black neighborhoods. They have fought for, and won, protections and funding for affordable housing, along with various amenities that many newcomers take for granted. The question is how to handle a demographic reversal in which cities across the country have regained population following years of “white flight” to the suburbs. After losing population for two decades through the 1970s, San Francisco resumed growth in the ’80s and has only accelerated from there. “There’s that book, ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas? ’” said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of SPUR, an urban policy research organization. “What’s the matter with San Francisco? Why is it that in a city that’s renters we have adopted a housing policy that is horrible for renters?” The challenge for groups like BARF is that, politically speaking, they have a lot of persuading to do. The talk might sound great to a recent Stanford graduate, but San Francisco is in a moment when corporate buses are regarded as instruments of a tech invasion bent on turning people who can’t code into a underclass. The idea that everything would be better if only the city threw up more tall buildings is a hard sell. Of the 11 propositions on San Francisco’s ballot in November, seven were either directly or indirectly related to high home prices and the influence of the technology industry. Michael Hankinson, a Harvard Ph. D. candidate who is studying and housing prices, surveyed voters for his dissertation and found renters skeptical that new development would do anything other than raise prices. For instance, a recent proposal to temporarily stop development in the city’s Mission District, a gentrifying neighborhood popular with technology workers, failed citywide. But Mr. Hankinson found that a majority of renters favored it because they did not think that new development would do anything for them — and feared that it might, somehow, get them evicted. “BARF has to convince renters that neighborhood change will benefit them in the long run,” he said. Today, when eviction is a hot party topic, most renters are unwilling to take that gamble. So Ms. Trauss is taking her campaign to the courts. In December she sued the city of Lafayette, Calif. an East Bay bedroom community, after it took a parcel that had been set aside for apartments and office buildings and rezoned it for homes instead. She wrote the petition herself, saying the move violated the California Housing Accountability Act, a 1980s law and “ ” statute that limits cities’ ability to downsize housing developments. Recently, she hired a lawyer to litigate the case. Asked about Ms. Trauss’s lawsuit, Steven Falk, Lafayette’s city manager, said the city actually faced another lawsuit over the same development. The second group is suing, he said, because they think it is too big. | 1 |
830 | Championing Optimism, Obama Hails Clinton as His Political Heir - The New York TimesPHILADELPHIA — President Obama delivered a stirring valedictory address at the Democratic convention Wednesday night, hailing Hillary Clinton as his rightful political heir and the party’s best hope to protect democracy from “homegrown demagogues” like the Republican Donald J. Trump. Taking the stage to rapturous roars of “We love you” and “Yes we can,” Mr. Obama acknowledged that Democrats were still divided after a bruising nomination fight and that Mrs. Clinton had made “mistakes. ” But he vouched passionately for Mrs. Clinton as a trusted and reliable ally not just for him but for all Americans who need a fighter to improve their lives and keep them safe. “She’s been there for us — even if we haven’t always noticed — and if you’re serious about our democracy, you can’t afford to stay home just because she might not align with you on every issue,” Mr. Obama said, an explicit appeal to supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders who continue to resist Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Obama offered an optimistic portrait of America and a strong defense of his policies, but also unleashed by far his most ferocious attack yet on Mr. Trump, even portraying the Republican nominee as a threat to the country. “That’s why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end,” he said. In the most unmistakable declaration yet by Mrs. Clinton that she is effectively seeking Mr. Obama’s third term, she strolled on stage after his speech and embraced the president as the delegates roared. It was a tableau of continuity and a vivid illustration of how dependent the two former rivals are on each other now. Mr. Obama also used his own remarks to try to drive a wedge between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Republican voters. “It wasn’t particularly Republican and it sure wasn’t conservative,” he said of last week’s Republican convention. “There were no serious solutions to pressing problems. Just the fanning of resentments and blame and hate and anger. ” The president’s contempt for Mr. Trump took on a personal dimension as well when he recalled his grandparents from Kansas and said, “I don’t know if they had their birth certificates” — a reference to Mr. Trump’s leadership of the birther movement that raised questions about Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Wednesday signaled a transition for the party. Emotion suffused the convention hall: Some delegates, in tears, were not ready to say goodbye to Mr. Obama yet, and others — particularly some liberals and young Democrats — were not ready to accept Mrs. Clinton as their new leader. As she prepares to give her nomination acceptance speech on Thursday night, the left wing of the party still remains divided, while many Republicans appear ready to fall in line behind Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama’s speech, a passionate defense of Mrs. Clinton’s vision and character, did not itself herald the start of new political era. Mrs. Clinton has wrapped herself in the cloth of the Obama presidency rather than break with him and offer a new path, like Vice President George Bush’s promise of “a kinder, gentler nation” in 1988 after the Reagan years. Instead, the lineup on Wednesday reflected a party attempting to rally its own partisans and attract Republicans with blunt warnings that, whatever they may think about the new Democratic they must all do their duty to thwart Mr. Trump. And the convention speeches were full of appeals, as Senator Tim Kaine, the Democratic nominee, offered Republicans “a home” if they felt Mr. Trump did not represent “the party of Lincoln,” and former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York urged independents to vote for “a sane, competent person” — Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Kaine, a senator and a former governor of Virginia, introduced himself to his largest television audience yet as a product of a Jesuit high school who embraced its motto — “Men for others” — who held close to his faith while trying to help Americans as a civil rights lawyer and then as a political leader whose most searing experience was the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007. He occasionally shifted to Spanish, which he speaks fluently, and led the audience in a chant of an Obama political slogan, “Sí se puede” (“Yes you can”). Mr. Kaine paid brief tribute to Republicans and also hailed Senator Bernie Sanders, whom Mrs. Clinton defeated for the nomination, at several points. Yet some Sanders supporters were not willing to fall behind the new nominee. As Mr. Kaine spoke, jeers broke out from the Utah delegation attacking the Partnership trade deal that the senator has supported and Mr. Sanders is against — and Mrs. Clinton has shifted to oppose. Placards denouncing the trade deal quickly spread through the hall, including a couple of dozen in the California delegation. Leon E. Panetta, the former defense secretary and C. I. A. chief, spoke early in the evening and was repeatedly interrupted with shouts of “No more war!” from several state delegations that favored the candidacy of Mr. Sanders during the presidential race. As the heckling persisted, Mrs. Clinton’s supporters took up a heard more often at the Republican convention to drown out the jeers: “U. S. A. U. S. A. !” Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. also turned to images and language more commonly used by the right to depict Mr. Trump as denigrating American greatness, invoking patriotism and saluting military service. Before Mr. Obama even entered the convention hall here, the audience was clearly as devoted to him as they were excited for Mrs. Clinton. The first lady, Michelle Obama, was received with adoration and her speech on Monday was the most moment of the first days of the convention. And even a quick flash of Mr. Obama’s face, amid a procession of past presidents on the convention screen Tuesday, brought a burst of applause. The president is also the strongest adhesive holding Democrats together after five months of bitterly fought primary and caucus contests between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders of Vermont. According to a New York poll earlier this month, 82 percent of Sanders supporters approved of Mr. Obama’s job performance. After two nights of convention speeches focused on Mrs. Clinton’s virtues and attempts to make peace with Sanders supporters, Clinton campaign officials sought to address the threat of radical Islamists — an omission early on that Republicans had criticized. And in a shift from only about a decade ago when they largely avoided the issue, Democrats used much of Wednesday to advocate gun control, sending relatives of those murdered in Newtown, Conn. and Charleston, S. C. as well as a former congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, to recount their stories. But virtually all of the anticipation on Wednesday surrounded Mr. Obama and the symbolic passing of the torch to Mrs. Clinton after she became the party’s nominee on Tuesday night. Mr. Obama’s resounding endorsement of his rival was the final consummation of a political alliance over a decade in the making, since Mrs. Clinton flew to Chicago in 2004 to raise money for a state senator and discovered a phenom. Back then he was the one who benefited from the imprimatur of a political star, and her support continued to prove critical over the years. After he won the presidential nomination that she expected to be hers in 2008, Mrs. Clinton put aside her resentment and helped him unify a divided Democratic Party. And later that year, she again came to his aid by agreeing to become his first secretary of state. Mr. Obama is the one riding high now, his approval rating over 50 percent. And his image is only enhanced as voters view him, in his final months as president, through the prism of a race to replace him that features two deeply unpopular candidates. While acknowledging that Mrs. Clinton has “her share of critics’’ on the right and the left, the president sought to transfer his prestige and political appeal to his long ago rival. “Tonight, I ask you to do for Hillary Clinton what you did for me,” he said. “I ask you to carry her the same way you carried me. ” “And if you’re serious about our democracy, you can’t afford to stay home just because she might not align with you on every issue. You’ve got to get in the arena with her, because democracy isn’t a spectator sport. America isn’t about ‘Yes he will.’ It’s about ‘Yes we can. ’” | 1 |
831 | Fiona Apple Releases a Trump Protest Chant - The New York TimesOn Saturday, hundreds of thousands of women are expected to march in Washington after Donald J. Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. This past Tuesday, the Fiona Apple gave those preparing to protest a signature chant. The chant is on a new track called “Tiny Hands,” which repeats 10 words recorded by Ms. Apple on a phone: “We don’t want your tiny near our underpants. ” The track includes a sample of Mr. Trump’s comments from a 2005 leaked “Access Hollywood” recording with Billy Bush in which he brags of grabbing of women’s body parts whenever he wanted. The track was produced by the composer Michael Whalen, who released the song on SoundCloud, where some commenters did not think that the chant went far enough. ”A reference to male rhetoric?” said one SoundCloud critic, arguing that Ms. Apple should have included more substantive complaints. “If that’s the worst we can complain about him, then maybe we should have all voted for him. ” Mr. Whalen responded that Ms. Apple’s goal had simply been to create a chant for the march. A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. Online, the song met with a scattering of criticisms from Mr. Trump’s supporters, who pointed out that those who normally denounce bullying were embracing derogatory and demeaning language about the future president. Ms. Apple, who began her music career in the 1990s, has become something of a recluse. A New York Magazine article from 2012 labeled Ms. Apple a “musical hermit. ” But her albums continue to be critically acclaimed. Her last L. P. released that year, received a high aggregate score, 89, on the website Metacritic, and was her effort to date. Ms. Apple’s new song is not the first time that Mr. Trump’s comments from the incendiary recording have been repurposed by his opponents. A group of knitters united online to form “The Pussyhat Project,” dedicated to creating 1. 1 million hats for protesters to wear at the march on Saturday. “Tiny Hands” is also not the indie singer’s first protest song aimed at Mr. Trump. Last year, Ms. Apple released a Christmas tune on Tumblr that made such ferocious use of a double entendre that its title can’t be published in The New York Times. Ms. Apple has spoken publicly about being sexually assaulted at the age of 12 and has a history of airing her perspective on serious matters in her music. Accepting an MTV award for best new artist in 1997, she railed against the artificiality of the music industry, referred to Maya Angelou as an inspiration and implored her fans to think for themselves. Other artists, however, are celebrating Mr. Trump’s imminent assumption of the presidency. A relatively obscure American poet, Joseph Charles MacKenzie, wrote a poem praising the and his Scottish heritage. The poem refers to Mr. Trump as “the Domhnall,” the Scottish form of his first name. It reads in part: When crippling corruption polluted our nation And plunged our economy into stagnation, As rogues took the opulent office And plump politicians reneged on their promise, The forgotten continued to form a great crowd That defended the Domhnall, the best of MacLeod! | 1 |
832 | Susan Rice: U.S. Must Integrate LGBT Rights into Gov’t and Foreign PolicyOctober 28, 2016 Susan Rice: U.S. Must Integrate LGBT Rights into Gov’t and Foreign Policy
National Security Advisor Susan Rice told students at American University in a speech on LGBT rights Wednesday that the “United States must continue to integrate LGBT rights into our government and foreign policy,” including “creating a more diverse national security workforce.”
“This is an issue that I’m particularly passionate about, and one that President Obama has prioritized,” Rice said, “because without tapping America’s full range of races, religions, ethnicities, social and economic experiences—without embracing people of every sexual orientation and gender identity—we’re leading in a complex world with one hand tied behind our back.”
Rice, who once served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said that “whether we are talking about race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity, this fight for equal rights is what our history and values demand.” | 0 |
833 | Trump Organization Moves to Avoid Possible Conflicts of Interest - The New York TimesIn its latest effort to defuse a major public relations problem that might have loomed over Donald J. Trump’s presidency, the Trump Organization on Wednesday announced union accords at two major hotel holdings. The agreements resolve labor disputes that could have posed a conflict of interest for the and come on the heels of other similar moves in recent weeks. In November, Mr. Trump paid $25 million to settle a number of lawsuits surrounding fraud allegations at Trump University, his former education business, and this month the Trump Organization extricated itself from the management of a hotel project in Brazil, where the authorities were investigating allegations of corruption. Taken together, the moves suggest that Mr. Trump is sensitive to at least the perception that his business dealings could cast a shadow over his presidency, even if he has yet to detail how he might seek a more comprehensive solution to potential conflicts, such as outright divestment. “On the one hand, I think it’s important to acknowledge that this is meaningful, it does matter,” Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan ethics watchdog group, said of Wednesday’s agreements. “However, this piecemeal approach to dealing with conflicts is not going to deal with the bigger looming problem. ” The agreements also provide insight into Mr. Trump’s views on workers and labor unions. In contrast to the deal he helped broker at the Carrier plant in Indiana, which recently agreed to preserve about 850 jobs that it had planned to shift to Mexico, and which Mr. Trump was on hand to announce in person, the announcement of Wednesday’s deals came by way of a news release featuring statements from the Trump Organization and affiliates of the unions involved. The Trump transition team offered no comment and released no statement. One of the two labor agreements provides a union contract to workers at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, whose union the hotel had previously refused to bargain with. The second agreement eases a hurdle to unionization at a recently opened Trump hotel in Washington. The agreements reduce the probability that the National Labor Relations Board, which protects the labor rights of employees, will be called on to adjudicate disputes between workers and the Trump Organization. That possibility raised the prospect of a conflict of interest if Mr. Trump were to retain a stake in his business. As president, Mr. Trump will eventually nominate all five members of the labor board, as well as its general counsel, who typically has the final say on whether to issue formal complaints against employers. The speed of the negotiations at the hotel in Las Vegas suggested that Mr. Trump was eager to put the issue behind him before his inauguration in January, after the hotel resisted workers’ efforts to unionize there for most of the past year and a half. The hotel hired consultants who spoke with employees at mandatory meetings about the risks of unionizing, according to earlier statements from the union. In charges filed with the labor board, some workers alleged that they had been fired or suspended from their jobs because of their unionization efforts. After the successful union election last December, the hotel appealed within the labor board structure, arguing that workers had been intimidated into voting for the union. When the full board rejected its final appeal last month, the hotel appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Bethany Khan, a union representative, said the new labor agreement had come together over a few days of negotiation last week and been ratified by union members over the weekend. Under the accord, the workers will join locals for culinary workers and bartenders that are affiliated with Unite Here, a prominent national union that represents hotel workers. The two sides agreed to a contract beginning Jan. 1 and running through May 31, 2021, which follows a relatively standard template for hotels in Las Vegas by providing annual wage increases, pension and health benefits, and job protections. Under the second accord, the Trump International Hotel Washington D. C. agreed to remain neutral as workers seek to unionize under a agreement, enabling workers to simply sign authorization cards indicating that they want to unionize. The hotel will recognize the union if a majority of workers sign cards. The alternative, a election, typically occurs when the employer opposes the unionization effort, as was the case at the Las Vegas property. In a statement referring to the agreement in Washington, Eric Danziger, the chief executive of Trump Hotels, said, “We share mutual goals with the union, as we both desire to ensure outstanding jobs for the employees, while also enabling the hotel to operate successfully in a competitive environment. ” Wednesday’s agreements do not eliminate the potential for conflicts of interest involving Mr. Trump and the labor board. The board’s general counsel, whose replacement Mr. Trump will probably appoint next year, will be in a position to decide whether to issue complaints about allegations of labor rights violations, but could also leave the decision to career civil servants. Such allegations could include refusing to bargain with the union in the future, or firing or disciplining union stewards for sticking up for fellow members under procedures outlined in the contract. The decision on issuing a complaint is in some sense the critical step of the labor board process. There are typically 20, 000 to 25, 000 charges of unfair labor practices in a given year, of which only a fraction result in a complaint — about 1, 270 last year — although some are settled beforehand. Any complaint issued by a regional director or the general counsel could then come before the board, at least some of whose members are likely to have been appointed by Mr. Trump. But if the general counsel declines to issue a complaint, the charge is effectively dead and generally cannot be appealed. “It’s the gateway into litigation,” said Wilma Liebman, a former labor board chairman. There remains an open charge of unfair labor practices against the Trump Organization, which was filed on behalf of a worker advocacy group in September over the contract that employees of the Trump presidential campaign were required to sign. The group alleged the contract’s noncompete and confidentiality clauses illegally discouraged employees from exercising their labor rights. Mr. Trump and his organization faced a potentially punishing calculus in deciding to bargain with the union in Las Vegas, aside from the issues of conflict of interest. Even if the Trump hotel in Las Vegas had prevailed in its efforts to undo the union election in federal court, which was probably a long shot in itself, the culinary workers would probably have continued their unionization campaign, creating a lingering source of embarrassment for the . In September, workers at the Boulder Station casino in Las Vegas — owned by a company controlled by Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, who until recently operated the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a mixed martial arts promoter — voted to unionize after a dogged campaign by the union that lasted more than six years. The campaign included the creation of a website highlighting the tirades of the president of the U. F. C. and an effort by union affiliates in New York State to fight the league’s attempts to overturn a law banning the sport there. “They fight really hard,” said C. Jeffrey Waddoups, an economist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies union bargaining in the hotel and gambling industry. “It would draw a lot of attention. ” | 1 |
834 | Sweden on the Brink? Police Force Pushed to Breaking Point by Violence amid Migrant InfluxSweden on the Brink? Police Force Pushed to Breaking Point by Violence amid Migrant Influx Lizzie Stromme, Express, November 1, 2016
Sweden is on the brink of becoming a lawless state as the police force is losing the battle against unprecedented levels of crime and violence amid a growing migrant crisis.
The Scandinavian country is facing an existential crisis with on average three police officers handing in their resignations a day.
If the alarming trend continues, and police officers continue to resign more than 1,000 officers will have quit the service by New Years.
Since the migrant crisis began last summer, Sweden has been hit by a series of brutal crimes and violent incidents .
In 2015 alone Sweden, with a population of 9.5 million, received over 160,000 asylum applications and the country is expected to take as many as 190,000 refugees, or two per cent of the population, by the end of 2016.
Since the Second World War Sweden has prided itself on helping migrants who cross their borders despite some moves to the political right in recent years.
But police have now admitted the force has reached breaching point as more than 50 areas in the country have now been placed on a “no-go zone” list .
In February a report from Sweden’s National Criminal Investigation Service announced there were 52 areas where officers would not cope with the levels of crime being committed .
Sex assaults , drug dealing and children carrying weapons were just some of the incidents mentioned in the report.
In September, Swedish officials were forced to add another three areas to the list.
Now the Police Association have said they need at least 200 new officers to regain control in the south-east of the country.
Thomas Stjernfeldt, from the region’s police association, told SVT : “We are missing extremely many officers in the operational sector, right now we need 200 more officers to be added to the force to establish a reasonable working environment in the southeast of Götaland.”
Götaland is one of the regions in the country that has been hit hard by the car fire attacks, which have been occurring throughout Sweden.
On Monday, Express.co.uk reported a number of the arsonist attacks in the city of Växjö, in Götaland, had been committed by frustrated migrants .
Currently there are more than 6,000 suspected crimes that are unsolved in the area and 400 of these cases are suspected to be rapes, murder or attempted murder.
Mr Stjernfeldt said the figures are alarming and police officers are constantly forced to work overtime in an attempt to solve the reported crimes.
The Police Association admitted it fears the public will lose faith in the force and their ability to protect citizens if the situation is not resolved.
The union’s call for more resources echoes National Police Commissioner Dan Eliasson’s February warning, where he said he needed a further 4,100 officers and specialist staff to reestablish law and order in Sweden. | 0 |
835 | Comment on Hemp vs Cotton: The Ultimate Showdown by Hemp: Readdressing Cannabis – kuebiko.co Hemp has been making a lot of noise lately, especially with the growing awareness surrounding the use of hemp oil for treating cancer. Although the word ‘hemp’ still often gets confused and lumped into the same definition as Cannabis, a similar but psychoactive plant, it’s important to realize hemp can be a major game changer for our world if used to its potential. As we go through this post, you will be wondering ‘why don’t we use this stuff all the time.. for everything?!’ Simple answer, farming hemp was banned in the US and other countries in the 1937 because of the threat it caused to certain companies and their businesses. More about that here. Although hemp has many practical uses , let’s focus on one that would affect us every day; clothing. For this, we will compare hemp to cotton, as cotton is a very popular resource used in clothing production. We’ll need to focus on various areas that have to be taken into consideration when comparing the two so we can determine not only what is better for us, but also what is best for our environment as it’s important to view things holistically. Let’s do it. Water Cotton : To grow cotton you require about 1400 gallons of water for every pound you intend to produce. That’s a lot of water! Some areas of the world that produce cotton are running out of fresh water due to the production of cotton as well as clothing. Some areas of the world have even experienced desertification as a result of producing cotton. Hemp : You require about half the amount of water to produce hemp as you would if producing cotton. Hemp is a strong and reliable plant that grows very quickly. Not only that, hemp produces about 200% – 250% more fibre in the same amount of land compared to cotton.
The victor: Hemp Pesticides Cotton : One of the biggest downsides to cotton is how much pesticides are used to grow the plant. Although organic cotton farming is beginning to catch on a bit more, the production of cotton worldwide takes up about 25% of the world’s pesticide use. The other unfortunate factor is that these chemicals can end up being absorbed into our skin as we wear clothing. Hemp : The beauty of hemp is that it requires no pesticides to grow. In fact, it doesn’t require any chemicals at all to grow. The growing nature of the plant competes with weeds and over-powers their ability to sustain themselves. This allows the hemp plant to grow freely and quickly.
The victor: Hemp Comfort & Longevity Cotton : Generally very comfortable to begin with, as you continue to wear cotton it ‘breaks in’ to become even more comfortable. There is no denying how soft cotton can be, but it is also true that cotton fibres break down over time and the more it is washed the faster it breaks down. Hemp : The hemp fibre used in clothing is a strong natural fibre that, like cotton, gets progressively softer with each passing day you wear it and each time you wash it. Although it may not start off quite as soft, it is still soft and certainly would not be considered uncomfortable. The plus is that the fibre is much stronger and durable. Repeated washed will not break the fibre down anywhere near as quickly as cotton. Creating more hemp clothing would mean we would need to produce much less clothing.
The victor: Hemp B reathability & Wicking Cotton : Breathability is certainly a strong suit for cotton. It also does not hold odours for very much. This is quite possibly one of the biggest downsides to synthetic fibres, they don’t dispel odour well and don’t often deal with moisture well either. While cotton has a natural wicking system, it also holds moisture a little longer than what might be considered most desirable. Hemp : Performs very well when it comes to breathability and wicks moisture away from the body effectively. Hemp also carries anti-bacterial properties that trump any other natural fibre. This means hemp will not mold or grow mildew very easily. Since it also does not hold odours, hemp clothing edges out cotton slightly on this one The victor: Almost a tie, but hemp is our pal on this one again Aesthetics Cotton : Without the use of dyes, cotton comes naturally in white, cream and off-white. Cotton can be dyed naturally or synthetically to achieve a desired color. The growing knowledge that cotton is very taxing on the environment and not healthy for our skin is creating quite the demand for organic cotton. In terms of the fashion market, organic cotton is showing up more and more. Hemp : Given the various processes available to remove fibres from the stem of a hemp plant, hemp can be naturally creamy white, black, green, grey or brown. Without even requiring the use of dye, hemp comes in a variety of colors. Of course, you are still able to dye hemp both naturally and synthetically. Hemp is quickly becoming more and more popular in the fashion market as designers see the potential in the material while being a very environmentally sound option. Since it is durable and lasts a long time, it can be attractive to certain designers.
The voctor: Hemp Final Decision Winner by knockout and growing undisputed champion of natural harmony, HEMP! This isn’t to say that cotton, especially grown organically, is not a good material, it simply isn’t better all around than hemp. In some cases, cotton could be a must use if something specific is being produced. The biggest differences are in the facts that hemp requires much less water and no pesticides to produce. Not only that, it boasts a lot more fibre per acre. Concerned about excess CO2 in the atmosphere? Hemp is spectacular at sequestering CO2! Take the time to check out some hemp clothing around the internet or see if there are some local stores who sell it. Although options can sometimes be limited right now, look out for more hemp clothing as awareness continues to spread!
| 0 |
836 | Jared Kushner, Trump’s Son-in-Law, Is Cleared to Serve as Adviser - The New York TimesWASHINGTON — Hours after President Trump took his oath on Friday, the Justice Department issued an opinion saying that his appointment of his Jared Kushner, as a senior White House adviser would be lawful despite a federal antinepotism law. In a opinion signed on Friday, a longtime career lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said that the president’s special hiring authority exempted White House positions from a 1967 law barring the president from employing relatives at a federal agency. Some legal experts had raised concerns that Mr. Kushner’s appointment violated that law, which Congress enacted several years after President John F. Kennedy had appointed his brother Robert as attorney general. But the new Justice Department opinion, signed by Daniel L. Koffsky, a deputy assistant attorney general in the legal counsel office, said Mr. Trump had the power to appoint Mr. Kushner anyway because of a subsequent 1978 law that gives the president the authority to appoint White House staff members without regard to other laws restricting employment and compensation of federal employees. Mr. Koffsky’s opinion acknowledged that in several cases since 1978, the Office of Legal Counsel had determined that the antinepotism statute prevented presidents from appointing relatives to positions. “Although our conclusion today departs from some of that prior work, we think that this departure is fully justified,” he wrote. The revised position came after an effort by Jamie S. Gorelick, Mr. Kushner’s lawyer and a deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration who is now a lawyer at the firm WilmerHale, to clear away obstacles to Mr. Kushner’s appointment. The opinion paves the way for Mr. Kushner, 35, to join Mr. Trump in the West Wing. Among the new president’s closest advisers during the campaign, Mr. Kushner married Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka in 2009. He has run his family’s vast real estate company and has owned a newspaper, The New York Observer. Mr. Trump announced on Jan. 9 that he would appoint Mr. Kushner, who will not accept a salary. His purview is expected to include the Middle East and Israel, government partnerships with the private sector and matters involving free trade. “If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,” Mr. Trump said to Mr. Kushner at an event on Thursday. The appointment of Mr. Kushner will be a dramatic change. In 1977, for example, the Justice Department barred President Jimmy Carter from appointing his son to an unpaid White House role, citing the antinepotism law. Even after Congress enacted the 1978 law, the Justice Department continued to block proposed appointments of presidential relatives. Mr. Koffsky’s opinion, which he worked on in the final days of the Obama administration, acknowledged a 1983 case in which the office barred President Ronald Reagan from appointing a relative to an advisory committee, and a 2009 case in which it blocked President Barack Obama from appointing his and a half sister to advisory committees. But, Mr. Koffsky maintained, those opinions failed to adequately address the impact of the special hiring authority that Congress gave the president for his personal staff as part of the 1978 law. He also wrote that it was unlikely that Congress could bar a president from obtaining informal, ad hoc policy advice from a relative, and a major consequence of allowing Mr. Kushner’s appointment to a formal role is that he will be subject to the usual ethics rules for White House employees, like laws. Mr. Kushner intends to sell some assets to his brother and to put others into a trust overseen by his mother, said Ms. Gorelick, who has worked on the plan. Ms. Gorelick said she had been consulting with federal ethics officials to try to address any issues associated with Mr. Kushner’s appointment. He will also be required to file a financial disclosure report that details his assets and income, and to divest some holdings that could create a conflict of interest. When Mr. Trump announced Mr. Kushner’s appointment, Ms. Gorelick told reporters that while there were arguments on both sides of the legal question, she believed the “better argument” was that it would be lawful. She also disclosed then that the Trump transition team would seek an Office of Legal Counsel opinion. In an email on Saturday, Ms. Gorelick said that “we believed that we had the better argument on this,” adding that “the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department — in an opinion by a highly regarded career deputy assistant attorney general — adopted a position consistent with our own. ” Richard W. Painter, who served as a White House lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said that while he had some doubts about the new opinion, “it is a reasonable interpretation” of the law. “But what is important now,” he added, “is that Mr. Kushner complies with the and disclosure provisions, and I wish his the president, would do the same. ” | 1 |
837 | Fisherman Faces Life in Prison for Catching $500,000 Worth of Cocaine and Selling It - BreitbartA commercial fisherman faces life in prison for catching a 45 pound haul of cocaine and selling it instead of turning it over to the authorities. [Thomas Breeding, a boat captain who has had a history of drug and weapons convictions, was charged with conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance and unlawfully transporting a firearm, the Panama City News Herald reported. Breeding said he had never been involved in the drug trade before and was “just a young commercial fisherman. ” Breeding distributed the cocaine to four others who helped him sell the product and then received a cut from the sales. The cocaine haul was worth between $500, 000 and $620, 000, according to AL. com. Authorities investigated the scheme and charged all five people involved with conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance. Breeding pleaded guilty to the charges Wednesday along with his . Breeding faces a maximum sentence of life in prison and a $4. 25 million fine, and he’s warning others not to follow his example. “This changed my life and way of thinking and also made me aware of some of the dangers that can be found off shore in the Gulf,” Breeding wrote recently in a letter to the News Herald from the Washington County Jail. “I would like to let the public know the dangers and what not to do if this situation comes about. ” | 1 |
838 | Stepping Out of the Ring While Rolling With the Punches - The New York TimesThe moment Joanna Acevedo first set foot in a boxing gym, she had a vision of herself standing in the ring, wearing gloves and trading blows with an opponent. But her adoptive mother refused to let her box. She was too much of a fighter out of the ring. Ms. Acevedo, who as a child would not back down from a schoolyard brawl, said her irascible nature stemmed from years spent in the foster system. Her birth mother had a substance abuse problem, and her father was in prison for much of her life. “I grew up not being loved at all,” Ms. Acevedo, 22, said. “If you tell me how it feels for somebody to love me, I wouldn’t even know. ” She distracted herself with heavy partying and dropped out of high school. In 2011, Ms. Acevedo was arrested on robbery and assault charges. After her release from the Rikers Island jail complex, Ms. Acevedo vowed to correct her errant path. She returned to Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the South Bronx and received her diploma. She also connected with a social worker from the Children’s Aid Society, one of the eight organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. Then Ms. Acevedo finally took up boxing. “Boxing has changed my life from zero to 100,” she said. “It helped me stop drinking, smoking, clubbing. That’s all I was doing at one point. ” The sport brought and a focus she had never known. Ms. Acevedo devoted herself to it, competing in numerous tournaments across New York City. In 2014, she learned she was pregnant. Her first instinct was not to go through with the pregnancy. But she decided to become a mother in part because she dreamed of training alongside her daughter at the boxing gym. Ms. Acevedo gave birth to Serenity in July 2015. Her daughter, she said, has helped her experience life in a new way. “The only love I have is for my daughter,” Ms. Acevedo said. “Once I had my daughter and I cried, I felt like this is how it feels to be loved. I love her like crazy. ” Serenity was born with a rare condition called optic nerve hypoplasia. In utero, her pituitary gland shifted in her brain, preventing her optic nerves from fully developing. The extent of her blindness is still unknown. “That’s a one in a million,” Ms. Acevedo said. “My daughter got it. That’s not fair. ” A month after Serenity was born, her father was arrested, and Ms. Acevedo and her baby moved into her mother’s home in the Bronx. Ms. Acevedo does not work. Much of her time is dedicated to caring for Serenity, administering medications and taking her to doctors. Each month, Ms. Acevedo receives about $250 in federal assistance. She is in the process of applying for disability benefits for Serenity. In June, Ms. Acevedo was given $250 from the Neediest Cases Fund by the Children’s Aid Society for gift cards, which were used to buy clothing and food. For a time Ms. Acevedo was able to continue boxing, taking her daughter with her to the gym. As Serenity grew older, more apt to squirm and cry, Ms. Acevedo had to stop going. “Sometimes people can’t accomplish their dream because of a certain situation they’ve got to put first,” she said. “That’s how I feel right now. I can’t really do what I’d love to do because I have to take care of her right now, put her first. ” Her dream of expanding her family has been postponed. Ms. Acevedo is hesitant to have more children, concerned that something could happen to them. And without an outlet for aggression, Ms. Acevedo has become more restless. She has picked back up what she admits is a bad habit: smoking. But she said she would go no further than cigarettes, for fear of losing her daughter. “That’s what keeps me focused,” she said. “I don’t want her reliving a life that I lived. ” Recent experiences have led Ms. Acevedo to consider a career in nursing, but she is not sure when or if she will be able to pursue it. There is no day care for blind children in the city, she said, and she does not trust others to care for Serenity as vigilantly as she does. Ms. Acevedo says she believes in God, and in miracles, and remains hopeful that modern medicine will find a remedy for her daughter’s condition. Ms. Acevedo laments what her daughter will miss: sunsets, the delight in the holiday spectacle of Rockefeller Center or the joy of animals at the zoo. “I’m going to wish she could do this with me, that with me,” Ms. Acevedo said. “I’m never going to let her know, of course. But deep down inside, closed in a room or when she’s sleeping, and I’m up at night, that’s going through my head. ” | 1 |
839 | Adnan Syed, of ‘Serial’ Podcast, Gets a Retrial in Murder Case - The New York TimesA judge in Maryland has granted a new trial to Adnan Syed, setting aside his conviction for the 1999 murder of his former girlfriend, in a case that was the subject of the first season of the hit podcast “Serial. ” Mr. Syed’s lawyer, C. Justin Brown, posted the news on Twitter on Thursday afternoon and confirmed by phone that the motion for a new trial had been granted by Judge Martin P. Welch of the Baltimore City Circuit Court. The decision to grant Mr. Syed, 35, a retrial was a major victory for an inmate who has long maintained his innocence and has exhausted all other avenues of appeal. He was convicted in 2000 in the murder of his former girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, and had served 16 years of a life sentence. “Serial” turned speculation about Mr. Syed’s guilt and whether he had received a fair trial into something of a national pastime in 2014. The show was downloaded more than 100 million times and won a Peabody Award for its role in illuminating flaws in the criminal justice system. At a news conference in Baltimore, Mr. Brown was asked if he thought there was any chance that the retrial could have come about without “Serial. ” “I don’t think so,” he said. On the possibility that Mr. Syed may eventually go free, Mr. Brown said: “I’m feeling pretty confident right now. This was the biggest hurdle. It’s really hard to get a new trial. ” On Thursday, Mr. Brown said that he had not been able to reach Mr. Syed to tell him the news, but by Friday, he said in a post on Twitter that his client had been “informed of the decision. ” The family of Ms. Lee has expressed pain and outrage at the attention surrounding Mr. Syed’s bid for a new trial. In a statement released through the Maryland Attorney General’s Office on Friday, the family said: “We continue to grieve. We continue to believe justice was done when Mr. Syed was convicted of killing Hae. ” For its part, the Attorney General’s Office said Thursday night that it had a responsibility to keep pursuing justice and “to defend what it believes is a valid conviction. ” Mr. Syed’s brother, Yusuf, 26, said in an interview on Thursday that the family had high hopes for a favorable decision, based on the strength of the legal arguments and the outpouring of support. “We really felt 100 percent that the judge would rule in our favor,” he said, adding, “We’ve been waiting 20 years for this. ” Rabia Chaudry, a family friend of Mr. Syed’s who introduced Sarah Koenig, the host of “Serial,” to the case, celebrated the decision online, thanking the judge and witnesses, among others. A production manager for “Serial,” Emily Condon, declined to comment on Thursday. The judge’s decision came after three days of postconviction hearings in February. Mr. Syed and his legal team had presented new evidence, including the testimony of a new alibi witness, and argued that his original defense counsel had been grossly negligent. The proceedings were held before Judge Welch, a retired judge, who had granted Mr. Syed’s request for a hearing in November. Mr. Syed first filed a request for a postconviction hearing in 2010, but was denied. Mr. Syed’s defense had argued in February that the decision by Mr. Syed’s lawyer in the original trial, Maria Cristina Gutierrez, not to question a state’s expert, Abraham Waranowitz, about the reliability of evidence relating to cellphone towers constituted ineffective assistance. The judge’s decision to grant Mr. Syed a new trial turned on that issue. In a memo, Judge Welch wrote that Ms. Gutierrez’s failure to question Mr. Waranowitz “created a substantial possibility that the result of the trial was fundamentally unreliable. ” Judge Welch also said in the memo that the substantial public interest in the case did not affect his decision. “Regardless of the public interest surrounding this case, the court used its best efforts to address the merits of petitioner’s petition for postconviction relief like it would in any other case that comes before the court unfettered by sympathy, prejudice, or public opinion,” he wrote. Ms. Gutierrez was a prominent Baltimore defense lawyer in the 1990s whose career crumbled in 2001 when she was disbarred by consent after a state commission uncovered financial improprieties involving her clients. She told The Baltimore Sun at the time that her legal practice suffered in part because of her severe medical problems related to multiple sclerosis. She died of a heart attack in 2004. On Thursday, hundreds of fans of “Serial” took to social media, some of them to celebrate and others to emphasize that they still believed Mr. Syed was guilty. The podcast recently ended its second season, which told the story of Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier in Afghanistan who was captured by the Taliban in 2009 and released as part of a prisoner swap in 2014. | 1 |
840 | NYT Admits Key Al Qaeda Role in AleppoEDITOR'S CHOICE | 08.11.2016 NYT Admits Key Al Qaeda Role in Aleppo Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s As much as The New York Times and the mainstream U.S. media have become propaganda outlets on most foreign policy issues, like the one-sided coverage of the bloody Syrian war, sometimes the truth seeps through in on-the-ground reporting by correspondents, even ones who usually are pushing the “propo.” Such was the case with Anne Barnard’s new reporting from inside west Aleppo, the major portion of the city which is in government hands and copes with regular terror rocket and mortar attacks from rebel-held east Aleppo where Al Qaeda militants and U.S.-armed-and-funded “moderate” rebels fight side-by-side. Samantha Power, Permanent Representative of the United States to the UN, addresses the Security Council meeting on Syria, Sept. 25, 2016. Power has been an advocate for escalating U.S. military involvement in Syria. (UN Photo) Almost in passing, Barnard’s article on Sunday acknowledged the rarely admitted reality of the Al Qaeda/”moderate” rebel collaboration, which puts the United States into a de facto alliance with Al Qaeda terrorists and their jihadist allies, fighting under banners such as Nusra Front (recently renamed Syria Conquest Front) and Ahrar al-Sham. Barnard also finally puts the blame for preventing civilians in east Aleppo from escaping the fighting on a rebel policy of keeping them in harm’s way rather than letting them transit through “humanitarian corridors” to safety. Some of her earlier pro-rebel accounts suggested that it wasn’t clear who was stopping movement of civilians through those corridors. However, on Sunday, she reported: “We had arrived at a critical moment, as Russia said there was only one day left to pass through a corridor it had provided for people to escape eastern Aleppo before the rebel side was flattened, a corridor through which precious few had passed. The government says rebels are preventing civilians from leaving. Rebels refuse any evacuation without international supervision and a broader deal to deliver humanitarian aid.” Granted, you still have to read between the lines, but at least there is the acknowledgement that rebels are refusing civilian evacuations under the current conditions. How that is different from Islamic State terrorists in Mosul, Iraq, preventing departures from their areas – a practice which the Times and other U.S. outlets condemn as using women and children as “human shields”– isn’t addressed. But Barnard’s crimped admission is at least a start. Barnard then writes: “Instead [of allowing civilians to move through the humanitarian corridors], they [the rebels] are trying to break the siege, with Qaeda-linked groups and those backed by the United States working together — the opposite of what Russia has demanded.” Again, that isn’t the clearest description of the situation, which is stunning enough that one might have expected it in the lede rather than buried deep inside the story, but it is significant that the Times is recognizing that Al Qaeda and the U.S.-backed “moderates” are “working together” and that Russia opposes that collaboration. She also noted that “Three Qaeda-linked suicide bombers attacked a military position with explosive-packed personnel carriers on Thursday, military officials said, and mortar fire was raining on neighborhoods that until now had been relatively safe. It was among the most intense rounds in four years of rebel shelling that officials say has killed 11,000 civilians.” While she then throws in a caveat about the impossibility of verifying the numbers, the acknowledgement that the U.S.-backed “moderate” rebels and their Al Qaeda comrades have been shelling civilians in west Aleppo is significant, too. Before this, all the American people heard was the other side, from rebel-held east Aleppo, about the human suffering there, often conveyed by “activists” with video cameras who have depicted the conflict as simply the willful killing of children by the evil Syrian government and the even more evil Russians. More Balance With the admission of rebel terror attacks on civilians in west Aleppo, the picture finally is put into more balance. The Al Qaeda and U.S.-backed rebels have been killing thousands of civilians in government-controlled areas and the Syrian military and its Russian allies have struck back only to be condemned for committing “war crimes.” The second plane about to crash into the World Trade Center towers in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001 Though the human toll in both sides of Aleppo is tragic, we have seen comparable situations before – in which the U.S. government has supported, supplied and encouraged governments to mount fierce offensives to silence rockets or mortars fired by rebels toward civilian areas. For instance, senior U.S. government officials, including President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, have defended Israel’s right to defend itself from rockets fired from inside Gaza even though those missiles rarely kill anyone. Yet, Israel is allowed to bomb the near-defenseless people of Gaza at will, killing thousands including the four little boys blown apart in July 2014 while playing on a beach during the last round of what the Israelis call “mowing the grass.” In the context of those deaths, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, who has built her career as a supposed humanitarian advocating a “responsibility to protect” civilians, laid the blame not on the Israeli military but on fighters in Gaza who had fired rockets that rarely hit anything besides sand. At the United Nations on July 18, 2014, Power said , “President Obama spoke with [Israeli] Prime Minister Netanyahu this morning to reaffirm the United States’ strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself…. Hamas’ attacks are unacceptable and would be unacceptable to any member state of the United Nations. Israel has the right to defend its citizens and prevent these attacks.” But that universal right apparently does not extend to Syria where U.S.-supplied rockets are fired into civilian neighborhoods of west Aleppo. In that case, Power and other U.S. officials apply an entirely different set of standards. Any Syrian or Russian destruction of east Aleppo with the goal of suppressing that rocket fire becomes a “war crime.” Perhaps it’s expected that the U.S. government, like other governments, will engage in hypocrisy regarding affairs of state: one set of rules for U.S. allies and another for countries marked for U.S. “regime change.” Statements by supposed “humanitarians”– such as Samantha Power, “Ms. R2P”– are no exception. But double standards are even more distasteful when they come from allegedly “objective” journalists such as those who work at The New York Times, The Washington Post and other prestige American news outlets. When they take the “U.S. side” in a dispute and become crude propagandists, they encourage the kind of misguided “group thinks” that led to the criminal Iraq War and other disastrous “regime change” projects over the past two decades. Yet, that is what we normally see. A thoughtful reader can’t peruse the international reporting of the U.S. mainstream media without realizing that it is corrupted by propaganda from both government officials and from U.S.-funded operations, often disguised as “human rights activists” or “citizen journalists” whose supposed independence makes their “propo” even more effective. So, it’s worth noting those rare occasions when The New York Times and the rest of the MSM let some of the reality peek through. When evaluating the latest plans from Hillary Clinton and other interventionists to expand the U.S. military intervention in Syria – via prettily named “safe zones” and “no-fly zones”– the American people should realize that they are being asked to come to the aid of Al Qaeda. | 0 |
841 | Scientists say weird signals from space are 'probably' aliensScientists say weird signals from space are ‘probably’ aliens A team of astronomers believes that strange signals emanating from a cluster of stars are actually aliens trying to tell the universe they exist. The study, which appeared in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, analyzed the odd beams of light from 234 stars — a fraction of the 2.5 million that were observed. The bizarre beacons led the paper’s authors, Ermanno F. Borra and Eric Trottier from Laval University in Quebec, to conclude that it’s “probably” aliens. “We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis,” wrote Borra and Trottier. They also note that their findings align with the Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI) hypothesis, since the mysterious activity only occurred in a tiny fraction of stars. The hypothesis also suggests that an intelligent life force would use a more sophisticated optical beacon than, say, radio waves to reveal its existence. Click link for article... **MODS - If this is a duplicate please delete / and or lock ** So apparently signals detected from 230+ stars are fitting the hypothesized parameters established for extraterrestrial intelligence. The stars in question also fit the hypothesized parameters for supporting life. Since only a small amount of stars in the area being looked at are fitting the parameters they are using that as further evidence in support of their claims. Thoughts? | 0 |
842 | U.S. Swimmers’ Disputed Robbery Claim Fuels Tension in Brazil - The New York TimesRIO DE JANEIRO — Soon after the first news media reports surfaced Sunday morning of an armed assault on four American swimmers, the athletes were interviewed at the United States Olympic team’s hospitality house by State Department officials, national swim team officials and Olympic officials. They all agreed that the swimmers should avoid further attention and that the United States Olympic Committee would soon put out a statement. But Ryan Lochte, a medal winner, left the hospitality house and walked across the street to Ipanema Beach, where he gave a lurid interview to NBC, describing a holdup by men identifying themselves as police officers. Mr. Lochte’s account touched off a dispute that quickly transcended sports, emerging as a point of tension between the United States and Brazil as the authorities in Rio de Janeiro faced scrutiny over their security preparations for the Olympics in a city on edge over a crime wave and gun battles between drug gangs and the police. On Thursday, Mr. Lochte’s account came under siege by the Brazilian police in an internationally televised news conference. They said he had fabricated his description of the episode, damaging Rio’s image at its moment on the global stage. “We saw our city stained by a fantastical version,” said Fernando Veloso, the Civil Police chief for the state of Rio de Janeiro. Beyond the sensitive issues of sovereignty and nationalism around the Rio Olympics, the episode unleashed a discussion around Brazil about perceptions of privilege, accountability and danger in a society where many Brazilians themselves often lament their exposure to alarming levels of violent crime and police corruption. The episode “has tapped into one of Brazilians’ biggest pet peeves — gringos who treat their country like a spring break destination where you can lie to the cops and get away with it,” said Brian Winter, vice president for policy at Americas Society and Council of the Americas. The uproar has its origins in a lavish Olympics party hosted by the French authorities over the weekend at the Sociedade Hípica, a riding club that is a bastion for Rio’s elite. The four swimmers — Mr. Lochte, Jimmy Feigen, Jack Conger and Gunnar Bentz — stumbled out at dawn into a taxi for the ride across Rio to their lodgings in the Olympic Village. In his original account, Mr. Lochte said the car had been pulled over by armed men, one of whom put a gun against his head before taking the cash from his wallet. But police investigators said Thursday that Mr. Lochte and the others had acted more like vandals than the victims they claimed to be. Making a stop around 6 a. m. Sunday at a Shell gas station, the men were obviously drunk, the station’s owner said. They broke a soap dispenser in the bathroom, damaged a door, tore down a sign and urinated around the premises, the owner told reporters. “One of them was really worked up,” said Mr. Veloso, the police chief, who described Mr. Lochte, 32, as a kind of elder ringleader of the group. Mr. Lochte had left Brazil before a judge ordered the police to seize his passport. Mr. Bentz, 20, and Mr. Conger, 21, flew back to the United States on Thursday night, the United States Olympic Committee said in a statement. Mr. Feigen, 26, remained in Brazil on Thursday evening, but on Friday morning, after meeting with a judge and prosecutors, his lawyer, Breno Melaragno Costa, told reporters that Mr. Feigen had agreed to pay 35, 000 reals, or about $10, 800, to a Brazilian organization called the Reaction Institute, as part of a deal to avoid prosecution, The Associated Press and ABC News reported. The Brazilian police suggested on Thursday that Mr. Lochte and Mr. Feigen, the only swimmers who had given initial testimony to investigators about the episode, could face charges of providing false testimony about a crime. Mr. Bentz and Mr. Conger, who were pulled off their plane by the police on Wednesday in Rio, offered testimony on Thursday that contradicted Mr. Lochte’s accounts, police investigators said. The two men were still shouted down as “liars” by a crowd when they left a Rio police station. The sight of the athletes wading through the crowd, along with a torrent of venomous comments by Brazilians on social media, raised concerns after a period in which Brazil and the United States had experienced a thawing of ties, with law enforcement officials working closely to identify potential security threats during the Olympics. “This episode will not in any way interfere in the relations between the U. S. and Brazil,” said Eliseu Padilha, the chief of staff for Brazil’s interim president, Michel Temer. Mr. Padilha added, “This could have happened with individuals of any other nationality. ” Using video footage, accounts from witnesses and testimony from the swimmers, investigators said a security guard had brandished a gun after one or more of the athletes vandalized the gas station bathroom. In his original account, Mr. Lochte claimed that men claiming to be police officers had pulled over the taxi and that an assailant had put a cocked gun to his forehead before taking his money. He later altered that account, saying the taxi had stopped at a gas station so the athletes could use the bathroom. Still, the description of the security guard’s use of a gun dovetailed with Mr. Lochte’s explanations of the episode, raising the possibility that the men had felt during the confusion of the moment that they were being pressured to hand over their money. Mr. Veloso, the police chief, said he could not rule out that there was an extortion attempt by the guards, whom he described as “public agents,” a term that can be used for police officers or other members of the public security forces. Another police official clarified that the guards were prison guards working a second job at the gas station. “For the time being, nothing indicates” extortion, Mr. Veloso said, emphasizing that the guards were reacting to four large athletes “exhibiting, at a minimum, inadequate attitudes, breaking things and showing themselves ready to elevate the level of violence. ” In the midst of the confusion at the gas station, someone called the police, but by the time a police car arrived, the swimmers were gone. Witnesses, including a man who offered to translate for the swimmers, said they had offered to give money to the manager before leaving. Mr. Lochte’s lawyer, Jeff Ostrow, said the video footage had corroborated the “primary elements” of his client’s descriptions of the episode. “There was a uniformed person with a gun who forced them to hand over their money,” Mr. Ostrow said. Mr. Veloso said one of the first leads in the investigation had come from a taxi driver who gave a ride to two Brazilian women who had left the same party and discussed having romantic encounters with the swimmers. “At least one of the athletes may have had a motive for telling a story that wasn’t true,” Mr. Veloso said, raising the possibility that the accounts were fabricated to disguise that the swimmers had remained at the party until almost sunrise. Mr. Veloso did not specify which of the swimmers might have had that motive. Still, Judge Marcello Rubioli, the head of the special court handling the case involving the swimmers, said that making a false claim in Brazil was “not that serious” and “results in very little punishment. ” “If they are found guilty, they would just have to make a payment to an N. G. O. that does humanitarian work,” he continued, referring to a nongovernmental organization. The new turns in the case raised tensions around Brazil, with some commentators questioning the role of American Olympic officials in providing confusing initial accounts and then shielding the swimmers from scrutiny. But Olympic officials in Rio seemed to be trying to play down the episode. “No apologies from him or from the other athletes are needed,” said Mario Andrada, a spokesman for the Rio Olympics organizing committee, referring to Mr. Lochte. “We need to understand that these kids were trying to have fun. ” He added, “Sometimes you take actions that you later regret. ” Some in Rio lamented the episode, though, emphasizing that they wished the police were always so efficient in clearing up reports of violent crime. Before the Olympics, the authorities had sought to ease fears by deploying a security force comprising 85, 000 police officers and soldiers. “The real dilemma is that people in this city live in fear of crime,” said Eduardo Rangel, 64, the owner of store selling office supplies. “The swimmers took advantage of the mess that exists around here to further denigrate the city. That doesn’t mean Rio is some paradise without crime. ” Others in Rio, however, said they felt deeply insulted by the behavior of the American swimmers. “These guys from abroad think they’re superior to us, that they can come here, make a mess, lie about it and stain the image of Brazil,” said Airton Rocha, 28, a waiter at a cafe. “Well, the law is the law, and it should apply to everyone in the same way. ” Late Thursday night, American Olympics officials issued an apology. “The behavior of these athletes is not acceptable, nor does it represent the values of Team USA or the conduct of the vast majority of its members,” said the statement, which was attributed to the organization’s chief executive, Scott Blackmun. “On behalf of the United States Olympic Committee, we apologize to our hosts in Rio and the people of Brazil for this distracting ordeal in the midst of what should rightly be a celebration of excellence. ” | 1 |
843 | 5 Ways to Take a Self-Care Vacation - The New York TimesIn the past five weeks, you’ve seen America inaugurate a president, march for women’s rights, protest an immigration order and debate a Supreme Court nominee. Even if you’ve only occasionally peeked at the news, the shock of so many updates may have left you reeling. This is the moment for a vacation, especially one where the focus isn’t on screens. But it sounds easier than it is. “Being so technologically connected all the time, as many of us are, is overwhelming, and a break is a way to show yourself some love,” said Miriam Geiser, a travel consultant with KK Travels Worldwide in Chicago who has planned getaways for clients and has taken several herself. “A vacation is about slowing down and nurturing yourself so you feel truly mentally and physically rested at the end,” she said. Here is advice on how to take such a trip. D. I. Y. a Digital Detox You don’t have to camp on a remote island to shed your devices. Leave your laptop and iPad at home, and lock your cellphone in your hotel room safe, using it only for emergencies. Sometimes, just the idea of cutting the cord can lead to anxiety, and the first few hours of such a trip can feel stressful, but Ms. Geiser said that many of her clients who have taken digital detox trips report feeling liberated and peaceful by the second day of their vacation. Suggested destinations: Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, Calif. and any national park within driving distance. Painting Away the Pressure You don’t have to be Picasso, but a vacation incorporating art can inspire creativity in your everyday life, according to Susan Sparks, a travel adviser at Points of Interest Travel in Aspen, Colo. “Art is a way to express yourself and go beyond your usual spectrum, and that can be very reviving,” she said. Many resorts and spas around the world offer art classes, ranging from a few hours to several days, in painting, sculpture and collage. Suggested destinations: Vik Retreats in Uruguay Ojai Valley Inn Spa in Ojai, Calif. and Sundance Mountain Resort in Sundance, Utah. Immerse Yourself in Nature There’s nothing more relaxing, according to Ms. Geiser, than being surrounded by nature. Hearing the sound of crashing waves or chirping birds and insects, taking in a beautiful vista on a pristine lake, smelling the flowers of a tropical garden or feeling the warmth of the sunshine on your skin stimulate the senses in a positive way and take you away from the hubbub of your daily life. Spend your days on a trip, going on hikes, bike rides and walks, or consider kayaking, fishing, horseback riding or snowshoeing. Suggested destinations: Lake Kora in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York the Resort at Paws Up in Greenough, Mont. Jade Mountain Resort in St. Lucia Minaret Station on South Island in New Zealand. Savoring Rather Than Food — cooking and eating it — can actually be a destressor, Ms. Sparks said. “Cooking, even if you only do it for a few hours, shuts off your brain, and at the end, you have a meal that you put your heart and soul into,” she said. Weeklong cooking holidays abound around the world. Suggested destinations: Mamma Agata, a cooking school on the Amalfi Coast of Italy and Ballymaloe Cookery School in County Cork, Ireland. Many hotels also offer and cooking classes. The Wellness Retreat Route The singular focus of these means that they do often work. Some retreats are meant to be a lifestyle overhaul with medical professionals who complete a comprehensive diagnostic analysis and provide a customized road map to improve your health. Other programs are more focused on detoxes or cleanses, and others still are spiritual in nature, offering daily yoga or meditation. No matter the approach, you’ll return refreshed. Suggested destinations: The Ranch at Live Oak in Malibu, Calif. Golden Door in Escondido, Calif. Como Shambala in Bali Chablé Resort Spa in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. | 1 |
844 | 370 Economists Sign Letter Urging America Not To Vote For Donald TrumpBy Jason Easley 5:03 pm 370 of nation's top economists have come together to urge the American people not to elect Donald Trump to be the next President Of The United States.
370 of nation’s top economists have come together to urge the American people not to elect Donald Trump to be the next President Of The United States.
In the letter , the economists listed a dozen economic policy reasons why voters should not vote for Trump, but it as their conclusion that was stunning, “He promotes magical thinking and conspiracy theories over sober assessments of feasible economic policy options.Donald Trump is a dangerous, destructive choice for the country. He misinforms the electorate, degrades trust in public institutions with conspiracy theories, and promotes willful delusion over engagement with reality. If elected, he poses a unique danger to the functioning of democratic and economic institutions, and to the prosperity of the country. For these reasons, we strongly recommend that you do not vote for Donald Trump.”
Trump’s thoughts on the economy are dangerous to the prosperity of the country. It isn’t just that Trump is a person of bad character who lacks any of the human traits that voters should seek in a president. It is also that his policies are nonsense.
Economists don’t write these types of letters ever. The economists aren’t discussing partisan politics. They view Trump and his ideas as a threat to the American economy.
Donald Trump’s economic ideas aren’t based in reality. Trump is selling a fantasy, and when 370 of the nation’s top economists warn that a vote for Trump is a dangerous choice for the country, voters would be wise to listen. | 0 |
845 | Campaigns Are Long, Expensive and Chaotic. Maybe That’s a Good Thing. - The New York TimesThe election of a president of the United States isn’t just democracy in circuslike action. It also may be, at its core, the most elaborate and expensive recruitment and hiring process that mankind has ever created. You can think of a presidential election as being like a particularly large company’s search for a chief executive. In this case, the search costs a couple of billion dollars (the amount that will be expended on campaigns) has a hiring committee of 127 million people (the number of voters last cycle) and is covered at every turn by virtually every media organization on earth. What, then, can the latest evidence about best hiring practices tell us about the election, in which hiring the best employee has particularly high stakes? Good news: The answers might just make you feel a little better about American democracy. In the last several years, there has been a lot of evidence, both from academic work and from companies that approach recruitment analytically, that traditional job interviews aren’t particularly good tools for identifying the best employees. One conclusion: It’s a bad idea to hire someone primarily based on a job interview, or on a manager’s gut instinct. Some people perform better when being interviewed, but that seems to be a skill. It doesn’t tell you much about whether a person would be a good software engineer or accountant. “Interviewers are likely to feel they are getting useful information from unstructured interviews, even when they are useless,” concluded a 2013 article in the academic journal Judgment and Decision Making. “Our simple recommendation for those who make screening decisions is not to use them,” wrote Jason Dana, Robyn Dawes and Nathanial Peterson. Major companies have come to the same conclusion. Google long had a reputation for putting job candidates through multiple interviews and asking potential employees questions to see how they responded. Not anymore. “We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job,” Google’s chief human resources executive, Laszlo Bock, told The New York Times in 2013. “We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess. ” Maybe the search committee for the next president — that is, every American voter — shouldn’t put too much weight on what they see in unstructured press interviews with candidates. I argue that speeches and debate performances fit the same pattern, in that they are performances that don’t tell you a ton about how a person would perform in the vast portion of the presidency that takes place . So what does work? Google found that structured interviews, in which applicants are asked uniform, concrete questions, were helpful. And a large body of work suggests that tests and simulations can give particularly useful information about how a person will perform on the job. Economists looked at data from firms employing workers, in which some managers had the discretion to hire the employees they thought were the best fit, while others relied on a performance test. Those hired with tests alone stayed in the jobs 15 percent longer than those chosen by managers, a sign they were a better match. And in an experiment with British doctors, a daylong series of simulations, such as interaction with an actor playing a sick patient, more accurately predicted their future performance than a test. Plenty of companies in a wide range of fields have embraced the idea. Consulting firms like McKinsey have long hired bright young M. B. A.s in part by giving them a case study of a business challenge and asking them a series of questions about how they would approach the problem. If tests and simulations are the way to go in picking an employee, what does that mean for picking a president? Perhaps the ideal scenario would be to put Ted Cruz and Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders through a simulation in which they must jump between persuading a member of Congress to vote for a highway bill and conducting an arms control negotiation. That won’t happen anytime soon. But in a weird way, we might be seeing a version of exactly that simulation. What are the qualities it takes to be a successful president? He or she needs to be good at hiring and trusting the right people making constant big decisions with limited information and often while exhausted setting the right big picture strategy and knowing when to stick with it as circumstances change and when to make tactical adjustments. If you look at it that way, running a presidential campaign starts to look like exactly the kind of simulation of being president that our search committee needs to pick a president! The leading candidates in this campaign come from very different backgrounds: two senators, a former secretary of state and a businessman, which makes it hard to judge them against one another. But right now we’re seeing an comparison in how they run a campaign. Is the campaign disciplined and well run, displaying the aforementioned mix of smart strategy and clever tactical choices? Does the candidate hire skilled employees and put trust in people who are competent? Does the candidate have the kind of stamina to put in the long hours of campaigning, or does that person get tired and say the wrong thing or make bad decisions? It’s easy to criticize the length of American campaigns, and the complexity of the system by which delegates are selected to choose each party’s nominee. But in a weird way, the duration and complexity of the task make campaigns an even better hiring test. Just as a daylong simulation was a better way to judge the competence of British doctors than a test, a long campaign gives more time for a person to flunk the simulation by making bad strategic decisions, listening to bad advice or saying something stupid. In early 2008, a person would have had plenty of reason to be skeptical about whether Barack Obama, who had served in the Senate for about three years and had never run anything larger than his Senate office, had the leadership chops to run the entire federal government. The fact that he ran his primary campaign more effectively than Mrs. Clinton was one piece of evidence that he did. The American campaign system has evolved over the years without any master plan. But whenever you groan about yet another state primary or long debate, look at it this way: If you were on the search committee to hire a C. E. O. you would want the longest, hardest simulation you could get. And in your role on this very large search committee, that’s exactly what you’re getting. | 1 |
846 | ‘Alien Megastructure’ Star Targeted by $100 Million SETI SearchBy Mike Wall
If intelligent aliens actually do live around Tabby’s star , astronomers are determined to find them.
The Breakthrough Listen initiative, which will spend $100 million over the next 10 years to hunt for signals possibly produced by alien civilizations, is set to begin studying Tabby’s star with the 330-foot-wide (100 meters) Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, project team members announced Tuesday (Oct. 25).
“The Green Bank Telescope is the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and it’s the largest, most sensitive telescope that’s capable of looking at Tabby’s star given its position in the sky,” Breakthrough Listen co-director Andrew Siemion, who also directs the Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.
“We’ve deployed a fantastic new SETI instrument that connects to that telescope, that can look at many gigahertz of bandwidth simultaneously and many, many billions of different radio channels all at the same time so we can explore the radio spectrum very, very quickly,” Siemion added.
The observations will take place for 8 hours per night for three nights over the next two months, with the first observations set to take place Wednesday (Oct. 26), project team members said.
Tabby’s star, officially known as KIC 8462852, lies about 1,500 light-years from Earth. Observations by NASA’s Kepler space telescope showed that the star dimmed dramatically several times over the past half-decade or so, at one point by a whopping 22 percent. These occasional brightness dips — which were first reported last year by a team led by Yale University postdoc Tabetha Boyajian (hence the star’s nickname) — are far too substantial to be caused by an orbiting planet, astronomers have said.
So researchers have offered up a number of alternative explanations for the dimming to date. Perhaps a cloud of comet fragments periodically blocks the star’s light, for example, or maybe some unknown structure in the depths of space between Earth and Tabby’s star is responsible.
It’s even possible that the brightness dips are caused by an “alien megastructure” — an enormous collection of energy-gathering solar panels, for example.
Astronomers have stressed that the megastructure hypothesis is a long shot, but long shots shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, Breakthough Listen team members said.
“I don’t think it’s very likely — a one-in-a-billion chance or something like that — but nevertheless, we’re going to check it out,” Dan Werthimer, chief scientist at Berkeley SETI, said in the same statement . “But I think that E.T., if it’s ever discovered, it might be something like that. It’ll be some bizarre thing that somebody finds by accident … that nobody expected, and then we look more carefully and we say, ‘Hey, that’s a civilization.'”
A number of other research teams have already searched for signals coming from Tabby’s star, and all of those searches have come up empty so far.
Siemion, Boyajian and astronomer Jason Wright, who’s based at Pennsylvania State University, will discuss the planned Tabby’s star observations during a video chat from the Green Bank Telescope site on Wednesday at 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT). You can watch it live here:
Source: Live Science
| 0 |
848 | Brazen Killing of Myanmar Lawyer Came After He Sparred With Military - The New York TimesYANGON, Myanmar — The rights lawyer had devised a plan to replace Myanmar’s Constitution with one that would strip the military of its extraordinary political powers. The lawyer, U Ko Ni, a top adviser to the governing National League for Democracy, had recently been working on a new draft, a colleague said, and he hoped to promote his project at a conference this month. But when he returned to the Yangon airport on Sunday from a trip to Indonesia, cradling his young grandson in his arms as he waited for a taxi, a man drew a pistol and shot him in the head. The killing appears to have been a rare political assassination in Myanmar, fueling rumors, distrust and worry about the country’s future. “This bullet was not only for Ko Ni,” the colleague, U Thein Than Oo, a human rights lawyer in Mandalay, Myanmar, said by telephone. “It was for the N. L. D. and the people who want to amend and replace the 2008 Constitution and support the peace process. ” The Myanmar police have said that the assailant, detained shortly after the shooting, was a professional hit man, and they have arrested three other suspects in the attack, including the man they say hired the killer. The police have not announced a motive for the killing. It is not clear whether Mr. Ko Ni could have succeeded in changing the Constitution, although colleagues said he had been pressing the case. While unverified rumors swirled on Myanmar’s social media this week that the military was behind the killing, the police said there was no evidence to support the claims. The assistant secretary of the Home Affairs Ministry, U Maung Maung Myint, issued a statement on Wednesday denying rumors that the home affairs minister, Lt. Gen. Kyaw Swe, had orchestrated the killing. But even as a few details began to leak out, there were still more questions than answers. Those guessing at motives noted that Mr. Ko Ni, 65, was one of the country’s most prominent Muslims in a majority Buddhist country torn by religious strife. But he was hardly a firebrand. While he did not hesitate to advocate the legal rights of Muslims and other minorities whenever he felt they were threatened, he did not promote Islamic law and he backed a decision by the National League for Democracy not to field Muslim candidates in the 2015 election, telling a reporter at the time that it was not worth it given the polarized political climate. Instead, he expressed an inclusive vision that was shaped in part by his background as the son of an ethnic Burmese and Buddhist mother and a Muslim father from India. “He was a man who could appreciate different traditions precisely because his own tradition in his country did not always receive the respect that it deserved,” said Melissa Crouch, an expert on Myanmar’s Constitution at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. The main suspect, U Kyi Lin, had been jailed from 2003 to 2014 for smuggling ancient Buddha statues, according to police statements and leaked police documents. That would hardly be the profile of a radical Buddhist. Mr. Kyi Lin was pardoned in 2014 in a prisoner amnesty by the government of former President Thein Sein, who was an army general. Some lawyers wondered how the gunman had acquired a pistol, which is manufactured by the Myanmar Army, in a country where civilian firearm sales have been prohibited for decades. There was also speculation about how the attacker could have carried out the killing in daylight in a public place that is among the country’s most secure and that regularly hosts national and foreign dignitaries. All of which lead Mr. Ko Ni’s friends and colleagues back to his efforts to challenge the military and its powerful supporters. A canny constitutional lawyer, Mr. Ko Ni had outmaneuvered the military before. Before the military dictatorship that ruled Myanmar for nearly 50 years allowed democratic elections, it left in place a Constitution that barred anyone with a spouse or child with foreign citizenship from becoming president. That clause was aimed at one person: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the popular Nobel laureate and leader of the National League for Democracy, whose husband, now dead, was British and whose sons are also British citizens. Mr. Ko Ni is widely credited with helping devise the strategy that allowed her to take power after her party won a landslide election in 2015. Parliament created a new position, state counselor, that would be above the president and appointed her to the job. Richard Horsey, a political analyst and former United Nations official in Yangon, called the move a legal “fudge” that may have survived because Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party controlled the courts. But he said that Mr. Ko Ni was among the most knowledgeable legal minds in the National League for Democracy orbit. “There aren’t many people like that, so in that sense, he played a very important role,” Mr. Horsey said. But the party has long had another target: eliminating the special powers for the military enshrined in the Constitution, including a crucial veto. The veto is actually two parts: a quota that allocates a quarter of the seats in Parliament to the military, and the requirement of a 75 percent majority to pass a constitutional amendment. Mr. Ko Ni had proposed introducing a bill on a referendum about drafting a new constitution. The bill could be passed with a simple majority, which the National League for Democracy could easily muster. “If the military still focuses on protecting its interests, it will be impossible to change any part of the Constitution within Parliament,” he said last year, according to The Myanmar Times. “That’s why writing a new one is the best way to pursue a democratic Constitution. ” Party officials, however, have not publicly endorsed this solution, and U Win Htein, a party leader contacted this week, said the party still favored amending, rather than replacing, the Constitution. But Mr. Ko Ni was still promoting the idea, and one colleague, Mr. Thein Than Oo, said that “one of his last works” had been drafting a new Constitution. The consequences of the killing for the country will depend on what motive is ultimately established, as well as the transparency of the police investigation. But the killing has already demonstrated that the rule of law in Myanmar remains fragile, and it could further erode the National League for Democracy’s ability to govern, said Elliot Brennan, a Myanmar specialist and a research fellow at the Institute for Security and Development Policy in Stockholm. Initial expectations that the party could bring major changes to Myanmar were “far too high, and we’ve been waiting for the expectations, the red balloon, to pop,” he said. “The assassination might not be the final pinprick, but we’re getting very close. ” That the party leadership has said little about the killing has raised questions about its ability to handle the situation. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has faced international criticism for recent military operations in Rakhine State against the Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority, has also been rebuked. The office of Myanmar’s president, U Htin Kyaw, said in a statement on Monday that the attack had been carried out to undermine the country’s stability. U Zaw Htay, a spokesman for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, later said that the statement by the president’s office had been made on her behalf. But Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi did not attend Mr. Ko Ni’s funeral, and his daughter, Dr. Yin Nwe Khaine, said on Wednesday that, to the best of her knowledge, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi had not sent condolences. She said she knew that her father’s work carried risks, but that he never talked about them at home. “He always said that lawyers are forever worrying, and he never wanted to pass those worries on to his family,” she said by telephone, fighting back tears. But he did train her to be strong in difficult times, she added, and this was one of them. “My father is my hero,” she said. | 1 |
850 | Jane Pauley Is Back — Again - The New York TimesShortly after Jane Pauley’s daytime talk show was canceled 11 years ago, she thought that might be it for her. Though long forgotten, “The Jane Pauley Show” was a program NBC spent millions on, and executives had very high hopes for it. Instead, it was a bust, and was yanked off the air after one season. “I didn’t expect to have a career in television after that,” Ms. Pauley said in a recent interview. For a while, it looked like she might be right. All anchors of a certain age — particularly women — are confronted with the reality of diminished opportunity, and even with a distinguished broadcasting career, Ms. Pauley was no exception. Over the course of the next several years, there were some work with PBS, the irregular appearance on “Today” where she profiled aging baby boomers, and little else. And then came an unexpected comeback. She signed on with CBS two years ago and started doing features for its popular “Sunday Morning” program and filling in for various anchors, including on “CBS This Morning” and “The Evening News. ” And on Sunday she will triumphantly return to the spotlight: A couple weeks shy of 66, Ms. Pauley will formally succeed Charles Osgood as the anchor of “Sunday Morning. ” “There have been high points in my career, and low points as well,” she said. “But even at the low points there have always been these rebounds. Like those trick birthday candles: It flickers off, and comes on again!” Ms. Pauley was sitting on a couch at the CBS Broadcast Center, nursing a cup of tea to help her stave off a coughing fit. (She said she got a cold from her grandchildren by way of her husband, the “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau.) She was quick to point out the fairly incredible timing of her “Sunday Morning” debut: It will occur almost 40 years after her first day as a on “Today” where, at 25, she followed Barbara Walters. Her first day at “Today” was Oct. 11, 1976. But as much as Ms. Pauley will be remembered for her broadcast accomplishments, it is her departures that have prompted more sensational headlines. “I always make news by leaving,” she said, laughing. Well before Ann Curry’s disastrous departure from “Today,” in 2012, Ms. Pauley also left the show in acrimonious circumstances. NBC had brought in Deborah Norville to join Ms. Pauley and Bryant Gumbel in 1989. Ms. Pauley figured NBC had hired her replacement, and decided to act first: She announced shortly after Ms. Norville’s arrival that she was leaving the show. The damage to NBC was significant. Viewers were repelled by what they perceived as Ms. Pauley being pushed out, and fled “Today” for “Good Morning America” on ABC. The magazine editor Michael Kinsley once said Ms. Pauley was “the first baby boomer they tried to put out to pasture … and failed. ” Ms. Pauley stayed with NBC and moved onto a successful run as of the newsmagazine show “Dateline. ” But Ms. Pauley decided it was time to do something different, and in 2003 announced she would leave that show. NBC was caught off guard by her decision and what followed was yet another wave of warm publicity for her. NBC’s parent company found a way to get her to stay. “I think NBC noticed I’m getting all this attention and then came to me with the offer of a daytime show,” she said. Ms. Pauley has long been praised for exuding normalness on camera (“She’s as skilled a prompter reader as anyone I’ve worked with in 40 years in the business,” said Michael Weisman, the producer of her daytime show). That skill set did not carry over for her talk show. “People respected her and liked her, but she wasn’t relatable to the typical daytime audience,” Mr. Weisman said. “She was somebody who you would go to for career advice, not the girlfriend who you’d go to for cooking tips or weight loss tips or who’s dating who. ” Ms. Pauley said she was proud of the show, but even she acknowledged that it was a failure. And that is when she entered what she describes as her “fallow period. ” She returned to “Today’’ with a segment about baby boomers. In 2014, she published a book, “Your Life Calling: Reimagining the Rest of Your Life,” that was inspired by those spots. The AARP paid for and sponsored the segment — which is why Ms. Pauley says she believes “Today” broadcast it — but just as she was beginning her book tour, the AARP said it was ending its commitment. Once again, Ms. Pauley was a television personality without a television job. “It wasn’t a tremendous disappointment but it was a little awkward in that I was on book tour talking about the future and I didn’t have one,” she said. Until she did again. While promoting her book, she was featured on “Sunday Morning. ” That is when CBS producers noticed something unusual: Emails were pouring in from viewers about how much they enjoyed the segment. CBS signed her as a contributor. Ms. Pauley leapt at the chance, and what was a modest commitment soon turned into steady work. When Mr. Osgood, the host of “Sunday Morning,” was ready to step aside after more than two decades, CBS turned to Ms. Pauley. David Rhodes, the CBS News president, said that Ms. Pauley’s range, reputation and warmth made her the right steward for the job. “Sunday Morning” is the highest rated show on Sunday mornings, and CBS needs it to stay that way. “As much as you always want to bring new viewers to a program, this broadcast has a very dedicated audience,” Mr. Rhodes said. “You can’t chase them away. ” Ms. Pauley said that there would be few changes to the quirky show and that she was confident of one thing: she would be a good fit as anchor, she said repeatedly during the interview. And after a stretch where TV work was hard to come by, she said she’s soaking it all in now. “Where I come from — which is Indiana, and I’m a Hoosier five generations both sides — you do not boast or brag,” she said. “It’s an old joke of mine that the only thing we’re entitled to brag about is our humility. I’ve been dragging that around my whole career by apologizing, or saying ‘Oh, I’m so lucky. ’” She started laughing and added, “I seem to be over that. ” | 1 |
851 | People Power! Natives declare treaty rights, police admit defeat - cite lack of 'manpower' to remove DAPL protestersWed, 26 Oct 2016 23:00 UTC Authorities in North Dakota may be feeling the heat from the international attention the Dakota Access Pipeline is getting. They're now saying they lack the manpower to remove the encampment of protesters located on federal land near the controversial pipeline. The announcement may signal a softening of the treatment the protesters, up until now, have been receiving. For months now, The Free Thought Project 's spotlight has been shining on the, some might say, dark and dirty deeds of law enforcement and their treatment of largely Native American peaceful protesters. Attack dogs were unleashed on the protesters in September, injuring six, and an additional 30 protesters, including children, were sprayed with pepper spray. In all, more than 260 people have reportedly been arrested since the protests began in Morton County — over 100 this weekend alone. The sheriff's office's announcement comes just two days after The Free Thought Project encouraged readers to contact Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier's office demanding him to allow for peaceful protest, even providing a link to a petition for his removal. Spokeswoman Donnell Preskey told The Associated Press the department doesn't "have the manpower" to remove the more than 100 protesters from the property. "We can't right now," she said. Preskey said the land belongs to a Texas-based firm, Energy Transfer Partners, and was purchased from a local rancher for an undisclosed price. According to the AP , the Native Americans claim the land is theirs by way of an, "1851 treaty and they won't leave until the pipeline is stopped." "We never ceded this land," said protester Joye Braun. "The $3.8 billion pipeline, most of which has been completed, crosses through North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois. Opponents worry about potential effects on drinking water on the Standing Rock Sioux's reservation and farther downstream on the Missouri River, as well as destruction of cultural artifacts," writes the AP. The disputed ranch is more than 100 years old and was the first one to be inducted into the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. According to the AP: "It is within a half-mile of a larger encampment on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' land where the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and hundreds of others have gathered in protest. Protesters do not have a federal permit to be on the corps' land, but the agency said it wouldn't evict them due to free speech reasons . Authorities have criticized that decision, saying the site has been a launching point for protests at construction sites in the area." While the announcement by the Morton County Sheriff's office may signal a change in tone and the potential for more relaxed police tactics, it remains to be seen. Late Monday, Standing Rock Sioux chairman Dave Archambault II issued the following statement, calling on the Obama Administration's U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the militant treatment of its peaceful protesters, and asked for an injunction to the pipeline's construction. Archambault wrote; The militarization of local law enforcement and enlistment of multiple law enforcements agencies from neighboring states is needlessly escalating violence and unlawful arrests against peaceful protestors at Standing Rock. We do not condone reports of illegal actions, but believe the majority of peaceful protestors are reacting to strong-arm tactics and abuses by law enforcement. Thousands of water protectors have joined the Tribe in solidarity against DAPL, without incident or serious injury. Yet, North Dakota law enforcement have proceeded with a disproportionate response to their nonviolent exercise of their First Amendment rights, even going as far as labeling them rioters and calling their every action illegal. We are disappointed to see that our state and congressional delegations and Gov. Jack Dalrymple have failed to ensure the safety and rights of the citizens engaged in peaceful protests who were arrested on Saturday. Their lack of leadership and commitment to creating a dialogue towards a peaceful solution reflects not only the unjust historical narrative against Native Americans, but a dangerous trend in law enforcement tactics across America. For these reasons, we believe the situation at Standing Rock deserves the immediate and full attention of the U.S. Department of Justice. Furthermore, the DOJ should impose an injunction to all developments at the pipeline site to keep ALL citizens - law enforcement and protestors - safe. The DOJ should be enlisted and expected to investigate the overwhelming reports and videos demonstrating clear strong-arm tactics, abuses and unlawful arrests by law enforcement. The chairman's request seems to validate many of the reports coming from the field, that peaceful protesters are being labeled as rioters and are not being treated with the dignity they feel they deserve. As The Free Thought Project reported two days ago, many of the protesters are being thrown to the ground, squashed underfoot, strip-searched, and forced to remove sacred hair braids — all considered "strong-arm tactics, abuses, and unlawful," by Archambault. | 0 |
852 | Deutsche Bank Considering Alternatives To Paying Cash BonusBy Zero Hedge
It has been at least a few weeks since Deutsche Bank appeared in the flashing red breaking news sections of newswires, with news that was – mostly – negative. And while the stock has since rebounded materially, wiping out all losses since the DOJ’s $14 billion RMBS settlement leak, it appears that not everything is back to normal for the largest German lender. Because in what may be the worst news yet for DB’s employees, moments ago Bloomberg reported that the German Bank is exploring “ alternatives to paying bonuses in cash ” as Chief Executive Officer John Cryan seeks to boost capital buffers.
According to Bloomberg, DB executives have discussed options including giving some bankers shares in the non-core unit instead of cash bonuses. Another idea under review is replacing the cash component with more Deutsche Bank stock.
The supervisory board may discuss the topic of variable pay at a meeting on Wednesday though no final decisions are expected, the people said, the day before it reports third-quarter earnings. The measures, if pursued in the coming months, would mostly impact the investment bank, the people said . The Frankfurt-based lender is still considering other alternatives, they said.
As Bloomberg adds, any bonus-related decision will depend on the size and timing of Deutsche Bank’s settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice over a probe into the the sale of faulty real-estate securities. Last year, Deutsche Bank awarded staff 2.4 billion euros ($2.6 billion) of bonuses for 2015, 1.45 billion euros of which was for the combined investment banking and trading unit. Of the 2.4 billion euros, 49 percent was deferred stock and cash while the remainder was paid out immediately. It appears that DB wants to take the 49% number and make it bigger.
The idea echoes a similar move by Credit Suisse Group AG at the height of the financial crisis, when the Swiss firm used its most illiquid loans and bonds to pay employees’ year-end bonuses.
The report is comparable to a similar announcement made exactly one year ago , when DB announced it may slash bonuses by as much as one third. Since then, however, DB’s aggressive cost cutting initative has made life for the bank’s employees progressively more miserable. Since taking over in 2015, Cryan has suspended the dividend, reduced bonuses, cut risky assets, frozen new hiring and announced plans to shed some 9,000 jobs. The CEO has already said Deutsche Bank may fail to be profitable this year after posting the first annual loss since 2008 last year. Now, DB bankers may end up getting “paid” in some of the billions in impaired tanker loans, carried quietly on the bank’s book, if not CDS or interest rate swaps. Those DB certainly has a lot of.
Should DB be successful with this significant shift in compensation strategy without leading to an exodus of workers, it will likely be attempted at other banks as the core problems facing Deutsche Bank, namely declining profitability, have now become systemic across the entire banking sector. Which is bad news for investment bankers everywhere.
Source: Zero Hedge
| 0 |
853 | All of “Danny Dyer’s Football Foul Ups” DVD in 90 secondsNext Swipe left/right All of “Danny Dyer’s Football Foul Ups” DVD in 90 seconds All the highlights from “Danny Dyer’s Football Foul Ups” DVD edited together into one glorious chunk. I edited the "Danny Dyer's Football Foul Ups" DVD into one 90 second chunk. pic.twitter.com/X40YquHTt9
— #BROKEN Wil Jones (@AchinglyChic) October 27, 2016
In case you missed it, here’s all six episodes of Danny Dyer’s “The Real Football Factories” condensed into a minute. I edited the entire first season of Danny Dyer's The Real Football Factories into one 60 second chunk. pic.twitter.com/U8thmYU9CR
— #BROKEN Wil Jones (@AchinglyChic) September 29, 2016 | 0 |
854 | Lack of Oxford Comma Could Cost Maine Company Millions in Overtime Dispute - The New York TimesA lawsuit about overtime pay for truck drivers hinged entirely on a debate that has bitterly divided friends, families and foes: The dreaded — or totally necessary — Oxford comma, perhaps the most polarizing of punctuation marks. What ensued in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and in a court decision handed down on Monday, was an exercise in grammar pedantry that could cost a dairy company in Portland, Me. an estimated $10 million. In 2014, three truck drivers sued Oakhurst Dairy, seeking more than four years’ worth of overtime pay that they had been denied. Maine law requires workers to be paid 1. 5 times their normal rate for each hour worked after 40 hours, but it carves out some exemptions. A quick punctuation lesson before we proceed: In a list of three or more items — like “beans, potatoes and rice” — some people would put a comma after potatoes, and some would leave it out. A lot of people feel very, very strongly about it. The debate over commas is often a pretty inconsequential one, but it was anything but for the truck drivers. Note the lack of Oxford comma — also known as the serial comma — in the following state law, which says overtime rules do not apply to: Does the law intend to exempt the distribution of the three categories that follow, or does it mean to exempt packing for the shipping or distribution of them? Delivery drivers distribute perishable foods, but they don’t pack the boxes themselves. Whether the drivers were subject to a law that had denied them thousands of dollars a year depended entirely on how the sentence was read. If there were a comma after “shipment,” it might have been clear that the law exempted the distribution of perishable foods. But the appeals court on Monday sided with the drivers, saying the absence of a comma produced enough uncertainty to rule in their favor. It reversed a lower court decision. In other words: Oxford comma defenders won this round. “That comma would have sunk our ship,” David G. Webbert, a lawyer who represented the drivers, said in an interview on Wednesday. The language in the law followed guidelines in the Maine Legislative Drafting Manual, which specifically instructs lawmakers to not use the Oxford comma. Don’t write “trailers, semitrailers, and pole trailers,” it says — instead, write “trailers, semitrailers and pole trailers. ” The manual does clarify that caution should be taken if an item in the series is modified. Commas, it notes, “are the most misused and misunderstood punctuation marks in legal drafting and, perhaps, the English language. ” “Use them thoughtfully and sparingly,” it cautions. Legal history is replete with cases in which a comma made all the difference, like a $1 million dispute between Canadian companies in 2006 or a very costly insertion of a comma in an 1872 tariff law. Varying interpretations of a comma in the Second Amendment have figured in court decisions on gun laws, including a Federal District Court overturning a Washington gun ordinance in 2007. (The Supreme Court later overturned the law in the case known as District of Columbia v. Heller.) Most American news organizations tend to leave the Oxford comma out while allowing for exceptions to avoid confusion, like in the sentence: “I’d like to thank my parents, Mother Teresa and the pope. ” Reporters, editors and producers at The New York Times usually omit the comma, but Phil Corbett, who oversees language issues for the newsroom, wrote in a 2015 blog post that exceptions are sometimes made: The Associated Press, considered the authority for most American newsrooms, also generally comes out against the Oxford comma. But the comma is common in book and academic publishing. The Chicago Manual of Style uses it, as does Oxford University Press style. “The last comma can serve to resolve ambiguity,” it says. A 2014 survey of 1, 129 Americans by FiveThirtyEight and SurveyMonkey Audience found 57 percent in favor of the comma and 43 percent opposed. Mr. Webbert, who said working on the case recalled his boyhood grammar and Latin lessons, scoffed at the idea that he was representing all those in favor of the Oxford comma. He was only representing the truck drivers, he said. The drivers, who earned between $46, 800 and $52, 000 per year without overtime, worked an average of 12 extra hours a week, Mr. Webbert said. Though three drivers filed the lawsuit in 2014, about 75 will share the money. Oakhurst, a longtime family business that was acquired by Dairy Farmers of America in 2014, employs about 200 people and has annual sales of $110 million, selling dairy products throughout New England, according to its website. Its president, John H. Bennett, said in an interview on Thursday that “our management team values our employees and we take employee compensation seriously. ” “We believe we’re in compliance with state and federal wage laws, and we’ll continue to defend ourselves in this matter,” he said. Mr. Webbert declined to take a personal position on the broader debate of using the Oxford comma. But he sounded like a lot of English teachers and writing coaches who offered an alternative suggestion: If there’s any doubt, tear up what you wrote and start over. “In this situation, it did create an ambiguity, which means you have to either add a comma or rewrite the sentence,” he said. | 1 |
855 | European Parliament Committee Considering Legal Rights for Robots - BreitbartThe European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs has voted favorably on a draft report which proposes giving legal personage to robots. [With seventeen votes against two, along with two abstentions, the committee agreed that “the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations, including that of making good any damage they may cause. ” The report asserts that humanity stands “on the threshold of an era” in which artificial intelligence could be responsible for a “new industrial revolution. ” It includes obligations that robots would be held to as well, which seem based on Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, introduced by the author in a 1942 short story. His visionary fiction is now on the road to becoming a legal reality. Luxembourg MEP Mady Delvaux has further proposed a “kill switch,” a mechanism by which humans could deactivate any artificially intelligent entity that operates outside of the laws established. Different levels of accountability would be assigned robots based on their level of sophistication, with increased levels of personal responsibility commensurate with the complexity of the synthetic being in question. Despite offering a semblance of humane treatment to robots, the draft report also proposes very stringent boundaries on their design. It clearly draws a line in the sand, where “a robot is not a human and will never be human. A robot can show empathy but it cannot feel empathy. ” Furthermore, it declares that no robot should ever appear to be “emotionally dependent. ” Robots should never be allowed to seem overtly human, or “that he loves you or he is sad. ” Delvaux addressed the need to solve the complicated problems arising from daily interaction with complex AI in a brief interview. Among those issues are things as obvious as safety and privacy, but as nuanced as “informed consent. ” The rise of artificial life will very likely be humanity’s first interaction with intelligent entities. Despite being of our own creation, there is a distinct possibility that they could outstrip us both mentally and physically. It’s heartening to see such concepts addressed with the gravity they’re owed, even if such rules are somehow never necessary. The draft report and its revolutionary proposals are now on their way to the house, which will vote on it in February. Follow Nate Church @Get2Church on Twitter for the latest news in gaming and technology, and snarky opinions on both. | 1 |
856 | Rex Tillerson, an Aggressive Dealmaker Whose Ties With Russia May Prompt Scrutiny - The New York TimesHOUSTON — Twenty years ago, as Rex W. Tillerson was rising through the ranks at Exxon, he was charged with negotiating with the government of Yemen to build a natural gas export plant. The talks got bogged down over Yemen’s insistence that it have veto power over important business decisions. Mr. Tillerson, at one point, flew into a rage, throwing a book across the room and storming out, perhaps for dramatic effect. Yemeni negotiators and other representatives of other oil companies partnering with Exxon in the international consortium looked on in bewilderment. In the end, Yemen got at least some of its demands. But that kind of determination to bend others’ wills could be exactly what Donald J. Trump is looking for in a secretary of state. It is also the kind of unconventionality that could open up Mr. Tillerson to closer scrutiny in Senate confirmation hearings, particularly when it comes to his close relations with Russia. “He’s much more than a business executive,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Tillerson in an interview with Fox News on Sunday, without confirming that Mr. Tillerson would be the ultimate choice. “He’s a player. ” To make a fresh start with Russia, as Mr. Trump promised during the campaign, there may not be a better envoy than Mr. Tillerson, 64, who has made a career at Exxon — and Exxon Mobil since the 1999 merger — by drilling more fossil fuels out of Russian soil and has even been decorated for his friendship with the country. The United States and Russia are quarreling these days in ways rarely seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ukraine and Syria are just two of several hot spots where the countries have clashing interests, and United States intelligence has concluded that Russia covertly tried to undercut the very essence of American democracy by hacking computers and selectively leaking information to hurt Hillary Clinton and promote Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. Mr. Tillerson’s clever maneuvering in Russia at a time of growing tensions with the West was amply shown in 2014, shortly after the United States and its allies applied sanctions on Russia for meddling in Ukraine. President Obama asked American business leaders not to attend a major business forum in Russia that May, and Mr. Tillerson obeyed the president’s wishes. But Mr. Tillerson, Exxon Mobil’s chief executive, still found a way to get a seat at the table. He sent his company’s top exploration official in his place. The official, Neil W. Duffin, signed an agreement to promote more business with Rosneft to expand joint drilling in the Arctic Ocean, develop shale fields with new technologies and cooperate on a gas export plant in Siberia. Tougher sanctions eventually froze the growth of Exxon’s activities in Russia, but Mr. Tillerson had once again proved his commitment to doing business with the country’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. “Tillerson will be a credible and effective messenger for a U. S. reset because he is not a member of the foreign policy establishment but also because his history embodies the investment potential Russia could enjoy with a better relationship with the United States,” said David L. Goldwyn, who was the State Department’s top energy diplomat during the first Obama administration. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. Goldwyn said: “He has definitely decided to do a reverse Nixon and side with Russia against China. He thinks we probably can make common cause with Russia in Syria but also in Libya, and he doesn’t have a problem supporting strongmen. ” Russia may be Mr. Tillerson’s strength, but it could also ultimately be his Achilles’ heel. The Russian government gave him the country’s Order of Friendship decoration in 2012, an award that could now well be an embarrassment. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said on Twitter on Sunday, “Being a ‘friend of Vladimir’ is not an attribute I am hoping for from a Secretary of State. ” Mr. Tillerson has opposed sanctions on Russia, which are the single greatest obstacle to foreign investment in that country. Russia has two enormous areas for new oil development, in the Barents Sea and the Bazhenov shale field in western Siberia, that are essentially closed to development because of a lack of foreign capital and expertise. Exxon was poised to invest in both areas before the sanctions. Exxon operates in about 50 foreign countries, and Mr. Tillerson has relationships far and wide. Energy experts say he is particularly well versed in the affairs of Angola, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, Nigeria and Qatar. “My impression is he is a corporate diplomat,” said Chase Untermeyer, who was United States ambassador to Qatar in the George W. Bush administration. “In my day in Qatar, he would come and go for meetings with the most senior leadership of the country. ” But environmentalists and human rights groups have already reacted to the likely appointment with alarm, saying Mr. Tillerson would send the wrong message on the United States’ commitment to curbing climate change because he has spent his entire professional career at a company. Also likely to come up at confirmation hearings would be Mr. Tillerson’s potential interest in seeing Exxon succeed in Russia and elsewhere in the future. According to company filings this year, Mr. Tillerson owned $218 million in company stock, and his pension plan was worth nearly $70 million. Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, an antipoverty organization, said his group questioned how Mr. Tillerson would “balance the pressure to transact deals against his larger responsibility to strengthen the rules and institutions that protect economic hope and fundamental human rights for so many on the planet. ” Mr. Offenheiser added, “Under Tillerson’s leadership, Exxon has continued to work to undermine climate science. ” Mr. Tillerson is not always easy to define. Deeply conservative and committed to the Boy Scouts of America, he quietly pushed the organization to be open to gay rights. But under his leadership, Exxon was slow to adopt explicit policies protecting gay employees from discrimination. Although reputed to be a decisive leader with a long view, he appeared slow to grasp the full potential of the United States’ shale gas revolution. Exxon executives, speaking confidentially because they were not authorized to discuss the potential nomination, argued that Mr. Tillerson had pushed for more research on advanced biofuels, carbon capture and sequestration, and carbon taxes to reduce greenhouse emissions. Mr. Tillerson has also moved the company toward acknowledging climate change as a serious problem, although he has strongly defended the company amid investigations by several state attorneys general into allegations that the company took public positions skeptical of climate change when its own scientists were warning of the risks of burning fossil fuels. Meanwhile, Mr. Tillerson’s opposition to sanctions for Russia made sense given Exxon’s interests there, supporters say. Exxon has been active in Russia for decades, and it has various joint ventures with Rosneft inside and outside Russia. Western sanctions against Russia have hurt the company, costing it as much as a billion dollars by some estimates. The company is unable to collect revenue from an investment in an oil and gas consortium that operates off Sakhalin Island or develop other unconventional projects, like Arctic offshore and shale drilling. Mr. Tillerson’s strong suit could be his knack for getting his way in negotiations. He can be expected to encourage the permitting of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would deliver more oil from the Canadian oil sands to American refineries. Having just successfully bid for a deepwater drilling block off the coast of Mexico, and understanding the importance of Mexico as a growing natural gas export market, he can also be expected to try to smooth relations with Mexico City. Some energy experts say Mr. Tillerson could encourage Mr. Trump to support the international climate accord negotiated in Paris last December, but with added emphasis on the benefits of natural gas and ways to bury carbon waste. Mr. Tillerson, said Paul Bledsoe, a former climate change adviser in the Clinton administration, “might bring Trump equal measures of new pressure and political cover to engage on international climate change issues. ” | 1 |
857 | NOT OVER: FBI To Conduct New Investigation Of Emails From Clinton’s Private Illegal ServerNTEB Ads Privacy Policy NOT OVER: FBI To Conduct New Investigation Of Emails From Clinton’s Private Illegal Server In a letter to congressional leaders, Comey said that the FBI had, in connection with an “unrelated case,” recently “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the Clinton investigation.” by Geoffrey Grider October 28, 2016 The FBI will investigate whether additional classified material is contained in emails sent using Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was secretary of state, FBI Director James Comey informed congressional leaders Friday.
EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s a sad, sad, day in America when the first and only woman from one of our two political parties to run for president is being investigated by the FBI for leaking classified information through her private and illegal email server. Crooked Hillary has bragged about “making history” and she’s right, this is truly an historic event, albeit one that belongs in the Hall of Shame.
The announcement appears to restart the FBI’s probe of Clinton’s server, less than two weeks before the presidential election, an explosive development that could shape the campaign’s final days. MSNBC: FBI re-opening investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server Donald Trump announces FBI reopening Hillary Clinton case:
In a letter to congressional leaders , Comey said that the FBI had, in connection with an “unrelated case,” recently “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the Clinton investigation.” Breaking news: FBI reopening Hillary email case
Comey indicated that he had been briefed on the new material yesterday. “I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation,” he wrote. CNN: Clinton team ‘stunned’ by FBI re-opening email investigation, didn’t know until plane landed
T he FBI had previously closed its investigation in July with no charges, though Comey had concluded there had been classified content exchanged on the server and that Clinton had been “extremely careless.” source SHARE THIS ARTICLE Geoffrey Grider NTEB is run by end times author and editor-in-chief Geoffrey Grider. Geoffrey runs a successful web design company, and is a full-time minister of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to running NOW THE END BEGINS, he has a dynamic street preaching outreach and tract ministry team in Saint Augustine, FL. NTEB #TRENDING | 0 |
858 | Hearts & Mines: The US Empire’s Culture IndustryPublished on Oct 29, 2016 Hearts and Mines: The US Empire’s Culture Industry From Katy Perry training alongside US Marines in a music video, to the global box-office mastery of the US military-supported Transformers franchise, it’s clear that the US national security state is a dominant force in global media culture. How and why is this so? This book covers the production, profit and power of US Empire’s culture industry — a nexus between the US state and globalizing media firms and the source of entertainments that promote US Empire as a way of life around the world. With: * Tanner Mirrlees, Assistant Professor of Communication and Digital Media Studies, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, and * Scott Forsyth, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts, York University. The launch was co-sponsored by the Centre for Social Justice, the Global Labour Research Centre, the Socialist Project, and Union for Democratic Communication. Recorded in Toronto, 20 October 2016. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: [email protected]
We apologize for this inconvenience.
What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda? =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. | 0 |
859 | REPORT: Megyn Trashes Trump, Newt… Then Murdoch Announces Replacements Are AvailableWikiLeaks Destroys Hillary Mouthpiece Donna Brazile… Iron-Clad Proof
“I am sick and tired of people like you using that language. That is inflammatory, that is not true,” Gingrich said during the interview. “When you use those words, you take a position, and it is very unfair of you to do that, Megyn.”
“I think your defensiveness on this may speak volumes, sir,” Kelly told Gingrich. “If Mr. Trump is a sexual predator, then it is a big story. And what we saw on that tape was Trump saying himself he likes to grab women by their genitals and kiss them against their will. That’s what we saw. And then we saw 10 women come forward after he denied actually doing it.”
“You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy,” Gingrich countered. Advertisement - story continues below
You can watch the interview here:
Now, it seems the chickens from that encounter might be coming home to roost.
“Mr. Murdoch said in an interview that she is important to the network and he hopes to get a contract signed ‘very soon,’ but noted, ‘it’s up to her,’” The Wall Street Journal reported. Advertisement - story continues below | 0 |
860 | Russian scientists will track sea lions from spaceRussian scientists will track sea lions from space 28 October 2016 TASS The researchers succeeded in installing five GPS tags on two full-grown sea lionesses. Facebook science , research , russia
Researchers at the Kamchatka branch of the Pacific Institute of Geography of Russia’s Science Academy’s Far East Department now have the opportunity to monitor Steller sea lions that are on Russia’s Red List of Threatened Species, from space, the Komandorsky Nature Reserve’s Spokesman Alexei Veledinsky told TASS on Friday. The researchers succeeded in installing five GPS tags on two full-grown sea lionesses and three cubs on the national park’s territory.
"It was not an easy task as these animals are very timid. They had to be knocked out using tranquillizers so that they could be tagged," Veledinsky said.
However, right after the animals woke up, scientists started receiving the data on their movement. In one case, a few days after being tagged, a sea lionesses and her cub travelled several hundred kilometers from the Commander Islands through the Pacific Ocean to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. All of the sea lions’ movements are depicted on a map via a computer program.
"Researchers will be able to follow the sea lions for approximately one year. The tags placed on the animals’ heads will fall off when they begin to shed their fur. That said, the tags are glued to their fur with a specific paste," Veledinsky explained.
One of the main goals of this research is to garner scientific data on the winter habitats of the sea lions populating the Commander Islands as their number has been falling. In the 1960s and 1970s up to 12,000 sea lions used to spend the winter on the islands, while in summer there were 2,000 to 5,000 animals there. Now there are no more than 600 sea lions. The new data will enable the creation of more safe conditions in the sea lions’ rookeries. There are four rookeries where sea lionesses bear cubs on the Commander Islands, which is encompassed by the national park. Besides that, there are also three rookeries where cubs are not born.
The Komandorsky Nature Reserve, founded in 1993, is the largest marine sanctuary in Russia with a territory of more than 3 mln hectares.
First published by TASS . | 0 |
861 | By Seizing the Definition of ‘Populism,’ Reuters Warns Us of Chaos to ComeBy Seizing the Definition of ‘Populism,’ Reuters Warns Us of Chaos to Come By Daily Bell Staff - November 10, 2016
After Trump & Brexit, populist tsunami threatens European mainstream … Back in May, when Donald’s Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election seemed the remotest of possibilities, a senior European official took to Twitter before a G7 summit in Tokyo to warn of a “horror scenario”. Imagine, mused the official, if instead of Barack Obama, Francois Hollande, David Cameron and Matteo Renzi, next year’s meeting of the club of rich nations included Trump, Marine Le Pen, Boris Johnson and Beppe Grillo. -Reuters
Back in June, we identified what has become an overarching elite meme: “populism versus globalism.”
We’ve never fully defined populism, and this Reuters article gives us an opportunity to examine the word and the context in which it is being used.
With Trump’s triumph over his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, the populist tsunami that seemed outlandish a few months ago is becoming reality, and the consequences for Europe’s own political landscape are potentially huge.
In 2017, voters in the Netherlands, France and Germany – and possibly in Italy and Britain too – will vote in elections that could be colored by the triumphs of Trump and Brexit, and the toxic politics that drove those campaigns.
The lessons will not be lost on continental Europe’s populist parties, who hailed Trump’s victory on Wednesday as a body blow for the political mainstream. “Politics will never be the same,” said Geert Wilders of the far-right Dutch Freedom Party. “What happened in America can happen in Europe and the Netherlands as well.”
We can see from these excerpts that “populism” is not seen by Reuters as positive description. In fact, the synonym in the above excerpt is “toxic.”
“Populism” is contrasted to the “political mainstream” as well. This informs us that populism is irregular, even aberrant. We are living through unusual times and populism is the result.
Watching the “populism versus globalism” meme advance is fascinating because it is such a significant positioning of propaganda.
We can see clearly that in many ways mainstream media around the world is not at all hesitant to reveal the basic organizational structure behind it.
There is no way that populism – and, contrastingly, globalism – would appear ubiquitously in so many arenas without considerable unity among supposedly disparate media.
In other words, the organization behind this is formidable. It’s not just this one example either that provokes our observations. The powers-that-be were not shy about illustrating the essential linkages between publications during Trump’s election.
The mainstream sounded as one when it came to Trump. And top-down control was obviously evident, and commented on as well.
The emergence of “populism versus globalism” doesn’t just provide us with evidence of editorial control. Even more importantly it shows us how those who secretly run our societies find this sort of meme-making to be a priority because it anticipates trends and reinterprets them.
By beginning to disseminate the meme in the summer, elite media shapers were able to position fall’s narrative – Trump’s win in particular – within the larger context they’d already defined.
We would suggest that the wave of “populism” sweeping over the US and Europe is at heart a resurgence of a yearning for freedom that is obviously slipping away – not that there was much of it to begin with.
But the Internet has raised people’s consciousness about what they are losing, and why. As a result, more than ever, people are coming to understand the globalist narrative and are registering their disgust.
But this is NOT going to be how the mainstream media interprets what is going on. We can already see that people’s determination to shake off political, monetary and military control is going to be interpreted as essentially greedy and selfish.
We could see this interpretation emerge within the context of Trump’s increasing appeal. Over and over we were told that his support was “rural” and “white” – and that these individuals were flocking to Trump because they were feeling “left out” of the current prosperity and thus resentful.
Of course, one can interpret this trend much differently. Our perspective is that globalism is at fault here. Initiated and expanded by a tiny group of banking interests, globalism seeks to consolidate worldwide power with a tiny group of massive corporations, governments and technocratic leaders.
No wonder why so many people in the West feel left out. This vision provides them no room to grow or prosper. In fact they are not – but their emotion at what’s occurring is perfectly reasonable and logical. We wouldn’t characterize it as resentment so much as rightful anger and frustration.
But Reuters and the other mainstream media have gotten here first and are busily redefining what’s taking place.
We’ve pointed out that the mainstream may be actively enhancing the meme now that they have gotten control of it.
The idea is to marry this emergent propaganda with “directed history” and create a series of economic and political disasters that can be directly (if illegitimately) linked to “populism.”
As populism is denigrated, globalism, in our view, will be uplifted. We’ll be subject to considerable contrasts between “toxic” populism and erudite – “mainstream” – globalism.
We’ve already indicated that we believe this meme is a cultivated one. We don’t believe that the sudden emergence of populism throughout the West is simply coincidental or even evolutionary.
We think this meme is being deliberately cultivated and that it is part of a larger Hegelian dialectic that is intended to reinforce globalism in the long-term. You can see some additional speculation here.
Here at DB we analyze elite memes, their significance and impact. It’s clear to us that the mainstream media is “out front” when it comes to defining “populism” and that there are forces urging it on.
The conclusion of the meme will probably involve a series of catastrophes that will further cultivate and expand globalism. It’s happened before, especially after the 20 th century’s world wars. There is no real reason to think the playbook has been significantly adjusted.
Conclusion: This meme is not only of the utmost importance, it is clearly warning us of considerable distress to come. | 0 |
862 | Seaworthy and Ready for an Early Unveiling - The New York TimesABOARD WAVERTREE IN KILL VAN KULL — In the 131 years since the cargo ship Wavertree was built, it has been tossed and tattered — its main mast ripped away in a hurricane, and its role demoted to sand barge. So when the vessel sailed from the South Street Seaport to Staten Island last year for a restoration, the crew feared that the extensive damage would draw out repairs and delay the ship’s return to its Manhattan berth. They should have known better. Wavertree, which has endured no shortage of natural and economic calamity, turned out to be more resilient than anyone anticipated. In September, after more than a year away, it is set to return to the South Street Seaport Museum, mended, gleaming and ready to remind visitors of the ships that define New York City’s history. The $13 million undertaking has progressed ahead of schedule, hastening the goal of once again sailing Wavertree through New York Harbor. “We were pleasantly surprised,” Jonathan Boulware, the executive director of the seaport museum, said. “It’s a real testament to the era’s wrought iron. ” When it was commissioned in Southampton, England, by R. W. Leyland Company of Liverpool, Wavertree was among the last sailing ships fashioned from wrought iron and it remains the largest afloat, according to the museum. Last May, workers brought it by tugboat to the Caddell Dry Dock and Repair Company in the Richmond Terrace section of Staten Island and expected to replace 10 large metal plates on the hull. Instead, the 4 slabs of iron, which sit below the water line, needed only minor repairs. Wavertree has nonetheless required an ambitious overhaul, carried out by a crew of up to three dozen. The ship spent five months in dry dock, where workers scrubbed away barnacles, seaweed and other gunk before adding layers of protective paint to its underside. The team has also been replacing three decks. The wood that once covered the main deck has been exchanged for steel to keep out water. The poop deck is being repaired traditionally, using wooden planks caulked with cotton and oakum then sealed with pitch. And Wavertree once again has its ’tween deck, a modest level between the main deck and the cargo hold that had been absent for decades. The most daunting task, workers said, has been the renovation of the ship’s three masts and their rigging. For that, Caddell built a pair of sheds outfitted with both and highly modern tools. Inside one, the crew is building 16 spars from laminated timber. The other has held more than three miles of wire, which was stripped of its old protective coating and wrapped in a new layer of pine and leather. Though the crew did not expect to fully rig the ship by September, time and money saved on the hull plates accelerated the schedule. “I marvel at how effectively and efficiently we’ve been able to conduct the restoration,” Mr. Boulware said. Although its immense iron frame and masts give Wavertree a distinguished profile today, it was a relatively common model when it was built by Oswald Mordaunt Company in 1885. A plaque identifies the Wavertree as the company’s hull No. 231. Mr. Boulware noted that stringers, which fortify the hull, on the ship’s port side dip below those on its starboard — one of several imperfections in the construction. The cramped quarters once held bunk beds stacked tightly to accommodate a crew of 35 men in the ship’s heyday. Over the years, Wavertree circumnavigated the globe nearly 30 times, ferrying sundry cargo — coal, kerosene, jute, cotton, tea, coffee, molasses, timber. On Jan. 14, 1895, it called on the Port of New York, bearing a load of nitrate from Chile. In 1910, a violent storm off Cape Horn splintered Wavertree’s masts, ending its days. Its owners sold the ship to Chilean businessmen, who used it as a warehouse for 30 years. It transferred hands again in 1947, beginning a career as a sand barge in Buenos Aires. Wavertree was acquired by the museum in 1968. The ship’s homecoming was made possible in part by the impending departure of Peking, another sailing ship, which has graced the seaport since 1974. Peking, too, has been battered — by war, by waves and by weather. It suffered through plummeting tourism in Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Faced with mounting financial difficulties, the museum considered dispensing with the barque, which was built in Hamburg, Germany, in 1911. However, salvation came from the German government, which is spending 30 million euros (about $33 million) to bring Peking home, carried across the Atlantic Ocean on the back of a ship. “I’ll be sad to see her go, but it’s what’s best for everyone,” Mr. Boulware, said. “It’s about resource allocation. ” Funding for Wavertree’s restoration has come from the City Council, the office of the Manhattan borough president and the city’s Cultural Affairs Department. “Wavertree is an incredible object with a direct connection to the site that really gives the area an authentic sense of its past,” Tom Finkelpearl, the department’s commissioner, said. The Wavertree project was also helped by a $4. 8 million grant given to the museum in March by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. The money will go toward improving safety and accessibility at the museum, and adding an education center, Mr. Boulware said. “The port is what built the city and what continues to build it today,” Mr. Boulware said, showing off the museum’s first new exhibition since 2012, “Street of Ships: The Port and Its People. ” It plumbed the museum’s collections to tell the history of the Port of New York, once the fulcrum of world shipping. That exhibition will be complete, Mr. Boulware said, when Wavertree assumes its place again in the museum’s marina. | 1 |
863 | Donald Trump Adds K.T. McFarland to His National Security Team - The New York TimesWASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump filled two but influential White House staff jobs on Friday, while his candidate for secretary of housing and urban development, Ben Carson, continued to deliberate about whether to join the administration. Mr. Trump offered the housing job this week to Mr. Carson, a neurosurgeon who challenged him for the Republican presidential nomination. But despite expectations of a Friday announcement, Mr. Carson was “still pondering,” said a friend, Armstrong Williams. The ’s aides said Mr. Trump did not plan any more announcements until next week. For the politically sensitive post of White House counsel, Mr. Trump chose Donald F. McGahn II, a Washington election lawyer who pushed to deregulate campaign finance and election laws. The counsel’s job may be even more daunting than it was in previous administrations, given Mr. Trump’s business empire, with which he shows no inclination toward severing ties. For the equally critical job of deputy national security adviser, Mr. Trump chose K. T. McFarland, an aide in three Republican White Houses and a Fox News commentator. She has been highly critical of President Obama’s approach to combating terrorism — a view that aligns her with Mr. Trump’s choice for national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn. In rolling out the appointments, the Trump transition team lined up testimonials from big names in both parties. Former Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, regarded as a foreign policy hawk, praised Ms. McFarland, 65, as “one of our country’s most experienced, informed and wise foreign policy and national security experts. ” Mr. Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat turned independent, was a Yale College and law school classmate of Ms. McFarland’s husband, Alan R. McFarland, a investment banker. Edwin Meese III, an attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, said Mr. McGahn, who was the general counsel for the Trump campaign, had “dealt ably with the intersection between politics, government ethics and the rule of law. ” C. Boyden Gray, a White House counsel to the elder President George Bush, said Mr. McGahn was well suited to the job because of his “serious prior relationship with the president” and his “working knowledge of government ethics and election law. ” A brash, conservative born in Atlantic City, Mr. McGahn learned the fine points of election law from a longtime Republican expert in the field, Benjamin L. Ginsberg. At the Federal Election Commission, where he served five years, including terms as chairman and vice chairman, Mr. McGahn was a powerful voice of opposition to what he often saw as intrusive government meddling in elections. He also spent nearly a decade as the general counsel to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Ms. McFarland’s national security experience dates to the Nixon administration, when she was an aide to Henry A. Kissinger. She was a staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, a speechwriter for Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, and the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. She is a familiar presence on Fox News, where she has harshly criticized Mr. Obama over his handling of the Islamic State. “The president has stuck his head in the sand,” she said in September 2014 after the group had kidnapped and executed two American journalists. “To me, it’s a dereliction of duty,” she added. “What was this president doing? Well, he was playing a lot of golf this summer, but he clearly was not attending to the defense of the United States. ” In 2006, Ms. McFarland mounted a bid for the Republican nomination for the Senate in New York. The mayor of Yonkers, John Spencer, defeated her and went on to lose to the Democratic incumbent, Hillary Clinton. During the campaign, Ms. McFarland came under scrutiny for gilding her résumé — claiming, for example, that she had been the woman in the Pentagon when, in fact, two other women outranked her. The deputy national security adviser has one of the most demanding jobs in the West Wing, coordinating meetings of deputies and principals to formulate policies and organizing the vast flow of paperwork from the agencies to the White House. “That job is the ultimate policy and job,” said Peter D. Feaver, who served in the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. “It is all about reviewing policies, framing disagreements and teeing up decisions. It is supposed to be the place where bad ideas die, and so places a premium on analytical insight. ” “Her early work in the Reagan administration is more important than her recent work on TV,” he said of Ms. McFarland. As Mr. Trumps fills key staff positions, some of his cabinet decisions have become complicated. The search for a secretary of state has bogged down as rival factions argue for Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and a Trump loyalist, and Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential nominee, who stridently opposed Mr. Trump during the campaign. Among those raising questions about Mr. Giuliani is Vice Mike Pence, according to people in the Trump transition who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters. Mr. Pence, they said, has favored Mr. Romney in internal discussions. Reince Priebus, whom Mr. Trump named as chief of staff, has said positive things about Mr. Romney but has been more circumspect, and has tried to offer perspective to Mr. Trump on both men. But other people, including Kellyanne Conway, who managed the campaign, have raised questions about Mr. Romney’s loyalty after he became one of the most vocal critics of Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Mr. Trump has remarked to people that he was surprised by the intense resistance to Mr. Romney. Mr. Romney and Mr. Trump spoke again in recent days, according to people briefed on the deliberations, and plan to speak again early next week. But some of Mr. Romney’s allies, who have no interest in seeing him apologize for criticizing Mr. Trump during the campaign, say privately that his chances of being chosen are dimming. With Mr. Carson, the delay appears to be less about fissures within the Trump camp than within Mr. Carson himself. “He’s still pondering, believe it or not,” Mr. Williams, his friend, said on Friday. “Dr. Carson is very methodical, just like he’s going through a surgery, planning every aspect. ” Mr. Carson endorsed Mr. Trump after ending his own campaign. But he has appeared conflicted about joining the administration. Last week, Mr. Williams was quoted as saying his friend was reluctant to take a job for which he had no experience and that “could cripple the presidency. ” Mr. Carson, however, then took to Facebook, where he has built much of his political following, to say his reasons for declining a cabinet job had been misreported. He was on Facebook again on Wednesday, explaining his change of heart. “After serious discussions with the Trump transition team,” Mr. Carson wrote, “I feel that I can make a significant contribution particularly to making our inner cities great for everyone. ” | 1 |
864 | Snowstorm Brings Wintry Mix of Slush and Gripes - The New York TimesAs the snow falls, Times reporters hit neighborhoods and airports from Washington to Boston. Here are some of the stories they found. Snow may have been in the forecast for the Jersey Shore on Tuesday morning but something else ended up coming down in buckets: sarcasm. “What storm?” said Billy Pisano, a painter, who said he “fought the lines for bread and milk” Monday night and canceled his Tuesday job only to wake up to no snow. “I guess I’m going to stay home in the rain,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a Netflix day. ” At a Wawa convenience store in Neptune, people stopped for coffee, cigarettes and griping. George Martin, 50, had strapped a snowplow to his sport utility vehicle and planned to spend the day using it to scrape up a few dollars. He expected seven inches. His spirits sank when he woke up extra early and looked outside. “Like, oh man, come on, they did it again,” he said. “It’s like having a firecracker and you throw it and it’s a dud. ” He added, “There’s nothing to plow. You can’t charge people for something that’s not there. ” Al Clark, 38, and Stephen Vierschilling, 26, at a shop that paints fire engines, shared jokes about weather forecasters. “The last few storms they said it was going to be Armageddon and it wasn’t,” Mr. Clark said. Soo Becchina, a special education teacher from Oceanside on Long Island, tutors students after school four days a week. Because of the storm, she had to cancel sessions with her students. The missed day means missed wages. “Tutoring is a side business for me,” Ms. Becchina said. “But, more important it always upsets me when I cannot give my kids what they need. One of the girls I see is having a math test tomorrow. I am hoping that the teacher doesn’t give the test but, I know this teacher and she normally doesn’t move test dates. ” Despite losing the day and the money, Ms. Becchina still plans on doing a phone session with her student later in the day, at no charge. — NATE SCHWEBER and RUTH BASHINSKY Cancellation notices covered the international flight board at Terminal 4 at Kennedy Airport in Queens on Tuesday morning. But one flight, from Guangzhou, China, had landed shortly before 5 a. m. David Dubois, an engineer and aviation enthusiast from Hudson, N. H. was among the passengers. He said he was impressed with the plane’s landing, despite the snowy conditions. “The pilot really had a difficult time and pulled it off really well,” Mr. Dubois said. “There was no tarmac it was all snow. When he landed, you could just feel it starting to go sideways. He pulled it straight — no bounce, no nothing. I couldn’t believe it. ” But Mr. Dubois still had to get to New England. Kamari Simon, 18, was in a similar bind in Terminal 5. Mr. Simon, a D. J. said he was scheduled to perform with a rapper named Smooky Margiela at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. “I hope everything goes through and I’ll be down in Austin,” said Mr. Simon, who studies music at Five Towns College in Dix Hills, on Long Island. “It’s an opportunity for me to meet other artists and network. ” — SEAN PICCOLI Tuesday’s storm shuttered schools along the Eastern Seaboard, keeping students out of the classroom. But, even though school was closed, elementary students in Petersham, Mass. a town of 1, 200 in the central part of the state, did not exactly have a snow day. Instead, they had homework — books, activities, worksheets and even a science experiment — intended to allow them to make up the day of school without being there, and, thus, to prevent the school from having to add a day at the end of the year. The idea emerged after the winter of 2015, when the district had 10 snow days. Tari Thomas, the superintendent of schools for a consolidated school district that includes Petersham, said the district experimented with sending older students home with online coursework to complete on laptops (although that was not the case on Tuesday, because the students had already used up the five days of online learning they were allowed for the year). “There have been a small pocket of parents that have said, ‘Why can’t kids be kids and have a snow day? ’” said Ms. Thomas. But, Ms. Thomas added, “We’ve had parents say, ‘Oh my gosh, thank goodness you gave them something to do. ’” In Central Park in Manhattan, it was a different story. It was a true snow day with schools canceled. Aliana Lambert, 6, dragged her purple sled to a hill. There was no written rule banning girls from the hill at 100th Street and Central Park West, but at 2 p. m. Aliana was the only girl standing. Kat Vlasica, Aliana’s mother, said they came to their neighborhood hill for every snowstorm. “When you’re in New York with 800 square feet, you have to take advantage of a hill like this,” she said. “This is our hill, and we don’t even have to salt or scrape it. ” — JESS BIDGOOD and EMILY PALMER Navigating New York City streets was a challenge, what with snow and sleet and gusting wind and patches of ice. Drivers on Staten Island confronted another obstacle: a pair of runaway ponies. Terence Monahan, the chief of patrol, said the two ponies escaped from a stable. An police officer driving his truck saw them walking down Hylan Boulevard on the South Shore. The officer stopped and grabbed a tow strap from inside his truck. “He grabbed them, tied them to a lamp post. We got a radio car there and we were able to return them back to the stables,” he said. “They’re safe, they’re in great shape. ” The mayor, for his part, thanked the “cowboy officer. ” — ASHLEY SOUTHALL WASHINGTON — Washington is finally getting the snow day it thought this winter had forgotten — well, kind of. Never mind that only an inch or two of snow, sleet and freezing rain fell across the city and nearby swaths of Virginia and Maryland overnight. Or that public transportation and the federal government, the region’s largest employer, were open for business. As layers of snow and sleet buried crocuses and wilted Washington’s early cherry blossoms, the roads were unplowed and mostly empty at dawn on Tuesday. Business owners who decided to open anyway shoveled front walks only to see them recoated in slippery slush. Even lawmakers in the House of Representatives, who are racing to move major health care legislation forward this week, elected to give themselves something of a snow day on Tuesday. Citing the rash of canceled flights across the country, they postponed all votes until Wednesday. Inside the Oval Office, President Trump hosted Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, for lunch and a . Outside, the daily steady shuffle of tourists posed for pictures. David and Michelle Wilding of Dallas were among them, accompanied by their daughters, Hope and Grace. They had imagined something of a greener spring getaway. So snow? “It’s wonderful,” Mr. Wilding said, especially after a winter at home that did not send its usual dose. — NICHOLAS FANDOS The snowstorm threw a wrench into Town Meeting Day, a pillar of the local democratic process in New Hampshire. With the jury out on what, exactly, elections officials were allowed to do, some town moderators postponed the votes that make up the backbone of governance here. Others let them go ahead, and voters navigated wind and snow to make it to the polls. “We had to instruct our voter clerks to tell the voters, please don’t drip on the ballots,” said Wayne Colby, the town moderator in Henniker, N. H. west of Concord. “I grew up in New Hampshire,” Mr. Colby said, adding, “We don’t have snow days for elections. ” The town meeting, where voters hash out the budget or other issues related to fire and police departments, is older than the state itself. It is also a day of voting for local offices, ordinance changes or bonds. When it became clear that the day would collide with a major winter storm, some town moderators wondered if they could postpone their votes and meetings. The answer from the governor? It’s not clear, but please don’t. “Given that there are differing opinions, the best we can do is strongly recommend that all towns stay open for voting tomorrow,” said Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican. The issue has become the latest disruption in a state that is reeling over accusations of widespread voter fraud by President Trump, and comes on the heels of a number of proposals by Republicans to tighten voting rules. — JESS BIDGOOD | 1 |
865 | Republicans, Wilders, Tillerson: Your Thursday Evening Briefing - The New York Times(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. President Trump has produced an “America First” fiscal plan that is not even earning much praise from his own allies in Congress. His $1. 1 trillion spending plan does not reduce the deficit. It sharply increases military spending while cutting the budgets of federal agencies and programs, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department and the National Endowment for the Arts. It is a gamble for a politician whose supporters include workers who rely on many of the programs he proposes to reduce, including grants that feed hungry children and help local law enforcement. “This will be a heavy lift for the House, and for the Senate, a lot of this will be nonstarters,” said former Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, who chaired the Budget Committee. Here are the winners and losers in the budget, broken down by agency. _____ 2. House Republicans took another step toward repealing the Affordable Care Act. After the Budget Committee approved the new health care bill over the objections of three Republicans, it goes now to the full House. Party leaders acknowledge that they don’t have the votes yet to ensure it will pass. To appease conservatives, the White House is looking at accelerating cuts to Medicaid. Above, Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director. _____ 3. Who undercut Mr. Trump’s travel ban? You might say Mr. Trump himself did — as a candidate. The two federal judges who blocked his revamped travel ban cited his own campaign rhetoric as evidence of his unconstitutional aim of barring Muslims from entering the country. The White House says it will appeal the rulings. We took a look at the long and extensive visa process to enter the U. S. It can take months, or even a year, and often ends in denial. And we tagged along on a trip to the airport, as one family caught up in the travel ban was reunited. _____ 4. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson began his first major foreign trip in Japan, warning that the United States needs a “different approach” to North Korea’s escalating nuclear threat. He faced questions (from preselected reporters) about the 29 percent cuts to the State Department in Mr. Trump’s budget plan. He called current spending “simply not sustainable” and said that the department could “do a lot with fewer dollars. ” He heads to South Korea and China next. _____ 5. European leaders cheered the record turnout — and results — in the Dutch elections on Wednesday. Voters denied Geert Wilders’s party a victory in an election that was seen as a barometer of the far right’s appeal on the Continent. The party of Prime Minister Mark Rutte won the most votes, offering a milder version of Mr. Wilders’s platform, and remains the largest bloc in Parliament. “The Netherlands, after Brexit, after the American elections, said ‘Whoa’ to the wrong kind of populism,” Mr. Rutte said in his victory speech. _____ 6. Federal and state prosecutors closed their yearlong investigation into the practices of Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City. While they faulted the mayor and his aides, saying he had failed to abide by the “intent and spirit” of the law, they said they would not press charges. _____ 7. While scolding Mr. Trump, the Mexican government is quietly trying to gut basic legal protections for its citizens at home. Experts fear a bill submitted by a close ally of President Enrique Peña Nieto to overhaul the legal system would set human rights in Mexico back decades, while another bill would legalize the military’s domestic security role. _____ 8. Ivanka Trump and Nikki Haley, the ambassador to the United Nations, were among the 600 guests that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada took to a new Broadway musical. Mr. Trudeau sent a clear message with his choice of show — “Come From Away,” which is about a Canadian town that hosted thousands of air travelers from around the world when North American airspace was closed after Sept. 11. The musical celebrates generosity toward foreigners in need. Mr. Trudeau, whose policy of welcoming refugees has been at odds with the harsher stance of the Trump administration, was greeted with a standing ovation. _____ 9. The first games in the N. C. A. A. men’s basketball tournament were tight. Here’s the full March Madness schedule, plus how to watch. South Carolina is allowed to host for the first time in 15 years, after it took down the Confederate flag from the State Capitol. Now it’s North Carolina that is banned, because of a law that curbs protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. _____ 10. Finally, some updates from . comedians were unimpressed with Rachel Maddow’s Trump tax return scoop. “Is this news or a reality show?” asked Stephen Colbert. “I don’t want to watch ‘America’s Got 1040s. ’” Netflix is adding more foreign programming. Our critic likes “Fauda” from Israel, above, and “Nobel” from Norway. If you haven’t bought a television in the last two years, it might be a good time to upgrade. Here’s a guide on what to look for. Have a great night. _____ Photographs may appear out of order for some readers. Viewing this version of the briefing should help. Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a. m. Sundays. Want to look back? Here’s last night’s briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
866 | Review: Bryan Cranston Shines as Lyndon Johnson in ‘All the Way’ - The New York TimesBryan Cranston brings his Tony interpretation of President Lyndon B. Johnson to television on Saturday night in an adaptation of the Robert Schenkkan play “All the Way,” and it’s still quite a sight to behold, just as it was on Broadway in 2014. Nothing beats witnessing this kind of portrayal onstage, of course. But the television version, presented by HBO, offers plenty of rewards, allowing Mr. Cranston to work the and liberating him from the confines of a theater set. In his hands, this accidental president comes across as an amazing bundle of contradictions, someone who seems at once too vulgar for the job and just right for it. Mr. Schenkkan adapted his own play (which also won a Tony) for HBO, and he and the director, Jay Roach, have quickened the pace a bit. The slice of history, though, remains the same: Johnson’s pivotal first year in office, from his swearing in after John F. Kennedy’s assassination through his 1964 campaign for election to a full term. The first half of the film, its most compelling stretch, focuses on Johnson’s wheeling and dealing to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. Other prominent figures of the era are manipulated by this master of political hardball: senators like Hubert H. Humphrey (Bradley Whitford) and Richard B. Russell Jr. (Frank Langella) J. Edgar Hoover (Stephen Root) the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Anthony Mackie). Some, especially King and other black leaders, are quite good at manipulation themselves. Given all we hear about the current climate in Washington, “All the Way” is enough to make you misty for the days when in the interest of securing significant achievements was what national politicians did. Not that the film gilds this era. We hear some of the actual arguments used to oppose civil rights legislation (sometimes via archival clips of George Wallace and others) and they’re mighty ugly. Is the verbiage today any different? The film invites us to make the comparison. Halfway through, Mr. Schenkkan turns his attention to the presidential campaign of 1964, with Johnson showing signs of paranoia about his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, and about the possibility of a challenge from Robert F. Kennedy. The details of the story grow a bit technical — a tussle over the seating of black delegates at the Democratic convention takes up a lot of time — but Mr. Cranston keeps it watchable with a performance that grows ever more fervent but never goes over the top. [See our NYT Watching picks for what else you should watch this weekend] The main obstacle in turning the play into TV fare is that “All the Way” has considerably more competition on television than in the theater. Muscular political drama is an entire genre on the small screen, whether it’s made up (“The West Wing” and all its thematic offspring) or based on historical events (“Game Change” and “Recount,” both of which Mr. Roach also directed for HBO). There’s a sameness to a lot of these offerings: the lurching from one crisis to the next the brusque, pithy exchanges that rarely last more than a few sentences the cursory attention to secondary characters. (Lady Bird Johnson, the first lady, played by Melissa Leo, is the most noticeable casualty in “All the Way. ”) Also sapping power from this film is that we’re only a few years removed from the orgy of coverage of the watershed events of 1963 and ’64. With those caveats, “All the Way” is still solid historical drama, and Mr. Cranston’s performance is a gem. | 1 |
867 | Samsung Urges Consumers to Stop Using Galaxy Note 7s After Battery Fires - The New York TimesSEOUL, South Korea — Samsung on Saturday urged consumers worldwide to stop using Galaxy Note 7 smartphones immediately and exchange them as soon as possible, as more reports of the phones catching fire emerged even after a global recall by the company. The call from the South Korean company, the world’s largest maker of smartphones, came after the United States authorities urged users to switch the Galaxy Note 7 off and not to use or charge it during flights. Several airlines around the world asked travelers not to switch on the smartphone or put it in checked baggage, and some carriers banned the phone on flights. In a statement posted on Saturday on its website, Samsung asked users around the world to “immediately” return their existing Galaxy Note 7 and get a replacement. “We are asking users to power down their Galaxy Note 7s and exchange them as soon as possible,” said Koh the president of mobile communication for Samsung. “We are expediting replacement devices so that they can be provided through the exchange program as conveniently as possible. ” Consumers can visit Samsung’s service centers to receive rental phones for temporary use. Samsung plans to provide Galaxy Note 7 devices with new batteries in South Korea starting Sept. 19, but dates for other countries vary. This month, Samsung announced an unprecedented recall of 2. 5 million Galaxy Note 7s worldwide, just two weeks after the phone was released. That move came after Samsung’s investigation into reports of fires found that rechargeable lithium batteries manufactured by one of its suppliers were at fault. The United States was among the first countries to take action after the recall. Late on Friday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission urged people to turn the phones off and leave them off. It also said it was working with Samsung and hoped to announce an official recall “as soon as possible. ” The recall by the safety commission will allow the United States Federal Aviation Administration to bar passengers from carrying the phones on planes. The F. A. A. warned airline passengers on Thursday not to turn on or charge the Galaxy Note 7 during flights and not to put the smartphone in their checked bags. Scandinavian Airlines said Saturday that it had prohibited passengers from using the Galaxy Note 7 on its flights because of concerns about fires. Singapore Airlines has also banned the use or charging of the device during flights. Samsung said it had confirmed 35 cases of the Galaxy Note 7 catching fire as of Sept. 1, most of which occurred while the battery was charging. There are at least two more cases that Samsung said it was aware of — one at a hotel in Perth, Australia, and another in St. Petersburg, Fla. where a family reported that a Galaxy Note 7 left charging in a Jeep had caught fire, destroying the vehicle. Samsung released the Galaxy Note 7 on Aug. 19. The Galaxy Note series is one of the most expensive lines made by Samsung. | 1 |
868 | Election Result Discussion For The 2016 Presidential Election (Open Thread)The day has come. Within a few hours, we should know who is the next President of the United States. You can also follow results on the RVF election results thread or the high energy Donald Trump thread .
Don’t Miss: If Donald Trump Doesn’t Win, We’re Screwed
| 0 |
869 | AG Lynch told FBI Director Comey NOT to go public with the new Clinton email investigationPosted by Daisy Luther
According to a report in the New Yorker, James Comey , Big Kahuna of the FBI, went full-on cowboy in releasing details of the new Clinton email inquiry. Apparently, the Department of Justice advised him not to release the information just days before the presidential election.
Gosh. I wonder if the same advice would have been given if it was Donald Trump who was being investigated by the FBI.
Comey explained his decision in a letter to FBI employees :
“We don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.”
The DoJ – and by DoJ I mean Attorney General Loretta Lynch , who famously had a secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Bill Clinton to talk about her non-existent grandchildren – is implying that Comey is not playing fair and that the move is inconsistent with the rules which have been designed to make it seem like they are not interfering in an election.
Here’s Comey’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee:
Really?
The DoJ thinks that the public shouldn’t know that the person they may be voting for is being investigated by the FBI?
That’s the most absurd thing I have heard for quite some time, and considering this election, that’s really saying something.
This is from the New Yorker report, emphasis mine.
On Friday, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acting independently of Attorney General Loretta Lynch , sent a letter to Congress saying that the F.B.I. had discovered e-mails that were potentially relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server. Coming less than two weeks before the Presidential election, Comey’s decision to make public new evidence that may raise additional legal questions about Clinton was contrary to the views of the Attorney General, according to a well-informed Administration official. Lynch expressed her preference that Comey follow the department’s longstanding practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations, and not taking any action that could influence the outcome of an election, but he said that he felt compelled to do otherwise .
Comey’s decision is a striking break with the policies of the Department of Justice, according to current and former federal legal officials. Comey, who is a Republican appointee of President Obama, has a reputation for integrity and independence, but his latest action is stirring an extraordinary level of concern among legal authorities, who see it as potentially affecting the outcome of the Presidential and congressional elections. ( source ) Is this investigation the iceberg to HRC’s Titanic campaign?
Hillary Clinton has said she finds the development “unprecedented and deeply troubling.” (source )
Oh, I’ll bet she does.
I’ll bet if Trump had been the target of the investigation she would have been up on the stage, gripping the podium to stay upright , saying how wonderful it was that Comey decided to break the news so that voters could be aware that they might be voting for someone who was suspected of having broken federal laws. I’ll bet she’d be saying that the public has a right to know if a candidate was under investigation. I’ll bet she’d take the high road and say that those elected to the office of President of the United States have to be above and beyond reproach.
Of course, when it’s her, things are a little different, aren’t they?
We do have a right to know. We absolutely have a right to know that a person who could be elected to know all of the secrets was careless when she only knew some of the secrets. It seems like a no-brainer that the public should know that a candidate is being investigated for a second time for being criminally negligent with information entrusted to her.
And the fact that we know has severely damaged Clinton’s campaign. Although previous polls were incredibly skewed to the point of being outright fake , it looks like the mainstream is now trying to save face with a new batch of polls. A poll from ABC news and the Washington Post , both hotbeds of liberal voters, has shown that her lead has dropped to within a single point over Donald Trump due to the Clinton email scandal.
“About a third of likely voters say they’re less likely to support Clinton given FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure Friday that the bureau is investigating more emails related to its probe of Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. “
Finally, some people are actually paying attention to the character of Hillary Clinton.
But it may not be enough. There was one finding that was astonishing to me, even though it probably shouldn’t be:
“Given other considerations, 63 percent say it makes no difference.”
Meanwhile, on social media, the FBI emails are somehow not a trending topic. It certainly appears that Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Buzzfeed are blacking out the topic. My biggest question is this: Why now?
Why did James Comey, who has probably committed career suicide, along with a potential actual “suicide” via a shot to the back of his own head like others who have run afoul of the Clintons, feel the need to break the news, particularly after giving her a pass during the last investigation?
Opponents will jump on the fact that he’s a Republican and will say that he did it for political reasons.
They won’t admit that perhaps he felt guilty for being complicit in letting her off the hook in the first investigation into the Clinton email negligence.
They will never, ever admit that maybe his integrity and belief in the office he holds made it impossible for him to keep quiet until after the election and that, perhaps, when he was given a chance to right a previous wrong, he took it. Clinton isn’t taking it gracefully.
Clinton’s complaints, which have appeared in the press around the world, make her look even worse than she did before.
This is from The Telegraph , a UK publication:
Hillary Clinton was furiously fighting to keep her Presidential bid on track on Saturday night as her lead in the polls narrowed, after the FBI’s bombshell announcement that it had reopened its investigation into her emails.
James Comey announced on Friday afternoon that fresh evidence had emerged for his investigation into whether Mrs Clinton was criminally negligent in her handling of classified material.
On Saturday, the latest poll of polls by tracker site RealClearPolitics put Clinton 3.9 percentage points ahead of the Republican nationwide, down from 7.1 points just 10 days previously.
But wait – it gets better:
The Clinton campaign has responded with what amounts to a declaration of open warfare against Mr Comey, alleging that his actions are backed by a political motive. And Mrs Clinton herself called the decision “unprecedented” and “deeply troubling”.
“It’s pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information right before an election,” she complained, addressing cheering supporters at a rally in the must-win state of Florida.
Democrats questioned the timing of the agency’s decision, which comes as polls showed Mrs Clinton’s lead falling just 10 days before the presidential election.
“This is like an 18-wheeler smacking into us, and it just becomes a huge distraction at the worst possible time,” said Donna Brazile, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.
“The campaign is trying to cut through the noise as best it can.
“We don’t want it to knock us off our game. But on the second-to-last weekend of the race, we find ourselves having to tell voters, ‘Keep your focus, keep your eyes on the prize.’”
Hillary’s campaign manager sounds pretty desperate to me. As for the complaints from HRC, they just make her sound like the out-of-touch, money-grabbing, power-hungry, deceitful | 0 |
870 | VIDEO : Epic Loser Weiner Says He Downloaded ALL OF HUMA’S EMAILS By “ACCIDENT” – TruthFeedVIDEO : Epic Loser Weiner Says He Downloaded ALL OF HUMA’S EMAILS By “ACCIDENT” VIDEO : Epic Loser Weiner Says He Downloaded ALL OF HUMA’S EMAILS By “ACCIDENT” Breaking News By TruthFeedNews November 1, 2016
HOLY SMOKES! So ALL of Huma’s emails from her smartphone are now in possession of the DOJ and FBI.
Anthony Weiner says it was “by accident.” Perhaps so, either way he is an epic disgraced loser.
You have to believe that with DOJ and the FBI having all of Huma’s emails, MANY will contain threads with Hillary and there will be enough damning information to convict her without any reasonable doubt.
The question is, are there people in the DOJ and FBI with enough pull to have the courage to tell the truth, or will their efforts be stonewalled by the likes of Hillary shill Loretta Lynch and Peter Kadzik.
Watch the video:
Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. | 0 |
871 | “Donald Trump And The Rise Of White Identity In Politics” | 0 |
872 | GUEST POST: Why I’m Exceptional & Indispensable – by Hillary Clinton - Rob SlaneOriginally appeared at The Blog Mire
Following on from her recent piece for Time magazine , in which she so eloquently explained why America is indispensable and exceptional, TheBlogMire brings you an exclusive piece in which Mrs Clinton explains why an indispensable and exceptional nation must have an indispensable and exceptional leader.
(Warning: May contain traces of satire)
If there’s one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of my career in public service, it’s this: I am an exceptional woman. A great, unselfish, compassionate woman, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy. And when you add up all my advantages, it’s clear I’m indispensable too – someone all others can look to for leadership.
And what I’m really excited about is not just that I’m indispensable, but that I’m about to become President of the indispensable nation. An indispensable nation needs an indispensable woman. An indispensable woman needs an indispensable nation. It’s a match made in heaven, which is why I am asking you to help me break the glass ceiling on November 8th – so that together we can become even more exceptional than we already are.
So what makes me so indispensable?
I’m indispensable in part because of my love for our armed forces. Our military is the greatest in history, with the best troops, training and technology, and I believe it is a travesty that we are not using it to its full potential. It’s essential we do everything we can to support our men and women in uniform, and I intend to do just that by sending our brave soldiers on important missions around the globe from day one of my presidency.
I’m indispensable because of my commitment to the truth. Throughout my career, I’ve always sought to stay close to the truth. I know that there’s a lot of folks out there who say I’m corrupt. But those who know me closest will tell you that this isn’t the real Hillary. Ask those who know me best. Ask my husband Bill. He’ll tell you. Ask my campaign chairman John Podesta. He’ll tell you. Ask Lloyd Blankfein, CEO at Goldman Sachs. He’ll tell you. Ask some of our closest allies in places like Saudi Arabia. They’ll tell you. They will all tell you about the real Hillary, and that my commitment to honesty and fighting corruption is second to none. It may even be my most exceptional quality. Alongside humility.
I’m also indispensable because of my network of alliances and supporters. You only have to look at who they are. Has there ever been a candidate in the entire history of our exceptional nation that has managed to get the backing of the entire media and corporate America? I don’t think so. But it does tell you something, doesn’t it? I humbly submit that it speaks volumes that some of the most important people in our exceptional country are prepared to place their trust in me.
I’m indispensable because, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t need to rely on the help of people like Vladimir Putin and countries like Russia to help get me elected. Can you imagine me having to rely on Putin and Russia to get elected? Of course I’ve had to bring Putin and Russia up in this campaign from time to time, not because I want to keep bringing Putin and Russia into it. In fact, the only reason I’ve occasionally mentioned Putin and Russia is not because I want to keep talking about Putin and Russia, but because I have to keep taking about Putin and Russia because Trump is depending on Putin and Russia to get him elected and so I have to draw attention to Putin and Russia. But trust me, if I had my way I wouldn’t bring Putin and Russia up at all.
I’m indispensable because of my commitment to helping countries get rid of their dictators, and establishing democracy and peace. Like Libya, for example. We came. We saw. He died. And the Libyans got their liberty.
Most of all, I’m indispensable — and exceptional — because of my values.
Take my commitment to human rights, which I have shown by being one of the most vocal supporters of a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy, right up to a few seconds before the thing inside her becomes a human.
Take my commitment to raising money, which my husband and I have shown through our tireless work with the Clinton Foundation, and in making hundreds of speeches for various organisations.
Take my commitment to making the world a better place, which I’ve shown time and time again by saying things like “love trumps hate”. Which it does, doesn’t it? I’m proud of that expression.
But with all of these advantages comes responsibility – I need to lead the world. You need me to lead the world. Because if I fail to lead, I will leave a vacuum that lets extremists, Putin and Russia, haters, bigots, the intolerant, Putin and Russia, the severely backwards , the Julian Assange’s of this world,Putin and Russia – Baskets of Deplorables – take root everywhere.
Of course, being exceptional doesn’t mean that other people don’t also have something to offer — maybe they do. But I have an unparalleled ability to be a force for peace, progress and prosperity around the world, which I intend to demonstrate on day one of my presidency, by standing up to Putin and Russia and showing Putin and Russia who’s boss.
I’ll never stop doing good. Never. That’s what makes me great. I’m good because I’m great, and I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll never stop.
That’s why I’m indispensable.
Let’s keep me exceptional. Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount
If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire | 0 |
873 | Red, Blue and Divided: Six Views of America - The New York TimesRed, blue, optimistic, fearful. Here are six takes on a divided America, in the wake of Donald J. Trump’s narrow election victory. DENVER — Marjorie Haun, 55, a Trump supporter living in Colorado, let me sign into her Facebook account on Friday. protests had rocked cities across the country, and I wanted to see what the reaction looked like to her. And so I logged in and took a spin. Her friends (she has 4, 996) had posted images of a supposed Democrat defecating on a Trump sign. Another shared a protest video — “Idiot Paid Anarchists Yell ‘Peaceful Protest’ as they Bash Cars” — with the message, “Run these vile Liberal dirtbags down! !!” Others called protesters “spoiled brats” and urged friends to keep their guns loaded. Ms. Haun had added a video of her own — “ rioters brawl — with each other!” — with a note: “Are we having fun yet?” Then I opened a new window and logged in as Meredith Dodson, 42, a Hillary Clinton supporter who lives in Washington, D. C. She has 1, 176 friends. On her feed, no one was talking about the protests. Instead, there was fear. How would women, Latinos, immigrants, gay people and others be treated under President Trump? “As a woman and a Latina I’m feeling lost and afraid,” one person wrote. “Friends please tell me you have my back. ” “This morning,” another wrote, “I started mentally planning how I would react if someone were to refer to me as the N word. It has already happened to 3 of my friends. ” Ms. Dodson had tapped out her own message: “The vast majority of my daughter’s DC Public Schools PreK classmates are the children of immigrants,” she said. “These are 3 and 4 year olds! I am so frightened. ” In some ways, the echo chamber was the winner of this election. Here we are, deeply connected. And yet red America is typing away to red America, and blue America is typing away to blue America. The day after the election, some people said the echo chamber had begun to feel like a prison. I called Ms. Haun and Ms. Dodson and thanked them for letting me hang out in their social spaces. Ms. Dodson said that she had two or three Facebook friends who supported Mr. Trump, but no friends who did, and that she had been trying to get out of her bubble. ”I have this suspicion that I have no idea what’s going on in the rest of white America,” she said. Ms. Haun has a few friends who support Mrs. Clinton, but they largely avoid talking about politics online, she said. She was less concerned than Ms. Dodson about getting trapped in a loop of ideas. “We want to be inclusive in our echo chamber,” she said. “If anyone wants to come in, come on in. ” JULIE TURKEWITZ NEW ORLEANS — Perhaps the best way to understand “the elite” that Mr. Trump railed against is to consider what it is not — or at least how it differs from the way Clinton supporters might see it. Elite does not simply mean having a lot of money. Mr. Trump, who inherited millions, is not considered an elite sellout by his supporters any more than Edward J. Snowden is considered a tool of the government for having worked at the National Security Agency. Rather, the thinking goes, it’s because Mr. Trump knows how it all works that he is in the best position to take it all apart. “The people he hung around, with all those wealthy folks and how they manipulated everything,” made him uniquely qualified, said Pat Bruce, a conservative activist in the suburbs of Jackson, Miss. who grew excited about the Trump campaign when she saw that “he never changed what he said to fit what they wanted him to say. ” Elite does not necessarily mean educated, either. While university professors might be scorned as condescending eggheads, book smarts are prized when used against the bookish. While covering the 2012 Republican primary races in the Deep South, I remember conservatives crowing giddily about Newt Gingrich’s ability to demolish foes in a debate. Elite is certainly not, as many on the left would argue, a function of historical advantage: being, say, a white Christian male in a country that has long made little room for anyone else. It is in some ways exactly not this. Rather, much of Mr. Trump’s support arose from frustration that the majority must grant marginalized groups — immigrants, transgender people — particular protection and deference. Last year, the political leadership of Mississippi came out for the dedication of a metal cross south of Jackson, an event at which speakers talked of taking a stand despite “people coming against you, of course, your atheists, your critics. ” There, in the most religious state in the country, atheists are an extreme minority. But they are the ones who ignite the court battles, who mean no prayers at high school football games, who must be accommodated. This is, to many, what constitutes the elite: the people who set the cultural and societal norms, and who do so without their input or influence. Across social media this week, some were celebrating but many others — including the himself — were expressing deep frustration. Even after a stunning victory, they saw themselves being described as bigoted and unenlightened. And even with the Republicans having achieved control of all levels of government, this remained an aggravating conundrum: The elites are still the ones who decide who gets to be elite. CAMPBELL ROBERTSON Religion is a purple state. There were indeed plenty of religious folks cheering at Mr. Trump’s rallies, but there were many clergy members who fought hard to elect Mrs. Clinton. White evangelicals stuck with Mr. Trump. Exit polls show that 81 percent voted for him, more than either of the past two Republican presidential candidates drew. Majorities of Mormons and white Catholics, as well as many mainline Protestants, also supported Mr. Trump, undeterred by his offensive language and harsh perspectives on Mexicans, Muslims and the disabled. In interviews this year, I often heard bewilderment and resentment from these believers at the pace of cultural and demographic change. Still reeling from last year’s Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage, they felt pummeled this year when the Obama administration set rules for transgender students in school bathrooms. They were disturbed to see businesses setting aside prayer rooms for Muslims when Christians were not allowed to recite the Lord’s Prayer at high school graduation. Mr. Trump told them he was their “last chance” to protect their religious liberty and limit abortion — and many believed it. The Clinton camp included many evangelicals, but they were predominantly black, Latino, Asian and female. Her supporters also included of Latino Catholics and four in 10 white Catholics Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and other religious minorities and those who say they have no religious affiliation. These voters are also guided by religious and moral values, but they arrive at a completely different destination than do conservatives. Their concerns are poverty, economic inequality, immigration, health care, criminal justice reform, voting rights, gay and transgender rights, reproductive choice, climate change and environmental protection. The Rev. William Barber II, a black minister and civil rights leader in North Carolina, held “moral revivals” in 22 states this year with three friends: the Rev. James A. Forbes, the Rev. Traci Blackmon and Sister Simone Campbell. After the election, Mr. Barber’s Twitter feed went silent until Friday, when he put out a stream of posts. “This is where we redouble our commitment to be instruments of truth, love, and justice,” he wrote, rallying people of faith to lead the way in resisting the Trump administration. LAURIE GOODSTEIN A Trump supporter called me Thursday to criticize my coverage of the ’s immigration policies. He pointed to it as an example of egregious bias that he said had led the news media to miss the groundswell of support that lifted Mr. Trump to victory. His tone was hostile at first, but we got to talking. The supporter, Douglas Freeman, a retired postal worker from Knoxville, Tenn. explained why Mr. Trump’s proposals to raise a border wall and punish cities that protect immigrants here illegally resonated with his view of the United States as a nation under siege — from outside and within. “He speaks with conviction and passion,” Mr. Freeman said of Mr. Trump, “and he is obviously an American patriot who is very upset with the political ruling class, which is selling our sovereignty out to globalism. ” He added: “When he said Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo, we stood up and cheered. ” For Mr. Freeman, Mr. Trump’s blunt immigration talk signified that he was a true rebel who would take on the powers that be, including in the Republican Party. “We have a duopoly,” he said. “They want to destroy this country by importing armies of people who will vote to keep the checks flowing from the federal government. ” Mrs. Clinton’s paid speech to a Brazilian bank, in which she said open borders throughout the Western Hemisphere were “my dream” — an excerpt that was released by WikiLeaks — confirmed that for Mr. Freeman. In covering immigration for The Times, I’ve been to the southwest border many times in recent years. I have not seen the boundary Mr. Freeman depicts. There are 700 miles of walls and fences, 17, 000 Border Patrol agents, and drones and aerial cameras. Homeland Security officials said last week that they were detaining more than 41, 000 immigrants and opening jails for more. Despite a surge of Central American migrants, illegal crossings are at the lowest level since the 1970s. But Mr. Freeman wants Mr. Trump to add a lot more border security to send a message to migrants to stay out, and to reassure his American supporters that the borders “are no longer open. ” He said he did not expect Mr. Trump’s actions to match all the heated statements of his campaign. The wall does not have to cover remote, impassable stretches of the border, he said. He understands the country needs guest workers for agriculture. He does not expect agents to go door to door looking for immigrants to deport. But he wants Mr. Trump to cut federal funding for cities that do not cooperate with immigration authorities. And he strongly favors “extreme vetting” for refugees from the Middle East. “We are deliberately importing Muslims who are very intolerant and don’t believe in ” Mr. Freeman said. “If Mr. Trump doesn’t deliver,” he said, “he won’t have support for very long. ” JULIA PRESTON In vowing to “Make America Great Again,” Mr. Trump laid bare competing visions of what America is — or should be. For years politicians have framed the divide as Red America versus Blue America. But Mr. Trump’s victory has me thinking about our national divide as a clash between Americans who prize the melting pot, and those who embrace the concept of the “salad bowl. ” So I reached out to several women I knew. Mary Barket is 60, a Republican strategist and avid Trump supporter in Nazareth, Pa. squarely in the Rust Belt. Her grandfather emigrated from Poland shortly before World War I, joined the Army and returned to Europe to fight. He learned English and insisted his children do the same. “He was all about assimilation,” she said. Mrs. Barket said she had watched with alarm as identity politics and racial divisions flourished under President Obama, the nation’s first black president. She works in her church, helping run a food pantry, and once took in a black friend of her daughter’s for six months. She said she approved of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but today’s Black Lives Matter protests against the police have unnerved her: “It doesn’t seem like they come from a place of peace. ” She has a gay cousin who is in a relationship, but she is not enamored of the gay rights movement she says the focus should be on “human rights” instead. “I just don’t like this striating of our culture,” she said. “I think we have to go back to thinking of ourselves as Americans. ” I met Tessa — who is “ ” and the president of the Baltimore chapter of the N. A. A. C. P. — while covering the unrest spurred by the death of Freddie Gray after his arrest by the police. Her grandfather, a doctor in Kentucky, was the descendant of a slave impregnated by her master. “We didn’t come here looking for a melting pot,” she said. “We were tortured and brought here. ” Like Mara Kiesling, 57, who began life as a boy in Harrisburg, Pa. and now fights for transgender rights in Washington, Ms. envisions an America where differences are celebrated, not airbrushed away. Both women are terrified Mr. Trump will roll back their rights. “The feeling that is the strongest for me this week is that this is my country,” Ms. Kiesling said, “and no one is going to tell me I can’t be here. “ All of these women insist they want a unified America, and in many respects — including their age and socioeconomic status — they are very similar. Yet as they fight for their version of America, they could not be further apart. SHERYL GAY STOLBERG HOUSTON — Before America had a presidential candidate who offended Latinos, Muslims, women and the disabled, Texas had Sid Miller, the state agriculture commissioner, who compared Syrian refugees to snakes and called Mrs. Clinton an obscene term on Twitter. And Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor, who said illegal immigrants were bringing leprosy and other “ diseases” to Texas. And Molly White, a state lawmaker who told her staff to ask Muslims visiting her office to “publicly announce allegiance to America and our laws. ” And Jonathan Stickland, another state lawmaker, who in 2008 wrote on an online forum: “Rape is nonexistent in marriage, take what you want my friend!” A candidate for the State Board of Education — Mary Lou Bruner, a former kindergarten teacher, 69, who was pleasant when I spoke to her by phone in March — claimed President Obama was a gay prostitute in his youth. Chris Mapp, a candidate for Senate, referred to undocumented immigrants as “wetbacks. ” None of this bothered Texas Republicans a great deal. There were a few apologies and statements of regret, but not much more. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters in blue America cringed at Mr. Trump’s inflammatory remarks during the campaign, but his supporters throughout red America barely flinched. They were used to it. They lived in places where public figures had been making comments for years. In red Texas in particular, I have found, the notion of being offended is regarded as a “blue” concept. Lance Herrington, 73, has long offended Democratic motorists on State Highway 71 in La Grange, plastering the marquee and other signs outside his classic car company with provocative slogans. He told me a story about someone he had offended with his marquee in 2012. Red America will take it one way. Blue America will take it another. After the debates between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in 2012, his marquee read: “The Mormon won. The moron zero. ” He also hung a white plastic chair, a reference to Clint Eastwood’s conversation with a chair during the Republican convention that year. “This minority, she was out front,” he said. She later called him and threatened to turn him into the F. B. I. “I said, ‘For what?’ She says, ‘For that chair.’ I said, ‘Darling, as you can see, it’s a white chair.’ And she hung up on me. ” “The pendulum swung so far toward political correctness that you can’t do anything without offending someone,” he said. MANNY FERNANDEZ | 1 |
874 | France Identifies 2nd Man Who Attacked Church and Killed Priest - The New York TimesPARIS — The French authorities on Thursday identified a second man who stormed a church in Normandy and killed an priest as he celebrated Mass. The Paris prosecutor’s office identified the man as Nabil Petitjean, 19. It was not clear how he knew the other killer, Adel Kermiche, also 19, who lived near the church, the Église St. in St. a suburb of Rouen. Both were of Algerian ancestry. They were shot dead by the police after the assault on the church on Tuesday, which also left an parishioner severely wounded he is in stable condition. The Islamic State released videos on Wednesday in which the two young men pledged allegiance to the terrorist group before the assault, which killed the Rev. Jacques Hamel. Mr. Petitjean was born in St. in Lorraine in northeastern France, but grew up in in the southeast. He attended a high school there, the Lycée Marlioz, and his father lives in Montluçon, a town in central France, north of . Mr. Petitjean flew to Turkey on June 10 but was stopped at the airport, before he reached the desk, when he was seen talking with someone who was on the list, according to a Turkish official who spoke on condition of anonymity. He left Turkey the next day, and was placed on a blacklist, as a precaution, the following week, and the French authorities were immediately notified, the official said. The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Thursday that Mr. Petitjean came to the attention of the police on June 29. On July 22 — four days before the attack — a foreign intelligence agency sent his picture to French intelligence services, but without a name or description, the office said. Interviewed by French reporters, Mr. Petitjean’s mother, who was identified by news agencies as Yamina Boukessoula, expressed astonishment. She said he had last spoken to her early this week. She said: “He said, ‘Don’t worry, get some sleep, everything is O. K.’ He had a soft voice. He sounded well. It wasn’t worrisome. He has friends, like everyone else. ” The mother told reporters, “Daesh is not part of his language,” using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. She said that her son had been visiting a cousin in northeastern France and that she had no idea how he had ended up in St. the town in Normandy where the attack occurred, although he appeared to have relatives in Normandy. “I was a good mother,” she said. “I was always there for my children, maybe even too much. Malik doesn’t have psychological problems. He’s like all with ambition, with plans. He’s smart. ” Mr. Kermiche had been detained for nearly 10 months after trying, twice, to enter Syria, but he was released in March over the objections of prosecutors. He was made to wear an electronic ankle bracelet, forbidden to leave his local department of required to report to a probation officer once a week and ordered to live in his parents’ house. He was allowed free movement from 8:30 a. m. to 12:30 p. m. on weekdays the attack on the church occurred at 9:25 a. m. The killing of the priest has elicited condemnation worldwide. On Thursday, the French Council of the Muslim Faith urged Muslims to attend Mass on Sunday morning, to “again express solidarity with and compassion for our Christian brothers. ” President François Hollande has again found himself confronting the specter of Islamic State terrorism — a rampage in Nice, on the evening of July 14, Bastille Day, which killed 84 people, followed by the attack on the church in Normandy just 12 days later — as the nation’s mood has increasingly turned somber. On Thursday morning, Mr. Hollande met with lawmakers to discuss the possibility of establishing a National Guard of volunteer reservists, including retired gendarmes, to help protect the nation. The plan, which he first floated in November, “is not meant to replace public forces, but to back them up and reinforce them,” Mr. Hollande said at a ceremony to open a highway in southwestern France. Mr. Hollande’s government declared a state of emergency in November. It was extended after the attack in Nice, giving the police and prosecutors expanded powers. But he has resisted calls by political rivals, including former President Nicolas Sarkozy and the leader of the National Front, Marine Le Pen, for even more drastic constitutional and legal changes. On Thursday, Mr. Hollande reacted angrily to a comment a day earlier by Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee for president of the United States, who, in response to the killing of the priest, said that “France is no longer France. ” Mr. Hollande retorted: “France will always be France. It never gives up, because it still bears ideals, values, principles that are recognized worldwide, and it’s when you lower your standards that you are no longer what you are. That’s something that may happen to others, on the other side of the Atlantic. ” | 1 |
875 | DREAMers Arrested in Nationwide Gang CrackdownFederal immigration officials arrested nearly 1, 400 gang members in a nationwide operation, including illegal immigrants gang members who had protected status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. [Altogether, 1, 378 gang members were arrested by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, 1, 098 of which already have federal or state criminal charges against them, according to a news release. of the members had pending murder charges against them, while another seven were facing rape allegations. The other 280 were arrested for being in the U. S. illegally. Three of the gang members arrested in the ICE operation had protected status as illegal immigrants under the DACA program. Since DACA’s inception, more than 1, 500 illegal immigrants have had their protected status revoked after they were found to be involved with a gang or committed a crime. DACA recipients are given protection by the federal government and since the Trump Administration has not ended the program, experts like Mark Krikorian have previously said that 800 new permits for protected DACA status can be granted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) every day. “They’re still processing these work permits,” Krikorian told Breitbart Texas at the time. “That’s got to end at the absolute minimum. ” Additionally, of the 1, 478 gang members arrested, 10 of them had crossed the U. S. Brder as unaccompanied minors. Of those 10, nine were confirmed gang members and eight of those 10 were specifically. Most recently, Breitbart Texas reported on the continued resettlement of foreign unaccompanied minors into regions of the U. S. despite experts pointing to evidence that this process allows foreign crime syndicates to flourish. Since the beginning of the Fiscal Year, October 1, 2016, 651 unaccompanied minors were placed in Nassau County, which is home to one of the largest growing gang population’s in the U. S. In neighboring Suffolk County, which has a widespread gang problem in Brentwood and Central Islip, approximately 915 have been resettled in the region. John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 1 |
876 | Maxine Waters: American Public ’Getting Weary’ That Trump Not Impeached Yet - BreitbartSunday on MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” Rep. Maxine Waters ( ) said the public was “getting weary” that Democrats have not done enough to begin the process of impeaching President Donald Trump. Partial transcript as follows: REID: Congresswoman, on the subject of being more aggressive, you have openly talked about the fact that this president has put himself in a position where impeachment is on the table but your party, the Democratic party is very reluctant, The New York Times has an article out last week about how hesitant Democratic leadership, in particular, are to call for Donald Trump’s impeachment. In closing, why do you suppose that is? WATERS: I don’t know what the reticent is but I know this, that the American public is getting weary of all of these actions without enough being done by the elected officials who they elected to represent them. I believe that this man has done enough for us to determine that we can connect the dots, that we can get the facts that will lead to impeachment. I believe there was collusion. I think we have enough information about the meetings, the about the lying about those meetings to help us to understand that something was going on. There was an interaction there. And certainly I believe it was collusion, but if they just do their work and do their job, they will find out it was collusion. And I believe this president should be impeached. I don’t care what others say about ‘it’s too soon, we don’t know, we think.’ I think that they’re letting the American public down by not delving deeper into what is going on with Jared Kushner and this back channeling, about the lies and his failure to disclose he had had these meetings, the same thing with sessions, failure to disclose about the meetings. What more do we need? Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
877 | WWN’s Horoscopesaries 21 March – 20 April
Does the ‘5 second rule’ for food on the ground mean nothing to you?! That crisp was there for at least a day. taurus
You get sunburn, in November. IN NOVEMBER. Fuck sake like. gemini May 21 – June 20
We have to congratulate you, we’ve never seen someone vomit so much after three pints. cancer
There’s no sense in dancing around this. You smell. leo
We continue to light a candle for you. virgo August 23 – September 22
You travel to Australia, and they have to change the warnings on everything because you are now the most poisonous creature in the country. libra
Your IMDB page could use a little work. scorpio
You spend an ungodly amount of money on Lego. What the fuck are you thinking? sagittarius November 22 – December 21
You find an heir in your food. He’s got loads of money, a house, the lot. capricorn December 22 – January 19
You can’t enjoy Westworld because the sums just don’t add up. There’s no way that place is making money. aquarius January 20 – February 18
Your favourite website finally posts something you disagree with, and boy does it bring your piss to a simmer. pisces February 19 – March 20
Your tinfoil hat business fails to take off. It must have something to do with the Illuminati. Always trying to keep you down! | 0 |
878 | Deported Italian Mobster Caught Sneaking Across U.S.-Mexico BorderA previously deported Italian mobster has been arrested trying to illegally enter the U. S. by sneaking across the porous border with Mexico. The man had originally been deported after serving time in federal prison in connection with drug trafficking and violent assaults. [The arrest took place near the border city of Nogales, Arizona, where U. S. Border Patrol agents arrested Salvatore Marciante as he tried to sneak into the country. After the arrest, agents were able to search Marciante’s criminal history and confirmed that he had been a permanent legal resident who had been living in New York until his convictions in 1995, when he lost his legal status. After serving several years in U. S. prison he was deported to Italy. According to federal court records obtained by Breitbart Texas, Marciante is a citizen of Italy who had traveled to Mexico in order to enter the country through Nogales, Arizona. Marciante had been deported on September 1, 2004 from New York. Currently he is facing illegal charges in the federal courthouse in Tucson, Arizona. Marciante was originally named in a indictment filed in 1994 accusing him and 12 other members of the Italian mafia of distributing and trafficking narcotics in New York. Many of the documents listed in the court proceedings remain sealed by the court. Available court documents revealed that federal agents arrested Marciante on September 15, 1994, and on October 6, 1994, and a federal judge set his bond at $1 million. While in prison, Marciante and several other members of the same group were further charged in a separate indictment in connection with a series of armed robberies targeting various restaurants in New York. The indictment was filed in June 1999, while Marciante was already in prison for the drug charge. For unknown reasons, the criminal indictment and many of the court documents remain sealed by the court. By April 2000, Marciante pleaded guilty to various counts in connection with the charge of interference of commerce by violence in connection with the robberies. For that case, Marciante was sentenced to serve more than five years in prison however the prison term was set to run concurrent with the previous case. Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. | 1 |
879 | Leaked Audio: Hillary Clinton Pushed “Rigging” Palestine Elections in 2006Email
A bombshell of new audio is exposing Hillary Clinton for the immoral, politically motivated opportunist that she is. Now the question is, will this impact her race for the White House?
Some ten years ago (more recent than Donald Trump’s now infamous “locker room talk” recording) in September of 2006, Hillary Clinton was running for reelection to the Senate when she sat down to speak with the editorial board of the Jewish Press. The sit-down was recorded, but the full conversation had never been released, until now. One of the editors present during the interview spoke with the Observer this week and played them the 45-minute long tape of the conversation with Clinton.
Below is what is likely the most important disclosure of the conversation, and it provides reason for American voters to worry. It also proves that Donald Trump is not some crazy conspiracy theorist for expressing concern about the Democrat Party trying to “rig” the 2016 election.
While talking to the Jewish Press, Clinton commented on the 2006 election for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (where terrorist organization Hamas won control of the Palestinian government) and expressed her belief that allowing the election was a huge mistake, but if they were going to allow it… then the US government should have rigged the election to suit their needs.
“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”
Yes, you just heard correctly. A sitting US Senator, and the future Secretary of State and then presidential candidate just argued that we should have rigged the election, thereby disallowing the right of the Palestinian people to choose their own leaders.
While Hamas is a terrorist organization and they are horrible, murderous thugs whose ideology we must stamp out… the comments should raise this question in our minds – if Hillary Clinton is willing to rig an election in Palestine, why wouldn’t she do the same here if she could? This realization that Clinton is not beyond “fixing” the results of an election, should make all of the other recent evidences of massive voter fraud all the more concerning.
Well known election fraud expert John Fund has written article , after article , after article and even books chronicling voter fraud in the U.S.
Fund wrote extensively, for instance, of the 2008 election that put Al Franken in the U.S. Senate for the State of Minnesota. The 312-vote victory Franken eked out, Fund wrote , was not a happy result of just enough votes but a result born of massive vote fraud.
Other reporters have written of vote fraud, of course. Take the report in the Washington Free Beacon that revealed that 141 U.S. counties have more people registered to vote than they even have residents eligible to do so!
These charges have been building for at least 20 years and over the last few months they have shifted into high gear. But we don’t have to stick to recent history to find people complaining about voter fraud. Only eight years ago when he was first running for the White House, even Barack Obama was heard complaining about rampant vote fraud in the U.S…
And then there is the new series of undercover videos by Jame O’Keefe’s Project Veritas which has revealed Democrat operatives admitting that they routinely engage in voter fraud in order to win elections by hook or crook.
Please make sure to read the full Observer story about the 2006 interview with Hillary Clinton. There are a few other remarkable observations made about some of Clinton’s comments – like her willingness to speak with world leaders no matter the current political climate between our countries and Clinton’s seeming approval of “an eye for an eye” interactions between Israel and Hamas.
Article reposted with permission from Constitution.com | 0 |
880 | How the Iranian-Saudi Proxy Struggle Tore Apart the Middle East - The New York TimesBehind much of the Middle East’s chaos — the wars in Syria and Yemen, the political upheaval in Iraq and Lebanon and Bahrain — there is another conflict. Saudi Arabia and Iran are waging a struggle for dominance that has turned much of the Middle East into their battlefield. Rather than fighting directly, they wield and in that way worsen the region’s direst problems: dictatorship, militia violence and religious extremism. The history of their rivalry tracks — and helps to explain — the Middle East’s disintegration, particularly the sectarianism both powers have found useful to cultivate. It is a story in which the United States has been a supporting but constant player, most recently by backing the Saudi war in Yemen, which kills hundreds of civilians. These dynamics, scholars warn, point toward a future of civil wars, divided societies and unstable governments. F. Gregory Gause III, an international relations scholar at Texas A M University, struggled to name another region that had been torn apart in this way. Central Africa could be similar, he suggested, referring to the two decades of interrelated wars and genocides that, driven by meddling regional powers, killed five million. But in the Middle East, it is just getting started. Saudi Arabia, a young country pieced together only in the 1930s, has built its legitimacy on religion. By promoting its stewardship of the holy sites at Mecca and Medina, it could justify its royal family’s grip on power. Iran’s revolution, in 1979, threatened that legitimacy. Iranians toppled their authoritarian government, installing Islamists who claimed to represent “a revolution for the entire Islamic world,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The revolutionaries encouraged all Muslims, especially Saudis, to overthrow their rulers as well. But because Iran is mostly Shiite, they “had the greatest influence with, and tended to reach out to, Shia groups,” Dr. Pollack said. Some Saudi Shiites, who make up about 10 percent of the population, protested in solidarity or even set up offices in Tehran — stoking Saudi fears of internal unrest and separatism. This was the opening shot in the sectarianization of their rivalry, which would encompass the whole region. “The Saudis have looked at Iran as a domestic threat from the from 1979,” Dr. Gause said. Seeing the threat as intolerable, they began looking for a way to strike back. They found that way the next year, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran, hoping to seize territory. Saudi Arabia, Dr. Pollack said, “backed the Iraqis to the hilt because they want the Iranian revolution stopped. ” The war, over eight years of trench warfare and chemical weapons attacks, killed perhaps a million people. It set a pattern of struggle through proxies, and of sucking in the United States, whose policy is to maintain access to the vast oil and gas reserves that lie between the rivals. The conflict’s toll exhausted Iran’s zeal for sowing revolution abroad, but gave it a new mission: to overturn the regional order that Tehran saw as an existential threat. That sense of insecurity would later drive Iran’s meddling abroad, said Marc Lynch, a political scientist at George Washington University, and perhaps its missile and nuclear programs. The 1990s provided a pause in the regional rivalry, but also set up the conditions that would allow it to later explode in such force. Saudi Arabia, wishing to contain Iran’s reach to the region’s minority Shiite populations, sought to harden rifts. Government programs promoted “ incitement in schools, Islamic universities, and the media,” Toby Matthiesen, an Oxford University scholar, wrote in a brief for the Carnegie Endowment. These policies, Dr. Matthiesen warned, cultivated sectarian fears and sometimes violence that would later feed into the ideology of the Islamic State. In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, a Saudi ally. The United States, after expelling the Iraqis, established military bases in the region to defend its allies from Iraq. This further tilted the regional power balance against Iran, which saw the American forces as a threat. Iraq’s humiliating defeat also spurred many of its citizens to rise up, particularly in poorer communities that happened to be Shiite Arab. In response, Dr. Gause said, “Saddam’s regime became explicitly sectarian,” widening divides to deter future uprisings. That allowed Iran, still worried about Iraq, to cultivate allies among Iraq’s increasingly disenfranchised Shiites, including militias that had risen up. Though it was not obvious at the time, Iraq had become a powder keg, one that would ignite when its government was toppled a decade later. The 2003 invasion, by toppling an Iraqi government that had been hostile to both Saudi Arabia and Iran, upended the region’s power balance. Iran, convinced that the United States and Saudi Arabia would install a pliant Iraqi government — and remembering the horrors they had inflicted on Iran in the 1980s — raced to fill the postwar vacuum. Its leverage with Shiite groups, which are Iraq’s largest demographic group, allowed it to influence Baghdad politics. Iran also wielded Shiite militias to control Iraqi streets and undermine the occupation. But sectarian violence took on its own inevitable momentum, hastening the country’s slide into civil war. Saudi Arabia sought to match Iran’s reach but, after years of oppressing its own Shiite population, struggled to make inroads with those in Iraq. “The problem for the Saudis is that their natural allies in Iraq,” Dr. Gause said, referring to Sunni groups that were increasingly turning to jihadism, “wanted to kill them. ” This was the first sign that Saudi Arabia’s strategy for containing Iran, by fostering sectarianism and aligning itself with the region’s Sunni majority, had backfired. As Sunni governments collapsed and Sunni militias turned to jihadism, Riyadh would be left with few reliable proxies. As their competition in Iraq heated up, Saudi Arabia and Iran sought to counterbalance each other through another weak state: Lebanon. Lebanon provided the perfect opening: a frail democracy recovering from civil war, with parties and lingering militias primarily organized by religion. Iran and Saudi Arabia exploited those dynamics, waging a new kind of proxy struggle “not on conventional military battlefields,” Dr. Gause said, but “within the domestic politics of weakened institutional structures. ” Iran, for instance, supported Hezbollah, the Shiite militia and political movement, which it had earlier cultivated to use against Israel. Riyadh, in turn, funneled money to political allies such as the Sunni prime minister, Rafik Hariri. By competing along Lebanon’s religious lines, they helped drive the Lebanese government’s frequent breakdowns, as parties relied on foreign backers who wanted to oppose one another more than build a functioning state. With Iran promoting Hezbollah as the nation’s defender and Saudi Arabia backing the Lebanese military, neither had a full mandate, and Lebanon struggled to maintain order. As the foreign powers escalated their antagonism, Lebanon’s dysfunction spiraled into violence. In 2005, after Mr. Hariri called for the withdrawal of Syrian troops, he was assassinated. (Hezbollah has long been suspected.) Another political crisis, in 2008, culminated with Hezbollah overpowering Sunni militias to seize much of Beirut. Saudi Arabia requested United States air cover, according to a WikiLeaks cable, for a force to retake the city. Though the intervention never materialized, the episode was a dress rehearsal for the turmoil that would soon come to the wider region. When the Arab Spring toppled governments across the Middle East, many of them Saudi allies, Riyadh feared that Iran would again fill the vacuums. So it rushed to close them, at times with force. It promised billions in aid to Jordan, Yemen, Egypt and others, often urging those governments to crack down. After protesters rose up in Bahrain, a Saudi ally whose Sunni king rules over a majority Shiite population, Saudi Arabia sent 1, 200 troops. In Egypt, Saudi Arabia tacitly supported a 2013 military takeover, seeing the military as a more reliable ally than the elected Islamist government it replaced. As Libya fell into civil war, it backed a general who was driving to consolidate control. Though Iran has little influence in either country, Saudi Arabia’s fear of losing ground to Iran made it fight harder to retain influence wherever it could, analysts believe. Syria, an Iranian ally, reversed the usual dynamic. Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states steered money and arms to rebels, including Sunni Islamists. Iran intervened in turn, sending officers and later Hezbollah to fight on behalf of Syria’s government, whose leaders mostly follow a sect of Shiism. Their interventions, civil war scholars say, helped lock Syria in the stalemate that has killed over 400, 000. The United States has struggled to restore the region’s balance. President Obama has urged Iran and Saudi Arabia “to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace,” he told The Atlantic. But Dr. Lynch called this plan for “a equilibrium” between the Mideast powers “ . ” The nuclear agreement with Iran, instead of calming Saudi nerves, hit on fears that “the United States wants to abandon them in order to ally with Iran,” Dr. Lynch said, calling the belief “crazy” but widespread. Mr. Pollack said he often heard Sunni Arab leaders express this as a metaphor. “They would say, ‘What is wrong with you people? You have this good, loving, loyal wife in us, and this crazy mistress in Iran. You don’t understand how bad she is for you, and yet you endlessly run off to her the moment that she winks at you,’” he recounted. The White House looked for other ways to reassure Saudi leaders, facilitating arms sales and overlooking Saudi actions in Egypt and Bahrain. Then came Yemen. A rebel group with loose ties to Iran ousted the president, deepening Riyadh’s fears. Saudi Arabia launched a bombing campaign that inflicted horror on civilians but accomplished little else. The assault receives heavy American support, though the United States has few interests in Yemen other than counterterrorism and sometimes criticizes the campaign. In exchange, Riyadh acquiesced to the Iran deal and began to follow Washington’s lead on Syria. But the underlying proxy war remained. Asked when the struggle might cool, Mr. Pollack said he doubted that it would: “Where we’re headed with the Middle East is the current trend extrapolated, with more failed and failing governments. ” In Yemen, this is already “reorganizing Yemeni society along sectarian lines and rearranging people’s relationships to one another on a basis,” Farea an analyst, wrote in a Carnegie Endowment paper, which cited similar trends across the region. Continued crises will risk sucking in the United States again, Mr. Lynch said, adding that no American president was likely to persuade Saudi Arabia or Iran to stay out of regional conflicts that it saw as potentially existential threats. Donald J. Trump will enter office having echoed Saudi Arabia’s view of the region. Iran “took over Iraq,” he said at a rally in January. “They’re going to have Yemen. They’re going to have Syria. They’re going to have everything. ” Mentioning both the and Hillary Clinton, Dr. Gause said he doubted that any administration could reset the Middle East’s power struggles. “I do not think that the fundamental problem of the region,” he said, “is something that either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton could do that much about. ” | 1 |
881 | Lavrov and Kerry discuss Syrian settlementLavrov and Kerry discuss Syrian settlement October 28, 2016 TASS
Russian Foreign Ministry Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry discussed the Syrian settlement as well as the situation in Yemen and Libya by telephone on Oct. 28.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said that the conversation had taken place at the U.S. side’s request.
"The foreign policy chiefs continued discussing ways of settling the Syrian conflict, including the normalization of the situation around Aleppo, with account taken of fundamental approaches contained in the previously reached Russian-U.S. agreements. For that, the United States should ultimately separate moderate opposition (in Syria) from terror groups," the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
"Lavrov and Kerry also discussed assistance to the solution of crises in Yemen and Libya as well as separate issues of bilateral agenda," the Russian Foreign Ministry stressed. | 0 |
882 | L'influence des USA et de l'Otan dans les rapports de l’UE avec la Chine, Manlio DinucciL’influence des USA et de l’Otan dans les rapports de l’UE avec la Chine par Manlio Dinucci Intervenant dans un forum international, le géographe italien Manlio Dinucci synthétise son analyse des armes dont les États-Unis se sont dotés pour dominer l’ensemble du monde. Cet article est d’autant plus important que c’est cette domination clairement assumée, cette organisation unipolaire du monde, que la Syrie, la Russie et la Chine mettent aujourd’hui en cause les armes à la main.
Réseau Voltaire | Rome (Italie) | 27 octobre 2016 Je vais tout de suite au nœud de la question. Je pense qu’on ne peut pas parler de relations entre Union européenne et Chine indépendamment de l’influence que les États-Unis exercent sur l’Union européenne, directement et par l’intermédiaire de l’Otan.
Aujourd’hui 22 des 28 pays de l’UE (21 sur 27 après la sortie du Royaume-Uni de l’UE), avec plus de 90 % de la population de l’Union, font partie de l’Otan, reconnue par l’UE comme « fondement de la défense collective ». Et l’Otan est sous commandement US : le Commandant suprême allié en Europe est toujours nommé par le président des États-Unis d’Amérique et tous les autres commandements clé sont aux mains des USA. La politique étrangère et militaire de l’Union européenne est ainsi fondamentalement subordonnée à la stratégie états-unienne, sur laquelle convergent les plus grandes puissances européennes.
Cette stratégie, clairement énoncée dans les documents officiels, est tracée au moment historique où la situation mondiale change à la suite de la désagrégation de l’URSS. En 1991 la Maison-Blanche déclare dans la National Security Strategy of the United States : « Les États-Unis demeurent le seul État avec une force, une portée et une influence en toute dimension —politique, économique et militaire— réellement globales. Il n’existe aucun substitut au leadership américain ». En 1992, dans la Defense Planning Guidance , le Pentagone souligne : « Notre premier objectif est d’empêcher qu’une quelconque puissance domine une région dont les ressources seraient suffisantes pour engendrer une puissance mondiale. Ces régions comprennent l’Europe occidentale, l’Asie orientale, le territoire de l’ex-Union Soviétique et l’Asie sud-occidentale ». En 2001, dans le rapport Quadrennial Defense Review —publié une semaine avant la guerre USA/Otan en Afghanistan, aire de première importance géostratégique à l’égard de Russie et Chine—, le Pentagone annonce : « La possibilité existe qu’émerge dans la région un rival militaire avec une formidable base de ressources. Nos forces armées doivent conserver la capacité d’imposer la volonté des États-Unis à n’importe quel adversaire, y compris États et entités non-étatiques, de façon à changer le régime d’un État adverse ou occuper un territoire étranger jusqu’à ce que les objectifs stratégiques états-uniens soient réalisés ».
Sur la base de cette stratégie, l’Otan sous commandement US a lancé son offensive sur le front oriental : après avoir démoli par la guerre la Fédération Yougoslave, de 1999 à aujourd’hui elle a englobé tous les États de l’ex-Pacte de Varsovie, trois de l’ex-Yougoslavie, trois de l’ex-URSS, et sous peu elle en englobera d’autres (à commencer par la Géorgie et l’Ukraine, cette dernière étant de fait déjà dans l’Otan), en déplaçant bases et forces, y compris nucléaires, toujours plus près de la Russie. En même temps, sur le front méridional étroitement relié à celui oriental, l’Otan sous commandement US a démoli par la guerre l’État libyen et a essayé d’en faire autant avec celui de la Syrie.
Les USA et l’Otan ont fait exploser la crise ukrainienne et, accusant la Russie de « déstabiliser la sécurité européenne », ils ont entraîné l’Europe dans une nouvelle Guerre froide, voulue surtout par Washington (aux dépens des économies européennes à qui les sanctions et contre-sanctions ont porté préjudice) pour casser les rapports économiques et politiques Russie-UE néfastes aux intérêts états-uniens. C’est dans la même stratégie qu’entre le déplacement croissant de forces militaires états-uniennes dans la région Asie/Pacifique dans une fonction anti-chinoise. L’U.S. Navy a annoncé qu’en 2020 elle concentrera dans cette région 60 % de ses forces navales et aériennes.
La stratégie états-unienne est focalisée sur la mer de Chine Méridionale, dont l’amiral Harris, chef du Commandement US pour le Pacifique, souligne l’importance : c’est là que passe un commerce maritime d’une valeur annuelle de plus de 5 000 milliards de dollars, dont 25 % de l’export mondial de pétrole et 50 % de celui du gaz naturel. Les USA veulent contrôler cette voie maritime au nom de celle que l’amiral Harris définit comme une « liberté de naviguer fondamentale pour notre système de vie ici aux États-Unis », en accusant la Chine d’« actions agressives en mer Chinoise Méridionale, analogues à celles de la Russie en Crimée ». Pour cela l’U.S Navy « patrouille » la mer de Chine Méridionale. Dans le sillage des États-Unis arrivent les plus grandes puissances européennes : en juillet dernier la France a sollicité l’Union européenne pour « coordonner la patrouille navale de la mer Chinoise Méridionale afin d’assurer une présence régulière et visible dans ces eaux illégalement réclamées par la Chine ». Et tandis que les États-Unis installent en Corée du Sud des systèmes « anti-missiles » mais en mesure de lancer aussi des missiles nucléaires, analogues à ceux installés contre la Russie en Roumanie et bientôt en Pologne, en plus de ceux qui sont embarqués sur des navires de guerre en Méditerranée, le secrétaire général de l’Otan Jens Stoltenberg reçoit le 6 octobre à Bruxelles le ministre des Affaires étrangères sud-coréen, Yun Byung-se, pour « renforcer le partenariat de l’Otan avec Séoul ».
Ces faits et d’autres encore démontrent qu’en Europe et en Asie la même stratégie est à l’œuvre. C’est la tentative extrême des États-Unis et des autres puissances occidentales de maintenir la suprématie économique, politique et militaire, dans un monde en forte transformation, dans lequel émergent de nouveaux sujets étatiques et sociaux. L’Organisation de coopération de Shanghai, née de l’accord stratégique sino-russe, dispose de ressources et de capacités de travail capables d’en faire la plus grande aire économique intégrée du monde. L’Organisation de Shanghai et les Brics sont en mesure, avec leurs organismes financiers, de supplanter en grande partie la Banque mondiale et le Fonds monétaire international qui, pendant plus de 70 ans, ont permis aux USA et aux plus grandes puissances occidentales de dominer l’économie mondiale à travers les prêts usuraires aux pays endettés et d’autres instruments financiers. Les nouveaux organismes peuvent en même temps réaliser la dédollarisation des échanges commerciaux, en ôtant aux États-Unis la capacité de décharger leur dette sur d’autres pays par l’impression de papier monnaie utilisé comme devise internationale dominante.
Pour maintenir leur suprématie, toujours plus vacillante, les États-Unis utilisent non seulement la force des armes, mais d’autres armes souvent plus efficaces que celles proprement dites.
Première arme : les dits « accords de libre-échange », comme le « Partenariat transatlantique sur le commerce et les investissements » (TTIP) avec l’UE et le « Partenariat Trans-Pacifique » (TPP) dont le but n’est pas seulement économique mais géopolitique et géostratégique. C’est pour cela qu’Hillary Clinton qualifie le partenariat USA-UE de « plus grand objectif stratégique de notre alliance transatlantique », en projetant une « Otan économique » qui intègre celle politique et militaire. Le projet est clair : former un bloc politique, économique et militaire USA-UE, toujours sous commandement états-unien, qui s’oppose à l’aire eurasiatique en ascension, basée sur la coopération entre la Chine et la Russie ; qui s’oppose aux Brics, à l’Iran et à tout autre pays qui se soustraie à la domination de l’Occident. Comme les négociations sur le TTIP ont du mal à avancer à cause de divergences d’intérêt et d’une vaste opposition en Europe, l’obstacle est pour le moment contourné avec l’ « Accord économique et commercial global » (CETA) entre le Canada et l’UE : un TTIP camouflé étant donné que le Canada fait partie du NAFTA avec les USA. Le CETA sera probablement signé par l’UE le 27 octobre prochain, pendant la visite du Premier ministre canadien Trudeau à Bruxelles.
Seconde arme : la pénétration dans les pays cible pour les désagréger de l’intérieur. En s’appuyant sur les points faibles qu’a tout pays en mesure diverse : la corruption, l’avidité d’argent, l’arrivisme politique, le sécessionnisme fomenté par des groupes de pouvoir locaux, le fanatisme religieux, la vulnérabilité de vastes masses à la démagogie politique. En s’appuyant aussi, dans certains cas, sur un mécontentement populaire justifié quant à la conduite de leur gouvernement. Instruments de la pénétration : les soi-disant « organisations non gouvernementales » qui sont en réalité la main longue du département d’État et de la CIA. Celles qui, dotées d’énormes moyens financiers, ont organisé les « révolutions colorées » dans l’Est européen, et ont tenté la même opération avec la soi-disant « Umbrella Revolution » à Hong Kong : qui visait à fomenter des mouvements analogues dans d’autres zones de la Chine habitées par des minorités nationales. Les mêmes organisations qui opèrent en Amérique Latine, avec l’objectif premier de subvertir les institutions démocratiques du Brésil, en minant ainsi les Brics de l’intérieur. Instruments de la même stratégie : les groupes terroristes, type ceux armés et infiltrés en Libye et en Syrie pour semer le chaos, en contribuant à la démolition d’États entiers attaqués en même temps de l’extérieur.
Troisième arme : les « Psyops » (Opérations psychologiques), lancées à travers les chaînes médiatiques mondiales, qui sont définies ainsi par le Pentagone : « Opérations planifiées pour influencer à travers des informations déterminées les émotions et motivations et donc le comportement de l’opinion publique, d’organisations et de gouvernements étrangers, afin d’induire ou renforcer des attitudes favorables aux objectifs préfixés ». Avec ces opérations, qui préparent l’opinion publique à l’escalade guerrière, on fait apparaître la Russie comme responsable des tensions en Europe et la Chine comme responsable des tensions en Asie, en les accusant en même temps de « violation des droits humains ».
Manlio Dinucci, et son épouse, Carla, devant la maison natale de Mao Tsé Toung, en 1965. Une dernière considération : ayant travaillé à Pékin avec ma femme dans les années Soixante, contribuant l’un et l’autre à la publication de la première revue chinoise en langue italienne, j’ai vécu une expérience formatrice fondamentale au moment où la Chine —libérée depuis à peine quinze ans de la condition coloniale, semi-coloniale et semi-féodale— était complètement isolée et non reconnue par l’Occident ni par les Nations Unies comme État souverain. De cette période restent imprimées en moi la capacité de résistance et la conscience de ce peuple, à l’époque 600 millions de personnes, engagé sous la conduite du Parti communiste à construire une société sur des bases économiques et culturelles complètement nouvelles. Je pense que cette capacité est également nécessaire aujourd’hui pour que la Chine contemporaine, qui est en train de développer ses énormes potentialités, puisse résister aux nouveaux plans de domination impériale, en contribuant à la lutte décisive pour l’avenir de l’humanité : la lutte pour un monde sans plus de guerres dans lequel triomphe la paix indissolublement liée à la justice sociale.
Manlio Dinucci Traduction
Marie-Ange Patrizio | 0 |
883 | Monica`s Stained Blue Dress Back in the newsMonica`s Stained Blue Dress Back in the news # rr bb 1
Bill Clintons son Danny Williams just had a press conference stating that he has sent a letter to Monica Lewinski . The letter asks Monica if Danny Williams can barrow the Blue Dress that Bill Clinton left his DNA on many years ago. Can DNA still be abstracted from that dress after all these Years. Well if Monica says yes we will soon find Out! Tags | 0 |
884 | The MSM's twisted war language: Our 'sieges' and theirsWed, 26 Oct 2016 21:12 UTC © Alice Martins/The Washington Posy View of a heavily damaged neighborhood in Kobane, Syria, which had been targetted by a series of US-led coalition airstrikes. The hypocritical Western heart beats for all except those the US Empire drowns in blood . [1] "In Syria almost everybody is under siege to a greater or lesser degree," observes the Independent's Patrick Cockburn. [2] Most people, however, think the only siege in Syria is the one imposed on (East) Aleppo by Syrian and Russian forces. But siege as a form of warfare is hardly uniquely embraced by the Syrian Arab Army and Russian military. On the contrary, the United States and its allies have been practicing siege warfare in the Levant and beyond for years, and continue to do so. It's just that US-led siege warfare has been concealed behind anodyne, even heroic, labels , while the siege warfare of countries Washington is hostile to, is abominated by Western state officials crying crocodile tears. Here's how the deception works: Sieges of cities controlled by Islamic State, carried out by US forces and their allies, are called rescue operations, or campaigns to liberate or retake cities—never sieges. Other sieges— the ones carried out by Al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria , Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, formerly Al Nusra, which, herein, I'll call Al Qaeda for convenience— are ignored altogether (which might suggest something about the relationship of Al Qaeda's Syria affiliate to the United States.) And a particularly injurious form of siege— economic sanctions — is presented as a separate category altogether and not siege warfare at all. But sanctions, imposed by rich countries , such as the United States and those of the European Union, on poor countries, such as Syria, are a modern form of siege, and have been called sanctions of mass destruction, in recognition of their devastating character. In the Levant, the sieges which are identified as such by Western state officials , and in train, by the Western mass media, are sieges of cities controlled by Al Qaeda, carried out by Syrian forces and their allies. These sieges —which cause hunger, kill civilians, and destroy buildings— are denounced in the West as ferocious attacks on innocents which amount to war crimes. "Russia's bombardment backing the siege of Aleppo by Syrian government forces," notes the Wall Street Journal , "has created a humanitarian crisis." [3] A UN Security Council resolution—vetoed by Russia—has called for an end to Russian bombing of Aleppo. British foreign minister Boris Johnson has mused openly about war crimes indictments against Syria and Russia. Yet US campaigns to drive Islamic State out of Manbij, Kobani, Ramadi, Fallujah, Baiji and Tikrit, and now Mosul, have also caused hunger, killed civilians, and destroyed buildings. Unlike the Syrian military's siege of East Aleppo, these campaigns have been celebrated as great and necessary military victories, but have, themselves, created vast humanitarian crises. Cockburn observes that the "recapture" of "cities like Ramadi, Fallujah, Baiji and Tikrit...would scarcely have happened without the coalition air umbrella overhead." [4] That is, the cities liberated by Iraqi forces and their US patron were bombed into submission, even though civilians were trapped inside. Iraqi ground forces only moved in after these cities were left in ruins by coalition airstrikes and Iraqi artillery bombardment, as mopping up forces. © Ali al-Mashhadani, Reuters Market in Ramadi destroyed by US coalition airstrikes Rania Khalek, writing in the Intercept , points out that "U.S.-backed ground forces laid siege to Manbij, a city in northern Syria not far from Aleppo that is home to tens of thousands of civilians. U.S. airstrikes pounded the city over the summer, killing up to 125 civilians in a single attack. The U.S. replicated this strategy to drive ISIS out of Kobane, Ramadi, and Fallujah, leaving behind flattened neighborhoods." [5] To recover Ramadi from Islamic State, Iraqi forces surrounded and cordoned off the city. [6] In addition, the US led coalition bombarded Ramadi with airstrikes and artillery fire. [7] The bombardment left 70 percent of Ramadi's buildings in ruins. The city was recovered, but "the great majority of its 400,000 people" were left homeless. [8] Iraqi forces also besieged the city of Fallujah, preventing most food, medicine and fuel from entering it. [9] Militias "prevented civilians from leaving Islamic State territory while resisting calls to allow humanitarian aid to reach the city." [10] This was done "to strangle Islamic State" [11] with the result that civilians were also "strangled." Inside the city, tens of thousands endured famine and sickness due to lack of medicine. [12] Civilians reportedly survived on grass and plants. [13] Many civilians "died under buildings that collapsed under" artillery bombardment and coalition air strikes. [14] © US Defense Department The US-led coalition has been bombarding Mosul for months. The current campaign to recover Mosul is based on the same siege strategy US forces and their Iraqi client used to liberate Ramadi and Fallujah. US and allied warplanes have been bombarding the city for months. [15] Iraqi forces, aided by US Special Forces, are moving to cordon it off. "Some aid groups estimate that as many as a million people could be displaced by fighting to recapture the city, creating a daunting humanitarian task that the United Nations and other organizations say they are not yet ready to deal with." [16] Writer and journalist Jonathan Cook commented on the utter hypocrisy of Westerners who condemn the Syrian/Russian campaign to liberate East Aleppo from Islamist fighters while celebrating the Iraqi/US campaign to do the same in Mosul. Targeting the British newspaper, the Guardian , beloved by progressives, Cook contrasted two reports which appeared in the newspaper to illustrate the Western heart beating for all except those the US Empire drowns in blood. Report one: The Guardian provides supportive coverage of the beginning of a full-throttle assault by Iraqi forces, backed by the US and UK, on Mosul to win it back from the jihadists of ISIS - an assault that will inevitably lead to massive casualties and humanitarian suffering among the civilian population. Report two: The Guardian provides supportive coverage of the US and UK for considering increased sanctions against Syria and Russia. On what grounds? Because Syrian forces, backed by Russia, have been waging a full-throttle assault on Aleppo to win it back from the jihadists of ISIS and Al-Qaeda - an assault that has led to massive casualties and humanitarian suffering among the civilian population. [17] Aleppo’s rebels, members of the Al Qaeda derived Jabhat Fatah al-Sham. Central to Western propaganda is the elision of the Islamist character of the Al Qaeda militants who tyrannize East Aleppo. This is accomplished by labeling them "rebels," while the "rebels" who tyrannize the cities the United States and its allies besiege are called "Islamic State," ISIL" or "ISIS" fighters. The aim is to conjure the impression that US-led sieges are directed at Islamic terrorists, and therefore are justifiable , despite the humanitarian crises they precipitate, while the Syrian-led campaign in East Aleppo is directed at rebels, presumably moderates, or secular democrats, and therefore is illegitimate. This is part of a broader US propaganda campaign to create two classes of Islamist militants—good Islamists, and bad ones. The first class, the good Islamists , comprises Al Qaeda and fighters cooperating with it, including US-backed groups, whose operations are limited to fighting secularists in Damascus, and therefore are useful to the US foreign policy goal of overthrowing Syria's Arab nationalist government. These Islamist fighters are sanitized as "rebels." The second class, the bad Islamists , comprises Islamic State. Islamic State has a mbitions which make it far less acceptable to Washington as an instrument to be used in pursuit of US foreign policy goals. The organization's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, aspires to lead a caliphate which effaces the Sykes-Picot borders, and is therefore a threat, not only to the Arab nationalists in Damascus—an enemy the organization shares in common with Washington— but also to the US client states of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which Islamic State attacks. The US objective in connection with Islamic State is to push the organization out of Iraq (and out of areas in Syria that can be brought under the control of US-backed fighters) and into the remainder of Syria, where they can wear down Arab nationalist forces. Syria's "moderates"—the "rebels"—if there are any in the sense of secular pro-democrats, are few in number. Certainly, their ranks are so limited that arming them, in the view of US president Barack Obama, would make little difference. The US president told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that his administration had "difficulty finding, training and arming a sufficient cadre of secular Syrian rebels: 'There's not as much capacity as you would hope,'" Obama confessed. [18] Obama's assessment was underscored when "a US general admitted that it had just four such 'moderate' fighters in Syria after spending $500 million on training them." [19] Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk dismissed the idea of the "moderates" as little more than a fantasy. "I doubt if there are 700 active 'moderate' foot soldiers in Syria," he wrote. And "I am being very generous, for the figure may be nearer 70." [20] Elizabeth O'Bagy, who has made numerous trips to Syria to interview insurgent commanders for the Institute for the Study of War, told the New York Times' Ben Hubbard that my "sense is that there are no seculars." [21] Anti-government fighters interviewed by the Wall Street Journal found the Western concept of the secular Syrian rebel to be incomprehensible. [22] To be clear: Syrian and Russian forces are waging a campaign to liberate East Aleppo from Islamists, whose only difference from Islamic State is that they're not a threat to the US client states, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It's "primarily al-Nusra who holds Aleppo," US Department of Defense spokesperson Colonel Steve Warren said on April 25, referring to Al Qaeda. [23] Other militant Islamist organizations, including US-backed groups, are also in Aleppo, intertwined with, embedded with, sharing weapons with, cooperating with, and acting as auxiliaries of Al-Qaeda. Author and journalist Stephen Kinzer, writing in the Boston Globe , reminds us that: For three years, violent militants have run Aleppo. Their rule began with a wave of repression. They posted notices warning residents: "Don't send your children to school. If you do, we will get the backpack and you will get the coffin." Then they destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed workers would have no recourse other than to become fighters. They trucked looted machinery to Turkey and sold it. [24] The Invisible Sieges While sieges imposed by US-led forces are hidden by not calling them sieges, sieges imposed by Washington's Al-Qaeda ally are simply ignored. "Only three years ago," notes Fisk, the same Islamist fighters who are under siege today in East Aleppo, "were besieging the surrounded Syrian army western enclave of Aleppo and firing shells and mortars into the sector where hundreds of thousands of civilians lived under regime control." [25] Fisk observes acidly that the "first siege didn't elicit many tears from the satellite channel lads and lassies" while the "second siege comes with oceans of tears." [26] © Delil Souleiman/Agence France Presse Wreckage of Manbij in the wake of US coalition airstrikes, June 23, 2016 To the ignored Al Qaeda-orchestrated siege of West Aleppo can be added "the untold story of the three-and-a-half-year siege of two small Shia Muslim villages in northern Syria," Nubl and Zahra. Those sieges, carried out by Al-Qaeda against villages which remained loyal to Syria's Arab nationalist government, left at least 500 civilians dead, 100 of them children, through famine and artillery bombardment. [27] The "world paid no heed to the suffering of these people," preferring to remain "largely fixed on those civilians suffering under siege by (Syrian) government forces elsewhere." [28] And then there's the largely untold story of the 13 year-long siege imposed on a whole country, Syria, by the United States and European Union . That siege, initiated by Washington in 2003, with the Syria Accountability Act, and then followed by EU sanctions, blocks Western exports of almost all products to Syria and isolates the country financially. This massive, wide-scale siege plunged Syria's economy into crisis even before the 2011 eruption of upheavals in the Arab world [29]—demonstrating that Washington's efforts to force Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to step down began long before the Arab Spring. The roots of US hostility to Assad's government are found in the danger of its becoming "a focus of Arab nationalistic struggle against an American regional presence and interests" [30] - another way of saying that the Arab nationalist goals of unity, independence and socialism, which guide the Syrian state, are an anathema to the US demand—expressed in the 2015 US National Security Strategy—that all countries fall in behind US global "leadership." Under US siege warfare, unemployment shot up, factories closed, food prices skyrocketed and fuel prices doubled. [31] "Syrian officials" were forced "to stop providing education, health care and other essential services in some parts of the country." [32] Indeed, so comprehensive was the siege, that by 2011 US "officials acknowledged that the country was already under so many sanctions that the United States held little leverage." [33] Western siege warfare on Syria has blocked "access to blood safety equipment, medicines, medical devices, food, fuel, water pumps, spare parts for power plants, and more," [34] leading Patrick Cockburn to compare the regime change campaign to "UN sanctions on Iraq between 1990 and 2003." [35] The siege of Iraq—at a time when the country was led by secular Arab nationalists who troubled Washington as much, if not more, than the secular Arab nationalists in Syria vex Washington today—led to the deaths, though disease and hunger, of 500,000 children, according to the United Nations. Political scientists John Meuller and Karl Meuller called the siege a campaign of economic warfare amounting to "sanctions of mass destruction," more devastating than all the weapons of mass destruction used in history. [36] When the West's siege warfare on Arab nationalist Iraq ended in 2003 it was immediately resumed on Arab nationalist Syria, with the same devastating consequences. According to a leaked UN internal report, the "US and EU economic sanctions on Syria are causing huge suffering among ordinary Syrians and preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid." [37] Cockburn notes that "Aid agencies cited in the report say they cannot procure basic medicines or medical equipment for hospitals because sanctions are preventing foreign commercial companies and banks having anything to do with Syria." [38] "In effect" concludes the veteran British journalists, " the US and EU sanctions are imposing an economic siege on Syria as a whole which may be killing more Syrians than die of illness and malnutrition in the sieges which EU and US leaders have described as war crimes." [39] | 0 |
885 | Open Borders Groups Gird for H-1B FightsThe open borders lobby is bracing for a fight with President Donald Trump’s administration over the foreign guest worker program, which opponents say is discriminatory against American workers. [In a piece by the Hindustan Times, a newspaper based out of India, open border proponents with the Indian group “Immigration Voice” are decrying the Trump Administration’s expected effort to not defend an rule that allows foreign guest workers’ spouses to also work in the U. S. Sudarshana Sengupta, who is specifically cited by Immigration Voice, is currently in the U. S. on an visa, which is given to spouses of workers as they await green cards. When Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a longtime opponent of massive foreign guest worker programs, did not immediately defend the open borders lobby in a Washington court case, Immigration Voice denounced the move. The Washington court case was filed by Save Jobs USA, an organization comprised of IT workers who have been fired from their jobs after being replaced by cheaper, foreign workers under the program. “The recent statements from the government present an unacceptable risk for Immigration Voice members that the department of justice might decide after 60 days to adopt the position of Save Jobs USA,” of Immigration Voice Aman Kapoor wrote in a statement. Immigration hawks at NumbersUSA say the open borders lobby appears to be opposing every position the Trump Administration holds on immigration. “I think that the advocacy groups are going to scream and yell about any single thing that anyone proposes that is not open borders,” NumbersUSA Government Affairs Director Rosemary Jenks told Breitbart Texas. “They’ve decided that it’s in their interest to fight everything Trump wants to do. ” Jenks said the “coalition” between the business community, who wants continued cheap, foreign labor, and the Hispanic advocacy groups, who want to see higher levels of illegal and legal immigration, will continue as a united front in order to give the illusion that they care about workers and business. “The business community doesn’t really have much stake in chain migration issues,” Jenks told Breitbart Texas. “And the advocacy groups like La Raza don’t have a lot of stake in the foreign guest worker issues. They’re going to look like they’re defending the interest of business in order to keep that coalition going. ” Trump and Sessions’ positions on foreign guest worker programs remains highly popular with the American public, as only 30 percent of Americans said in a recent poll that the visa was necessary, Breitbart Texas reported. The vast majority of Americans also said the number of visas allotted every year to companies should either be kept on level or decreased. Only 23 percent of Americans said the number of visas given out should be raised. John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 1 |
886 | Report: Things Finally As Bad As Trump Claims - The Onion - America's Finest News SourceReport: Things Finally As Bad As Trump Claims Close Vol 52 Issue 44 · Politics · Politicians · Election 2016 · Donald Trump
WASHINGTON—Following Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the general election early Wednesday morning, political experts confirmed that conditions in the United States are now finally as bad as the Republican nominee has long claimed. “Though we had previously been able to dismiss Trump’s proclamations as mere hyperbole and scare tactics, the United States now definitively meets the criteria of being the declining superpower that Trump has described for the past 17 months,” said Georgetown University political science professor Ronald Leidecker, adding that, as of tonight, the nation no longer commands the same respect among world powers it once did, and our country’s greatest days most definitely lie in its past, just as the Republican has asserted. “Our economy is, since about 10 p.m yesterday, on the verge of collapse, and when it comes to foreign relations, we have foolishly made ourselves vulnerable on multiple fronts, putting the very existence of everything our nation holds dear at risk. In the words of Donald Trump, our country is a disaster.” Once again echoing the pronouncements of president-elect Trump, Leidecker noted that we sadly won’t be able to rely on Washington to change anything, as our political system is largely run by self-serving, power-hungry factionalists who don’t have the best interests of common Americans at heart. Share This Story: WATCH VIDEO FROM THE ONION Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter
Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines | 0 |
887 | ‘Trump Unveiled’ Reveals the Big Con of Donald Trump’s Presidential Run‘Trump Unveiled’ Reveals the Big Con of Donald Trump’s Presidential Run Posted on Nov 1, 2016
By John K. Wilson ( OR Books )
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from “Trump Unveiled: Exposing the Bigoted Billionaire,” by John K. Wilson. “Trump Unveiled” is published by OR Books. Click here for details.
With his casino background, Trump is an expert at attracting gamblers, people who are willing to throw the dice with the irrational hope it will make their lives better. Trump understands how to recruit gamblers—by evoking hope and concealing facts. A casino doesn’t tell you that you’re likely to lose; a casino tells you that anything can happen, and you might just win, and what the hell, you’ll have some fun along the way. That’s the appeal of Trump’s campaign: take a chance on me, and I’ll give you everything.
In fact, Trump literally promised “everything” to his followers. Trump promised workers in Michigan, “I’ll get you a new job; don’t worry about it.” If the cost of supporting Trump is so small (a mere vote) and the potential economic benefits are so great (a new job, economic prosperity, and global dominance), why not go for Trump? Trump is the cheapest lottery ticket you’ll ever buy. And even if the odds that he’ll keep his word are very small, why not take a gamble on Trump?
This explains why Trump is so committed to denouncing America. He claims (despite all the evidence to the contrary) that the economy is a disaster, that the unemployment rate is really 42 percent, that everything is terrible, and that only he can make America great again. If you’re trying to recruit a gambler, you need to make them feel like normal life is boring and miserable. Trump tells America that their lives are horrible, and even though it’s factually not true for the overwhelming majority, they begin to wonder if he might be right. Everyone can imagine being richer and happier, and that’s precisely the core appeal of gambling.
As Trump the real estate developer put it: “I play to people’s fantasies. ... The more unattainable the apartments seemed, the more people wanted them.” Trump is applying the same principles to politics: Trump is presenting a fantasy of what people want from a president, and the more unattainable and unrealistic his promises are, the more people will want him even if they know they are being irrational.
Trump’s own lavish lifestyle serves his message. Trump loves to have rallies at airport hangers; it’s not just the convenience of flying in and out quickly. The true appeal of it to Trump is that it reminds his audience how incredibly wealthy he is: he has a giant plane with his name on it. Trump is telling supporters, I’ve got a plane. Do you? Vote for me, and who knows, maybe you will. Might Trump’s ostentatious display of extreme wealth turn off potential voters who are angry at financial inequality and the rigged system that favors the rich? The opposite is true: Trump is telling them the system is rigged and they’re right to be angry at the rich, but Trump is the only one who can offer the salvation of getting rich yourself. Trump University was another form of shafting suckers gambling on Trump. Give Trump thousands of dollars to learn his secrets, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll get really rich, too.
Trump also understands that the best way to bring people to a casino is with a distraction, and the best kind of distraction is a fight. A big boxing match attracts crowds who stick around to toss some coin at the casino. And so Trump is always provoking fights: with his opponents, with protesters, with the media, with Twitter critics, with anyone and everyone who irritates him. Distraction is essential to any casino. You want bright lights and noisy machines, free drinks and sexy waitresses. You want fancy palaces with shimmering chandeliers. You want the customer paying attention to everything except the fact that it’s all a giant, flashy scam. As the slogan of the Trump Taj Mahal says, “Excitement Returns.” Distractions make people more willing to gamble. In an environment of calm analysis, rational thinking tends to prevail.
Trump explained his approach to The Apprentice: “I rant and rave like a lunatic and the crazier I am, the higher the ratings.” This is also Trump’s approach to his presidential campaign, because it is his way of life.
Casinos are a legal con. The gamblers always lose, collectively, and everyone knows that. But individuals can sometimes win. The key for any casino is to convince gamblers to imagine that they will be the exception to the odds. They don’t even have to believe something so irrational is likely, they just have to hope.
Trump is gambling on the idea that he can convince the voters that the world they live in is a rigged game. They keep trying to play fair, and they get screwed. Trump is promising to play this rigged game, but says he will rig it on behalf of America. Nobody thinks Trump is an honest person; but the more he lies, the more his supporters can imagine that he’s going to lie for us. He’s going to be a lying son of a bitch, but he will be our lying son of a bitch. He’s a con man working for us to take the rest of the world’s money after they stole it from us.
The trick of Trump’s con is that he implicitly admits to being a con man. Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal, could easily have been titled The Art of the Con. The book is full of examples of how Trump misleads (“truthful hyperbole”) and manipulates people to take advantage of them. Trump has bragged, “I’ve taken advantage of the banks probably more than any other human being on earth.” To Trump, conning people is a credential.
As a con artist, Trump believes in nothing but himself. Only a con artist could propose the largest tax increase on the wealthy in human history just a few years ago and now propose the largest tax cut on the wealthy in human history while simultaneously claiming that he’s going to make the rich pay more. Trump will say anything to get elected.
Trump has only a few consistent positions he has held for decades. Because Trump is a con artist, he will never believe in free trade. The concept of mutually beneficial agreements is alien to him; someone is always taking advantage of someone else in Trump’s world. You’re either the con artist or the victim.
The fact that Trump is a con artist does not mean he is plotting as president to steal a trillion dollars and run off to a remote island. Trump, after all, is a narcissist who dreams of being president and imagines himself the greatest leader in history. But Trump can never escape his con artist instincts. He is unable to change, and incapable of self-criticism. He will govern as a con artist, as someone who deceives and manipulates and seeks to control everything around him. As a con artist, Trump imagines that everyone is organizing a con as well, which leads to his conspiratorial thinking. Only the naïve fail to understand they’re the victim of a con.
Casting a vote is as easy as buying a lottery ticket, and it’s free, too. Why not take a chance that Trump can deliver what he says, even if you know he can’t? The odds are against you, but hope matters more than probabilities. As the Powerball ad slogan says, “anything’s possible.”
Trump once said, “My life is like a game of poker.” As a gambler, Trump knows how to take risks with other people’s money. But he shows a dangerous tendency to follow instinct rather than reason. The only hope for Trump to emerge victorious is if he can convince the American people to be the same kind of gambler he has been.
Donald Trump is a pathological liar, a sexist pig, a hateful racist, a corrupt businessman, a pandering populist, a conspiracy nut, and a vicious bully. Trump’s cynical narcissism explains why he wants to be president, but his political success reflects much deeper problems in America: the inequality of wealth that makes a man like Trump so powerful, the celebrity-obsessed media that gave Trump an uncritical platform for his ideas, and the failure of our political system to address America’s flaws, which has allowed a bigoted demagogue to seize control of the Republican Party. | 0 |
888 | Will WeinerGate Expose Darker and Dirtier Secrets Than We Imagined?
Another day, another scandal…but this one might turn out to be the most damaging so far.
On October 28, FBI director James Comey informed the Senate Judiciary Committee via letter that the agency would be re-opening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
Comey wrote:
In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation … I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.
Later that day, The New York Times provided an intriguing update:
Emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server were found after the F.B.I. seized electronic devices once shared by Anthony D. Weiner and his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, federal law enforcement officials said Friday.
The F.B.I. is investigating illicit text messages that Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, sent to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. The bureau told Congress on Friday that it had uncovered new emails related to the Clinton case — one federal official said they numbered in the thousands — potentially reigniting an issue that has weighed on the presidential campaign and offering a lifeline to Donald J. Trump less than two weeks before the election.
Now, Weiner is reportedly cooperating with the FBI…and gave them a laptop that he shared with his estranged wife…which means no warrant is necessary to search that particular device.
Is it possible that he will get some sort of deal based on an agreement to testify?
One can’t help but wonder what the FBI is going to find on that laptop. There are a reported 650,000 emails to scour through. It will take weeks – possibly longer – to sort through them, and the election is just days away.
There’s a particularly disturbing rumor circulating about the emails…
Rumors stirring in the NYPD that Huma's emails point to a pedophila ring and @HillaryClinton is at the center. #GoHillary #PodestaEmails23 pic.twitter.com/gkEH5oL269
— David Goldberg (@DavidGoldbergNY) October 30, 2016
I would not report this unless I was 100% sure – known this source 15+ years
— Greg Hilliard (@UnityActivist) October 31, 2016
Now, to clarify again – this IS just a rumor – unsubstantiated as of now.
And it sounds preposterous…until you consider that child sex rings among the powerful elite have been reported for years. Bill Clinton has been linked with a convicted billionaire pedophile named Jeffrey Epstein , who pimped out underage girls to powerful men. Flight logs show that Clinton was a frequent flyer on the registered sex offender’s infamous jet.
In May, Fox News reported :
…flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the “Lolita Express” — even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail for at least five of the flights, according to records obtained by FoxNews.com.
…trips between 2001 and 2003 included extended junkets around the world with Epstein and fellow passengers identified on manifests by their initials or first names, including “Tatiana.” The tricked-out jet earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls.
Conchita Sarnoff of the Washington, D.C. based non-profit Alliance to Rescue Victims of Trafficking and author of a book on the Epstein case told Fox:
Bill Clinton … associated with a man like Jeffrey Epstein, who everyone in New York, certainly within his inner circles, knew was a pedophile. Why would a former president associate with a man like that?
Also from Fox:
Epstein, who counts among his pals royal figures, heads of state, celebrities and fellow billionaires, spent 13 months in prison and home detention for solicitation and procurement of minors for prostitution. He allegedly had a team of traffickers who procured girls as young as 12 to service his friends on “Orgy Island,” an estate on Epstein’s 72-acre island, called Little St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Why didn’t Epstein face harsher punishment?
Remember, he’s a billionaire with friends in high places.
More shocking details from Fox:
The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida prepared charging documents that accused Epstein of child sex abuse, witness tampering and money laundering, but Epstein took a plea deal before an indictment could be handed up.
On Sept. 24, 2007, in a deal shrouded in secrecy that left alleged victims shocked at its leniency, Epstein agreed to a 30-month sentence, including 18 months of jail time and 12 months of house arrest and the agreement to pay dozens of young girls under a federal statute providing for compensation to victims of child sexual abuse.
In exchange, the U.S. Attorney’s Office promised not to pursue any federal charges against Epstein or his co-conspirators.
Florida attorney Brad Edwards, who represented some of Epstein’s alleged victims, is suing the federal government over the secret non-prosecution agreement in hopes of having it overturned. Edwards claimed in court records that the government and Epstein concealed the deal from the victims “to prevent them from voicing any objection, and to avoid the firestorm of controversy that would have arisen if it had become known that the Government was immunizing a politically-connected billionaire and all of his co-conspirators from prosecution of hundreds of federal sex crimes against minor girls.”
Oh, but there’s more . According to the pilots’ logbooks, which surfaced in civil litigation surrounding Epstein’s crimes, this happened in 2002…
…Clinton, his aide Doug Band, and Clinton’s Secret Service detail are listed on a flight from Japan to Hong Kong with Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen, and two women described only as “Janice” and “Jessica.” One month later, records show, Clinton hopped a ride from Miami to Westchester on a flight that also included Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen, and a woman described only as “one female.”
Why hasn’t Donald Trump added Bill’s Epstein ties to his arsenal against Hillary? He’s brought up the women who have accused Bill of sexual assault and rape.
Why would he leave out Epstein?
Probably because Trump also knows Epstein – very well, actually – as reported in a 2002 New York magazine profile titled Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery :
Epstein likes to tell people that he’s a loner, a man who’s never touched alcohol or drugs, and one whose nightlife is far from energetic. And yet if you talk to Donald Trump, a different Epstein emerges. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
Trump’s name and contact information is in Epstein’s black book – but so are the names and contact information for MANY other prominent and influential people, including Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, Tony Blair, former Utah governor and Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, Senator Edward Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, David Koch and Pepe Fanjul, according to a report by Vice .
In 2010 , Epstein pled the Fifth when asked by a lawyer representing one of Epstein’s victims about his relationship with Trump:
Q: Have you ever had a personal relationship with Donald Trump?
A. What do you mean by “personal relationship,” sir?
Q. Have you socialized with him?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Yes?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Have you ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18?
A: Though I’d like to answer that question, at least today I’m going to have to assert my Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendment rights, sir.
Both Trump and Epstein are named in a lawsuit for the rape of a 13-year old girl who is using the name Katie Johnson that allegedly occurred at a “sex party” way back in 1994, but the veracity of the case has yet to be determined. Judge Ronnie Abrams has scheduled an initial status conference in the civil lawsuit for December 16 in a New York district court.
Trump has vociferously denied the accusations. Epstein, an associate of the UK’s Prince Andrew who was convicted of underage sex crimes in Florida in 2008, has also denied the allegations. A lawyer for the Trump Organization told the Guardian in July: “This is basically a sham lawsuit brought by someone who desires to impact the presidential election.”
Edwards, who has represented Epstein victims, spoke with Johnson and declined to take her case, as The Daily Beast reported:
Concerning Trump’s involvement in Epstein’s illicit affairs, Edwards said he hadn’t seen any evidence that would implicate the GOP nominee and described Trump as “extremely helpful and honest,” during questioning.
In 2014 , another young woman filed a lawsuit claiming that Epstein used her as a sex slave for his powerful friends—and that she’d been at parties on his private island with Bill Clinton.
Epstein also reportedly donated money to the Clinton Foundation – even after he was convicted.
****
Back in July, a 4chan user by the name of FBI Anon shared some inside information, which was then posted on Reddit .
When asked if Hillary sold weapons and favors from the State Department for cash to our enemies, FBI Anon replied : “Weapons, favors, intelligence, and people.”
When asked what the Clinton Foundation does, FBI Anon replied: “Sold intel, favors, and people to anyone willing to pay.”
Regarding a possible Hillary indictment, FBI Anon said , “There is enough for her and the entire government to be brought down. People do not realize how enormous this whole situation actually is. Whether she will be or not depends on how much info about others involved gets out, and there are a lot of people involved.”
More quotes from FBI Anon:
“The real point of interest is the Clinton Foundation, not the email server. We received the server from Benghazi, then from the server we found data on the CF. Then we realized the situation is much worse than previously thought.”
“The DOJ is most likely looking to save itself. Find everyone involved in the Clinton Foundation, from its donors to its Board of Directors, and imagine they are all implicated.”
(Could this be why the DOJ tried to stop the investigation into the Clinton Foundation?)
“My message to you and everyone on this board is do not get distracted by Clinton’s emails. Focus on the Foundation. All the nightmarish truth is there. The emails will pale in comparison.”
More, from page 2 :
When asked if the people leading the investigation are blackmailed pedophiles: “No. The people under the magnifying glass do have an affinity for children.”
When asked what would happen if all of the information regarding the Clinton Foundation was released to the public: “Total chaos. The government would be exposed at every layer, who pays who, who buys what, and no one has yet asked about the human trafficking bits I have been laying out.”
When asked if members of Congress own strip clubs and have their own sex slaves?: “Epstein.”
“Pedophiles and sex traffickers everywhere. Many politicians trade girls like cattle.”
“BC (Bill Clinton) is a confirmed pedo.”
“Sex rings are popular in all governments, but pedophilia is primarily in British parliament & Saudi Arabia, and that’s why HRC and BC love foreign donors so much. They get paid in children as well as money. Dig deep and you can find it. It will sicken you.”
Of course, all of this could be fabricated by a person pretending to have inside information. We may never know the truth. But if these claims are true, they are deeply disturbing.
****
In August 2015, Trump made an interesting prediction…
It came out that Huma Abedin knows all about Hillary’s private illegal emails. Huma’s PR husband, Anthony Weiner, will tell the world.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 3, 2015
What will the emails (and perhaps other information) on Weiner’s devices reveal?
Will it be more revelations regarding play-for pay schemes, election rigging, or email-scrubbing?
Or will something more sinister be uncovered?
Hillary has called for the FBI to release details about the latest probe to the public “Immediately.”
Could that be because she knows they WON’T publicize the information if it would bring down MANY of her government colleagues and cause mass chaos and disruption?
Time will tell.
It would be something, though – wouldn’t it – if both Clintons were brought down by misbehaving weiners?
Oh, and speaking of perverted folks…
Two days ago, during an interview with Michael Smerconish of CNN, Creepy Uncle Joe Biden learned, on live TV, that the new emails being reviewed by the FBI are related to the investigation of Anthony Weiner. Watch his response.
Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ).
Contributed by Lily Dane of The Daily Sheeple .
Lily Dane is a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple. Her goal is to help people to “Wake the Flock Up!” | 0 |
889 | Wallonia caves in? Belgium reaches secret EU-Canada trade deal compromiseThu, 27 Oct 2016 16:45 UTC © Yves Herman / Reuters The Belgian government has reached a deal with the Wallonia region on the free trade agreement between the European Union and Canada, according to Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel. Michel said "an agreement" was found after a last minute round of negotiations with Belgium's French-speaking community who have been holding up the deal. Brussels has not released the details of the compromise. The signing of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) was cancelled on Thursday after the deal was blocked by Wallonia's regional parliament. Comment: Belgium's Wallonia region defying EU Junker's CETA trade deal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was forced to cancel Thursday's trip to Brussels as the negotiations had stalled. Wallonia premier Paul Magnette said the region was not opposed to an EU trade deal with Canada. However, he insisted the secret arbitration scheme allowing corporations to sue governments had to be dropped from the agreement. Regional leaders in Wallonia voted 46 to 16 against CETA over fears of job losses due to cheaper farming and industrial imports. CETA promises to eliminate tariffs on 98 percent of goods immediately after ratification and also encompasses regulatory cooperation, shipping, sustainable development and access to government tenders. CETA's supporters say the deal would yield billions in added trade through customs and tariff cuts and other measures facilitating business ties. Opponents claim the trade deal will only benefit the wealthy and large corporations. For CETA to be ratified, all 28 European Union countries have to agree the treaty. Until now, Belgium has been the main obstacle to the free trade deal. "All parliaments are now able to approve by tomorrow at midnight. Important step for EU and Canada," Michel tweeted. | 0 |
890 | Trump’s election breaks chains of political correctnessTrump’s election breaks chains of political correctness By Ben Tanosborn Ben Tanosborn
One likely winner to come out of the 2016 US presidential election: accuracy in polling. Obviously not past but future polling!
Donald Trump, from the start of his campaign to capture the presidency, harangued his followers during the rallies with such unrestricted language that they felt liberated, able to speak out their minds without any fear of repression or recrimination. Well, at least not in the safety and camaraderie of their rallies; although also aware that politically correct America frowned on such openness, leaving them with a bi-forked tongue when applied to people who would likely judge, or categorize them . . . and that definitely applied to pollsters.
One suspects that as much as 10 percent of the actual Trump vote came out of what we could call correctness-hiding, making total mockery of most pollsters. As a pertinent note I might add that while a student in operations research, I had a professor (Anant Negandhi, UCLA) who then claimed that polling involving issues with sociopolitical subjectivity was for the most part worthless because of the difficulty in modeling a survey which would correctively identify and quantify both the causal and intervening variables. Over a generation later, that difficulty has not really changed; nor has the need of pollsters to make a living, which may push them to sell smoke and mirrors to a well-funded political establishment.
My own observation in weighing the impact of Trump’s campaign on his followers, most particularly those in the construction trades, has been one where from the start of the campaign, and solidly after Trump’s winning the Republican candidacy, these people who had expressed racial and ethnic bias with some trepidation were now doing so with little angst, as if their speech now had society’s imprimatur and they had been godfathered by Donald Trump.
After the cataclysmic misreading by a polling industry that has reverted from a science to an art . . . lagging miles behind the weather predicting science, one would expect the rigidity of science to take a critical role. So, of necessity if wishing to survive, the entire industry must undergo a true and complete overhaul. And that would be one positive result from this election: accuracy in polling.
Now that Trump has become president-elect, to be escorted to the White House by a Republican Congress . . . and a conservative-in-waiting Supreme Court, will the specter of political correctness exit from American life? Not likely; but rest assured that there will be a great degree of accommodation for the 26 percent of American bigoted patriots (bigopats). [Read my article of June 16, 2016: Bigopats: ‘ Undocumented’ Largest Group in American Politics . ]
To say that America is divided is a mini-characterization of incredible proportions that we, as a nation, will have incredible difficulty in overcoming . . . and perhaps never will. First, we must cope with the surreal realization that this United States of America isn’t at all represented by Kansas being a dream away from Oz. The results from this last election have told us the naked truth about our nation; a truth that most Americans would like to keep under wraps: that more than a divided country split in two or more political camps, America is really a fallen Humpty Dumpty fragmented economically, socially, and politically in a way that it will take a Herculean effort to be able to put it back together again. An effort that requires drastic change: both political and institutional.
Once upon a united America, we insist in telling ourselves, we were the land of promise and hope; the great experiment in humankind: economic opportunity, the American dream, the mythical melting pot, freedom, dignity and self-realization. But we seem to forget, that it was the economic wellbeing in the America of generations past that did provide the glue that kept our multi-part Humpty Dumpty (diverse America) sitting smilingly on the wall, looking condescendingly over the rest of the world.
Globalization has melted that glue; and economic change for that symbolic American middle class, whether coming from the Right (Trump) or the Left (Sanders), is unlikely to improve their lot. But at the end of the day, neither would have that middle path that Hillary Clinton would have walked.
The establishment Detestables have lost the Toilet Bowl to Trump’s Deplorables . . . we either grin and bear it; or, for the lack of a better plan, get ourselves dirty fighting Trump’s Movement . . . certifiably a bowel movement in this last Toilet Bowl. Copyright © 2016 Tanosborn
Ben Tanosborn, columnist, poet and writer, resides in Vancouver, Washington (USA), where he is principal of a business consulting firm. Contact him at . | 0 |
891 | WhiteHouse.gov Takes Down Climate Page, Puts Up ’America First’ Energy Plan - BreitbartObservers on Twitter noted Friday afternoon that the White House’s page on climate change, a creation of the Obama administration, appears to have been taken down shortly after Donald Trump assumed the nation’s presidency. [In its stead, the new White House published an explanation of what the Trump team is calling the “America First Energy Plan. ” At press time, the link to the White House page publicizing a plan to combat climate change leads to a blank page. RIP @WhiteHouse climate webpage. pic. twitter. — Amy Harder (@AmyAHarder) January 20, 2017, A cached version of the page shows that President Obama’s administration had used it to advertise a plan to reduce America’s carbon footprint and have America participate in “global effort to combat climate change. ” “For the sake of our children and future generations, we must act now,” the page read, “And we are. ” The Trump administration has instead published a page that lays out its energy plan. “The Trump Administration is committed to energy policies that lower costs for hardworking Americans and maximize the use of American resources, freeing us from dependence on foreign oil,” the page reads. The page addresses finding economically viable energy solutions that are mindful of the environment: [O]ur need for energy must go with responsible stewardship of the environment. Protecting clean air and clean water, conserving our natural habitats, and preserving our natural reserves and resources will remain a high priority. President Trump will refocus the EPA on its essential mission of protecting our air and water. | 1 |
892 | Iran Warns President-Elect Trump Not To Mess With Their Sweetheart Nuclear Deal From Obama Iran Warns President-Elect Trump Not To Mess With Their Sweetheart Nuclear Deal From Obama President-elect Trump once said during his campaign that he would “rip up” the agreement, drawing a harsh reaction from Khamenei, who said if that happens, Iran would “set fire” to the deal. 23, 2016 Extending U.S. sanctions on Iran for 10 years would breach the Iranian nuclear agreement, Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said on Wednesday, warning that Tehran would retaliate if the sanctions are approved. The U.S. House of Representatives re-authorized last week the Iran Sanctions Act , or ISA, for 10 years. The law was first adopted in 1996 to punish investments in Iran’s energy industry and deter Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. The Iran measure will expire at the end of 2016 if it is not renewed. The House bill must still be passed by the Senate and signed by President Barack Obama to become law. Iran and world powers concluded the nuclear agreement, also known as JCPOA , last year. It imposed curbs on Iran’s nuclear program in return for easing sanctions that have badly hurt its economy. Obama Announces a Historic Nuclear Deal with Iran:
So the same guy who said you could “keep your doctor” and “keep your plan” now says this deal will solve the problem. Do YOU believe him? We sure don’t. “The current U.S. government has breached the nuclear deal in many occasions,” Khamenei said, addressing a gathering of members of the Revolutionary Guards, according to his website. “The latest is extension of sanctions for 10 years, that if it happens, would surely be against JCPOA, and the Islamic Republic would definitely react to it.” The U.S. lawmakers passed the bill one week after Republican Donald Trump was elected U.S. president. Republicans in Congress unanimously opposed the agreement, along with about two dozen Democrats, and Trump has also criticized it. Obama’s deal with Iran “worst treaty since Chamberlain”: Lawmakers from both parties said they hoped bipartisan support for a tough line against Iran would continue under the new president. President-elect Trump once said during his campaign that he would “rip up” the agreement, drawing a harsh reaction from Khamenei, who said if that happens, Iran would “set fire” to the deal. The House of Representatives also passed a bill last week that would block the sale of commercial aircraft by Boeing and Airbus to Iran. Trump and Clinton on U.S. nuclear policy, Iran deal: The White House believes that the legislation would be a violation of the nuclear pact and has said Obama would veto the measure even if it did pass the Senate. source SHARE THIS ARTICLE | 0 |
893 | Tony Perkins: Trump EO Re-Affirms Jefferson’s Doctrine of Separation of Church and StateTony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council spoke with Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Friday regarding President Trump’s signing of an executive order allowing churches to engage in more political activity and its implications for the Jeffersonian notion of the separation of church and state. [Asked if the executive order is “a contravention of the Jeffersonian notion of separation of church and state,” said Perkins, “actually, I think it’s in compliance with Thomas Jefferson’s view that the government shouldn’t be meddling in the business of the church. ” “That’s what’s happening, increasingly,” added Perkins. “The wall, so to speak, that’s been breached hasn’t been breached by the church, its been breached by the government getting involved … I mean, when you have the government telling churches that they have to provide for elective abortion coverage in their health care plans, regardless of what their faith view is of human life … that’s the government meddling in the business of the church. ” Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. | 1 |
894 | The Moon that Fell from HeavenThe Moon that Fell from Heaven page: 1 link There is an intriguing text from Anatolian myth with regards to the Moon falling from Heaven; The Moon God fell from the sky and fell upon the gate complex, but no one saw him. The Storm God sent rain after him; he sent rains after him. Fear seized him; anxiety seized him. The god Hapantali went there. He stood beside him and uttered over him the words of a spell. The goddess Kamrusepa looked down from the sky and said: "What in the world has happened here? A good question from Kamrusepa there then, but the text is fragmentary and partial and the matter isn't really explained, so anyway the first question then is were was this gate complex and why couldn't he, the Moon, be seen having landed. My consideration is that the gate complex is that of the Cilician Gates , and that the Moon can no longer be seen as he has infused the Taurus Mountains with Silver. That region did relate to the Silver Mountains as several sources mention and was a major centre for the trade in Silver at Kultepe/Kanes; The essence of the trade was to ship tin, woolen textiles and lapis lazuli to Anatolia to sell it there in order to acquire, directly or indirectly, silver and gold, which was shipped back to Assur. Tin, essential for the Anatoian production of bronze was imported in Assur from Susa, perhaps by Elamite caravans, and ultimately originated from Central Asia. Assyrian trade colony at Kanes There are a great many tablets related to this trade recovered from Kultepe, on these sometimes can be seen the Taurus bull that bears upon it's back the Silver Mountain. Also seen beneath on that example is the Scorpion which was likely also an ideogram based upon the Cilician gates and greater region, also the symbol of Ishara the Goddess of the Silver Mountain and related to concept idea of the Moon within the Underworld, her symbolic metal silver and purity through refinement, the Temple of Ishara being at Kanes or Nesi to the Hurrians. There were a great many ideas bound up within this symbolism then, including in Cosmological terms the entrance into the underworld being above Taurus in Gemini, and it's opposite point of emergence in Scorpio, according to the inter-section point of the Galactic and Ecliptic planes. Were this gets interesting is that there is a Hurrian myth that relates to a conflict in the primeval period named The Song of Silver involving their tutelary God Tessub and his ongoing issues with Kumarbi, God of Destiny; Among Tessub, the Sun God of the Sky, Sauska Nineveh's Queen, and all the gods, no one worships him, although his power is greater than their power. His word is greater than their words, his wisdom is greater than their wisdom, his battle and his g1ory are greater than theirs. It is Silver the Fine of whom I sing. Wise men to1d me the story of the fatherless boy. It did not exist. Long ago Silver's Father had disappeared. And they do not know his sp1endor. Heroic men ran to battle. Abundance did not exist. And grain did not grow only hunger The Songs of the Kumarbi cycle can contain veiled allegory regarding ethnic disputes such as i outlined here with regards to Byblos and Ebla, it is likely the same in this case, conflict with the region of Nesa and the Silver Mountains, this however relating to a much earlier period, potentially also this relates to conflict from the Heavens as Silver could be named Kubbabar-Anzu as noted here the association with Anzu in conflict with Tessub relating to the same with Ninurta in the Sumerian mythos, and that seemingly from Anatolia. The identification of Silver as DUMU also correlates with the Sumerian notion of the Divine child as Damu, often seen as the basis for the cult of Dumuzid, were it was also the case that the City of Dumuzid, Bad-Tivira, was the centre of the Sumerian metallurgy industry. Silver is described in this text as a wannumiyas DUMU, which means a child whose father is dead or missing. Hittitologists generally translate this as "orphan," Silver's consternation at being told by the orphan boy that he too was an orphan need not mean that he was discovering this for the first time. The Song of Silver again is fragmentary but does seem to involve Silver at some point establishing his power; Silver seized power with his hands. Silver seized the spear. He dragged the Sun and Moon down from heaven. The Sun and the Moon did reverence. They bowed to Silver. The Sun and the Moon began to speak to Silver: O Silver, our lord, do not strike/kill us! We are the luminaries of heaven and earth. We are the torches of what lands you govern. If you strike/kill us, you will proceed to govern the dark lands person-ally." His soul within him was filled with love.He had pity on them In dragging the Sun and the Moon down from Heaven again it could be considered that is what had infused the Mountains with Gold and Silver, but also it could relate to the establishment of the cults of Allani and Ishara at the time of silver, the spiritual qualities brought down to Earth. Hopefully in the future more complete accounts of these texts will emerge as they are most intriguing and almost completely overlooked apart from specialists in the field, which is a pity as they are more interesting than most. edit on Kam1031300vAmerica/ChicagoThursday2731 by Kantzveldt because: (no reason given) | 0 |
895 | ‘Mom’ Stars Launch Campaign for Planned ParenthoodThe stars of CBS’s Mom are launching a donation campaign to support Planned Parenthood. [Twitter: Now is more important than ever to #StandWithPP. Thank you @JOSS Whedon for joining the fight → https: . — Allison Janney (@AllisonBJanney) May 18, 2017, Actresses Allison Janney (pictured) and Anna Faris, along with series producer Chuck Lorre, are kicking off their campaign to support the abortion industry giant in place of spending funds on an Emmy FYC campaign, reports Deadline: Hollywood. I am so proud of everyone at @MomCBS for making this decision at such a critical time in @PPact future 💖 https: . — Allison Janney (@AllisonBJanney) May 18, 2017, Thank you @Abartlette ’m really proud to be a part of @MomCBS and I thank you guys so much for being the fucking awesome people you are https: . — Anna Faris (@AnnaKFaris) May 19, 2017, Many Hollywood celebrities are supporting Planned Parenthood after videos emerged two years ago that led to allegations the organization sells the harvested body parts of aborted babies for a profit. Several congressional committees have referred the abortion provider for possible criminal prosecution as a result of investigations into the allegations. Just in case anyone needed yet another reason why @AllisonBJanney is amazing — thank you Allison and @MomCBS! https: . — Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards) May 18, 2017, Republicans in Congress are attempting to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding and redirect it to other federally qualified healthcare centers (FQHCs) that provide more comprehensive care without performing abortions. President Donald Trump has promised to work to defund the group if it continues to provide abortions. A video produced by organization Live Action highlights how politicians promote Planned Parenthood’s “healthcare services” when such services are either unavailable or greatly declining: [VIDEO] A recent Marist poll found that 61 percent of Americans oppose taxpayer funding of abortion, including 40 percent of those who say they are “” and 41 percent of Democrats. Planned Parenthood performs more than 300, 000 abortions per year and receives over a half billion dollars in federal taxpayer funding annually. Live Action also reports that, over the last six years, Planned Parenthood’s annual clientele has dropped half a million clients, and the organization has closed more than 200 clinics. Utilizing Planned Parenthood’s own annual reports, the group found that over the last ten years, Planned Parenthood’s annual breast exams have declined 60 percent, Pap tests have decreased 77 percent, and annual cancer screenings have dropped 68 percent. “However, Planned Parenthood’s annual abortions have increased 27 percent,” observes Live Action, noting the group performs 34. 9 percent of abortions in the nation. | 1 |
896 | Assad’s Lesson From Aleppo: Force Works, With Few Consequences - The New York TimesBEIRUT, Lebanon — For months, the bodies have been piling up in eastern Aleppo as the buildings have come down, pulverized by Syrian and Russian jets, burying residents who could not flee in avalanches of bricks and mortar. And now it is almost over, not because diplomats reached a deal in Geneva, but because President Bashar of Syria and his foreign allies have won the city. Cold, hungry and scarred by the deaths of loved ones, tens of thousands of civilians and fighters are awaiting buses to take them from their homes to uncertain futures. It is not the first victory that Mr. Assad has secured with overwhelming force in the Syrian conflict. But his subjugation of eastern Aleppo has echoed across the Middle East and beyond, rattling alliances, proving the effectiveness of violence and highlighting the reluctance of many countries, perhaps most notably the United States, to get involved. President Obama, on Friday at his final news conference of the year, acknowledged that the nearly war in Syria had been among the hardest issues he has faced, and that the world was “united in horror” at the butchery in Aleppo. But Mr. Obama — who came into office committed to reducing America’s military entanglements in the Middle East — also defended his decision not to intervene more forcefully. To do otherwise, he said, would have required the United States to be “all in and willing to take over Syria. ” The recent developments in the Syrian conflict send a message to autocratic leaders in the region and elsewhere that force works — and brings few consequences, said Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. The lesson for the victims of that force is that they are on their own. “Everybody has been watching helplessly as this conflict unfolds,” Ms. Yahya said. “They are watching civilians being massacred mercilessly and all they can do is tweet about it and sign petitions. ” This is the Middle East that Donald J. Trump will face upon taking office next year, a region where jihadists have erased borders, Russia is ascendant, Iran has extended its reach through powerful militias and American allies are questioning how much they can rely on Washington. Mr. Trump has articulated no comprehensive policy for the region, other than underlining his support for Israel and suggesting he could work with Russia against the Islamic State, perhaps establishing “safe zones” in Syria — an apparent contradiction since Russian jets have bombed civilian areas. But the fallout from Aleppo highlights the dynamics that are likely to shape the region throughout his term. Analysts have begun to add Aleppo to the list of places where humans have failed to stop tragedies committed against other humans, as in Grozny, Rwanda and Srebrenica. The comparisons are not perfect, but can be instructive. Most estimates put the death toll in the Rwandan genocide much higher than that of the entire Syrian war, although the killing in Rwanda happened much faster, giving foreign powers less time to react. The siege and bombardment of Aleppo, on the other hand, came after years of conflict in which Mr. Assad’s forces attacked protesters, dropped exploding barrels on rebellious communities and used chemical weapons on their own people. What is more, because of smartphones and the internet, the Syrian conflict has arguably been better documented than any armed conflict in history. But that has still failed to bring about accountability. “Aleppo is now the symbol of how far we have retrenched,” said David M. Crane, a veteran international war crimes prosecutor and a professor at the Syracuse University College of Law. “It is part of a worldwide move away from a global village. Countries are turning back into themselves. ” While acknowledging the current weakness of international justice, Professor Crane has been working throughout the Syrian conflict to compile evidence of possible war crimes against different parties in hopes that they will one day be held to account. “I really do believe that over time we will be able to move forward,” he said. “International justice is not going away. ” By way of example, he mentioned Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia, whom Mr. Crane helped put behind bars in an international trial many years after he had committed his crimes. The Syrian conflict did not begin as a civil war but as a popular uprising aimed at ousting Mr. Assad. He responded to protests with gunfire, detentions and torture. Many in the opposition took up arms to defend themselves and fight back, drawing support from Gulf countries, Turkey, the Syrian diaspora and the United States. The conflict escalated from there, as Mr. Assad sought help from Russia and Iran. As the state receded and chaos spread, jihadist movements established themselves, attracting recruits with religious fervor and ample funding, fueling accusations by Mr. Assad that his opponents were terrorists. Over time, as the space for civil activism narrowed, that claim became increasingly true, giving Western nations another reason not to intervene. Mr. Obama denounced Mr. Assad as an illegitimate leader but kept American forces out of the battle to oust him. He argued that the United States could not resolve the conflict and that Syria was not a core American interest. Even when Mr. Assad deployed chemical weapons, crossing a “red line,” Mr. Obama did not bomb Syria, angering the opposition and allies like Saudi Arabia, who felt he had further empowered Mr. Assad. Instead, Mr. Obama made a deal with Russia to rid Syria of chemical weapons. But the war metastasized, spawning new horrors that increasingly affected the United States and its allies. The Islamic State seized territory in Syria and Iraq, declaring a caliphate and inspiring attacks from Bangladesh to San Bernardino, Calif. And the violence sent waves of refugees into Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey and let loose a flow of migrants whose arrival in Europe has undermined its unity and stability. All those shocks contributed to the environment in which the siege and battering of eastern Aleppo could take place, changing the course of the conflict. Mr. Assad’s seizure of Aleppo will leave the opposition with no control in any of Syria’s major cities, possibly signaling its end as a political force that can pressure the government to negotiate. “The Assad regime has won the strategic war,” said Hassan Hassan, a resident fellow from Syria at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy in Washington. “Psychologically, the opposition is no longer seen as a force that can break Bashar . ” Other leaders have paid attention to how he did it. “The Assad playbook now is that you can crush your people you can destroy cities you can attack with chemical weapons you can enable extremists — and the international community will stand by and not do anything,” Mr. Hassan said. “That is a precedent for dictators who feel threatened by their populations. ” But Mr. Assad’s seizure of Aleppo does not mean the end of the war. Gulf states like Qatar have said they will continue to back the rebels, and many analysts predict that the movement will become a prolonged insurgency. Mr. Assad’s surprise loss of the ancient city of Palmyra last week to the Islamic State indicates that his fighters are stretched thin. Also converging in Aleppo is the region’s rising sectarian split. As the rebels have been adopted by Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia, Mr. Assad has deepened his reliance on Shiite militias who receive support from Iran. Bolstering Mr. Assad’s troops in Aleppo were fighters from Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Shiite militiamen from Iraq and elsewhere who viewed the battle in religious terms. Many Syrians, including in parts of Aleppo, will be happy when Mr. Assad takes back the whole city because they see him as a symbol of a unified state or because they distrust the rebels for accepting support from foreign powers. Others will just be glad the fighting has stopped. For some, the war’s greatest casualty has been the ability of Syrians to live together. Samir Altaqi, a surgeon and former member of the Syrian Parliament who now directs the Orient Research Center in Dubai, said he now avoids images of Aleppo, where he grew up and began his career. “I don’t bear to look too much at this footage because it would mean a full moral collapse, and I would become too extremist,” he said. His interactions with younger Syrians who have lived through the war have scared him, he said. “My impression is that these people have no more distance from death,” said Mr. Altaqi, who is in his . “They are sorry to be alive because all their beloved people are dead. ” He recalled his youth in Aleppo decades ago, when his family had Jewish and Christian neighbors and a “mercantile attitude” pervaded the city. “I remember how we never asked about the religion of our neighbors and friends,” he said, even when a son or daughter brought home a potential mate. “What will happen to all of this history?” he asked. | 1 |
897 | Pence: Bossert and Bannon Weren’t Demoted, Both Will ’Continue to Play Important Policy Roles’ - BreitbartTONIGHT @marthamaccallum interviews @VP Pence on #First100 Tune in at 7p ET on Fox News Channel! pic. twitter. During a preview of an interview set to air on Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “The First 100 Days,” Vice President Mike Pence pushed back against assertions that the on the National Security Council constituted a demotion of homeland security adviser Tom Bossert and chief strategist and former Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon. Pence said that neither Bannon and Bossert were demoted, and both are “highly valued members of this administration. They’re going to continue to play important policy roles. But I think with H. R. McMaster’s addition as our National Security Adviser, a man of extraordinary background in the military, this is just a natural evolution, to ensure the National Security Council is organized in a way that best serves the president in resolving and making those difficult decisions. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett, | 1 |
898 | Bundy Ranch occupiers acquitted on all counts after challenging the corrupt Bureau of Land ManagementBundy Ranch occupiers acquitted on all counts after challenging the corrupt Bureau of Land Management
Saturday, October 29, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes Tags: Ammon Bundy , Oregon ranchers , court decision (NaturalNews) In what freedom fighters across the country are calling a stunning victory against a tyrannical government agency, a jury in Oregon has acquitted all seven defendants involved in the armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge in January.Cheers broke out in the Portland, Ore., federal courtroom when the jury announced the acquittals of Ammon Bundy, along with brother Ryan Bundy and five others, the Chicago Tribune reported .The seven were charged with conspiracy to impede federal workers from their jobs at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which is located about 300 miles southeast of Portland. Also, the jury could not reach a verdict on even one count of theft for Ryan Bundy. Shocked by the acquittals The announcement by the jury did not come without additional drama, however. Upon hearing the jury's decision, Marcus Mumford, one of Ammon Bundy's attorneys, demanded his client be released, even shouting at the judge. That prompted U.S. marshals to tackle Mumford to the ground and use a stun gun on him a number of times before arresting him, the Tribune reported.U.S. District Judge Anna Brown said she was not able to release Bundy because he faces federal charges in Nevada, his home state, related to an armed standoff with federal Bureau of Land Management agents at his father Cliven Bundy's ranch in 2014 .As reported by KATU , the armed standoff began Jan. 2 and lasted nearly six weeks. The incident brought new attention to the long-running issue of too much federal ownership of lands in the American West. The confrontations at the refuge earlier this year and on Cliven Bundy's ranch in 2014 essentially reignited arguments between private citizens – mostly ranchers – and the federal government that stem from the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion in the late 1970s, when Western states like Nevada attempted to wrestle more control of their own territory from the federal government .As noted by The New York Times the federal government owns nearly half of the land – 47 percent – in the West.The Tribune noted that even the defendants' attorneys were shocked by the acquittals."It's stunning," said Robert Salisbury, an attorney for defendant Jeff Banta. "It's a stunning victory for the defense. I'm speechless."The U.S. Attorney in Oregon , Billy J. Williams, said in a statement that his office stood by its decision to prosecute the seven defendants."We strongly believe that this case needed to be brought before a Court, publicly tried, and decided by a jury," the statement said. 'When the jury hears the story, I expect the same result' The Oregon case was, in a sense, an extension the tense standoff between federal officials with the BLM and other authorities, and the Bundy's two years ago in Nevada. Cliven, Ammon and Ryan Bundy are all scheduled to go on trial for that standoff early next year.It's not clear what the outcome of the Nevada trial will be. Federal attorneys have said they don't feel like the outcome in Oregon will have any effect whatsoever on the Nevada trial.But defense attorneys involved in the Nevada trial aren't so sure. Daniel Hill, an attorney for Ammon Bundy , says the Oregon acquittal bodes well for his client and the other defendants, all of whom are facing felony weapon, conspiracy and other charges, the Tribune reported."When the jury hears the whole story," he told The Associated Press , "I expect the same result." Sources: | 0 |
899 | Report: Google Faces Fine of up to $9 Billion in EU Antitrust Case - BreitbartGoogle could be facing a $9 billion fine from the European Union (EU) following a investigation into the search engine. [“The EU competition authority accused Google in April 2015 of distorting internet search results to favour its shopping service, harming both rivals and consumers,” reported the Independent on Friday. “The US company has in the past rejected the charges, saying that regulators ignored competition from online retailers Amazon and eBay. ” The Independent continued to claim in their report that “Fines for companies found guilty of breaching EU antitrust rules can reach 10 per cent of their global turnover, which in Google’s case could be about $9bn of its 2016 turnover. ” “Apart from the fine, the Commission will tell Google to stop its alleged practices but it is not clear what measures it will order the company to adopt to ensure that rivals get equal treatment in internet shopping results,” they explained. “The regulator could set out general principles or specific instructions for Google to follow, said an observer. ” Google has previously been accused of rigging and changing their search results in their favor, most notably during the 2016 U. S. Presidential Election. Autofill suggestions about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s health were censored, despite the popularity in searches, as well as other search suggestions which conveyed negative messages about Clinton, including “Crooked Hillary. ” During an investigation, users discovered that every other popular search engine featured these popular search suggestions apart from Google, who were major backers of Clinton’s campaign. Last year, WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange claimed that Google was “directly engaged in Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Negative search suggestions about other candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz were not similarly censored. In September, Google was also accused of manipulating the search results for “Jihad” to promote a post from the Islamic Supreme Council defending Jihad as a “misunderstood concept,” while in April the search engine announced that they would be further manipulating results to combat “fake news” and “hate speech. ” Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 1 |
900 | Don’t ask Thom Yorke to write a cover quote for your book Don’t ask Thom Yorke to write a cover quote for your book If you’ve got a book coming out and need a quote for the cover, it’s probably for the best if you don’t ask Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. Subtext: Don’t ask Thom Yorke to blurb your book pic.twitter.com/yILKS1vXry
— Mark O'Connell (@mrkocnnll) October 27, 2016 | 0 |
901 | Internet Flasher | 0 |
902 | Gretchen Carlson Suit Aims at Retaliation Over Discrimination - The New York TimesIn the complaint that Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox News anchor, filed this week against Roger Ailes, the network’s chairman, one thing stands out above all: the overtness of the sexual harassment that Ms. Carlson says she endured. “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better,” Mr. Ailes told her last year, according to the complaint. And yet the legal case Ms. Carlson has built is based largely on her claims of Mr. Ailes’s retaliation against her for standing up to him, not the underlying discrimination. “Definitely the primary complaint is that she has been retaliated against by rebuffing his demands, complaining about discrimination,” Nancy Erika Smith, Ms. Carlson’s lead lawyer, said in an interview. In fashioning their arguments this way, Ms. Carlson and Ms. Smith epitomize a stark trend in discrimination cases over the last decade or two: More and more workers are bringing retaliation claims, and those claims, in turn, often determine the outcome of their cases. So pronounced is this practice that proving retaliation has sometimes displaced attempts to remedy the discriminatory treatment itself, a development that concerns some legal experts. “A lot of companies would find it easier to deal with the problem of retaliation, as opposed to addressing these underlying problems of harassment — denying promotions, paying lower wages because of sex,” said Peter of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. According to data compiled by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charges of retaliation linked to discrimination claims more than doubled from 1997 to 2015, to just under 40, 000, overtaking charges of racial discrimination, which had previously been the most common E. E. O. C. charge. One reason for the trend may be a pair of Supreme Court rulings in the late 1990s that prompted employers to enact policies that encourage workers to come forward when they believe they have suffered discrimination. But, of course, any uptick in workers speaking up also creates more risk that their bosses will retaliate against them for doing so, said Carolyn Wheeler, a longtime E. E. O. C. lawyer now at the firm Katz, Marshall Banks in Washington. In recent years, the commission has also made a priority of combating retaliation, Ms. Wheeler said, for the simple reason that it can fulfill its mission only if “people aren’t afraid to bring discrimination to the attention of the agency. ” Perhaps most important, however, is the fact that it is often easier to win a retaliation claim than a case about the original discrimination, and it has become more so in recent years. The Supreme Court in 2006 made it easier to prove that an employer’s response was serious enough to constitute retaliation, instead of being able to win only when an employee suffered an unambiguously harsh consequence for speaking up, like being fired. Anything that might well have discouraged a reasonable person from coming forward, like a schedule that makes it tough to care for one’s children, could suffice. Ms. Smith, the lawyer in the Carlson case, adds that retaliation claims can be more intuitive, because the desire to punish an accuser is almost universal. By contrast, discrimination claims may involve comments or actions that not everyone will view as hostile or demeaning. “I do think it’s absolutely true that it’s easier for juries to get retaliation,” she said. “It’s easier for even men to understand retaliation in a case. Maybe women might understand more how damaging this environment is. ” There is evidence to support this. Cynthia Calvert, a discrimination lawyer and senior adviser at the Center for WorkLife Law in San Francisco, recently reviewed 4, 400 cases involving workers who believed their employers had discriminated against them because of their role as caregivers, such as mothers of newborns. Ms. Calvert said that although many employees would file both discrimination and retaliation claims, “not infrequently, the discrimination claim would be dismissed in summary judgment, but the retaliation claim would remain. ” “The end result,” she said, “is that we probably have more verdicts and settlement on retaliation than on the underlying claim. ” In one prominent case in May, a sheriff’s sergeant in Sacramento won an award of more than $3 million when the jury found that her superiors had retaliated against her for complaining of discrimination. The discrimination claims had been dismissed. (Other lawyers note that retaliation claims can fail when the alleged retaliation comes a considerable time after the plaintiff first complained of discrimination, so this approach is hardly bulletproof.) The trend has its downsides, however, if the goal is to root out and address actual discrimination. “The whole point of this is, if there’s wrongdoing in a workplace, you want to make sure an employer understands what it is and corrects it so that it doesn’t go on in the future,” Ms. Calvert said. If the focus is primarily on retaliation, “you’re not getting that effect. ” In the extreme situation, aggressively policing retaliation but setting a dauntingly high bar for many types of discrimination claims could have the odd effect of making it relatively easy for workers to confront their employers while giving those employers little incentive to change certain corrosive practices. It would be akin to protecting corporate and government while leaving intact barriers to prosecuting corruption. To truly root out discriminatory behavior, many experts say, it must become easier for victims to gain redress legally. For example, courts frequently require plaintiffs to show that a similar employee was treated differently — say, a woman claiming that she was denied promotion because of gender discrimination would need to show that a similarly productive man with the same duties and qualifications received the promotion. But such airtight comparisons frequently do not exist, particularly at smaller companies. More broadly, courts grappling with discrimination cases are often laboring under a standard that favors direct evidence — like explicitly sexist or racist comments — that emerged almost two generations ago. In those days, bias was frequently overt. Today, biases tend to be more subtle and unconscious, like employers believing they are treating different workers equally even when they are not. “‘We don’t hire people like you’ was the world of the 1960s and 1970s, and the courts came up with ways of proving discrimination of that sort,” said Ms. Wheeler, the former E. E. O. C. lawyer. “That doesn’t help very much for plaintiffs today. ” | 1 |
903 | Google Launches AI Program to Detect ’Hate Speech’ - BreitbartGoogle has launched a new AI program called Perspective to detect “abusive” comments online in an effort to crack down on hate speech. [Publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Economist are testing the new software as a way of policing comments sections, according to the Financial Times. “News organizations want to encourage engagement and discussion around their content, but find that sorting through millions of comments to find those that are trolling or abusive takes a lot of money, labour and time,” said Jared Cohen, president of Jigsaw, the Google social incubator that built the tool. “As a result, many sites have shut down comments altogether. But they tell us that isn’t the solution they want. ” Perspective is available to all publications that are currently part of Google’s Digital News Initiative, which includes The Guardian, the BBC and The Financial Times. In theory, the software could also be utilized by social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter. Twitter has recently attempted to impose stricter rules on users in an attempt to reduce supposed harassment on the platform. CJ Adams, a product manager at Jigsaw, discussed the adaptability of their program, saying, “We are open to working with anyone from small developers to the biggest platforms on the internet. We all have a shared interest and benefit from healthy online discussions. ” Perspective is used to filter and compile comments on websites for human review. In order to learn what exactly counts as a “toxic” comment, the program studied hundreds of thousands of user comments that had been deemed unacceptable by reviewers on websites like The New York Times and Wikipedia. “All of us are familiar with increased toxicity around comments in online conversations,” said Cohen. “People are leaving conversations because of this, and we want to empower publications to get those people back. ” Apparently Perspective cut the review time of comments on The New York Times in half, allowing reviewers to check twice as many comments thanks to Perspective’s comment filtering abilities. Speed is paramount to Paragon, Jigsaw’s Chief Research Scientist Lucas Dixon said: “Their goal is to be able to [improve] review speed by 10x, so the project is ongoing. ” Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart. com | 1 |
904 | Why Polls Showing Hillary in The Lead Are Useless And Misleading [CARTOON]You are here: Home / political cartoon / Why Polls Showing Hillary in The Lead Are Useless And Misleading [CARTOON] Why Polls Showing Hillary in The Lead Are Useless And Misleading [CARTOON] October 29, 2016 Pinterest
Robert Gehl reports that with less than ten days to go, Donald Trump appears to be surging with likely voters across the country.
Despite an onslaught of negative coverage from all corners of the media, the Republican Presidential candidate has gained on Hillary Clinton in the latest poll from The Washington Post and ABC News.
Hillary still holds a 48-44 percent edge over Trump, but that is up from 38 percent support for Trump in the last week alone, fueled by support is shoring up among political independents and hard-core Republicans. He has made up ground among white people – with a 30-point advantage among whites without a college degree, up from a 20 point advantage.
Trump saw his biggest gains among political independents, favoring Trump by a 12-point margin in the latest tracking poll, 49 to 37 percent, after giving Clinton a narrow edge in late last week. Neither candidate has maintained a consistent lead among independent likely voters in Post-ABC polling this fall.
Despite the surge in Trump’s popularity, still six in ten voters expect Hillary Clinton to win anyway. The same poll found that only 30 percent thought Donald Trump would prevail. This plays into the Trump narrative that the vote is somehow “rigged” in favor of Clinton and no matter how much support he has, Trump would never ascend to the presidency.
Sizable minorities of likely voters express concerns about fraud and inaccuracy at the ballot box, though worries about both have declined in the past month. Fewer than four in 10 voters now say voter fraud occurs very or somewhat often (37 percent), down from 47 percent in early September. Studies of voter fraud have found that it is very rare.
In a separate question, the share of voters saying they do not have confidence votes will be counted accurately dipped from 33 to 28 percent, while the percentage saying they are “very confident” rose from 31 to 43 percent.
Seven in 10 Trump supporters say voter fraud occurs at least somewhat often, including 34 percent who think it happens “very often.” And Trump voters are split on whether votes will be counted accurately across the country, with 50 percent at least somewhat confident and 49 percent “not too” or “not at all” confident.
While Trump voters’ concerns about fraud and vote counting have not changed significantly since last month, Clinton supporters expressed growing confidence in the election process. The share of Democrats who are “very confident” the vote will be accurately counted has grown from 45 percent last month to 70 percent in the new Post-ABC poll. And while more than 1 in 5 Democrats last month thought voter fraud occurs at least somewhat often, that has fallen to slightly more than 1 in 10 in this week’s poll.
The poll was conducted with a sampling of 1,775 adults and has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 2.5 percentage points. | 0 |
905 | Why Last-Second Lane Mergers Are Good for Traffic - The New York TimesThe orange highway sign with black letters holds a familiar warning: “Lane closed ahead. ” What do you do? If your instinct is to immediately get out of the lane that will be closing, you may think you are being courteous to fellow drivers by reacting early — but in reality you could be slowing traffic, experts say. It may sound like a breach of etiquette to wait until the last minute to merge, but traffic engineers and transportation departments in several states are promoting that exact move, sometimes with mixed results as they try to overcome drivers’ ingrained habits. The maneuver is known as the late merge — or zipper merge, for the way that cars taking turns getting into a lane resembles the teeth of a zipper coming together. The move, in which drivers in dense, traffic remain in the lane that will be closed and then pull into the other lane at the merge point, helps ease congestion and drivers’ frustrations, experts said. As Tom Vanderbilt, the author of “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us),” noted, “Merging late, that purported symbol of individual greed, actually makes things better for everyone. ” Colorado started to promote the late merge during a highway project more than 10 years ago. Signs were posted, starting two miles from the point of the lane closing. The first signs read, “Use both lanes during congestion. ” The next signs said, “Use both lanes to the merge point. ” When the lane was ending, the last signs read: “Take turns. Merge here. ” The result? A 15 percent increase in the volume of cars moving through the work zone and a 50 percent decrease in the length of the line, K. C. Matthews, a traffic specifications and standards engineer at the Colorado Department of Transportation, said in an interview last week. The approach is effective in traffic and it allows drivers to take advantage of the lane that is about to close. In traffic, there is less need to rely on the late merge, officials said. A work zone engineer for the Kansas Department of Transportation, Kristi Ericksen, said in an email that officials would customarily expect in work zones to see “large differences in the speed of traffic (nearly at a standstill in one lane and highway speeds in the adjacent lane) and road rage (rude gestures, eliminating gaps, lane blocking). ” Since the late merge was introduced, the queues for those two types of lanes are about half the length officials expected, and drivers take turns at the merge point, she said. “As for traffic flows, the data suggests that while the speeds are lower and the travel time may not be shorter, traffic continues to move and is predictable,” she wrote. “In other words, the travel conditions are more reliable, which has its own set of benefits. ” But when people apply their “ sensibilities” to their driving, the late merge can be harder to manage, Mr. Vanderbilt, the author, said in an interview last week. For instance, a person would be considered rude if he or she walked to the head of a line of customers waiting for a bank teller. A driver in a free lane who zipped to the merge point and then tried to cut in could be judged similarly. Some drivers then take it upon themselves to become traffic monitors, enforcing societal norms and straddling the lanes to block those who might try to get ahead, he said. “In a car moving at a certain speed, when the moment comes to make a quick decision, we may become more interested in getting into a battle for progress,” he said. When the Minnesota Department of Transportation tried to promote the zipper merge, officials found that some drivers in the lane that was going to end kept pace with the car next to them “whether acting out of perceived courtesy or a sense of vigilante justice,” Mr. Vanderbilt wrote in his book. The result was confusion and congestion. Quoting the puzzled Minnesota transportation officials, Mr. Vanderbilt wrote, “For some unknown reason, a small number of drivers were unwilling to change their old driving behaviors. ” Officials report mostly positive feedback from drivers about the late merge, though some occasionally take a dim view of it. Mr. Matthews recalled a Federal Highway Administration official who was in her own vehicle and driving through a construction zone in Colorado. She was excited to see a zipper merge in action and zoomed to the merge point in the lane that was to end. Another driver, who was apparently not as impressed as she was, threw a burrito at her car, he said. | 1 |
906 | In Macau, Skipping the Casinos, but Embracing the Past - The New York TimesAs we bumped along in the No. 25 bus on Estrada do Istmo, it was impossible not to notice the Venetian Macau, a mountain of steel and glass, shining in the distance in the afternoon sun. Opened in 2007, it’s home to one of the largest casinos on earth. And it’s not alone: Of the 10 biggest casinos in the world in 2014 (based on revenue) a staggering eight were in Macau, a tiny region on the southern coast of China, where over half a million people are packed into fewer than 12 square miles. But I wasn’t there to gamble. Following a precedent I’d established in my very first Frugal Traveler column, when I toured Las Vegas without going to the famed Strip, I was determined to break the shell of Macau’s opulent exterior and see what lay beneath the surface. During a quick trip, taking the ferry across the Pearl River Estuary, I found it was the perfect place for a getaway from the noise and intense urban compactness of Hong Kong. Owing to its colonial past, Macau, with its cobblestone streets, old Catholic churches and narrow alleyways, has an almost European feel to it, along with an interesting local cuisine that fuses Portuguese and Chinese flavors. And my focus, naturally, was putting this trip together without causing undue strain on my budget. Macau was one of the first Asian settlements to be forced into the yoke of European colonization and the last to shed it, achieving full independence from Portugal in 1999. As with Hong Kong, China administers Macau but employs a somewhat approach. There are no visa requirements for Americans staying in Macau fewer than 30 days (you will need to bring your passport). The TurboJet ferry ride from Hong Kong (150 to 200 Hong Kong dollars for an economy fare, about $20 to $25) is reasonably quick and comfortable. Ferries leave from various spots in Hong Kong regularly, so if you miss one, there’s no need to worry. (Be more cautious when you’re leaving Macau — it’s easier to end up on the wrong ferry.) My attack plan was simple: to see as much as I could, by foot and by public transportation. Macau is traditionally divided into three sections: the peninsula and the islands of Coloane and Taipa. (A fourth “region” of land reclaimed from the ocean, Cotai, now connects Coloane and Taipa and is the home to many of the newer casinos.) I particularly had my eye on rustic Coloane Village in the south. Though I had no plans to indulge in the casinos, one lesson I’ve learned in my travels is that where there’s gambling, cheap rooms follow — it’s how they lure you in. I was able to land a very comfortable, relatively luxurious room at the Sofitel on the western side of the peninsula for 650 Hong Kong dollars, a little over $80. Close to the center of the city, it was an ideal point. I was able to check another essential off the list by walking to Yin He Dian Xun (roughly, Galaxy Telecommunications) and purchasing a SIM card from a very helpful young woman for 50 Macanese patacas (about $6). Ah, yes, the currency. The Macanese pataca and Hong Kong dollar are separate currencies but virtually interchangeable in Macau. Change will sometimes come in patacas, sometimes in Hong Kong dollars. A dollar is, however, slightly more valuable than a pataca. If you’re considering making a big souvenir purchase (like gold or jade jewelry, which is plentiful on the main drag of Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro) either use a credit card with no foreign transaction fee, or walk into a bank to exchange for patacas — I was able to do both without difficulty. Senado Square, within walking distance of my hotel, was a good place to begin exploring. Beautiful old yellow and pink pastel buildings with arched doorways and green shuttered windows frame the historic square, which is paved with small tiles. It was a perfect place to stroll and enjoy the egg tart I’d purchased for 9 dollars from Koi Kei Bakery. The egg tart is one of Macau’s signature delicacies, a local interpretation of the Portuguese pastel de nata — perfectly creamy custard with a pleasantly caramelized top, encased within a delicate, flaky pastry cup. Another distinctive item is the pork chop bun. I stopped into the celebrated Tai Lei Loi Kei, a nearly Macanese chain, and paid 48 dollars for a small, pork chop that had been slapped somewhat unceremoniously onto a buttered white roll. Fortunately the meat was simply seasoned and well cooked (just be careful not to break a tooth). In addition to its cuisine, Macau has memorable architecture. Catholic influence is still very much present, at least aesthetically. St. Dominic’s Church, a beautifully restored, structure, is free to enter, as is a art museum housed in the church’s bell tower. I looked over the icons and relics of the church on display, including beautiful old wooden carvings. Other worthy architectural attractions include the Ruins of St. Paul, a grand stone facade that is one of the few remaining pieces of a complex. While there, I made the steep hike up to the adjacent Fortaleza do Monte, which provided an excellent view of the city. I could walk to the ruins and St. Dominic’s from my hotel, but despite Macau’s compact size, not everything is walkable. I would not recommend driving in Macau, nor riding one of the city’s ubiquitous scooters. I found a bike rental shop called Si Toi in Taipa that charged 20 dollars per hour (only $2. 50, remember) but I ultimately decided on the bus: I found it cheap and fairly reliable. Unless you have something called a Macaupass (which I did not, and purchase locations are annoyingly scarce) you will need coins. Lots of coins. And they don’t make change on the buses, so get used to walking around with a pocketful of patacas. (Local businesses and banks can help you make change if you’re hard up.) I hopped the 26A bus to Coloane, eager to see the rustic, more peaceful side of Macau. (A quick note on signage: Every official sign in Macau will be in both Portuguese and Chinese. I found this somewhat curious, as I didn’t hear a word of Portuguese my entire stay. I asked Neal, a server at the cute Cafe Cheri, if he spoke Portuguese or knew anyone who did. “Well,” he hesitated, “No, not really. ” Did anyone in Macau speak Portuguese? “Yes, I think in some restaurants. ”) Coloane Village was quiet, almost sleepy, when I hopped off the bus by the roundabout near Eanes Park. It was, in other words, exactly what I was seeking. I began walking north up the coast, stopping for another excellent egg tart at Lord Stow’s Bakery. Colorfully painted houses stood on stilts in the bay, China a mere 1, 000 feet to the west. Fishermen hung their catch outside their homes, and every now and then there was the distinctive clack of tiles. I wound my way down Avenida de Cinco de Outubro, in the shade of ficus rumphii trees with aerial roots, like banyan trees. I eventually found myself in a beautiful cobblestone plaza with a fountain on one end and the beautiful, bright yellow Chapel of St. Francis on the other. I dined al fresco at Cafe Nga Tim on a dish of rice and curried prawns and watched evening set in. The casinos? Didn’t need them. They do provide a useful benefit, though: When it came time to head back to the ferry terminal, I happily used the hotel’s free shuttle bus. | 1 |
907 | In Montreal, an Ungainly and Unloved Christmas Tree - The New York TimesMONTREAL — The idea was to celebrate Montreal’s coming 375th anniversary with a Christmas tree bigger and grander than the famous one at Rockefeller Center in New York. Instead, downtown Montreal wound up with something only Charlie Brown could love. “It’s a bit of an eyesore,” said Noor Malick, who has a view of the tree from her office window. “It’s horrible, it’s completely awful,” said Georges Malouin, who was passing through the Christmas market where the tree is displayed. “I’m so surprised. I saw it on the internet but now, live, it looks very — cheap. ” “It’s quite sad, really,” said Michaela van den Berg, a visitor from England whose husband, Jos, compared the tree to a matchstick. “Maybe it’s a joke. ” People certainly are laughing, both in the streets and online. The tree has two mock Twitter accounts, one mainly in French and one in English. Mélanie Joly, the federal minister of Canadian heritage who, among other things, oversees the national holiday decorations in Ottawa, tweeted that she loved the Montreal tree, but she added a winking emoji. A classic specimen, the tree is not. Its trunk is crooked, for one thing. And its other shortcomings are painfully obvious to . “It doesn’t have a top. It looks like it’s missing branches it’s kind of ” Pierre Bourcier said after snapping a photo with his phone. And then there are the ornaments: The tree is covered with red plastic inverted triangles topped by green maple leaves, the logo of the Canadian Tire retail chain, which supplied its white lights. A small child standing at the base of the tree this week stumped her father by asking why it “looked like a store. ” How did a holiday celebration became a municipal punch line? Chalk it up to (perhaps too much) ambition, inadequate financing and Murphy’s law. “We have good intentions,” said Pelletier, one of the principals of Sapin MTL, the company that came up with the idea of rivaling New York’s tree. “But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we had problems. ” Sapin MTL is in the business of Christmas trees, and it proposed the big one as a promotional gimmick. Mr. Pelletier said the company had a more majestic, shapely tree in mind. It researched the typical height for recent Rockefeller Center trees — 74 to 76 feet — and found a in Ontario that Mr. Pelletier described as “amazing. ” But its narrow height advantage vanished in early November when Rockefeller Center announced that its 2016 tree would be a Norway spruce. Mr. Pelletier and his partners then had less than a month to come up with a new, taller rival, and they appealed to the public, which suggested about 100 candidates. The balsam fir they chose came from the Eastern Townships of Quebec, near the border with the United States. “It’s not perfect, but it’s authentic and it’s a real tree that you find in the forests of Quebec,” Mr. Pelletier said. “We’re not pretending this is the most amazing, beautiful tree in the world. ” Facing a Nov. 30 deadline for unveiling the tree, the Sapin crew had to hurry. The tree was harvested, placed on a special flatbed truck and brought to Montreal under police escort within 72 hours. But a tight schedule and a tight budget meant that some corners were cut — and so was the tree. Somehow, the tree that reached the section of St. Catherine Street where the market is held measured just 88 feet tall, six feet short of the one in Rockefeller Center. Mr. Pelletier’s brother Philippe, another principal in the company, said a bit sheepishly on Friday that they had simply settled for the tallest tree they could find in time. And there was no time or money to give it the extensive arboreal spa treatment that the New York tree gets all the workers could do was reattach, sometimes rather obviously, a few of the larger branches that had broken off in shipping. As for the decorations, Pelletier said his company’s responsibility ended once the tree was in its bare steel stand on St. Catherine Street. Jane Shaw, a spokeswoman for Canadian Tire, said the company had not required the logo ornaments in exchange for donating the lights. She called them “a gesture from the organizers” of the Christmas market. The skinny, misshapen and widely unloved tree does attract some expressions of appreciation. Many seem to be of the ironic variety often reserved for horror movies. But some seem sincere. As a reporter was interviewing Mr. Pelletier in the market, a woman interrupted to say the tree was “beautiful,” before swiftly walking away. This year’s debacle hasn’t deterred Mr. Pelletier. He said his company was determined to make sure that Montreal truly outdoes New York next year, now that his fellow citizens have had their fun at this year’s tree’s expense. “I think we can celebrate the Christmas magic and stop saying it’s ugly, ugly, ugly,” he said, as a family posed for a photo in front of the tree. “Now in Quebec, there’s Cirque du Soleil, Celine Dion and the naughty fir — we prefer that to ‘ugly.’ ‘Naughty’ is better. ” Gesturing up at the tree, he said: “Look at him. You’ll find something sympatique in him. ” So would Charlie Brown. | 1 |
908 | Photos of Jupiter From NASA Spacecraft, Both Near and Far - The New York TimesNASA is getting new looks at Jupiter, from close up and far away. Its Juno spacecraft made its fifth dive of Jupiter on March 27, its eight instruments gathering data on the planet’s interior as it accelerated to 129, 000 miles per hour. On each flyby, the public nominates and then votes on the atmospheric features Juno’s camera should record. This time, one of the winning targets was a boundary between two atmospheric regions. The bluish streak on the right is part of a persistent storm. Juno snapped this image 7, 900 miles from the planet. This week, NASA released an image of Jupiter taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, which is in orbit around Earth. The distance, 415 million miles, is the closest that Earth gets to Jupiter, which makes it a good time for Hubble to perform a survey of the solar system’s largest planet. The space telescope is able to discern features on Jupiter as small as 80 miles across. “We can map out the full planet,” said Amy A. Simon, an astronomer at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. who led the observations. “On a first glance, the Great Red Spot is still strikingly colored. It stands out quite well. ” Dr. Simon said that Jupiter’s atmosphere appears to be more turbulent than in the past couple of years. “That’s telling us something about the deeper atmosphere,” she said. “We’re going to be analyzing this over the next few months. ” Because the Hubble observations roughly coincided with Juno’s flyby, scientists will be able to match the with a wider view of the planet. “We could do a there and help out Juno at the same time,” Dr. Simon said. | 1 |
909 | Trump’s Labor Pick, Andrew Puzder, Is Critic of Minimum Wage Increases - The New York Times Donald J. Trump on Thursday chose Andrew F. Puzder, chief executive of the company that franchises the outlets Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. and an outspoken critic of the worker protections enacted by the Obama administration, to be secretary of labor. “Andy Puzder has created and boosted the careers of thousands of Americans, and his extensive record fighting for workers makes him the ideal candidate to lead the Department of Labor,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. Mr. Puzder, 66, fits the profile of some of Mr. Trump’s other domestic cabinet appointments. He is a wealthy businessman and political donor and has a long record of promoting a conservative agenda that takes aim at President Obama’s legacy. And more than the other appointments, he resembles Mr. Trump in style. He seems to delight in bashing elites — he complained that “big corporate interests” and “globalist companies” were supporting Hillary Clinton in the presidential election — and is prone to the occasional streak of political incorrectness. On policy questions, he has argued that the Obama administration’s recent rule expanding eligibility for overtime pay diminishes opportunities for workers, and that significant minimum wage increases would hurt small businesses and lead to job losses. He has criticized paid sick leave policies of the sort recently enacted for federal contractors and strongly supports repealing the Affordable Care Act, which he says has created a “ restaurant recession” because rising premiums have left people with less money to spend dining out. Speaking to Business Insider this year, Mr. Puzder said that increased automation could be a welcome development because machines were “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a or an age, sex or race discrimination case. ” And on the political incorrectness front, Mr. Puzder’s company, CKE Restaurants, runs advertisements that frequently feature women wearing next to nothing while gesturing suggestively. “I like our ads,” he told the publication Entrepreneur. “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American. ” Richard L. Trumka, president of the A. F. L. . I. O. said Mr. Puzder was “a man whose business record is defined by fighting against working people. ” As labor secretary, Mr. Puzder would oversee the federal apparatus that investigates violations of minimum wage, overtime and worker safety laws and regulations. According to a Labor Department database, many Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. stores have been investigated over the past 15 years, and some have been fined or ordered to pay back wages, though most of the cases appear to have been at stores owned and operated by franchisees, not CKE itself. Such investigations are relatively common in the industry. Matthew Haller, senior vice president for public affairs and communications at the International Franchise Association, of which Mr. Puzder is a board member, said Mr. Puzder saw “a role for government to provide advice to employers, rather than simply deterrence by ‘gotcha’ enforcement,” an allusion to the Obama Labor Department’s enforcement of laws and regulations in the industry. Mr. Haller and other allies of Mr. Puzder said that those who took the time to look beyond his most provocative statements would find the wisdom of a man who has toiled on labor issues for years. “His position on the minimum wage is more nuanced than people want to give him credit for,” Mr. Haller said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s middle ground” on the overtime rule, he added. “He’s a business person, a deal maker. ” There is some evidence to support that view. In a Wall Street Journal article after his comments on automation, Mr. Puzder wrote that humans remained important “to assure smooth experiences” for customers. In an appearance on Fox Business in May, he said that he was “not opposed to raising the minimum wage rationally I’m opposed to raising it to the point where workers, Americans, young people, minorities, are losing the jobs they need to get on the ladder of success. ” Though he did not explain what a “rational” increase would entail, he opposed the Obama administration’s efforts to raise the federal minimum wage to $10. 10 from $7. 25, where it has stood since 2009. That is far below the $15 per hour that many advocates have called for and that a variety of cities and states have enacted in recent years, albeit on a gradual timetable. Economic research suggests that an increase to the vicinity of $10. 10 per hour would have little or no effect on employment in much of the country, though the impact could be larger in areas. Mr. Puzder has raised concerns about the effects in those regions. On other issues, Mr. Puzder has taken positions that leave less room for negotiation. Perhaps most prominent is the joint employer doctrine that the Obama administration and its agency appointees have put forth in recent years. Under that doctrine, large companies that have franchises or hire other companies as contractors are more likely to be held liable for violations of employment laws by those contractors or franchisees. Parent companies typically argue that they have no legal responsibility in these cases. Mr. Puzder has been unambiguous in his disdain for the new standard. As labor secretary, there are certain immediate steps he could take to undo it, though there are some applications, like to the law governing unions, that would require action by the National Labor Relations Board or federal courts to overturn. Perhaps the biggest question surrounding Mr. Puzder is how he would be perceived as a wealthy chief executive charged with looking out for workers’ interests. According to a 2012 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Puzder’s base salary that year was more than $1 million and his total compensation over $4 million, down from more than $10 million the year before. “Annual base salaries should be competitive and create a measure of financial security for our executive officers,” the filing said. During the 2016 election cycle, Mr. Puzder and his wife gave more than $300, 000 to Mr. Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee. But for all his populist rhetoric, his previous political contributions — as well as his positions on most business issues and regulations, and his reading habits — suggest he is more of an orthodox Republican than Mr. Trump. Before backing Mr. Trump, he donated to the campaigns of Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, Rick Perry, Scott Walker and Jeb Bush, and he helped shape Mitt Romney’s economic plan in 2011. When asked to provide some insight into what Mr. Puzder was like away from the job, Mr. Haller said he was an avid reader who loved Ayn Rand, the libertarian novelist. According to a 1989 article in The St. Louis Mr. Puzder helped draft a Missouri law banning most abortions at public facilities and requiring doctors to test the viability of fetuses starting at 20 weeks. But according to another article, after his accused him of domestic violence, he offered to resign from a task force convened by Gov. John Ashcroft to study a Supreme Court decision upholding the law. Mr. Puzder, who declined to comment for this article, eventually did resign from the task force, but he denied the allegations. The Trump transition team forwarded a recent letter from his declaring that she had been “counseled then to file an allegation of abuse. ” She added, “I regretted and still regret that decision, and I withdrew those allegations. ” “You were not abusive,” she said. | 1 |
910 | Nico Rosberg Takes Formula One Drivers’ Title Despite Lewis Hamilton’s Win in Abu Dhabi - The New York TimesABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Lewis Hamilton may have won the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on Sunday, and he may have won 10 races this season compared to nine victories for his Mercedes teammate, Nico Rosberg. But Rosberg, who finished the race in second place, not only won the 2016 world drivers’ championship, having earned 5 points more than Hamilton this year, but he also proved that he deserved that title, and above all, that it is still possible in the cutthroat world of modern Formula One to win with the style and grace of a gentleman. After conceding the drivers’ title to Hamilton during the past two seasons, and even losing when they were teammates in as children, Rosberg finally beat his nemesis. “It feels like I’ve been racing him forever,” Rosberg said of Hamilton. “He has always managed to just edge me out and get the title, even when we were small in . He’s an amazing driver and one of the best in history, so it’s unbelievably special to beat him because the level is so high. ” It was not just the manner in which Rosberg succeeded, and his generosity in praising his teammate, but also the contrasting style with which Hamilton lost the title, that defined this final duel of the 2016 season. With just 12 points between them before the race, and Rosberg leading the series, Hamilton, who started from the pole position — with Rosberg starting second — had to win the race and hope that Rosberg failed to finish second or third. There was widespread speculation before the race that Hamilton would use dirty tactics by trying to hold his lead to the first corner, and then drive slowly in order to force Rosberg into a battle with the drivers who were behind him — notably those from Red Bull and Ferrari, who started from third to sixth. “That’s not really ever been my thought process,” Hamilton said before the race, adding that it “wouldn’t be very easy or wise to do so. ” But it was exactly what Hamilton did, driving at one point as much as nine seconds slower per lap than he had in qualifying for the pole, and despite his Mercedes engineer regularly telling him to speed up as the team feared it could lose the victory. But even before that point, Rosberg had also fallen victim early in the race to another similar tactic from a competing team, after Max Verstappen in one of the Red Bull cars moved ahead of him after his pit stop, and Verstappen slowed to block Rosberg and help the other Red Bull driver, Daniel Ricciardo, to catch up from behind Rosberg. At that point, Rosberg had to contemplate that he might end up behind both of the Red Bull drivers, with Hamilton winning the race and the title. “The feelings out there in the battle with Max, unreal,” said Rosberg, looking both emotionally and physically exhausted. “I hope I don’t experience that many times again. ” He then proved what a gutsy and precise driver he is when his engineer told him that he absolutely had to pass Verstappen as soon as possible. He did so with a brilliant and brave move on Lap 20 of the race, despite the knowledge that Verstappen has been criticized all season as a dangerous and unpredictable driver to pass. Rosberg then set several fastest laps of the race and caught up to Hamilton again, showing that he was in full control of his car and himself. But a bigger trial lay ahead in the final laps of the race: As predicted, with Rosberg less than a second behind him, Hamilton drove as slowly as he could in order to push Rosberg into Sebastian Vettel of Ferrari, who was catching him, and Verstappen. Hamilton’s engineer continuously requested he speed up. But Hamilton kept his car as slow as possible, even answering, for an employee of a racing team, insubordinately. “Right now, I’m losing the world championship,” Hamilton said with two laps remaining. “So I’m not bothered if I’m going to lose the race. ” Rosberg had a card of his own to play, of course, had he decided to act like drivers such as Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Michael Schumacher in similar situations in the 1980s and 1990s, who all settled titles with knockout crashes into their own teammates. But before the race, Rosberg had said he would only do everything within the rules to win. And after the race, he said he never considered trying to pass in unrealistic circumstances. There was a certain justice that dawned after the race about Hamilton’s tactic, as Vettel repeated twice that he could not have made an attempt to pass Rosberg because Hamilton was actually too close in front of Rosberg, and any leap past Rosberg might send Vettel into a collision with Hamilton’s car. Under immense pressure throughout the season, Rosberg did everything he had to do to hold his advantage — Hamilton led the series for a period of only four midseason races — and Rosberg did so despite Hamilton’s efforts, both in words and on the track, to impose his will. Paddy Lowe, the technical director of the Mercedes team, explained why he felt there was no question that Rosberg deserved to win the title. “For me, it’s about not just winning races, it’s about sustaining that energy, sustaining that commitment, sustaining that nerve throughout a championship,” Lowe said. “And it all came down to this race today, and he did it, and that is the mark of a real world champion. ” But it was Rosberg’s own contrasting, and worthy, behavior that impressed the most. Despite Hamilton’s tactics on Sunday, and the media grilling them both over its ethical merits, Rosberg refused to say a bad word against Hamilton. “You can understand the team’s perspective, and you can understand Lewis’s perspective — so that’s it,” said Rosberg, closing the debate. Hamilton, however, was unrepentant. “I don’t think what I did was dangerous, so I don’t think I did anything unfair,” Hamilton said. “We are fighting for a championship, so I controlled the pace. That’s the rules. ” It was all a stark contrast to the early years of the series, when it was possible for one driver to hand his car to another driver of the same team, as Peter Collins did for Juan Manuel Fangio in 1956 in the final race, handing his own chance at winning his first title to Fangio, who ended up claiming his fourth. But Rosberg has perhaps learned his lessons from a driver from another age as well, as he became only the second son of a Formula One world champion — after Graham and Damon Hill — to win the title himself. His father, Kéké, won the title while driving for the Williams team in 1982, and after only a single victory that season. “I hope my dad survived that race,” Rosberg said of his victory. “I haven’t seen him yet. I’m sure it was pretty intense for him, so I hope he’s O. K. ” | 1 |
911 | What a Sensory Isolation Tank Taught Me About My Brain - The New York Times“Take off your clothes, step into the pod and shut the top. And be really careful not to get any of the salt in your eyes. ” Those were the instructions I was given recently just before I entered a sensory isolation tank in Seattle. Finally, I would have my chance to see what it would be like to be a brain in a jar. Lying in a supersaturated solution of magnesium sulfate — better known as Epsom salts — cranked up to body temperature, I pulled the top down over me and pushed the button to extinguish the violet light illuminating the pod. Cut off from the world of sensory stimuli, my brain had free rein to invent any experience it had up its sleeve. So I floated in pitch blackness and waited for a profound experience to wash over me. This is what adherents paid $89 a pop to feel. I’d heard it was better than meditation, yoga and drugs — perhaps because it promised nirvana without any effort or side effects. But I felt nothing. After some time, I became acutely aware that I could not feel my body, which I suppose was the whole point of depriving the brain of any connection to the physical world. I started to slowly move my hands and legs to reassure myself they were still there. Check. I had a vivid image of my phantom body I knew intellectually that it was present, but couldn’t detect it in the normal sense. Just then, I made the error of letting my head drop too low in the salt broth and got some into my eyes. The sting was immediate and distinctly unpleasant. The brief period of nothingness had ended, and over the next few minutes, my mental state moved from curiosity to boredom to annoyance. I blinked and rubbed my eyes. My stomach rumbled. My brain was bombarded with all kinds of physical sensations. I was beginning to feel sympathy for pickled fish. Instead of a transcendent excursion into an altered consciousness, sensory deprivation had hilariously underscored the primacy of my body it was almost a purely physical experience from start to finish. It was like being at a meditation retreat with a runny nose. My brain was simply incapable of escaping the signals my body was sending it. When the hour was up, I showered and came down to the receptionist to pay. There were three women there who were like me, and they all looked blissful. “How was it?” one of them dreamily asked me. Not wanting to be a downer, I replied that it was lovely and interesting. At least it was half true. The experience made me wonder about a question that has never let go of me: Are you more than your brain? Hardly a week goes by, it seems, without an enthusiastic report in the popular media about intriguing neuroscience research linking some human behavior to the function of a particular brain circuit. So you might hear that the insula lights up when you’re sad, another region when you’re happy and still another when you’re enjoying a drink or an orgasm. For some reason we love to hear our mental experiences described in the language of neuroscience, yet what does it actually add to our understanding of ourselves to learn that our brain shows activity when we think and feel one thing or another? By itself, not a lot, except to encourage the erroneous and simplistic idea that the brain is an independent sovereign, calling all the shots. Of course, the brain gives rise to our mind, which then tries to understand and manipulate the very neural apparatus that brought it about. It gives me a headache just thinking about it. Some very smart neuroscientists and philosophers like to say that the very notion of mind is an illusion, a trick of the brain — something they have been carrying on about for rather a long time. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a neuroscience junkie. But we are not just a brain in a jar we are also bodies, and what we do with those bodies can influence the brain. You can easily alter your thinking and mood by manipulating your body: by, for example, injecting your forehead with Botox, shining light into your eye, exercising — or floating in an isolation tank. In the end, whether or not we are more than our brain is less important and less interesting than the fact that our brain does not just give orders it takes them, too. An isolation tank can turn the body weightless and invisible, but your brain knows better. | 1 |
912 | Chelsea Handler Botches Tweet Attacking Trump’s GrandchildTalk show host Chelsea Handler tweeted a joke mocking President Donald Trump’s unborn grandchild Monday afternoon, but appeared to misspell the word “genes,” leading Trump’s sons to reply with the correct spelling. [“I guess one of @realDonaldTrump’s sons is expecting a new baby,” Handler tweeted. “Just what we need. Another person with those jeans. Let’s hope for a girl. ” I guess one of @realDonaldTrump’s sons is expecting a new baby. Just what we need. Another person with those jeans. Let’s hope for a girl. — Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) March 20, 2017, Handler had apparently attempted to use the word “genes. ” Donald Trump Jr. replied to Handler’s post to correct the mistake, writing: “Jeans? ?? I guess I’m not at all surprised … but really? !?! #genes” Jeans? ?? I guess I’m not at all surprised … but really? !?! #genes https: . — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) March 20, 2017, A short time later, Eric Trump — who announced earlier Monday that he and wife Lara are expecting a boy in September — also replied to correct the tweet and remind Handler he is expecting a son. Somewhat ironically, Handler mocked Melania Trump’s English skills in a recent interview at Sundance, during which she said she would never interview the First Lady on her Netflix talk show. “No. Melania? To talk about what? She can barely speak English,” she told Variety in January. The First Lady, who was born in Slovenia, reportedly speaks five languages. Handler apologized for the spelling error in a tweet Monday evening, saying she was a “little stoned. ” Sorry about spelling mistake. I meant ”genes,” not ”jeans.” I’m a little stoned. What’s your excuse? — Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) March 20, 2017, The Chelsea star — who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race — has been a vocal critic of Trump since well before the November election. In April, the comedian posed with the phrase, “Trump is a butt hole” scrawled across her back. “It’s always a good thing to be able to look at somebody and be like, ‘That’s the worst thing that could happen,’” she told Variety in September. “And I think we should keep him in the spotlight. Not as president, obviously, but, you know, as The Apprentice or whatever that show is called. ” In January, Handler led the Women’s March on Main in Park City, Utah, a sister march of the larger Women’s March on Washington that occurred simultaneously in the nation’s capital. “Women are under a political assault, and I intend to fight back with all my might against a Republican president, a Republican Congress, and the radical, religious right who are drooling to defund Planned Parenthood health services nationwide,” she wrote in a guest column for the Hollywood Reporter at the time. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
913 | Report: Trump Moves to Own Tax Reform Plan Without Speaker Paul Ryan - BreitbartPolitico reported Thursday that President Donald Trump, chastened by his experience pushing for the failed Ryancare bill, is moving forward on tax reform with is own economic team in the lead — not Speaker Paul Ryan ( ):[Just on Thursday, President Donald Trump huddled with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, senior strategist Steve Bannon, and consigliere Jared Kushner and staffers from the National Economic Council and Treasury to delve into the various policy and ways to structure a plan. The key takeaway: The White House is not outsourcing these details to anyone, including the speaker of the House. The report said White House press secretary Sean Spicer confirmed this new dynamic at Friday’s news briefing: “The president will put out principles, I’m sure, in terms of what his goals are and drive this as the process moves forward. ” A paper, obtained by Politico and developed during the presidential transition, is the central blueprint for the president’s tax reform program — and it would push Ryan’s own Border Adjustment Tax off the table. The president is expected to propose cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent combined with a wiping out of the tax code’s catalog of tax loopholes and deductions Congress created to ameliorate the 35 percent rate for business profits. Another part of the plan is to simply the individual tax rates, again by lowering the rates and removing specialized deductions. Trump’s corporate and individual tax reforms are significant, but no way near the revolutionary changes contained in Ryan’s Border Adjustment Tax, which shifts $1 trillion in annual tax burden onto exported goods and exporters. That fight has already been going on behind the scenes, as domestic manufacturers and retailers line up allies and resources as they contest for who will be on the hook for of the federal government’s annual revenues. Ryan read Capitol Hill Republicans into his schedule that would carry on through Labor Day at the GOP lawmakers’ policy retreat held in Philadelphia in the last week of January. The schedule called for the House to focus on overturning President Barack Obama’s regulations through the Congressional Review Act, while the Senate focused on confirming the first wave of Trump administration appointees. March was dedicated to the of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. In April, the Senate would confirm the president’s choice to fill the Supreme Court seat made vacant by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, and the House would tackle reforming the tax code — a process coupled with the approval of the fiscal year 2018 budget that would consume both chambers. In Philadelphia, Ryan had not yet revealed that he would hijack the of Obamacare with his own bill that fell short of what Republicans had expected and had promised voters in every political cycle since Obamacare became law in 2010. The Ryancare bill alienated conservatives and frightened moderate Republicans hesitant to cast a politically risky vote for a bill that might not pass the Senate. In the end, the speaker pulled the Ryancare bill from the House floor March 24, nearly 15 minutes from the roll call that would have meant its certain defeat. If Ryan had a working majority in the House, he would be the man driving the agenda, he but does not have that majority, so the White House is moving forward with its own agenda and its own ideas. The aborted American Health Care Act has been portrayed as a defeat for the president, who rallied for the bill in events outside of Washington and behind closed doors at the White House and on Capitol Hill. Now that things have settled, it appears that instead of a setback for the president, the failure of the speaker’s health care legislation was really Trump’s liberation. During the 2016 presidential cycle, Ryan created “The Better Way” agenda as a parallel campaign platform, so that he and his allies could campaign for themselves without mentioning the president’s name nor offer him support. Now, Trump has found his own better way. | 1 |
915 | AG Jeff Sessions Unveils Program to Accelerate Deportation of Imprisoned Illegals - BreitbartU. S Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Department of Justice are introducing measures to accelerate the deportation of imprisoned illegal aliens with the announcement of a new immigration program on Thursday. [The Institutional Hearing Program (IHP) will seek to reduce the bureaucratic processes involved in deportation by using hearings to determine the fate of illegals once they have served their sentence. The program includes giving more Bureau of Prisons contract facilities the power to undertake deportation proceedings, installing the required technology, and introducing new uniform intake policy between a DOJ office and U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We owe it to the American people to ensure that illegal aliens who have been convicted of crimes and are serving time in our federal prisons are expeditiously removed from our country as the law requires,” Sessions said in a statement announcing the plan. “This expansion and modernization of the Institutional Hearing Program gives us the tools to continue making Americans safe again in their communities,” he continued. Earlier this week, Sessions said that cities refusing to comply with federal immigration law, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, risked losing federal tax dollars. “I strongly urge our nation’s states and cities and counties to consider carefully the harm they are doing to their citizens by refusing to enforce immigration laws and to rethink these policies. Such policies make their cities and states less safe. Public safety as well as national security are at stake and put them at risk of losing federal dollars,” Sessions said at a White House press briefing. The warning comes amidst a nationwide crackdown enforcing immigration policy as part of Donald Trump’s wider immigration reforms. As well as plans to hire 15, 000 new Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) agents, the Department of Justice is now publishing a weekly list all 118 localities refusing to cooperate with the administration’s immigration policy, as well as crimes committed by illegal immigrants within them. You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart. com | 1 |
916 | Former US Attorney for DC: New Hillary Email Probe Was Result of ‘Revolt’ Inside FBIFormer United States Attorney for the District of Columbia Joe diGenova suggested Friday James Comey’s reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails was the product of a “revolt” inside the FBI.
While speaking with WMAL’s Larry O’Connor , diGenova was asked what Comey meant by saying newly discovered Clinton emails from Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin’s devices “appear to be pertinent” to the FBI’s prior investigation.
“It tells me that the original investigation was not thorough, and that it was an incompetent investigation,” diGenova said, “otherwise they would have discovered this — and I’ll tell you why.”
“These were found on the phone that was used by Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin,” he said. “Why was that phone not looked at originally?”
“There could be one explanation: Huma Abedin may have denied that any other phone existed, and if she did, she committed a felony. She lied to the FBI just like General Cartwright, and if she did, she’s dead meat, and Comey knows it, and there’s nothing he can do about it.”
diGenova continued: “And why this letter was sent today was very simple: the agents came to Comey yesterday, they told him about the evidence, and he said oh ‘S’, and realized that his goose was cooked, that this would prove conclusively that his original investigation was incompetent, and he knew that the agents running the Weiner case would leak it if he did not send this letter to congress.”
“And I’ve also been told something very significant, it’s been reported that those laptops [belonging to Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson] were destroyed, they were not, and the reason is the FBI agents refused to do it.”
diGenova went on to say he believes “there is a quiet but serious revolt against the director right now.”
“He sent those letters today because he is in deep trouble inside the bureau,” he said. “Comey sent this letter today because he had to. He has no moral authority inside the agency right now, he’s a joke, he’s a laughingstock of the agency, and among former FBI agents, he has become an anathema.”
Listen to the full interview courtesy of WMAL:
Courtesy of Information Liberation Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this: | 0 |
917 | How Keeping Up Appearances Ruined a Former Dallas Banker - The New York TimesAt age 67, Thomas C. Davis should be enjoying all the perks of a long and distinguished career at the pinnacle of Wall Street and the Texas business elite. These include golfing at the prestigious Dallas Country Club and Preston Trail Golf Club, where he was a member trips to Las Vegas and golf tournaments on the private jet he and fractional ownership of two professional sports teams, the Texas Rangers and the Dallas Stars. What he faces instead is the prospect of 20 years or more in federal prison and millions of dollars in fines. Last month, Mr. Davis pleaded guilty to 12 felonies for a brazen insider trading scheme in which he leaked a stream of confidential information about the Dean Foods while he served as the company’s chairman. When questioned by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2014 and lawyers from the Securities and Exchange Commission last year, he lied, compounding his securities fraud by committing perjury. And after the F. B. I. agents left, he took a prepaid cellular phone he had used to leak the information and threw it into a creek near his Dallas home, destroying evidence and obstructing justice. Mr. Davis’s crimes have received relatively little attention, in part because of the blaze of publicity that accompanied the flamboyant professional sports gambler William T. Walters, who was accused of being his and the Masters golf champion Phil Mickelson. (Mr. Mickelson wasn’t charged but netted nearly $1 million from the Dean Foods tips and agreed to forfeit the proceeds plus interest.) Mr. Walters pleaded not guilty last week to 10 felony counts. What led to Mr. Davis’s actions? His plea hearing, coupled with the S. E. C. and criminal complaints, and interviews with people who know him, offer some clues. For one thing, Mr. Davis was so desperate for money he even took from a charity. According to the S. E. C. Mr. Davis ran a charity that raised money for a Dallas shelter for battered women and children. The charity, tax records show, was Shelter Golf Inc. which held an annual golf tournament at Preston Trail to benefit Genesis Women’s Shelter Support. The event typically raised over $400, 000 and, after expenses, contributed about $300, 000 a year to Genesis. Mr. Davis was a and trustee of Shelter Golf the golf legend Lanny Wadkins was one of five other trustees. According to the S. E. C. in August 2011, Mr. Davis told his assistant to write him a check for $100, 000 on the charity’s account, which he then used to cover an overdraft in his personal checking account of $80, 000. “This $100, 000 check resulted in a significant shortfall in the amount available for donation to the battered women’s shelter,” the S. E. C. said in its complaint. “Davis first delayed the charity’s donation to the shelter and later wrote a check for a partial amount only after prompting by the shelter leader and promising another $100, 000 by the end of the shelter’s fiscal year. ” Mr. Davis eventually repaid the $100, 000 using money he had obtained as part of the insider trading scheme. Many of his former colleagues on Wall Street were stunned by the charges against the distinguished Mr. Davis, a Harvard Business School graduate and a Navy veteran, who, in contrast to Mr. Walters and Mr. Mickelson, both known gamblers, was seen as a pillar of the business establishment. In addition to his long tenure on the Dean Foods board, culminating in being named chairman in 2013, Mr. Davis served on at least nine other corporate boards, including Triton Energy, Suiza Foods, and the Colonial Bank (now owned by BBT Financial). He was chief executive of the Concorde Group and a founder of Bluffview Capital, both investment firms. Before that, he was a managing partner at Donaldson, Lufkin Jenrette, where he was head of banking and corporate finance for the southwestern United States and handled many mergers and acquisitions. He left after Credit Suisse acquired the firm in 2001. As someone actively involved throughout his career in confidential deals, Mr. Davis would have been acutely aware of insider trading law. “This was a shock,” said John C. Coffee Jr. a professor and expert on insider trading at Columbia Law School who has written about the failure to charge Mr. Mickelson. “He, of all people, should have known better. ” But the annals of insider trading are filled with people who knew better, from Ivan Boesky to Rajat Gupta. What’s perplexing is their motives. Like Mr. Davis, they were already rich and successful beyond most people’s dreams. At his plea hearing last month, Mr. Davis said he knew that his actions were “wrong and unlawful” but otherwise shed little light on why he turned to insider trading. But clearly, he needed money, despite his years of bonuses as a highly paid investment banker and his lucrative directors’ fees. According to the S. E. C. ’s complaint, by April 2010 Mr. Davis was in “desperate” financial straits. He owed the I. R. S. $78, 000. His brokerage account was heavily margined, and he had run up tens of thousands in credit card debt. He owed $550, 000 to one of his investment funds. Mr. Davis sought salvation in gambling and in Mr. Walters, whom he met decades earlier on a golf course. The two often played together, especially when they were both living in Southern California. The insider trading scheme began around June 2008, when Mr. Davis tipped Mr. Walters to Dean Foods’ coming earnings. It isn’t clear who came up with the idea, but Mr. Walters, an active investor, often expressed an interest in how Dean Foods was doing. There was no explicit agreement for Mr. Davis to share in any proceeds from Mr. Walters’s trading. Rather, as Mr. Davis put it at his plea hearing, “I expected that I would receive personal benefits in the form of business opportunities and a potential source of capital. ” As Professor Coffee put it, “This is a perfect example of a favor bank, which is exactly how Wall Street works. ” However vague the terms of their deal, they clearly knew that what they were doing was wrong. Mr. Walters gave Mr. Davis a prepaid cellular phone for use when conveying inside information and told him to use the code “Dallas Cowboys” when referring to Dean Foods, the government asserted. Mr. Davis finally came knocking in April 2010, when he met with Mr. Walters in Las Vegas and asked for money. Mr. Walters arranged a loan of $625, 000, which solved the immediate demands of the I. R. S. and his investment firm. But his spending continued. In just one month, March 2011, Mr. Davis ran up gambling losses of $200, 000 at one Las Vegas casino. He owed $178, 000 for the private jet. And he had to cover the $100, 000 he had taken from the charity. (The overdraft had occurred when the casino cashed in his “markers” after Mr. Davis failed to make good on the gambling losses.) This time Mr. Walters guaranteed a $400, 000 line of credit for Mr. Davis, who promptly drew down $350, 000 of it. And Mr. Davis repaid Mr. Walters’s $625, 000 loan, with interest. Mr. Davis ultimately received over $1 million in “loans” from Mr. Walters, most never repaid. As it turned out, that was a pittance compared to the $43 million in profit Mr. Walters reportedly reaped from Mr. Davis’s tips — a sum Mr. Davis learned of only in the course of the investigation. Despite Mr. Davis’s reputation as a skilled deal maker, that will surely rank as one of the worst insider trading deals in history, and it may help explain why Mr. Davis is now cooperating with the government against Mr. Walters. A lawyer for Mr. Davis, Thomas M. Melsheimer at Fish Richardson in Dallas, declined to comment. The government has shed little light on Mr. Davis’s motive, other than that he needed money. The S. E. C. said he did little to adjust his expensive lifestyle after leaving Credit Suisse in 2001. He experienced a sharp drop in his income, went through an expensive divorce soon after and suffered big investment reversals during the 2008 financial crisis. None of that is a crime. Mr. Davis is hardly alone in trying to maintain the illusion of wealth and prosperity even as his personal finances veered out of control. But after a lifetime of success, Mr. Davis was too proud and too embarrassed to admit any of this and turn to his wealthy friends and fellow golf club members, though many would have been willing to help, according to a person close to him. (This person and others insisted on anonymity because the situation involved a pending criminal matter.) “Some people would risk anything rather than suffer that kind of personal embarrassment,” Professor Coffee said. “And once you’ve decided you’re willing to risk anything, you can get into deep, deep trouble. ” | 1 |
918 | Sesame Seeds for Knee OsteoarthritisSesame Seeds for Knee Osteoarthritis VN:F [1.9.22_1171] Close Transcript Transcript: Sesame Seeds for Knee Osteoarthritis
Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.
Ever since the 1920s, doctors have been injecting arthritis patients with gold. Evidently, “gold-based medicines have been in use for thousands of years,” and remarkably, are still in clinical use as so called disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs—meaning they can slow the progression of rheumatoid arthritis.
Unfortunately, such drugs can be toxic, even fatal, causing conditions such as gold lung, a gold-induced lung disease. “Although its use can be limited by the incidence of serious toxicity,” injectable gold has been shown to be beneficial. But maybe, some researchers suspected, some of that benefit is the sesame oil that’s injected, which is used as the liquid carrier for the gold.
Sesame seeds contain anti-inflammatory compounds, with names like sesamin and sesamol, which researchers suspect “may serve as a potential treatment for various inflammatory diseases.” But, these were in vitro studies. First, we have to see if it has an anti-inflammatory effect in people, not just cells in a petri dish. But, there haven’t been any studies on the effects of sesame seeds on inflammatory markers in people with arthritis, for example—until now.
“Considering the high prevalence of osteoarthritis…and since until now there has not been any human studies to evaluate the effect of sesame in [osteoarthritis] patients, this study was designed to assess the effect of administration of sesame [seeds] on inflammation…” And, they found a significant drop in inflammatory markers. But, what effect did it have on their actual disease?
Fifty patients with osteoarthritis of the knee were split into two groups; standard treatment, or standard treatment plus about a quarter-cup of sesame seeds a day, for two months. Before they started, they described their pain as about 9 out of 10—where zero is no pain, and 10 is the maximum pain tolerable. After two months, the control group felt a little better—pain down to 7. But, the sesame group dropped down to 3.5—significantly lower than the control group.
The researchers conclude that sesame appeared to have a “positive effect,”“improving clinical signs and symptoms in patients with knee [osteoarthritis].” But, the main problem with this study is that the control group wasn’t given a placebo. It’s hard to come up with a kind of fake sesame seed. But, without a placebo, they basically compared doing nothing to doing something. And, any time you have patients do something special, you can’t discount the placebo effect.
But, what are the downsides? I mean that’s the nice thing about using food as medicine—only good side effects. Though the results are mixed, there have been studies using placebo controls that found that adding sesame seeds to one’s diet may improve our cholesterol and antioxidant status. And, the amount of sesamin found in as little as about one tablespoon of sesame seeds can modestly lower blood pressure a few points within a month—enough, perhaps, to lower fatal stroke and heart attack risk by about 5%; potentially saving thousands of lives. Please consider volunteering to help out on the site. Close Sources Video Sources | 0 |
919 | How White Cops Interact with Blacks in Real LifeAndrew Anglin
26, 2016
What Blacks think Black interactions with White cops look like:
What SJW feminists think Black interactions with White cops look like:
What I wish Black interactions with White cops looked like:
What Black interactions with White cops actually look like:
Black People Cops The Blacks 2016-10-26 Andrew Anglin | 0 |
920 | Pennsylvania Republican Pushing Ban on Private Gun Sales - BreitbartPennsylvania State Rep. Jamie Santora ( ) is pushing a ban on private gun sales nearly identical to the ones Michael Moms Demand Action pushed in Washington state, Maine, and Nevada. [Santora’s bill would bar the private sales that Americans have enjoyed since the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791 and would require that every sale be processed in front of an agent of the government via a background check. This means that Pennsylvanians selling a gun to a fellow hunter, lifelong or childhood friend would have to seek out a Federal Firearms License (FFL) holder and the buyer would have to pass a background check just as the Orlando Pulse attacker (June 12, 2016) the Aurora movie theater attacker (July 20, 2012) Gabby Giffords’ attacker (January 8, 2011) the Fort Hood attacker (November 5, 2009) and the Virginia Tech attacker (April 16, 2007) did. According to the Delaware County News Network, Santora says his attempt to expand the frequency of background checks is “common sense. ” He said, “We’re not trying to take away Second Amendment rights. Anyone who has a gun should have a background check. ” It should be noted that the following individuals all submitted to background checks in order to acquire their guns: The two of Santora’s gun control bill are Democrats. AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com. | 1 |
921 | Review: In ‘Warcraft,’ Orcs of a Different Domain, Fighting With Heart - The New York TimesProbably the best way to experience “Warcraft,” a generally amusing and sometimes visually arresting absurdity, is stoned. If watching the big screen through a cannabis cloud isn’t your idea of a good movie time, though, I suggest that you do what I did and just go with the incoherent flow. You may not grasp who the creatures with simian arms and woolly mammoth tusks are or why they seem permanently engorged with rage. But there’s more to movies than narrative coherency, as anyone who has sampled the cinema of Michael Bay or certain art films well knows. There is in this movie, for starters, the visual appeal of those Blutoesque beings, lovingly fabricated and ornamented creations who share their name with the creatures that J. R. R. Tolkien called orcs. Tolkien borrowed orc from the Old English, citing “Beowulf,” one of the many tales of blood lust and vengeance, heroes and monsters that are woven into the “Warcraft” DNA. The ruler here is King Llane (Dominic Cooper) a rather progressive monarch who fights the invading orcs with a multihued army, a rakish (Travis Fimmel) a token chick (Paula Patton) and a magical twosome (Ben Foster and Ben Schnetzer). If there’s a mythology here, I missed it, much as I also missed the charm and periodic lightness of Tolkien’s world, with its hobbits and Shire. “Warcraft” by contrast weighs in as a Hobbesian war of all against all, though it does allow for a little romance and campy winks. It also, more surprisingly, offers some notably with Durotan (Toby Kebbell) an orc chieftain with hands as big as Volkswagen Beetles and a pregnant mate, Draka (Anna Galvin). He has qualms as well as enemies, which surface amid battles and exposition. Stuff happens in one part of this world, and other stuff happens elsewhere: Jaws clench, bodies fall, and scenes oscillate — ’twas ever thus, genrewise. Even so, despite the incessant clashing and clanging, you can hear the tremulous pulse of a heartbeat. That faint thrumming belongs to Duncan Jones, the director who, against the odds, has mined a watchable movie out of an entertainment franchise that started with a video game and now includes novels, comics and assorted schlock (toys, costumes, a set). That Mr. Jones even factors into this production counts as some kind of actual achievement given that “Warcraft” is such an obvious bid at brand expansion, which may be why no one bothered with an intelligible story. Apparently, branded content (i. e. the characters, their world) was meant to be enough. Whether you see more here will depend on your mileage and patience, though moviegoers habituated to (and the perfunctory she) pulverizing one another for 100 or so minutes are likely to have greater tolerance for this diversion than others might. As suggested, trying to figure out who’s doing what to whom and why — or how orcs dress with such huge hands or how they chew steak with those tusks — is often pointless when it comes to spectacles. In cinema’s earliest years, moviegoers thrilled not to stories but what the scholar Tom Gunning calls “the cinema of attractions,” with its shocks and tricks we’re still getting pummeled, story or no. Mr. Jones doubles down on the action, though without any real shocks (or awe) but he also modestly complicates the question of the monstrous. The orcs in “Warcraft” prove somewhat more psychologically complex than any number of cartoon Hollywood villains — they’re sincere, for one — and they’re generally better company than the king and his crew. It says something about Mr. Jones’s choices that he gives Durotan so much screen time and that Mr. Kebbell, with the help of the wizards, makes good use of that time with a nuanced, turn that evokes gladiators like Victor Mature. Durotan is a beautiful brute, and all the more human for it. “Warcraft” is rated (Parents strongly cautioned). Heads pop like grapes and so forth. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. | 1 |
922 | When Good People Share Bad Info — Here’s Why You Need to Fact Check Before You Click ShareBy Claire Bernish Disinformation. Misinformation. Propaganda. Outright lies. Purposeful distractions. Misleading bias. All tools of the government and close ally, corporate media, to keep the... | 0 |
923 | For Those Who Have It All, Charitable Wedding Registries - The New York TimesChristopher and Deirdre Culver met four years ago in Newport, R. I. aboard his yacht, through mutual friends. Their courtship was rooted in their love of the sea and of sailing. One sign that they made a good couple was the experience they had sailing together on his yacht in a race. “He’s very calm,” Ms. Culver said. “He thinks of it as a team effort. We win as a team, we lose as a team. ” Both in their 50s and successful in their own careers, the Culvers felt they needed nothing in the way of gifts when they married two years ago at the American Yacht Club in Rye, N. Y. He is the chief executive of the Health Media Network, a technology company. She is a vice president at Brookside Mezzanine Partners, which provides financing to small and companies. They decided to put just one item on their registry: a link to Sail to Prevail, a charity that teaches disabled children and adults to sail and in the process imparts life skills. The Culvers’ wedding ended up raising enough money to help the group build an endowment, with some money left over for general operating expenses. “It made a major, significant difference,” said Paul Callahan, chief executive of Sail to Prevail. “We’ve got a budget and it helped seed that comfortably. ” Technology has made it easier for couples, from millennials to older adults, to replace wedding gifts with charitable donations. Given the vast amount of money spent on weddings in the United States each year, this shift could move the charitable needle in a major way. In 2015, 2. 2 million couples married in the United States, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Last year, couples spent, on average, $35, 000 to cover the costs of their big day, according to the annual survey by the Knot, the wedding website, of its membership. Their guests spent, on average, $127 on a gift if they were family members and $99 if they were friends, according to an American Express survey. Wedding planners and philanthropic advisers say the interest in including a charity on a wedding registry has paralleled the growth of internet registries. In essence, when guests can click online boxes for wine glasses, vases, china sets, silverware and silver picture frames, it is just as simple to add a link to a charity of the couple’s choice. “It’s easy for people who don’t have the dream of a registry for gifts in the traditional way,” said Anthony Taccetta, a wedding and event planner in New York. He said he recently worked with one couple who wanted donations to go to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in New York and raised over $10, 000. Another couple, who had their dog in their wedding, were able to raise more than $15, 000 for the Humane Society of New York. Lindsay McKay, 37, and James Nero, 38, who are to be married in September in Santa Barbara, Calif. are making the rescue dog that brought them together a focus of their wedding. While they are registered at traditional places like they are also asking people to make donations to a animal shelter in Los Angeles. Ms. McKay credits the dog she adopted from the shelter with leading her to slow down in her life — she’s a Hollywood costume designer — and making herself more open to a relationship. Adding a nonprofit organization to a registry is fairly simple. The Culvers simply put a link on their wedding website to Sail to Prevail. Ms. McKay and Mr. Nero broached the idea with their wedding planner, Beth Helmstetter, who about a year ago started a website called the Good Beginning, to ease the process of charitable for guests and make gifts trackable the way they are in a regular registry for couples. “What is important to couples is they want to be able to thank people for those donations,” said Ms. Helmstetter, who charges 10 percent of the donation for the service. Since it started last year, some 800 couples have used the platform to set up charitable gift registries, including 10 of her client couples, she said. She hopes to reach $500, 000 in donations by next year. Ms. Helmstetter is not alone. Other websites, including Blueprint Registry, SimpleRegistry and JustGive, allow charities to be added to wedding registries. Of course, for many couples, wedding presents give them their start in life. Those sheets, plates and glasses are practical help in setting up their lives together as much as they are nice gifts. But more affluent couples who can afford to buy what they want or older couples who have already accumulated what they need often face the opposite problem: having two of everything. They may even be preparing to downsize. While it might be easy to dismiss these charitable options as just one more request of guests who may already be spending a lot of money traveling to a wedding, the registries have the potential to be effective and to have a positive impact. “I think there’s a growing awareness among millennials that what you do with your whole life should reflect your values,” said Melissa A. Berman, chief executive of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. “Millennials have really pushed this into the forefront. ” For the charities themselves, being given prominent billing on a couple’s wedding day, when their closest friends and family are there, can bring new donors to the cause. “From where I sit, it’s awfully thoughtful and generous,” Mr. Callahan of Sail to Prevail said. “When you do something so special as this at one of the two to three most important days of your life, it sends a message to the people who are close to you. ” Ms. Culver said what made her happiest were the guests who were not sailors and did not know about Sail to Prevail ahead of time. “We got some great bites,” she said. “I wouldn’t care if someone gave $10 or $100. ” Putting a charity on a wedding registry is not without some risk. With some causes, there is the potential to alienate guests. Ms. Berman said making Planned Parenthood the recipient of wedding largess, for example, could risk alienating guests who are opposed to the organization’s mission. “Guests might feel like they’re being told their values are wrong,” she said. “Most people I know who are doing this always offer this as an option. Or they stick to charities everyone is O. K. with or say, ‘some other organization of your choice. ’” If couples still want or need gifts, Mr. Taccetta said, they can incorporate a donation into the party favors. He said he had clients who totaled up what they would spend on party favors — generally $5 to $100 per person — and made a donation in that amount to their favorite charities. “They just leave a note saying a donation has been made in your name to an organization in lieu of a gift,” he said. “It’s another way to bring a donation into a wedding. ” And it also saves guests from having to cart home a jar full of seashells or other cute but useless mementos. | 1 |
924 | THIS IS IT: NYPD Just Raided Hillary’s Property! What They Found Will RUIN HER LIFE • USA NewsflashUSA News Flash 1 Comment
As you know, the NYPD confiscated Huma and Antony Weiner’s home devices as part of the investigation into Weiner’s “sexting” with underage girls.
Well guess what… the cops didn’t stop only with them. They also raider Hillary’s property and guess what they found?!
An NYPD source just claimed that within the emails on that device, Hillary and Bill are directly implicated ins a MASSIVE child sex/trafficking ring along with their friend, and convicted pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. (See Below)
According to the source,
“…It’s much more vile and serious than classified material on Weiner’s device. The emails DETAIL the trips made by Weiner, Bill and Hillary on their pedophile billionaire friend’s plane, the Lolita Express.”
“We’re talking an international child enslavement and sex ring“
These claims were backed up by other NYPD sources as well:
Jeff Epstein is a level-3 registered sex offender and the media ignores the fact hat Bill Clinton flew 26 times on Epstein’s private Jet and allegedly visited Epstein’s sex slave island. Now that Hillary has also been directly implicated, the media cannot ignore this any longer!
The NYPD source makes specific claims about her involvement. He says, “Hillary has a well documented predilection for underage girls, and Mr. Weiner could not bear to see those details deleted.”
This can very well be the biggest scandal of Hillary Clinton. She is definitely losing the election after this.
Let’s all share this article everywhere and expose her! The media refuses to cover this, but we will.
Thank you for reading. | 0 |
925 | Feinstein: Gorsuch’s ’Originalist’ Doctrine ’Really Troubling’ - Originalism Would Have Allowed Segregation - BreitbartDuring the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch on Monday, Ranking Member Senator Dianne Feinstein ( ) said she was troubled by Gorsuch’s “originalist” judicial philosophy, and that “if we were to dogmatically adhere to originalist interpretations, then we would still have segregated schools and bans on interracial marriage, women wouldn’t be entitled to equal protection under the law, and government discrimination against LGBT Americans would be permitted. ” Feinstein said, “Judge Gorsuch has also stated that he believes judges should look to the original public meaning of the Constitution when they decide what a provision of the Constitution means. This is personal, but I find this originalist judicial philosophy to be really troubling. In essence, it means the judges and courts should evaluate our constitutional rights and privileges as they were understood in 1789. However, to do so, would not only ignored the intent of the framers, that the Constitution would be a framework on which to build, but it severely limit the genius of what our Constitution upholds. I firmly believe the American Constitution is a living document, intended to evolve as our country evolves. In 1789, a population of the United States was under 4 million. Today, we’re 325 million and growing. At the time of our founding, were enslaved. it was not so long after women had been burned at the stake for witchcraft, and the idea of an automobile, let alone the Internet, was unfathomable. In fact, if we were to dogmatically adhere to originalist interpretations, then we would still have segregated schools and bans on interracial marriage, women wouldn’t be entitled to equal protection under the law, and government discrimination against LGBT Americans would be permitted. So I am concerned when I hear that Judge Gorsuch is an originalist and a strict constructionist. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
Subsets and Splits