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900 | Don’t ask Thom Yorke to write a cover quote for your book | Poke Staff | 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 | 1 |
901 | Internet Flasher | Groucho Marxist | 1 |
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902 | Gretchen Carlson Suit Aims at Retaliation Over Discrimination - The New York Times | Noam Scheiber | In 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. ” | 0 |
903 | Google Launches AI Program to Detect ’Hate Speech’ - Breitbart | Lucas Nolan | Google 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 | 0 |
904 | Why Polls Showing Hillary in The Lead Are Useless And Misleading [CARTOON] | TFPP Writer | 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. | 1 |
905 | Why Last-Second Lane Mergers Are Good for Traffic - The New York Times | Christopher Mele | The 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. | 0 |
906 | In Macau, Skipping the Casinos, but Embracing the Past - The New York Times | Lucas Peterson | As 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. | 0 |
907 | In Montreal, an Ungainly and Unloved Christmas Tree - The New York Times | Ian Austen | MONTREAL — 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. | 0 |
908 | Photos of Jupiter From NASA Spacecraft, Both Near and Far - The New York Times | Kenneth Chang | NASA 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. | 0 |
909 | Trump’s Labor Pick, Andrew Puzder, Is Critic of Minimum Wage Increases - The New York Times | Noam Scheiber | 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. | 0 |
910 | Nico Rosberg Takes Formula One Drivers’ Title Despite Lewis Hamilton’s Win in Abu Dhabi - The New York Times | Brad Spurgeon | ABU 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. ” | 0 |
911 | What a Sensory Isolation Tank Taught Me About My Brain - The New York Times | Richard A. Friedman | “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. | 0 |
912 | Chelsea Handler Botches Tweet Attacking Trump’s Grandchild | Daniel Nussbaum | Talk 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 | 0 |
913 | Report: Trump Moves to Own Tax Reform Plan Without Speaker Paul Ryan - Breitbart | Neil W. McCabe | Politico 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. | 0 |
914 | null | Teapolicy | You mean a war against Russia -- starting in Syria, and spreading to god only knows where. | 1 |
915 | AG Jeff Sessions Unveils Program to Accelerate Deportation of Imprisoned Illegals - Breitbart | Ben Kew | U. 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 | 0 |
916 | Former US Attorney for DC: New Hillary Email Probe Was Result of ‘Revolt’ Inside FBI | Chris Menahan | Former 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:
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917 | How Keeping Up Appearances Ruined a Former Dallas Banker - The New York Times | James B. Stewart | At 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. ” | 0 |
918 | Sesame Seeds for Knee Osteoarthritis | Michael Greger M.D. FACLM | Sesame 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 | 1 |
919 | How White Cops Interact with Blacks in Real Life | Andrew Anglin | Andrew 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 | 1 |
920 | Pennsylvania Republican Pushing Ban on Private Gun Sales - Breitbart | AWR Hawkins | Pennsylvania 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. | 0 |
921 | Review: In ‘Warcraft,’ Orcs of a Different Domain, Fighting With Heart - The New York Times | Manohla Dargis | Probably 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. | 0 |
922 | When Good People Share Bad Info — Here’s Why You Need to Fact Check Before You Click Share | Activist Post | By Claire Bernish Disinformation. Misinformation. Propaganda. Outright lies. Purposeful distractions. Misleading bias. All tools of the government and close ally, corporate media, to keep the... | 1 |
923 | For Those Who Have It All, Charitable Wedding Registries - The New York Times | Paul Sullivan | Christopher 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. | 0 |
924 | THIS IS IT: NYPD Just Raided Hillary’s Property! What They Found Will RUIN HER LIFE • USA Newsflash | Usa News Flash | USA 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. | 1 |
925 | Feinstein: Gorsuch’s ’Originalist’ Doctrine ’Really Troubling’ - Originalism Would Have Allowed Segregation - Breitbart | Ian Hanchett | During 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 | 0 |
926 | Confrontations Flare as Obama’s Traveling Party Reaches China - The New York Times | Mark Landler | HANGZHOU, China — Air Force One had a bumpy landing in Hangzhou on Saturday, but it was nothing compared with what happened after the plane rolled to a stop. As the reporters who traveled to the Group of 20 summit meeting with President Obama from Hawaii piled out and walked under the wing to record his arrival, we were abruptly met by a line of bright blue tape, held taut by security guards. In six years of covering the White House, I had never seen a foreign host prevent the news media from watching Mr. Obama disembark. When a White House staff member protested to a Chinese security official that this was not normal protocol, the official shouted, “This is our country. ” In another departure from protocol, there was no rolling staircase for Mr. Obama to descend in view of the television cameras. Instead, he emerged from a door in the belly of the plane that he usually uses only on trips, like those to Afghanistan. Witnessing the scene, Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, looked baffled and annoyed. Joined by her deputy, Benjamin J. Rhodes, she ducked under the rope to make her way closer to the president. The two were immediately stopped by the same Chinese official, who angrily challenged them. Asked later what happened, a diplomatic Ms. Rice replied, “They did things that weren’t anticipated. ” There were further surprises. At the West Lake State House, where Mr. Obama met President Xi Jinping, White House aides, protocol officers and Secret Service agents got into a series of shouting matches over how many Americans should be allowed into the building before Mr. Obama’s arrival. There were fears the confrontation would become physical. “Calm down, please,” an American official said, according to a pool report. A Chinese foreign ministry official said, “Stop, please,” adding, “There are reporters there. ” To some in Mr. Obama’s delegation, it was reminiscent of the rough treatment he received on his first trip to China, in 2009. Then the Chinese refused to broadcast on state television a meeting packed the hall with Communist Party loyalists and censored an interview he gave to a Chinese publication. At the time, many viewed the treatment as a metaphor for a rising power flexing its muscles with a young president from a superpower in decline. In later visits, the White House has pushed the Chinese for better news media access — with some success. In November 2014, the Chinese agreed to have Mr. Xi take questions at a news conference with Mr. Obama in the Great Hall of the People. When I asked Mr. Xi about the Chinese government’s refusal to renew visas for foreign correspondents, including some from The New York Times, he offered a curt lecture. When one’s car breaks down, he said, “perhaps we need to get off the car and see where the problem lies. ” On this trip, there was little threat of reporters making trouble. China has placed tight restrictions on foreign news media coverage of the entire summit meeting. When Mr. Xi took Mr. Obama on a leisurely stroll after dinner on Saturday, Chinese security cut the number of American journalists allowed to witness it to three from the original six, then ultimately to a single reporter. “This is our arrangement,” a Chinese official explained to his American counterpart, according to a pool report. “Your arrangement keeps changing,” the American replied. Asked on Sunday about the conflict, Mr. Obama noted that it was not the first time there had been tension with the Chinese over security and news media access during his travels here. This time, he said, “the seams are showing a little more than usual. ” But Mr. Obama said it had no bearing on the broader relationship. “I wouldn’t the significance of it,” he said. | 0 |
927 | 3 Reasons Why You Should Apply For A Job In The Trump Administration | Matt Forney | With the election over and done with, America is turning its attention to the transition from President Obama to President Trump. In barely two months, the Donald will take office, ejecting the Democrats’ coterie of corrupt courtiers and beginning his mission to right America’s wrongs . But President Trump can’t do it alone: he needs good, talented people to work under him and carry out the hard work of making America great again.
That’s where you come in.
The Trump administration is now soliciting people to apply for jobs for when the man himself takes office in January. We are officially calling on all ready and able Return Of Kings readers to submit their applications and take up any job offers. Here’s why you should consider a job in President Trump’s administration (beyond obvious reasons such as money and prestige)…
1. It’ll help keep President Trump accountable
While the media is lying about Trump reneging on his campaign promises, it’s still a good idea to give the man more reasons to keep his word. By staffing his administration with committed nationalists, we’ll make it easier for President Trump to fulfill his political program, as well as make it more difficult for him to go back on his promises. Remember, it was rank-and-file FBI agents who forced James Comey to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton ; a leader needs loyal men in order to carry out his agenda.
2. You’ll be able to make history
Given the momentous task of rebuilding America after eight years of Obama’s perfidy and failure, you almost have a civic duty to help President Trump in his mission. Expecting America to become great again all on its own is delusional; we need to do our part to restore this nation’s glory. By working with the Trump administration, you’ll have a direct role in reshaping America for years—possibly decades—to come.
3. You’ll help trigger the left
Despite their massive losses in the election—beyond Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the Democrats now control only a handful of state governments and failed to dent the GOP’s Congressional majority—the leftist mainstream media is trying to order Trump around and persuade him to staff his administration with the same flacks who filled Bush’s and Obama’s. Right now, they’re freaking out over Breitbart executive chairman Stephen Bannon being appointed as Trump’s chief strategist .
By joining the Trump administration, you’ll have a hand in helping trigger the left into conniption fits and spasms of impotence. Nothing horrifies them more than losing access to the levers of power, which they’ve controlled for decades. Watching leftists squirm and cry is one of the biggest fringe benefits of Trump’s victory, and we need to keep the triggering up for years to come.
If you think you have the job skills, Return Of Kings highly recommends you apply for a job in Trump’s administration . President Trump may have started the fire, but it’s our job to help the fire rise.
Read More: Did The Anti-Donald Trump Riot In Chicago Help Trump Cruise To Victory On Tuesday?
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928 | Police truncheon anyone calling for Orgreave inquiry | null | Police truncheon anyone calling for Orgreave inquiry 01-11-16
PEOPLE contemplating an inquiry into the ‘Battle Of Orgeave’ have been broken up by mounted police.
South Yorkshire Police commander Roy Hobbs said: “Some of those involved were wielding extremely dangerous opinions that we managed to beat out of them with big wooden sticks.
“I can reassure the public that none of our officers were physically hurt as the protestors were mostly old people due to the length of time they’ve been waiting for justice.
“Over 100 officer statements were generated during the operation and will be made public just as soon as I’ve got round to writing them.”
A formal confirmation of the decision will be published next week with a lengthy foreword to explain obscure historical terms such as ‘mining industry’ and ‘unions’.
Share: | 1 |
929 | And You Thought the Silver Market was Rigged! | The Doc | And You Thought the Silver Market was Rigged! Posted on Home » Headlines » Finance News » And You Thought the Silver Market was Rigged!
The great irony will not be lost on precious metals investors…
From Dr. Jeffrey Lewis :
We live in a world where the yield-starved and tech-savvy conspire in the basement of the underground and unaccounted. While the rise of Bitcoin and the explosion of alternative currencies may become the new scapegoat of behavioral finance, there is nothing quite like the reality of trickle down finance gone wrong.
Recently, EU officials called for putting safeguards on Internet currency.
The European Banking Authority called on the EU to develop safeguards for trading platforms. They were also called to start groups to oversee each Internet currency to ensure that no individual can manipulate the integrity of a particular virtual currency scheme and its key components. In the meantime, banks shouldn’t buy, hold or sell virtual currencies.
They stated:
“European Union banks should shun virtual currencies such as Bitcoin until rules to prevent abuses are put in place, according to the Bloc.”
This would be sad if it wasn’t so ironic.
It is also ironic that one of the other excuses for regulation is that electronic currencies make it harder for regulators to “manage monetary policy”, which is one of the reasons for using alt currencies to begin with to avoid the unintended consequences of intervention.
The key point is that media and the financial elite see the central banks as regulators and policy makers.
The 100 year old central banking meme is still very much alive and well.
On the surface, Bitcoin represents many things. To the precious metals inclined, it is often framed as an alternative or substitute.
But it is better to view the phenomenon and an anonymous currency with market backing.
The Bitcoin trading is well advanced. Not only do dozens of exchanges exist, but they are also functioning like their mainstream financial counterparts.
Yes, similar equities and other paper trading vehicles borrowing Bitcoins is a robust and well entrenched phenomenon. Margin swaps run in excess of $25 million on a daily basis.
Spin-off currencies are an even more dramatic spectacle. Well in excess of 200 individual currencies, these “software code-backed” instruments are born on an almost weekly basis. Coders, the exchanges, and a handful of insiders collude on the rise and inevitable fall of these new alternative currencies. New crypto currency launches come equipped with the most advanced automated social media marketing tactics.
The tactics used to launch a new currency are an extension of those pioneered by the penny stock ‘pump and dump’ phenomenon. At least the penny stocks have some form of backing — and not just code.
Regulation of these markets is a show.
First of all, regulators do not understand alt currencies anymore than they understand high frequency trading or algorithm. And secondly, while there is certainly a taboo associated with this, there really isn’t much money to go after.
In addition, the rate in which these new currencies crash and burn (and the relatively small size of the pool) results in an odd form of self or market regulation. Alternative currencies beckon for their own form of backing.
But speaking of justice and regulation…
Isn’t it ironic that any fuss should be made over these small markets, when a journey up the chain of modern finance reveals the same corruption and collusion – only worse?
When you consider that mainstream financial regulators are always one step from rotating into the banks they are charged with regulating, it becomes much easier to fathom the astounding degree of corruption.
And then there are the precious metals markets.
Regulators, exchanges, and a small handful of advantaged and well positioned players have access to the greatest ongoing pump and dump scheme imaginable.
It makes what happens in the alt currencies seem like child’s play – which is some ways it is when you consider the average age of the typical coder copying and pasting the next program into the next new currency.
The great irony will not be lost on precious metals investors. As the alt currency markets burn themselves out one by one before regulators have a chance to get close, the fuse has been lit on another (largely) limitless electronic experiment gone wrong. As the gold and silver pump and dump becomes recognized for the scam that it is, the desperate search for wealth will become apparent and too late for most. | 1 |
930 | UNSC Members Fail to Agree on New Zealand Draft Resolution on Aleppo | null | Get short URL 0 28 0 0 UN Security Council members have expressed differing views and failed to agree on New Zealand's draft resolution on Aleppo, the country’s ambassador to the United Nations Gerard van Bohemen said after a Security Council meeting.
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik) — New Zealand started working on a draft resolution on the Syrian city of Aleppo earlier this month after the French-Spanish and Russian draft resolutions were vetoed by the UN Security Council. © Sputnik/ Michael Alaeddin UN Failed to Carry Adequate Medical Evacuations in Aleppo - Churkin "Earlier this week, we had the curious situation that one side of the debate said the key paragraph in our draft was not acceptable because it would stop all air attacks over Aleppo and the others said it was unacceptable because it would not. Both cannot be right. Yet for now, there is no prospect of navigating these mutually inconsistent positions," van Bohemen stated on Wednesday.
Van Bohemen expressed regret that "geopolitics are being put ahead of people and once again preventing agreement on effective international action." ... | 1 |
931 | Can You Hear Agnes Martin’s Serenity in John Zorn’s Frenzied Music? - The New York Times | Zachary Woolfe | There could not, on first glance or listen, be two artists more different than John Zorn and Agnes Martin. Mr. Zorn, 63, a longtime fixture of downtown Manhattan, is known for composing frenzied, explosive music, riots of psychotically bright colors. Martin — who lived alone in the New Mexico desert for decades, died in 2004 at 92 and is currently the subject of a quietly majestic retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum — made paintings of serene subtlety. Mr. Zorn stated the obvious question as he walked on Monday morning around the Guggenheim’s rotunda, where a series of his works will be played on Thursday and Friday evenings. “Crazy John Zorn and Agnes Martin, the spiritual, the saint,” he said. “Where does it connect?” In fact, the connections go back to Mr. Zorn’s teenage years in New York, when he first encountered Martin’s painting “Red Bird,” with faint lines in colored pencil on a background, at the Museum of Modern Art. “I was completely hypnotized by it,” he said. Martin had by then grown famous for her softly colored grids, but Mr. Zorn found in her art as much passion as precision. “When I look at her work, I don’t see horizontal lines,” he said. “I don’t see a grid. I see a glow. It’s a feeling that’s going on here. ” Walking up to one of the paintings at the Guggenheim, he added: “You see all these minute — you could call them mistakes. It’s supposed to be a straight line, but it’s not a straight line. But she accepts those irregularities, the imperfections that make it perfect. That’s improvisation. Playing, and making a mistake, but you keep working with that mistake and it makes it right. ” It’s in that spirit of improvisation that Mr. Zorn, with his grounding in jazz, perceives a connection between his work and Martin’s that transcends their obvious differences. (“I can’t just go to the desert and start writing,” he said. “That’s not who I am. ”) But they share, in his telling, a fundamental focus on their work and a perpetual need for the sensory rejuvenation aloneness brings, whether in the expanses of New Mexico or the chaos of the East Village. “She lived in a desert environment,” he said. “I live in a city environment. My home is a device to enable creativity. It’s my desert, it’s where I’m going to get those receptors open. ” “As crazy as my work may sound,” he added, “even at its craziest, there is a spiritual practice going on in the process. ” Mr. Zorn long ago gave up on the idea of seriously collecting Martin’s work. (One of her paintings sold at auction this year for more than $10 million.) Instead, he has accumulated old posters for her gallery shows. His musical tributes to her began in the 1990s, when he returned to a few hypnotic, sensuous chords he had created as part of a soundtrack for a lesbian erotic film. Playing with the chords, Mr. Zorn stretched them into a piece that amplified that mesmerizing quality. He hadn’t been thinking explicitly of Martin while composing, but when he finished, he said, he realized, “Oh, this is an Agnes Martin thing. ” “Her work has a hypnotic vibe to it, you know,” he added. “It has introspection. And it flows in a sensual way, and that’s what those chords did. ” “Redbird,” as he called the piece, moves forward in a long series of calm yet ominous downbeats and their comet trails of resonance, sprinkled with slight rustles of percussion and the smoky undercurrent of a jazz club. The general stillness quivers with the expectancy of a long Morton Feldman work when “Redbird” came out, some summed it up as “Zorn does Feldman. ” Translating the order of the chords in “Redbird” into the duration of hits on four bass drums, he created the booming “Dark River,” and released the two works together. When the Guggenheim was planning its Martin retrospective (a traveling exhibition that, since the summer of 2015, has visited museums in London Düsseldorf, Germany and Los Angeles) officials there, having heard “Redbird,” asked Mr. Zorn if he would perform it live. He demurred, believing that the piece, intended to be heard solely in recorded form, wasn’t meant to be revived in person. But he surprised the museum by offering to write something new instead — and for free. (Mr. Zorn said that he does not accept commissions, preferring to follow the timetable and subject matter his inspiration dictates.) At the time, he was mulling a piece for the American Brass Quintet. While he usually composes scores in full, all at once, this time he started with a simpler harmonic progression, which he wrote down on a staff. (Think of piano music.) When it was done, though, it somehow didn’t seem like a brass piece: It felt, instead, like a work for harp. That became “Praise,” which surrounds a harpist with electronics and percussion. Just as Mr. Zorn considers “Dark River” a précis of “Redbird,” so is “Praise” a précis of “Blue Stratagem,” the piece he eventually made for the brass quintet, featuring the same harmonic motion. Both new works will have their premiere at the Guggenheim this week, alongside “Dark River” and “Curling” (1977) one of the “game pieces” that Mr. Zorn created early in his career. “Redbird” will play over speakers as the audience tours the exhibition after the concert. It is not the first time Mr. Zorn has occupied a major museum in recent years. This downtown doyen, once an enfant terrible and now an established master, was celebrated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on his 60th birthday in 2013, as performances of his work sprawled through the building, an experience that, for this art lover, was, “ ” he said. “I’m still naïve enough,” he said as he looked closely at a Martin, “to believe that a few marks on a piece of paper can change the world. ” | 0 |
932 | MUST SEE! “Welcome to the family.” Why so many Hispanic-Americans are voting for Donald Trump | BareNakedIslam | Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. PLEASE DONATE TO KEEP BARE NAKED ISLAM UP AND RUNNING. Choose DONATE for one-time donation or SUBSCRIBE for monthly donations Payment Options GET ALL NEW BNI POSTS/LINKS ON TWITTER Subscribe to Blog via Email
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933 | Iraqi Forces Enter Western Mosul, in Fierce Battle Against ISIS - The New York Times | Omar Al-Jawoshy and Sewell Chan | BAGHDAD — Iraqi forces trying to reclaim Mosul penetrated the western part of the city on Tuesday, retaking a bridge and several public buildings during heavy clashes with the Islamic State militants, officials said. Civilians reported that the bombardment and gunfire were the heaviest since Feb. 19, the beginning of the operation to retake the western part of the city — the country’s where roughly a million people are trapped and living in desperate conditions. Soldiers recaptured a branch of the central bank, an archaeological museum that jihadists ransacked after taking the city in 2014, and the Hurriya Bridge, which crosses the Tigris River in the center of the city, Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool, a military spokesman, said by phone. “We will never stop until we liberate Mosul entirely,” he said. Lt. Gen. Raed Shakir Jawdat, the chief of the federal police, said that security forces had also retaken a government compound. A statement from the coalition forces assisting the Iraqis gave a similar account of their progress. The museum was a focus of worldwide attention after it was seized by Islamic State militants, who used sledgehammers and drills to smash artifacts in its collection. The destruction horrified scholars around the world. Lt. Gen. Abdul Amir a spokesman for an elite unit of Interior Ministry troops, said that the buildings retaken from the Islamic State included a courthouse where militants had carried out whippings, stonings and beheadings, as well as a building where militants had thrown people to their deaths. “The liberation of the government compound is a step forward for our forces, a vital motivating position for us,” General Muhammadawi said in an interview. “The international coalition’s airstrikes and drones have played a major role in accelerating the liberation of the city. ” It was not yet clear how lasting the gains would be. Although soldiers raised the Iraqi flag over the government compound, in the Dawasa neighborhood, they were later forced to retreat under heavy fire from Islamic State militants, The Associated Press reported. The museum remained within the range of Islamic State snipers, making it vulnerable to a counterattack. Social media accounts associated with the Islamic State reported that militants had set off three suicide bombs during the offensive. Though the military advances were tenuous, government forces said that Tuesday represented a critical moment in their weekslong offensive to retake western Mosul. The fighting, which included recapturing most of the city’s airport, has not been easy. It took Iraqi forces more than three months to gain control over eastern Mosul, and casualties there were heavy. Prime Minister Haider and the chief of staff of the country’s armed forces toured the headquarters of the operations command responsible for the offensive, just outside Mosul, on Tuesday to “review the progress of security forces,” according to a statement. The Hurriya, or Freedom, Bridge is the second of five bridges to be retaken by government forces. airstrikes damaged all five bridges last year in a bid to isolate the militants in Mosul. Mosul fell to the Islamic State in June 2014, along with large parts of the country’s north and west. It is the largest Iraqi population center still wholly or partly in the militant group’s control. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported on Tuesday that about 46, 000 people had been displaced from their homes in Mosul since Feb. 19 — including 13, 350 on Friday alone — in the highest continuous displacement of civilians since October. “All people displaced from western Mosul have been accommodated either with family members or in camps or emergency sites, where they receive a tented plot, basic household supplies, hygiene kits and food rations,” the United Nations office said. Camp construction and the installation of water and sanitation services are underway south of Mosul, the office added. Since Feb. 19, the office said, more than 500 people have been treated for wounds, including 15 people who were hospitalized in Erbil, a city east of Mosul, for treatment after an apparent attack. Many in eastern Mosul lack drinking water, officials have warned, and many in the southern and western parts of the city are drinking untreated water, which could lead to the spread of diseases. | 0 |
934 | Europeans have no future - Putin on Migrant Crisis [Video] | Inessa S ([email protected]) |
November 6th, 2016 - Fort Russ News -
RT- Translated by Inessa Sinchougova
In a truly shocking twist, the Supreme Court of Austria has decided to acquit the Iraqi man, "that may not have realised the 10-year-old Austrian boy did not want to be sexually abused by him." Amir, 20, was visiting the Theresienbad pool in the Austrian capital of Vienna in December 2015, as part of a trip to encourage integration, when the incident occurred.
Europe - if you can't stand up for your children, who will? Of course there is the fact that Western Europe has supported the US in their violent destruction of the Middle East over the past 20 years. Is it a guilty conscience that seems to appease the blatant criminal activity on behalf of some newcomers? Or are they Soros puppets implanted into the judicial system that are at work?
Russia is a multicultural and multi-religious society, and has been for 1000 years. The law applies to everyone equally - whether you're a Crimean Tatar or a Slavic Russian - every Russian citizen is 'native' as such and subject to the same protocols.
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935 | In Rolling Stone Defamation Case, Magazine and Reporter Ordered to Pay $3 Million - The New York Times | Hawes Spencer and Ben Sisario | CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — A federal jury on Monday ordered Rolling Stone and one of its writers to pay $3 million in damages to a University of Virginia administrator over a discredited article two years ago about a supposed gang rape at the university. The jury in Charlottesville, Va. had already decided on Friday, after a trial, that Rolling Stone Wenner Media, its parent company and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author of the article, were all liable for defamation in a case that centered on faulty reporting and a failure to apply basic in editing. After deliberating for less than two hours on Monday, the jury of eight women and two men decided that Ms. Erdely was liable for $2 million of the total, and Rolling Stone and Wenner Media for $1 million. In her suit, filed in May 2015, the administrator, Nicole P. Eramo, had asked for $7. 5 million in damages. The jury found that assertions made in the story, as well as public statements made after publication by Ms. Erdely and Rolling Stone, were made with “actual malice,” the legal standard for libel against public figures. To meet that standard, a publisher must be found to have known that the information it published was false, or to have had reckless disregard for the truth. Rolling Stone has not said whether it would appeal the verdict. Scott Sexton, a lawyer for Rolling Stone, said on Monday that according to its agreement with Ms. Erdely, the company was obligated to cover “all liability arising out of the article. ” Ms. Erdely and her legal team declined to answer questions after the decision was read. In its decision, the jury made no distinctions about what portion of the damages was tied to the article and what was tied to other comments made by Ms. Erdely and Rolling Stone after publication. Outside the courtroom on Monday night, Deborah J. Parmelee, a teacher who was the jury forewoman, read a brief statement from the jury that said, in part: “With careful consideration of the facts in evidence for determining damages, the jury made its determination. We were proud to execute our civic duty. ” Ms. Parmelee declined to answer any further questions about the case. The article, “A Rape on Campus,” was published in November 2014 and intensified national attention on sexual assault of college students. But the article was soon called into question for its reliance on a single source, identified only as Jackie, in describing a brutal gang rape at a fraternity party near the grounds of the university, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 and is steeped in tradition. After a report by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism reprimanded Rolling Stone for failing to take fundamental steps to verify Jackie’s account, and after the Charlottesville police said they had found no evidence that an episode like the one described had occurred, the magazine retracted the article and removed it from its website. Ms. Eramo, the former associate dean of students, sued for defamation, saying that she had been made out to be the “chief villain” in the article, which portrayed the university administration as being indifferent to the threat of sexual assault on campus. In one of the story’s most scalding passages, Jackie said that Ms. Eramo had told her, “Nobody wants to send their daughter to the rape school. ” Testifying on Monday in the damages hearing, Ms. Eramo wept repeatedly as she recounted personal and professional difficulties after the article was published. She spoke of a loss of and a change of her job at the university. Some members of the jury could be seen dabbing tears during Ms. Eramo’s testimony. Rolling Stone’s lawyers pointed out that since the article was published, Ms. Eramo has gotten two raises, and her salary is now set at $113, 000 a year. They also noted that a report from the United States Department of Education backed up the magazine’s general findings by criticizing how the University of Virginia handled sexual assault cases. David Paxton, a lawyer for Rolling Stone, also stressed how much the article had already damaged the magazine’s reputation. “This has been a badge of shame,” he said, “for Rolling Stone and Ms. Erdely. ” But Ms. Eramo found that response wanting. “It took two years and all this to get an apology,” Ms. Eramo said, gesturing around the courtroom. “And I still don’t believe it is a real apology. The regret I see is that they’re in the position they’re in today. ” | 0 |
936 | Hillary is Sick & Tired of Suffering from Weiner Backup | Captain Craptek | 1 |
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937 | Taiwan, Italy, Joe McKnight: Your Friday Evening Briefing - The New York Times | Karen Workman and Sandra Stevenson | (Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. Donald Trump spoke with the president of Taiwan, a striking break from decades of diplomatic practice that could cause a major rift with China. He was back in New York after Thursday’s victory tour in Indiana and Ohio. Emotions are still raw from the campaign, evidenced during an angry debate between top strategists from the campaigns of Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, Mr. Trump’s supporters filed legal challenges to stop recount efforts. _____ 2. Mr. Trump will inherit an unusually strong economy, with the official unemployment rate, 4. 6 percent, at its lowest level in more than nine years. Employers added 178, 000 workers in November, clearing the way for the Federal Reserve to raise the benchmark interest rate. Housing prices are up, consumer confidence is high and the American economy grew by a healthy 3. 2 percent during the third quarter. But millions of workers continue to feel the recovery has passed them by. _____ 3. We’ve taken a closer look at the complications Mr. Trump will face in fulfilling some of his campaign promises. On immigration, his plan to deport millions of immigrants could be stalled by courts that are already crippled by a backlog of more than 520, 000 cases. And if he follows through on punishing countries he deems guilty of unfair trade, American manufacturers who rely on imports to build their products could be hurt as well. _____ 4. A jury in Charleston signaled that it was within a single vote of convicting a white former police officer in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man. Video of the shooting, which showed Michael Slager, above left, firing shots at Walter Scott as he fled after a traffic stop last year, rocketed into the national consciousness. “I cannot in good conscience consider a guilty verdict,” a single, unidentified juror wrote in a letter to the judge. “We may never reach a unanimous decision. ” _____ 5. A man arrested in the fatal shooting of Joe McKnight, above, a former N. F. L. player, was released without charge, sparking outrage on social media. Law enforcement officials in Louisiana, where the shooting happened on Thursday, said it might have been spurred by a “possible road rage incident” and remained under investigation. McKnight played for the New York Jets before the team cut him in 2013. _____ 6. Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, may be the next leader crushed by the wave of populist anger that has upended political establishments in Europe and the U. S. Mr. Renzi has vowed to resign if voters reject a measure to overhaul the country’s constitution in a referendum on Sunday. Polls indicate that the measure may fail, largely because of disillusioned young voters. In West Africa, voters in Gambia ousted a strongman who had reigned for 22 years. _____ 7. Friday marks one year since a married couple attacked public health employees in San Bernardino, Calif. killing 14 and seriously injuring 22 others. For survivors, like Amanda Gaspard, above with her parents, the long road to recovery has been complicated by repeated denials for medical care. Because the shooting was a workplace attack, a restrictive workers’ compensation system is responsible for their coverage. _____ 8. A tournament that bills itself as the Super Bowl of double dutch will have its 25th anniversary on Sunday in Harlem. The schoolyard game, which was adopted and perfected by black girls in urban American communities after World War II, has fallen out of favor in the neighborhoods where it was born. But its appeal has spread abroad: Teams from France and Japan will be competing this weekend. _____ 9. For the first time in more than 100 years, the Metropolitan Opera in New York is performing a work composed by a woman. The opera, “L’Amour de Loin” (“Love From Afar”) by Kaija Saariaho, above, debuted this week with a female conductor, Susanna Malkki, as well. Ms. Malkki became only the fourth woman to take the podium in the company’s history. _____ 10. Finally, let us introduce you to the participants of this year’s Ms. Senior America Pageant, a celebration of women of a certain age — “between 60 and death,” one contestant joked. They are doctors and nurses, business owners and executives. Some have escaped wars, survived illnesses and lost loved ones. And yet, they are still kicking — and kicking high. There is no swimsuit competition. _____ 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. | 0 |
938 | Shiite militia says it is close to Tal Afar, which Turkey has warned is off limits | GPD | Trump rape accuser skips press conference, citing threats ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board Shiite militia says it is close to Tal Afar, which Turkey has warned is off limits By GPD on November 4, 2016 By Rudaw ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The Shiite-led Hashd al-Shaabi militia said Thursday that its forces are 15 kilometers from Tal Afar, a Turkmen town that Turkey has warned the militia to stay clear of. “The Hashd al-Shaabi are continuously advancing and we are just 15 kilometers from Tal Afar” and nearing the Mosul-Raqqa road, Karim Nuri, spokesperson of the Hashd al-Shaabi, told Rudaw. He said he hoped that “in a few hours” his forces will be in control of the Mosul-Raqqa road, a critical supply line for the two ISIS strongholds in Iraq and Syria. Nuri said the Iranian-backed Hashd had not received any air support from the coalition, which had from the outset opposed any role for the militia in the Mosul offensive. Tal Afar, north of Mosul city, is a predominantly Turkmen town that was captured by ISIS two years ago when the group captured large swathes of land in the north. Turkey has warned Hashd forces from entering Tal Afar, for fear the Shiite militia would brutalize the town’s population, which is divided between Sunnis and Shiites. Earlier this week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country opposed any Hashd presence in Tal Afar. “Tal Afar is a very sensitive issue for us. We definitely do not regard it [Hashd involvement] positively in Tal Afar and Sinjar. I already told this to officials clearly,” Erdogan said Saturday. “Tal Afar is a totally Turkmen city, with half Shiite and half Sunni Muslims. We do not judge people by their religious affiliation, we regard them as Muslims,” he added, “But if Hashd al-Shaabi terrorizes the region, our response would be different.” Related Posts: No Related Posts The GPD 19 Reads Filed under World | 1 |
939 | null | Sane Responder | Consolidate all the muslim countries into one big caliphate, give them one vote at the UN, and then tell them to all shut up. Problem solved. | 1 |
940 | Brother of Clinton’s Campaign Chair is an Active Foreign Agent on the Saudi Arabian Payroll | # 1 NWO Hatr | Free Thought Project – by Claire Bernish
Tony Podesta — brother of the now-disgraced Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, whose files Wikileaks has been publishing — is not only a powerful Democratic Party lobbyist, but a registered foreign agent receiving a hefty monthly paycheck from the nefarious government of Saudi Arabia.
No — as tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist as it might sound — that scenario is the absolute truth.
In 1988, John and Tony Podesta formed the Podesta Group and have used their bigwig party-insider status to lobby and influence government policies — while, at various times, simultaneously holding positions of power — which has created a number of glaring conflicts of interest.
According to the March 2016 filing made in accordance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, Tony Podesta is an active foreign agent of the Saudi government with the “ Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court ,” and acts as an officer of the Saudi Arabia account.
At this point, the web of pay-for-play between the Washington, political heavyweights, and foreign governments comes lurching into the spotlight.
For starters, the Podesta brothers’ lobbying firm receives $140,000 every month from the Saudi government, which, in no uncertain terms — and despite a status as privileged U.S. ally — wages a bloody campaign of censorship, murder, suppression, human rights abuse, and worse against its civilian population, while bombing hospitals, schools, and aid convoys in neighboring nations.
John Podesta previously served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, founded the think tank Center for American Progress (which oh-so-coincidentally touts the need to reframe Saudi Arabia’s hopelessly tarnished image), counseled President Obama, and now chairs Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Tony Podesta acts as a foreign agent for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia — lobbying to influence government policy in favor of the Kingdom — while also contributing to and bundling for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Think about that for a moment.
One brother uses the influence of money to both affect United States foreign policy and infuse the Clinton campaign with cash — while the other wields the influence of power as a political insider for the same entities.
As the Washington Post reported months ago in July, Tony Podesta’s lobbying efforts “raised $268,000 for the campaign and $31,000 for the victory fund.”
“The Saudis hired the Podesta Group in 2015 because it was getting hammered in the press over civilian casualties from its airstrikes in Yemen and its crackdown on political dissidents at home, including sentencing blogger Raif Badawi to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for ‘insulting Islam,’” Alternet reported . “Since then, Tony Podesta’s fingerprints have been all over Saudi Arabia’s advocacy efforts in Washington DC. When Saudi Arabia executed the prominent nonviolent Shia dissident Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, causing protests throughout the Shia world and inflaming sectarian divisions, The New York Times noted that the Podesta Group provided the newspaper with a Saudi commentator who defended the execution.”
Notably, the Saudis’ reputation has only worsened as further atrocities pile up — concerning not only a record number of barbaric beheadings this year, but suspiciously reckless and errant U.S.-backed coalition bombings of civilian sites in several regions of active conflict.
Additionally, Tony Podesta’s status as a registered foreign agent for Saudi Arabia is at least obliquely discussed in an email from April 15, 2015 — ironically revealed by Wikileaks’ publishing of his brothers personal communiques — in which former Clinton Foundation chief development officer and now campaign national finance director Dennis Cheng wrote to a small group of insiders:
“Hi all – we do need to make a decision on this ASAP as our friends who happen to be registered with FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] are already donating and raising.
“I do want to push back a bit (it’s my job!): I feel like we are leaving a good amount of money on the table (both for primary and general, and then DNC and state parties)… and how do we explain to people that we’ll take money from a corporate lobbyist but not them; that the Foundation takes $ from foreign govts but we now won’t. Either way, we need to make a decision soon.”
To which general counsel to the Clinton campaign, attorney Marc Elias, replied [all errors original and emphasis added],
“Responding to all on this. I was not on the call this morning, but I lean away from a bright line rule here. It seems odd to say that someone who represents Alberta, Canada can’t give, but a lobbyist for Phillip Morris can. Just as we vet lobbyists case by case, I would do the same with FARA. While this may lead to a large number of FARA registrants being denied, it would not be a flat our ban. A total ban feels arbitrary and will engender the same eye-rolling and ill will that it did for Obama.”
As the exchange continues, how to precisely handle the campaign’s image with potentially controversial donors — while, at all costs, maintaining the flow of cash — becomes even more apparent. As strategist and campaign manager Robby Mook responds,
“Where do we draw the line though?”
Elias suggests a particularly intricate solution:
“If we do it case by case, then it will be subjective. We would look at who the donor is and what foreign entity they are registered for. In judging whether to take the money, we would consider the relationship between that country and the United States, its relationship to the State Department during Hillary’s time as Secretary, and its relationship, if any, to the Foundation. In judging the individual, we would look at their history of support for political candidates generally and Hillary’s past campaigns specifically.
“Put simply, we would use the same criteria we use for lobbyists, except with a somewhat more stringent screen.
“As a legal matter, I am not saying we have to do this – we can decide to simply ban foreign registrants entirely. I’m just offering this up as a middle ground.”
Mook eventually decides plainly,
“Marc made a convincing case to me this am that these sorts of restrictions don’t really get you anything…that Obama actually got judged MORE harshly as a result. He convinced me. So…in a complete U-turn, I’m ok just taking the money and dealing with any attacks. Are you guys ok with that?”
All of this political wrangling appears to have had the desired effect — despite increasing calls for the United States to either rein in or sever completely its support for the bloody Saudi regime — the U.S. approved a stunning $1.29 billion sale of smart bombs to the Kingdom in November 2015.
Tony Podesta’s specific contract with the government-run Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court, which will earn $1.68 million by year’s end, does, indeed, suggest the infusion of a pro-Saudi message into the U.S. media propaganda machine.
“Saudi Arabia is consistently one of the bigger players when it comes to foreign influence in Washington,” Sunlight Foundation spokesman Josh Stewart told the Washington Post . “That spans both what you’d call the inside game, which is lobbying and government relations, and the outside game, which is PR and other things that tend to reach a broader audience than just lobbying.”
That broader audience — the American public — has indeed been manipulated courtesy of at least the thoroughly-corrupt Clinton campaign if not surreptitiously by the Saudis, as well.
As The Free Thought Project has repeatedly reported , the evidence of collusion among the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the mainstream presstitutes is indisputable — including no less than 65 so-called journalists listed by name in various leaks as darlings of the campaign.
Although this level of corruption and collusion would be considered intolerable in nearly any other nation on the planet. And yet, at the center of this shit storm of contention is an official nominee for the White House — who will not be held responsible for any number of questionable and criminal acts.
The system isn’t rigged — it’s performing exactly as intended — and always will as long as the vote validates its existence. Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/clinton-podesta-campaign-saudi-arabia/#gYcjBFazk755MGcp.99 Share this: | 1 |
941 | ‘We Must Fight Them’: Trump Goes After Conservatives of Freedom Caucus - The New York Times | Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin | WASHINGTON — President Trump launched a vengeful tirade against conservatives in his own party on Thursday in an attempt to health care talks and show that he remains a force to be feared in the looming battles over the budget, a tax overhaul and infrastructure. In an early morning Twitter attack, Mr. Trump singled out members of the House Freedom Caucus, which scuttled his health care overhaul last week. “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, fast,” he wrote. “We must fight them, Dems, in 2018!” He continued on Twitter throughout the day, naming individual members of the caucus, likening them to Democrats and urging other Republicans to “fight them” in the 2018 midterm elections if they do not back his agenda. But the Republican upstarts hardly cowered in the face of Mr. Trump’s criticism. They struck back, some of them ridiculing the president, using his own taunting and confrontational social media style. “Stockholm Syndrome?” Representative Tom Garrett of Virginia asked on Twitter, suggesting that the president had become captive to the Republican establishment he attacked during the campaign. “It’s a swamp not a hot tub. We both came here to drain it. #SwampCare polls 17%. Sad!” wrote Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who often sides with the caucus on votes, mocking the president’s campaign pledge. This was the moment when Mr. Trump, riding a wave of populist anger, was supposed to be at his most fearsome — enforcing discipline on his fragmented party. But in the wake of last week’s stunning defeat of legislation to replace the Affordable Care Act, which further eroded his already flagging poll numbers, Mr. Trump has made an abrupt shift from courting his party’s most conservative lawmakers to hurling threats at them, a vivid illustration of his difficulties uniting a Republican Party. “Intimidation may work with some in the short term, but it never really works in the long run,” said Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who opposed the health overhaul pushed by the White House and written by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan. Mr. Trump and his team believe the Twitter attacks will his leverage in coming negotiations. It also has the added virtue of allowing the most expressive of presidents to give voice to his anger. And they were not done out of impulse. Mr. Trump’s advisers have become more involved in his Twitter feed in the last few weeks, ever since his impetuous, conspiratorial posts about President Barack Obama’s supposedly wiretapping his phones touched off a controversy. Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, has counseled a tough tone with the rebels, instructing his staff to use Twitter as a rhetorical prod to keep the party in line. Dan Scavino, an aide who controls Mr. Trump’s official White House Twitter account, recently moved into Mr. Bannon’s West Wing office, where he closely monitors social activity by and about the president, according to two officials. A handful of people have always had access to Mr. Trump’s personal Twitter account, but in the weeks since the president’s accusation against his predecessor, there has been a stricter imposition by aides to make sure there is a strategic imperative behind his posts, according to two people briefed on the process. The cannon blasts at the House Freedom Caucus followed nearly a week of the president’s stewing about the debacle over his failed health care effort. He did not take the loss especially well. His aides quickly began discussions about reopening negotiations that would at least demonstrate a commitment to what in the past has been one of his party’s most urgent priorities. The House Freedom Caucus came away from the health care fight feeling emboldened, and Mr. Trump’s senior advisers are now mindful of the need to slow any momentum the group has going into other legislative battles, including the budget fight just four weeks away. The health care bill that the many House members rejected was extremely unpopular. Only 17 percent of Americans — and 41 percent of Republicans — supported the proposal, according to a Quinnipiac poll released last week. Presidents — from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Mr. Obama — have said they would campaign against rebels in their own parties, and the threats have mostly been empty. Mr. Trump seems especially to follow through, senior Republicans say. Beyond blustery Twitter messages, he has so far not shown even a willingness to take them on. In the mostly conservative House districts where Mr. Trump could target lawmakers, voters are likely to be more in sync with their representatives, who felt that the rollback of the law did not go far enough, than their president, who simply wanted a win. When Mr. Sanford, fresh off helping torpedo his party’s health care bill, showed up at a Berkeley County Republican meeting in South Carolina on Saturday, he was met with applause and praise. “It’s fairly banal,” said Representative David Schweikert, Republican of Arizona and a member of the caucus, said of Mr. Trump’s attack. “We are used to it. It goes with the job. He is not the first president who has attacked us, just the first from our own party. ” If the back and forth between Mr. Trump and the House inflamed tensions between the president and some of his most loyal, if not exactly ideologically aligned, congressional supporters, it bound the president more closely to Mr. Ryan, reinforcing the most unlikely of shotgun political marriages. “I understand the president’s frustration,” Mr. Ryan told reporters on Thursday when asked about the president’s morning Twitter attack. “I share frustration. ” All week, the White House lurched between battering conservatives and trying to win them over. On Wednesday — about 18 hours before Mr. Trump’s Twitter blast — senior officials invited two dozen leaders from conservative groups for a session to plot a path ahead. Participants, who were instructed by the organizers of the event not to divulge details of the meeting, or even the groups attending, described the hourlong session as a welcome but long overdue policy discussion. It included a candid, polite airing of complaints that they have been largely left out of the loop on major administration decision making, according to people who attended. The meeting, put together by Mr. Trump’s conservative outreach director, Paul Teller, at the request of conservatives, included representatives of the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Limited Government and Judicial Watch, all of whom were critical of some administration policies, including the health bill. Thomas Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch — a conservative legal advocacy group that successfully sued the Obama administration for the release of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails — made a pointed pitch for the release of all documents pertaining to Russia’s interference in the election campaign controversy, according to people who attended the session in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building beside the White House. Mr. Fitton, the participants said, told Mr. Teller that the president needed to be committed to a policy of extreme transparency about contacts between Russian government officials and Trump associates during the 2016 campaign, including Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s . He also asked Mr. Teller and other administration officials present to more rapidly approve Freedom of Information requests about Russia and other topics — likening the on legally mandated disclosure to what he said was the Obama administration’s flouting of immigration laws. An activist in attendance said that Mr. Teller nodded, took notes and was noncommittal. Mr. Trump’s targeting of the Freedom Caucus came on a day of an unexpected change in his senior staff. Katie Walsh, a deputy to Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, announced her sudden departure after less than three months on the job to work for a “super PAC” allied with Mr. Trump. The White House offered no explanation for the timing of her departure. | 0 |
942 | ISIS Kidnaps, Kills at Least 30 Civilians in Afghanistan | Jason Ditz | Locals Say as Many as 42 May Have Been Killed in 'Revenge' Attack 26, 2016 Share This
Underscoring the group’s growing presence around Afghanistan, ISIS has launched a mass kidnapping and execution in Afghanistan’s Ghor Province today, rounding up and shooting dozens of civilians who were gathering firewood in the hills.
The victims were nomads from the Kuchi group, and while it was initially thought the attack might’ve been part of an ethnic conflict in the area over sheep ownership, it has since been attributed to ISIS, who officials say has a growing presence in the area and a bone to pick with the Kuchi.
That the victims were nomads is making it hard to nail down exactly how many people were killed, with official reports saying it was at least 30, and locals saying as many as 42 were missing and presumed to have been killed in the attack.
Ghor is far afield from the areas ISIS has been previously reported to have a major presence in Afghanistan. Early on they were claimed to be confined to the Nangarhar Province, but have also set up some territorial possessions in the far south. | 1 |
943 | Holding Hillary Accountable | EdJenner | Go to Article
This week’s WikiLeaks dump provided further sordid details about the Clintons’ breathtaking corruption—something nobody reasonable has doubted for quite some time. As expected, the Clinton camp’s response is to dismiss, distort, diminish, dodge, and divert. They do so in easy reliance | 1 |
944 | BREAKING : TED CRUZ CALLS FOR SPECIAL PROSECUTOR TO INVESTIGATE HILLARY – TruthFeed | Amy Moreno | BREAKING : TED CRUZ CALLS FOR SPECIAL PROSECUTOR TO INVESTIGATE HILLARY BREAKING : TED CRUZ CALLS FOR SPECIAL PROSECUTOR TO INVESTIGATE HILLARY Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 3, 2016
The Trump train is peaking at the perfect time.
Donald Trump is leading in most polls, and gaining in key BLUE states, like Michigan, where he is within one point of Crooked Hillary.
Clinton is plagued by endless scandals, lies, and two criminal investigations.
The reopening of her email investigation after FBI officials discovered 650K emails on her top aide’s computer, and the FBI investigation into the scam Clinton Foundation.
Today, Trump supporter Ted Cruz tweeted out a call for a special prosecutor to investigate the Clinton scandals. RT if you agree there needs to be a special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute the corruption of Hillary Clinton!
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 3, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. | 1 |
945 | Spared by Gunman in Charleston, Churchgoer Describes Night of Terror - The New York Times | Alan Blinder and Kevin Sack | CHARLESTON, S. C. — Polly Sheppard, a retired nurse and longtime stalwart of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, dived under a table as the gunfire began and did the only thing she could think to do: She prayed aloud. She could see the bullet casings skittering across the floor of the fellowship hall and the young man’s boots approaching. Dylann S. Roof told her to “shut up,” then asked menacingly if he had shot her yet. “I said ‘no,’” Ms. Sheppard testified on Wednesday, as the final witness in the guilt phase of Mr. Roof’s federal trial on 33 counts, including hate crimes resulting in death. “And he said, ‘I’m not going to. I’m going to leave you to tell the story. ’” She did, in a panicked call to a 911 operator that night, and again on Wednesday, when she described the events to a courtroom crowded with family members of the nine parishioners Mr. Roof is accused of killing in a massacre on June 17, 2015. After Ms. Sheppard finished testifying, the prosecution rested, and Mr. Roof’s defense lawyers followed suit after declining to call any witnesses. With their eyes on the sentencing phase of the death penalty trial, the lawyers have tried to make suggestions of Mr. Roof’s mental incapacity, but have been allowed little leeway by Judge Richard M. Gergel. Before the defense rested, Judge Gergel, of Federal District Court, summoned Mr. Roof to the bench, placed him under oath out of the jury’s presence and asked if he wanted to testify in his own defense. Mr. Roof, 22, with pale white skin and a distinctive haircut, said he did not. Judge Gergel has scheduled closing arguments for Thursday, and jurors are then expected to begin deliberations. If Mr. Roof is convicted — a virtual certainty, as he confessed in a recorded F. B. I. interview and left a trail of incontrovertible evidence — the jury will return in January to hear more evidence and decide whether to sentence him to death or to life in prison. Mr. Roof, who offered to plead guilty in exchange for a life term, plans to represent himself during that phase. He also faces capital murder charges in state court in a trial scheduled to begin on Jan. 17. Over six days, federal prosecutors presented the jury with an array of technical evidence that established the timeline of Mr. Roof’s plot, but they bookended their case with Ms. Sheppard’s testimony and that of her friend and fellow survivor, Felicia Sanders, who appeared as the opening witness. Guided gently through questioning by an assistant United States attorney, Julius N. Richardson, Ms. Sheppard humanized the nine victims. There was the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr. known as “Dapper Dan,” who always wore a fedora and usually led the Bible study. She spoke of Ethel Lee Lance, who cleaned the church with “a woman’s touch” and loved the song “One Day at a Time. ” Tywanza Sanders had a “big smile,” and his Susie Jackson, was “a very sweet lady. ” The Rev. DePayne “could sing like an angel. ” Cynthia Hurd, a librarian, had a soft spot for Zora Neale Hurston. And the Rev. Sharonda the tall, graceful track coach, could preach like nobody’s business. Ms. Sheppard said she attended the Bible study that night only because her friend, Myra Thompson, was leading it. She sat near the back because she planned to sneak out early, but Ms. Thompson kept an eye on her. At some point, Ms. Sheppard testified, nodding toward Mr. Roof, “the young man at the table over there joined us. ” She said the church’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, asked Mr. Roof if he was there for the study session, handed him a Bible and a pamphlet about the night’s lesson, and offered him a chair. Usually, Ms. Sheppard said, the group would end with a prayer adapted from Genesis: “The Lord watch between me and thee when we are absent from another. ” But as they rose for the benediction, the gunman began firing, she said. Mr. Pinckney was the first to be shot. Ms. Sheppard said she first thought the explosions had come from the church’s aging wiring but then heard Ms. Sanders scream, “He’s shooting!” She reached for Ms. Lance’s cellphone and, after initially pressing the wrong buttons, managed to dial 911. “He shot the pastor,” she told the dispatcher during a recorded call that was played in court on Wednesday. “He shot all the men in the church. ” Soon after, she told the dispatcher, “There’s so many people dead, I think. Oh, my God. ” When the gunman finally left the building, Ms. Sheppard checked the pulse of Mr. Pinckney and another victim. She found none. Mr. Roof, who confessed that he had planned to kill himself if confronted by the police at the church, fled in his car into the sweltering South Carolina night. He was captured the next day in North Carolina. The evidence that prosecutors presented against him included GPS data showing he had visited the church’s neighborhood six times in the six months before the attack and telephone records showing he had called the church four months before. They also have used Mr. Roof’s writings, photographs and possessions to depict him as a racial extremist. Jurors heard, for instance, that he had downloaded a history of the Ku Klux Klan in August 2014, and that investigators found in his bedroom a pillowcase cut into a triangular shape, perhaps to represent a Klan hood. Prosecutors presented photographs Mr. Roof had taken of the Confederate battle flag when it flew on the grounds of the State House, before its removal in July 2015 in response to the shootings. They had a witness read aloud a white supremacist manifesto that Mr. Roof had posted online. They also showed chilling footage of Mr. Roof’s preparations for his assault on the church, including surveillance video of his purchase of a Glock . 45 caliber handgun and ammunition. Mr. Roof also recorded himself, wearing a black muscle shirt and reflective sunglasses, practicing with his pistol, expressionlessly firing shot after shot. But on the final day of testimony, prosecutors turned away from Mr. Roof’s planning and back to its consequences. A forensic pathologist, Dr. S. Erin Presnell, described the findings of autopsies that showed the nine parishioners had been struck at least 60 times. Then Ms. Sheppard, a bright pink scarf draped around her neck, mounted the witness stand. She plucked a tissue or two from a nearby box, and told her story for about 40 minutes. There was no from Mr. Roof’s lawyer, David I. Bruck. “Ms. Sheppard, I’m so sorry,” he told her softly. “I have no questions. ” | 0 |
946 | War on Saturated Fats Has Harmed People in Poor Countries Who Shunned Traditional Fats Like Coconut Oil | Admin - Orissa | War on Saturated Fats Has Harmed People in Poor Countries Who Shunned Traditional Fats Like Coconut Oil Making traditional coconut oil in Liberia.
by Paul Fassa Health Impact News
One of the most pervasive dangerous food myths has been the lipid hypothesis or theory of heart disease. It proclaims that eating foods containing saturated fats are the root cause of obesity and heart disease. It has prevailed for over a half-century and is only now beginning to deteriorate.
It was originally created by University of Minnesota researcher Ancel Keys with his “ Seven Countries Study” that spawned the lipid theory of heart disease. This theory claims that saturated fats create cholesterol and cholesterol clogs arteries and induces heart disease and heart attacks.
What followed was recommendations by the USDA to condemn saturated fats like the tropical oils, and recommend instead the new expeller-pressed polyunsatured seed oils developed after World War II from US cash crops like soy and corn, which are heavily subsidized by taxpayers to keep prices artificially low and dominate the world market in edible oils.
In the pharmaceutical world, the lipid theory of heart disease spawned the most profitable drugs of all time, statin drugs, designed to artificially lower cholesterol, a substance needed in our body and without which life would be impossible.
The new lipid theory of heart disease got Ancel Keys on the 1961 cover of Time Magazine. Yet in 2014 Time issued their mea culpa for falling for Ancel’s bogus report and claims with a featured titled “ Eat Butter: Scientists labeled fat the enemy. Why they were wrong .” Many doctors and nutritionists echoed Ancel in condemning saturated fats, but “new science” has demonstrated the lipid theory is wrong and unscientific.
But this proclaimed “new science” has been here all along, before Ancel Keys report and the subsequent McGovern led Senate Committee, the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs final 1977 report that contained a few valid dietary points, but vilified saturated fats and salt.
The USDA and FDA followed the Committees’ dietary advice and made the lipid theory official and more popular – an “everybody knows” type of common knowledge that really wasn’t true. It is simply a case of politics and money over real science.
Only after a half-century of low and no fat food like substances had created more obesity and did nothing to rein in heart disease control in the marketplace that the saturated fat cholesterol myth began to erode, thanks to internet sites that publish real dietary science like Health Impact News and their website CoconutOil.com .
“It’s Easier to Fool People than Tell Them They’ve Been Fooled” – Mark Twain
Very few want to hear that his or her time and energy was invested in a bogus claim, even claims detrimental to one’s health. Better to think that the “authorities” have their backs and they’re doing the right thing. This is a major reason falsehoods all too slowly surrender to truth.
The effort to reduce cholesterol with dangerous statin drugs has made a lot of money, maybe more than any other type of drug on the market. But its successful function is actually harmful in addition to its “side effects.” A plethora of new and old science supports cholesterol as a very vital substance for creating hormones, producing vitamin D from sunlight, cell walls, and brain and nervous system tissue.
The high cholesterol count fears persist along with the notion that consuming saturated fats is behind it all. The officially supported no or low fat food propaganda supports a processed food industry that delivers foods and beverages with high amounts of added sugars or high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) added to processed grain carbohydrates stripped of their natural nutrients.
Unpopular but real science points to those added sugars and HFCS as the primary source of obesity, metabolic dysfunction leading to diabetes, and arterial inflammation leading to heart disease.
The trans-fats of cheap processed hydrogenated vegetable oils replacing healthy saturated fats contained in butter and coconut oil adversely affect cellular function and structure. Folks do get fatter and unhealthier with these cheaper substitute fats that are ubiquitous in the standard American diet (SAD).
These oils are peddled for their lower prices and longer shelf lives. But their longer shelf lives are meaningless. They do not preclude processed vegetable oils’ inherent toxicity. (Source)
Processed foods containing these partially hydrogenated oils have contributed more to obesity, diabetes, and declining heart health than pure saturated fats, which if untainted promote health in all those areas. But the misinformation is still official thanks to key decision makers’ vested interests within the USDA and FDA. (Source) A Study Explaining Fat Disinformation’s Worldwide Worsening Health and Economic Woe
The most obvious harm done by the false propaganda against saturated fats in traditional foods are with regions that relied heavily on saturated fats for centuries, especially edible tropical oils such as coconut oil prior to the lipid hypothesis or theory’s dogma that permeated and replaced their traditional diets.
A recent paper, “Coconut oil and palm oil’s role in nutrition, health and national development: A review,” was published in the September 2016 Ghana Medical Journal (GMJ).
This report points out the obvious, among those wary of government and medical propaganda, without reservation:
… anti-tropical oil campaigns in the United States were conducted more for economic gains than for genuine concerns of the health of the Americans [Emphasis added]. Sadly, this adverse publicity of tropical oil in the United States, has spread worldwide, even to countries in the developing world, with heart disease prevalence far lower [prior to the lipid theory] than that of the United States.
Furthermore, in the developing world, this adverse publicity is characterized by pressure from all fronts including governmental agencies and health professionals (including nutritionists) to reduce consumption of oils such as palm and coconut oils. (Source)
The paper goes on to detail the nutritional benefits of saturated fats, called saturated because they are saturated with hydrogen, and the different types of saturated fats according to the lengths of their carbon atoms.
While considering that long chain fatty acids could be a triglyceride storage issue for those with digestive issues, the paper mentions how long chain fatty acids’ slow conversion to energy enhances their nutrient absorption.
Then the paper explains short and medium chain fatty acids’ ability to be rapidly converted to energy, focusing on coconut oil’s medium chain fatty acids’ health benefits and rapid conversion to usable energy within a body’s cells, especially restoring proper brain cell metabolism.
This attribute has been a boon for those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological diseases, as explained in Health Impact News . (Source)
So what have we induced by going along with the lipid theory embraced by the USDA, FDA, mainstream nutritionists, and the medical profession’s acceptance of blockbuster (high sales revenue) pharmaceutical statin drugs?
The real answer has been more obesity, diabetes, and heart disease with an epidemic surge of neurological diseases, especially those related to dementia.
This study explains a similar impact among those third world or developing nations in West Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere that had embraced consuming and cooking with saturated fats as a staple in their diets for centuries. Regional Economics Also Adversely Affected
Prior to “Westernizing” their diets somewhat, their low levels of obesity, heart disease, and neurological disorders were areas of curiosity and envy. Now those populations are catching up to American and European non-infectious disease rates.
Also, the fact that most of developing or third world regions used their own edible oils for centuries were now more dependent on importing American and European processed edible oils has destabilized their local food and agricultural economies.
Medium chain triglyceride (MCT) fatty acids that are unheated or chemically untainted, such as virgin palm and coconut oils.
Even the so called “French paradox,” the fact that France’s heart morbidity and obesity was low despite diets rich in saturated fats, was explained away by Western medical media’s assertion that their drinking wine with small traces of heart healthy resveratrol allowed the French to imbibe high fat diets with impunity.
This was mainstream media national news a very few years ago. Never mind that the truth could be too shocking for our food and medical industries to handle. Resveratrol levels from wine are actually insufficient for protecting the heart against any imagined damage from saturated fats, unless one wants to pass out drunk with every meal.
Ignoring the lipid theory despite authority supported dogma will lead to better health for those who wish to cancel their subscription to it. Read and listen to the few medical practitioners who have countered that dogma instead. (Source)
Comment on this article at CoconutOil.com.
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947 | Democrats, With Garland on Mind, Mobilize for Supreme Court Fight - The New York Times | Carl Hulse | WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats have one particular judge’s name in mind as they await the identity of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee: Merrick B. Garland. Democrats and their allies remain furious that Senate Republicans refused to even consider Judge Garland, President Barack Obama’s nominee to the high court, with 10 months remaining in Mr. Obama’s second term. That deep resentment is certain to color their handling of Mr. Trump’s choice just as it has contributed to their resistance to moving quickly on Mr. Trump’s cabinet selections. All indications are that they see the forthcoming nomination as a chance to take a strong stand against the new president, since they still have the power to filibuster a Supreme Court choice — at least for now. “I haven’t seen the names,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and a veteran of multiple Supreme Court fights. “But when they had a consensus person with Merrick Garland, every single Republican who raised their hand and solemnly swore before God to uphold the Constitution refused to follow the Constitution and even have a hearing. ” Top Democrats say they don’t intend to play “tit for tat” with the nomination. But they say they will insist on what they consider to be a mainstream candidate capable of securing at least the 60 votes needed to thwart any filibuster. Otherwise, they promise to do whatever they can to block the nominee. “We are not going to do what the Republicans did,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, “but if the candidate’s out of the mainstream, I can tell you I will fight and my caucus will fight tooth and nail against them. ” The chief reason that Democrats will not do what the Republicans did is that they can’t — Republicans remain in the Senate majority, which last year enabled them to refuse to even schedule a hearing and now gives them control over the confirmation process. But unlike with cabinet nominees, Democrats could still employ a filibuster against a Supreme Court pick, because the high court was excluded from a 2013 change engineered by Democrats to thwart filibusters against nominees. If Democrats hold out, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, will no doubt come under pressure to wipe out the possibility of filibuster against Supreme Court nominees. Given the steps Republicans were willing to take to hold open the vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia, Democrats believe Senate Republicans might choose to eliminate that filibuster power, too. “All the signals are there is no limit to what they are capable of doing to give the big special interests behind them control of the court,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee. But Republicans are already differentiating their handling of Mr. Garland’s nomination from whatever is to come with the announcement by Mr. Trump. They argue that the situations are not comparable, given the timing of the presidential election. “There’s a big difference between not approving a Supreme Court nominee in the middle of a highly contested presidential election, and the beginning of a term,” Mr. McConnell said on Tuesday, noting that Republicans did not filibuster Supreme Court nominees in the first term of either President Bill Clinton or Mr. Obama. Mr. McConnell took pains on Tuesday to note that both Republicans and Democrats were invited to the White House to discuss the coming nomination with Mr. Trump as part of the requirement for seeking the Senate’s advice and consent. Many Republicans and their conservative allies would prefer not to abolish the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees, knowing that it could come back to haunt them by allowing a future Democratic majority a free hand — essentially the same reason Democrats left high court nominees out of the 2013 change. It is also unclear whether Republicans would even have the votes to do so through a simple majority vote on an arcane procedural maneuver. But the question will hang over the entire confirmation fight and could force a showdown. If the Democrats filibuster, “ then I guess we’ll see what steps need to be taken at the time,” said Senator John Thune of South Dakota, a member of the Republican leadership. “But I think the one thing that we’re committed to is getting a Supreme Court justice confirmed. ” Democrats say that one result of the stalemate over Judge Garland is that it has shown that the Supreme Court can function, though imperfectly, without a full complement of nine members, relieving the party of some guilt for keeping the court if it comes to that over a Trump nominee. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who sits on the Judiciary Committee, said Democrats were also galvanized by the turnout at last weekend’s protests. He said it would serve as a unifying force for Senate Democrats. “That swell of people and strength and spirit at the marches we had Saturday showed us we have the American populace on our side,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “They understand the importance of the Supreme Court to those issues that brought them to the streets, principally women. ” Mr. Blumenthal said the selection of a nominee by President Trump would “put a face and a voice” on the Supreme Court battle. But for now, the face and voice most Democrats are putting on the coming clash are those belonging to Judge Garland. | 0 |
948 | Comment on 4 of the Best Kinds of Milk That Aren’t Dairy by 4 of the Best Kinds of Milk That Aren’t Dairy – Collective Evolution | APG Editorial | 4 of the Best Kinds of Milk That Aren’t Dairy – Collective Evolution | APG Editorial | Now, numerous studies have concluded that milk doesn’t actually build bone and provide the same amount of calcium that we thought. A study published in the British Medical Journal , for example, followed more than 100,000 people in Sweden over periods of 20 to 30 years, with shocking results: The people who drank milk were more likely to die from heart disease and cancer. The women suffered more overall fractures and hip fractures as well. Different studies have also shown that higher dairy intake is linked to higher risks of prostate and ovarian cancer and can trigger type 1 diabetes. It is also linked to forms of acne, just to name a few effects. There is also the disturbing side of the dairy industry, where animals are abused to produce the milk we drink. A lot of dairy products are filled with the hormones that were given to female cows to keep them perpetually lactating so they produce an endless flow of milk. This doctor describes it perfectly when he says “cow’s milk is for baby calfs, just like human milk is for babies.” It is a substance we need while in crucial stages of development, but past a certain age, it becomes obsolete. While there are many alternatives to dairy milk, some are much better than others. Here are some of the better “milk” products out there. Almond Milk Raw organic almond milk is a great choice when you know where it’s coming from. As with many mass produced products, even some almond milks aren’t the best for us. An analysis of a UK almond milk brand showed that nuts make up only 2% of the drink itself. A single serving of almond milk has almost no protein. Compared with plain old almonds, it fares even worse. There is one place where almond milk comes out on top, of course: It has more potassium and more of the vitamins A and D. But almond milk is fortified with these nutrients — they’ve been added during the production process. Making almond milk yourself, however, is a fantastic option, and allows you to control exactly what goes inside it, ensuring there are no additives, preservatives, or substances you’ve never even heard of before. Rice Milk Rice milk is another good choice that works well as a dairy substitute, if you don’t mind the taste. It’s higher in carbohydrates than other milk choices and contains around the same amount of calcium as cow’s milk. Yet it contains almost no protein, so it needs to be balanced with other protein rich foods. During processing, the carbs break down into sugars and give the milk a sweet taste. It is filled with more sugar, around 10 grams for one serving, which is a lot more than something like coconut milk, which has around 3 grams. If you’re trying to have as little sugar as possible, rice milk may not be the best choice, but it’s certainly better than plain old dairy milk. Coconut Milk Coconut milk is definitely one of the healthier options here. When this milk is all natural, meaning there’s no added sugars, natural flavours, or preservatives, it is incredibly healthy for us. “ Coconuts are highly nutritious and rich in fibre, vitamins C, E, B1, B3, B5 and B6 and minerals including iron, selenium, sodium, calcium, magnesium and phosphorous.” The things that makes coconuts so good is the type of fat they contain. They have a form of medium-chain fatty acids rather than long-chain fatty acids, which are stored in our tissue for much longer. One of the beneficial acids within coconuts is called lauric acid. This gets converted inside the body into a beneficial substance called monolaurin acid, which acts as an antiviral agent. But unlike other milks, if you have access, you can go right up to a coconut tree and drink the milk straight from the coconut without the need for processing. This is one of the most pure and fresh ways to get some milk in you! Hemp Milk Ah, hemp; one of the most versatile plants on our planet. Hemp milk has a wide range of health benefits that a lot of other milks don’t. Some companies make fully organic, non-GMO, and unsweetened hemp milk, but it’s always good to check exactly where you’re getting your products from. Hemp milk has a more bean-like and nutty flavor to it, which still tastes great in many drinks or foods. It’s also packed with healthy omega-3 fatty acids, which help with our heart health. In a single 8-ounce glass of hemp milk you can find the following nutrients: Vitamin A | 1 |
949 | Harry Reid BLASTS Comey For Misconduct, Drops Bombshell: FBI Is Sitting On Russian-Trump Info | Michael Hayne |
The decision of FBI Director Comey to go public with a supposed ‘bombshell’ investigation into new Hillary emails was welcomed by Trump as the mainstream media recklessly reported on this total dud of a controversy. It basically dominated the news cycle all day and probably will until we all cast out our vote next Tuesday (or November 28th if you support Trump.)
But the politically motivated and reckless actions of Comey have many outraged, including Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid
Senator Reid appeared with Clinton today to push back against the “inappropriate,” “unprecedented,” and “puzzling” move by FBI Director James Comey to suddenly go public with new emails. Roughly two months removed from retirement, Reid is waging an all-out war on Comey as he claims a “disturbing double standard” took place in the FBI’s decision to publish this misleading announcement while essentially ignoring Trump.
Reid pointed specifically to information the FBI allegedly has that ties Trump to Russia – information Reid says they have intentionally sat on in order to not hurt the candidate’s chances of being elected.
He expressed his ire in a blistering letter to Comey. Here’s a key passage:
Your actions in recent months have demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be a clear intent to aid one political party over another. I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act, which bars FBI officials from using their official authority to influence an election. Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law.
And it’s not as though one can accuse Reid of being blindly partisan since he previously defended Comey when Republicans tried to filibuster his nomination and subsequently delay his confirmation. Reid wrote:
“I believed you to be a principled public servant.”
The actions of Comey were indeed politically motivated as he desperately wished to be loved again by law & order conservatives. But Reid just opened up a whole new can of worms.
Featured image via Alex Wong/Getty Images Share this Article! | 1 |
950 | NATIONAL REVIEW, Conservatism Inc., Plan To Cave EVEN MORE On Immigration! | James Kirkpatrick | 1 |
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951 | [WATCH] Thug Calls US Marine a “Pussy” – Barely Lives to Tell the Tale | The Conservative Millennial | 0 comments
A video uploaded in 2013 called “Marine vs. Thug” is nearing five million views on YouTube. People just love seeing disrespectful bottom-feeders get what’s coming to them, I suppose!
While riding on the subway, a thug decided to attack a US Marine for no apparent reason. He quickly found out what a horrible idea that was, though.
The thug left the subway with his life, but certainly not his pride…
Watch: | 1 |
952 | Will the next US president be a psycho lesbian? (plus 2 breaking news videos) | Admin | By Tom Leonard with pictures and captions added by Lasha Darkmoon
Hillary Clinton faced an upset in her run for the White House two days ago after the FBI announced a fresh probe into her emails. Investigators will examine new messages to see whether she sent classified information on a private server. Just ten days before Americans go to the polls, the Democrat candidate’s bid to become the first woman US president may be derailed if it is decided she should face criminal charges. ‘I AM INNOCENT!’ Recent Polls suggest Mrs Clinton will trounce Republican rival Donald Trump, who has been struggling to fight allegations about groping women. But Mrs Clinton will now be forced on the defensive herself in the final days of their vicious election battle. FBI director James Comey had recommended earlier this year that the Department of Justice not press charges over emails sent by Mrs Clinton when she was secretary of state under Barack Obama. But he said ‘recent developments’ had prompted him to take another look. The agency has obtained new emails from an unrelated case that ‘appear pertinent’ to the investigation, said Mr Comey. A jubilant Mr Trump hailed the dramatic development of a re-opened investigation as ‘bigger than Watergate’, a reference to the corruption scandal that brought down Richard Nixon. ‘Bigger than Watergate’ The controversy has weighed heavily on the campaign, challenging Mrs Clinton’s key contention that – unlike her opponent – she would be a safe pair of hands in the White House. Mr Comey announced in July that the FBI’s 12-month investigation into Mrs Clinton’s controversial email traffic while secretary of state was over. She was criticised for using a private email server rather than the official system to transmit classified information, but escaped prosecution. In a harshly-worded criticism of her ‘extreme carelessness’ and ‘gross negligence’, Mr Comey said it was possible that hostile foreign governments had gained access to her poorly-protected account. He also flatly contradicted various Clinton claims although – in explaining why he had not recommended prosecuting her – he accepted there was no evidence she had intentionally jeopardised state secrets. The scandal has been brandished by Republicans as evidence of Mrs Clinton’s dishonesty and incompetence. Mr Comey informed Congress by letter that his agency had obtained new emails. They will be reviewed to see if they are significant and if new action against Mrs Clinton is required. Mr Comey did not give a timeframe for how long this investigation will take. The original FBI probe found that of 30,000 emails Mrs Clinton handed over to the State Department, 110 contained information that was classified at the time she sent or received them. However, another 33,000 emails went missing. They were presumed to have been permanently deleted but newly released FBI notes suggested they still exist in several locations and could be recovered. It is unclear whether any of these are involved in the new FBI inquiry. Law enforcement officials said the newly discovered emails were taken from the electronic devices of senior Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her disgraced husband Anthony Weiner during an investigation in the latter’s ‘sexting’ of girls. ANTHONY WEINER AND HUMA ABEDIN
LD : Huma is a Palestinian and rumored to be Hillary Clinton’s lesbian lover. Weiner is a Jewish sexual pervert who, incidentally, is passionate about gun control. He wants women to be disarmed, it has been said, so that sexual predators like himself can attack them more easily.
Weiner, a former Democrat congressman for New York, became embroiled in a series of scandals over exchanging sexually explicit text messages with a string of women.
He separated from Miss Abedin, vice chairman of the Clinton campaign, in August.
It is understood the FBI is investigating Weiner after it was revealed that he had been sexting a high school student who was 15 at the time. Mr Trump reacted with delight to Mrs Clinton’s 11th-hour election nightmare.
Addressing a jubilant crowd in New Hampshire, Trump said: ‘Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we’ve never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.’ Mr Trump had previously criticised the FBI and Department of Justice for not bringing charges against his election opponent. His running mate, Mike Pence, called on the FBI to immediately release all the emails pertinent to the investigation, adding: ‘The American people have a right to know.’ The Republican vice presidential candidate told a rally in Pennsylvania, that he and Donald Trump ‘commend the FBI for having the courage to reopen the case’. Chants of ‘Lock her up!’ came even before Mr Pence referenced the FBI investigation. Mrs Clinton ignored shouted questions from reporters about the new FBI investigation as she walked off her plane in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. House Speaker Paul Ryan, the most senior Republican in Congress, said she had betrayed Americans’ trust for handling ‘the nation’s most important secrets. HOT NEWS! (just sent in by our Far Eastern correspondent ‘FM’) LATEST! . . . 4-minute VIDEO | 1 |
953 | Critics See Efforts by Counties and Towns to Purge Minority Voters From Rolls - The New York Times | Michael Wines | SPARTA, Ga. — When the deputy sheriff’s patrol cruiser pulled up beside him as he walked down Broad Street at sunset last August, Martee Flournoy, a black man, was both confused and rattled. He had reason: In this corner of rural Georgia, are arrested at a rate far higher than that of whites. But the deputy had not come to arrest Mr. Flournoy. Rather, he had come to challenge Mr. Flournoy’s right to vote. The Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration was systematically questioning the registrations of more than 180 black Sparta citizens — a fifth of the city’s registered voters — by dispatching deputies with summonses commanding them to appear in person to prove their residence or lose their voting rights. “When I read that letter, I was kind of nervous,” Mr. Flournoy said in an interview. “I didn’t know what to do. ” The board’s aim, a lawsuit later claimed, was to give an edge to white candidates in Sparta’s municipal elections — and that November, a white mayoral candidate won a narrow victory. “A lot of those people that was challenged probably didn’t vote, even though they weren’t proven to be wrong,” said Marion Warren, a Sparta elections official who documented the purges and raised an alarm with advocates. “People just do not understand why a sheriff is coming to their house to bring them a subpoena, especially if they haven’t committed any crime. ” The county attorney, Barry A. Fleming, a Republican state representative, said in an interview that the elections board was only trying to restore order to an electoral process tainted earlier by corruption and incompetence. The lawsuit is overblown, he suggested, because only a fraction of the targeted voters were ultimately scratched from the rolls. “The allegations that people were denied the right to vote are the opposite of the truth,” he said. “This is probably more about politics and power than race. ” But the purge of Sparta voters is precisely the sort of electoral maneuver that once would have needed Justice Department approval before it could be put in effect. In Georgia and all or part of 14 other states, the 1965 Voting Rights Act required jurisdictions with histories of voter discrimination to receive preclearance before changing the way voter registration and elections were conducted. Three years ago, the Supreme Court declared the preclearance mandate unconstitutional, saying the blatant discrimination it was meant to prevent was largely a thing of the past. But since the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case, Shelby County v. Holder, critics argue, the blatant efforts to keep minorities from voting have been supplanted by a blizzard of more subtle changes. Most conspicuous have been state efforts like voter ID laws or cutbacks in early voting periods, which critics say disproportionately affect minorities and the poor. Less apparent, but often just as contentious, have been numerous voting changes enacted in counties and towns across the South and elsewhere around the country. They appear as Republican legislatures and election officials in the South and elsewhere have imposed statewide restrictions on voting that could depress turnout by minorities and other groups in a crucial presidential election year. Georgia and North Carolina, two states whose campaigns against voter fraud have been cast by critics as aimed at black voters, could both be contested states in autumn’s presidential election. Kristen Clarke, the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a leading advocacy group, said that before the Supreme Court’s Shelby County ruling, discriminatory laws and procedures had been blocked by the preclearance provisions. Now, she said, “We’re seeing widespread proliferation of these laws. And we are left only with the ability to mount slow, costly challenges” to their legality. Conservative critics of the Voting Rights Act say that is as it should be — that the federal government has no business usurping the role of elections monitor that citizen advocates have long and effectively played in other states. “Now every jurisdiction in the country must be treated equally in our courts when election issues are at stake,” said Edward Blum, the director of the Project on Fair Representation, a nonprofit legal program. The local voting changes have often gone unnoticed and unchallenged. A June survey by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund found that governments in six former preclearance states have closed registration or polling places, making it harder for minorities to vote. Local jurisdictions in six more redrew districts or changed election rules in ways that diluted minorities’ votes. Alabama moved last year to close 31 driver’s license offices, almost all in rural areas with large populations, as a measure. After lawsuit threats and complaints that the closings would severely curtail local voter registration, the state chose to open the offices at least one day a month. Gov. Robert J. Bentley, a Republican, has strongly denied that the closings were racially motivated. In Hernando County, Fla. Cleveland and Watauga Counties in North Carolina Baldwin County, Ala. and elsewhere, elections officials eliminated or moved polling places in largely minority districts a state court overturned the Watauga County closure. The Republican majority in North Carolina’s General Assembly redrew the political districts last year in Wake County, whose main city is Raleigh, concentrating black voters in the city center into a single voting district. (A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that map unconstitutional.) In Pasadena, Tex. officials eliminated two District Council seats in largely Hispanic areas in 2014 and replaced them with seats chosen largely by white voters. Hispanic voters have filed a federal lawsuit seeking to undo the change. In County, Ga. in February, the elections board moved a polling place in a predominantly black neighborhood from a gymnasium that was being renovated to the county sheriff’s office. Officials changed the location to a church after a petition drive legally forced a reversal. While those changes took place in states that once were wholly or partly under Justice Department supervision, other restrictions have been adopted by mostly Republican legislatures and election officials in states never cited for voting discrimination. Wisconsin’s unusually stringent photo ID law is the object of a federal lawsuit. A South Dakota county is in litigation over equal access to its polling places for Native Americans. The effect on voter turnout is impossible to measure, but Ms. Clarke of the Lawyers’ Committee offers one barometer: So far in the 2016 primary election cycle, an election hotline run by the committee and others has fielded more than 22, 000 questions and complaints from voters. That is more than 10 times the number received by this point in 2012, although those presidential primary contests were considerably less pitched than the current ones. Georgia has seen a litany of changes in — and challenges to — voting procedures since the Shelby County decision. A federal lawsuit accuses that state of illegally purging its voter rolls in a recent period, the 372, 000 voters scrubbed from the rolls exceeded the number of new voters who were added. The chief elections official, Secretary of State Brian P. Kemp, has called the suit frivolous. Mr. Kemp, a Republican who has crusaded against what he called the threat of voter fraud, has investigated drives by and predominantly black groups. A 2014 criminal inquiry into a group that had registered 85, 000 new voters, many of them minorities, found problems with only 25 of the registrants, and no charges were filed. Several counties have been sued over redistricting plans that dilute minority voting influence. But perhaps none of the battles is more striking than the one in Hancock County, about 100 miles southeast of Atlanta, where three in four of the roughly 10, 000 residents are black. The racial divide here is deep and prolonged the white mayor of the county seat, Sparta, made headlines in 1970 after responding to black citizens’ protests by equipping the town’s police force with submachine guns. By the 1990s, the Justice Department had invoked its preclearance authority to block measures that it said would weaken minority representation on the Sparta City Council, but political control of the county was frequently split. By last year, black politicians ran Sparta, a white majority controlled the Hancock County commission, and a furious contest was underway between black and white slates to control the next Sparta administration. The Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration was controlled by three white members — the chairwoman, appointed by a local judge, and two members appointed by the Hancock County Republican Committee — one of whom, curiously, is a Democrat. According to documents filed in a federal lawsuit in nearby Macon, the board began taking steps last August that seemed destined to tilt the playing field to the white slate’s advantage. The board first proposed to close all but one of the county’s 10 polling places, a move the N. A. A. C. P. and other minority advocates argued would disenfranchise rural blacks who could not travel long distances to vote. Board members eventually chose to eliminate just one predominantly black precinct. But around the same time, they began to winnow the county’s roll of registered voters, ordering an aide to compare the registrants’ stated addresses with those on their driver’s licenses to spot voters who had moved after registering to vote. By October, a month before the city election, the board and a private citizen who appears to have worked with its white members had challenged the legality of 187 registered voters in Sparta. The board removed 53 of them, virtually all — roughly one of every 20 voters. As a “courtesy,” court papers state, county sheriff’s deputies served summonses on the targeted voters, commanding them to defend themselves at election board meetings. Some did, and were restored to the rolls. Others reacted differently to a police officer’s knock on their door. “A lot of voters are actually calling to say they no longer wish to be on the list, so now we have people coming off the list who no longer want to vote,” Tiffany Medlock, the elections supervisor for the Hancock County elections board, told a Macon television reporter in late September. “It’ll probably affect the City of Sparta’s election in a major way. ” Mr. Warren, an who is Sparta’s elections registrar, bought a video camera and began videotaping the county elections board’s meetings. His evidence helped lead the Georgia N. A. A. C. P. the Lawyers’ Committee and other advocacy groups to sue the county elections board, demanding that voters struck from the rolls be restored unless the county could prove they were ineligible. A federal judge agreed. So far, 27 of Sparta’s 53 disenfranchised voters have been reinstated the rest have yet to be located. Hancock County officials insist they did nothing wrong. In depositions this summer, the three white elections board members said their purge of Sparta’s voter rolls not only was correct, but that they would do it again. But Julie Houk, an attorney handling the case for the Lawyers’ Committee, said the plaintiffs were determined to ensure that they do not. She said they plan to seek an injunction against future purges — and their lawsuit demands that the Justice Department reimpose preclearance reviews in the county until elections are a reality. | 0 |
954 | Your Evening Briefing: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Cultural Revolution - The New York Times | Andrea Kannapell and Sandra Stevenson | (Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. The Supreme Court unanimously decided not to rule in a major case on contraception, averting a possible deadlock. The suit, challenging rules of the Affordable Care Act, was sent back to lower courts for a compromise. Religious groups will buy insurance plans for their workers that do not cover contraception, and employees will be able to obtain that coverage from the same insurer. _____ 2. Doctors said this Massachusetts man was recovering well after undergoing the first penis transplant in the U. S. Thomas Manning, whose penis was amputated several years ago to remove a rare cancer, said he hoped his case would help reassure other men with genital injuries, especially veterans. “Don’t hide behind a rock,” he said. _____ 3. Donald Trump outlined his strategy against Hillary Clinton. “Just getting nasty” won’t work, he said, and could cost him women’s votes. Instead, he told our political reporters, he will portray her as enabling Bill Clinton’s infidelities, hold her responsible for the Benghazi attacks and challenge her as fundamentally corrupt. He’s also urging Bernie Sanders to consider running as a candidate. _____ 4. Oregon’s primaries and Kentucky’s Democratic one are on Tuesday. Mrs. Clinton has been campaigning in Kentucky for the last couple of days, stressing her plans to revitalize the economy and her support for the coal industry. Mr. Sanders took his campaign to Puerto Rico, criticizing Wall Street banks for the territory’s crippling debt. A group of big unions pledged to boycott the Democrats’ ambitious operation unless they cut ties with Thomas Steyer, a manager who has spent millions to fight climate change. _____ 5. Dogs are at the forefront of a new approach to improve human health. Researchers are testing rapamycin, a drug that appears to delay the onset of aging in mice, to see if it has any canine side effects, before undertaking human tests. (The dogs’ owners are thrilled at the possibility of lengthening their pets’ lives.) The overall goal is to target the biology that underlies human aging, which is the greatest risk factor for the biggest killers in the developed world: heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and cancer. _____ 6. Venezuela’s economic crisis, set off by collapsing oil prices, has metastasized into a health crisis. Hospitals and clinics have little medicine, and even less in the way of sterile equipment. Some lack even sufficient water to wash blood from surgical tables. Deaths among new mothers in government hospitals have multiplied, and deaths of their newborns have skyrocketed more than a hundredfold. _____ 7. “The students brought elderly people into the school and beat them. They beat their teachers and principals. There was nothing in the way of law. ” That’s a Chinese composer who now lives in France, remembering the Cultural Revolution, a decade of political upheaval unleashed by Mao Zedong. The Communist Party’s main newspaper broke a general silence about the 50th anniversary of the era’s beginning, writing, “We sum up and absorb the lessons of history in order to use it as a mirror to better advance. ” _____ 8. This week’s roundup of TV finales includes “Jane the Virgin” (9 p. m. Eastern, The CW) “ ” (Wednesday, 9:30 p. m. ABC) “Empire” (Wednesday, 9 p. m. Fox) and “Shark Tank” (Friday, 9 p. m. ABC). And our entertainment team recommends taking advantage of iTunes’ deals to rent “Sicario” with Emily Blunt or Spike Lee’s “ . ” Above, the stars of “Empire. ” _____ 9. A host of media organizations in the Bay Area — including television and radio stations, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, Mother Jones and online publications — have set June 29 as their target date to publish comprehensive reports on homelessness. It’s a pervasive problem in a city where the tech boom has sent rents ever upward. “We want the full force of the Fourth Estate to bear down on this problem,” an editor said. _____ 10. Finally, President Obama honored 13 police officers with the Medal of Valor, the nation’s highest award for public safety officers. This Los Angeles officer, Donald Thompson, was when he dashed across a highway to pull an unconscious man from a burning car, suffering serious burns in the process. Mr. Obama promised to listen and learn from the officers, and to provide the resources they need to do their jobs. “Our country needs that right now,” he said. _____ 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 the Weekend Briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 0 |
955 | null | Ian | If this is really true our leaders are sicker than I thought. Its madness and and the people need to rise up in protest | 1 |
956 | Indiana Parents Lose Their Baby and 2 Years of Their Lives in Jail for “Abuse” They Say Never Happened | Admin - Orissa | Indiana Parents Lose Their Baby and 2 Years of Their Lives in Jail for “Abuse” They Say Never Happened Laura Gellinger and Dylan Day with baby Jackson. Photo used with permission from the family.
by Health Impact News/MedicalKidnap.com Staff
An Indiana couple watches their mailbox with dread, waiting for the papers they hope will never come – papers saying that their young son has been adopted out.
Laura Gellinger and Dylan Day haven’t seen their son in over 2 years, after they took their then 3 month old baby to the hospital for a minor injury and were subsequently accused of child abuse. They each spent 2 years in jail and are currently on probation after their son was found to have multiple fractures in various stages of healing. For some reason, the family alleges that they were not shown the x-rays. According to Laura’s mother Jamie Gellinger:
They didn’t show us proof of anything!
A family history of osteoporosis, on both sides, was ignored, and there was only minimal testing for any other possible medical explanation for baby Jackson Day’s alleged injuries. There are reportedly numerous issues with the way the case was handled, as well as arguably inadequate representation, and a family has been torn apart in the meantime.
Could this be a case of innocent parents being unjustly accused, and imprisoned, for something that they didn’t do? Laura’s parents believe so, and Laura and Dylan maintain that they don’t know what actually happened, and that they never hurt their baby.
The fact that they had no explanation for the fractures discovered by the hospital was apparently used against them. However, parents with children with brittle bones generally had no previous indication of any problems, and thus have no explanation for something they didn’t know was happening. Too often, they find that the doctors that they look to for help would sooner accuse them of abuse, rather than search for a medical explanation.
Courts and judges across the U.S. are increasingly overturning Shaken Baby abuse convictions, as most of these cases do not present the science against “Shaken Baby Syndrome,” and the medical evidence that can support injuries apart from parental abuse.
See: University of Michigan Law School Awarded $250K to Learn How to Defend Shaken Baby Syndrome Cases
This story from Indiana shares many details in common with other stories that Health Impact News has covered where innocent parents were falsely accused of abuse when there are legitimate medical conditions that caused the injuries to their children.
Local media published the side of the story that Child Protective Services presented. Dylan Day and Laura Gellinger would like the opportunity to tell their side of the story – a side that has never been heard publicly, but which leaves many unanswered questions, and challenges the integrity of the investigation that led to the loss of their son and to their imprisonment.
Here is their story:
Laura and Dylan were young, just 19 and 20 when Jackson was born. They had never been in any trouble with the law and had no history of any kind of violence. Laura has always loved babies, and had dreams of becoming a nurse one day. According to Greg Gellinger, Laura’s father, the couple lived in a nice mobile home near her parents, and were excited about preparing for the arrival of their little one. Excited about the upcoming arrival of their little one. Photo source: Day family.
During her pregnancy, Laura reports that she took Prilosec for heartburn during mid-pregnancy. Her vitamin D levels were reportedly low.
Prilosec is a Proton Pumb Inhibitor (PPI) often used as an antacid. We asked a clinical radiologist if Prilosec during pregnancy could contribute to brittle bones in the baby.
The known consequences are many including reduced absorption of Calcium, Magnesium, B12, vitamin C, copper. The bones can be affected by nearly all of these deficiencies (except B12). This is very well known.
Since infant metabolism is different than maternal, what do we know on the outcomes to fetus? Almost nothing. While there are many studies which claim there are no problems with PPI use in pregnancy, none actually measured bone quality in any meaningful way, thus were only recording severe congenital defects.
In a nutshell, there is biological plausibility that use in pregnancy is a sign of nutritional deficiencies and can further result in fragile bone states to mom and fetus.
Jackson was born at 41 weeks after an induced labor led to an emergency cesarean section on March 6, 2014. He weighed 7 lbs, 11 oz. Formula and Vaccines
Though Laura attempted to breastfeed, she says that didn’t go well, and Jackson was put on formula. During his first few months, he was healthy and happy except for some issues with gas. He spit up a lot and showed symptoms of reflux, which is a sign of vitamin D deficiency. Doctors recommended Mylicon drops, and his formula was changed several times. Typically, he only cried when his diaper was being changed or when he had gas.
Laura kept all of the doctor and WIC appointments. Jackson got all of the recommended vaccines according to the typical schedule. At 2 months of age, he received 8 vaccines in one day. Sweaty Head – Missed Sign of Rickets
Baby Jackson sweated a lot at night, especially around his head and back. Laura says that he would often soak through his pjs, and they had to put him to sleep in a short-sleeved onesie because he would sweat so much. Laura and Dylan just assumed he was hot-natured.
However, a sweaty head is a classic sign of rickets, discussed in the older textbooks. It is often overlooked, but Dr. David Ayoub discussed the symptom in an interview with Dr. Mercola:
I would be very concerned if a baby is perspiring heavily at night, especially around the face, head, and neck. They’re described as soaking their pillows. They had to change the sheets, because they’re so wet. That’s one of the odd, lesser-known signs of infantile rickets. Trip to Hospital has Disastrous Results
The family got him a swing, and he loved it. Sometimes, he would pull a leg up and rest it on the tray of the swing. Laura says that she noticed a bump on his ankle that she assumed came from the swing, so she called the doctor’s office about it on Friday, June 14. They left a message, but didn’t hear back from the doctor’s office that day, so they planned to take him in the following Monday to check on it. Photo courtesy of the family.
Meanwhile, there was a family reunion on Saturday. It was Father’s Day weekend. After a long day of being loved on by various relatives, Jackson went down for a nap with his pacifier. He was 3 months old and was teething at the time. He was a bit fussy and fighting sleep, turning his head back and forth as he lay on his tummy.
A short time later, Laura says she heard him crying and checked on him. She was alarmed to see blood around his mouth and on the sheet where his head was. Laura’s mother Jamie went with Laura and Dylan to take him in to Reid Hospital in Richmond.
None of them were prepared for what would happen next.
They learned that the frenulum on the baby’s upper lip was torn. The medical records describe the “abrasion” as “small” and “superficial,” and they note that 2 teeth were just beginning to emerge. A nurse reportedly reassured the family that she had seen injuries like this, from teething or fussy babies moving their heads back and forth on the bed with a pacifier in their mouth.
What the family didn’t realize was that the state of Indiana has a policy that a report must be filed with the Department of Child Services any time that there is an injury of any kind to a child’s face or head:
Child Protective Services was, indeed, called, and social worker Amy Benton came to the hospital. When Laura began crying, her mother Jamie says that she walked her outside to get some air while Dylan held the baby. X-Rays and Hospital Chaos
On their way out, Jamie overheard 2 nurses in the hallway discussing another case in horrified whispers. There was allegedly another baby boy at the hospital the same age as Jackson, and the nurses were shocked at the bruises and multiple broken bones in the baby.
Shortly after that time, the emergency room doctor, Dr. Jamie Brummett, ordered a full skeletal survey for Jackson. This is the typical protocol when child abuse is suspected. The family thought that it was only going to be one or two x-rays.
Jamie describes the atmosphere at the hospital that night as “chaotic.” Dylan reports that he took his son into the room for the x-rays. He noticed that there were already 2 sets of x-rays hanging up in the room that were from someone else. It appeared to be from a child, he says. He also reports that the nurses were having problems with the machines, and had to keep re-doing the x-rays. His son’s x-rays were then printed out in the room, so by the time they left the room, there were x-rays from 2 different people in the room. Dylan Day and baby – Easter photo used by permission from the family. Another Case of a Doctor’s Accusations Being Taken as “Truth”
Shortly after, Dr. Brummett and the social worker met with the parents and grandparents and informed them that Jackson had multiple fractures in various stages of healing, including some ribs, and broken arms and legs. The family was stunned, and both Laura and Dylan began crying. They still don’t understand how some of the fractures were supposed to be several weeks old, but no one had seen any signs of them during any of the previous doctor visits and WIC visits. Jackson had not acted like he was in any pain, and there were no bruises on the baby. Laura says there were:
None at all. That’s what makes no sense. There was never any abnormal crying, either.
There was nothing that precipitated this. That’s what we couldn’t understand. There is something that is not right. I know I didn’t hurt my child, and my boyfriend didn’t hurt my child.
Immediately, Dylan asked for testing to be done, because osteoporosis runs in his family. His sister had been diagnosed with it as a teenager. It is also on Laura’s side of the family, and Laura’s mother has been diagnosed with osteoporosis. Those concerns were reportedly dismissed. Dr. Jamie Brummett. Should doctors have the power to put parents in jail and destroy families simply based on x-rays? Image source.
Dr. Brummett allegedly told the social worker and the detective that the fractures were due to non-accidental injury. The family reports that, after she made that statement, the investigators never looked further or checked for any alternate explanation. Investigators reportedly had multiple theories, but all of them involved accusations of abuse: Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS), the baby was yanked, or jerked, or maybe it was from being swaddled too tightly. Or the parents squeezed the baby. “Consistent with Non-Accidental Injury,” But Also Consistent with Other Medical Conditions
The fractures were reportedly consistent with non-accidental injury, but, as Health Impact News has reported many times, multiple unexplained fractures are also consistent with numerous medical conditions, such as osteogenesis imperfecta, infantile rickets, vitamin D deficiency, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and even vaccine damage. A hallmark of good medical care is careful investigation to rule out other medical conditions before accusing a parent of abuse, but all too often, that is not what parents find when they take their children to the emergency room.
See related articles, including another recent story from Indiana: 5 Children Kidnapped from Family in Missouri When Baby with Low Vitamin D Found with Broken Bones
There are more stories just like these, and they often read like they all came from the same script. Most involve parents who take a child to the emergency room for one thing, only to have their child be subjected to full skeletal x-rays. Someone discovered multiple fractures in various healing stages that no one ever previously suspected, and the parents have no explanation. The child is then taken from their family, and other possible medical conditions are ignored. Many of the families learn later that their child did, indeed, have some type of brittle bone or other medical condition.
Others, like Laura Gellinger and Dylan Day, are never given the opportunity to find out if there is a medical condition. Once Reid Hospital’s Dr. Brummett identified the fractures as abuse, the family says that no one even entertained other possibilities.
Laura and Dylan were taken to the police station and interrogated late into the night. The detective reportedly believed Laura abused the baby because, even though they had occasional babysitters, she was the one with the baby most of the time. They were scared to death, with good reason. Their son was placed into foster care the next day – on Father’s Day.
They didn’t have an explanation, because the young parents, who were 19 and 20 at the time, didn’t know what had happened. Experts assert that a baby with a brittle bone condition can break a bone with something as innocent as a diaper change or change of clothes. It doesn’t take much, because their bones are so fragile. They recalled an incident where a dog had jumped on the baby when he was 2 to 3 weeks old. They wondered if he could have hurt his leg on the swing. Dylan says that every possibility they came up with was rejected. Baby Jackson at his 2-month checkup. Before that night at the hospital, no one mentioned any possibility of abuse. Photo supplied by family.
Lack of explanation for injuries is seen by the child abuse industry as being evidence of abuse, when, in some cases, it simply means that there is a medical explanation that the parents have neither the knowledge nor the experience to know, and that the doctors they turn to for help refuse to differentiate between abuse and legitimate medical conditions. Lack of explanation is seen as proof of guilt.
They asked to see the x-rays, but Detective Tom Legear reportedly told them that, by law, they don’t have to show them the x-rays, and that it was up to DCS to show them the x-rays if they wanted. Laura and Dylan were never permitted to see the x-rays.
For the first 2 weeks after Jackson was placed into foster care, his parents were permitted to visit him 3 times a week for 2 hour visits. During that time, DCS took Jackson to Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis to be evaluated by a Child Abuse Specialist.
On July 1, 2014, about a half dozen police cars came to Dylan and Laura’s home and the couple was arrested. They have not seen their baby since then. Parents not Adequately Defended in Court
Their case went to court. Public defenders were appointed for Laura and Dylan, but the family does not believe that they were adequately represented. Greg Gellinger, Laura’s father, referred to the whole court system when he told Health Impact News :
They’re all in cahoots with each other. The public defenders are a joke in this town.
He reports that his daughter’s public defender told him and his wife that he had such a big caseload that he didn’t care whether or not Laura and Dylan did it or not. On one occasion, Laura reportedly went to see him in his office about her case, but he had a ballgame playing and paid no attention to his client.
To this day, the senior Gellinger beats himself up for not being able to afford a good attorney. He feels like he let his daughter down:
I knew neither one of them done it. I thought we had a good case, but the public defenders didn’t do anything.
He said that social worker Amy Benton approached him at the courthouse, telling him not to take it personally. Greg was incredulous:
What if it was your daughter and you knew she didn’t do it?
This isn’t simply the rantings of an emotional father upset that his child was arrested. There are a number of anomalies in the way that the case was reportedly handled, which cast serious doubts on their guilt.
The attorneys never obtained the x-rays or any more medical records than those that the parents already had. The family was told that they have no right to see the x-rays. To this day, there has only been one occasion that any family member has seen any x-rays, but they have no way of knowing if the x-rays are actually of Jackson’s bones.
There were only a couple of x-rays used in court, but there was no name on the x-rays. Based on the experience that Dylan had in the hospital, he has no way of being assured that the x-rays he saw in court belonged to Jackson. They could easily have been mixed up with those of the other child who was in the hospital the same night.
The attorney challenged the x-rays due to the lack of a name on them, but the court reportedly allowed them, simply based on the word of the doctor. Grandmother Jamie with baby Jackson. Photo courtesy of the family.
The question arises: did Jackson actually have any broken bones? Laura’s mother told Health Impact News that they have never actually see any evidence that Jackson ever sustained any injuries, besides the torn frenulum, which she sees as easily explainable.
Detective Tom Legear allegedly told the family that the hospital ran a standard blood test to rule out a bone disease, but again, no one in the family or their attorneys has ever seen it. To the family’s knowledge, that simple test is the only test that was reportedly performed.
There is another test that could be performed, but the judge reportedly decided that it would cost too much money to order that test. Social Workers Make False Statements
At one point, social worker Amy Benton accused the parents of not ever taking Jackson to the doctor or vaccinating him – facts that were easily proven incorrect. She had allegedly pulled the records of a different baby with the same name.
Another time, a DCS supervisor, Karen Bowen, reportedly talked about “bruises all over his body,” but, again, that was another baby, not Jackson. Medical records from the night in question clearly state that no bruising was noted.
Amy Benton alleged that the baby’s pacifier caused Jackson’s mouth injury, but several family members recall seeing her throw the pacifier away in the trash at the hospital. When the judge asked where it was, she reportedly said that Detective Legear had it. Neither were able to produce the pacifier.
Benton also allegedly told the court that the couple didn’t have adequate shelter or food or clothing. Greg and Jamie assert that this was never true, and that the detective and social worker went to the home and photographed furniture, food, diapers, and other supplies.
However, they don’t know what happened to the photos, because they were not presented in court. Their mobile home is “really nice,” according to the the Gellingers. This is just one more example of the DCF system painting an alternate picture of reality to the court, one which makes the family look much worse than they are.
The family says that the detective and the judge agreed that, since Laura and Dylan were 1st time parents, they probably lost patience with their baby and hurt him, an assumption which the young parents vehemently deny.
The court reportedly was never told that both sides of the family have brittle bone conditions.
Local media reported that Dr. Brummett said that the baby weighed 10 lbs at 3 months, but should have weighed closer to 13 lbs. This is an error. The medical reports state that he weighed 5.56 kg on the night of June 14, which translates 12.26 lbs, not much under 13 lbs. Parent’s Coerced into Plea Bargain
Once Dr. Brummett testified to the court, the court-appointed attorneys advised their clients to accept a plea deal, telling them that DCS always uses her, and once they use her, they always win.
It’s a done deal.
Laura Gellinger and Dylan Day were originally charged with battery, but that was dropped because there was no evidence that they themselves had hurt Jackson. The occasional babysitters allowed for the possibility that someone other than the parents hurt the baby.
There was a charge for neglect of a dependent for failure to get medical treatment, but because they took him to the E.R., that charge was dropped.
However, Laura and Dylan report that they felt bullied into accepting the charge of neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury, alleging their responsibility for his being hurt in their care. That was the plea bargain. They were sentenced to 10 years in prison, with 5 suspended, and 3 of those years as probation. Laura Gellinger and her adoring baby before the accusation of child abuse. Photo courtesy of the family. Other Prisoners Believe in Laura’s Innocence
They are currently on probation after each served 2 years in prison. Laura was released on April 1, and Dylan came home on May 7.
Laura spent the first 13 months of jail in solitary confinement as protective custody. She went into the general population after requesting to be removed from solitary confinement, and, as feared, she was initially harassed and bullied. She reports that they “laid off” harassing her after she let other prisoners see the evidence. They could see that something wasn’t right. She says that her bunkmate was in tears after reading the medical reports:
You don’t belong here.
Laura recalls that the other prisoners once called her to the TV because the Dr. Phil show was covering a story that was very similar to hers. In early March, just before Laura’s release, Dr. Phil aired his coverage of Marty Coleman’s case – a brittle bones story that Health Impact News first brought to public attention after local media inaccurately painted the mother out to be a monster.
See story:
Laura’s bunkmate crocheted a scarf for Jackson, but Laura has not had an opportunity to give it to him. She doesn’t know if that will ever happen. Home Now, Hoping for a Miracle
Both Dylan and Laura are home now, and they are still together. Their parental rights to their son have been terminated. They tried to appeal the TPR decision, but report that the request was denied because they still have no explanation for how the injuries occurred.
They have been told that their son is being adopted out and that papers could arrive in the mail at any time. Laura recently contacted us, saying:
I have been searching and searching to find a doctor or someone to please help me prove my innocence and get my child back … Please help!
They haven’t seen their son since he was 3 months old. The grandparents have been completely cut off as well from their grandson. The only hope they can see of reversing the decisions that have been made is for them to take their case to the state Supreme Court, but that would require money for an attorney, money that they don’t have. According to Laura:
I’ve lost my child. I’ve lost 2 years of my life – for something I didn’t do.
The Governor of Indiana is Vice-President-elect Mike Pence. His office may be reached at 317-232-4567. He can be contacted here , and his Facebook page is here .
Senator Jeff Raatz may be reached at 317-232-9400, or contacted here .
Representative Richard “Dick” Hamm may be reached at 317-232-9769, or contacted here .
Comment on this article at MedicalKidnap.com. Support the cause of Medical Kidnapping by purchasing our new book! If you know people who are skeptical and cannot believe that medical kidnapping happens in the U.S. today, this is the book for them! Backed with solid references and real life examples, they will not be able to deny the plain evidence before them, and will become better educated on this topic that is destroying the American family. 1 Book – 228 pages | 1 |
957 | The Rolling Stones Paint It Blue on Their New Album - The New York Times | Jon Pareles | Beverly Hills, Calif. — More than five decades after they started, the Rolling Stones are a rock institution still running on intuition, impulse and chemistry. “Blue Lonesome,” their new album, arrived as a happy accident — or, as Keith Richards said with his piratical cackle, “as if we’d been ordered to do it from some higher being. ” It started as a break from their own material, then suddenly turned into a throwback: the Stones returning to their days as a cover band, knocking out songs live in the studio and recording an entire album in three days. “Blue Lonesome” is the first studio album the Stones have made since “A Bigger Bang” in 2005 it’s due for release on Dec. 2. Talking about it put smiles on band members’ faces in an string of interviews last month at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, a few days after the band’s jubilant set at the first weekend of the Desert Trip festival in Indio, Calif. “This album,” said the drummer, Charlie Watts, “is what I’ve always wanted the Stones to do. It’s what we do best and what we did when we first got together. ” In conversation, they play roles: Mr. Watts as and supportive, the guitarist Ronnie Wood still treating himself as a new band member (he joined in 1975) Mr. Richards as the roots music fan and Mick Jagger as the extrovert and . “Blue Lonesome” is not the batch of new songs that the band has been laboring over intermittently for years between bursts of touring, like the Latin American tour that concluded with an unprecedented concert in Havana and that has been the subject of two documentaries: “Olé Olé Olé” and “Havana Moon. ” In recent years, the band has tried to follow up on touring momentum with recording sessions. But the new songs, Mr. Jagger said with a frown, currently add up to “half an album. ” Mr. Wood said new songs need time to settle in. “It’s like putting it on top of the strainer and seeing what soaks through by the time you come back to them again,” he explained. “The lumps that are left on top after time has gone by, that’s what you make your dough out of. ” He added, “It wouldn’t surprise me if we recut them all again. It’s one of those things. ” Instead, “Blue Lonesome” is a set of a dozen blues songs that were originally recorded, mostly in the by titans like Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter and Jimmy Reed. It was the breakthrough era of electric Chicago blues: a modernized, urbanized, amplified update of music from the Deep South. “These guys were basically inventing,” Mr. Richards said. “They had nothing to fall back on. They’d got these new guitars and amplifiers. They were all feeling their way through it. So there’s a feeling about that particular period of the blues which we could identify with, because you could hear the guys egging each other on and wondering where it’s going to go. ” The style was barely a decade old when it changed the lives of the English teenagers who would become the Rolling Stones, along with a generation of musicians worldwide. The rest is rock history, as the blues has been transplanted, revamped, venerated, repeatedly rediscovered and sometimes plundered, with its ideas ricocheting across cultural and geographical divides long before the more recent discussions about cultural appropriation. The blues became one of the foundations of rock, though its influence has been waning in recent decades. “Sounds have changed,” Mr. Jagger said. “What makes you excited now is not the same. In music, everything’s different. But the blues still have something about them that’s really good. I love all kinds of music, and I still listen to the blues. ” The songs for “Blue Lonesome” were all on his iPod. Half a century on, playing vintage blues songs is an act of preservation and reclamation — and for the Rolling Stones, who have always been careful to credit their sources, a matter of continuity. “We’ve known these songs for 50 years,” Mr. Jagger said. “It is a learned idiom. It’s like me singing in Italian. If I’d been doing that for 50 years, you wouldn’t ask me, ‘How do you feel about singing in Italian?’ I don’t feel anything about singing in Italian, I always sang in Italian.’ It works most of the time. It’s like, you just have to go with it and suspend disbelief. “To me it’s a homage to all those people that we’ve always loved since we were kids,” he added. “I can see why people might find it vaguely not correct, but we’ve always done it. And the artists themselves, they never objected. ” “Blue Lonesome” was recorded nearly a year ago, on the spur of the moment. While planning for recording sessions, Mr. Richards recalled, he emailed Mr. Wood, urging him to learn “Blue and Lonesome” by the singer and harmonica player Little Walter. “If Keith says something like that, there’s a reason for it,” said Don Was, the Stones’ longtime . “I don’t think he meant, ‘Go do this because we’re going to do a blues album.’ More like, ‘Let’s apply the principles of “Blue and Lonesome” to what we’re doing here. ’” The sessions took place in December at British Grove Studios, a West London complex owned by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits. There, the Stones were recording together in a large open room with a setup generally used to record classical music: a tall, contraption called a Decca tree, which uses overhead microphones to capture what a conductor hears. (The tree was devised at Decca Records, the Stones’ first label British Grove also has a vintage Decca mixing console, Mr. Was said.) It was a deliberately configuration: not layering isolated instruments, but demanding an live approach. The band was “a little unsure of the studio and the sound of it,” Mr. Richards recalled. So it fell back on the blues. “I looked at Ronnie and said, ‘Let’s put a hold on this new stuff while we try and figure things out and get the room warmed up. O. K.: ‘Blue and Lonesome.’ “And it comes out that suddenly the room’s opened up and the sound is there,” Mr. Richards continued. “And then, ‘That was damned good, man!’ Mick turns around and says, ‘Let’s do Howlin’ Wolf’s “Commit a Crime”’ — and it really just led from there. No preplanning, no real instigation. Suddenly Mick just jumped on this train that he’s so good at. ” Mr. Richards recalled thinking: “Keep rolling, keep rolling! I don’t care how many you do — just catch it while the man’s in the mood. ” He laughed. “It just bloody happened. That was the amazing thing and the beauty of it,” he said. At the end of the first session, the Stones had recorded five songs. “No one said, ‘We should do a blues album,’” Mr. Was said. “It’s like, when a guy’s throwing a you don’t talk to him about it in the middle of the game. ” Still, Mr. Was suggested that Mr. Jagger choose more songs band members who didn’t know them learned them over a weekend. With further serendipity, Eric Clapton was also at British Grove, doing some mixing, and in the next session he ended up sitting in on two songs, joining the improvisational weave of guitars. Mr. Richards was happy to, as he said, “Just roll it, decide later what to do with it,” he said. “It was only at the end, when we’d got 12 tracks and Don Was and I were talking together, and Mick was there and he was saying, ‘This is an album. You can’t chop this up. ’” Mr. Wood recalled, “I got a text from Mick saying, ‘The blues tracks are really sounding good.’ And I thought, is this from the Jagger that I know? Because he never, never says that things are happening well. ” Mr. Jagger described the album as “an exercise in sprezzatura” — a term for hiding skillful effort behind seeming nonchalance. “You’ve got to concentrate, but it can’t sound like it’s difficult. And it doesn’t,” he said. The Stones tucked lifelong blues scholarship behind the kick and yowl of the music. As they delved into individual songs, the band praised the studio musicians who forged the Chicago sound: guitarists like Howlin’ Wolf’s sideman Hubert Sumlin (with whom Mr. Richards shared regular jam sessions) and drummers like Freddy Below and Earl Phillips. “When I was doing my song choices, I was thinking about tempos, moods, keys, different emotions,” Mr. Jagger said. But feel came first. “They’ve still got to blow you away a bit. They’ve still got to be exciting. ” The songs on “Blue Lonesome” are, deliberately, choices rather than war horses. The Jimmy Reed song, for instance, isn’t “Big Boss Man” but the spooky, echoey, melancholy “Little Rain. ” From Howlin’ Wolf, Mr. Jagger chose two tales of fierce, comic romantic strife and churning rhythm: “Just Like I Treat You” and “Commit a Crime. ” Little Walter’s songs — there are four on the album — fell naturally into Mr. Jagger’s vocal range and gave him a chance to play lots of harmonica. Many of the songs elude the regularity of blues they add or skip beats, start vocals in unexpected places, lurch and leap. have often flattened out those quirks, but the Stones maintain them. “It’s not like rock music or programmed drum music,” Mr. Jagger said. “It pulsates in a very weird way, where each bar is different. And that’s what’s interesting about this kind of music when it’s played properly. It has a swerve, and it has a dynamism about it. ” Mr. Jagger also noted that while the songs were recorded almost entirely in real time, the final mixes were painstaking. “I just looked back at the original records, and we wanted some of these moods,” he said. “Every track is different. We all thought it was going to be easy but it wasn’t. ” Still, after more than a decade between albums, “Blue Lonesome” may have loosened up the Stones for their own new songs. Sessions for the next studio album are still in progress. “We did things after we’d done this and I’d say, ‘O. K. just play it! It’s only got three chords, just play it, stop thinking about it,’” Mr. Jagger said. “‘Just imagine this is a blues. ’” | 0 |
958 | Uber Extends an Olive Branch to Local Governments: Its Data - The New York Times | Mike Isaac | The company Uber and local governments often do not play well together. Uber pays little heed to regulation while city officials scramble to keep up with the company’s rapid deployment and surging popularity. But now, with a new product, Uber is offering a tiny olive branch to its municipal critics. The company on Sunday unveiled Movement, a website it hopes will persuade city planners to consider Uber as part of urban development and transit systems in the future. The site, which Uber will invite planning agencies and researchers to visit in the coming weeks, will allow outsiders to study traffic patterns and speeds across cities using data collected by tens of thousands of Uber vehicles. Users can use Movement to compare average trip times across certain points in cities and see what effect something like a baseball game might have on traffic patterns. Eventually, the company plans to make Movement available to the general public. If urban planners embrace the data, that could work toward a future Uber has long dreamed of, one in which the company’s transportation options are woven into municipal planning. “Our relationships with cities have typically been uneven, but there are a lot of places around the world where Uber and the cities we operate in have the same goals,” Andrew Salzberg, head of transportation policy at Uber, said in an interview. “We operate better in a world that has policy grounded on data. ” The collected trip data is made anonymous and aggregated, Uber said, which it hopes will assuage user privacy concerns. That data, Uber said, will most likely be much more reliable than what is typically used by urban planners, many of whom hire agencies to study traffic patterns over time. Often, that data is expensive, and it can be out of date by the time it is analyzed. Uber argues that its data is more reliable because all of its drivers use smartphones equipped with accelerometers and global positioning technology. One challenge for Uber: improving upon the rocky partnerships it forged in the early, data sharing deals it struck two years ago. In a widely publicized move in January 2015, Uber announced a deal with the city of Boston in which the company planned to share some anonymous data, with many of the same urban planning aspirations it has today. But that deal quickly soured. Boston officials said the agreement was not practical for city planning and development because it restricted what agencies the city could share the data with and because the data came only in quarterly batches. Boston city employees also grew frustrated with the lack of useful data being shared and Uber’s seeming lack of understanding of how to deal with city governments. “The totality of Uber and Lyft drivers in Boston represent what is effectively the addition of another transit line,” Jascha chief information officer at Boston’s Department of Innovation Technology, said in an interview. “The fact that we’re dealing with a whole new line that we don’t have data on and can’t integrate it into our planning is sort of ridiculous. ” Uber seemed to take the criticism to heart. After the Boston partnership, the company created a team to develop an approach to sharing data with city planners across the world. Led by Jordan Gilbertson, a product manager at Uber, that project eventually became the new website, Movement. City officials said that they appreciated user data privacy concerns but that they also hoped to see more useful information from Uber. Mr. shared a list of detailed requests that could aid future urban development, like demand patterns around tenant housing, locations with likely potholes and the most common pickup and locations. Uber maintains that it plans to release more data to cities over time as it rolls out the Movement tool to a wider audience of researchers and to the public. But the company said it would balance that demand for information with concerns about user privacy and the need to protect competitive data that could prove valuable to rivals like Lyft, Hailo and Grab, which are vying for riders across many of the same markets. “Ideally, we’ll someday find what that middle ground looks like,” Mr. said. | 0 |
959 | Wilders: Put Dutch First, Not ’Brussels, Africa and Asylum Seekers’ | Jack Montgomery | Geert Wilders, the Eurosceptic, migration candidate who heads the insurgent Party for Freedom (PVV) has blasted incumbent head of government Mark Rutte as a “prime minister for foreigners” urging voters to put the Netherlands first in a fiery debate. [“I say to all Dutch people at home, when you go to vote on Wednesday, if you want to put our country up for sale and ensure that our money goes to asylum seekers, Brussels and Africa instead of our own people, vote for the VVD” — the political party which Rutte heads. Wilders also called on Rutte to expel Turkey’s ambassador, after the country’s authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan denigrated the Dutch as “Nazi remnants” and threatened the Netherlands with “harsh retaliation” for preventing Turkish government ministers from staging a political rally in Rotterdam. Wilders said anything less would be “an insult to us and our police officers” after Turkish migrants and dual nationals rioted in support of their native country’s Islamist president. But Rutte ruled the measure out. “It’s the difference between tweeting from the sofa and running a country,” he said, in reference to the robust message to Turkish rioters which Wilders broadcasted in the wake of the unrest. 🇳🇱🇹🇷 Geert Wilders’s message to Turks: ”You are not welcome here!” #Turkey #Rotterdam pic. twitter. — Keith Walker (@KeithWalkerNews) March 12, 2017, “You are no Europeans, and you will never be,” he said. “An Islamic state like Turkey does not belong to Europe. All the values Europe stands for — freedom, democracy, human rights — are incompatible with Islam. “Turkey voted for Erdoğan, a dangerous Islamist who raises the flag of Islam. We do not want more, but less Islam. So Turkey, stay away from us. You are not welcome here. ” Rutte cited a desire to avoid escalating the dispute with Turkey as his reason for failing to act — although the Turks have already effectively expelled the Dutch ambassador from their own capital. BREAKING: Turkey says Dutch ambassador can’t return, will advise parliament to withdraw from friendship group. — The Associated Press (@AP) March 13, 2017, The VVD leader ruled out any sort of coalition agreement with Wilders’s party, which is on course to come first in the upcoming election, casting up comments Wilders made about Moroccan criminals which resulted in controversial hate speech charges. “Since then you have radicalised still further by saying the mosques will close and you will remove Qur’ans from people’s homes,” Rutte claimed. “I will not work with a politician like that, either in government or with a supporting deal. Not ever, ever. ” Wilders did, in fact, rise in the opinion polls after the courts convicted him for his remarks. | 0 |
960 | Donald Trump: Good Education ‘Enriches Both the Mind and the Soul’ | Charlie Spiering | President Donald Trump visited St. Andrew Catholic School in Pine Hills, Florida, on Friday to draw attention to his plan to open up education opportunities to every child with school choice. [During the visit, Trump quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who hoped that “inferior education would become a thing of the past. ” He commented that the school was doing a “fantastic job” and pointed out that education at St. Andrew “enriches both the mind and the soul. ” “That’s a good education,” he added. Trump spoke to a class of about 25 students, asking them what they wanted to do with their lives and where they wanted to go to college. One student said she hoped to open her own business. “That’s a good idea. Make a lot of money, right? But don’t run for politics after,” Trump replied. Trump was joined by Florida Governor Rick Scott and Senator Marco Rubio, as well as Secretary of Education Betsy Devos. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner also joined the trip. Ivanka Trump signed one ’s cast: Might be only kid that would ever want to keep a cast on. @IvankaTrump signs 8th grader’s cast at school visit. pic. twitter. — Sarah H. Sanders (@SHSanders45) March 3, 2017, The president repeated a slogan from his speech to Congress on Tuesday, calling education the “civil rights issue of our time. ” “Betsy’s going to lead the charge, right?” he asked, looking at his choice to lead the Department of Education. “You bet,” DeVos answered. | 0 |
961 | Watch: Brad Pitt Plays Afghanistan War General in ’War Machine’ Teaser - Breitbart | Daniel Nussbaum | Brad Pitt plays Gen. Dan McMahon, a parody of Afghanistan war general Stanley McChrystal, in the first teaser trailer for Netflix’s satire film War Machine. [Here’s the full synopsis from Netflix: “A war story for our times, David Michôd (Animal Kingdom) recreates a U. S. General’s rise and fall as part reality, part savage parody — raising the specter of just where the line between them lies today. His is an absurdist look at a born leader’s march right into the dark heart of folly. At the story’s core is Brad Pitt’s sly take on one of the most polarizing war figures of a generation: successful, charismatic General Stanley McChrystal, who leapt in like a rock star to command NATO forces in Afghanistan, only to be taken down by a journalist’s exposé. ” Tilda Swinton, Ben Kingsley, Topher Grace, Will Poulter, Anthony Michael Hall and Lakeith Stanfield . War Machine is on Netflix May 26. Watch the teaser trailer above. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 0 |
962 | Two Powerful Earthquakes Strike Central Italy | Carol Adl | Posted on October 26, 2016 by Carol Adl in Sci/Environment // 0 Comments
Two powerful earthquakes struck central Italy on Wednesday, causing fear among residents still rattled by a deadly tremor in August.
An 6.0-magnitude earthquake hit the Marche region almost two hours after a 5.4-magnitude quake damaged buildings and cut power lines across the area.
There have been no reports of casualties so far.
RT reports:
The latest earthquake occurred 71 km east of Perugia, with United States Geological Survey reporting it as a 6.0-magnitude temblor, and Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology saying it was 5.9-magnitude. M5.9 #earthquake ( #terremoto ) strikes 135 km NE of #Roma ( #Italy ) 13 min ago. Updated map of its effects: pic.twitter.com/LKWAtTLmBe
— EMSC (@LastQuake) October 26, 2016
The first earthquake was detected at 7:11pm local time, about 66km to the southeast of Perugia, striking a mountainous part of the Marche region and lasting several seconds.The exact epicenter of the tremblor remains unclear, but it was relatively shallow, at about 9km below ground.
Within an hour of the first earthquake, there was a series of small but noticeable aftershocks, ranging in magnitude from 2.5 to 2.8.
“We’re in the square, all the lights are out, we can’t see, we’re counting each other to see who’s here, we still don’t know how bad the situation is,” Mauro Falcucci, mayor of Castelsantangelo sul Nera, the small commune closest to the epicenter, told Sky News by phone. “The situation is delicate. It is important to remain calm.”
The official said that the emergency is exacerbated by a downpour, and intermittent problems with mobile phone communication.
“It was a very strong, apocalyptic earthquake – people were screaming in the street, and now the lights are cut off,” said Marco Rinaldi, the mayor of Ussita, a community of 400 that was also affected by the initial earthquake.
A video posted by a Huffington Post journalist shows rubble strewn through the streets of Visso, a commune less than 10 km from the epicenter.
— Claudio Paudice (@clapaudice) October 26, 2016
The Civil Protection agency, the centralized service which is receiving infromation from dozens of tiny settlements scattered across the area, say that older buildings have been damaged, or collapsed entirely, but that no injuries have been reported. #Italy Civil Prot Agency says so far no reports of injuries following 5.4M #earthquake in central Apennines. Panicked people in streets.
— Daniele Pinto (@DanielePinto) October 26, 2016
Eyewitnesses also reported a powerful tremor in the capital on the western side of the country, more than 150 km away, saying that centuries-old buildings were shaking. It’s been almost a hour since the earthquake and my heart is still racing. I hope nothing else will happen over night or tomorrow… | 1 |
963 | Indoor Gardening Made Easy: The Nutritower! | Elina St-Onge |
I’ve always dreamed of having my own indoor garden so that I can be self-sufficient during winter, but I live in a tiny apartment and have no room for a hydroponic system… Or so I thought! Thanks to the NutriTower , this dream of mine is now possible!
The NutriTower The NutriTower is a vertical hydroponic system specifically designed for indoor use. It is the first system to use the patent-pending vertical lighting design. This technology allows you to grow more food than ever before without taking up valuable floor space! In just under 2 square feet of floor space, with up to 48 pots, it’s the most efficient method of growing food on the market.
How Does It Work? The NutriTower is a vertical hydroponic system that is simple, elegant and efficient. The patent-pending vertical lighting design and the gravity fed nutrient delivery system make this the most effective way of growing food in your home year round.
Strong custom extruded aluminium frame The only system with vertical lighting Energy efficient high output bulbs Standard 24 pot layout is highly customizable Pots are easily removed for maintenance Gravity does most of the work Large reservoir means less maintenance Quiet pump runs only a few minutes each hour Individual timers so you’re in control Small footprint allows it to be placed anywhere The NutriTower is designed to be flexible to its users needs. You can customize your systems to be more oriented toward leafy greens or fruits and vegetables or a m i x ! Because it is a hydroponic system, there is no messy soil to deal with.
My friends from the Valhalla Movement who have personally seen and interacted with the system have loved it so much they will use it in their own greenhouse inspired earthship ! If you are still not convinced why this system is awesome, click here to learn 8 reasons why the food revolution might happen in your kitchen!
Want This Technology? Visit NutriTower! The therapeutic benefits of having living plants around you has been proven again and again. Not only will you have fresh organic food, you will be saving the world from food miles (distance food travels from producer to consumer). With this new addition to your home you will be sure to have some interesting conversations as friends visit to see 5 (or more) different veggies growing in your kitchen!
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964 | Elizabeth Warren Defines Sleazy Hypocrisy | admin | Financial Markets , Market Manipulation , U.S. Economy Elizabeth Warren , Soros , Wall Street fraud admin
Look in the dictionary under the term “hypocrisy” and there has to be a picture of Elizabeth Warren. Her latest beaut is sending a letter to Trump criticizing his transition team’s ties to Wall Street.
Yet, how come Obama never received the same type of letter from her? Obama’s entire cabinet from 2008 to now is riddled with Wall Streeters. By the way, Lizzie, when the AG and former AG have law practices built around keeping Wall Street out of jail, that is a “tie to Wall Street.” I guess it’s a matter of convenience to overlook the fact that both Treasury Secretaries are and were deeply tied to Wall Street.
Oh. Wait. I almost forgot. What about your beloved Hillary? No Wall Street ties there? You certainly forgot to chat about this when you were campaigning for her. Let me review the facts starting with the fact that Wall Street firms were among her largest campaign financiers. The biggest donor was perhaps the biggest Wall Street criminal: George Soros. Speaking of which, is this guy ever going to die and leave us alone?
“Do as say, not as I do” seems to be de rigeur for the people and entities who thought Hillary’s presidency was a matter of formality. These people forgot that some segment of the public still pays some attention to the truth.
Make no mistake, I’m not issuing support for Trump. But someone needs to hold people like Miss Warren accountable. God knows her zombie, slavish supporters won’t. I remain firm in my convictions that: the good news is, Hillary lost – the bad news is, Trump won. Share this: | 1 |
965 | Rush Limbaugh: O’Reilly Departure Was Not ’Natural’ - It was a ’Campaign’ - Breitbart | Pam Key | Thursday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh called Bill O’Reilly’s departure from the Fox News Channel a “campaign,” and not a “natural” event. Limbaugh pointed to the origin of the story, which was first published in The New York Times and how it may have something to do with an internal struggle of “corporate intrigue” within Fox News. Partial transcript as follows: Why do The New York Times break the story? Out of the blue, they want to do a story on O’Reilly and Fox with whatever number of payouts to women. Where’d this come from? Nothing just comes out of the ether folks. They are not sitting there over at the New York Times waiting for ideas to pop into their head and then one second some reporter, ‘You know what I think I’m going to do a story on what a sexual harasser Bill O’Reilly is.’ That is not how it happens. The reason that it starts in The New York Times is important is because the second aspect is the corporate intrigue that I mentioned that is also behind this. It is — I don’t work there so there is no quicksand — but there is a battle for power going on there between sons of Rupert Murdoch and Rupert. And they are not conservatives my friends. In fact, they are — what is the generation before millennials? X? Their friends are all liberal, their wives. One of their wives works for the Clinton Global Initiative. One of the wives when this New York Times story, ‘You can’t keep the man on the air you just can’t this is embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to us, it’s embarrassing to dad company. You can’t do this.’ And the fact that the story ran on The New York Times was such a profound shock, sadness, and embarrassment that they felt that had to do something. That is why the fact that is started on The New York Times is crucial. There is two reason it is important. The Times is not just appearing out of nothing out of the ether. Here’s the timeline, story New York Times. How long did it take before you started hearing about massive advertiser defections, just a day, right? You think that was natural? No, this was a campaign, folks. That’s why this is so frustrating to me, even after all this time, these campaigns are not immediately spotted for what they are. Therefore, people are not able to deal with them. And this one should have been expected given what’s been going on the last two years there. Tey should have been ready for this. But see the bottom line is they were. Fox is not going to be the way it is for long. There is a massive — shakeup coming, and it is generational. It is generational and political. It is like anything else, nothing ever is constantly the same, there is change everywhere. But it has been amazingly easy to sit from a distance and watch this, it’s amazing how easy it appears, at least to me, that this massive and rapid transformation is occurring. ( RCP Video) Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 0 |
966 | Budgies demand to be released from weird people’s homes | null | Budgies demand to be released from weird people’s homes 31-10-16 BUDGERIGARS imprisoned by weirdos around the UK have issued a statement pleading to be set free. The small birds trapped in slightly creepy living rooms and conservatories called for the public’s support in freeing them from the pensioners and loons holding them captive. Budgie Roy Hobbs, who lives in a cage full of mirrors, swings and bells in Hull said: “We don’t guard people’s house, we don’t like to be cuddled, our plumage is offensively luminous and we shit relentlessly. On that basis I’d say we are not ideal pets. “I’m supposed to be flying round the Australian outback, not watching someone’s nan’s TV.” Norman Steele said: Call me an eccentric, but I admire the enigmatic aloofness of the domestic budgerigar. “I bought a pair of budgies for my wife for our tenth wedding anniversary as a way of celebrating our love, and also of letting her know exactly how trapped I felt in our marriage. “Every day I look at them and think ‘You and me both, fellas, you and me both’.”
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967 | Museum Trustee, a Trump Donor, Supports Groups That Deny Climate Change - The New York Times | Robin Pogrebin | The American Museum of Natural History has long been on the front lines of the climate change discussion, as its scientists study the potential damage and its educators try to alert new generations to the dangers of global warming. The depth of that mission is evident in the numerous exhibitions at this Manhattan museum, like the film “Wonders of the Arctic,” which is on view through March 2. “The polar bear has always been the symbol of the Arctic,” the narrator intones. “Now it’s become the face of climate change and the threat it poses. ” But one of the museum’s leaders, a trustee who is also an important donor to the institution, Rebekah Mercer, has been using her family’s millions to fund organizations that question climate change, a cornerstone of the conservative agenda she is advancing as an influential member of Donald J. Trump’s transition team. In recent years the Mercer Family Foundation — which Ms. Mercer operates with her father, the New York investor Robert Mercer — has given nearly $8 million to organizations including the Heartland Institute in Illinois, a group that rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. She is also on the board of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that is skeptical of whether human behavior causes climate change. The connection of Ms. Mercer, the museum and the Mercer Family Foundation’s donation history came to light during an analysis by The New York Times of activities by cultural leaders who donated to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. Several of them are board members at New York City arts organizations, including John Paulson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Mercedes T. Bass at the Metropolitan Opera. But none are as unusual a fit as Ms. Mercer and the American Museum of Natural History. On one level, she is the sort of trustee museums and other nonprofit arts groups compete for: a donor whose board membership could lead to more contributions. Museums regularly ask major donors to become trustees — particularly those as generous as Ms. Mercer, whose foundation has donated at least $3 million to the museum over the past few years. Museum leaders generally do not vet donors and trustees for their personal or political views or apply ideological litmus tests. But more often than not, trustees champion the missions and philosophical underpinnings of their museums. Since Ms. Mercer has only recently emerged as a player in the Republican Party, bringing her charitable giving new public attention, it’s likely that the museum’s trustees were unaware of her philanthropic history — and specifically, her generous funding of organizations on the forefront of climate change skepticism — when she joined the board in 2013. About a dozen other trustees at the American Museum of Natural History contacted for comment declined or did not respond. Moreover, institutions with boards as large as the museum’s (which numbers 49) are typically run by a core group of highly active trustees, with others often being less knowledgeable about the detailed backgrounds of fellow members. It is unclear what, if any, influence Ms. Mercer has had at the museum beyond her financial leverage and her power as a board member. Ms. Mercer did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and Ellen V. Futter, the museum’s president, declined to comment about Ms. Mercer. But Ms. Futter was emphatic that it is the museum’s scientists, not its trustees, who make decisions about the substance of what is presented at the museum. “The scientists at the museum are the ones who are responsible for the interpretation and presentation of scientific content,” she said. “We’ve done several exhibits on climate change, we’ve done numerous education offerings on climate change,” she added, “and it is the scientists who make all of the decisions about science. ” Ms. Futter would not comment on the calls for Ms. Mercer to step down or what brought her to the board, declining to discuss the activities of a specific trustee. Told of Ms. Mercer’s role on the museum board, several scientists and environmental organizations said that she should resign or be removed from her position because, they said, she was working at cross purposes with its mission. “There is no room for promoters of on the board of a science museum, let alone arguably the greatest science museum in the world,” said Michael E. Mann, a leader in the climate field who directs the Earth System Science Center at Penn State. He added that Ms. Mercer “has actively funded the climate change denial and disinformation campaign. ” The climate change positions of people surrounding Mr. Trump are being closely scrutinized as he takes office, partly because the has described climate change as a hoax, and vowed to “cancel” the Paris climate accord and to undo President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. During the campaign, Ms. Mercer was one of Mr. Trump’s biggest donors, eventually joining his transition team, in which she played a significant part in pushing forward one climate change skeptic for the cabinet: Jeff Sessions, the nominee for attorney general. “She’s certainly a force,” the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a top Trump adviser, said. “She’s one of the people whose phone calls get taken. ” Environmental concerns prompted climate scientists and other groups last year to call for removal of the conservative philanthropist David H. Koch from the museum’s board. He stepped down, though the museum said the reasons were unrelated to the protests. Ms. Mercer is not known for publicly speaking out on the climate change issue. But her generous support of organizations that raise doubts about global warming drew criticism from environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. “To politicize science is shameful to politicize the institutions that are designed to foster greater learning is even worse,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said. The museum’s executives “should acknowledge that they have a healthy endowment — a steady stream of funding — and they should thank Ms. Mercer for her service and talk about a reasonable plan for her to resign,” he said. Jesse Coleman, a researcher with Greenpeace, called Ms. Mercer’s role on the board troubling. “They’re an educational institution and they are trying to present the truth,” he said, “and now they have people in important positions on their board who are actively funding misinformation and they know that. ” In addition to the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation, the Mercer foundation has made significant donations to the Cato Institute and the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, both of which also challenge aspects of climate change. The Oregon Institute, which does research on biochemistry and diagnostic medicine, was by Arthur B. Robinson, a chemistry professor who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in Oregon and received $15, 000 in campaign contributions from Ms Mercer. In 1997, Mr. Robinson was of an piece in The Wall Street Journal, “Global Warming Is a Myth,” which called rising levels of carbon dioxide “a boon for the environment. ” The article was a rebuttal to the Kyoto Protocol, which embraced the existence of global warming and set goals for worldwide emissions reductions. “There is not a shred of persuasive evidence that humans have been responsible for increasing global temperatures,” the piece said, adding, “So we needn’t worry about human use of hydrocarbons warming the Earth. ” Mr. Robinson also directed the Oregon Institute’s Petition Project, which said “that the global warming hypothesis is without scientific validity and that government action on the basis of this hypothesis would unnecessarily and counterproductively damage both human prosperity and the natural environment. ” Ms. Mercer has science bona fides, having earned a master’s degree in management science and engineering from Stanford University, where she studied biology and math as an undergraduate. Her father worked for IBM before joining the successful hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, where he became a chief executive in 2010. Though she briefly worked on Wall Street, Ms. Mercer — along with her sisters, Jenji and Heather Sue (their mother is Diana) — in 2006 purchased the Manhattan bakery Ruby et Violette, which now operates online. During the recent presidential campaign, Ms. Mercer started as a leading supporter of Ted Cruz, who also argued that the threat of global warming was overstated. She and her husband, Sylvain Mirochnikoff, a managing director at Morgan Stanley — they have four children — hosted a for Mr. Cruz in 2015 at their Upper West Side triplex in Heritage at Trump Place. Among the biggest Mercer beneficiaries is the Heartland Institute, to which their foundation has given nearly $5 million. In 2011, Joseph Bast, president and chief executive of the institute, wrote that liberals accept global warming as true because stopping it “requires higher taxes, more income redistribution” and other “policies already on the liberal political agenda. ” “Liberals have no reason to ‘look under the hood’ of the global warming scare, to see what the real science says,” he added. “They believe in global warming because they feel it justifies their ideological convictions. ” Beka Economopoulos is founding director of a mobile project called the Natural History Museum, which in 2015 drafted a letter signed by scientists calling for institutions of science and natural history to “cut all ties” with fossil fuel companies. She said she found it troubling that Ms. Mercer held a governing role at the museum despite her support for groups that oppose its efforts. “How can a science museum reconcile placing a climate denier in a leadership position?” she said. “It’s incomprehensible. ” “In the era,” Ms. Economopoulos added, “the role of our most trusted institutions of science is more important than ever. ” | 0 |
968 | Cecile Richards Credits Planned Parenthood Supporters with Stopping AHCA - Breitbart | Dr. Susan Berry | Immediately after the cancellation of the House vote on the American Health Care Act (AHCA) Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards sent out a fundraising email to her supporters, crediting them with stopping the vote on the bill. [“Paul Ryan and Donald Trump tried forcing through the worst legislation for women in a generation,” Richards says. “They were on stripping health care from 24 million people, cutting essentials like maternity care, and blocking women from getting care at Planned Parenthood health centers. ” Because people organized and spoke out, tomorrow 8, 118 people will be able to get care at Planned Parenthood health centers across America. — Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards) March 24, 2017, Great to have so many women’s health experts around the table discussing ending maternity coverage blocking access to Planned Parenthood. pic. twitter. — Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards) March 23, 2017, For awhile, Planned Parenthood was touting its “prenatal services. ” Once it was realized what these services were — for the most part, “fake news” — the abortion chain began boasting about its “maternity care,” largely to justify its more than half a billion dollars annually in taxpayer funding. “The reality is, Planned Parenthood does zero mammograms, performs less than two percent of women’s cancer screenings in the U. S. offers virtually no prenatal care, yet does over a third of the nation’s abortions — 887 abortions every day,” says Lila Rose, president of national group Live Action. Rose’s organization recently released another investigative video in which Planned Parenthood staff members throughout the country are repeatedly heard informing the investigator that their clinics do not offer “prenatal care. ” “Live Action’s recent investigation has shown that women wanting to keep their children who were seeking prenatal care at Planned Parenthoods across the country were consistently turned away, despite Planned Parenthood’s claims that its federal funding goes toward prenatal care,” Rose says. “When subsequently asked, the abortion chain has refused to tell the media how many of its centers actually provide prenatal care. ” In her email message, Richards says to her supporters, “Your strength was far greater than theirs. The unprecedented grassroots energy from you and the entire Planned Parenthood community helped stop this bill from even leaving the House. ” “The incredible support of the Planned Parenthood community just made all the difference in stopping this dangerous bill right now,” she adds. “Our voices together are loud enough to drown out the politicians — and we’ll need you with us for whatever comes next. ” | 0 |
969 | When They Switch the Chip On You Won’t Know Who You Are Anymore | dailouk | Home | Sci/Tech | When They Switch the Chip On You Won’t Know Who You Are Anymore When They Switch the Chip On You Won’t Know Who You Are Anymore By Dr. Kane Targonen 15/11/2016 18:20:20
LOS ALAMOS – USA – The immersive qualities of Virtual Reality are only just being rolled out right now, but in a few years every household will have multiple head sets, eventually progressing to mind chips.
People who have these VR sets are already completely addicted to the sensation of total immersion within another world, and this is the clincher, soon they will not be able to live without their VR headsets.
The natural progression from an external device, like a pair of goggles is to have a chip implanted into the brain directly which will link up with the synapses and billions of dendrites. These chips are already in use for the severely disabled, however their development is accelerating daily.
Mapping out every channel and synapse in the human brain is a feat in itself, and they have already mapped out the brains of rodents and smaller creatures.
“We can upload any scenario directly into your brain, you will feel as if you are there, you will see, smell, and feel every nuance the programmers introduce into the world, you will taste food, you will feel the wind on your cheek, every sensation you feel in the real world can be replicated in the brain directly through the zones activated by the neural implants.
“This technology will be sold through the premise of perfect memory and data recall. Imagine going to a dinner party and knowing who the head honchos are to schmooze with immediate data downloaded into your brain, imagine being able to speak in any language at the drop of a hat, or recall any text ever written by man at the blink of an eye,” a scientist on the project revealed.
The next step will no doubt be a jump from the intrusive machinery strapped on to our bodies to the discreet internal implants, and of course with every leap forwards there is always a leap backwards in freedom. You will essentially allow an external force into your own mind.
Behaviour modification
“We have apps now for everything, and in the future, you want to fly that Huey, just download the app in thirty seconds and you will be an expert pilot. Yes, it sounds very Matrix, but consider the fact that every six months, the power of computers doubles. We are getting very close now to a point of no return, and the processing power in chips is getting more powerful, yet shrinking in size. We will be able to alter every facet of someone’s behaviour. After the chipping process, you will not be recognisable.
“This is not one way traffic, and advertisers will be able to beam adverts directly into your brain. If you do not comply with whichever regime or government is in charge, they can not only shut you down, but implant nightmares into your own brain to torture you for your crimes. We can see prisoners in jail, who will be put into states of mind torture lasting thousands of years , this is accomplished by speeding their mind clock to the desired level. Prisoners could therefore spend thousands of years breaking rocks with no end in sight, all in their own minds,” the scientist added.
Once they’re in your head, that’s it.
The future will certainly be an interesting place but with the introduction of artificial intelligent systems, sentient machinery and brainchipping, there may be no place for humans to go other than the augmented fashion. Employers will require their staff to be chipped, and all transactions will require biometric approval. Therefore, if you wish to be employed, and eat, you need the chip. Share on : | 1 |
970 | U.S. Concedes $400 Million Payment to Iran Was Delayed as Prisoner ‘Leverage’ - The New York Times | David E. Sanger | The State Department conceded for the first time on Thursday that it delayed making a $400 million payment to Iran for several hours in January “to retain maximum leverage” and ensure that three American prisoners were released the same day. For months the Obama administration had maintained that the payment was part of a settlement over an old dispute and did not amount to a “ransom” for the release of the Americans. Instead, administration officials said, it was the first installment of the $1. 7 billion that the United States intends to pay Iran to reimburse it for military equipment it bought before the Iranian revolution that the United States never delivered. But at a briefing on Thursday, John Kirby, the State Department spokesman, said the United States “took advantage of the leverage” it felt it had that weekend in to obtain the release of the hostages and “to make sure they got out safely and efficiently. ” Republicans opposed to the nuclear deal President Obama reached with Iran have described the payment as ransom and a further sign of his administration’s feckless dealings with Tehran. Administration officials have said that the two transactions were negotiated entirely separately over a period of years. That they came together on one weekend reflected a desire on the part of Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, to set aside a series of disputes, complete the nuclear deal and try to remove irritants from the relationship between two longtime rivals. The acknowledgment by Mr. Kirby on Thursday touched off a torrent of criticism from Republicans. “It was ransom,” said Representative Ed Royce of California, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “We now know it was ransom. And on top of that it put more American lives at risk. And we’ve emboldened Iran. We’ve encouraged them, frankly, to take more hostages and put more American lives at risk of being taken hostage. ” Neither the payment nor the prisoner release was a secret. Mr. Obama announced the financial settlement, and the release of three Americans, on Jan. 17, just as the Iranian nuclear deal reached its “implementation day. ” But for months the administration remained silent on the carefully choreographed timing, apparently fearful of the political blowback of appearing to have paid for the release of the three — a Washington Post reporter, a Marine veteran and a pastor. “We do not pay ransom,” Mr. Obama said on Aug. 4. “We didn’t here and we won’t in the future. ” Mr. Kerry said something similar: “The United States does not pay ransom and does not negotiate ransoms. ” But the Iranian press has described the payment as a ransom — which fits Tehran’s narrative that it has outmaneuvered the Obama administration. That is also the argument of Republicans, including Donald J. Trump, the party’s candidate for president. At a rally in Charlotte, N. C. on Thursday night, Mr. Trump said that the State Department’s admission vindicated his past accusations that Mr. Obama had lied about the intent of the $400 million payment. In fact, it appears that the money was not a ransom payment sooner or later the United States would have had to pay Iran back for the military goods it never delivered. But in recent weeks a series of stories, chiefly in The Wall Street Journal, established that the planeload of cash sent to Iran that day was timed to ensure that the American citizens, aboard a plane leaving Iran, were released first, before Iranian officials could put their hands on the money. On Thursday, Mr. Kirby conceded that while the deals were negotiated separately, the timing of the final transactions was linked. “As we said at the time, we deliberately leveraged that moment to finalize these outstanding issues nearly simultaneously,” he said. The State Department and the White House, however, said nothing about using the payment as leverage at the time, and on Thursday Mr. Kirby said, “I certainly would agree that this particular fact is not something that we’ve talked about in the past. ” It was a diplomatic maneuver that had some precedents. Often, to get deals done with a minimum loss of face, governments negotiate two or more issues, insisting they are separate. President John F. Kennedy, for example, agreed to move nuclear missiles out of Turkey as part of the 1962 agreement with the Soviet Union to end the Cuban missile crisis, but denied that the acts were linked. They clearly were. Mr. Kirby argued that the timing was beneficial to the United States. “This was a sound decision made in the end game of two separate negotiation tracks,” he insisted. “It’s their money. They were going to get it anyway. ” Mr. Trump got into trouble this month when he described seeing secret Iranian government tapes of the handoff of the $400 million in Iran. His campaign later said he had been mistaken, that he had seen images of a different plane, in Geneva. The original financial dispute arose because of military goods the United States sold to the shah of Iran, but never delivered after the Islamic Revolution and the taking of hostages inside the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979. The mullahs who overthrew the shah demanded back the money Iran had paid. The United States refused. years ago, Iran and the United States agreed that a commission set up at The Hague would sort out that claim, among others. In recent years it became clear that the United States would lose the case and the only question was how the interest would be calculated. The $1. 7 billion the United States paid included accumulated interest on the original $400 million owed to Iran. Mr. Kirby pointed out that the United States’ paying back only $1. 3 billion in interest rather than the billions more Iran had sought was one of the reasons the January deal was good for the United States. “We were able to conclude multiple strands of diplomacy within a period, including implementation of the nuclear deal, the prisoner talks and a settlement of an outstanding Hague Tribunal claim, which saved American taxpayers potentially billions of dollars,” he said, a reference to estimates that the United States would have had to pay far more if it lost the case in The Hague. | 0 |
971 | null | gatorengineer | Make 1k per car (cough cough) sell a million a year to make a billion profit and with a Ford PE have 6 billion dollar market cap. All good. | 1 |
972 | Australia Says It Foiled a Terrorist Plot - The New York Times | Michelle Innis | SYDNEY — A terrorist plot to attack the Australian city of Melbourne with explosives, knives and guns — possibly on Christmas Day — is believed to have been headed off with the arrest of five people, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said on Friday. Mr. Turnbull told reporters in Sydney the group was “ ” and inspired by the Islamic State. Five men, ages 21 to 26, were to be formally charged later Friday, the authorities said. Another man and a woman were also taken into custody, but were later released. According to the police, the plotters had scouted Federation Square, a popular shopping and entertainment district, as well as the Flinders Street train station, Melbourne’s busiest, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, an Anglican church. All three locations are close to one another in the center of the city. The country’s justice minister, Michael Keenan, said the planned attack was imminent and “would have been the most serious in terms of its intent” in Australia. Had it occurred, he added, it would have “caused very significant casualties. ” Andrew Colvin, the commissioner of Australia’s Federal Police, said the arrests had been carried out in overnight raids involving about 400 officers in Melbourne’s northern and western suburbs. “This is a significant disruption of what we would call an imminent terrorist event,” Mr. Colvin said at a news conference in Sydney, held with Mr. Keenan and Mr. Turnbull. “They had moved very quickly from an intention to a capability, a developed capability, including quite progressed plans, we will allege,” Mr. Colvin said. The premier of Victoria State, Daniel Andrews, said in Melbourne: “What was being planned were not acts of faith, they were, in their planning, acts of evil. ” Graham Ashton, the chief commissioner of the Victoria police, said: “The attack we will allege was being planned was going to involve the use of explosives and we have gathered evidence to support that, and the intention to use other weapons, that could include knives and or a firearm. ” Of the five to be charged, four were born in Australia, and one was born in Egypt. “We believe they were ” Mr. Turnbull said. “They’ve been inspired by Daesh or ISIL, that’s our intelligence at the present time,” he added, using alternate names for the Islamic State. The police have disrupted a number of terrorist plots in Australia, and Mr. Turnbull said that, since September 2014, 57 people have been charged as a result of 25 counterterrorism operations. But he added there had been four attacks in the country since then. In an episode that attracted international attention, two people were killed when a gunman took hostages at a cafe in Sydney in December 2014. The gunman was killed when the police stormed the building. Mr. Colvin said the state and federal police, as well as the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, had been monitoring the Melbourne suspects. “We believe that they were narrowing down exactly what their plan was, but that’s all in one very small part” of Melbourne’s central business district, he said. The police, he said, were confident there was no longer a threat to public safety. A series of tough counterterrorism measures were enacted by Parliament this year, including legislation that could keep convicted terrorists in prison after the completion of their sentences, and control orders to monitor children as young as 14 if they were thought to be involved in, or planning, a terrorist act. Mr. Turnbull on Friday urged Australians to defy terrorists by simply going about their lives. “We are the most successful multicultural society in the world,” Mr. Turnbull said. “That’s because we have a culture of mutual respect. ” | 0 |
973 | Oroville Dam: State and Federal Government Share Blame | Joel B. Pollak | No sooner had officials issued an emergency evacuation order for 200, 000 residents living below the Oroville Dam than the political arguments began. Was it the federal government’s fault, for not being attentive enough? Or was state government to blame, for rejecting proposals to raise the dam and spending money on rail instead? [The San Jose Mercury News has an answer: both are to blame, for ignoring a warning raised in 2005 that the emergency spillway could fail in heavy rain. The paper reported Monday: Three environmental groups — the Friends of the River, the Sierra Club and the South Yuba Citizens League — filed a motion with the federal government on Oct. 17, 2005, as part of Oroville Dam’s relicensing process, urging federal officials to require that the dam’s emergency spillway be armored with concrete, rather than remain as an earthen hillside. The groups filed the motion with FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. They said that the dam, built and owned by the state of California, and finished in 1968, did not meet modern safety standards because in the event of extreme rain and flooding, water would overwhelm the main concrete spillway, then flow down the emergency spillway, and that could cause heavy erosion that would create flooding for communities downstream, but also could cause a failure, known as “loss of crest control. ” … FERC rejected that request, however, after the state Department of Water Resources, and the water agencies that would likely have had to pay the bill for the upgrades, said they were unnecessary. There will be plenty of in the days to come. For officials dealing with an emergency situation on Sunday evening, however, it was more important to work together. For now. Joel B. Pollak is Senior at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak. | 0 |
974 | The Daily Traditionalist: Jeff Schoep and the NSM | Sven Longshanks | Radio Aryan October 29, 2016
Matthew Heimbach brings us the last show of the week accompanied by Jason Augustus and special guest Jeff Schoep from the National Socialist Movement. Jeff tells us how he has been involved in White Nationalism for around 25 years and reminds us of the sacrifices that many good men have made over that time to promote our cause, being imprisoned or physically attacked for their beliefs. The NSM is a political movement as well as being involved in street activism, so they are involved in a lot of community outreach work. Jeff talks about how their roots go back to George Lincoln Rockwell and the only groups that have legitimate ties to his movement are the New Order and the NSM. He was taught by the people who had learned from him and public service was always a part of what they were doing.
Jason asks what it was like to be a political skinhead involved in National Socialism and what changes he has seen in his time. Years ago a fight just used to be a fight, but nowadays you can be hit with hate crime charges as well, which can lead to lengthy prison sentences and ruined lives, just for a fistfight that may not have even involved racial politics. You cannot even defend your life any more without being charged with hate crime, as we have seen recently in Britain, where activists have received serious jail time for defending themselves against violent antifa in Kent. Jeff is banned from Britain as well as Matt, not due to any criminal activity but just because his speech is politically incorrect. Matt reminds us that the reason for this is because they have no answer to our talking points. They cannot debate us so they always seek to shut us down.
The NSM will be taking an important role in the new Nationalist Front alliance with the TWP and Jeff talks about previous attempts to do this before, where good people have tried to broker a peace between the various organisations but due to petty reasons were never able to achieve it. He explains how the main problem has always been personality issues, where people have an issue with someone and then make up stories about them to cause problems.
The TWP and the NSM will be at a national rally together at the state capital of Pennsylvania on November 5th and all are welcome, especially other organisations. Jeff reminds us that although it is good to be promoting stuff on the internet, real political change has always been made on the streets. He suggests that if people are worried of being caught on camera, they should just wear a hat and sunglasses. Matt points out that he has never met anyone at an event that he has ever then gone on to have problems with on the internet.
For the last part of the podcast Jeff talks about how he has worked to modernise the NSM, distancing them from German symbols and concentrating on American ones instead. He has taken some flak for this but believes that if we want to win, then we will have to start taking risks, after all, who dares wins.
Presented by Matthew Heimbach and Jason Augustus with special guest Jeff Schoep
The Daily Traditionalist: Jeff Schoep and the NSM â DT 102816 | 1 |
975 | Michael Moore: Joe Blow Will Vote Trump As “Ultimate F–– You to the Elite… A Human Molotov Cocktail” | The Doc | Tweet Home » Headlines » World News » Michael Moore: Joe Blow Will Vote Trump As “Ultimate F–– You to the Elite… A Human Molotov Cocktail”
He is the human Molotov cocktail that they have been waiting for. The human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them. So, on November 8th, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain, take that lever — or felt pen or touchscreen — and put a big f**king X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J. Trump. Trump’s election is going to be the biggest F**K YOU ever recorded in human history.
From Mac Slavo, SHTFPlan :
A tidal wave is coming.
Michael Moore, a liberal’s liberal who holds die-hard loyalty to Hillary Clinton, is acknowledging what everyone with a clear head recognizes: that she doesn’t even remotely connect with the average voter, doesn’t understand their problems – and above all, doesn’t care about them.
Although Moore can’t support Donald Trump, he seems to admire his ability to resonate with the actual problems that the people who formerly made up the middle class are going through – economic and otherwise. Moore, like Trump, understands the pulse of the people, though they differ in just about every other way.
This election represents a pivotal point, and an end of the line for the deal that people once held with their leaders. After decades of broken promises and deals to sell them short and sell them out, people have had enough.
THAT’S what this election is about.
Right or wrong, Trump represents a rebuke of the system – as Moore calls it, the ultimate “F––– You” ever directed at the system.
Here’s some of what he said in an epic rant (reportedly excerpted from his rush-election film Trumpland) that is strangely validating of Trump’s entire campaign:
Whether Trump means it or not, it’s kind of irrelevant because he’s saying the things that people who are hurting. And it’s why every beaten down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle-class loves Trump.
“They’re not racists or rednecks, they’re actually pretty decent people. So, after talking to a number of them, I sort of wanted to sort of write this.”
[…]
Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of the Ford Motor executives and said: if you close these factories, as you are planning to do in Detroit, and rebuild them in Mexico, I am going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody’s going to buy them.
It was an amazing thing to see. No politician — Republican or Democrat — had ever said anything like that to these executives. It was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The Brexit states. You live here in Ohio. You know what I am talking about.
He is the human Molotov cocktail that they have been waiting for. The human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them. And on November 8th — Election Day — although they have lost their jobs. Although they’ve been foreclosed on by the bank. Next came the divorce and now the wife and kids are gone. The car’s been repossessed. They haven’t had a real vacation in years. They’re stuck with the shitty Obamacare bronze plan. They can’t even get a f**king percocet.
They have essentially lost everything they had…except one thing. The one thing that doesn’t cost them a cent and is guaranteed to them by the American Constitution: the right to vote.
[…] So, on November 8th, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain, take that lever — or felt pen or touchscreen — and put a big f**king X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J. Trump.
[…]
They see that the elites who have ruined their lives hate Trump.
Corporate America hates Trump. Wall Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The Media hates Trump…
The enemy of my enemy is who I am voting for on November 8th.
Trump’s election is going to be the biggest F**K YOU ever recorded in human history.
And it will feel good.
What red-blooded American, working stiff or laid off schmo wouldn’t want to stick it to the establishment and rebuke the very system that brought them to this point? After all, it is their fault.
People have been hurting and in decline for eight long years – and for all his smiles and posturing, Obama hasn’t done a damned thing. And Hillary can’t even pretend.
The people who will be deciding the popular vote in this election want to take down that system and put someone in who will – once and for all – stand up for them. Basically, Americans want revenge.
What the electoral college decides is another matter altogether, of course. On Sale At SD Bullion… This Week Only… | 1 |
976 | Jaguars Owner Shahid Khan Opposes Trump’s Immigration Ban - The New York Times | Ken Belson | HOUSTON — Commissioner Roger Goodell of the N. F. L. declined to take a public stance last week on President Trump’s executive order temporarily banning visits by citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries, even as leaders in the N. B. A. spoke out against the order. But the owner Shahid Khan of the Jacksonville Jaguars made it clear Saturday that he was opposed to the ban and said he had been heartened on Friday when a federal judge in Seattle temporarily blocked the president’s immigration order. “The bedrock of this country are immigration and really a great separation between church and state,” Mr. Khan, 66, said in Houston, the site of Sunday’s Super Bowl. “Even for the country, it’s not good,” he added, explaining that he thought the order could deny entry to some of “the tens of thousands of people who can contribute to the making of America. ” The only Muslim among the principal owners of N. F. L. teams, Mr. Khan came to the United States from Pakistan in 1967, earned a degree in engineering and went on to own a car parts business. He became a United States citizen decades ago. Mr. Khan said it was “kind of a sobering time for somebody like me,” in part because he had expected Mr. Trump to moderate his views on immigrants and Muslims once in office. But Mr. Khan said he hoped the courts would provide a bulwark against the president’s actions against immigrants. He said he understood Mr. Goodell’s decision not to make a public statement, to avoid the appearance of “grandstanding” on the president’s action. Instead, Mr. Khan said, the league should see how the issue plays out in court. “We have to look at it based on what can we do to make a difference,” he said. “And right now, there are enough forces in power and play that we have to see how this thing ends up. ” Mr. Khan has been a vocal supporter of a bill in Jacksonville, Fla. that would expand the city’s human rights ordinance to offer more protection for people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Similar laws have passed in other cities in nearly two dozen states. Mr. Khan said that he knew endorsing the bill might alienate some Jaguars fans but that he was willing to risk cancellations. “I have no remorse over supporting it,” he said of the nondiscrimination bill. Despite his opposition to the president’s immigration policies, Mr. Khan, a registered Republican who said he had voted for Mr. Trump, supports his economic plans, specifically the emphasis on creating manufacturing jobs. Mr. Khan said his company opened or announced plans to build new factories in seven states last year, as well as in China, Mexico and Spain. He has some reservations about Mr. Trump’s approach to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which the United States signed with Canada and Mexico and which took effect in 1994. Consumers over all have benefited from Nafta, Mr. Khan said, and his business could be hurt if the president changes the agreement. But Mr. Khan said he would support changes if they helped create manufacturing jobs in the United States like the ones he had when he arrived a ago. “In a way, Nafta is like a scrambled egg,” Mr. Khan said. “How do you unscramble an egg? The value chains are so interwoven that it would be very difficult to do that. But government policies force us to look for ways to unscramble it. ” | 0 |
977 | This anti-Trump advert on the side of a bus is really visually clever and you have to see it in motion | Sausage Machine | Next Swipe left/right This anti-Trump advert on the side of a bus is really visually clever and you have to see it in motion @Madsalbers over on Twitter writes, “Epic Bus Ad from the political party SF in Denmark is mocking @realDonaldTrump and encouraging Americans abroad to…” Epic Bus Ad from the political party SF in Denmark is mocking @realDonaldTrump and encouraging Americans abroad to vote. #Election2016 pic.twitter.com/MfyeOYtDuQ
— Mads Albers (@MadsAlbers) October 26, 2016
Well done Denmark! Rolling your eyes like that… | 1 |
978 | A Piano Man of Many Faces, and Some Stranger Stories - The New York Times | Alex Vadukul | When Midtown Manhattan goes dark after hours, Chicken Delicious edges onto his piano stool at Mimi’s, tinkling some notes to start. He opens to the crowd with his soft Southern accent: “Good evening, everyone. My name is Chicken Delicious. I come from Mississippi. I live on the kindness of strangers. ” This is a reference to his tip jar. Mimi’s at midnight resembles those parties you used to hear about in New York, rowdy affairs of offbeat regulars for whom last call always seems far away. The Italian restaurant and piano bar, which opened on Second Avenue and 52nd Street in 1973, glows invitingly from its street corner in those hours with the warmth of Tiffany lamps. The sign above its bar reads, “What Happens at Mimi’s Stays at Mimi’s. ” Its regulars, mostly over 50, seem to appreciate this nightly time warp, and could themselves be extras from “Midnight Cowboy” or “Taxi Driver”: a Scandinavian brain surgeon who requests Beatles tunes, a Taiwanese man who sings and hogs the microphone, a woman who keeps saying she needs to get home to her husband but keeps ordering another drink. But for evenings to hum like this at Mimi’s, much depends on Chicken Delicious, 74, who is the conductor of festivities, the metronome to which things swing. Chicken Delicious, a voluminous bald man, started at Mimi’s in 1996, and he may be one of New York’s most eccentric and unsung acts. He is not in guidebooks for tourists, but to those at Mimi’s, he is a kind of Midtown legend, performing every night except Mondays and Saturdays. Liza Minnelli has been known to go see him play. “In a city full of talent, Chicken is an icon,” Anders Cohen, the Scandinavian brain surgeon, said recently at the bar. “When he’s on he’s got the schtick. He’s got the . And he can play it all. ” His humor is mildly crude and New . “You used to play football in college didn’t you?” he recently taunted someone. “How did it feel always being the wide receiver? Or were you the tight end?” During a Billy Joel tune, he gave the chorus a Midtown twist: “I’m in a Tudor City state of mind. ” Outlandish masks are part of his act: the pope, a dog, Marilyn Monroe, a baby, a fairy. He has made hundreds and keeps the collection at his home in Yonkers. He also narrates the tale of a persona in between tunes, one of a shy artistic boy from a fictional town in Mississippi who fled to New York to play the piano and make it big. He has described the town as “not quite Faulkner. ” During his set breaks, he waddles to the kitchen for baked French fries, which he likes blackened. If customers engage him during a break, he may ask for their “numbers” and start notating equations about their luck on a cocktail napkin. But every so often he will offer the details of his own luck. If he does, make sure to pay attention to the ornaments on his wrists and the peculiar sun pendant around his neck. Chicken Delicious’s path from the Deep South to a Midtown piano bar is a classic story of New York reinvention. But his story is stranger than most. He has crossed paths with Yoko Ono and her entourage, had a moment in the New York art world, and he helped create a voodoo love potion so powerful its effects could not be reversed. He was born Lewis Hunter Stowers III in 1943 and grew up in Jackson, Miss. Like the character in his act, he was a shy boy who often felt out of place. Mr. Stowers’s early passion was watercolors, and his paintings (he has scans of his work on his iPad) portray the landscape of his formative years: rickety roadside general stores, crumbling antebellum mansions, a dilapidated bowling alley on the edge of a swamp. He credits his mother, who died when he was 7, with instilling in him a love of piano playing. When he was 5, Mr. Stowers said, he ran away from home to crawl into a pit teeming with alligators. “My parents found me sitting on their heads,” he said. The alligators didn’t touch him, however, which he took as a sign that he was different. He studied art at a Christian college and motorcycled through Europe in his early 20s to, he said, “sleep in fields and eat yogurt. ” In the late 1960s, he started teaching art in New York as his own career as a painter was blossoming the New York Times art critic John Canaday even reviewed him, seeing in his work “echoes of German romanticism adapted to juvenile (or even infantile) demonism. ” Then in 1969, Mr. Stowers met a mystic named Joseph Lukach and everything changed. This is a period his fans at Mimi’s know little about. The man who would become Chicken Delicious would bear witness to a chapter of occult history. Mr. Lukach was a short and rotund figure who wore glasses and practiced a blend of religions like Yoruba, Santería and Voodoo. Mr. Lukach, who died in 1995, never became as famous as the English occultist Aleister Crowley, but in the spheres of witchcraft, he was considered a powerful witch and healer and counted Ms. Ono among his acolytes. “Witches U. S. A. ,” a popular book in the early 1970s that chronicled America’s occult scene at the time, devoted a full chapter to him. “Despite being and weighing 200 to 250 pounds, depending upon the current state of his casual attitude toward dieting,” a passage reads, “Joe is as light as a perfectly dumpling. ” It also said his most prized possession was a “ green Egyptian scarab set in heavy gold” that he wore on the little finger of his left hand. Though his relationship with Mr. Lukach later became troubling, initially Mr. Stowers was in awe of the abilities he saw. When Mr. Lukach was displeased by a pasta dish, he set the cook’s buttocks on fire, Mr. Stowers said, and on a weekend trip to a lake together, Mr. Lukach grew weary watching a and made him flip into the water by slicing his finger through the air. “‘What are you doing?’ I asked him,” Mr. Stowers said. “‘Target practice,’ he told me. ” Mr. Stowers became Mr. Lukach’s apprentice, and they opened a small botanica together on the Upper West Side. He started managing Mr. Lukach’s meetings with clients, helping sell herbs and potions, and became a skilled palm reader and student of numerology. One of their products was a love potion they believed was created by the infamous Louisiana Voodoo practitioner Marie Laveau. “He summoned her one night,” Mr. Stowers said. “She arrived and her dress was ruffling in the air. He said he wanted her love spell recipe and would she give it to him. She did. We made it. The ingredients were grisly. We bottled and sold it. “I told customers there is no antidote and they would say: ‘I don’t care. I want this person. I need them.’ Then they would come back six months later saying they wished they could get rid of this person more than anything. ” Mr. Stowers said that he still had some vials left and that they collected dust inside a box in his Yonkers basement. “I will never touch them,” he said. It was an exciting time to be a witch in New York. Conjurers of all kinds would hang out near Astor Place at Weiser Antiquarian, the oldest occult bookstore in America, and they shopped for ingredients for spells at Alberto Rendon’s botanica on 116th Street. On the side, Mr. Stowers became a fixture on the piano bar circuit playing at gay bars like the Painted Pony. “Everyone knew everyone,” Mr. Stowers said. “Not like now. There’s nothing unique about witchcraft in New York today. Everyone who wants to be a witch can say they’re a witch. You used to have to really know what you were doing in that world to be respected by others. ” But potions and incantations were not entirely new to Mr. Stowers. He had been having visions since he was a child. He said he started sleeping in cemeteries in his 20s. “That’s when I started working with the dead,” he said in his car outside Mimi’s recently as he hunted for a parking space. “That was when I started visiting the African spirit world. The gods talked to me. After that, a conga line of the dead started following me wherever I went. ” Mr. Lukach was merely empowering something that was inside him all along. He was finally able to conclude that an African deity named Oshun, who represents love and the arts, had protected him in that swamp when he was 5. “She had been watching me since I was a boy,” he said. Regarding Mr. Lukach, Migene an author and expert on religions, said, “It sounds like he was mixing various religions and beliefs and making his own special blend. ” She suggested he had fallen through the cracks of occult history, but added: “I don’t want to pass judgment, but this was a time people were interested in spiritualism. Everyone was looking for enlightenment. Bob Dylan was. The Beatles were. It was a period of . But he may have been completely sincere in his beliefs. ” Interest in the occult was having a moment in pop culture around the same time. Rock bands like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones were drawn to the dark teachings of Mr. Crowley. Mr. Stowers would enter this cultural moment himself. He and Mr. Lukach, he claimed, were psychics to Ms. Ono in the late 1970s. “She’d send a limo to pick us up and take us to the Dakota,” he said. “As Joseph and her would do readings together, I’d play the theme to ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ right there on John Lennon’s big beautiful white piano. She would call Joseph at all hours of the night if she had a good song idea and ask him, ‘Am I going the right way? ’” Mr. Stowers said he still had Ms. Ono’s “hand prints” from those days stored away in his home. He is mentioned briefly in the controversial 1988 biography “The Lives of John Lennon,” by Albert Goldman. Of a close friend named Sam, Mr. Goldman wrote that one June evening, Ms. Ono “told him that as a step toward his elevation he must go that very night to see a marvelous psychic whose name was Joseph Lukach. He would make a study of Sam and give him potions that would strengthen him spiritually. Sam was taken by limousine to Yonkers, where Joey was living with his companion, Hunter, in a suburban bungalow with a backyard and garage. ” (Ms. Ono did not respond to requests for comment.) By the end of the 1970s, the Yonkers house was filled with altars to deities like Oshun and Anubis, and students of Mr. Stowers and Mr. Lukach would commute from the city on weekends for lessons in their living room. Many of these people are no longer around, but Mr. Stowers remains in touch with a man named Peter, who joined Mr. Lukach’s circle in the late ’70s, and declined to use his surname to avoid association with his past in the occult. He is a veterinarian in Manhattan. “He could do things saints could do,” Peter recalled in a phone interview. “Things that Jesus could do. “We’d go there every week and meet in these groups. Hunter was always there. And he too began to open himself up to the universe and see things like Joseph could. ” But there had long been a darker side to their union. Mr. Stowers has described it as “servitude. ” In his mind, it was no ordinary apprenticeship, but rather a form of slavery. Soon after they met, according to Mr. Stowers, he was compelled to obey Mr. Lukach, who chose his friends, the relatives he could speak to and even what he could eat. Mr. Stowers slept on the floor and made Mr. Lukach’s clothes by hand. “I was a free bird who was put in a cage for 20 years,” he said. He reflects calmly on this period now. “There is a tradition of a shaman choosing a whipping boy to break him and then remake him,” he said. “I had to be broken. I was lost. I was looking for him. I look back and wouldn’t change one thing about it because I wouldn’t be who I am now. ” Peter reluctantly admitted that Mr. Lukach, when inclined, could use his prowess as a healer for darker biddings. “He could use black magic on those that rubbed him the wrong way,” he said. When asked to elaborate further, he declined and said, “It’s best not to talk about this. ” When Mr. Lukach died in 1995, Mr. Stowers believed the spell of servitude was broken, but their students dispersed, and Mr. Stowers was left alone in the home filled with potions and Voodoo relics, where he still lives. “One of the great sadnesses of Hunter’s life is that none of these people who were supposedly so friendly to him are around anymore,” Peter said. “Once Joseph was gone, the thing that brought everybody there left as well. That is what happens when relationships are based on a desire to touch power. ” But Lewis Hunter Stowers III then started his transformation into Chicken Delicious. He still had the piano gigs, which he said Mr. Lukach permitted him because they brought home money. Over the years, he had kept his act simple: background music with little showmanship. After Mr. Lukach died, however, he suddenly felt like singing one night at a bar in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He did. And he liked it. “I’d never sang before,” he said. “I stood up and sang. I sounded terrible. They laughed at me. But I was finally out of my cage. ” In 1996, he auditioned at Mimi’s. A longtime bartender, Star, remembered his arrival. “When he first came here they said he was too wacky,” she said. “I told them: ‘Nonsense. Let’s hire him. ’” Another bartender, Laurie Bricker, also recalled his start. “Mimi’s will be around no matter who is behind the piano,” she said, “but when Hunter came here, a very special and psychic power arrived with him. ” The masks and the tale of the fictional Mississippi town developed soon after. So did his exotic pendants. “I make them all myself,” he said. “Each one represents a god or goddess I worship. I throw the bones every evening and ask them which I should wear. They tell me if it will be a hard night or if someone will need special care. I’m like a pastor. Each is an omen of how the night will be and what will be needed from me. ” Before a set at Mimi’s last month, Mr. Stowers drove around the block repeatedly in his car. This nightly search for a parking spot has become something of a ritual. “Jesus will help us find a spot,” he said. As he looped around the block, he explained how he took the name Chicken Delicious. First, he became Hunter Blue in 1998, because he dyed his hair blue, then he became Chicken Delicious in 2010, when a spirit told him he was becoming an old man. He said it told him: “Do this and they won’t think of you as an old man. Do this and they will think of you as an old chicken. ” “Now I’m just waiting for my next name,” he said. “I’m waiting for the next step in my evolution. ” At a red light, he offered divinations about my life: “You’ve been a nervous wreck. ” “You’re not an easy person and you will never be easy. ” “You have problems in your romance life. ” Eventually, a red Toyota pulled out in front of Mimi’s. “I told you Jesus would deliver,” he said, pulling into the space. “Some people think this all just fun. But there’s a depth happening. This is a distilling of many years of magic. What I’m doing isn’t obvious, but I find the people who are looking, even if they don’t realize it. ” Mr. Stowers hobbled out of his van, collected a bag of props and headed into Mimi’s, where regulars were gathering. He edged onto his stool. “Good evening, everyone,” he said. “My name is Chicken Delicious. ” He told them he came from Mississippi. “I live on the kindness of strangers. I’m going to show you what it means to follow a passion every day like I have for 74 years. ” Then he put on a mask and started to play. | 0 |
979 | 250,000 More Tickets to Be Released for ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ - The New York Times | Christopher D. Shea | Harry Potter fans, take heart: If you are looking for tickets to the London stage play inspired by J. K. Rowling’s books, there are plenty more coming your way. The show’s producers said this week that 250, 000 tickets to “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” would be released next Thursday. Performances of the play are sold out through May (though a small number of tickets are available through a lottery each week, and tickets occasionally go on sale). The new tickets being released are for performances taking place from next spring through 2017. “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” takes place 19 years after the end of the final book and tracks the of Harry’s son Albus. The production had its first previews in June, and it officially opened, to enthusiastic reviews, this week. It has two parts, which viewers can watch in a day or over the course of two days. In his review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote that the play conjures “a kind of magic that is purely theatrical yet somehow channels the addictive narrative grip of Ms. Rowling’s prose. ” | 0 |
980 | FBI Visits Man at His Home After He Films US Postal Distribution Center | Ryan Banister |
A copblocker in southern California was visited by two FBI agents at his home after conducting a first amendment audit at a US Postal Central Distribution Center, where he filmed inside and outside of the building as an effort to verify that the right to film was respected in that location.
Felipe Hernandez and fellow auditors began to film one of the controlled entry points at the facility, and almost immediately two US Postal Service Police park their cruisers in front of them, one blockading the sidewalk. They asked questions and paced back and forth, but they eventually left without incident.
After a few minutes, Hernandez walked to another gate to film only to find another individual in an unmarked car following surveilling their activities. However, no further police contact was made and the auditors left.
Nearly two weeks later on October 19, Hernandez filmed two plain clothes agents from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, one with a clipboard, asking him questions pertaining to his filming of a US mail distribution facility. The agent declares that filming “critical infrastructure” can be considered “suspicious activity,” and that is why he is investigating Hernandez.
Hernandez tells them that he was instructed by his lawyer, who was on the phone at that moment, to not answer any questions. After a few minutes, Hernandez hands one of the agents the cell phone and they speak directly with his lawyer.
The agent tells the attorney that the filming of a US
After a few minutes on the phone with the attorney, the officer is heard saying:
So, we’re done here. If you’re saying that he was videotaping whatever in Los Angeles for whatever reason, and it’s not a terrorism-related activity, then we’re good. They don’t look like terrorists to me, I’ll tell you that.
The agent hands back the phone, and Hernandez says, “You guys be safe,” as they walk away. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
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Contributed by Ryan Banister of The Daily Sheeple . | 1 |
981 | Hispanic Crowd Boos Marco Rubio off Stage | Henry Wolff | Hispanic Crowd Boos Marco Rubio off Stage Rafael Bernal, The Hill, October 25, 2016
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) took the stage in Orlando at Calle Orange, a Puerto Rican-themed festival, on Sunday when some in the crowd started booing, NPR reported .
The jeering got louder as the Cuban-American senator, seeking reelection after dropping his presidential bid earlier this year, was introduced.
And when the emcee asked for applause as Rubio took the same, boos drowned out any supporters in the crowd, NPR added.
“Thank you for having me today,” Rubio said in Spanish. “I want you to enjoy this day. We’re not going to talk about politics today. Thank God for this beautiful day, and for our freedom, our democracy, our vote, and our country. God bless you all, thank you very much.”
He left the stage to more boos from the crowd, according to the report.
{snip}
Rubio is running against Rep. Patrick Murphy (D), and the latest average of polls in the race shows Rubio ahead by about 3 points.
Murphy’s campaign seized on the Sunday incident and blasted out video it says shows the booing. It also noted that Murphy attended the festival “with a leader for Puerto Rican communities, Rep. Nydia Velazquez,” while “Marco Rubio was booed off the stage.”
Rubio’s campaign shared a video with The Hill Monday that it says counters what the Murphy campaign sent out and shows him being greeted enthusiastically as he moves through the crowd.
{snip}
Festival attendants said they disapproved of Rubio’s endorsement of Trump, who is deeply unpopular among Hispanics.
“When we have someone like Trump, who hits our Mexican brothers, our Latino brothers, then you jump on that bandwagon after all that stuff he says not only about you personally . . . as a Latino, you’re a freaking sellout. I would not vote for him if they paid me,” Calle Orange attendant Angel Marin told NPR about Rubio.
{snip} | 1 |
982 | Fired TV Reporter: I’ve Received Thousands of ’Sexual and Violent’ Threats | Katherine Rodriguez | A Philadelphia television reporter who lost her job after she was caught screaming expletives at a police officer outside a comedy club said she is now receiving thousands of “sexual and violent” phone messages and threats. [Colleen Campbell, 28, said she is the one being targeted now after she claimed she was “ruined” when the video of her tirade went viral and caused her to lose her job as a reporter at PHL 17. “From the time the video was made public, Ms. Campbell has been the recipient of thousands of lewd and threatening phone calls, texts, messages, and emails ranging from angry, profane, and defamatory insults to deeply disturbing sexual and violent threats,” Campbell family spokesman and attorney Wayne Pollock told the New York Post in a statement. “Ms. Campbell and her family are still sorting out the events of that night. Their highest priority is the health and of Ms. Campbell. ” Pollock added that Campbell is trying to reach out to the Philadelphia police officer to offer an apology for her behavior. The video showed Campbell verbally lashing out at the officer while the officer just asked her to walk away. “Or what? Or what, motherf — ker? Lick my a — hole,” Campbell says in the video. “How about that? F — king piece of s — t. That’s why nobody likes f — king police … idiots in this f — king town. ” Police told Philadelphia magazine that Campbell faces assault charges for allegedly kicking the unidentified officer as well as the doors and windows of the police cruiser multiple times after her arrest. The assault charges are in addition to the charges of resisting arrest, criminal mischief, and disorderly conduct that she already faces. Campbell originally claimed to have consumed two drinks at the comedy club and believes she was drugged. The Post reports that she later admitted to having five drinks, including two shots she consumed before the show and a few drinks she had while bartending at the Devil’s Den in South Philadelphia earlier in the evening. | 0 |
983 | Detained Illegal Aliens End 3-Day Hunger Strike | Bob Price | Illegal immigrants detained at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, stopped a hunger strike shortly before Easter Sunday. The detainees demanded more money for doing chores, better food, and medical care. [Nearly 750 detainees reportedly refused their meals nearly half of the 1, 500 inmate capacity of the detention center. The hunger strike began earlier in the week on April 10 when some of the male detainees refused their lunches. Some women at the detention center later joined in the protest, the Seattle Times reported. Protesters planned to fast for at least three days because the U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency reportedly does not recognize hunger strikes that are any shorter. All but one detention had stopped the strike by Saturday morning, said a spokeswoman for ICE. The detention facility was at the center of a publicized hunger strike in 2014 when Time reported that Paulino Ruiz “was sick of eating a boiled potato at every meal. ” He also reportedly claimed to be with the $ he received for doing custodial chores. He further alleged harsh treatment by detention center personnel. Ruiz is a legal resident who came to the United States at the age of three. He was scheduled for removal by immigration officers after he served prison time for robbery. All but just a handful of inmates stopped their strike after it had gone on for more than a week, Time reported. Breitbart Texas reported in that more than 60, 000 illegal aliens that were housed in a Colorado detention center are suing the federal contractor who operates the detention center. They allege the facility compelled “forced labor” in violation of federal human trafficking laws and are seeking money damages and restitution. Lawyers for the GEO Group, Inc. counter that no other court has ever recognized trafficking or unjust enrichment claims for cleaning bathrooms, serving meals, doing laundry, and performing other housekeeping duties. There is a supervised program of daily cleaning by all detainees, and GEO implements these requirements “through an program. ” “Nobody trafficked them there,” the defendant argued in a motion filed with the court which authorized the class action lawsuit. Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook. | 0 |
984 | US, Russia to Meet to Discuss Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty - Alex Gorka | null | Politics US, Russia to Meet to Discuss Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty
The US has accused Russia of breaking the INF Treaty and summoned a special meeting, but as of yet Washington has provided no evidence of Russian violations Originally appeared at Strategic Culture Foundation
The United States has called for a special meeting with Russia over alleged violations of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty - a landmark Cold War-era agreement.
Washington wants the Special Verification Commission (SVC) to discuss the problems related to the treaty’s compliance. The event is expected to take place in mid-November. The INF set up the Special Verification Commission as a way to deal with disputes surrounding the treaty. Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan can also attend the meeting because they housed intermediate range missiles before the disintegration of the Soviet Union and remain parties to the treaty. No SVC meeting has been convened since 2003.
Russia welcomes the United States' offer. «We have responded positively», said Mikhail Ulyanov, the head of Foreign Ministry's Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Department.
The treaty, which bans testing, producing, and possessing ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 to 5,500 kilometers, eliminated an entire class of missiles from Europe, and set up an extensive system of verification and compliance.
Two years ago, the United States first asserted that Russia was in violation of the treaty, by developing a missile system that fell within the INF prohibitions.
Last year, Rose Gottemoeller, the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, said that Russia risked provoking «military and economic countermeasures» if it continued to stonewall the INF issue.
The US has not released any specifics about which exactly Russian missile is the source of the violation. It should be noted that if Washington cannot present compelling evidence of the Russian non-compliance, the United States could be seen by the world as the party that killed the INF Treaty. The only thing the State Department has said is that an unspecified Russian ground-launched cruise missile breaches the agreement.
The issue has been in focus of US media outlets recently. For instance, an article published by The New York Times on October 19 said « Russia appears to be moving ahead with a program to produce a ground-launched cruise missile».
According to the article, «the concern goes beyond those raised by the United States in July 2014, when the Obama administration said that Russia had violated the 1987 treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces». On the very same day, The Wall Street Journal chimed in saying «The US is escalating a dispute with Russia over its accusations that Moscow possesses banned missile technology».
On October 17, two top House Republican chairmen - House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (Texas) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (Calif.) – wrote a letter to the US president saying «It has become apparent to us that the situation regarding Russia’s violation has worsened, and Russia is now in material breach of the treaty».
Russia, in turn, has accused the US of violating the pact. According to Russia’s officials, the Aegis Ashore missile defense system that the US has activated in Romania and plans to install in Poland represents a violation of the treaty.
Aegis Ashore uses the naval Mk-41 launching system, which is capable of firing long-range cruise missile. This is a blatant violation of the INF Treaty provisions.
The treaty bans launchers capable of firing intermediate range missiles. Mk-41s deployed in Europe may launch short and intermediate range cruise missiles deep into Russian territory. A US intermediate range weapon launched from Romania or Poland would require only a short flight time to reach beyond the Urals. Russia has also said that American armed drones violate the treaty.
The US plans to arm tactical aviation in Europe with modernized B61-12 guided warheads will virtually nullify all the benefits of the INF Treaty from the point of view of Russia’s security. The aircraft could fly from bases in Lithuania, Estonia and Poland to Russia’s largest cities in 15-20 minutes – not that much longer than the flight time of the missiles scuttled by the INF treaty.
If the US really wants the talks to produce a positive result, all these concerns should be part of the agenda.
The SVC meeting will take place against the background of Russia’s withdrawal from the plutonium disposal deal with the US because of Washington’s non-compliance, recent movement of nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad , rising tensions over NATO’s ground forces to deploy near Russian borders in 2017, US withdrawal from the agreement over Syria and apparent disintegration of arms control regime.
Only political unity among the major global powers can reverse the disintegration process. Non-compliance, technical or material, is not the only problem the INF faces. Russia and the US adherence to the treaty’s provisions does not prevent other countries from efforts to acquire ground-based intermediate range nuclear capability. The treaty should become multilateral. Russia and the US could cooperate in an effort to reach this goal with the help of the United Nations. It may be kind of forgotten today as so many things have happened since then, but in October 2007 Russia and the United States issued a joint statement to call on all countries to join a global INF Treaty addressing the First Committee (Disarmament and International Security) of the UN General Assembly.
Setting the existing differences aside, the parties could revive the process in an effort to involve other states.
The SVC meeting may become a venue for addressing other issues related to arms control. The concerns are there. Candid talk is the best way to address the burning problems of mutual interest.
The US has demonstratively refused to discuss the host of problems related to the ballistic missile defense in Europe.
This stance is erroneous. The US should change its approach to the problem. The two great powers do need a venue for arms control dialogue. The reached agreement to restart contacts within the framework of SVC against the background of US presidential election gives hope that the tide may gradually turn. | 1 |
985 | Breaking Silence, Officer Testifies About Killing of Walter Scott - The New York Times | Alan Blinder | CHARLESTON, S. C. — The defendant, one of the most vilified police officers in recent American history, stood alone before a judge on Tuesday and made a simple declaration: He would testify in his own defense against the accusation that he had murdered an unarmed black man. Minutes later, that defendant, Michael T. Slager, the North Charleston police officer who shot and killed Walter L. Scott during a traffic stop and foot pursuit, ended nearly 20 months of silence and told a jury that he had been consumed by “total fear” in the moments before he opened fire on April 4, 2015. “I see him with a Taser in his hand as I see him spinning around,” Mr. Slager, 35, said as he described the fatal encounter with Mr. Scott, 50. “That’s the only thing I see: that Taser in his hand. ” But Mr. Slager also conceded that given the benefit of hindsight, the encounter could have ended much differently, with an outcome that did not leave a man dead and a police officer on trial for murder. “Going back 18 months later and looking at everything,” he said, “things could have been different. ” Still, to a prosecutor who was skeptical and sneering during the Mr. Slager was a lawman with questionable judgment, a selective memory and a finger quick to pull the triggers of his Taser and his handgun. “It seems like you’re not remembering things that are bad for you,” said D. Bruce DuRant, the chief deputy solicitor for Charleston County. Before the jury of 11 white people and one black man, Mr. DuRant accused Mr. Slager of exaggerating the confrontation with Mr. Scott. “You’re starting to make up things as we go along, aren’t you?” he asked. Mr. Slager, who was fired after the shooting, said his recollection of the day was hazy or nonexistent. “I don’t remember everything that happened,” he said. The defense rested its case, and closing arguments were expected Wednesday, after which jurors are to begin deliberations. They will have a trove of evidence to weigh, including a bystander’s recording that showed Mr. Slager firing eight times at Mr. Scott’s back. If found guilty, Mr. Slager could be sentenced to life in prison. The jurors again saw the video, at some moments, on Tuesday, as the man who recorded it, Feidin Santana, sat in the front row. Mr. Slager insisted that specific facts confirmed by the recording, including that Mr. Scott did not have the officer’s Taser when he was shot, were not apparent amid the stress and commotion of an encounter that occurred after Mr. Scott fled from a traffic stop for a broken taillight. Instead, Mr. Slager said that he thought Mr. Scott was “running for some reason,” and that he felt he was outmatched and “going to lose” the struggle with Mr. Scott. Soon, according to Mr. Slager, Mr. Scott seized the Taser and appeared ready to fire it. “I pulled my firearm, and I pulled the trigger,” said Mr. Slager, who said he suffered from nightmares after the shooting. “I fired until the threat was stopped, like I’m trained to do. ” By the time Mr. Slager squeezed the trigger of his Glock, Mr. Scott was at least 17 feet away, a distance Mr. Slager suggested he did not recognize in the chaos. Mr. Scott, whose family believes he initially fled because of unpaid child support obligations, crumpled to the ground. Not long after the shooting, Mr. Slager dropped his Taser next to Mr. Scott’s body, a decision he could not easily explain on Tuesday, but one that prosecutors view as proof that he was trying to plant evidence to cover up a murder. The murder statute in this state is a decidedly unembellished one: It defines murder as “the killing of any person with malice aforethought, either express or implied. ” Although prosecutors have not brought conspicuous evidence of racial animus on Mr. Slager’s part, they have depicted him as an officer who broke the law and local policies, including one that stipulates that “the preservation of life must always take priority over apprehension of criminals. ” Until the Saturday morning when he killed Mr. Scott, Mr. Slager had not fired his handgun while on duty. But to prosecutors, and to a defense team plainly worried about Mr. Slager’s being seen as a rogue officer, his history of using other types of force could be crucial to the jury. Part of that history, first detailed by The New York Times in May 2015, shows that Mr. Slager often relied on his Taser to defuse a situation. In 2014, for instance, he alone accounted for about 4 percent of Taser use by the police force in North Charleston. Under questioning, Mr. Slager denied that his Taser use was a reflection of his temperament. But he did say that Mr. Scott had behaved in ways that heightened his suspicions and fears. Mr. Slager also said that had he known about Mr. Scott’s limited criminal record — he was apparently flagged in a law enforcement database as a wanted person with “violent tendencies” — he would not have pursued him alone. As Mr. Slager neared the end of his testimony, he became emotional about the aftermath of the shooting. “My family has been destroyed by this,” he said. “The Scott family has been destroyed by this. It’s horrible. ” | 0 |
986 | The Onion’s Special Coverage Of Election Day 2016 - The Onion - America's Finest News Source | null | The Onion’s Special Coverage Of Election Day 2016 Pinned Articles 5:51 PM Report: Turnout Fairly Unattractive Throughout Suburban Philadelphia
Our correspondents are reporting a steady turnout of homely and hideous residents throughout the suburban Philadelphia area that shows no signs of slowing down. In Montgomery County, polling places are said to be bustling with scores of schlubby, overweight voters, while Bucks and Delaware counties were reportedly busy all morning with an influx of unsightly, poorly groomed constituents, with many of the local oinkers having to wait upwards of an hour in line to cast their ballot. Overall, turnout in the area appears to be way uglier than analysts initially predicted.
Compiled from reports out of The Onion’s Philadelphia bureau as part of our Precinct Watch initiative, dedicated to covering all voting rights obstacles encountered by the feckless and feeble-minded American electorate. The Onion 9:51 PM The Onion Calls Upon The Cowardly State Of Iowa To Stop Its Dithering And Declare Itself For One Candidate Or The Other
With 42 percent of precincts reporting and the margin between the candidates holding at less than a percentage point, The Onion calls upon the spineless state of Iowa to quit its tarrying, pull itself together, and make a goddamn choice already. According to The Onion ’s electoral models, the Midwestern state needs to get its shit in order and figure out which way it’s going to go, because this isn’t even that complicated, for Christ’s sake. The Onion projects that the timid little Hawkeye State has 20 minutes or so to decide which candidate will get its six puny electoral votes, or we’ll just go ahead and call it for Jill Stein, and you’ll just have to deal with it. The Onion 9:46 PM Nation’s Optimists Need To Shut The Fuck Up Right Now
WASHINGTON—Saying their rosy attitude about the state of the election was not helping anything given what is currently transpiring, sources confirmed Tuesday night that the nation’s optimists need to seriously shut the fuck up as soon as humanly fucking possible. “Sure, things may look bad right now, but even if the worst happens, it’s only four years we’re talking about here,” said Santa Fe, NM resident Pete Mirenge, one of hundreds of thousands of positive thinkers across the nation who would do everyone a huge goddamn favor by closing their fucking traps right this fucking second and keeping them sealed for the foreseeable future. “This is exactly why we have a system of checks and balances—to ensure that whatever happens in the election, the executive branch never gets too much power. Think about it: Has any president been able to carry out their platform to the letter? No. Nothing’s ever as bad as it seems, believe me.” According to sources, a calm and composed Mirenge—who reportedly has about five seconds before his mouth is shut for him—then added that the country’s been through much worse and everything turned out okay. 9:27 PM Tim Kaine Shows Hillary His Belly Button To Cheer Her Up After Losing Ohio
After it was officially projected that Donald Trump would take the critical swing state of Ohio and its 18 electoral votes, vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine quickly ran over to a visibly disappointed Hillary Clinton and attempted to lift her spirits by pulling his shirt up above his midriff and showing her his belly button. The Virginia senator spent several minutes holding up the bottom of his shirt with his chin while repeatedly pointing at his navel and informing Clinton that he has “a innie [sic],” prompting Clinton to curtly nod and say “Yes, that’s right,” before craning her neck to look past him at the electoral map to track her progress in Florida and Nevada.
Onion chief political correspondent Martin Hazelton is reporting live from Clinton HQ in New York City throughout the evening. The Onion Jill Stein Addresses Voters On Twitter The Onion 8:38 PM A Recap Of The Onion’s Exit Polls
The Onion has been camped out at polling locations nationwide to collect the most accurate exit poll data and offer the only journalistic refuge in a world teeming with chaos and lies. Here are the highlights: The Onion 8:13 PM How Ordinary Americans Feel About What Remains Of This Country
Every four years, against anyone’s better judgment, the American people are entrusted to elect the next president. The Onion let them tell their stories. 7:58 PM Clinton Leaves Office On Motorcycle To Hunt Down Precinct Leaders Who Haven’t Reported Yet
With the majority of polls now closed across the country and no victor yet declared, Hillary Clinton reportedly left her campaign watch party moments ago, jumped on a red Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle, and sped off to track down any precinct leader who has yet to report their county’s election returns. Secretary Clinton could be seen weaving between cars in Manhattan, driving on the sidewalk to get past several areas of heavy traffic, and then accelerating to speeds in excess of 110 miles per hour once she reached the interstate. Reporters were unable to keep up with the Democratic nominee, but numerous witnesses confirmed that Clinton had a baseball bat stowed next to her and appeared incredibly irate before she pulled down the tinted visor on her helmet, revved the motorcycle’s engine, and tore away.
Onion chief political correspondent Martin Hazelton is reporting live from Clinton HQ in New York City throughout the evening. The Onion 7:51 PM Wolf Blitzer Walks Into Middle Of Olive Garden Commercial To Announce Breaking Election Results
NEW YORK—Briskly striding into frame and interrupting a jubilant family meal, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer reportedly entered the middle of an Olive Garden commercial airing during the network’s election coverage Tuesday night to announce a late-breaking election result. “Breaking news: CNN is calling Nevada for Hillary Clinton,” said Blitzer, stepping directly in front of a smiling mother passing a heaping plate of fettucine alfredo to her daughter and shushing the laughter of surrounding tables so that he could add that the victory dealt a severe blow to Donald Trump’s chances of reaching the Oval Office. “We are projecting that Secretary Clinton will take the crucial swing state’s six electoral votes, putting her on the inside track to securing the 270 electoral votes needed—hey, excuse me, will you please keep it down?—needed to win the presidency.” At press time, Blitzer was ducking in panic as the Olive Garden logo came swooping into frame. The Onion 7:36 PM Election Flashback: Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress (2008)
WASHINGTON—After emerging victorious from one of the most pivotal elections in history, president-elect Barack Obama will assume the role of commander in chief on Jan. 20, shattering a racial barrier the United States is, at long last, shitty enough to overcome.
Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.
“Today the American people have made their voices heard, and they have said, ‘Things are finally as terrible as we’re willing to tolerate,” said Obama, addressing a crowd of unemployed, uninsured, and debt-ridden supporters. “To elect a black man, in this country, and at this time—these last eight years must have really broken you.”
Added Obama, “It’s a great day for our nation.” | 1 |
987 | Illegal Immigrant Allegedly Kills for Parking Spot | John Binder | Following a fight outside a Texas nightclub, an illegal immigrant is now being accused of killing a man over a parking spot. [Jose Morales, a from Guatemala, allegedly shot and killed Mariano after a fight outside the OK Corral night club, with two more men involved in the incident, according to KXAN News. Investigators say that the four men first started fighting over parking spaces, with Morales and others in his car leaving the parking lot while and individuals in his car followed them. While the two cars full of men drove away, they each started throwing bottles and other objects at each other, before pulling over and physically fighting. That is when investigators say hit beat Morales’ vehicle with a baseball bat and then fled. Soon after, the two groups of men met at a nearby apartment complex, with Morales exiting his vehicle with a rifle, pointing it at the men and telling them he would kill them for beating his car. The car was in tried to flee the scene, but ultimately got stuck while trying to get away from Morales. This is when police say Morales opened fire on the car, killing . Morales fled the scene, but was arrested later on by the Lone Star Fugitive Task Force. Now, Morales is facing murder charges and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a detainer on the illegal immigrant, meaning he will be deported if he is released from prison for any reason. John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 0 |
988 | Writing with pen and paper hailed as latest twatty show-off thing to do | null | Writing with pen and paper hailed as latest twatty show-off thing to do 15-11-16 SITTING in a cafe with a notepad instead of a computer is the new twatty thing to do, it has been confirmed. All UK cafes now have at least one person staring listlessly at a Mac in them, prompting people at the cutting edge of cool to abandon their laptops for something simpler yet just as annoying. Self-proclaimed cool person Nikki Hollis said: “There’s something really soulless about looking at a screen when the beautiful world is happening all around you, which is why I’ve opted for this charming retro style of recording my important thoughts. “Having not actually written anything down for several years, my handwriting is comparable to that of a troubled six-year-old, but I find that it gives it a sense of childlike wonder. “I really love going back to basics, and for me writing a blog about internet marketing techniques in longhand has a beautiful authenticity to it. “It’s a massive waste of time because I still have to type it all up and email it to my boss when I get home, but I know I look winsome and cute chewing on a pen, which is something that you can’t really do with a laptop. “I know. I’ve tried.”
Share: | 1 |
989 | President Trump Honors Little Sisters of the Poor on First White House Nat’l Day of Prayer in Years - Breitbart | Michelle Moons | WASHINGTON, D. C. — President Donald Trump held the first National Day of Prayer event at the White House in many years on Thursday in the Rose Garden with approximately 150 guests in attendance. [The President announced his first trip overseas, which will take him to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Vatican. The trip will come ahead of the NATO G7. The President thanked all those gathered, spoke of the commemoration of the National Day of Prayer occurring the the White House for the first time in years, and took a moment during the course of his speech to bring the Little Sisters of the poor on stage as he spoke of his new religious freedom Executive Order. Steven Curtis Chapman opened the ceremonies with a version of the song Great is Thy Faithfulness. He then sang the words of The Lord’s Prayer, inviting those gathered to join in singing along — which some did. Steven Curtis Chapman singing Great is Thy Faithfulness at White House National Day of Prayer event @StevenCurtis pic. twitter. — Michelle Moons (@MichelleDiana) May 4, 2017, Pastor Paula White then took to the podium thanking those cabinet members present for attending. She noted that this year the National Day of Prayer event is taking place in the Rose Garden at the White House. She spoke of the rarity of holding these prayers this day on the lawn of the White House. VP Pence introduces President Trump for National Day of Prayer @VP @POTUS @WhiteHouse pic. twitter. — Michelle Moons (@MichelleDiana) May 4, 2017, Prayers were given by evangelical pastor Jack Graham to comfort those who are persecuted, that God’s love would be expressed to people. Catholic Cardinal Donald Wuerl offered prayers of God’s promises and leading, that people would walk in the full freedom of God, in the fullness of peace, in the fullness of freedom, mindful of those who do not experience the same freedom. Prayers were offered for President Donald Trump’s leadership. Jewish Rabbi Marvin Hier followed with prayers for President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, others in the Administration, and others around the country. Vice President Mike Pence recounted the long American history of the National Day of Prayer. Every President has issued a proclamation for the day since it began, Pence noted, but not every President has held a commemoration in the Rose Garden of the White House. President Trump brings Little Sisters of the Poor on stage at National Day of Prayer event at White House #NationalDayofPrayer pic. twitter. — Michelle Moons (@MichelleDiana) May 4, 2017, In his remarks Trump said: We are a nation of believers. Faith is deeply embedded into the history of our country, the spirit of our founding and the soul of our nation,” he added as he thanked the faith leaders. “As we look at the violence around the world, and believe me it’s violent … we realize how truly blessed we are to live in a nation that honors the freedom of worship. Today my administration is leading by example as we take historic steps to protect religious liberty in the United States of America. “We will not allow people of faith to be targeted, bullied, or silenced anymore,” said Trump. “We will never ever stand for religious discrimination. Tolerance is the cornerstone of peace. ” The President then announced his overseas trip and that he will meet with leaders from across the Muslim world in Saudi Arabia. Trump mentioned President Abraham Lincoln’s announcement of a National Day of Prayer. “It’s so great to be doing it in the Rose Garden,” Trump said as he announced the proclamation of this year’s National Day of Prayer. The crowd gave a standing ovation upon this announcement. “Freedom is not a gift from government, freedom is a gift from God,” proclaimed Trump. He referred to the founders of the country who enshrined the freedom of religion in the First Amendment. He spoke of his new executive order on religious freedom. “No American should be forced to choose between the dictates of the federal government and tenets of their faith. ” He spoke of the Johnson Amendment and the impediment it imposes on religious leaders. The President declared, “This financial threat against the faith community is over. ” He said he would sign the EO, adding, “You’re now in a position that you can say what you want to say. ” “No one should be censoring sermons or targeting pastors,” said Trump. The President called the Little Sisters of the Poor to the podium and even recognized the lawyers that have been fighting a court case for the group that has faced prosecution for noncompliance with a portion of the Obamacare mandate. The president said to them, “I want you to know that your long ordeal will soon be over. ” “God bless you and God bless America,” concluded President Trump. President Ronald Reagan held observances of the National Day of Prayer in the Rose Garden, as did President George H. Bush and George W. Bush, according to the National Day of Prayer Task Force. President Bill Clinton invited guests for prayer events at the White House on the National Day of Prayer. While President Barack Obama did sign National Day of Prayer proclamations in the standing presidential tradition, he chose “not to personally participate nor host events for the National Day of Prayer at the White House,” according to the NDOP Task Force. Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana | 0 |
990 | Hillary Clinton Supporters Now Calling for a Recount of Votes in Battleground States | Mike Rivero | November 23, 2016 By 21wire Leave a Comment
“The person who received the most votes free from interference or tampering needs to be in the White House. It may well be Donald J. Trump, but further due diligence is required to ensure that American democracy is not threatened.”
21st Century Wire says…
Although the election was called on Nov 8th, the Democratic Party’s ongoing campaign to delegitimize the new incoming President is still ongoing.
For those of us with long enough memories, the Democratic Party, their media operatives and the Clinton Campaign were claiming that Trump and the GOP would be engaged in this very same behavior after Hillary Clinton won the Presidency (as expected).
Notice how the shoe is now on the other foot.
It’s interesting reading past stories by ‘news’ sources linked to the Clinton Campaign and John Podesta as Politico has, who ran a feature on Aug 16th entitled, “Why the GOP Will Never Accept President Hillary Clinton” which lays out the case of Hillary’s lock on the White House and how the evil Republicans will not accept her eventual election victory.
“Will Donald Trump respect the peaceful transition of power?” howled CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in the run-up to the election. The question now is: will the Democrats respect the result, and simply “Move On,” as they say?
Of course, we now know that ‘journalists’ like Wolf at CNN were getting their talking points directly the Clinton Campaign .
As it turns out, the only thing illegitimate about the 2016 Election… was the mainstream corporate media.
More form the Guardian…
The Guardian
A growing number of academics and activists are calling for US authorities to fully audit or recount the 2016 presidential election vote in key battleground states, in case the results could have been skewed by foreign hackers.
The loose coalition, which is urging Hillary Clinton’s campaign to join its fight, is preparing to deliver a report detailing its concerns to congressional committee chairs and federal authorities early next week, according to two people involved.
The document, which is currently 18 pages long, focuses on concerns about the results in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“I’m interested in verifying the vote,” said Dr Barbara Simons, an adviser to the US election assistance commission and expert on electronic voting. “We need to have post-election ballot audits.” Simons is understood to have contributed analysis to the effort but declined to characterise the precise nature of her involvement.
A second group of analysts, led by the National Voting Rights Institute founder John Bonifaz and Professor Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan’s center for computer security and society, is also taking part in the push for a review, and has been in contact with Simons.
In a blogpost early on Wednesday, Halderman said paper ballots and voting equipment should be examined in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, warning that deadlines were rapidly approaching.
“Unfortunately, nobody is ever going to examine that evidence unless candidates in those states act now, in the next several days, to petition for recounts,” he said.
The developments follow Clinton’s surprise defeat to Donald Trump in the 8 November vote, and come after US intelligence authorities released public assessments that Russian hackers were behind intrusions into regional electoral computer systems and the theft of emails from Democratic officials before the election…
READ MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 Files | 1 |
991 | HBO Scraps Jon Stewart Animated Comedy Series | Daniel Nussbaum | HBO has discarded plans for an animated political comedy series from former Daily Show host Jon Stewart. [In a statement Wednesday, the premium cable network said that technical difficulties had derailed the untitled project, which Stewart had been working on since at least the summer of 2016. “HBO and Jon Stewart have decided not to proceed with a digital animated project,” the network said in a statement. “We all thought the project had great potential but there were technical issues in terms of production and distribution that proved too difficult given the quick turnaround and topical nature of the material. ” Stewart signed an exclusive production deal with HBO in November 2015, shortly after retiring from his stint as host of Comedy Central’s Daily Show. The network said Wednesday that it is currently developing other projects with Stewart. The scrapped project was described as an animated parody of a cable news network, which would have been delivered over the Internet and would have allowed Stewart to comment on political news in real time. At the Television Critics Press Association summer tour last year, HBO programming president Casey Bloys described the project as being an “ portal. ” The network had initially hoped to have the new project in production during the 2016 presidential race. The news of the cancellation comes as Stewart’s former colleagues Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee have seen interest in their programs spike under President Donald Trump’s administration. Colbert’s Late Show on CBS earned its first total viewer victory over NBC and Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show this season for the first time since 1995. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 0 |
992 | Sentencing for Murderer of Rare Book Dealer | Joel Wickwire | This past week, on Monday, Oct. 24, 2016, a judge with the Oxford Crown Court in the United Kingdom sentenced Michael Danaher to life in prison for murdering rare book dealer, Adrian Greenwood. The purpose of the crime was to steal a rare first edition of the book, “The Wind in the Willows.” Danaher argued he killed Greenwood in self-defense, yet it only took two hours to render a unanimous guilty charge. Adrian Greenwood, 42, was found dead after being stabbed 30 times at his Oxford home in April.
Prosecuting Attorney Oliver Saxby told the court that this was a “brutal” murder that included stab wounds to the “chest and neck and a deep wound to his back.” There was also evidence of torture and blunt wounds indicating Greenwood had been “stamped on.” The sentence Danaher received for murdering the rare book dealer was life in prison or no less than 34 years. Saxby explained to the court that Danaher stabbed Greenwood until the knife broke, after which he began beating him. Saxby went on to say that Danaher, “cool as you like, he helped himself to that first edition of ‘The Wind in the Willows,’ and Adrian Greenwood’s phone, and his laptop and his wallet.”
The book is valued at £50,000 but Danaher listed it on eBay for only £2,000 after returning home from murdering Greenwood. Danaher learned that Greenwood was in possession of the book after he tried selling a copy on eBay in August of 2015. Danaher had been planning the crime for some time. He also had a list in an Excel file on his laptop titled “Enterprises” of other wealthy persons who were targets. It included their addresses, the method to be used like “stun gun” and the “expected take” from each target. Next to Greenwood’s name on the list Danaher wrote “Modus: Any!! Expected take: rare books.”
Saxby, the prosecutor, told the jury the wealthy targets on Danaher’s list “exudes a sense of resentment. It is almost as if these people who, because of their wealth . . . deserve to be subjected to what he has planned.” The jury was comprised of four women and eight men. The names on the list included Simon Cowel, Kate Moss, Jeffery Archer and others. About two weeks before Danaher’s attack on Greenwood, he tried to break into wealthy businessman Adrian Beecroft’s house pretending to be a delivery man, but Beecroft’s wife believed the man to be suspicious and “raised the alarm,” which caused Danaher to flee. He later drafted a letter on his laptop to Mrs. Beecroft demanding 200 bitcoin or about £96,000 for leaving them alone. The letter was never sent.
The sentencing handed down by the Oxford Crown Court for murdering book dealer Greenwood over “Wind in the Willows” is perhaps a relief to those who were on his list. The author of the book is Kenneth Grahame and it was published in 1908. “Wind in the Willows” is a children’s book known for its “mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality and camaraderie.” Its text is available online for free as part of Project Gutenberg.
By Joel Wickwire
Sources:
BBC News – Man Guilty of Murdering Adrian Greenwood Over “The Wind in the Willow” Book
The Guardian – Alleged Killer of Antiques Deal Had List of Famous Targets, Jury Told
The Las Angeles Times – British Book Dealer Slain for His First Edition of “The Wind in the Willows”
Top and Feature Image Courtesy of Ken Wilcox’s Flicker Page – Creative Commons License
In-Line Image Courtesy of Karen Cox’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
book | 1 |
993 | The Latest Stock Market and Investing Books | Financial Markets | beforeitsnews.com | (Before It's News) If you re looking for new and interesting books to read over the holidays that are related to the stock market and investing, look no further than the following list. These are books that have recently been released or will be released within the next couple weeks. Happy reading!
Quantitative Momentum: A Practitioner’s Guide to Building a Momentum-Based Stock Selection System – – – Frontier Investor: How to Prosper in the Next Emerging Markets – – –
Stock Market 101: From Bull and Bear Markets to Dividends, Shares, and Margins_Your Essential Guide to the Stock Market – – –
Great Investment Ideas – – – The Harriman Stock Market Almanac 2017: Seasonality Analysis and Studies of Market Anomalies to Give You an Edge in the Year Ahead – – –
The Stock Picker: A financial history from the sharp end – – –
How to Spot the Next Starbucks, Whole Foods, Walmart, or McDonald’s BEFORE Its Shares Explode – – – | 1 |
994 | Fashion Industry CEO: Supporting Planned Parenthood Is a ‘Civic Responsibility’ | Dr. Susan Berry | The CEO of the trade association for American fashion designers says supporting Planned Parenthood is a “civic responsibility,” since the abortion business faces the possible elimination of its taxpayer funding. [The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) is launching a collaboration with Planned Parenthood and a campaign to raise awareness of and support for the abortion industry giant with a pink pin that states, “Fashion Stands with Planned Parenthood”: Fashion stands with @PPFA! Check out https: . for the full story on our new exciting partnership. #IStandWithPP pic. twitter. — CFDA (@CFDA) February 6, 2017, The pins were designed by The Creative Group, Condé Nast, and will be distributed throughout the industry in time for New York Fashion Week, which begins Thursday, says CFDA. Steven Kolb, CFDA president and CEO, said supporting Planned Parenthood is a “civic responsibility. ” “Defunding Planned Parenthood will impact millions of Americans,” he added. “We will raise awareness and support this fashion week and show that Fashion Stands with Planned Parenthood. ” According to CFDA, more than 40 designers and brands are participating in the campaign, “including Diane von Furstenberg, Carolina Herrera, Cushnie et Ochs, Public School, Jonathan Simkhai, kate spade new york, Rosetta Getty, Proenza Schouler, Mara Hoffman, Narciso Rodriguez, Milly, Prabal Gurung, Tory Burch, and Zac Posen. ” “We are truly thrilled by the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s show of support for Planned Parenthood at New York Fashion Week,” said Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards in response. “Planned Parenthood has stood defiantly in the face of opposition for a century, and we’re not backing down now. ” “The American people overwhelmingly support our organization and strongly oppose ‘defunding’ care at our health centers,” she continued. “Planned Parenthood’s millions of supporters, including the CFDA, are mobilizing to protect access to reproductive health and rights for everyone, including the 2. 5 million patients we serve, and we will continue to fight to ensure that all people can get the care they need. ” However, 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. The House recently approved the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act, a measure that would permanently prohibit taxpayer dollars from being used to fund abortions and would make the Hyde Amendment permanent across all federal expenditures. “House passage of this legislation is the first step towards fulfilling a promise made by President Trump to keep taxpayers out of the abortion business,” said Susan B. Anthony President Marjorie Dannenfelser. “He and his administration are working for the American people, not the abortion lobby. We urge the U. S. Senate to follow suit so that this bill can get to President Trump’s desk as soon as possible. ” According to NYMag. com, CFDA board member Tracy Reese said, “So many people stand with Planned Parenthood — including designers and entertainers — because they and their loved ones have relied on Planned Parenthood for health care, including care like cancer screenings, birth control, STI testing and treatment and sex education. ” “Planned Parenthood is often the only option for this type of care in underserved communities,” she added. “By creating a visually engaging and fashionable pin, we hope to create an organic social media movement promoting awareness and education. ” Planned Parenthood, however, does not provide mammograms, and in a new video series, group Live Action is challenging the abortion business’s claim that it provides “ care. ” Live Action’s investigators seeking “ care” contacted 97 Planned Parenthood clinics across the country and were told at 92 of them that “ services” were not available. Similarly, investigators discovered that Planned Parenthood staff members admitted ultrasounds are only done prior to abortions and not for care. “The reality is Planned Parenthood’s focus for pregnant women is abortion,” Live Action President Lila Rose said at a press conference on Capitol Hill Thursday. “It’s not care. It’s not serving young mothers, promoting them, supporting them it’s abortion. ” leaders and members of Congress also point out that federally qualified healthcare centers (FQHCs) provide more comprehensive medical and family planning services than Planned Parenthood to women and families. Nationally, there are 13, 000 FQHCs — a figure that outnumbers Planned Parenthood facilities by 20 to 1. Republicans plan to redirect Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding to these thousands of other health centers that do not provide abortion. Planned Parenthood receives more than a dollars in taxpayer funding annually and performs an excess of 300, 000 abortions per year. | 0 |
995 | Anti-Trump protests are paid and staged, Craigslist reveals | Sergey Gladysh | November 12, 2016 348 Ads on Craigslist reveal that paid anti-Trump protesters and Soros-sponsored staged demonstrations are continuing to fuel hate and division. Share on Facebook
It was reported previously on The Duran that MoveOn – a George Soros controlled NGO, is behind the organization of anti-Trump protests across the country. As the protests continue, however, Craigslist has become an important recruitment tool for some of these organizers, and here is what it reveals:
Fight the Trump Agenda! We’re hiring Full-Time Organizers 15/hr! – reads a Craigslist ad from Washington CAN in Seattle . Activists are promised Medical, Dental, Vision, 401(k), Paid Vacation, Paid Sick Days, Holidays, and Leave of Absence .
Washington CAN claims to be the state’s oldest and largest grassroots non-profit with over 35 years of organizational experience. It is unclear whether it has any direct ties to Soros’s MoveOn, but it certainly wouldn’t be a wild assumption to make under the circumstances.
In another instance, a Craigslist ad exposed paid Anti-Trump protesters being recruited for a staged event in Los Angeles. And this time the Soros link is quite clear and in the open. TruthFeed reports:
In this case, a Craigslist ad in Los Angeles shows that activists are wanted to block traffic in the heavy traffic intersection of Highlands and Hollywood.
Here’s an example of a Soros employee literally “posing” as a protester. Not all that “grass roots.”
Obviously, no one is disputing the fact that there are millions of people unhappy with the election results. Neither is there any doubt that thousands across the the country are protesting genuinely out of emotion and desire to express their discontent. What’s important is that these people realize that they are playing right into the hands of an establishment agenda that doesn’t have America’s best interests in mind.
The election is over and we have a clear winner. The losing side has conceded, admitting that the election was fair and calling for a peaceful transition of power. For all the smart folks out there this is a clear indication that it’s time to go home, back to school, back to work, back to your daily routine and stop trying to prolong the division and hate that has been eating away at this country for far too long. | 1 |
996 | Men, Is Exercise Putting a Damper on Your Sex Life? - The New York Times | Gretchen Reynolds | Men who exercise strenuously may have a lower libido than those whose workouts are lighter, according to one of the first studies to scientifically delve into the relationship between men’s workouts and their sex lives. For years, scientists and active people have debated whether and how exercise affects sexual desire and human reproduction. But most past studies have centered on women. Typically, this research has found that when some female athletes, such as marathon runners, train intensely for many hours a week, they can develop menstrual dysfunctions. These problems seem caused by hormonal imbalances related to physical stress and frequently affect a woman’s interest in sex and her ability to conceive. But such dysfunctions are rare and usually resolve after the athlete lightens her training load. Less is known about the effects of exercise, especially heavy exercise, on men’s libidos and fertility. There have been hints that, in moderate amounts, physical activity increases the male body’s production of the hormone testosterone, which theoretically should ramp up sex drive. Other small studies, on the other hand, have suggested that lengthy and grueling training may blunt the levels of testosterone in a man’s bloodstream both immediately and over the long term. But those studies examined only hormone changes related to exercise, which can be measured easily, and not differences in sexual emotions and behavior, which are tougher to quantify. So for the new study, which was published this month in Medicine Science in Sports Exercise, researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill decided to ask active men about their sex lives. They began by developing a questionnaire based on earlier psychological research into men’s sexual behavior that asked, for instance, how often they thought about and engaged in sex. The scientists also created a separate questionnaire with detailed queries about exercise habits, including how often and intensely the men worked out each week. A final set of questions asked about general health and medical histories. Then the researchers contacted running, cycling and triathlon training groups, university athletic departments, and publications targeted at endurance athletes and asked them to alert members and readers to the questionnaires, which were available online. Almost 1, 100 physically active adult men completed all of the questions. Most were experienced athletes who had participated for years in training and competitions. The scientists used their responses to stratify the men based on both the extent and intensity of their workouts. They wound up with groups whose weekly exercise was short, moderately lengthy or quite prolonged, and separately whose weekly exercise was light, moderate or extremely intense. It was possible, of course, for someone to be in the top or bottom of both of these categories, meaning that their workouts were both long and intense or light and short. But the scientists wanted to examine each of those aspects of a workout separately, so did not track such overlaps. They also categorized the men according to their answers about their sex lives, creating groups with relatively high, moderate or low libidos. Finally, they compared the men’s exercise habits to their reported interest and engagement in sex. And there were clear patterns. The men whose exercise routines were moderate or light in intensity or duration were far more likely to report moderate or high libidos than were the men whose workouts were especially prolonged or intense, even after the researchers controlled for age. (Older men tend to report less interest in sex, although not by much.) In effect, strenuous exercise “was associated with lower libido,” says Anthony Hackney, a professor of exercise physiology and nutrition at the University of North Carolina who led the study. Of course, this was a small sample of men who voluntarily chose to complete a personally intrusive survey. It is impossible to know whether they were truthful or representative of the rest of their gender. This type of study also cannot tell us whether too much exercise actually causes low libido, only that the two are linked. And it did not examine why strenuous exercise might dampen libidos. But Dr. Hackney speculates that both physical fatigue and lower testosterone levels after exhausting exercise likely play a role. He and his colleagues hope to soon mount experiments that directly track exercise, hormone levels and libidos to learn more about their interactions. They also aim to learn more about whether the intensity of the workouts or duration has the greater impact on male sex drive. Perhaps most important, he hopes eventually to pin down at what point exercise might start to lower some men’s libidos. Both moderate and light physical activity were associated in this study with relatively high libidos, he points out. “But there does seem be a potential tipping point,” after which more exercise may blunt desire. The necessary studies likely will require years and many cooperative men to complete. In the meantime, he suggests that if someone is worried about whether his training is affecting his sex life, he might try exercising a little less, to see if his libido changes. This advice could be especially important for couples trying to conceive, he says. “Fertility specialists will often ask a woman about whether and how much she exercises,” he says. “Based on our data, we think they should also be asking the man. ” | 0 |
997 | Baking Soda & Coconut Oil Can Kill Cancer: Eye-Opening Evidence | stevew | Humans Are Free Baking Soda & Coconut Oil Can Kill Cancer: Eye-Opening Evidence
A woman diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma skin cancer located on the crown on her head managed to cure it by applying baking soda paste directly on the affected area.
At first, when her daughter insisted, she refused, but then she decided to give it a try. After three major surgeries, the cancer returned and each time it was even worse, so she decided to trust nature and started using pure cold pressed organic coconut oil instead of water and baking soda .
Coconut oil has cellular regenerative powers, which is why she applied the thick paste directly onto the affected area.
Azizo, her daguhter, used only Polysporin Triple 3 Antibiotics, and she applied them only at night.
You are allowed to use other antibiotic ointment just as a precaution against bacterial infections within the sore area. For instance, you can use colloidal silver soaked cotton as well.
Once the wound is closed, you can stop using the ointment. Azizo continued applying the combination of baking soda and coconut oil, but she also applied cotton ball soaked in ACV and taped it to the skin.
As a result, this induced the penetraton of baking soda to the basal cell carcinoma roots beyond the skin’s surface. Yet another even better solution for this purpose is DMSO.
Azizo continued applying this remedy to her mother for 38 days, and finally, the woman was completely free from skin cancer and the wound healed in no time.
You can read their story and learn more about the method she used by following this link .
Even though this skin cancer is nor deadly as melanoma can be, it can still continue spreading on the skin if it’s not properly cured.
If you didn’t know, tumors only thrive in acidic environments, which makes baking soda an excellent solution since it provides only alkaline environment.
Dramatic Life and Death Story
Vernon Johnson, recently divorced and low on cash was diagnosed with stage III prostate cancer, which metastasized into the hip area and soon developed in stage IV.
He was supposed to be examined about the therapy he needed to undergo in several weeks, when his son suggested him to try several substances that could rapidly alkalize on a cellular level.
Even though he ordered cesium, it never arrived, so he used baking soda and blackstrap mollases, instead of maple syrup.
The Trojan Horse sugar should open cancer cells wide so that they could receive the highly alkaline influence of baking soda. This should eventually result in destruction of cancer cells.
After two weeks of using this natural solution, his bone scan showed that there is no spreading of the cancer. The PSA dropped from 22 to 5 to 1 over the course of his treatment and pharmaceutical prescriptions.
However, beside his treatment, Vernon started spending a lot of time on sunlight, switched to a healthier plant based diet and did breathing exercises on a regular basis in order to increase the oxygen delivery to the cancer affected area.
Moreover he wrote a book called “ Vernon’s Dance With Cancer: After the Jolt ”, where he shared his experience with cancer.
He wrote this book over five years after the original baking soda alkaline producing treatment. Five years later, he is cancer free and he gives lectures about the treatment.
It should be mentioned that there are certain foods that produce alkalinity in the body, while certain acidic foods such as lemon and limes become alkaline in the body right after their ingestion. Make sure to incorporate baking soda in your life since it is alkaline and produces alkalinity.
Dr. Mark Sircus is an Italian former physician who is now an alternative health practitioner. Based on his experience as an oncology surgeon, he injects baking soda solution into the blood vessels that feed tumors.
According to Dr. Simoncini , there is no pharmaceutical anti-fungal that is more effective and safe than baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate.
Moreover, he also claims that cancer thrives on fungal colonies which also create cancer. His claim resulted in removing of his physician certification in Italy.
As you can see, baking soda is extremely powerful natural ingredient which should receive more attention and examination, or at least is should be considered as a complementary treatment for severe ailments and a total approach for minor ailments. | 1 |
998 | Saudi Arabia announces date certain for the application of VAT | null | Email Saudi Arabia announces the VAT Act, which was the last touches which come into force in early 2018 mode, and angry on Twitter. After the case of austerity pursued by the government of Al-Saud and the trade deficit in the budget, said Ibrahim al-Assaf, Saudi Minister of Finance, on Thursday, by members of the Ministry of Finance meeting, it was finalized last basics of the adoption of the VAT law, and will be implemented in the early 2018 according to an earlier agreement, a law requiring the buyer to pay a financial tax of $ (5% or 10%) on everything you buy from any store and these fees (value added) of the state and is applied in most countries of the world. This law has angered the Saudis on social networks commentators on this law that will adversely affect the community, describing the situation experienced by their government that when there is a surplus in the budget, they go to the rich pockets, and when there is a deficit in the budget are taken from the pockets of the poor and this law is a "reward for the rich .... and the punishment of the poor." | 1 |
999 | Trump, Citing No Evidence, Suggests Susan Rice Committed Crime - The New York Times | Maggie Haberman, Matthew Rosenberg and Glenn Thrush | WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Wednesday that Susan E. Rice, the former national security adviser, may have committed a crime by seeking to learn the identities of Trump associates swept up in surveillance of foreign officials by United States spy agencies, repeating an assertion his allies in the news media have been making since last week. Mr. Trump gave no evidence to support his claim, and current and former intelligence officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations have said they do not believe Ms. Rice’s actions were unusual or unlawful. The president repeatedly rebuffed attempts by two New York Times reporters to learn more about what led him to the conclusion, saying he would talk more about it “at the right time. ” The allegation by a sitting president was a remarkable escalation — and, his critics say, the latest effort to change the story at a time when his nascent administration has been consumed by questions about any role his associates may have played in a Russian campaign to disrupt last year’s presidential election. Since March 4, when Mr. Trump posted on Twitter that President Barack Obama had “wiretapped” him at Trump Tower during the campaign, the president and his allies have repeatedly sought evidence trying to corroborate that claim, despite flat denials from James B. Comey, the director of the F. B. I. and other senior intelligence officials. Wednesday’s interview revealed how Mr. Trump seizes on claims made by the conservative news media, from fringe outlets to Fox News, and gives them a presidential stamp of approval and also increases their reach. Last week, some Republican television commentators asserted that Ms. Rice had improperly leaked the names of Trump associates picked up in surveillance of foreign officials. On Sunday, a conservative writer and conspiracy theorist reported, without identifying his sources, that Ms. Rice had been the one to seek identities of the Trump associates. Other conservative outlets picked up the report, and the Drudge Report website, which has been supportive of Mr. Trump, featured the story prominently. White House officials then accused mainstream news outlets of not giving the story proper coverage. The interview with The Times was supposed to be focused on Mr. Trump’s plans for spending on the nation’s infrastructure. But moments after it began, the president began talking about Ms. Rice. “I think the Susan Rice thing is a massive story. I think it’s a massive, massive story. All over the world,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s a bigger story than you know,” the president added cryptically, also saying that new information would emerge “in terms of what other people have done also. ” “The Russia story is a total hoax. There has been absolutely nothing coming out of that,” he said. Turning the subject to Ms. Rice, the president said: “What’s happened is terrible. I’ve never seen people so indignant, including many Democrats who are friends of mine. ” Through a spokeswoman, Ms. Rice said, “I’m not going to dignify the president’s ludicrous charge with a comment. ” In an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday, Ms. Rice said she had done nothing wrong. “The allegation is that somehow the Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes,” Ms. Rice said. “That’s absolutely false. ” Normally, when Americans are swept up in surveillance of foreign officials by intelligence agencies, their identities are supposed to be obscured. But they can be revealed — or “unmasked” — for national security reasons, and intelligence officials say it is a regular occurrence and completely legal for a national security adviser to request the identities of Americans who are mentioned in intelligence reports. Intelligence officials said any requests that Ms. Rice made would have had to be granted by the intelligence agency that produced the report. In most cases, that would likely have been the National Security Agency, which is responsible for electronic surveillance of foreign officials. “Requests to learn the identity of a U. S. person were not routine, but also not uncommon,” said Stephen Slick, a retired C. I. A. official who served as the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. Requesting that a name be revealed so that officials could “make sense of an intelligence report was a normal part of the daily intelligence rhythm at the White House, State Department, Defense Department and other national security agencies,” added Mr. Slick, who is now the director of the Intelligence Studies Project at the University of Texas at Austin. It could be a crime if Ms. Rice leaked the name of any American wrapped up in the surveillance net, but she flatly denied doing so in her MSNBC interview. “I leaked nothing to nobody, and never have and never would,” Ms. Rice said. The broader issue of how intelligence collected by the national security apparatus is disseminated and used has long been an animating issue for civil libertarians, a point that Mr. Trump made in the interview. Revelations about American programs for intercepting and mining private data made by Edward J. Snowden, a government contractor, proved deeply embarrassing for the Obama administration in 2013. Mr. Trump declined to say whether he would be willing to declassify some of the information that has been at issue. He also did not explain what he believed was unlawful in his estimation. It is not the first time Mr. Trump has made a provocative allegation without providing supporting evidence. One of the most notorious instances of this was his yearslong claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. Like his statements about Mr. Obama — which he walked away from late in the 2016 presidential campaign — Mr. Trump’s claims about Ms. Rice have taken hold in the conservative news media, where she has been a target ever since her press appearances after the terrorist attack on a diplomatic outpost in Libya in September 2012. Mr. Trump’s March 4 Twitter message came after reports in conservative news outlets — including Breitbart, the website once run by the president’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon — claiming that there had been surveillance of some kind against Mr. Trump when he was a candidate. Mr. Trump was widely criticized for the intemperate post, and he began to ask his advisers about how he might be able to investigate the issue. Weeks later, Representative Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters that he had learned of new information that Trump associates may have been surveilled in some way. He rushed to the White House to brief the president, even though it was later revealed that the information had come from White House officials. Representative Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, cast Mr. Trump’s comments as part of a broader effort by the president to distract from the investigations into Russia’s interference in the election. The committee is running one of the investigations. “He began by accusing President Obama of a crime without any evidence,” Mr. Schiff said. “He’s now moved on to accusing Susan Rice of a crime without any evidence, and this is sadly how this president operates. ” It “would be a terrible way to do business,” Mr. Schiff added. “It’s a worse way to run a country. ” | 0 |
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