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U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter, eyeing the possibility of rival U.S. and Russian air operations in Syria’s limited airspace, agreed in a call with his Russian counterpart to explore ways to avoid accidental military interactions.
“They agreed to further discuss mechanisms for deconfliction in Syria and the counter-ISIL campaign,” Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said after the call, referring to the campaign by the United States and its allies against Islamic State militants.
The former Cold War foes have a common adversary in Islamic State militants in Syria, even as Washington opposes Moscow’s support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, seeing him as a driver in the nation’s devastating, four-and-a-half-year civil war.
A senior U.S. defense official, recounting details of the conversation, said Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu had described Moscow’s activities in Syria as defensive in nature.
Shoigu said Russia’s military moves “were designed to honor commitments made to the Syrian government,” the U.S. official said.
It was unclear, however, what those commitments to Syria are or how Russia’s military buildup was relevant to them.
Russia’s latest deployment has added significant airpower to a buildup that, according to U.S. estimates, also includes helicopter gunships, artillery and as many 500 Russian naval infantry forces at an airfield near Latakia.
One U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said four tactical Russian fighter jets were sent to Syria. Another U.S. official declined to offer a number but confirmed the presence of multiple jets.
In London, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States was looking to find “common ground” with Russia.
Kerry said it was important to forge a political agreement in Syria and end the hardship of Syrian people.
“Everybody is seized by the urgency. We have been all along but the migration levels and continued destruction, the danger of potential augmentation by any unilateral moves puts a high premium on diplomacy at this moment,” he said.
Carter told Shoigu that future consultations would run in parallel “with diplomatic talks that would ensure a political transition in Syria,” Cook said.
“He noted that defeating (Islamic State militants) and ensuring a political transition are objectives that need to be pursued at the same time,” he said.
The last time a U.S. defense chief spoke with Shoigu was in August 2014, the Pentagon said, adding high-level communications were halted following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its intervention in Ukraine.
Kiev and the West accuse Moscow of driving a pro-Russian separatist rebellion in east Ukraine, which started shortly after the Crimea annexation. Russia denies this.
Moscow’s moves in Syria set the stage for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 28, likely shifting some attention away from Ukraine and toward the conflict in Syria.
“The trajectory that Putin was on for UNGA was to come to New York and basically be ignored,” said Andrew Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
I truly hate Absa, and they haven’t done a thing to me.
If you’ve ever run an email account without any spam filtering on, you’ll have had an inkling of just how much spam is piling up across the net, a veritable flood of dirtybits looking for tiny cracks in the dyke.
The spam filters run by our ISPs and on our local PCs do a huge amount to stem the flood, but when spammers are out on phishing expeditions (in search of our PIN numbers) using bank addresses/names that cannot be blocked by the ISPs because of all the legitimate traffic that has to be parsed, the situation gets truly messy.
That’s why I hate Absa. It seems the phishing mafia just love them because day in, day out the Absa spam floods my mailbox. Maybe it’s because Absa customers are dumber than those of other banks, so they’re more prone to handing over their PIN numbers and having their accounts fleeced, but whatever the reason, this must be becoming a marketing nightmare for Absa.
Imagine if the core emotional association generated by your brand is a brew of intrusion, deception and disgust.
Sorry Absa, BUT that’s exactly how you are being processed in my cortex these days. If you pitched me an interest-free mortgage I’d likely refuse; that’s how ugly you look to me right now.
The Crucifixion by Pieter Brueghel the Younger is considered a masterpiece of Flemish art.
The heist appeared to have gone entirely according to plan. The thieves broke into the display case in an Italian church on Wednesday morning and made off with a €3m painting by the 17th-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel the Younger.
But police revealed that night there had been one hitch – the snatched artwork was a copy.
The bona fide version of The Crucifixion, donated to Santa Maria Maddalena church in the small Ligurian town of Castelnuovo Magra more than a century ago, was safely stored away last month as part of a carefully concocted bluff.
Police were aware that the thieves had set their sights on the masterpiece, which was the target of a successful theft in 1981 before being recovered a few months later, and so set up a surveillance system to keep watch until the criminals chose their moment to act.
The town’s mayor, Daniele Montebello, was among the few people privy to the subterfuge, and had to keep up the pretence in the hours after the heist, telling journalists that losing the painting was “a hard blow for the community”.
The painting was donated to the church by a wealthy family and was hidden during the second world war to prevent it from being stolen by German soldiers.
Pieter Brueghel the Younger is the son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who was considered one of the greatest artists of the Flemish and Dutch Renaissance. Brueghel the Younger mostly made a living from copying his father’s works. The Crucifixion is an oil painting on an oak panel.
While the number of art thefts in Italy fell from 906 in 2011 to 449 in 2016, the country is still the biggest market for stolen art due to its abundance of works.
Almost half of the artefacts stolen in 2016 had been kept in churches. Italian art police have drawn up guidelines on how to better protect churches that remain open all day to the public, including installing alarm and surveillance systems and hiring volunteers to keep watch.
Missing since the 1960s, Caravaggio’s Christ in the manger is believed to have been stolen by the mafia and eaten by hogs. But could the painting now be recovered in time for Christmas?
Bristol Palin has always said her one-year-old daughter Sailor Grace is her husband Dakota Meyer's mini-me, and now she's proud to note that their newborn Atlee Bay looks just like her.
The 26-year-old mom took to Instagram on Thursday to share a photo of Sailor when she was a baby alongside an image of two-month-old Atlee, who was born in May.
'Not even sorta kinda alike,' she wrote, adding that Sailor is a 'mini Dakota' while Atlee is a 'Palin baby'.
And while they are both adorable, the sisters, who are just a little over a year apart, do appear to have very different features.
Baby Sailor has a round and almond-shaped eyes, while newborn Atlee is wide-eyed and her head is more oval in shape.
Dakota, a former Marine and Medal of Honor recipient, is in San Antonio, Texas, for work, but she made sure to have their two little girls say goodnight to him via Instagram Stories while he was away.
On Wednesday evening, Bristol shared precious videos of her daughters right before she tucked them into bed.
But before Bristol had Sailor blow kisses to her daddy, she prompted her eldest daughter to remind him that 'mommy' is her best friend while she cuddled both girls in her arms.
The series of clips start with Bristol prompting Sailor to show the camera how she smiles, and when she starts to fuss a bit, the mom asks the tot if she wants to 'go night night'.
Sailor clearly wants to stay up, and Bristol has her politely say 'please' after she asks whether she wants to read a book before bed.
'That's right! Daddy's so jealous,' she says gleefully as she snuggles her little girl.
In another video, Sailor is seen blowing kisses and Bristol reveals in the caption that they are 'kisses for daddy'.
She then prompts Sailor to say her sisters name before turning the camera to Atlee who is smiling for the camera.
Although Atlee is only two months old, Dakota already had her shopping for guns this week before he left for San Antonio.
Dakota, 29, shared footage on Instagram of his youngest daughter smiling and gurgling in her car seat while he perused the semi-automatic pistols section of a gun store.
The clip sees Atlee happily snuggled in her car seat, and Dakota moves the camera to show viewers the selection of glocks that he is looking at.
The former Marine is currently training for Competition Dynamic's 2017 Sniper Challenge, which involves land navigation and practical shooting, and he has been sure to include his family every step of the way.
Dakota and Bristol are strong advocates for the right to bear arms, and they've made it clear that their children will grow up with an appreciation and respect for guns.
In the comments section of the post, which was viewed nearly 10,000 times, one woman called Atlee a 'future Annie Oakley', while another noted that she had her first shotgun put into her hands when she was just seven years old.
'My daddy taught me right! Respect respect and safety were essential to learning how to use a weapon before I was even allowed to strike the trigger!' she added.
Of course, little Atlee isn't the first of his daughter to be introduced to guns at a very early age.
Last July, Dakota shared a photo of himself adjusting his gun holster while his firearm that was left sitting on the kitchen counter next to his then-seven-month-old daughter Sailor Grace, who was gleefully smiling in her car seat.
'Carrying has always been important to me for my own safety but now it is imperative because now I have someone [relying] on me,' he wrote at the time.
Meanwhile, around the same time, Bristol, 26, called now-one-year-old Sailor a 'future member of the NRA' when posting a photo of Dakota and their eldest daughter posed in front of a replica Gatling gun.
In addition to Atlee and Sailor, the couple is also raising eight-year-old Tripp, Bristol's only child with her former high school sweetheart and fiancé, Levi Johnston.
After posting his latest video of Atlee, Dakota returned to Instagram to post videos of Sailor testing out her 'new rig' - a plastic scooter that she can sit and stand on.
'Whoa look at you,' he yells while Sailor plays with the toy outside, and even Bristol got in on the fun.
Another clip sees Bristol and Sailor sitting on the scooter together as the mom pushes them throughout the house while asking the little girl if she wants them to go faster.
'Looks like I found something to occupy her,' Dakota captioned the footage.
What do Ross Geller and Scott Pilgrim have in common?
If you like comics, then you'll love these gifts.
Still included: all seven evil ex-boyfriends.
Six graphic novels, one movie.
PHOENIX, Aug. 20, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Cable ONE announced today that it will double downstream speeds for new and existing residential High Speed Internet customers in more than 90 percent of its markets beginning October 2015.
The company will double speeds on the following services: the Streaming 50Mbps plan will double to 100Mbps; the 75Mbps Premier plan will double to 150Mbps; and the 100Mbps Ultra Plan will double to 200Mbps.
"As customers continue to stream, download, and connect across multiple devices, we know that speed is key in satisfying this growing demand," said Joe Felbab, Vice President of Marketing for Cable ONE. "Doubling our speeds will create more customer value and provide a superior High Speed Internet experience for our customers."
Cable ONE will invest $67 million in 2015 on network upgrades and enhancements – the first step in providing 1 Gigabit service to residential customers. The company plans to announce residential 1 Gigabit markets next month.
"Our continued investment in improving and expanding our network enables us to deliver the fastest, most reliable internet connections at the best value and allows us to continue on our roadmap to offering gigabit speeds to our residential customers," Felbab said.
Cable ONE High Speed Internet was recently ranked by PC Magazine as one of the top 10 fastest Internet Service Providers (ISP) in the nation for the fourth year in a row. Cable ONE was also ranked by Netflix as one of the top ISPs for delivering the best Netflix experience to customers and Google rated Cable ONE's High Speed Internet "YouTube HD Verified" for providing consistent and stable HD (720p) streaming without interruption or buffering.
New customers can take advantage of 100Mbps speed for just $35 per month for the first three months of service beginning in October 2015.
Seven years ago, Shawn Thorsson saw Iron Man and it changed everything.
"For me the real star was the suit," he says. "As soon as it showed up on screen, I figured I had to have one. By the time I was done, I had a pretty good facsimile of the screen-used suit."
From then on out, Thorsson just wanted to make costumes. He’s done Iron Man. He’s done Star Wars characters. He’s even done RoboCop and Warhammer 40,000. It takes Thorsson a while to decide on his projects, and just as long—if not longer—to execute them, but when he does he doesn't stop until they’re perfect.
"It's really difficult for me to decide exactly on a process for determining what's worth making and what’s not worth making," Thorsoon says. "The way I usually do it is I’ll see something that I really like, whether it’s from a videogame or a movie or a TV show, and I'll make it a point to ignore the initial impulse to jump right in and start building something right away. If six or seven months pass and I still am in love enough with the thing to make it happen, then there’s a pretty good chance that I like it enough to see a project all the way through from start to finish."
Find out how he makes his wonderful costumes in the video above.
A federal election will be rerun because of fraud. Republicans aren’t talking about it much.
The 2018 midterm elections are not yet over.
North Carolina’s State Board of Elections voted Thursday to throw out the results of the election held in November in the state’s 9th Congressional District after the candidate who led in the vote, Mark Harris, suddenly agreed that a new election was warranted. Harris had resisted a do-over, claiming that fraud allegedly perpetrated on his behalf through the manipulation of absentee ballots would not have been enough to affect the outcome of the contest (which may or may not be true). After Harris’s son testified Wednesday that he’d warned his father about the election worker accused of committing the fraud — and after Harris admitted having failed to turn over emails from his son to investigators — Harris agreed to support a new election.
He may not be on the ballot. The Republican legislature in North Carolina voted last year to force a new primary in the event that the 9th District election needed to be rerun and overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of the measure. Harris goes from being the presumptive next congressman in the district to having to win two elections to get back to that point.
It may go without saying that this is an unusual situation. The last time there was a federal election that needed to be rerun was more than 40 years ago, when a close race combined with a faulty voting machine in Louisiana to prompt the calling of a new election. Politico’s Steven Shepard has a good history of past do-overs, including that Louisiana race, a history that makes clear that this is probably the first federal election in which the results were tainted by fraudulent activity.
Probably. There was a race in 1827 in Kentucky in which the death of a sitting Congress member spurred a special election between Thomas Chilton and John Calhoon. Chilton led — but then votes from Hardin County were thrown out. That put Calhoon in the lead, but he agreed to resign so that the election could be rerun. Chilton won.
Why the votes from Hardin County were tossed isn’t clear. Records from that period are sketchy, and no one answered the phone at the Hardin County Historical Society. Eric Ostermeier from the University of Minnesota had pointed out that race to Shepard but couldn’t immediately remember why those voters didn’t count. He did note, though, that election fraud was far from a rarity in the early 19th century, so that could very well have been the case.
That’s incidental. More important at this moment is that, after years of warnings, a federal election has indeed been tainted by fraud to the extent that an election has had to be rerun. But it wasn’t an election tainted by people showing up to cast illegal ballots, the fraud allegation that has been leveled scores of times by President Trump alone. Instead, it focused on allegedly corrupt actions by a man working for a consulting firm hired by one of the candidates.
A week after the midterms, Trump had claimed that the election process was riddled with fraud.
There was no evidence that this happens. In fact, there’s no evidence that in-person voter fraud happens at any significant scale. But there’s recurring political benefit in claiming that this happens. For Trump, it allows him to soften the blows of political losses, as with the midterms and as with his loss of the popular vote in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, after which he falsely claimed that millions of votes had been cast illegally. (Trump’s effort to prove the existence of such fraud by forming a commission early in his presidency soon collapsed.) For Republicans more broadly, claims of rampant in-person voter fraud have allowed them to advocate voter ID laws that have the happy side effect of tamping down turnout from communities that tend to vote for Democrats.
Yet here, where the alleged fraud involved absentee ballots (which an expert told me in 2014 was a potential threat to the integrity of elections), there has been almost no outcry from Republican elected officials. Trump hasn’t mentioned the situation in North Carolina. A review of congressional tweets shows no Republican officials who have linked the events in the 9th District to their party’s campaign against voter fraud — and plenty of Democrats who have noted that silence.
There was a flurry of concern about voter fraud among Republicans after the midterms, though. That was when Republicans such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) alleged that fraud had occurred in the counting of votes in Florida’s tightly contested Senate race.
Fox News, on which Gaetz is a frequent guest, covered the Florida allegations as well. But he paid less attention to the subject when questions were first raised about Harris’s campaign in early December.
No fraudulent voting activity was found in Florida.
We all dream of showing off a svelte physique during the summers and now that the time is finally here, a lot of us are still to catch up with our weight loss goals. During winters, we all tend to gain a lot of weight thanks to all that festive eating. It's easier to hide all that weight gain under layers of woolens during winters, but now that summers are here, we're left with no excuses. If you're still carrying around some festive weight and wish to lose fat quicker, you can achieve that by making changes in your daily diet. There are a number of easy diet changes that you can make to lose weight quicker and get your body summer ready. One of the best ones is to start adding more veggies and fruits to your diet.
Summer salads are an easy way of cutting calories and to lose fat quickly. They're rich in essential vitamins and minerals and low in carbs. Additionally, leafy greens are negative calorie foods, which means that they help you burn fat faster. Summer salads contain a number of veggies and fruits that help you stay cool naturally and also combine nutrition with taste.
This leafy salad is a sure-shot way of drastically reducing your calorie count for the meal. With the goodness of lettuce and cabbage, and the healthy fats and fibre of walnuts, this summer salad is doused in sherry vinegar and contains the tarty goodness of cherry tomatoes.
The refreshing taste of green apples will turn your diet into a cakewalk with this salad recipe. It contains green apple and raw mango in a dressing of lemon juice and is simply spiced with salt and pepper.
This cabbage salad is extremely light and flavourful. A delicious cold salad with a mix of capsicum, tomatoes and cabbage in a French dressing, this one makes for a great low-carb and low-calorie meal for the summers.
Cucumber is the quintessential summer vegetable that helps you stay hydrated and refreshed naturally. Add to that the antioxidant goodness of olives and the cooling properties of mint and you have a winner of a summer salad that will also help you stay in shape.
Summer melons come loaded with various nutrients and high water content, and are also low in calories. Made using four different types of melons- water melon, honeydew melon, cantaloupe and musk melon, this salad is dressed in a delicious mint pesto salad dressing and is topped with crunchy pine nuts for a punch of taste and nutrition.