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House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes pushed for information. Among other things, he learned that the former British spy, well-connected with the FBI, was paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. That apparently did not matter to the bureau.
Then Nunes and others wondered: What did the bureau do with the sensational allegations in the dossier? That gave birth to the so-called “FISA abuse” investigation, when Republicans looked into whether the FBI used unverified allegations from the Trump dossier in proceedings before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. It turned out the FBI did just that, to win a wiretap on Carter Page, who for a short time was a volunteer on candidate Trump’s foreign policy advisory board.
Congressional investigators came away with the impression that the FBI was hiding something. It was.
Now, Congress is trying to get information about the informant(s) the FBI used in the Trump-Russia probe, and precisely what those informants did.
As part of that line of inquiry, investigators have discovered a number of instances in which Trump figures were approached, sometimes by people with FBI connections, with offers of derogatory information on Clinton. Each incident was before the FBI says it began the Trump-Russia investigation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, on July 31, 2016.
In early June 2016, a Russian lawyer who was working closely with the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which had commissioned the Trump dossier, asked for and received a meeting with top Trump campaign officials, including Donald Trump Jr., by promising dirt on Clinton. The meeting came to nothing.
In late May 2016, a Russian who had apparently been an FBI informant for years contacted an associate of Trump campaign official Michael Caputo, and later met with Trump figure Roger Stone, reportedly offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. Stone told The Washington Post the Russian asked for $2 million, and the meeting went nowhere. The Russian said he was not working for the FBI when he met Stone.
Stone has on a variety of occasions denied he met with any Russians during the campaign — so take that into account when considering his credibility. The problem for congressional investigators is that the probe has become a two-front battle: dealing with the untrustworthiness of some of the figures in the investigation, while also fighting the FBI to learn the basic facts of what happened.
Lawmakers would not be shocked that Roger Stone might lie to them. But they expect the FBI to be open and transparent with constitutionally empowered oversight committees.
The bottom line is that some Republicans are wondering whether in the above instances, and perhaps others, someone actively tried to frame or entrap or set up Trump figures. And those Republicans wonder whether the FBI knew about it or played some sort of role in it.
In short, there is suspicion that the FBI might have abused its tremendous powers in a highly politicized investigation undertaken in the middle of a presidential campaign.
The suspicions are behind the House move to force the FBI to give up information. Last Friday evening, top House lawmakers, including Speaker Paul Ryan, met with bureau and Justice Department officials to demand compliance with House subpoenas. They gave the FBI a tight deadline to produce the subpoenaed information or face serious retaliation, like contempt proceedings, from the House.
Some Republicans believe the FBI will, finally, comply. Maybe that will happen, and maybe it won’t. But the only thing that can reduce suspicion in the current atmosphere is more openness.
Idina Menzel Secretly Marries Aaron Lohr at Home: Details!
Surprise! Idina Menzel and Aaron Lohr have tied the knot. The Frozen actress revealed the news via Twitter on Monday, September 25.
Menzel, 45, and the Mighty Ducks star, 41, made their first red carpet debut at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington, D.C., in April 2015.
Menzel was previously married to Taye Diggs. The former couple, who also met on Broadway’s Rent, separated after 10 years of marriage in December 2013 and are parents of son Walker, 7.
The Private Practice alum also opened up about their son during Menzel’s wedding weekend. “[He likes] basketball, kung fu and still dinosaurs,” he gushed to Us at the My Little Pony special screening in NYC on Sunday.
Spring YA Fiction Roundup It's getting too nice to stay inside, but when you venture out into the sunshine, be sure to take a good book with you. And if young adult fiction is your favorite, we've got three great spring reads.
Emerge from winter hibernation and get your blood moving with three young adult novels featuring girls who realize they must take a stand against unjust establishments, regardless of the personal cost.
In 1943, a German university student named Sophie Scholl was executed for distributing pamphlets that criticized the Nazi regime. White Rose, named for the resistance group that Sophie belonged to, tells the story of how Sophie went from being a carefree member of the League of German Girls to a brave rebel who was willing to give up her life to undermine the Nazis.
A radical girl deserves a radical interpretation of the historic fiction genre, so White Rose eschews chronology for a more complex structure, letting Sophie's moral awakening blossom one petal at a time, spiraling out from the turning points that lead to her inevitable fate. Also remarkable is the choice to tell the entire narrative in verse, with each page offering a short poetic interpretation of a letter, a conversation, or a thought weighing on Sophie's mind. Because of the spare nature of the poetry, each word carries the full weight of this tragic story.
It's a common moral conundrum, to look back at the Nazi era and ask what would I have done? Sophie's brothers and boyfriend are German soldiers. Her family is relatively safe from the terrors of the Nazi regime — unless she endangers them. Yet she makes the choice to risk everything for her moral belief that the things being done in the name of her country are not right. This is a powerful story to hold in our hearts, and White Rose tells it with an honesty that is both brutal and beautiful.
Cold winds and a river of blood howl through Emily A. Duncan's debut fantasy, Wicked Saints.
Nadya is not an ordinary cleric. Like her brothers and sisters at the monastery, she is devoted to the gods and spends her time training to fight off the faithless blood mages who relentlessly attack her country. But unlike other clerics, Nadya can actually hear the gods speaking to her and wields the power of their holy magics. When the war to defend her people is almost lost, she finds herself in an uneasy alliance with a powerful mage whom she would rather kill — or maybe kiss. Her country and her faith hang in the balance.
The last few years have seen an influx of Slavic-influenced fantasy, and Wicked Saints feels as though it follows closely in the snowy footprints of Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse. It revels in its gods and magics while tormenting its main characters with forbidden love and religious malaise, which makes for an entertaining if predicable read. The story itself is familiar territory, and many of the side characters feel as though they're interchangeable and frequently shuffled off stage for the convenience and intimacy of the mains. Still, if you like your young adult fantasy full of ice, blood, and angst, Wicked Saints will sweep you up in its wintery embrace.
Murder mystery, court intrigue, and layered, Chinese-inspired worldbuilding entwine to form something new in Joan He's debut YA fantasy, Descendant of the Crane.
Hesina has never relished the prospect of being queen of Yan, but now, with her father dead, she has no choice. Her first act as a queen is to commit treason by visiting a sooth — a person who can read the future with magic - whose very existence is illegal in Yan. But Hesina is certain that her father was murdered, and when the sooth tells her that a mysterious convict in her prison is the only one who can deliver justice, Hesina makes him her chief prosecutor. As the trial escalates, so do the many tensions that threaten to tear apart Hesina's family and Yan itself.
Descendant of the Crane lingers over beautiful imagery and elegant language without sacrificing tension or intrigue. The twists and turns revealed as the mystery unravels in Hesina's hands are very satisfying, and she becomes more and more likable as her gentle nature is pushed to its limits. It's also rare to find a book in this genre that has sibling relationships at its heart rather than friendships, but Hesina's deepest and most troubled bonds are with her brothers and sister — full, half, and adopted — and the complexities of these relationships are lovingly explored.
One area where Descendant of the Crane doesn't shine its brightest is the romance that blooms between Hesina and her appointed prosecutor, which feels forced and tepid at best. It's easy to imagine that this could have been a late addition, dropped in to make the book more marketable to perceived young adult audiences. It really wasn't necessary, because Descendant of the Crane is unabashedly a unique and richly embroidered tapestry of genres.
HELENA – A Montana legislative committee has advanced several proposals to address the issue of missing people, especially women, in Indian Country.
On Friday, the State-Tribal Relations Committee held its last meeting before the 2019 legislative session. Members voted on a number of proposed bills they’ll put before the Legislature.
Committee members backed five bills dealing with missing persons cases. The first is named “Hanna’s Act,” in honor of Hanna Harris, a 21-year-old Lame Deer woman murdered on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in 2013. It would clarify that the Montana Department of Justice can assist in any missing persons case, regardless of the person’s age. It would also add a missing persons specialist at the department.
Another bill would require all law enforcement authorities in the state to accept missing persons reports without delay, and forward them to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database. While the Legislature only has authority over state, county and city agencies, committee members said they want to encourage federal and tribal officials to follow the same procedures.
Lawmakers said they spoke to families of missing people who felt authorities didn’t take their concerns seriously at first.
The other proposed bills would require law enforcement to file a missing child report when a child is taken or kept from a custodial parent or guardian, set up a voluntary directory of school photographs that can be used if a child is missing, and call for a study of options for youth who repeatedly run away from home.
Rep. Susan Webber, a Democrat from Browning, is not a member of the committee, but spoke during the public comment period. She said she has seen years of cases where Native American women went missing – from a neighbor of hers in 1972 to Ashley Loring HeavyRunner, who disappeared last year.
The committee also heard testimony from Bill Lecompte, acting special agent in charge for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs law enforcement in most of Montana and Wyoming. He told lawmakers the agency is already following many of their suggestions, including immediately opening missing persons cases. But he said they struggle with getting enough resources to investigate those cases, since law enforcement also has to work on other serious crimes.
“All the tribes are doing the best they can to serve the communities they’re assigned to,” he said.
Lecompte said his agency takes all missing persons reports seriously. He said one concern, though, is that there is often a delay in the initial report.
“A delayed report on anything is very difficult to solve,” he said.
According to the committee’s report, less than seven percent of Montana’s population is American Indian, but 25 percent of the people reported missing were American Indian. The percentages are even higher for women and children.
The report says it is difficult to get reliable data on the number of missing and murdered indigenous women, but a doctoral students in Canada found at least 60 in Montana between 1979 and 2018. Most of those were in just the last five years. They suggest social media means more individual missing persons’ cases are now known.
Democratic Rep. Sharon Stewart-Peregoy of Crow Agency, the committee’s chair, said the issues of missing people and violent crimes are difficult to tackle, but that it was important to do something to address them.
A new fly discovered in Thailand is the world's smallest. It is five times smaller than a fruit fly and tinier than a grain of salt (0.4 millimeters) in length — half the size of the smallest "no see-ums." It probably also feeds on tiny ants, likely decapitating them and using their head casings as its home.
"It's so small you can barely see it with the naked eye on a microscope slide. It's smaller than a flake of pepper," said Brian Brown, of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who identified the fly as a new species. "The housefly looks like a Godzilla fly beside it."
The tiny finding is detailed in the July 2012 issue of the journal Annals of the Entomological Society of America.
It has smoky gray wings and the female they discovered has an egg-depositing organ that is pointed to make it easy to lay eggs inside another insect, as a parasitic fly would. While it's not the smallest insect (that title belongs a species of fairy wasp, coming in at 0.14 millimeters in length, about the size of a human egg cell), it is the world's smallest fly.
"When you get really small like that, the environment changes," Brown said. "The viscosity of air starts to become a problem and wind currents are major events. It's amazing how small something can be and still have all of its organs. This is a new frontier, and publishing this tiny fly is basically a challenge to other people to find something smaller," he said.
The researchers named the new fly Euryplatea nanaknihali. It comes from a group of 4,000 hump-backed flies called phorid flies. One genus of the fly, Pseudacteon, is known for its anti-ant behaviors, which include decapitation. They usually range from 0.04 inches to 0.12 inches (1 millimeter to 3 millimeters) in length, so they can only prey on larger ants.
The flies lay their eggs in the body of the ant; the eggs develop and migrate to the ant's head where they feed on the huge muscles used to open and close the ant's mouthparts. They eventually devour the ant's brain as well, causing it to wander aimlessly for two weeks. The head then falls off after the fly larva dissolve the membrane that keeps it attached.
The fly then takes up residence in the decapitated ant head for another two weeks, before hatching out as a full-grown adult. In this case, researchers think the fly parasitizes tiny acrobat ants, whose heads are about as large as the fly itself and grow to about 0.16 inches (4 millimeters) long.
They haven't been able to see this in action, but think it's likely in the newfound fly since the fly's closest relative decapitates ants in Equatorial Guinea.
Callousness shown by the successive governments in Jammu and Kashmir has left thousands of farmers cultivating finest varieties of basmati rice in the world at the mercy of the broker-miller cartel.
As harvesting is about to end, the state has again failed to bring basmati under the ambit of the minimum support price (MSP). This has left the field open for exploitation of cultivators who are forced to sell their produce at the rates set by millers.
Ironically, J&K lifted ban on the export of basmati in 2009, but no sincere effort has been made to promote it as a national and international brand.
According to officials in the agriculture department, the annual production of basmati is about 1 lakh metric tonnes. The varieties grown in the state are known for its long grains, aroma and exotic flavour. It is estimated about 30,000 metric tonnes is procured by buyers from outside the state.
“Basmati is still treated as a novelty item. It has not been brought under the Essential Commodities Act which determines the MSP for other crops, like wheat. The harvesting will end in the next two weeks in most of the areas. However, in the absence of government intervention, traders from outside the state decide price and export produce of J&K,” said Choudhary Dev Raj, president, Rice Growers Association in RS Pura, the main basmati growing area of J&K.
It is estimated that about 50,000 hectares is under cultivation of different basmati varieties, including 370, Sugandha, Sanwal, Ranbir basmati, RR-564, Pusa no.1 and Pusa basmati 1121.
About 90 per cent of the land falls near the 198-km International Border which traverses through Jammu, Samba and Kathua district.
When contacted, Director, Agriculture, HL Razdan, admitted that the basmati farmers faced problems in the absence of the MSP, but said the department was trying to streamline the system.
“It is under consideration of Central and state governments. But till such a mechanism is announced, we will keep on holding regular meetings with farmers during the harvesting season to ensure they get the maximum price from buyers,” said Razdan.
Although officials from the agriculture department said in 2017, cultivators got Rs 4,000 to Rs 4,500 per quintal for the produce, but an activist alleged that the farmers did not get more than Rs 2,500 to Rs 3,000 per quintal as brokers had upper hand in the deals.
MORVEN, Ga. (AP) — Small-town police departments across the country have been gobbling up tons of equipment discarded by a downsizing military — bicycles, bed sheets, bowling pins, French horns, dog collars, even a colonoscopy machine — regardless of whether the items are needed or will ever be used.
"That was one of those things in the old days you got it because you thought it was cool," Yates said of his bayonets. "Then, after you get it, you're like, 'What the hell am I going to do with this?' "
"He was getting any kind of equipment he wanted," Rising Star city attorney Pat Chesser said. "I don't understand why anyone city would get that amount."
"This is probably one of the last quiet small Southern towns left in this area," he said. "Even my worst drug dealer here, if I was broke down on the side of the road, they would stop and help."
He said he plans to use the boats and scuba gear to form a dive team because the county doesn't have its own. He says he formed a SWAT team, arming it with surplus military rifles, a Humvee and an armored personnel carrier, before the local sheriff's office had such a unit. And although the decontamination machine, which collects dust in a grassy area next to the Morven fire station, would be very expensive to fix, Yates said he wanted one in case he has to respond to a "nuclear, chemical, biological" incident.
Yates said he could "take my guys and the training they have, the equipment we have, and we could shut this town down" and "completely control everything." Seeking to avoid "over-policing" the population and giving the appearance of "an occupying army," the chief said he's had some of the military equipment painted non-military colors.
Gary Randall, manager of Morven's only grocery store, said the chief's stockpiling of equipment seems like "big-time" overkill.
"They've got a bunch of damn junk is what it looks like to me," he said. "This is a little, itty bitty town. His mentality is, 'If I don't get it, someone else will.' "
The chief said he doesn't use the program much these days because he "pretty much" has gotten what he needed. "Another department may need something. I don't want to get in there and be a pig."
"We assist Morven. They don't assist us," Major Joe Wheeler said. "They're a one-horse town."
Wheeler said the county relies on a dive team from neighboring Lowndes County for any water rescues and can call in the state Department of Natural Resources if a corpse needs to be recovered from the water.
"We don't depend on Morven for anything," he added. "If we felt like we needed a dive team, the sheriff's office would create one."
"The harm for me is that it further militarizes American law enforcement," Stamper said. "We make a serious mistake, I'm convinced, in equipping domestic law enforcement, particularly in smaller, rural communities, with this much military equipment."
Navy Vice Adm. Mark Harnitchek, director of the Defense Logistics Agency, said state coordinators and the support office in his agency both perform a "sanity check" on requests.
"The intent here is that we're not giving Barney Fife an attack helicopter," he said. "If you want a helicopter, you've got to have significantly more justification for it than if you want a (personal computer) that's 8 years old."
"He spent most of his time on the computer looking for that stuff. He wasn't really doing his job," said June Stone, a former member of Rising Star's city council.
Associated Press writers Holbrook Mohr in Jackson, Miss., and Mitch Weiss, in Charlotte, N.C., also contributed to this report.
India is unhappier than ever before. The United Nation's World Happiness report 2019 has ranked India at the 140th position from the previous 133 in 2018, dropping seven spots in just a year and 23 positions since 2015.
Out of the total 156 countries that were covered, India's happiness index has been steadily declining but remains ahead of Pakistan, Bangladesh and China. Since the world happiness ranking began in 2012, the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland and the Netherlands have always found themselves at the top. India’s decline in ranking has been quite visible: from 111st (2013), 117th (2015), 118th (2016), 122nd (2017), 133rd (2018) and 140 in 2019.
Finland topped the list as the world’s happiest country for the second consecutive year, followed by Denmark and Norway. South Sudan was at the lowest rank. The World Happiness ranking takes into account factors like GDP per capita, income, freedom, healthy life expectancy, social support, generosity and absence of corruption.
The report said government institutions and policies set the stages on which lives are lived. “These stages differ largely from country to country, and are among primary factors influencing how highly people rate the quality of their lives,” it added.
For India, while the per capita GDP has only increased progressively over these years, but that hasn’t been enough. Public services, health, education, inequality, employment are some of the factors India has been struggling with.
A report released by Oxfam earlier this year revealed that inequality has been on the rise. The rich got richer by 39 percent while the poor only climbed the ladder by 3 percent while the poorest 10 percent of the country still remain in debt.
Contribution towards public services has not been upto the mark either, the total amount contributed to public health, sanitation, and water supply by the state and central government combined stood at Rs 2,08,166 crore in 2018.
India's healthcare has, for long, been under major scrutiny. According to the United Nations, India has one of the highest under-five child mortality rates in South Asia (behind Afghanistan at 91 and Pakistan at 81). In terms of numbers, India has the largest share of global under-five deaths at 1.3 million annually. About five percent of the Indian government's annual expenditure goes towards healthcare. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), most of the healthcare expenditure in India - which averages $75 per capita – comes primarily from the private spending of households.
Education in India, although is heading in the upward direction has been slow. According to a 2013 report by Centre for Research and Debates in Development Policy, access to education beyond higher secondary schooling is a limited to a meager 10 percent among the university-age population in India. The discrepancy occurs across genders, socio-economic religious groups and geographical regions. Furthermore, public Indian institutions providing quality higher education are even fewer and require brutal competition among scores of candidates, affecting mental health. The situation in rural India is worse. The proportion of children (age 6-14) who are not enrolled in school fell below 3 percent for the first time and stands at 2.8 percent in 2018.
Suffice to say that these criterias alone do not define a state/country's happiness. These are basic human needs. You could compare a state like UP where healthcare is still in its early stages to a state like Kerala where healthcare and quality of life is comparatively better but it is one of the top states with highest suicide rates - How do we know if people are happy?
India is still struggling to fight poverty, corruption, human rights, and basic needs. Focusing on "happiness" as an end goal or formulating policies around it could be questionable. It’s important to give prominence to human development – which will ultimately create road for happiness.
It’s true, Gaddafi is gone. But what about Qadaffi, Kaddafi and Gathafi? Stephen Colbert takes a closer look at what may still be lurking about in the bizarre world of dictators.
Today at f8, Facebook’s Deb Liu walked developers through the future of Facebook’s official currency, Facebook Credits. During this presentation, Liu discussed some of the new features Facebook plans to launch in the near future.
One new feature is called App2user Credits. This is a set of promotions that allow users to earn Facebook Credits in ways that don’t involve paying with their credit card. Liu presented three examples. First, Liu said that users could earn credits through credit card reward programs (she said Chase was already involved in setting up a program). A second example involved Plastic Jungle, the service that lets you sell gift cards you don’t want. And users can earn credits as they shop using services like TrialPay. Liu said that Facebook wants to make this a platform that everyone can plug into, so it sounds like there will be many other ways to earn Credits. App2user Credits is slated to launch this June.
Other future plans: Facebook will be seeding non-paying users with credits (to help get them in the habit of using them) and will also have a way to seed inactive users in the hopes of getting them to interact with apps again. There are also plans to offer bulk discounting on Credits, which will be paid for using some of the 30% fee that Facebook charges developers to use Credits. There will also be a feature for ‘auto top-up’, which can automatically refill a user’s account with 50 credits whenever they have fewer than five.
When asked if Facebook will allow if alternative currencies like Social Gold will be able to exist alongside Facebook Credits, Liu dodged the question, saying that the platform was still in early days.
Investigative reporters are, by their nature, dogged, tenacious and deeply suspicious, crashing through official roadblocks as they chase the most elusive stories.
Some of them continue that quest long after their support evaporates, their evidence crumbles and even their employers abandon them.
Mary Mapes, the CBS producer fired over the journalistic fiasco involving President Bush's National Guard service, is the latest in a line of lonely crusaders, defending her work more than a year after it was widely discredited. Dan Rather may have apologized for the story, an independent panel may have denounced it and CBS News may have criticized her "disregard for journalistic standards," but Mapes argues in her new book that the critics are either politically motivated, cowardly or just plain wrong.
In challenging those who have questioned her work -- including The Washington Post and this reporter, who is cited in the book for a triple-bylined news story recounting the mess -- Mapes displays the relentless qualities that all good diggers share. But she also opens herself up to the charge that her obsession has clouded her judgment.

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