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The president also joked with his Tajik counterpart that he would sign anything he wanted him to because it was his birthday.
"I always knew that you were a wise person and that you invited us on your birthday, enticed us, you could say. Because you can't refuse anything on someone's birthday, and we will have to sign anything you ask us to," Putin quipped.
Coincidentally, Putin's own 60th birthday is on Sunday.
Putin signed an agreement that was reportedly worked out last month with Tajik authorities to extend Russia's military presence in the country for 30 years in exchange for discounts on arms and military training.
On a trip to Kyrgyzstan last month, Putin said that having Russian military bases in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan was a major stabilizing force.
Putin was also set to visit the 201st base on his trip, Ushakov told Interfax.
Five Assembly members will compete to make the best sushi roll at the 12th annual “Circle of Life Reception,” sponsored by the California Rice Commission. The event is held every year to connect rice producers with legislators and the public, though it was called off last year as the drought worsened. Top prize is a framed golden samurai sword, to be presented by reigning sushi champ (and speaker of the Assembly) Toni Atkins, D-San Diego. The event is held in the Sheraton Grand Sacramento at noon and also features other dishes involving rice.
The Sacramento LGBT Community Center and Cares Community Health are hosting a community meeting from 7 to 8 p.m. to discuss preventing HIV infection by taking a single pill each day. Dr. Paolo Toia, chief medical officer of Cares Community Health, will speak and take questions. The meeting will be held at Cares Community Health, 1500 21st Street.
Godbe Research will present the results of a Community Satisfaction and Priorities Survey for Roseville at the City Council meeting. The company was hired to do the survey in February. The meeting is at 7 p.m., Roseville City Hall, 311 Vernon St.
The Genealogical Association of Sacramento meets from noon to 3 p.m. at the Belle Cooledge Library, 5600 S. Land Park Drive, Sacramento. There will be a featured speaker at the free event.
Dr. Faith Fitzgerald presents cases of famous people and their illnesses from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Sierra Sacramento Valley Medical Society, 5380 Elvas Ave., Sacramento. Fitzgerald is an internist and professor of medicine and assistant dean of humanities and bioethics at UC Davis.
Iconic drummer Sheila E. and the drum lines from Grant High School and Natomas High School will perform on the west steps of the state Capitol from 6 to 8 p.m. The Juneteenth Concert in the Park is hosted by the California Legislative Black Caucus. Admission is free.
The Kick ’n 60s will perform at a free concert during Picnic in the Park, scheduled from 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Central Park on B Street, between Third and Fourth streets, in Davis.
Sacramento River Cats vs. Fresno Grizzlies, 7:05 p.m., Raley Field.
Following demonstrably false statements made by President Trump and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer that Trump's inauguration ceremony had “the largest audience to witness an inauguration," pro-Trump propaganda outlets amplified the lies while more mainstream conservative figures provided cover for the lies by casting doubt on available evidence.
President Trump used his first full day in office on Saturday to unleash a remarkably bitter attack on the news media, falsely accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd.
In a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency intended to showcase his support for the intelligence community, Mr. Trump ignored his own repeated public statements criticizing the intelligence community, a group he compared to Nazis just over a week ago.
Later, at the White House, he dispatched Sean Spicer, the press secretary, to the briefing room in the West Wing, where Mr. Spicer scolded reporters and made a series of false statements.
He said news organizations had deliberately misstated the size of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Friday in an attempt to sow divisions at a time when Mr. Trump was trying to unify the country, warning that the new administration would hold them to account.
Spicer said, "That was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period."
To support his claim, Spicer offered a few pieces of misleading or inaccurate evidence.
He said that floor coverings highlighting empty spaces on the National Mall were not used for previous inaugurations, but these were in place for Obama’s 2013 inauguration.
He claimed metro ridership was higher for Trump’s inaugural than for Obama’s 2013 inaugural, but he compared numbers for the morning of Obama’s inaugural to the whole day for Trump’s.
Spicer suggested 720,000 attended Trump’s inauguration, while organizers said they expected 700,000 to 900,000, and Trump himself estimated 1.5 million. All of those figures are less than the 1.8 million people who attended Obama’s 2009 inaugural.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held an emergency press briefing on Saturday where he lit into the media for their “egregious” and “deliberately false reporting” of Friday’s inauguration of President Donald Trump and his first day in office.
Spicer further noted that the media had attempted to paint Trump’s inauguration as appearing much smaller than President Barack Obama’s.
@TeamTrump @seanspicer @DanScavino you all know that the media never shows the true crowd size- we are the only one that ever moved our cam!
Ok, it's a new day. Time to get past the arguments over crowd size.
audience lower than '08 and '80 but online audience numbers elusive. Appreciate pointers.
Jordan Peele just released his second movie as a director and is now two-for-two when it comes to his horror output. Both Get Out and Us are intelligent horror movies that subvert expectations and leaves the viewers talking about it long after the final frames role.
However, while he has mastered horror and has a clear love for the genre, that is not where he started out his career or what he was best known for before he took his hand at directing movies. Long before horror movies, Peele was a comedian and worked in sketch comedy, while also taking roles in different television shows. Peele also has worked behind-the-scenes on some great projects as well. Here is a look at 10 productions Jordan Peele worked on other than Us and Get Out.
In what has to be the craziest debut for the director behind Get Out and Us, Jordan Peele made his acting debut in a music video for Weird Al Yankovic's "White & Nerdy." As a matter of fact, Peele is one of the first people you see in the video.
He is in the passenger seat of the convertible who pulls his sunglasses up when Weird Al's nerdy character runs up to talk to them. Not only that, but the driver is Peele's close friend and comedian partner, Keegan-Michael Key.
Possibly the way that Weird Al Yankovic discovered Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key to be in his music video was by seeing them on the Fox sketch comedy MADtv. Peele got his start at The Second City in Chicago, which was also the former home for comedians like Bill Murray, John Candy, and Steve Carrell.
He got onto MADtv and performed celebrity impersonations mostly. He took on the roles of everyone from Ja Rule, James Brown, and Flavor Flav to Montel Williams, Timbaland, and Morgan Freeman. This also set him up for his biggest opportunity.
After MADtv, Jordan Peele got some roles in Children's Hospital and Wanderlust, but soon he re-teamed with Keegan-Michael Key and the two created their own sketch comedy show on Comedy Central called Key & Peele. The series lasted from 2012 until 2015.
Unlike MADtv, Key & Peele featured mostly pre-taped sketches featuring the two comedians dealing with social issues like racial stereotypes, race relations, with pop culture gags mixed in as well. Peele had a number of recurring characters including Barack Obama, a young angry woman named Meegan and nerdy sci-fi lover called Wendell Sanders. The duo won an Emmy in 2016.
Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key produced their first movie Keanu in 2016, with Peele in the lead role. The movie saw Key and Peele as assassins who charge in and kill an entire Mexican drug cartel and their boss. The Drug Lord's cat Iglesias escapes.
Soon, a guy named Rell, who Peele also portrays, finds the cat and names him Keanu. Soon, someone ransacks his apartment and his cat disappears so he convinces his cousin Clarence (also played by Key) to head out to find the cat, where they get in a lot of trouble along the way.
"White & Nerdy" was Jordan Peele's first acting role but that wasn't his only connection to Weird Al Yankovic. In 2017, Weird Al sang the theme song for Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie. Based on the immensely popular children's books by Dav Pilkey, this was the origin story of the boys turning their mean principal into the heroic Captain Underpants.
Jordan Peele had a key role in the movie as the voice of Melvin Sneedly, the nerdy antagonistic student that was always getting George and Harold in trouble at school. Peele only voiced him in the movie, replaced on the Netflix series by Jorge Diaz.
In 2017, Jordan Peele proved to be one of the top young directors working today when he won an Oscar for his horror movie Get Out. In 2018, he didn't release his own movie but he did produce one for Spike Lee in BlackKklansman, and watched it pick up six more Oscar nominations, including a win for Spike Lee.
With the nominations for Get Out and BlackKklansman, Jordan Peele now has more Best Picture nominations than any black producer in history. It was actually Peele who brought the idea to Lee, so he is really working behind the scenes to help others right now as well.
Arguably one of the greatest Netflix animated series to ever air is Big Mouth, the story of two boys entering adolescence, aided by their Hormone Monsters. It is an honest and hilarious look at the difficulties of the teenage years shown from a unique angle thanks to the hormones revealing their true feelings.
There are also other beings in the show, from talking pillows and pubic hairs to the Ghost of Duke Ellington, the late jazz musician who just so happens to live in Nick's attic. Jordan Peele provides the voice for this character, as well as voices for Freddie Mercury, Patrick Ewing, and a pitbull named Featuring Ludacris.
YouTube Premium is upping their special original shows and they signed Jordan Peele to come in and create a show for their growing streaming service. The show he came up with was a fantasy series called Weird City.
Weird City is a strange and bizarre series that has a batch of episodes that are only connected by the fact that they take place in a future city where the rich live Above the Line and the poor live Below the Line, and the two sides are separated by a wall with guards. As expected, it shows how the haves and have-nots exist and demonstrates how ludicrous things can be when the wealthy section themselves off from the rest of the world.
At the same time that Jordan Peele was making his latest movie Us, he was also working hard on producing his new version of The Twilight Zone for CBS All-Access. Peele takes on the role that Rod Serling did in the original, as the narrator and producer of the show that originally aired from 1959 to 1964.
Peele is not the showrunner for The Twilight Zone but he is the executive producer and the show is being produced through his own Monkeypaw Productions. With names like John Cho, Adam Scott, Greg Kinnear, Seth Rogen, Steven Yeun and Ginnifer Goodwin among the cast members, Jordan Peele looks to have a success on his hands.
With Weird City on YouTube Premium and The Twilight Zone on CBS All-Access, it seems that Jordan Peele has no horse in the race of streaming services. Fans can also add cable to the mix as Peele also has another series coming to HBO called Lovecraft Country. Also produced through his Monkeypaw Production label, Peele is the executive producer here as well.
This is a horror series that stars Johathan Majors as Atticus Black, a man who heads across the country to find his missing dad. The series takes place in the '50s and Black travels through the states most affected by Jim Crow America, dealing with racist terrors and otherworldly monsters as well.
U.S. soldiers deployed in support of Operation Inherent Resolve prepare for helicopter exfiltration during an aerial response force exercise in Iraq, Dec. 31, 2018.
Great power competition has been the primary driver of the Pentagon over the past few years, but the Defense Department doesn’t get to pick the next war.
It is more likely that the U.S. military will be drawn into another conflict against an insurgent or proxy force, than it will end up fighting naval battles in the South China Sea or halting Russian armor in the Fulda Gap.
“While you’re going to have the larger force-on-force kind of engagements, at the same time, there’s going to be action in ‘gray zone’ ... the space in between war and peace,” said retired Col. Frank Sobchak, co-author of the long-delayed Iraq War Study and a former Army Special Forces officer.
In January, the Iraq War Study’s two volumes were finally published online, roughly five years after the Army originally commissioned it. The findings, while at first glance appear to not be in lockstep with the Pentagon’s new focus on China and Russia, are perhaps more important than ever.
In the study’s conclusion, Sobchak and fellow co-author retired Col. Joe Rayburn wrote that "an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” of the Iraq War.
That country looks like a victor in the Syrian civil war, as well.
Iran, which the 2018 National Defense Strategy singled out as “the most significant challenge to Middle East stability," was a covert actor throughout the Iraq War, responsible for the deaths of more than 600 U.S. troops, the Pentagon says.
The Iranian regime appears to have reemerged as a focus of Washington leaders as the fight against the Islamic State’s physical caliphate winds down.
U.S. troops will remain in the region for the time being, at places like Manbij in northern Syria. During a visit to Manbij in May, a general who formerly led U.S. Special Operations Command said Americans were “coffee breath-close” to Syrian, Russian, Hezbollah, Iranian, Turkish and Israeli forces.
The entire Syrian conflict has been a soup of proxy forces and mercenaries operating on behalf of state-level militaries. But so far, the U.S., Iranian, Russian and Syrian forces have shared the battlefield against ISIS relatively well.
That wasn’t the case during the Iraq War, and with ISIS’ territorial demise, there is the possibility that easy peace will not last, especially if, or more likely when, an ISIS insurgency begins en masse.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and its specialized Quds force, was designated a foreign terrorist organization by President Donald Trump’s administration Monday, an unprecedented move against another nation.
Iran retaliated by designating U.S. Central Command a terrorist organization and the U.S. government as a sponsor of terror.
That could have implications for American outposts in the region, especially the U.S. base at Al-Tanf in southeastern Syria, which blocks one of Iran’s most direct supply lines to its Syrian regime allies and local proxy forces.
“A U.S. withdrawal from Syria could facilitate the expansion of these corridors, particularly a departure of U.S. troops from bases like Al-Tanf,” Seth Jones, a former Pentagon official and current senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a March brief.
“The [Quds Force] is particularly active in such countries as Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria," Jones wrote. “It has provided military and non-military aid to partners, boosting their capabilities and increasing Tehran’s influence."
It’s not clear how Iran would attempt to counter the U.S. troop emplacements in Iraq and Syria, if at all. But it is important to understand the role Iranian influence played in the Iraq War.
Immediately after the invasion of Iraq, Iranian leaders feared they were next. But that evolved as a Sunni insurgency developed.
One long-standing complaint by the U.S. government was that metallurgy and other forensic evidence from explosively formed penetrators — shaped charges designed to penetrate armor — had been traced back to Iran during the war.
“They took an active role in targeting American soldiers, they took an active role in aligning influence upon the Iraqi elections and were very active in directly challenging U.S. objectives,” Sobchak said.
Former President George W. Bush did not want to risk escalating a conflict with Iran, and so his administration attempted to deal with Iranian proxies within Iraq, rather than target Quds forces directly.
The Bush administration also never declared the Quds force a terror group, as they are now, nor did it designate them enemy combatants, which would have allowed them to be targeted under the rules of engagement, Sobchak said.
“Similar to the issues that are debated now, the reason why, in both 2005 and 2006, they decided not to do that was the fear of climbing the escalatory ladder with Iran,” Sobchak said.
“If we had pushed back more, I think Iran would have backed down,” he added.
Is the U.S. finally pushing back?
Because Quds force operatives were never designated enemy combatants, Iran was emboldened to continue attacking U.S. forces, said Bradley Bowman, senior director of FDD’s Center on Military and Political Power and a former national security adviser in the U.S. Senate.
The new foreign terror organization designation may have that effect, according to Bowman.
“Yes, this [designation] might increase danger, but probably the most dangerous thing is for Tehran to feel that they can continue to attack with impunity," Bowman said.
The foreign terror designation, however, is not a one-for-one comparison to the enemy combatant designations contemplated in the Iraq War days, cautioned Barbara Leaf, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and a senior Foreign Service officer.
The issue, though, can still inform current policy, Bowman added.
The Trump administration appears to be ratcheting up tension with Iran at a time when the Pentagon is supposedly focusing primarily on China and Russia.
But Iran is undoubtedly a major regional power, and the administration has long complained that Iranian weapons exports have been captured across the Middle East.
“We’re one [Iranian] missile away from igniting a regional conflict,” Brian Hook, special representative for Iran, told reporters in November at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Washington.
Hook showed off a display of captured weapon systems, including ballistic missiles, guidance components and unmanned aerial vehicles, that the Trump administration says are evidence of Iran’s violation of United Nations resolutions against weapons proliferation.
“Our maximum pressure campaign will continue until the Iranian regime decides to change its destructive policies, or it can continue to watch its economy crumble,” Hook said.
The Iraq War Study, like the various designations contemplated against Iranian forces, is not a perfect comparison to current situations, but there are lessons learned.
Iran began seriously meddling in the Iraq War only after it devolved into an insurgency.
At the same time, U.S. troops created camps to detain local militants. These became unintended accelerators of radicalization for many detainees — the most famous of whom was future ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.
The situation got worse in Iraq during the 2004 and 2006 time frame partially because the U.S. pursued a strategy of scaling down the troop presence, Sobchak said.
This was done because U.S. planners incorrectly thought that American forces were akin to an infection in Iraq, creating antibodies, or insurgents, just by being there, Sobchak said. At the same time, it was hoped that decreasing troops would empower the Iraqi security force apparatus to stand on its own.
Neither of these came to pass, largely due to the intense sectarian division in the country that extended to even the Iraqi government.
Portions of that equation are certainly present in Iraq and Syria today. U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces operate massive detainment camps for ISIS prisoners, and have pleaded with the international community to repatriate non-Syrian foreign fighters.
Additionally, a United Nations report in August said that ISIS still has between 20,000 and 30,000 members distributed between Syria and Iraq, posing the risk of another major insurgency.
The partner forces in Iraq and Syria appear more competent today, but the ingredients are present for a similar situation as in the surge years of the Iraq War.
And even today, Iran remains active in Iraq and Syria. Iranian-sponsored Shiite militias, for instance, were key to bringing about the defeat of ISIS.
Discussions about bringing all U.S. troops home from Syria, and not continuing stabilization funding, paint a similar picture to the 2004-2006 Iraq War decisions.
A return Interislander sailing has been cancelled because of swells of up to five metres expected to batter Cook Strait tomorrow morning.
KiwiRail said it cancelled the Aratere's 6.45am sailing from Wellington and 10.45am return sailing from Picton.