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Comment on Evidence that Hillary Clinton and her associates are satanists by traildustfotm | Dr. Eowyn | 2 Comments
I’ve been blogging every day, every week, every month for more than 7 years now.
Blogging for FOTM requires that I’m really “plugged in,” ear-to-the-ground on news and goings on, including conspiracy theories.
After more than 7 years of being “plugged in,” I’ve come to the conclusion that the conspiracy theories that I, who began as an innocent, had initially thought to be outlandish turn out to be credible. That’s my honest, sober observation — from a person who is a full professor, has a Ph.D., was well-trained in and had taught epistemology and the scientific method to undergraduate and graduate students. I go to where the empirical evidence leads me.
One of the most far-out conspiracy theories is that a shadowy group of élites controls governments. In the United States, those élites variously are called shadow government, secret government or deep state. (See “ Deep State: Who really rules America ”)
An even more far-out version of that conspiracy theory is that the shadowy élites are satanists.
This post is about Hillary Clinton and her close associates being satanists. Really. Exhibit A Larry Nichols in 2009
I originally reported the following more than a year ago in “ Clinton friend and assassin Larry Nichols says Hillary Clinton is a satanist “.
Larry Nichols is a former Green Beret and a longtime associate of Bill Clinton. The two men first met in Arkansas in the late 1970s when Bill was an up-and-coming politician. When Bill was elected governor of Arkansas, he inserted Nichols as the marketing director of the Arkansas Development Finance Authority , an Arkansas state agency that was one of the entities investigated by the Senate Whitewater Committee .
On the Pete Santilli radio show on September 24, 2013, Nichols admitted that he had killed people as the Clintons’ hit man or assassin-for-hire. (See “ Bombshell: Long-time Clinton associate says he killed people for Bill & Hillary “)
On June 24, 2015, interviewed by Alex Jones for InfoWars , Nichols dropped another bombshell. He said, beginning at the 28:44 mark in the audio above:
“Back when Hillary was first lady, she would go home on the weekends to California with Linda Bloodworth-Thomason * and some of the other ladies of ‘Designing Women’. And they went to a church for witches. Witches, witches, witches . . . . You know that lady that was tryin’ to run for the Senate and sometimes she’d gone to some place where they did witch stuff? Hillary went to a church and worshiped Satan . . . . What . . . I think is scaring the hell out of you: there are people that love them [Clintons], no matter what.”
* Note: Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, together with her husband Harry, was the producer of Designing Women , a popular TV sitcom (1986-1993). Exhibit B
I first reported the following in a post about two months ago, “ Hillary aide talks about animal sacrifice to demon Moloch in WikiLeaks email “.
In early August 2016, WikiLeaks released a (hacked) email from W. Lewis Amselem to Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s chief of staff. At the time of the email, Amselem served in the State Department under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as head of the U.S. delegation to the Organization of American States (OAS). (He has since retired.) In the email, Amselem made mention of “sacrificing a chicken in the backyard to Moloch” — an ancient demon.
Below is a screenshot I took of the WikiLeaks email (you can see the email for yourself here ). I painted a red bracket around the animal sacrifice phrase.
In the Old Testament , Gehenna was a valley by Jerusalem, where apostate Israelites and followers of various pagan gods sacrificed their children by fire (2 Chr. 28:3, 33:6; Jer. 7:31, 19:2–6). One of those gods was Moloch (aka Molech, Molekh, Molok, Molek, Molock, Moloc, Melech, Milcom or Molcom), an ancient Ammonite god who demanded a particular kind of propitiatory child sacrifice from parents. ( Amselem is a Sephardic Jewish surname.) Exhibit C
The latest evidence of satanism on the part of a Hillary Clinton associate is an email recently released by WikiLeaks .
The email was sent from Tony Podesta, a powerful Democrat lobbyist, to his brother John Podesta , a longtime Clinton associate who is the chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Tony had forwarded an invitation to attend a satanic ritual called “spirit cooking dinner” from Marina Abramovic, 69, a Serbian “performance artist” who now lives in New York. Abramovic’s email says:
“Dear Tony,
I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place. Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother is joining? “
Tony appended to Abramovic’s invitation this message to John Podesta:
“Are you in NYC Thursday July 9 Marina wants you to come to dinner. ” Here’s a screenshot of the email (you can view it on WikiLeaks here ): Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars explains that “spirit cooking” is a “sacrament” in Thelema — a religion founded by British occultist-satanist Aleister Crowley, whose motto was “Do As Thou Wilt”— in which menstrual blood, breast milk, urine and sperm are mixed to create a “painting.” According to Abramovic, if the ritual is performed in an art gallery, it is merely art, but if the ritual is performed privately, then “spirit cooking” is a “spiritual ceremony”—“to symbolize the union between the microcosm, Man, and the macrocosm, the Divine” and “a representation of one of the prime maxims in Hermeticism ‘As Above, So Below’.” Mike Cernovich cuts (no pun intended) to the quick: Spirit cooking is an “occult practice used during sex cult rituals , as explained in the book Spirit cooking with essential aphrodisiac recipes .” So who is Marina Abramovic? Let’s begin with this disturbing image of Abramovic posing with a bloody goat’s head — a representation of Baphomet: Here’s a video of Abramovic on “spirit cooking painting”: Cassandra Fairbanks of WeAreChange.org has more information on Marina Abramovic: She is known for gory “performance art” in the name of “confronting pain and ritual.” One of Abramovic’s performances involved repeatedly stabbing herself in her hands. Another featured her throwing her nails, toenails, and hair into a flaming pentagram, then jumping inside the pentagram and fainting. Exhibit D
Many FBI agents involved in the now re-opened criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, who we would expect to know more about her than we do, regard Hillary Clinton as the antiChrist.
Spencer Ackerman reports for The Guardian , Nov. 4, 2016:
“Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.
Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.
‘The FBI is Trumpland,’ said one current agent. […]
The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is ‘the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel ,’ and that ‘the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.’”
H/t FOTM ‘s Anon and Will Shanley
See also: | 1real |
Donald Trump Says Being President Makes Him Immune To Lawsuits As Supporter Throws Him Under The Bus | Apparently, Donald Trump wanted to be president because he seriously thinks being president makes him immune to lawsuits. As usual, he s wrong.During his campaign, Trump often urged his supporters to physically assault protesters. And at a rally in Kentucky in March 2016, Trump did exactly that and it caused a black woman to be assaulted as she was forced out of the venue. I was called a n****r and a c*nt and got kicked out, University of Louisville student Shiya Nwanguma recounted. They were pushing and shoving at me, cursing at me, yelling at me, called me every name in the book. They re disgusting and dangerous. In fact, the assault was caught on camera and revealed that Alvin Bamberger, Matthew Heimbach, and Joseph Pryor each contributed to the crime.Well, a lawsuit was filed against the men and Donald Trump himself.Of course, attorneys for Trump were quick to try to claim presidential immunity to wriggle out of being held liable for the actions of the three men.They argue that Trump is immune from suit because he is president of the United States. But that s not true at all and the Supreme Court says so.Back during Bill Clinton s presidency, the high court ruled that a president can be sued for action taken outside of the presidency. And since Trump was not president in March 2016 when he ordered the crowd to get em out of here he can and will face this lawsuit.U.S. District Judge David Hale ruled earlier this month that the evidence indicates that Trump is at least partially responsible for the actions of his supporters at rallies.And even Trump s own supporters are throwing him under the bus.Bamberger, who is a member of a veteran s association, claims his actions were provoked by Trump. Bamberger had no prior intention to act has he did, his attorneys wrote. Bamberger would not have acted as he did without Trump and/or Trump campaign s specific urging and inspiration. To the extent that Bamberger acted, he did so in response to and inspired by Trump and/or Trump campaign s urging to remove the protesters. Bamberge is literally arguing that if he is found liable in court, so should Trump. And that makes sense. After all, Trump egged his supporters on every time protesters attended his rallies. He even once offered to pay for their defense if they roughed up protesters. So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of him, would you? he said during a February rally. Seriously, okay, just knock the hell. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees; I promise, I promise. From that point forward, violence against protesters by Trump supporters got even worse.So Trump will have to deal with more lawsuits. Because no one, not even the president, is above the law.Featured Image: Win McNamee/Getty Images | 1real |
TRUMP THREATENS TO SUE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT ACTIVIST AND FAV OBAMA CELEBRITY CHEF For Pulling Out Of Restaurant Deal In New DC Hotel | America better wake up and realize we are quickly becoming victims of leftist bullies and their desire to destroy our right to free speech Celebrity chef Jose Andres is backing out of a deal to put his new flagship restaurant inside the new Trump International Hotel in Washington DC after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump caused a media firestorm with his recent comments about illegal immigration.In a statement, Andres whose ThinkFoodGroup oversees more than a dozen restaurants in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, and Puerto Rico said comments Trump made about illegal immigration during his presidential campaign announcement last month make it impossible for him to open his restaurant in Trump s new hotel. Donald Trump s recent statements disparaging immigrants make it impossible for my company and I to move forward with opening a successful Spanish restaurant in Trump International s upcoming hotel in Washington D.C., Andres said in a statement. More than half of my team is Hispanic, as are many of our guests. And, as a proud Spanish immigrant and recently naturalized American citizen myself, I believe that every human being deserves respect, regardless of immigration status. Andres s statement comes after Washington DC resident Erick Sanchez started a Change.org petition asking the chef to pull his planned restaurant from Trump s hotel. The petition had gathered 2,750 signatures by Wednesday afternoon, but it was unclear whether it had played a role in Andres s decision.In an email to the Washington Post, Trump s son Donald Trump Jr. said that Andres had no right to back out of what he said is a 10-year lease the chef signed with the hotel and threatened legal action:Our relationship with Jos Andr s has always been a good one, but simply put, Jos has no right to terminate or otherwise abandon his obligations under the lease. In the event Mr. Andres defaults in the performance of his obligations, we will not hesitate to take legal action to recover all unpaid rent for the entire 10 year term together with all attorneys fees and additional damages we may sustain. We will also enforce the exclusivity provisions preventing Mr. Andr s from opening a competing restaurant anywhere in the D.C area. Mr. Andr s obligations under the lease are clear and unambiguous. More importantly, construction is ahead of schedule at Trump International Hotel, Washington D.C. and when completed in 2016, will be a crown jewel within the Trump Hotel Collection.Andres has been a vocal advocate for immigration reform. In a 2013 op-ed for the Post, the chef, who became a naturalized American citizen after living in the United States for decades, lobbied Congress to pass an immigration bill that had stalled in the legislature. The fellow immigrants I ve known and worked with over the years, those with legal status and those without, are here for the right reasons, Andres wrote. They don t want to cause any trouble, take any handouts or steal anyone s job. Many already pay taxes and have jobs tough, dirty, exhausting work that America depends on, such as picking our tomatoes, cleaning our fish or canning our products on cold factory floors for low wages and no benefits. Andres s decision to cut ties with Trump follows other individuals and companies who have backed away from the real estate mogul and presidential candidate in recent weeks. NBC, Univision, Macy s, PGA Golf, the Miss Universe pageant, and ESPN have all distanced themselves from Trump following his comments.Via: Breitbart News | 1real |
Obama DOJ: Handmaiden of Clinton Corruption | Go to Article
The Obama Department of Justice has been corruptly aiding and abetting the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, to escape legal accountability for her actions. From Attorney General Loretta Lynch on down through the Justice Department’s political ranks, the Department has blocked the FBI from searching for the truth and following the evidence of potential criminality to its logical conclusion. Whether it is Hillary’s use of a private e-mail server while serving as Secretary of State or her involvement in the pay-for-play Clinton enterprise known as the Clinton Foundation, the Obama administration is applying a banana republic-style double standard to pervert justice and the rule of law in order to shield her.
Lynch and President Obama were reportedly furious with FBI Director James Comey for sending a letter to Congress on October 28 th indicating that new evidence potentially pertinent to the e-mail case had come to light, which required further investigation. This evidence consisted of a batch of e-mails FBI investigators had found on one or more computers belonging to Anthony Weiner, Clinton confidante Huma Abedin’s estranged husband, while they were searching for evidence in an unrelated case involving Weiner’s alleged sexting to an underage girl. Comey sent his letter after months of agonizing over his previous decision to let Hillary off the hook in the e-mail case last July. He was said by a source close to him to have been particularly disturbed by the mounting number of resignation letters from FBI agents who felt betrayed by that decision.
Department of Justice officials had leaned on Comey not to send the letter to Congress, claiming that it would violate Department protocols and procedures against taking any action that could be perceived as interfering with the upcoming presidential election. To his credit, Comey ignored the Department officials’ objections, claiming he had an obligation to keep the Congress and the public informed of any potentially significant new developments in the case.
Democrats, who had lavished praise on Comey for his July decision, lashed out at Comey for sending his letter updating Congress. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid went so far as to make the baseless charge that Comey may have violated the law by informing Congress, because, Reid argued, he appeared to be taking sides in an election. The disgraced former Attorney General Eric Holder, held in contempt of Congress for withholding information relating to the Fast and Furious scandal, said about Comey’s action, “I fear he has unintentionally and negatively affected public trust in both the Justice Department and the FBI. It is up to the director to correct his mistake — not for the sake of a political candidate or campaign but in order to protect our system of justice and best serve the American people.”
Since when has Holder been genuinely concerned about protecting our system of justice and best serving the American people? Holder had already contributed to the erosion of public trust, with his blatant politicization of the Obama Department of Justice. As evidenced by the Obama Department of Justice’s handling of the multiple FBI investigations involving Hillary Clinton, the Department has continued its slide into the muck of corruption. It interfered with both the normal course of criminal investigations and the election by stacking the deck in Hillary’s favor, ensuring that no indictment would occur to derail her path to succeed Obama and preserve his legacy.
First, the Department of Justice reportedly refused to empanel a grand jury in either the e-mail case or in connection with the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation pay-for-play allegations. “The problem here is this investigation was never a real investigation,” former assistant FBI director James Kallstrom said . “That’s the problem. They never had a grand jury empanelled, and the reason they never had a grand jury empanelled, I’m sure, is Loretta Lynch would not go along with that.”
Kallstrom’s belief that Lynch acted to influence the results of the FBI probes in Hillary’s favor is buttressed by Lynch’s 30 minute private tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton shortly before FBI Director Comey faced the cameras on July 5 th with his exculpatory announcement.
Second, at least five immunity agreements were handed out in the e-mail case, including to Hillary’s lawyer and confidante Cheryl Mills and to Platte River Networks’ Paul Combetta. It appears that Combetta had previously lied to government investigators – a crime in itself – while trying to cover up the fact that he had evidently Bleachbited e-mails to delete them, even though they had been subject to a previously issued Congressional subpoena. The immunity agreements garnered nothing in return, but had the effect of blocking access to the computer devices of the immunity beneficiaries in the FBI’s separate Clinton Foundation investigation. Apparently, the Department decided against the alternative option of subpoenaing the computer devices or seeking a search warrant, rather than granting useless immunities, in order to obtain any evidence relevant to the e-mail investigation that might have been contained in those devices.
Third, the Department and FBI did not conduct their last minute interview of Hillary Clinton under oath and allowed Cheryl Mills – herself a material witness – to sit in during Hillary’s interview. They did not ask pertinent follow-up questions. There was no verbatim transcript of the interview to use in checking the veracity of Hillary’s statements during the interview against her sworn Congressional testimony or her many public statements.
Fourth, the Department of Justice reportedly refused to allow the FBI to issue subpoenas to gather more evidence in connection with its investigation of the Clinton Foundation pay-for-play allegations. In fact, senior Department officials reportedly would not authorize a more thorough FBI investigation because they claimed there was not sufficient evidence gathered thus far to justify going further. Such a circular argument was a mere cover to prevent seasoned career investigators from learning the full extent of foreign government donations while Hillary was Secretary of State, their true motivations and any favors extended by the State Department in return.
Finally, the cross-connections between the Clintons and some high level Department of Justice and FBI officials cry out for recusal. But not so in this administration. For example, the wife of the deputy FBI director who was involved in the laggard Clinton Foundation investigation, Andrew McCabe, just happened to have received a large donation from close Clinton ally Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe to her 2015 run for the State Senate.
To make matters worse, the Obama Department of Justice assigned Assistant Attorney General Peter J. Kadzik, a close friend of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, to communicate with Congress about what Kadzik promised would be a “thorough” review of the newly discovered e-mails from Anthony Weiner’s online account.
Podesta praised Kadzik in an e-mail to an Obama campaign official back in 2008 as a “Fantastic lawyer,” and said about his pal, “Kept me out of jail.” Their history together goes further back than that. During the waning days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, it was Kadzik, then representing the infamous billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, who lobbied Podesta, then serving as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, for a presidential pardon on his client’s behalf. Kadzik’s lobbying effort, no doubt helped along by contributions to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign and to Bill Clinton’s presidential library, paid off. Bill Clinton delivered the requested pardon on his last day in office.
Kadzik joined the Department of Justice in April 2013, first as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs, and then as the Principal Deputy. With the Podesta connection intact, Kadzik has served as a highly placed Clinton campaign mole in the Department. An e-mail dated May 19, 2015 from Kadzik to Podesta, released by WikiLeaks , proves the point. Bearing the subject heading “Heads Up,” Kadzik advised Podesta about upcoming Congressional testimony by the head of the Department’s Civil Division, and about another filing in the Freedom of Information case that would mean “it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the emails.” Podesta forwarded Kadzik’s heads up e-mail to several senior Hillary Clinton campaign officials with the admonition: “Additional chances for mischief.”
Exploiting his coordinating role in the re-opened e-mail investigation and contacts with FBI investigators, Kadzik will now be in a position to relay inside information to his pal Podesta and to provide inside information to the Clinton campaign’s supporters in Congress as well.
The Clintons manage to turn virtually everything they touch into a cesspool of corruption. The Obama Department of Justice is no exception. | 1real |
Italian Senate approves electoral law; likely to produce hung-parliament | ROME (Reuters) - Italy s upper house Senate approved on Thursday a new electoral system that is expected to handicap the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement at a forthcoming national election and favor mainstream political blocs. The bill has already been approved by the lower house thanks to a battery of confidence motions that swept aside all opposition and now only needs a green light from the head of state to become law. This is expected in the coming days. The voting system, a mix of proportional representation and first-past-the-post, will benefit parties that form pre-election coalitions something the 5-Star has always ruled out. With opinion polls pointing to a three-way split between the centre-left, centre-right and 5-Star, analysts say the new electoral law will not produce a clear-cut winner at the next election, which is due by May 2018. Italy has had 64 governments since the end of World War Two, including five in the past seven years, and a renewed bout of political instability in the euro zone s third-largest economy could hurt global financial markets. To prevent a financial backlash, analysts say some form of grand coalition between the more moderate parties on the left and right is likely to emerge from any ballot-box stalemate. You are all the same. You don t have any ideas or any policies, just the same mission: to keep hold of your seats and continue to squeeze the country dry, the 5-Star Senate leader, Giovanni Endrissi, told the upper chamber on Thursday. Polls show the 5-Star is currently the most popular party in Italy, with support at around 30 percent nationally. President Sergio Mattarella had called on parliament to draw up a new law to harmonize the existing voting rules that risked throwing up different results in the two houses. All previous attempts at reform fell foul of political infighting but, unexpectedly, the ruling Democratic Party (PD) of former prime minister Matteo Renzi struck a deal with Silvio Berlusconi s Forza Italia party over a revised voting system. The rightist Northern League also backed the initiative. This law is the fruit of delicate mediation between coalition and opposition parties, which are very different parties with very different interests, said Luigi Zanda, PD Senate leader. This will be Italy s third electoral law since 1993 and gives political leaders the power to pack electoral lists with supporters, potentially stifling internal party debate. The first-past-the-post element will benefit parties that have a strong local base, notably the Northern League, which looks set to win a large majority of seats in the wealthy north. Under the new system, IXE pollsters predicted on Thursday that a centre-right bloc made up of Forza Italia, the Northern League and Brothers of Italy party would win 269 of the 630 seats up for grabs in the lower house. Renzi s PD allied with a small centrist party would take 180 seats and 5-Star 153 seats. A small bloc of leftist parties that have rebelled against Renzi, would take 20 seats, IXE said. Approval of the electoral law leaves parliament with one final task to complete before the houses can be dissolved the reading of the 2018 budget. That legislation is expected to be passed by Christmas, which could open the way for national elections as early as March. | 0fake |
After One-Child Policy, Outrage at China’s Offer to Remove IUDs - The New York Times | BEIJING — A few months after Lu Qiumei gave birth to her daughter in 2012, local officials visited her home and told her that she was required to be fitted with an intrauterine device. For more than three decades, this was national policy in China. The IUD was the government’s most important tool for limiting couples to one child, and almost all new mothers were required to get one. Ms. Lu, a former advertising executive, considered the demand invasive, insulting and potentially harmful to her health. Still, like hundreds of millions of Chinese women before her, she made an appointment with a state gynecologist and had one put in. Now, a year after abandoning the “ ” policy, the government is hoping to make it up to Ms. Lu and millions of women like her — by removing their IUDs, free of charge. But the offer, made without even a hint of an apology, has provoked incredulous outrage. “We shouldn’t even have had this in the first place, and now the government wants to use it as a form of state benefit for people,” Ms. Lu, 36, scoffed in a phone interview from her home in the eastern city of Linyi. “It’s like they are slapping themselves in the face. ” While IUDs elsewhere can often be removed with the tug of their strings in a doctor’s office, surgery is usually needed in China because most devices here are designed or altered to be more difficult to extract, some with shortened strings and others with no strings at all. But many Chinese women have chafed at the thought of the government’s getting involved, yet again, in their private lives. And for many mothers, the offer has come too late for them to consider having a second child. “It’s the equivalent of someone injuring you and then mending the wound,” said Zhang Xintian, 25, who watched her mother go into surgery two years ago in the eastern province of Zhejiang to remove the IUD she had worn for more than two decades. In China, women often have the same IUD from soon after childbirth until menopause while popular IUDs in the United States are typically deemed effective for up to 10 years, those used in China offer birth control for much longer. China began demanding that women be fitted with an intrauterine device after they had one child, and sterilized after they had two, in the early 1980s. Those who refused risked that their children would be denied access to public schools and health insurance. Civil servants and state employees who refused lost their jobs. From 1980 to 2014, according to official statistics, 324 million Chinese women were fitted with IUDs. And 107 million underwent tubal ligations or, as is commonly said, got their “tubes tied. ” Local officials were evaluated by their ability to meet targets, leading some to order that the procedures — as well as abortions — be performed by force on women who resisted. Then last year, confronting an aging population and a shrinking work force, President Xi Jinping relegated the policy to the Communist Party’s scrap heap of discarded dogma. And without so much as an expression of regret or an admission that it had perhaps made a mistake, the party pivoted from punishing couples for having a second child to encouraging them to get on with reproducing. To that end, an official said at a recent news conference that 18 million women would be eligible for the free removal of IUDs in the next three years so they could bear a second child. “Our country provides support in terms of law, finance and service systems to ensure citizens’ access to the free removal of IUDs,” said the official, Song Li of the National Health and Family Planning Commission’s department of women and children. But the reversal, the paternalistic attitude, the failure to accept any culpability — for some, it was too much. Within hours of the news conference, the internet was fuming with indignation. The mass implantation of IUDs amounted to “involuntary, forced acts of mutilation,” Han Haoyue, a popular columnist, wrote in a post shared nearly 3, 000 times on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. “And now, to say they are offering free removal as a service to these tens of millions of women — repeatedly broadcasting this on state television as a kind of state benefit — they have no shame, second to none. ” Over the years, many Chinese women have come to hate the IUD, which is inserted into the uterus to block fertilization. In the novel “Frog,” by Mo Yan, the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, the main character imposes a reign of terror involving the compulsory implantation of IUDs and tries to catch women who surreptitiously remove them. In mainland China, being fitted with an IUD is called “shang huan,” a phrase that literally means “installing a loop,” referring to the stainless steel ring that was the state’s preferred device for more than a decade despite higher rates of complications. The rings were replaced in the by safer and more effective IUDs. According to gynecologists in China, IUDs used for Chinese women were meant to be left indefinitely, with surgery necessary to take them out. Dr. Gloria Korta, a gynecologist at Winchester Physician Associates in Massachusetts, who toured Chinese hospitals as part of a cultural exchange in 2001, said that while there was a risk of infection from having an IUD implanted for many years, it was small. Perhaps because of the problems associated with the early model, there remains widespread concern in China about the IUD’s impact on women’s health. In 2012, the online portal Tencent published a lengthy report arguing that many Chinese women had “experienced serious damage to their mental and physical health” from the IUD campaign because of “rough surgeries and poor hygiene conditions. ” Ai Xiaoming, 63, a prominent documentary filmmaker, said many women, herself included, had never been advised of potential complications and the need for regular checkups after getting an IUD. She had to have a hysterectomy when surgery to remove her IUD was botched. “In the eyes of the government, women are labor units,” Ms. Ai said. “When the country needs you to give birth, you have to do so. And when they don’t need you to give birth, you don’t. ” Even before the end of the policy, the government allowed some women to remove their IUDs if they complained of medical complications. Others, including Ms. Zhang’s mother, did it without permission, paying sympathetic doctors to remove them. But Wang Feng, a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the policy, said the government appeared to be preparing to remove IUDs on a larger scale. “They were anticipating the numbers, how many operations need to be done, as if this is another government program,” he said. The government’s eagerness appears to be driven in part by growing concern over the economic impact of the nation’s plummeting birthrate, now one of the lowest in the world. According to 2015 data, Chinese women had 1. 05 children on average, well below the population replacement rate of more than 2. 1. With fewer young people to support larger numbers of retirees in China, scholars have warned of a looming demographic crisis. But many couples are not interested in having a second child, some because of the potential costs, others because of their age. Cao Cuihua, 35, a restaurant owner in the central province of Anhui and the mother of a boy, said she did not plan to remove her IUD because she and her husband could not afford more children. “I did think about having a second child, but my economic circumstances don’t allow it,” she said. “This national policy to have two children has come a bit too late. ” Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of who studies China’s demographics, said half of all Chinese women eligible to have a second child were 40 or older. “Most people have already lost the ability to give birth,” Dr. Yi said by email. “The willingness to have children is already very low, so the Chinese government’s offer of free surgeries will be of no avail. It will have little effect on the birthrate. ” Mao Qun’an, a spokesman for China’s family planning commission, defended the offer to remove IUDs and said the government would also cover the costs of surgery to reverse tubal ligations and vasectomies. (Such procedures are more complicated, and critics say most Chinese hospitals are not equipped for them.) Dr. Dalice Marriott, a gynecologist at Beijing United Family Hospital, said a woman who had an IUD for a long time ran the risk of “having it embedded in the uterine wall. ” “That makes it much more difficult to remove,” Dr. Marriott said, adding that the surgery could result in bleeding, infection and injury to the uterus. Asked about the public outcry over the government’s offer to remove IUDs, Mr. Mao replied, “We did not deliberately emphasize that it’s a government benefit. ” Li Yinhe, a prominent Chinese scholar of sex and the family, defended the government’s approach, arguing that population control measures were “not targeted against women’s rights. ” “If the state doesn’t engage in this, then it’s not only a disadvantage for men, it also hurts the interests of women,” she said. “Women giving up their reproductive rights is a sacrifice that is made for the whole Chinese society. ” But many women want the government to acknowledge that its original policy was wrong. “What they’ve done to women is inhumane,” said Xu Dali, 35, a mother of two sons in Linyi. “Why did the government force every women then to have an IUD? At that time, why did it not consider the physical harm that has been inflicted on every woman?” | 0fake |
Supreme Court Complicates Corruption Cases From New York to Illinois - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — After Dean G. Skelos, the New York state senator, was sentenced last month on federal corruption charges, one of his lawyers asked the judge to allow Mr. Skelos to remain free on bail while he appealed his conviction. Her argument: A case pending in the United States Supreme Court, challenging the conviction of former Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, could help undermine the criminal charges against Mr. Skelos. “It is extremely likely that the court will reverse the conviction in Governor McDonnell’s case,” Alexandra A. E. Shapiro, the lawyer, told the judge. Her prediction proved accurate. And within moments after the Supreme Court reversed Mr. McDonnell’s conviction on Monday, defense lawyers from Illinois to New York were citing the unanimous ruling as grounds to challenge past and pending criminal corruption cases brought by the Justice Department. “This is a sign of the court saying to prosecutors, ‘You are overreaching,’” said Leonard Goodman, a lawyer for former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, who was convicted on corruption charges in 2011 and is scheduled to be resentenced in August. “They think they have unfettered discretion to take down any elected officials. ” Current and former prosecutors strongly disagreed. In Manhattan, a spokesman for Preet Bharara, the United States attorney there, said in a statement on Monday, “While we are reviewing the McDonnell decision, the official actions that led to the convictions of Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos fall squarely within the definition set forth by the Supreme Court today. ” Mr. Bharara has repeatedly said he remains committed to ending a pattern of corrupt acts by elected officials, and most recently, his office won the convictions of Mr. Skelos and Mr. Silver, a former State Assembly leader. Still, there was agreement among legal experts on Monday that the ruling would make it harder for the government to win corruption convictions. For the second time since 2010, the court narrowed the avenues that prosecutors have to file such charges. The decision could even discourage some cases from being brought in the first place. “The bar is now higher in terms of what you have to prove,” said Randall D. Eliason, a former chief of the public corruption section at the United States attorney’s office in Washington. “This will leave a lot of unsavory conduct unpunished. ” Mr. McDonnell was accused of accepting gifts, loans and vacations from an affluent Virginia businessman who wanted the governor’s help dealing with state officials. “Our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes and ball gowns,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the court, adding that “setting up a meeting, talking to another official or organizing an event (or agreeing to do so) — without more” — does not fit the definition of an “official act. ” In 2010, in a decision also involving honest services fraud, the Supreme Court set aside the conviction of Jeffrey K. Skilling — the former chief executive of Enron, the bankrupt energy company — ruling that the law could be used to prosecute only bribery or kickbacks, not more limited actions like “self dealing,” in which an official secretly takes an action for personal gain. Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal nonprofit group, said the combination of rulings was likely to have a major impact because elected officials involved in wrongdoing often did not have the power to personally deliver the favor that had been requested. Mr. Bookbinder said examples of cases that might now be harder to prosecute included those of Representative Randy Cunningham, Republican of California, who pushed the Defense Department to select a particular contractor after receiving gifts and pleaded guilty in 2005, and Representative William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, who was convicted in 2009 of taking bribes from a company that asked him to press executive branch officials to buy its products. “The Supreme Court seems to be giving people a way to go ahead with corrupt conduct, with kind of a wink and a nod,” Mr. Bookbinder said. Joel Bertocchi, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago, cautioned against overstating the impact of Monday’s ruling. “Having the same set of facts, they may be able to file different charges,” he said. But defense lawyers and some conservative legal groups that have been critical of the Justice Department said they hoped the ruling would bring real change. They argued that the government had, in its zeal to win headlines, filed charges in recent years for activities that did not meet the standard for federal corruption. “Once again, it has taken the U. S. Supreme Court to remind prosecutors that they do not have a blank check to read all kinds of unintended and overly broad criminality into vaguely worded statutes passed by Congress,” said E. G. Morris, a lawyer in Austin, Tex. and the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The precise impact of the McDonnell ruling on the Skelos and Silver cases was not immediately clear. Lawyers for Mr. Skelos, the former State Senate majority leader and a Republican, had no comment on the decision. But at Mr. Skelos’s sentencing last month, Rahul Mukhi, a prosecutor in Mr. Bharara’s office, argued that Mr. Skelos’s corrupt acts had gone far beyond those taken by Mr. McDonnell, and that the cases were not “factually analogous. ” “McDonnell involved only meetings,” Mr. Mukhi said. “This case involved, overwhelmingly, legislation. ” Mr. Bharara’s office had said, for example, that Mr. Skelos supported legislation in Albany to benefit companies that arranged payments to his son, Adam B. Skelos, who was convicted along with his father. The elder Mr. Skelos received a prison term his son was sentenced to six and a half years. Lawyers for Mr. Silver, a Democrat who received a sentence, said Monday that the McDonnell decision “will be central” to their client’s appeal. The lawyers, Steven F. Molo and Joel Cohen, said the decision “makes clear that the federal government has gone too far in prosecuting state officials for conduct that is part of the everyday functioning of those in elected office. ” Noel J. Francisco, who argued Mr. McDonnell’s case before the Supreme Court, said that he hoped the ruling would be the end of his client’s prosecution and that the charges would be dropped entirely. “They brought the case they brought,” he said, “because that was the most they could get a conviction on. That theory has been squarely rejected. ” | 0fake |
Macedonia wants EU membership process, Greek talks to run in tandem | LONDON (Reuters) - Macedonia hopes it has done enough to convince the European Union to start accession talks while a quarter-of-a-century-long row with neighbouring Greece rumbles on, its foreign minister said on Wednesday. Greece has vetoed the ex-Yugoslav republic s attempts to join both the EU and NATO because it says the name Macedonia implies a territorial claim over Greece s own northerly region of Macedonia. Macedonia s suggestion last month to use the name the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as it does at other international bodies was not immediately embraced by Greece, Macedonia s Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov told Reuters. The two sides are set to meet again later this month at the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Whatever the outcome, Macedonia wants the EU to agree that accession talks - which could take years - can at least get under way. If we have enough in terms of reform at home, we hope we will reach that stage (to start EU accession talks) and deal with the name issue in parallel, Dimitrov said. The time it takes to go through the EU membership process might give Greece, which has previously insisted that Skopje use a compound name such as New or Upper Macedonia, enough comfort that process can be halted if needed. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker gave a boost to Macedonia s EU hopes, and those of Serbia, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Kosovo, saying on Wednesday: We must maintain a credible enlargement perspective for the Western Balkans. Joining NATO is more clear cut, meaning that for now there is unlikely to be much leeway from Greece. We cannot fight our way into the NATO alliance, we have to talk our way in, Dimitrov said. We need to be seen in Athens as an ally ... In the long run it is also in the Greek interest to have a law-governed neighbour to their northern border. Macedonia, a small ex-Yugoslav republic of about 2 million people, declared independence in 1991 and avoided the violence that accompanied much of the breakup of Yugoslavia. It was later rocked by an insurgency among its large ethnic Albanian minority that almost tore the country apart in 2001 and it has just emerged from two years of political turmoil after a wiretapping scandal brought down the previous ruling nationalist VMRO-DPMNE party bloc in 2015. Tensions boiled over again in April when protesters stormed parliament and assaulted the country s now prime minister after his party and ethnic Albanian allies voted to elect an Albanian as parliament speaker. Macedonia s position just above Greece meant it was also on the key Syrian refugee and north African migrant transit route to northern Europe until the EU and Turkey struck a deal to stem the flow. Turkey is due in the coming months to receive a tranche of the money that came with the deal and Dimitrov said it was important the arrangement remained firm. We think it is very important for Europe to continue to assist Turkey. I think closing the Balkan route and the Turkish-EU (financial) deal together helped both Europe and the refugees have a more organised approach to the problem so both are very important and we need both to stay in place. (This version of the story removes wrongly attributed acronym from paragraph 3) | 0fake |
OBAMA FLOODS America With Illegal Aliens, Muslim Refugees, While Veteran Under VA Care Dies With Maggot-Infested Wound | Four employees at an Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs facility have resigned after a resident with a maggot-infested wound died while under their care.Vietnam veteran Owen Reese Peterson, 73, initially came to the Talihina Veterans Center with an infection, but ended up with sepsis and died on Oct. 3.Sepsis is a potentially life-threatening complication of an infection that can damage the internal organs, causing them to fail.Peterson had apparently been at the facility for just a few weeks, and the time frame between the gruesome discovery of the maggots and his death is unclear. He did not succumb as a result of the parasites, Executive Director Myles Deering told the Tulsa World. He succumbed as a result of the sepsis. A physician s assistant and three nurses, including the director of nursing, resigned in the wake of the investigation, said Shane Faulkner, a spokesman for the ODVA. All four chose to resign before the termination process began, Faulkner said. WND | 1real |
Democrats Push to Prevent Gun Sales to Terror-list Suspects | Congressional Democrats are trying to build support for an effort to bar gun purchases by terror suspects, hoping to take advantage of the same public anxieties about security that gave Republicans a ringing House victory.
The Democratic push seems likely to fall victim to opposition from the National Rifle Association and congressional gun-rights backers, chiefly Republicans, who have smothered firearms curbs for years. If the Republicans who control Congress block votes on the proposal, Democrats hope to profit politically by winning sympathy from angry voters.
"By leaving this terrorist loophole open, Republicans are leaving every community in America vulnerable to attacks by terrorists armed with assault rifles and explosives purchased legally, in broad daylight," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Friday in a written statement.
The bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would have the attorney general compile names of known and suspected terrorists, likely drawing from huge lists the government already keeps. Federally licensed gun dealers would be barred from selling firearms to people on that list if government officials believed they planned to use the weapons for terrorism.
Gun dealers are prohibited from selling to 10 categories of people, including many convicted criminals or those with severe mentally illness.
But people appearing on the government's terror watch lists — including those kept off from airlines — are not automatically disqualified from buying weapons from gun dealers. The FBI is notified when a background check for the purchase of firearms or explosives generates a match with the watch list, and agents often use that information to step up surveillance on suspects.
By law, people can try persuading the Justice Department to remove their names from terror lists or can file lawsuits challenging their inclusion. The lists are overwhelmingly composed of foreigners.
Between 2004 and 2014, people on one terror watch list underwent background checks to buy guns 2,233 times and were allowed to make the purchase 91 percent of the time, according to a March report by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative agency of Congress.
NRA spokeswoman Jennifer Baker noted that there have been numerous instances of innocent people mistakenly added to terror lists. She also accused Democrats of trying to take advantage of heightened public alarm following last week's attacks in Paris, which claimed at least 130 lives and for which the Islamic State, which has also threatened the U.S., has claimed responsibility.
"It is appalling that anti-gun politicians are exploiting the Paris terrorist attacks to push their gun-control agenda and distract from President Obama's failed foreign policy," Baker said.
Feinstein's measure echoes legislation that the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., proposed repeatedly over the last decade and that Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., has long pushed. None of those measures has ever received a vote.
Feinstein introduced her bill in February. But last week's mass killings in Paris have injected new life into terrorism and public safety as top-tier political issues.
Just Thursday, Republicans took advantage of voters' security jitters and muscled legislation through the House preventing Syrian and Iraqi refugees from entering the U.S. until the administration tightens restrictions on their entry. Forty-seven Democrats voted for the bill, ignoring a veto threat by President Barack Obama, who said the current screening system is strong and accused Republicans of playing on panicked voters.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., did not respond directly when asked Thursday if he favored barring people on terror lists from buying guns. "We are just beginning this process of reassessing all of our security stances," he said.
Donald Stewart, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said McConnell has not said whether he would be open to a vote on Feinstein's bill.
But opposition from Republicans and some Democrats to curbing firearms runs deep, and such legislation would require support from 60 of the 100 senators. Democrats could not attain that margin even when they had a Senate majority in the months after the 2012 massacre of 20 first-graders and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut.
Though the Senate had showdown votes on gun curbs in early 2013, it did not revisit the issue as the 2014 elections approached and Reid opted to protect vulnerable Democrats from potentially angering constituents.
The GOP-run House has held no votes on major gun control measures since the Newtown killings.
Feinstein's bill isn't the only gun-related measure Democrats may pursue. A measure by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., would bar gun sales to foreigners in the U.S. from the 38 countries from which visitors need not have visas. | 0fake |
Franken: I’ll Still Appear With Griffin, Picture Was ’Horrible Mistake’ - Apology Was ’The Right Thing’ - Breitbart | On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “New Day,” Senator Al Franken ( ) stated that he would still appear with comedian Kathy Griffin, and denounced the picture depicting her holding up President Trump’s severed head as something that “had no business” being in the public discourse and a “horrible mistake. ” Franken said that Griffin deserved to be denounced for the picture, and that he thought she went too far. He added, “Kathy is a friend, and she’s a terrific comedian, but what — this had no business being in our public discourse. And I talked to her. She apologized, a real fulsome apology. She’s actually begged for forgiveness, and I believe in forgiveness. ” Franken further stated, “I think she did the right thing. I think asking for forgiveness and acknowledging that this — this was a horrible mistake. ” Interviewer Alisyn Camerota then asked Franken, “And you’re still going to appear with her?” He responded, “Yes. ” ( GOP War Room) Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 0fake |
null | Everybody send it to Drudge, infowars lets see if they expose it. Time to call them out i say . | 1real |
Militant threat hangs over Islamic State's former Libyan stronghold | SIRTE, Libya (Reuters) - Nearly a year after Islamic State was driven from its Libyan stronghold Sirte, residents surveying their wrecked homes feel neglected and vulnerable, still afraid of the militant threat that has waned but not vanished. Though security in the Mediterranean coastal city has improved, residents remain wary of jihadists in the desert to the south who have stepped up their activity in recent months, setting up checkpoints and carrying out occasional attacks. In a country where fighting between rival forces frequently flares, Sirte is particularly exposed. It sits in the center of Libya s coastline on the dividing line between loose alliances aligned with rival governments in Tripoli and the east. If the situation continues like this then Daesh (Islamic State) will come back, no doubt. There was a reason why they came. People were angry, felt sidelined, said Ali Miftah, a civil servant and father of five. Now we don t get any support from the government. Look at these ruins. We lost everything. Last month, Islamic State gunmen staged a suicide attack in Misrata, the coastal city about 230 km (140 miles) to the northwest that led the campaign last year to expel the militants from Sirte. IS also has sleeper cells in other cities along Libya s western coast, security officials say, and there is concern foreign fighters seeking sanctuary after defeats in Syria and Iraq could once again exploit the country s security vacuum and link up with al Qaeda-linked militants in the desert south. Divisions among Libya s many armed factions and uncertainty over how long the forces from Misrata that drove Islamic State out will remain in Sirte are compounding residents worries. In parts of the city, life is slowly returning to normal, though Islamic State s black logos are still visible on some shops and inhabitants struggle with cash shortages and failing public services, as they do elsewhere in Libya. But in areas that saw the heaviest fighting, families see little hope of rebuilding their homes. Sirte, the home city of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, was pounded by nearly 500 U.S. air strikes between August and December last year. In El Manar and Giza Bahriya, once among Sirte s best neighborhoods, houses looking onto the crystal blue Mediterranean are now crumpled piles of twisted metal and concrete, doors blasted from their metal frames. A damaged primary school said to have once been attended by Gaddafi lies abandoned. Residents say skeletons among the rubble have been left to be tested to see if they belong to Islamic State fighters, or their captives. They are also scared to search their ruined homes because of the unexploded ordnance in the wreckage. Local forces man checkpoints on the outskirts of Sirte and carry out patrols to the south. But they say they lack the vehicles and weapons to pursue the jihadists, who have retreated into mobile desert camps. Instead, they rely on the U.S. air strikes that have killed dozens of suspected militants this year. We contain the threat but we cannot chase them in their camps because we lack the right equipment like four-wheel cars needed to drive in the desert, said Taher Hadeed, an official with the forces securing Sirte. It won t be possible for Daesh to take back the city, but there is a risk of attacks. The forces that led the campaign against Islamic State in Sirte last year are nominally loyal to the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli to the west - and Sirte now represents the eastern limit of their control. Beyond, forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar s Libyan National Army control oil terminals they seized during the campaign. But for now, the two sides do not coordinate, said Mohamed al-Ghasri, a military spokesman from Misrata. Residents and officials in Sirte say the threat cannot be dealt with without proper support from the state and professional security forces. They are suffering from a lack of services and we don t see any real efforts or results on the ground at any level, said Siddeeq Ismaiel, a municipal official. An estimated 2,500-3,000 homes need to be built so families forced to live in other parts of Sirte or Misrata can return. This will never end if there is no government, said Hamza Ali, a 34-year-old university employee, standing near his brother s ruined house. It will stop maybe for two, three, four, five, six months, then you will hear an explosion somewhere if there is no official security, police. | 0fake |
WATCH FOR IT! TOWN HALLS FLOODED With Unhinged Fake Protesters Are Supported By These Radicals with Deep Pockets | Discussion in America has been officially hijacked by the unhinged left and is supported by radicals with deep pockets We know you re thinking George Soros but there are more men with tons of money to support this effort to fundamentally change America. Tom Stayer, John Posesta, SEIU, Jimmy Dahman and others are all trying to hijack free speech by dominating and shutting down discussion at town halls across America. This is a serious effort to undermine America with tactics that are planned out in advance with a manual full of how to s. It s a recipe for the overthrow of our way of life. BUT will it backfire on these Democrats? Do you think this will change the minds of the voters or just make them angrier at the radical Dem agenda? Their tactics are truly unAmerican and they come off as jackasses We think this means more votes for Republicans.The Center for American Progress Action Fund, the advocacy arm of an organization founded by Hillary Clinton s former campaign manager John Podesta, has partnered with a town hall protest group for upcoming anti-Trump events during the congressional recess and beyond.The Town Hall Project, a group that has served as the central hub for raucous town hall events against Republican lawmakers, announced the partnership with CAP Action to amplify their efforts. So today I m excited to announce a partnership between Town Hall Project and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, an email from Town Hall Project said. With CAP Action amplifying our town hall event research, we can even better ensure that that all Americans have the tools needed to channel their organic energy to ensure their voices are heard and their elected representatives held accountable. ADVERTISING Let me emphasize that this is collaboration towards a common goal, the email continued. Town Hall Project is 100% independent and will never waiver [sic] from our core values of grassroots research and citizen engagement. While we stay true to ourselves and to supporters like you we know the way we win is to build a big coalition of progressive groups: big and small, new and old, online and offline, all working together to fight back. The email urges readers to visit ResistanceNearMe.org, a re-launched CAP Action website run in conjunction with the Town Hall Project. In partnership with Town Hall Project, Resistance Near Me is a hub for progressive local #resist actions, designed for you to find any public event, rally, town hall, protest, and more, near you, as well as the information you need to contact your member of Congress, the website states. It s never been more important to raise our voices to resist Trump s harmful agenda and the elected representatives who aren t speaking for us. Jimmy Dahman, the founder of Town Hall Project, claimed on CNN in February that previous, explosive town hall events were all organic and happening at the grassroots level. Dahman is a former staffer for the Clinton campaign in Iowa, the Washington Free Beacon previously reported. At the time of his CNN interview, his group had already forged a partnership with MoveOn.org, a major progressive advocacy group, to encourage people to attend the town hall events. The group teamed up with Indivisible, a group that provides a practical guide for resisting the Trump agenda that contains information on how to organize in congressional districts.Dahman s group also uses the Action Network, a progressive online organizing platform that was involved with Walmart demonstrations and protests in Ferguson, Missouri.The Action Network is located at the same Washington, D.C., address as Change to Win, a labor union group, and United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the nation. United We Dream has received funding from liberal billionaire George Soros and has been involved actively in protests against Trump and Republicans.The Action Network s board of directors includes Mark Fleischman, a former vice president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); Jeffrey Dugas, who worked for Podesta s Center for American Progress and Elizabeth Warren s 2012 Senate campaign; and Brian Young, who worked for John Kerry and Howard Dean.The Town Hall Project website now acknowledges a partnership with NextGen Climate, an environmentalist super PAC founded by liberal billionaire Tom Steyer.In the email announcing the CAP partnership, the Town Hall Project took credit for some incredible victories with their progressive allies. The group linked to a Yahoo article on how activists organized to defeat the Republican health care reform bill.Via: WFB | 1real |
Liberian court clears way for presidential run-off vote | MONROVIA (Reuters) - Liberia s supreme court cleared the way for a presidential run-off election, ruling on Thursday that it had not found enough evidence of fraud to halt the whole process. Ex-soccer star George Weah will now face off against Vice-President Joseph Boakai in a vote that could mark Liberia s first peaceful transition of power in seven decades. The court dismissed a complaint from the third-place finisher Charles Brumskine s Liberty Party, which had said fraud had undermined the first round of voting in October. In the absence of sufficient evidence, the court cannot order a re-run of the election, Justice Philip Banks said, reading out the court s decision. There were over 5,000 polling places, (so) to present evidence of just a few is problematic, the judge said. The evidence should have (shown) ... that they were committed in such magnitude that they could have altered the results. The winner of round two will replace Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as leader of the small West African country, one of the world s poorest despite abundant diamonds and iron ore. The delays caused by all the legal wrangling have ratcheted up tensions in a country still recovering from decades of civil war that killed tens of thousands. However, a spokesman for the Liberty Party said it would accept the result. If we did not respect the judiciary, we would not have come, Darius Dillion said. Liberia has won, our democracy has won. Liberians are eager for change after Johnson Sirleaf s 12-year rule, which sealed a lasting peace that many doubted was possible, but which has failed to tackle corruption or significantly lift living standards of the country s poorest. Authorities still have to name a date for the run-off. NEC spokesman Henry Flomo told reporters outside the court he believed one could be held in two weeks, but said the date would be announced shortly. The judges made the ruling with a 4-1 majority. | 0fake |
Rubio falters in presidential debate, offering hope to rivals | MANCHESTER, N.H. (Reuters) - Republican White House contender Marco Rubio struggled at a debate on Saturday at the worst possible time, potentially confounding his bid to emerge as Donald Trump’s chief rival in New Hampshire and giving hope to three rivals desperate for a strong showing. Under assault from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie over his level of experience as a first-term U.S. senator from Florida, Rubio retreated time and again to canned statements from his stump speech and looked uncomfortably rattled for the first time after seamless performances at seven prior debates. “Marco, the thing is this,” Christie said during one heated exchange early in the night, “when you’re president of the United States, when you’re a governor of a state, the memorized 30-second speech where you talk about how great America is at the end of it doesn’t solve one problem for one person.” While Rubio recovered later in the debate, the timing of his performance was terrible, coming three days before New Hampshire Republicans register their choices on Tuesday in the nation’s second nominating contest. The debate at St. Anselm College was the last face-off of the candidates before the vote. Rubio’s tough moments may breathe new life into the campaigns of Christie, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Ohio Governor John Kasich, three experienced politicians who, like Rubio, represent establishment Republicans. All three have suffered from the dominance of front-runner Trump in the Republican race. They are badly in need of a breakout moment to change the trajectory of the battle in New Hampshire, where the polls show Trump in the lead, Rubio in second and Texas Senator Ted Cruz in third place. Trump did not have his best debate. He looked flustered in a fight with Bush over the use of eminent domain in advancing the interests of public use projects and private industry. But he seemed to do well enough to possibly win on Tuesday in what would represent his first victory of the 2016 race, erasing the pain from a loss in the Iowa caucus last week, where he finished second to Cruz and just ahead of the surging Rubio. A victory in New Hampshire could put Trump on track for more wins in South Carolina on Feb. 20 and beyond on the way to the Nov. 8 election. For the second debate in a row, Bush looked polished and sounded like the candidate many establishment Republicans had pinned their hopes on. His problem is it may be too late. Kasich, likely to end his candidacy if he does not do well on Tuesday, delivered a positive message that could appeal to New Hampshire Republican voters, who famously make up their minds late and never seem in the mood to follow the lead of the Iowa caucuses, won by Cruz. The trouble for Rubio began soon after the debate started when the ABC News moderators asked Christie about Rubio’s experience in the U.S. Senate, and Christie pressed his case. Rubio critics have made much of the fact that his experience is akin to that of much-derided Democratic President Barack Obama, elected in 2008 when a first-term senator. Rubio’s defense was that his and Obama’s world views are different, not that Obama has simply led the country down the path it is on because of inexperience. “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing,” Rubio said. When Rubio repeated the same line again, Christie sought to reinforce the charge that Rubio is so inexperienced that he relies on well-worn talking points and cannot think on his feet. “There it is. There it is. The memorized 25-second speech. There it is, everybody,” Christie said. Rubio repeated the line enough that someone created a Twitter profile called @RubioGlitch that repeated his line about Obama. Bush attacked Trump for using eminent domain, which allows governments to seize private lands for projects for the public good, to help him build casino complexes in Atlantic City. Eminent domain is a frequent target of criticism from conservative and anti-government groups. “What Donald Trump did was use eminent domain to try to take the property of an elderly woman on the strip in Atlantic City. That is not public purpose. That is downright wrong,” he said. Trump said eminent domain was “a good thing” and was necessary to building roads, bridges, schools and hospitals. “Certainly, it’s a necessity for our country,” he said. “He wants to be a tough guy, and it doesn’t work very well,” Trump said of Bush, telling the son and brother of former presidents to be quiet. When the crowd booed, Trump said, “that’s all his donors and special interests out there.” Trump, known for his tough stances with calls to ban Muslims from visiting the United States and deport immigrants without the proper documents, also called for a more empathetic view of the Republican call to repeal Obamacare insurance coverage for Americans. “There will be a certain number of people who will be on the street dying, and as a Republican I don’t want that to happen,” he said. Trump captured the biggest share of the conversation on Twitter during the debate, winning 33 percent of the conversation followed by Rubio at 20 percent and Cruz at 15 percent. (Additional reporting by Ginger Gibson and Alana Wise in Washington; Writing by Steve Holland and John Whitesides; Editing by Mary Milliken, Paul Simao and Robert Birsel) SAP is the sponsor of this content. It was independently created by Reuters’ editorial staff and funded in part by SAP, which otherwise has no role in this coverage. | 0fake |
WATCH: Trump’s Attorney Flat-Out ADMITS Trump Admin Just Too Intellectually Lazy To Study Facts | Trump s Syrian policy is all over the place, to the point where The Economist actually published a story saying, Wanted: a coherent Syria policy. Trump s position was let Syria handle its own problems, right up until Assad dropped sarin gas on his people. It wasn t until the images of poisoned children started coming in that he decided we needed to respond. Why?Trump s attorney, Michael Cohen, appeared on CNN with Chris Cuomo to discuss President Flip-Flop s new Syria policy. Cuomo asked why Trump would shift from a hands-off-Syria policy to an intervene-now policy, and Cohen s response was downright frightening: When we were watching, whether it was here on CNN or any of the other stations, the Syrian refugees that were leaving, they weren t the young. They weren t the aged. They weren t women. They were all these 19 to 25-year-old men that when they were walking to these makeshift homes in Germany that they put up for them, it looked like a military operation. Cuomo responded by saying that those videos were selective, and the numbers and facts painted a very different picture of the refugees coming out of Syria. Yes, you have young men, but those refugees are the same people that the president is saying he cares so much about. Cuomo is referring to the sheer hypocrisy of this administration s current Syria policy: Assad is gassed his own people, including women and children, but Trump doesn t want to accept the refugees Assad s regime creates. Unfortunately, that didn t sway Cohen, who doubled down on the idea that misleading videos are more reliable than data and facts:CUOMO: Yeah, the question is, why were people picking those videos? Was it misleading? The data would say yes.COHEN: But maybe it wasn t misleading. Maybe it was more of the reality, what was going on.CUOMO: No, but the numbers, Michael, say it s not the reality.COHEN: Again, I don t want to start talking about numbers. Numbers have not proven to suit me well.And there it is: Cohen and Trump and probably a large chunk of the entire administration is too intellectually lazy to try and understand facts and data.Watch the full exchange below:Featured image via screen capture from embedded video | 1real |
Life on the Farm Draws Some French Tired of Urban Rat Race - The New York Times | France — Two years ago, Elisabeth Lavarde decided to quit her office job in Paris and start a new life in a small town with two butchers and one baker just south of the capital. Ms. Lavarde, 39, is now an apprentice farmer at a farm that grows organic vegetables, sold directly to local consumers. New farmers like Ms. Lavarde usually make what they see as a decent salary of about 1, 500 euros, or about $1, 600, a month, slightly above the French minimum wage. “I wanted a job with more meaning,” she said. “I felt like I was tilting at windmills. ” Alongside the experienced farmer she has been paired with as part of a training program set up by an association that nurtures farmers, Ms. Lavarde grows around 40 kinds of organic produce, including tomatoes, potatoes, cauliflowers and carrots. As the sun was about to set behind rows of cauliflower plants on a recent afternoon, Ms. Lavarde gazed over the land she cultivates. A few yards away, a large shelter of tarpaulins rippled in the wind. Ms. Lavarde and her farming tutor, Guilain Vergé, 31, use the shelter to do their bookkeeping and to keep track of their crops on a whiteboard as they wait for authorization from the local government to build a decent barn. It’s all hard work, she acknowledges. But, she says, “Seeing the sky every day, be it blue or gray, it’s amazing. ” More younger people like Ms. Lavarde are making lives as farmers in France, drawn in some cases by idealistic notions of tilling the land and of getting away from the rat race of the cities. They often leave behind jobs, as well as relatively comfortable lives that they nonetheless find unfulfilling. Powering this farming drive is a thriving market for organic food that amounted to nearly €7 billion in France in 2016, according to Agence Bio, which tracks the trade in the country. The drive has also been bolstered by an increased awareness of the environmental and health benefits of consuming local products. Before they can set up shop, however, new entrants have to overcome a range of obstacles, including navigating their way through a labyrinthine bureaucracy that oversees building permits and the distribution of land. The Duke of Sully, a minister of King Henri IV of France in the early 17th century, once described “plow and pasture” as the lifeblood of the French economy, and farming has long been romanticized in a country that values gastronomic treasures like Camembert cheeses and Bordeaux wines. But the reality is much bleaker for most farmers, who say they feel constrained by European Union regulations and who have been hit by global competition, shrinking margins and poor harvests in recent years. Generous agricultural subsidies mostly benefit large farms. In France, a farmer commits suicide almost every other day, a rate 20 percent higher than the national average, according to a 2016 report by the national public health agency. That dire outlook, however, has not deterred people like Ms. Lavarde from taking up farming, even if established farmers view their efforts with skepticism. Standing near a frozen wheat field near Ms. Lavarde’s farm, Bruno Gilles, 47, a farmer who grows cauliflowers, tomatoes and other vegetables, was skeptical about Ms. Lavarde’s chances of success, citing narrow margins and competition from farms that produce vegetables . “It’s going to be very hard,” Mr. Gilles said, his arms folded over a military sweater. The first test for new entrants might be their hardest: finding land. “I find myself to be extremely lucky,” Ms. Lavarde said. “When I see other people around me, access to land truly has been an obstacle for them. ” Since the 1960s, that access has been tightly regulated through regional agencies that act as intermediaries between and those either selling or renting. The agencies have traditionally favored established farmers over new entrants, many of whom grow alternative products based on organic farming and have modest farming experience. Ms. Lavarde said that when a young farmer she worked with set out to find agrarian land in the area of she discovered that a tract had been allocated to a conventional farmer without anyone informing her that it was available. Ms. Lavarde found a plot to farm through Les Champs des Possibles, which translates roughly as Realm of the Possible, a nonprofit that pairs new farmers with experienced farmers on test farms for two or three years. “We provide them with land if needed, with a status, with means of production, with professional support,” said Cavalier, an agronomist at Reneta, a national network of 70 testing grounds, of which Les Champs des Possibles is a member. At the end of their training period, aspiring farmers have agrarian experience, some money in the bank and mentors to vouch for them when they fill out papers to apply for land. Part of the problem with land allocations is the lack of farms on the market, said François Purseigle, a sociologist at an agronomy engineering faculty in Toulouse, in southern France. “We have guys in the fields that think: ‘I’m keeping my farm. My children are teachers or doctors, so they’re not going to take over. I have a crummy pension. I’ll still keep that property because, you never know, it could gain in value,’” Mr. Purseigle said in a telephone interview. Vincent Martin shielded his eyes from the sun on a recent morning at a farm near the village of St. about a drive east of . He said much of his future as a farmer relied on finding agrarian land. “Land is key,” said Mr. Martin 36, a single farmer who made a living selling health club memberships in Paris until he left his job about five years ago, eventually to take up farming. To find agricultural land in the area, he was counting on word of mouth rather than on the regional agencies, despite having filled out piles of application forms. His tutor, Philippe Caron, 58, who took up farming a few years ago, said he and his wife, Anna, would do all they could to help Mr. Martin get started. The other challenge facing new producers is distribution, which for larger, established farms usually involves dealing with middlemen selling products to supermarkets and stores around the country. For small producers, the system cuts deeply into meager profits. The solution has been to find ways of selling directly to consumers, mostly through nationwide networks like the Association for the Defense of Agriculture, known by its French acronym, AMAP. Under one AMAP plan, consumers sign up for a year and get a basket of vegetables, meat, cheese or fruits each week, delivered by a local producer. Prices for a basket range from €12 to €24, and customers, by paying in advance, agree to take their share of the risks that come with climatic contingencies. Hélène Rouet, 43, a former logistics manager volunteering in one AMAP office, quit her job to live in the country with a local producer. She said customers who took the produce baskets had a unique link to the food. “The farmer tells us about the difficulties he’s faced it’s like he’s bringing us his babies,” she said. Even when they’ve found land and distribution, some still find themselves having to commute to their land, whereas older farmers often live on the edge of their fields. New entrants often can’t afford to buy the buildings on their farms, if there are any. Some buy shabby trailers to stay in near their farms or sleep in their cars. Mr. Martin said it sometimes took him over two hours to commute to the farm. He started work at dawn to plow, sow or harvest, depending on the season. “It’s worth it,” Mr. Martin said, “for now. ” | 0fake |
Finland suspects Russian aircraft violated airspace | HELSINKI/MOSCOW (Reuters) - Finland s defense ministry said on Tuesday it suspected a Russian aircraft had violated Finnish airspace over the Baltic Sea earlier in the day. The ministry said a Tupolev TU-154, a Russian passenger and transport plane, had been detected south of Porvoo and that the border guard was investigating the matter. A ministry spokesman declined to say whether Finland had scrambled jets to identify the plane. The Russian defense ministry was not immediately available to comment. Finland, which is preparing to celebrate 100 years of independence on Wednesday, has accused Moscow of several airspace violations since the Ukraine crisis began in 2014. Last year, Estonia and Finland blamed Russia for entering their airspace as Finland was signing a defense pact with the United States. In a separate incident, two Russian warplanes flew simulated attack passes near a U.S. guided missile destroyer in the Baltic Sea. Finland was part of the Russian Empire and won independence during the 1917 Russian revolution, then nearly lost it fighting the Soviet Union in World War Two. It is now an EU member state which does not belong to NATO military alliance. | 0fake |
13 Year Old Girl’s Rousing Speech: “If Donald Trump Had A Brick For Every Lie Hillary Has Told He Could Build Two Walls” | Who can argue with this young lady’s speech?
I bet if Donald Trump had a brick for every lie Hillary has told he could build two walls.
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As a thirteen year old even I know Hillary Clinton is working for her own success and ways to control my life, my family’s life and your lives… She wants to make it Hillary’s America… not The Peoples’ America.
Hattip Gateway Pundit
| 1real |
This Is The First Sign Republicans Are Already Crumbling On The Supreme Court | Senate Republicans have publicly said they are refusing to give Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland a fair hearing and an up or down vote that has been afforded to others in a similar position for decades. But on Friday came the first sign that political pressure over the court is getting to some in the party.Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois is up for re-election in a state that voted overwhelmingly for President Obama in 2012, and he has now become the first to give in.Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk took shot at his Republican colleagues on Friday for refusing to hold a Senate hearing and vote on President Barack Obama s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. Just man up and cast a vote. The tough thing about these senatorial jobs is you get yes or no votes, Kirk told The Big John Howell Show on Chicago s WLS-AM. Your whole job is to either say yes or no and explain why. Kirk realizes that he needs some Democrats to back him in his race against Rep. Tammy Duckworth, and that his own party s petulant insistence to not even give Judge Garland a hearing is hurting them.Garland was nominated in part due to past statements from Republicans like Senator Orrin Hatch, who said his strong record and credentials would make him worthy of a nomination and consideration by Republicans, even if nominated by a Democrat.In other ways Republicans have begun to crumble on Garland. They originally said they wouldn t even meet with him, as is customary for nominees. But now some Senate Republicans have decided that the optics of refusing to answer the door when Garland comes calling would make for bad television and fodder for Democrats in the fall election.Republicans are being squeezed even further with the news that front-running presidential candidate Donald Trump also believes that Garland s nomination should be rejected out of hand without hearings. As polls show Trump could be a drag on the party in the fall, they are being forced to demonstrate ways that they aren t marching in lockstep with him, and in fact working towards a situation where Trump is the one picking the next Supreme Court justice.Their kneejerk opposition to the nomination offered by Obama is going to have to last for about nine months, and as Kirk has shown, that may be impossible in the long run.Featured image via Flickr | 1real |
YIKES! TRUMP ANNOUNCES “Major Speech” About Hillary On Monday: “I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting” | Crooked Hillary has met her match: Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into her private hedge fund. Here is Trump s speech in its entirety. It is one of his best speeches to date and truly worth watching to the end.https://youtu.be/nO7GAbBoIF0 | 1real |
Fact-checking Barack Obama's 2016 State of the Union address | Editor's note: We also annotated the State of the Union on Medium. Follow us on Medium to see our commetary.
President Barack Obama went after his doubters in his final State of the Union address, dismissing their warnings about the country’s economy and military preparedness under his watch as "political hot air."
"Let me tell you something: The United States of America is the most powerful nation on earth. Period. It's not even close. It's not even close,"
Yet even as he defended his seven years as commander in chief, Obama acknowledged he didn’t deliver on his to bring a more civil tone to a sharply divided Capitol Hill.
"It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency — that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better," Obama said. "There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office."
PolitiFact is fact-checking several statements from Obama’s speech, as well as the Republican response from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
A year ago, Obama used the same setting to claim the United States has seen "our deficits cut by two-thirds" during his tenure. We rated that claim .
During his 2016 State of the Union address, Obama raised the bar, saying, "We’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters."
When we checked Obama’s assertion a year ago, he compared his first budget year in office, 2009, with 2014, using the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product, or GDP. Economists consider this a valid way to measure the size of the deficit. In fact, for most purposes, it’s the best way, since it factors in the economy’s change over time.
According to this data, the deficit as a percentage of GDP has fallen by 76 percent -- almost exactly what Obama said.
If you use dollars rather than percentage of GDP, the decline is a bit smaller but still pretty close -- 70 percent.
That said, experts have told us that while Obama's math may be correct, it's missing some important caveats. It's important to note that the deficit swelled in 2009 partly because of the massive stimulus program to jumpstart the cratering economy. Also, experts have said the more important question is whether Obama has put the government on a path that will keep deficits stable.
"And the answer is no," said Princeton University economics professor Harvey Rosen, because entitlement programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, have not had substantial reform.
There’s no way Obama’s final State of the Union wouldn’t mention his most significant legislation. In spite of its controversy, Obama said the Affordable Care Act has led to nearly 18 million more people gaining health insurance and has helped to slow health care cost inflation. He added that the law didn’t destroy the job market, despite pessimistic predictions from critics.
"Our businesses have created jobs every single month since it became law," he said.
Because Obama referred specifically to "our businesses," we looked at private-sector employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics starting in March 2010, when Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. Of the 70 months since, Obama is correct that every single one has seen positive job growth.
There’s room for argument over what the growth would have looked like absent the health care law, but Obama’s statistic is on target.
Obama cited education as an area of bipartisan agreement, but he brought up a shaky statistic in the process.
"We agree that real opportunity requires every American to get the education and training they need to land a good-paying job," he said. "The bipartisan reform of No Child Left Behind was an important start, and together, we’ve increased early childhood education, lifted high school graduation rates to new highs, (and) boosted graduates in fields like engineering."
At first glance, he appears to be correct about high school graduation rates. But there's an important caveat. So we rate the claim .
In December, the that the rate had reached 82.3 percent, and the department billed it as a "new record high."
However, the department acknowledged it was the "highest level since states adopted a new uniform way of calculating graduation rates five years ago."
It's a key distinction because high school graduation rates can be a slippery topic and difficult to track. Different states and different school districts have used different measures over the years. For example, some states included private school students who received public funding.
The last time the rates were close to being this high was for the class that graduated in 1970, when the Education Department pegged the rate at 78.7 percent.
Yet because the current method for calculating rates is only five years old, it's not clear that the 1970 rate, or even the subsequent ones, are comparable to current rates.
Obama defended American might in the face of attacks from critics who say the United States has become a weak player on the national stage.
"We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined," Obama said.
We found Obama’s claim is in the ballpark. So it rates Mostly True.
One set of international military spending figures comes from the (SIPRI), which maintains an online database of military expenditures since 1988 for more than 170 countries. By their calculation, the United States spends more than the next seven countries combined.
In 2014, the most recent year available, the United States led the world in military spending at $610 billion, marking 34 percent of the world total, . U.S. expenditures were nearly three times higher than China, the second-highest nation with an estimated $216 billion in military spending. Russia was in third place at $84.5 billion.
But counting together military spending from the eight countries after the United States comes out to $646.4 billion, surpassing the United States’ $610. Omitting No. 9 on the list, Japan, the calculation comes out to about $601 billion.
, put together by the fiscal policy-focused Peter G. Peterson Foundation, shows the United States’ spending in stark contrast to the next seven highest spenders:
Another data set matches Obama’s claim exactly. The United States does spend more than eight countries combined according to the (IISS), a London-based think tank that also tracks military spending. The United States spent $581 billion on the military in 2014, according to IISS, while the eight next-highest spenders combined spent about $531.9 billion.
Calculating military expenditures for worldwide comparisons is inherently challenging, in part because there is no common definition of what constitutes military spending. Further, a country’s expenditures does not necessarily correlate perfectly with its military capabilities.
In the Republican response proceeding Obama’s speech, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley praised Obama’s speech-giving but criticized his ability to deliver on the goods.
"The president's record has often fallen far short of his soaring words," Haley said. "As he enters his final year in office, many Americans are still feeling the squeeze of an economy too weak to raise income levels."
Six years into the economic recovery, are income levels really still in the doldrums?
For the most part, yes. Haley’s statement rates
Haley is basically correct if you look at Census Bureau data for median household income, adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted, median household income has fallen from $57,357 in 2009 to $53,657 in 2014, the most recent full year available.
That’s a decline of 6.4 percent over a five-year period once inflation is taken into account. Obama himself seemed to acknowledge this trend when he spoke about "more and more wealth and income" concentrated at the top and "squeezed workers."
Median income is lower now compared to 2009. It is, however, slightly up from its low point in 2012.
Haley’s claim is generally accurate but somewhat depends on your time frame and what you would consider a rise in income levels.
Obama repeated his longstanding request to Congress that they work with him to close the detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama campaigned on this pledge, and we’ve been on our Obameter.
During the State of the Union, Obama spoke of American leadership as encompassing "a wise application of military power and rallying the world behind causes that are right."
"That is why I will keep working to shut down the prison at Guantanamo: It’s expensive, it’s unnecessary, and it only serves as a recruitment brochure for our enemies," he said.
Because Obama is still asking for this at the end of his presidency, we’ve rated his campaign pledge as .
As for Obama's statement that Guantanamo "only serves as a recruitment brochure" for terrorists, this doesn't square with reporting by PunditFact, which found that the facility has never really been a key component of ISIS or al-Qaida propoganda. More often, they focus on airstrikes and the American military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama also seemed to be responding to Republican attacks that he didn’t take seriously enough the fight against Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL:
"As we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands. Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence. That’s the story ISIL wants to tell; that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit."
We explored this claim in a story without rating it on our Truth-O-Meter. We found general agreement among experts that ISIS aspires to become an existential threat to the United States. But that’s not the same thing as actually being one.
Obama presented a range of statistics designed to show his economic record in a positive light during his 2016 State of the Union address. He kicked it off with this assertion: "The United States of America, right now, has the strongest, most durable economy in the world."
We should note up front that many of the experts we checked with considered Obama’s claim to be vague and difficult to prove. "This is the type of braggadocio statement that is hard to interpret in a rigorous way," said Barry Bosworth, an economist at the Brookings Institution.
However, many of the same experts agreed that if you had to choose one country for the title of "strongest, most durable economy in the world," it would be the United States.
We turned to projections for GDP growth over the next two years released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of economically advanced countries. The group looked at 43 countries, ranging from large, advanced economies to smaller, advanced economies to large, emerging economies.
The United States ranked almost exactly in the middle of the OECD’s list -- No. 21. Experts told us, however, that a middling ranking on this list doesn’t necessarily mean the United States’ economic outlook is weak. (The full chart is at the end of this article, ranked in descending order by projected GDP growth in 2016).
For starters, many of the countries with higher projected growth rates have significantly smaller economies, making a comparison with the United States apples-to-oranges. These countries include Ireland, Iceland, the Slovak Republic, Poland, Israel, Latvia, Luxembourg, Lithuania and Estonia.
In addition, a few countries have much higher projected growth rates, but they are generally considered emerging economies, making for a different but equally questionable type of apples-to-oranges comparison. These include the top three countries on the projected-growth list: India, China and Indonesia.
The most direct comparisons to the United States are probably the other six members of the elite Group of 7 economies — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan. And all of them rank below the United States when measured by projected growth for 2016 and 2017.
As for employment, the United States scores well among its closest competitors. Hoddenbagh pointed to data showing only one of the Group of 7 with a lower unemployment rate than the United States’ current 5 percent. Japan’s unemployment rate is 3.3 percent.
We rated the claim Mostly True.
This story is updated as new fact-checks are published. | 0fake |
BREAKING: IRAN THROWS DOWN ULTIMATUM: …Your Move Barry | The nuclear industry is a necessity, for energy production, for desalination, and in the fields of medicine, agriculture and other sectors. -Iran s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali KhameneiSo many lies Is it finally time for the US to act before it s too late?Iran s president on Thursday said Tehran will not sign a final nuclear deal unless world powers lift economic sanctions imposed on the country immediately.The United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China and Germany the so-called P5 +1 group reached an understanding with Iran last week on limits to its nuclear program in return for lifting crippling economic sanctions, after extended talks in Lausanne, Switzerland.The U.S. has previously said the sanctions would be lifted in phases, but the details have not yet been negotiated.However, in a televised speech on Thursday, President Hassan Rouhani appeared to rule out a gradual removal of the successive round of sanctions that have hit hard its energy and financial sectors and crippled its economy. We will not sign any deal unless all sanctions are lifted on the same day, Rouhani said, according to Reuters. We want a win-win deal for all parties involved in the nuclear talks. Rouhani was speaking at a ceremony to mark Iran s nuclear technology day. The Iranian nation has been and will be the victor in the negotiations, he said.The deal negotiated in Switzerland says that sanctions will be suspended after international monitors verify that Iran is abiding by the limitations set out, and that the sanctions will resume if Iran fails to fulfill its obligations. It has never been our position that all of the sanctions against Iran should be removed from Day One, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday.Iran s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Thursday said there is no guarantee a full agreement will be reached by the end of June, the AFP news agency reported. What has been done so far does not guarantee an agreement, nor its contents, nor even that the negotiations will continue to the end, he said, according to the agency. Everything is in the detail, it may be that the other side (the six world powers), which is unfair, wants to limit our country in the details, he added. Officials say that nothing has been done yet and there is nothing binding. I am neither for nor against. The nuclear industry is a necessity, for energy production, for desalination, and in the fields of medicine, agriculture and other sectors. Negotiators have until June 30 to fill in the critical details to assure Iran it will get relief from the sanctions as soon as possible, and guarantee the world powers that Iran won t develop a nuclear weapon.Rouhani on Thursday also called for an end to airstrikes by a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, and said they were a mistake. Not singling out any country in particular, he said, You learned that it was wrong. You will learn, not later but soon, that you are making mistake in Yemen, too, the Associated Press reported.(Wouldn t that be considered a threat?)Rouhani also called for a cease-fire in Yemen to enable talks to end the crisis, the AP said, adding to calls by the Red Cross and Russia for a cease-fire to allow aid into the war-torn nation.On Wednesday, the Pentagon said the U.S. military has begun air-refueling operations for the coalition conducting the airstrikes, as Shiite rebels known as Houthis continued their advance on the southern port city of Aden.The Pentagon also said the United States would expedite delivery of ammunition including bombs and guidance systems to the Saudis and other coalition members.Via: USA Today | 1real |
HOT MIC! PRESS GOES BONKERS At Trump Presser: “This sh*t is nuts … that guy was assaulting me” [Video] | President Donald Trump and South Korea s President Moon Jae-In held a press conference earlier today and it got waaay out of control complete with a hot mic moment The press is so disrespectful! A hot mic at MSNBC picked up this comment: this shit is nuts that guy was assaulting me A lamp was almost knocked over (see video below)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAKIQKn9bAEA mob of media rushed like crazy people into the Oval Office! You can hear people saying easy fellas go easy as the press and photographers all jockeyed for position.As the media frenzy continued, they bumped into the couches which pushed one of the end tables knocking over a lamp next to the President. Fortunately President Trump s personal bodyguard Keith Schiller was in position and quickly caught the lamp.Trump s bodyguard Keith Schiller catches lamp in Oval Office during visit with South Korean President Moon:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp0VgLCXvLwPRESIDENT TURMP S BODYGUARD IS A SAINT:King Keith (Schiller) keeping POTUS safe for the past two decades.Catches lamp knocked over by unruly prestitutes aimed at POTUS head. pic.twitter.com/cnXGWZFhiV H. H. (@HH36133705) June 30, 2017 | 1real |
Bernie Sanders Just Told Republicans And Billionaires To F*** Off In The BEST Possible Way (VIDEO) | Last night, the Republican Party made a disturbing move to strip millions of Americans of health care by voting to repeal Obamacare. Fortunately, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) didn t hesitate to rip them apart for it this morning.In an interview with Morning Joe, Sanders railed against the GOP and its hatred for Obamacare, as well as rallied Democrats to unite and stand up against the horrendous Republican agenda that is now threatening the country under Donald Trump. Sanders, encouraging a reform in the Democratic party, said: We need to reach out to working people and young people all over this country. He quickly worked the GOP s attack on the Affordable Care Act into his rant, promising to do everything in his power to block them from succeeding. He said: No, you re not going to repeal the Affordable Care Act, throw 30 million people off of health insurance, raise the cost of prescription drugs for seniors. You re not going to do that. We re going to fight and organize at the grassroots level. And right after Sanders spoke about uniting the Democratic Party to fight voter suppression, to reactivate grassroots politics in this country, Sanders reminded the GOP why he s their biggest nightmare because he truly doesn t give a f*ck what they think. In fact, Sanders considers it a blessing if billionaires the ones that will heavily benefit from a corrupt Trump administration and a Republican-dominated Congress hate him. Sanders said: If the billionaire class hates me, or hates other progressives, we should be proud of that, because we ve got to start identifying with the working people who have seen their jobs go to China and Mexico, the people who are making 10 bucks an hour, the elderly people who can t afford prescription drugs. You can watch Sanders unleash on those taking advantage of working class Americans below:Featured image via screenshot | 1real |
Donald ‘War Criminal’ Rumsfeld Takes A Moment To Remind Us He’s Close To Death (TWEET) | There are some people in life that, if they are wise, will just keep their mouths shut and their voices out of public reach. Donald Rumsfeld is one of those people. Yet, he can t seem to keep his mouth shut on Twitter and likes to continue to remind us of what a horrific human being he is, and should likely really belong in prison.On Monday, Rumsfeld decided to tweet out in regards to tax day:At 83, I am close to losing hope that I will live to see a flat tax. Donald Rumsfeld (@RumsfeldOffice) April 18, 2016Aww, how terrible for him that a regressive method of taxation will never come to fruition during his lifetime. He apparently isn t done screwing over the American people, and would prefer the wealthy to pay less and the poor to pay more. What a peach.We already knew this guy is a douchebag, though. He s one of the evil assholes who lied to get us into a war with Iraq. A war that has subsequently killed thousands of American soldiers, wounded thousands more, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and gave rise to ISIS (but really, who s keeping track). He knew we didn t have enough intelligence to back claims that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction. Yet, he as the Secretary of Defense under former President George W. Bush, continued to lead the drumbeat towards war.So Rumsfeld, we as pissed off American citizens think your tweet should have probably read At 83, I am close to losing hope that I will be tried as the war criminal that I am. And if you go to Twitter and read the replies to his tweet, it seems many, many people agree with that sentiment. Probably not wise for a man who s actions lead to so many deaths to tweet he s close to death himself. Likely not gonna be received too well.He truly is a person who should keep his mouth shut, because if he had kept it shut in the first place, so much worldwide would be different to this day.Featured Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images | 1real |
Japan's Abe vows to put education spending before budget balance | TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan s prime minister has vowed to make education and childcare a priority over balancing the budget after winning a new mandate from voters on Sunday, as a rapidly-ageing population threatens to undermine his efforts to reflate the economy. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe s ruling coalition scored a landslide victory at the polls, boosted by his campaign promises to invest more heavily on education and childcare, aimed partly at encouraging more women to join the workforce. Abe also made clear he would continue to press cautious Japanese firms to spend their record cash piles on boosting employees wages to stoke a virtuous growth cycle. With his Abenomics recipe centered on hyper-easy monetary policy likely to continue, Abe s solid election win also raised expectations he would reappoint Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda in early April when his five-year term expires. Abe's election victory lifted world stocks and the dollar on Monday, sending Japan's Nikkei share average .N225 to 21-year highs. The index ended up 1.1 percent at 21,696.65, up for a record 15th straight session. Abe swept to power in late 2012, pledging to pull Japan s economy, the world s third largest, out of nearly two decades of deflation and stagnation. The economy is recovering gradually but sluggish wage growth keeps consumer spending and inflation from accelerating, while corporations face labor shortages due to a low birth rate and fast-ageing population. The premier promised to offer free pre-school for all children aged three to five and for children aged two or below from low-income households. The key to Japan s sustainable growth is how we respond to ageing of the population, which is the biggest challenge for Abenomics, Abe told a news conference. We aim to exit deflation by accelerating wage growth through innovation on productivity. If free pre-school education is applied to all children now, it would cost 1.2 trillion yen ($10.54 billion), government estimates show. SMBC Nikko Securities estimates that free pre-school education would relieve households of a financial burden of around 1 trillion yen. If half the reduced cost is spent on consumption, that would push up real gross domestic product by 0.1 percent, the securities firm said. Furthermore, Abe has vowed to expand education benefits with the aim of offering free higher education for low-income households. Abe said he would go ahead with a planned sales tax hike to 10 percent from 8 percent in 2019 and use some of the revenue to create a social security system for all generations , by diverting the funds to education instead of paying down public debt. The premier had earlier admitted that would make it impossible to meet the pledge to balance the primary budget excluding debt-servicing and new bond sales by the year ending March 2021. While Abe s plan to spend more on education and childcare has helped buoy stocks of some related companies such as JP-Holdings Inc that operates nursery schools, the specter of bigger spending raises concerns about looser fiscal discipline. Fiscal reform is a matter of urgency. Japan s public debt tops twice the size of its $5 trillion economy, making it the industrial world s heaviest debt burden. Nonetheless, Abe, who prioritizes growth, has pushed back the primary budget-balancing target without setting a new goal yet, while vowing to compile by the year-end an extra spending plan worth around 2 trillion for human capital investment. Simply boosting benefits for all generations means politically putting off the pain to future generations, which can be criticized as pork-barrel spending, said Yasuhide Yajima, chief economist at NLI Research Institute. Diverting sales tax revenue could open the door to expanding fiscal spending further. In order to prevent fiscal discipline from slipping, Japan must continue efforts needed to restore public finances. | 0fake |
NYPD Cop Secretly Records His Boss Ordering Him To Racially Profile Black Men (AUDIO) | It s always depressing when allegations that police target African-Americans are confirmed not just by eyewitness accounts, but with audio or video evidence. Recently, a NYPD officer provided Gawker with chilling audio that sounds a whole lot like his boss pressuring him into profiling black men.Michael Birch recorded the audio in 2012 when he was called to a performance evaluation meeting with his commanding officer and a lieutenant in August 2012. He told the publication that he was expecting to hear that he wasn t generating enough activity which meant he would be ordered to arrest more people and issue more summonses but the conversation just turned completely weird to him when he was flat-out told to racially profile. Who commits the crimes in the city? commanding officer, Constantin Tsachas, who was recently cleared for a promotion from captain to deputy inspector,asks in this rather damning clip.Birch answers that it s mostly teenagers, anywhere between the ages of 15 and 19, mostly male blacks and Hispanics. Asked who he is stopping, Birch explains that he stops everybody.. Fifty-four [TABs] up to 8/20, the commanding officer says. Twenty-five of those are female. Half. Like I said, I stop everybody, Birch replies. I m not targeting anybody. You just told me who the bad guys are, his CO presses. Yeah, I know that. But there s also other people who are committing violations as well, Birch says. I m not saying that there s not violations being made. In other words, people from all demographics break the law. That should have been good enough for the commanding officer, but then the conversation went completely off the rails:CO: The male blacks, that you told me commit the crimes Birch: Plenty of people that I write summonses to are male blacks and male Hispanics.CO: You stopped two male blacks.Birch: Not for the whole year. You re telling me for the whole year I only stopped two male blacks on summonses?CO: 8/20. From January 1st to August 20th. Fifty-four TABs: two male blacks, seven Hispanics, seven other, ten white, three Asian. So where are you targeting the perps that you just told me?Birch: Like I said, if I don t see a perp jumping over the turnstile, what am I supposed to do to him?CO: These people are not going to pop.Birch: How do I know that? A female Hispanic that I stopped in Sheepshead Bay did pop, actually, for a warrant, and I arrested her. Female Hispanic. The Hispanics that we re supposed to be going after. That are committing the crimes. The people that I CO: Did you think that she was going to pop?Birch: Did I think she was going to pop? I didn t put no thought into it. If you come up for a collar, I m taking you in. Pop is a term for when a warrant pops up and leads to an arrest. TAB is a term for a court summons resulting from a transit violation. The conversation continues, getting worse as it progresses:CO: Here s what I see. You just described to me who s committing the crimes. You re fully aware of it. But you re not targeting those people.Birch: I am. I m targeting everybody.CO: Two male blacks.Birch: Whoever is out there. If I CO: So you only saw two male blacks jump the turnstile?Birch: If you re saying that s what s in front of you, then yes, that s all I saw, is two male blacks for the whole year jumping the turnstile. If you re saying that s what s in front of you, I m not disputing that. If that s what I got there.CO: That is what you have. That is not disputed here.Birch: I m saying, we re also talking Hispanics as well. I stopped a lot of Hispanics, too.CO: Seven male Hispanics. But more than half are female.Birch: And like I said, everybody s committing violations in front of me. I was shocked, Birch said of the meeting. I was not only shocked, I was mad. My last name is Birch. I look white. They didn t realize I was a Puerto Rican kid, and they re just saying this to me like it s OK. It s OK, we re amongst friends. I don t want to be stopped because I m Puerto Rican, he says. I want to get stopped because I did something wrong. Birch is suing the department to combat what he sees as a larger trend of policing that disproportionately affects minority New Yorkers, Gawker reports. The targeting of minorities by the NYPD has caused so many problems throughout our city yet the NYPD continues to promote officers who engage in these activities, his lawyer told the publication. It s very hard to have a job where the whole public is against you, including your bosses. And when you actually try to do something right, they don t care, Birch says. I can t wait to get away from this place. Birch is evidence that good cops do exist. The problem is that, unlike him, most good cops stay silent as bad actors disgrace the profession, unfairly targeting people who are not white. Thank you for stepping forward, Officer Birch. Hopefully, your example will lead other good cops to call out the bad ones.Hear the audio for yourself below:Featured image via YouTube | 1real |
Путин: Запад постоянно наступает на одни и те же грабли | 0 комментариев 4 поделились
"На примере террористической опасности со всей очевидностью проявляется неспособность оценить характер, причины возникновения и нарастания угроз. Мы видим это по тому, как развивается ситуация в Сирии, остановить кровопролитие и запустить политический процесс не удается. Казалось бы, после долгих переговоров, огромных усилий и сложных компромиссов наконец начал формироваться единый фронт борьбы с терроризмом, однако этого не произошло, он, фактически, не создан", - сказал российский лидер.
Президент отметил, что примеры терактов последних лет (в том числе США и Франции) показывают - террористы могут действовать в одиночку.
По его словам, люди напуганы тем, что терроризм из далекой угрозы стал повседневностью, что "теракт может произойти буквально рядом, на соседней улице, если не на собственной улице, а орудием массового убийства способно стать любое подручное средство - от изготовленной кустарным способом взрывчатки до обычного грузовика".
В том же время Запад в противостоянию терроризму наступает на одни и те же грабли.
"Не сработали и наши личные договоренности с президентом США. В Вашингтоне нашлись силы, которые сделали все, чтобы они - эти договоренности - не были реализованы на практике. Все это демонстрирует необъяснимое, я бы сказал, иррациональное стремление западных стран раз за разом повторять свои ошибки, как у нас в народе говорят, наступать на одни и те же грабли", - заявил Путин.
По словам российского лидера, любые вызовы можно преодолеть только сообща, на базе правил ООН.
"Универсальные правила ООН необходимы, чтобы включить как можно большее число стран в процесс экономической и гуманитарной интеграции, гарантировать политическую ответственность и обеспечить согласованность действий, разумеется, при сохранении суверенитета", - сказал Владимир Путин.
Читайте также: | 1real |
BREAKING: C.I.A. Knew Russia Wanted Trump WAY Before Election; NOTHING Was Done (DETAILS) | We already knew that Russia wanted Donald Trump to be president and interfered with the election, but new information has just been revealed showing that not only was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) aware of this, but they were in the know as early as August of 2016. That s well before anything was revealed to the public.According to the New York Times: The C.I.A. told senior lawmakers in classified briefings last summer that it had information indicating that Russia was working to help elect Donald J. Trump president, a finding that did not emerge publicly until after Mr. Trump s victory months later, former government officials say. Further: The former officials said that in late August 10 weeks before the election John O. Brennan, then the C.I.A. director, was so concerned about increasing evidence of Russia s election meddling that he began a series of urgent, individual briefings for eight top members of Congress, some of them on secure phone lines while they were on their summer break.It is unclear what new intelligence might have prompted the classified briefings. But with concerns growing both internally and publicly at the time about a significant Russian breach of the Democratic National Committee, the C.I.A. began seeing signs of possible connections to the Trump campaign, the officials said. By the final weeks of the campaign, Congress and the intelligence agencies were racing to understand the scope of the Russia threat. Then there s this: The officials said Mr. Brennan also indicated that unnamed advisers to Mr. Trump might be working with the Russians to interfere in the election. So, not only did Russia work to get Trump elected, but those closely connected to Trump may have been working directly with Russia.Here s the thing if this information was available before the election, and it was well known that not only was Russia trying to influence the election, but Trump advisers may have been talking directly to Russia, why was the election allowed to even go forward? For all intents and purposes, the election should be considered absolutely illegitimate and a new election should be held in light of all this new information.Our democracy and the core of everything we are as a republic has been compromised by a foreign adversary, and NOTHING has been done. This is NOT okay.The public had a right to know this information going into the voting booth, and nothing was said. This is beyond maddening, and someone needs to be held responsible.Featured Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images | 1real |
HE WAS WARNED AGAINST NEGOTIATING WITH TERRORISTS: Iran Says They Won’t Permit Foreigners “to inspect the most normal military site in their dreams.” | Iran, where the thought police will always have a job: Not only will we not grant foreigners the permission to inspect our military sites, we will not even give them permission to think about such a subject. A spokesman for Iran s nuclear agency has once again rejected calls to grant IAEA access to military sites, continuing a war of words on the issue that began Sunday.Press TV reports that Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), gave an interview Monday in which he stated that demands for access to Iran s military sites were not practical and acceptable. According to Press TV, his statement was a response to a claim U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz made earlier in the day.During an interview with Bloomberg News earlier Monday, Secretary Moniz said, We expect to have anywhere, anytime access within Iran. That statement appears to match the contents of the U.S. fact sheet published three weeks ago. The fact sheet states, Iran will be required to grant access to the IAEA to investigate suspicious sites or allegations of a covert enrichment facility, conversion facility, centrifuge production facility, or yellowcake production facility anywhere in the country. Secretary Moniz s statement about access anywhere, anytime was itself an apparent response to a blunt statement Sunday by Brigadier General Hossein Salami. According to Press TV, General Salami gave an interview to Fars News in which he stated, Not only will we not grant foreigners the permission to inspect our military sites, we will not even give them permission to think about such a subject. In case that was not clear enough, Gen. Salami added, They will not even be permitted to inspect the most normal military site in their dreams. General Salami is not the first high ranking Iranian to deny the IAEA will get access to Iran s military sites under the proposed deal. Nearly two weeks ago, Iran s Defense Minister said any inspection of Iran s military sites was a red line and added that no inspection of any kind from such facilities would be accepted. Ayatollah Khamenei backed up that stance the next day.AEOI spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi who said military site inspections were not acceptable was reportedly awaiting a nuclear delegation from Russia to discuss the construction of two new nuclear power plants in Iran next year.Via: Breitbart News | 1real |
How to Plan a Safe Trip for Gay and Transgender Travelers - The New York Times | Andy Hicks, owner of HIX Inc. a small health care technology consulting business in Denver, travels frequently. And as a gay man, he said, he’s enjoyed acceptance in many destinations — even in Cuba, where he traveled this year with his partner. “We didn’t know what to expect,” Mr. Hicks said. “We had zero problems. ” The travel industry offers gay travelers everything from special cruises and tours to hotels. But there are still many places in the world, including many countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific, as well as Russia, where laws or social customs create an unwelcoming and unsafe environment for travelers who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. More than 75 countries consider consensual sexual relations a crime, and in about 10 countries a person could be put to death for being gay, according to the United States State Department. “Today, it is important for a L. G. B. T. person to understand the laws and how they are enforced and the culture of the countries and even cities where they visit,” said Bruce McIndoe, chief executive of iJet International, a travel risk management company. In an environment of religious extremism, he said, “individuals are more likely to lash out or take unilateral action against assumed members of the L. G. B. T. community. ” IJet, he said, has seen increased requests from clients to help prepare and protect their gay and transgender travelers after the mass shooting at an Orlando, Fla. nightclub last June and other episodes. Mr. Hicks, who has been to many countries, recently returned from North Korea. “It was absolutely a nonissue,” he said. “You have to adapt, go with the flow and fit in as best you can. ” Yves Gentil, founder of DQMPR, a travel public relations and marketing agency, has been to nearly 50 countries for work and pleasure. “When you travel with your you blend in a little bit more. But I’ve never had a problem, even in places like Saudi Arabia and Dubai. ” But then he visited Jamaica last year with his partner. “It was awkward to the point that I couldn’t wait to get out,” he said. “Not unsafe, but I just did not feel welcome. ” Jamaican law prohibits consensual sexual conduct between men, according to the State Department. Sean Williams, a senior intelligence analyst for iJet, said the duration of a stay was an important safety factor. Business travelers typically spend a few days attending meetings and return to their hotels at night. “The risk is largely minimal. It’s no different from any other business traveler,” he said. But decisions made afterward when they go sightseeing and are not completely aware of the environment can, he said, “put their lives at risk. ” Gender expression is also a risk factor. “In some countries, they expect men to have a certain appearance if you are not dressed for your gender, they can arrest you,” Mr. Williams said. In other countries, homosexuality may be legal but not culturally accepted, “so if you end up in the wrong neighborhood, it can get you in trouble. ” As Americans, he said, “we have a strong tradition to be yourself, but in some countries the safest approach is to be the person they want you to be. ” Matthew Breen, editorial director of Logo and former editor in chief of The Advocate, two media organizations aimed at an L. G. B. T. audience, said gender identification and its potential dangers had informed his personal and professional travel policies. He does not write or assign stories, he said, about “destinations where L. G. B. T. s are persecuted or where our relationships are illegal. ” IJet recommends that transgender travelers take a few extra steps to smooth interactions with airport security: Ensure that the sex designation matches on all official documents and the traveler’s physical appearance carry letters from doctors in English and in the local language when traveling internationally and anticipate that body scanners may lead to security flagging. Still, many countries and cities have rolled out the welcome mat, even ones with strong religious and machismo cultures, like Spain, with its “live and let live” attitude, and Colombia, where the number of laws to support lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and the speed in which they were recently passed were “quite impressive,” Mr. Williams said. Many mainstream travel companies, including Delta Air Lines and Marriott, have provided employees with benefits and ensured that their employees are adept at handling reservations for customers with spouses and their families, experts say. And tourism boards around the globe routinely reach out to travelers. “It’s a message we are seeing loud and clear,” said John Tanzella, president and chief executive of the International Gay Lesbian Travel Association, which offers trip planning tools. Apoorva N. Gandhi, vice president for multicultural affairs for Marriott International, said, “If you take great care of your associates, they will take great care of your customers. ” Marriott, like many major brands, trains staff members about respectfully serving gay travelers. “We show a video scenario of a couple at a hotel approaching the front desk for ” Mr. Gandhi said. “If the couple requested one bed, staff is directed to not make assumptions and do what is on the reservation without comment. ” Marriott, with IBM, sponsored the LGBT Guide to Business Travel, recently published by Man About World, a digital gay travel magazine. “We’ve learned from experience that L. G. B. T. businesspeople and entrepreneurs face added pressures not only in the workplace but especially when they travel for business,” the home page of the online publication says. The number of harmful episodes, arrests, prosecutions or deaths involving gay, bisexual or transgender travelers globally is not tracked, said Renato Sabbadini, executive director of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, a nonprofit human rights group in Geneva. “The overall trend is positive,” he said, but while many countries move forward, others backtrack. India decriminalized sexual activities between men in 2009, but reversed the decision in 2013. “There is gradual change in societies all over the world,” Mr. Sabbadini added. “Maybe not as fast as it should, but it’s changing. ” Kevin Brosnahan, a press officer for the Bureau of Consular Affairs for the State Department, said many of its safety recommendations apply to all travelers: research a destination to be aware of local laws and customs register travel plans with the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program, a free State Department service, so the local United States Embassy can contact you in an emergency and make sure to have appropriate documents and medical and evacuation coverage. The department’s website has a special section for L. G. B. T. travelers with and general tips, like to be discreet in rural areas of some countries, where there is a greater likelihood of problems, and to watch out for entrapment campaigns: “Police in some countries monitor websites, mobile apps, or meeting places, so be cautious connecting with the local community,” the website says. “Travelers who are well prepared often do the best,” Mr. Brosnahan said. Henry H. Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst and founder of Atmosphere Research Group, said that as a gay man he has never had a problem traveling for work to countries where homosexuality is illegal. “I knew where to ‘color within the lines’” to avoid potential problems, he said. But he added that he worried whether the changing political landscape in the United States might make travel more difficult. “For L. G. B. T. travelers, visiting some states will be like being in another country,” Mr. Harteveldt said. “And guess what? That’s going to have an impact on inbound tourism. ” Policies that curtail travel are “a ” Mr. Harteveldt said. “Destinations lose revenue and travelers lose valuable experiences. ” Some travelers remain undeterred. Do your homework, use social media, reach out to a destination’s local lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and be prepared to respect different cultures, Mr. Gentil said. “But don’t be afraid to explore the world, because you just learn so much. ” | 0fake |
PLANNED PARENTHOOD Draws Outrage After Mother’s Day Tweet | The irony of the Tweet put out on Mother s Day by Planned Parenthood is certainly not lost on us. The cognitive dissonance of a baby killing, baby parts seller promoting motherhood is a nutty comment! Planned Parenthood, the nation s largest abortion provider, on Sunday celebrated Mother s Day with a tweet picturing two mothers holding their children. Planned Parenthood is committed to building a world that values, respects, and supports safe and wanted motherhood, a caption on the picture reads. Social media users were quick to point out the cognitive dissonance of an abortion provider celebrating mothers. Does anybody else see the irony of abortion provider Planned Parenthood wishing a Happy Mother s Day? Angel C tweeted. Appalling! chimed in Jana Allen. But I guess not all unborn babies matter, another Twitter user said. The unborn are innocent victims murdered at PP. Via: WT | 1real |
LOL! RATINGS CRASHER Megyn Kelly Is DESTROYED On Social Media For Using Her NBC Show To Give Liberal Trump Sexual Assault Accusers A Platform | Last week, President Trump totally humiliated ABC News on Twitter, as he pointed out their embarrassing attempt at gotcha journalism when Brian Ross erroneously reported in a BREAKING NEWS story, that Michael Flynn was told by Donald Trump to talk to the Russian Ambassador during his campaign. Brian Ross was suspended for a month. President Trump suggested should be fired for his #fakenews reporting.Congratulations to @ABC News for suspending Brian Ross for his horrendously inaccurate and dishonest report on the Russia, Russia, Russia Witch Hunt. More Networks and papers should do the same with their Fake News! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017This week, it was NBC s Never-Trump Megyn Kelly s chance to exact revenge on President Trump, who after attacking him during his first debate, lost her conservative Fox News fanbase and basically saw her promising career come to a screeching halt. NBC picked up Kelly in a $23 million per year contract in a gamble that liberals would warm up to the formerly conservative host. NBC has since found out that conservatives no longer want anything to do with Kelly, and liberals despise her for her past performances as a top-rated host on conservative-leaning FOX News.Twitter users were on fire after Megyn Kelly did her part to help tear down President Trump (again):Megyn Kelly,You and your employer need to smear Trump but there's nothing left to accuse him of so you're going to re-interview Trump accusers who've already been proven pos liars?How desperate you must be. Philip Schuyler (@FiveRights) December 11, 2017Today, Megyn Kelly traipsed out a trio of Donald Trump accusers on her failing show. Rest assured, there will be many more liberal accusers who come out against Donald Trump, as racism appears to have lost its glow, as a means to draw voters into the Democrat Party, as Americans have become tired of watching Democrats constantly drawing from the bottom of the deck, as a way to cloud Trump s Make America Great Again agenda of a pro-growth economy, jobs, education, lower taxes, and America first.Megyn Kelly, who is desperate for ratings, must have been incredibly disappointed when breaking news of a botched suicide bomber attack in New York City was reported at the same time her Democrat Donald Trump accuser was telling her story on her show.Daily Mail A trio of the president s accusers reemerged on Monday to hound him for sexually harassing them.Samantha Holvey, Jessica Leeds and Rachel Crooks had previously made allegations against Trump and appeared on Megyn Kelly Today to demand justice as the White House resumed its claim that the issue had been litigated in last year s election. All of a sudden, he s all over, me, kissing and groping and groping and kissing, said Leeds, a self-proclaimed Democrat, who says she revealed her story because I wanted people to know what kind of a person that Trump really is what a pervert he is. This is the same Jessica Leeds that accused Trump of sexual harassment.Think Megyn Kelly will bring this picture up?Think she ll bring up the time that Jessica Leeds was in a two year property law suit with Trump? pic.twitter.com/AvdEyYu8Ew WhiteNitemare (@Carl_Anthony215) December 11, 2017Leeds claims that Trump assaulted on a plane in the 70s and called her a c*** when he ran into her some time later at a party in New York while he was still married to his first wife Ivana.Megyn Kelly asked former Trump accuser Jessica Leeds what she wants other women to know about sexual harassment. Leeds replied, We have a problem in that we have been enculturated all of this time for all of this time, for years and years and years, to be compliant. Leeds went on to say, For the woman who voted for Trump, they just didn t want to vote for a woman It became reasonably difficult to believe a single work Leeds had to say when she used the word enculturated when referring to her alleged meeting with Donald Trump. It became impossible to believe a word she said when Leeds followed up her comment by exposing her bitter feelings towards women for not voting for Hillary. The only thing missing from Leeds during her appearance on the Megyn Kelly show was her pussy hat and an I m a committed Democrat Feminist tattoo on her forehead. Watch:WATCH: "If there are other women out there, what do you want them to know?" Megyn asks Trump accusers Jessica Leeds, Samantha Holvey & Rachel Cooks on #MegynTODAY pic.twitter.com/YPt1CxieUA Megyn Kelly TODAY (@MegynTODAY) December 11, 2017Watch Crooks tell Megyn her alleged story here: Is it true he [Trump] asked for your phone number? @megynkelly Yeah I remember saying, What do you need that for? Trump accuser Rachel Crooks on @MegynTODAY pic.twitter.com/OCX1ZpnV2J TODAY (@TODAYshow) December 11, 2017Watch the obvious excitment of Megyn Kelly to be able to pretend as though she s relevant with a breaking news announcemnt with the official White House response to the allegations:WATCH: Statement the @WhiteHouse just provided to #MegynTODAY pic.twitter.com/0hahP6goW1 Megyn Kelly TODAY (@MegynTODAY) December 11, 2017Daily Mail The two other women said that Trump s conduct while he was a businessman left them shocked and devastated and feeling very gross and very dirty. I was so uncomfortable, and a little, yeah, threatened, like I didn t have a choice, Crooks on Monday said.Kelly s program was preempted in New York as an explosion went off in Manhattan. Her show aired in other parts of the country, however, including Washington.Holvey, a former Miss USA contestant, said that Trump came backstage in 2006 and reviewed the women while they were indecent.She recalled thinking at the time that it would be a meet and great with Trump. But it wasn t.The former Miss North Carolina says Trump was just looking me over like I was just a piece of meat. I was not a human being. I did not have a brain I did not have a personality. I was just simply there for his pleasure. It left me feeling very gross, very dirty, like this is not what I signed up for. Here s how Twitter responded to Megyn s show: You know the Russia narrative is over when Megyn Kelly is having Trump accusers on her show.It will be never ending the next 3-7 years.The media is becoming the little boy that cried wolf.If they ever did find REAL dirt on Trump, no-one will believe them. Josh (@JoshNoneYaBiz) December 11, 2017Megyn Kelly is interviewing the lying 3 blind mice Trump accusers to save her failing show. Hope it s the final blow revealing to all that it s all about Megyn, for Megyn & nothing but Megyn s self serving ass who owes Trump gratitude for her relevancy. Tiff (@LATiffani1) December 11, 2017 | 1real |
More Fake News: Mainstream Media Lies About Trump ‘Evicting’ White House Press Corp | 21st Century Wire says Many mainstream news outlets have been abuzz about the headline going around saying that Trump may evict the press corp from accessing the White House, but when one looks deeper into what is being written in such articles it quickly becomes clear that there is nothing official stated about disallowing any press from the White House.Here s the facts: Incoming White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, while discussing potentially moving the press corps room from the James Brady Press Room, to the White House Conference Room in order to add more seating for press to cover President Trump in the White House said: If the plan goes through, one of the officials said, the media will be removed from the cozy confines of the White House press room, where it has worked for several decades. Members of the press will be relocated to the White House Conference Center near Lafayette Square or to a space in the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House.Look to the Blaze for how this is spun into a narrative which serves the dual purpose of agitating Trump s detractors into believing that he is going to suppress the freedom of the press and at the same time serves as a rouse to cause his ardent supporters to appear as though they are rejoicing at the potential of a Trump Presidency that would support suppressing the free press. When comparing the actual quotes with the editorial it is obvious that The Blaze and other mainstream media outlets are playing a wicked game of deceit to further the attempts at demonizing the incoming President.We can now see who the real Fake News culprits are.Below is one of the fake news articles circulating online this one was floated out by Glenn Beck and his dubious media organization The Blaze . The BlazePresident-elect Donald Trump s transition team is reportedly considering plans to evict the White House press corps from accessing the White House.According to a report from Esquire, which cited three sources with the transition team, Trump administration officials are seriously considering plans to evict the press corps from being able to access the White House, arguing that it would allow the press increased access to Trump. There has been no decision, incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer told Esquire, adding that there has been some discussion about how to do it. More from Esquire:If the plan goes through, one of the officials said, the media will be removed from the cozy confines of the White House press room, where it has worked for several decades. Members of the press will be relocated to the White House Conference Center near Lafayette Square or to a space in the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House.Spicer, in his comments to Esquire, suggested that one of the reasons the administration is looking to evict the press from the White House is because they want to offer more members of the press the ability to cover Trump and the White House.Currently, there are only 49 seats in the White House James Brady Press Briefing Room, not enough to honor the hundreds, and sometimes, thousands of requests from journalists to cover Trump, Spicer said.However, a different, unnamed source told Esquire that the administration might have a different motive. According to the source, the administration is considering the move because of how the media covered Trump during the campaign and after his election victory.Trump has repeatedly lambasted the media for their coverage of him, regularly taking to Twitter to blast a news agency or a reporter by name. Most recently, Trump scolded CNN s Jim Acosta during his press conference See the rest of Glenn Beck s Fake News story at The BlazeREAD MORE ELECTIONS NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 Files | 1real |
This Activist Might Go To Jail For Criticizing Michigan’s Governor On Facebook (IMAGE) | A Michigan man just received a disturbing letter. The letter alleges that he has violated his probation for threatening Michigan s Governor, Rick Snyder, on Facebook.In 2013, Chris Wahmhoff, of Kalamazoo, Michigan was arrested for protesting the rebuilding and expansion of a pipeline that ruptured in 2010, creating the largest inland oil spill in history. In December 2014, Wahmoff was sentenced to probation, in lieu of a jail sentence.Wahmhoff received a letter from his probation officer, claiming that he has violated the terms of his probation on three counts. The first count is for his failure to pay back restitution. The second is for failing to provide his DNA for testing. The third count is where things get quite disturbing.The letter says that he has violated his probation for allegedly threatening Rick Snyder. The letter reads:Count 3: On 1.27.16 the defendant displayed threatening behavior on social media (Facebook) when he responded to a posting pertaining to the Governor of Michigan hiring two public relations firms in lieu of hiring to restore the infrastructure to provide clean water for Flint when he stated so when y all are ready to march in and take his ass across the street I have my torch, I got warm socks. I m waiting on y all. This is in no way a credible threat of violence. In fact, it is actually quite tame compared to many of the things that have been posted about Snyder. Cher caught wind of the situation going on in Flint, Michigan before the story had reached critical mass. She called for Snyder to be put in front of a firing squad. A Michigan militia has even taken sides against Snyder.WTF IS GOING ON W/POWERMAD,GREED DRIVEN,KILLER,INCOMPETENT,POLITICIANS?THEY R CRIMNALS GOV.RICK SNYDER OF MICH.#FIRINGSQUADWORKSFORME Cher (@cher) January 6, 2016Whether or not a Snyder and his cronies are found culpable for their role in the Flint water crisis, or not remains to be seen. That being said, the people of Michigan well, people all over the U.S. and the world for that matter have already found Snyder to be guilty. He has eroded democracy through his expansion of Michigan s emergency manager law. He has poisoned an entire city. At least ten people have already died from water contamination. When people refer to Snyder as a baby killer, it is by no means an exaggeration.I spoke to Wahmhoff over the phone. He says that he was publicly calling for a citizen s arrest of Rick Snyder. Wahmhoff is emphatic that he does not think that people should go into the Capital building guns blazing. He doesn t want any violence to come to Snyder. He does, however, think he needs to be removed from office immediately. Wahmhoff told Addicting Info: I never intended to call for violence against Rick Snyder.. But according to Michigan law 764.16 (b), I have the right to, and do intend to legally invoke the arrest of governor Rick Snyder for felonious child endangerment. Not just for Flint, but for Detroit, for the Kalamazoo River, and for the children who will continue to suffer as long as Rick Snyder is in power. The right-wing has usurped and bastardized the concept of government tyranny and the expulsion of tyrants, to the point where birthers think that President Obama should be removed from office by force. Those people are insane. I by no means support violence. Though I have to say, I am sure that the founders of the United States would consider the Snyder administration a domestic threat. As many have pointed out, the poisoning of an entire city s water supply is an act that any ISIS member would look upon with envy.There are mobs of people out there who actually would tear Rick Snyder to shreds, given the opportunity. In light of that, the idea that someone would actually take a person s vague comment from Facebook seriously enough to consider it a violation of their probation, is absurd. Especially when the person who made the comment is on probation for protesting a corporation that created the worst environmental disaster in Michigan s history not including the current crisis in Flint, of course. Michigan activists are planning a protest, to stand in solidarity with Wahmhoff. Featured Image Credit: Donkey Hotey via Flickr. With letter screenshot added by Joe Fletcher. | 1real |
Chuck Todd to BuzzFeed EIC: ’You Just Published Fake News’ - Breitbart | During a discussion of BuzzFeed’s story on a dossier regarding Russia and Donald Trump on Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “MTP Daily,” host Chuck Todd told BuzzFeed Ben Smith “you just published fake news. ” Todd said BuzzFeed’s decision to publish the dossier was an instance where they “would not have made the same decision in the era. ” Smith stated that it was more “the era. ” And that there was a time “where we could act as gatekeepers. Where we could say, you know what, crazy people are claiming that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is forged, but we’re not going to write about that, that’s crazy. ” He continued that this era doesn’t exist, and that while they had reporters trying to confirm or deny specific details, the dossier was “in play,” and “having consequences for the way our elected leaders are acting. The — you do have to ask the question of, why should I suppress that? There are then good reasons, right? Once though, it emerges, as it did last night in the public conversation that there is this secret document floating around, full of dark allegations that we will not repeat to you. That I feel like in this era, you really have to share [with] your readers what that is in an appropriate context. And our original report, I mean, if you read what we wrote, it stressed that there were real solid reasons to distrust this. It noted two specific errors. ” Todd then asked if BuzzFeed had a responsibility to not spread false information. Smith responded that, like with the Obama birth certificate issue, it’s a “difficult balance that everybody in our business navigates every day. ” Todd then asked if BuzzFeed would publish a false birth certificate. Smith answered, “We certainly quoted the of the United States making false claims about it, and years ago we debated whether we should quote regular citizens in Iowa saying, I don’t believe his birth certificate. And I remember us thinking at first, we probably shouldn’t. That we we shouldn’t pass that on and then saying, you know what, this has become a force that is impacting the conversation. ” Todd countered, “I know this was not your intent. I’ve known you a long time, but you just published fake news. ” Smith countered that people throw the term “fake news” around to diminish things they don’t like, and that “this was a real story about a real document that was really being passed around between the very top officials of this country. And then the question you say is, okay, it’s okay for you — to Chuck Todd see this document. It’s okay for me to see it. Okay for Senator John McCain ( ). Okay for the CIA. What’s — why is it not okay for your audience?” Todd then countered that BuzzFeed could have published a redacted version of the document. Smith answered that there was fair disagreement, but didn’t think you could defend acknowledging the dossier’s existence but then not say what was in it and that this was saying it was okay to summarize false claims. Smith further stated that if there wasn’t a “public conversation” about the dossier, they would have just continued to report the story out. ( Mediaite) Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 0fake |
Merkel emerges as clear winner of only TV debate: poll | BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel emerged as the clear winner of the only television debate with her center-left challenger Martin Schulz three weeks before a federal election, a poll showed on Sunday. The survey by Infratest Dimap for ARD television showed that 49 percent viewed Merkel as being more credible while 29 percent favored Schulz. Merkel s overall performance was viewed as more convincing by 55 percent, compared to 35 percent for Schulz. | 0fake |
Polling Site Corruption Enraged New Yorkers [Update] · Guardian Liberty Voice | Polling site corruption enraged voters on November 8, 2016, at 6:00 a.m. EDT, as several New Yorker’s stood in line awaiting their chance to partake in this year’s presidential election.
Brooklyn Located at 450 Pacific Street, at least 20 people were waiting for the doors of Public School 38, the Pacific School, for a half hour before leaving for work. Public School 9, Teunis G. Bergen, located at 80 Underhill experienced a 2-hour delay. Many New Yorkers were enraged with polling-site corruption, as they stood on long lines to no avail. Bronx Bronx County Supreme Courthouse, located at 851 Grand Concourse, could not adequately accommodate the voters with mobility impairments.
New York City CS 154 Harriet Tubman Learning Center, located at 250 West 127th Street, only had one of four working ballot scanners. This produced a 2-hour delay for voters. Yorkville Community School located at 412 E. 88th Street, only had one of six ballot scanners working, producing a 2-block line. New Yorkers throughout the city are enraged about the polling site corruption they have experienced. Update: NY Daily News
The Board of Elections has released that a mistake by an office clerk omitted 126,000 registered voters names from the list, in April. Written by Jhayla D. Walls
Edited by Jeanette Smith
Sources:
Pix11: Broken Machines, Vanishing Names Leave New Yorkers Waiting for Hours at Polling Stations
New York Times: Long Lines and Minor Glitches for Voters on a Peaceful Election Day
NY Daily News: NYC Voters Complain of Long Lines, Broken Scanners
Top and Featured Image Courtesy of Coventy City Council’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
First Inline Image Courtesy of Subfinitum’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License 2016 Elections , New york , polling corruption , polling-site corruption | 1real |
OBAMA’S Defense Deputy ACCIDENTALLY ADMITS Obama White House Spied On Candidate Trump During MSNBC Interview…But WAIT…There’s Even MORE To This Story! [VIDEO] | Accidents are bound to happen when Democrats become so comfortable with their allies in the liberal media that they forget they re on TV, as they expose themselves and their crooked administration to a national audience.The Conservative Treehouse does a brilliant job of dissecting the interview between former Obama administration official Evelyn Farkas and MSNBC s Mika Brzezinski. They also offer evidence of a fake disinformation campaign that was spread by the Obama regime about a Trump- Russian connection. [UPDATE to story below]This is stunningly interesting and hopefully will be picked up by MSM and congressional investigators.Sometimes when a person is deep inside an echo-chamber of like-minded ideologues, they might not realize what they re saying is rather revealing to those on the outside. That s the set up for former Obama administration official Evelyn Farkas (Deputy Asst. Secretary of Defense) appearing on MSNBC and admitting first hand knowledge the Obama administration spied on candidate and president-elect Donald Trump s transition team to gather intelligence for political use.It would appear Ms. Farkas was so caught up in the discussion, she didn t quite realize the significant admissions she was making about the Obama administration spying on Donald Trump s team and generating classified intelligence for Ms. Farkas (and others) to spread to Capitol Hill politicians. MSNBC s Mika Brzezinski recognized the oh-snap admission and tried to play it off, but by then it was too late.With the help of MSNBC, simultaneous to her admission of first-hand specific knowledge of the administration spying on Mr. Trump, Ms. Evelyn Farkas outs herself as the key source for a New York Times report which discussed President Obama officials leaking classified information to media.Considerable irony jumps to the forefront when you recognize, the New York Times tried to protect Evelyn Farkas as the source of their reporting by stating: More than a half-dozen current and former officials described various aspects of the effort to preserve and distribute the intelligence, and some said they were speaking to draw attention to the material and ensure proper investigation by Congress. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing classified information, nearly all of which remains secret. (link)D oh.Whoopsie.Looks like Devin Nunes and the House Intelligence Committee has a new person to bring in for testimony. A positive development because at this rate the media leakers will out themselves without much need for investigation.I wonder what the criminal penalties are for having access to intelligence and sharing it with Democrat politicians [ The Hill People ].Question #1:Who, specifically, are these Hill People you speak of Mrs. Farkas?Watch again. Longer version starts at the 4:50 mark:https://youtu.be/cVGp2FZmVA4 Evelyn Farkas has stated freely on TV that she and a group of associates from the Obama Administration went to congressional staffers who did not have access to these COMINT products and urged them to seek to gain access to them.At some point in the recent past Farkas was de-briefed (cut off) from access to the various kinds of compartmented information she had been given as a requirement of her prior job. When that occurred she signed some papers in which she accepted the responsibility to protect the secrecy of that information. (link) Evelyn Farkas is also a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council SEE HERE the Atlantic Council is funded in part by the US State Department, NATO, the governments of Latvia and Lithuania, the Ukrainian World Congress, and the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk. The Atlantic Council has been among the loudest voices calling for a new Cold War with RussiaAnd guess who else is a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council? Dimitri Alperovitch the founder and CTO of CrowdStrike! Alperovitch is head honcho of the Atlantic Council s Cyber Statecraft Initiative . CrowdStrike, aka Dimitri Alperovitch was the organization that initially claimed they had evidence the Russians were connected to the Trump organization. A claim they have subsequently walked back SEE HERECrowdStrike has retracted statements it used to buttress claims of Russian hacking https://t.co/8AZOvoQl0K Michael Tracey (@mtracey) March 28, 2017Combine all of these data-points and you discover that Evelyn Farkas was essentially part of a disinformation campaign with Obama insiders spreading a fake DNC constructed story using false information. However, in addition to pushing the false Trump Russian conspiracy narrative, Farkas has knowledge of the outcome of the original pushing of the narrative leading to actual surveillance of the Trump team.This bolsters the information already presented by Devin Nunes that an entirely separate network of surveillance, unrelated to the Russian conspiracy story, was directly targeting the candidacy of Trump and the post-election surveillance of the President Elect Trump-transition team.For entire story: The Conservative Treehouse | 1real |
World Food Programme cuts rations for refugees in Kenya | NAIROBI (Reuters) - The U.N. World Food Programme is cutting food rations by 30 percent for more than 400,000 refugees living in camps in Kenya due to insufficient funding, it said on Monday. Dadaab and Kakuma camps in Kenya are primarily home to refugees from neighboring Somalia and South Sudan, both ravaged by wars that have forced millions of people to flee. The World Food Programme said it needed $28.5 million to cover the food assistance needs of the 420,000 refugees living in the camps for the next six months. An abrupt halt to food assistance would be devastating for the refugees, most of whom rely fully on WFP for their daily meals, said Annalisa Conte, the top WFP official in Kenya. The funding shortfall comes six months after the United Nations warned that the world was facing its greatest humanitarian disaster since World War Two because of the threat of famine in South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen. It said in March that 20 million people risked starvation in what it called largely man-made hunger crises in addition to drought. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network said in a report last month that risk of famine persists in parts of Somalia due to the extended drought and disease outbreaks. | 0fake |
Firing of South Africa’s Finance Minister Widens a Political Rift - The New York Times | JOHANNESBURG — The two rival factions inside South Africa’s governing African National Congress attacked each other publicly on Friday after President Jacob Zuma abruptly fired a finance minister who was considered a bulwark against government corruption. Mr. Zuma, who has been embroiled in a series of scandals since taking office in 2009, dismissed the finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, as part of a cabinet shuffle in which 10 of 35 ministers were fired. The deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, called the decision “unacceptable. ” Another senior figure, Gwede Mantashe, the A. N. C. secretary general, said the cabinet shuffle was not done with the party’s approval. “Ministers have been moved, and the majority of them were good performing ministers,” Mr. Mantashe said. Jackson Mthembu, a senior A. N. C. lawmaker, said Mr. Gordhan’s only crime was “incorruptibility. ” “It’s unprecedented to have senior A. N. C. members come out with dissenting views in public like this,” said William Gumede, a political scientist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and executive chairman of the Democracy Works Foundation, a group. “Now that the conflict has gone public, people and party members can see the divisions clearly,” Mr. Gumede said. “It will be very difficult for Zuma to shrug this off and claim that everything is fine. ” The firing was a result of a battle between Mr. Zuma and Mr. Gordhan, and the interests they represent. Mr. Zuma’s supporters have accused Mr. Gordhan of representing South Africa’s business community and have urged Mr. Zuma to fire the minister and replace him with someone with a looser grip on state coffers, so as to carry out “radical transformation. ” Mr. Gordhan’s backers belong to the urban faction of the A. N. C. one less beholden to the politics of patronage that the party practices in rural strongholds. Mr. Ramaphosa, a liberation figure who also became one of the country’s richest black businessmen after the end of apartheid, is considered the leader of the urban faction, and he is seen as a leading candidate to succeed Mr. Zuma as the party’s leader in December. The other top contender, Nkosozana a former chairwoman of the African Union who was once married to Mr. Zuma, has been backed by groups most loyal to the president. The finance minister’s dismissal sent the currency, the rand, plummeting as much as 5 percent at one point. The cost of borrowing for the government jumped, amid fears that rating agencies would downgrade South Africa’s government bonds to junk status. Africa’s most industrialized economy, South Africa is projected to grow 0. 8 percent this year, and unemployment is 27 percent. Speculation is rife that Mr. Zuma might be compelled to step down before the scheduled end of his second term in 2019, clearing the way for another party leader to take the reins. Mr. Gordhan, who learned of his dismissal from a television report, defended his record on Friday as protesters gathered at the headquarters of the National Treasury, part of the Finance Ministry. “We hope more and more South Africans will make it absolutely clear that our country is not for sale,” Mr. Gordhan said. “It is important that the public knows what we do at the Treasury, how we serve South Africa, how the budgeting process works and how we make sure that the poor in South Africa benefit from the taxes that we collect from all South Africans, as well. ” The firing on Thursday night capped a week of tensions that began on Monday when Mr. Zuma ordered Mr. Gordhan to return abruptly from a trade and investment roadshow in Britain. As rumors circulated that Mr. Gordhan would be fired, Mr. Zuma summoned A. N. C. leaders for a meeting. The meeting did not produce a consensus, officials have said. The South African Communist Party, part of the A. N. C. coalition that governs the country, said that Mr. Zuma had cited an intelligence report speculating that Mr. Gordhan might be plotting to undermine the president. Mr. Gordhan has called the report preposterous. Mr. Mthembu, the senior A. N. C. lawmaker, said that the intelligence report’s accusations were “plain rubbish. ” Mr. Zuma, in a statement on Friday, announced that he had replaced Mr. Gordhan with Malusi Gigaba, the home affairs minister. Mr. Gordhan’s deputy, Mcebisi Jonas, was also fired and replaced by Sfiso N. Buthelezi. The two new finance appointees — A. N. C. loyalists active in the party since their youth, and members of Parliament — are “largely unknown to investors,” Morgan Stanley said in a research note on Friday. “This could create further uncertainty in South Africa’s financial markets. ” Mr. Zuma said that the — 10 new ministers and 10 new deputy ministers were named — was intended to “improve efficiency and effectiveness” and to “bring some younger M. P. s and women into the national executive in order to benefit from their energy, experience and expertise. ” Mr. Gordhan, after a stint as finance minister from 2009 to 2014, was reappointed to the job in December 2015, after Mr. Zuma abruptly replaced his successor, Nhlanhla Nene, with a junior lawmaker. Mr. Zuma changed that decision four days later, after the rand and the stock market tumbled, and Mr. Gordhan’s return to the job helped reassure investors. But Mr. Gordhan has repeatedly been at odds with the president since then. He resisted Mr. Zuma’s push to approve expensive nuclear power plants, and he tried to rein in public spending. He also clashed with a powerful family, the Guptas, who are close to Mr. Zuma and are so influential that Mr. Zuma was obliged to publicly insist last year that he was in charge of his government. Trieu Pham, a credit analyst at MUFG Securities in London, said there were important differences between this week’s dismissal of Mr. Gordhan and the firing of Mr. Nene in 2015. Mr. Gordhan’s departure, if not the timing, had been expected his replacement, unlike Mr. Nene’s, is a cabinet minister, albeit one with limited experience in finance and the rand and stock prices have risen in recent months, allowing some room for maneuver. “The long waiting time indicates that Zuma has well weighed the factors for and against the reshuffle, and thinks that he has garnered enough support to resist a power struggle and a breakup of the A. N. C. ,” Mr. Pham said. | 0fake |
Senate Republican tax chief wants dividend deduction in tax reform | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate’s top Republican on tax policy said on Tuesday that allowing U.S. corporations to deduct dividend payments to shareholders from federal income tax could overcome problems facing Republican efforts to overhaul the U.S. tax code. In a statement at the outset of a tax reform hearing, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch said he sees the proposal known as “corporate integration” as a way to end the perceived double taxation of U.S. companies through tax legislation that would also reduce the statutory U.S. corporate income tax rate, which now stands at 35 percent. “This idea – whether it applies fully or in some other limited way – can help address a number of the problems we’re trying to solve with comprehensive tax reform,” said Hatch, a member of the “Big Six” tax policy makers from the Trump administration and Congress who are expected to issue a tax reform blueprint next week. | 0fake |
Typical U.S. family earning $100,000 to get $1,000 tax cut under Trump plan: aide | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A typical U.S. family with two children earning $100,000 a year can expect a tax cut of $1,000 under President Donald Trump’s proposed tax overhaul, White House economic adviser Gary Cohn said on Thursday. Cohn also told reporters at the White House that the repeal of estate tax and alternative minimum tax would be immediate under the proposal. | 0fake |
Gonzaga Marches Into Its First Final Four by Routing Xavier - The New York Times | SAN JOSE, Calif. — Mark Few’s father, Norm, was a Presbyterian minister for more than 50 years. He entered hundreds of couples into the bonds of matrimony and comforted the bereaved at more than a thousand funerals. When Few is asked about his legacy at Gonzaga, where he has coached the past 28 seasons, he thinks about his father’s accomplishments, and not how he has won far more basketball games than he has lost. But results do matter to Few. His charge is to win, and in his 18 years at the helm, he has presided over Gonzaga’s ascension from spunky upstart to midmajor darling to certifiable contender. He does not need validation or vindication, but now that the Bulldogs have advanced to the first Final Four in their history, he has it. Until Saturday, when Gonzaga clobbered Xavier, in the West Regional final, Few had won the most N. C. A. A. tournament games (24) among coaches who had never reached the national semifinals. This best version of Few’s best team played with fury and purpose, burying Xavier’s bid to become the fourth No. 11 seed to reach the Final Four. Gonzaga ( ) made a dozen and disrupted the Musketeers near the rim with a fierceness that Xavier had yet to encounter during its unlikely stampede to the round of 8. As a measure of Gonzaga’s offensive efficiency, consider that it allowed more points before halftime than it had in any other game this season — 39 — and it still led by 10. That lead ballooned to 17 less than five minutes into the second half, and although Xavier’s fans chanted, “We believe,” they had no better luck forestalling the inevitable than its players did. Few has coached some superb teams, but none like this one, which has coalesced despite the fact that five members of its rotation did not even wear a Gonzaga uniform last season. One transfer, Nigel led Gonzaga with 23 points, and another, Johnathan Williams, added 19 points, 8 rebounds and 3 blocks and was selected as the region’s most outstanding player. The arrivals of all these talented players, accustomed to taking many shots and scoring loads of points, could have crashed the program, but the players subjugated their egos. praised Josh Perkins, another point guard, for welcoming him. “We know how good you are,” Perkins said of the team’s attitude, “but we can be so much better together. ” And here the Bulldogs are, going to the Final Four, where they will play next Saturday in Glendale, Ariz. against the winner of Sunday’s East Regional final between Florida and South Carolina. To get there, Gonzaga overwhelmed a university that resembled itself — a small Jesuit school with no Final Four experience where basketball, not football, drives the sporting culture. “There’s no pro team there’s no football team,” Perkins said of Spokane, Wash. home to Gonzaga. “We’re pretty much it. We’re the celebrities we’re the role models. It’s fun, but you’ve got to win basketball games, or it’s not so good. ” On Perkins’s first day on campus, he was recognized at a Chipotle restaurant. That introduced him to the intensity of Gonzaga basketball fandom, which was on display not only at San Jose’s SAP Center — where fans packed several of the lower sections — but also back in Spokane. After the game, players in the locker room passed around a cellphone showing scenes of people there jumping around. “Spokane’s lit!” someone shouted. To Perkins’s point, things have been good at Gonzaga far more often than they have not — 28 victories last season, 35 the season before, 29 in 32 in . Aside from Gonzaga, only Wisconsin and North Carolina have reached the round of 16 the past three years. That consistency is the envy of so many programs, but that popular benchmark of greatness — the Final Four — had managed to elude the Bulldogs. They lost in their two previous regional finals, in 1999 and 2015, when they were underdogs, and the only other time they were seeded No. 1, in 2013, they lost to Wichita State in the second round. Gonzaga’s strong alumni base remains close to the program. Former players, like Kelly Olynyk, Jeremy Pargo and Matt Santangelo, have sent out encouraging text messages: “Hey, we couldn’t do it, so you guys do it. ” The Bulldogs did it by silencing a team that had trampled over one favorite after another, baffling Maryland, Florida State and, on Thursday, Arizona with impenetrable defense. Gonzaga detonated that defense early and often. “I mean, they’re really good,” Xavier Coach Chris Mack said. “Sometimes, you just lose to a better team. ” That was about as close as Mack has gotten this postseason to acknowledging that a better team existed than his Musketeers, who proved they were far better than their seeding might suggest. On Tuesday, before they flew to San Jose, Mack showed players a video clip of confetti cascading onto a court. He asked how badly they wanted to experience that themselves, and then a ladder appeared. The Musketeers acted out a traditional celebration, hooting and hollering as if in a packed arena instead of their auxiliary gym. They then placed the strands in a jar that contained the detritus of another motivational ploy, the ashes from the burning of February calendars that the staff had printed — with the results from Xavier’s five straight losses that month, all to teams that went on to make the N. C. A. A. tournament. Mack tried willing that act into a sequel here, but soon after the buzzer sounded Saturday, after Gonzaga’s players danced at center court, it was his counterpart who climbed the ladder. Few clipped the net, turned to the crowd and hinted at the possibilities in Arizona. “Might as well win it,” he said. | 0fake |
Pope Francis is not endorsing Kim Davis's views, Vatican says | The Vatican moved to distance Pope Francis from the controversial county clerk on Friday, saying, 'The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis.'
Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis making a statement to the media at the front door of the Rowan County Judicial Center in Morehead, Ky. earlier this month. On Friday, the Vatican distanced Pope Francis from Kim Davis, the focal point in the gay marriage debate in the US, saying she was one of dozens of people the pope greeted in the US and that their Sept. 24 encounter at the Vatican's embassy in Washington "should not be considered a form of support of her position." Davis, an Apostolic Christian, spent five days in jail for defying a series of federal court orders to issue same-sex marriage licenses after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage across the country.
The Vatican on Friday distanced Pope Francis from Kim Davis, saying she was one of dozens of people who met with the pontiff on his visit to the United States and that their meeting was not an endorsement.
"The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Ms. Davis, and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects," Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said in a statement.
Friday’s announcement clears up days of speculation over Davis's 15 minutes at the Vatican's embassy in Washington on Sept. 24, which suggested to many that the pontiff condoned her decision as a Kentucky county clerk to defy a US Supreme Court order to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
During the meeting, Francis gave Davis a rosary, reportedly telling her "to 'stand strong,'" according to The Christian Science Monitor.
Since it had also come just days after another meeting he had with nuns opposing a government mandate on contraceptives, the encounter was not wholly unfitting with Francis’s style of reaching out to “people he calls on the 'peripheries,'" The Monitor reported.
The pope also said "Conscientious objection is a right that is a part of every human right," according to NBC News. "And if a person does not allow others to be a conscientious objector, he denies a right."
Pope Francis "took somebody on the front of the newspapers for faith-related concerns and met with her," Joe Valenzano, an expert on religious rhetoric at the University of Dayton in Ohio, previously told the Monitor. "[The pope told Davis that] you don’t lose faith because you lose a battle. That’s not the pope weighing in on the culture wars or endorsing Kim Davis’s position. That’s the pope endorsing the idea that religion is important to people."
"Such brief greetings occur on all papal visits and are due to the pope’s characteristic kindness and availability," said Father Lombardi. "The only real audience granted by the pope at the Nunciature was with one of his former students and his family."
Davis gained national attention this summer for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses in one Kentucky county after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage across the country. She later spent five days in jail for refusing to adhere to federal court orders. | 0fake |
Why pundits, politicians and the press hate Ted Cruz | Senator Ted Cruz is now the frontrunner in the Republican race for the White House.
But if you believe the Mainstream Media and the political pundits -- Marco Rubio won the Iowa Caucus.
Click here to get Todd’s American Dispatch – a must-read for conservatives!
Just look at Tuesday's news coverage -- they marginalized Senator Cruz -- and glorified Senator Rubio.
And that's the narrative. Cruz may have won -- but Rubio is more electable. And yet... the numbers in Iowa tell a very different story.
One out of three evangelical voters chose Cruz -- so did four out of ten very conservative voters.
And 26 percent of young voters -- 18 to 29 - -- they didn't vote for Rubio -- they also voted for Cruz.
The voters recognize a simple truth. Senator Cruz has been a man of his word -- a principled conservative -- and that is something the Establishment cannot tolerate.
“What we are seeing is evangelicals who have been dormant in the political process that are turning out,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “It’s something we haven’t seen in a number of years.”
Perkins, who has endorsed Cruz, told me the voters are not interested in a moderate candidate. They don’t want someone in the “middle.”
“There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead animals,” Perkins said.
Looking back on the results in Iowa, Perkins said there should be one take-away for voters.
“Do not listen to the pundits or the polls – but vote your values,” he said. “It was values voters and the return of those voters that put Ted Cruz over the top.”
It's not that the pundits and politicos hate Senator Cruz - they know he can't be controlled -- and that has them terrified.
Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is "God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values." Follow Todd on Twitter @ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.
| 0fake |
DEMOCRAT GUN GRABBER SIT-IN Rages On With A Damned Ironic Feast Behind The Scenes | Democrats staging a sit-in on the floor of Congress won t go hungry we spotted their food order on its way into the Capitol and it s pretty damn ironic. A couple carts full of Chick-fil-A food were toted in by Congressional interns. We get it protesters gotta eat, but consider this: The push for gun control legislation was prompted by Omar Mateen s heinous attack on a gay nightclub and Chick-fil-A s ownership has a long history of opposing LGBTQ rights. To be fair, the company s undergoing an image makeover, and has contributed tons of food and money to relief efforts in Orlando. Still odd choice. DC s a big city. Via: TMZWE THOUGHT A SIT IN WAS SUPPOSED TO JUST THAT A SIT IN! THIS LOOKS MORE LIKE A EAT IN OR FEAST IN! CHECK OUT ALL THE FOOD IN THE CLOAK ROOM: | 1real |
Clinton's election night party will be at a Manhattan venue with a glass ceiling | Clinton's election night party will be at a Manhattan venue with a glass ceiling They seem extremely confident in victory on Nov 8th. Jacob Javit Center in Manhattan Related Threads 1 09/23/16 2 Mail with questions or comments about this site. "Godlike Productions" & "GLP" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ Website Design Copyright © 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.053s (11 queries) | 1real |
Donald Trump is running out of ways to win | But 25 days before the election, Trump's path to the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the presidency is looking more and more impossible by the day, as states he once said he'd flip from blue to red increasingly slip out of his reach. Meanwhile, reliably red states threaten to turn purple.
Trump's odds of a win were spiraling downward days before the 2005 "Access Hollywood" recording that surfaced last week and depicted him bragging about his ability to grope women as a perk of his celebrity. Since then, his support has collapsed -- particularly among women. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed Clinton with a 9-point lead and a new national Fox poll released Thursday night that had Clinton at 45% and Trump at 38% in a four-way race.
In the most stunning development of the week, Trump and Clinton were tied at 26% in ruby-red Utah, with virtually unknown independent candidate Evan McMullin closing in on third place with 22%, according to a survey from Y2 Analytics.
"He's at a point where he's trying to draw an inside straight now by campaigning primarily in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina," said veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres. "He is well behind in Pennsylvania; he appears according to the latest polls to be effectively tied in North Carolina and Ohio; and he's behind in Florida."
"Donald Trump said he would put new states in play," Ayres said, but he noted wryly that he never thought they would be the red states of Utah, Arizona and Georgia. Clinton's campaign has already invested resources in Arizona and is marshaling forces in Georgia as they eye ways to expand the map for down-ballot races. And this is before allegations this week from a growing number of women who have accused him of unwanted sexual advances. Trump has vehemently denied those accusations, and there is no data yet to gauge whether he will suffer further fallout in the polls, but it's another issue that has knocked Trump off-message with time running down before Election Day. "The map looked strong for Clinton at the start of this race and it's looking even stronger for her toward the end of it," Ayres said. "If a landslide is winning in the Electoral College by more than 100 votes, Clinton is on track to do that now." Because of Democrats' advantage in the Electoral College, Trump's path to the White House relied not only on keeping all the states that Mitt Romney won in 2012, but also seizing Democratic turf in states like Pennsylvania. Clinton held a 9-point lead in Pennsylvania, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll released Thursday. Most striking was her lead in the Philadelphia suburbs -- the place where many strategists believe this race will be won or lost. A startling 56% of suburban Philadelphia voters said they were supporting Clinton, compared to 28% for Trump. What female voters in Philly suburbs really think Even if Trump were to win the mighty battleground states of North Carolina (where Clinton currently has a 4-point lead), Ohio, Nevada and Florida, he would still fall short of the 270 electoral votes that he needs to win. That means he would have to make up ground in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin -- all states where he is trailing far behind her, according to new polls. Democrats have long been confident about their ability to win Colorado, where both Trump and Clinton visited recently And they are increasingly bullish about their chances in Nevada, another state Clinton hit this week. In another blow to Trump's campaign on Thursday, Republican sources confirmed that Trump was pulling his resources from Virginia, a state that has seen a huge influx in the number of foreign-born citizens and large growth among Asians, who have increasingly tilted toward Democrats in recent years. Because of demographic changes in Arizona and Georgia, those two states appear to be closer this year than in 2012 when Romney won them comfortably. Democrats had already made inroads with the large African-American population in Georgia, and been buoyed by the growing Hispanic population in that state. But Clinton has also shown particular strength this cycle among college-educated white women voters in the suburbs of Atlanta. While campaigning in Colorado this week, Clinton urged her supporters to get their friends out to vote in Utah and Arizona. "We are competing everywhere, and the polls are tightening because I think Americans want a turnout in as big a number as possible to reject the dark and divisive and hateful campaign that is being run by my opponent." Many Republican strategists still expect Trump to hold on in Utah and Arizona, even if he loses the race. But Democrats believe they are laying the groundwork for 2020 and beyond. "In the same way President Obama helped build up registration in the African American community and among millennials, Donald Trump is offering new opportunities for Democrats to make gains," said Bill Burton, a former Obama adviser. Burton noted that in California, for example, registration among Latinos has grown exponentially, "and you're seeing that trend across the country. It's opening doors that wouldn't otherwise be open.... Donald Trump is inspiring a whole new generation of voters to go out and get registered, and get engaged, it's really helping Democrats build up our network." | 0fake |
Republican lawmakers propose more conservative Obamacare fix | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two prominent Republican lawmakers from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on Tuesday proposed short-term measures to stabilize Obamacare health insurance markets that would compete with bipartisan legislation under discussion in the Senate. The proposal outlined by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Republican Representative Kevin Brady, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, includes provisions to suspend requirements for individuals and employers to buy health coverage under former President Barack Obama’s healthcare law. The recommendations appear to address many of the Trump administration’s objections to a short-term fix drafted by senators Lamar Alexander, a Republican, and Patty Murray, a Democrat. Democrats are likely to oppose such changes as undermining the viability of Obamacare’s subsidized insurance market for individuals. Like the bipartisan proposal, the Hatch-Brady fix would reinstate billions of dollars in subsidy payments to insurers that Trump jettisoned earlier this month. Insurers say they had to raise monthly premium rates by 20 percent on average for 2018 to account for the lost subsidies, but could reduce consumers costs if they are restored. “It is encouraging to see a growing consensus that Congress should fund the cost-sharing reduction payments for two more years,” Alexander said in response. But the Hatch-Brady legislation would also repeal the individual mandate, or requirement that everyone purchase health insurance or else pay a fine, from 2017 to 2021. It would retroactively repeal the employer mandate from 2015 to 2017 and introduce restrictions on abortion that have yet to be detailed. Health industry experts and Democrats say the individual and employer mandates are critical to making Obamacare work. Murray called on the Senate to move forward with the deal she has worked on with Alexander “and move away from partisan dysfunction on healthcare,” which she said could take health coverage away from millions of people. The Alexander-Murray bill is expected to have the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate, but it is not clear whether it could find enough support in the House. President Donald Trump initially expressed support for the deal, but has since insisted it include more far-reaching provisions toward repealing Obamacare. | 0fake |
RADICAL “TOLERANT” FEMALE Antifa, Black Bloc, Leader Follows Muslim Boyfriend To Turkey… Surprised When She Was Beaten, Raped | DC Antifa Leader Moved to Turkey with Man She Met, Surprised When Beaten and Abused https://t.co/MsBtGGxwem pic.twitter.com/XjC3UbmvRn Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) May 2, 2017McCauley claims this is not the person who she traveled to Turkey to be with in her response to Prosibiec:How nice of you to link to my blog, Jack. I wrote about this publicly. Nice "investigative" skills. You got a photo of the wrong guy though. https://t.co/shOj6FfEyl Lacy MacAuley (@lacymacauley) May 2, 2017So all day, #fascists were a lot of bluff and bluster. Brought guns they never shot. Just chanted, gave #Nazi salutes, taunted. #Pikeville pic.twitter.com/FlVAOkudlW Lacy MacAuley (@lacymacauley) April 29, 2017How nice of you to link to my blog, Jack. I wrote about this publicly. Nice "investigative" skills. You got a photo of the wrong guy though. https://t.co/shOj6FfEyl Lacy MacAuley (@lacymacauley) May 2, 2017Lacy Mccauley can be seen acting as the tolerant host at this organized LGBTQ dance party in front of Vice President Mike Pence s home. At about the 1:40 mark, Lacy interviews Natalie, one of the peaceful protesters who warns Mike Pence, Bro .at me bro! She continues, We re gonna fight you and dance the more you come at us. So bring it! We re ready. We re gonna keep resisting in love dancing because it looks like you don t have any. So it looks like you need to be taught. Lacy then goes on to interview more hateful gay protesters preaching love and tolerance . So many angry, hateful people protesting against hate The hypocrisy of a liberal exposed. Note: the original post (seen in screen shot below) claims the protest was organized by the Islamic Center. We re pretty sure that LGBTQ members dancing in the streets is not a sanctioned Islamic event LOL! | 1real |
So ein Ärger! Obama hat über Nacht sämtliche Atomcodes verloren | Mittwoch, 9. November 2016 So ein Ärger! Obama hat über Nacht sämtliche Atomcodes verloren Washington (dpo) - Wie konnte das nur passieren? Barack Obama soll in der Nacht zum heutigen Mittwoch seinen Atomkoffer verloren haben. Das gab der scheidende Präsident nach den ersten Hochrechnungen zur Wahl bekannt. Er glaube auch nicht, dass dieser innerhalb der nächsten vier Jahre wieder auftauchen werde. In dem Koffer befinden sich unter anderem die streng geheimen Atomcodes, auf die ausschließlich der Präsident Zugriff hat. Obama erklärte sein Missgeschick so: "Ich schaute gerade gespannt die ersten Prognosen zur Wahl, als ich plötzlich zu meinem Entsetzen bemerkte, dass der Koffer weg war. Was bin ich nur für ein Schussel!" Er habe zwar sofort das komplette Weiße Haus abgesucht, aber die Codes blieben verschwunden. "So ein Ärger. Naja, nützt ja nichts. Aber die Codes wurden in der Vergangenheit ja ohnehin nicht benötigt, deshalb ist der Verlust nun nicht ganz so tragisch. Mein Nachfolger wird auch ohne Atomkoffer auskommen. Vielleicht fällt mir ja in vier Jahren wieder ein, wo ich das Ding hingepackt habe." Nicht hinter dem Sofa, nicht unter dem Schreibtisch und auch nicht von Bo im Garten vergraben... Der Atomkoffer ist und bleibt verschwunden. Zeit für eine noch intensivere Suche hat Obama, der in zwei Monaten das Weiße Haus räumen muss, eigenen Angaben zufolge leider nicht. "Ich muss ja noch Schönheitsreparaturen für die Übergabe durchführen. Gerade bin ich dabei, alle Räume pink zu streichen." Es sollte nicht das einzige Missgeschick des Präsidenten bleiben: Nur kurz nach offizieller Bekanntgabe von Trump als Wahlsieger trat ein peinlich berührter Obama erneut vor die Mikrofone und teilte mit, dass er "blöderweise" jetzt auch noch ein Glas mit hochaggressiven Termiten fallen hat lassen, die das Weiße Haus bis zur offiziellen Übergabe womöglich schwer beschädigen werden. | 1real |
Trevor Noah Roasts Jeb Bush’s Pathetically Desperate Effort To Remain A Viable Candidate (VIDEO) | If Jeb Bush watched The Daily Show last night, he should finally throw in the towel before he embarrasses himself and his family even more than he has already.On Monday night, Trevor Noah torched George W. Bush s brother in a hilarious segment that began with Noah referring to Jeb as the most desperate candidate in the presidential field. He s so desperate, he s even released his own fragrance for men, Noah quipped. Dubbed Desperation by Jeb!, Noah promoted the scent as being for when being yourself just isn t enough. He then took a whiff and laughingly remarked, Smells like George Bush. But it got even worse for Jeb from there.Noah reported that Bush and his supporters have spent more money on ads than anyone else, but that for all of the $40 million spent on positive ads telling voters about Bush, it has resulted in zero returns.This is a private admission from advisers to Jeb s own SuperPAC, Right To Rise. Even a Bush supporter was embarrassed by the results, exclaiming that, You might as well light all of this money on fire. An amused Noah pointed out that it s pretty messed up when your campaign spending is failing so bad that burning the money would have been just as useful. That would have been more effective for Jeb Bush because at least people would have gathered around him for the warmth of the fire. People notice a fire. They don t notice Jeb Bush. The money could have been put to better use by building a new water system for Flint, Michigan, Noah added.Instead, Bush spent a lot of the money on video mailers featuring a Bush documentary that were actually mailed to his supporters and potential voters, something that Noah found to be such a huge waste of money that he was rendered speechless for a few seconds before regaining his composure to nail Jeb with another zinger. Poor Jeb, he s so desperate for his videos to go viral he s willing to physically mail them to your house. Still, Jeb Bush hadn t reached the bottom of the desperation pot.Noah then revealed that Bush had enlisted his mother to appear in an ad touting him as the one candidate who seems to be able to solve the country s problems. The Daily Show host noted that Jeb s own mom didn t sound sold on her son s qualifications as presidential material. It s like a guy getting his mom to hit people up on Tinder for him, he said, which led to a video clip showing an exchange between Bush and a voter. Bush asked the voter who she is voting for. After she replied that she didn t know yet, Bush responded, Oh, come on. And thus a new campaign slogan was born.Here s the video via Comedy Central.Seriously, Jeb. Do America a favor and put yourself out of our misery. It s probably the only thing you can do that people will support.Featured Image: Screenshot | 1real |
As Republicans anoint Trump, party grapples with identity crisis | CLEVELAND (Reuters) - On the floor and corridors of the basketball arena hosting the Republican National Convention, in restaurants and bars, hotel lobbies and conference rooms across Cleveland, the talk was of the rise of Donald Trump, whose unlikely presidential candidacy has caused seismic fractures in the Republican Party. While the venues changed, the question didn’t: Where do we go from here? This was the week that Trump was officially nominated as the Republicans’ 2016 presidential candidate and was effectively given control of a party whose leaders have criticized him for his incendiary rhetoric, personal attacks on fellow Republicans, and tendency to stray from decades-old party orthodoxy. He packed the convention hall with his grassroots army of supporters, who seemed almost completely disinterested in his policy positions, even though they could reshape the party for years to come on core issues like trade, immigration and foreign policy. Those who were interested - party veterans, lawmakers, donors and lobbyists - found little clarity in any of the speeches delivered from the convention stage or in conversations with members of the Trump campaign. Are we still a party that embraces free trade and free markets, they asked. Are we still committed to ending abortion rights? Do we want to create a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants or ship all of them out of the country? Paul Ryan, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the most powerful elected Republican, acknowledged that Trump has transformed his party. But he hedged on whether he believes Trump’s impact will be lasting or simply a temporary phenomenon that will dissipate if he loses on Nov. 8. “I don’t know the answer to that question. I really have no idea,” Ryan said at an event in Cleveland. Trump had changed the party, he said, but “how specifically and in what direction, I don’t know.” Even after two days of speeches, Utah delegate Matt Throckmorton was still trying to figure out what a Trump presidency would mean for the Republican Party. “What happens next?” asked Throckmorton. In many way the uncertainty about Trump reflects the conflict within the Republican electorate. The party has struggled to find consensus on a number of key issues, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling during the 2016 campaign season. For example, when asked in March about international trade, the same number of Republicans said it “creates jobs” as said it “causes job losses.” When asked about abortion in June, the number of Republicans who wanted it to be illegal “in all cases” was matched by those who wanted it to be legal “in most cases.” Trump had his biggest stage on Thursday night, when he officially accepted the party’s nomination, to spell out his vision of where he would take the Republican Party if he won the presidency. But his speech, rich in rhetoric, offered scant detail beyond sweeping promises to put “America first.” “If this Trump speech - and this GOP platform - defines what a Republican is today, then it’s hard to say I’m one. Hard for a lot of us,” tweeted Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman under President George W Bush. A week earlier, Republican activists were celebrating the adoption of a deeply conservative political platform that condemned gay marriage and opposed abortion with no exceptions, among other things. Trump’s lineup of speakers at the convention this week barely referenced it. “It’s a little bit frightening,” said Chris Herrod, another Utah delegate, explaining that the platform was one of the main ways delegates could help shape party policy. “And he seems to have an attitude of just completely disregarding it.” Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said Trump was “the future of the Republican Party.” Away from the floor, some anti-Trump Republicans were quietly debating whether it would be better in the long-term interests of the party to lose the White House in November. “This week we’re having some real anguished discussions,” said Vin Weber, a former congressman from Minnesota. “People are falling in line” with Trump, Weber said, “but what does this party believe?” Take trade, for example. Republicans have long been the party of free trade, but Trump has said current trade deals have impoverished American workers and wants to renegotiate them or in some cases block them altogether, like President Barack Obama’s signature Trans-Pacific Partnership. Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and a close Trump ally, worked to ease fears that a Trump administration would derail the U.S. economy by scrapping trade alliances. “He has no interest in breaking up the world market,” Gingrich told a group of diplomats, adding that Trump was, in fact, committed to free trade with some added protections for American companies. “Now how Trump will work this out, I have no idea,” Gingrich added. Some attendees at the convention expressed the hope that Trump would align himself with many of their cherished conservative values but admitted they just didn’t know what he would do once he was in office. They would have found little solace in Gingrich’s remarks to the diplomats. “You will not know what he’s doing every morning, because he will not know what he’s doing every morning,” Gingrich told them, suggesting a Trump presidency would be similar to his candidacy - reactive, spontaneous and centered almost entirely around Trump’s instincts. But Trump’s instincts are sometimes at odds with key elements of the party. For example, he has been more accepting of gay rights and has see-sawed on abortion rights, first defending them and then saying he opposes abortion. “Conservatives are prepared to believe Trump might be wrong 20, 25, maybe 30 percent of the time,” Richard Viguerie, a veteran Republican activist, told Reuters at an anti-abortion event. But, Trump’s opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, “will be wrong 100 percent of the time.” Asked if Trump supported the conservative social values espoused in the platform, he laughed. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll have to wait and see.” Some lawmakers at the convention dismissed some of Trump’s most provocative proposals, like his vow to deport an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, as unlikely to be implemented. “Full-blown deportation is not going to sell politically and I don’t think a Republican Congress, or any Congress, would stand by and watch it happen,” Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma told a group of convention attendees. Some Republicans believe should Trump lose, the party will simply return to its more traditional conservative principles. “The Republican Party is bigger than any one candidate, even a presidential candidate,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster. But Trump supporters said those Republicans were in denial and that Trump had permanently wrested control of the party away from the establishment elites. “Where’s Mitt Romney, where are the Bushes?” said Mary Lou McCoy, who had traveled to Cleveland from Buffalo, New York, referring to the 2012 Republican nominee and the Bush political dynasty. “The people have spoken.” | 0fake |
British negotiators still working on Brexit deal: Treasury minister | LONDON (Reuters) - British negotiators are still working out a deal with the European Union, Treasury minister Liz Truss said on Wednesday, calling reports that the government has agreed a sum of money to pay the Brexit bill media speculation . Truss told parliament that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed in the talks for Britain to leave the EU, saying it would be wrong of her to cut across the ongoing negotiations in Brussels by commenting on the reports. | 0fake |
German political rivals agree: No lottery for me | BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Social Democrat challenger, Martin Schulz are still fighting hard for every vote as Sunday s national election nears, but they do have one thing common: neither is a gambler. Merkel, asked by the mass circulation newspaper Bild what she would do if she won millions of euros in the Lotto lottery, said, I personally don t play Lotto. The conservative leader, a trained physicist and daughter of a pastor who grew up in the former Communist east, Merkel told the paper she donated any money that she won in awards and prizes to charitable groups. Schulz, the former European Parliament president who never went to college, said he also didn t gamble. I ve never played Lotto in my life, he told Bild. I never wanted to leave the question of my success in life up to chance or a lottery drum. The two politicians also share similar views on prayer. Merkel, asked if she prayed to win the election, said she didn t pray for such concrete political results, adding: Prayers are a very personal matter. Schulz, whose party is trailing Merkel s conservatives by double digits, echoed that view. Politicians always have to know that there s something greater than their own success. | 0fake |
Pour booster les ventes, Dassault offre un porte-clé Hello Kitty pour tout achat de Rafale >> Le Gorafi | null | 1real |
Trump’s Newest Foreign Policy Advisor Is One Of The Dumbest People To Ever Serve In Congress | If you weren t having nightmares before about Donald Trump potentially having the nuclear codes, his latest choice for national security advisor should keep you up for months, or at least until November 9th. He has chosen, as a national security advisor, a woman who believes the earth is six million years old and that the world is ending very, very soon anyway. That woman is the former Congresswoman from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann.The campaign hasn t yet confirmed that Bachmann is advising on matters of foreign policy, but she is advising him on evangelical matters and she was, in a bit of tragic irony, part of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence when she was still in Congress. To some who have no idea about anything outside the borders of our country (Donald Trump), it would be logical to believe that she s an expert on foreign policy. She s not.As for her reputed position as a foreign policy advisor on Trump s team, Bachmann says this:The former Minnesota congresswoman attended a fundraiser in the state for Trump on Saturday, where she revealed to the press that she has his ear on foreign policy. He also recognizes there is a threat around the world, not just here in Minnesota, of radical Islam, she said, according to MPR News. I wish our President Obama also understood the threat of radical Islam and took it seriously. He s a common-sense guy, not into political correctness, Bachmann added, according to the Star Tribune.Source: The HillLet s forget for a moment that Bachmann is a disaster on social issues. She hates gay people. She thinks the Founding Fathers outlawed slavery. She is anti-science. She s an anti-government conspiracy theorist. She thinks half of all African-American pregnancies end in abortion. She thinks that there would be no unemployment if there were no minimum wage. She thinks the U.S. is running out of rich people.As for her foreign expertise, she believes that the United States wants some sort of global currency. She believes Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. That would be Tel Aviv. She believes Sharia Law is around every corner. More significantly, she believes that there s no point in making the world a better place because Jesus will come vacuum everyone up to Heaven within the very near future. We know that there is more prophecy of Jesus second coming even than there was in the first, she said. We also should be encouraged and empowered as believers in Jesus Christ now more than ever with the Bible in one hand, the newspaper in another, to say to our neighbors and co-workers and people at church, this is about the Lord speaking to the world that, I am coming soon. Source: The BlazeAre you frightened yet?h/t: Buzzfeed | Featured image via Jeff Swensen at Getty Images. | 1real |
Report: Online Dating Lowers People’s Standards - Breitbart | Using online dating services can lead to the lowering of the user’s standards, according to a recent university report. [The report was based on a survey by the Queensland University of Technology, who used data from over 41, 000 participants between the ages of 18 and 80 that were using the Australian dating site RSVP. “We looked at whether or not people actually contact people who match what they say is their ideal partner in their profile, and our findings show they don’t,” said Queensland University of Technology behavioral economist Stephen Whyte. “Stating a preference for what you are looking for appears to have little to no bearing on the characteristics of people you actually contact. ” “Disclosure of ‘ideal’ partner preferences is a widely offered and option for people creating a profile on online dating websites, but whether it’s effective or useful in helping people find that special someone is unclear,” he continued. “This study provides quite unique findings in that people may state a preference for an ideal partner but they are more than happy to initiate contact with potential love interests that bear no resemblance whatsoever to that ‘Mr or Mrs Perfect’ they initially think they prefer over all others. ” “As Internet and cyber dating continues to grow at a rapid rate further research is required into the process and the links between stated preferences and actual choice,” Whyte concluded. “Our study reviewed the interactions of people whose ages ranged from millennials to octogenarians, which in itself demonstrates how widespread online dating is and how it is changing traditional ways in which people find potential love interests. ” Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 0fake |
Trump Assails Nordstrom for ‘Unfairly’ Dropping His Daughter Ivanka’s Line - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — President Trump lashed out on Wednesday at the Nordstrom department store chain for dropping his daughter Ivanka’s accessories and clothing line, once again raising ethical questions about the relationship between his presidency and his family’s sprawling business interests. Mr. Trump has already broken with tradition by singling out companies for criticism, like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, automakers and news organizations, sometimes causing gyrations in their stock prices and prompting debates about whether corporations would tailor their conduct to suit a bellicose president. But in those cases, his ire targeted government contracts, departing American jobs or news coverage — not his own family’s personal fortunes. Six days after Nordstrom announced that, based on sales, it would no longer carry Ms. Trump’s products — a decision that prompted some Trump supporters to call for a boycott of the stores — the president took to Twitter to complain that “Ivanka has been treated so unfairly” by the company. He first posted the message from his personal account, and then it from his official White House account. Mr. Trump’s complaint also raised questions about how he might handle the moves of numerous other companies as their relationships with Trump brands change. The large national discount retailers T. J. Maxx and Marshalls, and Neiman Marcus, the luxury department store, for example, have recently taken steps to give less prominence to Ms. Trump’s products. Sean Spicer, Mr. Trump’s press secretary, said the president’s tweet was not about business but about “an attack on his daughter. ” “For people to take out their concern about his actions, or his executive orders, on members of his family, he has every right to stand up for his family,” Mr. Spicer said. It was not clear if Mr. Spicer was referring to critics of Mr. Trump who have called for a boycott of businesses bearing the family name, or to some political motive by Nordstrom. After the president temporarily barred people from seven countries from entering the United States, Nordstrom sent its employees a statement saying that it valued immigrants and offered support to those affected by the executive order. On Wednesday, responding to Mr. Spicer’s comments, Nordstrom maintained that it had pulled Ms. Trump’s products based on their declining sales performance. The company said it informed Ms. Trump of its decision in early January. “Over the past year, and particularly in the last half of 2016, sales of the brand have steadily declined to the point where it didn’t make good business sense for us to continue with the line for now,” the Nordstrom statement said. “We’ve had a great relationship with the Ivanka Trump team. ” As Mr. Trump has noted several times, the president is exempt from conflict of interest provisions in federal law that prohibit other government officials from using their positions to benefit themselves or their family members financially. So even if his post was meant to intimidate Nordstrom or other retailers that still work with Ivanka Trump, it probably does not violate conflict of interest rules, said ethics experts, who nonetheless called it inappropriate. “It is a total misuse of presidential power,” said Lawrence M. Noble, the general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center and formerly the top lawyer at the Federal Election Commission. “He is really bringing to bear the whole weight of the office of president on a business decision. Take another company that is considering whether or not to drop her line — they obviously are going to ask themselves if they want to be attacked by the president. ” Mr. Trump’s blast at Nordstrom came two days after his wife, Melania, filed a libel lawsuit that described her “multiyear term” as “one of the most photographed women in the world” — an apparent reference to her status as a candidate’s wife and now first lady — as a lucrative business opportunity. And Mr. Spicer, the White House spokesman, has urged people to visit the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which opened late last year. Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a group that promotes ethics in government, said Mr. Trump’s swipe at Nordstrom was not a major issue in itself. But Mr. Weissman said it demonstrates that as president, Mr. Trump continues to have multiple conflicts of interest with his own and his family’s business interests. Mr. Trump refuses to sell his assets or put them into a blind trust, but he has said that he has ceded operation of his businesses to his adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric. “He has committed to severing himself from the family business operations,” Mr. Weissman said. “That is obviously not the case. ” Ivanka Trump has no formal role in the administration, but her father has included her in meetings with foreign officials and business leaders, and her husband, Jared Kushner, is an adviser to the president. After years as a business executive, Ms. Trump has suddenly found herself without a clear path to walk as she adjusts to life in Washington. She has expressed frustration to a number of associates with Nordstrom’s decision, describing it as a political move and maintaining that the sales of her brand had not sagged. While she is no longer involved in the management of her business, she is said to be acutely aware of the controversies surrounding her product line. The Trump presidency is forcing retailers to rethink their relationships with Trump product lines, weighing how well they sell and what actions will anger or placate the largest number of customers. After Nordstrom said it was dropping Ivanka Trump’s merchandise, Trump supporters on social media began calling for a boycott of the stores. Last week, T. J. Maxx and Marshalls stores sent a note to employees — a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times — telling them to throw away signs for Ivanka Trump products. “Effective immediately, please remove all Ivanka Trump merchandise from features and mix into” the racks where most products hang, the note read. “All Ivanka Trump signs should be discarded. ” The instruction was to eliminate special displays for the merchandise, “not to remove it from the sales floor,” said Doreen Thompson, a spokeswoman for the TJX Companies, the retailers’ parent corporation. “We offer a rapidly changing selection of merchandise for our customers, and brands are featured based on a number of factors,” she said. Ms. Thompson did not respond directly to questions about whether instructing stores to discard signs was unusual. But an employee at one of the company’s stores, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said she had not received such a request during her several years working there. Neiman Marcus recently stopped selling Ms. Trump’s jewelry and accessories through its website, but her clothes are still sold at Macy’s, the nation’s largest department store chain, as well as its sister company Bloomingdale’s, where her shoes and handbags are available online. In August, Bloomingdale’s committed to selling her clothes in seven of its stores, according to a spokeswoman, Anne Keating. “I think they all have probably been looking closely at Ivanka’s sales numbers and weighing whether they’re worth all the problems she’s brought them,” said Shannon Coulter, who helped found #GrabYourWallet, an online campaign to boycott Trump products. | 0fake |
Why Are Russia and China Buying Up All of America’s Food? Paul Martin and Dave Hodges |
The Port of New Orleans is quickly running out of food. The Russians and the Chinese are buying up a good portion of America’s grain and food. Inside sources are saying that China is preparing to buy up all beef. What is behind these actions. Could it have anything to do with an impending War between China and Russia and the United States.
The threat is greater than one can imagine. The details are in the following video.
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Whoopi Goldberg FURIOUS Over Trump’s John Lewis Attacks, GOES OFF In PERFECT Pre-Inauguration Rant (VIDEO) | As the majority of Americans are completely depressed and worried sick over what is going to happen to this country after President-elect Donald Trump is officially in charge, The View came through to perfectly point out just why Trump is such a concern.On Tuesday, co-host Whoopi Goldberg brought up a topic that most of us are still extremely upset about, especially right after Martin Luther King Day Trump s vicious attacks on civil rights leader and Democratic Congressman John Lewis. Tearing Trump a new one for throwing a temper tantrum just because Lewis said he didn t consider Trump a legitimate president (face it, most of us don t), Goldberg reminded Trump that he himself has been raising questions and conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama s legitimacy for years. Urging Trump to grow the hell up and get yourself right , she pointed out just how thin-skinned Trump is when she said: You can t do it for eight years and then be pissed off that someone does the same thing to you, comrade. Look, that s what America is built on, man. And if you re going to be the president you ve got to get yourself right, because people are going to be coming at you because now there are questions about your presidency. Maybe the same kind of BS questions you might have had if you d been thinking, had you thought about this. The women on The View also made sure to note that Lewis, the man that Trump accused of being all talk, talk, talk no action or results, had suffered a fractured skull while marching with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma. Meanwhile, Trump had dodged the draft and has no examples of ever being of service to others. Clearly, we all know who the real bullsh*tter is here.Railing against Trump for his complete meltdown in the form of various Twitter attacks not only on Lewis, but on CIA director John Brennan and Alec Baldwin (and others), Goldberg said what most of us have been thinking the whole time: You ve got too much time on your hands, man. You better be trying to figure out what to do! Exactly. You can watch the women of The View rip Trump apart in the two-part series below:Featured image via screenshots | 1real |
Hillary Clinton en 5 dates >> Le Gorafi | null | 1real |
Syria Calls on UN to ‘Punish’ Israel Over Airport Attack | BEIRUT (AP) — Syria on Friday called on the international community to “punish” Israel for an apparent missile attack on a major military airport west of Damascus, and accused the US, Britain and France of supporting the assault. [The Syrian Foreign Ministry condemned the missile attack in two letters to the UN and the president of the UN Security Council, saying such an attack would not have occurred had it not been for the “direct support from the outgoing American administration and French and British leaderships. ” The ministry said the Israeli assault on the Mezzeh military airport comes as part of a series of periodic Israel attacks that started with Syria’s war in March 2011. It called on the international community to “punish the Israeli aggressor. ” The attack was the third such incident recently, according to the Syrian government. In a statement carried on the official news agency SANA, the Syrian military said several missiles were launched just after midnight from an area near Lake Tiberias. The missiles fell in the vicinity of the Mezzeh military airport on the western edge of the Syrian capital. The statement did not say whether there were any casualties. Residents of Damascus reported hearing several explosions that shook the city. The Mezzeh airport compound, located on the southwestern edge of the capital, had been used to launch attacks on areas near Damascus and has previously come under rebel fire. The Syrian army said Israel, through its attacks, was assisting “terrorist groups” fighting the Syrian government. “The Syrian army command and armed forces warn the Israeli enemy of the repercussions of this blatant attack and stress that it will continue its war on terrorism,” the statement said. On Dec. 7, the Syrian government reported Israel fired missiles that also struck near the Mezzeh airport. A week earlier, SANA said Israeli jets fired two missiles from Lebanese airspace toward the outskirts of Damascus, in the Sabboura area. The Israeli military has declined to comment on those incidents, and there was no immediate comment on Friday’s reported attack. Israel is widely believed to have carried out a number of airstrikes in Syria in the past few years that have targeted advanced weapons systems, including missiles and missiles, as well as positions of the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group in Syria. The Shiite group has sent thousands of its fighters to Syria to support President Bashar Assad’s forces in the country’s civil war, now in its sixth year. Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman recently reiterated his government’s position to not get involved in the Syrian war. | 0fake |
Senators pledge aggressive Russia probe after meeting with U.S. Justice Department's No. 2 | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday vowed to press ahead with their investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election as aggressively as possible despite turmoil over the firing of the FBI director. The panel’s Republican Chairman Richard Burr and ranking Democrat Mark Warner made the comments to reporters following a meeting with U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in the wake of President Donald Trump’s firing of James Comey this week. | 0fake |
Report: Marines Nude Photo-Sharing Scandal Suspect Facing Court-Martial, Another Discharged - Breitbart | A Marine Corps service member is facing a while another has been discharged following the “Marines United” nude scandal. [“[Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert] Neller told Senate Armed Services Committee lawmakers that 65 individuals were identified in the scandal — in which service members allegedly shared nude photos of female Marines and veterans in the private Facebook group ‘Marines United,’ — and that 59 were sent to their commands for possible disciplinary or administrative action,” reported The Hill on Thursday. “Of the 59 individuals, seven have received punishment, 20 have received ‘adverse administrative actions,’ and one Marine has been administratively separated. ” “The service is also planning an Article 32 hearing to determine whether there is enough evidence to warrant a on one suspect, but Neller did not say if it was a Marine,” they continued. General Robert Neller also detailed how he and other leaders spoke to “tens of thousands” of Marines to make them understand their responsibility. “I’ve gone personally, as all of my leaders have gone, and spoken to literally tens of thousands of Marines and made them understand what their responsibilities are,” claimed Neller. “The social media things that we’ve seen have been … were just indicative of a problem within our culture that we did not properly respect or value the contributions of women in our Corps and that’s the problem we have to fix. ” In April, it was reported that sharing private nude photos had been made a crime in the U. S. Marine Corps and Navy following the scandal, which led to nude images of female Marines ending up for sale on the dark web. Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 0fake |
‘Go Back to Where You Claim Home,’ Kansas Lawmaker Tells Protester | ‘Go Back to Where You Claim Home,’ Kansas Lawmaker Tells Protester Dion Lefler, Wichita Eagle, October 25, 2016
Kansas state Rep. Joe Seiwert commented on Facebook that an African-American singer who knelt while performing “The Star Spangled Banner” at a Miami Heat game should “go back” to where she claims as home.
Seiwert, R-Pretty Prairie, posted that comment and a longer follow-up on an anti-black meme that was originally posted to a pro-Donald Trump Facebook group and then shared by one of Seiwert’s constituents.
Seiwert confirmed the comments were his and said he was exercising his First Amendment right to free speech, as he says the woman in the meme did when she wore a Black Lives Matter T-shirt and knelt while singing the anthem.
{snip}
The photo in the meme is of Denasia Lawrence, a Miami social worker and, according to the Miami Sun-Sentinel, a part-time game-night employee of the Heat professional basketball team. The team has issued a statement saying team officials were unaware that Lawrence planned to protest when they asked her to sing the anthem at Friday’s preseason game with the Philadelphia 76ers.
{snip}
To which Seiwert responded: “I am where I claim home and like it, they want to claim it and it is their right to go where ever they like, so if they don’t like it here, I believe that their freedom completely allows them to go wherever they believe is more free and non racist if that’s what they believe.”
Seiwert said he didn’t see the profanity in the meme when he commented and didn’t do anything wrong.
“I have a personal life besides a legislative life,” he said. “Maybe it was inappropriate; I don’t believe so, because I said nothing derogatory. And I believe that (if) people are that upset with the national anthem, they can do whatever they want to on their own time, but when they’re using it on national TV to make a statement, that’s not right.
“I said if she (Lawrence) doesn’t like it here, then go where she would like it. What’s wrong with that?” he said.
Asked why a person should leave rather than try to change things where they are, Seiwert responded: “Because maybe there’s other people who don’t want their place changed.”
He also said he did not think his comments had anything to do with race.
“It don’t make any difference if they’re black, white or green, it’s the disrespect to our country,” he said. “And why does everybody put the color to it?”
{snip}
The person who made the meme took a photo of Lawrence from the web and added, in capital letters, “KNEELING WHILE SINGING THE NATIONAL ANTHEM . . . I’M SO SICK OF THESE ANTI-AMERICAN BLACKS . . . (Expletive) BLACK LIVES MATTER.”
Seiwert’s comment, directed at Lawrence, was: “Go back to where you claim home than (sic).”
{snip} | 1real |
“Nothing Good Can Come of This Election”–and That’s Good | Posted on November 4, 2016 by Charles Hugh Smith
The overwhelming consensus of the punditry across the political spectrum is that “Nothing Good Can Come of This Election”–and that’s a very good thing. The handwringing goes like this: The country is deeply divided by schisms that cannot be bridged, every institution from the two parties to the mainstream media to the Department of Justice has been tarnished by cover-ups, collusion or worse; whomever wins the election will enter the presidency without a mandate, and so on.
Why is “nothing good can come of this” good? Because ridding the nation of its political corruption will require hitting bottom.
Just as an alcoholic or drug addict is incapable of making any truly positive changes until he/she hits absolute bottom, so it is with our tolerance of a corrupt political system that is poisoning the nation, one injection of corrupt cash, collusion and pay-to-play at a time.
If our rotten-to-the-core politics as usual is indeed flying off the cliff to complete destruction, that is an unalloyed good.
Just as alcoholics continue down their self-destructive path with the aid of enablers, so too has the corrupt political order expanded with the aid of the Mainstream Media, insiders in the Department of Justice, K Street lobbyists and a veritable army of well-paid lackeys, pundits, academics, apparatchiks and assorted toadies in the organs of governance and in the big-money private sector and philanthro-capitalist dynasties of pay-to-play foundations.
The only way anything will truly change in the political order is if every Establishment insider politico loses every election, from the presidency to dogcatcher. Nothing will change until the mere existence of a private foundation like the Clinton Foundation triggers a landslide loss for the politico with ties to such corruption.
Nothing will change until the collusion of the mainstream media (supplying the insider candidate with debate questions, etc.) alone causes the colluding candidate to lose by a landslide.
Nothing will change until candidates who refuse to accept any donation larger than $100 from anyone or any entity beat the Goldman Sachs/Saudi prince-funded insider candidates by a landslide.
Nothing will change until candidates who fund costly negative TV advertising campaigns with millions in pay-to-play “contributions” from Goldman Sachs et al. lose by a landslide.
You get the point: we the citizens and voters have to stop being enablers of systemic corruption. We have to stop being bamboozled by insiders with promises of “hope and change” and the usual negative TV blitzes funded by corrupt big money.
It’s easy to blame lax campaign laws or the corrupted candidates and their insider toadies, but ultimately we’re responsible for enabling corruption, collusion, pay-for-play and a political and financial Elite that’s above the law.
From the point of view of the corrupted, colluding insiders, MSM flunkies, Department of Justice lackeys and well-paid parrot-pundits, nothing good can come from this election because half the voters may actually cast off the shackles of the nation’s corrupt and corrupting political and financial Elites.
This mass rejection of the politics as usual of corrupt and corrupting political and financial Elites is the highest possible good –a public good that eludes the hand-wringing corrupt insiders, pundits and toadies who have sucked up fortunes from the trough of putrid systemic corruption. | 1real |
Too early to say if UK has made sufficient progress in Brexit talks: Irish PM | LONDON (Reuters) - Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said on Monday it was not possible to say that Britain had made sufficient progress to move onto the next phase of Brexit talks with the European Union, adding there was a bit of a way to go yet . When it comes to making a recommendation as to whether sufficient progress has been made, it s too early to say. That s a decision that will be made by the 27 prime ministers including me when we meet in Brussels in October, Varadkar said after a meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May in her Downing Street office. It s possible that between now and the decision point in October that may happen. I don t think at this stage it would be possible to say that sufficient progress has yet been made. Varadkar said it was important that Britain had committed to not having any physical infrastructure on the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. He also said neither he did not believe there would be any advantage in having another election in Northern Ireland to solve an impasse in the British province after a power-sharing coalition collapsed in January - but added that he did not favor a return to direct rule from London. | 0fake |
Harnessing the Immune System to Fight Cancer - The New York Times | Steve Cara expected to sail through the routine medical tests required to increase his life insurance in October 2014. But the results were devastating. He had lung cancer, at age 53. It had begun to spread, and doctors told him it was inoperable. A few years ago, they would have suggested chemotherapy. Instead, his oncologist, Dr. Matthew D. Hellmann of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, recommended an experimental treatment: immunotherapy. Rather than attacking the cancer directly, as chemo does, immunotherapy tries to rally the patient’s own immune system to fight the disease. Uncertain, Mr. Cara sought a second opinion. A doctor at another major hospital read his scans and pathology report, then asked what Dr. Hellmann had advised. When the doctor heard the answer, Mr. Cara recalled, “he closed up the folder, handed it back to me and said, ‘Run back there as fast as you can. ’” Many others are racing down the same path. Harnessing the immune system to fight cancer, long a medical dream, is becoming a reality. Remarkable stories of tumors melting away and terminal illnesses going into remissions that last years — backed by solid data — have led to an explosion of interest and billions of dollars of investments in the rapidly growing field of immunotherapy. Pharmaceutical companies, philanthropists and the federal government’s “cancer moonshot” program are pouring money into developing treatments. Medical conferences on the topic are packed. All this has brought new optimism to cancer doctors — a sense that they have begun tapping into a force of nature, the medical equivalent of splitting the atom. “This is a fundamental change in the way that we think about cancer therapy,” said Dr. Jedd Wolchok, chief of melanoma and immunotherapeutics services at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Hundreds of clinical trials involving immunotherapy, alone or combined with other treatments, are underway for nearly every type of cancer. “People are asking, waiting, pleading to get into these trials,” said Dr. Arlene an oncologist at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who specializes in bladder cancer. The immune system — a network of cells, tissues and biochemicals that they secrete — defends the body against viruses, bacteria and other invaders. But cancer often finds ways to hide from the immune system or block its ability to fight. Immunotherapy tries to help the immune system recognize cancer as a threat, and attack it. Doctors tried a primitive version of immunotherapy against cancer more than 100 years ago. It sometimes worked remarkably well, but often did not, and they did not understand why. Eventually, radiation and chemotherapy eclipsed it. Researchers are now focused on two promising types of immunotherapy. One creates a new, individualized treatment for each patient by removing some of the person’s immune cells, altering them genetically to kill cancer and then infusing them back into the bloodstream. This treatment has produced long remissions in a few hundred children and adults with deadly forms of leukemia or lymphoma for whom standard treatments had failed. The second approach, far more widely used and the one Mr. Cara tried, involves drugs that do not have to be tailored to each patient. The drugs free immune cells to fight cancer by blocking a mechanism — called a checkpoint — that cancer uses to shut down the immune system. These drugs, called checkpoint inhibitors, have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat advanced melanoma, Hodgkin’s lymphoma and cancers of the lung, kidney and bladder. More drugs in this class are in the pipeline. Patients are clamoring for checkpoint drugs, including one, Keytruda, known to many as “that Jimmy Carter drug” which, combined with surgery and radiation, has left the former president with no sign of recurrence even though melanoma had spread to his liver and brain. Checkpoint inhibitors have become an important option for people like Mr. Cara, with advanced lung cancer. “We can say in all honesty to patients, that while we can’t tell them we can cure metastatic lung cancer right now, we can tell them there’s real hope that they can live for years, and for a lot of patients many years, which really is a complete ” said Dr. John V. Heymach, a lung cancer specialist and chairman of and neck medical oncology at M. D. Anderson. Yet for all the promise and excitement, the fact is that so far, immunotherapy has worked in only a minority of patients, and researchers are struggling to find out why. They know they have their hands on an extraordinarily powerful tool, but they cannot fully understand or control it yet. Mr. Cara, an apparel industry executive from Bridgewater, N. J. had lung cancer, the most common form of the disease. The diagnosis shattered what had been an idyllic life: a happy marriage, sons in college, a successful career, a beautiful home, regular vacations, plenty of golf. In December 2014, he began treatment with two checkpoint inhibitors. They cost about $150, 000 a year, but as a study subject he did not have to pay. These medicines work on killer white blood cells that are often described as the soldiers of the immune system. are so fierce that they have brakes — the checkpoints — to shut them down and keep them from attacking normal tissue, which could result in autoimmune disorders like Crohn’s disease, lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. One checkpoint stops from multiplying another weakens them and shortens their life span. As the name suggests, checkpoint inhibitors block the checkpoints, so cancer cannot use them to turn off the immune system. Mr. Cara took drugs to inhibit both types of checkpoints. Every two weeks, he had intravenous infusions of Yervoy and Opdivo, both made by Squibb. He had no problems at first, just a bit of fatigue the day after the infusion. He rarely missed work. But turning the wrath of the immune system against cancer can be a risky endeavor: Sometimes the patient’s own body gets caught in the crossfire. About two months into the treatment, Mr. Cara broke out in a rash all over his arms, back and chest. It became so severe that he had to go off the drugs. A steroid cream cleared it up and he was able to resume treatment — but with only one drug, Opdivo. Doctors stopped the other in hopes of minimizing the side effects. Checkpoint inhibitors can take months to begin working, and sometimes cause inflammation that, on scans early in treatment, can make it look like the tumor is growing. But Mr. Cara’s first scans, in March 2015, were stunning. His tumor had shrunk by a third. By August, more than half of the tumor had vanished. The rash came back, however, and worsened. Steroids worked again, but in October a far more alarming side effect set in: breathing trouble. Doctors diagnosed pneumonitis, a lung inflammation caused by an attack from the immune system — a known risk of checkpoint drugs. Continuing the treatment posed too great a danger. Mr. Cara stopped the infusions, but the months of treatment seemed to have transformed his cancer to stage 2 from stage 4, meaning that it was now operable. This spring surgeons removed about a third of his right lung, and discovered that the cancer was actually gone. “No cancer was seen in any of the tissue they took out,” Dr. Hellmann said. “‘One hundred percent treatment effect,’” he read from the pathology report. “It was pretty cool. ” Immunotherapy had apparently wiped out the disease. “It’s amazing. Unbelievable,” Mr. Cara said. As of now, he needs no further treatment, but he will be monitored regularly. He is back to work, and golf. “He’s had the best possible response,” Dr. Hellmann said. “I hope that remains permanent. Only time will tell, and I think he’s conscious of that. ” Mr. Cara acknowledged, “Is there something in the back of me that says this thing never goes away, it could come back any time? Sure. But it’s not the main thing I think. I’m young, I’m strong, I’m healthy, my pathology report came back clean. ” He considered framing that pathology report. But, he said, “I don’t want to jinx myself. ” When checkpoint inhibitors work, they can really work, producing long remissions that start to look like cures and that persist even after treatment stops. Twenty percent to 40 percent of patients, sometimes more, have good responses. But for many patients, the drugs do not work at all. For others, they work for a while and then stop. The vexing question, and the focus of research, is, why? One theory is that additional checkpoints, not yet discovered, may play a role. The hunt is on to find them, and then make new drugs to act on them. Despite the gaps in knowledge, checkpoint inhibitors are coming into widespread use and are being tried in advanced types of cancer for which standard chemotherapy offers little hope. One example is anal cancer, a painful disease that carries a stigma because it is often linked to the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus or HPV, which also causes cervical cancer. Lee, 59, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her privacy, found out in 2014 that she had the disease, and that it had spread to her liver. “I was told I’d be dead in 12 to 18 months with treatment, six months with no treatment,” she said. Chemotherapy and radiation at a hospital near Dallas brought a remission that lasted only a few months. The cancer spread to her lungs. Bedridden and in severe pain, she entered an immunotherapy trial at M. D. Anderson. In May 2015 she began receiving Opdivo every two weeks. The tumors in her liver and lungs have shrunk by about 70 percent. She is back at work. While the drugs initially were given only to people with advanced disease, especially those who had little to lose because chemotherapy had stopped working, Dr. Heymach of M. D. Anderson predicted that soon some patients — including some with earlier stages of lung cancer — will receive checkpoint inhibitors as their first treatment. Immunotherapy is also enabling doctors to help patients in unexpected ways. Until recently, surgeons were reluctant to operate on people with advanced cancer because they knew from experience that it would not lengthen the patient’s life. But checkpoint inhibitors are changing that. For instance, some patients have taken checkpoint inhibitors for an advanced cancer that had spread around the body, and wound up with only one stubborn tumor left. They then have had it surgically removed and have gone years without a relapse. “Time has slowed down to the point where you can pay attention to individual tumors, since you’re not running to put out the fire of wholesale systemic progression,” Dr. Wolchok said. If there is a potential downside to the advances, Dr. Hellmann said, it is that the buzz about immunotherapy has led some patients to think chemotherapy is passé. “Immunotherapy represents a hugely important new tool, but chemotherapy can work too and has been the backbone of the way we’ve treated patients with lung cancer,” he said. “Immunotherapy is not a replacement for that. It’s a new weapon. ” One of his patients, a man with lung cancer that had spread to his brain, was eager to try immunotherapy instead of chemotherapy. After having radiation treatment for one brain tumor, he began treatment with two checkpoint inhibitors. But they did not work. So his doctors switched to chemotherapy. “He’s had a tremendous response,” Dr. Hellmann said. He said it was impossible to tell whether the immunotherapy could have had some delayed effect and worked synergistically with the chemotherapy. Clinical trials are now trying to resolve that question. But the potential for dangerous side effects cannot be overemphasized, doctors say. A 2010 article in a medical journal reported that a few melanoma patients had died from adverse effects of Yervoy. In addition to causing lung inflammation, checkpoint inhibitors can lead to rheumatoid arthritis and colitis, a severe inflammation of the intestine — the result of an attack by the immune system that remedies cannot treat. Patients need steroids like prednisone to quell these attacks. Fortunately — and mysteriously, Dr. Wolchok said — the steroids can halt the gut trouble without stopping the immune fight against the cancer. But if patients delay telling doctors about diarrhea, Dr. Wolchok warned, “they could die” from colitis. Checkpoint inhibitors can also slow down vital glands — pituitary, adrenal or thyroid — creating a permanent need for hormone treatment. Mr. Cara, for instance, now needs thyroid medication, almost certainly as a result of his treatment. Doctors have reported that a patient with a kidney transplant rejected it after taking a checkpoint inhibitor to treat cancer, apparently because the drug spurred his immune system to attack the organ. Another of Dr. Hellmann’s patients, Joanne Sabol, 65, had to quit a checkpoint inhibitor because of severe colitis. But she had taken it for about two years, and it shrank a large abdominal tumor by 78 percent. Patients like her are in uncharted territory, and doctors are trying to decide whether to operate to remove what is left of her tumor. “I have aggressive cancer, but I’m not giving in to it,” Ms. Sabol said. “It’s going to be a big battle with me. ” Dr. William B. Coley, an American surgeon born in 1862, is widely considered the father of cancer immunotherapy. But he practiced a crude form of it, without understanding how it worked. Distressed by the painful death of a young woman he had treated for a sarcoma, a bone cancer, in 1891, Dr. Coley began to study the records of other sarcoma patients in New York, according to Dr. David. B. Levine, a medical historian and orthopedic surgeon. One case leapt out at him: a patient who had several unsuccessful operations to remove a huge sarcoma from his face, and wound up with a severe infection, then called erysipelas, caused by Streptococcal bacteria. The patient was not expected to survive, but he did — and the cancer disappeared. Dr. Coley found other cases in which cancer went away after erysipelas. Not much was known about the immune system, and he suspected, mistakenly, that the bacteria were somehow destroying the tumors. Researchers today think the infection set off an intense immune response that killed both the germs and the cancer. Dr. Coley was not alone in believing that bacteria could fight cancer. In a letter to a colleague in 1890, the Russian physician and playwright Anton Chekhov wrote of erysipelas: “It has long been noted that the growth of malignant tumors halts for a time when this disease is present. ” Dr. Coley began to inject terminally ill cancer patients with Streptococcal bacteria in the 1890s. His first patient, a drug addict with an advanced sarcoma, was expected to die within weeks, but the disease went into remission and he lived eight years. Dr. Coley treated other patients, with mixed results. Some tumors regressed, but sometimes the bacteria caused infections that went out of control. Dr. Coley developed an extract of bacteria that came to be called Coley’s mixed toxins, and he treated hundreds of patients over several decades. Many became quite ill, with shaking chills and raging fevers. But some were cured. and Company began producing Coley’s toxins in 1899, and continued for 30 years. Various hospitals in Europe and the United States, including the Mayo Clinic, used the toxins, but the results were not consistent. Early in the 20th century, radiation treatment came into use. Its results were more predictable, and the cancer establishment began turning away from Coley’s toxins. Dr. Coley’s own institution, Memorial Hospital (now Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center) instituted a policy in 1915 stating that inpatients had to be given radiation, not the toxins. Some other hospitals continued using them, but interest gradually waned. Dr. Coley died in 1936. Chemotherapy, developed after World War II, was another blow to his methods. And in 1965, the American Cancer Society added Coley’s toxins to its list of “unproven” treatments. (The toxins were later taken off the list.) After Dr. Coley’s death, his daughter, Helen Coley Nauts, studied some 800 case records that he had left behind, and became convinced that he was onto something important. She tried to rekindle interest in his work, but she was thwarted by doctors who opposed it, including some with high rank at Sloan Kettering. However, in 1953 she founded the Cancer Research Institute in New York, a nonprofit that has become a significant supporter of research on the interplay between cancer and the immune system. The group awarded more than $29. 4 million in scientific grants in 2015, and its advisory board includes Dr. Wolchok and the scientist credited with developing the first checkpoint inhibitor, James P. Allison. “Are you Dr. Allison?” James Allison and his wife, Dr. Padmanee Sharma, had just settled into their airplane seats when another passenger approached with tears in her eyes and thanked him for creating the drug that was keeping her husband alive. Dr. Sharma described the encounter during a joint interview with her and Dr. Allison in his office at M. D. Anderson in Houston, where both work. “Every time Jim meets a patient, he cries,” Dr. Sharma said. “Well, not every time,” Dr. Allison said. Dr. Allison, 67, and Dr. Sharma, 45, have been research collaborators since 2005, and spouses since 2014, when he proposed by saying that nobody else could stand either of them — they talk about their work all the time — so they might as well get married. The drug the woman on the plane thanked him for was Yervoy, the first of the checkpoint inhibitors. It was approved for advanced melanoma in 2011. Dr. Allison — a scientist, not a physician — has won numerous research awards and is expected by many to win a Nobel Prize. He drives a Porsche convertible with a license plate bearing the name of the checkpoint he deciphered: . A bearded, slightly rumpled figure, Dr. Allison plays harmonica with research colleagues in a band called the Checkpoints. He is good enough to have accompanied Willie Nelson onstage at the Redneck Country Club in Stafford, Tex. this spring, playing, “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die. ” Immunology, particularly the study of has been his life’s work. Cancer came later. “I became interested in cancer because I’ve lost a number of family members to cancer,” said Dr. Allison, chairman of the immunology department and executive director of the immunotherapy platform at M. D. Anderson. “My mother and two of her brothers, and my own brother, died of cancer. ” Around the time of his brother’s death from prostate cancer, Dr. Allison learned that he had the same disease himself. He was treated successfully, he said, adding with a laugh that he was more likely to die from inactivity than from cancer. In the 1990s, Dr. Allison, then at the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Jeffrey Bluestone of the University of California, San Francisco, independently made a landmark discovery: They proved that a molecule widely believed to activate the immune system actually shut it down. The molecule was a protein on the surface of — a crucial checkpoint — and it was nature’s way of subduing the apparently to dial back their ferocious activity and prevent them from attacking a person’s own tissue. Cancer cells can sometimes lock onto checkpoints, disabling the . Dr. Allison wondered if it might be possible to block the checkpoint and launch the against cancer. He and a graduate student, Matthew Krummel, developed an antibody — a molecule made by certain cells of the immune system — that would stick to the checkpoint and block it. When the researchers, including Dana Leach, a postdoctoral fellow, gave the antibody to mice with cancer, tumors vanished. Recalling those first tests in mice, Dr. Allison said it was astounding to see the cancers shrink and disappear. Veterinarians thought the mice had contracted an infection or a skin disease. But the sores that worried the vets were actually tumors that were ulcerating and rotting away under assault by . Many drug companies were skeptical about the findings, but one, Medarex, created a human version of the antibody. Medarex was later acquired by Squibb, and the antibody, given the trade name Yervoy, was approved in 2011 to treat advanced melanoma. It became the first drug to prolong survival in people with this deadly form of cancer. Major studies that started before it was approved found that among 1, 861 patients treated for advanced disease, about 22 percent were still alive three years later, with no signs of recurrence — an astounding result for a disease that was almost always fatal. Some have survived 10 years or longer. The discoveries that led to the drug, Dr. Allison said, came entirely from years of basic research in immunology — experiments in test tubes and mice — and not from the clinical or “translational” science, aimed at moving rapidly into humans, that is so heavily favored now by institutions that pay for studies. “None of this came from cancer research, none,” Dr. Allison said, adding that without support for basic research, “progress, if any, will be incremental, not a big leap. ” His own work is well funded, he said, but he worries about an overall trend to shortchange basic science. The focus of much of his and Dr. Sharma’s research now is to understand how and why checkpoint inhibitors work in some patients and not others. Dr. Sharma, a professor of genitourinary medical oncology, is a physician and researcher who treats patients and oversees clinical trials, and she brings stories home to Dr. Allison about patients whose lives may be extended by his discoveries. In general, checkpoint inhibitors seem to work best for tumors with many mutations, like most melanomas and cancers of the lung and bladder. “It’s like buying a lottery ticket,” Dr. Sharma said. “The more genetic abnormalities, the more lottery tickets you’ve bought — and you have a much higher chance of a recognizing something to start the immune response. ” One area of particular interest is the tissue immediately in and around a tumor, what researchers call the microenvironment. By examining that zone, scientists can tell whether are fighting the cancer. Sometimes mob the margins of a tumor, but cannot get in. Other times, they get in but cannot kill it. “How do we understand what drives the immune response in one patient to give a good clinical outcome, and how do we then drive that same immune response in all the other patients?” Dr. Sharma asked. “Did the get in? If not, is there another drug that can drive the in?” Researchers also suspect that checkpoint inhibitors might work better if combined with treatments that kill tumor cells, because debris from dead cancer cells may help the immune system recognize its target. Studies are underway to test checkpoint drugs in combination with treatments like chemotherapy and radiation. But it is a delicate balance to adjust the timing and doses, because in addition to killing cancer cells, those other treatments can knock out the immune system just when it is needed most. As word spreads about immunotherapy, a troubling fact remains: Patients do not have equal access to the new treatments, which can be prohibitively expensive. Insurers cover F. D. A. treatments, but can be high for costly drugs. Some people get costs covered by volunteering for clinical trials that are testing new drugs or novel combinations. But not everyone can, or wants to, enter a study. Participants tend to have the education, determination and means required to get second and third opinions, rearrange their lives, and buy plane tickets to get to medical centers. And they are willing to take risks for a chance to survive. Minorities have been underrepresented in studies, for reasons that are not clear. David Wight, a retired oil engineer in Anchorage, is a study participant who has been able to take every possible step to save his life. When bladder cancer began to spread in his abdomen, he was given three to 12 months to live. That was four and a half years ago. On a recent Saturday, Mr. Wight, who is 75 but looks younger, refereed a boys’ soccer game, racing up and down the field with the players. The following Wednesday he rose at 3 a. m. to fly 3, 300 miles to Houston, where he would arrive at about 5 p. m. He has been making that trip every other week for over two years to receive immunotherapy at M. D. Anderson. For about a year and a half, his disease has been in complete remission. Until recently, he paid his own airfare. But a few months ago, Squibb, the maker of the drug being studied, began picking up the tab, even reimbursing him retroactively — about $50, 000 so far. He has five children: three in their 40s, a son, 16, and a daughter, 10. The younger two were only 10 and 5 when he learned he was ill, and the thought that he might not have survived to raise them still brings tears to his eyes. Describing the time he has gained to be with his family, he said, “I won a lottery that’s bigger than anybody could imagine. ” His cancer was diagnosed in summer 2010, after a test during a routine physical found cancer cells in his urine. A small tumor had invaded the wall of his bladder. Mr. Wight had his bladder removed at a hospital in Anchorage, and was told he needed no further treatment. A year after the surgery, he and his doctors were horrified to find that a large tumor had wrapped itself around his colon. Only then did the doctors discover that he had a rare, aggressive type of bladder cancer, called plasmacytoid. His doctors consulted with a hospital in Seattle, which devised a treatment plan. “They said one word that told me I was not where I wanted to be: ‘palliative,’” Mr. Wight said. He knew palliative treatment was meant to ease symptoms, but not cure the disease. “I said, ‘No thank you. We can do better than that,’” he recalled. His next stop was M. D. Anderson. Months of chemotherapy shrank the tumor enough to allow colon surgery in May 2012. But the disease kept coming back: spots in one lung, then the other, then a tumor under his kidney. “I was getting a new tumor every six to eight months,” he said. Chemotherapy and an experimental gene therapy cleared his lungs and shrank the tumor near his kidney but could not get rid of it. In June 2014, Mr. Wight became one of the first patients with bladder cancer at M. D. Anderson to enter a study of two checkpoint inhibitors. For three months he received Yervoy and Opdivo every two weeks, and then continued with only Opdivo. The tumor under his kidney shrank, then disappeared. It has been gone for a year and a half, and he has had no other signs of cancer. He is still receiving Opdivo — the reason for his regular trips to Houston. “I’m very fortunate,” Mr. Wight said. “It has for me a single irritating side effect. It makes me itch like you wouldn’t believe. I itch all the time but it’s a small price to pay to stay alive and be feeling pretty well. ” An antihistamine helps. Regarding how long he will keep being treated, he said: “It’s experimental. You don’t know the answer. As long as I have positive results I’m eligible for the treatment. ” His oncologist, Dr. called his response to immunotherapy “fantastic” and said other patients, also in complete or partial remission, were flying or driving to Houston for treatments every two or three weeks. Many do not want to stop taking the drugs. But doctors do not know how long the treatments should continue. They wonder how long the remissions will last, and whether some will even turn out to be cures, Dr. said. Some studies were planned to last just a year or two, longer than the life expectancy of most patients with advanced disease. Researchers did not think they would have to decide whether to keep treating people for years. “We were not expecting to see patients going this long,” Dr. said. | 0fake |
CLASSIC VIDEO: Angry Woman Nails It Describing “Deadbeat Mamas” Pampered With Gov’t Money [Video] | This woman nails it! LANGUAGE ALERT! | 1real |
EU's Juncker says ready to retaliate if needed over new U.S. sanctions on Russia | BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union’s chief executive on Wednesday said the United States had taken into account some EU concerns over new sanctions on Russia but Brussels was ready to retaliate within days if the measures hurt EU economic interests. Speaking after U.S. President Donald Trump signed the measures, Jean-Claude Juncker said the EU would take counter measures if the U.S. sanctions harmed European companies involved in oil and gas projects with Russia. “We are ready: we must defend our economic interests vis a vis the United States, and we will do that,” Juncker said, according to a transcript provided by his press team. The U.S. measures, grudgingly approved by Trump despite his desire to improve relations with Moscow, have angered EU officials, who see them as breaking transatlantic unity in the West’s response to Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 and support for separatists in the east. Juncker told a German radio station that it was crucial to coordinate with the United States to ensure sanctions against Russia over its role in the Ukraine crisis are effective. German Economy Minister Brigitte Zypries said the sanctions could hit European firms involved in the construction, operation and maintenance of natural gas pipelines from Russia, an extra-territorial impact that Europe could not accept. “I am counting on ... President Trump to use the leeway given to him by the law so that those sanctions don’t happen,” she wrote in the German weekly magazine Wirtschaftswoche. “That would be a clear signal that close cooperation between the USA and Europe will continue.” If diplomacy fails, an EU document, seen by Reuters, says the bloc will prepare to use an EU regulation allowing it to defend companies against the application of extra-territorial measures by the United States. Brussels also has plans to file a complaint at the World Trade Organization. | 0fake |
WATCH: Don Lemon CRUSHES Trump Supporter For Claiming That Mike Pence Loves Gay People | Trump mouthpiece Kayleigh McEnany just made the most asinine claim about Mike Pence and got roundly hammered for it on CNN.Unless you ve been hiding in cave over the last decade, you know that Mike Pence is a hateful bigot who thinks gay people are an abomination. He not only tried to legalize discrimination against gay people in Indiana, he supports inhumane conversion therapy and took money away from HIV funding to fund that right-wing bullshit cure instead.Angela Rye kicked off the panel discussion about Mike Pence being booed by the audience prior to a performance of Hamilton on Broadway. The cast of the play then delivered a thoughtful message to Pence expressing their hope that he learned something.Rye explained that the lead actor is a gay man who is HIV-positive and could not imagine what he felt when the biggest anti-gay bigot in the country walked in to watch the performance.McEnany responded by attacking the Hollywood elite, the media elite, the political elite and whined about people calling Trump a racist and homophobe even though Trump is a racist and homophobe.Lemon finally shut her up by getting the discussion back on point, asking her to imagine how gay people feel when Mike Pence discriminates against them. He then pointed out that the Hamilton cast was expressing their hope that Pence will treat the LGBT community like human beings. Can you imagine how that feels when Mike Pence, who has rallied and railed against gay people, and tried to shoot down and block gay legislation? Lemon asked. He s saying, I m giving you a chance to give me a chance, he added in reference to the star of Hamilton. But then McEnany opened her mouth her spewed a monster lie. Mike Pence loves all people, she claimed, drawing an emphatic rebuke from Lemon, who is also openly gay. Mike Pence does not love gay people. His record shows that he does not love gay people. Here s the video via YouTube.Make no mistake, Mike Pence is an anti-gay bigot and he will stop at nothing to try and roll back gay rights to the point where they have no rights left. He is hateful and divisive and does not deserve the office he is about to occupy.Featured Image: Screenshot | 1real |
AWESOME! DONALD TRUMP Slams Hillary Hecklers At Detroit Speech With The Best Line Ever! [Video] | The Hillary Campaign sent in numerous hecklers and protesters today to disrupt Donald Trump s economic speech in Detroit. Democrats think Detroit is just fine. After about the 10th protester Donald Trump mocked the Hillary hecklers,. | 1real |
These Countries Just Stood Up For Women’s Rights And Spat In Trump’s Face (DETAILS) | Other nations are stepping up to play larger roles in the world because of Donald Trump, proving that he is destroying American respect and power abroad.One of Trump s first acts after taking over the White House was to issue a global gag rule on abortion.The executive order bans groups that receive funding from the United States from giving women information on abortion, reversal of President Obama s policy that had been in effect for the last eight years.Apparently, conservatives believe they not only have the right to tell American women what to do with their bodies, they believe they have the right to tell all women around the world what to do with their bodies as well.Trump s policy is an embarrassing shift. Women around the world will now see America as a hostile enemy of women s rights and bodily autonomy.And as a result of of the United States abandoning women around the world, other nations are sticking it to Trump by filling the gaps.According to Reuters,Norway has joined an international initiative to raise millions of dollars to replace shortfalls left by U.S. President Donald Trump s ban on U.S.-funded groups worldwide providing information on abortion.In January, the Netherlands started a global fund to help women access abortion services, saying Trump s global gag rule meant a funding gap of $600 million over the next four years, and has pledged $10 million to the initiative to replace that.Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Finland, Canada and Cape Verde have all also lent their support.Norway is also chipping in $10 million. The government is increasing its support for family planning and safe abortion, Prime Minister Erna Solberg said in a statement. At a time when this agenda has come under pressure, a joint effort is particularly important. So Donald Trump just hurt American prestige by doing something that will hurt women around the globe. But other nations are boosting their own prestige by filling the funding gap.Abortion is a medically necessary procedure that women should have access to no matter where they live. By trying to deny women that access, Donald Trump is putting lives at risk and taking rights away from women after our country has fought for years to lift up women around the world.Trump and Republicans should realize that as they continue to shrink America s role in the world, other nations will take advantage of it and increase their own prestige and power. As long as Trump and Republicans continue down this path, respect for us will plummet and our influence will wane.Featured image via Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images | 1real |
Obama on growing friendship with Trudeau: 'What's not to like?' | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Thursday turned the page on years of shaky ties with Canada by staging a lavish White House welcome for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, making clear the new leader is a man after his own heart. Trudeau, 44, the left-leaning Liberal Party leader and son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, took power last November. He already enjoys a closer bond with the Democratic president than his right-of-center predecessor, Stephen Harper of the Conservatives, managed in more than six years of dealing with the Obama administration. “He campaigned on a message of hope and of change. His positive and optimistic vision is inspiring young people,” Obama said after meeting with Trudeau in the Oval Office. “So, from my perspective, what’s not to like?” he added, also noting Trudeau’s commitment to the environment. Keeping good relations with the United States is critical for Canada, which sends 75 percent of its exports to its southern neighbor. Trudeau brought along six Cabinet ministers in a sign of how seriously he took the visit. Obama struck a warm, informal tone from the start and told Trudeau at a state dinner he “may well be the most popular Canadian named Justin.” Singer Justin Bieber is from Canada. The White House dinner was the first for a Canadian leader since 1997. Obama never did the same for Harper, who irritated the administration by insisting it approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Obama blocked the project last year. At an arrival ceremony on Thursday morning, Obama teased Trudeau about the failure in recent years of Canadian hockey teams to win the sport’s top honor. “Where’s the Stanley Cup right now?” he asked. “I’m sorry. Is it in my hometown with the Chicago Blackhawks?” Trudeau replied there was a high U.S. demand for Canadian exports, including three of the star players who helped the Blackhawks win the National Hockey League championship last year. In Ottawa, Conservative Party foreign affairs spokesman Tony Clement said Trudeau’s visit had little deeper meaning, given that Obama would out of office in January 2017. Even so, the next few months could be crucial for Canada, said Colin Robertson of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, a former senior diplomat with two U.S. postings. Encouraged by Obama’s tone, American officials are starting to re-examine important elements of the bilateral relationship in a favorable way, Robertson said. “The next administration is not going to have Canada on their radar,” he said in a phone interview. “But their reference point when they do ... will be this review conducted under the best possible auspices.” | 0fake |
Iran's Rouhani says foreign interference in Syria must end, names no names | SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) - Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday that foreign interference in the conflict in Syria must end and foreign military presence in the country may only be acceptable if it is by the invitation of Syria s government. Rouhani, who stopped short of naming any specific nations, also told his Russian counterparts Vladimir Putin and Turkey s Tayyip Erdogan that now there was the need to uproot the last terrorist cells in Syria and the ground was prepared for political settlement. Rouhani was speaking at the three leaders meeting in the southern Russian city of Sochi. | 0fake |
Hillary FRANTIC As Dirty Secret Implodes, Gets Worse With Prison Bombshell | Share This
Hillary Clinton thought her email scandal was in the rearview mirror, but it just blew up in her face days before the election. Unfortunately for her, everything just got worse as a bombshell just exploded – and seeing how the topic is about prison, it looks like things are about to get juicy.
There’s no doubt that Hillary is as crooked as they come. Although the left would have you believe otherwise, with the presidential hopeful all but admitting her criminal acts, not too many people believe them.
However, things just got a lot worse for Hillary, but his time, it’s not only her presidential campaign that’s in jeopardy. According to The Economic Collapse , Hillary Clinton is looking at a whopping 20 years behind bars if she’s convicted of “obstruction of justice” – a term that could very well be a life sentence for a woman of her age. A sight we may get to see soon, and one that Hillary Clinton rightfully deserves
As of this point, no one is mentioning the phrase “obstruction of justice,” but that doesn’t mean the idea isn’t floating out there. In fact, when you look at the actual definition of the term in regards to the Federal statute, you start to get a better idea of just how guilty Hillary is:
Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsified, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under Title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
We already know that Hillary is guilty of trying to cover this up. Not only did she delete and “bleachbit” her server in a desperate attempt to block the FBI from finding out her dirty little secret, but then she said she didn’t have the emails they were looking for.
Of course, when others stumbled across the mythical 33,000 emails, things started to take a turn – and it all just got worse. According to The Wall Street Journal , the FBI now has another 650,000 emails to sort through with about 10,000 pertinent to Hillary’s case. Things aren’t looking so good for Hillary Clinton
Why did FBI Director James Comey find the need to come forward with this information so close to the election? Well, as it turns out, the answer is rather simple – redemption.
According to a Daily Mail article written by Ed Klein, the author of a bestseller about the Clintons entitled Guilty As Sin , it seems as though Comey was suffering for letting off Hillary so easy. As explained by Klein:
“Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,” said the source. ‘They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist. He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom.”
Further speculation pertaining to Comey’s reasoning seems to indicate that the urgency here stems from the information actually found. Knowing just how much the release would impact the election, one can only assume that Comey was only comfortable in doing so as someone had already found something really big.
The fact of the matter is, people had lost faith in justice after Comey’s dismissal of Hillary’s charges. After proving that power meant exclusion from the law, it seems as though the FBI Director is trying to right that wrong today. Furthermore, as there seems to be something of substantive nature, Hillary can expect to be facing 20 years behind bars – a sentence a great many people would feel is justified. | 1real |
Equifax Is Tricking Consumers Into Waiving Their Right To Sue Over Data Breach | Equifax, the oldest and most valuable of the three main credit reporting agencies, revealed a massive data breach; one of the largest such hacks ever recorded. Personally identifying information like Social Security numbers, birth dates, and even driver s license numbers were involved in the breach, affecting up to 143 million people nearly half the U.S. population.Naturally, anyone who with any credit at all will want to know whether or not their info was involved in the incident, and Equifax says they want to help. But now, concerns are being raised that Equifax is deceptively requiring consumers to waive their rights to join any class action lawsuit against them, should they enroll in the company s fraud protection program and possibly if they even use the website to see if they ve been affected.PSA: If you check Equifax's site to see if your data was stolen, you *waive your rights* to sue Equifax or be part of a class action suit. pic.twitter.com/p4AlmmLQ3r Zack Whittaker (@zackwhittaker) September 8, 2017That s right if you enroll in their fraud protection something they specifically provided to you because of the breach you automatically agree to arbitration and lose your right to sue. It s currently unclear whether this applies to merely checking to see if your information has been compromised.Outrageous. The website for the Equifax ID monitoring service Equifax is telling victims to sign up for includes an arbitration clause. pic.twitter.com/G7kSbrOsjS Matthew Preusch (@mpreusch) September 8, 2017The website, which, for obvious reasons, we will not provide a clickable link for here, is equifaxsecurity2017.com.The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB ) is actually trying to ban arbitration clauses like this, specifically because they can be so deceptive. But those rules have not yet taken effect, and won t for another ten days. More importantly, the rule will not work retroactively, so consumers can t get out of this arbitration if they follow through with the sign-up process on the Equifax site.New York s Attorney General has already contacted Equifax about the arbitration clause:This language is unacceptable and unenforceable. My staff has already contacted @Equifax to demand that they remove it. https://t.co/vT0x7f5Xhc Eric Schneiderman (@AGSchneiderman) September 8, 2017The CFPB said in a statement that the clause was troubling, and that they were investigating both the security incident that set this all off and the company s response to it, saying that Equifax could remove this clause so that consumers can receive this service without condition. Not only is Equifax requiring an agreement that strips you of your legal rights, but even if you decide you don t care about all that, the company requires you to provide even more personal information as you sign up for the resolution tool.Featured image via media library | 1real |
Turkey detains 54 former university staff in Gulen-related operation: Anadolu | ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish police have detained 54 staff from a university shut down after an attempted coup last year that was blamed on U.S.-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, state-run Anadolu news agency said on Wednesday. It said the police had arrest warrants for a total of 171 academics and staff from Istanbul s former Fatih University, which was regarded as having close ties to Gulen. The cleric has denied any involvement in the failed putsch of July 15, 2016. Fatih University was shut under a state decree following the coup attempt and Anadolu said staff there were found to have been users of ByLock, an encrypted messaging application which the government says was commonly used by Gulen s supporters. Since the coup attempt more than 50,000 people, including civil servants and security personnel, have been jailed pending trial and some 150,000 suspended or dismissed from their jobs. Rights groups say the crackdown has been exploited to muzzle dissent. The government says the measures have been necessary due to the security threats which has Turkey faced since the putsch, in which 250 people were killed. | 0fake |
Trump Said ‘Torture Works.’ An Echo Is Feared Worldwide. - The New York Times | When the United Nations’ top official tried to inspect an infamous prison in Gambia two years ago, officials there denied him access. So he protested all the way up the country’s chain of command. In a tense meeting with members of the cabinet of the country’s autocratic ruler, the United Nations official, Juan E. Méndez, was again denied, this time with a jeering dismissal. “They said, ‘Why don’t you go to Guantánamo instead,’” recalled Mr. Mendez, a former United Nations special rapporteur on torture. In Bahrain, officials were a little more subtle, but the message was the same, as they twice canceled prison inspection visits. “They said we face the same threats to national security as other countries face,” Mr. Mendez said. “It was clear they were referring to the United States, and they didn’t feel that they needed to give me access. ” Now, after Donald J. Trump’s campaign vows to reinstate the sort of torture used in the war on terrorism — and to fill the Guantánamo Bay prison with “some bad dudes” — human rights experts fear that authoritarian regimes around the world will see it as another green light to carry out their own abuses. A return to such “enhanced interrogation” — and even to techniques that Mr. Trump has pledged will be “much worse” — would also send a powerful message just as nations around the world have begun to examine their own past abuses to ensure that they will not be repeated. “Sometimes we see progress, and then we see ” said Victor the of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, a umbrella organization for groups. “When the U. S. was engaging in torture, that created an enormous of the pendulum,” he added. “There were a lot of officials in other countries during the Bush administration who were saying, ‘The Americans are doing it, so why can’t we?’ Now, with Trump saying, ‘I will bring a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,’ you can imagine how far we could go backwards. ” Nils Melzer, who succeeded Mr. Mendez as the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture in November, warned that if the Trump administration revived the use of torture, the consequences around the world “would be catastrophic. ” A fragile consensus against torture, said José Miguel Vivanco, the regional director for the Americas for Human Rights Watch, could be shattered “when you have the White House openly advocating for torture. ” During the campaign, Mr. Trump declared that “torture works,” and he vowed to “immediately” reinstate techniques like waterboarding because “we have to beat the savages” of the Islamic State, who “deserve” such treatment even if it is fruitless. Since the election, Mr. Trump has indicated that he might be reconsidering his position, citing the firm stance against torture by James N. Mattis, his Pentagon nominee. In an interview with The New York Times in November, Mr. Trump said that he was “surprised” when Mr. Mattis told him that he opposed torture and instead favored more humane interrogations of prisoners based on rapport building. But Mr. Trump did not close the door entirely. If Americans feel strongly about bringing back waterboarding and other tactics, he said, “I would be guided by that. ” Nora Sveaass, a psychologist at the University of Oslo and a former member of the United Nations Committee Against Torture, warned that if Mr. Trump revived the use of torture by the United States, it would have a ripple effect around the globe. “The U. S. is a very strong voice,” Ms. Sveaass said. “It’s just like putting a bomb into all of those major principles — the absolute prohibition on torture the absolute obligation to provide redress and justice to victims of torture, including rehabilitation the obligation to investigate and hold people to account,” she added. “If one country such as the U. S. openly torpedoes those principles, you can just forget about asking for compliance from states already challenging the absolute prohibition. ” The signal from Mr. Trump that torture is acceptable again comes just as countries from Argentina to Tunisia, either through courts or special truth commissions, are engaged in tentative efforts to hold themselves accountable for past conduct. In Argentina, Omar Graffigna, the former chief of the country’s air force, was sentenced to prison in September for the 1978 kidnapping and torture of two activists, Patricia Roisinblit and José Manuel Pérez Rojo. The prosecution of Mr. Graffigna was just one in a series of old cases that have been brought into the courts this year in Argentina, as the nation comes to grips with the legacy of its “dirty war” of the 1970s and early 1980s. In Tunisia, a new Truth and Dignity Commission held its first hearings in November, allowing torture victims to tell their harrowing stories before a national television audience. The commission was created to investigate torture and other human rights violations dating to 1955, primarily by the regime of President Zine Ben Ali, who was deposed during the Arab Spring in 2011. And in December, Bolivia’s legislature voted to create a truth commission to investigate torture, murders and other crimes committed by a series of authoritarian regimes from 1964 to 1982. Even in countries that have not conducted such investigations, new organizations have begun to take root, and those groups are trying to make it more difficult for their governments to continue to engage in torture with secrecy and impunity. Samuel Herbert Nsubuga, the chief executive of the African Center for Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Victims, based in Uganda, said legislation that the country passed in 2012 had still not been put into effect. When the law finally takes effect, “our challenge will be to bring some people to trial in Uganda for torture,” he said. In the meantime, his group has enlisted doctors and psychologists to provide medical help and therapy to torture victims, as well as lawyers to provide legal advice. But the moves toward examining past abuses are so far limited to relatively small nations or countries where the focus is on historical events rather than the current use of torture. The inquiries are also often being conducted in the face of strong resistance from top government officials, who oppose aggressive investigations even of past crimes. Those modest efforts could face sharp setbacks if Mr. Trump brings back banned practices. “I am afraid that Trump’s government will question the basic values of the international order, and torturing people will be justified,” said Carlos Jibaja, a psychologist with CAPS, a group in Lima, Peru, that helps victims of torture. At the same time, Mr. Trump’s advocacy of torture may encourage some major countries, like Russia and the Philippines, to be even more open and aggressive in their use of torture. Olga Sadovskaya, the vice chairwoman of the Committee Against Torture, a human rights group in Russia, said that torture was already common in the country. She noted that Russian prison and police officials routinely used torture tactics with cruel nicknames, such as the “President Putin,” which involves attaching wires from an office telephone to a victim’s body and then running electric current through it. The police like that tactic, she said, because it does not leave marks. Edeliza Hernandez, the executive director of the Medical Action Group in the Philippines, an organization that documents cases of torture and provides treatment and rehabilitation, estimated that there were 200 political prisoners in detention centers in the country, and said that most of them had been tortured. “The government has soldiers watch us while we inspect prisoners,” she said. Mr. Melzer, the United Nations official, warned that if Mr. Trump followed through on his pledges, more countries would follow his lead and get back into the torture business. “What kind of message would that be to the world?” Mr. Melzer asked. “It couldn’t be worse. What happens to the role of the United States as an example in the world, and what would that mean for the policies of other states? If the United States does it, those other countries will know they can get away with it. The last thing the world needs is a U. S. president legitimizing this. ” | 0fake |
Factbox: Republican presidential candidate Trump's economic team | (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Friday announced his team of economic advisers, among whom are a hedge fund manager, a former top steel executive and a former high-ranking U.S. government official. Trump said he would deliver a speech on his economic policy plan on Monday. Here are some facts on the members of his economic team: Paulson is best known on Wall Street for his bet against the overheated housing market in 2007 that netted him and his investors billions of dollars in profits. But Paulson’s calls on stocks and the economy have been less accurate lately. His investments have lost some $15 billion in assets in the last five years, leaving his Paulson & Co Inc hedge fund with roughly $13 billion at the end of June. He is known for making contrarian bets and being patient. He has been one of only a handful of hedge fund managers to have publicly endorsed Trump. Many others have said privately that they are still on the fence or leaning toward his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Feinberg is chief executive officer of Cerberus Capital Management LP, a private equity firm he co-founded in 1992. He headed the investment firm during its failed takeover of automaker Chrysler in 2007. The investment firm served as Chrysler’s majority owner until the troubled car maker was restructured in a government-sponsored bankruptcy in 2009. Feinberg had promised to revive the company, according to a New York Times profile, but instead lost billions. (here) Feinberg has defended his role to try to save the carmaker. He ultimately had to appeal to Washington for help. Malpass served under two previous Republican administrations, first as a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for President Ronald Reagan and later as a deputy assistant secretary of State for President George H.W. Bush. Malpass, in a CNBC interview on Friday, called for greater infrastructure spending as well as tax cuts, trade reform, regulatory reform and energy reform, although he gave few specifics. “We need more effective spending and Trump wants to do that - to have stronger finances for the country,” he said. Malpass has been a vocal critic of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s monetary policy since the financial crisis, in particular its large bond holdings. Malpass, who was also previously chief economist at investment bank Bear Stearns, now runs Encima Global Llc, an investment consulting firm. Navarro is the only adviser on the list with a doctorate in economics and the only one who has spent most of his life as an academic. He earned his doctorate at Harvard University and is now a professor of economics and public policy at the University of California, Irvine’s business school. Navarro has written nine books, three of them critical about China’s effect on the rest of the world, including “Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – A Global Call to Action.” He thinks the United States should be tougher on trade and intellectual property theft and has proposed slapping a 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports. Navarro recently wrote in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times that Trump would crack down on any country “that cheats on its trade deals using practices such as currency manipulation and illegal export subsidies.” (here) Lorber is president and CEO of holding company Vector Group Ltd (VGR.N), whose three subsidiaries make cigarettes as well as e-cigarettes. Vector also operates two real estate subsidiaries: a real estate investment company and a real estate brokerage firm. A fellow New Yorker, Trump's campaign has mentioned Lorber as one of Trump's best friends. (here) The two traveled together to Russia in the 1990s, according to news reports. A former partner at Goldman Sachs Group Inc who now works in entertainment financing, Mnuchin is chairman and CEO of private investment firm Dune Capital Management LP. Trump named Mnuchin, who had a long history of political donations to Democrats, including to Hillary Clinton, as his finance chair in May. Mnuchin has said he has had a personal and professional relationship with Trump for more than 15 years. DiMicco is the former chief executive and executive chairman of steel producer Nucor Corp (NUE.N), one of the biggest U.S. steelmakers. His outspoken push for tougher U.S. trade policies to support domestic manufacturing and his fierce anti-China rhetoric have made him one of the most high-profile executives in the steel industry. In recent years, he has taken his campaign for new trade rules online and has publicly endorsed Trump’s call for a tougher approach on trade. “You don’t win a Trade War with appeasement or more Free Trade agreements,” DiMicco wrote in a July 10 blog post on his website, www.dandimicco.com. Moore is one of the leading conservative economic voices in the United States. He embraces tax cuts as key to economic growth, as well as free trade and immigration reform. Moore founded the anti-tax advocacy group Club for Growth, where he served until he left the organization in 2004. He later served as a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board. He is currently a fellow at the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, focusing on economic growth. Barrack is a longtime friend of Trump and a fellow hotel developer. He is the founder and executive chairman of private equity firm Colony Capital Inc CLNY.N and is co-chairman of the board of trustees of Colony Starwood Homes SFR.N. Barrack spoke out in favor of Trump at the Republican National Convention in July, but afterwards his company announced it was dropping out of Trump's Old Post Office hotel project in Washington, according to a report in The Washington Post. (here) Kowalski has served as the deputy staff director of the Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee and has over 20 years of experience in fiscal policy at the federal, state and local levels of government. He has a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Beal is the founder and chairman of Beal Bank as well as affiliated companies including, CSG Investments, Inc, Loan Acquisition Corporation, and CLG Hedge Fund, LLC. Calk is the founder, chairman and CEO of Federal Savings Bank, and National Bancorp Holdings. He is a commissioned Army officer and received his MBA from Northwestern University. Roth is chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Vornado Realty Trust (VNO.N), which focuses on real estate investments in New York City and Washington, D.C. Vornado and Trump are partners in an office building in midtown Manhattan. | 0fake |
Cleveland police are out of control, say the feds. Now they're making a deal to change. | The consent decree between Cleveland and the Justice Department emphasizes community policing, an approach that involves law enforcement closely working with the local community to guide best practices. In particular, the city vowed to establish a commission that will act as a link between the Cleveland police department and community groups. "We will have community policing as part of our DNA," Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson said.
The agreement also promises new guidelines, improved training, and more oversight for use of force. As part of these changes, the Cleveland police department will reform and strengthen existing watchdog agencies. The mayor will also appoint an inspector general that will watch over the police department, and a civilian will be in charge of the police force's internal affairs unit.
Among the reforms, police officers will be required to stop pistol whipping people in the head, and document each time they unholster their guns.
An independent monitor will oversee all of these changes. The city will only be relieved of federal oversight once a federal judge agrees that the police department has met a specific set of standards for reform detailed in the agreement.
A brutal Justice Department report in December found Cleveland police officers used excessive deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons; unnecessary, excessive, and retaliatory force, including Tasers, chemical sprays, and their fists; and excessive force against people with mental illness or in crisis, including one situation in which officers were called exclusively to check up on someone's well-being.
In one case, a police officer shot at an unarmed man wearing only boxer shorts as he was fleeing from armed assailants:
An incident from 2013 in which a sergeant shot at a victim as he ran from a house where he was being held against his will is just one illustration of this problem. "Anthony" was being held against his will inside a house by armed assailants. When officers arrived on scene, they had information that two armed assailants were holding several people inside the home. After officers surrounded the house, Anthony escaped from his captors and ran from the house, wearing only boxer shorts. An officer ordered Anthony to stop, but Anthony continued to run toward the officers. One sergeant fired two shots at him, missing. According to the sergeant, when Anthony escaped from the house, the sergeant believed Anthony had a weapon because he elevated his arm and pointed his hand toward the sergeant. No other officers at the scene reported seeing Anthony point anything at the sergeant. The sergeant's use of deadly force was unreasonable. It is only by fortune that he did not kill the crime victim in this incident. The sergeant had no reasonable belief that Anthony posed an immediate danger. The man fleeing the home was wearing only boxer shorts, making it extremely unlikely that he was one of the hostage takers. In a situation where people are being held against their will in a home, a reasonable police officer ought to expect that someone fleeing the home may be a victim. Police also ought to expect that a scared, fleeing victim may run towards the police and, in his confusion and fear, not immediately respond to officer commands. A reasonable officer in these circumstances should not have shot at Anthony.
This is just one of many examples of police officers using "poor and dangerous tactics" that often put them "in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk," according to the report.
The Justice Department attributed many of these problems to inadequate training and supervision. "Supervisors tolerate this behavior and, in some cases, endorse it," the report said. "Officers report that they receive little supervision, guidance, and support from the Division, essentially leaving them to determine for themselves how to perform their difficult and dangerous jobs."
Former US Attorney General Eric Holder, who headed the Justice Department at the time of the investigation, argued that fixing these issues is crucial for both the general public and police. "Accountability and legitimacy are essential for communities to trust their police departments, and for there to be genuine collaboration between police and the citizens they serve," he said.
For Cleveland, settling with the Justice Department to reform its police force averts a costly court battle. But it also could help alleviate tensions with a community that has long seen its police department as overly aggressive and even abusive. | 0fake |
G.O.P.’s Moneyed Class Finds Its Place in New Trump World - The New York Times | CLEVELAND — In his unlikely rise to the Republican nomination Donald J. Trump attacked lobbyists, disparaged big donors and railed against the party’s establishment. But on the shores of Lake Erie this week, beyond the glare of television cameras, the power of the permanent political class seemed virtually undisturbed. Though Mr. Trump promises to topple Washington’s “rigged system,” the opening rounds of his party’s quadrennial meeting accentuated a more enduring maxim: Money always adapts to power. At a downtown barbecue joint, lobbyists cheerfully passed out stickers reading “Make Lobbying Great Again” as they schmoozed on Monday with Republican ambassadors, lawmakers and executives. At a windowless bar tucked behind the hotel, whose rooms were set aside for the party’s most generous benefactors, allies of Mr. Trump pitched a clutch of receptive party donors on contributing to a “super PAC. ” And on Tuesday night, as Republican delegates formally made Mr. Trump their presidential nominee, a few dozen lobbyists and their clients instead sipped gin and munched on Brie puffs in an room at the Union Club. They had come to witness a more urgent presentation: Newt Gingrich, a top Trump adviser and Beltway fixture, painting an upbeat picture of the deals they could help sculpt on infrastructure projects and military spending in the first hundred days of a Trump administration. “It is the business of Washington,” said Michael J. Anderson, a Democratic lobbyist who represents American Indian tribes, after watching Mr. Gingrich speak. “Mr. Trump is talking about changing the paradigm. It’s not changing one bit. The political and influence class is going on as before. ” In Cleveland, even some of those who had worked against Mr. Trump’s candidacy now saw opportunity. In dozens of private receptions, behind a scrim of barricades and police officers, they inspected their party’s new Trump faction with curiosity and hope. There were spheres of influence to carve out. There was money to raise and money to be made, whether or not Mr. Trump ended up in the White House. There were new friends to make and old relationships to nurture. “This is an event like no other — there are governors, senators, members of Congress,” said Eric J. Tanenblatt, a longtime ally of the Bush family whose law firm, Dentons, hosted Mr. Gingrich’s remarks on Tuesday. “For people who operate in and around government, you can’t not be here. ” And so, far above the din of protesters and delegates, on the 49th floor of the Key Tower, Squire Patton Boggs, a lobbying and legal powerhouse, held packed receptions honoring Ohio and Florida officials. Not far away, Mike Leavitt, the former Utah governor turned consultant for pharmaceutical companies and health insurers, was slated to lead a panel on policies to spur the development of prescription drugs. As Speaker Paul D. Ryan helped tamp down efforts on the convention floor, his political operation ran a daily series of receptions and hospitality lounges for members of the “Speaker’s Council,” the top donors to House Republicans. “You have these two worlds colliding a little bit here,” said David Tamasi, a lobbyist at the firm Rasky Baerlein and a top Republican on K Street, who joined Mr. Trump’s team after his preferred candidate, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, went down to defeat. “That’s what’s going to be interesting: How do the establishment guys make those folks feel at home?” They are doing so, in part, by footing the bill. While some of the party’s elite donors have shunned Mr. Trump’s coronation this week, they are still paying for it. Roughly 500 wealthy Republicans poured close to $16 million into the Republican National Committee’s convention account leading up to this week, according to disclosures made to the Federal Election Commission through last Friday. The biggest donors, giving more than $100, 000 each, are also a veritable roll call of the movement, among them the billionaire investor Paul E. Singer and Marlene Ricketts, who bankrolled early efforts to deny Mr. Trump the nomination. Mr. Singer did not attend, though his political advisers made the rounds in Cleveland, as did representatives for other megadonors who remain opposed to Mr. Trump. And there were growing signs that at least some of the party’s biggest givers were warming to him: of Monday’s super PAC reception at the included Harold Hamm, a billionaire oil tycoon and former energy adviser to Mitt Romney, and Stanley Hubbard, a Minnesota television station owner and prominent donor. Among the guests was Foster Friess, the mutual fund investor and super PAC donor, who expressed optimism at his party’s prospects. “I think it could be a landslide,” Mr. Friess said in an interview. “Donald Trump has the ability to reach all the plumbers and carpenters and factory workers who usually vote Democratic. ” Mr. Trump, of course, remains unpopular among many Republican donors, and it is unclear how many will ultimately open their wallets to help fund his campaign. Some events were more sparsely attended than they would have been four years ago, Republicans said. It was a little easier to get tickets to concerts in Cleveland, a little easier to get bumped up to the premium hotel rooms. And there is no question that Mr. Trump’s blasts against unfettered trade and Wall Street banks have unsettled powerful business interests — and are now, to some extent, reflected in the party’s own DNA. In recent days, Trump activists have helped install new planks in the party platform calling for tougher trade negotiations and for reinstating the Act, the law that walled commercial banking off from investment banking. Yet those same power brokers won a more consequential victory even before the convention started, when Mr. Trump’s team helped them quash a rule proposed by some conservative delegates that would have banned lobbyists from serving as Republican National Committee members. The proposal by supporters of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas pitted Tea Party conservatives against the party’s business wing the conservative delegates were soundly defeated. “It is disappointing,” said Mary Anne Kinney, a New Hampshire state representative and Cruz delegate, who was among those who pushed for the ban. “Some of us had heard things that maybe Donald Trump was not a fan of the lobbyists. They are not always for the interest of the people. ” In fact, many of them are for the interests of Mr. Trump, at least this week. Among the floor whips prowling the convention floor in Cleveland in neon yellow baseball caps, managing and corralling delegates, were a number of volunteers from Washington government affairs firms or Capitol Hill. Many had supported other candidates during the primary. Now they were working for their party’s nominee. One of them was Robert Hoffman, a Republican lobbyist at Heather Podesta and Partners. Earlier in the week, the firm hosted a barbecue brunch for friends and delegates, where Mr. Hoffman and his colleagues handed out “Make Lobbying Great Again” stickers. Mr. Hoffman seemed to see Mr. Trump’s policy agenda more in terms of possibilities than threats. The convention, he noted, was a chance to learn more about Mr. Trump’s plans, and perhaps to help shape them. “We want to be a sounding board,” Mr. Hoffman said. “Not just for our clients, but for our campaign. ” | 0fake |
New Male Birth Control Method Tested - The Onion - America's Finest News Source | Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Cleveland Indians Worried Team Cursed After Building Franchise On Old Native American Stereotype CLEVELAND—Having watched in horror as their team crumbled after a 3-1 World Series lead, members of the Cleveland Indians expressed concern Thursday that the organization has been cursed for building their franchise on an incredibly old Native American stereotype. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Nurse Reminds Elderly Man She’s Just Down The Hall If He Starts To Die DES PLAINES, IL—Assuring him that she’d be at his side in a jiffy, local nurse Wendy Kaufman reminded an elderly resident at the Briarwood Assisted Living Community that she was just down the hall if he started to die, sources reported Tuesday. | 1real |
BREAKING: HILLARY CAMPAIGN Planned Fake “GRASSROOTS” Millennial Movement To Steal Bernie Followers | Wikileaks released another email showing how phony Hillary s campaign has been from the start. Americans should never believe the polls. Hillary has NEVER given Americans a reason to want to get behind her. Its why she and her camp, with the help of the media are constantly manufacturing what appears to be (but really is not) support for her candidacy. The most HILL-larious part of this whole story is that Hillary s camp planned to use the young Tallahassee Mayor, Andrew Gillum to launch Hillary s fake grassroots group after he gave a speech at the DNC about how trust in government can be restored! Here is the attachment to an email addressed to Hillary s campaign manager, John Podesta:CONCEPT PAPEROBJECTIVE:Mobilize young voter participation for the 2016 election in support of Hillary ClintonSTRATEGY: Use young elected officials and entertainers to build a grassroots movement of under 40 voters as a vehicle to migrate support for Bernie into activism for Hillary.OPERATIONAL GOALS: Identify young elected officials (YEOs)across the country to become the face of a new organization that is focused on a progressive future. These young elected officials would promote both the organization, the ideas embraced by it and the need for civic engagement with an immediate focus on involvement in the 2016 election. They would be seen as the faces of a new progressivist movement that combines noble goals with political realities resulting in real progress.The organization would be built around a group of ideas or concepts as opposed to parties or individuals. The ideas should always reinforce the message that the under 40 generation needs to engage politically to shape their own future. Building the New Economy, Creating an Empowerment Society, Transitioning to a Sustainable World, Tearing Down Barriers are all phrases which might be included in the messaging. Support for the Hillary would be included in the messaging but initially as tangential to it, i.e. if you support these things then there really isn t another choice but her . Over time the messaging would transition more into the actionable item of involvement in the campaign and support for its efforts.The organization should be built around a Ready for Hillary type model: grassroots driven, limited engagement of the principal, both an organizational and small dollar fundraising component, centered on-line and in venues frequented by under 40 s college campuses, with a big emphasis on community colleges, nightclubs, athletic events, etc.The group should be branded separately from the campaign so people who engage with it feel like they created and own it as opposed to feeling swallowed by an organization that defeated them. A distinct name, artwork, website, spokespeople etc would be desired.TACTICS:The program should be launched initially in one state and then expand out. It should be seen as growing and spreading. We want people calling and asking if they can set one up in their state as opposed to forcing the model on them.The YEO s in that state would announce the formation of their group stating theirs goal to help elect a progressive President and engage young people with a goal of making sure their voices are heard and they are ready to participate. It should feel almost like we got together and decided to do this on our own . Depending on the organizational model, they could say they all support Hillary and are doing it to help but there are bigger and longer term objectives here, etc. Ideally you could say something like the campaign is providing limited resources but has agreed any funds you raise will be directed into youth outreach.They would then do a series of event which would be a college campus town hall during the day and a club type event that night. The town hall with students would be informal with talking with students about goals, dreams, political reality, how government can make things happen, how sometimes it doesn t, etc. It would end in a pitch for them to become engaged politically to build a progressive future. Later in the evening, these YEO s would attend and speak briefly at a campaign event in a bar/club featuring a local DJ or entertainer and has a nominal contribution as part of attendence. The campus event will be used to build buzz for the second event as well as the campaign itself. As momentum grows for the organization, bigger names would be brought in for the town hall events as well as bigger artists for the club events, furthering the momentum. Eventually, HRC/WJC/CVC as well as VP and Spouse would be integrated into these events but it should be seen as them coming to the movement as opposed to them trying to take it over.RECOMMENDATIONS:This program be launched by Mayor Andre Gillum in Florida. Goal would be early AprilTarget is to have 10 people at launchDo events in Miami, Palm Beach, Gainesville, Jacksonville, Tampa and Orlando in April.Convene a group of National YEO s in May/June to discuss their involvement.Have organization functioning in 5 battlegound states by June 1 Florida, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina? | 1real |
Senior ISIS Strategist and Spokesman Is Reported Killed in Syria - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — The senior Islamic State strategist Abu Muhammad was killed in northern Syria, the group announced on Tuesday, signaling the death of one of the world’s terrorists. In Washington, the Pentagon spokesman, Peter Cook, confirmed that an American “precision strike” near Al Bab, Syria, on Tuesday night had targeted Mr. Adnani, but could not confirm his death. “We are still assessing the results of the strike,” he said in a statement. Two American officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said a United States military drone had hit a vehicle Mr. Adnani was thought to be traveling in, following a close collaboration between the Central Intelligence Agency and Special Operations forces to track him. A founding member of the Islamic State, Mr. Adnani, a Syrian, was the group’s chief spokesman and propagandist, running an operation that put out slickly produced videos of beheadings and massacres that shocked the world and sent a rush of recruits running to join the group in Syria. Accounts from arrested members of the Islamic State confirmed Mr. Adnani’s role as an operational leader as well. He oversaw the group’s external operations division, responsible for recruiting operatives around the world and instigating or organizing them to carry out attacks that have included Paris, Brussels and Dhaka, Bangladesh. In the context of recent territorial losses in Syria and Iraq by the Islamic State, Mr. Adnani’s death would be another in a series of serious setbacks. But even as the United States has focused much of its counterterrorism operations on targeted strikes against terrorist leaders, analysts say the jury is still out on whether such strikes have been truly effective at curbing groups as a whole. The Islamic State, in particular, has seemed built around the premise of maximum flexibility in the face of attacks. “In isolation, Adnani’s death represents the demise of an important strategic and operational leader of the Islamic State — though only one person,” said Seth G. Jones, a terrorism specialist at the RAND Corporation. “Adnani is likely replaceable, and the Islamic State will replace him as they have with other operatives that have been killed. ” In an official statement, the Islamic State said Mr. Adnani had been killed while checking up on the group’s military operations in Aleppo Province. In the northern part of that province, near the Turkish border, the Islamic State is currently under attack by a long list of antagonists. It is facing airstrikes from Turkey, the United States and Russia. And it is under attack on the ground from several directions, by Syrian rebels backed by the United States and Turkey and by militias that are also backed by the United States. Mr. Adnani was prominent enough that he was frequently the subject of speculative reports about death and injury, including in January, when Iraqi officials announced that he had been critically injured in a strike in the Iraqi province of Anbar. That report was soon proved false. But analysts said it would be highly unlikely for the Islamic State to put out false information about the death of a leader of Mr. Adnani’s significance through its official channels. His death would be a within the group’s most senior ranks. Mr. Adnani has been in sights of American military and counterterrorism forces for more than two years, and the State Department put a $5 million bounty on him. Intelligence officials in the United States and Europe, as well as arrested members of the group, say that the Islamic State’s external operations unit is a distinct body inside the group, with its structure answering to Mr. Adnani, who in turn reports only to Abu Bakr the caliph of the Islamic State. Mr. Adnani was being groomed to succeed Mr. Baghdadi, analysts said. The Islamic State regularly carries out attacks on civilians and security forces in Iraq and Syria, where it still holds territory. But Mr. Adnani’s unit has focused on attacks abroad. It identifies recruits, provides training, hands out cash and arranges for the delivery of weapons. Although the unit’s main focus has been Europe, external attacks directed by ISIS or those acting in its name have been even more deadly elsewhere. At least 650 people have been killed in the group’s attacks on sites popular with Westerners, including in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia, according to a New York Times analysis conducted this year. Even as the group has lost much of its territory and operatives from its mark in 2014 and 2015, the kinds of attacks abroad that Mr. Adnani’s division oversees have continued. In May, Mr. Adnani declared: “Do you think, America, that defeat is by the loss of towns or territory? Were we defeated when we lost the cities in Iraq and retreated to the desert without a city or a land?” He offered an answer: “No, true defeat is losing the will and desire to fight. ” A vital part of the group’s strategy has been to inspire, and in some cases direct, opportunistic attacks against Western interests. In September 2014, Mr. Adnani made an explicit call to Muslims in the West to strike out wherever and however they could. “We will strike you in your homeland,” he warned foreign governments, calling on Muslims to kill Europeans, “especially the spiteful and filthy French. ” And he urged them to do it in any manner they could: “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car,” he said, according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist propaganda. In the year after that speech, at least two dozen plots linked to the Islamic State were documented. In some, there were no direct operational ties back to Syria, but there were clear signs that the attacker had, at the least, consumed the group’s propaganda online. “During the past decade, when it comes to both orchestrating and inciting violence in the West, no other leadership figures in jihadist groups have proven as dedicated or effective as ” said Michael S. Smith II of Kronos Advisory, a terrorism research and analysis firm, who is writing a book on the Islamic State’s external operations. His blended roles of spokesman and terrorism director is a reflection of the Islamic State’s central strategy: So much of the group’s impact and innovation in the world of violent Islamist extremism came from its new brand of messaging — mixing social media reach and savvy with presentations of its worst atrocities. That in turn gave the group an ability to franchise its terror and expand its reach farther than its military capacity would otherwise go. Mr. Adnani’s real name was Taha Sobhi Falaha, and he was born in the town of Binnish in the northern Syrian province of Idlib. One Binnish resident, Muhammad Najdat Haj Kadour, whose mother was a distant relative of Mr. Adnani, said the family was “super poor. ” Mr. Adnani’s brothers had worked in the orchards of Mr. Kadour’s grandfather, “watering the olive trees. ” Mr. Adnani was one of the few surviving, still active, founders of the ISIS precursor organization, Al Qaeda in Iraq. That group grew out of the armed Iraqi resistance to American occupation and forged an affiliation with Al Qaeda under Abu Musab . Back then, the Syrian government was accused of facilitating the flow of foreign fighters, Syrians and others, to Iraq to fight the Americans. Mr. Adnani was among the first foreign volunteers to fight in Iraq. Mr. Adnani had already been arrested twice by the Syrian government when he went to fight in Iraq, according to Mr. Kadour, who is now a Syrian antigovernment activist who opposes the Islamic State. There, Mr. Adnani is believed to have helped found Al Qaeda in Iraq, and to have spent time in the American prison at Camp Bucca — a site now seen as the crucible of the Islamic State’s future leadership. Sometime in the first year or so after the Syrian uprising began against President Bashar in 2011, Mr. Kadour and several other Binnish residents recalled, Mr. Adnani reappeared in town. Mr. Adnani and other members of Al Qaeda in Iraq, especially those with Syrian roots, were arriving in Syria to try to infiltrate the Syrian opposition. They eventually formed the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria. Later, the Islamic State split off from Al Qaeda and established itself as a separate group bent on declaring its caliphate. As it set about literal statebuilding work — making street signs telling drivers they were entering the Islamic State, and issuing tickets and tax bills in the northeastern province of Raqqa — Mr. Adnani worked to build a virtual state, to publicize the group’s cause as a kind of viral phenomenon. The videos and publications he oversaw were a great success in driving recruitment, and in opening the door to attacks outside of Syria and Iraq. In that capacity, the virtual state he presided over may well outlive the physical one. | 0fake |
Violence flares at protest near U.S. Embassy in Lebanon | BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanese security forces fired tear gas and water canons at protesters near the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon on Sunday during a demonstration against President Donald Trump s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Protesters, some of them waving Palestinian flags, set fires in the street and threw projectiles toward security forces that had barricaded the main road to the U.S. Embassy in the Awkar area north of Beirut. Security personnel used force to disperse most of the protesters and detained some, witnesses said. Addressing the protesters, the head of the Lebanese Communist Party Hanna Gharib declared the United States the enemy of Palestine and the U.S. Embassy a symbol of imperialist aggression that must be closed. Protesters burned U.S. and Israeli flags. We came to say to the U.S. Embassy that it is an embassy of aggression and that Jerusalem is Arab and will stay Arab, said Ahmad Mustafa, an official in the leftist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who was among the demonstrators. Trump s recognition of Jerusalem has infuriated the Arab world and upset Western allies, who say it is a blow to peace efforts and risks causing further unrest in the Middle East. Late on Saturday Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo urged the United States to abandon its decision and said the move would spur violence throughout the region. Israel says that all of Jerusalem is its capital. Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future independent state. Most countries consider East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed after capturing it in a 1967 war, to be occupied territory and say the status of the city should be left to be decided at future Israeli-Palestinian talks. The government of Lebanon, which hosts about 450,000 Palestinian refugees, has condemned Trump s decision. Lebanese President Michel Aoun last week called the move a threat to regional stability. The powerful Iran-backed Lebanese Shi ite group Hezbollah on Thursday said it backed calls for a new Palestinian uprising against Israel in response to the U.S. decision. Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah also called for a protest against the decision in the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut on Monday. | 0fake |
How Western Media Teleported a Child 'Victim' from Homs to Aleppo (PHOTOS, VIDEO) | How Western Media Teleported a Child 'Victim' from Homs to Aleppo (PHOTOS, VIDEO)
Western media is capable of amazing feats which defy even the laws of physics Originally appeared at Russian Spring
The West keeps fighting its informational war on Russia blaming Russian Air Force for bloody crimes in Syrian Arab Republic. To persuade the world community of the fact that Moscow is to blame for catastrophic humanitarian situsation in Syria and not «moderate opposition» fighters turning the country into chaos world media descend into manipulating facts and publishing fakes.
The easily expected maximum effect has photos and videos showing children suffering from war and bombardments. Western readers keep on commenting such stories and blaiming “Assad’s regime and Putin”, but haven’t the slightest idea that those stories are skillfully made up.
«Russian Spring» has already covered a story of a girl who had been saved again and again, several times in just one month , and now we are offering a tear-squeezing vide about a girl who was teleported from Homs province to Aleppo by the Western media.
Child, where are you from?
On October 10 a footage showing allegedly one of the “bombardment victims» of Syrian Talbiseh in Homs province was published on YouTube channel of local informational resource talbisah.
And then the taer-sqeeinf video started its walk of fame thriugh media and social media: it was published on AJ+ Facebook page in particular (a Qatar-based telecom giant Al Jazzera) where it was reached by over 10 mln people (as of October 24).
Al Jazeea accompanied the video with pitiful subttles and corresponding title: «Happy Moday from Syria: this little girl is calling her dad after her house was destroyed by an airstrike».
BBC dealt with that video shortly and "relocated" the girl called Aya (as she introduced herself on the video) from Talbiseh to Aleppo by including a footage called «Aleppo: Where is my dad?» aya_bbc.jpg
Have a more attentive look on how medical staff working: even if we omit the shooting location fraud look at how strange the doctors behave. Instead of giving the first aid necessary for a kid after (alleged) bomberdment, instaed of cleaning head and face wound to minimize comtamination risk the doctors (or the actros playing doctors) keep walking around the girl wearing a troubled look not to hinder filming the vdeo.
Quite thick and artificail-looking blood cathes our eye as well as dark-blue bruises under girl’s eyes lookking a lot like make-up.
The whole video looks like a staged one, the authors and creators have just used a win-win tactics for their short film: a child wounded at war.
Twitter star
The journalists kept on using the pretty-looking mode in their propaganda. Som time later the girl was given a poster which read “Don’t bomb me again. It hurts. Aya” and made another tear-sqeezing photo which was then published by some Omar Qayson calling himself war journalists and media activist on his Twitter page . aya_twit.jpg
It’s laughable but “media activist’s” Twiiter «has only 11 posts open to public and the first of them is a photo of a bird killed by bombardments, the three last are reposts of the aforementioned Aya’s photograph.
Hashtags he chosen for his photo (Children of Syria and Russian kills us ) confirm the obvious fact: social media accounts like that are created by Western journalists with just one aim — to spread false photo and videos blaimimg Russia for «bloody crimes against Syrian people». | 1real |
STAND UP AND CHEER! UKIP Party Leader SLAMS Germany, France And EU Invasion Of Phony Refugees [VIDEO] | He s been Europe s version of the outspoken Ted Cruz for some time now. Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party may be the most disliked member of the European Parliment. But he plows ahead, ignorning the open sneers and insults by his fellow members of the EU Parliment. In what must count as perhaps the worst piece of public policy seen in modern Europe for half a century. When you compound it with an already failing and flawed EU common asylum policy, by saying to the whole world, Please come to Europe. and we saw frankly, virtually a stampede, and we learned that 80% of those that are coming are not Syrian refugees. In fact, what you ve done is opened the door to young, male, economic migrants, many of whom I have to say behave quite in a rather an aggressive manner, quite the opposite of what you would expect to see of any refugee. And yet when that failure is met by objections from countries like Hungary, their opinions are crushed. This isn t a Europe of peace, it s a Europe of division, it s a Europe of disharmony, it s a Europe that s a recipe for resentment. And yet, faced with all this failure, both of you said the same thing today. You said, Europe isn t working so let s have some more Europe, more of the same failing. Well there is I think, a bright star on the horizon. It s called the British referendum. And given that none of you want to concede Britain the ability to take back control of her own borders, a Brexit now, looks more likely than at any other time. We could use about 100 Nigel Farage s in our U.S. Congress .https://youtu.be/GbJp8zxduWk | 1real |
Detroit school system's manager to step down this month | DETROIT (Reuters) - Detroit Public Schools’ emergency manager Darnell Earley is stepping down later this month, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder said on Tuesday. Earley, who has drawn criticism from the teachers union and black state lawmakers for the crumbling state of the city’s schools, will leave the school district on Feb. 29, the governor said in a statement. Earley, who had formerly presided over the city of Flint and its now lead-contaminated water system, has served as manager of the Detroit schools since January 2015. The school system is drowning under $3.5 billion of debt, including $1.7 billion of bonds backed by property taxes. Detroit Public Schools is suffering from declining enrollment. Heavy pension and debt obligations have left the district in danger of running out of cash in April. The governor said if the state Senate passes legislation reorganizing the school and tackling the debt soon, the school system could revert to some form of local control. If the debt is not addressed, the system will be “virtually insolvent” by April, Snyder said. A November report by Earley said a bankruptcy by Detroit’s school system could shift liabilities for pensions and bonds to the state and local governments. The governor, whose approval is needed for the system to file for bankruptcy, is unlikely to support such a move. Snyder said on Tuesday that Earley has done a “very good job under some very difficult circumstances,” restructuring the school system, cutting costs and working to stabilize student enrollment. The governor said he will appoint a transition leader before the end of the month to set in place his plan to restructure the system to address the district’s academics and finances. The Michigan black legislative caucus last week asked Snyder to fire Earley. Also last week, the union for Detroit public school teachers sued the district, demanding Earley’s immediate removal and a return of local control with a plan to repair the district’s crumbling buildings. Ivy Bailey, interim president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, called Earley’s departure a “step in the right direction.” Under Earley’s leadership as emergency manager of Flint, the city switched its water supply from Detroit to the Flint River in April 2014. It switched back last October after tests found high lead levels in blood samples from Flint children. Lead is a neurotoxin that can damage the brain and cause other health problems. Earley has said he is not to blame for the problem since the decision was made before his tenure. | 0fake |
[WATCH] Donald Trump Finds YUGE Support From Unlikely Fan In SC: “I’m A Muslim…And I’m For Trump!” | As GOP candidate, Donald Trump walked through a packed group of supporters at a rally in SC, he was approached by a man who yelled out, I m a Muslim and I support this man all the way! The media has spent an enormous amount of time trying to convince voters that Trump will never get the Muslim vote because of the hate he has earned from the Muslim community, after saying we need to stop allowing un-vetted Muslim refugees to enter our country.Look for this exchange to be used in future Trump ads: | 1real |
As Hong Kong Ponders Its Future Under Beijing, Politics Infuses Its Art - The New York Times | HONG KONG — As fewer than 1, 200 electors were casting ballots on Sunday for Hong Kong’s next leader, Sampson Wong was tagging Facebook videos that showed city residents making breakfast, riding trains and playing with cats. The scenes were unremarkable, and that was the point: Mr. Wong and other members of the Add Oil Team, an artists’ collective, were broadcasting the videos of people engaged in activities that did not include voting as a critique of an unrepresentative political process. “No Election in Hong Kong Now,” the title of their Facebook Live stream said. The Add Oil Team plans to turn the videos into a work that could be exhibited in a gallery. “Although it’s an angry protest gesture, it’s also kind of peaceful,” Mr. Wong said, flanked by laptops and coffee cups in a minimalist design studio. Nearly three years ago, this semiautonomous Chinese city of 7. 3 million was roiled by months of protests, known as Occupy Central or the Umbrella Movement, that stoked an existential debate over its political future. The protests ended without achieving their goal of greater public participation in the election of Hong Kong’s leader, and several organizers now face criminal charges. In July, Hong Kong will inaugurate its new leader, Carrie Lam, Beijing’s preferred candidate, as the former British colony commemorates the 20th anniversary of its handover to Chinese rule. All of that leaves local artists struggling to find meaning in the city’s upheavals, art professionals said in interviews. And while some of their recent works are more overtly political than others, many are infused with a sense of helplessness toward what is widely seen here as the city’s increasing subjugation to Beijing’s authoritarianism. “The expression of frustration, or the acceptance of failure, could be the key words of the artwork which reacts to the Umbrella Movement,” said Chow Chun Fai, who paints scenes from films in which characters comment on Hong Kong’s relationship with the mainland. “Three years ago, we had to be very quick and loud” during the street protests, he added. But recent artwork is “more sentimental, and we have the distance to tell the story and to listen to the story. ” Artists and curators in Hong Kong say that some of the themes coursing through local art have been present for decades. But the 2014 protests, they say, were an important catalyst for many artists, particularly those who came of age in this century. “Somehow the Umbrella Movement unfolded a lot of layers of the political and social problems” that Hong Kong faces, said Clara Cheung, a of CG Artpartment, an art space in the Kowloon district. Recent artworks that address Hong Kong politics vary widely in message and delivery. Some are intended for public spaces, rather than commercial galleries, and feature loaded commentaries on the “one country, two systems” framework that guarantees the city its civil liberties and a high degree of autonomy until 2047. A prominent example is the light show Mr. Wong and Jason Lam mounted last year that counted down the seconds until “one country, two systems” was due to expire. The display was exhibited across the face of Hong Kong’s tallest skyscraper to coincide with a visit by Zhang Dejiang, a member of China’s governing Politburo Standing Committee — but pulled after the artists explained its subversive message. In a similar vein, “Controlling Device,” by Kacey Wong, shows a pair of nooses, one bronzed, and one coated in red wax. Mr. Wong has said the piece is a commentary on recent crackdowns on free expression in Hong Kong, including the apparent abductions of several prominent booksellers to the mainland in 2015. “We’re fighting a war that we cannot win, so how to fight it?” Mr. Wong asked on a recent afternoon in his studio. “You fight it with grace. ” Other artworks comment on Hong Kong’s relationship with Beijing in more roundabout ways. Ocean Leung, for example, incorporates police and political banners into works that intentionally distort the banners’ original messages. The works are not overtly and Mr. Leung said that his art illustrated how difficult it was to take clear positions on political questions. “It’s an embrace of failure,” he said. Similarly oblique commentaries run through “Breathing Space: Contemporary Art From Hong Kong,” an show on view through July 9 at the Hong Kong Center of the Asia Society, which in November canceled a planned screening of a documentary about the Umbrella Movement, citing political concerns. One piece, “Defense and Resistance,” by South Ho, shows photos of the artist walling and then unwalling himself in with bricks marked with “Made in Xianggang,” the word for Hong Kong in Mandarin, the mainland’s dominant tongue. The bricks are also stacked up in the center of the gallery, with a chunk missing, and it is unclear whether the wall is structurally sound — a possible metaphor for Beijing’s power over the city. An especially haunting work, “If the Moment Came,” is a black box with a top made of wired glass and a murky interior that shows a looping video of a hand playing with a kendama, a Japanese toy featuring a wooden handle and a small ball. The artist, Chloë Cheuk, said that she created the installation after making an audio recording of boys playing with kendamas at one of the 2014 protest sites. She added the wired glass, she said, as a reference to protesters who smashed a window at the Legislative Council complex around the same time. Ms. Cheuk, 27, said that the ball’s inevitable failure to break through the glass was intended to evoke the feeling of helplessness that she said was now familiar to many young Hong Kongers. But that feeling transcends politics, she said, and her artistic practice is primarily guided by her emotions. “When people see my work, they can respond because they can really feel it,” she said on a recent evening in Yau Tong, an industrial area in eastern Kowloon. “They feel that they’ve been understood. ” | 0fake |
When Is Peach Season? It’s a Bit Fuzzy - The New York Times | Kathleen Purvis, the Southern food writer most likely to let you know when you have something wrong, made a peach declaration on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. Peaches, she said, should never be eaten before the Fourth of July. From there, one has six weeks to fill up. Ms. Purvis, the food editor of The Charlotte Observer, adopted the rule after an interview in the 1990s with Jeanne Voltz, the pioneering food editor, who died in 2002. Ms. Voltz said that her Alabama father never wasted his calories or his jaw power on a peach before July 4. It just wasn’t worth it. The private Facebook post unleashed a peach debate among a circle of cooks and food writers. “That is a North Carolina rule, not a Georgia or South Carolina rule,” admonished Nathalie Dupree, another Southern food writer with deeply held opinions. Texans offered that their peach season was almost over. Cathy Barrow, who writes Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s Kitchen from her home in Washington, D. C. reported that she had eaten some great peaches from Georgia and Virginia recently, blaming climate change for their early arrival. Peach fans from the Northeast weighed in, crying over what is shaping up to be an exceptionally lousy peach season because of a late frost. Californians were silent, even though the drought has affected the largest state. Here in the South, where high humidity, rain and long hot nights give peaches plenty of time to plump up, the crop isn’t as abundant as farmers would like. Still, the fruit itself is exceptional, with dense but yielding flesh so full of sugary juice that leaning over the sink is the best approach to eating one. And in Atlanta, they are indeed at their best in July and August. But for many people, the need to eat a peach overrides seasonal perfection. Juan Carlos Melgar, the peach specialist at Clemson University, ate his first peach around the middle of May. It was a clingstone, a type of peach that is not as good to eat out of hand as the freestones. In Florida, farmers are planting peach trees that produce fruit as early as April or May. “They are not so nice looking,” Dr. Melgar said. “But they are peaches for people who want them as early as possible. People need their peaches. ” Indeed, we all need our markers of summer. For Ms. Purvis, it’s a fresh peach not eaten until the Fourth of July. For others, it’s a peach whenever one shows up. “I always go in too early and stay too long when it comes to peaches,” Katie Monson, a Charlotte resident, posted on the Facebook peach debate. “I can’t help myself!” | 0fake |
Delays dog 'shovel ready' projects in Trump's infrastructure plan | NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump reassured manufacturers gathered in the White House Roosevelt room on March 31 that a massive infrastructure program was coming soon. “We’re going to make it happen” this year, he said, according to Drew Greenblatt, the president of Marlin Steel in Baltimore, who was present. “That was actually the first thing that he talked about behind closed doors with us,” Greenblatt added. But putting a trillion-dollar infrastructure program to work could be easier said than done, as some of the projects suggested to the administration underscore. Project lists submitted by the North America’s Building Trades Unions and by an outside developer who helped with the transition both contain projects that infrastructure builders call “shovel ready.” But, for a range of reasons, shovel ready does not always mean ready for shovels to break ground. That means any effort to jump-start projects, put people to work and inject economic stimulus could drag on Trump’s promise for a 10-year, $1 trillion infrastructure project After North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) president Sean McGarvey met with Trump on January 23, the group submitted a total of 26 bridge, pipeline and water projects. A second list of 51 projects was assembled by Ohio developer Dan Slane, who assisted with the transition, including everything from inland waterways to ports to a new FBI headquarters. While details on Trump’s plans are scant, a senior administration official said they’re looking for ways to shorten the lengthy permitting process. “The current system has just lost its way,” he said. Nine projects have garnered the support of both Slane and the NABTU, appearing on both lists; of those, seven have yet to start construction, and one has only done preliminary construction, highlighting how hard it is to launch infrastructure projects as quickly as Trump wants to do. “The shovel ready moniker that they put on projects, it’s just rarely applicable,” said Bill Miller, president and chief executive of two companies that overlap the two lists. The Power Company of Wyoming LLC is building the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project, and TransWest Express LLC is developing the TransWest Express Transmission Project, crossing Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Nevada. The Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind project, which is being built in part on federal land, took eight years and “tens of millions of dollars” before it could recently start construction. The TransWest Express transmission project is still waiting for several state-level permits, Miller said. “To be shovel ready is incredibly expensive and time consuming,” Miller added. The administration says it wants to get ground broken fast. But some of that just might be out of the president’s hands, such as state-level permitting. “A significant part of the president’s infrastructure plan will focus on streamlining regulating and permitting so that it is easier for all viable projects to move forward in a timely manner. These reforms might not be driven by the hurdles facing a single project, but rather will create more certainty in the process overall,” a White House spokesperson told Reuters. The delays that have beset a desalination plant proposed by Poseidon Water, a developer of water-related infrastructure, in Huntington Beach, California illustrate how clashing interests and regulations can hold up projects. Poseidon first proposed the idea of a plant to turn salt water into drinking water for Orange County in the late 1990s and started permitting in the early 2000s, said Scott Maloni, a vice president at Poseidon and the Huntington Beach project manager. The city of Huntington Beach originally approved the project in February 2006. But Poseidon still needed to secure 24 permits from state agencies, such as approval from the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board for the plant’s national pollutant discharge elimination system, which is required by the Environmental Protection Agency. After the city issued the necessary local approvals in 2006, project builder Poseidon was able to apply to the California Coastal Commission. That application was amended several times over the years as the project evolved. For example, the plant had to alter its design after the state began phasing out power plants that use seawater for cooling purposes. Poseidon had planned to desalinate that wastewater, and changed its design to instead take in water directly from the ocean instead. In 2013, Poseidon shelved the permit application after the state’s coastal commission directed the company to look into concerns about the effects of the operation on fish larva in the area. The application was resubmitted in 2015, and then withdrawn yet again in September 2016, because the commission wanted proof the plans complied with new, 2015-passed rules from the State Water Board on desalination plants. That compelled Poseidon to redesign the plant’s seawater intake and discharge technologies. The project still needs three more approvals, from the State Lands Commission, the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board and the California Coastal Commission. Poseidon says they’re confident they’ll secure the last approvals soon. But even then, construction might not start until the second quarter of 2018, Maloni said. And the objections from environmentalists haven’t stopped. The plant is “far from a done deal,” said Mandy Sackett, the California policy coordinator for the Surfrider Foundation. The foundation argues that the plant is unnecessary, expensive and energy-intensive, putting marine life at risk. Sackett said the foundation will continue to fight the project. “There’s still several opportunities for public input and important regulatory review that is yet to be completed,” she said. | 0fake |
Republican candidate Cruz wins 2016 CPAC straw poll | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas beat out rivals in the 2016 Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll as the first-choice pick for the U.S. presidency. A total of 2,659 attendees were surveyed, with Cruz snagging the first-place slot with 40 points, followed by rivals Marco Rubio with 30 points and Republican national front-runner Donald Trump with 15. The election will be held in November. (Reporting by Alana Wise; Editing by Matthew Lewis) This article was funded in part by SAP. It was independently created by the Reuters editorial staff. SAP had no editorial involvement in its creation or production. | 0fake |
The Savvy Person’s Guide to Reading the Latest Polls - The New York Times | You’ve probably heard that it’s always best to focus on the average of polls. The poll results that often get the most attention are outliers — they get attention because they’re shocking, not because they’re representative. But we also know that people often ignore that advice. They want to know the details of the newest poll, and how and why it might be different from the last. And to tell you the truth, I do, too. I read the details and methodology of almost every survey that is released. The problem is that it’s a lot harder than it looks. After a splashy poll is released, Twitter is often overflowing with but misguided analysis. It’s true: You really are better off looking at the averages. But if you’re going to assess individual polls this election, here’s a guide on how to do it well. When a poll comes out, I start by looking at the topline results — Hillary Clinton is plus 3 percentage points, or Donald J. Trump is plus 1, for example. But it’s also worth looking at vote share — whether Mrs. Clinton has 47 percent or 40 percent, for instance. In particular, I care about how close the leading candidate is to 50 percent. There’s more uncertainty the further a candidate is from 50 percent and the larger the number of undecided voters. Until a candidate approaches 50 percent, it’s hard to know whether the lead is because of party unity or because the candidate has won over the key voters needed for victory. This is especially true in a reliably red or blue state: A Democrat who has 40 percent of the vote in Arizona still has a lot to prove, even with a lead. He or she hasn’t yet won the voters who decide the state’s elections. There was a good example of this in the Arizona Senate race. A lot of polls showed John McCain narrowly ahead, or even behind. But once he won the G. O. P. primary, voters returned to his side. Usually, anything at 46 percent or above is a good indicator of real strength. Less than that, and you have to wonder about undecided voters. ■ It’s also worth looking at whether there’s a difference between registered and likely voters. In a presidential election year, I generally prefer looking at the registered voter numbers — with a caveat. That’s because many methods that screen for likely voters are poor and yield noisy data. Registered voter samples are larger, and there aren’t additional questions to add statistical noise. But here’s the caveat: Registered voter polls tend to overrepresent Democrats, so I often focus on the registered voter number and mentally shift it a point or two toward the Republicans. ■ This year, there’s also the question of whether to look at or polls. I’m not sold on which is best. This year’s candidates don’t have the strong bases of a Ross Perot or John Anderson. It’s possible that the polls that name them will overestimate their support it’s possible that the polls that do not name them will underestimate their support. For now, I’m inclined to split the difference. To get a sense of whether a poll is good or bad news for a certain candidate, I usually compare the results of the poll with the polling averages or the last poll conducted by the same pollster. ■ If the poll is very different from the polling average, there’s a good chance it’s an outlier. ■ If the poll shows a big shift from a prior survey, I also wonder whether the previous poll was an outlier. If so, a candidate might appear to rebound simply because he or she was unusually weak in a prior poll. So compare that prior poll with the average of the time, too. ■ It’s also worth looking at whether the candidate has gained or lost vote share. When candidates fall without good reason, I often assume they’re likelier than not to win back their former supporters. I definitely take note when candidates have won more supporters than they’ve won before. If that happens a lot, it’s a real sign of strength. ■ I also look at the various measures of whether Mr. Trump has a ceiling: like a 50 percent “very unfavorable” rating, or 50 percent who say they would be scared of a Trump presidency. I’m not convinced that those measures actually represent a ceiling. But they very well might, and I am curious about whether he’s making progress by those measures. I also care a lot about how the poll was conducted. Polling is hard. A lot of things can go wrong, from question wording to weighting a sample or selecting likely voters. These choices can make a big difference — even with the same data. Worse, there are very few pollsters that really provide enough information to know whether they’re making reasonable choices — and what the consequences of those decisions might be. As a result, I strongly prefer experienced firms with solid track records. ■ I have serious problems with IVR polls (interactive voice response). These are sometimes called and they don’t have any means to contact voters with a cellphone. This is a problem for even an experienced firm with a good record. It can be disastrous for firms without much . ■ I have reservations about online polls. It’s harder to draw a representative sample online because you can’t rely on traditional random sampling. There are skilled and experienced pollsters that do a good job, like YouGov and SurveyMonkey. But there’s a somewhat higher burden for online pollsters to build solid track records, make good hires and publish a detailed methodology. ■ If the poll is from a less established firm, I’ll give a closer look if it has been transparent — if the pollsters publish a detailed methodology that gives me a better sense of what I’m getting. You don’t have to analyze every detail of a poll’s methodology, but here are some rules of thumb: ■ A poll is often a bad poll. You usually need multiple days to call voters back and get a representative sample. ■ Well over half of adults ought to be reached on cellphones in a typical national survey about 40 percent of Americans do not have a landline at all. A poll of registered voters off the voter file can have a somewhat smaller number of voters, since the poll can typically be weighted by partisanship, and registered and likely voters are less likely to have only a cellphone (they’re older, more affluent and often less mobile than the population as a whole). ■ Pay attention to sample size. If a poll has a small sample — less than 800 people or so — be aware that sampling error will play a bigger role than usual. The gains from big samples are smaller than you might think, so don’t give a lot of extra credit for a poll that goes much higher than 1, 200. Often, the polls with huge samples are actually just using cheap and problematic sampling methods. If the sample is less than 400, the result should be considered no more than a ballpark estimate. ■ I don’t usually pay much attention to the margin of error because it does not even come close to approximating the actual potential for error in a survey. And pollsters calculate margin of error somewhat differently. In particular, I see a lot of firms that don’t adjust their margins of error to account for the effect of weighting — making their poll seem more confident than it is. The country is deeply divided along demographic lines, which makes it very important to check on the demographic composition of the sample. But this is not so simple to do. ■ Know the polling universe: adults, registered voters and likely voters. This is trickier than you might suppose. Often, a poll of registered or likely voters will report the demographic composition of the overall sample of adults — generally a much more diverse group. That doesn’t tell you about the demographic makeup of registered or likely voters. ■ Know the targets. Almost all pollsters adjust their sample to match demographics, like age, race and gender. If a pollster isn’t weighting for something fundamental like that, it’s a big warning sign: See for yourself whether the poll is off by a wide margin on those measures (sometimes, they’re fine). It’s also worth looking at education or party registration. Not every poll weights by those measures, and sometimes that’s a mistake. ■ The exit polls are not the word of God. There are legitimate debates about the electorate. Many of these debates center on differences between estimates based on the census, voter files or exit polls. Most polls are on the end of the spectrum showing a whiter sample, since most polls use voter file and census data. Many times, polls get slammed on social media for being “too white” in comparison with the exit polls, even though they’re near the consensus of more reliable measures. ■ Wrong is wrong. In general, I wouldn’t criticize a poll if the electorate fell somewhere in the debatable range around the exit polls, census and voter file. But if a pollster leaves the debatable range, it’s probably just wrong. It may even indicate colossal failures in weighting or sampling. The poll can be dismissed out of hand on this basis alone. Examples of what I mean: a poll showing that more than 45 percent of the electorate in Pennsylvania will be over age 65 (that’s too high) or that 13 percent of the electorate will be black in North Carolina (that’s too low). ■ I really don’t look at party identification. We have no idea what the “right” partisan breakdown of the electorate really is: It’s an attitude, not a nearly fixed characteristic. Depending on the news or the national political environment, or voters can switch in and out of the “unaffiliated” or “independent” column. It is very clear that there are more Democrats than Republicans in the country, which has been true for about a decade. But I will look at party registration, if it’s available from the voter file. That’s a pretty fixed characteristic: It doesn’t swing with the mood. ■ When I look through the polling crosstabs for subgroups — like young people or black voters — I compare with old polls, not the exit polls. The two measures are irreconcilable, and a direct comparison introduces a lot of bias. It will generally show, for instance, Democrats doing better among white voters even as they’re not doing better over all. ■ Subgroups are noisy, and that’s fine. I often see a lot of people who dig into the polls and find a crosstab that doesn’t make sense — maybe Hispanic voters give Hillary Clinton only 55 percent of the vote. Well, that’s O. K. For one, it matters a lot less than you might think (giving Mrs. Clinton an additional shift among Hispanic voters will boost her national vote share by just two points). And subsamples are noisy by nature. It might be canceled out by noise elsewhere in the sample, either by chance or for a more structural reason. An underappreciated fact is that polls are usually adjusted for the right number of voters by race, age and gender, but subgroups don’t each have the right demographic composition. There won’t necessarily be the right number of young, female Hispanics, or old, less educated white men. So a Hispanic subsample could be too old and male, but in exchange, some other part of the electorate is too young and female. ■ A lot of polls conducted off voter registration files will select a certain set of past voters, like people who have voted in the last two elections in addition to those who are newly registered. These decisions can exclude less likely voters, who may vote differently. That’s a problem. I get even more concerned when I see a screen on top of a sample that was already especially likely to vote. I could go on. But these are the basics of my mental checklist in judging whether an individual poll might maintain the status quo, move the needle or stand as an outlier. And then I go back to the poll averages. | 0fake |
Merkel welcomes "a lot of material" from Macron on EU reform | BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomes French President Emmanuel Macron s speech on EU reform, her spokesman said on Wednesday, without giving details on how she would go about improving the way the European Union is run. Macron offered a sweeping vision for Europe s future in a speech on Tuesday, calling for the EU to cooperate more closely on defense, immigration, tax and social policy, and for the single currency bloc to have its own budget. Merkel s spokesman Steffen Seibert said Berlin shared Macron s view that the EU needs reforms and that his speech contained a lot of material for debate on the issue. This discussion is necessary and sensible, Seibert told a regular news conference, adding that EU leaders would have a chance to talk at a meeting in Estonia on Thursday. Macron said he hoped his ideas would be taken into account in Germany s coalition building negotiations, talks that are not expected to begin until mid-October and may take months. His proposals drew mixed reaction from Germany s pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens, both possible partners in the coalition government Merkel will form after her center-right CDU/CSU bloc won a Sept. 24 election albeit with a much reduced share of parliamentary seats. In a sign that her Christian Democratic Union might block Macron s plan for a joint euro zone budget, Eckhardt Rehberg, the most senior CDU member on parliament s budget committee, said: The problem in Europe is not a lack of money. Rehberg pointed to existing instruments to boost investments such as the EU budget, the so-called Juncker fund (EFSI), the euro zone bailout fund (ESM) and European Investment Bank (EIB). And not to forget the ECB s monetary policy, he added. Rehberg said it was more important to discuss how existing funds could be used better and that member states must implement their own reforms to increase competitiveness and clean up their budgets. The taxpayers of other countries cannot relieve them of this duty, Rehberg told Reuters. Germany s biggest industry association, BDI, called Macron s proposals courageous but not uncontroversial . Europe now needs speed in the reform discussion, BDI chief Joachim Lang said. Macron s proposals for a joint euro zone budget and a common finance minister were at least worth discussing, Lang added. The influential economic institute Ifo described Macron s speech as an invitation for Germany to join the brainstorming about the EU s future. A stronger EU would certainly make sense in the areas of foreign, defense and trade policy, Ifo head Clemens Fuest said. But Macron s plans for the euro zone are wrong, from my point of view. Fuest said the euro zone s problems would not be solved by creating a finance minister or budget for the 19-member bloc. It would be more important to ensure more stability in the financial sector and to reconcile liability and control in economic and financial policy, he said. Fuest was among a group of top German and French economists who issued a joint statement on Wednesday made calling on Paris and Berlin to shift their stances on EU reforms. | 0fake |
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