title stringlengths 1 456 ⌀ | text stringlengths 1 143k ⌀ | label class label 2
classes |
|---|---|---|
Trump discusses North Korea threat in calls with China, Japan leaders | BRIDGEWATER, N.J. (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump spoke to Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday and discussed the threat posed by North Korea, the White House said. “Both leaders reaffirmed their commitment to a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. President Trump reiterated his determination to seek more balanced trade relations with America’s trading partners,” the White House said of Trump’s call with Xi. Trump has become increasingly frustrated with China’s inability to rein in North Korea. Trump and Abe, in their call, reiterated their commitment to increase pressure on North Korea. “They reaffirmed that the United States-Japan Alliance stands ready to defend and respond to any threat or action taken by North Korea,” the White House said in a statement. | 0fake |
Axelrod: The slow-motion implosion of the Republican Party | David Axelrod is CNN's senior political commentator and host of the podcast " The Axe Files. " He was senior adviser to President Barack Obama and chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
That's where the Republican Party finds itself today, both in its nominating battle and in its implacable "not even a hearing" stance on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Merrick Garland.
Privately, and to some degree publicly, Republicans seem resigned to death in November by fire or by hanging. The prolonged nominating process is merely a means of determining the nature of the execution and limiting the risk to other candidates on the ballot.
The normal pattern of GOP nominating contests for the past two decades is that the party endures heated primary fights between populist, evangelical and center-right candidates, only to settle on the leading establishment choice.
Having stoked anti-Obama fever in order to score midterm victories at the polls and then failed to deliver on pledges to derail major elements of the President's agenda, the party elite now finds itself overrun by a wave of outrage and discontent.
That wave has carried Donald Trump to the brink of the nomination, a hostile takeover that so horrifies the Republican establishment that many are now turning in desperation to a man they dislike almost as much as the prospect of Trump as their standard-bearer.
Sen. Ted Cruz's entire tenure since his arrival in Washington in 2013 has been dedicated to taunting a Republican leadership he views as accommodationist.
He called Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a "liar" on the floor of the Senate. He led the party over the cliff of a government shutdown in a vain effort to derail Obamacare. To this day, he casts his campaign as one to upend "the Washington cartel" of insiders and lobbyists who he says have betrayed the GOP and the country.
Now, that same "cartel" is slowly and grudgingly embracing Cruz, who is currently running a distant second to Trump, as their last, best hope to deprive the bilious billionaire of the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the nomination.
Sen. Lindsey Graham's painfully tepid "endorsement" of Cruz last week, followed by Mitt Romney's announcement that he would stand up for the Texas senator in Tuesday's Utah caucuses, reflected the dilemma in which the GOP finds itself.
In backing Cruz, neither of these pillars of the Republican establishment spent a whole lot of time extolling his virtues, focusing instead on the man they are desperate to stop.
"Today, there is a contest between Trumpism and Republicanism," Romney said. "Through the calculated statements of its leader, Trumpism has become associated with racism, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, vulgarity and, most recently, threats and violence. I am repulsed by each and every one of these."
So he's for the other guy.
Jeb Bush followed in similarly measured fashion on Wednesday.
Many are gravitating to Cruz, arguing, as Bush did, that his predictable views are more plausible in a Republican nominee than the philosophically promiscuous, cult of personality spectacle that is Trump.
"I don't like Cruz, but I can defend most of his positions with a straight face," one prominent Republican leader told me. "I don't know how I go on TV and make an argument for Trump."
There is a potential bonus of a Cruz nomination, this party leader explained. For the past several cycles, conservative activists have complained that by nominating relatively moderate candidates -- Romney in '12 and Sen. John McCain in '08 -- the party spurned its base and depressed Republican turnout.
"Let's have Cruz, and we will put that issue to rest," said this party leader, convinced that the Texan's appeal, pitched to evangelicals and the right, is too narrow to command a general election. "If it's Trump, there will be no resolution. Each side will blame the other for the disaster."
But all these efforts to stop Trump may well be too late. Even if they succeed in depriving him of the delegates he needs to clinch the nomination, his victory in Arizona's winner-take-all primary meant Trump probably will come close.
That would leave the party establishment in the unhappy position of either embracing the front-runner or courting a rebellion among his supporters by dumping him. And while a few weeks ago, many still talked hopefully about swapping in a fresh and more appealing recruit -- say, House Speaker Paul Ryan -- the somber realization is seeping in that it will be hard enough to topple Trump, much less bypass Cruz at the same time.
Though Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, would enter a general election campaign with historically high negatives, she is running well ahead of Trump, whose unfavorable ratings eclipse even hers.
Cruz runs a tighter race in early polls. But as a factional candidate, his ability to grow is very much in question.
Only Gov. John Kasich is outrunning Clinton in general election trial heats. But Kasich has won just one of the first 37 nominating contests -- his own state of Ohio -- and netted not one delegate in Tuesday's races in Arizona and Utah.
Kasich's brand of compassionate conservatism might sell in a general, and he would be a comfortable choice for the party establishment. But he has struggled to find traction within a party riven by anger.
The party leaders are prisoners of their base.
Base politics also has trapped the Republican leadership when it comes to Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.
While some opponents have portrayed Garland as a threat to the Second Amendment, his record over 19 years on the federal bench makes it hard to paint the judge out of the mainstream. He is more liberal than Republicans in the Senate would prefer but as moderate a choice as they probably would get from any Democratic president.
A solid majority of Americans feels that the Senate should take up the Garland nomination rather than allowing the seat, left vacant by the death in February of Justice Antonin Scalia, to go unfilled for more than a year.
But were Garland seated to replace Scalia, a conservative judicial icon, he would shift the balance of the court, giving it a majority of Democratic appointees for the first time in decades.
That's why McConnell has ordained that the Garland nomination will not get even a hearing, much less a vote.
The right has threatened summary expulsion for any Senate Republican who breaks ranks with the majority leader over Garland.
Erick Erickson, an influential conservative commentator, threw down the gauntlet on my podcast, "The Axe Files."
"If Republicans cave, I mean, this would be more the end of the Republican Party than Donald Trump," he said. "Because, I mean, going back to Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the Supreme Court has been the issue of the Republican Party. It comes up in every campaign -- presidential campaign, it comes up in every congressional campaign, every even-numbered year. And if the Republicans were then to say in this year -- after years of saying, 'The Supreme Court hangs in the balance; you must vote Republican' -- 'Hey, we're going to go through with this,' it would be game over."
All this has put the six Republican senators running for re-election in states that voted for Obama in a terrible bind. Swing voters in those states, already probably influenced by the presidential race, also would be among those favoring action on the Garland nomination.
That group includes Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who suddenly is facing a challenge from a former Democratic lieutenant governor, the aptly named Patty Judge.
Playing base politics -- tolerating nativism, birtherism and promising obstruction at every turn -- could cost Republicans the presidency and threaten control of the Senate.
And if the GOP crashes and burns, it will probably get a more liberal court nominee than Garland from the next President Clinton.
For seven years, the GOP establishment knowingly and cynically rode the anti-Obama tiger, feeding the beast with a steady diet of red meat.
Now, whatever happens at the Cleveland convention, the party elite may wind up as dinner. | 0fake |
Malala Announced That She Plans To Become Prime Minister Of Pakistan | Videos Malala Announced That She Plans To Become Prime Minister Of Pakistan At a conference this month in the United Arab Emirates, Malala announced that she intends to one day be the prime minister of Pakistan. | November 1, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! Malala Yousafzai gestures as she speaks to an audience during a discussion of her book, “I am Malala” hosted by the John F. Kennedy Library and held at Boston College High School Saturday, Oct. 12, 2013, in Dorchester, Mass. (AP Photo/Jessica Rinaldi)
Malala Yousufzai is a remarkable young woman who has made headlines and is known globally for the brave work she does in Pakistan, her home country. Her fight for the right for everyone to have a proper education, especially women, has put her life at risk many times and she even survived an assassination attempt where she was shot in the head.
When she was just 17, she won the Nobel Peace Prize and her book, I Am Malala, is a national bestseller. Now, at the age of 19, she is still working harder than ever to improve education in both Pakistan and other countries worldwide. One of her most recent moves was opening a school for refugee girls aged 14-18 in Lebanon, on the border of Syria.
At a conference this month in the United Arab Emirates, Malala announced that she intends to one day be the prime minister of Pakistan. She said that when she grew up, women were really only allowed to be doctors, teachers, and housewives. However, her education and activism has helped her see the world and her place in it different. “When I saw women role models, it broadened my vision. I saw Benazir Bhutto as a woman leader [who was] twice the prime minister of Pakistan. I heard about women athletes, women astronauts, women artists, women entrepreneurs … It allowed me to recognize the potential that I had, and that I can have as a woman, to achieve anything in my life,” she said. “My dream changed from becoming a doctor to becoming the prime minister of Pakistan.” It may seem prestigious to be a doctor as a female in Pakistan, which it certainly is, the job does come with strings attached. Though the huge majority of medical students are female, only 23 percent of registered doctors are women. This is because being a doctor or even in medical school is a big selling point for marriage proposals, so the majority of women wind up getting married and not working as doctors. The ratio of medical students and their propensity for excelling more than their male counterparts is likely culturally-driven as well. One fifth-year medical student gave his opinion on the issue: “Boys go out, hang out with their friends,” he said. “Girls can’t go out as much, so they stay at home and rote-learn.” Malala can truly do anything she sets her mind to, whether it be going to medical school, becoming prime minister , or continuing with her activist efforts. This young woman has so far stunned the world into listening what she has to say as she raises awareness about what a lack of education can do to women in hers and other countries. Education for girls is necessary to improve the world and the quality of life for people everywhere, and Malala will not rest until significant changes are made to include girls in school. This work by True Activist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International License. | 1real |
Libyans dig for water in latest test for capital's residents | TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Across Libya s capital residents have started drilling through pavements to access wells in a desperate search for water after the taps ran dry in a new low for living conditions. After years of neglect, workers turned off the water to do urgent maintenance earlier this month, cutting supplies to many Tripoli households. Then an armed group sabotaged the system, prolonging the misery. The water crisis is a powerful symbol of state failure in a country that was once one of the wealthiest in the Middle East but has been gripped by turmoil since a 2011 uprising unseated Muammar Gaddafi. For Libyans the chaos has meant power cuts and crippling cash shortages. These are often made worse by battles between armed groups vying for control of the fractured oil-rich state and its poorly-maintained infrastructure. We haven t had water for ten days. The state does nothing, said Nasser Said, a landlord in Tripoli s upmarket Ben Ashour district. Already equipped with a generator to keep the power running during outages that sometimes last more than a day, he hired drillers to dig some 31 meters to extract groundwater for the six apartments in the residential block he owns. No water, no electricity. You become a state in a state, he said, standing next to his building on a leafy sidestreet. We last had to do this maybe 20 years ago. Like many Libyans, Said is skeptical about the chances of U.N.-led peace talks unifying rival factions that have been fighting for control. The talks were adjourned last week with little sign of progress in creating a government that could stabilize Libya and stand up to armed groups that have repeatedly seized oil facilities and other state assets to make demands. The U.N.-supported Government of National Accord (GNA) has struggled to impose its authority since its leaders arrived in Tripoli in March last year. Early last week an armed faction in the south said it had turned off water supplies from Gaddafi s Great Man Made River, a pipeline system that pumps water from underneath Libya s vast southern desert to coastal areas such as Tripoli. The group is seeking the release of a leader imprisoned by a rival faction in the capital, said Tawfiq Shwehaidi, a manager at the Great Man Made River based in the eastern city of Benghazi. We had started maintenance work on the 16th (of October) and cut supplies to Tripoli, he said. Afterwards an armed group... set one power plant on fire which closed three other plants and shut down 24 wells. That has deprived residents of water while boosting the business of drillers who for 4,000-6,000 Libyan dinars ($2,940-$4,410 at the official exchange rate) access groundwater unused in some neighborhoods since the Great Man Made River started pumping water to Tripoli in 1996. We drill about three wells in two weeks it takes about three to four days to drill a well, said Abdulsalam Forganea, a 23-year-old worker helping to operate an ageing drilling rig. Parts of Tripoli offer a semblance of normality and power cuts have eased since the summer. The city has seen fewer big clashes since a handful of armed groups aligned with the GNA earlier this year. But security is still fragile. A former prime minister was abducted in August for nine days by one of the two most powerful armed groups, while the other engaged in a battle this month that shut down the airport. A Reuters reporter recently saw a traffic clogged commercial street suddenly empty as a man was fatally shot by militiamen. Kidnapping for ransom is rife. A conflict that escalated in 2014 has put extra pressure on a Tripoli population that swelled to an estimated three million with the arrival of displaced families from other Libyan cities. Public health services are failing, inflation has spiraled, and the start of the school year has been delayed by several weeks because teachers are striking over salaries. Shutdowns crippled oil revenues so little has been spent on repairs and maintenance, and the water network and other infrastructure have been corroded. Most government spending goes on public salaries, including for former rebel groups that forced their way onto the state payroll after Gaddafi s overthrow. No budget has been transferred... since 2011 except the emergency budget, which is the result of the financial difficulties experienced by the Libyan state, said Naji Assaed, head of the Libyan Water Authority. Production at desalination plants has fallen sharply, with output at a plant in the western town of Zuwara dropping from 80,000 cubic liters to 16,000 cl annually. Assaed said officials were working hard to resolve the crisis, but it was not clear when supplies would be restored. As he spoke a tanker arrived up to deliver water for his tattered ministry building. In the absence of adequate spare parts, lack of budgets, lack of stability in the security situation, security chaos, people do not comply with the law and all this has affected the performance of the system, he said. ($1 = 1.3607 Libyan dinars) | 0fake |
NATO, US, And UK Assemble Largest Troop Buildup On Russian Border Since Cold War | By John Vibes
In the midst of deepening tension between US allies NATO and Russia, NATO is planning the largest military buildup along the Russian border since the cold war.
NATO called on allied governments this week to contribute whatever troops and equipment they can to the effort. According to Reuters , thousands of troops are expected to arrive in the coming days and weeks.
It was reported that Italy, France, Denmark and other European states are expected to join the NATO military divisions that will be led by the United States along Russia’s border.
On Wednesday, Britain announced it is sending hundreds of soldiers and hardware to Russia’s borders as part of a huge military deployment.
A total of 800 troops, drones and tanks are moving to Estonia as part of the biggest military build-up of NATO troops on Russia’s borders since the Cold War.
In addition to the forces allocated for his specific operation, NATO has an army of over 40,000 ready to be called up to fight at any time.
The US military claims that this threatening move is meant to act as a “deterrent” to the Russian military, but this is obvious a move that will escalate tensions and push towards a possible third world war.
“This is a credible deterrence, not to provoke a conflict but to prevent conflict,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday — ironically ignoring the fact that it is a de facto provocation.
Just imagine what would happen if Russian troops amassed along the Mexican border and told the US that this move was to ‘prevent conflict.’
The so-called Iskander-M cruise missiles can hit targets across Poland and the Baltics, although NATO officials declined to say if Russia had moved nuclear warheads to Kaliningrad.
The United States’ envoy to NATO, Douglas Lute, told reporters that NATO and the US military may consider Russia a threat if they had nuclear weapons within range of NATO’s deployment. This statement is insane considering the fact that the US military is the one that is many miles from home on the border of someone else’s lands.
“This deployment, if it becomes permanent if the presence of nuclear weapons were confirmed, would be a change in (Russia’s) security posture,” Lute said.
If anyone is a threat, it is NATO and the US government.
These military tensions are the result of an ongoing proxy war in Syria, in which Western powers are attempting to institute a regime change in the country by funding violent rebel groups. Meanwhile, Russia has interests in keeping their allies in the Syrian government in control, putting the two superpowers at odds.
Until now, Russia and the US have been fighting through third parties, just as they had during the previous Cold War, and the same type of situation is developing today.
John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. John writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com , where this article first appeared . You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. John is currently battling cancer naturally , without any chemo or radiation, and will be working to help others through his experience, if you wish to contribute to his treatments please donate here . Activist Post Daily Newsletter Subscription is FREE and CONFIDENTIAL Free Report: 10 Ways to Survive the Economic Collapse with subscription | 1real |
U.S. Army Veteran: ‘I Killed Four People In One Hour In Iraq’ | U.S. Army Veteran: ‘I Killed Four People In One Hour In Iraq’ Posted on Nov 3, 2016
First filmed in 2008, Isaac Lebonte, known as ‘Bone’ to his fellow soldiers in Iraq, talks eight years later about killing people in his first firefight, the deaths of close friends and his difficulty adjusting to life outside of war.
The interviews were filmed by the award-winning photographer Sean Smith. | 1real |
Hillary Is a Communist Spy- Alex Jones, Dave Hodges and Global Research | Hillary Is a Communist Spy- Alex Jones, Dave Hodges and Global Research
Hillary Clinton wanted for treason.
Alex Jones came out with his reasons why he believes that Hillary Clinton is a Communist Chinese spy. Alex and I both have our beliefs as to why Clinton should be considered to be a Communist operative and we both come at this from different angles. Alex maintains that Hillary is a Communist Chinese spy. I maintain that Hillary is a KGB operative. However, I believe at the time we are at today, we are both right. Alex Jones maintains that the Chinese will emerge as the dominant power whose mission it will be to usher in the NWO. I agree wholeheartedly with that statement. For the Moment, China and Russia Are Allied
Russia and China are allied and the linchpin of the Russia/Chinese alliance are the massive energy deals that Russia and China have mutually entered into. In something that our main stream media (MSM) never talks about, Russia and China are militarily aligned in Syria. as I have noted in past articles. Therefore, in the present moment, when Hillary is working for the Russians, she is also, by default, working for the Chinese.
Alex Jones has a very interesting take on why Hillary’s association with China will help perpetuate our downfall.
Global Research Declares Clinton to be Foreign Spy
It is at this point that Alex Jones and Dave Hodges find common ground.
From Global Research : During her 4 years as Secretary of State of the United States (2009-2014), Hillary Clinton controlled US foreign policy. She had access to the most confidential information and state documents, numbering in the tens of thousands, from all of the major government departments and agencies, Intelligence, FBI, the Pentagon, Treasury and the office of the President.
She had unfettered access to vital and secret information affecting US policy in all the key regions of the empire…”
“…There are several lines of inquiry against Mme. Clinton:
(1) Did she work with, as yet unnamed, foreign governments and intelligence services to strengthen their positions and against the interest of the United States?
(2) Did she provide information on the operations and policy positions of various key US policymakers to competitors, adversaries or allies undermining the activities of military, intelligence and State Department officials?
(3) Did she seek to enhance her personal power within the US administration to push her aggressive policy of serial pre-emptive wars over and against veteran State Department and Pentagon officials who favored traditional diplomacy and less violent confrontation?
(4) Did she prepare a ‘covert team’, using foreign or dual national operative, to lay the groundwork for her bid for the presidency and her ultimate goal of supreme military and political power? (Ed. Note: My assertion)
Clinton’s covert war policies, which included the violent overthrow of the elected Ukraine government, were carried out by her ‘Lieutenant’ Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, a virulent neo-conservative holdover from the previous Bush Administration and someone committed to provoking Russia and to enhancing Israel’s power in the Middle East. Clinton’s highly dangerous and economically destabilizing ‘brainchild’ of militarily encircling China, the so-called ‘pivot to Asia’, would have required clandestine exchanges with elements in the Pentagon – out of the State Department and possibly Executive oversight.
In other words, within the Washington political circuit, Former Secretary of State Clinton’s escalation of nuclear war policies toward Russia and China required secretive correspondences which would not necessarily abide with the policies and intelligence estimates of other US government agencies and with private business interests…” (EDITOR’S NOTE: I MAINTAIN THAT THIS ISSUE IS ALSO CONTAINED IN THE “MISSING EMAILS”).
My main interest toward Hillary Clinton’s treason has recently focused on one issue, namely, the Clinton Foundation’s selling uranium to Russia. I would argue that Clinton’s policies which pushed the US into a war mode against Russia was done so Clinton would have a willing buyer of uranium (i.e. Russia) should war every come.
Again, from Global Research:
“The executive leadership now faces the problem of how to deal with a traitor , who is the Democratic Party nominee for US President, without undermining the US quest for global power. How do the executive leadership and intelligence agencies back a foreign spy for president, who has been deeply compromised and can be blackmailed? This may explain why the FBI, NSA, and CIA hesitate to press charges; hesitate to even seriously investigate, despite the obvious nature of her offenses. Most of all it explains why there is no indication of the identity of Secretary Clinton’s correspondents in the various reports so far available”… Hillary Clinton: An Agent for Russia
I published my assertion that Clinton was a traitor in 2015. I repeated this charge nearly two months ago.
A former key member of the Obama administration and current Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, has proven herself to be the Ethel Rosenberg of her generation. You may recall your U.S. history as Ethel Rosenberg sold nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. In an act every bit as egregious as Ethel Rosenberg’s treason, Hillary Clinton sold uranium to the Russians while serving as the Secretary of State. Ironically, the original source on this treasonous act committed by Clinton was none other than the liberal rag we call the New York Times . The proof is undeniable that Hillary Clinton committed the treasonous act of selling uranium to the Russians while Secretary of State , as reported in the New York Times. The Russian blood money, as reported, is being held in an offshore account and is being used to fund her run for the Presidency.
From the New York Times….
“A Uranium One sign that points to a 35,000 acre ranch by John Christensen, near the town of Gillette, Wyoming. Uranium One has the mining rights Mr. Christensen’s property.” This is proof of more BLM chicanery which will involve multiple BLM ranches.
The New York Times further asserts that members of the Canadian mining industry, who have supported Clinton’s campaign, financed and sold off to the Russians a company known as Uranium One. Uranium One is directly responsible for transferring uranium from BLM land to the Russians through an off-shore holding company. Again, according to the NY Times, the Russians, through three separate transactions, acquired Uranium One, while paying off the Clintons and their Canadian partners from 2009-2013. The business deal also involved paying Bill Clinton $500,000 dollars for a speech on energy which was delivered in Moscow.
Conclusion Alex Jones, Global Research and Dave Hodges all agree on central point. Hillary Clinton is a foreign asset dedicated to the destruction of the United States. Alex maintains that Hillary is aligned with China and I see evidence that she is aligned with Russia. At this point in time, I do not view this as a discrepancy. Nor, do I have an issue with believing that the globalists have chosen China to usher in the NWO agenda. The central point here is that this nation sits upon the precipice of putting a person into the White House who is an absolute traitor to this country. To this point, whether it is the Chinese flavor or the Russian flavor that Hillary represents, “what does it matter?” She is going continue to sell America out to her enemies. It is interesting to note that during the Grid EX drills, which simulated a take down of the grid, both the Chinese and the Russians were invited to participate. Finally, when Alex Jones, Dave Hodges and Global Research all reach the same conclusion, via different means, THAT HILLARY CLINTON IS A SPY, perhaps it is time to pay closer attention to who we are electing as our next President. | 1real |
Immigration chaos and long nights led to Washington's court win | SEATTLE/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson arrived in Seattle last Saturday after a trip to Florida, public outrage over the immigration order issued the previous day by President Donald Trump was quickly growing. He went home, greeted his family and then went to work. By late Monday afternoon, just minutes before the court closed for the day, Ferguson, a Democrat, and his team of lawyers were ready to file the first state lawsuit seeking to block the order. On Friday, they won a dramatic courtroom victory when U.S. District Judge James Robart put on hold the travel ban for refugees and citizens of seven mainly Muslim countries. The lawsuit emerged out of a chaotic 48-hour period in which the need for immediate action held sway over the kind of carefully thought-out strategizing that usually leads up to a major legal complaint being filed, according to Ferguson and other attorneys involved in actions against the order. “We knew we had one shot,” Ferguson said in an interview, in reference to the bid for a temporary restraining that would immediately overturn Trump’s executive order. The lawsuit is one of several now filed against the executive order around the United States, but it was the first case leading to a broad decision that applies nationwide. The fight over the immigration order is just the first of what is likely to be a series of court battles between Democratic attorneys general, the top legal officers in liberal-leaning states, and the administration. Several attorneys general have already said they expect to sue Trump on various issues if he oversteps his authority, including on the environment and consumer protection. President Trump on Saturday ridiculed Judge Robart, a George W. Bush appointee, and his decision. The Justice Department filed a formal appeal. The Washington state lawyers worked around the clock last Saturday and Sunday against the backdrop of turbulent scenes at U.S. airports, where immigrants were detained by federal officials unprepared to implement the president’s directive. There was little time to coordinate with other states, though ultimately one other state, Minnesota, joined the effort. Additional states, including Virginia, New York and Hawaii, have filed their own lawsuits or sought to intervene in cases brought by individuals affected by the ban. State attorneys general did not collectively decide to let Washington file first for any strategic advantage, Ferguson said. Rather, Washington was able most quickly to marshal evidence of the harm Trump’s order caused to the state, which is crucial to establish legal standing. Ferguson called the general counsels at major Washington employers Amazon.com Inc. and Expedia Inc. for their support. The companies eventually filed sworn statements in court saying the ban hurt their businesses. The state lawyers also gathered information on the harm to state residents and institutions such as the university system, which the judge appeared to find persuasive. The legal assault on the order has involved Ferguson and other Democratic lawyers taking a leaf from the play-book followed by Republican states that successfully challenged actions taken by Trump’s predecessor, former President Barack Obama. Washington state’s claims rely in part on the same legal arguments that Texas and 25 other Republican-led states made when they challenged Obama’s November 2014 plan to protect up to four million immigrants from deportation. In that case, the Republican states argued that Obama overstepped his constitutional powers by infringing upon the authority of Congress. Washington and other states say Trump has violated the Constitution too, albeit on different grounds. They say he has violated protections against discrimination on the basis of religion by targeting Muslims. The state has a responsibility to protect the “health, safety, and well-being” of all its residents, the lawsuit said. In the 2014 case, Texas, like Washington state in the Trump case, asked for a nationwide injunction. Where the fight against Trump’s order differs from the Texas challenge to Obama is that various lawsuits have been filed around the country by states and civil rights groups. The Texas case was a single lawsuit that the other states joined. ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt said there was little time to talk strategy among the many states and advocacy groups opposing the order, as would normally happen. “It’s moving too quickly,” he said. That sense of urgency was all too clear to Washington state lawyers on Monday as they feverishly gathered the required documents to file with the lawsuit, including the motion for a temporary restraining order. Unlike other court papers filed electronically, a paper copy of that motion had to be delivered to the clerk’s office in person. So Noah Purcell, the solicitor general, led a race to the Seattle courthouse with others from the office just as the building was about to close. They pulled up to the courthouse, jumped out of the car and ran up the steps to the doors before they were locked. They arrived just in time. | 0fake |
Так кто же в итоге создал международную коалицию против ДАИШ? | Новое восточное обозрение | Страна: Ирак Как отмечает в своей новой статье пакистанский исследователь Салман Рафи, штурм иракского города Мосула вынудил международных и региональных игроков координировать свои усилия ради достижения собственных интересов. Однако, как того и стоило ожидать, с Вашингтоном никому из участников штурма оказалось «не по пути», потому что Белый дом попытался настоять на том, чтобы Турция не участвовала в штурме Мосула. А потому никакого другого выбора, кроме как дать иранским военным «зеленый свет», Обама просто-напросто не имел. Автор отмечает, что едва бы осторожные предупреждения Вашингтона смогли остановить Турцию. Однако Эрдоган все-таки не пошел на штурм Мосула. Это говорит о том, что Москва смогла добиться крупного успеха в переговорах с турецкими коллегами, которые всегда рассматривали данный иракский город как «турецкую вотчину». В то время как иранские и иракские военные занимаются планомерным освобождением Мосула, Москва, Анкара и Дамаск координируют свои действия с ними на сирийской территории. Автор отмечает, что сейчас самое время задаться вопросом, так кто же на самом деле создал международную коалицию против ДАИШ? С полной версией статьи вы можете ознакомиться здесь . Популярные статьи | 1real |
Ubisoft Surprises with ’Mario’ Crossover Title at E3 Press Conference - Breitbart | Ubisoft’s E3 2017 press conference was an uneven showing of new and old with a few standout titles hogging the spotlight. [First on the stage was Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. Legendary Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, effusive about Ubisoft’s “passion,” said that when he spoke to them regarding the new title, he had one request above all. Rather than recycling the Mario license into another 2D platformer, “try to make a Mario game that has never been done before. ” It seems the team took that challenge to heart. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is a tactics game, like a slapstick starring a mix of Nintendo characters and Ubisoft’s screeching Rabbids. I’m still not certain what marketing department is responsible for these demented rabbits’ continued existence, but I feel as if they make a strong case for the reinstatement of public floggings. Despite that, the game itself looks great. I should have known better than to doubt the merit of a title which earned Miyamoto’s personal endorsement. Color me interested. In the words of my editor: Do not doubt you heathen. https: . — Noah Dulis (@Marshal_Dov) June 12, 2017, Next came Ashraf Ismail to introduce Assassin’s Creed Origins, the first main entry in the series since the release of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate in 2015. Our “taste of Egypt” was a cinematic trailer and then approximately 10 seconds of footage from a camera looking at a dim monitor. The demonstration was jarring and reeked of some sort of unexpected technical difficulty. They promised 30 minutes of gameplay footage once the press conference was over — we’ll get to that later. We had a glimpse of racing title The Crew 2, though no real gameplay was shown. In addition to geographic expansion, the sequel expands into the air and sea. And while it was certainly very pretty, there was little way to know how the game will actually play out when the rubber hits the figurative and digital road. Twisting stunt planes around skyscrapers does look thrilling, but the original The Crew didn’t lack ambition either — it just wasn’t much fun to play. Hopefully, we’ll get a clearer picture of the game on the show floor. South Park: The Fractured But Whole returned to the show after its unfortunate delay and now officially has a release date of October 17th, 2017. The RPG looked typically crude and hilarious, and I don’t doubt that it will be one of Ubisoft’s stronger releases for the holiday season. #UbiE3 Is this the first time ”butt f***ing” has been used at an E3 press conference? I mean, besides annual franchise references. — Nate Church @E3 2017 (@Get2Church) June 12, 2017, After the ***ing came ***ing, by way of a VR experience led by Elijah Wood. Transference takes the player on what is pitched as a virtual reality trip into the memory and emotion of a test subject that has had their experiences digitally recorded by a computer. It was difficult to tell exactly what we might expect, but it’s an adventure that Ubisoft hopes will leave you “still [feeling] unsettled” even after you’ve taken off your headset. Transference is due to launch in 2018. After that we took a trip back in time to 2013 with pirate title Skull Bones which looks similar to Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. Ubisoft Singapore has extracted the excellent naval combat for a game that is obvious for their fans. Skull Bones is a piracy game where you’ll swashbuckle and hoist mainsails alongside friends and enemies, competing for booty while attempting to evade 1720’s justice on the end of a cutlass. The game certainly has potential — Black Flag’s design was just begging for a dedicated pirate adventure — but with boarding that seems to be entirely automated and seemingly little to do beyond multiplayer matches, Skull Bones has a lot to do to prove it can stand on its own. I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more about it on the way to its release in Fall 2018. We left the seas for a brief aside into Just Dance and a South Park mobile game, both given little more than token attention en route to Starlink: Battle for Atlas. Think “No Man’s Skylanders. ” This hybrid will see you customizing and piloting a transforming ship through various missions both in space and on the planet’s surface. If you can’t find your ideal craft on store shelves, this time around you can simply purchase the digital version. It’s another solid idea that will depend on how heavily Ubisoft leans on customers for more collectible content. Skylanders was notorious for locking just about every corner of every level behind walls that could only be breached by heading to your local toy store. Ubisoft finished their presser in grand fashion with Far Cry 5, which looked absolutely stunning. It doubled down on the series’ brutal violence, bringing it to fictional Hope County, Montana to the tune of Amazing Grace. Recruitable pets, characters, and multiplayer were confirmed as features, as well as some limited form of tactical command over the AI. We will definitely be diving as deep as we can go into this one — but hopefully not climbing too many towers in between. Finally, Beyond Good Evil 2 was debuted with a massive cinematic trailer that left most in attendance — myself included — with goosebumps. There’s no word on what the game will be, but they’ve nailed an epic aesthetic. If nothing else, they did a phenomenal job of whetting appetites for whatever information is planned next. After the main show, we saw Assassins Creed Origins in full. It was, in a word, devastating. The proposed rejuvenation of the franchise has turned it into a shambling mash of mechanics from Far Cry and Watch Dogs, with an Assassin’s Creed aesthetic smeared over the same things we’ve seen countless times before. You are a Medjay, a guardian of Egypt. RPG elements take center stage here, with loot rarities and statistics that will help you advance as you level up. A branching skill tree allows you to specialize in stealth or assault approaches to the massive world’s challenges. Senu, your eagle friend, functions like a Watch Dogs 2 drone. You’ll use him to tag enemies in order to see their level, role, and behavior. Meanwhile, your ability to actually assassinate them is almost wholly dependent on your respective level, and crafting is based on the same hunting mechanic we’ve seen reused in every Far Cry release since Far Cry 3. The game was beautiful and polished but lacked any sense of the lethality present in earlier Assassin’s Creed titles. Seeing the protagonist drive his hidden blade into the skull of a foe, then that foe turn and charge him because his hidden blade hadn’t been crafted to a high enough level did nothing but completely destroy the fantasy around which the franchise was built. If anything, Assassin’s Creed Origins drives home the point that Ubisoft simply doesn’t seem to understand the franchise or its loyal fans. The 30 minute demo felt bloated, unfocused, and more than anything else, like Assassin’s Creed in name only. We’ll sit down with each of these titles in the next few days. I’m sure that the developers will have a lot to say and that we’ll have even more complete impressions once we’ve had some time to get our hands dirty. Stay tuned for our ongoing coverage of E3 2017. Follow Nate Church @Get2Church on Twitter for the latest news in gaming and technology, and snarky opinions on both. | 0fake |
“Stop watching RT and other Russian-biased sources.” A Tale of Two Cities | November 1, 2016 -
By Tom Winter exclusively for Fort Russ -
Screen capture from In the Now video A TALE OF TWO CITIES “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” The best of times — that’s Mosul. The liberation of the city from ISIS is going apace, with the US Air Force assisting Iraq. Yes, the resistance is fierce, and there will be door-to-door fighting, but the day of deliverance is coming -- a summary of NPR this morning.
No war crimes, not even any mention of civilian casualties under the euphemism of “collateral damage." And Mosul is never called "a city under siege"!
The worst of times — that’s Aleppo, "a city under siege." This is where Dictator Assad and the Russians are deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure under the condemnation of the western world for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Thus speak the parrots, with one voice, following Mark C. Toner's press briefings. And NPR is there to remind us that Kerry wants Russian war crimes investigated [' Russia's bombing of civilians in Syria "beg for an appropriate investigation of war crimes."'] and to remind us that Russia is bombing hospitals .
Never a mention of the besieged being ISIS!
Listening to CNN and NPR (National PR), no one would ever guess that it’s the same struggle in each city, a struggle to liberate innocent civilians from the headchoppers of ISIS. But in Mosul, NPR acknowledges that the innocent civilians are forced to stay and serve as human shields for ISIS.
Your retired Latin prof translator/commentator keeps up with the help of Facebook friends in 35 countries. Comparing the international posts and comments with the American ones points out the irony. One of them, in Romania, has been advised to “Stop watching RT and other Russian-biased sources.”
But in Romania, there is no access to Fox, CNN, or even to NPR. So what is the poor Rumanian to do? And in another bingo for Godwin’s law, the one advising against trusting RT calls Trump “another Hitler.”
In the following response to a report of 300 civilians killed in a US airstrike,
there is a mix of the rational, yet it is still written through the lens of CNN and the rest of western MSM: “I am a little defensive that some of these stories have come from RT (not this one) when Russia is deliberately targeting civilians and basically you could argue we need to try harder to avoid them. It is an area with a high damned if you do (potentially causing collateral deaths) and damned if you don't (thus allowing ISIS to spread and kill civilians directly) quotient.” To which the only possible reply:
look at what you wrote! OUR airstrikes cause "collateral damage;" Russian airstrikes "deliberately target civilians." The collusion of the western press with the Washington Blob took a month or two to take hold: There was a time, early in 2014, when talking heads were saying stuff like “Ukraine should just make the best deal they can with Russia.” One retired French politician noted there is no sense getting involved in matters of what used to be internal boundaries of the Soviet Union. CNN as late as September of 2014 once acknowledged that the Kiev government was bombing civilians .
But not any more! All the non-Russia-biased media have long since gotten the memo.
And to avoid intellectual discomfort from exposure to views and news that do not jibe with the US State Department and CNN, don't watch RT or any Russia-biased sources!
Follow us on Facebook!
Follow us on Twitter!
Donate!
| 1real |
EgyptAir crash: official dismisses claim that remains suggest blast | The head of Egypt’s forensics authority has dismissed a suggestion that the small size of the body parts retrieved since an EgyptAir plane crashed last week indicated there had been an explosion on board.
All 66 people on board were killed when the Airbus A320 crashed in the Mediterranean early on Thursday while en route from Paris to Cairo, and an international air and naval effort to hunt for the black boxes and other wreckage continues.
On Tuesday an unnamed senior Egyptian forensics official told Associated Press that he had personally examined human remains recovered from the crash site and that they suggested there had been an explosion.
Speaking on condition of anonymity he said all 80 pieces brought to Cairo so far are small human fragments, leading him to conclude that “the logical explanation is that it was an explosion”.
He added: “There isn’t even a whole body part, like an arm or a head.”
However Egypt’s head of forensics later denounced the reports as “completely false”, state news agency Mena said.
“Everything published about this matter is completely false, and mere assumptions that did not come from the forensics authority,” Hesham Abdelhamid was quoted as saying in a statement.
Another senior forensics official told Reuters only a tiny number of remains had arrived so far and it was too early to specify whether there had been an explosion on board.
In the aftermath of the crash both the French and Egyptian leaders said that terrorism could not be ruled out, but there has been no claim of responsibility from any group.
The black box could hold clues as to why the plane crashed. Minutes earlier, smoke was detected in multiple places on board.
On Monday, the head of Egypt’s state-run provider of air navigation services, Ehab Azmy, said the plane plunged directly into the sea and challenged an account by the Greek defence minister that it made “sudden swerves” before the crash.
Azmy said radar had shown the plane was flying at its normal altitude of 37,000 feet (11,270 metres) in the minutes before it disappeared.
“That fact degrades what the Greeks are saying about the aircraft suddenly losing altitude before it vanished from radar,” he said.
“There was no turning to the right or left, and it was fine when it entered Egypt’s [flight information region], which took nearly a minute or two before it disappeared,” Azmy added.
The Greek defence minister, Panos Kammenos, said last week that the plane took a normal course through Greek airspace before abruptly taking sharp turns.
“The plane carried out a 90-degree turn to the left and a 360-degree turn to the right, falling from 37,000ft to 15,000ft and the signal was lost at around 10,000ft,” he said.
Another senior Egyptian navigation services official, Ehab Mohieeldin, meanwhile told a local broadcaster that Egyptian officials had been able to track the plane on radar for one minute before it crashed but were unable to communicate with the crew.
The same channel, CBC, was told by air accident investigator Hani Galal that the plane’s black box recorder would be analysed in Egypt if it is found intact, but would be sent abroad for analysis if it is found to be damaged.
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report | 0fake |
PODCAST: The Serenity Of Stoicism | Stoicism is a philosophy for your mind that helps you deal with suffering and misfortune. In this podcast, I review stoicism’s strongest points as presented by three powerful thinkers (Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius) by using direct quotes from their most important works. I also share how I’ve used stoicism to reduce pain in my own life and how you can do the same through an effectively four-point strategy.
Listen on Soundcloud or download the MP3:
Listen on Youtube:
Subscribe on iTunes or add the RSS feed to your favorite podcast app. If you like the podcast, please leave a rating and review on iTunes.
Previous Podcast: What Travel Can And Can’t Give A Man
| 1real |
Black Agenda Report for Week of Oct 31, 2016 | News, information and analysis from the black left. Black Agenda Report for Week of Oct 31, 2016 Submitted by Nellie Bailey a... on Mon, 10/31/2016 - 20:45 Venezuela The Missing Black Movement Ingredient: Self-Determination
The Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations will hold a National Black Political Convention on Self-Determination, November 5 and 6, in Washington, DC. “If you go through history, the fundamental thing that we’ve confronted is the loss of our self-determination as a people,” said Black Is Back chairman Omali Yeshitela . The Coalition has put forward a 19-point position on the need to put self-determination at the center of Black struggles. The 19 points “give us the beginning of some kind of a plan,” said Yeshitela. “It says, specifically, here is our view on self-determination and the subject of reparations, Black women, the question of police invasion and brutality in our community,” and many other issues. The “Moment of Truth” for the Empire
“We are entering a new moment in American history,” said Dr. Anthony Monteiro , the Duboisian scholar and Black Radical Organizing Committee activist. “It is a moment of truth for the ruling class, for the ruling elite. What do they do when they are trumped at home -- forgive the pun -- and trumped internationally?” he asked. “Do they back off of empire, do they readjust, do they become peaceful, or do they up the stakes and attempt to resolve all problems with war abroad and oppression at home?” Dr. Monteiro is one of the planners of a Revolutionary Science for Radical Times conference, in Philadelphia, December 9 and 10. Hard Times in Venezuela
Despite what the corporate media are telling you, Venezuelans are not starving and the Socialist Party government will not be toppled any time soon. However, the rightwing opposition “is smelling blood” due to an economic crisis that “has made it very difficult for people to get access to imported goods, and many goods are very expensive,” said political science professor George Caccariello-Maher , of Drexel University, author of We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution . Corruption, smuggling and money speculation are serious problems, said Caccariello-Maher. However, the strength of the Left lies in the nation’s grassroots organizations and communes. “It would be very difficult for an opposition government to come in and attempt to throw them off their land” or return property to the private sector, he said. Happy Birthday, Rev. Pinkney!
Benton Harbor, Michigan, human rights leader Rev. Edward Pinkney, currently serving a 2 ½ to 10 year sentence on election tampering charges, turned 68 years old this month. Marcina Cole , a courtroom observer at Pinkney’s trial, teamed up with David Sole , of the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice, to throw a birthday party for Pinkney, in absentia, in Detroit. “He’s definitely in support of other inmates, doing ministry work, and looking forward to being out very soon,” said Cole. She reported that Green Party vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka visited the political prisoner on October 19. “This was historical,” said Cole. “They know how powerful Rev. Pinkney is” -- and that he has allies on the outside. Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour. | 1real |
Trump Issues Bizarre Threat To Ted Cruz’s Wife (TWEETS) | Donald Trump has once again taken to Twitter to issue a threat to a perceived rival, except this time he is launching the threats at the wife of Ted Cruz.We have been awaiting Trump s response to a hostile ad campaign designed to appeal to the religious right, which featured Melania Trump (Donald s wife and the prospective First Lady) in a naked photoshoot. The ad was put together by a pro-Cruz PAC. Anti-Trump group is running Facebook ads to drive up Mormon turnout in Utah and Arizona. https://t.co/v6ZZPKPMPp pic.twitter.com/Gps5KPbb2T McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) March 21, 2016It appears that Trump is now making his play back at Ted Cruz, by aiming the guns at the Texas Senator s wife Heidi.Lyin' Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a G.Q. shoot in his ad. Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, 2016Whether Trump has some beans to spill on Heidi, or he just huffing and puffing like some sort of fairy tale wolf the spat marks a new low in an already desperately poisonous election season for the Republican party. Two potential candidates for the office of President of the United States trading Yo wife! insults it is an embarrassment to the election process.It also comes hot on the heels of the worrying news that US elections have just been ranked worst among the longstanding democracies of the world. America came flat last. As the Washington Post puts it:What do Argentina, Costa Rica and Brazil have in common?They all outranked the United States in a comparison of election standards and procedures conducted by the Electoral Integrity Project. The United States ranked 47th worldwide, out of 139 countries.So what is it that has driven America to the bottom of a league table of which we should be on top? The report states: experts expressed concern about the quality of the electoral laws, voter registration, the process of drawing district boundaries, as well as the regulation of campaign finance, In short, the game is rigged to a degree in the United States, which it is not elsewhere in the developed world. This issue should be front and center in this election campaign, with candidates doing everything they can to restore the integrity of American democracy. Instead, the Republican candidates are busy sl*t-shaming each other s wives.The electorate deserve better, and they should vote for better.Featured image via Screengrab/Flickr Creative Commons | 1real |
Michelle Obama Rips ’Partisan’ Critics of Her ’Let’s Move’ Campaign - Breitbart | Friday in Washington, D. C. at the Partnership for a Healthier American 2017 Healthier Future Summit, former first lady Michelle Obama blasted “partisan” critics of her 2010 “Let’s Move!” program to combat childhood obesity, which included regulations on school lunch programs. [Obama said, “So we have a lot more work to do for sure but we got to make sure we don’t let anybody take us back. Because the question is where are we going back to? I mean this is where you really have to look at motives. You have to stop and think, why don’t you want our kids to have good food at school? “What is wrong with you? And why is that a partisan issue? Why would that be political? What is going on? Now that is up to moms. I’m talking to moms, think about this, take me out of the equation, like me, don’t like me, but think about why someone is OK with your kids eating crap? Why would you celebrate that? Why would you sit idly and be okay with that? ” ‘Cause here’s the secret, If somebody is doing that, they don’t care about your kids. And we need to demand everyone to care deeply about our kids. ” ( NTK) Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN, | 0fake |
Explosive Assange/Pilger Interview on US Election: Expect Riots if Hillary Wins | By wmw_admin on November 6, 2016 Darkmoon — Nov 6, 2016 RT : “Whistleblower Julian Assange has given one of his most incendiary interviews ever in a John Pilger Special [released late yesterday] courtesy of Dartmouth Films. Here he summarizes what can be gleaned from the tens of thousands of Clinton emails leaked by WikiLeaks this year.” LD : Despite the enormous populist support for Trump and the extraordinary loathing in which Hillary Clinton is held by millions of American, Assange says that “Trump cannot be allowed to win.” Trump has already indicated that he will not recognize the result of the election if he loses, given the enormous enthusiasm he has generated during his speeches, compared to the relatively tepid and anaemic response evoked by Hillary Clinton on similar occasions. Recent news reports reveal that “election related violence is increasing and Right-wing armed militia groups are even preparing for unrest if Mrs Clinton ‘steals’ the election, as they fear will happen.” If Hillary Clinton wins this election, as Assange predicts, we can expect riots to erupt all across America. Violent insurrection, in the circumstances of a rigged election, would appear to be more than justified. Hillary Clinton clearly belongs behind bars, not in the White House. [LD] John Pilger (left) conducted the 25-minute interview at the Ecuadorian Embassy where Assange has been trapped since 2012 for fear of extradition to the US. Here is a transcript of the interview followed by the YouTube interview itself. Click to enlarge THE SECRET WORLD OF THE US ELECTION John Pilger: What’s the significance of the FBI’s intervention in these last days of the U.S. election campaign, in the case against Hillary Clinton? Julian Assange: If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America’s political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA General David Petraeus over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist us. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI’s investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. We’ve published about 33,000 of Clinton’s emails when she was Secretary of State. They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails, [of which] Clinton has kept about half — 30,000 — to herself, and we’ve published about half. Then there are the Podesta emails we’ve been publishing. John Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign manager, so there’s a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations. These emails are combined with the cover up of the Hillary Clinton emails when she was Secretary of State, which has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases. ‘Russian government not the source of Clinton leaks’ PILGER : The Clinton campaign has said that Russia is behind all of this, that Russia has manipulated the campaign and is the source for WikiLeaks and its emails. ASSANGE : The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything. Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source. ‘Saudi Arabia & Qatar funding ISIS and Clinton’ PILGER : The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she is benefitting politically, are quite extraordinary. I’m thinking of when the Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque. ASSANGE : And twelve million dollars from Morocco … PILGER : Twelve million from Morocco, yeah. ASSANGE : For Hillary Clinton to attend a party. PILGER : In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it. ASSANGE : There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS. PILGER : The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia. ASSANGE : Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, worth more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled. PILGER : Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIl or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation. ASSANGE : Yes. PILGER : That’s extraordinary. ‘Clinton has been eaten alive by her ambition’ ASSANGE : I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of the reaction to their ambitions. She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states. The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network? She’s a centralising cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis. She’s the centraliser that inter-connects all these different cogs. She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from City Bank. This is quite amazing. PILGER : Didn’t Citybank supply a list… ? ASSANGE : Yes. PILGER : Which turned out to be most of the Obama cabinet? ASSANGE : Yes. PILGER : So Wall Street decides the cabinet of the President of the United States? ASSANGE : If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely, you could see it had become very close to banking interests. So I think you can’t properly understand Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy without understanding Saudi Arabia. The connections with Saudi Arabia are so intimate. ‘Libya is Hillary Clinton’s war’ PILGER : Why was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya? Can you talk a little about just what the emails have told us – told you – about what happened there? Because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria: the ISIL, jihadism, and so on. And it was almost Hillary Clinton’s invasion. What do the emails tell us about that? ASSANGE : Libya, more than anyone else’s war, was Hillary Clinton’s war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it? Hillary Clinton. That’s documented throughout her emails. She had put her favoured agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; there’s more than 1700 emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton emails that we’ve published, just about Libya. It’s not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state — something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President. So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it’s the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis. Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself err was no longer able to control the movement of people through it. Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa — previously people fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi: ‘What do these Europeans think they’re doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There’s going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe, and this is exactly what happened. ‘Trump won’t be permitted to win’ PILGER : You get complaints from people saying, ‘What is WikiLeaks doing? Are they trying to put Trump in the White House?’ ASSANGE : My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he’s had every establishment off side; Trump doesn’t have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence agencies, arms companies… big foreign money … are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves. PILGER : There is the accusation that WikiLeaks is in league with the Russians. Some people say, ‘Well, why doesn’t WikiLeaks investigate and publish emails on Russia?’ ASSANGE : We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical. Our Russia documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up. PILGER : Do you yourself take a view of the U.S. election? Do you have a preference for Clinton or Trump? ASSANGE : Let’s talk about Donald Trump. What does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind? He represents American white trash, which Hillary Clinton called ‘deplorable and irredeemable’. It means from an establishment or educated cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these people are like the red necks, and you can never deal with them. Because he so clearly — through his words and actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies — represents people who are not the middle, not the upper middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton. If you look at how the middle class gains its economic and social power, that makes absolute sense. ‘US attempting to squeeze WikiLeaks through my refugee status’ PILGER : I’d like to talk about Ecuador, the small country that has given you refuge and political asylum in this embassy in London. Now Ecuador has cut off the internet from here where we’re doing this interview, in the Embassy, for the clearly obvious reason that they are concerned about appearing to intervene in the U.S. election campaign. Can you talk about why they would take that action and your own views on Ecuador’s support for you? ASSANGE : Let’s let go back four years. I made an asylum application to Ecuador in this embassy, because of the U.S. extradition case, and the result was that after a month, I was successful in my asylum application. The embassy since then has been surrounded by police: quite an expensive police operation which the British government admits to spending more than £12.6 million. They admitted that over a year ago. Now there’s undercover police and there are robot surveillance cameras of various kinds — so that there has been quite a serious conflict right here in the heart of London between Ecuador, a country of sixteen million people, and the United Kingdom, and the Americans who have been helping on the side. So that was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do. Now we have the U.S. election campaign, the Ecuadorian election is in February next year, and you have the White House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information that we have been publishing. WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from this embassy or in the territory of Ecuador; we publish from France, we publish from, from Germany, we publish from The Netherlands and from a number of other countries, so that the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is through my refugee status; and this is, this is really intolerable. It means that [they] are trying to get at a publishing organisation; they try and prevent it from publishing true information that is of intense interest to the American people and others about an election. PILGER : Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy. ASSANGE : I would be immediately arrested by the British police and I would then be extradited either immediately to the United States or to Sweden. In Sweden I am not charged, I have already been previously cleared by the Senior Stockholm Prosecutor Eva Finne. We were not certain exactly what would happen there, but then we know that the Swedish government has refused to say that they will not extradite me to the United States we know they have extradited 100 per cent of people whom the U.S. has requested since at least 2000. So over the last fifteen years, every single person the U.S. has tried to extradite from Sweden has been extradited, and they refuse to provide a guarantee [that won’t happen]. PILGER : People often ask me how you cope with the isolation in here. ASSANGE : Look, one of the best attributes of human beings is that they’re adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are adaptable. They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue on. So in my situation, frankly, I’m a bit institutionalised — this [the embassy] is the world … it’s visually the world for me. PILGER : It’s the world without sunlight, for one thing, isn’t it? ASSANGE : It’s the world without sunlight, but I haven’t seen sunlight in so long, I don’t remember it. PILGER : Yes. ASSANGE : So , yes, you adapt. The one real irritant is that my young children — they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That’s a hard, hard adaption which they didn’t ask for. PILGER : Do you worry about them? ASSANGE : Yes, I worry about them; I worry about their mother. ‘I am innocent and in arbitrary detention’ PILGER : Some people would say, ‘Well, why don’t you end it and simply walk out the door and allow yourself to be extradited to Sweden?’ ASSANGE : The U.N. [the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention] has looked into this whole situation. They spent eighteen months in formal, adversarial litigation. So it’s me and the U.N. verses Sweden and the U.K. Who’s right? The U.N. made a conclusion that I am being arbitrarily detained illegally, deprived of my freedom and that what has occurred has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and Sweden, and that those countries must obey. It is an illegal abuse. It is the United Nations formally asking, ‘What’s going on here? What is your legal explanation for this? Assange says that you should recognise his asylum.’ And here is. Sweden formally writing back to the United Nations to say, ‘No, we’re not going to recognise the UN ruling, so leaving open their ability to extradite. I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publically in the press, because it doesn’t suit the Western establishment narrative — that yes, the West has political prisoners, it’s a reality, it’s not just me, there’s a bunch of other people as well. The West has political prisoners. Of course, no state accepts that it should call the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don’t call them political prisoners in China, they don’t call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don’t call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception. ASSANGE : Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared by the Stockholm prosecutor and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the State of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum. Those are the facts, but what is the rhetoric? PILGER : Yes, it’s different. ASSANGE : The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been charged with a crime, and never mentioning that I have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that the police made it up. The rhetoric is trying to avoid the truth that the U.N. formally found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States. | 1real |
Louisiana Election Officials Seize Voting Machine Illegally Placed In Private Room For ‘VIP Voters’ (VIDEO) | Louisiana Election Officials Seize Voting Machine Illegally Placed In Private Room For ‘VIP Voters’ (VIDEO) By Stephanie Kuklish
Election officials in Louisiana seized a voting machine on Wednesday that’s purpose was to serve “VIP” voters so that they could skip voting lines, an illegal and suspicious tactic by the longtime Jeffrey Parish Registrar Of Voters, Dennis DiMarco.
The unique voter machine was kept in a conference room and only allowed “special” citizens to use it. Allegedly it was meant for the purpose of allowing citizens such as police officers, fireman, emergency physicians, and anyone else with a job that may keep them from being available during voting hours.
Meg Casper, a spokeswoman for Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler’s office, told the Huffington Post that the machine was seized immediately and the user’s names have been retrieved. Schedler wrote a letter to DiMarco stating : “I feel this action is necessary to preserve the transparency and integrity of early voting and to promote confidence within the general public regarding the voting process.”
Louisiana state law says that : “Each voting machine shall be placed inside the polling place and shall be in full view of the public from the time the election begins until the last elector has voted. The commissioners and watchers shall be stationed near the voting machines, and the commissioners shall regulate the admission of the voters thereto, and each shall always be in full view of the other election commissioners and watchers and, as far as possible, of the public.”
Apparently the Registrar of Voters, DiMarco, wasn’t aware of his own laws and replied with a statement saying:
“There was no fraudulent votes; they’re no allegations about that. No allegations of anyone voting who was not entitled to vote. Now, we’ve turned down everybody. So no one gets preferential treatment. But again, that means that those firemen, those policemen, are standing up rather than maybe doing their duty on the streets.”
If Louisiana requires every police officer, firemen, and other emergency personnel to work every day all day long then maybe we should be taking a look at that instead of refusing to acknowledge the law.
Or maybe the Republican party should stop pushing so hard for limited early voting hours after fanning the flames of Republican presidential nominee’s unfounded claims that the election is rigged. Featured Image Via Gambit About Stephanie Kuklish
I am a 30 something writer passionate about politics, the environment, human rights and pretty much everything that effects our everyday life. To stay on top of the topics I discuss, like and follow me at https://www.facebook.com/keeponwriting and https://facebook.com/progressivenomad . Connect | 1real |
Militants kill U.N. peacekeeper in Central African Republic | DAKAR (Reuters) - Christian militiamen killed a Mauritanian U.N. peacekeeper in an attack on a camp for displaced people in a Central African Republic diamond-mining town on Monday, the United Nations mission there said. Fighters armed with AK-47s and makeshift weapons also wounded one Zambian and two Mauritanian peacekeepers during the 90-minute gunfight at the police checkpoint in the town of Bria, the U.N. added. The country has been riven by sectarian conflict since 2013 when Muslim Seleka rebels ousted President Francois Bozize. That triggered a backlash by Christian anti-balaka fighters. As many as 100 people died in Bria in June during a day of clashes between rival factions. The area is coveted by militia for its surrounding diamond mines. It also hosts tens of thousands of people displaced by the conflict. Even with 13,000 troops, the U.N. mission has struggled to restore order to a country the size of France and has lost 14 peacekeepers in attacks this year alone. | 0fake |
It Begins: Crowds Mass In Major Cities: DC, LA, NYC, Philly, Portland, More… | Will It Escalate? | “95% Chance Of Widespread Violence” | (Live Streams Available Below)
Anti-Trump protesters are massing all over the country at this moment. Thousands of angry people in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Portland, New York and Los Angeles. The New York Times reports that crowds have been peaceful thus far:
Protesters claim they are there to reject Donald’s Trump racist policies and some say they fear mass deportations under a Trump Presidency.
The anxiety began to build on social media this morning as scores of people called for protests, revolution and open threats to kill President Elect Donald Trump .
In the build up to November 8th we warned that the situation post-election, regardless of who wins, could quickly escalate into open warfare and Mike Adams of Natural News warned of a 95% chance of widespread post-election violence .
With large-scale protests now brewing in major cities across the country, we believe it is only a matter of time before some or all of these forecasts could come to fruition. Should things turn violent, though not confirmed by official sources, the Obama administration is prepared to respond. An insider leak last month indicated that the Federal government, including the military and the Department of Homeland Security, would be holding drills before and after the election in which they anticipate “no rule of law.” Such drills, should it be necessary, could very quickly go real-world.
In such a scenario a lock-down of major cities following widespread rioting would be the likely course of action.
There is a strong possibility that protests will be ongoing and that they may escalate. We encourage readers to take preventative measures by preparing for breakdown with a an easy to implement preparedness plan and necessary emergency stockpiles that may include food, water, self defense and protective breathing masks (for those who find themselves too close to the action for comfort) .
Live Streams (Some of these streams may become unavailable as the night progresses):
Related:
The Prepper’s Blueprint: A Step-By-Step Guide To Prepare For Any Disaster
Tactical Gas Masks and Filters
Riots, Flag Burning And Open “Threats to Kill Trump” Follow Hillary’s Election Loss
“This Quickly Escalates Into Open Warfare” – Why The Government Is Preparing For Post-Election Chaos
Unrest and Martial Law? Leaked Military Drill Anticipates “No Rule of Law” After Election Results
Prepping for a Full On Breakdown? Stockpile These Foods | 1real |
Todd Rundgren: ’If You’re a Trump Supporter, Don’t Come to My Show’ | Todd Rundgren isn’t bothered that some of his fans might avoid his concerts due to his politics. [The musician and record producer conceded as much in an interview with Variety when asked about an incident in which a couple walked out of a concert in Los Angeles due to comments he made about President Donald Trump. “No,” Rundgren said when asked if it bothered him. “If I had the power, I’d say: If you’re a Trump supporter, don’t come to my show, because you won’t have a good time. And also, I don’t understand your frickin’ values. Because I’m not singing about that. If you don’t understand that basic thing, you’re just fooling yourself. ” The “Hello It’s Me” singer was talking to the magazine to promote his latest album, White Knight, which is filled with collaborations with artists such as Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Joe Walsh. One song on the album, “Tin Foil Hat,” is a direct jab at Trump, written and performed with Steely Dan Donald Fagen. The lyrics reference Trump’s descent down an escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential run, and add that Trump tweets “like a teenage girl” and “puts the ‘pluto’ in ‘plutocrat. ’” Rundgren is currently on a tour, with multiple dates in Florida and Texas, states that Trump won during the 2016 campaign. But the musician told Variety that Trump supporters “will likely be offended” if they attend his concerts. “Let the buyer beware! I mean, if you can’t take a joke, or you can’t admit that you’ve made a mistake, you don’t belong with the rest of us,” he said with a laugh. Elsewhere in the interview, Rundgren explained that music is the most “plagiaristic” art when compared with other forms, because there are only so many ways musicians can arrange a limited amount of notes together. “You’ve got the western scale. That’s essentially 11 notes. So you’re eventually going to run out of melodies, just by the pure mathematics of it,” he said. “So the whole art of making music is trying to obscure the fact that this is a melody from another song and has just been changed in subtle enough ways that you don’t recognize it. ” Read Rundgren’s full interview with Variety here. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 0fake |
PRESIDENT TRUMP Just Responded Directly to #KathyGriffin on ‘Beheaded Trump’ Photo | President Trump just let comic Kathy Griffin know that she should be ashamed of herself for the photo holding a head resembling Trump s. He added that the photo had upset Barron, his 11-year old son. Can you imagine?Griffin posed with a beheaded Trump in a classless attempt to be edgy. TMZ published a preview of the photo shoot with a video of Griffin holding the beheaded Trump . Social media immediately exploded with negative comments from both sides of the aisle.Griffin apologized for the photo but did not apologize to President Trump. Here s her lame attempt at an apology:I am sorry. I went too far. I was wrong. pic.twitter.com/LBKvqf9xFB Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) May 30, 2017Griffin apologized but NOT to President Trump and his family: I m a comic. I cross the line. I move the line, then I cross it. I went way too far. The image is too disturbing. I understand how it offends people. It wasn t funny. I get it. I ask your forgiveness. In case you haven t seen the photo: Yes, it s disgusting and horrifying! Lame! | 1real |
The rest of the field figured out how to make Trump not quite as dominant | Something unusual happened here Wednesday when the Republican presidential candidates met for their second debate: For the first time since he joined the race, Donald Trump wasn’t the commanding presence on the stage.
Not that Trump wasn’t the Trump whom Americans have seen nonstop on cable television. Among the first words out of his mouth was a personal and unprovoked attack on Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. He sparred at times angrily with Carly Fiorina over who was the better business executive. He and Jeb Bush, standing next to each other, had repeated exchanges.
But at other times, particularly when the discussion shifted from what Trump has said about the others to issues of domestic and foreign policy, the candidate who has dominated the summer and leads the polls was far less a force.
Unlike the debate in Cleveland last month, the other candidates arrived with no illusions about Trump’s candidacy — they take him seriously now — or the need for them to step up and show their own mettle, both in challenging Trump and in displaying their own attributes, records and character.
Over three hours of lively, entertaining and at times angry debate, Trump was put on the defensive as much as he tried to stay on the offensive. Whether that will change the course of the nomination battle won’t be known for some weeks. After the last debate, despite missteps, Trump rose rather than fell. But Wednesday showed that his rivals are ready to engage him, when necessary, both from long distance and to his face.
This was billed in advance as the debate that would highlight the current state of the Republican race, one in which the outsiders — Trump, Ben Carson and Fiorina — enjoy more than 50 percent of support against the insiders — the eight current or former elected politicians. Instead, it became a classic of debates past — poke the front-runner. It was Trump against the field, or rather the field against Trump.
The ebb and flow of the debate, guided by CNN’s Jake Tapper with the help of CNN’s Dana Bash and conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, oscillated between personal exchanges, many of them with Trump involved, and discussions of issues.
When immigration came to the fore, Trump was at the center of the debate, defending his hard-line stance that calls for deporting the millions of undocumented immigrants and challenging the 14th Amendment over the issue of birthright citizenship.
Bush fired back at him over those proposals. He invoked Ronald Reagan’s optimistic vision in contrast to what he said was Trump’s approach “that everything is coming to an end.” He said Trump’s proposals would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and tear families and communities apart. Trump disputed Bush’s comment that those who have come illegally came out of an act of love. “This is not an act of love. He’s weak on immigration. He doesn’t get my vote.”
Trump and Fiorina clashed memorably several times. Once was over their business records, and it was as pointed and sharp as any during the evening. He accused her of running Hewlett-Packard into the ground. She accused him of running up “mountains of debt” and filing for bankruptcy four times.
The other exchange, one everyone was waiting for, came when Fiorina was asked about Trump’s comment, captured in a Rolling Stone profile, denigrating her looks by saying, “Look at that face!”
Trump had earlier explained that he was talking about her “persona,” not her looks. Asked about that, Fiorina said acidly, “I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.” The audience responded with one of the biggest rounds of applause of the night. Trump’s response: “She’s got a beautiful face, and I think she’s a beautiful woman.”
Fiorina was the new addition to the main debate stage, after her performance in the undercard debate in Cleveland, and she came with the clear intention of making a memorable impression. She got another applause-meter moment with a ringing statement about Planned Parenthood and sought to project strength and confidence surrounded by 10 men in suits and ties.
At times, others stepped forward. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, in danger after seeing his poll numbers plummet nationally and, critically, in Iowa, leapt into the conversation when the question on the table was whether Trump could be trusted with his hand on the nuclear codes. “We don’t need an apprentice in the White House,” Walker said. “We have one right now. . . . We don’t know who you are or where you’re going.”
One reason Trump seemed a less commanding presence was that on some issues, he offered little substance beyond reassurances that he would be strong and tough, a negotiator par excellence and someone who would grasp the complexities of national security issues as president — and would find experts to help him.
Challenged on how he would deal with the Russians putting military resources into Syria, he said he would know how to get along with Russian President Vladimir Putin, an answer that others seemed to find unsatisfying.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who displayed his fluidity with foreign policy, challenged him implicitly on how much he knew about the world, saying he would be happy to have a longer discussion of the issues to see the depth of Trump’s knowledge.
Rubio wasn’t the only one who had a moment. Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz sparred over what to do with the Iran nuclear deal. Paul expressed his support for diplomacy over war in dealing with Iran.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie upbraided Trump and Fiorina for talking about their business records and said the candidates should instead focus on the lives of middle-class Americans.
Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, displayed the same low-key, sober demeanor that has found a growing audience over the past six weeks. And near the end, he showed humor, when he tweaked Trump for having called him “an okay doctor.” After Trump had spoken about vaccinations, Tapper asked Carson for his view of Trump’s ideas. “He’s an okay doctor,” Carson said.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee defended his strong support for Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis for her resistance to giving marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
The prelude to Wednesday’s debate was strikingly different than the buildup before Cleveland. Then, many of the other candidates still were clinging to the belief — or hope — that Trump would quickly burn himself out, that his candidacy would prove a short-lived, if entertaining, sideshow.
By this month, that belief had disappeared. Trump’s continued strength atop the Republican field has forced all the others to rethink his potential and its impact on their hopes of winning the nomination. Some still believe he will sink under his own weight, and if they were not prepared to abandon their original strategies, they recognized that they had to make adjustments.
Last month’s debate in Cleveland marked the beginning of the end of a long exhibition season. Wednesday’s forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library signaled a turn to the post-Labor Day phase of the campaign that, historically, brings more intensive campaigning, more debates, sharper engagement and heightened stakes for the candidates.
It was clear throughout the evening that everyone on the stage understood what’s now at stake. Trump may continue to dominate the polls, but if Wednesday’s debate was any indication, he can expect a bumpier ride in the weeks and months ahead. | 0fake |
Purchasing Loyalty with Foreign Aid | Purchasing Loyalty with Foreign Aid By Jacob G. Hornberger
FFF " - A dispute that is taking place between Saudi Arabia and Egypt indirectly demonstrates the nature of U.S. foreign aid. After dumping a walloping $25 billion in foreign aid to help the Egyptian military dictatorships economic woes, the Saudis are hopping mad.
Why?
Because last month in the United Nations, contrary to Saudi Arabias wishes, Egypt voted in favor of a Russian resolution on Syria.
In the world of foreign aid, thats a super no-no. When a regime has received $25 billion from another regime, it is expected to vote the way its benefactor wants it to vote.
In a remarkable admission regarding foreign aid, at least in this particular case, the New York Times , in an article on the matter, wrote, The Saudis may have thought they were buying loyalty . The Times article pointed out that to punish the Egyptians for their independence, The state-owned Saudi oil company, Aramco, postponed a promised shipment of 700,000 tons of discounted oil in October, and the spokesman for Egypts oil ministry said the fate of Novembers shipment remains unknown.
Although the New York Times would probably be reluctant to describe U.S. foreign aid in the same way, thats precisely what it is a way to purchase loyalty from foreign regimes, including dictatorships. The U.S. government loves to put foreign regimes on the federal dole because once that happens, U.S. officials know that they have bought them, lock, stock, and barrel. Once a regime is on the dole, it inevitably becomes dependent on it.
The racket works like this: The IRS collects money from hard-pressed U.S. taxpayers, which U.S. officials use to send millions of dollars in foreign aid to foreign regimes.
The foreign regimes then use the money to buy weaponry to fortify their hold on power or to just to line the pockets of government officials.
It doesnt matter to U.S. officials what the tyrants do to people within their country. They can abuse them, incarcerate them, torture them, or kill them. None of that matters to U.S. officials.
What matters to U.S. officials is the international arena. Like votes in the UN. Or public support for U.S. invasions, coups, interventions, assassinations, kidnappings, and the like. Or joining coalitions of the willing. Thats when U.S. officials expect loyalty, in the form of blind support, which was what Saudi Arabia was expecting from the Egyptian tyrants.
And heaven help any nation that takes the wrong position. The U.S. will respond in the same way the Saudis have responded to the Egyptians. It will threaten to do very bad things to the nation that opposes a U.S invasion, coup, or resolution within the UN. When a nation is on the U.S. dole, U.S. officials expect loyalty.
Americans cant do anything about foreign aid by the Saudi government. But they can do something about U.S. foreign aid. What they should do is demand that it be ended, immediately.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. | 1real |
null | Everybody send it to Drudge, infowars lets see if they expose it. Time to call them out i say . | 1real |
New York governor calls for amending state constitution for abortion rights | NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Monday he would seek to ensure that women have access to late-term abortions in the state even if conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court remove federal legal guarantees in place since the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. Cuomo, a Democrat who is considered a potential candidate for his party’s 2020 presidential nomination, proposed an amendment to the New York Constitution that he said would preserve the status quo regardless of future Supreme Court rulings. President Donald Trump, the Republican who took office on Jan. 20, plans to announce a nominee to the Supreme Court on Tuesday. That person, if confirmed, is expected to restore the court’s conservative majority after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. The high court ruled four decades ago that the U.S. Constitution protects the right of a woman to have an abortion until the point of viability. The court defined that as when the fetus “has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb,” generally at about 24 weeks into pregnancy. The court also recognized a right to abortion after viability if necessary to protect the woman’s life or health. If the Supreme Court were to overrule Roe v. Wade, as abortion opponents have long hoped, the procedure would remain legal only where state laws allow it. In New York, a state law that dates to 1970 legalized abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, and afterward only if the woman’s life is at stake, with no exception for health. The law is not enforced but could be if Roe v. Wade were overruled, abortion advocates say. The state’s law was “revolutionary back in the day because it legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade, but is now unchanged,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview this month. “The state law is not as protective as Roe,” she said. Dennis Poust, a spokesman for the New York State Catholic Conference, which opposes abortion, predicted that Cuomo’s proposal would fail. “How many abortions are enough?” he said in a statement, noting New York’s high rate of abortions. “No one can credibly claim that access to abortion is under any threat in New York.” There were 29.6 abortions per 1,000 women in New York in 2014, compared to 14.6 abortions per 1,000 women nationally, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit group that supports abortion rights. Cuomo told a Planned Parenthood rally in Albany, New York, on Monday that women’s rights were under attack in Washington. “As they threaten this nation with a possible Supreme Court nominee who will reverse Roe v. Wade,” Cuomo said, according to a transcript provided by his office. “We’re going to protect Roe v. Wade in the State of New York.” New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued a legal opinion in September making clear that federal court rulings supersede the state’s 1970 law. For a constitutional amendment to succeed in New York, majorities in the legislature must approve it twice, in successive terms, and voters must approve it. Republicans control the New York Senate, although it is possible some Republicans might support such an amendment if pressured by constituents who favor abortion rights, said Costas Panagopoulos, a political scientist at New York’s Fordham University. Opposition to Trump may galvanize liberals into being aggressive, Panagopoulos said. “People are scared, and that might compel them to action in a way that different circumstances might have them sitting on the sidelines,” he said. For years, states have planned for a day when the Supreme Court might overrule Roe v. Wade. Some 19 states have laws that could restrict abortion in that event, while seven have laws that would still guarantee the right to an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute. | 0fake |
If Donald Trump Wins The Election, It Will Be The Biggest Miracle In US Political History | If Donald Trump Wins The Election, It Will Be The Biggest Miracle In US Political History Posted on Home » Headlines » World News » If Donald Trump Wins The Election, It Will Be The Biggest Miracle In US Political History
Are we about to see the largest election day miracle of all time?
From Michael Snyder :
Because as I will show in this article, that is precisely what it is going to take in order for Donald Trump to win. Before I go any further, I want to make it exceedingly clear that I am not saying what the outcome will be on November 8th. As I recently told a national television audience, I do not know who is going to win.
In this article I am simply going to examine the poll numbers and the electoral map as they currently stand. But in this bizarre election things can literally change overnight, and it is entirely possible that we could still have another “October surprise” or two before it is all said and done. And without a doubt Donald Trump desperately needs something “to move the needle”, because if the election was held today Hillary Clinton would almost certainly win.
What we have witnessed so far during the 2016 election season has been absolutely unprecedented. Just consider some of the things that we have seen up to this point in time.
We have never had a bigger “October surprise” than the release of the lewd audio tape from 11 years ago in which Donald Trump claimed to grope women without their consent.
We have never seen the mainstream media openly attack a presidential candidate as much as they have attacked Donald Trump. In the past, the big mainstream news outlets at least pretended to be fair and balanced, but this year they have completely discarded all notions of objectivity.
They should be completely and utterly ashamed of themselves, and no matter who wins the election they will never be able to get their integrity back.
We have also never seen a major party at war with itself this close to a presidential election. It has been said that a house divided against itself will surely fall, and a whole host of prominent Republican leaders have been openly attempting to sabotage the Trump campaign.
If Donald Trump is able to overcome all of these factors, it truly will be a miracle of Biblical proportions.
As it stands at the moment, however, the numbers are looking quite ominous for Trump. Right now, the Real Clear Politics average of national polls has Hillary Clinton ahead by 6.2 percent. Most political experts consider that to be an insurmountable lead at this stage in the game.
But even if Trump can close that gap and pull ahead, that does not mean that he will win the election. In fact, Trump could beat Clinton by millions of votes nationally and still lose.
In order to win the election, one candidate has got to get to 270 electoral votes. And on the latest Real Clear Politics electoral map, 262 electoral votes are being projected to go to Hillary Clinton, 164 electoral votes are being projected to go to Donald Trump, and 112 electoral votes are in the “toss up” category.
So unless something dramatically changes, Donald Trump is essentially going to have to run the table in all of the closely contested states in order to win, and the mathematical odds of that happening are extremely slim.
Let’s take a closer look at this. The first thing that Donald Trump is going to have to do in order to get to 270 electoral votes is to win all of the states that Mitt Romney won in 2012. That would get him up to 206 electoral votes.
Unfortunately, it looks like that may be very difficult to do. Romney won North Carolina, but the six most recent polls all have Clinton ahead in that state. Romney also won Arizona, but the most recent poll to be taken there has Clinton ahead by five points.
But for a moment, let’s assume that Trump can win all of the states that Romney won. On top of that, there are four other states that Trump must win…
#1 Trump must win Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Without Florida, Trump has no realistic path to 270 electoral votes. So on election night if it is announced that Trump has lost Florida, you might as well turn off your television and go to bed because Trump is going to lose the election.
Unfortunately for Trump, four recent major surveys all show Trump down by four points in the Sunshine state.
#2 Trump must win Ohio’s 18 electoral votes. No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio, and the two most recent major surveys show that Trump and Clinton are tied in the state.
#3 Trump must win Iowa’s 6 electoral votes. Fortunately for Trump, most recent surveys show him actually leading in Iowa.
#4 Trump must win Nevada’s 6 electoral votes. At this point that is looking like it will be very tough to do, because all of the recent polls have Clinton leading in Nevada, including the most recent one that has her up by 7 points.
If Donald Trump can win those four states, that still does not get him to 270 electoral votes. Instead, it gets him to 265 electoral votes, and so he would still need one more medium-sized state to win.
The most likely candidates for that last state are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin or Minnesota. Unfortunately for Trump, Clinton appears to have big leads in all four of those states right at this moment.
But even if Trump can somehow pull off a miracle and squeak past the 270 electoral vote mark, the truth is that Utah could still mess everything up.
Do you remember Evan McMullin?
He was the third party “conservative alternative” candidate that was hyped for a couple of days but that seemingly fell off the map afterwards.
He is only on the ballot in 12 states, but one of those states is Utah, and it turns out that Evan McMullin is a Mormon.
Many Mormons believe that a Mormon will be elected president someday when the U.S. Constitution hangs “like a thread“. According to this belief, this Mormon president will turn the country around and all sorts of wonderful things will start to happen. Many Mormons thought that Mitt Romney was going to be this president, but now Evan McMullin has become the target of these expectations.
So how in the world could Evan McMullin become president?
Well, their plan is to have Evan McMullin win Utah, and that could potentially keep both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton from both getting to 270 electoral votes if the election is super close. If that happens, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives.
It is being projected that the House will still be controlled by the Republicans after this election, and so the choice would come down to either Trump or McMullin, and those backing McMullin believe that he would have a realistic shot in that scenario.
I know all of this sounds very strange, but this is actually being discussed around family dinner tables all over Utah tonight.
And in recent days Evan McMullin has been soaring in Utah. One recent survey shows Trump with a one point lead over McMullin, and another recent survey actually show McMullin leading Trump by four points in the state.
So Trump could pull off a miracle and do everything else that he needs to do to get to 270 electoral votes, and Utah could end up messing up everything for him.
In addition, it is also very important to keep in mind that Trump could actually get all of the legitimate votes that he needs to win and still have it stolen from him by election fraud. There was widespread evidence of “funny business” in 2012, and this is something that I detailed for a live studio audience down at Morningsideearlier this month…
Are you starting to see why I would consider this to be the biggest miracle in American political history if Donald Trump actually overcomes all of these factors and wins the election?
And we don’t have to wait until November 8th to get some indications about how the vote is going to go. Early voting is already taking place is some states, and so far the signs are not encouraging for the Trump campaign. The following comes from CNN…
Democratic early turnout has stayed steady in North Carolina compared to 2012, while Republicans have dropped by about 14,500. In Nevada, Democrats have a smaller early voting deficit today than they did at this point in 2012. And Democrats are slightly ahead in Arizona in the early vote so far, though they are lagging Republicans in the tally of how many Arizonans have requested ballots.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Democrats improved their position in conservative and Mormon-heavy Utah, where recent polls have shown a tight race. At this point in 2012, Republicans led Democrats in early voting by more than 22,000 voters. But so far this year, the GOP advantage is only 3,509.
But if you do want Trump to win, the good news is that we still have more than two weeks before November 8th.
We have seen some extremely bizarre things happen already in this election, and a miracle is definitely not out of the question.
In fact, I am of the opinion that it is quite likely that some very strange events could take place between now and early November. So hold on to your hats, because the most interesting portion of the 2016 election may still be ahead of us. | 1real |
Man in Charles Tyrwhitt store “only wanted to hear it said it out loud” | November 3, 2016
A man who spent an entire afternoon browsing ‘half-heartedly’ at the shirts in Charles Tyrwhitt’s flagship store in London’s Jermyn Street has admitted he was only there to hear someone say the name ‘Tyrwhitt’ out loud.
“We get all these leaflets and inserts from Charles whatsisface through the post and I’m tired of saying to the wife ‘just some more rubbish from Charles thingummy, dear’, and her saying ‘who?’ and me going ‘Trywhite, tirrywitt, trrrHitt, tyreRwhite’, and her getting worried about me.”
“So I decided to find out how you said the name of the person whose leaflets account for most of the stuff in our recycling bin. Unfortunately, not a single customer came in so I was unable to witness any conversations about this twirrit shirt or that tirriwrit tie. I thought my luck was in when the assistant mistook me for someone genuinely interested in the range of middlemanagerwear on display, but when he said it was one of Charles Wossname’s biggest sellers, he sort of mumbled the wossname bit.” Bravenewmalden Bravenewmalden News In Brief 0 | 1real |
No new U.S. administration is completely prepared: Biden | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - No newly elected administration is totally ready to govern on the first day in office, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said on Wednesday after a lunch meeting with Vice President-elect Mike Pence. “No administration is ready on day one. We weren’t ready on day one,” Biden told reporters. “But I’m confident on day one everything will be in good hands.” Biden met with Pence and his wife at the vice president’s residence in Washington for about two hours. He said he would be available to assist Pence at any time. | 0fake |
Melania's Slovenian hometown eyes Trump win as boon for tourism | SEVNICA, Slovenia (Reuters) - The small Slovenian town of Sevnica, Melania Trump’s birthplace, savored her husband’s shock win in the U.S. election as a likely boon for tourism on Wednesday, while a former schoolmate remembered her as “creative and innovative”. Until about a year ago, the town of fewer than 5,000 people, nestled in the foothills of the Alps, was scarcely known in Slovenia, let alone abroad. But on Monday, Sevnica was clearly looking forward to a financial spin-off from being the hometown of the 46-year-old future U.S. First Lady. “Sometimes the pressure of the media was too hard. The people of Sevnica are not used to it. On the other hand, the global attention is positive because Sevnica is developing into a tourist destination,” mayor Srecko Ocvirk said. Speaking to Reuters shortly after 7 a.m. (0600 GMT) in Sevnica’s Central cafe, the smiling mayor said local residents had supported Trump and his wife’s campaign. “We are very satisfied at the result,” he said. Born Melania Knavs in 1970, she lived in an apartment block in Sevnica with her family as a child. When she was a teenager, the family moved to a modest two-storey house above the Sava river on the outskirts of town, which sits below a well-maintained medieval castle. Residents say her father sold car parts and her mother worked for a factory that made a brand of children’s clothing very popular in communist Yugoslavia, before the country fell apart in the 1990s. Melania’s modeling career took her to Milan and thence to the United States, far away from her native Slovenia, a tiny former Yugoslav republic of 2 million people comparable in size to New Jersey. “Even as a child Melania was creative, innovative and Sevnica was too small for her,” said Mirjana Jelancic, Melania’s friend who is now a headmistress of Melania’s elementary school. “She was reserved and when I heard that Donald was running I said (to myself) this will be hard for her. She never wanted to be in the spotlight,” Jelancic said. “She was excellent at her job (in the campaign).” The head of the town’s health center, which received a donation from Melania in 2005 when she was pregnant with her son Barron, said she believed Melania would be a success in the White House, as well. “Melania will be an excellent First Lady who will take Slovenian values of generosity, loyalty and trust to the United States and the world,” Vladimira Tomsic said. | 0fake |
Democrats, advocacy groups launch blitz of ads attacking tax plan | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The tax overhaul pushed by President Donald Trump and fellow Republicans is prompting a slew of attack ads by Democrats and progressive groups that say the legislation would lavish benefits on corporations and the rich, while harming the middle class. One ad launched on Tuesday warns that the Republican tax plan would leave Maine residents “lost in the wilderness” as it pans through a dark, deserted forest. The television spot, paid for by the group Not One Penny, urges the state’s Republican senator, Susan Collins, who is undecided on the plan and whose vote could help decide its fate in the Senate, “not to lose her way.” Another Not One Penny ad in Nevada, where Republican Senator Dean Heller faces a tough re-election race next year, says that the Senate plan is “a tax break for billionaires and wealthy corporations, paid for by higher taxes on every day Nevadans.” Republicans are looking to pass tax legislation within the next few weeks. Groups spending millions on the ads are aiming to sway public opinion in the final stretch of debate over the legislation, which would cut the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent, and reduce individual income tax rates. Liberals see criticism of the tax plan as a potent issue for the 2018 U.S. congressional elections, when all 435 House seats are up for re-election, along with 33 in the Senate. The House of Representatives passed its tax bill last week. The Senate plans to vote once lawmakers return to Washington after this week’s U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. Republicans are under pressure to deliver a tax bill to score their first major legislative achievement since taking control of the White House and both chambers of Congress in January. Many Democratic ads focus on Republicans thought to be vulnerable in the 2018 elections. Others target Republicans such as Collins in the Senate, where Republicans have a slim 52-48 majority and can afford to lose just two Republican votes and still pass a tax bill, with Democrats united in opposition. Republicans say their tax plans would provide across-the-board cuts for both businesses and middle-class workers, along with tax code simplifications that would make it easier for individual taxpayers to file. Republican tax writers contend their plan would mean a “typical family of four would see their tax bill drop by nearly 60 percent.” But Democrats say Republicans have used as a model a family with a specific set of tax circumstances, and that other families at similar income levels could end up paying more. Both the House and Senate plans cut individual tax rates but eliminate popular deductions. In the Senate plan, the tax rate cut for individuals is temporary, while the corporate rate cut is permanent. The Senate plan would repeal a key provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires individuals to pay a penalty if they do not have health insurance. The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation has estimated that the Senate bill would, beginning in 2021, lead to higher tax bills on average for households earning $10,000 to $30,000 annually. By 2027, most taxpayers earning $75,000 or less annually would be paying more taxes, the JCT said. Democratic advocacy group Priorities USA on Tuesday increased to $2 million a tax-related digital ad campaign targeting voters in 20 House districts where Republicans voted for the House bill. It also plans ads in states represented by Senate Republicans Collins (Maine), Heller (Nevada), John McCain (Arizona), Bob Corker (Tennessee) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska). The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is running digital ads in more than 40 Republican-held House districts. The group Save My Care is running digital ads in the districts of 14 House Republicans who voted for the bill, and in Alaska, Arizona and Maine. Republican and conservative groups are running ads of their own. The National Republican Congressional Committee started running spots in multiple districts last week promoting the tax bill. America First Policies, a nonprofit run by former Trump campaign advisers, is spending $135,000 this week for spots on conservative radio programs. | 0fake |
DEAR KIDS: Socialism Is Not Cool…Socialism Kills [VIDEO] | This video should be viewed by every middle school, high school and college student. Every adult American who truly understands how evil socialism is, yet would still support it in the United States Of America should hang their selfish heads in shame | 1real |
Trump will not visit DMZ during Asia trip -official | (This version of the October 31st story corrects date of Trump s visit to Asia to November 5 in 8th paragraph) WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will not go to the heavily fortified demilitarized zone (DMZ) on the border of North Korea and South Korea during his Asia trip, a senior administration official said on Tuesday. The president is not going to visit the DMZ. There is not enough time in the schedule, the official told reporters in a background briefing. Instead, Trump will be the first American president to visit Camp Humphreys, a military installation south of the South Korean capital of Seoul. We thought that would make more sense in terms of its messaging, in terms of the chance to address families and troops there, the official said. U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visited the demilitarized zone that divides the Korean Peninsula last week and Vice President Mike Pence made the same trip in April. The official, speaking on customary condition of anonymity in briefing reporters, noted the two Trump administration forays to the zone. It s becoming a little bit of a cliche, frankly, the official said. Trump leaves for his first trip to Asia this week and is expected to arrive on November 5 in Tokyo. Separately, two U.S. officials said a decision may be made for the three aircraft carriers currently in the Asia Pacific region to carry out an exercise to coincide with Trump s trip. The officials said no decision had been made, but it would be the first exercise with three U.S. aircraft carriers in the region since 2007. A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the buildup of naval forces was part of the military component of the Trump administration s strategy to put maximum pressure on North Korea, which includes sanctions and diplomatic isolation. Earlier on Tuesday, the State Department welcomed a decision by China and South Korea to resume normal ties after a year-long standoff over a decision by Seoul and Washington to deploy a missile defense system to counter North Korea s nuclear program. | 0fake |
Trump says U.S. Secretary of State Tillerson not leaving post | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is not leaving, President Donald Trump tweeted on Friday, after U.S. officials on Thursday said the White House had a plan for CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace him. “The media has been speculating that I fired Rex Tillerson or that he would be leaving soon - FAKE NEWS! He’s not leaving and while we disagree on certain subjects, (I call the final shots) we work well together and America is highly respected again!” Trump said on Twitter. The tweet linked to a picture of Tillerson being sworn in as secretary of state with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence looking on. Senior administration officials on Thursday said that Trump was considering a plan to oust Tillerson, whose relationship with the president has been strained by the top U.S. diplomat’s softer line on North Korea and other policy differences, as well as by reports in October that he called the president a “moron.” Tillerson has not directly addressed whether he made the comment, though his spokeswoman denied it. The New York Times on Thursday first reported the White House plan to replace him. Asked to comment on some White House officials wanting him to resign, how the matter was being handled and what his plans were, Tillerson replied: “It’s laughable. It’s laughable.” His comments came as he posed for pictures with Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj of the United Nations-backed government in Tripoli. Tillerson visits Europe next week to attend NATO meetings in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday, an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) meeting in Vienna on Thursday and talks with French officials in Paris on Friday. He is tentatively scheduled to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Vienna on Thursday on the sidelines of the OSCE meeting, a senior State Department official told reporters. | 0fake |
Poll: Clinton Support Spikes Following Democratic Convention | Following the Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton now leads Donald Trump by 8 points — 50 percent to 42 percent — up from a single-point difference last week, according to the latest NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll.
Clinton's gain also comes after a series of controversial comments made by the Republican nominee this past week regarding the family of a fallen American soldier and Trump's suggestion that Russian hackers should seek out deleted Clinton emails.
The Republican National Convention did not result in a post-convention bounce for Trump.
Clinton also saw a bounce in a four-way general election match-up against Trump, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Clinton now leads Trump by 5 points — 43 percent to 38 percent — in the four-way race. This is a lead-reversal from last week, when Trump was beating the Democratic nominee by 2 points. Support for Johnson (9 points) and Stein (4 points) remained virtually unchanged from last week.
These results are according to the latest from the NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking poll conducted online from July 25 through July 31 among 12,742 adults who say they are registered to vote.
Perhaps a result of a series of well-received speeches from high-profile Democrats, Clinton's gains this week were not only in the horserace numbers. Overall, the number of voters who say they have a strongly favorable impression of the Democratic nominee is up 5 points — from 15 percent to 20 percent — since the question was asked two weeks ago.
Clinton's favorability among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters rose from 74 percent two weeks ago to 80 percent this week. Her unfavorable rating also dropped among Democrats from 24 percent to 19 percent.
President Obama, who spoke at the convention last week, also got an increase in approval this week. His job approval rating is up 3 points — 52 percent approve this week compared to 49 percent last week.
After a contentious primary season, the convention offered Democrats the chance to unite as a party. Overall, most voters who watched or followed the convention did not view the Democratic Party more favorably as a result — 27 percent viewed the Democratic Party more favorably as a result of the convention, but 35 percent viewed the party less favorably, and 37 percent said their opinion of the Democratic Party didn't change.
Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, half said they have a more favorable opinion of the Democratic Party as a result of the convention. Among Independent voters, 42 percent said they view the Democratic Party less favorably and 49 percent said the convention did not change their opinion. These results are similar to the favorability ratings we saw for the Republican Party last week following the GOP convention.
Overall, four in 10 voters said they were more interested in this year's Democratic National Convention compared to previous years. Among Democrats, 58 percent said they were more interested in this year's convention than in prior years. Roughly the same number of Republicans said that about the GOP convention last week. Among Independents, 46 percent said they had about the same level of interest this year as in previous years and 34 percent said they were less interested this year.
A strong Democratic convention combined with Trump's troubles over the past few days surrounding his tweets toward the Khan family and comments about Russia produced a very good bounce for Clinton. The question is whether the bounce is short lived or represents a more permanent shift in the race.
The NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking poll was conducted online July 25 through July 31, 2016 among a national sample of 12,742 adults who say they are registered to vote. Respondents for this non-probability survey were selected from the nearly three million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. Results have an error estimate of plus or minus 1.2 percentage points. For full results and methodology, click here. | 0fake |
Ugandan parliament passes law allowing Museveni to seek re-election | KAMPALA (Reuters) - Ugandan legislators voted late on Wednesday to amend the country s constitution to allow 73-year-old leader Yoweri Museveni to extend his rule, potentially guaranteeing him a life-time presidency. A provision in the current constitution limits the age of a presidential candidate at 75 years, which would have made Museveni ineligible to stand at the next polls in 2021. At the end of Wednesday s day-long House debate, which capped a protracted and violence-marred process to remove that age limit, MPs voted 315-62 in favor of the amendment. The bill passes, said speaker Rebecca Kadaga after announcing tally results, prompting raucous celebrations from the mostly ruling party MPs who favored the bill. Earlier in the day, two lawmakers were dragged away and detained when they tried to enter parliament, as the divisive debate proceeded in the chamber. Police had blocked some legislators from entering the building, and live television footage showed two of them being driven away in security vehicles. Both opposed the bill. The legislators blocked by police were attempting to enter parliament to serve court documents on House speaker Rebecca Kadaga, who was presiding over the debate. The document called on her to appear in court at 2:00 PM in respect of the irregular suspension of our members of parliament, independent lawmaker Wilfred Niwagaba told a local television station minutes before he was detained. Six MPs - all opposed to removal of the age cap - were suspended from parliamentary proceedings on Monday for alleged disorderly conduct and refusing to heed the speaker s instructions. The bill to amend the constitution was introduced in parliament on October 4 by a Museveni loyalist, after two consecutive days of brawling in the debating chamber between those opposed and those in favor, supported by security personnel. On the second day, security personnel who some MPs said were soldiers from an elite military unit entered the chamber and violently ejected at least 25 MPs that the speaker had suspended from proceedings for alleged misconduct. Wednesday s vote was the second time Ugandan parliament has changed the constitution to allow Museveni extend his rule. In 2005, they voted to remove a limit of two five-year terms, which blocked him from standing again. The bill also extended the length of a term for MPs to seven years from the current five. The limit of two terms was also re-imposed for the president, although that only means Museveni would be limited to two more terms, starting with the 2021 election. Are you not seeing what happened in Zimbabwe, do we want his excellency to end like Gaddafi of Libya, opposition legislator, Gilbert Olanya, who opposed to the amendment, said in Wednesday s debate as he attempted to persuade colleagues to reject it. Several African leaders have amended laws designed to limit their tenure. Such moves have fueled violence in countries including Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. Initially hailed for restoring political order and fostering economic growth, Museveni has lately come under mounting pressure fueled by runaway corruption, and accusations he uses security forces to maintain his grip on power. A combination of both military and police personnel were heavily deployed around parliament this week, which opposition MPs say was meant to intimidate members. | 0fake |
Ollie the Bobcat Is Found Near Her Zoo’s Birdhouse (Where Else?) - The New York Times | She had her fun and, it appears, she was ready to come home. After a brief flirtation with freedom, Ollie, a bobcat living at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, was found on Wednesday near the zoo’s birdhouse, officials said. Though they could not retrace the bobcat’s nearly adventure, officials said she might have left the property but most likely never strayed more than two miles from the zoo. “We’re just happy,” Craig Saffoe, the zoo’s curator of great cats, said at an evening news conference. Ollie’s disappearance on Monday morning reportedly led some area schools to cancel recess and inspired a slew of jokes, a Twitter parody account and grand metaphors. (She had become “a symbol of freedom and one of its last hopes in a world gone rotten,” The Washingtonian proclaimed on Wednesday night.) But for zoo officials, her capture, thanks to a tip from a visitor who spotted her crossing a walkway, offered relief. After receiving the tip, staff members at the birdhouse notified Mr. Saffoe and his colleagues, who set up live traps in the area of the sighting. “Within 15 minutes, the birdhouse keepers called us back and told us, ‘We have a bobcat in a trap up here,’” he said. Ollie was taken to a veterinary hospital, where she was determined to have suffered no harm from the adventure, save a small cut on her front left paw, said Dr. Brandie Smith, the National Zoo’s associate director for animal care sciences. “There’s no need to treat it,” Dr. Smith said. “We’re just letting her be kind of calm and safe and secure. ” Ollie will receive a full examination on Thursday, and the zoo plans to investigate how she was able to leave her enclosure, Dr. Smith added. Ollie probably never traveled far, apparently sticking close to Rock Creek, which abuts the zoo, Mr. Saffoe said. Reported sightings of her on a nearby road appeared to be credible, too, he added. “I think she wanted to go out, have a little bit of fun, see what it was like on the outside,” he said. Zoo officials said this week that they did not consider Ollie a threat to humans, but that she might pose a threat to cats, dogs and birds. Mr. Saffoe described her on Wednesday as “standoffish. ” “She’s not the cat who’s going to walk right up to you,” he said, adding that he had suspected she was nearby and watching as the zoo staff set up the trap that ultimately ensnared her. “She was just waiting to see what kind of goodies we left for her,” he said. The last animal to vanish at the National Zoo was a male agouti — a rodent — named Macadamia, said Pamela a zoo spokeswoman. He escaped for only a . The Virginia Zoo in Norfolk has not been as fortunate: It has yet to report any reliable leads in the search for Sunny, a red panda who disappeared early last week. | 0fake |
Fugitives in Kim Jong Nam killing changed clothes at airport, witness says | KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Four men suspected of killing the North Korean leader s half-brother at a Malaysian airport changed their clothes and appearance to escape detection, a police witness said on Thursday. The four, who are still at large, are charged together with two women - Indonesian Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong from Vietnam - with killing Kim Jong Nam at Kuala Lumpur airport s budget terminal on Feb. 13. Prosecutors in the Malaysian court say Siti Aisyah and Huong conspired with the men to murder Kim, by smearing his face with liquid VX, a chemical poison banned by the United Nations. Defense lawyers have argued the women did not know they were handling poison and thought they were involved in a prank for a reality TV show. The men had been formerly identified only as Mr. Chang, Mr. Y, James, and Hanamori, also known as Grandpa or Uncle , which a police witness has said were assumed names. The men changed clothes after the attack, before they were seen leaving the airport, police investigator Wan Azirul Nizam Che Wan Aziz told the court. They were trying to confuse (observers), Wan Azirul said, describing closed-circuit television recordings made on the day of the killing. More than 40 CCTV video clips of the men s movements at the airport were screened in the darkened courtroom. They showed Mr. Chang and Mr. Y heading to different bathrooms in the airport before emerging in different clothes, shortly after the attack on Kim Jong Nam. Mr. Chang, who had earlier been seen wearing a goatee, also came out of the bathroom clean-shaven. All of the suspects at large, even though they changed clothes, did not change their shoes, added Wan Azirul, who said the shoes were among the features enabling identification of the suspects, besides their body types and movements. Other videos showed Mr. Chang and Mr. Y meeting separately with a man, identified as Hanamori, at a restaurant near the airport s check-in counters, prior to the attack. Hanamori was seen arriving at the restaurant with a fourth man, who Wan Azirul said was suspected to be James . Mr. Chang later met alone with Siti Aisyah at the restaurant, while Mr. Y was seen walking past the restaurant with Huong. It is unclear whether the four suspects at large were the same four North Koreans authorities described as having left Kuala Lumpur for Pyongyang on the day of the killing. An Interpol alert has been issued for the four who left, identified as North Koreans Ri Ji Hyon, Hong Song Hac, O Jong Gil, and Ri Jae Nam. U.S. and South Korean officials have said agents of Kim Jong Un s regime masterminded the murder. The trial will resume on Nov 6. | 0fake |
Irish PM 'doing everything he can' to avoid election: spokesman | DUBLIN (Reuters) - Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar is doing everything he can to avoid a snap general election, his spokesman said, but the crisis that has brought his minority government to the brink showed no obvious sign of resolution on Sunday. Varadkar has two days to end the standoff with the party propping up his government before it submits a motion of no confidence in his deputy prime minister, a move that Varadkar says will force him to call a snap election before Christmas. The crisis has erupted less than three weeks before a summit on Britain s plans to leave the European Union, where Ireland will play a major role in deciding whether the negotiations can move onto the next phase. Talks between Varadkar and Micheal Martin, the leader of the main opposition party, Fianna Fail, will continue on Sunday ahead of Martin bringing the motion of no confidence in Deputy Prime Minister Frances Fitzgerald before parliament on Tuesday. The Taoiseach (prime minister) is doing everything he can to avoid an election, and hopes it will be possible to reach agreement with Micheal Martin, Varadkar s spokesman said in a statement on Sunday. The spokesman added that there was no question of Fitzgerald being asked to resign over her handling of a legal case involving a police whistleblower. Fianna Fail say this is the only way to avoid an election. The Sunday Times newspaper reported that the leaders agreed the outline of a deal that would allow an ongoing judge-led tribunal to investigate the issue but that sources in Varadkar s Fine Gael party said an election was unavoidable if Fianna Fail continued to call for Fitzgerald to step down. Varadkar is due to play a major role in the Dec. 14-15 EU summit on Brexit, telling fellow leaders whether Dublin believes sufficient progress has been made on the future border between EU-member Ireland and Britain s province of Northern Ireland. The government has said enough progress has not been made to date and Ireland s EU Commissioner Phil Hogan said on Sunday that Dublin would continue to play tough over its threat to veto talks. The border is one of three issues Brussels wants broadly resolved before it decides whether to move the talks on to a second phase about trade and EU officials have said a snap election in Ireland would complicate that task. Bosses at a number of Ireland s top companies were quoted by the Sunday Business Post as telling the parties to step back from the brink. This thing of bringing the country to a standstill at a critical time is just unacceptable, Dalata Hotel Group (DHG.I) chief executive Pat McCann told the newspaper. Politicians say they also know there is no appetite among voters for an election just 18 months after the last one and an opinion poll on Saturday suggested there would be little change with another minority administration the most likely outcome. | 0fake |
Uber Partners With Daimler in a Step Toward a Driverless Future - The New York Times | SAN FRANCISCO — Uber is one step closer to its dream of a future — with a little help from a new partner. The company announced on Tuesday a partnership with Daimler, under which the German automaker plans to build autonomous vehicles that will operate on Uber’s transportation network. The move marks the first time a major automaker will provide its own vehicles — built entirely and without Uber’s help — specifically to operate on the company’s network. The agreement is not exclusive, and Daimler may produce autonomous cars for Uber’s competitors, while Uber can also bring other automakers onto what it calls its “open platform” for ride hailing. The two companies said they expected Daimler’s vehicles to reach Uber’s network “in the coming years. ” “Auto manufacturers like Daimler are crucial to our strategy because Uber has no experience making cars — and in fact, making cars is really hard,” Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, said in a statement. “We can combine Uber’s global network with the vehicles of companies like Daimler, so that Uber riders can have a great experience getting around their cities. ” Uber has a history of cooperating with automakers to jointly produce autonomous vehicles. The company has worked with Volvo to develop the XC90, a sport utility vehicle now being tested in Pittsburgh, near Uber’s research headquarters. Uber has also modified a fleet of Ford Fusion vehicles, outfitting them with sensors and cameras for autonomous capabilities. Lyft, Uber’s largest competitor in the United States, has also worked closely with a major automaker, General Motors, which is making its own vehicles for Lyft’s network. Google struck a deal with Fiat Chrysler last year to work on vehicles. Uber stands to benefit from the Daimler partnership in several ways. Collaborating with automakers could reduce the perception that Uber is a threat to the sales of the auto industry, for example. The company can also bolster its supply of vehicles to pick up a growing base of riders. Uber faced some setbacks with its experiments last year. It ended a pilot program in San Francisco in December after disagreeing with California’s Department of Motor Vehicles over whether it had the proper permits for the test. Uber plans to begin a similar test in Phoenix in the coming months. “Daimler aims to be a leader in autonomous driving,” Dieter Zetsche, Daimler’s chairman, said in a statement. “Together with Uber, we seek to combine our strengths. ” | 0fake |
Mattis directs Joint Chiefs head to prepare to carry out Trump's South Asia strategy | AMMAN (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Tuesday that he had directed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to carry out President Donald Trump’s South Asia strategy after a rigorous interagency review which he would discuss with NATO allies. “I have directed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make preparations to carry out the president’s strategy,” Mattis said in a statement. “I will be in consultation with the Secretary General of NATO and our allies—several of which have also committed to increasing their troop numbers,” he added. | 0fake |
WOW! HILLARY’S RAPIST HUSBAND Has To Hold Her Up As She Makes Way To Vehicle After Devastating Debate [VIDEO] | Hillary got her butt kicked last night. Trump pulled out every stop and hammered her on almost every one of her lies. She was obviously shaken by a number of things, not to mention having to watch her husband s rape accusers sitting in the front row, courtesy of Donald J. Trump.While the debate shook her up, we all know that her inability to walk to the car unguided is not something new. Hillary can t walk more than 10 feet without looking for an arm, a chair or some prop to hold her up. Bill Clinton, her rapist husband was more than happy to provide her with assistance. He knew things were about to get ugly when he got in that vehicle. The least the he could do was prop her up Watch:https://youtu.be/jgX6XRz0ZLQ | 1real |
North Korea seen moving missiles from development center: South Korean broadcaster | SEOUL (Reuters) - Several North Korean missiles were recently spotted moved from a rocket facility in the capital Pyongyang, South Korea s Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) reported late Friday amid speculation that the North was preparing to take more provocative actions. The report cited an unnamed intelligence source saying South Korean and U.S. intelligence officials detected missiles being transported away from North Korea s Missile Research and Development Facility at Sanum-dong in the northern part of Pyongyang. The report did not say when or where they had been moved. The missiles could be either intermediate range Hwasong-12 or intercontinental ballistic Hwasong-14 missiles, according to the report, though the missile facility at Sanum-dong has been dedicated to the production of intercontinental ballistic missiles. A source from South Korea s defense ministry said he could not confirm details of the report or whether there has been any unusual activities in the area mentioned. South Korean official have voiced concerns that North Korea could conduct more provocative acts near the anniversary of the founding of its communist party on Oct. 10, or possibly when China holds its Communist Party Congress on Oct. 18. Amid heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula, South Korea and U.S. forces recently held their first joint short range air defense training exercise in South Korea, according to a statement released by the U.S. Pacific Command on Friday. The statement did not give the date of the exercise, but said the next exercise is scheduled to take place over the next few months as the two forces become more familiar with each other s capabilities. | 0fake |
U.S. Russia envoy cancels trip saying Russian officials won't meet him | MOSCOW (Reuters) - U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman has been forced to cancel a planned trip to Russia s Far East next week because senior regional officials could not find time to meet him, the U.S. Embassy to Russia said in a statement on Friday. The United States has a consulate in Vladivostok in the Russian Far East and the embassy said his planned visit was part of a series of trips to places where the U.S. hoped to resume consular operations which were suspended earlier this year amid a diplomatic dispute. | 0fake |
Comment on Like a ‘Concentration Camp’ Police Mark DAPL Protesters with Numbers & Lock Them in Dog Kennels by marlene | Posted on October 30, 2016 by Claire Bernish
Cannon Ball, N.D. — On Thursday, police from no less than five states sporting full riot gear and armed with heavy lethal and nonlethal weaponry, pepper spray, mace, a number of ATVs, five tanks, two helicopters, and military-equipped humvees showed up to tear down an encampment of Standing Rock Sioux water protectors and supporters armed with … nothing.
Under orders from the now-notorious Morton County Sheriff’s Office, this ridiculously heavy-handed standing army came better prepared to do battle than some actual military units fighting overseas.
But the target of their operation — a group of slightly more than 200 Native American water protectors and supporters opposing construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline — never intended to do battle with the armed, taxpayer-funded, corporate-backed, state-sponsored aggressors.
Reports vary, but no less than 141 people were arrested Thursday, and — according to witnesses — police marked numbers on arrestees’ arms and housed them in cement-floored dog kennels , without any padding, before they were transported as far away as Fargo.
“It goes back to concentration camp days,” asserted Oceti-Sakowin coordinator Mekasi Camp-Horinek, who, along with his mother, was marked and detained in a mesh kennel, reports the Los Angeles Times .
Although Thursday’s incident remained relatively peaceful for some time, with only shouts, chants, and occasional attempts by water protectors to convince this standing army to examine its motives and reconsider, clashes nonetheless broke out — solely because of gratuitous police aggression.
After facing off for a couple hours, these militant cops began closing in on the water protectors to shut down the Treaty of 1851 camp — in reference to the Fort Laramie Treaty of that year, which established a large parcel of land designated exclusively Native American territory not to be disturbed by the U.S. government. Prior to his arrest, Camp-Horinek had established the camp, stating, as cited by Indigenous Rising :
“Today, the Oceti Sakowin has enacted eminent domain on DAPL lands, claiming 1851 treaty rights. This is unceded land. Highway 1806 as of this point is blockaded. We will be occupying this land and staying here until this pipeline is permanently stopped. We need bodies and we need people who are trained in non-violent direct action. We are still staying non-violent and we are still staying peaceful.”
Despite the water protectors’ commitment to nonviolence, the militarized police response went as would be expected — horribly awry.
“A prayer circle of elders, including several women, was interrupted and all were arrested for standing peacefully on the public road,” stated a press release from Indigenous Environment Network. “A tipi was erected in the road and was recklessly dismantled, despite law enforcement statements that they would merely mark the tipi with a yellow ribbon and ask its owners to retrieve it. A group of water protectors was also dragged out of a sweat lodge ceremony erected in the path of the pipeline, thrown to the ground, and arrested.”
Claims to the contrary by Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier aside, Native American and Indigenous water protectors and supporters have refrained from violent acts on the whole, preferring instead peaceful prayer vigils and acts of civil disobedience.
No matter how peacefully the opposition acts, armed defenders of Big Oil interests seem determined to brutalize , disrespect, and generally incite and inflict violence against those who desire unsullied water for generations to come.
In fact, at the beginning of September, a private security firm hired by Energy Transfer Partners, the company responsible for pipeline construction, indiscriminately unleashed vicious attack dogs on water protectors, press, and supporters — for reasons as yet unknown.
During the savage attack, a pregnant woman, young girl, and many others suffered serious dog bites thanks to the ineptitude of the dogs’ handlers. Afterward, a warrant for inciting a riot was issued Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman — for doing her job, filming events as they happened — though charges were subsequently thrown out.
Although ETP and some law enforcement officers defended the barbarous actions of the private security mercenaries, the Guardian now reports that — because the guards lacked proper licensing — they could now face criminal charges. On Wednesday, the Morton County Sheriff’s Office made the determination that “dog handlers were not properly licensed to do security work in the state of North Dakota.”
Bob Frost, owner of Ohio-based Frost Kennels, told the Guardian , “All the proper protocols … were already done. I pulled my guys out the next day because we weren’t there to go to war with these protesters.”
Frost insisted he had cooperated with authorities investigating the incident — but the sheriff’s department disagrees. Seven handlers and dogs were deployed to the scene in early September, allegedly in response to reports of trespassers; but, according to the Guardian , police have only managed to identify two people.
The sheriff’s department claims Frost has not provided necessary information, and unnamed security officials cited in the report said that “there were no intentions of using the dogs or handlers for security work. … However, because of the protest events, the dogs were deployed as a method of trying to keep the protesters under control.”
In a statement cited by the Guardian , Morton County Captain Jay Gruebele said, “Although lists of security employees have been provided, there is no way of confirming whether the list is accurate or if names have been purposely withheld.”
Water protectors, in the meantime, are left to deal with absurdly disproportionate state violence — and the altogether unacceptable, disrespectful, and demeaning insult of being relegated to dog kennels after being arrested for exercising their rights.
As Lakota Country Times editor Brandon Ecoffey wrote in an editorial Thursday,
“Over the course of the last several months the abuse of detainees by Morton County Law Enforcement has overstepped every boundary guaranteed by the American constitution. Water protectors have been seen being bound and hooded by police. People are being stripped searched and abused within their jail for misdemeanor crimes. And police have employed the use of mass surveillance through drones on the protector camps. This isn’t a war zone this is North Dakota.” Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this: | 1real |
China says it has right to bar people from Hong Kong after British activist expelled | HONG KONG/BEIJING (Reuters) - China said on Thursday it had the right to bar people from Hong Kong, a day after a British activist was denied entry to the former British colony, and that it had complained to Britain after it demanded an explanation. Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997 under a one country, two systems formula that promises it a high degree of autonomy and freedoms not enjoyed on the mainland. But critics have accused the government of bending to the will of Communist Party leaders in Beijing and of a gradual watering down of the territory s freedoms, including freedom of speech and right to protest. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said he was very concerned that Benedict Rogers, a co-founder of the Conservative Party s Human Rights Commission, was denied entry to Hong Kong on Wednesday and demanded an urgent explanation from Hong Kong and China. It came a week before a sensitive Communist Party leadership meeting starts in Beijing. Johnson also said Hong Kong s high degree of autonomy, rights and freedoms were central to its way of life . Rogers has been a vocal critic of China-ruled Hong Kong s treatment of political activists, including that of jailed student leader Joshua Wong. He believes the decision to bar him was made by Chinese officials after the Chinese Embassy in London had warned him earlier, through a British member of parliament, that he wouldn t be allowed in. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the central government had a responsibility for foreign matters related to Hong Kong. The central Chinese government and the special administrative region government handle the relevant issue in accordance with the law, Hua said. Allowing or not allowing people in is China s sovereignty ... Hong Kong affairs are a purely internal matter for China. She said China had lodged a solemn representation with Britain, meaning an official complaint. When asked about the incident on a radio talk show, Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam agreed. Ultimately, under the Basic Law (Hong Kong s mini-constitution), the central government is responsible for foreign affairs, Lam said. Asked if immigration controls fell under Hong Kong jurisdiction, Lam said: It has to be considered whether foreign affairs are involved during the process of immigration. If you say everything falls under Hong Kong s high degree of autonomy, this is not what the Basic Law says. Rogers, speaking to Reuters shortly after arriving in London, said Beijing s statement confirmed his assumption that the decision to boot him out was made not by Hong Kong but by Chinese authorities. He described the interference in Hong Kong s immigration controls as very alarming and a very serious threat to one country, two systems . China has now revealed its hand. The world ought to have woken up a long time ago, but I think now they really ought to wake up to what this means for one country, two systems , he said. I m very sad for what this means for Hong Kong. The former head of Hong Kong s civil service turned pro-democracy activist, Anson Chan, said the case was a serious breach of the Basic Law. Article 154 of the Basic Law says Hong Kong may apply immigration controls on entry of foreigners into Hong Kong. The Immigration Department must have sought instructions from on high, she told Reuters. They (Beijing) are sending a message that if you dare speak out on Hong Kong ... you will not be allowed in. Amnesty International s East Asia director, Nicholas Bequelin, suggested China s definition of what constitutes national security is creeping into Hong Kong. In China if you re critical of the political system, you re committing a national security crime and this is exactly the type of thing one country, two systems should protect against. In response to a Reuters request for comment on whether China was involved in Rogers denial of entry, Hong Kong s Immigration Department said it did not comment on individual cases. China has admitted asking a group of British MPs to cancel a visit to Hong Kong in 2014 during the massive pro-democracy protests, of which Joshua Wong was a leader, that paralyzed highways for 79 days. Hong Kong has, on occasion, barred entry to individuals including dissidents, such as former leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing and a Danish sculptor, Jens Galschiot, who made a Tiananmen sculpture. | 0fake |
Russian helicopter missing off Norway found: rescue center | OSLO (Reuters) - The wreckage of a Russian Mi-8 helicopter missing off Svalbard, Norway, since October 26 has been located, Norway s rescue coordination center said on Sunday. The wreckage was found offshore at a depth of 209 meters, it said. Eight Russian men - five crew and three passengers - are assumed dead and the search for them will continue. | 0fake |
Good Riddance: James Clapper Resigns as Director of US Intelligence | 21st Century Wire says Like CIA Director John Brennan, a large part of the job of James Clapper, National Intelligence Director, was to lie to the American people and to continually exaggerate certain threats, while trying to conceal real problems most of which are created by US federal agencies. Like the CIA, this post has become a political one, and a government propaganda mouth piece for the deep state and all its domestic clandestine designs.When asked in 2013 by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans? Clapper s reponse was, No sir. This was a flat out lie, under oath (which seemed to be the norm for all testimonies under 8 years of Obama).Chief among James Clapper s propaganda campaigns directed at the American people was the greatest politically motivated phony talking point to date: that Russia and its president Vladimir Putin were somehow hacking US Elections, while offering no evidence whatsoever to back up this alleged claim by the intelligence community, that irresponsible talking point was spun far out of control and probably set back US-Russian relations years. Clapper claimed that leaked emails posted on WikiLeaks, DCLeaks.com and Guccifer 2.0, were identified as being associated with Russian intelligence even though most of the sober world has come to realize this grand conspiracy theory more than likely originated within the White House and the DNC itself. In a just world, this howler would be a black mark against the credibility of Clapper for the rest of his paid speaking and lucrative conference junket career, but alas, it s not a just world Clapper will continue to cash in regardless. Maybe that was the intention.There are a number of other things that Clapper said, and did, during his tenure, too many to mention here. More from Adam Garrie Adam Garrie The DuranIn a first major resignation since Donald Trump s electoral victory, the US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper quit his post.US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has just announced his resignation. This was the man who presided over the US government spying on its citizens and those throughout the world. This scandal was one whose existence Clapper denied, in spite of plain and clear evidence to the contrary.Edward Snowed had exposed numerous constitutional violations during Clapper s reign. This man s exit from the Bush-created position of Director of National Intelligence should be welcomed by everyone who opposes the surveillance state.It has been under Clapper that the government has been cut free of any checks and balances on its use of technology to violate the privacy of ordinary individuals, yet individuals of extraordinary conscience who blow the whistle on the illegal covert activities of government are prosecuted, victimized, and threatened with execution. I m referring specifically to Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.Clapper said that he is happy to resign. I personally share in this happiness as will many others. The timing of his resignation, which will be effective in 64 days, is a clear indication that he does not see eye to eye with his incoming boss, Donald Trump.If Clapper is replaced by someone guided by conscience rather than someone who uses George Orwell s 1984 as a handbook rather than a warning, it could well pave the way for the pardon of Manning, Assange and Snowden.One can only hope that Donald Trump does the right thing.READ MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 1real |
North Korea fires ballistic missile; U.S., South Korea analyzing: South Korea military | SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea fired one ballistic missile from Pyongsong, a city in South Pyongan Province, at around 1817 GMT over the sea between South Korea and Japan, South Korea s Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Wednesday. South Korea and the United States are currently analyzing what type of missile North Korea was fired, the military said in a text. Minutes after the North fired the missile, South Korea s military conducted a missile-firing test in response to the provocation, the South Korean military added. (This story corrects launch time to 1817 GMT, not 0617 GMT) | 0fake |
‘Classified’ Emails from Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin found on Anthony Weiner’s Laptop | Looking back on the 2016 Presidential election, there was a non-stop chorus on denials by Hillary Clinton, her campaign surrogates, and the mainstream media that had not allowed any classified emails to float around her home-brew server, or onto the family of her close aids.As it turns out, Hillary Clinton was lying. A new batch of emails released by the US State Department clearly show that Anthony Weiner, convicted sex criminal and husband of Clinton s chief aid Huma Abedin, had kept classified emails pertaining to official US State Department business during Hillary Clinton s tenure as Secretary of State kept on the same laptop which Weiner used to target an underage girl and where he also kept child pornography.Among the released emails were exchanges which clearly show Hillary Clinton conspiracy with authoritarian Saudi Arabia to stop Wikileaks. The reopening of this old Clinton gaping wound is another devastating blow for the mainstream media and the Democratic Party s resistance movement, whose mission is to remove Donald Trump for office.RT International reports At least five of the 2,800 emails stored on a laptop belonging to former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner were marked confidential and involved delicate talks with Middle Eastern leaders and Hillary Clinton s top aide.On Friday, the State Department released a batch of around 2,800 work-related documents from the email account of Huma Abedin, who served as the deputy chief of staff to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.At least five of the emails found on Abedin s ex-husband s laptop were heavily redacted and marked classified and at confidential level, the third more sensitive class the US government uses below secret and top secret. The State Department applies the confidential classification level to information that the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security, according to the Government Publishing Office.While the documents were not marked as classified before they were released, some of the information recovered in the emails was considered classified. It is illegal for civilians to posses or read classified documents without a security clearance.The confidential emails, which date from 2010 to 2012, concern discussions with Middle Eastern leaders.Dishonest: despite being caught multiple times, Hillary Clinton is still in denial about mishandling classified material.One of the emails has the subject Egyptian MFA on Hamas-PLO talks, referring to the Palestine Liberation Organization. The email is mostly redacted, only mentioning that it is a further update on Hamas-PA talks, referring to the Palestinian Authority.Another four-page email contains a completely redacted call sheet to prepare Clinton for an upcoming call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.A call sheet in another 2010 email includes notes to guide Clinton through a call she would make to Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal. The purpose of the call was to inform Saud about an impending WikiLeaks disclosure. This appears to be the result of an illegal act in which a fully cleared intelligence officer stole information and gave it to a website. The person responsible will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, the call sheet instructed Clinton to say.Clinton was warning the Saudis the leak could contain information related to private conversations with your government on Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, and asked the Saudi s to help the US prevent WikiLeaks from undermining our mutual interests. During a congressional hearing in 2016, former FBI Director James Comey said Abedin regularly forwarded emails to Weiner for him to print out for her so she could deliver them to the secretary of state. The emails were released in response to a 2015 lawsuit filed by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch against the State Department after it failed to respond to a Freedom of Information request (FOIA) seeking: All emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013 using a non- state.gov email address. In a statement issued Friday, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton called the release a major victory, adding that it was no surprise there were classified documents on Weiner s computer. It will be in keeping with our past experience that Abedin s emails on Weiner s laptop will include classified and other sensitive materials, Fitton said in a statement. That these government docs were on Anthony Weiner s laptop dramatically illustrates the need for the Justice Department to finally do a serious investigation of Hillary Clinton s and Huma Abedin s obvious violations of law. The emails were discovered on Weiner s laptop during an FBI investigation into allegations that he engaged in sexting with a 15-year-old girl. In September, Weiner was sentenced to 21 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to sending obscene material to a minor.The discovery of the emails led Comey to announce that the FBI was reopening an investigation into Clinton s use of a private email server 11 days before the 2016 presidential election. Clinton said the announcement contributed to her loss to Donald Trump See more at RTLast year, in effort to shore-up Clinton s crumbling reputation for being truthful to the public, her campaign published a bizarre 4,000-word fact sheet on the Clinton campaign website.As it turned out, Clinton s fact sheet was riddled with numerous false statements and other half-truths, including a lie that the FBI was conducting a security review when it was in fact conducting an investigation, and that she never sent or received classified information on her email account.This latest Weiner revelation is just another devastating blow to an already damaged political brand.Could Clinton mount a 2020 run?It s highly unlikely.READ MORE HILLARY NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Clinton FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 1real |
BILL CLINTON Spaces Out…Chews On His Tongue During Rally [Video] | 1real | |
Pentagon Makes STUNNING Reversal On Enlistment Bonus Repayments | You are here: Home / US / Pentagon Makes STUNNING Reversal On Enlistment Bonus Repayments Pentagon Makes STUNNING Reversal On Enlistment Bonus Repayments October 26, 2016 Pinterest
It was recently announced that members of the California National Guard who were deployed overseas would have to pay back enlistment bonuses to the government.
The troops were deployed nearly ten years ago, and the Pentagon offered bonuses to encourage enlistment. Average bonuses were around $15,000. However, it turns out that only certain enlisted soldiers in specific intelligence, civl affairs, and non-commissioned officer roles were eligible for these bonuses, according to CNN .
The call-back from the Pentagon was going to set people back an extraordinary amount of money, dollars that these people had come to depend on. Because of the government’s mistakes, those who served in the military were going to be forced to give that money back.
However, the Pentagon is issuing a reversal of that order.
Fox News reported :
BRUSSELS – U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter has ordered the Pentagon to stop seeking repayments of enlistment bonuses given to California National Guard members who served overseas.
His decision comes in the wake of angry reaction from members of Congress who demanded he relieve the burden on the Guard members. And the White House said President Barack Obama has warned the Defense Department not to “nickel and dime” service members who were victims of fraud by overzealous recruiters.
In a statement issued during a meeting of defense ministers in Brussels, Carter said effort to collect reimbursement should stop “as soon as is practical” and will continue until a process to help the troops deal with the problem is worked out.
It is a good thing that those who received these bonuses are not being forced to give them back. Granting of enlistment bonuses to those who were not eligible is a bad mistake that is the fault of the government, not the soldiers being deployed. The soldiers and their families should not have to suffer hardship for mistakes made by top Pentagon officials.
Unfortunately, this is just the latest in a long history of reckless handling of finances by the Pentagon. I recently reported on how the Pentagon cannot account for over $6.5 trillion in its budget. That’s trillion with a T.
Yet where is the outrage? It’s almost non-existent. Maybe it’s because we don’t fathom how much a trillion really is.
Nonetheless, the Pentagon needs to be reined in. Their pattern of reckless spending is not one that can be tolerated. (And, no, effectively punishing the troops for top officials’ mistakes is not an option). | 1real |
30 people killed in attack on cattle herders in northeast Nigeria: police official | BAUCHI, Nigeria (Reuters) - Unidentified attackers killed more than 30 cattle herders in the northeastern Nigerian state of Adamawa, a police spokesman said on Tuesday. The attack, in the Numan area of Adamawa, began on Sunday night and fighting continued into Monday morning, said Othman Abubakar, a police spokesman for the state, adding that an investigation was underway. He gave no further details. Earlier on Tuesday, a suicide bomber killed 50 worshippers during morning prayers in a mosque in the town of Mubi in northeastern Nigeria, police said, in one of the deadliest attacks in the region in years. | 0fake |
MEXICANS, Liberal Tourists NOT HAPPY! American Spring Breakers Chant “Build That Wall!” In Cancun, Mexico | In the past, high school kids have had to worry about getting into the college of their choice, if pictures of them overindulging in adult beverages while on spring break were posted to social media. Today, college students may have to worry about the treatment they ll receive if their college or college professors see pictures or videos of them showing their support for President Trump while on spring break.https://twitter.com/Lexi1095/status/843094566207131649What would be a dream night for Suly and Anaximandro Amable, a newly married couple who went to Cancun for their honeymoon, became a bitter experience on Monday March 13.During a family show on the high seas, young American spring breakers began to sing the controversial Build That Wall chant, which shocked Mexican national tourists and workers.This is just one of the many blameworthy behaviors that young spring breakers have shown recently in Cancun and that are described as acts of xenophobia and discrimination against Mexicans within their own country, which is (or should be) totally unacceptable.Anaximandro, from Per , made the following statement on social networks: Today I was with Suly, my wife (who is a native of Mexico), watching an entertainment show off the coast of Cancun aboard a boat, and at the end of the show, a flock of Americans (maybe under the influence of alcohol, or maybe not), began to sing the infamous Build that wall chant louder and louder .The Pirate Ship sails out from Puerto Juarez, and the show takes place in the middle of the ocean, where attendees can witness the clashing of swords and the explosion of cannons along with a constant flow of drinks.For entire story: The Yucatan Times | 1real |
First Open Lesbian Bishop Wants To Add Muslim Prayer Room And Remove All Crosses From Church…Here’s Why | Wake up Christians the left won t stop until they ve removed any mention of Christ in your church The Bishop of Stockholm has proposed a church in her diocese remove all signs of the cross and put down markings showing the direction to Mecca for the benefit of Muslim worshippers.Eva Brunne, who was made the world s first openly lesbian bishop by the church of Sweden in 2009, and has a young son with her wife and fellow lesbian priest Gunilla Linden, made the suggestion to make those of other faiths more welcome.The church targeted is the Seamen s mission church in Stockholm s eastern dockyards. The Bishop held a meeting there this year and challenged the priest to explain what he d do if a ship s crew came into port who weren t Christian but wanted to pray.Calling Muslim guests to the church angels , the Bishop later took to her official blog to explain that removing Christian symbols from the church and preparing the building for Muslim prayer doesn t make a priest any less a defender of the faith. Rather, to do any less would make one stingy towards people of other faiths .The bishop insisted this wasn t an issue, after all airports and hospitals already had multi-faith prayer rooms, and converting the dockyard church would only bring it up to speed. Regardless, the announcement has aroused protest.Father Patrik Pettersson, one of the priests in her diocese and active in the same parish as the Seaman s mission church has hit back in a blog of his own, complaining there is no way you could equate a consecrated church with a prayer room, remarking I should have thought a bishop would be able to tell the difference .Calling the bishop s words theologically unthinking , he asked what was to be done with crucifixes screwed to the walls, and heavy items such as baptismal fonts. Ignoring the rhetorical murmuring , Pettersson wrote: The only argument bishop Eva really put forward in support of her view is hospitality How do you respond to that? Not much of a basis for discussion, as one colleague put it. The theological, ecclesiological, pastoral and working issues are left untouched .Via: Breitbart News | 1real |
Republicans Demand Chelsea Clinton Be Questioned Over Benghazi, Hillary ‘Scandals’ (VIDEO) | If you thought leaving Congress would somehow make former Benghazi witch hunter Jason Chaffetz smarter, you were utterly, woefully wrong.In an appearance on his new home, Fox News, Chaffetz whined that Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. have to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee because of that teensy little meeting they had with a Russian government lawyer, a KGB spy, and a Russian money launderer where they expected to receive damaging information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.Instead, he says, Chelsea Clinton should be dragged in to testify about Benghazi. Republicans need to get a backbone, Chaffetz said. Every time the Democrats say they need to call up Jared Kushner or Don Jr. call up Chelsea Clinton, call up the Clintons. So every time a Democrat says I gotta talk to Donald Trump Jr., then go up and bring Chelsea Clinton in there, Chaffetz said, falsely claiming that Chelsea Clinton was involved in the Benghazi situation because of her association with the Clinton Foundation. They would never, ever do this to the Clintons, Chaffetz said of Kushner s testimony despite the fact that they literally did this to Hillary Clinton, forcing her to withstand 11 hours of ridiculous questions notably in public, unlike Kushner and his cohorts.Watch it below:Featured image via screengrab | 1real |
Turkey, United States 'on same wavelength', to speak again this week: Erdogan | ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday his talks with U.S. President Donald Trump last week were the first occasion in a long time the two NATO allies were on the same wavelength and they would speak against this week. Diplomatic ties between Ankara and Washington have been strained by several disagreements, particularly over the United States support for the YPG Syrian Kurdish militia, which Ankara regards as a terrorist group. The telephone call which we had with Trump on Friday was the first in a long time in which we got on the same wavelength, Erdogan said in a speech to deputies from his ruling AK Party in parliament. He said discussions would continue in the coming days on the issues of the YPG, defense industry cooperation and the fight against the network of a U.S.-based cleric whom Ankara accuses of orchestrating last year s failed coup in Turkey. According to Turkey s foreign minister, Trump on Friday told Erdogan he had issued instructions that weapons should not be provided to the Syrian Kurdish YPG. However, the Pentagon said on Monday it was reviewing adjustments in arms for Syrian Kurdish forces, but it stopped short of halting weapons transfers, suggesting such decisions would be based on battlefield requirements. Speaking to reporters in parliament after his speech, Erdogan said the Pentagon statement would be discussed at Turkey s National Security Council (MGK) meeting later on Tuesday. He also said that Trump indicated that another call may happen this week. If he doesn t call, I ll call, Erdogan said. The YPG spearheads the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias fighting Islamic State with the help of a U.S.-led coalition. Turkey regards the YPG as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought a decades-long insurgency in Turkey and is designated a terrorist group by Ankara, the United States and European Union. | 0fake |
Italy Plucks 2,000 Migrants from the Mediterranean Sea | ROME (AP) — Italian rescue ships have plucked some 2, 000 migrants from unseaworthy smugglers’ boats off the coast of Libya, with hundreds of them arriving Saturday in southern Italian ports. [advertisement | 0fake |
Special prosecutor creation seen easing U.S. Congress partisanship: Senator Cornyn | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Justice Department’s decision to name a special prosecutor to investigate Russia’s involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections could ease red-hot partisan tensions in Congress, Senator John Cornyn, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, said on Wednesday. Cornyn, speaking to reporters immediately after ex-FBI Director Robert Mueller was named as the special prosecutor, also said the announcement could make it easier for the Senate to confirm President Donald Trump’s replacement of fired FBI Director James Comey and said former Senator Joe Lieberman would get widespread support among the 100 senators for confirmation, if he were to be nominated. (This version of the story corrects second paragraph to make clear that Lieberman has not been nominated) | 0fake |
Italy: Muslim Mother Shaves Head of Daughter Who Refused to Wear Veil | A Muslim mother has shaved the head of her daughter in Bologna, Italy, on learning that the child was taking off her headscarf as soon as she would leave the house. [The girl would reportedly put her headscarf back on just before returning to the family home, but her deception was eventually caught by her mother on Wednesday, who summarily cut off all her hair. When the girl arrived to school bald on Thursday, her teachers inquired into what had happened, and when she told them, the school principal decided to inform the police, who took the girl into custody. Charges of mistreatment and abuse have been brought against the girl’s parents, who are of Bangladeshi origin, and the case has been handed over to the local prosecutor of offenses involving minors, together with the cooperation of social services. The mayor of Bologna, Virginio Merola, criticized the punishment inflicted on the girl as “unacceptable parental authoritarianism” and warned that “those who come to Italy must follow our laws and our Constitution. ” The Bologna coordinator of the Muslim community, Yassine Lafram, also took the girl’s side in the matter, stating that according to Islamic tradition “any form of coercion makes the act itself invalid. ” All the prescriptions of Islam, from the Ramadan fast to the pilgrimage to Mecca, “are part of a free choice of the person and no one can impose them, religiously speaking,” Lafram said. At the same time, Lafram said it is necessary “to help the family, including the mother herself, and to understand what motivated her to carry out this act. ” “It’s too easy to condemn her and hand her over to the mediatic slaughterhouse,” he said. Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome | 0fake |
Women won't earn the same as men for another two centuries - report | Thu, 27 Oct 2016 11:40 UTC © Joshua Lott / Reuters It will take close to two centuries for women to earn the same as men, according to the World Economic Forum's latest report. The annual Global Gender Gap Report was released Tuesday and found economic disparity between the sexes is on the rise. When looking at income and employment, we are back to similar levels of inequality seen during the 2008 financial crash. "At the current rate of change, and given the widening economic gender gap since last year, it will not be closed for another 170 years," the report read. The Gender Gap Index uses economics, education, health and political empowerment to rank 144 countries that have enough available data to use. Last year's report estimated it would take 118 years for economic equality to be achieved. Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden were the best countries on the Global Gender Gap Index having closed the gender gap in more than 80 percent of cases, but all still have disparities between the sexes. Rwanda and Ireland came fifth and sixth in the index. The UK came 20th and the US came 45th, falling 17 places from last year. Yemen came last. "There also continues to be a persistent wage gap in paid work," the report says. "Women's average earnings are almost half those of men, with average global earned income for women and men estimated at US$10,778 and $19,873, respectively. Countries that perform well in this dimension of gender parity span all regional and income groups." To examine economic participation and opportunity, the report looks at the ratio of female and male workers, wage equality for similar work and the ratio of women to men in various roles. The greatest gap between the sexes was found in political empowerment. The first Index was conducted in 2006 to track gender disparities and countries' progress over time. | 1real |
The Fix Is In: NBC Affiliate Accidentally Posts Election Results A Week Early: Hillary Wins Presidency 42% to Trump’s 40% | Posted 11/03/2016 12:44 am by PatriotRising with 1 comment
Why The U.S. Presidential Election Has The Entire World Confused By Brandon Smith
Well, everyone thought it was a sure thing — Hillary Clinton had the White House in the bag; the entire political system from the DNC to the RNC and the mainstream media had already called the election over and done. Online gambling sites listed Clinton as a sure bet and Irish site Paddy Power even paid out one million dollars on the assumption of a Clinton win. And then, one Weiner ruined everything — Anthony Weiner.
The revelation of an October surprise re-opening of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s misuse of classified data on private and vulnerable email servers does not come as a shock to me, but it certainly does to many people around the world. Hundreds of mainstream outlets are scrambling to spin the news as misconduct by the FBI rather than a victory for the halls of justice. Numerous alternative media analysts are rushing to cover their butts and admit that there is now a “chance” of a Trump win. Confusion reigns supreme as the weirdest election in U.S. history continues to bewilder observers.
The first issue that needs to be addressed is the lack of an open mind displayed by some when it comes to the real purpose behind this election. The second issue here, of course, is one of timing.
Through the majority of this election cycle the public consensus has been that Clinton will win. Some argued that Trump would not be able to compete with the leftist media empire standing against him, while others have argued that the entire system including the Republican establishment would ensure that Trump would fail. The alternative media has in the past simply pointed out that elections have always been rigged, either by the elites playing both sides of the competition, or through outright voter fraud. They have assumed that the elites want Clinton, and therefore, the election has already been decided.
I tend to agree with the latter point of view, though I disagree with the conclusion. U.S. elections are indeed controlled, and have been for decades, primarily through the false left/right paradigm. However, as I have been pointing out since I correctly predicted the success of the Brexit referendum, I don’t think that Clinton is the choice of the elites.
I outline my reasons for this conclusion in-depth in articles like ‘2016 Will End With Economic Instability And A Trump Presidency’ , published in August. For the past several months it seems as though I have been the only person holding the view that Trump will be president. Only in the past few days have I received emails from readers stating that they used to think I was probably crazy, but now they aren’t so sure…
To be clear, my position is that Trump is slated to take the White House and that this is by design. This has been my position since before Trump won the Republican Primaries, it was my position when the election cycle began, it has never changed, nor have my views on the reasons for this outcome ever changed. Of course, the election is not over yet, and if Clinton ends up soiling the already thoroughly soiled Oval Office with her presence, then everyone can color me confused as well. That said, here are some issues that I think many people are overlooking when coming to conclusions on the election and the events surrounding it.
Clinton Is The Worst Candidate The Elites Could Have Chosen
I have been studying the activities and behaviors of establishment elites for over a decade and I have to say… they are not stupid. They certainly have hubris, and I would not call them “wise,” but they are definitely devious. They know how to rig a game. They know how to play both sides. They know how to cheat to get what they want when it comes to politics and how to manufacture consent from portions of the public. They’ve been doing it a long time. They have mastered it.
So, in my view it is rather insane for the elites to field a candidate such as Hillary Clinton IF the entirety of their globalist empire hangs in the balance (I don’t think it does). Though she is fond of BleachBit, the woman is unbleachable. With a decades-long rap sheet from her work at Rose Law Firm (in which document destruction and “misplacement” was apparently routine) to her interference with investigations into Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions, to the strange odyssey surrounding her lies on the Benghazi attack, as well as her rampant mishandling of classified documents as head of the State Department, not to mention the Clinton Foundation’s pay to play scandals, it is impossible to endear her to the masses. Her dismal crowd turnouts are rather indicative of this.
On top of all this, Clinton’s anti-Russia rhetoric is coming off as absolutely crazy, and I think this is by design. Many in the alternative media, while assuming that Clinton is paving the way for WWIII, forget that the average person may not be up to speed on the same information we are, but most of them aren’t ignorant. Clinton’s ravings on Russian hacking and potential war are even putting liberals off rather than inspiring their confidence.
One would think that if the elites have their veritable pick of any politician to represent their interests in the White House and convince the American public to go along for the ride, Clinton would be the worst choice. Even if the intention were to rig the election in favor of Clinton, she would be a lame-duck president the second she took office, and, her mere presence would galvanize conservatives to the point of mass rebellion.
This is not generally how the elites play the game. Instead, they prefer co-option to direct confrontation.
Which President Is Better For The Elites During An Economic Breakdown?
If you consider the premise that Clinton is NOT the chosen one, and that the entire election is theater, the situation changes rather drastically.
Those that follow the underlying economic data that the mainstream tends to ignore know that large swaths of the global financial system are not long for this world. With Europe’s banking system plunging towards a Lehman-style event, the OPEC production freeze deal ready to fall apart yet again, and the Federal Reserve threatening to raise rates into recessionary conditions in December, our already floundering fiscal structure is approaching another crisis.
My questions has always been who would the elites rather have in office when this crisis occurs? I’ve said it a hundred times before and I’ll say it again here: with Clinton in office, globalists and international financiers get the blame for any economic downturn. With Trump in office, conservative movements will be blamed. In fact, I suggest anyone who doubts this scenario watch stock market reactions every time Trump rises in the polls or Clinton faces renewed scandal. The narrative is already being prepared — a Trump win equals a market loss.
For those that think it outlandish that the public could be tricked into blaming Trump and conservatives for an economic crisis, I suggest they consider that possession is nine-tenths of the law in the minds of many. People can also be irrational when facing financial ruin. I would remind readers that history is written by the victors. The globalists plan to be victorious in the dismantling of America and our founding principles. Whether or not they succeed is really up to average conservatives and liberty proponents, not Trump.
The FBI’s Move Prepares The Way For Trump
Clinton and the DNC argue that FBI Director James Comey’s announcement of a re-opened investigation is politically motivated. And they are right, sort of. The real motivation, I believe, is that Clinton was never meant to win the election in the first place, and that the elites want Trump placed in power during the final hours of the U.S. economy. Everything else is just a Kabuki dance.
The democrats are crying foul and accusing Comey of “working with Putin,” or working with the alt-right. The nefarious Harry Reid has even accused the FBI of hiding Trump’s supposed ties to the Russian government and violating the Hatch Act.
I think much of this outrage is real, as I believe much of the mainstream media attacks on Trump are coming from people who really think they are waging a propaganda war to get Hillary Clinton elected. This, however, does not mean that the elites plan to install Clinton.
Some might see my position as bizarre. I understand. But equally bizarre to me are some of the rationalizations people attempt to argue when dealing with the Comey revelation.
For example, the argument that the entire re-opening of the investigation is a complex ploy designed by the establishment to distract away from the Wikileaks data dumps. This makes little sense. If anything, the re-opening investigation is only bringing MORE attention to the Wikileaks data, not less. If the elites were hoping to create a distraction, they failed miserably.
The FBI’s announcement ONLY harms the Clinton campaign. Period. Even if it fizzles out, even if they announce that nothing was found, the investigation hitting the news streams so close to election day refocuses all public attention back on Clinton’s corruption and will continue to do so for the next week at least. The idea that the elites hope to use it to help Clinton is nonsensical.
I have also seen the argument that Comey is acting to cover his own posterior, perhaps because of a fear that Trump may steal away a victory. I find this equally absurd. Months back the consensus among alternative analysts was that Comey (placed in the FBI by Obama) was a traitor and the FBI was a puppet agency of the establishment. Now, suddenly, Comey is worried about a possible Trump win and so takes an action which might self-fulfill the prophecy?
Comey does what he is told. The FBI is an owned and operated elitist franchise. They do not go rogue. If the rogue FBI narrative were true and Comey actually feels the need to cover his bases with Trump, then it is only because he knows something the rest of us do not. With Clinton in office, his goose would be cooked after this little incident. Comey only gains an advantage if Trump is slated to win.
Trump May Or May Not Be Aware Of The Plan
The bottom line, according to the evidence I have seen in terms of elitists influence over U.S. elections, is that if Trump wins it will only be because they wanted him to win. The FBI firestorm this past week appears to support my view and we still have another week left for further Clinton ugliness to be revealed. I also expect that if Trump wins, the reaction from conservatives and liberty activists will be that the event was a “miracle,” a shocking upset against the establishment. Much like the reaction to the Brexit referendum. I continue to hold that conservatives and sovereignty champions in Europe and America are being set up to take the fall for a coming global destabilization.
I have not taken this position just to be contrary. If I think about it honestly, my position is truly a losing position. If I am mistaken and Clinton wins on the 8th then I’ll probably never hear the end of it, but that’s a risk that has to be taken, because what I see here is a move on the chess board that others are not considering. If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong.
That said, if I am right, then I still lose, because Trump supporters and half the liberty movement will be so enraptured that they will probably ignore the greater issue — that Trump is the candidate the elites wanted all along.
If I am right, I cannot say either way if Trump is aware that he will be a potential scapegoat for the elites. With Trump on the way to the White House I can guarantee a Fed rate hike in December. Imagine what a staged war between Trump and the Federal Reserve will do to the U.S. dollar? What a way to destroy the currency’s world reserve status and make way for the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights! I also suspect that widespread rioting is on the schedule as well from various social justice mobs; a perfect excuse for expansive martial law measures, don’t you think?
The point is, as horrifying as a Clinton presidency might be to conservatives (or to everyone), don’t get too comfortable under Trump. The party is just getting started and our vigilance must be even greater with a conservative White House, because, like it or not, everything Trump does is going to reflect on us. We can no more allow unconstitutional activities under Trump than we could under Clinton. If you think the election has been chaotic and confusing so far, just wait until after it is over.
If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit our donations page here . We greatly appreciate your patronage. You can contact Brandon Smith at: Do you enjoy reading Patriot Rising? | 1real |
Pope Francis Warns Against Judging Trump Too Hastily | In an interview with Spain’s flagship leftist newspaper, Pope Francis warned against rash judgments of President Donald Trump, noting that he deserves to be given a chance to prove himself. [The interviewer from the Spanish daily El País told the Pope that “the whole world is tense” over the election of President Trump, calling him a xenophobe filled with “hatred for foreigners. ” The Pope said that the new President deserved to be judged by his actions, not by “prophecies” of what he may or may not do. “I think that we must wait and see,” Francis said. “I don’t like to get ahead of myself nor judge people prematurely. We will see how he acts, what he does, and then I will have an opinion. ” The Pope said it is “most unwise” to be afraid of something that might happen. “It would be like prophets predicting calamities or windfalls that don’t take place. We will see. We will see what he does and then evaluate,” he said. “I prefer to wait and see. ” The interviewer, Antonio Caño, pressed the Pope further, asking whether he wasn’t “worried about the things you have heard up until now. ” “I’m waiting. God waited a long time for me, with all my sins … ” Francis replied. The Pope’s words Friday echoed a recent interview with the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, who also advised against rushing to negative judgments of Trump, comparing him to Ronald Reagan, who turned out to be a great president. Asked for his impressions about the election of Donald Trump, Cardinal Schönborn noted that when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 “many shook their heads” and it turned out they were wrong. “Good God, an actor from California!” they said. “And Reagan was certainly one of the best presidents the U. S. ever had. So you should not be too quick to judge,” he advised. In Friday’s lengthy interview with El País, Pope Francis was also asked whether he was concerned about the spread of a populism throughout the world that capitalizes on “people’s fears,” preaching “a message of hate. ” Francis distinguished between a good, grassroots populism, where it is the people who are “the protagonists,” and a cult of personality where a charismatic figure like Hitler rises to power and is welcomed as a savior figure. The latter can be very dangerous, he said. The risk, Francis said, is that in times of crisis we lack judgment and people can begin to think, “Let’s look for a savior who gives us back our identity and let’s defend ourselves with walls, whatever, from other people that may rob us of our identity. ” “And that is a very serious thing,” he said. “That is why I always try to say: talk among yourselves, talk to one another. ” Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome | 0fake |
Republican Senate Hawks Praise Donald Trump for Bombing Syria | Republican Senator hawks quickly praised President Donald Trump for ordering a strike in Syria last night in retaliation for the chemical weapons attack ordered by dictator Bashar . [Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator John McCain, two of the biggest critics of President Barack Obama’s failure to act in Syria, issued a joint statement in favor of Trump’s decision. “Unlike the previous administration, President Trump confronted a pivotal moment in Syria and took action,” they said. “For that, he deserves the support of the American people. ” McCain and Graham urged Trump to consider further action, calling for a strategy to take out Assad’s Air Force, the establishment of safe zones, and supporting Syrian rebels. “Building on tonight’s credible first step, we must finally learn the lessons of history and ensure that tactical success leads to strategic progress,” he said. Senator Marco Rubio also supported the action. “By acting decisively against the very facility from which Assad launched his murderous chemical weapons attack, President Trump has made it clear to Assad and those who empower him that the days of committing war crimes with impunity are over,” he said in a statement. Rubio wrote on Twitter that Trump was “deeply moved” by the images of children suffering the effects of the chemical weapon attack. “Be sure of this: The wicked will not go unpunished,” he wrote, quoting Proverbs 11:21. Senator Tom Cotton issued a statement of support as well. “I commend President Trump for taking swift, decisive action against Bashar ’s outlaw regime,” he said. “Any country that violates agreements with the U. S. develops illicit or programs, or supports those countries that do ought to take note. ” | 0fake |
Defense Secretary Halts Forced Repayment of Enlistment Bonuses | Email
Responding to a chorus of protests and complaints, Defense Secretary Ash Carter has suspended collection of repayments of enlistment bonuses made to members of the California National Guard. Carter has also directed that a review be made of the process that led to members of the California Guard being given bonuses to reenlist, only to have the Department of Defense demand repayment of the bonuses.
Carter called the process “unfair to service members and to taxpayers,” and said he has ordered the Defense Finance and Accounting Service to “suspend all efforts to collect reimbursement from affected California National Guard members, effective as soon as is practical.”
“This suspension,” Carter added, “will continue until I am satisfied that our process is working effectively.”
“I’m glad the Pentagon came to its senses,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said, in response to Carter’s statement. “Congress will continue to work on any reforms necessary to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
Jeff Miller, a Florida Republican, and chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, was not as charitable as Ryan, however. He denounced Carter’s response as “weak and ham-handed,” pointing out that the moratorium will not cover potential problems outside California.
Miller added, “Carter seems to have no plan to make those who’ve already been forced to pay back their bonuses whole, and by focusing only on the California Guard, he is ignoring what media reports indicate could be a national problem. Once again, it seems Congress will be forced to fix a problem that the Obama administration created but refuses to fully address on its own.”
During the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the California National Guard offered soldiers thousands of dollars in bonuses to entice them to re-enlist. It was at a time when the military was having difficulty meeting its recruiting goals. It is estimated that the bonuses were given to almost 10,000 soldiers, in amounts of $15,000, or even more.
David Cloud of the Los Angeles Times explained the problem to National Public Radio (NPR). The bonuses were paid to encourage soldiers to sign up for another tour in the Army, generally for an additional six years. “They were being paid at a time when the California Guard desperately needed soldiers to fill the ranks of units going to Iraq. So they were more generous than usual.”
Unfortunately, many soldiers given bonuses did not qualify under the rules used at the time. Then, many years later, the Pentagon conducted audits and demanded the soldiers who received the payments pay them back — with interest.
“This story has made my blood boil,” said Bill Hahn, vice president for communications with The John Birch Society (parent organization of The New American magazine), making specific reference to a woman — a master sergeant — who went to Afghanistan after getting a $15,000 bonus. Susan Haley’s entire family served in the Army, and she had served 26 years in the military herself. After all of that, she received notice — while caring for her son, another soldier who had lost his leg in Afghanistan — that she owed thousands of dollars to the Pentagon.
“I feel totally betrayed,” said Sergeant Haley, a native of Los Angeles. Haley is presently sending the Pentagon $650 each month — a quarter of her family’s income. Haley is worried that she will have to sell their home to repay the bonuses. “They’ll get their money, but I want those years back,” Haley said, referring to the additional six years she spent in the military as a consequence of the bonus she is now forced to repay.
A former Army captain, Christopher Van Meter, expressed similar sentiments: “People like me just got screwed. These bonuses were used to keep people in.” Van Meter has been forced to refinance his home mortgage to pay the $25,000 in re-enlistment bonuses the Army insists he should not have received. During the extra time he spent in the service, he was thrown from an armored vehicle turret, after the vehicle detonated a buried roadside bomb. He received a Purple Heart for his injuries.
Robert Richmond, an Army sergeant, re-enlisted for $15,000 as a special forces soldier. In 2007, his company was deployed to Hillah, an Iraqi town 60 miles south of Baghdad. In this area — known as the “Triangle of Death” — a roadside bomb exploded, leaving him with permanent injuries to his back and his brain.
With the $15,000 unpaid “debt” on his credit report, he was turned down for a home loan in Texas.
The Army began to experience recruiting shortfalls during the second Bush administration and the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, forcing the Pentagon to resort to the most generous re-enlistment incentives in history. The recruiting and re-enlistment difficulties have continued into the Obama administration, causing some to address causes for the problem, and others to offer solutions.
National Guard units, such as those in California, have been activated more and more frequently in recent years, as the Pentagon has faced difficulty raising enough troops in the regular Army to handle the frequent overseas deployments in the administrations of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. This in turn has led to more difficulty in filling the ranks of the various state units of the National Guard across the country.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are obvious reasons for the reluctance of many to join the national armed forces or the National Guard units. But with the increasing political correctness of the armed forces (with training in such morale-damaging classes as “White Privilege,” the inclusion of women in combat roles and the lowering of physical standards to accommodate them, the push to allow for homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered soldiers, and the like) thousands more soldiers have opted for a different career.
With difficulties in raising enough soldiers through recruitment, some have advocated a return to the military draft. The draft ended in 1973, but at the urging of President Jimmy Carter, draft registration was reinstated in 1980. This became a minor issue in the presidential campaign of 1980, with Governor Ronald Reagan speaking out in opposition to draft registration. Since that time, there has been insufficient national support for reinstating the draft. But with the decline in recruitment, supporters of the draft have blamed the all-volunteer force.
If the country were to return to the draft, the question of whether women should be included in any conscription law would be raised. Recently, the U.S. Senate voted to include women in draft registration, but the Republican-led House of Representatives balked, narrowly defeating the effort by 217-203.
Presently, men must sign up for the draft within 30 days of turning 18. But with falling numbers of young men willing to join today’s military forces, for whatever reason, expect increasing pressure to add women to the draft registration rolls.
In 1940, on the eve of a presidential election, President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “I say to you again, and again, and again — your sons will never be sent to fight in a foreign war.” With the inclusion of young women in both the draft and combat, perhaps this should be updated to “Your sons and your daughters will never be sent to fight in a foreign war — but if they are, expect us to ask for their bonuses back.” | 1real |
Africa’s Tennis Talent, Though Obscure, Is Burgeoning - The New York Times | Fifteen years ago, I was a Peace Corps volunteer living in a village of mud huts on the dry Sahel landscape of northern Ivory Coast. The nearest market town, Ferkessédougou, was 20 miles away, and every Thursday morning I would mount my Trek 820 and pedal out past the last huts, announcing in limited my intention to ride to Ferké and return by sundown. In town, I would collect groundnut paste and cucumbers, down a cold Coke and buy a local newspaper. Once, below the fold, I saw a picture of a man playing tennis. The man was bending low for a backhand, and his form evoked something of yesteryear. attire, planted leg, clean stroke. The man was Ivorian, and Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s largest city, had just hosted some kind of national tennis tournament. At this information, I considered my days on the high school tennis team and my friends in Ferké and the village. I figured I might just be one of the best tennis players in the entire country. Today, I live across the African continent in Rwanda, and I thought of this photo recently when a United States Tennis Association newsletter dropped into my inbox acclaiming a charity project with the subject line “Maine Woman Brings Tennis to Africa. ” No, she did not. And I am nowhere near the best player in any African country. If my difficulty handling the groundstrokes of Ernest Habiyambere, Rwanda’s top player, is any indication, I should be ashamed I ever considered the possibility I was a national contender. Except for two South Africans, no players from Africa will play in this year’s United States Open, but the world’s poorest continent indeed plays tennis, and plays it well. I have spent some time exploring African tennis during my many years in Africa. I have watched Habiyambere clean up at local tournaments, sat courtside at International Tennis junior championships, and been stomped by Ghanaian teenagers. I suspect that — to inversely paraphrase the U. S. T. A. newsletter — an could bring Africa to tennis sooner than we think. Regional ascendancy tends to happen quickly in sports. In 1990, only six Eastern Europeans were among the top 50 players in women’s tennis. Today a legion occupies nearly half of those slots. The world’s man, Novak Djokovic, led a class of Serbian players who emerged in the . For its part, Africa has scaled to the heights of another sport over the same period: soccer. The youngsters who watched Cameroon’s pioneering run to the 1990 World Cup quarterfinals have filled roster spots on Europe’s greatest teams, including superstars like Samuel Eto’o, who scored more than 100 goals for Barcelona. Is African tennis the next African soccer? Where might the African counterpart to Djokovic, who struck tennis balls in an empty Belgrade swimming pool as a child, be found ripping forehand after forehand? To understand African tennis is to understand the fate of the game’s juniors, the children who learn the game as ball boys at private clubs, the teenagers who rally with local businessmen for cash to enter tournaments, and the talent tapped by the I. T. F. to compete worldwide. It is also to understand why, in any given week, rarely is more than a single black player from Africa ranked among tennis’s top 1, 000 players. Habiyambere likes this, an opportunity for an angle when a backhand lands near his service line and hangs waist level. At the sight of this sitter, he cocks low and then snaps his racket through the ball, drilling a forehand that smacks the clay and kicks off the deuce side beyond the flail of Olivier Havugimana, Rwanda’s No. 2 player. Habiyambere has early control of the Gasigwa Memorial Tournament final. It is March at Cercle Sportif de Kigali, Rwanda’s premier tennis club. Rwanda, an area smaller than Massachusetts, is known as the land of a thousand hills, and Cercle Sportif sits pinched between two of them. The leafy Kiyovu neighborhood rises above the club’s six clay tennis courts on one side on the other, a soccer field sunk at the valley bottom abuts the poorer Gikondo neighborhood. At Court 1, Rwanda’s tennis establishment has clustered on a wooden grandstand to watch Habiyambere and Havugimana: older weekend players in Adidas tracksuits, returned members of the diaspora in slacks and oxford shirts, and Maj. Gen. Jean Bosco Kazura, whose résumé includes the military campaign to end Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and a nice kick serve to the backhand. Shouts of “ !” and “oui!” punctuate clean baseline winners. The felt concussion of competitive tennis — of racket thud, air hiss and friction — is all over this match. The players are wearing white emblazoned with a blanched photo of Gasigwa, for whom the tournament is named. Last year, Gasigwa, 31, collapsed and died at Cercle Sportif while jogging around the soccer field. He was one of Rwanda’s most accomplished tennis players, having won the national tournaments of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Habiyambere learned the game from Gasigwa and is his heir apparent. In 2013, at 13, Habiyambere won the East African Junior Championships in Tanzania, dropping only two sets. Over the next months, he won matches at regional tournaments. Then he reached the semifinals of the African Junior Championships, narrowly losing to the eventual continental champion. His run caught the attention of the I. T. F. the organizer of the tournaments, the sport’s governing body and the institution most responsible for developing junior players in countries without serious tennis traditions or budgets. The I. T. F. awarded Habiyambere a scholarship to its training center in Morocco, and he was soon playing in junior tournaments across Europe, telling the Rwandan news media that a professional tennis career was his dream. “I want to be among the best tennis players this country will ever have,” he said. Tennis may be played worldwide, but excluding Antarctica, Africa is the only continent with a lone player among the top 50 men or women: Kevin Anderson, a white South African. Many of Anderson’s countrymen and women — all white — have excelled in elite tennis, including the former No. 3 Amanda Coetzer Wayne Ferreira Kevin Curren, Africa’s last Grand Slam singles finalist and Johan Kriek, who won Australian Open titles in the 1980s. North Africans have also starred. The Moroccans Younes and Hicham Arazi were players who made deep runs in Grand Slam tournaments in the early 2000s. Ons Jabeur of Tunisia won the girls’ title at the French Open in 2011, and No. 53 Malek Jaziri of Tunisia will play at the United States Open this week. Technically, a North African has won Wimbledon: Jaroslav Drobny of Egypt in 1954. Czechoslovakian by birth, Drobny defected in 1949 and settled on Egyptian citizenship before securing British papers. But aside from South Africans, Africa is deeply underrepresented in world tennis. Once ranked 74th, Yahiya Doumbia of Senegal won two ATP tournaments in France, in Lyon in 1988 and in Bordeaux in 1995. For most fans, Doumbia’s will be the only unrecognizable name on the list of those competitions’ champions, dropped in among John McEnroe, Pete Sampras, Ivan Lendl, Andy Roddick and Richard Gasquet. Nduka Odizor of Nigeria topped out at No. 52 in 1984, a year after he won his only ATP tournament. Odizor learned to play tennis in Lagos but was spotted there by a visiting University of Houston professor, who sponsored a move to Texas, where Odizor finished high school and became an for Houston. Emigration from Africa to lands of greater tennis opportunity remains viable. The black player from Africa today is Takanyi Garanganga of Zimbabwe, which has its own history of successful white players. Garanganga benefited from Zimbabwe’s relatively strong junior program, but the country’s economic woes and interest from a United Zimbabwean coach prompted his family to move to Atlanta when he was 13. Garanganga climbed the junior rankings, emerged as a top college prospect and declined scholarship offers to turn pro in 2009. Although once ranked as high as No. 288, Garanganga was 495th as of last week. The only other black African players in the men’s top 1, 000 are No. 930 Alexis Klegou of Benin, who grew up in France and attended Texas AM, and No. 988 Duncan Mugabe, a Ugandan who has played mostly in Africa. The black African women are No. 551 Valeria Bhunu of Zimbabwe and No. 892 Lesedi Jacobs of Namibia. At Cercle Sportif, Habiyambere has little trouble with Havugimana, one of the few players within Rwanda’s borders capable of giving him a match. Habiyambere wins, closing with a winner down the line to break and a service game held at love. Three days later, I take the court for my weekly session with Habiyambere. He charges expatriates like me $6 for an hour’s lesson. It is the only income his family earns. One hot January several years ago, when I lived in Accra, Ghana, I boarded a minibus headed west to Winneba, home of Ghana’s National Sports College and site of the I. T. F. ’s West and Central African Junior Championships. I was playing tennis regularly with one of Ghana’s juniors. As with Habiyambere, I paid him several dollars an hour to hit and, basically, to be badly beaten. In Winneba, a taxi dropped me at a semicircle campus of concrete basketball courts, concrete classroom buildings and concrete dormitories. Through these were the tennis courts, and while they were lined with concrete grandstands, the backstop fences were sturdy and the courts painted the fresh green and blue of professional tournaments. They were the first hardcourts without cracks that I had seen in Africa. I met Amine Ben Makhlouf, the director of the I. T. F. training center in Casablanca, Morocco. A Moroccan a few years past his playing prime, Ben Makhlouf was there to manage the tournament and scout promising players. I asked him if there was talent in Africa. “Our feeling,” Ben Makhlouf said, “is if Africa can make it in football, why not tennis?” The boys’ draw included a New named William Bushamuka. He would eventually rank among the world’s top 200 juniors, train at IMG Academy in Florida and compete for the University of Kentucky, where today he ranks among the top collegians. Bushamuka did not win the tournament. Seydou Diallo did. Diallo was from sparsely populated Mali, its team by a Peace Corps volunteer who estimated there were only 40 Malian children playing organized tennis. One of them — Diallo — beat Bushamuka twice, in the stage and in the semifinals. The lanky Diallo possessed height that suggested a power game, but he relied instead on looping groundstrokes to pin opponents behind the baseline and wear them down with consistency. In both victories over Bushamuka and in the final against Nigeria’s best player, he dropped the opening set before his unassailable defense frustrated his opponents into impatience, errors and lost sets. For Ben Makhlouf, such evidence of African tennis promise abounds. When I spoke with him again this year, he cited the presence of Africans on American college teams and the success players have had with I. T. F. traveling teams. “We have seen that some of them who were part of the training center made good results by beating some of the top European players,” he said. Ben Makhlouf’s colleague Thierry Ntwali, a Rwandan who runs the I. T. F. ’s East Africa training center, told me, “It’s possible to get our best players in the top 50, top 20, in I. T. F. juniors rankings. ” Ntwali’s best evidence is Sada Nahimana, a girl from Burundi. Nahimana has won continental championships three times, and excluding South Africans, she is the junior from Africa, at No. 176. “We feel that around the age of 17, she will be top 50,” Ntwali said. At Wimbledon this year, Serena Williams was asked if she was surprised that so few African women played on the world tour. “Yes,” she replied. Williams, who has conducted clinics on the continent, said she saw “so much talent. ” She added, “There has to be, one day, a player from Africa that can do really well. ” I sat with Habiyambere one morning at Cercle Sportif’s bar. He spoke imperfect English, a reflection of spotty schooling in Rwanda, which has spurned French. Although English became an official language after the 1994 genocide — exiles toppled the perpetrating government — it was not till 2009 that the country, a former Belgian colony, switched to English in schools. The result is a tennis club where only younger players and educated members possess any English, scores are called in French, and net chatter carries on in Kinyarwanda. Habiyambere was describing his rise from disciple of Gasigwa to I. T. F. prospect at the federation’s High Performance Center in Morocco. “I was thinking I would never go in Europe,” he said. “I went in Europe because of tennis. ” Habiyambere had proved too strong for the competition at the smaller East Africa I. T. F. center. The move to Morocco, where the Malian Diallo was also training, was intended to push Habiyambere up the federation’s Pyramid of Opportunity, the pinnacle of which is a junior ranking, an achievement thought to indicate that a boy can mature into a man. An important step is participation on travel teams because, Ben Makhlouf said, “the best way to improve is to play competitions. ” Habiyambere’s first European match, on his first trip out of Africa, was in France. “I was excited,” he said. “First match I was really scared. ” Habiyambere lost and listed the reasons: “changing weather,” “you’re thinking too much,” “my body was tight. ” But he settled down and won elsewhere in Europe. “The time you play more matches,” he said, “is the time you feel like you get match it’s normal. You feel like it’s practice. You feel like, I can do this I can do this. ” Still, Habiyambere did not win any tournaments on the tour. I asked if he thought the European players were simply better. “The difference was, they have more matches,” he said, adding, “For them, the tournaments and matches, they don’t get scared. ” One day last year at the Morocco center, Habiyambere collapsed during training. He recovered but fainted again days later. Habiyambere could not articulate a diagnosis, but I. T. F. coaches I spoke with suggested he was having seizures, an ailment the federation would not monitor. They sent Habiyambere home to Rwanda. Doctors in Rwanda found no medical problems. Habiyambere said he was assured that he could return to Morocco if he felt better. But since last August, he has played only at Cercle Sportif. Ntwali, of the I. T. F. told me that Habiyambere was welcome back but that the federation needed proof he was medically sound. Habiyambere’s coach at Cercle Sportif, Sylvain Rutikanga, insisted that Habiyambere was healthy and that returning to the I. T. F. was a matter of paying tuition or playing tournaments to revive his scholarship. Tuition was not something Ntwali had mentioned. Vagueness of diagnosis, conflicting stories, opacity of the way forward, authorities acting (or not) for the powerless — Habiyambere is in a limbo all too common for many young Africans. He is highly skilled in his discipline, but without the means to leverage it. Another thing makes it difficult for Habiyambere: His father died when he was very young, relatives were lost in the 1994 genocide, and his mother has back and leg problems so severe that Habiyambere says she cannot work. “I’m the one who tries to take care of her,” he said. For an East African tennis champion, for a ranked among the world’s top 750 juniors, fainting at tennis practice is not just a setback. It might mean a life derailed. “Ernest can be a bon joueur” — a good player — Rutikanga said. In Rutikanga’s French, the phrase translates better as “someone who can make it. ” “He has everything he has everything,” Rutikanga said. “He has la force he has la tête” — the strength and the head. “He is in bon condition. Now, he trains all alone. Now, it hurts me. ” Rutikanga is considered by many the best teaching coach in Rwanda. At 43 and with tournament experience, he can still play with Habiyambere or feed flawless balls to a diplomat. Rutikanga made clear something I have heard at clubs across the continent. In Africa, he said, “the players who play tennis, they are people who come from families who are not rich. ” Habiyambere is an example, but so is Rutikanga. He came from a poor family, but one that lived near Cercle Sportif. As a child, Rutikanga could not afford club membership — I pay $110 annually for unlimited court time — but he was captivated by the foreigners and wealthy Rwandans driving by his neighborhood to play tennis. There was a back door: play at the more welcoming Hotel Diplomat courts by day and work for tips as a Cercle Sportif ball boy by night. “All the players you see here,” Rutikanga said of Cercle Sportif, “first they worked as ball boys. ” When Rutikanga talks about “the players,” he is making a distinction between club members and the young men and women who can really hit. Those players almost exclusively emerge from the handful of ball boys who fetch netted serves and water the dusty clay, or from clinics that Cercle Sportif holds for neighborhood children. (The club, at the Rwanda Tennis Federation’s request, is more open to nonpaying children than in Rutikanga’s childhood days.) Thus, the tennis talent pool in Rwanda is tiny and impoverished. I brought this up with Ben Makhlouf, the I. T. F. center director. “How many players are getting the right training, are getting the right coaching, are getting the right competition?” he said. “Let’s be nice: We will find a hundred persons. But if you go, for example, to a city like Barcelona, and all the academies there, you will find 5, 000 — only in Barcelona. ” Further, Africa’s elite talent is so scattered it lacks competition for itself — hence the I. T. F. strategy of congregating top African players and exposing them to European competition. “We don’t have enough players playing competition at such level compared to Europe,” Ben Makhlouf said. In the case of Habiyambere, Ntwali, of the I. T. F. said bluntly, “Rwanda does not produce enough competition for him. ” No one is more aware of this than Habiyambere. “Our coaches, they are good,” he said proudly of Cercle Sportif and Rwanda. “They are not very good, but they are good. But the thing, you can’t coach someone who is not playing tournaments. ” The value of competition, Habiyambere said, is not just being pushed to another level but also facing different styles of play. “You have some people who hit hard, who hit flat,” he said. “There are some who like to push the ball inside the court. They make you like running. You find some players who have a lot of spin. ” He added, “You play matches you feel comfortable you feel the confidence. ” The U. S. T. A. newsletter that caught my eye recently, about “bringing tennis to Africa,” was highlighting an American volunteer’s clinic in Cameroon and donation of rackets. Used equipment and guest clinics might help address the quantity factor of African tennis, perhaps drawing a few more youngsters to the game. But when it comes to Africa’s dearth of players, the “lack of resources” lament boils down to access to competition. Habiyambere never asks me for a new racket he asks me for a bus ticket to Nairobi for the Kenya Open. Eric Hagenimana, a Rwandan coaching at a New Mexico tennis club, and Garanganga, today’s top black player from Africa, do not harp on poverty when describing Africa’s tennis plight. Hagenimana, 31, posted a youth record that still stands as the Rwandan benchmark. He reached No. 102 as a junior and defeated a Kevin Anderson. “I don’t think about resources to produce a good tennis player,” Hagenimana told me over a Skype call from Albuquerque. “Look at Serbia, Djokovic and other guys from there. It doesn’t matter where you start. ” But support — financial and otherwise — becomes critical when players are vying for ranking points and meager prize money on the professional circuits, Hagenimana conceded. Tennis careers come not to winners of junior tournaments but to players who show up week in and week out at disparate tournaments, cobble victories together to secure higher rankings, and maintain the rigor year after year. The costs of these logistics pose a serious challenge even for American and European players, who at least have several tournaments each month to choose from and often have backing from their families to keep the dream alive. Garanganga said those juniors also had the advantage of an accepted “blueprint for tournaments kids need to play by the time they are 16 if they decide to turn pro. ” But if you are from the steep dirt streets by Cercle Sportif, you may have had access only to the 23 boys’ I. T. F. tournaments and the 14 men’s Futures tournaments that were held across Africa in 2015. And a bus ticket to Nairobi amounts to months of wages for the average family airfare to North Africa, where tournaments are more frequent, can run $1, 000. Garanganga said African coaches, tennis federations and parents often had distorted perceptions of players’ options. “The reason why we have junior players with some skill they haven’t developed is because they don’t have the right guidance to transition into the professional career,” he said. A couple of months ago, Habiyambere showed me a spreadsheet prepared by a local coach. The cost of competing in two Futures tournaments in Egypt totaled $3, 000. What, Habiyambere asked, could I do? His question captured more than an unfathomable financial stratosphere. It captured the mechanics of a livelihood. Hagenimana and Garanganga are tennis pros, but so are Habiyambere and the players at Cercle Sportif. There, a member typically forms a relationship with a single and the association runs deeper than lessons and hourly rates. The relatively negligible fee I pay to hit with a national champion is supplemented by an unspoken expectation that I will pay for many sessions in advance that I will bring gifts of racket string when I return from an American vacation that I will have cash on hand should there be a problem at home that I will not abandon my coach for another that I will help sponsor him to compete in tournaments. All this I do. The fate of the best tennis players in Rwanda, then, is closely tied to the largess of those with whom they play. Life as an I. T. F. darling ends age, stagnated skill and hardship preclude money tournaments not everyone can move to the United States, as Hagenimana did. Perhaps Habiyambere will find a way back to an I. T. F. center. Perhaps a rich benefactor will sponsor him for a tennis academy abroad. Maybe Habiyambere is destined to remain at Cercle Sportif and become the next generation’s Sylvain Rutikanga. “My career is good,” Rutikanga told me. “I have a lot of clients. ” He is indeed always on the court when I am at Cercle Sportif. But there are not enough members and expats to sustain the dozen or so other players I know. What if Habiyambere never takes the next step? And what about all the other coaches? Rutikanga said each would give lessons “until he dies. ” Rutikanga added: “He will give lessons, play competitions. He will continue if he doesn’t have a problem — until he isn’t capable of playing. ” Across the continent, ever since I saw that newspaper photo of an Ivorian playing tennis during my Peace Corps days, I have asked African players and coaches whether a black player from Africa will reach the top 100 in the next 10 years. Rutikanga was skeptical, saying, “We don’t have the players. ” Garanganga said he thought “the level of top African juniors participating internationally has dropped. ” And Hagenimana strained to be positive. “Top 200, maybe it can happen,” he said. “Top 100? I can never say no. ” But Ben Makhlouf and Ntwali of the I. T. F. want to believe. Ntwali, who has seen Nahimana, the Burundian teenager, scale the junior rankings, was the most optimistic. “WTA: Yes, 100 percent,” Ntwali said. “We will see some black girls coming up. For men, within five years we can get someone close to 200. ” There are days I believe, too. Especially when Habiyambere passes me with brutally paced, angled and dipped shots. Or when Rutikanga demonstrates a slight open racket face for a soft volley, the kind of instruction I would pay $75 an hour for in the United States. Then there are the matches on the Cercle Sportif clay. I recall how Habiyambere won the Gasigwa Memorial Tournament. He torqued forehands with such force that the resulting yellow arc appeared harshly parabolic. He skipped confidently beneath overheads. When his opponent stretched as if to suggest a tight back was slowing him down, he gazed with patient silence and remained merciless. On changeovers he organized water bottles with a deliberation worthy of Rafael Nadal and sat with the posture and flat feet of Andy Murray. When he won, Habiyambere shook hands with his opponent and the umpire. Then he turned to the grandstand and softly clapped his hand against his racket like Roger Federer. | 0fake |
Dark Money: Ted Cruz Bought His Senate Seat With A Secret Loan From Goldman Sachs | Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz (R-TX) secretly obtained a loan from the big pockets of financial giant Goldman Sachs, which he used to provide a decisive financial edge to his U.S. Senate campaign in 2012.Cruz has previously accused Goldman of being the beneficiary of crony capitalism, and said they they seek out and get special favors from government. The loans obtained by Cruz were not disclosed on forms filed with the federal government.Neither loan appears in reports the Ted Cruz for Senate Committee filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which candidates are required to disclose the source of money they borrow to finance their campaigns. Other campaigns have been investigated and fined for failing to make such disclosures, which are intended to inform voters and prevent candidates from receiving special treatment from lenders. There is no evidence that the Cruzes got a break on their loans.A spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz s presidential campaign, Catherine Frazier, acknowledged that the loan from Goldman Sachs, drawn against the value of the Cruzes brokerage account, was a source of money for the Senate race. Ms. Frazier added that Mr. Cruz also sold stocks and liquidated savings, but she did not address whether the Citibank loan was used.Cruz is now characterizing the omission of this information as inadvertent and a technical matter. He went on to say The facts of the underlying matter have been disclosed for many, many years. He also told reporters, All of the information has been public and transparent for many years, and that s the end of that. But the election was over in the fall of 2010, and it is now 2016 a six year gap between when he spent the money and when he finally acknowledged where it came from and how it was used. Cruz failed to amend or update this information for a large sum of money. Considering the candidate s history of playing fast and loose with the truth, there is no independent verification of his claim that the filing was inadvertent. Cruz s wife Heidi is a managing director at Goldman Sachs in Houston, but is currently on a leave of absence from her job as her husband campaigns for president. When speaking about his wife s career, Cruz omitted the ten years of experience she had at the company.Featured image via Flickr | 1real |
Hermine Swirls Off East Coast, but Threat Eases - The New York Times | ATLANTA — The powerful cyclone Hermine lurked off the Eastern Seaboard on Sunday, and its evolving path made the storm more likely to be a bother than a threat. Yet even as the storm churned hundreds of miles from the shoreline and positioned itself farther east than anticipated, officials, fearful of floodwaters and skeptical of shifting forecasts, often kept beaches closed, roads shut down and Labor Day weekend concerts canceled. “It’s gone east, it could wobble back west or wobble further east,” said Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who on Saturday declared emergencies for three counties. “All those things will decide what impact it has, especially in our coastal areas. ” By Sunday evening, the National Hurricane Center said the storm, which made landfall on Friday in Florida as a Category 1 hurricane, was about 335 miles east of Ocean City, Md. A “slow motion” was predicted through Monday, and the hurricane center said Hermine’s center would “meander slowly offshore of the coast for the next couple of days. ” Tropical storm warnings were in effect between the Fenwick Island, Del. area and Cape Cod, Mass. and the hurricane center described a storm system with tropical winds — between 39 and 73 miles per hour — extending more than 200 miles from its center. Hermine had maximum sustained winds on Sunday of 70 m. p. h. and the hurricane center said the storm was “expected to be at or near hurricane strength” before beginning to weaken on Monday night. But to the federal and state authorities, wind speed was only part of the riddle of Hermine, which seemed ready a little over a week ago to disintegrate without becoming a named storm. Flooding always loomed as a threat, and some forecasters predicted events. On Sunday, after extensive preparations, those fears mostly eased with every passing hour. “This is certainly not Sandy, nowhere near that,” Mr. Christie said, referring to the catastrophic 2012 storm. “And it’s not even Jonas. ” On Long Beach Island, to the north of Atlantic City, Christian Gagliardi, who has a rental on the island, said he was not worried about the storm. “Even if it stalls at this point, unless you live on the ocean, it’s not going to be a problem,” Mr. Gagliardi, 43, said while standing on a dune that was built to protect the island after Sandy. Drivers approaching the island on Route 72 from the west were greeted with electronic signs warning “Severe Coastal Storm — Be Prepared,” and a convenience store near the causeway connecting the island to the mainland had placed a small pile of sandbags near its door. The governors of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia also declared emergencies for at least parts of their states, and in New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office said the National Guard was on alert. New York City banned swimming, bathing and surfing on its beaches through Labor Day, and the city said the restrictions could extend into Tuesday. The city also warned that it could limit access to bridges, and that Staten Island Ferry runs could be delayed or canceled. The storm’s shift to a slow churn off the coast followed its destructive and deadly march through Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. Although officials in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina reported mostly limited damage, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida said on Sunday that electrical service issues remained a problem in Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, the state capital. Mr. Scott’s office said more than 40, 000 customers were still without power there, and in a pointed statement on Sunday, Mr. Scott mentioned issues that he called “still unresolved by city and county government. ” “There are still too many people without power in the City of Tallahassee and Leon County and, as you would expect, I will not be satisfied until it is fully restored,” Mr. Scott said. Local officials have defended their response amid what Mayor Andrew Gillum of Tallahassee described over the weekend as an “unfortunate and irritating situation. ” “Our No. 1 priority is to get power back to our residents and businesses as quickly as possible,” he wrote in a lengthy post on Facebook. “Once we’ve successfully done that, we’ll worry about cleanup and getting Tallahassee back to the beautiful community that we have all grown to love. ” Also on Sunday, officials in Pasco County, north of Tampa, oversaw a blend of mandatory and voluntary evacuations in response to the rise of the Anclote River. Deputies helped people to evacuate, and prisoners were assigned to fill sandbags. Officials have attributed two deaths — one in Florida and another in North Carolina — to the storm. | 0fake |
Carson cancels campaign events after staff in fatal car accident | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson canceled public events on Tuesday after a van carrying three volunteers and a campaign staffer slid on ice in Iowa, flipped on its side and was hit by another vehicle, his campaign said. One of the volunteers, Braden Joplin, 25, died after being taken to a trauma center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, the hospital said in a statement released by the Carson campaign. The other three people were treated and released from a hospital in Atlantic, Iowa, the statement said. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, was traveling from South Carolina to Omaha where he planned to meet with Joplin’s family members and offer his condolences, the hospital statement said. Carson is among a dozen Republican presidential candidates crisscrossing Iowa before the state’s Feb. 1 caucuses, the nation’s first contest to determine the party’s nominee in November’s presidential election. (Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Eric Walsh; Editing by Alistair Bell and Peter Cooney) SAP is the sponsor of this coverage which is independently produced by the staff of Reuters News Agency. | 0fake |
U.S. to open new vetting agency for 'secret' security clearances | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government will open the doors next week to a new agency, with stronger data protections, meant to shorten by many weeks the time it takes to vet government workers seeking “secret” and “top secret” security clearances. The National Background Investigations Bureau will be headed by Charles Phalen, who has worked as a security executive at the CIA, the FBI and defense contractor Northrop Grumman, officials said on Thursday on a conference call with reporters. The bureau will replace an Office of Personnel Management (OPM) clearance system that was hit by hackers who stole potentially sensitive personal data on as many as 22 million people, including government employees and job applicants. Phalen and OPM Director Beth Cobert said a top priority for the bureau will be shortening delays in the clearance process, which can hold up the hiring of government employees for months. Cobert said that OPM figures show on average the time required to complete an investigation for a “secret” level security clearance is now 120 days; for a “top secret clearance, it is 170 days on average. “These timelines are well too long,” Phelan acknowledged. Cobert said the new agency’s goal would be to reduce the time for completing a “secret” clearance to 40 days and to cut the time for a “top secret” investigation to 80 days. Officials said that individual government agencies, rather than the new central investigations bureau, would be responsible for social media checks of security clearance applicants. Officials said that the new bureau would still depend on outside contractors, especially for hiring field investigators. The new agency will employ 2,500 government workers and 6,000 contract employees, officials said. | 0fake |
Clinton surrogate says ‘nothing new here’ three times in response to Clinton Foundation stories | Clinton surrogate says ‘nothing new here’ three times in response to Clinton Foundation stories | 1real |
Lifting weights could ward off dementia and make you smarter | Lifting weights could ward off dementia and make you smarter
by: Vicki Batts Tags: weight lifting , dementia , brain health (NaturalNews) There are many reasons to partake in strength training; weight-baring exercises are known for their health benefits. But, could lifting weights also boost your brain? Recent research indicates that may just be the case.To begin the study, researchers asked a group of people aged 55 to 86 to engage in a mix of weight lifting and brain training exercises. All of the people who partook in the study had been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, which is a precursor to Alzheimer's disease , and is an early sign of dementia.While this particular study did not examine whether the benefits of exercise could be extended to the general population, the results were quite impressive. Published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society , the study found that weight-baring exercises could indeed provide some brain benefits. The researchers found a casual relationship between an increase in muscle strength and an increase in brain function. On that basis, the team recommended that more people begin a strength training regime so that the world's aging population can hopefully be a little healthier. It is currently projected that about 135 million people will have dementia by the year 2050.The same team behind this most recent research also published a paper in 2014 that revealed that weight training provided cognitive benefits to just about every area of the brain – something cognitive training failed to do.While discussing their most recent data, one of the study's researchers, Dr. Yorgi Mavros of Sydney University, commented, "What we found in this follow-up study is that the improvement in cognition function was related to their muscle strength gains. The stronger people became, the greater the benefit for their brain."For the strength training, study participants were asked to lift weights that were equivalent to about 80 percent of their maximum capacity, twice a week for six months – similar to the way in which many athletes train. And, as the participants got stronger, the amount of weight they lifted went up as well, in order to maintain the desired 80 percent of their maximum effort.Brain scans revealed that certain regions of the brain actually increased in size for those who took part in the exercise regime. Dr. Mavros says that the benefits were profound enough to warrant recommending weight training for everyone."The more we can get people doing resistance training like weight lifting , the more likely we are to have a healthier ageing population," he told the Independent . Dr. Mavros also added that the best way to ensure that you get the most benefit from exercise is by maintaining a regular routine. Exercising frequently, and with some intensity, is key to getting the most out of what you're doing.This new research is not the first to suggest that exercise can provide benefits to brain health . The body of research linking physical exercise to better cognitive function has only continued to grow over the last several years. Science has indicated that in addition to better mental health, exercise can also promote both better memory and concentration.Dr. James Pickett, head of research at the Alzheimer's Society, also had a few things to say about this new study. He noted, "New research is beginning to unravel how physical exercise may have benefits for the brain as people get older. This study suggests that people with minor memory and thinking problems, known as mild cognitive impairment, may benefit from weight training to improve their brain health."Pickett also noted that while it is not yet clear if exercise can reverse dementia, they do know that it is one of the most important factors in its prevention. Along with being active, he says that not smoking and eating a healthy, balanced diet are all essential to reducing the risk. Sources: | 1real |
Kremlin: We see Trump's tweets as official statements | MOSCOW (Reuters) - Tweets by U.S. President Donald Trump are viewed in Moscow as his official position and read by his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin said on Tuesday. A prolific user of Twitter before he was elected late last year, Trump has continued to use the social media platform to voice his views on policy and world affairs since moving into the White House. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday it was not his place to comment on Trump s actions, but added: In any case, everything which is published from his authorised Twitter account is perceived by Moscow as his official statement. Naturally, it is reported to Putin along with other information about official statements by politicians, Peskov said, adding that Putin was not a Twitter user himself. Trump s activity on Twitter have previously cause controversy. His tweets sparked outrage in Britain last month and a sharp rebuke of Prime Minister Theresa May when he retweeted anti Islam videos from a British far-right group. | 0fake |
Unrepentant: Only Change Clinton Would Make to 2016 Run is ‘I’d Win’ - Breitbart | During a question and answer session at her alma mater, Hillary Clinton said the only thing she would change about her unsuccessful 2016 presidential run was that she would win. [In what was intended to be a private QA session at Wellesley College, Clinton was asked what aspect of her campaign she would do differently, to which she responded, “I’d win. ” Clinton’s campaign was marred by controversy after private emails released by Wikileaks revealed extensive collusion between her campaign and the media. The FBI also investigated her on charges of mishandling her private email server midway through the campaign. The former secretary of state also drew criticism for describing half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” as well as generally failing to provide a convincing message to the American people on issues such as the economy, national security, and immigration. Clinton also suggested that sexism damaged her chances of winning, arguing that as the first woman nominated for the presidency by a major political party, “you know you’re going to be subject to unfair and criticism. ” Amazing to see @HillaryClinton speak today @Wellesley ! What a great way to kick off #womenshistorymonth #wellesleycollege pic. twitter. — Abigail Harrison (@AstronautAbby) March 3, 2017, On the subject of passing legislation, Clinton took the opportunity to make a veiled dig at Trump, arguing that “compromise is not a dirty word in a democracy. ” To avoid her remarks leaking out to the press, Wellesley closed the event to the media and asked attendees to keep their cell phones off. However, parts of her address later emerged on Twitter. You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart. com | 0fake |
Geraldo Rips Yale Student ’Symbolic Hunger Strike’ - Everything Wrong With ’Millennial Activism,’ ’Activism Without Sacrifice’ - Breitbart | .@GeraldoRivera: The symbolic hunger strike at Yale is everything that’s wrong with millennial activism. It’s activism without sacrifice. pic. twitter. Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox Friends,” network contributor Geraldo Rivera criticized a “symbolic hunger strike” at Yale University. According to reports, the strike involves students eating when they are hungry. “Political correctness and the symbolic hunger strike — this particular example of this symbolic hunger strike is everything wrong with the millennial generation’s activism. It’s activism without any cost. It’s activism without any sacrifice. It’s activism without a price. ” Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 0fake |
TRUMP BREAKS TRADITION Started By Bill Clinton…Doesn’t Host White House Ramadan Dinner…Had Other Plans [VIDEO] | Never mind that the Trump s had a previous engagement it s just a great excuse for the left to justify their false claims that our President is an Islamaphobe President Trump broke with 20 years of White House tradition by opting not to host a dinner to mark the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting and reflection.Instead of a dinner commemorating the religious holiday Eid al-Fitr, the president and first lady Melania Trump released a statement on Saturday offering warm greetings. Muslims in the United States joined those around the world during the holy month of Ramadan to focus on acts of faith and charity, they said. Now, as they commemorate Eid with family and friends, they carry on the tradition of helping neighbors and breaking bread with people from all walks of life. The past three administrations Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have held traditional iftar dinners that often included members of Congress and prominent members of the Muslim community. NYPPresident Trump and First Lady Melania Trump instead attended Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin s third wedding to actress Louise Linton.First lady fashion: Melania Trump wears pink to Washington wedding https://t.co/mT7c0gZpeH pic.twitter.com/Y0IgJlQQRk Newsco Inc. (@newscoinc) June 25, 2017 | 1real |
Trump voices new doubts about Russian efforts to sway U.S. vote | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President-elect Donald Trump voiced new doubts on Wednesday that Russian hackers attempted to influence the U.S. election on his behalf, saying WikiLeaks had denied Moscow was behind documents it made public during the campaign. Trump, writing on Twitter, continued to raise questions about the findings by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia was behind a series of leaks that embarrassed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign before the Nov. 8 vote. The tweets prompted White House spokesman Josh Earnest to ask, “Who are you going to believe?” Documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager, were leaked to the media in advance of the election. One email showed the Clinton campaign received a question in advance of a town hall forum. Trump resumed sending notes on Twitter about the hacking issue on Wednesday, saying, “(WikiLeaks founder) Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta’ - why was DNC so careless? Also said the Russians did not give him the info!” Trump also quoted Assange as telling Fox News that U.S. media coverage of the matter was “very dishonest.” Asked about the tweets, Earnest said the president-elect’s public comments have pitted the Russians and Assange against 17 U.S. government intelligence agencies, outside cyber experts and lawmakers from both parties. “There’s a pretty stark line that’s been drawn, and the president-elect will have to determine who he’s going to believe,” he said at a daily news briefing. Vice President-elect Mike Pence defended Trump as simply voicing a “very sincere and healthy American skepticism about intelligence conclusions” he has been hearing. “Given some of the intelligence failures of recent years, the president-elect has made it clear to the American people that he’s skeptical about conclusions from the bureaucracy,” Pence told reporters at the U.S. Capitol. But the top ranking elected Republican, House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, had harsh words for Assange, whose group released the hacked emails. “I think the guy’s a sycophant for Russia, he leaks, he steals data and compromises national security,” Ryan told radio host Hugh Hewitt. President Barack Obama last month ordered an investigation into malicious cyber activity and foreign intervention in the 2016 presidential election before he leaves office on Jan. 20. Earnest said the intelligence community will meet the deadline with ample time to spare. Separately, five Democratic U.S. senators introduced legislation urging the creation of an independent, nonpartisan commission to investigate any Russian interference in the election. Several lawmakers, including a few of Trump’s fellow Republicans, have backed calls for an investigation. Trump and Pence were scheduled to receive a briefing from intelligence officials on the hacking issue on Friday. | 0fake |
Croatia opposition seeks government no-confidence vote on Agrokor handling | ZAGREB (Reuters) - Croatia s opposition parties on Thursday demanded a no-confidence vote in the government over its handling of a crisis at the country s largest company, Agrokor, but analysts said the ruling coalition would likely survive. The government intervened in April because Agrokor [AGROK.UL], the largest employer in the Balkans, faced a debt and liquidity crisis. Given its importance, the crisis could have destabilized the economy. The opposition led by Social Democrats says a liquidity loan agreed this summer with creditors including foreign investment funds to finance Agrokor s operations through a 15-month period of restructuring lacked transparency and favored some creditors. The SDP has a responsibility to expose corrupt activities, the SDP leader Davor Bernardic told reporters. The government and Agrokor s crisis manager Ante Ramljak rejected the opposition charge and said it achieved the best possible loan terms in the circumstances. A debate and vote must take place by early December and the conservative-led coalition has a small but firm parliamentary majority. I don t think this is a particularly wise move for the top opposition party (Social Democrats) as they are likely to achieve little. I see it rather as an effort to divert attention from political weaknesses within their own ranks, said political analyst Davor Gjenero. | 0fake |
Appeals court revives challenge to California county's gun law | LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Monday revived a lawsuit by prospective gun shop owners who were banned by Alameda County, California, from opening within 500 feet of a residential district, ruling that local officials had failed to justify their law in the face of a constitutional right to bear arms. A three-member panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not strike down the local ordinance, but voted 2-1 to overturn a federal judge who threw the gun store owners’ lawsuit out of court. Gun rights groups quickly hailed the decision as an important protection of the Second Amendment. “We’re very happy to see the Court take a very principled and reasoned approach to protecting the fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms,” Brandon Combs, executive director of the Calguns Foundation, said in a written statement. The Ninth Circuit panel ordered that judge to take up the case again and said that if Alameda County wanted to enforce the gun-control ordinance, officials there would have to prove that there was a basis for the restrictions. “Alameda County’s ordinance may very well be permissible. Thus far, however, the county has failed to justify the burden it has placed on the right of law-abiding citizens to purchase guns,” Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain wrote in a 34-page opinion for the majority. “The Second Amendment (of the U.S. Constitution) requires something more rigorous than the unsubstantiated assertions offered to the district court,” O’Scannlain wrote. Representatives for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors could not immediately be reached for comment. In tossing the lawsuit out of court, the lower-court judge found that Alameda County’s gun restrictions were permissible to achieve such “important governmental objectives” as protecting public safety, preserving the character of residential areas and guarding against “secondary effects” of gun stores. But the Ninth Circuit majority said that Alameda County had not provided any evidence that such objectives would be achieved. The plaintiffs also asserted that no parcels in Alameda County would fit within the regulations, which meant that gun sales were effectively banned there. In dissenting from the majority, Judge Barry Silverman said that the ordinance did not infringe upon anyone’s right to bear arms and that “what we’re dealing with here is a mundane zoning dispute dressed up as a Second Amendment challenge.” | 0fake |
Comrade Trump Pushes Conspiracy Theory From Russian Propaganda Site | The ties between Donald Trump s presidential campaign and the regime of Russian leader Vladimir Putin have been extensive and troubling as they ve been revealed over the course of the campaign. Trump has repeatedly praised Putin, despite his invasion of Ukraine and his belligerent attitude on the international stage, including his support of Syrian dictator Assad.In exchange, Putin has also had nice words for Trump, and it is believed that Russia is backing hackers who have attacked Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.Now Trump has escalated the back and forth by promoting a delusional conspiracy theory that began on Russian propaganda websites. From CNN:Trump didn t cite a source to back up his claim, but the most recent report alleging this came from Sputnik News, a Russian state-owned news agency. Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton, Trump said, apparently referring to Google searches during the first presidential debate on Monday night.Trump s remarks Wednesday night came two weeks after Sputnik News, a Russian government-controlled news agency, published a report claiming that Google search results are biased in Clinton s favor. Conservative news outlets, including Breitbart News, whose chairman became Trump s campaign CEO last month, linked to the report.Trump has surrounded his campaign with conspiracy theorists, including radio host Alex Jones, who is an ardent Trump supporter and who believes that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job executed by the U.S. government. Jones also believes that the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary were crisis actors. There is no truth to Trump s claim about Google, and it is very possible he got the information from Jones, who has alleged that he is in phone contact with Trump.Trump s supporters ate up the claim, as a majority of them visit and believe the same propaganda false stories as their leader does.Featured image via Wikimedia Commons | 1real |
Children, teenagers among wounded Rohingya in crammed Bangladesh hospital | CHITTAGONG, Bangladesh (Reuters) - Mohammed Idrees, a 10-year-old Rohingya boy, does not remember how he landed at the hospital in Bangladesh with a part of his right ear blown off. But he says he won t return to his home country, neighboring Myanmar, until there is peace. Idrees is one of around 60 badly injured Rohingya Muslims admitted to the hospital in Chittagong since violence flared in Rakhine state in the northwest of Myanmar in late August. Rohingya insurgents attacked several police posts and an army base on Aug 25, leading to a military crackdown that has resulted in the deaths of at least 400 people and sent 146,000 people fleeing to Bangladesh. Apart from creating a humanitarian crisis, the unrest has also brought waves of international criticism of Myanmar s leader, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, for not speaking out for a minority that has long complained of persecution. The Rohingya are denied citizenship in Myanmar, a mainly Buddhist country. Almost all the Rohingya being treated at the Chittagong Medical College Hospital, the largest in southeast Bangladesh, have been injured by gunshots or bomb blasts, according to a hospital document given to Reuters. Around a third of the total injured are teenagers or younger, including a six-year-old boy. The Myanmar military has repeatedly said that it has been targeting only insurgents in the crackdown. Ajoy Kumar Dey, who is in charge of the hospital, said he had not seen similar wounds during previous influxes of Rohingya from Myanmar. He said the large number of young men and children, like Idrees, underlined the gravity of the situation in Rakhine. I don t remember what happened to me, but I want to go see my mother, Idrees said, lying on his bed in a soiled white shirt and a checked longyi, a Myanmar-style sarong. His head was bandaged and he was clutching the hand of his father, sitting by his side. It hurts a lot. He cried as his father, Mohammed Rasheed, described how Myanmar security forces sprayed bullets into their village, Kyauk Chaung, on the morning of Aug. 25. One bullet took off a chunk of Idrees ear as his family crouched behind a canal near their house. Six fellow villagers from Kyauk Chaung died in the hour-long shooting, said Rasheed. A bleeding Idrees was carried on a bamboo stretcher over some hills near the border to reach Bangladesh the same night. His mother, three sisters and a brother arrived on Sunday. We are lucky all of us are alive, said Rasheed. Across the ward, a Rohingya man with bullet wounds in one shoulder, the back of a thigh and a shin, writhed in agony. A plastic nasal pipe was helping him breath. The government hospital in Chittagong is usually crowded at the best of times; now it is receiving twice as many people as it has beds - many of them Rohingya with shattered faces, shredded legs and damaged eyes who are fighting for their lives. Around two dozen young Rohingya men, some groaning in pain, were laying on blue hospital mattresses on the floor of a corridor on Wednesday, their legs or hands heavily plastered. Zaw Htay, Aung San Suu Kyi s spokesman, said Thursday that Myanmar was in discussions with Dhaka on what to do about what he said were terrorists in the hospital, a charge the Myanmar military made earlier in the week. The Bangladeshi foreign secretary, Shahidul Haque, denied being contacted by Myanmar about militants being treated at the hospital. However, he said that Bangladesh had previously handed over two terrorists after being given their names by Myanmar. He did not provide further details, but said Bangladesh would hand any terrorists to Myanmar if it provided more names and the individuals could be found. A United Nations source said that on Sept. 3 alone, 31 Rohingya with bullet injuries and six with burn injuries were admitted to the Chittagong hospital. There have been many people who have come with bullet wounds on the backs of their bodies, said H.T. Imam, a political adviser to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh. That is most reprehensible. This is a killing mission, plain and simple. Myanmar officials have said the country has the right to defend itself from attack, adding that security personnel were told to keep innocent civilians from harm. Rohingya who have fled to Bangladesh are in urgent need of medical and humanitarian assistance given the massive scale of the influx, Doctors Without Borders said Wednesday. Many of the arrivals have serious medical needs, such as violence-related injuries, severely infected wounds, and advanced obstetric complications, Pavlo Kolovos, the humanitarian group s head in Bangladesh, said in a statement. Without a scale-up of humanitarian support, the potential health risks are extremely concerning. One such person with severe injuries is Mohammed Jubair, 21, who, according to doctors treating him in the burns and plastic surgery department, is on his deathbed. The right side of Jubair s face has been smashed up completely; the left has severe burns, as does his lower body. He was fleeing his village in Rakhine with his five-year-old sister when Myanmar forces in a helicopter hurled a bomb at them on Aug. 26, killing the girl on the spot, according to his older brother, Nur Mohammed. Unlike me, my brother was carrying our young sister as we fled to the hills when the army came and started setting our houses on fire, he said. I could move ahead faster, now Allah save my brother. Like the attack on the village reported by Rasheed, it was not possible to independently verify Mohammed s account. | 0fake |
Trump administration may seek NAFTA currency provision - Mnuchin | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Thursday the Trump administration may seek a provision to deter currency manipulation in the North American Free Trade Agreement as part of its planning for future free trade deals. Mnuchin, testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, said that currency manipulation by U.S. trading partners needs to be met with an impact, “and not just talk.” He said that a proposal from the Peterson Institute for International Economics for the Treasury to engage in countervailing currency interventions — essentially buying the currency of a country that is deliberately trying to suppress it — could be one of many such possibilities. But Mnuchin added that the scale of such operations could be prohibitively large. | 0fake |
Republicans have finalized compromise U.S. tax bill -chief House tax writer | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The chief tax writer in the U.S. House of Representatives said on Friday that Republicans had finalized a tax bill they hope to vote on next week and that details would be released in a “few hours.” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady told reporters the text of the bill would be posted when the House comes into session at 5:30 p.m. (2230 GMT) on Friday. | 0fake |
Candace Cameron Bure Dishes on the Main Conservative Issue Driving Her to the Polls | Getty - Tibrina Hobson
Candace Cameron Bure has never been shy about voicing her opinions on social and political issues — a trait that has made her an exceptionally good fit at ABC's “The View,” as she stood out in contrast to the decidedly liberal viewpoints of many of her co-hosts.
But aside from praying (with Whoopi, no less) for the election cycle to be over soon: A video posted by Candace Cameron Bure (@candacecbure) on Oct 26, 2016 at 9:35am PDT
Bure has kept her 2016 voting plans under her hat, noting earlier this summer that although she wasn't exactly thrilled with the remaining choices, she absolutely planned to vote:
"I've talked about how conflicted I am. I'm not happy with the ultimate choices that we're left with, but I'm still going to go out there and vote because I do believe that it's my right. And I think there are other things we have to consider.
And then there's the congressional power. There's also the seats in Congress. And I think a lot of people who don't show up to vote for the president then forget that there's all these other people we get to vote into Congress. So you're giving up so much just because you don't like the candidate choices."
She did reveal the issue that has her most concerned this election cycle , however, in a recent podcast with “The Church Boys”:
"The biggest thing for me is the Supreme Court justices… because, no matter who wins this election, it’s four years, maybe eight, if they’re reelected, but that’s the maximum.
The Supreme Court justice seats will be until those people die — and that could be a very long time."
A number of Americans share Bure's concern, noting the age of several sitting justices.
According to ballotpedia , with the increasing likelihood that Justice Scalia's seat will remain empty into the next president's term, the next president could potentially appoint four justices:
“The average age at which a Supreme Court justice retires is 78.7 years old. Justice Kennedy will be 80 when the next president takes office, Justice Ginsburg will be 83, and Justice Breyer will be 78.”
Bure explained her concern by noting that she has spent time recently studying the “bigger picture” and the principles outlined by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution:
“If we get too far away from what our Founding Fathers wrote up for us in how this country will be different from all other ones, then we will lose it.”
But in order to hold on to what we have, Bure says that it's not about putting faith in Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton — or any candidate, for that matter.
Instead, she says her faith remains unshakable in Jesus Christ, and that she will pray for the wisdom of whomever wins the election. | 1real |
Top Democrats in Congress say won't meet with Trump as planned | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top two Democrats in the U.S. Congress said they would not meet with President Donald Trump on Tuesday as planned after he said he does not think he can reach a deal with them on legislation to fund the government. “Given that the president doesn’t see a deal between Democrats and the White House, we believe the best path forward is to continue negotiating with our Republican counterparts in Congress instead,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said in a joint statement. | 0fake |
Islamic State hostages, strongholds stand between U.S.-backed forces and Raqqa's capture | RAQQA, Syria (Reuters) - Raqqa s hospital, a big complex pocked with bullets holes, whose capture will signal the end of Islamic State s crumbling Syrian capital, lies just 200 yards from a front-line base of the Syrian Democratic Forces. Beyond it, a roundabout where the jihadists once displayed the heads of their enemies, crucified people and held military parades at the height of their expansion is another strategic prize sought by the U.S.-backed militia alliance. Commanders directing the battle on the ground say seizing these and a nearby stadium, Islamic State s last strongholds in the city, could take as little as a week once a final assault begins against just a few hundred remaining militants. But the ultra-hardline group is holding civilian hostages in the hospital and stadium and using sniper fire, booby traps and tunnels that emerge behind SDF lines to slow the battle. The SDF faces a tough final showdown with IS which commanders say will end at the hospital, now almost completely surrounded. There are many civilians being held. We can t use heavy weaponry or air strikes around the hospital or stadium, so we ll encircle them as we advance, commander Haval Gabar said at the front-line base, a home that SDF units captured last week. The hospital will be the last point (in Raqqa) to be freed, he said on Saturday, as bullets coming from the sprawling medical complex whizzed over the base. The SDF, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias dominated by the Kurdish YPG, has been fighting since June to drive Islamic State from Raqqa city, backed by air strikes and special forces from a U.S.-led coalition. The assault, which YPG officials initially predicted would take weeks, has dragged on as Islamic State bogs down forces with tactics used in other bastions such as Iraq s Mosul. Senior Kurdish commanders recently said Raqqa would fall by the end of October. Right now there s no advancing, Gabar, 25, said. There have been many attacks from behind us with militants launching surprise raids from a network of tunnels they dug after marauding through swathes of Syria and Iraq and capturing Raqqa in 2014, he said. When that happens we divert forces from front-line assaults to deal with the infiltration. But it doesn t take long, maybe half an hour to deal with each attack. The home the SDF was using as a base had an IS tunnel emerging into its living room - now blocked up with furniture. Commander Zilzal Tarhams said militants emerged from a second nearby tunnel two days before and fired a rocket into a house occupied by the SDF. If we find tunnels we usually cave them in with explosives. There are so many, he said. The commanders were confident of total victory soon, however, with Islamic State surrounded in a small portion of the city which houses the remaining strategic sites. Gabar, who directs fighting on the western front, said forces were waiting for the order for a final push, after which the roundabout, stadium and hospital would quickly fall. When we begin it will be quick, maybe 10 days or so, he said. Tarhams predicted a week. It s really because of the civilians presence that it s taking us some time, Gabar said. There were thousands of residents still trapped in the city, including an unknown number at the stadium and hospital, he said. Air strikes that have been used heavily in other parts of the city are not as frequent around the remaining sites, although missiles still slam into buildings in the city center. Gabar and Tarhams did not say how the SDF planned to capture the stadium and hospital, both of which provide high vantage points over the city center, while avoiding the deaths of residents held there. Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi commanded his militants not to negotiate or surrender in an audio message released recently. Raqqa s complete capture will end the group s sway in the city from where it plotted deadly attacks abroad, and projected its power in 2014 parading through streets flying black flags on military vehicles. The two SDF commanders estimated there were no more than 350 militants left in Raqqa and said these were not the elite of the group. Many leaders are believed to have fled to Deir al-Zor where the SDF and Syrian government forces are pressing competing offensives against IS. Other tactics the jihadists were using to slow SDF advances include laying booby traps, Tarhams said. They put mines under rugs in homes and use motion sensors to set off bombs. It s a huge obstacle. Battle weary, the commanders were keen to capture the last strategic sites as soon as possible. We want to finish before winter - bad weather makes it harder to advance, Gabar said. We ll need months to fully clear the explosives afterwards - that s going to be an even bigger job. | 0fake |
All Governments Lie, the Movie | All Governments Lie | 1real |
LOL! SOCIAL MEDIA Users Respond To Hillary’s Birthday Tweet To HERSELF…And They’re HILARIOUS! | Exactly one year ago today on arrogant Hillary Clinton s birthday, she was so sure she d win the presidency, that Hillary actually tweeted a birthday message calling herself the future president. LOL! What a difference one year makes. Not only is Hillary nowhere near the Oval Office, but she s traveling around the world, on an embarrassing blame everyone but me book tour . Ironically, the name of the book that Hillary s pushing is What Happened . Well, unfortunately for Hillary, when it comes to Russian collusion, the world is about to find out what happened and Hillary s gonna wish she still some friends in government who could protect her. Hopefully, this time next year, Hillary will be celebrating her birthday in a federal penitentiary, while wearing an orange jumpsuit.Twitter users destroyed the arrogant Hillary and her future president birthday message to herself. Here are some of the hilarious responses to her tweet from exactly one year ago:Here s a hilarious video featuring a surprise guest to help Hillary celebrate her birthday:One year anniversary of Hillary "Happy Birthday To This Future President" tweet; #HappyBirthdayToThisFutureInmate #ThursdayThoughts pic.twitter.com/Rrk0BCWYCK Cris (@ThePatriot143) October 26, 2017Donald Trump Jr. (whose tweets are usually hilarious) had this to say about Hillary s birthday message: A year later the arrogance and entitlement in this tweet is exactly why it was never going to happen. #maga A year later the arrogance and entitlement in this tweet is exactly why it was never going to happen. #maga pic.twitter.com/zQ68AQpPE0 Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 26, 2017Former presidential deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka nailed it with this uranium cake birthday message to Hillary. LOL!It's Hillary's Birthday. Here's a cake. #ClintonUraniumGate pic.twitter.com/vk1jBJ1Vsl Sebastian Gorka DrG (@SebGorka) October 26, 2017Since she was old enough to dream of the day she d hold the ultimate office of President of the United States, Hillary s been involved in some sort of shady dealing or criminal activity. That s what makes this tweet so hilarious. If there s a crime that s been committed in Washington DC, Hillary s fingerprints are probably on it somewhere.Today is the release of the #JFKFiles. Coincidentally, it s also crooked Hillary s birthday. pic.twitter.com/VyjFbxdQiO GRANT J. KIDNEY (@GrantJKidney) October 26, 2017Stacey Stiles, like most of America, is just waiting patiently for the day when Hillary is permanently behind iron bars:Happy Birthday, Hillary. May your next be celebrated behind bars. #UraniumOne #RussiaDossier #ClintonFoundation pic.twitter.com/Bis5tgOOPV StacyLStiles (@StacyLStiles) October 26, 2017 | 1real |
WATCH: Only 6 People Show Up To See Hillary At TX Airport…And She IGNORED All 6 Of Them | Heavy security, but a small crowd for Hillary. She didn t say hello or visit with anyone while at the airport. https://youtu.be/eNj2ScPW-egYou know what they say about Karma | 1real |
TRUMP WINS IMPORTANT CATEGORY OF VOTERS Over HILLARY And BOTH Previous GOP Candidates | Could it be Hillary s scre-e-e-eching that turns them off?Donald Trump shattered the GOP primary record this year by 1.4 million votes.And he won more youth voters than John McCain or Mitt Romney. Trump also received a larger percentage of the youth vote than the previous two Republican candidates. GPDonald Trump has so far won more support from younger voters than the last two GOP presidential candidates and Hillary Rodham Clinton.A new analysis of the primary youth vote from Tufts University s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life shows that in 21 primaries, Trump received 828,675 votes from those up to age 29, and Clinton 766,425. Sanders owned the category, receiving 2,052,081 votes.And, said the report, During the primary season, Donald Trump received a slightly larger proportion of youth votes than the two previous Republican nominees, Senator John McCain (2008) and Governor Mitt Romney (2012). Before all other candidates suspended their campaigns, Trump was receiving an average of 33 percent of youth votes per state, compared to McCain s average of 29 percent and Romney s 28 percent in their competitive primaries. And Trump received more of the youth vote than Hillary Clinton in the primaries this year. Washington ExaminerRepublican presidential candidate Donald Trump has some youthful fans. Students for Trump, an online movement to promote the business mogul s campaign, is powered by high school and college students across the U.S.The grassroots organization was started in September 2015 by North Carolina college student Ryan Fournier of Campbell University, the Houston Chronicle reports.You can follow them on Twitter at @TrumpStudentsAs of March 2016, Students for Trump has 40 state directors, 225 chapters and 5,178 registered members. It is among 340 other social media groups advocating for Trump s presidential bid.18-year-old Josh Gremillion, a Texas high school student, said that the online group awakened his political activism. I ve always been a conservative but never paid much attention to it, said Gremillion. But this is our future. Members of Students for Trump refer to themselves as an underrepresented minority among American students. American News | 1real |
U.S. election agency breached by hackers after November vote | (Reuters) - The U.S. agency charged with ensuring that voting machines meet security standards was itself penetrated by a hacker after the November elections, according to a security firm working with law enforcement on the matter. The security firm, Recorded Future, was monitoring underground electronic markets where hackers buy and sell wares and discovered someone offering log-on credentials for access to computers at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, company executives said. Posing as a potential buyer, the researchers engaged in a conversation with the hacker, said Levi Gundert, vice president of intelligence at the company, and Andrei Barysevich, director of advanced collection. Eventually they discovered that the Russian-speaking hacker had obtained the credentials of more than 100 people at the election commission after exploiting a common database vulnerability, the researchers said. The hacker was trying to sell information about the vulnerability to a Middle Eastern government for several thousand dollars, but the researchers alerted law enforcement and said Thursday that the hole had been patched. The Election Assistance Commission said in a statement late Thursday that it had become aware of a “potential intrusion” and was “working with federal law enforcement agencies to investigate the potential breach and its effects.” “The FBI is currently conducting an ongoing criminal investigation,” the statement added. The election commission certifies voting systems and develops standards for technical guidelines and best practices for election officials across the country. The researchers said the hacker had an unusual business model, scanning for ways to break into all manner of businesses and other entities and then moving rapidly to sell that access, rather than stealing the data himself. “We don’t think he actually works for any government or is super sophisticated,” Barysevich said. In the case of the election commission, the hacker used methods including an SQL injection, a well known and preventable flaw, obtaining a list of user names and obfuscated passwords, which he was then able to crack. Though much of the commission’s work is public, the hacker gained access to non-public reports on flaws in voting machines. In theory, someone could have used knowledge of such flaws to attack specific machines, said Matt Blaze, an electronic voting expert and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The researchers were confident that the hacker moved to sell his access soon after getting it, meaning that he was not inside the system before election day. The U.S. voting process is decentralized and there were no reports of widespread fraud in November. The Election Assistance Commission was created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and is led by presidential appointees. | 0fake |
Turkey detains 136 for suspected ties to coup plotters: agency | ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey detained 136 people, including former police, teachers and soldiers, in four separate operations on Thursday over suspected links to last year s attempted military coup, the state-run Anadolu news agency said. Authorities detained 60 former security officials in the operation centered in the capital Ankara and spread over 30 provinces, Anadolu said. In a separate operation that began on Wednesday and centered on Diyarbakir and spread over 26 other provinces, 55 soldiers were detained, Anadolu said. Officials were still searching for one more suspect. Six others were detained in the northern provinces of Samsun and Karabuk, as well as 15 teachers in Ankara, Anadolu said. The suspects were alleged to be using the encrypted messaging app, ByLock, which the government says was used by the network of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen. Ankara blames Gulen, for orchestrating the failed coup in July 2016. Gulen has denied involvement and denounced the putsch. More than 50,000 people, including police, military personnel and civil servants, have been jailed pending trial in the aftermath of the July 2016 coup. Some 150,000 people were sacked or suspended. The crackdown has alarmed Turkey s Western allies and rights groups, who say President Tayyip Erdogan is using the coup as a pretext to muzzle dissent. The government says the measures, taken under emergency rule that was imposed after the coup, are necessary due to the security threats Turkey faces. | 0fake |
Australia Is Not as Down Under as Everyone Thinks It Is - The New York Times | SYDNEY, Australia — That map of Australia you have? It’s wrong. And the whole country is going to officially relocate to correct the error. The trouble is caused by plate tectonics, the shifting of big chunks of the earth’s surface. Australia happens to be on one of the pieces of all, and by geological standards it’s practically flying: about 2. 7 inches northward a year, with a slight clockwise rotation as well. People on the ground may not notice, but the Global Positioning System does. So Australia needs to adjust its longitudes and latitudes so they line up with GPS coordinates. Four times in the last 50 years, Australia has reset the official coordinates of everything in the country to make them more accurate, correcting for other sources of error as well as continental drift. The last adjustment, in 1994, was a doozy: about 656 feet, enough to give the delivery driver an alibi for ringing your neighbor’s doorbell instead of yours. “You might think, ‘Where’s my pizza? ’” said Dan Jaksa of Geoscience Australia, the government agency that worries about the coordinates. But something bigger is at stake, he said: intelligent transportation systems that rely on the finer accuracy that will come with the next generation of GPS technology. The next adjustment, due at the end of the year, will be about 1. 5 meters (4. 9 feet) — not really enough of a discrepancy to throw off satellite navigation systems, which are generally accurate only to within 15 to 30 feet. But the next generation of GPS devices, using both satellites and ground stations, will be accurate to within an inch or less, and new technologies that depend on precise location will be important to Australia’s future. The mining company Rio Tinto already has 71 immense ore trucks rumbling around iron mines in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia that are guided remotely from an office in Perth, 930 miles away. Pilots who patrol the Anna Creek cattle ranch in South Australia must pick out small water bores in the ranch’s 8, 880 square miles of dry pasture, an area larger than Israel, where small errors can equate to big misses. “If we get a new pilot, he’s relying on GPS until he finds his way around landmarks,” said the ranch manager, Norm Sims. Not to mention driverless cars. “If you’re 1. 5 meters out,” Mr. Jaksa said, “you’re potentially on the wrong side of the road. ” | 0fake |
MN Taxpayers To Pay Rent For African Refugees While Visiting Homeland…Freeing Them From Financial Burden | We re just wondering if the state of MN has ever considered giving US veterans the same consideration? Or is this an exclusive offer given to African refugees because they contribute so much to our economy or wait do they? In the USA, 91.4% of Muslim refugees are on food stamps and 68.3% are taking Cash Welfare. Here s a chart to show how much refugees are contributing to the overall economy. Via: Senator Jeff SessionsThe Minneapolis Housing Authority passed legislation this week that will allow migrants to skip their monthly rent in Minnesota when they travel back home to East Africa.The move was sought by local East African immigrants. Immigrants traveling for 30 to 90 days could apply for a hardship which will reduce their rent to $75 a month while they are gone. The Star Tribune reported:Public housing residents in Minneapolis will no longer need to pay their normal monthly rent when travel abroad erases their income, a change particularly sought by East African immigrants.The board of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority approved this week reverting to its previous policy of collecting only minimal rent during extended absences. The change takes effect once approved by federal housing officials, which is expected by year s end.Abdi Warsame, a City Council member, told the board that the policy in place for the past five years works a particular hardship on elderly East Africans who must save for long periods if they want to visit their homelands. He said that many receive federal Supplemental Security Income, which is halted when the recipient is outside the United States.Yet the policy required people to keep paying rent, which is income-based. Travelers gone for 30 to 90 days could apply for a hardship, which meant that they paid the minimum $75 monthly rent during their absence, but were required to make up the difference between that and their normal rent over the next year or two. GP | 1real |
Pro-trade Republicans get nervous that NAFTA talks could fail | MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Pro-trade Republicans in the U.S. Congress are growing worried that U.S. President Donald Trump may try to quit the NAFTA free trade deal entirely rather than negotiate a compromise that preserves its core benefits. As a fifth round of talks to modernize the North American Free Trade Agreement kicked off in Mexico on Friday, several Republicans interviewed by Reuters expressed concerns that tough U.S. demands, including a five-year sunset clause and a U.S.-specific content rule, will sink the talks and lead to the deal’s collapse. Business groups have warned of dire economic consequences, including millions of jobs lost as Mexican and Canadian tariffs snap back to their early 1990s levels. “I think the administration is playing a pretty dangerous game with this sunset provision,” said Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from eastern Pennsylvania. He said putting NAFTA under threat of extinction every five years would make it difficult for companies in his district, ranging from chocolate giant Hershey Co to small family owned manufacturing firms, to invest in supply chains and manage global operations. Hershey operates candy plants in Monterrey and Guadalajara, Mexico. Some 74 House of Representatives members signed a letter this week opposing U.S. proposals on automotive rules of origin, which would require 50 percent U.S. content in NAFTA-built vehicles and 85 percent regional content. They warned that this would “eliminate the competitive advantages” that NAFTA brings to U.S. automakers or lead to a collapse of the trade pact. Representative Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican who has long been a supporter of free trade deals, said he disagreed with the Trump approach of “trying to beat someone” in the NAFTA talks. Texas is the largest U.S. exporting state with nearly half of its $231 billion in exports last year headed to Mexico and Canada, according to Commerce Department data. “We need to offer Mexico a fair deal. If we want them to take our cattle, we need to take their avocados,” Sessions said. Still, congressional apprehension about Trump’s stance is far from unanimous. The signers were largely Republicans, with no Democrats from auto-intensive states such as Michigan and Ohio signing. Some pro-labor Democrats have actually expressed support for U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s tough approach. “Some of those demands are in tune,” said Representative Bill Pascrell of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means trade subcommittee. “We don’t want to blow it up, Republicans don’t want to blow it up. But we want substantial changes in the labor, the environmental, the currency, on how you come to an agreement when there’s a dispute, and on problems of origin.” Farm state Republicans are especially concerned that a collapse of NAFTA would lead to the loss of crucial export markets in Mexico and Canada for corn, beef and other products. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa said Lighthizer in a recent meeting agreed that a withdrawal from NAFTA would be hard on U.S. agriculture, which has largely benefited from the trade pact. U.S. agricultural exports to Canada and Mexico quintupled to about $41 billion in 2016 from about $9 billion in 1993, the year before NAFTA went into effect, according to U.S. Commerce Department data. Grassley said, however, that Lighthizer’s approach was “taking everybody to the brink on these talks.” Other Republicans are taking a wait and see approach to the talks. Representative Frank Lucas of Oklahoma said he was willing to give Trump “the benefit of the doubt” on NAFTA talks, adding that farmers and ranchers in his rural district were strong Trump supporters in the 2016 election. “The president’s a practical fellow. When push comes to shove, he understands the base,” Lucas said. | 0fake |
#CHARLOTTESVILLE While Media and Politicians Stir the Pot…Are We Missing the Elephant in the Room? | A tweet caught my eye after exploring all of the hate and violence posted from Charlottesville. Did you dig deeper and do you know: Who Paid For Helmets, Bus Rentals, Body Armor on both sides in Charlottesville? Are we missing the elephant in the room? Is this event being used for political purposes (see VA Gov. McAuliffe video below) to shut down free speech and to denounce President Trump who has NO CONNECTION to any of these radical groups? George Soros must be so proud right now What s missing in all of the news reports is that the group that got permission to rally (we don t agree with them but they got permission to rally) was infiltrated by bussed in Black Lives Matter and Antifa thugs who are very violent. Remember Berkeley? The rally then became a violent mob Was this the plan by the left when they bussed in hundreds in opposition? A perfect scenario for the left Something isn t right here George Soros of MoveOn.org was advertising for protesters too:Antifa is paid by DNC funder George Soros but not one Democrat is being asked to condemn them for Charlottesville Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) August 12, 2017The Truth is that Trump supporters and most Americans on both sides reject this violence! It s being used as a tool to destroy the Trump supporters and Trump!Doesn t matter what evil it is. Remember the media rule. Every story must be twisted around so that Donald Trump is the villain. MARK SIMONE (@MarkSimoneNY) August 12, 2017My feelings were confirmed when Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe waisted no time in denouncing white nationalists but this sounds more like a political stump speech than anything else. Notice how he didn t denounce BLM or Antifa:I just asked @GovernorVA if he wanted to condemn antifa as well as neo Nazi groups. He heard. Refused to answer. pic.twitter.com/W7vcH4fSI0 Raheem (@RaheemKassam) August 12, 2017MCAULIFFE IS IN FULL POLITICIAN MODE HERE: It s sickening! I told President Trump that there has got to be a movement in this country to bring people together. .@GovernorVA on #Charlottesville protests: I told @POTUS that there has got to be a movement in this country to bring people together. pic.twitter.com/HUNCmubv4q Fox News (@FoxNews) August 12, 2017 | 1real |
WHY FINAL “Sunday Night Football” Game Was Canceled… Is Low Attendance The Reason? | The NFL announced Tuesday that the final Sunday Night Football game of the season has been canceled Was it due to low attendance in previous weeks? Well, it s part of the reason. Low attendance has been plaguing the league since the kneeling controversy took hold.Recently, a liberal news source tried to downplay the boycott from NFL fans by citing injuries from key star athletes in the NFL as the reason for low interest in games. We think the kneeling controversy has more to do with the lack of interest in games. It s being reported that the attendance is down 9% from last year:We ve seen stadiums with hundreds of empty seats along with low viewership.There are a few other reasons why the game was canceled but low attendance was certainly part of it:Daily Caller reports:The league had yet to announce who would play during the primetime game next Sunday, but with the chance that none of the matchups would have playoff implications for one or both of the teams, they opted not to schedule the game.NEW YEAR S EVE:The other problem the league faced was broadcasting a game on New Year s Eve, which would invite lower number of viewers traditionally on that night. We felt that both from a competitive standpoint and from a fan perspective, the most fair thing to do is to schedule all Week 17 games in either the 1 p.m. or 4:25 p.m. windows, NFL broadcast chief Howard Katz said in a statement.The last time a Sunday Night Football game took place on the final night of the year was in 2006 when the Chicago Bears hosted the Green Bay Packers. That game was Hall of Fame member Brett Favre s final game with the Packers. Despite that fact, the game only drew 13.4 million viewers, which for that season was a quarter of the typical audience for SNF. In a season plagued with lower ratings due to the national anthem protests, the league s decision was not surprising. | 1real |
Catalan police say Sagrada Familia bomb scare was false alarm | MADRID (Reuters) - Catalan police declared a false alarm on Tuesday following a bomb scare that had led agents to cordon off Barcelona s Sagrada Familia church and send in a bomb squad to check a parked van. Police said on Twitter that there had been no arrests as a result of the incident and that the area had returned to normal. | 0fake |
WATCH KELLYANNE CONWAY vs Total Jerk Chris Cuomo On Fake Russian Hacking [Video] | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VN1maBEKIk | 1real |
Britain summons North Korean ambassador over missile test | LONDON (Reuters) - The British Foreign Office said it had summoned the North Korean ambassador to condemn Wednesday s ballistic missile test. North Korea said it had successfully tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile in a breakthrough that put the U.S. mainland within range of its nuclear weapons. I summoned the North Korean Ambassador to the Foreign Office to make clear to him our condemnation of this latest ballistic missile test, Minister for Asia and Pacific Mark Field said in a statement. North Korea claims it wants to bring security and prosperity to its people. But its actions are creating only insecurity and deepening its isolation, said Field. Britain is a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. The latest test was the highest and longest any North Korean missile had flown, and it landed in the sea near Japan. | 0fake |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.