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Swedish Minister: Country Needs To Integrate Returning Islamic State Fighters | Swedish Minister for Culture and Democracy Alice Bah Kuhnke has suggested that Swedes who left to fight for radical Islamist groups in the Middle East should be welcomed back and helped to integrate into society. [Ms. Kuhnke made the comments Sunday evening on the television programme Agenda which is transmitted by the Swedish state broadcaster SVT. The programme focused on the fact that some 300 Islamic radicals from Sweden had gone to the Middle East to fight for groups like Islamic State and around half of them had returned to Sweden. “They need to be channelled back into our democratic society,” Kuhnke said. The minister added she and the government had no idea how many of the returnees were still radicalised versus how many left because they had become disillusioned with Islamist beliefs. When asked how many radical Muslims were involved in deradicalisation programmes, she estimated between 10 to 30 people based on information given to her by various municipalities. “There are far too few. We have to work together much better,” she noted. Kuhnke also could not confirm that those who had been through the programmes had been successfully deradicalised, saying the process could take a decade or more. “We can not say that we have succeeded because it’s been such a short time. It is only in years we can say that they actually managed to leave these environments,” she said. Many on social media criticised the minister’s comments including terrorism expert Magnus Ranstorp who took to Twitter to note that at least two returning Swedish jihadists were involved with the terrorist attacks that occurred in Paris in late 2015 and in Brussels in 2016. Dessutom har TVÅ av våra Osama Krayem Mohammed Belkaid varit delaktiga i terrorattackerna i Paris Bryssel. #agenda, — Magnus Ranstorp (@MagnusRanstorp) March 12, 2017, “The interview speaks for itself. This is how we are to deal with returnees,” Ranstrop noted. The Swedish attitude toward returning jihadists is seen as strange by many, as several municipalities have gone above and beyond to cater for returning fighters. In the medieval city of Lund, the government is considering a range of measures including debt forgiveness, driving lessons, and free housing in the name of integrating returning extremists. Last week, another damning report showed the Swedish government had still been paying many Islamists through the generous Swedish welfare system whilst they were fighting in Iraq and Syria. Ranstorp, who was one of the authors of the report, said the main problem was the Swedish government refusing to follow up on welfare claimants to check whether they were in the country or ensuring that someone else wasn’t collecting benefits on their behalf. Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson@breitbart. com | 0fake |
Tics and tricks: Here's what Trump and Clinton's body language reveals | When speaking, he sometimes holds his elbows into his body as if protecting something. He repeatedly gestures with an “A-OK’’-type sign, and waves his open palms back and forth, like he’s playing an accordion. He forces a smile — mouth corners up! — looks self-satisfied and insincere at the same time.
When speaking, she emphasizes a point by shaking a right fist with her thumb out on top — a gesture that wouldn’t be so distracting if it weren’t so reminiscent of the one from whom she apparently picked it up, her husband, the former president, at his most didactic.
When Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton debate Monday night, they’ll express themselves physically as well as verbally. Their body language — movements, posture, facial expressions — may inadvertently reveal as much about them as their words. Consultants call it “leakage.’’
It’s one thing to repeat talking points; it’s another to control the message you convey with your body. And it’s one thing to be coached on such nuances, as both candidates have been; it’s another to remember it with 100 million people watching.
Ruth Sherman, a prominent communications consultant and speaking coach, analyzed the candidates’ body language for the USA TODAY NETWORK.
Although Sherman admires Trump’s communications skills, some of his ticks and tendencies drive her crazy, because they distract an audience from his message (“It’s called ‘noise.’ You just get sick of it.’’) or contradict it.
• The self-hug. Trump gestures with his arms stuck out and elbows held unnaturally close to his sides. “It looks like he’s protecting something,’’ Sherman says — undesirable in one who claims to be a strong leader. (See 0:07-0:10)
• The A-OK. To the point of distraction, Trump forms his thumb and forefinger into the A-OK sign, except that the extra three fingers are curled instead of sticking out straight. (See 0:12-0:15)
• The chop. It’s what it sounds like, an annoying hand reflex that’s drummed out of every novice scholastic debater. (Starting at 0:12-0:15)
• The accordion. With his palms open toward each other, he moves his arms back and forth for emphasis, evoking those mechanical monkeys crashing the symbols.
• The grimace. With seemingly Herculean effort, Trump turns up the corners of his mouth. But the rest of his facial muscles are not cooperating — check the eyes. It undercuts credibility and looks incredibly uncomfortable.
Sherman says Clinton is well dressed and well groomed, uses her hands effectively and moves well. She particularly liked the way Clinton took the stage for her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, moving from right to left and basking in applause from around the hall.
• The thumb-over. When most people make a fist, they tuck their thumb across their knuckles. But Clinton rests her thumb on top of her forefinger, which is fine — she doesn’t look like she’s going to slug anybody — but reminds us that the gesture was popularized by the 42nd president. (See 0:25-0:27)
• The shrug. Clinton sometimes gives a little shrug while she’s making a point, which suggests subconscious uncertainty about what she’s saying.
Sherman has more technical complaints about Trump’s body language, but feels he’s a much better performer and communicator than Clinton — partly because he practiced before a national reality TV show audience for 14 years and partly because he’s a natural.
However grating his Queens accent or distracting his idiosyncratic gestures, Trump has trained his audience to accept him as he is — “that’s Donald.’’
Since in a televised debate performance tops content, Sherman says, “it’s his to lose. Content is not enough. Words are not enough.’’
But didn’t words sink President Gerald Ford in 1976, when he said in a debate with Jimmy Carter that the Soviets didn’t dominate Eastern Europe? She chuckles. “Gerald Ford was no Donald Trump.’’
• QUIZ: Test your memory of general election debates
• INTERACTIVE: Decide the next president's path to the White House | 0fake |
U.S., Nordic nations call on Russia's military to comply with obligations | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Five Nordic countries and the United States on Friday called on Russia to ensure its military maneuvers are in compliance with international obligations, in a joint statement during a summit at the White House. The leaders of Denmark and Norway also said in the statement they are prepared to join the United States in contributing to an “enhanced allied forward presence” with NATO ahead of the organization’s summit this summer in Warsaw. | 0fake |
OBAMA RACES TO SET GITMO TERRORISTS FREE…Leaves Servicemen Punished For Making “Heat-of-the-battle decisions that saved lives” In Fort Leavenworth | It s hard to imagine a President who could be more anti-American and more pro-terror than Barack Hussein Obama. And then my mind drifts to Hillary and Benghazi The Obama administration is emptying the military s Guantanamo Bay detention facility of avowed terrorists captured fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, but several American service members languish in another military prison for actions on those same battlefields that their supporters say merit clemency, if not gratitude.Among the prison population at Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas, are remaining members of the so-called Leavenworth 10, convicted service members doing terms ranging from 10 to 40 years for heat-of-the-battle decisions their supporters say saved American lives.[quote_box_center] The very people who protect our freedoms and liberties are having their own freedoms and liberties taken away, said retired U.S. Army Col. Allen West, a former congressman and political commentator. I think it s appalling and no one is talking about this issue. [/quote_box_center]The Leavenworth 10 is the name given to a fluctuating number of men housed at Leavenworth for actions in Iraq and Afghanistan that their supporters say were justified. Over the years, a handful have been paroled, and more have been incarcerated.Among the more well-known cases is that of Army First Lt. Clint Lorance, who is serving a 20-year sentence for ordering his men to shoot two suspected Taliban scouts in July 2012 in the Kandahar Province of Afghanistan. Lorance had just taken command of the platoon after the prior leader and several others were killed days before. The Taliban suspects were on motorcycles and matched descriptions given by a pilot who flew over the area earlier and spotted them as scouts.A Facebook page devoted to Lorance s case has drawn more than 12,000 likes, and supporters have launched a website, FreeClintLorance.com, dedicated to winning his release. A WhiteHouse.gov petition calling for Lorance to be pardoned garnered nearly 125,000 signatures, but the White House has not taken action.Critics say Lorance was given a military trial, and his conviction was based in large part on the testimony of men serving under him.It was September of 2010 when Sgt. Derrick Miller of Maryland, on a combat mission in a Taliban-held area of Afghanistan, was warned the unit s base had been penetrated. An Afghan suspected of being an enemy combatant was brought to Miller for interrogation and wound up dead. Miller claimed the suspect tried to grab his gun and that he shot him in self-defense. But he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.U.S. Army Master Sgt. John Hatley a highly decorated, 20-year vet who served in Operation Desert Storm and did another three tours during the Iraq War also is serving a life sentence at Leavenworth. His conviction stems from an April, 2007, incident in Iraq in which he and his unit captured enemies following a firefight. He radioed a U.S. detention facility to notify officials he was bringing in four prisoners, but was ordered to let them go, according to his legal team.Two years later, a sergeant who had served with Hatley, Jesse Cunningham, was facing charges for assaulting another officer and falling asleep at his post. As leverage for a plea deal, he told investigators that Hatley and two other officers had taken the insurgents to a remote location, blindfolded them and shot each in the back of the head. He claimed their bodies were dumped in a canal, though none was ever found.Hatley, now 47, insists he and his men let the insurgents go, but believes he was punished in the interest of the government s relations with Baghdad. When concerns over appeasing a foreign country are allowed to interfere with justice for the purpose of the U.S. government or the military demonstrating that we, the military or the U.S. government will hold our soldiers accountable using a fatally flawed military judicial system, it doesn t matter what the truth is; it matters only that there is only the appearance of the truth, he wrote in a message to supporters posted on freeJohnHatley.com.Law experts say military service members face a daunting task once accused of committing crimes in the heat of war. Killing on the battlefield is not the same as [a police officer] killing someone on the streets, Dan Conway, an attorney who specializes in military law, told FoxNews.com. When a cop uses force, there s a line of duty investigation. When a soldier uses force, it is investigated as criminal, and non-infantry investigators handle the case, many who have no combat experience. If you had experts handling the investigation, you d have much more balance, he added.While the military rightly holds its soldiers to a high standard of justice, detainees housed at Guantanamo Bay have been freed even with no mitigating circumstances or reasonable belief of rehabilitation. The release of Gitmo detainees began during the presidency of George W. Bush in 2005 when nearly 200 detainees were released before any tribunals were held.According to a March 2015 memo released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, of the 647 detainees transferred or released, 17.9 percent were confirmed of re-engaging in extremist activity with another 10.7 percent suspected of doing the same. Via: FOX News | 1real |
ISIS fails to produce any gains in east Homs after Russian chopper crash - Russia News Now | This post was originally published on this site
almasdarnews.com
DAMASCUS, SYRIA (2:05 P.M.) – The Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) launched a large-scale offensive in the eastern countryside of the Homs Governorate on Thursday, targeting the Al-Mahr Gas Fields and key town of Jubb Al-Jarrah.
Initially, the offensive got off to a good start for the terrorist forces, as they managed to shoot down a Russian attack chopper near the Al-Sha’er Mountains.
Not long after shooting down the attack chopper, ISIS stormed both Jubb Al-Jarrah and the Al-Mahr Gas Fields, resulting in a heated battle with the Syrian Armed Forces that lasted for several hours on Thursday.
The Syrian Army’s stiff defenses proved impregnable on Thursday after the Islamic State suffered heavy losses to both military personnel and equipment in eastern Homs.
According to an Al-Masdar field correspondent in Damascus, the Syrian Armed Forces killed a total of 28 Islamic State terrorists at Al-Mahr and Jubb Al-Jarrah, forcing the aforementioned terrorist group to withdraw their assault before sundown on Thursday.
ALSO READ Turkish-backed rebels recapture key town in northern Aleppo Related | 1real |
Acclaimed Documentarian BLASTS Christians For Supporting Trump: He Lusts After His Own Daughter | Anyone following this election can easily see that Donald Trump is no angel. From his bigotry, racism and misogynistic behavior and comments, it s hard to make the case that Trump is a man of virtue and worthy of running a country. Acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns was quick to point this out in a recent interview with the Daily Beast, where he spoke at length about how awful of a human being Trump is.Although Burns was promoting his films, the filmmaker couldn t help but get carried away when the conversation turned to race relations in the United States, and the topic of Trump came up. Burns had been talking about his film The Central Park Five, which is about five African-American teens that were wrongly convicted in the assault of a white woman in Central Park when he reminded everyone how Trump reacted to that case. He said: He shamefully took out a full-page ad in all of the New York dailies asking for a restoration of the death penalty for two 14-year-old, two 15-year-old, and one 16-year-old innocent children. While New York State laws would not have permitted their execution, just the fact that there was a rush to judgment ought to be complete evidence of how temperamentally unsuited he is for the office he now seeks. After his slam of Trump s racism, Burns went off on another anti-Trump rant, labeling Trump as a super-predator and going after the business mogul for being a bigot that has benefitted from the speed of social media and an amoral internet. Burns said: I find Donald Trump more of a super-predator. This idea that he can attack and attack and attack whole groups of people, and that we live in a media culture where that s permitted to be tolerated it s the spectacle and not the truth of it. An amoral internet permits a lie to travel around the world three times before the truth can get started, and we live in a place where lying is OK where a lassitude develops where it doesn t matter what the truth is and that s how it s possible for someone like him to be advanced who is so clearly temperamentally unsuited and has no idea about governing. Then, Burns turned to the GOP and the Religious Right. Bringing up Trump s long history of sexism, misogyny and his utterly creepy obsession with his daughter Ivanka, Burns criticized Evangelicals that are somehow able to justify voting for Trump. The Republican Party has been extraordinarily successful at getting many groups of people to vote against their self-interest. Evangelicals are voting for Donald Trump. What part of Donald Trump reminds you of Jesus Christ? Trump lusts after his own daughter on national radio, talks about women s bodies and breasts in such a disparaging way, and mocks them. How is this in any way Christian? When you make the other the enemy, how is that Christian? There has been incident after incident, past and present, of Trump saying things about his daughter Ivanka that no father should ever say. Most notable is what Trump said in a 2006 interview where he said, I don t think Ivanka would do that [pose for nude photographs] inside the magazine [Playboy]. Although she does have a very nice figure. I ve said that if Ivanka weren t my daughter, perhaps, I would be dating her. There have been several other instances, and it s amazing that Burns pointed this out. If racism and bigotry weren t enough to convince America s more religious voters that Trump doesn t live the values of Christianity, his obvious sexual attraction to his own daughter should certainly raise some red flags.Featured image is a screenshot | 1real |
U.S. has credibility with both Israel, Palestinians: Haley | UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States still has credibility as a mediator with both Israel and the Palestinians, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said on Friday after President Donald Trump s decision earlier this week to recognize Jerusalem as Israel s capital. She said the United Nations has damaged rather than advanced the prospects for Middle East peace. The United States has credibility with both sides. Israel will never be, and should never be, bullied into an agreement by the United Nations, or by any collection of countries that have proven their disregard for Israel s security, Haley told the U.N. Security Council. | 0fake |
True Believer? Why Donald Trump Is The Choice Of The Religious Right | True Believer? Why Donald Trump Is The Choice Of The Religious Right
When Donald Trump stepped to the podium in a football stadium in Mobile, Alabama, filled with 30,000 people there to hear him spread the gospel of Trump, he was overcome.
"Now I know how the great Billy Graham felt," Trump said last month.
Trump and Graham, the famed Baptist revival preacher and counselor to presidents, are not exactly cut from the same cloth. And yet, Trump is winning over Christian conservatives in the current Republican presidential primary.
That's right — the candidate currently leading among the most faith-filled voters is a twice-divorced casino mogul, who isn't an active member of any church, once supported abortion rights, has a history of crass language — and who says he's never asked God's forgiveness for any of it.
If that sounds like an Onion story, it's not. His blunt talk against a broken political system in a country rank-and-file evangelicals believe is veering away from its traditional cultural roots is connecting. He pledges to "Make America Great Again," a positive spin on the similar Tea Party refrain of "Take Our Country Back."
That redeeming message — and his tough talk on immigration, foreign policy and the Republican establishment — is quite literally trumping traditional evangelical concerns about a candidate's morality or religious beliefs.
"I've come to see somebody that's not scared to say what he thinks, and he thinks like I think," gushed Joe Smart, a security guard who was at a Trump event in Greenville, S.C., last month. "He's religious, and from what I hear, he's going to change the White House back to Christianity. I pray every night that our nation will come back to God."
It's all left prominent evangelical leaders in disbelief.
"Trump has made his living as a casino mogul in an industry that preys on the poor and incentivizes immoral and often criminal behavior," said Dr. Russell Moore, head of the influential Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
Moore offered a searingly blunt assessment of the current GOP front-runner in an interview with NPR. "He's someone who is an unrepentant serial adulterer who has abandoned two wives for other women," he added. "He's someone who has spoken in vulgar and harsh terms about women, as well as in ugly and hateful ways about immigrants and other minorities. I don't think this is someone who represents the values that evangelicals in this country aspire to."
Whether evangelical voters — who have been so key to national Republican presidential success — will heed that message or stick with a candidate who seems so anathema to many of their core beliefs will be tested as the campaign wears on.
Finding Trump Appeal In The Buckle Of The Bible Belt
In the heart of the Bible Belt at a Greenville, S.C., convention center last month — just down the road from the iconic evangelical school Bob Jones University — the line was long to get in to hear Trump's latest sermon against political demons.
When pressed, many in the crowd in the key early primary state said they didn't know about some of Trump's more controversial statements regarding his faith.
On whether he'd ever asked for forgiveness from God for his sins, he told pollster Frank Luntz this in Iowa in July:
He went on to describe the sacrament of communion this way:
Audrey Lindsey of Spartanburg, S.C., said she hadn't heard those comments, but believed his later exhortations of his faith. "He says his favorite book is the Bible," Lindsey said, "and I believe that's what it's going to take — good, honest Christian people praying for this country."
But Trump, who says he ranks the Bible just ahead of his own Art of the Deal, has been unable in this campaign to name his favorite Bible verse or even testament.
"Well, I wouldn't want to get into it, because to me, that's very personal," Trump told Bloomberg. When pressed, he demurred, saying, "I don't want to get into specifics."
He said the Old and New Testaments were "probably equal."
So, is Trump one of those "good, honest Christian people"?
"That's a question mark," Lindsey said. "That's between him and God. I know people make mistakes, and you can change your life. I'm hoping through this situation that if he's not a Christian, he'll come to know Christ."
Larry Linsin of Seneca, S.C., is also willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
"People do change, if it's an honest, legitimate turnaround," said Linsin, who is also considering voting for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, someone with long evangelical credentials. "None of us has a perfect past."
'I Love Them. They Love Me.'
Like with most things, Trump is confident about his appeal to evangelical voters.
"I love them. They love me," he said in a press conference following his Greenville speech. "I am protestant — I am Presbyterian. I love the evangelicals. Why do they love me? You'll have to ask them — but they do."
The polls so far bear that out. A national CNN poll out last week showed Trump (32 percent) and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson (28 percent) as the top choices among self-identified evangelicals.
In South Carolina, a state where nearly two-thirds of the GOP electorate identifies as evangelical or born-again Christians, Trump led Carson 33 to 13 percent, according to an August Monmouth University poll. In Iowa, Monmouth had Trump narrowly behind Carson with religious voters.
It's an astonishing development, particularly considering the rest of the Republican presidential field. He leads a Southern Baptist minister in former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, two sons of preachers in Cruz and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, plus former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who won over Iowa evangelicals four years ago to take the first presidential nominating contest.
Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical leader in Iowa and president of The Family Leader, said many religious voters see a kinship with Trump in his targets.
"It's not surprising is that the enemy of our enemy is our friend," Vander Plaats said. "That's the art of political warfare. He's calling out the establishment, the 'media elite,' and he's calling out a lot of people."
James Guth, a professor of political science at Furman University in Greenville who studies the intersection of religion and politics, said he, like many, have been "baffled" by the rise of Trump. But he echoed Vander Plaats in noting that evangelicals like that he's attacking a common enemy — the GOP establishment.
"He's quite clearly putting it to the Republican Party," Guth said, "and a lot of evangelical Christians feel like they've been neglected by the Republican Party."
The Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody explained it this way in July:
Robert Jeffress, pastor of the megachurch First Baptist Dallas, wrote that evangelical voters aren't under any delusion that Trump believes the same as them. Instead, they're just glad he's closer to their beliefs than President Obama:
When the Christian World Magazine surveyed 94 top evangelical leaders in July about who they support for 2016, Trump was near the bottom of the pack. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was their choice.
Moore contends that polls showing Trump ahead may be inaccurately identifying evangelicals and not differentiating among people who are committed, regular churchgoers.
"There ought to be a criterion of character for candidates for public office," Moore said. "Someone who has a life and a tenor of life that is so obviously at odds with what evangelicals claim to be their values, ought to cause some alarm."
Trump's lack of support among leaders may be because they are skeptical that he's a true believer. In addition to his past support for abortion rights, his divorces and inability to identify Bible verses, questions remain about his moral conviction on abortion and same-sex marriage. And there are holes in his story about something as basic as where he goes to church.
Trump recently agreed with an interviewer's suggestion that a good Supreme Court nominee would be his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. But she supports abortion rights. Many of Trump's rivals and conservative groups, like Concerned Women for America, pounced.
Trump talks fondly of growing up going to Sunday School at First Presbyterian Church in the Jamaica section of Queens, N.Y. When asked by NPR where he currently attends, he said he goes to Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan.
Yet the church says he's not an active member.
What's more, Marble Collegiate is part of the Reformed Church in America — typically considered more of a mainline rather than evangelical denomination. The church is supportive of gay rights, according to its website.
Vander Plaats — who backed the Iowa winners in both 2008 (Huckabee) and 2012 (Santorum) and will reveal his pick for president around Thanksgiving this year — said he thinks Trump is "very genuine." He trusts that his conversion on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage is real.
But Vander Plaats noted that Trump's lack of support for Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who was jailed for not issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, could be a problem for him. Huckabee and Cruz, on the other hand, rallied to her side and stood with her as she was released from jail Tuesday.
"[Voters] will hold his feet to the fire on a very real issue," Vander Plaats said, "and that's a danger issue for him."
Trump will hold a gathering of evangelical leaders at the end of the month. But it's led by Paula White, a Florida televangelist who preaches the "prosperity gospel" — a belief that it's God's will to financially bless devout Christians, something controversial in many evangelical circles.
Can The Support Of The Rank-And-File Last?
Throughout the summer, Trump defied political gravity. After each gaffe that would have been fatal for a conventional candidate, Trump has instead only soared.
The large field of candidates is helping Trump with evangelicals. There isn't one candidate the religious right has rallied around, so their support is split.
Guth, for one, is skeptical Trump's appeal can last. "I think as time goes on, many people in the evangelical community will begin to have reservations," he predicted. "Some of that fascination with Trump will eventually wear off once they become more aware of his downside."
It very well could be that as religious conservatives learn more about Trump's positions or another candidate connects as the primaries get closer, their support fades. But Moore conceded that evangelicals have not always supported the candidate who lines up exactly with what they believe. But even of those candidates, they were always men who espoused a legitimate moral turnaround.
Religious conservatives are credited with fueling George W. Bush's 2000 election and 2004 re-election despite his past with drugs and alcohol. And one of their heroes is Ronald Reagan, who himself was divorced.
Bush, of course, is the quintessential redemption story. While he never expressed publicly that he was "born again," he did point to a 1985 conversation with the aforementioned Billy Graham. Bush wrote in his 1999 autobiography, A Charge to Keep, that Graham "planted a mustard seed in my soul, a seed that grew over the next year."
Trump has pointed to no such conversion.
"As of right now, Donald Trump is the incarnation of a bumper sticker," Moore said. "The support for Donald Trump is a way of sending message of anger with the status quo, and there are many people angered with the status quo. But I don't think that that necessarily translates into people wanting to hand the nuclear codes to that living bumper sticker." | 0fake |
Stunning New Poll Reveals Global Opinion Of Donald Trump, This Is Unprecedented (IMAGES) | Donald Trump is doing a horrendous job of raising his historically low approval rating in America, and it looks like he s not doing any better in trying to gain the approval and trust of the rest of the world.Thanks to a new survey by the Pew Research Center, we can now rest assured that the entire world hates Trump just as much as most Americans do. The Pew Research Center surveyed 37 countries, discovering that 74% of respondents stated that when it comes to international affairs, they have ZERO confidence that Trump will respond appropriately or do the right thing.This will be damaging enough to Trump s ego, but it gets even worse for him! Pew Research Center also reported that a similar survey was conducted on former President Barack Obama when he was POTUS, and it produced some VERY different results. That survey revealed that 64% of respondents had complete faith in Obama on international affairs.While the fact that most of the world hates Trump is kind of hysterical, what it has done to America s reputation is quite depressing. The study revealed that America s reputation has declined dramatically since the days of Obama. When respondents were asked how they felt about the U.S., only 49% were favorable since Trump got into the White House, which was a 15% decline from Obama s time and it s only been a few months. The authors of the survey said: In the eyes of most people surveyed around the world, the White House s new occupant is arrogant, intolerant and even dangerous. Among the positive characteristics tested, his highest rating is for being a strong leader. Fewer believe he is charismatic, well-qualified or cares about ordinary people. Ironically, the only two countries who reported to have more confidence in Trump than Obama were Israel and, you guessed it Russia. In fact, Russia increased 42% thanks to Trump s presidency, which should certainly raise some suspicion.You can check out the findings below:Featured image via Pool / Getty Images | 1real |
RETIRED COP PENS Gut-Wrenching VIRAL Letter To 49er’s QB Colin Kaepernick…THIS IS A MUST READ! | It s easy to see why this letter went viral. Bravo Officer Chris Amos bravo!An Open Letter to Colin Kaepernick,Dear Colin guess you have been pretty busy these last few days. For the record I don t think any more or less of you for not standing for the National Anthem. Honestly, I never thought that much about you, or any professional athlete for that matter, to begin with. I ve read your statement a few times and want you to know I am one of the reasons you are protesting. You see I am a retired police officer that had the misfortune of having to shoot and kill a 19-year-old African American male. And just like you said, I was the recipient of about $3,000 a month while on leave which was a good thing because I had to support a wife and three children under 7-years-old for about 2 months with that money. Things were pretty tight because I couldn t work part time. Every police officer I ve ever known has worked part-time to help make ends meet.You know Colin the more I think about it the more we seem to have in common. I really pushed myself in rehab to get back on the street, kind of like you do to get back on the field. You probably have had a broken bone or two and some muscle strains and deep bruising that needed a lot of work. I just had to bounce back from a gunshot wound to the chest and thigh. Good thing we both get paid when we are too banged up to play , huh? We both also know what it s like to get blindsided. You by a 280- pound defensive end, ouch! Me, by a couple of rounds fired from a gun about 2 feet away, into my chest and thigh. We also both make our living wearing uniforms, right? You have probably ruined a jersey or two on the field of play. I still have my blood stained shirt that my partner and paramedics literally ripped off my back that cold night in January. Fortunately, like you I was given a new one. Speaking of paramedics aren t you glad the second we get hurt trainers and doctors are standing by waiting to rush onto the field to scoop us up. I m thankful they get to you in seconds. It only took them about 10 minutes to get to me. By the grace of God, the artery in my thigh didn t rupture or else 10 minutes would have been about 9 minutes too late. We also have both experienced the hate and disgust others have just because of those uniforms we wear. I sure am glad for your sake that the folks who wear my uniform are on hand to escort you and those folks that wear your uniform into stadiums in places like Seattle!I guess that s where the similarities end Colin. You entertain for a living, I and almost 800,000 others across this country serve and protect. Are there some bad apples within my profession? Absolutely and they need to be identified and fired or arrested! But you know what, the vast majority do the right thing, the right way, for the right reason. Did I mention that seconds before I was shot, an elderly African American gentleman walking down the sidewalk, turned to my partner and I as we rode past and said, Get them. Get who you ask? The thugs terrorizing an otherwise good and decent neighborhood, home to dozens of good, decent African American families trying to raise those families in communities not protected by gates and security guards. No these folks and families depend on America s Law Enforcement Officers.Colin I have buried 7 friends, killed in the line of duty and three others who have committed suicide. I have attended more funerals than I care to remember of neighboring departments who have lost officers in the line of duty, during my career. Law Enforcement Officers with different backgrounds, upbringings, and experiences united by their willingness to answer the call to protect and serve their fellow citizens.Colin I am sorry for the endorsement deals you may lose and the dip in jersey sales, but please know you will NEVER lose what these men and women and their families have lost. And so whether you stand or sit during the National Anthem means very little to me. As for me and the men and women on whose team I was privileged to serve, we will put on our ballistic vests, badge, and gun, kiss our loved one s goodbye, for some tragically for the last time, and out into a shift of uncertainty we will go. We will continue to protect and continue to serve and we will be standing at attention Colin, not just for the playing of our National Anthem, but far more importantly for the playing of Taps. V/R Chris Amos | 1real |
Trump eyes top policy aide for communications director role: official | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House may appoint a senior policy adviser with hardline views on immigration, who recently sparred with reporters in a televised briefing, as its new communications director, a senior administration official said on Saturday. Stephen Miller, a top aide and speechwriter for President Donald Trump, is a candidate to lead the White House’s communications team after a series of personnel changes in the more than six months that Trump has been president. The official did not say how many people were on the short list but the Axios news site reported on Saturday that Miller is not the top contender. Last week, Trump ousted White House communications chief Anthony Scaramucci over an obscene tirade to a New Yorker magazine writer only 10 days after he was appointed, leaving the position vacant. Retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, the new chief of staff who sources said was seeking to impose order on a White House riven with factions and backbiting, is said to have recommended the move. In June, Mike Dubke resigned from the communications director post and since then, there has been a revolving door, with Sean Spicer serving as acting director until Scaramucci was named. Miller, who has been a top adviser to Trump since the presidential campaign last year, is a former aide to Jeff Sessions when he was in the Senate. Sessions is now Trump’s attorney general. He was one of the authors of Trump’s controversial proposed ban on visitors from a half dozen Muslim majority nations, which has triggered protests and a slew of legal challenges. On Thursday, Miller briefed reporters at the White House on Trump’s support for legislation that would overhaul the current immigration system by creating a merit based system for issuing visas, favoring younger immigrants with advanced degrees. He sparred with a CNN reporter who asked whether such a policy was potentially racist and ran counter to the American values, and accused him of having a “cosmopolitan bias.” | 0fake |
Thanksgiving Day Fake News Turkey Shoot: Boiler Room – Special Holiday Event | Tune in to the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR) for another LIVE broadcast of The Boiler Room tonight 6:00 PM PST | 8:00 PM CST | 9:00 PM EST for this special broadcast. Join us for uncensored, uninterruptible talk radio, custom-made for bar fly philosophers, misguided moralists, masochists, street corner evangelists, media-maniacs, savants, political animals and otherwise lovable rascals.Join ACR hosts Hesher and Spore along side Fvnk$oul, Randy J, Patrick Henningsen, Infidel Pharaoh and Andy Nowicki for this special Thanksgiving holiday episode of BOILER ROOM. Turn it up, get your ears on and enjoy some holiday festivities with the Boiler Room on ACR.*WARNING* This special episode may contain, satire, comedy and ridiculous un-news events inspired by both the mainstream media and the so-called alternative media. Any similarities to actual persons or events is probably a big poke in the eye to a really lame media outlet or maybe just a coincidence. Enjoy the show!Direct Download: Boiler Room Thanksgiving Day Fake News Turkey Shoot Please like and share the program and visit our donate page to get involved! Reference Links, for your consideration and research: | 1real |
ANOTHER Trump Adviser Under Investigation For Russian Ties | It s no secret that Russia is very pro-Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is extremely pro-Russia. His policies align with Russia s Christmas list, and he hired for a campaign manager a man who benefited heavily from pro-Russian monies during the Ukrainian conflict. In fact, the ties between Paul Manafort and Russian oligarchs became so widely known that it caused his premature departure from the campaign, prompting many questions to be raised.The Trump campaign thought this would all be behind them in no time.But, as usual, they were wrong.On Friday, it was a announced that U.S. intelligence officials are investigating Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Trump, for alleged ties to Russia. Intelligence officials have reason to believe that Page has opened up secret and backroom communications with top Russian officials in an ongoing effort to have economic sanctions lifted.According to Yahoo News, which first broke the story:The activities of Trump adviser Carter Page, who has extensive business interests in Russia, have been discussed with senior members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential election, the sources said. After one of those briefings, Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote FBI Director James Comey, citing reports of meetings between a Trump adviser (a reference to Page) and high ranking sanctioned individuals in Moscow over the summer as evidence of significant and disturbing ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin that needed to be investigated by the bureau.The reports apparently had some members of Congress taken aback, due to the overwhelming and disturbing evidence that shows these ties. Congressional members, which includes California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, fear that such ties could lead to an unfair tampering with not only U.S.-Russian relations, but undercut foreign policy and even the November presidential election.Page is a former banker who worked for Merrill Lynch and is based in Moscow, giving him strong ties with rich and influential Russian officials. In fact, one of Page s business buddies is especially problematic for American diplomacy and international law:But U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian s leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News. That meeting, if confirmed, is viewed as especially problematic by U.S. officials because the Treasury Department in August 2014 named Sechin to a list of Russian officials and businessmen sanctioned over Russia s illegitimate and unlawful actions in the Ukraine.So now that that the Trump campaign is once again under the microscope for shady Russian ties, they did what they know best: they lied. Page has been listed as a foreign policy adviser to Trump since March. In August, Hope Hicks, spokeswoman for the campaign, confirmed that Carter was an adviser. Now? Communications director Jason Miller told The Hill that Page is not an adviser and has made no contribution to the campaign. So which is it? The campaign and its spokeswoman have confirmed that Page is in fact an adviser, and now their communications director says he s not nor has he ever been.It s becoming clearer and clearer everyday that the Trump campaign is nothing more than a puppet of the Kremlin and Putin s rich, thuggish buddies. But no, let s continue to talk about Hillary Clinton s pneumonia, because that s way more important than a potentially stolen election by the same people supporting one of the candidates.Featured image via Mark Makaela/Getty Images | 1real |
U.S. debt to reach 150 percent of GDP in 30 years: CBO | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. debt held by the public will balloon to 150 percent of economic output by 2047 unless tax and spending laws are changed, the Congressional Budget Office said on Thursday, far exceeding the record level just after World War II. The new projections show steeper 30-year debt growth than last year’s long-term forecast by the non-partisan budget analysis agency, and could make it harder for some members of Congress to support a tax reform plan that is partly financed with higher deficits. Last year, the CBO estimated U.S. public debt would grow to 141 percent of gross domestic product by 2046, while the record was 106 percent of GDP in 1946. That level would be reached in 2035, the CBO said. Under this year’s projection, CBO predicts public debt for 2017 to be about 77 percent of GDP, growing to 89 percent in 2027, and 113 percent in 2037. The new forecasts assume that the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare law known as Obamacare that House Republicans failed to replace last week, stays in place for the long term. The projected debt growth reflects CBO’s estimates of the rising costs of caring for a growing population of people over 65, growth in interest costs, and assumptions of slower economic growth due to reduced assumptions about productivity gains. Annual deficits are expected to average 8.6 percent of GDP in the 2038-2047 period versus 2.9 percent expected for 2017 and 4.0 percent for the 2018-2027 period. The long-term projections extend CBO’s assumptions made in its 10-year budget outlook in January, which showed falling deficits for the next two years, but growth thereafter. Net interest costs in 2047 are expected to be 6.2 percent of GDP, compared with 1.4 percent in 2017 and about 1.2 percent in 1967, the CBO said. But the wild card in the CBO 30-year projections are real interest rates. Real interest yields on 10-year Treasury notes are assumed to average 1.5 percent over 30 years, rising to 2.3 percent in 2047. Much higher interest rates, coupled with different assumptions in productivity and healthcare cost growth, could produce significantly different outcomes, CBO said. The CBO said that its debt-to-GDP ratio could range from 85 percent with low rates and strong growth, to 244 percent with weaker growth and higher rates. | 0fake |
Mexico presidency hopeful eyes tax cuts to counter Trump reform | MONTERREY (Reuters) - A Mexican presidential hopeful and governor of a wealthy border state said he would cut taxes to compete with lower rates in the United States if President Donald Trump s fiscal reform passes Congress, hinting at a broader potential response in Mexico. Jaime Rodriguez, the governor of Nuevo Leon who is seeking to become the first independent to take the presidency, said he would lower many taxes if successful. We re going to compete, he told Reuters on Monday. If I make it and am able to be president, I would lower taxes, he added, though he declined to give details. Mexico s government has been watching Trump s fiscal plans closely, and some senior officials and lawmakers say the country may have to cut taxes if the United States does. The U.S. Senate approved a bill on Saturday that could see corporation tax slashed to 20 percent from 35 percent, raising questions over whether this could make investment in Mexico, where the corporate tax rate is 30 percent, less attractive. Two years ago, Rodriguez pulled off a surprise win with a social media-led campaign and became the first independent governor of a Mexican state. Nuevo Leon, home to the major industrial hub of Monterrey, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which spurred an influx of investment from companies seeking access to U.S. consumers. That included a $1 billion investment from South Korea s Kia Motors under a 2014 deal, although Rodriguez and others were critical of the incentives the company received. We don t want any more car assembly plants, he said. We won t give incentives like the ones we gave to Kia to any other company, it s excessive. Trump has threatened to withdraw from NAFTA if he cannot rework it in favor of the United States. However, Rodriguez, who in May 2016 predicted that Trump would win the presidency, was adamant that NAFTA would survive. It s not going to collapse, he said. Known in Mexico as El Bronco due to his blunt style, the 59-year-old Rodriguez leads aspiring independents to gather the 866,593 signatures needed by Feb. 19 to get on the ballot for the July 1 election, according to statistics from electoral regulator INE. However, he has reached the threshold of 1 percent of voters in just three states, and the law requires getting that share in 17 states. Polls so far suggest Rodriguez is unlikely to mount a serious challenge for the presidency. | 0fake |
17 Shot Dead As Chicago Records Deadliest Weekend Of 2016 | 17 Shot Dead As Chicago Records Deadliest Weekend Of 2016 Published: Zero Hedge
After a summer of extreme violence, homicides in Chicago were supposed to slow down going into the fall and winter months. But, that certainly does not appear to be happening as the city just recording its most violent weekend of the entire year with 52 people shot and 17 of them killed. This weekend's violence brings the tally of year to date killings in Chicago to 646, an annual run-rate which implies the most violent year since the mid-90s.
According to the Chicago Tribune , of the 17 victims from this weekend's violence, 7 of them were under the age of 20, with the youngest victim being only 14.
The weekend toll also was deadlier than the three long summer holiday weekends when violence typically spikes because of the warm weather. Six people were fatally shot over the Memorial Day weekend, five over the Fourth of July weekend and 13 people over Labor Day weekend, according to Tribune data.
This past weekend there were shootings in every area of the city but the Far North and Northwest sides, according to police. Of the 17 people who were killed, seven were younger than 20.
The youngest was 14-year-old Demarco Webster Jr ., described by his grade school principal as one of her best students. Demarco had planned to run for student council and try out for basketball, and he was being recruited for an NAACP leadership program.
A little more than 24 hours later, 17-year-old twins Edward and Edwin Bryant were killed in an apparent drive-by shooting in Old Town. Police responding to calls about gunfire found one of the boys lying on the sidewalk in the 400 block of West Evergreen Avenue and another around the corner in the 1300 block of North Hudson Avenue.
"The two brothers, as far as we can tell, they didn't have any documented gang affiliation," said Johnson, who noted police recovered video of the shooting. "But the individuals they were with did."
While journalists suggested that the police department was caught off guard by gang violence linked to large crowds around Wrigley Field, police Superintendent Eddie Johnson insists that extra resources were deployed to the most dangerous neighborhoods around Chicago.
"It was a tough weekend, but that just goes back to what I've been saying all the time," he told reporters. "Listen, until we start holding repeat gun offenders accountable for these crimes, we're going to keep seeing cycles of gun violence like this."
Johnson denied that the department was caught off guard by the mostly gang violence on the South and West sides while deploying hundreds of extra officers for crowd control outside Wrigley Field for the Cubs' three World Series games over the weekend.
"We had canceled days off as well as (required) 12-hour shifts over the entire weekend, so I'm confident that we had the resources out there" in the most dangerous neighborhoods, he said.
According to HeyJackass! , killings from this weekend bring YTD Chicago homicides up to 646, a 51% increase versus last year.
Meanwhile, YTD killings imply a run-rate of 775 homicides for the year which would be the highest since the mid-90s.
And, of course, the majority of the violent crime continues to occur in the gang-ridden South and West side neighborhoods.
Finally, roughly 95% of the violent crime committed so far in 2016 has been against minority citizens with nearly 80% of the shootings going unsolved. Share This Article... | 1real |
Russia to test new anti-tank guided missiles in Syria | RBTH Daily , syria , aviation , missiles Ka-52K attack helicopters. Source: Yuri Smityuk / TASS
Ka-52K attack helicopters deployed on the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier will test-fire test the latest Hermes extreme-range anti-tank guided missiles for the first time in Syria in the battle with Islamic State, the daily newspaper Izvestiya has reported .
"Tests in a combat environment will help finalize the missile system, which should become a standard weapon for Russia's Alligator military helicopters," the newspaper said, citing a source in the Russian military-industrial complex. "It was decided to test the Hermes in more difficult, shipborne air operations." What is the Hermes and what is it for?
According to Izvestiya, owing to the new weapon, the Ka-52K will be able to destroy enemy tanks, fortifications and manpower at a distance of 30 km (20 miles). The range of similar Russian and foreign systems (Ataka, Vikhr, Hellfire, and others) is less than 10 km.
According to Viktor Litovkin, a retired colonel and military expert for the TASS news agency, the Hermes will be used to attack well-protected militant targets – arms and IED production facilities as well as command posts and temporary firing points.
"Based on its combat use, it will be decided whether to send the system back for revision or to adopt it," said Litovkin. Features of the Hermes
As experts interviewed by RBTH noted, the missile's key feature is the ability to track and destroy over-the-horizon targets. Due to its infrared homing and laser guidance capabilities, it can hit enemy armored vehicles autonomously, even if they are out of sight of the helicopter crew.
"Similar tactical tasks can be performed by Israel's Spike-NLOS system, which is mounted on a wheeled chassis. However, Russia's Hermes can be deployed on ground tracked vehicles as well as on helicopters and ships. Ours is more universal," a source in the Russian Defense Ministry said in an interview with RBTH. Defense Minister: Russian arms pass Syria test, but there are problems
According to the source, the official data on the missile will be provided after its adoption.
"Now we can only say that its range is much greater than that of foreign anti-tank systems, the farthest of which hits targets 10 km away," said the RBTH source.
He added that the missile can be equipped with either a cumulative or high-explosive warhead. The shipborne Ka-52
The Ka-52 Katran attack helicopters were created for the French Mistral-class amphibious assault ships.
However, according to Vadim Kozyulina, a professor of the Academy of Military Science, Francois Hollande had to terminate the contract for the supply of the ships to Russia under pressure from NATO allies. Eventually, the Mistrals were acquired by Egypt, and immediately thereafter Cairo purchased a batch of 50 Russian Katrans from Moscow.
It was decided to deploy the remaining helicopters on the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, and they will have their "baptism of fire" at the end of the year.
As Kozyulina noted, the "ground" version of the Ka-52 has proved to be successful in the Syrian campaign. The new machines will also have to demonstrate their combat potential to future buyers.
Video by YouTube
The helicopters can use P-73 and Igla-V air-to-air missiles, unguided air-to-surface missiles and Hermes anti-tank guided missiles. Subscribe to get the hand picked best stories every week Subscribe to our mailing list Facebook | 1real |
U.S., Russia in extradition tug-of-war over bitcoin fraud suspect in Greece | ATHENS (Reuters) - A Greek court on Wednesday backed the extradition to Moscow of a Russian citizen who also faces being sent to the United States on allegations of laundering billions of dollars in bitcoin. Alexander Vinnik, the suspected mastermind of a $4 billion bitcoin laundering ring, is one of seven Russians arrested or indicted worldwide this year on U.S. cybercrime charges. Judges ruled last week that he should be extradited to the United States, a decision Russia criticized as unjust and illegal and which Vinnik is challenging at Greece s supreme court. Should it decide to uphold the ruling to extradite him to the United States, the final decision is in the hands of Greece s justice minister, who can approve extradition to one country and block the other. Vinnik denies all charges against him. But he has agreed to be returned to Russia where he is to be tried on lesser fraud charges. That is his wish - to be extradited to Russia and to give his account before the Russian judicial authorities, Alexandros Lykourezos, the lawyer leading Vinnik s defense, told reporters after the ruling in Thessaloniki. In the United States, where he faces up to 55 years in prison, Vinnik is accused of running BTC-e a digital currency exchange used to trade bitcoin to facilitate crimes ranging from computer hacking to drug trafficking since 2011. He has told Greek judges that he was a technical consultant to BTC-e and not its operator. Vinnik was arrested while on holiday in a seaside village in Greece in July. Russia then sought his extradition as it has done with other nationals wanted by the United States. The supreme court hearing is expected within the next three weeks, Lykourezos said. | 0fake |
Vatican Makes Unprecedented Agreement With Chinese Gov’t | Vatican Makes Unprecedented Agreement With Chinese Gov’t 11/01/2016
DAILY CALLER
The Vatican and Beijing reached an agreement that will elevate the Chinese government above the Church, reports the Wall Street Journal.
The question of who has the authority to ordain bishops has been at the heart of a decades-old dispute between China and the Vatican.
The new agreement will give China the power to select bishops with only limited input from the Vatican. Furthermore, the Vatican will stop ordaining bishops for underground churches without the authorization of the Chinese government. While the pope will be acknowledged as the head of the Catholic Church in China, the Chinese government will have the last word on all appointments. The state will be able to pick individuals loyal to Beijing.
The new deal is likely to help repair ties between the Vatican and the Chinese government, but the full restoration of diplomatic relations is still a long way off.
The Chinese government and the Vatican have been estranged since the Communist Party of China (CPC) expelled Vatican envoy Antonio Riberi from the country in 1951, banned missionaries, and began oppressing organized religion. Pope Francis has been actively pursuing rapprochement with China.
China insists on appointing its own bishops, claiming that oversight by the Holy See, the judicial body within the Catholic Church, constitutes unnecessary foreign intervention in Chinese affairs. China also opposes attempts by the Vatican to appoint bishops for underground churches without state authorization.
In China, all Catholic organizations must register with the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. The Vatican expressed frustration over the Chinese government’s 2010 appointment of a bishop without Pope Benedict XVI’s approval. The Vatican called the move, one of a number of such occurrences, a “ painful wound ” to the Church.
The new agreement could thaw relations between Beijing and the Vatican, giving the world’s largest religious organization access to the world’s most populous country. For China, normal interactions with the Vatican could improve its international image, potentially reducing criticisms of China’s human rights record.
Negotiations for the new agreement reportedly began in April. Having reached an accord, negotiators are waiting for papal approval and a formal decision from the Chinese government. Once the agreement passes, it will mark an unprecedented shift in the Vatican’s interactions with foreign governments. The Vatican would officially accept the appointment of eight bishops, three of which were previously excommunicated.
Some observers expect members of underground churches in China to protest the accord.
“If the Vatican should be perceived as abandoning them, it could be seen as a betrayal” and “cause serious divisions in the Chinese Catholic Church,” Richard Madsen, a professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego, told the WSJ. “The government would probably actually like this. Its action over the years show that it would like to see the church weakened, and a deeper division in the church would help accomplish that,” he added, highlighting his suspicions of Beijing’s intentions.
China has a documented propensity for dominating and oppressing religion in order to better preserve state power. Christians played an important role in the shift from a dictatorship to a democracy in South Korea, and now there are an estimated 100 million Christians in China.
Having failed to eradicate religion, the Chinese government, which is officially atheist, set up state-run churches with pastors loyal to China. These churches advocate morality, not scripture, and that the state is superior to religion.
“We have to remember first of all we are a citizen of this country. We are a citizen of the Kingdom of God, but that comes second,” Pastor Wu Weiqing of the state-owned Haidian Church in Beijing told BBC. He further stated that if Jesus were alive today, he would probably be a member of the Communist Party. While the deal between the Vatican and Beijing could give the Catholic Church greater access to Chinese Christians, it could also give the Chinese government greater control over the Church and organized religion.
Pope Francis “would not accept any agreement that would harm the integrity of faith of the universal Church,” the Bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal John Tong argued in July, according to the WSJ.
The future of the Catholic Church in China remains shrouded in uncertainty. The new agreement between Beijing and the Vatican could be a positive step forward or a dangerous surrender of religious power to political organizations like the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and the State Administration for Religious Affairs. | 1real |
OBAMA TAKES TWO GAS GUZZLING PLANES For Sightseeing…What Global Warming? | Obama brings two gas guzzlers on a sightseeing trip just another day in the life of preezy It s really easy to spend someone else s money, isn t it? In this case, it s YOUR money! The really ironic thing is that Obama likes to preach about global warming HummmPresident Obama brought along a second, smaller Air Force One for his family to enjoy a day of sightseeing in Argentina on Thursday.After dancing the tango at a state dinner in Buenos Aires Wednesday night, the president and first lady Michelle Obama took their daughters aboard the government plane colloquially known as baby Air Force One Thursday to fly to the scenic town of Bariloche in southern Argentina. It s a Boeing 757 used when traveling to places where the runway is too short for the primary Air Force One.The larger Air Force One, a 747-200, was parked alongside the smaller plane at the airport in Buenos Aires, according to pool reporters traveling with the president. It costs about $206,000 per hour to fly the larger plane, which the president is expected to use for the 10-plus-hour flight back to Washington late Thursday night.It s common for the government to have a backup plane available when the president travels, although not often for a family sightseeing excursion.Bariloche is a lakeside resort town nestled in the foothills of the Andes mountains, famous for its chocolates and Swiss-style architecture.Bariloche is also well-known for having served as a sort of haven for Nazis on the run after World War II. Several top former Nazis, including Dr. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death from the Auschwitz death camp, are believed to have sought refuge there in the decades after the war.Via: WT | 1real |
You Will Never Want To Use Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder After Reading This | A jury in St. Louis has awarded a California woman over $70 million in her lawsuit alleging Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder of giving her cancer.
This lawsuit is raising concerns about the health ramifications of the extended use of talcum powder.
The trial began on September 26th, 2016 after Deborah Giannecchini of Modesto, California was diagnosed with ovarian cancer back in 2012. Her suit accused Johnson & Johnson of “negligent conduct” in making and marketing baby powder that is hazardous to human health.
There have already been two other lawsuits this year in St. Louis, ending in jury verdicts worth a combined $127 million. $72 million was awarded in February to relatives of a woman in Alabama who died of ovarian cancer, and a $55 million award was given to a South Dakota survivor in May. Yet there were two others in New Jersey that were thrown out by a judge who said there wasn’t enough reliable evidence that talcum powder leads to ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer, an often fatal but relatively rare form of cancer accounts for about 22,000 of the 1/7 million new cases expected to be diagnosed in the U.S. this year.
About 2,000 women have filed similar suits, while lawyers are reviewing thousands of other potential cases.
Although there are studies that claim that the use of talcum powder is safe, there is other research that connects talcum powder to ovarian cancer. Case studies have indicated that women who regularly use talcum on their genital area face up to a 40% higher risk of developing ovarian cancer.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies genital use of talcum as “possibly carcinogenic”, and yet the National Toxicology Program, made up of parts of several different government agencies, has not completely reviewed talcum yet.
Talcum is mainly used in a variety of products like paint and plastics, but since at least 1894, it has also been used in cosmetics and personal care products to absorb moisture. Talcum is the softest of minerals and it is mined from deposits from around the world and crushed into a white powder.
Prior to this recent verdict, the two previous St. Louis verdicts were the first talcum powder cases in which money was awarded.
This is not the first time Johnson & Johnson has been targeted by health and consumer groups over the ingredients in its products. In 2012 the company agreed to eliminate 1,4-dioxane and formaldehyde from all products by 2015.
| 1real |
Lying Liar Behind ‘Baby Parts’ Videos Rejects Plea Deal, Demands Apology (VIDEO) | David Daleidan, the ringleader for the deceptively named Center for Medical Progress, is foolishly rejecting a plea deal after being indicted by a Texas grand jury for the illegal activities he took part in to create the infamous baby parts videos used in an attempt to discredit and destroy Planned Parenthood. Daleidan surrendered to police on Thursday, and held a press conference in which he held steadfast to his stance that the beloved women s health organization is some kind of grotesque baby part mill. As he spoke to the huge crowd by the courthouse, Daleidan told them: I think we all know that every day that goes by that the Texas authorities do not prosecute Planned Parenthood for their illegal trade in baby parts, they are sending a message to the entire country. The state of Texas right now is open for business in baby body parts. Daleidan s attorneys spoke to the media, insisting that their client would not be making any kind of plea deal with prosecutors, even though he would get no jail time, only probation. They went on to have the gall to actually put Daleidan s work on par with that of people from 60 Minutes. If we re going to be prosecuting undercover journalists, we are sending ourselves down a very, very dark path. This is fully in the tradition, a long storied tradition, of undercover journalism. Well, real investigative journalists don t doctor videos, and real journalists don t break the law, which Daleiden and his organization of rabidly anti-choice zealots did repeatedly. That was when the lawyer actually had the nerve to demand that Daleiden receive an apology for being charged in the first place: What we want is an apology. He deserves an apology at this point. He is innocent of those charges. No, what he deserves is a jail cell, and hopefully at the end of his trial, that is exactly what he gets.Watch the video below:Featured image from video screen capture via Raw Story | 1real |
Republican 'Dump Trump' effort struggles to gain traction | NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. (Reuters) - A plan to block Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump struggled to gain traction on Friday as rival candidates rejected it, while Democrats reveled in the chaos they hoped would boost their chances of keeping the White House. The country’s top elected Republican, House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, said he was not interested in an effort to draft him into the White House race. And U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, a conservative presidential hopeful, ruled out a deal to pick a compromise Republican candidate at the party’s July convention, which senior party figures see as their best chance to stop the unpredictable billionaire. “The D.C. power brokers will drop someone in who is exactly to the liking of the establishment. If that will happen we will have a manifold revolt in this country,” Cruz said at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. “You want to beat Donald Trump, you beat Donald Trump with the voters,” he said. Party leaders worry Trump would not be able to beat Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in the election, but time is running out after he won most of the states that voted in this week’s Super Tuesday. Senior Republicans also fear Trump’s plans to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and ban Muslims from entering the United States will turn off voters in November and upset U.S. allies. Others note his past support for liberal policies and question whether he has any agenda other than advancing himself. “I don’t think he actually carries the conservative mantle. He’s a little too crass for me,” said Michele Minter, a San Diego executive assistant who was attending CPAC. Trump, a former reality TV star, often plays by his own set of rules. He canceled plans to speak at CPAC, normally an essential stop for ambitious Republicans, and will instead attend a rally in Kansas. The real estate magnate, who is drawing support from many blue-collar Republicans concerned about illegal immigration and stagnant wages, has won most Republican nominating contests and leads in many polls for the primary contests still to come. “I’m not a normal Republican,” he said to huge cheers at a rally in Warren, Michigan. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, the only candidate to ever challenge Trump’s months-long lead in opinion polls, officially ended his White House bid. “There are a lot of people who love me, they just won’t vote for me,” Carson said in a speech at CPAC, held in National Harbor, Maryland. A new group called the Committee to Draft Speaker Ryan filed papers with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday, seeking to raise money to push Ryan as a Republican alternative. Ryan, a budget wonk who was the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2012, is seen by many in the party as a unifier after he took the speaker’s job last year to unite establishment Republican lawmakers and conservative upstarts in the House. “He is flattered, but not interested,” Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong said in an email on Friday. As Trump cements his front-runner status, senior party figures hope to deny him enough delegates to clinch the nomination, which would give them the chance to choose a compromise candidate at their convention in Cleveland. The last time that happened at a Republican convention was in 1948 when Thomas Dewey was nominated. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said there was an 85 to 90 percent chance that the party will not face that scenario this year. Mitt Romney and John McCain, the party’s last two presidential nominees, called on Republicans to halt Trump’s rise by backing whichever candidate was strongest in their state, a form of tactical voting. Few elected officials are rallying behind the “Dump Trump” banner. The party’s 31 state governors, for example, are not lining up behind an alternative. Only five have endorsed Florida Senator Marco Rubio and one has backed Cruz, in a sharp contrast to previous years when governors overwhelmingly endorsed the party’s eventual nominee. Rubio has only one state so far and is gearing up for what could be a make-or-break contest in his home state on March 15. Cruz said Saturday he planned to open 10 campaign offices there, in what could be an effort to force the rival senator out of the race. Trump is expected to extend his lead on Saturday, when a total of 155 delegates are at stake in Kansas, Louisiana, Maine and Kentucky. Democrats were happy to let Republicans fight amongst themselves. “We can sit back and let them light their own dumpster fire and wait until they’re finished,” said Eddie Vale, spokesman for American Bridge, a Clinton-allied group which collects negative research on Republican candidates. “They’re giving us so much great video footage that we could run ads between now and November of nothing but Republicans attacking Trump,” Vale told Reuters. Nationally, Trump has the support of 41 percent of Republican voters, compared to 19 percent who back Cruz and 16 percent who back Rubio, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling data. (Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu, Emily Stephenson, Eric Beech, and Ginger Gibson; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Bill Trott and Alistair Bell) This article was funded in part by SAP. It was independently created by the Reuters editorial staff. SAP had no editorial involvement in its creation or production. | 0fake |
HUMA IS JUST ‘ONE OF MY STAFFERS’ AFTER CLOSE AIDE GETS LEFT BEHIND ON OHIO CAMPAIGN TRIP | Home › POLITICS › HUMA IS JUST ‘ONE OF MY STAFFERS’ AFTER CLOSE AIDE GETS LEFT BEHIND ON OHIO CAMPAIGN TRIP HUMA IS JUST ‘ONE OF MY STAFFERS’ AFTER CLOSE AIDE GETS LEFT BEHIND ON OHIO CAMPAIGN TRIP 1 SHARES
[10/31/16] Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton blasted the FBI again Monday – and this time brought up the bureau’s probe into emails maintained by longtime aide Huma Abedin – dismissing the idea she did anything wrong while minimizing the close role of her staffer. ‘Now they apparently want to look at emails of one of my staffers – and by all means they should look at them,’ Clinton said, bring up the FBI attack at the start of a rally before a room packed with students at Kent State University. ‘And I am sure they will reach the same conclusion they did when they looked at my emails for the last year. There is no case here. And they said it wasn’t even a close call,’ Clinton said. The staffer Clinton failed to name was Abedin, who has been at her side since Clinton was first lady. Clinton considers her like a surrogate daughter as well as longtime confidant. Abedin has been known for years to be Clinton’s gatekeeper, and has been revealed in State Department emails as someone constantly consulted on matters relating to Bill Clinton, top donors, close friends, celebrities, who gets face time with the first lady, and paid speeches that pose potential conflicts. ‘I’m sure a lot of you may be asking what this new email story is about and why it he world the FBI would decide to jump into an election with no evidence of any wrongdoing with just days to go,’ Clinton asked early in her remarks, before adding, ‘That’s a good question.’ Clinton hammered the FBI over the weekend, after news broke Friday about the investigation. Since then, senior Democrats have taken up the cause. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid released a blistering letter where he wrote that FBI Director James Comey violating Hatch Act provisions on government employees interfering in an election. As she unloaded on the agency this time, Clinton also offered up words of contrition. ‘For those of you who are concerned about using personal email, I understand,’ she said. ‘And as I’ve said, I’m not making excuses. And I’ve said it was a mistake and I regret’ it, Clinton said. Then she turned to attack Donald Trump for having a ‘hair-trigger temper’ that could imperil the entire world. Post navigation | 1real |
Trump Faces the Limits of American Power - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — President Trump, inspired by TV images of faraway suffering to launch missile strikes against Syria, may be about to discover a lesson that has confounded presidents for 25 years: American power can only do so much. That truth is also embedded in another set of disturbing images that Mr. Trump has not cited publicly: those from Nigeria’s northeast, where a very different crisis is drawing different American action toward different ends. Those two conflicts, in both their contrasts and commonalities, reveal something of the role that Mr. Trump has taken on and its limitation. Both are humanitarian disasters whose stories horrify and enrage. And they are both crises of a sort that the United States, since emerging from the Cold War as the world’s policeman, has repeatedly tried but often failed to resolve. The range of American intervention efforts, as well as their often modest success, can be seen in those two crises that Mr. Trump inherited: Syria, whose civil war has become a global issue, and Nigeria, where fighting with Boko Haram rebels has killed tens of thousands and displaced an estimated three million people. The two wars could hardly be more different, as are the American responses. Yet they may still share the fundamental dynamics that make crises so resistant to outside resolution. In Syria, the United States has sought to either mediate between the warring parties or tip the military balance through force, whether by the Obama administration’s efforts to arm certain rebels or Mr. Trump’s missile strikes. The scope of the United States’ involvement has been extensive and highly visible. In Nigeria, American action appears more modest. There, the United States is emphasizing political tools, pressuring the government to improve practices in the affected parts of the country and supporting any reforms. It has helped to coordinate a multinational force from surrounding countries. It is also providing military advisers, intelligence and other forms of military support, which Mr. Trump this week extended in the form of warplane sales, but nothing comparable to action in Syria. The difference between the two approaches is partly explained by the scale of the suffering, which is more severe in Syria, and perhaps by an even wider gap in attention received. It is also explained by Syria’s wider geopolitical stakes — its conflict touches on the European refugee crisis, Russia’s resurgence, global terrorism and Middle Eastern power struggles — whereas Nigeria’s is contained to a region that is less central to American interests. But the difference is also caused by the contrasting nature of the crises. Syria’s problem is seen, in part, as a deadlocked military imbalance that American force is meant to overturn. Nigeria’s problems are driven more by crises in governing. Boko Haram has exploited, and been fueled by, political tensions and grievances within Nigerian society, including neglect by the central government and abuse by its soldiers. American policy is aimed at helping Nigeria address the underlying issues that helped give rise to the insurgency, pushing for reforms to roll back corruption and military abuses. Because the goal is restoring government control and local faith in it, military power plays a smaller role in American strategy. Still, Americans sometimes see the degree of military intervention as a function of political will — if the president cared, he would intervene. This reveals a deeper assumption: that American power can solve any crisis, but only if it is sufficiently and correctly applied. But while the United States has exerted far more effort in Syria than in Nigeria, and has used different tools, the outcomes have been similar to what it often finds in such efforts: disappointment. The conflicts in Syria and Nigeria, in their breadth of difference, reveal the common factors that make humanitarian crises so hard to solve: simultaneous breakdowns in governing and in the social contract by which a population agrees to exist in harmony. Once these have collapsed, segments of society, whether divided by demographic tribe or political affiliation, come to see one another as locked in a contest for survival and control. The result is chaos, a cycle of violence with entire communities caught in the middle. Syria and Nigeria also illustrate a common American response: intervention, military or otherwise, to resolve the underlying political breakdown that compels the fighting. Since the early 1990s, when the United States took on the mantle of global leadership, it has acted in Somalia, in Afghanistan, in two different parts of Sudan, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Liberia and Sierra Leone’s overlapping conflicts, in East Timor and twice in the former Yugoslavia. It has tried diplomacy and foreign aid, imposed political reforms and peacekeepers, launched cruise missiles and outright occupations. Sometimes the variance in policy was because of differing temperaments or worldviews of key American officials, or the amount of attention those crises received on TV, but the outcomes were consistently modest. The relatively few breakthroughs offer hints as to why other efforts have faltered. Successful interventions have often come in one of two forms: resolving a conflict between two states, or nudging local dynamics that were already aligning around peace. The United States helped, for instance, halt the wars between the nations once united as Yugoslavia. Because the problem was one of forces, outside intervention could push them back. This rarely applies, though, in an era when interstate conflict is rare and most wars come from political breakdowns that do not fall along neat borders. Where outside intervention has succeeded in such crises, it has typically been not by changing those dynamics from the outside, but by capitalizing on major shifts toward peace that arose from within. In East Timor, which Indonesia claimed as its territory, years of diplomacy and political pressure faltered until Indonesia’s economy collapsed and its president was replaced by a reformer. The breakthrough, as is almost always the case, had come from the conflict’s participants, whose calculus was driven largely by local factors and not the threat or promise of outside action. George J. Mitchell, the former senator who led Northern Ireland peace talks, frequently emphasized this. In a 1999 address, he said, “Peace and political stability cannot be achieved in sharply divided societies unless there is a genuine willingness to understand the other point of view and to enter into principled compromise. ” That can be a difficult message for Americans accustomed to seeing themselves as deciders of major global issues. The United States assumes this leadership in part because it is the guarantor of the international order and the power of last resort, leading the world to look to American involvement. Jeremy Shapiro, the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, has argued that the United States is also driven by what he calls “the American omnipotence problem. ” A string of military victories in the early 1990s, Mr. Shapiro told The New York Times in October, established an assumption “that any problem in the world is basically solvable by American power if there is sufficient political will. ” As a result, when a crisis emerges, and Americans are confronted with images like those Mr. Trump saw from Syria, the question raised is often not whether the United States is capable of imposing a solution, but why it hasn’t. The United States has long tried to impose such shifts from the outside. If success were primarily a matter of American will or commitment, it would have come in Baghdad. The United States, responsible for a crisis largely of its making and driven by a president whose legacy hung in the balance, committed the full force of its might and diplomacy to resolving the city’s sectarian bloodletting. It imposed order through blast walls, patrols and checkpoints. It held peace talks and local neighborhood meetings. It won relative calm, but even proponents said this served only to create space for Iraqis to resolve the deeper issues that divided them, which many tried to do. Once American troops drew down, it became clear that outside force could restore order to a neighborhood. But it could not resolve the social and political breakdowns that had made it dangerous in the first place, and would do so again once the vacuum reopened. Syria and Nigeria, in their own ways, carry this same dilemma. American policy options are aimed at alleviating the suffering and violence that are symptoms of deeper problems. But resolution can come only when the war’s participants once again see peaceful coexistence as worth the compromises and risks — a task harder than any American mission. | 0fake |
WHOA! BLACK WOMAN FED UP WITH BLACK RACISTS NAILS IT: “Many Black People Voted For Barack Obama Simply Because He Was Black…And Now Your Black god Has Failed You!” [VIDEO] | WOW This woman absolutely nails it! | 1real |
Bolton: Obama ’Vindictive’ for Abstaining From UN Vote on Israeli Settlements - Breitbart | During Sunday’s New York AM 970 “The Cats Roundtable” radio broadcast, former United Nations ambassador John Bolton called President Barack Obama “vindictive” for abstaining in a Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlements, and accused the president of trying to box in his successor, Donald Trump. “[P]resident Obama has very negative views on the state of Israel,” Bolton told host John Catsimatidis. “He thinks they’re the obstruction in the peace process in the Middle East, not the Palestinians or some of the more radical Arab states. In many respects, what he did in this resolution by the Security Council just before Christmas was try to define the boundaries of the state of Israel. It’s a rejection of 50 years of bipartisan American foreign policy that says that the parties in the dispute themselves have to work this out. ” “I just think it was a very bad idea. It was vindictive because everybody knows that Donald Trump has a different policy view. This was intended to box [Trump] in. I’m just worried that more is coming, as well,” he added. Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 0fake |
This is Why Your Vote for President in the U.S. Doesn’t Count | . This is Why Your Vote for President in the U.S. Doesn’t Count Do you think your vote for president in the United States counts? Think again… Ultimately, the Ele... Do you think your vote for president in the United States counts? Think again… Ultimately, the Electoral College votes determine who becomes president, not the majority or popular vote. So, what is the Electoral College? The Electoral College process consists of the selection of the electors, the meeting of the electors where they vote for President and Vice President, and the counting of the electoral votes by Congress. The Electoral College consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the President. (1) The popular vote, on the other hand, is to appease the masses in thinking that they actually have a say in who gets elected. The above image is from NBC affiliate WRCB TV in Chattanooga, TN who apparently already have the results from the election that hasn’t occurred yet. (2) So, how is this possible? In 2012, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) legalized the use of PROPAGANDA on the American public. (3) This includes ANYTHING the mainstream media “reports” including the election results before they happened. This is reminiscent of the BBC announcing that World Trade Center building 7 collapsed before it actually collapsed on 9/11. (4) Related: British Man Won Law Suit Against BBC for 9/11 Cover Up As reported by Top Right News and other outlets, during a recent interview with Bloomberg News, Soros – a Democrat mega-donor – openly admitted that Trump will win the popular vote in a “landslide.” However, he said that none of that would matter, because a president Hillary Clinton is already a “done deal .” In the interview, which is now going viral, Soros says with certainty that Trump will take the popular vote , despite what the polls say now (which are completely rigged to oversample Democrats), but not the Electoral College, which will go to Clinton . When the reporter asks if that is already a “done deal”– that Clinton will be our next president no matter what – Soros says “yes,” and nods his head. (5) George Soros is most likely one of the main cogs in the shadow government . Look no further than all of the money his “Open Society Institute” donated to “ Black Lives Matter ” (6). His main agenda is to keep America living in the premise of “Divide and Conquer”. As long as America is divided, we cannot come together under a united cause. A George Soros company, Smartmatic, has provided voting machine technology in 16 states including battleground zones like Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia. You can read more about George Soros and his dark allegiance here . Other jurisdictions affected are California, District of Columbia, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. Its website includes a flow-chart that describes how the company has contributed to elections in the U.S. from 2006-2015 with “57,000 voting and counting machines deployed” and “35 million voters assisted.” After this report’s publication, Smartmatic updated its website to remove the flow chart and declare that “Smartmatic will not be deploying its technology in any U.S. county for the upcoming 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.” (7) I’m not buying it. Are you? My “vote” is for a council of elders to replace ALL governments and politicians . The current system is corrupt, broken, and outdated. It's time to evolve! (8) Source & References: | 1real |
Iraq’s Skies Darken as Islamic State Torches Oil | Iraq’s Skies Darken as Islamic State Torches Oil Posted on Oct 28, 2016
By Kieran Cooke / Climate News Network Photo: Kuwait, 1991. Today, the Islamic State copies Saddam Hussein, threatening Iraq’s environment with oil blazes. (Lt. Steve Gozzo USN via Wikimedia Commons)
LONDON—Even at the height of the day, the skies in many parts of northern Iraq are dark as ISIS torches oil wells and oil-filled defensive trenches in its retreat. Artillery fire and bombing raids by US aircraft and others battling Isis are also causing conflagrations at oil installations. Aid teams near the town of Qayyarah, about 80 kilometres south of the Isis stronghold of Mosul, talk of escaping civilians being covered in oil residues . “Everywhere is covered in a fine dusting of black soot and grime”, one aid worker from the Save the Children charity told the BBC. “And the children we met were covered in it—their hands were black, their feet were black and their hair was matted…they were coming out in rashes, developing problems with their lungs.” Deliberate pollution There are fears that as ISIS comes under ever greater pressure it will unleash “scorched earth” tactics, setting alight ever more oil wells and deliberately polluting the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, two of the region’s main rivers, which supply water and power to millions. Setting oil fields alight could also have wider climate-related consequences. During Saddam Hussein’s invasion and subsequent retreat from Kuwait in 1990/91, the Iraqis set alight nearly 800 Kuwaiti oil wells: at one stage—in March 1991 – it was calculated that up to six million barrels of oil were being burned each day . The result was daytime darkness and long plumes of black smoke across a wide area of the Gulf. Though the long-term impact of Kuwait’s oil fires on the climate is still being assessed, the release of vast amounts of climate-changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is considered to have added to the problems of warming, on both a regional and a global scale. The Gulf region is one of the fastest-warming in the world, with many areas forecast to be uninhabitable in the not too distant future because of higher temperatures and chronic water shortages. Long-term damage Pollution from the Kuwait oil fires and ruptured oil pipelines are also believed to have caused serious long-term damage to the waters of the Gulf. There are fears that, with pressure on the group mounting, similar developments could unfold in northern Iraq as Isis torches oil installations 25 years later. In recent years Iraq has been trying to ramp up its oil production in order to raise more revenues—partly to fund the war against Isis. But much of the development of Iraq’s fossil fuel resources has been badly planned and mismanaged . The World Bank says that, globally, approximately 140 billion cubic metres of natural gas produced together with oil are burned or flared off each year— adding 350 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere . “From exploding fuel barrels to exposure to carcinogenic chemicals and inhalational toxins, these makeshift oil refineries will have a long-lasting health impact. ...” Iraq is now one of the world’s leading gas-flaring countries: a lack of pipelines and infrastructure means that its gas is mostly burned off. Meanwhile the country has been forced to import large amounts of gas from neighbouring Iran in order to meet its energy needs. Across northern Iraq and eastern Syria—the country’s main oil-producing region—Isis controls large numbers of oil wells and derives considerable income from selling fossil fuels on the black market . A lack of maintenance and expertise means that many of these installations are a hazard to the environment. Badly-run oil facilities also cause considerable human suffering. A recent report by Pax , a Netherlands-based church grouping, says that more than 5,700 makeshift oil refineries are operating in the ISIS-controlled Deir ez-Zor area of Syria. Thousands of civilians, many of them children, are forced to work at these crude, basically-run facilities. “From exploding fuel barrels to exposure to carcinogenic chemicals and inhalational toxins, these makeshift oil refineries will have a long-lasting health impact on communities and their environment”, says the report.
Kieran Cooke, a founding editor of Climate News Network, is a former foreign correspondent for the BBC and Financial Times. He now focuses on environmental issues.
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Pro-Kurdish opposition leader's trial opens in Turkey | ANKARA (Reuters) - The jailed leader of Turkey s pro-Kurdish opposition was remanded in prison for at least two more months on Thursday at the opening of his trial on terrorism-related charges. Selahattin Demirtas, the co-leader of the Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) who has already been in detention more than a year, was not allowed to appear in court for security reasons and refused to take part via video link. The former human rights lawyer faces up to 142 years in prison in a case closely watched by rights groups and Western governments. The judge ruled he should be kept in detention until the next hearing on Feb 14. This trial bears all the hallmarks of a theater play. It s clear that this case was brought on orders. We demand an immediate end to this injustice, HDP quoted one of Demirtas lawyers as telling the court. The court ruled that Demirtas be kept in jail, in line with the prosecutor s demand. Demirtas was arrested on Nov. 4 last year, one of more than a dozen HDP lawmakers who were detained in a crackdown following last year s attempted coup. A crowd of several hundred gathered to show support for Demirtas in snowy weather outside the court near the capital Ankara. They joined hands and danced around small fires, singing songs in Kurdish. Demirtas is our honor, they chanted. Demirtas and other detained HDP members are mostly accused of links to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group, which has conducted a decades-old insurgency in which 40,000 people have been killed. The group is deemed a terrorist organization by the United States, Turkey and Europe. All of the accused deny the charges. The HDP is the third-largest party in Turkey s parliament. The party s other co-leader, Figen Yuksekdag, also jailed pending trial on terrorism charges, was remanded in custody by an Ankara court on Wednesday. Demirtas is held in a jail in the northwestern city of Edirne. The case was to be held within the city of Ankara itself but was moved to the Sincan prison complex outside the capital, two days before the trial, because of security concerns. European parliamentarians, Western diplomats and rights group representatives attended the session in the small court room with a capacity of 120 people. The HDP said 1,250 lawyers sought to defend Demirtas. The HDP said in a statement the indictment largely consists of press releases and speeches Demirtas has made at conferences, panels and similar legal and political activities. The charges aimed at Demirtas included establishing a terrorist organization , spreading terror group propaganda and praising crimes and criminals . Authorities banned protests across Ankara province for the three days until Friday for security reasons after the HDP called for protests to mark the hearing of Demirtas and other party officials, the governor s office said in a statement. About 150,000 people have been sacked or suspended and roughly 50,000 people have been jailed pending trial since last year s failed coup. Rights groups and some Western allies say Erdogan has used the putsch as an excuse to quash dissent. The HDP says as many as 5,000 of its members have been detained. Erdogan says such measures were necessary given the danger represented by the putsch in which 250 people were killed. | 0fake |
THE FIX IS IN: Michigan Mayor Threatened By DNC For CHEERING For His Candidate At Debate [VIDEO] | Here is a screen shot of the Facebook post by Warren, MI Mayor Jim Fouts where he explains what happened to him at the Democrat Debate last night. It s interesting that the Mayor accuses the Democrat party of using totalitarian control to silence him. Where the heck has he been for the last several decades? I mean, no one forced him to be a Democrat, and certainly nothing has changed in decades if not for centuries. The Democrat party just seems to be more open about their unscrupulous behavior now, since stealing and cheating their fellow Americans seems to be more acceptable under the reign of their Community Organizer In Chief .Maybe the real reason they didn t want the Mayor at the debate is because the Democrat Mayor lauded GM valet driver, Didarul Sarder, a concealed carrier, who stopped a woman from stabbing her mother to death at the GM Tech Center last month. Fortunately Didarul Sarder was able to prevent any further stabbing by threatening the aggressor with his gun. Sarder was also able to hold her at gunpoint until the police were able to arrive. Any Democrat Mayor who celebrates a concealed carry hero is not someone who the gun-grabbing Hillary wants supporting her campaign.Here s a screen shot of the loving daughter who stabbed her mother so many times, she was clinging to life by a thread.Watch dramatic video here: The man who broke up a stabbing at the General Motors Tech Center last week was honored Thursday for stopping a crime that could have ended worse.Didarul Sarder was given a proclamation from Warren Mayor Jim Fouts and a $1,000 gift certificate to a Shelby Township jewelry store. My first reaction was to try to save this woman s life, the Warren resident said when he saw a 32-year-old woman stabbing her 52-year-old mother multiple times outside the main door of one of the buildings on the automaker s Warren campus on Van Dyke.Said Fouts: Any of us we never know when we ll need a Didarul Sarder. Without his help, I believe the woman would ve passed away. Sarder intervened, but how he did it nearly cost him his job.Legally licensed to carry a weapon, Sarder pointed his gun at the younger woman and gave a warning drop the weapon or I ll shoot and the woman complied. The problem is, Sarder s employer, Chicago-based contractor SP Plus, and General Motors, which contracts with the valet service, have a no-gun policy at the tech center.GM interceded on Sarder s behalf and SP Plus agreed he should keep his job, with the understanding he would comply with the no guns policy. He returned to work Monday.The incident happened around 9:17 a.m. last Wednesday when Sarder heard from the valets he manages that a woman was being attacked. Video shown at Thursday s event shows Sarder, 32, ran through the building s lobby, got outside and saw a woman being stabbed. He pulled his gun and ordered her attacker to stop.The aggressor is facing charges and the victim is recovering in the hospital.Fouts said if his political role model, President Harry Truman, were around, Sarder might have received a presidential proclamation, not just a mayoral one. Via: Detroit News | 1real |
NFL Deletes Questions on Trump and Commissioner Goodell in Super Bowl Media Transcript - Breitbart | It appears that the transcript of the NFL’s Opening Night media event for the upcoming Super Bowl omitted most of the questions reporters asked about President Trump and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. [According to a hostile report by The New York Times, the NFL “built a virtual wall” around the New England Patriots to shield them from the discussion of the friendships that quarterback Tom Brady, coach Bill Belichick, and team owner Robert Kraft have with the President of the United States. But that “wall” also extended around questions reporters asked about Goodell. The Times report notes that many reporters quizzed players about politics, not just Brady but others as well, and asked their opinions on Commissioner Goodell. But those questions are absent in the NFL’s official transcript of the media event. The transcripts feature “almost no references to Trump or Goodell,” the paper notes. A spokesman for the NFL told the Times that these transcripts are not meant to be full, transcripts of the events. The paper further notes that the NFL has “sanitized its Super Bowl transcripts in past years,” with a reminder that two years ago the league also left controversial comments by Seattle Seahawks’ Richard Sherman out of transcripts. Andrew Bucholtz of AwfulAnnouncing. com points out that the questions missing from the NFL transcripts aren’t necessarily excised from the historical record, because reporters make their own recordings at these events. He also points out that the NFL is under no obligation to offer any transcripts regardless. Bucholtz concludes that those journalists who write about the controversies will write about them whether the NFL adds the comments to the transcripts or not. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 0fake |
Merkel Stands by Migrant Policy, Fights Terrorism with Compassion | In her New Year’s speech, Chancellor Angela Merkel affirmed that her government will win the fight against terrorism with compassion and denied that her mass migration policy, which directly brought terrorists to Germany, was wrong. [advertisement | 0fake |
Orlando Shooting Survivors Cope With the Trauma of Good Fortune - The New York Times | ORLANDO, Fla. — With dozens of survivors of the massacre at a gay nightclub here still hospitalized, some of the wounded on Tuesday gave gripping accounts of terror and pain on a night that turned in an instant from joyous to deadly. The survivors told of fleeing, hiding, using their phones to plead for help, watching friends die — and thinking that they would also — as a man with an assault rifle and a handgun went through the Pulse nightclub, firing more shots than they could count. The slaughter early Sunday left 49 victims dead, in addition to the gunman, and 53 wounded — the worst mass shooting in American history. “The guilt of feeling lucky to be alive is heavy,” said Patience Carter, who was shot in the legs and saw her friend Akyra Murray killed. “I was begging God to take the soul out of my body because I didn’t want to feel any more pain, I didn’t want any more shots. ” More than 30 of the wounded remained in hospitals on Tuesday, including at least six who were in critical condition. All of the dead had been identified, and most of the autopsies were completed. As the injured and the doctors who treated them told their stories, the F. B. I. continued looking into the actions of the gunman, Omar Mateen, 29, who died in a shootout with police, seeking evidence of a motive and any possible accomplices — in particular, whether his wife may have known he was planning the assault. His wife, Noor Zahi Salman, has told investigators that she once drove him to the nightclub, that she was with him when he bought ammunition, and that she tried to talk him out of mounting an attack, law enforcement officials said. Mr. Mateen had voiced hatred of gays, minorities and Jews, and had claimed links to Islamist terrorist groups during the siege at the nightclub, he declared allegiance to the Islamic State. But investigators were also looking into reports that he might have been gay himself. His Sitora Yusufiy, said that Mr. Mateen had told her that he had frequented nightclubs before their marriage, but had not described them as gay clubs. In Washington, President Obama on Tuesday reiterated that investigators had found no evidence that Mr. Mateen had actual contact with a larger terrorist group like the Islamic State. “It is increasingly clear, however, that the killer took in extremist information and propaganda over the internet,” Mr. Obama said. He appears to have been an “angry, disturbed, unstable young man who became radicalized,” the president said. “These lone actors or small cells of terrorists are very hard to detect and very hard to prevent,” Mr. Obama said. “We are doing everything in our power to stop these kinds of attacks. ” Referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, the president said: “I want to remind them that they are not alone. The American people and our allies, friends all over the world, stand with you and are thinking about you and are praying for you. ” On Sunday, there were about 320 people, most of them Latino, in Pulse shortly after 2 a. m. when Mr. Mateen entered with an assault rifle similar to an and a semiautomatic handgun. Angel Colon was exchanging goodbye hugs with friends when the shooting began, and like much of the panicked crowd he ran for the door. But three bullets hit his leg and he fell. “I tried to get back up but everyone started running everywhere — I got trampled over, and I shattered and broke my bones in my left leg,” he said at Orlando Regional Medical Center, where he was being treated. “All I could do was just lay down while everyone was just running on top of me, trying to get to where they had to be. ” He heard more gunshots and screaming as the gunman apparently went to a back room and then returned. “He’s shooting everyone that’s already dead on the floor, making sure they’re dead,” Mr. Colon said. “I look over, and he shoots the girl next to me. And I’m just there laying down and I’m thinking ‘I’m next, I’m dead.’ So I don’t know how, but by the glory of God, he shoots toward my head but it hits my hand, and then he shoots me again and it hits the side of my hip. I had no reaction. I was just prepared to just stay there laying down so he won’t know that I’m alive. ” Then the killer traded gunfire with arriving police officers, retreating to another room. An officer entered, found Mr. Colon still alive, and dragged him through broken glass, cutting his back and legs, to the street and then to a nearby Wendy’s, where, he recalled,“there’s just bodies everywhere. ” “I wish I could remember his face or his name,” Mr. Colon said of the officer. “I’m grateful for him. ” Ms. Murray, 18, arrived in Orlando on Saturday from Philadelphia with her friends, Ms. Carter and Tiara Parker, on a trip to celebrate her high school graduation, and they had just ordered an Uber car to take them back to their hotel when they heard a barrage of gunfire. Ms. Carter said that she and Ms. Parker fled the club, then realized Ms. Murray was not with them and ran back inside to get her. By then, the way out was blocked, she said, and the three of them ran deeper into Pulse. Like a number of other people, including Angel Santiago Jr. they took shelter in a bathroom several including Ms. Carter and her friends, cowered in a large handicapped stall. She and Mr. Santiago told their stories to reporters on Tuesday at Florida Hospital, where they were being treated. “We just continued to hear gunfire, and I just remember thinking, when is it going to stop?” Mr. Santiago said. “It kept getting louder, closer, and I could actually start to smell, I don’t know, I guess it was gunpowder. ” Then the gunman entered, spraying the room with bullets, aiming primarily at the walls of the toilet stalls. “He was shooting his machine gun, so we’re all scrambling around the bathroom, screaming at the top of our lungs,” Ms. Carter said. “People were getting hit by bullets, blood is everywhere. ” A bullet went through her right thigh, shattering the femur, and lodged in her left thigh both of her friends were also hit. Lying on the floor in a spreading pool of blood, she looked under the divider into the next stall. “I could see piles of bodies laying over the toilet seat and slumped over, and the bottom of the toilet was slumped over with handprints and blood,” she said. Turning her head in other directions, she saw more dead and wounded. “At that point, I was just like, `I really don’t think I’m going to get out of here.’ ” Mr. Santiago was shot in the left foot and right knee, and the friend he was with was more seriously hurt. The gunman left the room, he said, and “we were just trying to be as quiet as possible because we didn’t want to attract him back to us. ” Unable to walk, Mr. Santiago dragged himself out of the bathroom, past prone and broken bodies, to the front room of the club, where he found police officers waiting. “I yelled, I said, ‘There are people shot, people who are killed in the bathroom, we need help,’” he recalled. Mr. Mateen returned to the bathroom, and it was there, Ms. Carter said, that he called 911 to talk with the police, and she heard him pledge allegiance to the Islamic State. He said “that the reason why he’s doing this is because he wants America to stop bombing his country. ” Later, he addressed his victims directly, asking if any of them were black, explaining: “You know, I don’t have a problem with black people. This is about my country. You guys have suffered enough. ” He got angry when people’s cellphones beeped or rang, and demanded that people turn them over, she said, and he made comments like “we’ve got the snipers outside” indicating that he was not alone, or that he was talking with accomplices. After a standoff, she heard explosions as the police started their final assault on the club, trying to blow a hole in an outer wall. His rifle had apparently jammed, she said, and he used the pistol to resume firing, shooting three people who lay on the floor. Someone — she did not know who — got between her and the gun, and was shot. “It wasn’t for that person shielding me, I would have been shot, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. Doctors at Orlando Regional Medical Center said they ordinarily would get some warning that wounded were coming, as well as information about the number of patients and their conditions. But not in this case, with a chaotic mass shooting just blocks away. Patients arrived in trucks and cars, and on foot, as well as in ambulances. “We quickly got about five patients, and that was a lot for us, and we thought maybe that was going to be it,” Dr. Kathryn Bondani said. “And then they started lining up in the hallway. ” patients were taken to the medical center, the region’s only trauma center, and nine of them died quickly. No other patients have died since that night. Of the six patients in critical condition, Dr. Michael Cheatham said, “I suspect that they will survive, but my concern is that they will have lasting harm from this, in terms of their functionality. ” On Monday night, thousands of people gathered on a grassy knoll in downtown Orlando for a candlelight vigil that was by turns defiant and melancholy. “We have come together as a force here in Orlando that cannot be broken,” said Terry DeCarlo, the executive director of the L. G. B. T. Center of Central Florida. Mourners joined in the sports chant: “I believe that we will win. ” But moments later, during about 10 minutes of silence, tears flowed and embraces tightened as the crowd lifted candles into the air and a church bell tolled. “Numb,” Elayane Merriwether, a bartender who lost a in the shooting, said of the city’s mood. “People just keep crying. People don’t know what to say to each other. I think a lot of people are still in shock. ” | 0fake |
As Clinton builds on a strong debate, Trump lobs attacks and complaints | Hillary Clinton moved to capitalize Tuesday on a sharp-edged debate performance that exposed vulnerabilities for Donald Trump, excoriating his values and character in an effort to expand her coalition of women, minorities and young voters.
Trump, meanwhile, scrambled to move his campaign forward. While the Republican nominee insisted that he was not unnerved, he and his advisers grasped at excuses to explain why he did not perform better at the first presidential debate Monday night.
Trump on Tuesday was unrepentant and eager to defend his past, denigrating a former beauty pageant winner whom he targeted as his latest foil and vowing to attack Clinton over her husband’s marital infidelities in their next showdown.
In a country divided over two historically unpopular candidates, Trump’s turn is unlikely to shake his core support. But Democrats said they felt assured that Trump’s hot temperament, scattered demeanor and series of statements that left him exposed to further scrutiny would make it increasingly difficult for him to win over the undecided voters he has been courting, especially moderate white women.
“I look back as a former practitioner and say, ‘Is there anything Donald Trump did to convince somebody who wasn’t in his column to be for him?’ ” said David Plouffe, President Obama’s former campaign manager. “I have a hard time thinking there’s many of those people. I don’t think he lost anybody. But that’s not his challenge now. He’s got to add.”
Clinton was ebullient as she returned to the campaign trail Tuesday in Raleigh, N.C., and strove to keep alive the controversies that marred Trump’s debate performance.
“The real point is about temperament and fitness and qualification to hold the most important, hardest job in the world, and I think people saw last night some very clear differences between us,” Clinton told reporters aboard her campaign plane en route to North Carolina.
Trump did little to change the subject. In a Tuesday morning interview on Fox News Channel, he said debate moderator Lester Holt, the anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” was biased, and the Republican complained about the quality of his microphone. Clinton jabbed him for that, telling reporters, “Anybody who complains about the microphone is not having a good night.”
[Trump’s attacks on her weight are ‘a bad dream’ for former Miss Universe]
Trump also disparaged a former Miss Universe pageant winner, Alicia Machado, for her physique. In the debate, Clinton raised Trump’s past comments about the Venezuela-born woman, who was crowned Miss Universe at age 19 in 1996.
“He called this woman ‘Miss Piggy,’ and then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she is Latina,” Clinton said in one of the debate’s more electric exchanges.
The next morning, Trump offered an indignant defense of how he dealt with Machado when he was a partner in the company that owned the Miss Universe contest.
“She was the worst we ever had,” he said on Fox, adding: “She gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.”
The Clinton campaign sought to advance the story across media platforms, releasing a Web video featuring the beauty queen-turned-actor, now a U.S. citizen who lives in California, and arranging a conference call for reporters with Machado, who described the election as “like a bad dream.”
Like Trump’s feud this summer with the Muslim parents of a dead U.S. soldier, the Machado episode rapidly emerged as a microcosm of the campaign — and a test of whether Trump can expand his support beyond his base of aggrieved white voters, most of them men.
Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican strategist who has been critical of the party’s nominee, said Trump’s comments about Machado were “hugely tone deaf.” The debate overall, he said, was for many Republicans “an ‘Oh, crap’ moment. If you thought he had a spring in his step for the last few weeks and was getting back in the hunt, that’s pretty much gone.”
Few of Trump’s supporters went so far as to crown him the victor. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who has been a weather vane for the Republican leadership during this election season, was supportive though muted at a Tuesday news conference. He told reporters that Trump gave a “unique, Donald Trump response to the status quo.”
“I think he gave a spirited argument,” Ryan said, “and I think he passed a number of thresholds.”
Trump’s backers insisted that the debate would not damage his standing in the close race with Clinton. Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said, “As far as the temperament, that’s how he’s been for the last 15 months. It got him to the top. . . . He does have the feistiness that I think 51 percent of the American people will like.”
William J. Bennett, who served in President Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet, said of Trump: “When he loses his temper a little bit, many people see that as passion and as someone who’s engaged in the fight and in what he believes. People forgive that — and a leopard can’t change his spots.”
[Why even Republicans think Clinton won the first debate]
It will take several days before the political impact of Monday’s debate becomes clear, but many Republicans said they were bracing for Clinton to get a bump in the polls. An estimated 84 million people watched the clash at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., making it the most-watched presidential debate in history.
The event reverberated around the globe. Former Mexican president Vicente Fox said Trump’s behavior should alarm world leaders because he revealed himself to be “ignorant” and “dangerous.”
“When he speaks about the geoeconomic situation and the geopolitical situation and terrorism, he’s absolutely ignorant, and he’s only provoking us democratic leaders from around the world to reject everything he’s proposing,” Fox, who watched the debate on Mexican television, said in a telephone interview. “He is an imperialistic gringo.”
In the United States, the risk for Trump is that a negative impression sets in on shows such as NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” on social media and in workplace conversations.
Democrats sought to taunt Trump on his uneven performance, particularly given his regular attacks on Clinton’s “stamina” and appearance.
“He seemed unable to handle that big stage, and I really did feel that by the end, with the kind of snorting, the water gulping and the leaning on the lectern, that he just seemed really out of gas,” said Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
Trump previewed an even more combative second debate, Oct. 9 in St. Louis, by saying he might “hit her harder,” perhaps over former president Bill Clinton’s affairs.
“I really eased up because I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings,” Trump said on Fox, saying he would have brought up “the many affairs that Bill Clinton had” but held back because the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea, was in the audience.
“I didn’t think it was worth the shot,” he said. “I didn’t think it was nice.”
Hillary Clinton shrugged off the threat, telling reporters: “He can run his campaign however he chooses. I will continue to talk about what I want to do for the American people.”
Clinton campaigned at a community college gymnasium in Raleigh to whoops and loud applause. “One down, two to go,” she said of the debates.
During a campaign rally in Melbourne, Fla., Tuesday evening, Trump said that Clinton is “a woman that I think is virtually incompetent, certainly as secretary of state.” He called her incompetent repeatedly throughout the rally.
“We’re going to get rid of that crooked woman. She’s a crooked woman. She’s a very, very dishonest woman,” Trump said.
For Democrats, Trump provided what Plouffe called “an embarrassment of riches” at the debate — a series of controversial statements and unresolved, damaging questions. He seemed to affirm that he paid no income taxes; he made side remarks and pained expressions while Clinton praised the vibrancy of African Americans; he said it was a smart business strategy to profit from the housing crash.
Vice President Biden seized on that last point at a rally for Clinton in Philadelphia, where he charged that Trump has no “moral center.”
“This is a guy who said it was good business for him to see the housing market fail,” Biden said. “What in the hell is he talking about?”
Clinton and a brigade of high-profile surrogates plan to continue using Trump’s debate comments against him. She will campaign in New Hampshire on Wednesday with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), hoping to energize young voters there with a discussion of college affordability, while first lady Michelle Obama will stump across Pennsylvania on Thursday.
“He put a lot on the table — a lot of things that are not true and a lot of views that we think are counter to where most voters are,” said Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director. “It won’t end tomorrow. There’s a lot that will live on from this debate.”
Anne Gearan in Raleigh, N.C., Jenna Johnson in Melbourne, Fla., and Jose DelReal in Washington contributed to this report. | 0fake |
6 SYRIAN, 1 LIBYAN MIGRANT ARRESTED After Setting Sleeping Homeless Man On Fire | Who still thinks Trump was wrong to say we need to halt all immigration from countries who hate us until; we can properly vet them?Seven migrants have been arrested after a homeless man was set on fire on Christmas Eve at a Berlin subway station. The men, aged 15 to 21, are suspected of torching the victim as he slept on a platform bench at Sch nleinstra e station. Six of the suspects are Syrian and one is Lybian and an attempted murder investigation has been launched.Thomas Neuendorf, the vice chief of the press office at Berlin Police, told Bild that detectives believe the 21-year-old to have been the main perpetrator.He, along with his alleged accomplices, were arrested on yesterday.After torching the homeless man, the suspected assailants hopped onto a train to make their getaway.CCTV footage captured them watching and laughing as the man was burning on the platform.It appeared they were celebrating, according to local press. Remarkably, the victim escaped almost unscathed, thanks to the rapid intervention of several witnesses.Via: Daily Mail Read more: Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook | 1real |
France's Le Pen congratulates German far-right AfD | PARIS (Reuters) - French far-right leader Marine Le Pen congratulated the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on its breakthrough result in Sunday s German parliamentary election. Bravo to our AfD allies for this historic showing! It is a new sign that the people of Europe are waking up, tweeted Le Pen, the leader of France s National Front who reached the run-off of the French presidential election in May. According to early projections, the AfD was set not only to enter the national parliament for the first time, but to become Germany s third-biggest party with 13.5 percent. It is the first time that the far-right has been represented in the parliament for more than half a century. | 0fake |
North Korea warns of 'more gift packages' for United States | GENEVA (Reuters) - North Korea is ready to send more gift packages to the United States, one of its top diplomats said on Tuesday, dismissing the international uproar over his country s latest and biggest nuclear weapons test. Han Tae Song, ambassador of the Democratic People s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to the United Nations in Geneva, was addressing the U.N.-sponsored Conference on Disarmament two days after his country detonated its sixth nuclear test explosion. I am proud of saying that just two days ago on the third of September, DPRK successfully carried out a hydrogen bomb test for intercontinental ballistic rocket under its plan for building a strategic nuclear force, Han told the Geneva forum. The recent self-defense measures by my country, DPRK, are a gift package addressed to none other than the U.S., Han said. The U.S. will receive more gift packages from my country as long as its relies on reckless provocations and futile attempts to put pressure on the DPRK, he added without elaborating. U.S. disarmament ambassador Robert Wood sought to turn the tables on Han by using his language against him. With regard to the so-called gift packages that the North is presenting, my recommendation to the North would be, instead of spending inordinate amounts of money on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, that it give its people the gift package of peace with their neighbors, economic development and an opportunity to rejoin the family of nations. Han said military measures being taken by North Korea were an exercise of restraint and justified self-defense right to counter the ever-growing and decade-long U.S. nuclear threat and hostile policy aimed at isolating my country. Pressure or sanctions will never work on my country, Han declared, adding: The DPRK will never under any circumstances put its nuclear deterrence on the negotiating table. Wood said that North Korea had defied the international community once again with its test. We look forward to working with our partners in the (U.N. Security) Council with regard to a new resolution that will put some of the strongest sanctions possible on the DPRK, he told the conference. Advances in the regime s nuclear and missile program are a threat to us all ... now is the time to say tests, threats and destabilizing actions will no longer be tolerated, Wood said. It can no longer be business as usual with this regime. The White House said on Monday President Donald Trump had agreed in principle to scrap a warhead weight limit on South Korea s missiles following the North s latest test. The United States accused North Korea s trading partners of aiding its nuclear ambitions and said Pyongyang was begging for war . | 0fake |
PRESIDENT TRUMP PREDICTED THIS! Riots In Swedish Muslim No-Go Area Prove Trump’s Point [Video] | 1real | |
‘Jesus Woz Ere’ Inscription Found On Slab In Christ’s Tomb | 0 Add Comment
THE burial slab Jesus Christ was said to have been laid upon following his crucifixion has been photographed for the first time with what appears to be the inscription ‘Jesus woz ere’.
The writing, which has not been seen since 1555, was recently excavated during renovation work on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, and has sent archaeologists into a frenzy.
“This is the only known physical writing of Jesus,” said Harris Mouzakis, an assistant professor of civil engineering at National Technical University who is working on the project, “He obviously left this as a sign for his followers. It’s an amazingly cheeky statement, as if he was taunting the people who crucified him, and giving them the proverbial middle finger”.
Experts were left shocked to find the inscription was still intact following almost 1,600 years of being covered by marble cladding.
“We spotted the Jesus graffiti immediately after we removed the top layer of marble and dusted it off,” added Mouzakis, “His writing is very neat, as you would expect from the son of God. Hopefully this will put any doubts about the origin of the tomb to bed”.
Jesus Christ was crucified nearly 2,000 years ago on the Hill of Calvary after claiming he was the king of the Jews. It is understood he then came back to life three days later in the tomb, wrote Jesus woz ere, spent a few days freaking out his apostles, before then levitating into the sky, through the earth’s atmosphere and back to his dad’s place in heaven. | 1real |
Cartel Robberies Continue Along Mexican Border State Highways | SAN FERNANDO, Tamaulipas — Heavily armed criminals continue robbing and kidnapping unsuspecting motorists that travel along the state highways that connect the border region with the rest of the country. In one of the most recent cases, a group of gunmen attacked a married couple near this city. [The attack and kidnapping took place last week when a couple had been riding in a Dodge Caravan from the Mexican State of San Luis Potosi to the border city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas. According to the complaint that the wife gave authorities, between 3 a. m. and 4 a. m. the couple was crossing an area known as Las Norias in the municipality of San Fernando. In the woman’s account of events, she claimed that the gunmen ordered them to stop. Acting out of fear, her husband tried to speed off however the gunmen fired at their tires. The husband lost control of the vehicle, going off the road and crashing into a local shop. The woman appears to have passed out during the crash, while the gunmen went toward her husband and took him at gunpoint. This kidnapping marks the third case of disappearances that have been officially recorded by authorities in the areas around San Fernando. Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by “J. A. Espinoza” from Matamoros, Tamaulipas. | 0fake |
Gorka: ‘I Guess the Obama Administration Were Islamophobes, as Well,’ Since They Created List of Nations for Trump Immigration Order | Dr. Sebastian Gorka, deputy adviser to President Trump and former National Security editor for Breitbart News, addressed criticisms of the president’s revised immigration order on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily. [SiriusXM host Alex Marlow began with the charge that President Trump’s executive order is a disguised “Muslim ban” or the beginning of a “slippery slope” to block all Muslim immigration to the United States. “Well, then I guess the Obama administration were Islamophobes, as well, because the list of seven nations — which we’ve actually reduced to six, excluding a very large country called Iraq — that list was inherited from the Obama administration’s analysis,” Gorka pointed out. “The fact is, we agree with the threat analysis from the Obama administration, which also had concurrence from Congress, as well, that these are the seven nations that are most problematic when it comes to national security vetting for immigration and for refugees,” he said. “And again, I cannot make this point enough times: if there were any dread ulterior motive to this executive order with regards to Islam or Muslim nations, why is the largest Muslim nation in the world, Indonesia, not included? Why is the largest Arab Muslim nation in the world, Egypt, not included?” he asked. “This is about national security, very very simply. ” Marlow quoted an ACLU interview on National Public Radio that revealed that the crux of the argument against the new executive order will be President Trump’s campaign rhetoric, in which he referred to a “Muslim ban. ” “That’s incredibly telling,” said Gorka. “It really is part and parcel of what I call the fake news phenomena. You look at the media, and they always focus in on half a sentence, on a phrase, and believe they can generate stories out of that. That’s the same in this case. When you’re using shorthand for a very, very significant national security exercise, it’s the broader instrument that needs to be analyzed — especially if it goes to a court of law, where somebody wishes to use legal instruments to analyze it. ” “It’s good to hear they’ve tipped their hand, but yet again, if you look at the order, the text of what it predicates and why it was brought, there’s absolutely no way — in the courts or outside of the courts, using common sense — to imply anything other than this is a national security measure that is in the purview of the president,” he said. “Only the president has the prerogative, since the 1950s, to determine who comes into the United States and against what metrics they are measured. That’s not disputable. That cannot be parsed in a court of law. It is laid down in national statute. The ACLU may have an opinion, but the law remains the law. ” Marlow observed that some critics on the Right do not think the order went far enough, and he asked if it was meant as a negotiation or stalling tactic. “We start from simply a determination of where the threats are. Again, the list can be shortened. You saw that it was shortened in the last month. It can be increased. There can be more nations added to it. It’s a temporary measure — very important. This is 90 days, so it’s something that is about the review of the system,” Gorka replied. “You look at those seven nations, and there’s one thing that links them,” he said. “You take Iran out of it. Iran is a special case because they’ve been a state sponsor of terrorism since 1979. Every other country is home to the new Caliphate, the Islamic State, ISIS, or is a hotbed for activity. ” “This isn’t randomly chosen nations picked out of a hat. This is the most clear and present danger from individuals in active war zones, that have groups who say — have said this in English in their propaganda product — ‘We will exploit the refugee streams and the migrant streams to insert our individuals, our operatives, into those flows.’ It’s just hard, cold analysis,” said Gorka. Marlow cited a report from Fox News that about 300 refugees are currently the subjects of FBI terrorism investigations. Gorka said this was just part of a broader picture of the terrorist threat. “There have been, since September the 11, just under 600 successful terrorist prosecutions in the United States, in the last 16 years,” he noted. “Approximately half of those put people in prison who were not born in the United States, about half of them. And of the number that were not U. S. nationals, about three dozen were actually refugees or had asylum status. ” “So again, this isn’t hyperbole,” he stressed. “This isn’t fictional hypothesizing. It’s based on the facts of what’s happened in the last 16 years, and most importantly, Alex, it’s about preventing the next attack. Good isn’t reactive. You don’t wait until 120 people have been massacred at a rock concert in Paris. You don’t wait until somebody steals a truck and mows down 80 people, as in Nice. What you want to do is to prevent the bad guys coming in, and that’s exactly why the president brought his order,” said Gorka. Marlow quoted a complaint from the Powerline blog that Trump’s executive order does not go far enough to consider the possibility that “sons and daughters of those who will still be admitted” could become terrorists. “That’s another front in the war against global jihadism or radical Islamic terrorism,” said Gorka. “The author of the article should be fully aware of the fact that this administration understands that not all terrorism is done by foreign nationals or refugees,” he said in response to the Powerline piece. “We’ve seen this. We’ve seen this with Nidal Hassan. We’ve seen this with other individuals here in the United States. Yes, there will be other measures taken that look at the issue of what you do with people who choose the life of jihad as a U. S. national or as somebody who grows to the age of maturity and then decides to go down that path of killing their fellow American or plotting to do so. ” “Remember, this is just one executive order. Nobody in the administration is positing that we are solving all counterterrorism issues with this one executive order,” he promised. On the subject of detainees released from Guantanamo Bay and returning to terrorism, which President Trump addressed in a Tuesday morning tweet, Gorka said, “We’ve got to change the policies that we’ve seen occur over the last eight years. ” “We have an unbelievably high recidivism rate from Guantanamo Bay. The president has been clear that he understands the value of Guantanamo Bay,” Gorka said. “What needs to be understood about the facility is that it’s not just a detention facility. It’s also a very, very important intelligence asset if you look at the kinds of people that we’ve put in there and the kinds of intelligence we’ve gleaned from them. ” “There’s no ideology driving this administration that is about feeling good and releasing people when we feel that they’re no longer a threat. If these individuals have chosen the life of jihad and are committed to it, that means in perpetuity. Unless they distance themselves from it and reject it, they remain a threat to everything this nation stands for,” he declared. Gorka said President Trump’s next priority is “the finalization and deployment of the plan. ” “It’s been drawn up by the generals, by Secretary Mattis, and now the final touches will be put to that plan. The intent is — and it will happen the president said so in his joint session, when he addressed the joint session of Congress — that we will obliterate the Islamic State and wipe this type of terrorism from the face of the earth. The next large muscle movement is going to be the plan’s implementation,” he said. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. LISTEN: | 0fake |
Extension of Iran Sanctions Act passes U.S. Congress | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate passed a 10-year extension of sanctions against Iran on Thursday, sending the measure to the White House for President Barack Obama to sign into law and delaying any potentially tougher actions until next year. The measure passed by 99-0. It passed the House of Representatives nearly unanimously in November, and congressional aides said they expected Obama would sign it. The ISA will expire on Dec. 31 if not renewed. The White House had not pushed for an extension, but had not raised serious objections. Members of Congress and administration officials said the renewal of the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA) would not violate the nuclear agreement with Iran reached last year. “While we do not think that an extension of ISA is necessary, we do not believe that a clean extension would be a violation of the JCPOA (Iran deal),” a senior administration official said. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said recently the extension would breach the agreement and threatened retaliation. Democrats who backed the accord said they did not believe the ISA extension violated the pact because it continued a sanctions regime that was already in place. They said they had not heard such objections from U.S. partners. “I have not heard strident objections from our key allies in the JCPOA,” Democratic Senator Chris Coons told reporters. The agreement was signed by the United States, Britain, Russia, France, China, Germany and Iran. Congress’ action did not address the fate of the nuclear pact, which was opposed by every Republican in the Senate and House. Lawmakers said it would make it easier for sanctions to be quickly reimposed if Iran violated the deal. Republican U.S. President-elect Donald Trump railed against the pact as he campaigned for the White House. Many other members of his party, which also controls Congress, have called for the new administration to tear up the agreement. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker said the renewal ensures Trump can reimpose sanctions Obama lifted under the deal, in which Iran curbed its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. “Extending the Iran Sanctions Act ... ensures President-elect Trump and his administration have the tools necessary to push back against the regime’s hostile actions,” Corker said in a statement. Trump becomes president on Jan. 20. Corker has been mentioned as a possible Trump secretary of state. (Fixes typo in word “objections” in paragraph 8.) | 0fake |
U.S. Republican questions timing of $1.7 billion Iran payment, hostage release | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A powerful U.S. lawmaker on Wednesday demanded Secretary of State John Kerry provide an explanation of a $1.7 billion claim settlement paid to Iran just as Tehran released American prisoners last month. Republican Ed Royce, chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote that the timing of the settlement and the administration’s failure to brief Congress “has led some to express concern that the payment represents a de facto ‘ransom’ for the release of American hostages.” Royce asked Kerry to provide by Feb. 17 information including lists of all U.S. officials who participated in negotiations with Iran over the settlement agreement, the prisoner release and the nuclear agreement announced in July. He also asked for legal analyses of the dispute, a timeline of negotiations over the dispute and an explanation of how the interest payment in the settlement was calculated, among other information. On Jan. 17, the State Department said the United States and Iran had settled a longstanding claim at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, releasing to Tehran $400 million in funds frozen since 1981 plus $1.3 billion in interest. State Department spokesman John Kirby said Kerry would respond to the letter. He did not offer further specifics on when and how. “We can confirm receipt of Chairman Royce’s letter, and as with all Congressional correspondence, we’ll respond as appropriate,” Kirby said. U.S. Republican lawmakers, who are strongly critical of Democratic President Barack Obama’s Iran policy, have been questioning the payment for weeks. No Republican supported the nuclear agreement when Congress had the opportunity to review it last year. After the settlement was announced, Obama said it was a better alternative than letting more interest accumulate while waiting for a legal judgment. | 0fake |
MAYORAL CANDIDATE In DIE-HARD DEMOCRAT City May Prove That 2016 Trump Win Was Just The Beginning of The End For Democrats | If John Persinger wins the mayoral race in Erie, Pa., next month, it just might be the greatest local political upset in America this century. A Republican candidate has not been elected mayor here since 1961, when JFK was president.Tall, witty, energetic and razor-sharp, Persinger is not the guy you d expect to settle in a town like Erie. He is the kind of person who leaves, moves on to blazing success elsewhere and never returns.Persinger s grandfather, John DeMarco, was the son of Italian immigrants who was supposed to take over the family grocery store but instead went to medical school and ended up delivering more than 12,000 Erie babies.Before he was born, Persinger s parents moved to the suburbs outside New York City, but young John spent his summers with his grandparents in this port city in northwestern Pennsylvania. He got his undergrad degree at Harvard, where he was captain of the swim team; he also competed in the 2000 US Olympic team trials.From there he served as an aide in the George W. Bush White House and then chief of staff at the US Embassy in Australia, where he met his wife, a journalist fluent in Arabic. He left government for Notre Dame Law School, but when the couple started to have children, they decided Erie held the most promise for their young family.In many ways, they are correct. The city is affordable, the housing is charming. It is both a college town (there are three: Mercyhurst, Gannon and Penn State Behrend) and a tourist town (miles and miles of beaches along the lake). It boasts some of the top medical facilities in the country, and it is also a company town (Erie Insurance is one of the top employers).But it is also a struggling city, where schools are hurting financially, the opioid epidemic is rampant and the manufacturing base is collapsing all factors that led Erie County residents to vote for a Republican president in 2016, the first since Ronald Reagan.The city of Erie, however, is a different story Hillary Clinton won all 69 of its voting districts over Donald Trump.So can 35-year-old Persinger convince his townspeople to turn red? It s not impossible. And while he is nothing like the president in terms of temperament and style, the two politicians do share a key quality tapping into voters willingness for change. The fourth-largest city in the state, Erie has a population just under 100,000 and a 5.6 percent unemployment rate.As Persinger walked the shop floor of Fralo Industries, a sheet-metal fabricating plant, he talked to each worker, asking what they were making. One young man said he was building a new invention for college dorms that puts laundry in a shoot and allows students to track its progress until it s ready for pickup in a pod. Another worker was steering a high-tech laser.Persinger gives each worker his full attention, nodding and taking notes. He seems unbothered by the fact he s a Republican in a city with a nearly 3-1 Democratic registration advantage. Here, people are born blue.It doesn t seem to ruffle him that his rival, Democrat Joe Schember, is one of the nicest guys in the world and has been active in the community for over 40 years. Plus, they re neighbors (they even live on the same street). Everyone asks me about my odds. I am confident if I run a good, honest campaign, I can win, Persinger said. I didn t take time away from my family and waste the time of voters . . . not to win. Persinger is forward-thinking and energetic; he drives around in a mobile campaign office (a 22-year-old converted RV) with his name and photo shrink-wrapped around the entire vehicle. He visits neighborhoods, churches, community centers, mosques, synagogues and knocks on doors where no Democratic or Republican mayoral candidate has been for decades, especially in the African-American and Hispanic communities.And he listens. It is a trait that has not gone unnoticed in the black communities who for years have had their votes taken for granted by the Democrats and ignored by the Republicans.Just ask Steve McLallen, who got a visit from Persinger earlier this year. Hey, I just want to let you know I appreciate your willingness to come and listen to our concerns, McLallen told Persinger as he shook hands with the GOP candidate. You have made an impression and impact on me, not just by traveling to our neighborhoods or where we work, but actually asking us what we need. A longtime Democrat, McLallen said he is voting for Persinger.Jim Baer, meanwhile, is looking for new blood in the mayor s office. A welder at Fralo, he s a Democrat who did not vote for Clinton or Trump but is tired of the same old politics. Look, we tried the old ways; we have had nothing but Democrats running this city and managing the decline. It is time to place someone young with different ideas and the willingness to listen in charge, he said.While neither candidate has invested in polling, both keep detailed data on their campaigns voter outreach and they know this race is close. For entire story: NYP | 1real |
Trump Quickly Jumped On Twitter To DEFEND Abusive Campaign Manager, And It’s APPALLING | If there were a contest to describe who the most grotesque, misogynistic and outright awful human beings on the planet are, Donald Trump and those who he surrounds himself with would likely top the list. Not only is Trump wildly sexist and racist, but he comes to the defense of those who abuse others in his name. He has said it at his campaign rallies for those who go after protesters, and now he s come out in full defense of his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who was caught on video brutally grabbing a reporter.Lewandowski, while at a campaign event on March 8th at Trump National Golf Club, grabbed then Breitbart News Network reporter Michelle Fields. She filed charges, and subsequently Lewandowski has now turned himself into the police.You can see here, via security footage, that Lewandowski, without a doubt, grabbed Fields:Newly released security footage of the Corey Lewandowski incident: https://t.co/O5tTflBb5C Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) March 29, 2016Yet, Trump is still jumping to the defense of his abusive campaign manager. Shortly after Lewandowski turned himself in, Trump tweeted out:Wow, Corey Lewandowski, my campaign manager and a very decent man, was just charged with assaulting a reporter. Look at tapes-nothing there! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2016And then he blames the victim like the good misogynist he is:Why aren't people looking at this reporters earliest statement as to what happened, that is before she found out the episode was on tape? Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2016THEN he tries to make up an excuse as to why she was being grabbed, turning it back on her:Victory press conference was over. Why is she allowed to grab me and shout questions? Can I press charges? pic.twitter.com/qbW2RjkINX Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2016Why is this reporter touching me as I leave news conference? What is in her hand?? pic.twitter.com/HQB8dl0fhn Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2016His tweets are literally going from bad to worse.The right thing to do would be to acknowledge the abuse and swiftly fire Lewandowski, but instead he s choosing to victim-shame and back up his brownshirt flunky.It s beyond belief that people still support Donald Trump. Either they are racist and/or misogynistic themselves, hate themselves, or are simply too stupid and likely cannot even tie their own shoe laces. We need to make sure Trump stays as far away from the Oval Office as possible. No matter who, we need to vote blue. Don t let a vote of pure conscience and ego let this country slip into the hands of a man who will most definitely have his hands on nuclear codes. Wake up, people. This race is bigger than ourselves and even our nation. It affects the whole world.Featured Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images Twitter | 1real |
Potential Conflicts Around the Globe for Trump, the Businessman President - The New York Times | MANILA — On Thanksgiving Day, a Philippine developer named Jose E. B. Antonio hosted a company anniversary bash at one of Manila’s poshest hotels. He had much to be thankful for. In October, he had quietly been named a special envoy to the United States by the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte. Mr. Antonio was nearly finished building a $150 million tower in Manila’s financial district — a symbol of affluence and capitalism, which bluntly promotes itself with the slogan “Live Above the Rest. ” And now his partner on the project, Donald J. Trump, had just been elected president of the United States. After the election, Mr. Antonio flew to New York for a private meeting at Trump Tower with the ’s children, who have been involved in the Manila project from the beginning, as have Mr. Antonio’s children. The Trumps and Antonios have other ventures in the works, including resorts in the Philippines, Mr. Antonio’s son Robbie Antonio said. “We will continue to give you products that you can enjoy and be proud of,” the elder Mr. Antonio, one of the richest men in the Philippines, told the 500 friends, employees and customers gathered for his celebration in Manila. Mr. Antonio’s combination of jobs — he is a business partner with Mr. Trump, while also representing the Philippines in its relationship with the United States and the — is hardly inconsequential, given some of the weighty issues on the diplomatic table. Among them, Mr. Duterte has urged “a separation” from the United States and has called for American troops to exit the country in two years’ time. His antidrug crusade has resulted in the summary killings of thousands of suspected criminals without trial, prompting criticism from the Obama administration. Situations like these are already leading some former government officials from both parties to ask if America’s reaction to events around the world could potentially be shaded, if only slightly, by the Trump family’s financial ties with foreign players. They worry, too, that in some countries those connections could compromise American efforts to criticize the corrupt intermingling of state power with vast business enterprises controlled by the political elite. “It is uncharted territory, really in the history of the republic, as we have never had a president with such an empire both in the United States and overseas,” said Michael J. Green, who served on the National Security Council in the administration of George W. Bush, and before that at the Defense Department. The globe is dotted with such potential conflicts. Mr. Trump’s companies have business operations in at least 20 countries, with a particular focus on the developing world, including outposts in nations like India, Indonesia and Uruguay, according to a New York Times analysis of his presidential campaign financial disclosures. What’s more, the true extent of Mr. Trump’s global financial entanglements is unclear, since he has refused to release his tax returns and has not made public a list of his lenders. In an interview with The Times on Tuesday, Mr. Trump boasted again about the global reach of his business — and his family’s ability to keep it running after he takes office. “I’ve built a very great company and it’s a big company and it’s all over the world,” Mr. Trump said, adding later: “I don’t care about my company. It doesn’t matter. My kids run it. ” In a written statement, his spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, said Mr. Trump and his family were committed to addressing any issues related to his financial holdings. “Vetting of various structures and immediate transfer of the business remains a top priority for both Trump, his adult children and his executives,” she said. But a review by The Times of these business dealings identified a menu of the kinds of complications that could create a running source of controversy for Mr. Trump, as well as tensions between his priorities as president and the needs and objectives of his companies. In Brazil, for example, the beachfront Trump Hotel Rio de Janeiro — one of Mr. Trump’s many branding deals, in which he does not have an equity stake — is part of a broad investigation by a federal prosecutor who is examining whether illicit commissions and bribes resulted in apparent favoritism by two pension funds that invested in the project. Several of Mr. Trump’s real estate ventures in India — where he has more projects underway than in any location outside North America — are being built through companies with family ties to India’s most important political party. This makes it more likely that Indian government officials will do special favors benefiting Mr. Trump’s projects, including pressuring banks to extend favorable loans. In Ireland and Scotland, executives from Mr. Trump’s golf courses have been waging two separate battles with local officials. The most recent centers on the Trump Organization’s plans to build a sea wall at the course on the Irish coast. Some environmentalists say the wall could destroy an endangered snail’s habitat — a dispute that will soon involve the president of the United States. And in Turkey, officials including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a religiously conservative Muslim, demanded that Mr. Trump’s name be removed from Trump Towers in Istanbul after he called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States. More recently, after Mr. Trump came to the defense of Mr. Erdogan — suggesting that he had the right to crack down harshly on dissidents after a failed coup — the calls for action against Trump Towers have stopped, fueling worries that Mr. Trump’s policies toward Turkey might be shaped by his commercial interests. Mr. Trump has acknowledged a conflict of interest in Turkey. “I have a little conflict of interest because I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” he said during a radio interview last year with Stephen K. Bannon, the Breitbart News executive who has since been designated his chief White House strategist. “It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers — two towers, instead of one. Not the usual one. It’s two. ” These tangled ties already have some members of Congress — including at least one Republican representative — calling on Mr. Trump to provide more information on his international operations, or perhaps for a congressional inquiry into them. “You rightly criticized Hillary for Clinton Foundation,” Representative Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, said in a Twitter message on Monday. “If you have contracts govts, it’s certainly a big deal, too. #DrainTheSwamp” David J. Kramer, who served as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor during the Bush administration, said Mr. Trump’s financial entanglements could undermine decades of efforts by Democratic and Republican presidents to promote government transparency — and to use the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to stop contractors from paying bribes to secure government work abroad. “This will make it a little harder to be able to go out and proselytize around these things,” Mr. Kramer said. Even if Mr. Trump and his family seek no special advantages from foreign governments, officials overseas may feel compelled to help the Trump family by, say, accelerating building permits or pushing more business to one of the new president’s hotels or golf courses, according to several former State Department officials. “The working assumption on behalf of all these foreign government officials will be that there is an advantage to doing business with the Trump organization,” said Michael H. Fuchs, who was until recently deputy assistant secretary at the bureau of East Asian and Pacific affairs. “They will think it will ingratiate themselves with the Trump administration. And this will significantly complicate United States foreign policy and our relationships around the world. ” At the same time, Mr. Fuchs said, American diplomats in countries where Mr. Trump’s companies operate, fearful of a rebuke from Washington, may be reluctant to take steps that could frustrate business partners or political allies. Another question is, who will be responsible for security at the Trump Towers around the world, especially in the Middle East, which terrorism experts say may now become more appealing targets as symbols of American capitalism built in the name of the president? What is clear is that there has been very little division, in the weeks since the election, between Mr. Trump’s business interests and his transition effort, with the or his family greeting real estate partners from India and the Philippines in his office and Mr. Trump raising concerns about his golf course in Scotland with a prominent British politician. Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who is in charge of planning and development of the Trump Organization’s global network of hotels, has joined in conversations with at least three world leaders — of Turkey, Argentina and Japan — having access that could help her expand the brand worldwide. Mr. Trump, in the interview with The Times on Tuesday, acknowledged that his move to the Oval Office could help enrich his family. He cited his new hotel a few blocks from the White House, which the Trump Organization has urged diplomats to consider patronizing when in town to meet the president or his team. Federal law does not prevent Mr. Trump from taking actions that could benefit him and his family financially the president is exempt from most laws. But the Constitution, through what is called the emoluments clause, appears to prohibit him from taking payments or gifts from a foreign government entity, a standard that some legal experts say he may violate by renting space in Trump Tower in New York to the Bank of China or if he hosts foreign diplomats in one of his hotels. “I mean it could be that occupancy at that hotel will be because, psychologically, occupancy at that hotel will be probably a more valuable asset now than it was before, O. K.? The brand is certainly a hotter brand than it was before. I can’t help that, but I don’t care,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “The only thing that matters to me is running our country. ” Robert D. Blackwill, a former National Security Council member who also served as ambassador to India during the Bush administration, said Mr. Trump still had a chance to demonstrate that he could manage these challenges once he was sworn in. “Let’s listen and not prejudge,” said Mr. Blackwill, a Republican who was so critical of Mr. Trump that he endorsed Hillary Clinton. “I want to see what he does as president. ” Nation Under Pressure, Ventures Under Scrutiny Donald Trump Jr. the ’s oldest son, gushed with triumphalism when he announced a deal in 2014 to attach the family name to the Trump Hotel Rio de Janeiro, a lavish beachfront project featuring cavernous suites with private plunge pools and a nightclub. “This is an exciting time to develop our first project in South America and the perfect location to do so,” the younger Mr. Trump (his brother Eric is also involved in the family business) said at the time. But just two years later, the venture is embroiled in a criminal investigation in Brazil, pointing to unfulfilled promises that are casting a pall over both the Trump business empire and the in their dealings in Latin America’s largest country. Anselmo Henrique Cordeiro Lopes, a crusading federal prosecutor in the capital, Brasília, opened an investigation in the weeks before the American election into $40 million in investments made by two relatively small Brazilian pension funds in the Trump Hotel Rio. The Trump hotel inquiry is looking at why the funds — Serpro, which invests on behalf of retirees of a information technology firm, and Igeprev, which manages the pensions of public employees of the sparsely populated Tocantins State — put so much of their capital into the venture, which is owned by Mr. Trump’s Brazilian partner, LSH Barra. Back in 2014, the hotel might have seemed like a good deal. Brazil was about to host the World Cup soccer tournament that year, while Rio was preparing to be the venue for the 2016 Summer Olympics. At the same time, Rio, the nerve center of Brazil’s energy industry, had been bolstered by large offshore oil discoveries. But Brazil’s economy began to weaken in 2014, undermined by falling commodities prices, colossal graft scandals and political instability that culminated in the ouster this year of President Dilma Rousseff, who was replaced by her vice president, Michel Temer. The result: Brazil is still grappling with its most severe economic crisis in decades. The hotel officially opened for the Olympics, but months later remains unfinished. The top floors of the property, whose design evokes a futuristic pyramid, are closed. Parts of the hotel still resemble a construction site, including the second floor, where were supposed to mingle in a nightclub overlooking the Atlantic. The examination of the project by Mr. Lopes, the federal prosecutor, has already found a series of “highly suspicious” potential irregularities warranting a criminal investigation, according to court documents. “It is necessary to verify if the favoritism shown by the pension funds to LSH and the Trump Organization was due to the payment of illicit commissions and bribes,” Mr. Lopes said in documents filed in October. In his filings, Mr. Lopes said the size of the hotel investments relative to the overall holdings of the small pension funds reflected a highly unusual level of risk, especially for an unfinished venture that failed to capitalize fully on the demand for accommodations during the Olympics. Going further, Mr. Lopes positioned the inquiry within a broader investigation of public pension funds, pillars of the Brazilian economy that often work in tandem with large banks and energy companies. Mr. Trump first took interest in a Rio hotel venture in 2012, when Ivanka Trump was having lunch in Florida with Paulo Figueiredo Filho, a businessman who is a grandson of João Figueiredo, the last autocrat of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which ended in 1985. The younger Mr. Figueiredo spearheaded the hotel venture until recently. In a statement, Mr. Trump’s Brazilian partner, LSH, said it was innocent of any wrongdoing in connection with the investments by the pension funds, and was cooperating with the criminal inquiry. Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s general counsel, said in a statement issued Friday that the investigation was not targeting Mr. Trump or his company — given that it does not own the hotel — and “has no knowledge whatsoever regarding any governmental inquiry. ” The investigation of the Trump projects is unfolding at an awkward time for the Brazilian authorities. Foreign Minister José Serra, Brazil’s top diplomat, publicly declared in July that a Trump presidency would be a “nightmare. ” Although President Temer has formally congratulated Mr. Trump on his victory in a letter, he is still among world leaders who have not yet spoken by telephone with the . Even if Brazil’s executive branch actively tries to seek warmer relations with Mr. Trump, officials will face obstacles if they try to quell the investigation. Brazil differs from some other countries in Latin America where presidents can easily exert pressure on prosecutors and judges, with the judiciary steadily growing more independent. “Brazilian diplomats could try to avoid the problem of referring to the investigation when dealing with the Trump administration, but that’s about all they can do,” said Maurício Santoro, a political scientist at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “This is something that could hang over relations between the two countries for years. ” Potential Pitfalls in Dual Roles On the other side of the world, Donald Trump Jr. had other projects he was pushing. In 2012, he flew into Mumbai for a brief meeting with the state’s chief minister at that time, hoping to salvage a residential tower representing the Trump Organization’s first planned project there. He was hoping the chief minister, Prithviraj Chavan, would intervene on his behalf to get the permission needed. The participants recall the meeting differently: Mr. Trump’s partner, Harresh Mehta of Rohan Lifescapes, said development regulations had changed, leaving the project in limbo, and they hoped Mr. Chavan could formalize a policy so that the project could continue. Mr. Chavan said that in a meeting, Mr. Trump and his partner were “requesting a concession that could not be given. ” By the end of the meeting, in any case, it was fairly clear that the younger Mr. Trump’s presence had not worked any magic. The project was shelved soon after. “He thought the name was so big, we would bend backwards to satisfy him, but that was not the case,” Mr. Chavan said. Kalpesh Mehta, managing partner of Tribeca Developers of Mumbai, the Trump Organization’s development partner in India, confirmed that Donald Trump Jr. had met with the chief minister, but disputed the claim by Mr. Chavan that he had sought a special favor. “The notion that a request was made by Donald Jr. to waive any regulations is absolutely false,” Mr. Mehta said in the statement, which was issued Friday. “The Trump Organization does not get involved in the regulatory aspects interacting with government officials related to its projects in India. ” This example, analysts here say, points to a potentially serious ethical hazard for a United States president who is also a real estate mogul in India, with five projects underway. Mr. Trump was operating much like other developers in India, who cozy up to politicians — officially or unofficially — to push projects through the bureaucracy. Often, they must obtain as many as 60 permissions and building permits from government officials, including bureaucrats “whose main goal in life is to attract rent,” said Saurabh Mukherjea, the chief executive of institutional equities at Ambit Capital, a leading investment bank in India. One of Mr. Trump’s projects, Trump Towers Pune, is in fact under investigation by local authorities after another builder alleged that one of its permits was fraudulent. Panchshil Realty has disputed that accusation, saying the permit in question was not required for the construction. The very nature of the country’s real estate business, however, underscores larger concerns about potential damage to American efforts to discourage corruption in business abroad. In India, real estate is the main vehicle politicians and businessmen have used to invest black money, on which taxes have not been paid. In cities, where land is scarce and extraordinarily valuable, special favors from top political leaders can lead to windfall profits, and negotiations between developers and officials are informal affairs. It is so routine for developers to pay bribes at every step of the approval process that many bureaucrats have informal rate sheets showing exactly how much must be paid to each official. Politicians not only pressure the bureaucracy to approve their pet projects, sometimes even when they are against local regulations, they also squeeze government banks to give out favorable loans. Top officials might “think in some way the U. S. president will help them,” and “can put in a friendly word with the banks” to extend loans for around 8 percent interest, rather than the characteristic 15 percent, said Vikas S. Kasliwal, the chief executive officer and vice chairman of Shree Ram Urban Infrastructure. “If the son goes himself, if the son is willing to go and meet the prime minister of India, or the urban development minister, that is a very big thing,” he said. “They will think the president is meeting them. ” Another pitfall is that Donald Trump’s partners in major projects are, in some cases, politicians themselves. Most major Indian developers have some sort of alignment, direct or indirect, with regional political leaders, who can assist in acquiring the necessary permits. Mr. Trump’s first projects in India, which are expected to increase in number over the next year, follow this pattern: His partner for Trump Towers Pune is Panchshil Realty, owned by a family that has a close and longstanding family relationship with one of the state’s most powerful politicians, Sharad Pawar, the head of the small but influential Nationalist Congress Party. (Mr. Trump was photographed — in an image distributed on Twitter but since taken down — with executives from Panchshil Realty on Nov. 15.) Mr. Pawar’s daughter, Supriya Sule, a member of Parliament, holds a 2 percent share in Panchshil’s parent company, she said in an interview. Mr. Trump’s partner in the Trump Tower Mumbai is the Lodha Group, founded by Mangal Prabhat Lodha, vice president of the Bharatiya Janata Party — currently the governing party in Parliament — in Maharashtra State. The Lodha Group has already negotiated with the United States government it announced a landmark purchase of a property, known as the Washington House, on tony Altamount Road, from the American government for 3. 75 billion rupees, almost $70 million. His partner in an office complex in Gurgaon, near New Delhi, is IREO, whose managing director, Lalit Goyal, is the of a Bharatiya Janata member of Parliament, Sudhanshu Mittal. Mr. Mittal, in an interview, has denied having any connection with the real estate company. Suraj Hegde, the secretary of the All India Congress Committee, a national body of Indian National Congress party members, said he was troubled by the dual roles Mr. Trump and his family would play in Indian affairs — particularly given real estate’s important role in India’s economy, and the clout the United States has on the world stage. “Basically this is the globalization of lobbying across countries, which then tries to establish monopoly over real estate,” Mr. Hegde said in an interview. He added that he was already calling for an independent parliamentary investigation of such maneuvers, including Mr. Trump’s real estate ventures in India. “Establishing monopoly at the cost of small players by business connections to Mr. Trump is very worrisome,” he said. “This is not at all healthy for a democracy. ” Mixing Business, Politics and Islam Mr. Trump’s business interests in Turkey are emblematic of two weighty contradictions for a businessman turned politician. As a candidate, Mr. Trump railed against moving American jobs overseas and promised to do something about it. As a businessman, he invested in a partnership with a furniture company here, making luxury furniture in the firm’s factory in western Anatolia and selling it in the United States and worldwide — a partnership that apparently remains active. Mr. Trump the candidate inveighed against Muslims and threatened at least a temporary ban on their entering the United States. Mr. Trump the businessman has in recent years had some of his biggest expansions overseas, including in Muslim countries like Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and even Azerbaijan. One of the most visible symbols of that contradiction is in the bustling commercial district of Sisli, on the European side of Istanbul, where a pair of cantilevered modernist towers, nearly 40 stories high, bear Mr. Trump’s name. Turkey’s leader, Mr. Erdogan, visited Trump Towers Istanbul — one holds luxury apartments and one office space, with a shopping mall connecting the two — after their completion in 2012, with Mr. Trump and Ivanka Trump appearing as part of the celebration the next day. “We look forward to this being the first of many developments undertaken together in Istanbul and throughout Turkey,” Mr. Trump said in a statement issued during the visit. Beyond real estate, there is the Trump Organization’s 2013 partnership with Dorya International, a luxury furniture maker with a factory in Manisa Province, near the city of Izmir, to build pieces sold under the Trump Home Collection. But the presidential campaign demonstrated how the goals of his business and politics ventures can come into direct conflict, particularly once Mr. Trump in December proposed barring Muslims from entering the United States, implying that all Muslims might pose a terrorist threat. “We regret and condemn Trump’s discriminatory remarks,” Bulent Kural, the manager of the Trump Towers Mall, wrote in an email to a reporter at the time, as he announced that the mall was considering removing Mr. Trump’s name. “Such statements bear no value and are products of a mind that does not understand Islam, a peace religion, at all. Our reaction has been directly expressed to the Trump family. We are reviewing the legal dimension of our relation with the Trump brand. ” Mr. Erdogan weighed in on the issue, too, saying, “The ones who put that brand on their building should immediately remove it. ” Mr. Trump’s next move helped his standing. After a failed coup in Turkey in July, he defended Mr. Erdogan’s crackdown on dissidents, saying in an interview with The Times that the United States has to “fix our own mess” before trying to alter the behavior of other nations. “I don’t think we have a right to lecture,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. “Look at what is happening in our country,” he added, referring to violence in the United States. “How are we going to lecture when people are shooting policemen in cold blood?” In between his two remarks — one infuriating the president of Turkey, the other comforting him — the calls for the renaming of the Trump Towers Mall ended. But much more is at stake in relations between the United States and Turkey than a shopping mall and two skyscrapers. Turkey is a key player in United States efforts to combat the Islamic State in the Middle East, and sits next door to Syria as the United States has armed rebel groups in an attempt to remove Syria’s president, Bashar from power. The recent postelection telephone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Erdogan suggests that business and political roles will continue to be mixed. According to a Turkish journalist, Amberin Zaman, writing in the independent online news outlet Diken, Mr. Trump told the Turkish leader that he and his daughter — who participated in the call — admired both Mr. Erdogan and Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, Mr. Trump’s business associate in the towers, whom he called “a close friend. ” Ms. Zaman, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, said no government officials had disputed her account of the conversation. “I’m of the opinion they were quite happy for this to be published,” she said. A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump declined to comment about the call. Jennifer Harris, who served on the staff of the National Intelligence Council and on the State Department’s policy planning staff, said the twin hats that Mr. Trump and his family would be wearing in Turkey would almost certainly complicate the jobs of American diplomats there. “It makes me wonder if the Trump administration will use the power of the state to help political or business allies and hurt political adversaries and business rivals,” she said. What Stance Toward Duterte? President Duterte’s antidrug campaign has led to the summary deaths of thousands of suspected criminals at the hands of police and vigilantes since he took office June 30. The killing has been condemned by human rights activists — and the Obama administration. In August, Elizabeth Trudeau, a State Department spokeswoman, said the United States was “very deeply concerned” about reports of “extrajudicial killings by or at the behest of government authorities of individuals who are suspected to have been in drug activity in the Philippines. ” She added, “We have also made our concerns known. ” The question now, former State Department officials say, is just what kind of a stand the Trump administration will take as Mr. Trump and his family balance their personal and financial ties with foreign policy demands. Mr. Antonio first met Mr. Trump casually in the 1990s and has been his business partner in the Philippines for five years. President Duterte named him special envoy to the United States as the Philippines angrily pushed back at President Obama for criticizing his deadly campaign. At the time of the appointment, Mrs. Clinton was leading in the polls in the United States presidential election. Mr. Duterte has made clear that he does not appreciate American meddling in his country’s domestic affairs. “I am a president of a sovereign state, and we have long ceased to be a colony,” Mr. Duterte told reporters in early September, before a scheduled meeting in Laos with Mr. Obama that never took place. “I do not have any master except the Filipino people, nobody but nobody. ” Mr. Duterte handpicked Mr. Antonio as his intermediary with the United States, said his press secretary, Ernesto Abella, because of his business success, his previous experience as a special envoy to China and the Philippine president’s “deep intuition about people. ” The appointment will be advantageous for the Philippines, Mr. Abella added, because Mr. Trump already knows Mr. Antonio. Even before Mr. Trump has been sworn in, Mr. Antonio flew to New York and visited Trump Tower, where he met with Mr. Trump’s children, who are executives at the Trump Organization — which oversees the ’s real estate ventures. This was a business trip, not a diplomatic one, Robbie Antonio, Mr. Antonio’s son and the managing director of the family business, said in an interview. The two families are considering new ventures as they finish work on the Trump Tower in Makati City, a financial center within metropolitan Manila that is one of the country’s wealthiest enclaves and home to many of the nation’s elite. The $150 million tower — one of the tallest in the Philippines — is on the gritty side of Makati about two blocks from Manila’s most notorious district, where it is common to see prostitutes soliciting business and people sleeping on sidewalks. Completion, originally scheduled for this year, is now expected in 2017. About 240 of the 260 units have been sold, said Kristina Garcia, the director for investor relations. “We are bringing Trump to the Philippines because we believe that Trump exemplifies the best quality of real estate anywhere in the world,” Mr. Antonio said in a 2011 video promoting the project — in which Mr. Antonio is identified as “ambassador” and Mr. Trump also appears. “It also exemplifies luxury and it exemplifies exclusivity. ” In the interview at the celebration in Manila on Thursday evening, Robbie Antonio said he had little doubt of his father’s priorities: He will put the Philippines’ interests above those of his company. “It is for the good of the country now,” he said. But Mr. Fuchs, who helped oversee United States relations with the Philippines as the deputy assistant secretary of state until early this year, said he was deeply troubled by Mr. Trump’s overlapping priorities, particularly given the long list of globally significant issues in play with the Philippines. These include planned joint military exercises in the South China Sea, the fight against militant Islamic groups based in the country’s southern islands, and the human rights abuses taking place. “What we already have is a blurring of the lines between official and business activities,” Mr. Fuchs said. “The biggest gray area may not be a President Trump himself advocating for favors for the Trump Organization. It’s the diplomats and career officers who will feel the need to perhaps not do things that will harm the Trump Organization’s interests. It is seriously disturbing. ” Over a Tiny Snail, Big Concerns The vertigo angustior snail is only two millimeters long. But it punches above its weight. The endangered little snail has helped stall Mr. Trump’s plans to build a sea wall to protect the coastline along his Trump International Golf Links course on the west coast of Ireland, in County Clare. Environmentalists, as well as surfers, list a host of concerns about the proposed wall, particularly its potential impact on sand dunes. Along with the snails, a patch of the dunes near the course is protected by European Union rules. But Mr. Trump’s organization has said the golf resort development might be dead in the water without the sea wall, and many locals welcome the business and the jobs it brings. The battle is likely to be decided next year in front of a national planning board, in the weeks or months after Mr. Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20, several people said. The planning board was overhauled in the 1980s to insulate it from political meddling, and it now has the confidence of environmentalists. But there is little precedent for the Trump situation, which could involve a public hearing. “They can be long, they can be lively, and a lot of things could be aired,” said Sean O’Leary, the executive director of the Irish Planning Institute, which represents the majority of the country’s professional planners. He noted that the national planning board had considered a development proposed by a politician before, but that was a holiday home that the Irish president wanted to build. “The scale is slightly different,” he said. Local officials have said the Trump Organization needs to resubmit its application by the end of the year. In a statement, the Trump Organization said it was “considering all potential coastal protection options at present” and would be in contact with the local authority before Christmas. The snail, the statement said, “is thriving on the site. ” “Its only material threat is that presented by coastal erosion,” it added. Certainly, Mr. Trump’s golf courses in Scotland and Ireland have remained at the fore in the ’s mind, even in recent days. Shortly after his election, he urged a group of “Brexit” campaigners led by Nigel Farage, the head of the U. K. Independence Party, to fight against wind farms in Britain. Wind farms have been a favorite target of Mr. Trump’s in both Britain and Ireland, where he has railed against proposed installations as a potential blight on the views from his resorts. After a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump initially denied that the matter had been raised with Mr. Farage’s group, Mr. Trump conceded during his interview with The Times this past week that “I might have brought it up. ” Tony Lowes, an activist who runs a group called Friends of the Irish Environment, said Mr. Trump had once called him because Mr. Lowes’s group also happened to oppose a proposed wind farm near Mr. Trump’s Irish course on environmental grounds. “He certainly hates wind farms, that’s for sure,” Mr. Lowes said about the call. His group decided against working with Mr. Trump, and is now a leading opponent of his planned sea wall. “The dune system will not be able to develop naturally,” Mr. Lowes said. “It will be starved of the sand it needs to develop and evolve and it will die. ” He added, “The whole system there is alive and mobile and moving, and the wall is intended to stop that. ” Mr. Trump’s representatives have advanced a number of rationales for the sea wall, with the most straightforward being that they simply want to buffer the land from a continuing erosion problem. The proposal has previously attracted attention because an statement submitted by Mr. Trump’s team highlighted the risks of climate change and its influence on “coastal erosion rates. ” That was a noteworthy claim, since Mr. Trump has called global warming a hoax perpetrated “by and for the Chinese. ” The Irish government has zealously courted Mr. Trump. When he visited the course in 2014, he was greeted on the airport tarmac in Shannon with a red carpet, a harpist, a violinist and a singer whose voice cut through the runway clamor. Malachy Clerkin of The Irish Times called it “a preposterous welcome” and “the worst kind of . ” Many locals, however, support Mr. Trump’s development. Hugh McNally, the owner of Morrissey’s Bar in Doonbeg Village, about two miles from the course, said the issue had been “sensationalized by the media” because of the Trump connection. “I’ll give you an example,” he said. Roche, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, announced last year that it would close a plant in nearby Clarecastle, causing the loss of more than 200 jobs. “If someone told them you’d save those jobs by building any wall, everyone would do it,” he said. “The only reason people are objecting here is because of Trump. ” A Transition and a Business Plan Mr. Trump’s family appears to have been preparing for the transition to the Oval Office and ways to capitalize on it both in the United States and around the globe. In April, even before Mr. Trump had secured the Republican nomination, his business moved to trademark the name American Idea for use in branding hotels, spas and concierge services, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It was one of more than two dozen trademark applications that Mr. Trump and members of his family filed in the United States and around the world while he was running for president. The applications offer a glimpse of where the Trumps may intend to focus their business endeavors. Last month, representatives of the Trump Organization in Indonesia, where Mr. Trump has been pursuing two hotel deals, filed trademark registrations for use of the Trump name in connection with hotel management. Similar filings have been made in Mexico, Canada and the European Union. Ivanka Trump has filed at least 25 trademark registrations for her brand of clothing, cosmetics and jewelry in the United States, Canada, the European Union and Mexico since the beginning of the year, most recently in October. Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, filed an American trademark application for a line of jewelry in August. As he prepares for the presidency, Mr. Trump has made at least one concession so far, he said in the interview with The Times this past week. “In theory, I can be president of the United States and run my business 100 percent, sign checks on my business,” Mr. Trump said, before later adding, “but I am phasing that out now, and handing that to Eric Trump and Don Trump and Ivanka Trump for the most part, and some of my executives, so that’s happening right now. ” | 0fake |
On front page of China's flagship paper, Xi gets Mao-like prominence | BEIJING (Reuters) - The ruling Communist Party s flagship newspaper on Thursday provided more evidence that President Xi Jinping should be regarded as China s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong after this week s party congress. Xi s official portrait dominated the People s Daily s front page report on the unveiling of the party s new top leadership. Below that was a smaller group photograph of the new top leadership - the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee including Xi. It is a stark departure from recent precedent, with Mao Zedong the last leader to be granted such status on the front page after the party conclave - which is held once every five years. The People s Daily did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Since Deng Xiaoping introduced collective leadership three decades ago to ward off the rise of another Mao-like cult of personality, the official portraits of all newly-selected Politburo Standing Committee members have been presented together on the front page in a grid. The portrait of the party s top leader, the general secretary, is usually only slightly more prominent; reflecting his position as the first among equals. Xi is the party s general secretary, chairman of the Central Military Commission, and president of the country. In Thursday s People s Daily, the portraits and biographical information of the six other standing committee members - Li Keqiang, Li Zhanshu, Wang Yang, Wang Huning, Zhao Leji and Han Zheng - were relegated to the inside pages. That s definitely the first time since Mao, said Ryan Manuel, a China expert at the University of Hong Kong, referring to Xi s oversized portrait on the front of the paper. The People s Daily is closely parsed by party cadres and others, and sets the tone for media coverage in state-run newspapers at the provincial level. Manuel said the paper closely followed regimented rules and norms and would have done so especially meticulously for its most important front page in five years . It s a strict system, he said. The rules of placement and the rules of what type of photos you put on there are incredibly tightly argued and defined. Xi s status as China s most powerful leader since Mao was underlined on Wednesday when the party, in another break with precedent, revealed a new leadership line-up without naming an obvious successor to him. There has been persistent speculation Xi could seek to stay on in some capacity beyond the end of the customary second five-year term in power, which ends in 2022. During the congress, Xi became the first leader since Mao to have a political ideology bearing his name enshrined in the party s constitution while in office. | 0fake |
Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30? - The New York Times | Editor’s note: This article first ran on July 13, 2012, but we’re running it again because the topic is timeless. IT was like one of those magical scenes out of a Hollywood without the “rom. ” I met Brian, a New York screenwriter, a few years ago through work, which led to dinner with our wives and friend chemistry that was instant and obvious. We liked the same songs off Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde,” the same lines from “Chinatown. ” By the time the green curry shrimp had arrived, we were finishing each other’s sentences. Our wives were forced to cut in: “Hey, guys, want to come up for air?” As Brian and his wife wandered off toward the No. 2 train afterward, it crossed my mind that he was the kind of guy who might have ended up a groomsman at my wedding if we had met in college. That was four years ago. We’ve seen each other four times since. We are “friends,” but not quite friends. We keep trying to get over the hump, but life gets in the way. Our story is not unusual. In your 30s and 40s, plenty of new people enter your life, through work, children’s play dates and, of course, Facebook. But actual close friends — the kind you make in college, the kind you call in a crisis — those are in shorter supply. As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends. No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making B. F. F. ’s, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K. O. F. ’s (kind of friends) — for now. But often, people realize how much they have neglected to restock their pool of friends only when they encounter a big life event, like a move, say, or a divorce. That thought struck Lisa Degliantoni, an educational executive in Chicago, a few months ago when she was planning her 39th birthday party. After a move from New York to Evanston, Ill. she realized that she had 857 Facebook friends and 509 Twitter followers, but still did not know if she could fill her party’s invitation list. “I did an inventory of the phases of my life where I’ve managed to make the most friends, and it was definitely high school and my first job,” she said. After a divorce in his 40s, Robert Glover, a psychotherapist in Bellevue, Wash. realized that his roster of friends had quietly atrophied for years as he focused on career and family. “All of a sudden, with your wife out of the picture, you realize you’re lonely,” said Dr. Glover, now 56. “I’d go to salsa lessons. Instead of trying to pick up the women, I’d introduce myself to the men: ‘Hey, let’s go get a drink.’ ” In studies of peer groups, Laura L. Carstensen, a psychology professor who is the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity in California, observed that people tended to interact with fewer people as they moved toward midlife, but that they grew closer to the friends they already had. Basically, she suggests, this is because people have an internal alarm clock that goes off at big life events, like turning 30. It reminds them that time horizons are shrinking, so it is a point to pull back on exploration and concentrate on the here and now. “You tend to focus on what is most emotionally important to you,” she said, “so you’re not interested in going to that cocktail party, you’re interested in spending time with your kids. ” As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity repeated, unplanned interactions and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added. In the professional world, “proximity” is hard to maintain, as work colleagues are reassigned or move on to new jobs. Last year, Erica Rivinoja, a writer on the NBC series “Up All Night,” became close with a woman, Jen, when they worked together on a pilot. Almost instantly, they knew each other’s exercise schedules and food preferences. Jen could sense when Ms. Rivinoja needed a jolt of caffeine, and without asking would be there with an iced tea. “But as soon as the pilot was over, it was hard to be as close without that constant interaction,” said Ms. Rivinoja, 35. They can occasionally carve out time for a quick gin and tonic, she said, but “there aren’t those long afternoons which bleed into evenings hanging out at the beach and then heading to a bar. ” The workplace can crackle with competition, so people learn to hide vulnerabilities and quirks from colleagues, Dr. Adams said. Work friendships often take on a transactional feel it is difficult to say where networking ends and real friendship begins. Differences in professional status and income also complicate matters. “It really does get weird when your friends are making tons more than you, or tons less,” said Adriane Duckworth, a former marketing executive now working as an artist in Hamilton, Ontario. She recently welcomed a promising new couple into her circle of friends, but they quickly turned people off with their obsession with money. “At our wedding, other friends of ours who were seated with them actually complained to us afterward about the couple who was asking everyone how much money they made,” said Ms. Duckworth, 32. “People who made less felt uncomfortable discussing it, and people who made the same or more just felt it was weird to talk about it so nonchalantly. ” Once people start coupling up, the challenges only increase. Making friends with other couples “is like matchmaking for two,” said Kara Baskin, a journalist who works in Boston. “Not only are you worrying about whether the other woman likes you, you’re also worrying if her husband likes you, if your husband likes her, if your husband likes him. ” Not long ago, she invited her husband’s new work buddy over for dinner with his wife. But the wife was visibly unimpressed by Ms. Baskin’s home (they had just moved in) and spaghetti dinner. “It was basically clear that his wife had been cajoled into attending,” said Ms. Baskin, 33. “She settled on to our rickety Ikea kitchen chairs like she was lowering herself into a coal mine. ” The couple departed quickly after dessert. The next day at work, the husband made an excuse about his wife being tired. “But it was unspoken that we wouldn’t be seeking their company again,” Ms. Baskin said. ADDING children to the mix muddles things further. Suddenly, you are surrounded by a new circle of parent friends — but the emotional ties can be tenuous at best, as the comedian Louis C. K. related in one routine: “I spend whole days with people, I’m like, I never would have hung out with you, I didn’t choose you. Our children chose each other. Based on no criteria, by the way. They’re the same size. ” Even when parent friends develop a bond, the resulting friendships can be fleeting — and subject to the whims of the children themselves. Caryl Lyons, an event planner in Danville, Calif. and her husband found a budding friendship with a couple hit a roadblock when their young sons, who had been close friends, drifted apart. When the families planned a barbecue together, her son would say, “Can I have my other friends over?” said Ms. Lyons, 44. External factors are not the only hurdle. After 30, people often experience internal shifts in how they approach friendship. gives way to so you become pickier about whom you surround yourself with, said Marla Paul, the author of the 2004 book “The Friendship Crisis: Finding, Making, and Keeping Friends When You’re Not a Kid Anymore. ” “The bar is higher than when we were younger and were willing to meet almost anyone for a margarita,” she said. Manipulators, drama queens, egomaniacs: a lot of them just no longer make the cut. Thayer Prime, a strategy consultant who lives in London, has even developed a playful scale (100 being “best friend forever”). In her mind, she starts to dock new friend candidates as they begin to display annoying or disloyal behavior. Nine times out of 10, she said, her new friends end up from 30 to 60, or little more than an acquaintance. “You meet someone really nice, but if they don’t return a call, drop to 90, if they don’t return two calls, that’s an immediate 50,” she said. “If they’re late to something in the first month, that’s another 10 off. ” (But people can move up the scale with nice behavior, too, she added.) Having been hardened by experience, many people develop a more fatalistic view of friendship. “When you’re younger, you define what it really means to be friends in a more serious way,” said my screenwriter friend, Brian. (His full name is Brian Koppelman, and he wrote and is a of “Solitary Man,” a 2010 film starring Michael Douglas about a man trying to reconnect with friends and family.) “My ideas of friendship were built by ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Diner,’ ” he said. “Your friends were your brothers, and anything but total loyalty at all costs meant excommunication. As you get older, that model becomes unrealistic. ” By that point, you have been through your share of wearying or failed relationships. You have come to grips with the responsibilities of juggling work, family and existing friends, so you become more wary about making yourself emotionally available to new people. “You’re more keenly aware of the downside,” said Mr. Koppelman, 46. “You’re also more keenly aware of your own capacity to disappoint. ” “I haven’t really changed my standards for what it means to actually be friends,” he concluded. “It’s just that I use the word ‘friends’ more loosely. Making the real kind, the brother kind, is much harder now. ” Some, like Ms. Degliantoni, the executive, simply downsize their expectations. “I take an extremely efficient approach and seek out folks to fill very specific needs,” she said of her current strategy. “I have a cocktail friend and a book friend and a parenting friend and several basketball friends and a neighbor friend and a workout friend. ” “It’s much easier filling in those gaps in my life,” she added, “than doing an exhaustive approach for a new friend. ” Or, they hit rock bottom and turn back the clock to their breathlessly social 20s. After a move to New York in his 30s, Dave Cervini, a radio station executive, was so lonely that he would walk his cat in Central Park, hoping to stoke conversations. Finding only curious stares, he decided to start the New York Social Network, an activities group for people to find friends by hanging out at Yankees games or mixers. The company now counts 2, 000 members, most in their 30s. He considers 200 of them close friends. “It takes courage for people to take the first step,” he said. “Hopefully, I make it easier, having been there myself. ” In that spirit, I recently called Brian. We joked about our inability to find time to hang out, and made a dinner date at the next available opening. It is three months from now. | 0fake |
Poll: Trump in lead at 40.6 percent | DES MOINES (Reuters) - Republican front-runner candidate Donald Trump has a big lead in the race for the 2016 presidential nomination nationally, swamping his opponents with a 40.6 percent share of those surveyed, a Reuters-Ipsos tracking poll found on Friday. The survey of 582 respondents found Trump with a higher percentage of the vote than his next four challengers combined, with Texas Senator Ted Cruz drawing 10.5 percent, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson with 9.7 percent, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush at 9.2 percent and Florida Senator Marco Rubio with 7.2 percent. In a hypothetical matchup between Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and Trump, Clinton holds a statistically insignificant lead of 41.4 percent to 40.8 percent. Trump has been leading national polls of Republican voters for months. He also holds a lead in some polls in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire with the Iowa caucuses just days away on Feb. 1. A separate Reuters-Ipsos poll on Friday found the U.S. economy re-emerging as a major concern for voters. Economic concerns had taken a back seat to fears of terrorism after last year’s Islamic State attacks in Paris. The survey of 1,614 respondents found terrorism a top concern at 20.3 percent, but the U.S. economy close behind at 18.2 percent. (Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Richard Chang) SAP is the sponsor of this coverage which is independently produced by the staff of Reuters News Agency. | 0fake |
Zakharova Slams CIA Chief Pompeo: Stop Making Up Anti-Russian Fiction | 21st Century Wire says With the ongoing hysteria constantly spouting from the American mainstream media about alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election which saw Donald Trump elected as president of the United States, the world is still awaiting a single shred of real evidence to support the establishment s conspiracy theory. To date, none has surfaced. The intelligence community has said that this election was meddled with by the Russians in a way that frankly is not particularly original. They ve been doing this for an awfully long time, and we are decades into the Russians trying to undermine American democracy, CIA chief Mike Pompeo told MSNBC s Hugh Hewitt in an exclusive interview that aired Saturday, June 24.Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, has made a noteworthy response to Pompeo s comments.via Russia InsiderTranslation: We could not but take note of and comment on the June 24 statement by CIA Director Mike Pompeo during his NBC interview. The statement dealt with Russia s alleged long time attempts to undermine the American democracy and meddling in the US elections. It appears that in his opinion Russia s longtime attempts to undermine the US democracy have culminated in the interference in US elections. As we know the issue of Russia s meddling in the election process has become a favorite media story and an obsession in the United States. This story has been adopted by anti-Russia propagandists. This issue continues to pick up momentum and is mentioned in statements by officials who are trying to accuse Russia of engaging in unlawful actions but who have failed to produce any evidence to date.We would like to remind them about some outstanding pages of US history. Unlike the Americans, we have real facts at our disposal, and we know what we should focus on. It is common knowledge that since the early 1990s the United States had voiced its intentions to establish a Jeffersonian democracy in Russia. But the very fact of setting such a task completely runs counter to the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the American nation and democracy. All of us know he called for respecting various forms of government, chosen by other nations and said the United States would not impose its will anywhere. He was mistaken. Thomas Jefferson referred to the idea of dictating the form of government to an independent country as arrogant, brutal and outrageous.It appears that the ideologists of the present-day America have very poor knowledge of their own history and the foundations of their statehood, if the concepts of exporting democracy and humanitarian intervention have become their favorite method for conducting an aggressive foreign policy as part of their national concept. For decades, dozens of countries all over the world have been suffering from US-imposed sate system formulas they are trying to equate all countries under one and the same pattern, without any consideration for what makes each of them unique. This policy and experiments cannot be called harmless. In the past few years Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and Ukraine have fallen prey to this concept. Needless to say, al-Qaeda in all its manifestations, ISIS and other radical terrorist groups of all religious denominations evolved on the fertile soil created by the Americans and in fact often were the brainchildren of these forces.Generous financial injections in the form of projects and grants through numerous foundations and NGOs is another grey zone through which the United States has been trying to influence political processes all over the world for many years. Russia virtually tops the list of these allocations. Various government and non-government organizations, including the Peace Corps, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and many other similar agencies, have been planting their agents for decades in order to penetrate the Russian political establishment and media community and to influence public opinion. According to some sources, the US has spent 5 Billion dollars for these purposes in the 1990s alone. It is very strange that, while making such statements, Mr. Pompeo forgets that many decisions stipulating the allocation of funding were approved by his own agency. It is strange that Washington forgets the fact that in the run-up to the 1996 Russian presidential election, the Federal Reserve bank delivered $500 million in cash to the US Embassy in Moscow under a far-fetched pretext of avoiding frenzied demand during the exchange of old $100 notes. Operatives from the CIA s Moscow Embassy station, headed by Michael Sulick, virtually slept on the money bags, while guarding them. Foreign-made cars delivered small batches of money from the Embassy to certain individuals.Who did the US sponsor using this money? I believe we will also learn this someday. I do not mean our assumptions, everything is clear here Well will know the specific names, dates and so on. Here are only a few examples of diverse US activities aiming to undermine stability in various regions worldwide and in those areas that are not ready to follow American instructions. We are in no way demanding that Mr. Pompeo should stop his rhetoric because this is in the realm of fiction. One should simply understand that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We are ready. READ MORE RUSSIA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Russia FilesSUPPORT OUR WORK BY SUBSCRIBING & BECOMING A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 1real |
NASA to test in flight folding wing | NASA to test in flight folding wing page: 1 link NASA is set to begin testing a new wing design that would change shape in flight, bending up or down, to increase yaw stability, reduce required rudder size, and decrease drag. The Boeing 777X is set to introduce wingtips that fold on the ground, to allow the aircraft to fit in existing gates with a longer wingspan. NASA is set to begin testing the Spanwise Adaptive Wing, which would add shape-memory alloy actuators to the wingtip area that would bend the tips up or down. The SMA actuators would activate when heated electrically, so there is no need for complex hydraulic lines or actuators. Beginning in Spring of 2017, NASA will start flying the Area-I PTERA UAV. It has a 176 inch wingspan, with the outer 15 inches moving as far as 75 degrees up or down. PTERA is not set up for SAW, but it appears that it could see a 40% rudder authority. The idea behind SAW is similar to what was done with the XB-70, with the wingtips angled down. Boeing will introduce folding wings to commercial aviation when the 777X airliner enters service at the end of 2019. But the devices could become commonplace on future aircraft as wingspans increase in an effort to reduce drag and fuel burn. The 777X has almost 24 ft. more wingspan than today’s 777 to optimize lift distribution and maximize cruise efficiency. Folding the tips on the ground keeps the larger aircraft compatible with existing taxiway and gate size restrictions. But NASA is investigating whether also folding the wing in flight could save still more fuel. The Spanwise Adaptive Wing (SAW) concept will be tested on the ground and in flight in a rapid feasibility assessment under NASA’s new Convergent Aeronautics Solutions project. The goal is to show that angling the outboard wing sections up or down can increase yaw stability and control, and reduce rudder size and tail drag. | 1real |
MSNBC HOST Compares Getting Close to Trump to ‘Hugging a Suicide Bomber’ [Video] | President Trump came out today and said he doesn t have tapes of former FBI Director James Comey but that the possibility of someone else taping the conversation is there. The lefty media went nuts and claimed that Trump lied. The political analyst on MSNBC even compared President Trump to a suicide bomber. Oh, the drama from these liberal news analysts!Elise Jordan CALLS HERSELF A POLITICAL ANALYST BUT WE THINK SHE S MORE LIKE A POLITICAL HACK!MSNBC s Craig Melvin and Jordan were discussing Trump s tweet on Thursday saying he has no recordings of his private conversations with former FBI Director James Comey. Trump had previously suggested such tapes may exist.MELVIN COMMENTED: Earlier in the broadcast I said bluff. I said the president was bluffing. I may have been perhaps too fair. It would seem as if the president may have been lying all along about the existence of these tapes. JORDAN REPLIED: He wasted the country s collective time speculating over whether these tapes existed or not. It s a sad day when you cannot depend on the president s word. My advice would just be to Republicans who do cozy up to him it s just like hugging a suicide bomber. He blows you up in the process with him. MELVIN REPLIED: That s a little strong | 1real |
Clinton looks to sisterhood, but votes may go to Sanders | On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton’s quest to become the country’s first female president has encountered an unexpected problem: She is having trouble persuading women, young and old, to rally behind her cause.
The latest sign came Sunday, when a new CNN-WMUR survey here showed Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont beating Clinton among women by eight percentage points — which represents a big shift from the results last week in the Iowa caucuses, where Clinton won women by 11 points.
The survey followed unintentionally problematic comments over the weekend by Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem, older trailblazers who were trying to encourage younger women to support Clinton.
Steinem apologized Sunday for saying on a TV appearance Friday night that younger women were supporting Sanders because “the boys are with Bernie.” On Saturday, Albright drew criticism for saying that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” even though she has expressed that sentiment many times before.
Clinton’s struggles with women underscore the extent to which she has not yet figured out how to harness the history-making potential of her candidacy in the same way that Barack Obama mobilized minorities and white liberals excited about electing the first black president.
[Meet the feminists who want a man in the White House]
Cognizant of the challenge, the Clinton campaign has sought in recent days here to address the problem, tweaking her speeches to put a focus on Clinton as an advocate for women. Clinton spent part of Friday with a group of female U.S. senators she calls the “sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits.”
At the Saturday event with Albright, Clinton offered an aspirational message — saying that the country’s history is “one of rising, of knocking down barriers, of moving toward a more perfect union” — that appeared designed to present her candidacy as a milepost on that national journey.
In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Clinton defended Albright, saying that her words were a “lighthearted but very pointed remark, which people can take however they choose.”
“I think what she was trying to do, what she’s done in every setting I’ve ever seen her in going back 20-plus years, was to remind young women, particularly, that you know, this struggle, which many of us have been part of, is not over,” Clinton said.
Steinem wrote on her Facebook page that her remarks to comedian Bill Maher in which she seemed to say that pro-Sanders feminists were just looking for dating opportunities was a case of “talk-show Interruptus.”
“I misspoke on the Bill Maher show recently, and apologize for what’s been misinterpreted as implying young women aren’t serious in their politics,” she wrote.
Even so, Steinem’s comments pointed to the unexpected obstacle facing Clinton and her backers: a deep divide among women and feminist activists over how voters should respond to her.
While many older women’s rights advocates see the election of Clinton as the next logical step in a broader movement, some younger activists have expressed resentment at the notion that they should feel obligated to vote for Clinton simply because she’s a woman. Some have argued in recent months that Sanders, with his calls to end income inequality and make college free, is arguably the more feminist candidate.
[In Flint, Clinton casts herself as a problem-solver — and looks past N.H.]
“Hillary doesn’t seem to address those huge issues,” said Alexis Isabel Moncada, whose @feministculture Twitter account launched in April and boasts 170,000 followers.
Moncada, who is 17 but will be old enough to vote in November, said Clinton’s personal wealth and her life as a former first lady and secretary of state create a “disconnect with the entirety of women.”
On the trail, Clinton has begun to show more openness and reflection about the challenges of running as a woman in office, sometimes in response to challenges from other women.
At a student town hall at New England College on Saturday, a young woman told Clinton that she supported her in 2008 but has doubts about her candidacy now.
“My concern is that your answer that nothing new was found in the Benghazi hearings continues to give me some doubts,” the woman said. “Everybody knows you can’t write 30,000 emails to your yoga instructor.”
Another young woman asked why her peers think that Clinton is too buttoned up and “rehearsed.”
“I do have a somewhat narrower path that I’ve tried to walk. I do think sometimes it comes across as a little more restrained, a little more careful, and I’m sure that’s true,” Clinton answered. “It’s not just about me, it’s about young women, women of all ages, the expectations that are put upon you and how you deal with them and how you find your true voice and how you stand up for yourself and who you become.”
Many women’s rights advocates say they are proud to back Clinton, not just because of her gender but also because of her vast experience as a lawyer, first lady, senator and secretary of state.
[The Fix: Why won’t Clinton release the transcripts of those paid speeches?]
In recent weeks, Clinton has won endorsements from numerous women’s rights organizations, including the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the National Organization for Women, Emily’s List, NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Feminist Majority.
Feminist Majority’s president, Eleanor Smeal, who launched a campaign on Clinton’s behalf, She Wins We Win, said in an interview that Clinton has not only fought for women’s rights here and overseas but is “probably the strongest single candidate that has ever challenged for the presidency.”
Some have argued that they will vote for Clinton precisely because she’s a woman.
“There has never been a president who knows what it’s like to menstruate, be pregnant, or give birth,” Kate Harding, 41, wrote in the online women’s magazine Dame shortly after Clinton declared her candidacy. Nor, Harding said, has there been a president who has faced such blatant sexism “for showing too much cleavage, or having ‘cankles,’ or wearing unflattering headbands.”
A question for Clinton is whether she can use what is looking to be an extended primary campaign against Sanders to energize women for the general election should she win the nomination.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump traded accusations of sexism with Clinton, prompting a reexamination of the support Clinton won from feminists in the ’90s when she defended her husband against accusations that threatened to derail his presidency.
[New Wave Feminism: Today’s generation embraces feminism on its own terms]
Kate Michelman, a former NARAL president and a prominent supporter of Clinton’s candidacy, echoes Clinton’s own evocation of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” in arguing that “the forces of sexism and anti-feminism are going to be loud and clear in their attempt to make sure no women get the presidency of this country.”
And some self-identified feminists say they feel less urgency to elect a woman in 2016 than they did eight years ago, perhaps because this is the second time a woman has come so close.
Shelby Knox, 29, subject of a documentary about campaigning for sex education in Texas schools, was living and working with Steinem in 2008 and said she found the attacks so painful she was “almost scared” to see Clinton announce again.
“When Hillary lost, I had this horrible fear that Gloria [Steinem] would never see a woman president,” said Knox, “as if the nation would reject any woman.”
This time around, she is confident Clinton will win. And even if she doesn’t, Knox thinks she will live to see a female president.
“It will be impossible for us not to have a woman president,” she said. “I have no doubt it will happen.”
Sellers reported from Washington. Karen Tumulty in Concord contributed to this report. | 0fake |
Why Palestinians Want to Sue Britain: 99 Years since the Balfour Declaration | 9 Shares
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Last July, the Palestinian Authority took the unexpected, although belated step of seeking Arab backing in suing Britain over the Balfour Declaration. That ‘declaration’ was the first ever explicit commitment made by Britain, and the West in general, to establish a Jewish homeland atop an existing Palestinian homeland.
It is too early to tell whether the Arab League would heed the Palestinian call , or if the PA would even follow through, especially considering that the latter has the habit of making too many proclamations backed by little or no action.
However, it seems that the next year will witness a significant tug of war regarding the Balfour Declaration, the 100th anniversary of which will be commemorated on November 02, 2017 .
But who is Balfour, what is the Balfour Declaration and why does all of this matters today?
Britain's Foreign Secretary from late 1916, Arthur James Balfour, had pledged Palestine to another people. That promise was made on November 02, 1917 on behalf of the British government in the form of a letter sent to the leader of the Jewish community in Britain, Walter Rothschild.
MORE... Palestine’s reality: Al Nakba commemoration and the right of return or the return of the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement? To be a child in Palestine, where Israel has killed more children than the total number of goals scored in all FIFA World Cups Let There Be Water: Israel's policy of stolen water No hope and no heroes for Palestine At the time, Britain was not even in control of Palestine, which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Either way, Palestine was never Balfour’s to so casually transfer to anyone else. His letter read:
“His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
He concluded, “I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.”
Balfour was hardly acting on his own. True, the Declaration bears his name, yet, in reality, he was a loyal agent of an Empire with massive geopolitical designs, not only concerning Palestine alone, but with Palestine as part of a larger Arab landscape.
Only a year earlier, another sinister document was introduced, albeit secretly. It was endorsed by another top British diplomat, Mark Sykes and, on behalf of France, by François Georges-Picot. The Russians were informed of the agreement, as they too had received a piece of the Ottoman cake.
The document indicated that, once the Ottomans were soundly defeated, their territories, including Palestine, would be split among the prospective victorious parties.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement , also known as the ‘Asia Minor Agreement’, was signed in secret one hundred years ago, two years into World War I. It signified the brutal nature of colonial powers that rarely associated land and resources with people who lived upon or owned them.
The centerpiece of the agreement was a map that was marked with straight lines by a China graph pencil. The map largely determined the fate of the Arabs, dividing them in accordance with various haphazard assumptions of tribal and sectarian lines.
The improvised map consisted not only of lines but also colors , along with language that attested to the fact that the two countries viewed the Arab region purely on materialistic terms, without paying the slightest attention to the possible repercussions of slicing up entire civilizations with a multifarious history of co-operation and conflict.
The Sykes-Picot negotiations were completed in March 1916 and, although official, was secretly signed on May 19, 1916.
WWI concluded on November 11, 1918, after which the division of the Ottoman Empire began in earnest.
British and French mandates were extended over divided Arab entities, while Palestine was granted to the Zionist movement a year later, when Belfour conveyed the British government’s promise, sealing the fate of Palestinians to a life of perpetual war and turmoil.
Rarely was British-Western hypocrisy and complete disregard for the national aspiration of any other nation on full display as in the case of Palestine. Beginning with the first wave of Zionist Jewish migration to Palestine in 1882, European countries helped facilitate the movement of illegal settlers and resources, where the establishment of many colonies, large and small, was afoot.
So when Balfour sent his letter to Rothschild, the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was very much plausible.
Still, many supercilious promises were being made to the Arabs during the Great War years, as the Arab leadership sided with the British in their war against the Ottoman Empire. Arabs were promised instant independence, including that of the Palestinians.
When the intentions of the British and their rapport with the Zionists became too apparent, Palestinians rebelled , marking a rebellion that has never ceased 99 years later, and highlighting the horrific consequences of British colonialism and the eventual complete Zionist takeover of Palestine which is still felt after all of these years.
Paltry attempts to pacify Palestinian anger were to no avail, especially after the League of Nations Council in July 1922 approved the terms of the British Mandate over Palestine – which was originally granted to Britain in April 1920 – without consulting the Palestinians at all. In fact, Palestinians would disappear from the British and international radar, only to reappear as negligible rioters, troublemakers, and obstacles to the joint British-Zionist colonial concoctions.
Despite occasional assurances to the contrary, the British intention of ensuring the establishment of an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine was becoming clearer with time. The Balfour Declaration was not merely an aberration, but had, indeed, set the stage for the full-scale ethnic cleansing that followed, three decades later.
In fact, that history remains in constant replay: the Zionists claimed Palestine and renamed it ‘Israel’; the British continue to support them, although never ceasing to pay lip-service to the Arabs; and the Palestinian people remain a nation that is geographically fragmented between refugee camps, in the diaspora, militarily occupied, or treated as second class citizens in a country upon which their ancestors dwelt since time immemorial.
While Balfour cannot be blamed for all the misfortunates that have befallen Palestinians since he communicated his brief, but infamous letter, the notion that his ‘promise’ embodied - that of complete disregard of the aspirations and rights of the Palestinian Arab people – that very letter is handed from one generation of British diplomats to the next, in the same way that Palestinian resistance to colonialism has and continues to spread across generations.
That injustice continues, thus the perpetuation of the conflict. What the British, the early Zionists, the Americans and subsequent Israeli governments failed to understand, and continue to ignore at their own peril, is that there can be no peace without justice and equality in Palestine; and that Palestinians will continue to resist, as long as the reasons that inspired their rebellion nearly a century ago, remain in place. | 1real |
Trump’s Version Of Firing James Comey Was Just Blown Out Of The Water | Donald Trump s ever-changing story of why he fired former FBI Director James Comey amid an active investigation into the former reality show star s campaign for possible collusion with Russia was just smashed to bits.Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Friday defended the memo he wrote to Trump, which the alleged president initially cited as a recommendation to fire Comey earlier this month. Trump used Rosenstein s words to say that he recommended firing Comey. Of course, Trump changed that version later to say that he would have fired him anyway without the recommendation.As it happens, though, Trump decided to fire Comey before Rosenstein was asked to pen the memo.CNN reports:Rosenstein, according to his a copy of his prepared remarks at a briefing before the US House of Representatives, said that he learned on May 8 that Trump intended to fire Comey and that Trump sought Rosenstein s advice and input that same day.The next day Rosenstein issued the memo to Trump, and Comey was swiftly dismissed.(my emphasis)Rosenstein did say in the closed-door briefing that he chose the issues to include in my memorandum and believed it was time for new leadership at the FBI, but he added that it was not a statement of reasons to justify a for-cause termination. Rosenstein detailed why he thought Comey s public statement about Hillary Clinton s email scandal was profoundly wrong and unfair both to the Department of Justice and Secretary Clinton. Rosenstein said that he stands by his memo, then closed his prepared remarks by adding that he is not aware of any requests by the FBI to receive additional resources for the investigation into Russia s interference in the 2016 campaign.Rosenstein told Congress he knew DJT plan to fire Comey before writing memo says it was not a justification for firing; blows apart WH story pic.twitter.com/rD0Lnx10zY Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) May 19, 2017The White House and Vice-President Mike Pence, as well as numerous senior aides, repeatedly referred to the Rosenstein memo which listed the ways Comey mishandled the Clinton email controversy. And really, are we to believe that Donald Lock her up Trump felt that Hillary Clinton s unfair treatment by James Comey just before the election was the reason behind the firing of the former FBI Director and it s totally not because he was leading an investigation into the Trump administration s alleged ties to Russia?Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. | 1real |
DRAIN THE SWAMP! EPA Wastes Millions To Make Sure Employees Feel “Included”…”Advisory Bodies” = Scam | The Environmental Protection Agency is looking to hire 15 Diversity and Inclusion Specialists, each of whom will make $100,000 or more per year.The agency will hire employees to set up diversity and inclusion advisory bodies across the country, according to a government job posting. Earth Day is every day at EPA! the agency said. At EPA, you can protect human health and the environment of all Americans, and you ll discover that EPA is one great place to work! We offer great benefits and work flexibilities, and our diverse workforce connects to more than just a career we share a common passion to promote a cleaner, healthier environment, the EPA said.The salary range for Diversity and Inclusion Specialists is between $99,785 and $146,570 per year. If all 15 positions are filled, the hires would cost taxpayers between $1,496,775 and $2,198,550 each year.The employees will be in charge of implementing a diversity strategy within the EPA s Office of Research and Development. Other duties include analyzing recruitment and retention, as well as setting up diversity and inclusion advisory boards.Read more: WFB | 1real |
The Particle That Wasn’t - The New York Times | A great “might have been” for the universe, or at least for the people who study it, disappeared Friday. Last December, two teams of physicists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider reported that they might have seen traces of what could be a new fundamental constituent of nature, an elementary particle that is not part of the Standard Model that has ruled particle physics for the last . A bump on a graph signaling excess pairs of gamma rays was most likely a statistical fluke, they said. But physicists have been holding their breath ever since. If real, the new particle would have opened a crack between the known and the unknown, affording a glimpse of quantum secrets undreamed of even by Einstein. Answers to questions like why there is matter but not antimatter in the universe, or the identity of the mysterious dark matter that provides the gravitational glue in the cosmos. In the few months after the announcement, 500 papers were written trying to interpret the meaning of the putative particle. On Friday, physicists from the same two CERN teams reported that under the onslaught of more data, the possibility of a particle had melted away. “We don’t see anything,” said Tiziano Camporesi of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and a spokesman for one of the detector teams known as C. M. S. on the eve of the announcement. “In fact, there is even a small deficit exactly at that point. ” His statement was echoed by a member of the competing team, known as Atlas. James Beacham, of Ohio State University, said, “As it stands now, the bumplet has gone into a flatline. ” “This is the success of science, this is what science does,” he added. Dr. Camporesi said, “It’s disappointing because so much hype has been made about it. ” But, he added, noting that the experimenters had always cautioned that the bump was most likely a fluke, “we have always been very cool about it. ” The new results were presented in Chicago at the International Conference of High Energy Physics, ICHEP for short, by Bruno Lenzi of CERN for the Atlas team, and Chiara Rovelli for their competitors named for their own detector called C. M. S. short for Compact Muon Solenoid. The presentations were part of an outpouring of dozens of papers from the two teams on the results so far this year from the collider, all of them in general agreement with the Standard Model. The main news is that the collider, which had a rocky start, exploding back in 2008, is now running “swimmingly” in CERN’s words, producing up to a billion collisions a second. “We’re just at the beginning of the journey,” said Fabiola Gianotti, CERN’s in a statement. But perhaps nature has not gotten the memo. The has further deepened an already deep mystery about the famous Higgs boson, which explains why other particles have mass, and whose discovery resulted in showers of champagne and Nobel Prizes four years ago. The Higgs, one of the heaviest elementary particles known, weighs about 125 billion electron volts, in the units of mass and energy favored by particle physicists — about as much as an entire iodine atom. That, however, is way too light by a factor of trillions according to standard quantum calculations, physicists say, unless there is some new phenomenon, some new physics, exerting its influence on the universe and keeping the Higgs mass from zooming to cataclysmic scales. That would mean new particles. “We have seen the Higgs, we expect to see something else,” said Lisa Randall, a Harvard particle theorist who was not part of the CERN experiments. Hence the excitement over the December bump. Its mass, about 750 billion electron volts, was in the range where something should happen. “It would have been great if it was there,” Dr. Randall said. “It is the sort of thing they should be looking for if we want to understand the Higgs. ” For a long time, the phenomenon physicists have thought would appear to save the day is a conjecture known as supersymmetry, which comes with the prediction of a whole new set of elementary particles, known as wimps, for weakly interacting massive particles, one of which could comprise the dark matter that is at the heart of cosmologists’ dreams. But so far, wimps haven’t shown up either in the collider or in underground experiments designed to detect wimps floating through space. Neither has evidence for an alternative idea that the universe has more than three dimensions of space. The Large Hadron Collider is expected to run for another 20 years. So, these could still be exciting times. The CERN collider was built at a cost of some $10 billion, to speed protons around an underground track at more than 99 percent of the speed of light, and smash them together with a combined energy of 14 trillion electron volts, in search of new particles and forces of nature. The more energy they can pour into these collisions, microscopic samples of primordial fire, by virtue of Einstein’s equivalence of mass and energy, the more massive particles can come out of them. During its first two years of running the collider, hampered by electrical problems, ran at only half power but still managed to find the Higgs boson. Since last spring, after a shutdown, CERN physicists have been running their collider at nearly its full energy, 13 trillion electron volts, or 13 TeV. “The potential for discovery is the biggest we’ve had since it first turned on,” said Kyle Cranmer of New York University, a member of the Atlas team. Whether this is enough to break through to new physics — if in fact there is new physics to be found — depends on who is talking. “It might be we don’t have the firepower,” Dr. Randall said, suggesting that physicists might eventually have to build a more powerful machine, “If we didn’t see it at 8 TeV, it’s not a shocker if it is not at 13. ” Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, said, “Energy is the great tool of discovery, so going from 8 TeV to 13 TeV is a really big deal. Keep your fingers crossed. ” Dr. Camporesi said it was too soon to tell. So far physicists have only had time to pluck the fruit from their new machine, and more subtle, difficult analyses would take time. “I would consider us lucky if we discovered new phenomena or a new state of matter in two or three years,” he said, adding, “It would mean nature has been kind to us, but nature might be more subtle. ” Dave Charlton of the University of Birmingham, the Atlas spokesman, said, “We don’t know what nature has in store for us. ” Modern particle physics, in particular, is a counting game in which a small deviation from calculated expectations building up in the course of millions or billions of individual events — a bump on a graph — can rewrite the laws of nature. Last December’s bump first manifested as an excess of pairs of gamma rays produced in the collisions. They could have been produced in pairs by the radioactive decay of a new particle. This was exciting because the Higgs boson itself had first showed up as pairs of gamma rays, except this new particle was six times more massive than the Higgs and — unlike the Higgs — was not expected. But as Dr. Cranmer noted at the time, there was a chance this was a fluke — far from the . odds of mere chance, known as that is considered the gold standard for a discovery. But the fact that both teams saw something was enticing. Theoretical papers started flowing immediately, suggesting, among other things, that the new particle might be a cousin of the Higgs — good for supersymmetry — or a graviton, the conjectured quantum carrier of gravity. “Had the bump been real, it would have without a doubt been the most important discovery in particle physics in the past half century,” said Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist at Arizona State University. “Which is why the odds were that it probably wasn’t. ” In three months of this year, Dr. Beacham said, his team had collected more than a quadrillion proton collisions, four times as much data as in all of 2015. As experimentalists, Dr. Beacham and his colleagues had to ignore the theory papers about what it all might mean. “We can’t be chasing ambulances,” he said. “Let the data do the talking. In this case it turned into this flat line. ” Maria Spiropulu of the California Institute of Technology and a member of the C. M. S. team, said, “So there is no gloom and doom in my opinion that this is gone. As we have said multiple times, it could have been anything, including nothing. ” | 0fake |
Banzhaf: Trump’s Immigration Executive Order Is Constitutional | Professor John Banzhaf, public interest law professor at George Washington University Law School, joined Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Monday to discuss the constitutionality of President Trump’s immigration order. [Despite the media hysteria surrounding it, Banzhaf said, “This order is largely constitutional and probably will stand. ” Citing his own analysis, Banzhaf added that even if Trump said that “no Muslims could come into the United States, that would be constitutional. ” Explaining, he said, “We have something called the plenary power doctrine that says … the rights that we enjoy as Americans living in America don’t apply to foreigners living in foreign countries who are trying to come here. ” Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. | 0fake |
Police arrest 141 in crackdown on North Dakota pipeline protesters | Posted on October 28, 2016 by # 1 NWO Hatr Published on Oct 27, 2016 by Truthstream Media The oligarchy runs our society with Problem – Reaction – Solution. If anything, these leaks have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the two-party system is an illusion and the whole construct is one huge pay-for-play corporate sham. Obamacare was always meant to destroy the private health care system and usher in single-payer, government run socialist medicine. It was designed that way… and it’s “working”. Share this: | 1real |
Price on Obamacare Replacement: ‘Nobody Will Be Worse Off Financially’ - Breitbart | Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said that “nobody will be worse off financially” if Republicans in Congress repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act dubbed Obamacare. Price said, “I firmly believe that nobody will be worse off financially in the process that we’re going through, understanding that they’ll have choices that they can select the kind of coverage that they want for themselves and for their family, not that the government forces them to buy. So there’s cost that needs to come down, and we believe we’re going to be able to do that through this system. There’s coverage that’s going to go up. ” Price added, “I believe, and the president believes firmly, that if you create a system that’s accessible for everybody and you provide the financial feasibility for everybody to get coverage, that we have a great opportunity to increase coverage over where we are right now, as opposed to where the line is going right now where people are losing coverage and we’re going to have fewer individuals covered than we do currently. ” ( Politico) Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 0fake |
Sen. Menendez Ally Dr. Salomon Melgen Found Guilty on All 67 Counts of Medicare Fraud - Breitbart | Update: The Palm Beach Post just reported Melgen was convicted of all 67 counts. Jurors announced their verdict Friday for Dr. Salomon Melgen. He effectively faces a life sentence if no deal is struck. Menendez denies any wrongdoing. Prosecutors contended that the Melgen stole up to $105 million from the federal insurance program between 2008 and 2013, by giving patients treatments and tests that couldn’t help them. Melgen’s attorneys argued that any billing issues were simply mistakes. As Breitbart News has reported, the testimony presented by the prosecution’s expert medical witnesses during the trial was very damaging, while the testimony of his own defense witnesses backfired. The jury announced the verdict after its third day of deliberation. On April 1, 2015, Melgen and his friend and political contribution beneficiary, Sen. Robert Menendez ( Jersey) were indicted on charges of public corruption. Two weeks later, on April 15, Melgen was indicted on 76 charges of Medicare fraud. “[P]rosecutors said [Melgen] attempted to bilk the health care program out of as much as $190 million,” the Associated Press reported at the time of the second indictment. Sen. Menendez has previously indicated he intends to run for in 2018. With Melgen now facing life in prison, he will have reasons to consider cooperating with prosecutors as they present their case against Menendez. Steven Sandberg, a spokesman for the senior U. S. senator from New Jersey, referred an NJ Advance Media reporters’ inquiry to a statement released earlier in the day by Menendez’s attorney, Abbe David Lowell. “I have spoken to Sen. Menendez and he is saddened for his friend and is thinking of his family on this difficult day,” wrote Lowell. “As we have known for the past two years, the issues involved in Dr. Melgen’s case in south Florida had no bearing on the allegations made against the senator, and this verdict will have no impact on him. “Dr. Melgen’s case focused solely on the operations of his medical practice and the private care of his patients — specifics of which the Senator could not be aware, nor has it ever been suggested otherwise. “From the beginning, Senator Menendez has been clear that he has always acted in accordance with the law and in his appropriate legislative oversight role as a member of Congress. When all of the facts are heard, he is fully confident that a jury will agree and he will be vindicated. ” That trial is set to begin in a New Jersey federal courtroom in the fall. | 0fake |
High-Profile Attorney To Represent Trump’s Alleged Rape Victim In Upcoming Trial (VIDEO) | Donald J. Trump s rape trial will be held on December 16th and the alleged victim will be represented by a high profile attorney. This follows the GOP presidential nominee s leaked hot mic video surfacing in which he brags about sexually assaulting women.Casey Anthony was acquitted of murder charges with the help of attorney Cheney Mason and now, he s coming after Trump.The lawsuit alleges that Trump raped a 13-year-old girl at billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein s Upper East Side mansion in 1994. The alleged victim detailed a savage sexual attack stating she was tied to a bed, then Trump is accused of exposing himself and raping her. Trump allegedly responded by violently striking the victim in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted. That sounds remarkably like what Trump said to Billy Bush in the leaked video: And when you re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything. Grab em by the pussy. The victim, Jane Doe, has tried to file the lawsuit three times. The first suit was dismissed over filing issues and now, another suit was filed to add a new witness to the complaint, as Newsy notes.By the way, do you know how rare it is to have a witness to a rape?High-Profile Criminal Attorney, Cheney Mason, to Represent Trump Child Rape Victim in Upcoming Trial. pic.twitter.com/KJD0kFMOSA Mr. Jameson Neat (@MrJamesonNeat) October 11, 2016Trump s attorneys have dismissed the accusations as an attempt to smear the GOP presidential nominee.Last year, Trump said in reference to Mexicans, I mean somebody s doing it! Who s doing the raping? But in reality, Republicans are not sending their best people. They re sending pussy grabbers and rapists. We need to shut the GOP down until we find out what s going on. We need to build a wall around Trump and make his supporters pay for it.WATCH:Featured image via Joe Burbank-Pool/Getty | 1real |
France Beats Germany to Reach Euro 2016 Final - The New York Times | MARSEILLE, France — They sang. They danced, they chanted, they even — for some reason — did the Icelandic Thunderclap routine a few times. But mostly the French fans at the Stade Velodrome on Thursday just sang as one, long and loud and proud. Sometimes it was the national anthem. Sometimes it was the chorus to “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes. Sometimes it was just “Allez!” (roughly, Let’s Go!) over and over. In truth, it did not matter what they were singing. On this night, in this moment, the fans wanted simply to join in. To make a difference. To matter. And they did. Beneath a relentless, rambunctious cacophony, France defeated Germany, in a semifinal of the European Championships. The French, who won the last two major tournaments they have hosted, will go for a third against Portugal on Sunday at the Stade de France outside Paris. Germany, the defending World Cup champion, will go home. The Germans will rue injuries that cost them two starters (plus a suspension that ruled out one more) as well as an avalanche of missed opportunities and — in their minds, at least — a controversial referee’s decision that stunned them just before halftime. The French, of course, will say otherwise. To them, they had just 35 percent possession but defended ferociously they deserved the penalty kick awarded to them late in the first half, which they converted and they capitalized when the German defense scrambled itself in front of goal. Antoine Griezmann scored both goals for France. When he poked the second across the line after a flailing clearance by Germany goalkeeper Manuel Neuer, a frisson of unadulterated euphoria pulsed through the stands. This was, by far, the most difficult test the French had faced in this tournament, and they flourished. “We are like kids playing out here,” Griezmann said. “We know we have a whole nation behind us. ” The last time these teams met was Nov. 13 at the Stade de France, a match that will always be remembered for what happened outside — the terrorist attacks in St. and Paris — as opposed to anything that took place on the field. That night, Griezmann played while his sister, Maud, was inside the Bataclan concert hall where terrorists attacked with guns and grenades. It was only later, well after the match, that he learned she was one of the fortunate who escaped. The specter of those attacks has lingered over this event from the beginning, as security around the country was increased exponentially. François Hollande, the French president, even visited the French team before its first match to talk about the situation. Griezmann, recalling that meeting on Thursday, said the players understood that it was their job, their responsibility, to entertain their supporters, to give them verve and energy and excitement — to help the country move forward. The team began with a dramatic victory over Romania in the tournament’s opening game. Then it won its preliminary round group. In the knockout rounds, it stormed back against Ireland in the round of 16, blitzed Iceland in the quarterfinal and here, on this steamy, sticky night, pushed over the world champions. “There is happiness all over France tonight,” Manager Didier Deschamps said. It was not always pretty. Germany, which beat France in the quarterfinals two years ago on its way to the World Cup title in Brazil, weathered a French surge after the opening whistle and dominated for nearly 40 minutes of the first half. Mesut Özil was slick in the midfield, as usual. Thomas Müller was threatening in front of goal. Jérôme Boateng, the sturdy defender, helped hem the French into their own half. Yet there was no finish. France goalkeeper Hugo Lloris was ready when called on — he made a fine stop to deny Emre Can after about 15 minutes — but the Germans also lacked polish when it mattered most. The final cross was just a bit too high, the outstretched leg a bit too short. A score at halftime seemed reasonable and both sides appeared happy to accept it. Only then France earned a corner kick a few minutes before the interval and, as the ball swung in, Germany’s captain, Bastian Schweinsteiger, challenged for it with his arms raised. When it deflected off Patrice Evra’s head and caromed directly into Schweinsteiger’s right arm, the referee, Nicola Rizzoli, pointed to the penalty spot. Was it a good call? Current guidance on handling directs officials to penalize players if, among other things, they “make themselves bigger,” and Schweinsteiger seemed to do that. The Germans, nonetheless, were incensed the French, naturally, were ecstatic. Griezmann stepped up. A little more than a month ago he missed a crucial penalty kick as his club team, Atlético Madrid, was beaten in a shootout in the Champions League final by Real Madrid. This time, however, there was no hiccup. His shot was pure. “Everybody was shocked,” Germany Manager Joachim Löw said. “I had to calm the players down in the dressing room at halftime. ” He added: “And then, after, it was difficult. ” The second half brought more chances, but more frustration for Germany. Toni Kroos had his run cut off. Julian Draxler curled a shot just wide. Joshua Kimmich saw his powerful drive ricochet off the post. Meanwhile, Greizmann slipped in front of the German goal just as Paul Pogba went into a dazzling dance on the left side of the penalty area. Shucking off a defender, Pogba floated a cross that Neuer could only bat to the ground. Griezmann, who stands just 5 feet 9 inches, pounced, poked and — after the ball rippled the net — preened in front of the delirious fans. “He’s our little man who gives us something more,” forward Olivier Giroud said. Löw said that the Germans were unlucky, that France was not the better team. Deschamps did not necessarily disagree, saying that the Germans made France suffer. Still, he said, it made no difference. At this level, all that matters is the result. And so, after the final whistle, the French players went to each end of the stadium, joined hands in a line and, as a unit, offered gratitude to their supporters. The world champions had been eliminated. The final was in sight. The dream was ever closer. On this night, the combination had been unbeatable: the French players gave their hearts. The French fans, their throats. | 0fake |
Disney Refuses Ransom to Hackers Who Stole ‘Pirates of The Caribbean’ - Breitbart | Disney is refusing, thus far, to buckle to hackers’ ransomware demands to return the new edition of Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. [Deadline Hollywood reported that Disney CEO Bob Iger has gone to the FBI, rather than pay a huge amount of Bitcoins to the ransomware hackers to recover the latest Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. The first several episodes generated $3. 75 billion at the box office. The WannaCrypt virus, better known as “WannaCry,” over the weekend at the rate of about 5, 000 computers an hour. It exploited known vulnerabilities of servers running Microsoft software that had not been updated with the existing Windows Defender’s security patch, or are so old they are no longer supported. The WannaCry ransomware also exploits a Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) vulnerability developed by the U. S. National Security Agency and disclosed on Twitter last month by the infamous ShadowBrokers hacker auction site. Cybersecurity Ventures estimated financial losses at about $4 billion, before Disney late last night confirmed to ABC employees that the movie was being held hostage. Hollywood’s other big media property caught up in the WannaCry ransomware hack is Netflix’s Orange is the New Black. Huge corporations like Disney and Netflix employ very sophisticated security professionals and spend big bucks to license software. But the thousands of financially struggling creative individuals, and hundreds of small specialized vendors, who service the media giants lack appropriate security tools, which is providing criminals with an open door to steal intellectual property treasures. Despite estimated global corporate investment plans to spend $1 trillion on computer security over the next four years, annual cybercrime losses are expected to grow from $3 trillion in 2015 to a $6 trillion a year in 2021. Global damage from the WannaCry virus was limited after a researcher at Malware Tech accidentally discovered a “kill switch” over the weekend. | 0fake |
Ciccotta: Guest Speaker’s Call to Violence Reveals Bucknell’s Radicalism - Breitbart | Black Lives Matter activist and Christian minister Nyle Fort, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University who calls for revolutionary violence in the face of “white supremacist terror,” will return to Bucknell University this week. [As a part of an ongoing lecture series organized by the Griot Institute at Bucknell University entitled, “The Black Body (Re) Considered,” activist Nyle Fort will return to campus to “explore the moral and spiritual dimensions of the Black Lives Matter movement. ” His lecture is by the English department. In the 2014 issue of Syndicate Theology, a periodical, Fort wrote,”under conditions of white supremacist terror, revolutionary violence can be an expression of Christian love. ” I addressed Mr. Fort’s work last year in the introduction to an event featuring editor Milo Yiannopoulos, arguing that that the administration’s liberal politics motivated their respective responses (or lack thereof) to the Yiannopoulos and Fort events. Before Yiannopoulos spoke at Bucknell last February, the administration sent out a email to calm the community’s concerns over his upcoming visit. Bridget Newell, then the university’s Associate Provost for Diversity, suggested that Yiannopoulos’ values contradicted the “qualities of inclusiveness and respect that we want to emulate” at Bucknell. Although he criticized President Obama and the Black Lives Matter movement in his event at Bucknell, Yiannopoulos argued that “there is stuff left to do on race in America … ( ) are still owed something. ” Yiannopoulos addressed the struggles faced particularly by females, who he suggested are on the receiving end of institutional discrimination. Just weeks before Yiannopoulos appearance, Fort spoke at Bucknell without the smallest amount of resistance from those in the community on the right. This week, he’ll return to Bucknell in the aftermath of an incident in which Bucknell Professor Marcellus Andrews slandered my peers and me, publicly calling us “racists” and instructing students to “impose a steep and lasting price” on us for organizing last year’s Yiannopoulos event. “I praise Mr. Ciccotta for helping the young and dark understand that there is not much that the administration can do about racism on campus, because y’all can’t,” Bucknell Professor Marcellus Andrews wrote in an email to University President John Bravman and I after I brought my concerns over Andrews’ conduct to the administration. If there were to be “revolutionary violence” at Bucknell, as Fort calls for, who would it be directed towards? In a political climate in which the labels “racist” and “white supremacist” are thrown around arbitrarily without hesitation, and sometimes, without legitimate cause, Fort’s call for violence should be deeply concerning to university administrators that host him on their campuses. Fort even acknowledges that his theories on violence are controversial, but justifies his radicalism by arguing that the theological concept of a god being “one in three persons” is equally controversial, but nonetheless worthy of serious consideration. To say Christian love can embody revolutionary violence is controversial. But so is saying God is “One in three persons”! Just because something is controversial doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take it seriously or even embrace it. The idea of the Trinity is controversial to many as is revolutionary violence. Interestingly, however, most Christians are silent about State violence on black bodies, and yet condemn the very idea of those same bodies engaging in counter, revolutionary violence. He adds that Christians must start to recognize “that the face of Jesus Christ is the body of Michael Brown,” because “Jesus shows up in the suffering of black bodies and all the world’s crucified peoples. ” Fort, of course, should be allowed to speak, even without a disclaimer from the University, but it is concerning that the same community that took such issue with Yiannopoulos’ brand of provocation and humor gave Minister Fort, and his justification of violence in the name of Christianity, a warm embrace, and will do so again this week at Bucknell a second time. This isn’t a conversation about violence, but rather the failure of university administrations to act objectively when faced with matters. Last week, before American Enterprise Institute Scholar Charles Murray spoke at Middlebury College, the school’s president Laurie Patton injected her personal politics into the discussion and denouncing his scholarship, claiming that she “profoundly disagrees with much of Mr. Murray’s views. ” In January, Dean of Students Amy Badal attended a candlelight vigil held at Bucknell in response to President Trump’s executive order on immigration. Can students feel comfortable expressing their support of such legislation on campus if administrators like Badal are willing to take such a strong and public stance? Instead of defending my peers and I against Andrews’ threat and accusations of racism, Badal and the administration claimed that I had “mischaracterized” the email (which you can read in its entirety here). The administration argued that the university “values and encourages the free exchange of diverse ideas and perspectives,” despite the texts assigned throughout my economics curriculum consisting almost exclusively of leftist and market perspectives. University administrators must adopt an objective set of moral principles that isn’t derived from partisan ideology if they are to ensure that all students are treated fairly, educated comprehensively, and so that they can rightfully condemn conduct that infringes upon students’ ability to participate in the tradition of open intellectual inquiry upon which the academy was founded. Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about education and social justice for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart. com | 0fake |
FOLLOW THE MONEY: MEXICAN GIVEAWAY OF MILLIONS OF FLAT SCREEN TV’S TO THE POOR RAISES QUESTIONS | Follow the money on this one Mexico is spending over $1.6 billion dollars on flat screens for millions at a cost of $145.00 instead of just $40.00 for a decoder box. I m sure if you dig deep enough you ll find some sort of Carlos Slim corruption. He s the Mexican billionaire who made tons of money on the Obamaphone he provided for America. Nice, huh? We ll be checking into this one just to see if there s any connection to American corruption. It just doesn t pass the smell test MEXICO CITY Cradling a flat-screen television set in her arms, Tomasa Lopez beamed at her good fortune: She d just taken part in the world s biggest distribution of free digital televisions.Lopez, a domestic servant, was among thousands of people who ve thronged a cavernous tent in the populous working-class Iztapalapa district, one of hundreds of venues across Mexico where the poor are receiving some of the 10 million digital television sets the government is giving away at no charge.It s a program costing the Mexican treasury $1.6 billion in a push to convert the nation from analog television signals to a digital format. The United States made the switch in 2009. I am happy, Lopez said. We ve always wanted a digital television. We ll see more channels. The kids will see cartoons. Other nations, such as Argentina, have given away digital television sets, but none on the scale of Mexico, and the program has proved controversial. Critics question why the government of President Enrique Pena Nieto is giving away 24-inch flat-screen televisions, each costing around $145, when decoder boxes that allow older analog televisions to remain in use the U.S. solution cost only about $40.It s not just the recipients of TVs who benefit. Television manufacturers clustered along Mexico s northern border also profit, as do the two powerful media conglomerates that are moving quickly into digital services. The two companies will soon face competition from a third television network mandated into existence in 2013 with a constitutional reform to bring greater competition to the industry.At the entrance to the delivery tent, a recipient of a television set, Jose Luis Rodriguez, reproached a government official for suggesting the sets were free. Stop using that word. It s paid for with our taxes. It s not free, sputtered Rodriguez, who works for the federal social security institute.Already, the government has given away 4.6 million televisions in a massive operation that requires fleets of trucks to deliver the sets, and masses of workers to check documents, take fingerprints and scan the bar codes of the sets to ensure that each family gets only one.Recipients are all low-income Mexicans who take part in one of several government social service programs, including Prospera, which is the national crusade against hunger, and Liconsa, a subsidized milk program.A sense of urgency pervades the program. The constitutional reform enacted in 2013 gives the government a deadline of Dec. 31 to convert the nation to digital television. In recent weeks, government teams have been handing out 30,000 to 40,000 sets a day, but will have to double that figure to meet the deadline.Administrators for the program say it will have many benefits, among them raising the number of people with access to the Internet and cutting electricity usage. An analog television consumes 320 to 340 watts, and if you add a decoder then it s another nine watts, said Javier Lizarraga Galindo, an adviser behind the program at the Communications and Transport Secretariat. An energy efficient digital TV like the ones we are giving out in Mexico consumes less than 40 watts. Gabriel Sosa Plata, a professor at the Autonomous Metropolitan University and frequent commentator on television issues, said he thinks energy consumption might actually go up. Although analog signals are supposed to end on Dec. 31, he thinks many people will buy decoder boxes and move the old sets into their children s rooms. Instead of having just one television, they will have two, and that means more electricity consumption, Sosa Plata said.Skeptics also question whether the TVs really will make the Internet more accessible. The digital TVs offered by the state have USB and HDMI ports, but hooking them to the Internet would require additional hardware and, for now, a contract with a provider, though the government has pledged eventually to offer free wireless service.Mexico already provides free Wi-Fi at or near public parks, squares and government buildings in most of the nation s 2,400 municipalities and under the telecom reform is required to expand it to as many as 250,000 sites by 2018. Still only about 50 percent of Mexico s 120 million citizens regularly access the Internet.Criticism of the program also has centered on the bidding for the purchase of the television sets. Mexico is the world s largest assembler of TVs, producing between 35 and 40 million a year. Seven different companies with plants in Mexico, mostly along the U.S. border, have taken part in supplying the program. The first stage was not as transparent as it should have been. We were all suspicious, said Jorge Negrete Pacheco, executive director of Mediatelecom, a consultancy in Mexico City on telecommunications regulation. It was inevitable to think like this because none of the winners (of bids) were known brands. Negrete said the South Korean manufacturer Samsung was disqualified for offering a better product than required under the bid conditions. The winner of one bid sold televisions sets under the brand Diamante, largely unknown.The two television networks, Televisa and TV Azteca, are installing digital transmitters around the country. TV Azteca broadcasts on 180 channels while Televisa operates 220 channels. The two companies capture a majority of all advertising spent in the country for all media.By next year, however, a third network will step into the fray. Grupo Imagen Media, owner of Cadenatres, will begin broadcasting, after winning a bid in March to occupy 123 channels spread across the country:HERE S WHAT WE FOUND ON THIS CARLOS SLIM CONNECTION: Mexican media company Grupo Imagen, which has just won one of two new national TV concessions, may look to move into the lucrative telecoms sector, the chief executive of the family-owned company said on Thursday.Grupo Imagen was awarded the free-to-air TV concession on Wednesday after bidding 1.81 billion pesos ($116.8 million). The auction was part of a government overhaul of the hidebound phone and TV markets, which are controlled by billionaire Carlos Slim s America Movil and broadcaster Televisa.Grupo Imagen, the media arm of privately held banking, hotel, construction and hospital company Grupo Empresarial Angeles (GEA), is run by Olegario Vazquez Aldir, an up-and-coming Mexican mogul.In an interview, Vazquez Aldir acknowledged the threat posed to free-to-air TV by new technologies including Netflix, and said the company might at some point follow in the footsteps of Televisa, by looking to move into the more lucrative telecoms market. I don t rule out that in the future, we could strike alliances with telecoms companies, he said. We understand perfectly well the challenges posed by new technologies, and that the younger generations are consuming content through other digital platforms. Vazquez Aldir said he had not spoken with Slim or any other telecom companies. Slim s America Movil is trying to offload assets to comply with new regulation resulting from the government s telecom reform, which was finalized last year.Grupo Imagen expects to invest 10 billion pesos in the new network over the next 36 months, Vazquez Aldir said. It aims to be broadcasting in Mexico s main cities by January 2016 and to have the rest of the country covered within three years.The money would mainly be spent on buying or renting land to install broadcast infrastructure, he said, adding that the company hoped to sell its content eventually in the United States, to capitalize on the growing Latino market thereNegrete said the advent of a third channel is a democratic message because it will offer a new source of information, different newscasts. This seems very positive. Read more: ocregister | 1real |
83 Yr Old Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg Gives Rare Interview To BBC: Talks Retirement…Expresses “Hope” In Anti-Trump Protesters[VIDEO] | Speaking to BBC Newsnight in a rare interview, Justice Ginsburg reiterated the importance of the free press. I read the Washington Post and the New York Times every day, and I think that the reporters are trying to tell the public the way things are, she said.Justice Ginsburg was nominated by Bill Clinton and is regarded as a liberal.Justice Ginsburg was careful to avoid commenting directly on Donald Trump s presidency.Before the election, in July 2016, Justice Ginsburg criticised Donald Trump calling him a faker . She later said she regretted making the comments.Watch: Think of what the press has done in the United States, she said citing the Watergate scandal. That story might never have come out if we didn t have the free press that we do. Asked about the rise of the so-called post truth world , Justice Ginsburg said: I am optimistic in the long run. A great man once said that the true symbol of the United States is not the bald eagle. It is the pendulum. And when the pendulum swings too far in one direction it will go back. Some terrible things have happened in the United States but one can only hope that we learn from those bad things. Justice Ginsburg said she was encouraged by the Women s March, which saw millions in the US and around the world take part in anti-Trump protests. I ve never seen such a demonstration both the numbers and the rapport of the people in that crowd. There was no violence, it was orderly. So yes, we are not experiencing the best times but there is there is reason to hope that that we will see a better day. Justice Ginsburg has been on the Supreme Court since 1993 and at 83 years-old is the oldest serving member.Asked how much longer she would stay in post, she said: At my age you have to take it year by year. I know I m OK. What will be next year? She added: I m hopeful however, because my most senior colleague the one who most recently retired, Justice John Paul Stevens, stepped down at age 90. So I have a way to go. BBC | 1real |
Ben Carson To Call It Quits, Will Spend Time Exploring Grain Pyramids With Jesus | Ben Carson is setting all three of his supporters up for disappointment. In a statement Wednesday, the retired neurosurgeon announced that, in light of his crushing defeat on Super Tuesday, he will likely no longer continue the charade that can loosely be called his presidential campaign.Carson announced that he will be skipping the Fox News Presidential Debate in his hometown of Detroit on Thursday. I remain deeply committed to my home nation, America, Cason s statement says. I do not see a political path forward in light of last evening s Super Tuesday primary results. Carson promised that this grassroots movement of We the People will continue. I appreciate the support, financial and otherwise, from all corners of America, Carson added. Gratefully, my campaign decisions are not constrained by finances; rather by what is in the best interests of the American people. Carson s attempt to become the man to lose to the Democratic nominee started out promising. But Carson s campaign took a series of wrong turns that thrust him as far into political obscurity as Carly Fiorina after the Center for Medical Progress baby parts videos were shown to be heavily-edited and fraudulent.Carson s wild tales like his claim that he once tried to gut a motherf*cker only to be thwarted by a rogue belt buckle and that he attacked his mother with a hammer, his story about bravely telling an armed robber to shoot a Popeye s Chicken cashier, as well as his wild theory that Biblical storybook character Joseph built the pyramids to store grain did him absolutely no favors, nor did his complaint that Obama isn t black enough. His campaign also suffered from numerous shakeups, like much of his staff abandoning the sinking ship that was Team Carson all at once.While he was reluctant to give up, Carson seems to have finally come to his senses. Now, perhaps, he will have time to travel to Egypt with his buddy Jesus so they can have their portrait painted inside a grain pyramid.He promises to discuss more about his future plans at CPAC, the annual gathering of Christofascist lunatics like Carson.As the Stupid Part of America s options narrow, one thing remains certain it is more important than ever that you make it to the polls in November.Here are some of the dumbest things Carson has said. His intelligence and wit shall be missed.Featured image via Twitter | 1real |
Gen. Petraeus: Biggest threat to Iraq's stability is Iran-backed militias, not ISIS | Former CIA director and retired Gen. David Petraeus says the biggest threat to long-term stability in Iraq isn’t the Islamic State -- but instead, Iran-backed Shiite militias.
“What has happened in Iraq is a tragedy — for the Iraqi people, for the region and for the entire world. It is tragic foremost because it didn't have to turn out this way,” Petraeus told The Washington Post. “The hard-earned progress of the surge was sustained for over three years. What transpired after that, starting in late 2011, came about as a result of mistakes and misjudgments whose consequences were predictable.”
Petraeus, who continues to advise the Obama administration on Iraq despite his recent guilty plea for leaking classified information to his former mistress, says there is plenty of blame to go around for the chaos in the region.
But Petraeus told the Post he thinks Iraq and coalition forces are making progress against ISIS.
"In fact," he said, "I would argue that the foremost threat to Iraq's long-term stability and the broader regional equilibrium is not the Islamic State; rather, it is Shiite militias, many backed by -- and some guided by -- Iran."
He told the Post the Iran-backed militias returned to the streets of Iraq in response to a fatwa by Shia leader Grand Ayatollah Sistani during a moment of “extreme danger” and acknowledged this prevented ISIS from continuing its offensive into Baghdad. But he said the militias went after Sunni civilians as well as extremists, "and committed atrocities against them.”
What’s resulted is that the group has been both part of Iraq’s salvation but also its the most serious threat in the campaign to get the Sunni Arab population in Iraq to believe they have a say, Petraeus argued.
Petraeus, 62, admitted to having an affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell, following his resignation as CIA director. Prosecutors claimed that while Broadwell was writing her book in 2011, Petraeus gave her binders with classified information he kept while he was top military commander in Afghanistan.
In addition to working with the Obama administration, Petraeus has started to re-enter public life. He’s a scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and has taken a job at KKR & Co., a private-equity firm known for its large corporate takeovers. | 0fake |
7 DEAD, OVER 200 INJURED IN AMTRAK CRASH And This Passenger Has The Audacity To Complain About This… | This woman s remarks exemplify the Me first and Everyone s a victim attitude we re seeing so much of today..A violinist is facing backlash for her heartless tweet following the Amtrak train derailment Tuesday. Jennifer Kim, a professional violinist and music professor, was on board Amtrak 188 when it went off the tracks in Philadelphia about 9:30 p.m., killing seven people so far and left 140 injured. After the crash, Kim sent out a tweet that caused a strong counter blast from people social media. @AmtrakNEC @Amtrak thanks a lot for derailing my train. Can I please get my violin back from the 2nd car of the train? she wrote. The vitriol sent her way was so great, she deleted her Twitter account soon after her tweet started going viral, but thanks to screenshots it will never go away. Not even if she gets her violin back.Via: BizPacReview | 1real |
(VIDEO) WOMAN BEATEN BY TWO TEENS AFTER ‘SHUSHING’ THEM IN MOVIE THEATER | Is everyone else thinking what I m thinking? Two words come to mind on this one: concealed carry A Stroudsburg, Pa., woman suffered a broken eye socket and bruises during the attack, which took place in a local movie theater of all places. And why did the group of teen girls allegedly pounce on victim Cindy Santamaria-Williams? She tells WNEP-TV, which broke the story, that she shushed them for being loud and cursing. Worse, the attack didn t occur during the heat of the moment inside the theater. The woman tells WNEP that the girls jumped her after the film let out. They immediately jumped on me and knocked me to the ground, punched me in the face, she said, adding that the original girls were waiting with five other teens. She tells WNEP that she hopes someone will come forward to help police catch the young suspects: They were in my face. Their face is in my head. If I see them again or in a line up, I know exactly who they are, Santamaria-Williams said. Stroud Area Regional Police Chief William Parrish says authorities are looking at video from the mall.Via: wnep | 1real |
Exclusive: Top reason Americans will vote for Trump: 'To stop Clinton' - poll | NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. presidential election may turn out to be one of the world’s biggest un-popularity contests. Nearly half of American voters who support either Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump for the White House said they will mainly be trying to block the other side from winning, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday. The results reflect a deepening ideological divide in the United States, where people are becoming increasingly fearful of the opposing party, a feeling worsened by the likely matchup between the New York real estate tycoon and the former first lady, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “This phenomenon is called negative partisanship,” Sabato said. ”If we were trying to maximize the effect, we couldn’t have found better nominees than Trump and Clinton.” Trump has won passionate supporters and vitriolic detractors for his blunt talk and hardline proposals, including his call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, his vow to force Mexico to pay for a border wall, and his promise to renegotiate international trade deals. Former Secretary of State Clinton’s appeal to voters seeking continuity with President Barack Obama’s policies, has won her a decisive lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, but finds strong opponents among those disillusioned by what they see as lack of progress during Obama’s tenure. The poll asked likely voters about the primary motivation driving their support of either Trump or Clinton heading into the general election on Nov. 8. About 47 percent of Trump supporters said they backed him primarily because they don’t want Clinton to win. Another 43 percent said their primary motivation was a liking for Trump’s political positions, while 6 percent said they liked him personally. Similar responses prevailed among Clinton supporters. About 46 percent said they would vote for her mostly because they don’t want to see a Trump presidency, while 40 percent said they agreed with her political positions, and 11 percent said they liked her personally. The April 29-May 5 poll included 469 likely Trump voters and 599 likely Clinton voters. It has a credibility interval of 5 percentage points. (For results, click tmsnrt.rs/1TLCbqX) To be sure, voters’ opinions could change over the next several months. Candidates will be feted at party conventions, will square off in a series of national debates, and will be targeted by millions of dollars worth of advertisements. But the negative atmosphere is likely to reign, says Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University professor who has studied the rise of negative partisanship in America. Both campaigns probably will decide their best strategy is to work even harder to vilify each other, he said. “It’s going to get very, very negative,” he added. That would play into a longer-term trend. A 2014 study by Pew Research Center found that Democrats and Republicans have shown increasingly negative views toward each other over the past few decades. In 2014 more than a quarter of Democrats, and more than a third of Republicans, viewed the opposition as “a threat to the nation’s well-being.” Barbara Monson, 59, a Republican from Murray, Utah, is among them. “No matter who the Republican (nominee) is, I would have voted for him,” poll respondent Monson said of her support for Trump. “It’s never going to be Clinton. Never.” Jo-Anne Michaud, 69, an independent voter from Abingdon, Maryland, told Reuters she would try to keep an open mind. Although she has voted for both Republicans and Democrats in the past, she feels repelled by Trump. “I used to like the guy when I watched his show,” Michaud said. “But I just hate the way he talks now. I don’t think he’s a nice person deep down inside.” | 0fake |
Bergdahl's platoon mates: Head of Joint Chiefs knew he walked off base in 2009 | Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl walked away from his base in Afghanistan June 30, 2009, and by December of that same year, the president's principal military adviser, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, knew those details, according to three of Bergdahl's platoon mates who spoke to Fox News.
"I asked him (Mullen) if he knew about Bergdahl and that he deserted and he (Mullen) told me that he knew of the circumstances surrounding his walking off," former Sgt. Matt Vierkant told Fox,"(and) that they were developing leads and following leads, trying to do everything they could to get him back."
After pulling security duty for the chairman, who was doing a swing through Afghanistan in December 2009, Vierkant, along with Evan Buetow and Cody Full, said they met informally with Mullen and about eight other soldiers. After a pep talk about the mission, the three said Mullen asked the squad leaders and platoon leadership to take a break.
"He sat down with all the lower enlisted guys and the team leaders and basically he said, 'Hey, what do you want to know...You got any questions? He's like, I'm an open book. Let's just have a little question and answer session," Buetow explained.
"So Matt asked him, you know Bergdahl deserted, what's going on with that? And Admiral Mullen said, 'Yes, we know all the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl walking away from the OP (outpost,)and we're still working on getting him back, figuring out where he is and kind of figuring out that whole situation.’"
This account was backed up by a third platoon mate, former Specialist Cody Full. The men were split on whether Mullen singled them out because of the Bergdahl connection or whether it was a chance meeting, but they emphasized that at the time, they appreciated the fact that Mullen seemed to speak candidly and openly.
“I don't remember him being taken aback by it at all, you know, he knew what was going on, he answered not confidently but he didn't have to think about it, he didn't want to give us some political answer,” Buetow explained. “He just gave us an answer.
Asked if there was any ambiguity based on the conversation, Vierkant said no. "Without a doubt, he (Mullen) knew he (Bergdahl) deserted or, you know, was suspected of desertion. There was no doubt in my mind that he fully understood what Bergdahl did."
The three said they felt relieved, and grateful to Mullen for the conversation.
The men's account is significant because Mullen reported directly to President Obama and then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and the reported admission comes a full four and a half years before National Security Adviser Susan Rice said Bergdahl served honorably and his parents were called to the White House for a Rose Garden ceremony after he had been swapped for five Taliban commanders.
"If Mullen knew, and now it's alleged that he did know, it would be, it would be unthinkable that he didn't pump this up the chain of command, his chain of command, or, tell the president directly," Brad Blakeman who served in the Bush White House, explained. "At a minimum, this would have been included in the president's daily brief, and at a maximum, it would've been told directly to the President by Mullen."
In a statement to Fox News, Mullen said, "From the moment Sgt. Bergdahl went missing, the U.S. Military was focused on finding him--as it does with any serviceman or woman who goes missing. The exact circumstances were not known then, nor did they drive our decisions. We do not leave our people behind."
Fox has extended an open invitation to the Admiral to explain his recollection of events during the 2009 trip, what he knew in December 2009 about the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl’s capture, and whether he told anything to the president and defense secretary, or if the circumstances were already well understood at senior levels of the White House.
A military official who was travelling with Mullen during the 2009 Afghanistan trip confirmed Bergdahl's teammates did pull security during a leg of the trip,
While not commenting on the claims that they met informally with Mullen, the official said it was common practice for Mullen to ask leadership to take a break so that he could speak directly and candidly with soldiers.
"I want to ask him (Mullen) did they brief the White House? Who knew about it and why would you still do this trade knowing all the information that you knew?" Vierkant said. "We don't leave anyone behind. The thing is, we never left him (Bergdahl) behind. He left us behind. He chose to walk off and do whatever and get captured, that was his fault. Those were his choices."
Bergdahl has not been convicted of any charges, but faces a military court martial in the summer.
Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent. | 0fake |
White House to keep paying Obamacare subsidies for now: official | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration will continue to pay subsidies for low-income Americans receiving healthcare coverage under Obamacare, but no decisions have been made about future funding, a White House official said on Wednesday. “While we agreed to go ahead and make the ... payments for now, we haven’t made a final decision about future commitments,” the official said. | 0fake |
Trump to visit Paris for Bastille Day at Macron's invitation: White House official | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump has accepted French President Emmanuel Macron’s invitation to attend Bastille Day ceremonies in Paris on July 14, a senior White House official said on Wednesday. The two leaders spoke on Tuesday and Macron issued the invitation. The two men last met in Brussels in May, a session noted by an extended handshake between them. | 0fake |
U.S. judge frees Indonesian immigrant held by Trump order | BOSTON (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Wednesday ordered the release of an illegal immigrant who is among 47 Indonesians in New Hampshire challenging the Trump administration s order to deport them. The man, Terry Rombot, had been allowed to remain under the terms of a 2010 deal with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement until this year, when President Donald Trump instructed ICE that all people living in the United States illegally were subject to deportation. Rombot, part of a wave of Indonesian Christians who fled their country following deadly riots in 1998, learned of the policy change when he appeared for an Aug. 1 check-in with ICE and was arrested. He walks out of the courthouse right now, Chief U.S. District Judge Patti Saris said after concluding that Rombot s detention violated his rights. He walked out of the U.S. District Court in Boston in his blue jail scrubs, without a chance to change into street clothes. Rombot s lawyers said he was arrested despite a 2015 letter from ICE saying he would have a chance to prepare for an orderly departure. The judge cited that letter during Wednesday s hearing in holding that Rombot s detention despite ICE s previous guidance violated his due process rights under the U.S. Constitution. This is what intent was, that he would be given the opportunity to leave under his own steam and not under shackles, she said. Outside the courtroom, Rombot said: I just want to say thank you to my attorney, my pastor and all of my friends. The U.S. Attorney s office is considering an appeal, a spokeswoman said. ICE officials said the arrangement had always been a temporary one and that the agency always had discretion to deport the people covered by the arrangement. The Indonesians are part of an ethnic community of about 2,000 people clustered around the city of Dover in New Hampshire s seacoast region. Members of the group and advocates say they fear they could face discrimination or violence if forced to return to the world s largest Muslim-majority country. Their cause has drawn the support of Republican Governor Chris Sununu and New Hampshire s all-Democratic congressional delegation, including U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen. Saris previously ordered a stay to the deportations. She is currently weighing whether she can order a longer delay to give the affected people time to renew their efforts to gain legal status. | 0fake |
PRO-TRUMP GOP Senate Candidate Turns Tables On Liberal Rag, The Boston Globe…Calls Them “The White Supremacist” For Omitting His Name From GOP Candidates Running against FAKE Indian Elizabeth Warren | On October 25, 2017, the liberal Boston Globe ran an article that featured 3 GOP candidates who plan to challenge fake Indian Elizabeth Warren for her Senate seat in 2018. There s only one major problem with the article Many people have no clue who these 3 candidates are, but they do know who the pro-Trump, conservative candidate Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai is.Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai made a name for himself long before he announced his run against the liberal, lying, darling of the left Senator Elizabeth Warren.On February 25, 2017, Dr. Ayyadurai announced his candidacy for the GOP Senate nomination in Massachusetts:Today, ShivaRatri, when Light overcame Darkness, we launched my campaign for US SENATE against @SenWarren. Defend the American Dream! Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (@va_shiva) February 25, 2017Time to take fight right into the belly of the beast in MA, the epi-center of Fake News, Fake History & Fake Science! @nntaleb @Cernovich Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (@va_shiva) February 25, 2017Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai is a conservative, a successful businessman, an ardent supporter of President Trump, and is best known for his invention of the email when he was only 14-years-old. Recently, Elizabeth Warren came under fire, after she was caught by the Boston Herald for making up allegations of sexual misconduct by a Harvard professor, where Warren worked after lying on her application, claiming Native American heritage, to place herself in line in front of other applicants for the job.Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai made national news when mocked Warren by sending her a DNA kit for her birthday, saying it was a gift from a real Indian to a fake Indian .I'm deeply saddened @SenWarren refused my thoughtful (gift-wrapped) Birthday Gift: the 23&me DNA Test Kit. Most unfortunate! #FakeIndian pic.twitter.com/BI7F20wDW8 Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (@va_shiva) July 2, 2017Curiously, even after all of the news Ayyadurai made with his gift to Warren, and considering his impressive accomplishments as a private citizen thus far, the same Boston Globe writer, Jim O Sullivan who wrote a hit piece on Dr. Ayyadurai in August of 2017, seems to have forgotten to include Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, in his piece written only two months later, on October 25, 2017, about 3 of Elizabeth Warren s GOP challengers in the upcoming senate race.Now look at this in "liberal" @BostonGlobe. The "darkie" candidate Shiva doesn't exist. THEY are THE White Supremacist. @DineshDSouza pic.twitter.com/clX3vGyoRb Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (@va_shiva) October 30, 2017He s the inventor of email and polymath, holds four degrees from MIT, is a world-renowned systems scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. Yet, somehow, the same Boston Globe writer, Jim O Sullivan, who clearly knew Ayyadurai was running against Warren way back on August 14, 2017, when he wrote a hit piece on him for daring to speak in defense of free speech rally in Boston, neglected to mention that Ayyadurai is one of the GOP candidates running against Warren.The Boston Globe got slammed on Twitter for their obvious omission of the brilliant and badass GOP Senate hopeful:Why doesn't @BostonGlobe like brown people? Maybe they only like faux Indians. Robin McWilliams (@Queen0fcups) October 30, 2017I am appalled! VA Shiva announced his candidacy long ago! The Globe is well aware of it! marie (@singsandsews) October 30, 2017Here s Dr. Ayyadurai addressing the graduates that leftist Harvard University educates, that go on to become the Swamp of Washington D.C.:Cambridge Team Shiva 4 Senate Live in Harvard Square https://t.co/MASgHbNkeq Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (@va_shiva) October 29, 2017From Ayyadurai s website about who he is and why he s running for Senate:I am running for United States Senate from Massachusetts to be a 21st century Senator. We stand at the crossroads where we can either head into a Golden Age or into the Darkness. Incredible innovation and solutions, which have been created by everyday Americans, already exist for energy, education, health, affordable housing and much more. What stands in the way are the old guard of career politicians, political hacks, lawyer-lobbyists and academics who pervade Washington and local government with corruption and crony capitalism that chokes and suffocates these innovations and solutions from reaching us. America becomes great when innovators, entrepreneurs, working people with skills and those committed to using common sense and reason run this country. The Founders of America were blacksmiths, engineers, soldiers, architects, entrepreneurs, scientists they actually worked for a living and produced through their labor, products, and services to help other citizens.I stand before you as someone who is a personification of the American Dream. My parents and I left the caste system of India in 1970 where we were considered low caste Untouchables and Deplorables . We first settled in Paterson, NJ and I went through the public school system where I was fortunate to have come across incredibly dedicated teachers, coaches and mentors.Feel free to DONATE to Dr. Shiva Ayyardurai s campaign HERE. | 1real |
CRITICAL! HERE’S WHY HILLARY 2016 Comes With Sharia Law And The Loss Of Free Speech [Video] | Because of what Hillary Clinton agreed to with the UN, we are at the mercy of Islam in a BIG way! If you watch and read nothing else today, THIS needs to be your focus because if Hillary is elected we go down this path in a BIGGER way! THE 10 YEAR STRATEGIC ACTION PLAN TO COMBAT THE DEFAMATION OF ISLAM THAT HILLARY CLINTON AGREED TO: Islamic World Tells Clinton: Defamation of Islam Must be Prevented in AmericaThis brilliant article by Clare M. Lopez goes into much greater detail but I tried to give you the main part of the argument that Hillary is in cahoots with the OIC/UN to stifle our freedom of speech when it comes to Islam:As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton welcomes Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu to Washington this week, it is critical that Americans pay attention to what these two leaders intend to do. From 12 to 14 December 2011, working teams from the Department of State (DoS) and the OIC are going to discuss implementation mechanisms that could impose limits on freedom of speech and expression.The OIC s purpose, as stated explicitly in its April 2011 4th Annual Report on Islamophobia, is to criminalize incitement to hatred and violence on religious grounds. Incitement is to be defined by applying the test of consequences to speech. Under this twisted perversion of falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater, it doesn t matter what someone actually says or even whether it is true or not; if someone else commits violence and says it s because of something that person said, the speaker will be held criminally liable.The OIC is taking direct aim at free speech and expression about Islam.Last March, the State Department and Secretary Clinton insisted that combating intolerance based on religion can be accomplished without compromising Americans treasured First Amendment rights. But if that were so, there would be no possible excuse for engaging at this level with an organization like the OIC that is openly dedicated to implementing Islamic law globally. This is why it is so important to pay attention not only to the present agenda, but to a series of documents leading up to it, issued by both the U.S. and the OIC. From 12 to 14 December 2011, the DoS and OIC working teams will focus on implementation mechanisms for Resolution 16/18, a declaration that was adopted by the U.N. Human Rights Council in April 2011.Resolution 16/18 was hailed as a victory by Clinton, because it calls on countries to combat intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization based on religion without criminalizing free speech except in cases of incitement to imminent violence. But if the criterion for determining incitement to imminent violence is a new test of consequences, then this is nothing but an invitation to stage Muslim Days of Rage following the slightest perceived offense by a Western blogger, instructor, or radio show guest, all of whom will be held legally liable for causing the destruction, possibly even if what they ve said is merely a statement of fact. The implications of such prior restraint on free speech would be chilling (which is precisely the point). Clearly, the OIC feels some sense of urgency to get the rest of the non-Muslim world, and especially the U.S., on board with these objectives.In this same document is the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers Resolution No. 1/38-LEG On Follow Up and Coordination of Work on Human Rights, which makes reference to the OIC s new Independent Permanent Commission on Human Rights and stipulates that it shall promote the civil, political, social, and economic rights enshrined in the Organization s covenants and declarations and in universally agreed human rights instruments, in conformity with Islamic values. [Emphasis added.] This wording alone should set off alarm bells in view of the OIC s 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI), which explicitly declared that when the Muslim ummah (as represented by the OIC) uses the term human rights, what is meant is Islamic law (sharia). Universally agreed or not, the CDHRI was served as an official document to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in 1993, thereby creating an established instrument of reference on the Islamic definition of human rights. The foundational documents upon which the Muslim ummah the OIC now relies to undergird its sharia agenda were drafted years ago. The 1966 U.N. Commission for Human Rights International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which entered into force in 1976, was based firmly on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and preceded the 1969 creation of the OIC by just a few years. The ICCPR s Articles 19 (3) and 20 nevertheless foreshadow sharia Islam s demand for restrictions on free speech in an explicit and chilling way.Clearly, the OIC is trying to exploit these international standards, as shown in its April 2011 4th Annual Report on Islamophobia posted at its online Islamophobia Observatory. Given the ICCPR s assertions, the OIC s objective has long since been entered into official U.N. language. It required only a narrowing of the focus from the generality of the ICCPR down to the OIC s exclusive interest in protecting Islam from discrimination. It also required bringing the U.S. on board with the program to enforce Islamic law on slander. With the willing participation of the Obama administration, the OIC has tackled both of these challenges. In Section 6 of the Islamophobia Report, Conclusions and Recommendations, the language references the OIC goal of removing the gaps in international legal instruments to force the non-Muslim world to comply with its plan to criminalize slander of Islam.Those gaps in implementation and interpretation refer to U.S. objections to criminalizing free speech (in violation of the First Amendment), and the structured multilateral framework would appear to be the agenda in Washington, D.C. from December 12 to 14 at the meeting between Clinton and OIC Secretary General Ihsanoglu. It would not be overreaching to conclude that the purpose of this meeting, at least from the OIC perspective, is to convince the Obama administration that free speech that rouses Muslim masses to fury as defined by the test of consequences must be restricted under U.S. law to bring it into compliance with sharia law s dictates on slander.Clinton s own statements reflect the OIC language on the gap (emphasis added): together we have begun to overcome the false divide that pits religious sensitivities against freedom of expression, and we are pursuing a new approach based on concrete steps to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor. It may be recalled that the Obama administration claimed, obviously incorrectly, that defamation was no longer part of these agreements. The language of these resolutions instead stresses the importance of expediting the implementation process of its decision on developing a legally binding international instrument to prevent intolerance, discrimination, prejudice and hatred on the grounds of religion, and defamation of religions[.] The Department of State is not the only U.S. government agency committed to achieving compliance with the OIC s Islamophobia censorship agenda. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security both have committed publicly to an overhaul of their training materials to ensure that nothing in the curriculum gives offense to Muslim Brotherhood affiliates such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) or the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), with which both departments maintain close relationships. Instructors who previously taught the intrinsic connection among Islamic doctrine, law, and scripture and Islamic terrorism henceforth will be blacklisted by the U.S. government. As documented by the intrepid columnist and author Diana West, the Department of Defense also has made its obeisance to Islam, with troop instructions on how to handle the Qur an and avoid spitting, urinating, or sleeping with feet pointed in the direction of Mecca.Capping the administration s campaign to align U.S. national security policy within the parameters of Islamic law, the White House published Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States in December 2011. The plan makes clear that violent extremism, not Islamic terrorism, is the primary national security threat to the homeland. According to this strategy, the solution is partnership with local communities the term used for the administration s favored Muslim Brotherhood front groups, which already are using such relationships to silence their critics, both inside and outside government. These new rules of censorship state that the term violent extremism can no longer be used in combination with terms like jihad, Islam, Islamist, or sharia. And these new rules are already being taught to U.S. law enforcement, homeland security offices, and the military nationwide.The agenda of this week s Department of State/OIC meetings may mark an important milestone, as Sayyed Qutb might put it, on the pathway to sharia in America. If under the test of consequences those who speak truth about Islam, sharia, and jihad may be held criminally responsible for the violent actions of those who say they find such truth offensive, then, in the future, violent extremists could be just about anyone anyone the government, in obedience to the sharia dictates of the OIC, decides they are.Further, if the rubric is to be based on this test of consequence, then it creates a real temptation to any administration so inclined to create consequences that will justify a change in America s free speech rights. By way of example, analysts have suggested that the motive for the Department of Justice s Fast and Furious scandal, now under congressional investigation, may have been to create a crisis a consequence caused by U.S. guns shipped across the border to Mexican drug-dealers (and used in multiple homicides, including an American Border Protection officer) to nudge public consensus to expand gun control laws.Even if Obama s State Department seems fully enamored with a test of consequences on speech critical of Islam, most Americans across the political spectrum will realize that this perverts the traditional understanding of the First Amendment. It is to be hoped that dedication to the Constitution rather than to the OIC s definition of slander of Islam or the test of consequences will prevail among the ranks of our national leadership. Regardless of what s going on behind closed doors at the State Department this week, Americans should be aware and outraged. An informed citizenry, as always, remains the final defense of the Republic.Clare M. Lopez is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and also at The Clarion Fund.Read more: American Thinker | 1real |
Syria’s UN Envoy ‘Appalled’ By Rebel Attacks On Civilians In Aleppo | On Sunday Syrian state media said rebels had used chemical weapons against government-controlled districts of Aleppo.
RT reports:
Scores of civilians, including several children, were killed while hundreds of others were wounded in “relentless and indiscriminate” attacks carried out by opposition groups in the western districts of Aleppo, according to the UN statement.
“Those who argue that this is meant to relieve the siege of eastern Aleppo should be reminded that nothing justifies the use of disproportionate, indiscriminate [attacks,] including heavy weapons on civilian areas and it could amount to war crimes,” de Mistura said.
He echoed the condemnation voiced by the UN secretary-general regarding the attacks on schools. The special envoy also criticized the “use of heavy airpower on civilian areas.”
“The civilians of both sides of Aleppo have suffered enough due to futile but lethal attempts of subduing the city of Aleppo,” he said. “They now need and deserve a stable ceasefire covering this ancient city of Syria.”
Earlier on Sunday, state news agency SANA reported that “shells containing poison gases” had been fired at the residential district of al-Hamdaniya in western, government-held Aleppo.
RT Arabic’s crew in Aleppo reported 36 cases of suffocation. Al-Mayadeen reported that all the victims of the attack are civilians.
Just recently, the Russian Defense Ministry reported on a number of attacks in Aleppo that targeted schools and claimed the lives of at least three children in the period of 24 hours. Twelve more people died in an attack on a humanitarian aid corridor opened next to a school in the Al-Mashariq district, according to the ministry’s information. Twelve more people were injured.
Meanwhile, according to Russia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, over 16,000 people have fallen victim to opposition groups meant to be under US control. “From February to September, the opposition groups that are supposed to be under the US control committed 2,031 violations of the [cessation of hostilities], which claimed lives of 3,532 military personnel and 12,800 civilians,” the Mission’s statement, published on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry, reads.
According to Dr. Said Sadek, professor of Political Sociology at the American University of Cairo, it’s not likely that Western powers and the Gulf states will end their backing for rebel groups, even if they are found responsible for using chemical weapons in Aleppo. “We have to understand that for six years, the Western countries and the Gulf states invested in those ‘moderate’ or radical groups, and so they cannot abandon them,” Sadek explained. “They cannot pull out now and say, ‘OK we discovered that we are wrong, let’s get out and leave them.’ They have invested in them and they will still use them for bargaining in the future of Syria.” | 1real |
Federal judge in Hawaii extends court order blocking Trump travel ban | HONOLULU (Reuters) - A federal judge in Hawaii indefinitely extended on Wednesday an order blocking enforcement of President Donald Trump’s revised ban on travel to the United States from six predominantly Muslim countries. U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson turned an earlier temporary restraining order into a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit brought by the state of Hawaii challenging Trump’s travel directive as unconstitutional religious discrimination. Trump signed the new ban on March 6 in a bid to overcome legal problems with a January executive order that caused chaos at airports and sparked mass protests before a Washington judge stopped its enforcement in February. Trump has said the travel ban is needed for national security. In its challenge to the travel ban, Hawaii claims its state universities would be harmed by the order because they would have trouble recruiting students and faculty. It also says the island state’s economy would be hit by a decline in tourism. The court papers cite reports that travel to the United States “took a nosedive” after Trump’s actions. The state was joined by a new plaintiff named Ismail Elshikh, an American citizen from Egypt who is an imam at the Muslim Association of Hawaii and whose mother-in-law lives in Syria, according to the lawsuit. Hawaii and other opponents of the ban claim that the motivation behind it is based on religion and Trump’s election campaign promise of “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” “The court will not crawl into a corner, pull the shutters closed, and pretend it has not seen what it has,” Watson wrote on Wednesday. Watson wrote that his decision to grant the preliminary injunction was based on the likelihood that the state would succeed in proving that the travel ban violated the U.S. Constitution’s religious freedom protection. Trump has vowed to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is currently split 4-4 between liberals and conservatives with the president’s pick - appeals court judge Neil Gorsuch - still awaiting confirmation. | 0fake |
MUSLIM IMMIGRANT Chanted “Allahu Akbar” While Raping Gas Station Attendant…Refused To Appear In ND Court | Was this Somali immigrant refusing to appear in a ND court simply because he does not recognize American law? Or is it simply a case of believing he is entitled to special privileges because he is a victim of Islamaphobia in America? *UPDATE to story belowOriginal Story Dec 9, 2015A Muslim migrant who kidnapped a North Dakota woman and raped her while chanting Allahu Akbar has refused to appear in court.Abdulrahman Ali, a Somalian who arrived in America four years ago, is accused of sexually assaulting a gas station attendant in a bathroom at Gordy s Travel Plaza in Mapleton, North Dakota.After trying to kiss her, Ali allegedly forced the woman into the women s bathroom, locked the door behind him and started sexually molesting her while slapping and kicking the victim. When the woman tried to escape, Ali threw her against the wall. Documents say she was unsure if Ali was speaking English or a different language, but she could recognize one thing Ali said while they were in the bathroom alone. She heard Ali utter Allah Akbar, which, in Arabic means God is the greatest, reports Valley News Live.Ali s sister responded to the arrest by claiming her brother was a good person but that he was suffering from mental health issues.Ali, who refused to face a judge, claiming he was sick, faces charges of gross sexual imposition, kidnapping, aggravated assault, and two counts of terrorizing.The report again underscores concerns that the west is importing a real rape culture via the influx of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.Rapes occurring in and around migrant camps are now so prevalent, that authorities in Germany are covering up details of incidents so as not to legitimize critics of mass immigration.Via: Valley News Live*UPDATE- April 13, 2016 A Fargo man charged late last year with sexually assaulting a Mapleton store clerk appeared Wednesday, April 13, in Cass County District Court, but his case appears to be stalled for now as attorneys wait for a mental health exam.Abdulrahman Ibrahim Ali, 36, faces charges of gross sexual imposition, kidnapping, aggravated assault, and terrorizing stemming from an incident in December at Gordy s Travel Plaza in Mapleton. The most serious charge, Class AA felony gross sexual imposition, could carry a lifetime prison term if Ali were convicted.At one point Wednesday, Ali said he was having problems at the Cass County Jail and that he was taking medication but was not sleeping.Mental evaluations are used in criminal cases to assess whether a defendant is unable to assist in his own defense or was mentally ill or deficient at the time of the alleged crime. Either situation can prevent a defendant from standing trial.Ali s family has said he suffers from biploar disorder and that minor criminal charges against him in Ohio and Minnesota were dismissed on mental illness grounds. | 1real |
FRANCE’S INTERIOR MINISTER Makes INSANE Statement After ANTI-TERROR MARKSMAN Guns Down Man Shouting “ALLAHU AKBAR” KILLS Two Young Females With Butcher Knife | A man shouting Allahu Akbar has stabbed two women to death with a butcher s knife before being gunned down by soldiers in Marseille.The victims, aged 17 and 20, suffered horrific injuries during the frenzied attack, with one slashed in the throat and the other stabbed in the chest and stomach.Eyewitnesses told how a man dressed in black launched himself at the two women, who screamed for their lives as others ran for safety.The assailant was gunned down by soldiers who were on patrol inside Saint Charles train station at the time as part of France s ongoing state of emergency.The suspect, thought to be aged 25 to 30, was known to authorities for common law crimes while analysis of his fingerprints came up with several aliases.Photographs from the scene showed a woman lying on the ground and armed police standing over the attacker. A white sheet was later placed over his body.In a tweet, President Emmanuel Macron said: Deeply outraged by this barbaric act, in pain with the families and relatives of the victims of Marseille. I hail the Operation Sentinelle soldiers and the police forces who reacted with extreme calmness and efficiency. Marseille mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin said he believed the incident to be a terrorist attack , while interior minister G rard Collomb said it could be related to terror.A police source added: [ The stabbings were] frenzied and took place in front of lots of witnesses. The man first shouted threats and then launched into the two women. The two were killed by a knife, and then soldiers on anti-terrorism duties intervened. They shot the man dead. He added that the suspect shouted Allahu Akbar Arab for God is the Greatest during the attack.He was estimated to be aged between 25 to 30 years and no had no identification papers on him.The soldiers were part of Operation Sentinel, a wide-ranging security operation involving armed patrols dispersed all over France.It is thought to be the latest in a long series of Islamic State atrocities across France and the rest of Europe. -Daily Mail | 1real |
The biggest thing Iran deal critics get wrong, in one paragraph | According to critics of the Iran deal, Obama got played. If he had just waited, they argue, painful economic sanctions would have forced the Iranians to cave completely. And when that happened, the United States could have taken down Iran's nuclear program entirely, instead of just limiting it.
This narrative sounds compelling. It's also a total fantasy. The way sanctions actually worked means that the longer the US waited to make a deal, the worse it would have been.
Miles Kahler, a distinguished professor at American University, put this point really well in a piece for Brookings. Kahler's basic point is that the deal isn't just an agreement between America and Iran — it's a deal between America, Iran, and America's international partners. People who say there was a better deal don't really understand what countries like Russia and China wanted out of the negotiations:
Each of [America's] negotiating partners—three European allies, Russia, and China—paid a higher economic price for these economic sanctions in trade and investment foregone than the United States, whose companies have had (and will continue to have) limited economic exchange with Iran since the revolution, prevented by layers of unilateral sanctions imposed by successive U.S. administrations. Without the support of its negotiating partners for extending or deepening sanctions, their effectiveness would be immediately undermined. Given the greater opportunity cost of sanctions for them—particularly for Russia and China—it is difficult to imagine that they would follow any U.S. pursuit of a tougher bargain. Thus, the deal that is on the table represents not only a bargain between the P5+1 and Iran, but also a bargain among the P5+1 partners themselves.
In other words, the sanctions that led to this deal depended on the participation of those other countries. But because they previously traded a lot with Iran, they were also suffering a lot from the sanctions. America didn't have strong trade ties with Iran in the first place, so it felt much less economic pain. But Germany and China didn't want to give up the money they could make from Iran forever. If Obama walked away from this deal, these countries would likely have given up on sanctions altogether — and the prospect of a "better deal" would have vanished.
This is a very basic, fundamental point, but no deal critic has been able to answer it in a remotely plausible fashion. That's probably because the supposed "better deal" is 100 percent fictional. It was never a real option — just a myth made up to obscure the truth that this deal was the best one available. | 0fake |
In Istanbul, Optimism Fades to a Familiar Melancholy - The New York Times | ISTANBUL — When the army cut off traffic in Istanbul on Friday night by shutting two bridges in the opening moments of a coup, the municipality ordered ferries to work overtime. City trucks blocked roads near army barracks. Buses and subways operated free of charge, and local officials and mosque preachers helped mobilize government supporters to the streets. And when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan finally emerged in public, after uncertain hours in which he narrowly missed being seized at a seaside hotel by soldiers trying to topple his government, he flew, not to the capital, Ankara, but to Istanbul, where he remained throughout the weekend and on Monday. Ankara may be the seat of Turkey’s government, but it was Mr. Erdogan’s grip on Istanbul, a city he once governed as mayor, that was crucial in putting down the coup. In the failed coup’s aftermath, it was in the streets, mosques and public squares in Istanbul that his Islamist supporters raucously celebrated, and where Mr. Erdogan consolidated his hold on power. The two cities, in many ways, represent Turkey’s deep divisions: Istanbul owns the hearts of the Islamists and is Turkey’s showcase to the world, while Ankara is a special place for secular Turks. “Istanbul’s becoming almost the second capital of the country has been very instrumental in preventing the coup,” said Yusuf Muftuoglu, who was an adviser to the former president, Abdullah Gul, and briefly for Mr. Erdogan. The drama of the failed coup mostly played out across two urban spaces and the skies overhead — Istanbul, the sprawling megacity that symbolizes the country’s past as the seat of Islamic empire, and Ankara, the utilitarian capital, a onetime Anatolian backwater built up by modern Turkey’s secular founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Much of the violence occurred in Ankara, where different factions of the armed forces battled over government buildings. But the events in Istanbul proved crucial in fending off the coup. It was there that two private news channels broadcast coverage and gave a platform to elected leaders, including Mr. Erdogan. During his time in power, Mr. Erdogan has spent far more time in Istanbul than previous presidents and has overseen the construction of Turkey’s largest mosque in the city. He has also built up the police force, much of which is based in Istanbul. By stocking the force with loyalists and purging suspected enemies, he created a counterweight to the military, which has a history of carrying out coups against civilian governments. And it was largely the police special forces that defended the government over the weekend, confronting the renegade military factions. In the days before the attempted coup, a palpable sense of melancholy could be felt when walking through the city, whose singularity is measured in numbers: seven hills, two continents, the capital of three former empires. Turks call it “huzun,” a rich, word that means melancholy and a lot more: loss, sadness, spiritual anguish. Turkey’s most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk, used it to describe Istanbul in the dreary years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The word is back in the city’s lexicon now, as years of optimism about Turkey’s growing power on the world stage give way to anxiety over terrorism and internal conflicts. After the coup was decisively put down, and Mr. Erdogan’s supporters flooded the streets and city squares over the weekend to celebrate, a sense of buoyancy returned to the streets, but the joy masked a deep unease that has enveloped the city. Istanbul, where ancient mosques and churches jostle with gleaming skyscrapers and shopping malls to define an evolving cityscape, was reshaped by Mr. Erdogan’s Islamist government, which created a glistening image of the city that is now threatened by instability. The government embraced Turkey’s Ottoman and Islamic past as a mythical time of harmony and reimagined Istanbul as Turkey’s true capital, investing heavily in public works projects, new shopping malls and office buildings. Ankara took a back seat. “I think the city was presented as this perfect dream without its problems,” said Kaya Genc, a novelist and essayist who wrote about “huzun” after the recent attack on Istanbul’s main airport, which left dozens of people dead. “Maybe it was a lie, but we miss it. ” Now, he said, “is the return of the real Istanbul. ” By that he meant a city whose mood is more in sync with its unstable past of military coups, political violence and economic crisis. In recent years, the government built an image of Istanbul as an urban wonderland of fascinating history and great architecture and cuisine, and tourism boomed. Mr. Genc said that like many other liberals and intellectuals he bought in to the vision. “A past was reinvented, and repackaged as this great, multicultural history where there are no conflicts,” he said. Even before the failed military coup, all that was clouded by spillover from the Syrian civil war — terrorism and a flood of refugees, hundreds of thousands in Istanbul alone — that set the city on edge. “Everything is being Arabized,” said Karaca Borar, who owns an antiques shop on one of the crooked, cobbled streets in European Istanbul, and supplied many of the items that fill a nearby museum owned by Mr. Pamuk that is based on his novel “Museum of Innocence. ” He said he was tired of hearing the Arabic greeting of “salaam aleikum” on the streets, and tired of so many Syrians in general. (It is a widely shared sentiment: When Mr. Erdogan recently said Turkey should offer citizenship to Syrians, a secular newspaper called Syrians “vermin” in a headline.) Asked about the mood of the city, which before the coup attempt had faced several devastating terrorist attacks for which the Islamic State was blamed, Mr. Borar said, “Terrible, terrible, terrible. ” “We’re not happy,” he said. “I’m not at ease. ” He continued: “We were the only secular, decent country in a bad region. Now, we are like one of those Arab states. ” With so many threats, even the weather can set off panic, a clap of thunder sending people scampering for cover. People walking the streets are scrutinized for what they are wearing and what they are carrying. A backpack could be a bomb. A sweater or jacket in summertime could conceal a vest of explosives. Nowadays, it seems, all of Turkey’s old conflicts — most prominently the divide between religious and secular Turks — and many new ones, are coming to the fore. The most dramatic was the long night of uncertainty as fighter jets buzzed the sky, gunfire echoed across the city, and protesters mobilized as the military tried to secure the city. But even before that, Turkey’s traumas were playing out across Istanbul, in bitter conversations about politics, in painful decisions to move away or in to gated communities, in smatterings of protests quickly put down by the police, and in new debates over the use of public spaces. Three years ago, protesters in Gezi Park, in Taksim Square in European Istanbul where Mr. Erdogan’s supporters rallied over the weekend, rose up to oppose plans to convert the park into a shopping mall. The protests became a widespread challenge to his rule, which is growing increasingly autocratic. It produced no lasting political changes, but it did save the park. But maybe not for long. In recent comments that seemed designed to provoke his enemies, Mr. Erdogan said he could revive the plan. On a recent afternoon, Ali Erdogan, a retired military man in his late 60s who is not related to the president, sat on a bench in Gezi Park, where the city has planted new trees, blossoming with pink flowers, and told how his life had improved since Mr. Erdogan came to power more than a decade ago. He pulled out his card for retirees for free rides on Istanbul’s subway, which has been modernized in recent years, as has Turkey’s health care system. “Everything is new and shiny,” he said. More important, he said, he can freely express his religion, something he was unable to do when Turkey’s secular elite ruled the country for decades. He said when he was in the military, the guardian of secularism, he had to conceal his religiosity. “I had to lie that I prayed five times a day,” he said. “I had to find a secret corner to pray. ” The city’s most conservative district is Fatih, in the old city, across the Golden Horn waterway that divides European Istanbul. There, Mr. Erdogan spoke at a funeral on Sunday, and rallied his supporters to keep gathering in the city’s public squares. It is also where three suicide attackers who carried out the airport bombings lived in an orange apartment building. But the area is far from homogeneous. In one gentrifying enclave of Fatih, in a neighborhood called Balat, cafes and quirky antique shops have sprouted on the narrow streets, raising tensions and testing the limits of social diversity. “Istanbul used to be like a village,” said Hikmet Bardok, 63, a longtime resident. “I don’t recognize it anymore. A lot of people who live here are poor. And these rich people are coming in an looking for places to park their Ferrari. ” Mr. Bardok said he quit drinking in 1994 when he turned to religion, and blamed secular Turks for the country’s polarization because they are “arrogant and disrespectful. ” Now that they are moving in to his neighborhood, he is worried that “in five to 10 years this place is going to turn into Amsterdam. ” Mr. Genc, meanwhile, has been thinking of writing a book on what he calls the “New Istanbul,” a chronicle of the “artificial, distant new neighborhoods” that have built up in the city’s outer reaches during Mr. Erdogan’s tenure. Mr. Erdogan once enjoyed the support of many of Istanbul’s intellectuals and elites, some of whom now call him a dictator, even though they opposed a coup. They once thought him capable of healing the country’s divides, and basked in the optimism that flowed through Istanbul. Now, in the aftermath of the coup attempt, they are left to wonder if Mr. Erdogan will turn more autocratic or, perhaps, seize the time to patch up relations with segments of the society he has alienated. That will become clearer in the days and weeks ahead. For now, Turks are simply trying to make sense of their dizzying weekend. The morning after the coup attempt, Mr. Genc woke early, and went for a walk along the Bosporus. “In the background was the waterway,” he wrote in an essay for The New York Times, “a burning sun and two bridges that span two continents, where just hours before tanks had been firing shots. ” | 0fake |
BREAKING: NORTH KOREA Can Now Fit Missiles With Nuclear Warheads…Thanks Obama | It s being reported that the markings of China s involvement in the ability of North Korea to get a nuclear warhead are there. This is disturbing to say the least!North Korea has successfully created a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside missiles, a key step in the rogue regime s ambitions to become a nuclear power, a report on Tuesday said.The findings were contained in a study by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Washington Post reported.The newspaper also said the US calculated that North Korean President Kim Jong Un s regime now controls as many as 60 nuclear weapons.The findings show that North Korea s efforts to develop a long-range missile that can carry a nuclear warhead and strike the mainland United States is progressing more rapidly than experts had predicted.On Saturday, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to impose severe economic sanctions on North Korea for launching two intercontinental ballistic missiles in July.Read more: NYP | 1real |
Trump to meet with airline CEOs on Thursday: White House | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will meet with the chief executive officers of airlines on Thursday, the White House said, another in a series of meetings the new president has had with business leaders. The White House statement on Friday did not say who would attend the breakfast and “listening session.” Last week, Trump met with the CEOs of the Big Three U.S. automakers and pressed them to bring more jobs to the United States. This week he met with pharmaceutical executives and called on them to make more drugs in the United States and cut prices. | 0fake |
Incredibly Sexist Comment At Rally Earns Kasich Some Instant Karma (VIDEO) | Consider this John Kasich s Binders full of women moment: The exact second he reminded the entire country that his views of women are antiquated and misogynistic.At a campaign stop in Fairfax, Virginia, Kasich was making the pitch to a (nearly empty) room of supporters when he went off script to remark that his success in politics was due to wait for it women having the courage to leave the kitchen and come help him get elected. We just got an army of people, and many women who left their kitchens to go out and go door-to-door and to put yard signs up for me. It was an incredibly daft remark, especially from a candidate who is sitting so low in the polls that he can t afford to alienate even a single voter much less 50 percent of the country.Needless to say, the juvenile women spend their time in the kitchen! comment was greeted with one of Kasich s own supporters turning on him. A woman in the crowd aptly summarized the reaction many probably had when she told Kasich: First off, I want to say, your comment earlier about the women [who] came out of the kitchen to support you I ll come out to support you, but I won t be coming out of the kitchen. A flustered Kasich is left sputtering meekly. His chances, already grim, becoming more remote by the second.Making things worse, Kasich spent the weekend signing a disgusting bill into law that will go after women s rights in Ohio. The bill, intended to attack Planned Parenthood, will strip funding for vital procedures like STD testing, cancer screenings, and birth control from women s health clinics that also perform abortions. And due to the fact that no federal money goes to abortions in the first place, the budget cuts won t affect abortions, they ll affect everything else. Just one more way Kasich and his party have found to cause damage to women s health as part of their fanatical quest to take down Planned Parenthood.Ironically, Kasich has promoted himself as the moderate choice for the Republican Party. He s repeatedly argued that America should vote for him over the likes of Trump and Rubio because he isn t (quite) as crazy. With his views of women s role in the home (in the kitchen, of course!) and his quest to make it harder for them to receive health care, it s becoming a laughable premise. Kasich is no moderate, he s just typically better at hiding his misogyny.Featured image via YouTube | 1real |
Trump considers Fed's Powell, economist Taylor to lead central bank | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump is considering nominating Federal Reserve Governor Jerome Powell and Stanford University economist John Taylor for the central bank’s top two jobs, in an apparent bid to reassure markets and appease conservatives hungry for change. Under that scenario, either Powell or Taylor would take the reins from Fed Chair Janet Yellen when her term expires in early February, and the other would fill the vice chair position left vacant when Stanley Fischer retired this month. “That is something that is under consideration, but he hasn’t ruled out a number of options. He’ll have an announcement on that soon, in the coming days,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters on Friday. Making Powell, a soft-spoken centrist who has supported Yellen’s gradual approach to raising interest rates, the next Fed chief would provide the continuity in monetary policy that investors crave. The addition of Taylor, who has backed an overhaul of the Fed and embraced a more rigid rule-oriented monetary policy, would be a feather in the cap of conservative Republicans who feel that monetary policy has been too loose under Yellen, who was named as Fed chair by Democratic President Barack Obama and has led the central bank since February 2014. “I think Powell might be the safer pick insofar as we know what we’re getting,” said Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at J.P. Morgan Chase. “He’s a guy who obviously knows the Fed culture, how the (policy-setting) committee operates, so for some of those soft skills we know he would be effective.” Powell has embraced the Yellen Fed’s monetary policy, keeping the faith that a tighter job market will eventually push wages higher and end a lengthy period of worryingly low inflation. Taylor has spent the last two decades refining and advocating wider use of a rule that lays out where interest rates ought to be, given certain conditions of inflation and the broader economy. His rule implies that rates should be higher than they are now. Yellen, speaking at an economic conference in Washington on Friday evening, mounted a strong defense of the tools the Fed has used to fight the sharp economic downturn triggered by the financial crisis and said there was a risk of another crisis in which those “unconventional policies” may be needed again. Yellen, who Trump has indicated could still be named to another term as Fed chair, was not asked about the Fed job and did not offer any comment on the selection process. Although Taylor is highly regarded within the Fed, his rule-based rate-setting position has spurred criticism that he would handcuff U.S. monetary policy. Taylor pushed back at a meeting at the Boston Fed on Saturday, saying he favored a flexible implementation of policy rules and did not want to tie the Fed’s hands or suggest that he was motivated by a distrust of policymakers. “I think that’s completely incorrect,” he said. “I trust policymakers; (rules) are an effort to make policy better.” Some analysts suggest that fears that Taylor would bring an inflexible monetary policy with him to the Fed, as some Republicans in Congress hope, are likely exaggerated. “There is some scope for disappointment if people think putting Taylor in will just lead to mechanical-based policy,” Feroli said. Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester, speaking with reporters on Friday, seemed to agree. “Even if you pick a rule, the rule itself would need to be modified given the structure of the economy,” she said. “But I do think being systematic, looking at the kinds of information we look at systematically over time, articulating our strategy for policy and being less discretionary is a good idea.” At the same time, there are concerns that the combination of Powell and Taylor atop the world’s most powerful central bank could send a confusing signal to markets. It is unclear whether Trump, who has criticized Yellen’s stewardship but also said on several occasions that he preferred rates to stay low, wants to dramatically alter the Fed’s direction. Although he appears to be tilting to Powell and Taylor, in addition to Yellen the Republican president has interviewed his top economic adviser Gary Cohn and former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh for the Fed chief position. | 0fake |
THE YOUNG GIRL THE CLINTONS DESTROYED…Monica Lewinsky: “I’m Probably The Only 41 Year Old Who Doesn’t Want To Be 22 Again” | In 1998, I lost my reputation and my dignity. I lost everything and I almost lost my life -Monica Lewinsky, 2015Here is Monica Lewinsky, now a 41 year old woman who is actually being paid to address audiences about how her affair with then President Bill Clinton destroyed her life. What price did Bill Clinton pay for destroying this young girl s life? What price did Hillary pay for enabling his behavior (that bordered on pedophilia given the age difference between Bill and Monica)? This young girl was slut shamed by the entire world while Bill and Hillary, unconcerned with her well-being, huddled together to work out the details of how they would deceive the world with lies and save their political careers and ambitions. Hillary even went so far as to call Monica a narcissistic looney tune. Does anyone really believe the audience at this event had any desire to hear what Monica Lewinsky had to say about the age of media, and how it affects people s lives? They wanted to hear about what it was like to have an affair with the former President of the United States of America, who also happens to be a serial philanderer, and is still married to a woman who pretends to be a champion for other women. The Clinton machine made sure Monica Lewinsky didn t receive any compassion from the media. She was made into a public joke, and humiliated by a rabid press who was looking for someone other than the Clinton s to blame for the shame that Bill Clinton brought to the office of President of The United States.The Clinton s never gave a damn about this young girl they only cared how about how they could spin it with the media, so as not to affect Hillary s Presidential ambitions | 1real |
Britons can change terms of Brexit to diverge from EU: pro-Brexit minister Gove | LONDON (Reuters) - British voters will be able to change the terms of the country s relationship with the European Union after leaving the bloc if they don t like the final Brexit deal, senior cabinet minister and pro-Brexit lawmaker Michael Gove said on Saturday. Britain and the EU achieved sufficient progress in Brexit negotiations on Friday to allow them to move on to discussing future trade ties, in a move welcomed by Gove and other Brexit supporters in Prime Minister Theresa May s Conservative Party. However, while Gove, who is Britain s environment minister, reiterated his support for May, he gave succour to critics of the deal by saying that if Britons were dissatisfied with the terms of Brexit, future governments could change it. The British people will be in control. By the time of the next election, EU law and any new treaty with the EU will cease to have primacy or direct effect in UK law, Gove wrote in a column in the Daily Telegraph. If the British people dislike the arrangement that we have negotiated with the EU, the agreement will allow a future government to diverge. Britain is due to exit the EU in March 2019. The next election is not scheduled until 2022, though there has been speculation in British media that it could come earlier, given May s lack of a parliamentary majority and deep divisions within her party about Brexit. Some eurosceptic voices outside the government have said that May has betrayed British leave voters and given in to EU demands with the agreement. It has been a tough week for May after Northern Ireland s small Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) - whose support she needs in parliament - unexpectedly blocked an initial deal on Monday, leaving Britain and the EU scrambling to find wording acceptable to all sides ahead of next week s summit of EU leaders. While agreement was eventually reached on Friday, Gove said that all UK proposals were provisional on a final deal being done, and even then, that arrangement could be revisited by future governments. Matthew Parris, an anti-Brexit columnist and former Conservative lawmaker, told BBC radio that Gove might envisage a situation in which he would be spearheading a new approach to Brexit. But Gove, who was briefly in the running to lead the party last year, praised May on Saturday, and said the deal was a result of her tenacity and skill . Fellow pro-Brexit cabinet colleague Andrea Leadsom defended his comments, saying it did not imply that May would be replaced before the next election. It s simply the case that in taking back control (from Brussels)... it will be for the voters to determine what future governments do, Leadsom told BBC radio. I think it is a statement of the obvious. | 0fake |
John Podesta: Hillary “Acting Like a Retard – Smells Like Boiled Cabbage, Urine & Farts” A Hoax? | 0 comments
According to ClashDaily , newly leaked email from Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Manager John Podesta is titled “Hillary actions / unpleasant odor.” Many are claiming this is a hoax. Sure sounds like one.
“People tell me that Hillary is acting ‘like a retard’ since her head injury,” wrote Podesta on March 22, 2015. “Frankly, considering her normal behavior, I’m surprised anyone noticed! (this is a joke!) Have someone talk to her doctor and see if there’s anything he can give her.”
“Also, I’ve noticed she’s had an ‘odor’ lately,” he continued. “It reminds me of a combination of boiled cabbage, urine and farts. I’m guessing it’s either connected to her fall or simply the fact that she rarely bathes.”
“Outside of encouraging her to take a shower once in a while, I don’t know what to do about this. — any suggestions would be appreciated.”
Well, apparently, Hillary Clinton is just as gross as we all thought! | 1real |
Feds: 275,000 born to illegals in 1 year | Feds: 275,000 born to illegals in 1 year 7% of all U.S. births, would fill city size of Orlando Published: 10 mins ago
(WASHINGTON EXAMINER) Moms in the United States illegally gave birth to 275,000 babies in 2014, enough birthright U.S. citizens to fill a city the size of Orlando, Florida, according to an analysis of data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
The data showed that newborns to illegals accounted for 7 percent of all births in 2014, according to the analysis from the Pew Research Center. | 1real |
FOUR PREVIOUSLY DEPORTED ILLEGAL ALIENS Charged In Rape, Beating Of Couple | There are numerous crimes we report on every day that do not tell if the criminal is in America legally. When we find a news source that actually tells you we re shocked! The main stream media is really good at hiding the details of criminals like the ones who committed the crime below. The Boston Herald reported when it came to light that the accused are in the U.S. illegally.Federal immigration officials are requesting detainers on four illegal aliens accused of a heinous attack on a Framingham couple in which the woman was raped and her boyfriend was beaten and threatened with death, the Herald has learned.Two of the illegals had previously been deported to Guatemala, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Shawn Neudauer.Elmer Diaz, 19, is charged with rape, assault with a dangerous weapon, kidnapping and threatening to commit a crime. His brother, Ariel Diaz, 24, was charged with unarmed robbery, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, indecent assault and battery, kidnapping and witness intimidation.He was deported to Guatemala in May 2014 after convictions for drunken driving and disorderly conduct, said Neudauer.Another brother, Adan Diaz, 32, and Marlon Josue Jarquin-Felipe, 27, are both charged with indecent assault and battery and kidnapping. All four suspects are from Guatemala. Jarquin-Felipe was deported back to his homeland in April 2014, according to Neudauer.Neudauer told the Herald yesterday the agency is closely monitoring the cases and has placed detainers on all four illegal immigrants. He added that Ariel Diaz was also arrested this winter on a drunken driving charge. ICE was not notified of that case, he added.In the Framingham case, the victim s boyfriend was beaten while his girlfriend was held down on a bed and raped Sunday evening, authorities say.The still-shaken boyfriend told the Herald yesterday that he and his girlfriend have not yet come to terms with the horrific assault. Via: GP | 1real |
Meryl Streep Does a Number on Donald Trump at Public Theater’s Gala - The New York Times | At the moment that Hillary Clinton was all but clinching the Democratic nomination for president, Meryl Streep was on a stage in Central Park, impersonating Donald J. Trump. In orange face makeup and pompadoured hair, Ms. Streep, the chameleonic Oscar winner, did a more than credible version of the presumptive Republican nominee, down to the pursed lips and belly. She got the voice, too, even while singing. Ms. Streep was part of the Public Theater’s gala benefit celebration on Monday night, a tribute to Shakespeare at the Delacorte Theater, home to Shakespeare in the Park. She was the closing act with Christine Baranski, doing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” a number from the Cole Porter musical “Kiss Me, Kate. ” “We could do a deal — you’ll let me know — why it is all the women say no?” she sang, stretching out her arms in a Trumpian gesture. Later she strolled the stage, gesticulating to the audience in Mr. Trump’s signature style. The song, traditionally a duet for men, offers advice for picking up women — in this case, female voters. Some of the original lyrics were altered, but some could stand as is, for Mr. Trump’s combative attitude: “If she says your behavior is heinous, kick her right in the Coriolanus!” The crowd, which included Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor: the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power Miranda and Bette Midler, loved it. Her performance came as something of a surprise to the event organizers, who knew only that Ms. Streep, a supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s, wanted to take on Mr. Trump. “Utterly her idea, beginning to end,” Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, said after the show. “There were skeptics, there were doubters, but one of those skeptics was not Meryl Streep. She was absolutely sure she could do it. None of us had seen her in costume or makeup, till she walked out tonight. ” Ms. Streep skipped the dinner before the show to get into character, and spent time holed up in her dressing room. “She was showing us this thing that Donald Trump always does,” said the actress Kate Burton, who shared the dressing room with Ms. Streep along with Ms. Baranski, Lily Rabe and Phylicia Rashad. “He apparently does this thing, where he goes to close to his jacket but it doesn’t close all the way, and so he kind of goes for it and then he tries to close it again. ” It was a mannerism that only Ms. Streep seemed to catch, Ms. Burton said. “She treats this like she would her greatest roles: she’s working on it all the time. ” For the show, she came onstage in a black suit, white shirt and overlong, clownish red tie. Her transformation astounded her cast mates, who had only glimpsed her with the Trumpian coif in rehearsal. “She showed up, and I thought, ‘Meryl’s having a terrible hair day,’” said the Shakespeare in the Park veteran Hamish Linklater. (Ms. Burton reported that Ms. Streep even used her own hair: “She did some funky thing with pins. ”) Other performers watched from the wings as she and Ms. Baranski, in a black pantsuit, did their finale. “She’s willing to try anything, and have fun with what she tries,” Mr. Eustis said of Ms. Streep, who has appeared at the Delacorte several times in starring roles. “She’s just fearless. ” Mr. Linklater, who played a comic Romeo in another number, called Ms. Streep’s take “naughty. ” But, he added, Shakespeare “wanted to be valuable to his times. And she gave a performance that was valuable to her times. So absolutely, she’s honoring the spirit of the evening. ” On Tuesday afternoon, shortly after her name trended on Twitter with news of the Trump portrayal, Ms. Streep issued an statement through a Public Theater spokeswoman. “I appreciate the interest, but this was a a once in a (last in a) lifetime appearance of this character,” she said. | 0fake |
Amazon Will Stream N.F.L.’s Thursday Night Games - The New York Times | SEATTLE — Amazon customers will soon be able to watch live football games as part of the retailer’s growing online video service. The National Football League has reached an agreement with Amazon to allow Amazon Prime customers to stream 10 “Thursday Night Football” games in the coming season, N. F. L. and Amazon representatives said. Prime customers spend $99 a year for a membership that includes free shipping and a video service with a library of movies and TV shows. Amazon agreed to pay about $50 million for the streaming rights to the N. F. L. games, according to a person briefed on the deal who asked for anonymity because the price was confidential. The amount was about five times the roughly $10 million Twitter agreed to pay the N. F. L. last year for streaming rights to “Thursday Night Football,” this person said. The agreement represents another step in the delicate dance between tech and entertainment companies as more viewers shift their viewing habits to the internet and digital devices. Amazon and Netflix are pouring money into their video services, both licensing content and producing original programming. Some viewers of these video services are cord cutters, who forgo cable television subscriptions. Sports remain a big reason people keep their cable services. But ratings wobbled last year for many N. F. L. broadcasts, and the league has grown concerned that younger viewers are not watching football in traditional ways. Agreements with Amazon and other internet companies are an attempt by the N. F. L. to reach younger fans, even though the league risks alienating the broadcast networks that pay hundreds of millions of dollars in rights fees. For Amazon, the N. F. L. agreement is an attempt to fill one of the biggest holes in its lineup. Amazon will stream games produced by either CBS or NBC, which air the games on television. The Thursday night games will also air on NFL Network, the league’s cable channel. The television audience for “Thursday Night Football” dwarfed the internet audience during last season’s experiment on Twitter. The average viewership on Twitter at any given minute was 266, 000, according to the N. F. L. The figure for television, including broadcast and cable, was 15. 8 million. Analysts estimate that as many as 60 million households use Amazon Prime. | 0fake |
Obama: Once I’m Gone From Office, The Gloves Come Off | As the first African-American President, Obama knows that white America wouldn t have tolerated him as an angry black man, which is much of the reason he seems to never go far enough for progressives, especially some African-American progressives like Cornel West. The presidency is far from Obama s final act, though. Once he s out of office, he said in an interview with Vanity Fair, he ll be speaking out a lot more and likely doing things that he can t do while in office.Obama sat down with presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin for the interview, which was published on Friday.The walls of the private dining room where the interview was conducted didn t have past presidents. Instead, there were pictures of black civil rights leaders like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr. and of John Lewis during the 1965 march on Selma. Still, though, Obama s role model is Abraham Lincoln. My particular passion for Lincoln, though, dates back from my earliest memories of politics. And we ve talked about this before that there s no one who I believe has ever captured the soul of America more profoundly than Abraham Lincoln has.Not just his biography, of somebody who genuinely rose from nothing, self-taught, striking out along the borders of our Great Frontier. Somebody who worked with his hands and then worked with his mind, and somehow became one of the greatest writers in the English language. And I think, most importantly, somebody who was able to see humanity clearly, see the fundamental contradictions of the American experiment clearly, and yet still remain hopeful and still remain full of humor, and still have a basic sympathy for the human condition, even in the midst of a terrible war and having to make terrible decisions. And having a forgiving spirit. While Obama seems to have loved his time in office, he does regret some of the institutional constraints that might limit him from being who he wants to be. On the other hand, there are things he feels he can only accomplish once outside of office: Having had this office has given me this incredible perch from which to see how the world works. The power of the office is unique and it is a humbling privilege. With that power, however, also comes a whole host of institutional constraints. There are things I cannot say. There are things that I cannot say, not out of any political concerns, but out of prudential concerns of the office. There are institutional obligations I have to carry out that are important for a president of the United States to carry out, but may not always align with what I think would move the ball down the field on the issues that I care most deeply about. Ex-President role models couldn t be any different. Perhaps the most respected post presidency, at least in modern times, would have to be Jimmy Carter s. He s dedicated his life to building homes for those who most need them and to social justice around the world. Bill Clinton has the Clinton Foundation, and the Bushes and Reagan, well, they retired into near obscurity.Obama is still young, though, at just 55. He will potentially have decades to finish his community organizing, only on a grander scale, or really, whatever he wants to do. You can be sure that no matter what he does, he will be working to try to make lives better for his fellow African-Americans, an in turn, his fellow Americans.Featured image via Win McNamee/Getty Images. | 1real |
Skeptical lawmakers pressure Comey on Trump wiretap claim | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A key Republican lawmaker said on Wednesday he did not believe the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 election campaign, adding to pressure on FBI Director James Comey to provide evidence supporting or debunking Republican President Donald Trump’s claim. “We don’t have any evidence that that took place,” House of Representatives Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes told a news conference. “I don’t think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower.” Trump made the claim on Twitter on March 4 without providing evidence. Nunes’ congressional committee is one of at least four that have added the startling accusation to investigations of possible Russian meddling in the election campaign and Russian ties to Trump and his associates. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence under Obama, has said he knew of no warrant to wiretap Trump Tower. Nunes said if Trump’s tweets were taken literally, then “clearly the president was wrong.” With his statements, Nunes, who served on Trump’s transition team, joined other lawmakers, including some of his fellow Republicans, who have been skeptical about the president’s claim, and frustrated with what they see as federal law enforcement’s failure to provide them with information. The top Democrat on the House intelligence panel, Adam Schiff, said at the news conference with Nunes that Comey would be asked about wiretap evidence at a rare public hearing on Monday. “It deeply concerns me that the president would make such an accusation without basis,” Schiff said. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia conducted cyber attacks on Democrats in an effort to influence the 2016 U.S. election on Trump’s behalf. Russia has denied this. At the same time, Trump has been dogged by allegations that his associates had ties to Russian officials. Trump fired his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, last month after he failed to disclose contacts with Russia’s ambassador before Trump took office on Jan. 20. Trump seemed to back away from his accusation of wiretapping in a Fox News interview on Wednesday, saying “wiretap covers a lot of different things.” Without providing details, the president added, “I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks,” according to excerpts of the interview, which will air later on Wednesday. Schiff and Nunes said they sent a letter asking Comey, Rogers and CIA Director Mike Pompeo to provide by Friday information on leaks of classified information, including names of any Americans that might have been gathered. Schiff said he expected the Federal Bureau of Investigation to cooperate. The committee leaders said they were prepared to issue subpoenas if they did not. In Richmond, Virginia, Attorney General Jeff Sessions told reporters that he never gave Trump any reason to believe he was wiretapped by the previous administration, according to a transcript provided by CBS News. While White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters Trump “feels very comfortable” that information existed regarding surveillance conducted during 2016, a number of Trump’s fellow Republicans in Congress remained unconvinced. Spicer told reporters traveling on Air Force One on Wednesday that Trump had not meant wiretaps specifically. “He was very clear that he used the word ‘wiretap’ generally, he put it in quotes to mean that it counts for surveillance and all types of activity of that sort,” Spicer said. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said he had no reason to believe a judge ever issued a warrant, which would have reflected there was probable cause that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians. If it is not true, he said, the FBI should confirm that. Graham and Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime and terrorism, asked Comey two weeks ago to provide information on Russian activities and the wiretapping by Wednesday. Graham said on Wednesday that the FBI had responded that it would provide an answer to him and Whitehouse at a future classified briefing. “The bottom line is a lot of Americans are wondering what’s going on here,” Graham said at a subcommittee hearing, titled “The Modus Operandi and Toolbox of Russia and Other Autocracies for Undermining Democracies Throughout the World.” Whitehouse said he would prefer an unclassified briefing. Comey met on Wednesday with the Judiciary Committee chairman, Chuck Grassley, and its top Democrat, Dianne Feinstein. A law enforcement official said the meeting was an opportunity for the senators to ask Comey about subjects that concern them, expected to center on FBI investigations of Trump and associates’ Russia contacts, as well as the wiretap claim. | 0fake |
NATO declares full combat readiness because of conflict with Russia | NATO declares full combat readiness because of conflict with Russia AP photo NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that against the backdrop of growing tensions in relations with Russia , hundreds of thousands of NATO troops would be brought to a higher readiness. To restrain the "Russian aggression," the alliance intends to prepare an impressive amount of ground troops, although Stoltenberg did not specify the exact number of the troops. According to the UK permanent representative to NATO Adam Thomson, the alliance seeks to speed up the response time of 300,000 servicemen from 180 days to two months. Residents of NATO countries do not want a military conflict with Russia , nor are they ready to deal with it, a poll conducted by Pew Research Center said. The survey found that residents of several NATO member states were not ready to come into a military conflict with Russia, even if she attacked one of the alliance members, RT reports. According to the poll, 53% of French, 51% of Italian and 58% of German residents are ready to sacrifice the principle of collective security. At the same time, one can hear NATO officials saying the mantra about the unity within the alliance. The main purpose for the existence of NATO is collective defense. If one member of the alliance is attacked, others are supposed to come to its rescue. According to the poll, however, 53% of French respondents did not support the idea of the country's defense (51% share the same point of view in Italy and 58% - in Germany). The poll was conducted in eight countries of the alliance, but only in two of them - the USA and Canada - the majority of respondents supported the idea of using military force. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru How Russia-NATO war comes out | 1real |
THE DEEP STATE SPEAKS: Clapper and Brennan Threaten Trump During Aspen Institute’s Lefty Gaggle [Video] | Nice threat to POTUS: The intelligence community will continue to convey truth to power even if power doesn t necessarily listen. This entire video is disturbing but eye opening. THEY FEEL THREATENED BY TRUMP and this is clearly an effort to hurt President Trump. This coming from two men who ok d spying on Americans and who lied under oath:How convenient that CNN s Wolf Blitzer is the host for this bashfest of the current administration under President Trump. How ironic is it that two men who lied under oath are speaking truth to power FYI: John Brennan literally voted for the Communist party in the 1970s during the height of the Cold War now they re lecturing us about Russia.These two men define the deep state This talk was really all about creating doubt on Trump and to defend themselves post Obama. Can you imagine if the tables were turned and this vitriol was directed at Obama? Shameful!All you have to do is listen to Clapper lie before Congress and you know he has ZERO credibility to speak:Remember the famous moment when US NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE CHIEF James Clapper was testifying about the NSA surveillance of Americans when he let slip a sign he was not being truthful. Of course, we knew this was all a smoke and mirrors show. Clapper later said he misspoke last we checked it s pretty much the same thing as lying NOT WITTINGLY JAMES CLAPPERHere s the video below where he parses words in his testimony: REMEMBER WHAT CLAPPER SAID RECENTLY ABOUT TRUMP:Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says the United States political institutions are currently under assault both externally and internally, in the wake of President Donald Trump s firing of ex-FBI Director James Comey. The developments of the past week are very bothersome, very disturbing to me, Clapper said on CNN s State of the Union on Sunday. I think in many ways our institutions are under assault, both externally and that s the big news here, the Russian interference in our election system and I think as well, our institutions are under assault internally, When asked if he meant if those institutions were under assault internally by the president himself, Clapper said exactly and added that he believed Trump was undermining the checks and balances inherent to the U.S. political system. | 1real |
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