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BAM! LIBERAL THUG Tossed From Trump Rally…Crowd Goes Nuts! [Video] | Donald Trump was in Waterbury, Connecticut speaking to a huge group of supporters when a disgusting thug interrupted his speech. He was promptly tossed but you know the liberal media will blame Trump somehow | 1real |
CONFIRMED: Russia deploys Kuznetsov aircraft carrier to defend Syrian coast | ALEXANDER MERCOURIS | THE DURAN R ussia’s use of its aircraft carrier in the Syrian conflict is principally intended to learn lessons for the design of more potent such warships in the future, rather than to change the situation in Syria itself. The Russian navy’s deployment of aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean has provoked a very confused response in the Western media.
On the one hand it is described as a major escalation, as if was a US style super carrier. On the other hand there has been a great of deal of derision , with the ship called an obsolete rust bucket dangerous mainly to its crew. Where does the truth lie? The Admiral Kuznetsov is the first and only Russian aircraft carrier capable of launching fighter aircraft conventionally. The preceding Kiev class carriers were smaller ships, which could only launch a small number of aircraft vertically. Contrary to what reports say, Admiral Kuznetsov is by the standards of navy carriers a relatively new ship. She was launched in 1985, commissioned in the then Soviet navy in 1990, but only became operational after prolonged trials in 1995. The US navy currently operates 10 Nimitz class supercarriers. If the age of a ship is determined by its date of launch; then three of the US navy’s Nimitz class supercarriers are older than Kuznetsov; if by date of commission, then five are; if by entry into service then six are. The Russian navy had no previous experience of operating carriers, so the lengthy time scale of her sea trials between commission and entry into service is not surprising. In addition what undoubtedly extended this period before her full entry into service was the political and economic crisis Russia experienced during the 1990s. Given the severity of this crisis, it is a wonder a ship as large and complicated as Kuznetsov was brought into service at all. Either way talk of Kuznetsov as some sort of archaic ship from a bygone era is exaggerated, whilst jokes about Kuznetsov being “….practically old enough to have been deployed in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war….” are simply silly. The Admiral Kuznetsov is expected to deploy off Syria, carrying 15 warplanes, including new MiG-29K/KUB fighters and the Su-33a, shown here. Aircraft carriers as it happens tend to be long-lived ships. Coral Sea, a US Medway class carrier, served in the US Navy from 1947 to 1990. By the standards of aircraft carriers Kuznetsov is not an old ship. What is true about Kuznetsov is that because she was the first of a type of ship of which the Russians had no previous experience, and because of the fraught period during which she was commissioned and brought into service – which made it impossible to sort out her teething problems properly – Kuznetsov suffers by comparison with US navy carriers from design flaws and from engine problems. The ship’s engines are unreliable, because they are insufficiently powerful for a ship of this size. The Russians when they built Kuznetsov lacked suitable nuclear reactors for this type of ship (they were designed for the intended follow-on Ulyanovsk carrier, which because of the 1990s crisis was however never built). They also lacked conventional engines large enough for a ship of this size, which was roughly twice as heavy as the largest other ship the Russian or Soviet navy had commissioned before. The Russians accordingly came up with a complicated solution of using multiple steam turbines and turbo-pressurised boilers to make up for the lack of power of the individual engines. Like all complicated arrangements, this arrangement is unreliable and prone to breakdown, with the engines experiencing stress especially in heavy seas. To compound the trouble with the engines, they were built by a plant in what is now independent Ukraine. As political relations between Russia and Ukraine deteriorated, servicing of the engines by this plant became increasingly erratic, and has now stopped completely. It is these problems with the engines that account for the practice of accompanying Kuznetsov on long range deployments with a tug. The tug in question – the Nikolai Chiker – is the most powerful tug in the world. This same tug played a key role in successfully hauling Kuznetsov’s uncompleted sister ship Varyag from Ukraine to China in 2005, where she has now become the Chinese carrier Liaoning. The fact Kuznetsov is accompanied by a tug on long range deployments has provoked some derision. However it is common practice in any navy to accompany large surface warships with service ships, and accompanying Kuznetsov with a tug ensures in Kuznetsov’s case that the carrier will get to where the Russian naval staff are sending it. The engine problems will not affect Kuznetsov’s Mediterranean deployment when the carrier finally reaches its position. Kuznetsov suffers from other problems, which are unsurprising given that Kuznetsov is so much bigger and so different to any other ship the Russian navy has ever previously commissioned, and the unhappy times when it was launched. The arduous deployment of the Russian flotilla. Everything is harder for the Russians. (BBC) There are for example known to be problems with Kuznetsov’s water pipes, which have a history of breakdowns and of freezing up in Arctic weather. These problems too however will not affect Kuznetsov’s capabilities as a warship when the carrier finally reaches the eastern Mediterranean, and the close proximity of Russian bases in Sevastopol and Tartus means they can be dealt with quickly if they arise. Once this deployment is ended Kuznetsov will go through a lengthy refit, which unlike previous refits is intended to be practically a rebuild. With Russia developing a new range of much larger and more powerful engines, Kuznetsov’s current unsatisfactory engines will finally be replaced, and the other teething problems like the problem with the water pipes will finally be addressed. Ultimately this is a potent warship, bigger than any other carrier other than those operated by the US navy, and once the refit is done it will be a powerful asset. In the meantime the ship already provides the Russian fleet with a carrier capability matched by no other navy apart from that of the US.
The Russian carrier passing through the English Channel. In saying this it is important to stress however that the US navy carrier force – with its 10 nuclear powered supercarriers – dwarfs the capability of any other navy, including Russia’s, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Neither the Kuznetsov, nor any other carrier the Russians might build, nor any other navy, can match or rival it. A more pertinent criticism of Kuznetsov is that though Kuznetsov is a large ship (at 55,000 tonnes standard weight and with a 305 metre length Kuznetsov is midway between a US Medway class carrier and a US Forrestal class supercarrier) the air group it carries at 40-50 aircraft is relatively small (by comparison a smaller US Medway class carrier carried an air group of 75-80 aircraft in the 1980s). This suggests that Kuznetsov is inefficient in its use of its spaces, a fact which again reflects Russian inexperience designing this sort of ship when Kuznetsov was built. However it also partly reflects differences in Kuznetsov’s intended role. At the time Kuznetsov was built the Russians did not envisage using their carriers for the sort of long range carrier type operations carried out by the US navy. Unlike US navy supercarriers Kuznetsov prioritises air defence of the fleet rather than long range strikes. That explains why Kuznetsov’s fighter aircraft take off from the carrier using a ski jump rather than steam catapults. Ski jump takeoffs put less stress on the pilots and shorten takeoff times, enabling more aircraft to take off from the carrier more quickly, which can be important in an air defence situation. The penalty is that aircraft are limited in the loads they can carry by comparison with aircraft launched by steam catapults. For air defence – the purpose for which Kuznetsov was designed – this is unimportant since fighter aircraft carrying out air defence missions only carry light air to air missiles rather than heavy air to ground missiles and bombs. However it does significantly reduce the air group’s capability to carry out long range strikes. Combined with the relatively small size of the air group, this means that Kuznetsov’s ability to carry out long range ground strikes is fractional compared to that of a US navy supercarrier. If Kuznetsov is not really designed to carry out long range ground strikes, why are the Russians deploying Kuznetsov off the coast of Syria? The plan to deploy Kuznetsov to the eastern Mediterranean was made many months ago, long before the recent collapse in relations with the US over Syria. The decision therefore can have nothing to do with deterring the US from declaring a no fly zone over Syria, as some people are suggesting. Most likely the intention is to gain experience operating aircraft against ground targets from an offshore carrier. This is not something the Russians have ever done before. Even if Kuznetsov’s capability to do it by comparison with a US navy supercarrier is marginal, the fighting in Syria does at least give the Russians an opportunity to try it out to find out how it is done and what it involves. That way they can learn lessons that will help them with the design of the far more powerful ships that are to come (see here and here ). In other words the deployment of the Kuznetsov to the eastern Mediterranean is essentially a training exercise. It does not merit either the derision or the hype that has been created around it. | 1real |
BREAKING: TODD PALIN In “Very Serious” Snowmobile Accident | Sarah Palin canceled a campaign stop for Donald Trump in Florida on Monday after her husband Todd was injured in a snowmobile crash in Alaska.A source told NBC News that Todd Palin was in a very serious crash Sunday night and is currently hospitalized in intensive care.In a brief unplanned appearance before Trump s afternoon event in Tampa, Palin referenced the little wreck and thanked audience members for their prayers. The former Alaska governor stopped by the Trump town hall in Tampa but canceled her other planned appearances with the GOP frontrunner, whom she endorsed earlier this year. She has been in contact with medical personnel and will be traveling back to Alaska today, the source said.Palin was scheduled to appear on Trump s behalf at noon ET in The Villages, Florida. Just minutes before its scheduled start time, the Trump campaign advised that the event had been canceled. Governor Palin wishes her best to Mr. Trump in the upcoming primaries, that earlier brief statement from the Trump campaign read.Read more: NBC | 1real |
14 Days and Counting-There Will Be a Civil War No Matter Who Wins the Election |
It is 1860 and Stephen Douglas is running against Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s election will lead to a civil war. The pitfalls of catastrophic events were ever present.
In 2016, it is Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton. It is becoming clear that the election of either candidate will set off civil unrest and possibly lead to a civil war.
We are now just beginning to see a myriad of pieces fall into place in which will irrevocably divide this country for at least a generation.
When Hillary Clinton wins, the awakened American people, and some in the military will not accept this country being handed off to the UN and ultimately the Chinese. Hillary has no plan for America and the reason is clear. America has no future is she is elected by hook or crook.
If Trump even gets close to winning, the forces are of the NWO are not going to forsake the continued raping of the American people and just give up. They will fight!
The Electoral College Through out this week, I have documented case after case of voter fraud through the use of George Soros voting machines. Soros is omnipresent in the voting fraud fiasco. Also, I have broken a story about the attempted bribe of an elector in Arizona and this is only the beginning.
This summer we will begin to hear rumors of the officials of the Electoral College being bought off by TPTB, for it is their vote, not the people, whose votes will elect the next President. Trump could win 70% of the vote and not carry one state if the Electoral College refuses to cast their vote in accordance with the popular vote. And you thought you lived in a Republican form of Democracy.
As I just pointed out, there is always the question of “dirty” voting machines. Most pollsters will tell you that if the general vote is reported with more than 3-4% variation from the polls, one can easily demonstrate voter fraud. However, do you think TPTB, the criminal elite running this country, will care at this point that you know what they are doing? This is why they do the fake polls to condition us to the fact that Trump is losing. He is not, he is winning in a landslide. Further, the globalists always have their finger on the false flag button. This is why they have economic collapse, World War III, power grid down, a manufactured food crisis, etc., etc., etc., and the ultimate martial law to accompany any and all of these potentialities waiting in the wings.
Right now, UWEX 16 is practicing for Civil War and foreign troops are in play. UWEX 16 (i.e. Jade Helm 16) will be spreading to other states as announced in their operational plans. The Federal Reserve has met with Obama and Biden. The only thing that Obama could the Fed is the use of the military to put down any populist uprising over a stolen election or a false flag attack to prevent the election from happening.
Now, Paul Martin’s sources have learned and are communicating that there is a coordinated 18 state swat team drill. Could they be practicing for anything else but civil unrest over a stolen election? In short, if by some manner of Divine intervention, Trump wins, we will see massive terrorism in this country on an unprecedented scale from the Clinton Democrats and the terrorists we have let into the country through the Refugee/Resettlement program. I believe that Obama will not leave the White House and will impose his version of martial law, Executive Order 13603 style.
If Clinton is able to steal the election, America is done and unfortunately, the streets will run red with blood.
More Foreign Troops The knot in the noose, consists of the foreign troop movements that are taking place on our soil. I am getting repeated reports of large armored columns of UN vehicles being transporting or traveling on their own in the South stretching from Texas to Georgia. However, wide scale proof, with clear and convincing photos, not photo shopped, are lacking. Do I think that foreign military are planning for civil unrest in America? Yes, there is no question. I am encouraging all to keep their eyes open, take raw footage and transmit the raw footage to outlets like the The Common Sense Show .
Yesterday, when I said on a radio interview that America is grave danger because of Trump securing the nomination, these are just a few of the things that I had in mind. Yesterday, I was reading about massive revivals in West Virginia. Pray that these revivals sweep the country because we, the American public are defenseless and our faith is our best defense.
Conclusion Barring a miracle from the Almighty, the forces of subjugation have lined up against Trump and appear to have stolen the election. Pray, pray and pray some more that this 4th degree Coven Witch is not allowed to occupy the White House.
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Van Jones Has Powerful Conversation With Trump Supporters About The Possibility Of Civil War (VIDEO) | The possibility of a civil war has been on a lot of people s minds as the election gets closer. CNN s Van Jones decided to sit down with a family of Trump supporters to discuss this very issue. Fittingly, the family he met with lived in Gettysburg, the site of the bloodiest battle of Civil War.The video, titled Episode One: The Messy Truth, is the first of a three part series and delves into the deep divisions facing America right now. Jones spoke with the Coradetti family just one day after Donald Trump had given his own Gettysburg Address.' I asked: are we on the verge of ANOTHER Civil War? What I discovered will shock you, amaze you and possibly even inspire you, Jones wrote on Facebook. We need to start talking to each other, not just about each other. Please SHARE far and wide. #NextCivilWar? Jones succeeded in what he set out to do, which was to have an honest and eye-opening conversation about the political climate in the United States, bringing both sides together. Not in an effort to change anyone s mind and agreeing to disagree, but hopefully allowing all involved to walk away with a deeper understanding of one another.Are we headed for another civil war? Why on earth do these people support Trump? How can they ignore Trump s history of sexual assault and his willingness to brag about it? How do they get past the racism and hatred Trump spurs on? Their answers may surprise you.Watch Episode One: The Messy Truth here, via Facebook: Featured image via video screen capture | 1real |
Kenyan election board chairman says hard to guarantee free election | NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya s election board chairman Wafula Chebukati said on Wednesday ahead of a repeat presidential poll on Oct. 26 that it was difficult to guarantee the election would be free and fair. He invited political leaders in the country to discuss impediments to the vote, which was ordered by the Supreme Court on Sept. 1, adding he would not tolerate further threats to board staff. | 0fake |
Britain's Boris Johnson wants maximum two-year Brexit transition | LONDON (Reuters) - British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has said a transition period from the European Union after Britain s exit from the bloc in March 2019 must not last more than two years. In an interview with The Sun newspaper on Saturday, on the eve of the governing Conservative Party s annual conference, Johnson detailed four red lines for Brexit that appear to go beyond the agreed position of Prime Minister Theresa May s cabinet. In addition to a two-year maximum transition, he said the UK should not accept new EU or European Court of Justice rulings during transition, must not make payments for single market access when the transition ends, and should not agree to shadow EU regulations to gain access. Johnson also again strayed from his Foreign Office brief. He said Britain s current national minimum wage of 7.50 pounds an hour, rising to 9 pounds by 2020, was not enough , and called for public sector employees to get a pay rise, funded by layoffs. But he told the newspaper speculation about his leadership intentions had been massively overdone. Am I impatient about it (Brexit), do I want to get it done as fast as possible? Yes, absolutely. Do I want the delay to go on longer than two years? Not a second more, Johnson was quoted as saying in the tabloid newspaper. Some of Johnson s cabinet colleagues recently accused him of backseat driving on Brexit after setting out his vision for the UK s future outside the EU in a 4,300-word newspaper article just days before a key speech by the prime minister. In her speech in the Italian city of Florence on Sept. 22 May outlined a transition period of around two years of trading on the same terms, but no payments for single market access. The crucial thing I want to get over to Sun readers about Brexit is that it is going to be great and we need to believe in ourselves and believe we can do it. It is unstoppable, Johnson said in the article on Saturday. However, in an interview with The Times newspaper, Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson said that over optimism about Britain s future outside the EU sells people short and called for serious people to take charge of Brexit. At the Conservative party conference in Manchester, May will set out plans to build a road to a better future for Britain, hoping to head off a rebellion over her handling of Brexit and her poor showing in the June election. | 0fake |
Factbox: Likely players in potential post-coup Zimbabwe unity government | HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe s army appears to be pushing for a quick and bloodless end to 93-year-old President Robert Mugabe s 37 years in power, to be replaced by a national unity government headed by his former deputy, Emmerson Mnangagwa. According to political sources in Harare, Mugabe - now under house arrest in his lavish Harare home - was resisting pressure to stand down voluntarily. [nL8N1NM1N9] Assuming he does, the following are likely to be key players in the expected settlement, according to political sources in Zimbabwe and South Africa and several years of Zimbabwean intelligence documents seen by Reuters: EMMERSON MNANGAGWA (LIKELY PRESIDENT) - A lifelong Mugabe aide and 1970s liberation war veteran known as The Crocodile , Mnangagwa, 75, was in the pole position to succeed Mugabe until his progress was impeded by the dramatic political ascent of Mugabe s wife, Grace. His sacking as vice-president this month cleared a path for Grace to the presidency and appears to have been the trigger for the army to step in to advance its preferred successor. MORGAN TSVANGIRAI (LIKELY PRIME MINISTER) - A former union leader who founded the Movement for Democratic Change in the late 1990s, Tsvangirai, 65, has been Mugabe s main political rival for two decades. He served as prime minister in a 2009-2013 unity government formed after violence-ridden elections in 2008. Tsvangirai has been undergoing treatment for cancer outside Zimbabwe but returned to Harare late on Wednesday. CONSTANTINO CHIWENGA (POSSIBLE VICE-PRESIDENT) - As the military chief who pulled the trigger on the coup, Chiwenga is expected to win a senior role in the interim administration. Chiwenga, 61, who has served in the armed forces since Zimbabwe s independence in 1980, was sanctioned by the United States and European Union although the latter removed him from its list of restricted individuals in 2014. JOICE MUJURU (POSSIBLE VICE-PRESIDENT) - A liberation war veteran with the nom de guerre Spill Blood , Mujuru, 62, formed her own political party after being ousted as vice-president in 2014. Her husband, Solomon Mujuru, a general who died in suspicious circumstances in 2011, was regarded as one of the most feared men in Zimbabwe and one of the few people capable of challenging Mugabe. DUMISO DABENGWA (POSSIBLE VICE-PRESIDENT) - Moscow-trained Dabengwa, 77, nicknamed The Black Russian , fought in the 1970s anti-colonial struggle for ZIPRA (Zimbabwe People s Liberation Army), a rival to Mugabe s ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army). His incorporation in any unity government would ensure it represented both wings of the liberation struggle. TENDAI BITI (POSSIBLE FINANCE MINISTER) - A lawyer by training, Biti, 51, won international plaudits as finance minister in the 2009-2013 government that stabilized the imploding economy. He told Reuters he would be happy to reprise this role if Tsvangirai, his former political mentor, was on board. | 0fake |
Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines Unleashes HILARIOUS Twitter Tirade Against Trump (TWEETS) | With this presidential election being as absolutely bizarre as it is, sometimes it s incredibly important to keep our sense of humor about us. One person who seems to being doing this very well is none other than Dixie Chicks Natalie Maines.As a woman who s never shied away from letting her opinion be known about politicians, Maines began by taking to Twitter to make a joke about her apparent issues with airline travel saying that she ll vote for whoever makes the airline industry decent again. Although, she had one quick addendum to that statement: But only if it s a Clinton. At this point I might vote for whichever candidate promises to make the airline industry decent again.But only if it's Clinton?. Natalie Maines (@1NatalieMaines) September 22, 2016Then Maines went on to joke about the fact that not even George H.W. Bush can vote for Trump for president. Which for a Bush not to vote for a bad president to be in office is just utter irony.Even Bush won't vote for Trump!Which honestly has kind of turned my world around and forced me to rethink everything.#skiddin Natalie Maines (@1NatalieMaines) September 22, 2016She didn t stop there, however, in reply after reply, the jokes kept coming:@giannaL Oh no! Not at all! It's totally natural.For an Umpa Lumpa. Natalie Maines (@1NatalieMaines) September 22, 2016@DCXn24Fan OMG! That's even a better visual than him in a tanning bed. So presidential! Natalie Maines (@1NatalieMaines) September 22, 2016@mysheltieestate @hochalicious Actually it's also hands. And he has little ones. Natalie Maines (@1NatalieMaines) September 22, 2016@DarthPug Let's hope they forget to register. Natalie Maines (@1NatalieMaines) September 22, 2016And those are just a few of the replies.Maines was clearly on Twitter and ready to strike back at anyone or anything (if we re talking about Trump supporters) that decided to reply to her tweets against him. And honestly, we re all a little better for her wit and wisdom during this most troubling time.Featured image via Mike Windle/Getty Images for SiriusXM | 1real |
Egyptian presidential hopeful says barred from travel from UAE | DUBAI (Reuters) - Former Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, who told Reuters on Wednesday he intended to run in the presidential election early next year, told pan-Arab TV channel Al Jazeera that the United Arab Emirates had barred him from traveling. Shafiq, an ex-air force commander and presidential candidate, said earlier he had planned to return to Cairo in the coming days from his current location in the UAE, a close ally of Egypt. UAE officials could not be immediately reached for comment. | 0fake |
Texas Republicans ACTUALLY Claim Their Awful ‘Bathroom Bill’ Doesn’t Target Transgender People | There are many important issues in the world: racism, discrimination, poverty, police brutality. Unfortunately, Republicans issue of the week, while it touches on one of those in all the worst ways, is something so unimportant, so petty, that Americans are actually paying attention to the plight of transgender individuals for once.All across the nation, the GOP is focused on making sure that no one with a penis enters a women s restroom, even if they identify as a woman. Kansas, for example, literally wants to place a bounty on transgender individuals with its spot a penis, win a prize bill, which provides financial incentives for people who simply share a bathroom with a transgender individual to childishly scream Eek, a penis! Republicans in other states Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, and South Carolina, and others, are attempting to punish transgender people simply for using the correct restroom while North Carolina and Mississippi, for example, have already passed legislation that punish women who happen to have a penis (let s face it: they aren t concerned with trans men) for going pee.Not to be outdone by the other bigots in our country, one Texas city has thrown itself into the fray with a bathroom bill that would levy huge fines against transgender people though they are attempting a new approach to the matter by claiming that it doesn t target transgender individuals.Now, you may be shaking your head at his point and asking, F*cking SERIOUSLY? But we assure you it s true.The New Civil Rights Movement reports:Transgender people could face fines of up to $500 for using restrooms according to their gender identity under an ordinance to be considered by the City Council in Rockwall, Texas, on Monday.The ordinance, submitted by Rockwall Mayor Jim Pruitt (photo), would require people to use restrooms according to their biological sex, as shown on their birth certificates. It would also bar businesses from allowing trans people to use restrooms according to their gender identity. I just think that it s insanity not to have those protections in place, Pruitt, a Republican, told WFAA-TV. These folks aren t transgender that this is targeting. This is targeting folks of the opposite sex that are going into those restrooms under the guise of being transgender and having access. This is not about sexual orientation or anything of that nature. It is about privacy and the protection of our children. Republicans love to claim that they are protecting women and children with these obviously discriminatory pieces of legislation but the truth is that there isn t a single verifiable instance of a transgender individual so much as harassing a non-transgender person in a bathroom. None. Nada. Zilch. In fact, if they truly wanted to protect women and children in bathrooms, Republican lawmakers would ban Republican lawmakers from entering bathrooms at all.At this point, everyone needs to recognize these bills for what they are. They keep no one safe. They do not prevent crime. They do not protect women or children. They do not make sense when one looks at crime statistics. What they do is perpetuate a culture of hate and fear among the poorly-educated and bigoted in society. They increase the chance that women cisgender or trans will be harassed by stupid people who think they don t look feminine enough. They do nothing but promote exactly the sort of mentality that reasonable people have been trying to eliminate every single time conservatives find a new group of people at whom they can level their irrational hatred.But they do accomplish one positive thing: They bring attention to the plight of a group of people who regularly face discrimination, yet whose cries for help are ignored.Watch one example of the sort of nonsense this legislation encourages below: Featured image via Tumblr | 1real |
Burundi loses bid to stop U.N. atrocities investigation | GENEVA (Reuters) - The U.N. Human Rights Council voted on Friday to extend its investigation into suspected crimes against humanity in Burundi, dealing a blow to an attempt by a group of African countries to dial down the level of scrutiny. Burundi had hoped that by promising to cooperate fully with the U.N. human rights office and inviting three experts to the country, the Council would drop its Commission of Inquiry. It appeared to have succeeded on Thursday when the Council agreed to send the three experts, backing a resolution that also welcomed Burundi s decision to restore full cooperation with the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Burundi s ambassador, Renovat Tabu, told the Council that after that decision, there was no longer any need to continue the Commission of Inquiry, as demanded by the European Union. There is a clear will of the EU to instrumentalize the Council to politicize human rights, he said. But the EU, with strong backing from the United States, pressed the case for the Commission of Inquiry. Just days ago, when Burundi finally agreed to engage members of this council in discussions for the first time, the Burundian ambassador portrayed a rosy picture of his country, with the clear goal of ending the Commission of Inquiry, which he repeated again today, U.S. diplomat Jason Mack said. Don t be confused by Burundi s last-minute engagement, which is solely to put an end to ongoing investigations, he said. The commission has said there are reasonable grounds to believe crimes against humanity have been committed since April 2015 when President Pierre Nkurunziza said he would seek a third term in office. The opposition has said he acted unconstitutionally by doing so. Burundian officials at the highest level should be held accountable for crimes against humanity and a list of suspects has been drawn up, the commission said earlier this month. In a statement following the vote, the commission said it would like to believe that the Burundian authorities will now respond to a renewed request for dialogue . Among the 22 countries voting to maintain maximum scrutiny were Botswana and Burundi s neighbor Rwanda, alongside European countries and the United States. Other African nations were among the 11 no votes and 14 abstentions. | 0fake |
Sperm Banks Accused of Losing Samples and Lying About Donors - The New York Times | MONTECITO, Calif. — Even as she mourned the death of her husband from a rare genetic disorder, Sarah Robertson was comforted by knowing that six vials of his sperm were safely stored at the Reproductive Fertility Center — in Tank B, Canister 5, Cane G, Position 6, Color Blue — waiting until she was ready to have the baby they had both longed for. But 10 years later, when she was ready to use the sperm from her husband, Aaron, she got devastating news. All six vials were missing. “I’d been completely focused on having something of Aaron’s live on, and now there was nothing,” said Ms. Robertson in an interview at her ’ home in Montecito. Now she and her are suing the Los Angeles clinic, and its owner, Dr. Peyman Saadat, accusing them of negligence, fraud, breach of contract and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The suit, filed in May, also says the clinic misappropriated Mr. Robertson’s sperm — which had a 50 percent chance of carrying Marfan syndrome, the disorder that killed him — and used it to supply other patients who would not know to undergo testing to ensure their babies did not inherit the disorder. The Robertsons’ case is part of a new wave of lawsuits against sperm banks, highlighting claims of deception and negligence, and adding an array of challenges beyond the longstanding issue of undetected genetic problems. Dr. Saadat declined to be interviewed, but denied the accusations in a statement. Frozen sperm has become a major industry, dominated by a few large sperm banks, but with smaller stocks of sperm maintained at hundreds of centers nationwide. The Food and Drug Administration requires that donor sperm be tested for infectious diseases. Beyond that, sperm banks are lightly regulated. Several states require health department licensing of the labs, but only New York conducts routine inspections. Some of the new cases accuse sperm banks of careless or mishandling or misappropriation of sperm banked for a client’s personal use. Others say the banks use hyped, misleading descriptions to market their donors. Several cases accuse a Georgia facility of marketing sperm as belonging to a neuroscientist with a I. Q. who turned out to be a schizophrenic felon, and who has fathered at least 36 children. “Even in New York, when they inspect, they’re looking at hygienic conditions not ” said Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at New York University. “Nobody confirms that you have what you say you have. ” “It’s absurd that we have these materials so valuable that people pay to store them, but we run it like a grocery,” he continued. “Cryopreservation has historically operated in a casual environment, where people were just supposed to trust. ” Sperm banks are not required to verify the information provided by donors, and lawyers familiar with the industry say many do not. They set their own limits on how many children a donor can sire, but unless the mothers voluntarily report the births, they may not know how many are out there. Some, including the two largest, California Cryobank in Los Angeles and Fairfax Cryobank, headquartered in Virginia, test for many genetic conditions, while others test for very few. So it is — for people banking their own sperm for personal use after cancer treatment, and for those relying on a sperm bank’s description of an anonymous donor. Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, said his group did not see a need for further regulation and believed that the industry was generally reliable. “All indications are that sperm donation has been a terrific way to help people start a family even if, as with anything that involves humans, there are mistakes and some actors,” he said. In the past, few problems with sperm came to light, because most families were unwilling to discuss such an intimate matter in public. But that is changing, with a demographic shift in sperm buyers. Once, sperm banks mostly served heterosexual married couples in which the husband had a fertility problem, but today about of the buyers are either lesbian couples and single women, who are more open about their children’s origins. With genetic testing widely available and relatively cheap, the concept of donor anonymity is increasingly open to question. “I can personally attest that there are more cases than you ever hear about, but almost all settle before they get to court,” said Andrew Vorzimer, a California fertility lawyer representing the Robertsons. Wendy Kramer, of the Donor Sibling Registry, which helps families connect with others who used the same donor, says she hears a steady stream of problems, including lost records and genetic issues reported to the sperm bank but never shared with all the donor’s offspring. “People think it’s a medical industry, it must be regulated and trustworthy, but it’s just sperm sellers,” said Ms. Kramer, whose registry, founded in 2000, has more than 50, 000 members, and has connected more than 13, 000 relatives. “They can say whatever they want. ” In Florida, California, Canada and England, lawsuits are pending against Xytex, the Georgia facility that sold sperm from Donor 9623, James Christian Aggeles. The lawsuit claims the sperm bank described Mr. Aggeles as a neuroscientist with bachelor’s and master’s degrees who was pursuing a Ph. D. in neuroscience engineering. Instead, according to court papers, Mr. Aggeles did not have a college degree, had a history of psychiatric hospitalizations and had an arrest record that included burglary. Many of the families that used Mr. Aggeles’s sperm had already found each other before Xytex sent an email that accidentally included his email address, prompting intense internet sleuthing by the mothers to discover his identity. “We found out a lot of things about him from public information,” said Angie Collins, an Ontario woman with a son fathered by Mr. Aggeles. “Xytex could have done that, too, if they’d wanted to. I think sperm banks should be required to get the donor’s medical records, and run a criminal background check. ” Xytex would not discuss the case but Ted Lavender, a lawyer for the company, said in a statement that Xytex “complies with all industry standards. ” Jennifer Cramblett, a white Ohio mother who mistakenly got sperm from a black donor, is suing the Midwest Sperm Bank in Downers Grove, Ill. on the grounds of negligence. She and her partner had been sent vials from Donor 330, an donor, rather than Donor 380, the white donor they had chosen, according to her lawsuit. No one at the Midwest Sperm Bank would discuss the case. Dr. Saadat, who was sued by Ms. Robertson, also faces a suit by Justin Hollman, a California man who froze five vials of his sperm before undergoing chemotherapy for testicular cancer at age 20. Years later, Mr. Hollman wanted his sperm transferred to his wife’s fertility doctor. When he was presented with paperwork, his lawsuit says, he noticed that it authorized the destruction of his sperm instead of the transfer. After refusing to sign, the court papers say, Mr. Hollman got a call from Dr. Saadat later that day telling him the samples had been destroyed as a result of “human error. ” Mr. Hollman declined to discuss the case, and repeated calls to Dr. Saadat’s center and to his lawyers were not returned. The Robertsons’ lawsuit also claims there was deception by the center, which on different occasions said the sperm either had never been stored there or had been destroyed in a fire. When Ms. Robertson initially asked for the sperm, according to court papers, the center told her that five of the six vials were missing. The complaint went on to say that Dr. Saadat urged her to try to get pregnant with the sixth vial, but the clinic’s manager later emailed that the sixth vial, too, was gone. “When I got that email, I stood up and screamed,” said Ms. Robertson, who is a nurse practitioner. The Robertsons still wonder what sperm Dr. Saadat would have used if Ms. Robertson had agreed to use the purported last vial to get pregnant. “Was he just going to take someone’s sample at random?” Ms. Robertson asked. “It’s terrifying to imagine a health care business being operated so recklessly. ” | 0fake |
BREAKING: 5 People Shot At Anti-Trump Protest…All Are In Critical Condition [VIDEO] | This is 1 of 7 anti-Trump rallies raging across America. Wouldn t it make sense for Obama and Soros to prey on the anger so many Americans are feeling right now over Trump s win?According to social media posts by KOMO-TV and other sources, multiple people were shot Wednesday in Seattle during protests over election results.At least five people have reportedly been shot and all are said to have critical injuries.Seattle Asst. Chief says that a lone suspect was in a crowd near or watching the anti-Trump protests, when an argument of some sort developed. One of the people in the argument stepped away, fired back into the crowd at the person or people with whom he was arguing.At least some of the wounded are believed to be innocent bystanders waiting for a bus. Only one man is seriously injured. The four other injuries are believed to be to the lower extremities.VICTIM UPDATE: All five people shot were taken to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Hospital spokeswoman Susan Gregg told The Associated Press that two men and one woman were in critical condition and that two men were in serious condition Wednesday night. Later Wednesday, Gregg said the condition of the woman had been upgraded to serious.Authorities were on the scene within 60 seconds, as police and EMS were staged just down the street due to the protests.The suspect is still at large. Bearing ArmsSEATTLE, WA NOW REPORTED 5 SHOOTING VICTIMS ALL REPORTED W/CRITICAL INJURIES MCI DECLARED #BREAKING https://t.co/7c1rakpPAg https://t.co/DFFUsmar4M Alertpage Inc. (@alertpage) November 10, 2016LIVE on #Periscope: Anti-Trump protest takes to the streets in downtown Seattle #komonews https://t.co/QclXVo02ol KOMO News (@komonews) November 10, 2016Here is a Craig s List ad that was sent to us looking for Hillary supporters to join protesters to join them in NYC: | 1real |
U.S. senator insists special counsel won't derail Congress' Russia probes | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior U.S. senator said on Friday that he expects Congress’ investigation of Russia and the 2016 U.S. election to go ahead, even after the appointment of a special counsel, and said Congress has a broader mandate that extends to financial conflicts of interest. The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia. “The Congress has a broader oversight responsibility than just whether crimes have been committed,” Senator Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee and a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during a round-table meeting with Reuters. The Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting one of the main congressional probes of the issue. “Bob Mueller doesn’t have, for example, the same broader responsibility to get into the kind of financial entanglements that I have especially focused on,” Wyden said. Questions remain about what contacts took place between Trump advisers and the Russians, and about Russia investments in Trump businesses. In March, for example, the White House disclosed that Trump’s son-in-law and White House senior adviser, Jared Kushner, met executives of Russian state development bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB, in December. In February, Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign for failing to disclose the content of his talks with Sergei Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, and then misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the conversations. Reuters reported on Thursday that Flynn and other advisers to Trump’s campaign were in contact with Russian officials and others with Kremlin ties in at least 18 calls and emails during the last seven months of the 2016 presidential race. U.S. intelligence agencies said Russia hacked emails of senior Democrats and orchestrated the release of embarrassing information in a bid to tip the 2016 U.S. presidential election in favor of Trump, whose views were seen as more in line with Moscow’s. Russia has denied the allegations. Trump has dismissed suggestions of links with Moscow as Democratic sour grapes for losing the election. Trump and his aides have repeatedly denied any collusion with Russia. Mueller’s appointment raised questions about whether he would ask Congress to step away from its investigation, or whether the dual track would complicate issues such as calling witnesses or obtaining documents. Some congressional Republicans have also suggested that Mueller’s appointment would lead to changes in Congress’ investigation. Wyden said he would “go to the mat” to be sure congressional investigators get what they need. He has already put a hold on Trump’s nomination of Sigal Mandelker to the position of under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence until Treasury hands over all documents related to financial dealings between Russia, Trump and Trump associates. Wyden also said he was looking into ways to obtain documents related to dealings with Russia by Flynn. The Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Flynn for the documents on May 10. His lawyer said on Thursday that Flynn had not yet decided how to respond. Wyden said he needed time to decide how to respond, but pledged he would do so. “We still have to know more ... about how Russia corrupted our democracy,” he said. He said he knew that it would involve the Department of Justice. | 0fake |
Next round of Syria peace talks in Geneva to begin November 28: opposition chief | RIYADH (Reuters) - The next round of U.N.-backed peace talks in Geneva aimed at ending the Syrian civil war will begin on Nov. 28, the newly appointed head of the main opposition negotiating team said early on Saturday morning. Nasr Hariri told a news conference in Riyadh that the opposition was going to Geneva to hold direct talks and was ready to discuss everything on the negotiating table . | 0fake |
U.S. mulls potential F-16 sale to Greece: Trump | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that his administration has informed Congress of a potential sale to upgrade the F-16 aircraft in Greece s Air Force, a deal could be worth $2.4 billion. The U.S. State Department approved the possible sale on Monday. Trump spoke of the potential sale following a meeting with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsirpas at the White House. | 0fake |
Sean Hannity Gets Chewed Out By Fox News For Citing Fake Polls To Support Trump | Even Fox News is not pleased about Sean Hannity citing unscientific polls to claim that Donald Trump won the first debate with Hillary Clinton.Not long after the Republican nominee finished being clubbed by his Democratic opponent, the Fox News host was quick to use online polls as proof that Trump was victorious, even though such polls are often flooded by Internet users to skew the results in favor of one candidate or the other. I ll give you the list of polls, Hannity crowed before listing Time Magazine, Drudge Report, CNBC, The Hill, and CBS as online polls that said Trump won. The only one that has Hillary winning is CNN and they re the Clinton News Network anyway, Hannity complained. CNN s poll had 500 respondents. These polls have thousands of respondents and CNN is the Clinton News Network. But all of these polls were online polls that are easy to manipulate and are simply inaccurate.And that why Fox News vice president of public-opinion research Dana Blanton sent out a memo calling out Hannity and other Fox hosts for using such polls . As most of the publications themselves clearly state, the sample obviously can t be representative of the electorate because they only reflect the views of those Internet users who have chosen to participate, Blanton wrote. Another problem we know some campaigns/groups of supporters encourage people to vote in online polls and flood the results. These quickie click items do not meet our editorial standards. News networks and other organizations go to great effort and rigor to conduct scientific polls for good reason. They know quick vote items posted on the web are nonsense, not true measures of public opinion. Unfortunately, despite the fact that Fox News acknowledged that these polls are unscientific and should not be cited by their on-air personalities, Hannity and others apparently ignored the memo and continued touting them.Of course, it s pretty clear why Hannity would rather tout online polls. After all, a real scientific poll like one conducted by Public Policy Polling after the debate shows that most people surveyed said Clinton won the debate 51 percent compared with only 40 percent who said Trump won.In addition, the poll not only shows that Clinton won by a landslide among young voters, blacks, Latinos, and women, she beat Trump handily in more specific categories as well.By a 17 point margin, 55/38, voters say Clinton has the temperament to be President. On the other hand, by an 11 point margin, 42/53, voters say Trump does not have the temperament to be President. Among independents the gap is even wider- by a 56/36 spread they say Clinton has the temperament for the job, while by a 41/54 spread they say Trump does not.By an 11 point margin, 52/41, voters say Clinton is prepared to be President. On the other hand, by a 10 point margin, 42/52, voters say Trump is not prepared to be President.By a 21 point margin, 56/35, voters say they think Clinton can be trusted with nuclear weapons. On the other hand, by a 9 point margin, 42/51, voters say they think Trump can not be trusted with nuclear weapons.Once again, science proves that Hannity and Fox News are full of shit.Featured Image: Screenshot | 1real |
‘Child, I Trust You’: On Deadline With Bill Cunningham - The New York Times | On Fridays at 10 a. m. we heard his voice before we saw the flash of his bright blue jacket. Bill was hard of hearing and always spoke loudly, very loudly. We had to speak loudly to him, too, always talking directly into his right ear. If he was making his way down to us this meant he had completed hours of designing his On the Street and Evening Hours columns with John Kurdewan, his long time collaborator and close friend. He never deviated from his daily uniform: blue jacket, khaki pants and sensible black sneakers. He said once that Vanity Fair wanted to put him on their list and asked for his fashion essential. “Duct tape is what I will tell them!” he said. (He sometimes his jackets to prolong their use.) “Miss Joanna! Miss Val!” he would call out as he approached our desks. He was so focused on getting his pictures precisely organized on the layout, he usually forgot to eat breakfast. So one of us or another colleague would go out and get his regular order: a sugar doughnut (with the sugar scraped off) and a coffee with milk. The total was $2, not that he would let any of us pay for it. Cecilio, who works at the coffee cart across the street, always knew the was for Bill, and would say, “Tell Billy I said hi. ” Over the course of the day — almost every Friday until Bill’s death on June 25 — we worked with him on our projects. He and Joanna would go to a conference room so they could record his popular On the Street videos. Nothing was rehearsed or scripted. He would give a nod and then start. “Hello, this is Bill Cunningham. ” His Billisms were always left in, like his throat clearing as he said his introduction or his laughing at his own jokes. There might be tangents about how all the kids had a fashion revolution at Sheep Meadow in Central Park on Easter Sunday 1967, or about the giddy feeling he got when he saw Courrèges’ first collection. Bill never watched the completed videos. He just said, “Child, I trust you. ” (He would often call people “child,” and sometimes “Miss Muffett. ”) Maybe he didn’t want to suggest he was questioning the work. Maybe he didn’t like to hear the sound of his voice. The meeting with Val would be in her cubicle. Bill described her job as “doing the words,” the words being the names and scene setters in his Evening Hours column and the descriptive paragraphs in On the Street. He would dictate. She would take down everything he said. Together they would edit. This was a task taken on by many New York Times employees over the years, a lot of copy editors among them. It was not without its difficulties. There was always the tension of the looming 3:30 p. m. deadline. He had a tendency to make changes at the last minute. He wanted his columns to be just the way he wanted them to be. What mattered to him was the quality of the pages hitting doorsteps that Sunday. Bill embraced fashion’s eccentrics and didn’t care about celebrities. (He refused to say Kanye West’s name in the most recent Met Gala video, referring to him as “one man. ”) Though it was a photo of Greta Garbo that earned him his first spread of pictures in 1978, the only reason he had photographed her was because he loved how her coat fell on her shoulder. He knew the back stories and family trees of the “unknown” guests he repeatedly photographed at society parties. And he loved babies and children. While every other photographer was shooting clothes on the runway, Bill turned his camera to the “kiddies” in the front row. “Are you kids interested in this?” was one of his favorite questions. He had a passion for museums. Many weeks, his Evening Hours column was a roundup of names, but on certain occasions, such as when the Frick Collection and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum were involved, he would leave extra space for a narrative. Flowers received special attention, as well, and they often appeared in his photographs. In the office, when he saw arrangements wilting on someone’s desk, he would rush to get a cup and water them, muttering as he did it, “Oh, what a crime. ” Bill expressed his enthusiasm regularly and effusively. He complimented all of us who worked with him, and he was a generous, playful colleague. On days when the vending machines would malfunction, he would call everyone over and hit the numbers to hand out free sodas. He’d ham it up when friends from other departments came by and even consented to pose with us for selfies, against his better instincts. When Joanna wore red lipstick to work, Bill would ask her, “Oh child, do you have a date tonight?” After she told him she just liked to wear red lipstick for herself, he replied: “That’s right, child. Just remember they need you, you don’t need them!” He considered those who worked with him family. On Thanksgiving, he would invite many of us over to his modest apartment, which had a view of the parade. He would hand out chocolate turkeys and let people sit on his bed, a thin mattress on a wood strip over two box crates. This year, he gave everyone feathers that he used on his hats when he was a milliner. Bill marked every holiday with gifts. On Easter, he’d hand out toy bunnies. On the Fourth of July, it was scarves with a print of the United States flag on them. On Christmas, a box of truffles from Godiva or Myzel’s, a small chocolate shop on 55th Street from the ’60s, where Kamila Myzel, a Polish immigrant, still makes the chocolates by hand. When he received a Christmas card that lit up, he rushed downstairs to show us how it worked. This year, for Valentine’s Day, Bill left us paper hearts with a toy bird attached to each one. The birds were the same ones he had in his apartment. He was giving us a piece of himself. | 0fake |
France launches fierce assault on ISIS targets in Syria | French warplanes launched a ferocious retaliatory assault late Sunday on targets in Raqqa, Syria — the Islamic State’s de facto capital — after coordination with U.S. defense officials who helped with the targeting.
The French Defense Ministry said that 10 aircraft dropped 20 bombs on facilities used by the militant group, which has claimed responsibility for Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris, striking a command center, a militant-training facility and an arms depot.
Opposition activists reached in Raqqa said they counted at least 30 bombs, which they said had hit, among other things, a soccer stadium, a museum and medical facilities. They said the strikes had knocked out electricity in the city of about 200,000 people.
The French statement said the operation, launched from bases in the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, was conducted in coordination with U.S. forces, which have compiled an extensive target list in Raqqa. American officials, speaking at the Group of 20 summit here that President Obama is attending, said the French operation was discussed between the two militaries, as well as in telephone calls Saturday and Sunday between Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and his French counterpart.
U.S. planes have repeatedly struck in and around Raqqa, in north-central Syria, in recent months.
In Iraq on Sunday, Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari said Iraqi intelligence had obtained information before the Paris attacks that the Islamic State was planning an imminent terrorist strike overseas that may have been aimed “in particular” at France, the United States and Iran.
“We notified these countries and warned them,” Jafari said in a statement, which did not include specifics of when the Iraqis acquired the information. U.S. intelligence officials did not confirm the report.
Administration officials said the United States would not alter its strategy against the Islamic State in response to the Paris attacks, despite evidence that the terrorist group was expanding its ability to hit Western targets. In recent weeks, Obama has approved the escalation of airstrikes in Syria and Iraq and has authorized the deployment of 50 Special Operations troops to assist Syrian Kurdish and Arab forces pushing toward Raqqa.
Officials said that, in response to the attacks in Paris, the administration was seeking renewed global commitment to that intensified military action, and to a negotiated settlement of Syria’s civil war.
France’s retaliation came as Obama held talks with allied leaders and with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the summit being held in this Turkish Mediterranean resort city.
Obama vowed again on Sunday to help France hunt down the perpetrators of the attacks. Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said Obama agreed with French President François Hollande that the rampage, which killed at least 132 and wounded more than 350, was an “act of war.” But he and others disputed suggestions from Republicans that Obama, who said in an interview last week that the U.S.-led coalition had contained the Islamic State, has consistently underestimated the adversary.
[Manhunt in Europe for at least 1 suspect ‘directly involved’ in Paris attacks]
The president was referring to recent setbacks for the militant group on the battlefield in Iraq, Rhodes told reporters. The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, a derogatory term in Arabic, has long harbored ambitions to sow bloodshed farther from its home base in Syria, he said, emphasizing that Obama has been realistic that the fight would be long and difficult.
“It’s the manifestation of what has been the ambition of ISIL for some time now — to conduct attacks beyond Iraq and Syria,” Rhodes said. “The president indicated when he launched the counter-ISIL strike campaign that he knew ISIL had those ambitions, which is why we have always focused on the threat of foreign fighters.”
The highly coordinated assaults on several locations in Paris on Friday evening have shaken the gathering of global leaders here. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks, which intelligence officials said were carried out by three teams of terrorists affiliated with the extremist group.
The attacks prompted Hollande to declare that France would lead a “merciless” fight against the Islamic State, a move that could increase pressure on the Obama administration to take stronger actions to ensure that the Islamic State cannot attack the United States directly.
GOP leaders, including some presidential candidates, have faulted Obama’s strategy as too limited to contain the Islamic State. The Paris attacks, along with the recent bombing of a Russian commercial plane claimed by the group, have thrust the administration’s approach in the Middle East into the 2016 campaign for the White House.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, who served as secretary of state in Obama’s first term, has struggled to articulate how she would deal with the threats. Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the United States “should declare war and harness all of the power the U.S. can bring to bear.”
[In Paris, a soccer game, an Asian dinner, a concert — and then terror]
After a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the summit host, Obama said that the attacks in Paris, and last month in Ankara, were attacks “on the civilized world,” and that the United States would “stand in solidarity” with the victims in “hunting down the perpetrators of this crime and bringing them to justice.”
Rhodes emphasized that the attacks did not change the White House’s reluctance to establish a massive ground force of U.S. troops in the region, saying the administration remains confident that it can push back the Islamic State by relying on local forces it is training and advising in Iraq and Syria, along with punishing airstrikes.
“The further introduction of U.S. troops to fully re-engage in ground combat in the Middle East is not the way to deal with this challenge,” Rhodes said.
In Vienna on Saturday, diplomats from the region and from Europe, the United States and Russia agreed to press the various factions they back in Syria’s civil war to come together no later than Jan. 1 to begin talks on forming a transitional government.
Once that process starts, participants agreed, they will support a U.N.-monitored cease-fire between forces of President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia and Iran, and a wide array of rebel groups variously backed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others.
[Coordinated assault seems to mark new chapter in terrorism]
The administration has said that settling the ongoing civil war would allow global competitors to focus on defeating the Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq.
The Paris attacks, Rhodes said, “can serve to create a greater sense of urgency in the international community behind supporting various elements of the counter-ISIL campaign and support for a diplomatic resolution of the Syrian conflict.”
Obama met with Putin on the sidelines of the summit. White House officials said that they spoke for 35 minutes and that the discussion “centered around ongoing efforts to resolve the conflict in Syria, an imperative made all the more urgent by the horrifying terrorist attacks in Paris,” and on the “diplomatic progress” achieved in Vienna. While the United States has insisted that Assad must relinquish power, Russia, Assad’s main backer, has bombed rebel forces in a bid to help him remain in control.
Obama and Putin were joined in their meeting, held in the lounge area of a hotel conference center, by U.S. national security adviser Susan E. Rice and a man who appeared to be an interpreter. A closed-circuit video feed showed them sitting around a coffee table, with Obama leaning forward in his chair and talking intently with Putin, who was also leaning in, as other world leaders milled about.
The president also met here with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman.
In Brussels, NATO dropped the flags of its 28 member nations to half-staff to honor the French dead. NATO officials said that France so far has declined to invoke the alliance’s Article 5, which would oblige all members to join its fight against the militants.
The only time Article 5 has ever been invoked — at the request of the United States — was after the September 2001 al-Qaeda attacks.
“We support the French authorities in their determination to deal with the terrorist threat,” a NATO official said Sunday, “and a number of allies are already working with France on their ongoing operations and investigations in the wake of the attacks.”
Loveday Morris in Dahuk, Iraq, and Hugh Naylor in Beirut contributed to this report. | 0fake |
COMMIE OBAMA BASHES AMERICA: “I personally would not disagree,” with Raul Castro’s criticism of America.” [Video] | Wow! We REALLY do have a serious problem with this anti-American jackhole of a president! | 1real |
TRUMP TELLS THOUSANDS At FL Rally “Barack Hussein Obama Is Founder of ISIS…Hillary Is Co-Founder” [VIDEO] | For anyone who thinks Trump s comments have crossed over the line, perhaps they ve forgotten about the Obama supported Arab Spring in Egypt that resulted in the violent overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak who was replaced by the radical Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi. And that s just one example Donald Trump accused President Barack Obama on Wednesday of founding the Islamic State group that is wreaking havoc from the Middle East to European cities. A moment later, on another topic, he referred to the president by his full legal name: Barack Hussein Obama. In many respects, you know, they honor President Obama, Trump said during a raucous campaign rally outside Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He is the founder of ISIS. He repeated the allegation three more times for emphasis.The Republican presidential nominee in the past has accused his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, of founding the militant group. As he shifted the blame to Obama on Wednesday, he said crooked Hillary Clinton was actually the group s co-founder.Trump has long blamed Obama and his former secretary of state Clinton for pursuing Mideast policies that created a power vacuum in Iraq that was exploited by IS, another acronym for the group. He s sharply criticized Obama for announcing he would pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, a decision that many Obama critics say created the kind of instability in which extremist groups like IS thrive.The White House declined to comment on Trump s accusation.The Islamic State group began as Iraq s local affiliate of al-Qaida, the group that attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. The group carried out massive attacks against Iraq s Shiite Muslim majority, fueling tensions with al-Qaida s central leadership. The local group s then-leader, Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in 2006 in a U.S. airstrike but is still seen as the Islamic State group s founder.Trump s accusation and his use of the president s middle name, Hussein echoed previous instances where he s questioned Obama s loyalties.In June, when a shooter who claimed allegiance to IS killed 49 people in an Orlando, Florida, nightclub, Trump seemed to suggest Obama was sympathetic to the group when he said Obama doesn t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands. In the past, Trump has also falsely suggested Obama is a Muslim or was born in Kenya, where Obama s father was from. Via: AP | 1real |
Japan to launch crackdown on asylum seekers: Yomiuri | TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan will curb asylum seekers rights to work and detain any not deemed refugees or who have made multiple applications, the Yomiuri daily reported on Tuesday, in a move to further tighten one of the developed world s toughest refugee systems. From as early as mid-November, Japan will only allow those it regards as bona fide refugees the right to work. The Justice Ministry estimates that the new rule will effectively deny the right to work for more than 10,000 asylum seekers a year who don t qualify for refugee status, the Yomiuri said, without citing sources.Others, including those who fail to qualify as refugees in initial checks and multiple asylum applicants, will be held in detention centers after their permission to stay in Japan expires, the report said. At present, asylum seekers with valid visas receive renewable permits allowing them to work in Japan while their refugee applications are reviewed - a system the government says encourages people to seek asylum in order to work. We are looking at policies, including that in the (Yomiuri) article. We haven t decided whether to put it into action, said Yasuhiro Hishida, a Justice Ministry official overseeing refugee recognition. Japan accepted just three refugees in the first half of 2017 despite a record 8,561 fresh asylum applications, and only 28 in 2016. Human Rights Watch in January described the country s record on asylum seekers as abysmal . The prospect of the crackdown drew criticism from Japan s most prominent refugee organization, which said that asylum seekers would struggle to make ends meet without work permits. It s essential that minimum living conditions are ensured while people apply for asylum, said Eri Ishikawa of the Japan Association for Refugees. The world s third biggest economy has remained unwelcoming to immigration despite a shrinking, aging population that has exacerbated the worst labor shortages in four decades and drags on an already slow economic growth. Japan s reluctance to accept foreign workers and refugees is in contrast to the policies of other industrialized countries, and has forced labor-hungry industries including construction and manufacturing to rely on asylum seekers with work permits. Immigration remains a controversial subject in Japan, where many pride themselves on cultural and ethnic homogeneity. Almost six in 10 Japanese think diversity of ethnic groups, religions and races makes their country a worse place, a poll this month by the Pew Research Center showed. | 0fake |
Two liberals on a crusade submit petition for Oregon to secede from the Union | Two liberals on a crusade submit petition for Oregon to secede from the Union New petition hopes to make Oregon a 'safe space' as bigoted liberals plan State's succession By Shepard Ambellas - November 11, 2016 PORTLAND ( INTELLIHUB ) — Two liberals by the names of Jennifer Rollins and Christian Trejbal, likely offended by the powerhouse personality of the new President-Elect, have filed a petition for the State of Oregon to secede from the Union.
The petition for a 2018 ballot initiative will require only 1,000 signatures to move forward as the two wish to make the state a liberal safe-space, where robust personalities with vigor can’t encroach on their feelings.
Trejbal told the Oregonian Thursday, “Oregonian values are no longer the values held by the rest of the United States.”
“Those values? “Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.”
So essentially you have two bigoted liberals who likely crave open borders, more tax, more security arising from false flag attacks like 9/11 and transgender bathrooms.
Is this what they call “happiness?”
Ladies and gentlemen, if this is the mindset of Oregonians — then all I have to say is good riddance.
However, I suspect that it is not the mindset of most Oregonians and that these two crazed loons have their own agenda in which it is okay for them to express their ideology but they do not want others, like Trump, to express his.
The not so dynamic duo plans to get the 1,000 signatures needed by the end of Thursday.
#SafeSpaceFail
Shepard Ambellas is an opinion journalist, filmmaker , radio talk show host and the founder and editor-in-chief of Intellihub News & Politics. Established in 2013, Intellihub.com is ranked in the upper 1% traffic tier on the World Wide Web. Read more from Shep’s World . Get the Podcast . Follow Shep on Facebook and Twitter . Featured Image: Mike McCune/Flickr | 1real |
It’s Official: Trump is POTUS 45 | Today Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America. The new president gave a resounding speech that was a major break from tradition clearly an anti-establishment and anti-Washington speech, resuming his campaign stance of characterizing Washington DC as a corrupt, elitist cadre of career-minded, self-serving politicians. Oligharchs in attendance looked noticeably uncomfortable with Trump s words.Trump also went into full populist mode, casting aside globalism in favor of the national interest: From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land, Trump said soon after Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office. From this day forward, it s going to only be America first, America first. Expect a wild first 100 days READ MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER@ 21WIRE.TV | 1real |
Trump, Puerto Rico governor to discuss hurricane aid at White House | WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump and Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello are due to meet at the White House on Thursday to discuss rebuilding efforts after Hurricane Maria devastated the island a month ago, the White House said. The Trump administration and Congress are considering further assistance for the bankrupt U.S. territory as it seeks to recover from its worst natural disaster in 90 years. The catastrophic storm struck on Sept. 20, causing widespread flooding and damaging homes, roads and other infrastructure. Less than 20 percent of the 3.4 million Americans who live on the island have electricity, after the power grid was wrecked, and 35 percent still lack drinking water. Disaster costs are expected to run into the tens of billions of dollars. The U.S. Congress is currently working on boosting funding for emergency relief as well as a $4.9 billion loan to help Rossello’s cash-strapped government, which is poised to run out of money for payroll and essential services at the end of the month. “The meeting is related to the current recovery and response in Puerto Rico, and the long-term recovery process and what it’s going to take to recover in all aspects,” said Carlos Mercader, a spokesman for the territory’s government. “We need to think about rebuilding Puerto Rico in a holistic way. All the crops are all dead, agriculture is dead, housing is destroyed,” he said, noting more than 50,000 homes were destroyed and more than 660,000 individuals have so far filed claims with the federal government. Rossello asked Trump on Oct. 2 to expand the disaster declaration that provides for federal emergency services to allow federal funds to be spent on fixing damaged schools, buildings, and power plants. The governor has also asked the White House and Congress for at least $4.6 billion in block grants and other types of funding. The White House budget office asked departments and agencies to provide estimates of funding needs by Oct. 24. Trump visited the Caribbean island earlier this month to view the damage and meet with Rossello. But he and White House aides have suggested there would be a limit to how much help Puerto Rico could expect from Washington to solve its long-term issues. | 0fake |
U.S. citizen recaptured after Bali jail break | DENPASAR, Indonesia (Reuters) - Indonesian police have recaptured a U.S. citizen who escaped a week ago from an overcrowded prison on the holiday island of Bali, the jail s second breakout of foreign inmates this year. Cristian Beasley from California was rearrested on Sunday, Badung Police chief Yudith Satria Hananta said, without providing further details. Beasley was a suspect in crimes related to narcotics but had not been sentenced when he escaped from Kerobokan prison in Bali last week. The 32-year-old is believed to have cut through bars in the ceiling of his cell before scaling a perimeter wall of the prison in an area being refurbished. The Kerobokan prison, about 10 km (six miles) from the main tourist beaches in the Kuta area, often holds foreigners facing drug-related charges. Representatives of Beasley could not immediately be reached for comment. In June, an Australian, a Bulgarian, an Indian and a Malaysian tunneled to freedom about 12 meters (13 yards) under Kerobokan prison s walls. The Indian and the Bulgarian were caught soon after in neighboring East Timor, but Australian Shaun Edward Davidson and Malaysian Tee Kok King remain at large. Davidson has taunted authorities by saying he was enjoying life in various parts of the world, in purported posts on Facebook. Kerobokan has housed a number of well-known foreign drug convicts, including Australian Schappelle Corby, whose 12-1/2-year sentence for marijuana smuggling got huge media attention. | 0fake |
U.S. House panel slams former NSA contractor Snowden | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S congressional intelligence committee on Thursday issued a scathing report accusing former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden of leaking information that “caused tremendous damage” to U.S. national security, lying about his background and feuding with co-workers. In a report endorsed by both its Republican and Democratic leaders, the House intelligence committee said Snowden was “not a whistleblower” as he has claimed. Most of the material he stole from the NSA was not about invasions of privacy, but revealed intelligence and defense programs of great interest to America’s foreign adversaries, it said. The committee said that while the “full scope” of damage caused by Snowden’s disclosures remains unknown, a review of materials he allegedly compromised “makes clear that he handed over secrets that protect American troops overseas and secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and nation-states.” The committee released only a four-page summary of what it said was a 36-page investigative report that remains Top Secret, but the summary contained strong words about Snowden’s actions and background. The report contains previously unreported allegations about Snowden and his possible motives for taking government secrets. It alleges that Snowden, who took refuge in Moscow after fleeing to Hong Kong, “was and remains a serial exaggerator and fabricator.” It says his official employment records show that while he claimed to have left U.S. Army basic training because of broken legs, in fact he “washed out because of shin splits.” The report says Snowden claimed to have obtained a high-school graduation equivalent, but in fact never did. It also says he claimed to have worked as a “senior advisor” for the CIA when in fact he was an entry-level computer technician. While the report says Snowden “stole 1.5 million sensitive documents,” other sources who have examined materials he turned over to media outlets say that the total is between 200,000 and 300,000 documents. Some U.S. officials involved in Snowden-related investigations acknowledge that the U.S. government does not know how many documents Snowden downloaded, and that the 1.5 million figure is an estimate. The report also disputes Snowden’s motives for taking and leaking classified information, saying he got into a “workplace spat” with NSA managers in June 2012 over how to manage computer updates. It says a contracting officer reprimanded him for failing to follow proper grievance procedures, and he began downloading classified information two weeks later. However, in 2013, Reuters quoted U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the matter as saying that Snowden began downloading such data in April 2012, almost a year earlier than had previously been reported at the time. The issuance of the House committee report coincided with the release of “Snowden”, a movie directed by Oliver Stone that portrays him as a whistleblower and hero. On Wednesday, prominent human rights advocates urged President Barack Obama to pardon Snowden before leaving office in January. U.S. officials have said Obama is not considering a pardon for Snowden, who is facing U.S. criminal charges for providing classified information to unauthorized persons. Ben Wizner, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who represents Snowden, dismissed the House committee report as lacking substance. Wizner said the report’s release a day before the Snowden film opens “is evidence that people in the intelligence community are taking us seriously, that they are concerned that Oliver Stone’s movie will help solidify Snowden’s image as a true patriot, which he is.” | 0fake |
Here’s Hillary Clinton’s big 2016 challenge, in one chart | As many have already observed, one of the big questions that will help decide whether Hillary Clinton wins the White House next year is this: Can Clinton turn out the coalition that helped power Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 wins at the same levels that the president did?
A new poll by veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, to be released later this morning, illustrates the challenge Clinton faces.
The new poll, which was commissioned by Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund and conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, shows that members of the Rising American Electorate — minorities, millennials, and single women — are significantly less tuned in to next year’s election than GOP-aligned voter groups are.
The poll has some good news for Democrats. The survey, which was taken in four key battleground states — Colorado, Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin — suggests that in those states, the demographics do favor Dems. That’s because the poll finds that RAE voter groups — who helped drive Obama’s wins — now make up a “majority or near majority of the vote” in all those states. The poll also finds Dems leading in Senate races in two of those states and tied in two others.
But members of the RAE are insufficiently engaged in next year’s election when compared to Republican-aligned voter groups:
Unmarried women, minorities, and particularly millennials are less interested in next year’s voting than seniors, conservatives, and white non-college men are. Non-college women — a group the Clinton camp is reportedly eyeing as a way to expand on the Obama coalition — are also less interested.
“Unmarried women are a key dynamic in American politics,” Page Gardner, the president of Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, tells me. “It’s clear that the party or candidate who can increase turnout of unmarried women and the other segments of the Rising American Electorate will be well-positioned for victory in 2016.”
Now, obviously there is a very long way to go, and plenty of time for these voter groups to get more engaged. If Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, and the prospect of electing the first female president seems increasingly within reach, you could see engagement kicking in much more substantially. (It will be interesting to see how non-college, unmarried, minority and millennial women respond.)
But Greenberg’s pollsters are sounding the alarm now, warning that Democrats need to take more steps to tailor their message towards boosting the interest level among these voters. As Stan Greenberg outlines in his new book, America Ascendant, the key to engaging these voters is two-fold. It isn’t enough to simply outline bold economic policies to deal with college affordability, child care (universal pre-K), workplace flexibility (paid family and sick leave), and so forth, though those things are crucial. What’s also required to engage these groups, Greenberg argues, is a reform agenda geared to reducing the influence of the wealthy, the lobbyists, and the special interests over our politics. Today’s new poll suggests the same.
The basic problem outlined by Greenberg (and noted by other Dem pollsters) is that, even if Democratic economic policies are broadly popular, this isn’t enough on its own, because many Americans don’t believe government can or will actually deliver on those policies. Greenberg writes: “when voters hear the reform narrative first, they are dramatically more open to the middle-class economic narrative that calls for government activism in response to America’s problems.”
Thus, it’s not an accident that Clinton, in addition to embracing a robust economic agenda, has also stressed campaign finance and voting access reform. Her campaign knows engaging these voter groups on Obama-like levels is crucial to her White House hopes, and seems to share in Greenberg’s analysis.
* IT’S ON!!! TED CRUZ VERSUS MARCO RUBIO: Bloomberg reports that Ted Cruz is carefully escalating the attacks on Marco Rubio, now that both are roughly tied in national polls. Cruz is making the case that he is a real conservative, while Rubio is competing in the “moderate” lane. But:
As I noted on Friday, the GOP race could shape up as a battle between Cuban-Americans over who is more anti-“amnesty.”
* ARE DEMS BROADENING THE SENATE MAP? Politico takes a look at the Senate map and finds signs that Democrats may be putting unexpected states in play:
But Dem chances of winning in places like North Carolina and Indiana may not be as great as expected. Still, Dems only have to flip four seats out of the above seven if they win the White House.
* A BIG PUSH FOR AUTOMATIC VOTER REGISTRATION: The New York Times reports that a group called iVote, which is headed by former aides to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, is pushing a national bill that would require states to make voter registration automatic with the issue of driver’s licenses. That’s not going anywhere. But:
It’s another reminder of the long-term importance for Democrats of regaining ground on the level of the states.
* AMERICANS DON’T THINK GOVERNMENT WORKS FOR THEM: A Los Angeles Times poll released over the weekend showed a fascinating disconnect: Americans say by roughly 60-40 that “unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy” is a bigger problem than “over-regulation of the free market that interferes with growth.”
But only one in 10 say the federal government “increases opportunities for people like me,” while half say government “gets in the way.” This — majorities see an unfair economy, but most don’t believe government can do anything about it for them — perhaps confirms the problem laid out in the lead item. (Though generic “government” always polls badly.)
* A DEEP DIVE INTO HILLARY’S EMAILS: Hillary Clinton has claimed that “90 to 95 percent” of her work related emails are “in the State Department system.” Glenn Kessler does a very deep dive into the controversy over this statement and what is really true and what isn’t, concluding that it is “not unreasonable” for her to claim that most those emails might be in the State Department’s system, but that it is wrong for her to definitively declare this to be so.
The upshot is that these emails were sent over State Department servers, because they were sent to other State employees with .gov accounts, but the department has not made any official determination of how many of them have been captured.
* WHY IS MORTALITY RISING AMONG WHITES? With a new paper showing rising mortality rates among middle aged whites, Paul Krugman knocks down the conservative explanation that faults the left for eroding traditional values:
Krugman also suggests that many of these Americans may be feeling betrayed by the American dream, though he concedes economic explanations may not account for what’s happening.
* AND WE’VE HIT ANOTHER GRIM CLIMATE MILESTONE: Nothing to see here, folks:
Which gives me another excuse to link to my new feature on the current state of GOP climate skepticism. | 0fake |
Contaminated Food from China Now Entering the U.S. Under the 'Organic' Label | Contaminated Food from China Now Entering the U.S. Under the 'Organic' Label The Chinese food production industry is one of the world's least-regulated and most corrupt, as ... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/contaminated-food-from-china-now.html The Chinese food production industry is one of the world's least-regulated and most corrupt, as has repeatedly been proven time and again. Now, it appears, there is no trusting anything that comes from China marked "organic."Natural Health 365 reports that several foods within the country are so contaminated that Chinese citizens don't trust them. What's more, the countries that import these tainted foods are putting their citizens at risk.U.S. Customs personnel often turn away food shipments from China because they contain unsavory additives and drug residues, are mislabeled, or are just generally filthy. Some Chinese food exporters have responded by labeling their products "organic," though they are far from it.There are several factors at play which make Chinese claims of organic unreliable. First, environmental pollution from unrestrained and unregulated industrial growth has so polluted soil and waterways with toxic heavy metals that nothing grown in them is safe, much less organic. Also, there is so much fraudulent labeling and rampant corruption within the government and manufacturing sectors that it's not smart to trust what is put on packaging.In fact, farmers in China use water that is replete with heavy metals, Natural Health 365 noted in a separate report . In addition, water used for irrigation also contains organic and inorganic substances and pollutants. Chinese "organic" food is so contaminated that a person could get ill just by handling some of it. 'Dirty water' is all there is The report noted further:"This is reality – all of China's grains, vegetables and fruits are irrigated with untreated industrial wastewater. The Yellow River, which is considered unusable, supports major food producing areas in the northeast provinces."Many Chinese farmers won't even eat the food they produce, if you can believe that. That's because it's clear that China's water pollution issues are so pronounced that it threatens the country's entire food supply.Chinese farmers have said there is no available water for crops except "dirty water." As part of the country's industrial prowess, it is also one of the largest producers (and consumers) of fertilizers and pesticides, Water Politics reported.The site noted further that as China's industrial might grows, so too does the level of contaminants in the country's water supply. Lakes, rivers, streams and falling water tables are becoming more polluted by the year.In addition to man-made pollutants, animals produce about 90 percent of the organic pollutants and half of the nitrogen in China's water, say experts at the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning. There are times when water is so polluted it turns black – yet it is still used to irrigate crops, and of course, that affects so-called organic farming operations as well. These nine foods are particularly vulnerable to becoming tainted, Natural Health 365 noted: Fish: Some 80 percent of the tilapia sold in the U.S. come from fish farms in China, as well as half the cod. Water pollution in China is a horrible problem, so any fish grown there are suspect. Chicken: Poultry produced in China is very often plagued with illnesses like avian flu.Apples and apple juice: Only recently has the U.S. moved to allow the importation of Chinese apples, though American producers grow plenty for the country and the world. Rice: Though this is a staple in China and much of the rice in the U.S. comes from there, some of it has been found to be made of resin and potato. Mushrooms: Some 34 percent of processed mushrooms come from China. Salt: Some salt produced in China for industrial uses has made its way to American dinner tables. Black pepper: One Chinese vendor was trying to pass off mud flakes as pepper. Green peas: Phony peas have been found in China made of soy, green dye and other questionable substances. Garlic: About one-third of all garlic in the U.S. comes from China.Shop wisely. | 1real |
Have there been 353 mass shootings this year — or just 4? | The shooting in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday was the 353rd mass shooting of 2015, according to the crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker that Vox uses for our maps documenting mass shootings. Or it was the 29th, if you use data from USA Today. Or it was the fourth, if you use a database maintained by Mother Jones.
How are three news outlets coming up with such different answers? It all comes down to definitions:
There are other differences too — for example, Mother Jones says it generally only includes single gunman incidents, though it includes San Bernardino and the Columbine massacre in its database. But those are the main ones.
What's happening here a dispute not about the facts, but over what the appropriate definition is.
The Mass Shooting Tracker definition is fairly new, but the dispute between Mother Jones and USA Today is older and more ideologically fraught. That's because the Mother Jones definition suggests that mass shootings are rising in number, and the USA Today definition doesn't.
If you look at all killings in which four or more people died, there doesn't appear to be a strong upward trend, according to estimates by Northeastern University criminology professor James Alan Fox, who uses a similar definition to USA Today:
But other researchers, like Amy P. Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller of the Harvard School of Public Health, argue that Mother Jones's more restrictive definition is appropriate. Cohen et al. analyzed Mother Jones's data and concluded that mass shootings were becoming more frequent. They measure the average period of time between mass shooting incidents, rather than the number of incidents themselves; mass shootings of the kind they're studying are rare enough to make the latter untenable. They find that the period of time separating mass shootings (by their definition) has been shrinking:
So who's right? Well, Fox is right about the phenomenon he's studying, Cohen et al. are right about the phenomenon they're studying, and the Mass Shooting Tracker is right for the phenomenon it's studying. Declaring one or the other definition the "right" one is too pat; each is right for the thing it tracks. Fox's data tells us that shootings of four or more people didn't decline in the 1990s the way shootings as a whole did; that's concerning. Cohen et al.'s data tells us that high-profile public mass shootings like Aurora or Newtown have not only failed to decline the way normal shootings have but have increased in recent years; that's also concerning. And the Mass Shooting tracker tells us that mass shootings, deadly or not, are a daily occurrence in the US; that is, obviously, concerning.
But people still care about determining the "right" definition in cases like this for the purpose of ideological proxy warfare. Declaring Fox or Cohen et al. right, in particular, has a certain political valence in the wider gun control debate. You see something similar in discussions around school shootings, wherein gun control skeptics are as eager to declare that gang-related shootings in school are not real school shootings as they are to embrace Fox's definition in which gang-related mass shootings are real mass shootings — and vice versa for gun control supporters.
The best case for gun control has little to do with mass shootings, and isn't necessarily focused on homicides at all
What's frustrating about this is that whether mass shootings are increasing or decreasing in frequency has very little to do with the generalized case for gun control. Mother Jones's Mark Follman — who has done extraordinary work on gun violence in America, including compiling the data set used by Cohen et al. — is not wrong when he writes that the Mother Jones–defined mass shootings are "a unique phenomenon that must be understood on its own." And it's worth studying both the phenomena identified by Fox and those identified by Mother Jones to find specialized ways to prevent them.
But mass shootings are very rare. By Fox's definition, there are between 50 and 125 victims a year (compared with 11,068 total gun homicides in 2011); by the Mother Jones definition, there are substantially fewer than that.
Mass shootings can and should be prevented, and their comparative rarity makes them no less monstrous or tragic. But the best case for gun control has little to do with mass shootings, and isn't necessarily focused on homicides at all. Of the 33,636 firearm deaths in 2013, 63 percent, or 21,175, were suicides. The evidence that the presence of additional guns contributes to more firearm homicides is persuasive, but research from the Means Matter Project at the Harvard School of Public Health (much of it done by Azrael and Miller themselves, along with Cathy Barber) shows that the evidence that guns contribute to higher levels of suicide is considerably stronger.
Suicide, contrary to popular belief, isn't typically planned and thought through extensively in advance. It's impulsive; one survey found that 90 percent of respondents deliberated for less than a day before attempting suicide. And 90 percent of people who survive suicide attempts end up dying by other means. They didn't make a considered choice and then seek to follow through by whatever means; they made an impulsive decision and got lucky. Ken Baldwin, who survived a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, once told the New Yorker's Tad Friend that as he was falling, he "instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped."
America's gun homicide problem is real, frightening, and must be addressed. But its gun suicide problem is considerably worse.
Guns make it likelier that these impulsive decisions end in death rather than in survival and recovery. Studies suggest that suicide attempts using guns are fatal in the vast majority of cases, while attempts using cuts or poisoning are only fatal 6 or 7 percent of the time. So it's perhaps unsurprising that areas with more guns tend to have higher suicide rates, or that a number of gun control measures have been successful in preventing suicides. In one particularly dramatic case, the Israeli Defense Forces stopped letting soldiers bring their guns home over the weekend, and suicides fell 40 percent, primarily due to a drop in firearm suicides committed on weekends.
The dominant focus of gun control efforts, then, should be on keeping guns (and particularly handguns) out of the hands of suicidal people. America's gun homicide problem is real, frightening, and must be addressed. But its gun suicide problem is considerably worse. My concern is that disputes over whether this or that incident counts as a mass shooting reaffirms the myth that Jared Loughner and Adam Lanza are the face of America's gun violence problem. They're not. The tens of thousands who die every year because of depression and a nearby gun are. They are rarely, if ever, mentioned in the gun debate, and they deserve better. | 0fake |
Marriott Hotel Shoots Back Response After Muslim Group Demands A Ban On Act for America | A Muslim activist group has pushed Marriott International to ban Act for America from holding a conference. Marriott indicated it won t do so Get ready for another protest from another group of victims Oy vey! We think we ll book with Marriott next time e travel Act for America is scheduled to hold its conference, ACTCON 2017, on Oct. 2 and 3 at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, Virginia. Saying there should be no room for hate at Marriott hotels, Muslim Advocates has pressured Marriott to force out Act for America. However, Marriott indicated the event will be held as planned. We are a hospitality company that provides public accommodations and function space, said a Marriott spokesperson. Acceptance of business does not indicate support or endorsement of any group or individual. Muslim Advocates calls Act for America a hate group. Act for America describes itself as an advocacy group that stands for the protection of the United States of America and the Western values upon which our nation was built. Act for America, which claims to have 750,000 members, touts its conference as the nation s largest national security-focused grassroots gathering. The conference theme is United Against Terror. Muslim Advocates said it previously sent a letter to Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson urging him to cancel the Crystal Gateway Marriott s commitment to host the convention. The group suggested Marriott was hypocritical for doing business with an anti-Islam group while trumpeting its commitment to dignity for all people in its Golden Rule TV ad campaign.Scott Simpson, Muslim Advocates public advocacy director, said, Hosting the nation s largest anti-Muslim gathering is clearly incompatible with the values of our nation, of Marriott s customers, and of Marriott s own stated commitment to inclusion. Read more: Travel Weekly | 1real |
The Parliamentary Tactic That Could Obliterate Obamacare - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — Republicans hope to repeal major parts of the Affordable Care Act using an expedited procedure known as budget reconciliation. The process is sometimes called arcane, but it has been used often in the past 35 years to write some of the nation’s most important laws. “Reconciliation is probably the most potent budget enforcement tool available to Congress for a large portion of the budget,” the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, has said. Here is a primer. Q. What is the budget reconciliation process? A. It is a way for Congress to speed action on legislation that changes taxes or spending, especially spending for entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Although conceived primarily as a way to reduce federal budget deficits, it has also been used to cut taxes and to create programs that increase spending — changes that can raise deficits. In the Senate, a reconciliation bill can ordinarily be passed with a simple majority. For other bills, a majority is often needed to limit debate and move to a final vote. Q. Why is it called reconciliation? A. The term originated in the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which was intended to give Congress more control over the budget process by allowing lawmakers to set overall levels of spending and revenue. The process begins with a budget blueprint, a resolution that guides Congress but is not presented to the president for a signature or veto. It recommends federal revenue, deficit, debt and spending levels in areas like defense, energy, education and health care. The resolution may direct one or more committees to develop legislation to achieve specified budgetary results. By adopting these proposals, Congress can change existing laws so that actual revenue and spending are brought into line with — reconciled with — policies in the budget resolution. Q. How has reconciliation been used? A. Since 1980, Congress has completed action on 24 budget reconciliation bills. Twenty became law. Four were vetoed. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 was a vehicle for much of the “Reagan revolution. ” It squeezed savings out of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, the school lunch program, farm subsidies, student loans, welfare and jobless benefits, among many other programs. In 1996, Congress reversed six decades of social welfare policy, eliminating the individual entitlement to cash assistance for the nation’s poorest children and giving each state a lump sum of federal money with vast discretion over its use. Those changes were made in a reconciliation bill, pushed by Republicans but signed by President Bill Clinton. Congress reduced deficits with another reconciliation bill, the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. That law also created the Children’s Health Insurance Program, primarily for uninsured children in families. On the same day in 1997, Mr. Clinton signed a separate reconciliation bill that cut taxes. The Bush tax cuts were adopted in reconciliation bills signed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003. On several occasions, Congress has increased assistance to working families by increasing the tax credit in reconciliation bills. Congress also made changes to the Affordable Care Act in a reconciliation bill passed immediately after President Obama signed the health care overhaul in 2010. Later, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, they passed a reconciliation bill to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act, but Mr. Obama vetoed the bill in January 2016. Republicans say that measure will provide a template or starting point for their efforts to undo the health care law this year, with support from Donald J. Trump, who calls the law “an absolute disaster. ” Q. How does the reconciliation process work in the Senate? A. In the House, leaders of the majority party can usually control what happens if their members stick together. In the Senate, by contrast, one member or a handful of senators can often derail the leaders’ plans. The reconciliation process enhances the power of the majority party and its leaders. Senate debate on a reconciliation bill is normally limited to 20 hours, so it cannot be filibustered on the Senate floor. The Senate has a special rule to prevent abuse of the budget reconciliation process. The rule, named for former Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, generally bars use of the procedure to consider legislation that has no effect on spending, taxes and deficits. The Senate parliamentarian normally decides whether particular provisions violate the Byrd rule, but the Senate can waive the rule with a majority. Q. What does this mean for the Affordable Care Act? A. Republicans hope to use the procedure of budget reconciliation to repeal or nullify provisions of the law that affect spending and taxes. They could, for example, eliminate penalties imposed on people who go without insurance and on larger employers who do not offer coverage to employees. They could use a reconciliation bill to eliminate tens of billions of dollars provided each year to states that have expanded eligibility for Medicaid. And they could use it to repeal subsidies for private health insurance coverage obtained through the public marketplaces known as exchanges. Republicans could also repeal a number of taxes and fees imposed on certain people and on health insurers and manufacturers of prescription drugs and medical devices: tax increases that help offset the cost of the insurance coverage expansions. Those provisions were all rolled back in the reconciliation bill Mr. Obama vetoed last January. That bill did not touch insurance market standards established in the Affordable Care Act, which do not directly cost the government money or raise taxes. The standards stipulate, for example, that insurers cannot deny coverage or charge higher premiums because of a person’s conditions. Insurers must allow parents to keep children on their policies until the age of 26, and they cannot charge women higher rates than men, as they often did in the past. Such provisions are politically popular, but it is not clear how they could remain in force without the coverage expansions that help insurers afford such regulations. Without an effective requirement for people to carry insurance, and without subsidies, supporters of the health law say many healthy people would go without coverage, knowing they could obtain it if they became ill and needed it. Democrats say they will fight to preserve the law after Mr. Obama leaves office. Recent history shows that lobbying and public pressure can sometimes make a difference, altering the votes of individual lawmakers and changing the contents of a reconciliation bill. | 0fake |
BREAKING NEWS: Susan Rice ADMITS To Unmasking “US Persons” During Interview With MSNBC Media Ally Andrea Mitchell [VIDEO] | During her Tuesday interview with MSNBC s Andrea Mitchell, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice for the first time admitted to unmasking U.S. persons included in intelligence reports. There s no equivalence between unmasking and leaking. The effort to ask for the identify of an American citizen is necessary to understand the intelligence report in some circumstances. Daily CallerBut only less than 2 weeks ago, on March 22nd, Susan Rice told PBS host Judy Woodroof that she knew nothing about the unmasking of people being investigated. Watch the video below, as she pretty much lies through her teeth. | 1real |
Top Democrat says he hopes U.S. Senate at turning point on healthcare repeal | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said on Friday he hoped Congress had reached a turning point on efforts to repeal Obamacare and it was time for the parties to work together to stabilize the insurance markets and fix the system’s weaknesses. Schumer, speaking at a news conference, praised the three Republican senators who decided join Democrats in voting against a Senate effort to pass a slimmed-down version of the Republican healthcare bill. “I hope this is a turning point,” Schumer told reporters. “On healthcare, I hope we can work together to make the system better in a bipartisan way.” | 0fake |
This Congressman Just Took A Stand Against Trump’s Corruption And Trump Will HATE It | Donald Trump s conflicts of interest are finally starting to create some major problems for the undeserving POTUS.When Trump was elected, most Americans were up in arms over the fact that Trump has so many messy, shady business ties and would clearly be trying to exploit his position in the White House for his own personal gain. Judging from what we ve seen from Trump and his corrupt family in these short six months of his presidency, we had every right to be worried Trump has been trying to profit off of his new role from the second he stepped into the White House.Fortunately, members of Congress are standing up to this unethical behavior. On Monday, a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives proposed legislation that would prevent the government from renting rooms at any of Trump s hotels for official business matters. In a statement that pretty much reflects exactly how most Americans feel about this, Representative Don Beyer of Virginia said: Donald Trump should not be allowed to line his or his family s pockets with taxpayer dollars. Exactly! Rep. Beyer also stated that these amendments to a spending bill were critical due to Trump s unprecedented failure to divest from his business, and the ongoing entanglement between the Trump Organization and the White House. This is following a similar motion that happened last month, when the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit that stated it was a constitutional violation to make government payments to Trump s businesses.The White House has yet to comment on this, but we can all be certain that Trump is going to have a colossal meltdown over it. Every time someone calls out his unethical actions even if they re 100 percent true Trump acts like a toddler and has a meltdown. Whether he likes it or not, Trump should NOT be profiting from his presidency when he is supposed to be serving the American people, and his personal interests must be blocked.Featured image via Alex Wong / Getty Images | 1real |
Trump’s Stink Poisons GOP Race That Could Decide Whether Dems Retake The Senate | Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) is fighting hard to keep her seat, but now it seems that Donald Trump is busy destroying her chances. Her opponent, Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan, is leading her by a full ten points now, when before the two were virtually deadlocked. Ayotte was swept to power in the disastrous Tea Party wave of 2010, but her support for Trump has now made her look like a fool.To be sure, Ayotte is no fan of Trump. She supports him in the name of party unity, though. Her lack of a formal endorsement doesn t seem to sway the voters, who increasingly view Trump and his supporters as, well, really horribly bad people. That includes Ayotte. As one of the pollsters involved in this particular poll says: There s a very close relationship between the votes for Kelly Ayotte and Donald Trump. Their support is sort of locked together. And with the direction that Donald Trump seems to be heading in, Kelly Ayotte s task is to somehow decouple those two. Trump s stock has plummeted in New Hampshire, where Hillary now commands a 17-point lead. She has also gained solid leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan two other crucial battleground states. If Trump s support is locked together with Ayotte s, then as he falters, so does she.Democrats said just three days ago that Ayotte is too much of a coward to stand up to Trump, despite the fact that she defended the Khan family against Trump s childish, classless tirades. They re right, but, predictably, her campaign said that s not true. She s merely focusing her attention on keeping her seat, and Trump is irrelevant to her race.Then they dropped this gem, which isn t going to help her in the slightest: It s just not good manners to attack the nominee of your party. Oh please. When the nominee of your party is as dark and dangerous as one Donald Trump, attacking him may well be the only way some of these Republicans keep their seats.Ayotte is one of three Republicans that Trump has refused to endorse, and he bashed her over the weekend while inexplicably and laughably saying, I m leading her in the polls. I m doing very well in New Hampshire. Just, what? It s amazing she doesn t know how stupid her support for Trump makes her look.If Trump can t get himself under control, then there are several Republicans that are done. Alas, it s impossible to call that a heartbreaking conclusion.Featured image by Mark Wilson/Getty Images | 1real |
Florida lawmakers: Couples can move in without saying 'I do' | TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (Reuters) - Florida lawmakers on Wednesday gave the thumbs-up to living together without being married, sending to the governor a bill repealing the state’s Reconstruction-era ban on cohabitation by unmarried couples. The old law made it illegal to “lewdly and lasciviously” live together without being married to each other - language that presumably differentiated between romantic couples sharing a bed and non-romantic roommates splitting the rent. In either case, sponsors said, it is a law that is impossible to enforce but dangerous to have on the books. “You shouldn’t have statutes that are not being enforced,” said state Representative Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda, a Tallahassee Democrat and bill sponsor. “You’d have to arrest a half-million people, if we enforced this.” The repeal statute leaves in place a section of the 1868 law making it a misdemeanor to engage “in open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior,” regardless of marital status. It is difficult to determine if anyone gets arrested for cohabitation, since the offense is combined in the state with public lewdness, said Rehwinkel Vasilinda, a law school instructor. But the law “could be used in a discriminatory manner” if a jealous ex-spouse or prosecutor wanted to harass a person or unmarried couple, she said. The cohabitation ban is the latest in a string of antiquated and rarely-if-ever-enforced sex laws being repealed across the country - either by new laws, referendum, or court action, the most notable being bans on same-sex intercourse struck down by the courts in recent years. If Florida’s repeal passes the governor’s muster, only Mississippi and Michigan will be the holdouts on laws requiring couples to marry before sharing roof and bed, according to a staff analysis of the Florida bill. The bill was also sponsored by state Senator Eleanor Sobel, a Hollywood Democrat. The repeal earned the overwhelming support of the Florida lawmakers, with a unanimous vote in the state Senate and five dissenters in the House. Among them was Representative Jennifer Sullivan, a Republican from Mount Dora, who said she “ran on a pro-family platform” and could not vote to legalize cohabitation. “Based on my own faith and what I believe, I voted accordingly,” she said. “My faith affects everything I do and who I am, so I’m just being consistent with who I said I was as a candidate.” | 0fake |
Taliban attack Afghan checkpoints, killing more than 20 police | KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The Afghan Taliban attacked more than a dozen checkpoints over six hours in the southern province of Kandahar, killing 22 police and wounding 15, officials said on Tuesday, as militants killed eight soldiers in the west in a growing insurgency. Government forces killed 45 insurgents and wounded 35 and none of the police checkpoints was captured in the overnight attacks, officials said. Our forces resisted until they received reinforcements and air support, said Zia Durrani, spokesman for Kandahar s police chief. The Taliban were defeated. The Taliban told reporters by WhatsApp that they killed 43 police and members of a militia and destroyed 13 armored vehicles. The insurgents often exaggerate battlefield casualties. The Taliban, fighting to restore Islamic rule after their 2001 ouster by U.S.-led troops, also attacked Bala Boluk, in the western province of Farah, on Tuesday, killing eight soldiers and wounding three, according to the provincial government. The government s control or influence over the country has fallen to just under 60 percent, down six percentage points from last year, according to the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. | 0fake |
TRUMP TAPS Anti-Iran Deal Congressman To Head CIA…The Left Goes Ballistic! | The main stream media wasted no time in trashing Congressman Pompeo and his supposed anti-Islamic rhetoric :Pompeo, of Wichita, met with the president-elect s transition team in New York s Trump Tower earlier this week. He is a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and has been an ardent supporter of the Patriot Act and the National Security Agency s collection of bulk data.Pompeo was a vocal critic of President Obama s nuclear deal with Iran and has come under fire for what his critics have called anti-Islamic rhetoric. Via: FOX News | 1real |
How to Predict Gentrification: Look for Falling Crime - The New York Times | Everyone has theories for why professionals are moving back into parts of cities shunned by their parents’ generation. Perhaps their living preferences have shifted. Or the demands of the labor market have, and young adults with less leisure time are loath to waste it commuting. Maybe the tendency to postpone marriage and children has made city living more alluring. Or the benefits of cities themselves have improved. “There are all sorts of potential other amenities, whether it’s cafes, restaurants, bars, nicer parks, better schools,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University. “But a huge piece of it,” she said, “I think is crime. ” New research that she has conducted alongside Keren Mertens Horn, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and Davin Reed, a doctoral student at N. Y. U. finds that when violent crime falls sharply, wealthier and educated people are more likely to move into and predominantly minority urban neighborhoods. Their working paper suggests that just as rising crime can drive people out of cities, falling crime has a comparable effect, spurring gentrification. And it highlights how, even if many Americans — including, by his own words, Donald Trump — inaccurately believe urban violence is soaring, the opposite trend has brought change to cities. “We’re trying to help people understand what a dramatic difference the reduction in violent crime in particular has made in our environment,” Ms. Ellen said. “That has repercussions far beyond what we think of. The homicide rate has gone down — that’s directly the most important consequence. But there are all sorts of repercussions as well. This really has been a sea change. ” Nationally, violent crime peaked in 1991. It fell precipitously for the next decade, then more slowly through the 2000s (and there’s a whole other set of theories about why that has happened). While homicides have increased recently in some cities, rates remain far below what they were 25 years ago, including in Chicago. (Another reality check, while we’re at it: Mr. Trump said during the 2016 campaign that homicides in his new home in Washington were rising by 50 percent, apparently citing the previous year’s crime statistics. At that time in July, though, the rate in the city was already falling compared with 2015, and by year’s end, it was down by 17 percent.) The new research looked at confidential geocoded data from the 1990 and 2000 censuses, and more recent American Community Surveys, to identify the neighborhoods where more than four million households moved. Using citywide violent crime data from the F. B. I. the scholars tracked the changing probability of different demographic groups moving into central cities, as opposed to suburbs, as crime fell. and movers — and to a lesser degree, whites — appeared significantly more sensitive to changing crime levels in their housing decisions than other groups. and minority households, for instance, didn’t become more likely to move to cities as they grew safer. That may reflect the fact, Ms. Ellen suggested, that families have more experience or confidence in their ability to navigate crime. Or it may suggest that attention to violence is a luxury in housing decisions that the poor and minorities may not have. A household facing racial discrimination, high housing costs or the need to be near supportive family members simply has fewer options — and less leeway to be choosy — than the households that this research identifies. “When cities feel safer, that opens people’s eyes,” Ms. Ellen said of the willingness of new groups to consider these neighborhoods. It’s entirely likely that the arrival of more affluent residents affected crime, too — either by increasing opportunities for property crime in the short term, or by adding eyes on the street and pressure on the police in the long run. Because this research looked at moves that occurred after crime was already falling, the authors believe the movers were reacting to changes in crime and not simply causing it themselves. But the relationship between crime and gentrification in particular is complex. Wealthier residents may bring new tensions to neighborhoods, fearing — and reporting — criminal activity where none exists. And such demographic change in cities could play a role in pressuring the police to pursue tactics that feel unduly aggressive to the people who preceded the newcomers. This study also doesn’t offer evidence that existing residents were displaced by the new arrivals. Many of the urban neighborhoods studied had lost population, so they had room to grow again without pushing existing residents out. But the possibility that these trends portend higher housing costs and more housing demand in the future in poorer, minority neighborhoods adds a cautionary note, Ms. Ellen said, to the declining crime trend. | 0fake |
In Health Bill’s Defeat, Medicaid Comes of Age - The New York Times | When it was created more than a half century ago, Medicaid almost escaped notice. stories hailed the bigger, more controversial part of the law that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed that July day in 1965 — health insurance for elderly people, or Medicare, which the American Medical Association had bitterly denounced as socialized medicine. The New York Times did not even mention Medicaid, conceived as a small program to cover poor people’s medical bills. But over the past five decades, Medicaid has surpassed Medicare in the number of Americans it covers. It has grown gradually into a behemoth that provides for the medical needs of one in five Americans — 74 million people — starting for many in the womb, and for others, ending only when they go to their graves. Medicaid, so central to the country’s health care system, also played a major, though far less appreciated, role in last week’s collapse of the Republican drive to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. While President Trump and others largely blamed the conservative Freedom Caucus for that failure, the objections of moderate Republicans to the deep cuts in Medicaid also helped doom the Republican bill. “I was not willing to gamble with the care of my constituents with this huge unknown,” said Representative Frank A. LoBiondo of New Jersey, a member of the centrist Tuesday Group caucus, noting that in three of the counties in his district in the state’s more conservative southern half, over 30 percent of all residents are covered by Medicaid. In the Senate, many Republicans, echoing their states’ governors, had worried about jeopardizing the treatment of people addicted to opioids, depriving the working poor, children and people with disabilities of health care and in the long run reducing funding for the care of elderly people in nursing homes. The Republican bill would have largely undone the expansion of Medicaid under the A. C. A. which added 11 million adults to the program and guaranteed the federal government would cover almost all of their costs. It would have also ended the federal government’s commitment to pay a significant share of states’ Medicaid costs, no matter how much enrollment or spending rose. Instead, the bill would have given the states a choice between a fixed annual sum per recipient or a block grant, both of which would have almost certainly led to major cuts in coverage over time. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that the Republican bill would have cumulatively cut projected spending on Medicaid by $839 billion and reduced the number of Medicaid beneficiaries by 14 million over the coming decade. Many Republicans could not stomach those consequences. Even some conservatives — Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey, for example, and Daniel Webster of Florida — expressed concerns about the number of Medicaid recipients who could suffer. The Trump administration will likely still seek to rewrite Medicaid rules and give states more leeway to limit benefits or eligibility, for example, allowing them to require certain adults in the program to have jobs or pay monthly premiums. And many Republican governors and members of Congress remain determined to curb Medicaid spending, including by methods proposed in the bill. In 2015, the nation spent more than $532 billion on Medicaid, of which about 63 percent was federal money and the rest from the states. Still, last week’s defeat reflected how hard it is to take away an entitlement. It also showed the broad and deep reach of Medicaid, which covers about six times as many people as the private marketplaces created under the A. C. A. but, perhaps because the markets are more strongly associated with President Barack Obama and his law, got less attention in this month’s contentious debate. Medicaid now provides medical care to four out of 10 American children. It covers the costs of nearly half of all births in the United States. It pays for the care for of people in nursing homes. And it provides for 10 million children and adults with physical or mental disabilities. For states, it accounts for 60 percent of federal funding — meaning that cuts hurt not only poor and families caring for their children with autism or dying parents, but also bond ratings. The program is so woven into the nation’s fabric that in 2015, almost two thirds of Americans in a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation said they were either covered by Medicaid or had a family member or friend who was. The program not only pays for 16 percent of all personal health care spending nationwide, but also accounts for 9 percent of federal domestic spending. Because it has always covered a patchwork of groups — and many of its beneficiaries are poor and relatively powerless — Medicaid lacks the unified, formidable political constituency that Social Security and Medicare have. States often have different names for the program, and many who rely on it don’t realize that MassHealth in Massachusetts or TennCare in Tennessee are just Medicaid by another name. But in Kaiser’s polling since 2005, the percentage of people who support cutting Medicaid spending has never exceeded 13 percent. “The conventional wisdom that there’s a great deal of stigma attached to this program does not bear out in the public opinion data,” said Mollyann Brodie, who oversees polling for the foundation. President Trump led the charge for the bill that would have slashed Medicaid, but he recognized the program’s political potency during his campaign, proclaiming when he announced his candidacy that Medicaid should be saved “without cuts” and repeatedly taking to Twitter to declare his support for it. “The Republicans who want to cut SS and Medicaid are wrong,” he wrote in July 2015. The C. B. O. report made it clear that within a few years, the cuts to Medicaid in the Republican bill would have been felt by millions of Americans. “It’s health care for a huge chunk of the country,” said James A. Morone, a professor at Brown University, “and as Donald Trump discovered, it’s really, really complicated to mess around with. ” As he waited to see what would happen to the Republican proposal last week, Myrone Pickett said, “I’ve got a question mark hanging over my head. ” Mr. Pickett, of Bloomfield, N. J. got health insurance under the A. C. A. ’s expansion of Medicaid, and has used it for monthly shots of Vivitrol, a drug that reduces cravings for opioids and alcohol. A heroin addict for 16 years, Mr. Pickett, 51, said the treatment had helped him stay clean for the past year, get medication for bipolar disorder and land a job at a grocery store. The A. C. A. offered a tempting deal to states that agreed to expand Medicaid eligibility to everyone with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty level — $16, 400 for a single person — mostly workers like cooks, hairdressers and cashiers. The federal government would initially pay 100 percent of the costs of covering their medical care, and never less than 90 percent under the terms of the law. Over the past three years, 31 states and the District of Columbia took the deal. The move was especially helpful to states overwhelmed by the opioid epidemic. It required Medicaid to cover addiction and mental health treatment for those newly eligible. Announcing his vote against the G. O. P. proposal last week, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican who represents a politically moderate district north of Philadelphia, said his top concern was “the impact on the single most important issue plaguing Bucks and Montgomery Counties, and the issue that I have made my priority in Congress: opioid abuse prevention, treatment and recovery. ” The Republican bill would have allowed Medicaid payments to grow per person at an inflation rate that would have eroded their value over time. The C. B. O. estimated that states would have gradually had to devote more of their own money to Medicaid, cut payments to doctors, tighten eligibility or cut services covered. In 2020, states would have started losing the 90 percent federal match for anyone who had gained Medicaid under the A. C. A. expansion but was dropped from the rolls, even briefly. And the bill required beneficiaries in the expansion population to every six months, instead of annually, increasing the likelihood that many would be dropped. As a result, the C. B. O. estimated that by 2026, less than 5 percent of Medicaid recipients enrolled under the A. C. A. would have been covered at the higher matching rate. But more broadly, the cuts would have almost inevitably affected every group covered by Medicaid, including the biggest block of recipients: 36 million children as of last year. Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Washington State Republican, announced her “no” vote on the bill Thursday, saying, “Protecting vulnerable children is a core purpose of the Medicaid program and when the program fails to do so, it fails entirely. ” The cuts would also likely have eventually hit poor, chronically ill mothers like Tracie Scott of Paulding, Ohio. She has multiple sclerosis and quit her job at a dollar store two years ago because of it. Medicaid covers her and her four children, including her daughter and an son with disease who has needed expensive medication and care for frequent fractures. “I’d be afraid to see some of the bills for my son,” Ms. Scott, 30, said as she cradled her newborn, Izabella, in their hospital room recently. “It’s been a lifesaver. ” For more than six million Americans older than 64, Medicaid pays for nursing homes and other care that they would never otherwise be able to afford, while Medicare covers their medical care. The threat to such care propelled Representative Webster, whose Central Florida district includes The Villages, a retirement community with more than 150, 000 residents, to lean “no” on the bill. “This uniquely impacted Florida and our growing senior population that’s only going to explode in years to come,” said Jaryn Emhof, his spokeswoman. Representative Smith of New Jersey said he was voting no because of concerns about the impact on people with disabilities, who make up just 15 percent of all Medicaid recipients but account for 42 percent of spending, making them particularly vulnerable to cuts. For millions of disabled people, Medicaid covers services provided at home or through local programs — aides who help them walk, eat and bathe, for example, and physical and speech therapy — that allow them to stay out of institutions, where care is often more expensive. But those services are optional for states, while the cost of institutional care is not. The law would have given states an incentive to place them in institutions. Medicaid pays for Barbara Theus, 67, to attend a day program in Southfield, Mich. so that her son and caregiver, Royale Theus, can work. Ms. Theus sustained a serious head injury in a car accident 11 years ago and has not been able to care for herself since then. Medicaid also pays for home health aides who help Ms. Theus, a former nurse who did not have much savings at the time of her accident, get showered and fed. Mr. Theus was relieved when the bill failed. Had his mother lost coverage, he said, he would have had to leave his job to care for her. “I was hopeful that the powers that be would make the best decisions for the people, and that’s what happened,” he said. This was the third major effort by Republicans to end Medicaid as an entitlement. The first was under President Ronald Reagan, the second was in 1995, after President Bill Clinton’s unsuccessful attempt to expand health care coverage. But this was the first time Republicans tried it while they controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. For all the battles over the years, Medicaid started as something of an afterthought. By 1960, both parties were worried that the country’s growing reliance on insurance was leaving out elderly people, who were unable to pay the rapidly rising cost of health care. The night of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, Lyndon Johnson returned to his home in Washington and, unable to sleep, summoned three aides. “That’s when he took out his pen and wrote down the priorities that he was going to pursue,” one of those aides, Bill Moyers, recalled in an interview. Among them was government health insurance. President Harry S. Truman had sought to establish national health insurance — and failed. Democrats decided to take on a more limited goal: insurance for elderly people. They called it Medicare. Democrats pushed for it to cover hospital bills for the elderly Republicans wanted it to pay for private doctor’s bills. The American Medical Association had long lobbied against Medicare, hiring Reagan, then a Hollywood actor, to be the face of its campaign, producing a 1961 LP titled “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine. ” And the doctors’ group had an ally in Wilbur Mills, a conservative Democrat who was chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, who like the doctors’ group did not think that elderly people should have their bills covered. In 1960, Mr. Mills had a law that established a small program to help the states treat the needy, as a way to stave off proposals for Medicare. The doctors’ group suggested expanding this program, preferring it because it would be administered by states, not the federal government. Mr. Mills had a change of heart after Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964. Johnson’s Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, had denounced Medicare, and Mr. Mills, and many Republicans, were eager to distance themselves from him. In early 1965, Mr. Mills proposed what became known as the cake: Medicare for hospital insurance, Medicare for doctor’s bills and a broadened version of the law that helped states pay for the care of the poor, the program that would become Medicaid. “Hardly anybody talked about Medicaid,” said Paul Starr, a sociology professor at Princeton. “It just got added on. ” At first, Medicaid helped states provide medical care only for single parents and children on welfare. Over the next 25 years, Democrats — sometimes working with Republicans — gradually pushed to expand benefits — to families, to children with speech and development delays, to home treatment for people who would otherwise be institutionalized, to children up to age 5, then to age 8 and later to age 18, and to pregnant women. Ironically, some of the biggest expansions in Medicaid came in the 1980s under Reagan, the onetime A. M. A. mouthpiece. After Republicans failed to turn Medicaid into a block grant, Democrats, who still controlled Congress, worked on compromises with the president and other Republicans, sometimes allowing cuts in programs like Medicare in exchange for expanding Medicaid, said former Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat who shepherded many of those expansions. Democrats carefully calibrated each expansion to fit within the annual budget, submitting plans to the Congressional Budget Office for “scoring,” to see how much each would cost. “We couldn’t do it all at once because we didn’t have enough money in the budgets,” Mr. Waxman said. But eventually, the goal to decouple Medicaid from the welfare system was achieved. “We broke the link to welfare,” he said. By the 1980s and ’90s, health insurance was becoming prohibitively costly, and wages were starting to stagnate. health insurance was eroding. States led by Republicans as well as Democrats began to expand their Medicaid programs. “What people began to accept, including Republicans, was that the assumption that you could afford health insurance if you were an adult was not true,” said Colleen M. Grogan, a professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, who has written extensively on health care. “You could be working and still not afford health insurance. ” In 1996, Mr. Clinton expanded Medicaid to cover more working families as part of his welfare overhaul. Campaigning for that year, he depicted Medicaid as a program, telling audiences it was helping their grandparents. “He is the first Democrat to start calling Medicaid one of ‘our programs,’” said Professor Morone of Brown. “There was a sense that Medicaid had sort of grown up as an entitlement. ” The expansion of Medicaid in the Children’s Health Insurance Program, passed with Republican sponsorship in 1997, set the stage for the sweeping expansions of the Affordable Care Act 13 years later. But politics during Mr. Obama’s presidency had become highly polarized. While earlier expansions of Medicaid had sometimes been bipartisan, the A. C. A. passed without a single Republican vote in Congress. The Tea Party had risen in opposition to the legislation, and later helped elect many of those who now form the conservative Freedom Caucus. Gradually, though, states have adopted the expansion. And now that the law known as Obamacare has survived the effort to repeal it, more states may choose to expand Medicaid. In Maine, voters will decide this fall whether to do so, and in Kansas, the Legislature has all but approved an expansion, although Gov. Sam Brownback could veto it. Last week, despite their desire to repeal Mr. Obama’s biggest domestic legacy, some Republicans recognized that any bill that would lead to such drastic cuts in Medicaid would simply hurt too many of their constituents. In Ashland, Va. Medicaid made it possible for Kim Goodloe and her husband, Tom, to start a small company making metal parts for semiconductors and medical devices after the birth of twin boys with tuberous sclerosis 27 years ago. The genetic disorder causes tumors in vital organs, leading to frequent seizures, and Mrs. Goodloe had quit her job to take care of the boys when they were 4 — Medicaid did not cover services for them back then. But now, Medicaid provides a home aide for Matthew, who is incontinent and nonverbal, suffers daily seizures and needs help walking. For the other twin, Christopher, who is less severely developmentally disabled, Medicaid provided a job coach, helping him to work at their company and earn enough money that he now pays taxes. The Goodloes have private insurance, but it is not required to pay for the twins’ services, she said. With Virginia facing such steep cuts to its federal Medicaid payments, Mrs. Goodloe worried about losing the home health aide. They would have had to downsize the business, which employs 30 people. “Even within my own family, when you say ‘Medicaid’ it comes with some, ‘Those people don’t want to work.’ They believe there’s a lot of fraud, there’s people that don’t deserve it. ” “But then,” she said, “They’ll say, ‘How could they take it away from Matthew? ’” | 0fake |
PRINCIPAL OF WEALTHY NYC SCHOOL Sends Hate-Filled Email To Parents: Trump Is Worse Than 9-11 | The principal of a fancy New York City private school says the election of President Trump is worse than the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.Steve Nelson, principal of the Calhoun School, fired off a hate-filled email to parents blasting the president. He also said Trump s election would be more devastating than Vietnam, Watergate and the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. I walked the complex inner-city streets of Cleveland during the racial unrest of the 60 s, he wrote in an email obtained by the New York Post. I was in rural Georgia when Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated in Tennessee. I watched every moment of the Watergate hearings that led to the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. I watched soot-covered New Yorkers grimly trudging north on West End Avenue on September 11, 2001. I am more troubled now. The principal would have us believe that he was more disturbed by Trump s election than the sight of New Yorkers falling from the sky or the Twin Towers collapsing onto the streets of lower Manhattan.Just to put this in perspective, the principal believes President Trump is worse than the Muslim hijackers who flew jetliners into buildings and slaughtered thousands of Americans.I do not know Principal Nelson, but he sounds like a deeply disturbed educator who should not be around impressionable school children.I m rather surprised the principal did not blame Trump for sinking the Titanic or causing the Black Plague.As repulsive as his comments might have been, I believe the principal s beliefs are rather mainstream among liberals.- Todd Starnes, FOX NewsThe controversial missive roiled some parents of the elite Upper West Side school, who thought Calhoun went too far.But some members of the school community said they had the principal s back. Proud to work at Calhoun and for someone like Steve Nelson, school staffer Nahuel Fanjul-Arguijo in a Facebook post. Getting this email yesterday made me a very proud Calhoun alumni, posted Rachel Geisler. NYDNSo let s set the record straight.President Trump has never waged jihad against Americans nor has he assassinated a Civil Rights leader or napalmed a jungle in Vietnam.And to compare those horrific atrocities with the president s desire to make our nation great again is not just offensive it s downright evil. FNPeople like Steve Nelson, principal of the Calhoun School in NYC, who have so much hate in their hearts have no business anywhere near young and impressionable children. It really doesn t matter what your political leanings are. If a person tasked with educating children has so little control over their seething anger after their candidate loses an election that they feel it necessary to drag the parents into their world of pity and hate, why should any parent who have any faith in their mental capacity? Why would any parent, regardless of their political persuasion, entrust this clearly unhinged man with the safety and well-being of their most precious possessions? To have lived in New York City and witnessed the horrific tragedy of 9-11 firsthand should make his email all the more serious for these parents | 1real |
Christian Charity President Embezzled The Entire Fund To Finance Sex Addiction | One of the tenets of Christianity is Thou shalt not steal, but, apparently, Jon S. Petersen s pastor never bothered to tell him that.On Monday, Petersen admitted to a federal judge that he has stolen almost all of the money people have donated to World Ambassadors, Ltd., the charitable organization that he has been the president of for years. He pleaded guilty to one count of filing a false tax return a crime that could lead to a three-year prison sentence, restitution and a $250,000 fine. The reason for his thievery? He has a sex addiction:In his plea deal, Petersen admitted that he moved $475,000 in donations from the charity to his personal checking account between 2010 and 2014, draining virtually all of its funding, prosecutors said. The group had about three dozen contributors annually. The guilty plea concerned his personal 2013 tax filing, when he failed to report $114,000 diverted from the group as taxable income. The charge carries up to three years in prison, and Petersen may be required to pay restitution to the group s donors.Petersen said he struggled with a sex addiction over the last decade and used the donations to pay for it.I don t think Jesus would approve of this behavior.More than thirty people donated a total of $476,466 to the organization, and Petersen moved $475,555 of it to his personal accounts. What s even more alarming is the fact that this wasn t the only money he was using to feed his supposed sex addiction. He said that he was also using his home s equity and credit cards to pay for it.Think about this for a moment, not just about the Christian hypocrisy, but he probably paid half a million dollars for sex. Whoah.Now, sex addiction is a real thing and we really shouldn t laugh about it (I know it s hard no pun intended). According to Recovery Ranch:Sex addiction, also known as hypersexual disorder, is characterized by persistent and escalating sexual thoughts and acts that have a negative impact on the individual s life. Sex addicts struggle to control or postpone sexual feelings and actions. Most sex addicts do not know how to achieve genuine intimacy, forming little or no attachment to their sexual partners. Eventually, the pursuit of sex becomes more important than family, career, and even personal health and safety.Just like any addiction it can take over and destroy someone s life. If he is telling the truth, that is definitely what happened here. However, if he is using this as an excuse (which is entirely possible) to cover up his crimes, I hope the judge throws the book at him not the Bible, but that would work too.Find out more about sex addiction here.Featured image via Wdea.am | 1real |
This Is The Future: Tree-Shaped Vertical Farms That Grow 24 Acres Of Crops | By 2050, the world’s population is estimated to reach 9.7 billion people. Already, 795 million people go to bed hungry each evening. Catching up to – and alleviating – the problem of... | 1real |
Thailand kicks off sumptuous funeral of King Bhumibol Adulyadej | BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand on Wednesday marked the start of a lavish, five-day funeral for King Bhumibol Adulyadej with a Buddhist religious ceremony attended by senior members of its royal family. King Bhumibol, who died last year aged 88, will be cremated on Thursday on a royal pyre within a cremation complex of gold pavilions in front of Bangkok s Grand Palace, in a ceremony that is expected to draw about 250,000 mourners. Thailand has observed a year of mourning for King Bhumibol, who was regarded as a pillar of stability during a reign of seven decades that witnessed political upheaval and rapid development in the Southeast Asian nation. It s overwhelming, said one mourner, Aporn Wongdee, 60, who hails from the southern province of Nakhon Si Thammarat. I ve been here for two days already and I want to see our father to heaven. A sum of $90 million has been set aside for the funeral, the likes of which has never been seen in Thailand, officials involved in the funeral preparations said. King Maha Vajiralongkorn, known as Rama X, who inherited the throne in December on his father s death, arrived at the Grand Palace by car on Wednesday as soldiers dressed in red uniforms and black hats stood to attention. He was flanked by his two daughters. Live television images from inside the palace showed the king lighting candles in front of his father s coffin and a symbolic royal urn. The Buddhist funeral ceremony, mixed with Hindu rituals, was attended by 119 Buddhist monks who chanted prayers in the ancient Pali language. Queues of black-clad mourners, many carrying portraits of the king, snaked around parts of Bangkok s old town, waiting to enter the cremation area. By mid-afternoon, 25,000 mourners had gathered around the cremation site, city police said. In what is expected to be an emotionally-charged morning, King Bhumibol s body will be moved on Thursday from the Grand Palace to a crematorium in a public square in front, where thousands of people have already pitched tents to ensure places. On Thursday, three processions will make their way from the palace to the cremation site - a series of specially-erected Thai pavilions that took nearly a year to build. Some Thais have folded flowers of sandalwood paper to be used in the cremation, in the belief that their fragrance guides the soul of the departed to heaven. The cremation day has been declared a national holiday, when banks will be closed and major shopping centers will be shut from 3 p.m. | 0fake |
Will FBI Director Comey’s October Surprise Derail Hillary’s White House Bid? | Dispatches from STEPHEN LENDMAN H aving closed his earlier investigation into Hillary’s use of her private email server for classified State Department documents without bringing charges, dismissing indictable evidence, it’s hard imagining a shift of agency policy now. So what’s going on? Is FBI Director Comey trying to save face, even at this late stage, having tarnished the reputation of the agency and himself. The fullness of time will show what he has in mind. He faces intense political pressure from key Democrat senators, demanding immediate answers about why he’s reopening his investigation days before November’s election, an unprecedented act. .. Senators Patrick Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, Thomas Carper and Ben Cardin wrote Comey , saying: .. “(N)o later than Monday, 31 October 2016, we request you provide us with more detailed information about the investigative steps being taken, the number of emails involved, and what is being done to determine how many of the emails are duplicative of those already reviewed by the FBI.” They want Attorney General Loretta Lynch explaining her involvement in Comey’s action, if any. The Hillary campaign called for “public answers” to clarify what new information the FBI discovered. .. After saying that revisiting his decision last July would be unlikely, Comey opted for an October surprise – the likes of which Washington hasn’t seen since the tumultuous end of Nixon’s tenure. Paul Craig Roberts said he’s gotten word “ that the FBI has reopened the Hillary case of her violation of US National Security protocols, not because of the content of the new email releases, but because voter support for Trump seems to be overwhelming, while Hillary has cancelled appearances due to inability to muster a crowd. The popular vote leaves the FBI far out on the limb for its corrupt clearance of Hillary. The agency now has to redeem itself.” .. How remains to be seen. Like Roberts, I’m puzzled. Washington power brokers chose Hillary to succeed Obama. Enormous resources, energy, corporate pollsters consistently showing her ahead, and one-sided scoundrel media support have gone into assuring it. .. Have things changed days before November 8? Are power brokers abandoning Hillary this late in the game? The last 48 hours have been breathtaking – the stuff Hollywood thrillers are made of. Will Hillary supporters blame Russia for Comey’s action? One Democrat congressman suggested it. Will Comey be accused of being a Kremlin agent? .. However things unfold in the campaign’s final days, Trump got a significant boost – whether enough for a “master of suspense” Alfred Hitchcock ending remains to be seen. My view, right or wrong, remains the same. After going all-out for Hillary throughout months of campaigning, it’s hard believing power brokers decided otherwise this late in the game – unheard of in US electoral politics. .. At the same time, this political season has been unlike any I remember since the 1940s. Nothing ahead will surprise me. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS ABOUT THE AUTHOR STEPHEN LENDMAN lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net . His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” ( http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html ) Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com . =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. [email-subscribers namefield=”YES” desc=”” group=”Public”] | 1real |
ADHD NATION: How Big Pharma Created the ADHD Epidemic | By Kalee Brown
While I was at university, many of my peers would take Adderall, a drug commonly used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (A.D.H.D.), to help them study or maintain focus while writing an exam. It was somewhat of a social norm and no one seemed to care why because it was so popular; however, I believe it is a clear representation of the social and academic pressures imposed on children to be “successful.”
It also begs the question: How are so many kids gaining access to Adderall? Author and journalist Alan Schwarz explains that American children are not only severely over-diagnosed with A.D.H.D., but also frighteningly under-educated on the drugs they’re being prescribed, so they end up selling the pills instead of taking them. Well-known for his investigative reporting on how Big Pharma manufactured the “A.D.H.D. Nation” through advertising and doctor bribery, Schwarz recently published his book A.D.H.D. Nation using a term he coined to describe the widespread mishandling and misdiagnosis of the disorder.
How A.D.H.D. Became An Over-Diagnosed Disorder According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 11% of children between the ages of 4 and 17 have been diagnosed with A.D.H.D. as of 2011. However, if you ask the American Psychiatric Association, they maintain that even though only 5% of American children suffer from the disorder, the diagnosis is actually given to around 15% of American children. This number has been steadily rising , jumping from 7.8% in 2003 to 9.5% in 2007. Schwarz identifies two main themes involved with A.D.H.D. misdiagnosis: the pharmaceutical industry’s role in pushing A.D.H.D. drugs, and doctors failing to identify the root cause of children’s behavioural issues.
In an interview with Scientific American , Schwarz explains: “Many kids have problems and need help—but those problems in many cases will derive from trauma, anxiety, family discord, poor sleep or diet, bullying at school and more. We must not abandon them. We must help. But we must also be more judicious in how we do that, rather than reflexively giving them a diagnosis of what is generally described as a serious, lifelong brain disorder.”
Big Pharma’s Role in Widespread A.D.H.D. Misdiagnosis It’s no secret that pharmaceutical companies essentially buy out the medical industry. As with many other diseases and disorders, when it comes to A.D.H.D., pharmaceutical companies have paid doctors and researchers to overstate the dangers of A.D.H.D. and the benefits of taking their drugs and understate the negative side effects. It’s easy for people to believe this misguided information when it’s affiliated with well-known universities like Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Many people don’t even realize that these studies are funded by the very companies that profit from the drugs’ sale because that relationship is hidden in small print ( source ). Even though many of the advertisements Big Pharma has released state that A.D.H.D. medication is “ safer than aspirin ,” these drugs can have significant side effects and are actually considered to be within the same class as morphine and oxycodone due to high risk of abuse and addiction. You can’t just blame all doctors, either; many of them genuinely believe they’re helping these children because of the information they’ve been given in these studies and by Big Pharma.
Big Pharma creates advertisements for A.D.H.D. drugs that are specifically targeted at parents, describing how these drugs can improve test scores and behaviour at home, among other false claims. One of the most controversial ones was a 2009 ad for Intuniv, Shire’s A.D.H.D. treatment, which included a child in a monster costume taking off his terrifying mask to reveal his calm, smiling self with a text reading, “There’s a great kid in there.” The FDA has stepped in multiple times, sending pharmaceutical companies warning letters or even forcing them to take down their ads because they are false, misleading, and/or exaggerate the effects of their drugs ( source ).
The following New York Times video was created by Schwarz and Poh Si Teng:
What Is A.D.H.D. and Is It Even Real? If brain scans are performed on people with A.D.H.D., there are clear structural differences; however, the majority of A.D.H.D. diagnoses are confirmed by observation, and often not even by a doctor. Parents or school teachers are typically responsible for observing a child’s actions, and if they fit the “criteria” for A.D.H.D., doctors confirm the diagnosis and hand them a prescription. Instead of getting to the root of these children’s “attention deficit,” they are told they have a medical condition that can only be fixed with medication. This is not only unethical, but also clearly damaging to a child’s self esteem. Many of these kids could simply be uninterested in the subject matter, suffering from some sort of emotional trauma, or even have heightened creativity and energy!
Many doctors question the legitimacy of A.D.H.D. in general and whether or not it should be classified as a mental disorder. This is largely because the definition of this and similar disorders is usually heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. American psychologist Lisa Cosgrove and others investigated financial ties between the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) panel members and the pharmaceutical industry. Their findings showed that, of the 170 DSM panel members, 95 (56%) had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry and 100% of the members of the panels on ‘mood disorders’ and ‘schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders’ had financial ties to drug companies (read our article about it here ).
Neurologist Richard Saul spent his career examining patients who struggle with short attention spans and difficulty focusing. His extensive experience has led him to believe that A.D.H.D. isn’t actually a disorder, but rather an umbrella of symptoms that shouldn’t be considered a disease. Thus, Saul believes it shouldn’t be listed as a separate disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual. You can read more about his opinion in our article here .
No matter what your stance on A.D.H.D. is, it is clear that too many children are being diagnosed with it and handed prescriptions without proper medical evaluations. If you or a loved one has just been diagnosed with A.D.H.D., I suggest you do your own research on the subject instead of simply taking drugs for a “mental disorder” that may have been falsely diagnosed.
Source: Collective Evolution
| 1real |
5 takeaways from the debate that didn’t matter | The first and only vice-presidential debate of 2016 was less a game-changer than a channel-changer, a snippy and probably inconsequential 90 minutes marginally won by Mike Pence – a confident, slightly smarmy debater very much in the mold of those calculating Washington, D.C., politicians who are destroying America.
Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s more voluble running mate, didn’t flop but he was visibly less comfortable than the square-jawed Pence, frequently interrupting the Indiana governor, jamming his pre-programmed attacks on Donald Trump into every answer with admirable, tedious efficiency.
Their performances almost perfectly reflected the priorities of each candidate: Kaine was a hyper-briefed Trump-thumping machine, barking the GOP nominee’s name, as if it were a slur, some 160 times – more than twice the number of times Pence mentioned Clinton’s, according a POLITICO tally.
Pence, on the other hand, seemed less concerned with out-and-out defending his running mate than rope-a-doping away from uncomfortable questions: His standard response was to pucker his face and mock Kaine as “ridiculous” for pelting him with facts, statistics and actual Trump quotes.
And if Kaine (who doesn’t have an especially close personal relationship with Clinton) warmly referred to “Hillary” as if the two were the best of friends, Pence maintained a wary rhetorical distance from Trump. He behaved less like an affectionate pal than a guy getting paid to do a job, a pet employee reassuring disgruntled co-workers that their unpopular boss was actually a great guy, really, if only you guys got to know him.
In the end you got the sense that Pence did as much (maybe more) to burnish his own brand than Trump’s – and even if he’s widely deemed the winner, what lasting good will it do for his undisciplined, self-defeating nominee? Here are five takeaways.
1. Hillary Clinton is lucky she’s facing Trump instead of Pence. Even after having his leonine head handed to him at the first presidential debate last week, there’s no decisive evidence that Trump is taking prep for Sunday’s second round in St. Louis any more seriously than he took prep for the first. The same cannot be said for Pence, a true professional, who huddled with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker for a week, and produced a focused performance, parrying every attack with a sharp assault on the unholy trinity of Clinton sins: emails, the foundation and her foreign policy failings as secretary of state.
Pence was as un-goad-able as Trump was easily gulled. When an aggressive Kaine demanded he defend his running mate’s comments on everything from declaring Mexican immigrants “rapists” to Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. encourage other countries to develop nukes, Pence mocked him. “Did you work on that one a long time? Because that had a lot of creative lines in it.”
In the real world outside the Farmville, Va. debate hall, Pence has contradicted or contrasted himself from Trump on any number of issues – most notably his flat refusal to entertain the false assertion that President Obama isn’t a native-born citizen. But inside he did a far better job of making Trump’s case than the candidate has made on his own behalf.
During his Hofstra meltdown Trump was so occupied defending himself against the self-assured Clinton he forgot his most effective attacks, including a much-anticipated hit on the fundraising practices of the Clinton Foundation. Pence was a cooler customer who calmly went through his head-hunting to-do list.
“While she was secretary of state, the Clinton foundation accepted tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments, and foreign donors," he said – precisely the kind of targeted attack Trump needs to make in order to recover from his disastrous first debate.
Alec Baldwin studied Trump for weeks to pull off his uncanny impersonation on last week’s Saturday Night Live. Trump would be well served to study the YouTube of Pence’s performance for pointers.
2. Tim Kaine wasn’t trying to win the debate – he was trying to bash Trump. The Virginia senator has a reputation for being a nice guy, but he was given a hit man’s job on Tuesday. And the target was Trump, not Pence, whom the Clinton campaign regards as a political bit player who will vanish into obscurity after the election.
Hence, Kaine’s task was a slightly awkward one: to aim over Pence and hit Trump. It didn’t really work, and not for lack of trying.
His best moment, arguably, came when he produced a laundry list of awful things Trump has said about women, Mexicans and a disabled reporter; Pence juked and refused to answer – which allowed Kaine to declare: “He's refused to defend his running mate. . .and yet, he's asking everybody to vote for somebody that he cannot defend," he said in one of the debate’s few memorable exchanges.
But he came off as a bit nervous, like a frustrated school kid trying to disgorge a memorized speech if only his rowdy classmates would allow him to deliver it. At times, he seemed peevish. Pence actually interrupted Kaine a lot, but his interjections were punchy (often an aspirated “no!” intended to deprive the former Virginia governor a clean sound bite) while Kaine’s frequent attempts to be heard were of the whiny it’s-my-turn-to-talk variety which had many viewers (and a focus group convened by GOP pollster Frank Luntz) judging Kaine to be rude.
3. Snatching discord from the jaws of victory? Clinton and her brain trust, according to several Democrats I spoke to, were satisfied (if not elated) by Kaine’s performance. Whether Trump appreciated Pence’s defenses, well that’s less clear. Moments after the candidates left the stage, John Harwood of CNBC and The New York Times quoted a Trump adviser saying that the GOP nominee, who was watching the debate from a hotel in Vegas, was less than satisfied with his running mate.
“Pence won overall, but he didn’t win with Trump,” the adviser told Harwood.
4. Pence dodged almost every tough question. How do you defend a running mate much of America deems as indefensible? You don’t!
Trump’s chorus of validators fanned out this week to declare him a “genius” for “using” the tax code to avoid paying taxes – but the real genius may have been Pence who figured out the best way to answer the thorniest questions about Trump was to respond with an attack on Kaine, or the moderator Elaine Quijano. Sure, he answered a handful, but a tiptoe through the transcript reveals what amounts to a master class in rhetorical deflection.
When it came to the New York Times story on Trump’s 1995 New York State tax return – which showed the estate and casino magnate claiming a nearly $1 billion loss, Pence shrugged his shoulders and repeated the campaign’s talking-point with televangelistical conviction. “Donald Trump is a businessman -- he actually built a business,” Pence intoned. “Like everybody, he faced some pretty tough times 20 years ago.”
Pence slipped the hook during the most consequential exchange of the night – a tag team onslaught by Kaine and Quijano pressing for Pence to call for Trump to release his tax returns.
Quijano, to her credit, repeatedly asked Pence why it was okay for Trump to withhold his filings when the Indiana governor had dutifully released the 10 most recent years of his income statements; Pence was fumbling for an answer when Kaine, who seemed more focused on venting outrage than pinning his quarry, interrupted her to make a forgettable point.
5. Quijano was a weak moderator. Tuesday marked the first time a digital division reporter moderated a major debate, and Quijano – a well-regarded former CNN anchor who now works for CBSN – showed her inexperience. She allowed both candidates to repeatedly interrupt each other, at times seeming to whisper her questions and demands for decorum.
Elaine Quijano, one and done. | 0fake |
Pro-sovereignty Legislators Demand That Administration End Border Anarchy | 1real | |
Ted Cruz Arrives In The Bronx Only To Put Down New Yorkers, Tosses Protester Who Speaks Up | You ve honestly got to be a special kind of stupid to go into the Bronx in your effort to try to win New York, and then double-down on putting New Yorkers down for their supposed values. However, there Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz was, in all his creepy glory, again going after New York values. When asked to elaborate on what he meant, he said: Those are the values, the values of the New York liberal politicians that have been hammering the people of this great state. And he especially went after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, saying: Every time there is a confrontation between criminals and cops he sides with the criminals, looters and rioters instead of the police officers. Which is just a flat-out lie, but he s clearly trying to cater to a crowd outside of New York, and completely giving up on any chance as winning the state over Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. However, Cruz did take the opportunity to try to bash Trump when he said, If you want to know what liberal democratic values are, follow Donald Trump s checkbook. Donald Trump has been funding those liberal democratic politicians. Which may very well be true, but those liberal politicians keep winning, because they are clearly favored over smarmy, pretentious, wannabe Christian conservatives who think they ve been appointed by God to run the nation. Conservatives like Cruz.One protester, clearly fed up with the arrogance and idiocy of Cruz even being there said, You re running on an anti-immigrant platform, and you re speaking in the Bronx. You should not be here. The Bronx, of course, being home to thousands of immigrants, and has been for over a century.Not liking to be interrupted, Republican staffers had this protester removed, but according to the NY Daily News, it seems the protester got his fair share of applause for speaking up.Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. said: Ted Cruz is a hypocrite. He not only offended New Yorkers, he offended Bronxites, and now he s here today in New York and in the Bronx looking for money and votes. We in the Bronx know how offensive he s been. We know the truth about our borough. Cruz just being there is an insult in and of itself. Who the hell does he think he is to come into the Bronx seeking support, but then continue to put New Yorkers down? That protester was absolutely right, he shouldn t have even been there.Featured Photo by Kyle Rivas/Getty Images | 1real |
Anti-Trump Marchers ‘Mostly White’ Women Who Need ‘Therapy’ After Clinton Loss | The tens of thousands of women marching in the Women’s March on Washington demonstration in Washington, D. C. Saturday are “mostly white” and experiencing “therapy” for their anxiety over Hillary Clinton’s election loss to Donald Trump in November, the Washington Post reports. [Planned Parenthood tweeted: We stand shoulder to shoulder with all women in the struggle for equality justice. #WhyIMarch @womensmarch pic. twitter. — Planned Parenthood (@PPFA) January 21, 2017, According to the Post: Marchers — mostly women and mostly white — said they came to take the most public possible stand against Trump, a candidate and now president whom they said routinely insults women and the issues they care about. But the gathering also provided therapy for many, the balm of immersing themselves in a sea of citizens who had shared their anxiety and disappointment after Democrat Hillary Clinton’s historic bid for the presidency ended in defeat. The report notes some of the women are “sometimes sleeping on the couches of people they had never met before” due to the vast crowd participating in the march. “Organizers, who originally sought a permit for a gathering of 200, 000, said Saturday they now expect as many as a half million participants — potentially dwarfing Friday’s inaugural crowd,” the report says: 12 Ways You Can Fight Back Against All This Oppressive Crap In 2017: https: . via @buzzfeed #IDEFY, — Planned Parenthood (@PPFA) January 20, 2017, The march’s central focus appears to be to protect abortion chain Planned Parenthood from taxpayer defunding, one of the stated goals of the Trump administration. Though cast as a “women’s rights” march, women who attempted to register for the march were refused. “If you want to come to the march you are coming with the understanding that you respect a woman’s right to choose,” Linda Sarsour, a Muslim racial justice and civil rights activist, and a chairwoman of the event, told the New York Times. Feminist Gloria Steinem and Planned Parenthood have partnered for the event, providing it with its decidedly tone. On her website, Steinem says to her fans: We have all the powers we had [before Trump was elected] of lobbying and pressuring and making clear that the political consequences are great. We may look up and feel powerless and think there’s nothing we can do, but it’s not true. There are things we can do at each level. And there’s always civil disobedience. Trump is not my president. Steinem also recently said she would refuse to pay the full amount of her federal income tax if Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funds were eliminated. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards said about the march: We will send a strong message to the incoming administration that millions of people across this country are prepared to fight attacks on reproductive health care, abortion services, and access to Planned Parenthood, as they intersect with the rights of young people, people of color, immigrants, and people of all faiths, backgrounds, and incomes. According to the march’s website, its mission is to “send a bold message to our new government on their first day in office, and to the world that women’s rights are human rights. ” Democrat Sens. Patty Murray (WA) and Elizabeth Warren (MA) are supporting Planned Parenthood: Today, we stood with Planned Parenthood and the millions of women men who don’t want to see their health care taken away. pic. twitter. — Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) January 20, 2017, Despite its message of unity among all the left’s political identity groups, the Times previously reported the “Women’s March” has been anything but unified from its inception: On the march group’s Facebook page, it is easy to see how complicated the idea of the “women’s vote,” an already mythological concept, has become, and how difficult it might be for organizers to fulfill their aim of gathering women who remain fiercely divided on reproductive rights, gun control, marriage and immigration, among other issues. Not everyone on the page believes, for instance, that Hillary Clinton would have made a good president, or that Stephen K. Bannon, a chief strategist under Mr. Trump, holds divisive views about minorities. Debates over both have sprung up in recent days. Bob Bland, one of the march’s organizers, said in an email that organizers in Maryland had to change a Facebook page from public to private to protect the safety of women who want to attend. Writing at the Week, abortion rights supporter Shikha Dalmia asserts the demonstration has already failed in its mission. “Demonstrations serve a useful function in a democracy — but only when they have clarity of purpose,” she writes, adding that the march is “shaping up to be a exercise in search of a cause. ” Dalmia writes some of the “absurdity” related to the event stems from “the fact that they are billing this event as the voice of women when 42 percent of women (and 62 percent of educated white women) actually voted for Trump. ” She also observes “the progressive hysteria over the event’s name. ” The initial plan by the “three white women” organizers, she says, was to call the event the “Million Women March,” but the women were criticized for “cultural appropriation” for “allegedly poaching the heritage of the 1997 Million Woman March for black women. ” “Feminists are confusing the issue by making Trump’s threat about themselves,” Dalmia concludes. “If they really wanted to help, they would have kept their powder dry for now, rather than embark on this confused and pointless march. ” | 0fake |
UPLIFTING: Anaheim Ducks Honor Bomb Detection K9 During ‘Military Appreciation Night’ | It is no secret that our military forces make great sacrifices to ensure our safety at home and abroad, however, our nation’s four-legged often go forgotten. With this in mind, the Anaheim Ducks found a very special way to honor one K9 hero during Sunday night’s game against the Calgary Flames.
As part of the Ducks “Military Appreciation Night,” one very special bomb-sniffing German Shepherd was honored with the duty of dropping the ceremonial opening puck.
Watch below:
H/T SmokeRoom
| 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 |
LOOK WHO “THE VIEW” HIRED To Replace Only “Conservative” On Their Panel After She Dared To Ask Hillary The Wrong Question [VIDEO] | Jedediah Bila is at most, a lukewarm conservative. She s a hardcore Trump hater, so the show gave her a little leeway when it came to expressing her lukewarm conservative views. Apparently, no one gave her permission, however, to ask Hillary Clinton to accept some responsibility for her loss during a taped segment last week.When Hillary agreed to appear on The View to hawk her new book, What Happened that explains why everyone else is to blame after was clobbered in the 2016 presidential election by Donald J. Trump, she certainly didn t expect to be challenged by the token conservative, who clearly hates President Trump. In other words, Hillary and likely the entire panel of dingbats on The View believed she was entering a safe space , but that didn t turn out to be the case, as Bila zinged her with an unexpected question, that forced Hillary to scramble for an acceptable answer to her question. Of course, Hillary s answer had nothing whatsoever to do with the question Bila asked her, as Hillary hilariously attempted to blame the media for her loss. The 5:30 point is where Bila crosses Hillary Not surprisingly only one week after Bila s question of Hillary, the token conservative host finds herself in the unemployment line, while Meghan McCain, the daughter of one of the worst RINO s in the Senate will be taking Bila s spot, as the lukewarm conservative on the panel of hosts with the dingbats of The View.Meghan McCain told liberal rag PEOPLE magazine that she shed tears when Donald Trump officially won the GOP nomination for president at the Republican convention.For anyone who thinks Bila expected to be exiting The View, a quick look at a couple of her most recent posts on Facebook show that she was gearing up for the next season with the dingbats at The View:Only 5 days ago, Bila posted about hoping that Hillary would come back to discuss the issues with her:Most of her questions were softball questions and she spent a great deal of time trashing our president, but something happened lately, as Jedediah seemed to be actually defending her conservative principles. She recently challenged the racist, Trump-hating CA Congresswoman, Maxine Waters and her over-the-top rhetoric about our sitting President. The hyena s on the panel and the clapping seals in the audience would have nothing to do with an opinion that is contrary to anything other than the hard left. Why Bila put up with those dingbats for so many seasons is a mystery to many who watched. Apparently hating Donald Trump is enough to land a semi-talented female a coveted seat at The View s leftist propaganda table.Watch:Maybe it was just the Clinton interview that ended her career, or maybe it was a combination of the Waters and then Clinton interviews, either way, The View can sit back and rest easy, as Meghan McCain doesn t have a conservative bone in her body, and the Goebbels Sisters can now carry on, uninterrupted with their disinformation campaign about President Trump and about the American people who support him. | 1real |
EXCLUDING WHITES IS NOT RACIST: Racist, Angry BLM Activist Tells Tucker Carlson It’s Okay To Have “Blacks Only” Celebrations [VIDEO] | After Black Lives Matter hosted a blacks-only Memorial Day party, Tucker Carlson asked a BLM supporter why such an event is acceptable.Carlson said the party promoted segregation the exact thing BLM purports to oppose. I thought the whole point of Black Lives matter was to speak out against singling out people based on race? Carlson asked political commentator Lisa Durden. Boo-hoo, you white people are angry because you couldn t use your white privilege card to get invited to the Black Lives Matter all-black Memorial Day celebration, Durden said. Carlson asked again why BLM would exclude others based on their race while they protest against such actions. FOX News | 1real |
The Washington Post Just Asked A MAJOR Question Of Trump’s Administration, And He’ll Be LIVID | Trump s young administration is fraught with trouble, but we all knew that already. Most of us probably haven t thought of just how to frame Trump s behavior since assuming the White House, but an enterprising writer at the Washington Post just did. Eugene Robinson, an opinion writer for the Post, wrote an entire op-ed based around the following question: Does Trump know he s president? Well, does he? One of the things that Robinson points to as evidence that he doesn t, or, at least, doesn t know what he s doing at all, is the fact that we had a bunch of government executives tell Europe, tell Iraq, even tell the U.N., not to listen to what Trump says. For instance, he said we re going to take Iraq s oil. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told the press in Baghdad that we were absolutely not there to do that.U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said that we absolutely support a two-state solution after Trump said we didn t. Mike Pence told NATO that we re fully devoted to them, after Trump has said repeatedly that NATO is obsolete and wants to cozy up to Russia.He said that rounding up undocumented immigrants is a military operation, which supposedly means a non-military operation, and he was just using military as an adjective, according to Sean Spicer.Not mentioned in Robinson s article is Trump s neverending Twitter temper tantrum, though he does mention Trump s feud with the press. There s also the fact that Trump loves hobnobbing with his rich buddies in Florida, to the point where he had a meeting on North Korea in plain view of his VIPs, who pay him a ton of money. He won t divest from his businesses, which is creating massive conflicts of interest and may even be in violation of the Constitution.He rushed out his Muslim ban and the courts promptly halted it, and we have to wonder if he even consulted with anyone knowledgeable about the law with that. The 9th Circuit just rejected the Justice Department s request to put that case on hold pending a new order.So when the Post has to ask if Trump even knows he s president, we have to wonder the same thing. We also have to assume that Trump will be pissed if he hears about this op-ed because it makes him look like the buffoon he is, and he already hates the Post. Not as much as The New York Times or CNN, but he hates them enough. The answer to Robinson s question is, No, he doesn t know he s president, especially not in the same way every other president we ve had knew they were president. Featured image by Aude Guerrucci via Getty Images | 1real |
Turkey to close Iraq border, air space, will open new gate with Baghdad | ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey wants to open a new border gate with Iraq in cooperation with the central government in Baghdad after it shuts down the existing gate in response to last week s Kurdish independence referendum, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said. We have proposed opening the new Ovakoy gate, west of currently used Habur gate, to Baghdad and we are expecting their support. We will be happy to discuss this with (Iraqi Prime Minister Haider) al-Abadi, Yildirim told reporters, saying the timing of his visit to Baghdad was a work in progress. Yildirim also said he wanted to boost cooperation with central Iraqi government on economy, defense, security and political issues. | 0fake |
Comment on The Liberal Conservative Examines The Bill Of Rights, Part VIII by Entertainment and Movie reviews with tips on how to get Website Traffic and Make Money Online. | The Liberal Conservative Examines The Bill Of Rights, Part VIII By Jonathan Lenhardt on October 28, 2013 Subscribe
We’re in the home stretch here at The Liberal Conservative’s look at the United States Bill of Rights. Welcome to Part 8! Just joining us? Then click here to play catch up and check all things Liberal Conservative courtesy of Liberal America. Now, on with the show!
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
We finally return to the hot-button issues! In this case; “Is the death penalty cruel and unusual and thus a violation of the 8th Amendment?” Let’s take a look…
…but, let’s get those first two provisions out of the way. Excessive bail. Excessive fines. Pretty self-explanatory: you can’t be charged $1 million bail for littering and you can’t be fined $14k for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign. Seems reasonable enough to me; albeit, there are some whacky things you can be fined for in this country. In the end, though, they’re really more comedic than intrusive or unconstitutional.
On to the juicy bits! Is the death penalty unconstitutional? Well, it comes down to the one question alluded to earlier: “Is the death penalty cruel and unusual?” The ACLU certainly thinks so and there are eighteen states, plus the District of Columbia , that have outright abolished the death penalty; the most recent being Maryland just this past May. That should make it clear just how divisive this issue truly is throughout this country.
The polls would seem to match the divide among the States. The 18-against-32 against/for ratio of the states comes in at 64% for the death penalty and 36% against. According to a Gallup poll published in January of this year 63% of Americans support the death penalty; down from 64% in 2010, but up from 61% in 2011; and that’s pretty much where the capital punishment approval rating been hanging out for the past few years after a steady decline in the decade prior. That same piece also goes on to explain that most support does, in fact, come from the Conservatives and Moderates while the majority of Liberals – just barely – oppose. Also, 67% of men stand in favor of capital punishment while 59% of women are in favor.
So with almost two-thirds of the nation supporting the death penalty where does the opposition come from? What triggers it?
It probably has to do with the old , archaic methods which were used to off the offenders. While three states – Delaware, New Hampshire, and Washington – still have death by hanging, and eight states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia – still have death by electrocution, they all use lethal injection as their primary method of execution; as do twenty-one other states – plus Connecticut, Maryland, and New Mexico whose bans on the death penalty weren’t retroactive. Now lethal injection isn’t the coziest of methods, but at least the offenders aren’t being fried like breaded chicken or hanged like deer cuts.
Still, one could understand that the idea of taking a person’s life in response to a crime may be a little…heinous. So maybe those who support the death penalty are heinous.
Wanna’ know who else was heinous? John Wayne Gacy killed 33 boys and buried most of them under his very own house. He was executed on May 10, 1994 via lethal injection. Wanna’ know another heinous serial killer? David Alan Gore raped and killed a 17-year-old girl on top of five other murders – all female. He was executed in April, 2012 via lethal injection.
Many pro-death penalty folks will explain to you that they are proponents of Hammurabi’s Code . For those of you who may not know, Hammurbi’s Code is widely regarded as the first set of written laws in human history. Even if you’ve never heard it referred to as “Hammurabi’s Code” before, you’ve definitely heard of the concept; “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. You kill, you get killed. Pretty even trade.
So, How Does This Amendment Apply To Modern America?
Now Hammurabi’s Code doesn’t translate 100% picture perfectly into 21st Century America; but, then again, the only absolute is that there are no other absolutes. Shades of gray run roughshod in modern law, but this is one case where black & white would seem to apply. Murder is heinous and maybe – just maybe – it deserves heinous punishment.
Once more, the death penalty is one of those issues that is highly divisive; drawing sharp opinions from people both for and against it. Whether or not this – the 8th Amendment – can possibly fit with a pro-death penalty America depends entirely on who you’re talking to and what their opinion on it is.
At the end of the day, though, the death penalty is legal and utilized by almost two-thirds of the States; and, even those who do abolish it don’t do so retroactively,?it leaves those who received death sentences to remain on death row awaiting their inevitable doom. Therefore, it’s hard to argue that this amendment doesn’t apply to modern America. It does. Very well, in fact; whether you love it or hate it.
Edited by SS About Jonathan Lenhardt
I'm Jonathan Lenhardt; fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republican. I'm pro-choice, pro-2nd Amendment, anti-Tea Party, and happily atheist just to name a sparse few things about me. You can direct all hate mail to [email protected] Also, you can find me on Google+, Twitter (@JonLenTheLC), and I have an L.C.-specific Facebook page (Jonathan Lenhardt, The Liberal Conservative). Connect | 1real |
U.S. Navy Fires Warning Shots at Iranian Vessels in Strait of Hormuz - Breitbart | Four Iranian boats made a approach at the destroyer USS Mahan on Sunday, obliging the Navy vessel to fire warning shots after they ignored radio requests to break off. [USNI News reports the Iranian boats came within 900 yards of the Mahan, which was escorting two U. S. ships through the Strait of Hormuz, the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island and a fleet oiler. The Iranian group consisted of four fast inshore attack craft, approaching at a high rate of speed with their weapons manned, according to a U. S. official. “After several attempts to warn off the boats with radio communications, siren and the ship’s whistle the boats came within 900 yards of the guided missile destroyer before the crew fired three warning shots from one of the ships . 50 caliber,” USNI News writes. “A helicopter from Makin Island also deployed a smoke screen generator, a “smoke float” that did not deter the IRGCN boats. ” The UK Guardian clarifies that radio communication with the Iranians was established, but they ignored requests to slow down and “continued asking the Mahan questions. ” The U. S. Navy described the Iranians’ behavior as “unsafe and unprofessional. ” The U. S. official quoted by the Guardian said the Mahan had a total of seven “interactions” with vessels from Iran over the weekend, but the other six were “judged to be safe. ” As with several previous tense encounters, the boats were under the command of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) which is separate from the Iranian Navy, reports directly to the theocratic government, and is given great discretion to “boldly and courageously” defend the Iranian coastline. | 0fake |
Military Plane Approaching A UFO. See What Happens Then... | Military Plane Approaching A UFO. See What Happens Then... # Grey 0
It’s not very often that someone has to catch a UFO and at the same time, military fighter planes in the sky.
The video recording captures a UFO of elliptical shape that is chased by a military jet. Tags | 1real |
Vermont deer attempt to flee to Canada after election results roll in. | Debate a draw at minus 6 on a ten point scale Wide-ranging response to presidential debate 2 has now settled down to a tie, with a rating of minus 6 on a ten point scale for each candidate. A 1 on a ten point scale would be much lower than a 9. A 9 would indicate "very good" or "excellent."... The President in the locker room Spoof Investigations has just been handed a video related to a certain candidate for president in the 2016 election. It shows him in his own locker room at Trump Tower being interviewed by a radio show host with first name Billy. This new inter... Obama Replaces John Kerry with Jack Reacher as the New Secretary of State Trying to secure his legacy, especially when it comes to foreign policy, President Barack Obama replaced reigning Secretary of State, John Kerry, with Jack Reacher. Obama wanted to leave the White House remembered as a tough guy who could handle the... Kirk lands killer blow on Trumphole™ with 'Rope a Dope' Weapon™ The Earth Defense League has landed a killer blow on the Trumphole™ Fleet using a variation of Mohamed Alis 'Rope a Dope' strategy and has developed a 'Give the Psychopath Enough Rope to Hang Himself' Gun™ The Earth Defense League hea... Trump's Minority Outreach Met With Deafening Silence Faced with faltering poll numbers, Donald Trump and his advisors are taking a shot at tapping the African American vote, which normally goes Democratic 9 to 1. His recent outreach, however, might be doing more harm than good. Trying to piggyba... | 1real |
null | China and Phillipines are developing relations Momo. Keep up | 1real |
Britain says expects most EU citizens can stay after Brexit | LONDON (Reuters) - The British government said on Tuesday that most European Union citizens currently living in Britain will be allowed to remain in the country after Brexit in 2019. Outlining plans for a mass registration program, the Department for Exiting the European Union and the interior ministry said EU nationals will be given a two-year grace period to apply for settled status after Britain leaves the EU. The legal status and rights of EU nationals is one of the thornier issues in Britain s complicated exit from the bloc. There are about 3 million EU citizens living in Britain. Caseworkers will be able to use discretion when processing applications, meaning they should not be refused for minor technicalities, and the majority would be granted, the departments said in a statement. The cost of an application should be no more than the cost of a British passport and EU citizens will also be given a statutory right of appeal if denied. We have been clear that safeguarding the rights of EU citizens is our top priority in negotiations, Brexit minister David Davis said. We will support everyone wishing to stay to gain settled status through a new straightforward, streamlined system. | 0fake |
Bishops Warn of Anti-Christian Intolerance after Government Advisor Criticises Catholic Schools | Two English bishops have hit out after the government’s top advisor on integration said it was “not OK” for Catholic schools to oppose gay marriage. [The Catholic bishops of Portsmouth and Shrewsbury said it was becoming increasingly difficult to pass on traditional teaching in Britain, and that Christian values are facing discrimination. Earlier this week, Dame Louise Casey, the British government’s senior advisor on integration told MPs: “It is not OK for Catholic schools to be homophobic and marriage,” adding: “I have a problem with the expression of religious conservatism because I think often it can be . ” Philip Egan, the Bishop of Portsmouth, said any restrictions on Catholic schools passing on Church teaching would by worthy of George Orwell’s Nineteen . He told Catholic News Service that trying to preach on traditional sexual morality in Britain has become “like arguing with an alcoholic”. “After a while, they won’t argue with you on grounds of reason, they just become furious and respond that way. There is something in our culture increasingly like that,” the bishop said. Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury also said that Britain’s values had been shaped by its Christian heritage. “These values would be undermined if an ‘equalities agenda’ in schools became the vehicle for an increasing intolerance of Christian teaching,” he said. “Strangely, it is the historic teachings of Christianity and the Christian vision of marriage which might be in need of toleration,” Bishop Davies added. He said the Catholic Church would benefit from a new papal document on anthropology to clarify Church teaching and counter the rise of gender ideology. In November, Dutch cardinal Willem Eijk called on the Pope to issue a document condemning gender ideology, saying many Catholics were being “misled” into believing people could choose their own genders, partly because “they don’t hear anything else”. “[Gender theory] is spreading and spreading everywhere in the Western world, and we have to warn people,” he said. “From the point of moral theology, it’s clear — you are not allowed to change your sex in this way. ” | 0fake |
Texas committee passes bill to curb transgender bathroom access | AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A bill that would restrict access to public bathrooms by transgender people was approved by a Texas Senate committee on Wednesday after hundreds of people lined up for a nearly 21-hour session on that legislation, which critics said promotes discrimination. The bill would require people to use restrooms that correspond with the gender on their birth certificate, not the gender with which they identify. It will now go to the Republican-controlled Senate where it is expected to pass. Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who guides the Senate agenda, has said the legislation is a priority. Analysts do not expect the bill to make it through the state House of Representatives, where there is more concern about the potential economic impact of such legislation. The bill, which focuses on a heated political issue in the United States, is similar to one enacted last year in North Carolina. That law prompted economic boycotts and the loss of sporting events that were estimated to have cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars. The Texas Association of Business released a study in January in which it said that if the legislation were enacted it could cost Texas as much as $8.5 billion in the state’s gross domestic product and the loss of more than 185,000 jobs in the first year alone. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has challenged the survey and brought North Carolina Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest to Texas to rally support for the bill. Nearly 70 businesses, including some of the state’s biggest employers such as American Airlines, sent a letter to Republican leaders this month asking them to reject the bill on the grounds that it would “legalize discrimination.” THIRD-GRADER TESTIFIES Hundreds registered to testify, and more than 250 people addressed the committee. Some waited more than 12 hours while many bill opponents lined the corridors in the Capitol’s dome. “At the core of this bill is privacy,” Republican state Senator Lois Kolkhorst, the bill’s sponsor, told the committee. Almost all the testimony was against the bill while supporters said it would help prevent sexual predators from targeting women and children. Chelsa Morrison, whose 8-year-old daughter Marilyn started third grade at a suburban Dallas school after a gender transition, choked back tears as she told the committee that her daughter was bullied and if the legislation was enacted it would be devastating. Marilyn told lawmakers, “Trans people are real. You are looking at one right now. This bill is horrifying to me and all of my transgender friends.” She said it would be embarrassing if she were forced to use the boys’ bathroom. “All we got to do is tinkle and get out. That’s all.” Her mother said later in a telephone interview that Marilyn attended school in the latter part of last year for about a month, then left because of bullying and bathroom restrictions. She is now being schooled at home. Lieutenant Governor Patrick has called the bill common sense legislation. “North Carolina was the tip of the spear,” he told reporters this week. “We will be next to pass a bill that focuses on privacy, a person’s privacy, and public safety.” | 0fake |
AMERICA IS CLOSER TO BECOMING SWEDEN Than You Think…Don’t Believe Us? Watch This… | These videos will shock you. When you think of Sweden, do you think of Muslim gangs roving the streets in no-go zones lobbing hand grenades at warring migrant tribes? Do you think of Muslim men raping so many Swedish women, girls, men and boys, that it has now earned the designation as the rape capitol of the world? Do you think of children being taken from their homes for the crime of being homeschooled by their parents? Do you think of a nation of spoiled everyone gets a trophy children? Do you envision a nation where parenting your children is now considered taboo? Sweden can be proud today to have shed its long standing reputation as the most boring country in the world . The Nordic state finds itself in the grip of a terrifying crime wave instead, which even new Swedes describe as like being back in Syria .Grenade attacks in multicultural paradise Malm are now so commonplace the English-speaking media has all but stopped bothering to report them. Compounding the apparent disinterest in the descent of beautiful, historic Malm into a third-world ghetto where native Swedes are very nearly in the minority, is a striking dearth of facts about what is actually going on there.Did you know that it s ILLEGAL to home school your child in Sweden? So much for tolerance. You must learn what the state teaches you or you will be severely punished.It s been called one of the worst cases of government abuse ever committed against a home schooling family: the abduction by Swedish authorities of Domenic Johansson, a happy, healthy, 7-year-old boy taken from his parents Christer and Annie Johansson in 2009 as they waited to leave Sweden on a flight to India.After the abduction, the Johanssons story spread quickly on the Internet.But three years later, Domenic is still being kept from his parents, and Swedish authorities keep finding new reasons for why the child can t go home. This is about the most fundamental right you have. You have the right to your own children, or you should have, Christer told CBN News during the first television interview he and his wife have given since their only child s abduction.In 2008, Christer and Annie were making plans to leave Sweden for humanitarian work in Annie s native India.They decided it would be best for Domenic to be home-schooled during the final months before their departure, rather than enroll him in public school.Christer says Sweden s Ministry of Education told him they could home-school, but local officials levied steep fines and threatened the couple to discourage them from doing so.Then, as the parents sat on a plane at Stockholm airport for their scheduled trip to India, police came aboard and took Domenic away. They took Domenic from the plane, Christer recalled. Then he threw up until they took him to ER. That s how severe the trauma is. If someone throws up so you have to take him to the hospital, that s severe. I have no clue what went on, Annie added. There was just a stampede. My child had no clue, and I have no clue still what s going on. I can just hear the screams of my child all the time. Sweden s liberal approach to parenting has bred a nation of ill-mannered brats, a leading expert has warned in a new book which calls on parents to seize back control of their families. David Eberhard, who was a prominent psychiatrist before becoming a writer, warns in his new book, How Children Took Power, that Swedish parents are now unwilling to discipline their children in any way. Swedes in 1979 became the first to adopt a total smacking ban. We live in a culture where so-called experts say that children are competent and the conclusion is that children should decide what to eat, what to wear, and when to go to bed, he said. If you have a dinner party, they never sit quietly. They interrupt. They re always in the centre, and the problem is that when they become young adults, they take with them the expectation that everything is centred around them, which makes them very disappointed. He points to Sweden s growing truancy rates, a rise in anxiety disorders, and the country s declining performance in international educational league tables, as the tangible results of its liberal parenting approach. They don t say thank you. They don t open doors. If you see them on the subway, they don t stand up for elderly people or pregnant women. Stricter parenting is a taboo in Sweden, let alone advocating a return to smacking, a ban on which he believes has more to do with ideology than scientific evidence. It s very difficult to contradict. If you say I m putting forward a stricter way, then people think you re an idiot. Can you say #BlackLivesMatter movement? | 1real |
Neocon Nightmare: Trump Wants to ‘Get Along With Foreign Countries’ | 21st Century Wire says Could this be the real reason why Trump is so despised by the elite Republican establishment?Watch a video of this report here: Trump had this to say: Wouldn t it be nice if actually we could get along with Russia, that we could get along with foreign countries. The neocon political faction that has dominated the Republican Party during recent history believes there is little to be gained from cooperation in politics, and prefers confrontation and domination instead; as they amply demonstrated with their 2003 Iraq War.For Donald Trump to be specifically saying that he wants to get along with Russia is unparalleled, as Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, said that Russia was without question our number one geopolitical foe .A world with an American President that wants to get along might certainly look a lot different to today s. Yet, as we are seeing, with the myriad of attacks against Trump, certain political and military industrial complex elite interests are not happy about the concept.Of course, we must remember that this is still just that a concept. However good of a concept it is, Trump may very well not deliver this goal.Still, it certainly is a very different, and somewhat sweeter, change to the tune of American foreign policy rhetoric than we are used to hearing.Do you believe Trump has the right foreign policy stance, and will he implement it?GET THE FULL STORY ON ELECTION 2016: 21st Century Wire Election Files | 1real |
Trump Held A Signing. The Only Problem Is, He Had Nothing To Sign | Back in February, Donald Trump described his administration as running like a fine-tuned machine and that mind-numbingly stupid remark will come back to haunt him as much as his We re going to win so much. You re going to get tired of winning promise to his supporters. Case in point: The alleged president held a signing today but had nothing to sign.On Monday, Trump announced his goal to privatize the nation s Air Traffic Control System, but that proposal was actually based on legislation introduced by Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA), the Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. That bill never came to fruition on the House floor for a vote as it faced bipartisan opposition in the Senate.But anyway, Trump sat down at a desk and signed two documents.Time reports:There was only one problem: He wasn t actually signing something that would have any tangible impact on what he had just proposed.A White House aide told reporters Trump had signed a decision memo and letter transmitting legislative principles to Congress, surrounding the privatization of the Air Traffic Control system, which he had just spent the last few minutes advocating for. But in order for his goal to come to fruition, Congress would need to pass legislation implementing it. Before Trump gave remarks Monday, White House officials had told reporters that the President is only dictating his legislative goals of separating air traffic controls from the FAA. Congress is not required to follow through on these goals.Still yet, while Trump fake-signed a bill which doesn t exist (yet, if ever), his team was behind him applauding the signing.This isn t the first time Trump did something like this but previously it was even worse. During a press conference, he said in mid-January, These papers are just some of the many documents I ve signed turning over complete and total control to my sons They are not going to discuss [the business] with me. Again, I don t have to do this. They re not going to discuss it with me. The pages appear to be blank.The pages are blank. pic.twitter.com/agLqnBTjrg Mikey Neumann (@mikeyface) January 12, 2017Trump s signing event was as fake as his presidency.Photo by Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images | 1real |
De Blasio Snubs New York Post Reporter and Calls Paper a ‘Right-Wing Rag’ - The New York Times | For weeks, Mayor Bill de Blasio has barely disguised his disgust for the coverage of his administration in The New York Post. He has referred to the newspaper as “propaganda” and suggested recently during his weekly radio show that New Yorkers would do well to ignore what he called The Post’s “fabricated” stories. The mayor took his disdain to a new level on Thursday, blatantly and pointedly ignoring the paper’s City Hall bureau chief, Yoav Gonen, during a news conference, and belittling The Post while doing so. The conflict erupted in a petulant exchange, with Mr. Gonen furiously, and futilely, trying to attract the mayor’s attention. Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, refused to call on him, explaining that he had “no use for a rag” while excoriating Mr. Gonen for a recent story he did not write. “Mr. Mayor? Mr. Mayor? Mr. Mayor? Over here,” Mr. Gonen said, speaking up in frustration. “You can keep calling all you want,” Mr. de Blasio said. “Are you going to call on me today?” Mr. Gonen asked. “I’m calling on real media outlets, go ahead,” the mayor said, signaling a reporter from The New York Observer. It is nothing new for a mayor of New York to view the city’s press corps with contempt. And some powerful public figures, including Donald J. Trump and Raymond W. Kelly, a former New York police commissioner, have gone further, barring reporters from events altogether. But Mr. de Blasio’s very public and dismissive display was extraordinary in the history of antagonism between City Hall and the press. It reflected an escalation of Mr. de Blasio’s longstanding war with the tabloids, which he and some of his closest aides deemed irrelevant early in his tenure. But political operatives said they saw no purpose in the mayor’s lashing out. “I understand his frustration, but unfortunately losing your temper with the news media gets you nothing but stories about losing your temper,” Karen Hinton, Mr. de Blasio’s former press secretary, said. Her advice: Call on the reporter, answer the question, then move on. George Arzt, a political consultant and former press secretary for Mayor Edward I. Koch who was a reporter and City Hall bureau chief for The Post from 1968 to 1986, noted that Mr. Koch’s chief antagonists were investigative reporters from The Village Voice, namely Wayne Barrett and Jack Newfield. The two would never get interviews, Mr. Arzt said, “but they were allowed to ask questions” during news conferences. “No one that I’ve seen before this has gone after a paper as an institution,” he said. “You can’t say everyone on the paper is against me without making them against you. He’s creating his own problem. ” Last month, Mr. de Blasio characterized as “fabricated stuff” a Post article suggesting he had made a appointment at the behest of a donor who has since pleaded guilty to bribery charges. This month, he refused to answer a question from Mr. Gonen about the background of a contractor hired by the city to train correction officers, adding sarcastically that he did not “appreciate your propagandistic newspaper. ” In a telephone interview late Thursday, Mr. de Blasio said it was time to “have this conversation” about The Post, which he described as “a very negative presence in our city” and an “ideological apparatus” with little resemblance to a news operation. “I think it’s important, as the leader of this city, to say out loud what so many people already know,” he said. “The Post’s approach has gotten worse and worse. ” He said he had not planned the comments he made at the news conference, adding that he would answer questions from Post reporters in the future, provided they were not “in the middle of playing out one of their propaganda strategies. ” The news conference on Thursday included several exchanges in which the mayor appeared exasperated with questions from various reporters about transparency and overlapping investigations into his administration. All the while, he ignored the raised hand of Mr. Gonen. “You can keep trying, man,” Mr. de Blasio said. “In the back for the last one. ” Mr. Gonen then began to ask his question anyway — a request for comment on a report by the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog, about a costly aspect of teachers’ pensions. “You can talk all you want,” the mayor said. “I’m credentialed just like the other media,” Mr. Gonen said. “That’s nice, I appreciate solidarity,” Mr. de Blasio said before explaining that his anger stemmed from a Post story on Monday that used the word “crony” to describe Victor Calise, the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities. “I’ve got no use for a rag that attacks people who are good public servants and tries to undermine their reputation,” he said, pointing to Mr. Calise who was seated nearby. “I’m not playing that game. ” The of Friday’s Post, published online Thursday night, embraced the clash with glee. “De Waaasio,” read the headline above a of the mayor’s head on a baby’s body in a highchair. “Aww, did we hurt your feelings?” | 0fake |
Venezuela frees two anti-Maduro activists; scores still jailed | CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan authorities overnight freed two activists who were in jail for more than a year after being accused of plotting against socialist President Nicolas Maduro, the opposition said on Saturday. Delson Guarate, who had been a mayor in central Aragua state, and former student leader Yon Goicoechea were among nearly 400 jailed anti-Maduro activists who rights campaigners say are political prisoners but whom the government calls coup-plotters. I m with my family today, tweeted Goicoechea, displaying a photo of himself against the backdrop of Caracas Avila mountain. Tomorrow I ll address the country. God is with us. I m free! Guarate tweeted. The pair s freedom, with some unspecified conditions attached, was confirmed by opposition parties and a rights group, but the government had no comment. The releases came as Maduro called for one of the most prominent opposition leaders, congress head Julio Borges, to face treason charges for lobbying against his government in global financial circles. And the pro-Maduro Supreme Court began moves this week to remove parliamentary immunity for congress deputy leader Freddy Guevara, so he can be tried for instigating violence. Guevara runs the militant Popular Will party, which both Goicoechea and Guarate belong to. It has been at the forefront of anti-Maduro protests, including four months of demonstrations this year that led to 125 deaths. Critics say Maduro has turned the OPEC nation into a dictatorship. His supporters say the 54-year-old successor to Hugo Chavez is resisting a Western-backed push to oust him. In a New York Times column earlier this year, Goicoechea described how a dozen policemen put a black cloth over his head when they arrested him before taking him to a cell without natural light or ventilation. When I stretched my arms, I could touch two opposite walls, he wrote in the column smuggled out of prison. The door was blocked with black garbage bags, leaving the room in total darkness. There was rotten, worm-infested food on the floor alongside scraps of clothing covered in feces. It felt as if I had been buried alive. Senior officials said Goicoechea was an imperialist agent caught with explosives in his possession, while Guarate had been financing terrorism. Neither was tried. Popular Will, which the government has threatened to proscribe as a terrorist organization, said it would not stop fighting for the freedom of all activists. The dictatorship s justice is a revolving door, said party legislator Juan Mejia. Some leave, while others come in at its discretion and to its benefit. | 0fake |
CROOKED HILLARY Slams The Bank She Took A $258K Donation From [Video] | 1real | |
Should Ivanka Trump the Woman Wear Ivanka Trump the Brand? - The New York Times | A few hours after her father’s news conference on Wednesday at Trump Tower, Ivanka Trump posted a notice on her personal Facebook page officially announcing that she was taking a “formal leave of absence” from all management and operative responsibilities at her fashion brand and that she would be stepping down from her role at the Trump Organization. She would, she wrote, be spending the next few months concentrating on settling her children into their new lives in Washington and exploring how she could “determine the most impactful and appropriate ways for me to serve our country. ” This follows earlier decisions to separate her personal social media accounts from those of her brand. Yet in one meaningful area, Ms. Trump and her brand are harder to divide: That is, her wardrobe. After all, the same day she announced she was separating Ivanka Trump the person from Ivanka Trump the brand, The Daily Mail announced she had worn an Ivanka Trump coat to her father’s news conference. Then it offered a box and link. In case, you know, anyone wanted to buy the garment. That turned out not to be true — according to a spokesman for Ms. Trump, the coat was by Joseph Altuzarra — but the confusion around woman and product made for some uncomfortable optics, and it raises the question: What does it mean to separate individual from company where fashion is concerned? On the one hand, there’s something ridiculous about suggesting that Ms. Trump not wear whatever clothes are in her closet, and as the founder of a fashion brand that bears her name, presumably part of her job has been to promote said brand by wearing it — to, in effect, demonstrate her belief in her own products. So she probably has a lot of such products within reach. And it’s not her fault if some media outlet chooses to point out that she looks good and tells people how they, too, can look good. On the other hand, her brand is clearly built on her image: Not just her name, but her face, and what she represents. It’s selling the promise that women who wear her clothes can get a piece of her gold dust — and now that this gold dust is visible in the corridors (and news conferences) of power, that is only going to be more true. Every time she is pictured in an Ivanka Trump outfit, it is bound to give a boost to the Ivanka Trump brand. Whether or not they are technically linked. It’s unclear whether Ms. Trump would benefit from that financially, as specifics about her monetary relationship with her brand were not included in her statement. But even if she is selling her part of the company, for a prominent member of the first family to be seen to be endorsing a brand with her own name on it is a complicated proposition. And an endorsement is exactly what an appearance in an item of clothing has become. This is a time, like it or not, of obsession with the wardrobe selections of anyone in the public eye, especially women in the public eye (their clothes are more interesting than men’s, after all). And though she has repeatedly said that she will not take a formal role in the new administration, Ms. Trump is emerging as the female face of her father’s inner circle. Simply consider the news conference, where she was the only woman from the immediate family in attendance. There’s a reason The Daily Mail did not get into the specifics of what her brothers wore. She is smart enough to know that any time she steps out of her door, someone is going to try to snap a picture and parse her clothes. You can argue that Ms. Trump is not an elected official, and thus to demand that she recuse herself from all products associated with her name is unfair punishment. You could say that if she wears, for example, an Alexander McQueen dress, as she did on election night, she is giving that brand a boost, so why shouldn’t she do the same for her own brand? You can point out that there is precedent because she wore her own line numerous times during the campaign, including to introduce her father at the Republican National Convention — but then, the latter choice was not without controversy. In part, the resulting brouhaha was, of course, because her brand then promoted that appearance with its own “get the look” link, as it famously did, without her knowledge, when she wore her bracelet during her family’s appearance on “60 Minutes. ” Presumably that won’t happen any more. But brands need personalities to succeed, at whatever price point, and those personalities derive most easily from, well, a person. A scenario in which Ivanka Trump the brand removes Ms. Trump utterly from its identity is hard to imagine. Though to be fair, the brand’s website is adorned with images and line drawings of many different kinds of women and not with Ms. Trump, so it may be possible. Either way, this is another illustration of the multiple complicated issues that are going to arise with a member of the first family who also had designs on being a fashion brand. There’s really no playbook for this, as the Ivanka team — figuring it out as it goes along — is quick to remind. In which case, the clothes question should be the next piece of the puzzle to be solved. | 0fake |
Virginia Republican Goodlatte will not seek re-election | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Representative Bob Goodlatte, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said on Thursday he will not seek re-election next year. “This is a natural stepping-off point,” Goodlatte said in a statement. The announcement came on the heels of Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, where Democrats won the governor’s office and triumphed in local races in some Republican strongholds. Goodlatte has represented Virginia’s 6th congressional district for 25 years. He joins a string of Republican lawmakers who have announced their retirements from Congress in recent weeks. Two other House committee chairmen, Representatives Lamar Smith and Jeb Hensarling, both of Texas, said last week they would not seek re-election. Hensarling leads the House Financial Services Committee, while Smith leads the Science, Space and Technology panel. | 0fake |
Illinois House enacts FY 2018 budget, ending record impasse | CHICAGO (Reuters) - Illinois’ first full-year budget since 2015 became law on Thursday after the House of Representatives overrode the governor’s vetoes of a $36 billion fiscal 2018 spending plan and a companion measure that implements it. The House’s actions followed the Senate’s successful override votes on Tuesday. | 0fake |
Fed up with Washington, Trump's 'deplorables' shake up the elite | MIAMI/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fed up with Washington and feeling left behind, supporters of Republican Donald Trump upended the U.S. presidential race, electing a political newcomer they say offers the country a shot at dramatic change. Once dismissed by Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton as “deplorables,” supporters interviewed on Tuesday shrugged off his late-night tweeted insults, allegations against him of sexual misconduct and dire warnings from many in the Republican establishment that the businessman-turned-reality-television-star would throw U.S. economic and foreign policy into disarray. The economy, terrorism and healthcare ranked as the top three concerns facing Americans casting ballots in Tuesday’s election, according to an early reading from the Reuters/Ipsos Election Day poll of about 35,000 people. “The freedom-loving Americans pushed back against the elites and the globalists. They might win in the long run, but we’re not dead yet,” said Andrew Dye, 48, of Dexter, Michigan. “I think this big country is getting a little too far left a little too quickly and some people finally woke up and said enough,” said Dye, a partner in a small management consulting firm. Cuban-American Sarah Gird, 67, described herself as an independent who had felt let down after twice voting for Democratic President Barack Obama. “I’m not conservative at all,” she said. But Obama “didn’t produce anything.” In contrast, she said she trusted Trump would fix the economy. “I think he’s sincere, he’s truthful, he means what he says,” said Gird, adding she thought Trump would address poverty and jobs in African-American neighborhoods. For many, the vote was a rejection of Clinton, whose use of a private email server during her time in government came to symbolize what is wrong with Washington. “All the corruption. I’m tired of business as usual, being sold out all these years,” said Kevin Barrett, 57, in Nashville. Tom Kipp, 53, an architect also of Nashville, said he voted for Trump because “we need somebody in there not beholden to anyone.” “Our checks and balances system is beyond being compromised. I don’t say he’s my prime candidate, but he’s my best option,” Kipp said. Others found Trump’s promise to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico appealing. “Last-minute decision: I changed my mind to Trump,” said Lisa Ciafone, 48, of Madeira Beach, Florida, citing her concerns about illegal immigration and the rising costs of health insurance. “It made me lean towards Trump.” Vicki DeLira, 54, a dental hygienist from Schererville, Indiana, grew up a Democrat but voted for Trump because it was time for change even if it means “a little bit of chaos.” “It will be a little different atmosphere for a non-politician to be in the White House,” DeLira said. “But I think there’s enough politicians around him to help round them out.” Todd Recknagel, managing partner of private equity firm Three20 Capital Group, said the caricature of Trump as a “monster” was overdone. “He is an effective business man at the end of the day. So things are never quite as good as they appear and things are never quite as bad as they appear in life and I think he can make a decent president,” said Recknagel, 52, from Panama City Beach, Florida. As Trump became the projected winner in state after state, fans from Arkansas, Texas and Virginia sitting on velvet sofas in the lobby of his new Washington luxury hotel just down the street from the White House celebrated as waiters popped champagne. Preston Parry, 20, had bet all along that Trump would defy the pollsters who predicted a Clinton victory. “These were shadow voters, people who had never, ever voted before that the polls didn’t pick up. Unlikely voters. Like him or hate him - look, he did something right.” | 0fake |
Fooling Ourselves — Trump is Not the New Messiah (includes video) | According to John Kaminski, the New Boss is the same as the Old Boss. FORGET IT! “If that’s what you think,” Kaminski says, “you’re kidding yourself!”
President-elect Donald Trump’s claim he is reinvestigating 9/11 is just so much meaningless hot air — more neocon crapola — if he intends to solve the greatest crime in American history by including two of the event’s participating perpetrators — Rudy Giuliani and Lewis Eisenberg — on his team of detectives.
What kind of truth can we expect from this kind of sandbagged scrutiny? None at all. Once again our government is investigating itself with predictable results. It will do no better than the first time — which was a total whitewash, because it is the very system itself that all these political functionaries are trying to defend which bears responsibility for this event and its impact on history.
Hiring the people who played minor supporting roles in the 9/11 bloodbath to identify its architects and actors may yield a few sacrificial scapegoats like Cheney and some generals, but the top of the line power structure will remain solidly in place, hidden from view and utterly in control of world events.
That Trump has surrounded himself with the tainted players who have carried out all these wars for Israel augurs for a dark future in which the militarization of America will further shrink individual rights, and the harsh crackdown on legitimate dissent — which will soon be banned — plainly signals the end of free speech as we have known it in the United States.
Recall Thomas Jefferson’s dictum: “Freedom of the press cannot be limited without being lost.” Today, it is long gone. The press prints only what the government allows it to print.
For Trump to hire such rancid refugees from the Bush administration means that he won’t be investigating 9/11. Instead he will be crafting a new more realistic coverup that lambastes Saudi renegades and totally omits the overwhelming presence of Israeli Jews in all aspects of the tragedy — the same presence that now dominates the U.S. government and its criminal activities throughout the world.
Preemptive war is criminal activity, in case you didn’t know. The U.S. is practicing it everywhere under the cynical guise of fighting terror, which it itself creates by hiring thugs from around the world to fit into the proper terror slots and become believable enemies for the press to vilify and our military to bomb.
The U.S. has literally slaughtered millions of people around the world at the behest of a small group of mostly Jewish men (and the gentiles they have bought) who control not only virtually all the money of the people in the world, but also control their thoughts as a result.
Mayor Giuliani ran the command post in Building 7. You remember Building 7, that building that was knocked down by not being hit by an airplane. Giuliani knows everything that happened, and who did what.
Eisenberg, one of the world’s foremost financiers, was the head of the New York Port Authority who leased the Twin Towers to Silverstein. Silverstein, who spoke frequently with top Israeli leaders, wound up with $4.55 billion.
The question with regard to Trump’s integrity kind of splits down the middle since he seems to have a genuine desire to succeed and restore the peace, but he is indebted to forces far larger than himself, which he is now trying to placate by surrounding himself with the traditional pseudo Republican goons like Gingrich and Romney.
If only they were genuine Republicans it wouldn’t be so bad, but they’re poseurs, all ultimately working for the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds.
Business as usual in the Jewish American empire, gnawing on the fatted calf while bleeds.
Trump’s choices reveal a desire to continue the swashbuckling sadism of the Bush Administration. Throughout his campaign I always shuddered when Trump would proclaim that we needed a stronger military, and I thought, tell that to the people beneath the bombs because they want no part of any of this.
As a newspaper blows trivial events into earthshaking issues, so politicians identify all manner of enemies that demonstrate the desperate need for them to be elected.
Like the Boston Marathon bombing that turned a mercenary drill into a region wide suspension of freedom of movement, the worst story possible is presented even as inconvenient facts are left behind.
Think about the atrocities and false flag shockers that have been foisted on us since 9/11. Statistics reveal that more than 90 of significant terror incidents began life as FBI sting operations manipulating low IQ bigmouths into capital crimes.
Why is it the cops can commit crimes against the people but the people can’t commit crimes against the cops? This is not the kind of freedom we thought we’d get while growing up.
Trump certainly is not addressing any of these issues, and a Trump administration will merely continue the clumsy depredations and smokescreen lies that have exemplified the utterly corrupt and criminal nature of the United States as it is run by Jews bankers holed up in the City of London, and wreaking havoc throughout the world by their control of everyone’s money.
What is really needed is a full accounting of what the Jews have done to the United States, and restitution to United States citizens over moneys illegally stolen by the Federal Reserve Corporation to be taken from its stockholders immediately.
Of course this is impossible because the Jews own the government and all the corrupt minions within it. One word from them and you’re out of a job.
The avaricious Jews are really only a reflection of the darker side of humanity. Like good sociopaths, they learned everything they know by mimicking others, and have become better than everyone else at what they do simply by practice and cooperation.
They have never once considered that the fate of the world ultimately depends on treating everyone in the world as members of your own family, even as that becomes impossible on a continent overrun by hungry savages who were put there by these very same sadists who control the United States and its fearsome war machine.
A war machine that is now being used against its own people — through media, medicine and food — as the people who control everything consolidate their hold on a population rapidly being shaped into the cattle our Hebrew herders have always called us. DISCLAIMER. All articles, comments, and videos published on this website reflect the views of their original authors and in no way necessarily mirror the outlook of anyone associated with this website. VIDEO : 8:46 mins | 1real |
Sick Hillary Needed a Doctor in the Oval Office during Coughing Fit | 1real | |
Congress to probe Juniper 'back door' exposure, possible U.S. involvement | SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A U.S. congressional probe into the impact of a hack of Juniper Networks Inc software will examine the possibility that it was initially altered at the behest of the National Security Agency, a lawmaker said in an interview on Thursday. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform this month sent letters asking some two dozen agencies to provide documents showing whether they used Juniper devices running ScreenOS software. The company said in December ScreenOS had been compromised by hackers using a so-called back door in the software. Rep. Will Hurd, a Texas Republican who heads the committee’s technology subcommittee and formerly worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, said his initial goal in pursuing the probe was to determine whether government agencies, many of which use Juniper gear, had been compromised by the hackers. But Hurd, a key player in the investigation, said the committee would also probe the origins of the breach. If it turns out that a back door was included at a U.S. government agency’s request, he said, that should help change the policy debate. The earliest Juniper back door identified by researchers used a technique widely attributed to the NSA. The NSA did not respond to a request for comment. Juniper declined to comment. U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have long lobbied in vain for legislation that would require technology companies to provide back doors in equipment that use encryption technology. They say they need such access to conduct authorized wiretaps and other types or surveillance. The technology industry has fiercely opposed any such policy, arguing that back doors could be exploited by criminals or foreign intelligence services. The debate has heated up in the wake of recent attacks by Islamic militants, who make heavy use of digital communications networks. “How do we understand the vulnerabilities that created this problem and ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen in the future?” Hurd said. “I don’t think the government should be requesting anything that weakens the security of anything that is used by the federal government or American businesses.” Juniper said in December it had found two unauthorized pieces of code inserted into ScreenOS that would have allowed whoever planted them to read email sent over supposedly secure connections known as virtual private networks, or VPNs. After outside researchers picked apart the software patches Juniper issued to fix the problem, they concluded that one back door had been inserted in 2014 and one in 2012. The 2012 version, though, merely changed the formulation of a piece of software known as a random number generator, which is part of most encryption products. The random number generator used in the Juniper products, known as Dual Elliptic Curve, has long been suspected by security professionals of containing a back door engineered by the U.S. National Security Agency. Those suspicions were largely confirmed by leaks from former agency contractor Edward Snowden. Juniper said this month it would remove Dual Elliptic Curve entirely in future versions of its products. Juniper has not said how the code got there in the first place. It sells into defense and intelligence agencies, however, and major customers could have requested that the code be modified as part of a contract, former employees told Reuters this month. That is how Dual Elliptic Curve made it into a software kit distributed by security company RSA. The NSA is a logical suspect for the 2008 code insertion, said security researcher Nicholas Weaver of the International Computer Science Institute, while the offenders in both 2012 and 2014 are more likely to have been other countries. | 0fake |
Biden warns Ukraine on reforms, says EU sanctions on Russia at risk | (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday warned Ukraine needs to live up to its promises economic and political reforms or risk seeing the European Union walk away from its sanctions on Russia. “We know that if they give an excuse to the EU, there are at least five countries right now that want to say ‘We want out’” of sanctions against Moscow, Biden said, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Europe imposed sanctions after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014. Fighting has continued in the east of the country, despite the so-called Minsk ceasefire agreement, and Western powers fear peace efforts could unravel. In exchange for financial support from the United States and other Western allies, Ukraine promised reforms, but progress has been mixed. Biden’s comments came a day after he met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko at the United Nations, pushing on reforms in Ukraine’s energy and justice sectors, while saying conditions had been met for a third U.S. sovereign loan guarantee of up to $1 billion. Biden said he has spent two to three hours a week on the phone with Ukrainian leaders since the crisis began, urging them to persist with reforms, while also pressuring Germany, France and Italy to hold fast on sanctions. “There’s an overwhelming instinct in Europe to say, ‘Hey: before [Poroshenko] became president, this was owned by Russia anyway. They had a puppet there. What difference does it make? What the hell’s the difference? Why are you making us engage in these sanctions?’” Biden said. Noting a crisis of “self-doubt” in Europe caused by the United Kingdom’s referendum decision to leave the bloc and the Syrian migration crisis, Biden said he has warned Poroshenko to make sure that the failure of the Minsk deal is not blamed on Ukraine. “I’ve been the guy on the back of Ukrainians - which was a thoroughly corrupt system when they came in - making the case that, ‘You have to understand: everybody’s willing to blame the victim, and you better straighten up and fly right,’” Biden said. | 0fake |
Spain's constitutional court suspends Catalan referendum law: court source | MADRID (Reuters) - The Spanish Constitutional Court has suspended a referendum law that was approved on Wednesday by the Catalan parliament, blocking the way for an Oct. 1 ballot on independence from Spain, a court source said on Thursday. The law will be suspended while judges consider arguments that the vote breaches the country s constitution. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said earlier on Thursday he had appealed to the court to declare the referendum illegal. The constitution states Spain is indivisible. | 0fake |
Yemen Just Told Trump to Stay The F*ck Out Of Their Country After Disastrous FAILURE Of A Raid | Donald Trump may call his disaster of a raid in Yemen last week a success, but the rest of the world views it as just one of the more deadly ways in which he has demonstrated his ineptitude and now we are paying the price.Not only did Trump completely miss his main target, Qassim al-Rimi, who is currently mocking him, but the poorly-planned raid slaughtered 30 civilians including 10 women and children (one of them a U.S. citizen). Three U.S. service members were injured and a Navy SEAL was killed.So what went wrong? Everything.Trump reportedly decided to go ahead with the raid over dinner after his cabinet convinced him it was the right thing to do by telling him that Obama would not have the balls to go through with him (seriously, that s all it took). According to a senior U.S. intelligence official, almost everything went wrong once the team arrived. Officials say Trump approved the attack without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations. On top of failing to kill his target, slaughtering civilians wholesale, murdering a U.S. citizen, and getting a SEAL killed with his bumbling mess of an operation, the intel that was gathered is garbage. The military is touting three videos they recovered from the raid as evidence of success but the videos are a decade old and available on YouTube.Because of all this, Yemen has decided that they don t want Trump coming in and wrecking their living room again. The New York Times reports:Angry at the civilian casualties incurred last month in the first commando raid authorized by President Trump, Yemen has withdrawn permission for the United States to run Special Operations ground missions against suspected terrorist groups in the country, according to American officials.Grisly photographs of children apparently killed in the crossfire of a 50-minute firefight during the raid caused outrage in Yemen. A member of the Navy s SEAL Team 6, Chief Petty Officer William Owens, was also killed in the operation.While the White House continues to insist that the attack was a success a characterization it repeated on Tuesday the suspension of commando operations is a setback for Mr. Trump, who has made it clear he plans to take a far more aggressive approach against Islamic militants. The fool of the White House got slapped at the beginning of his road in your lands, al-Rimi said in a video following Trump s failed raid. Yemen s decision not to let Trump play with his toys in their house is a bit uncomfortable for The Donald, who promised to step up our approach to fighting terrorism. Now that he is President, he has done nothing but hurt that effort.Watch a report on the raid below:Featured image via Getty Images/Pool | 1real |
BREAKING: FBI AGENTS UNDER INVESTIGATION For Shooting Death Of Patriot, Levoy Finicum [VIDEO] | Support for an investigation into the shooting death of Lavoy Finicum has been growing. Something about his shooting death just didn t seem right. FBI agents involved in the traffic stop that led to the killing of one of the armed occupiers of an Oregon wildlife refuge are under investigation for not disclosing they fired shots that missed Robert LaVoy Finicum, authorities said Tuesday.Oregon State Police troopers fired the three rounds that killed the Arizona rancher during a confrontation on a remote road, law enforcement officials said at a news conference in Bend.CLICK HERE to see the video of FBI Agents shooting and killing Lavoy Finicum.An independent investigation by Oregon authorities found the troopers were justified in shooting Finicum because he failed to heed their commands and repeatedly reached for his weapon, Malheur County District Attorney Dan Norris said.The investigators discovered members of an FBI hostage rescue team who were at the scene failed to disclose they fired two rounds.As they looked into how many shots were fired during the confrontation and by whom, the investigators found a round in the roof of Finicum s truck. We could not explain the fourth shot into the roof of the truck, or its trajectory given the placement of the Oregon State Police troopers at the time, Deschutes County Sheriff Shane Nelson said.The U.S. Justice Department s Office of Inspector General said it is investigating the FBI team s actions, working with Oregon officials.During the news conference, Oregon officials played videos showing Finicum and others in his truck Jan. 26 during the initial stop by law enforcement. Finicum was driving one of two vehicles that were pulled over while carrying key occupation figures.Video taken from the phone of one of his passengers shows the occupants panicking after authorities stop the truck.With his window rolled down, Finicum shouts at the officers: Shoot me, just shoot me! Put the bullet through me. Do as you damn well please. After a conversation with others in the truck, Finicum drives off, leading authorities on a short chase. The song Hold Each Other by a Great Big World was on the vehicle s stereo.Finicum was driving over 70 mph when the truck came to a roadblock, Nelson said.A trooper fired three shots at the truck as it approached because it was a threat to law enforcement, he said. The truck plowed into a snowbank. Finicum got out, and someone from the FBI team fired two more shots, Nelson said.As Finicum stood in the snow, authorities told him multiple times to lie on the ground. Instead, he reached into the inside of his jacket. The troopers fired three rounds, all of which hit Finicum. A loaded pistol was found in his jacket pocket.Oregon investigators said Finicum posed a threat to officers by nearly running over one of them at the roadblock, and by reaching for a gun.Occupation members in the other vehicle, including leader Ammon Bundy, surrendered.Finicum was a high-profile part of the weekslong standoff at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, launched Jan. 2 by a small armed group demanding the government relinquish control of public lands and objecting to the prison sentences of two local ranchers convicted of setting fires.His death became a symbol for those decrying federal oversight, on public lands in the West and elsewhere, and led to protests of what they called an unnecessary use of force. Via: AP | 1real |
Photos: Joy Villa Unveils Donald Trump Dress at Grammys - Breitbart | Pop singer Joy Villa arrived Sunday at the 2017 Grammy Awards wearing a simple white outfit — until she removed it on the red carpet, revealing a dress in the style of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” presidential campaign posters. [Before she arrived at the Grammys, Villa shared a “sneak peek” of the decoy outfit, as well as a message that her “whole artistic platform is about LOVE!” Sneak Peek … 😱😝🎉💋#grammys2017 #grammys #joyvillagrammys #joyvilla #singerlife #singersongwriter #singer #style #grammysfashion #blessings #beautiful, A photo posted by Joy Villa (@joyvilla) on Feb 12, 2017 at 12:30pm PST, 💥My whole artistic platform is about LOVE! 🎶💕💋 I couldn’t be where I am today without the love and tenderness of those beautiful supporters and friends around me. Thank you ❤️ I hope you enjoy tonight’s @grammysawards2017 and remember to forget your problems and focus on your future! You are infinite and beautiful and no one can stop you but you. 💋So go out and celebrate yourself as a winner no matter what, together with those you adore! #happygrammysday #blessings #beautiful #love #grammys2017💝 #happyvalentinesday #celebration #style #postivevibes #love, A photo posted by Joy Villa (@joyvilla) on Feb 12, 2017 at 12:40pm PST, However, love was the last thing on the minds of many leftists reacting to the young star’s fashion statement: . @Joy_Villa is just doing this for attention. let’s give her some. screw you @Joy_Villa pic. twitter. — Jay Franzone (@JayFranzone) February 12, 2017, @Joy_Villa you’re cancelled, — steven j. horowitz (@speriod) February 12, 2017, Here’s the coon with the Trump dress. I’m truly outdone. @Joy_Villa, — . (@eIectricgold) February 12, 2017, But … why, Joy Villa? #GRAMMYs pic. twitter. — TV Guide (@TVGuide) February 12, 2017, Attention seeking @Joy_Villa is cancelled #GRAMMYs pic. twitter. — Karen Civil (@KarenCivil) February 12, 2017, I think I speak for everyone when i say ”who the fuck is Joy Villa and why is she so thirsty?” — Damian Holbrook (@damianholbrook) February 12, 2017, Uh oh, someone’s been at Joy Villa’s Wiki … pic. twitter. — Alex Hannaford (@AlHannaford) February 12, 2017, Everyone please be aware that Joy Villa is the worst. pic. twitter. — Sammy Nickalls (@sammynickalls) February 12, 2017, who the fuck is Joy Villa and why is she wearing that godawful Trump dress at the #Grammys?? — Kevin Allred (@KevinAllred) February 12, 2017, Villa has a modest entertainment résumé and social media following where she promotes herself as an actress, and vegan bikini bodybuilder. In past years, the entertainment world has ranked her as one of the “Worst Dressed” at Grammys for skimpy and outlandish outfits. In a recent vlog, Villa shares how she overcomes much of the criticism she has received. She encourages aspiring performing artists to “tell the haters to eff off, because they have no say over your life — and as a performing artist, people are going to criticize you ’til you’re black and blue. ” | 0fake |
TYRANNY: Obamaphone Fraud Kept Under Wraps Until Vote To Expand Program | REMEMBER THE OBAMAPHONE LADY? Federal regulators were instructed to keep a massive fraud investigation under wraps until a day after a controversial vote to expand a program that was allegedly used to bilk taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars, one those regulators claims.The Federal Communications Commission on Friday announced that it would seek $51 million in damages from a cell phone company that allegedly defrauded the federal Lifeline program of nearly $10 million.The commission s five members unanimously backed the Notice of Apparent Liability (NAL), but Republican commissioner Ajit Pai parted from his colleagues in a partial dissent. According to Pai, he and other commissioners were told not to reveal the details of its investigation until April 1, a day after the FCC voted to expand the Lifeline program. Commissioners were told that the Notice of Apparent Liability could not be released or publicly discussed until April 1, 2016, conveniently one day after the Commission was scheduled to expand the Lifeline program to broadband, Pai wrote. That s not right. Pai did not say who issued that directive. However, it had the effect of preventing public knowledge of widespread fraud in the Lifeline program ahead of a contentious vote on expanding it despite persisting concerns about a lack of internal safeguards.FCC spokesman Will Wiquist insisted that the timing was completely coincidental. The timing of the enforcement action was in no way related to the timing of the vote on the program modernization, he said in an email.Lifeline has faced controversy over enrollment requirements that its critics say are too lax and vulnerable to fraud. The service, which subsidizes cell phone plans for low-income Americans, allows beneficiaries to enroll using cards issued for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a welfare program that has also faced fraud allegations.Critics of the Lifeline program began calling its subsidized cell phones Obamaphones early in the Obama administration in response to viral YouTube videos of beneficiaries thanking the president for their free phones. The program was actually created under President Ronald Reagan.The FCC s NAL last week accused cell phone provider Total Call Mobile, which provides Lifeline services in 19 states, of systematic and egregious misconduct and widespread enrollment fraud. According to the commission, Total Call employees enrolled tens of thousands of duplicate Lifeline beneficiaries and pocketed the extra subsidies. The FCC caught onto the scheme when the company enrolled an undercover FCC investigator in the program without asking for any eligibility documentation. Since 2014, Total Call has requested and received an estimated $9.7 million dollars in improper payments from the Universal Service Fund for duplicate or ineligible consumers despite repeated and explicit warnings from its own employees, in some cases compliance specialists, that company sales agents were engaged in widespread enrollment fraud, the FCC said in a news release.A common means of fraudulent enrollment was the repeated use of a single SNAP identification card, according to the FCC. That drew the ire of Commissioner Michael O Reilly, who said the use of SNAP cards as Lifeline verification mechanisms is woefully inadequate. I must once again lodge my extreme frustration that the Commission continues to rely on SNAP as an entry point in the Lifeline program, and has the gall to claim that it is a highly accountable program, when it is painfully obvious to anyone paying attention that SNAP is riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse, he wrote in a partial dissent in the Total Call case.Despite those ongoing concerns, the FCC recently voted to expand the Lifeline program to include subsidies for 3G wireless broadband service.That vote followed a contentious debate over the scope of the expansion and its accompanying price tag. The commission approved the expansion by a narrow 3-2 vote on March 31, a day before the FCC announced its Total Call NAL. Read more: WFB | 1real |
Introducing The Upshot’s Presidential Prediction Model - The New York Times | For now, at least, Hillary Clinton has a 76 percent chance of defeating Donald Trump to become president of the United States. A victory by Mr. Trump remains quite possible: Mrs. Clinton’s chance of losing is about the same probability that an N. B. A. player will miss a free throw. This electoral probability, the first forecast by the Upshot’s presidential prediction model, is based on the voting history of each state and on roughly 300 state and national polls of the race conducted since . Our model suggests Mrs. Clinton is a strong favorite in 14 states and the District of Columbia, enough to give her 186 of the 270 electoral votes she needs to win the White House. Add to this eight more states that polls currently show are leaning Democratic — including Minnesota, Michigan and Pennsylvania — and Mrs. Clinton would have 275 electoral votes and the presidency. But, with 16 weeks remaining in the campaign, a lot can change. Using the same model, we would have said that Bill Clinton had less than a 20 percent chance to win the presidency with roughly four months to go in 1992. It was only after Ross Perot left the race and the Democrats rallied around Mr. Clinton after the Democratic convention that his polls improved. And they improved sharply. One month later, he was an 84 percent favorite. This kind of polling volatility should be expected, particularly with party conventions at hand. It is one reason that Mrs. Clinton’s probability of victory is not higher. Current polling averages suggest a victory in the national popular vote for Mrs. Clinton, if nothing changes. But we expect changes between now and Election Day. The Upshot is not the only news organization trying to forecast election results. We believe each model provides useful glimpses of possible futures, so we are compiling forecasts from a variety of them into one table. Viewed side by side, the differences among the models become clearer. Arizona, for example, is rated as a tossup by FiveThirtyEight, while our model has not yet seen enough polling evidence to revise its assessment of Arizona’s recent history as a state. Similarly, while the betting markets rate New Mexico as almost a sure thing in the Democratic column, our model is not as certain, giving Mr. Trump a 21 percent chance to upset Mrs. Clinton there. We’ll update our forecast every day until Election Day. Check here to see our predictions and that of others, and to play around with the possible paths that could lead Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump to victory. Below is more about how we built our model. Our model is slow to move. This is by design. Our model starts with a weighted average of polls in each state, giving polls conducted more recently and polls with a larger sample size a greater weight in the average. At this point in the election cycle, it uses a longer time window to calculate these averages. This steadiness means it is more stable and less inclined to chase after the most recent poll. But it also means it is slower to react to developing trends, such as recent polling that may indicate a tightening race. This can be a feature or a bug, depending on your perspective. Preconvention polls are informative, but history suggests that it is a mistake to place too much emphasis on a week’s worth of polling. Let’s say you want to forecast the average margin of national polls for the next month. Would you rather take the average of the polls from the previous two weeks or average every poll from the previous two months? More often than not, you’d be better off taking the average of the longer period. This informs the approach taken by our model. That said, we expect the simulations in our model to converge rapidly over the next month or two, as the conventions end and polling becomes more predictive of the final outcome. Distributions are more interesting than averages. Our estimate for Mrs. Clinton’s lead over Mr. Trump nationally is 3. 7 points our friends at FiveThirtyEight have a slightly smaller estimate of 3. 4 points, but our overall probabilities of winning differ by 12 percentage points. This is a small difference, but a notable one. We believe one source of the difference is in the ways we believe states will (or won’t) swing together, and how much they’ll shift. This is illustrated best by seeing our electoral distributions side by side: The FiveThirtyEight histogram is wider and flatter than ours. It assigns a greater chance that something highly unusual will happen, while ours thinks that the course of this election will look pretty much like the ones that have come before it. For example, we think there is only about a 1 percent chance that Mrs. Clinton will get fewer than 160 electoral votes. The FiveThirtyEight model assigns that prospect an 8 percent chance. Fundamentals say it’s a good year for Mr. Trump, but we don’t rely much on fundamentals. Although our model uses how states voted in previous presidential elections as a starting point, it is almost entirely a model. In contrast, some other models of presidential elections use fundamentals to arrive at their forecasts, like the state of the economy and the number of years the Democrats have been in power. These fundamentals models will generally be more favorable to Mr. Trump history suggests that this should be a more election cycle. For example, the FiveThirtyEight “ ” model has been more favorable to Mr. Trump than the “ ” model. Our model is well calibrated. One of the differences between a model and a simpler polling average is that the model knows how wrong it has been in the past. So when we say that we think Mrs. Clinton has a 14 percent chance of winning North Dakota, we mean that, judging from how the polling averages have moved in previous election cycles, candidates in Mrs. Clinton’s position have won in one in seven similar situations in past elections. Of course, there is no guarantee that this election will turn out the way that elections have in the past, a flaw that is common to any forecasting model. These numbers are our best guesses using the information we have. Expect shifts. This has been a long election cycle, but the ride will probably get even more wild. Our forecast will move again, here’s where you can find it. | 0fake |
HYSTERICAL LIBERALS CHEER FOR JOHN KERRY…He Came To Protest Something…He’s Not Sure What It Is [Video] | This is scary this guy was our Secretary of State! Yikes! His tongue! | 1real |
Little Known Treasury Committee Gives Us a Look At Market’s Most Powerful Players | Little Known Treasury Committee Gives Us a Look At Market's Most Powerful Players By Lee Adler. Have you ever considered how the US Treasury decides how much debt to sell each month to raise the cash it needs to pay its bills in full? If you are like 99.9% of us, probably not. But for investors and traders, it’s important. | 1real |
Security for Trump's summer visit ruffles tranquil New Jersey town | BEDMINSTER, N.J. (Reuters) - Three military helicopters hovered over Anne Choi’s backyard, engaged in what appeared to be a drill ahead of President Donald Trump’s visit three weeks ago to this tranquil town of farmland and horse barns in rural New Jersey. “My sheep were terrified,” Choi, 44, said on Thursday inside her two-story barn a mile east of Trump National Golf Club, as half a dozen Shetland sheep grazed outside. “It’s awful. We don’t have the infrastructure here. We can’t support the weight of his presence.” As Bedminster prepared this week for the president’s latest trip to the 600-acre (240-hectare) private club, a 17-day stay that is his first extended vacation in office, some of the town’s 8,000 residents expressed frustration at the security protocols, road closures and daily disruption that will begin with his arrival on Friday. On Wednesday, the U.S. Secret Service said safety measures would also include a “tethered drone,” equipped with optical and infrared cameras and powered by a wire attached to a ground controller, that could impede on the privacy of nearby residences. “It’s super creepy,” said Julie Henderson, an artist who lives down the road from Trump National, as two military helicopters roared overhead before circling and heading back toward the golf club. The Secret Service said the drone would focus primarily on the outer perimeter and would not “physically intrude upon or disturb the use of private property outside the Trump National Golf Course.” Trump’s movements can also lead to the closure of local roads and highways. Julie Henderson’s husband, Paul Henderson, said he has twice been stuck on an Interstate on his way to work while Trump’s motorcade used the highway. Not everyone in this town about 40 miles (60 km) west of New York City agrees Trump’s visit will be a nuisance. Steve Desiderio, who owns a restaurant and catering business in Bedminster’s modest downtown, said the influx of federal agents and journalists would be a welcome boost to his business. Desiderio, a 48-year-old Trump supporter, added that complaints about the disruption were overblown and media-driven. “It’s just fake news,” he said, echoing one of the president’s favorite phrases. “They try to spin it like it’s gridlock. So there are five more cars at the stoplight?” Bedminster’s Republican mayor, Steven Parker, also brushed off the criticism. “It’s really been a big non-event,” he said. Some residents said Trump has been a generous neighbor in past years, allowing local events to be hosted at his club. As in previous years, the township committee held its annual reorganization meeting in 2017 at Trump National, where Parker was selected to continue as mayor. While Trump’s visit may help the town’s eateries, it will shut down the local airport, where 110 private planes and 60 flight school students will be grounded from Aug. 4 to Aug. 20. “Our summertime is our busiest time,” said Somerset Airport President Chris Walker, as a Coast Guard helicopter landed on the runway in preparation for the weekend. “We’re just rolling with the punches.” About half of the planes were being moved to other airports outside the 10-mile (16-km) no-fly zone, Stewart said. Some workers will be sent home until Trump returns to Washington. Trump has also drawn local protesters, both for and against him. Anti-Trump activists have been staging a weekly “People’s Motorcade,” driving slowly down the road past Trump National and honking their horns. The town’s administrator, Judith Sullivan, said they were more of a distraction for her 16-member police department than the president, though they have largely been well behaved. She hopes to recoup the $30,000 in overtime for officers working during Trump’s visit from the U.S. government. Choi, who moved to Bedminster from Maryland two years ago, said she likely would not have chosen her house had she known the “summer White House” would be only a mile away. “Even if you agree with his politics, I think we can all agree that this is not what we bargained for,” she said. | 0fake |
Britain has ways to secure no hard border with Ireland post-Brexit, says minister | LONDON (Reuters) - Britain has two proposals on how to secure a frictionless border with EU member Ireland after Brexit, a new customs partnership or a highly streamlined approach to customs, Northern Ireland minister James Brokenshire said on Sunday. We set out two proposals in relation to how we would deal with the issue of tariffs, how we would deal with those sorts of elements in relation to customs whether that be a new customs partnership where we would effectively apply a similar or the same tariff that the EU currently applies to goods coming into the EU, or a highly streamlined approach with effectively exemptions that would apply for small business, he told Sky News. | 0fake |
Egon von Greyerz | 134742 Views November 05, 2016 BROADCAST King World News FOR DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PLAY OR DOWNLOAD AUDIOS: CLICK HERE Egon von Greyerz (EvG): Founder and Managing Partner of Matterhorn Asset Management AG & GoldSwitzerland – EvG forecasted the current economic problems over 12 years ago. In 2002 (gold $300/ oz.) MAM recommended to its investors to put 50% of their investment assets into physical gold stored outside the banking system. EvG specialises in M&A and Asset allocation consultancy for private family funds. MAM (based in Zurich, Switzerland) specialises in wealth preservation for high net worth individuals as well as institutions. The GoldSwitzerland Division was created to facilitate the buying and storage of physical gold and silver for private investors, companies, trusts and pension funds. About Us – Matterhorn Asset Management / GoldSwitzerland – GoldSwitzerland is the precious metals investment division of Matterhorn Asset Management AG (MAM), a Swiss asset management company specialising in wealth preservation for high net worth individuals and institutions. GoldSwitzerland advises investors on precious metals investments and buys, sells, transfers and stores precious metals for investors. The metals are stored in the name of the clients in ultra-secure vaults in Switzerland. MAM also assists clients in transferring existing gold and silver holdings out of the banking system to the private vaults. Clients have full control of their gold and silver bars which are allocated and segregated. Clients have personal access to the vaults to inspect or collect their metals. MAM is associated with the Aquila Group, Switzerland’s largest independent asset management group.
Why Gold & Why GoldSwitzerland – There are times in history when protecting your wealth should be the primary objective of your investment strategy. As Mark Twain said: “I am more concerned about the return of my money than the return on my money.” To preserve wealth in a fragile financial system, involves investing in assets which have no counterparty risk. Gold is not an investment, it is real money. Gold reflects governments ongoing deceitful action in destroying the value of paper money. Matterhorn Asset Management (MAM) has invested in physical gold for clients for over 10 years. Back in 2002 we advised our investors to buy physical gold for up to 50% of their financial assets. The image shows how in 1913 you could buy nearly 50 oz of gold for $1,000 and today only 0.75 oz. Thus against real money – GOLD – the dollar has declined 98% since the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the USA in 1913. But it is not only the dollar that has declined in value, all major currencies have lost 97-99% against gold since 1913. Until 1971 the US dollar was backed by gold. Since Nixon abolished the gold backing, money printing started in earnest and in the last 41 years the dollar lost 98% in real terms . Egon von Greyerz: Founder and managing Partner of Matterhorn Asset Managment AG & GoldSwitzerlan – EvG forecasted the current present problems in the world economy over 12 years ago. In 2002 when gold was $300 per ounce, MAM recommended to its investors to put 50% of their investment assets into physical gold stored outside the banking system. Egon von Greyerz started his working life in Geneva as a banker and thereafter spent 17 years as Finance Director and Executive Vice-Chairman of a FTSE 100 company in the UK. Since the 1990s EvG has been actively involved with financial investment activities including Mergers and Acquisitions and Asset allocation consultancy for private family funds. This led to the creation of Matterhorn Asset Management an asset management company based on wealth preservation principles. The GoldSwitzerland Division was created to facilitate the buying and storage of physical gold and silver for private investors, companies, trusts and pension funds. EvG makes regular media appearances such as on CNBC, BBC and King World News and speaks at investment conferences around the world. He also publishes articles on precious metals, the world economy and wealth preservation. About author | 1real |
Why Trump’s Victory Wasn’t a Surprise | Bernstein interview with John Pilger November 16, 2016
America’s liberal elitists, who look down on the discontented working class and put up a presidential candidate representing a failed Establishment, set the stage for Donald Trump’s victory, journalist John Pilger tells Dennis J Bernstein.By Dennis J Bernstein
Despite Donald Trump’s long history of stiffing workers, dodging taxes and abusing women, he will become the 45th President of the United States, a remarkable turn of events that has a lot of liberals and Democrats scratching their heads and wondering how he could have beaten the powerful Clinton political/money machine.
One person who was not surprised was journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, who was born in Sydney, Australia, and now is based in London. Pilger has reported from all over the world, covering numerous wars, notably Vietnam. When he was in his 20’s, he became the youngest journalist to receive Britain’s highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year, which he won twice. He also has an Emmy and his most recent book is Hidden Agendas and the New Rulers of the World .
Dennis Bernstein: I’m going to ask you later on about the new film, which I’m very excited about. But let’s begin with [the Nov. 8] victory over Clinton, by Trump. Were you surprised? What do you think was at the core of the Trump victory? Journalist John Pilger (Wikipedia)
John Pilger: You know, I wasn’t surprised. Brexit undoubtedly helped this. I wasn’t surprised. I think I’m quite surprised by how decisive his victory is. But I must say I felt rather angry, and I think we probably expended enough anger on Trump. He’ll, no doubt, provide us with plenty of material coming up. But I think it’s time for people, so-called liberal people, to look in the mirror.
Who created Trump? Who created this disastrous election, so-called campaign? In my opinion the enablers of all of this was the liberal class, in the United States. The liberal class has refused to acknowledge, in its arrogance, the huge disaffection and discontent among ordinary people. And painting them in such broad strokes has been… what did Clinton call them?…”deplorables” and “irredeemable”? That’s really disgraceful.
DB: Yes, that’s my father.
JP: You know, Clinton was an extremely dangerous prospect. Dangerous because she represented a war making, rapacious status quo. The status quo would have, actually, altered slightly under her. It’s my understanding, in fact, I believe that she might have provoked a very major war, with Syria and with Russia.
We don’t know what Trump will do. We have to now, putting aside all the parodies and the abuse, we have to now be thinking in terms of practicalities. He’s running the show. What will he do? But I think before we do that, again, we have to reflect on all the myths.
I heard a Harvard professor on the BBC, on the very night, before the count began, talk about the hard left in the Democratic Party, and how she would have to embrace the idea of Bernie Sanders and what he stood for. You know, this kind of drivel, and misrepresentation has been everywhere. The media, personally, and I’m speaking of journalists, produced probably the most unfettered propaganda I can remember at any time. In my career, this has been the worst.
There was no serious attempt, really, to analyze and examine either candidate and what they stood for. Trump was dismissed as a demon, with all the salacious stuff around him, undoubtedly some of it true, and all of that. But he was a serious candidate, he was never analyzed, and that’s why there’s a great surprise, and a great shock.
And, it’s something that liberal America has to start coming to terms with itself. We had Barack Obama presented seriously as a candidate of hope and real change. He was nothing of the kind. He was in fact a warmonger. He’s got four wars going at once. He conducted an international terrorist campaign using drones. He has prosecuted more whistleblowers than any president in American history. And, you know, when you think of Trump’s disgraceful remarks about throwing people out of the country, and building a wall… who is the Deporter-in-Chief? The liberal Barack Obama. He has deported more people than any other president. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arresting suspects during a raid in 2010. (Photo Courtesy of ICE)
So, all of these facts have been lost and they represent a real crisis for the opposition in the United States, the broad opposition. Barack Obama’s great achievement was that he killed off the anti-war movement, because people, doe-eyed from the beginning, thought that Barack Obama was some kind of genuine inspirational liberal, instead of the warmonger that he is. I think there’s a lot of these people [who] are going to be listening to your program, they need to hear this.
Say that there is a real opposition to Trump and what he’s going to do. We don’t know what he’s going to do, but also an understanding of his constituency, the majority of Americans eligible to vote voted for him. That’s a fact that has to be come to terms with, we have to come to terms with.
DB: You know I think, John Pilger, you know I’m thinking about all the things Hillary Clinton accused by Trump of, oh, you know, supporting Bill Clinton’s attacks on women, and molestations. I’m not really interested in that, at this point, because what I’m interested in is how she sustained Bill Clinton’s war policy. You remember Layla Al-Attar, right? You remember how Bill Clinton sowed his oats in his first days of his presidency by killing this leading artist of the Middle East who welcomed women into the art world, an unusual situation. It happened in the context of Hillary Clinton giving her famous speech in Beijing about women. But she never mentioned Layla Al-Attar. She never apologized to the family. Layla’s daughter was blinded, in that attack. She was getting operations, getting medical treatment near Stanford where the Clintons would go visit Chelsea. And she never said a word. But, anyway, more on that?
JP: Yeah, well, that’s a very good and rather notorious example. Clinton’s war making is on the record, her destruction, and she was the lead destroyer of a modern state, Libya. And as a result of that destruction–which she gloated, on camera, she gloated about the gruesome murder of Gaddafi–in that destruction some 40,000 people died. Honduras, she was responsible for the coup against the democratically elected government.
DB: They call her there the Deposer-in-Chief.
JP: Yeah, yeah. And the idea that among certain liberal people that she represented some kind of honorable alternative to the verbose and unpredictable Donald Trump is so absurd. I think, again, I think all this is important because there will not be an opposition, there won’t be an opposition to Trump, and there won’t be an opposition to the great national security machine that really runs the United States.
I mean, okay, he’s anti-establishment, but that establishment isn’t going anywhere. And, yes, he will bring in his own establishment. He’s talking about defense secretary. Who is it? Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican of Alabama. And national security advisors will have a hawkish edge: General Flynn and Representative Duncan Hunter of California, there. So all this is unknown. The point is, there was very little between Trump and Clinton. And what really distracted people, diverted people, from understanding this was what is unfortunately called, because there has to be […] a better term, identity politics.
Clinton was said to represent an advance for women. She’s anything but. She’s a diametric opposite of that. Clinton, the Democrats were meant to be an advance for people of color. Well, it was Clinton, the two Clintons, Bill and Hillary Clinton in the mid-90’s, who devised the so-called welfare reforms that most historians, political historians, now agree was the trigger for sending so many African-Americans into the gulag that is America’s prison system.
So these, these have to be confronted because an opposition is going to be needed. At the present, there isn’t one, in my opinion. There was never an opposition to Barack Obama, a violent president, who seduced the media. It’s interesting that the more unpopular or that Donald Trump was made, with the media, and all of them were against him, all of them, bar some Murdock outlets, and others. But most media was against him. I think that helped to give him support. The media is held in such low regard by ordinary people. The so-called elites are held in such low regard by ordinary people. This is a class issue. There was a class issue running right through this campaign. And that has to be understood.
DB: Indeed, that word class does not come up in the United States. We’re the upwardly mobile society. Everybody can make it.
JP: Well, it didn’t. But it is, you know, that’s what I mean by identity politics. Gender and race are separated from class. And it’s not who you are, or what the color of your skin is, sometimes it is, perhaps often it is, but in the final analysis it’s the power you serve. And that’s class. And until the resistance to an intelligent understanding of that is swept aside, people are going to be mired in this, the distractions of identity politics. Where they don’t feel any obligation, really, to find out. To find out about how the rest of humanity, how the rest of their compatriots in the United States live and what their problems are. It’s all about “me, me, me.” And until that is understood and discarded, discarded, and real feminism returns, not the kind represented by Hillary Clinton, real feminism, to take one major issue, then the Trumps will triumph. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking at Planned Parenthood Action Fund membership event at the Washington Hilton on June 10, 2016. (Photo by Lorie Shaull, Wikipedia)
DB: Real feminism? What do you mean by that John, real feminism?
JP: Well, I mean feminism that is part of class. The feminism that understands that it’s not just simply the privileges of bourgeois women. That’s it not simply the privileges of the readers of the New York Times, and the Guardian in this country. It is the rights of women everywhere. It is the right of women to life, in places like Iraq, but are bombed by Americans. I think it was actually the New York Times source for this but one extraordinary statistic I read not long ago, there were 700,000 widows created since 2003. The last 13 years in Iraq, widows, women…
DB: 700,000…
JP: 700,000… Now until those proclaiming themselves as feminists but keeping their feminism very parochial, very tight, and saying that a woman should be in the White House even if she’s Hillary Clinton, I would suggest they consider that fact. Those women have a right too. And those deaths were caused by American policies. And, all I’m saying is that the so-called identity, single issues have to stop being single issues. Feminism should be part of class, all the time. Because it’s poor women who suffer most. And a lot of the people who voted for Trump were those women. I read that, is it 52% of white women voted for him?
DB: Something like that, yeah.
JP: Well, that has to be understood. Those women have rights too.
DB: In a little bit, I want to talk more about the press. I’m going to do that with you in the context of Jeff Sessions. Let’s talk specifically about one huge foreign policy issue. How do you understand… were you able to understand the difference between Clinton, Syria, Russia and Trump? You know, we know that the Clinton machine played Trump as a dupe of Putin, in Putin’s pocket, the Russians sabotaged the election, that’s what most people who were supporting Clinton probably now feel that Hillary would have won if the Russians didn’t subvert. But the actual policies, what do you understand about that?
JP: If they believe that, Dennis, then they suffer from, I’ll be gentle, terminal naiveté. I really want to say that they are stupid. Because it’s really stupid to believe that. And it’s been proven to be stupid: that it was all down to the Russians. I mean, for God’s sake, what nonsense. You know? Those myths… projected by the media, should be rejected, immediately. We have to learn to deconstruct and reject these propaganda messages that come out. But that one is a particularly obvious one. How could people believe such nonsense? I find that, actually, quite depressing. And I’ve heard it from people. How could they believe such nonsense? That the Russians were actually on the side of Trump, he was in league with them, and all of that nonsense.
What wasn’t reported was there was a strand running through a lot of Trump’s speeches that sounded to me like a kind of America first, what they used to call isolationist politics. We’re going to deal with our people at home, we’re not going to spend the treasure on overseas, and especially in going to war with countries. I mean, frankly, for those of us living outside the United States, who are not American, that’s encouraging. I always find it remarkable that I’ve got to this stage in life and that I haven’t really… and that I’ve survived American foreign policy.
So, Clinton was a very dangerous prospect. Trump may be a dangerous prospect too. We don’t know. Will he do as he said, as he said in his acceptance, victory speech? We will have relationships, we will not have conflict with other countries, and all that. That could be just rhetoric. Trump is Mr. Rhetoric, so who knows? I think the most important thing is that an opposition is built, a genuine movement. Now, having been seduced and subverted by Obama, and largely by Clinton and others, there has to be a real oppositions in the streets. And it has to be informed. It can’t accept these terrible myths.
DB: Hillary Clinton, just to bring it to Syria for a moment, she was very strong on a no-fly zone. And it did appear that Trump was a little more interested in negotiating. What do you see the dangers of a no-fly zone? That, to me, was perhaps the most frightening part of what her policy could have been.
JP: I don’t know. I mean, he has said contradictory things on the Middle East. Very contradictory. He’s been bellicose, in one sense. But in another, he’s been… a thread that has run through Trump’s speeches, fairly consistent, and that is that he wants to do a deal with Russia. He doesn’t want to fight them.
It’s ironic, because, as we speak… and I read only the other day, hundreds of thousands of NATO troops, Americans, British, and others, in effect, massing on the borders of Russia. Now what will happen to them? What will happen to that provocation? That’s a very, very dangerous provocation. Now, will Trump diffuse it? Will he step back? I don’t know.
It’s interesting, he has spoken against NATO. In fact, for the Republican Convention Platform his people were asked to remove one issue, and that was that NATO would receive renewed shipments of weapons. And they were quite specific about removing that. That was pointed out to me by Professor Steven Cohen, who’s been very interesting on this at New York University, and taken a lot of criticism for taking seriously, or at least analyzing some of the things that Trump has said over Russia. But, you know, we never know if he meant it. He’s contradicted himself. So, now we’re about to find out.
DB: I’m laughing a little bit because I think I’m a little bit afraid of the potential, in terms of where this could go. I’m not sure if I would be more frightened if Hillary was elected. A lot of people are furious with me for taking this perspective. But I, as you’ve outlined, Iraq, Libya… given the history, you know Honduras, Hillary Clinton, her hands are full of blood. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions donning one of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” caps.
JP: Dennis, it’s an uninformed, and often the… and often a willfully uninformed and ignorant fury that you’re describing. It’s a knee-jerk. You know we’re in the age of the knee-jerk, of social media, knee-jerk, government by Facebook, war by media. It’s an anti-intellectual time, not to think through. So the fury you describe, I would suggest, is almost a willfully ignorant one. Because what are we if we’re not questioning, and what are we, if we’re not pointing out that which the mob, as they used to call them in the 19 th century, disagrees with?
DB: Now, let me sort of put Henry Kissinger and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, as he’s known inside Alabama, together in a question about the media. It was very interesting to me… I mean I have investigated a number of church burnings, probably 30 or 40 that took place in Alabama when Jeff Sessions was the attorney general. Before that he was the U.S. attorney prosecuting phony voter fraud.
But Jefferson Sessions is the pre-eminent racist. I was interested, everybody was upset about David Duke. Well, he’s a frightening fellow, former Klan member. But it was Sessions who was the uptown Klan. He was one of the funders, he was one of the prosecutors of the same kinds of stuff that continue in terms of undermining people of color’s rights to vote, and poor people’s’ rights to vote in this country. But the media, they were upset about Duke, but they don’t know who Sessions is.
JP: No, they don’t know. Isn’t that interesting? And Sessions is being considered, as I understand it, as Trump’s Defense Secretary.
DB: Well, for him, anything outside the border of Alabama is foreign policy. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaking to the AIPAC conference in Washington D.C. on March 21, 2016. (Photo credit: AIPAC)
JP: Yeah. Now, if that’s correct, then […] how you’ve described him, of course, it’s worrying. This is a new situation, entirely new situation. And this is Trump now building a completely new, presidential establishment. But I do stress, that the so-called old establishment, the Pentagon, the intelligence, the NSA, the CIA, and all the rest of them, are going nowhere. They are the establishment. They will remain the establishment.
Actually, Trump reminded us, in his acceptance speech that he had something like 200 generals and admirals… I suppose there must be a lot of generals and admirals, former ones anyway hanging about. But he had 200 of them. Hillary had a lot of them because the Pentagon serving generals and admirals came out and demanded that Trump be beaten. Just as the CIA demanded that Trump be beaten. And the State Department demanded that Trump be beaten. He’s building his own establishment but those… the old establishment will remain as powerful as it’s always been.
What will give Trump power is the fact that he has both the houses in Congress, including many of his enemies in the Republican Party. And they also demanded that he be beaten. So that’s a volatile situation.
DB: Indeed it is. What about this? How do you see this sort of parallel structure that people talk about in terms of the relationship… you mentioned it in the beginning of the interview, between the Brexit vote and Donald Trump? Is this sort of a parallel structure?
JP: Yeah, I think it’s related. And your first question, you know, was I surprised? Yes. Ah, no, I wasn’t surprised that much, because of Brexit. I think we are at a stage in contemporary history where people almost feel like a Greek chorus, they can see and they are aware of what is happening, but they feel they can’t do anything about it. I think that’s widespread.
And it doesn’t only apply to working people. I think it applies, in the United States, of course, we go back to the issue of class. It certainly does apply to working class people, but it applies to many in the middle class which has been destroyed by these extreme neoliberal economic policies, in recent years.
So, that’s what happened here, in Brexit. I always felt that Brexit was a rebellion. It was a rebellion. It was people saying, “We’re fed up with these arrogant elites, taking away our basic rights, ignoring us, not hearing us.” And I think many people…it wasn’t… it was painted, of course, by the liberal class in Britain, as the result of a possibility of increased immigration. Yes, that was part of it. But it wasn’t… it was only part of it. (Photo by Luis Felipe Salas, 2009)
It was about impoverished people, people losing the very underpinning of their security and the security for their families. And that’s exactly true in the United States. You go to places like Kentucky where… in those ravaged coal areas, where the life expectancy, I read recently is less than that of Ethiopia. Alright, that may be right at the end of the spectrum. But, you know, it applies to all the states that Trump won. Pennsylvania, particularly, Ohio, and others.
Yeah, and that applied here in a different sense, but not really. It’s about… it’s about a rebellion. In the United States, there is a vacuum on outside the establishment. I would say that both Clinton and Trump were extreme right-wing. That’s how I would describe them.
DB: Well, it was a riveting moment, I guess you could say, when I think it was in a debate with Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton evoked, as one of her key advisors, Henry Kissinger.
JP: Yeah.
DB: That was pretty extraordinary, right?
JP: Yeah, well, you know as someone who should have been prosecuted a long time ago, has been wrong on practically everything anyway, I’m not surprised. She is extreme right-wing. Trump is extreme Populist right-wing. And we’re still to find out what that means.
But my point is, that that, even in the center, in the social democratic space, in the former, going way back, Democratic Party space which now doesn’t… Democratic Party as far as a reforming party is long gone. But that doesn’t exist. The United States has never had a Labor Party. They’ve got a Labor Party, we’ve got a Labor Party here, but that’s been corrupted by our very own, although rather different in personality, Clinton-type character, Tony Blair. And all the others. That’s been corrupted.
And that… in Britain, that has given rise to the extraordinary popularity of Jeremy Corbyn, who never wanted to be leader of the Labor Party, but was really swept up in it by a popular movement, that came straight from this disenchantment, this disaffection, this rejection of the political system.
The same disaffection and disenchantment is in the United States. But who do people vote for? Who do people vote for? In comes Trump, trumpeting all the American stuff about, you know, I’m a rich man, but I got rich because I knew how to do it, and you can too. Speaking this populist language. I don’t think Sanders was ever a threat. And really Sanders is a disgrace. You know, his embrace of Clinton was so false some, to the point where Clinton could declare him as an ally. So he was never a threat. He joined, he joined up.
DB: That was really troubling, and obviously, a lot of young people who supported Bernie Sanders, were profoundly troubled. And, I’ve spoken to some of them, and they are furious, and they didn’t show up for Hillary even though they had it drummed into their heads, things like, “Even if it’s just the vote on the Supreme Court, that alone is worth it.” The appointment of liberal judges.
JP: Yeah. This is grasping for straws, really. And people have got to be, got to stop being disappointed. They’ve got to be stopped being shocked. Stop being surprised. They’ve got to understand why something happened. They’ve got to inform themselves. And they’ve got to be part of a real movement, a real oppositional movement. Nothing less than that will do now. uncomfortably accepting the Nobel Peace Prize from Committee Chairman Thorbjorn Jagland in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2009. (White House photo)
DB: John, you’ve got a new film that’s just coming out now, about to come out. Among other things, it’s sort of a document that calls attention to the fact that the United States, under Barack Obama, has been engaged in a massive, and very dangerous nuclear buildup. This is in the context of Hillary Clinton being Secretary of State. So would you tell us a little bit about what you’ve learned about Obama and about the film?
JP: Yeah, not only… well, it’s about China as a target. At present… and, Dennis, this is truly shocking, in the northern hemisphere, there is the biggest buildup of U.S. led NATO forces since World War II, confronting Russia. In the Asia-Pacific, there is the biggest buildup of U.S. Naval forces confronting China. This was not an issue. This was not an issue. It is truly something in the election campaign that we just had. And the… you know, we’re faced with so much provocation [that] has gone on, and that’s what my film is about. It has to do with the Asia-Pacific. But the nuclear issue has returned.
Under Obama, nuclear warhead construction and spending increased massively. It increased in spite of Obama’s pledge in 2009 to help get rid of nuclear weapons. The opposite happened. There’s something like a trillion dollars has been earmarked to be spent on nuclear weapons development in the coming years. Nuclear… the whole nuclear issue is so urgent, it’s so urgent because of this, these provocations against Russia, against China, both of them nuclear armed powers. China has reportedly changed its nuclear weapons policies to first strike, as a direct consequence of this pressure from the United States. Now what will happen to that? That’s such an important question, because war and peace really should be at the top. If a kind of apocalyptic war broke out then all other issues are irrelevant.
DB: We see this in the so-called U.S. Pacific Pivot, how dangerous this is getting. Again, because of idiotic U.S. press, all attention is on this so-called maniac in North Korea that we have to do something about. But I think the point here is that we’ve got another… when it comes to nuclear proliferation, and weapons, we’ve got a maniac in the White House.
JP: Well, yeah, that’s it. And there’s always been a maniac in the White House, I’m afraid. And that’s why I said recently I am always grateful that I’m still here, that I haven’t found myself witnessing my own demise in some nuclear apocalypse, that was the result of U.S. foreign policy. Our understanding of who’s the maniac… I don’t think North Korea is a threat, really, to anybody, frankly.
What North Korea wants is a peace. They want a peace treaty with the South. They want a peace treaty with the United States. They almost had it a while ago. That’s what they want. And I don’t think they’re a threat. But they’re exploited. With their recent test of, I think a nuclear missile, the U.S. has employed, or is about to employ these THAAD missile defense system. These are very aggressive. They got the word defense in there but they’re very aggressive. A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor is launched during a successful intercept test by the US Army, September 10, 2013. (Wikipedia)
DB: And they’re aimed, they’re meant to be aimed, at China.
JP: They’re aimed at China. They’re not aimed at North Korea, well maybe in the end, North Korea. But North Korea is regarded, really, contemptuously, as an oppositions of power. They’re aimed at China. And China is being told now–this is from Clinton’s speeches, that WikiLeaks released–according to Clinton, you know, the threat against China is that you control North Korea or we’ll let you have some of their missiles, but they’re all aimed at China. And when I was in Okinawa recently, there’s no question, 400 – 500 miles from China, that in the 132 U.S. bases on the island, they were all aimed at China. Now that is a massive, provocative situation. Will Trump dismantle it? Or will he appease it? Or will he use it? These are the questions.
DB: These are big questions. And this may seem a little bit silly but I think it makes a lot of sense. In the midst of everybody talking about the crazy person in the north, we learn that Park, the current president, the daughter of the late and bitter dictator of South Korea has been… one of her key advisors has been a seer. That she’s been taking advice from somebody who has been essentially sort of a phony, if you will, a crystal ball reader who has the attention of the president. And so we find out that policy coming out of our allies in the south, with this huge massive military operation happening in Jeju and other places. She’s taking orders… people made fun of Nancy Reagan.
JP: Yeah, well I’m not surprised. I mean, South Korea is a colony. It’s not an ally. It’s an American colony. But it’s a colony that, as a lot of colonies, can cause you a lot of trouble. The French found that with Algeria. And it’s got potential for trouble. It could, you know, it could… it has some very extreme people there, and they could start a war. But it is a colony. It has thirty odd thousand U.S. troops, bases all over it. And as you mentioned, it has this… the South Koreans have built this new naval base on Jeju Island, with facilities for nuclear submarines, and Aegis missile destroyers and all the rest of it.
So… these places are flashpoints. They’re flashpoints in… almost in a war waiting to happen, or in a war that is being beckoned. During the old Cold War–and I think we’re in the second Cold War now–during the old Cold War, there were red lines, at least, [that] you didn’t cross, there were spheres of influence. And you might probe but you didn’t really cross the red lines marked down by the Soviet Union, and…which were mostly in Europe, to protect itself, of course. And the Soviets, although they supported liberation movements in the developing world, did not confront the Americans there. So there were these red lines. There are no red lines now. That’s the difference. It’s much more dangerous, now, in my opinion.
DB: Well, and, you know, it’s interesting I’m on my way out to North Dakota, at Standing Rock, and where we see the Indigenous communities of North America trying to once again warn the genocidists of the United States government, how dangerous it is to be destroying the Earth, the water flow, not to mention destroying sacred burial grounds. We see, we’ve got Bull Connor coming back, in the sense that we’ve got dogs, an incredible, heavily armed force, brutally going after people who are resisting with their bodies, with their buffalo, with their beliefs. And the lines are drawn again. And no major candidate mentioned Standing Rock, I don’t think. JP: Yeah.
DB: Trump is invested, by the way. He’s invested there.
JP: None of these pressing issues were mentioned. That’s why it’s a very strange time. What is going to happen now? But, again I repeat, I think it’s time for people to organize. There has to be an independent, an extra-parliamentary, if you like, opposition. An opposition, a movement of the streets, a movement among people having been shamed into silence almost, during the Obama years. People have got to come back now.
DB: It’s amazing how many smart people can be so stupid. I guess they are well schooled but they don’t have any ability to understand foreign politics. I don’t know. This country is desperate in that regard. How little the politicians know about the rest of the world. It’s incredibly troubling.
JP: Yeah, so in one sense it’s up to us, in the broader sense of us. Not to believe the myths. Not to accept the propaganda, not to retreat in our own introspective worlds of me. But collectively to do something.
DB: John, I left upstairs, all the background on your film. Could you remind us the name of the film and what’s the schedule in terms of the distribution, and how people can pay attention?
JP: Yeah. Well, my new film is called “The Coming War on China.” And it will be broadcast on the ITV network in Britain, which is the biggest television network in Europe. It will be broadcast here [England] on the 6th of December. It will be released around the same time. As yet, we don’t have a distributor in the United States, and it’s always difficult but we’re doing work on that. And it really is about the recurring theme in much of my work, and that is the imposition of great power on people, and their resistance to it. And it’s very much, as I’ve mentioned, about the renewal of the nuclear danger. But it traces the history of the abuse of people in order to achieve a nuclear supremacy. Part of the film is set in the Marshall Islands where between 1946 and 1958 the equivalent of more than one Hiroshima was exploded every day. People were guinea pigs. The noon time “Human Chain” at the entrance of the Naval Base at Gangjeong Village, done to remind the South Korean Navy that the opposition to the construction of the naval base on Jeju Island has not ended. (Photo by Ann Wright)
DB: And they’re still suffering.
JP: And they’re still suffering. So the film traces this across a broad landscape. It starts there and it brings us across the Pacific to the 400 U.S. bases that ring China. One of which, a very important one, is in the Marshall Islands. So it tries to explain the geopolitical situation in the Asia-Pacific, and the resistance to it. It has some extraordinary people resisting this militarism in Okinawa, and Jeju, and the Marshalls. And we’ve got a lot to learn from them.
DB: And just to note, I mean it is interesting the Chinese are not sitting still for this and they’ve just joined, if you will, with the Russian fleet on their way to Syria. So this is getting pretty ugly.
JP: Yeah.
DB: This is a touchstone for more terrible things. Well, John, I do thank you for spending the hour with us. It’s always enlightening, to have you. I want to tell people that your name is John Pilger. And you’re, really, an inspiration to me and many journalists who really believe in getting down and finding out what’s really going on. One of your latest books is Hidden Agendas and the New Rulers of the World. You’ve got your film coming out The Coming War Against China. And you wrote a piece most recently Inside the Invisible Government War: Propaganda, Clinton and Trump. And you did an excellent interview with Julian Assange.
JP: Yeah, yeah. Interestingly, that interview with Julian Assange went out on, RT, Russia Today, and one of the reasons it did, well they a good job of it, such a good job that it ended up with something like four million viewers. But no other broadcast, mainstream broadcast would take it. They have their own agendas. And that has to be understood by people. If you want to find out what is going on, you abandon the media as it’s presented to us. It’s unwatchable, it’s really just a product of enduring propaganda.
DB: And if you happen not to like Donald Trump, you can thank the corporate media who didn’t mind getting rich on Trump. And sort of gave him 50 to 1 coverage compared to the other candidates.
JP: Yeah, yeah.
DB: Unbelievable. What a struggle. Dennis J Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom . You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net . | 1real |
Ukraine, allies fear escalation after Russia exits ceasefire group | KIEV (Reuters) - Ukrainian officials, security monitors and Kiev s foreign backers warned on Wednesday that Moscow s decision to withdraw from a Ukrainian-Russian ceasefire control group could worsen the fighting in eastern Ukraine. On Monday, the Russian foreign ministry said it was recalling officers serving at the Joint Centre for Control and Coordination (JCCC) in Ukraine, accusing the Ukrainian side of obstructing their work and limiting access to the front line. Ukrainian Defence Minister Stepan Poltorak and security chief Olekshandr Turchynov said the decision, coupled with a recent surge in fighting in the eastern Donbass region, suggested Russia had switched to a more offensive strategy. We cannot rule out that they withdrew their officers in order to start stepping up not only military provocations but also military operations, Turchynov said. We will strengthen our positions at the front. The Ukrainian armed forces are currently prepared for a change in the situation, Poltorak told journalists. A Russia-backed separatist insurgency erupted in 2014 and the bloodshed has continued despite a ceasefire that was meant to end the conflict. More than 10,000 people have been killed, with casualties reported on a near-daily basis. A spokesman for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which works with the JCCC to monitor the much-violated Minsk peace agreement, said: We are concerned about any step that might lead to a further deterioration of the security situation in the region, affecting both the SMM (OSCE special monitoring mission) and the civilian population. Fighting between Ukrainian troops and separatists has climbed to the worst level in months, the OSCE said this week, after the shelling of a frontline village wounded civilians and destroyed or damaged dozens of homes. Russia denies accusations from Ukraine and NATO it supports the rebels with troops and weapons, but the U.S. envoy to peace talks, Kurt Volker, said Moscow was answerable for the violence. Russia withdrew its officers from JCCC - a ceasefire implementation tool - right before a massive escalation in ceasefire violations. Ukraine just suffered some of the worst fighting since February, 2017. Decision for peace lies with Russia, Volker tweeted on Tuesday. Germany and France, which have spearheaded international efforts to resolve the conflict, expressed concern. A Germany foreign ministry spokesman said it could have severe consequences for civilians in the conflict zones. We call on the Russian authorities to reconsider this decision and hope that the Ukrainian authorities will guarantee access to Ukrainian territory to Russian representatives of the joint center (JCCC), said Alexandre Giorgini, deputy spokesman for the French foreign ministry. Created in 2014, the JCCC is made up of Ukrainian and Russian officers, who are meant to work together to ensure the safety of OSCE monitors and help implement the Minsk ceasefire. | 0fake |
DREAMers Continue to Demand Protections from Trump DHS | Migrants covered by former President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) continue making demands to President Donald Trump. [A group of DACA recipients gathered for a press conference in Connecticut, home to some 8, 500 DACA recipients, to express that they were “here today to let everyone know we’re not going back in the shadows,” as Connecticut Students for a Dream Camila Bortoletto told WNPR. “It’s a different time, it’s a tough time,” Bortoletto said. “It’s definitely a scarier time than we’ve had in the past. ” Another DACA recipient, Eric Cruz Lopez, complained that some ‘DREAMers,’ as the mainstream media has dubbed them, are being deported under Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS). “DACA for a lot of undocumented immigrants meant relief, it meant protection, it meant something, it meant a win,” Lopez told the media. “But that doesn’t mean anything anymore, right? As we see DACA recipients being picked up, that relief of deportation doesn’t mean anything to anybody anymore. ” Lopez is most likely referring to Daniel Ramirez Medina, who was a DACA recipient that was most recently arrested by the Immigration and Customs Agency (ICE) agency after they said he is a “ gang member. ” As Breitbart Texas reported, the mainstream media covered Medina’s arrest as a plight for other DACA recipients, failing to point out his alleged gang relations across the West Coast. Connecticut’s DACA recipients are now telling others to not apply for the program until after there is clarity on the issue from the Trump Administration. John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 0fake |
Canada, Mexico vow to stick with NAFTA talks, Mexico works on Plan B | MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The leaders of Mexico and Canada on Thursday pledged to work toward a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) even as talks taking place in the United States turned sour due to hard-line U.S. demands. Speaking in Mexico City as a fourth round of talks to rehash NAFTA was held near Washington, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said they were committed to a “win-win-win” deal. The talks in the United States hit obstacles, with tensions increasing dramatically Thursday due to U.S. demands that include adding a so-called “sunset clause” to NAFTA that would force negotiations of the $1 trillion pact every five years. Two sources with direct knowledge of the talks in Arlington, Virginia described the atmosphere as “horrible” and highly charged. “We will not be walking away from the table based on the proposals put forward,” Trudeau said at a news conference in response to a question about whether the clause was a poison pill for the talks. Asked whether bilateral deals were possible if talks failed, Pena Nieto said Mexico would keep working with both Canada and the United States to reach a deal that was beneficial for all three countries, but he suggested there could be other ways to move forward. “I think that Canada and Mexico share that the NAFTA agreement is a good mechanism, not the only one, but it is a good mechanism to boost the development of the region,” Pena Nieto said. U.S. President Donald Trump says NAFTA, originally signed in 1994, has been a disaster for the United States and he has frequently threatened to scrap it unless major changes are made. Besides the sunset clause, the United States also wants to modify dispute settlement mechanisms and boost the amount of U.S. content that autos must contain to qualify for tax-free status. Business leaders from all three countries have said the U.S. proposals could derail the talks. Earlier on Thursday Mexican Finance Minister Jose Antonio Meade said Mexico was analyzing tariffs and import substitution plans in case NAFTA was scrapped. “We have the possibility of identifying tariff measures, we have the possibility to identify other markets to be our providers and other markets that we can turn to,” Meade told senators in the capital. “We’re working on that, we have been working and perfecting the analysis to identify not only industries but companies that could help the contingency if we don’t reach a satisfactory negotiation.” Meade did not give details of what tariffs were being analyzed. In 2011, Mexico successfully used targeted tariffs on U.S. goods such as pork and cheese to win a dispute over trucks. Meade’s comments and the tensions at the talks drove the peso to a nearly five-month low of 18.92 against the dollar, a fall of more than 1 percent in the session. The currency has shed close to 4 percent since Oct. 3 on concerns the NAFTA talks could founder. | 0fake |
U Of WI STUDENTS SELL Hateful Hoodies: “All White People Are Racists”…Message Promoting Violence Against Cops | University of Wisconsin Madison, where NOT to send your kids to school The sale of hateful racist sweatshirts or hoodies on campus is really not surprising considering the University of WI Madison has been a hotbed for radical students and faculty for quite some time now. We shared a story about a U of WI Madison student who was given cover by his professor when the police came to talk to him during class after he was caught on camera spray painting racist graffiti all over school property. Students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are asking people to buy sweatshirts promoting violence against police officers and classifying all white people as racists. Racism, claims one hoodie s page, is a set of systematic, institutional, cultural, and epistemological (although not limited to said forms) structures that inherently empowers white folk and in turn disempowers people of color. This power dictates who lives, have housing, access to education/healthcare etc. Racism has little to do with hatred and mostly to do with who has power. White folk or those who see themselves as white are given said power inherently regardless of socioeconomic class, education etc. This is why white men created race in the first place to maintain power. Racism gave birth to the idea of race. This is a [sic] oversimplified definition, the description continues.Facebook has already removed an original picture of the sweatshirt for not following Facebook s Community Standards. However, as of this writing, Facebook has yet to remove the post selling the sweatshirts.One of the sweatshirt says If I Encounter Another Cop With A God Complex I m Going To Have To Show The World That They Are Human , seemingly promoting violence towards police.Via: Campus Reform | 1real |
Factbox: Trump on Twitter (Oct 1) - Rex Tillerson, Puerto Rico | The following statements were posted to the verified Twitter accounts of U.S. President Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS. The opinions expressed are his own. Reuters has not edited the statements or confirmed their accuracy. @realDonaldTrump : - We have done a great job with the almost impossible situation in Puerto Rico. Outside of the Fake News or politically motivated ingrates,... [0822 EDT] - ...people are now starting to recognize the amazing work that has been done by FEMA and our great Military. All buildings now inspected..... [0826 EDT] - ...for safety. Thank you to the Governor of P.R. and to all of those who are working so closely with our First Responders. Fantastic job! [0830 EDT] - I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man... [1030 EDT] - ...Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done![1031 EDT] - Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I won’t fail.[1501 EDT] - Congratulations to #TeamUSA on your great @PresidentsCup victory! bit.ly/2hH6rKW [2122 EDT] -- Source link: (bit.ly/2jBh4LU) (bit.ly/2jpEXYR) | 0fake |
U.S. energy bill caught up in fight over Michigan water crisis | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A political fight over the federal government’s role in Michigan’s water contamination crisis spilled onto the U.S. Senate floor on Wednesday as Democrats threatened to block a bipartisan energy bill if it fails to include immediate aid for the city of Flint. Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan told reporters that a “solid agreement” that appeared to be in hand on Tuesday now seemed to be falling apart. “As a senator from Michigan, I intend to make it very clear that they can’t ignore the families of Flint,” Stabenow said when asked about prospects for the energy bill. | 0fake |
SWISS ARMY CHIEF WARNS CITIZENS About Explosive Refugee Situation: Tells Them To Arm Themselves | Wouldn t it be great if we had someone in government who would take the import of thousands of Muslims from countries who hate us seriously?Swiss army chief Andr Blattmann warned, in a Swiss newspaper article on Sunday, the risks of social unrest in Europe are soaring. Recalling the experience of 1939/1945, Blattman fears the increasing aggression in public discourse is an explosively hazardous situation, and advises the Swiss people to arm themselves and warns that the basis for Swiss prosperity is being called into question. Even though Switzerland has not been involved in an armed conflict since a standoff between Catholics and Protestants in 1847, the Swiss are very serious not only about their right to own weapons but also to carry them around in public. Because of this general acceptance and even pride in gun ownership, nobody bats an eye at the sight of a civilian riding a bus, bike or motorcycle to the shooting range, with a rifle slung across the shoulder.As Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten reports, speaking on the record for the first time since the November Paris terror attacks, Blattmann told the paper that despite a rise in security incidents over the past two years Switzerland s means of defence were being reduced.The situation is growing increasingly risky, Blattman begins. The threat of terror is rising, hybrid wars are being fought around the globe; the economic outlook is gloomy and the resulting migration flows of displaced persons and refugees have assumed unforeseen dimensions. Social unrest can not be ruled out , the vocabulary in public discourse will dangerously aggressive. The mixture is increasingly unappetizing Blattmann sees the basis of Swiss prosperity, has long been once again called into question. He recalls the situation around the two world wars in the last century and advises Switzerland, to arm themselves.Via: Zero Hedge | 1real |
GAY MAFIA STRIKES AGAIN: Denver City Council Goes After Chick-Fil-A | Chick-fil-A is in the news again and it s more of the same push for political correctness and the rights of the left to not be offended by just about everything. The LGBT crowd seems to be offended by everything under the sun and Chick-fil-A s views against gay marriage are especially upsetting to this special group.The fast food chain s reputation as a supporter of traditional marriage has drawn another series of boycott threats, this time from the Denver city council. The council is currently debating whether or not to sign a contract with the restaurant for a spot at Denver International Airport.From the Denver Post:Councilman Paul Lopez called opposition to the chain at DIA really, truly a moral issue on the city. His position comes despite ardent assurances from the concessionaires who have operated other DIA restaurants that strict nondiscrimination policies will include protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity.Robin Kniech, the council s first openly gay member, said she was most worried about a local franchise generating corporate profits used to fund and fuel discrimination. She was first to raise Chick-fil-A leaders politics during a Tuesday committee hearing.The normally routine process of approving an airport concession deal has taken a rare political turn. The Business Development Committee on Tuesday stalled the seven-year deal with a new franchisee of the popular chain for two weeks.Should the committee reject the lease, an individual member if one is willing could introduce the concession deal in the full council. Ten of the 13 members attended Tuesday s meeting, and none rose to defend Chick-fil-A, although some didn t weigh in. We can do better than this brand in Denver at our airport, in my estimation, new member Jolon Clark said. | 1real |
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