title stringlengths 1 456 ⌀ | text stringlengths 1 143k ⌀ | label class label 2
classes |
|---|---|---|
Donald Trump Suggests ‘Second Amendment People’ Could Act Against Hillary Clinton - The New York Times | WILMINGTON, N. C. — Donald J. Trump on Tuesday appeared to raise the possibility that gun rights supporters could take matters into their own hands if Hillary Clinton is elected president and appoints judges who favor stricter gun control measures. Repeating his contention that Mrs. Clinton wanted to abolish the right to bear arms, Mr. Trump warned at a rally here that it would be “a horrible day” if Mrs. Clinton were elected and got to appoint a tiebreaking Supreme Court justice. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd began to boo. He quickly added: “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know. ” Oblique as it was, Mr. Trump’s remark quickly elicited a wave of condemnation from Democrats, gun control advocates and others, who accused him of suggesting violence against Mrs. Clinton or liberal jurists. Bernice A. King, daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called Mr. Trump’s words “distasteful, disturbing, dangerous. ” Mrs. Clinton’s running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, expressed disbelief. “Nobody who is seeking a leadership position, especially the presidency, the leadership of the country, should do anything to countenance violence, and that’s what he was saying,” Mr. Kaine said in Austin, Tex. He called Mr. Trump’s remark “a window into the soul of a person who is just temperamentally not suited to the task. ” And Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign and Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which has endorsed Mrs. Clinton, said Mr. Trump’s statement was “repulsive — literally using the Second Amendment as cover to encourage people to kill someone with whom they disagree. ” “For Trump, violence has become a standard talking point, a common punch line, and even a campaign strategy,” Mr. Gross said. Paul D. Ryan, the Republican House speaker who has had a tense relationship with Mr. Trump, told reporters on Tuesday night that the remarks sounded “like a joke gone bad. ” He added: “You should never joke about that. I hope he clears it up quickly. ” Mr. Trump and his campaign did not treat his remark as a joke instead, they insisted he was merely urging gun rights supporters to vote as a bloc against Mrs. Clinton. “The Second Amendment people have tremendous power because they are so united,” he told a CBS affiliate in North Carolina late Tuesday. In an interview with Fox News, Mr. Trump grew adamant. “There can be no other interpretation,” he said, adding, “I mean, give me a break. ” But at his rally earlier in the day, Mr. Trump had actually been discussing what could happen once Mrs. Clinton was president, not before the election. And even many in the audience seemed caught by surprise. Video showed a man just over Mr. Trump’s shoulder go and turn to his companion, apparently in disbelief, when Mr. Trump made the remark. The uproar over Mr. Trump’s remark came as his campaign has been faced with a series of public opinion surveys showing him quickly losing ground to Mrs. Clinton, and just a day after his campaign called his delivery of a prepared economic speech in Detroit, evidence of a newfound political discipline. Mr. Trump’s fellow opponents of gun control stood by him, focusing on his depiction of Mrs. Clinton as a threat to the Second Amendment. “Donald Trump is absolutely correct,” said Jennifer Baker, a strategist for the National Rifle Association. “If Hillary Clinton is elected, there is nothing we can do to stop her from nominating an Supreme Court justice who will vote to overturn the individual right of citizens to own a gun in their home for protection. ” The association also began running a new commercial characterizing Mrs. Clinton as “one of the wealthiest women in politics” and calling her a hypocrite for favoring gun restrictions while having been “protected by armed guards for 30 years. ” Her gun policies, the ad says, would leave ordinary people “defenseless. ” Veiled references to gun violence have tripped up candidates before. In 2010, Sharron Angle, a Nevada Republican challenging the Senate majority leader at the time, Harry Reid, severely damaged her unsuccessful candidacy while discussing the importance of the Second Amendment. “When you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny,” she said, adding: “It’s to defend ourselves. And you know, I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems. ” Mrs. Clinton herself learned the hard way: In June 2008, shortly before she conceded defeat in her Democratic primary contest with Barack Obama, she defended her perseverance in a way that critics said alluded to the possibility that Mr. Obama could be gunned down. “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California,” Mrs. Clinton said. She apologized hours later. Mr. Trump did not repeat his violent insinuation at a later event in Fayetteville, N. C. But Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, who has championed gun control since the Sandy Hook mass shooting in his state, called Mr. Trump’s remarks “disgusting and embarrassing and sad. ” “This isn’t play,” Mr. Murphy wrote. “Unstable people with powerful guns and an unhinged hatred for Hillary are listening to you, @realDonaldTrump. ” The condemnation from Mr. Trump’s critics across the political spectrum was deep. On Twitter, the conservative writer John Podhoretz, in a series of posts, wrote that Mr. Trump had implied that all Second Amendment supporters were “potential assassins. ” He added that a president’s words “CANNOT MEAN NOTHING. They are the most important words spoken in the world. ” And Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, wrote on Twitter that the Secret Service should investigate Mr. Trump for making a death threat against Mrs. Clinton: “Donald Trump suggested someone kill Sec. Clinton. We must take people at their word. ” A Secret Service spokesman, who refused to identify himself, said that the agency was “aware of the comments” but did not elaborate. Others seized on Mr. Trump’s remark as an occasion for mockery. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote on Twitter that Mr. Trump “makes death threats because he’s a pathetic coward who can’t handle the fact that he’s losing to a girl. ” Mr. Trump’s campaign events have grown increasingly vitriolic, with angry chants and jeers directed at Mrs. Clinton. People at his rallies have, with greater frequency, loudly called for violence against Mrs. Clinton — catcalls that Mr. Trump has generally let pass. And on Saturday, Mr. Trump praised his New Hampshire state State Representative Al Baldasaro, who said recently that Mrs. Clinton deserved to face a firing squad over the F. B. I. ’s investigation of her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. In Wilmington on Tuesday, chants of “lock her up,” which first gained traction during the Republican National Convention, were loud and frequent before Mr. Trump took the stage. But one speaker, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, tried to tamp those down. “No, no, we’re here to beat her, and keep her out of Washington,” Mr. Giuliani said. He was interrupted by the same chant minutes later. | 0fake |
Nanny State Health Warning: Burnt Toast Can Give You Cancer - Breitbart | Don’t eat burnt toast or fish ‘n’ chips or over crispy roast potatoes — or you may end up getting cancer, a UK government agency has warned. [According to the warning by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) issued today in a campaign launched on its website, these foods should be avoided because they all contain higher levels of acrylamide, a chemical which has caused cancer in mice. The campaign — called Go For Gold — says that acrylamide is produced when starchy foods such as bread and potatoes are cooked for long periods at higher temperatures such as baking, frying, grilling, toasting, and roasting. The FSA claims: The scientific consensus is that acrylamide has the potential to cause cancer in humans. Which, according to its critics, is precisely the kind of junk science which gives junk science a bad name. As Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs says, this is a classic case of “mission creep” from a government agency. “They should be dealing with real safety issues like the handful of restaurants who are putting out genuinely dangerous food,” he said. “This sort of thing undermines public faith in scientific advice and terrifies people. “People just don’t know what to eat anymore because they’re not being given clear advice. ” Indeed. Neither Cancer Research UK nor the European Food Standards Agency have been able to find a major health risk issue, despite their best efforts. The quango was set up in 2000 under Tony Blair in response to a spate of food poisonings in restaurants. Few would argue that ensuring basic standards of hygiene and safety in the food supply is a legitimate public health goal, but the FSA soon got bored of that and became part of the nanny state. Amongst its dubious achievements are telling football fans to substitute sparkling water and grapes for beer and crisps when watching the World Cup, defining cheese as ‘junk food’ and lobbying for bans on advertising. It is a classic example of bureaucratic expansion. As its mission crept, its budget grew, and although it has been trimmed somewhat in the era of austerity its annual income exceeds £130 million and it apparently still has time to tell people not to fluff their roast potatoes. | 0fake |
McConnell optimistic of tax bill deal between Senate and House | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Sunday that he is optimistic the Senate and House of Representatives will reach a conference agreement on tax legislation that can be signed into law by President Donald Trump. “We’ll be able to get to an agreement in the conference. I’m very optimistic about it,” the Kentucky Republican told ABC’s “This Week” program. | 0fake |
TUCKER CARLSON GRILLS A “TESTY” KARL ROVE: How could you be so wrong about a Trump win? [Video] | 1real | |
U.S. agency to free up protest sites during Trump inauguration | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Protesters will get public sites for demonstrations during Republican Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, a major federal land agency said on Thursday, after being threatened with a lawsuit from civil rights lawyers who accused it of quashing dissent. Up to 900,000 people are expected to pack into the U.S. capital for the New York businessman’s Jan. 20 swearing-in to his first political office. Some plan to protest Trump’s more controversial promises, including plans to build a wall along the Mexican border and deport illegal immigrants. Only three of the more than 30 groups seeking to stage rallies either protesting or celebrating Trump’s election independently of the Trump Presidential Inaugural Committee have received permits to use National Park Service land before, during or after Trump’s inauguration. The agency said it expected to begin issuing permits for demonstration sites on park land in coming days, an announcement that came a few hours after the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund said it would sue if the permits were not issued by Friday. “We believe that this is a significant victory for free speech. They are doing this under threat of litigation,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, the fund’s executive director, said in a telephone interview. The Park Service had maintained it was following a procedure in place since 2008 by turning over control of sites, including along the parade route from the Capitol to the White House, to Trump’s Presidential Inaugural Committee. Agency spokesman Mike Litterst said the Park Service would regain control of permits for the Ellipse, a grassy area south of the White House, from the inaugural committee on Jan. 21. Litterst said in an email that the agency was working with more than 30 permit applicants and was still receiving requests. The Park Service has been under a court order since 2008 mandating it to guarantee free speech during presidential inaugurations. Three liberal groups, the ANSWER Coalition, the American Constitution Society and the Black is Back Coalition, have been permitted to hold events near the parade route, but only ANSWER was granted one for Inauguration Day, according to the Park Service permits website. Some 3,000 police officers and 7,000 National Guard troops from outside the District will be on hand to help provide security at Trump’s swearing in, Chris Geldart, the District of Columbia’s homeland security director said in a phone interview. The biggest inauguration protest, the Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21, will go on regardless of the dispute over protest sites since it will be held on city streets. At least one protest could come with a cloud of marijuana smoke, as the DCMJ pro-pot lobbying group, which spearheaded the legalization of the drug in Washington D.C. in 2015, plans to distribute 4,200 joints near the inaugural site. Smoking marijuana along the parade route would violate the laws of both the District of Columbia - which allows it only in private spaces - and the federal government, which bans it outright. | 0fake |
SKETCHY FIRM BEHIND SALACIOUS ALLEGATIONS Against Trump Tries to Pull a Fast One on Senate Judiciary Committee | Remember Fusion GPS (please see our previous report on this below)? They are the opposition research firm behind the Trump golden showers dossier that attempted to embarrass the president with untrue stories of sexual escapades. Well, Fusion GPS had been ordered to turn over the dossier to the Senate Judiciary Committee late Wednesday but when they turned them over it was clear Fusion GPS was trying to pull a fast one on the Senate: The committee is reviewing the production received late this afternoon from Mr. Simpson, but virtually all of the documents appear to be merely news clippings rather than records of Fusion s substantive communications. The paltry document production escalates the standoff between Fusion GPS and the Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley.After Simpson declined an invitation to testify before the committee last month, Grassley issued a subpoena to compel him to appear. But the subpoena was withdrawn after Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, said he would voluntarily meet in a closed session with committee staff.A date for that meeting has not been set. WHY NOT???Last month, the committee requested records from Fusion GPS, the Trump campaign, Donald Trump Jr. and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort as part of its investigation into Russian meddling in the election.The Trump campaign gave the committee 20,000 pages of records last week while Trump Jr. and Manafort produced 250 pages and 400 pages of records, respectively.The committee is one of three congressional panels investigating Russia-related matters, including the dossier and the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting held between Trump Jr. and a Russian attorney linked to Fusion GPS.In its request to Fusion, the Judiciary Committee asked for contracts that the firm signed for its work on the dossier.Fusion was initially hired to investigate Trump in Sept. 2015 by an unidentified Republican donor who opposed the real estate mogul. After Trump ascended to the GOP nomination, the donor dropped the project. But Fusion soon found a Democratic ally of Hillary Clinton s also still unidentified to continue the research. Fusion hired Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent, to conduct the investigation.Fusion and Steele s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, have worked together on various projects since 2010.The committee also asked Fusion to produce contracts and communications regarding its work against the Magnitsky Act, a sanctions law opposed by the Russian government.Who exactly was paying Fusion GPS for all of its projects against Trump? Read more: Daily CallerOUR PREVIOUS REPORT ON THE DOSSIER:SHOCKING TESTIMONY Confirms Comey Used Fake Russian Golden Showers Dossier to Target Trump [Video]During congressional testimony, the CEO of Hermitage Capital was speaking about the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). During the testimony the origin of the Fusion GPS Russian Dossier was discussed (please see our previous report on this below). The Hermitage Capital CEO revealed that the Russian government actually paid Fusion GPS to create the fake Golden Shower propaganda dossier on candidate Trump. Here s the kicker: That same dossier was used by the FBI in June/July 2016 to generate the FISA surveillance warrants against the Trump campaign.Yes, that means FBI Director Comey used the fake dossier commissioned by Russia to attack Trump, as the framework to launch his FBI investigation into candidate Donald Trump and Russian collusion.Soooo why is Mueller still investigating President Trump?Entire video of Testimony Below:Graham s questioning begins at the 48:40 point:Foreign Agent Registration Requirements William Bowder, a Russian market investor, testifies at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on foreign agent registration requirements, as well as what he knows about Natalia Veslnitskaya, a Russian attorney who met with Donald Trump, Jr. in 2016. OUR PREVIOUS REPORT ON THE DOSSIER:EXTRAORDINARY DETAILS EMERGE About How Senator John McCain Got Dirty Dossier On President Trump From Ex-Spy Where s The Media Outrage?Where was the media s outrage when a sitting United States senator, John McCain went on a wild goose chase, that led him overseas, in an effort to obtain what he believed was incriminating evidence that could be used to harm President Trump? How is it okay for Senator John McCain to actively seek dirt on a sitting president, but not okay for Donald Trump Jr. (who is NOT a government official) to meet with a Russian lawyer in an attempt to discover potential dirt on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton?Sen. John McCain commented on Tuesday about Donald Trump Jr. s meeting with the Russian lawyer. How serious do you think this particular shoe is? Raju asked, referring to Donald Trump Jr. s meeting with Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya after being promised dirt on Clinton that was reportedly part of a Russian government effort. I don t know. But it s certainly another shoe that s dropped that needs to be pursued and looked at, McCain said. TPMWatch RINO Senator John McCain express his concern overt the seriousness of Donald Trump Jr. s meeting with the Russian lawyer about the lifting US sanctions on Russian adoption. It s curious that the reporter never asked McCain about his efforts to smear our president with a unsubstantiated dirty dossier from an ex-spy:Before we go any further into the messy details of John McCain s international dealings to find dirt on our sitting president, it s worth mentioning that as far as we know, no one was murdered as a result of Donald Trump Jr. s meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who entered the US without a visa under extraordinary circumstances thanks to the efforts of Barack Obama s DOJ. The same cannot be said about McCain s dealings with the dirty dossier on Trump. Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya is also said to have ties to Fusion GPS, the sketchy secretive Washington firm that commissioned the dubious intelligence dossier on Donald Trump.According to the Daily Caller The Russian lawyer who offered Donald Trump Jr. damaging information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly has ties to the opposition research firm that commissioned the dossier on President Donald Trump.When the June 2016 meeting took place, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was in New York to defend Prevezon, a Russian holding firm accused of laundering money for corrupt Russian businessmen. Veselnitskaya had been working on the case for years with assistance from Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that compiled the Trump dossier.Fusion GPS denied any knowledge of, or role in, facilitating the meeting between Veselnitskaya and Trump Jr.According to The Sun: A FORMER KGB spy chief suspected of helping Brit spook Christopher Steele compile the Trump dirty dossier has been found dead in his car under mysterious circumstances.Oleg Erovinkin, described as a key source behind the widely discredited document, was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow on Boxing Day.Today, the Daily Mail reports: Sen. John McCain said he did what any citizen would do in turning over the dirty dossier, which contained unconfirmed secrets about the president-elect, over to the FBI.The Guardian charted the path of how the dossier came to be and how it was that McCain got his hands on the controversial documents.In turn, that firm outsourced the research to a retired western European former counter-intelligence official, with a long history of dealing with the shadow world of Moscow s spooks and siloviki (securocrats), explained the Guardian.Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal identified the ex-spy as Christopher Steele.The Guardian pointed out that just because a Democrat was willing to pay for the information that didn t mean that said Democrat was Hillary Clinton s campaign or the Democratic National Committee.Sometimes donors seek out this information in order to ensure they ve made a sound investment.***Yeah okay!***The contractor, who the Guardian didn t name, but the Wall Street Journal identified as Steele, reportedly found the information that he dug up to be concerning. He and another ex-British diplomat, Christopher Burrows, run their own company, Orbis Business Intelligence. If the allegations were real, their implications were overwhelming, the Guardian wrote.On November 18, at the Halifax International Security Forum, McCain was introduced to a former senior western diplomat who had set eyes on the documents and knew who put them together, telling the Arizona Republican that the individual was highly reliable. That man can now be named as Sir Andrew Wood, British ambassador to Moscow from 1995 to 2000.Wood told the Independent that he had met McCain, spoken to him about Trump, and about the potential for him to be compromised.In a carefully nuanced statement he said: Yes I did meet Senator McCain and his aides at the conference. We spoke about the kind of activities the Russians can be engaged in. We also spoke about how Mr Trump may find himself in a position where there could be an attempt to blackmail him with Kompromat [a Russian term for compromising material] and claims that there were audio and video tapes in existence. He added: I would like to stress that I did not pass on any dossier to Senator McCain or anyone else and I did not see a dossier at the time. I do know Christopher Steele and in my view he is very professional and thorough in what he does. He did not however address whether he told McCain there was a dossier and how to get it.Clearly, somebody did.From there, McCain dispatched a trusted emissary who flew across the Atlantic to meet the source of the documents at an airport that the Guardian did not name.The aide was instructed to look for a man with a copy of the Financial Times and that s how the individuals met, with the source taking McCain s emissary back to his house and giving the American a copy of the documents.Within 24 hours, the dossier was in Washington, though the contents of the file couldn t be verified without an investigation. McCain, the Guardian said, was worried that his actions might be interpreted as revenge for some of the controversial comments Trump made about him such as knocking the fact that the longtime senator had been a prisoner of war.However, McCain decided to hand over the documents to FBI Director James Comey on December 9. Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the Director of the FBI, McCain said Wednesday in a statement about that matter. That has been the extent of my contact with the FBI or any other government agency regarding this issue, McCain said.For entire story: Daily MailRead more: CT | 1real |
INTERNET: Living with the Great Firewall of China | (Reuters) - The Great Firewall of China the world s most extensive effort to try to control cyberspace has become more formidable under President Xi Jinping. Authorities have closed some video and audio streaming websites, limited online access to foreign and foreign-inspired television programs, stiffened penalties for spreading rumor via social media and restricted access to virtual private networks. For the very wired Class of 2012 , these measures are largely minor inconveniences. Some buy into the idea that the Internet needs to be closely managed. Others just find workarounds. Here are their views on living with the Great Firewall. Wang Siyue, a product specialist at an Internet education company: "I'm sure these restrictions will exist in the short term, but over the long term they can't block the development of this industry domestically. I believe there will be even more internet companies and startup opportunities." Zhang Weixuan, an assistant secretary at a software company: For contemporary youth in China right now, our channels for information are broad, including the use of VPNs, or a variety of means through which we can be exposed to foreign news. For me (blocking VPNs) won t have a great impact. Maybe for second- and third-tier cities, or for those young people who have never had the experience of going abroad, or whose English is not very good, they may be subject to the impact of the country s more stringent controls over propaganda. Fu Shiwei, an assistant university teacher: My students are very tech savvy so they help me solve things like looking up academic information or stay updated on global current affairs. I think it s okay. The government keeps everyone in line, so I don t have any strong opinions about the government. Zuo Aining, a senior credit risk associate, based in Washington, D.C.: I personally think that for the Internet, as a very open platform, certain strategies for oversight are very necessary ... what I m concerned about are things like terrorist attacks. Maybe if you make better use of systems to supervise the Internet you ll have a more positive impact in terms of protecting national security. Qin Lijuan, a senior wealth management consultant: If I want some news I usually just ask friends abroad. I ve got a lot of classmates who are abroad, who studied there or are working there. GRAPHIC: Great Firewall of China tmsnrt.rs/2kUuirU | 0fake |
This Election is Not About Trump, Its about a Giant Middle Finger to Washington DC. | Does anyone like Trump as a person ? The answer in No. It's not about that, it never was. This is about a giant middle finder to the DC Establishment. As a Citizen we only have one way to express our displeasure with DC. We are as divided as I've ever seen. This is not acceptable. If young people can't open businesses we have failed them. They can't. Trump is a tool we need for real change. He blew up the GOP. Our friends on the other side wanted Bernie. But, it was rigged against Bernie. Now you are going to support the very person who rigged your Primary. You almost blew up the DNC, but the job is not complete. We can not hand this crap to our younger generation. We will not. Only a billionaire can get this far on his own. He will be checked by Congress. Join us in giving the middle finger to the slave masters controlling our future. This Country belongs to us. Not a handful of wealthy families. This isn't about Trump. He's a tool in more ways than one. This is about cutting restraints and letting the American People go. At least, that's the way I see it. | 1real |
Kurds offer joint border deployment as Iraq threatens more military operations | BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq s Kurdish region said on Thursday it had offered a joint Kurdish-Iraqi deployment at a strategic crossing into Turkey with the participation of U.S.-led international forces as part of a compromise aimed at ending a stand-off with Baghdad. The offer was disclosed hours after the Iraqi armed forces threatened to resume military operations against the Kurds, accusing them of delaying the handover of control of borders and taking advantage of negotiations to bolster their defenses. The central government in Baghdad has cracked down hard on the Kurds since the government of the Kurdish autonomous region staged an independence referendum on Sept. 25 that Baghdad considers illegal. Central government forces swiftly seized swathes of Kurdish-held territory last month and have demanded control of all border checkpoints, including the Turkish frontier which has been controlled by the Kurds since the Saddam Hussein era. Over the past week, the Kurds have tried to defuse the crisis with negotiations. The Kurdish defense department said the offer for joint control of the frontier was part of a deconfliction proposal made to Baghdad on Oct. 31. Other proposals included a ceasefire on all fronts, continued cooperation in the fight against Islamic State and joint deployments in so-called disputed territories claimed by both the Kurds and the Iraqi central government. The KRG continues to welcome a permanent ceasefire on all fronts, deconfliction and the start of a political dialogue with Baghdad, the Kurdish statement said. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi suspended military operations against the Kurds on Friday. The sides have since held talks which Baghdad says cover only technical issues, with political questions off the table unless the Kurds discard the referendum. Iran and Turkey back Abadi s tough line, fearing a drive for independence could spread to their own Kurdish populations. The Kurdish statement said the offer of a joint deployment at the strategic Fish-Khabur crossing was meant as a goodwill gesture and trust-building exercise that ensures a limited and temporary arrangement until an agreement is reached in accordance with the Iraqi Constitution . Fish-Khabur is strategically vital for the landlocked Kurds as the point where oil from northern Iraq crosses into Turkey. Iraq wants the Kurdistan region to stop exporting its own oil and hand over sales to the Iraqi state-oil marketer SOMO, the company s director said on Thursday. Iraq is talking to Turkey to let SOMO sell Kurdish crude that arrives by pipeline, acting SOMO director general Alaa al-Yasiri told reporters. The Iraqi Joint Operations Command accused the Kurds on Wednesday of using the talks buy time to strengthen positions. We will not allow it; the federal forces are mandated to secure (the disputed) areas and borders, it said in a statement. The command of the Kurdish security forces, known as Peshmerga, accused Iraqi troops of massing weapons and threatening force to resolve domestic political differences . The office of the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq said more than 183,000 civilians had been displaced by the conflict, including 79,000 from Kirkuk city which Baghdad captured on the first day of its offensive last month. A humanitarian official involved in the relief efforts said more than three quarters of the displaced are Kurds. Iraqi troops set up positions on Tuesday at the Turkish border for the first time, between Turkish and Kurdish checkpoints at Habur, the Turkish name for the road border crossing located 10 km from Fish-Khabur in Iraq. The Turkish frontier with Iraqi Kurdistan is a critical security issue for Turkey, which says Kurdish insurgents fighting against the Turkish state shelter across it. Turkish security forces killed 17 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants near the border, the Turkish armed forces said on Thursday, after eight members of Turkey s security forces were killed in clashes. The Kurdish militants were intercepted crossing the border into Turkey, the Turkish military said. | 0fake |
Putin Just Exposed US Election Rigging By Trolling The State Dept. In The Most Hilarious Way | Putin Just Exposed US Election Rigging By Trolling The State Dept. In The Most Hilarious Way Oct 28, 2016 Previous post
Proving he does, indeed, possess both a caustic wit and sharp political acumen, Putin just shut down the raging rigged elections controversy in what could best be called an epic prank to prove the point — Russia requested, and was unsurprisingly denied, permission to monitor the U.S. presidential election.
Think about it. This somewhat tongue-in-cheek offer, although likely made with the expectation of futility, makes several critical points on the true farcical nature of the American electoral process.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner, cited by USA Today , dismissively condemned President Vladimir Putin’s suggestion as a “PR stunt,” and Meg Casper, spokeswoman for Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler, noted, “We’ve allowed observers from overseas in the past from other countries, never from Russia,” adding both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security “told us not to do this.”
But the swift rebuke from the U.S. aligns more with its unprecedented since the Cold War anti-Russia propaganda campaign — a sensationalistic and proven fictitious narrative meant to inculcate Americans into believing Russia poses an imminent threat.
In fact, with the Clinton campaign thoroughly capitalizing on the laughable narrative to warn Russia might attempt to rig the elections, and Donald Trump, rightly pointing to the former secretary of state’s efforts to rig the system from within and being accused of having ties to Putin, the State Department’s rebuke seems more a hypocrisy-tinged joke.
As USA Today reports, “Toner noted that U.S. officials participated in a similar observation mission for Russia’s parliamentary elections in September.”
How the U.S. State Department expects anyone to ignore this blatant moral duplicity — It’s Perfectly Acceptable When We Do It, But Not For Someone We Don’t Like — was not made immediately clear.
Russia would, by any measurable standard, have every reason to act as an election observer, despite being “categorically rejected” — all talk of the
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK | 1real |
WOW! COMPANY THAT BUYS ABORTED BABY PARTS FROM PLANNED PARENTHOOD HAS WEBSITE WITH DROP DOWN MENU CHOICES LIKE: Heart, Liver, Veins, Arteries, Lungs, etc. | Last we checked harvesting and selling body parts in America was illegal. Perhaps the abortion industry has some sort of special exception since killing babies is such an important service to Americans In the gruesome and now viral video that shows a Planned Parenthood medical officer talking to undercover actors posing as biotech entrepreneurs about the prospects of buying fetal body parts, the name of one company pops up several times:In the context of selling aborted fetal tissue, Dr. Deborah Nucatola is seen and heard discussing her ongoing relationship with a company called StemExpress that works as the middleman between Planned Parenthood affiliates and research institutes that use the body parts in scientific experimentation.The video, provided by the pro-life group Center for Medical Progress, purports to show an actual online order form from StemExpress where buyers can order the parts they want and the age of gestation.The pull down menu shows brain, heart, heart (veins and arteries attached), lungs, liver, liver and thymus, spleen, large intestine and so on. The order form allows the buyer to choose the gestational age of the baby to be aborted from four weeks upward.StemExpress is a five-year old privately held for-profit business located in Placerville, California that describes itself as a multi-million dollar company that supplies human blood, tissue products, primary cells and other clinical specimens to biomedical researchers. The company says it offers the largest variety of raw material in the industry, as well as fresh, fixed and cryopreserved human primary cells. StemExpress calls itself as the only company of its kind to both procure tissues and isolate cells for researchers individual needs in its own labs. Our human tissue products range from fetal to adult and healthy to diseased, and we also collect bone marrow and leukapheresis for isolation. StemExpress promises that by partnering with them you ll get the high quality samples you need so that you can focus on the research. Some will wonder how something that is apparently illegal goes on so openly. David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress told Breitbart News, It is the Kermit Gosnell effect. There is simply a lack of interest in enforcing this kind of law because of abortion. On the video Nucatola is heard talking about pricing, that specimens would range from $30 to $100. It is expected that Planned Parenthood will claim these charges are merely for their services and do not include a profit. Daleiden told Breitbart News that there are no extra services because companies like StemExpress are there at the facility to harvest the organs on order and walk out with them, not even shipping charges.Daleiden said that while the practice goes on around the country, it is especially hard to prosecute in California because of the political power of the abortion industry.The buying and selling of human body parts is illegal under the U.S. Criminal Code though companies can charge for expenses. The question becomes how a multi-million dollar for-profit company buys fetal body parts and sells them but makes no profit.Repeated calls to StemExpress for a comment have gone unreturned. The company website crashed sometime today.Via: Breitbart News | 1real |
Fictional New York City Apartments Get Real - The New York Times | What I love about Marnie’s studio apartment in Chinatown on HBO’s “Girls” is that I used to have one a lot like it, with a shower in the kitchen and a bathroom in a closet. At some point before I moved in, someone had neatly tacked sheets to the ceiling to hide, I don’t know, probably a really terrible ceiling. I shared the place, a poor excuse for a in Little Italy, with a roommate, so it was larger than Marnie’s 250 square feet. The biggest difference was I lived there in 1999, when everyone was busy watching Carrie Bradshaw bound up the picturesque steps of her Upper East Side brownstone on “Sex and the City. ” Remember her closet? What freelancer has a closet? Even then, I knew it was absurd. But I could will myself to believe in it, because my friends could still afford to live in neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where the telltale markers of gentrification — construction cranes, restaurants and soaring rents — had yet to take hold. But the real estate landscape has shifted so profoundly over the last two decades that this generation’s occupies a very different kind of space. And it is one that keeps shrinking, which is why Desi, Marnie’s hapless husband, frantically builds a wall down the middle of Marnie’s tiny studio to try to save their crumbling marriage. “Welcome to your new apartment,” he says, to her horror. As rising rents squeeze young New Yorkers, the TV apartment has become grittier, dirtier and ever more cramped. You could almost say it is angry. A generation ago, Carrie could whine about the size of a closet in a $ apartment in the episode where she goes apartment hunting after being threatened with eviction. “I pay $750 for something that’s twice the size!” she laments. The broker is unmoved. Carrie, of course, has what most New Yorkers could only dream about, then and now: a apartment. Now we have Abbi on Comedy Central’s “Broad City,” with Pam, the broker in a neck brace. Abbi’s options include “a beautiful apartment in your budget” that is bright green, has no bathroom and might actually be a hallway. But it sure beats the place with the walls. “You guys know that television show ‘Friends?’ ” Pam asks as she jimmies the door with a penknife. “Here’s this place. ” What Abbi finds inside is the antithesis of the “Friends” apartment: austere, soulless and stark white, except, of course, for the blood spatter, remnants of an apparent double murder. “More good news! The walls are super thick,” Pam says. As you will recall, the “Friends” apartment, shared by a young barista and a struggling chef, was a palatial with amusing purple walls in the West Village. Even in 1994, few of us were fooled by the “Friends” fantasy, but we ran with it anyway. Television has become smarter since then — viewers expect more rawness. Well, maybe they expect more truth. It just happens to be raw. But dig deeper and shows like “Broad City” and “Girls” tell a different story, one that is experienced in the shadow of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. The characters on these shows are part of a generation burdened by student loan debt and stagnating wages. Netflix’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” doesn’t get a place with a balcony in the happening West Village. For her, there’s a grim garden apartment reached by a dicey set of steps in far Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “Younger generations are having to face this reality,” said Lindsay T. Graham, a psychologist at the Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. “When you see shows where the characters are existing in these sorts of struggles, I think that that’s actually comforting. ” We’ve traded crown molding for blooming mold in the bathroom. Furniture is worn and stained. None of the throw pillows match. “We make sure there’s no bedbugs and then we use it,” said Angelique Clark, “Broad City’s” production designer, about choosing furnishings for the set. The walls have been painted countless times, and Abbi definitely did not choose the puke green of the hallway wall of her apartment in Astoria, Queens. But the grime and the lack of space are the point. At a rent party that Abbi’s friend Ilana hosts, she trips over her guests as she tries to shield them from the rats that have overrun her in Gowanus, Brooklyn. “We were just trying to capture a New York that was more realistic to us,” Ilana Glazer told me during a phone call with Abbi Jacobson, her “Broad City” and . “We crack up looking at the ‘Friends’ set. It’s like a play, facing the audience. ” Although Marnie’s studio in Chinatown could have been modeled on my sad pad, its inspiration was an apartment the show’s art director once rented. “People can watch and be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I had an apartment like that,’ ” said Matt Munn, the production designer for “Girls. ” New York has never been kind to young people just starting out. But in recent years, it has become downright cruel. In early 1996, when “Friends” was in its second season, the median rent in Manhattan was $2, 000 a month. Over the next 20 years, it jumped 67 percent to $3, 344 a month in early 2016, according to Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. But while that may seem like an enormous increase, adjust those numbers for inflation, and the median rent in 1996 would have been $3, 645 a month, or 9 percent more than it is today. “Rents are actually somewhat lower than they were in the mid 1990s,” Mr. Miller said. “But because wages have leveled off, it doesn’t feel that way. ” Young people between the ages of 18 and 29 earned about 20 percent less in real wages in 2014 than they would have earned in 2000, according to a report by the city comptroller. Also, Brooklyn — at least the parts seen as hip alternatives to Manhattan — is no longer cheaper. The flow of young professionals looking for housing led to a rise in rents in those areas, while displacing many of the people who were living there. Consider Williamsburg, the epicenter of Brooklyn gentrification. A 1996 New York Times article about the neighborhood reported that rent for a started at around $700 a month. According to Mr. Miller, the minimum starting rent for a is now around $1, 832 a month. Grim reality brings us to “The Holdouts,” a web series about a grumpy guy named Kevin who lives in a rundown apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. It is described as “a comedy about New Yorkers who can’t afford to live in New York anymore. ” The concept appears to have struck a nerve. It took less than a month for the creators to raise $35, 790 on Kickstarter in June to begin producing episodes. Filming began this month, and next month we will be able to watch the pilot episode in which Kevin resists his landlord’s overtures to buy him out. “He is living in the past,” Stephen Girasuolo, one of the show’s creators, said of Kevin. “You could sort of say, ‘Dude, maybe you should sort of let it go.’ ” | 0fake |
Trump on Twitter (Dec 18) - Congressional Races, train accident, tax cuts | 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 : - Remember, Republicans are 5-0 in Congressional Races this year. The media refuses to mention this. I said Gillespie and Moore would lose (for very different reasons), and they did. I also predicted “I” would win. Republicans will do well in 2018, very well! @foxandfriends [0623 EST] - Ivanka Trump will be interviewed on @foxandfriends. [0642 EST] - The train accident that just occurred in DuPont, WA shows more than ever why our soon to be submitted infrastructure plan must be approved quickly. Seven trillion dollars spent in the Middle East while our roads, bridges, tunnels, railways (and more) crumble! Not for long! [1341 EST] - My thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved in the train accident in DuPont, Washington. Thank you to all of our wonderful First Responders who are on the scene. We are currently monitoring here at the White House. [1351 EST] - Our deepest sympathies and most heartfelt prayers are with the victims of the train derailment in Washington State. We are closely monitoring the situation and coordinating with local authorities... bit.ly/2Bail99 [1435 EST] - Over the past 11 months, I have travelled tens of thousands of miles, to visit 13 countries. I have met with more than 100 world leaders and everywhere I traveled, it was my highest privilege and greatest honor to represent the AMERICAN PEOPLE! bit.ly/2BajKwn [1519 EST] - When the American People speak, ALL OF US should listen. Just over one year ago, you spoke loud and clear. On November 8, 2016, you voted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! bit.ly/2Ba2kQr [1528 EST] - As the world watches, we are days away from passing HISTORIC TAX CUTS for American families and businesses. It will be the BIGGEST TAX CUT and TAX REFORM in the HISTORY of our country! bit.ly/2BbAjI6 [1540 EST] - 70 Record Closes for the Dow so far this year! We have NEVER had 70 Dow Records in a one year period. Wow! [1725 EST] - With the strategy that I announced today, we are declaring that AMERICA is in the game and AMERICA is DETERMINED to WIN!OUR FOUR PILLARS OF NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY: bit.ly/2BdrOfJ [1849 EST] - Together, our task is to strengthen our families, to build up our communities, to serve our citizens, and to celebrate AMERICAN GREATNESS as a shining example to the world.... bit.ly/2Bdsjq7 [1954 EST] -- Source link: (bit.ly/2jBh4LU) (bit.ly/2jpEXYR) | 0fake |
Philippine activists to protest U.S. immigration policy, military | MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine activists will protest on Monday against a tough immigration order by U.S. President Donald Trump and Washington’s decision to upgrade some military bases in the Philippines. Anakbayan, a Filipino youth movement, said it would hold a “let them in” rally outside the U.S. embassy in Manila against Trump’s temporary freeze on refugees into the United States and his ban of travelers from Syria and six other countries. Chaos and confusion ensued in the United States at the weekend and a federal judge in New York intervened to block the deportation of dozens of visitors and stranded refugees. The Filipino group will also protest an announcement last week that U.S. troops would build warehouses, barracks and runways this year in five agreed locations under an Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) between the two countries. EDCA covers the rotational deployment of U.S. ships, aircraft and troops at five Philippine bases and storage of equipment for humanitarian and maritime security purposes. In November, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said he hoped Trump would treat illegal immigrants fairly and trusted his judgment. Manila had then urged Filipinos working illegally in the United States to return before Trump took office. Broadcaster ABS-CBN on Sunday quoted Assistant Presidential Communications Secretary Marie Banaag as saying it was too early to comment on Trump’s immigration move and it was the U.S. administration’s right to make such decisions. | 0fake |
Former Swedish Prime Minister BRUTALLY Mocks Trump’s Rally Insanity; It’s GLORIOUS (TWEET) | Donald Trump s buffonery, lies, and unhinged antics are not playing well on the world stage. The latest embarrassment to Americans from Trump comes via his weirdly timed campaign rally, held this weekend in Florida. During the rally, Trump attacked the media as fake like he always does, and, of course made up lots of ludicrous and bizarre lies.One such lie was designed to defend the Muslim ban, and he used a made-up terror attack in Sweden to do so. Trump told his crowd of brainwashed fans: When you look at what s happening in Germany, when you look at what s happening last night in Sweden Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden! They took in large numbers, they re having problems like they never thought possible. Trump s lie did not go unnoticed by former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt. Bildt took to Twitter to mock Trump s delusional statement, saying: Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound. Here is the tweet:Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound. https://t.co/XWgw8Fz7tj Carl Bildt (@carlbildt) February 19, 2017Bildt would not be the first to question Trump s mental state. Whether he is high or not is a mystery; all we do know is that any normal person watching the train wreck that is Trump s first month in office knows that something isn t right upstairs with this guy. Bildt wasn t finished with Trump with just that one tweet, though. He went on to tweet a mocking photo of a muppet Swedish Chef who Bildt says is sought for the attack, complete with butcher knives.Donald Trump has only been in office for one month, and already his behavior is making America a laughingstock. Hell, his very candidacy did that, to say nothing of his presidency. He s an absolute disgrace, and dangerously unhinged. Trump must be removed. Congress, do your job.Featured image via Tom Pennington/Getty Images | 1real |
Bernie Sanders SKEWERS Trump And Cruz For Their ‘Unconstitutional’ Profiling Of Muslims (VIDEO) | While the Republican presidential candidates have responded to the tragic terrorist attacks in Brussels with the most despicable, xenophobic remarks, Bernie Sanders took a different approach and instead defended the Muslim community.The most notable reactions from the GOP following the bombings in Brussels came from none other than candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Trump like most conservatives criticized President Barack Obama and said that if this attack had happened while he was in office, he would close up our borders. The front runner, who previously said he would like to ban all Muslims from coming into America, also said that he would use waterboarding as a solution and try to expand the laws to go beyond waterboarding. Cruz s reaction was just as anti-Muslim and offensive the Texas Senator issued a statement entitled We Can No Longer Surrender to the Enemy Through Political Correctness, which encouraged local police forces to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized. Sanders, on the other hand, offered some refreshing perspective. The Vermont senator denounced the GOP s xenophobia completely opposed Trump and Cruz s tactics, and said that he strongly disagreed with the idea of increasing surveillance on American Muslims because it would be unconstitutional and wrong . Sanders said: That would be unconstitutional, it would be wrong. We are fighting a terrorist organization, a barbaric organization that is killing innocent people. We are not fighting a religion. Instead of encouraging violence and hateful attitudes against Muslims, Sanders was in favor of improved intelligence sharing between the United States and other countries, as well as monitoring social media more closely in order to prevent ISIS from recruiting.You can watch Sanders interview below:Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton issued her own response on Tuesday, stating that the United States should ramp up security cooperation, not only in our own country among all levels of authorities but also with Europeans. Featured image via Gage Skidmore | 1real |
Aide Said He Was Running 'Bill Clinton Inc.' in New WikiLeaks Dump | Aide Said He Was Running 'Bill Clinton Inc.' in New WikiLeaks Dump
By MaryAlice Parks
" ABC " - A 12-page memo written by a former aide to President Bill Clinton illustrates how he and other advisers raised millions of dollars for the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons after they left the White House, according to a new batch of emails released by WikiLeaks.
The purported memo from Doug Band details how he and his team locked in lucrative speaking deals for Bill Clinton and how he leveraged his work at his global consulting firm, Teneo Strategies, to persuade clients to contribute to the Clinton Foundation. Band described his work as running "Bill Clinton Inc."
"We also have solicited and obtained, as appropriate, in-kind services for the president and his family for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like, Band allegedly said in the document.
A Teneo representative told ABC News in a statement: "As the memo demonstrates, Teneo worked to encourage clients, where appropriate, to support the Clinton Foundation because of the good work that it does around the world. It also clearly shows that Teneo never received any financial benefit or benefit of any kind from doing so."
Band, the Clinton Foundation and staff for Bill Clinton did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The memo appeared to be targeted at informing lawyers and top Clinton advisers about fundraising efforts. In previously released emails, dated just days before this memo, Band expressed concern over the conflated, tangled and confused web of personnel roles and money in the Clinton world, citing, for example, his opinion that Chelsea Clinton was running a business out of the family foundation office. In this memo, he pushed for more clearly defined roles and documents outlining conflicts of interest.
Around this same time, in late 2011 and early 2012, Chelsea Clinton, according to the emails, was complaining and threatening to launch internal investigations after hearing that Teneo employees were making solicitations and evoking her fathers name without his approval. This offended Band, and in one email exchange, he purportedly called her a spoiled brat kid.
"I don't deserve this from her and deserve a tad more respect or at least a direct dialogue for me to explain these things, Band allegedly wrote in an email to John Podesta , now chairman for Hillary Clinton 's campaign.
Band added that Chelsea Clinton has nothing else to do but create issues to justify what shes doing because she, as she has said, hasn't found her way and has a lack of focus in her life.
In the memo, Band said he had convinced Dow Jones and Coca-Cola, two Teneo clients, to give to the Clinton Foundation and pay for in-kind services to Bill Clinton, such as his trips to conferences. It also discussed how Band urged UBS to hire Hillary Clinton to give paid speeches. Moreover, the memo revealed that Laureate International Universities, a for-profit school, was paying Bill Clinton $3.5 million annually to serve as its Honorary Chairman.
The Clinton campaign has not confirmed nor denied the authenticity of the emails or commented on any content in them. ABC News has not determined the authenticity of the emails published by WikiLeaks.
ABC News' Matthew Claiborne contributed to this report. | 1real |
WOW! IS MEGHAN MCCAIN FINISHED With The Hateful Hags of “The View” After Today’s Blow Up With Joy Behar? [VIDEO] | It s pretty common knowledge for anyone s who s tortured themselves by watching The View, that it s really nothing more than a liberal, think-tank for dummies with too much time on their hands. Only one month ago, Meghan McCain left her job at Fox News as a co-host on The Five to plant herself at the end of the table, where anywhere between 4-6 angry women spend one-hour every weekday telling their viewers why they re angry, and why they hate President Trump and anyone who supports him. Thankfully for Meghan, she s the daughter of RINO Senator John McCain, one of the angriest men in politics, so she knows a thing or two about how to handle angry, and irrational people, who are driven by hate, and inspired by their desire to seek revenge. She also knows that her position at the end of the table (where the token conservatives are seated on The View), was likely offered to her because she was already on the anti-Trump train and didn t need any coaching.Every day, it becomes more and more obvious to the viewers that the pressure cooker relationship between unhinged co-hosts, Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin, and their hated opponent Meghan McCain won t last. If I was a betting woman, I d bet McCain is packing up her dressing room and heading back to Fox for another attempt at more intellectual discourse and meaningful dialogue by the end of this year.Watch [Fireworks start at about the 3:30-minute mark]: There s a lot of Democrats asking for [Franken] to step down if you can believe it I don t just watch Fox, McCain said, looking at Behar. Fox is sex harassment central, Behar interrupted. You know what. That s so cheap. I m trying to talk about the fact that I watch other networks and people in your party are calling for the stepping down of Al Franken because of this investigation being a distraction, a frustrated McCain shot back.Whoopi attempted to interject, before losing her words and simply exclaiming, Well, shoot. I was responding to Joy. I just don t think that saying Fox is X, I know, I used to work there, McCain continued. We re talking about the present. This is what s exhausting about this conversation. I totally agree with you that it s absolutely disgusting at this point that we re still having conversations about Roy Moore. He should step down. but right now we re talking about another senator. We re also talking about hypocrisy, which is what provoked my outburst, Behar explained. Trump s hypocrisy, Fox s hypocrisy, Breitbart, Sean Hannity, all of them. What about the hypocrisy of Bill Clinton right now? McCain asked, prompting Joy to ask, Why bring up Bill Clinton at this point? It was at this point Whoopi stopped the conversation in its tracks, saying, We re doing and we ll be right back, before the show went to commercials. TooFabDo you think Meghan McCain will last another month on The View? We d love to hear your thoughts below. | 1real |
Frankfurt to evacuate 60,000 people to defuse British WWII bomb | FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Around 60,000 inhabitants of Germany s financial capital Frankfurt will be ordered to leave their homes on Sunday while a large World War Two bomb discovered at a building site is made safe, the police said. Germany s central bank, the Bundesbank, Frankfurt s Goethe University, and at least two hospitals will also be evacuated, in one of the largest evacuations in German post-war history. The 1.4-tonne HC 4000 bomb dropped by the British air force during World War Two was uncovered on a building site on Wismarer Strasse in Frankfurt s leafy Westend where many wealthy bankers live. Bomb disposal experts who examined it said the massive evacuation could wait until the weekend. We are still working on the modalities of the evacuation plan, a spokeswoman for Frankfurt police said on Wednesday. | 0fake |
WHOA! FORMER DEMOCRAT CONGRESSWOMAN Reveals Hillary’s Criminal Past [VIDEO] | Dr. Cynthia McKinney reveals Hillary s murderous past with Benghazi, and how the globalists will attempt to fuel race wars to further divide americans.Help us spread the word about the liberty movement, we re reaching millions help us reach millions more. Via: InfoWarsDr. Cynthia McKinney has made a career of speaking her mind and challenging authority. With her opinions, actions, and even her sense of style, McKinney has inspired both admiration and controversy.McKinney s political career began unofficially in 1986 when her father, Georgia State Representative Billy McKinney, put her name on the ballot as a write-in. Cynthia McKinney was living in Jamaica at the time and did not take the matter seriously; still, she garnered a large percentage of votes without even trying. Two years later, McKinney ran for and won the seat, creating the first father/daughter combination to serve together in the Georgia State House of Representatives. Cynthia immediately began making her own mark, defying House dress codes for women by wearing trousers instead of dresses. She spoke out against the first Persian Gulf War, and despite being in the House with her father, she often disagreed and voted against him.In 1992, McKinney won a seat in the US House of Representatives in Georgia s newly created 11th district. She was the first African-American woman to represent Georgia in the US Congress. Though a Democrat during President Clinton s tenure, McKinney voted against NAFTA, showing that she was not one to simply follow the Party line. McKinney worked hard in Washington to clean up pollution in her district and improve its rural roads.During her second term, McKinney earned distinctive committee assignments with the National Security Committee and the International Relations Committee s International Operations and Human Rights Subcommittee. A supporter of a Palestinian State in Israel-occupied territory, she sparked controversy by criticizing American policy in the Middle East. After the 9/11 attacks, McKinney suggested the President might have had prior knowledge of 9/11. The criticism she received from this highly controversial idea probably contributed to her defeat in the 2002 election; however, she ran for the seat again and was re-elected in 2004.Between terms in office, McKinney traveled the country and Europe, speaking against the war in Iraq war and also about her 2002 defeat, which she attributed to Republicans being organized to cross over to vote against her in the Democratic primaries. Her career, including this episode of her defeat, was made into a documentary film titled American Blackout.Once back in office, she continued her criticism of the Bush administration on the first anniversary of the 9/11 Commission Report by gathering victims families and intelligence experts together on panels to address the flaws in the report and critique its recommendations regarding foreign and domestic policy. In 2007, McKinney left the Democratic Party to become a Presidential Candidate for the Green Party. | 1real |
WATCH: Trump Supporter Gets Totally CRUSHED By Robert Reich For Defending Anti-Labor Cabinet Pick | Trump mouthpiece Kayleigh McEnany attacked former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on Thursday night and quickly discovered that she was out of her depth.While CNN awaited Donald Trump s appearance at a rally, Anderson Cooper turned to Reich for his thoughts on Trump conflicts of interest and his cabinet selections.Reich slammed Trump s picks, pointing out that he has chosen people to run departments that they want to destroy. For instance, Jeff Sessions has been chosen to run the Department of Justice and he s an opponent of civil rights and the Voting Right Act. Betsy DeVos hates public education and she has been chosen to run the Education Department. And Andrew Puzder was recently chosen to run the Labor Department even though he is hostile towards workers and opposes minimum wage, overtime pay, and basic labor regulations.Well, of course, Kayleigh McEnany threw a hissy fit about what Reich said and she proceeded to attack him and offer a pathetic defense of Trump s choices. I just want to quickly say to Secretary Reich, I thought it was really unfair the way you characterize the cabinet picks, she began. You know Jeff Sessions is a great guy. He s not against the Voting Rights Act. But that s not true. Jeff Sessions is, in fact, against the Voting Rights Act. He has often claimed that its provisions are unconstitutional and actually cheered when the Supreme Court gutted a key piece of it in 2013.And then McEnany defended Trump s Labor pick. I think the pick today, Mr. Puzder, is a guy who his employees have said he cares about the cashier the same way he cares about the business owners, McEnany said. I think it s really unfair to characterize him that way. She continued to defend Puzder by noting that he only opposes the federal minimum wage, which really doesn t help since without federal minimum wage many red states would set their already low wages even lower. She then accused Reich of attacking Puzder just because he s a conservative. Just because he s conservative, it doesn t mean he s anti-worker, she whined.But Reich was prepared for such bullshit and promptly ripped McEnany a new one. I m not saying he s anti-worker because he s conservative, Reich replied. I m saying he s anti-worker because he s anti-worker. The Department of Labor came into his restaurants and found that half his restaurants had wage and labor violations that violated the law of the United States. You think that s pro-worker? You think it s pro-worker that his weekly paycheck equals the average yearly paycheck of his workers and he s against a minimum wage increase? You think that is pro-worker? I m sorry I ve never heard of that. McEnany then resorted to accusing Reich of being a socialist and claimed that Puzder is qualified because he s a rich fast food CEO. Of course, she doesn t mention that he s a staunch opponent of the Fight for $15, a movement by fast food workers to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. In other words, he has a conflict of interest because by taking the Labor Secretary job he can destroy the drive for fair wages that his own employees are part of.And Reich called McEnany out for it. But why should they be Secretary of Labor when they are in charge of enforcing the labor laws and they have a record of not even obeying the labor laws? he asked.McEnany then spouted bullshit about how trickle-down will work because it worked in the 1980s, which forced Reich to shut her down. It did not work in the 1980s, Reich forcefully declared. Wages were flat The median wage started to flatten and decline. And that s because we had a president who believe in supply-side trickle-down economics and nothing trickled down Nothing nothing trickled down to typical workers. Here s the video via YouTube.Indeed, the only people who saw gains because of Reagan s policies were the wealthy. And his economic policies are still punishing Americans to this day and all Republicans want to do is double down on them like they did in Kansas, and as we all know, Kansas economy has imploded.The next time McEnany thinks about attacking a former Labor Secretary who was also a former Harvard professor and current professor at the University of California at Berkeley, she should just keep her mouth shut. She won t embarrass herself that way.Featured Image: Screenshot | 1real |
Those Intel Reports That Nunes Ran To Trump With Reveal A BOMBSHELL That Trump Will HATE | Remember the House Intelligence Committee s investigation into the Trump-Russia connection, and how Chairman Devin Nunes compromised it by running to Trump with documents he should have shown to his fellow committee members first? And how he then had to recuse himself from the investigation for all of that? It seems that those documents do, in fact, contain a bombshell, but it s not the one that Trump insisted we d find.House Republicans and Democrats have completed their review of those documents, and they demonstrate that nobody in the Obama administration wiretapped Trump at any time, nor did they do anything unusual, let alone illegal, with foreign surveillance. Even the scandal that Republicans tried to create around Susan Rice s request to unmask certain members of Trump s campaign turned out to be a big ol nothingburger.One particular Congressional source said that Rice s requests were both normal and appropriate, and another said that there are absolutely no smoking guns present that demonstrate Rice and Obama did anything wrong. This vindicates Rice s assertions that her requests were normal: There were occasions when I would receive a report in which a US person was referred to name not provided, just a US person and sometimes in that context, in order to understand the importance of the report, and assess its significance, it was necessary to find out, or request the information as to who the US official was.The notion that some people are trying to suggest, is that by asking for the identity of a person is leaking it, is unequivocally false. There is no connection between unmasking and leaking. Trump isn t going to like this. It makes him look like a bigger paranoid, narcissistic moron than ever over these tweets:Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my wires tapped in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017Is it legal for a sitting President to be wire tapping a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017I d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017He also said he felt somewhat vindicated by what was in those reports. But besides that, he thought this was going to be a yuuuuuuuuuuge story. When he was asked whether he thought Rice acted illegally, he said, Do I think? Yes, I think. He also said: I think it s going to be the biggest story. It s such an important story for our country and the world. Nunes looks like an idiot too, and now should probably resign his chairmanship. If Trump says anything, expect him to double down on his accusations. He doesn t let anything go and he doesn t ever admit he s wrong.Featured image by Alex Wong via Getty Images | 1real |
TRUMP GOES THERE: Comments On Hillary’s Health And Low Energy Campaign [Video] | Donald Trump is so funny! He was speaking at a National Association of Home Builders and made these remarks about Hillary s health: She s voted for tax increases, and by the way, she s proposing a big one today in her speech, her Teleprompter speech. Her speeches are so short though. They don t last long. They re like ten minutes and lets get out of here. Go back home and go to sleep. Three days later she gets up and does another one and goes back home and goes to sleep. | 1real |
Trump's Great America To Deport Teenage Babysitter for Tax Evasion | Topics: arrest , Donald J. Trump , James Comey Tuesday, 15 November 2016
Austin, TX - A local babysitter of Mexican descent was arrested yesterday for failing to pay taxes on income earned while babysitting. The babysitter, a 15-year old juvenile, will be arraigned in Federal court on Tuesday.
The girl, whose name is being withheld due to her age, reportedly earned $1,800 from babysitting over the course of the prior tax year, and is a full time high school student with strong grades.
FBI officials tracked check deposits made at a community bank. Parents all reported that the checks were for babysitting services.
The income should have been reported by April 15, subject to an extension. The babysitter is also being charged with Social Security fraud and Medicare fraud.
Local FBI officials, led by Director James Comey, applauded the new initiative modeled after the policies of Donald Trump, stating, "Here we are, making America great again! Feeling so proud! This is exactly what we planned for!"
One FBI insider stated anonymously, "The juvenile was brought into the country as an infant illegally and based on her tax evasion, she is a criminal, so we need to get her back over that wall, or fence, or whatever it will be, just get her back to Mexico, let's just say."
Trump denies that his policies imply such extreme actions and denied any accountability, tweeting, "Comey is going rogue again."
Many young parents are disappointed with the news. The juvenile was known as one of the neighborhood's most popular babysitters.
"Such a shock," stated one local mother who would not give her name, "Where am I supposed to get my babysitting services now?"
mike_peril@aol.com Make Mike Peril's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!) | 1real |
Trump declines invitation to speak at NAACP convention | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump has declined an invitation to address the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said on Wednesday. The White House did not offer any details on why Trump would not speak to the 108-year-old civil rights group. “My understanding is that the invitation has been declined for this year,” Sanders told reporters at a briefing. She said that while Trump would not speak at the conference, the White House would be happy to have a dialogue with the group. “We would certainly like to be able to continue to do that,” Sanders said. The NAACP did not immediately respond to request for comment. Trump had declined to speak at the NAACP convention last year because it coincided with the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where he was formally nominated as the party’s presidential candidate. Previous Republican presidential nominees regularly attended the annual meetings of the oldest U.S. civil rights organization. Trump’s most recent predecessors in the White House, Barack Obama, a Democrat, and George W. Bush, a Republican, both delivered speeches to the NAACP during their time in office. This year’s NAACP convention begins Saturday in Baltimore. During his campaign, Trump pledged to improve the lives of black Americans, who voted overwhelmingly in favor of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 presidential election. Trump has been criticized by some groups, including the Congressional Black Caucus, for not doing enough to address issues in the African-American community. | 0fake |
Biden Warns Trump Is Risk to U.S. Security - The New York Times | SCRANTON, Pa. — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. warned on Monday that Donald J. Trump, even as a candidate, had elevated the dangers confronting American allies and military personnel overseas. Mr. Biden said that on a trip to Kosovo and Serbia this week, he would be compelled to “reassure” allies that the United States would honor its commitment to NATO, given Mr. Trump’s comments saying he would reassess the arrangement if elected. “Because they’re worried,” Mr. Biden said, in his first campaign appearance beside Hillary Clinton. He added that if his son Beau, who died of brain cancer last year, were still serving in Iraq, he would advise him that the danger had increased “a couple clicks” because of Mr. Trump’s remarks, which have included the suggestion that President Obama was the “founder” of the Islamic State. “This guy’s shame has no limits,” he said. Mr. Biden suggested Mr. Trump had demonstrated a fondness for brutal leaders like Saddam Hussein — “He would have loved Stalin,” Mr. Biden said twice — and repeatedly reminded the crowd of the stakes. “There’s a guy that follows me, right back here, has the nuclear codes,” Mr. Biden said at one point. Mr. Trump is so reckless, the vice president said, that if his late son had planned to enlist in a Trump administration, “I would have thrown my body in front of him. ” For Mr. Biden, after nearly eight years in the nation’s chief supporting role, the appearance hinted at the niche he sees for himself as Election Day nears: a figure who can argue, plainly and personally, that Mr. Trump has already imperiled the nation he aspires to lead. It was also a glimpse at the campaign that wasn’t — the earned folksiness, the willingness to test audience stamina, the years of practice at appearing unpracticed — laying bare the strengths and tics of a candidate who decided last year against challenging the woman he spent Monday embracing. He mustered characteristic zeal to hold forth on American greatness and sacrifice. He interrupted himself at one point to wave to his family, arranging aloud for a future hug. He appeared to make an joke about an old house of his in Scranton. For much of the performance — with sleeves rolled slightly and any prepared text doomed to be ignored — Mr. Biden assured his hometown’s residents that Mrs. Clinton was “made of the same stuff,” even if she could not always show it. “Maybe the difference between the Irish Catholic and the Methodist,” he wondered aloud, comparing himself to Mrs. Clinton from behind the seal. “We wear everything on our sleeve!” Since announcing in October that he would not seek the presidency, Mr. Biden has been a loyal Democratic lieutenant, taking care to praise Mrs. Clinton in public and rousing Democrats with a vintage address at the party’s national convention last month. But their relationship has more often been defined by an intense rivalry in private — a predictable tension, perhaps, for two figures who have long imagined themselves in the nation’s top job. As he considered a run last year, still grieving his son’s death, Mr. Biden felt slighted as the party establishment fell in line behind Mrs. Clinton, viewing himself as the natural heir to President Obama’s legacy. In conversations with donors, Mr. Biden expressed astonishment at Mrs. Clinton’s handling of questions over her private email server. At times last year, people close to the vice president said, the mere mention of Mrs. Clinton’s name could make him fume. “They were professionals, but also competitors,” William M. Daley, President Obama’s former chief of staff, said of their time in the administration. “They’d do the dance. There was respect there, but Joe considered himself the expert on foreign policy. ” Asked if largely watching the campaign from the sidelines had been hard for Mr. Biden, Mr. Daley said: “Of course. He wanted to run. ” Yet in their first joint campaign appearance on Monday, in the city where both claim roots — Mrs. Clinton’s father also grew up here, as she said at the outset — any lingering rancor was well concealed. They took the stage to Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising,” with Mrs. Clinton clapping the beat. Mr. Biden settled in a chair behind her, turning back to smile at the crowd. Mrs. Clinton introduced him as “a fighter for families” and a passionate advocate. She said, if elected, she would ask Mr. Biden to continue to help lead a “cancer moonshot” initiative at the White House. She even brandished a few retail politicking touches that Mr. Biden might appreciate, describing her own christening “at the Methodist church on Court Street,” recalling summer visits to Lake Winola and detailing her grandfather’s time at the Scranton Lace mill. She said her father had “literally hopped a freight train from Scranton to Chicago” to find work, deploying Mr. Biden’s favorite adverb, if perhaps unwittingly. She heaped praise on local officials, including “your amazing Lackawanna County recorder of deeds,” and spoke deferentially of her time in the “ cabinet. ” And in an attack on Mr. Trump, Mrs. Clinton — a speaker so formal that she often ignores contractions in prepared text to deliver them as two words — set off on a flourish of her own. She was discussing Mr. Trump’s assertion that he provides child care services. In fact, Mrs. Clinton said, those benefits apply only to the pampered guests at some Trump properties — not to his workers. “Just sayin’,” she added. Repeatedly, the complex filled with chants for the two, with signs of “Welcome home, Joe!” or, simply, “Joe” shooting into view. Mr. Biden, recalling weekly breakfasts with Mrs. Clinton, described himself as her “Obama whisperer. ” “She’d look at me and say, ‘What did he mean by that? ’” Mr. Biden said, often clutching the lectern with two hands. Often, Mr. Biden conspicuously interrupted himself, as if bantering with his own notes. “I really mean this,” he said. “This is not a joke. ” But sometimes it was. Shortly after taking the stage, he meandered through an anecdote about a former home. “I was there when I was running, and up in the bedroom, written on the wall is one of those, ‘Joe Biden slept here,’” he said. “Then it said, ‘lived here. ’” He held for a beat: “Glad they added the ‘lived here’ part. ” Chuckles filled the space, where Mr. Biden had appeared with Mrs. Clinton eight years earlier to campaign for President Obama. For about 30 minutes, the people were rapt. Then a child cried audibly. “I am testing your stamina,” Mr. Biden said, smiling once more. He wrapped up. | 0fake |
Trump Fan Puts Disgusting, Racist Float Of Obama In 4th Of July Parade (IMAGES) | Don Christy, who claims he s neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but rather, a patriot in the most vile sense of the word, had a float in the town of Sheridan, Indiana s 4th of July parade. It wasn t all stars and stripes, though. No, he decided to go way too far with it, and constructed a likeness of President Obama in a toilet, with the words Lying African on it.While sane and reasonable people are questioning the town for even allowing that float, Christy is busy waving his flag and claiming that he tries to do something outrageous every year for that parade, because that makes it totally okay. Last year, he made fun of marriage equality by dressing gay and marrying a guy in the parade. This year, he did that horribly disrespectful and bigoted display as a statement against what he sees as rampant dishonesty in the White House, along with political correctness: It s time to start changing our country back a little bit. Christy is 73 years old, so he remembers well what life was like before African-Americans could even dream of seeing a black man elected President. That was a great time for white people no minorities, with their irrelevant, irrational feelings were ruining the country for white people with their political correctness.Take a look at the float in all its hateful glory:So.. today in Sheridan Indiana.. somehow this float was approved for their parade .. yea wtf Sheridan. Classy. pic.twitter.com/9NEOlMFLIs ashley s mething (@ashleys_mething) July 4, 2016And from another angle: Man drives Lying African Obama float in Fourth of July parade: SHERIDAN, Ind. Sheridan, Indiana is a small https://t.co/OJE6zirL9E Ogden Daily News (@ogdendailynews) July 5, 2016Christy thinks portraying Obama in one of the most racist and disrespectful lights imaginable is just fun and games, but others aren t laughing at all. Another Sheridan resident, Rebekah Sanders, said: Too many people die fighting for our freedom. I don t think that display is the type of freedom they are out there fighting for. She added: I do not want my child to think that racism is OK. Unfortunately, Christy doesn t care about that kind of thing. He s a Trumper, so he probably wants children to grow up in the supremely white environment he grew up in. He s on King Donald s bandwagon regarding political correctness, and totally missing the point that people always found racism offensive and saw it everywhere. The only difference is that now they re speaking up about it because they can.Not to worry, though. Christy issued a totally insincere and backhanded apology for this travesty of a float: I apologize to anyone I offended, which would be a total liberal. Here s hoping the Sheridan Lions Club bans this small, disgusting excuse of a human being from all future parades.Featured image via embedded tweets | 1real |
November 23: Daily Contrarian Reads | November 23: Daily Contrarian Reads By David Stockman. Posted On Wednesday, November 23rd, 2016 My daily contrarian reads for Wednesday, November 23rd, 2016. You need to login to view this content.
David Stockman’s Contra Corner isn’t your typical financial tipsheet. Instead it’s an ongoing dialogue about what’s really happening in the markets… the economy… and governments… so you can understand the world around you and make better decisions for yourself.
David believes the world -- certainly the United States -- is at a great inflection point in human history. The massive credit inflation of the last three decades has reached its apogee and is now going to splatter spectacularly.
This will have lasting ramifications on how governments tax and regulate you… the type of work you and your family members will have available and what you get paid… the value of your nest egg… and all other areas comprising your quality of life. Login
David Stockman's Contra Corner is the only place where mainstream delusions and cant about the Warfare State, the Bailout State, Bubble Finance and Beltway Banditry are ripped, refuted and rebuked. Subscribe now to receive David Stockman’s latest posts by email each day as well as his model portfolio, Lee Adler’s Daily Data Dive and David’s personally curated insights and analysis from leading contrarian thinkers. | 1real |
Put Some Me-ing in Your Be-ing | 2 Replies
Jennifer Hoffman – Whenever I hear the word selfish, I can hear my mother’s voice saying ‘Don’t be selfish’ when I didn’t want to share something. As the oldest child and the oldest of my cousins, I was always expected to share my things with everyone, whether I wanted to or not. Selfishness was defined as not being willing to let everyone have whatever belonged to me anytime they wanted it, a belief I highly disagreed with. But there is a big difference between being selfish, taking everything so no one else can have any, and being self-ish, as in making your needs a priority, and this needs to be our focus now. Our joy is fully available when we ask ‘What makes me happy’ and ‘What works best for me’ and this happens when we are willing to be self-ish and putting ‘me-ing into our be-ing’.
It is not possible for us to be comfortable within the collective if we are not self-ish because without selfishness, or having an awareness of our self and out needs, we can’t have any boundaries. And boundaries are how we manage the energy flows into and out of our realities. They ensure our energetic stability and set the foundation for the joy and other energies we want in our life. Without boundaries we risk scattering our energy and giving our power away. The key is to find the balance that maintains our individual joy-based energies as we share with and participate in the collective energy.
Being self-ish is a delicate balance that is both in-clusive and ex-clusive, and the fulcrum or midpoint is the point of our optimal energetic frequency and vibration, which determines who approaches our boundaries and feels the need to be included and who excludes themselves because they can’t feel or do the connection. Anyone is welcome to be with us if they can pay the energetic price of admission, which could be to ‘love, honor, and respect me’. As long as we maintain a strong ‘me’ focus, we can be inclusively self-ish in a way that allows us to be confident in our insistence on the joy or other energies we want to be part of our reality.
If we use another word for self-ish, like self-aware, self-focused, self-caring, and self-sourced, we don’t associate it with the negative meaning our mothers used, which also led to us believing that we needed to share our energy and power with everyone who looked like they needed it. Being self-ish simply means that in every choice and interaction, we are aware of our needs and we give them consideration first, without doubting our worthiness.
Our spiritual path is both self-ish and unselfish, where we are inclusive in all things but exclusive in the energies we choose to participate in. This perspective also liberates us from the Martyred Healer paradigm, where we feel the need to heal everyone’s wounds, while denying ourselves access to the joy we try so hard to create for others. Putting ‘me-ing in your be-ing’ feeds your soul with the joy it craves, while empowering you to expand your reality to explore the fullness of your potential and possibilities. And when we are at the frequency of joy we become an example of empowered, joyful energy for everyone, as well as creating a portal for that energy to be experienced in the collective.
At a time when the energies feel so chaotic and scattered, focusing on our joy, peace of mind and heart, love, and highest frequencies and outcomes allows us to ground those energies firmly into our realities. We can no longer adjust our reality to meet others’ needs, it feels too bad now. Nor can we wait for them to figure out what they want, they will have to do that for themselves. So much of what we are doing now is challenging us to be more self-ish, but that simply means to put ourselves in a state of joy so our light can shine brightly, and in the way that we and the world needs right now.
And putting the ‘me-ing in our be-ing’ reminds us that when we give our needs the attention they deserve, we are allowing our heaven on earth to become possible and that is a good thing for everyone. Copyright (c) 2016 by Jennifer Hoffman. All rights reserved. Share this: | 1real |
Many Austrian voters still undecided ahead of election: poll | ZURICH (Reuters) - More than a quarter of Austrian voters may still be undecided ahead of the Oct. 15 election, according to one poll, although a separate survey suggested that Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz s People s Party maintains a robust lead. Twenty-seven percent of voters were undecided, according data from a Research Affairs online poll of 600 people released late Saturday by tabloid newspaper Oesterreich. Another poll published on Sunday by the Kurier newspaper showed 33 percent of voters backed Kurz s conservative party, with current Chancellor Christian Kern s left-leaning Social Democrats running second at 27 percent. The rightist Freedom Party was third, according to the Kurier poll, with 25 percent. Last week the Social Democrats chairman resigned after the party was linked to two Facebook accounts that made unsubstantiated allegations against Kurz and the controversy is likely boost voter turnout, said Wolfgang Bachmayer, whose OGM research service conducted the survey for Kurier. His poll suggests 79 percent of eligible voters will cast their ballots. Issues of substance have been completely overshadowed, with mud-slinging instead moving into the spotlight, Bachmayer said . On the brighter side of things, there are clear indications that participation will rise. Austria s co-governing Social Democrats and conservative People s Party said on Friday they would sue each other in the escalating scandal. The Kurier poll was conducted between Sept. 29 and Oct. 5 and included 1,002 telephone interviews, with 470 people identifying themselves as voters certain to cast ballots on Oct. 15. Oesterreich s online survey, gathered from last Monday to Wednesday, had a relatively small sample size of 600 people, with a wide margin of error. | 0fake |
U.S. gives Laos extra $90 million to help clear unexploded ordnance | VIENTIANE (Reuters) - The United States announced on Tuesday it would provide an additional $90 million over the next three years to help Laos, heavily bombed during the Vietnam War, clear unexploded ordnance that has killed or injured more than 20,000 people. The figure announced during President Barack Obama’s first visit to Laos is close to the $100 million the United States has spent in the past 20 years on clearing its UXO in Laos. From 1964 to 1973, U.S. warplanes dropped more than 270 million cluster munitions on the communist country, one-third of which did not explode, the Lao National Regulatory Authority for UXO says. Obama became the first U.S. president to visit Laos when he arrived in the once-isolated country on Monday to attend two regional summits, half a century after America’s “secret war” left Laos with the unfortunate distinction of being the most heavily bombed country, per capita, in history. The White House said in a statement U.S. programs in Laos had helped slash UXO casualties from 300 to less than 50 a year and the additional funding would be used for a “comprehensive UXO survey of Laos and for continued clearing operations”. “The United States is helping Laos clear unexploded ordnance, which poses a threat to people and hampers economic development,” it said. The package would help support UXO victims needing rehabilitation, including orthotics and prosthetics, it added. Obama, in a speech on Tuesday in the capital, Vientiane, addressed the secret war. “As a result of that conflict many people fled or were driven from their homes,” Obama said. “At the time America did not acknowledge its role.” “I believe the United States has a moral obligation to help Laos heal.” UXO remains a stubborn problem in the region and experts say it could take decades to clear landmines and bombs in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, which were beset by conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s, and in Cambodia’s case, in the 1980s and 1990s too. In the central Lao province of Xieng Khouang, the area most heavily bombed by U.S. aircraft during the war in neighboring Vietnam, there is a trail of devastation. About 80 percent of the people of landlocked Laos rely on agriculture, but some of it is simply too dangerous to farm. Approximately a quarter of its villages are contaminated with unexploded ordnance, says the British-based Mines Advisory Group, which helps find and destroy the bombs. On Wednesday, Obama is expected to visit an organization in Vientiane that works with those disabled by unexploded ordnance, the Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise Visitor Center. | 0fake |
Trump banking review raises fears for global standards talks | LONDON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s review of post-crisis banking rules could sound the death knell for new global standards now being finalized and rip apart a common approach to regulating international lenders, bankers and regulators said. Central banks and watchdogs around the world have spent the past eight years drawing up regulation aimed at preventing a repeat of the 2007-2009 financial crisis, but there are fears that project could unravel after Trump said he wants the U.S. to row back on capital rules. Trump’s order for a regulatory review to overcome what he sees as obstacles to lending came as banking watchdogs were trying to complete the final piece of global capital requirements, known as Basel III. Given that the United States wants to shrink the banking rule book, there are doubts over whether the Basel rules can make it over the finishing line next month if they don’t have backing from the United States. Without support from the world’s biggest capital market, other countries would be less willing to commit too. The core aim of the outstanding part of Basel III that regulators are working on - dubbed Basel IV by critical banks who worry about more stringent capital requirements - is to impose more consistency into how banks calculate the amount of capital they hold against risky assets like loans. JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon said in the aftermath of the financial crisis that European rivals had been “a lot more aggressive” than American banks in calculating capital, meaning they were holding less. European policymakers have rejected that criticism, but their region’s banks have been lobbying against the remaining Basel rules, saying they would force them to increase significantly the amount of capital they need to hold. If the United States fails to approve the completion of Basel III, the perceived problem that European banks get away with holding less capital than U.S. lenders may not be properly tackled, a source involved in the negotiations said. “It’s in the interests of American banks to get this done,” the source said. Others are less optimistic that a deal can now be done after Trump’s intervention. “It’s going to delay completing Basel III, and perhaps lead to it not being concluded,” an adviser to banks said on condition of anonymity. “I do fear that Basel IV is doomed,” a banking industry official added. There are headwinds from elsewhere, too. Patrick McHenry, Republican vice chairman of the House financial services committee, fired a warning shot at Federal Reserve Governor Janet Yellen about the Basel talks in a letter dated Jan. 31, ahead of Trump’s executive order. The Fed must “cease” all attempts to negotiate binding standards “burdening American business” until the Trump Administration has had the opportunity to nominate officials that prioritize “America’s best interests”, McHenry said. While lawmakers often call on regulators to ease pressure on firms, regulators said Trump’s intervention in banking rules gives more clout to McHenry’s warning. The Basel Committee declined to comment. Trump’s decision to review existing, post-crisis banking rules has rung alarm bells among regulators outside the country. Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, which regulates the euro zone’s main lenders, said on Monday that easing banking rules could threaten financial stability. Draghi was chairman of the Group of 20 Economies’ (G20) regulatory task force, the Financial Stability Board, which during the financial crisis was instrumental in building up a global approach to reinforcing banking standards. A former regulator said the United States would be scoring an own goal by withdrawing from multilateral bodies like Basel as it would no longer be shaping rules that impinge on U.S. banking competitiveness globally. “It’s early days, but what we have seen in language and rhetoric from Washington is worrying,” said David Wright, a former top EU official who was part of crisis-era efforts to create the global regulatory consensus. “If you break international consensus, you are effectively opening up a regulatory race and heaven knows where it will end,” said Wright, now at Flint Global, which advises companies on regulatory matters. Wright was referring to what was seen in the run-up to the financial crisis, when countries like Britain resorted to a “light touch” approach to banks to make London a more attractive financial center. Valdis Dombrovskis, the EU’s financial services chief, said last week that international regulatory cooperation had been vital in tackling the financial crisis and must continue. Much will hinge on how much regulatory change Trump can actually push through. Former Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, who jointly sponsored the Dodd Frank Act that Trump wants to review, told the BBC last week he does not expect Congress to approve the wholesale rolling back of rules, but the Trump administration could pressure U.S. regulators to ease up on applying existing requirements. Anil Kashyap, a Bank of England policymaker, said last month that Trump’s nomination for the powerful role of Fed Vice Chair in charge of banking supervision would shape the U.S. approach to international rule-making. It will have a “huge impact”, a regulatory source added. The fear among global regulators is that multilateral bodies like the Basel Committee and the Financial Stability Board could be abandoned by the United States under Trump. Jose Ignacio Goirigolzarri, chairman of Spain’s Bankia, told Spanish television on Tuesday he would be concerned if Trump was questioning the usefulness of international banking rules. “It would worry me very much because I think it’s very important, very relevant that there have been advances in the homogenization of regulation amongst developed countries,” he said. | 0fake |
Bank of England Asks UK Banks To Detail Their Exposure To Deutsche And Italian Banks | Stupid Stuff, Late-2016 Edition by Sprott Money - Oct 26, 2016 11:03 AM
Debts implode, stocks plunge, economies contract, financial assets fall out of favor, and real things start attracting capital. And the people who caused the mess go quiet for a while. by williambanzai7 - Oct 26, 2016 10:39 AM
War is Peace... Bullion Banks "pass the parcel" on El Salvador’s Gold Reserves by BullionStar - Oct 26, 2016 12:30 AM
Gold lending by central banks to bullion banks is one of the most opaque areas of the gold market. Bank of England Asks UK Banks To Detail Their Exposure To Deutsche And Italian Banks Oct 26, 2016 2:13 PM 0 SHARES
In what may or may not be a coincidence, just hours after Bloomberg reported that DB launched a probe into whether it "misstated" derivatives, moments ago the FT reported that the Bank of England is seeking details from large British banks on their current exposure to Deutsche Bank and some of the biggest Italian banks, including Monte dei Paschi , "amid mounting market jitters over the health of Europe’s financial sector."
The FT notes that the request was made in recent weeks by the BoE’s Prudential Regulation Authority as investors sold off Deutsche and Monte dei Paschi, both of which have been the subject of scrutiny over their capital levels. Supervisors worldwide have attempted to curtail the links between large institutions since the 2008 banking crisis, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other big groups threatened to drag down the entire global financial system.
While the PRA regularly speaks to banks about their exposures, particularly to any lender that might be facing difficulty, the BoE’s recent intervention is a sign of continued nervousness among regulators that the interconnectedness of Europe’s largest banks could harm otherwise healthy groups if one of the weakest links were to fall into crisis.
Som more details:
Normally, exposures to other financial institutions are not disclosed to regulators unless they are particularly large or as part of annual stress tests. That forced the BoE to ask for the latest snapshot of the big UK banks’ exposures to their German and Italian rivals as those groups came under market attack. Banks can be exposed to one another directly through lending or derivatives but indirect exposures — such as lending to a counterparty of a bank in trouble — also need to be considered.
Global rules cap the amount that one bank can hold in another to 25 per cent of the first bank’s capital, while anything above 10 per cent must be disclosed to regulators. Smaller holdings are therefore harder for supervisors to spot.
Paul Sharma, a former PRA official now a consultant at Alvarez & Marsal, said large UK banks were now able to monitor their direct exposure to troubled banks on a “near real-time” basis but that market turmoil could complicate the picture.
The FT also writes that British regulators are particularly anxious about the impact of litigation costs on Deutsche’s already weak profitability and that large piles of non-performing loans could have a similarly corrosive impact on Italian banks .
As we pointed out earlier, Germany’s biggest bank still faces serious doubts on whether it will need to raise billions of euros of extra capital and slash costs drastically to strengthen its balance sheet and boost profits. Among the entities rumored to provide backstop capital are various middle-eastern funds as well as rumored Chinese investors.
Normally, similar reports of heightened regulatory scrutiny would lead to a brike selling in any named bank; however perhaps because Deutsche Bank has already been through hell and back over the past few months, this latest news will hardly come as a shock to investors.
Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank is set to announce earnings tomorrow, in which it is expected to announce a lower net loss of around €610 million, versus a massive €6 billion loss one year ago, much of which stemmed from write-downs on investment-banking and other assets. At this time last year, Deutsche Bank was kicking off its new, multi-year overhaul under Chief Executive John Cryan. This quarter's loss is expected to be largely due to another large major litigation provision ahead of a potential settlement with the DoJ. Analysts are split on precisely how much the bank will set aside, but their forecasts range from €250m to €1.5bn according to a consensus report compiled by the bank. Analysts also expect third-quarter revenues to be €7.1 billion, according to a consensus of 17 analysts' estimates compiled by the bank. That compares with €7.3 billion a year ago.
Prolonged uncertainty around Deutsche Bank's capital position-exacerbated by the litigation questions--have fueled persistent questions about whether the lender might be forced to sell shares, shed businesses it has planned to keep, or accelerate cost-cutting plans.
Keys to Deutsche Bank's plans for building its capital cushion include divesting its German retail-banking division called Postbank. That plan has proved more difficult than expected, and investors want to know the latest-especially if executives have changed their minds. Investors will also want to know when the bank is going to see the cash it is expecting from selling its roughly 20% stake in Chinese bank Hua Xia. The roughly $4 billion deal was announced in December 2015, but the proceeds have taken longer to arrive than executives expected.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to cut costs, DB has undergone on a major layoff spree and, as reported yesterday, is considering paying banker bonuses in compensation other than cash. | 1real |
TRUMP SOUNDED LIKE A CHOIR BOY Next To Hillary’s Foul-Mouthed, Abusive Rants: “Where’s the miserable c*ck sucker?”…and MORE | Hillary Clinton has a long history of violence and abusing and men, women and security officers.Of course, you ll never see any of these quotes from the condescending former First Witch in the mainstream media, but that doesn t mean they didn t happen. Hillary has a reputation for having a vulgar potty mouth and a nasty disposition. Wouldn t it be nice if the GOP leaders cared as much about her negatives as an 11 year old Trump story.Here are a few of her more memorable lines: Where is the G-damn f**king flag? I want the G-damn f**king flag up every f**king morning at f**king sunrise. (From the book Inside The White House by Ronald Kessler, p. 244 Hillary to the staff at the Arkansas Governor s mansion on Labor Day, 1991) You sold out, you mother f**ker! You sold out! From the book Inside by Joseph Califano, p. 213 Hillary yelling at Democrat lawyer. Son of a b*tch! (From the book American Evita by Christopher Anderson, p. 259 Hillary s opinion of President George W. Bush when she found out he secretly visited Iraq on Thanksgiving just days before her highly publicized trip.)F**k off! It s enough that I have to see you shit-kickers every day, I m not going to talk to you too!! Just do your G*damn job and keep your mouth shut. (From the book American Evita by Christopher Anderson, p. 90 Hillary to her State Trooper bodyguards after one of them greeted her with Good morning. You f**king idiot. (From the book Crossfire p. 84 Hillary to a State Trooper who was driving her to an event.) If you want to remain on this detail, get your f**king ass over here and grab those bags! (From the book The First Partner p. 259 Hillary to a Secret Service Agent who was reluctant to carry her luggage because he wanted to keep his hands free in case of an incident.) Get f**ked! Get the f**k out of my way!!! Get out of my face!!! (From the book Hillary s Scheme p. 89 Hillary s various comments to her Secret Service detail agents.) Stay the f**k back, stay the f**k away from me! Don t come within ten yards of me, or else! Just f**king do as I s ay, Okay!!!? (From the book Unlimited Access , by Clinton FBI Agent in Charge, Gary Aldrige, p. 139 Hillary screaming at her Secret Service detail.) Why do I have to keep proving to people that I am not a liar?! (From the book The Survivor, by John Harris, p. 382 Hillary in her 2000 Senate campaign) Where s the miserable c*ck sucker? (From the book The Truth About Hillary by Edward Klein, p. 5 Hillary shouting at a Secret Service officer) Put this on the ground! I left my sunglasses in the limo. I need those sunglasses. We need to go back! (From the book Dereliction of Duty p. 71-72 Hillary to Marine One helicopter pilot to turn back while en route to Air Force One.) Come on Bill, put your dick up! You can t f**k her here!! (From the book Inside The White House by Ronald Kessler, p. 243 Hillary to Gov. Clinton when she spots him talking with an attractive female at an Arkansas political rally) You know, I m going to start thanking the woman who cleans the restroom in the building I work in. I m going to start thinking of her as a human being -Hillary Clinton (From the book The Case Against Hillary Clinton by Peggy Noonan, p. 55) The only way to make a difference is to acquire power (From the book I ve Always Been A Yankee Fan by Thomas D. Kuiper, p 68 Hillary to a friend before starting law school.)Trump talks smack with men. Hillary Clinton abuses people.Via: Gateway Pundit | 1real |
Ted Cruz wins Wyoming Republican presidential nominating contest | CASPER, Wyo. (Reuters) - Republican U.S. presidential hopeful Ted Cruz won all 14 delegates at stake on Saturday in Wyoming, besting rival Donald Trump, who made little effort to win the rural state, and further narrowing the gap in the race for the party’s nomination. Cruz is trying to prevent Trump from obtaining the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the Republican nomination at the July convention in Cleveland. By continuing to rack up small wins, Cruz is gaining ground on the New York real estate mogul, who has thus far failed to shift his focus on the local-level campaigning necessary to win delegates. Trump has been critical of the process, again on Saturday calling it “rigged” while speaking at a rally in Syracuse, New York. He has repeatedly complained about Colorado, which awarded all 34 of its delegates to Cruz despite not holding a popular vote. Trump said his supporters are becoming increasingly angry with states such as Wyoming and Colorado. “They’re going nuts out there; they’re angry,” Trump said in Syracuse. “The bosses took away their vote, and I wasn’t going to send big teams of people three, four months ago, have them out there.” While Trump has won 21 state nominating contests to Cruz’s 10, the billionaire leads the Texas senator by only 196 delegates (755-559). That means he must win nearly 60 percent of those remaining before the party’s political convention in July. Wyoming does not hold a primary vote. Instead, 475 party activists convened in Casper on Saturday to hold a state convention and award 14 delegates. Previously, 12 other delegates had been designated at county-level conventions. Cruz won 10 of those, with one going to Trump and another being elected as “unbound.” Cruz spoke at the convention, capping off a months-long effort to organize support in the state. Trump had originally planned to send former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who remains popular among conservatives, as a surrogate, but she canceled at the last minute. Cruz spoke about local issues in Wyoming, the largest coal-producing state. He discussed the Democratic “attack” on the fossil fuel, saying President Barack Obama has tried to put the coal industry out of business through government regulations targeting air pollution. “America is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and we are going to develop our industry,” Cruz said. At the same time, Trump was speaking at a rally in Syracuse, New York, ahead of the state’s Republican primary on Tuesday. | 0fake |
null | The media already is accountable, DOC, under US law, as I tried to illustrate in my post, above.
That said, the repeal of The Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s was devastating for the US public, and gave birth to Fox Propaganda News and MSNBC, among others. Also, having disingenuous propagandist commentators on every night like Kayleigh McEnany and Katrina Pierson should be shameful to CNN and Fox, respectively in these 2 cases.
I watch some Fox and CNN for details, and for the opinions of just a few of their commentators (Krauthammer, Acosta for the Electoral Map). I used to watch mostly Al Jazeera America, which of course closed shop, and still watch The BBC, which is better than anything American, although not as good as Al Jazeera was. CNN International also is excellent - available only over the Internet - and the much-despised Russia Today has some excellent programming as well - I like The Keiser Report. Thanks for your post. | 1real |
Hariri back in Lebanon for first time since quitting as PM | BEIRUT (Reuters) - Saad al-Hariri returned to Beirut on Tuesday for the first time since he resigned as Lebanon s prime minister in a broadcast from Saudi Arabia and plunged his country into political crisis. Hariri s sudden resignation on Nov. 4 thrust Lebanon to the forefront of regional tussle between the Sunni monarchy of Saudi Arabia and Shi ite Islamist Iran, whose powerful Lebanese ally Hezbollah is part of the government. Hariri was greeted by members of the security forces as he disembarked from a jet at Beirut airport, live footage of his arrival showed. Hariri, a long-time ally of Saudi Arabia, cited fear of assassination and meddling by Iran and Hezbollah in the Arab world in his resignation speech. The move caught even his aides off guard, and politicians close to him say Riyadh forced him to quit and held him in Saudi Arabia. Riyadh and Hariri have denied this. Lebanese President Michel Aoun has refused to accept the resignation until Hariri returns to present it in person. Earlier, Hariri met Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo, saying after the meeting that he would announce his political position in Lebanon. In a Nov. 12 interview from Saudi Arabia with Future TV, a station affiliated with his political party, Hariri said he would return to Lebanon to confirm his resignation. But he also held out the possibility of withdrawing it if Hezbollah respected Lebanon s policy of staying out of regional conflicts such as Yemen. | 0fake |
Ford Expands Costly Door Latch Recall - The New York Times | Ford will spend $640 million to replace door latches on nearly 2. 4 million cars, trucks and vans because the doors can pop open while the vehicles are moving. On Thursday, the company announced it would add 1. 5 million vehicles to the growing recall, which has become so costly that Ford had to cut its estimated pretax profit to $10. 2 billion from at least $10. 8 billion. Customers have been complaining about the problem, which has affected much of Ford’s North American model lineup, since 2014. At least three million vehicles have been recalled after a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation found 1, 200 customer complaints about doors failing to latch. Thursday’s announcement came under pressure from the highway safety agency, which deemed an Aug. 4 recall of about 830, 000 vehicles inadequate. Ford said in a regulatory filing that the $640 million would cover the cost of both the Thursday recall and the one announced Aug. 4. The latest recall includes the Ford Focus, the Ford Escape and the 2015 Ford Mustang and Lincoln MKC and the Ford Transit Connect small van. Ford says a spring tab in the door latches can break, and the doors either won’t close or could pop open. Dealers will replace the latches without charge. The company said it knows of one crash and three injuries that may be related to the problem. The Aug. 4 recall was limited to Mexico and 16 states with high temperatures and sunlight exposure because, Ford said, the rate of reports of failure was higher. Customers can check whether their vehicle is included on ford. com by clicking on safety recalls and entering their vehicle identification number. | 0fake |
Gun Controller Amy Schumer Wields Gun in ’Snatched’ Trailer | Gun control proponent Amy Schumer wields a gun in her upcoming kidnapping comedy caper Snatched, according to a scene in the trailer for the film released Tuesday. [The Wrap introduced the film — which Goldie Hawn as Schumer’s mother — by writing: “Fox released a new trailer this morning for May movie Snatched, which features the two funnywomen going all on a bunch of kidnappers. And this time, they’ve got a gun. ” “You messed with the wrong b*tches,” Schumer tells a man toward the end of the trailer as she trains a gun on him. Schumer only holds a gun in one scene in the trailer, but that may be one scene more than her fans were expecting. After all, Schumer took up the gun control cause with particular passion following the shooting deaths of two moviegoers at a showing of her movie Trainwreck in Lafayette, Louisiana. The shooting occurred in a theater on July 23, 2015, and the alleged gunman passed a background check to acquire the firearm used in the attack. Yet Schumer emerged from the episode by pushing for increased gun control measures — especially background checks. In August 2015, the actress partnered with her cousin, Senator Chuck Schumer ( ) to push for more gun control and later used an appearance at the Glamour Awards to advocate for tighter gun laws. In January 2016, Schumer spoke out on the topic again at the Critics’ Choice Awards. Now she is using a gun in her upcoming film. It is interesting to note that Schumer upped the size of her personal security force, even as she campaigned for gun control for everyday Americans. In September, she assured fellow actress Lena Dunham that she had increased the size of her security team, saying, “Security is up. I’m really trying to protect myself. I am not being an idiot. ” Snatched centers on a mother and daughter who are kidnapped while on a bonding trip to Ecuador and who must fight to survive the ordeal. Twentieth Century Fox releases the film nationwide on Mother’s Day. AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com. | 0fake |
Doorway on Moon Found at Bancroft Crater, Google Map, Oct 2016, Photos | Paranormal | (Before It's News)
Date of discovery: October 26, 2016
Location of discovery: Bancroft Crater, Earths Moon
Google Earth Coordinates: 27°54’52.71″N 6°23’23.82″W
I found this entrance to an underground alien base inside of Bancroft crater. The dark opening measures 70 meters by 50 meters exactly. The outer edges measure 114 meters by 114 meters. I used Google ruler to measure this, so it is their statistics. The base entrance is just outside the shadow of the crater, which means it was placed there deliberately to be in the light and make entering and exiting it with smaller ships much easier. Similar base entrance have been found before. For instance, a very similar entrance was found on Google Mars and was 160 meters across, but with similar design. (Click here to view the Mars entrance) .
Scott C. Waring
Thanks http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ Check out more contributions by Jeffery Pritchett ranging from UFO to Bigfoot to Paranormal to Prophecy | 1real |
Sierra Club sues U.S. Energy Department over power grid study | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Environmental group the Sierra Club sued the U.S. Energy Department on Monday in hopes of forcing it to reveal the groups it has consulted in conducting an eagerly awaited study on the electricity grid. It was the latest push-back on the department’s study from backers of renewable energy such as wind and solar power who fear it could be used by the Trump administration to form policies that could slow growth in the industry. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who commissioned the 60-day study in April, ordered his department to see whether “regulatory burdens” by other administrations including former president Barack Obama’s had forced the premature retirements of so-called baseload power plants, fired by nuclear and coal. Perry said those policies potentially put at risk the reliability and security of the national power grid. The Sierra Club, in the suit filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, said the department had ignored a Freedom of Information Act request it filed in May. That request sought the release of communications between staff and outside groups it had consulted, in the belief that the Energy Department had mostly relied on fossil fuel backers. “We want to make sure that when this study is finally released, that the public and policy makers fully understand how it went about doing it, who they were influenced by, and whose views they did not take into consideration,” said Casey Roberts, a Sierra Club lawyer. The Energy Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It had initially said the report would be released in July, but the release has been delayed. A draft of the study, conducted by a contractor who included contributions from staff across the department, said that intermittent renewable power has not harmed the grid, was leaked to the media last month. But an energy department spokeswoman said then that the draft was “outdated” and had not been reviewed by political or career staff, leading Sierra Club and others to believe the final draft could favor coal and nuclear. Several lawmakers with strong renewable power output in their states have said that the Energy Department had already completed long-term studies of renewable power’s impact on the grid that concluded there has been no harm. Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, raised concerns in a letter sent to Perry in May that the secretary had commissioned a study that appeared “geared to undermine” the wind energy industry. | 0fake |
Afghan Vice President Seen Abducting Rival - The New York Times | KABUL, Afghanistan — As heavy snow fell on the muddy arena in northern Afghanistan where a traditional game of buzkashi — two teams of horsemen fighting for a dead goat — was underway on Friday, a scuffle broke out near the stands. It was not just another group of hotheaded fans going at it. The man who had thrown the punch is the vice president of Afghanistan, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum. And he did not stop there: To drive the humiliation home, he put his foot on the chest of his downed victim, a political rival named Ahmad Ishchi, who was then beaten by the general’s bodyguards, thrown into the back of an armored vehicle and taken away, said several of Mr. Ishchi’s relatives, many of them speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “Dostum came there, and he walked around the stadium, — then he called Ahmad Ishchi over to him,” said Gulab Khan, a relative of Mr. Ishchi who was among about 5, 000 spectators at the game. “After talking with him for a couple of minutes, he punched him, and his bodyguards started beating him with . They beat Ahmad very badly and in a barbaric way. ” The account of General Dostum’s actions — while not unexpected for a former warlord with a history of accusations of human rights violations and abuse, including physical acts of retaliation against allies and rivals — underscores fears about someone a heartbeat from the presidency. With President Ashraf Ghani traveling on an official visit to Central Asia, General Dostum is technically the acting president. For more than two days, he has held a political rival hostage in one of his properties, with members of Mr. Ishchi’s family increasingly concerned about his health. On Sunday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the vice president’s pink palace in the northern city of Shibarghan, pleading with him to free Mr. Ishchi. The protesters remained all day, but General Dostum did not meet with them. His guards simply told the protesters that the general was busy or resting. Spokesmen and advisers to General Dostum did not respond to requests for comment, despite promises from several of them. Aides who had accompanied the general to the game, and who were shown at his side in official pictures, flatly denied they had been there. Lutfullah Azizi, the governor of Jowzjan Province, which includes Shibarghan, said on Sunday that he was away from his office on a visit to Kabul, the capital, but was trying to calm the situation. “I organized the tribal elders and sent them to talk with General Dostum to release Ahmad,” Mr. Azizi said. “They are currently meeting General Dostum, and we are emphasizing Ahmad’s release tonight, as he is sick. ” While the two men have a long history of not getting along, a senior Afghan official who also spoke on the condition of anonymity said Mr. Ishchi had shown some sign of disrespect at a very vulnerable time for the general. General Dostum has increasingly felt marginalized and humiliated by Mr. Ghani in Kabul. He has spent more time away from his office — he is often seen in uniform on the battlefields of his northern stronghold — than behind his desk. Mr. Ishchi has been involved in politics in the north for decades and helped General Dostum found the Junbish party, which he leads now. A former labor leader during the Communist regime, he rose to serve in senior provincial government positions. One of his sons was a district governor in Jowzjan, and another is a member of the provincial council there. A third son has become rich in recent years through businesses he has in Turkey. The senior Afghan official said that although Mr. Ishchi had little power compared with General Dostum, the general considered the Ishchi family a threat to his own dynasty as he groomed his children to inherit his party and influence. The confrontation happened soon after General Dostum returned to the country from an absence that followed another outburst aimed at Mr. Ghani, in which he threatened to cause trouble if he was not taken seriously. The general was angry at the lack of help from the central government when his convoy was ambushed by the Taliban during a military operation in Faryab Province, killing many of the men who had been at his side for years. At Friday’s game, General Dostum arrived in a convoy of black armored vehicles. Before the goat was slaughtered to start the action, a video of the event showed, local musicians sang a tribute to the recent martyrs as the general wept. His trembling lips pushing out deep breaths of pain, and with snow gathering on his shoulders, he wiped his tears with a white tissue. Then he took it out on Mr. Ishchi. | 0fake |
I watched Megyn Kelly for six weeks: How I learned to uncode the Fox News propaganda machine | As numerous surveys have revealed, Fox News may be the “most-watched” cable news channel, but its viewers are older than those of its competitors (though, to be fair, the competition’s viewers are pretty old, too), and its most devoted ones are consistently conservative. Rutenberg’s piece raised the possibility that Kelly might be able to attract younger and more ideologically diverse viewers, especially “independents” who watch Fox from time to time but are not regulars.
The magazine’s cover went so far as to suggest that Kelly’s style and departures from conservative orthodoxy might even make her appealing to … readers of the New York Times! (That appeal, such as it is, seems likely to have been undercut in recent weeks by Kelly’s bafflingly out of touch interview of the Duggars and her resort to the tired, racially coded “not exactly a saint” to describe the teenage girl knocked down by a cop in McKinney, Texas.)
These departures from orthodoxy have become legendary among close followers of the media and have earned her praise from a variety of figures outside the conservative movement. Rutenberg calls them “Megyn moments”: occasions when she asks a conservative guest, nearly always an older white man, a sharp question that doesn’t necessarily fit within the conservative worldview.
Rutenberg’s argument struck me as dubious. While conducting research for my book on the history of TV news, I watched lots and lots of old segments and programs, including many from Fox News. I’m pretty familiar with Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Shepard Smith and the rest of the Fox crew, including its regular pundits. But I hadn’t seen that much of Kelly. Could Ailes really be moving away from his successful formula of pandering to Fox’s conservative base? By watching Kelly’s program, could I learn about important subjects unreported by the Times and the other “mainstream media” that I follow? Or perhaps acquire new and useful perspectives on things that I thought I understood?
To find out, I watched “The Kelly File” nearly day every from early March through the first week of May. I saw her report on everything from the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program to the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account, and watched her interviews with Republican presidential aspirants and her coverage of the riots in Baltimore in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death. But, in the end, I wasn’t impressed — and not because Kelly is a conservative and her program trumpets conservative points of view. The problem is that she is a conventional Fox News television anchor, and Fox News isn’t about nuance or complexity, the things I look for in news reporting and analysis.
It’s true that she is less doctrinaire than Hannity. And she can occasionally ask good questions — though, mostly, it’s her prosecutorial style, rather than the question itself, that it is noteworthy. Watching her regularly, however, made me realize that she’s merely a slightly different version of O’Reilly — she’s a smart, engaging television personality whose “reports” reaffirm the conservative ideology of most of her viewers.
Kelly’s biggest attribute is her personality. She’s intelligent, down-to-earth and can poke fun at herself as well as at her guests. And, no doubt much to Ailes’s delight, she has developed a very effective broadcasting style. Her husky voice, quick wit and experience as a lawyer give her an admirable air of authority. In the peculiar style favored by FNC producers, she evokes a still glamorous ex-cheerleader. She is also a superb performer, never losing her cool or command of her program. She’s well-suited for television journalism, and in another era, would likely have been a big star for the networks.
Sadly, however, she works for Fox News, a purveyor of a kind of television journalism that has become the norm for cable news, even among channels that eschew its conservatism. That means covering only a few stories, usually the ones most likely to appeal to their target audience, and following them very closely over the course of the broadcast day, sometimes through live reports from the field, but mostly by allowing assorted guests to opine and pontificate about them. At Fox News and MSNBC, anchors routinely join in the pontificating, and these breaks with old-school journalistic practice are part of their appeal. It makes them seem “real,” and as Ailes recognized long ago, most viewers of TV news prefer this to the detachment displayed by journalists at the major networks and CNN. And Fox at least has the ratings to prove it. Kelly is most certainly “real,” and she opines and pontificates no less than O’Reilly and Hannity. This is why she is popular with Fox News viewers, who expect this from their prime-time anchors in particular. But I doubt it will appeal to very many real independents (as opposed to people with largely conservative beliefs who like to think they are independents) or readers of the Times. And this isn’t just because “The Kelly File” covers so few stories or because Kelly expresses her opinions about so many things. The same can be said about Rachel Maddow. It’s because Kelly’s program isn’t very informative, even when she devotes attention to stories given short shrift by other news outlets. With a handful of exceptions — usually compelling breaking news stories like the tragic Germanwings airline crash — every story Kelly and her producers select is predictable. And, rather than exploring their complexity, Kelly and her guests dumb them down so that everything fits neatly into their viewers’ worldview. I was shocked at how few subjects, sources and points of view “The Kelly File” presents, and by her almost ritualistic recourse to the same old conservative clichés and talking points during discussion and analysis, even when more interesting and complicated angles virtually begged to be examined. As on “The O’Reilly Factor,” the role played by liberal guests is to be flayed by the host and her allies. Often this is easy because such guests are academics or policy wonks unaccustomed to talking in sound bites; sometimes their statements are so out of touch with reality that they almost invite ridicule. Even those famous “Megyn moments” are too few for my liking. And they always are followed by gracious and supportive remarks that demonstrate to viewers that Kelly is on the side of the “good guys.” Watching Kelly reminded me of what I learned while researching my book — that Fox News, particularly during prime time, really isn’t in the news business. It’s in the entertainment business. To a certain degree, this is true of most all television news. But in FNC’s case, there is a difference. Fox News’ core audience is more than just a particular slice of the larger consumer marketplace. It’s a group of people with firm convictions and a coherent ideological worldview — not unlike orthodox Marxists back in the early 1900s. And part of what Fox does is make this worldview seem even more coherent — and impervious to information that might undermine or contradict it. That’s actually what its viewers want, and, from the start, Ailes and FNC have eagerly given it to them. I’m sure Ailes would like to expand FNC’s audience and win over viewers whose views are less doctrinaire. This would be good business, and Ailes is a brilliant businessman. But I can’t see this happening without him alienating his most loyal viewers, who prefer every story and virtually every fact filtered through the lens of ideology. At least in present form, “The Kelly File” isn’t going to do this, despite Kelly’s undeniable appeal as a broadcaster. | 0fake |
Trump Administration Surrenders; Staffers Are Already Passing Around Their Resumes (Details) | The last two weeks of Donald Trump s presidency have been riddled with bombshell after bombshell over his Russia scandal, and it s definitely taking a toll on his administration. Apparently, things in the White House have gotten so grim that staffers are looking forward to the end and have already started to send out their resumes.The Washington Post reported that ever since Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, the mood in the White House has been worse than ever. The staffers have felt paralyzed and senior officials have been moping around with funeral looks on their faces. While Trump s staffers feel absolutely helpless as their boss continues to become more erratic and create more PR nightmares, the POTUS has only become more furious and frustrated at his staff for not being able to keep up.The Post wrote:Some White House staffers have turned to impeachment gallows humor. Other mid-level aides have started reaching out to consultants, shopping their resumes. And at least one senior staffer has begun privately talking to friends about what a post-White House job would look like, according to two people close the staffer.Another report by TIME magazine said something similar, stating that West Wing aides have started shopping r sum s to think tanks, super PACs and corporate communications firms. And when you think of what these staffers have had to deal with, it s no wonder. According to one mid-level aide, staffers are exhausted and have no hope that conditions under Trump s chaotic leadership will improve: Just when you think the pace is unsustainable, it accelerates. The moment it gets quiet is when the next crisis happens. This news also comes on the heels of rumors that Trump is considering a major staff turnover in the near future which may include senior aides like chief of staff Reince Priebus, press secretary Sean Spicer and communications director Mike Dubke. Clearly, the chaos is far from over.Featured image via Pool / Getty Images | 1real |
Democrats Across The Country Are Figuring Out Ways To FORCE Trump To Release His Tax Returns | Every major party presidential candidate in the last 40 years has released his or her tax returns, except for two. One was Gerald Ford and the other was Donald Trump. Trump, who s completely embroiled in a scandal surrounding ties to Russia, may soon be forced, at court or congressional order, to release his returns, but if that doesn t happen, Democrats at the state level might be forcing Trump s hand.State legislatures are now proposing measures that would ban any candidates from their ballots who don t release tax returns. Tax return information would provide some transparency there to give voters the assurance that they need that the president is acting on behalf of us, said Kathleen Clyde, an Ohio state representative who recently introduced a version of the bill. It is problematic that he is the only candidate in 30 or 40 years not to provide that information. Clyde s bill, the Tax Returns Uniformly Made Public Act the TRUMP Act would require candidates for president and vice president to disclose five years of tax documents to Ohio s Secretary of State, who would then post the documents online. Only after a candidate disclosed the tax information would he or she qualify for the ballot in one of the nation s most hotly contested battlegrounds.Similar measures requiring candidates to file with Secretary of State offices have been introduced in California, Oregon and Tennessee. Candidates would be required to file tax documents with state boards of election under bills filed in Illinois, Maryland, New York and Rhode Island.Source: The HillSo far, 19 states are considering similar bills and not all of them are blue, but it s probably that only blue states will pass the bills, if at all.Elections, even national elections, are run by the states. Nationally, there are only two qualifications to run for President: The candidate must be at least 35-years-old and must be a natural born citizen. None of the rest matters in the eyes of the law. That s why Trump didn t have to release his tax returns to begin with.However, states have more latitude. For example, in many states, candidates must receive a minimum number of signatures on a petition before being allowed on a ballot, although that typically applies to non-major party candidates. Still, states can impose rules like filing fees and deadlines, although it s still not clear that forcing candidates to release tax returns will pass constitutional muster.Even if this passes in a few states, Trump could still, if he doesn t implode, win reelection if he wins enough red states. In theory, he could win without a single vote in our most populous state (California), as long as he won the Electoral College. Let s hope these bills do pass to prevent a future Trump, but first, let s pressure Congress to force Trump s hand right now.Featured image via Pool/Getty Images | 1real |
Trump Hires Son’s Wedding Planner To Run New York Housing Department | Here s something you might want to send to your nearest Trump supporting family member the next time you hear them say Trump is draining the swamp : When it came time to hire the person who would control the multi-billion dollar New York/New Jersey housing department, he went with his son s wedding planner a woman with zero experience in housing and who is currently mixed up in Eric Trump s charity fraud scandal.With the exception of Trump s golf caddie (who now runs his social media presence from the White House), it s safe to say that nobody has gained as much by Trump s rise as Lynne Patton. Prior to Trump winning* the election, Patton was an event planner responsible for organizing parties from rich people. She helped the Trumps host golf tournaments, organized upscale events, and planned Eric Trump s wedding.She has shown zero interest in public service, nor does she have any experience in housing or urban development. Her only qualification is that she is loyal to Trump. It appeared that was enough. Trump appointed her to head up the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development s Region II, which includes New York and New Jersey, where she ll oversee distribution of billions of taxpayer dollars, according to the New York Daily News.Overseers should probably keep a close eye on the billions she s about to get her hands on. Patton is involved in the charity golf tournaments that investigators say Eric Trump and his father used to skim $1.3 million from for their own personal gains. At the time, Eric bragged about hosting the event for charity at his father s golf course by saying it was great because the Trumps had donated the course for the day in reality, according to a detailed investigation by Forbes, they were charging their donors major bucks for the privilege of using it for charity:In reviewing filings from the Eric Trump Foundation and other charities, it s clear that the course wasn t free that the Trump Organization received payments for its use, part of more than $1.2 million that has no documented recipients past the Trump Organization. Golf charity experts say the listed expenses defy any reasonable cost justification for a one-day golf tournament.Additionally, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which has come under previous scrutiny for self-dealing and advancing the interests of its namesake rather than those of charity, apparently used the Eric Trump Foundation to funnel $100,000 in donations into revenue for the Trump Organization.Making matters worse, Patton appears to be a serial liar. In the course of vetting her, reporters discovered she had lied about at least two things on her resume. She falsely claimed she received a juris doctorate from Quinnipiac University School of Law. She also claimed she went to Yale, which, again, appears to be completely fabricated.Trump s obsession with stocking his administration with loyalists means he limits himself to only the yes-men (and women), hanger ons, and opportunists who attach themselves to Trump and properly inflate his ego. It leaves him with little choice but to pick from among the least qualified and most unethical people in the country to head jobs that would otherwise go to extremely serious and intelligent applicants. The result is this: incompetence mixed with dishonesty mixed with inexperience.Featured image via Win McNamee/Getty Images | 1real |
Hamas Member Admits On Live TV That ‘Palestine’ Never Existed | jewsnews © 2015 | JEWSNEWS | It's not news...unless it's JEWS NEWS !!! Proudly powered by WordPress — Theme: JustWrite by Acosmin Join the over 1.4 million fans of Jews News on FB…It’s NOT news unless it’s Jews News! | 1real |
Cher Drops An ENORMOUS Truth Bomb On Twitter; SLAMS Trump’s Cabinet (TWEET) | It s pretty obvious at this point that Donald Trump duped his working and middle-class voters. He ran on a ridiculous slogan of drain the swamp. Meaning, he would rid Washington D.C. of business as usual politics and be the supposed outsider to change things up.Well, now that Trump has won, albeit only by a slim electoral advantage with Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by 2.7 million votes, he s showing all of us that his drain the swamp slogan was absolute bullsh*t.With cabinet pick after cabinet pick, Trump is showing all of us that not only is he not draining the swamp but instead filling it to the brim with politics as usual. He s filled his cabinet with millionaires and billionaires, and putting them in roles they are not at all suited for.Pointing out how outrageous Trump s picks are is none other than the legendary entertainer extraordinaire, Cher.On Twitter, Cher wrote: How many Goldman Sachs, Billionaire Execs, Does it take to run America!? These Men didn t become Billionaires by looking out for Working men and women. How Many Goldman Sachs, Billionaire Execs,Does it take2 Run?? These Men didn t become Billionaires by looking out 4 Working men & Women Cher (@cher) December 9, 2016And she s exactly right. These billionaires are only out for one thing, themselves, and maybe their business cronies.Republican voters, hopefully, will one day learn that they re not voting in their best interests, but that day was most certainly not this most recent election day.Featured image via Gustavo Caballero/Getty Images | 1real |
GOP Rep Goes Full Racist While Giving RIDICULOUS Reasons For Avoiding Town Hall | A cowardly Republican gave a racist excuse for why he doesn t want to face his constituents at a town hall.As angry Americans show up to town halls to give their Republican representatives hell over their obsession with repealing the Affordable Care Act, an Illinois Republican has decided that he doesn t care about his constituents enough to take criticism from them in person.Rep. Mike Bost has been largely ducking his constituents by holding tele-town halls that they aren t informed about until the last minute, which means not a lot of people are able to participate. Those that do are dedicated supporters who will agree with everything Bost says without any push back whatsoever. The in-person ones going on around the United States right now are out of control, which means you don t actually get to talk to people and listen, and we re looking for ways to do that, Bost told The Southern Illinoisan.And then Bost made a racist comparison to describe the angry people who are attending town halls. The amount of time that I have at home is minimal, I need to make sure that it s productive. You know the cleansing that the Orientals used to do where you d put one person out in front and 900 people yell at them? That s not what we need. We need to have meetings with people that are productive. I m not going to have the public town hall meetings, in that respect, because I am busy trying to work on the issue, Bost continued. If all you want to do is stand and yell at me we re not going back and forth. What Bost wants is a town hall where he won t be criticized and won t have to answer the criticism. You know, because Bost and Republicans like him are snowflakes who want to pretend that everyone likes them and what they are doing in Congress.Republicans know that repealing the Affordable Care Act is getting more and more unpopular as their own constituents begin to realize that they will lose their own healthcare.To explain the anger at town halls, Republicans have falsely portrayed their own constituents as out-of-state paid protesters rather than admit that they are wrong to repeal the landmark healthcare program.But as Republicans continue to duck their voters they will only make them angrier in the long run. When the 2018 midterm election comes around they won t be able to avoid the voice of the people then. And they will discover quickly that they made a huge mistake by not facing their constituents when they had a chance.Featured image via St. Louis Public Radio | 1real |
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 |
Puerto Rico debt fix unlikely to resemble Detroit's | NEW YORK (Reuters) - The federal appointees tapped to help map Puerto Rico’s economic future are technocrats more than political actors, and that could make the U.S. territory’s fiscal turnaround look more like a corporate restructuring than a politically charged municipal bankruptcy in the vein of Detroit. The law known as PROMESA, which created the board when it passed the U.S. Congress in June with bipartisan support, envisioned a pragmatic solution for an island combating $70 billion in debt, 45 percent poverty and a brain drain as residents bolt in droves for the mainland United States. Its members, four Republicans and three Democrats appointed last week, were chosen by Republican and Democratic lawmakers and President Barack Obama. The board has broad powers to help stabilize the island’s economy, from investigating Puerto Rico’s government to working with that government on projects to spur economic growth. It must also approve the island’s annual budgets, and will eventually facilitate debt-restructuring talks with creditors. In the latter endeavor, it will have to navigate a minefield of competing interests. The island has 18 separate debt issuers, backed by different revenues streams, as well as $18 billion in so-called general obligation debt backed by the “full faith and credit” of the territory’s government. While that promise is legally weak in a bankruptcy setting, it is a sacrosanct pledge in municipal debt markets. Holders of all that debt will jockey for payouts against government vendors and beneficiaries of the island’s public pensions, which have less than $2 billion in assets to cover some $45 billion in liabilities. Detroit’s bankruptcy, which ended in December 2014, treated city pensions much better than its outstanding bonds, which were largely insured. Some Puerto Rico creditors, still suffering Detroit flashbacks, feared Puerto Rico could look similar - especially since Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla has pushed big haircuts and railed against the idea of reducing government services. But the makeup of the Puerto Rico board has offered some reassurance, said Nader Tavakoli, chief executive officer of Ambac, which insures $2.2 billion of Puerto Rican bonds and also insured some of Detroit’s bonds. “These board members are technocrats, and it gives us confidence that this is not going to be overly politicized,” he said. Deal makers also feature prominently, with an ex-bankruptcy judge, a banker and a hedge fund operator in the mix. Republicans, generally seen as creditor-friendly, nominated a bankruptcy academic who favors restructuring the island’s debt, David Skeel. And Democrats nominated a banker, Jose Ramon Gonzalez, and a Democratic finance expert in Ana Matosantos who directed California’s budget under former Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Experts see the group as likely to push a solution that sees all sides share a burden, a typical approach for companies restructuring under Chapter 11. “There are no ideologues in the group,” said Keefe Bruyette & Woods analyst Chas Tyson. That does not mean there are not drawbacks. For one, the board will have to navigate a testy local political climate with residents who largely revile a panel they see as an extension of colonial rule. Island voters broadly unhappy with the Garcia Padilla administration in November will elect a new governor as well as members of the legislature and scores of mayors. “There are still politics here,” said veteran bankruptcy attorney Richard Levin, who is following the situation. “The governor and legislature retain some authority.” For Height Securities analyst Daniel Hanson, the board is short on expertise in economic development. Any real solution for Puerto Rico requires fundamental economic changes, including at its underperforming education department, and it’s unclear whether the board can facilitate such change. But from a financial perspective, at least, the board seems less inclined to promote a political agenda than figure out a collaborative fix and then get out, said Matt Fabian, partner at Municipal Market Analytics. “The board is not being installed to fight with Puerto Ricans or to impose some kind of federal view,” Fabian said. “They just want these troubles to be fixed.” | 0fake |
Frustration and fury among Arabs at Trump's Jerusalem declaration | CAIRO/AMMAN/BEIRUT (Reuters) - Arabs denounced President Donald Trump s plan to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem as a slap in the face but few thought their governments would do much in response. Trump phoned allies in the Middle East late on Tuesday to tell them the United States would acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of Israel on Wednesday and prepare to move its embassy there. It incites feelings of anger among all Muslims and threatens world peace, said Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, Imam of Egypt s al-Azhar mosque, one of Islam s most important institutions. The gates of hell will be opened in the West before the East, he added, warning of the possible reaction. Israel s sovereignty over East Jerusalem, which it seized in the 1967 war, is not recognized internationally, and under the U.S.-brokered Oslo accords of 1993 the city s status was to be decided in negotiations with Palestinians. Arab governments issued statements of concern or condemnation and emergency meetings of both the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation have been called. But the U.S. decision has been taken. In a bitterly divided region, backing for Palestinians is often seen as a unifying position, but it is also often a source of internal recriminations over the extent of that support. A cartoon in al-Arabi al-Jadeed, a London-based Arabic news website, showed Trump raising a hand against an Arab as if to slap him, wearing a large glove marked with the Israeli flag. In Lebanon, the Daily Star newspaper ran a full page photograph of Jerusalem on its cover with the headline No offense Mr. President, Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine . Around the Arab world - including Egypt and Jordan, its only two countries to recognize Israel - and across the bitter divide between allies of regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran, people denounced the move. Neither I nor my children nor my children s children will give up our right to Palestine and Jerusalem, said Hilmi Aqel, a Palestinian refugee born in Jordan s al-Baqaa camp after his family fled the fighting that accompanied Israel s creation. America does what it wants because it s powerful and thinks it won t feel the consequences ... Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine, not of Israel. It never can be, said Nada Saeed, 24, a property broker in Cairo. This is a provocation for the Arabs, said Mahdi Msheikh, 43, a taxi driver in Beirut s Hamra district. However, few people Reuters interviewed on Wednesday expected their governments to take any real action. What saddens me most about this is that Palestine in the past was an ultimate rights cause for us as Syrians and Arabs ... Palestine has retreated from our priorities, said a lecturer at Damascus university, who asked not to be named. Saudi Arabia, home to Islam s holiest sites, pushed a plan in 2002 offering Israel peace with all Arab countries in return for a Palestinian state including east Jerusalem. But a recent newspaper report suggested it was willing to compromise on several areas that are regarded by Palestinians and some other Arab countries as red lines. Riyadh has denied that and called on Trump not to move the embassy. The current events on the world stage and especially in the Gulf help Trump take this step because the most important thing is that Saudi Arabia is not against it, said Adnan, a 52-year-old trader in Beirut. The kingdom s top clergy issued a mild statement saying Saudi Arabia supported Jerusalem, but did not explicitly denounce Trump s move. Many Saudi Twitter users posting under the hashtag Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Palestine , shared a film clip of the late King Faisal, who launched the 1973 Arab oil embargo against the West, pledging never to accept Israel. But one Twitter user posting with a common Saudi family name said that while Muslims and Arabs would be provoked by the move, its top royals would not be. Instead, they would suppress any move or call to jihad against the Zionist enemy , he wrote. In Cairo, Khaled Abdelkhalik, a lawyer, said: We paraded Trump as an ally of the Arabs, but he turned out dirtier than his predecessors. Jordan, which agreed peace with Israel in 1994 while the peace process with the Palestinians still seemed on track, held a special session of parliament. I call on my colleagues to tear up the treaty of humiliation and shame, said MP Yahya Saoud, referring to the peace deal. Jordan, like Lebanon, is home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. This is a conspiracy that is denying us our rights, the first of which is to return. They think we are a branch of thorns that they can step on and break, said Fadia, a social worker with two daughters in Lebanon s Burj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp. But we are a bomb. If they step on it, it explodes, she said. In Israel, analysts said that despite such warnings, they expected little violence or opposition. The moderate camp in the Arab world needs the United States as well as Israel in order to face their main threat, which is Iran, said Efraim Inbar, president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies. We may see some public announcements maybe denouncing the American decision, but in substantive terms I don t think much will change. | 0fake |
Pentagon Retreats on Enlistment Bonus Collection Efforts | Pentagon Retreats on Enlistment Bonus Collection Efforts October 26, 2016 Pentagon Retreats on Enlistment Bonus Collection Efforts
Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Wednesday ordered a suspension in efforts to seek repayment of thousands of enlistment bonuses and tuition assistance mistakenly paid to members of the California National Guard.
"While some soldiers knew or should have known they were ineligible for benefits they were claiming, many others did not," Carter, who is in Europe meeting with U.S. allies, said in a statement.
"This process has dragged on too long, for too many service members," he said. "Too many cases have languished without action. That's unfair to service members and to taxpayers."
Last week the Los Angeles Times reported that about 10,000 California National Guard troops had been ordered to repay enlistment bonuses - some of more than $15,000 - that were improperly given to them. The newspaper said audits revealed the California Guard had overpaid troops in order to entice them to join and meet enlistment targets more than a decade ago.
Senior Defense Department officials have been told to assess the bonus situation and establish a "streamlined, centralized process" by the start of next year, Carter said in the statement.
"The objective will be to complete the decision-making process on all cases as soon as possible - and no later than July 1," he said.
The issue has caused outrage in Congress. Members from both parties have called on the Pentagon to drop efforts to reclaim the bonuses.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said on Fox News on Tuesday that if the Pentagon did not drop the effort to reclaim re-enlistment bonuses, lawmakers would move legislation on the issue. Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! | 1real |
Clinton Campaign Announces BAD News For Trump, Will Participate In Recount (TWEETS) | On Saturday morning, Hillary Clinton s campaign counsel posted a statement to Medium to announce that the campaign will back recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan if Green Party candidate Jill Stein follows through with reexamining the votes in those states.The post was written by attorney Marc Erik Elias, who said that the campaign had been questioning the results since the election ended, weighing different options. Elias said: It should go without saying that we take these concerns extremely seriously. We certainly understand the heartbreak felt by so many who worked so hard to elect Hillary Clinton, and it is a fundamental principle of our democracy to ensure that every vote is properly counted. Since the day after the election we have had lawyers and data scientists and analysts combing over the results to spot anomalies that would suggest a hacked result. These have included analysts both from within the campaign and outside, with backgrounds in politics, technology and academia. TwitterTwitterTwitterElias said that although actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology was not found, Stein s successful movement to get votes recounted in Wisconsin has persuaded the Clinton campaign to support the initiative. Now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides. If Jill Stein follows through as she has promised and pursues recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan, we will take the same approach in those states as well. We do so fully aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states Michigan well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount. But regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself. Echoing Stein s own words about making sure that America s elections maintain integrity, Elias said: We believe we have an obligation to the more than 64 million Americans who cast ballots for Hillary Clinton to participate in ongoing proceedings to ensure that an accurate vote count will be reported. Elias entire statement can be read here. On Friday afternoon, Stein had filed for a recount in Wisconsin, promising to also follow through in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where Trump is leading by narrow margins. The deadline Stein must file for recounts in those states is Monday and Wednesday.Featured image via Justin Sullivan/Getty Images | 1real |
COMEDY GOLD! Clinton Gaffe While Reading Off Of The Teleprompter Is Darn Funny [Video] | Hillary reads off of the teleprompter an emotion that was meant to be a sigh and not the word sigh too funny! | 1real |
Watch This CBS Host Utterly DEMOLISH Ted Cruz For Being Racist | Ted Cruz has said many stupid things during his run for the Republican nomination yet it s no surprise he s still a contender among GOP candidates since all the choices are pretty bad. The senator from Texas faced tough questions from CBS This Morning hosts about his call for law enforcement officials to patrol Muslim communities. After the attacks in Belgium, Cruz said: We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized. CBS hosts demanded an answer to his bizarre suggestion on how it would logistically work to patrol millions of Muslims who are not ghetto-ized in radical communities as Cruz had suggested. Cruz also admitted that he didn t even know how many Muslims live in America when asked by co-host Norah O Donnell. Co-host Gayle King then slammed Cruz: There are so many people that say that your comments are decidedly anti-Muslim, and that you re playing right into the hands of ISIS. You re giving them ammunition to come after us, to really take action against us. Instead of addressing the issue, the creepy Cruz went on a nonsensical tangent about political correctness. He said: Gayle with all respect, people are fed up with the political correctness of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Islamism is a political and theocratic philosophy that commands its adherents to wage violent jihad. King then pointed out Cruz was painting a broad population with one brush. King is correct. Not only is Cruz painting millions of people with one brush, but his rhetoric is very dangerous because it vilifies millions of people and dehumanizing them. Moreover, as President Obama stated following the attacks on Belgium, What they can do is scare and make people afraid and disrupt our daily lives and divide us and as long as we don t allow that to happen, we re gonna be okay. That s what Cruz does with his rhetoric: he divides Americans and that s not the type of leadership we need in this country.Watch Video Here: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWLeXdHKOOM] Featured image via video screenshot | 1real |
10 Problems That Kill Your Rural Survival | Carmela Tyrell November 11, 2016 10 Problems That Kill Your Rural Survival
If you are a rural town dweller, or live on a farm or off-grid, you already have an expanded set of survival skills. Your isolation along with these skills are the keys to your survival, but you still must expect the unexpected.
Here are ten problems that you may not even give much thought but they still can cause a lot of troubles in turbulent times.
1. Lack of Key Supplements for Livestock
Modern farming methods can feed their livestock any number of things that might have been out of the question in the past. For example, today, many farmers think that it is safe to feed alfalfa to cattle because they also include a supplement in the feed.
Without this supplement, cattle and other sensitive animals will suffer from stomach bloat and die. You have a big pile of these supplements for now, but you will run out of them.
Therefore, be aware of the natural nutritional needs of all livestock in your care, and know exactly why you are giving various supplements to livestock.
Make it a point to see if you can replace these supplements with something you can make on your own or find out how to eliminate them altogether.
Adjust farming methods so that you no longer need antibiotics or other chemicals that won’t be available after a crisis hits.
Your animals will be healthier , and your body won’t be absorbing all those chemicals and toxins through animal based meat, milk, and eggs.
2. Insufficient Genetic Material for Plant and Animal Based Sources of Food
If you do some research, you will find that many animal based industries are already having problems with lack of sufficient genetic variation. For example pedigree dogs and thoroughbred horses are rapidly becoming a point of scandal and derision because of the serious genetic defects that lead to disease and early death.
Now consider a situation where you have just one bull and 5 or 6 milk cows, and that the cows are from all different blood lines. Even though the bull may be different from them, within just a few generations the animals produced will be sicker and weaker.
No matter whether you are raising chickens, cattle, goats, sheep, cats, dogs, horses, or other animals, make sure that you have enough genetic variation in both the males and females .
While one gender may not be as valuable as the other in terms of producing meat or eggs, the genetic variance is truly far more important than the inconvenience of keeping a few extra animals for the sake of genetic diversity.
This is also very important to consider when growing plants for food . Always use heirloom seeds, and try to get them from as many different places as possible. As long as the species and strain are the same, you can keep the plants strong and genetically viable from one generation to the next.
The last thing you will want to do is be ten, or even twenty years into a survival scenario only to realize that major staple plants are less robust or becoming weaker despite proper care of the water and soil. Needless to say, you should also store away triple, or even quadruple the number of seeds that you plan to use during an active crisis scenario.
At the very least, if genetic viability proves to be a problem, you will still have some to start over with, and then look for resources in other locations. This may include studying wild plants in the local area and cultivating them on a larger scale if needed.
3, Inadvertent Hybridization of Key Food and Medicine Bearing Organisms
If you currently use hybrid seeds because they offer more disease resistant plants or other benefits, you may not be thinking about the long term consequences of hybridization.
A hybrid is defined as a cross between two species that are close enough to produce viable offspring, however the offspring usually cannot produce a viable next generation.
For example, if you have two fields of heirloom corn or plant two strains close together, hybridization will occur. From there, the next year’s crop may grow, however, the seeds for the third year may not even sprout let alone produce a mature plant.
When growing plants , be very careful about where you plant different strains as well as which pollinators can create hybrids without your knowing. This includes bees which can carry pollen for miles as well as the wind itself which can transmit pollen from one field to another.
If at all possible, only grow one strain of a plant per year. It is also very important to be aware of: wild plants from a related species that might provide pollen plants grown by other survivors in the area that may be of a different, but related strain
4. Loss of Soil Fertility
Together with soil erosion, loss of soil fertility is a huge problem and apt to get worse in a survival situation.
Many farmers today rely on a range of fertilizers to enhance the soil . While this may produce edible plants, the lack of micronutrients is showing up in poor health and increased risk for disease for consumers.
Since you will be using the same soil over and over again to grow foods, this problem may cause serious health problems sooner than expected.
Take the time now to know how the soil on you farm differs from undisturbed land nearby. Make sure that you know how it differs in key nutrients that you expect to absorb from the foods.
If you find lacking nutrients, then look for ways to naturally recondition the soil in order to restore those nutrients. Some options may include: expand the types of plants used on composting to include wild plants and leaves from surrounding areas find ways to add animal bones and other parts in order to create a natural fertilizer. For example, eggshells are an excellent soil conditioner that you can get from chickens being raised on the farm research safe ways to compost human excrement. It should be noted that there is a good bit of controversy on this matter as human feces and urine carry diseases that have left your body. While animal excrement can also be very dangerous to your health, at least the pathogens are not already established and accustomed to the human immune system, and therefore readily able to evade it.
5. Loss of Key Species Due to Overhunting or Overfishing
Many people think that as long as they live in a country setting, all they will have to do is go out into the woods and shoot a deer or some other animal for food. Aside from the fact that larger populations of people will easily cause animal depletion, there are some other problems with this idea: Overhunting and over fishing can also occur when injured animals get away. Not only is the meat from them lost, the hunter will more than likely go out and shoot at one or more animals until they catch one.
If the person in question is not a very good hunter , this means dozens of animals may be knocked out of the gene pool and also made unavailable to people that need the food from these animals. As the gene pool of target species becomes less diverse, illness and fewer offspring will result.
Just take a look at the changes in deer spot patterns and white deer that signal pending collapse of a herd. Unknown stresses from social collapse may impact vital species. Consider a situation where you are in a rural area that is surrounded by mines or factories. Even though they may appear far enough away to prevent damage to the land in your area, they can still pose a hazard during a collapse.
In particular, waste from factories and mines can be carried for hundreds of miles down a river, or seep into the air and soil via other means. Once these toxins get into the deer, rabbits, and other animals of interest, these animals will die off and leave you with very few, if any to hunt.
In order to mitigate these problems, you must always be aware of how many animals are being taken from the land for food as well as make sure you know how many got away and were never found.
It is very important to keep security patrols going through hunt areas so that you can stop strangers and prevent them from interfering with the wild herds you depend on.
You should also have longer ranging scouts take periodic trips to factories, rivers, and other water features that may impact your local area.
At the very least, if you know that a mine or factory has released a dangerous toxin, you may just have enough time to drive animal herds to another area where they can continue to live and reproduce.
6. Loss of Key Habitats
No matter whether you chop down trees to provide wood for fires or use a nearby pond for potable water and irrigating crops, your activities will change the land around you. This, in turn, can lead to the loss of forests and other key habitats that you depend on for raw survival materials.
As rural families expand or more people find their way out of the cities, this problem will get even worse. You have only to look at the mess of an inner city to see what becomes of areas that were once as filled with trees and other natural landmarks.
As with protecting wild animals used for food, you must also protect the trees and other natural resources that you rely on. Do your best to patrol areas where loggers or scavengers may be looking to cut trees and take them away. Make sure that you know who is coming into the local area and how to keep them away from valuable land so that it is not destroyed.
While you may be inclined to share some of your resources, remember that you can never truly own a tree or the land it grows on. Be careful with these resources so that they will be available to future generations.
Since clearing land is unavoidable, you must replace what was taken. For example, if you cleared some land for farming, look for abandoned areas nearby that no longer have trees or other plants. You can always take tree seeds or even hand started seedlings and plant them in these areas.
If the soil in these areas is toxic or has many contaminants, you can try growing carrots, certain mushrooms, and conifers to clean the soil as quickly as possible. Once the soil is cleared of heavy metals and other contaminants, then you can plant maple trees or other forest bearing trees that will be of use to you.
7. Inadequate Sewage and Sanitation Systems
If you currently have a septic tank and leach field, then you may not realize just how easily your sewage system can become useless in a crisis situation . Among other things, if you don’t have a pump system to clean out the tank, then backing up toilets, sinks, and tubs, can easily force you out of your home. Some things you can do to avoid these problems include: keep a good supply of sludge destroying organisms on hand. These can eat way materials that do not go out into the leach lines and buy you at least a few years before the next cleaning is required. Have an outhouse and other outdoor plumbing ready for use. Know how to make slit trenches and other short term sanitation options. Do some research on composting toilets and how best to use the materials from it.
8. Lack of Common Vaccines
As with people trying to survive in a city setting, you will also be faced with a lack of vital vaccines. This includes those used to fight off tetanus and diphtheria. Many people today are misinformed about vaccines and believe that all of them are bad.
While many vaccines use Thimerisol as a preservative (which contains Mercury), that does not mean every single person that gets the shots will be poisoned or rendered permanently disabled.
In fact, thousands of people (including members of the military) take dozens of vaccines at a time without many long term problems. On the other hand, if you contract tetanus, it will kill you despite access to the best modern medicine.
It is very important to make sure that tetanus, diphtheria and other critical vaccinations are kept up to date. Aside from that, if you are part of a survival community, or have a survival doctor as a friend, ask them to store away these vital vaccines for long term needs.
Even though these vaccines supplies will run out one day, they can still be very important. You can also do some research on how Jonas Salk and other early vaccine developers created their products.
Some of those methods may be within reach of local doctors that may be able to use them in a time of need.
9. Lack of Fuel for Farm Equipment or Other Vehicles
As a prepper, you are sure to be very aware of the problems associated with loss of gasoline and diesel supplies. On the other hand, if you have been putting off converting your farm equipment to run on natural gas or biodiesel, then you may not be as ready as you though you were.
It is also very important to note that biodiesel and natural gas options aren’t completely free of problems. This includes creating long lasting and viable storage solutions as well as making sure that you have enough plant matter to make fuel.
If you have been following the ethanol saga , then you may already know that the loss of arable farm land for the sake of making fuel can be a huge problem.
Aside from expanding the range of fuels that your farm equipment can use, it is very important to have alternative farm equipment on hand. This includes plows and other equipment that you can pull on your own or use a horse, donkey, or oxen to pull them.
Even if you never use these tools, they may still be of use to future generations that may not be able to produce farm equipment to replace machines that wear out or break down.
Here are some other things you can do to manage the lack of fuel problem as well as some others that are likely to come up over time: Consider building either a hydroponics or aeroponics farming system. You can usually grow a good bit of food in a very small space without the need for complex farm equipment. Since water and air based growing systems require very little soil, you can also have peace of mind knowing that you won’t have to worry about soil depletion. If you choose to use fish as the source of nutrition in the hydroponics system, then you can also use them for food once they become large enough to eat. Video first seen on WeLikeShootingVideos . Look for ways to reduce plantings only to plants that will be needed for making new seeds. Instead of allowing so many plants to reach full size, you can get a good bit of benefit from consuming micro plants. Not only will this make it easier to grow food indoors, you will also have access to more nutrients in a limited space.
10. Lack of a Bug Out Plan
Today, the vast majority of preppers tend to see forests, farms, and small towns as the ultimate bug out location. If you are already in this type of setting, then you may also feel that there is no place else to go.
If you do not have a viable bug out plan, then you may be at a bigger disadvantage than expected. No matter whether you need to navigate to another rural area, or to a smaller city that has little damage from a large scale crisis, you will have a lot of problems without a well designed bug out plan.
Here are some things that you should at least have on hand in case you need to leave your bug in location: A bug out bag that includes a complete navigation kit. Maps and other materials that can help you get from one place to another as quickly and safely as possible. Some means of transport other than a motor vehicle and a cart for carrying your bug out supplies. A radio and means of communication so that you can always know what is going on in the area you are about to enter. From military patrols to roving bands of thieves, you are best served by knowing where the highest risks are so that you can skirt around these areas instead of going through them.
Before a crisis hits, it is very important to have reliable sources of information. This goes well beyond how to carry out certain tasks or manage any given project. Rather, you will need real-time information from people in areas you intend to enter.
This includes information on the nature of the crisis in the area, how badly it is damaged, and what the biggest threats are. If you need to build a weapon or change your travel plans, it is best to have up to date information that will help you make the best decisions.
Invariably, there is nothing like trusted contacts in the location to tell you what is really going on.
There is no question that many people see a return to nature or homestead farming as the ultimate form of prepping.
On the other hand, a nuclear bomb in the right place, a hurricane, tornado, or even an earthquake can make all your hard work go to waste.
These are just a few reasons why you need to consider more than basic survival when planning for rural area bugging in.
At the very least, if you consider the ten points listed in this article, you will have a chance to avoid them, and also use them as a basis for looking into other parts of your bug in plan that might need some additional work.
To survive you need to learn the lost ways and skills that helped our forefathers survive during harsh times. Click the banner below and learn how to live without our modern days technologies and gadgets.
This article has been written by Carmela Tyrell for Survivopedia. 28 total views, 28 views today | 1real |
These New Solar Panels Use Sunlight to Create Clean Drinking Water from the Air | By Christina Sarich
Jordan — You’ve already heard of solar panels that can sustainably provide energy, but what about an ultra-high tech solar panel that can provide doubly-pure, twice distilled water for a family of four, out of thin air?
A new start up company called Zero Mass Water that won’t rely on outdated municipal water with decaying pipes full of lead to deliver water to the ‘middle billion’ and under-served people lacking clean drinking water in the world. It will create it with solar panels and a technology that capitalizes on moisture in the air.
The company’s tag line is ‘drinking water democratized,’ and it certainly seems to stand for the exact opposite world view of, say, Nestle , which has been stealing water from people and San Bernardino National Forest reserves and then selling it back to people in plastic water bottles. Zero Mass Water can deliver clean water to people in the poorest nations, with no need for piping or complicated water plants. The solar panel itself is smaller than a traditional air conditioner and can be placed in remote areas with ease.
The United Nations claims that more than 783 million people currently lack clean drinking water and more than 6 million people die annually from water-borne disease. They also claim that, with population growth, we can expect a 50 percent increase in water demand; but they haven’t accounted for simple technologies which can make use of millions of gallons of water using clean, sustainable, and even simple technologies. The demand for water could also easily be met by practicing better water harvesting, catchment, and filtering.
Zero Mass Water joins other breakthrough technologies like the “Drinkable Book” and experimental wastewater filters , which are trying to bring water to every corner of the world.
A blog post from Duke Energy, a partner in Zero Mass’s project claims the water purification system doesn’t need an outside source of energy, so it can be placed were infrastructure is damaged or non-existent.
At a recent installation in the coastal city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, a medical clinic was able to enjoy clean water for the first time without having to haul it in with trucks — an expensive endeavor. Though it rains frequently in Ecuador, there is little potable water .
The project has targeted an even larger area for humanitarian aid — water-generating solar panels are being placed in Jordan. The company claims the panels will help Syrian refugees in the country, possibly aiding 200,000 people, who currently have no access to clean drinking water.
If Zero Mass Water is successful in a war-torn area, their solar panels might also be perfect for the 5,300 cities across the U.S. who have been drinking lead-contaminated water due to crumbling infrastructure and a political elite who have been unwilling to replace old pipes with new ones, along with expensive water filters on municipal supplies.
When the sun can bring you energy, and drinking water, there is little need for poverty, ill-health, and reliance upon aging government and corporate structures . This invention truly could democratize water for the planet.
This article ( These New Solar Panels Use Sunlight to Create Clean Drinking Water from the Air ) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Christina Sarich and UndergroundReporter.org . If you spot a typo, please email the error and the name of the article to undergroundreporter2016@gmail.com . Image credit: Pexels .
| 1real |
null | We Are Change
Project Veritas continues with it’s series of videos this time an undercover reporter exposed early clinton email witness Cindy Almodovar. In the video Cindy Almodovar who spoke with Huma Abedin about email issues that were going on admits that the FBI didn’t interview her. In December, 2010, U.S. Department of State IT Systems Administrator Cindy Almodovar reported that she met with Huma Abedin for thirty minutes regarding emails at the then unknown, but now notorious, @ clintonemail.com site. Here’s is the text from that email exchange: “From: Almodovar, Cindy T Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 11:17 AM To: SES-IRM_Tech Cc: SES-IRM_FO-Mgt Subject: Meeting with Huma I met with Huma for about 30 minutes to go over mail issues. She gave me some examples listed below, but also, things are inconsistent. But issue #1 is of an e-mail which was sent to her twice this morning, did get received on <REDACTED> but was not delivered. See details below. I have a contact for the @clintonemail site, his name is Bryan Pagliano and he actually now works for State, but he apparently set all of this up. Huma sent several tests from her clintonemail account to Lona and myself – they were received. But there are many messages and responses not received. She sent a message this morning from her state.gov account to cheftwan@mail.house.gov.On 12/14, hdr22@clintonemail.com sent a message to huma@clintonemail.com and Valmoroli@state.gov at 10:03 pm . The subject line was blank. Huma received at Clinton address, but Lona did not receive on her state.gov account.” As a result of subsequent investigations regarding Secretary Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. State Department reported the following: From the unclassified May 2016 State Department report ESP-16-03: Two staff in S/ES-IRM reported to OIG that, in late 2010, they each discussed their concerns about Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email account in separate meetings with the then-Director of S/ES-IRM. In one meeting, one staff member raised concerns that information sent and received on Secretary Clinton’s account could contain Federal records that needed to be preserved in order to satisfy Federal recordkeeping requirements. According to the staff member, the Director stated that the Secretary’s personal system had been reviewed and approved by Department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further. As previously noted, OIG found no evidence that staff in the Office of the Legal Adviser reviewed or approved Secretary Clinton’s personal system. According to the other S/ES-IRM staff member who raised concerns about the server, the Director stated that the mission of S/ES-IRM is to support the Secretary and instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again. The director referred in the OIG report is John Bentel. In 2010, he was the State Department employee who managed IT security issues for the top echelon of the department. He told FBI investigators those conversations back in 2010 never occurred. In March of 2016, Bentel refused to answer questions from Senate investigators and asserted his Fifth Amendment right 87 times during a deposition for a civil lawsuit related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.” Here’s a transcript of the exchange between Project Veritas’s journalist and Cindy Almodovar. PV Journalist: I’m working on a story. I’m interested. I want to know the truth and I want to know if you’re one of the people who came, who went to John Bentel and said they were concerned about Hillary’s private server. Almodovar: I don’t know anything about that. PV Journalist: You weren’t involved in that at all? Almodovar: You’ve got to stop this because this is like harassment. PV Journalist: This will be the last time you see me. I just want to know the truth. I’m interested. I want to know if the FBI has talked to you. Almodovar: No they haven’t. PV Journalist: They haven’t at all… …PV Journalist: I’m sure reporters and people have been coming to your door. Almodovar: No. No one has come to the door. You’re the first one. “Even though her name stands out in the emails released by the FBI, no one from the FBI ever spoke to Aldomovar,” said Project Veritas Action founder James O’Keefe. “No one interviewed her or made any attempt to get to the bottom of what information she might have about this case that is so important to national security. It made us wonder…who else the FBI neglected to talk with.” The post appeared first on We Are Change .
| 1real |
Hillary Supporters Jay-Z And Beyonce Are Members Of Aleister Crowley’s Satanic Cult OTO | NTEB Ads Privacy Policy Hillary Supporters Jay-Z And Beyonce Are Members Of Aleister Crowley’s Satanic Cult OTO Other celebrities linked to OTO include the rapper Jay-Z, who has repeatedly purloined imagery and quotations from Crowley’s work. Whether wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Do what thou wilt’ or hiring Rihanna to hold aloft a flaming torch in his music videos (a reference to the Illuminati, an outlawed secret society whose name supposedly derives from Lucifer, or ‘light bringer’), he has given the sect priceless publicity. by Geoffrey Grider November 5, 2016 Aleister Crowley, who was born into an upper-class British family in 1875, styled himself as ‘the Great Beast 666’. He was an unabashed occultist who, prior to his death in 1947, revelled in his infamy as ‘the wickedest man in the world’.
“And he was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” Luke 22:41,42 (KJV)
His form of worship involved sadomasochistic sex rituals with men and women, spells which he claimed could raise malevolent gods and the use of hard drugs, including opium, cocaine, heroin and mescaline.
Crowley’s motto — perpetuated by OTO ( Ordo Templi Orientis ), — was ‘do what thou wilt’. And it is this individualistic approach that has led to a lasting fascination among artists and celebrities. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, for example, routinely took part in occult magical rituals and was so intrigued by Crowley he bought his former home, Boleskine House, on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland. And there are now OTO lodges scattered around the country, practising the same ceremonial rituals and spreading the word of Crowley. Jay-Z and Beyonce are leading the way
Other celebrities linked to OTO include the rapper Jay-Z , who has repeatedly purloined imagery and quotations from Crowley’s work. Whether wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Do what thou wilt’ or hiring Rihanna to hold aloft a flaming torch in his music videos (a reference to the Illuminati , an outlawed secret society whose name supposedly derives from Lucifer, or ‘light bringer’), he has given the sect priceless publicity.
His clothing line , Rocawear , is shot through with OTO imagery such as the ‘all seeing eye’ in a triangle, the ‘eye of Horus’ (an ancient Egyptian symbol frequently referenced in occult texts) and the head of Baphomet (the horned, androgynous idol of Western occultism). Beyoncé Knowles admits demon possession by Sasha Fierce:
Some conspiracy theorists have seized on this as evidence that he is a member of a secret Masonic movement which they believe permeates the highest levels of business and government. Others take a more pragmatic view: that it is commercial opportunism, cashing in on impressionable teens’ attraction to the ‘edginess’ of occult symbolism. Yet OTO is much more than a marketing opportunity for attention-seeking celebs. It is a living religion, with adherents still practising occult rituals set out by Crowley in his books.
This week I tracked down John Bonner, 62, the head of OTO in the UK, to his home in East Sussex. He told me: ‘We are not a mass-appeal sort of organisation — in the UK we number in our hundreds. Worldwide it’s thousands. Hillary Clinton gets in formation with Jay Z and Beyonce:
Celebrities are not always a boon or a benefit. ‘We are used to being misunderstood. Many stories about Crowley, like people saying he filed his teeth down into fangs, are nonsense.
‘YOU COULD CALL US A SEX CULT IN A WAY, BECAUSE WE RECOGNISE, ACCEPT AND ADORE THE WHOLE PROCESS WHICH GOES TOWARDS MAKING TANGIBLE THE PREVIOUSLY INTANGIBLE.’ According to adherents of OTO it takes years of study before you can begin to understand what the religion is about — much like the equally controversial Church of Scientology.
A former FBI agent , Ted Gundersen, who investigated Satanic circles in LA, found that Crowley’s teachings about ‘raising demons to do one’s bidding’ suggested human sacrifice, preferably of ‘an intelligent young boy’.
John Bonner is dismissive of any idea that he and his fellow believers would even begin to countenance such excesses, pointing out that his is the only religion that sends people a letter of congratulations when they decide to leave (‘because they are exercising free will, which is what we’re all about’).
But he accepts many people may not be able to deal with Crowley’s complex teachings.
‘You’re not supposed to just jump straight in to it. It takes time and study, but our rituals are not for public consumption. You need to join us and go through the initiation process before you can begin to understand. ‘But according to our beliefs we can’t turn anyone away. So if you are over 18, are passably sane and are free to attend initiations, then you have an undeniable right of membership.’ source SHARE THIS ARTICLE Geoffrey Grider NTEB is run by end times author and editor-in-chief Geoffrey Grider. Geoffrey runs a successful web design company, and is a full-time minister of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to running NOW THE END BEGINS, he has a dynamic street preaching outreach and tract ministry team in Saint Augustine, FL. NTEB #TRENDING | 1real |
Canada's Trudeau broke ethics rules with visit to Aga Khan island | OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau broke some conflict of interest rules when he accepted a vacation last year on the Aga Khan s private island, the ethics watchdog said on Wednesday, the first time a prime minister has been found to have committed such a transgression. While the finding could tarnish Trudeau s popularity half-way into his mandate, he does not face any penalties. Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson said Trudeau contravened a rule on gifts when he accepted the use of the island in March and December 2016, while there were ongoing official dealings with the Aga Khan and the Aga Khan Foundation Canada was registered to lobby Trudeau s office. The vacations accepted by Mr. Trudeau or his family could reasonably be seen to have been given to influence Mr. Trudeau in his capacity as Prime Minister, Dawson said. While Trudeau says the Aga Khan is a family friend, Dawson found the exception for gifts from friends did not apply. Trudeau said he accepted her report and would clear future vacations with the watchdog. I take full responsibility for it. We need to make sure that the office of the prime minister is without reproach, Trudeau said. Trudeau and his family vacationed on the island during the holidays in late December 2016 into January this year. Members of his family visited in March 2016. Trudeau has come under fire from the opposition, who have said the luxury Bahamas vacation was inappropriate and showed the Liberal government is out of touch with average Canadians. The opposition has also accused Finance Minister Bill Morneau of being in a conflict of interest for not putting his assets in a blind trust. He has since said he will do so and has divested his stock in his family business. Trudeau says he has known the Aga Khan, Prince Shah Karim Al Husseini, since childhood. The Aga Khan, the title held by the leader of the Ismaili branch of Shi ite Islam, was a pallbearer at the funeral of Justin s father, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Trudeau also contravened the rules when he and his family traveled in the Aga Khan s private helicopter last December and when his family traveled on a non-commercial aircraft chartered by the Aga Khan in March 2016, Dawson said. However, she found no evidence Trudeau discussed any parliamentary business with the Aga Khan or his representatives, or participated in any related debates or votes. | 0fake |
null | There is plenty of proof the machines are rigged whic also means trhe polls are rigged to match the machines so they must all know about it . Ask yourself how can a poll of a few thousand asked questions where they have no option possible tell you what hundreds of millions people who havent been polled think ?? Its impossible and has been the greatest con of the elite . And using past eletion results which were rigged to ppredict future results is also a scam .Soros Expects "Landslide Popular Vote Victory" For Trump But President Clinton Is A "Done Deal" Zero Hedge Done deal alright , they have been rinning this gig forever . | 1real |
Netanyahu’s Critical Foreign Tour | Netanyahu’s Critical Foreign Tour Israel's strategic repositioning.
Originally published by the Jerusalem Post .
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming trips to Australia, Singapore, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan might be the most significant diplomatic visits he makes in his tenure in office. The trips will take place against the backdrop of two major international shifts that cast Israel into uncharted waters as a small state with a dizzying array of strategic threats arrayed against it. The states that he will visit are all well-positioned to help Israel navigate its next moves. The first shift is the US’s political crackup.
Next week American voters will choose their next president. The major candidates, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, are the weakest candidates to have ever stood for the highest office in the land. Their rise is a testament to the weakening, if not the unraveling of the glue that has held America together since the Civil War. The unraveling of the US electorate comes against the backdrop of the diminution of US military power. The US’s multi-trillion dollar investment in inconclusive if not failed wars in the Middle East over the past 15 years has come at the expense of military modernization. The F-35 program has sucked up the majority of the remaining research and development funds. And it has yet to produce a reliable airplane. Worse, the F-35’s long and problematic gestation period has given Russia and China the time and opportunity to develop air defense systems capable of neutralizing the F-35’s stealth systems. Those systems were supposed to be its chief advantage as the next generation fighter for the US and its allies. The deterioration of the US’s military capabilities has gone hand in hand with the US’s apparent loss of strategic rationality. This is apparent worldwide, but is nowhere more obvious than in the Middle East. President Barack Obama’s decision to effectively abandon the US’s major allies in the Middle East in favor of cultivating ties with Iran has made the region far more dangerous to the US and its spurned allies than it was eight years ago. True, in theory, Obama’s decision to prefer the Shi’ites to the Sunnis makes sense given the totalitarian and imperial nature of Sunni jihadism. But in light of the genocidal, totalitarian and imperial nature of the current Iranian regime, his move made no sense and its impact has been massively destructive. Moreover, Obama’s willingness to rack up the US’s national debt in an unprecedented manner and repress economic growth through overregulation has left a large question mark over the possibility of a military buildup. In other words, even under the best circumstances, it is hard to imagine that the US will be capable of reestablishing its global primacy over the next four years or even over the next decade. The implications for Israel are far reaching. For decades, Israel’s strategic posture has been predicated on its ability to depend on US power. This strategic posture is no longer tenable. The second major international shift is Russia’s sudden rise as the primary global power in the Middle East. As Channel 2 reported Sunday night, Russia has deployed sophisticated naval and air systems in the region that can detect all of Israel’s air and naval operations. In a matter of months, Israel has lost the air and naval supremacy it has enjoyed for the past four decades. The air force reportedly is convinced that the F-35’s stealth systems will be able to neutralize Russia’s detection capabilities. But given the well-documented current problems with the F-35’s stealth systems, this conviction is unwise. And even under the best circumstances, in which Israel has the opportunity to develop its own electronic warfare systems and apply them to its F-35 without American interference, it will take Israel years to surmount the challenge that rapidly improving Russian systems present to our air force. According to Channel 2’s report, air force and naval commanders are in a panic over the sudden turn of events. Rather than panicking though, Israel needs to roll with the punches and figure out how best to cope with this new situation. The obvious answer is that we need to quickly expand our capabilities in areas that Russia’s military primacy does not reach. Specifically, Israel needs to expand massively its capacity for under-the-radar operations. The first area that needs to be massively strengthened is our intelligence capabilities, particularly human intelligence capabilities. Israel should be investing massively in developing and expanding our cultivation and direction of proxies on the ground throughout the region. Second, Israel needs to adapt its cyber technology capabilities in a manner that diminishes our enemies’ ability to strike us. Israel needs to be able to disrupt and disable command and control and other systems. Israel’s reach needs to extend as low down the line of its enemies’ military chain of command as possible. If our offensive capabilities are being checked, so must the capabilities of our enemies. Indeed, our enemies need to be subverted. Part of the intelligence and cyber capabilities that Israel must develop and deploy must be geared toward destabilizing with the goal of overthrowing the regime in Iran. At the same time, Israel should be empowering anti-regime sectors in Iran in a manner that expands the prospect of developing close ties with a successor regime along the lines of the strategic alliance Israel built with the regime of the shah in the decades which preceded the 1979 Islamic revolution. Third, Israel needs to expand and diversify the capabilities of our ground forces. Israel needs to be capable of using new means to deploy its fighters at home and on distant shores. It needs to align its both its special and regular forces with the new threat environment. And it needs to be able to utilize its ground forces in manners that can extend the reach and diminish the compromised positions of its air and naval assets in the era of Russian regional primacy. Fourth, Israel needs to expand its economic growth and diversify its economic ties in a manner that positions it as a regional economic power. It needs to use it natural gas resources specifically as a means to expand and deepen its ties with Asia. Such economic growth and power will positively influence Russia’s willingness to allow Israel to carry out air and naval operations against its enemies – and Russia’s allies in Lebanon, Syria and beyond. In other words, the more economically powerful Israel is, the more Russia will be willing to side with Israel against Hezbollah and others that are currently operating under the Russian umbrella. This then brings us to Netanyahu’s upcoming trips. Each state that he will visit has something to offer Israel in expanding its intelligence, cyberwarfare and economic capabilities. Australia, a major Western economy, is moving toward China as America has become less engaged in the Pacific. Israel has an acute interest in using Australia as a platform for expanding its ties to China and other Asian countries, both because of the economic advantages such ties convey and due to China’s strategic importance to Russia. As for Singapore, Israel effectively built the Singaporean military in the 1960s and 1970s. The country remains extremely supportive of Israel. Like Australia, Singapore has close ties to China. It has technological and other capabilities that can be extremely advantageous for Israel today. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are critically important to Israel today. Their strategic proximity to Iran, and their ties to Russia, along with their ethnic composition and their natural resources make securing good relations with both critical to Israel’s ability to advance and security its strategic interests in every sphere. Israel has tremendous assets to offer each of the four countries that Netanyahu will visit. These assets must be deployed wisely to ensure that Israel gains as much as possible from his trip and from its future ties with all of them. Given the dramatic changes in the global power balance, and their implications for Israel, Netanyahu’s decision to fly to visit these four countries just after the US elections tells us that he gets it. At a time of regional and global turbulence and uncertainty, in the context of swiftly multiplying threats, this is no small matter. | 1real |
Aid convoy reaches Syria's Deir al-Zor after three-year siege | BEIRUT (Reuters) - An aid convoy arrived at Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria on Thursday, bringing supplies to soldiers and civilians days after the Syrian army broke a three-year Islamic State siege, Syrian state media reported. The Syrian army and its allies reached Deir al-Zor on Tuesday in a sudden advance following months of steady progress east across the desert. The army on Thursday advanced against militants in a pocket they still hold further west, pro-Damascus media reported. State TV broadcast footage of scores of residents cheering with relief in Deir al-Zor as the convoy arrived. The United Nations estimated that 93,000 civilians living under Islamic State siege in Deir al-Zor had been in extremely difficult conditions, being supplied only by air drops. The 40 trucks that reached the area on Thursday carried basic needs such as fuel, food and medical supplies to civilians, and included two mobile clinics, state news agency SANA reported. The army also holds another besieged enclave at the city s airbase, separated from its advancing forces by hundreds of meters of IS-held ground. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Thursday that the army had not yet connected with that enclave, and was working on expanding its corridor from the west. Islamic State mortar fire on neighborhoods still surrounded near the air base killed at least seven civilians and wounded dozens more on Thursday, the British-based monitoring group said. On Thursday, the army also advanced against Islamic State militants in countryside east of the city of Hama, a media unit run by Damascus ally Hezbollah reported. The advance, which saw forces recapture two villages there, is part of efforts to drive the militants out of an isolated pocket of territory they control east of Hama and Homs. Separately, the U.S. special envoy to the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State, Brett McGurk, said on Wednesday that a convoy of Islamic State fighters and families from the Syria-Lebanon border was still in open desert. The coalition is using air strikes to block the convoy from reaching IS-held territory in eastern Syria, to which the Syrian army and its ally Hezbollah were escorting it as part of a truce following fighting on the Syria-Lebanon border. Islamic State is fighting separate offensives by both the Syrian army and its allies in eastern and central Syria, as well as the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in Raqqa. The group has lost nearly half of its territory across both Iraq and Syria, but still has 6,000-8,000 fighters left in Syria, the United States-led coalition has said. | 0fake |
Public Support for the Euro | by Yves Smith
By Felix Roth, Associated Research Fellow, University of Göttingen, Lars Jonung, Senior Professor, Knut Wicksell Centre for Financial Studies, Lund University, and Felicitas Nowak-Lehmann, Senior Researcher at CEGE and IAI, University of Goettingen. Originally published at VoxEU
The euro as a common currency has recently been the subject of harsh criticism by economists from both sides of the Atlantic, including claims that citizens in some Eurozone countries are turning against the it. This column argues that, in fact, the euro currently enjoys comfortable popular support in each of the 12 original member states of the Eurozone and that potential upcoming referenda in any of these countries do not appear to pose a threat to the currency. In contrast, popular support for the euro has declined sharply in non-Eurozone EU member states since the recent crisis, with the UK standing out as the country with the most negative view.
Recently the euro as a common currency has been the subject of strong criticism by economists from both sides of the Atlantic (e.g. Stiglitz 2016, Sinn 2014). This criticism has been inspired by the financial and economic crisis in some Eurozone countries and by the slow recovery in the region after the Global Crisis of 2008. Scholars claim that a majority of citizens have turned against the euro in large member states of the Eurozone, such as Germany (Stiglitz 2016: 314) and Italy (Guiso et al. 2016: 292, Sinn in Kaiser 2016a).
In the wake of the vote for Brexit in the UK referendum in June this year, it is argued that knock-on effects in the form of potential upcoming referenda on the euro in the Eurozone (e.g. in Italy) might lead to its break-up (Feldstein 2016, Stiglitz in Martin 2016, Stiglitz in Kaiser 2016b). In addition, it has been postulated that animosity amongst EU member states is at a high (Alesina 2015: 78). This suggests a rising threat to the European project, including the common currency.
These claims concerning the standing of the euro raise the question: How does the public in EU member states actually look upon the common currency at this stage? We are able to provide an answer based on survey data on the popularity of the single currency, which are available from its creation, as polled by TNS-opinion (European Commission 2016). These data are provided through the Eurobarometer (EB). The euro is a unique currency in the sense that similar time series evidence does not exist for any other currency.
Our answer draws upon our previous contribution to this site (Roth et al. 2012), where we explored Eurobarometer survey data on public support for the common currency from 1990 to 2012. There we concluded that in the first four years of the crisis (2008-2012), public support for the euro declined only marginally. Now the question is: What has happened in the most recent years regarding public support for the euro?
Support for the Common Currency Within the Original Eurozone
We present an up-to-date picture of the evolution of public support for the euro until May 2016, adopting our approach in Roth et al. (2016). First, we focus on the original 12 Eurozone member states (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain – the EZ12) that adopted the euro as a physical entity in January 2002. Figure 1 shows average net support (in per cent) for the single currency in the EZ12 countries over a 27-year period from 1990 to 2016.
Figure 1 Average net support (in %) for the single currency in the EZ12 countries, 1990-2016
Note : The y-axis displays net support in percent. Since the figure depicts net-support, all values above 0 indicate that a majority of the respondents support the single currency. The dashed lines distinguish the introduction of the euro as a book keeping entity in January 1999, the actual circulation of the euro in January 2002 and the start of the financial crisis in September 2008. Data for EB45 were not available. Population-weights are applied. Net-support is measured as the number of ‘For’ responses minus ‘Against’ responses and is constructed according to the equation: Net-support = (For – Against)/(For + Against + Don’t Know). Source : Figure 1 is an updated version of Figure 1 until 5/2016 (by EB’s 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016; 948).
Figure 1 leads us to the following conclusions: Over the 27-year time period, a majority of citizens within the EZ12 has supported the single currency (with average net support exceeding 15% at all times). Since the introduction of the euro in 1999, a large majority of EZ12 citizens has supported the euro (with average net support exceeding 30%). In the 8th year (in May 2016) since the start of the financial crisis, average net support of 42% has surpassed the pre-crisis level of 40% in March-May 2008.
Figure 1 gives the aggregate picture. How has support for the euro evolved in the individual members of the EZ12? Figure 2 provides an answer.
Figure 2 Net support for the single currency in EZ12 countries, 1990-2016 (%)
Source : Figure 2 is an updated version of Figure A1 until 5/2016 (by EB’s 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016: 957).
Figure 2 suggests that: Since the introduction of the euro in 1999, aside from short periods in Finland and Greece before the crisis, a majority of citizens in each member state of the EZ12 supported the euro, even in times of crisis. From 2008 to 2016, significant increases in support in Greece, Portugal and Germany (26, 23 and 10 percentage points, respectively) have levelled out the fall in net support in other EZ12 countries, ranging from 11 percentage points in Ireland to 5 percentage points in Finland. Over the 27-year time period (1990-2016), Italy has always had a pro-euro majority, with the minimum net level of 17% in November 2013, clearly above the majority threshold of 0%.
Support for the Euro Among the New Members of the Eurozone
How has support for the euro evolved in the new member states that joined the euro after its physical introduction in January 2002, that is, in Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia? After adopting the euro, aside from short periods in Cyprus, a majority of citizens in each country has supported the euro.
Figure 3 Net support for the euro across seven EZ countries that joined the euro in the period 2004-16 (%)
Source : Figure 3 is an updated version of Figure A3 until 5/2016 (by EB’s 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016: 958).
Support for the Euro Outside the Eurozone
In our 2012 column, we highlighted the distinct fall in public support for the euro in EU member states outside the Eurozone (Roth et al. 2012). What has happened since then? Figure 4, displaying the evolution of net support for the euro outside the Eurozone from 1990-2016, gives an answer.
Figure 4 Net support for the single currency in non-EZ countries, 1990-2016 (%)
Source : Figure 4 is an updated version of Figure A2 until 5/2016 (by EB’s 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016: 958).
Figure 4 suggests: Outside the Eurozone, net support for the euro has declined in a pronounced manner. Whereas in Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Poland a majority of citizens supported the euro in the years preceding the crisis, a majority in those countries has turned against the euro after the crisis. The decline in support, ranging from 65 to 30 percentage points, is strong. In contrast, in Romania and Hungary, in spite of a fall of 35 and 28 percentage points, respectively, a majority of euro support still exists. In Denmark and Sweden, the majority has turned away from euro support after the crisis. Just before the crisis, there was for brief periods a majority for the euro. The UK is an exceptional case. For the 26 years from 1991 to 2016, a majority of citizens was always against the single currency. During the crisis, net support for the euro reached levels as low as -66% (in November 2012). Given the persistent rejection of the euro, the Brexit vote should not come as a surprise but rather as reflecting a long-running critical view towards the European project. Therefore, any knock-on effects of the Brexit vote in the form of a break-up of the Eurozone via potential upcoming referenda in the Eurozone are not likely to emerge. On the contrary, recent survey data from July 2016 by the French polling institute, Ifop, suggest an enduring majority support for the euro in the Eurozone (Fourquet et al. 2016: 52).
Conclusions
Our updated analysis of public support for the common currency over a quarter of a century, from 1990-2016, brings out four major conclusions.
First, in contrast to recent claims, a majority of citizens support the euro in each member state of the original Eurozone, including in Germany and Italy. This was the case even during the peak of the recent crisis.
Second, in contrast to some critical euro voices, we do not believe, on basis of Eurobarometer data, that any knock-on effects of the Brexit vote in any potential upcoming referenda on EU issues would pose an imminent threat to the euro.
Third, taking into account our earlier findings, which identify the unemployment rate as a key driver of public support for the euro in times of crisis (Roth et al. 2016), a strong job recovery in the Eurozone is likely to increase public support for the euro.
Fourth, popular support for the common currency has fallen sharply after the recent crisis in EU member states that have not adopted the euro. Here the negative sentiment is strongest in the UK.
We suggest the following bottom line: with the exception of short periods in Finland and Greece before the crisis, the evidence points towards majority support for the euro in each original Eurozone member state (including Italy and Germany) before, during and after the crisis. So far, the euro has clear backing from the public. It has adopted the common currency as its own currency.
See original post for references 0 0 0 0 0 0 | 1real |
Kohei Uchimura Leads Japan to Gymnastics Gold, Dethroning China - The New York Times | RIO DE JANEIRO — Japan returned to the top of the men’s gymnastics world, beating Russia and China in the team event at the Olympics. The event was a renewal of the longtime gymnastics rivalry between Japan and China. China won the last two gold medals, in 2008 and 2012. But Japan has Kohei Uchimura, the world’s best gymnast — and perhaps the best ever — anchoring their team. In the final rotation, Japan took on Russia in the floor exercise, holding a slim 0. 208 lead. Japan went first. After an outstanding score from Kenzo Shirai and a good one from Ryohei Kato, Uchimura locked down the win with a 15. 6. Combined, it was the best team floor exercise score of the night. It was the end of a dominant night for Uchimura, who started strong with a 15. 100 on the pommel horse, below. Russia could not match those scores and had to settle for second. China won the bronze. Russia had been the early leader after strong horse and rings performances, including a 15. 7 by Denis Abliazin on rings. Japan rallied on the vault and parallel bars and took the lead on the high bar. Abliazin, below, and the Russians came up short on the floor routine later in the night, allowing Japan to seal the victory. Russia met with some jeers from the crowd, as it has at other events in the aftermath of reports of doping. China was making early mistakes. You Hao stumbled on his rings landing. More stumbles followed on the vault, normally a chance to pick up high scores. A big parallel bars, including a stellar one by You, thrust China back into medal contention. The Americans got off to a slow start on their first apparatus, floor exercise, when two of their three gymnasts, Alexander Naddour, below, and Sam Mikulak, tumbled out of bounds. Next up was the horse, where Danell Leyva slipped on the dismount, leading to another low score and seriously denting United States medal hopes. Better performances followed, but Leyva fell on the high bar, and the team could finish no better than fifth. | 0fake |
UnitedHealth plans to exit Obamacare exchanges | (Reuters) - U.S. health insurer UnitedHealth Group Inc on Tuesday said it would largely exit the Obamacare individual insurance market in 2017, citing expectations for mounting losses from the program. UnitedHealth is the largest U.S. health insurer and one of the biggest sellers of plans on the exchanges, which were created as part of President Barack Obama’s national healthcare law. UnitedHealth sells these plans in 34 states this year, up from 25 states last year. “Next year, we will remain in only a handful of states,” UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said in prepared remarks as part of the company’s first-quarter earnings report. The company warned investors late last year that it was losing money on the new plans and might exit the market. On Tuesday, the company raised its 2016 expectation for losses on the exchanges by $125 million to $650 million. UnitedHealth’s Hemsley said that the shorter term, higher risk profile of the new members, as well as the smaller than expected enrollment, suggested UnitedHealth could not offer plans on a sustained basis. For the first quarter, United Health’s profit was better-than-expected and UnitedHealth shares rose 1.9 percent to $130.29 in early New York Stock Exchange trading. Other health insurers including Aetna Inc and Anthem Inc are also large players on the exchanges. In recent months they said they will continue to sell exchange plans. The company has 795,000 customers from the exchanges, more than half of them new to UnitedHealth, it said. It expects about 650,000 members by year end. The government said in February that more than 12 million people had signed up for Obamacare-related insurance through HealthCare.gov or a state-based exchange as of Jan. 31. Previous government expectations had been for more than 20 million people. UnitedHealth raised its expectations for 2016 profit, in part because of a more favorable tax rate that also helped it beat Wall Street expectations for the first quarter. Lower sales and administrative costs and a decline in amortization of intangible assets also helped its first quarter results. On an adjusted basis the health insurer earned $1.81 per share, compared with Wall Street analyst expectations for earnings of $1.72 per share, according to ThomsonReuters I/B/E/S. Net profit rose to $1.61 billion, or $1.67 per share, from $1.41 billion or $1.46 per share, a year earlier. The company now expects 2016 adjusted net earnings of $7.75-$7.95 per share, up 15 cents per share from its previous estimate. | 0fake |
James Comey’s Opening Remarks: It’s All About Him - Breitbart | Former FBI director James Comey opened his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday by complaining about “shifting explanations” for why he had been fired, and by attacking the Trump administration. [Comey said that he had originally intended to accept his firing quietly, but then found that the administration’s statements about the matter “confused me and increasingly concerned me. ” He said that President Donald Trump had assured him that he was doing a good job, and that he had assured the president in return that he intended to stay. “I was extremely by the FBI workforce,” Comey said. “So it confused me when I saw on television the president saying that he actually fired me because of the Russia investigation. ” Under questioning, Comey would later admit that the president did not ask him to stop the Russia investigation, an admission already contained in Comey’s prepared written testimony. Comey continued: “I was also confused by the initial explanation that was offered publicly: that I was fired because of the decisions I had made during the election year. ” He had assumed that was “water … under the bridge,” he said. “The administration then chose to defame me, and more importantly the FBI, by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader. Those were lies, plain and simple, and I am so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them, and I’m so sorry that the American people were told them. ” Comey closed his remarks by offering words of praise for his former colleagues at the FBI. But his remarks left little doubt that his motivations for testifying were deeply personal. And they created an impression that he intended to exact a political price from the president for doing what he acknowledged the president had every right to do. Joel B. Pollak is Senior at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak. | 0fake |
Key conservative lawmaker says making headway on healthcare bill | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Representative Mark Meadows, chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said on Wednesday he is very encouraged by the negotiations with Republican leadership over a sweeping healthcare bill. “I’m very encouraged that we might be seeing some real headway,” Meadows told reporters before a caucus meeting. Earlier, a Freedom Caucus aide said more than 25 members of the group opposed the legislation to replace Obamacare, enough votes to sink the bill in Thursday’s scheduled vote. | 0fake |
Trump’s Biggest KKK Fan Is Back, And He Just LOVED Those Anti-Muslim Tweets This Morning | Just in case you needed any more proof that Donald Trump s racist tweets were a thinly-coded message to his alt-right, anti-Muslim, and white supremacist followers, a former Grand Wizard of the KKK has jumped on board today in praise of President Hates-a-Lot.It wasn t enough that the KKK endorsed Trump during his campaign to stop his multitudes of followers from voting for him, so it s hard to say whether Duke s full-throated endorsement of today s disgusting display of racism will be any different. But for the average American, seeing the former Klan leader get behind Trump so vigorously should make them more than a little sick.To even go to Duke s page on Twitter is to subject yourself to a blinding cover photo, all white, with a blue-eyed Aryan baby in the upper corner, and the words It s Okay To Be White across the middle. The phrase is part of a hate campaign that Doctor Duke has been pushing across America, a play on the notion that there is some kind of war on white people happening.But the tweet itself is disturbing:Trump retweets video of crippled white kid in Europe being beaten by migrants, and white people being thrown off a roof and then beaten to death, He's condemned for showing us what the fake news media WON'T. Thank God for Trump! That's why we love him! David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) November 29, 2017By invoking God in his message, Duke is trying the age-old tactic of pretending that white supremacy has its roots in Christianity, an angle that KKK members have tried to use for generations.Sadly, it works on some followers of both Duke s and of Donald Trump s. It seems there s quite a bit of crossover between the two racist groups. That s no surprise: The KKK were absolutely instrumental in getting Trump elected.The bottom line is, both men know exactly what they re doing when they send messages like that to their followers. Trump s racist retweets were already disgraceful enough. But continuing to leave them on his Twitter feed even after seeing praise from a Loyal White Knight like David Duke is just rubbing salt in the wound.Featured image via William Thomas Cain/Getty Images | 1real |
Police: Suspects Punch Army Veteran, Steal His Service Dog Outside Home in the Bronx - Breitbart | Two men punched an Army veteran and stole his service dog outside his home in the Bronx before they fled the scene, police said.[ Police say a man punched Robert Lebron, 40, from behind and then chased after him while a second man grabbed Lebron’s service dog, Mala, from his porch at Valentine Ave. and E. 194th St. May 14, the New York Daily News reported. WABC reported that Lebron suffered minor injuries, but did not seek medical attention. Police say they identified one of the suspects as Brian Cohen, whom they say is the of the victim’s wife, CBS New York reported. The Army veteran said he has the dog to help with his PTSD, NBC New York reported. Lebron says he has a special bond with his service dog. “What she gives me I can’t get from someone else: not a therapist or a family member or my friend,” he said. “It’s unconditional love. ” Police have not identified the second suspect, but they say he was last seen wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and dark pants and shoes. The suspects are still at large, and police are asking anyone with information about the suspects to call NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at . | 0fake |
Uncle of Benghazi Victim Sean Smith: “Hillary Clinton Is a Serial Liar” | Hillary Clinton is a serial liar. Hillary Clinton has a hard time maintaining a consistent level of truth and that was proven today and it s been proven before I think Hillary Clinton should really think about resigning from ever running for any office at this point. She s incompetent. Michael Ingmire, Uncle of Benghazi victim Sean Smith | 1real |
No Joke! Chicago Cops Searching For Thug Dad Who Filmed Toddler Smoking Pot: “Inhale it” [Video] | Holy Smokes! This is what our world has come to?Chicago police are investigating a video posted to Facebook that appears to show a diaper-clad toddler smoking a marijuana joint as a man off-screen encourages the boy to Inhale it. A community activist yesterday tipped cops to the clip, and Special Victims Unit detectives are now trying to identify who filmed the video, according to a Chicago Police Department spokesperson.It is unknown when or where the video which was posted to the Facebook page of a Chicago resident was recorded.Seen below, the 17-second clip found on Facebook shows the video playing on the screen of a cell phone, and it includes markings indicating that it may have previously been uploaded to some video sharing site.In the clip, a man s voice is heard directing the toddler to Smoke, bro. Inhale it. The man who appears to be filming the boy with his cell phone then says, Let me hit that, okay? Via: the smoking gun | 1real |
Fake News: WikiLeaks Threatens to Sue CNN over Analyst Calling Assange a Pedophile - Breitbart | WikiLeaks threatened to sue CNN for defamation after the network aired a clip of CNN counterterrorism analyst Phil Mudd accusing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of being a pedophile. [Tweeting from the official WikiLeaks Task Force account — a support account for the organisation — a tweet reads, “CNN airs of the CIA falsely calling Assange a ‘pedophile. ’” CNN airs of the CIA falsely calling Assange a ’pedophile’ https: . The plot: https: . — WikiLeaks Task Force (@WLTaskForce) January 4, 2017, The clip attached to the tweet shows Phil Mudd on CNN’s New Day program discussing the recent Fox News interview with Julian Assange. Mudd accuses Fox News’ Sean Hannity of “skirting the bottom line” in relation to questions about Russian interference in the US election, despite Assange openly stating that WikiLeaks’ source of DNC documents was in no way related to Russia. Mudd further stated that he thought there was an “effort by WikiLeaks to protect a pedophile that lives in the Ecuadorian embassy in London,” and further claimed that Julian Assange was “not credible. ” In response to this, the official WikiLeaks Twitter account has retweeted the Task Force tweet with the added quote, “We have issued instructions to sue CNN for defamation,” clarifying, “Unless within 48h they air a one hour expose of the plot. ” We have issued instructions to sue CNN for defamation:https: . Unless within 48h they air a one hour expose of the plot. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 4, 2017, CNN’s New Day twitter account has since deleted the tweet WikiLeaks Task Force cited and appears to have removed the segment of the video in which Mudd called Assange a pedophile from the story the tweet originally linked to. It also tweeted out a statement saying CNN had “no evidence” to support the accusation that Assange is a pedophile. We’ve deleted a tweet that included a video clip from New Day earlier this morning. Here’s our statement: pic. twitter. — New Day (@NewDay) January 4, 2017, Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart Tech covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart. com | 0fake |
Iran’s carpet exports to US at $50mn | Iran’s carpet exports to US at $50mn Thu Oct 27, 2016 5:55AM Economy Iran says it exported about $50 million of hand-woven carpets to the United States since the removal of sanctions in January.
Iran says its exports of hand-woven carpets to the United States have reached around $50 million since the removal of sanctions in January.
Hamid Kargar, head of the Iran National Carpet Center, told Reuters that Iran was under pressure in the US market by rivals such as like India, Pakistan and Turkey during the years that the sanctions were in place.
Kargar emphasized that the world’s largest buyer imported more than $80 million worth from Iran in 2010, before the trade embargo on the country was tightened.
He emphasized that a growth in exports of hand-woven carpets will have a positive impact on the lives of the carpet weavers in the country.
There are almost 1 million carpet weavers in Iran, 700,000 of whom are working full-time, Kargar said.
Between March and September this year, Iran exported $134 million worth of handmade carpets, or 2,330 tons, to 80 countries, Reuters said. That was a 17.7 percent increase in value and 10 percent rise in weight compared to a year earlier.
During the sanctions years, Iran partially compensated for its loss of market share in the United States and Europe by finding new buyers in Russia, China, South Africa and some Latin American countries, the report added. It still holds about 30 percent of the global trade in handmade carpets, Kargar further told Reuters.
Iran shipped its first cargo of hand-woven carpets – globally considered the crown jewel of its handicrafts industry – to the US in February after the sanctions against the country were lifted.
The cargo was sent to Los Angeles from Hamburg. Loading ... | 1real |
Civil rights group sues in U.S. court over immigration detention | (Reuters) - The American Civil Liberties Union sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in federal court on Thursday, seeking records the civil rights group contends provide accounts of hunger strikes at immigration detention facilities. The ACLU said in its filing that in recent weeks there have been a new series of hunger strikes at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers in Georgia, Oregon and Washington, adding hunger strikes have previously hit detention centers in Arizona, Florida, Louisiana and Texas. The suit comes as U.S. Republican President Donald Trump has promised a crackdown on illegal immigration and the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress this month agreed to fund an additional 5,300 detention beds for those suspected of illegally entering the country. “The Trump administration’s plans to expand detention and strip away existing structures for oversight of detention are likely to produce more protests both inside and outside the walls of detention facilities,” the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea said in an email: “ICE is unable to comment on pending litigation.” The lawsuit said detention center inmates have launched the hunger strikes over the past few years as a non-violent way to bring attention to what they see as a lack of access to bond hearings and inhumane conditions of confinement. The suit also said that some inmates who have previously launched hunger strikes were met with extraordinarily punitive responses. From April 1-22, an average of 36,235 immigrants were in detention per day, according to the most recent statistics provided by ICE. The White House in March requested bringing the total number of beds up to 45,700, saying the additional capacity was necessary to achieve the president’s goal of “enhancing interior enforcement efforts and ending ‘catch and release’ for those apprehended at the border.” The agreement reached in Congress would increase the number of immigration detention beds to 39,324 from 34,000 currently, according to a summary provided by the House Appropriations Committee. In April, hundreds of detainees at an immigration detention center in Washington state began refusing meals in a hunger strike to protest conditions at the facility and delayed immigration hearings, activists said. The Geo Group Inc, the company that operates the Washington state facility and other detention centers around the United States, declined to comment on the lawsuit. | 0fake |
Trump Fires Adviser’s Son From Transition for Spreading Fake News - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump on Tuesday fired one of his transition team’s staff members, Michael G. Flynn, the son of Mr. Trump’s choice for national security adviser, for using Twitter to spread a fake news story about Hillary Clinton that led to an armed confrontation in a pizza restaurant in Washington. The uproar over Mr. Flynn’s Twitter post cast a harsh spotlight on the views that he and his father, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, aired on social media throughout the presidential campaign. Both men have shared fake news stories alleging that Mrs. Clinton committed felonies, and have posted their own Twitter messages that at times have crossed into Islamophobia. But their social media musings apparently attracted little attention from Mr. Trump or his transition team before a North Carolina man fired a rifle on Sunday inside Comet Ping Pong, which was the subject of false stories tying it and the Clinton campaign to a child sex trafficking ring. Hours after the episode, the younger Mr. Flynn, 33, went on Twitter to say that until “Pizzagate” was proved false, it remained a story. On Tuesday morning, after the post had attracted national attention and it was reported that Mr. Flynn had a transition team email address, Vice Mike Pence denied that Mr. Flynn had ever worked for the team, saying on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that he had “no involvement in the transition whatsoever. ” But later in the morning, Jason Miller, a transition spokesman, tacitly acknowledged that Mr. Flynn had worked for the transition, saying in a conference call that Mr. Flynn was now no longer involved. Mr. Miller did not say what prompted the dismissal of Mr. Flynn, but two other Trump transition officials said it was tied to his Twitter posting. The move may have cost the younger Mr. Flynn an eventual post in the White House. Until Tuesday, he had planned to join his father on the staff of the National Security Council and had even started the process of getting a security clearance, according to an acquaintance who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid upsetting the Flynns. Despite the younger Mr. Flynn’s abrupt removal from the transition team, there was no indication that Mr. Trump was reconsidering his choice of General Flynn, 57, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, to serve as national security adviser. But beyond the tight circle around Mr. Trump, there were growing concerns in Washington about General Flynn’s fitness for the job, fueled by talk of his temperament, his conspiratorial worldview and his own incendiary Twitter postings. Many Democrats were openly critical from the moment the appointment was announced last month, and several prominent Republican national security officials also quietly voiced concerns. Now, with Mr. Flynn under growing scrutiny, some are beginning to speak publicly. “The national security adviser should have a moderating effect on the instincts of the president, and it remains to be seen if Mike can do that,” Michael V. Hayden, a former director of both the C. I. A. and the National Security Agency, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. The role of national security adviser calls for mediating the conflicting views of cabinet secretaries and agencies, and sifting fact from speculation and rumor to help the new president decide how the United States should react to international crises. It is a job that is likely to take on greater importance for Mr. Trump, who has no experience in defense or foreign policy issues and has a habit of making broad assertions that are not based in fact. General Flynn, too, has shown similar inclinations both on Twitter and in his previous jobs in the military. At the Defense Intelligence Agency, his staff members even coined their own name for his sometimes dubious assertions: “Flynn facts. ” “He has regularly engaged in the reckless public promotion of conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact, with disregard for the risks that giving credence to those theories could pose to the public,” Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said on Tuesday. “Someone who is so oblivious to the facts, or intentionally ignorant of them, should not be entrusted with policy decisions that affect the safety of the American people,” Mr. Smith added. For now, General Flynn appears to be weathering the criticism, which has been far harsher than that directed at other Trump nominees, by keeping a relatively low profile since the election. He has not given interviews — he did not respond to requests for comment — and he has kept his Twitter posts relatively tame, publishing patriotic messages on Veterans Day and more recently praising Mr. Trump’s selection of Gen. James N. Mattis, a retired Marine, for defense secretary. His son, in contrast, showed no such restraint in the weeks before he was fired, regularly posting on Twitter about conspiracy theories involving Mrs. Clinton and her campaign staff well after the election. He continued to push his support for the fake news about Comet Ping Pong after his messages on Twitter about Sunday’s episode began attracting widespread attention. It was not until shortly before 3:30 p. m. Monday that he went silent on Twitter. In one of the last messages he posted, he shared a post from another Twitter user who sought to spread a conspiracy theory that sprang up on the fringes after the shooting: that the suspect arrested at Comet Ping Pong, Edgar M. Welch, 28, of Salisbury, N. C. was actually an actor, and that the episode was a hoax cooked up to discredit the claim of a sex trafficking ring at the restaurant. | 0fake |
Insider Leaks Bill’s 2-Word Nickname For Hillary, Exposes Dirty Sex Habits | Insider Leaks Bill’s 2-Word Nickname For Hillary, Exposes Dirty Sex Habits Posted on October 26, 2016 by Robert Rich in Politics Share This
Bill and Hillary Clinton just can’t stay out of the spotlight these days, and the most recent leak about them could be the most damaging yet. As it turns out, someone once close to the duo just came forward to share Bill’s revealing nickname for his wife — but the worse comes as their dirty bedroom habits were exposed. Bill and Hillary Clinton (left), Photoshopped image of Hillary (right)
It’s no mystery that Bill Clinton is a sexual deviant, but the most recent account given by the woman who had a 3-decade affair with the man is damning, to say the least. According to an exclusive interview given to Mail Online , Dolly Kyle was behind the scene’s long enough to not only know the two’s darkest secrets but even their dirty sexual habits – and now, she’s telling everyone.
The connection between Dolly and Bill began when she was just 11-years-old. He was about 13-years-old at the time, but Dolly states that there was an immediate attraction, even then. As the years progressed, the two became romantically involved and stayed that way through several of their marriages over the next 30 years. Dolly Kyle (Source: Mail Online )
The real affair began in 1974 just after Dolly divorced her first husband, and although Bill wasn’t married yet, he would be within the year. Although she was never interested in sharing the intimate details of the relationship, she states that she snapped when she heard Hillary recently say that all sexual assault victims have the “right to be believed.”
Knowing full well just what Hillary had done – between the threats and the lies – to the many women who either had an affair with or were sexually assaulted by her husband Bill, Dolly knew she had to do something about it. Unfortunately for Hillary, Dolly is now coming forward with the dirty 2-word nickname Bill husband once called Hillary, among other things.
According to Mail Online , Bill approached Dolly at their high school’s 35-year reunion to talk about “ the warden ” – a.k.a. Hillary. Saying he was unhappy with his life and marriage, this was the least significant account Dolly had to share. A very unhappy Bill and “the warden” Hillary Clinton (Source: Mail Online )
In fact, Dolly recalls that Bill mentioned something about having a baby to her. Although she thought he was saying he wanted to have one with her, he was actually talking about Hillary. He wanted to put to bed the rumors that Hillary was a lesbian, even though everyone in their hometown already knew it to be true.
Dolly states that the worst came when she met Hillary for the first time. “In that moment I noticed that the woman emitted an overpowering [body] odor of perspiration and greasy hair. I hoped that I wouldn’t gag when she got in my car,” she said. “The sandal-shod woman with lank, smelly hair stood off to the side and glared at everyone.” Bill and Hillary Clinton (Source: Mail Online )
No wonder Bill went elsewhere to fulfill his “sexual addiction,” as Dolly referred to it. After all, what else can you do when you’re married to a stinky woman who doesn’t shower and isn’t attracted to men anyways? Although an affair is never justified, it’s easy to sympathize with Bill on this one. But, I digress.
The bigger point here is what the two are willing to do in order to remain in power. Most people know that you can’t trust Hillary as far as you can throw her – which isn’t very far – so the fact that she has any supporters is beyond baffling at this point. This woman is corrupt and fake to the core. Let’s just hope all of America wakes up to this reality before it’s too late and she can do any more damage than she already has. | 1real |
Rohingya say their village is lost to Myanmar's spiraling conflict | (Story refiles to add dropped word not , in paragraph 10, in the September 7th story) By Simon Lewis KUTAPALONG, Bangladesh (Reuters) - The villagers said the soldiers came first, firing indiscriminately. Then came civilians, accompanying the soldiers, to loot and burn. Now in Bangladesh, 20 Muslims and Hindus gave interviews in which they recounted how they were forced out of their village of Kha Maung Seik in Myanmar s Rakhine State on Aug. 25. The military brought some Rakhine Buddhists with them and torched the village, said Kadil Hussein, 55. All the Muslims in our village, about 10,000, fled. Some were killed by gunshots, the rest came here. There s not a single person left. Hussein is staying with hundreds of other new arrivals at the Kutapalong refugee settlement, already home to thousands of Rohingya who fled earlier. Nearly 150,000 Rohingya have arrived in Bangladesh since Aug. 25, when insurgents of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army launched attacks on security forces in Rakhine State. Reuters interviewed villagers from Kha Maung Seik and neighboring hamlets, who described killings and the burning of homes in the military response to the insurgent attacks. Reuters has been unable to verify their accounts. Access to the area has been restricted since October, when the same insurgent group attacked police posts, killing nine. Myanmar says its forces are in a fight against terrorists . State media has accused Rohingya militants of burning villages and killing civilians of all religions. Myanmar does not recognize the 1.1 million Rohingya as citizens, labeling them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. The refugees from Kha Maung Seik, and from numerous other villages across the north of Rakhine State, say Myanmar forces and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists are intent on forcing them out. One refugee, Body Alom, 28, said he hid in forest with thousands of others when the soldiers arrived. He waited for hours before emerging to look for his family. He says he saw corpses in paddy fields, and eventually found his mother and brother dead with gunshot wounds. Two other villagers said they saw bodies in the fields. It wasn t safe, so I just left them, he said. I had no chance to give them a burial. A military official denied that Buddhist civilians were working with authorities and instead accused Muslims of attacking other communities. The military arrived at the village later but did not find any bodies, said the military source, who declined to be identified as he is not authorized to speak to media. Another military source in the state capital, Sittwe, said Kha Maung Seik was in the conflict zone and clear information about what happened had yet to emerge. The main village of Kha Maung Seik was home to a mixed community, with Rohingya Muslims in the majority along with about 6,000 Rakhine Buddhists, Hindus and others. The village is known to the Rohingya as Foira Bazar for its market of about 1,000 shops where everyone did business. But relations have been strained for some time. A government plan to grant Hindus citizenship, violence in the state in 2012 and October, and an identity card scheme that the Rohingya rejected as it implied they were foreign, all contributed to tension, the refugees said. Since October, more soldiers were posted near the village, with border police. Patrols went house-to-house arresting anyone suspected of having militant links, they said. Abu Kalam, 31, showed Reuters welts on his back, arms and legs, and what he said were cigarette burns on his arms. He said he was detained by the military last month, before the attacks, as he was working in his vegetable patch with a knife. After October, the military told us not to have knives. When they saw me using one they arrested me, he said, adding he was kept in a barracks for six days. They regularly tortured me, asking are you connected with al-Yaqin? , he said, using another name for the rebels. Villagers in Kha Maung Seik say they heard shooting at 2 a.m. on Aug. 25. A military source in Maungdaw town and two Muslim residents said militants attacked a police post near the village that night. According to the military source, the rebels attacked with grenades then turned their attention to a Hindu neighborhood. Four Rohingya villagers separately gave Reuters accounts of how, at about 5 a.m., soldiers entered the village, firing indiscriminately. Thousands fled. I was at the front of a big group running for cover, but I looked back and could see people at the back getting shot, said Abul Hussein, 28. Later, grenades and mortar bombs were fired into the forest, according to Hussein and three other villagers. I saw a mortar hit a group of people. Some died on the spot, he said. From the forest, residents watched military and civilians loot and burn houses. Civilians helped gather bodies, according to Body Alom and two other villagers. They collected the bodies, searching for belongings, said Body Alom. They took money, clothes, cows, everything. Then they burned the houses. Members of Myanmar s small Hindu community seem to have been caught in the middle. The military source said some Hindus from Kha Maung Seik were unaccounted after the militant attack. A group of Hindu women refugees in Kutapalong said they saw eight Hindu men killed by Buddhist Rakhines after they refused to attack Muslims. They asked my husband to join them to kill Rohingya but he refused, so they killed him, said Anika Bala, 15. Six months pregnant, she said Muslims helped her get to Bangladesh. After seeing their homes burned, Kha Maung Seik s Muslim leaders decided it was too dangerous to stay. We thought we might be able to return and live with other types of people, said Mohammed Zubair, 30, assistant to the village chairman. But we realized that s not possible. About 100 men decided to stay and fight, Body Alom said. One said to me If I have to die, I will die here . | 0fake |
Be careful, murdered Iranian activist's daughter tells European exiles | THE HAGUE (Reuters) - The daughter of an Iranian Arab activist killed in the Netherlands last month linked his death to political conflict in the Middle East, and warned other exiles in Europe to be on their guard. Ahmad Mola Nissi, 52, was gunned down by an unidentified assailant in front of his home in The Hague on Nov. 8 in a suspected political killing. Hawra Ahmad Nissi said her father s death was reminiscent of a string of murders of Iranian dissidents in Europe in the 1990s. Europe seems safe, but be careful, she told Reuters in an interview. The conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran is not confined to the Middle East. It is spreading into Europe. Relations between Shi ite Muslim Iran and Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia have soured in recent months, with the struggle for influence between the two long-standing regional rivals played out through increasingly bitter proxy confrontations, notably in Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. Mola Nissi established the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA), which seeks a separate state in Iran s oil-rich southwestern Khuzestan province, in 1999. Since his murder, his family have been under Dutch police protection at a safe house. We came here to be safe but we don t feel safe. European governments should do more to secure the safety of activists, Hawra Nissi, 25, said. Ahvazi Arabs are a minority in mainly ethnic Persian Iran, and some see themselves as victims of occupation and want independence or autonomy. Tehran, which has condemned Mola Nissi s killing and promised to investigate it, accuses Riyadh of funding separatist groups active in Iran, a charge the Saudis deny. A source close to Mola Nissi s family, who asked not to be named due to security concerns, said he had accepted Saudi financial support but did not want the Ahvazi cause to be used as a pawn in the proxy war. This attitude could have made him an obstacle to efforts to bring the ASMLA movement under Saudi influence, the source said. The family is open to all scenarios. Iran is a prime suspect, but not the only suspect, Hawra Nissi said. Police are exploring a possible link between Mola Nissi s killing and the unsolved murder of another Iranian near Amsterdam in December 2015, a spokeswoman said. They are looking for two suspects believed to have gunned down Ali Motamed. The police declined to comment on the circumstances of Motamed s death or a motive, but Iranian media have linked him to exiled Iranian opposition Shi ite group the People s Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (PMOI), which would have made him a potential target. A man detained in relation to Mola Nissi s death has since been released, the spokeswoman added. The most prominent among a string of killings and disappearances of Iranian dissidents in the 1980s and 1990s was the shooting of three Iranian Kurdish opposition leaders in Berlin in 1992, which a German court ruled had been ordered by the government in Tehran. | 0fake |
Poll: Trump gains in Iowa, still dominates in New Hampshire | With just over a week until the first 2016 election contest, Donald Trump takes the lead in Iowa -- and maintains his big advantage in New Hampshire.
That’s according to the latest round of Fox News state polls on the Republican presidential nomination contest.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE IOWA POLL RESULTS
CLICK HERE TO READ THE NEW HAMPSHIRE POLL RESULTS
Trump bests Ted Cruz in Iowa and now receives 34 percent support among Republican caucus-goers. Trump was at 23 percent in the Fox News Poll two weeks ago (January 4-7).
Cruz is second with 23 percent -- down a touch from 27 percent. Marco Rubio comes in third with 12 percent, down from 15 percent. No others garner double-digit support.
Among caucus-goers who identify as “very” conservative, Cruz was up by 18 points over Trump earlier this month. Now they each receive about a third among this group (Cruz 34 percent vs. Trump 33 percent).
There’s been a similar shift among white evangelical Christians. Cruz’s 14-point advantage is now down to a 2-point edge.
A lot has happened in the intervening two weeks. Fox Business Network hosted a Republican debate where Trump questioned Cruz’s eligibility to be president, and Cruz attacked Trump’s liberal “New York values.” On Tuesday, Gov. Terry Branstad urged his fellow Iowans to vote against Cruz because of his opposition to ethanol -- and former Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin endorsed Trump.
Republican pollster Daron Shaw says, “We tend to over-interpret every little thing in a presidential race, but here we actually have solid evidence Trump didn't just win last week in Iowa -- he won it by enough to put some distance between himself and Cruz.” Shaw conducts the Fox News Poll with Democratic pollster Chris Anderson.
But a lot can change before Iowans caucus February 1.
A third of Republican caucus-goers say they may change their mind (33 percent). Even one in four Trump supporters says they may ultimately go with another candidate (25 percent).
Cruz tops the list when GOP caucus-goers are asked their second-choice candidate. When first and second-choice preferences are combined, it’s extremely tight between Trump (48 percent) and Cruz (45 percent).
That’s because 20 percent of Iowa Republican caucus-goers are so negative on Trump they say they would “refuse” to vote for him over the Democrat in November, while fewer say the same of Cruz (11 percent). Another 14 percent say they would stay home if the nominee is Jeb Bush.
Here’s how the rest of the field stands: Ben Carson is at 7 percent, Rand Paul is at 6 percent, Bush and Chris Christie each get 4 percent, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich and Rick Santorum tie at 2 percent, and Carly Fiorina gets 1 percent.
More than a third who say they will attend a Republican caucus this year have never gone before (38 percent). Many of these first-time attendees, 43 percent, are supporting Trump, while 19 percent favor Cruz and 14 percent Rubio. The poll can’t predict how many from this group will actually show up.
Among just those Republicans who have caucused before, it’s a 3-point race: Trump 28 percent vs. Cruz 25 percent. Another 10 percent go for Rubio.
True conservative values is the top characteristic GOP caucus-goers want in their party’s nominee (27 percent), closely followed by telling it like it is (24 percent) and being a strong leader (23 percent). Those traits outrank nominating someone who can win in November (9 percent) or has the right experience (7 percent).
Unlike Iowa, there has been little movement in the New Hampshire Republican race. Trump continues to garner more than twice the support of his nearest competitors.
The Fox News poll shows Trump at 31 percent (down 2 points), Cruz at 14 percent (up 2 points) and Rubio at 13 percent (down 2 points).
Kasich is at 9 percent, Bush and Christie each receive 7 percent, Carson and Paul tie at 5 percent, while Fiorina gets 3 percent, and Huckabee 1 percent.
Despite dominating the NH race, Trump also tops the list as the nominee who would make Republicans stay home in November: 26 percent say they would refuse to vote for Trump against the Democrat. Fifteen percent say the same of Bush, 14 percent feel that way about Cruz, and 12 percent about Rubio.
Over half of likely Republican primary voters in the Granite State say they are certain to vote for their candidate, while 36 percent could still shift their support.
Granite Staters also want slightly different traits in their nominee than their Iowa counterparts. NH GOP primary voters want a strong leader (27 percent) and someone who tells it like it is (21 percent) more than a nominee who has true conservative values (15 percent), is electable (13 percent), or has the right experience (12 percent).
The Fox News Poll is conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R). These polls were conducted January 18-21, 2016, by telephone (landline and cellphone) with live interviewers.
The New Hampshire poll was among a sample of 801 registered voters selected from a statewide voter file. Results based on the sample of 401 Republican primary voters have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.
In Iowa, the poll was among a sample of 801 registered voters selected from a statewide voter file. Results based on the sample of 378 Republican caucus-goers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points. | 0fake |
New York City reaches agreement on $82.1 billion FY 2017 budget | NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Wednesday an agreement on a balanced $82.1 billion city budget for the 2016-2017 fiscal year that boosts reserves and expands a summer youth employment program. The agreement was reached with New York’s City Council and comes well ahead of a July 1 deadline. De Blasio, a Democrat, said it was the earliest agreement since 2001 and credited the cooperation between his administration and the City Council. The agreement increases reserves, with an additional $250 million to grow the Retiree Health Benefits Trust Fund to $3.9 billion. It includes $1 billion every year in general reserves, and $500 million in the capital stabilization reserve. The budget highlights de Blasio’s social mission. The executive budget, presented in April, dedicated $2 billion to overhauling the city’s $7.5 billion public hospital system, which treat around 1.4 million people per year. City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and other council members hailed the expansion of the city’s summer youth work program to 60,000 at a press conference at City Hall. The program places young people aged 14-24 with community organizations for summer employment. The budget agreement comes at a difficult time for de Blasio who is facing multiple investigations into his campaign finances. On Wednesday the head of New York City’s prison guard union and a hedge fund financier were charged with operating a kickback scheme. It marked the first major prosecution to emerge from state and federal corruption probes examining de Blasio’s fundraising practices, among other avenues of inquiry. | 0fake |
How Voting Machines Are Programmed In Order To Steal Elections | How Voting Machines Are Programmed In Order To Steal Elections
Americans are being told by “experts” (read “Hillary supporters”) that election fraud in the US is rare. They are also being misinformed that voting fraud would be detected. The fact of the matter is, as has now been proven, that no vast conspiracy is required. One person suffices to have the machine count the votes as desired. Once the vote is recorded the code erases the elements that would reveal the fraud.
The entire purpose of the presstitutes reporting a non-existent Hillary lead is to create in advance acceptance that she won, thereby discrediting in advance any challenge to the rigged outcome.
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2016/10/31/biggest-election-fraud-in-history-discovered-in-the-united-states/
The post How Voting Machines Are Programmed In Order To Steal Elections appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org . | 1real |
BREAKING: SCREW THE FRONT-RUNNERS Chosen By “We The People”…The GOP Establishment Has Other Plans | Here s the REAL reason Mitt Romney came out against Trump. If you can t beat a candidate ON THE SAME TEAM fair and square, resort to plan B right? Ironically, if the GOP establishment fought back against Obama as hard as they re fighting against Trump, he wouldn t likely be the front-runner right now.Former Speaker of the House John Boehner has endorsed current Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) for president, in the event that no Republican candidate achieves a majority on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July.Politico reports that Boehner, speaking at a conference in Boca Raton, Florida, said: If we don t have a nominee who can win on the first ballot, I m for none of the above. They all had a chance to win. None of them won. So I m for none of the above. I m for Paul Ryan to be our nominee. Late Tuesday evening, as results from primary contests confirmed Donald Trump s victories in four out of five states, CNBC reported that Ryan had not ruled out accepting such a nomination.EXCLUSIVE: Paul Ryan won't categorically rule out accepting GOP nominationif a deadlocked convention turns to him https://t.co/kuxSyWEDZg CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) March 16, 2016Ryan was welcomed by conservatives as Mitt Romney s choice for running mate in 2012. The pro-life fiscal conservative had led the charge to reform entitlements, and used his policy prowess to point out the deep flaws in Obamacare during the intense debates of 2009-10.In the aftermath of that 2012 loss, Ryan turned his attention to the task of governing rather than opposing, convinced that Republicans shared responsibility with Democrats and the president. As a result, he showed an openness to compromise on immigration and on budget issues that resulted in the erosion of some conservative support. Via: Breitbart News | 1real |
Democratic U.S. senator seeks audit of EPA chief's trip to Morocco | WASHINGTON () - The top Democrat on the Senate environment committee on Monday asked the Environmental Protection Agency’s internal watchdog to audit a recent trip to Morocco by the agency’s head to determine if it was in line with the EPA’s mission. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, in a trip to Morocco last week, promoted U.S. liquefied natural gas. Senator Tom Carper asked EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins to expand its current audit of Pruitt’s travel to include the trip to Morocco as part of a U.S. trade mission. “I request that you review the purpose of Administrator Pruitt’s travels to determine whether his activities during each trip are in line with EPA’s mission ‘to protect human health and the environment,’” Carper wrote in the letter to Elkins. Traditionally, the EPA, which regulates clean air and water, does not promote the U.S. energy industry. Last week, the EPA announced that Pruitt attended bilateral meetings in Morocco where he “outlined U.S. environmental priorities for updating the Environmental Work Plan under the U.S.-Morocco Free Trade Agreement and the potential benefit of liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports on Morocco’s economy.” Liquefied natural gas is produced by cooling natural gas until it is condensed into a liquid, allowing it to be shipped via tanker instead of moved by pipeline. It is reconverted into gas at the other end. When asked why the head of the EPA was involved in touting LNG, EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said Pruitt discussed the role of U.S. technology and innovation abroad, “including but not limited to LNG.” It “only serves to emphasize the importance this administration has placed on promoting U.S. businesses,” Wilcox said. Carper said the Morocco travel has cost taxpayers $40,000 and that gas exports do not fall within the agency’s jurisdiction. The Inspector General’s office is already reviewing all travel by Pruitt conducted until Sept. 30 after Democratic lawmakers asked for a review of Pruitt’s frequent travels to Oklahoma, his home state. | 0fake |
The Changeup: Liberals Now Saying ESPN’s Liberal Bias is a Good Thing | For most of the last year, ESPN in particular and the liberal sports media in general have jumped through hoops to deny that the cable sports network has a liberal bias problem. But now that the obvious has grown too hard to deny, their tactics are changing. Now, all of a sudden, ESPN’s liberal bias is a good thing. [Until now, ESPN and its hosts have repeatedly denied that it has a liberal bias problem. Last year ESPN ombudsman Jim Brady published an investigation into the claim of liberal bias that ran thousands of words only to reach the conclusion that there was no liberal bias. But that wasn’t all the question so vexed the network that it hired a polling firm to find out if there is any liberal bias and, if so, has it hurt the network’s ratings. Unsurprisingly, the survey bought and paid for by ESPN miraculously showed that there was no liberal bias at the network. ESPN’s survey, though, flies in the face of three other surveys that did find that the network has a liberal bias problem and that the constant content is driving viewers away. Many liberal members of the sports media, such as Awful Announcing’s Andrew Bucholtz, joined ESPN to any notion that the network has a liberal bias problem. But there seems to be a changeup in the discussion as at least one liberal sportsman is now saying ESPN’s dive into liberalism is a good thing for the network that is losing 10, 000 subscribers a month. According to Ty Duffy of Awful Announcing, ESPN’s liberal bias is a good thing because it will bring in young, liberal fans. “There is truth in the liberal claim. ESPN has tilted leftward under John Skipper,” Duffy initially observed. Despite that admission, Duffy goes on to claim there is “no proof” that conservative fans have abandoned ESPN over its constant content. Naturally Duffy ignored the three surveys that serve as proof of conservative discontent and relied only on ESPN’s bought and paid for survey to “prove” his contention. But even as he offers no statistical proof to buttress his own claim, Duffy insists that ESPN’s drive leftward is a shrewd move because it will bring young, “woke” viewers to replace the fleeing conservative audience. Major brands, such as ESPN, are now expected to exhibit a political and social consciousness. They pay a cost when they are tone deaf. If there are now two Americas, ESPN (and sports leagues) will move with the one advertisers want to reach: young people, people with disposable income, and growing minority populations. Of course, Duffy indulges gross generalizations. Only far liberals “expect” major brands to “exhibit a political and social consciousness. ” Even if that is the case, he also seems to simply assume that even liberals don’t want a place to escape politics and instead want politics to invade and conquer the sports world. Time will tell, of course, but it is interesting to see how this argument is morphing from staunch proclamations that ESPN isn’t liberal to the admission that, yes, some hosts are liberal, and finally to the obdurate notion that “yeah, we’re liberal. What of it?” Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 0fake |
Presidential candidate Cruz appoints Islam critics as advisers | NEW YORK (Reuters) - Ted Cruz, Donald Trump’s closest rival in the Republican race for the White House, named his national security advisers on Thursday, including former staffers of President Ronald Reagan and members of a think tank that has been called an anti-Muslim “hate group” by a civil rights organization. Announcing the team in a statement, Cruz said he would reverse what he described as the weakening of the United States in a dangerous world, singling out militant Islamist groups in the Middle East and North Africa as his focus. Among the most recognizable names on the senator’s list of 23 advisers was Elliott Abrams, who served in the administrations of both Reagan and President George W. Bush and is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. But the list of advisers drew more attention for its inclusion of several critics of Muslims. Among those were Frank Gaffney, a former official in the Reagan administration, and at least two other members of a think tank Gaffney founded, the Center for Security Policy. The center’s reports argue that hundreds of thousands of American Muslims support Islamist violence in the United States and that there is a conspiracy to erode the U.S. legal system by elevating sharia, the Islamic legal code. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that monitors U.S. extremist groups, has labeled the Center for Security Policy a “hate group” and Gaffney a “notorious Islamophobe.” Gaffney did not respond to a request for comment, but a spokesman pointed to online essays where Gaffney has rejected such criticism, saying his group is a defender of civil liberties against “Islamic supremacists.” “Do you mention any of the other 22 members of the advisory coalition?” Brian Phillips, a Cruz spokesman, said in an email, declining to respond to questions about the criticisms made against Gaffney and his think tank. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim rights group, urged Cruz, a Christian, to reconsider having Gaffney and others who have made anti-Muslim remarks as his advisers, saying it suggested the candidate entertained “anti-Muslim bigotry”. Besides Gaffney and his think-tank colleagues, CAIR said Cruz should drop William Boykin, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who has said the government should be allowed to ignore the U.S. Constitution to pass laws limiting Muslims’ right to freedom of speech and religion. Some of Cruz’s other advisers have been critical of anti-Islamic rhetoric, including Abrams and Mary Habeck, another former Bush adviser; both have said Islam should not be demonized. Another adviser is Katherine Gorka, president of the Council on Global Security, a group that produces research on Islamist violence, who said in an email that Cruz “understands the vital role that America’s military strength plays across the globe but without wanting to engage the U.S. in expensive democracy-building adventures.” TRUMP-CRUZ SHOWDOWN Trump, a 69-year-old billionaire businessman from New York, has surged to the front of the once-crowded Republican field, drawing support from voters by proposing to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States for fear they might secretly be members of violent Islamist groups. Trump cited research by Gaffney’s group in announcing the plan last year. Cruz, a 45-year-old Texan, is seeking to keep Trump from winning an outright majority of delegates as states vote for party nominees in the coming months, and to wrest the nomination from him at the party’s national convention in Cleveland in July. Conservatives who think Trump strays too far from Republican ideology continued to plot openly to thwart him at or before the convention. Erick Erickson, a conservative blogger, said in a statement that he joined a meeting of “grassroots conservative activists” from around the country in Washington on Thursday. He said they made plans to appoint an as-yet-unnamed candidate at what they hope will be the first contested Republican convention since 1948, where a complicated system of ballot rules would come into effect. Earlier this month, Mitt Romney, the party’s unsuccessful 2012 presidential candidate, called on Republicans to use tactical voting to slow Trump. The call appeared to have been ignored by many Republican voters, with Trump remaining the leading candidate following the most recent round of primary elections on Tuesday. Cruz has said “everyone understands” the proposed Muslim ban by Trump, also a Christian, but the senator does not support it, saying there are millions of Muslims who are not murderous. Instead, Cruz supports stopping refugees from some predominantly Muslim countries from coming to the United States. Democratic politicians and others have condemned Republican candidates’ remarks on Islam, saying they foster further division and discrimination. | 0fake |
FINALLY! THE 538 ELECTORAL COLLEGE MEMBERS Cast Ballots Today…What You Need To Know About The Process | WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:In all 50 state capitals and the District of Columbia, electors chosen by the state parties of the candidate who carried their state, Trump or Hillary Clinton will meet to cast their ballots. There s no national meeting of the Electoral College. Instead, electors gather in each state usually in the Capitol.Under federal law, though, electors must gather on December 19. And each elector must sign six copies certifying their votes for president and vice president.Two ballots go to the National Archives. One goes to the president of the Senate. Two go to their state s chief elections officer. And one goes to a local judge. After Monday s votes, there is still one last step: On January 6, Congress has to officially count the electoral votes. Vice President Joe Biden will preside over the count. Lawmakers can technically object in writing, with objections signed by at least one House and one Senate member to individual electoral votes or entire states results. If the House and Senate support that objection, the vote or votes in question are thrown out. But that has never happened. After the votes are counted, the results are final, and Trump is officially set for his inauguration at noon on January 20.Read more: CNN | 1real |
More than 180,000 people, mostly Kurds, displaced by Iraqi-Kurdish conflict | BAGHDAD (Reuters) - More than 180,000 civilians, mostly Kurds, have been displaced by the conflict between the Iraqi central government and the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, humanitarian organizations said on Thursday. Last month Iraqi forces captured Kirkuk and other territories from Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, in retaliation for a referendum on independence held by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) on Sept. 25 in northern Iraq. As of 2 November, over 183,000 people are displaced in the disputed areas, including 79,000 from Kirkuk city, the Office of the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq said in a statement, giving no breakdown by ethnic or religious group. | 0fake |
LIBERAL BIGOT Destroyed by Legendary Democrat Alan Dershowitz in Discussion on Trump’s Travel Ban: “You’re lying through your teeth!” [Video] | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-TBfkqk7gU | 1real |
FBI reopens Clinton investigation as new emails found ‒ Comey | The FBI has learned of more emails involving Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she headed the State Department, FBI Director James Comey told several members of Congress, telling them he is reopening the investigation. “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of email that appear to be pertinent” to Clinton’s investigation, Comey wrote to the chairs of several relevant congressional committees, adding that he was briefed about the messages on Thursday. “I agree that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.”
FBI Director Comey, in letter to members of Congress, says FBI is investigating additional emails in Clinton private server case pic.twitter.com/Ue0qlhqT5w
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) October 28, 2016
The FBI director cautioned, however, that the bureau has yet to assess the importance of the material, and that he doesn’t know how long that will take.
FBI Dir just informed me, "The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation." Case reopened
— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) October 28, 2016
Stocks fell after Comey’s announcement, CNBC reported.
Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, praised the decision to reopen the case.
“Now that the FBI has reopened the matter, it must conduct the investigation with impartiality and thoroughness,” he said in a statement. “The American people deserve no less and no one should be above the law.”
Almost 15,000 new Clinton emails were discovered in September.
In mid-October, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, promised at least “four new hearings” after Congress returns from recess in November based on the new emails, which lawmakers received but have not been made public.
“This is a flashing red light of potential criminality,” Chaffetz said.
The new evidence points to a “quid pro quo” arrangement between the FBI and the State Department, he noted.
DEVELOPING — DETAILS TO FOLLOW
Source: RT News
| 1real |
Jailed Kremlin critic calls on Russians to protest on Putin's birthday | MOSCOW (Reuters) - Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny called on his supporters on Wednesday to hold street protests this weekend across Russia, in defiance of an official ban, to demand that Navalny be allowed to run in next year s presidential election. Navalny, a vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin, was jailed for 20 days on Monday for repeatedly violating laws governing the organization of public meetings and rallies. His arrest, the third this year, means that he will miss a campaign rally planned in Putin s hometown of St Petersburg on Oct. 7 - the Russian leader s birthday. Appealing to his supporters via his Facebook page, Navalny called on them to attend protests in both St Petersburg and Moscow on Saturday, adding that 80 of his support groups were meanwhile organizing protests across Russia. Our task is to make Oct. 7 the day when every decent person will pronounce aloud or to himself at least these two demands: political competition and Navalny s admission to the polls, he said in the appeal, which he said he had dictated from jail. The authorities have banned the planned weekend rallies in Moscow and St Petersburg, and the Kremlin warned on Tuesday that those calling for the protests would be prosecuted. Putin said earlier on Wednesday that he had not yet decided whether he would run for re-election in March 2018, something he is widely expected to do. Opinion polls show that if both Putin and Navalny were running, the incumbent would win by a wide margin. | 0fake |
Obama Apologizes, Takes Responsibility For Deaths Of Innocent Hostages In U.S. Drone Strike | President Barack Obama gave a statement Thursday after the White House announced U.S. drone strikes had killed innocent American and Italian hostages in Pakistan, saying he takes full responsibility for the operation.
A statement from the White House identified the hostages as Dr. Warren Weinstein, an American held by al Qaeda since 2011, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian national who had been an al Qaeda hostage since 2012. According to the White House, the operation in which the two were killed targeted an al Qaeda-associated compound, "where we had no reason to believe either hostage was present, located in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan."
"As a husband and as a father, I cannot begin to imagine the anguish that the Weinstein and Lo Porto families are feeling today," Obama said.
"I know there's nothing I can ever say or do to ease their heartache," he added.
Two other Americans who were working with al Qaeda were also recently killed in the same region, according to the White House. Ahmed Farouq, an American who was an al Qaeda leader, was killed in the same operation that took the lives of Weinstein and Lo Porto, while American Adam Gadahn, a member of al Qaeda, was killed in a separate operation in January. The White House said the two were not specifically targeted and counterterrorism officials "did not have information indicating their presence at the sites of these operations."
The Wall Street Journal reports this is the first known instance in which the U.S. has accidentally killed hostages in a drone strike.
Obama defended U.S. counterterrorism operations in his remarks Thursday, saying the strikes occurred after "hundreds of hours of surveillance" had been conducted. He noted "it is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally, and in our fight against terrorists specifically, mistakes...can occur."
After Obama gave his remarks, Weinstein's wife released a statement on behalf of the family condemning the "cowardly actions of those who took Warren captive" and expressing disappointment in the U.S. government.
“I want to thank Congressman John Delaney, Senator Barbara Mikulski, and Senator Ben Cardin – as well as specific officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation – for their relentless efforts to free my husband.” Elaine Weinstein said. “Unfortunately, the assistance we received from other elements of the U.S. Government was inconsistent and disappointing over the course of three and a half years. We hope that my husband’s death and the others who have faced similar tragedies in recent months will finally prompt the U.S. Government to take its responsibilities seriously and establish a coordinated and consistent approach to supporting hostages and their families.” | 0fake |
Yazidis to Anti-Trumpers: Where Were You During Genocide Against Us? | Outrage over President Donald Trump’s executive order prioritizing refugee claims by persecuted religious minorities has puzzled activists from Iraq’s Yazidi community, who note the lack of major protests against the brutal massacre of thousands of Yazidis and Christians by the Islamic State. [Former President Barack Obama’s administration and the United Nations recognized that Yazidis, Christians, and other ethnoreligious minorities in the Middle East have been victims of genocide at the hands of the Islamic State ( ). Nevertheless, opponents of the executive order (EO) have lambasted the religious minority exception, denouncing President Trump for giving preferential treatment to persecuted minority groups. The order bars the entry into the United States of visa travelers from seven countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen) for at least 90 days and orders the U. S. government to prioritize refugee claims by persecuted religious minorities. The order, which has sparked protests and outcry across the nation, does not identify religious minority groups by name. However, Michael Short, a White House spokesman, told Breitbart News,“Yazidis would be covered under the EO as they are a persecuted religious minority. ” U. S. District Court Judge James Robart in Seattle has issued a ruling that temporarily blocks Trump’s order, which the Trump administration argues is primarily intended to strengthen U. S. national security. Breitbart News spoke to several Yazidi activists who expressed support for the executive order and argued that it does not amount to a Muslim ban, as critics argue. Echoing Iraqi Catholic Archbishop Bashar Warda, Mizra Ismail — a Yazidi activist with the Yazidi Human Rights — told Breitbart News, referring to opponents of Trump’s executive order: My first question for those protesters is: where were they when ISIS was committing genocide against the Yezidis and Christians in Iraq and Syria? ISIS killed and kidnapped thousands of Yezidis, mostly young women, girls and children. The ISIS jihadists also beheaded many Yezidis and Christians openly in the most brutal way and posted their videos on social media. What were those protesters doing then? I believe when ISIS committed all those crimes against the Yezidis and Christians, those protesters were blind. Another Yazidi activist expressed support for Trump’s order, saying it is necessary to keep the U. S. safe. “As a Yezidi, I am supportive of any genuine effort and precaution meant to keep this country safe and prosperous,” Gulie Khalaf from Yezidis International, told Breitbart News. “If a ban on all refugees, including Yezidis, is what it will take to ensure that this country does not become full of residents who neither care for the values of this society nor its constitution, then let us have the ban. Hopefully, that time will be spent to figure out who is deserving of the opportunities and the rights this country offers. ” The activist argued that the persecuted minority exception is necessary and does not subject Muslims to “discrimination” as many opponents of the order have claimed. “It is not breaking laws or going against any kind of values if Trump and his administration decide that endangered groups should be an exception to the ban,” declared Khalaf. A different Yazidi activist, Haji Hameka, stressed that the executive order is not a Muslim ban but rather an effort to keep America safe. “It is not a ban against bringing Muslim refugees to the United States. It is a security check to avoid the entry of terrorists from groups such as and ISIS,” he told Breitbart News. “Trump is a real American Patriot who is putting America and Americans first,” noted the activist. “He has to protect, support, and save the United States. He was elected by Americans to put America first. ” Trump’s measure dictates that once refugee admissions resume after a suspension aimed at improving the vetting process, the U. S. government, “to the extent permitted by law,” is expected to “prioritize claims made by individuals on the basis of persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality. ” In other words, persecuted minorities in Iraq in Syria, such as the Christians and Yazidis, may go to the front of the line after the refugee program suspension is over. During the suspension, the Secretaries of the State and Homeland Security have the discretion “on a basis” to allow the entry of members of persecuted religious minority groups. “Identifying specific countries with Muslim majorities and carving out exceptions for minority religions flies in the face of the constitutional principle that bans the government from either favoring or discriminating against particular religions,” argued American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Anthony Romero in a statement. The Trump administration and Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker Paul Ryan ( ) have defended the religious minority exception. Meanwhile, Democrats like Sen. Diane Feinstein from California have denounced the directive, arguing that granting priority to persecuted minorities is unfair to Muslims. | 0fake |
MSM Fake News: How Washington Post Sexed-up its ‘Facebook Russian Bot’ Conspiracy | This is a story about how once trusted mainstream media outlets like Washington Post and the New York Times have used their vast platforms to distort reality and spread disinformation en masse to both the American and global public. It s also a story about a new excuse industry which has sprung up to medicate Hillary Clinton s tragic defeat.The article below, written by award-winning journalist Robert Parry, reveals the shocking extent to which the establishment is willing to go to achieve both domestic political, and international geopolitical outcomes.In September, we were told by multiple US mainstream media that suspected Russian operators used Facebook and Twitter accounts to spread anti-Clinton messages which somehow affected the electoral outcome in 2016. This was followed by a dramatic announcement by Facebook officials that they had responded to the crisis by shutting down several hundred accounts (approx. 470) suspected to have been created by a firm linked to the Kremlin who used Russian bot accounts to purchase $100,000 worth of Facebook post ads 3,000 ads in total over a 3 year period (that s only $33,000 per year) which we re told were pushing divisive issues during and after the American election campaign (so said the New York Times).As it turns out, the story was not only wildly exaggerated, it provided a convenient smoke screen to cover-up another case of real collusion.The scale of American propaganda is simply breathtaking.In this single passage taken from the recent New York Times scoop on the alleged Facebook Russian Bot phenomenon, you can see the full compliment of packaged lies which has become a set piece in US mainstream discourse now: The Russian information attack on the election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails or the fire hose of stories, true, false and in between, that battered Mrs. Clinton on Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik. Far less splashy, and far more difficult to trace, was Russia s experimentation on Facebook and Twitter, the American companies that essentially invented the tools of social media and, in this case, did not stop them from being turned into engines of deception and propaganda. It gets worse though. What the Washington Post and others like the New York Times have obscured from the American people through this massive propaganda exercise is the Obama Administration and partisan Democrats own role in helping to generate this contrived conspiracy, or fake news. In the absence of any actual evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia what we have now is a case of Silicon Valley giant Facebook, actually colluding with the White House and the Federal government officials in order to help fabricate a highly politicized false conviction. Here are some of the main points in the article below: Powerful politicians pressured Facebook executives to come up with any evidence to support the Democratic Party s theory of Russian meddling. The Washington Post and others tried to convince a naive portion of the public to believe that somehow $100,000 in transient Facebook ad impacted the tens of billions of dollars spent during U.S. political spending for the 2016 election cycle. With all of the hype about Russian operatives, the mainstream media has not produced evidence to show who bought the ads.As journalistic hoaxes go, this is one of the biggest we ve seen.Perhaps an even bigger fraud in all of this however, is how a corporate mainstream media outlet like the Washington Post can use it s unlimited resources and media might to push out a blatantly fake narrative, intentionally distorted to deceive the public in order to achieve some partisan political objective and then site on the board of the establishment s First Draft project which they claim is leading the fight against fake news . How can a major purveyor of fake news be left to lead the fight to tackle fake news ? This is the danger of allowing an establishment cartel comprising of the corporate media, Facebook, Google and other tech monopolies to devise their own information policing regime.More on this incredible story from award-winning Consortium News here . . By Robert ParrySome people are calling the anti-Russian hysteria being whipped up across the U.S. mainstream news media a new golden age of American journalism, although it looks to me more like a new age of yellow journalism, prepping the people for more military spending, more information warfare and more actual war.Yes, without doubt, President Trump is a boorish and dangerous demagogue, now highlighted by his reckless speech before the United Nations last week, his schoolyard Tweet taunts toward North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and his ugly denunciation of black athletes for protesting against police killings of often unarmed African-Americans.And, yes, I know that some people feel that the evidence-lite and/or false allegations about Russian meddling are the golden ticket to Trump s impeachment. But the unprofessional behavior of The New York Times, The Washington Post and pretty much the entire mainstream media regarding Russia-gate cannot be properly justified by the goal of removing Trump from office.Ethically in journalism, the ends however much you might wish them to succeed cannot justify the means, if those means involve violating rules of evidence and principles of fairness. Journalism should be a place where all sides get a fair shake, not where some get a bum s rush.But the U.S. mainstream media has clearly joined the anti-Trump Resistance and hates Russian President Vladimir Putin, too. So, we are given such travesties of journalism as appeared as a banner headline across the front page of Monday s Washington Post, another screed about how Russia supposedly used Facebook ads to flip last November s election for Trump.The article purports to give the inside story of how Facebook belatedly came to grips with how the company s social network played a key role in the U.S. election, but actually it is a story about how powerful politicians bullied Facebook into coming up with something anything to support the narrative of Russian meddling, including direct interventions by President Obama and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a key legislator regarding regulation of high-tech industries.Finding the Evidence In other words, Facebook was sent back again and again to find what Obama and Warner wanted the social media company to find. Eventually, Facebook turned up $100,000 in ads from 2015 into 2017 that supposedly were traced somehow to Russia. These ads apparently addressed political issues in America although Facebook has said most did not pertain directly to the presidential election and some ads were purchased after the election.Left out of the Post s latest opus is what a very small pebble these ads were even assuming that Russians did toss the $100,000 or so in ad buys into the very large lake of billions of dollars in U.S. political spending for the 2016 election cycle. It also amounts to a miniscule fraction of Facebook s $27 billion in annual revenue.So the assertion that this alleged meddling and we ve yet to see any evidence connecting these ads to the Russian government played a key role in the U.S. election is both silly and outrageous, especially given the risks involved in stoking animosities between nuclear-armed Russia and nuclear-armed America.Facebook: Colluding with government.Even the Post s alarmist article briefly acknowledges that it is still unclear who bought the ads, referring to the purchasers as suspected Russian operatives. In other words, we don t even know that the $100,000 in ads over three years came from Russians seeking to influence the U.S. election. (By comparison, many Facebook advertisers even some small businesses spend $100,000 per day on their ads, not $100,000 over three years.)But this diminutive effort by suspected Russian operatives doesn t stop the Post from going on and on about fake news and disinformation, albeit again without offering evidence or specifics of any Russian fake news or disinformation. It has simply become Official Washington s new groupthink to say that everything linked to Russia or its international TV network RT is fake news or disinformation even though examples are lacking or often turn out to be false accusations themselves.For instance, there is nothing in the Post s article acknowledging that nothing from the various Democratic email disclosures, which have been blamed on Russia (again without real evidence), has been identified as untrue. So, how can truthful information, whether you like how it was obtained or not, be fake news or disinformation ?Falsehood as FactBut Monday s Post expos simply asserts the claim as flat fact. Or as the article asserts: what Russian operatives posted on Facebook was, for the most part, indistinguishable from legitimate political speech. The difference was the accounts that were set up to spread the misinformation and hate were illegitimate. In responsible journalism, such an accusation would be followed by a for-instance, giving an example of the misinformation and hate that the Russian operatives note how they have been magically transformed from suspected Russian operatives to simply Russian operatives were disseminating.But there is no example of the Russian misinformation and hate, a classic violation of the reporting principle of show, don t tell. In this story, it s all tell and no show.Indeed, what is shown in the article is often contradictory to the story s conclusion. The article says, for instance, A review by the company found that most of the groups behind the problematic pages had clear financial motives, which suggested that they weren t working for a foreign government. But amid the mass of data the company was analyzing, the security team did not find clear evidence of Russian disinformation or ad purchases by Russian-linked accounts. So, Facebook initially after extensive searching did not find evidence of a Russian operation. Then, after continued pressure from high-level Democrats, Facebook continued to scour its system and again found nothing, or as the Post article acknowledged, Facebook had searched extensively for evidence of foreign purchases of political advertising but had come up short. That prompted Warner to fly out to Silicon Valley to personally press Facebook executives to come up with the evidence to support the Democrats theory about Russia paying for carefully targeted anti-Clinton ads in key districts.The Post s article reported that Finally, [Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex] Stamos appealed to Warner for help: If U.S. intelligence agencies had any information about the Russian operation or the troll farms it used to disseminate misinformation, they should share it with Facebook. The company is still waiting, people involved in the matter said. Under PressureStill, faced with extraordinary pressure from senior Democrats, Facebook finally delivered the desired results, or as the Post reported, By early August, Facebook had identified more than 3,000 ads addressing social and political issues that ran in the United States between 2015 and 2017 and that appear to have come from accounts associated with the [St. Petersburg, Russia-based] Internet Research Agency. So, the ads covering three years, including post-election 2017, only appear to be associated with some private Russian operation that only allegedly has ties to the Kremlin. And the total sums of the ad buys are infinitesimal compared to what it actually takes to have any real impact on Facebook or in a U.S. presidential election.If the context of this story were changed slightly say, it was about the U.S. government trying to influence public opinion in another country (which actually does happen quite a bit) the Post would be among the first news outlets to laugh off such allegations or dismiss the vague accusations as a conspiracy theory, but since these allegations fit with the prejudices of the Post s editors, an entirely different set of journalistic standards is applied.What the article also ignores is the extraordinary degree of coercion that such high-level political pressure can put on a company that recognizes its vulnerability to government regulation.As Facebook has acknowledged in corporate filings, Action by governments to restrict access to Facebook in their countries could substantially harm our business and financial results. It is possible that governments of one or more countries may seek to censor content available on Facebook in their country, restrict access to Facebook from their country entirely, or impose other restrictions that may affect the accessibility of Facebook in their country for an extended period of time or indefinitely. In the event that access to Facebook is restricted, in whole or in part, in one or more countries or our competitors are able to successfully penetrate geographic markets that we cannot access, our ability to retain or increase our user base and user engagement may be adversely affected, we may not be able to maintain or grow our revenue as anticipated, and our financial results could be adversely affected. Avoiding RealityIn other words, another way to have framed this story is that powerful politicians who could severely harm Facebook s business model were getting in the face of Facebook executives and essentially demanding that they come up with something to support the Democratic Party s theory of Russian meddling. The Democratic leaders wanted this finding as an explanation for Hillary Clinton s (image, left) stunning defeat, rather than going through the painful process of examining why the party has steadily lost ground in white working-class areas across the country.What is missed in these Russia-bashing articles is that the Democratic brand has been sinking for years, including massive losses in statehouses across the country as well as in Congress. The party s decline was not a one-off event with Donald Trump suddenly snaking away with significant parts of the white working class because the Russians bought some Facebook ads.However, instead of looking in the mirror, national Democrats demanded that Facebook executives ferret out whatever tiny or imaginary information there might be about some Russians buying Facebook ads and then allow those coerced findings to be fed into the excuse industry for why Hillary Clinton lost.And, what about the Post s repeated accusations about Russia engaging in disinformation and fake news without offering a single example? Apparently, these assertions have become such articles of faith in the U.S. mainstream media that they don t require any proof.However, honest journalism demands examples and evidence, not just vague accusations. The reality is that the U.S. government has stumbled again and again when seeking to paint RT as a disinformation outlet or a vehicle for undermining American democracy.For instance, the Jan. 6 report on alleged Russian cyber operations, released by Obama s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, included a lengthy appendix, dated from 2012, which decried RT for such offenses as allowing a debate among third-party presidential candidates who had been excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates; covering the Occupy Wall Street protests; and citing the environmental dangers from fracking. The idea that American democracy is threatened by allowing third-party candidates or other American dissidents to have a voice is at best an upside-down understanding of democracy and, more likely, an exercise in hypocritical propaganda.False AccusationsAnother misfired attempt to discredit RT came from Obama s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Richard Stengel, who issued a Dipnote in April 2014, which helped establish the narrative of RT as a source of Russian disinformation.For instance, Stengel claimed that RT reported a ludicrous assertion that the United States had spent $5 billion to produce Ukraine s regime change in February 2014.But what Stengel, a former managing editor of Time magazine, apparently failed to understand was that RT was referring to a public speech by Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013, in which she told them that we have invested more than $5 billion in what was needed for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations. In other words, the RT report wasn t ludicrous at all.Nuland also was a leading proponent of regime change in Ukraine who personally cheered on the Maidan demonstrators, even passing out cookies. In an intercepted pre-coup phone call with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, Nuland discussed who should run the new government and pondered with Pyatt how to glue or midwife this thing. So, Stengel was the one disseminating false information, not RT.Similarly, senior U.S. politicians, including Hillary Clinton, and the U.S. mainstream media have falsely asserted that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies signed off on the Russia-did-it hacking claims.For months, that canard was used to silence skepticism. After all, how could you question something that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed to be true?But it turned out that as DNI Clapper, himself a hardline Russia-basher, belatedly acknowledged the Jan. 6 report on the alleged Russian hacking was the work of hand-picked analysts from only three agencies, the CIA, FBI and NSA, and the assessment itself admitted that it was not asserting the Russian conclusion as fact, only the analysts opinion.The New York Times finally retracted its use of the fake claim about all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies in late June 2017 although it wouldn t let the lie lie, so instead the Times made misleading references to a consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies without using the number Continue this story at Consortium NewsREAD MORE RUSSIAGATE NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Russiagate FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @ 21WIRE.TV | 1real |
IF HILLARY GETS ELECTED…She’s Got Big Plans For Gropin’ Joe Biden | Vice President Joe Biden has reportedly been added to a potential shortlist of Hillary Clinton s choices for secretary of state if she were to be elected president in November.The Clinton campaign has not formally reached out to Biden but has put him at the top of its list, Politico reported, citing a source familiar with the matter.Biden, a former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, has played an integral role in President Obama s foreign policy decisions and the Clinton team believes he would be a good fit for her administration.Biden and Clinton have known each other since her days as first lady and worked together while Clinton was secretary of state. Their relationship somewhat soured last summer, though, as Biden s political team gamed out a possible presidential run. | 1real |
Former Trump girlfriend rebuts NY Times story on history with women | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A woman at the center of a New York Times piece detailing Republican Donald Trump’s history with women took issue with the story on Monday, saying she never had a negative experience with the billionaire and does not believe he ever mistreated women. Rowanne Brewer Lane, a former model who dated Trump for several months starting in the late 1990s, said her words were mischaracterized in the Times article, which used dozens of interviews to show what it said was a pattern of unsettling personal behavior by the presidential candidate with women. The Times story said Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the Nov. 8 election, asked Lane to change into a bikini shortly after meeting her at a pool party at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. According to the article, he then introduced her to the crowd outside, saying, “That is a stunning Trump girl, isn’t it?” On Monday, Lane told the same story in a series of television interviews but said she had been flattered by his comment. “They spun it to where it appeared negative,” Lane said on Fox News. “I did not have a negative experience with Donald Trump.” Lane said that during the time she and Trump were dating, he “never made me feel like I was being demeaned in any way.” She also said she supports Trump’s presidential run. The New York Times responded to Lane’s accusations by saying she was quoted “fairly, accurately and at length.” “The story provides context for the reader including that the swimsuit scene was the ‘start of a whirlwind romance’ between Ms. Brewer Lane and Mr. Trump,” Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement. Trump has deflected criticism about his attitude toward women throughout his campaign. On Monday, he called the New York Times “so dishonest.” “Their hit piece cover story on me yesterday was just blown up by Rowanne Brewer, who said it was a lie!” Trump posted on Twitter. Times reporters Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey defended their story in several television interviews on Monday, saying it showed how Trump behaved privately with women and revealed common themes including unwelcome advances, aggression and commentary on their appearance. “People can evaluate the story ... on its own merits,” Barbaro said on CBS “This Morning.” | 0fake |
Turkey orders arrest of former police investigator's parents: Hurriyet | ISTANBUL (Reuters) - An Istanbul prosecutor has issued arrest warrants for the parents of a former police investigator who gave evidence at the trial of a Turkish banker in the United States last week, the Hurriyet newspaper reported on Wednesday. Turkey has called for the arrest of Huseyin Korkmaz after he testified at the trial of Mehmet Hakan Atilla, a former executive of state-lender Halkbank who is accused of helping Iran evade U.S. sanctions. The Istanbul prosecutor s office was not immediately available for comment. U.S. prosecutors have accused Atilla of working with Turkish-Iranian gold trader Reza Zarrab and others to help Iran evade U.S. sanctions through fraudulent gold and food transactions. The case has strained relations between Turkey and the United States, which are NATO allies. Atilla has pleaded not guilty and Halkbank has denied involvement with any illegal transactions. But Zarrab has pleaded guilty and testified for U.S. prosecutors. Korkmaz said he fled Turkey in 2016 fearing retaliation from the government after leading an investigation in 2013 into Zarrab which implicated high-ranking officials. Hurriyet said the Istanbul prosecutor s order to arrest Korkmaz s parents came after his testimony in the U.S. case in which he said he gave documents related to the 2013 investigation to his mother to keep. Last week, Turkish police summoned a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official over statements made by Korkmaz in the U.S. court, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported. | 0fake |
WATCH: Top Senator Proves GOP Built Trump, Makes Them Own It | Republicans now scrambling to contain the political damage being inflicted on their party by presidential candidate Donald Trump were given a strong wakeup call by Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), the top ranking Democratic senator in the country.In a speech delivered at the Center for American Progress, Reid tore into Trump with particular emphasis on how the extremism of the modern Republican Party led to his shocking rise. The Republican establishment acts bewildered. But they shouldn t. As much as they may try to distance themselves from Trump now, Republican leaders are responsible for his rise, he said.He attacked his Senate colleagues for trying to distance themselves from Trump s rise, saying they bear the responsibility. When Trump calls immigrants rapists and murderers, he s just doing what he s learned from generations of conservatives, Reid said. The Republican Party has become the party of Trump. Reid went on to describe the actions of Republican leaders towards Trump as moral cowardice, pointing out that they simply dole out a verbal slap on the wrist when Trump indulges in hate but are still prepared to back him for the highest office in the land.Republican leaders, looking at Trump s poor performance in head to head polls against Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, particularly among the core voters that have given Democrats victories in the last two presidential elections black, latino, and female voters have begun to prepare contingency plans.One group is organizing in order to arrange votes against Trump at the Republican convention this summer in Cleveland, while others are discussing an idea to draft a third party candidate to run in the elections this fall. As a practical matter, both plans would likely lead to the easy election of whoever the Democratic nominee happens to be.Reid also pointed out that he at least respects Ted Cruz, even though he is amazingly unpopular in the Senate Because he stands for things. Trump stands for nothing. Featured image via Flickr | 1real |
Президент Путин ответил на критику Запада по поводу Алеппо | 0 комментариев 14 поделились Фото: kremlin.ru
"Хотел бы отреагировать на абсолютно правильные вещи: колокола в Финляндии звонят по погибшим в Алеппо. Ну давайте позвоним сейчас по погибшим в районе Мосула, где сейчас начинается операция (иракских сил при поддержке коалиции США — прим. ВЗГЛЯД). Там уже более 200 человек, по-моему, террористы расстреляли в надежде остановить наступление на город", — сказал Путин, выступая на итоговой пленарной сессии Международного дискуссионного клуба "Валдай".
Путин также напомнил, что в Афганистане, например, "одним ударом авиация уничтожала целые свадьбы". "А что сейчас происходит в Йемене? На мой взгляд, колокола должны звонить по всем этим безвинным жертвам", — добавил он.
"Мы все время слышим: Алеппо, Алеппо, Алеппо… Ну да. Вопрос в чем? Или оставить там террористическое гнездо, или, минимизируя, делая все, чтобы избежать жертв среди мирного населения все-таки это гнездо дожать. Если не нужно ничего трогать, то не нужно наступать и на Мосул. Давайте все оставим как есть. Давайте Ракку не будем трогать. Ведь мы все время слышим от наших западных партнеров: "Нужно наступать на Ракку, нужно уничтожить это гнездо терроризма. Но в Ракке тоже живут мирные граждане. Мы не будем с террористами бороться вообще? Вот когда они где-то в городах захватывают заложников, мы что, оставляем их в покое? Возьмите пример с Израиля, Израиль никогда так не делает, благодаря чему и существует. Да и выбора другого нет. Надо бороться. Если мы постоянно будем сдавать позиции, мы всегда будем проигрывать", — заявил президент.
По мнению российского лидера, единый фронт борьбы с терроризмом не созда н. "На примере террористической опасности со всей очевидностью проявляется неспособность оценить характер, причины возникновения и нарастания угроз. Мы видим это по тому, как развивается ситуация в Сирии, остановить кровопролитие и запустить политический процесс не удается. Казалось бы, после долгих переговоров, огромных усилий и сложных компромиссов наконец начал формироваться единый фронт борьбы с терроризмом, однако этого не произошло, он, фактически, не создан", — сказал российский лидер.
Напомним, сегодня глава государства принимает участие в итоговой пленарной сессии XIII ежегодного заседания Международного дискуссионного клуба "Валдай". Тема заседания в этом году — "Будущее начинается сегодня: контуры завтрашнего мира".
Читайте последние новости Pravda. Ru на сегодня | 1real |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.