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Manslaughter Charge for Tulsa Officer Who Killed Black Driver - The New York Times | TULSA, Okla. — The white police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black driver here last week as he stood outside his vehicle overreacted during a confrontation captured on video and was charged on Thursday with manslaughter, the authorities said. According to court documents, the officer, Betty Jo Shelby, 42, was overcome with fear that the man, Terence Crutcher, 40, who was not responding to her commands and was walking away from her with his hands up, was going to kill her. An investigator with the Tulsa County district attorney’s office said in an affidavit that Officer Shelby became “emotionally involved to the point that she overreacted” and fired her weapon even though she “was not able to see any weapons or bulges indicating” that Mr. Crutcher had a gun. Prosecutors have charged the officer with committing manslaughter “in the heat of passion. ” Oklahoma law defines such passion as a strong emotion, such as fear or anger, that exists to such a degree in a defendant that it affects “the ability to reason and render the mind incapable of cool reflection. ” Those found guilty of manslaughter face a sentence of no fewer than four years in prison. Officer Shelby, a Tulsa police officer since 2011, has been on paid administrative leave. The authorities said that a warrant had been issued for her arrest and that arrangements were being made for her to surrender to sheriff’s officials. Mr. Crutcher was unarmed when he was shot, and no weapons were found in his vehicle, officials said. The Tulsa County district attorney, Stephen A. Kunzweiler, said he filed the charge against Officer Shelby after reviewing video of the shooting from both a patrol car’s dashboard camera and from a helicopter that had responded, as well as 911 calls, witness interviews and other evidence. Court documents state that based on Mr. Crutcher’s noncompliance, Officer Shelby’s fear “resulted in her unreasonable actions” that led her to fire her weapon. Mr. Crutcher died from a single gunshot wound to the chest. The shooting is one of a string of deaths of black people at the hands of the police that have stoked outrage around the country. The unrest and violence in Charlotte, N. C. that has followed a police killing of a black man in that city were part of the backdrop in Tulsa. In a statement, Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma praised city leaders, law enforcement officials “as well as the citizens of Tulsa for keeping peace and order during this difficult time. ” She asked residents to keep both the Crutcher and Shelby families in their prayers. “No matter how you feel about the prosecutors’ decision in this case, I hope Oklahomans will respect the views of your friends and neighbors, because we still have to live peacefully together as we try to make sense of the circumstances that led to Mr. Crutcher’s death,” she said. Last Friday, according to court documents, Officer Shelby was responding to a domestic violence call when she passed an intersection in north Tulsa and noticed Mr. Crutcher standing in the street, and his vehicle partly blocking traffic lanes. She was alone in her patrol car, and she stopped and approached Mr. Crutcher’s vehicle. Officer Shelby asked Mr. Crutcher if the vehicle belonged to him and whether it was disabled, but he only mumbled to himself and did not answer any of her questions, the district attorney’s investigator wrote in an affidavit. According to the affidavit, Mr. Crutcher kept putting his hands in his pockets, even as the officer told him to show his hands. Mr. Crutcher walked toward his vehicle with his hands up and refused to comply with her orders to stop. She pulled her weapon as he walked to the driver’s side door, the investigator wrote, and another officer arrived and told Officer Shelby he had his Taser ready. Mr. Crutcher reached into the driver’s side front window, the investigator wrote, and then the officer fired his Taser and Officer Shelby fired her gun. Lawyers for Mr. Crutcher’s family dispute some of the authorities’ account of the shooting. They said the window of Mr. Crutcher’s vehicle was up, not down, and so he could not have reached into the vehicle before he was shot. The two videos of the confrontation do not show the actual moment of the shooting. Benjamin L. Crump, one of the lawyers for Mr. Crutcher’s relatives, praised the filing of a criminal charge against the officer. “Through the vivid slow motion video witnessed around the world, America once again witnessed the tragic death of another person of color, gunned down senselessly by an officer who swore to protect and serve,” Mr. Crump said in a statement. “Make no mistake, it was clear from the beginning that charges were necessary in this case. ” Federal prosecutors and F. B. I. agents are conducting a separate investigation into whether Mr. Crutcher’s civil rights were violated. The Rev. Al Sharpton said the charge against Officer Shelby was “a swift step in the right direction as we pursue justice in the death of Terence Crutcher. ” But Mr. Sharpton, who was asked by Mr. Crutcher’s relatives to come to Tulsa on Tuesday, said he wanted the investigation into the actions of all the officers at the scene to continue. In downtown Tulsa, outside the courthouse where the district attorney announced the filing of charges against Officer Shelby, a group of protesters gathered, waving signs reading “Black Lives Matter” and “This stops now. ” Three Tulsa cosmetology students who stood holding signs said they wanted the officer to be charged not with manslaughter, but with murder. “Manslaughter is when you get drunk and you hit someone with your car,” said Mia Hogsett, 27. “It’s not when you point your gun at someone and know that that trigger can kill a person. She was afraid, but she was trained. She was trained to be in that situation. ” | 0fake |
Christians Targeted by Islamic State Flee Egypt’s Sinai Villages | Reuters provides a sobering account of the danger facing Egyptian Christians, beginning with the plight of civil servant Adel Munir, who found himself Number Two on a list of Christians marked for death by the Islamic State. Said Sameh Adel Fawzy wasn’t taking any chances and fled the Sinai after ISIS fighters barged into his uncle’s home and shot him and his son dead. “Last Thursday, my cousin went to open the door after he heard someone knocking,” Fawzy recalled. “He found masked terrorists with a pistol who took him inside and shot him in the head. ” “When my aunt heard the sound of his body falling on the floor she came from her room and yelled: ‘What did you do to my son? ’” he continued. “They took her out to the street barefooted and in her pajamas, then went back for her husband and killed him. ” Even worse, some of the families who spoke to Reuters said Muslim neighbors who were not linked to the Islamic State have been emboldened by ISIS rhetoric to attack them and even seize their property after they flee to escape ISIS. The L. A. Times quotes other Christian refugees who thanked Muslim neighbors for hiding them from terrorist attackers and helping them find shelter. “What we are seeing here is new. There has always been violence against Christians but it was usually for a ‘reason’ like land disputes. Now Christians are killed just for being Christians,” said researcher Ishak Ibrahim of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. “Militants are sending the government a message saying they can change part of the country’s demographics. This is a dangerous precedent. ” What Ibrahim means is that ISIS is slaughtering Christians — literally going and murdering Christians who answer a knock on the door, tooling down the streets in pickup trucks flying ISIS flags — in order to destabilize the government of President Abdel Fattah . Sisi made promises to protect religious minorities after ousting Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi in 2013. The wanton murders and dislocations of Christian families are a significant blow to his authority, especially if Muslims are joining in. Coptic Christians have been strong supporters of Sisi Muslim Brotherhood activists blame them for colluding with Sisi to overthrow Morsi. The savages of ISIS were correct in thinking they would feel dismay or even betrayal when the government failed to protect them. This is exacerbated by Sisi’s strong promises to restore order after the December bombing of a Cairo church, seen by most analysts as the starting gun for the rampage. Local observers described a sense of panic to along with a sense of regional betrayal, as residents of the Sinai complain the Cairo government is not taking all necessary measures to protect them. Sinai residents have long felt alienated from the central government, which is one reason ISIS and its local affiliate Sinai Province have been so successful at recruiting there. Some of the Christians interviewed by the L. A. Times expressed fears that ISIS sympathizers have infiltrated the Egyptian security services, noting that murders have been carried out with impunity very close to security checkpoints, and the Islamic State death squads have been provided with suspiciously detailed hit lists of Christian residents. “The vast majority of the Egyptian population is not impacted by the activity in Sinai, so it is easy for the central government to ignore — either because they aren’t able to address the growing violence there or because they don’t want to,” explained Brookings Fellow Sarah Yerkes. One Cairo journalist told that Copts are even dismayed with the performance of their own church hierarchy because it has taken a “weak and lenient” stance against the violence, including a pronounced refusal to admit local Egyptian Muslims are participating in the attacks. “They are thirsty for the blood of any Christian so there is no way for any Christian to live in . They were pretty clear when they said, ‘We won’t leave any Christian in peace.’ They want an Islamic state,” Coptic Christian Wafaa Fawzy told CBN. Note the “s” in “state” is . | 0fake |
Left Attacks Black Miss USA for Saying Health Care Not a ’Right’ | Miss USA Kara McCullough faced widespread backlash from liberal social media users after she called health care a “privilege” and not a right while answering questions onstage during Sunday night’s pageant. [McCullough, a scientist who works for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and who competed as Miss District of Columbia, was asked if she believes health care should be a right or a privilege for American citizens. “I’m definitely going to say it’s a privilege,” the pageant winner said, adding that taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize someone else’s health care. “As a government employee, I’m granted healthcare. And I see firsthand that for one, to have healthcare, you need to have jobs, so therefore we need to continue to cultivate this environment so that we’re given the opportunities to have healthcare as well as jobs for all Americans worldwide,” McCullough said. ”I’m definitely going to say it’s a privilege.” Listen to your new #MissUSA talk about healthcare in the USA. pic. twitter. — Miss USA (@MissUSA) May 15, 2017, The answer sent social media users into a frenzy, as many user chided McCullough for her answer. #MissUSA Miss DC just lost me with that answer … . Affordable healthcare is a privilege? Girl bye. pic. twitter. — Kat ❤ (@dazella_may) May 15, 2017, Miss DC was my fav but … not after that answer. Everyone has a right to healthcare. #MissUSA pic. twitter. — Charlsley✿ (@CharlsleyCarey) May 15, 2017, DC just disqualified herself with that answer #MissUSA, — Keeni Rodgers (@keeniz__) May 15, 2017, Some Twitter users, however, defended McCullough. Black people hating on #MissUSA because of conservative positions need to stop acting like owned brainwashed slaves to the left. — darnell (@cross_bearer89) May 15, 2017, CHILL FOLKS … Freaking out about Miss DC’s answer on healthcare? She’s just saying that you need to pay for it it’s not free #MissUSA, — Jackie Cunningham (@Cubsin2020) May 15, 2017, Way to go Miss DC You are correct! Healthcare is not a privilege — xoxo a nurse! #MissUSA, — 🌞TrumpsAmerica🌞🌊 (@irshroz) May 15, 2017, During the competition, McCullough was also asked if she considered herself a feminist, to which she said she prefers to “transpose” the word feminism to “equalism. ” “I don’t want to call myself a feminist. Women, we are just as equal as men, especially in the workplace,” McCullough said. “I believe we’ve come a long way and there is more work to be done. I think domestically we are making progress and I do believe that we will become equal one day,” she added. McCullough beat out first Miss New Jersey Chhavi Verg, a student at Rutgers University. McCullough will compete next in the Miss Universe contest. “I’m extremely thankful for this opportunity,” she said after the event. ““I just want to encourage so many women nationwide to find their passion in any subject possible and understand that nothing is difficult if you really, truly put the work in for it. ” | 0fake |
LOL! ANTI-TRUMP ACTORS George Clooney and Matt Damon’s “Suburbicon” Movie TANKS: “One of Paramount Pictures’ worst performing wide-releases ever” | In fly-over country, and pretty much anywhere in between the east and west coasts of America, people are sick and tired supporting the arrogant, condescending, anti-American, Trump hating, liberal actors and Hollywood is finally starting to feel the pain in their pocketbooks. George Clooney s Suburbicon notched one of the most dismal wide-release debuts in recent years on a sluggish pre-Halloween weekend where the horror sequel Jigsaw topped all releases despite an underperforming debut.Despite debuting on more than 2,000 screens, Suburbicon managed just $2.8 million, making it one of Paramount Pictures worst performing wide-releases ever and marking a new box-office low for Clooney as a director and star Matt Damon. Obviously we are disappointed in these results which we don t feel are indicative of the quality and message of his original movie, said Kyle Davies, president of distribution for Paramount. liberal activist actors Matt Damon, George Clooney and Julianne MooreAre liberal activist actors Matt Damon, George Clooney and Julianne Moore so blinded by their hate for middle America, that they can t see the audience they re trying to appeal to, has lost their desire to support them and their sub-par movies?Before the election last year, Matt Damon expressed his anxiety over a possible Trump win: It makes me nervous, Damon said of the possibility that Trump would win the presidency (which he did via the Electoral College). It s a binary choice . There s no way we can let this guy be the [president]. To let that dude have the nuclear football, are you kidding me? That s dangerous. He s impulsive and rash, and doesn t seem to think deeply about too many things. Who can forget George Clooney s interview, where he laughed at the idea that Trump would win the election, saying There s not gonna be a President Donald Trump. That s not gonna happen. Co-star Julianne Moore is no stranger to the Hollywood anti-Trump movement. The outspoken gun-control advocate shared her thoughts with the Huffington Post on Trump s nationalistic rhetoric more specifically. It s a very interesting time, she said. I don t know that any society has moved forward by being exclusive and nationalistic and that s what I m seeing Donald Trump doing. I think it s very negative and incredibly detrimental to us as a society. | 1real |
VOTING MACHINES STOLEN In Controversial GA Election Where Dems Hope To Embarrass Trump With 30-Yr Old Jon Ossoff Win | SANDY SPRINGS, Ga., April 18 (Reuters) For U.S. President Donald Trump, an off-year congressional election on Tuesday in the reliably Republican northern suburbs of Atlanta could spell trouble if Democratic upstart Jon Ossoff pulls off a surprise victory.Watch MSNBC Morning Joe show hosts and guest attempt to contain their excitement over the possibility of a Democrat winning the seat of former House Leader Newt Gingrich and now, in a special election they are hoping to replace Tom Price s Georgia s 6th District seat:Donald Trump is actively campaigning against Ossoff on social media:Republicans must get out today and VOTE in Georgia 6. Force runoff and easy win! Dem Ossoff will raise your taxes-very bad on crime & 2nd A. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2017A 30-year-old political novice, Ossoff is running as the lone Democrat against a field of 17 Republicans for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives vacated when Trump named Tom Price to be secretary of health and human services.The outcome will not tip the balance of power in the Republican-controlled House. But an Ossoff win could weaken Trump s already shaky hold on his fellow Republicans in the House by encouraging those in competitive districts to distance themselves from the president.The Democrats are in the fight of their lives. They re pulling out all of the stops, as they believe a win in this traditionally red district of Georgia would be a huge black eye for President Trump. Is anyone really surprised that voter machines from this district have been stolen only days before what Democrats are calling a must win election?Channel 2 Action News has learned that critical voting machines were stolen just days before polls will open for a special election.State officials are investigating after equipment was taken from a Cobb County precinct manager s vehicle. According to Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the equipment was stolen on Saturday evening while the vehicle was parked at the Kroger on Canton Road.Kemp s office says Cobb County Elections waited two days to tell his office about the theft of the machines.The four so-called ExpressPoll machines were the computers poll workers used to check-in voters, and check those off who cast ballots. It s very shocking, especially with the climate we have of voter fraud out there, one Georgia voter told Channel 2 s Ross Cavitt.Cobb County Elections Director Janine Eveler said the stolen machines cannot be used to fraudulently vote in Tuesday s election. Eveler said the machines have voter information on them, but that information is hard to access. Eveler said they will completely replace the machines at the Piedmont Road precinct. | 1real |
Standing Rock Protests: Police Turn In Badges Rather Than Incite Violence | Share on Facebook It should be evident if you’re following news concerning the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota that tension continues to escalate between protestors supporting the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and riot police. The big deal? A four-state Dakota Access Pipeline which threatens to uproot sacred burial ground, poison the Missouri river, and make null an 1881 treaty ensuring the property belongs to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. In addition to being maced and beaten with batons, activists have been tased and even shot with rubber bullets . Despite the violence taking place, tribal leaders continue to ask all “water protectors” to maintain peaceful relations and rely on prayer as the only weapon used to halt construction of the DAPL. After watching videos of the mass arrests and beating that have taken place , many have asked how those employed by the State can continue to terrorize weaponless protestors. Surely, some form of cognitive dissonance must be taking place? For some, most likely, and that's undoubtedly what inspired at least two officers to turn in their badges today. According to an activist named Redhawk, there have been reports of at least two officers turning in their badges after acknowledging that the battle against the American people is not what they signed up for. On Facebook, the activist wrote : “You can see it in some of them, that they do not support the police actions. We must keep reminding them they are welcome to put down their weapons and badge and take a stand against this pipeline as well. The comments on the ordeal have been quite positive. Charlotte Holywater Vincent wrote, “Brave to stand up for what is right ! To hand over years of training and service in a little metal badge and then stand on the side of humanity.” Ron Hemming, who reportedly is a retired deputy in Washington, shared his thoughts: “As a retired deputy in Washington state, I would have refused to go on a detail such as this. As I am also part native blood, I stand with my relatives on the front line protecting the water from the black snake. Be safe, stay strong.” Related: | 1real |
Former US Intelligence Chief Admits Obama Took “Willful Decision” to Support ISIS Rise | Region: USA in the World If one was only to read mainstream news in the West, you would probably be inculcated with the myth that Islamic State (ISIS) appeared almost out of thin air and many governments in the Western world have been completely shocked by the rise of this terror group. Perhaps you would correctly blame the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq as a major reason why such extreme groups gained power in the region, in addition to blaming certain governments for supposedly marginalizing Sunni’s. But what most mainstream readers will be miserably ignorant of is the fact that one of the main opposition groups fighting the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria has been ISIS itself, a group that has been trained, funded, aided and armed by NATO countries in collusion with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel (to name a few). This reality has been completely omitted in numerous corporate media publications, once again demonstrating the inept and deceptive nature of mainstream news. Some Western news outlets are still peddling the fallacy that the Obama administration misjudged the threat of ISIS, and was taken by surprise by the groups rise. Obama himself claimed in 2014 when responding to a question asking whether the US underestimated ISIS: “That their advance, their movement, over the last several months has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates and I think the expectations of policy makers both inside and outside of Iraq.” This narrative runs in stark contrast to a recently declassified US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document from 2012 which was released by Judicial Watch after the watchdog group filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The DIA document warned: “ISI [the Islamic State of Iraq] could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organisations in Iraq and Syria.” ( p.5 ) In a recent interview with Mehdi Hasan of Al Jazeera, the former head of the DIA, Michael T. Flynn, reiterates that the Obama administration was warned about the potential of extreme groups gaining influence in the region but instead of halting the support for the Syrian opposition, the administration took the “wilful decision” to support the rebels anyway: Hasan (Interviewer) (From 11.15 onwards into the interview): “In 2012, your agency was saying, quote: “The Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda in Iraq [(which ISIS arose out of)], are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” In 2012, the US was helping coordinate arms transfers to those same groups. Why did you not stop that if you’re worried about the rise of Islamic extremism?” Flynn : “Well I hate to say it’s not my job, but… my job was to ensure that the accuracy of our intelligence that was being presented was as good as it could be, and I will tell you, it goes before 2012. When we were in Iraq, and we still had decisions to be made before there was a decision to pull out of Iraq in 2011, it was very clear what we were going to face.” Hasan (Interviewer): You are basically saying that even in government at the time, you knew those groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who wasn’t listening?” Flynn : “I think the administration.” Hasan (Interviewer): “So the administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?” Flynn : “I don’t know if they turned a blind eye. I think it was a decision, a willful decision.” Hasan (Interviewer): “A wilful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?” Flynn: “A wilful decision to do what they’re doing… You have to really ask the President what is it that he actually is doing with the policy that is in place, because it is very, very confusing.” It is quite obvious that NATO countries in conjunction with regional allies have been funding, arming and training an array of rebel bandits to overthrow the secular Syrian government for years now, although they have been unable to force regime change in Damascus so far. In the 2012 declassified report from the DIA, the document reveals that the powers supporting the Syrian opposition – “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” – wanted to create a “Salafist principality in Eastern Syria in order to isolate the Syrian regime”: “Opposition forces are trying to control the Eastern areas (Hasaka and Der Zor), adjacent to the Western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar), in addition to neighbouring Turkish borders. Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting these efforts… If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).” ( p.5 ) Shipping Weapons from Libya to the Syrian Rebels Numerous reports in 2012 alleged that the US was sending heavy weapons from the military stockpiles of the former Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, to the Syrian rebels. Another formerly classified document released by Judicial Watch from the US Department of Defense (DOD) reveals that the White House was at least aware of arms shipments from Libya to Syria, although the document does not disclose who was shipping the weapons: “Weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The weapons shipped during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s, and 125 mm and 155mm howitzers missiles… The numbers for each weapon were estimated to be: 500 Sniper rifles, 100 RPG launchers with 300 total rounds, and approximately 400 howitzers missiles [200 ea – 125mm and 200ea – 155 mm.]” ( DOD Document ) This is all part of a long term strategy by the West to overthrow regimes that are not subservient to Western interests. NATO’s 2011 war in Libya has already forced regime change in the North African country, with the West still working on bringing down the Syrian regime. Both countries were listed as enemies of the US by the neoconservative thinktank, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in their 2000 report, long before the illegal 2011 war in Libya and the ongoing proxy war in Syria. Iraq, Iran and North Korea were also on PNAC’s hit list . Further illustrating the fact that many of the wars and proxy wars we have witnessed in recent years were premeditated operations by imperial powers, t he former French minister of Foreign Affairs, Roland Dumas, revealed that the war in Syria was “ prepared, preconceived and planned ” at least “two years before the violence” erupted. Dumas said he was approached in the UK by “top British officials” to see if he would participate in “organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria”, a proposal Dumas refused, but it is clear that many others within the Western establishment did not. Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of The Analyst Report , especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” . Popular Articles | 1real |
Scope of Kerimov's immunity status up to judge to decide upon, says France | PARIS (Reuters) - The scope of the immunity status accorded to Russian businessman and lawmaker Suleiman Kerimov, who has been arrested in France, is up to the French judge dealing with the matter to decide upon, said the French foreign ministry. Kerimov was arrested by French police at Nice airport on Monday evening in connection with a tax evasion case, and the Kremlin said it would do everything in its power to defend his lawful interests. It is up to the judge, who has been called upon in this case, to clarify whether the charges that have been brought against him are related to his official roles and would therefore be protected by diplomatic immunity, said French foreign ministry spokeswoman Agnes Romatet-Espagne. Kerimov is ranked by Forbes magazine as one of Russia s richest businessman, with a net worth of $6.3 billion. His family controls Russia s largest gold producer Polyus. | 0fake |
Pompe drug lauded by Trump costs $300,000 a year | (Reuters) - President Donald Trump told Congress on Tuesday that more needs to be done to bring down “artificially high” prices for prescription drugs, while at the same time praising a drug that turns out to cost $300,000 per year. During the televised address, Trump acknowledged in the audience Megan Crowley, a college student who has Pompe disease - a rare muscle disorder that can be treated with an expensive enzyme replacement therapy. “But our slow and burdensome approval process at the Food and Drug Administration keeps too many advances, like the one that saved Megan’s life, from reaching those in need,” the president said. “If we slash the restraints, not just at the FDA but across our Government, then we will be blessed with far more miracles like Megan.” Trump has in the past excoriated drugmakers for charging “astronomical” prices, while acknowledging how “complicated” the nation’s healthcare system is. Representatives of the Trump administration could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday on whether the president believes the treatment price for Pompe disease is fair. Trump’s comments on Tuesday night highlight an issue central to the industry and investors - the potential for deregulation of the FDA, the agency charged with approving pharmaceutical products. “I think Trump used this example somewhat cynically as a way of trying to advance the deregulatory agenda,” said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a researcher at Harvard Medical School. “The FDA’s standards actually promote innovation because patients don’t want just any old drug - they want drugs that work.” Megan’s father, John Crowley, now chief executive at Amicus Therapeutics Inc, started a biotech company in 1998 to seek a treatment for Pompe disease. In 2006, the FDA - after a nine-month review - approved infused enzyme replacement therapy Myozyme for patients born with the condition. A similar drug, Lumizyme, was approved in 2010 for late-onset Pompe disease and is now used regardless of a patient’s age. The average annual cost of treatment is $298,000, according to Paris-based Sanofi SA, which now owns the drugs. Under the Orphan Drug Act of 1983, drugs for rare diseases - defined as those that treat fewer than 200,000 patients - are given a range of incentives including seven years of marketing exclusivity. “Pharmaceutical companies know they get a free pass for very expensive drugs for orphan diseases, whereas they don’t for mainstream diseases,” said Joel Hay, professor of pharmaceutical economics and policy at the University of Southern California. The National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) applauded Trump’s recognition, but disagreed with the idea that the regulatory process needs an overhaul. “Our patients deserve the same quality therapies as everyone else, and to weaken the standards will only threaten our population with unsafe, ineffective therapies,” NORD said in a statement on Wednesday. Pompe disease, affecting 5,000 to 10,000 people worldwide, prevents the body from making enough of an enzyme used by heart and muscle cells to convert a form of sugar called glycogen into energy. When glycogen builds up in these cells it can lead to disability and death. NORD estimates that around 30 million Americans suffer from 7,000 rare diseases. | 0fake |
‘In-Betweeners’ Are Part of a Rich Recruiting Pool for Jihadists - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — They were young men caught between cultures, sons of immigrant families, feeling lost or rejected — and angry about wars. Online they encountered the recruiters of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, who said their first loyalty should be not to their nation but to Islam. Then they plotted sensational violence. In the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey and stabbings at a mall in Minnesota, the suspected perpetrators fit the same rough pattern as in previous attacks at the Boston Marathon in 2013 in San Bernardino, Calif. in 2015 and in Orlando, Fla. in June, as well as in the terrorist assaults in Paris and Brussels. A rich recruiting pool for Al Qaeda and the Islamic State includes what psychologists call “” young adults whose identities have not yet solidified. Their uncertainty makes them vulnerable, said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and clinical professor at the University of California, San Diego. “It allows the individual to attach his identity to something that is larger and inflates his sense of himself,” he said. The uncomfortable status can be especially acute for those with recent immigrant roots. Living in two cultures at once is very enriching for most people but very unsettling for others, said Lorenzo Vidino, the director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. For some Muslim immigrants, he said, “You have a message at home that’s very conservative, and a completely different message from the society around you when you’re growing up. ” The full history of Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, the naturalized American of Afghan birth who is accused of planting bombs in Manhattan and New Jersey, is not yet known. But his 2014 arrest in an alleged stabbing in a family dispute suggests a young man adrift his scribbling in a notebook the names of Osama bin Laden, Abu Muhammad — an Islamic State leader — and Anwar the Qaeda recruiter, appeared to reflect a embrace of jihadism. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a Chechen immigrant and the older of the two Boston Marathon bombers, turned to Islamist extremism when his hopes for a boxing career dimmed. He was 26 at the time of the attack. Omar Mateen, the son of an Afghan immigrant with outspoken political views, was 29 when he opened fire at an Orlando nightclub, killing 49 people. He had been dismissed from training as a prison guard after making disturbing remarks about weapons, and ended up as a private security guard. Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, the son of immigrants from Pakistan, found work as a health inspector but had spent years searching for dates and a mate before meeting Tashfeen Malik online and marrying her in Saudi Arabia. Together, the couple attacked a luncheon attended by Mr. Farook’s colleagues last December, killing 14 people. “When you dig into these cases, you find the ‘why’ is a very complex question,” said Peter Bergen, the director of the security program at New America, a research group, and author of “United States of Jihad. ” Personal disappointment, perceptions of discrimination, anger about American foreign policy and the desire “to become a hero in one’s own story” are all at play in addition to jihadist ideology, he said. “Many of them just take their grievances and dress them up in the garb of Islam,” Mr. Bergen said. That has become easy in the age of the internet. The attackers in San Bernardino, Orlando and New York all had expressed support for the Islamic State, and they and the Boston bombers were devotees of the voluminous online work of Mr. Awlaki, who was killed in an American drone strike in 2011. His arguments remain highly popular on the web, where he urged Western Muslims to reject even the friendliest neighbors, whom he called “Sally Soccer Mom and Joe . ” Mr. Rahami wrote in his journal that “Sheikh Anwar,” as well as Mr. Adnani of the Islamic State, had “said it clearly”: “Attack the kuffar,” or “in their backyard. ” Farhad Khosrokhavar, a sociologist at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the author of “Radicalization,” said Muslims in Europe more often than those in America felt “frontally rejected” by the larger society. He said he had often seen in his research individuals who felt neither French nor Arab. “In France, they are blamed for not being French enough, and when they go to their parents’ country of origin, they are blamed for not being Arab enough,” Mr. Khosrokhavar said. “That double denial can push them to adhere to a radical version of Islam, as a kind of lifeline: Since I am neither French nor Arab, neither American nor Afghan, I am Muslim and to hell with you all,” he added. These roots of radicalization do not make immigrants in general a danger. In the United States, immigrants have a lower rate of crime and violence than other Americans. Converts to Islam are disproportionately represented among Americans and Europeans drawn to extremism, and other ideologies also motivate mass violence — as in the case of Dylann Roof, who was 21 when he fatally shot nine black people last year at a church in Charleston, S. C. in the name of white supremacy. “The actual content of the ideology is secondary,” said Mr. Meloy, the psychologist. “What’s important is the identification and fixation. ” But the Islamist terrorist groups target the particular anxieties of Western Muslims from immigrant backgrounds, posing recruitment as a religious loyalty test. They call on supporters to reject the nations where they live and embrace instead a devotion to the ummah, the global community of Muslims. The West is at war with Islam, they say, and you must strike out to defend your fellow Muslims. That message has been delivered with particular power by Mr. Awlaki, often reinforcing the newer propaganda efforts of the Islamic State. As an imam who counseled immigrants at three American mosques, and as a who had lived in both countries and in Britain, Mr. Awlaki understood the worries of Muslims in the West. When he joined Al Qaeda, he did his best to open a gulf between them and their neighbors. “The important lesson to learn here is: Never, ever trust a kuffar,” Mr. Awlaki said in a 2003 lecture in London that was captured on video and remains a YouTube favorite. “Now, you might argue and say: ‘But my neighbor is such a nice person. My classmates are very nice. My — they’re just fabulous people, they’re so decent and honest. ’” Yet these can never be relied upon, he said. Later, after moving to Yemen, he spoke not only of shunning but also of attacking them. In a 2010 video, he tried to shame his listeners into choosing his brand of religion over their country. “To the Muslims in America I have this to say: How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful coexistence with a nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brothers and sisters?” he said. “How can you have your loyalty to a government that is leading the war against Islam and Muslims?” He has led many people down the jihadist path, and not just in countries. The Counter Extremism Project, an advocacy group based in Washington, said Wednesday that it had counted 88 “extremists” who had been influenced by Mr. Awlaki: 54 in the United States and 34 in Europe. Most such jihadist recruits are the children of immigrants, said Olivier Roy, a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and the author of “Globalized Islam. ” His research shows that 65 percent of Muslim extremists in France and Belgium are from this second generation. “These young people have broken away from their parents, who they blame for many things — for practicing the wrong Islam, for having brought them to the West, for having failed in life,” Mr. Roy said, noting that Mr. Rahami reportedly had clashed with his father. But such conflicts pass. Few jihadists are from the third generation, the grandchildren of immigrants, he said. | 0fake |
Should We Worry About McMaster as Trump’s National Security Advisor? | 21st Century Wire says Is McMaster going to reignite tensions with Russia?In the follow video Stuart J. Hooper asks if we should be worried about General McMaster replacing General Flynn as Trump s National Security Advisor.While Flynn understood that Russia has a sphere of influence in the world that the US should be wary of encroaching upon, McMaster is the author of a report entitled The Russia New Generation Warfare Study , which is, is intended to ignite a wholesale rethinking and possibly even a redesign of the Army in the event it has to confront the Russians in Eastern Europe .Watch the report video here: READ MORE TRUMP NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Trump FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 1real |
Pledging to tackle inequality, UK PM May seeks identity beyond Brexit | LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Theresa May pledged on Tuesday to hold a mirror up to society with a study showing sharp racial disparities in Britain, as she looks for a way to demonstrate her leadership is about more than just delivering Brexit. Among the findings of the audit, the data showed Asian, black and other minority ethnic households were most likely to be in persistent poverty, that ethnic minorities have a lower employment rate than white people, and that they were under-represented in senior public sector jobs. Bogged down by Brexit and losing her parliamentary majority in a snap election in June, May has struggled to deliver on social reforms to tackle what she has called burning injustices since taking control of the ruling Conservative party in July 2016. Attempting to relaunch that agenda, she published the findings of a Race Disparity Audit which pulled together existing data from across sectors such as health, education, employment and the criminal justice system and analyzed it to discover how ethnicity affects people s lives. This audit means that for society as a whole for government, for our public services there is nowhere to hide. These issues are now out in the open, she told a private meeting to launch the report, according to her office. The message is very simple: if these disparities cannot be explained then they must be changed. May s center-right Conservatives were blindsided in June s election by a surge in support for the left-wing policies of opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has presented higher state spending as part of the cure for voters he says have been let down years of cuts to public services. The prime minister has done nothing but exacerbate the problems. Far from tackling the burning injustices she has added fuel to the fire, Labour s equalities spokeswoman Dawn Butler said. She called for the government to start offering solutions to the problems the audit highlighted. At last week s Conservative conference, May was keen to show party members that she had a plan to counter Corbyn s rise and allay fears that Brexit was squeezing out action on Britain s social problems. It will hold a mirror up to society and allow us and wider society to see where action is needed, May told a meeting of her senior ministers, according to a spokesman. May s deputy Damian Green said the audit s findings were not relentlessly negative , but added in a forward to the document: There is still a way to go before we have a country that works for everyone regardless of their ethnicity. (This refiled version of the story fixes date, no change to text; updates after publication). | 0fake |
Two ex-Trump aides charged in Russia probe, third pleads guilty | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election charged President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and another aide, Rick Gates, with money laundering on Monday. A third former Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty in early October to lying to the FBI, it was announced on Monday. It was a sharp escalation of U.S. Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s five-month-old investigation into alleged Russian efforts to tilt the election in Trump’s favour and into potential collusion by Trump aides. Manafort, 68, a longtime Republican operative, and Gates were arraigned at a federal courthouse in Washington. Both men pleaded not guilty to the charges in a 12-count indictment, ranging from money laundering to acting as unregistered agents of Ukraine’s former pro-Russian government. The judge ordered house arrest for both men, and set a $10 million (7.57 million pounds) unsecured bond for Manafort and a $5 million unsecured bond for Gates. With unsecured bonds, they are released without having to pay but will owe money if they fail to appear in court. There will be another hearing on Thursday. The developments in the Mueller probe weighed on the U.S. dollar, which slipped 0.5 percent against a basket of currencies. Mueller’s investigation and others by congressional committees into alleged Russian efforts to influence the election have cast a shadow over Trump’s first nine months in office. U.S. intelligence agencies say Russia interfered in the election by hacking and releasing embarrassing emails and disseminating propaganda via social media to discredit Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Russia denies the allegations and Trump denies any collusion. Neither Trump nor his campaign was mentioned in the indictment against Manafort and Gates. The charges, some going back more than a decade, centre on Manafort’s work for Ukraine. The indictment includes accusations of conspiracy against the United States, failure to report foreign bank accounts to the U.S. government and conspiracy to launder money, a count that carries a 20-year maximum prison sentence. A White House spokeswoman said the indictment had nothing to do with Trump or his campaign and showed no evidence of collusion between the campaign and Russia. “We’ve been saying from Day One there’s no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, and nothing in the indictment today changes that at all,” spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told a news briefing. Manafort’s attorney, Kevin Downing said in a statement that there was no evidence the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government. Downing said Manafort’s work for the Ukrainians ended in 2014, two years before he joined the Trump campaign. Downing accused Mueller of using a “novel” legal theory to prosecute Manafort under a law requiring lobbyists to register with the Department of Justice when they are doing work for a foreign government. In a development directly related to Trump’s 2016 election campaign, it emerged on Monday that Papadopoulos, a former campaign adviser, pleaded guilty earlier this month to making false statements to Federal Bureau of Investigation agents. Mueller’s office said Papadopoulos lied to FBI agents about the timing of contact between him and a professor in London who claimed to have information that would hurt Clinton. Papadopoulos, a little-known former foreign policy adviser in the campaign, made a plea bargain that stated he had since “met with the Government on numerous occasions to provide information and answer questions,” according to a court document. Sanders, the White House spokeswoman, said Papadopoulos’ role in the campaign was “extremely limited” and that he was a volunteer. “He asked to do things (and) he was basically pushed back or not responded to in any way,” she said. In a May 4 email quoted in the Papadopoulos indictment, a Trump campaign employee forwarded a message from Papadopoulos proposing a meeting between Trump and the Russian government to another campaign official. The employee included a note, according to the indictment, that read: “Let’s discuss. We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.” A source in Washington, who did not want to be identified and who has seen the email, said the sender was Manafort and the recipient was Gates. Manafort ran the Trump campaign from June to August of 2016 before resigning amid reports he might have received millions of dollars in illegal payments from a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. Trump reiterated his frustration on Monday with the Mueller probe, which he has called “a witch hunt.” “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????,” Trump wrote on Twitter, referring to Clinton. Mueller has been investigating Manafort’s financial and real estate dealings and his prior work for a political group, the Party of Regions, which backed former pro-Kremlin Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich. Both Manafort and Gates generated tens of millions of dollars of income from Ukraine work and laundered money through scores of U.S. and foreign entities to hide payments from American authorities, the indictment said. They concealed from the United States their work and revenue as agents of Ukrainian political parties and used their wealth to lead a “lavish lifestyle” without paying taxes on the income, it said. The indictment said Manafort owned properties in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Hamptons, Arlington, Virginia, and elsewhere. Prosecutors said Manafort spent almost $1 million on eight rugs in two years and more than $1.3 million on clothes from shops in Beverly Hills, California, and New York City. They also said he had been making payments on four Range Rovers and a Mercedes-Benz. Gates was a longtime business partner of Manafort and has ties to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. He also served as deputy to Manafort during his brief tenure as Trump’s campaign chairman. | 0fake |
In a break with Obama, Clinton lays out tougher worldview | Hillary Rodham Clinton — who has spent much of her campaign embracing the policies of President Obama — signaled clear disagreement with her former boss Wednesday in key areas of foreign policy, suggesting in some cases that he has been too hesitant.
Again and again, Clinton pointed to instances overseas where she would have taken a tougher stance than Obama, from arming Syrian rebels to confronting an expansionist Russia. In some cases, she was talking about policy debates she lost while serving as Obama’s first-term secretary of state, or about advice she suggested was not heeded.
The critique, delivered as part of a Washington speech focused on the Iran nuclear deal, was in many respects subtle — wrapped inside overall praise for Obama and never targeting him directly. But the differences were nonetheless striking for a candidate who has worked carefully to soften her hawkish national security reputation and who badly needs Obama’s liberal coalition of voters to gain the White House.
“Those of us who have been out there on the diplomatic front lines know that diplomacy is not the pursuit of perfection,” Clinton said. “It’s the balancing of risk.”
That line was meant to answer Republican critics who say the Obama administration failed to drive a hard bargain in international nuclear talks with Iran. But Clinton echoed some GOP criticism of Obama’s hands-off approach to some world problems.
The decision to distance herself from Obama on some foreign-policy issues comes at a difficult time for the Democratic front-runner, who has seen her lead erode amid the rise of an iconoclastic challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and the worsening controversy over her use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state.
It also represents a delicate balancing act for Clinton, who has sought to focus on her tenure as the top U.S. diplomat during Obama’s first term as a crucial qualification for becoming commander in chief. Much of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing remains skeptical of her sometimes hawkish tilt on foreign policy, including her now-disavowed vote in favor of the Iraq war.
[How Clinton is banking on the Obama coalition to win]
Clinton reviewed some of her policy differences with Obama in her State Department memoir, “Hard Choices,” published last year. But Wednesday’s speech at the Brookings Institution was the first time she had gone significantly beyond the mild and often implicit criticisms in that book to question foreign-policy decision-making after she left the administration.
The main goal of Wednesday’s wide-ranging foreign-policy address was to support the Iran deal against Republican criticism and make clear that if elected president she will enforce it and seek to strengthen it.
Obama deserves praise for his leadership in seeking the deal, Clinton said, and she claimed some credit for helping open the door for the negotiations that produced the accord this summer.
“Either we move forward on the path of diplomacy and seize this chance to block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon or we turn down a more dangerous path, leading to a far less certain and riskier future,” Clinton said.
But Clinton’s support for the deal came with caveats, starting with whether it could lead to rapprochement with Iran after more than 35 years of enmity. Clinton was also blunt in her skepticism that Iran will fully comply with the accord limiting but not ending its nuclear program, but she said there are adequate safeguards built in.
She zeroed in on what critics of the deal call a chief weakness — a concession to Iran that allows a delay of up to 24 days before international inspectors could check up on some kinds of suspected violations.
“I’d be the first to say that this part of the deal is not perfect,” Clinton said. “But our experts tell us that even with delayed access to some places, this deal does the job.”
Jake Sullivan, a top Clinton aide who helped launch the Iran negotiations and is now the senior policy adviser for Clinton’s presidential campaign, said she was not suggesting that the administration caved on inspections.
“Acknowledging the imperfections of the deal is not criticism of the deal” but rather an argument that enforcement must be vigilant, Sullivan told reporters after the speech.
[How Hillary Clinton is running against parts of her husband’s legacy]
Other pieces of direct or implicit criticism flared throughout the speech and during a question-and-answer session afterward.
On Russia, Clinton said she had warned of trouble on the horizon with the return of Vladimir Putin as president. “I am in the category of people who wanted us to do more in response to the annexation of Crimea and the continuing destabilization of Ukraine,” she said, referring to Russia’s military moves there.
Clinton said she would “sustain a robust military presence” in the Persian Gulf. The Obama administration has acknowledged that there will be a gap of about two months this fall when no U.S. aircraft carrier group will be stationed in the gulf, the first time that has happened in several years.
On Syria, Clinton noted that she argued for arming moderate Syrian rebels far earlier than the White House eventually tried to do, and she suggested the United States is not leading as it should in response to an exodus of refugees fleeing the civil war there. She proposed organizing a pledging conference, like one she helped put together after the 2011 earthquake in Haiti, to take in refugees and pay for resettlement.
“The United States has to be at the table, has to be leading it,” Clinton said.
In response to a question, Clinton also suggested that her former boss had miscalculated by trying to strong-arm Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over dealings with the Palestinians. That tactic was tried during and after her tenure.
[For Hillary and Bibi, a long and sometimes fraught relationship]
“Well, I think there’s a lot of room for tough love, particularly in private,” Clinton said. “But I just don’t think it’s a particularly productive approach for the United States to take” in public.
“In the absence of, you know, some kind of greater goal that we were trying to achieve by doing that, I just don’t think that is the smartest approach,” she said.
Clinton was measured but still critical on whether the administration should have pulled back from its request that Congress authorize military force in Syria. It opted instead for a 2013 agreement to remove chemical weapons from that country.
“It’s always difficult in hindsight to say what could have happened if something different had been done,” she said of the debate over how to respond to allegations that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces had launched chemical-weapons attacks on civilians. The vote may well have failed, she noted, which would have left Obama to decide whether to proceed with punitive airstrikes on his own executive authority and over congressional objections.
“I do think that not being able to follow through on it cost us. I am certain of that. That still comes back in conversations that people have with me” at home and abroad, Clinton said. “But I do think it was a net positive to get as much of the chemical weapons out as we could.” | 0fake |
4 Things To Watch At The First Presidential Debate | 4 Things To Watch At The First Presidential Debate
The first presidential debate tonight is shaping up to be one of the most-watched political events ever, with a potentially Super Bowl-size audience.
Here are four things to watch for as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump take the stage at Hofstra University on Long Island.
Donald Trump "won" the primary debates by dominating his opponents, often by name-calling and bluster. This one will be different.
Instead of facing multiple opponents, he will be doing something he's never done before — face off against just one opponent (and in this case an experienced one) on a debate stage.
Trump's goal is to present himself as a plausible president, someone voters can imagine as commander in chief. And he has work to do, since majorities of voters say he doesn't have the judgment or qualifications to be president. So Trump needs to show a basic command of policy — and in particular, his own policies. He has made so many contradictory statements about his plans for Syria, ISIS, tax reform and crime fighting that he will have a real thicket to untangle.
Trump wants to reach those voters who won't want to vote for Clinton but are worried about his temperament. Does that mean the new "teleprompter Trump" will show up tonight? He has proven that he can maintain a little more discipline in a set-piece speech, but there are no teleprompters in a 90-minute debate.
And although Trump benefits from low expectations, his team isn't even trying to make him out to be the underdog. On Sunday morning, Trump's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, called him "the Babe Ruth of debating."
Clinton has the much tougher task tonight. She has the burden of high expectations.
The former senator and secretary of state, who has now been through two presidential campaigns, is an experienced debater who knows policy inside and out.
But her job is very hard — Clinton has to convince voters who don't want to vote for Trump but haven't warmed up to her that she is likeable, honest and trustworthy. And she has to press her case that Trump is unqualified to be president without being overly aggressive or "harsh."
Gender communications research shows that debaters who are on offense win, and those that are on defense lose. But being on offense for a woman is tricky. Male debaters who are aggressive are perceived positively; female politicians who are aggressive in debates are perceived negatively.
So Clinton has to stay on offense without being angry. All of that advice about "smiling" that drives Clinton's supporters nuts? It's unfair, but that's just the way it is, says Brett O'Donnell, a veteran Republican debate coach: "People like to see a happy warrior. Clinton has to look like she's enjoying herself even if she's not."
Both campaigns have been working the refs hard. Trump has said the debate system is "rigged" against him, and he falsely accused NBC's Lester Holt, the moderator for tonight's debate, of being a registered Democrat. Holt is an experienced journalist who happens to be a registered Republican.
The Clinton campaign, on the other hand, has complained about a double-standard. It says the media creates a "false equivalence" between Trump's falsehoods and Clinton's, even though numerous fact checks have shown that Trump prevaricates many more times than Clinton does.
In the recent NBC commander-in-chief forum, Clinton's top aides said moderator Matt Lauer grilled Clinton a lot more intensely than Trump. And they say that for tonight's debate the moderator and the TV networks — with the crawl at the bottom of the screen — have a responsibility to fact-check Trump in real time.
There are three phases to a debate:
First, the pregame expectations-setting and referee-massaging, which has been going on at a furious pace over the past week.
Second, the debate itself.
And third, the post-debate spin.
Debates are not forums to score policy points. They are tests of character and demeanor. And they are often judged not in their totality, but by "moments" — the zingers and put-downs that the candidates prepare in advance. Those moments — "Where's the beef?" "You're no Jack Kennedy," "There you go again" — help determine who voters think won or lost the debate.
But there are many debates that were "won" in the hours after the candidates left the stage by the campaign that was more adept at getting its narrative into the media.
Follow along with the NPR Politics team's coverage of tonight's debate, which starts at 9 p.m. ET, at npr.org and on many NPR member stations. | 0fake |
Britain calls on Myanmar leader to show lead in ending violence | NEW YORK (Reuters) - Britain s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson on Monday urged Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi to show a lead in ending violence against the country s Rohingya Muslims, which the United Nations has branded ethnic cleansing. What we are trying to get everyone to agree is that, number one, the killings have got to stop, and the violence has got to stop. And we look not just to the military but also to Daw Suu to show a lead on that, Johnson told Reuters ahead of hosting a ministerial meeting on the crisis on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. | 0fake |
Racist Trump Supporters Lose Their Sh*t Over State Farm Ad Featuring Interracial Couple | White racists launched a war against State Farm insurance company for posting an image of a black man proposing to a white woman.Who said yes??Cheers to the newly engaged this holiday season! Be sure to #ProtectTheBling! https://t.co/XG807VEWaH pic.twitter.com/nUOcAVvq7J State Farm (@StateFarm) December 21, 2016The image was meant to remind people that they may want to consider purchasing jewelry insurance to protect precious items like engagement rings but racists absolutely hated that State Farm used an image of diversity to advertise insurance.Emboldened by Donald Trump, the racists flocked to State Farm s Twitter feed to whine and attack the company, with some even vowing economic retaliation.@StateFarm and you thought the Geico cavemen were bad. Never buying your crap again, State. TexasStormer (@TxStormer) December 24, 2016@GEICO_Service @TxStormer stop trying to normalize interracial pedophilia(or any other kind) in your ads please. Coprophile Dungdee (@BomptonBrotha88) December 24, 2016seriously, it s getting ridiculous Trump s America, now. We gotta be FIRM on this @wisdom2m3 @StateFarm Brenda Gale (@bgc558) December 24, 2016@StateFarmShould whites no longer marry whites? MoreFreedomLessGov (@ConservativLuke) December 24, 2016@StateFarm Been a State Farm customer for 20 years. Will be taking business elsewhere next week. gab.ai/exxivy (@exxivy) December 24, 2016@StateFarm what the hell are you doing? This is disgusting and nobody wants to see this Bran mak Morn (@mc_morn) December 24, 2016@Fuhrerious1488 @mc_morn @StateFarm this is some cuck using his fantasy as an advertisement. 84 Roddy Wehrmacht (@MineshaftG) December 24, 2016@MineshaftG @Fuhrerious1488 @mc_morn @StateFarm I am cancelling all my business with them , long time customer bye Jimmy Slade (@JimmySlade1) December 24, 2016@mikaylabruendl our patience is over and any white whores seen with these animals will be shunned shamed and made a second class citizen. White Russian Agent (@SavetheWhites17) December 24, 2016@StateFarm In 4 years: pic.twitter.com/cJGC8d1qvB Zorost (@Zorost1588) December 24, 2016@StateFarm Also, blacks don t marry they create welfare cases that live in section 8. 72% of all black children are illegitimate. Rep. Larry McDonald (@juck_fews) December 24, 2016@StateFarm Disgusting. This is White Genocide k. rahekr (@krahekr) December 24, 2016Basically, this what happened to white racists when they saw State Farm s tweet.@StateFarm insecure, racist white men when they saw this image. LOL pic.twitter.com/HbCTV6YuLS Erick Fernandez (@ErickFernandez) December 24, 2016But make no mistake. While these racists are attacking State Farm, Republicans are busy trying to appease their racist base by trying to bring back interracial marriage bans. Kentucky Republicans recently attempted to pass a law allowing discrimination against interracial couples. It actually made it through the state Senate.In fact, a 2012 poll revealed that over 20 percent of Republican voters in Alabama (the home state of Trump a Attorney General pick Jeff Sessions) and Mississippi want interracial marriage to be illegal.Featured Image: Twitter | 1real |
BREAKING: VIDEO RELEASED Of Angry Leftist Mob Attacking Home Of Chicago Lawmaker With Rocks, Torches | If this had been a Tea Party group attacking Nancy Pelosi s home, it would have been international news Angry leftists with rocks, wood chunks and torches attacked a Chicago alderman s home this weekend. Once you start throwing objects, that crosses the line, he said. He said there wasn t any major damage to the home, just debris near the windows and objects on the sidewalk.Alderman Cardenas provided a video of the attack to authorities:Three people landed behind bars Saturday night after mobbing a home owned by Ald. George Cardenas (12th) with rocks, pieces of wood and tiki torches, according to the alderman and police.The mob of more than 50 people was protesting police violence in the city, said Cardenas, who provided DNAinfo Chicago with a video clip shot outside the home, where his ex-wife, two daughters and his mother live.Police eventually arrested three protesters in the 2100 block of South Marshall.Efrain Montalvo, 23, of the 2600 block of West 22nd Place; Javier Ramos, a 29-year-old Des Plaines resident; and Billie Kincaid, a 25-year-old woman from the 1500 block of West Lunt Avenue, each stand charged with one misdemeanor count of mob action.Cardenas had been eating dinner with a friend across town when the mob rolled down 26th Street in Little Village and ended up in front of his house. Via: Gateway Pundit | 1real |
Victim Blaming the Planet | Stay ahead of the curve. Yes! Send me daily news! You have Successfully Subscribed! | 1real |
Sanders could endorse Clinton's White House bid, but some divisions linger | NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders is set to throw his support behind fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House on Tuesday, a boost for the former secretary of state as she prepares to face off with Republican rival Donald Trump in the Nov. 8 presidential election. An endorsement from Sanders would end a bitterly fought battle for the Democratic nomination that split the party over education, healthcare and climate change, and comes after Clinton offered Sanders a handful of policy concessions on those issues in recent weeks. At a rally in New Hampshire on Tuesday, the pair will appear together to discuss a shared “commitment to building an America that is stronger together and an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top,” according to statements released Monday by both campaigns. Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver would not confirm whether Sanders would formally endorse Clinton on Tuesday but said the rally will be the first of many in which Sanders will “be out there stumping for the Democratic nominee.” Sanders had been under pressure for weeks from Democratic Party officials to throw his weight behind Clinton after she locked up the required number of delegates last month with a string of wins in state-by-state primary contests, but had resisted, citing policy differences. Clinton needs Sanders’ supporters to boost her chances against Trump in her run for the White House. Only about 40 percent of Sanders’ supporters say they would vote for her, according to recent Reuters/Ipsos polling. Weaver said that despite Sanders backing of Clinton, he would likely still press on with his efforts to reform the Democratic Party nominating process after a contentious primary season, pushing to open primaries to independent voters and change the roles of superdelegates, party stalwarts who can support a nominee of their choosing regardless of how people voted in their districts. In the past few weeks, both camps have been in regular contact on how to bring Clinton closer to some of Sanders’ progressive stances on issues like wealth inequality, trade, healthcare, education, and the environment in an effort to unify the party. But some Sanders’ supporters are not fully satisfied by Clinton’s concessions on the party platform - most of which centered on education and healthcare - suggesting there may be some room for friction at the Democratic National Convention later this month where Clinton is set to be formally nominated. “This is a platform clearly influenced by Bernie Sanders,” said James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute and a Sanders appointee to the party’s platform drafting committee. But, he added, “there were several areas where the Clinton campaign lost an opportunity to not only reach out to the Sanders base but to also to make a dramatic statement to the American people in general that would have gone a long way in helping her demonstrate that she will be a different kind of candidate,” he said. For example, he said, the party could have used stronger language in its policy platform draft to condemn the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which Sanders has argued would hurt American workers and which Clinton has also vocally opposed. Sanders’ challenge to Clinton, one of the best-known figures in U.S. politics, lasted far longer than expected, running for four months and across 50 states and yielding record numbers of small donations to his campaign. He has previously vowed to help Clinton defeat Trump but has been reluctant to end his campaign, and has come short of making a formal endorsement even as other prominent Democrats have rallied around her, including President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a favorite of the party’s liberal wing. On Monday, the Communications Workers of America endorsed Clinton, after having earlier endorsed Sanders. | 0fake |
Video Shows Cop Slamming Man’s Head To Pavement, Breaking His Neck | Newly released body camera footage shows a La Junta, Colorado police officer violently slamming a man s head to the pavement with enough force to break his neck. The officer s actions left the man, who was never charged with any crime, paralyzed from the chest down.According to Donovan Duran s family the young MMA fighter was experiencing a mental health crisis at the time of the encounter with police, which took place in December of 2015.Over the course of several days Duran s family called police to help them cope with what they describe as unusual behavior.The Denver Post reports that Duran was drinking excessively and experiencing bouts of paranoia in the days prior to his injury.On two prior occasions police had taken the man to a local hospital. On both occasions he was released without treatment.According to police, authorities were not able to hold him in custody because he had not broken any laws.The latter half of the body cam video shows officer Vince Fraker speaking with Duran before his arrest. Although it appears that some of the footage has been edited, none of the footage published by the Denver Post shows the man being combative or threatening the police.The first portion of the video shows the moment that Fraker slams Duran s head to the pavement. It s clear that he is severely injured and no longer able to stand or walk.The video shows Fraker and another officer dealing with Duran s injuries in a shockingly callous manner, dragging him across the hospital parking lot and tossing his limp body around without any concern whatsoever for his well-being.Watch the video below, courtesy of the Denver Post.More than six months later Duran still remains in the hospital. In spite of the brutal treatment he received from police, he was never charged with any crime.According to the Denver Post:A grand jury in April found there were no fileable charges against Fraker or another officer involved in the encounter.The grand jurors wrote in a report that while Fraker was responsible for Duran s injuries a fractured neck that left him paralyzed from his nipples down when he rolled him out of a La Junta police SUV, it cannot be the basis of any criminal charges. Duran s attorneys have filed a federal lawsuit, stating: La Junta Police Department training of officers does not include proper training in responding to calls involving persons in crisis or with obvious mental health problems, including use of force policies and de-escalation strategies. The suit goes on to say: Fraker s use of excessive force as described above herein was outrageous and shocking to the conscience, in violation of Duran s substantive due process rights. A spokesperson for the La Junta Police Department states that an internal investigation into the incident is still underway.Image credit: video screen capture via Denver Post | 1real |
Trump's UK visit on despite criticism, says foreign secretary | LONDON (Reuters) - British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Tuesday he saw no reason to cancel Donald Trump’s state visit to Britain after the U.S. president criticized Mayor Sadiq Khan’s response to the London Bridge killings. Prime Minister Theresa May called Trump’s comments “wrong.” Trump has lambasted Khan on Twitter, accusing him of making a “pathetic excuse,” for saying Londoners should not be alarmed by the sight of additional police on the streets of the British capital after Saturday’s attack that killed seven people. “The invitation has been issued and accepted and I see no reason to change that, but as far as what Sadiq Khan has said about the reassurances he’s offered the people of London, I think he was entirely right to speak in the way he did,” Johnson said in a BBC radio interview when asked whether Trump’s state visit should be canceled. No date has been set for the visit, which was agreed during May’s visit to Washington in January and seen as a sign of her desire to maintain good ties with Britain’s traditional close ally as Trump began his presidency. The Conservative prime minister has said Khan is doing a good job, echoing public sentiment across London. On Tuesday, May told a political rally in response to a question about Trump’s tweets, “I think Donald Trump was wrong in the things that he has said about Sadiq Khan.” Trump and Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants and the first Muslim elected as London’s mayor, have been at odds since Khan denounced as “ignorant” Trump’s campaign pledge to impose a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. Since taking office on Jan. 20, Trump has ordered temporary travel restrictions on people from several Muslim-majority countries, although the ban is currently held up by federal courts. Asked on Tuesday about the London visit, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said only that Trump intended to go and that “he appreciates her majesty’s gracious invitation.” Asked on Monday evening if he would like Trump’s visit to be called off, Khan, a member of Britain’s opposition Labour party, said his position remained the same. “I don’t think we should roll out the red carpet to the president of the USA in the circumstances where his policies go against everything we stand for,” Khan told Channel 4 News. Tim Farron, leader of the opposition Liberal Democrats, also has urged May to cancel the visit, saying Trump was insulting Britain’s values “at a time of introspection and mourning.” Former Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, defeated by Trump last November, praised Khan’s performance in dealing with the attacks. Speaking at a fundraising event on Monday, she did not name Trump but said it was “not the time to lash out, to incite fear and use trash talk and terror for political gain,” the Washington Examiner reported. Deputy White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters on Monday that she did not think it was correct to characterize Trump’s tweets as “picking a fight” with Khan. Asked if Trump was attacking the mayor because he is Muslim, Sanders replied: “Not at all. And I think to suggest something like that is utterly ridiculous.” Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., defended his father. “Every time he puts something out there he gets criticized by the media. All day, every day,” Trump Jr. said in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” broadcast on Tuesday. “And guess what, he’s been proven right about it, every time. We keep saying, ‘It’s going to be great’ and ‘Hold fast,’ ‘We’re going to keep calm and carry on.’ Maybe we have to keep calm and actually do something,” he said. He was referring to a World War Two-era slogan of resilience, to “keep calm and carry on”, that Britons have echoed following the London attack. British author J.K. Rowling said on Tuesday that if a state visit did go ahead, Trump’s tweets related to the attack should be enlarged and shown wherever he goes. “I’d rather he didn’t come, but if he does, I’d like his vile Tweets juxtaposed against whatever he’s been coaxed to read off an autocue,” Rowling, celebrated for her Harry Potter books and a frequent critic of Trump, wrote on Twitter. | 0fake |
Russia, Syria armies step up attacks on Damascus enclave-rebels | AMMAN (Reuters) - The Syrian army backed by Russian jets on Wednesday stepped up shelling and air strikes on a besieged rebel-held enclave in Damascus a day after rebels stormed an army base in the area, rebels, a war monitor and residents said. The bombardment follows a surprise ground offensive by jihadist rebels on Tuesday on an army complex in the heart of the city s Eastern Ghouta region that has defied opposition assaults since the start of the conflict. The fortress-like Military Vehicles Administration in the government-held part of Harasta town has long been used to strike at the densely populated Eastern Ghouta, where over 300,000 people live under siege. Rebels have failed in repeated offensives to seize the sprawling compound, from where surface-to-surface rockets are launched against the rebel enclave. Douma, the main city in opposition-held Eastern Ghouta, is only three km away. The fighting is continuing and the shelling and air strikes are heavy near the base and most of the towns of the Ghouta, said Abu Kutaiba, a military commander for Ahrar al Sham, an Islamist rebel group that has spearheaded the attack. A Syrian military source said on state media the army had repelled terrorists who sought to infiltrate in large numbers, killing tens and destroying their weaponry. It did not mention the heavy aerial strikes on opposition areas. Backed by Russian strikes, government forces have escalated military operations against Eastern Ghouta in recent weeks, seeking to tighten a siege on the area, residents and rebels say. The rebel assault aims partly to relieve that pressure. The Eastern Ghouta is part of several de-escalation zones which Russia has brokered with rebels across Syria that has freed the army to redeploy in areas they can regain ground. The rebel offensive which began on Tuesday is the first since last March when mainstream Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels staged an attack against government-held areas in northeastern Damascus. The rebels were forced to retreat after initial gains. In retaliatory attacks, aerial strikes and shelling hit Harasta, Irbin, Misraba, Hamouriya, and Saqba towns in Eastern Ghouta with at least eight civilians killed and about 94 wounded in the last 20 hours alone, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and residents. After securing the last rebel pocket inside the capital s Qaboun district last May, the Syrian army has since concentrated its military drive against Ain Terma and Jobar, northeast of the capital in the Ghouta area. Rebels helped by an elaborate network of underground tunnels have repelled repeated attempts to storm these areas. The army and its militias have failed to make any progress and have had heavy losses, said Alwan, a spokesman for the FSA s Failaq al Rahman rebel group. Backed by Russian strikes, the army has however gradually succeeded in the last year in shrinking rebel held control over Eastern Ghouta. The loss of agricultural land has compounded the humanitarian plight of civilians. The United Nations has warned of impending starvation if aid does not reach the area, where international deliveries have long been erratic and obstructed. | 0fake |
26 BASEMENT DWELLERS ARRESTED In Oregon Riots…Police Post Pictures Of Suspects…Ask For Help To Identify Pro-Hillary Rioters | Thanks to George Soros, at least 26 couches in the basements of Oregon parents will be vacant for a while. Anarchists and rioters paid by Soros organizations and Democrat sore losers will spend some time in jail and will be facing charges for their violent and destructive behavior. Of course the sentences these radicals get will depend on the judges who hear their cases. This action is following burning projectiles being thrown at officers. Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) November 12, 2016Can You IDME? Riot Vandalism & Assault Suspect https://t.co/QJ4kiAHyzd #CanYouIDME pic.twitter.com/zBQBkuxzxW Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) November 12, 2016Police are looking for this guy who caused over $200,000 in damages: Can You IDME? Riot Vandalism Suspect https://t.co/AfynIElcbz #CanYouIDME pic.twitter.com/c92umDftsm Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) November 12, 2016Can You IDME? Vandalism Riot Suspect https://t.co/IbSCEsWL9f #CanYouIDME pic.twitter.com/ZnGYZkFh1G Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) November 13, 2016These thugs are likely not going to be missed by their parents:25 People Arrested in Thursday Night Riot in Portland (Photo) https://t.co/oas2XpzoHw pic.twitter.com/ikipWaoqB1 Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) November 11, 2016 | 1real |
Trump, Macron agree to work together on North Korea: White House | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron spoke by phone on Saturday and agreed to work together on a crisis on the Korean Peninsula, the White House said in a statement. “They discussed the need to confront the increasingly dangerous situation associated with North Korea’s destabilizing and escalatory behavior,” the White House said in a statement. In recent days, Trump and the North Korean regime have engaged in heated rhetoric about the Asian nation’s nuclear weapons program. | 0fake |
Mattis looking at ways to bring Russia into compliance with arms control treaty | BRUSSELS (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Thursday he had discussed Russia’s violation of an arms control treaty with his NATO counterparts and they were looking at how to bring Moscow into compliance with it. “We have a firm belief now over several years that the Russians have violated the INF and our effort is to bring Russia back into compliance,” Mattis said, speaking with reporters during a meeting of NATO defense ministers. U.S. officials have said Russia has deployed a cruise missile despite complaints by Washington that it violates the arms control treaty banning ground-based, U.S. and Russian intermediate-range missiles. Russia however, has said in the past that it appears that Washington, now in the midst of a $1 trillion, 30-year modernization of its ageing ballistic missile submarines, bombers and land-based missiles, that was in breach of the same treaty. “Many of the nations already have their own evidence of what Russia has been up to and we have been in active discussions amongst ourselves on the issue,” Mattis said. He added that the United States and NATO would be engaging with Russia to try and resolve the issue. | 0fake |
BREAKING: Devin Nunes Is Now The Subject Of A CRIMINAL Complaint To The FBI | Embattled House Intel Chairman, Devin Nunes (R-CA), has been reported to the FBI for corruption. The criminal complaint, filed by Scott Dworkin of the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, seems to include Nunes failure to disclose the fact that he s got all his money sunk into a winery with heavy ties to Russia (which means he s got a conflict of interest). It may also includ his admission that he had an obligation to inform Trump that some of his transition team s communications got swept up in a foreign surveillance operation.Nunes is definitely compromised, which is worth investigating.Dworkin can t make the details of his complaint public, but he did say that Nunes is unethical and that he was working on just such a complaint earlier today:RT if u think Devin Nunes is unethicalI doI m finishing our House Ethics Complaint on him now#NunesMustResign #trumprussia #russiagate Scott Dworkin (@funder) March 26, 2017Then he tweeted the news that his criminal complaint had officially been filed, along with the FBI s explanation of their public corruption program. One of the things they do is work to identify any connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence that would pose and imminent threat to national security. The entire fact sheet is below:#BREAKING:Rep Devin Nunes Reported to FBI Office of Public Corruption for Russian Business Connections & Fraud #nunesmustresign #trumprussia pic.twitter.com/8lDDzVQtwd Scott Dworkin (@funder) March 24, 2017Something has to be done since Nunes doesn t seem to be willing to resign his post at this time, and he s guilty of both a lie of omission regarding his business investments, and of sabotaging an official investigation into whether the Trump campaign (and possibly, his administration) colluded with Russia.Whether the FBI will take this up is anybody s guess. They should, though, because Nunes has proven that he s compromised, which further drives us into the morass that is the Russian scandal.Featured image by Drew Angerer via Getty Images | 1real |
BREAKING: Police Raid Democratic Office – Hillary is SCREWED! | 0 comments
On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania State Police raided a Delaware County political field office for the Democratic Party in search of “templates utilized to construct fraudulent voter registration forms,” and “completed voter registration forms containing same or similar identifying information of individuals on multiple forms.”
A warrant was filed last week in County Court seeking the documents tied to voter fraud. Investigators said they were looking for the documents, financial information, and lists of employees at the Norwood office of FieldWorks LLC, a national organization that often does street work for Democrats.
Matt Dorf, a spokesman for FieldWorks’ national headquarters in Washington, released the following statement:
“FieldWorks is now working with county officials to provide them with information on our program and applications they are investigating. In keeping with our regular practice, we will work aggressively with authorities to seek the prosecution of anyone involved in wrongdoing.”
Founded in 2001, according to promotional material online, FieldWorks describes itself as “a nationally recognized grassroots organizing firm founded to help progressive organizations, advocacy groups, and members of the Democratic family take their public engagement and electoral strategies to the next level.”
In 2012, FieldWorks’ voter registration efforts in Ohio sparked some controversy when the organization’s employees filed thousands of new voter registration cards in the final week before the registration deadline and some of them were found to be fraudulent. | 1real |
Senate votes to repeal Labor Department rule on state-run retirement plans | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate voted narrowly on Wednesday to repeal an exemption from strict federal protections that former President Barack Obama’s Labor Department had given to state-sponsored retirement savings plans for lower-income workers. The exemption, championed by states such as California but opposed by the mutual fund industry, had freed the state-run plans from the strict compliance requirements of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA. Private-sector workers whose employers do not offer 401(k) or other retirement benefits, and who often have low incomes, are automatically enrolled in plans being launched in some states, such as Illinois. States say the exemption would have let employers pass workers’ money into plans without footing ERISA compliance costs. It stoked fights in Washington, however, over the reach of federal regulation, states’ rights and income inequality. The Republican-led Senate passed the resolution repealing the exemption by a vote of 50-49. The House of Representatives, also controlled by Republicans, previously approved the measure, which President Donald Trump is expected to sign into law. It was the 14th Obama-era rule killed by Congress under the once-obscure Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to repeal newly minted regulations and forbids agencies from enacting similar rules in the future. In mid-April, Trump signed a nearly identical resolution affecting city-run retirement plans, which are in the design stages. But the resolution for state-run plans was stuck in limbo for weeks, as Republicans struggled to gather votes and major lobby groups representing retirees and business interests turned up the heat on lawmakers. Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, missed Wednesday’s vote because of minor heart surgery, helping the Senate avoid a tie. Republican Senator Todd Young of Indiana broke party ranks to oppose the resolution, saying Americans were in a “real and ongoing crisis” to save enough money for retirement. “While state-based retirement plans are not my first choice, if implemented carefully, they could help close the retirement savings gap,” he said in a statement to Reuters. The California plan’s primary champion, Democratic state Senator Kevin de Leon, expressed outrage at the vote, saying taxpayers would ultimately foot the bills of people who retire without adequate savings. “Wall Street investment firms fear their profits will take a hit ... even though the investment industry has historically ignored middle- and lower-income workers at medium- and small-sized businesses,” he said in a statement. The mutual fund, insurance and securities industries said the exemption would have denied some workers protections that are guaranteed for others. “Denying ERISA protections to workers who are automatically enrolled would limit their legal remedies to fight against high fees or mismanagement of the plans,” said Paul Schott Stevens, president of the Investment Company Institute, a trade group representing funds holding $19.3 trillion in assets and that are often used to save for retirement. | 0fake |
Senate panel rejects Trump's 'doctrine of retreat' on foreign policy | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A powerful Senate committee blasted the Trump administration on Friday in a report accompanying its spending plan for the State Department, saying its approach to foreign policy weakens U.S. standing in the world. On Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted 31-0 for legislation allocating more than $51 billion for the State Department and foreign operations, nearly $11 billion more than requested by President Donald Trump’s administration. In the report released on Friday accompanying the legislation, the committee criticized the administration’s request to cut spending on such operations by 30 percent from the year ending on Sept. 30, 2017. “The lessons learned since September 11, 2001, include the reality that defense alone does not provide for American strength and resolve abroad. Battlefield technology and firepower cannot replace diplomacy and development,” it read. “The administration’s apparent doctrine of retreat, which also includes distancing the United States from collective and multilateral dispute resolution frameworks, serves only to weaken America’s standing in the world,” it said. Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican chairman of the State and Foreign Operations subcommittee, which wrote the bill, said on Thursday that he had asked for more details from the White House about its spending plans. “We’ve got nothing back,” he said. Senator Patrick Leahy, the top subcommittee Democrat, called the “soft power” work of the State Department “absolutely essential.” Democrats and many of Trump’s fellow Republicans have blasted his budget request since it was released earlier this year. Congress, not the administration, controls spending. The administration says the State Department would be more effective if it were run more efficiently, arguing that the country needs to cut in other areas to fund a large increase in military spending. The bill passed by the Appropriations Committee is still several steps from becoming law. It must pass the Senate, and be reconciled with legislation passed by the House of Representatives, and then signed by Trump - or garner enough votes to override a Trump veto. The bill passed by the Senate committee on Thursday departed from Trump policy in other ways, including approving funding for the U.N. climate body and rejecting prohibitions on funding for international organizations that perform or provide counseling on abortions. Those measures, however, stand little chance in the House. Although Republicans control both chambers of Congress, conservative Republicans most skeptical about climate change and opposed to abortion exert more control in the House than in the Senate. | 0fake |
FEMA chief says Irma path is 'worst-case scenario' for Florida Keys | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The new path forged by Hurricane Irma posed a severe threat to Florida s west coast and the Florida Keys, the head of the U.S. federal emergency agency said on Sunday, and the storm was bringing tornado watches and warnings around the state. This is a worst case scenario for Monroe County, the Florida Keys and the west coast of Florida, Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told the Fox News Sunday program. Any time you re in that northeast quadrant as the storm is moving forward, that s where the maximum radius winds are that define the intensity of the storm, he said. That s where the storm surge is most prevalent and the inland winds are going to be tough. | 0fake |
BOOM! OBAMA REQUIRED To Respond, After Petition To “Formally Recognize BLACK LIVES MATTER As A Terrorist Organization” Exceeds Required 100K Signatures In ONLY 5 Days…ADD YOUR NAME! | A We The People petition was started on July 6TH, asking the government to formally designate Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization . The White House requires that the person or group who initiates a petition on their We The People petition page must gather at least 100,000 signatures in 30 days. Once they have the signatures, the White House site guarantees they will review the petition and offer an official response. Obama will no doubt spin this, but in the meantime, it s a statement by over 100,000 American citizens about their belief that Black Lives Matter is nothing more than a terror organization. The overwhelming support for labeling Black Lives Matter at terror group won t bode well for Hillary, who has openly supported them in an embarrassing effort to pander for votes.From the White House created We The People Petition page:About We the PeopleThe right to petition your government is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. We the People is a platform that empowers the American public to take this action like never before it s a way for anybody, anywhere, to speak directly to the government and become an agent for change.With We the People, you can easily create a petition online, share it, and collect signatures. If you gather 100,000 signature in 30 days, we ll review your petition, make sure it gets in front of the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response.Petitioning has the potential to enact real change just check out some of our petition creator s success stories but it s also your fundamental right as an American citizen, and an opportunity to connect with a community of like-minded people who are invested in making a change. Ideally, running a petition on We the People is just the start of something bigger a long-term, robust form of civic engagement.The White House Reviews and RespondsOnce the petition reaches the required threshold (100,000 signatures), it will be put in a queue to be reviewed by the White House. Others can still sign the petition while it is awaiting a response. When the White House responds, everyone who has signed the petition will get email from the White House to let you know that we ve reviewed and responded to the petition.Q: How will the White House decide which petitions to respond to?The White House plans to respond to each petition that crosses the current signature threshold, which you can view on the Terms of Participation page. In some cases, the White House response might not address the facts of a particular matter to avoid the appearance of improper influence (such as in specific procurement, law enforcement or adjudicatory matters). In addition, the White House will not respond to petitions that violate We the People s Terms of Participation. In some cases, a single update may be used for petitions on similar topics.To date, the petition has collected 107,652 signatures. If you d like to add your name, click HERE. | 1real |
Company that Supplied Voting Machines to 22 States Donated to Clinton Foundation |
No wonder they’re so confident!
Dominion Voting Systems brags on its home page that “Together with our customers, we strive to change elections for the better!”
Wikipedia currently reports that Dominion provides voting machines to 22 states.
If you hit the link to this statement, however, the supporting post has now been taken down.
Dominion Voting Systems is owned by George Soros an internationalist billionaire who is openly supporting Hillary Clinton and donated to her campaign dozens of millions of dollars.
We now know that the machines are already flipping out votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton in Texas, Illinois, North Carolina and other states. The people working at the voting boots always find out some WHATEVER excuses while so far there hasn’t been a single vote switched from Hillary to Trump.
Soros is also said to control a British company called Smartmatic, which had something to do with election fraud in Venezuela. Thanks to the Smartmatic machines, communists “won” the elections over and over again.
Smartmatic is tied to Soros’ Open Road Foundation and it used to have a subsidiary called Sequoia. Sequoia electronic voting machines are used in the US general election. Sequoia was eventually sold to Dominion Voting Systems.
How do you like that people? The man in charge of counting your votes happens to have a favorite.
This is exactly like Joseph Stalin’s famous quote: “The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who count the votes do.”
It does’t matter that you go out and vote for Trump, what matters is that Soros is gonna count votes the way he wants to and that’s just not right to have a private person in charge of the elections basically.
Soros needs to have his entire fortune confiscated by the US government, nationalized and included in the state budget and have him locked up for the rest of his miserable life. Remember how those commie SJWs call for equality and taking from the rich and giving to the poor? Sure lets start with this high-profile thief right here.
The system is rigged people and Trump is right! Voting should only be on paper not on machines which can be manipulated easily!
| 1real |
At Least 20 Firefighters Killed in Tehran Building Collapse - The New York Times | TEHRAN — The scene unspooled as if in a disaster film: As firefighters fought to control a blaze in one of Tehran’s most prominent buildings, the structure suddenly collapsed on Thursday in a smoldering heap of wreckage — all while millions watched on Iranian state television. The channel PressTV said that at least 20 firefighters were confirmed dead and that dozens of people could be trapped beneath the rubble. But other local news agencies said that as many as 50 firefighters and shopkeepers could have been inside the building when it collapsed. “It was total chaos, there was dust, there were people everywhere. No one knew what to do,” said Nasim Khakpour, a Tehran resident who had gone to buy a guitar for her brother in the area. Firefighters had battled the blaze for several hours as police officers tried to shoo away shopkeepers trying to return to collect their valuables, PressTV reported. Then came the collapse. As the building fell, a television journalist reporting in front of the building suddenly raised his voice. Onlookers could be heard gasping and shrieking. Several firefighters burst into tears. “They had been trying to put out the fire for hours when suddenly the building just collapsed,” said Ibrahim Najafi, a cosmetics seller, who could see the building crashing down from his shop window. He said there were 590 stores, offices and warehouses in the building. “My friends are in there. What a horrible day. ” People at the scene were visibly upset and the police were required to control angry crowds who yelled at security forces, who they said had arrived too late. “My friend is calling me from under the rubble, help him,” one man was heard shouting. In the chaotic aftermath of the collapse, ambulances had to fight their way through onlookers drawn to the scene, some taking selfies in front of the rubble. Army conscripts were deployed to clear paths for the emergency vehicles. The the Plasco Building in the center of Tehran, housed a shopping center and garment manufacturers, and it was as familiar to most residents as the Empire State Building is in New York. Built in 1962 by Habib Elghanian, an businessman, and named for his company, it was Tehran’s first modern and long stood as a symbol of the drive for modernization during the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. After the 1979 revolution, Mr. Elghanian was accused of spying for Israel and was executed. Firefighters said the blaze appeared to have started in the morning on the 11th floor before spreading to a floor below, trapping some of their colleagues inside. Firefighters on the ground stared upward as the fire advanced, apparently horrified by the predicament faced by those in the building. Two of them comforted a colleague, his face ashen, as he knelt, pointing at the building. The choreography of the structure’s collapse played out with cinematic inevitability. First, one side of the building crashed, just missing a firefighter standing on a ladder, The Associated Press reported. Then the rest came down. So dense were the plumes of smoke that Jalal Maleki, a spokesman for Tehran’s fire brigade, told The A. P. that the cloud was “visible from the southern parts of Tehran,” miles away. Masoumeh Abad, a member of the Tehran City Council, said tenants of the building had been warned “at least 20 times” that maintenance was needed, the semiofficial news agency Fars reported. But local news outlets suggested that the municipality had been lax in carrying out safety regulations. The Plasco Building had been fully stocked with garments for the Iranian New Year on March 21, for which Iranians traditionally shop for new clothes, and there were reports that the clothing had choked the hallways, impeding the work of firefighters. | 0fake |
A Florida of Sun, Sky, Sea and Mind - The New York Times | GULFThe Making of an American SeaBy Jack E. DavisIllustrated. 592 pages. Liveright. $29. 95. SUNSHINE STATEEssaysBy Sarah Gerard359 pages. Harper Perennial. $15. 99. Florida is a place and a state of mind. As the former, it’s lovely but afflicted, like Fay Wray in the hands of King Kong (developers). As the latter, it leaves much to be desired. I went to high school in southwest Florida. The malcontents pronounced it . Florida is a supposedly fun place that has a lot of sadness clinging to it, like barnacles to a boat’s hull. The novelist Cynthia Ozick is not someone I can imagine enjoying blender margaritas down at the beach bar, with sand in her toes. Yet Ozick was not far off, in her short story “Rosa,” when she wrote: “The whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. ” One of the themes of “Sunshine State,” Sarah Gerard’s striking book of essays, is how Florida can unmoor you and make you reach for shoddy, solutions to your psychic unease. Gerard grew up in Clearwater, a beach city near Tampa. She writes about how her otherwise incredulous parents (they met in a biker bar he was wearing a Jimmy Buffett ) fell into New Thought, a movement. Almost as bad, they signed on with Amway. That company, by the of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, can, many have argued, resemble a pyramid scheme. Gerard decides that dabbling with Amway was, in her perfect phrase, a form of “achievement tourism. ” She writes, “We left reality for a moment and believed the impossible was possible. ” Gerard’s essay collection is one of two new books that examine the Florida experiment. The other is Jack E. Davis’s “Gulf: The Making of an American Sea,” a sensitive and sturdy work of environmental history. Obviously, the Gulf of Mexico does not belong solely to Florida. It is the body of water in the world. It touches several other countries — indeed, it is named for one of them — as well as other American states. But Davis lives in Florida, and that state’s wet western edges run along a vast amount of the Gulf’ like salt on the rim of a cocktail. He can’t help but dwell often upon his home place. Thanks to books by John Jeremiah Sullivan (“Pulphead”) and Leslie Jamison (“The Empathy Exams”) and a handful of other young writers, the essay collection has new impetus and drama in American letters. The essay has gained ground on the short story. “Sunshine State” deserves to be talked about in this company, even if its essays are . When Gerard is on, she is really on. She’s the author of one previous book, the novel “Binary Star” (2015). The first essay is a knockout, a lurid red heart wrapped in barbed wire. It’s called “BFF,” and it’s about the author’s intense friendship with a girl who grew up to become a stripper and who spent time in shelters for battered women. This essay is about attraction and betrayal, and has the sinister propulsion of a Mary Gaitskill short story. “You shinier,” Gerard writes about her friend. “You prettier. You taller. You thinner, more popular. In middle school, you had friends and I had you. ” They’d had tattoos on their hips that read, when they stood side by side, “Forever ever. ” Their eventual split was devastating. The author had the means to get out of town the friend did not. Gerard catalogs the lies her friend told her, then she lists her own. She writes about her damage, splitting her face open while jumping from a train. This essay draws blood. Many of the essays in “Sunshine State” fall somewhere between memoir and journalism. Two of the longer pieces, about work to care for the homeless in Florida and about a troubled bird sanctuary, are serious and impeccably reported. But the author’s voice is lost in the telling. She’s best when her evocations of the frenzy that is Florida are personal. Historians, inspired by Fernand Braudel’s epic 1949 study of the Mediterranean Sea (1949) have written books about most of the world’s important bodies of water. Davis’s “Gulf” is the first comprehensive history of the Gulf of Mexico, a place that tends to be, he persuasively argues, “excluded from the central narrative of the American experience. ” Texas and Louisiana also have a great deal of real estate, and Davis’s book does not skimp on their histories. But since Gerard, Davis and I each grew up staring at the same water off Florida, I will stick with Florida in this review. Davis carefully relates its history, from the state’s native people and its earliest European explorers, through the early history of the United States and the arrival of tourists, developers and those who would fish and hunt Florida to depletion. The author has a mind, and frequently views the history of the Gulf through the prism of artists and writers including Winslow Homer, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway and John D. MacDonald. His prose is supple and clear. About the arrival of motorized shrimp boats on the Gulf, he writes: “They pushed farther out into the Gulf, the classical music of a sea passage drowned forever by the heavy metal of internal combustion and snorting exhaust. Fishers discovered that if they worked past sunset, their trawls were filling with a new kind of shrimp, browns, which rose near the surface at night. ” Davis’s book functions, as well, as a cri de coeur about the Gulf’s environmental ruin. His book runs up through the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. That event aside, he writes, “Every day in the Gulf is an environmental disaster, originating from sources near and far, that eclipses the spill. ” “Goodbye North, Hello South,” Bessie Smith sang in “Florida Bound Blues. ” “It’s so cold up here that the words freeze in your mouth. ” The words in Gerard’s and Davis’s books are and, in their way, optimistic. Both writers make the effort, essential to any form of love, to see their state plain. | 0fake |
WATCH: Trump’s Wiretap Accusation BLOWN WIDE OPEN – He May Be Guilty Of Obstruction Of Justice | Trump just can t stop embroiling himself in scandal, and his week-old accusation that the Obama administration wiretapped his tower is just getting bigger and bigger. Congress is demanding his evidence. Various House Republicans have said they have no evidence. FBI Director James Comey has publicly denied the claims. And now it seems that stupid attempt to make Obama look like a criminal may, in fact, make him guilty of obstruction of justice. That is an impeachable offense.Back in November, a right-leaning website, Heat Street, reported on the existence of a FISA warrant that would allow the FBI to monitor two Russian banks that were communicating with a server in Trump Tower. That s all reporter Louise Mensch didn t say that any wiretaps actually existed.In talking to MSNBC today, Mensch dropped a bombshell on Trump s claims. She flat said: For once, I think it s possible the president does not have a fake news problem. I think he may have a real news problem, being that, what if there really is a wiretap at Trump Tower? The problem the president has then is that I didn t report that, and neither did any other journalist, which means that if he tweeted evidence in an ongoing, top-secret case, then he obstructed justice, and that s an impeachable offense. She goes on to say that she believes the reason the White House has more or less gone silent is not the possibility that the wiretap claims are fake it s the possibility that they re real. Trump could have gotten himself in a world of shit with those tweets.She also says that the White House s desperation to find a member of the press who reported the wiretaps before Trump did is because they re terrified that he committed obstruction of justice. Nobody in the press ever said there was a wiretap. The press reported on his accusations and the FISA warrant. Big difference.Watch below:Featured image by Olivier Douliery via Getty Images | 1real |
Ted Cruz Says Endorsing Trump Is A ‘Grave Mistake’, Promises To Do It Anyway (VIDEO) | Republican presidential candidate and Texas Senator Ted Cruz believes with every ounce of his being that Donald Trump in the White House is a grave mistake but he confessed that he would endorse the disgraceful GOP candidate anyway.Cruz revealed this on Sunday during CNN s State of the Union. Host Jack Tapper asked Cruz about the recent attacks against Trump by other conservatives, especially presidential candidate Marco Rubio (R-FL). Not to be outdone, Cruz also had some choice words for Trump, blasting the front runner for standing behind Planned Parenthood, his plan to stay neutral between Israel and the Palestinians, and longtime support of expanding Obamacare into Bernie Sanders-style socialized medicine, putting the government in charge of your health care, putting government bureaucrats into a position to ration your care, especially that of seniors. Cruz, absolutely terrified of what President Trump could mean for America, warned: If Donald becomes president, who the heck knows what he would do? Even Donald doesn t know what he would do. I think the challenges facing the nation, they re too grave to roll the dice. Cruz made it perfectly clear during this interview that he felt a Trump presidency would be the worst case scenario for America, but Tapper pressed him to see if he would still back his rival if Trump took the nomination. Cruz s answer is puzzling after all the negative things he just said about Trump, Cruz still felt that: I will support the Republican nominee. Period. The end. This response by Cruz is absolutely infuriating and goes beyond stupidity. Cruz recognizes that Trump is dishonest, terribly offensive, unqualified and without question the wrong person to lead the country and will STILL advocate for him just because he s a Republican. Cruz should be wise enough to know that even though he doesn t want a Democrat president in the White House, America would be in far more capable hands and so much safer.You can watch the interview below:In another part of this interview, Tapper also asked the same question of candidate John Kasich (R-OH). Kasich echoed Cruz s opinion and said: At the end of the day, I m going to support that person who came through the arena and became the nominee. As insane as these responses from Cruz and Kasich are, they re not entirely to blame the Republican National Committee is basically forcing them to back Trump if he wins the nomination, as every GOP candidate took a solemn oath to support whichever candidate wins the Republican party s nomination.It s so unfortunate that the GOP is so bitter about left-leaning politics that they would rather support a candidate that is going to destroy America than explore alternative possibilities with a more capable Democratic candidate. They cannot see far enough past their narrow-minded views and hateful rhetoric to see that the future of America will be greatly jeopardized with Trump, and they d rather watch it crash and burn than trust someone outside the GOP. Featured image via Flickr | 1real |
Those Indecipherable Medical Bills? They’re One Reason Health Care Costs So Much - The New York Times | The catastrophe struck Wanda Wickizer on Christmas Day 2013. A generally healthy, energetic she suddenly found herself vomiting all day, racked with debilitating headaches. When her alarmed teenage son called an ambulance, the paramedics thought that she had food poisoning and didn’t take her to the emergency room. Later, when she became confused and groggy at 3 a. m. her boyfriend raced her to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in coastal Virginia, where a scan showed she was suffering from a subarachnoid hemorrhage. A vessel had burst, and blood was leaking into the narrow space between the skull and the brain. During a subarachnoid hemorrhage, if the pressure in the head isn’t relieved, blood accumulates in that narrow space and can push the brain down toward the neck. Vital nerves that control breathing and vision are compressed. Death is imminent. Wickizer was whisked by helicopter ambulance to the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, 160 miles away, for an emergency procedure to halt the bleeding. After spending days in a state, Wickizer slowly recovered and left the hospital three weeks after the hemorrhage, grateful to be alive. But soon after she returned home to her two teenage children, she found herself confronted with a different kind of catastrophe. Wickizer had had health insurance for most of her adult life: Her husband, who died in 2006, worked for the city of Norfolk, which insured their family while he was alive and for three years beyond. After his death, Wickizer worked in a series of jobs, but none provided health insurance. A minor condition — she was taking Lexapro, a common medicine for depression — meant that her only insurance option was to be funneled into the “ pool” (a type of costly insurance option that was essentially rendered obsolete by the Affordable Care Act and now figures in some of the G. O. P. plans to replace it). She would need to pay more than $800 per month for a policy with a $5, 000 deductible, and her medical procedures would then be reimbursed at 80 percent. She felt she couldn’t afford that. In 2011, she decided to temporarily stop working to tend to her children, which qualified them for Medicaid with trepidation, she left herself uninsured. And so in early 2014, without an insurer or employer or government agency to run interference between her and the hospital, she began receiving bills: $16, 000 from Sentara Norfolk (not including the scan or the E. R. doctor) $50, 000 for the air ambulance. By the end of January, there was also one for $24, 000 from the University of Virginia Physicians’ Group: charges for some of the doctors at the medical center. “I thought, O. K. that’s not so bad,” Wickizer recalls. A month later, a bill for $54, 000 arrived from the same physicians’ group, which included further charges and late fees. Then a separate bill came just for the hospital’s charges, containing a demand for $356, 884. 42 but little in the way of comprehensible explanation. In other countries, when patients recover from a terrifying brain bleed — or, for that matter, when they battle cancer, or heal from a serious accident, or face down any other health condition — they are allowed to spend their days focusing on getting better. Only in America do medical treatment and recovery coexist with a peculiar national dread: the struggle to figure out from the mounting pile of bills what portion of the fantastical charges you actually must pay. It is the sickness that eventually afflicts most every American. What’s less understood is the extent to which our current system itself is responsible for the high prices patients are charged. There are, of course, many factors that have led to the United States’ $3 trillion health care bill: runaway drug prices, excessive testing and charges for even the most basic medical interventions. But all of those individual price increases have been enabled — indeed, aided and abetted — by the complex system of billing and coding that underlies bills like those sent to Wickizer. That system, with its lines of alphanumeric codes and arcane medical abbreviations, has given birth to a gigantic new industry of consultants, armies of experts whom medical providers and insurance companies deploy against each other in an endless war over which medical procedures were undertaken and how much to pay for them. Caught in the crossfire are Americans like Wanda Wickizer, left with huge bills and indecipherable explanations in languages they cannot possibly understand. systems originated during an outbreak of the bubonic plague in London — epidemiologic constructs to classify and track causes of death and prevent the spread of infections among populations that spoke different languages. In the 1890s, the French physician and statistician Jacques Bertillon further systematized death reporting by introducing the Bertillon Classification of Causes of Death, the first system, which was adopted and modified in many countries. It became an official global effort, which was periodically revised by an international commission. During the first half of the 20th century, the number of entries naturally increased with improved understanding of science, and many countries began tabulating not just causes of deaths but also the incidence of diseases. In the 1940s, the World Health Organization took over stewardship of Bertillon’s system and renamed it to reflect a new, broader focus: the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, Injuries and Causes of Death (ICD). The codes became an invaluable tool, a common language for epidemiologists and statisticians to track the world’s afflictions. But over the last several decades in the United States, codes gradually took on a bedrock financial function as the basis for medical billing. In 1979, the government decided to use what by then were called codes — which specify the patient’s diagnosis — in adjudicating Medicare and Medicaid claims, with some modifications added specifically for that purpose the United States version was called . (The country has recently moved to a new iteration, .) For its beneficiaries, Medicare pays a fixed fee for inpatient hospitalization based primarily on the code, which is translated into a DRG ( group) code — which is the immediate basis for reimbursement. Other insurers followed in making codes the basis for billing. Coding systems begot new coding systems, because few hospitals wanted to be paid according to Medicare’s relatively low DRG standards. And because strategic coding meant increased payment, that begot coding specialists and coding courses and coding degrees. There are now different increasingly complex coding languages that define payment for different kinds of services: CPT codes, for office visits delivered by doctors, as well as HCPCS, and DRG, for charges that are incurred in the hospital. There are tens of thousands of codes in each lexicon that have become increasingly specific. For example, there are different codes for earwax removal depending on the method used (irrigation or instruments) different codes for delivering different vaccinations and a code for each injection delivered in the hospital. Different insurers also use different coding systems. While Medicare would have most likely considered Wickizer’s brain bleed as DRG 021, if billed to a commercial insurer, it could result in more than a dozen ICD codes and hundreds of HCPCS entries. Seemingly subtle choices about which code to use can have large financial consequences. If after reviewing a hospital chart of, say, a patient who has just had a problem with his heart, a hospital coder indicates the diagnosis code for “heart failure” ( Code 428) instead of the one for “acute systolic heart failure” (Code 428. 21) the difference could mean thousands of dollars. “In order to code for the more lucrative code, you have to know how it is defined and make sure the care described in the chart meets the criterion, the definition, for that higher number,” says one experienced coder in Florida, who helped with Wickizer’s case and declined to be identified because she works for another major hospital. In order to code for “acute systolic heart failure,” the patient’s chart ought to include supporting documentation, for example, that the heart was pumping out less than 25 percent of its blood with each beat and that he was given an echocardiogram and a diuretic to lower blood pressure. Submitting a bill using the higher code without meeting criteria could constitute fraud. Each billing decision, then, can be seen as a battle of coder versus coder. The coders who work for hospitals and doctors strive to bring in as much revenue as possible from each service, while coders employed by insurers try to deny claims as overreaching. Coders who audit Medicare charts look for abuse to reclaim money or fraud that needs to be punished with fines. Hospital coders teach doctors — and doctors pay to take courses — to learn how they can “upcode” their charts to a more lucrative level with minimal effort. In a doctor’s office, a Level 3 visit (paid, say, at $175) might be legally transformed into a Level 4 (say, $225) by performing one extra maneuver, like weighing the patient or listening to the lungs, whether the patient’s illness required that or not. While most hospitals and insurers set their own rates for each level of care, adding a step when interacting with a patient can also bring windfalls. E. R. doctors, for example, learned that insurers might accept a code for the examination and treatment of a patient with a finger fracture (usually 99282) if — in addition to needed interventions — a narcotic painkiller was also prescribed (a plausible bump up to 99283) indicating a more serious condition. Toward the end of the 20th century and into the next, as strategic coding increased, a new industry thrived. colleges offered degrees, and internships soon followed. Because alphanumeric coding languages are as distinct from one another as Chinese is from Russian, different degree tracks are necessary, along with distinct professional organizations that offer their own particular professional exams, certifications and licensing. Hospital systems and insurers — which have become huge, enterprises — now all employ roomfuls of graduates to perform these tasks. Membership in the American Academy of Professional Coders has risen to more than 170, 000 today from roughly 70, 000 in 2008. Individual doctors have complained bitterly about the increasing complexity of coding and the expensive necessity of hiring their own professional coders and billers — or paying a billing consultant. But they have received little support from the medical establishment, which has largely ignored the protests. And perhaps for good reason: The American Medical Association owns the copyright to CPT, the code used by doctors. It publishes coding books and dictionaries. It also creates new codes when doctors want to charge for a new procedure. It levies a licensing fee on billing companies for using CPT codes on bills. Royalties for CPT codes, along with revenues from other products, are the association’s biggest single source of income. Patients with good health insurance are often blissfully unaware and mostly unaffected by the jockeying that goes on over how to code their bills. But uninsured patients like Wickizer, or (increasingly) those with high deductibles, are stuck with no insurer to argue on their behalf. Her experience with the University of Virginia Medical Center is not unique: Studies have shown that hospitals charge patients who are uninsured or 2. 5 times more than they charge those covered by health insurance (who are billed negotiated rates) and three times more than the amount allowed by Medicare. That gap has grown considerably since the 1980s. When Wickizer arrived home from the hospital in January 2014, she had trouble concentrating and finding words she spoke deliberately, slowly. She remembers nothing before February, she says, but relied on help from her parents, who live nearby, and her boyfriend, who is retired from the Navy. She did her best to address the onslaught of bills that began appearing in her mailbox. First, she took stock of her finances. She paid the rent for the Norfolk apartment that she and her children lived in by renting out a townhouse that she and her deceased husband had bought in Virginia Beach after paying property tax, insurance and maintenance on the townhouse, she just broke even. She also received about $2, 000 a month in Social Security survivor benefits because of her husband’s death. In addition, she had about $100, 000 from her husband’s life insurance in a retirement account, which she was also hoping would help pay for her children’s college. With medical bills totaling nearly $500, 000 and no health insurance, the numbers didn’t add up. “My dad said: ‘They’ll never expect you to pay that,’’u2009” Wickizer told me. “But they did. ” As a sign of good faith, she quickly paid $1, 500 to the hospital and $1, 000 to the doctors and sought to make sense of the bills. Patients today are told to be good medical consumers, but they are asked to write checks for thousands of dollars — in this case hundreds of thousands — with little explanation of what they’re for. Wickizer did what she would have done with a statement: She contacted the hospital and requested an itemized bill. Her idea was that if she could understand how much she was being charged for each procedure, she could compare the fees with the reimbursements that Medicare or another insurer would pay for those services and begin some kind of negotiation. A month later, on March 19, the hospital finally sent a list of charges, using medical abbreviations and terminology but not revealing the alphanumeric codes. Despite being 60 pages long, the tally seemed incomplete, leaving out doctor’s charges and including other fees that seemed incidental, like charges for catheters, wires and oxygen. Room charges were vastly different on different days. Nearly simultaneously, she received a bill for the hospital portion of her care, broken down only into the broadest categories, including $111, 162 in room charges, $34, 755. 75 for pharmacy, $19, 653 for labs, $8, 640 for the operating room, $8, 325 for anesthesia, $1, 143 for the recovery room, $44, 524 for medical supplies and $40, 489 for radiology services, totaling $356, 884. 42. The bill informed her that the medical center was prepared to offer her its standard 20 percent discount for patients who are uninsured, leaving a “what you owe now” fee of $285, 507. 58. It noted that the hospital could offer some additional financial assistance, but only if her household of three had assets of less than $3, 100 (“such as bank or retirement accounts”) which disqualified Wickizer and very likely most Americans who have ever held a job. Next, she did her best to find out what Medicare or another insurer would have paid for her hospitalization, hoping to offer the hospital that amount from her retirement account. To understand the Medicare codes, she had to learn a bit of coding language. Would her hospitalization count as Medicare DRG 020 or 021? She estimated that in 2013, her subarachnoid hemorrhage (most likely coded, she determined, as “intracranial hemorrhage or cerebral infarction disorders, DRG 021, with procedures and major comorbidities or complications”) would have been reimbursed by Medicare for about $80, 000. Had a member of the armed services experienced the same condition, Tricare, the military insurer, might have paid closer to $70, 000. But to know how much a commercial insurer would have paid, she would have to figure out what HCPCS codes the hospital used to calculate her bill, and the hospital did not send those. Hospitals tend to treat their billing strategies — codes and their master price list, called a charge master — as trade secrets vital to their business. State laws and judges tend to respect that as proprietary information. When the billers called insisting on payment of the full $285, 507. 58, Wickizer explained, “I don’t have this kind of money. ” She offered the hospital and its doctors the $100, 000 in her retirement account. They declined and suggested that she sign up for a payment plan of $5, 000 a month to the hospital — and a second $5, 000 plan for the physicians’ group. It was an untenable amount. In October 2014, a sheriff affixed a summons to Wickizer’s front door, saying that the university was suing her for nonpayment. Eric Swensen, a spokesman for the University of Virginia, declined to answer questions about the case, citing patient privacy, as governed by HIPAA rules. But he noted that the university provides $270 million worth of free care to patients who meet its criterion for assistance and sets up payment plans for those who don’t. After receiving the summons, Wickizer resorted to a technique followed by many a frustrated customer: She went on Facebook, posted her story and solicited advice. (The Facebook group Paying Till It Hurts, where she posted her story, was created in 2014 in connection with a New York Times series that I wrote with the same name.) A handful of experts — patient advocates, billing professionals, lawyers and a coder — volunteered their help pro bono to try to get more information from the medical center and translate the coding that yielded the unaffordable figure. (One notable aspect of our commercialized health system is that for every person who is pushing to profit, there is another who is doing his or her best to protect patients.) In vetting Wickizer’s bill, the experts encountered roadblocks from the medical center at every turn in a contentious battle that lasted for over a year. Multiple legal requests to review Wickizer’s chart and complete bill — with its coding elucidated — were refused. Nora Johnson, a retired hospital auditor from West Virginia who volunteered to help Wickizer, noted that not revealing the billing codes constituted a violation of federal law. No insurer would have paid the bills without seeing them, allowing at least a rational attempt at negotiation. As Wickizer’s team wrote to the University of Virginia in one of their letters: “No Codes = No Pay. ” The University of Virginia Physicians’ Group, which independently charged Wickizer $54, 000, eventually turned over its billing codes. Wickizer’s experts were able to use the bill fragments they had received in discovery, supplemented by those codes, to get a better idea of what medical procedures Wickizer received during her hospitalization. From there, they tried to extrapolate how the hospital had, perhaps, coded her case. By examining the cost reports the University of Virginia hospital must file with Medicare, which indicate the amount it spends delivering certain types of care, Christine Kraft, another expert, estimated that even by its own calculations, the medical center spent less than $60, 000 treating Wickizer. The stealth battle between hospitals and insurers over bills for each hospitalization, office visit, test, piece of equipment and procedure is costly for us all. percent of United States hospital spending — the single most expensive sector in our health care system — is related to administrative costs, “including salaries for staff who handle coding and billing,” according to a study by the Commonwealth Fund. That compares with 16 percent in England and 12 percent in Canada. That discrepancy comes, in part, from the prolonged negotiations over payment and the huge number of coders, billers and collectors who have to be compensated: Their salaries and loans from those years of training in obscure languages are folded into those high charges and rising premiums. In addition, as is often the case in warfare, the big conventional army can be at a disadvantage: The insurance companies and government seem to be always one step behind the latest guerrilla tactics of providers’ coders. For years, creative coding has been winning over what the government calls “correct coding,” meaning coding that gives providers their due, but without exaggeration. Indeed, each attempt by the government to control questionable coding to enhance providers’ revenue has seemed to only fuel more attempts. In 1996, for example, Medicare’s National Correct Coding Initiative made it clear that certain codes couldn’t appear on the same bill because they were inherently part of the same procedure. As a rule, an anesthesiologist could not, for example, separately bill for anesthesia and checking your oxygen level during your surgery. But the government created Modifier 59 — a code that could be appended to other codes to allow doctors to take exceptions to that rule in unusual cases. Modifier 59 could be used to allow for two payments in certain situations, such as when an oncology nurse needed to insert two separate IVs for two different purposes — one to administer chemotherapy, say, and another hours later because the patient seemed dehydrated. Such cases were expected to be exceedingly rare. But just as entrepreneurial corporate tax lawyers search each new tax code for economic advantage, entrepreneurial coders and billers find loopholes to exploit at the edge of the law. An investigation by the Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General in 2005 found many instances of Modifier 59 abuse. Forty percent of code pairs billed with Modifier 59 in 2003 were not legitimate, resulting in $59 million in overpayment. Similarly, when Medicare announced that it would pay only a set fee for the first hour and a half of a chemotherapy infusion — and a bonus for time thereafter — a raft of infusions clocked in at 91 minutes. Like nearly every area of medicine, coding science has advanced — though not to the patient’s benefit. Commercial computer “encoder” programs maximize income from coding and make helpful suggestions (“That could be billed for Level 3,” or “Did you forget Code 54150,” indicating a circumcision on a bill for a male newborn). Today many medical centers have coders specializing in particular disciplines — joint replacement or ophthalmology or interventional radiology, for example. Advanced coding consultants advise lesser coders. The Business of Spine, a consulting firm with a partner office in Long Island, advises spine surgeons’ billers about what coding Medicare and commercial insurers will tolerate, what’s legal and not, to maximize revenue. The evolution of this mammoth growth enterprise means bigger bills for everyone — whether through increasing premiums and deductibles on insurance policies or, as in Wickizer’s situation, depleting the savings earmarked for children’s college. Like many medical centers, the University of Virginia Health System has turned at least some of its billing and debt collection over to professionals, contractors who have no pretense of the charitable mission espoused by the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 to educate leaders in public service. The collectors are often paid a percentage of the money they recover. They tend not to care whether a procedure was coded well or poorly. Their task is usually to go after the total sum the hospital says it is owed. In Wickizer’s case, the hospital brought in a law firm that specialized in debt collection, then called Daniel Hetzel and based in Winchester, Va. For a year and a half, Wickizer’s team of experts dissected the bills and negotiated with the hospital and its representatives at the law firm over its charges and coding strategies — just as insurers do behind the scenes on patients’ behalf. The experts laid out their logic for what might constitute reasonable payment in a detailed report based on what they could discover about Wickizer’s care: how it could be coded and what other hospitals and insurers would have paid. They helped her local lawyer, Kelly Roberts, write motions for discovery and legal letters and made offers of payment between $65, 000 and $80, 000, which they calculated should provide the hospital a profit on the services rendered to Wickizer. But the hospital did not accept any of the offers. In a letter, Peter Hetzel, an attorney at the firm, said his client would accept only just over $225, 000, saying the University of Virginia Medical Center was “the victim here. ” He noted, too, that the small rental property that Wickizer owned — appraised at $90, 200 in 2014 — was considered fair game for the hospital to seize as payment. Swensen, the spokesman for the university, said that it decides on a basis whether or not to report nonpayment to credit agencies or to pursue civil cases against patients in court. He added: “If we obtain a lien on real estate, we do not seek to sell the property if it is the patient’s primary residence. ” In February 2016, Wickizer received a letter from the state of Virginia saying that the medical center would be dunning money from any tax refund she might get. At one point, in exasperation, Wickizer wrote to her group of experts: “More than likely I am going to have to declare bankruptcy by the time this is all said and done, and I just would like to have everything settled. I want to pay them what I have and what is fair. ” By then, Wickizer was recovering physically and had married her boyfriend. But she was still struggling with stress from the uncertainty of the mammoth bills hanging over her. With court dates scheduled and postponed, motions filed and denied, she and her pro bono lawyer from Chicago, Tom Osran, along with her local lawyer were finally scheduled to face off in court with the University of Virginia Medical Center on April 29, 2016. The day before trial, after Osran was preparing to book his plane ticket to Virginia, and after I called the hospital inquiring about attending the court session, the case was dismissed. The terms of the settlement are sealed. Nearly a year later, Wickizer remains exhausted by the ordeal. Her speech, which was hesitant when I first spoke with her more than two years ago, sounds fluid now, and she is funny and thoughtful, though she says she still occasionally needs to search to find the right word, a form of a condition known as aphasia. Now working as a clerk in a small store, she would like to go back to her previous work as a bookkeeper, she told me when we spoke in March. But she has failed to secure a job she worries that her barely noticeable speech problems make her job interviews less than optimal. Or perhaps, she frets, the problem is her credit rating, which (unknown to her at the time) dropped more than 200 points after the doctors who cared for her reported her unpaid bills to credit agencies. That black mark will remain until 2021, even though her legal case is resolved and she now has military health insurance through her husband. And, she notes with a sigh of resignation, “I’m the kind of person who’s always tried to do everything right. ” | 0fake |
Hate Hoax: Black Teen Arrested for Posting Fake KKK Threats - Breitbart | Officials at a Maryland high school were alarmed when students began to receive threats on social media apparently from a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). But now, police are saying the threats came from another black student at the school. [Students were frightened after receiving a tweet from what appeared to be a KKK Twitter account from a user named “KoolkidsKlanKkk” that warned, “We’re planning to attack tomorrow. ” Arundel High School officials reported the tweets to the Anne Arundel County Police Department and also noted that the language of the tweet was reminiscent of language used on a racial petition signed by “Kool Kids Klan” that had previously been passed around the school. Police computer teams reportedly tracked the account to a student at the school. The girl was apprehended and slapped with a juvenile citation for disruption of school activities. She was then released into her parents’ custody, according to CBS Baltimore. After the initial fright, parents expressed gratitude to authorities for identifying the threat so quickly. Anne Arundel County Public Schools Superintendent George Arlotto released a statement after the arrest: I want to thank Police Chief Tim Altomare, State’s Attorney Wes Adams, County Executive Steve Schuh, and their staffs for their thorough and expeditious work to identify a suspect in the online post that threatened violence at Arundel High School this week. The anonymity of the internet provides a murky and complex disguise for many who want to threaten the safety and security of our communities. Our partners in the Police Department and county government peeled back that disguise quickly in this case, in the process reassuring parents, students, and staff that our schools are safe places in which to educate our children. After the incident was settled, school officials said they discussed a social media policy but decided not to make any changes or announce any new ideas just yet. “Our teenagers in our society … live on electronic devices,” School system spokesman Bob Mosier said. “That electronic device use has many, many, many positive ramifications to it. ” Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 0fake |
ALERT: #Cleveland, Ohio Lunatic Shooting Randomly…One Confirmed Dead [Video] | THIS MAN IS OUT THERE DRIVING AROUND FILMING MURDERS! We do not have all of the details as this is breaking. We just want everyone to be safe! We will not show the video of the horror of this man murdering an elerly man but have provided a video below to identify him. Please beware if you are in Cleveland! A lunatic is out there shooting people at random on Facebook live! Please stay indoors! He says he has killed 15 people so far but only one was confirmed. Please be safe!HORROR VIDEO: Steve Stephens live on Facebook saying he just killed 13 people in Cleveland and is about to kill his 14 victim. STAY SAFE! pic.twitter.com/wxHPgy8pVT Tennessee (@TEN_GOP) April 16, 2017 Steve Stevens is the man doing this: | 1real |
If You Thought The Trump Child Rape Case In NY Couldn’t Get Much Worse — You Were Wrong | By Joe Clark Crime , Election 2016 , Politicians Behaving Badly , Politics , Videos November 1, 2016 If You Thought The Trump Child Rape Case In NY Couldn’t Get Much Worse — You Were Wrong
On November 9, 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump could become the first president-elect to be named as a defendant in a child rape case.
A woman named Katie Johnson filed a 100 million dollar federal lawsuit against Trump in a New York federal court this summer.
Johnson filed a similar federal lawsuit in California on May 2, but her case was thrown out due to a clerical error.
The alleged victim later refiled her case in a New York federal court.
Johnson accuses Trump along with his long time friend Jeff Epstein, who’s also a billionaire financier and convicted sex offender, of raping a woman when she was only 13-years-old in 1994.
In a court affidavit, the alleged victim, who is identified in court documents as “Jane Doe,” said that Trump hit her and raped her while she was tied to a bed in Epstein’s posh upper east side New York apartment.
Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting sex from an underage girl. He served 13 months of an 18-year prison term before being released.
In the affidavit, Johnson also mentions that Trump threatened her life.
The alleged victim’s accounts are corroborated by two witnesses (identified in court records as “Joan Doe” and “Tiffany Doe”), who allegedly worked as “party planners” for Epstein.
“I personally witnessed four sexual encounters that the Plaintiff was forced to have with Mr. Trump during this period, including the fourth of these encounters where Mr. Trump forcibly raped her despite her pleas to stop,” Tiffany Doe alleges .
Tiffany Doe also claimed to have witnessed Trump force Jane Doe and an unidentified 12-year-old girl (identified in court records as Maria) to perform oral sex on him, then continue to physically abuse the girls after the act concluded.
In court documents, Tiffany Doe said that part of her job was to “personally witness and supervise encounters between the underage girls that Mr. Epstein hired and his guests.”
According to the former “party planner,” both Trump and Epstein threatened Jane Doe if she ever revealed what they had done. They used Maria’s disappearance as collateral that they would make good on their threat, implying that they had the girl murdered.
“I personally witnessed Defendant Trump telling the Plaintiff that she shouldn’t ever say anything if she didn’t want to disappear like the 12-year-old female Maria, and that he was capable of having her whole family killed,” Tiffany Doe alleged.
When Tiffany Doe stopped working for Epstein in 2002, she said the billionaire threatened to kill her and her family if she ever came forward about his activities.
“I fully understand that that the life of myself and my family is now in grave danger,” she said.
A federal judge has ordered a hearing concerning Johnson’s case to be held on December 16.
Featured image via Alex Wong/Getty Images Share this Article! | 1real |
Trump Just Claimed Andrew Jackson Had Psychic Powers And The Internet Was Not Kind To Him (TWEETS) | In an interview with Washington Examiner reporter Salena Zito, Donald Trump managed to utter one of the dumbest series of sentences in human history:I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart, and he was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, There s no reason for this. People don t realize, you know, the Civil War, you think about it, why?People don t ask that question. But why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?Now, if Trump was an intelligent human being, he might admit he is completely uneducated regarding Andrew Jackson, the Civil War, and pretty much everything else. He would apologize. He would say he was wrong. But Trump? Well, he s a f*cking moron.In what appears to be an effort to convince people he was somehow right when he claimed that Andrew Jackson used the psychic powers bestowed upon him by Satan himself in exchange for that whole Trail of Tears thing Steve Bannon keeps saying we should do again (at least, we can reasonably assume Bannon says that) to foresee a conflict that occurred 16 years after his death and he was f*cking pissed about it.President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the Civil War started, saw it coming and was angry. Would never have let it happen! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2017Andrew Jackson would have, had he actually possessed the magical ability to foresee the future, almost certainly used his powers for evil. Slaves represented the majority of Jackson s income. He owned 150 of them when he died. If Jackson had actually known what was coming, he would have done all he could to ensure a Southern victory you know, had he not died 16 years before the Civil War began. Trump is correct that our seventh President would have been very angry about what he would certainly call the War of Northern Aggression, however had he had a heartbeat.Trump s attempt to smooth things over by claiming that Jackson was a psychic didn t quite go over in the world of Twitterville, with Americans stopping by to collectively ask What the f*ck is wrong with you? @realDonaldTrump You wish that Andrew Jackson an owner of HUNDREDS of slaves should've just made a deal w the South to allow slavery?! pic.twitter.com/We1qOHLlm8 William LeGate (@williamlegate) May 2, 2017@realDonaldTrump Was he angry because he had 150+ slaves? Just wondering because pragmatically, that s a slave owners view. https://t.co/pUb8z0EwhH Kevin (@TheKevinDent) May 2, 2017@TheKevinDent @realDonaldTrump Do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound? Margaret Owens (@Margaret_Chloe_) May 2, 2017@realDonaldTrump He owned slaves, caused the Trail of Tears, and didn t care about human rights. You need to read a history book. Tony Posnanski (@tonyposnanski) May 2, 2017@realDonaldTrump What did Andrew Jackson see coming?? He had 150 slaves Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) May 2, 2017@realDonaldTrump You stupid motherfucker. BenDavid Grabinski (@bdgrabinski) May 2, 2017@realDonaldTrump Andrew Jackson committed genocide. He was a butcher & was a slave owner who believed in the institution. Al Letson (@Al_Letson) May 2, 2017@realDonaldTrump How was your emergency Civil War history briefing? Did they do it in crayon so would (kind of) understand some of it? Tommy Campbell (@MrTommyCampbell) May 2, 2017@realDonaldTrump Yes, from his deathbed, the slaveowner had a vision of a war over slavery and was super pissed about it. A++ analysis, as usual! Jason Bailey (@jasondashbailey) May 2, 2017@realDonaldTrump We have a new contender for the most insane thing you ve ever said, and there s a lot of competition. Nick Jack Pappas (@Pappiness) May 2, 2017@realDonaldTrump Ha! A slave breeding, slave trading, genocidal, ethnic cleansing, venal, vindictive heart of ashes? No civil war? Jackson? Emancipation? Ha! James Morrison (@JamesPMorrison) May 2, 2017Look, folks, we hate to break it to you but our President* is an idiot. We should probably demand that Republicans think about their country for a goddamn second and get him out of office while we still have a country to MAGA at all.Featured image via Getty Images (Alex Wong)/screengrab | 1real |
Federal judge in Hawaii expands block on Trump travel ban | (Reuters) - A federal judge in Hawaii extended his halt of U.S. President Donald Trump’s travel ban on citizens from six Muslim-majority countries. U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson, who stopped the ban from taking effect this week, on Friday converted his temporary restraining order to a preliminary injunction. Watson’s ruling, issued in Honolulu, applies only to the six Muslim-majority countries of Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Chad, although the ban, announced in September, also limits travel from North Korea and Venezuela. Trump has said the restrictions are needed to tighten security and prevent terrorist attacks, and his administration reserved its right to appeal the injunction. Opponents say the ban violates the U.S. Constitution because it discriminates against Muslims while overstepping the bounds of U.S. immigration law by discriminating by nationality. | 0fake |
POWERFUL: A RAPE SURVIVOR EXPLAINS Why Men Should Never Be Allowed In Women’s Bathrooms And Locker Rooms | This is a powerful story of a courageous young woman who is fighting for the rights of women and children everywhere in America to feel safe in public bathrooms and locker rooms. It is a MUST read and SHARE story.A few months ago, Kaeley Triller, from the Keep Locker Rooms Safe organization and a victim of rape registered for a workshop called The Story Workshop at the Allende Center in Seattle. It was primarily aimed at helping survivors of sexual abuse find the purpose and weight in their fractured personal narratives, the conference promised to be intense but deeply healing.I don t know exactly what I expected. I was naively hopeful that I would get a few good writing tips that would enable me to beautify my past and approach it like one of Aesop s fables third-person fiction with a perfect little moral at the end of the story.That s not what happened. One of the pre-assignments was to write 700 words about a painful childhood memory. I was surprised at the one I chose. It wasn t a heavy hitter, so to speak. I wrote about a Polaroid picture I kept rediscovering in a shoebox at my parents house, and my inability to figure out why looking at it made me want to rip it to shreds.I m about ten years old in the picture, with scraggly hair, pale skin, and a vacant expression. I m wearing my mom s oversized knit sweater and Oxford shoes my dad had bought me. In my hands is a piece of green felt I d cut into the shape of New York for a school report about a U.S. state. Coincidentally or not, New York is the place my abuser had recently moved. I think I wanted to be closer to him. Don t try to understand it. I still don t.My small group dissected the story with grace and insight that could only be offered by those who spoke the same horrific language of shame and rage and grief. I felt nothing as I spoke about it. It is what it is, I remember saying, committed to my ambivalence. My group leader brushed away a tear and said, Kaeley, this story breaks my heart. Why do you hate the little girl in that picture so much? I couldn t access her understanding or her empathy. I recognized the accuracy of her assessment, but I didn t know how to change it.Later that evening, one of the workshop presenters tasked us with a seemingly benign activity. We were instructed to play with crayons and miniature tubs of play dough on the tables in front of us. I hated these types of exercises. I thought they were such a waste of time. I reached for a purple crayon and reluctantly complied. I drew a picture of a flower and rolled a snake out of my play dough. And I burst into tears.The invitation to engage as a child had revealed my whole dilemma: I didn t hate the little girl in the photo. I hated her need. I hated her anonymity. I hated the visible proof that she loved her abuser. I hated that she didn t know any better, that it took her another ten years to figure out why she still slept with the light on and showered in her underwear and vigilantly lined the crack under the bathroom door with a beach towel and destroyed her teeth with gum she relentlessly chewed as a means of escaping the recollection of his breath on her face. I hated that he fooled her. He fooled everybody. He was really good. Wake up! I wanted to scream at her. Can t you see what s going on? Do something about it! It s the same desperate inclination I m fighting today. Everywhere I read in the news, there s talk of another school or gym or business that is boldly adopting progressive new locker room policies designed to create equal rights for people who identify as transgender. These policies allow transgender individuals to use the locker room consistent with the sex they identify as their own, regardless of anatomy.While some have proposed a third option for transgender people (single-occupancy restrooms and showers), this option has been largely struck down, and employees are prohibited from suggesting it, as it is considered discriminatory and emotionally damaging to a group of people who are working so hard to fit in. The solution? Anyone can use whatever restroom he or she wants without being questioned.I read these reports, and my heart starts to race. They can t be serious. Let me be clear: I am not saying that transgender people are predators. Not by a long shot. What I am saying is that there are countless deviant men in this world who will pretend to be transgender as a means of gaining access to the people they want to exploit, namely women and children. It already happens. Just Google Jason Pomares, Norwood Smith Burnes, or Taylor Buehler, for starters.While I feel a deep sense of empathy for what must be a very difficult situation for transgender people, at the beginning and end of the day, it is nothing short of negligent to instate policies that elevate the emotional comfort of a relative few over the physical safety of a large group of vulnerable people.Don t they know anything about predators? Don t they know the numbers? That out of every 100 rapes, only two rapists will spend so much as single day in jail while the other 98 walk free and hang out in our midst? Don t they know that predators are known to intentionally seek out places where many of their preferred targets gather in groups? That perpetrators are addicts so committed to their fantasies they ll stop at nothing to achieve them?Do they know that more than 99 percent of single-victim incidents are committed by males? That they are experts in rationalization who minimize their number of victims? Don t they know that insurance companies highlight locker rooms as a high-risk area for abuse that should be carefully monitored and protected?Don t they know that one out of every four little girls will be sexually abused during childhood, and that s without giving predators free access to them while they shower? Don t they know that, for women who have experienced sexual trauma, finding the courage to use a locker room at all is a freaking badge of honor? That many of these women view life through a kaleidoscope of shame and suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, dissociation, poor body image, eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, difficulty with intimacy, and worse?Why would people knowingly invite further exploitation by creating policies with no safeguards in place to protect them from injury? With zero screening options to ensure that biological males who enter locker rooms actually identify as female, how could a woman be sure the person staring at her wasn t exploiting her? Why is it okay to make her wonder? Wake up! I want to scream. Can t you see what s going on? Do something about it! Despite the many reports of sexual abuse and assault that exist in our world, there s an even larger number of victims who never tell about it. The reason? They re afraid no one will believe them. Even worse, they re terrified of a reality they already innately know to be true: even if people did know, they wouldn t do anything to help. They re not worth protecting. Even silence feels better than that.There s no way to make everyone happy in the situation of transgender locker room use. So the priority ought to be finding a way to keep everyone safe. I d much rather risk hurting a smaller number of people s feelings by asking transgender people to use a single-occupancy restroom that still offers safety than risk jeopardizing the safety of thousands of women and kids with a policy that gives would-be predators a free pass.Is it ironic to no one that being progressive actually sets women s lib back about a century? What of my right to do my darndest to insist that the first time my daughter sees the adult male form it will be because she s chosen it, not because it s forced upon her? What of our emotional and physical rights? Unless and until you ve lined a bathroom door with a towel for protection, you can t tell me the risk isn t there.For me, healing looks like staring at the little girl in a Polaroid photo and validating her need to be seen, heard, and protected instead of hating it. It looks like telling my story, even the parts I can never make pretty, in hopes it will help break the anonymity of survivors and create a sense of responsibility in others to act.I still battle my powerlessness to do anything that feels substantial to affect change, but the good Lord didn t bring me out of Egypt and set my feet upon a rock so I could stand idly by in the face of danger. So even if a little article or Facebook post doesn t ultimately change the world, it s better than silent resignation to negligence and harm. I feel a sense of urgency to invite people to consider the not-so-hidden dangers of these policies before more and more of them get cemented into place. Once that happens, the only way they ll change is when innocent people get hurt.Even if there aren t hundreds of abusers rushing into locker rooms by the dozens, the question I keep asking myself is, What if just one little girl gets hurt by this? Would that be enough to make people reconsider it? And what if that little girl was me? It s a question I really don t want to ask. But God s grace has enabled me to value the face in the photo enough to realize that I have to. And even if I don t like the answer, at least I wasn t silent.Author Kaeley Triller Via: The Federalist | 1real |
Creepy: Christie Is The Latest Republican To Fantasize About Spanking Hillary Clinton (VIDEO) | The Republican presidential candidates have been shamelessly revealing their deepest desires to spank a certain popular Democrat.While it s understandable that candidates will talk smack about their opponents and use more colorful language, the GOP candidates have completely crossed the line by repeatedly talking about how much they want to spank Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.Following a loss at the Iowa Caucus earlier this week, Chris Christie went to New Hampshire to raise eyebrows and earn a few uncomfortable laughs by making a misogynistic joke about how badly he would beat [Clinton s] rear end if they were to ever go head to head against each other in a debate. The GOPer said: You know the last person she wants to see on that stage in September? You re looking at him. You know why? She s been running away from federal prosecutors for the last six months. She sees a federal prosecutor on the stage, I ll beat her rear end on that stage, and after I do, she ll be relieved because she ll just be worried I was going to serve her with a subpoena. You can watch Christie make the crowd shift uncomfortably in their seats below via ABC:WATCH: @ChrisChristie promises to beat Clinton s rear end on debate stage https://t.co/TYKQ3wwG72https://t.co/j3XMYAFXJA ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) February 3, 2016Christie has gained a reputation for making off-the-wall comments about his rivals, but the right s disturbing fascination with spanking especially when Clinton is concerned is getting out of hand. Just last month, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz revealed his own weird, creepy fantasy about spanking the former Secretary of State.As fully grown adult human beings, we all have thoughts that come across our minds throughout the day, and the majority of us know which ones should be kept to ourselves to maintain our own dignity and keep the environment around us respectful and peaceful. Unfortunately, this election has brought about the worst in the Republican candidates and it seems that every racist, bigotry-filled and misogynistic thought needs to be expressed loud and clear. The GOP has no filter, and unfortunately what has been said cannot be unheard. Featured image via screenshot | 1real |
О принцессах — ни слова! | Спорт
В Москве 30 октября прошли чемпионат мира по акробатическому рок-н-роллу и международные соревнования Мировой Мастерс по буги-вуги. В соревнованиях приняла участие предполагаемая (?!) дочь Владимира Путина Екатерина Тихонова.
Те российские СМИ, которые не смогли пройти мимо этого знаменательного события, стыдливо рассказывали о нём, прикладывая без комментариев фото молодой женщины, которую заочно, давайте говорить честно, знает вся страна. Лишь немногие с дрожью в голосе и коленках позволили себе опубликовать переводы статей западных изданий, захлебывающихся от восторга и желчи.
Ещё бы, дочь человека, который одним нажатием кнопки может ввергнуть всю Землю в пекло термоядерного костра, который скупает страны и политиков оптом, по дешёвке, который как фокусник в цирке, манипулирует чувствами 140 миллионов человек, как простая смертная приняла участие в соревнованиях на правах рядовой участницы. Или не совсем рядовой? Или не совсем участницы?
Помнится, в доброй детской сказке про Аладдина грозный глашатай кричал: «Сейчас царевна Будур, дочь султана, пойдёт в баню, и никто не должен видеть её!». Все скрывались в своих домах, а кто не успевал, падали ниц и прятали лица в песок. Увидевший лик несравненной Будур, должен был или погибнуть на месте, или быть достаточно богатым и могущественным, чтобы заплатить за это право.
Так, вместе с правом быть мужем царевны, и без того не бедный прекрасный принц получил путёвку в список самых богатых людей мира. На учёных мужей ВУЗа, которому посчастливилось стать альма-матер наследницы, пролился золотой дождь. Их работа неожиданно и сразу заинтересовала всех сильных миров сего. Разве грешно быть безмерно благодарными за это прекрасной царевне? Гляди, она поможет войти в Лигу плюща, даром, что эта Лига в США расположена.
А что же спортивный рок-н-ролл? Ему в нашей стране несказанно повезло. Молодая, энергичная, талантливая в разных областях Екатерина Тихонова, возглавившая национальную спортивную федерацию (несмотря на скромность лет), является одним из вице-президентов международной конфедерации. Более того, она активно занимается продвижением любимого спорта к олимпийским вершинам. А если ей активно помогают те же дюжие джины, которые вкладываются в создание долины МГУ в нашей Златоглавой, то включение в число олимпийских видов спорта у рок-н-ролла, отнюдь, не за горами.
Как неожиданно популярной по всей стране стала художественная гимнастика (стыдливо промолчим, почему), так столь же радужные перспективы открываются и перед рок-н-роллом. И пусть только кто-то скажет, что это — чуждые нашей стране музыка и танец. Стерпится-слюбится! Сослушается-привынется! К большому-то теннису в своё время привыкли.
И пусть тысячи маленьких девочек становятся сильными и гибкими, как…, ну, хотя бы, как Алина Ка…, как Екатерина Тихонова, пусть стремятся к высокой цели и заветным рукомашественным и ногодрыгательным результатам. Такими, как она, они стать всё равно не смогут: имя в паспорте не то. А и надо ли? Вот воспользоваться тем, что на этот спорт деньги выделяют – почему бы нет? Пока выделяют. Пока папа может. А папа — может. | 1real |
Xi, top China party officials, make symbolic visit to Shanghai | SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Days after taking over as China s leader in 2012, Xi Jinping led other top Communist Party officials to Beijing s National Museum to visit an exhibit on party history entitled The Road to Rejuvenation . The museum trip telegraphed what would become one of Xi s overarching policy priorities in the next five years. On Tuesday, less than a week after being anointed for a second term as party chief at a twice-a-decade party congress, Xi and the other men at the pinnacle of the party made a rare joint visit to China s financial capital, Shanghai, where they paid homage to the party s birthplace and founding fathers. Official photos showed the men at the site of the first party congress in 1921, gazing solemnly at a relief sculpture of the party s original leaders and standing around a wooden meeting table. This is an important symbolic gesture, said Willy Wo-Lap Lam, an adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It s a reinstatement of the commitment of the party in this so-called new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics that they would stick to original values of the founding fathers. That means definitely no move away from orthodox Marxism, orthodox Maoism. No taking up of Western values. The visit brought parts of the city of 25 million people to a standstill as police blocked roads and highways around the Xintiandi area, home to the modest grey brick building that hosted the first congress. State television showed Xi leading the six other Politburo Standing Committee members, fists raised, in a symbolic retaking of the Communist Party oath. The men then travelled to Jiaxing, in eastern Zhejiang province, visiting a replica of the Red Boat on the South Lake - another historic site of the Communist Party s founding. The Communist Party was born here, state television showed Xi saying. These are the roots of the party. At the congress that ended last week - the party s 19th - Xi consolidated his grip as China s strongest leader in decades, promoting allies and getting his name and signature political platform enshrined in the party charter. Xi is not the first general secretary of the party to try to send a message with a well-publicised trip early in his tenure. Hu Jintao, his predecessor, sought to cultivate a man of the people image starting with a visit one month after becoming party chief in 2002 to the town of Xibaipo, a one-time revolutionary base. In December 2012, a month after Xi became party chief, he made a low-key but widely watched trip to Shenzhen, the southern city was where late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping jumpstarted economic reforms in the early 1990s. The visit to Shanghai on Tuesday may also send another message, Lam said. The city had been synonymous with the political patronage network of 91-year-old former president Jiang Zemin, who attended the congress. At the weekend, Xi promoted ally Li Qiang to the role of Shanghai party chief, the city s top job. Li is not from the city, nor has he built his career there. In January another Xi man from elsewhere, Ying Yong, was appointed mayor. Traditionally, the city s party chief or mayor, or both, have hailed from Shanghai or worked up the ranks there. Having two outsiders is a break with the past. It shows indirectly that the Shanghai faction under Jiang Zemin has ceased to be a force to be reckoned with, Lam said. Now, it s Xi Jinping bringing his own people. | 0fake |
HILLARY IS FURIOUS OVER EMAIL HACKS…Openly Threatens War With Russia…Media Is SILENT [VIDEO] | But the media s concerned Trump is the threat to our national security with his reckless words. LOL!Watch #UnFitHillary threaten Russia here: | 1real |
Austrian coalition talks set to begin, far right likely partner | VIENNA (Reuters) - Austria s president gave the green light to conservative leader Sebastian Kurz on Friday to form a government, but Kurz gave little away about his coalition plans, leaving a tie-up with the far right the most likely outcome. Kurz s People s Party (OVP) secured 31.5 percent of the vote in Sunday s parliamentary election, winning by a clear margin but falling well short of the majority needed to control parliament in the affluent Alpine republic. I would like to build a government that has the courage and determination to bring real change to Austria, Kurz, 31, told reporters after meeting President Alexander Van der Bellen, who will oversee the process. Kurz campaigned on a platform that combined a hard line on immigration similar to that of the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) with traditional conservative principles like slimming down the state and cutting taxes. He said he would start by holding talks with all parties in parliament although only two of them, the Social Democrats (SPO) and FPO, have enough seats to give him a majority if they go into coalition with the OVP. I will now get straight to work and hold the first discussions, definitely in the coming days, and possibly even today, Kurz said, adding that after those initial discussions he might launch formal coalition talks with one party. Kurz went to Brussels on Thursday to assure European Union leaders of his support, allaying concerns that Austria country would become a dissonant voice in the EU with the anti-immigrant far right likely to enter its government. It became clear after neighboring Germany s election last month that it was headed towards a three-way Jamaica coalition - so called because the parties colors match that country s flag. Austria s political future could be colorful too. Using the same principle and some creative licence, Austria s next government could be dubbed Botswana or Islamic State . Two other options, Haiti and Albania , appear to be off the table, at least for the time being. In Austria as in Germany, each party is traditionally associated with a color - black for Kurz s OVP, red for the centre-left SPO and blue for the far-right FPO. Botswana (black and blue) remains the most likely option, given that Kurz and the head of the Social Democrats, outgoing Chancellor Christian Kern, have often clashed and Kurz called an end to their coalition, forcing Sunday s snap election. Kurz has said he would prefer to form a stable coalition but not ruled out a minority, monochrome government (Islamic State). He has accused his rivals of holding talks on an SPO-FPO, red-blue coalition (Haiti). But FPO leader Heinz-Christian Strache poured cold water on the idea of a coalition of losers in an interview with tabloid Oesterreich. Asked if Kern had been voted out as chancellor, Strache said: In my opinion, yes. He added that people had voted for change and Kurz had a mandate to try and form a government. If he were to invite us (to hold coalition talks), we would accept the invitation, he said, adding that in such a case the FPO would not hold parallel talks with the SPO. Strache hosted Kurz at his home for dinner this week, their first one-on-one meeting, he said. The chances of a red-blue alliance are a thousandth of a thousandth , Kern told reporters at an EU summit in Brussels, but he added that his party was still open to talks. A black-red coalition (Albania) has not been completely ruled out. Kurz has hinted at being prepared to consider it if Kern is replaced as leader by Defense Minister Hans Peter Doskozil. Strache also focused his criticism on Kern rather than the SPO as a whole. | 0fake |
Factbox: Trump fills top jobs for his administration | (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has chosen former Texas Governor Rick Perry to head the U.S. Department of Energy, a transition official said, putting him in charge of the agency he proposed eliminating during his bid for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. The following is a list of Republican Trump’s selections for top jobs in his administration. All the posts but that of national security adviser, the White House chief of staff, White House director of the National Economic Council and White House strategist require Senate confirmation. Sessions, 69, was the first U.S. senator to endorse Trump’s presidential bid and has been a close ally since. Son of a country store owner, the Alabama senator and former federal prosecutor has long taken a tough stance on illegal immigration, opposing any path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. U.S. Representative Pompeo, 52, is a third-term congressman from Kansas who serves on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, which oversees the CIA, National Security Agency and cyber security. A retired Army officer and Harvard Law School graduate, Pompeo supports the U.S. government’s sweeping collection of Americans’ communications data and wants to scrap the nuclear deal with Iran. Ross, 78, heads the private equity firm W.L. Ross & Co. His net worth was pegged by Forbes at about $2.9 billion. A staunch supporter of Trump and an economic adviser, Ross helped shape the Trump campaign’s views on trade policy. He blames the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, which went into force in 1994, and the 2001 entry of China into the World Trade Organization for causing massive U.S. factory job losses. Mattis is a retired Marine general known for his tough talk, distrust of Iran and battlefield experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. A former leader of Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East and South Asia, Mattis, 66, is known by many U.S. forces by his nickname “Mad Dog.” He was once rebuked for saying in 2005: “It’s fun to shoot some people.” DeVos, 58, is a billionaire Republican donor, a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party and an advocate for the privatization of education. As chair of the American Federation for Children, she has pushed at the state level for vouchers that families can use to send their children to private schools and for the expansion of charter schools. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY ADMINISTRATOR: SCOTT PRUITT An ardent opponent of President Barack Obama’s measures to stem climate change, Oklahoma Attorney General Pruitt, 48, has enraged environmental activists. But he fits with the president-elect’s promise to cut the agency back and eliminate regulation that he says is stifling oil and gas drilling. Pruitt became the top state prosecutor for Oklahoma, which has extensive oil reserves, in 2011, and has challenged the EPA multiple times since. U.S. Representative Price, 62, is an orthopedic surgeon who heads the House Budget Committee. A representative from Georgia since 2005, Price has criticized Obamacare and has championed a plan of tax credits, expanded health savings accounts and lawsuit reforms to replace it. He is opposed to abortion. The final leadership role of Kelly’s 45-year career was head of the U.S. Southern Command, responsible for U.S. military activities and relationships in Latin America and the Caribbean. The 66-year-old retired Marine general differed with Democratic President Barack Obama on key issues and has warned of vulnerabilities along the United States’ southern border with Mexico. Carson, 65, is a retired neurosurgeon who dropped out of the Republican presidential nominating race in March and threw his support to Trump. A popular writer and speaker in conservative circles, Carson previously indicated reluctance to take a position in the incoming administration because of his lack of experience in the federal government. Carson is the first African-American picked for a Cabinet spot by Trump. McMorris Rodgers, a 47-year-old U.S. congresswoman from Washington state, is the fourth most senior member of the House of Representatives leadership. A member of the House Energy Committee, she has supported efforts to expand the U.S. energy industry such as the recent repeal of the decades-old ban on oil exports and efforts to reject the Environmental Protection Agency’s Waters of the United States Act. She has also expressed skepticism about climate change. Before joining Congress in 2004, McMorris Rodgers served for a decades in the Washington state legislature, eventually becoming the first woman there to serve as minority leader. Cohn, 56, president and chief operating officer of investment bank Goldman Sachs, had widely been considered heir apparent to Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of the Wall Street firm. Trump hammered Goldman and Blankfein during the presidential campaign, releasing a television ad that called Blankfein part of a “global power structure” that had robbed America’s working class. Puzder, chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants Inc [APOLOT.UL], which runs the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s fast-food chains [APOLOT.UL], has been a vociferous critic of government regulation of the workplace and the National Labor Relations Board. Puzder, 66, has argued that higher minimum wages would hurt workers by forcing restaurants to close, and praises the benefits of automation, so his appointment is likely to antagonize organized labor. Retired Lieutenant General Flynn, 57, was an early Trump supporter and serves as vice chairman on his transition team. He began his Army career in 1981 and was deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Flynn became head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012 under President Barack Obama but retired a year earlier than expected, according to media reports, and became a fierce critic of Obama’s foreign policy. Tillerson, 64, has spent his entire career at Exxon Mobil Corp, where he rose to serve as its chairman and CEO in 2006. A civil engineer by training, the Texan joined the world’s largest energy company in 1975 and led several of its operations in the United States as well as in Yemen, Thailand and Russia. As Exxon’s chief executive, he maintained close ties with Moscow and opposed U.S. sanctions against Russia for its incursion into Crimea. Perry, 66, adds to the list of oil drilling advocates skeptical about climate change who have been picked for senior positions in Trump’s Cabinet. The selections have worried environmentalists but cheered an industry eager for expansion. Perry, who also briefly ran in the 2016 presidential race, would have to be confirmed by the Senate to head the Energy Department, which is responsible for U.S. energy policy and oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons program. McMahon, 68, is a co-founder and former chief executive of the professional wrestling franchise WWE, which is based in Stamford, Connecticut. She ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut in 2010 and 2012, and was an early supporter of Trump’s presidential campaign. Chao, 63, was labor secretary under President George W. Bush for eight years and the first Asian-American woman to hold a Cabinet position. She is a director at Ingersoll Rand, News Corp and Vulcan Materials Company. She is married to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky. Mnuchin, 53, is a successful private equity investor, hedge fund manager and Hollywood financier who spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs before leaving in 2002. He assembled an investor group to buy a failed California mortgage lender in 2009, rebranded it as OneWest Bank and built it into Southern California’s largest bank. Housing advocacy groups criticized the bank for its foreclosure practices, accusing it of being too quick to foreclose on struggling homeowners. Haley, 44, has been the Republican governor of South Carolina since 2011 and has little experience in foreign policy or the federal government. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she led a successful push last year to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol after the killing of nine black churchgoers in Charleston by a white gunman. Recently re-elected to serve as Republican National Committee chairman, Priebus will give up his party post to join Trump in the White House, where the low-key Washington operative could help forge ties with Congress to advance Trump’s agenda. The 44-year-old was a steadfast supporter of Trump during the presidential campaign even as the party fractured amid the choice. CHIEF WHITE HOUSE STRATEGIST, SENIOR COUNSELOR: STEVE BANNON The former head of the conservative website Breitbart News came aboard as Trump’s campaign chairman in August. A rabble-rousing conservative media figure, he helped shift Breitbart’s into a forum for the alt-right, a loose confederation of those who reject mainstream politics and includes neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites. His hiring signals Trump’s dedication to operating outside the norms of Washington. As White House chief of staff, Bannon, 63, will serve as Trump’s gatekeeper and agenda-setter. | 0fake |
Clinton and Associates’ Education Ponzi Scheme | Dady Chery News Junkie Post Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. F. Scott FitzgeraldEducation is the latest public commons that is being turned into a commodity by a group of the world s arrivistes, including Douglas Becker, Donald Trump, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Money brings, in those who obsessively accumulate it, a transformation of thought and deed that is most discernible in the nouveaux riches.To give meaning to their purchasing power, they commodify all they can. As part of this process, and almost as a celestial joke, they also become persuaded that anything can be bought. Gradually, they come to believe that money will guarantee access to anything, the acquiescence or corruption of anyone, the evasion of any law or ailment, and the repair of any deficiency including, in many cases, a spotty education.Consider 49-year old Douglas Becker, the founder, Chairman, and CEO of a network of 88 for-profit institutions in 28 countries that offer undergraduate, master s and doctoral degrees and enroll more than a million students. Becker s for-profit institutions, which are mainly in South America and Europe, although also in the United States and quickly branching out through Asia and the Middle East, cynically exploit the deeply held belief by many people that an education is a passport out of poverty, to in-debt, ambitious working-class people.Laureate has especially targeted as a market Latin America, where in many countries only about 20 percent of college-age people manage to gain admission to the public universities. Such institutions are free, but they require passing grades on difficult entrance exams and are the most prestigious schools in these countries.Becker did not reach his status by attending college. Possibly he regards as a fool anyone who does, although he claims that his mission is to make a college education more accessible. According to Bloomberg Markets, Becker worked at a Computer Land store while he was in high school, and he got his first taste of money by selling to Blue Cross Blue Shield the idea of a swipe card with patient information. He then built on this wealth by buying a stake in a chain of tutoring services called Sylvan Learning Systems, taking Sylvan public in 1993, and targeting universities on the verge of bankruptcy for purchase by Sylvan.The first such acquisition was Universidad Europea de Madrid (UEM) in 1999. UEM now boasts of 15,600 students and claims that 90 percent attain employment within 12 months of completing their studies, but it mentions nothing whatever about its faculty, which is known to have dropped by more than 40 percent within its first five years under Laureate.As UEM has cut its teaching staff, it has increased its cachet by inviting famous people to its campus to accept honorary degrees and large speaking fees. Like the Wizard of Oz, Becker confers degrees on anyone he wishes, including honorary doctorates from UEM on South Africa s Nelson Mandela and Turkey s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.Istanbul Bilgi University, where the faculty was cut and prevented from unionizing even as the enrollment grew by more than 40 percent and the tuition climbed to $14,000 per year, was among about 20 institutions that Sylvan controlled by 2007. That year, Becker renamed his operation Laureate Education and took it private in a $3.4 billion deal that might have been conceived to prevent the scrutiny of shareholders.The main backers included Henry Kravis, of the New York based equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR); Steven Cohen of Point 72 Asset Management (formerly SAC Capital Management); and Citigroup Private Equity. Within three years of Kravis investment of $487 million, his portion of the business grew to $711 million.Financial analyst and whistleblower Charles Ortel points out that the buyout involved unnecessary risks, and one of the main players, Steven Cohen, had to make a $1.2 billion settlement with the US Justice Department in 2014 for allegations of insider trading regarding another business deal. Ortel explains: When the management of a publicly traded company wants to take the company private, there is an inherent conflict of interest because the management knows more than the public as it raises the money to buy up the public shares. In this case, the process of negotiating among multiple parties with aligned and with competing financial interests took about 15 months from start to finish: a quite long time. The buyout transaction was completed on August 17, 2007, just as strains on the global economy and financial system began to accentuate. Given the financial performance of Laureate since August 2007 and the risks that are materializing now, the price paid to other public shareholders of Laureate by Douglas Becker and members of the buying group may seem attractive, in hindsight. Regulators might choose to re-examine more carefully the process by which Mr. Becker secured financing to buy out public shareholders, concentrating on the variances, if any, between representations made to investors and lenders to the buying group, with disclosures made to the selling shareholder. Details of another profitable move by Becker became known just before Hillary Clinton s announcement of her latest presidential bid, when she and Bill Clinton made public their federal income tax information. In their tax returns, $16.5 million of payments from Laureate to Bill Clinton were disclosed that purportedly were made for his role as the Honorary Chancellor of Laureate International University. Recall that Hillary Clinton had become the US Secretary of State in 2009 and that Bill Clinton was, at all times in position to exercise significant influence over the affairs of the Clinton Foundation and all its affiliates, including Clinton Global Initiative, Inc. (New CGI), which had been involved with Laureate in a venture known as Clinton Global Initiative-University or CGI-U Charles Ortel said.Indeed, during the same period, the State Department initially granted $55 million to International Youth Foundation, a charity in which Becker has been actively involved for years and that is based in Maryland. The US government later organized for Laureate to receive $100 million from the World Bank s International Finance Corporation (IFC); in this transaction, a fund managed by the IFC provided $50 million and the sovereign wealth fund of Korea provided $50 million.Ortel has verified the Clintons taxes and says they are a huge mess. He notes that: Bill and Hillary Clinton each earned substantial sums for speeches rendered in numerous states other than New York and Washington, DC, and many countries other than the US, yet they have not supplied information concerning such state and foreign tax filings. Furthermore the Clintons did not disclose their transactions with Laureate as Related-Party Transactions in their IRS Form 990s for the Clinton Foundation and New CGI, not only in their original filings for 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013, but also in their corrected filings. It is not even clear how CGI-U is controlled, whether it is registered in all legal jurisdictions where it operates, or what its financial results may have been. In an interview with Richard Johnson of the New York Post, Trump advisor Roger Stone wondered if the Clintons got rich from State Department funds. Further, he accused the Clintons of helping Laureate to eliminate its competition. Stone argued that the payments to Bill Clinton have protected Laureate from government attacks on their accreditation and fitness for student loans even as much smaller operations like Corinthian and Trump University have been severely hit.Corinthian went bankrupt in 2015 after a federal district court in Illinois found it to be liable for $530 million in predatory loans for promising its students jobs that did not materialize and getting them heavily indebted. Trump University was recently hit by fraud lawsuits from New York and California for calling itself a university, although it had been doing so since its inception in 2005. By contrast, no lawsuit so far has stuck to Laureate.Possibly the main mistake of Trump U. and Corinthian has been to grow on US citizens, unlike Laureate, which has taken care to parasitize foreign nationals first, particularly working-class people from emerging powers.Bill Clinton s greatest help to Laureate has likely come as introductions to foreign politicians, most of them probably corrupt, who could influence their governments student loan programs. The highest number of campuses in any single country so far is in Brazil, where Laureate owns 12 institutions. There Dilma Rousseff s seven-fold increase of government-backed student loans has been a great boon. The Centro Universario IBMR of Rio de Janeiro is a typical campus. Enrollment there has more than tripled because of a Ponzi scheme in which, to pay their loans, students become employed as telemarketers who recruit new students and are paid by the head.The school remains open although Rio s legislature has criticized it for firing faculty while it achieved its extraordinary expansion. In Chile, where President Sebastian Pinera raised taxes around 2012 to fund student loans, Laureate owns five institutions. At Santiago s Universidad de Las Am ricas (UDLA), accreditation was withdrawn in 2013 because graduation rates had dived, and 10,000 new students had been added as the number of teachers had dropped. UDLA accepts students with scores as low as 20 percent on its entrance exam and has been described as the place where you go when no one else will accept you. The list of campuses goes on. You may inspect them here.Laureate decided to go public again in fall 2015. It filed to convert to a Delaware-based public benefit corporation for an initial public offering (IPO) in which it disclosed $4.7 billion in debt, probably hoping that the IPO would erase some of this crushing debt burden. With friends like the Clintons, how can it lose? If Laureate continues to grow, it will expand to the US market, and there will be no way to stop it when it does.Imagine, if you will, a Laureate bid for Brandeis University (which was in the red after Bernie Madoff squandered its endowment) or Wayne State University (where a city such as Detroit has gone bankrupt); imagine further the devaluation of every degree that these universities have granted. Now think of your school, suddenly insolvent, or your children s schools becoming parodies of educational institutions.Clinton has packed Laureate s board with people from his 1993-2001 administration, including his former Secretary of Education, Richard W. Riley; his former Secretary of Housing and development, Henry Cisneros; and his former head of the US Information Agency, Joseph Duffey.Quite apart from the fact that the Clintons and their associates appear to have set up a for-profit education scam to dwarf all others, they also seem to have established an entity that can grow their wealth, finance their political campaigns on the sly, grease the wheels wherever needed, and indefinitely keep them in power regardless of voter choice.All of it has been done so far on the backs of the world s aspiring poor, with the collusion of their governments and pretext of improving their lot. This is the way of the Clintons and their rich friends.*** Dady Chery is the author of We Have Dared to Be Free. Photographs one by Joe Brusky; two by Joi Ito; three and four from the archives of Universidad Europea de Madrid; six from Quinn Dombrowski; seven from the archives of the World Bank; and nine from Mike Licht.READ MORE ON THE PONZI SCHEME: 21st Century Wire Ponzi FilesSupport our work and Become a Member @ 21WIRE.TV | 1real |
THE HUNT IS ON: How Trump Team Is Smoking Out Leakers To Take Down And Punish | President Trump has made it clear that he will not stop the search for those responsible for leaks at the White House.The hunt that began with the resignation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn does not stop, now that he is gone. Trump has also vowed that the perpetrator will be punished to the fullest extent of the law, even possibly serving hard time.Via Fox News: Leaks are prevalent in Washington, [but] I think what makes this different is the leak environment has just kicked into hyper drive, Thomas Dupree, former deputy assistant attorney general, told Fox News. In the first few weeks of this administration, we have seen a multitude of leaks on a variety of subjects from national security to immigration, to the conversation that Flynn had with the Russians it s just every direction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCI7OMB6qQs(Source: Fox News) | 1real |
The Onion’s Special Coverage Of Election Day 2016 - The Onion - America's Finest News Source | The Onion’s Special Coverage Of Election Day 2016 Pinned Articles 5:51 PM Report: Turnout Fairly Unattractive Throughout Suburban Philadelphia
Our correspondents are reporting a steady turnout of homely and hideous residents throughout the suburban Philadelphia area that shows no signs of slowing down. In Montgomery County, polling places are said to be bustling with scores of schlubby, overweight voters, while Bucks and Delaware counties were reportedly busy all morning with an influx of unsightly, poorly groomed constituents, with many of the local oinkers having to wait upwards of an hour in line to cast their ballot. Overall, turnout in the area appears to be way uglier than analysts initially predicted.
Compiled from reports out of The Onion’s Philadelphia bureau as part of our Precinct Watch initiative, dedicated to covering all voting rights obstacles encountered by the feckless and feeble-minded American electorate. The Onion 9:51 PM The Onion Calls Upon The Cowardly State Of Iowa To Stop Its Dithering And Declare Itself For One Candidate Or The Other
With 42 percent of precincts reporting and the margin between the candidates holding at less than a percentage point, The Onion calls upon the spineless state of Iowa to quit its tarrying, pull itself together, and make a goddamn choice already. According to The Onion ’s electoral models, the Midwestern state needs to get its shit in order and figure out which way it’s going to go, because this isn’t even that complicated, for Christ’s sake. The Onion projects that the timid little Hawkeye State has 20 minutes or so to decide which candidate will get its six puny electoral votes, or we’ll just go ahead and call it for Jill Stein, and you’ll just have to deal with it. The Onion 9:46 PM Nation’s Optimists Need To Shut The Fuck Up Right Now
WASHINGTON—Saying their rosy attitude about the state of the election was not helping anything given what is currently transpiring, sources confirmed Tuesday night that the nation’s optimists need to seriously shut the fuck up as soon as humanly fucking possible. “Sure, things may look bad right now, but even if the worst happens, it’s only four years we’re talking about here,” said Santa Fe, NM resident Pete Mirenge, one of hundreds of thousands of positive thinkers across the nation who would do everyone a huge goddamn favor by closing their fucking traps right this fucking second and keeping them sealed for the foreseeable future. “This is exactly why we have a system of checks and balances—to ensure that whatever happens in the election, the executive branch never gets too much power. Think about it: Has any president been able to carry out their platform to the letter? No. Nothing’s ever as bad as it seems, believe me.” According to sources, a calm and composed Mirenge—who reportedly has about five seconds before his mouth is shut for him—then added that the country’s been through much worse and everything turned out okay. 9:27 PM Tim Kaine Shows Hillary His Belly Button To Cheer Her Up After Losing Ohio
After it was officially projected that Donald Trump would take the critical swing state of Ohio and its 18 electoral votes, vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine quickly ran over to a visibly disappointed Hillary Clinton and attempted to lift her spirits by pulling his shirt up above his midriff and showing her his belly button. The Virginia senator spent several minutes holding up the bottom of his shirt with his chin while repeatedly pointing at his navel and informing Clinton that he has “a innie [sic],” prompting Clinton to curtly nod and say “Yes, that’s right,” before craning her neck to look past him at the electoral map to track her progress in Florida and Nevada.
Onion chief political correspondent Martin Hazelton is reporting live from Clinton HQ in New York City throughout the evening. The Onion Jill Stein Addresses Voters On Twitter The Onion 8:38 PM A Recap Of The Onion’s Exit Polls
The Onion has been camped out at polling locations nationwide to collect the most accurate exit poll data and offer the only journalistic refuge in a world teeming with chaos and lies. Here are the highlights: The Onion 8:13 PM How Ordinary Americans Feel About What Remains Of This Country
Every four years, against anyone’s better judgment, the American people are entrusted to elect the next president. The Onion let them tell their stories. 7:58 PM Clinton Leaves Office On Motorcycle To Hunt Down Precinct Leaders Who Haven’t Reported Yet
With the majority of polls now closed across the country and no victor yet declared, Hillary Clinton reportedly left her campaign watch party moments ago, jumped on a red Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle, and sped off to track down any precinct leader who has yet to report their county’s election returns. Secretary Clinton could be seen weaving between cars in Manhattan, driving on the sidewalk to get past several areas of heavy traffic, and then accelerating to speeds in excess of 110 miles per hour once she reached the interstate. Reporters were unable to keep up with the Democratic nominee, but numerous witnesses confirmed that Clinton had a baseball bat stowed next to her and appeared incredibly irate before she pulled down the tinted visor on her helmet, revved the motorcycle’s engine, and tore away.
Onion chief political correspondent Martin Hazelton is reporting live from Clinton HQ in New York City throughout the evening. The Onion 7:51 PM Wolf Blitzer Walks Into Middle Of Olive Garden Commercial To Announce Breaking Election Results
NEW YORK—Briskly striding into frame and interrupting a jubilant family meal, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer reportedly entered the middle of an Olive Garden commercial airing during the network’s election coverage Tuesday night to announce a late-breaking election result. “Breaking news: CNN is calling Nevada for Hillary Clinton,” said Blitzer, stepping directly in front of a smiling mother passing a heaping plate of fettucine alfredo to her daughter and shushing the laughter of surrounding tables so that he could add that the victory dealt a severe blow to Donald Trump’s chances of reaching the Oval Office. “We are projecting that Secretary Clinton will take the crucial swing state’s six electoral votes, putting her on the inside track to securing the 270 electoral votes needed—hey, excuse me, will you please keep it down?—needed to win the presidency.” At press time, Blitzer was ducking in panic as the Olive Garden logo came swooping into frame. The Onion 7:36 PM Election Flashback: Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress (2008)
WASHINGTON—After emerging victorious from one of the most pivotal elections in history, president-elect Barack Obama will assume the role of commander in chief on Jan. 20, shattering a racial barrier the United States is, at long last, shitty enough to overcome.
Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.
“Today the American people have made their voices heard, and they have said, ‘Things are finally as terrible as we’re willing to tolerate,” said Obama, addressing a crowd of unemployed, uninsured, and debt-ridden supporters. “To elect a black man, in this country, and at this time—these last eight years must have really broken you.”
Added Obama, “It’s a great day for our nation.” | 1real |
4 Truly Important Items for Your Post-Election List of Things to Protest | Waking Times
Supporters of Clinton in the painfully long 2016 presidential campaign warned us before the vote that if Trump lost the election, his supporters would stop at nothing to disrupt Clinton’s inauguration. They said riots, violence and revolution would break out, and that Republicans would claim voter fraud and refuse to respect the democratic process or accept the results should Hillary have won.
This scare tactic and all the other nightmare fantasies about Trump projected into public consciousness by the left were insufficient to persuade enough voters to go for Hillary, and as many suspected would happen, Clinton voters are now doing the precise things they had previously declared to be unacceptable.
Hypocrisy is now as American as apple pie, and no one is really all that surprised that phony idealists are taking to the streets, destroying property, threatening to assassinate the president elect , and organizing to prevent Trump’s inauguration . Some are even openly calling for revolution. The deeper irony here, though, is that people from all walks of life should be out protesting the government as well, but for much more significant reasons than to protest the outcome of the election.
In the true American spirit of redressing grievances, and as a public service to a nation struggling to find purpose and reason, here are four critical issues that any worthwhile protestor should add to their post-election list of complaints against the machine. 1.) The Orwellian Permanent War and The Military Industrial Complex
This is the biggest elephant in the room. The U.S. has ongoing military operations in dozens of nations, and it has at least 800 military bases in eighty something foreign nations . Hundreds of non-combative foreign civilians a year are killed by U.S. bombs and drones and written off as collateral damage. The military industrial complex has fully commandeered the progress and development of technology, and sells billions of dollars of weapons each year to countries around the world including severely oppressive dictatorships states like Saudi Arabia .
At home, expenditures on ‘defense’ account for over half of every dollar U.S. taxpayers give Uncle Sam, diverting resources away from improving our country here at home. Surplus military equipment and battle hardened veterans are increasingly moving into the civilian law enforcement sector, dramatically exacerbating social issues such as police brutality and racism . The security industry has expanded to include the mass surveillance of every American and continues to invade our privacy in evermore creative ways . Genuine organic terrorism against Americans at home and abroad is the indirect result of destroying foreign nations and entire civilizations , stealing oil and other resources from foreign nations, while murdering innocents.
War has become the health of the state and it’s poisoning every segment of our society and culture. 2.) Serious Human Rights Abuses Committed by Government
Protestors today are taking to the streets to reject the verbal and emotional abuse of minority and sensitive members of our society, while actual physical human rights abuses are going under-addressed.
Members of America and the world’s elite are involved in covering up and participating in a global trade of sex slaves , and widely believed to be involved in pedophilia, child abduction and occult worship and rituals . 3.) Debt Slavery
The top-tier of the banking and investment world have created a global system of economic slavery which intentionally creates ever-increasing public debt. The human race owes so much money that no one really understands to whom it is owed . It could be aliens for all we know, but if the status quo remains, it would take the daily productivity of many generations to come to pay off only what is owed today, and the debt increases every minute.
This is a stealthy form of slavery that is written into the matrix code of society. To be born on earth is to owe money. This is utterly unacceptable, and so systemically unstable it’s guaranteed to collapse, causing worldwide suffering . 4.) Environmental Stewardship is Criminally Negligent
Viewpoints on the environmental stress we see in our world today vary wildly depending on who you talk to and what their background or agenda may be. Call it global warming, climate change, or whatever you like, but at its core, our natural world is being sold off and destroyed for corporate profit. Massive unchecked pollution and environmental destruction by the energy industry and corporations at large is destroying this planet at an exponentially increasing rate. Industrial disasters like Fukushima go unaddressed while the world’s rainforests are being decimated and indigenous cultures driven to extinction . This sad list just goes on and on. It’s just too much to put down here. Final Thoughts
You could easily add so much more to this if you like, as there are a thousand and one causes rebelling against, yet so very few ever seem to make it into public consciousness and onto the corporate mainstream news . If you’re outraged about what is happening in America today, but haven’t yet included these issues on your ‘mad as hell’ list , then your protest isn’t living up to its full potential, and your idealism is only half-assed. Read more articles by Dylan Charles . About the Author
Dylan Charles is a student and teacher of Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi and Qi Gong, a practitioner of Yoga and Taoist arts, and an activist and idealist passionately engaged in the struggle for a more sustainable and just world for future generations. He is the editor of WakingTimes.com , the proprietor of OffgridOutpost.com , a grateful father and a man who seeks to enlighten others with the power of inspiring information and action. He may be contacted at . This article ( 4 Truly Important Issues for Your Post Election List of Things to Protest ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.
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BREAKING: Obama Threatens Great Britain With Trade Penalties If They Leave The EU | ITV Reporter: British reporters in various degrees of politeness they have said to you that you should really keep your views to yourself. With that in mind, Mr. President, do you still think it was the right thing to intervene in this debate? ANd what happens if the UK does decide in June to leave the European Union?Barack Obama: This is a decision for the people of the United Kingdom to make. I am not coming here to fix any votes Maybe some point down the line there might be a UK-US trade agreement but it s not going to happen anytime soon because our focus is in negotiating with a big block the European Union to get a trade agreement done. And the UK is going to be in the back of the queue. Not because we have a special relationship but because given the heavy lift on any trade agreement, us having access to a big market with a lot of countries rather than trying to do piecemeal trade agreements is hugely inefficient. | 1real |
U.S. trial of Turkish banker not legal, should be ended: Turkish minister | ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish Justice Minister Abdulhamit Gul said on Tuesday he will tell his U.S. counterpart that the New York trial of a Turkish banker, charged with helping Iran evade U.S. sanctions, is not legal and should be ended. Gul told Turkish broadcaster 24 TV in an interview that it would be impossible to accept a verdict contrary to Turkey s interests in the case, which has strained ties between the NATO allies. | 0fake |
Cartel Massacres, Rampant Corruption Taint Mexican Border State Elections | PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Coahuila — As the border state of Coahuila prepares for its upcoming gubernatorial election, the main issue that resonates with voters is how Los Zetas were able to murder and incinerate hundreds of victims while the government turned a blind eye. [In early June, the state of Coahuila will have its general elections to select the next governor, mayors, senators, and congressmen. As Breitbart Texas has been reporting, the process is closely linked to Mexican drug cartels. One of the candidates for the border city of Piedras Negras has a long list of relatives who are members of Los Zetas including one regional commander. Breitbart Texas has spoken with several residents of this border city who expressed their various viewpoints as to the ongoing situation in Coahuila, a state with a long history of being home to Mexican drug cartels and corrupt government officials. One of the key issues that residents kept bringing up is how state officials turned a blind eye to the various cartel massacres that took place in the state. As Breitbart Texas reported, from early 2011 to 2013, Los Zetas kidnapped, murdered and incinerated more than 300 victims from the rural communities in and around Allende. Half of those were incinerated inside the state prison in Piedras Negras. Residents in Coahuila continue to ask themselves how Los Zetas were able to operate with complete impunity to carry out the mass executions, set fire to and destroy dozens of homes, and avoid facing any consequences. To date, government officials do not know how many people throughout the state have actually been kidnapped and murdered by cartel gunmen due to a systemic effort throughout Mexico where government officials try to downplay cartel violence. At the time of the massacre and in the months after, the Coahuila Attorney General’s Office in the Piedras Negras and Allende region was run by Santos Vasquez Estrada and Patricia Rivera Barrera. Politically connected sources in Saltillo have revealed exclusively to Breitbart Texas that Rivera Barrera, who ignored the Allende massacre, continues to collect a director’s salary but has since been demoted to working at a PGJE archive where she handles documents tied to cases that have already been closed. Santos Estrada has since left the PGJE and is now a criminal defense lawyer. According to Zocalo, the former prosecutor who turned a blind eye to the actions of Los Zetas became the defense attorney for Juan Manuel “Padre Meño” Riojas, a priest who has been criminally accused of having violated a seminary student. New information provided to Breitbart Texas revealed that the priest is now considered a fugitive after he went into hiding and is believed to have fled the region. As Breitbart Texas reported, witness testimony from U. S. court cases and documents revealed that Los Zetas had free reign over Coahuila for many years where politicians sold control of the state in exchange for bribes. Some of the revelations point to Los Zetas having close ties to former governor Humberto Moreira, the brother of current governor Ruben Moreira. Both Moreira brothers were elected governors under Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) a political party that has a long history of being tied to drug cartels, Breitbart Texas reported. In Tamaulipas, two former governors are currently listed as fugitives of the U. S. Department of Justice on money laundering charges. One of those Tamaulipas governors is also wanted on drug trafficking and conspiracy charges. Most recently, Humberto Moreira was kicked out of the PRI for running for a plurinominal congressional seat with the Partido Joven (Young Party). As Breitbart Texas reported, internal discussion within the PRI pointed to the party trying to distance themselves from Moreira in case the U. S. unveils a criminal case against him as they have done with the two former Tamaulipas governors. Most recently, Mexico’s Reforma reported on leaked documents that revealed Moreira and his relatives managed to stash away approximately $60 million in bank accounts in Monaco and the Cayman Islands. Since the publication of Reforma’s investigation, Moreira has gone on the offensive using a Facebook page and various interviews to call the outlet’s reporting a lie. Ildefonso Ortiz is an journalist with Breitbart Texas. He the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. Brandon Darby is managing director and of Breitbart Texas. He the Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and Stephen K. Bannon. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart. com. | 0fake |
(VIDEO) THIS IS GREAT! TRUMP’S STORY ON HOW CAROLINE KENNEDY GOT HER POSITION IN JAPAN IS PRICELESS! | This is so typical of the Obama administration! Positions of importance have been given to people who supported him during his election in some way. The fact that Caroline Kennedy could just go into the White House and ask for a job is ludicrous! You ll love how Donald Trump tells the story and the creepy laugh well, I don t even know what to say about that | 1real |
You Wouldn’t Allow Someone To Abuse Your Child…So Why Do We Allow Climate Change Radicals To Target Them? | So, if the climate scare-mongers can t frighten the adults, the next logical step is to heap angst on their children who then frighten (or better, pester) the adults into action. You need to read this ENTIRE story and watch the video near the end of the page. Finally, the United Nations Environmental Programme is spending our money to come out with scary children s fairy tales about global warming. Sedena, the Mother of the Sea, is featured in the UN Environmental Programme s latest children s book on global warming entitled Tore and the Town on Thin Ice . This book tells the story of a young boy named Tore who lives in a village in the Arctic and is upset when he loses a dog sled race. The Mother of the Sea appears in Tore s dream and informs him that the thinning ice, which caused his loss in the dog sled race, was due to man-made global warming. But that is nothing compared to what it is doing to the Mother of the Sea s own dominion and to all living creatures. She sends an owl, a polar bear, and a whale to scare poor Tore into thinking that they will become extinct during his lifetime and that our world is melting from climate changes, mostly caused by those bad people in rich countries who are spewing gases in the air from their huge cars , air conditioners and the like. In the words of the whale, children like Tore should get good and angry . The book ends with a so-called facts section, blaming climate change on the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America and singling out the United States in particular for its contribution to the production of carbon dioxide added by humans. It claims that climate change will hit the poorer countries hardest while at the same time saying that New York along with other coastal areas could disappear beneath the waves. A psychotherapist, a true believer in the Climate Church, nevertheless argues that children should not be targeted by the climate activists it is not good for the children and it is not good for the cause. I wish she could also see that her cause is a phony one, but I m glad she is against harming children in the name of it:Climate change community groups often want to work with children. We must get into the schools, says someone and there is a nod of agreement. It s worth thinking about the psychology behind this. Why is this idea so appealing? And why is it so damaging?The appeal is clear. It s fun working with children: they re responsive, creative and willing. And it s certainly easier than working with white-van-man, frequent fliers or the oil industry. The reasons given for working with children are usually two-fold:We need to influence them while they are young. If they understand the issue and the effect of their actions, they will grow up finding it natural to care for the environment. It s a good way of getting to their parents. Who can resist their child pleading with them to change the lightbulbs because it will save a polar bear?Both reasons are suspect. The first reason assumes that instruction at best participatory, at worst didactic is the route either to action or to the inculcation of positive values towards the environment. There is little evidence for this. We know that information based campaigns have a limited impact with adults, so why should we expect children to be different? As for values these tend to be formed through experience, relationship, identification and social systems, not through information. If the school has an influence on values it will be through its culture, ethos and the relationships and experiences it offers not through the information it provides.Both reasons also raise direct ethical questions. It is easy to engage the sympathies of children with stories of damage to the natural world and images of suffering animals they will identify with. But children have very little power. Of all the sections of society who might make an impact on climate change, they have the least influence, the least agency, the least leverage. There is a real risk of raising levels of anxiety amongst children that will not only cause distress in the immediate term but will in the long term lead to those children turning against the environmental causes we hoped they might espouse.When I was 10 a speaker came to my school and told us about food shortages and starvation in the third world. I rushed home and explained to my parents that we needed to grow more food. I couldn t understand why they wouldn t accede to my idea of banding together with the neighbours and turning all our back gardens into a corn field. I was left haunted by images of dying children, guilt at my good fortune and the anxiety that feeds on powerlessness. In adolescence I became determinedly indifferent to the appeals from 3rd world charities. As an adult I have continued to find them difficult to relate to.We need to ask what happens to the child whose parents are indifferent to their attempts to get them to act? What happens to the child who is overwhelmed by stories of disasters he or she cannot influence?But the deeper question is why are adults so keen to focus on children? Why concentrate on the weakest, least influential members of society and ask them to act?Got kids? Watched as they ve been indoctrinated sorry, I mean educated about global warming over the last decade? Then you ll know what I mean. They come home from school moodily depressed about the future of our planet and, of course, what that means for their own lives. What s the point? We re all doomed! Why study? Why bother getting an education? It s futile. Sea levels are rising. Temperatures are soaring. Soon we ll all be living in a polluted hell-hole constantly battling the equivalent of the Queensland floods or the Victorian bushfires year upon year. And you want me to waste what precious time I have left studying accountancy? It s called nihilism, and it s even more terrifying to witness in your teenage children than hickeys, drunkenness, truancy, insolence, idleness, bad marks or bullying. Nihilism, or the conviction that life on Earth is totally pointless, saps the young of their energy, their ambition, and their will to strive, struggle and triumph. Extract from an online article by Rowan Dean, 17 August 2011.A postgraduate student in Oxford gets it This should be a wake-up call for all the purveyors of the politics of fear . Children are, naturally, relatively powerless and likely to feel overwhelmed by the challenges facing mankind. But as adults, we should have a greater sense of our own collective power to master problems and build better societies. Not only does jumping from one panic to another, each with disastrous consequences mobile phone radiation, BSE, SARS, crime, paedophilia, terrorism, bird flu, global warming diminish our own sense of agency, by turning childhood dreams of utopia into nightmarish visions of the future it is teaching the citizens of the future all the wrong lessons. This is one of the best videos we have seen on climate change. There are 5 parts to this series. This is Part 1:An excellent, easy to understand piece about the TRUTH surrounding phony climate cooling, warming, change:The pollution resulting from the rapid uncontrolled post-war industrial expansion spawned two environmentalist movements. One group primarily composed of physical scientists and engineers set about to directly address the pollution problems by developing facilities and legislative controls that have to date virtually eliminated industrial contamination of soil, water and air.A second group primarily composed of activists with little or no physical science background did nothing but protest against industry without ever having addressed a single environmental problem for which they created a solution.While the physical scientists and engineers worked quietly with industry solving the environmental problems, the ideology driven environmentalist activists, used dramatic alarmist rhetoric to gain media control and have become a dominant political force capable of forcing their self-serving ideologies on the general public with impunity.The Earth entered a cooling phase in 1942, and by 1970 the environmentalists found a way to blame this cooling on industrial expansion. The concept was that particulate matter from fossil fuel usage was blocking energy from the sun giving this cooling effect. This concept was incorporated as a parameter in the crude climate models of the time, and the predictions from models run by James Hansen in 1971 projected fifty years of further cooling from the increased use of fossil fuels.Only four years later, and in spite of the continued increase in fossil fuel usage global cooling came to an end, proving that the models did not have a proper physical basis for relating fossil fuel usage to global cooling.By 1988, after 13 years of global warming the ideological environmentalists developed a new tact for blaming fossil fuels. The British Government had embarked on a political campaign to promote their nuclear industry and attack the powerful coal unions by creating alarmist scenarios of runaway global warming resulting from CO2 produced by coal and other fossil fuels. This was entirely political in nature with absolutely no scientific backing, but it did make the perfect weapon for the environmentalists to promote their anti energy (and anti humanity) ideology. All that was needed was some scientific justification.As was done in 1971, climate models which were now far more sophisticated provided the science backing. Instead of blaming fossil fuels for blocking incoming solar radiation, the models removed this parameter and replaced it with a newly contrived parameter that now related global warming to the effect of fossil fuel sourced CO2 on the outgoing thermal radiation from the Earth.This model also produced by James Hansen, projected warming for the next century because of the fossil fuel CO2 emissions that were increasing at a continued accelerated rate. As with the 1971 model, the 1988 model was proven to be false when global warming ended after 1998 even as CO2 emissions continued to rise at unprecedented rates. To make matters worse since 2002, the Earth has been cooling making all of the projections clearly in the wrong direction.By even the most basic standards of ethical science, models that first predict cooling from fossil fuel usage that are discredited just four years later when warming occurs with increased usage, and then predict warming from fossil fuel usage and are again discredited ten years later as cooling reoccurs with increased usage, would be declared absolutely invalid; but when ideology is involved science protocol is totally abandoned.Impact 2009As a result of the alarmist predictions of the 1988 climate models of Hansen, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed under the auspices of the United Nations. This body was given a science mandate to investigate the possibility of human effects on climate to determine if the projections of Hansen were valid.The true nature of the IPCC was not that of a science based body, but that of a political body to give scientific legitimacy to false alarmist predictions in order to meet a political self serving environmentalist agenda. Since its inception, the IPCC has used its position of authority to promote its agenda to the detriment of science and even more importantly to the detriment of the global population.From 1997 to 1998 the average global temperature increased by over half a degree C and from 1998 to 1999 the average global temperature fell by over half a degree C. This was due to an extraordinary el Ni o and has nothing to do with either the greenhouse effect or CO2 emissions (CO2 emissions increased from 24.0gt/y in 1997 to 24.2gt/y in 1998 to 24.4gt/y in 1999).An honest scientific body would have made some sort of statement to this effect, but the IPCC in their 2001 Third Assessment Report and particularly in their Summary for Policy Makers for this report not only made no mention of the fact that from 1998 to 1999 the Earth cooled more than it had ever cooled during the entire global temperature record, but emphatically stated that from 1997 to 1998 the Earth had warmed more than it ever had.This is an absolute violation of science ethics because the policy makers were purposely misinformed with alarmist rhetoric. This same 2001 report also stated that the observed global warming for the past century which they stated was attributable to CO2 emissions was measured at 0.60 C + 0.20 C. This is only 0.006 C per year making the el Ni o temperature spike over eighty times greater than what the IPCC stated was attributable to CO2 emissions, so it is clear that this was stated for the purpose of politically motivated alarmism and not to properly convey information in a scientifically justified manner.The 2001 IPCC report also included the infamous MBH98 Hockey Stick temperature proxy which used physical temperature measurement data up to and including 1998 which gave the alarmist impression of twice the 20th century warming because 1999 was not included.The Hockey Stick graph became the pivotal evidence that convinced governments around the world to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, that has resulted in such detrimental effects to the global population and global economy.In this regard the el Ni o temperature spike of 1998 may be considered the most significant climate event in recent history, and when one considers the hundreds of millions of the world s poorest people starving because of Kyoto biofuel initiatives that has literally taken their food away and made it into Kyoto friendly fuel, this el Ni o might also be considered the most tragic climate event as well.Through diligence and hard work physical scientists were able to correct most of the environmental problems that had been created through industrialization, but there is no scientific effort capable of undoing the damage caused to the global population by the ideological environmentalists. This issue is now out of the hands of the scientists and the only salvation for the global population is the media who must readopt their lost journalistic integrity and expose the true nature of this global fraud. | 1real |
Guess Which Supreme Court Justice Got Caught SLEEPING During A Case (IMAGE) | These days, a certain few justices on the Supreme Court (the Republicans, of course) are known to be doing little more than occupying space and selling their votes to the corporate owners of the Republican Party. The one who is most notorious for being a useless sack of protoplasm is Justice Clarence Thomas. The guy never says a word. He just sits there, staring into space and waiting until he can render his verdict. It s a contemptible type of conduct for someone who is supposed to help decide on issues that are of grave importance to millions of if not all Americans on a daily basis.Thomas has openly admitted in the past that he has a work ethic that can be summed up best by the word zero. There were times he had admitted that he decided how he would rule on a case before it even started. This is literally judicial malpractice. As a judge, the essence of how you do your job is tied to listening to evidence and making a conclusion based on the facts in an impartial way. What Clarence Thomas does is a complete abdication of his responsibilities as a Supreme Court justice.So you must be wondering, What does Clarence Thomas do all day at work if he doesn t actually DO or even SAY anything? You ll get your answer by hitting the play button below:look at this drawing from SCOTUS oral arguments yesterday pic.twitter.com/eSTR9IiEfN sarah jeong (@sarahjeong) April 22, 2016A courtroom artist decided to be brutally honest and draw Clarence Thomas doing exactly what he does sleeping on the job.Yes, a judge on the highest court in the free world, responsible for deciding cases of monumental importance to the function of our republic, finds it to be just fine to just sit and sleep during his work day. After all, it s not like he will have anything to say! Why not just sit there and sleep while getting paid. Right?This is the trash you get when you have Republican presidents. This is why it s important to vote.Featured image via Wikicommons | 1real |
COAL MINERS ENDORSE TRUMP …Crowd Goes Nuts [Video] | Donald Trump held a rally in West Virginia and was endorsed by the coal miners well done! | 1real |
British Government Admits Marijuana Has ‘Medicinal Value’ | Posted on October 30, 2016 by Sean Adl-Tabatabai in Health // 0 Comments
The British government have finally admitted that marijuana has medicinal value in helping to treat a number of different illnesses and diseases.
The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) announced that Cannabidiol (CBD) has restorative, correcting or modifying effects on “physiological functions” when administered to humans. In other words, cannabis has the potential to cure illnesses without the need for pharmaceutical drugs. Recommended
An official investigation has revealed that the British government directly funded and organised terrorists in the Loughinisland massacre in 1994. (58 mins ago)
Anonhq.com reports:
Observers say this new development in Britain is a potential milestone that will help marijuana campaigners to press for the country’s lawmakers to legalize the plant based on the available evidence.
Before this good news, some of the country’s politicians had pressed on the government to legalize marijuana for medicinal use. Currently, in the United Kingdom, it is illegal to possess marijuana in any form. Without a so-called appropriate licence, it is also illegal to grow, distribute or sell marijuana in the nation.
However, over the years, marijuana advocates have been gaining momentum in their quest to have the plant legalized and regulated in the country. In 2015, James Richard Owen, an economics student at Aberystwyth University, started a petition on the country’s official petitions website, calling for the legalization, cultivation, sale and use of the plant.
The petition gathered 218,995 signatures, far exceeding the 100,000 needed for it to be considered for debate in Parliament. On Oct. 12, 2015. the country’s Parliament debated the petition. Recommended
The mainstream media are covering up the fact that Hillary Clinton admitted in public that the U.S. government created both ISIS and Al Qaeda. (58 mins ago)
According to the Independent , the latest findings by the MHRA are not directly applicable to the British government’s response to last year’s petition to legalize marijuana.
In a statement on the assessment done by the MHRA, the agency said: “The MHRA has now completed its review and has considered all information available to it relating to Cannabidiol(CBD) and having taken into account all the scientific advice and evidence, it has come to an opinion that products containing Cannabidiol will satisfy the second limb of the definition of a ‘medicinal product’ because it may be used by or administered to human beings either with a view to restoring, correcting or modifying physiological functions by exerting a pharmacological, immunological or metabolic action, or to making a medical diagnosis.”
The review of CBD, a cannabinoid accounting for up to 40% of the marijuana plant’s extract that doesn’t contain its psychoactive THC but has immense health benefits, came about following discussions with CBD vaporiser company MediPen.
The Managing Director of MediPen, Jordan Owen was quoted by the Independent as saying: “Since our inception we’ve worked hard to obtain our goal of breaking down the negative connotations surrounding Cannabis to lead to a reform in the law for medicinal use. Now this is finally becoming a reality, which will provide ground-breaking results.”
Past studies on marijuana have revealed its CBD helps to control brain and nerve activity, energy metabolism, heart function, the immune system and even reproduction. Recommended
The British Air Force has admitted to helping the US conduct airstrikes on the Syrian army, which Russia say has ignited World War 3 in Syria. (58 mins ago)
To add to the MHRA’s findings, the British pro-marijuana pharma company, GW Pharmaceuticals, has also announced it has just concluded a positive phase 3 clinical trial demonstrating the safety and efficacy of CBD, which has helped people with a variety of illnesses.
As a result of these new developments in the United Kingdom, many charities and pro-marijuana organizations have intensified their research into the use of the plant as a medical drug. Observers predict that the full legalization of the plant is imminent in the United Kingdom.
In all these positive developments regarding marijuana in the United Kingdom, the Mainstream Media (MSM) in the United States have refused to report on them. Despite the news being published by many British media outlets, in the United States, the corporate MSM have pretended not to have heard it. This should tell us that there is a grand agenda to suppress marijuana in the United States, with the help of the corporate media, in order to prevent people from benefiting from the medicinal value of the obviously wonderful plant; pushing the agenda of favor for Big Pharma products. | 1real |
A Shooting, the Hospital and Then, Months Later, It’s a Homicide - The New York Times | The gunshot survivor, frozen from the waist down, a . bullet lodged between his left kidney and lowermost rib, lay on a hospital bed looking at mug shots of South Bronx gang members. Sgt. Michael J. LoPuzzo asked the man whether he could pick out his shooter. “Yep,” Bruce Purdy answered, looking spent. Then he handed back the 8 booklet, with 23 photos. “Who?” Mr. Purdy would not say. Soon, he told Sgt. LoPuzzo, the police would hear about a crazy man in a wheelchair shooting the person who had put him there. “Then you’ll know who it was,” Mr. Purdy said. The threat only hinted at Mr. Purdy’s scorn for the system. Raised during a crack plague, he was a child of government institutions — a foster homes, a city jail, six state prison facilities, public housing — who, at 29, had landed at yet another: Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center, a red brick monument to both emergency treatment and overburdened recovery care where most gunshot victims in the South Bronx are taken. Detectives began to make regular trips to Mr. Purdy’s bedside in Room 6C at the hospital after the shooting in October. But he was unswayed: Having been robbed of sex and the use of his legs, he said, all he had to look forward to was getting revenge. Then one night in December, a week after Mr. Purdy had left the hospital against doctors’ orders with little more than a basic wheelchair, he fell short of breath, was picked up by an ambulance and, in the same emergency room that had tended to his gunshot wound, died of a blood clot. A investigation by the New York City medical examiner traced the fatal clot to the shooting, and on March 14, Mr. Purdy’s death was added to this year’s homicide tally for the 40th Precinct, a section of the South Bronx where violence takes diverse paths to death. To understand what drives such violence, The New York Times is documenting each murder logged in the 40th Precinct this year. The killing of Mr. Purdy counted as the fourth homicide there two more have since been recorded, making the 40th the precinct in New York City in 2016. Mr. Purdy’s murder is perhaps the precinct’s truest mystery this year. The killer remains on the loose, the beneficiary of a lack of cameras outside the public housing building near where Mr. Purdy was shot and a reluctance on the part of his companions and other witnesses to cooperate with the police. He carried his silence to the grave. Beyond the detectives, Mr. Purdy also gave up on Lincoln Medical Center in his last weeks. He resisted physical therapy. He told relatives he had been left to lie for hours in his own excrement. He lit his bedsheets on fire, and cursed and yelled at doctors to send him home. The hospital, in turn, said in medical records that it was unable to do more for Mr. Purdy. Doctors tried for weeks to find a bed at a rehabilitation center — especially difficult for patients on Medicaid — only to have him change his mind on the day of his discharge and go home. He told a nurse he planned to kill himself but was never admitted to a psychiatric ward. The records are not clear about whether he went home with a prescription for medicine his mother said he did not. Saving Mr. Purdy from a bullet in the back was not enough. The poor pockets of the Bronx from which he carved his itinerant life created hurdles that made it hard for a gunshot survivor to stay alive. Mr. Purdy’s long path to death wound through a bathtub in a project where a brother lifted his limp 181 pounds in and out of the water. Before that, Mr. Purdy lingered for six weeks at Lincoln Medical Center, a hospital for trauma care that — like many institutions across the country — struggles to care for paraplegics. “This is just another case where society’s ability to care for people in a multidisciplinary way is not always so perfect, especially in underserved populations,” said Dr. Ronald Simon, the former chief of Lincoln’s trauma division and one of the doctors who oversaw Mr. Purdy’s treatment. While the challenges of his care illuminate broad problems in how the health care system treats the poor and permanently disabled, Dr. Simon and outside medical experts said the hospital appeared to have met the relevant treatment standards and that Mr. Purdy might have unwittingly hastened his death by leaving. He spent much of his last 47 days trying to prove he could return from injury and get justice on his own, without the help of doctors or detectives. Mr. Purdy’s mother, Thelma Johnson, believes her son would still be alive had doctors treated him more thoroughly at discharge. “When he left,” she said, “they didn’t do nothing but give him a wheelchair. ” Hanging on her wall at a homeless shelter on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx is a red she pulled off his body in the emergency room, near a box containing his ashes. “One day,” she said, “I’m going to get some money and buy an urn for them. ” Mr. Purdy was shot in a void: a stretch of sidewalk unwatched by the city’s extensive surveillance equipment, outside the reach of cameras, floodlights or gunshot detectors. It was 9 p. m. on Oct. 28, and he had been hanging out in Apartment 3C at 517 East 144th Street, a building at the Betances Houses, a project. He was with Yesenia Figueroa, the wife of his best friend, Shamel Robinson. The two had gone to court earlier after Mr. Robinson was arrested in the apartment early that day for having a loaded . pistol. (Mr. Robinson told officers he had gotten the gun after an argument at a bodega, according to court papers.) Mr. Purdy stepped outside to get chips and a soda. Ms. Figueroa, who has a history of arrests for prostitution, stayed inside. The apartment — sparsely decorated, with a curtain marking off one area — is home to a cast of transients. Mr. Purdy told detectives at one point that Ms. Figueroa was his fiancée, though she told a reporter they were only close friends. Steps from the building’s front door, a gunman came up from behind and fired two shots, the second going deep into Mr. Purdy’s back. He fell between two parked cars. “RRN!” the gunman yelled, Mr. Purdy told detectives, referring to a gang that, the police said, reigns in the Betances Houses and was behind a surge in shootings in the 40th Precinct that hit a recent peak of 72 in 2011 amid a feud with gang members from the nearby Moore Houses. Mr. Purdy told his sister Precious Parker that the gunman also screamed, “You on my block. ” Mr. Purdy told detectives that he had thought about playing dead, but it was too late. His eyes were still open and twitching when the gunman stood over his body. Then, inexplicably, the gunman uncocked his pistol and walked away. “I’m shot. I’m down, Miss, I’m down. Please,” Mr. Purdy told a 911 operator on his cellphone as he lay there alone. The operator mixed up the street name Mr. Purdy repeated it. When she asked him several times who shot him, he said he did not know. He grew more desperate as seconds ticked by. “Ma’am, ma’am, hurry up, there’s people coming,” he said. “Please hurry up. ” Of the gunman, he said: “They ran off, I think. I’m afraid. ” There was no blood at the scene the slug had spared major blood vessels on the way to Mr. Purdy’s spine. At the hospital, Mr. Purdy lurched between being depressed and being sanguine about his recovery, according to medical records his mother received. He had once dreamed of being a doctor and had studied nursing in prison. Now he was a case study in the physical devastation and psychological ripples that result from surviving a shooting. The bullet had shattered two of the strongest vertebrae, in the small of his back, nudging his spinal cord to the right. He lost movement and feeling in his lower half. Roughly one in four trauma cases at Lincoln Medical Center involve penetrating trauma — gunshots or knife wounds — compared with about 5 percent at most private hospitals, and so a trauma surgeon is always on duty. Mr. Purdy spent his time in Room 6C learning to shift from his bed to a wheelchair and being taught to insert a catheter to urinate. On Nov. 5, the day he was to have the bullet removed, he declined to be operated on, a decision that may have increased his back pain later. Doctors deemed him a “very high risk” for deep vein thrombosis, or blood clots in the legs, a notorious danger for paraplegics that stems from the loss of movement. He was treated with Lovenox, an injectable drug to prevent blood clots. Doctors say typical standards call for such patients to continue preventive treatments for at least three months, possibly six, sometimes forever. Starting around 2004, the city’s public hospitals undertook a effort to address what Dr. Robert S. Kurtz, a trauma specialist who helped lead the push, called a “national problem” of failing to prevent deep vein thrombosis. He said city hospitals had raised their compliance rate above 90 percent. Reeling from his injury, Mr. Purdy clashed with medical staff members, refusing at first to discuss his family situation or mental state. Two days after the shooting he threatened to slide onto the floor unless someone brought him a wheelchair. Doctors said he had adjustment disorder, a response to trauma. Mr. Purdy’s mother said his cousins took him cigarettes to smoke in bed. Having lost control of his bowel movements, he told relatives that nurses had left him sitting in his own excrement for hours. On Nov. 19 at around 2 p. m. a social worker, Maria told him that he had not been doing physical therapy sessions. He replied that an attendant had tried to take him to therapy without cleaning the stool he had been lying in for three hours. He recorded his conversation with Ms. and a physical therapist, Michael Santoro. Mr. Purdy says of the physical therapy, “How am I going to go if I’m sitting in” excrement? On the video, Mr. Santoro can be heard telling Mr. Purdy his health has improved and that he can go home, but Mr. Purdy asks how they know. He says he has not seen them in five days. Ms. replies, “You saw me like four days ago, not counting the weekend. ” They ask Mr. Purdy whether he can think of any other equipment he would need. Mr. Purdy sounds confused. They abruptly end the conversation, making preparations for Mr. Purdy’s discharge, possibly the next day. “The discussion was scattered, superficial, totally disconnected — it’s pathetic,” said Dr. Kurtz, former director of service for trauma and surgical critical care at Kings County Hospital Center and one of three doctors who reviewed the video and Mr. Purdy’s medical records at the request of The New York Times. He cautioned that the encounter showed only a snapshot of his care. “It’s a religion to take care of a spinal cord patient. It’s a massive undertaking. ” The city hospital system said in a statement, “The video demonstrates that the hospital staff were actively developing a safe and appropriate discharge plan. ” Mr. Santoro, asked about the video, said: “I gave him the best care I could, we all did. There was no improper care by me. ” Ms. who has since left the hospital, declined to comment through her husband. On Nov. 26, Thanksgiving Day, at 7:34 p. m. with a TV commercial hawking holiday deals playing in the background, Mr. Purdy recorded another video. He lay naked on his bed, with a clump of stool and dirty wipes next to him. Speaking into his cellphone camera, he said he had been waiting 25 minutes for help. “This is embarrassing, man,” he said, aiming the camera out the open door. “You got guests, you got all sorts of people just walking by, door open. Look at me, look at me. ” He panned the camera to the pile of waste beside him. Paraplegic patients often languish without thorough and affordable care. Sound recovery requires, among other things, buying a special bed for home and teaching a patient’s relatives to give an enema. But doctors say that outside of Veterans Affairs hospitals, treatment often neglects even simple needs. “The care is fragmented, it’s scattered, it depends on the whim and the will of individuals,” Dr. Kurtz said, adding that there was a “crying need” for more seamless programs. A patient like Mr. Purdy could have left the hospital after as little as two weeks for a rehabilitation center, Dr. Simon said. But while he estimated that 20 local rehabilitation centers would have taken Mr. Purdy if he had insurance, far fewer would have done so without insurance. “So he ended up staying at Lincoln for a more prolonged time until they found him a bed,” Dr. Simon said. The city hospital system said there was pressure from the federal government, in the form of financial penalties for delays, to move patients to rehabilitation centers. It did not take long for Mr. Purdy to spiral into desperation. “Patient started a fire by smoking and burning the bedsheet with the cigarettes stating to the nurse, ‘I will set more fire in the room to kill myself and the rest of the people,’” say medical records from six days after he was shot. Mr. Purdy told a nurse he had started to work out the details of how to kill himself and intended to carry out his plan. For a time, a health aide watched him around the clock. A psychiatrist followed up the next day to assess his capacity to make decisions. But the limited mental health care documented in the medical records provided to Ms. Johnson surprised some of the doctors interviewed for this article. Ms. Johnson said she had asked twice for her son’s full case file and specifically for his psychiatric records, but doctors who reviewed the documents said they appeared incomplete. The city hospital system said all records had been provided. Mr. Purdy later denied being suicidal. Dr. Simon noted that trauma care was often the first encounter with doctors in many years for young victims of violence in the South Bronx. Mr. Purdy’s mother and sister visited a few times a week, but without a regular family presence, the burden on him only grew. He repeatedly asked to go home, only for doctors to talk him out of it. Lincoln finally secured a bed for him in rehabilitative care at the city’s Metropolitan Hospital Center in East Harlem. An ambulance was arranged to take him at 1 p. m. on Dec. 7. But he changed his mind. Medical notes quote him telling attendants he was going home because someone had lost his belongings. Doctors enlisted a psychiatrist to evaluate whether they could keep Mr. Purdy in the hospital. Medical notes say he showed “magical thinking” in believing that he would walk again, but he was deemed “not delusional. ” Doctors concluded it would be illegal to hold him against his will. Dr. Simon, who was not involved in Mr. Purdy’s discharge, said he has had patients insist on leaving before, even when he told them they risked dying. “And they’re like, ‘I don’t care,’” he said. “That’s a sticky situation once you leave against medical advice. ” Mr. Purdy was told about the risks of blood clots, encouraged to exercise and stop smoking and educated on an injection for blood thinners, records show. But the records do not include a clear list of prescriptions he received at discharge. His family said he did not return home with a prescription or medication. Ms. Parker, Mr. Purdy’s sister, whose public housing apartment doctors noted he was going to, said she was not informed of the risk of blood clots or how to help prevent them. Dr. Michael M. Baden, a former New York City chief medical examiner, said that proper administration of blood thinners would very likely have prevented the fatal clots. His decision to go home would have made any plan more difficult to enforce. Dr. Kurtz said that he would have prescribed a blood thinner for home use, but that other doctors might reasonably have decided otherwise. He said he understood why someone as distraught and isolated as Mr. Purdy would have left against medical advice. One of the cousins who had been delivering him cigarettes rolled Mr. Purdy out in his wheelchair. Mr. Purdy came home to a family that hardly knew him. His own daughter was in foster care, sent there in 2012 after he fought with the girl’s mother. It was a fate he knew himself. Around 1990, New York City’s child welfare agency took Ms. Johnson’s seven children from her home. Mr. Purdy was 5. His mother was sprinkling crack cocaine on cigarettes — she liked the smell of the drug mixing with tobacco — and smoking crack rocks from pipes. It was the tail end of an era when the crack cocaine trade drove violence across the city and left many children in broken homes. That began an institutional odyssey, as Mr. Purdy and his siblings bounced through five foster homes across the city together, rebelling at every turn and sometimes running away, Ms. Parker said. The most difficult siblings, Mr. Purdy among them, were separated and scattered across Long Island and the city. He landed in a Brooklyn home and at age 13, he joined the Shotgun Gangsta Crips, a local affiliate of the national Crips gang, he told a detective during a 2010 arrest. “He looked at it like his family,” said Mr. Robinson, his friend, who also grew up in foster care. “He didn’t have his real family. ” Around age 14, the two of them landed at an alternative school in Yonkers, where they bunked next to each other. Mr. Purdy told Mr. Robinson that he wanted to pursue a music career, and maybe become a doctor. They finished school, Mr. Robinson said, before moving into a group home in the northern Bronx that helped them look for jobs and took them to Six Flags and Disney World. But Mr. Purdy had inherited some of his parents’ drug habits, first smoking a joint around 15, Ms. Johnson said. “That’s what we do,” said Ms. Johnson, who started smoking marijuana at 9. “That’s just what we do. ” Ms. Johnson recalled telling mourners at her son’s funeral that he had tested her patience as a boy, running in from the street and sticking his hands in pots for an early taste. “That was me and his biggest problem,” she said. But he grew more bitter in later years. He would sometimes meet his mother on the streets after running away from foster homes. As they parted, he would call out, just loud enough to hear, “Crackhead. ” “I thought I was paranoid, that I was just hearing things,” Ms. Johnson said. “But that’s how he really felt about me. ” She trailed off, clapping her hands, upset at the memory. people told the police they heard gunfire from Mr. Purdy’s shooting. But none reported seeing anything, using some version of a mantra that has wearied generations of Bronx detectives: “Heard shots, saw nothing. ” Detectives combed Mr. Purdy’s arrest record. (Over the years, he had used four different names — Mike Johnson, Bruce Cobb, Bruce Cobbs and his real name.) Many of his 23 arrests were for petty crimes, but some were for selling drugs, suggesting the possible role of narcotics or gangs in the shooting. His most serious crime came in 2009, when he choked a man from behind as two friends beat him and stole a cellphone and wallet. He pleaded guilty to attempted robbery in 2011, after having served nearly 20 months at Rikers Island. He was in and out of state prison on parole violations until December 2014. He foretold his problems in a Facebook post the next year: “When I married the streets,” he wrote, “I knew she made your heart cold and would eventually take everything from you. ” But the Shotgun Gangsta Crips, Mr. Purdy’s gang, was not known to be in conflict with gangs in the Betances Houses. He had little history in the South Bronx many of his arrests were farther north, near his old group home. Mr. Purdy told relatives he believed the gunman had walked away while he was still alive because the man had mistaken him for someone else. A young man was arrested in a shooting using a . gun at the same housing complex in April, and he said in an interrogation that the word on the street was that Mr. Purdy’s shooting was a case of mistaken identity. Without video footage, Detective Richard Simplicio said he made at least four visits to Mr. Purdy’s bedside, trying to get him to say what he knew. On one occasion Mr. Purdy commented on Detective Simplicio’s Nike Dunks, leading to a conversation between sneaker buffs. “He felt comfortable,” the detective said. “Unfortunately not comfortable enough to assist in the shooting. ” Detective Simplicio said he sympathized. “At the end of the day, too, we’re not with them 24 hours a day,” he said, “we’re not there for the most part to help them out. ” Ms. Figueroa, his friend, rebuffed detectives twice. She and her husband, Mr. Robinson, had their own criminal cases, with Ms. Figueroa toting her baby in a carrier to an April court appearance for Mr. Robinson. He said he was in jail when he learned that his friend had died. Investigators believe Mr. Purdy told people close to him before he died that the man who had shot him was someone he had seen before. But detectives were counting on having more time to build a rapport with Mr. Purdy, to persuade him to cooperate rather than face the repercussions of his own revenge. Detective Simplicio said, “Obviously I didn’t think he was going to, you know, die, after he got cut loose from the hospital. ” Mr. Purdy joined the ranks of what the police call reclassified homicide victims, injured in one year but not added to the department’s murder tally until at least the next. They include people stabbed or shot decades ago who hang on until old age, as well as young paraplegics felled by bedsores that lead to amputations and infections. They are linked only by the creeping pace of death’s arrival, and the stalled investigations that can follow. Of the seven reclassified homicides logged by the police so far this year, five remain unsolved, a Police Department spokesman said, a reflection of how cases become harder to close as time goes on. There were 16 over all last year. “Of course a delay presents another challenge, but it’s not the only challenge,” said Dermot F. Shea, the department’s deputy commissioner in charge of crime analysis, stressing that detectives are trying just as hard to uncover clues while a victim is alive. In Mr. Purdy’s case, the crime scene unit that handles homicide scenes did not respond, leaving the work to an evidence collection team that conducts less rigorous ballistics tests and takes less detailed measurements. There was scant progress in the case between his death in December and the medical examiner’s homicide ruling in March. Only in recent weeks have detectives begun gathering better leads. No matter how quickly a victim’s relatives or law enforcement officials want an answer on the cause of death, the city’s 30 medical examiners are bound to trace a corpse’s clues to the start of the chain. “The No. 1 thing in every case is the body itself,” said the chief medical examiner, Dr. Barbara Sampson. “And the body never lies. ” Mr. Purdy’s autopsy was completed the day he died, and an examiner would have found the fatal blood clots in his lungs immediately. But the delay in ruling the case a homicide appears to have stemmed from toxicology tests, which can reveal contributing causes and take weeks or months to be completed. When Mr. Purdy arrived at the emergency room he said he felt short of breath after smoking marijuana, initially leading doctors to believe he might have died of complications. They told his mother it looked as if he had taken K2, a drug whose popularity at the time was creating a panic, though Mr. Purdy told his mother he had not. Soon after, the medical examiner’s office cautioned Sergeant LoPuzzo, the commander of the 40th Precinct detective squad, that drugs like K2 could have raised Mr. Purdy’s body temperature and caused the release of the blood clots. But his death certificate ultimately linked them to the gunshot wound and resulting paralysis, not to any drugs. The blood clots pooled in his legs, migrated toward his heart and threw off fatal clots to both lobes of his lungs. Back at his sister’s apartment, Mr. Purdy’s nieces and nephews jumped into his thick, tattooed arms, competing for attention. They asked why he was in a wheelchair. “And he said, ‘Because I done something really stupid,’” his mother, Ms. Johnson, recalled. He kept to himself what he meant. He took trips outside in his wheelchair for a smoke or fresh air. He fitfully discovered life outside the hospital as a paraplegic. He dwelled on the numbness in his penis, expressing anxiety about never again being able to have sex or children. “I’m never going to feel this again?” he would say, Ms. Johnson recalled. “It was funny to me, but he was really serious. ” As a salve for his fears, his aunt tickled him below the waist. “And he felt that,” Ms. Johnson said. At the end of each day his younger brother Randy Parker, an Army veteran of Kuwait and Afghanistan, scrubbed him down in the bath. Mr. Purdy often hugged him and told him he loved him, and grieved his wilting body. Mr. Parker recalled him saying, “‘I never thought that I would see the day that my baby brother would have to pick me up and do this, you know, wipe my ass and change my Pampers and stuff like that. ’” “He would sit there and he would cry,” Mr. Parker added. On the night of Dec. 13, Ms. Parker ordered a pizza. Mr. Purdy and some siblings were playing cards at a table in a cramped kitchen of her apartment. He gasped for air. “At first I’m thinking it’s a joke,” Ms. Parker said. “He said he was tired. ” Mr. Purdy had been sleeping on a couch in the living room, and Mr. Parker wheeled him there to rest. It was the first time he had lost his breath since coming home. “Next thing you know, he’s like, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,’” Ms. Parker said. An ambulance rushed him to Lincoln Medical Center, where emergency medical workers took him in just as his mother arrived. His heart was racing, its rate in the 130s. He had high blood pressure. Nurses tried pulling his clothes off, but it hurt his back. “So I was like, ‘O. K. I got this, let me do this,’” his mother said. Her son threw up his arms, and she pulled off his shirt. Seconds later his eyes rolled back and his body started shaking. Nurses tried to tie him to the gurney to draw blood, but he went unconscious. He “began having activity where he would gesticulate and make grunting noises,” medical notes say. Doctors pulled him away. He was put on a ventilator at 12:43 a. m. A later, he had no pulse. For 26 minutes, doctors tried to resuscitate him. At 1:41 a. m. on Dec. 14, he was pronounced dead by Dr. Allysia Guy. They wrote in medical records that his death appeared connected to an unknown drug, though they acknowledged not understanding the true cause. The next day at 10 a. m. Mr. Purdy had been scheduled to have his first doctor’s appointment since his discharge from Lincoln. It was the day before what would have been his 30th birthday. One of the last things doctors had told him was how important that appointment was. | 0fake |
Why The NRA Could Be In Big Trouble For Breaking Federal Law | The National Rifle Association may be in violation of federal law, according to documents the NRA itself filed with the Internal Revenue Service.While the NRA often refers to itself as a membership organization with millions of members that contribute to its operations, they said something completely different on their tax forms.The NRA, which was founded in New York in 1871 and claims to have millions of members, even told the IRS it didn t receive membership dues, thus enabling it to avoid disclosing more about its activities. Last year, it spent $345 million.At the same time as this deceptive practice reportedly occurred the NRA also conveniently disappeared the existence of its political slush fund, the Political Victory Fund, the PAC the organization uses to target any and all politicians attempting to reduce gun violence, including President Obama.The forms the NRA signed omitting the existence of its PAC and membership status state that they must be truthfully signed under penalties of perjury. The NRA also ignored the box requiring that it disclose whether it engaged in lobbying despite the NRA often flooding congressional offices with lobbyists seeking to flood neighborhoods with guns and ammunition. How that form wasn t intended to mislead the IRS, I don t know. I don t know how you come to any other conclusion, said lawyer Marcus Owens, a former IRS official and leading expert on non-profit tax law.Unbelievably, the NRA told the IRS it hadn t spent any money on lobbying between 2008 and 2014. But the Manchin-Toomey gun bill, which the NRA opposed, came up in the U.S. Senate in 2013 in the months after the Sandy Hook gun massacre.Then when news organizations began pointing out these possibly illegal discrepancies, the NRA suddenly began adding information about its donation and lobbying efforts on its 2014 returns.According to the New York Post, NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman s office hasn t commented on whether the NRA is being investigated for its incomplete filings with the federal government. Schneiderman received widespread coverage for going after fantasy football providers Draft Kings and Fanduel, if he began criminally looking into the NRA it would create huge shockwaves across the world of politics.Featured image via Flickr | 1real |
DNC Chair Perez: Trump’s Speech ’Was Steve Bannon on Steroids With a Smile’ - Breitbart | WASHINGTON, D. C. — DNC Chair Tom Perez called President Donald Trump’s first joint address to Congress “Steve Bannon on steroids with a smile” during an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, where he appeared with his appointed deputy chair, Keith Ellison. [Ellison laughed, raised his eyebrows, and looked at Perez after he made that statement. According to one MSNBC reporter, when asked about Trump’s speech, Perez sarcastically clapped: “Oh, he read a TelePrompTer!! It’s like my kid ate and didn’t spill!” When asked about the speech DNC Chair Perez sarcastically clapped: ”oh, he read a TelePrompTer!! It’s like my kid ate and didn’t spill!” — Michael LaRosa (@MichaelLaRosaDC) March 1, 2017, Perez said Trump started out his speech with “alternative facts. ” He charged that Trump “took credit for things [he] had nothing to do with … . All these new companies are adding jobs. ” He added, sarcastically, that “since January 20, the Washington Wizards have one of the best records in the NBA, including they beat the Golden State Warriors tonight. Must have been Trump. ” Trump started his speech on Tuesday night reminding the nation of Black History Month and condemning the recent spate of attacks: Tonight, as we mark the conclusion of our celebration of Black History Month, we are reminded of our Nation’s path toward civil rights and the work that still remains. Recent threats targeting Jewish Community Centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a Nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms. Each American generation passes the torch of truth, liberty and justice — in an unbroken chain all the way down to the present. That torch is now in our hands. And we will use it to light up the world. I am here tonight to deliver a message of unity and strength, and it is a message deeply delivered from my heart. In his interview with MSNBC, Perez continued, “Then you move on to immigrant baiting. You know, that immigrant baiting is like the salt and pepper on the table of that Trump administration. ” He said, “And then you close it up with a bunch of promises that you’ll never keep. And frankly, some of the promises, I’m glad they can’t keep, because the Affordable Care Act is a lifesaver. It’s not a job killer. ” Ellison took the opportunity to recruit for the Democratic Party. “This is a good time to get with the Democratic Party,” “We have a level of organization, unity, commitment and passion that, I think, is going to serve the American people very well. ” Perez added: “Our most important area of agreement, and we have many, is that we need to redefine the mission of the Democratic Party. ” Follow Adelle Nazarian on Twitter and Periscope @AdelleNaz | 0fake |
Clinton allies urge campaign to torch Trump | The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all. | 0fake |
Trump says he would consider alliance with Russia over Islamic State | WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (Reuters) - Republican nominee Donald Trump said on Monday that if elected U.S. president he would weigh an alliance with Russia against Islamic State militants but rejected any suggestion Russian President Vladimir Putin might be trying to help him win. Speaking at a rally in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Trump dismissed any suggestion that Putin’s intelligence services might have had a hand in hacking the Democratic National Committee’s email system. Emails leaked last week disclosed that some party officials had been in favor of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic presidential nomination over U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and sought ways to thwart Sanders. The uproar over the WikiLeaks revelations prompted Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign as DNC chairwoman, and Trump eagerly injected himself into the controversy. Trump dismissed a charge from Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook that Russian hackers might have stolen the emails and leaked them to embarrass Democrats and help Trump defeat Clinton in the Nov. 8 election. “I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention here, and I think that’s disturbing,” Mook told CNN’s “State of the Union.” Trump dismissed what he called “one of the weirdest conspiracy theories” he said he had heard. He said he had never met Putin. But over the course of his year-long campaign, Trump has praised the Russian leader and one of his top foreign policy advisers, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, had dinner with Putin last December. “When you think about it, wouldn’t it be nice if we got along with Russia?” Trump said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we got together with Russia and knocked the hell out of ISIS?” he added, using another name for Islamic State. As it happens, skeptics in the U.S. government, European allies in the anti-Islamic State coalition and the main Syrian opposition, distrustful of Russia’s intentions, are questioning Secretary of State John Kerry’s own latest proposal for closer U.S.-Russian cooperation against militant groups in Syria. Trump, kicking off a three-day campaign swing with his vice presidential running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, returned to his freewheeling style after giving a scripted speech on Thursday accepting the Republican presidential nomination. During an earlier event in Roanoke, Virginia, Trump labeled Clinton “low-energy,” the same characterization he lobbed at Republican rival Jeb Bush; attacked her running mate, U.S. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia; and complained about the air conditioning in the hotel ballroom where he spoke. “I think the ballroom and the people who own this hotel ought to be ashamed of themselves,” Trump said. Trump made light of Democratic disunity as party loyalists gathered in Philadelphia on Monday to anoint Clinton as their nominee this week, after a week in which Republicans struggled to unite behind Trump at their convention in Cleveland. Trump waved away Republican disunity as essentially isolated pockets of resistance and made an apparent reference to U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who was booed in Cleveland when he would not endorse Trump after losing to him in a bitter primary race. “We had a couple people who probably destroyed their career, but who knows,” Trump said. “Look what’s going on in Philadelphia. ... We had no riots, no nothing. It was unbelievable. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.” On Twitter, Trump added, “Wow, the Republican Convention went so smoothly compared to the Dems total mess.” | 0fake |
Rodrigo Duterte Says Donald Trump Endorses His Violent Antidrug Campaign - The New York Times | MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines said on Saturday that Donald J. Trump had endorsed his brutal antidrug campaign, telling Mr. Duterte that the Philippines was conducting it “the right way. ” Mr. Duterte, who spoke with Mr. Trump by telephone on Friday, said Mr. Trump was “quite sensitive” to “our worry about drugs. ” “He wishes me well, too, in my campaign, and he said that, well, we are doing it as a sovereign nation, the right way,” Mr. Duterte said. There was no immediate response from Mr. Trump to Mr. Duterte’s description of the phone call, and his transition team could not be reached for comment. Since his election last month, Mr. Trump has held a series of unscripted calls with foreign leaders, several of which have broken radically from past American policies and diplomatic practice. A call on Friday with the president of Taiwan, Tsai appeared to be out of sync with four decades of United States policy toward China and prompted a Chinese call to the White House. Mr. Duterte has led a campaign against drug abuse in which he has encouraged the police and others to kill people they suspect of using or selling drugs. Since he took office in June, more than 2, 000 people have been killed by the police in what officers describe as drug raids, and the police say several hundred more have been killed by vigilantes. The program has been condemned by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and others for what rights organizations have characterized as extrajudicial killings. In rejecting such criticism from the United States this fall, Mr. Duterte called Mr. Obama a “son of a whore. ” In a summary of the phone call with Mr. Trump released by Mr. Duterte’s office on Saturday morning, Mr. Duterte said the two had spoken for just a few minutes but covered many topics, including the antidrug campaign. “I could sense a good rapport, an animated Trump,” Mr. Duterte said. “And he was wishing me success in my campaign against the drug problem. ” Mr. Duterte added: “He understood the way we are handling it, and I said that there’s nothing wrong in protecting a country. It was a bit very encouraging in the sense that I supposed that what he really wanted to say was that we would be the last to interfere in the affairs of your own country. ” Mr. Duterte, who has said he was seeking “a separation” from the United States, a longtime ally, and has threatened to bar American troops from his country, also said, “We assured him of our ties with America. ” He did not elaborate on that comment. Mr. Duterte also said that Mr. Trump had invited him to visit New York and Washington, and that Mr. Trump said he wanted to attend the summit meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations next year in the Philippines. Mr. Duterte has often been compared to Mr. Trump for his blunt speech and populist positions. “I appreciate the response that I got from Trump, and I would like to wish him success,” Mr. Duterte said. “He will be a good president for the United States of America. ” | 0fake |
House Committee Uncovers DAMNING BOMBSHELL – Russia PAID Michael Flynn To Appear With Putin | It s easy to think the whole brouhaha with Michael Flynn was over the moment he was forced from his post as Trump s national security adviser, but it s not. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been investigating Flynn and his connections with Russia, and they just found something incredibly damning.RT, a state-run news network in Russia, paid Flynn to attend a gala in Moscow with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, released records that include checks, invoices and emails showing that RT literally paid Flynn nearly $34,000 to attend the function.And not too long afterward, he was busy advising Trump and his campaign in a voluntary capacity. Not only was he paid a speaking fee at the gala, but his company, Leading Authorities, received $11,250 from that gala. All told, Flynn was paid $56,250 to appear with Putin and do work for two Russian firms, all while he was acting in an advisory capacity with Donald Trump.Some of that involved a Russian company, Kaspersky Lab, which is a subsidiary of a Russian company that specializes in uncovering Western government spyware. In other words, evidence shows that he worked for a company that works against not just the U.S., but also against all our NATO allies. Kaspersky Lab claims it has no ties to any government, but is proud to collaborate with the authorities of many countries, in fighting against cybercrimes.Cybercrimes like hacking the DNC to help tilt our election to Trump s favor, maybe? If this isn t corruption by a foreign power, then what is? Democrats on the House Oversight Committee now want an additional investigation into these payments because the come from companies based in Russia.We already know Flynn was acting as a foreign agent in Turkey while working for Trump s campaign, and that he failed to disclose that until just recently. But now we see he was working with Russia, too. It s high time we learned just how deep this goes. It s not likely that Flynn was a solo actor here. The entire Trump administration must be thoroughly investigated we can t allow Flynn to serve as their scapegoat.Featured image by Andrew Harrer via Getty Images | 1real |
MUSLIM WOMAN BUSTED Buying Soda With Food Stamps For Her Store: “My Name Is F*ck America!” [Video] | 1real | |
Wow: Did The Palins Lie About When Bristol’s Baby Was Born To Cover Up The Truth? (IMAGES) | Conspiracy theories aren t something I take seriously very often. The type of people who engage in conspiracy theories spend their time on Alex Jones site talking about false flags and how mass shootings are a hoax. Fourteen years later, and they just can t admit that steel does in fact bend and melt and buildings fall down when you crash big planes into them.To be grouped with the crazies is inconceivable, but every so often something comes along that seems far-fetched until you look closely. This particular theory is brought to you by the Blogspot Right Wing Crooks, who seem to have figured out how and why Bristol Palin s baby was born in November and not December like she claims.The entire story goes into great detail about individual Instagram, Facebook and Twitter posts, friends of the family and the supposed father and former fiance brought in to make it all neat and clean. In a nutshell, the theory is that Bristol Palin was impregnated in or around the time she was in Las Vegas last year complaining about the night that ruined her life a month before a Medal of Honor winner mysteriously appears to sweep her off her feet, propose and become an immediate fixture in all aspects of her public, private and online life.The timeline begins on Palin s Instagram on Valentines Day. A selfie of her and an Alaskan prostitute adult industry worker dressed to impress for a night on the town appears with the caption The night before the worst mistake of my life. The picture is still there, but the caption, as reported by Right Wing Crooks, has been changed to #Vegas.If that was the night Bristol Palin was impregnated, a typical gestation period would bring her into early to mid-November for a due date. The fist picture of Bristol with her new daughter, Sailor, appeared on Christmas Eve:The Palins are notorious attention seekers. Up to this point, there was no mention of babies or deliveries or hospitals. All of a sudden, bam. There s Bristol, looking content with her daughter.Sarah hadn t posted at all either, but when she did there was a bit of a problem. When you post to Facebook your location is logged. Sarah Palin was somehow holding and loving on her brand new granddaughter in a Hospital in Parker, Alaska but posting to Facebook from New Orleans. Here is the actual post:https://www.facebook.com/sarahpalin/posts/10153836923483588Things got really fishy when a picture of Bristol and her little girl showed a piece of tape with an IV date on it. After enhancing, both Right Wing Crooks and Winning Democrats are convinced that the date most likely reads 11/4/15. November 4th, which by the Vegas pregnancy theory puts Sailor at exactly where she s supposed to be gestation-wise.Here are the pictures with enhancements:Right Wing CrooksThe theory is simple. To keep Bristol from looking like she got knocked up during a one night stand, a plan was formulated to move the birth. Bristol took pictures along the way, posting them a month or two in advance. If yopu check out her Instagram account, you ll see that at 32 weeks (according to her) pregnant she looked pretty along:32 weeks with my babe girl ? A photo posted by Bristol Palin (@bsmp2) on Oct 29, 2015 at 10:36pm PDTThat from October 29th to this on Thanksgiving, an entire month later? And what s with the Christmas tree? It s almost like the whole thing is just staged:Happy Thanksgiving ? .. thankful for my babies A photo posted by Bristol Palin (@bsmp2) on Nov 26, 2015 at 12:03pm PSTHow far-fetched is it really? You would simply have to consider what Sarah and the Palins would do to keep Bristol safe from the career (doing whatever it is she does) ending publicity of a one-night stand Vegas baby. Already her position as an abstinence counselor makes absolutely no sense, so that s kind of a wash, but with the Duggaresque hypocrisy of Bristol being a faith blogger on Patheos and possibly a future where are they now Dancing With The Stars special guest, the concept of changing a couple of months for a clean(er) slate may have been just that appealing.Did she fake the birth of her daughter nearly two months after it happened? According to Right Wing Crooks there are a slew of other tidbits that add to their theory:That is all admittedly very compelling stuff. It is also very circumstantial. If it turns out to be true it will go down as a not-so-well-planned scandal from America s first family of fools. If it s not true, well shame on the Palins for having an existence that makes it seem plausible.Featured image via Instagram | 1real |
We are fake news…or are we? | In an elaborate game of double-bluff respectable news outlets, with flour-based products in their name, have been forced to defend well-researched headlines like – Robert Mugabe declares himself the new Doctor Who and Ventnor man fails to acknowledge acknowledgement of traffic courtesy . Bizarrely some skeptical folk still question the facts behind – Universe in chaos as Pavlov’s dogs may or may not attack Schrödinger’s cat .
The issues with ‘fake news’ spreading on social media have been solved according to Facebook: ‘We know everyone has been very concerned about fake news stories spreading, especially stories that exaggerate the number of murders committed by presidential candidates, but I can assure you we’ve fixed the problem now, don’t worry about it any more and move on with your lives. Please share this news with all your friends in case anyone tries to spread a story that it’s still a problem’. Bigglesworth | 1real |
A Long Road to the Epigenome | 29 UTC The link between DNA and disease is by now obvious. But it's also obscure. A zillion moving parts go into disorders like cancer and Alzheimer's disease, and only a comparative few are known for sure. Researchers believe something called the Epigenome Roadmap a cascade of two dozen papers published last year is gradually changing that. The Roadmap is a catalog of the millions of epigenetic switches that control gene action. It's pretty clear that epigenetics is key to really understanding disease as well as normal human traits. Eventually, that is; nailing down those connections is going to take time. For one thing, disease mutations and other DNA variations, it turns out, are hardly ever where you would expect them to be: in genes that make the proteins that run the show. Ninety percent of disease-related mutations are in the regions of DNA that lie outside those genes, the regulatory regions that control protein-coding gene action. The working hypothesis is that variation in disease susceptibility - or any other trait - depends mostly on subtle differences in the expression of protein-coding genes, which is under epigenetic control. Mutations associated with Alzheimer's disease, in a surprising and immediately practical finding among those new papers, turned out to be active not so much in brain cells, where you might expect activity. Instead, they altered epigenomic activity in cells of the immune system. "Our results suggest that repression of neural pathways does not represent genetic predisposition, even though it is a hallmark of Alzheimer's," senior author Li-Huei Tsai of MIT said in a statement. "Instead, it may occur as a consequence of environmental factors and aging , and result from interactions with the altered immune pathways." This was work done in mice, so we don't know for sure that it applies to humans. But it gives scientists a hopeful new target for figuring out how to prevent and treat this devastating disease, which every day grows more urgent in our aging populations. Epigenome researchers also reported advances in asthma and allergy research. They identified more than two dozen genes that regulate IgE, the antibody that provokes allergic reactions. In some people, epigenetic mechanisms interfere with shutting down those genes at the right time. The result is the overproduction of IgE, which triggers asthma attacks. Miriam Moffatt, a senior investigator on the project, said in a statement, "The genes we identified represent new potential drug targets for allergic diseases as well as biomarkers that may predict which patients will respond to existing expensive therapies." What is the epigenome? But what is the epigenome anyway? The epigenome is the reason that all your body cells, which started out identical when your mother's fertilized egg began splitting into daughter cells, were able to turn themselves into specialists: brain, liver, heart, skin, etc. The epigenome is the reason identical twins, which have identical genomes, are always different from each other (sometimes very different), grow more different as they age, and often have different diseases. The epigenome is a reason that we humans are utterly unlike chimpanzees, even though our DNA differs very little. The simplest way to think about the epigenome is that it's all about the biochemical switches that turn genes on and off in particular cells at particular times of life. Epigenetics seeks to explain how the environment—what you eat, how your parents treated you, all of your life events and possibly even your ancestors' life events—has made you into you. Those biochemical switches are how nurture shapes nature. Explaining the relationship of the genome and the epigenome at a press conference announcing the papers (all published in Nature and associated journals), study coauthor Manolis Kellis of MIT said, "All our cells have a copy of the same book [the genome], but they're all reading different chapters , bookmarking different pages, and highlighting different paragraphs and words." The bookmarks Kellis spoke of are biochemical mechanisms that change the behavior of genetic material without changing any DNA sequences. The two best known and most studied of these mechanisms are DNA methylation and histone modification. Histones are the proteins DNA is wrapped tightly around. Histone modifications usually involve attachment of an acetyl group (CH3CO.) Acetylation helps tightly coiled DNA unwind a bit, making genes easier to get to and turn on. In methylation, methyl groups (CH3) stick to DNA and usually suppress gene expression. That's what was going on in the asthma study described above. Among asthma patients, the researchers found low methylation at 36 places in 34 genes. Low methylation meant the genes didn't get turned off. Hence overproduction of IgE antibodies that trigger asthma attacks. For the National Institutes of Health's Roadmap Epigenomics Program, hundreds of scientists around the world studied epigenetic events in more than 100 types of body tissues from healthy adults, fetal cells, and stem cells, assembling reference epigenomes for each one. These epigenetic patterns characteristic of each tissue can be compared to other samples, including tissue from people with dozens of diseases. Examples: type 1 diabetes, Crohn's disease, high blood pressure, inflammatory bowel disease and Alzheimer's disease. Comparisons permit scientists to see epigenetic abnormalities in particular cell types. Naysaying and cautions Not everybody thinks the epigenome project is awesome. An anonymous scientist blogging at Homolog.us - Bioinformatics complained, " Nothing managed to derail this expensive boondoggle over the last four years, including powerful critics of the scientific principle behind it, fraud allegation against the leader, public humiliation of its sister project ENCODE, NIH cost-cutting and protest of the scientists, and so on." As for the idea that diet, toxic exposures, parental behavior, and other lifestyle factors determine health, "not a single claim is backed by any science. We have gone through many of the relevant studies, and they were often based on poor-quality association studies of 30 or 40 persons and no further study of causal mechanism." That fulmination is a minority view, and it's not accurate to claim that all epigenetics studies are weak. But it is certainly the case that, despite the hoopla surrounding these papers, realizing gains to human health from research on the epigenome is a long way away. These studies need to be replicated and, in the case of studies done on animals, replicated in humans. But to date, epigenetics findings have been difficult to repeat . Also, epigenetic activity varies throughout the lifespan, and so epigenetic investigations tied to the aging process will be required. Studies of 1000 additional cell type epigenomes are being planned. Kellis, a leader of the Epigenome Roadmap Consortium roundly savaged at Homolog.us, certainly, can be counted a fan of epigenome research. But even his forecast, which is presumably optimistic, predicts that figuring out how one person's epigenome differs from another will take the next decade. Tabitha M. Powledge is a long-time science journalist and a contributing columnist for the Genetic Literacy Project. She also writes On Science Blogs for the PLOS Blogs Network. Follow her @tamfecit. | 1real |
BOOM! TRUMP Announces CHRISTIAN Syrians Applying For Refugee Status In U.S. Will Be Given Priority [VIDEO] | Though they are officially non-profit organizations, Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, and several other Christian organizations are profiting from lucrative contracts with the federal government to resettle refugees in the United States.Of the 100,000 refugees resettled in the United States in 2014 under the Refugee Resettlement program, an estimated 40 percent were Muslims. BreitbartAs of August 29, 2016, 224 new Syrian refugee arrivals have been reported. That lifts the total this fiscal year to 10,126, of whom 52 or 0.51 percent are Christians; and 9,945 or 98.2 percent, are Sunni Muslims.The Obama administration s goal was to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees in the fiscal year.The number of Christians among the 10,000 was less than half of one percent.Of the 9,902 before Monday s arrivals, just 47 (0.47 percent) are Christians, according to State Department Refugee Processing Center data.The vast majority of the Syrian refugees permitted to resettle in the United States are Sunni Muslims 9,726 of the 9,902, or 98.2 percent. Another 20 are Shi a Muslims, and a further 85 are identified in the data simply as Muslims. CNS NewsIn an exclusive interview President Donald Trump was asked by David Brody of Christian Broadcasting News if he considers it a priority to bring persecuted Christians over to the US from Syria.Trump responded, You know, if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very, very tough to get in to. If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair, everybody was persecuted in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians, and I thought it was very,very unfair, so we are going to help them. Watch Trump s interview with CBN here: Reuters | 1real |
[Video] OBAMA TAKES ADVANTAGE Of Opportunity To Speak In Front Of Communists in Panama About Racist America: ‘There Are Dark Chapters in Our Own History’ | We have not observed the principles and ideals upon which this country was founded. Obama makes sure to let everyone know Americans never makes a claim about being perfect, we do make a claim about being open to change.' We re pretty sure every communist and socialist in the room would approve of Obama s version of change. h/t red flag news | 1real |
Pope decries 'irrational' attitude towards nuclear weapons | ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (Reuters) - Pope Francis on Saturday urged world leaders to turn back from the brink of possible human annihilation, suggesting that some of them had an irrational attitude towards nuclear weapons. The pope made his comments to reporters aboard the plane taking him back to Rome from a trip to Myanmar and Bangladesh, which was dominated by the crisis of Rohingya refugees affecting both countries. In a speech last month, the pope suggested that he was ready to officially harden the decades-old Church teaching that possessing nuclear weapons as a deterrence was morally acceptable as long as the ultimate goal was their elimination. In that speech on Nov. 10, Francis said even the mere possession of nuclear weapons should now be condemned because there appeared to be little or no intention by world leaders to reduce their numbers. Aboard the plane, he was asked what had prompted him to consider changing the official Church position and specifically, what he felt about the war of words between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. What has changed is the irrationality (of the attitude toward nuclear weapons), Francis said. Today we are at the limit, he said. It can be debated but it is my opinion, my conviction, that we have reached the limit of the (moral) licitness of having and using nuclear weapons, he said. Why? Because today, with such a sophisticated nuclear arsenal, we risk the destruction of humanity or at least a great part of humanity, he said. The pope has in the past suggested that a third nation should try to negotiate a deal between the United States and North Korea and had urged both sides to cool down the rhetoric and stop trading insults. We are at the limit, and because we are at the limit, I ask myself this question ... Today, is it licit to keep nuclear arsenals as they are, or today, in order to save creation, to save humanity, is it not necessary to turn back? South Korea said on Friday that North Korea s latest missile test puts Washington within range, but Pyongyang still needs to prove it has mastered critical missile technology, such as re-entry, terminal stage guidance and warhead activation. The test prompted a warning from the United States that North Korea s leadership would be utterly destroyed if war were to break out, a statement that drew sharp criticism from Russia. | 0fake |
Battered by cyclone, Philippines suffers flooding, landslides | MANILA (Reuters) - A cyclone dumped heavy rains in the Philippine capital, Manila, and nearby provinces on Tuesday, causing widespread flooding and landslides in some areas that killed at least two people, the national disaster agency said. Financial markets, government offices and schools were closed and port operations in some provinces were suspended, it said. Several flights were canceled. The weather bureau said cyclone Maring, which was packing winds of up to 60 kilometers per hour (37 mph), made landfall in the morning over Mauban municipality in the eastern province of Quezon. Romina Marasigan, a spokeswoman for the national disaster agency, said two teenaged brothers died from a landslide in Taytay, Rizal, 20 kilometers (12.43 miles) from Manila. Some residents unfortunately did not heed the advice of local officials to evacuate to safer grounds, she said in a media briefing. Marasigan warned of more flashfloods and landslides as rains were expected to continue later in the day, before the cyclone moves back over the sea early on Wednesday. Twenty-two passengers were rescued from a bus stuck in floodwaters in Pitogo town in Quezon, she said. Local officials ordered the evacuation of residents in some towns under floodwaters in Quezon, Laguna, Rizal and Batangas provinces, she said. The weather bureau said it was also keeping an eye on typhoon Talim which was packing winds of up to 120 kph (75 mph), spotted moving toward the country s northern tip and to Taiwan. | 0fake |
Clinton hires Latino as voter outreach deputy | NEW YORK (Reuters) - As she looks ahead to the November White House election, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has hired the leader of a group that seeks to built political power among Latinos to help mobilize key voting communities. Cristobal Alex, president of the non-partisan Latino Victory Project, will be the Clinton campaign’s new deputy director of voter outreach and mobilization, starting later this month, an aide said. Alex will work under Addisu Demissie, the national voter outreach and mobilization director. Minority voters have been major blocs for Clinton as she has built a commanding lead over Senator Bernie Sanders, her rival for the Democratic nomination, and they could prove a crucial factor in the general election. Among those minority voters are Latinos, a fast-growing group that, many activists say, has recently seen a spike in voter registration. Many activists point to presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump as the spur for those registrations. Seeking to portray himself as tough on illegal immigration, Trump has angered Latinos by saying Mexico is sending rapists and drug dealers over the border, and pledging to build a border wall that he says he will make Mexico pay for. Most recently, he has drawn criticism, including from senior Republicans, for saying a Mexican-American federal judge overseeing lawsuits involving fraud allegations against Trump University cannot do his job properly because of his Mexican heritage. In contrast, both Clinton and Sanders have actively wooed Latino voters, releasing ads in Spanish and promising to hire Latinos to key cabinet positions. But one complication when courting these voters is the difficulty in polling multi-lingual, multi-cultural communities. “Throughout the election cycle we know that we are going to see a lot of really bad Latino polling,” said Matt Barreto, co-founder of research firm Latino Decisions and pollster for the Clinton campaign for Latino issues. Barreto said that he has used “large sample surveys of Latino voters” for the campaign. “We are very confident that the Clinton campaign is taking all the necessary steps to gather the most accurate data possible on Latinos voters,” he added. Clinton added to her delegate lead Sunday, when she won Puerto Rico’s primary. Primaries on Tuesday, when Clinton hopes to wrap up the nomination, include delegate-rich California, with a diverse population including Latinos, African Americans and Asian Americans. Latino activists have warned Democrats that merely attacking Trump is not enough to win their votes, pressing for engagement on a range of issues. | 0fake |
As China’s Growth Slows, Banks Feel the Strain of Bad Debt - The New York Times | HONG KONG — For Chinese banks, the decision to lend to companies like Bohai Steel was for years a . Lenders took heart from its state backing, which appeared as solid as the millions of tons of steel pipes that rolled off its production lines each year. That ironclad image is now tarnished. Plunging demand and a worsening glut in production capacity have left Bohai Steel struggling to repay as much as $30 billion in debt. Worried creditors — more than 100 of them — are locked in negotiations with the company and local officials. China’s bad loans are on the rise, as companies that borrowed heavily in headier times struggle against a slowing Chinese economy. Underscoring the slowdown, China said on Friday that growth in the first three months of this year fell to 6. 7 percent, a low. Growth might have been even slower, had China not revved up lending during the quarter — a solution that could add to debt problems later on. The stakes are high for banks and for the Communist Party, which ultimately controls wide swaths of China’s economy. China’s total local currency loans have more than tripled since the start of 2009, to 98. 6 trillion renminbi, or about $15 trillion, at the end of March, according to official Chinese figures from CEIC, a data provider. That is equal to 144 percent of China’s gross domestic product in the 12 months to the end of March — relatively high for China’s level of development, and still rising. In January, Goldman Sachs said other countries that experienced similar debt faced either financial crises or prolonged slowdowns. Defaults tend not to pose a risk to individual Chinese banks because the government is perceived as standing behind them. But a chain of defaults could lead to a pullback in lending that could crimp China’s economic output, said Anne a of J Capital Research. “Companies that default are not individually all that important,” she said. “But if you allow them to default categorically, then you are sending a message that type of debt can default, and people stop lending. ” Profit growth at China’s biggest banks stalled in the first three months of the years as bad loans mounted. Bad loans as a share of their total portfolio remains low, at less than 2. 5 percent, but economists believe the figure understates the problem because banks often extend the payment dates for problem debt. Bohai Steel has not disclosed details of its debt, and it is unclear which banks might be affected. But it regularly did business with China’s biggest banks, as well as local and regional banking groups also tied to the state. Since the beginning of this year, company executives have lobbied for more support from banks, as slowing growth and a property slump have reduced China’s demand for steel. In January it met with officials from China Bohai Bank, a lender that like Bohai Steel counts the city of Tianjin as a major shareholder. At the meeting, according to a statement from Bohai Steel, Yan Zesheng, general manager of Bohai Steel Group, said he hoped the bank would “continue to offer robust financial support” to the company. Over the years, the company stressed its ties to lenders including the Bank of China, Industrial Bank and Citic Bank, among others, according to statements on its website. In 2013, the company said, it received a roughly $4. 6 billion line of credit from Bank of China. A recent article in Caixin, a respected Chinese financial news outlet, said Bohai Steel’s 105 creditors included at least three local banks in Tianjin and Beijing that were each owed more than 10 billion renminbi. One of those lenders identified by Caixin, the Bank of Tianjin, raised nearly $1 billion in a Hong Kong public offering last month. The bank’s listing document did not mention Bohai Steel but said that nonperforming corporate loans — or loans that had gone sour — rose 46 percent between the end of 2014 and September of 2015, the most recent data available. It cited the Chinese economy and problems in the steel industry. Neither Bohai Steel nor the banks responded to requests for comment. Xu Zhongbo, a professor of metallurgy at the University of Science and Technology in Beijing, described the situation at Bohai Steel as one where “the banks are now hijacked by the company, and it will take magic to bring the company back. ” “Economically, it’s really hard to get the company back to life, but politically the government needs to support it,” Mr. Xu added. Other recent examples of corporate defaults in China offer, perhaps, less room for confidence. Dongbei Special Steel Group, based in the northeastern port city of Dalian, has defaulted on its bonds multiple times since its chairman, Yang Hua, was found hanged in his home last month. China Railway Materials, a supplier of construction materials to the railroad industry, became one of the first companies that is directly owned by the central government to run into debt trouble. The company suspended trading this month on more than $2 billion worth of bonds and said it would seek to restructure its debt. For China’s banking system, the coming months are almost certain to bring more defaults, bankruptcies and other debt problems, according to economists. “The low default rates that we have seen in recent years are perhaps too good to be true,” said Tao Wang, the of Asia Economics at UBS. “The rise is natural considering the economic circumstances,” Ms. Wang said. The Bohai Steel case also demonstrates how China’s mountains of corporate debt extend beyond just traditional bank loans. One of the company’s main subsidiaries, Tianjin Steel, also sought to raise money from ordinary investors. Tianjin Steel sought to raise as much as $100 million in investments known in China as trust products, according to a review of the marketing materials for those investments. Trust products, which are often used by industries that have a hard time getting funding, are lightly regulated and difficult to track. National Trust, a trust company that issued some of these investment products on behalf of the steel maker, has said that some of the products have run into problems. | 0fake |
SPINELESS GOP PROVES MAJORITY Means Nothing …Senator Schumer Brags About Not Funding Border Wall: “Budget Deal Reflects Democrats’ Principles” | Wow! Republicans had a chance to stand up to the Democrats and fight for the border wall, as well as other issues that got President Trump and many Republican members of Congress elected. The swamp monsters first attempt at backing our president and his efforts to make America Great Again however, proved to be an epic failure. Meanwhile, Democrats who are the minority party in both the House and Senate are gloating over the power they still wield over our spineless leadership in the GOP Top Capitol Hill negotiators reached an agreement on a huge $1 trillion-plus spending bill that avoids a government shutdown, aides said on Sunday.The deal means virtually all the day-to-day-operations of the federal government will be funded until September.It was a victory for Trump, who got an extra $15billion to strengthen the military and another $1.5billion to enhance border security.However, he lost out on the funding he needed for the US-Mexico-border wall, a promise that was one of the cornerstones of his presidential campaign.Details of the agreement were expected to be made public Sunday night, said aides to lawmakers involved in weeks of negotiations. The House and Senate had until midnight Friday to pass a measure to avert a government shutdown. Daily Mail White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said earlier in April that the shutdown fight was the first real test of whether or not the Democrats specifically in the Senate are interested in negotiating, interested in compromising. The White House last week dropped its demand for immediate funding for the border wall after Democrats said it would result in a government shutdown because they would not vote for any bill that included it. The White House also dropped its threat to stop paying federal subsidies to insurance companies that offer lower-cost coverage to low-income Americans. Trump had threatened to stop paying the subsidies to force Democrats to support legislation to replace the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.Here s a look at the trillion dollar budget that was passed by Republican majority Congress and Democrat minority. We ve highlighted budget items where Democrats and RINO s in Congress came together to vote against promises President Trump made to voters who elected him. Once those two major stumbling blocks to a deal were removed, negotiators had just a few remaining issues to resolve over the weekend.While Republicans hold majorities in the House and Senate, the GOP needs Democratic votes in both chambers to pass the funding bill. In the closely divided Senate, the GOP has a slim majority of 52 seats in a chamber where 60 votes are required to pass the legislation. In the House, Republican leaders need help from Democrats because some conservatives will oppose any bill that increases spending.Democrats used that leverage to get concessions from the White House on the border wall and Obamacare while also getting extra money for medical research and other domestic programs. At the same time, Democrats agreed to beef up defense and border security, allowing the White House to claim at least a partial victory. USA Today | 1real |
BREAKING: HILLARY CAMP Looking To Challenge Vote…Suspects “Irregularities” In WI, MI And PA | Reports from several sources revealed on November 22 that Clinton campaign chief John Podesta was taking meetings with a group claiming it had discovered irregularities in several counties of some of the states that Trump won.Apparently a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers met with Podesta to express their belief that they found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked, according to New York magazine.In order to overturn the election, these challenges would have to succeed in multiple counties and multiple states all at the same time to swing the Electoral College to Clinton, so it certainly seems like a desperate long shot.It is such a long shot that even the left s favorite numbers guru, Nate Silver, essentially dismissed the effort.To follow: some *very* quick analysis which suggests the claim here of rigged results in Wisconsin is probably BS: https://t.co/SYlE76bnmQ Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 23, 2016 | 1real |
Wil Wheaton Just RAZED Trump’s Racist Supporters For Being Thin-Skinned Bullies (TWEETS) | Have you noticed that Donald Trump s supporters are a bunch of thin-skinned bullies? Star Trek and Big Bang Theory actor Wil Wheaton has.Sure, Trump fans are perfectly fine with spending eight years questioning Barack Obama s birthplace and calling him a n*gger, using words lime fag and queer and Untermenschen (we can t forget the alt-right here), and generally existing as hate-filled garbage fountains. But whenever you point out that they might be a little bit racist when they call the President a monkey, suddenly you re the bigot.Wheaton regularly hammers Trump and his inbred fans on Twitter and he has been doing a lot of that lately:Nazi punks fuck off. pic.twitter.com/ATJPbZyBmP Wil Wheaton (@wilw) November 22, 2016I'll just hold my breath while I wait for principled conservatives to take a stand against this. _( )_/ https://t.co/1tmGngsNA3 Wil Wheaton (@wilw) November 22, 2016Don't worry, Trump voters! The racism, homophobia, misogyny, bigotry, and authoritarianism you supported is still going strong! https://t.co/8p77ufWoJ0 Wil Wheaton (@wilw) November 22, 2016Unsurprisingly, The Donald s vapid, meth-addled supporters jumped yet again at the opportunity to attack. Unfortunately for them, they re dealing with Wil F*cking Wheaton:Stupidsphere: *proudly votes for a racist*Me: You voted for a racist.Stupidsphere: OMG stop being so hateful and divisive! Wil Wheaton (@wilw) November 23, 2016This, as always, prompted the typical you voted for a criminal response, but Mr. F*cking Wheaton wasn t having any of that:No, I voted for Hillary Clinton. https://t.co/qxVuCiPLk5 Wil Wheaton (@wilw) November 23, 2016Bravo, Wil. Bravo.If you go a single day without doing something that makes Trump or his fans fly off the handle, you need to try harder. The next four years are going to be rough, but it is our responsibility to resist this fascist movement at every turn if you see a Nazi, for instance, say Nazi. Not alt-right and not (looking at you here, mainstream media) economically anxious voters. Trump s fans are one of two groups:That s it. Always remember that, and constantly remind yourself that this is not normal.Featured image via screengrab | 1real |
First Day of Syria Peace Talks Quickly Descends Into Quarreling - The New York Times | ASTANA, Kazakhstan — The first meeting between Syrian rebel fighters and government officials in nearly six years of civil war ended abruptly on Monday when diplomatic talks quickly devolved into harsh words and competing accusations. The new round of talks arranged by Russia and Turkey in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, was meant to showcase Moscow’s increasingly dominant role in the diplomacy and its new understanding with the Turkish government, a leading sponsor of the rebels. But the Syrian delegations almost immediately began arguing and refused to negotiate directly. Mohammad of the Army of Islam, in his opening statement, labeled the government “a bloody despotic regime” backed by “vengeful sectarian militias,” and called for it to release what he said were 13, 000 women being held as political prisoners and to end starvation sieges. That led to a heated exchange around a large circular table that forced Kazakh officials to call for calm, several participants said. The lead government negotiator, Bashar speaking to reporters after the opening session, responded by calling the opposition delegation “armed terrorist groups,” and accused them of “impertinent” and “provocative” behavior. The tension demonstrated the challenges that remain for Russia, the Syrian government’s most powerful backer, as the Russian government tries to show its approach can accomplish more than the largely fruitless efforts led in past years by the United States and the United Nations. Expectations for progress had been low. Many diplomats and analysts say the more meaningful talks are those that have been held in recent months, largely in secret, among Russia, Turkey and Iran. The meeting in Astana, meant to send the message that Russia would seek to resolve the conflict in its sphere of influence, was markedly different from the United talks that have taken place in recent winters in Geneva. Delegates crisscrossed the towering atrium of the Rixos Hotel in the remote Kazakh capital built 20 years ago on the orders of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former Communist boss who has been the country’s president since it became independent with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He has a reputation as a pragmatic strongman and enjoys good relations with Russia and Turkey. Palm trees planted indoors belied the subzero temperatures and blowing snow outside, as a duo wearing evening gowns played “Strangers in the Night” and the theme from “Titanic. ” Western diplomats, largely sidelined, huddled in the hotel’s Irish pub, and the United States ambassador to Kazakhstan, who was invited over Iran’s objections and attended only as an observer, avoided reporters. When the Americans had participated in previous rounds of talks in Geneva, the meetings took place at the Palace of Nations, one of the stolid lakeside edifices built in the first half of the 20th century that have housed the United Nations since it was formed after World War II. Those buildings symbolized a postwar order that tried to institutionalize human rights and the laws of war, an order associated with American leadership — or domination — amid the tensions of the Cold War. Now, the role of the United States in Syria and across the Middle East is widely seen as having receded under former President Barack Obama, and its future remains uncertain. Mr. Obama, while backing some rebel groups, resisted deeper American involvement in the Syrian conflict, ceding the leading role to Russia. His successor, President Trump, has signaled broad approval of Russian leadership and policies and sent mixed messages on Syria. Officially, all sides in the Syrian conflict describe the goal of the talks in Astana as reaffirming a tenuous in order to revive the Geneva talks. The started in December and known formally as a cessation of hostilities, is largely ignored in many parts of the country and excludes jihadist groups, including the Levant Conquest Front and the Islamic State. A strengthening of the cessation across Syria, the United Nations envoy Staffan de Mistura said Monday, could pave the way for discussion of more substantive political issues at talks scheduled for February in Geneva. The United Nations initially resisted anything more than an observer role in the talks in Astana, but Mr. de Mistura at the last minute agreed to act as a mediator and was shuttling between the delegations who were in separate rooms. Western diplomats were also watching warily to see whether the talks in Astana could be a Russian effort to ultimately replace the Geneva discussions, which the Russian government has criticized. The Syrian government and the Russians have long argued that the Geneva framework, calling for a transitional body with full governing powers, does not require President Bashar to step down, while the opposition has insisted that it does. But as a practical matter, an increasing number of Western countries, including the United States, and even some of the rebels’ backers in the Middle East, like Turkey, have moved toward the Russian position. With Turkey mainly concerned about checking Kurdish militants within its borders and in Syria, and the United States focused on battling Islamic State militants, they have stopped pushing loudly for Mr. Assad to step down ahead of a settlement, instead signaling that they could accept some role for him in a transitional political arrangement. There were signs on Monday of Russian willingness to apply pressure on the Syrian government to keep the talks on track. The tense exchanges in Astana were followed by a Russian statement unusually critical of the Syrian government: The news agency RIA Novosti said monitors of a in Syria were “particularly concerned about sporadic violations of truce by the Syrian government forces” — echoing a complaint of rebels. Russia’s air campaign, which began in the fall of 2015, helped forces loyal to Mr. Assad drive rebels from their foothold late last year in half of the important city of Aleppo, an offensive criticized by the opposition for indiscriminate air and artillery attacks on civilians. Some rebel groups also shelled civilians in areas. Now one of the main battles is over Wadi Barada, a besieged area in the watershed that provides most of the drinking water for Damascus, the Syrian capital. Water supplies have been cut off for weeks, with the government blaming rebels and rebels blaming the government. Mr. Jaafari, the chief Syrian government negotiator and his country’s envoy to the United Nations, was incensed that Mr. Alloush, the rebel representative, had sounded the alarm over the plight of people in Wadi Barada. He said raising concerns about government attacks on Wadi Barada was tantamount to defending the Nusra Front, the former name of the Levant Conquest Front, which is excluded from the . Residents and rebel fighters in Wadi Barada say that some Nusra fighters are present, but they are a minority among other rebel groups and civilians. Mr. Jaafari said that rebel groups had “misunderstood” the terms of the adding, “We had guarantees from their guarantors that they would behave, but they did not behave. ” Fares Bayoush, a negotiator from an rebel group who defected from the Syrian Army, said, “He is the one who misunderstood. ” | 0fake |
Media Dig the Grave for Self-Government | You are here: Home / *Articles of the Bound* / Media Dig the Grave for Self-Government Media Dig the Grave for Self-Government November 9, 2016, 9:06 am by Cliff Kincaid Leave a Comment 0
By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media
At this time in history, organizations like Accuracy in Media are needed more than ever. The bias in the media has been exposed as a poison that undermines the public’s right to know and threatens the future of democratic self-government.
Our duty is to tell the American people what has happened to their once-great country.
In his letter to Donald J. Trump, New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick said, “Congratulations on a tremendous campaign. You have dealt with an unbelievable slanted and negative media and have come out beautifully.”
Belichick is not alone. Poll after poll has confirmed that the American people understand and recognize the problem of liberal media bias. In fact, the bias is just one aspect of the corruption that surrounds us and infects the government.
A Quinnipiac University poll found that 55 percent of voters told pollsters that Trump was right when he charged the media were biased against him. An Associated Press-GfK poll found that “Overall, 56 percent of likely voters say the media is biased against Trump…”
One cannot say with certainty that the media bias in the 2016 campaign was worse than, say, the elections of 2008 or 2012. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton enjoyed extraordinary media bias in their favor. One difference this time around is that the media bias has been extremely well-documented by the emails released from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. We have seen the evidence of how the collusion and collaboration occur. The evidence shows that “journalists” work secretly with one major political party, the Democrats, against conservatives and Republicans.
Needless to say, all of this is a blatant violation of the ethical standards that journalists profess to uphold.
The preamble of the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists says they “believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough. An ethical journalist acts with integrity.”
Instead, they have compromised their integrity in order to elect a woman whose record as a security risk should make her ineligible to seek the presidency.
But it’s worse than being unethical.
We see in one of the emails that Washington Post “journalist” Dana Milbank was in touch with the Democrats about crafting one of his anti-Trump columns.
This email proves that Milbank has been functioning as an operative of the Democratic Party. Of course, those of us who have watched his appearances at conservative events over the years had suspected what was going on. Now we have the proof of the actual collaboration. The email portrays help for Milbank as a “research request” from the columnist.
In other words, he couldn’t even write his own columns. He was lazy and liberal.
What this suggests is that Milbank’s function was to write (or put his name on) certain articles in order to divert attention away from scandals involving Democrats. In the latest case , in order to justify a Post black-out of Danney Williams’ charges that he was Bill Clinton’s black son, Milbank would cover his news conference and make fun of the event.
Such an attack serves two purposes. One, it justifies the Post’s decision not to cover the event as a legitimate news story. Second, it scares others away from covering it. How many conservatives in the media shied away from the story?
In his landmark book, The Corrupt Society , Robert Payne wrote, “There are many weapons that can be used to prevent the corruption of societies. The most powerful of these weapons are vigilance and knowledge. Hence the importance of the press, radio, and television to break through all imposed restrictions to discover how the government works, how it arrives at its decisions, how it manages its defenses, how it deals with traitors, especially the traitors in its midst.”
Payne dedicated his book to Richard Nixon. That was a joke, of course, because Payne found Nixon and his administration to be utterly corrupt. Nixon was forced from office for covering up a burglary into the offices of the opposition political party, the Democrats. Stories in The Washington Post sparked his resignation in the Watergate scandal. Victor Lasky’s book, It Didn’t Start With Watergate , proved that Democrats had done similar things.
In 2016, the Democrats nominated a candidate whose corruption made Nixon look like a choir boy. Nixon was ruthless, but he was determined to promote American interests in the world. He was critical in exposing State Department official Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy.
By contrast, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is one of those “traitors” Payne had warned about. Her illegal private server, full of classified information, was open to hacking by foreign governments. Her top aide, Huma Abedin, arranged for some of Mrs. Clinton’s emails to be stored on a computer shared with her pervert husband. The Clinton Foundation laundered money to her husband on behalf of foreign governments seeking favors from the State Department. And the FBI, at this late date, refuses to hold any of them responsible for undermining the security of our nation.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post facilitates this corruption in government by failing to expose it. And one Post “journalist” has been exposed as a lazy liberal pawn of those who were in charge of getting Mrs. Clinton into the White House.
The Christian existentialist philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote about the corruption in the church and how church and state had become one. In his critique of the Danish State Church, he said everyone knew privately that the system was rotten and corrupt but they would not say so publicly. “Just as one says that death has marked a man, so we recognize the symptoms which demand to be attacked. It is a battle against lies,” he said.
The problem we face today is not just media bias, but corruption in government and the media that runs so deep that it is uncomfortable for some to even talk about it publicly. Cliff Kincaid
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid . 0 | 1real |
NFL protests are protected speech but 'misguided': U.S. House speaker | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan on Thursday said National Football League players’ protests were constitutionally protected free speech, but their decision to kneel while the national anthem played at games was “misguided.” “Clearly people have a right to express themselves,” Ryan told reporters at a news conference. But doing so in front of the U.S. flag, “it looks like you’re protesting against the ideals of America... I think it’s misguided,” he added. | 0fake |
Germany calls for reconciliation, respect for constitution in Spain | BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany called for reconciliation and respect for the constitution in Spain after separatists triumphed in Catalan regional elections on Thursday in a result that threatens to prolong political tensions there. We hope that the current division in Catalan society can be overcome and that a common future can be found with all political forces in Spain, government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer told a regular government news conference on Friday. Any government will have to act on the basis of the rule of law and the Spanish constitution, she added. | 0fake |
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MAN Who Reformed Welfare And Balanced 4 Straight Budgets… | Boom! Share this everywhere, as Hillary aligns herself with her with the successes of her philandering, lying husband | 1real |
Islamist militants 'taken out of action' in Mali: French military | PARIS (Reuters) - The French military has targeted Islamist militants in northern Mali near the border with Algeria and took 15 militants out of action , an armed forces spokesman said on Thursday. It was not immediately clear if the operation had any connection to the pursuit of assailants who killed four U.S. soldiers in an ambush on Oct. 4 in western Niger, about 400 kilometres to the south. The French operation in the region of Abeibara took place overnight on Monday and targeted members of Islamist militant group Ansar Dine, the spokesman said. It involved French Mirage jets, attack helicopters and forces on the ground, he added without providing details on how many of the 15 militants targeted had been killed or wounded. France intervened in Mali to ward off an offensive by Islamist militants that began in 2012. Around 4,000 of its troops remain in the region as part of Operation Barkhane, where they work alongside around 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers in Mali. The U.S. deaths have drawn attention to counter-terror efforts in the arid Sahel region where an Islamist insurgency involving countless armed groups has been intensifying for years, regularly killing local soldiers. | 0fake |
A guide to the topical fireworks of 2016 | A guide to the topical fireworks of 2016 | 1real |
MELANIA PUNCHES BACK…HARD…After Leftist Publication Admits They Had No Basis For Story Created To Destroy Melania…But Published It Anyway [VIDEO] | They had no basis for publishing their article and yet they published anyway. This is journalistic malpractice at its finest:From the Daily Mail: The book makes a number of unpleasant claims such as one that a modeling agency Melania worked for in Milan before moving to New York was something like a gentleman s club .The claims are all unsubstantiated and the Mail could find no trace of the book s author, Adam Schlecter. It is quite possibly the work of an enemy of Trump there are many.Yet the fact a book with such a title even exists must be an acute embarrassment to the Trumps.Say what???Melania Trump has started legal action against the Daily Mail and other outlets for what she claims is a defamatory article about her past.Charles Harder, an attorney for Trump, said in an email that the legal action goes beyond just the Daily Mail and is not limited to the United Kingdom, where the Daily Mail is headquartered. Mrs. Trump has placed several news organizations on notice of her legal claims against them, including Daily Mail among others, for making false and defamatory statements about her supposedly having been an escort in the 1990s, Harder said in an email. All such statements are 100% false, highly damaging to her reputation, and personally hurtful. She understands that news media have certain leeway in a presidential campaign, but outright lying about her in this way exceeds all bounds of appropriate news reporting and human decency. The article in question was published last week by the Daily Mail and questions Trump s biography and history as as model.For entire story: Politico | 1real |
Swiss strip refugee status from Libyan preacher | ZURICH (Reuters) - Switzerland has stripped a Libyan Muslim preacher of his refugee status nearly two decades after he won it following a media firestorm over his sermons that some have branded hate speech. The man who goes by the name of Abu Ramadan has been in the headlines since a Zurich newspaper branded him a Islamist who incited hate in his sermons while living off more than 600,000 Swiss francs ($618,000) in social benefits. The 64-year-old preacher denied the hate speech allegations, saying his remarks were poorly translated from Arabic. In a ruling released on Friday, the Federal Administrative Court said immigration officials had been right to revoke Ramadan s asylum after finding he had kept a Libyan passport and gone home a dozen times, most recently for more than a month this year. The ruling is final and cannot be appealed but separate hearings will have to decide if the man can stay in Switzerland. The preacher has told Swiss media he was unaware he could not travel to his homeland as a refugee and wanted to see his 93-year-old mother. | 0fake |
Second court rejects Trump bid to stop transgender military recruits | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal appeals court in Washington on Friday rejected a bid by President Donald Trump’s administration to prevent the U.S. military from accepting transgender recruits starting Jan. 1, the second court to issue such a ruling this week. Four federal judges around the country have issued injunctions blocking Trump’s ban on transgender people from the military, including one that was also handed down on Friday. The administration has appealed the previous three rulings. In a six-page order, the three-judge-panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the administration had “not shown a strong likelihood that they will succeed on the merits of their challenge” to a district court’s order blocking the ban. On Thursday the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it was denying the administration’s request while the appeal proceeds. The two courts’ actions could prompt the administration to ask the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. Also on Friday, a federal trial court in Riverside, California, blocked the ban while the case proceeds, making it the fourth to do so, after similar rulings in Baltimore, Seattle and Washington, D.C. U.S. District Judge Jesus Bernal said without the injunction the plaintiffs, including current and aspiring service members, would suffer irreparable harm. “There is nothing any court can do to remedy a government-sent message that some citizens are not worthy of the military uniform simply because of their gender,” he added. The administration had argued that the Jan. 1 deadline for accepting transgender recruits was problematic because tens of thousands of personnel would have to be trained on the medical standards needed to process transgender applicants, and the military was not ready for that. The Obama administration had set a deadline of July 1, 2017, to begin accepting transgender recruits, but Trump’s defense secretary, James Mattis, postponed that date to Jan. 1. In an August memorandum, Trump gave the military until March 2018 to revert to a policy prohibiting openly transgender individuals from joining the military and authorizing their discharge. The memo also halted the use of government funds for sex-reassignment surgery for active-duty personnel. | 0fake |
A Golden Rule for journalists: Objectivity is a myth but fairness is a must | Back when I was a pup of a reporter, a wise old editor at The New York Times pulled me aside after I submitted a news story with too much attitude. His name was Shelly Binn, and I’ll never forget the bright red line he drew for me.
“Nobody expects you to be objective,” he said. “That’s impossible because we all have feelings and opinions. But you have to be fair to both sides, no matter how you feel.”
There it was, a golden rule of journalism: Objectivity is a myth, fairness is a must. Obviously, the CNBC debate moderators never got the lesson.
The news business is in trouble and overt displays of media bias of the kind we witnessed Wednesday are a big reason. Technology and changing lifestyles have fractured markets and wrecked revenues, but self-inflicted wounds compound the damage.
The moderators’ relentless badgering, arrogance and ignorance toward the GOP candidates was so bad that their performance was universally panned, no small feat at a time when the media, like everything else, is polarized. The tenor provoked astonishment over the failure of network brass to recognize the black eye coming its way.
To continue reading Michael Goodwin's column in the New York Post, click here.
Michael Goodwin is a Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist. | 0fake |
Macron says there is EU 'consensus' for new reforms | TALLINN (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday European Union leaders agreed during a summit dinner that they should push ahead more quickly with reforms of the bloc. Macron used the dinner in Tallinn to expound a vision of faster, deeper EU integration which he laid out in a speech on Tuesday. He told reporters the meeting had been fruitful . Last night s discussions showed there s a common realization of a need for a leap forward in Europe, he said. Today we re all convinced Europe must move ahead faster and stronger, for more sovereignty, more unity and more democracy. | 0fake |
In Search of the Slave Who Defied George Washington - The New York Times | MOUNT VERNON, Va. — The costumed characters at George Washington’s gracious estate here are used to handling all manner of awkward queries, whether about privies or the first president’s teeth. So when a visitor recently asked an in a full skirt and head scarf if she knew Ona Judge, the woman didn’t miss a beat. Judge’s escape from the presidential residence in Philadelphia in 1796 had been “a great embarrassment to General and Lady Washington,” the woman said, before offering her own view of the matter. “Ona was born free, like everybody,” she said. “It was this world that made her a slave. ” It’s always 1799 at Mount Vernon, where more than a million visitors annually see the property as it was just before Washington’s death, when his will famously freed all 123 of his slaves. That liberation did not apply to Ona Judge, one of 153 slaves held by Martha Washington. But Judge, it turned out, evaded the Washingtons’ dogged (and sometimes illegal) efforts to recapture her, and would live quietly in New Hampshire for another 50 years. Now her story — and the challenge it offers to the notion that Washington somehow transcended the seamy reality of slaveholding — is having its fullest airing yet. Judge is among the 19 enslaved people highlighted in “Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon,” the first major exhibition here dedicated to the topic. She is also the subject of a book, “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge,” by Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Most scholars who have written about Judge’s escape have used it as a lens onto Washington’s evolving ideas about slavery. But “Never Caught,” published on Tuesday by 37 Ink, flips the perspective, focusing on what freedom meant to the people he kept in bondage. “We have the famous fugitives, like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass,” Ms. Dunbar, a professor of black studies and history at the University of Delaware, said in an interview in Mount Vernon’s food court. “But decades before them, Ona Judge did this. I want people to know her story. ” Research on slavery has exploded in the two decades since Mount Vernon, Monticello and other founder home sites introduced tours and other prominent acknowledgments of the enslaved. “Lives Bound Together,” which runs through September 2018, was originally going to fill one room in the museum here, but soon expanded to include six other galleries normally dedicated to the decorative and fine arts, books and manuscripts. “We had so much material, and it’s such an important story,” Susan P. Schoelwer, the curator at Mount Vernon, said. “We realized we could take many of the objects already on view and reframe them. ” The exhibition makes it clear just who poured from the elegant teapots and did the backbreaking work on the estate. But integrating the harsh reality of slavery into the heroic story of Washington — “a leader of character,” as the title of the permanent exhibition across from the slavery show calls him — remains unfinished work, some scholars say. “He’s a much more mythic figure than Jefferson,” said Annette the author of “The Hemingses of Monticello” and a Harvard professor. “Many people want to see him as perfect in some way. ” But his determined pursuit of Judge, she said, as much as his will freeing his slaves, reflects the basic of slave owners. “It’s saying, ‘Whatever I might think about slavery in the abstract, I should be able to do what I want with my property,’” she said. Ms. Dunbar, the author of “Never Caught,” first came across Ona Judge in the late 1990s, when she was a graduate student at Columbia researching free black women in Philadelphia. One day in the archives, she noticed a 1796 newspaper ad offering $10 for the return of “a light Mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy hair” who had “absconded” from the president’s house. “I said to myself: ‘Here I am, a scholar in this field. Why don’t I know about her? ’” Ms. Dunbar recalled. Since then, Judge’s story has inspired several children’s books, and even an episode of “Drunk History. ” But “Never Caught” is the first nonfiction account, drawing on some newly unearthed sources to track her from Mount Vernon to New York City, Philadelphia and then New Hampshire, at a time when gradual abolition left the line between slavery and freedom ambiguous. “There’s a myth of the North as free, but her story shows how complicated that was,” Ms. Dunbar said. It is in the meticulous ledgers of Mount Vernon that we first see Ona Maria Judge, who was born around 1773 to an enslaved mother and a father who was a white indentured servant. At age 9 she was brought to live in the mansion house, eventually becoming Martha Washington’s personal maid. When Washington became president, Judge followed the first couple to New York and then Philadelphia, home to a growing free black community. Free blacks, Ms. Dunbar writes, aided Judge’s escape in the midst of a presidential dinner, after she had learned that she was to be given to Martha Washington’s granddaughter, Eliza. And it was free blacks who helped her catch a sailing ship to Portsmouth, N. H. where she married, had three children and lived on the edge of poverty, laboring in households far less exalted than the Washingtons’. In two interviews published in abolitionist newspapers shortly before her death in 1848, Judge testified to the desire for freedom that drove her to run away from the Washington household, where she had “never received the least moral or mental instruction,” she said. Judge’s story, Ms. Dunbar said, explodes any notion of “privileged” house slaves, or of the benevolence of the Washingtons, whose far from passive role in perpetuating slavery — and in doling out sometimes brutal punishment to the rebellious — is described in detail. Ms. Dunbar describes how the Washingtons quietly maneuvered around Pennsylvania’s 1780 gradual abolition law, rotating their slaves in and out of the state every six months. And she recounts their shock at the “ingratitude” of Judge, who fled “without any provocation,” the president wrote. After hearing that Judge was in Portsmouth, Washington, offering a story that she had been “enticed away by a Frenchman,” discreetly sent a federal customs officer to bring her back, circumventing procedures laid out in the 1793 fugitive slave law he himself had signed. When Judge agreed to return on condition that she be freed on Martha’s death, George Washington dismissed her demand as “totally inadmissible. ” However much he might favor general emancipation, he wrote to the customs officer, granting Judge any say in her fate would only “reward unfaithfulness” and give ideas to others “far more deserving of favor. ” In August 1799, Washington, through another associate, tried again to capture her, but was foiled when Judge received a tip about the plot and disappeared. Four months later Washington was dead, freeing all his slaves in his will. Judge and the others held by Martha Washington remained her legal property. Ms. Dunbar calls Washington’s act “no small thing,” but does not see the former president, who had no biological children to disinherit, as the hero of the story. “When it was safe, he emancipated his slaves,” she said. “He dealt with it after his death. And you know what? That’s what all the founders did with slavery: They kicked the can down the road. ” | 0fake |
Factbox: Trump on Twitter (Dec 4) - Roy Moore, Stock Market | 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 : - Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet! [0617 EST] - Putting Pelosi/Schumer Liberal Puppet Jones into office in Alabama would hurt our great Republican Agenda of low on taxes, tough on crime, strong on military and borders...& so much more. Look at your 401-k’s since Election. Highest Stock Market EVER! Jobs are roaring back [0700 EST] - With the great vote on Cutting Taxes, this could be a big day for the Stock Market - and YOU! [0703 EST] - A must watch: Legal Scholar Alan Dershowitz was just on @foxandfriends talking of what is going on with respect to the greatest Witch Hunt in U.S. political history. Enjoy! [0735 EST] -- Source link: (bit.ly/2jBh4LU) (bit.ly/2jpEXYR) | 0fake |
Trump to propose deduction on childcare spending: aide | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will propose allowing parents to deduct spending on childcare from their income taxes in a speech on Monday meant to challenge the economic policies of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, a campaign aide said. The aide, who asked not to be identified, said on Sunday in outlining the plan: “We don’t want it to be an economic disadvantage to have children.” The aide said the campaign would have a more detailed childcare plan in the future. A wealthy businessman seeking his first public office, Trump seeks to counter Clinton’s argument he is out of touch with the problems of working families. He will also say that, unlike Clinton, his business policies would encourage companies to remain in the United States, a concern of blue-collar workers he has tried to court, the aide said. In his speech, to business leaders of the Detroit Economic Club, Trump will also propose stronger protections for American intellectual property and a temporary moratorium on new regulations, the aide said. Seeking to move beyond a week of discord, Trump will outline plans for trade, taxes, regulation and energy policy. His plans include proposing a 15 percent corporate tax rate, an idea that is on his website. The current federal rate is 35 percent. Senior aides and supporters said in television appearances on Sunday that Trump wanted to put behind him his disputes of last week with Republican Party leaders and the parents of a Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq. With the economy a major issue, Clinton on Thursday lays out a plan of her own for the “biggest investment in good-paying jobs since World War Two,” her campaign said. A Democrat like President Barack Obama, Clinton will be buoyed by figures released on Friday showing U.S. employment rose more than expected for a second month in a row in July and wages picked up, bolstering expectations of faster economic growth. Clinton has pledged that no family should pay more than 10 percent of its income on childcare. She has called for a tax cut to help middle-class parents cope with rising childcare costs and an expansion of a federally funded program that provides education and health services to low-income families with young children. In a phone call lasting little more than an hour on Sunday and run by some of Trump’s most senior aides, members of his newly announced economic advisory group shared their views on policy, said banker Stephen Calk, one of the members who took part. The Clinton campaign has criticized Trump over the advisory group, announced on Friday, for including no women and relying on members who come from hedge funds and investment banking, a make-up at odds somewhat with Trump’s populist message. Calk, chief executive of Federal Savings Bank and National Bancorp Holdings, said Trump had asked advisory group members to nominate women and minorities who could be added to the group. He said there were some “big, recognizable” names on the call who would be announced soon as joining the team but did not elaborate. A new Washington Post-ABC News opinion poll on Sunday showed Trump trailing Clinton by 8 percentage points after her party’s convention in Philadelphia. A Reuters/Ipsos poll out on Friday showed the race closer three months ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election. | 0fake |
HYPOCRISY ON STEROIDS: Check Out HATEFUL Trump Bullies In Anti- Bullying Ad For Kids [VIDEO] | Lady Gaga, who protested in front of Trump Towers against Trump s election and mocked Melania Trump for wanting to work on the prevention of bullying in schools, says it s important to have tolerance for others in the video below: Comedian Kathy Griffin goes on expletive rant. We re not sure how many times she tells Trump to, F*ck off, but it s quite a few. We re pretty sure her outrageous behavior based on her abject hate for Donald Trump would be considered bullying by teachers and parents alike. But then again, Hollywood celebrities and those on the Left are experts at telling us and our children how to behave. Rules and socially acceptable behavior just don t apply to them.Watch full-fledged bully Kathy Griffin s embarrassing anti-Trump, F*ck You rant:(WARNING*** Vile language***)In a much less offensive tweet, Adam Levine had this to say about Donald Trump on Twitter (you know social media, where the celebrities in the anti-bully video warn kids are bullied).Donald Trump is one slip into a vat of toxic waste away from becoming an ACTUAL comic book super villain. Adam Levine (@adamlevine) November 8, 2012Here s Cher calling Trump a F*cking idiot and Hitler in front of a crowd of Hillary supporters. Remember, she s a role model for kids of how not to bully other people right? | 1real |
Albright, Hadley urge U.S. to weigh using more force in Syria | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States should prepare to use greater military power and covert action in Syria to help forge a political settlement to end the country’s civil war, according to a bipartisan report to be released on Wednesday. Produced by a task force led by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a Democrat, and former U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, a Republican, the report amounts to a bipartisan rejection of President Barack Obama’s decision to limit U.S. military engagement in the nearly six-year civil war. Largely drafted before Republican Donald Trump’s victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election, the paper, which has not been presented to Trump, makes a case for deeper U.S. involvement in the Middle East. An interview with Madeleine Albright and Stephen Hadley in this week's War College podcast: “Isolationism is a dangerous illusion,” said the report, which was obtained by Reuters on Tuesday. It calls for outside nations to help wind down conflicts in Iraq, Libya and Yemen and back home-grown reform throughout the region. Its key recommendation for Syria may be moot when Trump takes office on Jan. 20 if government forces seize eastern Aleppo, the opposition’s most important urban stronghold. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been dramatically strengthened by Russian military support over the past 14 months. “The United States should be prepared to employ air power, stand-off weapons, covert measures and enhanced support for opposition forces to break the current siege of Aleppo and frustrate Assad’s attempts to consolidate control over western Syria’s population centers,” the report said. It is unclear what policy Trump will pursue on Syria. In an Oct. 26 interview, he told Reuters a more aggressive military policy advocated by Clinton could “lead to World War Three,” because of the potential for conflict with Russian forces. Trump also made clear his priority was fighting Islamic State militants rather than unseating the Syrian president, saying: “Assad is secondary, to me, to ISIS.” The Syrian army and its allies aim to seize all of eastern Aleppo before Trump takes office on Jan. 20, keeping to a Russian-backed timeline after big gains in recent days, a senior official in the military alliance supporting Assad said. The United States has two main lines of effort in Syria: a covert CIA operation that backs opposition forces trying to oust Assad and a wider military operation that uses air strikes and special forces to target Islamic State and al Qaeda fighters. The report argues U.S.-backed opposition forces should also be allowed to strike Assad government targets. Asked whether a greater U.S. military effort might yield a bloodier proxy war rather than a political solution, Hadley told Reuters: “It may not work. But one of the things we know is that what’s now going on isn’t working.” | 0fake |
WHAT OSCARS? “CONGRATULATIONS MELANIA!”…PRESIDENT TRUMP and FIRST LADY Host The Governor’s Ball [Video] | As Hollywood had its big night at The Oscars, Donald and Melania Trump hosted their own black-tie affair.The Trumps chose the theme Spring s Renewal for the annual Governors Ball, which took place at the White House on February 26, coincidentally during The Oscars. The White House announced the theme of the dinner earlier in the day, saying that the mansion has come to life, gleaming with the dazzling, senorial experience of eternal spring. During his speech, Donald touched on health care and was optimistic about a replacement to Obamacare and previewed his address to Congress on February 28.Just an FYI: We can t figure out why the White House videographer did such a horrible job in videotaping this. They don t have a tripod?Read more: Heavy | 1real |
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