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9,000 | EPA Chief Reveals Her ‘Trashy’ Upbringing And What She’s Sure All Families Did Pre-EPA | EPA Chief Gina McCarthy reveals a bad habit her family had and one she s sure all other American families had as well. Does anyone believe this? I know I was taught not to do this and really don t know anyone who just flings stuff out the window. This woman is the same woman who believes we re all nuts if we don t follow along with the global warming scam | 0 |
9,001 | House Speaker Ryan to speak with Trump Wednesday night | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan and likely Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump are to speak by telephone on Wednesday evening, a spokesman for Ryan said. “This is not an endorsement call,” spokesman Zack Roday said. Ryan, the top U.S. elected Republican, on Wednesday continued to withhold his support from Trump for the presidential nomination, saying he was not ready to endorse the real estate billionaire. Ryan set up the call with Trump to continue discussing the party’s campaign agenda, a Ryan aide said. | 1 |
9,002 | Turkey summons U.S. embassy undersecretary, calls for end to visa dispute: sources | ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey s foreign ministry on Monday summoned the U.S. embassy undersecretary and called for an end to a dispute between the two countries, Turkish foreign ministry sources said, after the NATO allies suspended visa services. The sources said the undersecretary was told the visa suspension move caused unnecessary tensions and should be reversed. They said Turkey s foreign ministry undersecretary also spoke by phone with the U.S. ambassador on Sunday. In a move signaling a sharp deterioration in relations between the two NATO allies, the U.S. mission in Turkey and the Turkish mission in Washington mutually scaled back visa services after a U.S. consulate employee was arrested in Turkey. | 1 |
9,003 | U.S. House will delay break if Senate passes health bill: House speaker | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan on Thursday said he would delay his chamber’s August break in order to push forward final healthcare overhaul legislation if the Senate succeeds in passing their version before the scheduled summer recess. Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has already said he plans to delay senators typical month-long recess by two weeks in order to try and pass a bill, and on Thursday released Senate Republican leadership’s latest proposal to unwind Obamacare. | 1 |
9,004 | Republican Party chairman calls meeting with Trump a step toward unity | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said a meeting on Thursday with presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump and U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan was a step toward unifying the divided Republican Party. “The meeting was great. It was a very positive step toward party unity,” Priebus posted on Twitter after the meeting. | 1 |
9,005 | U.S. presses Russia to comply with nuclear missile treaty | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is reviewing military options, including new intermediate-range cruise missile systems, in response to what it says is Russia s ongoing violation of a Cold War-era pact banning such missiles, the State Department said on Friday. Washington is prepared to cease such research and development activities if Russia returns to compliance with the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement. Nauert also hinted at possible economic sanctions, saying the United States is pursuing economic and military measures intended to induce the Russian Federation to return to compliance. The warning was the Trump administration s first response to U.S. charges first leveled in 2014 that Russia had deployed a ground-launched cruise missile that breaches the pact s ban on testing and fielding missiles with ranges of 500-5,500 kms (310-3,417 miles). U.S. officials have said the Russian cruise missile is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, and that Moscow has refused to hold in-depth discussions about the alleged breach. Russia has denied it is violating the accord. In a statement issued before Nauert s, the Russian foreign ministry said it was ready for talks with the United States to try to preserve the treaty and would comply with its obligations if the United States did. In a statement marking the 30th anniversary of the treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, the ministry said Moscow considered the language of ultimatums and sanctions unacceptable. The U.S. allegation has further strained relations between Moscow and Washington. U.S. and Russian officials are to discuss the issue at a meeting in coming weeks of the special commission that oversees the treaty, said a U.S. official, who requested anonymity. In the U.S. statement, Nauert said the United States remains firmly committed to the INF Treaty and continues to seek the Russian Federation s return to compliance. The administration firmly believes, however, that the United States cannot stand still while the Russian Federation continues to develop military systems in violation of the treaty, she said. The U.S. spokeswoman did not disclose the U.S. economic measures under consideration to secure Russian compliance with the treaty but offered some details on the military measures. These, she said, involve a review of military concepts and options that include researching new ground-launched conventional cruise missile systems. This step will not violate our INF Treaty obligations, Nauert said. We are also prepared to cease such research and development activities if the Russian Federation returns to full and verifiable compliance with its INF Treaty obligations. Her statement came a week after Congress sent to President Donald Trump for signing a fiscal 2018 defense policy bill authorizing $58 million to develop a new INF-busting road-mobile conventional cruise missile and U.S. defenses against the Russian weapon. The bill also called on Trump to submit to Congress a plan to impose U.S. sanctions on Russians responsible for ordering or facilitating non-compliance with the treaty. It was unclear when Trump would sign the bill. The United States already has sanctions on Russian entities and individuals, including people close to President Vladimir Putin, for Moscow s 2014 seizure of Crimea from Ukraine and its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election. Moscow denies that it interfered in the election. A senior administration official, speaking recently on condition of anonymity, said the administration wanted to preserve the INF Treaty rather than rip it up. If we took the Russian approach, we d all sort of say happy things about what a nice treaty we have and we would both go about violating it secretly, said the senior administration official. But that s not how we roll. It s because we like arms control when it s done properly. | 1 |
9,006 | Homeland Security not targeting Dreamers: Kelly | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Department of Homeland Security will not target immigrants brought to the United States as children for deportation, despite conflicting statements within the Trump administration, its secretary John Kelly said on Sunday. Kelly, asked on Sunday morning talk shows to clarify the department’s position on the status of these illegal immigrants protected under an Obama-era program, said the agency is focused on deporting only dangerous criminals. “My organization has not targeted these so-called Dreamers,” Kelly told CNN, referring to the name given to those granted protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program created by Democratic President Barack Obama and extended by Republican President Donald Trump. “We have many, many more important criminals to go after,” he said. Trump has said Dreamers “have nothing to worry about,” but Attorney General Jeff Sessions last week said immigrants who arrived in the United States as children were “subject to being deported.” On Sunday, Sessions walked back his earlier statement. “I believe that everyone that enters the country unlawfully is subject to being deported; however, we’ve got — we don’t have the ability to round up everybody and there’s no plans to do that,” Sessions said on ABC. “But we’re going to focus first, as the president has directed us, on the criminal element.” On Feb. 17, Juan Manuel Montes, 23, who had lived in the United States since he was 9, was deported from the border city of Calexico, California, after being questioned by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer. That was the first documented deportation of a Dreamer. Kelly said in another Sunday interview on CBS that while Dreamers are not being targeted, several of them end up detained by immigration officers as they round up criminals. “People fall into our hands incidentally that we have no choice in most cases but to go ahead and put in the system,” he said. | 1 |
9,007 | Trump vows crackdown on immigrants who overstay visas if elected | DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump offered fresh details of how he would tackle illegal immigration on Saturday, saying he would crack down on those who overstay their visas as he sought to quiet criticism from conservatives. In a campaign speech in Des Moines, Iowa, Trump also cited the shooting death of a cousin of NBA star Dwyane Wade to urge African-American voters to rally behind him, calling it an example of violence that has to be addressed. Trump, speaking on the Iowa State Fairgrounds with hay bales stacked behind him, sought to clarify his views on how to overhaul the U.S. immigration system after saying earlier in the week that he was softening on his plan to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants. That stance drew fire from conservatives who wanted him to stand fast after he won the Republican presidential nomination in large part by a hardline stance that would include building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. In his speech, Trump said he would seek to institute a tracking system to ensure illegal immigrants who overstay their visas are quickly removed, and would propose an e-verify system to prevent the illegal community from gaining access to welfare and other benefits. “If we don’t enforce visa expiration dates, then we have an open border – it’s as simple as that,” he said. In outlining his views, Trump said addressing illegal immigration is important to helping Americans find jobs. “Every time an African-American citizen, or any citizen, loses their job to an illegal immigrant, the rights of that American citizen have been violated,” he said. “Equal protection under the law must include the consistent application of our immigration laws.” Trump said his first priority upon taking office next January would be the immediate deportation of thousands of illegal immigrants who remain in the United States despite having committed crimes. “These international gangs and cartels will be a thing of the past. Their reign of terror will be over. In this task, we will always err on the side of protecting the American people – we will use immigration law to prevent crimes, and will not wait until some innocent American has been harmed or killed before taking action,” he said. He did not explain how his plan would affect many of the illegal community who have been in the United States for decades and obeyed U.S. laws. Trump said the death in Chicago of Wade cousin Nykea Aldridge, 32, a mother of four, was an example of turmoil in U.S. inner cities. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a former chief of staff to Democratic President Barack Obama, has struggled in particular to contain violence in his city. The incident permitted Trump to bring up again his desire to be a “law and order” president and underscore his drive to appeal to African-American voters who traditionally vote Democratic and overwhelmingly support Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. “It breaks all of our hearts to see it, it’s horrible,” Trump said. “And it’s only getting worse. This shouldn’t happen in our country. This shouldn’t happen in America. We send our thoughts and our prayers to the family, and we also promise to fight for a much, much better tomorrow.” Trump raised the subject after sending out tweets earlier in the day that prompted charges of insensitivity to the death and accusations he sought to exploit it for political purposes. The New York businessman was the headline speaker at “Joni Ernst’s Roast and Ride,” a charity event for military veterans run by U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican. Ernst and most other speakers offered praise for Trump, a rarity at a time when many Republican political leaders have distanced themselves from his candidacy due to his incendiary rhetoric. Trump is running neck and neck with Clinton in polls in the state with 72 days until the Nov. 8 election. | 1 |
9,008 | Factbox: Highlights of draft U.N. North Korea sanctions resolution | (Reuters) - The United States on Thursday proposed a draft United Nations Security Council resolution that would dramatically tighten sanctions on North Korea following Pyongyang’s recent nuclear test and missile launch. Here is an overview of the draft resolution circulated to the 15-member council: The draft resolution targets North Korea’s conventional arms capabilities by closing a gap in the arms embargo that had allowed small arms and light weapons to be sent to North Korea. North Korea would instead be subjected to a full arms embargo on all weapons. It has an unprecedented ban on the transfer to North Korea of any item that could directly contribute to the operational capabilities of the North Korean armed forces, such as trucks that could be modified for military purposes. It bans states from hosting North Korean military and policy trainers and advisors. The draft resolution has a new requirement that states expel North Korean diplomats who are involved in illicit activities. The draft resolution has a new requirement that states must inspect on their territory all cargo going to or coming from North Korea via land, sea or air. Previously states were only required to do this if they had reasonable grounds to believe there was illicit cargo. It calls upon states to carry out inspections in a way that minimizes impact on the transfer of humanitarian relief cargo. It would ban all flights suspected of carrying prohibited items and ban all port calls by any vessel suspected of engaging in illicit activities. All vessels belonging to Ocean Maritime Management Company Limited would be banned from entering any port. It would require states to ban the chartering of their vessels or aircraft by North Korea, unless the state determines those services are for “livelihood purposes” and will not be used by North Korea to generate revenue. It also requires states to ban their nationals from operating North Korean vessels or using North Korean flags of convenience. The draft resolution would ban the supply or transfer to North Korea of aviation fuel, including rocket fuel. It would ban the export of gold, titanium ore, vanadium ore and rare earth minerals. It would also ban the export of coal, iron and iron ore unless such transactions are for “livelihood purposes” and would not be generating revenue for North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. The draft resolution would require states to freeze the assets of any entity of the North Korean government or the ruling Workers Party of Korea that is associated with the nuclear and missile programs or other prohibited activities. It would require states to ban North Korean banks from opening branches on their territory or engaging in correspondent relationships. It would require states to ban their financial institutions from opening new offices, subsidiaries, branches or banking accounts in North Korea. It would require states to close existing financial activities in North Korea if there are reasonable grounds to believe those services could contribute to North Korea’s nuclear or missile programs. It would ban all public and private financial trade support to North Korea if there are reasonable grounds to believe there is a link to proliferation. The draft resolution would require states to prevent the transfer of any item that could contribute to North Korea’s nuclear or ballistic missile programs. It would also update a list of banned chemical and biological weapons materials. 1) A list of 17 North Korean individuals to be blacklisted. A U.S. official said this includes people based outside of North Korea and involved in the country’s illicit programs, such as representatives of Korea Mining Developing Trading Corp, Pyongyang’s primary arms dealer. Also listed are leaders of key North Korean companies responsible for illicit programs. 2) A list of 12 North Korean entities, many of which are key North Korean government agencies responsible for illicit programs, including the National Aerospace Development Administration, the Ministry of Atomic Energy Industry, a set of banks, including Korea Kwangson Banking Corp. 3) A list of 31 vessels - with names and International Maritime Organization numbers - belonging to Ocean Maritime Management Company Limited. 4) A list of additional technical items that could be used to advance North Korea’s nuclear, missile, chemical or biological activities. 5) An illustrative lists of banned luxury items: watches, aquatic recreational vehicles, snowmobiles valued more than $2,000, lead crystal and recreational sports equipment. | 1 |
9,009 | Jihadists launch big attack on Syrian government near Hama | BEIRUT (Reuters) - Jihadists launched an offensive against government-held parts of northwestern Syria near Hama on Tuesday in their biggest attack there since March, triggering heavy air strikes on rebel territory, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. It said air strikes hit three hospitals, a medical center and premises used by a rescue service in rebel-held Idlib. A Syrian military source denied the report, saying only insurgent convoys and positions had been hit. The insurgent attack north of Hama revived hostilities in the northwestern region near the Turkish border that has been relatively calm in recent months as Russian-led diplomacy seeks to shore up ceasefires in western Syria. Islamist militants who hold sway in Idlib reject the diplomacy, including a tripartite deal struck last week by Moscow, Tehran and Ankara to deploy an observer force on the edge of an Idlib de-escalation zone . A Syrian army source cited by state media said the attack launched on several fronts was being repelled, and the insurgents had suffered losses. The clashes are continuing and the air force and artillery are targeting the headquarters and movements of the terrorist convoys in the area, said the source. An insurgent source told Reuters that rebels were making advances in the northern Hama countryside, in an area where President Bashar al-Assad and his allies have been steadily rolling back rebel gains over the last two years. The Observatory said insurgents taking part in the assault included Tahrir al-Sham, the jihadist Turkistan Islamic Party, and rebels fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army. They had captured four villages, it said. The ex-Nusra Front, which cut ties with al Qaeda and rebranded last year, spearheads the Tahrir al-Sham alliance of Islamist groups. A media outlet run by the Damascus-allied Lebanese group Hezbollah said Syrian army air strikes were targeting insurgents in the northern Hama and southern Idlib area. Insurgents advanced to within a few km (miles) of government-held Hama city earlier this year, before the Syrian army and its allies retook the territory in April. Ceasefire deals in western Syria - for years the main theater of the war - have helped the Syrian army and its allies advance against Islamic State in the east, where government forces are battling IS in Deir al-Zor. A U.S.-backed militia force, the Syrian Democratic Forces, is waging a separate offensive against Islamic State in Deir al-Zor province, focusing on areas on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River. The rival forces have generally stayed out of each other s way, with the river often acting as a dividing line. Syrian government forces and their allies have however crossed into the SDF s area of operations on the eastern bank of in recent days. The Hezbollah-run media unit said on Tuesday that government forces and their allies captured a village and parts of the nearby town of Khasham on the eastern bank. Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said Syrian soldiers, with Russian air power, continued to expand the captured area in recent days. Despite the persistent resistance of ISIS (Islamic State) fighters, Syrian troops managed to free more than 60 square kilometers of terrorists on the left bank of the Euphrates, he said. | 1 |
9,010 | THERE IS ONLY ONE THING CONSERVATIVES WANT TO HEAR THIS GUY SAY TODAY… | I m leaving the GOP and running as a Democrat!Unfortunately, it doesn t look like that s what we re going to hear from our amnesty loving RINO (Republican In Name Only) friend.Reporting from Washington Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina defense hawk, plans to enter the crowded Republican presidential primary field Monday with a campaign that probably won t deliver him to the White House, but will highlight the party s divide over national security.Graham lacks the big-money backing and name recognition that s likely to be needed to pull away from the party s increasingly unwieldy field.But for him, that may not matter.For the last several years, Graham, a former Air Force colonel and legal officer, has played a central role in a sometimes-bitter battle between the GOP s traditional defense advocates and newly emergent isolationist-leaning libertarians led by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is also seeking the party s presidential nomination. The South Carolina senator did not originate the wacko birds label for Paul and his allies that was coined by Graham s best friend in Congress, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) but he might as well have.Last week Graham was caught on camera rolling his eyes as Paul objected to Senate efforts to continue the National Security Agency s once-secret collection of records of Americans telephone calls.Paul returned the favor by releasing a video denouncing the NSA program. It ridiculed both Graham and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas for their support of NSA surveillance, depicting Graham as trying to read Americans emails while sitting in a 1997-era car.In an interview during the heat of the Senate debate, Paul also accused Graham, McCain and other Republicans who support arming insurgents in Syria of having contributed to the rise of Islamic State, also referred to as ISIS. ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party, who gave arms indiscriminately, and most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS, he said.Graham said in an email to supporters that his presidential announcement will be one of the biggest and most memorable moments of my life. As he approaches the military s mandatory retirement age and eyes the White House, Graham said last week he was retiring from the Air Force after nearly 30 years. He had continued to serve as a reserve officer, at times using his skills as a military lawyer to handle legal affairs in Iraq during breaks from the Senate.A Southern Baptist and conservative on social issues, Graham, who never married, is known as a deal-maker in Congress. In 2013, he led efforts with Democrats to reform immigration laws to allow a path to citizenship for those living illegally in the U.S.Graham, 59, was born in Seneca, S.C., and lived with his family behind their liquor store, restaurant and pool hall on Main Street in Central, S.C., where he plans to announce his campaign.His personal story has helped shape his policymaking. After his parents death, he helped raise his younger sister and has championed the Social Security survivors benefits they relied upon as young people.But it is his military service and alliance with McCain that have come to define much of Graham s work in Washington as the two tried to defend hawkish foreign and defense policies against attack from some in the party s new generation. Now, he ll try to bolster those policies on the presidential campaign trail.Via: Virginia Gazette | 0 |
9,011 | OOPS! WAS ANTIFA TERRORIST Who Threatened Acid Attack On Trump Supporters Caught Violating His Probation Today? [VIDEO] | Antifa member, Paul Luke Kuhn who was busted by Project Veritas undercover journalists plotting Butyric acid attacks to disrupt Trump s inauguration party and subsequently arrested was spotted today at a DC protest today.Was he violating his probation orders following his arrest?Rebel Media s Jack Posobiec was live on the scene in D.C. reporting at a protest when he was assaulted by Antifa. The Antifa supporter who physically assaulted Posobiec was immediately arrested. After reviewing the footage, Antifa member, Luke Kuhn was immediately recognized. (A face that creepy is impossible to forget).VIDEO footage of assault where you can see Luke Kuhn clearly.Note the woman who is pretending to be a reporter with a notebook in her hand who tells the police officer, nothing happened when he rushes across the street after clearly seeing what just happened. Another friend of the violent leftist who sucker punched Jack Posobiec tells the police officer, It was self-defense. Lying, violent liberals wearing their little sister s bike helmets and masks. God help us if we ever need these men to actually defend our nation Jack Posobiec Assaulted by Antifa Terrorist pic.twitter.com/L2UvnJ2pKq Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) April 23, 2017Here s a Twitter user telling the reporter Lacy MacAuley to lawyer up after she lied to the police officer telling him, nothing happened after Posobiec got sucker-punched on camera:This is the video of you yelling, "Nothing happened." You were an accessory. I'd lawyer up pronto if I was you. https://t.co/mcY9sisqPC Covfefing Michaela (@MichaelaAleach1) April 23, 2017Here is her arrogant response. Clearly she s living in the past (when Obama still reigned supreme, and when criminals had the upper hand over law enforcement). You re living in Trump s world now Lacy. You may want to lawyer up.Yes I am absolutely proud of this. Thanks for reposting this video. Because, guess what? Nothing illegal happened. No one was punched. https://t.co/XSEXFK7VmO Lacy MacAuley (@lacymacauley) April 23, 2017This is the video of you yelling, "Nothing happened." You were an accessory. I'd lawyer up pronto if I was you. https://t.co/mcY9sisqPC Covfefing Michaela (@MichaelaAleach1) April 23, 2017Let s hope this loser who threatened an acid attack on Trump supporters joins his little lying friends behind bars: https://twitter.com/Stello_Official/status/856254436641042432Jack Posobiec Assaulted by Antifa Terrorist pic.twitter.com/L2UvnJ2pKq Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) April 23, 2017h/t Gateway Pundit | 0 |
9,012 | ANGRY BERNIE REFUSES To Respond When TV Host Asks About Collapse Of Socialist Latin American Countries [VIDEO] | #FeelTheBernOfSocialismUnivision host Leon Krauze asked avowed Socialist Bernie Sanders about the collapse of several Latin American countries due to their failed socialist policies. Angry Bernie responded with well, anger.WATCH: | 0 |
9,013 | Trump Abruptly Cancels Interview For An EXTREMELY Racist Reason | Donald Trump might be desperately trying to win over the Latino vote with his false claims that he loves Hispanics, but he s going to have a really hard time especially when he continues to expose himself as a racist in his everyday interactions.On Monday, Trump s campaign cancelled an interview with freelance journalist Marcos Stupenengo at the very last minute. Stupenengo, who is originally from Argentina, was already in the Trump Tower and had gotten the campaign s approval to do the interview with Trump for TV Azteca. While he was waiting for Trump, Stupenengo took a phone call and was heard talking in Spanish. Nearly as soon as the words came out of Stupenengo s mouth, the Trump campaign did a complete 180 and turned him away. According to a Buzzfeed report: But as he waited to conduct the interview, Stupenengo received a call, and began speaking in Spanish. That s when the Trump campaign informed him they had no interest in taking part in an interview with him, according to a source with knowledge of the incident. Once Trump s campaign decided to cut the interview, one of Trump s Secret Service agents was forced to tell Stupenengo that he had to leave. The agent apologized to Stupenengo, and said that he didn t know what was happening. When Buzzfeed reached out to Stupenengo, the journalist s comments were short: I can say that after 13 years of journalism worse things have happened to me. Team Trump is actually lying through their teeth and denying that this incident ever happened. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said: There was no interview scheduled. We do not know this individual or anything about the alleged situation. Stupenengo isn t the only Spanish-speaking reporter that has been shunned by Trump. Last August, Trump kicked Univision s Jorge Ramos out of a press conference, telling him to Go back to Univision. Featured image via Spencer Platt / Getty Images | 0 |
9,014 | HABITUAL LIAR: Remember The Touching Story Hillary Told About Helping A Little Girl In A Wheelchair? It Was All A LIE…Here’s PROOF! [VIDEO] | Last Thursday, during Hillary s acceptance speech at the DNC, she delivered a heart-wrenching and emotional tale about a little girl in a wheelchair. Boy, that Hillary she s always thinking of the less fortunate and doesn t think twice about sticking her neck out to help the little guy. There s only one problem with Hillary s story (and pretty much everything she says) it was all a big LIE! Hillary told the crowd at the DNC and millions more who were watching her on TV, about a poor suffering handicapped girl in a wheelchair in New Bedford, Massachusetts who could not go to school because of her disability. Hillary said she helped the girl get to school.Here s part of the transcript from the LA Times: My mother, Dorothy, was abandoned by her parents as a young girl. She ended up on her own at 14, working as a housemaid. She was saved by the kindness of others.Her first-grade teacher saw she had nothing to eat at lunch and brought extra food to share the entire year. The lesson she passed on to me, years later, stuck with me: No one gets through life alone. We have to look out for each other and lift each other up.And she made sure I learned the words from our Methodist faith: Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can. So, I went to work for the Children s Defense Fund, going door-to-door in New Bedford, Mass., on behalf of children with disabilities who were denied the chance to go to school.I remember meeting a young girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house. She told me how badly she wanted to go to school it just didn t seem possible in those days. And I couldn t stop thinking of my mother and what she d gone through as a child.It became clear to me that simply caring is not enough. To drive real progress, you have to change both hearts and laws. You need both understanding and action.So we gathered facts. We built a coalition. And our work helped convince Congress to ensure access to education for all students with disabilities. WATCH HILLARY SPIN HER BIG LIE HERE:Ken Pittman at WBSM reported:Here s what I learned; The Mayor of New Bedford in 1973 was a guy I happen to know, Mayor John Markey (81 years old and a lifelong Democrat now living in Dartmouth, MA. Mayor Markey is also a retired judge and a man whose credibility and character are beyond reproach. Jack as he is known, is eligible for both court and municipal pension but only accepts one. He is not one to double dip . I called Jack and asked him a few questions about handicap services in 1973 at the New Bedford Public Schools, including wheelchair accessibility. I took over as Mayor in January of 1973. We had a budget for vans with drivers and provided services to students with disabilities. It was Tremblay Bus. They would pick them up and drop them off at their homes. Now, they may not have been able to go to the local school, depending on whether or not the schools were accessible for wheelchairs but there were many schools then which could and did accommodate our handicapped students in wheelchairs . In fact, we had a local guy who was a paraplegic, injured in a diving accident who came to my office many times to advocate for the disabled and I actually spent an entire day in 1973 in a wheelchair to better understand the challenges they face everyday. Soon after that we were cutting out sidewalks for wheelchairs and doing things in New Bedford before the laws ever compelled us to. Via: Gateway Pundit | 0 |
9,015 | SARA CARTER WAS RIGHT ABOUT SPYING ON TRUMP! “This goes far beyond what is being reported” [VIDEO] | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws5ojb0PCCo | 0 |
9,016 | OBAMA’S DOJ LET Russian Lawyer Into U.S. WITHOUT A VISA Under “Extraordinary Circumstances” Before She Met With Donald Trump Jr…Lawyer Has Ties To Left-Wing Democrat Activist, Major Hillary Supporter | In July of 2016, Donald Trump, Jr. met a 42-year-old Russian attorney named Natalia Veselnitskaya who had promised him damaging information about then-candidate Hillary Clinton. One of his father s contacts, a music publicist named Rob Goldstone, had arranged the meeting as a favor to a client of his, the Azeri real estate developer and pop singer Emin. Goldstone had worked with the Trumps on the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. There were other reasons to take the meeting, too: Emin s father, Aras Agalarov, is the 51st-richest man in Russia and an instrumental figure in the President s aborted foray into Russian real estate: the Moscow tower he tried and failed to erect.Trump Jr. has said he knew absolutely nothing about Veselnitskaya before their meeting, not even her name. She turned out to use the promise of information that could help his father s campaign as a pretext to discuss reinstating a popular Russian-American adoption program, according to his version of events. What could be more harmless?In fact, Veselnitskaya was already a key figure for the defense in one of the most notorious money-laundering scandals in recent memory, encompassing $230 million in public funds allegedly stolen from the Russians by a network of corrupt bureaucrats and routed into real estate sales, including some in Manhattan, through ironclad Swiss bank accounts. And she was accused of lobbying U.S. officials for a Russian NGO that sought to overturn the Russian ban on U.S. adoptions, according to a complaint filed with the U.S. Justice Department and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).-TPMThe Hill -The Russian lawyer who penetrated Donald Trump s inner circle was initially cleared into the United States by the Justice Department under extraordinary circumstances before she embarked on a lobbying campaign last year that ensnared the president s eldest son, members of Congress, journalists and State Department officials, according to court and Justice Department documents and interviews.This revelation means it was the Obama Justice Department that enabled the newest and most intriguing figure in the Russia-Trump investigation to enter the country without a visa.Later, a series of events between an intermediary for the attorney and the Trump campaign ultimately led to the controversy surrounding Donald Trump Jr.Just five days after meeting in June 2016 at Trump Tower with Trump Jr., Trump s son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Moscow attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya showed up in Washington in the front row of a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Russia policy, video footage of the hearing shows.Veselnitskaya also attended a dinner with the chairman of the House subcommittee overseeing Russia policy, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) and roughly 20 other guests at a dinner club frequented by Republicans.Rohrabacher said he believed Veselnitskaya and her U.S. colleagues, which included former Rep. Ronald Dellums (D-Calif.), were lobbying other lawmakers to reverse the Magnitsky Act and restore the ability of Americans to adopt Russian children that Moscow had suspended.Daily Caller Radical left-wing icon former California Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums was a hired lobbyist for Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. June 9, 2016, the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned.Dellums, who represented liberal San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., is a long-time darling of left-wing political activists. He served 13 terms in Congress as an African-American firebrand and proudly called himself a socialist. He retired in 1996.The former congressman is one of several high-profile Democratic partisans who was on Veselnitskaya s payroll, working to defeat a law that is the hated object of a personal vendetta waged by Russian President Vladimir Putin.Former Democratic Congressman and Oakland, CA Mayor Ronald Dellums endorsed Hillary Clinton for President against Barack Obama in 2008:Ronald Dellums endorsed Hillary again in 2016. I don t think this was very heavily lobbied at all compared with the other issues we deal with, Rohrabacher said.As for his former congressional colleague Dellums, Rohrabacher said he recalled having a conversation about the Magnitsky Act and the adoption issue: Ron and I like each other I have to believe he was a hired lobbyist but I don t know. Here s how Veselnitskaya is tied to the massive 2013 money laundering scheme and the controversial piece of legislation: 2012 s Magnitsky Act that involved Denis Katsyv, the son of Russian railroad baron Petr Katsyv and owner of the Prevezon group. It was the Magnitsky Act that Veselnitskaya allegedly discussed in her meeting with Donald Trump Jr.:TPM In 2013, Veselnitskaya agreed to represent Denis Katsyv, The younger Katsyv was accused of collaborating with corrupt Russian officials in the money-laundering scheme. Then-U.S. attorney and Sheriff of Wall Street Preet Bharara (who was appointed US Attorney in Manhattan by Barack Obama and was fired by President Trump in March) led the charge against Prevezon; the company, his office said, had used cash from the theft to buy condos in Bharara s jurisdiction.Katsyv had been Veselnitskaya s highest-profile client by far, and his defense would be a world-historic success not just for the wealthy real estate investor, but for the Russian establishment under President Vladimir Putin.Until this weekend, the closest Veselnitskaya had come to the public eye was as a footnote to the compounding scandal of the Prevezon affair. Veselnitskaya had come to the United States with Katsyv, who was to be deposed by Bharara s team. Not only wasn t she deposed herself, she didn t attend her client s deposition in person. But after the deposition, she moved to the Plaza Hotel for the remaining two nights of her stay at a cost of $995 per night. Her firm then billed the U.S. government for the entire stay, as well as a single meal for five that included eight grappas, two bottles of wine, eighteen dishes and a bill that came to nearly $800. The group s total expenses topped $50,000, and they promised to file more.The legal proceedings in which Veselnitskaya was enmeshed contain a spy novel s-worth of twists, turns and tragic, suspicious accidents. Sergei Magnitsky, a whistleblowing accountant who called attention to Russian bureaucrats alleged widespread embezzlement, was arrested and detained without trial for nearly a year until his death in 2009 from what prison staff described as pancreonecrosis, ruptured abdominal membrane and toxic shock, according to the U.S. government s suit against Prevezon. The Russian Interior Ministry later revised the cause of death to heart failure. When Magnitsky s family examined his body, they found bruises and that his fingers had been broken, according to an early draft of a report by then-president Dmitry Medvedev s own investigative committee.The incident led to a controversial piece of legislation: 2012 s Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned 18 Russian officials believed by the US to have been involved in Magnitsky s death. Five days later, the Russian parliament voted to ban adoptions of Russian children by Americans, a move understood to be retaliation for the Magnitsky Act. Putin, by that time president of Russia again, also began to compile an anti-Magnitsky list of his own, according to the New York Times. Bharara was among the prominent names on it.Magnitsky s death, and the original theft by Russian bureaucrats, are believed by many, including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), to be the work of the Klyuev Group, a network of criminals working in the Russian government to enrich themselves at the expense of Russian citizens (its exploits are chronicled in English in a number of articles by reporter Michael Weiss). Magnitsky and others sought to expose what they believed was hundreds of millions of dollars worth of graft by the group.The suit against Prevezon never went to trial. On March 11, Donald Trump fired Bharara, and on March 21, Nikolai Gorokhov, the Magnitsky family s attorney and a key witness for the prosecution, fell from the fourth floor of an apartment building, apparently when a rope broke while he and others were trying to move a bathtub in through the window. He sustained head injuries. | 0 |
9,017 | NEW ACCUSATION AGAINST BERNIE SANDERS Exposes Him As “The Other” Criminal Democrat | By now, it s pretty clear that Bernie doesn t respect other people s possessions. His whole campaign is built on the concept of stealing what belongs to other people. This story should really come as no surprise to anyone Officials with the Democratic National Committee have accused the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of improperly accessing confidential voter information gathered by the rival campaign of Hillary Clinton, according to several party officials.Jeff Weaver, the Vermont senator s campaign manager, acknowledged that a staffer had viewed the information but blamed a software vendor hired by the DNC for a glitch that allowed access. Weaver said one Sanders staffer was fired over the incident.The discovery sparked alarm at the DNC, which promptly shut off the Sanders campaign s access to the strategically crucial list of likely Democratic voters.The DNC maintains the master list and rents it to national and state campaigns, which then add their own, proprietary information gathered by field workers and volunteers. Firewalls are supposed to prevent campaigns from viewing data gathered by their rivals.NGP VAN, the vendor that handles the master file, said the incident occurred Wednesday while a patch was being applied to the software. The process briefly opened a window into proprietary information from other campaigns, said the company s chief, Stu Trevelyan. He said a full audit will be conducted.The DNC has told the Sanders campaign that it will not be allowed access to the data again until it provides an explanation as well as assurances that all Clinton data has been destroyed.Having his campaign cut off from the national party s voter data is a strategic setback for Sanders and could be a devastating blow if it lasts. The episode also raises questions about the DNC s ability to provide strategic resources to campaigns and state parties.Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said four Sanders campaign staffers accessed Clinton data, and that three of them did so at the direction of their boss, Josh Uretsky, who was the operative fired.Uretsky told CNN Friday morning that he and others on the campaign discovered the software glitch Wednesday morning and probed the system to discover the extent of their own data s exposure. He said there was no attempt to take Clinton information but said he took responsibility for the situation. We investigated it for a short period of time to see the scope of the Sanders campaign s exposure and then the breach was shut down presumably by the vendor, he told CNN. We did not gain any material benefit. Weaver said the Sanders campaign never downloaded or printed any of the data, meaning it is no longer in possession of any proprietary information. He squarely blamed NGP VAN for the glitch and blamed the DNC for hiring the company.He said the campaign has flagged similar problems with the software for the DNC in the past.For entire story: Washington Post | 0 |
9,018 | Trump signs order dismantling Obama-era climate policies | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an order to undo Obama-era climate change regulations, keeping a campaign promise to support the coal industry and calling into question U.S. support for an international deal to fight global warming. Flanked by coal miners and coal company executives, Trump proclaimed his “Energy Independence” executive order at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency. The move drew swift backlash from a coalition of 23 states and local governments, as well as environmental groups, which called the decree a threat to public health and vowed to fight it in court. The order’s main target is former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which required states to slash carbon emissions from power plants - a key factor in the United States’ ability to meet its commitments under a climate change accord reached by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015. Trump’s decree also reverses a ban on coal leasing on federal lands, undoes rules to curb methane emissions from oil and gas production and reduces the weight of climate change and carbon emissions in policy and infrastructure permitting decisions. Carbon dioxide and methane are two of the main greenhouse gases blamed by scientists for heating the earth. “I am taking historic steps to lift restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion and to cancel job-killing regulations,” Trump said at the EPA. The room was filled with miners, coal company executives and staff from industry groups, who applauded loudly as Trump spoke. Shares in U.S. coal companies edged higher in response. The wide-ranging order is the boldest yet in Trump’s broader push to cut environmental regulation to revive the drilling and mining industries, a promise he made repeatedly during the 2016 presidential campaign. Energy analysts and executives have questioned whether the moves will have a big effect on their industries, and environmentalists have called them reckless. “I cannot tell you how many jobs the executive order is going to create, but I can tell you that it provides confidence in this administration’s commitment to the coal industry,” Kentucky Coal Association president Tyler White told Reuters. Environmental groups heaped scorn on Trump’s order, arguing it was dangerous and went against the broader global trend toward cleaner energy technologies. A coalition of mostly Democrat-led states and local governments issued a statement saying they would oppose the order in court. “We won’t hesitate to protect those we serve — including by aggressively opposing in court President Trump’s actions that ignore both the law and the critical importance of confronting the very real threat of climate change,” the coalition, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, said in a statement. The coalition includes states such as California, Massachusetts and Virginia, as well as cities including Chicago, Philadelphia and Boulder, Colorado. U.S. presidents have aimed to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil since the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, which triggered soaring prices. But the United States still imports about 7.9 million barrels of crude oil a day, almost enough to meet total oil demand in Japan and India combined. An overwhelming majority of scientists believe that human use of oil and coal for energy is a main driver of climate change, causing a damaging rise in sea levels, droughts and more frequent violent storms. But Trump and several members of his administration have doubts about climate change, and Trump promised during his campaign to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, arguing it would hurt U.S. business. Since being elected, Trump has been mum on the Paris deal and the executive order does not address it. Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change who helped broker the Paris accord, lamented Trump’s order. “Trying to make fossil fuels remain competitive in the face of a booming clean renewable power sector, with the clean air and plentiful jobs it continues to generate, is going against the flow of economics,” she said. The order directs the EPA to start a formal process to undo the Clean Power Plan, which was introduced by Obama in 2014 but was never implemented in part because of legal challenges brought by Republican-controlled states. The Clean Power Plan required states to collectively cut carbon emissions from power plants by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Some 85 percent of U.S. states are on track to meet the targets despite the fact the rule has not been implemented, according to Bill Becker, director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, a group of state and local air pollution control agencies. Trump’s order also lifts the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management temporary ban on coal leasing on federal property put in place by Obama in 2016 as part of a review to study the program’s impact on climate change and ensure royalty revenues were fair to taxpayers. It also asks federal agencies to discount the cost of carbon in policy decisions and the weight of climate change considerations in infrastructure permitting, and it reverses rules limiting methane leakage from oil and gas facilities. | 1 |
9,019 | Boiler Room EP #85 – The Return of the Social Rejects Club | Tune in to the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR) for another LIVE broadcast of The Boiler Room starting at 6:00 PM PST | 8:00 PM CST | 9:00 PM EST for this special broadcast. Join us for uncensored, uninterruptible talk radio, custom-made for barfly philosophers, misguided moralists, masochists, street corner evangelists, media-maniacs, savants, political animals and otherwise lovable rascals.Join ACR hosts Hesher and Spore along with Jay Dyer, Jamie Hanshaw host of Happy Hearts, Andy Nowicki of Alt Right Blogspot and Daniel Spaulding of Soul of the East for the 85th episode of BOILER ROOM. Dim the lights, dawn the headphones and indulge in a post-election special broadcast of Boiler Room with the crew. This week the Boiler mind-trust is going about examining current events like the media aardvarks that they are. Jamie brings up the odd behaviors of Kanye West and the Boiler Room discusses if he has he gone star-truther and off the rails or is it all an act? PizzaGate rears its ugly head yet again along with the ongoing events being lumped into the FakeNews hashtag meme wars. The Boiler team is also putting their analysis on record as we witness the continued demonization of the Alt Right in the #DiscreditedMedia. Please like and share the program and visit our donate page to get involved!BOILER ROOM IS NOT A POLICTALLY CORRECT ZONE! LISTEN TO THE SHOW IN THE PLAYER BELOW ENJOY!Listen to Boiler Room #85 The Return of the Social Reject Club on Spreaker.Reference Links: | 0 |
9,020 | BREAKING: FBI Didn’t Record Hillary Interview, Didn’t Make Her Swear Under Oath To Tell Truth | No worries FBI Director James Comey is has assured everyone that Crooked Hillary told the truth. She s been lying and under criminal investigation for most of her adult life, and now we re supposed to believe that she is suddenly telling the truth? Hillary Clinton did not swear an oath to tell the truth before meeting with the FBI for three and a half hours last weekend, and the interview was not recorded, FBI Director James Comey told House lawmakers on Thursday.The lack of a sworn oath does not remove the possibility of criminal penalties against Clinton if she lied to the FBI, though he said he had no basis to conclude that she was untruthful. Still a crime to lie to us, Comey told the House Oversight Committee. FBI policy is not to record interviews as part of its investigations.Yet the revelations will nonetheless raise questions among Republicans, who have been skeptical of the FBI s investigation and have demanded to see the transcript of the former secretary of State s interview in downtown Washington on Saturday. Well, that s a problem, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) told Comey when the FBI chief explained the terms of the interview. It s pretty clear that the American people would like to see what Hillary Clinton said to the FBI, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters on Wednesday, a day before Comey s appearance before House lawmakers.Under FBI policy and to the dismay of civil libertarians and staunch transparency advocates the bureau does not conduct electronic recordings of interviews. Under the current policy, agents may not electronically record confessions or interviews, openly or surreptitiously except in rare circumstances, the bureau said in a 2006 memo.The FBI did, however, complete a federal form summarizing the interview, known as an FD-302, Comey said.Comey himself was not among the five or six agents who interviewed Clinton, he testified on Thursday. But he assured lawmakers that Clinton told the truth throughout the session.Via: The Hill | 0 |
9,021 | Tillerson to visit Turkey as Raqqa operation heats up | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will meet with senior Turkish officials in Ankara next week, in talks that could be vital to an advancing U.S.-backed campaign to retake the Syrian city of Raqqa from Islamic State, U.S. officials said on Friday. Turkey has been pressing the United States to drop its military alliance with the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which it considers part of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party that has been fighting an insurgency for three decades in Turkey. But U.S. officials have long viewed Kurdish fighters as key to an approaching assault on Raqqa, Islamic State’s de facto capital. It would work alongside Arab fighters in the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Instead, Turkey wants the United States to draw from Syrian Arab rebel groups backed by Ankara for the final assault on Raqqa, a predominantly Arab city, proposals that so far have failed to convince U.S. officials who are not certain that the Turkish-backed Arab force is large and well-trained enough. “We first need to work out details with Turkey,” one senior official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The decision sets President Donald Trump’s wish for quick battlefield victories against the need to maintain the United States’ longstanding strategic alliance with Turkey, a NATO ally which provides the United States access to a base critical for the air war in Syria. The Raqqa campaign appears to be gathering steam as an overlapping U.S.-backed effort in Iraq is drawing closer to driving Islamic State from the city of Mosul. French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Friday that the battle for Raqqa would likely start “in the coming days.” The head of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia told Reuters last week that the assault would begin at the start of April, and that the YPG would be taking part. Some U.S. officials think that timeline is too optimistic, noting that a major battle underway for Tabqa dam, about 25 miles (40 km) west of Raqqa, could take weeks to complete. The Pentagon also has said the United States has not decided on the composition of an American-backed assault force in Raqqa. The United States has about 1,000 troops in Syria at the moment, and the Raqqa campaign could involve hundreds more. Senator John McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s chairman, suggested to reporters earlier this week that it would be hard to convince Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan of the merits of backing Kurdish fighters, even if they are the most effective weapon against Islamic State. “The conundrum is that if you don’t use the Kurds, it will take a lot longer while (Islamic State is) sending streams of terrorists out of Raqqa,” McCain said. “But if you do, you have an enormous challenge as far as relations with Turkey is concerned,” he added. McCain said the relationship with Erdogan was particularly important and cited an April 16 referendum on constitutional changes to extend his powers. Tillerson’s meeting in Ankara also closely follows a meeting of 68 coalition partners this week in Washington, where they agreed to intensify the fight against Islamic State, including in Syria. At Wednesday’s meeting, Tillerson said the United States would create “interim zones of stability” through ceasefires to help refugees return home in the next phase of the fight against Islamic State and al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq. He did not elaborate, although one U.S. official said there was not yet agreement among all American agencies on where and how such zones would be set up. The U.S. military has long been skeptical of creating safe zones inside Syria or Iraq, partly because any safe zone guaranteed by the United States almost certainly would require some American military protection. Securing the ground alone would require thousands of troops, former U.S. officials and experts say. The top U.S. commander on the ground, Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, said earlier in March that, “We are building safe zones right now for all Iraqis and all Syrians to be safe from (Islamic State).” Increased U.S. or allied air power would be required if Trump chooses to enforce “no fly” restrictions and ground forces might also be needed to protect civilians in those areas. The State Department did not provide more details of Tillerson’s trip to Turkey, but said he will visit Brussels on March 31 to participate in a rescheduled meeting of NATO foreign ministers. The NATO meeting had been set for April 5-6, but it was rescheduled after Tillerson decided instead to attend a summit with China. That caused unease among European allies already worried about Trump’s commitment to the Western military alliance. | 1 |
9,022 | Russia's Putin signs decree imposing restrictions on North Korea | MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday signed a decree imposing restrictions on North Korea in order to comply with a United Nations Security Council resolution. The resolution, about special economic measures, was a response to Pyongyang s missiles tests in late 2016. | 1 |
9,023 | (VIDEO) For the Love of Winston Smith, “Let The Truth Be Told” | Undoubtedly, we are living in an age of universal deceit, where government and corporations are colluding to bury the truth, and promote only state-sanctioned narratives. The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. George Orwell describing the plight of Winston Smith in the literary classic, 1984.YouTube artist Rebekah Johnson says, Propaganda puppets are lying to the public and suppressing the truth to further their agenda. Listen to her song and watch her video here:. READ MORE PROPAGANDA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Propaganda FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @ 21WIRE.TV | 0 |
9,024 | Atlanta Mayor And Newspaper DESTROY Trump For Attacking Their City And Rep. John Lewis | Donald Trump called Atlanta a crime infested city that is falling apart in response to Rep. John Lewis calling him illegitimate. That was a YUUUGE mistake.One of America s most influential southern cities just hit back at Trump for attacking the congressman who represents them in a scathing editorial on the front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sunday.Earlier this week, Rep. Lewis stated his belief that Trump is an illegitimate president. In response, Trump attacked Lewis on Twitter and the district Lewis represents, which includes the city of Atlanta, Georgia.Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2017mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk no action or results. Sad! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2017Trump literally accused Lewis of being all talk and no action. This comes from a wealthy prick who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War and obtained his riches through inheritance while Lewis was busy fighting for civil rights and voting rights, and getting beaten by police for it during the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, Lewis has been a tireless crusader for equal rights and a tireless public servant for the city of Atlanta, the state of Georgia, and the United States.Trump immediately drew backlash for his attack, including from Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed..@RepJohnLewis is an American hero & a national treasure. Period. Full stop. (1/3) pic.twitter.com/SN9W4uY31c Kasim Reed (@KasimReed) January 14, 2017That PEOTUS Trump would attack Congressman Lewis on MLK Day weekend for all talk no action when he bled to actually Make America Great Kasim Reed (@KasimReed) January 14, 2017is why far less than half the country supports him at the dawn of his presidency. #HeStoodUpForUs #LetsStandForHim Kasim Reed (@KasimReed) January 14, 2017And the Atlanta Journal-Constitution followed that up with a blistering defense of the city and Lewis.The newspaper pointed out that many Atlanta residents slammed Trump for ignoring Lewis accomplishments and informed Trump that Atlanta boasts a strong and thriving downtown area with great neighborhoods.The congressional district that Lewis represents includes many of Atlanta s crown jewels as well as pockets of poverty. It runs from Buckhead to Decatur, over to Atlanta s Westside and reaches south to include Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and parts of Clayton County. Georgia went for Trump, but the 5th Congressional District and the city of Atlanta as a whole remain solidly Democratic and supported Hillary Clinton over Trump in November.The district that Trump described as in horrible shape includes Emory University and Morehouse College, as well as Spelman College and Georgia Tech. The Coca-Cola headquarters is just one of that district s many, high-profile corporate residents. Lewis represents Midtown s shiny residential high-rises and the pricey Intown neighborhoods filled with renovated homes, the Beltline and Ponce City Market.The newspaper also pointed out that Trump once sought to build a skyscraper in the same city he is now calling horrible and crime infested. Atlantans understood Saturday that a political fight was playing out. But, the city wondered, did Trump, who once aspired to add his own skyscraper to the city s skyline, really think Atlanta was a depressing, dangerous place to live? In short, Trump is a hypocritical bully who will do anything to attack someone who criticizes him, even if it means flat-out lying.Featured image by Drew Angerer via Getty Images | 0 |
9,025 | Turkey condemns U.S. move on Jerusalem as 'irresponsible' | ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey s foreign ministry on Wednesday condemned a decision by the United States to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel as irresponsible and called on Washington to reconsider the move. Several hundred protesters gathered outside the U.S. consulate in Istanbul, a Reuters cameraman at the scene said. The protest was largely peaceful, although some of the demonstrators threw coins and other objects at the consulate. We condemn the irresponsible statement of the U.S. administration... declaring that it recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and it will be moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, the foreign ministry said in a statement. We call upon the US Administration to reconsider this faulty decision which may result in highly negative outcomes and to avoid uncalculated steps that will harm the multicultural identity and historical status of Jerusalem, it said. | 1 |
9,026 | Lebanese president hopes Hariri visit to France will end crisis | BEIRUT/PARIS (Reuters) - Lebanon s president said on Thursday he hoped the crisis over Saad al-Hariri s resignation as prime minister would end soon, with Hariri due to leave Saudi Arabia for France this weekend. Hariri quit in a broadcast from Saudi Arabia on Nov. 4, railing against Riyadh s bitter foe Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah. The shock resignation thrust Lebanon into both a domestic political crisis and the Middle East s overarching rivalry that pits Saudi Arabia and its allies against a bloc led by Iran. A Elysee Palace source said Hariri would fly to Paris on Saturday and meet President Emmanuel Macron the same day. French officials said they did not know how long Hariri would stay before returning to Beirut but hoped his trip would help soothe the crisis by demonstrating he was not being held in Saudi Arabia, as Lebanon s President Michel Aoun has said. His arrival will ease tensions by showing he s free to move around, said a French diplomatic source. There would be consultations before he returns to Beirut to build international support for him to negotiate a new political deal in Lebanon, French officials said. We re not trying to find a compromise or open dialogue between sides, but trying to create the conditions for a de-escalation in the region. We want to avoid a proliferation of crises that could get out of control. Hariri accepted an invitation to France on Thursday after meeting French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, who was visiting Saudi Arabia. Aoun, who has refused to accept Hariri s resignation unless he returns to Lebanon, has accused Riyadh of holding Hariri hostage. He said on Thursday on Twitter he hoped the crisis is over and the France visit would open the door to a solution. Lebanon maintains a delicate sectarian balance, after Sunnis, Shi ites, Christians and Druze fought a 1975-1990 civil war, with factions often backed by regional rivals. Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, is a long-term ally of Saudi Arabia. Aoun, a Christian, is a political ally of Hezbollah, the heavily armed Shi ite Muslim movement that is backed by Iran. Hariri s government, a power-sharing coalition formed last year, includes Hezbollah. Since Hariri announced his resignation, Saudi Arabia has accused Lebanon of declaring war on it, citing Hezbollah s role fighting in other Arab countries. On Thursday, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Saudi Arabia was consulting with its allies about what leverage to use against Hezbollah. We will make the decision when the time comes, he told Reuters in an interview. Top Lebanese officials and senior politicians close to Hariri say he was forced to quit and was being held by the Saudis. Politicians from all sides in Lebanon have called for his return to Beirut. Saudi Arabia has denied forcing Hariri to resign or detaining him. In an interview on Sunday, his first public comments since resigning, Hariri said he is free to leave and would return home soon to formally submit his resignation. He also warned of possible Saudi action against Lebanon, including sanctions and threats to the livelihood of Lebanese workers in the Gulf, unless Hezbollah is reined in. Aoun said in a statement that once Hariri returned to Lebanon he would have to stay until a new government was formed. Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil has toured European capitals seeking diplomatic help to end the crisis. On Friday he is to go to Russia, after visiting Germany and Turkey on Thursday. The issue is one of freedom ... of international conventions related to immunity, Bassil said in Ankara after meeting with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. France s foreign minister, Le Drian, said Paris was working to normalize the situation in Lebanon. After meeting Le Drian, Jubeir described Hezbollah as an arm of Iran s Revolutionary Guards and said it must disarm for Lebanon to be stable. Whenever we see a problem, we see Hezbollah act as an arm or agent of Iran and this has to come to an end, he said. | 1 |
9,027 | Schumer on Republican Obamacare repeal: it's their responsibility | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said on Wednesday that Democrats in Congress want to see Republican lawmakers’ plan for a replacement healthcare program before they repeal the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. “They want to repeal it and then try to hang it on us. Not going to happen. It’s their responsibility, plain and simple,” Schumer said at a news conference after President Barack Obama met with Democratic lawmakers to discuss preserving his signature health care plan. | 1 |
9,028 | U.S. lawmakers ask for disclosure of number of Americans under surveillance | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. congressional committee on Friday asked the Trump administration to disclose an estimate of the number of Americans whose digital communications are incidentally collected under foreign surveillance programs, according to a letter seen by Reuters. Such an estimate is “crucial as we contemplate reauthorization,” of parts of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that are due to expire at the end of the year, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Republican, and John Conyers, the panel’s top Democrat, wrote in a letter addressed to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. The request comes as some Republican lawmakers, many of whom have stridently defended U.S. surveillance programs in the past, express sudden interest in considering additional privacy safeguards to how U.S. spy agencies collect and share intelligence that contains information about Americans. That interest has been sparked by evolving, unsubstantiated assertions that the Obama White House used surveillance powers to improperly spy on the incoming Trump administration. Privacy advocates have for years demanded that the U.S. government share an estimate of how many Americans are ensnared by programs authorized under a certain part of FISA, known as Section 702, that allows for the collection of vast quantities of internet communications from foreigners believed to be living overseas. Some experts and lawmakers have said they believe data on millions of Americans could be caught under such surveillance, exposing them to warrantless searches by federal investigators. “It is clear that Section 702 surveillance programs can and do collect information about U.S. persons, on subjects unrelated to counter-terrorism,” wrote Goodlatte and Conyers, who requested a response by April 24. “It is imperative that we understand the size of this impact on U.S. persons as our committee proceeds with the debate on reauthorization.” In a separate letter sent last December to the outgoing Obama administration, members of the House Judiciary Committee said they were given assurances by officials that an estimate would be provided, likely by January of this year. Richard Ledgett, the deputy director of the National Security Agency, said “yes” when asked by a Reuters reporter last month whether an estimate would be provided before year end. He also said about 20 “vignettes” would be publicly released that show the important national security value of Section 702, which officials have described as among the most important intelligence tools at their disposal. Section 702 will expire on Dec. 31, 2017, absent congressional action. | 1 |
9,029 | Trump expected to nominate attorney Sullivan as No. 2 at State Dept.: WSJ | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump is expected to nominate attorney John Sullivan as deputy secretary of state, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing U.S. officials familiar with the discussions. Sullivan, 57, has been a partner in the Washington office of law firm Mayer Brown and served in the George W. Bush administration in senior roles in the Commerce Department and the Defense Department, the Journal reported. He was initially picked to become general counsel at the Pentagon, but the Trump administration recently decided to nominate him for the No. 2 post at the State Department, the Journal quoted the officials as saying. | 1 |
9,030 | FBI's Comey defends Clinton email probe announcement, but feels 'nauseous' | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - FBI Director James Comey said on Wednesday it made him “mildly nauseous” to think his announcement of the reopening of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails affected the 2016 presidential election, but he had no regrets and would make the same decision again. In four hours of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey delivered his most impassioned defense yet of a decision that many Democrats believe cost them the White House: telling Congress 11 days before the Nov. 8 election that the FBI had uncovered a new trove of Clinton-related emails. Comey said he felt he had to speak out at that time because he had repeatedly told lawmakers the Clinton email probe was over. “To not speak about it would require an act of concealment in my view,” Comey said. “Concealing, in my view, would be catastrophic.” He told the panel one reason for the FBI’s renewed interest in Clinton’s case was that investigators had found emails, some of them classified, forwarded by Clinton’s assistant Huma Abedin to her husband, who was not authorized to see such information. “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election, but honestly, it wouldn’t change the decision,” Comey said. The FBI, which is supposed to remain politically neutral, said a few days later that the new emails did not change its decision not to recommend criminal charges against Clinton, but many Democrats believe the political damage was done. Clinton said on Tuesday her election bid was derailed in part by Comey’s announcement about the renewed probe of her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. She said her effort also was damaged by the WikiLeaks release of her campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, allegedly stolen by Russian hackers. Senator Dianne Feinstein, ranking member on the committee, led the Democrats in hammering Comey with questions about why he went public with the Clinton probe but kept silent on an investigation related to the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. “It’s still very unclear - and I hope director that you will clear this up - why the FBI’s treatment of these two investigations was so dramatically different,” she asked. U.S. intelligence agencies in December accused Russia of hacking of Democratic emails in an effort to tilt the election to Trump. Comey confirmed in March the FBI was investigating possible collusion between Trump surrogates and Russia. Comey said on Wednesday the probe into whether Russian hacking activities and American citizens was a classified investigation in its early stages – far different from the almost completed email probe. Comey declined to comment on whether Trump, or anyone else, had been ruled out as a possible subject. Moscow has denied the hacking allegations. The FBI director acknowledged recent months have been difficult. “But I think I’ve done the right thing at each turn. I’m not on anybody’s side. It’s so hard for people to see that,” Comey said, adding later, “I don’t have any regrets.” | 1 |
9,031 | U.S. wants Sahel force strategy before giving money: officials | KINSHASA (Reuters) - The United States strongly supports an African military force to combat extremist militants in the Sahel region, but needs to see a strategy for the operation before it considers funding, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations and the U.S. Africa commander said. Washington is wary, however, of the 193-member United Nations funding the force - to be made up of troops from Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad and Mauritania - according to Ambassador Nikki Haley and General Thomas Waldhauser. The United States currently funds more than a quarter of the $7.3 billion U.N. peacekeeping budget. Haley said Washington wanted to know what the strategy would be, how they see this playing out, what s involved in it before we ever commit to U.N.-assessed funding. Show us something, we re open to it, we re not saying no, but what we re saying right now (is) there literally has been no information that has been given that gives us comfort that they know exactly how this is going to play out, Haley told reporters on Friday. The rise of jihadist groups - some linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State - in the arid Sahel has alarmed Western powers like France, which has deployed thousands of troops to the region in response. The United States has also been targeting Islamic State in Libya and al-Shabaab in Somalia. But U.S. involvement in counter-terrorism operations in Africa has been under the spotlight since four U.S. Special Forces troops were killed in an Oct. 4 ambush in Niger. In Africa with all the challenges of the youth bulge, poverty, the lack of governance, wide open spaces, these are areas where violent extremist organizations, like ISIS or like al Qaeda, thrive, said Waldhauser, who oversees U.S. troops deployed in Africa. He was speaking to a small group of reporters traveling with Haley on her first African tour as U.S. envoy to the United Nations, visiting Ethiopia, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. United Nations forces don t do counterterrorism, they do peacekeeping operations, Waldhauser added, reflecting U.S. unease at the United Nations funding the prospective force. The African counter-terrorism force, known as the G5 Sahel, plans to launch its first joint operations in the coming days. One of the hardest things to do in an organization like that is to try to synchronize the efforts of those five countries and have a coherent strategy as opposed to just a series of engagements in different locations, Waldhauser said. The United States supported a French-drafted U.N. Security Council resolution in June to give political backing to the G5 Sahel force, but refused to back a formal U.N. mandate. The 15-member council is due to discuss the force on Monday. Haley said the United States would continue its bilateral support for the G5 countries, but when asked how much Washington was prepared to contribute to the G5 Sahel force, she said: You will hear about that, coming soon. Waldhauser said the United States currently makes a total of $51 million in bilateral defense contributions to the G5 countries. French Defense Minister Florence Parly said last week that the United States must step up support for the planned Sahel force or it could fail, leaving French troops to carry the burden. [nL8N1MV58Z] A report to the Security Council by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres earlier this month said that the planned force budget of $490 million for the first year was only 25 percent funded. Waldhauser said the G5 countries had discussed their planned counter-terrorism force with U.S. military officials in May at a U.S. organized defense conference in Germany. This is exactly what we want to have happen, we want partner nations who share the same overall strategic objectives that we do. We want to try to foster that type of behavior, he said. | 1 |
9,032 | Trump says sets measure to punish companies that outsource | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said he has prepared an “economic-development” measure that would punish companies that globally outsource jobs. The bill would provide economic incentives for companies, Trump said in an interview published on Tuesday, and reward firms that maintain jobs in the United States, and deliver punitive measures against those that move operations offshore. “It’s both a carrot and a stick,” Trump said. “It is an incentive to stay. But it is perhaps even more so - if you leave, it’s going to be very tough for you to think that you’re going to be able to sell your product back into our country.” He did not specify what the rewards or punishments would be. The White House was not immediately available to comment. Trump, a New York real estate developer reality television host, has struggled to translate his business experience into government success, failing to push through any major legislative victories. The Trump administration has repealed a number of regulations. The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Monday he planned to rescind the Clean Power Plan, which was former President Barack Obama’s cornerstone regulation to fight climate change. (This story corrects final paragraph to show Clean Power Plan has not yet been revoked.) | 1 |
9,033 | Saudi king sacks top ministers, gives more power to crown prince | RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi King Salman appointed two new ministers on Saturday to key security and economic posts, removing one of the royal family s most prominent members as head of the National Guard and boosting the kingdom s young crown prince. The king also announced the creation of a new anti-corruption committee chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman which Al Arabiya TV said had already detained 11 princes, four current ministers and tens of former ministers. The suspects were not named. The cabinet reshuffle saw Prince Miteb bin Abdullah replaced as minister of the National Guard by Khaled bin Ayyaf, while Economy Minister Adel Fakieh was removed in favor of his deputy Mohammed al-Tuwaijri, according to a royal decree carried by state-run media. Prince Miteb, the preferred son of the late King Abdullah, was once thought to be a leading contender for the throne before the unexpected rise of Prince Mohammed two years ago. He had inherited control of the National Guard, an elite internal security force built out of traditional tribal units, from his father, who ran it for five decades. Prince Miteb was the last remaining member of Abdullah s branch of the family to hold a position in the upper echelons of the Saudi power structure. The move consolidates Crown Prince Mohammed s control of the kingdom s security institutions, which had long been headed by separate powerful branches of the ruling family. Prince Mohammed, the king s 32-year-old son, already serves as defense minister and was named heir to the throne in a June reshuffle that sidelined his older cousin, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef who had also served as interior minister. He has been responsible at the same time for running Saudi Arabia s war in Yemen, dictating an energy policy with global implications and behind the plans for the kingdom to build a future after oil. Prince Mohammed, who has pledged to go after graft at the highest levels, will now also head up the new anti-corruption body, which was given broad powers to investigate cases, issue arrest warrants and travel restrictions, and freeze assets. The homeland will not exist unless corruption is uprooted and the corrupt are held accountable, the royal decree said. The country s new economy minister, Tuwaijri, is a former Saudi air force pilot and former chief executive of HSBC s Middle East operations who has led the economy ministry s program to privatize some $200 billion of government assets. He replaces Fakieh, who served as the point man for the kingdom s wide-ranging economic reforms since his appointment as economy and planning minister in 2015. A former food executive with a reputation for pushing through politically sensitive reforms, Fakieh had previously served as labor minister, health minister and mayor of Jeddah. Fakieh faced down fierce opposition from the business community as labor minister when he established quotas for foreign workers to boost jobs for Saudis. Under Prince Mohammed, Fakieh led the development of a national transformation plan and privatization drive launched last year to end the kingdom s vulnerability to an unpredictable oil market. His replacement comes as the kingdom makes adjustments to that plan, a process dubbed NTP 2.0. The royal decree did not say whether Fakieh would hold any other government position. Former ministers often serve in advisory roles after leaving their posts. | 1 |
9,034 | Turkish cabinet agrees to close air space to Northern Iraq | ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey s cabinet agreed on Monday to close its air space to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and said work had started to hand over the main land border crossing into the autonomous region to the central Iraqi government. Government spokesman Bekir Bozdag also said the cabinet approved a recommendation from the national security council, chaired by President Tayyip Erdogan, to extend a state of emergency imposed after last year s failed coup by another three months. | 1 |
9,035 | France says Saudi coalition must boost aid efforts to Yemen | RIYADH (Reuters) - France s foreign minister on Thursday called on the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen to boost humanitarian efforts for the local civilian population who required urgent assistance. The heads of three U.N. agencies urged the Saudi-led military coalition on Thursday to lift its blockade on Yemen, warning that untold thousands would die if it stayed in place. We spoke about the humanitarian situation and the measures that needed to be taken so that international aid can quickly get to the Yemeni population that have an extremely urgent need, Jean-Yves Le Drian said in a news conference with his Saudi counterpart Adel Jubeir. The coalition led by Saudi Arabia has taken the first measures that now need to be followed up and amplified. Saudi Arabia is involved in a two-year-old war in neighboring Yemen and has been criticized for blocking humanitarian aid. In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, Jubeir accused the Iran-aligned Houthis of besieging civilian areas and preventing supplies from coming in or out. | 1 |
9,036 | Republican Kelly Ayotte Gets BRUTALLY Trolled For Calling Trump A Role Model For Kids | During a debate in New Hampshire, Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte was asked if she would tell her kids to be like Donald Trump, who is a sexist bigot who says and does outrageous things every day: I think that certainly there are many role models that we have and I believe he can serve as president, and so absolutely I would do that, she responded.Well, that didn t make New Hampshire voters very happy at all.So, Ayotte, who is in a tight race against Democratic opponent Governor Maggie Hassan, was forced to back away from the remark entirely, apparently hoping voters are stupid enough to believe that she misspoke. I misspoke tonight, Ayotte wrote on Twitter. While I would hope all of our children would aspire to be president, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton have set a good example and I wouldn t hold up either of them as role models for my kids. My statement on tonight s debate: pic.twitter.com/BxNE0NQn6m Kelly Ayotte (@KellyAyotte) October 4, 2016Notice how she made sure to include Hillary Clinton in there even though the main question and her original answer was all about Trump.But voters refused to let her pull the wool over their eyes and they promptly gave her hell for it.@KellyAyotte @KatCapps nope. Can t be unheard Dave Allen (@DaveAtBEATS) October 4, 2016@KellyAyotte Tomorrow morning I will use YOU as a role model to my girls of how NOT to be. Soulless, spineless, and thoughtless. Owen Burke (@owenburke) October 4, 2016.@KellyAyotte so how s #nhsen going? pic.twitter.com/Rv1vclf6Ib Michael Beyer (@michbeyer) October 4, 2016.@KellyAyotte Nope. You went on TV and said Trump was absolutely a role model. You get to live with that now. #nhsen #nhpolitics Melissa Miller (@Meliss1001) October 4, 2016@KellyAyotte Somebody knows they re in trouble Edmond Guidry (@edmondguidry) October 4, 2016.@KellyAyotte misspoke? NH voters are smarter than that Nicholas W. Goss (@NickGossNESN) October 4, 2016@KellyAyotte Tough year to be a Republican and try to tow the party line without embarrassing yourself. ?Robot Taylor? (@robotterror) October 4, 2016@KellyAyotte nah we heard you loud and clear Boke18 (@Boke18) October 4, 2016@KellyAyotte pic.twitter.com/A0BUal1Uj8 Blake (@blakeaparker) October 4, 2016.@KellyAyotte pic.twitter.com/CHl2nEaZIi Adam the K (@adam_the_k) October 4, 2016@KellyAyotte Amazing, the dance you have to do to support Trump and still try to resemble a human being with basic decency michael f (@bunkosquad) October 4, 2016@KellyAyotte How do you explain to your kids how you ve come to support a racist, misogynist, neo-fascist casino magnate who pays no taxes? Mark Childress (@markchildress) October 4, 2016@KellyAyotte Ha ha. Nice backtracking after realizing you ve become the laughing stock of the country. John P Vogt (@jpvogt) October 4, 2016@KellyAyotte pic.twitter.com/YKLOBPee6K ND (@ndechenne) October 4, 2016Clearly, Kelly Ayotte is in serious trouble with only a month to go before Election Day and now that she has had to face this question, it should be posed to other Republicans across the country to see what they really think of Donald Trump and we can all grab our popcorn and enjoy the implosion.Featured image via Flickr | 0 |
9,037 | CROOKED HARRY REID Threatens FBI Director James Comey In Letter…Last Paragraph Of Letter Says It All | Scumbag Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) lays bare how Democrats handle anyone who opposes them in his arrogant, threatening letter to FBI Director James Comey. Funny, I don t remember Comey getting a public admonishment from Harry Reid when he essentially let Hillary off the hook. Hillary should ve been taken away in handcuffs, but she walked right back onto the campaign trail without missing a beat. Where was Harry s outrage then? Why wasn t he reminding Comey who put him in his powerful position several months ago? The crooked Democrats house of cards is falling and its almost funny (almost) how they re blaming the Russians, Donald J. Trump and now James Comey for their inability to keep their crookedness hidden from the public. The top Democrat in the Senate on Sunday accused FBI director James Comey of violating federal law by showing favoritism to one political party over another by publicly stating that he had been made aware of new evidence in the Clinton email investigation. I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act, Senator Minority Leader Harry Reid s (D-Nevada) letter to Comey reads. Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law, Reid said.The Democrat also accuses Comey of suppressing negative information related to the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government, the letter reads. The public has a right to know this information And yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information, he said, referring to the explosive ties he accuses Trump having with Russia.Reid goes on to accuse Comey of tarring Secretary Clinton with thin innuendo by writing his letter to Congress informing the lawmakers of new evidence in the Clinton investigation. You rushed to take this step eleven days before a presidential election, despite the fact that for all you know, the information you possess could be entirely duplicative of the information you already examined which exonerated Secretary Clinton, he wrote.- NYPHere is the last paragraph of Reid s letter to Comey. In a typical Chicago-like thug tactic, Harry Reid reminds Comey how he got to be the director of the FBI and how he owed Reid more for sticking his wretched old neck out for him:Here is Reid s letter in its entirety to James Comey: | 0 |
9,038 | Finally, Obama Speaks: Americans Need to ‘Reconcile Themselves’ with a Trump Presidency | 21st Century Wire says There is an amazing scene unfolding in America While the Democratic Party s community organizing machine helps ignite street protests, and even some violence, on streets nationwide the Democratic President goes in front of the press this morning saying, Look, the people have spoken. Donald Trump will be the next president. After a week of concentrated unrest, the President has been totally silent about street protests rejecting the election result almost as a wink and a knod, quietly encouraging, or perhaps tempting a boiling point. When will President directly engage the American people on this issue?Certainly, if this situation were reversed, the media would be demanding that a Republican president go to the American people calling for calm and to accept the American media s newly invented term, the peaceful transition of power. More leading from behind in Washington Gregory Korte USA TodayPresident Obama is answering questions about the election, the presidential transition and his legacy Monday at a White House news conference his first since voters handed the White House over to a candidate who promised to dismantle his agenda.Appearing relaxed and reflective, Obama said Americans had to reconcile themselves to the Trump presidency, but that he was optimistic about the country and his Democratic party.He also made clear that he has things he wants to accomplish before he leaves office. We re going to make sure that we finish what we started, that we don t let up in these last two months, he said.Obama said his White House team should be proud of what they ve accomplished. We ve already ensured that when we turn over the keys, the car is in pretty good shape. We are indisputably in a better position now than we were when I came in eight years ago. ( ) At the Monday news conference, Obama addressed: The outcome of the election: Look, the people have spoken. Donald Trump will be the next president, the 45th president of the United States. Those who didn t vote for him have to understand, that s how the system works. That s how democracy operates, he said. Whenever you have an incoming president on the other side, particularly after a contentious election like we ve had, it takes a while for people to reconcile themselves to that new reality. Hopefully it s a reminder that elections matter. His Oval Office meeting with Trump: Probably the most important point that I made was that how you staff, particularly the chief of staff, the national security adviser, the White House counsel that s something that has to be attended to right away, he said. I think it s important to give him the room and the space to do that. Obama said he told Trump he was encouraged by his more conciliatory tone since the election. Gestures matter, and how he reaches out to groups that may not have supported him those are the kinds of things that can set the tone to move forward once he takes office. The future of the Democratic party: It s a healthy thing for the Democratic party to go through some reflection. I think it s important for me not to be bigfooting that conversation. We want to see new voices and new views emerge, he said Continue this story at USA TodayREAD MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE NOW & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 0 |
9,039 | David Letterman Is Sick And Tired Of Trump’s Constant Whining, Has PERFECT Solution To Stop It | This needs to happen.David Letterman is no stranger to dealing with Donald Trump. The comedy legend humiliated Trump repeatedly as host of The Late Show. And since retiring, Letterman hasn t shied away from commenting on Trump s dumpster fire presidency when he is asked about it.During an interview with the Associated Press on Monday, Letterman made it clear that he is sick of Trump s constant whining and offered a brilliant solution. We know there s something wrong, but what I m tired of is people, daily, nightly, on all the cable news shows telling us there s something wrong, Letterman said before calling for action. I just think we ought to direct our resources and our energies to doing something about it, Letterman continued. And other people have made this point: If the guy was running Dairy Queen, he d be gone. This guy couldn t work at the Gap. So why do we have to be victimized by his fecklessness, his ignorance? Indeed, Trump would have been fired long before now and definitely would not have even been hired after many of the things he has said in public. Ordinary American workers would no longer have a job if they repeated some of things Trump has said.Letterman also had a message for Trump s supporters. Letterman said he feels bad for them because they got duped into thinking Trump would be best for America. Letterman said that he wishes Trump would be the one who fixes the problems our country faces. But Trump is not the right person to get the job done. In fact, Trump should be ousted from office and placed in a home where he can get the medication he needs whenever he feels the need to rant uncontrollably. But it s just the behavior is insulting to Americans, whether you voted for him or not and I feel bad for people who did vote for him because he promised them things that they really needed and one wonders if he s really going to come through. I know there s trouble in this country and we need a guy who can fix that trouble. I wish it was Trump, but it s not, so let s just stop whining about what a goon he is and figure out a way to take him aside and put him in a home. David Letterman s solution is a great idea but the only place Donald Trump should really be right now is prison. Either that or a mental health facility.Featured Image: Screenshot | 0 |
9,040 | HILLARY Tries To Bash Trump For Foreign-Made Ties…BUT Let’s Check Out Those Pantsuits! [Video] | Trump has been bashed by Hillary for manufacturing items out of the country BUT it s the failed policies of past administrations that sent jobs overseas and made it very difficult for manufacturers to produce in America. The kicker to all this is that Hillary bashes Trump while wearing pantsuits produced all over the world. | 0 |
9,041 | MSNBC’S MIKA ATTACKS MELANIA TRUMP…A Furious Melania Issues Immediate Response | Mika is all of a sudden aware of the Trump s marital situation? This woman needs to stop! The MSNBC host has no business saying anything about the Trumps. She left her husband of 23 years to hook up with her cohost Joe Scarborough. Not such a great track record.We love Melania Trump s response! Great job! It is sad when people try to further their own agenda by commenting on me and my family, especially when they don t know me First Lady Melania TrumpMelania Trump issued a furious condemnation of Mika Brzezinski on Friday afternoon after the Morning Joe co-host suggested she wanted out of her marriage to the president.The First Lady issued a statement claiming to not know Brzezinski, hours after an explosive interview with the MSNBC broadcaster.Brzezinski had put some oomph behind unsubstantiated rumors that Melania wants out of her marriage during an interview with InStyle that appeared on the magazine s website. I know Melania. I haven t talked to her in months, but if my gut is right, I don t think she s going to put up with it much longer, Brzezinski said. I know nothing. That s just my instinct and I go with my gut and my gut s always right.Later in the day the first lady s office hit back hard issuing a statement for Mrs. Trump. It is sad when people try to further their own agenda by commenting on me and my family, especially when they don t know me, she said. Read more: Daily Mail | 0 |
9,042 | Vatican urges politicians to defend migrants, not stereotype them | VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis launched a global Roman Catholic campaign on Wednesday to improve the lot of immigrants and one of his top cardinals urged politicians to touch the hand of a migrant before trying to stereotype them. The two-year Share the Journey campaign comes at a time of growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States and many European countries where far-right parties have made inroads. On Sunday the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (Afd) party surged to third place in a national election, tapping into public disquiet over the arrival of more than a million migrants in Germany over the past two years. The pope, who has made defense of migrants a major plank of his pontificate, launched the campaign in comments to tens of thousands of people in St. Peter s Square for his weekly audience, urging Catholics around the world to be open, inclusive and welcoming . Italy s anti-immigrant Northern League has vowed to clamp down on migration from developing countries if it takes power in a coalition government after next year s elections. At a news conference at the Vatican, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila called for a culture of personal encounter where friendship supplants fear. I would invite the leaders to meet a migrant, touch the hand of a migrant, smell a migrant, listen to their stories and you will see that they are like you and me, he said. They are not really other . They could be me. They could be my brother, my sister, my parents, said Tagle, whose grandfather left China for the Philippines as a poor boy. The two-year campaign of action and awareness is being spearheaded by Caritas Internationalis, the worldwide umbrella of Catholic charities. The campaign encourages local communities to facilitate encounters between migrants and those who fear or denigrate them in church halls and private homes. Look them in the eyes, listen to why they left their homes, how their journey s been, see the real people behind the numbers and scare stories, Tagle said. He urged politicians not to close the doors on people who might enrich your society . In the United States, where President Donald Trump wants to build a wall along the border with Mexico, his ex-chief strategist Steve Bannon - himself a Catholic - got embroiled in a row with the U.S. Catholic Church this month when he said its bishops backed illegal immigrants in order to fill empty pews. Francis this month said he hoped Trump would re-think his decision to end a program protecting undocumented immigrant children, saying it was important for young people to have roots. | 1 |
9,043 | Trump, conservatives try to put aside bitterness to cut tax deal | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Raw feelings and mistrust could pose an obstacle to President Donald Trump and hard-line conservative lawmakers in his Republican Party as they seek to rebound from defeat on healthcare legislation by launching into an overhaul of the U.S. tax code. Trump has accused the Freedom Caucus lawmakers of snatching a “defeat from the jaws of victory” with their rejection of the White House-backed healthcare bill to replace President Barack Obama’s 2010 healthcare reform bill. In interviews with 10 of the roughly three dozen House Freedom Caucus members, the lawmakers said they were eager to put aside tensions over the healthcare debacle and seek common ground on tax reform. But there is no consensus, even within the conservative faction, on details of a tax-reform bill, with some members open to discussing ideas such as the border tax plan supported by House leaders and others opposed to it. Representative Warren Davidson, a Freedom Caucus member from Ohio, said Republicans should leave aside the blame game and work through their policy differences before launching tax reform legislation. “Some people are still in that hurt-feelings and frustration” stage, Davidson said. “I do think it’s smart to take the time to get it right.” Republican Representative David Schweikert of Arizona, a Freedom Caucus lawmaker who sits on the tax-writing House of Representative Ways and Means Committee, could emerge as a bridge between the conservative faction and House leaders. The panel will work closely with House leadership on the tax bill. Schweikert said he planned to consult with rank-and-file members to discuss plans and listen to their priorities. He said giving companies incentives to invest in plants and equipment was one of the items on his own wish list. “My personal fixation is very simple: What maximizes economic growth?” Schweikert said. Representative Mark Meadows, chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said the group has “no formal position” on the structure of tax reform legislation. But Meadows listed the top priorities on his own wish list: “Lower taxes, lower taxes and lower taxes.” A 35-page blueprint developed by House Republican leaders, known as a “Better Way,” will serve as a starting point for the tax-reform discussions. The plan calls for streamlining the income tax system and cutting the corporate income tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent. It would exclude export revenue from taxable income and impose a 20 percent tax on imports. The border tax proposal has divided the business community and is a top flashpoint for lawmakers. Big exporters such as General Electric Co say the tax would boost manufacturing and jobs. But retailers like Target Corp have said the border tax would hike consumer prices and hurt the economy. Trump, a businessman who had never been in public office until he took over at the White House on Jan. 20, has at times praised the border tax idea but at other times has been noncommittal. Virginia Congressman Dave Brat said he would insist that the tax bill not add to the deficit, while Meadows said he would not necessarily insist on that. Other conservatives said they needed more information about the tax bill to form an opinion - and some space from the contentious health care debate. “We just had a major battle on a Republican welfare plan and that has consumed to a large degree my time and mental effort,” said Alabama Representative Mo Brooks. “When we have a tax reform bill I can evaluate, that’s when I’ll start voting on it,” Brooks said. As a sign of tensions that have lingered after the collapse of the healthcare bill, Freedom Caucus lawmakers faced tough questioning from their colleagues during a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday, said Representative Randy Weber of Texas. But Weber said some of the friction eased by the end of the meeting, prompting House Speaker Paul Ryan to say that more give and take might have been useful in the healthcare effort. “Ryan said: ‘This is what we should have been doing,’” Weber told Reuters. Republican Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, a member of the Freedom Caucus, said he thinks lawmakers learned lessons from the healthcare defeat that could apply to tax reform. “I think people are going to work harder to get to ‘yes’ this next piece of legislation,” Buck said. A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Wednesday showed Republicans mostly blame Congress, and not Trump or party leaders, for failing to pass the healthcare overhaul. | 1 |
9,044 | Syrian opposition SNC wont participate in Russia-sponsored congress: spokesman | BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Syrian National Coalition, a group fighting the Syrian government, said on Wednesday it opposed a Russian-sponsored congress of Syrian groups, calling it an attempt to circumvent U.N.-backed Geneva peace talks that aim for a political transition for the war-torn country. The Coalition will not participate in any negotiations with the regime outside Geneva or without U.N. sponsorship, SNC spokesman Ahmad Ramadan told Reuters. Russia s call for a conference for Syrians in Sochi is an attempt to circumvent Geneva and the international desire for a political transition in Syria in accordance with U.N. security council resolutions, the Turkey-based SNC said. | 1 |
9,045 | life now its mustards time to shine | email
in an election season full of anger and divisiveness its easy to lose sight of just how important and meaningful our democratic process is thankfully as millions have cast their ballots today theres been no shortage of heartwarming stories involving americans exercising their right to vote one of those stories centers around lifelong mississippi resident helen karnes who although not quite old enough to have been born before women won the right to vote is still pretty goddam old
wow what a special woman
while karnes cant claim that she was alive during a time when women were still politically disenfranchised it just takes one look at her to tell that shes fucking old no she might not have the inspiring thematically satisfying story of a yearold but you get the sense that shes definitely lived through some shit she was certainly around in wwii times and she mightve even been there for the depression too who knows this is no spring chicken were talking about here
though admittedly karnes story would be a bit cooler if shed been alive before you still have to applaud her for being old on this historic election day also her mom and her aunts were definitely alive before womens suffrage so you know shes probably got some good secondhand stories that she heard from them maybe one of them was even an important figure in the womens rights movement or something statistically speaking thats probably not the case but you never know
its unclear if karnes voted today for americas first female presidential nominee or if she even voted at all but what matters is that shes brittle stoopedover and ancient there are probably lots of dusty ol bats out there who are older than karnes and who have more of a substantial foothold in us womens history but this lady is still more or less a living skeleton and thats something that should make us all proud to be americans | 0 |
9,046 | Republican Kirk breaks with U.S. Senate leaders on high court seat | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican U.S. Senator Mark Kirk, facing a tough re-election fight in Illinois, said on Monday the Senate should vote on whomever President Barack Obama nominates to the U.S. Supreme Court, breaking with his party’s leadership. In another defection among Republicans, Senator Susan Collins of Maine called for hearings on the eventual nominee. A political fight has erupted over filling the court’s vacancy left by the Feb. 13 death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, with many top Republicans threatening to block any nominee put forth by the Democratic president. Obama’s nominee could shift the court to the left for the first time in decades. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said the seat should remain vacant until Obama’s successor takes office in January so voters can have a say on the selection when they cast ballots in the November presidential election. Kirk wrote in a Chicago Sun-Times opinion piece that he recognized the right of any president to choose a Supreme Court nominee and he looked forward to Obama picking one for the Senate to consider for confirmation. “I also recognize my duty as a senator to either vote in support or opposition to that nominee following a fair and thorough hearing along with a complete and transparent release of all requested information,” Kirk added. Kirk, who holds Obama’s old Senate seat, said he hoped the president would pick a nominee “who can bridge differences, a nominee who finds common ground and a nominee who does not speak or act in the extreme.” Kirk’s stance illustrates that McConnell may have trouble keeping Senate Republicans fully united over filling Scalia’s seat. Some senators like Kirk are seeking re-election this year in states where Democrats are competitive. Collins, who is not facing re-election until 2020, said on Monday the Senate had an obligation to hold public hearings on Obama’s nominee. “The kind of thorough process that a hearing allows is the best way to evaluate a nominee,” Collins told reporters, according to the Hill newspaper. But it appeared unlikely that enough Republicans would peel away from McConnell to allow a vote on the Senate floor. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah said on Monday it was up to McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to decide whether to hold confirmation hearings. “I feel like we ought to put it off and get it out of this harsh atmosphere,” Hatch told reporters. | 1 |
9,047 | May's Brexit deal wins her some peace at home - at least for now | LONDON (Reuters) - Britain s Theresa May won a temporary reprieve from rival factions within her own party on Friday by striking a overnight agreement with the European Union that some business leaders hope will increase prospects of an orderly exit from the bloc. After all-night negotiations and an early morning dash to Brussels by May, she and EU Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker agreed to start talking about trade and a post Brexit transition period, declaring sufficient progress had been made on the cost and detailed terms of the separation. This took some of the heat out of a conflict between Conservative lawmakers that had threatened May s fragile grip on the party s leadership, and eased pressure on her minority government from business leaders who have repeatedly warned of a post-Brexit exodus. Everyone s won a reprieve here, said Anand Menon, director of The UK in a Changing Europe think tank. This isn t a deal, it s a progress report ... It s exactly what she wanted - all she wanted was progress. The Conservative Party s historical divisions over Britain s relationship with the EU had threatened to erupt earlier in the week when a carefully choreographed announcement of a deal spectacularly collapsed after the small Northern Irish party propping up her government objected to the terms. That raised the prospect of a fourth successive Conservative prime minister being forced from power over a row about Europe - a flashpoint that played a major part in the downfall of David Cameron, John Major and Margaret Thatcher. Pro-Brexit supporters said the only solution to the impasse over how to manage the Irish border after Brexit was to walk away from talks; pro-EU lawmakers said the deadlock could be better broken by agreeing to stay in the EU s customs union. In the end, they agreed that the details of the Irish border would be agreed as part of talks about the future relationship, according to a 15-page negotiators report. All we have done is put everything off until next year, Menon said. But, influential voices from both sides of a party which still identifies along the Leave and Remain lines drawn during the June 2016 referendum, rallied round their leader, signaling a temporary truce. The agreement was endorsed by both Conservative Brexiteers and Remainers - both of which can count on enough supporters to undermine, and possibly even topple, May after her gamble on a June snap election backfired and stripped the party of a parliamentary majority. This is a significant personal political achievement for the Prime Minister ... Earlier this week, there were all sorts of doomsayers who thought there would be no prospect of an agreement. They ve been proven wrong, Michael Gove, an influential pro-Brexit member of her cabinet, told the BBC. In part, the closing of ranks around May reflects her party s concern that deposing her could trigger a fresh election in which a resurgent Labour Party, led by socialist Jeremy Corbyn, could win power. Former finance minister George Osborne, sacked by May in 2016, once described her pledge to run again as leader at the next election as something similar to seeing the living dead in a second-rate horror film . On Thursday he predicted she would lose her leadership before the end of the current term, due to run until 2022. Businesses also warmed to the declaration of progress, which was rubber-stamped over breakfast in Brussels after a night of back and forth phonecalls between May, her Northern Irish backers the Democratic Unionist Party, and EU officials. Businesses will be breathing a sigh of relief, said Adam Marshall, Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce. The endorsements came with hefty caveats, warning that more clarity needed to come quickly to prevent businesses from triggering contingency plans to cope with a so-called hard Brexit in which Britain would leave without a negotiated settlement The sand in the timer is running out - leave it too late and damage will be done to both the UK and the EU, said Miles Celic CEO of the TheCityUK trade body which represents London s financial services sector. For the financial and related professional services industry, our critical issues must now be progressed. Equally, the calm among Brexiteers within May s party was not matched by those outside it, with one of the main campaign groups that persuaded Britons to vote 52 to 48 percent in favor of leaving saying she had not met their definition of Brexit. Much of their anger was directed at a backstop option set out in the text of the agreement which promised that if trade talks failed, the United Kingdom would maintain full alignment with those rules of the EU internal market and customs union that help protect north-south cooperation in Ireland. Under Theresa May, we are leaving the European Union in name only, said Leave campaigner Arron Banks in a statement. If anyone in the Conservative Party has any integrity or sense of duty left, we call on them now to save Brexit by triggering a leadership contest. Nevertheless, Friday s agreement was seen as a big step toward avoiding a chaotic exit and formalizing terms which would meet many pro-EU observers definition of a soft exit . It means that no deal overall is less likely, said Charles Grant, Director of the Centre for European Reform think tank. But the toughest part of the negotiations could be yet to come, with Britain looking to agree a huge free trade deal before March 2019 - a tight timetable seen as unrealistic by Brussels. In phase two it will emerge that the EU is going to give us a pretty bad deal in terms of what s in our economic interests, Grant said. Asked if Friday s agreement was a step toward a softer Brexit, May s spokesman said: They re not terms that we ve ever recognized or engaged with. There is the Brexit, which the British people voted for, and that s what we re delivering. | 1 |
9,048 | THE DEMOCRAT WHO WROTE A PAPER About How Women Fantasize About Being Gang Raped Draws Larger Crowds Than GOP Presidential Candidates | The producers vs. the looters The man honeymooned in a Communist country. He even wrote a paper about how woman fantasize about being gang raped. Combine all of that with the fact that he subscribes to the disturbing belief of Socialism and a reasonable person might believe it would all add up to a failed Presidential campaign. In the America of the past that would undoubtedly be the case. But in the Progressive hell the United States has now become a candidate with those credentials just seems to draw an ever larger crowd of supporters.Politicus USA reports that Socialist presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, attracted a good size crowd during his recent visit to Denver, Colorado. So large in fact it was a larger crowd than any Republican candidate has attracted so far:Bernie Sanders drew a bigger crowd than any Republican candidate, as 4,500 supporters filled his event in Denver.According to the Sanders campaign: Thousands of cheering and chanting Coloradans one of the biggest crowds for any presidential candidate so far this campaign showed up here on Saturday night to hear Bernie Sanders tell them they were sending a message to the billionaire class that You can t have it all. This is our country too. By the university s count, 4,500 people were in the gym, atrium and lacrosse field to see Sanders, the candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination and a U.S. senator from Vermont.Sen. Sanders drew the second biggest crowd of the entire campaign in Denver. The only bigger crowd by official count wasHillary Clinton s rally in New York last weekend. Sen. Sanders is pulling off the most impressive feat of the campaign. People are excited and showing up for his events.Unlike Ted Cruz who drew a big crowd for his campaign launch by holding it a university event that students were forced to attend, the enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders is real. He doesn t pay actors to come to his rallies and support him like Donald Trump did If the Progressive website s claim is true, IF, then this would possibly signify a disturbing trend where the United States is embracing the Socialist mantra more than it has previously.But most likely, the fact that no one Republican candidate has yet to attract a large amount of public support at their rallies is just a result of the large field of Republican candidates, and the fact that the voters on the political right are just tired of establishment, cookie cutter politicians who will say anything to get elected. And then do as they please once in office.As the number of candidates is whittled down on the Republican side either the crowds will appear to support that one candidate or, as they did during the last presidential election, they ll stay home. Which, if history and Hillary s lack of luck on her presidential runs hold, could possibly mean that Bernie Sanders may be the next United States President.God help us if that cold day in hell becomes a reality. We ve seen the damage one Progressive President who denies being a Socialist and a Marxist has done to this nation. Image the destruction a full fledged, proud to be Socialist President would do .Via: Progressives Today | 0 |
9,049 | Obama: Once I’m Gone From Office, The Gloves Come Off | As the first African-American President, Obama knows that white America wouldn t have tolerated him as an angry black man, which is much of the reason he seems to never go far enough for progressives, especially some African-American progressives like Cornel West. The presidency is far from Obama s final act, though. Once he s out of office, he said in an interview with Vanity Fair, he ll be speaking out a lot more and likely doing things that he can t do while in office.Obama sat down with presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin for the interview, which was published on Friday.The walls of the private dining room where the interview was conducted didn t have past presidents. Instead, there were pictures of black civil rights leaders like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr. and of John Lewis during the 1965 march on Selma. Still, though, Obama s role model is Abraham Lincoln. My particular passion for Lincoln, though, dates back from my earliest memories of politics. And we ve talked about this before that there s no one who I believe has ever captured the soul of America more profoundly than Abraham Lincoln has.Not just his biography, of somebody who genuinely rose from nothing, self-taught, striking out along the borders of our Great Frontier. Somebody who worked with his hands and then worked with his mind, and somehow became one of the greatest writers in the English language. And I think, most importantly, somebody who was able to see humanity clearly, see the fundamental contradictions of the American experiment clearly, and yet still remain hopeful and still remain full of humor, and still have a basic sympathy for the human condition, even in the midst of a terrible war and having to make terrible decisions. And having a forgiving spirit. While Obama seems to have loved his time in office, he does regret some of the institutional constraints that might limit him from being who he wants to be. On the other hand, there are things he feels he can only accomplish once outside of office: Having had this office has given me this incredible perch from which to see how the world works. The power of the office is unique and it is a humbling privilege. With that power, however, also comes a whole host of institutional constraints. There are things I cannot say. There are things that I cannot say, not out of any political concerns, but out of prudential concerns of the office. There are institutional obligations I have to carry out that are important for a president of the United States to carry out, but may not always align with what I think would move the ball down the field on the issues that I care most deeply about. Ex-President role models couldn t be any different. Perhaps the most respected post presidency, at least in modern times, would have to be Jimmy Carter s. He s dedicated his life to building homes for those who most need them and to social justice around the world. Bill Clinton has the Clinton Foundation, and the Bushes and Reagan, well, they retired into near obscurity.Obama is still young, though, at just 55. He will potentially have decades to finish his community organizing, only on a grander scale, or really, whatever he wants to do. You can be sure that no matter what he does, he will be working to try to make lives better for his fellow African-Americans, an in turn, his fellow Americans.Featured image via Win McNamee/Getty Images. | 0 |
9,050 | In Mexican slum, a decades-long wait for quake relief | MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - I first visited Camp No. 3 a few days after the Sept. 19 earthquake. After reporting from collapsed buildings around the city, this was a different type of shock. Row after row of tiny tin shacks crammed into a small lot hidden behind a high fence in the middle class neighborhood of Lindavista. Here, hundreds of families who lost their homes in an earthquake 32 years ago are living in deplorable conditions, with children and grandchildren born during the interminable wait for promised government-subsidized homes. The 1985 earthquake was a defining moment for the Mexican capital. The death toll is still disputed, but at least 5,000 were killed. Some say many more died. Three decades on, hundreds of its victims are still living in hovels in encampments across the sprawling city of 20 million and now the latest quake has made thousands more people homeless. On first impression the camp is a little menacing, the smell of marijuana hangs in the air and residents warn of thieves and petty crime they blame on new arrivals - people who have moved in to occupy shacks left by families who have received new homes. A strong sense of community prevails among the 1985 earthquake survivors, necessary perhaps for families who share outdoor toilets and use bared electric cables to heat water to bathe. And as I have seen among many of Latin America s poorest people, there is resourcefulness. Most families had some kind of work, many setting up small businesses like food stands selling tacos, or makeshift photocopy shops on the roadside. One woman made her living charging for toilet paper and access to a bathroom. According to the leaders of the Lindavista camp, its ramshackle shacks are home to around 750 people, divided into roughly 250 families. There are almost 200 children who are the grandchildren of those originally resettled here, according to local leaders. At least six such camps exist in the capital. Mexico City s housing institute said that since 2016, it has delivered 173 homes to victims of the 1985 quake and expects to hand over 120 more before the end of next year. Click on reut.rs/2go1OS4 for related photo essay | 1 |
9,051 | U.S. interior secretary raised political funds on government trip: report | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of the U.S. Department of the Interior came under further scrutiny on Thursday amid a media report that he had attended a Republican fundraiser in March during a government trip to the Caribbean. Politico, citing department travel records and other documents, said Ryan Zinke attended a Virgin Islands Republican Party fundraiser where donors paid up to $5,000 per couple for a photograph with the secretary. The report comes as multiple investigations into the former one-term congressman’s travel while serving in the Trump administration were announced this week following various media reports on the subject. On Monday, the Interior Department’s watchdog agency said it was probing Zinke’s travels after recent reports that he had used a private plane owned by an oil executive. On Tuesday, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel said it was investigating whether he broke the law in June when he gave a speech to a professional hockey team owned by a political donor. Other Cabinet members have also been scrutinized over their use of taxpayer money for more expensive private travel rather than less expensive commercial trips. Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigned on Friday following an uproar over his use of costly private charter planes. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt have also come under question over their private plane use. Questions have also been raised about the cost of security for U.S. Education Secretary Betsy Devos. Democratic House lawmakers earlier this week called on Zinke to disclose the full details of all of his privately chartered airplane trips. In a letter to the secretary, lawmakers pointed to one reported $12,000 private flight from Nevada to Montana, a route they said commercial airlines charge as little as $300 for. “Abuse of taxpayer money has so far been a problem for the Trump administration,” the group of 26 lawmakers wrote on Tuesday. Representatives for Zinke did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Politico report Thursday. Separately, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has said he is seeking information on any private, non-commercial or military flights taken by White House counselor Kellyanne Conway. U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings, in a statement released on Wednesday, also said he was seeking evidence that Price had repaid U.S. taxpayers for his private flights. Representatives for the White House said on Thursday that U.S. agencies were responsible for arranging their own transportation, and that Cabinet members “occasionally invite relevant White House staff for official travel” that is then “planned and secured by the inviting agency.” | 1 |
9,052 | British aid minister resigns over undisclosed meetings in Israel | LONDON (Reuters) - British aid minister Priti Patel resigned on Wednesday, saying her actions had fallen below the high standards that are expected of her position when she failed to disclose meetings with Israeli officials during a holiday. After meeting Theresa May, the prime minister s office released Patel s resignation letter in which she apologized for causing a distraction from the work of government. May responded in a letter to say she believed Patel s decision was right . | 1 |
9,053 | Anthem to cut back Obamacare plan offerings in California | (Reuters) - U.S. health insurer Anthem Inc is pulling back from 16 of 19 pricing regions in California where it offered Obamacare options this year, state officials said on Tuesday. The move, which takes effect for 2018, means Anthem will offer Obamacare coverage in three pricing regions comprising 28 counties in California. That is just 41 percent of its current enrollment, or about 108,000 consumers, leaving some 153,000 consumers without Anthem Obamacare options, state officials said. Anthem blamed the move in part on uncertainty over whether the Trump administration would maintain subsidies that keep costs down among the factors that have “led to an increasing overall lack of predictability.” As a result, the insurer said it does not allow them to provide affordable plan choices for all California consumers. “The market for these plans has become unstable. And with federal rules and guidance changing, it’s no longer possible for us to offer some of those plans,” Brian Ternan, president of Anthem Blue Cross of California, said in a statement on the company’s website. U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to cut off subsidy payments that make the plans affordable for lower income Americans and help insurers to keep premiums down, after efforts to repeal the law signed by his predecessor, President Barack Obama, failed in Congress. Trump has repeatedly urged Republican lawmakers to keep working to undo Obama’s Affordable Care Act which has extended insurance to some 20 million more Americans. Anthem said it would offer individual plans both in and out of the state’s exchanges in the three regions made up of those 28 counties. Anthem, which announced last month that it was mostly exiting individual plans in Wisconsin and Indiana, said the decision does not affect those with employer-provided insurance, Medicare Advantage, Medicare Supplement, Medi-Cal or “grandfathered” plans purchased before March 2010. Also on Tuesday, federal regulators extended the deadline for insurers in Michigan to submit 2018 Obamacare individual plan premium rates as they await more clarity from the Trump administration, Michigan’s Department of Insurance and Financial Services said. Michigan said it was given permission by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to postpone the release of its proposed 2018 rate changes for 30 days. The state now plans to release them on September 1. | 1 |
9,054 | Gay GOP Operative Endorses Doug Jones Over ‘Bigoted, Deviant’ Roy Moore In Senate Race (VIDEO) | The Republican Party has a Roy Moore problem. Even before it came out that the judge turned Alabama Senate candidate is accused of being a child molester, he was a problem. He had been removed twice from the Alabama Supreme Court for flagrantly defying the law. Moore has said Muslims should not be allowed to serve in Congress. He waved a gun around on stage at a campaign rally and rode a horse to the polls in Alabama to vote for himself in the primary he would eventually win against establishment-backed interim Senator Luther Strange. Well, it seems that with all of this and then some, sane Republicans have had enough of Roy Moore. One such person is former Jeb Bush campaign strategist Tim Miller. He has a solution to his party s Roy Moore problem: Vote for the Democrat, Doug Jones, to keep Roy Moore the hell away from the United States Senate.Miller happens to be gay, so of course Moore s disgusting homophobia is a problem for him. Then there is, of course, the child molesting. In a column for the left-wing site Crooked Media entitled The Republican Case for Doug Jones, Miller says of his decision, which he calls, obvious : But here we are in the dark abyss of 2017, and in this political moment, child exploitation attempted child rape, even has become a partisan issue. President Donald Trump is even cool with it, as long as the sex predator is on his team. A comrade in genital grabbing if you will. So after Trump essentially re-endorsed Alabama s Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, this particular child predator, on Tuesday, I took what I thought was an obvious step. I donated to the other guy s campaign. But in this instance there was one wrinkle for me. The other guy, Doug Jones, is a Democrat. And I a Republican political operative have never donated to one of those before. Thus, in sharing the fact that I had made the donation on social media, I also noted that this was a first for me, even though it felt extremely obvious. Here is the tweet where Tim Miller announces his crossover:I just donated to a Democrat for the first time in my life if any of yall want to do so as well. Enough is enough. https://t.co/YlDXTXSnyJ Tim Miller (@Timodc) November 21, 2017Tim Miller is right. Roy Moore is absolutely deplorable, and should be nowhere near the United States Senate. This isn t politics, it s morals. Now, it is time for more sane, reasonable Republicans to get out there and do the unthinkable reject a child molester and endorse and donate to the man who prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan while Roy Moore was busy creeping on little girls. It s not that hard.Watch the video of Tim Miller s appearance on The Last Word with Lawrence O Donnell below:Featured image via Drew Angerer/Getty Images | 0 |
9,055 | Canadian says child killed, U.S. wife raped during Afghan kidnapping | OTTAWA/TORONTO (Reuters) - A U.S.-Canadian couple freed in Pakistan this week, nearly five years after being abducted in Afghanistan, returned to Canada on Friday where the husband said one of his children had been murdered and his wife had been raped. American Caitlan Coleman and her Canadian husband, Joshua Boyle, were kidnapped while backpacking in Afghanistan in 2012 by the Taliban-allied Haqqani network. They arrived in Canada with three of their children. Obviously, it will be of incredible importance to my family that we are able to build a secure sanctuary for our three surviving children to call a home, Boyle told reporters after arriving at Toronto s Pearson International Airport, wearing a black sweatshirt and sporting a beard. Pakistani troops rescued the family in the northwest of the country, near the Afghan border, this week. The United States has long accused Pakistan of failing to fight the Taliban-allied Haqqani network. The stupidity and the evil of the Haqqani network in the kidnapping of a pilgrim ... was eclipsed only by the stupidity and evil of authorizing the murder of my infant daughter, Boyle said, reading from a statement, in a calm voice. And the stupidity and evil of the subsequent rape of my wife, not as a lone action, but by one guard, but assisted by the captain of the guard and supervised by the commandant. He did not elaborate on what he meant by pilgrim , or on the murder or rape. Coleman was not at the news conference. Boyle said the Taliban, who he referred to by their official name - the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan - had carried out an investigation last year and conceded that the crimes against his family were perpetrated by the Haqqani network. He called on the Taliban to provide my family with the justice we are owed . God willing, this litany of stupidity will be the epitaph of the Haqqani network, said an exhausted-looking Boyle. He did not take questions form reporters. The family traveled from Pakistan to London and then to Toronto. Boyle provided a written statement to the Associated Press on one of their flights saying his family had unparalleled resilience and determination. AP reported that Coleman wore a tan-colored headscarf and sat with the two older children in the business class cabin. Boyle sat with their youngest child on his lap. U.S. State Department officials were on the plane with them, AP added. One of the children was in poor health and had to be force-fed by their Pakistani rescuers, Boyle told AP. Reuters could not independently confirm the details. They are expected to travel to Boyle s family home in Smiths Falls, 80 km (50 miles) southwest of Ottawa, to be reunited with his parents. Canada has been actively engaged with Boyle s case at all levels and would continue to support the family, the Canadian government said in a statement. At this time, we ask that the privacy of Mr Boyle s family be respected, it said. The journey home was complicated by Boyle s refusal to board a U.S. military aircraft in Pakistan, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. Boyle instead asked to be flown to Canada. But Boyle said he never refused to board any mode of transportation that would bring him closer to home. Boyle had once been married to the sister of an inmate at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay. The marriage ended and the inmate was later released to Canada. The families of the captives have been asked repeatedly why Boyle and Coleman had been backpacking in such a dangerous region. Coleman was pregnant at the time. Boyle told the news conference he had been in Afghanistan helping villagers who live deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan where no NGO, no aid worker, and no government had been able to reach. The Taliban and Haqqani network share the same goals of forcing out foreign troops and ousting the U.S.-backed government in Kabul but they are distinct organizations with separate command structures. | 1 |
9,056 | Trump backs Republican healthcare plan: U.S. health secretary | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump maintains his support of Republican House leaders’ healthcare plan, U.S. Health Secretary Tom Price said on Friday, adding that the proposed measure tackles key issues important to the president. “The president’s very supportive of this plan, thinks that it addresses his priorities,” such as the coverage of patients with pre-existing medical conditions, among others, Price told reporters at a news conference. | 1 |
9,057 | DIAMOND AND SILK Clap-Back at Eminem: ‘When you come for President Trump, we are going to come for you, boo… [Video] | In case you haven t heard about the nasty Eminem rap about President Trump, we bring you the diamond and silk version We think it s much better! Has-been rappers are so boring diamond and silk spice it up a bit in the video below .@DiamondandSilk clap-back at Eminem and them. When you come for President Trump, we are going to come for you, boo . pic.twitter.com/LyPbrrPk9n Diamond and Silk (@DiamondandSilk) October 12, 2017CHECK OUT THE LYRICS BELOW TO THE 4 MINUTE FREESTYLE RAP FROM HAS-BEEN RAPPER EMINEM: It s the calm before the storm right here Wait, how was I gonna start this off? I forgot oh, yeah That s an awfully hot coffee pot Should I drop it on Donald Trump? Probably not But that s all I got til I come up with a solid plotGot a plan and now I gotta hatch it Like a damn Apache with a tomahawk Imma walk inside a mosque on Ramadan And say a prayer that every time Melania talks She gets a mou Ahh, Imma stopBut we better give Obama props Cause what we got in office now s a kamikaze That ll probably cause a nuclear holocaust And while the drama pops And he waits for s**t to quiet down, he ll just gas his plane up and fly around til the bombing stops Intensities heightened, tensions are risin Trump, when it comes to giving a s**t, you re stingy as I am Except when it comes to having the b***s to go against me, you hide em Cause you don t got the f**king n**s like an empty asylum Racism s the only thing he s fantastic for Cause that s how he gets his f**king rocks off and he s orangeYeah, sick tan That s why he wants us to disband Cause he cannot withstand The fact we re not afraid of Trump F**k walkin on egg shells, I came to stomp That s why he keeps screamin Drain the swamp Cause he s in quicksandIt s like we take a step forwards, then backwards But this is his form of distraction Plus, he gets an enormous reaction When he attacks the NFL so we focus on that Instead of talking Puerto Rico or gun reform for NevadaAll these horrible tragedies and he s bored and would rather Cause a Twitter storm with the Packers Then says he wants to lower our taxes Then who s gonna pay for his extravagant trips Back and forth with his fam to his golf resorts and his mansions? Same s**t that he tormented Hillary for and he slandered Then does it moreFrom his endorsement of Bannon Support for the Klansmen Tiki torches in hand for the soldier that s black And comes home from Iraq And is still told to go back to Africa Fork and a dagger in this racist 94-year-old grandpa Who keeps ignoring our past historical, deplorable factors Now if you re a black athlete, you re a spoiled little brat forTryina use your platform or your stature To try to give those a voice who don t have one He says, You re spittin in the face of vets who fought for us, you bastards! Unless you re a POW who s tortured and battered Cause to him you re zeros Cause he don t like his war heroes capturedThat s not disrespecting the military F**k that! This is for Colin, ball up a fist! And keep that s**t balled like Donald the b**ch! He s gonna get rid of all immigrants! He s gonna build that thang up taller than this! Well, if he does build it, I hope it s rock solid with bricks Cause like him in politics, I m using all of his tricks Cause I m throwin that piece of s**t against the wall til it sticks And any fan of mine who s a supporter of his I m drawing in the sand a line: you re either for or against And if you can t decide who you like more and you re split On who you should stand beside, I ll do it for you with this:F**k you! The rest of America stand up We love our military, and we love our country But we f**king hate Trump | 0 |
9,058 | donald trump en dates le gorafi | top doctors chemotherapy one of dozens of procedures shown to give no benefit
thursday october by vicki batts tags cancer chemotherapy ineffective medicine naturalnews chemotherapy is arguably one of the medical industrys biggest frauds perhaps thats why it recently landed on a list of ineffectual treatments drawn up by the academy of medical royal colleges amrcthe list was created by top specialists who were each asked to think of five treatments they felt provided little to no patient benefits and surprise surprise chemotherapy was one of them doctors from the amrc said that chemotherapy cannot cure terminal cancer and may bring unneeded distress in the final months of life the guardian reportedthe treatment is by its very nature toxic the college said therefore the combination of failing to achieve a response and causing toxicity can do more harm than gooddo more harm than good you dont sayresearch has shown that in some hospitals up to percent of cancer patients are dying not from their disease but from chemotherapy drugs for the first time ever researchers actually looked at the numbers of patients who were dying within days of chemotherapy administration which could indicate that the treatment was the cause of death rather than the cancer what they found was horrifyingthe study which was conducted by public health england and cancer research uk found that the average day mortality rate across england was about percent for lung cancer and percent for breast cancer but in some hospitals those numbers were much higher for example at lancashire teaching hospitals the day mortality rate for palliative chemotherapy for lung cancer was percent in milton keynes the death rate for lung cancer treatment soared up to percentthe research revealed that the death rate for lung cancer patients was higher than average in several areas including blackpool coventry derby south tyneside surrey and sussexthe data also revealed that about in people who underwent palliative care for breast cancer at cambridge university hospitals died because of chemotherapy treatmentof course the industry was quick to defend their practices with doctors suggesting that these occurrences could simply be the outcome of data problems noting that even a few deaths could skew statisticshowever no one really argued with the fact that chemotherapy is indeed a toxin it doesnt discriminate it kills cancerous cells and healthy cells and therein lies the rub it may kill the cancer but not without increasing your risks of getting cancer again in the futurea study also found that cytotoxic chemotherapy does very little towards enhancing cancer survivors year survival rates the research which was led by scientists from the department of radiation oncology at the northern sydney cancer centre of the royal north shore hospital located in sydney australia raised serious questions about the actual efficacy of curative and adjuvant chemotherapieswhat they found was that in australia chemo only contributed percent to the year survival rate in adults and in the us that number dropped to percent these findings suggest that overall chemotherapy truly provides very little benefit to any patients survival in their conclusion the study authors wrote as the year relative survival rate for cancer in australia is now over it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival to justify the continued funding and availability of drugs used in cytotoxic chemotherapy a rigorous evaluation of the costeffectiveness and impact on quality of life is urgently requiredthe amrc urges doctors and patients to question whether or not particular treatments are necessary after all unwarranted and harmful treatments are truly anything but medicine sources | 0 |
9,059 | IT’S CHRISTMAS IN OCTOBER: American Debt Is $18 Trillion But Dems Want To Give Away Free Goodies For Votes | This one sentence should scare every taxpaying American to death: I know we can afford it because we re gonna make the wealthy pay for it. - HRCLast night s debate for the candidates running for President on the Democrat side proved to be a fluff fest as if Santa himself was in the room. Free college, free this and free that Could someone please tell these people we re 18 TRILLION dollars in debt!Here s the transcript from Rush today that speaks to this Santa syndrome in the Democrat party:RUSH: First up is a montage here from the debate last night. Bernie Sanders, Hillary, Lincoln Chafee, and they re all talking about all the free stuff. College and health care and whatever you want. If you re an illegal immigrant, it s all yours. All you have to do is show up.SANDERS: Make every public college and university in this country tuition-free.HILLARY: Anyone to go to a public college or university tuition-free.SANDERS: We re all gonna have medical and family paid leave.HILLARY: Make sure every child gets health care, including undocumented children and others.CHAFEE: Funding education, funding infrastructure, funding health care.HILLARY: Enhance the benefits for the poorest recipients of Social Security.SANDERS: We should be putting money into education. I want Wall Street now to help kids in this country go to college, public colleges and universities.HILLARY: I know we can afford it because we re gonna make the wealthy pay for it.RUSH: (laughing) We can afford it cause we re gonna make the wealthy pay. We are $18 trillion in debt. Now, you can afford anything if you ignore that, and if you don t think that s a problem and if that number is irrelevant, the money never has to even be serviced or paid back, then of course you can afford anything. But the truth is, we can t afford anything. We can afford maybe, what, what s the number that we drag in by tax revenue every year? The numbers are confusing, but $3 trillion whatever we can afford every year, but we so exceed that. We have exceeded it for so long. We re already paying for things we can t afford. And these people just want to lap more and more on top of it.Via: Rush Limbaugh | 0 |
9,060 | New York Times Reporter Tells Of Horribly Degrading Insults Trump Hurled At Her In Sexist Rage | Donald Trump has never tried to hide the fact that he is a misogynistic a**hole. Rosie O Donnell, Megyn Kelly, and any other woman who dares challenge Trump s right to grab em by the pussy becomes a target for his hate. Clearly, this man has a problem with women. But somehow, we put him in the White House anyway.This week, Trump attacked MSNBC s Mika Brzezinski, tweeting that he refused to let her hang out with him a few months ago because she was bleeding badly from a facelift. And we all know that Trump finds the idea of a woman bleeding out of her wherever is just too gross for him to handle.Not surprisingly, it turns out that this kind of sexist degradation is a lifelong pattern for Trump. New York Times columnist Gail Collins remembers Trump attacking her in the most degrading way possible.I have to confess I ve overestimated Donald Trump.Back in the day, he sent me a copy of a column he objected to, with some notes suggesting I was a dog and a liar with the face of a pig. I ve had many opportunities to make use of that story since Trump became a presidential candidate, so it s all fine for me. However, I have to admit that it did not occur to me he d keep doing that kind of stuff as president of the United States.This is not normal. A real man would never treat women the way Trump does, calling them fat pigs and dogs and talking about dating his own daughter. But this isn t even just any man. This is the President of the goddamn United States behaving this way. It is absolutely appalling that this man is supposed to be leading our country, yet this is how he speaks about women.Worse yet, is that this has never been some kind of deep, dark secret. This is who he his and he has flaunted it for decades. And he won the election anyway, at least he did in a kind sorta type of way, but I digress. What the hell have we become? How are we allowing this? Why are we acting like any of this is okay in any way at all?Featured image via Alex Wong/Getty Images | 0 |
9,061 | FOX PANELIST CLAIMS “Investigation” of Trump and Associates Began in Spring of 2015 [Video] | Mary Anne Marsh, a democrat, reveals that the Obama admin had been investigating Trump since the spring of 2015!! pic.twitter.com/PYlhTAhOhE Dagny Delinquent (@DagnyDelinquent) March 31, 2017AND NOW FOR A LITTLE REALITY CHECK: A former acting director of the CIA who advised the Hillary Clinton campaign says he has yet to see even a spark of evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government during the presidential campaign.Michael Morell also said Wednesday that he has serious questions about the 35-page dossier alleging campaign collusion because the author of the document paid his sources through intermediaries. On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all, Morell told a crowd of intelligence analysts at an event hosted by the Cipher Brief, a website that monitors the intelligence community.Read more: DAILY CALLER | 0 |
9,062 | Trump Gets PUMMELED During TODAY Show Interview; Matt Lauer Did NOT Hold Back (VIDEO) | Ever since Matt Lauer threw Donald Trump some majorly softball questions during his Q&A with the president-elect during the campaign, many people have been criticizing how he didn t go hard enough on Trump to get some real answers.Well, Lauer clearly got the message, albeit a little too late, because he just absolutely went after Trump during a phone interview on the TODAY show Wednesday morning.Lauer said: You seem to understand that perhaps having fights on Twitter would not be appropriate for the president. I have not seen you backing off fights on Twitter In the time since you were elected, you ve targeted the cast of Hamilton, The New York Times, China, Boeing, the media, and SNL. Which, of course, put Trump on the defense pathetically trying to explain how going after SNL and a Broadway show are somehow justified. The president-elect also seems to think that Twitter is an appropriate form of communication, no matter how immature the tweets. He also, again, went after SNL, and when Lauer brought up the fact that he had previously hosted the show, Trump whined that it s gone downhill since then.Sure, Donald, that s it.Good on Lauer for finally being tough on Trump.Watch Lauer really press Trump here: WATCH: I like Alec, but his imitation of me is really mean-spirited and not very good. @realdonaldtrump on #SNL https://t.co/NEslxLZJuS TODAY (@TODAYshow) December 7, 2016Featured image via video screen capture | 0 |
9,063 | NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR Calls Out Liberal Press For FAKE NEWS: “The story…is false” [Video] | The Washington Post just got called out BIG TIME on a fake story they published This is a screenshot of the article:THE BIG LIE FROM WASHINGTON POST: President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.They tried to discredit President Trump in his dealings with Russia by saying President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russians .NOT TRUE! They got caught and then called out by the Trump administration s National Security Advisor.This is awesome:National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster made a statement saying, The story that came out tonight, as reported, is false. Natl Security Adviser McMaster made a statement denying a report that @POTUS revealed classified info to Russia. https://t.co/LB3P3BgT10 pic.twitter.com/gRNcLlZNvC Fox News (@FoxNews) May 15, 2017 | 0 |
9,064 | UK raises 'grave concerns' about illegal settlements with Israel's Netanyahu: May's office | LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May raised concerns about illegal settlements on Thursday at a meeting with her Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu in London, May s office said. They discussed the need to overcome obstacles to peace, with the prime minister noting our grave concerns about illegal settlements, a spokesman from May s office said in a statement. The prime ministers also discussed the fact settlements are not the only obstacle and that the people of Israel deserve to live free from the scourge of terrorism and anti-Semitic incitement. | 1 |
9,065 | China says it will stick to commitment to fight climate change | BEIJING (Reuters) - China said on Friday it would stick to its commitment to fight climate change after President Donald Trump said he would withdraw the United States from the landmark 2015 Paris global agreement to curb climate change. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying made the comment at a daily news briefing in Beijing. Trump’s move fulfilled a major campaign pledge but drew condemnation from U.S. allies and business leaders. | 1 |
9,066 | Obama's judges leave liberal imprint on U.S. law | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When President Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009, the federal appeals court based in Virginia was known as one of the most conservative benches in the country. Two Obama terms later, Democratic appointees hold a 10-5 majority on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a panel of which issued a groundbreaking ruling this April backing transgender rights. FACTBOX: Cases where Obama judges left a mark The shift to the left on the court, which hears cases from Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina, highlights a widely overlooked aspect of Obama’s legacy. His appointments of dozens of judges to the country’s influential federal appeals courts have tilted the judiciary in a liberal direction that will influence rulings for years to come and be further entrenched if Democrat Hillary Clinton wins this November’s presidential election. MORE FROM REUTERS Election 2016 LIVE: Who is the better president for minority voters? Bolivia says deputy interior minister killed after kidnap by miners Judge orders search of Clinton emails from 2012 Benghazi attack by September 13 A Reuters review of rulings by the courts over the last two years shows Obama’s appointees to the appeals courts have influenced major legal battles likely to ultimately reach the Supreme Court. Obama-appointed judges have voted in favor of broad civil rights protections, major Obama administration regulations and gun regulations and against Republican-backed voting rules. When seeking to appoint judges, the White House has said it is looking for highly credentialed lawyers reflecting the diversity of U.S. society. Conservative critics say he has picked judges who are willing to circumvent the law in order to reach preferred outcomes. “There’s no question President Obama’s nominees have absolutely been part of his effort to transform the country and move it dramatically to the left,” said Carrie Severino, a conservative legal activist. White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement that Obama’s appointees “all share impeccable qualifications, unquestioned integrity, and a steadfast commitment to equal justice under the law.” The appeals courts are the first stop for any case appealed from the lower U.S. district courts and often have the last word. The next and final destination is the Supreme Court, but it hears fewer than 100 cases a year. The appeals courts handle 35,000 a year according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Of the 13 appeals courts, nine now have a majority of Democratic appointees, compared with one when Obama took office, according to research carried out by Russell Wheeler, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. In addition to appointing two Supreme Court justices and dozens of district court judges, Obama appointments now make up 55 of the current 168 appeals court judges, according to the judiciary. Obama’s current total of 323 district and appeals court appointments, most of them district court judges, is similar to the tallies achieved by other recent two-term presidents. The regional appeals courts are currently more powerful than ever because of the vacancy on the Supreme Court caused by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, which has left the court divided equally between liberals and conservatives. If the ideologically divided court splits 4-4, the appeals court ruling is left intact. Such an outcome occurred four times in the Supreme Court term that recently ended. Scalia’s seat is unlikely to be filled until next year due to political opposition from Republicans in the Senate, which has the job of confirming nominees. One of the most dramatic transformations has been on the 4th Circuit. In July 2007, 18 months before Obama became president, Republican appointees held a 7-5 majority. Through a mix of seven Obama appointments and retirements, Democratic appointees now hold sway. In April, a three-judge panel featuring two Obama appointees ruled in favor of a transgender student seeking to use a boys’ restroom. The two Obama appointees were in the majority, with a Republican appointee dissenting. Three months later, a three-judge panel featuring two Obama appointees and one judge appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton struck down North Carolina’s strict voter identification law on a 3-0 vote, saying the state legislature had enacted it with discriminatory intent. It is one of several recent court rulings pushing back on Republican-led efforts to impose new voting regulations, which Democrats say is intended to deter minorities from voting. Caroline Fredrickson, president of liberal legal group the American Constitution Society, said Republican-appointed judges are generally less likely to rule in favor of broad interpretations of civil rights. The transgender case would “very likely” have come out differently with a more conservative panel of judges, she said. The federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. is another where the balance of power has been flipped. Often known in legal circles as the second highest court in the land because it hears important cases concerning the federal government, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was dominated by conservatives 6-3 when Obama took office. Obama was able to force through four appointments after a major showdown in the Senate. The court now has a 7-4 split in favor of Democratic appointees. In June, an Obama appointee, Judge Sri Srinivasan, cast the deciding vote as a three-judge panel upheld the Federal Communication Commission’s so-called “net neutrality” regulation. Srinivasan joined a Clinton appointee in the majority. A judge appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan dissented. The regulation is widely opposed by the telecommunications industry and backed by digital rights advocates. Obama’s appointees do sometimes vote in favor of conservative outcomes. Paul Watford, a judge on the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has on several occasions reached a different conclusion to his more liberal colleagues. In one recent decision from Aug. 15, he dissented along with conservative judges when the court ruled that a death row inmate should be able to file a new appeal. When announcing three of his nominees to the appeals court in Washington at a White House press conference in June 2013, Obama rejected any notion that they were political pawns, emphasizing their strong credentials. “These are no slouches. These are no hacks,” he said. | 1 |
9,067 | Donald Trump’s Latest Namesake Has Bad Hair And Small Genitals, But It Flies | Before running the most controversial and bombastic political campaign in recent presidential history, Donald Trump was perhaps best known for plastering his name, preferably plated in gold, across absolutely everything he could especially on very tall phallic symbols. He might not be as proud of his latest namesake, though. It s a moth and it s known for its weird hair and its tiny genitalia.Image via Twitter.This centimeter-wide moth was identified by evolutionary biologist and lepidopterist Vazrick Nazari, who announced the find in a paper published Tuesday in the open-access journal ZooKeys. Nazari settled on the name N. donaldtrumpi because the silky yellow-white scales these moths develop on their heads in adulthood reminded him of the President-elect s signature hairdo.By meticulously examining specimens of the moth and its close relatives, Nazari was able to catalogue its unique anatomy, including its male genitalia, which is comparatively smaller than the moth s close relative Neopalpa neonata, according to the study.Source: MotherboardOh, but it gets worse for the President Elect. The moth is native to Trump s nemesis state of California, and into Mexico. Did I mention that it has really tiny genitals? Well, it s worth mentioning again.The moth is also known as a Twirler Moth, and like the man it s named from, it exhibits unexplainable bursts of frantic behavior. If it had hands, it would probably be tweeting weird vendettas at 3:00 am as well.Naming the moth after Trump wasn t just a silly jab at the thin-skinned man baby about to occupy the Oval Office. It was a pretty clever attempt at bringing attention to the moth and to the environment. By naming this species after the 45th President of the United States, I hope to bring some public attention to, and interest in, the importance of alpha-taxonomy in better understanding the neglected micro-fauna component of the North American biodiversity. The timing couldn t be better. Republicans are already set to roll back parts of the Endangered Species Act.Dr. Peter Oboyski, manager and curator of the Essig Museum of Entomology at University of California, Berkeley, hopes that this finding will help bring attention to all species of moths, most of which we may never discover, before they go extinct. As for Trump, Dr. Oboyski said:Hopefully our new president will take pride in having a species named for him, recognize the enormous task set before biologists and encourage his administration to support research to discover and describe the overwhelming biodiversity all around us while it is still there.Let s hope.Featured image via Christopher Furlong/Getty Images | 0 |
9,068 | Secret U.S. court issues first order for phone data under new law | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The secretive U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has issued its first order allowing the National Security Agency to collect telephone records under a new electronic spying law Congress passed last year. According to an order from the court posted Tuesday on a website operated by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the court issued the order on Dec. 31. The order, signed by FISC Chief Judge Thomas Hogan, said the court concluded that a surveillance application, apparently submitted by the NSA, met the requirements of the USA Freedom Act, which President Barack Obama signed last year. That law replaced an older one that allowed NSA to collect telephone “metadata” - records of American citizens’ and residents’ calls, including their origin and destination, when a call was placed and how long it lasted. However, U.S. intelligence officials have said the NSA did not collect the content of phone calls under this program and did not look at the data without some specific justification. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed classified details of the collection program in 2013, and last year, Congress and the Obama administration narrowed the government’s power to collect such domestic telephone metadata. Under the new law and revised procedures, the government no longer collects bulk telephone metadata, but must request targeted information from telecoms companies after obtaining authorization from the foreign intelligence court. The identities of the telecoms “providers” and the individuals or numbers whose metadata the NSA has targeted were redacted from the version of the court order released on Tuesday. Hogan says in the opinion that the government was seeking “the ongoing daily production of detailed call records relating to an authorized international terrorism investigation”, but does not offer further detail about the nature of the investigation. In his order, the judge accepts the argument that while the government was obliged to explain why targeting the telephone numbers of individuals is “relevant” to its investigation, it does not need to demonstrate the same relevance when examining numbers called from the initially targeted phones. The judge also said that although the new surveillance law requires government agencies to promptly destroy telephone metadata that it might have mistakenly collected on U.S. persons, they sometimes can retain such data for as long as six months if they have reason to believe it could provide evidence of a crime. | 1 |
9,069 | Wells Fargo To Give Strikingly Fat Reward To Top Exec For Ripping Off Customers | Wells Fargo, one of the biggest banks in the U.S., was recently caught running a scam known as sandbagging, to inflate bankers numbers and get them more money. Basically, they were opening fake accounts and transferring customers money into those accounts without their authorization. They ve been slapped with $185 million in fines, but the executive who is most closely and directly linked to this scam is walking away with a nice, fat reward for it at the end of the year, when she retires.Carrie Tolstedt, the head of Wells Fargo s Scamming Department, will receive almost $125 million at the end of this year despite being in charge of a department that ripped off its customers to inflate its own bottom lines. Of course, as is standard procedure whenever a big company is caught ripping people off, Wells Fargo isn t admitting any wrongdoing, even though this has been going on for the last five years.Tolstedt herself isn t saying anything about it, either, but Wells Fargo is praising her service, saying she s been a standard bearer of our culture and a champion for customers. Yeah, right, charging your customers fees they don t owe because you put their money into accounts they didn t open to inflate your bottom line is being a champion for customers. At least the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau saw right through that drivel: It is quite clear that [the actions of Tolstedt s unit] are unfair and abusive practices under federal law, said Cordray. They are a violation of trust and an abuse of trust.' Wells Fargo has fired some 5,300 employees for these tactics, but their clawback provision, which they expanded after the 2008 financial crash, didn t seem to deter this department, and they kept up these secret and deceptive practices. It s bad enough that Elizabeth Warren, who s been after the big banks since she was elected in 2012, wants hearings into Wells Fargo s sandbagging. She doesn t believe Wells Fargo didn t know about the fake accounts any more than anyone with any sense does: Come on this went on for years and they didn t smell anything in the air about fake accounts? And if they did, she believes, then Wells Fargo is too big to manage. Either way, they defrauded their customers and should pay. As should the head of their department.Instead, Wells Fargo has decided to send a message to other banking executives that this kind of behavior is okay. It s the same problem we ve had with the big banks since before 2008. Tolstedt should be fired, and walk away with nothing.Featured image by Joe Raedle/Getty Images | 0 |
9,070 | Europe rights watchdog says Turkey's emergency laws go too far | BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A leading European rights watchdog called on Turkey on Friday to ease post-coup state of emergency laws that have seen thousands arrested and restore power to regional authorities. President Tayyip Erdogan has overseen a mass purge in the armed forces and the judiciary, as well as a crackdown on critics including academics and journalists since a failed military coup in July last year. An advisory body to the Council of Europe, of which Turkey is a member, acknowledged in a report the need for certain extraordinary steps taken by Turkish authorities to face a dangerous armed conspiracy . However...Turkish authorities have interpreted these extraordinary powers too extensively, said the experts, known as the Venice Commission, in an opinion that has no legal force. It urged Ankara to lift laws allowing it to pick mayors, deputy mayors and members of local councils outside of local elections, a reference to rules the Turkish government has used to replace local pro-Kurdish politicians across the largely Kurdish southeast of the country. The experts at the Council of Europe, Europe s leading human rights organization with 47 member states, recommended Turkey set a time limit on the emergency rules and ensure proper judicial oversight of any counter-terrorism measures. Erdogan has accused U.S.-based, Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen of orchestrating the coup, in which 250 people were killed. Gulen has denied involvement. Since then, more than 50,000 people have been jailed pending trial over links to Gulen, while 150,000 people have been sacked or suspended from jobs in the public and private sectors. Rights groups and Turkey s Western allies - including the European Union - have been taken aback by the scale of the purge, sounding alarm that Erdogan was using the coup as a pretext to quash dissent. The government in Turkey, a NATO member, says it must neutralize the threat represented by Gulen s network deeply rooted in the army, schools and courts. | 1 |
9,071 | Trump FREAKS OUT About Deleting His Anti-Semitic Tweet: ‘We Shouldn’t Have Taken It Down!’ (VIDEO/TWEET) | It is literally impossible for Donald Trump to let America forget about what an awful person he is for one day.Trump s campaign has been getting wrecked over the past week thanks to a blatantly anti-Semitic tweet he sent out a few days ago. The tweet was a meme with the Star of David slapped over an anti-Hillary Clinton graphic a meme that was traced back to a website frequented by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. It doesn t seem possible, but Trump has managed to make the situation even worse.At a rally in Ohio on Wednesday night, Trump went on an insane rant about how unfair it was that his offensive tweet had to be taken down and is getting so much negative attention. The Donald repeatedly insisted that the Star of David is actually just a regular star (or a sheriff s star) and that the dishonest media are actually the ones who are profiling not him. Trump went out of his way to go after CNN, or the Clinton News Network, for rightfully calling him out on the anti-Semitic tweet, labeling the network and the rest of the media sick. Then, Trump complained that he d had to alter the meme (by putting a circle over the Star of David) and pull the original off of social media. He whined that his social media director, Dan Scavino, shouldn t have taken it down. TwitterYou can watch Trump throw a temper tantrum about not being able to show his true bigot colors freely below:It s clear that Trump doesn t give a sh*t if his meme carried a super offensive or oppressive message. All that matters in Trump s mind is that he s right, everyone else is wrong, and he can do whatever the hell he wants without being called out on his bigotry.Featured image via Gage Skidmore / Flickr | 0 |
9,072 | First $200 admission for a Trump rally; more to come? | NEW YORK (Reuters) - The email Donald Trump’s campaign sent inviting fans to a rally next week looked familiar: “Meet me in New Jersey!” it urged. But something was different. “You will need to buy a ticket to get into the rally,” it added. The cost: $200. During the months-long battle for the Republican presidential nomination, rallies staged by Trump, the party’s likely candidate in the Nov. 8 election, were free and open to anyone with the stamina to withstand half a day’s wait outside and a heady hour packed into a sports stadium or warehouse. Supporters could buy snacks or hats or T-shirts while they waited, but they never had to pay for admission. The May 19 rally advertised in the email is a fundraiser for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a former presidential rival now working for Trump who, according to news reports, needs to retire debt from his own failed campaign. The emailed invitation to supporters said it will be a fundraiser. It was not clear whether Trump will charge for rallies that are not specifically designated as fundraisers. The New York billionaire has claimed he was self-funding his campaign and did not need donations. He has financed his offensive in the nominating phase of the race for the White House with loans to himself as well as around $12 million in unsolicited donations from fans. Now that Trump is pivoting toward the general election, where conventional estimates put the cost of winning at around $1 billion, things are changing. The move to charge admission for some appearances was just one harbinger of a new relationship between Trump and his fans, many of whom cited their perception of his financial independence as a major factor behind their support. It will test the loyalty of those who have swelled his rallies to capacity, either transforming huge crowds into cash cows or creating more breathing room in the places where he appears. When asked whether the format of the Christie fundraiser rally would be repeated in the future, Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, did not comment. “This is a fundraiser for Governor Christie,” she said. Supporters have said Trump’s about-face on fundraising does not bother them. Susan Kihne, a Mandan, North Dakota resident who snagged a ticket to see Trump speak at a petroleum conference later this month decided the $30 it cost her was worth it. “He’s self-funded up until now, so I don’t mind supporting him,” she said. | 1 |
9,073 | Pakistan raps Trump over vow to free doctor who helped track bin Laden | ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan angrily criticized Donald Trump, frontrunner for the U.S. Republican presidential nomination, for saying he would force the country to free a jailed Pakistani doctor believed to have helped the CIA hunt down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Trump, a 69-year-old billionaire real estate developer, told Fox News on Friday that, if elected, he would get Pakistan to free Shakil Afridi “in two minutes”, saying that Islamabad receives a lot of development aid from the United States. “Contrary to Mr. Trump’s misconception, Pakistan is not a colony of the United States of America,” Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar said in a statement on Monday. The statement said Afridi’s fate would be decided “by the Pakistani courts and the government of Pakistan and not by Mr. Donald Trump, even if he becomes the president of the United States”. The statement came on the fifth anniversary of the killing of bin Laden - architect of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities - during a secret raid in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad that damaged relations between the strategic allies. Washington views Afridi as a hero but Pakistan sentenced him in 2012 to 33 years in jail on charges of belonging to militant group Lashkar-e-Islam, which he denies. That sentence was overturned and Afridi is now awaiting trial on another charge. Trump has alarmed U.S. allies with his combative rhetoric and his calls for an “America First” agenda that many see as a threat to retreat from the world. In his comments about Pakistan and Afridi for Fox News, Trump said: “I would tell them let (him) out and I’m sure they would let (him) out. Because we give a lot of aid to Pakistan.” Afridi has also been accused in Pakistan of running a fake vaccination campaign in which he purportedly collected DNA samples to help the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) track down bin Laden. He has not been charged over those allegations. After his original conviction was overturned, he was charged in 2013 with murder relating to the death of a patient eight years earlier. He remains in jail. In the Fox interview Trump also said he supported leaving the roughly 10,000 U.S. troops still based in Afghanistan instead of withdrawing them by the end of 2017. “I would stay in Afghanistan,” he said. “It’s probably the one place we should have gone in the Middle East because it’s adjacent and right next to Pakistan which has nuclear weapons.” The United States led the military invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to oust the Taliban for sheltering bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders following the Sept. 11 attacks. (This story has been corrected to fix typo in Pakistan minister’s name in paragraph 3) | 1 |
9,074 | HILLARY’S “OH SH*T” MOMENT: FBI Reveals Emails Found On Weiner’s Laptop Are NOT Duplicates [VIDEO] | The FBI reportedly has found emails from Hillary Clinton s private server on the laptop computer seized from Anthony Weiner and they are not duplicates of those already found in the server probe, according to CBS News.It was not clear, however, if the emails were related in any way to the Clinton server scandal or how many new messages were found.Weiner s estranged wife, Huma Abedin who is Clinton s top aide has claimed she had no knowledge of the existence of any Clinton emails on her husband s laptop.The FBI on Monday obtained a warrant to look through the laptop s 650,000 emails. NYP | 0 |
9,075 | Turkey cautions citizens about travel to 'anti-Turkey' Germany | ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey cautioned its citizens on Saturday to take care when traveling to Germany, citing what it said was an upswing in anti-Turkish sentiment ahead of a German national election later this month. The advisory is likely to further exacerbate tensions between the two NATO allies, whose ties have soured following last year s failed coup against Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and his subsequent crackdown on alleged coup supporters. The political leadership campaigns in Germany are based on anti-Turkey sentiment and preventing our country s EU membership. The political atmosphere... has actually been under the effects of far-right and even racist rhetoric for some time, Turkey s foreign mininstry said in a statement. Last weekend German Chancellor Angela Merkel said during a televised election debate that she would seek an end to Turkey s membership talks with the European Union, in an apparent shift of her position that infuriated Ankara. Merkel, whose conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) have long been skeptical about Turkey s EU ambitions, is expected to win a fourth term in office in Germany s Sept. 24 election. Turkish citizens who live in, or who plan to travel to, Germany should be cautious and act prudently in cases of possible incidents, behavior or verbal assaults of xenophobia and racism, the foreign ministry said. The advisory marks a reversal of roles. Earlier this year Germany warned its own citizens traveling to Turkey about increased tensions and protests ahead of a Turkish referendum on April 16 which considerably expanded Erdogan s powers. Merkel and other EU leaders have strongly criticized Erdogan s actions since the failed coup, saying his purges of Turkey s state institutions and armed forces amount to a deliberate attempt to stifle criticism. More than 50,000 people have been detained and 150,000 suspended in the crackdown, including journalists and opposition figures. Some German nationals have also been targeted. Turkey says the purges are necessary given the extent of the security threat it faces. | 1 |
9,076 | Fox News Fires One Of Its Longest Running Hosts After He’s Caught Making Racist Remark To Employee | The latest in a seemingly unending torrent of scandals and toxicity coming from Fox News, the network says it was forced to abruptly fire Bob Beckel after the longtime host of The Five made a racially insensitive remark to an African-American Fox News employee. The firing comes just weeks after the conservative channel faced a class-action lawsuit that alleged executives would entertain themselves by forcing black female employees to arm wrestle white employees.Beckel himself had a history with inflammatory, offensive comments. Ostensibly the channel s token liberal, Beckel proved himself to be anything but with repeated misogynistic and racist comments. In 2014, Beckel was briefly suspended after using the derogatory term Chinamen while bashing the Chinese government.His remarks towards an African-American employee were apparently the final straw: Bob Beckel was terminated today for making an insensitive remark to an African-American employee, the network said in a statement. Fox News human-resources department was made aware of a complaint about what one person familiar with the situation characterized as a racially insensitive remark on Tuesday evening. Executives conducted an internal investigation, this person said, and decided to part ways with Beckel Friday morning.It may be small consolation to the countless people its hurt over the years, but Fox News is having an exceptionally bad year. Despite their guy winning the election, the network has been plagued by scandals big and small.Worse still, by refusing to cover Trump honestly, the network has seen its ratings plummet. It now consistently loses to rivals CNN and MSNBC in primetime viewers, who tune into the other networks to learn about the Trump scandals Fox refuses to cover.And at this point, it s not entirely clear whether Fox News can ever fully recover from the culture of misogyny and racism that Ailes built. The fact that Beckel is still using racial slurs seems to suggest the problems go much deeper than any one host.UPDATE: The attorneys representing the man verbally harassed by Beckel have come forward with the victim s account of Beckel s behavior. It s bad. Mr. Beckel stormed out of his office when our client, a Black [sic] IT employee came to service his computer, telling our client that he was leaving his office because he is Black, the attorneys said in a statement. They also allege that when their client went to lodge a complaint against Beckel, Fox News Chief Human Resource Officer Kevin Lord tried to intimidate him and convince him to withdraw the complaint.It appears that even when ultimately deciding to fire Beckel, Fox still behaved with characteristic awfulness.Featured image via Fox News | 0 |
9,077 | Trump's defense chief eyes debut trip to Japan, South Korea next week | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump’s defense secretary plans to visit Japan and South Korea next week, choosing the two close U.S. allies for his debut trip abroad as Pentagon chief, a U.S. official said on Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity. James Mattis, a retired Marine general, was sworn into the Pentagon’s top job shortly after Trump’s inauguration on Friday and a quick departure to Asia could be seen as a nod to the importance the new U.S. administration places on security ties. The trip would closely follow Trump’s withdrawal from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact, fulfilling a campaign pledge but disappointing many key U.S. allies in Asia. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, for example, had touted TPP in part as a counter-weight to a rising China. No further details were immediately available about Mattis’ proposed itinerary. Still, Mattis, in his confirmation hearing this month, described “the Pacific theater” as a priority and analysts expect new U.S. military spending under Trump’s administration would strengthen America’s military presence in Asia over time. Topping U.S. concerns in the region are North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs and China’s military moves in the South China Sea. Tension with Beijing escalated this week when Trump’s White House vowed to defend “international territories” in the strategic waterway. China responded by saying it had “irrefutable” sovereignty over disputed islands there. Mattis, in his Senate testimony, also voiced concern about North Korea, describing Pyongyang’s activities as a “serious threat” that required U.S. attention. There are about 28,500 U.S. troops based in South Korea helping to defend the country against North Korea, which has technically remained in a state of war with the South since the 1950-53 Korean conflict. South Korea and the United States say the upcoming deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system will better help to protect Seoul against North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic capabilities. But China says THAAD’s powerful radar could penetrate its own territory, prompting calls from some South Korean opposition leaders to delay or cancel its deployment. | 1 |
9,078 | U.S. suspends official travel to Myanmar's troubled Rakhine | YANGON (Reuters) - The United States temporarily suspended travel for American officials to parts of Myanmar s Rakhine state, the U.S. embassy said on Thursday, citing concerns over potential protests after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson accused Myanmar of ethnic cleansing in the state. | 1 |
9,079 | Iran seen as winner after Iraq's Kurds lose referendum gamble | ERBIL (Reuters) - There are no winners among Iraq s Kurds, just weeks after Kurdish president Masoud Barzani gambled away his people s autonomy in a defiant independence referendum. The losing bet has come at a steep price for everyone involved. Barzani has had to give up the presidency, his Kurdish political foes have angered their popular base, and the Kurdish people, who overwhelmingly voted to break away from Iraq, feel further than ever from their lifelong dream of independence. The ultimate winner, analysts say, is Iran, widely believed to have backed and orchestrated Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in his Oct. 16 offensive to recapture Kurdish held-areas, including the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. The Iranians outwitted the Americans; they were the driving force behind the deal to hand over Kirkuk, said Hassan Shaaban, a political commentator and rights activist in Baghdad. The balance of power has been transformed in the north of Iraq, exposing the limited hand the Kurds have to play in future negotiations. It has also exposed the dominant role Iran played in transforming the fate of the Kurdish region. Iran is poised to exploit the political aftermath, pushing to move the centre of power from the regional capital Erbil, where the Barzanis and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) have dominated, to its Kurdish allies in the city of Sulaimaniya. Iran was always one step ahead on the referendum, said Renad Mansour, an Iraq expert at the Chatham House think-tank. They knew Barzani was never going to postpone the vote, he said, adding: The U.S. was left scrambling while the Iranians were plotting. A senior Iranian official said Tehran had advised Barzani against the referendum but he would not listen. We tried to stop this referendum because it was not in their interest. But unfortunately Mr Barzani miscalculated his social base among Kurds and went ahead with the vote, Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran s National Security Council, was quoted as saying by Mehr news agency on Tuesday. Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani has for years been allied to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the main rival of Barzani s KDP. But the referendum has drawn the powerful Iranian commander even closer to Kurdish politics, and shown how far Iran s reach has extended beyond the central government in Baghdad. Ahead of the vote, Soleimani warned Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq to withdraw their forces from Kirkuk or face a fiery onslaught by Iraqi forces and Iranian-backed fighters, according to Kurdish and Iraqi officials. The warning prompted Kurdish Peshmerga fighters to withdraw from most areas, and deepened the split between Barzani s power base in Erbil, and the rival Talabani clan in Sulaimaniya, long allied with Iran. Iraqi politicians have voiced concern about the growing influence of Iran, despite praising Abadi for reining in Kurdish ambitions. We feel worried seeing the octopus arms stretching deeper in the north, said Ahmed Asi al-Obeidi, a Sunni tribal sheikh and a member of Kirkuk s tribal council. We all have seen the problems Iranian meddling has caused in other parts of Iraq, including mainly Sunni areas, and if the same amount of interference is repeated in Kurdish areas, then the worst is coming and instability will prevail. Addressing his people, demoralized by humiliating territorial defeats, Barzani said on Sunday that he would step down, just one month after the vote he championed in the face of regional and international opposition. He accused his enemies of committing high treason in surrendering Kirkuk to Iraqi forces without a fight, while his rivals have directed the same accusation against him for holding the referendum in the first place. The vote and its ensuing political and military retribution from Baghdad - backed by Iran and Turkey - demolished the position of relative strength the Kurds had enjoyed for years. The blame has been placed on Barzani s shoulders, both by his political opponents, notably the rival Talabani clan allied to Iran, and his Western allies, who were angered by his insistence on holding the vote against their advice. On Sunday, Kurdish lawmakers agreed to divide Barzani s presidential powers between parliament, the judiciary and the government, in the absence of imminent presidential elections and a named successor. Barzani remains head of the KDP, which dominates parliament and government, and will still sit on the High Political Council, an opaque non-governmental body which emerged after the referendum. He will thus retain his ability to influence policy. Barzani could therefore mitigate the mounting political chaos. But his position instead highlights the lack of clarity over who is in charge as crucial negotiations with Baghdad get underway over the region s future. Dominant since he became president in 2005, Barzani has consolidated the power of his office, and boosted his family members political profiles. Before the referendum, Barzani s son Masrour was his likely successor, but he has been damaged by his backing for the vote. Instead, Nechirvan Barzani, Masoud s nephew and the regional prime minister, has moved to the fore. He has gained some of Barzani s newly devolved presidential powers, and maintained ties with the Kurdish opposition, making him a more palatable candidate to mend regional fences. He also enjoys a close relationship with Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan. On Monday, the United States commended Barzani for stepping down and said it would actively engage with Nechirvan, and his deputy, Qubad Talabani, a member of the rival political faction with whom he maintains a good relationship. Who emerges as the next leader of the Kurdistan Regional Government is anything but straightforward. In addition to an intra-Kurdish compromise, the influence of Baghdad and Iran will have to be considered. Senior Kurdish officials from both the KDP and PUK say their best bet is to present a united front in negotiations with Baghdad. But that now seems all but impossible. Iraqi forces, including the Iran-backed Shi ite militias, now control border crossings in the north, vital trade routes for the Kurds. The military capitulation in Kirkuk was a crushing blow to the Kurds, both morally and financially, halving the region s oil export revenue overnight. Now the Talabanis are facing their own succession crisis, following the death of former president Jalal Talabani. Iran saw the disintegration of their Kurdish ally in Talabani, said Mansour, who added Iran needed a clear successor to ensure its continued influence. Another set of sons and nephews are vying for leadership in the aftermath of the referendum. But the PUK base has expressed more widespread disappointment with how their leadership handled the Kirkuk crisis. We were betrayed by our leaders in Kirkuk, who stopped us from fighting the (Iraqi Shi ite) militias, said a PUK-allied Peshmerga commander who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. They sold us to Iran for their own benefit. For a graphic on Iaq's Kurdish zone, click tmsnrt.rs/2yXRWcI | 1 |
9,080 | Factbox: Who are Britain First, whose leader's posts Trump re-tweeted? | LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump has re-tweeted anti-Islam videos originally posted by Jayda Fransen, a leader of a far-right British party convicted earlier in November of abusing a Muslim woman. Fransen is deputy leader of the anti-immigrant Britain First group. Here are some details about her organization: Britain First was founded in 2011 by leader Paul Golding with a membership of three individuals. It describes itself as a “patriotic political party and street movement”, although critics denounce it as a far-right, racist organization. “Britain First is committed to preserving our ancestral ethnic and cultural heritage, traditions, customs and values,” it says on its website. It wants to deport all illegal immigrants, halt all further immigration, and introduce “a comprehensive ban on the religion of Islam” with headscarves being outlawed in public. “Anyone found to be promoting the ideology of Islam will be subject to deportation or imprisonment,” its policy platform states. It holds protests across the country, usually attended by a couple of hundred supporters at most, many of whom hold white crosses because the group argues Christianity in Britain is being threatened by immigration and the growth of militant Islam. Golding was a former senior figure in the far-right British National Party and was elected a local councillor in 2009. In his biography on the group’s website it says he was “sent to prison in 2016 for confronting a Muslim hate preacher who was secretly recorded saying it’s okay for Muslims to keep sex slaves”. Golding stood for election as London mayor in May 2016, winning 31,372 votes, 1.2 percent of all cast. Fransen, who was elected deputy leader in 2014, was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment in November 2017, and both she and Golding are facing further similar charges. The group gained prominence in June 2016 when Labour lawmaker Jo Cox was shot dead on the street by a Nazi-obsessed loner who witnesses said had been shouting “Britain first” during the attack. Fransen told Reuters the killer had nothing to do with her group. | 1 |
9,081 | CBS Reporter Describes Racism At Donald Trump Rallies | CBS reporter Sopan Deb has been speaking out about the level of racism he has personally encountered at Donald Trump rallies.As Addicting Info reported here, Deb, a U.S. citizen of Indian descent, was arrested earlier this week while covering Donald Trump s canceled IUC rally.His unconstitutional arrest by Chicago police is now helping to draw attention to deeper issues that define the Trump campaign.Deb reports that he has encountered a shocking amount of racism from Trump supporters, during the time he has been assigned to cover Trump s rallies.For example, in January he describes a man accusing him of recording a Trump rally for ISIS. A Trump supporter just asked me at Reno event if I was taking pictures for ISIS. When I looked shocked, he said, yeah, I m talking to you. Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) January 10, 2016He went on to describe the encounter in more detail, writing on Twitter,The man then repeated the accusation multiple times. I told him, politely, I was with CBS and that what he said was inappropriate. Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) January 10, 2016The same man then told him This is America, be glad you re here. I have a couple of guesses what he meant by that, Deb said on Twitter.He says that during a different rally, held in December, another Trump supporter told him to Go back to Iraq. It should come as no surprise to anyone to learn that Trump s rallies are a magnet for the lowest common denominator. If there is any sort of diversity among Trump s supporters, it s only in the slight difference between proud white supremacists with swastika tattoos, and semi-closeted racists, who prefer to hide behind crosses while crying that their traditional Christian values are under attack. Politically speaking, however, there s very little difference between the Tea Party platform, the platform of the American Nazi Party, that of the KKK or any other white supremacist organization.As the Washington Post reported here, membership in white supremacist groups grew at an enormous rate after the election of President Obama in 2008. There were 194 such groups in 2000, a number that dropped to 149 by 2008, but after President Obama s election, the number jumped to more than 1,000 Trump has capitalized on the right wing s seething race hatred, and in doing so, he s been propelled to the head of race.Knowing that, it s no surprise that the candidate has refused to condemn the KKK, or that white nationalists have been robocalling voters on behalf of his campaign.In 2016, voters will decide which direction our country will move in. Should Donald Trump, or any other right-wing racist win the presidency, racial tensions are likely to explode across the country.Now s the time to keep our country moving forward, challenging racism and right-wing extremism at every turn. A great battle was won during the historic 2008 election of President Barack Obama, but the war is far from over.Image credit: Darron Birgenheier via Flckr; screen capture, Sopan Deb via Twitter | 0 |
9,082 | ONLY DAYS AFTER ANNOUNCING Shameless Money Grab…Clock Boy Explains Why He Wants To Come Back To Texas | It s hard to be famous for being a victim in an Arab Gulf state who settles their disputes in a Sharia Court of Law. Someone should have told Clock Boy that being a victim in a country where victims are plentiful isn t really that special. Unlike America, being accused of bringing a fake bomb to school in Qatar isn t likely a guarantee you ll land a visit with their King.Within days of demanding a total of $15 million from the City of Irving and the Irving Independent School District, Clock Boy Ahmed Mohamed announced in a long distance phone interview from Qatar, he is homesick and wants to come home to Texas now.In October, Ahmed accepted a fully-funded education scholarship from the Qatar Foundation, an organization with reputed ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, over an invitation to MIT, which is among the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world. The family announced they would relocate to Qatar to accommodate his education, which they did.Happy #Thanksgiving!! Ahmed Mohamed (@IStandWithAhmed) November 26, 2015Dallas KTVT 11 (CBS) interviewed the teen from halfway around the world over Facetime. Now, Ahmed claims he misses Texas. I want to go back to a place where everyone knows me, meaning the kids he grew up with. He also hinted a trip to Dallas may be in the works over the Christmas holiday. He told the CBS affiliate he is ready to come home and wants to do so immediately, but insists last week s armed yet peaceful protest outside the Irving mosque stopped him.Breitbart Texas reported on the small group outside of the Islamic Center of Irving. The organizer released dozens of names and addresses considered Muslim and Muslim sympathizers over social media. The list, however, was posted on the City of Irving s website since March with the information of those who signed up to speak for and against the topic of American laws for American courts at an Irving city council meeting.Ahmed told the TV news outlet: I was scared because I ve heard what happened recently with, like, people with guns going to my local mosque, adding: I mean, they have the right to do that but it s scary because I m afraid, you know. Last week, through West Texas attorney Kelly Hollingsworth, Ahmed s family demanded $15 million plus apologies in letters that asserted they moved to the Middle East because threats and fear drove his family from Texas. However, Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne received serious online threats and remains under fire over decisions made by the Irving ISD and Irving police to detain the high school freshman, who, on Sept. 14, brought into school a makeshift clock that resembled a briefcase bomb.The KTVT reporter pointed out that questioning the teen about the $15 million was something that nearly ended (the interview). He captured Ahmed s metered responses with eyes drifting off camera that appeared to look offside for approval from someone before answering questions. Ahmed first looked away when asked if he wanted to come back to Texas before answering yes with a smile. Clock Boy then told the CBS affiliate he was waiting for people to calm down back home before he returned.In a Christmas season blanketed by the Islamic State attacks in Paris, State Department travel alerts, and Syrian refugees at U.S. borders, sympathy continues to wane for the Islamophobia poster child. Breitbart News reported that the same liberal media that championed the teen s every move, including his Qatar Foundation-sponsored tour of Education City, lost interest.The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette added what little sympathy Americans had for the Clock Boy is gone thanks to a shameless money grab by the teen s family. The newspaper added that the Mohamed family s departure and subsequent demands make them look like opportunists, or worse. Via: Breitbart News | 0 |
9,083 | Syrian army, allies, take last IS stronghold in Syria: commander | BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syria s army and its allies, spearheaded by Lebanon s Hezbollah, captured Islamic State s last stronghold in Syria on Wednesday, a commander in the alliance said, bringing the self-declared caliphate close to complete downfall. The last stronghold of Daesh (Islamic State), Albu Kamal, is free of the Daesh organization, said the commander in the military alliance supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Islamic State has been all but destroyed over the past two years. At the height of its power in 2015, it ruled an expanse of Iraq and Syria, eradicating the border, printing money, imposing draconian laws and plotting attacks across the world. On Wednesday, after a months-long advance through central and eastern Syria, the Syrian army and allied Shi ite militias encircled and attacked Albu Kamal. Hezbollah was the foundation in the battle of Albu Kamal , said the commander, adding that hundreds of the elite forces of the Iran-backed Shi ite group took part in the battle. Syrian state television declared Albu Kamal is liberated . But a war monitor, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said it was not true that Albu Kamal was taken and there was still fighting in the area. Albu Kamal is located on the border with Iraq on the bank of the Euphrates. During the battle, Hezbollah forces entered Iraq and the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces crossed into Syria to help capture the town, the commander said. Islamic State retains control over some areas of desert and villages nearby, as well as a town and some other villages in adjacent areas of Iraq, and in scattered pockets elsewhere in both countries. Despite its losses, Islamic State still has a territorial presence in Libya and elsewhere, and many governments expect it to remain a threat even after it loses the caliphate it declared from Mosul, Iraq, in 2014. It has already carried out guerrilla operations in both Iraq and in Syria, and has continued to inspire lone militants to attack civilian targets in the West. In Syria, the end of major operations against Islamic State may only prefigure a new phase of the war, as the rival forces which have seized territory from the jihadists square off. The Syrian army, alongside Hezbollah and other Shi ite militias, and backed by Iran and Russia, have seized swathes of central and eastern Syria in the advance against Islamic State this year. Russian official media have in recent weeks reported a surge of strategic bombing and cruise missile strikes on Islamic State targets in eastern Syria as the army advanced. A U.S.-backed coalition has supported a rival campaign by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias that have pushed Islamic State from much of the country s north and east. The Syrian government has sworn to recapture territory held by the SDF, including Islamic State s former capital Raqqa and oil and gas fields east of the Euphrates. In areas controlled by the SDF in northern Syria, Kurdish-led groups have established autonomy, announcing elections and setting internal policies. On Tuesday, Bouthaina Shaaban, a senior adviser to Assad, described the U.S. forces aiding the SDF as illegal invaders. Washington has not spelled out how its military support for the SDF would evolve after Islamic State s defeat. Shaaban also pointed, in a television interview, to the example of Iraq, where the government retaliated against an autonomous Kurdish region after it held an independence referendum. Iraqi military officials say small groups of Islamic State militants are still entrenched in the town of Rawa and the border desert strip with Syria. Scattered villages near al-Qaim, close to Albu Kamal, are still under militant control in an area called Rummana. The Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), an alliance of militias, earlier on Wednesday denied it had crossed the Syrian border and was attacking Albu Kamal. Our movements are carried out under orders from the commander in chief of the armed forces and our key objective is to liberate Iraq s territories from Daesh. We have no orders to cross the borders, PMF spokesman Ahmed al-Asadi said. | 1 |
9,084 | Matt Damon SHREDS Trump And Wall Street Bankers During MIT Commencement (VIDEO) | While speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) commencement ceremony, Matt Damon took a moment to take a quick jab at Donald Trump. He suggested that maybe we re living in an alternate environment. One that is simulated and controlled by others, because how else could one explain Trump being the Republican presidential nominee.During his impassioned speech, Damon also told the audience of new graduates: There is more at stake today than in every story that has ever been told. He told the graduates that it is up to them and those like them to get out there and start tackling the world s many problems. However, he especially spoke of one problem, and that is what bankers did to millions of Americans during the housing crisis that took place nearly a decade ago.Damon said: Let me say this to the bankers specifically the ones that brought you the biggest heist in history. Adding: It was theft, and you knew it. It was fraud, and you knew it. And you know what else? We know that you knew it. Also driving the point home that if we were to pass these bankers on the street, they need to know that we have absolutely no respect for them.Damon also added one very important point: I don t know if justice is coming for you in this life or the next. But if it does come in this life, her name will be Elizabeth Warren. Hell yeah it will be, and Warren, of course, being the U.S. Senator from the great state of Massachusetts where MIT resides.Damon, like many of us, is fed up with how there are rules for bankers, and then somehow different rules for the rest of us. And he also knows that there are those who are fighting for us, those like Senator Warren, who will try to make sure another financial crisis like the one a decade ago never happens again.Watch a clip from Damon s speech here: Featured image via video screen capture | 0 |
9,085 | new pan report warns of global contamination of health damaging glyphosate | top amazing indigenous allnatural cures from around the world
s d wells tags natural cures indigenous medicine healing plants naturalnews before world war ii very few americans suffered from cancer alzheimers parkinsons diabetes heart disease strokes arthritis osteoporosis food allergies psoriasis eczema autism aspergers syndrome or even fibromyalgia there were no processed foods no genetically modified organisms no chemical pesticides no toxic vaccines loaded with mercury and aluminum no overthecounter medications loaded with artificial food dyes and heavy metal toxins no artificial sweeteners no fluoride in the tap water no leaking nuclear reactors and of course there were no insidious oncologists giving people lethal chemical drugs chemotherapy to fight off cell disorder cancer thats caused by chemical consumption in the first placenone of that was going on because the american medical association had yet to figure out that if all mainstream medicine was simply made of chemicals everybody who got sick would stay sick and the medicine industry would become one of the biggest money makers in the history of the worldyes that was the time of amazing indigenous medicine when natural healers were doing wonders for sick folks using natural remedies and when people did get sick they took medicine that had worked for millennia not some labconcocted chemicals that crooked science journals swore would work the chinese and the american indians didnt get lucky they used food as medicine and it workedhave you had enough of medicine thats so poisonous that they have to inform you about side effects more dangerous than the condition being treated are you sick of paying an arm and a leg for symptomcoverup chemicals that make you fat dumb sicker and closer to death so is everybody else join the club end the insanity try the top amazing indigenous allnatural cures from around the world and never suffer another side effect never perpetuate illness and never ever eat cancer again allnatural indigenous cures from around the world hemp seed oil ready for the most complete amino acid profile in the world hemp seed oil has a ratio of omega to omega fatty acids that best supports heart health and promotes proper cardiovascular function thus preventing degenerative diseases the oil even has antioxidant and antiinflammatory properties that protect against the aging process the oil from the seeds also contains essential fatty acids mercuryfree that are crucial for brain and eye health especially during the first years of life cannabidiol cbd made from the roots and stems of the cannabis plant cannabidiol yields none of the psychoactive compound thc tetrahydrocannabinol that marijuana contains also known as the ultimate preventative medicine the miracle herb and even referred to as the forbidden medicine cbd is a medical wonder having antiinflammatory and anticancer properties including the support of mitochondrial function at the cellular level oil of oregano pharmaceutical companies wish they could patent it produced from the perennial herb oregano the oil is loaded with antioxidants that annihilate the free radicals that cause cancer one of the most potent remedies in the world oregano oil beats down viruses and knocks back allergies to pollen chlorella stressed about keeping your blood sugar levels in a healthy range a recent clinical study proved that superfood chlorella helps maintain healthy blood sugar metabolism even at the genetic level be sure to buy organic chlorella but not from china because its contaminated with heavy metals aloe wars have been waged to control areas where aloe flourishes the aloe vera plant has been used for thousands of years to heal all kinds of health conditions including wounds burns skin irritations sunburn and even constipation grown in mostly tropical locations this succulent plant has more than species with over nutrients in the gel including vitamins a c e b b b niacin b choline folic acid alphatocopherol and betacarotene plus aloe extracts improve absorption of both vitamin c and vitamin e maca a member of the cruciferous family maca root is an adaptive superfood grown high in the mountains of south america maca is very rich in nutrients and supports increased libido hormone balance immune boosting effects and increased energy garlic cloves garlic contains a compound called allicin thats a potent medicine that was used by the egyptians romans greeks and chinese to combat sicknesses including the common cold licorice root dating back as far as ad this chinese herbal remedy is used in over formulas for clinical purposes including in aiding digestion elderberry sambucol a black elderberry extract shortcircuits the flu medical doctors will never tell you about this because its cheap and it works medicinal mushrooms check out reishi turkey tail maitake shiitake and chaga to boost immunity and brain power and to fight cancer cells for everything from brain cancer to breast cancer sources for this article include | 0 |
9,086 | Obama pushes values and prods Trump in final, emotional address | (The story refiles, to fix quote in 14th paragraph to read “middle-aged white guy,” not “middle-aged white man”; read “has seen his world,” not “who’s seen his world”; add dropped word “and”) By Jeff Mason CHICAGO (Reuters) - With a final call of his campaign mantra “Yes We Can,” President Barack Obama urged Americans on Tuesday to stand up for U.S. values and reject discrimination as the United States transitions to the presidency of Republican Donald Trump. In an emotional speech in which he thanked his family and declared his time as president the honor of his life, Obama gently prodded the public to embrace his vision of progress while repudiating some of the policies that Trump promoted during his campaign for the White House. “So just as we, as citizens, must remain vigilant against external aggression, we must guard against a weakening of the values that make us who we are,” Obama told a crowd of 18,000 in his hometown of Chicago, where he celebrated his election in 2008 as the first black president of the United States. Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, proposed temporarily banning Muslims from entering the country, building a wall on the border with Mexico, upending a global deal to fight climate change and dismantling Obama’s healthcare reform law. Obama made clear his opposition to those positions during fiery campaign speeches for 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, but has struck a more conciliatory tone with Trump since the election. In his farewell speech, he made clear his positions had not changed and he said his efforts to end the use of torture and close the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were part of a broader move to uphold U.S. values. “That’s why I reject discrimination against Muslim Americans,” he said in a clear reference to Trump that drew applause. He said bold action was needed to fight global warming and said “science and reason” mattered. “If anyone can put together a plan that is demonstrably better than the improvements we’ve made to our healthcare system that covers as many people at less cost, I will publicly support it,” he said in another prodding challenge to his successor. Trump has urged the Republican-controlled Congress to repeal the law right away. Obama, who came to office amid high expectations that his election would heal historic racial divides, acknowledged that was an impossible goal. “After my election, there was talk of a post-racial America,” he said. “Such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic. Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society.” However, Obama said he remained hopeful about the work that a younger generation would do. “Yes we can,” he said. “Yes we did.” In an indirect reference to the political work the Democratic Party will have to do to recover after Clinton’s loss, Obama urged racial minorities to seek justice not only for themselves but also for “the middle-aged white guy who from the outside may seem like he’s got advantages, but has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological change.” Trump won his election in part by appealing to working-class white men. First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, his wife Jill Biden, and many current and former White House staff members and campaign workers attended the speech. Obama wiped his eyes as he addressed his wife and thanked his running mate. They all appeared together on stage after the address. The Chicago visit is Obama’s last scheduled trip as president, and even the final flight on the presidential aircraft was tinged with wistfulness. It was the president’s 445th “mission” on Air Force One, a perk he has said he will miss when he leaves office, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. All told, Obama will have spent more than 2,800 hours or 116 days on the plane during his presidency. Obama plans to remain in Washington for the next two years while his younger daughter, Sasha, finishes high school. Sasha, who has an exam on Wednesday, did not attend the speech but her older sister Malia was there. The president has indicated he wants to give Trump the same space that his predecessor, Republican President George W. Bush, gave Obama after leaving office by not maintaining a high public profile. | 1 |
9,087 | UK PM May promises to uphold N. Ireland peace process as Brexit impasse ends | LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Friday she would continue to govern in the interests of all Northern Ireland and uphold the agreement that ended decades of sectarian violence in the province. The statement comes as an impasse over the future of the Irish border once Britain leaves the European Union looked to have been resolved. This Government will continue to govern in the interests of the whole community in Northern Ireland and uphold the Agreements that have underpinned the huge progress that has been made over the past two decades, a statement published on the government s website said. | 1 |
9,088 | Trump says open to repeal of debt ceiling: 'It complicates things' | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he discussed a permanent repeal of the debt ceiling at a meeting with congressional leaders this week and is open to the concept. “For many years, people have been talking about getting rid of debt ceiling altogether, and there are a lot of good reasons to do that,” Trump told reporters at a meeting with the Kuwaiti emir in the White House Cabinet Room. “So certainly, that’s something that will be discussed. We even discussed it at the meeting we had yesterday. It complicates things; it’s really not necessary,” Trump said. | 1 |
9,089 | lol parody sponsorship video perfectly mocks millennials | on tuesday night in a scenario that has only occurred four times in american history the presidency was won by a candidate who lost the popular vote comment on this article via your facebook account comment on this article via your disqus account follow us on facebook | 1 |
9,090 | Gulf rulers boycotting Qatar skip annual summit | KUWAIT (Reuters) - Qatar s Emir said on Tuesday he hoped a summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Kuwait would help maintain stability in the region, Al-Jazeera TV said, though three Arab heads of state involved in a rift with Qatar stayed away. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain sent ministers or deputy prime ministers to the annual event. The countries and non-GCC member Egypt have imposed economic, diplomatic and trade sanctions on Qatar in a dispute that began in June. Qatar s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani said the summit took place in highly sensitive circumstances . He and Kuwait s Emir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber al-Sabah were the only heads of state to attend the meeting. I am full of hope that the summit will lead to results that will maintain the security of the Gulf and its stability, Tamim said, according to the Doha-based Al-Jazeera. Sheikh Sabah said in a speech at the end of the summit: We proved once again the resilience of our Gulf institution and its ability to be steadfast, simply by holding into the mechanism of convening these meetings. In his opening speech, the Kuwaiti ruler called for a mechanism to be set up in the Western-backed grouping to resolve disputes among its members. Relations within the Gulf have soured since the four Arab states accused Qatar of supporting terrorism. Qatar denies the charges. Kuwait, which had spearheaded unsuccessful mediation efforts since the rift began, had hoped the summit would give leaders a chance to meet face-to-face, two Gulf diplomats said. Earlier, the UAE said it would set up a bilateral cooperation committee with Saudi Arabia, separate from the GCC, on political, economic and military issues. UAE president Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan said the new committee would be chaired by Abu Dhabi s crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahayan, Mohammed Bin Zayed, state news agency WAM reported. Saudi Arabia has not yet commented. The proposal coincides with an escalation in a conflict in Yemen that involves Saudi Arabia and UAE. Veteran former president Ali Abdullah Saleh was killed in a roadside attack on Monday after switching sides in the war and abandoning his Iran-aligned Houthi allies in favor of a Saudi-led coalition. The GCC was founded in 1980 as a bulwark against bigger neighbors Iran and Iraq. | 1 |
9,091 | In Bolivia's bellwether city, anger at Morales grows | EL ALTO, Bolivia (Reuters) - In El Alto, a former shantytown high in the Andes that has mushroomed into Bolivia s second-largest city, students and professors are growing disenchanted with Evo Morales, the leftist president their protests helped put in power a decade ago. A sprawling settlement of nearly 1 million people on Bolivia s dusty Altiplano plateau, El Alto is a larger and more politically radical extension of the capital La Paz, which sits hundreds of meters below in a canyon. An uprising here in 2003 over the use of revenues from the poor South American nation s natural gas reserves helped force the resignation of U.S.-backed President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. Some 60 residents were killed in the upheaval. The protests were led in part from the campus of El Alto s public university UPEA and opened the way for Morales to take power as Bolivia s first indigenous president three years later. Now, students and teachers feel forgotten. Demonstrations, some violent, have broken out in recent weeks over what teachers and students call insufficient funding for the school, a potential obstacle in Morales plan to win a fourth term in 2019. The government has a pending debt, said Ramiro Limachi Apaza, director of UPEA S communications department and an El Alto resident who protested alongside Morales in 2003 in the so-called gas wars. Morales fulfilled protesters demands to nationalize the gas industry after taking office in 2006, promising to spread natural resource wealth in the country of more than 10 million, long one of Latin America s poorest. Bolivia s economy grew and thousands of Aymara peasants moved to El Alto. While El Alto generally remains poor, some immigrants became wealthy merchants, building glamorous, colorful homes known as cholets and hosting lavish parties. Lines of cable cars, inaugurated by Morales, whisk Bolivians between El Alto and La Paz, above the dizzying mountain traffic. Yet Limachi said the public university, which charges students next to nothing, has been unable to pay its teachers for three months. Morales administration, one of Latin America s few remaining hard-line leftist governments after the region turned to the right in recent years, says it increased spending on education by 25 percent since 2006. It questions UPEA s use of its funding and the number of students enrolled. Due to its history, the recent protests at UPEA have drawn national attention, especially as they coincided with a widely criticized court decision in late November allowing Morales to run for a fourth turn. Bolivia s constitutional court, padded with members of Morales MAS party, argued term limits violate human rights - defying the result of a referendum last year in which 51 percent of Bolivians said they opposed Morales running again. The ruling was criticized by the United States and raised eyebrows in urban areas across Bolivia where support for Morales is weakening. Mining communities, coca farmers and rural villages generally still support him. Across the sprawling city of El Alto, where new homes are being built every day, discontent had been creeping up for some time. Since 2015, the city has had an opposition mayor. It s quite disturbing that our demands are not being listened to, said Celia Quecana, a UPEA sociology student dressed in a traditional Aymara pollera, a flowing skirt worn in the Andes. She said that Bolivia s constitution guarantees funding for public universities. There s a lot of discontent that democracy, in the form of the Feb. 21 (2016) referendum, has not been respected, she said at the university, where trash had not been collected nor bathrooms cleaned for days. In judicial elections on Dec. 3, nearly 54 percent of Bolivians spoiled their ballots rather than voting, as a means of protesting against Morales. Vote null graffiti remains scrawled across walls in El Alto and La Paz. As El Alto has grown, so has the number of students studying at UPEA, the basis for the university s dispute with the government. UPEA says it now has 47,000 students, double the 2011 enrollment when the amount of funding it receives was determined. For Diego von Vacano, a Bolivian political scientist at Yale University, the UPEA protests have legitimate roots and touch on a major problem for Morales. The government did not invest in education, Vacano said. El Alto is one of the most radical areas of Bolivia. A government can quickly fall if it does not get the support of El Alto. The United Nations says Bolivia spent about 7 percent of its gross domestic product on education in 2014, its most recent data, a percentage that is high for Latin America, although one that had not changed much over the past decade. El Alto s explosive growth coincided with the end of a commodities boom felt in Bolivia through lower gas prices, which have halved since 2006. Bolivia s gas production peaked at an average 59.6 million cubic meters per day in 2014 and has fallen for the past two years, according to the government. The gas issue is incredibly important, it affects everything. We had received an impressive amount of money, but it s gone down for everyone, said Nelson Vila, a UPEA professor who was hospitalized after clashes with police in November. | 1 |
9,092 | Trump senior aide Dina Powell to resign early next year: White House | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump’s Deputy National Security Adviser for strategy, Dina Powell, plans to resign early next year but will continue to have a role in Middle East diplomacy, the White House said on Friday. White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Powell, a key player in U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Middle East, had always planned to stay one year at the Trump White House and then return to her home in New York. Powell could be one of several administration officials to leave at the one-year mark of Trump’s presidency. Speculation has centered on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who officials say could be replaced by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and top economic adviser Gary Cohn may possibly leave also. Powell’s replacement is likely to be Nadia Schadlow, a National Security Council aide who has been working with Powell on a new U.S. national security strategy expected to be released in the next couple of weeks, a senior administration official said. Powell has been one of Trump’s inner circle and a key aide to National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. She engaged in diplomacy throughout the Middle East with Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. “Dina has done a great job for the administration and has been a valued member of the Israeli-Palestinian peace team. She will continue to play a key role in our peace efforts and we will share more details on that in the future,” Kushner said in a statement. Trump’s move to have the United States officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has been denounced across much of the Arab world. His team is working on a framework for a potential Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that aides say could be released early next year. | 1 |
9,093 | Trump Tried To Give $100K Bribe To Vets To Be ‘Props’ At His Rally – They Told Him To Screw Himself | Five-time draft deferment Donald Trump tried to buy the love of American soldiers so he could use them at his rally, and it went about as well as one might expect.It s obvious why Donald Trump would want to appear as if he had the troops on his side: He s spent much of his campaign insulting them. Whether it was implying that POWs were losers or mistakenly featuring the servicemen of other countries (including Nazis and Russian soldiers) in his political ads, it s clear that Trump has only a surface-deep appreciation of all the sacrifices America s military has made.Needless to say, his pandering in the face of his reprehensible actions didn t go over well. In a bombshell exclusive by The Daily Beast s Tim Mak, Trump was exposed as having tried to bribe a veterans charity to be his political prop for a promise of $100,000.On Friday, Liberty House executive director Keith Howard received a call from a Trump campaign staffer, who conveyed that Trump would like to publicly present them with a six-figure check at a Londonderry rally on Monday, right before the Granite State primary.It s an enormous amount of money for a small charity. But Howard said he wouldn t do it risking the entire, substantial donation on a point of principle.Howard was right to question Trump s donation. Apart from being manipulated by the Republican front-runner to serve his agenda, the charity would have probably lost its nonprofit status by appearing at a Trump rally. After Trump s convoy pulled out and headed towards their next rally, the charity would have been left with a sizable check but without legal standing. Not that Trump seemed to care what would happen if the group actually accepted his bribe.Even worse, Trump was running this bribe through his Donald J. Trump Foundation which, as Mak notes, is very likely considered an illegal campaign contribution to himself.The campaign utilizing the foundation to help support and promote campaign events is a potential legal problem for both the campaign and the Trump Foundation, said Larry Noble, general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.The value of the work the foundation did to assist the campaign event could be considered an illegal campaign contribution. And the foundation is barred from getting involved in political activity, such as supporting a campaign rally, he continued. Neither the foundation nor other charities should be working hand-in-hand with the campaign to promote Trump s campaign events. Which is exactly what Trump s charity is doing. It hasn t escaped the attention of some in the media.When will Republican Congress have hearing on @realDonaldTrump Foundation violating IRS charity rule last night? https://t.co/3FbAXzNN5E Lawrence O'Donnell (@Lawrence) January 29, 2016Hilariously, Howard later called Trump s campaign and told them that if they were serious about helping veterans, they wouldn t mind giving him the contribution behind closed doors and not, say, at a giant political rally. This of course would defeat the whole purpose for Trump. What good is charity if you can t brag about it to pander to voters? For days, Trump s campaign signaled that they were very disappointed that the veteran s group wouldn t help Trump look good but finally, sensing a losing battle, they relented. Howard got his money, but on his terms.So much for Trump being an expert deal maker, as he just got played by a small charity to the tune of $100,000.Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr | 0 |
9,094 | GEORGE WASHINGTON PROFESSOR On Soros Activists Shutting Down Roads: Why It’s Time To Start “Suing the Bastards” | Americans better start fighting back against these people who are shutting down our public roads by hitting these thugs where it really hurts in their wallets. Otherwise, we will continue to see increased violence that is being blamed on pro-Trump supporters in the media Anti-Trump activists who protested his planned appearance in Arizona today by blocking a limited access highway and creating a traffic nightmare with cars backed up for miles [N.Y. Daily News] could be sued in class action law suits for massive damages modeled after suits filed against those who similarly illegally blocked traffic at the George Washington Bridge, and judgments against other illegal protesters, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf.With the mainstream media continuing to blame Trump supporters for the efforts of their opponents to shut down their free speech rights, it may be time to adopt the tactics the left favors to get its way: lawsuits. That s the suggestion of John Banzhaf, a George Washington University law professor who defies categorization politically but is often labeled a gadfly. He explains:Anti-Trumpers Block Highway; Face Class Actions For DamagesSuits Filed re Blocked GW Bridge Provide Precedenthttps://t.co/LN17FGakCw John Banzhaf (@ProfBanzhaf) March 19, 2016Why and How to Sue Anti-Trump Protesters and Other Disruptors"Sue The Disruptors" More Effective Than Criminal Lawhttps://t.co/9MMiZtE5wq John Banzhaf (@ProfBanzhaf) March 21, 2016As Banzhaf had predicted and later helped inspire, two different class action law suits seeking millions in civil damages were brought by persons stuck in the massive traffic jams at NYC s GW Bridge which were illegally caused by former aides to Governor Chris Christie.Suing protesters Suing the Bastards may be the most effective way to help deter illegal protests, says Banzhaf, noting that slap-on-the-wrist criminal fines usually aren t very effective, especially since it sometimes also helps give illegal protesters a soap box to air their grievances in criminal trials.The lead protester who chained her neck to a pickup truck was George Soros paid operative, Jacinta Gonzalez from New Orleans.But the tide may already be turning, says Banzhaf, citing these examples.When other groups see that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has been forced to pay $2.55 million to Japanese companies for illegally using acid and smoke bombs to disrupt their whaling, they may think twice before blocking traffic to advance their agenda, says Banzhaf, who has promoted the idea and the very slogan of Suing the Bastards when the law is broken.In another example, a student who illegally chained himself to some construction equipment because he opposed an oil pipeline was forced to pay out big bucks for his criminal conduct.As NPR reported it, he was apparently ready to accept a relatively painless conviction for trespass, but not to pay the pipeline company $39,000 in restitution.Similarly, eleven protesters who allegedly engaged in illegal activities at the Mall of American are facing restitution claims from the City of Bloomington.In these and many similar situations, protesters are often willing to accept a small misdemeanor fine and conviction for a chance to focus attention on their cause, especially if it means they get to have a criminal trial which generates even more publicity for them and for their grievance, argues Banzhaf.While most of these actions against criminal protesters have been brought by businesses, there s no reason why similar legal actions cannot also be brought by any person falsely imprisoned on that Arizona highway as was the case with one of the two GW-Bridge suits.Using the threat of legal actions is a far better and more American way of deterring illegal protests than engaging in physical violence against them, as some Trump supporters have apparently already done, says Banzhaf.Via: PRLOG | 0 |
9,095 | WI Supreme Court Justice Penned Column Mocking ‘Queers,’ ‘Degenerates’ With AIDS | The AIDS crisis is far from over, but thanks to medical advancements, the diagnosis is no longer a death sentence as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. In those days, the LGBT community was blamed for the epidemic and our pain was largely ignored by those in positions to help. In fact, bigots often mocked the suffering of people they clearly viewed as less than human. One such person was Rebecca Bradley, who was a student at Marquette University at the height of the crisis. She also happens to be the newest justice to make it to the Supreme Court in the state of Wisconsin.One Wisconsin Now, a left-wing activist organization, managed to dig up some of this woman s more interesting articles, in which she expressed some truly disturbing opinions. In one such article Bradley slammed AIDS activists and their misdirected compassion for the degenerates who basically commit suicide through their behavior. She also opined that having AIDS was better than having cancer because those afflicted with the politically-correct disease will be getting all of the funding. As if that weren t bad enough, Bradley topped it all off with an even more disgusting opinion: How sad that the lives of degenerate drug addicts and queers are valued more than the innocent victims of more prevalent ailments. Here are screenshots of just a few choice quotes from Rebecca Bradley, via One Wisconsin Now:It is also worth noting that this woman believes that abortion is the equivalent of Nazism and slavery.Now, sure, this was more than two decades ago, but it s quite likely that Bradley s opinions haven t changed all that much. Hateful tigers generally don t change their stripes. In response to the controversy, Bradley only said that what s in the articles have nothing to do with who I am as a person or a jurist, and they have nothing to do with the issues facing the voters of this state. With all due respect Madame, that is a load of horseshit and you know it. There s no way you could be fair on any matter involving LGBT people if those are the views you hold on something as serious as the AIDS epidemic. Further, your use of dehumanizing slurs is truly beyond the pale. You, my dear, have no business being on any judicial bench, or in any position of power whatsoever, anywhere.Wisconsin, rise up and reject this hateful excuse for a Supreme Court justice, or you ll be stuck with a bona fide bigot making decisions for you for the next decade.Featured image via screen capture from Queerty | 0 |
9,096 | Obama says will focus on criminal justice reform, cancer research | BATON ROUGE, La. (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Thursday that he will focus his final-year legislative efforts on criminal justice reform, an expansion of a tax credit for the working poor, and a push to find medical research breakthroughs. The three areas are relatively rare areas of common ground between Obama and the Republican-controlled Congress, Obama said during a town hall, part of a push to promote his priorities as attention turns to the race to replace him in the November presidential election. Obama told a crowd of about 1,000 people at a high school that “I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff to do between now and next year” when his second and final term in office ends. Obama has tasked his vice president, Joe Biden, with marshalling scientists to “double down” on research into a cure for cancer. “It’s a good story and it’s not as politically controversial as some issues,” Obama said. “It probably won’t be cured in my life time, but it might be cured in yours,” he told a 10-year-old girl at the town hall. The research push will need a “big investment,” he said. Details could come in his Feb. 9 budget proposal. Obama also said he would like to expand the earned income tax credit, a tax break for poor families, to also help single people - an idea for which Republican Speaker Paul Ryan has expressed support. He told the crowd that he thinks there is enough bipartisan support to reform mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent offenders. Obama said he will use his authority to take action where he can - an approach that has enraged Republicans on issues like immigration, environmental regulations, and gun control. Giving another example of where he wants to use his executive authority in the year ahead, Obama talked about the need to modernize ancient government computer systems. “That’s what we can do without Congress,” he said. Obama praised Louisiana’s newly sworn in Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards, who made expanding Medicaid coverage for low-income people his first order of business. In his Feb. 9 budget, Obama will propose to give the 19 state governments that passed up an earlier offer to expand Medicaid a second chance to opt in, with aid from the federal government, the White House said. “We’re hoping to encourage more states to do the right thing,” Obama said. Medicaid expansion was part of the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature health care reform law better known as Obamacare. But some Republican governors opposed expansion as costly and unnecessary. | 1 |
9,097 | U.S. proposes hike in Medicare Advantage payments; insurer shares rise | NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. government on Friday proposed raising payments by 1.35 percent on average next year to the health insurers who offer Medicare Advantage health benefits to elderly and disabled Americans. Payments to insurers will vary under the 2017 Medicare Advantage proposal, based on the region the plans are sold and on the size of bonus payments insurers can receive based on quality ratings, the government said. Shares of health insurers rose in after-hours trade. Analysts said the proposal looked positive for insurers at first glance, but cautioned that they needed to parse it fully. “Looks like the best case scenario has played itself out,” said Ipsita Smolinski of Capitol Street, a Washington D.C. research firm, who had anticipated about 1 percent increase in payments. Insurers and lawmakers have pressured the government not to cut payments, saying any decrease would hurt older Americans by forcing insurers to cut benefits. Insurer lobbyist America’s Health Insurance Plans President Marilyn Tavenner said it was important that the final policy ensure the long-term stability of Medicare Advantage. She said in a statement that the group was looking closely at the proposal. About 17 million Americans have healthcare coverage through Medicare Advantage, offered by insurers including UnitedHealth Group Inc, Aetna Inc, and Anthem Inc among others. Another more than 30 million people receive benefits through the government Medicare fee-for-service program. Shares of Anthem Inc rose 1.4 percent in after-hours trading, while UnitedHealth Group gained 1.6 percent. Some insurers may benefit more than others from the proposal to pay more to insurers who are managing plans for people who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid for the poor, said Kim Monk, managing director of Capital Alpha Partners. The 1.35 percent increase is based mostly on anticipated medical cost increases next year. The government expects a 3 percent payment growth rate, which is in line with estimates the government provided to insurers in December. That 3 percent increase is then reduced to 1.35 percent due to lower payments to insurers for sicker-than-average customers and some medical coding changes, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Medicare agency said on Friday. The 1.35 percent also takes into account an increase in how it pays insurers based on quality measures, called star ratings, it said. The final rate for 2017 Medicare Advantage payments is based on this proposed figure and will be released in April. | 1 |
9,098 | Iraq's Abadi accepts Macron invitation to come to discuss Kurds: Elysee source | TALLINN (Reuters) - Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi accepted an invitation from French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday to come to Paris on Oct. 5 for talks on the Kurdish independence referendum, a source in Macron s office said. Macron had offered to help ease tensions between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government over Monday s referendum, which produced an overwhelming vote in favor of secession from Iraq, and had warned that any further escalation should be avoided. Baghdad has closed Kurdish airspace and vowed to take control of the autonomous region s external borders. In a statement after a telephone call with Abadi, Macron s office said he had invited Abadi to Paris, but warned that the two sides should remain united in their priority to defeat Islamic State and stabilize Iraq. All escalation should be avoided, Macron said in the statement. The president ... recalled the importance of preserving unity and Iraq s (territorial) integrity while recognizing the rights of the Kurdish people, the statement said. With the priority to fight Islamic State and the stabilization of Iraq, Iraqis must remain united. | 1 |
9,099 | Saudi Arabia requests urgent Arab League meeting over Iran: Egypt state news | CAIRO (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia has called for an urgent meeting of Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo next week to discuss Iran s intervention in the region, an official league source told Egypt s MENA state news agency on Sunday. The call came after the resignation of Lebanon s prime minister pushed Beirut back into the center of a rivalry between Sunni kingdom Saudi Arabia and Shi ite Iran and heightened regional tensions. | 1 |
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